Chapter 10: Beware who you give your name to

General Summary

After our rest in the potions closet, I take several minutes to carefully pack up the contents of the closet, first because I could use these and I can sell what is in here for a lot of money somewhere, second I don't want whoever is still here to create anything else with the contents of this closet.
Before we head on I peek through the door at the end of the closet to make sure of my suspicions and I was correct, the next room was the room where we accidentally created those oozes.
So, we retraced our steps back to the room with the stairs and headed down the small hallway only to see it was filled with green slime, we decide we don't need to explore that anymore than we already have and back up to the next hallway.

A voice up ahead

The voice up ahead shouted, "Hello, can you hear me? Can you help me get home to my Mommy and Daddy?" his voice sounded too old for how he was talking about his parents. We jumped down the large stairs into the small entryway that split into three rooms.
To our left we saw a table full of papers, but that wasn't what caught our eyes. No, it was the pink lightning that rolled through the room. In the corner, a young man stood chained to the wall. "The heroes!" he said, "I'm so glad you found me!"
"Who are you?" I asked.
"I'm Denar," he answered. "Remember, you stayed at my farm after you rescued my Mom and my sister. I was taken from the farm with my sister Katherine. I don't know what happened to her. This short man who said he needed me for his experiments."
"Why are you so much older?" DaVinci asked.
"I don't know, he did weird experiments and would mutter a lot as he did things."
"Do you know what happens when someone walks into that pink lightning?" Alfred asked. "I don't know, he always had this weird pattern he would walk when coming over to me."
I walked over to the table and started looking at the papers. His notes were all about time and how to manipulate it, there are more things on the table that I don't understand yet.
"I have an idea," Alfred said and he cast mage hand and tried tapping different squares in the room and As he tapped the squares with the invisible hand odd things happened in the room.
"Let me try," DaVinci said. He pushed the chair through the room and he was pulled into the pink lightning and almost died.
"We'll be back," I said. "We're going to see if we can find that hallway on the other end of the room to not go through the lightning."

A man covered in needles

We walked through the doorway and see a large circle engraved on the floor. We can feel the layers of magic in the room radiating from the ring. In the middle stood a man covered in needles, he politely made small talk with us and after a minute or two asked our names.
DaVinci answered with something and I wasn't paying too close attention because I answered and said, "Mary."
He repeated my name and as he said it, it felt like he knew part of who I was. I shuddered as the feeling was not pleasant.
I nudged DaVinci and nodded towards the desk in the corner. I ambled over as he continued to talk with the strange man who eventually introduces himself as Babska.
On the desk there are a series of notes talking about how he used the circle to try summoning an imp to help him, but something went wrong and he got the "man" in the ring next to us.
"What can you tell me about the man who works in here," DaVinci asked behind me.
"I'm afraid I don't know much about here, what with being stuck in this circle. Perhaps you would be so kind as to let me out?" he asked looking mildly around the room.
"I don't know how to, and maybe you're in here for a good reason."
"I can assure you, it was a most rude reason." Babska responded.
"DaVinci," I said, "There's a door across from me, perhaps you can get it open?"
"Sure Mary," he hurried over and picked the lock. It took him a few minutes, during which he said he seemed to be better at it than before, and on the other side is the former boy.
What do you call a child aged unnaturally? Mentally he is still a boy, but physically he looks like a man. DaVinci hurries over to the boy and starts picking the lock of the chains holding him in place. As he does, I look at the table next to him.
It's covered in papers with diagrams covering it, on the side of the table is a strange helmet with many different gears and wires coming out of it. I study it and stare at it for sometime trying to figure out what it does.
"Here," DaVinci said after he finished getting the boy out and he picked up the helmet and looked through it. "How fun! It changes how the room looks. Mary you need to see this." He plopped the helmet on my head and twisted a knob on the side of the helmet.
As I looked through the lenses on the helmet, the room changed. I looked over at the circle the man stood in, and there are lines showing energy going all around it that are amazingly strong, almost like it built a cage.
"I think we want to leave him there," I said as I took the helmet off. I looked down at it, studying it carefully, "I don't want him to continue his experiments, so I'm going to change a few settings on this helmet, so it will slow him down." I tinkered with the tools on the table, turning knobs and bending gears just ever so slightly. "There, it won't blow up, but it's also not helpful."
"We should get this," Alfred hesitated then started talking again, "this boy home. His family is worried." "That will let me leave these supplies at the herbalist's shop. I can give her some of them in exchange for storing them there until we finish dealing with this dungeon."

Report Date

21 Jul 2023