Duty Session 125: Obligatory Rat Cellar

    The owner of a general store at the outskirts of town has been having problems with rodents, so it did the obvious thing one would do in such a circumstance: it contacted the Huners Guild to have a few advneturers sent over. He was probably hoping for catgirls, but instead, the first one to walk through the door is a spriggan in a hybrid martial artist's gi/nurse uniform. Since the last time other people have seen her, they might notice that her long hair has been cut into a voluminous, but much shorter, pixie bob.

    "Hi, I'm here for the rats!", announces Uta.

    "You're lucky! We've got a full stock of them. They cost a bit more than at the competition's, but they're the best rats in the city. People are willing to pay more."

    "...Dang you're good," says Uta with genuine admiration. "No, no, I'm from the Hunters' Guild," she says, and pulls forward her obsidian badge with her thumb. "I'm here for pest management."

    "Oh, oh! Sure, sure..."

Goldenblade shows up shortly after Uta and huhs as she catches the end of that exchange. "Uh, I'm here for the rat killings. This is the right place, isn't it?" She peers at Uta, she looks different, but doesn't say anything because sometimes noticing things like that gets you scolded. If you notice the wrong difference. So she plays it safe with, "Hello!" and looks around the place. Well, it's a store, right? Not too different than others here.

Goldenblade does have a bit more swagger in her step, but that's for a different reason, and it may be soon revealed if things go as usual. "I'm ready to kill some rats," she announces confidently.

    One might think that clearing out a cellar full of rats would be beneath hardcore raiders and solo players. It's actually not. Not for Amalthea, at least, as she makes her way into the general store. Though the merchant does make her eyebrow raise by a degree, the old Paladin puts on a warm, albeit somewhat strained, smile.
    "Mn. I'm also here about the rats as well." She says matter of factly, dipping her head in a slight nod. "Hello, Uta, Goldenblade." Given in greeting as she rests her hand on the pommel of one of the swords at her hip.

    "Hi Goldenblade! Hi- OH! Amalthea! Haven't seen you in ages... since the soggy cracker thing, right? I think they discovered actual food immediately after that." She stares into the void for a moment, then looks back at the tank grandma. "...I think I will consider you my good luck charm from now on."

    "This way, Noble adventurers!", says the lander. "I, Mr.Shopkeeper, will lead the way towards..."

     He grabs a candle, lights it, looks around conspirationally, and then pulls a curtain, which reveals a small doorframe, inside which is a staircase which spirals down into the darkness. "...the Cellar of Wonders."

    What lies on the other side is... not Wonders. Unless you consider water damaged crates, moss, mold and ivy on the stone walls, and a mildewy, damp, oppressive atmosphere 'Wonders'. "Uhm...", begins Uta. But then she freezes. "...I hear noises."

     True enough, there is some chittering coming from the walls.

    "Time to find 'em, girls," she says.

    It takes a second but Amalthea's smile widens by a degree, growing a touch warmer as she nods. "It has been a while, yes." She agrees; "And let me tell you I'm glad for that discovery. I don't know how long I would have lasted on eating anything tht tasted like crushed dreams." She says before following into the cellar, humming... An oddly and hauntingly familiar song to herself.
    "Looks like an ordinary cellar to me." Amalthea muses, but then pauses. "I hear them too. Let's see here..." Muttered as she starts moving the heavier boxes and crates to try and find a path beyond.

Goldenblade smiles to Uta and Amalthea. She follows the proprietor down into the cellar, holding one sword aloft that glows with ethereal flames licking up and down the length. Cheaper than buying torches. Goldenblade descends into the cellar and wrinkles her nose at the stink of mold. "No wonder he's got rats, this place is a mess. If we kept a place like this back home, it'd get shut down." More Real Life observations. She looks around warily at the place. "Cellar of Wonders? More like the Temple of Poor Housekeeping."

She looks around for the source of the noises, pushing over crates and lifting boxes, but no such luck, anything that was in them skitters away unseen. At Amalthea's observation, she nods. "Yeah, that made things a hundred percent better. I actually don't mind it here, to be honest. It's like being fifty years younger."

    "The Temple of Bad Housekeeping pretty much describes every Cursed Temple in popular media, I believe. Strewn skulls, vines, dust and snakes, ominous creatures... you try leaving a bowl of fruit unattended, I can guarrantee you you'll have a haunted house before you can say 'ghostbusters'. Anyway, I don't know how old you are, Goldenblade but yes, I feel years younger myself."

    "Don't knock it, Amalthea. I kind of like the soggy cracker aesthetic..." Uta perks up at once, even if with a certain delay. "That song... where have I heard that song...", she says, her eyes suddenly attentive, with the intense and mildly annoyed look of someone who KNOWS they know a thing, but cannot recall what the thing is exactly.

    This happens seconds before the joined efforts of all Adventurers eventually manage to move all the crates and reveal a tunnel that proceeds further. A short passageway leads forward, made of crumbling, rough-hwen stone. And at the end, a strange door with runes is revealed.

    "Let's see...", says Uta, and begins hovering her hand over them. She pokes at a few of them, which light up for a moment, then go dark with strange notes and sounds. "...oh. Oh no. I get it now."

    She frowns. "It's a Fantasy Magical ATM... ugh. I could never remember my PIN code in real life..."

    She sighs, takes a step back, and materializes her staff from her inventory. She lifts the item, and begins chanting a melody, the handle of the staff lighting up at different points, in different colors...

Goldenblade pauses as we come to the runes, looking around. "This is quite the cellar," she remarks. "Very roomy. Lots of storage space." Her tone is amused. To Uta, she says, "I just turned seventy five a few months ago. My youngest granddaughter made the cake. It was pretty good." She hrms at the song, but it's just a song to her. She doesn't really remember a lot of the ingame ambiance stuff, sadly. The part of her that dismisses it all as just a game for kids makes it hard to keep track of all the details.

She peers at the runes and such as Uta hauls out her staff, and says, "Uh, I think we just guess until we get it right. Unless you have a magic trick for it." She takes a few guesses, but they're not correct guesses, and she stands aside after a bit. "Anyone?"

    Fifty years younger? That gets something of a curious look from the old Paladin, before Goldenblade goes so far as to elaborate. "Mm. Happy birthday, if belated." She says. "My granddaughter will be turning fourteen in... Two months." She maths out after a brief moment of thought.
    "Ever been to Aincrad?" She asks of Uta. "It's heard there a lot-- I learned it from the villagers in the city of Zumfit on the third floor." She explains. "It's... A different version of the 'first' song-- the song that was Elder Tale Online's opening song. The people of Zumfit called it the fifth song." She says before they stop at the rune-locked door.
    "Ah now this is familiar." She mutters. "Try that one, that one, that one, then that one." She says motioning out a series of the runes.

        Uta frowns. Goldenblade's attempt seems to interfere with her singing. She decides to stop for now, and engage in chatter instead, until the redhead is done.

    "Oh, congratulations, Goldenblade! I feel a little younger myself, to be honest. Must be the healthy lifestyle we're leading. Natural food, plenty of exercise, fighting monsters and swordfigting. They do wonders for your circulation."

    "I've been to Tolbana," she replies to Amalthea. "I'm not sure I've ever to Zumf-."

    Uta.exe has crashed.

    She shakes her head. "Wait, wait, wait, WAIT. Wait a minute. The first song? There is a /first/ song?" She stares ahead, concerned, perfectly still except for her eyeballs, jerking in small angles but in different directions every time, something one would expect more from a computer thrashing away at a massive problem and making short work of it rather than her usual relaxed self.

    No, more like... a robot going through a gigantic pins-and-strings-and-photos corkboards and solving a whole country's worth of murder mysteries at once.

    "...do you happen to know what "this world's Primordial Song" happens to be?", she suddenly asks. "It's important. It's very, very, VERY important."

    "*AHEM*", Mr.Shopkeeper clears his throat. "If you ladies are stuck, you can rent this Ancient Door Grade Ramming Axe," he says, conveniently pulling it out of... behind his back? "...just 15 gold per usage."

    Uta stares. "...Dang you're good.", she says, and reaching into her pouch, she counts out the required coins. "...We might have to split this bill later," she mumbles.

    She swings and hits the door a few times, until...

    FETOR!

    A blast of stench punches the group in the nose as soon as air gets through the shattered door (yes, it shatters in a million polygons). Uta goes green in the face, her cheeks bulge, and she places one hand in front of her mouth. "We... need... ventilation...", she exclaims, a rotten mass of decaying food past the threshold providing the site for what must be the rats' nest...

Goldenblade smiles at congrats, and at happy birthday, replying, "Happy birthday to you both, whenever yours was. I don't bother counting, to be honest. But you have to write it on forms, so...I know what it is. Dave Barry wrote, some years ago, 'There comes a time when you should stop expecting other people to make a big deal about your birthday. That time is age 11.'. We had parties for my sons until they were eighteen and they didn't complain, but my wife and I just went out to dinner for ours and didn't do anything special."

As they break through the door and find themselves in the stinkiest room yet, she winces. Holding her breath, she pulls off her cloak and uses it like fan to try and sweep the stinky air from the room. Slowly, it clears.

    "I think they said they had... 47 songs in total." Amalthea muses, before arching a brow. "Primordial Song? Can't say I've heard anything about that. Where have you heard this?" She asks curiously as... The door doesn't open.
    Sigh.
    "... Of course he has an axe for that."
    A few whacks later and in through to the next room where the stench hits like a wall to the face.
    "Ugh. This is something I didn't miss about the last time I helped with rats." Muttered as she covers her nose.
    "My family always did something small for our birthdays. My husband or daughter would usually treat me to dinner. Ariel's the one we always doted on, admittedly." She does note before looking around and finding... A pull chain.
    She yanks on it.
    It's an act that causes several sluices to open and let a stream of water into the chamber to rinse out some of the rotten food and dead animals into a series of grates on the floor and clear things up a little more.

    Uta tells Goldenblade, "As opposed to Neil Young, who said that comes a time when you're drifting, comes a time when you settle down?"    She says that in a rather excellent English, albeit, oddly enough, sounding British.

    Uta goes dead serious at Amalthea. "Medical grade inspection," she says to Amalthea, matter-of-factly, as she slides her back foot back and assumes a martial arts stance, staff held horizontally. Nose still scrunched because of the lingering stench.

    "You know all those people that get wrapped up in some project of theirs, so much they become completely isolated from the world, and make me look a paragon of focus and attentiveness by comparison? I suspected they might be suffering from some aliment, so I thought, hey, I'm a-" blank stare. She shakes her head. "So I thought, hey, I'm a nurse! I have access to special medical-grade Inspection. I can probably diagnose them!" And so I did on a few of them. And... guess what? They had a status effect nobody I've asked seemed to have ever seen before."

    She spins her staff, at such a speed it could probably cut someone's hand off with the ease of a ravenous bun-bun. "'Fey Mood', it was called. And it was explained, I quote, as 'the subject is Resonating with this world's Primordial Song". The way she says the phrase makes it obvious which words should be capitalized. "That was Gwen and Kita, if you know them. Now, Jazz...", she says, and trails off.

    "You certainly know Jazz. Undine. Sea witch. This tall. Adorable. Can't miss her. Anyway, Jazz... Jazz was different. She had 'Yuugen', as a status effect, but I was either not skilled or lucky enough to get the readout for that one." She sighs. "I've tried figuring out what that meant, but got nowhere." Satisfied with the ventilation, she blocks her staff all of a sudden, and stands up again. "Better. Now, to get in..."

    The whole group enters the new room and... it looks exactly the way it smells: rotten. At the far end of the room is a large twitching mound of fur, which slowly uncurls into the largest rat most anyone has ever seen. Blood drops from a gaping maw filled with sharp teeth. Red eyes stare with murderous intent. The ground shakes slightly as it steps forward on massive clawed hands, roaring a sound that causes the walls to tremble.

Goldenblade can only shrug as Amalthea talks about the song. "That's a lot of songs." More than she could hope to keep track of." She nods about the birthdays, and whews at the flush. "That was good!" she remarks, and moves on with the others. "Neil Young?" she asks Uta. "I think my sons listened to him..." At the mention of a status effect on Gwen, she hrms. She at least knows Gwen. A bit more than the others. Not that she knows anyone /well/.

She acks at the sight of the huge rat. No safe way to melee it, it'd kill her in one swipe before she could get more than a swing in, she draws her bow and begins plunking arrows into it. She's not used to using the bow, and she rarely employs it, other than hunting food. The damage isn't that good, it's a starter weapon, but it's what she can do, and she's quick enough to avoid it when it comes at her.

    "I know about it." Amalthea says. "Gwen was hit by something like that not too long ago... Made a tapestry. I had to stop by her place and remind her to eat more often than not." She muses, before the topic shifts to Jazz.
    "Aye, I remember that one. Yuugen? That's... 'a profound, mysterious sense of the beauty of the universe.'." She explains. "It's a concept of traditional Japaneses aesthetics. I did a little studying on my own before I moved to Japan." She admits. "But I was always more of a mathematics type than an artsy type, so I can't explain it much better than tha------at is a huge rat." She says trailing off before drawing her blade from the sheath, banging it against her shield to try and draw its attention to her with a taunt, as she's so used to being group tank.

    Uta nods at Amalthea. "That's the word's usual meaning in a real life context, yes," confirms Uta. She doesn't say explicitly, but her tone implies that her player is intimately familiar with Japanese culture in general, and the intricate real life meanings of Yuugen in particular. "But what does it mean /here/. 'Fey Mood', taken according to its usual meaning, does not imply anything about Primordial Songs or Resonating..."

    Uta nods at Goldenblade. "That is a lot of songs, yes." And she frowns deeper. "I don't like it. This game is getting creepy. Creepy, I said. The symbolism is unbearable."

    The rat completely ignores Amalthea's taunt, leaping straight for Uta instead. She pulls a spinning leap backwards just in time to avoid her head being snapped among bloody fangs, and while holding tight onto it, she thrusts her staff towards the Rat.

    A melodious, aria lights up the staff, the colorful, mostly yellow lights raising along the staff's handle with the pitch of the tune, eventually reaching the gem at the top and bursting into a flash of light that sends the rat jumping backwards, and docking half of its HP Bar in one go.

    The blinded rat becomes then an easy target for Goldenblade, who, arrow after arrow, manages to chip away at it and eventually shatter it in one million polygons.

    The maze of rat-filled tunnels and passageways exits, at last, in a strange circular room. Torches light the walls, casting everything in an almost eerie flicker. Runic symbols are drawn across the floor in what looks to be blood, though the power that emanates from them causes a glowing appearance. At the center of the circle is a strange looking man with a rodent's face and a thick robe. He is chanting, arms raised upwards, channeling energy through the summoning circle beneath him. As if with perfect timing, a pair of rats appear out of red and black portals, their noses twitching. This is the source of the rat infestation.

Goldenblade manages to use most of her arrows to down the big rat, and then we're off to see the wizard. The rat wizard. Or something like that. The source of the infestation, anyhow. She peers at the chanting, and sort of finds a rhythmic pattern to it. Once she's found the pattern, she can strike and dodge the adds, avoiding their attacks and ticking off their health bit by bit. It's not fast, but by working out the pattern, she's slowly hitting them when they're vulnerable. Or something like that. If it's more complicated than that, she's not picking up on it. She's not in tune with subtle details most gamers understand.

    With the giant rat dealt with, Amalthea heaves a sigh. That didn't go exactly as planned, but at least it's handled.
    "Aye, you're right that it could mean something different here. That's a good point." She says with a slow nod. "But this isn't much of a game anymore is it?" She also points out before the group moves on. And finds the cause of the infestation.
    The robed figure summoning rats is... Concerning really as the old Odysseia Knight frowns. But she actually sheathes her blade and chooses a different means of taking on the problem.
    She starts using her boot to scratch, scuff, and blot out the markings on the floor in a sudden fit of HEROIC VANDALISM, while Goldenblade takes on the rat wizard and cohorts, she...
    Completely attempts to just ruin the summoning circle, humming that familiar song to herself all the while.

    Goldenblade's rhythmical shooting and Amalthea's boot erasing might sound like pretty low-key approaches, but turn out to be of outstanding effectivity. They have the added advantage of reinforcing each other: with each erased rune, the attack of the wizard decrease in intensity, and with each attack from Goldenblade, the wizard is distracted enough to provide Amalthea with a window of complete freedom to do her thing, undisturbed. And when the combined efforts of the two wouldn't be enough because of a brief overlap, there comes Uta, ready to bounce to and fro and generally be an additional distraction.

    With the combined power of the three adventurers, the final boss is defeated! Shattering at the cry of "NOOOO! MY PLAN! CREATE INFINITE MEAT!! INFINITE RAT MEAAAAAATT....", he leaves behind a plethora of shining polygon, a ruined summoning circle, a huge mess, a bunch of tasty rat meat, and a rather perplexed Mr.Shopkeeper mumbling to himself, "...that was actually a /genius/ business model. Dang you're good..."