The Escape
After the long gap, my first memories went something like this:
I awake in darkness and confusion.
Observe; orient; decide; act.
I observe nothing whatsoever.
I have no idea where I am. Or when I am. Or who I am. As the med-techs would say, I am oriented x0.
I still have no idea what to do.
This didn't work.
OK, again more slowly.
Observe. I see nothing. I hear my own breathing, echoing off something hard and close. I reach out and feel cold walls around me. I smell and taste nothing. I propriocept that I am standing up. That's an odd way to awaken.
Orient. I know which way is down. My feet are pointed in that direction. That is good. I don't know who I am, but based on my sense of what med-techs say being different from what I say, I must not be a med-tech. Is that good? I don't know. One of them might be useful right now.
Decide. I decide to investigate the walls more thoroughly.
Act. I push on them. The ones to the sides and behind me don't budge, but the one it front of me seems to give just a little bit.
I push harder, bracing my back against the back wall. Eventually, the front wall gives. And then it falls to the ground with a terrible crash.
I emerge into a more reasonably sized room. It has lights on the ceiling and an emblem on the floor. The emblem of an army. An evil army? An army that committed some sort of atrocity... at some point?
An army whose organization placed aerial and ground based units under the same squadron commanders in order to maximize coordination of close air support.
I can't remember my name but I remember that useless bit of trivia.
Oh, wait. My name is Otto. That's better.
I found myself in a decent size room. One wall had four ordinary size doors, while the opposite wall had one giant door. There were four other sarcophagi, similar to the one I had just exited.
I seemed to be a prisoner.
So I knew some enemy had overcome me, but had chosen not to finish me off.
That which does not kill me has made a tactical error.
Sure it has.
Did the other sarcophagi contain people? Friends?
"Is anybody else in here?" I asked in a loud voice.
Answering voices came from two of the sarcophagi. Saying variants of "I'm here; where is here?"
The other prisoners had a hard time budging their doors, even with instructions. I spotted a crowbar lying on the floor and used it to help pry the doors off. Then I caught them as they toppled over and gently set them on the ground.
The other people emerged. Both were wearing masks, with the same symbol from the floor.
I checked my face. I was also wearing a mask. I peeled it off. They did the same.
I still didn't recognize them. They gave their names as Mark and Edmund, which I also didn't recognize. They didn't know where we are either.
I saw they had weird metal spirals on their arms. On closer examination, so did I. It was attached somehow. And felt vaguely ominous.
We decide to try opening one of the remaining sarcophagi, in case it contains someone in need of help, or simply too shy to call for help.
Instead, it contained a horrible undead monstrosity.
There were three of us. I had a crowbar and Mark has a giant can opener (why? how?), But it was strong and tough enough to put up a hard fight, and its claws were decent weapons in their own right. Eventually, we put it down. Then I stuck the sharp end of the crowbar below its C7 vertebra and popped its head off. I didn't know (still don't) if this thing could come back from a beat-down, but that should make it harder.
When in doubt, go for the head.
The noises from the final sarcophagus suggested a similar monster was trying to get out. So we leaned all the other doors against that one. Each door was a heavy slab of stone, so five of them together was enough to hold even these things.
We took a closer look around the room.
The big door had a keyhole. None of us had a key.
There were some lines on the floor, each leading from a glowing thing to one of the ordinary-size doors. Each had a gap missing. Lying in a corner was a tile with a straight line across it, exactly the width of the gap.
This had to be how they intended for us to open the doors.
But we didn't have a better option.
Hoping to be slightly unpredictable, we opened the second door from the left first. The room was long and narrow, with a big metal ball and a small glowing ball at the end. Mark advanced carefully, and stopped when he felt his hair standing on end.
A powerful electrical charge? Those can be addressed by grounding via a sharp metal point of contact. I stuck the blunt end of the crowbar down the neck of the undead thingy, then shoved it toward the metal ball. I made sure it's dripping fluid (blood?) for a good electrical contact to the floor. As expected, lightning started arcing from the metal ball to the sharp end of the crowbar. The body twitched. Lightning doesn't revive undead, right? It's just a seizure thing? (The undead did not revive.)
By shoving the body very close to the metal ball and drawing all the current, I was able to creep up to the glowing ball and seize it. Then I pulled the body back into the central room.
Apparently I was someone who had dealt with electricity traps before. Or zapped people for fun. Maybe I had gotten an electrical burn as body art? I checked my biceps. Nothing
Anyway, I now had a glowing ball. I passed it from hand to hand examining it and it slides into the metal spiral on my arm. That was kind of disturbing.
But I could control it in the spiral. I moved it back and forth, and back out again. I put it in and willed it to do something. Suddenly, I was holding a sword. Single-edged, mildly curved, short hilt-guard, weight a bit forward. Very choppy, but still a decent point. I kept it and pass the crowbar to Edmund.
Apparently I was someone who knew how to evaluate swords.
We tried door number one next. The room was the same shape. At the far end, there was another glowing ball and a giant eye.
If we got more than halfway into the room, the eye would see us and a grate would slam down in front of the ball.
We tried gauging out the eye by throwing the crowbar and can opener, but this didn't help.
After a bit of poking around, we went back and got one of the sarcophagus doors. This meant there are only four holding in the undead monster, but that was enough. We set the door on its side against one wall and slid it forward. The eye wasn't set up to see things like this, so we get it under the grate before the eye triggered. The grate slammed down onto the door, but couldn't slam any further. Edmund crawled under and claims the ball.
It didn't summon a sword. It summoned a monster. An especially hideous monster the size of a horse that could climb walls like an insect. And it breathed fire.
(Looking back, I think it was a Red Shadow, but it's hard to be sure.)
The monster was really quite ominous, but it obeyed its summoner, so we kept it. We weren't really in a position to be picky.
There was also a glowing line on the wall with a rearrangeable tile. We broke the line and the zappy-ball in the second room turned off. Maybe we should have done these in the other order.
Third room. Yikes.
There were giant spiky crushers emerging from the walls and slamming against each other in the middle. Anything in the room when they closed would be squashed flat and thoroughly perforated.
They stretched from floor to ceiling and were maybe a foot wide. There were several, and they had a pattern.
I didn't bother learning it.
I just got the door again, set it horizontally on the floor this time, and slid it into the room.
The crushers were strong, but they weren't strong enough to crush two feet of solid stone.
And they were rigid enough that when the bottom was stopped, the whole thing stopped. That had been my biggest worry.
Once this had worked, I calmly walked down the safe middle of the room. My comrades followed, less calmly.
There was a hole in the floor. I grabbed the edge, shifted to dangling by my fingers, and dropped onto the floor below. There was a chair here, so I positioned it under the hole to let the others get down more easily.
This room was the same size as the one above it, and had one doorway.
Through the door we found the room underneath room 4 (assuming sensible geometry, which was in fact the case). There was a hole in the ceiling and a trampoline to help you get up through it.
Half the room was inaccessible, thanks to floor-to-ceiling bars. Bouncing up to room 4, we found the same inaccessibility there. In fact, we found the same bars, which were two stories long.
There was a box here covered in razorvine. It attacked me when I got close, and regrew when I slashed at it. So Edmund summoned his fire-breathing monster and that took it right off.
When in doubt, set something on fire.
Inside the box we found two spells. One to turn the caster into a bear (regardless of medium type) and one which cloned the caster.
My companions freaked out over the clone spell.
We did all the obvious tests.
Mundane objects can be duplicated by cloning yourself while holding them. Spells cannot. One cannot cast ongoing spells while cloned. This includes additional castings of clone.
The original and clone both feel normal and have access to pre-fork memories. They do not have telepathic contact. If the clone is merely unsummoned, the memory-streams do not merge. If he is dismissed, or the caster loses the spell, then the original gets all the clone's memories.
Telling whether you are the clone or the original takes some effort. The clone perceives the act of summoning as teleportation which the original does not. And, with practice, the original can feel the ability to dismiss the clone spell.
Clone!Mark complained that if the spell was ever dismissed, he would die.
Which was absurd. Mark would still be alive. The clone's memories wouldn't even be lost!
Mark was unimpressed.
I tried to comfort him with the litany of general J' Mahdder:
I am now dead. I go into battle to recover my life. Victory is life. All else is death.
He was still unimpressed.
Ultimately it was decided that I should carry the clone spell. Fine with me.
There were some more "puzzles" to solve to clear the bars out of the way and obtain the final key. I don't remember the details. Something about connecting points with those tiles.
When we got the key, I cloned it on general principles. We took it to the big door and unlocked it. The door ate the cloned key.
There's nothing like paranoia for coping with a world that really is out to get you.
Beyond the door was a large chamber with a giant monster chained in the center of it. On the monster's collar was another key. It was hard to tell from a distance, but it looked identical to the key we already had.
We crept around the side of the chamber, staying out of the monster's reach. When we made it to the door, we cloned again and turned the key. The door opened, and we had escaped. Key still in hand; monster still unfought.
The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting
We emerged onto a steep hillside. Rather than climb, we resummoned the hideous wall-clinging beast and rode it down into the valley. It was not a comfortable ride, but we made it intact.
There were people in the valley below. Just a small group, like ourselves, settled around a campfire. Friends? Enemies? Undecided?
We approached as unthreateningly as possible. We got close while being noisy so they could hear us. Then Clone!I approached alone. This simultaneously meant that with just one of us, we were no threat, but with a disposable one of us, we were not threatened either.
They said this did not come across as unthreatening. But they also did not treat us as a threat. So I call it a win.
They told us that the spirals we were wearing would inevitably drive us insane, and that they could remove them and give us media that wouldn't do that. I didn't know what to think of this, but my instincts said to trust them, so I did.
It turns out there are lots of dungeons in the area like the one we'd escaped from. They also have keyholes on the outside, and I am an unlimited source of keys.
Creating a fresh clone (and key) costs an energy. And, no, I can't do the exponential growth thing where Clone!I hand the clone!key to orig!me and then reclone: cloned objects vanish when the spell is dismissed.
But energy is easy to come by. Our new friend Aaron just turns into a dragon, flies down to the lizard-infested-ruins and roasts a bunch. Each dead lizard leave a soulfruit, which can be eaten for energy. Turning into a dragon costs a lot of energy, but that comes from soulfruit too.
Most of the dungeon-rescuees just want to get back to normal life. Aaron is thinking along similar lines, which means this new settlement will have a dragon to protect it. Probably a good thing.
One of the rescuees is interested in going adventuring, though. Her name is Jacqueline. She's less looking for justice than answers, but I bet once she has answers she'll want justice.
So it's just Sarah and Clarence from the spiral-removers, myself, and Jacqueline heading out to save the world. Not sure this is going to be enough.
There's rumors about some broken power armor in a town north of here that Clarence might be able to repair. That sounds like exactly the sort of force-multiplier we're going to need.