Light and Blade

“Prepare for combat?” Trick looked back into the purple room, half expecting some kind of murderous robot to come out of the shadows and ambush him, but there was nothing there. “What are we fighting?”

“Starsight incoming. Prepare for combat,” the voice repeated. “Attention, attention…”

Trick crossed to the dais and jumped up onto it, looking around at the holograms in confusion. For some reason he could understand the voice but he still couldn’t read any of the text they projected. It didn’t even have anything that he recognized as letters. It just looked like a mix of triangles and squares stacked in different glyphs. He drifted his fingers through some of the strange symbols, as if that would help him figure out what they said. To his surprise, as soon as his fingers got near the glyphs the voice stopped talking.

The hologram that showed the night sky dissolved and reformed into a new vista. Whereas the last had been stationary, this new scene was centered on a strange arrowhead shaped object that was moving through the sky. It looked a bit like a diving falcon, except there was a strange ball of light underneath the swept wings. As it flew over the dark ground it dropped long, sticklike objects on the earth below.

“What is that?” Trick said under his breath.

As if it heard him the hologram zoomed in on one of the sticks unfolding itself into a winged, legged creature that reminded him of nothing so much as a dragonfly. It had a big, bulbous head and six glowing, blade shaped wings. There weren’t any legs on it and the torso was divided into eight or nine segments and for a moment Trick was ready to write it off.

Then the eyes opened.

There was one in the head and one in each of the torso segments and they seemed to take up ninety percent of the body segment they occupied. Their pupils were huge and glowed white in a deep pool of shifting colors. In spite of his best efforts Trick felt himself recoil from the image in revulsion as much as fear. “Nasty. Wonder what they expect me to fight them with?”

This time the holograms didn’t react. He got off the dais and walked around the outside of the room, this time looking for racks of crystals. He didn’t find them as such. Instead he found a much larger rack holding what he quickly figured out were sheathed knives or swords.

The weapons were slightly longer than his arm from shoulder to fingertip. The grip swept forward gently, looking almost like the handle of a flintlock pistol except it was made of some kind of dense substance he didn’t recognize. It had a slight give to it, like the handle of a good quality tool. The blade was secured in its sheath by a clip similar to the one on the belt he’d found and the sheath had a larger elastic loop that slid over that belt easily.

Once Trick had the sheath on his belt he drew the weapon and realized the blade was made of crystal. He didn’t know enough about crystals to tell if it was the same as the stuff he’d found in the color rooms but he assumed it was. It had a single edge that swept back gently towards the tip. Unlike the crystals in his belt it didn’t have a glow of its own but based on how easily the tip made a small cut in his polyester undershirt it was sharp. Really sharp.

“Great. Let’s hope that’s enough to deal with the dragonfly things.” He put it back in the sheath and kept looking for potential weapons. A sword was nice and all but he really didn’t want to get close enough to one of the things to hit them with it if he didn’t have to.

Unfortunately, while there were other places that looked like they might have held other objects, they were mostly empty. The only other object he found in the room's walls was an odd looking glove. Actually he found a lot of them in different sizes although only a few of them fit him and there wasn’t any point taking more than one. They were all right handed.

Like everything else Trick had seen, the gloves were stranger than they first looked. They didn’t have fingers, which wasn’t too weird, but there was a bracelet of thin, finely crafted metal links woven around the wrist. Three more thin chains linked the bracelet to rings on the thumb, middle and ring fingers of the glove. He wasn’t sure what to do with it but figured it was better to have it and never figure it out than realize he needed it but didn’t bring it. So he pulled one of them on and headed out to the next room.

It was exactly what he’d expected given what he’d seen so far, a hexagonal room with a dark, matte black finish to it. The room seemed to absorb light. Although Trick could see well enough in the room it still felt dimmer than the parts of the complex he’d seen so far. There was a noticeable breeze in the room, something he hadn’t noticed before. However there wasn’t anything else in the room except for a single, closed doorway in the far wall.

A quick look around the outside of the room didn’t reveal anything. The walls didn’t even have the strange ridges that looked like sound baffling he’d noticed in the other rooms although this place didn’t echo any more than the others. The door didn’t open when he approached nor did it have a knob or visible controls.

“Okay, people, this is getting a little old. You could give us a few more hints than this.” Trick was getting more and more certain that he wasn’t really dealing with a simple escape room scenario anymore, if he’d ever been in one in the first place. He still wasn’t sure where he was but he didn’t think he could figure it out with what he knew. “Nothing to do but go forward.”

The problem was that he had a door in the way. He reached up to run his hand over the door and stopped as the ring on the glove’s middle finger pulsed and glowed faintly. A holographic circle appeared a few inches to the left of his hand. When he moved his hand away from the door the circle disappeared. It reappeared when he moved his hand back and continued to grow brighter or dimmer as he moved his hand around near it. Trick shook his head. “That’s a lot of fancy technology to pack into your door.”

He tried moving the middle ring into the circle. The glow got brighter and the circle started to move with his hand as he moved it around. So he swept his hand to one side as if moving a sliding door and, as he’d hoped, the door also slid that way and opened the way into the next room.

Except there wasn’t another room. Trick found himself staring up and out into a landscape full of dull red sand twinkling softly in the light of a sky full of far more stars than he’d ever seen at home. “I think we’re through the rabbit hole,” he muttered. “So this must be Wonderland…”