What am I looking at, System?
No idea. Avoid touching it if you can.
Tulland found himself in a with another gate just like the one he had walked through, seemingly ready to be used to move to the next level. Otherwise, the room was about as boring as his old between-places waiting room in The Infinite had been. It was made of dark gray stone closely fitted together into a perfect square without windows, doors, or other apparent exits.
Aghli’s System seed to agree that there wasn’t much to see or know about the room itself, while still being highly suspicious about the whole matter.
Room of Unidentified Purpose
The basic frawork and structure of this room is identical to what used to be an earnable reward within this dungeon that allowed adventurers as a safe place to recover, reorganize, and generally reorient themselves for challenges to co. Within it, healing and the recovery of magical force were greatly accelerated, and many a life was saved by getting here before a wound could reach the conclusion it sought in the outside dungeon.
This room is sothing different. It offers almost none of the sa advantages. There is no healing to be had here besides what you brought in yourself, and none of the usual furnishings are here to grant you comfort.
Instead, there’s whatever that thing in the center of the room is. While the System of Aghli knows nothing about it that you can’t see yourself, it will inform you if it is able to figure anything useful out about it.
It wasn’t as if Tulland hadn’t noticed what was going on there. He could hardly miss the sphere in the center of the room, floating under its own power and occasionally giving off little wisps of blight. If he couldn’t feel the familiar sense of sick that blight brought with it, he would have thought it was made out of so very black tal. He got very close to it before the motion in the air told him it was actually spinning, rotating with very little friction to speak with but moving nonetheless.
“Don’t touch it. Whatever you do, don’t touch it.” Yuri sat down on the floor, looking at the orb with wide eyes. “I don’t want to go through what will happen if you do.”
“And what’s that?”
“No idea. But it’s unstable. It looks calm, but it’s not. That thing is kept together by nothing I can see. And it’s so much energy.”
Necia moved closer and bent her face close to the orb.
“Are you sure? It looks like nothing to ,” Necia said.
“I’m an energy expert, rember? That’s all energy. And it’s far, far more than should be there. Or anywhere,” Yuri said.
She isn’t wrong. I’m telling both of you at the sa ti that I have no idea what that thing is, but it’s nothing you’d want to touch. Tulland, rember when I expected you to die as a first-level farr?
That kind of thing is hard to forget.
This is more energy than I would have received if you did. Far more. Enough for to have made big changes to my situation. It’s not limitless, but certainly, you wouldn’t want to be in the room with it if it wasn’t under control.
“There’s no need to ss with it then. We’ll just move on,” Tulland said.
“You sure? It’s probably safe enough to rest here if we don’t ss with it.”
“I don’t like that probability.” Tulland pulled his Farr’s Tool loose, got it ready to use, and stepped towards the gate. “We can just do what we ca here for.”
He took a deep breath and stepped through the gate, flinching a bit. He had never liked stepping through them. The sudden change wasn’t disorienting in the sense that he got dizzy, but it wasn’t a pleasant feeling being sowhere one blink and another place the next. This ti, when he opened his eyes, he got a different kind of shock.
“It didn’t work.” Tulland stepped back through the arch just to make sure it wasn’t a matter of having chosen the wrong direction or sothing. It still didn’t work. “Necia, any idea why this thing isn’t working?”
“No, but I have a big guess. That thing is stopping it.”
—
“Just let handle it, okay?” Yuri stood close to the orb, not taking her eyes of it for a single second. “Energy problems need energy solutions. And I’m figuring this one out.”
“Is it even possible to destroy sothing like that?”
“Frankly, I’m not sure it’s even possible for it to exist. It’s just as likely this is a very bad dream.” Yuri put her hand close to the orb in the sa way a person might put their hand close to a stove top to feel the heat radiating from it. “But if it is, I’ll be the person who can do it.”
Hours passed, then passed again. Tulland paced the room nervously as the clock ticked down on his two-day tiline. It hadn’t been a short trip across the jungle, and now they were burning minute after minute on a new problem. After half a dozen hours, they weren’t any visibly closer to a solution than they had been.
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“You can’t hurry this up?” Tulland imdiately felt ashad for saying it, the sa way he had the last ten tis he had said it. “Sorry. I just don’t want to die.”
“I get it. It’s just… Oh, notification.”
Orb of Blight (Updated)
This orb is made of concentrated blight power. When you see a clump of dirt or a dying plant that is missing an elent, that stands out because it has been stripped of sothing important, it is this that it’s been stripped of. This is a mass of the power that the blight stole from the world, angry and roiling.
It is possible that this ball is ant to be a weapon. It’s unstable enough, certainly, and anything in the vicinity of it when it unstabilizes fully would be lted away by a torrent of rot. It could be a processing center for the sa energy, sothing that renders it useful to the blight and its terrible goals. It could even be a battery, sohow containing the energy for so unknown purpose.
In any case, the worst news about it is not its purpose. It is that whatever its intended use, it is tied to the next exit gate. It is rendering your way forward impassible, and only when it is in so way defeated or resolved will you be able to move on.
“Great. Truly great. We can’t move on until destroy this thing, but if we destroy this thing we die.” Tulland tried to keep from saying the next part, but couldn’t help himself. “You can’t hurry this up?”
“I can’t,” Yuri said. “But I promise I’m making progress. I’ll tell you as soon as I have anything.”
Eventually Necia all but tackled Tulland to the ground to get him to stop moving around, then held him there until he finally went to sleep. What felt like a few minutes later, he woke up. Yuri was still working, now from the other side of the orb.
“How long as it been?”
“A long ti. We have a few hours left, at most. Yuri says she’s getting close.”
“I am getting close,” Yuri confird. “I have to destroy this thing. That won’t be hard. The trick is not letting it know it’s been destroyed until we get through that gate.”
“That’s sothing you can do?”
“I think so. I can infuse so energy in to break it. There are a couple places where the energy… bubbles. Or sothing. If I poke it there, it will break.”
“And then we explode?”
“Not if I buff this thing. I can make a shell of energy inside it around the sa ti. It should hold it together a split second longer than it takes to die. That’s all I can promise.”
“And you can do that right now?” Tulland stood. “This mont?”
“Yes. If I can do it at all.”
“Then go stand by the gate, Necia.”
“Why?”
“Just do it. And don’t resist anything I do. No blocking. Got it?”
“Fine.” Necia went and stood by the arch. “But you are going to owe for this later.”
“Sure.” Tulland walked up behind Yuri and put his arms gently around her stomach. “You get what’s happening?”
“I do. Go ahead and do it as soon as I move. If I move at all, it’s done. Ready?”
“Ready.”
A second or two later, Yuri jerked backwards the slightest amount, and Tulland gave his own backwards jump everything it was worth. In front of them, the blight orb exploded, struggling against so sort of barrier for the barest of monts before spreading out like a lightning-fast tidal wave.
Tulland prayed Necia wouldn’t reflexively brace. If there was anything she was good at, it was stopping people. She had listened, though, which Tulland knew as he bowled her over back into the arch, the blight burning at his skin.
When they ca through the arch, they were alive, but cooking in a torch of energy that was also coming through the arch. It couldn’t have been more than a tiny fraction of the total energy of the bomb, but it was enough that if Yuri hadn’t been thrown clear in the process, she probably wouldn’t have lasted the mont it took Tulland to roll him and Necia out of the path of the flare of blight.
“I’m pretty sure the arch isn’t supposed to do that.” Necia rolled over as the supposedly indestructible dungeon arch bent forward, creaking and groaning under the force of whatever was happening within it. “We should probably…”
Tulland was already on his feet, scooping Necia up on one shoulder and Yuri on the other as he ran. The gate made another creaking sound behind them as it broke apart, shooting theoretically indestructible rocks over, around, and nearly through them as they ran. Luckily, none of them hit him. Even more luckily, the destruction of the gate seed to cut off whatever opening to the blight-orb room the energy was holding open, leaving them alone in a bizarre, pillar-filled cave.
“What in the hell is this?” Tulland looked out over a room with perfectly flat, seemingly infinite ceilings and floors. None of them seed blighted, which was a first for the dungeon. And interspersed every several yards were perfectly round pillars, each reaching from the very lowest to the very highest points they could see. “Tell you know what this is, Yuri.”
“No. I’ve never seen this before. I don’t think anyone has.”
It’s a spawning room. A very odd one. But a spawning room.
What?
Enemies that appear in dungeons are not born. They do not blink into existence. They are built. This takes so amount of ti.
Nearby, a pillar started to crack, pulling down into itself as any bit or piece that didn’t fall away resolved into a roiling mass of energy. Tulland stabbed it as it did, misting it before it could reveal whatever the room’s plans for it were.
“Easy enough,” Tulland said.
“Not if… dammit.”
The System of Aghli sent the next ssage express, in the form that took no ti to read at all.
Spawning Room (Corrupted)
Your experience in the ruined safe room was abnormal in many ways. Overwhelming the capacity of a gate to transport life, matter, and energy was one. Rarer still was disrupting the entire structure of a dungeon. Though the blight moved to protect its influence, the only two things it could save was the dungeon’s pillar and the room you find yourself in now.
Most spawning rooms are limited affairs. This one is as well, but not in any way you’d ever run afoul of. The influx of energy from the gate allowed it to spread farther and develop foes far faster than it otherwise would have been able to.
In a terrifying developnt, the destruction of every part of this dungeon but the spawning room has left it light, lean, and endlessly more capable of producing monsters than it was before. It is unclear how it is possible, but left unchecked, this dungeon will put the surrounding region in even more peril than it has experienced up to now.
Find the pillar, clear the dungeon, and prevent this catastrophe.
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