Chapter Three Hundred and Ninety-Three - First-Person Platformer

I didn’t know if dungeons had a sort of... ‘fairness system’ to them.

What I meant by fairness system was something that made it so that when challenging a dungeon, the dungeon wouldn’t go out of its way to make any floor entirely unfair. Each floor had a solution that anyone could figure out given a bit of time, and while some of them were a lot harder than others, I’d yet to encounter a dungeon floor that was entirely impassible.

I mean, all the dungeon had to do was make the challenge of a floor to dig through a wall of rock that was a dozen metres thick, and that would stop everyone but the most determined adventurer from pushing through. But so far I hadn’t seen or experienced anything like that.

Which is why I wasn’t too surprised by the platforming challenge on this particular floor.

Calamity and Puffles worked together to outline the route we’d need to take. Puffles had the experience, and Calamity just had excellent eyesight, could judge distances really well, and had a skill that helped him find paths, which all combined to make him really good at mapping out the route we’d need to take.

The first jump wasn’t hard at all. We had to move halfway down the branch that the floor’s entrance was on, then down onto a thinner branch that crossed it from below. The drop was shorter than I was tall, and straight down onto a flat platform.

We were still careful about it.

The fireflies buzzing around were a constant distraction, and being distracted while walking over a huge fall was a quick way to trip. So Amaryllis came up with a game while we were on our way to the second jump. “Broccoli, green,” she said.

“Green!” I repeated. “Calamity... red!”

“Red,” he said. “Caprica, yellow.”

“Yellow,” she repeated. “Mister Puffles, ah, white?”

“Hmm, White,” he replied. Then he called out Amaryllis’ name and a random colour that wasn’t the same one he’d repeated.

The game was simple, because a complicated game would be distracting, and that’s what the game was supposed to stop. By having us listen to our name and the colour, we were paying attention to each other. Your mind couldn’t wander off, not for long since your name would be called out soon. And if one of us failed to reply, then we’d know that they were more distracted than they should be.

I thought it was pretty clever.

We continued our callouts until we reached the second jump. This one was a bit trickier, since it wasn’t just a straight-down drop, but instead we had to run and jump over a gap that was just a bit longer than a full pace. That was about a metre and a little bit, I guessed, which really wasn’t very far. I could skip further than that.

Something about there being a massive drop made it a lot harder, however. I saw Awen breathing hard, and patted her on the back reassuringly. “It’ll be fine,” I muttered.

She nodded, then jumped as Amaryllis called out her name. “Uh, blue, and Broccoli, purple?”

“I think we can stop the callouts while we take turns jumping?” I asked. That seemed reasonable enough.

We went one at a time, with Puffles and Caprica hovering below on either side of the drop, just in case. With all the Jumping practice I’d gotten, the gap wasn’t much of a challenge at all. Then Calamity casually hopped over and Amaryllis did the same, arms spread out to catch a bit of air. Awen was last, and I clapped as she took a running jump and easily cleared the gap. She ended up running into my arms on the other side, but she more than earned the victory hug.

“Right,” Amaryllis said. “Let’s keep it up, then. “Broccoli, you were at purple?”

I nodded and picked up the callouts where we’d left off.

The next couple of jumps were pretty easy. One was a bit higher than the branch we were on, but it was closer too, so while we couldn’t just step up onto it, it wasn’t too hard to grab onto the bark on the side of the branch and use that to climb up. With a few friends there to give a hand, it was almost trivial.

Really, when Puffles had suggested that this floor was tricky, I was expecting it to be... well, harder than this. Not that I wanted to let my guard down or anything. I was fully expecting to run into trouble at some point.

And maybe because of that, we didn’t.

We were all careful with each jump. When we came onto a jump that seemed a little tricky (the fifth jump required us to leap not only vertically but also across a rather wide gap) we did the smart thing and had our fliers carry all of our gear over first, then we each jumped one after the other with a rope tied around us and a flying friend tugging upwards to give each of us more lift.

Being so cautious was probably slowing us down a ton, but I’d rather be slow and safe than quick and risk losing a friend.

It didn’t take too long that we were nearing the end of the floor. “Teal!” I said. “And Calamity, burple. Also, Mister Puffles, what’s the next floor like?”

“It’s the last one. There’s a boss to face, then the dungeon core and the exit,” he said.

“Burple?” Calamity asked. “That’s not a colour. Caprica, blonde.”

“Is blonde a colour?” Caprica asked. “In any case, can you tell us more about the boss? Puffles, scarlet.”

“Scarlet. And I can. We call her the Moon Mother, though that’s not the boss’s real name. There’s two ways of beating them. Well, I suppose three.”

We paused before the next jump, none of us having to really argue about taking a little break to let Puffles talk us through what he knew about the boss.

“The first is to use the light in the room to distract her. We used to carry big mirrors with us to do that.”

“We could have brought some,” Amaryllis said.

“No point. The dungeon core was the light source, and it’s all tangled up,” he said. “Which leaves the other option. There are these flowers in the room called lunaflowers. They have a powder that’ll make the boss dizzy. Run around, hit the flowers, and create a big screen of dust and it’s barely a fight at all. The dust makes you feel a little sick too, but nothing that bad.”

That was good to know. “What’s the third option?” I asked.

“Well, I suppose you could just fight her the normal way. You’d need to be pretty fast for it to work, and strong. We never did fight her head-on. But I imagine the lot of you might manage it, if you really tried.”

That was certainly an option, but I figured we’d try the flower thing first. A dizzy, uncoordinated dungeon boss sounded way better than one who was ready to fight.

“Have the roots changed anything other than the light?” Caprica asked.

“The room’ll be darker,” Puffles said. “So you need to keep that in mind. And there are vines all over. They clutter up the room, cutting across from one side to the other. Some are as big around as a man is tall. Last time we came all this way, there were enough of them that they made it hard for the Moon Mother to fight at all.”

“How does she fight?” Calamity asked.

“Mostly by trying to stab you with her legs. They’re long and end in sharp points. Ah, and there’s a lot of fluff around her neck. Hard to cut through that.” He touched his own neck, which was surrounded by a thick ruffle of pure white fur.

“So we’ll need high-penetration abilities,” Amaryllis said. “Awen’s crossbow, maybe Broccoli’s scythe. Some of my better spells. Calamity, if you focus on softer areas. Can we take her wings out?”

“They’re quite big. A few holes poked through them won’t do much,” Puffles said. Seeing as how he had moth wings of his own, I decided to trust his opinion on the matter. “It’s all rather moot if we don’t actually make it there though. Should we keep on going?”

We were most of the way there already, and the closer we came, the more the Evil Roots were more of a help than a hindrance. They formed bridges across the gaps created by the branches, long ropes of thick roots that hung between the platforms we were jumping off of.

None of us trusted the roots enough to try to walk across them, or to use them to get across one of the gaps, but they did seem to bind some of the branches closer together, and there was no harm in picking spots to jump from where we had a root-based safety net beneath us.

Finally, we arrived at the end of the obstacle. In the permanent daytime of this floor of the dungeon, it was hard to guess how long it had taken us to get this far through the dungeon, but it had to be at least a few hours.

Fortunately, the end of the challenge brought us to another large, wide branch that led back into the massive tree’s trunk. By unspoken agreement, we all decided to take a bit of a break far from the edge, but before crossing into the next room.

It wouldn’t do to face a dungeon boss with a gurgly tummy. We pulled out some snacks and sat down to eat. We had some hardtack from the ship, and some of that strange blue fish we’d picked up in Codwood. That, along with some seeds and nuts, made for a pretty light but filling meal.

That was for the best. We didn’t want to go in feeling bloated either.

“So, tactics for this boss?” Caprica asked.

“Ranged penetration as an opening,” Amaryllis said. “If we can use the terrain to keep distant from it and pepper it from afar, then that would make for the best option. Low risk, high reward.”

“She can fly, though, so it might not be all that slow. And Puffles mentioned that she was somewhat armoured,” Calamity pointed out. “Might not be so easy.”

“If it gets into close-range, then we’ll have to rely on Caprica to stall it if possible, and on Broccoli to strike it from different angles.” Amaryllis turned towards our guide. “Mister Puffles, how tough is she?”

“Other than the fluff? About as tough as good leather, I suppose.”

“Can that fluff be removed?” I asked.

“It can be burned off,” he said.

That was good to know. I could manage a fireball or two to help. We bounced a few more ideas around, but mostly our plans were kept on the simple side of things. Easy enough to change on the fly, mostly because even with Puffle’s descriptions, we didn’t know exactly what we were going to be up against.

So we’d do our very best and work together to overcome whatever was in there!

Once snack time was over, we picked up our stuff. It had been a nice break; we even had the fireflies putting on a bit of a bumbling show for us (now that it was okay to be a bit distracted, I did enjoy looking at them!) but it was time to get moving.

Squeezing through another crack in the wall, we arrived at the boss room, and immediately we could sense the presence of the Moon Mother. The room was darker than the previous floor, and the air was thick with the scent of the lunaflowers that Puffles had mentioned.

We could see the giant moth monster perched on a raised platform at the far end of the room, her massive wings folded neatly against her back. As soon as she sensed our presence, she let out a high-pitched screech and leapt into the air, her legs and wings unfolding as she prepared to attack.

Between us and her, however, was a room full of crisscrossing Evil Roots, many of which had large, delicate looking pods dangling from them.

Ah, that would complicate things a bit.

***