New System, Who Dis?

Friday, April 26th, 2069

It was strange to scout an area by literally crouching near a precipice and just waiting. But that was pretty much my entire contribution. I tried to find ways to occupy myself and flipped on and off my Heat Sense. Nothing really changed no matter what body part I used it on. This deep into the earth, my immediate area was almost devoid of heat.

Since the moss was glowing, I had expected it to give off a great deal of heat, but that wasn’t the case. It did glow with some residual warmth, especially when compared to the surrounding rock but that was it. The other interesting point was that I was far enough away from both the White Goblins and my group to not ‘feel’ either, when placing Heat Sense on my body.

I also couldn’t see them, I’d checked.

One thing did stand out due to Heat Sense though, and that was the Grotto I was waiting atop. It was darker to my vision and colder to my senses than any other place within range. Studying it with my eyes open, I realized that there was a shift in rock formation, or perhaps material was a better descriptor. Running my hands forward allowed me to feel where the rock had been cut. It was subtle but the texture change was too straight to be natural.

The rock didn’t look different to my eyes, either—appearing to be the same grayish-black stone in the low levels of light. However, the material used was clearly different and I was guessing that Smegma would return to tell me that this place had been excavated and then built. For what purpose, I couldn’t even guess—but the grotto was clearly dug into the stone. Then, either the same stone had been shaped or another similar stone had been used to build the place.

Smegma floated toward me, seeming like a shadow that exited the center of the crater. I followed his outlined dark form as he seemed to glide over on a non-existent wind. Everything about the Demon seemed extra terrifying and creepy down here in the cavern. Right up until he spoke.

“Well, dumb-dumb, it’s totally abandoned, and was some sort of facility. It has more of those yellow Crystals in the caves, and they are clearly being used for light. I couldn’t find anything usable, but there is also a fountain or reservoir with water.”

“So, it’s a good place to make camp?” I asked.

“I’d say yes, but we should probably scout it fully. I couldn’t go as deep or as far into the carved or constructed caves as I’d like because of the tether.”

“Okay, well let’s check it out,” I said, but was surprised when Smegma just stared at me.

“Yeah, one other small problem with that. I didn’t find a way down for those afflicted with gravity.”

I scratched at my head, but slowly started circling the crater-grotto as Smegma ‘ranged afield’. It actually took nearly an hour, according to my watch, before Smegma said he’d found a way down. However, when I arrived, I realized that his ‘way down’ didn’t mean he’d found stairs.

“I’m supposed to climb down that?” I asked, staring at a huge column that made it even more clear that this place was built or carved from the stone. The wear also made it clear that it had been done a very long time ago. The column's face was pockmarked with porous holes that almost looked like something termites might have done to wood.

Regardless of why the erosion pattern looked the way it did , it undoubtedly looked unsafe—ready to crumble, collapse or shatter.

Smegma looked at me, and then the column, before nodding. “I guess it isn’t the best option. Let’s keep looking.”

An hour later it turned out that it or another column on the opposite side, nearer to where I’d started circling the massive crater were the only two options.

“Wait a second,” I said, a thought coming to me. “You're a merchant, right? You’d be a pretty bad one if you didn’t have supplies and things, right? How much for some rope or climbing gear? Or were you not going to offer me anything and make me just Bare Grillz my way down to the bottom?”

“The husk? How are my skills as a Merchant being called into questions and not your stupid team's lack of preparedness?,” Smegma said, his voice affronted. “Of course, a Skill as great and wonderful as Demonic Vault doesn’t sell climbing supplies! No self respecting Demon would have that gear in their husking Rings of Holding! Well, maybe a Flesh Demon would, and I think we’ve established you’re as stupid as them. Maybe this ‘Bare’ person is actually a Flesh Demon if he’s as naked as his name suggests, which would explain so much if the least of my race got to Earth first!”

My eyebrows rose as I took in his spiel. I could tell he was covering for something, and I thought I knew what it was. “So, you’ve realized that stocking climbing gear would have been helpful?”

“Yeah,” Smegma said under his breath. “Pretty big oversight, I think.”

“Agreed. Now, how wide is this cavern?” I asked, trying to distract myself as I inched toward the second column. I told myself it looked safer than the last one, but if I was honest I couldn’t really remember.

“Well this hole is easily two of your Earth Miles in diameter—”

“It’s got to be bigger than that,” I countered. It wouldn’t take me two hours to walk approximately three kilometers. Then I remembered math terms and realized that he hadn’t said circumference. “Never mind,” I corrected quietly, also realizing how cautious I’d been while walking due to the Crystals and uneven rocks.

Not to mention the times I waited for Smegma to return before continuing. Again, I was trying to distract myself and when I realized that I couldn’t anymore, gulped down saliva to wet my throat.

It took me several steadying breaths before I reached out a shaking hand that managed to latch onto a handhold on the column. I gave it a few experimental tugs while sitting on the edge of the drop. It held my implied weight…

What was this column meant to hold up? I wondered, but knew I wasn’t going to get an answer.

“Get on with it,” Smegma said, his tone conveying that he knew I was stalling and that he had read my surface thoughts.

Slowly I lowered my first foot down until it too found a place that I deemed could hold my weight, with some testing flexes of my feet. This was the moment of truth, though. I looked back at the ledge, and then down into the pitch darkness below. I could just push myself back up and keep looking for another way down…

“Oh my god. Just husking start climbing down. It’s not even a hundred feet to the bottom.”

Smegma’s words made it worse. A hundred feet was like ten stories, wasn’t it? Mental Fortitude kicked in and logically explained that Smegma had a point. This was the hardest part, and if I didn’t focus on the fact that I couldn’t see the bottom…

“Easy to say for someone who can fly.” I grumbled. “Or better yet—who’s completely incorporeal.”

I pushed off and found a second foothold, followed by another grip for my last hand. Then it did become simple, as I slowly felt around with a foot, then hand, repeatedly. Often reusing my previous footrests for handholds. I had one minor scare as my foot kicked a stone loose and I heard it fall, bouncing and echoing in a strange way. It was so odd that it took me a moment to realize that I had kicked the stone with my toe and it had fallen inward—not out.

Then the sound I heard was the stone falling down a hollow center?

Had the column eroded that much? What kind of erosion or corrosion happened from the inside-out?

My heart started hammering in my chest, but thankfully, I could see the bottom at that point and stressfully rushed down the remaining twenty feet to it. Once I was back on flat rock again and had caught my breath, I looked around and found caves that shone with the same metallic yellow light I’d seen coming from the mural. It wasn’t bright, which was likely why I hadn’t seen it from above, but now that I was on the same ground level, it was apparent.

Smegma moved ahead of me, turning his form back into a shadow backlit by the entrance. I followed, and realized mid-step that I was walking on perfectly flat stone tiles. There were no Crystals growing here, and while the tiles may have some erosion from time, it was hard to discern with the low levels of light. That puzzling difference vanished between one step and the next, when I entered through a doorway.

Calling it a cave at this point was wrong. It was rectangular and only missing a door to make it a human habitation. Sure, it was wider than most doorways humans would build but it was also clearly decorated with scrollwork that was carved into the edges. What the carvings were meant to depict seemed difficult to discern, but I would call it vines or maybe coiled rope?

The room inside was likewise squared off, with flat, level walls and perfectly ninety degree corners. If there had been furniture, it was either long since pillaged or destroyed. Instead, it was just a large empty room of dark gray stone with three metallic yellow light fixtures in the ceiling.

There were two doors leading out of the room that looked identical to the one I’d entered through. Smegma was already moving toward the one that led deeper, seeming to ignore the one on the right. I followed, but did glance into the right doorway. Another room identical to the one I was walking through greeted me.

I toggled Heat Sense and found no heat sources in the room at all. The light fixtures were the same black as everything else, making me realize that they were even more efficient than the glowing plants outside.

Smegma was stopped in the next room’s center. As soon as I cleared the doorway he asked, “The stairs down? Or deeper in?”

“Which one couldn’t you scout before?” I asked.

“Both, but I think I was looking more in that direction,” Smegma responded quickly, while pointing vaguely to our right. “It seems like these square rooms repeated over and over again, no matter which way I went, but what would they need all the separation for?”

“Maybe the separation isn’t really meant to keep areas separate. Maybe the walls are load bearing.” I suggested.

“Possible, but they could have just used columns, I’d think,” Smegma said as he tapped his teeth with a talon. After a moment he pointed deeper, and I walked around the stairs that were dead center in the room. They had a half wall that surrounded them on three sides, and a quick glance down didn’t reveal more than what was likely an identical room below.

We were another ten rooms deeper into the structure before we finally lost an option to continue straight ahead. Smegma was standing still in the room’s center, seeming to be asking which way to go simply by his body language. This room was the first one I’d seen with a left door, though, and I pointed to it. He smiled and nodded before we continued.

There wasn’t another room, which was both welcoming and surprising as we passed through the doorway. Instead, there was a hallway that was the exact same width and height of the carved rectangle doorway we passed through. The carvings continued onto the walls of the hallway and I was finally able to discern that it was meant to be coiling snakes. I shivered despite myself—hoping we weren’t about to enter some sort of snake-filled chamber or spawning ground.

I toggled on Heat Sense but found nothing new both with vision and my—wait, above us there were faint traces of heat… They felt far away, though, and familiar.

Due to the wall carving and the distraction of discovering a source of heat, I didn’t realize that the floor was graded until I looked back down and discovered we were climbing. I also didn’t notice the bend up ahead before Smegma was already rounding it. It made a perfect one hundred and eighty-degree turn in a slow semi-circle. Smegma stopped on the other side and stared up a steep flight of stairs that seemed to climb for an unreasonable amount of time.

Probably about a hundred feet, give or take.

Spaced evenly up the staircase, and in the tunnel were more Metallic Yellow Crystals. I sighed when I realized just how many we’d passed in this place—they clearly couldn’t be that valuable if there were so many, right? I debated about dumping the ones that were ‘useless’ out from my Necklace of Holding out but deciding against it for now. I could hope that they’d at least be valuable to those feng shui Crystal people, I guessed.

“And right now it's like you need to make room for all your other amazing finds!” Smegma added derisively to my thoughts with a chuckle.

“I’m guessing this will lead to the surface?” I asked the Demon, while sighing and raising a brow in response to his comment.

Smegma stopped chuckling, shrugged and then flew up the stairs. I followed and sure enough I found myself stepping out of a stalagmite back onto the surface a few minutes of climbing later. This time when I toggled on Heat Sense, I discovered why the sources of heat I’d detected earlier had felt so familiar. We were probably a few hundred meters away from the group.

“Well, at least we found a place to rest, and an easier way into the grotto,” I said, as I motioned in the direction of my father, Willa, and Dave.

Smegma looked at a nearby stalagmite and a few others close to it, seeming to frown. It had become harder to see again now that the lighting levels were so low—wait. I spun and realized that the stalagmites seemed to be solid and weren't releasing any of the light from the Metallic Yellow Crystals that had been so abundant and bright moments ago.

“I scouted these earlier and didn’t think anything of it. How do you think it’s doing that?” Smegma asked, and I could tell it was rhetorical because he was already tapping his teeth.

Instead of answering I walked up and placed a hand on the stalagmite I’d just exited. It passed right through the ‘stone’ veneer, and I followed my own hand back into the stairwell. I came back out a moment later to find Smegma still tapping his teeth as he hovered around the rock formation.

I doubted he was going to want to stop in his study anytime soon, so I said, “I’ll go get the others? They might be close enough.”

He didn’t even wave a hand in acknowledgement of my words. I shook my head but walked off. Before I reached the group, he popped into the space beside me. His twitch made me sure he hadn’t been expecting the tether to reign him in. I kept walking without bothering to apologize. He could study it after the group was inside and safe.

* * *

The sale of the mined Crystals brought me above one-hundred fifty-five thousand mC. It made my breath come easier realizing we had nearly two days of Mana Apples to purchase. It also made me feel better when I realized that we’d done about forty thousand mC in trade in about three hours. Some rough math made me confident we could manage to keep ourselves fed for a few days if we worked eight-hour shifts.

We set up ‘camp’ in the last room before the hallway that led to the staircase and stalagmites—figuring that we could mine near the stalagmites tomorrow and have an easy retreat if White Goblins did venture out this far from their village.

“Let’s scout deeper,” Smegma said pointedly, as he phased through the floor not fifteen minutes after the group settled in. I gave him a look, feeling like he was a bit too demanding with that request. “It’s literally just four floors of this, but I think there’s more stuff under the outdoor courtyard.”

“Outdoor courtyard?” Willa asked, before I could do the same.

“That’s how Brodie got down here,” Smegma explained. “He climbed down a hollow column into an open courtyard.”

My head tilted at the explanation. Without a real light source, I just thought I’d climbed down onto a deeper cavern floor and then entered a cave. Yet, I’d quickly realized that they weren’t caves, thanks to the perfectly squared rooms and doorways. I should have made the connection to the ‘courtyard’ or whatever that floor was, myself.

Dave started to stand up, looking excited. Everyone watched him trying to understand what was going on. It took him a moment to notice his actions were being scrutinized. He started but then sheepishly asked, “Well, can’t we all go?”

Smegma put his arms up with his hands out to his side and shrugged in response. That made me replay his earlier words. He hadn’t implied that only me and him should go. I just would need to be in attendance so he could move further. Still, everyone looked tired—even how Dave had gotten to his feet with an exhausted sigh and knuckling the small of his back, made me wince in sympathy for him.

“Can it wait till tomorrow?” I asked.

“No,” Smegma said simply. At mine and everyone else’s worried looks, he pointed to the two other doors leading off from the room. “There might be little to no chance of something attacking you from those direction but when you’re in a Portal overnight, you don’t take that chance!”

I could only speak for myself, but at that moment Smegma did sound like an experienced Hunter. He was someone who had spent nights in a Portal before. I stood up as well, and heard Willa and my dad moving also. Once we were all standing Smegma began to lead the way through doorways to a room with a staircase.

As he moved, he pointed one of his three talons at Dave. Somewhat mockingly he said, “A bit of a walk will help the newbie—I’m betting twinkletoes here won’t be able to move tomorrow if he just fell asleep right now.”

That made us all spin to look at Dave, who was in fact, walking gingerly enough that ‘twinkletoes’ turned out to be an accurate description and not just sheer, Demonic taunting. No one laughed, but despite my best attempt I did smile.

“Hey!” Dave complained, seeing my amusement. The crack in his voice made the group, minus Smegma, burst into laughter, because, if anything, Smegma drawing attention to his ginger walking, exacerbated it.