by Deck Davis
He just needed to make stronger-looking armor and weapons for him and the others, and maybe that’d make Gilla back off, and then he could start to plan for room three. He felt the urge just to leave everything and go see it right now, but patience was a muscle, and he needed to flex his.
“Do you have any idea where to start with room three?” said Bee. “We’ve had lava, fiends, and tilting. It could be anything next. Something cold? Poison, maybe?”
“Until I have a vague idea about what to craft, I’m working blind. But I have an idea.”
Tripp walked to the fountain in the center of the plaza and lapped water over his face, letting cool drips run down his chin and neck and under his armor. Looking around, he saw the NPCs start to open up their shops for the day. A sturdy dwarf with tattooed arms carried a wooden sign and plonked it in front of his shop. It read ‘Orb Weaver Essence – 500 gold.”
“Wow, 500 gold for some essence? I guess the NPCs have taken note about the wave and they’re exploiting it.”
“You should do the same,” said Bee.
“I plan to. My weaver brooch helped last night. It doesn’t make me invincible, but it definitely took the edge off the damage.”
“What are we hanging around here for?”
“For the shops to open, but it looks like it’s time.”
He pointed just ahead, to a shop nestled at the edge of a street away from the plaza. It was a slanted building, almost like it was slowly falling down. When Tripp got to the window, he saw reams of paper rolled up, some yellowed, others white. The writing on them was almost illegible.
“Spell scrolls?” said Bee.
“If you can’t dance, then you can at least learn how to wave your arms in a semi-rhythmical way.”
“What does that mean?”
“That I dance about as well as a giraffe that’s been zapped by lightning, and that right now, I have to improvise.”
“In dancing?”
“No, in something else. I can’t be a mage, but spell scrolls are the closest approximation. Anyone can use a spell scroll without having to train in magery. The catch is that they’re usually one-use, and they cost a hell of a lot.”
He pushed opened the door and heard a squawk, and the noise made him jump. Above the door where there would usually be a bell to alert the shopkeeper to customers, there was an old vulture. It was perched on a wooden beam, and it was plump and looked older than time itself. Tripp and the bird stared at each other, an orc and a vulture both equally as curious about the other.
The shop keeper was a wizened old dwarf who walked with his back stooped and who had to rest on the counter while Tripp told him what he wanted. He took an achingly-slow walk to the back of the shop to look through his scrolls, but Tripp finally left with what he needed.
Outside, he put the scroll in his inventory.
“A trap reveal scroll?” said Bee. “You think it will work?”
“Only one way to find out. Besides, it’s not a trap reveal; it’s a secret reveal. It should show the good stuff that’s hidden as well as the bad. Not all secrets make you better for knowing them, but you don’t find that out unless you take a chance.”
Tripp left the plaza and went through Old Kimby and into room two of the labyrinth where he stood on the platform and faced the door to room three. Standing outside it made him stomach hum with excitement. There was something both tense and exhilarating about the idea that there could be absolutely anything behind the door.
He took out the spell scroll. Its weathered look reminded him of the pirate treasure maps he and Rory used to make when they were kids, where they’d stain paper using tea and then roll it up tight. Rory was always the villainous pirate, and Tripp was the treasure hunter.
“Looks like I need to repeat the words of the scroll to use it,” he said.
“Hope this works,” said Bee, floating nervously up and down.
Tripp did too, because he badly needed the intel. There was no room for error anymore; no chance to scope the room out and then die, and then respawn knowing what he needed to do. The Blood Wave meant that if he died in Godden’s Reach, then he was done.
“Okay, Bee. The doors in here stay open for 21 seconds. Keep a count for me.”
Tripp pushed open the door to room three and kept it in place with his foot. Way ahead of him was what looked to be a rectangular room with the flooring divided into red and blue squares, but the actual room was too far down the tunnel for him to see properly. To get a better view he’d have to go to the end of the tunnel, but then he’d get locked in.
The air smelled dusty, and there was no heat from lava. That was something, at least. He’d seen enough lava for two lifetimes.
Feeling time tick away, Tripp activated the scroll. Glitters of red dust left it, and then the spell burned up in his hand and became ash, before fading into nothing.
The red dust traveled into the room before spreading out to all corners. Tripp opened his map and switched the view so it showed the labyrinth. Zooming in on room three, his heart swelled when he saw something.
It had worked! While much of room three was blank on his map since he hadn’t been in there, the scroll of secrets had shown him something. There were four key icons set in a square toward the center of the room.
That was all it showed. It was both a bonus and a disappointment at the same time; it hadn’t uncovered the traps, and it hadn’t shown any secrets levers for doors, or hatches where enemies could spawn from.
“Four keys?” said Bee. “What does that mean?”
“It’s not much to go on.”
“Spell scrolls are available to everyone for a reason; they have limits. Maybe the traps in room three are ranked as gold traps, but your spell scroll will only uncover anything up to iron level.”
“Makes sense. The devs want us to be able to use the scrolls if we need magic, but they don’t want non-magic players to just buy their way to using gold-level spells.”
“Exactly.”
“At least we know that four keys have something to do with it. C’mon, onto step two. I want to get all this done before it gets dark.”
“Step two?”
“This way.”
They left Old Kimby and headed back to the plaza where they turned down a street called Shadowed Passage, named that way because a trick of geometry meant that the full glow of sunlight never quite hit it. The constant evening-like darkness made Tripp feel gloomy.
There was a reason that he was here, though. While the more popular shops basked in the plaza sunlight and sold the normal things you’d expect in a fantasy game, the more obscure and shadier businesses sold their wares in this shadow-drenched street.
Tripp went past a poisoner’s shop, a trader of exotic ingredients – the emphasis of exotic was painted on the shop sign – and a building that had been made to look completely unremarkable, but inexplicably had a sign out front saying, ‘Thieves’ Guild.’
He found what he needed at the end of the street, where a smell of nutmeg and ginger hit him so unexpectedly and was so cloying that he choked.
When he was finally breathing normally again his nostrils pinched, and he could still taste it.
While he was standing in front of the shop, the door opened. Tripp heard tinkling music, like the wind-up box his mom used to have in her bedroom. The doorway was dark and uninviting, and his body was resisting the urge to go in.
Bee looked at the sign above the doorway. “'Aubree Ashton - Psychic and Speaker to the Dead.’ You’re visiting a psychic?”
“Everything is worth a shot. In real life, no, I wouldn’t go near a place like this. But everything is in Soulboxe for a reason.”
“Sometimes that reason is that Boxe wants to screw with people.”
“If she sets off my bullcrap detector, then that’s fine. At least we tried.”
“Do we just go in?” said Bee.
Although the door had opened, nobody was standing there to welcome them. There was no sign of A
ubree the psychic; just the darkness that blocked whatever was inside from view, and the repeating of the tinkling music that sounded like the prelude to a horror scene where a ghostly child would giggle and then run out from a corner.
Tripp felt like a hand was pressing against his chest and stopping him from going in. He stared at the darkened doorway. What was it about this shop that chilled him?
“Are ya feckin’ coming in, or what?” called a voice, deep and croaky.
Tripp smiled and strode forward and into the shop.
It seemed that once he stepped across the threshold of the doorway, the darkness dispersed and he found himself in a room full of color and light. There was a hexagon-shaped table, and Aubree was sitting by it. She didn’t look like a stereotypical psychic; she wore a button-down shirt with her sleeves rolled up, and she had tattoos on her arm.
“Welcome to Aubree Ashton’s Psychic Shop,” she said. “Err, I’m the psychic, that is. Not the shop. I don’t mean that it’s a psychic shop, only that it’s a shop with a psychic in it. Sorry, let me be absolutely clear about this. My shop – the bricks and mortar – do not possess psychic abilities. It is I, Aubree-”
“I get it,” said Tripp, holding up his hand.
Tripp liked her already, but there was something familiar about the way she spoke. She had the gritty accent he’d come to hear a lot in Mountmend, but with a trace of familiarity.
He tried to think, but it wouldn’t come to him, and that made him bite the inside of his cheek. He hated that; it was a mental itch that he couldn’t reach.
“Sit down, for feck’s sake,” said Aubree.
For feck’s sake. It was coming to him now. He felt the sweet relief of scratching his mental itch.
“Do you know Konrad the artificer?” he said.
“Know him? He’s my fourth cousin. How do you know him?”
“I’m his new apprentice if you can call our relationship that.”
“He’s not your typical teacher, is he? Tripp, is it?”
“Yeah. I didn’t even tell you that! You really must be psychic.”
She arched an eyebrow at him. “Konrad was in the tavern last night, and he told me about his new apprentice. He didn’t tell me you were an orc, though.”
“Did he say anything else about me?” he asked, knowing he was looking to fuel his own vanity, but not caring.
“Something about dopey smiles and that you’re a quick learner and you work hard. Konrad might be tough in his teaching, but he’s free with his praise. Since he speaks so highly of you, I’m going to give you a discount. You get twenty percent off any reading, and as a bonus, I’ll filter out all the usual bullcrap I tell people. It’ll make the reading a heck of a lot shorter, but it’ll be true. Ready?”
Tripp nodded, glad to finally get a perk from being Konrad’s apprentice, and feeling a strange pride that Konrad had spoken highly of him. “Ready.”
“Tell me, Tripp, what knowledge do you feckin’ seek?”
He smiled at how similar she was to Konrad. “I have to work through a labyrinth in Old Kimby, and I haven’t seen the inside of the third room yet. I want to know what’s waiting for me.”
“Then let’s close our eyes and see if the spirits want to help us today.”
CHAPTER 54
Tripp left the shop ten minutes later and stepped back into the shade of the Shadow Passage. He felt a similar shade darken his mind as he thought about what Aubree had told him.
Trying to make sense of her visions was like trying to chase a goose around a field while wearing boots filled with cement.
“A key for every lock, a metal for every danger. Runes of death and deadly traps, snared and ready to snap. Does that make any sense to you?” he said.
That was all they’d gotten from the psychic, and it sounded like the kind of fortune he could have gotten from a cookie in a Chinese restaurant.
“Do you think that it’s a language they have to learn?” said Bee. “All psychics seem to talk the same, don’t they? All too vague and mystical. I’m sensing a man. He has…brown hair. And he has…eyes.”
“The vagueness is because they’re full of crap. The vaguer a statement, the more chance it applies to whoever paid for a reading, and then they’ll believe that the psychic is real. My mom used to go to them all the time. She’d look them up online and then make bookings with them, but she never went to the same psychic twice. It used to drive Dad mad.”
“What was she looking for?”
Tripp shrugged. “She never told me. We weren’t close. I mean, I loved her. She was my mom, after all, but she could be kinda cold, you know? It used to make me feel bad when I was a kid, but by the time I realized it was just as much my responsibility to do something about it as it was hers, it was too late.”
“What happened?”
“She passed. I won’t drag you down by getting into it.”
“I’m sorry, Tripp. One thing about being born from code is that I don’t grow up with the same parental issues as you people have. Lucas used to tell me about his father; how he’d tell him that he was a loser, that he’d never amount to anything. Soulboxe means a lot to Lucas. It’s his way of sticking his middle finger up at his father.”
Tripp had always felt a lot in common with Lucas, despite the fact that Lucas was an industry-renowned expert game designer, and Tripp had been an apprentice carpenter. Even before he’d considered playing Soulboxe, he used to watch Lucas’s v-log and lecture streams, because not only were his ideas interesting but he also liked how driven he was.
In a weird way, it was comforting to see that Lucas had issues of his own. Tripp guessed that no matter how who a person was, they always had specters of their past that the smokescreens of success and money hid away.
It was thinking about Lucas that helped him make sense of the psychic’s words.
In one lecture, Lucas had spoken about the idea of words actually being symbols. His concept, which he freely admitted he hadn’t created but was a believer in, was the power of words.
“When someone says the word ‘tree’,” Lucas had said, “You don’t see T R E E in your head. You see a giant tree with a brown trunk and green leaves. When someone says car, you see a picture of a vehicle, not the letters themselves. The words you use define what image you put in a person’s mind, and this applies to games. The things your NPCs say and do can shape how a person feels about a game, how they play it, everything.”
Even though Tripp knew that few of the NPCs in Soulboxe were scripted, it didn’t mean Lucas’s ideas weren’t present. It just meant that they were filtered through Boxe’s intelligence and then leeched down to the other characters.
He guessed that Aubree’s words weren’t just random psychic babble. He hoped so, at least.
“I wouldn’t put much thought into what she said,” said Bee. “It sounded phony to me.”
“If I heard it outside of Soulboxe, I’d agree. But there’s one thing that makes it true.”
“What?”
“Keys. The secret scroll showed keys on my map, and Aubree said, ‘a key for every lock.’ That’s not a coincidence.”
“So you need keys. You got one from the orb weavers the night of the first wave, remember?”
Tripp patted his inventory bag. “Yep. I got some last night, too. Another silver key, some bronze, even a gold. I wonder if the type of metal the key is made from is important.”
“How do you mean?”
“Aubree said ‘a metal for every danger.’ Does that mean different locks need different metal keys?”
Bee screwed up her golden forehead. “Or maybe the metal you use for the keys decides which chest you get, and which monsters you face in order to get it.”
Tripp paced in the alleyway, feeling his mental cogs turning. “Perhaps. Four bronze keys mean a bronze chest, and so on. But it can’t be that easy because that’d mean all I have to do is create four gold keys, and I’d complete the room. That kind of simplicity doesn’t fit with wh
at we’ve seen of the labyrinth so far.”
“What else did she say? ‘Runes of death and deadly traps, snared and ready to snap.’ That doesn’t sound good, Tripp. If there are deadly traps in there, you’ll need someone who is playing as a rogue to help you.”
“Let’s break it down,” said Tripp. “First, what are runes in Soulboxe? I haven’t seen any yet.”
“It’s like a container of pure manus, like a water bottle but with a spell inside it, and it can be made of anything; stone, metal, even wood. They’re usually unlocked with a word, and then the spell activates. Some runes are good, some are bad. Lots of dungeons have them as traps, while people who do a lot of traveling and fighting on their own might leave healing runes at waypoints.”
“No guessing which type of rune we’re going to face,” said Tripp. “The question is, what kind of horrible spells has Boxe locked into them? Is there any way of finding out which word will unlock a rune mark?”
Bee shook her head. “That’d be like trying to figure out a stranger’s password; it could be anything.”
“Without seeing the runes, we have absolutely nothing else to go on. Okay, time for me to empty my sleeve of tricks. There’s one more thing left to do.”
He had just started walking when he heard footsteps.
“Tripp!”
He turned to see Aubree standing outside of her shop, her face pale.
“Are you okay?” he said.
“I had another vision after you left, Tripp. I saw you, but not how you are now. You were a man.”
A shiver crept down his spine. “What?”
“I saw tubes sticking out of you, and you were suspended in some kind of, I don’t know… big egg.”
“What does she mean?” said Bee.
Tripp could hardly answer; shock had tied his mind in knots. He started walking toward her. “Aubree, tell me everything that you-”
Aubree melted.
In front of him, in an instant, her whole body melted into ash and then lay at a pile on the ground, like a body after cremation.
