“Found a couple good ones in this first batch. One key for each door. Want me to go ahead and put them in the right locks?”
“Go ahead,” Professor Orden replied. Which was good, because I was about to say it myself, and it would have been embarrassing to say something when I definitely wasn’t in charge.
Vera turned a key in one of the doors. I heard a click.
“Huh. I think that unlocked it. Maybe we don’t need all three for each door?” Vera put a hand on the doorknob, frowning. “It’s definitely unlocked.”
Derek walked over to the door. “Don’t open that yet. It’ll probably work now, but it’ll probably work better if we open all the locks first.”
Jin picked up a key, tossed it into the air, and caught it. “I’m pretty sure opening is all we need the door to do.”
Derek shook his head. “Yeah, it’s meant to tempt us to leave early. If we solve the whole thing, though, it’ll probably give us something extra. Like an additional tool, or it’ll change where the door leads.”
I’d almost forgotten that the doorways were more like teleporters. The connections between rooms in the tower were constantly shifting. I’d never actually seen it happen, but someone like Derek who had been in here dozens of times almost certainly had.
“It could just be that there are three keyholes to give us three options on which key to find, making the room easier to solve,” Jin pointed out.
He wasn’t wrong; that was a pretty reasonable assumption. Not every group would have an Enchanter handy, and certainly not a combination of an Enchanter and an Analyst. We had a pretty ideal group for this, although a powerful Diviner might have found it even easier.
“Let’s just see how long it takes to find another couple keys and go from there,” Derek suggested. “We’ve got days before we need to introduce Vera to Katashi. I’d like to do whatever we can to make this as safe as possible.”
Introduce? Really?
That was a very... optimistic way of thinking about what we were doing.
Vera straightened up a bit at the reference, her expression tilting definitively toward the dour in spite of Derek’s friendly language. She was still handling it a lot better than I would have in her place, though.
I tried not to think about the possibility that I was leading her to die.
It only took us a few more minutes to find the next matching key. That gave us a bit of encouragement. It seemed like it’d be a pretty easy task.
It took two hours to find the entire rest of the set. I’d shut off my attunement long before, so we had to rely strictly on Professor Orden’s vision to identify the magical keys. Fortunately, we eventually figured out a system — emptying out one corner, then dedicating gradually moving every single “disqualified” key to that corner — until we had all of the right ones.
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.