It is with trembling hands that you pick up the phone. You don't really have to; you already know what they will say. This is the fourth time in one hour that they call you about the database rights. "Do we have access yet?" they beg into the handset. "We need you to grant access yesterday." You are tired of their begging. You wish you could make them stop. And at that very moment, a massive feeling of drowsiness hits you, and you promptly fall asleep.
You don't know for how long you slept. All you know is that now it is dark outside, and you can't seem to recall where you are or how you got there. Sitting by a desk, you decide to look around, and it is with horror that you discover management circled around you, and fearing the worst, you decide against speaking. You merely acknowledge your wakefulness. The developer team's project leader speaks first, followed by your boss and the rest of management. You don't listen to much of what they say. However, one thing strikes your attention. For some reason, in some way, you have manage to finish off where the development team started.
It is with great curiosity that you open your bag to look at its contents. Your eyes fall on a selection of patch cables, a spare mouse, a few memory sticks and a rugged-looking laptop. Digging around some more, you spot a power adapter and a book, as well as a phone charger tucked in a pocket. As you close your bag, an unfamiliar squeaking sound is heard.
You re-open the bag, looking for whatever made the squeaking sound. You find nothing, so you re-close your bag. As you are about to put it down, you hear the squeaking again - from behind. You turn around and spot a co-worker's workstation. Reddit is visible in the list of tabs, and a seemingly empty Imgur tab is selected. On the keyboard, there is a kitten. Out of curiosity, you refresh the Imgur page. Suddenly, the kitten erupts into a shrill cry, and disappears altogether. The Imgur page finishes loading, and a kitten is visible on screen.
You grab the laptop from your bag and open it. The familiar keyboard is there, along with the "lmgtfy" sticker to the left of your mousepad. A document covers the keyboard, reading a single sentence: "You can run, but you can't hide." You boot the laptop, and to your horror, after logging in, you find your desktop background has been changed and the icons rearranged. The background contains the same sentence as the document, and the icons have been rearranged to form the word "Run." You hit Win+R, and in the Run dialog box, you see the word "Hide." Just as you are about to close the laptop, a loud scream and the sound of broken glass is heard, coming from just outside the door.
With great haste, you rise from your chair and leap out of the room to see what had happened. A ghostly sight meets you as you enter the secretary's office opposite the hallway. Thousands of glass shards cover the floor, many of them soaked in blood. The receptionist lies on the floor bleeding profusely. You quickly tell your co-worker to dial emergency services, and are just about to help out the secretary when you see a small metallic orb next to her head. Reaching out to touch it, it starts glowing a pale blue hue. There is no sign of the orb having hit the secretary, but there are a few shards of glass stuck in her arm. This seems like the source of the blood on the floor; there are no other cuts to be seen. An ambulance arrives to take care of the victim. Having had enough of work for a the day, you decide to just give in and go home. As you enter your car, you hear a faint, omnipresent whisper. "You can run, but you can't hide."
Hopefully safe, you start exploring the car. The seat next to you is empty, but the glove box contains some documents relating to the maintenance of the car. The back seats are also empty, but the trunk contains a bunch of networking equipment and a bunch of old broken computers you were going to securely dispose of. There is also a pile of paperwork, e-mail printouts and other papers serving as a paper trail in case something terrible happens and management tries to blame you for it. You've had a few cases where bad things really hit the fan, and you do not want to be held accountable if someone does something that crashes a server or other critical infrastructure. A faint orange glow is also emitted by an object concealed within a spare tire, an object you cannot recall having been there before.
With care and delicacy, you pick up the object. An orb, it is, just like the one that was found in the office of the secretary. It pulsates warmly in your hand, glowing ever so faintly. For a moment, it seems to be giving off a faint humming noise as well, but it quickly drowns out in the sound of street traffic. You bring it closer to your eye to examine it in detail. What appears to be a flame shines from within, a warm flame that burns confidently, like a small child eager to start off on an adventure of a lifetime. Suddenly, the orb becomes red hot to touch and starts glowing with an intense white light. You drop the orb. Turning around, you notice something odd. The bystanders on the street, they just stand there, frozen. Cars are slowing down, and a kid points up to the office building you just left and drops his jaw in awe. Turning to the building, you immediately notice that an entire floor has its outer walls covered in an inch of ice, and the frost seems to be spreading quickly. Meanwhile, the fiery orb, now on the ground, glows brighter than ever and seems to be reacting with the tarmac on which it lies.
You take a glove from your trunk and pick up the orb. Its intense heat pierces the glove easily - you dare not imagine what would happen if you picked it up with your bare hands. Quickly and forcefully, you throw the orb onto the ice. The intense heat instantly melts the ice as it lands, and it flies through a window. A loud sizzling sound is heard, followed by a splash of water. Seconds later, an emergency escape door just a few feet a way from you bursts open, and hundreds of gallons of water flood out of the door. The flood quickly recedes, revealing a staircase inside.
You enter the staircase. The stairs are typical for what an outdoors emergency escape might look like - metal grid stairs moving in a spiral upwards around a pole. It seems strange to you that someone would place a staircase of this design inside a building, but you quickly realize that had it not been for the grid design of the stairs, there would be no stairs here as they would have collapsed under the weight of the water. You decide to climb the stairs a few floors until you find an open door that seems to have been charred from the inside. Entering through the remaining door frame, you suddenly find yourself in the familiar room where the secretary was injured less than an hour earlier. Or so you thought. It was the same room, indeed, but everything had been rearranged - chairs and desks had been placed next to the walls, the glass shards were long gone, and there was water all over the floor. It seemed immediately obvious that the massive wave of water that had burst open the emergency exit had also rearranged the layout of the room.
You notice that the air around you is humid; and your immediate thought is to save the computer equipment that might still be here. You find none. In fact, apart from the desks and chairs, the only things remaining are two orbs - an orange and a blue one. They are about two feet apart from one another. Underneath the orange orb, the water sizzles and boils, and underneath the blue one, there is a chunk of solid ice. In the middle between them, the air seems distorted, like air immediately above dark surfaces on a warm, sunny day. A kind of fog, barely visible, seems to float between the orbs as well, kind of like a force field meant to keep them apart. You blow a breath of air towards the fog, and it dissipates, only to be formed again moments later.
Turning around again, you decide to inspect the wall you came from. An eerie, chilly feeling descends upon you as you look at what remains on the wall. A couple of paintings, a washed down poster of some comic, probably xkcd, and a broomstick approximately 5 feet in length.
Carefully, you push the orbs together. The instant they touch, you are blasted towards the wall, and fall unconscious. When you wake up, it's day outside. You look at the orbs. They seem to be orbiting each other at an extreme rate, making a loud humming noise. The noise gets louder and the orbs get even closer. You get up and dash towards the staircase, and practically fly downwards and escape from the door at the bottom. You don't manage to run far before you hear a massive explosion, and turn around to see a massive beacon light bursting through the roof, straight upwards, towards the sun. Confused, you jump into your car and drive home. The drive home takes just under 15 minutes. Before you go inside, you take another look where you came from, and the beacon light is focused, like a laser, towering higher than you can possibly imagine. You go inside. A mere two minutes later, a violent flash of light erupts outside, and the light outside starts fading. Less than half a minute later, it is completely dark outside. The only light you can see outside is the beacon light from the office building. Where the sun once was, only darkness remains.
You turn on the TV. News blasts are on all the channels. Reporters talk about the beacon of light rising from your city, how the sun has turned off, how everything is the darkness. Experts from various space agencies talk about how this event is of extremely high severity, and that it is basically certain that life as we know it will go extinct. People are rioting in the streets. The weather forecast shows increasingly colder temperatures in the coming days due to the sun missing.
You walk down the stairs to the basement. Much to your delight, there is a large stock of canned food and some large empty water tanks. All the things you can imagine are here, things you love, things you hate, things you have never tried before. A door leads into a small server room. The servers buzz away happily, serving as your little playground and game servers. Returning to the main room with the cupboard, you notice a large metal pipe, presumably used for water, as there is a water tap on it. You turn it on and confirm that it works. You decide to open one can of food when you suddenly hear a loud clang from the pipe, alike to someone hitting it with a wrench. Moments later, the sound of a person madly bashing on the front door. You look up the basement stairs to the unlocked door at the top.
You pick up the gun, but it crumbles in your hands, the force of your grip surprisingly powerful. "How can a gun crumble?" you ask yourself. "Someone is messing with me." Maybe the reality is that the orbs have affected your physical abilities. Meanwhile, the bashing sound gets dangerously loud. You don't like the events that are unfolding. Eventually, you just decide to go for it and run up and close the door, lock it, and hope for the best. As you return to the basement, you spot a huge vault door that could cover the entrance. You grab the door, but your hands turn the handle into a metal stew. Such strength, unknown to man, now in your possession. One might wonder what it could be used for.
You slam your hands with great force into the ground. All of a sudden, the floor collapses, revealing a mystical cave. You grab a headlight to explore, but the cave seems to be very cold and wet. If you enter, you are likely to freeze quickly. There are some coat hangers with clothes in a corner of the room. You are not yet sure whether you should enter.
You grab a warm coat, a headlamp and some chocolate. You bring a backpack to store more clothes, some flares you found, food and water and additional supplies and then lower yourself into the dark. You follow a stream of water downwards, and keep walking in the surprisingly big cave for a few hundred yards, when you suddenly come across a massive hole in the dark. You cannot seem to see the opposite wall or the floor with your headlamp. You make a loud noise and it echoes around, indicating that you're standing at the edge of a massive hall.
The flare falls down into what turns out to be a massive hall, probably half a mile deep. At the bottom, the flare lands next to a pile of rocks. It is then picked up, carried around and suddenly extinguished. To your right, you hear the sound of /u/1Matthias' footsteps as he somehow found the way into the same cave system as you.
/u/1Matthias unexpectedly shows up, and you have a talk with him about the arrow. You then grab him, bundle him with a bunch of rocks and throw him into the hall. He manages to get hold of a rope and climb back up, narrowly avoiding another arrow from whatever lurks beneath.
You wander around the caves, muttering something about going east. You cannot find a compass, so you just keep walking in circles in the narrow cave, sometimes stepping into the stream in the cave. A strange sound is heard from beneath.
You bend down and take a sip of the cold water, but instantly spit it out as it tastes extremely salty. Phew. Approaching the edge of the cave, you call out for /u/1Matthias (/u/Capt_Blackmoore), but there is no response. A very faint light is barely visible somewhere far down in the deep, but you cannot make out what it is.
You empty a water container. Lowering it carefully into the stream, you fill it with the saily water. Peeking over the edge of a cliff down into the dark depths below, you search again for the light, but cannot find it. Nevertheless, you look for a rope and start climbing carefully downwards. It takes you a few minutes to get down, but you make it in the end. You look around. A big city, it seems like. Shrouded in darkness, with a lonely house far off in the distance from which light seems to shine. It seems like someone is home.
Suddenly, a loud thunk is heard from the right, and you turn to find a shattered arrow coming to rest on the floor right beside you. Screaming loudly, you jump back, looking for safety, but are pushed to the ground by some creature. A sword is held to your throat, an ominous face looking down at you. The creature lifts his heavy weapon and is just about the strike when he falls back in agony, an knife stuck in his forehead. /u/1Matthias appears.
You grab the sword from the dead creature. It rests heavily in your hands. A nice sword, it is, inscribed with some strange symbols you cannot interpret. One might wonder what kind of history lies behind this metal craft. Urging /u/1Matthias to join you at the house, you start approaching the light.
Peeking inside the window, you see a humanoid creature. It is tall, at least seven feet, and it's sitting by a table in the center of the room, looking in another direction. On the floor, you can see what is presumably the daughter of this humanoid creature, this orc, playing on the ground. The orc seems to be some kind of guardian; he looks strong, and there is a sword and shield by the entrance to the room.
You decide to enter the house. There isn't exactly a lot to do down here in the dark, anyway, so why not just take the risk? You go around to the front door and enter. It isn't locked. The orc immediately spots you, instinctively grabs his sword and shield from the door, and knocks you to the ground outside. He yells in your face, "Who are you, who dare enter my house, guardian of the mighty realm of the Klaod People?!" Taken aback by his forceful aggression, you freeze on the ground, and the orc puts his sword to your throat while you desperately explain the situation. /u/LordTardus remains back at the hill where he was attacked by the creature, unaware of what is happening.
"We are adventurers from above," you explain, shivering and cold sweating under your fear for being killed. "We intend no harm. We are just curious, we do not mean to disturb you, we are so sorry. We ended up down here after falling into a cave in our basement." The orc stares into your eyes. "When we first found this cave, we were curious about what would hide in the dark, so we went down to explore the tunneling caverns. We spotted a house with lights in it, thinking it was some sort of geothermal illumination. That's how we ended up here. We do not intend any harm. We didn't think anyone were home." "How many are you?" the orc asks. "Two, but my friend is over there." You motion the hill where /u/LordTardus remains. The orc does not seem happy.
"If you come meaning no harm, why then do you just mindlessly enter my house? Is it not clear than when there are lights on, there has to be someone at home?" "Sorry," you say, repeating your explanation that lava could have lit it up. "Lava at these shallow depths?" the orc inquires. "Rubbish. You were well aware that I was here. Even more frightening is the fact that you so openly think you can get away with lying to an orc. And what is this thing on your arms? Blood?!" The orc sniffs at your hand. "Orc blood! By gods, you are no better than the filthy dwarves! You shall be punished for this!" The orc carries you into a stone room and locks the door. There is an open window with metal bars; the whole room looks like a prison cell. You hear a commotion outside, and not long after, /u/LordTardus is thrown into the cell with you. Hours pass before silence eventually falls outside. You try to open the door, but it won't budge.
Sitting quietly in a corner, you decide to have a look around you. A bunch of comrades have joined you in the cage. /u/RousedRabble is sitting right by the bars, and is desperately trying to grab some keys out of the orc girl's hands, but she is holding them just out of reach while eating a chocolate bar. /u/JWLove is trying to have a go at the bars in the outside window, but they don't budge. /u/Achillios is searching the walls, looking for loose bricks. The wall towards the room itself, where the orc girl is standing, is also made of metal bars, like a prison cell. Quietly, you sit down and hope that /u/TheGurw, the dragon, will show up. Far in the distance, through the window, you can see a light climbing down the rope you climbed down earlier. /u/-coalesce- on the way down.
You decide to wait for /u/TheGurw to appear, but before you have the chance, a blinding light is seen to your right. /u/JWLove has somehow managed to light a flare, which freaked out the orc girl enough that she dropped the keys, just within reach so that /u/JWLove could unlock the door. You all grab whatever weapons you can and flee out the door, but not before the orc girl has woken up the guardian orc with a deafening scream. The orc starts following you, running too quick - he will catch up on you if you don't speed up. You drop your weapons so you can run quicker, and you barely manage to keep up with the others as they enter a network of tunnels. You don't know for how long you were in the tunnels, or what happened underway, but what is certain is that he is no longer following you. Exhausted, you throw yourself to the ground, where you rest for about an hour. Feeling revived, you are ready for more adventures. However, it so happens that you are trapped in a huge maze of tunnels.
You dive into the massive cave, following the sound of the screaming girl. The sound seems to come from some house near the edge of a large city. As you land, you spot an orc girl inside the house. She has not noticed you yet. The girl is curled up on the floor. To the right of the room, there is what looks like a metal cage with outer stone walls. Keys are already inserted into the open door. There is also a table in the main room, surrounded by a selection of stone chairs. The main entrance to the house is wide open, suggesting that someone left in a hurry. Footsteps lead into some tunnels, but the tunnels branch in all directions. It is impossible to figure out where they went, whoever they were, just by looking for footsteps.
Entering the house, you find the girl on the floor. You lower your head and grunt while licking her skin. She is visibly shaking, crying almost inaudibly. The appears to be terrified. It could make a good meal, though. The little girl could probably use some chili powder and cumin. It would make her taste absolutely delicious.
Digging around in your backpack, you find a piece of chocolate. You carefully unwrap it, and out of the packaging, a delicious bar of milk chocolate appears, sure to be enjoyed by any child. You look around for the girl, but she is nowhere to be seen. Carefully, you whisper some enticing calls for her, and suddenly, she appears, looking at you with curious eyes. You give her a piece of the chocolate. A sudden glow strikes her eyes, and not long after, she's grasping between the bars of the metal cage, trying to grab the rest of the plate of chocolate. Looking across the room, you spot a key.
"Hey, little friend," you say, "see that keyring over there? If you can give it to me, you'll get this bar of chocolate from me!" She looks at you with prying eyes, more fixated on the chocolate than you. She does not appear to understand your words. Frantically, you point back and forth between the keys and the chocolate, but she still does not react. She is too young. Had she been just months older, she might have fetched the keys, you think, but just as you are about to give up, she goes across the room and grabs the keys. "Good girl!" you tell her, but just as you are about to give her the chocolate, she snatches it out of your hand and keeps both the keys and chocolate for herself. "Clever. Now what?" you mutter with an angry voice.
You start ripping up the clothes and is about to work on a doll when you suddenly see a flash of red light. /u/JWLove has lit a flare, scaring the orc girl so much that she dropped the keys on the floor. /u/JWLove unlocks the cage door, and you all start running into a tunnel system while the girl screams, waking up the orc. You drop your weapons and leap after the others, eventually reaching a point in the tunnels where you turn around and see that the orc is no longer following you. Exhausted, you sit down and rest.
An hour passes before you feel your energy has been recovered. /u/1Matthias is already long on his way into a tunnel, leaving behind him a string for guidance as to where he's been. /u/Achillios is making a list of gear still present with the group, but after a while, starts following the string to find /u/1Matthias.
Channeling the brute force within you, you have a go at the metal bars, but they won't budge. If only there was something you could eat or drink to get renewed energy. You remember you had a bar of chocolate in /u/RousedRabble's backpack, but just as you are about to reach for it, you spot the orc girl grabbing it out of /u/RousedRubble's very hands. The girl is still standing just outside the cage. If only there was something you could do to distract her...
You light a flare. The orc girl has never seen a flare before, so her natural instinct is to just drop everything and freeze. She does just that. The keys fall to the ground, just barely within reach. Unlocking the cage, you bring with you the other adventurers and grab the weaponry that the orc had left inside the door. The orc girl starts screaming, and you have to grab whatever you can take and flee from the house. Behind you, you can hear footsteps as the orc is now awake and running towards you at great speed. You are running too slow, so you have to throw away your weapons. After running for a while, you entered a tunnel network more akin to a giant maze. Finally, after running left and right for who knows how long, you turn around and notice that the orc is no longer following you. You all sit down, exhausted, and in silence, hoping that the orc doesn't lurk nearby. After an hour, you have all started chatting with each other, and you are eager to go on with the adventure. Unfortunately, as it happens, you are now stuck in a huge maze.
Wondering why you brought so many winter clothes, you pick up a woolen sweater and carefully turn it into a long string. It is red in color, and you start exploring the maze. You come upon many dead ends, but eventually, as you are walking over the stone floor, you hear a creaking sound below your feed. Bending down, you carefully brush off the dust on the floor, revealing a wooden trapdoor. Calling out for the others to come, you open the door and start descending down the ladder that is hidden below.
You shine the light into the tunnel. Seeing no signs of life, you start descending. The ladder is long, but at last, you reach the bottom, and end up in some kind of stone room. There are runic inscriptions on the walls. You cannot read them. Off to the left, there is a hole in the wall, leading out to some kind of hallway.
You call out for the others above. There is no response. They're probably busy with whatever they are working on. Either way, an adventure would be nice, so you start walking down the hallway. At the end, there is a door, leading out into another long tunnel. Hearing voices, you hide just behind the door frame. Someone walks past.
Being careful to avoid being spotted, you sit down on the floor and peek around the corner. Whoever just passed were not particularly tall - there were two people, and you assume they were dwarves. The tunnel seems to be clear now. /u/RousedRabble appears from behind. He crouches down behind you and grabs a rock that happens to be lying on the floor.
You take out a notebook and quickly scribble down the runes. You then proceed to sneak carefully into the tunnel. In the corner of your eye, you see /u/Achillios in the ladder room, carrying a torch. Following the tunnel for a while, you eventually reach a room from which more voices come. Peeking around the corner, you see a golden throne.
You scribble down the runes, but you cannot seem to decode them. It's as if they're written in a completely different language. By the looks of it, it might be some folklore, but it could just as well be instructions for the dwarves in case an emergency evacuation is warranted. Proceeding down the tunnel, you start looking for alternate entrances to the throne room, and come across a neighboring room with a door leading into the room from the side. You enter this room, but the door to the throne room is closed. It does not appear to be locked. If you open the door, the dwarves are sure to notice you.
You grab your pack, but decide that there are too many things in it, so you take out some random stuff. It is now very light. The string goes down a ladder, so you follow, eventually reaching a room with runic inscriptions on the wall. At the far end of a hallway, you see /u/1Matthias sitting next to a door, peeking into the room behind it. With light footsteps, you sneak towards him and crouch down behind him, grabbing a rock that happens to be lying on the floor.
You start searching the walls and floors for loose bricks, but you cannot seem to find any. Then suddenly, a single brick near the back wall seems to budge. You pull it out, and a small hole is made in the wall. Success, you think. Unfortunately, none of the other bricks seem to move. You study the brick you pulled out; some kind of inscription seems to cover one side.
Looking at the stone, you try to interpret the inscription. "To whoever reads this - do not trust the orcs. They are madmen. Run for the dwarves, and help them wipe out every last one of those filthy orcs. They are despicable creatures, existing solely to make the world a terrible place for all of life but themselves." As you read, you notice /u/JWLove has somehow managed to unlock the door. All of you leave and grab your weapons and gear as the girl starts screaming. You hurriedly flee, but the orc has now woken up. Running much faster than you, you are forced to drop your weapons and just run for your life. Through tunnels, you ran, for a long time, until you look back and realize the orc is no longer following you. You sit down to relax for a good hour, casually having a conversation when you feel eager to continue the expedition through the mountain. However, as fortune has it, you are now stuck in a maze of tunnels.
You examine the room. With you are several of your comrades - /u/Achillios, /u/SuperDuckMan and more. A loose brick is pulled out of the wall by /u/Achillios; it seems to be covered in some kind of inscription. The orc child is standing outside a metal bar door towards the main living room.
You settle down next to /u/Achillios and read the stone. "To whoever reads this - do not trust the orcs. They are madmen. Run for the dwarves, and help them wipe out every last one of those filthy orcs. They are despicable creatures, existing solely to make the world a terrible place for all of life but themselves." Who could have written this? You certainly are not the first humans to have been caught down here. Suddenly, you hear a commotion and see a blinding light - /u/JWLove has managed to light a flare and freak out the girl, who in turn dropped the keys on the floor, just within reach, so /u/JWLove could unlock the door. You hurry out of the cage, grabbing whatever weapons you can before the girl awakes the orc with a deafening scream. As you run from the house towards some tunnels, you can hear the orc catching up from behind. Dropping the weapons in order to shed some weight, you pick up speed and enter the tunnels with the others. You don't know how long you kept running, but you were in the tunnels for a good while before you turned around, noticing that the orc was no longer following you. You all settle down and chat for an hour or so before you feel your energy has been restored, and you are ready for a new adventure. However, as unfortunate as you are, you now find yourself trapped in a maze-like network of tunnels.
You take a look around you. The other adventurers seem to have brought with them most of their gear from earlier - clothes, food and drinks - but nobody has any weapons left. /u/1Matthias has unraveled a woolen sweater into a string, and has left off in some direction in the tunnels, leaving the string behind him as a guidance. Curiously, you follow the string, motioning for the others to come, but they seem to be busy playing some kind of card game. Eventually, the string disappears into a hole in the ground, an open trapdoor, with a ladder hidden underneath. Presumably, /u/1Matthias climbed down here.
You look around and find a bottle of some strong alcoholic substance, a t-shirt, matches and a small axe. After removing the head of the axe, you wrap the t-shirt around the remaining shaft and pour the alcohol over it before lighting it with the matches. It turns into a nice torch. Descending down the ladder, you find yourself in a mostly empty room with stone walls. There are runic inscriptions on the walls, but you cannot interpret them. There is a doorway that leads into a long hallway, at the end of which you see /u/1Matthias and /u/RousedRabble crouched down behind another door.
Thinking for a second that the prison-like door is an illusion, you leap towards the door, but hit it head-on. A loud metal clanging sound is heard, but fortunately, the guardian orc doesn't wake up.
You peek over the edge of the cliff you are resting at, and look down into the dark as /u/LordTardus starts climing downwards to explore the light. Remembering your dual existence with /u/Capt_Blackmoore, you contemplate the many facets of life when suddenly, you hear a scream from below. In a hurry, you bring out a knife and attach yourself to the rope, thinking that /u/LordTardus might be in danger. You descend at high speed with the knife in a firm grip below you. Just as you hit the ground, you feel your knife embedding itself into a creature, followed by the sound of a metal sword falling to the rocky floor below. You look around and see a very frightened /u/LordTardus on the floor, gazing up at you. You study at the dead creature; it has a very ominous looking face.
You come across /u/1Matthias and /u/KopfTrifftTisch arguing about why /u/KopfTrifftTisch pushed /u/1Matthias down into the hall. With an evil grin, you think of what would happen if /u/1Matthias had actually fallen down and landed on the cave floor, far down there in the dark. With a mighty push, /u/1Matthias falls off the edge and falls down. A few seconds later, you hear the sound of crushed bones. Thinking you killed /u/1Matthias, you stand at the edge contemplating life when /u/krumble1 appears and throws another flare down into the hall. You start considering the potential size of the hall when you suddenly hear a call from the depths, a call from /u/1Matthias encouraging the rest of your team to come down and join him, to see the extraordinary thing he has come upon.
With care and curiosity, you lower yourself down into the cave. It takes you minutes to climb down the rope, but when you reach the bottom, you spot /u/1Matthias standing next to a dead body. The dead creature is holding a bow, but it is of no use as it is broken in half. On the creature's back is a quiver with a dozen solid-looking arrows. Some of those are broken too, but most of them seem fine, so you store them for later use.
You seem to be standing on top of a small hill, so you look for a path down. At the bottom, you spot a stockpile of weaponry, mainly things like swords and knives, but also a few bows and more arrows. You try drawing a bow, but it is way too heavy for you to use. Remembering /u/KopfTrifftTisch's superpowers, you call for him to join you in the dark.
You call out for /u/1Matthias and tell him about the guy in the dark. Suddenly, a loud thunk is heard just above your head. You scream out as you see an arrow laying on the cave floor next to you. The scream is heard by /u/1Matthias. You back off from the edge and try to comprehend what just happened.
You have barely only spotted /u/1Matthias, /u/KopfTrifftTisch and /u/Moonhowler22 when you see what you can presume to be /u/1Matthias flying down off the ledge of the cave and down into a massive mountain hall. With desperation, you light a flare and throw it down into the cave, hoping that you could see where /u/1Matthias went, but it's already too late, the sound of broken bones echoing around the chamber below. Suddenly, you hear a call from below. /u/1Matthias calls for you to join him down there, so you could truly see for yourself what a great wonder he has stumbled upon.
You try poking /u/KopfTrifftTisch, but he looks frozen. Nothing you do seems to awaken him. Slightly worried, you check if he is still breathing, when suddenly, your eyes close by themselves. "What is this," you mutter, "what is happening?" And inside your mind, a voice is talking. The voice claims to be an alternate you, but afraid as you are, you decide not to answer. The voice goes away, and you open your eyes. A coat lies in front of you.
It turns out you were actually a bit chilly. The cave can't have been more than a few degrees above freezing, so you put on the coat and start descending into the giant hall, hoping to meet /u/Capt_Blackmoore and /u/Moonhowler22. As you land, you stumble on some old weaponry: A couple of swords, some knives, a bow and two dozen solid-looking arrows. You grab a knife for protection and start looking for the others.
You utter your command. The computer reacts, then seems to do nothing for 8 minutes. "`sun` rebooted", the shell proudly exclaims. Another 8 minutes later, a flash of light appears outside, and looking out the window, you spot a weak glowing dot in the sky. The dot is still much weaker than the sun you always knew. It suddenly dawns on you that this laptop you are in possession of can do wonders unheard of. You type a few other commands, "sudo explodetv", and your TV explodes. "An interface with reality?" you ask yourself as the laptop suddenly runs out of charge.
You look for the power cord, and remember that it is still in your car. You grab it, plug it in and turn on the laptop. As the familiar "user@ubuntu:~$" greets you, you type your command. The terminal seems to freeze for a few minutes, before telling you that the age of the sun was set. Minutes later, the lights outside return to a standard daylight level. The speakers of your laptop starts making a beeping sound, before abruptly shutting down.
You turn the computer back on. It seems to work fine still. However, a strange green bar seems to have appeared at the bottom of the screen. It is 20% full. You don't know what it's for, and it wasn't there just minutes ago. Otherwise, the familiar "user@ubuntu:~$" lights up on the screen.
Your commands yield results. The shell proudly exclaims it running Ubuntu Linux x86_64. A version number "3.13.0-32-generic" lights up on the screen, a rather old kernel version, actually. The current date is also visible. As it turns out, the home directory contains exactly one subdirectory, "realitytools". You cd in, and cd into the nested "bin" folder. You try to run a ls, but there are too many files to make sense of the results.
Suddenly, you hear a sound of someone bashing on the front door. The curtains are covered, but your instincts tell you that you do not want to open the curtains. You look around for a possible escape route, and the staircase to the basement catches your attention.
You enter the basement while the machine does its upgrades. Locking the door behind you, you feel at least somewhat safe. While Ubuntu upgrades to 3.13.0-74, you decide to have a look around. A cupboard filled with canned food is placed against one wall, along with some big empty water tanks. A water pipe with a tap goes down one wall, and opposite that, a door leads into a server room. A vault door can be closed over the staircase, so you close the door and secure it. There is also a toolbox with various rather odd tools, like a pickaxe, shovel and really heavy sledgehammer. There is also a broomstick, a bottle of dishwashing liquid and a sponge. In one corner, there is a rack of coat hangers, on which there is a various assortment of old rain clothes, wind coats and fleece and wool jackets. There is also a winter parka and thick, warm-looking pants for use in the cold. Next to it is another cupboard with an assortment of t-shirts and other summer wear. You can hear a faint trickle of water from underneath the stone floor.
You enter the server room and put your laptop to charge, also plugging it into the network. The upgrades suddenly speed up, and they finish within a minute. You hear a loud thud from the main room in the basement, and upon investigation, it seems like the sledgehammer, which had been precariously positioned against the wall, had fallen over for some reason. The thud is followed by a faint splashing sound from somewhere underneath.
You grab the heavy sledgehammer and strike the floor with a mighty force. The stone floor collapses, revealing a surprisingly cold, and wet cave underneath. A stream of water flows from one end down into the depths of the dark. You contemplate whether or not you want to enter the mysterious cave while the water tanks fill up.
You grab a flashlight and put on a massive amount of winter clothes. Bringing some additional supplies in a backpack, you lower yourself into the cave. You quickly start to sweat under the multiple layers of winter clothes you wear. Far in the distance, you can briefly see a red flair thrown by /u/KopfTrifftTisch disappear into the dark, who has found his way into the same cave from another place.
You raise your voice, but it falls on deaf ears - for now. You decide to further explore the cave, moving in the direction of the light. There is no response. The cave is really big and easy to follow, so you start walking downhill, following the stream of water. Meanwhile, you can feel you are getting really hot in your layers of clothes.
You stow some clothes in your backpack and take a sip of the water. It tastes salty. From far ahead, you can hear /u/KopfTrifftTisch call out about some guy deep down in a dark hall. Then, a faint thunk is heard in his direction, followed by a scream.
You move slowly towards the scream, protecting yourself from whatever fate has befallen the adventurer ahead. You see /u/KopfTrifftTisch, but he doesn't appear to have seen you yet. /u/KopfTrifftTisch sits a little bit away from the edge of what appears to be a massive hall of stone below, and an arrow lies by his side. It becomes clear that the arrow was shot by someone down there, possibly the person /u/KopfTrifftTisch was talking about.
/u/KopfTrifftTisch suddenly sees you, and explains what happened. He then grabs hold of you, and throws you down into the hall with a pile of rocks. Just in time, you manage to grab a rope and climb back up, narrowly avoiding another arrow from beneath.
You ask /u/KofpTrifftTisch why he would do such a thing as pushing you off the ledge. He starts apologizing and says that he just got a sudden urge to push you off, sort of a scientific experiment as to what would happen if a human was pushed off a cliff. You do not really believe his excuses, but you let it go as you do not want a fight with him.
Then, out of nowhere, /u/Moonhowler22 appears and with a mighty push, you fall down deep into the hall. You fly for surprisingly long before you abruptly land and hear a crushing sound beneath you. Your backpack softened the impact, but as you roll around, you see the body of some creature, crushed under the weight of your impact, lying dead on the ground. In his hand is a broken bow, and he has a quiver of arrows on his back. The hall lights up by /u/krumble1's flare, and reveals itself to be a massive underground city. Seeing nobody else in the hall, you eagerly call for your team of adventurers to come down for themselves.
Filled with awe, you stare out over the hidden cityscape of the cave. /u/Moonhowler22 has joined your party, and has descended from what appears to be a hill. He is studying a collection of swords, knives and bows, one of which he tries to draw without much success. He has called out for /u/KopfTrifftTisch, hoping that he could assist him with the weapon. Meanwhile, /u/KopfTrifftTisch and /u/krumble1 remain in the cave high above. Not yet certain of whether they should descend, they reluctantly peek down from the edge.
You call out for the adventurers above, but they don't seem willing to join your party. They seem a little afraid to descend into the deep, after seeing how /u/KopfTrifftTisch was almost shot with an arrow. Either way, you grab some weapons and prepare for an adventure with /u/Moonhowler22. Around the hill, there are buildings hewn from stone, and roads and streets keep the houses apart. Some of the buildings are low, others are tall. Off in the distance, there is a lonely house with a faint light from one of the windows.
You approach the house cautiously with /u/Moonhowler22. Being careful to avoid being spotted, you peek into the window. There is a table in the house, and around it, a single man sits eating dinner. Describing him as a man might be a bit generous; he looks more like an orc, and next to the door rests a sword and shield. From the looks of it, this orc is one of the guardians of the city. Tall, he is, a full seven feet, and he looks very strong.
Out from a closet runs a small girl, a child of the orc, playing hide and seek with herself. The guardian orc tries to make her eat as well, but she does not appear hungry. Blocks of stone cover the floor, as if the roof had collapsed at some point. The girl seems to pick up these blocks with ease as she tries to build a shelter for herself to hide in.
/u/krumble1 appears from behind with a rugged knife in hand. He explains that he climbed down to meet the two of you, and looks like he is eager to go on an adventure.
Comparing your inventory with the others', it becomes clear that you didn't really bring much down here. All you have is a coat, some flares and the knife you picked up earlier. In the pockets of your coat, you find some keys that probably belong to a cupboard of some kind. /u/Capt_Blackmoore and /u/Moonhowler22 have significantly more gear with them. Both of them have some heavy looking backpacks, filled with plenty of food, water and various clothes. There is also a spare rope, and a bunch of climbing gear. /u/Capt_Blackmoore manages to dig out a spare headlamp, which he gives you, seeing that you didn't have any good light sources. In his hands, /u/Capt_Blackmoore carries a sword, knife, and bow and arrows. You ask /u/Moonhowler22 if he carries anything of use, but he seems unresponsive.
After a lengthy discussion, you have made up your mind. There isn't exactly a lot to do down here in the dark, anyway, so why not just take the risk? You go around to the front door and knock on the door. From the inside, you can hear footsteps approaching. The door opens, and as soon as the orc spots you, he instinctively grabs his sword and shield from the door, and yells, "Who are you, who dare enter the mighty realm of the Klaod People?!" Taken aback by his forceful aggression, you stumble backwards and trip over a rock. Ending up on your back, the orc puts his sword to your throat while you desperately explain the situation. Your friends hide around the corner, so far having gone unnoticed by the orc.
"We are adventurers from above," you explain, shivering and cold sweating under your fear for being killed. "We intend no harm. We ended up down here after falling into a cave in our basement." With slow movements, you slide your knife carefully away. "When we first found this cave, we were curious, so we went down to explore. Not knowing where to go or what to do, we went to the only house with lights in it. That's how we ended up here. We do not intend any harm." "How many are you?" the orc asks. "Four in total. But one decided against going down here, so we are three down here." You motion for the others to come. They slowly walk into the light, carefully putting their weapons on the ground. "Very well," the orc says, motioning for you to enter.
You find yourself around the table inside the house. It is a relatively small space, but the orc has found some extra chairs for the three of you, and you sit down with him. He has brought your weapons and equipment inside, so they lie safely on the floor inside the door. The orc pours some soup for you, and you thank him and start eating. Delicious, it is, the soup. It has been a while since your last proper meal, so you are very glad to have been accepted into the orc's home. You look around and study the interior of the room. The orc's daughter is out of sight.
"Allow me to introduce myself," the orc starts. "My name is Vlorg. I am of the guardian force. Sorry for scaring you when you got here. We are a bit wary of foreigners around here, you see. A dark history has brought us to where we are today. A long, long time ago, hundreds of years back, this society used to thrive. We were a powerful people, we were skilled miners, and we prospered like never before. Back in the day, our people were the ones who dug out this hall," Vlorg says, motioning towards the window. "All that changed the day the dwarves attacked."
"Dwarves?" you inquire. "Yes. What we did not know when we built this place was that far beneath us, miles underground, there was a dwarven people. The folklore has it that they were threatened by our presence. We do not know for sure. All we know is that one day, the guards raised the alarm, and not even had we managed to draw our weapons before the dwarves were upon us. Thousands, they were. Raging, they went full on attack mode on us. We lost many people that day." Vlorg sheds a tear. "Normally, people think of orcs as evil creatures, but the truth is, we have been too preoccupied by the dwarves to bother declaring war against any other people. Had it not been for the fact that we are at war with the dwarves, you would not be alive right now." Vlorg's face takes on a disgruntled look.
"The Great Invasion, as we call it, lasted for days. Most of them came on the first day, but after three days, we were still fighting. We did our best to defend the city, but some soldiers made it past our barricades and lit fire to our homes, and crushed everything in their path. Families were brutally murdered. Children wandered the streets, both parents dead. It was mayhem, chaos everywhere. We are still attacked now and then, but nothing as bad as that fateful day. We never fully recovered, Only a few of us are left long, and I am afraid it won't be long before we leave either."
"Where would you go?" you asked. "Where did the others go?" "To Utharia," Vlorg responded. "It is an orc nation far to the north of here. None of us want to go, really. We know that if we go there, we will be taken as slaves. The people of Utharia hate foreigners, and hardly anyone who have gone have made it back alive. They all tell the same story - they were taken as slaves, forced to work under inhumane conditions, in shivering cold and blazing heat, pulling heavy loads of gold and silver from the mines down below. It is a terrible place to go to, but many still left because all they had ever fought for back here had been lost anyway. The only way to win would be to fight the dwarves, but even going near the entrance to their secret lair is suicide. We have sent people before, but nobody have returned. Once, we received a wooden box with a white powder. Most likely, it was the ground down bones of one of our soldiers. It is really terrible. We feel helpless, there is nothing we feel we can do." Vlorg starts sobbing quietly.
Feeling sorry for the poor orc, you ask him if there is anything you can do to help them in the struggle against the evil dwarves. "For centuries, we have been thinking of this question, and everything we have come up with has failed. In the end, we keep ending up with the same last resort - fighting off the dwarves. Of course, I won't stop you if you want to fight them, but you'll probably not survive the ordeal. The dwarves are many, and they all follow the orders of their Queen Yokheda. We imagine that if we somehow manage to kill off the queen, we could actually be within reach of winning the war. But the dwarves know all of us; an orc isn't exactly hard to recognize. Humans, on the other hand... I don't think they have seen your kind before. Maybe you could infiltrate them, I don't know. Still, it's a gamble, and actually defeating her would be nigh impossible."
You ask the dwarves if they have any weaknesses. "All we know is that they are sickly addicted to metals, and that crystal known as mithril. Their entire society, from what we've heard, is built around the extraction of those metals, and we've seen mithril before too. It's also a very strong material; we learned that the hard way in the war when dwarves came to us armored in that stuff. Apart from that, no, there are not any known weaknesses. Nobody who has ventured in there has ever returned alive to speak of it. And if you are going down there, you might as well take this. Maybe you could use it to trade for something." Vlorg tosses you a pouch with some silver in it. You look at /u/Capt_Blackmoore and /u/Moonhowler22, asking them what to do next.
You decide to ask if Vlorg has any mithril equipment or other good weapons. "I may have some," he replies, "let me have a look in the closet." He starts digging around in a closet, and pulls out a shiny white shirt made of some white crystal, and a very smooth and clean steel sword. "I have these. A mithril armor piece and a sword. We managed to capture this from one of the dwarves not long after the war. Some drunk soldier who had wandered into our realm, looking pretty unfit for a fight. We quickly eliminated him and took it." The mithril shirt glitters in the light. "You can have it if you want, but beware that the dwarves know that we took it from them. If you go down there wearing this, they may as well recognize you as an enemy and take you down. Only dwarves are supposed to have access to this stuff, hardly anyone even knows it exists. They normally wear another garment or armor of some kind on top of it to hide it. It makes them look much weaker than they are." Vlorg hands you the mithril shirt. It is very light.
"The sword was also carried by that soldier. It is of very high quality, at least compared to anything we've ever made. Many of the dwarves used this type of weapon in the war." You inspect the sword. "We have swords like that where we come from, too," you tell him. "I figured so," Vlorg replies. "But I don't think your swords have runic inscriptions like these." He motions to some inscriptions on the hilt and blade of the sword. "It is up to you if you want it, but beware that if the dwarves notice that it is theirs, they will not take it kindly."
You head off towards the dwarves, leaving most of your stuff behind. The dwarves will probably confiscate it anyway. Vlorg points in the direction of a tunnel leading to the dwarven entrance. "Before you leave, you should know about the dwarven leader - Queen Yokheda. She is the one protecting the dwarves. If you are to stand a chance of defeating them, the queen is the person that needs to be eliminated first. We don't know where she hides, but we know that she is down there somewhere." He wishes you good luck on your adventure as you leave. About 100 yards down the tunnel there is a big cave, in which the gateway to the dwarven settlement lies.
"Halt!" the guarding dwarf commands as you approach. "Who are you, and what is your purpose?" "We are /u/Moonhowler22, /u/krumble1 and /u/Capt_Blackmoore. We are humans who have managed to get lost in these magnificent caves. We come from above," you say. The dwarf inquires, "Have you by chance seen any orcs around?" while staring at you, trying to measure your strength by your looks.
You tell the dwarves who you are and what you have seen so far. "We went through a massive cave earlier, with what appeared to be a bunch of abandoned buildings, almost like a city that had just been left. It looked like some ancient civilization had once inhabited the place. And I don't know what this orc thing you talk about is?" you ask. "The orcs are old enemies of ours. They used to inhabit that city you found, but we killed most of them in the war. They are terrible, terrible creatures, and will do anything corrupt the world for their own gain," the dwarven guard answers. "They deserve not to live. Be glad you didn't met them. Come with us," he says while motioning you to follow him. Another guard takes his place.
"We are a dwarven society. I am Thakhuki Dimstone, guardian of the realm. We dwarves have been living here for millennia." Thakhuki takes you to a vantage point where you see dwarves moving in formation along various pathways, in a big cavern, carrying pickaxes. "We are mining people. Over the years, we have collected vast amounts of gold, which we use to build statues and trade with other people. We have built up wealth. However, long ago, the orcs made for a threatening presence. We had no choice but to attack them. Had they mined any further, they would have ended up right in our mineral reserves and stolen all of our values." Questioningly, you look at /u/Moonhowler22 and /u/Capt_Blackmoore.
Thakhuki takes you to a large dining hall. "I am sure you are hungry after having ended up here. Here is some bread and mead. It tastes very good, I promise." He sits down with you and takes a bite of his own bread. You sit down and questioningly take a bite yourself while carefully sipping the mead.
You ask Thakhuki your question. "Our vast wealth has bought us into many alliances, and we have obtained food supplies from other clans. It is a long way from here, but we have a long railway that helps us bring stuff back and forth," Thakhuki says. "Over time, we managed to build up a powerful army. We were ready for war when we became aware of the orcs' presence. After the first war, we lost a lot of men, but we have since rebuilt. Our army grew to its former size, and keeping the orcs at bay from then on was an easy task. Most of the common miners do not care much about the situation. They just keep up their normal activities, pretending like nothing is happening. I guess they have more important matters to worry about."
You are interested in adventure, so you ask Vlorg to take you to the entrance to the dwarven settlement below. Repeatedly, he tries to talk you out of it, saying that it's such a bad idea, it is madness to head down there, that you will be slaughtered the moment you set foot in their tunnels, but there is little he can do to stop you. As you part ways, he tells you about the dwarven queen, Queen Yokheda, who is the one ruling the dwarves and protecting them, and that if you are to stand a chance of defeating them, the queen is the person that needs to be eliminated first. About 100 yards down the tunnel there is a big cave, in which the gateway to the dwarven settlement lies.
"Halt!" the guarding dwarf commands as you approach. "Who are you, and what is your purpose?" "I am /u/25russianbear25, a human who has managed to get lost in these magnificent caves. I come from above," you say. The dwarf inquires, "Have you by chance seen any orcs around?" while staring at you, trying to measure your strength by your looks.
A green orb falls from the sky, but lands with a hard thud somewhere in the desert. It evolves and grows into what becomes a great Pokémon, longing to finally intervene and save the day. As Rayquaza looks around, it sees a hill over in the distance. Taking off with its mighty dragon wings, it flies over and examines the hill. A small stream of water disappears into the hill at its foot. Steamy water vapor floods out a hole in the top. It stomps at the hill, and part of it collapses, revealing a steaming hot cave below. Being a dragon, you decide against entering this cave, as it seems oddly small and you do not want to be stuck in a boiling cave of water. High above, some eagles soar, watching over the desert.
You take off from the ground, flapping your majestic wings, you quickly gain altitude. High above, the eagles soar, but you are no match for them. As you swallow them whole, you let out a majestic roar, which is sure to send any person within a mile's reach running in the arms of their mothers. From high above, you can see something; far off into the horizon you can see a city, with a lonely hospital about a mile and a half away from it. The sun reflects in what appears to be a trail of some form of liquid running from the hospital parking lot towards some hill, where it disappears. From the city, a powerful beacon light soars skywards from a ruined office building.
You turn towards the hospital on the horizon, flying with great speed. As you arrive, an ambulance catches your attention. Flying down, you take a great bite. The metal bends in your mouth, and scratches your throat as it slides down to your stomach. A small white orb falls out of some of the wreckage. The end of the slime trail, previously hidden, turns out to be a cave. The trail ends abruptly at the entrance. Some strange, glowing fluid is spilled by its entrance.
You lower yourself down to the ground to smell the orb, but underestimating the force of your breath, the orb is sucked into your nostril and disappears. You cannot seem to have picked up any particular smell from the orb. You look towards the hospital again. The lights are on inside, but there are no cars remaining in the parking lot. Peeking inside the building, it becomes clear what whoever were here, left in a hurry, and it cannot have been long ago. The door to the cafeteria is also open.
You fly towards the cafeteria and enter the door. You shriek as you notice how easily you passed through - your body has shrunk, significantly, you are not much larger than a human being at this point. On the cafeteria shelves, you notice some remaining baguettes, a bowl of delicious looking soup and a large sausage. There is also a vending machine, filled with some soda and water. A coffee dispenser is placed near the door to the reception. Behind the counter, there is a trail of blood, mixed with some dangerous looking slime.
You grab the sausage, slicing it with a kitchen knife. The piece fits perfectly into the coin slot of the machine. The machine appears to be malfunctioning, as five different types of soda suddenly fall out of the tray, together with three bottles of water.
You pick up a few bottles of soda from the floor, open them and pour the contents into the bowl of soup. The bowl overflows, leaving some of the sparkly mixture flowing down onto the floor. As it touches the slime pool, it starts reacting vigorously, sending orange sparks flying. You take the remaining empty bottles and eat them. They taste like plastic.
You jump over the counter and land on the other side, careful not to land in the pool of slime. You bend down and study the sparks closely. Bright orange, they are, with a trail of black smoke behind them. A spark lands on one of your claws, leaving a small black burn.
It is with a mighty roar that you retreat from the spark, but as you trash around, you come in contact with the slime, and it starts sizzling on your scales, slowly consuming them like acid. With a painful screech, you manage to turn on the sink, and you bathe the affected scales in water. More orange sparks are sent flying around, and soon, the entire kitchen has turned into a massive fireworks display, with you in the middle. More of the scales blacken as they are struck by the sparks. Furiously thrashing around, you knock down cookware, break a window and spray down the entire kitchen with water.
You exit the window, ending up on the hospital's parking lot. The trail of slime from within the kitchen seems to continue into the reception as well as towards a cave over in the distance. Apart from the parking lot and hospital, there isn't much around - the hospital is in the middle of a desert. To the left of the parking lot, there is a road leading back to the city.
Following the trail of slime, you eventually reach the cave, however, the cave entrance is blocked by rubble and the slime trail seems to end before the entrance. Bending down, you take a taste of the slime, but the instant it touches your tongue, it starts burning. The slime is very corrosive, but you manage to swallow it, and you feel a warmth spreading within. A tickle erupts in your nose, and when you sneeze, a small flame bursts out from your nostrils.
With a massive burst of flame, you rise and roar majestically in front of the cave. Fire, you breathe, blazing hot fire, setting alight anything it touches. How wonderful, a real dragon you are now! As you listen to the cave, you hear a tumble of rocks. There appears to have been some movement in the cave, whether naturally by a quake, or by someone or something moving rocks around.
Carefully, you move aside the rocks blocking entrance to the cave. Sunlight reaches into the cave, and down the cave, there are remnants of what appears to be a glowing liquid. The cave smells distinctly of coffee. You start walking into the cave and quickly come across the wrapping of a newly eaten baguette.
You eat the plastic wrap whole. Lowering your head to the ground, you study the liquid. It glows, is brown in color and smells of coffee. Sampling it with your tongue, you realize it tastes like coffee too, in fact, you conclude it probably is coffee. It tastes really good, so you scoop up what you find and swallow it with delight.
Suddenly, you feel an extreme energy kick. You soar down the cave, narrowly avoiding the pointy stalactites hanging from the roof. Before you know it, you come across a junction - in multiple directions, there are caves out of which streams of salt water is flowing. To the right, there is a massive cave, or rather, a hall, by the looks of it at least half a mile tall and two miles across. The entrance, where you are, is near the very top of this hall. You notice a human character - /u/the_leif - walking around up here, looking for a power outlet to charge his phone.
With your mighty power, you decide that water should indeed flow downwards, as it always has been. You remember that one time it flowed upwards, and you got sued for violating the laws of physics.
Directing yourself into the cave, you start flowing down through a network of tubes. After long, you end up in the sink, and for the brief moment you are out in fresh air, you see that there are nobody home. You then leave the sink and flow down into more tubes, presumably leading to some place wastewater is stored. They seem to be headed downwards a fair bit.
You flow downwards into the tunnels. For a long time, you flowed, when suddenly, you ended up a large stream of water. Then soon after, you find yourself flowing through an aqueduct. There are dwarves around you.
You look around, curiously, at all the dwarves who are going about their day, mining, inscribing runes on the walls, generally doing work for their queen. You check if you are carrying anything with you. A wooden box with a letter in it flows with you downstream.
Some rocks suddenly fall down into the aqueduct, blocking it. You start to accumulate, before overflowing. The box falls off the aqueduct and into a pool of water on the ground. The letter falls out into the water. It says something about the queen, some Queen Yokheda. The ink bleeds away before you manage to read the letter in detail.
"I serve only to do what I enjoy," the wizard says. "It warms me that there is appreciation of what I do. It has at times been hard to come up with things to write about, but once I get started with worldbuilding, things usually get easier as I can just expand on the universe whenever I feel like it. Without input from other redditors, I wouldn't have been able to bring this tale to where it is now, so I owe you all a thanks for that as well." The wizard fades into the distance.
You search the room, looking for a power cord, before suddenly remembering that you left it in your car. Quickly, you run out and grab it, and connect the computer to the power grid. It starts charging. You turn it back on, and the familiar "user@ubuntu:~$" greets you.
You go for a long drive to Winchester. When you arrive, you are many hours late, not that it matters much as there is no sun anymore to determine the day and night cycle. You exit your car and walk in the chilly night towards the nearest bar. You sit down and pay for a pint of beer.
The bartender explains a bit about the recent news, and not wanting to reveal yourself as the source of this chaos, you decide to play along and pretend you were from a completely different part of the country. You learn that as soon as the sun turned off, the secret service went out and announced that they would be systematically destroying various cities so that they could gather the resources there for "the greater good". People are now fleeing around everywhere between cities. You decide that another beer would help you feel less worried about the grave situation at hand.
You down some whiskey and more beers, and you quickly fall victim to the alcohol's effects. You pass away, and by the time you wake up, the bar is empty. Outside, it is still dark, and noticeably colder than whenever you first arrived here. There is still power, but some of the lights are flickering under the load on the power grid of thousands of space heaters warming the city.
You pick up a glass and fill it with water. As you down a few glasses, you start looking for painkillers, but being in a bar, you cannot find any except for the whiskey that remained from earlier. Across the street is a pharmacy, but the doors are closed and lights turned off inside. You think for yourself that there has to be at least one pill of something around. The bar being devoid of people, save for yourself, so you start opening the trays behind the counter. A bag labeled "paracetamol" catches your eye, but it is empty, not even a trace remains of what it once held. Looking in the storage room, you find more drinks, together with some employee's warm clothes and a hammer.
You put on some warm clothes and grab the hammer. Crossing the street, you shatter the glass and enter through the window. The alarm sounds, and you move swiftly to bring some assorted painkillers from the shelves. Afraid that police might arrive, you return to the bar and hide, but no police ever shows up. They are all too busy with the massive problem that is the darkened sun. You take out a glass and down some of the painkillers you obtained. You start to feel at rest, and fall asleep comfortably in a couch. When you wake up, it is still dark outside.
A quiet whisper draws your attention towards a box on the counter that you cannot recall having seen before. A voice begs you to open the box. However, you are very reluctant.
With great care, you approach the box and start sniffing at it. A wonderful scent arises. It seems to you like the box is moving, ever so slightly, across the counter. Stars appear to be hovering around it, but you're not sure if they're just an illusion. The voice, stronger now, persists with its commands. "Open the box," it says, desperate to be released from the container. A feeling of unwell hits you as the voice utters its commands.
You wish the box a merry Christmas before leaving the building. You exit onto a street. There are no cars in sight other than your own. Across the street is a pharmacy. The street has a variety of shops, none seem to be open. Far to the right you spot a school building.
Taking a walk down the street, you look into some of the shop displays. There are shops for every imaginable thing - some sell food, others sell fashion, one is focused on travel and hiking gear and another sells pet commodities. A little further down, you come across an ice cream shop, a toy store, a fast food place and an ATM.
Picking up and throwing a rock, you smash the glass into a million pieces. Entering the store through the window, you grab some supplies: A large backpack, rope, a bunch of winter clothing, a sleeping bag, a tent, a flashlight and headlamp and other miscellaneous things which could turn out to be useful in an apocalypse. There are all kinds of gear around you, you are not quite sure what to go for.
Grabbing a knife, you return to your car and drive back to the office building. However, angry protesters block the street. You are forced to leave your car and walk to the office in the cold. The beacon light from the office seems to have been put out somehow, and only ruins remain of the room it once shone from. The staircase is still intact, so you enter and ascend to the secretary's office, where there is no trace of the orbs. There is a pile of semitransparent pink powder on the floor where the orbs used to be.
You approach the powder and carefully sample it with your fingers. It's warm to the touch, but not burning hot, and some of the powder appears to stick like glue. You grab some more dust, and at once you notice how light it is - you are holding a handful now, but it feels like your hand is empty.
There is a cup of water next to you, so you pour a little bit of it on the powder. Nothing really happens, except that the pile absorbs it. Out of nowhere, black crystals start growing from the pile. The crystal is much bigger than it should have been, based on the amount of water you poured on the pile. Whatever, you think, maybe the powder will burn instead. The powder appears nonflammable.
The crystal is completely black. You touch it, and nothing happens, so you decide to grab it. It feels heavy in your hand, but upon squeezing it, it collapses into a pile of black powder on the floor.
You look around for the orbs, but they are nowhere to be found. The only thing that remains on the floor is the black and pink powders.
You sample both of the powders and head to the roof. However, you find no glowing orb. All you see is a hole where the beacon light shone through. It looks like roof was vaporized, indicating the amount of energy that passed through this point. You can watch over a large part of the city from here.
You open the box. Out of it comes a mysterious gas, but the box is otherwise empty. The gas is yellow in appearance, and upon seeing it dissipate into the air, you quickly close the box. You inhale a small amount of it. Suddenly, the world becomes wobbly. You hit the floor and knock yourself out. You wake up to a deafening explosion, and when you go to explore, it turns out the water heater in the storage room has blown up. Only bits of it remains, and there is a large hole in the roof, from which cold air starts flooding the room. It quickly becomes a bit too cold for your taste, so you return to the bar and close the door.
As you enter the room, there is a bottle of orange soda on the counter. You grab it and drink some of the delicious orange soda. You accidentally drop it on the floor, and the glass bottle shatters into many pieces, spilling orange soda on the floor.
You go outside, shivering. In the trunk of the car, the familiar items from before are present: A bunch of decommissioned laptops, some networking equipment, and a pile paperwork lie scattered around. There is also a spare tire, though it has melted from the heat of the orange orb, and is no longer usable for its intended purpose.
You install Ubuntu Server and set up a connection to the network. However, the Internet connection here is slow. This is near the city limits, so there probably isn't very good ISP coverage here.
You look up Internet speeds in the area. There are only two ISPs covering this area, and for both, this street is at the very edge of their coverage area. Opening up Google Maps, you start looking for a nearby place that could offer a better connection. A few blocks down from the bar, there is a large cinema. You grab your equipment, put it in your car and drive the short distance up to the building, narrowly avoiding a collision under the last effects of the alcohol you consumed last night. You look around for an Ethernet port, find one, and plug it in. Your laptop starts updating itself, and is soon ready with a high speed business connection.
You start typing your command, but the prompt dutifully informs you that you do not have an image file of the sun available, due to the size it would require to store. The prompt also informs you that the sun is up there, but has been shifted in time so that it was burnt out long ago. Figuring it is worth a try, you type in your command, "sun --age 4500000000". Nothing seems to happen at first, but minutes later, the prompts you that the age of the sun was changed. However, the darkness outside seems to persist. You check the clock, it's 3 AM. Apparently, your body has completely lost track of time due to the absence of the sun.
You try to return to the office, but there is anarchy in the streets. You are forced to leave your car and walk to the office in the cold. The beacon light from the office seems to have ceased, and only ruins remain of the room it once shone from. Going up the staircase, you find no trace of the orbs. A pile of semitransparent pink powder lies on the floor in their place.
You inch closer and carefully touch the powder with your hands. It feels warm, but not hot, to touch, some of it sticking to your hand. Its low weight strikes you as odd - you hold almost a handful of it, but it feel like nothing but air is resting on your palm.
You pick up some of the powder and mix it with water. The fine grained powder absorbs it, but nothing much happens beyond that. Then suddenly, the powder increases in weight. Crystals appear to be forming around some clumps of powder, black in color. Being significantly more massive than the small amount of water you applied, you strike the crystal with a metal object. The crystal pulverizes, forming black dust.
Looking for something to grab the powder with, you shuffle around some tables and find a lost spoon by the wall. Using the spoon, you sample the powder, and with a lighter, you carefully heat the substance. A cyan-colored gas rises from the powder, and before you manage to turn away, you inhale some of the smoke. A sudden feeling of unwell creeps up on you, and shortly thereafter, everything fades into black.
Waking up, you realize you are in a foreign place. Around you, not a tree is to be seen. There is grass on the ground, but it looks gray and withered, and a river runs through the fields around you. Over in the distance, there is a hill with a small patch of green, upon which grows the only living plant you can see for miles around: a single raspberry bush. You rise to your feet, and as you take your first steps around, grass is crushed underneath your feet.
You walk towards the river, only wearing a t-shirt, shorts and shoes. It is rather dark, but still warm like a summer day. As you bend down, staring into the river, you see your reflection in the blackened water. Off in the distance, you see a number of tiny whirlwinds, they seem to be common across the plains, acting as a token to the aridness of the landscape. The vast, dry plains stretch out for miles in every direction. You put your hand in the stream, and feel a pricking sensation as the blackened water flows around it.
Bending down, a putrid stench hits your nose, causing you to jump back nauseated. It smells terrible, and drinking it will probably make you deathly sick. You decide against taking a sip of the river.
You try to see where the river flows from, but all you see is flatland. Heading over to the hill, you decide to have a look from a better vantage point. Far in the distance, you can see an ash-capped mountain, however, it must be several days away from here by foot, and you do not have enough food or water to make it that far. The hill you are standing on has what appears to be the last living plants remaining on the entire continent, if such things exist here. There is a large raspberry bush, but it does not have enough berries to cover a journey to the mountain. A faint rustling of leaves is heart from the center of the bush.
You look over the bushes, and notice at once that there is a hole in the ground. It's not particularly large, and it looks artificially made. Descending into the hole, you end up in a room with dirt walls. What looks like a human-sized mole is preparing some form of dinner on the stove. You ask him what kind of place this is.
"Oh, oh-- hello, hello dear str-strangers! Oh yes hi, so long since I had visi-visitors! A skin-person! How rare!" The mole studies you intently. "Come, you must be non-fooded. Have some food so you can be fooded proper." You sit down, and the mole brings you a cup of raspberry soup.
"So, little skin-person! How did you finally here? Did you finally in metal bird? Finally in bush box?" the mole asks. What kind of strange language. It is English, but he does not have a good vocabulary, you could say. Not surprising, perhaps, he seems to be the only living creature for hundreds of miles around. Assuming he is asking you how you got here, you answer "I finally with pink dust." "Metal bird" could mean plane, but it is beyond you what "bush box" could mean.
"Pink dust? Finally with pink dust! How sparkling! The sparklers complete a nice job! Let me tell I am. I am Gassias, dirt-person. I live in dirt place. I food the bush above. Make it nondying. I can help finally you to green!" Move you to something green? Sure, whatever. Anything is better than this foul rotten marsh of nothingness. "Just touch this purple sun and--"
Suddenly, you are somewhere completely different. Gassias, that strange mole-person, seems to have used a purple orb to teleport you to somewhere else. Around you, there is a lush forest - wonderful green trees, and a pool of fresh water. It is like you ended up the middle of a jungle. Grateful for the water, you jump in and drink.
Curious as to what may hide behind the woods, you climb up the nearest tree. The jungle goes on for a while, but not far off in the distance, you spot what appears to be an ancient Maya-like civilization. There are mountains far in the distance as well.
You start moving towards the civilization. Upon arrival, you are greeted by the city guards. However, the guard does not offer you much help – he must think you are one of their people. You pass the gate and head into the city. People are walking around all over the place. Up ahead, there is a large pyramidal structure with a guarded door at the bottom. The street is lined with small houses.
You glance into the windows, inside of which there is basic furniture. Many places, there is no furniture at all. It has an ancient feel to it, as if you have somehow ended up way back in the past. Walking towards the pyramid, you hear worried talks of a spreading blight. Apparently, it is less than fifty miles away from here, and the population is worried about what will happen once it reaches their jungle. You reach the pyramid, but the entrance is blocked by guards.
You decide to walk around the pyramid, looking for alternative entrances, but at first glance, you find none. However, an abandoned looking building catches your eye. People seem to be avoiding it in the streets.
You ask a nearby villager about the building, however, he just looks at you weirdly and resumes his business. The building's door seems to be missing. The floor in the building is tiled, and some of the tiles have suspiciously big gaps between them. There doesn't seem to be any form of glue underneath the tiles.
You lift a few of the tiles, and find that under one of them, there is a narrow tunnel. You squeeze yourself in and follow it until you find yourself in a room made of massive stone bricks. The room is lit by torches hanging on the wall.
"Ask and ye shall receive," the wizard says. "Sometimes the things you are looking for are already there, before your very eyes. Or at least, things that are similar to what you ask for." The wizard points towards /r/WritingPrompts and fades away.
You reach for the broomstick and try to lift the blue orb, but the stick is too round to successfully lift it off the ground. The orb instead rolls away like a golf ball, coming to a stop dangerously close to the orange orb. Only inches of air separate them, and a powerful stream of steam and fog radiates from the small space still left between them, like a shield protecting them from each other. The chilly feeling grows in strength, and suddenly you hear footsteps from the staircase you came from. A ghostly, monstrous voice somewhere down there screams at you. "You can run, but you can never hiiiideeeeeeee...... I am coming for yoooouuuuuu......"
You pick up the broomstick and approach the orange orb with it. As the block of ice gets near, it instantly melts and vaporizes. When the stick itself touches the orb, it instantly catches on fire, but it does not have time to burn before it is pushed down the staircase. With a clanging sound, it rolls down the spiral staircase.
Suddenly, a shrill cry erupts from the stairs. You cover your ears, but it does not seem to help. What seems like a massive battle ensues, flashes of orange coming from the stairs. It is as if a monster is there, fighting for life, trying to survive, then all of a sudden, silence for a few seconds. All that is heard is the sizzling of the orb. Then, a dying, coarse voice exclaims. "Killlll.... theeeee... seeerveeeersss...." A loud boom is heard from the stairs, then everything stops. No more flashes. No more sounds. No more sizzling. You look down the stairs. At the bottom, there is a large pool of slime, smelling terrible. It seems to react vigorously with water, letting off orange sparks on contact. The orange orb is nowhere to be seen. Then, you get an alert on your phone. The data center is down.
Remembering what happened when you picked up the orange orb, you decide to carefully scoop the blue orb into a box before bringing it with you. Wondering if you could put it in a bag, you look for one and investigate its contents. The bag contains a phone, its charger as well as a lunch box. The lunch box contains a standard cheese and ham sandwich. There is also, somehow, a fan in the bag. It could have belonged to one of the office workers by the window, where the sun would shine all day, keeping their cubicles hot. You bring the box with the orb and the bag with you as you head to the data center.
Upon arriving at the data center, a wall of heat strikes you. The heat seems to emanate from the server room, where the temperature meters have reached dangerous levels. Servers are beeping like crazy, warning you about all kinds of overheating issues. Quickly, you pull the plug on the important systems, shutting them down so the heat can start dissipating. It seems like the AC units have simply disappeared from the room.
You look around and find a digital thermometer hanging on the wall. Picking it up, you carefully open the box with the orb and find the inside covered in frost. You lower the thermometer into the box, but the instant it touches the orb, it stops working. It seems like the orb has drained the energy from the thermometer's batteries. You switch batteries and it starts working again, but the same thing happens upon contact with the orb.
Carefully avoiding touching the blue orb, you place the orb so that it is in the air feed to the fan. You turn the fan towards the servers and then turn it on. The server room starts cooling. After a few minutes, you start turning on the servers. An hour later, the temperatures are down to about 23 °C, and seem to remain stable. You successfully killed the monster, and saved the servers! Congratulations! However, the world is big, and a lot is yet to be explored...
You poke the ice with the broomstick. The ice floats away, but the orb quickly freezes new ice from the displacing water. You pull the broomstick back towards yourself. A huge, heavy chunk of ice sticks to the end of your broomstick. You taste it. It tastes just like standard ice cubes.
You approach the orbs, and study them. You start reaching your hands out to grab them, but even before your hands touch, you can feel the strong radiance they emit in terms of cold and heat. "Should I really do this?" you think for yourself, considering once more if this really is a wise idea. Nevertheless, curiosity's grip on you finally wins, and you touch the orbs.
Pain. Crippling, unfathomable pain. The only thing you can sense as your hands encase the orbs is the horror of what happens within, what hides there within your fist as you struggle to open them, to let the orbs fall out, let this pain go. But you fail. Your left hand is frozen through, skin turning a dark blue color. Your right hand is on fire, and it doesn't look very pretty. In desperation, you knock your arms against the wall in the hope that the orbs will fall out, but to no avail. Unable to handle any more pain, you pass out.
You do not know how long you were unconscious, much less how you survived. What you do know is that you are alive. Looking down at your hands, you find none. Your lower arms are both amputated. You scream for help, but none arrives, not even a whisper of a reply is heard. Looking around you, you find you are in a small hospital room. A beeping machine to your left. The room is otherwise empty, except for your bed and a door. With some effort, you manage to force yourself into a sitting position.
Returning to the car, you realize you forgot your laptop in the office. You try to turn on the laptops in the trunk, but the decommissioned laptops don't seem to work. The batteries are full, apparently, but the hard drives are wiped of data. A DVD labeled "Ubuntu Server 14.04" catches the corner of your eye.
You put the installation disc into one of the laptops' DVD drive and boot it. It boots into the Ubuntu installation menu. Surprised that the previous IT admin did not disable booting from external media, you proceed to install it. The installation takes a while, as it is an old machine, presumably having run Windows XP before the hard drive wipe. The machine restarts, you eject the installation disc, and the machine boots back into a shell. "user@ubuntu:~$" greets you from the terminal.
You type your commands, and the terminal reacts. Unfortunately, it does not react in your favor. It turns out, the laptop is not connected to the Internet. There are no Ethernet ports on the outside of the building, and no unprotected wireless access points. You glance at your phone, and the long Ethernet cable in the back of the trunk.
You grab your phone and look for an option to tether your laptop. Finding one, you manage to configure the wlan interface to connect to your phone. It took a while, finding the right settings, but you're up and running. You then proceed to install frotz and play Zork. What a strange game this is - a reality simulator, perhaps? With glaring letters, the screen announces the start of your adventure west of a white house with a boarded front door. The house is placed next to an open field, the vast landscape only disturbed by a small mailbox. In front of the door, the terminal explains, there is a mat saying "Welcome to Zork!"
You tell the laptop to open the mailbox. A small leaflet is revealed to be inside. The laptop prompts for further action.
You grab the leaflet and read it. "Welcome to Zork," it says. It seems to explain a bit what the game Zork is. It highlights your goals of adventure, it invites you to explore the amazing realm of the land. There is mention of a labyrinth beep beneath the earth, vast treasures and fearsome monsters and traps. Finally, the leaflet lists credit to the original authors of the game. The game prompts for further action.
"Oh well, let natural selection do its thing," the wizard thinks for himself. The instant your tongue touches the orb, a pain so intense you'd think the world was about to end befalls you, and you fall back, screaming louder than any human could ever have done before. Writhing around on the ground, you wail loudly, Armageddon and Ragnarok and every doomsday scenario targeting you at the same time. An indescribable pain persists, and suddenly, everything goes completely dark. The pain stops. You sleep for weeks before you wake up, hungry, in an unfamiliar place.
You look around. The walls are white, hospital white. The room as no particular features at all; in fact it looks uncomfortably barren. A single door leads into your room. The fluorescent lights above cast a cold, white light over everything. You find yourself in a bed with plain white linen. The bed is soft. You touch your tongue carefully, but a sharp pain makes you retract your arm quickly.
You stand up and walk towards the door. It looks plain and boring - a window fills the upper half of the door, and a metal plate covers the bottom foot of it. The rest of the door is white, and as a whole, the door looks like a typical door into a restaurant kitchen. You try swinging it open, revealing a hallway with another door at the far end. You pass through the other door, and end up in the reception of what looks like an abandoned hospital. This strikes you as weird, because the lights are still on, there are modern computers, and a steaming cup of coffee rests on the coffee machine. It by all means looks like the place was left in a hurry. The reception looks otherwise normal - there are a bunch of chairs for visitors, there are some plants for decoration, and a jacket or two hangs from the coat hangers.
On the floor, there is a pool of what looks like water, but it smells funny. Upon closer inspection, it looks slimy. It appears corrosive. You take a picture of it with your phone, and look for a WiFi network so you can upload it to Imgur and post it on Reddit, asking for identification. However, the only network you can find is a secured network called "IWillFindYouInTheEnd". The pool of corrosive slime seems to extend out onto the parking lot and beyond.
You take a bite of the plant, but its terrible taste discourages further eating. You decide to flush away the taste with some coffee, but as you put the coffee cup back in the coffee machine, it seems to be full still. You turn it upside down, and suddenly a relentless torrent of coffee starts flowing out of the cup. You place it back in the coffee machine. The coffee on the floor seems to be reacting viciously with the slime, and orange sparks fly from the mixture.
You study the beautiful orange sparks as they fly from the reacting mixture of coffee and slime. Suddenly, a thought strikes your mind. How could this mixture taste? By the coffee machine, there is a table with a waffle iron and some plastic spoons, however, neither waffles nor jam is anywhere to be found. You pick up a spoon and try to sample the mixture. You manage to get a teaspoon's worth of fluid into the spoon. You study it for a little while. It smells terrible. Suddenly, the mixture drains out onto the floor through a hole in the spoon. Whatever it it, it probably doesn't taste well, and is exceptionally corrosive. There is a sign pointing to a canteen.
You head to the canteen, where some inviting baguettes are displayed on the shelf. There is also some warm food. You get some food and sit down and eat, and grab a cup of coffee from a dispenser. Upon closer look, it turns out that there is a trail of slime behind the counter as well, mixed up with some blood. The trail leads out a door behind the counter.
You bring a baguette and follow the trail. It seems to end up in the same place as the trail of slime from the reception. Leaving the hospital, you follow the slime track for a mile or so before it suddenly disappears down an icy, wet cave. You still have the infinite coffee cup. In presence of the cave, the coffee forms a brown orb and starts to glow with a warm light. You stand on the edge of the cave, contemplating whether or not to enter.
You pick up your baguette and carefully use it to touch the brown orb. A small bit of what looks to you like glowing coffee forms on the baguette. Curiously, you take a bite of it. It tastes like the coffee you drank at the hospital. Suddenly, the brown orb collapses back into the cup, turning into coffee again, but glowing this time, like a liquid candle in the dark.
As you enter the cave, you tumble over a rock. The coffee cup is sent flying out of your hands, landing sideways on the ground and sending a torrent of glowing coffee down the cave, warming it and lighting it up. Now much easier to navigate, you follow the cave for a while. The cave is surprisingly smooth and easy to follow, and after about a mile, you sit down to rest. Suddenly, a rumble is heard from behind as the entrance to the cave collapses. The cave smells distinctly of coffee. Somewhere, a bat squeaks, awoken by the rumble.
You eat a little more of the baguette. completely oblivious to any dangers lurking in the dark. With a satisfying burp, you finish off two thirds of the baguette, leaving only a little for later. Somewhere far in the distance, there is another rumble of stone.
You grab your phone from your pocket to investigate it, however, nothing seems to be wrong with it. You open Reddit. There are a bunch of blue links. You start exploring the latest news.
You start clicking through the links. A /r/space AMA stands out. Something about the continents, the astronauts had seen the continents moving about. "How can continents move at any noticeable pace?" you ask yourself. Clicking through some links, you end up at an ESA page describing some recent, worrisome events. You read for a bit before moving on to a TIFU, Today I Learned entry and a life pro tip before an explosion is heard from deep in the cave. Shortly thereafter, a weak yet noticeable shockwave hits you. Not thinking much about it, you read some recent /r/worldnews stories before putting the phone away, as the battery percentage starts dipping into the lower 20's.
You make an AMA about yourself. After a little while, some questions start popping in. "What do you see in the cave?" "How long have you been stranded?" "Where are you?" And lest we forget the infamous "would you rather fight 100 duck-sized horses or one horse-sized duck?" You start dutifully answering the questions you get, but your phone is now alerting you that you only have 5% battery left.
You type out the answers on your dying phone and barely manage to save the OP as the phone dies. You look around for a power outlet, but cannot find one in the staggering darkness. Pouring out coffee from your magic cup, the light returns and you follow the stream downwards, eventually reaching the edge of a cliff. The coffee seems to be running over the edge of the cliff, forming a waterfall of light as it tumbles into the endless dark below. A rope hangs suspended from the cliff, indicating someone has been here before and possibly descended down into the dark.
Carefully, you start climbing down the rope. You climb for a long while; the cave has to be at least half a mile tall. Once you reach the bottom, you find yourself standing on what appears to be a small hill in the middle of the ruins of an ancient civilization. Houses of stone surround you. At the foot of the hill, you find some weaponry; namely swords, knives, bows and arrows, but no power socket. Far in the distance, at the edge of the cave, there is a house with lights in it.
You grab whatever weapons you can. There are not many nice ones around; they all look very rough. They are heavy, though, and not after long, you cannot carry more on you. You don't look particularly shiny, it's more like clumps of iron have been attached to you. They all taste terrible.
Putting the remainder of the baguette on a knife, you start moving towards the house. The lights are on, but you cannot find anyone home. Entering the house, you find what appears to be some form of power outlet, but your charger doesn't fit. There is a wire of some sort on the table, and ignoring the risk of electrocution, you try to wire your charger into the outlet by connecting them to either end. It works! The phone starts charging. You sit down by the table as you evaluate your results.
You leave the phone on the table, charging. Looking around, you realize that the house you are in is really small. You are in the living room/kitchen, and a door leads into a bedroom. Inside the bedroom, another door leads to a small bathroom. In a corner of the living room, there is also prison-like cell, with a metal bar door serving as the entrance. The cell itself is constructed using solid stone bricks, and was probably used to keep prisoners. A loose stone brick with some inscriptions lie on the floor of the cell. The house has a small second floor with a ladder going up from the bedroom. By the looks of it, it is some sort of watchtower.
You read the inscription aloud. "To whoever reads this - do not trust the orcs. They are madmen. Run for the dwarves, and help them wipe out every last one of those filthy orcs. They are despicable creatures, existing solely to make the world a terrible place for all of life but themselves."
You start climbing down the rope. It takes a while to get down, but eventually you reach what appears to be the top of a small hill. You cannot see the walls of the cave with your headlamp, but off in the distance, you notice what looks to be a house, with light coming from the inside. At the bottom of the hill, you see various weaponry like swords, knives, bows and arrows.
Looking through the weapons, you spot a couple of daggers and a single shortbow, but no armor. You grab these and a sword. You try to nock an arrow to shoot it, but the bow is really heavy. You barely manage to draw it three quarters back before your fingers slip, sending the arrow flying forwards. Either way, you bring it and some arrows with you. Approaching the house, you quietly peek into the window. There is no one home.
Picking up the cup of coffee, your pour it onto your face. However, the stream of coffee doesn't stop when the cup should have been empty. A steady torrent of coffee flows out of the cup, burning your face and causing you to run into canteen, screaming, while desperately looking for cold water to relieve the pain. Eventually, you start looking for burn cream and painkillers, but it is not to be found anywhere. You go back to bed and sleep, and when you wake up, your face is sore from the burn.
"Why not," you thought, "what harm can it be? It worked for Randall Munroe." Typing in the command, a password prompt appears in the terminal. Dutifully, you type the sudo password, and are greeted with "Sorry, try again." You type the password again, making sure caps lock is off and that capitalization is correct. "Sorry, try again." Huh. You were sure this was the password. Maybe someone changed it.
Considering your options, you decide to go find a place to hide. A seemingly empty dumpster catches your eye, so you exit your car, open the dumpster and cower down inside. You look around for a flashlight and come across a wonderful golden necklace. How could someone throw away such a thing, you wonder. There is also a beautiful golden staff lying in the dark, with a green crystal mounted on top. Curiously, you try to pick it up. It is extremely heavy, being made of solid gold, but you figure it would be a nice thing to have on display in your home. You decide on bringing it with you if you were to leave the dumpster at some point.
You hear the sound of footsteps outside. There is also a squeak from inside the container which you realize is coming from a rat. Fearful of being noticed, you pick up the rat to kill it, but it vanishes in your very hands before your hands can strangle it.
In an effort to stay hidden, you leave the necklace by your side and turn off the flashlight. As your eyes slowly adjust to the dark, you spot a faint purple glow in one corner of the dumpster. Taking a closer look, you notice a purple orb, pulsating and spinning with a hypnotic, spiraling pattern. You gently feel your way around, but apart from the things you have found, the dumpster seems otherwise empty.
You decide to pick up the purple orb, but as soon as you touch it, the scenery around you changes, and you find yourself in the restroom of some store. Exiting the room, you realize you have been teleported to some fashion store. Heading back inside the restroom, you find the purple orb again, and as soon as you touch it again, suddenly you end up in a forest. Now, the orb is nowhere to be found. There is a campfire behind some trees. Curiously, you go to explore, and are greeted by a pair of campers.
Approaching the campers, you ask them where you are and who they are. However, they speak a foreign language; you do not seem to understand what they are saying. They motion for you to sit down with them nevertheless. Encouragingly, they reach you a bottle of clear liquid that you can only assume to be some kind of spirit, like vodka. It smells of alcohol.
You decide to sample the liquid. It tastes good, something like vodka indeed. You drink more, and not long after, you are merrily chatting away with the campers, not really understanding their words, but having a good time. You fall asleep after a while, and when you wake up, it is day. There is snow on the ground, the campfire has burned out and the campers are asleep, snoring heavily.
You look around for food and something to restart the fire with. All of your stuff is left back at the container, all you've got is what you wear. The staff is nowhere to be seen. Looking through the campers' tent, you find matches, some piled up firewood and an axe, and food. It is apparent that the campers plan to stay here for a long time, given that they took the time to cut down a tree. There is no way they would carry that around. You grab the matches, some firewood, a small metal bowl you found and a dry soup powder mixture and light the fire again. You melt and boil some snow from the ground in the bowl before pouring the soup mixture in. You let it boil for a little while before you take it off the fire. The campers are starting to wake up.
sounds like the beginning to a zork sequel.
what's in my inventory?
Investigate squeak!
creepy, I like this.
take laptop
open laptop
Run out of the room
Investigate interior of car!
investigate orange glow
pick up orb
throw at office building.
(oh dear)
(ah, there's the rabbit hole. let's see how deep this goes)
go staircase
Take broomstick
Use to push orbs together
Turn on TV
Watch news
(edit: spelling)
Check the store cupboard in the basement
Grab 12-Gauge
Slam my hands into the ground
Take warm coat
Take headlamp and grap a handful of chocolate bars
Enter
Throw lighted flare into the massive hall
Talk /u/1Matthias
Take /u/1Matthias
Take pile of rocks
Use pile of rocks with /u/1Matthias
East
Ask /u/1Matthias to investigate sound.
Take a sip of the water running in the cave.
Empty one of the water containers I brought along, fill it with the salty water and save for later.
Approach the light with an arrow in my hand at the ready.
Take the creatures sword.
Thank /u/1Matthias
Walk towards the house
Enter house.
Hope that someone comes and gets us out of here. Hint /u/theGurw hint
Wait some more.
Would you believe this is the first of these comments where I was supposedly pinged that I got notified of? Reddit broke for me, I guess.
Follow sound of screaming orc girl.
Lick orc girl.
Ponder flavour and best seasonings.
Offer chocolate to orc child
Rip up one of the spare coats and fashion a doll using buttons from coat and straw from near by cot and hair from one of my cellmates to trade with orc child, warily this time
Use newly acquired strength to break metal window bars and escape.
Light flare and play fetch with Orc girl
Unravel my (/u/1Matthias's) spare winter clothes to get string and start exploring the maze.
Shine light down into tunnel;
if (path == clear) {
Descend into tunnel;
}
else {
keep exploring;
}
Call for the others to come down, and start walking down the hallway.
Get as low as possible, and look around the doorframe.
Copy down runic inscriptions and save for later. Enter tunnel quietly
Grab a copy of the runes and attempt to decode and decipher them. Noticing my companions by the front door leading into a throne room, attempt to find another, possibly secret dark entrance, utilizing my torch, just in case something goes wrong I can quickly help my companions. From this secret vantage point examine the possible "throne room" as well as the creatures within to decide my next move.
Grab pack and follow /u/1matthias 's string. Crouch behind /u/1matthias and grab nearby rock, ready for anything
Check the cell walls and floors for loose bricks
Examine inscription.
Examine room
Examine inscription
Take stock of everyone's items and make an educated decision on a direction. Based possibly off of rock formations, moss, or maybe a specific item that's in the stock pile
I search for something to use as a light source. Possibly a stick or something that I might be able to wrap an old shirt around and light it to make a torch. Search my drinks for something alcoholic. Go into the tunnel, and make a mark on the wall, in a way only my companions would recognize, so they can find me if need be. And also to recognize the tunnel if I need to turn back. Pull the string down with me to avoid being followed by any orcs or unwanted visitors. Look around for my current companion and examine my new surroundings.
Plot twist! There is no spoon, AHEM I mean door.
I investigate the sound. (Good to be back!)
I love you and this story.
Push /u/1Matthias back down
Join /u/1Matthias
Pick up Bow and Arrows
Be glad the sun got rebooted and tell /u/1Matthias about the guy down there
Throw another flare down hall
(You should really call it a well or hole or something. Hall made me think of a hallway.)
Ask /u/KopfTrifftTisch to pick me up and jump down into the hall so we can land safely with his super powers.
(Now I see why you called it a hall. Sorry. Thanks for the amazing story so far!)
open laptop
sudo reboot sun
Search room for power cord
sudo sun --age 4,500,000,000
Press enter
Press the power button to turn it back on
uname -a
ls
PS. Thank you for doing this, I am enjoying this so much. :D
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
I partially close the laptop, tuck it under my arm, and go into the basement as it fetches the latest versions.
Go into the server room and plug the laptop in, both power and ethernet. Faster upgrades that way.
Hmm...I start digging with the pickaxe, sledgehammer, and shovel while letting the water tanks fill from the tap.
I look around for a flashlight and put on all the winter clothes that I can fit.
I call out "Hello? Who is there?". EDIT: Paging /u/KopfTrifftTisch
Take off a couple of layers to become comfortable and take a drink of the water.
I put the backpack on my front to protect me, and head towards the scream.
Oi! I ask /u/KopfTrifftTisch what he was thinking doing that, while staying as far away from the edge as possible.
Team; we have a bit of a mystery here-
look at city
~~you two go that way, while Daphne and I go have sex in the study~~
Take sword
Take knife
Take Bow and Arrows
Come on you two - get down here!
approach house with caution, look in window
Inspect inventories of all three of us
Consult with /u/Capt_Blackmoore and /u/Moonhowler22 about the wisdom of introducing ourselves to the orc guardian.
Knock on door
/u/Capt_Blackmoore, /u/Krumble - we're in for something now!
Express our sympathies and ask if there's anything we can do to help.
Ask if the dwarves have any known weakness, aside from not recognizing us humans.
(C'mon /u/Capt_Blackmoore and /u/Moonhowler22, I could use a little help here! I'm not a very experienced adventurer.)
/u/Krumble, I'm thinking if they've fought the dwarves, they're bound to have killed some of them. Those dwarves would have had the Mithril equipment. Maybe there are some weapons laying around. Wouldn't hurt to have better stuff.
I ask the Orc if there are any Mithril weapons we might have. If so, we head there, pick them up, and begin towards the dwarves. If no weapons are to be had, we head toward the dwarves.
Take the shirt and sword. Put the shirt on under my clothes.
I thank Vlorg, and we head off towards the dwarves.
Mention that we had seen several abandoned buildings, but nothing living. Ask him what an orc is.
How is it that you have thrived for so long under the surface; and in the war with the orcs?
Go to the entrance and try to talk to the dwarfs, trying to see if they have anything to say
Did....did I finally find the end (so far)?
Anyway, seems like you were channeling some Pokemon Ruby and Sapphire with those orbs. I'm just waiting for Rayquaza to drop out of the sky and tell everyone to calm the fuck down.
Eat eagles.
Roar majestically.
Go to hospital.
Eat ambulance.
Smell White Orb.
Ponder appropriate seasonings for amberlamps.
Investigate cafeteria for food.
Slice sausage.
Use sliced sausage with vending machine.
Eat bottles.
Use soda on soup.
Inspect orange sparks closely.
Roar in surprised pain and thrash wildly.
Exit window.
View surroundings.
Goto cave.
Lick slime.
Roar majestically while simultaneously breathing fire.
Listen to cave.
Move blockage.
Eat wrapper.
Inspect glowing liquid.
Hyperactively explore cave.
I am the spirit of the cave stream. I flow my blue life from here to everywhere, stroking the stone, the Earth holding me up, sinking down and around forever on this sphere.
I decide to flow downwards
Flow into the Orc home's sink.
Hm... No one home.
Flow downwards.
Listen.
Ooh. Life.
Look around at dwarves/society.
Check inventory.
Stop flowing. Collect in Aqueduct.
Open box.
Read letter quickly (before paper dissolves and the ink bleeds away.)
I love this story and I love your dedication to it. Keep on being awesome.
search room
(where the hell is the power cord)
Go to the Winchester
Have a pint
Get shitfaced
Pour glass of water
Drink water
Look for painkillers
Take hammer
Take clothes
Go to pharmacy
Smash window with hammer
Enter pharmacy
Sniff box
Wish box merry Christmas
Exit pub
Look around
Inspect shops
Break into travel and hiking store and prepare apocalypse edc.
I grab a knife and go back to my car, then head back to the office.
Investigate powder
Test powder in water and with heat
Investigate crystal
Search for the orbs
Grab samples of both powders and the crystals then go to the roof where the glowing orb was.
Open box
Drink from whatever bottle is closest to me
Check trunk
Take laptop and networking equipment into bar
Install os and connect to intent
Search local ISP speeds
Reload sun from last available data
Return to work building
Try to find orbs
Investigate powder
Test reactivity of small portions of powder
Heat black dust
Take inventory while walking towards the river
Smell water, test for potability
Follow stream to source
Investigate rustling
Climb tree investigate surroundings
Head towards civilization
Walk towards pyramid looking in house Windows along the way
Search for alternative entrance
Attempt to communicate with villager about building
Check for hollow or passage under tiles
This is a brilliant idea for a subreddit: text-based adventure games done between redditors.
Make a dexterity check and play Bocce with the two orbs, using the broomstick.
Push the orange orb into the staircase, using the broomstick.
Search a bag.
Take the blue orb.
Search a thermometer.
Measure the orbs temperature.
Combine blue orb and fan.
Deploy frost fan.
Eat standard ham and cheese sandwich.
(Rest)
Check temp 1 hour.
Look ice.
Use broomstick with ice.
Step into distorted air
Grab orbs
Screw this
open laptop
play Zork
Install Ubuntu...
sudo apt-get install frotz
wget http://www.infocom-if.org/downloads/zork1.zip
mkdir zork/
unzip zork1.zip -d zork/
frotz zork/DATA/ZORK1.DAT
Investigate phone, maybe it can create a wifi hotspot.
Open mailbox
Ok I think we've gone full meta
Read leaflet
Extend tongue.
Gather resolve.
Bend at waist.
Lick orb.
Look around
Stand up. Examine door.
Eat plant. Drink coffee.
Watch pretty sparks. Be hungry. Wonder how mixture tastes.
Investigate canteen
Investigate blood trail. Bring baguette.
Dip baguette in brown orb.
Nod affirmatively.
Enter cave.
Dip baguette in coffee. Eat more baguette.
Troubleshoot phone.
Wonder why it didn't work the first time.
Check all them blues.
Make a self post. "Trapped in a cave. AMA."
Issue the following replies:
"Coffee and acid."
"I forget."
"Since lunch"
"Duck sized horses"
Add the following to the OP: "Edit: Sorry guys, the battery on my phone is about to die and I think something just exploded. Thanks for all the great questions! I'll try to answer more later if I find a power outlet down here. "
Begin looking for power outlet.
Continue searching for a power outlet by descending the rope.
Begin adorning myself with as much weaponry ad I can muster, with priority given to each by shininess and taste.
Stick baguette heel on the end of a particularly conveniently located knife, for safe keeping.
Go try to find a power outlet at the house.
Leave phone to charge. Explore house.
Read the inscription on the brick aloud (if possible)
Climb down rope.
I rummage through weaponry looking for things that would suit a Rogue - leather armors, daggers, shortbows. Anything that let's me be quick and quiet. I also take one longer sword, just in case.
I quielty go near the house, hiding in the shadows, to check if the orc is back.
Pour coffee on face.
sudo hide
But, Rick, why would we trust this guy? He keeps telling us we can run but we can't hide. Maybe we should try hiding and not running.
I'm tempted to start attempting to vanish other things, but that might lead to an accident with the dumpster going bye-bye, and leaving me exposed. I leave the necklace where it is because it will also likely make noise.
Investigate the purple orb.
Talk to the campers
Experimentally take a swing
Restart fire. Search for food. Make breakfast. Investigate staff waiting for the food to cook.
Edit: I had to go back and check what was in my inventory
A special thanks to XiuathoTheWizard for creating the story
Also thanks to all the commenters appearing in the story:
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