The two of them have been staying in the ruined city for a few days now, having found an old house outside of the large dungeon-gate, which stands in the center of the ruins. The furniture has all long since rotted and broken away. The windows have long since crumbled and been shattered by time and the elements. Only the bare skeletons of the heavy stone foundations and walls, together with some bits of very rusted metal, remain to give proof of the fact that people had once lived here.
They do so again now. Sort of.
The two of them had tried to enter the dungeon a few times. But the large gate just doesn’t work. They aren’t sure why, but the gray fog that is contained inside of it, which is meant to teleport them into the dungeon itself, simply doesn’t let itself be walked through. Rather, it’s like moving against a solid wall.
Dungeon gates are entrances in the over-world that allow entry into dungeons, as the name suggests. Generally, they are large, ornate structures that are filled with a colorful fog. When one steps through it, it teleports the person passing through to floor one of the underground dungeon that is located there.
Canta had thought this gray fog here was odd, but then he remembered that the instance-fog in his old life used to be blue or red. Maybe gray means -
Standing in front of the gate, he looks at Alleluia, who is hanging up his clothes to dry, out on a jutting piece of metal. The sunlight shines off of her metallic body, creating a scene that is almost picturesque in his eyes.
- Maybe it means that the dungeon is dead? Empty, drained of magic. Now, only a door remains, but it has nowhere to connect to.
“I’m going to walk around,” calls Canta over to her.
“Okay! Be careful,” she calls back, busy with more work. “Remember what I asked you about!”
He shakes his head. He isn’t sure how, but she had found another book here, and it seems to have inspired in her some oddity that he can’t explain. But she’s been running around the ruin that they’re sleeping in and ‘fixing it up’, playing house, no matter how often he tells her that they’re going to leave soon, so there’s no point in her doing so.
Oh well, as long as she’s having fun and not hurting anyone.
As for the virtue — the smell that lingers in the air — he just can’t find the source. It’s as if the city itself carries the scent, as a whole. Like somebody, some saint, had passed through here and laid hands on every single building.
The perfume coats the world, and he isn’t sure how he feels about it. It’s making him hungry in a way he hasn’t felt before. But it’s also not just a simple hunger. It’s a longing hunger, like reminiscing about the cooking of a long-since passed loved one. It’s a taste that you can never have, but one that you know in your heart from days that fell during warmer, kinder years.
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Canta walks in through a ruined door, looking around the structure and at the scribbles that are visible through the vines, etched into the stone. The same hand wrote these that had written all of the other carvings in all of the other buildings in the city.
‘Where is the lizard?!’
He sighs, shaking his head. Whoever had been here before them was certainly an odd one. They had carved all sorts of nonsensical, non-informative sentences and questions like this one into every building. Often, they would describe their great affection for creatures and critters like frogs or lizards. Other times, there would be crude drawings of monsters, or of some odd blob that Canta assumes is a slug. The one in ‘their’ house is the most detailed one. Being a grand mural, which depicts some odd, shapeless-entity surrounded by a party of others. A human with a sword; an elf, noticeable only because of her long, pointy ears; and a hominid-slime.
Canta has no idea what these have in common, if anything at all, or if the artist was just a depraved lunatic. But they seemed dedicated, if nothing else. He can’t explain it, but something about their passion for these things, or for whatever it is that they lived for, touched these ruins and stuck to them.
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Flipping over some debris, he looks at a chest that he sees beneath. Cautiously, he instinctively gives it a good kick to make sure that it isn’t a mimic. He remembers them. They’re devious little things. Mimics are old-world monsters that liked to disguise themselves as treasure-chests or other common objects, to snap off any unsuspecting fingers.
This chest seems to be legit, though.
Carefully opening it up, he looks inside, expecting to find some coins in the worst case, or maybe even some useful equipment in the best.
Canta blinks, reaching in for the oddity inside the box – a small, old, leather wrap, rolled neatly together and filled on the inside with several metal implements. “What the hell?”
[Watchmaker’s Toolset](Masterwork)
A full set of artisanal watchmaking tools.
Quality Effect:
* Durability +500%
* Rust-proof
Weight: 0.16kg Durability: 30/30 Value: 460 Obols
He lifts his head, looking around the blank, ruined space. His eyes go wide as he quickly runs through the large, open, stone doorway in the back and looks around the room that he was just inside.
It might have once been filled with clocks. There might have once been a desk here with a lantern on it and a cot there, against the stone wall. But none of those things are here now, in what was once the watchmaker’s workshop. This is Oriol’s house. Oriol, the man with the hat – The shadow-entity that had attacked them back at the cathedral, before they fled.
Canta looks around, confused. Is this really his home? What are the odds? They’re too low. This is too convenient.
That feeling returns to him, that paranoid feeling that causes him to doubt any and every step that he takes.
This is where it happened. This is where Oriol, the man with the hat, did his work. This is where he made the pact with the Demon-King. Yet there is no inkling of that. Rather, all there is is that faint smell of something good and whole, always just on the edge of his nose.
Looking at the thing in his hand, he makes his way back, steeling himself for the sacrifice to come. After all, he had made Alleluia a promise.
It’s dumb. But it’s important to her for this game that she’s living out here.
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“Honey, I’m home,” he says, walking in through the door, but still rolling his eyes. Alleluia beams at him, having specifically requested that he say exactly this the next time when he comes back. It’s something she read in that book and she seems to be captivated by the image which that story presented to her. Canta tells her about his discovery, asking if she wants to see it. Alleluia agrees and the two of them head back and look around again, but nothing really pops up.
If she does have a connection to this place, in any sense, she doesn’t seem to know about it, simply shaking her head as she looks around the watchmaker’s workshop.
Canta had expected as much however.
Is she actually Evita, the watchmaker’s daughter? He doesn’t know. Or is she some offshoot of Evita, the original clockwork-person? He doesn’t know. After all, judging by the bishop, mechanical people just seem to exist here and there in some fashion.
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Once the two of them get back, she takes off her robe and allows Canta to use the tools to try and fix up some of the workings of her body that have gotten damaged, not only from her fall weeks ago, back in the church, but simply from their adventuring. Just normal wear and tear. Like any machine, she needs routine maintenance. So, she sits there with crossed legs and reads her book, while Canta fiddles around with her open back.
“Have you ever not had your crank wound up?” asks Canta, twisting a screwdriver to loosen a bent, bronze screw.
Alleluia thinks for a moment. “Huh? What? That’s an odd question.”
Canta narrows his eyes, poking her forehead lightly with the screwdriver. “It’s called smalltalk.”
She laughs. “I always kept myself topped up. I never wanted to ask the others. It’s a good thing too that I learned to do it myself, because one day, everyone just kind of… stopped.”
“They stopped?” asks Canta. “They stopped doing what?”
Alleluia shakes her head. “No, they just stopped. Poof.”
His fingers run beneath his hair. “Poof?”
“Poof,” she nods. “The dungeon-magic ran out, so… they stopped.”
“Oh… sorry,” he says, realizing that he was bringing up old wounds. “Do you want to try sleeping?” he asks. “I can wind yo-”
“– No!” she exclaims.
Canta lifts his hands and shrugs. “Okay, take it easy. I just wanted to offer.”
She turns back to her book. “…What will happen if you get sick again and fall over while I’m asleep?”
He presses a spring up and down a few times, checking if it is still compressed. “Huh?”
She shakes her head. “Or what if you smell something and run away to eat it and then you don’t find your way back to me?”
“That’s not gonna happen.”
“Or what if you get lost in the city and fall in a hole that you can’t climb out of?” she asks.
“I wouldn’t go anywhere while you’re asleep,” assures Canta. “I’ll stay right here.”
She holds her hands against her cheeks. “Or what if you take advantage of my helplessness to satisfy your base, animal desires?”
Canta sighs. “You really shouldn’t be reading those books.”
She lifts a finger before turning a page in her book. “You have my permission.”
“Stop making this weird, you degenerate,” barks Canta, and Alleluia starts laughing. The real truth of the matter is, though, that she feels like she’ll die if the crank stops. If it’s turned again, whoever comes back after that disabling isn’t going to be her. She thinks.
The two of them sit there for a while, Canta working on her body as best as he can and Alleluia reads meanwhile. He can’t help but feel watched, however, by the mural on the wall, especially by the drawing of the wide-eyed slime-girl. They were such odd creatures back in his day. Essentially, they were slimes like the ones they have encountered up until now, but instead of being droplet shaped piles of goo, they took on roughly human shapes.
He really hopes that they don’t exist anymore; he always found them to be rather creepy and unsettling, being things that look human, but aren't quite.
Alleluia hums, and he turns back to look at her fake, mechanical body that his hands are inside of.
Canta shrugs, if only for himself. It's different.