After riding the railcar back to the road and returning to the castle to dry off, the group split. Aviri stayed behind to explore the ominous garden while Eve took Lin and Trilup to Kurai Village (also known as Spotty Town) to have Lin's monster tooth made into a necklace. There may also have been some dancing involved.
In the garden, Aviri was able to figure out what some of the plants where before they mutated, and only got swallowed by carnivorous ones twice - but really, he was too big for them to handle. The worst thing was the sticky pollen that some of the plants liked to spray. Still, he was able to gather some seeds from the more interesting and less annoying flora.
After dinner, it was decided not to explore the castle again. Instead, Ysnor read them scary bedtime stories involving cannibals and gingerbread and sibling rivalry. The lisp ruined some of it, though, so the nightmares weren't too bad.
With morning came the smell of pancakes and porridge, and of course the big decision: the magic box was in the middle of the table, next to the butter dish, with one last symbol left to decode.
Linyala finishes off her pancakes and leans forward until her nose is level with the box. "I still think it's some kinda zombie proof toothbrush." She says and taps its lid with a finger, "There ain't a whole lot of room fer magic swords an' whatnot."
Aviri eats energetically, though politely, focusing more on eating than the box or the plants, now that he'd gotten a good look at them. He does occasionally look at the box, though. "Maybe it's some trinket," he offers. "Like my talisman-thing." He pulls the necklace out of his pocket and let it dangle from his hand.
"I bet it's candy!" Trilup says. "Magic candy! For zombie immunity."
Eve eyes the box, and considers. "It was great-grandpa, to help fight the Necromancers, so.. He didn't need a weapon, he already had one. Something else then," she concludes.
Aviri snaps his fingers and looks around, beaming at everyone. "It's a book!" he decides. "On how to fight zombies!"
"But that'd have the same problem as candy. You saw those books in the airship. All meltey and rotten." Lin counters, "It's prolly somethin' metal or cured wood."
Aviri glares at her. "It's not like whomever sent it expected it to get lost for a century."
Gnarr begins to clear the table, and notices the box. "What is?" he asks, pointing to it.
Lin nudges the box towards Eve. "Really old an' about ta be delivered." Lin chirps.
Aviri looks around. "Should Ysnor be here for this?" he asks, wary that he still hadn't experienced the box.
"It might be good to have someone handy that isn't here when we do the thingy," Eve notes.
"Try shake it, see if rattles?" Gnarr suggests as he stacks the plates.
Lin picks up the box and gives it a gentle rattle.
Nothing moves around inside. It may be packed tight.
"Do we wanna do it here, or in that little room again?" Trilup asks. She eyes the plants warily.
"Here should be fine," Aviri says, casting spiteful glances at some of the larger plants. "They're ... mostly harmless."
"Who wants to do the shuffling this time?" Eve asks.
"I vote we take it to the little room. I don't wanna get eaten by a plant." Lin looks over her shoulder at the weird garden. "Pretty an' glowey, but why give it more ta work with? If it's gonna get really dangerous, this seems like it'd be the time. It's supposed to be opened by someone who actually knows the code so that illusion spell stuff might get nastier than usual."
"Nastier?" Eve mews.
"What if it melts us all, or drowns us in blood, or does everything it's already done all at once!" Trilup says, and then covers her mouth with her paws. "I hope it's not listening.."
"There is a lot of space for ... mischief," Aviri notes, looking around and recalling how it had adjusted gravity earlier. "Okay, room it is!" He looks at Trilup. "Don't worry, I don't think it can hear us."
The little room is still as they left it, although someone has righted the bench at least. Ysnor lights the lanterns, and asks, "Thould I wait out-thide again, mithtreth?"
"An' even if it could, it hasen't seemed to pay too much attention to what we said before." Lin adds, "But it does kinda do somethin' that matches the situation. How could the box know we had a ghost with us that one time?"
"Yes please, Ysnor," Eve says, and the hunchback shuffles out and closes the door, sealing them all inside with the box.
"Who wants to do the honors?" Trilup asks.
Lin raises a paw. "Well, I did start this puzzley mess." She chirps.
Trilup and Eve take a few steps back from Lin. "Go Lin!" Trilup cheers!
"Alrightey!" Lin takes the box, turns it over a couple times, checks that all the other symbols are locked in on the dials, and gets to moving the pieces around!
Aviri takes a few steps back, scrunching into himself in preparation for whatever horrors come next.
Slide, click, pop, spin.. it seems to be taking longer than usual for the symbol to show up. When it does, it's a circle with an 's' sort of curve splitting it, with one side glowing and the other dark. Then there's a painful thump as everyone falls to the ceiling - causing Lin to drop the box back to the floor.
Aviri had not been expecting that, which ... well, he wasn't expecting anything, really. There had never been a true pattern. It caught him completely by surprise, and he flailed as he fell, landing in a crumpled heap on the ceiling with a groan. "Unnng." Rubbing his head he looks around. "Everyone alright?"
Lin groans and springs to her feet. "What did it do? What did it do?" She chirps, looking around. It slowly dawns on her that they're on the ceiling and the box is on the floor. "Oh."
Trilup and Eve both groan. The worst part is.. gravity doesn't feel reversed. Up and down haven't changed for the kids, so they know that they're upside down. It is disconcerting. Trilup solves this by standing on her hands.. on the ceiling.
The disorientation was, well, disorienting for Aviri. He shakes his head, and keeps blinking as though that would get rid of the whole situation. He ends up just lying down on his back, facing the floor, wary that if the box suddenly stopped he'd be in for a world of pain. "Could just get Ysnor in here," he said with a chuckle at Trilup's handstand.
Lin looks down at the box for a moment then says, "Why don't we just make a tower or pyramid to reach it? The two heaviest of us hold the lightest up and she'll make a grab fer the box."
"I'm the lightest!" Trilup says. "Aviri gets to be the base!"
"Wouldn't we all fall to the ground if Ysnor shuts it off?" Eve asks. It's an eight foot drop after all, onto stone.
"We could ask Ysnor to bring matresses in." Lin suggests.
"But we could prepare ourselves for it," Aviri says. "It wouldn't be too painful. No more than coming up here in the first place."
The floor below begins to look a little blurry, and the grout between the stones starts to glow red.
"Uh-oh," Eve mews.
"Ysnor...!" Aviri calls, worriedly, his eyes going wide.
"You'd better be calling your friend." Lin deadpans, glaring at the floor, "'Cause that doesn't look like a standard feature of magic castles."
"Yeah.. see.. Phelix made this castle with Earth Magic," Eve notes. "So.. I don't know if what's happening is the box or the castle.."
The door rattles, but doesn't open. "It theemth to be locked, young marthterth. I will fetch the key," Ysnor says from the other side. The glowing grout effect is starting to climb the walls.
"Alright!" Aviri calls back, scooting away from the walls. "We should gather in the middle." Stating the obvious sometimes helped in high-stress situations.
"Okay," Lin stands next to Aviri and gets down on one knee to make a setp up for Trilup, "Seems like a good time ta grab the box and get this stopped."
Aviri nods and gets unsteadily onto a knee, feeling the blood rushing to his head as he provides a platform for Trilup.
The two of them alone aren't quite enough - Trilup is too short, and can't exactly stand on Aviri's shoulders. Eve starts to climb up to sit on the Lapi's shoulders, but that would mean her skirt would cover up his face.
Aviri closes his eyes and lets this happen, trying to hold himself balanced against the non-gravity while the kitten and otter climb on him. "Lin, help steady," he says.
Lin stands up and holds on to the wobbly tower at about head height for maximum stability. "Jump if you have to Trilup." She suggests.
"This is freaky," Trilup says as she climbs 'down' the living ladder. She gets unto Eve's shoulders and reaches for the box, just as the walls and parts of the floor open up into big, glowing-red mouths full of stony teeth and congealed-rubble tongues. "Ah!" the little otter says, falling off and back to the ceiling as the room starts to make gibbering and gobbling sounds.
Somehow Aviri manages to stay upright through Trilup's departure. With his eyes closed, he can only hear the transformation around him. Figuring they were coming from the cracks, he adjusts his feet (luckily he was digitigrade!) so they keep away from the cracks. "Trilup, try again!" he cries.
"Oh, for the love of... Let me take a shot at it." Lin barks, "I'm a bit taller an' not much heavier."
"The floor is going to eat us!" Trilup cries out.
Lin grimaces and takes a deep breath to center herself. She cracks her knuckes and half scrambles, half climbs up Aviri and Eve then makes a grab for the box.
It's in easy reach! Until a mouth opens up underneath it and the box vanishes, while a tongue made of gravel wraps around Lin's wrist instead.
Aviri clenches his teeth together, trying to stay upright, trying to ignore the sounds. "Just get the box...!" he calls, not knowing it's no longer gettable.
"No no no, come back!" Eve counter-advises.
Bile rises in Lin's throat and she whimpers as she grabs the tongue right back and shoves her other arm into the mouth after the box.
The tongue yanks, and Lin is able to grab the box.. but gets swallowed in the process! Everything is a tumble of rock and red glow, until she gets spat out of a different mouth on the wall. Before she can fall up to the ceiling though, another tongue catches her around the waist and she's gobbled up again... to be spat out elsewhere and re-swallowed, over and over.
Aviri still cringes, still keeping his eyes closed and holding Eve above his head. The blood rushing down begins to make him dizzy, but he held tight, hoping that at the very least he could protect the Duchess from whatever was happening.
"Lemme down!" Eve cries, and starts climbing off of Aviri. "Lin.. got the box.. uh.."
"I've just about had it with this castle tossing me around!" Lin shouts as she wizzes past and tries to stop herself by kicking one of the faces.
That causes the mouth to clamp down on Lin's leg.. and then she's just dangling from that mouth. The tongue is tickling her captive foot though.
At least she's stopped moving for the moment and can focus on the box. Lin grits her teeth and dials in the last symbol.
"Wait.." Trilup calls, but then it's too late. Everyone falls from the ceiling. And gets swallowed up by one of the mouths! With the box no longer pumping out weird magic though, the others get spat out from the walls and then the mouths all disappear. For a moment Lin looks like her foot is still caught in the wall though, before she's spat out with a loud POP.
A key rattles in the door, and Ysnor appears. "I found the key," he reports.
Just as Aviri begins to obey Eve's orders, the Lapi carefully pulling her back up toward the ceiling, he feels himself falling, and tries to put himself between the floor and the Duchess. Eyes still closed, he could only feel as the room gulped him, and spat him out elsewhere, before finally hitting the floor hard, with another "Oof." He groanes and looks at Ysnor. "Of course you come in right now..."
Lin flops on her back, arms out to the sides with the box in her left hand. She just lies there for a while, catching her breath and blinking. Slowly, she looks over at the box, expecting it to let loose yet another mess of magical mayhem.
"Good work on the box..." Aviri says, opening his eyes finally to see who exactly had done it "... Linyala."
Everything seems normal again, although the bench and table are now stacked up in one corner. Eve looks stunned and Trilup dizzily runs over and hugs Lin hard! "It ate you up! It ate you up! Good thing you taste terrible!"
"It got you too Tril." Lin mumbles and hugs back with her free arm. "That was... I'm sore." She scoots back and props heself up against the wall. "Let's get this thing open!"
Aviri pulls himself to a sitting position, checking his body for breaks and bruises. "Very glad that was the last one," he said. "Everyone alright, I hope?"
"I don't want to do that again," Eve mews, and asks Ysnor to bring her some chocolate milk. Everyone has some aches and mild bruises though.
"Oh, the box.. how do you suppose it opens?" Trilup asks Lin.
Lin, ever so pragmatic after being tossed around, grabs the bottom in one hand, the lid in the other, and lifts the lid. "Like a box. After all that, I just want it to open like a box."
The lid pops off. Apparently it didn't have a lid before it was unlocked. There's what appears to be a glass ball inside.
"Huh, would'ya look at that." Lin chirps, "It did!" She tilts the box from side to side and peers at the ball.
Aviri gets to his feet and walks over to Lin. "What ..." he says, and tilts his head at the ball.
Inside the box.. it's just a glass ball. "Maybe it's a crystal ball," Eve suggests, sipping at her glass of milk when she comes over.
Lin holds the box out for Eve to take. "Whatever it is, it'll prolly do what it's s'posed to when it's delivered. Isn't there some kinda payment that usually goes along with a completed delivery?" Lin asks with a wink.
Aviri gives Lin a sharp but not too firm kick for asking that question, glaring at her as the box is finally delivered. "Any idea what it does?" he asks Eve.
The kitten sets down her glass (nobody willingly hands anything to an otter if they expect to get it back, especially food) and pulls the orb out of the box. She holds it up, looks through it (making her eye look weirdly distorted) and even shakes it. "I don't know what it does, or how you.. make it do.. what it does?" she notes.
"I don't know if there's payment for something that's broken," the Duchess then informs Lin.
"We should ask Silv," Trilup says. "If she's still around, then.. uh.. the delivery isn't complete, right?"
"Silver!" Lin pouts, "What're you supposed to do to make it go?"
"Prove that you are alive, I think," comes the ghostly reply.
Aviri closes his eyes and groans. "Can't it ... tell?" He asks quietly. Pulling the talisman from his pocket he shakes it in the air. "This thing can tell!"
"Oh, well that's easy!" Lin chirps. She pulls her knife out of its sheath, carefully pricks her finger, and pokes the ball with the drop of blood. "There. Not undead, see?"
Nothing happens, beyond there being a smear of blood on it now.
"That just proves you can bleed," Eve notes, wrinkling her nose. "How useful is something you have to bleed on to make it work?"
"Duchess, do you have any necromancy books?" Aviri asks, looking at the orb. "Might be able to figure out various tests to prove we're alive."
Lin sticks her finger in her mouth. "It's not like we're trained on how to turn on decades old magical thingmagummies in Scouts. It was a good guess at least..."
Trilup suggests, "Why not breath on it? Zombies don't breath, right?"
"Well, there's Phelix's study," Eve says, then looks at the orb again. "Fog it up you mean?" she asks Trilup.
The little otter nods. "That's how to tell when someone is dead or alive, if they fog up a glass held to their nose, isn't it?" she asks.
"Also if they have a pulse," Aviri adds. "Body-heat and flexibility's another good one, but ... things have to be dead a while to lock up. And I don't think undead things do lock up."
"Proof of livingness sure sounds like some kinda body thing. Unless you can rub yer soul on it or something." Lin agrees, "Maybe it's a fancy foot massage ball?"
"Well.. go ahead and rub it against your soul and see what happens," Trilup suggests to Lin.
Lin shakes her head, "Eve should, it's her weird ball afterall an' I've already bled on it."
Eve cups the ball in her hands. "Okay, there's the warmth and pulse part," she says, then exhales on it, causing one side to fog.. and then the entire orb to fog. When it clears, there's something floating inside. It looks like a ring - the sort one wears on a finger. Except it would be a really thick finger. There's a setting and a gem in it, which blinks on and off with a yellow light.
"Breath worked, I guess!" Aviri says happily, beaming at the ball. "I'm guessing that ring is the actual object to be delivered."
"Cool!" Lin chirps, bouncing to her feet and looking into the ball, "Maybe you can just put your finger in the orb now that it thinks you're alive."
"I think the Duchess should do it," Aviri says. "It's her ring, after all."
Eve tries tapping on the orb, twisting it, and other things. What is apparent is that the gem on the ring always faces the same direction no matter how the orb itself is oriented. Since it appears to be solid.. then maybe the ring isn't real.
The orb starts to lose Lin's attention and she starts fiddling with the box, checking for any writing or pictographical instruction. "With this much preperation, you'd think they'd think that maybe somethin' would go wrong. Tril, do you still have that magic horn? Maybe that's a part of all this."
"It's in my pack," Trilup notes. "So.. it shouldn't be hiding anything right now. Maybe this is how the orb thing is supposed to work?"
"Well, it's not pointing north, so it isn't a compass," Eve points out. "But.. it's supposed to help fight Necromancers.. uh.. it might still be a compass then."
Aviri scratches his head. "Seems there'd be more ... pointable things than a ring." He tries to look to where the gem points
"Then maybe it points to the nearest source of nercromantic energy." Lin offers, "But then it'd prolly be spinning unless there's something really really doomey in that direction."
"It's blinking yellow so.. uh.. warning? Yellow seems warny, or.. maybe it's distance?" Trilup suggests. "The color has to mean something."
"Maybe it's pointing to something else that's the real tool?" Eve asks.
"I'd thought about that, Duchess," Aviri says. "But that'd mean the tool was hidden nearby. And if that was the case ... why not just deliver it?"
"Well, we're hardly gonna figgure it out just standin' here!" Lin exclaims and starts towards to door, "Let's follow it an see where it leads."
"As long as it doesn't hurt," Trilup says.
Aviri laughs. "Oh, come on, it's not like the box has hurt us before!"
It's a visible struggle, but Lin resists giving an itemized list of every injury they've suffered thus far. "If it looks deadly, we kin just run really really fast towards it an' hope we scare it off!"
"What should we do with the box itself?" Trilup asks. "Is it.. just a box now?"
"Mine!" Lin chirps.
"Could close it, lock it, and give it to someone you don't like?" Aviri suggests with a smirk.
"We kin use it to train scouts in how to handle vindictive magical artifacts." Lin explains, "It could also be useful if we ever need to body swap half a dozzen scouts for some reason."
"The magic may have been all used up," Eve points out.
Aviri shrugs. "If the magic's gone ... all the better." He gets a weird twinkle in his eye, at the thought of boxes that can run out of magic. "So I guess we're following the ball, then! Should ... probably have not-fake stuff with us, this time."
"Just so long as we don't get the snarcastic sword from the basement. Do you have any real ones?" Lin asks Eve, "Or a whip! I've always wanted a whip. They're all woosh, crack! And you can swing from them! But a sword could be good for killing off zombies; even the wooden sword did in those moss monsters! Kin we just bring the whole armory? Aviri can cary lots!"
"I feel so lucky to be volunteered to be the pack-animal," Aviri says, rolling his eyes. "I Was thinking just some simple self-defence things. My talisman can fend off the undead well enough."
"Well, Waddles could carry all the stuff," Trilup says. "I don't know how to use a sword, or a whip, or a crossbow though. Do you have slingshots?"
Eve opens her mouth, then closes it, then opens it again and says, "I've got better than slingshots. I've got Titanian tinkerers. We'll make special weapons for ourselves!"
"I'll go get Waddles!" Lin chirps and dashes off.
Aviri freezes as Lin rushes off. "Whyyyyyy?" he says, his voice wavering with despair.