Chapter XVI - In Which I Get Even More Annoyed at the Elf, and Do One or Two More Things That I'm Not Too Proud of (and I End Some Sentences With Prepositions)
When last we left our hero, he was unconscious and falling down a well (not something I've done before, but somehow, it fits.) I came to with someone putting their hands all over me, and immediately grabbed at the neck of the blurry person leaning over me (hoping it was the elf.) It turned out it was the elf, and my hand was on his throat, squeezing, squeezing, squeezing. I said, "Good morning." He asked if I would let go of him, and talked me into it.
I was feeling better (awake) and looked around to see where we were. We were apparently in the latest waystation, with the typical repeating motif. This time there was a central fountain with many pillars around it, and each pillar had masks on each side. Also notable were the people here, everyone from our last trip, me, Jon, Charlie, Jay, Jeremy (the weird guy we'd met), as well as David Sakell. The surprise to me was that Gegi was there, as the last time I'd seen her, the earth was swallowing up, but I was the only one who'd seen that, so the others didn't realize that this was odd.
Then the elf said exactly what I'd been afraid he'd say, that the whole thing was a test. Not exactly a test, as it was a real place we'd been in, and everything that happened to us was real, but if we'd gotten in over our heads, he would have pulled us out, as was the case with Gegi. He explained that every step of the way was revealing something about us.
First of all, the Balrog's presence when we first showed up. He wanted to see if we'd listen to him and get away, especially me, since he seemed to feel that I might have some kind of urge to charge into battle and get myself dead. This was the most dumbassed part of the entire moronic test, as anyone with half a brain would probably realize that if I thought a Balrog would kill me, I'd probably try to stay as far away from Balrogs as possible.
The next part was how we'd handle meeting Jeremy, a strange new person, what we'd tell him, whether we'd kill him, that kind of thing. Then we ran into the doormen, and the elf bitched us out for telling them too much, as he felt was our constant problem, telling people more than we should. Yes, it was horrible that we told these guards that we were heading to the city of Antar, since I suppose that the only danger in telling them that would be if only lunatics bent on destroying the world ever went to the city of Antar.
Next, he saw how we responded to the torture chamber and prisoners being justly punished for the crimes that they'd committed, which was for us to get the hell out of there. Then we got in the collapsing room, which as I suspected, was a setup, with no way for everyone to get out. The handle could only be operated if a person was holding it down, which is why it broke several laws of physics everytime we tried to wedge it down. The test here was to see if someone would actually stay behind to hold the door open and let the others escape, which I did.
It turns out that there was another test associated with this room. Between Fabio and Sakell, they explained how although David Sakell was not present with us, the elf showed David us in the room, and me holding the lever so that the others could escape. He explained the situation, giving David more info than we had, about how a person had to hold the lever, and asked if he would be willing to take my place to let me escape. David tried to weasel out of it, asking if he or I was more important to the future of the mission, to decide if I was worth saving. He also asked if he could hold the lever, cut his hand off to keep the lever down, and get it regenerated later.
Eventually he gave up, and said that he would take my place, and as far as he was concerned, this was a real situation, not hypothetical. At this point David's little adventure ended, and he never actually got to take my place. It made me feel all warm and fuzzy that he'd sacrifice himself for me, and Fabio was pleased that he'd found multiple ways to get us to kill ourselves.
As for later experiences, he was halfway pleased that we'd turned down the gentleman who'd offered to guide us, but we'd still told him too much about our plans. Next, when the man with the wolf pack came after us, he wanted to see how we'd react to a berzerk irrational attack. As you'll recall, our response was to waste everyone. Also, we passed the test on distractions (again, the faithful reader will recall that one of our main directives was to avoid all distractions), we ignored the farmer and cattle herd that I saw while floating around. As if those were real great distractions, again, like testing whether I'd charge the Balrog, the pointed eared one showed his complete lack of understanding of our motivations. A farmer and some cows, and he thinks we're going out of our way for that? Naked women, yes, sheep, maybe - I mean NO, but cows, come on!
Then again, when we got to the city gates, we told the guards too much, that we wanted to go to the fountain. Then there were various situations to test us, like when Charlie was propositioned, and when the doctor wanted to buy my finger. Then of course, there was how we responded to the overwhelming predjudice we were subjected to in the city. Finally, there was the scene at the well, when we tried to fulfill our mission, and I didn't sell out to Johnny Cash.
We were annoyed at being jerked around like this, but so what's new?
The elvish one started going on about something else, but didn't get very far when another strange guy came out from behind a pillar. We didn't recognize him, and the elf wasn't happy to see him. This new guy started waving his arms, and acting like he was casting a spell or something, and then the elf froze him. He said that we needed to guard this fellow, and Jay said that he was no threat after reading his mind. Jon took the logical response to this, and shot this stranger in the knees.
It wasn't exactly at this point that all hell broke loose, but shortly thereafter. The guy broke loose and started to run amuck. He started disappearing and reappearing, and lobbing some kind of magic blasts at us that produced concussion blasts and knocked out Jay and Gegi, as well as wounding Jeremy. So he wasn't all bad after all.
At this point, Fabio told us that we needed to kill the guy, and left. We started running around like idiots, looking for this doofus, and having him pop up behind us repeatedly, without giving us any time to hit him. It also didn't help that he turned himself insubstantial. We decided that we'd have to stick with the magic weapons as our only chance of hurting him, assuming we actually got a chance to hit him, as fast as he was popping in and out. Eventually, we found the elf by one fountain, while following the noises of explosions and mental calls. Fabio was levitating and making fog come out of the fountain in an attempt to try to spot the wizard when he disturbed the fog (if he wasn't levitating.)
We decided to make our stand back at the first fountain where we'd left the unconscious ones, and placed ourselves so that we could see all around us and no one could get backstabbed. He showed up from time to time, and we were extremely ineffective in hitting him. However, we did get him once or twice, and Charlie pulled The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy from his library, and was reading the airlock passage to create a vacuum around the mist guy to try to break him up.
I forget exactly how, but Jon and I found the wizard with his back turned, and were getting ready to whack the shit out of him, when the spell he was casting went off, and we found ourselves in another strange place. We were already in our windups, so we hit him after this transport, and Charlie was doing his vacuum thing some more. Oh yeah, the others were there too. When the elf saw what had happened, he recognized that the spell had gone wrong, and sucked us into it as well. Then he and the others transported to the same location, just several seconds before our arrival. There was also the possibility of their interfering with our (Jon and me) arrival, and reducing us to a bloody pulp. Luckily, they didn't (lucky for them, because if they'd done that to me, I would have killed them).
As as result of the pounding we gave him, the wizard turned solid again, and we took him out. We took everything interesting off the body, which came out to some pouches of herbs/chemicals/powders, an arm band, and an amulet. Jeremy wanted to get his grubby little paws on these things, but we made sure he didn't, since his previous track record in all things magical was 0-1.
Fabio sent us back, and remained behind to destroy any useful notes of this wizard's, while leaving enough behind to indicate what he was up to, and placing his body to make sure that son one else would want to try the same thing. Oh, did I mention that when we transported, we went to Atlantis? No, I didn't think so.
When we got back to the original fountain room, and calmed down a bit, I actually started to get more upset, since I realized that basically, what we'd just done, was to kill some poor schmuck that was experimenting, and ended up in the wrong place. I yelled at Jon for shooting him when he shouldn't have, and I yelled at Fabio for using us as a hit squad, and made it clear that I would have nothing to do with anything else like that.
The elf explained that this gentleman was a wizard from Atlantis trying to reach "the edge of heaven", but found the edge of hell, and us, instead. I still felt this was no cause to kill him, but the elf went on, and said that this fellow had connections to some great powers, that would become aware of us if this man reported what he'd found, and attract some unfavorable attention to us. Still, this guy was not our enemy, just someone who got caught up in the wrong circles.
Anyway, for all the action, this was actually one of our least interesting adventures, as all we did was chase this turkey around until we killed him. How this fit into our effort to save the world was beyond me.
Sigh.