Duty Session 549: Tome Raider

Ameia walks in front as they approach the base of the tower, where a large, overgrown garden blocks their continued passage. Beyond that, they seem to be dealing with some kind of monster made out of roses.

"If it's just made of plants, we should be able to burn it," she says. "Just try not to get bitten."

Casting a flame spell, she burns away much of the Rose Guardian, incinerating vines and petals alike.

Dosbox smiles broadly at the weak rooted creature, claps his hands together, and punches the ground. A ripple of earth travels along the ground and propels itself toward the creature. On impact, the creature is partially uprooted; it flails its "legs" around like a turtle on its back, "Kill it with fire, guys!"

Schneider has joined the party even though it's a bit low-level for him. He's done a few like this, and seems pretty confident. He smiles insouciantly to the two Divine Dragons as this Scale partymoves on the tower. He nods at what Ameia says about plants, and raises his hand with a negligent, "Gunzenro!" and fire washes over the plants, which quickly burn and blacken and char until they're burned away.

Ameia pushes open those slightly charred doors and looks around at the inside of the first chamber. At a first glance, there doesn't seem to be anything dangerous about the place, so she approaches the library entrance. Of course, once the lions activate and start moving towards her she stops in her tracks.

"Oh, of course the statues come alive. That's a little too cliched, don't you think?" she says.

She puts up a barrier around each lion in an attempt to contain them, however, the animated statues break out after head-butting her shields a few times.

"...not sure why I thought that would work."

Dosbox dives forward in an attempt to shield Ameia from the lions blow, only to land directly in its mouth. It chews on him for a while before spitting him out. I guess rock lions don't like the taste of rock gnomes. Go figure.

Schneider blinks as Ameia attempts, and fails, to shield the statues, and will show her how its done. Except that he doesn't, and he looks quite surprised. "Something's changed," he says. But we need to get past them, so... he goes past them, heading to the door, getting chewed on in the process. It costs him a lot of HP, but his regenration turns out to be pretty staggering, and so it costs him mana more than HP..

Aemia dives and tries to catch Dosbox after the lion spits him out, but she ends up just being a landing pad for the surprisingly heavy projectile-gnome, who knocks her to the floor as she catches him.

She gets back up, wheezing a little as she managed to run past the lions and into the library, Dosbox in tow.

Once the three are inside the library, it becomes clear that whoever had arranged the bookshelves was not using any sensible method. Hadn't these ancient librarians ever heard of Dewey Decimal?

Picking up the faded directory, Ameia scans over it with her eyes. "So, the rarer books are further in," she says. "The ones on this floor are all worthless."

To check, she picks out a random book from a nearby shelf and opens it. "Hm, a cookbook. Maybe Asuna would like this?" She holds it up, shows a picture of sushi to Dos and Schneider. "What do you think?"

Unfortunately, the library doesn't seem too happy with her rifling through its old cookbooks, and a ghostly hand reaches out of the pages towards her. "Eep!" Thanks to her quick reflexes, she throws it on the ground.

"Crap," she says. "This place is haunted."

Dosbox looks excited about the prospect of getting Asuna a cookbook, "That idea directly correlates with the improvement of the food we eat, and I am 100% on board..." And then Ameia mentions the haunting. "Oh. Ghosts." Dosbox snaps his fingers with an unimpressed look, "No one's gonna touch us. Or at least they won't want to." The Gnome's high pitched chittering is suddenly replaced with a deep, baritone voice as his eyes glow an emerald green.

"THORN CALAMITE."

Soft vines gently wrap around the party in a way that does not restrict movement, and a brief second after sprout thorns, which seem to be glowing with a dark purple light, on all places that are not touching their bodies. It would probably hurt a lot to even touch them, even if you WERE a ghost. After that display, DosBox just moseys on forward. Whatever creature is there... It decides not to go for the small rockgnome morsel.

Schneider can only shrug to Ameia as she asks about the books. "I don't think she /needs/ books, but she may be interested. Or get some kind of inspiration. I don't know, really." He looks around, but can't really find anything of interest, or any way to get clear, and he'll have to rely on the party to help him out. So much for a support cannon. He's needed as much support as anyone!

Ameia looks down at the weird vines wrapping around her dress, but decides they're not so bad. Especially if it means not getting possessed by a ghost.

Given the geometry of the tower, and assuming the directory is correct, she determines that this is probably a good time to apply the left-wall-hugging strategy.

It takes... a while, but they eventually get to the end of the maze, and after climbing the staircase, find themselves faced with extremely annoying bees!

"Why are there bees in this library?!" Ameia shouts in exasperation. "First ghosts, now insects; this is the worst library ever!"

They still have to deal with the pollinating menace to get through, so she uses Air magic to mess with the bees' flight patterns, making them slam into walls and bump into each other. Hopefully, it gives the party an opening to bypass them.

Dosbox seems to dislike the noise the bees are making quite a lot. The cacophany of echoing buzz words rattle his mind and shake his brain against his skull. His only thought at the moment is to get the buzzing to stop... With Ameia disrupting the noise, however, the gnome is able to gather himself and assist her in disrupting their flight pattern. He rushes under the swarm in Ameia's footsteps.

Schneider can't understand why there are bees in the library because spelling bees are a joke in English, which he never did well in, in school. Now here, he swirls his cape around him protectively, and the magic cape actually seems to work as it should, protecting him from the bees as they are swatted or struck down one by one.

With bees only being a minor nuisance to them in the end, the three easily make it to the next floor. There, they're greeted by... really aggressive books?

A tome lands itself in Ameia's hands and flips open, encouraging her to read. Obviously, she does so, since reading was her whole reason for coming here in the first place. Unfortunately, she soon realises that the book is not only completely consisting of prose, but it's also draining her energy as she reads.

Using three fingers to flip pages, she speedreads the entire book before throwing it away.

"Boring," she says. As another book tries to do the same, she swats it away and quickly casts Mindshock... on herself, temporarily preventing her from being able to read.

When the next book opens, all she sees is gibberish. So she ignores it easily and proceeds forwards.

Dosbox likes sitting down with a good book just the same as anyone else, but he usually only likes to read one at a time, and they are usually Isekai visual novels: not random books off the shelves. No, this would not do. Still, he would feel remorse damaging a book, even if it were a bad one...

"Lord... of Vermillion..."

Quietly, he says the words of power to envoke this spell, for it is important not to damage the texts. The lightning shoots through the binding of the book, disturbing the magic that animates them. "Just hit them in the SPINE, and they'll be paralyzed..." DosBox winces, "Ooof. I felt bad about that one..."

Schneider is savvy to the books' attack, and uses his own literary skill, odd as it may seem that he has any, to confound the tomes where they rest. Most people know he's the manager of Scale's library, and he totally doesn't seem the type. Too much red meat and fireballs for most libraries, but this is Scale.

She's aghast at the state of this next room, seeing all those books thrown on the floor haphazardly, and ink just accumulating in random puddles.

"What... seriously?"

Ameia doesn't have much an opportunity to comment on the place's organisation, or lack thereof, as a great ink monster emerges from one of the book-piles.

She picks up Dos, managing to save the gnome's feet from being turned permanently blackened by the spreading puddles of ink.

Casting an alchemical spell, she alters the composition of the ink to become thicker and drier, causing the monster to slow significantly. Actually, it almost stops moving altogether, instead just sitting there and uselessly flapping its tooth-filled ink jaw.

Unfortunately, it's still between them and the pedestal, so they'll have to do something else to it.

Dosbox stares at the gigantic eye blankly, unable to process the creature. "I don't... what is... I don't even want to look at that." Once again, DosBox's voice drops to a deep base tone,

"NIGHTMARE SPHERE."

An orb of darkness surrounds the creature and begins choking whatever sentience it might have with bloodcurdling nightmares, squeezing its physical form with shadow.

Schneider looks over at Ameia, then back at the ink blob monster, and says, "You'll have to hate me for this," and when he begins to cast, a misasma forms. "Deep Doomsday," he chants. "To the spirits of land and air, bound by the pact, fulfill your obligation now. ... MEGADETH!" The explosion and conflagration are intense, but luckily the fire is so short-lived and intense that when there is no more monster to burn, after everyone's attacks drain its HP, his spell burns itself out. Leaving an inky scortchmark.

Ameia steps over the burnt-out corpose of the ink monster and picks up one of those pen-nibs.

"Well, it was just ink," she says. "Didn't have any information left. But seriously, what if the whole building caught fire? Totally irresponsible."

She sighs, then sits down on that pedestal, head turning slowly as she glances around. "Seems like we've finished exploring the tower, so you guys can head back to Rovia if you want. Or, you can help me loot some books...? I know what I'll be doing."

Schneider shrugs to Ameia about the fate of the building. "It didn't, did it?" He implies that he knew it wouldn't, but comes short of saying so. "I can help," he says of looting the books. He's Scale's librarian, he's not out of his element.

Dosbox agrees, "I can help, too! Ah... What books were we looking for again?" He begins to shuffle through the books, trying to judge the books by their cover, having learned nothing from their quest.