Instead of talking at it, he mentally pictured the stone and projected an immense amount of will at it like he was about to bust a nut. The light blazed forth from the stone with an intensity that drew him up short as his will wavered and the light blinked out again leaving him momentarily blinded as well as the phantom spots that flickered across his vision.
Cal gasped quietly as the implications of what had just happened stood up and smacked him in the face with a wet newspaper.
It’s will based…..how the fuck does that work. No you know what, it doesn’t matter how or why it is so. Just that it does and it’s repeatable.
Cal then spent the next 15 minutes figuring out exactly how much will was required to activate the device by slowly ramping up the imaginary force he was pushing towards the little stone. He found fairly quickly that it didn’t take that much at all and anything beyond this small arbitrary value of mentalism just increased the amount of light the rock put out. He experimented some more and found that with the precise mental imagery he could vary the colour of light emitted as well as what part of the rock lit up.
After a while he started to get a seriously banging headache the kind that just pulsated behind your eyes and Cal realised that it would make total sense if he could will a fucking rock to light up then there had to be some sort of equivalent exchange going on draining energy from himself to accomplish that.
Cal chuckled for a moment before he assigned this amount of minimum amount of will to get the rock to light up as 1 unit…..1 unit of mental power or mp for short. He was very impressed with his own genius at this idea for a good five minutes or so before he got over himself and started looking around the room as he started to think about moving forward.
He couldn’t just sit here and play with his pet rock all day so he strapped on the belt that he pilfered from one of the cultists, sheathed his dagger and took a swig of one of the water skins before he took his balls in hand so to speak and stood up.
First thing he did was do was take the least gory robes he could find and used the dagger to cut them into bandages. The transition or whatever cosmic fuckery had been used to send him here hadn’t healed him outright but he did feel better and stronger like some time had passed. His gut wound still needed binding but it was mostly to ensure it wouldn’t tear open again then to stop the bleeding.
He rinsed as much of the gore and blood out of the robes using up the water from one of the skins then finding a skin that had some kind of alcohol in it soaked the cloth in that skin. He didn’t want to keel over in a few weeks from infection which the alcohol should help prevent by acting as a primitive sterilisation agent.
He then twisted the cloth to ring out his improvised bandages just enough to ensure they were not sopping wet before he bound up his stomach and tied it off. It wasn’t the neatest bandage and he had to unravel them and try again a few times but he was satisfied with it for now.
After that he did a little bit of leg stretching and limbered himself up while doing his best to avoid aggravating his stomach wound. Something that he had learnt on his last attempt to walk anywhere was that it wasn’t just as simple as walk to your destination. After his little calisthenics session he then finished off inspecting the room he was in.
He figured that cultists performing a ritual that was crashed by a freaking devil PROBABLY didn’t do it in their back yards. That plus he had no idea where he was or where he could find other non robe wearing nut jobs meant he was going to have to puzzle this shit out and to do so he would need to pay attention to every detail possible.
So he walked the circular room for a while and the first thing that he paid attention to after activating the rorch….heh rock-torch in a directional beam was that there were 9 headless statues that were placed equidistantly around the room. He walked up to each statue in turn and each statue held a difference pose. One who looked obviously male was standing in an imperious manner and it didn’t take Cal long to come to the realisation that whatever damage had happened to these statues had been inflicted on purpose and not by animals.
I’m going to go with….desecrated temple. Are these this places gods maybe? Or were they a pantheon that used to be worshipped and were cast down like what the christians did to any pagan sites they came across. Yeah if I was a cultist and I was going to do some shady shit a desecrated site to ancient gods would be my go to place too.
Cal continued to look around failing to find anything else of significance he was just about to walk out the door when from his days of playing D&D he flashed his light upwards just to check if there was any traps in the ceiling cause the DM in his usual tabletop gaming crew had a penchant for sticking fall traps right behindndoors so he was a bit paranoid about it and he saw chiseled around the top of the door there was script in a variety of different languages one of which was English.
Now what da fuck. Ok, that shouldn’t be there. That REALLY shouldn’t be there. Cal thought to himself as he started to hyperventilate a bit as his mind churned at the thought that English and not just any English but modern English was chiseled into a archway in the middle of wherever the fuck this is.
He stopped and he walked back and forth trying to figure it out.
English is the resultant language of one particular place being invaded and conquered over and over again for two thousand years plus a vowel shift in one plus a whole heap of other shit. Old or Middle English I could accept though I wouldn’t be able to read it I mean fuck sake go back in time before the 1600’s and it’d be like they were speaking a completely different language.
Practical joke….no the fucking demon that faded out and the magic rock rule that out. Besides some cunt would have jumped out from behind a bush….err…statue… whatever and gone gotcha now already. VR? No that tech was only a headset, a treadmill and some haptics. No full sensory realism including pain. Not even fucking close.
But it’s there. Cal thought as he looked up at the words that shouldn’t be there once again.
The Keep of Broken Worlds.
Welp. Cal swallowed the lump in his throat as he continued to inch forward.
If that's how it's going to be then.
He mustered some gumption and took his first step out of the room in which he'd been summoned too. Hand clenching the dagger sheathed at his waist, the other clutching a water skein as he creeped forward waiting for the other shoe to drop and something to jump out of nowhere and scare the ever loving shit out of him.
AN: Sorry for no chappie yesterday, been playing a crap tonne of star field. I aim to publish five chappies a week with the exception of Friday and Saturdays as those are my days off from work that I will be writing on. Please comment, even if you don't like something feedback is good :)
