Andrew Rowe - Sufficiently Advanced Magic

We inserted all the keys into the left door first. Clicks for each, but no obvious change in the door itself. Vera was able to detect that the destination on the opposite side of the door hadn’t changed.

Exasperated, we inserted the three keys into the door on the opposite side of the room. A huge blue treasure box appeared in the middle of the chamber.

“Hrm.” Jin mumbled.

“Yeah, you mumble, you know I won the bet.” Derek nudged Jin as he walked toward the center. “Ah, Vera, you want to check this for traps?”

Vera wandered over, putting a hand on the box.

Her eyes shut. “…you’re not going to like this.”

Derek’s hand went to the hilt of one of his swords. “What’s wrong?”

“It’s not trapped. But…it is locked.”

She tipped over the box.

There were eight keyholes on the bottom side.

And we’d long ago consigned the magic keys we didn’t need into the same titanic pile as all of the non-magical ones.

That had, in retrospect, been a pretty serious oversight.

And, more importantly, I learned that Selys had a much meaner sense of humor than I’d imagined.

It was another two hours before we found all of the right keys to open the box. By that point, everyone aside from Derek had lost most of their enthusiasm. I was half-expecting to find another box inside the box.

At least we’d set aside all the remaining magical keys this time, just in case.

Finally, with every key in place, we popped the box open.

There was a key inside.

A single. Reshing. Key.

It was made out of blue crystal, serpentine in shape, with decorative spines forming the bittings on the blade of the key.

“Ooh.” Derek snatched the key out of the box. “Vera, any idea what this does?”

“I’m going to hazard a guess that it opens a lock, Derek.” She sighed. “Beyond that, you’re not going to get much out of me. I can tell you if it’s magic, the dimensions, and what it’s made out of — but not what it goes to. The serpent motif is probably significant, of course.”

“Check anyway.” He handed her the key.

“Definitely magic. Strong, too, but I can’t tell you what it does. Maybe one of the Enchanters could?”

Professor Orden silently held out a hand and Vera gave her the key.

Orden looked the key over while I checked my remaining mental mana. 37/48. I hadn’t used a dangerous amount, but I was already getting a pretty serious headache.

“No obvious runes. Like many tower items, it’s not enchanted through the same means as the Enchanter Attunement uses. It’s probably closer to Derek’s swords. Mana has been stored in it directly. That does mean that it was probably made by a visage, making it significant. If there are no objections, I’ll hold onto this until we find a use for it.”

Derek’s expression saddened, but no one objected. I was just happy we’d gotten anything out of all the effort.

We checked the northern door first.

The room beyond the door was rectangular, but the floor and walls were divided into black and white squares. It wasn’t set up like a Crowns board, though. Sometimes there would be a few white or black squares directly adjacent to each other.

After a few seconds, I heard a creaking sound, then a hail of spikes shot upward from the black squares on the floor. We hadn’t done anything to trigger it. Must have been timed.

Derek shut the door. “Okay, trap room. Looks complicated. Let’s check the other one.”

We made our way toward the other door, once again with Derek leading the way.

The other room was another classic; a long rectangular room with a water pit in the center. There was a single door on the opposite side. It had a single blue keyhole.

There was a broken bridge crossing about half the pool — and no obvious switch on the other side — but otherwise it was pretty close to the water room that I’d found in my Judgment.

The same room that had led me to the jail cells and gotten this whole mess started.

Suddenly, that spike look was looking awfully appealing by comparison.

Derek made the decision for us and stepped inside. “This one looks easy.”

The tile beneath his feet depressed just slightly into the ground.

I only heard a hiss before Derek’s hand blurred upward, catching the first spear of ice that emerged from the other side of the room.

“…okay, maybe not that easy,” he mumbled, hurling the icy spear to the ground and stepping fully inside.

That tile sunk into the ground, too.

“Oops?” he mumbled.

A hail of dozens of ice spears fired out of holes in the wall on the opposite side of the room, all aimed for Derek.

His arm blurred again, and then he had a flaming blade in hand, shattering each of the icy spears in a flicker of motions that were too quick for my eyes to follow.

I had to admit, it was pretty impressive.

Lowering his weapon after smashing the barrage, Derek sighed. “Okay. I need to stop moving for a minute.”

“Figured that one out all by yourself, did you?” Vera laughed, gingerly pressing a finger against the top of the first tile that Derek had stepped on. It was slowly moving back upward to the level of the rest of the floor. “Okay. Good news is that the tiles don’t seem to be linked to each other, so you haven’t triggered a chain reaction with those first couple missteps. Bad news is that each tile can trigger more than once, and I don’t see an easy way to differentiate them from normal tiles. If there are any normal tiles.”

Vera knelt down at the doorway, sweeping her hand around the area connecting to the first tile. “Hold on, let me check around here a little more.”

Derek frowned, looking down. “That’s fine… I’ll just, uh, stand here. And protect you. Yes. That is definitely what I will be doing.”

“How very gallant of you.” Vera continued tracing her way around the tile until she’d made a full circuit with her hand. “Okay, there are some spots that aren’t going to trigger any traps. I can figure them out by touch, but you’re all going to have to follow me carefully. And we should have a plan for crossing that bridge before we get this started.”

“I can handle that part,” Sera offered. “I can make an ice bridge.”

I glanced at her. “Any chance you could make an ice floor over the whole floor that’s solid enough for us to step on without touching the tiles?”

She pursed her lips, seeming to consider the idea. “I could, but it’d take up…maybe two thirds of my mana?”

“That’s too much, never mind. We’ll deal with it.”

Vera nodded. “Okay, I’ll lead the way, then. Derek will be next. He can ‘protect me’ if anything goes wrong. Sera can come up after that, then the rest of you.”

We made our way to the middle of the room slowly, but without incident.

Sera pointed her hand at the broken gap in the bridge.

“Child of the goddess, I call upon our pact. Form a bridge of ice!”

A thick section of ice formed over the gap. It looked slick, but when Vera tested it with a foot she judged that it was stable enough to cross.

We followed her to the other side of the bridge. It was Jin that noticed that we’d missed something.

“There’s a key at the bottom of the water.”

He pointed to the bottom left corner of the pool. I wasn’t even sure I could see it at first, but I checked my mana watch — it’s still 37/48, Corin, you haven’t used any since the last time you checked — and turned my attunement on.

Yeah, definitely a key down there.

Sera frowned down at the water. “Want me to try to lift it out with air magic?”

Derek narrowed his eyes at the key. “Might not be a bad idea, assuming you can maintain the bridge at the same time. Also, don’t splash us. That’s probably acid.”