Marmaladas, the 25th of Lost Speed, 4E 201

A great chunk of ice the size of a house sat near the little rowboat Mell had spotted. Its door was a little wooden hatch. The smell of freshly baked bread and rotten eggs filled the air. No one said anything as they opened the hatch and stepped inside. The short torch-lit tunnel led to a chamber hewn from snow and ice. A frozen walkway wrapped around the room leading them down into the bowels of the chamber.

At the bottom, on the floor, sat a large bronze box of strange design. An old man in flowing black robes paced about in front of it muttering to himself. He spotted them and his eyes narrowed either side of a hooked nose.

“Are you Severus Cygnet?” asked Kharla.

“The very person, Madam Orc! I can teach you how to bottle foam, brew a story, and even stop going deaf—if you aren’t as big a bunch of crackheads as I normally have to teach.”

“Erm…no, we’re not here to learn about potions,” said Kharla. “We want to know how to get our hands on an Elderly Scrawl.”

“I know of one. Forgotten. But I cannot go to it. Not poor Severus, for I…I have a bad back and awful gout these days. Wouldn’t get more than a mile…”

“Can you tell us where it is?” asked Kharla as they reached the end of the walkway.

“Ob-vious-ly, but one block lifts another…” Severus replied, enigmatically. “Severus will give you what you want, but you must bring him something in return. You see this masterwork?” The old man pointed to the bronze structure with a flourish of his deeply sleeved arm. “It is a Dweeber Lunchbox. Severus desires to learn what none have yet learned—what the Dweeber ate for lunch! I am an idiot child compared to the dullest of the Dweeber. Lucky then they left behind their own way of reading the Elderly Scrawls. In the depths of Blankreach one yet lies.”

“Where is this Blankreach?” asked Kharla

“Under deep. Below the dark. The hidden keep. Tower Mark.”

Draloth pulled out a notebook. “Could you provide a bit more by way of detail? And, please, not in riddles or bad rhyming verse?”

Severus folded his arms and gave the Dark Elf a hard stare. “You must delve deep into the Dweeber ruin of Elfland, past Dweeber automatons, cunning puzzles and deadly traps; do battle with the eyeless Foulmouths, and likely some Frostboot Spiders, and perhaps any bandits or adventurers who may also be there; then cross the expanse of the Blankreach where Giants and the Chorus also roam…”

Chorus are giant black bugs about the size of a dog (but nowhere near as friendly) that work in packs to emit multiple out-of-tune high-pitched screeching sounds, not unlike a very bad group of singers (think of an Orc choir), to confuse their enemies before they strike. Their exoskeleton is prized for its sound-dampening qualities and, in a twist of irony, can be used to craft helmets that block the sound of the Chorus; though these helmets are more commonly worn to provide sound-proofing when frequenting taverns and feasting halls that employ Orcish bards.

Kharla sighed.

“But only Severus has the key to open!”

Kharla rolled her eyes. “Of course.”

“Two things I have for you,” the old man continued. “Two shapes. One edged, one round.”

Kharla also had something that was edged, and if the old man didn’t speed things up she was going to use it to open him.

Severus grabbed something from each sleeve and put one of them in Kharla’s hands. It was round and metallic and about the size of a mammoth’s eyeball. “An entertainment sphere, Dweeber gaming is hardcore and not-at-all-subtle, and needed to open their cleverest gates.”

Severus placed the other object in Kharla’s hand next to the first. It was a cube with little colored squares on each side. Six colors in all, Kharla counted.

Mell picked up the cube and started twisting the segments on it, segments that rotated both horizontally and vertically.

“The edged puzzle,” continued Severus. “Find Mark and its eggshell dome. The Oology machination there will read the Scrawl and lay the lore within the cube. Bring it back to me. I will then open it by solving its colored puzzle—”

Mell put the cube back in Kharla’s outstretched palm. Each side of the cube now consisted of a single color of little squares.

“Our new celebrity,” said Severus, sneering. “I spent months trying to solve that.”

Mell smiled. “I used to love those sort of puzzles as a child. Still do. Quite an easy one really.”

“Well, that will save time later, but first it must be filled so off you all go. Time is ticking and I need to get into this Lunchbox!”

They left the old man and made their way back to the entrance, but as they neared the tunnel leading to the hatch something hideous blocked their way—a writhing mass of green tentacles.

This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

“Top o’ the mornin’ to you,” came a voice from inside the hideous form. “Bask in my presence. I am Seamus O’Mara. Guardian of the Unseen, Knower of the Unknown, Father of the Little People. I’ve been watching you. I have appeared a little earlier than I intended because I can see you’re obviously going to succeed in your quest.” A green buckled hat bobbed up and down in the writhing tentacles.

“What do you want with us, Foul Abyss?” demanded Eilgird, sword in hand.

“Your aid to Severus renders him increasingly obsolete. He has served me well, but his time is nearing its end. Once that infernal Lunchbox is opened, he will have exhausted his usefulness to me. And I’ll also have a spot of lunch. When that time comes, one of you shall take his place as my emissary. What say you?”

Kharla grabbed one of the tentacles that had a little brogue shoe on its end and twisted it sharply.

“Ouch!” shouted Seamus. “Let go. That hurts. I had a little accident with that tentacle last week after I dropped a crock of gold on it, so I did!”

Kharla was just about at her wit’s end. “Enough delays, enough quests, enough riddles, enough threats of being emissaries and champions or other roles we never asked for and don’t want. It’s time we did things my way. The Orcish way!”

Seamus writhed, a shamrock fell from his mass, but he couldn’t break free. Kharla twisted the tentacle even more. Seamus groaned in pain.

“Here’s what you’re going to do,” began Kharla. “You’re going to tell us how to get to this Tower of Mark without any faffing around. I want the fastest, most direct route. If you know all things then you’ll know that, right?”

“All right, you win. Here, let me show you on your map.” A tentacle whipped Kharla’s map out of her belt and marked it. “It’s the back entrance. The Lift will take you down to the Oology ‘machination’ Severus mentioned. This contains the Elderly Scrawl you seek.”

Kharla let go of the tentacle and the writhing mass that was Seamus O’Mara retreated and disappeared so quickly that he left his little green buckled hat behind. Kharla trod on it as she led the others out of the icy chamber. It may have been cold, but her blood was boiling.

***

Fortunately, the Tower of Mark wasn’t too far southwest of Wintercold and they made good time considering the depth of the snow on parts of the journey.

Eilgird reached the Lift first. A little abandoned camp with a single tent sat next to it. “It’s locked,” the Nord guard said, tugging on the gate that barred their way to the Lift. “I can’t see how to open it.”

“Ti’lief knows how to get into these,” said the Cat. “This one will need something long and wooden.”

“Will this do?” Mell picked up a long wooden plate from the ground next to the tent.

“Purrrfect!” said Ti’lief, taking the plate from the Breton.

Draloth rolled his eyes. “It was only a matter of time I suppose before we got to that pun.”

The Khapiit smiled as he removed a device from one of his pouches. A little serrated knife. He sawed into the side of the plate from both edges and then turned it to saw a larger gouge in the end of the plate, smoothing it out with a file. He then worked it into the grating of the door at about head height so that it fit fast between the thin bars, the gouged end poking into the Lift.

“The lever that opens the gate is cunning held behind this shielding plate.” Ti’lief pointed to a piece of metal behind the gate as he drew a thin oil-coated cord from another pouch and tied a noose in one end. “But it can be accessed with a little ingenuity.” The Cat worked the cord through the bars and over the wooden plate so that the noose dangled from the gouge.

Mell sat down and watched.

“Then we just lower it down and go fishing, adjusting the angle of the wooden plate if need be. But this one has done this enough to know the angle, yes.” The rope went taught and Ti’lief pulled on it with some effort. There was a click, and a gush of steam or air, and the gate opened and swung outward.

“Well done!” said Mell, giving a little clap.

Ti’lief bowed.

Once inside, they threw the lever on the floor in the middle of the Lift and, to another click and sound of steam venting somewhere, the lift carried them down deep into the ground to a short stone corridor. It was well-lit from some Dweeber light source, with a great bronze-looking Dweeber head on each side. At the end sat a metallic door. They pushed it open to reveal a most extraordinary chamber.

“Well, that’s not something you see every day,” said Eilgird.

A huge metal machine, limbs like a spider, hung from the domed eggshell-colored roof, and beneath it a rounded platform consisting of concentric bands of brass-colored metal. The legs of the machine had little glass receptacles at their ends in which were encased various types of bird eggs. Around the wall of the dome ran pictures of various types of birds.

Mark, according to the writings that have come down to us, was a Dweeber birdwatcher and oologist (someone who collects and studies bird eggs). His Oology Machination, as it was later termed, was built to preserve his egg collection. It also had the functionality to match eggs to birds. The reading device seems to have been created to record information about birds and their eggs onto the cube. How an Elderly Scrawl managed to end up in the device is anyone’s guess.

“Look here,” said Ti’lief, who’d made his way up onto a platform over the corridor via a sloped walkway. “This one thinks this is where the cube must go.”

The cube fit perfectly into the pedestal Ti’lief had indicated. To its left stood several short metal pedestals, each with a button at its top, apart from a taller central pedestal that had some kind of glass over its surface. The glass and buttons all lit up blue as the cube sunk into the receptacle Kharla had placed it in.

Kharla stared at the pedestals. “What do we do now?”

“Press a button, I guess.” Eilgird pressed the button nearest the pedestal with the cube.

The metalic bands on the floor moved upward as the limbs of the machination spun, the glass on the central pedestal displayed images of a rotating egg that kept changing shape, and some of the bird pictures around the wall lit up. Then everything stopped and nothing more happened.

Draloth pressed a button and the Dweeber machination moved again—a barn owl, buzzard, and chicken lighting up on the rim of the wall below the domed roof. Kharla pressed a button and the chicken dimmed and a Corimont Mouth-Plover lit up in its place. Mell and Ti’lief joined in, both pressing buttons, and though the circles and legs rose and fell, and bird images lit up and then dimmed again, the strange machine just seemed to lurch and swing all over the place with no rhyme or reason to it.

It was Thral who solved the puzzle by taking his warhammer to the central pillar and delivering a crushing blow. The machine lurched one final time and then all the limbs and circles came into symmetrical contact, all the birds on the wall lighting up as a limb with their corresponding egg pointed to each image. Then a large limb shot down from the middle of the machination holding a large glass case that opened as it reached the floor to reveal a tatty old piece of paper.

Draloth scratched his head. “Is that it? Is that the Elderly Scrawl? I was expecting something more…more valuable-looking.”