===>
The dungeon is a great temple of black stone, red fire flickering eerily on either side of the doorway in lanterns that are shaped into claws. It looks like something out of an N64 Zelda game. You hope that there aren’t any Zelda-vicious puzzles to get through in here, because you get the distinct feeling that GameFAQs isn’t going to be able to bail you out anymore.
Our Lord took the Light with him when he went into the earth, the dragons had said, and without his Light we cannot sustain ourselves for long. But there should be places where his Light lingers, though we have not the strength to take it by ourselves. If you are truly the Heir, then you should be able to keep the remnants of the Light alive for long enough to bring them to the village. We can last a little longer, if you do so.
The things your consorts say aren’t always particularly clear-it’s more of the same riddle bullshit that the game makes Siskier talk in, because Quests are only meaningful when you find things out on your own. Or, if you’re feeling a little bit more charitable, this is the world your consorts have always lived in, and they’re trying their best to explain things to you, but they don’t know where to start from so that they can give you the entire picture.
“It’s all baby steps to get up to my real hero’s journey, right,” you say as you squint into the mouth of the dungeon. There’s faint light from inside, which means there’s more fire in there, or at least windows. That’s good; you won’t have to rely entirely on Siskier to be able to see. “When I got to talk to the little guys yesterday, they said that their lord-this dragon god Denizen, whatever its name is-had given them light in the first place, and that now both of them are gone, and I have to get the light back somehow by finding the Denizen and I guess defeating it.”
Siskier nods expectantly. You straighten up and take a breath and keep thinking out loud.
“If beating the Denizen is what’s supposed to bring the light back, then I guess this is more like an errand or a stopgap measure. They did say ‘a little longer’, after all.” According to your status screen, your health meter is still full. You’ve got a little bit more food, in case this takes a really long time, and you’ve got your rocket boots and Siskier in case you run into something you can’t actually handle and need to haul ass. “It’d just be too easy to run around this planet and snatch little bits of light out of dungeons to keep the consorts happy.” You flick your sylladex shut, shake your head so that the pop-up screen goes away, the afterimage gone from the underside of your eyelids. “Siskier. I-I do understand, at least in my head, that there’s supposed to be personal meaning in doing sidequests. But what the consorts said, that they can’t live for very long without the light, that bothers me. Will they actually, like, start to die off or get killed or disappear, or whatever, if I don’t get light to them? Are they going to hold out until I can finish my real quest, or do I have to keep doing sidequests and stuff if I want them to live?”
Siskier folds her arms and leans to the side. “I… think everything kind of depends on how fast you get through your quest, here! It’s a bad idea to go looking for your Denizen before you’re ready.”
You breathe out a little fuck and yank your hair back out of your eyes, veering to your right. “So my consorts possibly dying is actually a thing. I-fuck, we need to figure out how long they can actually go before I need to, to recharge their lightbulbs or whatever. I can’t just go prancing off to other planets if that means I’m abandoning things I’m responsible for.”
When you weave back around to the left so that you’re facing Siskier again, she looks genuinely distressed-staring at you out of wide eyes, her hair actually standing out a little like a lion’s mane on end. “Gulcasa, you’ve got to leave this planet for the sake of your quest! Everyone has to travel to the other Lands too, in order to grow. You-you won’t be leaving the consorts helpless. The others will be here to look after them when you’re not here!”
She reaches out to pat at your cheek and shoulder, and the sensation of her is weird as fuck-chilly, like wind made solid. You’re not entirely sure that her hands aren’t going to go straight through you. It’s a dash of ice water to the face, and you realize distantly that you’re getting kind of overwrought.
Siskier is still staring at you kind of freaked-out, and she’s making this low kind of rumbly noise like a half-baked growl.
“I just-I can’t help it, okay, it bothers me,” you say, and fuck that is pathetic like an ASPCA commercial. You could never get further than fifteen seconds into one of those without changing the channel or turning the damn television off: Too obvious a tug on the heartstrings, and they made you feel like your ribcage was quietly imploding.
She looks at you, eyes all wide and concerned and brows knitted intensely. She looks at you like she has no idea what she should say, and that makes you feel the worst of all. You move backwards, half a step, and the soles of your rocket shoes crunch on the dry ground as you jam your hands into your pockets.
“Let’s just go,” you mutter, and it’s a relief when Siskier relaxes and nods.
There aren’t really any underlings lurking inside the temple! This is good, because you’re way more concerned with looking around; there’s a lot to take in. Some of the walls are carved into intricate obsidian windowpanes, what would be sheets of stained glass murals if every warped triangle wasn’t black. The stone at hand height is marked with a patterned motif: A stylized sun, something like a fanned-out pair of wings, a heart divided into two, a weeping eye, two vertical swirls, two horizontal swirls. You wind up dragging your fingertips along them absently, thud thud thud as they sink into the reliefs. The edges are soft with age. The sun symbol is much larger than the other five, and you trace the beams like numbers on a clock.
Time and again you run into heavy doors, all locked with the same mechanism: On the wall next to them, or maybe the floor, there will be a carving of four vaguely serpentine silhouettes and a dragon, all joined in a circle around a broken stone indentation: A cobbled jade picture of something amphibious. When you search the floor and find the missing tile of frog, then return it to the rest of the puzzle, the door will open.
All the murals, the symbols and the repeated imagery, are thick with meaning: There’s some grand design behind everything, you can just tell.
Unfortunately, this is Nessiah’s gig, not yours. Whatever vast truth is hiding behind all the frog pictures, you can’t quite wrap your head around it just yet.
“They should make some kind of Quest Symbolism for Dummies book,” you say at last. You’re three floors deep into the temple now, standing in a wide circular antechamber decorated in the same old carvings, sprinkled with blocky pictures of your consorts. Light from windows wouldn’t reach to these depths, but that same red-gold fire is dancing in wall sconces so that you can see. “If I’m supposed to be getting anything out of this, I’m really not yet.”
Siskier floats, and the lines of her mouth are pensive. The carved walls reflect in her eyes like stars, like she can decipher them. She looks like a real ghost-which you guess she sort of is, but she looks fey, like she doesn’t really belong on the same plane as you, like she maybe doesn’t mean you well.
Then she turns toward you with her head all cocked to the side, smiling until she dimples, pretty as a picture. A kind of disconcertingly sharp-toothed picture, but it’s all very Siskier in a way that makes some of your uneasiness go away.
“Hmm, well, you know I couldn’t actually tell you things straight out even if I wanted to,” she says. “But since I am supposed to be your guide, I guess I could always give you a hint or two.”
“Please and thank you,” you tell her immediately. “You know I’m not really smart enough for this riddle bullcrap.”
“I think that that is a very uncharitable thing to say about yourself,” Siskier proclaims, planting her hands on her hips, “and that you are perfectly capable of understanding the things that matter! Gao. But I will still help you, because I am a kind and benevolent partner.”
She straightens up, makes a very clear noise like a-HEM, and holds up her pointer finger.
“What do you think we’re going to find in the heart of this dungeon, to take back to the village?” is what Siskier asks you, and something clicks in your head.
“…We’re going to find the light,” you say very slowly, “but now that you mention it, we don’t really know what that means.”
Siskier nods. She’s beaming at you, kind of literally: Her smile is bright, and so is her body. The whole room is lit up with her, pale aquamarine light mingling with the red-yellow light of the torches to create interestingly colored shadows falling in different directions.
“What do you think it means, Gulcasa?” she asks.
You’ve already gotten your hint, so now you have to talk through it yourself. Maybe if you run your mouth for long enough, you’ll be able to hit on something of value.
“Well…,” and you hesitate because even though it’s Siskier you don’t want to run onto a train of thought that’s completely stupid, “I kinda doubt that it’s like literal physical light? Or at least, it can’t only be that, because there’s fire that can be used as a light source, the consorts do use the fire as a light source. And the fire is fucking everywhere, it can’t be that hard to get more of it if fire goes out in one place.
“So if it’s some kind of physical light or light source, I guess… that means that it actually is hard to obtain or transfer fire in this world, or that the Denizen’s light is special.”
Siskier is nodding. “Okay. What other things do you think it could be, then?”
“I really hope that you don’t want me to guess the exact object we’re recovering, because in that case we’re fucked,” you tell her, but she just keeps smiling. “Metaphorical ‘light’, though. There are kind of a lot of things that that could be. Light is usually associated with goodness in classic high fantasy, because humans have an instinctive fear of night and the dark. That’s not always true in modern stories, though, because real life’s not convenient enough to be divided into good and evil, and if the same plot device gets used too much it turns into a cliché. So… I don’t know if that’s a trustworthy interpretation.”
“If you’re grouping light and dark together as a pair, then what are some other things that you would associate with the dark?” Siskier prompts, tapping her fingertip in the air as if you’ve still struck onto something important. “Maybe that will help you think of even more things.”
“Things I’d associate with the dark.” You have to think about it for a few minutes. “Shit. Information, knowledge. Keeping someone in the dark means not telling them something. Inspiration, maybe? Because the image of a lightbulb turning on is associated with suddenly understanding or realizing something.”
Siskier keeps smiling and nodding in the background. You hold a hand to your forehead. Your thoughts are going at a million miles an hour, and you don’t know if you can keep up; it feels fucking weird. “And I think that you can push that definition and say that light leads people, inspires people. That it has something to do with things like, like love and hope, warm things that help others keep going. Things that can heal, even.”
You feel like you want to pace, but there’s not much room in this antechamber to do it, so you just shake your head. “So-some kind of special literal light, goodness, knowledge. It belonged to the Denizen, or maybe the Denizen makes it, and now that the Denizen is gone, this light is gone too. The consorts ultimately can’t live without it. Whatever it is, it’s corporeal enough that bits of it are hidden in dungeons, or there are things that generate it or hold it in the dungeons. I’m the Heir of Light, and my Quest is supposed to build up to me confronting the Denizen and bringing light back to the world.”
If the dots are supposed to connect now that you’ve said all this out loud, they’re not. You seriously aren’t cerebral enough for this shit. You wish you had been assigned a more clear-cut role; Nessiah’s Seer of Hope is pretty easy to understand. “…Welp. I’ve got nothing.”
But Siskier’s smile doesn’t fade; she doesn’t look disappointed at all. Instead, she looks even more pleased than ever. “Don’t worry about it! You’re thinking about it, and that’s good. There’s meaning in just trying to puzzle it out, too.”
Your head feels weirdly pressured, like there’s a nasty migraine coming on in a couple hours, and you’re glad it’s relatively dark in here.
“One more question,” you say, and you point to the familiar image of the snakes and the dragon and the frog made out of tiles. “If the monsters on the outside are supposed to be our Denizens, then what the hell does the frog mean?”
Siskier smiles and doesn’t answer.
You at least have enough common sense to know when pointless is pointless, so you sit on the gritty floor and cross your legs and flip through your sylladex for more food and your PDA. The temple probably doesn’t go that much further down, and so you might as well recharge and check in with everybody before you get up to your ears in any more weird puzzle shit.
Yggdra is still online, but you kind of don’t want to have to deal with her more than once a day, especially since you managed to end things on a less-than-antagonistic note earlier. She’s busy with her sidequest anyway, and you should probably just leave her to it.
Nessiah’s chumhandle is still grayed out, which makes all your insides sink. Hopefully he’s just been really busy today and hasn’t bothered to log in, instead of whatever he’s using as his ‘net device running out of batteries without his noticing. Hopefully he’s staying out of trouble, too, and not arguing with his sprite too much.
Leon’s handle is in gray too, but since he and his sprite have to deal with that Jack Noir prick, you’re not all that surprised there. For that matter, Elena’s not on, either. You’re actually pretty sure that she hasn’t been online since before the big entry clusterfuck yesterday. Somehow, you wouldn’t put it past Leon to have not given her a computer or cellphone or anything before shutting her in her room-that’d at least preclude Elena’s messaging everyone else in an appeal for a jailbreak.
…You’ve thought so before, but even though Leon’s your best bro, you have to admit he’s kind of an idiot when it comes to Elena.
While you’re shaking your head, Emilia’s handle changes from gray to pink. You sit up, alert, and nearly fumble the keys as you open a chat window with her.
-- genocideAura [GA] began pestering angelicCute [AC] --
GA: hey how are things
AC: oh!!!!
AC: hi i was just gonna message you actually
AC: were doing fine
GA: more or less same over here
GA: where you at?
AC: we went back to lofam
AC: weve been powerleveling!
AC: i mean i guess ive been powerleveling since luciana doesnt have levels to gain :p
AC: and now we have a buttload of grist and were gonna go home and play with the alchemiter for a while
AC: what about you
GA: middle of a dungeon on lodaf
GA: maybe almost at the end of the dungeon idk
GA: it’s baby’s first dungeon so i don’t have a frame of reference for average size
GA: how do sburb dungeons even work? we just don’t know
AC: hehehe
GA: anyhow it’s for some sidequest thing since i told siskier we were gonna work on quest shit today
GA: don’t tell anyone because if this gets back to her she’s gonna have me on sidequest duty forever
GA: but it’s basically impossible for me to say no to my consorts anyhow
GA: they are illegal amounts of precious
AC: hehe i know what you mean!
AC: the wooper loopers here are really really cute too
GA: looks like everybody more or less can’t stop the consort soft spot from hapening
GA: nessiah’s this way about his too
GA: we have got to sneak up on leon when he’s around his sometime it’d probably be a priceless spectacle
AC: maybe
GA: anyhow don’t want to keep you from fun alchemy shenanigans
GA: just wanted to check in and make sure you are doing okay
AC: of course im doing okay!!!!! :p
GA: well yeah i kinda figured you would be
GA: never hurts to make sure though
AC: you are really silly
GA: i’m your brother and i worry
GA: which
GA: means
GA: that yeah you’re right and i get to make a dumbass of myself a lot of the time
GA: is this a problem
AC: only sorta!
AC: you be careful too
AC: like dont make siskier work too hard keeping your dumb butt out of trouble
GA: i’ll do my best
AC: hehe later
GA: later
GA: love you
-- angelicCute [AC] ceased pestering genocideAura [GA] --
You put your PDA away, stand up, and dust off your pants. It’s probably time to get moving again.