(Strive 5̸̙̿:̴͍̓2̷̺̐)
After a final sweep of the floor, we made our way to the waiting elevator and rode up to the next one. But we emerged, impossibly, onto the exact same level we’d just left. The same posh hotel hallway, the same tiled flooring.
“This can’t be right,” I said, mashing the elevator button.
“It’s not the same place,” said El.
I stopped pressing the button for a second and opened my mouth to disagree. The appearance of the floor was undeniably the same as before.
And yet, there was a sense of wrongness in the air. The vibes were off, as the kids say.
My footsteps echoed as I turned to walk down the hotel hallway, El following uncharacteristically close. Each of us jawed on a Taste of the Rainbow candy. My strength and magic had both reached Unacceptable, and my dexterity was apparently that of a Worm.
El refused to tell me the levels of her attributes, but she had at least started eating some of the pills, albeit complaining the whole time.
“It’s like someone’s watching us,” I whispered.
“More than one,” El said.
As we proceeded down the hallway, I stopped to look at a portrait hanging on the wall. It was some Victorian-looking noblewoman in a frilly dress, her hair pinned up in tight curls. She had a demure smile on her face, and her hands were crossed modestly. They were nice hands, except that the fingers were all twisted and warped.
“Hey—” I started to say.
A six-fingered hand shot out of the painting and seized me by the throat just as I spelled E-X to examine it.
A̷n̵ ̶o̶r̷d̸i̶n̴a̵r̵y̷ ̴p̵a̷i̵n̵t̷i̸n̵g̷.̶
Choking, I reached up to claw at the canvas in desperation, but the hand grabbing my throat extended, snake-like, and slammed me against the opposite side of the hallway. El hissed and leaped at the painting before she was seized by another twisted hand.
I managed to spell Harden on my kada, and the pressure around my windpipe lessened, repelled by the scarlet aura.
The woman in the painting unhinged her jaw to reveal teeth filed to points. She began to pull El into her mouth. Behind her, the background of the painting had morphed into bloody orange skies swirling with shadows. The raccoon thrashed and screamed in wordless animal fear as she was drawn into it.
With a burst of speed, I leaped forward and seized the edges of the frame, using the last of my Harden timer to tear the painting into two pieces. The hands retracted, and the ragged edges of what my udjat now called a Painting Mimic spurted dark red paint onto the carpet.
I gathered El’s shaking form into my arms. “You're okay,” I breathed. “You're okay.”
She accepted the comfort, burying her snout in the crook of my neck. How could I have ever wanted to shoot this helpless creature, as innocent as a child—
“That fucking cunt of a painting,” El said. “Let me down. I’ll tear her to pieces, eat them, and shit them out. I'll piss on her corpse.”
“Back to normal, then,” I said dryly, and set her down on the ground.
Looking around, it was clear to me now that this wasn’t the same place as the fifth floor. It was a passable copy, but everything was a bit wrong around the edges. Corners didn’t line up right, and the repeating patterns in the carpet were a bit off. In truth, we were on the—
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(Strive 6:1)
—sixth floor, whose whole job seemed to be to mimic the fifth. I unholstered my pellet gun. Would the baseboards peel off the wall to tighten around our ankles? Would the sprinklers overhead shower us with a rain of blood? My throat tightened as I considered the possibilities. If an exit door presented itself to us, would it only drop us screaming into a trash chute? Or maybe the answer was D: all of the above?
It turned out to be E: attack of the killer ice machine.
The appliance lumbered into our path and sat itself down like a sentry, beeping once. A cheerful jingle began to play, rising higher and higher, as the lights on the front of the machine proclaimed: MAKING ICE…
“On me!” I cried, throwing my hand up in a sequence of signs.
A flurry of frozen cubes shot out of the front of the machine, bombarding us like hail. They pinged off my aura shield, but the momentum still drove me backwards. I dug my heels into the carpet and felt El’s paws hanging onto me like a backpack.
Gritting my teeth, I pushed forward. Through the haze of frost and the red aura of my shield, I was nearly blind. I felt my energy sap as my defenses bore the continued assault. Harden didn’t do anything for the cold, and I shivered. As I approached the source, the storm’s intensity only increased, becoming a hurricane.
“I can’t get any closer,” I shouted, renewing my shield. “It keeps pushing me back.”
El squinted around me, then ducked as a shard of ice grazed her fur. “Close enough!”
She clambered down my leg and darted forward along the ground. A moment later, she’d disappeared into the haze of ice, and then, without any fanfare, the attack simply stopped. The storm faded, and there was a final chunking sound as the machine’s compressor snapped off.
El stood next to it, her paw glowing. “Used Pickpocket on its battery,” she explained.
I dropped my shielding aura in relief. “You’re a lifesaver.”
We staggered to the end of the hall, where a small room held a sparkling treasure chest, practically begging us to open it.
“This is just obvious bait,” I said, rubbing my neck. My vocal cords still felt funny from the painting’s squeezing.
Sure enough, my kada identified it as a R̷̘̽̂e̸̺͠g̸̹̽ú̸͙̍l̶͓̓̎a̶̹̖͒̎ȑ̶͎͊ ̸͕̓Õ̷̡l̵̢̄'̸̝͚̈́̂ ̶͎̀̀C̶̹̀̈́ḧ̵̦͍͝ẹ̴͍̈͆ș̵̽ẗ̸̢͙̏, and I readied a Hardened fist. I punched a hole through the latch, and it popped open, fangs out and very dead.
“Good riddance,” said El. She padded up and stuck her head inside the chest. “Hey, free spellbook!” She held it up for me to see.
I was only mildly surprised when the book chomped me on the nose.
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Folio of Flames, a minor spellbook. A consumable item that grants a fire attack spell.
“Who would’ve known?” I said. “The book mimic’s actually a reward in itself. Seems pretty powerful, too.”
“Mm,” El said. She was rummaging around in the chest, digging for more loot.
“You’ve got no attack spells right now. You should take it.”
“Really?” El looked at me doubtfully. “You were the one who took the thing out. Got bit for your trouble, too.”
I didn’t need reminding of that, as my nose still stung. “I’m trying to give us the highest odds of survival here. Fairness doesn’t come into it.”
“If you say so,” the raccoon said, before stuffing the book in her mouth.
We’d found out that you didn’t have to read the book to use it (and in fact the contents seemed to be just over four hundred and fifty pages of insane ranting about burning and destruction.) All you needed to do was spell the sequence U-S-E with one hand while holding the book with the other. Unfortunately, even with her Aspect of Prestidigitation, El still lacked the manual dexterity to sign one-handed.
So with the Folio of Flames clamped in her jaws, El used both hands to execute the signs. Her bracelet and the book each beamed out a pure white glow, drowning out the dim lamps of the room, as the new spell loaded into her kada. Then, as suddenly as it had started, the light faded, and the book crumbled into ash in her mouth.
The raccoon spat. "This whole system was clearly designed by someone with opposable thumbs." She produced a bottle of Fernet from her inventory.
“You stole that from the lobby!” I grinned. “I never even noticed.”
El washed her mouth out with a generous swig from the bottle. “El Bandito strikes again.” Her eyes unfocused as she read the spell description that lit up her udjat. “Oh, this is some good shit,” she said, eyes glinting. “This one’ll be a real blast, if you know what I mean.”