Aporeu chronicles Issue 71: Exploring the dark
Stories from the adventurers
This week
Solving puzzles just to meet someone seems like a huge hassle, but adventurers need to be able to do it all for the mission.
Exploring the dark by Aşina Mengü
Today was an exciting day! I got to use the gate and entered a new world. I was joined by an interesting gnome called GnArt and a perpetually scared young elf by the name of Alyr. Apparently a world was discovered which led to some weird rooms which the guild did not know what to do about. I love investigating so I immediately signed up. Who would not be excited for the opportunity to enter the gate? When the three of us arrived there, we were instructed by the guard to enter separately as this world led to different rooms but GnArt thought it to be wiser to enter together. The guard did not care much as he agreed. When we passed through I felt a tingling sensation on my skin it felt weird, yet pleasant. As all of us regained our senses we noticed that we were in a dark room with a red wall, luckily no one had problems with seeing here. There was some weird scribbling on the wall, GnArt seemed to think that it was written in a code as it appeared to be total nonsense to me. As we investigated the room we found several interesting things. There were ropes growing out of the boxes leading into the two sides of the walls. At this point we were not sure what these were meant for, Alyr even went into the shaft to see where they may lead to but it was a dead end. On the wall there were numbers with colors beneath them which we could shift between and then confirm. Also a torch was locked behind bars, we did not have access to it. As we were looking around the room GnArt took out a pulley system from his interesting satchel and we tried to pull on the rope by tying it up to the bars from the torch. While doing so we managed to actually break the bar instead of pulling the rope. Somewhat of a success? Not knowing what else to do I randomly pressed the buttons with colors and confirmed it, resulting in a dart to my side which I did not even feel. So I did it again. Getting nowhere with the code on the wall and not having much else to do we went out the gate to enter one of the other rooms. Entering again this time we arrived in a room with a blue wall. This wall had a hole in it and at the side there was a basket tied to a pulley system with a lot of heavy balls nearby. This room also had two ropes going into the side walls connected to boxes. There was a symbol scribbled on another wall. Not much else to do, I just went ahead and put all of the heavy balls into the basket which seemed to do something as a mechanism was activated. Apparently these ropes were linked with the other rooms as the mechanism unlocked something. So Alyr went into the final room and I went back to the first room with the gibberish on the red wall. The last room seemed to have a green wall, guess these were the correct colors to choose. So I entered them in order and confirmed it on the panel, this seemed to activate another mechanism which allowed me to pull the rope and see what was in the box. There I found a stick which seemed to fit into the hole in the blue wall where GnArt was in. Making use of the rope and box I delivered it to the next room and GnArt put it in the wall. Alyr later said something about how she needed to scribble the symbol she saw in the second room in her room. All of this seemed very peculiar. But after doing all of this something seemed to have activated as the walls in all of our rooms slid upwards and we arrived in an opening within a forest. There were several pillars indicating several elements such as air, water, fire, earth, metal and lightning. Further into the road we could see four identical statues and one bigger one. GnArt was still busy figuring out what the text on the wall could mean, he swore he was so close in solving it. Alyr and I began looking into the pillars as we did not have much else to do. Maybe the pillars needed to be activated by their corresponding element, or so I thought. So I poured a little bit of water from my waterskin onto the corresponding pillar but it did nothing. At least I tried. Having no other Ideas I started walking towards the statues. Upon closer inspection they all looked very detailed, I could move their limbs. They were more like a puppet than a statue. I wondered what the bigger one would look like so I went ahead to have a closer look.
This was a bad idea as the large armor suddenly began to move and attack me. I was alone upfront so I started to fight it alone. It was a gigantic armor with a big gem embedded into its chest. Alyr and GnArt immediately came to my aid but the four smaller puppets also came to life. Luckily the smaller one were not so resilient as they went down quick. But still two of them came towards me so I was surrounded on every side. It wasn’t looking good for me. I was distracted by the small jabs from the smaller ones which resulted in the larger one getting an opportunity to whack me real good. I fell down, unconscious. Hoar must have protected me as I came to. The small fries were dealt with quickly, only the large puppet now standing. I felt my consciousness fading yet again but managed to hold on as we finally finished it off. The bright shining gem in its chest lost all of its luster as it cracked and all the armor pieces fell down on the floor.
While I was recuperating GnArt suddenly must have gotten an inspiration during the fight as he solved the code. It said that when leaving the building one must tap the stand in front of the room three times for “them” to call back the monster which guards the building. I guess it was a bit too late for that. A while later a group came towards us and introduced themselves and looked a bit around. Their leader was called Helman the gate guard captain, he was interested in our purpose on Barradera, the name of their world. He clarified that this whole mechanism was built for the purpose of keeping invaders from another world out. It sounds like they had an incident in the past regarding this. We clarified that we had no such intentions so he offered to bring us to their city called Terran.
When we arrived at their city we were brought to a person called Ulunièr, he held a position as a member of the human government there. No other races could be seen around. Apparently all the races lived in their own region, weird. We offered him to come back to our world as to make a more formal meeting with more upstanding members of the guild but he seemed busy. He offered to write a letter for us which we could bring back and in the meantime we could explore the city. So explore we did, while walking around we found a shop selling small trinkets as souvenirs and then went to another shop to try out some of the local food.
After the indicated time ended we went back to Ulunièr and received our letter. Helman came to escort us back to the gate as they had reset the entry mechanism and told us about how to arrive next time as to circumvent the whole security measure they had set up. We gave our farewells and returned back to the guild and delivered the letter to Lornan. This was quite an interesting day. I wonder if they know about the justice of my lord Hoar, if not I would need to enlighten their people of the magnificence of my lord.
Signed ~ Aşina Mengü, devout follower of Hoar, the Poet of Justice.
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