Chapter 21
The third door
Clyde watched intently, mesmerized, but came to and slowly reached for the vial. He held it up to the light. “Interesting. Some sort of magic potion. Just as I was expecting from such magician as Winston. I just wonder what you do with this.”
I had the same thought. Hoping there would be some further instruction, other than his kind regards. I grabbed the bottle from my hip that came with the “other” relic, to see if there were some clues. I opened it and unfolded the paper. There was more. But not just more, it had entirely changed.
If you have opened it by now, you would have found my version of good luck. There have been many attempts to create and recreate such an elixir, but I have mastered it, as I have mastered many others. This is one of a few that have been gifted to a very few of my favorite friends. One person’s life had even been saved. Good fortune to you, I only hope you have the better of intentions. Now, without further ado, drink up.
Love, Winston
P.S. The potions more pleasing to the pallet do have the better effects.
“He says to drink it.” I told Clyde.
“Not me! I’ve never found these type of things to work on anyone but organic creatures.” He handed it over.
I took it and also held it up to the light. Taking a magic potion made by Winston himself. One might normally take it greedily, with no reservations to say the least. But I opened it and thought of what would happen. Are my intentions good enough?
I looked to Clyde. He nodded and gestured for me to take it. I threw it back and waited for something to happen. It did taste nice. Very nice, like a fruit one has never tasted but always hoped for.
I waited for a moment to let the effects sit in. Nothing happened. But I suppose these things might not work that fast, or maybe have an unexpected life changing occurrence which instantly kills my enemies and brings everything good to me and my village. I doubt that would happen, but I don’t doubt that it would work. Dacoit did live for ten-thousand years, until I killed him.
Time will tell.
Clyde was watching me intently, waiting for something to happen just as I. “Your heart rate sped up, then once you took the potion it was racing and now is just coming down. No big changes in any other vital functions that I can see.”
“Thanks.” I said. “Did you happen to analyze it before I took it?” Hoping we might have been able to reproduce it. But Winston did write that nobody has been able to recreate any of his potions. Not to mention, they’re magic.
“No,” Clyde said, “But I guess not everyone can have good luck. Just one at a time. Otherwise intentions get crossed and you might find someone with more luck than you.”
I was busy thinking what this might do to affect me. Maybe the Ancients all drop dead. Maybe the city stops their corrupt dealings and everyone lives a wonderful and clean life. But I was still doubting all of that, it was just my imagination running rampant.
But I did wonder what was next. What are the Ancients doing besides sitting in their castle. Are they going to attack this week or next year? Are more of them coming? I’d have to keep my eyes and ears open. I could contact some friends and find out if they’ve seen any Ancients straggling behind that haven’t gone off to their island yet. Still, it was something I won’t know until I get there. Things happen and everything changes. I’ll just have to hope for the best.
Clyde had left while I was thinking and just came back. “I have this for you. I was told to keep this until you had opened the relic.” He was holding a key.
The key to the third door!
My eyes widened and I snatched it out of his hands. “Thank you Clyde!” I yelled behind me running up the stairs to open it up.
My hands trembled as I stood before the door, breathing heavily, wondering what was behind it and if I was ready.
I opened the door slowly and carefully.
Looking around the room, there were gadgets and things I haven’t seen before. Bulky items, small items. I checked a few of them out. The biggest of them was a jet pack, apparently strapping onto my back and pushing me into the air. Interesting.
The other item included goggles, watches and handheld devices, glasses and rings, small things that did something other than what you expected. The descriptions told me it was a lighter, but if you leave the cap off for more than ten seconds it will explode. Smoke bombs that even came in different colors. Throwing knives and stars that came with explosives or poison or acid.
After looking at the stars I went back to the hanger to talk to Clyde. “If these items are in the hanger, why do I have to get a key to open a room when I already have full access to anything that I might need in here?”
Clyde looked a bit confused, then curious, then offended. A remarkable feat for a robot with no variable facial feature.
But what he said didn’t come out rude. “I feel better about it,”he said, sounding honest. “Really, no other Huntress has opened my door before getting through the other three. But yes, everything in those rooms have been available to you for the last few days without exception.”
“And who am I talking to on the screen up there?” I asked, inquiring about the pedestals that seem to give me instructions for my next task.
“That would have been me.”
“But you never came out to meet me?”
“Strict rules.”
“Fine. I’m not angry but I was just wondering what’s the difference.”
“Of course. Really it’s just the formalities. I didn’t even expect you to have come in when you did. That’s why you saw me sleeping when you first opened the door.”
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“But don’t you always know where I am.”
“Yeah, but as I said, I wasn’t expecting you. And you do have a habit of checking my door very often.”
“Alright, I’ll go back up and formally pick my gadget,” I told him. “Do you have any recommendations?”
“The goggles would probably be the best, night vision, glare resistant, polarized. The list goes on and I’d have to go through all the functions with you, not to mention I can connect to it’s vision, so you can see what I see, which is much more than what you think, and I can see what you see.”
“What about the jet pack?” I asked.
“It’s cool, but… why are you asking, I can show you that one as well. I have a few back in storage.”
“I know, I know. I just want to pick a good one first, instead of having to say that I chose the lame gadget that never comes in handy.”
“What ever you say.” Clyde said, and seemingly went back to work at the bench which had nothing on it.
I entered the third room again and viewed a few other items. It felt like buying some new pricey item and getting first pick on the best thing in the store, but not being able to change it later on. I did feel that way. I didn’t want to change it later on. I wanted it to be part of me. Though I did trust Clyde, I wanted to see what other options I had. But unless there were more hidden aspects to these items, I wouldn’t know until I asked him about it.
Finally making it around the room I went back to the goggles and read everything there was about them in the small description and disclaimer beneath it. Glancing over it I quickly understood that I shouldn’t be looking directly at the sun and especially within a hundred million miles. That made me wonder how far I was from the sun.
I picked them up and out of their casing, put them around my head turned them on.
I heard Clyde from the hanger. “Just don’t walk around with them on yet, they’re quite disorienting at first.”
I took them off, worrying that I may topple over just standing there with them on. Fine, I’ll let him show me how to use them.
Going back downstairs to the hangar I found Clyde repairing some smaller bots that were apparently supposed to be cleaning but needed new treads as they haven’t been used for over ten years.
“What exactly do these do?” I asked him.
“Magnify up to 100x. Infrared and night vision with the highest details. Onboard display of most objects on Xenobia and creatures or Xenos, including communications to me, biofeedback from your suit as opted, most of your vitals, and various functions that would make use of facial recognition. Not to mention software that can tell wether someone is lying through their teeth, flustered, about to cry, dead or about to explode with internal combustion, and a mineral analyzer by sight and composition which include narcotics, water, liquids, and most minerals. Should I continue?”
I was a bit dumbfounded by that but I got most of it up to the part about the onboard display. “You’ll have to show me most of this.” I told him.
I put them on. Icons and numbers started popping up in the goggle’s screen so I started turning knobs and pressing buttons.
“Hold on. I’ll override the controls if you start pressing buttons like that again.”
I let go and listened to what he had to say. Right now I was looking at the top corner of his head and counting the number of slight scratches he had within the top eighth of an inch of his dome.
“Don’t look at me like that, it’s rude.” He said, now turning the screen black. “First thing I will show you is the magnification.” He turned the lights back on and set it to normal magnification. “Just look at the hangar door.” It opened and I looked outside. “Now focus on the horizon and keep your head still.”
I did and the horizon got bigger and bigger until I could see the individual seeds of the grass.
“Your head is bouncing too much. But fortunately, there is also a stabilizer, which I’m turning on now, and you should be able to see everything much much clearer, with hardly any lag.”
The image became much clearer suddenly.
“That’s seventy-five percent magnification. It works nice at night too, look up at the stars and see the other planets. Sometimes even some the larger planets in other solar systems. But the next thing I can show you is the infrared. If you walk back to the door.”
He turned the magnifications off and I could see normally as I walked to the door. The infrared turned on and the room went to different colors. Most of it was blue but where I was walking I could see my foot prints fading from red to yellow to green and back to blue.
“As you can see different colors represent heat or the lack of. Don’t be shy to use it and test it out in different situations, it comes in handy when you might least expect it.”
I looked around the room. The outline of Clyde was a shade of blue lighter than the rest of the room with his internals showing green and red in square looking shapes. I looked around some more.
“Some elements will be warmer than others, stone is usually quite cold as with other metals, and if you look outside you will see it adjust to show a relevance to the scene you are looking at. The numbers at the bottom show the range of temperature.”
I looked outside and sure enough the bright white faded and the sky turned an odd color of blue while the trees showed to be warmer at their tops where the sun shone onto their leaves.
“The next function will be the onboard display. We could turn the lights off to try out the night vision, but I think you might have fun with it tonight taking a stroll up to the peak.”
The infrared turned off and back to normal, square information bubbles popped up on the side of my vision, out of the way of what I was looking at, so I had to really look at them to see their data. They adjusted as Clyde told me that it knows what I am looking at and will fit to my eye’s capabilities, putting the displays somewhere off in the distance in a specific location. They looked like part of the surroundings now, a display on the table, one just above Clyde.
The captions that turned on were first my body temperature, heart rate, physical location in numbers, elevation, external barometric pressure and the time. There were a few more that I couldn’t figure out what they quite were, but then there was also an option to change the order and importance of the items.
“After you’ve figured that out I will upload a database of the items in this room. Uploading all the minerals, species of animals, bugs, plants, Xenos and hybrids, facial recognition, and the types of my own kind will take some time and might have to happen over night. But for now enjoy this.”
More bubbles popped up from items as I walked around the room. Bench, table, wood, steel. Almost everything in here was catalogued and my goggles told me in the most disgusting detail everything I needed to know as if I were a toddler.
“How do you ‘smarten it up’ a little bit?” I asked Clyde. “I know that the table is a table and that wood is wood.”
“You’d be surprised, some things aren’t always as they appear.”
I took the goggles off and realized, sure enough, the table that appeared to be metal was wood. It was surfaced with a printed paper that appeared to be metal, but looking underneath I found it was, sure enough, wood.
I rolled my eyes, trying think of what else isn’t what I really thought it was.
“I should really let you have the day off and get some food. I wouldn’t want you to miss out on learning how to use the thing by yourself. Learn to use it well. I myself go around wondering what other people see. Definitely not what I see.”
“You have all of that in your vision already?”
“Yeah, always. Somethings had to be downloaded, actually a lot, but it’s an entirely normal thing for anyone from where I come from.”
“I don’t know how I’ll ever get used to this. I hope it doesn’t give me four-hundred readings of trees as I go take a walk in the forest.”
“No, you can turn it on and off. That’s what the buttons are for, manually, but I’ll give you the instructions to read, plus most of the commands are built in to read your eyes when you just glance at a virtual button.”
“Interesting.” Then something popped up on the screen. It told me that the manual was downloaded and ready to be viewed. It opened and I read it. Most of it I knew but somethings had been described, like how to use it without touching the buttons and only using my eyes. I started reading through the table of contents and found that Clyde had barely scratched the surface with his tutorial. Actually, I already knew mostly none of it, though most of it was how to program and rebuild the whole thing.
“I’m turning full command over to you.” Clyde said. “Oh, and one more thing. If you need to, I can give you my vision.”
What I was looking at suddenly turned and I saw myself. I looked a bit funny, hunched over, my perceptions and balance were off using these goggles and they weren’t all that light. Not to mentions that I did have big bright green globes over my eyes, which I found I could change to virtually any color I wanted.
I had Clyde change my vision back to normal and I told him that I would be back soon enough. He said that If I get lost, I’ll have to figure out how to send a message.