by K.A. Rose
Stage 02:
Can You Tell Me Where I Am?
Many Wood-type dungeons had uniquely styled fields,
more like the first stage of the dungeon than anything else. These tended
to be made of narrow pathways bounded on all sides by a heavy growth of
trees, decorated at random with vaguely South American statuework. As with
all fields in The World, there was no overlying significance to
any of a stage's features, no plot to explain their fixture. It was just
ornamentation.
This was not it.
The Delta House of
Leaves field consisted of a single rectangular space, closed off on the
exterior sides by massive brick walls overgrown with ivy, and thick trees
above blotting out the sun. To the other side of the narrow pathway was
the dungeon entrance, but it was not a psuedo-Azteccan temple.
It was a house. It
stood three stories high, white with black panelling, something the more
astute student of architecture might pin down to colonial American. It,
too, was choked over with ivy, trailing into dark green veins that spiraled
up to the roof.
Kite had seen dungeons shaped like imposing castles
or giant human heads with writhing, beckoning fingers sprouting from the
ground. This was not in the same league. By all accounts, it was very plain
compared to The World's usual fare.
Still, Kite shivered.
There was no map. He walked the perimeter of the
structure in minutes and found no enemy portals, symbols or Springs of
Myst.
He tried a Fairy's Orb. They were disabled.
For the sake of documentation, he removed his peripheral
for a moment, and sought out in his room for a pad of graph paper and a
pencil. One of Tsukasa's gang, Bear, had once gone this route for an unmappable
dungeon, though that was a nonbattle event, and Kite had heard of no such
contest attached to this field. Visor half-on, he made estimations of length
in real-world ratio, charted the house's exterior
dimensions in relation to the barrier of the garden wall. He toggled to
third-person view and panned and tilted for extra dimensions, gauging the
height and tilt of the roof.
This done, he walked back around to the front porch
and tried the door. The handle turned easily under his hand, willing and
eager in some way, and the door slid open silently.
Kite's breath echoed through the interior long before
he stepped inside.
A pause for map loading, and Kite stood in a long
corridor, steel gray and unadorned. Unconventional for a Wood dungeon,
but nothing so unusual. And not the all-black chipset like the BBS post
had said.
He tried the Fairy's Orb again. Still disabled.
Well, that wasn't so bad. Some mystery event dungeons were like that. Kite
paused again to draft a rough sketch of the opening hallway, then proceeded.
What lay beyond the foyer was a four-way great hall.
A dungeon portal floated in the center.
Kite took a few steps forward.
The portal glowed fierce for a moment then expanded
outward in a shower of of gold sparks. A squat, hunched over goblin stood
at the center of the space. Battle Mode initiated. It waddled forward.
Kite stared at it. This was low even by Delta standards.
He stayed motionless for a bit, humoring the creature
by letting it attack at a whim. A string of Misses and 1 damage hits floated
up again until they'd formed a queue.
This was going to take a while.
Kite removed the visor and went to the kitchen for
a drink. He caught the face of the clock on the edge of his vision, and
felt a twinge of guilt over ignored piles of homework.
Returning, he found the goblin had criticalled in
his absence, and had reduced his health down enough to justify using a
potion or healing spell now. This was a bit more than Kite had anticipated.
Visor already on, he sought by touch a place on his desk for his drink,
and took up the controller again. X button, X button, X button-- dead.
0 EXP gained. He didn't get EXP now. What would
be the point?
Many years of intense play had streamlined his reflexes,
so it was on virtual autopilot that Kite opened up the Skills menu and
restored his health by spell. Without pause, he started forward again,
taking the house's leftmost path.
He had a rule about this, one he had never shared
with anyone, not even BlackRose. None of his compatriots had seemed to
notice it either, in all their time together. That is, how he went through
a dungeon each time, without fail. Particularly before he'd realized what
Fairy's Orbs were for.
The leftmost path extended straight, then south
into a dead end with a chest and a row of crates. It was in systematically
breaking these open that Kite noticed something: his SP was not regenerating.
Somehow, this did not enter into Kite's mind as
a unique feature for a unique dungeon, some redeeming qualify if none of
the other rumors had proved true. He did not think of the BBS posts.
Instead, a chill ran down his spine. This, compacted
with the prohibition of certain items, was almost like a noose tightening.
He shook the feeling off. Convincing himself that
it just meant sticking to items for this dungeon, Kite retraced his steps
to the great hall and took the right path. Here, too, was a repeat of the
same featureless gray map texture, a long hallway that reached a fork and
split off into two different directions. Automatically, as from years of
habit, Kite went straight past the middle path and opted for the left route.
An empty room. There was a pedestal intended for
a chest or a some sort of Grunty food, but neither resided there. He turned
back, then tried the center door. A small room with a chest and two barrels.
On the other side of that, a dungeon portal. It held five goblins. Kite
didn't humor them like he had with the first one.
The internal light seemed to be dimming. Of course,
the Twin Blade was used to dark dungeons in The World, and Delta
House
of Leaves certainly didn't qualify, but there was something to be said
for a dungeon that grew darker as you went along. Of course, it could just
be his imagination...
Doors bounded this present room to the right and
left. Kite took the left. A chest stood there, with one of the Tarot card
scrolls inside. He threw it out, then went back. The other door had another
hallway with a portal, seven goblins, then a chest with a Health Drink
(thrown out because he already had 99 in his inventory), then a dead end
with a bare pedestal again.
There was a definite shift in the lighting now,
he could tell.
His controller felt wet. He realized belatedly that
his palms were sweating, despite the low temperature in his bedroom. Tokyo
temperatures were typically unbearable, even in November, but Kite felt
as if he might see his own breath cloud up in front of him if he removed
the visor now.
Geez. Mom probably put on the AC again.
Back in the great hall again, he was left with only
the center door.
He wondered why he should feel apprehensive.
What lay beyond was, as he had suspected, the staircase.
But something about it caused Kite to do a momentary double-take, and go
back through the great hall to the main entrance just to see.
There was no mistake. The levels of this dungeon
were reversed. Instead of leading downward in successive basement floors,
the stairs were leading up.
"I get it," Kite said with satisfaction, a little
relieved. Figuring out one piece of a puzzle always made him feel more
comfortable about the rest of it; once you had the power of understanding
some of it, you knew it was within your scope to be dealt with. It rendered
itself mundane.
The only facet to Delta House
of Leaves really worth talking about was for the same reason Delta Hidden
Forbidden Holy Ground was such a relic of the game: it was uniquely designed.
The latter was a church, and this was, purely and simply, a house.
It was so stupidly ordinary that Kite felt like smacking his own forehead.
Probably the house once belonged to some admin-sponsored
event, and now that it was over, the dungeon had reduced itself down to
nothing but its weird, inexplicable design. With floors that went up rather
than down.
Back to the stairs at the other end of F1, then
bounding up the steps two at a time, Kite forgot entirely all the things
that had given him to worry before. This wasn't the field written of on
the BBS at all, but it wasn't a disappointment. He could show this one
off to his friends. BlackRose would love him-- well, if she was still around.
He wondered sometimes what his relationship with
BlackRose was intended as. It seemed strange to fall in love with someone
over the internet, but Kite didn't think it was quite that to begin with.
She was a dear friend of his, this much could not be argued; it was a bond
reinforced by the sheer longevity of their friendship, which surpassed
that of anyone else he had come to know online, except, lately, Sora. He
might not know the explicit details of her life, but he thought he knew
her pretty well.
So, why did she leave?
The upper level consisted of five rooms. The last
hall before the staircase possessed the floor's only dungeon portal. Twelve
goblins. Kite's framerate was starting to stutter.
By his own estimation he had guessed that it was
a three-story house. Though most dungeons'
actual dimensions couldn't be gauged from above-ground, this one was an
exception. So when he reached the Gott Statue on the tiny attic floor (one
Leather Cap, two Yellow Candies) he was rather proud of himself for the
accurate prediction.
The last dungeon portal held 20 goblins, enough
almost to freeze his monitor.
"Someone's bad idea of a gag dungeon," Kite said
aloud to himself as he walked back down to the lower levels. He verbalized
his inner monologue for the satisfaction of a decent echo, and noticed
that the echoes here were of a greater pitch than their spaces would suggest,
the mark of a bad programming job.
Yet Kite persisted jovially, crossing the expanse
of the great hall, "Sora's gonna laugh at me for a straight week, watch--"
He stopped.
Something had passed into and out of his peripheral
vision almost so quickly that he didn't noticed it, wouldn't have noticed
if he hadn't stopped so abruptly. It hung there still, seen out of the
corner of his eye, almost edging itself out of sight by sheer force of
will.
Kite turned.
There was a door set off-center on the western wall.
No doors were ever off-center in dungeons, nor were there ever two doors
along the same wall like this. But there was another thought even more
intruding in Kite's brain at the moment and it was that that door hadn't
been there before.
Looking closer he saw it wasn't really a door, just
the doorway, with nothing set around its edge to snap shut for a battle.
Beyond it lay darkness, indicating that stairs lay beyond, but no-- Kite
peered forward and saw there, seeming hanging in space, the rectangular
view of the doorway leading out into the dead-end room at the end of the
left path, where he'd first discovered his SP wasn't regenerating.
This was all there was. This doorway, and then the
opening on the other side of a darkened hallway, leading to a room that
had had no door there before. A hallway.
No light projected into it. Kite couldn't tell whether
the walls were black or there were no walls at all.
Rationality told him that this could not have any
correlation with the BBS posts, because one hallway was a far cry from
an entire house, but this was overwhelmed
by other thoughts, louder thoughts, jangling and ringing along the inside
of his skull until it throbbed. Go in, don't go in. Can go in, can't go
in. Go get Sora. Sora went to bed. Can't get Sora. Go alone. What if it's
not here when I get back?
Kite edged the toe of his shoe to the border of
light. His feet touched down on stone, hard and reassuring. Cold. How could
he feel that?
In his room before his terminal, Kite wasn't sweating
anymore. He was shivering. The room was freezing.
Reaffirmed of the solidity of the hallway, Kite
took another step. He extended a hand experimentally and touched wall a
lot sooner than he'd expected. Narrow. Not a place for claustrophobics.
A few more steps, cautious, paranoid, waiting for
something to leap out unexpectantly at him. Nothing. Now inside the hallway,
the glow of the distant room illuminated the slightest hint of floorspace
and gave the walls definition. Still, Kite felt himself straining his eyes
to adjust to the darkness, even if it couldn't be done here.
His heart pounded so fiercely it seemed to rattle
his ribcage. He wondered if the halls might echo it.
Before he realized he had made it to the other side,
and emerged blinking in the dull gray light of the dead-end room with the
crates.
Kite looked back; the hallway stood open, just as
before. Neither door had closed. It gave no indication that it would be
doing anything in the forseeable future.
But something was still off. Pausing his game for
a moment to remove his visor, looking at the pad of papers resting in his
lap, Kite felt he had an inkling as to why.
End Stage 02.