My eyelids flutter lazily as the sound of… something… draws me from… sleep? I frown and smack my lips, look around, and slowly come to terms with whatever Pearl did to knock me out right away. Suddenly and without warning, the grogginess is ripped away and the complete alertness of awakeness takes me.
I blink in surprise, then offer Pearl a quick nod of thanks. She smiles and returns it twofold.
One of the parts of the barrier flashes a deep red. I glance over at it and catch the tail end of something disappearing below the clover in a spray of molten salt. It almost looked like a reptilian tail, but made completely out of glass and metal.
“The apocalypse finally caught up to us?” I ask as I take the few steps to Ursula, then gesture down at a half-dissected salt sunflower. “Any luck?”
She shakes her head without looking up from her work. “I’ve found a few things, but none of them offer any good explanations. Take a sit; maybe you can see something I missed.”
“Sure. Doubt it, but sure.”
I fold my legs underneath me and drop down to the ground. Ursula’s cut the sunflower head in half perfectly down the middle like an apple, and she put one half off to the side to be… preserved, or something. The other is surrounded by tools I don’t know the use for, rests atop a silvery platform, and is in enough pieces to make a puzzle jealous.
“Huh.” I lean in and study the thing a little closer. “Aside from the cannonball seeds and the petals, it looks like one solid mass. Is that normal for elementals?”
“For elementals? No, not at all. But for formations created by magic? Yeah.” She picks up a cannonball with a grunt and offers it to me. “It’s one solid thing except for a tiny column right down the middle where the stem was. There’s the smallest trickle of magic in there–nowhere near enough to do anything serious, and not enough to let it sense that anything was in the room. Hell, it wasn’t even enough to light up through the darkness.”
“Yeah. Does that mean anything?” I ask as I stretch one hand to accept the cannonball.
She sighs and grabs my other hand, then presses the cannonball into both of them without letting go. “My best guess is that it was some kind of connection. Another elemental giving commands to the sunflower from somewhere we can’t get to right now. It could be below us, above us, or even in someplace we physically can’t get to.”
“That would be a–Hurgh!” I grunt in surprise as the Ursula lets go of the cannonball, which plummets to the metal platform as if it were being pulled by a super magnet. “What the hell? Did the flower dying make these super heavy?”
“First thing I checked. But no–the flower’s death has nothing to do with it. Try moving the cannonball off this little platform here.”
I raise an eyebrow in curiosity, then roll the cannonball off the platform. When it reaches the edge, something seems to overtake it. The slightest shimmer of magic, but in a way that I can only notice it thanks to the fact that it was missing before. And instead of falling to crush a bunch of salt clovers, the cannonball keeps lazily rolling with the exact same momentum as I’d pushed it with.
Hovering a few inches off the clovers.
“Are the clovers making a… repulsion field?” I ask as I watch the cannonball slowly roll away before snatching it up again. Now it’s lighter than a feather, but knowing it's true weight, I can see how it’d do all that damage.
“Again, that was my first thought. I tried out a few things–pushing one of ‘em to the ground, tossing it up in the air, and spinning it in place to see how long it took to stop.” She points over my shoulder, and I turn to see a cannonball spinning rapidly in place. “Still hasn’t stopped yet. Haven’t been able to rule out magical repulsion, but a gut feeling tells me that isn’t quite right. I’ve got Architect looking up the magical makeup of the clover, sunflower, and cannonballs, but she’s still working on it. Isn’t that right?”
“Only for the last forty five minutes.” March grumbles with more than a hint of boredom in her voice. “I haven’t been able to find anything other than ‘salt’, ‘magic’, and ‘apocalypse’. It’s pretty frustrating.”
“See? She’s working on it.”
March sighs in frustration and goes right back to being silent. A smirk graces Ursula’s face for a fraction of a second, but it’s gone just as quickly as it came.
“So… uh… what do we do with this?” I ask and poke the cannonball a little higher into the air. “Seems like we can’t do much of anything about the cannonballs. And if they’re being controlled from somewhere outside of the room, we can’t even go after whatever’s controlling them.”
“That’s what it looks like, yeah.” Ursula agrees. “We’ve got another hour to go before we have to leave, though, so we might as well get as deep into this thing as we can. Take up a pick and help me break this bitch into chunks.”
----------------------------------------
I spin the pick around in my hand, then drop it down on the silver platform. Thirty minutes to completely dismantle what Ursula hadn’t already dismantled, and what do we have to show for it? A bunch of salt crystals that–if you squint really hard–you could imagine once looked like a flower. Absolutely nothing to set it apart from anything of the other salt in this place.
“Done here.” I look over my shoulder at Ursula, who’s working on taking apart another cannonball in search of anything at all. “Number eight have anything different than the other seven?”
She quirks a smile on one side of her mouth. “You think I’d be standing here quietly if I found anything?”
“Probably not, no. Half an hour to go.” I pull out my Class Card to check if the salt’s given me any debuffs, then send it away with a shake of my head. “Man, this is a disappointment. All this salt breaking and we know basically nothing more than when we were completely in the dark.”
“Yup. Not fun when this happens, but it happens with magic way more than you’d think. No specifics for censorship’s sake, but Banker and I thought we hit the motherlode one time in magical gemstones. Then we tried to take them out of their quarry, and they quite literally evaporated.”
I frown and tilt my head to the side. “Evaporated? Literally evaporated?”
“Mmhm. In our hands one second, and rising in the air the next.” She confirms with a fond chuckle. “We went back to that place a dozen times to try different ways to get the materials out. Putting ‘em in our inventories, keeping ‘em in containers climate controlled to be exactly the same as the quarry, even exploring way deeper to find some kind of magical lodestone keeping ‘em solid.”
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She shakes her head and lets the chunks of cannonball fall to the ground. “Nothing we did worked. Finally we tried bringing in a jeweler and a blacksmith to make equipment in the quarry itself, but the second we walked outta there, only the gemstones disappeared. Even when we worked ‘em into a metal to create a weird alloy. The magic just didn’t want us to have it.”
“Wow. That’s bullshit.” I cross my arms and move to lean against the pillar. “So you think that’s what we’ve got here? A problem we’re trying to solve that doesn’t have a solution?”
“Could be. Or we’re looking at one problem and completely overlooking another. Back to the example–about two years later, we went back with Architect and Merchant. They tried a few new things we hadn’t thought of, and after a week of nothing, Architect found a cave entrance that definitely hadn’t been there before. We went in, found a quest and a dungeon, but there was one annoying-ass stipulation.”
Ursula dusts off her pants and swings her gun around to the front. She locks eyes with me, then nods over at the half sunflower. “You got space for that in your inventory?”
I shake my head. “Nothing’s changed since we got here.”
“Hey, it might’ve.” She walks over to the half sunflower, puts her hand on it, and puts it into her inventory. “You never know what kind of bullshit’s going to give you a reward. Architect, we’re pulling out early. Have another one of these pillars at the ready for next time we need a break.”
“I already made three of them.” March informs us. “Will you need more than that?”
“Maybe. Keep a stockpile of three no matter what, please.”
“Okay. I can do that.”
“Thank you very much.” Ursula nods, then bends down to grab her revolver that I left on the ground. She presses it into my hands as she tilts her head towards a particularly bright patch of salt clover. “We’re gonna kill that thing and see if it gives us any clues. Your brain in a good place right now?”
“As good as it’s going to get. You didn’t finish, though.”
Ursula frowns and tilts her head slightly. “Didn’t finish what?”
“You… your story. You cut off right before you told me the annoying stipulation.”
“Oh. Right. Got sidetracked a little there.” She chuckles apologetically. “So, there we were, standing around as we read the quest description. Can’t tell you anything about that. But at the very bottom–right under the actual objective–was a single line of text. One that would’ve made everything impossible if we hadn’t done all that pointless research beforehand.”
I sigh in impatience and pretend to tap a watch I don’t have.
Ursula rolls her eyes. “We’ve got time, don’t be a diva. Well, that stipulation was extremely important–because we couldn’t use anything resilient to go into the dungeon and complete the quest. Every single thing we had on us–clothes, weapons, even food–had to be easily destructible. Things like tissue paper pants, spun sugar desserts, that kind of thing. And weapons made out of a crystal so strong it could deflect a bullet without a scratch, yet so delicate that it dissolved when not in its absolutely ideal conditions.”
“So… what? The gemstones were literally only there for quest reasons? That almost sounds too video-gamey to be real.”
“Oh, it wasn’t video-gamey. It’s just that the aura in the dungeon completely obliterated anything the system didn’t deem ‘fragile’. We’re pretty damn sure the system didn’t put that aura there, either–just that the quest description warned us of it before we tried to go down there and lost a bunch of hyper-valuable stuff.”
The barrier flickers as Ursula taps it with her knuckles, then winks out completely as she scratches one of the runes through with a fingernail. She raises her gun and fires off a few much quieter bullets towards the glowing spot, then gestures for me to take a few steps back. I don’t hesitate in taking that freebie.
“Maybe I’m just stupid, but I don’t really see how that connects to our issue at hand.” I say as I steady the revolver at the heavy glow. “Unless the point of the story was that some things don’t make any sense until you have one specific piece of information that ties it all together.”
“Hey, that’s a damn good summary. Almost one-to-one with what I was trying to get at.”
Oh. Well, then I guess her little story was pretty effective.
“There’s one more thing I tried to get through, though; something that seems amazingly powerful can turn out to be useless, and something completely useless can turn out to be important in some very specific scenarios.” Ursula adds calmly as the stain of magic light darts towards her. “Could be that all the salt here is magically sensitive and we’re just missing a catalyst. Or we’ve picked up something utterly useless that’s only good for seasoning food or melting ice. But we won’t find out until we’ve delved a little deeper.”
Bulging clover heralds the emergence of whatever lurks below. It makes a move towards Ursula, then veers off at the last second and makes a beeline at me. I scrunch up my face in annoyance and push a spell into a ghost quarter I really don’t want to spend, then let my awareness out ever so slightly to get the timing perfectly right.
“Sh–Gambler!” Ursula slips ever so slightly as she calls out my ‘name’. “I’ll–”
The clover bursts out from under my feet, revealing a set of long jaws with jagged metal and glass teeth. I smack my foot into the less sharp side and push myself away while clutching my coin–really wish I’d put a projectile into it instead of shield. Maybe one good shot would’ve been enough.
“I’m good!” I call out as I catch myself in an awkward half-stand that I quickly maneuver into normalcy. “What the hell do you think turned into…”
A giant, low to the ground body of metal follows the jaws up into the air like a cresting dolphin. If a dolphin had a horrible child with a pile of scrap metal and the biggest damn alligator I’ve ever laid eyes on. The thing must be twenty-five feet from tooth to tail, only two feet tall, and a good five feet wide. Most of it is made of metal, save for the glass teeth and luminescent eyes filled with the glow of apocalyptic magic, but there’s a distinct corkscrew pattern running down its back. And a few ragged pieces of colourful somethings flutter from those corkscrews like ruined banners.
Chip bags and candy wrappers. Even if some of the brands haven’t been made in almost a decade, I’d recognize the combination of silver and colour anywhere. The vendigator lets out a deep bellow that has a little bit of electronic beeping woven into it, opens its mouth slightly, and rushes me.
Salt clings to its legs as it moves. But it doesn’t hinder the thing’s motion–it creeps up its limbs and solidifies instantly in what looks like natural plating. I grimace at just how fast the damn thing is and snap my shield out of my fingers, creating a small rectangle of extremely dense magic from the ground up to my thighs. The vendigator smashes into it mouth-first, steel and glass shrieking horribly against my coinbound magic, and the moment, it looks like we’re at a standstill. Thank goodness the thing isn’t smart enough to move four feet to either side.
Stubby legs shatter clover in a shockwave around each foot as the thing launches itself into the air from a completely stopped position. I watch in confused awe as it soars upwards five, ten, fifteen, and even further, slowly losing speed until it hangs a good thirty feet in the air like a novelty parade balloon.
“I–what–how?” I stammer and back up as Ursula sprints to get to my side. “No. There’s no way. Did the damn clover do this?!”
Both of us stare up at the hanging vendigator for a good thirty seconds before either of us say anything else. It wiggles its feet helplessly and tries to orient itself to snap at us, but it propelled itself a little too high for that. Salt which was previously only stuck to its feet in large crystal clumps starts to ooze over the rest of its body, crystallizing in strange jagged formations that look anything but natural.
“It’s almost like the salt thinks it’s an elemental.” Ursula murmurs in disbelief. “I’ve never seen anything like this before. And… the only reason it flew so high this time is because it has all that salt stuck to it. Which means the clover is definitely making the salt much lighter somehow, while still keeping its destructive mass.”
I nod in agreement. “So what does that mean for the fight? Do we try to keep it alive?”
“Oh, no. It’s incredibly dangerous and beyond stupid to try and research live apocalyptic creations.” Ursula aims her gun at the huge floating target. Which seems to be getting closer by the second. “All it means is that I’m going to have a lot less free inventory space after this.”