Chapter 56: Dungeoneering

I staggered to a stop at the lip of the pit. I stared down.

Lena stared back up at me.

I blinked.

So did she.

Neither of us spoke. I think what she’d fallen into was so bizarre, it short-circuited our brains.

Bernie’s grumble snapped us both out of our stupor.

Lena started to giggle. She slapped her hands down. Plastic balls popped up. She grabbed one and tossed it to me. I made a swipe at it, but missed, and it bounced off my shoulder and rolled to a stop against the wall. I started laughing too.

The trap, for such it clearly was, had dumped Lena into a ball pit straight out of a McDonald’s playplace. I felt like I hadn’t seen one of those in a while. Did I just stop paying attention to them sometime after I outgrew them, or had they been phased out? Even though I’d always disliked them, I felt a sad hit of nostalgia.

Whether I could walk into a fast food restaurant and find a ball pit or not, I sure as hell shouldn’t have seen one beneath what appeared to be hydraulic floors in what I’d taken for the maintenance corridors of some vast commercial compound. I supposed the floors could’ve been reshaped by some kind of ongoing Third Eye effect, but the hiss when Lena had triggered the trap had sounded pretty distinctive, and there was a layer of metal around the rim where machinery would go.

Bernie grumbled again. I’d let my concentration wander for a second, so his plushy form had appeared on top of the balls in front of Lena. His Third Eye form must have been shifting around, because the balls rolled beneath him. When I looked through my phone, I saw his sticky feet gyrating to try to stay atop them.

Lena swallowed her giggles. “Don’t worry, little guy. We’ll be out of here in just a sec.”

His burble sounded the most annoyed I’d ever heard him.

I leaned over the lip of the pit and stretched my hand down. I’d intended for Lena to tuck Bernie back into his sling and then clasp my hand so I could help her out. Instead, she lifted him up and I scooped him onto the linoleum floor.

By then, Miguel and Zhizhi had caught up to us.

“Are you okay, Lena?” Zhizhi called.

“Of course she is,” Miguel said. “Else, Cameron would not be nearly so calm.”

“You could act a little more concerned,” Lena shouted. “I’m fine, though.”

I knew Miguel would be grinning like a cat.

I reached down for her again, this time with both hands. She clasped my wrists and I tightened my grip around hers. To the other two, I said, “Can you guys brace me?”

I felt two pairs of hands on my shoulders and waist.

Zhizhi got her first look into the pit then. I knew, because it startled a laugh from her and she muttered, “What the hell?”

“Right?” Lena said. “I can honestly say I never expected this.”

“If you’re ready,” Miguel said.

Lena nodded.

Together, we pulled her up. We staggered back and I ended up on my ass, Lena sprawled on top of me. There were worse fates. She kissed my cheek, scooped up Bernie, and sprang to her feet.

She and Miguel helped me up, while Zhizhi panned her camera over the pit.

Lena and I turned to stare down into it. We should’ve been looking for the possible Daimon. Or at least watching out for danger. We couldn’t help ourselves, though. It was just so strange.

A sea of colored plastic balls. Too bad they weren’t collectible objects, or we’d never want for Plastic again.

“So weird,” Lena said.

I nodded. “Why do we think that?”

“You see a lot of ball pits in the backs of stores?” Lena asked.

“I don’t go into the backs of stores very often,” I said. “But you’re right. That’s what weirds me out about this.”

“Hrm?”

“When Third Eye puts something in an environment, it might be odd, or askew, but it usually fits on some level. It’s not what’s there, but it’s something you could convince yourself maybe should be there.” I rubbed my palms on my jeans. “Does that make sense?”

“I think so,” Lena said.

“It does,” Miguel said.

“But this.” The ball Lena had thrown at me had rolled near my foot. I kicked it down into the pit. “What would it be doing here?”

“If you’re right about Third Eye placing things appropriate for their surroundings,” Zhizhi said, “then what we’re wrong about must be what environment we’re in.”

Huh.

I looked around the halls again. If I’m being honest, I’d probably dismissed them as irrelevant when I first saw them. They looked so boring, so mundane. A backdrop for exciting things to happen, not important in themselves, like minimalist set design in a theater production. I wasn’t a fan.

These halls weren’t just empty archetypes, though. There was a sign over each room, and, in contrast to the construction site, where the back halls had seemed to stretch forever, these didn’t actually go very far. In both directions, the halls ended within two dozen feet. This space reasonably could exist. Even the linoleum tiles, for all that they’d yellowed with age, had patterns on them.

“These aren’t maintenance corridors,” I said.

“What are they, then?” Zhizhi asked.

“A dungeon.”

Miguel made a “Hm” sound.

I wanted to press him on it, but Zhizhi’s snort distracted me.

“Ah yes. The famous ball pit torture. How could I have missed it?” Her smile slipped. “Honestly, that sounds like it could be a real thing.”

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

“Not a dungeon like a place to keep prisoners,” Lena said. “A dungeon like in an RPG.”

“Do you get a lot of ball pits in those?” Zhizhi asked.

“Well.” Lena looked away and gave Bernie a squeeze.

“It’s not so much a trap as standing in for a trap,” I said. “We did something wrong, so we triggered it. But it’s not actually supposed to hurt us, just kind of embarrass us so we learn to watch out.”

“Like a tutorial dungeon?” Lena said.

I considered it. The vibe didn’t seem quite right. Tutorial dungeons might be easy for players, but within the worlds of their games, they usually didn’t advertise themselves as fake or harmless. “More like what I picture somebody doing if they made a dungeon themed amusement park IRL. The trap is even hydraulic, like something you could build for real, instead of being a Third Eye effect.”

It made me think of Omar’s VR theme park, Imagined Worlds. Would that come across as cheesy as this did, or slicker? I wasn’t sure which would end up more charming. Then again, I couldn’t tell if Imagined Worlds had proven charmless enough that no one wanted to visit it.

“Huh.” Zhizhi panned her camera down to take in the ball pit again, then back up to examine both hallways leading off of the intersection. “So what is it you did wrong?”

I rubbed the back of my neck. “Hadn’t gotten that far.”

“You missed this.” Miguel traced a line on the floor with his boot, then took over with his hand when it reached the wall. It was subtle, just the point where one of the linoleum tiles met one of the joins in the drywall. At least, that’s what it looked like to me until his hand raised further.

A faint pattern had been stamped into the wall.

We crowded over to examine it, then Lena, Miguel, and I stepped back so Zhizhi could film it.

Miguel had found two concentric circles of Third Eye runes. I’d thought they were stamped, but on closer inspection, I realized a piece had been cut out from the surrounding drywall, and this was more like an odd electrical fixture cut and painted to blend in.

Zhizhi held her camera close to the circles and panned up and down.

When she stepped back, Lena poked at the runes. Nothing happened. She furrowed her brow and pushed harder, and the outer ring rotated under her finger with a click.

“Oh,” she said, “a puzzle! Cam, Miguel, which one of you wants to do this boring shit?”

I chuckled. “Go for it, Miguel. You know more about the language side of things than I do.”

“I already told you –!” He sounded as close to snapping as I’d ever heard him.

Which didn’t make a lot of sense to me. As either a game master or player, he usually loved little puzzles. When he had some spare time, he would make props for Lena and I, and the other two players in our group, to fiddle with at the table.

He lit another cigarette – the previous one must’ve burned down while I wasn’t looking –, gave it one angry puff, and left it stuck in his mouth. He took Lena’s place in front of the circles, checked his phone, puffed again, and began to rotate them.

He aligned the circles in some way that made sense to him. He paused. Nothing happened. Then he made one more adjustment, almost a full rotation of the central circle, and the hydraulics underneath the floor hissed again. Slowly, two linoleum-covered panels rose and joined together over the ball pit with a sigh of escaping air.

Lena tapped the restored floor with the toe of her boot. When it didn’t give way, she stepped out onto it. She twirled around. She flashed both thumbs up.

“Nice job,” Zhizhi said.

“Thanks.” Another puff. A sigh. “Keep your eyes peeled. I’m sure there will be more of these.”

“More ball pits, you think?” Lena asked.

He shook his head. “Something a bit more creative. Even if it does not become dangerous, it might become more embarrassing.”

“Like what?” I asked.

“Perhaps we will get drenched by the sprinklers overhead.” He aimed his cigarette in their direction.

Zhizhi followed his gesture. “If you get smoke in the detectors, that might happen whether we miss a puzzle or not.”

He tilted his head in acknowledgment, but made no effort to put out the cigarette.

“This is cool and all,” Lena said, “but don’t forget, we got a Daimon to find.”

I’d have been happy to concentrate on figuring out the bizarre environment. Even more, to figure out Miguel’s bizarre behavior. Everything we’d discovered made the structure seem cooler and more inviting. Maybe he thought the whole place was a trap?

I didn’t. The vibe felt nothing like the construction site had. I believed beyond a shadow of a doubt we were supposed to be here.

Or at least that we were welcome. I frowned at Miguel.

But only for a second, and I didn’t have time to watch his reaction. With another pet on the line, I knew the best I could hope for was to inject a little caution into Lena’s inevitable forward momentum.

I let her get across the pit in the direction we’d seen the golden figure disappear, then sprinted to join her.

We walked side-by-side, and to her credit, Lena did slow down and check everything around her. She was the one who spotted the next circle. She grabbed my arm to keep me from walking over it. “Look at the floor.”

At first, I didn’t see what had tipped her off. Then I noticed that the squiggly, ‘70s-ass pattern in the linoleum tiles was disrupted across four of them. When I peered closer, I recognized more Third Eye runes.

I knelt and examined them while Miguel and Zhizhi caught up to us. These looked different than the ones on the circle the former had manipulated.

It clicked for me that the ones on the circle hadn’t been full runes, but halves. “You weren’t actually solving some kind of riddle back there,” I said, “and you weren’t just moving it at random until it clicked. Right?”

He nodded. “I just rotated the dials until the full characters resembled those I recognized.”

That wouldn’t be much of a puzzle for someone who could read this language, but it was pitched perfectly for a player who’d been attentive to the Third Eye objects they found.

“What do you make of this one?” I asked.

He looked it over. “I suspect the right ones need to be pressed in sequence.”

“You know which ones are the right ones?” I asked.

“‘Know’ is a strong word,” he said. Instead of focusing on the runes, he began to examine the walls. “Let’s see if we can figure out the mechanism of the trap. I wouldn’t want to commit without being sure it’s not dangerous.”

“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “Guess. I’ll go first. If you’re right about it being embarrassing, well, it’s not like it’s going to be the first time I got embarrassed. And if it’s dangerous, my HP will tank it.”

“Makes more sense for me to go first,” Lena said. “My HP come back.”

“We’ll trade off,” I said.

She rolled her eyes, but she didn’t argue.

Miguel pressed his lips into a line.

“I can tell you at least have some idea,” Zhizhi said.

“Some.”

She put a hand on his back and smiled tentatively.

He inclined his head. Smiled back. Then he stepped forward, swept his gaze up and down the hall, and pushed down hard on three of the four tiles in sequence.

Nothing happened.

I strode into what was presumably the target area for the trap. The air went still as everyone held their breath.

Nothing happened.

“Pretty good guess,” Zhizhi said.

Miguel tried to smile.

“What was the clue?” I asked.

“One tile was the rune for ‘person’ I showed you earlier,” he said. “The second, I recognized as the central character of what we – Joon Woo and I, I mean – believe to be the word for joy. The third, I made a fifty-fifty guess on, since I didn’t recognize either of them.”

“Heh.” I returned to the runes and etched them into my memory in the order he’d pressed them. “Knowledge of the self, knowledge of joy, knowledge of the world.”

Lena’s eyebrows shot up. “Like Albie said? Do you think she set this place up for us?”

Albie had suggested that those three forms of knowledge needed to come into alignment somehow. She’d also said she didn’t have the “right words” to explain them better to us.

I wondered if the whole game was an attempt to. “I think those concepts are central to Third Eye.”

Lena’s shoulders slumped. “Aw. I know you’re right, but it would’ve been cool, you know? Like she was our GM for the evening!”

“If you invite her to a session,” Miguel said, “I would be happy to let her take a spin.”

A dreamy smile appeared on Lena’s face. Miguel couldn’t have painted a more delightful picture in her head if he’d handed her a Daimon.

I hated to spoil the mood, so I didn’t point out that we’d have to ask her and she’d have to agree, and neither of those seemed likely to happen any time soon.

I also didn’t point out that I was pretty sure I’d figured out Miguel’s problem, and we were about to learn if it would become ours.