Chapter 57: Kiddy Stuff
I settled into my role as scout and guinea pig.
Nothing opened on me, or shut. Sometimes the puzzles stumped Miguel, but he or Zhizhi could figure out how they connected to the traps so we could avoid triggering them. Most, he solved.
While Lena took her turns, I studied the puzzles with him. They seemed like they would’ve been pretty rudimentary for anyone who could actually read the runic script. I couldn’t tell if their basic nature was appropriate to what I’d begun to suspect about the rest of the environment, or if it was somehow pitched with knowledge of how aware the player who found them would be.
They might have been basic, but they still represented a treasure trove of information about the Third Eye runes.
Speaking of –
“Look at this door,” Lena said. We’d traded off twice now, and were near the end of the hall. When Miguel, Zhizhi, and I started forward, Lena held her hand up. “Look at it from back there. Geez. You don’t all want to fall in a pit, do you?”
We froze in our tracks.
Lena waved her hand around the door, specifically its knob. Now that she’d pointed it out, I saw a series of runes etched into the metal. Only one visible ring, so it wasn’t another instance of just lining them up so they made actual characters; this looked more like a combination lock.
“I’m gonna try the door,” Lena said.
Miguel cleared his throat. “Perhaps we should inspect –”
Lena fiddled with the ring of runes, then gave the knob a twist.
Something opened, but it wasn’t the door. Another hydraulic hiss, but this was more of a puff, because it only opened a vent over Lena’s head.
She sprang backwards, but the slime that oozed through the metal slats was liquidy enough that some still splashed on her hair and shoulders, and Bernie’s head. The rest dripped into a puddle in front of the door.
Lena flailed backwards, swatting at her hair.
I caught her. “Are you okay? It’s not some kind of acid, is it?”
She paused. Took stock. “No, it doesn’t seem to hurt. Check my phone. I don’t want to touch it with my hands all goopy.”
I did, careful of the cracked screen. “No HP loss.”
“I guess it’s safe, then.” She scooped some of the slime up on a finger and opened her mouth.
I grabbed her hand.
She grinned. “I wasn’t really going to taste it. Although I do wonder...”
“Keep wondering,” I snapped.
Miguel took her place at the door, squishing through the slime. Why not? His boots looked waterproof. “I doubt you have anything to worry about, although I would not, of course, recommend eating it.”
“You know what it is?” I asked. I suspected he would.
I suspected he clammed up at the question, too. He bit out, “Perhaps.”
“It looks like the stuff kids’ game shows dump on Z-list celebrities,” Zhizhi said. She tapped something on her phone and showed Lena and I a picture of someone being drenched in greenish-yellow ooze. “Gunge, right?”
“Or simply slime.” Miguel clamped his jaw shut. Tightly, he added, “I’d like to concentrate on these runes.”
Lena shrugged and poked at the slime in her hair. Bernie grumbled about it, so she and I focused on trying to get his head as clean as we could manage with no water.
Zhizhi was either less distracted or less willing to let Miguel’s evasion go. She joined him by the door. “Why do you need to concentrate? Lena already triggered the trap.”
If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. Please report it.
“The door is locked,” he said. “It seems wasteful not to open it now.”
Zhizhi put her elbow on the door. “Wasteful? We’re looking for a Daimon, aren’t we? Bernie’s great, but I don’t see him solving a puzzle and slipping through a door in the few minutes it took us to round the corner.”
“What you caught on camera looked bipedal,” Miguel said.
Lena and I exchanged glances. I really wanted to see Zhizhi’s footage, but now didn’t seem like the right time to interrupt. Bernie chirped and we went back to scooping slime off him.
“Perhaps this one is more capable of working doors,” Miguel said. “In any case, Bernie’s physical form teleports. Why shouldn’t he be able to go through?”
Zhizhi sighed. “Okay, fair enough. Are you going to explain why you seem to know so much about this place?”
He crouched and squinted at the runes. “I’m guessing.”
She stared at him for a moment, then squared her shoulders, checked her camera, and backed off to join Lena and I.
Our attempts to clean up had mostly resulted in my hands becoming as wet and sticky as Lena’s hair.
Zhizhi looked us up and down. She seemed to fight against a smile, and lose. She held out her water bottle. “You’re getting nowhere fast like this. Here.”
With a few squirts of water, we managed to thin the slime to the point almost all of it ran off our hands, and some of it out of Lena’s hair and Bernie’s plush surface. By the time we finished, Zhizhi had produced a pair of wet wipes from her fanny pack; we took them and finished cleaning our hands, and I wiped off my phone since it didn’t have obvious cracks.
As I was shoving the wet wipe back into its open wrapper, and that into my pocket, the door clicked open.
It swung inwards with what looked like barely a push from Miguel. He stared at the interior. Something glinted in his eye, then he composed his face into an approximation of neutrality and took a drag on his cigarette.
“I’m guessing,” Lena said, “there’s no Daimon inside.”
“Alas not.” Miguel stepped back. “You suffered the trap. Would you like to see the prize?”
“Obvs!” She sprang into motion. Two bounding steps later, she peered through the open door. “Whoa. Actual treasure!”
Zhizhi and I joined her.
The room beyond the door appeared to be a storage space. Shelves and racks lined the walls, all metal, all empty. In the otherwise bare center of the room stood a wooden TV tray. Instead of the frozen dinner that was its natural occupant, it held a pile of coins.
Lena and I exchanged glances.
Gold? I didn’t even want to say the word for one of the Third Eye resources no one in our group had yet collected.
She tensed to enter, but I caught her arm.
She tugged against my grasp. “If I get slimed again or something, I do not give a single shit. You know what those coins could be, Cam.”
I swallowed. I shot a glance at Miguel. I didn’t want to say something I was, technically, just guessing at, and which in any case wasn’t my place to tell anyone. I also didn’t want to take something that wasn’t mine.
He met my eyes. “The trap was out here. I don’t see any runes inside, although certainly you should keep an eye out.”
As much permission as he was willing to give.
I let go of Lena’s arm.
She was off like a rocket. Her fingers clinked in the coins. She plucked one from the pile and held it up.
Which was not something we could do with a collectible Third Eye object.
Lena frowned at the coin, turned it in the light – it looked pretty dull for Gold, but then, how much gold had I really seen? –, and said, “Maybe I’ve still got a layer of slime on my hand?”
She reached into the pile to scoop up more. Her fingers brushed the top of the TV tray.
A flash from all our phones and Zhizhi’s camera. Bye-bye tray. One Wood by volume, or three for the two struts and the surface? I supposed it didn’t much matter.
Coins clattered to the ground.
One of them rolled near my feet. I scooped it up. No flash.
Did we need to do something special to collect Gold, or were these a different class of object? Or not Third Eye constructs at all?
They sure weren’t real gold. The coin in my hand was lightweight and unmistakably dull.
The side facing me had a picture of balloons embossed on it, and a ring of repeating Third Eye runic characters around its edge. So much for it somehow being a real coin. I turned it over – it didn’t have the distinctive grooves of national currency around the rim – and inspected its other face. A polygonal pyramid, viewed from an isometric angle. It looked more like something you might see on a real coin. This repeated writing was in English, though, and put paid to the idea.
“One token,” I read, “equals one play.”
“What does that mean?” Zhizhi asked.
Specifically, she asked Miguel, even though I was the one who’d read it off. Too good a journalist to miss how much more about the situation he knew then he’d been willing to let on.
If he’d hesitated, I would’ve answered this one for him, since it was general knowledge.
He didn’t. Of course, being himself, even when he wanted to answer a question, he did it with one of his own. “What’s treasure to a child?”
Zhizhi was in no mood. “Fortnite V-Bucks? I don’t know! Are you going to explain or not?”
“Right idea,” I muttered, because I wasn’t in any mood, either. “Wrong era.”
She swung the camera in front of my face. It could’ve just been because she wanted to capture me saying something, not to put me on the spot. You know. Could’ve been.
Wasn’t.
Before I could speak, though, Lena joined us in the doorway with the remaining coins piled in her cupped hands.
Miguel plucked one and held it up to the light. “It means that if we keep going, we’ll find an arcade.”