Ursula’s message pings in. I pull on her connection to the coin in my hand, let it fall to the ground, and take a step to the left. She appears in a puff of magic in the process of dusting off her clothes.
“That’s said and done. As quietly as possible, which ain’t that quiet, but it shouldn’t get the preservation any more riled up than they already are.” She wipes a hand on her pants, then pauses as she takes everything in. “Well, that’s about a hundred times worse than I expected. Was it stable when you teleported in?”
“Mmhm.” I confirm. “There was still some falling salt, but nothing that was actually dangerous.”
“Guess that’s about as good as I can hope for. Architect, can you monitor the preservation at the same time as you monitor us?”
“Not with all my attention, but I think so. Yeah. I should be able to.” March says confidently. “There’s a massive rift that leads down to something deep below, and there’s a bunch of moving things down there. Don’t jump down without a plan.”
“Thanks for the warning.” Ursula leans over the edge of a jagged fissure that nearly runs through half the room. “Are the exits down there too?”
“I think so.”
Ursula frowns and crosses her arms. “Then I guess we have to go down there. Gambler, you got any ideas?”
I raise an eyebrow, then raise my hand with two coins between my knuckles. “Depending on how dangerous you think it is, I could go take a ten second look. Take a few pounds of explosives with me, kill a few of whatever’s down there, and come right back up after I kick the hornet’s nest.”
“Nah, I hate that idea. Even with your instincts, something built for stealth could get the drop on you, and I’m not risking that. How about… we actually make some headway on this debuff first, maybe get it off of me, and then we can do the dangerous shit.”
“Sure. If you’ve got any more ideas than fifteen minutes ago, I’m all ears.”
There’s one long-ass pause that follows the end of my sentence. It’s really weird that she doesn’t have some kind of debuff-cleansing potion, or a piece of armor that gives her resistance to things like this. My matrix might be able to remove the debuff, but all that’d change is giving Ursula access to her mana again. And I’m not fully sure I want to play that card just yet. Unless…
I lean in next to Ursula and tap her shoulder to get her attention. She raises an eyebrow, then nods for me to go ahead.
“If you could get the debuff again while Architect monitors your Class Card, could she get some of the details?”
“Definitely. As long as I can access uncertainty first, since it’ll give us the instruments we need.”
Damn. I was kind of hoping the answer would be a simple ‘no’. I squeeze my fingers into a fist and let out a long, contemplative exhale. She’s already seen the knife and the holster. Why do I care about showing her the matrix?
Pearl’s worried face flashes over my eyes. And I recognize that the care isn’t fully my own. There’s something about the matrix–something that Pearl knows that I don’t–and it’s the reason she doesn’t want Ursula and March to know. But she didn’t bring it up before, and she isn’t really pushing me to stop, so maybe it’s more about potential consequences of me having too much shellraiser stuff.
“Gambler? You good?”
I shake my head and offer her a toothless smile. “Yeah, just deciding if one of my secrets is worth keeping held to my chest. And if it’ll work on you at all, since you’re not… since you don’t own the thing I’m thinking about.”
“You need us to swear to secrecy? Because we can easily draw up a contract for that.” Ursula easily suggests. “Architect, you good with that?”
“Yup.”
Ursula spreads her hands. “There you go. Make a contract if you want, then we can’t go blabbin your secrets. Even to Banker, if it’s that kind of secret.”
That kind of secret? What the hell’s she talking about?
“No, I don’t… rngh.” I grunt and pull out the empowerment matrix. “Sling this over your shoulder and tighten it. When I put a coin in there, it’ll wipe out all your debuffs. Maybe the buffs too, but if you really want to know what bonuses this debuff gives us, you’ll have to live with–”
The matrix’s strap flies over Ursula’s shoulder, and she pulls it tight enough that her jacket bunches up around it. She looks down at it with obvious curiosity glittering in her eyes, but she doesn’t say a damn thing. Because she’s respecting my privacy like a good friend would. I pull out a coin, push a projectile meant to work with the matrix into it, and insert it into the matrix.
Ursula shudders, doubles over like she’d just been punched, and coughs.
“Shit, right, should’ve warned you about that. Sorry.” I apologize and rush over to help her sit down. “Haven’t used it on myself yet, but apparently it’s extremely uncomfortable while it works. Sorry.”
“Nope, I get it, all healing shit has to suck in some way.” She wheezes and lets me slowly lower her onto her back. “Probably should’ve expected this, since I’m about a hundred times more experienced with this than you are. But if this doesn’t clear up that debuff, I’m going to kick your ass.”
I cock a grin and pat her on the forehead. “I’ll make a cardboard target for you if it comes to that.”
The next few minutes are filled with Ursula’s suffering. Not the kind of suffering that leads to lasting trauma, or even any injuries in the long run, but the kind that comes with setting a dislocated ankle. A moment of horrible pain, followed by a blissful wave of relief.
Hopefully.
A wet cough sputters out from deep in Ursula’s chest. Her eyes go wide and she sits bolt upright as a parade of coughs follows, each breaking loose a thin colourful liquid that hangs in the air instead of falling straight down. We both stare at whatever the hell it is in disbelief, punctuated every few seconds by another cough that adds to the minefield of droplets, until it finally looks like Ursuala’s got everything out of her.
She wipes her mouth while blinking furiously. “Ugh. I feel like my head’s full of mucus.” She sniffles, her voice muffled as though she had a bad head cold. “Is the debuff gone?”
“Let me make sure…” march hums to herself for a second. “Yes, it’s gone. Along with a lot of other stuff.”
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Ursula waves that off. “I can put that back on before I re-debuff myself. Gambler, can you send me back up?”
I offer her a hand to help her up. “See if you can stand first.”
“Yeah, that’s probably a good idea.” Ursula chuckles weakly and firmly grasps my wrist. I do the same to hers and help pull her up. She staggers a little, but finds her footing easily. “Is this good enough for you, doctor?”
“Plenty fine.” I press a coin into her hands and drop another at her feet. “You know the drill.”
“That I do.”
I relocate Ursula back to basecamp, then start counting in my head. If I reach a hundred without her or March saying anything, I’m going back up there to make sure she’s not dead. Or delaying because she wants to make a bunch more guns and explosives; we’ve still got eighty percent of the stash left, and only a few days to go through it. And that’s with blowing up multiple vendigators and sunflowers.
“Huh, what?” March says with a frown in her voice. “You don’t want to type it out? That’s lazy. You know it is. Yes, I’ll still patch you through. Gambler, Mercenary wants to talk to you. I’m giving her the airwaves right now.”
March’s voice crackles to a stop, and is instantly replaced with a loud, mucusy snort. “Gambler. Remember how when we got the debuff it messed up my protection spell?”
“Sort of?”
“Yeah, it kind of was a one-off thing. But it happened–and now that I’m back up here, I’m feeling a billion times better.” Ursula leans away and clears her throat. I still hear every horrible noise. “Just clearing the residual gunk outta my system while I connect the extra stuff to the monitoring equipment. It got me thinking; the debuff must be keeping us feeling fine down there. Or else you’d be hacking up a lung and draining a gallon of snot from your sinuses.”
I shake my head in disgust. “Paint a less disgusting picture, please.”
“Eh, you definitely already got the point. That debuff cleared away my spell, but it gave us the exact same effects. If we put dungeon rules to this–which I know is a contradiction to what I told you–it paints a picture of the krarig rewarding us for surviving the encounter with a deadly monster. Well, rewarding and punishing us at the same time.”
“Sure, but what if we killed it without getting hit? Then how could it give us the debuff?”
The sound of metal scraping across a table rings loud and clear. “Ow.”
“Was that you putting the debuff back on?”
“Why yes, it was. And to answer your other question; if we could kill the vendigator without getting hit, then we’d already be strong enough to not need the debuff. Brrr.” Ursula’s mic goes staticy for a second. “Lord almighty, that feeling still sucks ass.”
I cross my arms and look up at the glowing sunflowers. “I… don’t feel like that’s right. If we’re ascribing dungeon rules to this place, then we’d definitely need the debuff to clear it. We’d probably have to juggle cleansing it to fight and getting it to explore, and eventually, we’d be forced into a fight where we’d have to do that extremely quickly. But then they’d just give us the debuff at the start of everything to let us know it’s important.”
“All good here.” Ursula says, then grunts an echo when she relocates right next to me. “Point taken, internalized, and accepted. Which is why we shouldn’t ascribe dungeon rules to this place, but rather use an understanding of dungeon rules to make assumptions about how this place would work as a magical ecosystem.”
She takes a deep breath, then sighs in relief. “Confirmation that the debuff lets us feel normal down here. Probably because of the magical salt in our blood. Architect, you see anything we can take advantage of in my Class Card?”
“Nope. But I’m sending you all the data in text.” March replies.
Ursula opens her Class Card, taps it twice, and frowns. “The buffs came in instantly, but the debuff only happened a few seconds in. Three buffs in total, which is what we already knew, but from the commands they sent to my Class Card, I should be able to reverse engineer what they are.”
“That’s impressive.”
“Aw, thanks.” Ursula chuckles bashfully. “It took months to map out what the responses in the Class Card means. You see this one here?”
She turns so I can see her Class Card and taps on a long string of letters and numbers.
“This one means the buff lets us use another buff. Managed to rip that little bit of knowledge from the system after I found a spell that lets you drink liquid mercury for a stat buff.” She continues proudly. “So we don’t know what it’ll let us use, but it’s definitely going to be something around here. Salt, tainted water, maybe even an expired snack in the vending machine.”
“Cool.” I say honestly and lean in a little closer. “What do the other long strings mean?”
“Most of ‘em are simple system working commands; they barely change at all. The other two we’re looking for are here and here–” She taps two more strings of text; one short with an equal amount of letters and numbers, and the other littered with random punctuation marks. “That first one is the one that makes us immune to the negative effects of this place, and the last one… is…”
She trails off as a frown crosses her face. “It’s a location string. And it’s repeated a bunch with slightly different coordinates.”
My stomach drops, and the intense sensation from a few minutes ago flashes back to the forefront of my mind. “Something’s keeping tabs on us.”
“Not just keeping tabs; it knows our exact location at all times.” Ursula mutters and closes her Class Card. “That cements that there’s some kind of greater intelligence behind all this. And probably means the krarig’s not as not-alive-yet as we thought.”
That’s one terrifying thought. If the krarig’s alive right now, then there’s a good chance it wants us the hell out of here. Every glimmer of magic in the salt takes on a darker, more intelligent undertone; like billions of molten eyes watching our every move. Yet, for some reason, stopping the sunflowers from pulling the trigger. Maybe… maybe the krarig recognized that it won’t kill us this way. Or maybe it just wants to kill us on its own.
I drum my fingers nervously against my leg. “What does it want from us?”
“Just because it’s watching us, doesn’t mean it’s intelligent. I’ve never personally run into an apocalypse-touched thing with anything close to thoughts, but that’s how you get killed when you run into one that does.” Ursula chuckles and summons a bunch of the first flower’s salt pollen. “Especially with how the salt took over the vendigator, we have to keep it in the back of our minds that it might somehow take over the krarig too. No matter how unlikely it is. You got a water bottle on you?”
That came out of nowhere. “Yeah. You need a drink?”
“Nope; got one of my own.” She summons a canteen and pops open the cap. “Just wanted to make sure we’ve still got an untainted one if this does nothing.”
Pollen quietly flows into the canteen. It mixes with the water, creating a glow that’s bright enough to shine through solid metal, then starts to… do something. One solid light source breaks apart into thin beams, like light filtering down through a lake, and begins to wrap around itself like a wicker basket. Ursula and I watch with interested confusion as the light wraps itself closer and closer, forming a tight seal around the canteen that’s both unimaginably bright and somehow easy to look at.
All at once it flashes like a glittering crystal, then dies out. Ursula holds it at arm’s length for a few seconds on the off chance that something starts up again. No magic bursts free. It doesn't turn into a miniature supernova.
“Is it done?” I ask unconfidently.
“I… think so?” Ursula answers just as confidently, pulls the canteen back to her chest, and frowns down at the cap. “Definitely didn’t screw that back on. What kind of magic has the decency to re-cap your bottles?”
None I’ve seen so far, that’s for sure. She carefully reaches out and twists the cap off, closes one eye, and peers into the canteen. Since she doesn’t flinch or gasp in surprise, there definitely isn’t anything too amazing in there. Actually, from how little she reacts, I’d bet it looks just like staring down into her canteen pre magic salt-pollen.
Her face twists into a plastic smile, and the canteen is pushed into my hands.
“You don’t have mana, so–”
Before she can get too far into her convincing I tilt the canteen to my lips and take a long sip. Incredibly salty water coats my mouth in a thick film that’s cold as ice and slightly sticky, but the weirdest part is just how wet it is. It’s almost like my entire mouth is coated in drool, but it isn’t dripping out or even flowing. I smack my lips twice, furrow my brow, and hand the canteen back to Ursula.
“Your turn.”