After fifteen minutes, the three of them gave up on their unsuccessful attempts to puzzle out the locking control symbols and muscle the door open. Margen stepped back and wiped his brow. Even shoving on the door was taxing for him. Joe sighed and stopped trying to summon his force hands into the crack between the stone portal and the door jam, hitting the warrior with a few boosts to drive back the ever-persistent decay.
“I don’t see what the problem is,” Margen scoffed, sitting on the floor. “Why don’t we just keep going and look for a left-hand turn to reach your hallway.”
“Because I’m tired of getting lost … of being lost,” Joe countered, his voice full of frustration. “This level was designed to be a labyrinth, and none of us have any guide or ranger-type wayfinding abilities. If we head off from here, we are going to be wandering around in circles in no time.”
“You with me on this?” he added telepathically.
“Yeah, but be careful. You should say, ‘Neither of us’ instead of ‘None of us.’ Margen’s smarter than he pretends to be. He’ll figure us out if we keep leaving clues.”
“Good catch. Sorry.”
“So we mark the walls,” the warrior was saying as Joe left his mental side conversation with Yuk. “That trick is older than I am.”
“We do that if we move on. But I’m not quite ready to give up on the door yet. There has to be something we can do to open it.”
“I have [Sundering Strike], but to get through something that big will use a lot of stamina.”
“Then let’s not tap you out again. I have that skill, too.”
“Really. You have a very mixed bag of skills, Joe. Ok, then you do it. What rank is yours at?”
“Nine.”
“Pfff. Never mind. That is the downside to hodge-podge builds. Sure, you have a slew of tricks, but they are all too low to be very useful. Not saying you are not a fantastic healer, son. Just that restoration’s clearly your focus. Not [Sundering Strike].”
“Why not [Grit Razor ] it then?” Yuk suggested to Joe. “Like you did for the sword.”
“That was a bump of rock, not a thick stone slab. I’d need like a hundred razors to make an opening big enough for Margen.”
“Hmm. Ok. Ok. How about you razor the locking plate instead of the door?”
“Why?”
“This is just a guess. We’re no thief or locksmith,” Yuk mused. Accepting his friend’s caveat, Joe nodded as he lit a [Heart Fire] under Margen. “We’d bet that behind the plaque, there will be a space where the door mechanics are. A space we can fit into. Don’t you think a hook, pin, or something that’s probably locking the door? Put in the right pattern, and it unlocks while some sort of force magic pulls the slab out of the way.”
“Makes sense. You would not need to have magic always running that way. Only when the panel is being activated.”
“So if you break open the panel and we get in there, maybe we can find the catch and unhook it. Then the three of us try shoving the door again, but this time when it's unlocked. We would not have to blow through the whole door this way.”
“That could work. Granted, it could be something on the back side, top, or bottom, but it's definitely worth a try. One more purge and Margen will be good enough. One sec.”
When Joe finished removing the regrown rot, he let its foul traces burn away in the magical fire. “Ok, Margen. I’m going to try something. Can you move down the hall a bit for me? There is going to be some shrapnel from this.”
The warrior grunted and stood, moving off.
“Here goes,” Joe thought to Yuk. He placed his back to the stone door before extending an arm and turning his palm to rest on the symbol-covered plaque. The rock began to break apart a second later, forming into sharp shards. As soon as the spell reached the beginning of its damage phase, Joe let it go. Firing off [Grit Razor] from a fixed piece of stone, instead of one thrown, meant his fingers would end up in the way. This time, it was just a single discharge instead of the ricochets in the crevasse. The stone slices stung for a second before the pain faded away.
“We were right,” Yuk exclaimed, as buzzing wings hovered next to Joe, looking into the new hole in the wall. “There is a space here. Going in.”
Joe turned and looked into the jagged gap. Inside the space were crystals and rune-marked discs affixed to a sheet of silver metal. Oddly enough, to Joe, it looked a bit like an arcane version of a circuit board from an old electronic device you'd find on Earth.
“There it is, Joe. It’s a heavy bronze hook on a thick wire cable,” the living swarm declared. “If we can pull this end of the hook … or the wire down, it will unlock the door. We can’t budge it. Think you can get a gauntlet in here?”
“If you guide me, I don’t see why not. The size and shape of the force hands can be pretty much whatever I want.”
Joe recast [Glorious Gaunlet], letting the one he had lighting the hallway go out rather than spending the mana for a [Dual Cast]. [Heart Fire] was giving off plenty of light. As he summoned the golden hand, he imagined it was tiny, even smaller than Kaid’s miniature fists. He sent the spell into the hole, following Yuk’s guiding directions.
Joe tried putting his eye right up to the fissure in the wall, but he couldn’t see where the hand needed to go: it was behind too many things. This meant he had to manipulate the digit entirely from his friend’s explanations, which included several teasing jabs, such as, “Your other left, Joe.”
Finally, he had the cable in a good grip. As he pulled down, he heard Yuk’s mental cheer, as well as a grinding, shifting sound coming from the door itself. Margen looked over at Joe and raised an eyebrow. The big man stepped to the door and placed both palms firmly against the panel. With a shove, the door shifted. Joe joined him; this time [Dual Casting] two normal-sized hands of force magic. With six digits pushing, the slab rumbled to the right, sliding over rollers set under the door.
Their first push opened the way about two feet. Margen would need either another shove or to squeeze, but there was plenty of room for Joe to fit through, even without using any transformation magic.
“You’re a genius, Bud!” Joe commended, sticking his head through the gap, looking both ways.
“To be honest, we’re a bit surprised it worked. It made sense, but when you pointed out the hook could be anywhere on the door, we thought for sure we were chumped. Sometimes even a blind guess wins the pot.” The ragamuffin rightfully sounded pretty proud of themself. “Not feeling any vibrations other than us.”
“Then let’s go,” Joe stated out loud. He leaned forward, questing for the scents he wanted. They were there, far clearer on this side of the door.
Picking a direction, he found he could easily follow the traces, but walking while trying to discern which way the travelers were heading was surprisingly awkward. With nose up in the air, Joe kept tripping over his own feet. Even with [Hunter’s Pursuit], he found his balance was off, focused so heavily on the smells around him, keeping the ones he wanted while ignoring the stink of decay while looking for any increase or decrease in the scents he was tracking. Joe knew he needed more practice if he was stumbling in a flat, straight corridor. Or he needed to change the way he was doing it.
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“Hold on, guys. I’m going to try something,” Joe whispered. He had done scent work with his youngest dog, Ripple, for years and had witnessed how the ability to move while tracking was second nature for him. Joe didn’t have enough ranks yet to get to the twenty-five, thirty pounds he needed for his truffle-hunting Lagotto, but he had seen small beagles at scent trials before. They should be perfect. Auto-shunting his gear into his ring, Joe dropped to all fours and shrank in one motion.
He waited to reach the phase where he could start shaping into the long-eared canine, but he had to shed far more size than he expected. He realized that with only six ranks in [Beast Shape], he would have to settle for a 16-pound dog, and beagles were fairly big-boned. That would not be a small beagle; that would be a mini pocket beagle. By the time Joe stood on four little feet, he looked like a puppy, diminutive enough to fit in one hand.
Your skill [Beast Shape] has increased to rank 7
Surprised at his new physical state, Joe let out a small yolp.
“That’s ridiculous. How’re you going to be able to fight like that?” grumbled the scowling warrior, looming over the tiny Beagle-Joe like a redwood tree.
The pup shrugged his minute shoulders and yolped again before turning and trotting down the hallway.
As absurd as the miniature beagle form was in this evil lair of undeath and corruption, it was perfect for what he was trying to do. His floppy ears wafted the smells lingering above the ground right into his face, and his body was built to move and track with ease. Wide nostrils picked up everything, effortlessly locked onto the four scents he wanted while still being aware of everything else around him as well. Just ahead, there was a substantial gathering of Wild Order aromas. He was also positive there was not a single wight along this path.
Beagle-Joe darted down the passageway until he found himself looking down a flight of descending stairs. On the landing above the first step were his team's traces, pooled into layers like sheets in a book. Joe flipped through the imprints, reading Hah’roo slowly descending the stairs while the rest of the group waited at the top for her. A new dry smell caught his nose, which Joe followed to a chalked ‘X’ marking the fourth step down. As soon as he saw the warning sign, he knew exactly where they were. They were well past the room of the four seasons. A long, straight hall was at the bottom of this flight of stairs. If they followed it, it led to the curving stairway, which opened into the giant cavern where he and Yuk had separated from the rest of the team.
They weren’t lost anymore! They were still in danger, but at least now he knew where they were. In this dog shape, he was positive he could backtrack out of here. He could probably do it in his normal form as well, but as a canine, it was a sure thing.
Joe dispelled [Beast Shape] and rejoiced aloud for Margen, as Yuk had already telepathically heard Joe’s excited declarations.
“I know where we are. Back that way is the way out. A little ways below here is the cavern where the rest of the team teleported out from.”
“We are closer to where you were separated?” Margen asked, receiving a nod in reply. “Then we should go down. Guild protocols state, all things being equal, teammates should attempt to rendezvous at the point they were last together.”
“But, is it equal? There are horrible things down there, and that way is out of the pyramid,” Joe countered, pointing over Margen’s shoulder.
“True. But there are packs of wights that way as well. Not to mention the jungle beyond. The standing rule is to ‘last together, first checked.’”
“Is that right, Yuk?” Joe asked his party-mate, who had been a guiler far longer than Joe had.
“We have no idea. You know how we were with teams before you. But this is Margen, one of the guys who formed the Fort Coral guild. Are you really gonna argue with him?”
“Ok. Fair point.” Joe sighed. “Ok, down it is.”
With the path a straight line from here, Joe didn’t need to change shape or even really focus on the scents, though he did search out Kendell’s from time to time as they walked. Each time he caught that essence, it filled him with longing and the hope she was ok. He was more than ready to get the hell out of there and back with her again. While this was precisely the sort of adventuring lifestyle he had wanted, this particular stage of the mission, lost in darkness, surrounded by undead, was not nearly as much fun as the badboon questing he and RC had done.
The descent down the arcing steps was uneventful. When they spotted the opening into the cavern, Joe and Margen hung back on the steps. Yuk was going to go look on his own. Unless he was in [Big Bug], the ghouls paid no attention to him.
Still, Joe felt his nerves grow taunt as Yuk's last crawling bits slid off of him and crept into the darkness. He wondered if the only reason the dead ignored his creeping companion was that he had been there to draw their focus. Would he be in trouble without anything distracting the feral wights?
“If you think they’ve spotted you, get back here as fast as you can.”
“Aww. You care.”
“Don’t be a dope. Just be careful.”
“Well, we can tell you one thing. The team’s not here. Gonna go take a look. Maybe they left us something before they went or jumped back and left it.” There was a pause before Yuk spoke again, this time whispering in Joe’s head. “I’m going to go silent. There is one of those thrall mummies nearby, and it perked up when we were talking. It might sense telepathy.”
“Shit,” Joe swore to himself, keeping his thoughts away from Yuk’s.
“How’s it doing?” Margen asked.
“So far, so good. The team is not there, but they are going to check the site for anything left behind for us.”
“Smart. You’ll make a good team leader thinking like that,” the large founder exclaimed, quietly clapping a hand on Joe’s shoulder. Joe didn’t want to chance telling him it was Yuk’s idea.
The wait seemed endless. Even though it was hard to tell time in the dark, Yuk had been gone for a very long time. The only good news was that there were no sounds of alarm coming from the cavern. Even so, Joe felt himself start to sweat in the gambeson from the tension.
“Come on, Yuk,” he silently thought to himself. “Where are you?”
His thoughts must have been a lucky charm, as seconds later, a wave of beetles, centipedes, moths, and other such critters swarmed up Joe’s legs.
“Go, go, go. Up! Quiet! Quick!”
Joe tapped Margen’s arm and held a finger to his lips before lightly dashing up the long, sinuous stairway. His footfalls were silent on the stone treads.
Your skill [Stealth] has increased to rank 10.
When they reached the hallway, they stopped, and Yuk practically shouted in Joe’s head.
“You are not going to believe it. Look what Kendell left us!”
The big black cave cricket leapt onto the back of his shaggy hand, lifting its head to present Joe with its prize. Clasped in its mandibles was a jeweled stud: the very same two-way communication item Naragash had given the lovely skill-savant.
“We wanted to tell you earlier, but that mummy we warned you about was looking for it. As soon as we started moving with the earring, the thrall started following us. We had to flow all over the place to shake it. Didn’t dare use telepathy with it trying to find us.”
“You did perfectly! Here goes!”
Joe cast a very focused [Deaden Flesh] on his earlobe and punched the small spike through the flap of skin.
“Hello?”
“GOOD GOLLY McGULLY! JOE!” bellowed Myllo through the jeweled item. Unlike Yuk’s telepathy, Joe heard the Korrigan’s voice, but he knew from when Kenda wore it that the sound was only audible to the wearer. “You’re alive! Yuk?”
“With me,” Joe answered. He heard Myllo yell the news to the others. Even though he couldn’t hear their responses, it was clear from Myllo’s attempts to shush them there was a great deal of cheering going on at the base camp. “Oh, have I got a surprise for you …” he added, only to have Margen make a stern cutting gesture. Joe stammered to silence, holding up his hands in a baffled posture.
Mergen shook his head and held up a finger.
“Lay it on me, kid. Don’t make me guess.”
“Um. Uh,” a perplexed Joe stuttered before coming up with something. “Oh yeah. We know where the loom is. It’s at the very top of the pyramid.”
“You don’t say. Well …. That might change our plans. Are you two somewhere reasonably safe?”
“Yeah.”
“Stay put a sec. I’ll be right back.”
Joe’s moment of exhilaration petered out. Between Myllo’s hold and Margen's inexplicable silencing, he didn’t know what to feel. He had seen both Naragash and Kendell cover the earring when they wanted to talk without it going through the artifact, so he did the same.
“What the heck was that about?”
The big warrior sighed deeply, or as deeply as his damaged lungs allowed for. He started to speak and then closed his mouth, clearly working out something in his head.
This left Joe standing in the ancient hall, waiting on both guild leaders, new and old, to give him some answers.