The Shatterplate War Chapter 17 (Patreon)

Kay looked over the door in front of him, purposefully ignoring the burning remnants of the room behind him. It was on fire and therefore was no longer important. The door out of this room was a new type for him so far and the third type in total he’d found. There were the curtain doors with multiple choices, regular wooden doors that had a dial in their knobs that let you choose a symbol, and this third kind. It looked like the door frame was bricked up, with the same white stone bricks filling it, but there were golden symbols embossed into some of the stonework.

Kay reached out to touch one, and the other two disappeared. With the same amount of information about what each symbol meant, which was none, he continued to choose at random. This time, he picked one that looked like four parallel lines going up and down, two sets of two that were slightly off-center from each other, with one pair being a little lower and one pair a little higher. The symbol pulsed once with some kind of energy, then vanished as well. The bricks split in two and pulled back into the wall like automatic doors, and vanished. There was a passage ahead, and Kay started walking.

Like the entrance to the Dungeon, it curved near the end, and there was suddenly an open space before him. He stepped through and was greeted by a series of iron bars that formed a cage around him. Kay glanced behind and saw that just like every other time, what had been an open doorway for him to enter through was now a blank wall.

Slowly inspecting the area around him, he found himself trapped. There was a metal door, but it had no handle or knob, and it refused to move when he pushed on it. He started to look around the bars of the cage he was in, trying to find some kind of hint or answer. He scuffed the bricks with his boots, pulled at bars, kicked and tapped the door in various places, but nothing happened.

Then Kay heard a voice.

“Mayor Kay!”

Kay spun in place, searching for the source of the voice. “Jadet? Is that you?”

“Yeah! It’s me; I’m up here!”

Looking straight up, Kay saw the vague form of Jadet through what looked like a glass floor that Kay had missed earlier. “Are you alright? Have you seen anyone else?”

“No, you’re the first person I’ve run into since we got in here!” Jayden glanced around in the little room he was in. “What do you think is going on in this room?”

“I don’t know; I’m trapped in some kind of cell down here!”

Kay heard some banging from up above. “This door won’t open, but there’s a lever against the wall; I’m going to pull it!”

The sound of a mechanism being engaged rumbled from in the walls, and with a similarly loud clanging, the door in front of Kay sank down into the ground. “The door in front of me just opened!” Kay called up.

“Awesome!” Kay could just make out Jadet throwing his arms in the air. “Oh, the level went back up.”

The door in front of Kay slammed back up into position with enough speed to cause serious injuries. Kay jumped back in surprise and almost stumbled.

“What was that?”

“The door went back up. Can you hold the level down until I get through?”

“Sure thing!”

Kay stepped through the opening left behind as soon as possible, scared of being crushed if Jadet slipped or let go too soon. The next room was also constrained by metal bars, although the new ones were a little wider, so Kay could see that there were many more chambers or cells, all sectioned off from each other by the same iron bars that reminded him of a jail cell on TV. In the center of the new area was a small pedestal with four knobs on it. On the side of the pedestal was a small translucent crystal.

Looking closely at the knobs, Kay found each one had a symbol in the center of them, and each was surrounded by more symbols. He poked the crystal once, and for the moment his skin touched it, it glowed.

“Hey!” Jadet called out, “Something up here just flashed for a second!”

Kay turned his head to look up in Jadet’s direction and touched the crystal again, keeping his finger on it for longer.

“There’s a light that turned on!” Jadet’s voice rang out from up above and from the crystal itself. 

“Oh, is it that kind of thing?” Kay muttered to himself. “Jadet, there’s a crystal down here that lets us talk to each other. I think this room is a series of puzzles where we have to work together to let the other person move through the room to the exit.”

Kay could see the orc start slowly turning around the room. “Okay, so the lever lets you out of your starting point into the next one, and then that puzzle opens my door and so on?” 

“That’s what I’m thinking. There’s probably at least one that we both have to finish our end for either of us to continue, but overall I think you’ve got it right.”

“Okay, tell me about what you see.”

Kay leaned back, keeping skin contact with the crystal, and started to describe everything. The knobs, the symbols on each knob, the symbols around each knob, the pedestal itself, the symbols that Kay just now noticed on each of the sides of the bottom of the pedestal, everything.

“Okay, I found something,” Jadet said after a moment. “There’s a shape that looks like one of the ones you described carved really small on the wall here.” A tapping noise echoed through the crystal. “Alright, pressing on it didn’t do anything…” Then there was a click. “Oh, the whole brick moves. Okay, there’s a blue line that’s traveling across the wall… Okay! It hit a spot, and another shape appeared!”

“Which two symbols?”

The one that looks like a squiggly frog was the first one, and it went to the upside-down raindrop.”

“Alright…” Kay twisted the knob with the squiggly frog to point at the upside-down raindrop. There was a faint thrumming noise, and one of the symbols at the base of the pedestal lit up blue. “Okay! That did something. Can you find another one?”

“Sure thing!”

The first puzzle turned out to be pretty easy, which wasn’t outside of Kay’s expectations. There had to be something to explain how the room worked, or else it would be pointless. Why go to all the trouble of making a puzzle room if you were just going to kill someone anyway? It’d be easier to make a death room. Puzzles were meant to be solved.

After finding and activating the three other symbols, Jadet told Kay what they linked to, and Kay dialed them in. Once all four of the symbols were lit up their color, the door in Jadet’s room swung open.

“Can you hear me, Mayor?” Jadet shouted, which made Kay’s ears ring as it came from two directions.

“Yes! The crystal is still working!” He replied hurriedly before Jadet continued shouting.

“Oh, good. I see the same symbols again on some kind of furniture thing. There’s pictures of rain all over the walls, and the furniture thing has a bunch of tubes in it. At the top, there are the same four symbols from the knobs, and then at the bottom, there’s a big collection of all the shapes in a circle. The bottom ones all have tubes going towards them.”

They sat there for a bit as they thought it over. Kay got Jadet to describe everything more than once, just in case. Eventually, they figured it out enough to try.

“Oh, duh.” Kay felt like smacking himself but refrained. “Pour some water on one of the symbols at the top.”

“Okay!” Jadet pulled out one of his water skins and poured a small amount on the first symbol. “Oh, they’re actually holes in the shape of the symbols. Looks like the water is flowing through the pipes now. Uh… I don’t know what that’s supposed to mean. It went to more than one of them.”

“Which ones did it go to?”

Jadet described the four symbols that the water hit. “Oh, the water just flowed away somewhere.”

Kay stared up at the room above him, wishing he could see what was happening. “Um… Do it again, I guess?”

Jadet poured more water through. “I don’t know if it’s important, but it’s hitting the four symbols in an order?”

Kay looked down at the knobs. “It might be; which symbol on top did you pour into?”

“The three trees.”

“And what was the order?”

As Jadet called it out, Kay twisted the knob in order to each of the four symbols. After hitting the last one, the knob made a small click and pushed up from the surface. Kay pulled it, and it raised an inch before stopping in place with another click. “It’s a combination lock! We just got the first one done.”

“Oh, is that why it’s glowing up here now?”

Kay had a thought. “What color is it?”

“Orange.”

“Okay,” Kay glanced down at the four glowing symbols near his feet, none of which were orange. “This may or may not be more complicated than I just thought it would be. What’s the next symbol to pour into?”

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“Head down!”

Lauren threw he neck forward as far as she could and waited for the sensation of something sharp swinging by to pass before snapping her head back upright.

“Left arm!” She shouted back at Yven, who quickly threw up his arm above his head, narrowly dodging the spear that shot out from the wall.

She very deliberately didn’t look down at the pit of acid that divided the two very thin edges that they were slowly edging along, inch by inch.

The two of them had come through their respective entrances already across from each other. Lauren had come in after Yven and had been ecstatic to see someone else from their party when that excitement had been dashed by the gates keeping them from advancing, pulling out of the way, and the walls behind them starting to slowly move forward. If they had stayed in place, they would have been pushed into the acid, so they moved forward. The first section had been wide enough to run along, and they’d made good time getting to the first gate.

The puzzle keeping the gate locked wasn’t that hard, but finding out that the other person’s puzzle controlled your gate added another bit of pressure to the whole experience. Lauren was glad that the only people that seemed to be in the Dungeon with her were people who genuinely wanted them all to succeed. Running into another delver that might not care about her all that much, and having to rely on that person to survive, was a scary thought. They both solved the puzzle in a few moments and kept their lead on the moving walls.

The next puzzle wasn’t as easy, going from a simple substitution that was really more than a math equation than anything else to a four-part maze that reset if you made any mistakes, drawn out with their fingers on a magical plate. That had taken Lauren longer, as she’d made several mistakes, but they both moved on with the walls still a dozen feet away from them.

That was when the ledge got smaller. They went from being able to run to having to walk slowly, one foot in front of the other. During that stretch was when they discovered the traps. Yen saw a bright red light from an area on the wall behind Lauren that she couldn’t see and shouted at her to move. After that, they kept their eyes on the other person, making sure they didn’t get killed, injured, or pushed in by the traps that the other person had to warn them of.

This last section seemed to be the last one, with a large open area ahead of them behind the last remaining gate. Lauren stepped over the metal rod that had shot out at ankle level and swept past her, and wobbled as she did her best not to fall. After a moment, she managed to stabilize her footing and keep going. When she made it to the gate, she reached out and bodily dragged herself over to it, using it both to pull herself along faster and to keep balanced.

“Lauren, lean back!”

She jerked her body back and watched as a series of needles jumped out at her, one of them less than an inch from her eye as it poked past. “There are traps during the puzzle now? How are we supposed to pay attention long enough to solve it?” She quickly turned her head back to watch Yven and, more importantly, the warnings of danger from behind him.

Yven’s gaze quickly jumped around his puzzle, jerkily switching between looking at her and the puzzle that locked the gate. “Wait! This one has hinges! Swing it out so that we can see each other’s!”

The last puzzle was less complicated than the others before it if you compared just the puzzles to each other. Combined with the need to dictate to your partner what to do, both in dodging traps and solving the maze that you had to navigate a metal peg through by hand, it became an exhausting nightmare.

Through Yven’s directions, Lauren slammed the peg into the end of the maze, and Yven’s gate swung open, leaving him just enough space to slip through to safety. That was when Lauren saw the trap in this room of the Dungeon. Every gate up until now, you both had to solve the puzzles in order for both of you to survive. If someone died as you ran ahead of them, there would be nowhere for you to go, with the gate ahead of you locked. The person across from you could abandon you at this point, safely getting away and leaving the puzzle on their end unsolved.

Thankfully, that wasn’t an actual problem for her. “Push it up past the next three gaps, then slam it over to the right as far as it goes!”

Yven stayed in place, following her directions, which were admittedly a lot worse than his. He solved the maze within seconds of seeing it. On the other hand, Lauren had to double check each path even as she called out how to solve it, making sure every few seconds that she wasn’t fucking up. And that was ignoring the traps.

“Duck!”

“Left leg up!”

“Pull it down and go in the first opening on the left.”

“Spread your legs apart!”

“Okay, you’re going to take it up on the sec- Right hand!”

The pushing walls crept closer, getting to within a few feet of Lauren when she finally guided Yven into solving the puzzle. The gate blocking her swung open right as Yven’s eyes widened, and he screamed.

“Go forward!”

She threw herself off her feet into a roll along the open safe area past the gate. Through a small gap in between her legs in the ball she rolled herself into, she saw a rectangular blade swing upwards from the thin walkway to the ceiling. She sprang to her feet, looking desperately for Yven.

He waved tiredly from across the room, safely past his gate.

Lauren collapsed to her knees in relief for the both of them, exhausted beyond belief. “Do you think it's okay to rest her for a moment?”

He looked back in the direction of where they’d come from, watching the walls as they continued to inch forward. After a few seconds, they reached where the last gates were. Instead of the walls behind the gate starting to push forward like they had earlier, they stopped in place and didn’t move again. “Looks like we’re fine.” He leaned up against the wall and slowly inched down it until he was sitting. “That was horrible.”

“Have you noticed that each room is harder than the last one?”

“I mean, it is a Dungeon. They do get harder the further you go in.”

“True.”

They sat there for a while, catching their breath and getting themselves back from the adrenalin fuel panic state caused by almost dying.

Eventually, Lauren stood up and looked over the acid-filled gap separating them. “We have climbing pitons, right? I know I do. Think we can string up a rope over so one of us can climb over to the other?”

“Let me try something first.” Yven stood up as well and reached into a pouch hanging from his belt. He pulled out a broken piece of metal from something and tossed it towards Lauren.

She reached out to catch it but never got the chance. Directly in the middle between the two sides, they were on the piece of metal bounced off an invisible wall and landed in the acid, where it sank below as it fizzled. “No way across.” He shrugged, “Even if we could do that, the Dungeon could probably separate us from each other as we went through the door.”

“Yeah.” Lauren shook her head sadly, then pointed at Yven with a serious expression. “Be safe. I’ll see you on the other side.”

“Same to you. And damn straight.” 

They both turned to their doors, choosing one of the two they each had and passing through them.