Summoned by Monster Girls

Let me tell you, Shape-Shifting has been one of the cooler things I’ve gotten to experience since getting dragged to the world of Cortha.

Being able to do things like see at night, hear like a bat, and change my body to fit a task at need has been awesome. I was really looking forward to the day that I was able to do full-body shifts and learn to fly. The best thing was, of course, getting to meet and spend time with the girls, but the shifting was up there.

Until this exact moment.

In order to keep the best sort of watch over the girls that I could, I’d already shifted my eyes to be able to see well in the dim light, since our only source now was the light stone that Rieka was holding. So, when that panel of ancient glass illuminated while I was staring directly at it, the damn thing blinded me.

Both of the girls let out startled yelps at the sudden light. I heard a scrambling noise as I blinked furiously to clear the whirling stars out of my vision. A sudden pressure around my waist made me jump in surprise. The musk and cinnamon scent that I detected a moment later told me who it was that was clinging to me. Another presence pressed to my back. From the quiet, almost canine whine I could hear, I knew that was Rieka.

“Everyone okay?” I asked, still blinking my furiously watering eyes and trying to focus enough to use Shape-Shifting to turn them back to normal.

“Wasn’t expecting that, what happened?” Kassandra mumbled.

“It has to be enchanted lighting, there’s no other way to explain them turning on like that. I wonder if it was somehow tied to the door?” Was Rieka’s response.

I could feel both of the girls trembling against me, either from fear or from pain caused by the sudden increase in light. Using their presence to focus, I was able to get enough control together to shift my eyes once more.

Keeping my eyes pressed shut at first, I gave myself a count of three in hopes of my eyes recovering, then I opened them.

Where I had seen nothing but glaring yellow light and dancing, flashing spots in my vision, I could now see perfectly fine down the hallway.

Huh. Apparently shifting my eyes back corrected the dazzling? That’s neat, I thought while checking the tunnel both ahead and behind us.

There weren't any signs of movement as far as I could see. Only a stirring in the air of dust disturbed by our passage. Thick motes of dirt and fluff floated sedately through the still air.

The light that was directly above us, the one I had been unfortunately staring into, was the only one that burned brightly. Further down the tunnel, it was only around half as illuminated. The lights, while glowing, were still covered in a thick layer of grime. It gave them a surreal look and softened the light enough that dappled shadows darkened the tunnel as it disappeared off into the distance. It also made it hard to tell exactly how far the tunnel ran.

“You two okay?” I asked.

“Yes. That was just really unexpected,” Kassandra grumbled in reply, still not looking up from where her face was pressed into my side.

“Agreed. I thought we were going to be attacked or something.” Rieka shifted and released her hold on my back, stepping around and partially into view.

The wolf-eared woman had her spell rod out and was watching the tunnel warily, sparing the occasional glance at the light on the wall above us, though her eyes watered still as they adjusted.

“And your first instinct was to hide behind me?” I teased her gently. Rieka’s ears wilted and she winced, so I was quick to clarify so she would not blame herself. “That’s good. I’m supposed to protect you two after all. I can’t do that if you girls race off on your own.” Rieka’s tail slowly began to wag again and her ears popped back up.

Kassandra giggled from her spot at my side, muffling it in my hip. She sneezed explosively almost as soon as she pulled her face free and groaned, waving her hand to waft the cloud of particulates away.

“Ugh, all this dust is getting to me,” Kassandra whined.

“Come on then, let’s take a look where this goes. At least with the extra illumination we won’t have to worry as much about being surprised,” I replied, stroking Kassandra’s hair lightly and getting a smile from the shorter woman.

The scare with the lights had apparently been enough to remind both of the girls that there may be dangers in this ruin, so they were now letting me lead the way down. Rieka was on my right now and Kassandra on my left, both of them had their spell rods out and at the ready now too. I could tell that the floor was slowly sloping downwards as well, but the slope was very gentle.

We started our walk down the tunnel again, with Kassandra doing her best to not stir up the dust on the ground too much in her passing. Unfortunately, due to how her serpentine body moved as well as being the lowest to the ground, she caused the largest amount of dust to swell up and Kassandra suffered the worst. Rieka spent most of the walk theorizing what set off the lights in the walls.

“The timing itself was suspect,” Rieka began. “I doubt they were tied to the door, since it took over a minute for them to illuminate from the time the door was opened. I think they are either touch-activated or voice-activated. Given their height off the ground, I’m betting it was voice-activated. My mother has a few crystal orbs that are enchanted that way for kingdom functions.”

“Then why don’t you try turning them off and on again?” Kassandra suggested.

“Lights off!” Rieka commanded in a stern voice as we passed another of the glowing panels.

There was no response.

“Lights!” She tried next, but the strip of dusty illumination had not a care in the world.

“Maybe it has a different deactivation phrase?” Kassandra suggested after a moment of thought.

“I dunno, ‘lights off’ is a strai—,” I started to say. The lights deactivated half a second after I spoke the phrase ‘lights off’ aloud with another distant clunk. This dropped the tunnel once more into darkness.

I felt both girls shift and press into my back and sides as the darkness enveloped us once more. Rieka still had the light stone in her hand, so we weren’t entirely engulfed in shadow, but it was a paltry pool of light compared to what our eyes had been adjusted to.

“Lights,” I said aloud. There came that distant clunk noise again before the tunnel illuminated once more.

“Lights off!” Kassandra demanded immediately, but there was no reaction.

It took a few more experiments to confirm the fact, but apparently the lights only responded to the commands when I gave them aloud. Rieka and Kassandra could repeat the simple phrases of ‘lights’ or ‘lights off’ to no effect. They even tried several different pronunciations of the words, but none of them worked.

“So I have two theories here. Either it works for Liam because he’s a Traveler, or because he’s human,” Rieka mumbled thoughtfully.

“Or because he has earth magic!” Kassandra suggested, getting a nod from Rieka after a moment of thought.

“That is a distinct third, yes. We just have no way of testing it. I guess we will go deeper to see if there are any further clues?”

“The air doesn’t feel stale, so I think it will be safe. If either of you two feel woozy though, let me know,” I said and both girls nodded in acknowledgment. With the overhead lights glowing once more, we continued down the tunnel.

It ran for another half mile without deviation, other than the slight slope to the floor, before the tunnel ended in a pair of simple, metal doors. The doors had the same opalescent shimmer of the larger gateway further back, but not any of the curling decorations and accents of the larger main doors. Set in the middle where the two doors met were a pair of simple, wrought-iron handles. They were currently closed and the girls hurried to inspect them, checking the doors for any of the runic traps that had been on the previous set.

While the girls worked, I studied the walls and ceiling. On the girl’s request, I repeated my stretchy-limb maneuver to wipe the grime away from the nearest light to give them a better source of illumination to work with.

The two talked quietly as they studied the door. The way that the tunnel swallowed their words without allowing an echo began to make the hair on my neck stand on end again. There just felt like something wrong here that made my skin crawl.

Sharpening my vision again with a hawk's telescopic vision, I looked back up the long tunnel. I was relieved to still see the distant glimmer of daylight from where the first door sat open into the parking lot/cave.

A squealing noise of metal-on-metal immediately yanked my attention back to the girls and I turned to see Rieka pushing on one of the doors lightly with her spell rod. It swung open under the pressure with only noise as a protest.

“The door isn’t trapped or sealed at all, it’s just closed,” Rieka explained when she glanced back and caught me watching her. Kassandra nodded vigorously from beside her. Together, the three of us pushed the double doors the rest of the way open and surveyed what was on the other side.

Given how many strange occurrences had happened already today, I was expecting a fair number of things to be found at the bottom of the tunnel. The fact that the tunnel had been curving down into the earth and was angled deeper into the mountains, combined with the length of said tunnel, I figured it was unlikely to be something as simple as a basement storage. I’d actually been half expecting a mining complex, as the tunnels had been large enough to bring a wagon down here to load with ore.

The room on the other side of the swinging doors was both similar and distinctly different from what I’d been expecting to find.

The room was large, with ceilings that soared upwards into shadows. Globes of glass that glowed from inside like dangling fluorescent lights hung from the ceiling, spreading pools of illumination around the open room. Right in front of the doors was an open deck that was easily eighty feet long and thirty wide. It was covered in dust, but was made up of the glimmering, colored tiles. I confirmed that by sweeping away a patch of dust with my boot.

Benches were scattered around the platform, mostly against the walls. The leather that had covered them had long since rotted away, leaving behind only rusting metal frames and patterns in the dust to explain what they were. The walls were all made of the same smooth, gray stone as the walls of the tunnels, but unlike the tunnels, there were decorations here. I could see another set of doors off to my right, recessed into the wall. These were definitely sealed like the first had been though and were covered in runic symbols.

“Oooh!” Kassandra exclaimed, slithering rapidly to one side to inspect the nearest of the decorative pieces of art.

It was some kind of three dimensional sculpture worked into the wall. It looked somewhat like a topographical map, but it had the milky-green coloration of copper verdigris. There were several distinct humps that rose up out of the wall, a few large valleys, and different gouges cut into the surface.

Rieka followed her friend to inspect the display while I continued to study the room. The same sense of stillness, of waiting, was building in my guts again.

The shadows made it a little hard to make out, but I could see that the far side of the platform actually vanished off entirely into darkness, rather than butted up against the walls. After checking the tunnel earlier, I’d changed my eyes back to normal to avoid being blinded by the glare in the room. Hawk eyes wouldn’t have helped at the moment to pierce the gloom anyway.

Instead of wandering over to look, I used Shape-Shifting to adjust my eyes. This time I tapped into the sharper night-vision of an owl to see into those shadows. I had to shade my eyes with one hand as the brighter lights from above made it harder to see at first, but I felt that familiar niggling of recognition at the edge of my consciousness. The same feeling when I recognized the lights.

The shadows at the end of the platform concealed a large, round tunnel that vanished further into the mountain. Set into the ground both leading into and out of that tunnel were ancient and rusted iron tracks. Large ones.

Glancing around the platform once more, at the benches set irregularly about and the odd bits of metal art on the walls, I could almost hear the crackle of an announcer in my mind and the distant rumble of a train moving through a tunnel. A chill ran down my spine.

This looks like a subway platform…not exactly like one. But it definitely feels like one, I thought.

Glancing over my shoulders at the smaller double doors, I reexamined my previous thought that maybe this was a mining complex and they would bring down wagons. The tunnel was large enough, but those double doors were not nearly big enough to pull a wagon through. The similarities to a subway station made the differences stand out in a bizarre way. There was no ticket counter, no vending machines, no lockers or advertisements either.

“Liam!” Kassandra’s words yanked me out of my thoughts and I turned to check on my lover. She had her notebook out and was scribbling away in it while she glanced back and forth between the art piece and her parchment. “Come look at this!”

I hurried over to the girls, but I kept glancing over my shoulder to check that dark tunnel mouth.

“Tell me that this doesn’t look like the ravine that leads to the harbor?” Rieka’s voice was indignant and I pulled my eyes off the tunnel to look at the girls once more. Rieka was pointing at one particular cut between two of the lumps of green on the wall as she questioned Kassandra.

“It probably is,” I cut in, making both girls stop and turn to look at me in surprise. “I was thinking about it earlier, but that looks like a topographical map. A map that shows land features. They are normally done with grid lines to show increasing elevations, but I’ve seen displays like this set up in malls or museums. I bet that’s a map of the local territory.” I nodded to the piece that Rieka was pointing at.

“But that can’t be right,” Kassandra protested, turning her attention back to the map and gnawing on her bottom lip lightly.

“Why not? These are the Spearhead Mountains, that’s the Greensward Hills, and this would be Ruumo’s Rest.” Rieka rattled off, indicating one range of mountains, then a section of hills opposite them, before flicking one long finger at a singular mountain far to the east that I guessed would actually be out to sea.

“Yes, but what is this?” Kassandra demanded, indicating one peak far to the west. It was even more irregular than the other ‘mountains’, with odd pits and marks in the milk-green coating.

“I…don’t know?” Rieka mumbled, squinting at the structure and glancing to the others she recognized as if measuring distances and trying to guess what feature that might be.

“That’s because it doesn’t exist!” Kassandra insisted. “There isn’t a mountain there. There’s actually a lake there, not a mountain. Several in fact.”

“How long ago did humans vanish?” I asked and both women went silent again before turning to look at me. “Look, I know it would take far longer than the lifetime of a species for a mountain to turn into a valley, but humor me?”

“Thousands of years is the estimate. There aren’t written records, only those kept in stone. None of those in living memory have encountered humans besides you,” Rieka answered after a moment of thought.

“So is it possible that something catastrophic might have happened between now and then? I don’t know about magic, but there is technology out there capable of leveling mountains.” Both girls' eyes went wide at my statement and Kassandra went pale. It was clear that the idea of something that could level a mountain was terrifying.

“I…need to record this. If this is a map as you said, and I am leaning more and more towards that now, then I need an exact copy.”

“I wish that there wasn’t this buildup on it.” Rieka grumbled, scraping at the milky-green coating and revealing dull copper beneath it. “I have to wonder if there might be labels underneath the verdigris that might answer more about what this is.”

“Citrus or vinegar can help remove that.” I gestured to the green coating and both girls turned to stare questioningly at me.

This is turning into a habit, that’s the third time I’ve surprised them both, I thought in amusement before explaining more aloud.

“My mum had a copper skillet that she loved, so I inherited it when she passed. Don’t judge me.”

Kassandra gave a delicate snort of laughter and turned to grin up at Rieka.

“Our Liam is so useful. I’d never have thought of that,” my snakey lover said while giving me a loving smile.

“I mean, it’s not something that they teach young noblewomen,” Rieka countered with a grin of her own. “Too bad I didn’t bring any…the ussava!”

Rieka’s sudden exclamation made me jump in surprise. Kassandra clapped happily as her friend dove into the dimensional pouch at her hip and began rooting around before she produced several of the fruit that we had collected the other day from the trees while hunting vine rays.

“I don’t know if those will work. I used lemons and table salt back home, but it’s worth a try if it is acidic enough.” I suggested and Rieka set to work with a nod.

We’d packed everything but the tent and bedding into the bag when we left the campsite that morning, so while she didn’t have much, Rieka did have some coarse salt from our cooking supplies. Cutting one of the ussava fruit in half, which exposed a bright orange interior, she sprinkled some of the salt on it first. Rieka then began using it to scrub at the section of the copper map she was curious about.

It took some work, but the milky-green of the verdigris began to smear and shift finally, revealing the features underneath. While Rieka worked, Kassandra quickly sketched the map into her notebook and stood ready to take notes.

While the girls had things under control, I went back to keeping watch. Using my shifted eyes, I scanned every part of the platform and the ceiling. Nothing stood out besides a few more abstract pieces of art. Several walls held metal frames that looked like they had held paintings of some kind at one time, but they had long since rotted away in the damp air.

Once I was sure that nothing was creeping along the ceiling or hiding nearby, I started pacing the platform and squinting into the shadows of the tunnel. I could make out shapes of stones and other large objects that looked like they blocked the tunnel, but they were irregular and hard to define for sure without getting another light source closer to it. While there were plenty of lights on the platform, they did not run into the tunnel.

“Liam! We need you to come and read this!” Kassandra’s shout echoed over the platform and I flinched.

Again, just like the cave above, her words echoed strangely in the large room and the hair on my arms stood up to dance. Something else was wrong here and I couldn’t put my finger on it.

Shushing the girls, I hurried back to check on them. Rieka was bouncing in place excitedly, one hand stained by the dissolved verdigris and the pulp of the ussava fruit she still clutched. Kassandra was pointing at the smeared spot on the copper map with a grin on her face, but that fell away when she saw my expression.

“What’s wrong, Liam?” Kassandra asked, her slitted eyes watching me intently from behind her spectacles.

“Something just feels really off here. I don’t know what it is, but something has me anxious.”

“It could just be the fact that no one has been inside these ruins since the time of humans,” Rieka suggested weakly. Her enthusiastic bouncing came to a stop as she took in my expression as well.

“Possible. But it still makes me nervous,” I countered. “Shouting just feels…wrong here. What did you want me to look at?”

“This right here.” Kassandra pointed again. “I know there is writing there, but I cannot read it. I was hoping that you might be able to interpret it.”

I bent close to the map, trying to ignore the sharp scent of the odd citrus fruit that Rieka had used to clean that section of verdigris away.

At the base of the irregular mountain shape that the girls had noted shouldn’t be there, tiny words were inlaid in the copper in a different metal. Until Rieka had scrubbed it away, the verdigris had grown over it and left a puckered and unintelligible shape. Now though, I could read it.

“’Yellowtooth Chemical Research Facility’ is what it says,” I murmured after a moment of study. Kassandra stared at me in surprise and Rieka growled before elaborating when I gave her a questioning look.

“The lake that Kassandra mentioned is there? It’s a caustic lake. Animals that touch the water die and the land around it is also dead for miles. It’s one of the mysteries of the kingdom. Mother has a few alchemists studying it. But, since it isn’t spreading, she isn’t putting a lot of effort into it.”

“Hmm. That doesn’t sound good,” I said, staring at the map. The section that Rieka had cleaned was only a small part, and we had already uncovered something important. I couldn’t help the feeling that there had to be more bits of information hiding.

On an impulse, I held my hand out for the pulpy bit of fruit Rieka had. She passed it over without comment and I used it to scrub at the area Kassandra had been pointing at before, roughly where we would be located.

The milky-green buildup on the copper slowly scrubbed away until it revealed another inlaid label that I read aloud.

“Shadow Mountain Research Facility.”

“That doesn’t sound ominous at all,” Rieka murmured in a tiny voice. All three of us shared a look before Kassandra made a note of the label as well.

“What did you find over there, Liam?” Kassandra asked after closing up her notebook. It was clear she was trying to change the subject, but I didn’t feel like calling her on it. Kassandra gestured over one shoulder towards the far end of the cavern. “We got distracted with this, but we should secure the area to make sure it’s safe before we really get into studying this.”

“There’s another tunnel, much larger than the other one, that leads deeper into the mountain. I couldn’t see well enough to find out more, but it looked to be blocked up. We have to hop down off the platform to go look though,” I explained.

“There’s also that other set of doors,” Rieka suggested, pointing to the recessed and rune-clad doors further along the wall.

“I’m pretty sure those are as heavily locked as the first set,” Kassandra sighed. “I’ll have to study the runes on them to come up with a way to break through the wards later.”

“So the biggest unknown is the tunnel then?” Rieka asked and I nodded in agreement when she looked up at me.

“Well, let's go look then! This map isn’t going anywhere, so we can come back and study it more later. Maybe even detach that from the wall and take it with us?” Kassandra gestured to the sculpture. It was easily four feet on each side, but I remembered what the girls had told me. As long as they could get a portion of it into the dimensional pouch, the mouth would stretch to accommodate an object.

“Something to worry about later,” Rieka insisted and got a grudging nod from Kassandra.

Moving as a group, the three of us headed over to the far edge of the platform once more. Rieka still held the light stone, so I had her keep back just behind me so that it wouldn’t damage my currently shifted eyes. It didn’t add much illumination until we got to the edge of the platform and away from the overhead lights.

The drop down off the platform to the tracks was a good four feet onto rough gravel and packed earth. I hopped down first, then caught Rieka and Kassandra when the girls followed. For Kassandra I was more of a landing pad than a catcher. She used her coils as a counterbalance to ensure she didn’t really need the help, but she took the opportunity to dive into my chest regardless and nearly managed to bowl me over. Again, it was only my increased strength and improved balance that let me catch several hundred pounds of affectionate dwarf lamia when it smacked into me.

Once we were down by the tracks, we stopped to inspect them first. The tracks reminded me of something crossed between ancient railroad tracks and the sort of tracks one might see in a subway. Large, wooden beams crossed in between the trio of rails, supporting them from below. The wooden beams were slowly rotting away, but still remained generally intact despite their age. I vaguely remembered that railroad ties, the wooden beams, were often impregnated with chemicals and resins to make them far more resistant to damage than regular wood. The rails were different sizes, a smaller one on either side and one larger on the inside. All three looked to be made of iron and were heavily corroded.

The excitement that the girls had been showing earlier was fading away slowly as we progressed down the tunnel further to see what lay within the darkness.

Because of my sharper eyes, I recognized what I was seeing first, but waited until the girls were close enough to make it out before stopping them to let us all study it.

The tunnel was blocked off entirely. There were two parts to the barrier. One was that the ceiling had, apparently, caved in. Soil and broken stone filled most of the tunnel in front of us in erratic piles. The other half of the blockage was the twisted remains of what I could only describe as a primitive train and its cars. A primitive train that had either slammed into the blockage, or derailed to cause the cave in.

“Dear Gods…,” Kassandra muttered as she studied the wreckage.

“Sounds about right. What is that?” replied Rieka.

“That. Is a train. A type of conveyance like a wagon that travels on rails. Think of it like a high-speed mine cart. But what would have led to one going this deep, and into the mountains?” I replied. Rieka turned to look at me in question.

“Well. Obviously to a mine, right?” The platinum-blonde asked, but I could see in her eyes that she didn’t quite believe that thought.

“Wrong kind of cars. These are passenger cars,” I said gently.

The statement didn’t need further explanation. Both girls turned their eyes to the twisted wreckage. There were at least three of the large, passenger-style cars crumpled like crushed cans in the tunnel. Whatever had happened here, it had been violent. And while this had been a transport at one time, it was something entirely different now.

Now, it was a grave.