Walking the Halls

As I left the classroom I came out into a very nearly perfectly ordinary school hallway. The differences were the following: there were doors on both sides of the hall with no windows, and the hallway appeared to stretch in both directions for about three hundred feet. I could not tell you what came after 300 feet, as they disappeared in some sort of a mist. The only doors other than the classroom like the one I'd come from were bathroom doors. The doors opened outward into the hall and a few doors were open, and when I tried to close my door behind me it wouldn't budge. Hopefully that meant that some other people had left the room earlier and I could find them. If we all got here at the same time they couldn't have gotten that far. The countdown on my blackboard was still at 71:23:02, so it was less than an hour since I got here.

First, I tried to open the door opposite to me. It was locked, the handle wouldn't even move. Maybe the person inside had figured out how to do that spell? Or, it might just as well be that there was no one in there, or even that it was just some set dressing and this door didn't lead anywhere at all. I checked a few more doors just to be sure and all of them were locked. I then walked to one of the open doors, to the left of where I had come out. I noticed that the mist was receding, always remaining about the same distance away, new doors coming out of the mist as I walked towards them.

The room I entered was pretty similar to the one I'd left, except it was completely demolished. The desks had been thrown around the room, the storage cabinet was pushed on the floor, and one of the chairs was actually jammed into the wall opposite the door. It seemed like drywall, so it wasn't exactly a feat of herculean strength, but not nothing. I didn't think it had been a fight, at least I didn't see any blood or hair anywhere, but it's not like I was some sort of a crime scene investigator. I quickly searched through some of the desks, but found basically the same sort of office supplies I already had gathered. I was most interested in the storage cabinet. If someone thrashed the room and left within the first five minutes of this… whatever this was, then they might have missed a spell scroll and it may be different from the one I had. I pushed the cabinet over on its back, which took more effort than I'd like to admit, and looked inside. Damn, no scroll. The broom had broken near the handle, leaving it sort of jagged, which gave me an idea.

I was in a strange place, a 'tower' of some sort, but it already felt like a dungeon to me. A dungeon as in a place where you fight monsters and find treasure, not like a dungeon with cells and/or whips. It was the monster part that came to mind. If a goblin with a rusty dagger came charging at me it would probably kill me even if I managed to kick it around a little. And pen and paper instead of a video game interface certainly implied permadeath. An old piece of advice from a paramedic friend of mine- in a knife fight the loser dies on the street and the winner dies in the ambulance. So, having a longer, kind of sharp stick would not hurt my chances. I took the broken off broom handle and held it like a spear. I was suddenly perfectly aware of my inadequacy in combat and for the first time my excitement turned to a moment of fear. I heard writing from my notebook once more. There was an entry in my log and this time an Equipment page had appeared.

Log: You have armed yourself. +1 exp

Equipment:

The worst "spear" ever This broken broom-handle might work as an improvised spear against the most pitiful creatures of the dungeon. Like maybe a level 1 human! It has no special properties.

A costume shop wizard's hat This is a wizard's hat made of cheap synthetic material. It may be the worst wizard's hat in the tower. Nevertheless it is inarguably a wizards hat and therefore the height of fashion and utility, as well as providing some arcane power. Let's say you gain +1 arcana while casting spells, so long as your arcana attribute is 0

The rest of my tools and items didn't seem to even be deserving of an entry, although it was odd that the hats stats had only appeared now. Well, that settled it, I was going to be walking around this tower in a wizard hat. It said it would help me cast spells, so I tried to look at the scroll and think of the 'basic casting procedure' may be. It wasn't like there was a flood of mystical knowledge uploaded to my brain, but I felt a sort of tingle, like it was on the top of my tongue. I tried to visualize the sigil clearly in my head, and it felt like it might be a little clearer than it would have been back in my old world. There was also the incantation. I would experiment when I knew a little bit more, and when I could actually open and close any doors.

My next step was to pick a direction and walk, but there were just a few more things I wanted to do before leaving. First, I took a black permanent marker I'd found in the teacher's desk drawer and wrote "Alex Vorhal" on my door. I wanted to map out the floor a little, and since I did not know how long the hallway was I would have to conserve space on the page when drawing the map. What really mattered were turns and crossings, there was no reason to measure relative distance. Well, there were two reasons- first to know which door was which, but that could be bypassed by writing my name on my door and not bothering with representing doors on the map. The second was more significant- if I got close to mapping the whole floor the scale would be way off and hallways would probably start crossing over, but I didn't plan to go that far today. I started in the middle of a letter-sized notebook page, and drew two horizontal lines, making them a little longer on the left in relation to a small square room I drew below to represent the room I'd come in to. I heard the scratching sound from my notebook and my log said

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

Cartography skill experience to level 2 1.25/25

I felt it was safe to assume that I'd simply gotten 1 experience point, multiplied my my human ability, from starting to draw a map, and that not every half-dozen lines drawn would give me experience points in cartography, but I was still excited to see that it was a skill I could raise. And that I apparently had managed to get to level 1 in cartography with my janky battle-maps in the games I ran for my friends back on Earth.

And I finally started walking.

After about ten minutes of walking I was beginning to worry that there was nothing here but an endless series of doors, in which case that could imply some fucked up Lord of the Flies scenario where the 'survive' countdown was set because the challenge assumed we would start fighting each other. I also saw a few more open doors, but there was nothing special inside them. The rooms were not identical, but none of them held any loot even as significant as my own spell scroll. Whether that was because others had been just as careful to grab anything useful, the spell scroll was a rare or unique boon, or that there were no other people here and I was just being fucked with.

The first out of the ordinary thing I noticed was a bathroom door. It was much like the others, except it had the letters WC on it, and a pictograph of a toilet painted on in a very business-like style. I went to open it, and when I put my hand on the handle there was a slight buzz of static. I went in, and it was a perfectly ordinary bathroom, one that you might find in a shopping mall or a cinema. It seemed perfectly clean and I would think it was brand new, except there was not so much as a smell of construction in there. I turned the water tap, and it ran fine, and seemed to have both hot and cold water. That was good. Three days without food was survivable, especially with the slight belly I'd managed to acquire in my sedentary job, but three days without water was a death sentence.

I was still hesitant to drink it, and not thirsty enough to try, but I expected that sooner or later I'd have to use the tap water. And the bathroom for that matter. I looked in the mirror and saw the same face I always saw looking in the mirror. A man in his thirties, with a short beard, brown eyes with slight black circles under them. I gave a smile as I always did when looking at myself in the mirror, and turned to leave the room. I saw writing on the door, and much like the writing on the blackboard there was a countdown on it. This one seemed to be in permanent marker and said:

Temporarily Safe: 14:10

So, at least I could shit in peace if it came to it. Assuming that this Tower thing didn't lie to you. And if I did assume it didn't lie, I probably should take a drink of water. But I still just didn't trust this Journal, this Tower, or anything about it. Hell, even if it wasn't intentionally poison, maybe who or whatever made it didn't actually know human biology well enough to provide us safe drinking water. I decided that if I ever found some sort of a bottle, I'd fill it up for emergencies, but for now, at least I knew that there were plenty of bathrooms in the halls as far as I'd seen. I was about to leave, when I thought of properly trying out the spell.

I closed the door, closed my eyes, pictured the symbol and-

Shit, what was the incantation?

I picked up the notebook thing and looked at the spell description.

I closed my eyes, put my hand on the door, pictured the symbol and said: "Ka-Te-Mo" putting emphasis on every syllable.

I opened my eyes and looked up. The timer had stopped. I smiled, genuinely this time. With my free hand I went to open the bathroom door, and no matter how hard I pressed, the handle wouldn't budge. I put my entire weight on it, and still it remained locked in place. It wasn't exactly explosions and fireworks, but it was magic. I could even sort of feel the tingling sensation going from my chest, through my outstretched arm, into the door.

I laughed out loud, and I pulled my hand back. The timer started moving again, counting down. Temporarily safe. That was not promising. But, well, it was an adventure. Surely there had to be some danger. I would deal with it. There just had to be low level monsters to safely grind here, right? And I didn't even need to fight anything, just explore. It was not like the Tower was teeming with dangerous monsters as far as I could see, and with a few levels under my belt I would feel a lot better about my chances.

I left the bathroom, marked it on my map and continued walking. I passed by several more bathrooms, so, at least that was sorted, but didn't see anything else of importance. I was almost starting to get bored, despite the circumstances.

But eventually I did come to a crossing. Here the path split in four directions- including the one I'd come from- and I took out my notepad again and drew the crossing. I decided I'd go left and so made those two lines a little longer. As I didn't hear more scratching from my character sheet, I felt vindicated in my assumption that it wouldn't be that easy to level up cartography, and turned left.

As soon as I did I heard a scream and a baseball bat came swinging at my head.

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