MM1: Ch. 24b, 25

24b is a long enough to be a short chapter, but I'm tweaking the end of 24 (which I gave you last week) and gluing the two together into one longer chapter. 24b is still all new material

Chapter 24b

Some time later, Koby stopped shouting. He’d tried begging the distant voice, the monster in the room, and anyone else who might be able to hear. Perhaps someone in an adjacent chamber would come to his rescue! 

He wasn’t sure how that would work. The only exit he could see was locked tight, and it wasn’t like people could make a new entrance; he’d seen what the castle did to people who damaged it.

Maybe someone has a way to go through the walls without damaging them, he thought, without particular hope. True, it was probably possible for someone with the right mindset, but Koby wasn’t keen to experiment. That kind of magic seemed risky in and of itself, and if it left the walls askew in any way afterward, the castle would likely kill him even if his own magic didn’t.

Plus, he was far from sure that anyone outside this room could hear his shouting. In the nursery it was common to hear noise from the rooms overhead or beside your own, but now that he thought about it, he didn’t remember ever hearing anything from another room as they were going through the - what had the tiny lady called it? - the qualifying course?

So all his shouting had likely been for nothing.

The monster, Caliban, had been sitting patiently across the room as he shouted, lounging on its multijointed nightmarish limbs, seemingly unbothered by anything Koby had said.

Koby stared at it, and Caliban seemed to straighten under his attention, lifting one ghastly arm in a… what was it doing? Was it threatening him? Trying to order him around?

The arm slowed its motion as Koby stared, confused, a suspicion growing.

“Are you… are you waving at me?” 

The idea seemed insane, completely at odds with the monster’s horrific appearance and aggressive actions, but the monster bobbed its whole body in something akin to a nod.

“But you bit me!”

A pause. Another bob.

“You tied me up!”

A third bob, more confident this time.

“Why are you waving? You can’t possibly be trying to be friendly,” Koby accused.

No bob this time. Instead, it blinked its multitudinous eyes: not simultaneously, but one after another.

Can it… not talk? Koby wondered. His face twisted in skeptical revulsion as he reworded his question: “Are you trying to be friends?!”

The bob was instantaneous this time, bold and confident.

No chance, monster!

Koby didn’t speak the words aloud.

In many ways, his lengthy rant had accomplished nothing other than a sore throat, but in another, it had been useful. His panic and fury weren’t as strong anymore. He was still angry, yes, still scared, but the feelings were only in his mind, not running through his muscles like an errant bolt of lightning.

“Don’t throw away a potential tool,” his dad had always told him. “If you can act like you like someone, odds are they’ll like you back. If they like you, they’ll want to help you.”

Koby had seen how true it was. He truly liked most people, but his dad’s advice had made him go out of his way to demonstrate it, and he’d seen time and time again how it made his life easier.

Not recently, of course. His uncle and his cousin had been the ones to trap him - and the rest of his group - in the castle, and then Koby had gone and admitted out loud that his dad had warned him not to come.

He still thought he had been right to share information, but it had been hard to go from being friends with everyone to being universally reviled.

Not universally, he reminded himself. Dee and Ravel seem to have forgiven me. They know it’s just… just my family.

Of course, that thought wasn’t easy to process either. For most of his childhood, Koby’s Mom had lived with him and his siblings in Raccoon nursery, while his Dad lived closer to the administrative center near Fish nursery, but he’d visited regularly, and Koby had looked up to him. Idolized him. 

A lot Koby’s aunts, cousins, and uncles had been regular visitors as well, and more than one had told Koby they expected his father to become mayor someday.

Two years ago, he had.

Koby had been so proud. Recent events had turned that pride stomach-churningly sour.

His dad had tried to save him, yes, but he hadn’t done anything for Ravel or Dee, or anyone else.

He wasn’t just part of the government. He was the mayor. He didn’t have absolute power, but he had to know what was going on.

Maybe he’s been trying to stop this, Koby thought, but even he didn’t believe that. 

His dad said it had to be this way. Those weren’t the words of someone who was fighting something, much as Koby wanted to believe otherwise.

He seemed so concerned when Melinore died after her graduation. Trixel. Fazz. I guess… they might not be dead?

Koby really had been popular. Most of his friends had made it through their graduation just fine, but he’d known and liked several people who hadn’t.

Finding out some of the “dead” might be trapped in the castle brought its own confusing mix of emotions.

Did he hope his friends hadn’t died? 

Of course!

Did he want them to be trapped here like he was? 

He wasn’t sure.

Maybe there was a chance at surviving the castle - the old woman who’d fixed the faucet suggested there might be - but what kind of life had she led? 

Was this just a slower, more terrifying, more complicated way to die?

Koby shook his head. He could figure out his feelings about his dad later. Right now, he was in the clutches of a hideous monster, who would risk Koby’s life on the orders of its master in just a few days.

Unless he could convince it not to?

Koby forced a smile onto his face. “I’d like to be friends.”

The monster surged to its feet.

“Do you think you could cut these strings around me?” he asked.

The monster rocked from side to side.

“Is that… was that meant as a no?”

Confident bob.

“Why- No, you can’t answer why. Well gosh, Caliban, that makes it hard to be friends. Friends don’t leave friends tied up.”

Blink. Blink. Blinkblink.

“You can’t leave me like this.”

Bob!

“Yes? Yes you can? No, you can’t. I’ll need to eat, I’ll need to drink-” 

Caliban sprang into action, racing lightning-fast to a corner of the room Koby couldn’t see, and returning with an armload of the strange food the castle had been providing. The monster lifted one piece and pushed it gently against Koby’s mouth. 

Koby tried to keep the disgust off his face, turning his head aside so he could answer. “You’re planning to hand-feed me?!”

Bob!

“That won’t… even if that would work, I’d rather feed myself. Plus, um, the bathroom! You’ll have to let me out so I can use the bathroom.”

Side-to-side.

“No? What do you mean, no? I’m going to need to, and I’ll get sick if I just… go.”

The monster dropped its armload of food and scuttled back to the runed device. It carried it over to Koby and laid one grotesque, hairy hand against his forehead. A rune on the device pulsed briefly, and the magic in the room swirled over Koby and Caliban, gathering all the dirt and sweat off of Koby’s body.

Koby was speechless. That was the plan? That was horrific.

He gave up on arguing with Caliban for the moment and turned his mind toward gathering the room’s magic. 

If he couldn’t talk his way out of this, he’d have to find another way to escape.

Chapter 25

It was hard to help with a puzzle when you couldn’t see the whole thing.

Raza’s floating-cloth enchantments had faded quickly, and with Dee insisting Ravel rest, there hadn’t been much reason to redo them.

The girls carried picture frames over for him to analyze. Every picture showed people, but that was the only obvious similarity. One picture showed a group of people sitting around a table in a darkened room, while another showed a woman alone in an area filled with plants even larger than grandelions, which Dee was certain were the “trees” Ravel had learned about in history class. 

“They doesn’t look much like drawings I’ve seen of trees,” he said doubtfully.

“A lot of drawings are highly stylized,” she said. “People’s hearts look nothing like a heart shape, for example.”

“How-” Ravel asked, but Dee kept talking. She was focused on the painting, and didn’t seem to notice Ravel’s wide-eyed expression of alarm. “My brother always asked for detailed reproductions of ancient paintings for his birthday. The wall above his bed was covered with them. These look just like the trees in one of his favorites.”

Ravel had intended to ask how Dee knew what a human heart looked like, but he’d thought better of the question. Did he really want to hear the answer? He returned to trying glean information from the pictures she’d handed him. 

That lasted until Raza spotted a similarity between a symbol carved into the table and a symbol inside one of the paintings. Encouraged by the apparent progress, Dee and Raza had huddled around the table.

“So, we agree that the paintings likely show the ‘magic of the old,’ right?” Dee said. “So we’ve probably got to work some magic to do the ‘magic of the new’ part.”

“That’s what I figure,” said Raza. “Maybe we can like… tie the painting and the table together?”

It had taken the two some trial and error before they realized they needed to reproduce a different shape depicted in the ornate border of the painting over the symbol carved in the table. After they’d done that, a glowing line snapped into being between that section of the table and the painting they held, and Ravel heard a thunk.

“What happened?” he called.

“Part of the center of the table slid aside!” Dee said. “Only an inch, though. We’ll probably have to do this again… hm… fifteen more times, I’d guess.”

He tried to keep helping, but quickly realized how useless he was. He could ask the girls to describe the shapes on the table, but there were hundreds. 

To make matters worse, Dee and Raza got into arguments about those shapes pretty frequently. 

“The pattern looks a lot like veins! All the curves and splits?”

“Who knows what veins look like?” Raza said. “Looks more like a lumpy pie to me.”

“A pie?!”

Ravel sighed and set the frame he was looking at down. “Real helpful, guys. ‘A pie or maybe veins.’ If you can’t copy what you’re seeing on the table, I need to get up and look myself.”

“You need to keep laying down,” Dee said. “I suppose we could lay you on the table.”

Raza shook her head. “He’d hide the details we’re trying to look at! Plus, you don’t know what the table’s gonna do next time we figure something out. Just put him in a chair.”

“His leg needs to be elevated above his torso!” Dee said. 

Ravel put his hands on his face, letting them argue while he thought. Eventually, he came to a conclusion. “I’m going to have to be able to move.”

“We can solve this without your help,” Dee said. “Raza’s pretty sure you’ll still get credit just for being in here with us. Or, we could prop you up to activate one of the symbols if we want to be sure.”

“You probably can solve it without me,” Ravel said. “But then what? What if the door opens and another monster attacks? I don’t want to be stuck to the ground.”

“You can… uh… ” Dee trailed off, frowning thoughtfully.

“He’s got a point,” Raza said. “We can try to slow down on solving this room, but the castle could decide to kick us out at any moment. If we walk out of here into a combat room, what’s he going to do?”

“We should avoid those,” Dee said.

Raza grimaced. “We can try. But what if we go into something we think is a puzzle room, and it turns out to be a combat room? I haven’t explored that much, but the doors have been closing behind me pretty quickly most of the time.”

“My memory’s a little fuzzy, but didn’t that happen for us, too?” Ravel asked. “The monster was chasing us.”

“Yeah,” Dee admitted. “If it hadn’t shut so quickly, that thing would have been in here with us. You really think we won’t be able to tell a combat room by sight?”

Raza shrugged. “No idea. Even if we think a room has a combat challenge, we might have to go in. This room has two doors, and I don’t think there’s a rule that the castle has to open both of them. At best, though, we’ll get two choices about where to go next. It’s not like we can pick to stay still if we don’t like our options.”

  Dee sucked in a breath. “That’s true.”  She paused for a moment, downcast and indecisive, before shaking herself. “Right. How about this: Raza and I keep working on the puzzle. Ravel, you work on trying to get a set of enchantments to help you move. First priority is a sort of stiff sleeve or cast to keep gentle pressure on the wound. I think that will help keep the stitches in place, and it’ll slow down any bleeding if there’s an issue. After that, work on something like the enchantments Raza did, if you can. Try not to use too much magic? It didn’t seem like the room refilled quickly after she tied it all up in the first set, and it would be good to be able to test things on the puzzle.”

Ravel nodded slowly. “I can work on that.”

“Sounds like a plan… Doc!” Raza said. The taller girl eyed Dee, clearly waiting for her reaction.

“Not Doc, please,” Dee said, looking pained. “I’m not a doctor.”

Raza bit her lip. “Boss, then? You’re always trying to boss us around.”

Dee tilted her face upward. “Must you? Dee is only one syllable. It’s not difficult.”

Raza shrugged awkwardly.

After a few moments, Dee sighed. “If you refuse to call me by my name, I guess there are worse things than Boss.”

Raza brightened, snapping her hand to her brow in a Guardian salute. “Aye aye, Boss!”

“Whatever.” The word was an irritated grumble, but the glimpse Ravel caught of Dee’s face as she turned back to the table revealed that her mouth had quirked up in half a smile.

Good, Ravel thought. Maybe they’ll bicker less. The two girls had already argued more in one morning than Koby, Ravel and Dee had in all the time they’d spent together.

He turned his focus to his own assignment, carefully gathering magic and spinning it into a coiled thread as he thought. Efficiency, he thought. I don’t know enough pragmatic runes to do either of these things, so it’ll have to be perceptual magic. Making that efficient should be all about how well I understand and believe in what I’m trying to do. I think… I think I can do what Raza wanted to do with a lot less magic power. A scrap of cloth isn’t very much like a bubble, after all. It’s impressive that she made that work at all, but I doubt it was very efficient.

On the other hand, I know a lot about cloth and fabric. I know where it comes from and what it does. In fact…

Ravel pulled his backpack out from under his head, digging through it until he found what he was looking for. His fingers closed around the slender object and he grinned. This should help. This should work!