Lucky Rabbit

The interior of the tower was exactly as it was shown in Gacha Love, with five pillars arrayed around the edges, and an open area in the center. Rather than having a ceiling on each level, there were four circular mezzanines overhead, each one about fifteen feet above the previous one, so the whole tower was a mostly-hollow tube about seventy or seventy-five feet high. Looking up, Pandy could see two of the three statues that ringed the second floor, but the levels above that were mostly obscured, especially since the only light was what filtered in through the holes in the walls.

“There’re no stairs,” Thaniel said, and Pandy couldn’t quite stop herself from grinning at him.

“And watch this,” she said, lifting a stone she’d picked up just before entering the tower. Tossing it straight upwards with all her might – which was a lot of might, at this point – she immediately dodged back out of the way, knowing what was coming. Indeed, the moment the rock reached the point where the first mezzanine protruded from the wall, it cracked into something solid but invisible, rocketing right back at the spot she’d just vacated.

“The only way up is to solve all the puzzles,” she told them. Pandy had actually broken the promise she’d made to herself about making sure to communicate with her friends, and told only Augustus what to expect. There was nothing truly dangerous here, and she wanted the kids to try and figure it out for themselves.

Abbington’s face lit up. “Puzzle? Ahlikepuzzles.”

“I don’t,” Geraldine muttered, scooping Miss Cupcakes into her arms. Still, she looked around, taking in the pillars.

Each of them was about five feet tall, which was a good height for a bunch of adults or teenagers, but a bit of a challenge for a trio of eight and nine-year-olds. That was why Pandy had been having them practice jumping and using their magic though, because they’d need to empower the orbs on top of those pillars in order to proceed.

“Go ahead,” she encouraged Abbington, as he started edging toward the one closest to him. “Nothing on this level even moves, and you can’t break it. If you mess up, we’ll just have to start over from the beginning.” He nodded, and the children scattered, each moving to a different pillar. The simple stone columns all looked identical, as did the semi-opaque crystal spheres sitting atop them, so there were no clues there. 

Predictably, it was Thaniel who first tried touching one of the spheres. He had to stand on his tip-toes, but he managed it, which was good, because otherwise they were going to have to find something for him to stand on, and he definitely wouldn’t like that. The crystalline orb immediately revealed itself as what it was, by lighting up with a pure, clear light. Thaniel stumbled back, then stepped forward again when the light went out.

Seeing that Thaniel was fine, Geraldine and Abbington both copied him, with Geraldine’s orb lighting up a fiery orange, and Abbington’s a gentle blue. When he turned to look back at Pandy, the Valley boy’s eyes were huge behind his glasses. “Essencestoon?” he asked, sounding awed.

Pandy nodded, and Augustus waited until the children looked away again before murmuring softly, “When you told me, I thought you must be mistaken. Those are the largest, clearest essence stones I’ve ever seen. And five matching ones…” He shook his head. “They’re a treasure in and of themselves.”

Pandy shrugged. “They don’t really talk about that in the game, but I’d guessed from what you said when you tested Thaniel. I suppose even if we hadn’t tested him, we’d know he’s a Light mage now.”

Augustus gave a wry chuckle. “Indeed. Our surroundings might have taken a bit away from the revelation, however.” He gave her a sidelong look. “I hope you’re aware that this tower absolutely wasn’t here yesterday. I’ve… I mean, the Knights have had people scouring these woods ever since you told me about this.”

She wasn’t actually surprised. Pandy had been pretty sure that if the third floor had existed at Falconet since the school was built, someone would have stumbled on it before her. It was also pretty suspicious that there were actual hidden passageways no one seemed to know about. Sometime in the past few centuries, some chancellor would definitely have blocked a passage that existed only to allow children to sneak around in places they weren’t meant to be, when they weren’t meant to be there. Frankly, Pandy suspected even Augustus wouldn’t understand just how cool those secret passages were to children.

Any reply she might have made was cut off by Abbington’s cry of excitement when he figured out the next part of the puzzle. He’d assigned Thaniel and Geraldine to separate pillars, and they were touching their crystals all at the same time, then one after the other. Bing had just noticed that when Geraldine lifted her hand from her stone, his stone flashed momentarily orange.

“C’m here, Geri!” he told her, and the girl dutifully ran over and touched the stone on top of Abbington’s pillar, which promptly flashed orange once again. When she lifted her fingers, the orb on top of the next pillar to their right also lit up with an orange flare.

After that, it only took a few experiments to realize that if someone touched a stone, the next sphere to the right echoed the color of their magic, but only for an instant. Thaniel glanced at Pandy, touched his stone, then raced to the right and slapped the stone there before the repeated color could fade. It flashed again, even more brightly this time, and a pillar on the opposite side of the room lit up.

With dawning realization, all of the kids looked at Pandy, and she grinned at them, then made a go ahead sign with her hands. Thaniel and Geraldine glanced at each other, but Abbington just pointed to each pillar, assigning one to each person in the room. Miss Cupcakes and Brook went along with their humans, and even the kitten actually looked interested in what was happening for once.

Their young leader hesitated briefly when he came to Augustus, but when the chancellor indicated his complete willingness to go along with whatever the boy said, he, too, was assigned a spot, as was Pandy herself. Soon, they were each standing at a pillar, their hands resting on stones that gently glowed white, blue, orange, black, and violet.

“Go!” Abbington said, and they all sprinted for the next pillar to their right. Only Thaniel didn’t make it, his shorter stature preventing him from quite managing to lay his hand on the second sphere in time.

“It’s all right,” Pandy told them, trying not to react to the embarrassment on Thaniel’s face. He’d get it next time, and then it’d be fine. She was a little worried about getting him across the room for the next step, but they’d figure that out, too.

Abbington called it, everyone ran, and this time they all made it. The orbs opposite from them burst into corresponding light, making whoever was standing there blink away spots, and – remembering the pattern Pandy had been drilling into them all week – the children ran for the stones marking their own colors. This time Geraldine and Thaniel were both too slow, but now they all knew what to do.

It took three more tries before it worked, with Thaniel making a lunging leap that carried him off the ground to get to the second orb. It was enough, though. Lines of light formed between the pillars, following the movement of the people who’d touched them, and connected all of the pillars into a single pattern that would have looked like a five-pointed star enclosed in a multi-hued circle if seen from above. At the center of that circle, the floor lit up, five flagstones that hadn’t looked any different from the others suddenly scintillating with magic.

Without anyone having to tell them what to do, everyone ran for the section of floor matching their color, though these showed no sign of going out. As soon as they were all in place, the stones rose, lifting them to the second level, where they halted and turned back to simple gray flagstones. All around them, like the ripple after a stone entered a still lake, more stones formed from nothingness, cutting them off from the level below. They would have to figure out how to go up, because down was no longer an option.

“Now what?” Thaniel asked, looking to Abbington, rather than Pandy or Augustus. Abbington looked startled, then pleased, and looked around. Now that they were on the same level as the statues, the stone figures were a little bit creepy. Not that they appeared to be anything except inanimate objects, but they were so realistic and yet so blatantly inhuman that it had a kind of Uncanny Valley effect.

The first one was androgenous, edging into slightly feminine, with a slender body that looked a little too long in every way. The way the joints turned was just wrong, and the fingers on the hands holding another of the essence stone spheres each got progressively longer, with the pinky finger being the longest. What served it as hair licked upward in a flare that captured the essence of flames.

The second statue was clearly an Apparition. It had a vaguely humanoid shape, in that it had two flat appendages that extended from its sides, a lump at the top, and two more appendages that went from the center of mass down to the floor, but it was far too narrow to be human, and neither digits nor features could be seen on any of the appendages. Clearly fascinated, Miss Cupcakes circled this one, examining the way it seemed as thin as paper in one direction, while looking almost normal from another. Eventually, she hissed, batted at a ‘foot’ with her paw, then stalked stiffly back to Geraldine.

The third statue was the most human, trending slightly masculine in the same way the first was slightly feminine. Its skin was rough, rippled and seemed to sag until you looked more closely and saw that it was bark-like, thick with fissures and grooves. Its ‘hair’ was made of leaves, and rather than toes, it had roots that vanished into the ground.

“What do we do here?” Geraldine asked, moving closer to the statue with the flame-like hair.

Abbington reached out to the stone cupped in the Apparition’s fingerless arms. As his hand got close, something that wasn’t quite a spark leaped from it, and he yanked the hand back. Geraldine and Thaniel had been about to do the same with the Fire and Nature statues, but they pulled their own questing fingers away and took a step back.

This one wasn’t quite so easy to figure out, though Edgar had done it by working through an old story of a pair of Nature and Fire elementals who – though usually enemies – worked together to destroy an invading Dark elemental. Would the real Edgar have managed to dredge that particular tale from the recesses of his mind? Who knew? The important thing was that because game-Edgar had done it, Pandy now had the answer.

“We have to break the Dark statue,” she told them. “It’d be better if we had a Nature mage as well as a Fire mage with us for the next part, but I’m pretty sure it’ll work without one.”

“Break it?” Augustus asked, stepping up to the curled and looming figure, though he kept his hands to himself. “Do we have to?”

Wrinkling her nose, Pandy admitted, “In… my world, a Light elementalist destroyed the Dark statue, then Nature and Fire mages triggered the essence stones their statues are holding, and they created a set of stairs leading upwards. We don’t have a Nature elementalist, but-”

“But we do have a Dark one,” Augustus said, showing no sign of the distaste all of the characters had shown for the statue and its element in Gacha Love. “So what happens if we empower its stone instead?”

Pandy blinked. “I don’t know. They didn’t have a Dark, um, anything, so they didn’t even try.” Still, what was the worst that could happen? Well, all right, that probably wasn’t a good question, because she could think of a few really bad things, but in the game, the only thing that happened if they tried something that didn’t work was they used up too much Stamina, requiring a gacha spin to try to refill it. That wasn’t a problem here, so why not?

“I guess I can try,” she said. Crossing to the arching Apparition, she reached out and touched the cloudy stone resting in what passed for its palms. It didn’t shock her, the way it had Abbington, and soon her palm was fully pressed against the smooth, cool curve of the stone.

Behind her, something scraped, stone against stone, and Pandy tried to pull away, only to find that her hand was stuck to the stone like a fly on a glue strip. She twisted to look behind her, seeing that the formerly unmoving statues of the Nature and Fire elementals had turned their heads, and were looking straight at her with glowing eyes.

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