I am Veritas; a Knowledgeable Nano who Shares Stories. I am sending you this Postcard from the Ninth World.
We reached the city of Qi and, after finding lodging for the time we would be there, went in search of the address from the notice.
It was in a somewhat disreputable part of the city; one the Guardians wouldn’t even visit. But we were armed and the one group of thugs we encountered gave us a wide berth after realizing that our weapons weren’t just for show.
The warehouse we eventually reached was near the river. The others had guards stationed outside, sometimes several, but the one we wanted had only a hovering glow-globe out front. A copy of the notice that had brought us to Qi was on the door and, when there was no response to our knock, we pushed it open and entered.
The room inside was barely furnished. There was a single desk in the room, with a stack of papers on it and a single figure behind it. The room was illuminated by several glow-globes that floated near the ceiling.
The figure identified themselves as Komor Deran of the University of Doors. Their voice was soft, but I couldn’t tell if they were male or female. Human, probably, but their entire body was swathed in strips of cloth that were constantly billowing slightly, even though there was no air movement in the room. They asked if we were there in response to the ad and we acknowledged that we were.
They said that they represented a group that had made a discovery; a discovery dealing with the prior worlds that they were equipping an expedition to follow up on. They were recruiting “survey teams” for the expedition. If we thought that we were capable of “facing the challenges of the prior worlds” then we would be welcome. But they, and their employer, needed to be sure.
They gestured towards the door behind them. We were free to enter it or leave. If we left we could never enter the warehouse again. If we went through the door we would only leave if we passed the challenges within. Well, that was the only way we would leave while still alive.
We looked at each other, nodded, then entered the door behind them.
The room we found ourselves in had a large table in the middle, filled with food. Shelves with books filled the wall we had entered through, and a giant mirror encompassed the opposite wall. The wall to our left only contained a door, but it refused everything we could do to open it.
As did the door we had entered. We were committed.
After a while, we noticed that the “mirror”… wasn’t. The view of the room in it wasn’t what a mirror would show; some few items weren’t reversed as they should have been. We made the adjustments in the room so that the reflection was “correct” and the next door opened of its own accord.
The next room was divided by a chasm, spanned by several bridges. But, as soon as the first of us tried to cross, the bridge sank until it hit the bottom, at which time the person on the bridge was displaced back to our side of the chasm.
After some conversation among ourselves, we decided that the fastest of us should cross first. That would be Janal. Then I would cross, and Nyla would cross last as she was the strongest and could pull herself up the bridge even if it collapsed.
This plan worked and we soon found ourselves in another room.
This room had nothing but a column in its center, with what were obvious handholds protruding from it. We shrugged and worked together to lift the column.
As the door to the next room rose, projectiles started flying in. Unable to move, they hit us and we dropped the column in agony, pulling them from our skin.
They seemed to be large thorns of some kind. They did little injury, but imparted far more pain than their shallow penetration into our flesh would have suggested. It was another test.
After some discussion, Nyla agreed to lift the column, from the far side where it would protect her somewhat from the thorns being shot at us. Janal and I would rush through the open door and attempt to disable the source.
We did this, and we found a pair of circular discs that were flinging thorns from some kind of conduit towards the next room. Janal stopped the “attack” by shoving a dagger into the mechanism, jamming the discs. Then, he and I held the door open as Nyla came through.
The next few rooms followed similar patterns. We found a room where we had to walk on certain tiles in a certain order or we would be displaced back to our starting point. A room where a central column was spinning while flinging razor-sharp ribbons of metal around it. Rooms where wild animals were waiting for us and lept at us as soon as the door opened.
Then we entered the ninth room. From the pattern, we had decided that this would be the final one, but we were unprepared for what we found.
There were four people in the room. Well.. three people and… I still don’t know what it was. Their leader, whose name I never learned, stood up in an odd mixture of annoyance and relief.
He told us that only one group could pass the next door. They had been waiting for us. We had to fight, and the winners would be able to pass through. The losers? They would have to wait here until another group came along.
We glanced at each other, drew our weapons, and then waited until all of them were ready for battle as well.
Doing otherwise would not have been fair.
I will admit, I fell before the onslaught of someone wielding a short, curved dagger in a fighting style I had never seen before. The dagger was never where it should have been when I tried to block it. Fortunately, he fell to Janal, who also managed to defeat the… whatever it was, despite the venenous needles it was spitting at us, before falling to an axe attack from what was probably the largest person I have ever seen.
Nyla saved us. She defeated the axe-wielder before he could turn from defeating Janal, then turned to the remaining member of our opponents. The one who had welcomed us, ironically. She was disarmed but, as he stepped in for the kill, she revealed that it had been a feint. She had a dagger in her hand and shoved it into his throat as he stepped forward for what he apparently thought would be an easy kill.
As soon as he dropped all of us who had fallen were able to stand again. Despite our apparent wounds, we were healthy. The final door opened and Nyla, enjoying the moment a bit too much, gestured us through.
I looked back long enough to see the leader of the other group give me a rude hand-gesture. I returned it as we stepped through the door.
There, we found another room looking like the one we had first encountered. The woman there introduced herself as Hamae Treshk, an Amber Priest. Well… a former Amber Priest.
She had found an artifact, a pair of goggles, that were showing her signs that were otherwise invisible, leading her in a particular direction. Doing research, she had determined that what she had found was a… pilgrimage… that the inhabitants of the prior worlds had followed. She thought it belonged to the Eighth World, but it may have been part of the Seventh.
No matter. She was determined to follow the path. She didn’t know what she expected to find there, but she knew that it was important enough that numerous people from the prior world had abandoned everything to walk that path. She was looking for people who would help her.
The path would be long. And dangerous. She needed one more “survey team”, people who would work together to explore places that had gone unexplored. Mostly because most Numenera seekers who had gone there had turned back because of the danger.
Would we help her discover this secret from the prior worlds?
We glanced at each other, then we nodded almost in unison. I could tell she relaxed as she smiled. She welcomed us to the expedition. She didn’t know what she could promise us but she was convinced that the people of at least one, if not two, of the prior worlds had risked their lives following this path. Would we join her?
We agreed. And then we were “Survey Team Gamma”. We would accompany her and the other people she had previously recruited to a variety of locations, and retrieve what we could from them. She seemed a bit evasive about what she thought we would find, but we finally agreed.
She was happy and said that she was comfortable with the team we had assembled. We would be hailed for generations, she said, or we would die in obscurity. We were given instructions on where to meet the caravan in a few days.
Later, I talked to Janal and Nyla. Both of them were quite happy to go along with Hamae Treshk’s expedition. I’ll confess… I was intrigued as well.
In two days we will be leaving with the caravan. Until then… we will enjoy the opportunities that Qi has provided for us.