Trap
Hi Sorin. As you must have noticed, we found your trap.
I mean, maybe you’re not Sorin, there could be someone else who had a Locator and a reason to set a trap. But we know you had Locators, Sorin, since Otto saw you harvesting them in Mariana’s memories. It’s not that surprising, since you talked to Kaine’s assistant when you bought the emeralds, and must have gotten a look at the spell distiller. Still, it’s impressive that you figured out how to do spell distillation from a human, rather than waiting for the emerald to make a pocket dimension like you did in the Tall Woods. We’re on to you, Sorin. But I guess if you’re reading this then your trap worked so maybe we weren’t so on to you after all.
I’m pretty sure you’re not April, at least. April who only has two Chaos Emeralds after 250 years doesn’t make any sense with April who has a Locator spell. If you were April, you wouldn’t need to set a trap for us, you could just sneak up on us with your Tall Man like you keep doing. I still don’t get how you keep following us. I guess you could be April and Sorin working together. April is holding some of the emeralds while Sorin moves the rest around and keeps track of them with Locators. But why then is April’s castle marked with a question mark on Sorin’s map, and with no dates of delivery? Probably not working together, then. Except at the very beginning, when you conspired to bring an emerald into our lab and things started going wrong.
If you’re Citrine, you should leave immediately. It was very sensible of you not to follow us down the creepy hole we found in the floor of that shack. You told us it was a trap, and you were right, it is a trap! But we already suspected that, and it seemed worth it for a chance to get information about who else is after the Chaos Emeralds and why. Sorry for leaving you alone. You should probably run now, and head back to Gotita. Lara will have something sensible to do, like not walking into suspected traps.
Now we’re really quite certain it’s a trap, and we’re setting it off anyway, because we think it will give us useful information. Clarence is rigging it right now, and Jacqueline and Otto are wandering around killing all the half-formed Avatars they find, so they won’t accidentally get triggered if the other parts of the trap go off. I’m guarding Clarence, and writing because it feels safer (even though it does absolutely nothing in the way of defense). Jacqueline warned that written words might not be entirely trustworthy, but she’s been saying a lot of mysterious things, especially after we went to Nosgoth. Anyway, I don’t have a voice recorder like she left herself, so pen and paper it is.
It’s a pretty good place you’ve got here, Sorin. Isolated. These ruins used to be a town, didn’t they? Did you destroy it and that’s why you put your secret lair here? Sorry, that’s a pretty unfounded accusation. I don’t know that you’ve destroyed anything, besides stealing 20 years from Mariana, trying to break Vidriot and Penitencia, and, you know, causing the Cataclysm. Why did you give a Chaos Emerald to a group of scientists who didn’t know better than to go looking into the temple to Steve we found in our basement? Anyway, this facility is pretty hard to find, being deep underground (do you mind the depth when you’re climbing the ladder to get back out? It seemed an excessively long ladder on the way down and I am not looking forward to climbing back up. But maybe you can fly, or do a longer-range teleport, or maybe you’ve got a secret elevator we haven’t found yet). We only managed to find it using Leviazizmoth’s Tremorsense. And it’s hardened against Leviazizmoth’s other power, you’ve coated everything in metal thick enough there’s no Burrowing through for a quick escape. Nice job. It’s almost as if you knew we were coming. Ha. You did know we were coming, and you probably heard about what we did in Penitencia with Leviazizmoth, even if it’s nowhere in the official story.
The only thing that doesn’t make sense is all the barriers you put up. You wouldn’t put up so many obstacles if you wanted us to fall into your trap, we might have gotten discouraged and wandered off. The hidden trapdoor leading to an excessively long ladder and the locked doors. They were easily defeated by that key with the skull on the handle—a literal skeleton key, really?—we took from your desk, which apparently changes shape in order to open any lock. But how did you expect us to get through that? You can’t have done it on purpose based on our having gotten the key because we only got it a few days ago. Unless you did that on purpose, too? Left us the skeleton key and let us capture Mariana with her Locator Locators, then waited for us to come here? But you lose Mariana and the 20 years of leaving an emerald in her heart, that doesn’t seem worth it unless we’re an enormous threat to you. Twenty out of a hundred is a fair amount of progress in making a heart medium like Indra’s, and I’m pretty sure that’s what you’re doing. Your posters kind of gave it away, with the diagrams of a heart-shaped medium. What does post-threshold mean, though? And why do you want people to be able to turn into the Rain Bird? Did you create the original Rain Bird or simply capture it and put it in the hands of Indra? Why, though? I suppose it could be altruism, if you captured the Rain Bird and gave it to Indra, who uses it sparingly to ensure a good climate for growing tea instead of drowning large portions of the countryside. But that’s probably just wishful thinking.
It’s annoying how you aren’t going to answer any of my questions. You’ll only be reading this if we don’t make it out of here and you’ve won. Not that you’d answer the questions anyway, I expect. You didn’t want to talk in Lluvia City so I don’t know why you’d want to talk now.
We followed the Locator Locator just like you expected us to, and found it in suspended jar like an overgrown tadpole with a bunch of wires attached to the lid. What did you think we would do, Sorin? It was obviously a trap, were we supposed to just pick it up and trigger everything? We’re not that dumb, even if we did just walk into what we knew was a trap. We were going to leave it alone entirely, except that Clarence noticed one of the wires linked up to the big screen on the wall. He thinks it’s going to display a message from you which will tell us something useful. He was confident enough in this that he cut the wire leading to the screen, which should have triggered it.
(You probably would have gotten me with the trap, if I’d been alone. Did you know my secret weakness is swivel chairs? I would definitely have turned it around to go for a spin, and dislodged the wires attached to the jar sitting on the seat.)
But your trap was better designed than that. The screen wouldn’t turn on without the power, and the power was one of the other wires attached to the jar. So we went hunting them down, to see which ones were dangerous. It seemed like a lot of work for being able to view the screen, but Clarence is convinced. And anyway, we need whatever information we can get. It’s not like we have any idea what to do with the emeralds, besides contain them or set up a spell distillery. Or expanding the power of media, like we think you or April might be doing, only we’re not going to do that because it’s not okay to sacrifice someone to insanity in order to get a super powerful medium. Nothing that helps us figure out how to more permanently stop the emeralds from being used to hurt people, or to put things back the way they were. I don’t think we’ll get anything useful from your computer, but you never know. Maybe you messed up somewhere and once we wake your computer up, we’ll be able to browse everything it knows and figure out what you’re doing.
This place might be making us a little too paranoid. Nice job on the creepiness, I guess? Maybe it’s the complete lack of light and the eerie way flashlights reflect off the metal walls. When we first came in, we found a chair, which we regarded with utmost suspicion. Did it have hit points? No. Could Analyze see through its glamour to reveal something waiting to attack? No, it was an ordinary wooden chair. Was there something Antimemed hiding next to the chair? No. It was just a chair! Nothing sinister. And then we did the same thing to the doorknob. And the desk in the office, and the screen. This is getting a little silly.
Anyway, we figured out that the wires that power the screen and the computer it’s attached to all connect up to the glass cages you keep the Avatars in. Why do you have them anyway? It’s interesting that they’re all made of Steve-spirals, and not metal ones, even though we’re on the Lily side of the Chasm. Although perhaps metal-spirals don’t work as well as flesh ones for bundling together to act as limbs. And Lily’s dungeons have their own kind of undead different from the Nullified of the vampires, maybe those are her Avatars.
Clarence put up a pretty good effort at disabling that part of the trap. He followed the wire between the various Avatar-filled glass cases and the generator, then determined the best place to cut to disable the generator from opening the cases. Despite our worries that cutting the wire would set them off, the cases remained inert. Just to make sure, Otto’s clone lifted up the glass front of the case and Otto shot the Avatar into a pile of flesh-spirals.
Otto checked the remains for any useful spells or mons. Nothing. “It didn’t have time to cast anything,” Clarence pointed out. “None of these other ones have anything in them, I checked. They have those blobby centers where all the spells get sucked in and vanish when they die, I think maybe that connects to Steve to supply them with spells. So when they’re asleep they’re not going to have anything interesting, and you killed it before it had time to get a delivery.”
Otto looked like he was having an internal debate about the relative merits of harvesting spells versus crushing one’s enemies with fully-charged hyperbreakers.
“In any case,” Clarence went on, “I’m not sure if it’s safe to turn on this generator. It looks like it’s connected to things besides this group of Avatars. I think it would be safer to power the computer manually, I think I can hook something up with this Handy Flask of Everflowing Gasoline.” That’s what the generator was running on: it was attached to a 10-liter sphere with Handy Jug of Everflowing Gasoline stenciled on it in fancy letters. Clarence had taken a closer look at it and determined that it isn’t an infinite source of gasoline exactly, it just refills itself at about 10 liters per day. More than plenty for most purposes.
Otto and Jacqueline went to take care of any further Avatars they could find, debating whether or not to draw them out in hopes of getting an interesting spell or mon from Steve. Clarence and I headed back to the room with the trap and examined the computer setup. “This wire teleports the jar somewhere else,” Clarence noted. “Makes sense, you’d want to have a backup to make sure we didn’t manage to actually steal the spell since there aren’t any others to go around.”
“Where does it go?” I asked. “We avoid setting off the teleportation, and then show up there uninvited, I’m sure that would be informative, and also annoy Sorin. Or whoever set this trap.”
“It’s pretty far…” Clarence stared hard at the wire. “Oh, it looks like it might be the same general direction as the Parasonico updates come from. Way out west in the dark zone. That’s worrying.”
“So that’s a no on storming the castle,” I said. “Oh well, Otto probably wouldn’t have approved anyway.”
In the past twenty minutes, Otto and Jacqueline have killed eleven formed Avatars in various stages between mostly human and entirely flesh-spirals and retrieved two more Handy Flasks of Everflowing Gasoline. Clarence has disassembled part of the wall behind the computer to get at the wires and disconnected a microphone, two cameras, a barometer (why though?), and a small pile of other sensors. No sense letting them spy on us, he says.
I wonder how Rupert is doing. We left him at the Ranger station before going to Nosgoth. He was properly conscious again, and had decided that adventuring with us wasn’t the right thing for him, even if we were keeping the world from ending.
“There is far too much possibility of horrible pain,” he complained. “How do you deal with that? I am not sure being conscious is worth all this discomfort that comes with it.”
Had he been trying to kill himself by jumping off the roof after he got set on fire while fighting Mariana. “Maybe don’t kill yourself?” I suggested.
“Hmm.” Rupert seemed unconvinced. “This is one of the things I need to figure out. Whether I should kill myself, or become immortal so I can never die. Either way, I’m trying to avoid suffering, so the first step is to stop hanging around with people who get me set on fire.”
Which was pretty fair. We are not the most safety-conscious group of people.
“The other thing I need to figure out is whether everyone is part of the same mind,” he went on. “If we are all me, I will need to get immortality working for everyone, or kill us all, depending on what I determine about my preference to live or die. It will be more work, but it would be the right thing to do.”
Ummm. This was not going at all where I expected. “Could you consider not killing everyone?” I asked. “I think that would be better.”
Rupert rolled his eyes. “I said I was in the middle of figuring out what my course of action should be, Sarah. Of course I’m considering not killing everyone. Three out of my four options involve killing at most one person.”
That wasn’t as reassuring as he must have meant it to be. “Okay, I strongly encourage you to do the other options. If everyone else is also you, do they get a say on whether or not you all die? I think you might find yourself outvoted.”
Rupert wasn’t convinced by this argument. I didn’t think myself capable of coming up with anything that would convince him, so I asked him to return Mind Crush. He didn’t want to hand it over, claiming he might need it (which is exactly what I was afraid of), but was eventually convinced by my threatening to pinch him. I felt kind of bad about that, but it was better than the an omnicidal Rupert having access to a spell which couldn’t be blocked. I don’t think he’s going to be a problem. Even if he does decide to kill everyone, the Rangers are sensible and competent, and will tackle him and remove his medium before he can do too much damage.
And now Clarence has gotten the computer all ready to go, and he’s just waiting for Jacqueline and Otto to return so we can plug in the improvised generator and see what happens.
I was right, it was Sorin behind the trap. We turned on the screen to find him typing with one hand and eating a sandwich with the other. He looked up at the camera and grinned, revealing pointed teeth. “Hello?” he addressed the camera, an expression of glee spreading across his face.
It wasn’t a recorded message at all, but a live feed! Clarence scrambled to reconnect the microphone as we had a hurried discussion about who would speak to Sorin. Otto, we decided, since Sorin had never heard him speak, and therefore might not associate him with the rest of us (a long shot, given this was a trap pretty clearly directed at us, by what was the harm in trying?). But in the meantime, Sorin had gotten bored. He’d set down the sandwich and taken out a wooden box the size of two fists and opened it, running the tip of one claw over the wires protruding from the inside. It reminded me of the trapped jar sitting on the desk beside us. Clarence had almost finished splicing the wires back together when Sorin made a decision. “I’ll wait,” he muttered to himself, and the screen went dark.
“Call him back! Call him back!” I encouraged, bouncing in excitement. Sorin had set up an elaborate trap in order to talk to us, he must have something interesting to say!
“No, we should clear the facility first,” Otto decided. “I don’t like the look of that box he was holding, it might be some sort of control box for this place. And there’s one more section we haven’t checked.”
So we ran through the pitch-black hallway, towards the last section. As we passed through the central room with the exit ladder, the lights suddenly came on. Sorin had turned on the remaining generator. Arriving at the source of the new wumping sound, we found a pair of Avatars standing next to the generator, body language projecting confusion. One was facing away from us when we entered, so Otto managed to get off several shots with his hyperbreaker before the other one noticed us and summoned some mons.
There were two of them, and the looked sort of like two halves of a person. One arm and one leg each, with a torso-like bit stretched between. They looked like they should have fallen over, but instead seemed remarkably balanced even while one leveled a sword at us and the other brandished a shield.
We were doing pretty good damage to them when the shield-Noodle (they really did give the impression of extremely thick animate noodles, we all agreed) made some sort of forcefield around its companion and the remaining Avatar. It was only mildly annoying at the time, but when Clarence Analyzed the Noodles afterwards, we found out that the shield would have regenerated rather quickly if we hadn’t all hit it at once. Pretty impressive, actually. The fight wasn’t entirely straightforward, since the Avatar then summoned a Damn O’ Klees, which blasted most of us out into the hallway with its shotgun. Being able to summon multiple mons at once seems really useful for the Avatars.
The Avatar Otto had shot had fallen just before the shield went up, when Clarence x-bolted the group (mons can’t block two attacks at once, so coordinating is a good way to do damage to the summoner). We managed to get several spells out of it before they retreated to the core, by hitting it with a crowbar so the blobs leaked out. Jacqueline Nullified it and tried to get it to extrude spells, but further questioning revealed that it was no longer connected to Steve. So it looks like Clarence’s theory is right: you can only get spells out of Avatars if you get them to fight you, and then cut them open before the spells Steve sent to defend them run away. If you ambush too fast, Steve has no time to try to send anything so you get nothing.
Back in the office, we prepared to reconnect the screen again. The fight hadn’t taken that long, so hopefully Sorin wouldn’t have gotten bored. Jacqueline, Clarence, and I sat on the floor under the desk so we couldn’t be seen, while Otto stood in front of the screen. Clarence reconnected the wires and the screen displayed “no video signal available”.
“Hello, Sorin, are you on the other end of this?”
“I can neither confirm nor deny,” came Sorin’s smug voice. “Who am I speaking to.”
“The person you just tried to kill,” replied Otto promptly. “Why did you do that anyway?”
“I can neither confirm nor deny that I tried to kill you, just now or ever.”
“I see,” said Otto. “Well, I’m the kind of person who could be persuaded to forgive murder attempts, so maybe you could tell me a bit more about what you’re doing? I might be willing to help you.”
There was a long silence. Clarence checked the wires for unraveling and shrugged. “I couldn’t let you in on the plan…” Sorin finally began, then trailed off again.
“Oh, so there’s a plan?” Clarence scrawled on a piece of paper torn from my notebook and handed it to Otto. Otto ignored it, letting the silence stretch.
“Tell you what,” Sorin continued smoothly. I couldn’t see his face but I could just imagine his teeth bared in an amused grin. The scaly skin of his face would stay mostly immobile instead of wrinkling around the corners of his eyes the way humans do when we smile. It’s odd how well I can picture Sorin, given I only met him the once. I guess he makes an impression. “Take one of the emeralds to the Bogmire—that’s on the map, isn’t it?—bury it, then come back here and I’ll reward you.”
“Hmm,” Otto pretended to consider. “What sort of reward are we talking? Money doesn’t mean that much to me, and I do care somewhat what the end goal of all this is.”
“I can’t tell you that, of course!” Sorin laughed. “What would you say if I offered you a medium powerful beyond imagining?”
“Does it come with a side of insanity?”
“Ha. I can neither confirm nor deny any that this medium has any side effects whatsoever. I can, however, confirm it can summon the Pawn. Would that interest you?”
“The what?” Otto asked, after a pause to read Clarence’s latest note: “deny it”. He did an impressive job of sounding uninterested given his earlier eagerness to find a medium capable of using the Pawn.
“I don’t think I can credibly deny that I know you’re playing dumb,” said Sorin. “Anyway, deliver the emerald where I said and you’ll find the medium waiting for you right here.” And the connection dropped. The trapped jar, which had been sitting on the chair this whole time, vanished.
“That wasn’t what I was expecting,” said Otto once Clarence had disconnected all the wires he could find and we were pretty sure we were alone. “A job offer.”
“Yeah, and not a very informative one at that.” Clarence sighed. “All we got is that he wants the Chaos Emeralds, and we already knew that.”
“Why lure us here in the first place?” I wondered aloud. “He can’t really expect us to hand over one of the emeralds when we went to all the trouble of stealing one from him. But he’s put so much effort into this place. I’m starting to think he left us Mariana just in order to lead us here.”
“He was expecting us to be surrounded by Avatars,” Otto pointed out. “It really changes the negotiating position when the exit is blocked by your minions and you’ve got them trapped. The job offer is him trying to get something out of it even though his original plan didn’t go off.”
We continued speculating about what Sorin’s goals might be all the way up the ladder. “So then why doesn’t he keep them all in his secret base out in the dark area?” Jacqueline wondered as we opened the trapdoor to find Citrine playing checkers against herself on a grid drawn in the dirt floor.
“He needs people so he can put them in their hearts,” I said. “He’s not going to find many victims in the dark area, the Rangers said nobody lives there.”
“And maybe there’s something about putting them in cities that’s important,” Clarence added. “Though I still don’t see why he’d to exaggerate their cultures. But maybe the plan isn’t entirely about putting them in people, what about Vidriot?”
“The emerald was in the Heart of Cards,” Citrine pointed out, looking up from her game. “That’s a heart.”
“An experiment?” Clarence said doubtfully. “I guess it could be.”
So we’re no further towards figuring out what Sorin’s up to. At least we confirmed that he’s the one who’s got the last Locator spell, and we know the approximate location of his secret fortress (I assume it’s fortresslike given it’s in the dark area), not that we’ll be going there anytime soon.