Looking around the house, it seemed recently abandoned. No sound could be heard from anyone still moving around and dust hadn’t yet settled on the surface. Thought maybe dust didn’t exist in the Realms in the first place…
After carefully closing the door behind her, the girl went deeper into the mansion. Stairs to the left and right lead to the upper floor, while doors to the left, right and front lead deeper into the ground floor. Thinking for a moment about her options, the intruder decided to investigate her current floor first.
Getting closer to one of the doors to the side, the wood-like pattern on it turned out to be actually carved into stone or however else they managed to create the effect. In general, the more she looked around now, the more wooden objects turned out to be actually just stone. Not that surprising as even Sera could easily think of some reasons for it, like the availability of earth magic and the increased stability over wood. Maybe the fast decay of organic matter had also something to do with it.
Losing her interest in the oddity, she quickly passed through the door and continued her exploration. The passage behind it continued with the theme of stone imitating wood and statues. The girl could also make out a carving depicting some person, though while it showed excellent craftsmanship, it couldn’t manage to catch Sera’s attention for long.
The rooms leading away from the corridor mostly contained studies or libraries. Books anyway and a lot of them. They stood quite spaced out on the shelves, though once Sera tried to read one out of curiosity what one could read in this world, she quickly put the book back. The system window, which had appeared, had a very small scrollbar and its text was spiced with enough tables and numbers to even over overwhelm her curiosity, especially now with her still overheated body. She was about to leave the room, but then decided that she could at least take a few of the books with her. They were very light.
Sera wasn’t planning on taking everything, but maybe one or two from each room.
So completely disregarding the genre and continuity, she stuffed the books at random into her spatial bag.
Meanwhile her dizziness was slowly dissipating. Staying vigilant while being overheated was quite hard, yet it was fortunately slowly getting better. She had tried to remove her coat for a while, but it hadn’t offered any form of relief. Apparently heat worked differently here or the clothing somehow managed to help her keep her optimal body temperature.
Deciding to just wait for it to naturally vanish, she continued on.
Passing by a few more rooms, two of which were mostly empty with tables and chairs, probably meant for meetings or rests, she reached a much larger but empty hall. Maybe it was intended for grander meetings, though it could also have other applications. Some engravings in the floor hinted towards such a fact. Not that Sera understood much of them. As there wasn’t much to examine and she wasn’t that interested in the local choice of floor decorations, she decided that she was done with her investigations here.
Backtracking and taking the door on the opposite site, she again found a bunch of studies and meeting rooms, though still nothing of interest. Not that she was sure for what exactly she was searching in the first place. Maybe weapons, as money was tracked by the system and she didn’t have the patience to scour through hundreds of books. Though the exploration was quite fun by itself, well, if there had been a bit more diversity. Finding a library for the tenth time was getting boring.
In the end the second corridor also led to the big hall in the back part of the mansion. Going back to the lobby yet again the door opposite from the entrance was her last possible path. Made from metal Sera was already expecting the worst, but no barrier blocked her way. Whether no barrier was there in the first place or it got destroyed together with the one in the entrance was however hard to tell.
The door led back to the outside, to a passage roofed by the second floor and leading around a courtyard. Again some decorations or spells were carved into the ground and pillars holding up the roof, which stopped the girl from examining the mostly empty area closer. Not that she would have spent much time there anyway, with the lack of exciting elements present.
While she hadn’t run into any issues during her exploration, it was still a bit disappointing that she couldn’t encounter anything interesting. She had found an abandoned home, could confirm that actually none was present and even the local government was currently disabled, thanks to the summoning and their generous sacrifice. It was the perfect excuse and opportunity for her to sneak into such an enticing playground, yet now it seemed rather bland.
Going back inside and to the upper floors even the amount of books the girl found got drastically reduced. Though unfortunately there was still nothing around which could catch her attention for longer than a few moments. No kitchen, no laboratory, no weapon stash, not even clothes. The absence of bedrooms were understandable, without the need to sleep, but the rest, maybe minus the kitchen and laboratory, she would have expected.
Feeling a discrepancy Sera searched through the two floors again, yet still couldn’t find anything. Getting a bit frustrated, she went back to the various bookshelves and started to collect a few more randomly selected works to at least get something for her hard work. Though now looking at the shelves again, she remembered that the mansion was also missing its cellar and that in various fictions bookshelves had been used to camouflaged passages.
Having a secondary goal aside from simply collecting more books for her sister, she started to probe the walls and bookshelves. Finding any meaningful discrepancies turned out to be quite hard. The walls were made from solid rock imitating wood and the shelves used various different designs. Some were made from rocks, formed directly from the walls, others independent rock constructs or made from a variety of different metals, at least according to the sound they made as the girl struck them with the handle of her dagger.
Reaching the last quarter of the bottom floor of book storage devices Sera started to question whether she should have just used a more destructive method in finding any hidden entrances. Continuing the thought, the owner had built their house in a way that others would assume the existence of a secret passage. It was therefore their own fault when intruders searched a bit more forcefully.
However neither striking metal nor stone with her weapons seemed to be the best idea, when avoidable. Especially as the weapon with the best chances of destroying anything here was her scythe and she didn’t want to use her newly acquired weapon as a glorified wrecking ball. The fact that she tried the same earlier with the windows already forgotten.
Though fortunately there was no need to figure out a way to forcefully enter a potential cellar. Picking up yet another number filled book, the girl noticed the spell circle the book had concealed.
Having finally found something interesting, she quickly put away the book and started to strike against the wall in some proximity to the engravings, however the resulting sound still didn’t indicate a cavity. With her options getting reduced to either abandoning the spell and searching for more entrances or trying it out, she quickly chose the latter. Maybe not the safest choice, yet trusting in her belief that none would put a trap in their own home which could kill the owner by accident, she let her mana flood the engraving, similar to what she had seen from her sister.
It took the girl a moment to figure out how exactly one was supposed to operate it, as spells and weapons were somehow more intuitive, but the engraved spell soon started to work. Slowly distorting the space, the entrance to the basement was revealed.
Curious about her new discovery the girl slowly and carefully walked down the stairs. The spell on the shelf had drained a decent amount of her mana, though fortunately it had regenerated during her time in the mansion.
Similar to the dungeons there was no darkness in the corridor the stairs lead to. An omnipresent glow covered the now less wood-like but still from rock crafted walls. The earlier texture had now vanished and was replaced by engravings. Sera couldn’t tell whether they had any meaning or were just decoration, so she just chose to stay as far away as possible. Not that easy in the rather narrow passage.
Slowly and paying attention to everything in her surroundings the girl walked through the corridor.
And it continued on.
And on.
And on.
Thoughts about whether she entered some kind of illusory or spatial trap started to appear in her mind. If the entrance to this cavern hadn’t been hidden that well, and if she had found at least something worth her effort in the mansion, she would have already given up and returned.
Her thoughts were however interrupted by a sudden gnashing sound, as if rocks were moving against each other. Before she could even process what exactly was happening, she was already lying on the floor and in the next moment a rock shard hit the wall. The resulting cracks made the force behind the trap apparent, yet only seconds later the shard started to meld into the structure, vanishing together with the destruction it had created.
Getting into a position which would allow her to better dodge any follow up attacks, the girl waited.
Though as no additional projectiles seemed to appear she started to examine her surroundings more carefully. While she hadn’t been as attentive as she should have been, she was pretty sure that she wouldn’t have missed any obvious triggers for traps. However even now she couldn’t discern anything of that kind. No loose tiles, no holes in the walls, strings or beams of light, it didn’t even trigger as she walked through the same area again.
Her instincts seemed to have saved her.
While turning back seemed more and more a good choice, the fact that the tunnel contained traps made the conclusion that there must be treasure easy. Also the shard hadn’t been able to hit her, so she was confident that she would be able to dodge further attacks, especially now that she knew what to look for.
