Chapter 126 - 124 — No Protection II

The two sets of photographs are the same city and you can put them side by side and match the corners.

Colour tells you which one you are in before anything else does. Pale and white and cold, or black and orange and warm.

So does sound. The Stone Side has machinery in it, somewhere, always, and the guide is very clear that it is always somewhere else and you will never find it.

The Ash Side has wind going through buildings with nothing left inside them, and ash moving, and that is all it has.

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The geography corresponds exactly. What does not correspond is whether you can get anywhere.

The guide spends a long section on that and gives examples, and the examples are what made me sit forward.

A bridge that is intact on the Stone Side has come down on the Ash Side, and there is nothing at that crossing but a twenty-metre gap.

A street that is passable on the Ash Side is under the canal on the Stone Side, because the canal still has water in it there.

A sealed vault door on the Stone Side, which nobody has ever opened, is standing in the Ash Side with the wall around it collapsed and the doorway open, because the wall burned and the door did not.

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And then the thing that turns two problems into one problem.

Some of what you do in one city happens in the other one.

The guide gives three that are reproducible and says the list is longer and less reliable.

The old floodgate at the head of the Severed Canal still works on the Stone Side. Open it, and the water goes out of the canal, and on the Ash Side a passage that has been flooded since the catastrophe drains and becomes a route.

There is a support column under the eastern viaduct on the Ash Side that is cracked most of the way through.

Bring it down, and on the Stone Side the sealed wall at that place fractures, because on the Stone Side the wall is holding up the same viaduct.

And the bronze mechanism in the Inner City workshop district, on the Stone Side, moves a set of shutters.

On the Ash Side those shutters are welded into their frames by heat, and the only thing that moves them is somebody in the other city turning a handle.

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So neither three can run at the Spire on its own.

Each half gets some distance and then arrives at something that is not a fight and is not a puzzle either, because the answer is not in the room.

The answer is three people in a different version of that room who do not know you need anything.

Which is the second problem.

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> **Resonance Pillars.**

They are two metres of black stone, square, set upright, with thin silver lines cut into all four faces and running over the top.

They are in both cities in the same positions and there are somewhere between forty and sixty of them, depending on which survey you believe.

When one is activated, nothing happens. When the corresponding one is activated on the other side, the silver goes bright on both, and the two groups can hear each other.

Not indefinitely. The guide says "a few minutes" and three of the verified accounts give different numbers, so the honest answer is that nobody has timed it properly and you should assume less than you want.

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That makes them navigation as well.

Forty to sixty fixed objects in known positions in a city you have never been in, all of them identical, all of them visible from a distance.

It also makes them the worst place on the floor to stand.

Activation puts out a low vibration. You can feel it through your boots before you can hear it.

The guide says every experienced party treats a pillar the way you treat a noise in a corridor. You clear the ground around it first, and then you decide whether you can afford it.

Two of the five accounts describe being attacked at a pillar. One of them describes losing somebody there.

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Which brings the guide to what lives there.

> **Wardens.**

Slightly over seven feet. Humanoid, in the sense that the arrangement is the same and nothing else about it is.

Overlapping plates from the neck to the ankle, pale, closer to glazed ceramic than to stone, and where the plates meet at the joints there is bronze underneath, moving.

The head is a smooth oval with nothing on it. No mouth, no eyes, no features of any kind, and one narrow vertical slit down the centre of the face.

Most carry a hooked polearm about their own height.

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They patrol. That is the word every account uses and every account is uncomfortable with it.

They walk fixed routes at a speed that makes them look like statues being moved rather than things walking, and on the Stone Side the sound of them on that paving carries a long way.

Then they see you.

Every single verified account describes the same transition and describes it as the worst part. There is no build-up and no noise. A thing that has been moving at the speed of a slow walk is on you.

And the slit turns amber.

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That is the one piece of mercy in the whole design and every guide in that section puts it in bold.

Black slit, it is deciding. Amber slit, it has decided, and the attack is already on its way.

The gap between the colour and the impact is a fraction of a second. It is not a warning that gives you time to think.

It tells you which fraction of a second the thing is going to arrive in, and that turns out to be the difference between a floor people clear and a floor people do not.

The plate is hard. It is not invulnerable.

The bronze at the joints is exposed. There is a seam at the neck where the plates finish and the head starts. And anything that has already lost a plate stays lost, because they do not repair between encounters.

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Ash-Side Wardens are the same beings after the same catastrophe.

The pale shells are scorched black and cracked across. Several are missing plates entirely. Several are carrying a polearm with the hook gone or half the shaft gone and carrying it anyway.

There is a dim orange light coming out of the cracks in the chest and out of the facial slit, and on that side you can see them at night, which on that side is all the time.

They are worse to fight and easier to beat, and every account says both.

Less orderly. No patrol discipline. They come at you earlier and from further out and they commit to things a Stone Warden would not commit to.

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The guide points out, in one line, that this was one of the clues.

For decades there were reports describing two different kinds of creature on Floor Two, and people argued about whether the floor generated them differently on different attempts, and built theories about it.

They were the same creature. It was the same city. Half the people in those arguments had been in one version and half had been in the other and none of them knew there were two.

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Then a section I did not expect, which is addressed to people like me.

> **On mobility Abilities.**

The guide is blunt about it. Movement is worth a great deal inside a district, for getting across a gap or onto a roof or out of a street. It does not solve the floor and it has never solved the floor.

It gives the reason in one sentence and the sentence is correct.

Getting to the Spire is not the clear.

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The clear chamber is under the Spire, in both cities, in the same place.

At least one Challenger from each side has to reach their version of it alive. Both have to activate it inside the same window.

When both go, the two versions converge for a moment, and everybody still standing on either side gets the floor.

There is no placement. There is no count of Wardens. There is no requirement to kill anything at all, and two of the recorded clears did remarkably little fighting and are held up as the correct way to do it.

The objective is to get both halves of your party to the middle of that city alive.

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I read that three times and then went and got the history section, because I wanted to know why a floor with an objective that simple stopped humanity for as long as it did.

The answer is that the objective is only simple once you know there are two cities.

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The archived threads are still up.

The site does not delete anything and that section is a great deal older than the rest of the Tower board.

There is an expedition thread old enough that the formatting is wrong and the images do not load. Six people planned a Floor Two attempt in it for a fortnight.

Two of them came back and posted, and the two accounts of the same day do not describe the same place.

One of them says the party was separated at entry by something. The other says nobody was separated and the other three simply were not there.

Underneath, forty replies of people trying to reconcile it.

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There is a thread where somebody has laid out four route descriptions from four different expeditions in four columns, carefully, with the landmarks aligned, to demonstrate that the floor rearranges itself between attempts.

He was wrong and he was extremely close.

Two of those columns are the Stone Side and two are the Ash Side, and if he had grouped them by which ones agreed instead of by date he would have had it eleven years earlier.

The last reply in that thread is his and it says he is going back in to test it.

His account has a memorial marker beside the name.