#tower 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, I don't know if adopt is really the right word; as far as I know Flocsle is a full-grown whatever-she-is. But yeah, I guess I feel a little bad about the thought of leaving her here scared to fend for herself. I tell her she can come with us.

At first she doesn't really want to leave the moss and expose herself, but I point out that if we saw the moss moving and found her in here, then the inhabitants of the tower could probably find her too. Anyway, so far exploring the tower I haven't run into any of its inhabitants besides a skeleton—and I guess Xil and Flocsle if they count. Besides, this way if we do run into anyone who she might be in danger from, there's safety in numbers.

Eventually she agrees, though she asks if I can help her get out of the tower. I…don't know how to do that, and I tell her so, but if I figure out some way to help her I will, I guess. I also don't know how I'm going to communicate with her once we're out of this room and away from the telepathic man-eating-plant, but, uh, I guess we'll cross that bridge when we come to it?

Anyway, it's starting to feel like we're… kind of a weird adventuring party, or something? I don't know.

(In case you're wondering about the relative scales in that picture, remember the man-eating plant ate half of me; it'll take me a while to get back to full size.)

Tower Quest Reset Duration: 9/14 (Thu) 16:00 ~ 10/19 (Thu) 14:59

Floor progress and rewards for the tower quest will be reset and available for the above duration. The mechanics will remain the same.  An additional 5 floors will be added, bringing the total up to 60.

Once again, all boss attributes will be altered. The pattern will be:

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.

Okay. The skeleton doesn't do anything to stop us from leaving; in fact, it waves good-bye. (Xil waves back.)

Now, as a reminder, I entered the tower through a grate that dropped me into a basement level, and from there I seeped through a crack in the ground into the level where I've spent most of my time so far, which means this level is basically the second level down underground. So going up one level will bring us back to the floor where I first entered.

Anyway, from the skull room we pass through the room with the symbol on the ground...

..and going through the left door from there, of course, takes us back to the staircase.

Partway up the staircase there's a door on the left. There's no doorknob on the door, just a big keyhole. Which isn't much of an obstacle under the circumstances, because I can easily just, you know, liquefy myself and go through the keyhole, and then open the door from the other side.

Or we could keep going up farther; I can see that farther up the staircase is a trapdoor, and I guess beyond that trapdoor should be the aboveground part of the tower.

So I guess the choice is whether to go through the door or continue up to the trapdoor. I mean, okay, sure, there are other things we could also do, like jump down the shaft in the middle, or jump across the shaft to the landing on the opposite side, or wait here and see if anyone shows up, but those two choices seem like the most obvious options.

So, a couple of months ago I set off on a quest of exploration, and this became a... much more extended thing than I expected. What I'd initially thought was going to be just a few posts and be done in a couple of days has turned into an ongoing thing now with regular illustrations.

The problem is that because it's been going on a while, the older posts are kind of buried, and with all the Tower Quest posts interleaved with my other posts I feel like it's probably hard to follow. I made an Expedition Masterpost to address this, but I'm not sure that helps that much, especially if I have to link to it each time. I was going to go back and tag each post with "#Tower Quest" to make them easier to find, but it recently occurred to me there may be a better solution.

It might work best to just create a new sideblog for the Tower Quest. That way people who want to follow it can do so easily, and it won't be cluttering my main blog for people who aren't interested in it. (I may still mention it in my main blog for people who aren't aware of it, but new Tower Quest posts will go in the sideblog—and I'll probably start by reblogging all the old posts there.)

But this would be kind of a big undertaking and I didn't want to do it without kind of reading the room and seeing what people thought.

There would, of course, be little point in asking people to reblog for a larger sample size, because this question is irrelevant to anyone outside my followers, but I'll probably be reblogging it myself a few times over the next day to try to make sure all my followers see it.

(Given that this update involves a lot of drawing including a new room (well, a room I've been to before, but that was before I started including drawings of everything), it's going to be a two-parter; I'll post the first half tonight and then I'll try to get the rest up tomorrow morning.)

Okay, well, first of all, we've spent a long time in this room, so now that we're finally leaving it, I may as well show the map again:

So there are only two places on this level I haven't been (that I know of): behind the secret door in the symbol (northern) room, and in the room to the southeast where something's making an electronic crackling noise. Well, I guess technically there's also the small hole in the wall in the southern room, but while I could easily get through that hole myself, the shapeshifting powers that Xil got when he, uh, ingested part of me have worn off by now, so he wouldn't be able to get through there, and I don't think Flocsle could either.

I've only been in one room in the level above this, though, and I haven't been in the level below this one at all, and I have no idea how many levels this place has, so even if I've explored most of this level it doesn't mean there's not a lot of the tower I haven't seen.

But anyway, yeah, I guess my exploration of the skull room was kind of interrupted when the skeleton woke up and chased me out, so I may as well start by going back there and see what else is there that I missed.

Since we're leaving this room now, I guess it's time to give the man-eating plant my other arm like I promised. The plant argues that we ended up staying there and demanding its services a lot longer than it had initially expected, and demands to eat part of Xil and Flocsle too. That's not an option, because I don't think they can grow their parts back, but I eventually talk the plant into settling for getting one of my legs thrown in.

(And because somebody's bound to make this joke, yes, I guess that means paying off the man-eating plant is going to cost me an arm and a leg. Sure.)

So fine, I remove my left leg and I throw it to the man-eating plant and then… I can't really throw it my arm if I don't have any arms to throw it with. I mean, yes, I can grow more arms, but I don't want the plant to know that. I guess maybe it already knows that from reading my mind—I'm not really sure how powerful its telepathic powers are now—but in case it doesn't know about my abilities, I'd rather keep it that way. Xil offers to throw my arm for me, but the plant says if I walk up to it it'll just bite my arm off and leave the rest of me, so okay, I guess that works.

Yes, I know, I absolutely should have seen this coming. I think I may be too trusting.

Okay, I guess I can't totally blame the man-eating plant for this. We did kind of end up using its services a lot longer than initially agreed, and besides I'm not sure it was sentient until recently so maybe it hasn't really had a chance to develop a sense of morality. Oh well.

Xil says if it's getting too taxing to keep changing my shape, I can just stay like this for a while and he'll carry me. Honestly, it doesn't really take a lot of energy to change shape, but I've lost enough material by now that if I did form back into a humanoid shape I'd be a much smaller version of me and would probably have to be carried anyway to not slow everyone else down, and I kind of get the impression Xil sort of wants me to stay like this, so whatever, I guess I'll just be a leg and a… bottom for now.

Okay, so, back to the skull room.

Uh... the "poor soul"?

I mean, okay, yeah, I've met two people in this tower who turned out to be okay and became my traveling companions, but that doesn't mean everyone in this tower is friendly or a potential ally. I have no idea what it is that's in that energy cylinder. For all I know, it's in there for everyone's safety and if it's released it'll go on a violent rampage.

Still... I don't actually know that, and it is in a very confined space which definitely doesn't look comfortable, and I guess what little I know about the inhabitants of this tower from Xil and Flocsle doesn't paint them in the most favorable light. And I mean, there's one of it and three of us, or I guess in my present condition more like two and a quarter of us, and if worse comes to worse we should be able to, uh, run away. So okay, maybe I ought to try to release it.

The problem is, I have no idea how.