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[indent][indent][indent][color=gray][sub][right][color=#98A9B1][b]Location:[/b][/color] The Dungeon -- The City of Thorinn, Aetheria[/right][/sub][/color]
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[i]Benkei hated being right.[/i] Everything seemed off about this dungeon, and with the traps, with Graves wounded, with their being blood and [i]pain[/i] Benkei began to panic. What was happening? There were safeguards on their gear to keep issues like this from occurring, right? The government wouldn’t allow gaming technology that could actually harm a player, right? So what was this? An elaborate hack? A glitch gone horribly wrong? 

[color=plum]"B-Benkei, guys, be careful, there's...something's different."[/color]

He had to [i]think[/i] and think quickly. Between Graves, Rael and Alja, he’d gotten an idea of how the spikes worked. The question was, what did they need to do about the lever? He bright the torch ring up, inspecting the safe area around them. [i]Nothing.[/i] His heart was pounding. What would happen if someone suffered lethal damage if they actually felt pain? Would it kill them? 

He looked up at the spiked ceiling. If they didn’t solve this problem, he didn’t want to even imagine how the feeling of being both impaled and crushed would feel.He called to Rael. [color=98A9B1]“Rael! Do you see anything useful about how to solve this trap? Words or a mural of some kind? Even some kind of symbols would help!”[/color] 

[color=#A84B5E]“Something’s on the door! Could be a clue, but it’s covered in moss!”[/color]

[color=98A9B1]“Stay there! I’ll check it out!”[/color] He turned to the others. [color=98A9B1]“Keep your eyes open, protect Graves and Seele.”[/color] His eyes darted, a mixture of fear and hesitation. [color=98A9B1]“I’m entrusted to lead you all out alive, and I promise I will do that.”[/color]

It was a stupid, near suicidal idea he had in mind. Each pressure plate would cause a mechanical reaction. And one of those reactions was a spear erupting up and skewering the unlucky person standing under it. He reached into his satchel, and produced a tincture. An ironskin potion; a bitter smelling draught that hardened the skin, making it difficult to be cut or pierced. He quickly downed the potion, nearly gagging on the horrid taste. The feeling of his skin tightening, hardening, like an awful rash was miserable too. This wasn’t game mechanics, this was feeling his entire body change in a rapid way. 

There was no way this was a patch. Or a joke. Even a hack couldn’t be this elaborate, could it? 

He hefted up his greatsword, and slammed it into a pressure plate directly in front of him. The gears began to turn. The tile in front of it moved a spike up, while the previous one fell. He stepped forward and pressed the tile next to him, and remarked when the same effect happened. “I think I understand how this mechanism works,” he remarked, and stepped diagonally to a tile. The tile in front of it had a spike shoot up as expected. Benkei began moving in a diagonal pattern, with the spikes raising and following in his motion. In what only took a few seconds, but felt like hours to him, he reached the door, and quickly began to scrape away the dust and grime to read what words were etched into the stone and metal. 

He squinted his eyes, and read the riddle aloud to the party, his voice cracking with each nerve wracking sound of the stone ceiling: 

[color=98A9B1]“Charisma and Dexterity, between two levers sit,
Your Strength is always first, a clue I dare not to omit.
Your Int is next to Con, which is itself good friends with Dex,
But Strength and Charisma are foes for whom there's no respect.
Your job's to find the Wisdom that's required to pass this door,
Dexterity calls it its friend, pull now or witness gore!”[/color] 


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