image [https://i.imgur.com/9GmGLKv.jpeg]

You have died!

Go directly to the crypt.

Do not pass the Grasslands, do not collect 200 copper bits.

Death tax:

350 XP

Insufficient XP to pay.

An interest of 10% has been applied to the debt.

An interest rate of 10% per cycle has been instated for the debt.

All skills will be reduced to level 1 until your debt is paid.

All money in inventory has been lost.

Item lost: Wombat Sallet Helmet.

I’m not dead?

Or, maybe I’m dead but it’s only temporary?

I’ve got a nasty batch of penalties. Better than being dead though, and I’m fairly sure I didn’t actually have any money, so that part of it is less painful, at least. Can’t see myself on the map any more, but if this is equivalent to jail in Monopoly, I should be on the same square as the blacksmith, shouldn’t I?

As soon as Will dismissed the message, four torches flared to life around him, burning with an eerie green fire. Before Will could take a look around him, however, another message screen popped up.

New achievement “Memento Mori”

You have died.

This isn’t much of an achievement, really.

Just about everyone manages to die, eventually.

Just, you know, try not to make a habit out of it.

It’s probably bad for your health.

Reward:

Novelty T-shirt

The novelty T-shirt was obviously made to Will’s wombat body. It was printed with a cartoon winged wombat, and the sentence “There is no ‘bat’ in ‘wombat’”

Other than being tailored for wombats, there was nothing special about the shirt.

Ha ha. Very funny.

Shirt shoved into his inventory, second message window dismissed, and Will could finally take a look at his surroundings. He was sitting in a stone room, about ten meters by ten meters. Stone sarcophagi stood against two of the walls, each one carved with the likeness of something that was very nearly human, but somehow not quite there. Will felt a sense of wrongness at seeing them, and had to quickly avert his eyes, as the sight made him nauseous.

Two green torches flanked a door set into one of the sarcophagus-free walls, and two more torches were located one in each corner of the opposite wall. The door, for some reason Will couldn’t even begin to explain, had a wombat-sized pet door on the bottom. Complete with a flapping panel to keep it closed.

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If this was Monopoly, a roll of doubles would get me out. Let’s see if it works here too.

A quick bathroom break later, Will was still in the crypts. Of course, his dice fell on a two and a five, which wouldn’t have gotten him out of Monopoly jail either. Somehow, Will knew that another dice roll wouldn’t be immediately possible. He’d have to wait for an unknown amount of time before he could try again.

Well, if I’m stuck here for however long I need to wait between visits to the little joey’s room, I may as well do some exploring.

As soon as Will left the room, another message screen appeared in front of him.

Optional quest

Fine a way out of the crypt.

Reward:

50 XP

????

You will fail the quest if you leave the crypt by rolling doubles or waiting for three turns.

So. I am getting out of here if I roll a double, and otherwise after three turns. But there’s also a manual way out, which has some extra reward for it. I can live with it. Pun intended this time. I think this place is corrupting me.

The pet door opened easily when Will pushed against it, and led him to a stone corridor. The grey stone was illuminated by the same green torches that Will had seen inside the room he’d appeared in, spaced evenly every twenty meters or so. The corridor itself stretched to Will’s left and right, with nothing to distinguish one side from the other.

Shrugging, Will turned left. The corridor went on for further away than he could see, but there was another door in the left wall five meters ahead of him. The door had the same pet flap as the one leading out of the first room, and Will opened it and peeked inside.

The room inside was a ten meters by ten meters square. Two sarcophagi were located on the wall opposite the door, with green torches above them. As far as Will could tell, he may as well have returned to the room he’d appeared in.

Going back out, Will continued on. There was a third door ten meters after the second. And through it, yet another nearly identical room.

Only nearly identical this time though, since the torch above the left sarcophagus was missing, and the sarcophagus itself open. And as soon as Will’s snout crossed the door, a cluttering noise started to sound from it.

By the time Will was fully inside the room, a skeleton was stepping out of the sarcophagus. It was dressed in tattered cloths that looked like they were very fine, at some point in the distant past. A rusty sword was clutched in its left hand.

Will fired a Thunder Bolt at the skeleton. Only one bolt appeared, instead of the two he was expecting, but the impact was enough to splinter some of the skeleton’s ribs. There wasn’t any other effect, and the damage didn’t seem to bother the skeleton much.

The skeleton walked towards Will, and the wombat responded with another Thunder Bolt. This one hit the skeleton’s right shoulder, and caused enough damage that the monster’s arm fell off.

The skeleton still didn’t seem to care about the damage, and swung its sword at Will. The wombat jumped back to avoid the clumsy attack, and then closed back in to attack the skeleton’s leg with his claws.

The sharpened bronze didn’t seem to do any damage to the bones.

Damn it. I don’t have the armor pierce effect from level two anymore! Just like the Thunder Bolt only gets me one bolt per cast for now. Which means Burst won’t have knockback.

Dodging one ineffectual sword swing after another, Will cast Thunder Bolt again and again. It took a total of five Bolts to finish off the skeleton, rewarding Will with five XP that were instantly eaten by his debt. Harvesting the pile of bones yielded a pile of good quality Bone Dust, which added itself to Will’s lengthening list of random loot drops.

There was nothing else of interest in the room, and Will waited for his mana to regenerate before going back to the corridor.

An hour and a hundred meters later, Will had checked the contents of ten more rooms and had killed three more skeletons. Killing them became a lot faster, and less resource-intensive, once he’d realized that they were reasonably vulnerable to the bashing damage of his charge attack, only needing one charge and one Thunder Bolt to kill, instead of the five Thunder Bolts he’d used against the first one.

But now, Will had to make a choice.

The corridor he was walking down had reached a four-way intersection. There were now identical corridors stretching out in front of him, to his left, and to his right. He was also fairly sure he could roll his movement dice again, and maybe leave the crypt behind.

Not sure I want to get out yet. I need to reduce the XP debt as much as possible before the interest hits again, and I have to admit that I am curious about the mystery reward for finishing the quest. Which leaves me with three options here. What was that rule about mazes? Always stick to the left wall?

Taking the left turn, Will kept moving. In this corridor, the doors were located in the right wall, rather than the left. They still led to the same type of room, with the same occasional skeletons populating them.

Twenty rooms (and two hours) later, Will took another left turn at another four-way intersection.

Another couple of those, and I’ll end up back where I started. Isn’t the ‘take the left wall’ rule supposed to always get you out of the maze?

It took a while longer, but Will’s prediction turned out to be correct, and he found himself back in the room where he’d killed the first skeleton.

Welp. So much for that plan. Just how big is this place, really?