Chapter 2 Part 3: The Obelisk
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Chapter 2 Part 3: The Obelisk
They sat in the camp chairs longer than either of them had intended.
The ravine was quiet again in that muted, late-afternoon way, the tarps above them cutting the light down to a dull green haze. Ethan leaned back with his boots dug into the dirt, arms folded, eyes half-closed as if daring his body to relax. Abigail did the opposite. She stayed forward in her chair, phone in hand, thumb flicking occasionally as she scrolled through notes and images she had already reviewed twice.
Eventually, she broke the silence.
“So,” she said, tone casual in the way she used when she was about to drop something very much not casual. “Remember that fifty‑meter edge length you measured?”
Ethan cracked one eye open. “Unfortunately.”
“I fed it to an AI and told it to assume the room was a regular dodecahedron,” she continued. “If the floor is one face and the ceiling comes to the opposite vertex, the distance from the floor plane to that ceiling point is one hundred twenty‑five point seven four meters.”
He stared at her for a second, then let his head fall back against the chair. “You lost me somewhere between ‘AI’ and ‘whatever a dodecahedron is.’”
Abigail smiled, clearly pleased anyway. “It’s a bit more than a football field. And it absolutely does not fit under a twenty‑foot ravine. Not even close.”
“Shocking,” Ethan said dryly. “Next you’re going to tell me the laws of physics filed a complaint.”
She laughed softly and kept going. “I know we’ve only measured the first section, but the symmetry is really clean. Too clean. Which means it wouldn’t hurt to get ahead of the numbers. Also,” she glanced up at him, eyes bright, “if that obelisk in the center is five‑sided, I’m betting each face is about two point seven nine meters across.”
Ethan raised an eyebrow. “And you know that because…?”
“Self‑similarity,” she said easily. “The big shape contains smaller copies of itself that only differ by scale and rotation. If the room is a dodecahedron, the obelisk geometry follows naturally.”
He held up both hands in surrender. “Too much math. But I get the point. This place was designed. On purpose.”
Abigail nodded. “Exactly.”
He tilted his head toward the tarps and the dark shape hidden beneath them. “So,” he said, glancing back toward the tarps, “it sounds like you’re ready to go in already?”
Her grin came instantly. “Absolutely! It is a dungeon after all!”
They stood, folded the chairs, and set them aside well clear of the frame. Abigail started a fresh video call on Ethan’s phone and made sure recording was active before handing it back to him.
They stepped through together.
The worked stone chamber returned around them without warning or sensation. The same even light and the same impossible scale. Ethan walked straight toward the nearest corner, range finder already in hand, bracing himself near the wall and sighting across the chamber. The numbers lined up cleanly with Abigail’s earlier calculations, making him all out, “Your numbers were right.”
While he worked, Abigail stayed close to him near the corner, careful not to drift away as he took the measurement. She switched phones, holding her older one out close to the stone at the corner, framing the wall and floor junction where the glowing lines originated. She took a breath, then stepped carefully over the glowing blue line coming out of the corner.
“Here we go,” she said, voice light but tight.
Ethan snapped his head around. “Hey—what the hell? You could’ve at least grabbed my hand or something.”
She glanced back, sheepish but still smiling. “You’re right. Sorry. I just wanted to know.”
Nothing happened.
They both stood there for a moment, waiting for pressure, light, sound—anything at all. When the chamber stubbornly refused to react, Ethan let out a slow breath and joined her. Together they walked the room, measuring edges, checking angles, and confirming distances with the range finder. They deliberately stayed clear of the inner pentagram formed by the intersecting floor lines, skirting its boundaries as if it might bite.
Once they had everything they could reasonably record, they exchanged a look and stepped into the pentagram together.
Still nothing.
“…Okay,” Abigail said after a moment. “Good to know.”
They moved to the obelisk next. Up close, its black crystalline surface absorbed light so completely it felt like staring into a cutout in reality. Ethan measured one of the faces carefully and read off the number.
“Two point seven nine meters,” he said.
Abigail’s smile widened. “Called it.”
They stood there a moment longer, neither quite ready to touch it.
Ethan hesitated, then nodded to the obelisk. “Let’s touch the same side at the same time,” he said. “And we should probably hold hands, just in case something happens.”
“Romantic,” she teased, but she laced her fingers through his anyway.
They reached out with the forefinger of their joined hands and touched the obelisk. The facet flared to life.
The surge hit before they had time to process the light. Ethan yanked their hands back on reflex, heart spiking, and the light vanished instantly. Beside him, Abigail jerked sharply, her grip tightening hard enough to hurt.
It felt as though every nerve in his body had been seized at once and forced awake. His muscles locked without permission. His breath caught mid-inhale. For one disorienting instant he had the impossible sensation of being stretched thin from the inside, as if something were tracing every pathway through his body at once and rewriting it in place. There was no visible light, no sound beyond the rush in his ears, but the internal distortion was overwhelming.
The intensity peaked and collapsed just as suddenly. Sensation rushed back into proper scale. His heartbeat thundered in his chest. For those few seconds before everything settled, the contact of Abigail’s fingers against his felt impossibly precise. He could distinguish the pressure of each ridge of her fingerprints where they touched his hand. Their shoulders were close enough that he could hear her heartbeat clearly in the stone chamber, fast and uneven, and he found himself counting the beats without meaning to before the awareness dulled back to normal.
He staggered half a step, catching himself. “Did you—”
Abigail was staring at him, breathing hard. “What was that?”
“The shock,” he said, still trying to steady himself. “You felt that too.”
She nodded once, shaken but alert. “Like my body had been taken apart and fitted back together in a single breath.”
Abigail let out a short, incredulous laugh under her breath. “Okay. So that happened.”
Ethan looked at his hands, expecting numbness or pain, but there was none. If anything, he felt sharply awake, every sensation dialed slightly higher than normal. Ethan flexed his fingers once more, testing the steadiness in them. “You good?”
She rolled her shoulders and inhaled slowly, then nodded. “Yeah. Yeah, I’m good.”
He gave a single nod back. “Then we keep checking.”
They stood there for several long seconds, neither reaching for the obelisk again.
“What was that blue flash form the obelisk?” she wondered.
Before he could answer, she braced herself and then reached out and touched the same facet again.
The display returned.
Her breath caught. “Status,” she said, voice sharp with recognition. “It’s my status! This is a Dungeon!”
Ethan leaned in, squinting. “I can’t read any of that.”
They tried photos. Abigail’s phone captured the display cleanly, sharp and legible. When Ethan took the same shot, the image resolved into a blue blur.
They experimented, trading places, overlapping hands, pulling back. Each time, the rule held: only one person could access the facet at a time. When both touched the same facet, only one could see anything legible at all. The rule held true for images also: the person who could read the facet could take a picture of it and have that picture remain legible afterwards.
“Try another face,” Abigail said.
They did. Same result. Every facet displayed the same kind of information. Finally, they each placed a hand on a different facet at the same time and both displays activated.
They stared at each other, then laughed quietly, disbelief breaking through the tension.
Once they had clear images saved, they backed away from the obelisk and returned to the entrance. Neither of them stepping on the glowing lines on the way out.
The ravine greeted them again, solid and ordinary, as if nothing impossible sat just beyond the thick crystalline frame embedded in the ravine wall.
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@daermadm said in Chapter 2 Part 3: The Obelisk:
Before he could answer, she reached out and touched the same facett.
an AI can misspell things ?? that’s odd
doesn’t bode well for it eventually writing medical diagnoses… i was about to say prescriptions - but doctors have been making those illegible since the start of recorded history
oh, and Zap suggests you have the Obelisk suck an MP3 out of their phones and play it as they approach - if its intelligent like Arg’s
mebbe this one (since they’re all wiseasses) -
@dwarf said in Chapter 2 Part 3: The Obelisk:
an AI can misspell things ?? that’s odd
that would be be. I use the AI to improve my poor writing, but it is not written all by AI. I really should add a full editorial only pass.
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Chapter 2 Part 3 updated. Significant obelisk contact changes.
@dwarf fyi, the obelisk will eventually talk back. Decided to save it for something upcoming.
