CC 10: Thesaurize ~ Twenty-Four!

He continued flying on his normal route, leaving himself less than a day’s travel away from where his ritual had indicated Daniella could be found. His gut was churning with anticipation mixed with apprehension. The rescue of his friend was within reach, but he was still unable to shake the odd nervousness that came with the thought of seeing her again.

She’d double-crossed them by working with the Elves, then triple-crossed the Elves by creating an opportunity for Joe and Jaxon to escape. Frankly, Joe didn't know if his mind could handle a quadruple-cross; if it seemed that she was about to betray them… he wasn't sure if he would be able to stop himself from cursing her with the darkest rituals that he had available. The Ritualist didn’t want to get to that point, but he knew he would—as his first option.

That was one of the things that was holding him back from being too excited; the knowledge of how violently he would lash out if this was all some elaborate trick to waste his time and weaken his settlement.

As he completed his final shrine for the day, Joe took a deep breath to try and calm his churning emotions, then sent himself back to Novusheim. The loss of mana at the sheer distance traveled hit him in the gut like a punch from a cyclops, and he bent over wheezing as a full eight thousand mana was yanked out of him. Sucking wind, he quickly calculated how far he’d just traveled in an instant for almost the entirety of his non-reserved mana pool.

“That was… something like nine thousand miles in a second.” He heaved for breath as his mana regeneration kicked in, filling his depleted pool with nearly seventy-three at mana each second. “Still… less than a point of mana per mile. Efficient. Thanks… Tatum.”

He dry heaved for a moment, managing to keep everything in his stomach as he settled into his box-breathing pattern. “I’m good. I’m okay. Whew. Sorry, big guy, No ‘donations’ for you today.”

Joe chuckled as he walked away from the shrine, remembering the prank he’d played on Tatum in the past in order to clean up after a bunch of people got sick all over an altar. Now with a smile on his face, he began searching for his group. As per usual, with the immense density of the population in a relatively small area, it was much more efficient to hire a few people to seek out who he needed than to try and find them with his own two eyes.

Compared to the last time he’d done this, the price had skyrocketed; Joe found himself grudgingly agreeing to an entire Salamander corpse per message sent, though it made him itchy to give up so many raw materials for such a seemingly simple task. “I guess if I ever needed a push to work on my ‘Message’ spell, this is it.”

His eyes lit up as he remembered that he had a Ritual of Communication, and he rushed back to his workshop to make the low-ranking magical diagram immediately. “Where is it, where is—here! Yes! I was right. Ritual of Communication, has a range of fifty miles centered on the ritual. Well, that’s more than enough to start chatting in Novusheim. It gives twelve hours of communication, but that’s toggleable. If it's not on, it's not using the time up. Good…”

Joe checked outside, not finding his teammates anywhere in the vicinity. “I have time to make one of these for each of us, right? I totally do.”

This was an extremely basic ritual, and luckily it was considered as ‘activating’ only when linking two of the rituals together. Otherwise, Joe would need to figure out how to connect it to a series of stabilization cubes, which would bring the ritual from a nice, small tablet-sized chunk of tile, all the way up to an unwieldy item someone would need to lug around.

In a very short amount of time, Joe was able to create a total of eight of the rituals, linking each pair together and keeping four of them for himself. As Jaxon, Heartpiercer, and Socar showed up, he cheerfully handed each of them one of the devices and demonstrated how to use them. Each of them understood how to use a phone, and this ritual was barely more intricate than pressing a ‘call’ button. After familiarizing them with its usage, Joe got to the meat of the meeting.

“I believe that I’m only a single day's travel away from Daniella at this point, and I wanted everyone to be ready to swoop in and haul her out of there.” Joe went over the information he’d gathered, the settlements that he’d stumbled across, and what he was hoping for with the next plan of action. As he drew to a close, the Ritualist solemnly met each of their eyes. “Thank you all for being willing to help me with this, it’s a personal matter and I'm not sure how it’ll go. For the first stage, I was hoping to only bring Heartpiercer with me to help scout out the situation.”

“Wow, that was quite the adventure you've been having with your face pressed against a bubble!” Jaxon excitedly clapped his hands and cracked his neck back and forth. “I'm so ready to go in there. My fingers really have a taste for Elf flesh at this point. Yes, that is somewhat strange, I know. But my research is pointing at the fact that dinosaurs used to be the main predator of Elves, but then they started figuring out magic and managed to fight back.”

“You’re able to research this?” Socar interjected with a frown. “How? Where?”

Jaxon pulled a book out of his pack and dropped it on the table as if it was a priceless artifact. “You see, the Dwarves have a deep and abiding understanding of their enemy, and they packaged it in this easy to read manual!”

Joe read the title of the book, ‘Dinos vs Elves’, which was splayed across the cover of what was clearly a children's book depicting an Elf being bitten in half by a pterodactyl. Deciding against saying anything, he instead looked over at the Archer to see if she was willing to tag along with him on the last leg of his journey. It was clear that she didn’t particularly care to do so, but nodded along with an eye roll and a sigh.

“Yeah, I’ll go. You've made me pretty disgustingly rich thanks to those ritual towers. I suppose I owe you one.” Her words came out in a warmer tone than expected, earning her a grin from the Ritualist.

“Thanks, I’ll take all the help I can get.” Just as he was about to clap and announce the end of the meeting, Socar cocked his head and blinked a few times in confusion.

“Thanks for telling us all about this, but I truly thought you were calling us here to go to those mysterious ruins that you made a quest for. Last I heard, the excavation teams over there are right on the verge of getting the doors open. Did you not want to be there for that?”

Needless to say, Joe wasn't certain how to respond to that information other than running out the door with the others following him as soon as they realized where he was going. No one wanted to miss out on this discovery, and certainly not on the rewards that it could potentially provide. The Ritualist himself was half-terrified that the excavation team would manage to breach the doors before he got there—mainly because the people that had gone out to secure the area all seemed to have one common trait in mind.

In their minds: gear adrift was a gift. If Joe wasn’t there to take an accounting of whatever could be found inside, it was likely he’d be left with a building completely emptied out of anything of value.

Together, they raced through the Town toward the shrine, anticipation and excitement building with each step. Something about the physical motion helped soothe Joe's anxieties, and soon enough he and his team each had their hands pressed upon the shrine. Fractions of a second later, the shining metal obelisk stood before them, a grand vault practically begging them to try and uncover its secrets.

Chattering filled the air as the excited teams gathered around the entrance, scholarly looking Dwarves and humans fiddling with strands of mana and arguing back and forth as to the right way to finish the unlocking sequence of the doors. Joe and his companions hurried forward, pushing through the crowd until they were at the very front of the groups.

“I hear you've made great progress!” His bald head and gentle smile earned him double takes from the scholarly Dwarves, though the humans didn’t seem to find anything about his appearance out of the ordinary. Then came the customary wince as the Dwarves realized that Joe had no hair—facial or on his head—and they tried to collect themselves. At this point, he wasn’t even annoyed by their habits, it only made him chuckle at how uncomfortable his visage made them for reasons he couldn’t really understand. Cultural norms had never been his forte.

Offering a salute, the mustachioed Dwarf that Joe had previously met with about this project took on the role of speaking for the group. “Councilman Joe! You have… suspiciously fortuitous timing. We believe that there’s only a single tumbler remaining before the vault doors are opened, but we’re faced with a choice. We need to complete one of these runes, but our assumption is that if we fail, the consequences are going to be more dire than simply having to restart.”

Rune magic was something Joe wasn’t particularly good at; the practice was somewhere between enchanting and invoking. For a moment, he missed his old teammate Bard, the Skald, who could’ve likely solved this in an instant. But the man was two worlds away, and someone would be making an attempt on this in the next several minutes. The Ritualist took a deep breath, “Can you walk me through what brought you this far, and give me your reasons for why you think it should be one or the other?”

“Certainly.” The Dwarf cleared her throat and intoned the various instructions they’d been able to work out. “The first stage of passing this threshold was to stand before the door, gazing upon its intricate design and feeling the weight of its power. It is a majestic building that guards hidden knowledge or ancient treasures.”

Just before he opened his mouth to sarcastically ask if that was truly necessary, Joe realized that this building was heavily enchanted and had been here for untold millennia. There was a good chance that it was somewhat sentient at the bare minimum, and there was certainly no harm in trying to butter it up a little bit.

“Next, we needed to concentrate our will and attune ourselves to the interstice of the essence of these enchanted walls and the weight of Jotunheim attempting to scatter it. The first lock is in that fractional aperture, and only then were we allowed access to the mechanical mechanisms.” Her eyes were sparkling behind her glasses, clearly she’d gained some insight into her own abilities by managing this feat. “From there, it was a matter of aligning the internal locks and pushing them back with our combined force of will, as this building is far too powerful for any one person to do it alone.”

For a moment, Joe felt a feeling of ‘pleased’ emanating from the structure behind her, and by the way his magical senses were tingling, it wasn’t just his imagination. He thought over every word he’d just been told, taking each one of them far more seriously. “Now all that remains is aligning the rune?”

“As far as we know, yes.” She then waved at the odd scribbles of power that were shining along the seam of the door. Joe could tell that a single point of mana would be enough to bridge the gap in dozens of locations, but for some reason they had narrowed them down to only two. “We've been working on a translation of the runes, and we have a rough estimate of what they all say. Most of them are actually instructions when taken literally, while only the last two could finish the incantation portion of the rune.”

She lifted her finger and traced along the lines as she spoke, obviously reading the translated version for his benefit. “In the realm of spells, the physical is but an illusion. Let your mind's eye perceive the depths of the lock’s inner workings. Manipulate the ethereal threads of magic, feel the resistance as the door relinquishes its grip on the world. Unravel this riddle, let your intuition guide you.”

“Runes.” Joe sighed in slight annoyance as he shook his head. “I much prefer the clean, cold lines of enchantments and rituals myself. But I suppose shamanistic magics, such as this, are equally impressive in their own way. Unfortunately, I'm stumped by this one.”

Surprisingly it was Jaxon that reached out and gripped Joe's shoulder, pulling him close and whispering in his ear. “Wait, I have an idea.”

The Ritualist pulled himself out of his friend's grip and wiped his ear. “That's great. Can you share it with the whole class instead of licking my ear when you speak?”

Jaxon made a slurping sound at him and chuckled, “Tastes like a lit candle, your ear does. Listen, I think this is actually being literal when it is talking about your mind's eye. Unlike the rest of us, you have an actual magical eye in the middle of your forehead. Yeah, it's a tattoo, but it is a gift from a royal. Maybe this vault is secured so that only people with royal blessings are able to get into it?”

With everyone looking at him with great anticipation, Joe could only shrug and half-heartedly smile. “I guess it’s worth a shot?”