After I told Ruka the tale of Kiki, and after she’d stopped howling with laughter, she ended up staying very late that night. I know what you’re thinking but there was no sleepover. All we did was talk for hours, and eventually we both agreed she should probably leave so I could grab a bit of sleep before Sigrid came to wake me up.
I’d gotten to know a number of named NPCs quite well. I’d spent hours around Alice, Petal, Shashu, and Shannon, among others, and I had a pretty good sense of what they were like. They were virtually indistinguishable from real people, with a few key differences. Most importantly, they had a strong set of blinders on when it came to the game aspects of this place, and they had a strong set of unwavering personal beliefs that I suspected were programmed into them; they were capable of growth and change, but their core traits seemed unshakable, hard-coded. Like me and the other Players, they were all playing by a set of rules. They were different rules, no doubt, but there were things they could and could not do.
Having spent a lot of time with Annabelle and Akari, I’d discovered several ways that they were different from normal NPCs, even named ones. I had even started to believe that they were not actually NPCs at all. They weren’t human, but they also weren’t whatever Stratos was. Occasionally I’d get the feeling that they would like to come clean and tell me who they really were. Sometimes it felt like they were toying with me, dropping hints, or even forgetting themselves and accidentally letting something slip, but it also felt like they had rules they had to follow, too.
The other NPC I'd spent a lot of time around was Daruka, and by this point I was certain that she was the same as the sisters, whatever they were.
What I couldn’t figure out was why all three of them seemed to have taken a particular interest in me. The sisters seemed determined to make me stronger, whereas Ruka...she just seemed to like me. Whatever her ulterior motives were, and I was sure she had some, she kept them well hidden. The only thing I knew was that even though she was a demon — or playing the role of one — those motives did not involve causing me harm.
It was possible I was wrong and the succubus had been playing me since day one, but I chose to believe that whatever she was and whatever she was doing with me, the friendship we shared was genuine. I was in for a world of hurt if I was wrong, but I really didn’t think that I was.
The biggest problem with my relationships with all three of these mysterious people was that I was keeping it a secret from the other people who were important to me, namely Sigrid. Someday soon I'd have to come clean. Just not quite yet.
In the days following my duel with Flint things went back to normal: waking up and exercising with Sigrid, training with the sisters, all that fun stuff. The first stretch of time I had to myself, I pulled out the Legendary Gift Box the observers had given me after the fight. Now that I was brimming with abilities these reward boxes didn't spark the same excitement they once did, but this was a Legendary one. Who knew what could be in it? I pulled on the bow and the box sprang open with the now-familiar poof of virtual confetti.
Inside, there was an egg. It was big, about the size of a garden gnome, and its white shell had a strange silvery sheen to it.
> Legendary Egg
> Entire kingdoms have been won and lost in efforts to acquire one of these rare objects. What hatches from it is entirely dependent upon its owner.
>
> Powers:
> Sit On It - Hatch a legendary creature
Well, that was interesting. What counts as a legendary creature around here? A dragon popped to mind, but that seemed like wishful thinking. Maybe a giant flying turtle? A multi-tailed fox? Or would I get screwed and a baby shoggoth would pop out of the egg? Did I actually have to sit on it to make it hatch? Feed it mana? What would happen if I charged it with affinity energy? I had no idea how it worked, but I knew someone who might.
"Whatcha got there?" Annabelle said when I showed her the egg. When she got a better look at it her eyes widened with interest. "Oh, is that a legendary egg?"
"You know anything about them?" I said.
"Not a thing, apart from that they're legendary."
"Gee, thanks. So no clue what kind of creature might come out, or how to make it happen, or if I can influence what appears?"
"Nope. Not an electronic sausage," she said.
We spent some time scouring her library for any mention of legendary eggs, and I sent instructions to the doppels to search Daedalus' books as well, but we found nothing about it anywhere. In the end, we decided to have some fun and create a special incubator for it. It kept the egg comfortably warm and swirled affinity energy around it. All affinities. We had no idea if it would do anything, but I'd learned that the game often rewarded creative ideas and initiative so I was hopeful that something unique and interesting would come of it. Even if it didn't, it was worth the try, and it was always fun artificing things with Annabelle.
I set the incubator up in a tree house on the outskirts of the elf village with some elven midwives assigned to keep an eye on it, and I pretty much forgot about it because before I knew it the day of Team Maple Leaf and the Round Table’s raid on the Shadow Dungeon came. Sigrid hadn’t mentioned to anyone that she’d told me about their previous attempt, but she still kept me up to date on things in secret. She didn’t have to, my elven spies knew all. It meant a lot to me that Sigrid wanted to be open and transparent with me, and it made me feel even more guilty that I wasn’t telling her everything.
Sigrid had suggested to the team my idea of sending Kenji in to scout alone, claiming it as her own, of course, but it got shot down. Even though the boy himself was keen to do it, there were too many of them too squeamish to send him in all alone like that.
She didn’t say it outright, but she dropped enough hints that I strongly suspected she believed Arthur’s real reason for not wanting Kenji to scout the dungeon was because he knew it was actually my idea. That made me wonder what Arthur had done to make her think that, surely he wasn’t petty like that. Perhaps it had something to do with Jane. I wasn’t about to ask, though. I don’t like to pry.
The team’s quick dismissal of the scouting idea did make me start to wonder about Morgan’s strategies, though, and whether she was using everyone to their full potential. If they understood what Kenji was truly capable of I’m sure they wouldn’t have been so quick to shoot it down. I had seen him in the labyrinth and I knew firsthand how powerful his abilities were — there were good enough that I had synthesized all of them into my own powers — but perhaps Morgan was underutilizing him through over-caution, afraid to put a 14 year-old into harm’s way. I could understand that, but I was a high school teacher, mostly, and I knew that kids his age were far more capable than people gave them credit for, and Kenji was far more capable than most.
But, as they had made abundantly clear, it wasn’t my problem.
I made sure I wasn’t in the elf village when they set off, in case they chose to go through it on the way to the swamp. It was the most direct route. The fact that I hadn’t heard about them doing that on their first exploratory raid told me that they had skirted around the elves and taken the long way to get to the swamp. I couldn’t think of any logical reason for this except that they didn’t want me to find out what they were doing. Sigrid hadn’t mentioned that part to me. I guess she knew it would only upset me more, and she would have been right.
I had holed myself up in the labyrinth with Alice, trying – unsuccessfully – to come up with a version of Byron’s portal that could be opened beyond where I could see at that moment. I felt like I was missing something, some special insight into the magic (or whatever) behind the portal effect. I could tell it was associated with Void somehow, but I didn’t have enough expertise with Void to make sense of it.
It also didn’t help that I was finding it impossible to concentrate. I was trying – also unsuccessfully — not to think about how they were at that exact moment raiding the Shadow Dungeon, and how I was not there with them because they didn’t want me there. It was all I could think about.
I needed to do something that would take my mind off it.
Akari’s first rule of strength was her idea that you must be able to punch above your weight, and keep punching, until you meet someone you can’t beat. Then you work at it, practicing until you can, and after that you keep punching up until you meet someone else you can’t beat. Rinse and repeat.
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The only way she knew to get there is through grueling practice. Practice, practice, practice. She called it the Training Treadmill, although she said she did hear it also referred to as the Cultivation Cudgel. That name seemed a bit clunky to me and had all the signs of being poorly translated from another language, so it likely sounded more poetic in the original tongue.
Annabelle had a similar opinion about constantly challenging stronger opponents, but she approached it from a slightly different angle. Annabelle wasn’t so much about practice as she was all about experimentation and risk. Keep sticking your neck out and attempting different things until something works.
However they chose to approach it, they had turned me into a believer. Pushing myself to tackle problems that were too hard for me to overcome and sticking with them until they became easy to beat, I believed that would be the key to winning the game.
So yeah. I had fully bought into running on the treadmill (or constantly smacking myself over the head with the cudgel) and seeking bigger challenges, like beating Flint. Getting stronger was a game unto itself, and since I started working with the sisters things had become exponentially more fun.
Look at where I was. I was living the ultimate game and I had somehow lucked into the world’s biggest cheat code. I couldn’t deny it anymore: I was really enjoying my life on Crucible. I didn’t even care that whenever someone says something like that it’s guaranteed to trigger flags. It was by triggering flags like Ruka, Annabelle, and Akari that my life had become something I actually wanted to live. So I say bring it on.
And that was how I found myself doing something exceptionally crazy. Gob-smackingly insane.
I’d had this idea tickling my brain for a while but I’d kept putting it aside because it seemed ludicrous. A challenge far too big and terrifying to tackle. At that moment, however, as my friends were raiding a dungeon without me, I felt like crazy was exactly what I needed. And, as an added bonus, it might help shed some light on the portal problem.
You might see where this is going already.
When I finally made the decision to follow Annabelle’s approach of experimentation and risk, I slammed both my hands on the workbench Alice and I were working at. The suddenness of it startled her.
“Right,” I said. “I don’t need them either.”
“Excuse me?” Alice said.
“Never mind. We’re done here, I’m gonna go do something else.”
“What will you do?”
“I’m gonna figure out what the deal is with the Void Dungeon.”
“Oh,” Alice said. “That’s nice. What’s that?”
Right. Gotta put it in NPC terms.
“It’s under the Black Altar.” I figured she might’ve known what that was, it was in the adjacent hex, after all.
“Ohhhhh,” she said.
Nope, she didn’t have a clue. As immensely competent as Alice and the doppels were, they were ultimately still monsters born in a dungeon. That was okay. I made a mental note to educate them more about the world outside the labyrinth. Later.
“First,” I said, “I need to spend a little time with an Artifice forge.”
And that’s how, a few hours hours later, I found myself at the Black Altar.
Doing this alone was really stupid, I knew that. Maybe I’d just go in and test my idea, then come right back out. Yeah right, where had I heard that before?
I’m pretty sure someone, somewhere, would be appalled that I used an Artifice forge to create a set of clothing, but I didn’t have time to see a tailor. Besides, I’d done it before when Annabelle helped me make my new adventuring outfit. It was probably stretching it a bit to call what I made in preparation for my foray into the Void Dungeon a set of clothing, it was more like a cross between a skin-tight hazmat suit and a failed attempt at a Blue Man Group costume. I needed something that would cover my whole body, top to toes, with no gaps anywhere.
I ended up pulling fresh from the forge a one-piece black outfit, with a head-covering hood and built-in boots, gloves, and a smooth mask that covered the whole face, all flat black. I didn’t want to have to put a zipper in it – that would’ve ruined the sleek aesthetics and may have created unwanted gaps – so it ended up being fully enclosed. The only way to put it on was by donning it directly from my inventory.
The powers I then added to it included some I’d already synthesized, the most important of which was a power that was nearly as hard to create as the razor floss: Affinity Form. It was based on the Affinity Armor power that shrouded you in an element, but I’d turned it into something that could actually transmogrify me into a living form of that element. It was the difference between, say, being covered in fire and actually becoming fire. Affinity Form also had the Synthesis power itself synthesized into so I could become a blend of more than one element at a time, just in case.
The only way I was able to enchant such a potent ability onto the suit was by restricting it so that only someone who had the Good At Everything gift could use it. It was a bit of a cheat because the ability was so rare, possibly even unique, that no other restrictions were needed. It also meant that nobody but me could use that power on the suit, not that anyone else would be able to get into the suit anyway.
I built a few sensory enhancements into the mask and cowl, cause you never know, and the last power I added was one that I had to make specially for the suit. It was based on the elven cloak’s ability to blend in with the Green, aka Nature. I synthesized it with Good At Everything, Affinity Control, and the Synthesize power itself. The result was camouflage that worked in nearly any environment.
I put affinity restrictions on all those powers as well, not because I technically had to, but because I was in a rush and wanted to use as little mana as possible to enchant them onto the suit. I had stuff to do.
> Second Skin
> This one-piece suit offers the wearer unique elemental protection and camouflage.
>
> Powers:
> Affinity Form - Transform into a living element; Requires Good At Everything
> Blend In Anywhere – Camouflage; Requires Adept Affinity with Nature
> I Feel A Lot Closer To You Now – Telescopic vision; Requires Adept Affinity with Light
> See It Hot Hot Hot – Thermal vision; Requires Adept Affinity with Fire
> Speak Up, Sonny – Super hearing; Requires Adept Affinity with Air
If I was right, if I turned myself into living Void it would make me almost undetectable inside the Void Dungeon. Probably. Maybe. I mean, Void was all there was in there, apart from the horrifying monsters of course, so theoretically I should just blend right into the nonexistent scenery. Hopefully.
Just to make sure, I cranked every stealth ability I had up to eleven. My plan was to see if I could slip through the dungeon under the radar of the Shoggoth guardian, and any other nasty creature that might be lurking around, thereby avoiding fights I had zero chance of winning. If I’d had anything else that was voidy I would have been using it too. This dungeon scared the willies out of me, so I’d have guzzled any snake oil you gave me if you told me it would help me get through it.
It was an audacious gamble, sure — rash, reckless, impulsive, and totally irresponsible too — but at that particular moment prudency was not top of mind. I briefly thought about inviting Akari and Annabelle to come with me, but I can’t stand adventures where OP NPCs are required to make it through. This was something I had to do myself. Besides, I only had the one Second Skin suit.
Okay, Void Key? Check. Second Skin? Check. Sneaky skills? Check. Right. Let’s do this.
I turned myself into Void.
Whoah. That felt weeeeeird.
I looked down at my body and saw nothing but that ethereal blackness of the Void with faint colors swirling all over me like oil on water. Only one way to see if it would work. I took a deep breath, even though being pure Void I didn’t need to breathe, and stepped inside the dungeon.
It was just as I had remembered, the same chill as I passed through the gate, the same endless space stretching on forever in all directions, the same swirling mist around my feet. Only this time I didn’t have Jane’s strength beside me.
This camouflage had better work.
I froze as soon as I had passed all the way through the gate. I stayed very still for a while, waiting to see if anything came at me. Nothing did.
So far so good.
I took a tentative step. Nothing. A few more steps. Nothing. I started stalking in a slow, creeping tiptoe toward the tower far off in the distance, the only landmark around apart from the dungeon entrance’s square pillar of black that stretched endlessly upward behind me. Still nothing.
So I kept walking. This was nice. Sure. A nice, leisurely, terrifying stroll through the worst place ever.
The level of the mist swirling around my legs rose and fell, sometimes down by my ankles, sometimes almost to my waist. I couldn’t tell if the ground below me was dipping or if it was the mist itself swelling and sinking, so I tried not to think about it, especially during those times when more and more of my legs disappeared below its surface. I just kept walking.
Then I felt it. Something brushed against my leg, just under the surface of the strange swirling fog. I froze. I looked down. The mist was up to my waist, lots of room down there for an unwelcome guest.
Then again, wasn’t I the unwelcome one?