What follows is a brainstorming session of all the things which could go wrong, mostly torn from the celluloid of film or the pages of books. Every fictional hazard they can think of comes out of their mouths. Giant boulders, poison darts, explosions, incineration chambers, crushing ceilings, they imagine it all.

  None of that particularly prepares them for how do disarm such a defense.

  So they discuss pressure plates, tripwires, lasers, cameras, and motion sensors. They note that something more exotic could exist: a device that’s entirely magical. This brings them no closer to figuring out what to do.

  Joe begins running out of patience. “We don’t even know that it’s trapped in the first place,” he says. “We should just open it.”

  Todd waves his hand: no. “Let me at least check for tripwires or whatever.”

  Joe accedes, “fine. Make it quick though, we’re going to run out of time eventually.”

  Todd extends his [mercury rod] into a long wire. Sitting on the floor near the open gap, he ever so lightly slides the line up. He feels for the slightest resistance and finds none.

  “Nothing?” Joe asks.

  “If we want to open up the door, we should all get behind it for protection,” Todd suggests, undeterred.

  “I’m all for being careful, but aren’t we going overboard?” Officer Bernice asks.

  Nonetheless, the four of them get behind the vault door. Joe hands his sword off to Officer Bernice, grabs the handle, and starts pulling it open. The weight of the door is massive. It resists being moved and swings painfully slowly. Veins pop out on Joe’s forearms as he strains.

  The squad waits forty five seconds, in case something is going to happen. Nothing does.

  They peek around the open entrance and find a smooth tile floor and a short corridor.

  “This is fucking ominous,” Candra groans.

  “Alright, I guess watch where you step,” Joe warns.

  He moves in with painstakingly careful footfalls. When Todd follows after, he places his toes down on exactly the same tiles that Joe crossed. They all do.

  They approach the end of the corridor and a much smaller inset door. Todd barely breaths.

  “Do you want to check this one too?” Joe asks at a normal volume, giving Todd a fright.

  Looking over the door from top to bottom, Todd doesn’t see anything out of place. He admits it.

  “Might as well, then,” Joe says. He twists the wheel lock on the door, and a puff of stale air comes from the seams. He swings the door open and there’s another corridor inside.

  “I swear, after all this, this had better be the right place,” Candra mutters.

  The four of them inch into the next hall.

  Todd’s vision wavers and he rubs his eyes vigorously. At first, he searches for tripwires, but as they head further into the corridor he notices a series of metal disks inset into the walls.

  “Look at those, what are those?” he points out.

  Joe wobbles on his feet. “What are those? What are those?” His voice slurs.

  “Joe?” Todd inquires.

  “Oh. Okay, I’ve gotta sit down,” Candra wheezes. She plops down on the floor and her bag’s contents rattle.

  “How did we… where’s the treasure?” Officer Bernice says, confused.

  Todd’s vision gets worse. A fugue builds. The sensation is invasive, and he slaps his head to clear it. The corridor stretches out into endless darkness in front of him. Only the entry door is visible behind him. It appears welcoming, an escape.

  “Guys, I think there’s poison gas in here!” Todd calls out. He covers his mouth with his sleeve.

  “Poison… that’s bad,” Joe utters.

  “Oh shit,” Candra says. “I… should get up?”

  “Get up!” Officer Bernice warbles.

  Dropping her feather and Joe’s sword, she hauls Candra to her feet. Leaning on each other, they head towards the door. Todd grabs Joe by the shoulder and directs him out as well.

  Todd’s mind unfogs the second he exits. The sudden clarity is jarring.

  “Whoa, what was that?” Candra wonders. “Aw, shit. I left my stick inside.”

  “It messed with my head,” Joe says. “That stuff is nasty.”

  “I feel fine now though,” Officer Bernice notes.

  Todd sucks in air and steps further away. “We feel fine. But it could just be that the poison has stages.”

  “Jesus. Dark, Drips. Not everything has to go wrong,” Joe chastens.

  “If I was making a trap that poisoned people, I wouldn’t pick a gas that stopped working the second you got out of it,” Todd insists.

  “Well, luckily you didn’t design this thing, aliens did,” Joe snaps. “Okay, so what do we want to do? I figure we just hold our breath and push through.”

  “We could try to vent the room somehow,” Officer Bernice suggests.

  Joe rubs his chin. “I like the idea, but I don’t see how we pull it off.”

  “We could turn our [mercury rod]s into fans,” Candra thinks out loud.

  Todd scoffs. “That’ll just make the gas spread out here.”

  “For God’s sake. Then we’ll just hold our breath,” Joe declares. “Follow me and grab your stuff as we go.”

  Todd inhales deeply and holds. He follows after the others.

  He doesn’t take two steps into the room before his thoughts become clouded. Joe and the others stop in their tracks just a little further in. Todd hears Candra exhale right away.

  Joe just exclaims, “woah, boy. What?”

  The others stagger to a halt. As fractured thoughts intrude on his mind, Todd retains the focus to collect them and shepherd them out of the room again. He exhales.

  “What’s going on, we weren’t breathing,” Officer Bernice complains after they gather themselves.

  “Maybe it goes in through the skin,” Joe supposes.

  “It couldn’t affect us that fast, then,” Todd is certain. “There’s no way. Chemicals just don’t work like that.”

  They argue about it for two minutes.

  “Well then, maybe it’s magic,” Officer Bernice guesses. “Maybe it’s not poison at all.”

  Todd almost makes a noise, but then he stops himself. Why can’t it be magic? He’s experienced something similar in the tutorial already. And if it was magic, it would explain why he was less affected than the others. His wisdom score provides a defense against mental manipulation.

  They continue to debate. Joe is convinced that the pixies wouldn’t give them an impossible task. There has to be a way to bypass or traverse this barrier.

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  “What’s your wisdom at?” Todd asks them.

  “Nine,” Candra and Joe provide.

  “Eleven,” Officer Bernice reveals.

  “Let’s try it one more time,” Todd offers. “This time, I’ll lead us through. I think it’ll work.”

  Todd explains his reasoning and this attempt he takes the lead as the team enters the room.

  Joe and Candra lose their bearings after a few steps. Officer Bernice makes it further. Todd begins to lose track of his objectives and his sense of place too. Cotton fills his skull.

  He slaps his cheek hard. It doesn’t seem to help. Joe leans against the wall and begins to slump.

  “I’m so sore,” Joe slurs. “What happened?”

  Todd lunges over and grabs the tall young man. He gets him standing straight. Then he reminds himself that they’re moving forward. He gives Joe a nudge in the right direction and gets Candra. Which way are they headed again? Are they supposed to be leaving?

  “Ack, get out of my head,” Todd spits.

  Sending her the right way requires intense focus and trust in himself. Trust in himself is not Todd’s strongest suit. He starts to doubt what he’s doing.

  “Officer Bernice, we’re headed towards the vault, right?” he asks.

  “Stand right where you are,” the police officer commands, “show me your hands. Where’s my gun. Where’s my gun?”

  She grabs at her hip, then the other one, then spins around once.

  Todd is confounded by her reaction. Is he in trouble?

  Wait, where is he?

  “Argh! What the heck!” he cries. He bends over and picks up the team’s discarded weapons. The feather cuts his shoulder and he adjusts it to protect himself. He jams his [mercury rod], the sword, and the scepter into his bag. The ends of them hang out.

  “We are headed through the room. We are headed through the room. We are headed –” Todd chants to himself.

  Fragmented thoughts crash into his consciousness like waves to veer him astray. The room is filled with strangers. There’s a message hidden in the glowing paint on his body. What if he drank too much and got lost? He has an inexplicable feeling that if he turns around, his family will be waiting there.

  No. His family is back on Earth. He’s on a foreign planet. The people in the room with him are his friends.

  What about the mushroom juice?

  He isn’t sure about the mushroom juice.

  He remembers where he’s going. Grabbing Officer Bernice by the elbow, he starts to lead her deeper into the hallway. After a moment of confusion, she punches him in the face.

  Todd stumbles in blinding pain. Intrusive thoughts flash through him. He’s under attack, he needs to kill to survive.

  The idea is quashed as soon as it emerges. This is a person. What am I thinking?

  He kneads his cheek. It doesn’t feel broken, but Officer Bernice has hit him full force. He works his jaw.

  “Officer… Bernice, Officer Bernice. Follow me,” he motions. “Joe, Candra, follow me.”

  He paws at their sleeves. This time he ducks back if they take swings at him.

  “Come on, come on. It’s me, Todd.”

  Herding the team takes patience and a very calm voice. They make twenty feet of progress.

  What if he’s leading them into a trap?

  The thought freezes him in his tracks. He nearly turns around then and there.

  He looks down at the exit. He looks at the disks embedded in the walls.

  No. This is the trap.

  There has to be a way to fight it. Willpower isn’t enough. Pain doesn’t clear the mind. Chanting doesn’t help.

  Todd feels like he’s in that transitional state when he’s just woken from a particularly vivid dream and haven’t quite come to his senses yet. He’s beset by an oncoming urge to check if he’s still wearing pants. He wonders if his team has been replaced by the pixies, and now they’re conspiring against him. Why’s he so hot? What does he have in his hand?

  A whirl of discombobulation storms through his frontal lobe. He flows from one bafflement to another, the rowboat of his lucidity bailing seawater frantically.

  Candra has turned around and is headed for the door. Todd recognizes that this is the opposite of what they want.

  “Candra! Hey. Candra, come here.”

  “Don’t touch me,” Candra withdraws.

  “I’m not going to touch you,” Todd calms her. “Just come this way. We’re all going this way.” He pauses. “What if Joe holds your hand?”

  “Why?”

  Todd nearly loses track of his motive. Why indeed? Does he really think there’s treasure here? Isn’t that another delusion?

  “Hey everybody. I want you to hold hands,” Todd compels them. “Here, like this. Hold hands.”

  He guides Officer Bernice towards Joe and then Joe towards Candra. He pushes Joe’s hands into place and closes Joe’s fingers around their wrists.

  Officer Bernice throws another haymaker at Joe, but he ducks under the blow. He chuckles. She looks flummoxed.

  “Now, come follow me,” Todd implores. He walks backwards and waves to direct them. Losing track of what he’s doing, he feels a surge of jealousy towards Joe. It lasts until he remembers that he was the one that set up the arrangement himself. He slaps himself in the cheek again, but this time he hits the spot that Officer Bernice punched him. He bites off a scream.

  Everything changes when Todd chooses to cycle cosmic energy through his body. At first it’s just to counteract the pain he feels, to fortify his vitality as it nurtures broken blood vessels. But as the energy cycles through his head, some of it passes through his brain.

  The presence of the disorder lessens by more than a factor of three in ten.

  Todd doesn’t make the connection at first. He actually suspects he’s leaving the area of effect instead. But when he lets the cosmic energy idle, confusion sets in immediately.

  When he recaptures his senses, he experiments with energy again. The more confident he becomes, the more of it he directs to his head specifically.

  By now, he’s diminished the effect of the field by half.

  Feeling rational enough to continue, he regathers the team one last time. Maintaining the flow through his channels while speaking simultaneously requires arduously splitting his attention.

  His concern that they’re headed towards something more dangerous remains. He can’t shake it. But Joe had been confident they were almost at their goal. He chooses to trust Joe’s instincts over his own.

  The corridor is forty yards long. His teammates resist being led. They go astray. Todd holds out the [roc pinion] flat in front of him to find any possible tripwires as they go.

  He keeps setting the others on the right track. Officer Bernice is doing better. He keeps reminding her to cycle cosmic energy, and she does so until she gets distracted.

  Todd reaches the far door. It has a clanking latch that grinds as he pulls it open.

  Most thoughts of checking the room for traps fall to the wayside. He’s already at his wit’s end. At the least he shuffles the rest of the team off to the side while he opens the door wide. After waiting ten seconds, he sticks his head around the door and spies a small room.

  The walls are covered in racks of rusted metal drawers and larger lockers. In the center of the space, a shining steel table sits with seven wooden boxes of varied sizes stacked on top of it. A long two handed sword leans naked against the table and a pair of armored boots are set underneath it.

  Todd hops into the room and holds his breath. His knees are bent in case he needs to dive out.

  None of his fears materialize. His mind is completely clear.

  He sighs in relief. The treasure is finally within reach.