“Well done,” Sheridan said. “I suspect those boxes would have held standard keys. You’ve made us a better path. White should be a safe room.”
“Ooh, nice!” Patrick walked over the door. “Can we get out of here now?”
“Just give me a few more minutes.” I grinned. “I was hoping this would stop the timer. I have something else I wanted to do in here.”
Marissa tilted her head to the side. “What’s that?”
I illustrated by pulling the Jaden Box out of my bag, putting the remaining firebloom into the correct jar, and then putting the corner of the jar in the box. “Store: Firebloom.”
“Oooh.” Patrick clapped his hands together. “Nice.”
It took us another good hour to get everything sorted into the right containers and then stored in the Jaden Box.
I fully intended to take anything useful in the spire that I came across, as long as it wasn’t nailed down or on fire.
Possibly even if it was.
After that, we proceeded into the next room.
It was eerily familiar — a room with white stone walls, three doors leading in different directions, and a fountain in the center filled with mana-infused water.
We didn’t stop for long in the safe room; everyone felt like the alchemy room had been enough of a break.
We checked all three doors.
To the left, a door with a yellow gem, leading into a room where stone spikes would protrude from tiles in the floor every few seconds.
Easily solved with levitation, provided that there aren’t any other tricks.
There were two other doors in that room; an orange one and a green one.
On the north side of the safe room, we found a door with a blue crystal.
That one led to a much larger room with a rotating circular platform in the center, divided into several wedges. The platform was angled downward, like a funnel, and at the base of each of the wedges was a huge hole. Each of the wedges had huge letters written across it, but I couldn’t read the words from this distance.
On the side of the platform were three huge metallic spheres, probably around the size of my entire torso. At a glance, I judged the spheres to be just the right size to fit into the holes in the platform.
To complicate matters, there was a gap with no floor — maybe fifteen feet — between the wheel and the closest accessible areas around it. That meant we couldn’t just walk the spheres over and drop them in the holes.
I’d never been to a casino, but even I recognized the concept behind the challenge.
Marissa pointed. “I want to do that one!”
I glanced at her. “You want to gamble on whether or not we succeed?”
“S’not just gambling. It’s a test of skill!” Marissa clapped her hands together, then winced. She kept forgetting one of her hands was still injured. “It’ll be fair, right?”
“No.” “Nah.” “Definitely not,” came the chorus of replies from me, Patrick, and Sheridan.
“Aww.” Marissa folded her arms. “I bet we can figure something neat out for it. Maybe levitate the spheres?”
Patrick squinted as he inspected the room. “Depends on how heavy those are. They look like they’re metal — they could be hundreds, maybe thousands of pounds.”
“We can investigate it, but let’s check the red room first.” I gestured to the last door.
We walked over and opened it.
The room ahead looked like a pleasant garden, save for the gigantic snake-like heads that were erupting from the grass even as we opened the door.
I slammed the door shut. “Okay. Who’s good at gambling?”
Marissa laughed. “Don’t like snakes, Corin?”
“I don’t like poison. And that, Mara, looks like the kind of room where we’d get poisoned.”
“Bah, I could take ‘em. But I prefer the wheel thing, anyway. That looks more fun!”
“More importantly,” Sheridan pointed out, “It looked like a way up. I’m fairly confident I saw ‘stairs’ written on one of the slats on the whirl wheel.”
I hadn’t been able to get a look from that far away, but apparently Sheridan had better eyesight.
I also wasn’t familiar with the term “whirl wheel”, but I didn’t bother asking about it. It was easy enough to glean from context.
We started heading to the blue room, but we were interrupted by the sound of Keras’ voice.
“Corin, we have a problem.”
I paused in my step. “What’s wrong? Er, I mean, necklace. Message Keras. What’s wrong?”
It was easy to forget that I had to activate the necklace before I could actually send a reply.
“Researcher is…gone.”
I felt a moment of panic. “…Gone?”
“She was just telling me about the next rune to smash, then she said something about her Summoner, shivered, and disappeared.”
That was bad.
Potentially very bad.
If her Summoner had just called her back to the Divinatory, at least she’d be safe, but we’d have lost our tracker.
If her Summoner had unsummoned her…or cut off her contract entirely…
…She’d be dead. And it would be my fault.
“No specifics?” I asked, just to confirm.
“No. Whatever it was, she couldn’t resist it. I think she was trying to, but it only lasted a second.”
Resh.
“Okay. Did her bracers disappear with her?”
“Yeah?”
At least that meant if she was physically transported somewhere else, she’d still have a mana source. That was good.
“Okay. Did she tell you how to get to us?”
“Not in detail, but up is up. I’ve climbed a good way before. Now that she’s not here, I can just cut through here and start climbing, but I’m worried about her.”
“Understood, but we have no way to find her right now. Just head to us, then we’ll see if we can figure out if we can find her later.”
“Okay. I’m on my way, but even without Researcher slowing me down, it’s going to be a while.”
We said goodbye and turned off the necklaces for now.
I hoped Researcher was safe.
We headed to the blue room.
As soon as we were inside, I heard a loud ticking on the right side of the room. A clock had started, listing three hundred seconds.
There were no obvious traps, so we headed closer to the spheres, which were positioned about ten feet from the gap in the floor.
At that distance, I could see more details, and with that, more complications.
First, the wheel was surrounded by translucent crystal, similar to the walls I’d seen in the prison. There were gaps on the top side of the crystal, but only right around the outer ring of the wheel.
Second, the outer ring of the wheel was spinning faster than the central section, meaning that they were separate pieces. We couldn’t just throw the ball inside and expect it to roll directly down the nearest wedge in the funnel section — the momentum of the outer wheel would probably move it around a bit before it fell.
Third, there were tons of tiny runes on the walls of the room. I wanted to read them, but there wasn’t enough time. I could tell at a glance that several of them involved attack spells.
Fourth, I could now read the inner “wedges” that lead to the holes.
There were twelve in total. Some were more pleasant than others.
Monsters!
Traps!
Fabulous Prizes!
Bigger Traps!
Stairs Up!
Extremely Dangerous Traps!