Suddenly, the cold seems like the least of my problems. My hands tremble for an entirely different reason as I stare down at the slate, countless different possibilities fighting to take hold of my mind. A teleporter. It didn’t destroy the ground under me, it teleported all of it to… somewhere else. Turning the sand into glass in the process.
So where was it supposed to send me? To one of the tutorial towns like Gil? Maybe straight to the bottom of the ocean to kill me. Or… just a little bit closer to the place I’m supposed to be heading towards. Would I still have met Pearl if I got teleported? Why didn’t it teleport me while I was sleeping? Did that shovel from way before protect me somehow, and it’s the only reason I’m still here?
“Pearl, did you know it was a teleporter?”
She tilts her head to the side. “You didn’t give me a serious description of it. Our teleporters and weapons are pretty similar by design so our enemies can’t just find one and try to use it. Well, not without the risk of killing whoever tries to go in. Double-check to make sure you saw a teleporter?”
I shake my head and tap the slate with my knuckles. “I know this is what I saw. The descriptions of the functions, the way the shell spikes light up, and then there’s the fact that it’s completely uncensored. The only one out of all of these. My quest wants me to see this. It… wants me to know I wasn’t really in danger at all.”
“Oh, you were definitely still in danger. A teleporter that goes to the bottom of the ocean or into outer space can kill you a whole lot easier than a conventional weapon.” Pearl says in a tone that sounds like she’s trying to reassure me. “We don’t know if the system was using the teleporter, or if it was a wayward machine running ancient programs to kill, kidnap, or just relocate you. The only way to find out is to disable it.”
“How does that prove anything?”
“Because I can check the command logs once there’s no risk of it teleporting us to nowhere. But I’m willing to bet it’s something system-based since it gave you a quest to destroy it. Right, one more thing–was there anything that came before the teleporter? Like… a warning sign, or something that did weird things to the sand?”
I nod and reach back to put the slates into my backpack, leaving only the one with the power core on it out for Pearl to study.
“There was a sapphire shovel. I only really caught a glimpse of the shovel part itself, not the handle, so that could’ve been made of shellraiser shells for all I know. And… it made a bunch of sand-walls around me while I slept.”
“Probably to protect you from the teleporter.” Pearl cuts in. “I don’t remember hearing about anything like that, so it’s probably a system-made thing. Or it was made after I was turned into a quest item. Should we go looking for it after we’re done here?”
I shake my head. “It sank into the sand while it shone the colour of Fate. The only way I’m finding it is if the system decides I need it.”
Pearl makes a little noise of agreement, then shivers so violently she almost falls from my shoulder. I shift to make sure she doesn’t, then gesture at my backpack while raising my eyebrow. She purses her lips, but when she goes to talk, they stick together enough that it comes out muffled. And instead of trying to argue, or whatever she was attempting to do, she just blushes slightly and crawls into my backpack.
“Do you need a light in there?” I ask as I get moving again.
A few long seconds pass before I get an answer. “No, I can see just fine in here, thank you. Tell me when you see the core itself, okay? The sooner we get it into the shell, the sooner we can get warm again.”
“Amen to that.” I chuckle, then snap my mouth shut as the cold hits my teeth in just the wrong way. I keep it shut for the next couple of minutes, walking down the ever more cluttered bowels of the workshop towards a power core that’s so far out of the way for seemingly no reason. Hell, it would make a lot more sense to put it closer to the workshop so you don’t have to deal with all these pipes and cables. There’d be a lot less that could go wrong if there wasn’t a mile of them the power’s running through.
As I walk, the cold grows. It sticks to my skin like a thick paste, coating my very being in a layer of frost that seems to seep further into me by the second. I flex my fingers over and over in an attempt to keep them from going numb, my nose burns from the serious cold, and my lips are so dry that they’re starting to crack. Just keeping my eyes open is a task in and of itself, one that’s getting a whole lot harder by the second.
If there was any kind of airflow, I’d probably be done by now. But the dead-still cold stays just that–still and cold. Step by step I get closer and closer to the source of the cold, but the scenery never changes. Just the temperature.
Until suddenly it doesn’t. Something washes over me like a calm breeze on a winter morning, and then it’s there. A massive chunk of twisted shells connected to countless cables and pipes, sitting inside of a complex glass machine that’s almost completely frosted over. I blink in surprise and look over my shoulder, but it looks just like the hallway I’d come from.
There must be some kind of… cloaking spell on this thing. But there’s no reason for it. Anyone who got this far had to have known there was something more down here, so it wouldn’t keep anyone away. And if not to do that, then why cloak it in the first place?
“Pearl.” I whisper through cracked lips and pat my backpack. “We’re here.”
A shuddering groan echoes against my back, and I feel the things in my pack shifting as Pearl pulls herself out. First comes a blue-white head, then two blue-white arms, followed by a mostly blue-white body that tapers off to her regular colour only around where her ribs and stomach would be. Then it’s right back to blue-white for her hips and legs. She gestures for me to pick her up with barely any energy.
Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
“Holy shit, are you okay?” I reach to help her into my hands, which are pretty much numb at this point. “You look horrible.”
She cracks a smile. By which I mean a piece of her face cracks off when she tries to smile. “This really isn’t my colour, huh?”
I scramble to catch the piece, but it shatters on the ground like weak porcelain. We both stare down at it for a second as Pearl turns even whiter, then gestures aggressively at the machine. I hurry over to it as fast as I can, bobbing and weaving around the frosted glass pipes while also looking for any kind of panel she might need for access.
“Where is it?” I hiss in frustration and worry. “There has to be a control panel around here somewhere.”
One circle around the machine comes up with nothing. On the second I barely notice something sticking out from the opposite side of where we came in from, so encased in ice that it doesn’t look like anything at all. I make the split second decision that whoever made this place had to have made it bomb-proof, and accept whatever consequences come with it. Then I shift Pearl into my left hand, force a projectile into a skeletal coin, and launch it at the control panel.
Ice and glass shear away under the magical intensity, but the control panel itself survives without a scratch. I can’t say the same for the floor underneath it, or the pipe above it that’s now spewing out some kind of half-liquid magic into the room. It flows into my nostrils and rips a violent cough out of me, opening the wounds on my lips to let tiny rivulets of blood drip out. For all of a split second before they freeze up once again.
Pearl pushes back against my palm with a wince. “Put me there. I’ll open it.”
I do exactly as she asks. She stumbles onto the panel, tiny chunks of her body chipping off with every little move she makes. It rips my heart in two seeing her struggle so much, and the only thing that stops me from taking her back and shoving her into my inventory is the danger to my life. To both of our lives.
She taps on the panel a few times until a screen comes up with some kind of I.D. system. I bite my lip in worry, which causes a little bit of it to shatter. We need an I.D. The worker’s memories never showed her being allowed in here, so there’s no way she had one. Maybe… maybe if I put together all my coins, I can make a projectile violent enough to–
The screen flashes black. Speckles of colour swarm in from the borders, coating everything in Pearl’s colour. They coalesce into a symbol in the middle of everything, but as it forms, the system starts to censor it. Then it really starts censoring it. My brain feels like it stops working for a split second, and I force myself to turn away, but the sensation lingers. Tears pool in the corners of my eyes, only to freeze instantly as a shiver works its way through my mind. And it’s accompanied by one single word on a golden screen.
FORGET
I squeeze my eyes shut as the system assaults my mind. It isn’t just pain anymore. Forcibly inserted terror and sadness scrape together like two perfectly sharpened knives, then dig deep into the soft flesh of my memories. They carve something out, mince it up into tiny pieces, and reform it as something noticeably less than it was. I try to remember what the console looked like.
Nothing’s missing. Which means… I must’ve seen what was actually on the console. And it was important enough that the system ripped the memory of it out of my brain.
“Shelby, I have access.” Pearl says weakly, snapping me back to an equally painful reality. “Do you have the shell?”
I nod and summon the shell from my inventory, then reach back and pull the water bottle from my backpack. “I have everything ready. What do I need to do?”
Pearl slowly leans back and starts to fall. I’m moving before I can really register what’s going on, and the second my fingers touch her, I pull her into my inventory. She isn’t completely blue-white just yet, but the image of her shattering on the floor terrifies the hell out of me. The shell wobbles in my hand, and the bottle swings from one finger dangerously close to the panel.
Before I have a moment to think, the glass around the core shatters all at once. It bursts into a fine powder that freezes near instantly, clattering to the ground in frozen chunks that break once more on impact. Raw, unadulterated cold emanates from the core like an inverted sun. I can feel all the remaining moisture in my skin starting to freeze, and my vision starts to go… glassy. Almost like my eyes are freezing.
I swallow hard and press my lips tightly shut. Cold flows down my throat like the harshest drink, wracking me with shivers and twitches that threaten to debilitate me. But I can’t give in to the cold–I’ve got maybe a minute before this kills me, so it has to be now. I shakily uncap the water bottle. The skin on my fingers shatters away as I push, but no blood comes forth.
The lid comes undone and clatters to the ground. I try my best to ignore the white sticking through my fingertips and turn the bottle over into the shell, which starts to pulsate with an inner rainbow of colours the second it hits. The slightest warmth I’ve ever felt comes along with the light, but it doesn’t bring relief. It just ignites the pain that the cold has been masking.
I would bite down on my cheek to try and endure the pain, but I’m terrified my teeth will shatter if I put too much pressure on them. They already feel brittle and wrong from all the cold. And the heat from the shell is nowhere near enough to reach my face. My eyes grow glassier by the second. The cold bleeds away to absolutely nothing. Maybe even on the warm side of things.
From what I know about freezing to death, that’s an absolutely horrible sign. I stumble towards the core, presenting the shell like a peasant offering tribute to their monarch. Everything goes white. A soft hissing noise cuts through everything as my consciousness slips away.
As my mind spirals down to a single point, all I can feel is a slight encroaching warmth.
----------------------------------------
The first thing I smell is blood. Warm, metallic, and very much not-frozen blood. Pain shoots through every muscle, every bone, and every organ as my body is pulled from blissful nothing back into the real world. I think I’m screaming. My throat is vibrating like I am, but I can’t hear anything. Can’t see anything, either. Every sense except for pain is dull and old, and even pain isn’t the shooting agony I know it can be.
Just… a dull ache. I know that’s wrong. I know the state my body was in when I collapsed. Pain should be all I know–not just a small part of it. It takes a few tries to swing into what I’m pretty sure is a sitting up position, but I could honestly just as easily be face-down on the glass. Half-delusional and dying as the core thaws what’s left of my body.
I try to speak. My tongue doesn’t move. My throat rumbles, but no sounds come forth. I don’t want to believe it, but… I’m deaf. Blind. And I can’t even feel anything. I grope around me for some kind of… anything… but the second my fingers touch something blistering agony shoots up my arm and stabs my brain like a rusty icepick.
Those aren’t fingertips. They’re bones.
Shit. Shit, shit, shit. I’m so screwed. There’s nowhere near enough healing potion left to fix this, and I don’t think I’d be able to force it down my throat if there was. I can’t even ask Pearl to get it, since she’s stuck in my inventory, probably mostly frozen too and liable to shatter if I accidentally drop her. But… there has to be something I can do. There’s no way this is how I die, right?
Uncaring silence roars back.