Lilyth

We stepped through the door holding hands. Whatever happened… The four of us were in this mess together. What awaited us on the other side was… a classroom? It looked weird though. All the desks and chairs were small and colourful. There were images of various animals, none of which I could recognize, painted on the walls, along with what I guessed was an alphabet chart, posters with labelled items and so on. Under one of the walls, there was a row of lockers, and under another a basket full of plushies, shaped just like the animals on the walls.

Evening light shone through large windows and I could see green trees outside, along with some distant buildings. The best I could tell, we weren’t on the ground level - maybe on the first or second floor.

Feels like home.

‘What is this place?’ Aki asked with a dreamy expression.

‘It appears to be a kindergarten,’ I said, which was confirmed by the notification we got.

Leaving Zone: Space Station Kappa-3

Entering Zone: Fruitful Growth Kindergarten

Difficulty: ???

Description: A place which should be filled with laughter of children. Why is there only silence here?

Objectives:

* Find the exit

* (Optional) Discover the secret of the zone

* To be revealed upon completing the second objective

Rewards:

* 1000 experience points if objective 2 is completed

* Extra rewards if objective 3 is completed

Interesting.

‘A what?’ Caei asked with a furrowed brow.

‘A daycare where parents leave small children so that they are looked after while the adults are at work.’

‘This place… is so colourful,’ Aki continued. ‘It must be wonderful to spend your time in places like this.’

‘My experiences weren't good, but yeah… it was mostly other children. The place itself was okay, though it didn't look half as nice. The food sucked though.’

‘If I ever needed any proof how far ahead Terra was…’ Ren gasped awestruck. ‘It’s this place. You may think it regular, Lilyth, but from my perspective it’s grander than any manor I’ve been in. The colours… the furniture… everything… all just dedicated to children.’

‘I assure you… most of the buildings on my homeworld did not look like this,’ I replied, shaking my head. ‘But for once, someone had a good idea that small children should spend time in a nice and colourful environment. God, I wish they figured that many adults would like that too.’

‘No shit,’ Caei agreed. ‘What… what was your workplace like?’

‘Remember the high buildings inside Y-Ram?’ I asked.

‘Ohhh…. I forgot. Yeah… you mentioned something about it looking familiar.’

‘Mind sharing with the part of the group who weren't in the underground lair of monsters?’ Ren asked.

‘Gods…’ she said after I was done explaining. ‘Yeah. Those “Open Spaces” sound depressing.’

As I was telling my story, Aki and Caei went to rummage through the plushie bins “oohing” and “aaahing” over their contents. Eventually, the former picked up one of them, a brown three-eyed furry cow-thing, hugged it and stuffed it into her satchel. Caei eyed her weirdly, but judging by how greedily she was clutching a green smiling bat-creature with a toothy grin, I thought she was just pretending to be “above it”.

I used [Lesser Manipulate] to poke her on the shoulder. She looked towards me confused and slightly spooked. I waved, pointed at the plushie and gave her a thumbs-up. She immediately beamed at me and packed the plushie into her bag.

‘You are making her happy, you know’ Ren said softly. ‘She deserves that. And more.

‘She does,’ I agreed. ‘If I could, I would give Caeileera the world.’

‘And not Aki?’

There was no accusation in the question. Just curiosity.

‘Her too,’ I answered truthfully. ‘But I feel she is more than capable of taking it herself if you know what I mean.’

‘I do,’ Ren smiled. ‘Once Aki reaches your level of cynicism she will be terrifying.’

This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

‘I hope she doesn't,’ I said. ‘Not for the sake of others… fuck’em, but for her own. There is no joy in being this bitter and disillusioned, and her life was hard enough. Aki’s childhood was objectively worse than mine, and yet she came out of it… with optimism. Me… not so much. At her age… I was already well along the path to where I am now. I think… At some point, I forgot how to be happy. It hurt too much. It was too transient. I became convinced that happiness… caring… love… hope… those things never lasted. So why even bother when I could just be miserable, and pass through my life drowning out all the pain, despair and internal screaming by overindulging? So… what I want for Aki… is to protect her. From becoming like me. A miserable husk of a person.’

Ren took a deep breath and slowly exhaled.

‘Maybe you were that once, Lilyth,’ she said finally. ‘Not anymore. You are making a difference. You love and are loved back. You just need to relearn how to be happy. You are a good person and I am honoured to call you my friend.’

I took her hand into mine and squeezed lightly.

‘Thank you, Rennie,’ I said with a smile. ‘I think I needed to hear that.’

My friend wanted to say more, but by then Aki was by us and dragged her off to look at the plushies too. I only smiled at that and followed them, as I could see a chonky blue cat-looking shark with my name on it in one of the bins.

After we had all safely stowed our prizes, Ren’s pink squirrel ending up in Caei’s bag, we started planning our next moves.

‘For once, I think checking out the optional objectives might be worth it,’ I said. ‘That one thousand experience points would be nice.’

‘Yeah,’ Caei agreed. ‘Not gonna lie, I want to get my hands on [Mana Refinement] as soon as possible. I am concerned about the unknown difficulty level though.’

I could see in her eyes that Aki wanted to say something, but thought better of it.

‘I will order a stop if it gets too dangerous,’ she said instead. ‘And we find the exit first. If we need to run away, it will be nice to know where to.’

‘That’s reasonable,’ I agreed. ‘What was your initial objection, then?’

‘Oh, nothing. I wanted to joke about how both of you became quite the risk-takers. But then I realised that giving our spellcasters, especially the only healer we have available, shit for wanting to be able to cast more spells was not the best of ideas.’

‘You thought good,’ Caei said with a pleasant smile. ‘Would be a shame if I ran out of mana before I got around to taking care of your wounds.’

I doubted Caei was callous enough to actually withhold aid from Aki, but it was good to remind her that our survival literally depended on keeping the Sanguine well and happy.

With nothing left to say we began to explore the kindergarten. A closer look through the window confirmed we were on the first, and highest, floor. Alas, the window handles were completely non-functional. It’s not even that they refused to budge, they were just an unmovable part of the window frame.

Our weapons proved useless, so out of sheer desperation, I tried breaking through the glass by trying to jump through it, but I just bounced off the glass… I would say harmlessly, but I ended up hurting my shoulder. I waved Caei away when she tried to heal me, though.

‘Save your mana. I’ll be fine.’

I did end up having a bruise there, but a nice thing about not having internal organs is that I didn't actually damage anything important, and the pain would pass. Eventually.

‘Was worth a try,’ I summed it up.

‘Soo… everything outside… it’s all fake too, isn't it?’ Ren asked, sadly.

‘It would seem so,’ Caei confirmed, also sounding absolutely dejected.

‘There is an upside to that, though,’ I pointed out. ‘At least our search is limited to this building. Can you imagine that city being real?’

‘Ooooh,’ Aki said. ‘We could have spent days here then.’

‘Yeah. So as much as it sucks we can't go out, it beats the alternative.’

We ended up going through every room on the level but found exactly nothing of note. Just classrooms, playing areas, a staff room of some kind, normal kindergarten stuff.

The ground floor proved to be slightly more interesting. Our first direction was the main entrance. This was pretty much a case of wishful thinking on our end, but, on the other hand, if it turned out to be the right answer and we ignored it we would feel really stupid.

Aki and Ren continued to be very impressed by the building. Their joy at discovering that even the corridors had colourful images painted on them was palpable.

Why do I feel there will be some renovations in our new home?

The problem was… over time I noticed that as we got deeper and deeper into that building… the paintings became increasingly distorted. Maybe it started earlier, but with how unfamiliar everything was I just didn't notice. For example, a two-tailed rabbit-like animal was initially portrayed as happy and cheerful. Then its expression began to shift: The eyes were no longer friendly; The claws were slightly longer and so on. By the time we were nearing the exit even my companions felt… weirded out by all this.

‘What’s going on?’ Aki asked as she pointed to an animal that now looked like it belonged in H. P. Lovecraft’s fiction more than in a kindergarten.

Well… maybe in the Garten of Banban.

The sheep now had two heads, its wool was replaced with porcupine-like spikes and instead of short fluffy tails, it had two scorpion-like ones.

‘Maybe the people who ran this placed that you couldn't achieve fruitful growth without getting mentally scarred for life,’ I quipped. ‘Other than that… beats me.’

I took out my plushie. It looked normal. So did all the others.

‘On the plus side we are not dealing with an illusion here,’ Caei said. ‘That would be… sad.’

She hugged her bat and put it back into her satchel.

Out of curiosity, I asked them to wait and retraced our steps.

‘The ones near our entry point still look normal,’ I said upon returning.

‘Soo… it’s deliberate?’ Ren asked.

‘I think so? Though… I am getting really curious as to what the fuck is this place.’

‘On offshoot of the Labyrinth?’ Caei suggested. ‘It also… functioned like this.’

‘Why wouldn't Lady Madness contact us then?’ I asked with a raised eyebrow. ‘Or Lord Steward, for that matter? They were pretty open about us being in their domain the last time around.’

‘Maybe it is not “official.”’ Aki said, ponderously. ‘Like, it began as a part of the Labyrinth… and then broke away.’

‘That makes… a disturbing amount of sense…’ I furrowed my brow. ‘Then that would also mean that someone is running this place, which is likely given the difficulty rating bullshit so far.’

‘But who?’ Ren asked the question we all had on our minds. ‘Or what?’