#interactive quest

Okay. Like I said, the door has just a keyhole on this side, no knob or obvious way of opening it... but like I also said, that's not much of an obstacle to me because I can just liquefy myself and slip through the keyhole.

Uh... wow. Uh... okay.

I guess this must be the tower treasury or something?

The room is mostly filled by, like, a huge pile of gold (and some gems, but mostly gold)—most of it is coins, but there are some gold bars and a few other objects. There are two other doors; there's light glowing through the keyhole of the door to my left, and through the keyhole of the door to my right there's, uh... darkness glowing through? Or antiglowing? That's not how darkness is supposed to work, so I don't know what's going on there.

Okay, now it turns out there may be kind of a problem. The plan was, having entered the room through the keyhole, to open the door from the inside and let in Xil and Flocsle. The problem is, I'd kind of assumed that, even if there wasn't any sort of doorknob on the outside, there'd be one on the inside. And, uh...

...turns out there isn't. There's just a keyhole on this side, too.

So I guess I'm left with a few options.

I could try picking the lock? I mean, I've never done it before, but the fact that I can change shape and go inside the lock may give me an advantage... though if there are any traps in the lock, I might end up setting them off, and while they might not affect me, depending on the nature of the trap it's possible they might.

I could slip through one of the other keyholes and enter one of the other rooms, and hopefully that one will have a door I can open from the inside so I can let Xil and Flocsle in there. Although that might mean leaving them waiting outside for a while.

Or of course I could go back and rejoin Xil and Flocsle and we could try going a different way.

Well, that keyhole is big enough I can pass coins through it pretty easily, I guess.

(As I side note, I guess maybe I should change to a different shape for now? I mean, I've mostly kept this shape since the man-eating plant bit off my top half, but mostly because it made it easy for Xil to carry me around (and also he seemed to find it amusing), but at the moment when I'm separated from Xil and Flocsle maybe it makes more sense to just... turn back into my typical shape only half-size, or something. I don't know. I guess I can stay in just the bottom-half shape; I'm actually kind of getting used to it by now; but there's not really any reason I have to.)

Anyway, Xil points out he doesn't really have anywhere to put the coins, but Flocsle can stuff them into her... uh, dress? Sleeve? Whatever you call what she's wearing.

Still, the coins don't seem to be doing anything to unlock the door (not that I really expected them to—but at least they didn't set off any traps), so that doesn't really solve the problem of how to let Xil and Flocsle in here, or to meet up with them somewhere else. Like I said before, the three most obvious options are to try to pick the lock, to go through the lock into one of the adjoining rooms and to let them in there, or to just go back out and rejoin them and go a different way, though I'm sure there are other possibilities.

Oh... and I guess for reference I may as well update my map of the tower. So having gone up those stairs I'm back now on the level where I first entered the tower, though I'm on the opposite side of it.