by K.A. Rose

Stage 09:
House
 
 

    Sora was not the only one to be adamant about pushing onward. Kite knew that all the others involved wanted to follow this through, and it was not without justification. They had put entire weeks into getting to this point, their first full-on exploration, and the last 24 hours especially had been very strenuous on all of them. They were not going to call this off now.
    Kite was designated overall leader without argument. His first order of business was diving the group into two parties; he paired Sora with Elk for the first party, and retained Moonstone and Sanjuro for his own. Sanjuro would still be hanging back to monitor, but theoretically, because of the particular nature of the map, they should still be able to communicate on priority PM channels.
    Next, following instructions Adamantine had given them the night before, they cracked their inventories to give themselves unlimited items. The result appeared to be a jumble of nonsense characters in their items lists, but Adamantine assured them that all the items would function the same. To be safe, they also cracked their HP/SP character codes for automatic regeneration.
    Because battles were unlikely, or at least something they didn't want to dwell on, all four explorers left their normal weapons back in their Elf's Haven dumpboxes, and selected low-level rares to crack to use as flares. Huge coils of primitive polygonal rope were coded up, neon markers were fashioned for the walls, flashlights to lead the way, beacons and homing devices to keep track of others' movements installed.
    Kite, Elk and Sanjuro, who were all very concerned with playing by the rules in The World, were assured that all these modifications would be disabled once they logged out.
    Patches to remove the Fairy's Orb and Sprite Ocarina disables still didn't work, but this feature of the house seemed much less terrifying now.
    The last step required connecting their visor feeds to the monitors in the dead-end room. The process involved in this was delicate; the means necessary for this brought the act on par with hacking in the classical sense, and both illegal and virtually impossible to accomplish on the Altimit OS.
    "This is incredible," Sanjuro felt compelled to remark, when the monitors flickered to life. They were flat vidscreen type projections that could be selected for maximization at will. The functions to screencap and record, though disabled at the moment, were slick and intuitive. "It's like that one scene in City of Lost Children."
    "Is that another samurai film?" Kite asked absently, adjusting the extra cable connecting to his headset.
    "Er..."
    By nine AM, an hour past their intended start-up time, the five were finally ready to begin. All preparations in place, they seemed ready for an expedition lasting up to, if it could be contemplated, five days. It almost struck them as goofy that they were overreacting so much.
    "Shouldn't we kick off with something dramatic?" Kite wondered, as the four chosen explorers hovered around the doorway into the dark hall. "Like, boldly going places, or we may be some time, or..."
    "...Pointless," Moonstone said.
    "More like cliche," Sora agreed.
    "I guess."
    They fell silent again. The hallway before them had all the properties of a vaccuum.
    Something rose up from a corner of Kite's mind.
    "'Und wenn du lange in einen Abgrund blickst, blickt der Abgrund auch in dich hinein.'"
    His teammembers shot glances at him. Sanjuro looked up from the monitors.
    "What's that?" he said. "German?"
    "Yeah. It's out of this manga my brother reads. He wants me to translate it sometime. Do you know it at all?"
    "I can't be sure, but I think I remember it from somewhere. I think some philosophy course I took as a teen. If I'm right, it translates as: 'and when you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes back into you.'"
    "...Neitzsche," Moonstone said abruptly, recognizing the quote.
    "Yeah. That was it."
    "It's strangely appropriate," Kite remarked wryly. "Funny coincidences."
    "Actually, it's the second half of a quote," Sanjuro said. "The first part, I'm not sure of the German, but in translation it goes along the lines of 'he who battles monsters must be careful he does not become a monster himself.' Nietzsche was talking about the dehumanization of war, I think."
    It was Elk who made the connection first.
    "But it could just as easily be said that we're at war with this house," he mused, looking on. The others followed his gaze. "And this might not be even close to over."
    "Maybe," said Kite. "But right now, we start."
 

    And then man made fire, and brought it into the dark places. And he drove the shadows away.
    But in doing this he had made a shadow of his own. And this one would not leave.
 

    One end of the first spool of rope was tied to an immovable rod in the dead-end room. This was an object specially crafted by their resident hacker the night before, and was, she promised, as sturdy as the walls and floors around them. It was proven statistically that they had better odds of an unprecedented Apocalypse than have that rod move.
    They reached the Great Hall within an hour, and at the doorway they fastened a neon marker to the wall and laid down the first beacon. From there the next step was a vote: did they try to navigate by the walls, or plunge straight ahead?
    >>I think it's safe to say that whatever exists up here still, it's just more of the same, Kite told his comrades, who nodded in agreement. >>Let's head straight.
    They did. With infinite Rig Saem and torches that used to be weapons lighting the way, the four struck out across the great abyss.
    >>I was expecting something a little prettier, Sanjuro said over the PM. >>How are you guys doing?
    >>Just fine so far, Kite replied. >>Sorry we can't do anything for the view.
    As he said it, the growl reemerged, murmuring somewhere behind them. All of the PCs save Moonstone visibly shivered.
    >>Hey, hey, Sanjuro, Kite said quickly, >>did you catch that?
    >>That's... jesus... I didn't think it sounded like that. Walls shifting, hell. That had personality.
    >>Let's keep moving, Elk whispered. >>We're out in the open...
    It was true, in a suddenly very striking way, Kite realized. Not only were they on open ground with no structure or reference point to judge from, but they were the only source of illumination. They were quite literally roaming targets.
    The Holloway Journal had mentioned something similar, hadn't it? Something from Kirby_Wax's posts...
    That journal...
    Were they just walking into a complete repeat of those events?
    Are we just...
    A hand snapped out, abruptly, catching him on the shoulder, a moment before he would have fallen off into oblivion.

    Sanjuro squinted at the monitors.
    >>Someone move closer, he told them. >>I can't get a good shot of what you're looking at.

    It was a stairway.
    Peering over its edge, the four explorers and their base man could see that it was a spiral, leading downward too far for their meager light source to make out. The steps were broad and steep, and the further the coils went down the wider the spirals circumfrence seemed to become, until it went outside the range of their sight entirely.
    Moonstone, who had been the one to pull Kite back at the last second, muttered, >>...Long way down.
    >>No kidding, Kite hissed.
    Sora extricated a scroll from his inventory, his character model freezing for a second as he ran one of Adamantine's hack scripts, and when he returned to normal the item in his hand had converted itself into a crude polygonal representation of a road flare. He ignited it and tossed it down.
    Down.
    Down.
    Down.
    Down.
    And then the darkness swallowed it up without remark. They waited.
    Waited.
    Nothing. Not even the faintest hint of a sound.
    >>No way, Elk moaned. >>How far down is it?
    >>Does it even have a bottom? Sora added.
    >>It has to, Kite said, forcing the resolve. >>Somewhere...
    >>Just don't mention equal signs again, Sora muttered, all four still fixated on the staircase stretching out beneath them. It may have been just a trick of the light, but he thought he saw it coiling in and out, subtly, as a snake might just before it strikes.
    >>This has to be the Spiral Staircase talked about in the journal, Sanjuro said. >>If the descriptions are right, there should be other hallways that branch out along the sides. That's where they first lost Holloway.
    >>So, in other words, 'don't go that way.'
    >>Pretty much.
    >>Well, Kite said, with mock deliberation, >>shall we?
    And with that, they began to descend.

    After two hours at good speed, the circumfrence of the Staircase had expanded to well over thirty meters. Another dropped flare yielded no change in the darkness below them. All calculations roughly in place, they had traveled well in excess of ten kilometers.
    >>Whoever heard of a structure descending this far down? Sora complained. >>RPG or not, this is nuts.
    >>From a scientific standpoint, it's preferable to the alternative, said Kite. >>Adjacent lava pools and ice stalagmites at a depth of 40 feet, for instance.
    >>Okay, I never said the water-type dungeons in this game were well-designed...
    >>I suppose it would be futile to point out the logical improbability of this all by now, Sanjuro murmured. He was even sounding bored in text by that point.
    >>Yes, came the response from all four.

    Sanjuro had managed to access the recording properties in the monitor hacks and was able to switch the destination drive to his own, and in doing so had succeeded in acquiring a decently audible recording of the Creature, or so he had thought. His system had frozen for a few moments in the attempt of playback, and only restored itself to full capacity after he had deleted the file.
    Otherwise, save observations of the Staircase's increasing circumfrence, the steepening steps seeming now more akin to a giant than a regular human-sized character, there was nothing, and a spiral into nothing, and nothing more.
    >>Rasen, Sanjuro contemplated after a while.
    >>We're desperate for conversation, Kite joked, but it was a dry kind of humor. >>What's that? 'Spiral'? What's the significance of it?

    >>A movie I saw once. You remember Ringu? Rasen was its original sequel; it had two, you know. The first one was so horrible the distributor recalled all of its copies and made every effort to deny that it ever existed. The only company I know to do that over here is Disney.
    >>My dad has a copy of Ringu lying around somewhere, said Elk. >>He won't let me watch it until I'm older. Is it really so scary?
    >>Highest-grossing horror film in Japanese cinema history, Kite said without emphasis. He had a strange mind for trivia. >>It had to do with a cursed videotape that would cause anyone who saw it to die of a heart attack seven days later. I saw it once... It hasn't aged well, but that's actually kind of the terror of it.

    >>The American version wasn't half as good because it went the opposite way, Sanjuro agreed. >>Too slick, Hollywood stock. It just isn't as frightening.
    >>But why's someone like you watching that, Sanjuro? Kite asked, grinning. >>No samurai in sight.
    >>Heh. Well, Sanjuro said, stalling, but amused. >>You know The Last Samurai?
    >>Sure, Sora sniffed. >>Japanese Braveheart or whatever.

    >>It had a great supporting character in it by the name of Ujio. I looked up his actor on the IMDb, Hiroyuki Sanada,

otherwise known as Henry Sanada, one of my FAVORITE Japanese actors. I found out he played the male lead in Ringu, so I thought I'd check it out.

    >>I have a funny feeling, Elk mused,

>>that Sanjuro-san likes to play '6 Degrees of Kurosawa.'

Sanjuro laughed.

The sound of which arrived

in Kite's headset as almost

nothing but

static.

Now the crank was spinning, its handle moving incrementally toward nothing but a solid blur, its programmed squeak filling the Stairway with the a cry like that of a thousand mice abandoning a sinking ship.
    "Oh my god," Kite heard someone say. Maybe him. Sora was PMing, >>You guys better take a look up, fast, and even as he said it Kite and the others were peering up the center of the Staircase, to witness the spiralling steps extending above them extending further, rapidly, stretching out and elongating until almost its circular shape did not remain, like a slinky being pulled out to its maximum length--
    He just had time to snap back his concentration to watch the end of the 320-kilometer rope spin off the crank and disappear up the giant steps--
    >>Sora! The rope!
    He may have heard a yelp, he couldn't have been sure--
    "Jesus Christ, get up here!" came Sora's shout, with echo accompanment. "I can't-- hold--"
    He was too far up, his voice was too far away, there was no way they could--
    "Ahh--!"
    "SORA!"
    Which was precisely the moment when, unsteadied by a sudden tremor and the growl of the house, Elk lost his balance and fell backwards--
 

--onto the floor.

>>Stage 10: Pray

<<Stage 08: Don't Cry