by K.A. Rose
Stage 04:
Lost
Sora pushed his hand forward a second, but no stone
came to meet his fingers. What resided there in its place was pure and
simple darkness. The light of the dead-end room illuminated the start of
a branch into another hallway.
"Hey. Come here," he called to Kite, aware suddenly
that his voice was indeed echoing much more than the narrow corridor would
suggest.
It was Kite who appeared hesitant this time.
"What are you worried about? It hasn't closed on
us yet."
This was true. Further, the doorway had never snapped
shut when Kite explored the hallway alone. At the same time, though, this
new feature wasn't part of its design.
But arguing with Sora seldom came to fruitful end,
so a few seconds later Kite joined him ten feet down in the hall, where
the side corridor began.
The light cast by the joining rooms was not enough
to illuminate the hallway past a few feet, past which there was only shadow.
There was no way of telling how far back it went based on present resources,
and without retinas to adjust to darkness here, there were no means by
which to find out, even if they ventured further.
"This wasn't here when I walked it before," Kite
said, discovering too late his words came out as a tense whisper. He felt
his words escaping somehow into that void, wondering for a moment if Sora
had failed to hear him, until the taller PC responded.
"What do you think it means?"
Kite took a breath, mostly to give him pause enough
to think. "Helba and Wiseman once instructed me to a field whose internal
dimensions were supposedly expanding as the result of Morganna's viral
corruption. But by that they meant, I think, it was just a heavy infestation.
Because... there was nothing like this."
"Do we go?"
He hadn't been prepared for this question. Perhaps
he assumed that Sora would naturally want to plow ahead, having braved
the current hallway so many times anyway. What made it very strange, though,
was even though Sora showed no signs of this bravery now, neither was he
wrought with fear of the unknown. It seemed that he was simply waiting
for Kite's direction. Conceding to his leadership.
"Yes," Kite said, after an agonizing, pregnant silence.
"If it can so arbitrarily redesign itself, who knows if it'll be here at
all when we get back?"
"Right."
"But... what will we do for guidance? No light."
"Don't worry about that."
Before Kite could respond, he saw that Sora had
access his Skills menu, and jerky preloaded animation took over as the
Twin Blade selected among his impressive arsenal a spell to cast.
It was with a certain hypnotism in the movement
that Kite's eyes followed Sora's gloved hand, raised over the shorter player's
head, to release a faint green glow and a shimmer of sparkles. Above Kite's
head appeared for a moment a two-digit number in green.
Rig Saem was a regeneration spell, common in RPG
stock. That Sora possessed such a spell was a bit surprising --he was a
physically-oriented character with few exceptions-- but upon reflection,
Kite realized it fit well with his character. In any circumstance, Sora
would want to increase his own odds for survival as much as possible, even
if a threat didn't exist. He'd enhance his advantage just for the point
of showing off.
Also --Kite hated to think it-- but there was some
softening quality in this factor of Sora's design. Players like Sora, who
focused all their energy into physical strength, were not given to considerations
for curative skills in battle, past the emergency potion when HP went critical.
That Sora did had the effect of transforming Kite's mental perception
of his personality; prescience reflected intelligence, and a Tokyo U potential
like Kite could not but value something like that.
There was also the fact that Sora placed the spell
on him rather than himself first. Courtesy wasn't so uncommon in The
World, but Sora was never at the head of the queue to exhibit it--
"You ready?"
Where's my mind gone this time?
Sora saw the shift in Kite's expression, unhooking
from whatever daze had carried him off, and allowed a brief laugh. "The
glow of the spell should cast a bit of light. It's not much, but it should
be enough to go on."
"You sure you're all right with that?" Kite had
told him about SP failing to regenerate here.
"Maxed out SP, don't worry. This dungeon would have
to be a major strain before I have to start digging into items."
Kite nodded. Knowing that he was still assigned
the role of leader here, he took the first step down the new hallway.
It was the same width as the first one, enough that
the glow of the Rig Saem cast speckled green light against the black stone,
shifting and dancing like spring fireflies in the dark. The light was still
not enough to project more than a few feet in front of the pair, but for
lack of anything better this was an effective solution.
Going at a slow pace, Kite assigned one hand to
guiding his character and the other to the sketch pad in his lap.
At an estimated six meters, the hallway abruptly
ended with a flat, featureless wall.
"It's a dead--"
He stopped short of the second word, because his
eyes had shifted over to the right-hand wall, into which was set a plain
black door.
Kite's hand hovered over the handle for a moment.
Then, feeling Sora's eyes on the back of his head, he slid the door aside.
Another hallway, of what he could judge to be well over thirty meters in
length, lay beyond.
With a glance, once between them and then both back
at the last traces of the dead end room's light visible at the end of the
corridor, the two Twin Blades stepped through the door.
On unspoken agreement they fell to silence, acknowledging
that the strange harmonics of the place would make it more of a chore to
speak than it was worth.
Continuing, Kite discovered that this new hall,
wider and with a lower ceiling than the last, extended much further than
his estimations had suggested. Twice in their trek down this path, he asked
Sora to stop while he pulled out another sheet of paper. He had reached
the edge and run over.
"This is strange," Kite hissed. "We've gone over
100 meters so far."
No sooner had he said it than the halo of the Rig
Saem glow reached the wall, and the lip of a doorway leading off to the
left. Kite didn't even bother to glance for confirmation from his party
member before he ducked inside.
The ceilings, which before had just barely received
the illumination of the spell, were now far too out of range for its meager
light to touch. Shallow steps sang out as a full choir of echoes, but it
was not the sound that brought a cessation of Kite's movement.
They were in a large area now, this was all he was
able to ascertain. The wall behind him was just barely visible --moving
his hand back, he was only able to graze its surface with his fingers--
and the adjacent walls had disappeared entirely somewhere in the darkness.
"Kite...?"
The lack of the usual suffix was almost as striking
as Sora's tone.
"Right here. I see you." He did, looking over his
shoulder by the doorway. Sora was mostly discernable only as a shadow at
the center of a green glimmer of light.
Backing up a bit, Kite continued, "I think we should
stick to the walls."
"Right."
"Do you see me?"
"Yes."
"I'm putting my left hand on the wall. I'm facing
left from the doorway. See?"
"Nn-hn."
"We're going this way."
It was a study of terse commands, rendered simplistic
only out of concern for acoustics, but once again Kite felt as if he was
reducing his language to help Sora along.
Bear's remark kept coming back to him.
Orca had never said at length what he had experienced
while comatose, seeming to feel it unnecessary to bog Kite down with such
details. This void of information was in fact more detrimental, leaving
to Kite to imagine all sorts of horrors his schoolmate must have been subjected
to.
And, by extension, what Sora must have been subjected
to.
Humans had invented more ways to torture each other
than to conduct anything with a constructive purpose. It followed logically
that an AI like Morganna Mode Gone, with a mental capacity far in excess
of a human's, and far more insane, would have been able to invent things
Torquemada and his crew could have only wished to dream of.
And, Kite imagined, it was probably even worse than
that.
Kite watched the silhouette of his partymember until
he could be sure Sora had followed his lead in setting his left hand on
the wall. This done, Kite gave a nod, exaggerated so that he could be sure
the movement would get picked up, and started to walk.
Footstep followed footstep. Fingers slid across
a neverceasing smooth surface. Fingertips tingling, Kite's drawing hand
faltered in tracing the enormous length of this, the great hall, the real
Great Hall of the house. Still no adjacent
wall appeared, no feature in the wall to veer them off course even the
smallest fraction of an inch.
After five sheets of paper laid spent in creating
a single line, Kite stopped abruptly, nearly stumbling when Sora's reaction
failed to come fast enough and he collided with the shorter Twin Blade.
"This is no good. Let's go a different way."
"Yeah." Sora had answered almost too readily. Like
he was hoping Kite would suggest it.
Taking great care to keep one hand or the other
on the wall at all times, the two characters turned around a clear 180
degrees and headed back the way they had come, Sora now in the lead.
It was ten feet before they reached the doorway,
the gap in space under their fingers.
"What the--"
"It's probably not the right door," Kite hissed
sharply. "We must've just missed it somehow. Keep going."
Three meters later, the glow of Sora's Rig Saem
spell touched upon the northern wall.
They turned back, going faster now, less careful
to mark their steps. Now Kite's spell light met the southern wall, turning
off into a side hallway. Unthinkingly, he took the path, and with a short
cry of dismay Sora followed after before the small beacon, his only means
of seeing his companion, disappeared around the corner.
This hallway zigzagged first right then left, into
a dead end. Frantic now, Kite was going into a run, retracing his steps,
except there was nothing to retrace now, because in the moment in which
the two's backs were turned the left had become a right, and the right
a left, and two more turns than had even been there before, until reaching
a door, locked.
"What's going on? What's happening?"
-appening, -appening, -penning, -penning, -ping,
-ping, said the walls.
A hand on his shoulder. Kite jumped, but steadied
himself.
"Kite. Come on. Let's go back."
In desperation, Kite tried a Sprite Ocarina.
"No good still. Damn."
They went back, into a hallway that was absent of
all the twisting turns it had possessed before, around a single corner
to a fork, a doorway on the lefthand side. Sora tried the handle, witnessing
it move easily under his hand. They emerged into a small room, twelve square
feet in size, another door to the right, into the Great Hall again.
"This is progress. It is," Kite insisted.
Kite realized belatedly that he was breathing heavily,
on the verge of hyperventilating. He choked down these gasps and tried
to steady himself, taking a brave step forward--
Which was when Sora yelped.
Kite's light had gone out.
"Sora--"
"Where are you? Do you see me?"
-me, -me, -me, -me, said the Great Hall.
"Y-yes."
The edges of Kite's features could just barely be
seen by the halo of light around Sora. If Kite moved but one step back,
he would be engulfed in shadow.
Sora stood frozen in place, clutching no wall or
doorway but nevertheless firmly rooted to the spot, visibly shaking. The
entire scope of this state lay outside Kite's realm of observation. He
saw only the unmoving glow.
"Stay right there," Sora managed, coughing himself
into a steady tone. "I'll recast the spell."
At which point his light, too, ran out.
Kite, dutifully, remained perfectly still, waiting
with what reserves of patience still existed in him for Sora to cast the
spell again. Still, though, when it happened Kite found that the light
was much farther off than Sora had stood before, nearly six meters away
now, and worse yet, the wall that had existed not two feet from Sora's
back was not at all touched by the sphere of Rig Saem's light now.
Through what Kite could discern from a distance,
Sora still stood as if glued to the floor, glancing around him frantically.
He didn't call out for his teammate, nor form any other words, save the
utterance of a few desperate, meaningless vowels.
Fearing the acoustics of the echoes would frighten
him even more, Kite did not call out either. Instead, he started for Sora
across the hall, letting the spell act as a lighthouse
in dark sea.
Finally, after an eternity spent hanging in space,
he managed to touch Sora's shoulder.
In the space of a blink, and a terrible metallic
shriek that resounded through the Great Hall, Sora's lightning reflexes
had brought a blade to the center of Kite's forehead, right between his
eyes. The tip of the blade's edge grazed polygonal skin.
What seemed like hours ended in a painful dry swallow.
"Sora," Kite whispered, "let's get out of here."
Slowly, the taller PC lowered his weapon. His hand
shook convulsively; Kite could only imagine what the player Sora was going
through in the same moment, without the benefit of a graphical filter like
this...
The two were able to locate the eastern wall within
five minutes, and from there it was with relative ease that they found
a hallway the same size as the one from which they had entered. But that
ended in a dead end. Working back, they found a side path, from which a
left route on a t-branch took them to a series of three rooms, and another
hallway.
At one point Kite stopped their procession in the
middle of a corridor, closing his eyes in concentration, but more focused
on quieting all the thoughts in his head than meditation. He had little
by way of extrasensory powers, and he was pretty certain Sora didn't either,
or else that might have been an option to them.
When both his heart and the jumbling thoughts in
his mind had refused to slow down, Kite shook his head and struck out anew.
There had to be an end to this.
There was no way there was not an end to this.
They emerged soon in another, fatter corridor with
a low ceiling, at the end of which was a doorway, and from there--
--light.
Fully prepared to do battle with shifting corridors
again, the Twin Blades were stuck between puzzlement and relief when they
sighted the house's dead end room in less
time than it had taken to reach the Great Hall going in.
They took no more measurements. They walked straight
down into the four-way room previously considered largest in the dungeon,
what they had called by habit the great hall, by no definition immense
any longer, and passed it out onto the field without a glance.
Outside, the house remained
the same. Nothing moved about its form. Nothing suggested among its panelled
walls and coils of ivy that the least strange thing might be occuring within.
Whatever lay within those walls, it was within. It could not enter
here onto the field.
Although Kite's original exterior measurements had
matched it correctly, no longer were there any means by which to suggest
that. Not now. Of course not now.
The second casting of Rig Saem sputtered out into
weak, gray light, filtered through the leaves of choking trees.
"What's going on here?" Sora asked eventually, ending
the silence. "How do you explain that?"
"It's a house," Kite
answered.
Sora took to the tone to be stupor, acceptable under
the circumstances. He didn't realize that that had been a remark made in
full consciousness and sobriety.
Kite lifted his visor to peer at the crumpled balls
of paper lying around his feet in front of his console. His headphones
still attached, he was able to hear Sora say: "House.
Hell."
"Bunnying?" Kite said into the attached mic. His
eyes stayed fixed on the papers as if expecting them to present him with
some form of an answer. There was none.
"You'd never let me. Not now."
"I would, you know. I'd understand."
He replaced his visor in time to experience Sora
smacking him on the back of his head. "Before you start in about that freak-out
stuff back there, you weren't the picture of stability yourself."
"Yeah, I know..." Kite admitted, idly rubbing the
spot where he'd been hit. In a normal situation he might have denied Sora's
accusation, but the effort seemed lost now. It was better to acknowledge
it as one more unfortunate disadvantage, like a THAC0 penalty. "But if
we're going to be investigating this more, we're going to need that. Stability."
"A kid like you? You can't just magic that out of
the air."
"I wasn't figuring that."
"Then what?"
"We go to someone who has it in abundance."
End Stage 04.