The next room looked different. The previous rooms had been notably clean, but they still read as the kind of room one would find in a ruined temple. This room, however, took things in a starkly different direction. Its walls seemed to be made of metal, and the room it was filled with short barricades, barrels, and even a light fog. Everything was placed haphazardly, as if minimizing sightlines was the main goal, and the objects themselves were secondary.
The fact that all this made it look like a laser tag arena gave Reece pause.
Reece touched the nearby wall to try and confirm what his eyes were seeing, and found it was just a regular stone wall carefully painted with a reflective paint. A follow-up prodding of a nearby barrel revealed it to be a prop as well, made of a much lighter material than it looked.
The fact that this made it seem even more like a laser tag arena made Reece fully convinced he should be completely ignoring this room as far as historical insights go. Okay, I might have been willing to accept that the escape room legitimate, but this has to be an anachronism, right? He refused to believe otherwise.
“Cool room, right? This is actually the most recently added trial, and I really like how everything came out. …Now, this is a bit complicated but,” Roc started, beginning to sound a bit embarrassed, “okay, so: this trial was going to test your ability to fight together as friends – not with actual combat, mind you, but with a mock battle game type of thing. It was going to be really fun, trust me, but, well… Look, this has been planned for a while now, and almost all of the monsters - oh, friendly monsters, don’t you worry – nearly every monster that we had lined up to be your opponents… died, or escaped, or in likelihood both for most of them at this point. So uh, without any opponents, um…” Roc trailed off, not wanting to figure out how to finish that sentence.
The apologies confused Reece, as he couldn’t say he would’ve been thrilled to fight even “friendly” monsters even if it was just in Blatantly Laser Tag. Not knocking Laser Tag, but Reece knew almost every kind of monsters posed a real threat when out in the wilderness and even when exploring ruins. He wasn’t ever in any real danger of being injured by one (thanks to both his shell and his slime body), but he still wouldn’t want to be around most of them.
Tress, although somewhat checked out after learning there won’t be anything to fight, spoke up when Roc had paused long enough to give Reece a run for his money “…And? Don’t leave us hanging man.”
“It’s just that, without opponents, we won’t be able to do this trial normally, and might have to… skip, it?” The confidence from Roc’s voice fully drained before he could even finish his suggestion “No, that won’t work, you came all this way, we can’t just not do all the trials. Maybe there’s some way to make a replacement trial? Like, we still have the equipment, and there is still one monster we have here, and even if it’s not well suited for using the equipment sure we can put something together, right?” Roc stammered out, seemingly talking to himself more than Reece or Tress.
Tress shot Reece a look of “is this guy for real” and took point on calming Roc down. “Look, if we’ve got to skip this one it’s okay, we understand. It’s not like you’re the one being graded.”
Roc took a moment to respond, carefully considering his words as each came out of his mouth “Well, if you two are sure you’ll be alright without it, we can skip it, but um…” Roc sighed, somehow perfectly communicating the shaking of his head through audio only, “No, we still need to do something, just skipping a trial would never hold up…”
“Hold up to what?” Reece ventured to ask.
“Oh, I know!” Roc said, confidence surging back into his voice as he fully ignored Reece’s question. “I, apologize for this since I said there wouldn’t be a real fight, but since we do still have one monster we’ve got to use, a bit of real combat might substitute well for the fake combat. Don’t worry, I believe you can handle this, so good luck!”
Reece blinked a few times as he caught what Roc said, and before he could object, the ground began to lightly shake. Ancient technology hidden in the temple walls and beneath the floors churned as a hole opened up in the ground. The rumbles continued as a panel raised up to fill the gap from below, bringing with it a sleeping, ancient terror. Reece recognized it instantly as a creature known the world over for its endurance and utter indestructibility: a common slime. Of course, the common slime is also known the world over for being utterly harmless.
Reece walked up to and crouched down next to the sleeping slime. It was perhaps a stereotype for people to be endeared by animals and creatures that are similar in form to them
[1]
Rabbit-like people liking rabbits, horse-like people liking horses… It wasn’t always true but it’s right more often than not., yet the slime-bug was no exception. The simple creature fluttered open its eyes
[2]
For normal slimes, eyes are just a colored section of membrane used for sight. It should be noted that Reece’s eyes, meanwhile, are more standard eyes.as it roused from its slumber, and Reece found himself stared at with a clear mixture of harmless curiosity and awe.
This lasted for about 2 seconds before Tress completed her running start and punted the slime across the room.
Reece shot Tress an intense, accusatory glance for a moment, but stopped himself with a wince. I’m being stupid again, ugh. He’d admit to sometimes forgetting that slimes were monsters, in addition to having a bad habit of attributing too much intelligence to them. Plus, they were supposed to be fighting it, so it’s not like he could blame her. But still…
The slime landed with a SPLORT on the other side of the room. After taking a moment to reconstitute itself, it looked in sheer terror at the draconic-looking individual who just kicked it and seemed to be preparing to do so again. It fled in terror out the door Reece and Tress had entered from, officially forfeiting any fight it was a part of.
“Aaaand there goes our last monster.” Roc announced when the slime fled out of the temple. It was clear Roc was shrugging just from his tone of voice alone. “Well, I admit it wasn’t much, but still, wonderful showing you two! Good distraction tactic, it landed you a good sneak attack there, and all without any discussion too! You two really must be great friends to pull that off. You can move on to the penultimate trial now! The real test of friendship will begin here.”
Reece and Tress looked between each other, neither really wanting to take any credit for the undeserved praise. Perhaps a low bar for Reece, but certainly saying something for Tress. Unsure what else to do, they left through the newly opened door and continued onwards.