by T. K. Kato
Finally, almost ready to collapse, I sunk down to my knees. The overgrowth was coarse and uncomfortable, but kneeling, it almost went over my head. So … I slumped down onto my side, pretty certain this would offer total concealment. Cold mud squelched under my shoulder and I can’t say I enjoyed the experience. Nevertheless, there I lay for several minutes—I’m not even sure how long—letting my breath and pulse calm down. My head was pounding from the adrenaline that had been surging through me more or less nonstop all night.
Rest complete
7 HP Restored
Huh. I hadn’t expected that. Apparently the designers were not total sadists. I lay there a while more, but got no other messages. Probably, like healing from drinking or eating, there was some kind of time delay on recovering by resting. Either a long delay, or else it was tied to completing the different stages.
“Access menu.”
Stats:
HP 11/21
Dex 21
Might 24
Cha 24
Stealth 29
Sanity 57
Lore 7
Currency 11
Inventory:
Flashlight
Lock picks
Map
Mysterious book
Eldritch Powers:
Telekinetic Blast
Telekinetic Lift
Tongues
Tongues. Apparently now I could understand all languages. Not as flashy or fun as the first powers, I had to admit, though I guess it sounded useful. More a matter of uncovering in-game lore than dealing with enemies.
Of course, getting it I had also bled through a ton of Sanity. I would need to be cautious about that from here on out.
After I rose from the mud—which stuck to my clothes and left me chilly—I made my way toward the lighthouse. It seemed the next logical place to try, and the closest, though I’d have to climb a steep slope to reach the bluff.
It was a slope without much in the way of cover, except for rock piles scattered here and there. Just because I hadn’t seen signs of cultists out here didn’t mean there weren’t any. Actually … the bastards seemed in such never-ending supply, I had to wonder if they respawned when killed? Or had the designers just made a full town of them? If I somehow killed them all, would I be free to roam around unhindered?
That thought drew me up short. Cultists or not, had I just considered massacring an entire town to make my life easier? I’d never bought into any of that “video games desensitize us to violence” bullshit. I mean, no legit study has ever found any causal link between the two. But damn, I had to admit, the thought of killing that many people was … cold.
Grunting, I continued up the slope, scrambling from one rock pile to the next as quickly as possible. Maybe no one was watching, but better to rely on stealth without need than blunder blindly into more Cthulhu-worshipping goons.
In order to keep away from the town, I stuck closer to the edge of the bluff. From here, the smell of brine wafted up off the sea, and the sound of crashing waves covered my footfalls on the rough ground.
As I moved up, a shadow in the water caught my eye, and I paused. There were many shadows, actually, swimming in from the bay. From up here, they seemed tiny, hard to make out. But still, I knew. They swam too fast, too easily to be anything human. A swarm of grotesque half-man things were coming around Devil Reef, heading for the wharves. For the town.
A shudder wracked me. I was glad I hadn’t chosen to go down there. Those must be the Deep Ones themselves, finally joining the fight. I mean, it was inevitable, I supposed, but I sure as hell wasn’t looking forward to facing them.
Nothing’s ever easy, right? I started to rush for another rock pile when more croaking voices sounded out from just ahead. Immediately I scrambled back behind the rocks I’d just left.
“ … Don’t even know why we had to come up here.”
“Marsh said to check everywhere in the town. The surrounding wilds, too. We want to make sure we’ve got them both before midnight.”
A pair of cultists passed by my hiding place, barely sending a glance my way.
+1 Stealth
“I don’t see Marsh digging around on a ruined bluff, do you?”
The second one snorted. “You may as well ask the great Dagon himself to do your job for you. Marsh’s meeting with the masters soon. Has to be ready for the ceremony.”
Whatever the first one said, I didn’t catch as they moved farther away and their voices failed to carry well over the waves hitting the shore below me. It didn’t matter, I supposed. It was enough to tell me there shouldn’t be any more of them up ahead.
And apparently if I could stay free until after midnight, I’d be safe from their ritual. I checked my phone: 10:16pm. So, I just needed to stay clear of the cultists for another two hours or so. I should be able to manage that. Hell, I could just hide out in the lighthouse and wait it out.
Of course, where would the fun in that be?
Still staying low, just in case, I crept forward, making my way to the next rock pile. No, hiding was boring. I wanted to solve this thing, get the powers, and find out what was behind that big ass door beneath the hotel.
Playing it safe would get me nowhere. These cultists had messed with the wrong guy, and if I had to, I’d blast every single one of them into oblivion. Or send them to meet Cthulhu, or whatever.
I continued my climb, but spared a glimpse back out onto the bay. I saw no more of the Deep Ones. Maybe they were already ashore. If so, I’d have a bigger challenge waiting for me back in the town.
With a grimace, I pushed on until I reached the precipice. Up here stood the ruined lighthouse I’d spotted on my way into town. The builders had laid the stones thicker at the bottom, creating the appearance of three terraces. Near the top, an alcove jutted out, perhaps offering sleeping quarters for whoever had once manned the place. The paint had crumbled and peeled off in all but a few spots, though it must have once gleamed white.
The stone steps leading up to the tower bore cracks, and the rail against the cliff had rusted and broken away in several places. No light shone from atop the tower, and from down here, I couldn’t get a good look at it anyway—not without shining my flashlight up at it, which would have given away my position.
By all appearances, the lighthouse was nothing more than a useless, forgotten relic of the past. Then again, such places tended to make prime locations for hidden treasures or secrets. There had to be something here.
I was sure of it.
Stage 4
A dull ache ran through my legs as I climbed the stone steps up to the lighthouse. Yeah, I could stand to lose a little weight and to exercise a bit more, and the park had begun to push my physical limits. Despite the pain, I dismissed any thought of quitting for the night. Sure, I could remove the headset and stop. But honestly—hell no.
An eerie stillness permeated this place, with no sign of animal life, not even the chirp of insects. The only sound came from the waves, but they didn’t offer much comfort. Rust caked the iron door atop the stairs, enough that I barely wanted to touch the handle.
Nevertheless, I reached out and grabbed it. It clicked a little, but didn’t turn. Locked.
Maybe I could telekinetically blast my way in, but, besides being noisy, that would probably drain my Sanity even more. So back to picking locks, I supposed. I knelt in front of the lock and pulled out my picks, fiddling with the mechanism like I had the first clue how it worked.
After a moment of pushing and prodding, I felt something inside click into place.
+1 Dex
Huh. Always welcome. After stowing the picks, I opened the door and immediately reeled, having to steady myself on the doorframe. The room inside was ten times larger than the inside of that tower should have been. Worse still, it would have given M.C. Escher nightmares. Dozens of stairs, or perhaps one endless staircase, wrapped around the room at impossible angles that left me so woozy I had to shut my eyes.
-1 Sanity
No shit. The non-Euclidean space I’d found beneath the Gilman House was a pale prelude to the madness inside the lighthouse. Slowly, almost not wanting to, I opened my eyes and took in the chaos once more. Reality bent around itself, defying everything I knew about three-dimensional space.
Part of me wanted to think it was all an optical illusion, but I supposed the designers could achieve renderings not readily encountered in nature. The doorway exited onto a small landing, from which extended two branches of the staircase, one descending and one ascending.
At least, I tried to think of them as going up and down. Directions didn’t seem to matter or even make sense in the context of folding space. Numerous cyclopean archways dotted the room around me, leaving little doubt the designers had indeed referenced Escher in coming up with this little mindfuck. Theoretically one of those archways must hold a way out of here, but I had no idea how to plot a course through this maze.
Maybe the only way through was to go with it and blunder on. When reason fails, trust to … madness.
Figuring it didn’t matter, I turned left, toward the descending staircase. This I followed around a bend, and then another. I passed through one archway that led to yet another set of stairs, which deposited me onto a new landing. Here, I turned about, marveling at the place. Maybe I had some vain hope of orienting myself. I could see the open door leading out of the lighthouse, but it lay perpendicular to the landing I stood on. Meaning … I was on the wall.
Right.
I rubbed my eyes and took slow breaths in the hopes of clearing my head. On the wall ahead of me, a nondescript archway led to a door, this one engraved with the face of a Deep One. I shone my flashlight over the surface. Dull iron, like the door I’d come in, and, given the decor, no doubt the best way forward.
From the edge of the landing it looked like maybe twenty feet to that opposite wall. Relatively speaking, that ought to be down from my original location. At least I thought it was. Maybe I could jump to it, but a twenty-foot fall might seriously hurt.
Instead, I turned about, trying to spot a staircase leading there. Maybe I needed to work backward from my destination. There were stairs near the door, those winding up the opposite wall from where I stood and leading to yet another landing—or wall, rather. From there it broke off into three different staircases, each wrapping in a new direction.
My mind boggled trying to keep a route in mind.
You know what? Just screw it. I picked a staircase at random and started walking. Along this route I passed through two more archways, and followed the winding stairs to a new surface. After looking all around, I spotted the Deep One door, far above me.
So I’d managed to get to exactly the opposite of where I wanted to go. Yeah, I was already getting sick of this place. Barely caring about the fall anymore, I jumped up. And landed back in the same spot I’d left.
So much for that.
Okay. So, no matter how weird these stairs were, there had to be a finite number of them. If I just kept walking without retracing my steps, sooner or later I had to come to the damn door. Right? I pushed on, keeping my eyes locked dead ahead to avoid vertigo.
The stairs led me down, and after several more shifts in perspective, I exited to a landing—this one with a door leading back outside the lighthouse. As in exactly where I’d started this insanity?
All right, the designers could go to hell. That’s right, go directly to hell, do not pass Go, do not collect two hundred dollars.
I growled in frustration, then peered down over the landing. The door I needed was right there. As I gazed down, something caught my eye. Stairs I hadn’t even been able to see before actually wrapped around the underside of this landing. Their inverted design concealed them from anyone standing above them, so maybe they worked only as an exit.
As … an optical illusion. You could see it when coming from one direction. But they were still there when coming from the other way. Of course, trying to walk on them would mean basically stepping off a ledge. If gravity didn’t wrap me around them, I would fall and crack open my skull.
But what the hell?
I hovered one foot in midair above the inverted staircase, struggling to turn my ankle down enough to step onto it. There was no way without moving my other foot. So, then, may as well. The moment my second foot left the floor, my orientation swerved, filling me with a bout of dizziness that left me swaying.
And standing on the stairs I’d aimed for.
Nice.
Was this a secret shortcut, or the only actual answer? Either way, my destination lay dead ahead. I followed this staircase to another landing, the one that held the archway I needed. Beyond this lay the iron door engraved with a Deep One face. Actually, it wasn’t so much engraved as the face seemed to grow out of the door. Through the creature’s open maw, between rows of shark-like teeth, lay a keyhole.
I chuckled.
All right then.
After a bit more fiddling, my lock picks offered a satisfying click.
+1 Dex
Yeah, can’t say I knew what I’d have even done if that failed. Maybe tried to blow the door down like Bobby the big bad wolf.
As it was, I opened it, revealing an even larger chamber than the one I stood in. This one, like the last, was a maddening maze. Only now, the entire room was spherical, like I was on the inside of a globe, and the stairs had been replaced with walkways that crossed the sphere at improbable angles.
A frustrated growl escaped me. No, I wasn’t about to let this shit stop me, but still, I was sick of it. The designers had taken a good idea and stretched it too far, crossing the threshold from challenging to annoying.
Or maybe I was just tired and grumpy.
Before stepping off this landing, I looked down, checking to see if they had repeated the secret shortcut trick. No such luck. Instead, I had three paths to choose from, two skirting the outer edges of the sphere, and one straight through. All led to doorways, similar to arches I’d seen before, but now completely circular.
Not really knowing where I needed to go, I chose the middle path and started walking. The shift in orientation was slow and subtle, enough that I hadn’t even realized it had happened until I looked behind me and saw the door I’d come in was well above me and upside down. My eyes traced the path I’d followed and I saw no reason it should have left me on the underside of the walkway, yet here I was.
But as I stared longer at it, it seemed almost to warp and shift.
-1 Sanity
I shook myself. Maybe it had actually changed, or maybe I’d just seen multiple angles of the optical illusion. Either way, I decided to retrace my steps. I followed the path back, and yet, when I passed through another circular doorway, I found myself on a landing far above where I’d started.
It was like, depending on how you looked it, the path could be above itself or below itself. And if I wasn’t careful, I’d follow it to an unintentional end. Of course none of that made any actual sense.
Grumbling, I went through another doorway on this landing. It opened out to a new landing, one with differing paths. I couldn’t be certain, but it looked a lot like I’d crossed to the other side of the sphere entirely. Which wasn’t what I wanted.
I doubled back and retreated through the doorway, only to find myself exiting from a third location, this one on the wall above the door I’d just gone through.
All right. Enough was enough. I slumped down onto the surface and shut my eyes, blocking out the insane room. The multifaceted path was bad enough, but if going back through a doorway deposited me at a random location, I could never hope to plan a route—especially not with my orientation continuously changing, making it hard to know when I’d shifted locations.
Maybe someone smarter than I was could figure this out, but it was all beyond me.
Besides which, why the hell would the cultists build this bizarre maze? Nothing in a lighthouse was worth protecting with such a test … was it? Unless there was something else her
e, something besides the lighthouse. Even if that was true, though, I had no way to navigate this room or even to escape it. No sane person could.
But … somehow the cultists got around here. They must have had some means to reach whatever lay beyond the maze. Was there a route you had to memorize, like the path through the woods in the old Zelda game?
I opened my eyes and swept my flashlight around the massive sphere. There were at least a dozen doors here, maybe more. If I had to pass through them in a certain order, I couldn’t hope to memorize such a complex pattern. Probably nobody could. You’d need instructions or a map …
Had I missed something?
What would the cultists use to get around this place? If the Deep Ones had helped them create this maze, they’d have left instructions. Huh. I pulled out the book I’d taken from the shrine in the gorge and flipped it open.
As I stared at it, the nonsensical symbols morphed on the page, rearranging themselves into actual letters I could recognize and read. I hadn’t taken a long enough look at this before. I flipped several pages until I came to a sketch of the Cthulhu door beneath the Gilman House labeled Gate to Eternity.
The way to life everlasting lies through the attunement of all seals with the lore of the Old Ones. Only steeped in eldritch knowledge may one find the Gate to Eternity yawning wide.
Right. So I needed to find the six gems and attune them. I’d already figured that much out on my own. I kept flipping through the book. After going on for several dozen pages about the religious significance of the city and sacrifices and other bullshit, it made reference to the refinery.
Oh, yeah. I kept skimming. There. The lighthouse. The author waxed on about the virtues of hyperbolic geometry and spaces humankind couldn’t perceive and so on. A few pages later, the book depicted a sketch or map or something of the room I had already passed through. Beyond that one, it showed this spherical room—or maybe hyperspherical—I admit I wasn’t much for higher math.
