Citadel: Try Ignorance

   

Delicious in Dungeon probably has an excellent recipe for "Door Lobster Steamed in Dragon Venom."

     

Guest post from Quirkz: 

 

On to the ninth floor. That grate is also unlocked. I hadn't been down this far to investigate. Lower levels all take the key. I know there are 12 levels, and the elevator spans them all.

      
All of the doors are weird here. The handles appear to be alive and skitter away from your hand when you try to click them. Even if you pin it in the corner it won't open, but sometimes clicking the handle seems to initiate fights with wandering ettins. (According to the cluebook, the doors should open if you click them properly, but I tried more than 40 times and never got it to work. Now that I know it's possible, I've gone back and tested and gotten it to work, but boy is this unintuitive. I am retroactively all the more ticked about how the next few levels went.)

            

The two characteristics of the floor seem to be "pits everywhere" and "organized like a hedge maze." You have to constantly dodge and often calculate your approach to a location from several moves away. Nooks and crannies abound. Jumping will get you pretty far, but "Levitas" is going to be essential. Half of the doors have pits directly in front of them. I also have to be careful, because a fall down a pit right now means a reload until I can find stairs. 

      

Bronze dragons on the left, mind flayer up top. Foes seem tougher in general.

               

Fights are more challenging still. Attacks frequently miss, and it takes a dozen or more hits to kill most things. In one fight with a couple of ghosts, they render two of my team members unconscious. There's supposed to be an "Awake" cleric spell at Level 6, but I don't know the runes yet, so I have the temple cure the condition. It's only 100 gold and a day of rest, which is surprisingly cheap.

     
I've earned another 10,000 XP on this floor but zero treasure. For variety, I try Level 10, but it's much the same, just harder. There are bigger packs of ghosts, and more unconsciousness. One fight with a swarm of reavers nearly kills me because they can cast a spell that forces you to drop equipment. I was constantly either disarmed or unarmored, and Caltrop even lost his invisibility. I do find an "Awake" scroll, which I guess means the spell is cross-class. Siobhan scribes it in her spellbook, but it's 6th level so it takes ALL her spell slots. This is only going to be usable in camp, for now.

    
A few fights run so long I resort to throwing axes because they're the only thing that hits. Occasionally, one makes a breaking sound when I throw it, but I still have it and it still works, so I'm not sure what's up with that.

       
In exasperation I turn to a freakin' "Wish." Well, two. I'm 15 hours in, on the ninth level of a dungeon, and two of my characters are still third level! Meanie sells one scroll for 12,500, a 25% overage from the 10K appraisal. The other goes for standard price. It takes 17,100 gold to level everyone one level, putting the fighter, wizard, and cleric at 7, the shaman at 5, and the ninja and knight at 4. Everyone could train again, but I need another 20,650. I'm trying not to abuse this, but this is aggravatingly unbalanced, and I'm starting to remember why I resorted to a "Wish" blitz back in college.

     
One level doesn't make much of a difference, either. Back on 9, mantrees wipe the party a couple of times. I can't stay ahead of them and can't seem to knock them out fast enough. But there's a secret door hiding a helm of invisibility in the southeast quarter, and it's too good to pass up. On a third try, I sneak past them.

      
On the far north side of the floor, I find a regular door and stairs down to 10. I still don't know what's going on with the enchanted doors or how to get past them, but it seems plausible that the solution is located back here. Problem is, I don't get far before I have a couple of fights with large packs of ghosts and half the party ends up unconscious. The only way I can beat them is standing out of melee range and throwing axes at them. I have to retreat before I can fully explore.

      
To recap: early in the game I could only last a couple of fights before I had to retreat for healing. Then the moment I started surviving fights, I had to retreat every couple of combats because my inventory was full of gold. Now I've moved into a third phase in which I still have to retreat every couple of fights, not because of health or inventory, but because of status effects and full-party wipes. I think I hate this phase worst of all.

      
I realize I'm not having fun right now. There was a point where things were exciting, but I don't feel like I'm making any real progress anymore (except the map, but even that is more painstaking than satisfying; I find myself wanting to just rush through corners and put an X on the graph paper saying "been there, done that" without futzing with the details). The equipment isn't making much difference; combat spells haven't saved me from a single bad fight; and come to think of it, I'm not sure they've killed one monster yet. I'm skirting by on gimmicks and cheats.

     
I think what I need is a break. I'll give it a few days and see if the itch comes back. [Ed. But it's too early to break the entry, so just imagine a day or two passing for Quirkz.]

     
Starting fresh, I look back at my notes for unfinished tasks. I go back to the room with Death to try again. 40+ rounds pass with no hits from my three best fighters. I back off and throw the axe twice and it dies. Something is really off with the to-hit calculations. I get a golden pharaoh mask as a reward. It sells for 4k gold, and I level up Siobhan, getting one step closer to the "Risan" spell. At Level 8, she only has 22 HP. And yes, she has the XP to go to 9 but not the gold.
    

Grim reaper? But I 'ardly even know 'er!

      

In the northwest side of the floor, there's a square with a golden flute sitting on the ground. Stepping into the square teleports away my first four characters, leaving only the cleric and wizard, my two weakest fighters, though at least Siobhan has the light. I can swap parties, but I find the other four trapped in a 1 x 2 room with no exits. There is a crystal wand on the floor along with a dancing sword—a copy of the one the shop had for 20K.

        
Given the shape of the room, there are only so many places my crew might be stuck. I swap back to the other two and run all over Level 10. After some searching, I have a decent guess. There's one enormous chamber to the west, with a 3 x 4 block in the middle which would perfectly contain a hollow section. A plaque on the wall of it reads: "Weep not for those gone missing, for they find a great treasure. Sing their praise, instead, with the music of the wind." That certainly seems like the flute I found. I try playing it, more or less at random. Sometimes the pop-up window closes after a few notes; sometimes I can play dozens. Nothing seems to be working. During my tour of the floor, I also found a set of silver pipes. That, too, could be a way to make wind music, but it doesn't seem playable. The flute seems more likely but there's no indication what to play, or what I might be doing wrong.

     
Since I can't figure it out and don't want to explore with only a wizard and cleric, I have to reload. But I did notice that I ran all over both 9 and 10 with my two weakest characters for half an hour trying to figure this out, and I only encountered a few monsters, all of which I successfully ran away from. Either I've thinned out the crowd or I was very lucky, but the levels feel a lot more survivable today than they did yesterday. I think I can settle down and map.

      
Also, many doors on 10 have the same enchanted handles. I need to figure that out sooner rather than later. I spend a bit of time brainstorming, but all the damage spells (fire, freeze) only work in combat. I can't use or interact with most other items while exploring. Playing flute doesn't do anything, nor does arrows. 
       

This clue seems clear enough. I will not be happy when the riddle is solved.

        

I re-acquire the silver pipes, which sell for 7,200. Fights are back to small and easy. There's a morning star that improves Wort's flail (a starting weapon) from 2-7 to 2-8. Wowee.

    
The other characters be damned, I need to fly. Siobhan levels to 9. Clicking the "carouse" button 24 times in a row to make the time pass in the tavern has got to be the dumbest aspect of this game. Because of the spell slot size, she can indeed now memorize exactly one "Risan" and no other spells. I also check and find she is already eligible for Level 10.

     
Floor 6, here I come! I dash down the stairs and as I burst through the last door . . . the game hangs. Total system crash. They really don't want me to do this, do they?

      
On a retry, I get 2,000 easy XP, 1,500 gold, a golden flute (an apparent twin to the one on the tenth floor), the dagger Sting, and some gauntlets that don't appear enchanted but sell for 3,400. Sting only does 1-4 damage; while it would have been useful six hours ago, now it's only worth selling for 4,600 gold.
      

How come there's never a temple of receiving, eh?

     
The other half of this quadrant is a large temple of/for Lady Synd herself. A plaque reads in part: "You must give of yourself to find true knowledge." At the back of the temple is an altar. On earlier passes, I hadn't messed with it while already feeling trapped, but I also hadn't noticed the message. This sounds a little like it might be a gold-to-XP sink, which obviously this game does not need at all, but I try putting 100 gold on the altar to see what happens. A freaking secret passage opens up in the back, connecting this temple to the rest of the floor. You mean I could have done this part at any time after all? Audible shouting was produced.

      
I level up four of my characters: DV the Knight to 5, Mulk the shaman to 6, Wort the cleric to 8, and even though it's unbalanced, I send Siobhan the wizard to 10. I do the latter because I only had the spell slot for one "Risan," and I want her to be able to hold more spells. Except after leveling, she still doesn't have any more spell space. Not cool, Citadel, not cool.

     
Out of curiosity, I check Siobhan. For the first time in the last 13 game-hours, one of my characters does not have enough XP to go to the next level She needs 35,000 more (that's out of 176,000, so she's most of the way there, but still).

    
With "Risan," I grab the wand from the pit on 8 and apply it to Synd. I can't tell if I've got one or two more doses of crystal left, but I've been assuming it's four total.

     
Back on 10th floor I find a section with three visibly trapped squares. Even after trying to shoot them (the tip from the hint guide), I can't trip them, so I just soak it up. We get high-level scrolls of "Morale" (boost party damage), "Dopplegang" (clone party member), and "No Potionis" (cure poison). It sounds like good stuff, but I will never use any of these. I should have sold them instead of scribing them into my spellbook.

     
That's all I can reach on this level until I figure out the enchanted doors. Trying Level 11, I exit the elevator into a solid wall—or, rather, the illusion of a solid wall. I step in and face doors on three sides. I open a door and look into what I think is a 1 x 2 room with three doors at the end, but when the door closes behind me I realize the display is a little weird and I'm in a room with doors on all four sides. I've also turned some uncounted number of times while sorting out the room, and am already lost.  I go with it and just move at random for a while. Most of this level appears to be just a series of doors like this, one after another. Sometimes you can only go in three directions instead of four. Occasionally I hit a long hallway. Once I find stairs up to the tenth floor, right by that gold flute I'm not touching for now. Another time I find stairs down to a small section of the twelfth floor that is totally empty.

     
I don't find anyone to fight at all. But every now and then there's a circle on the floor. Sometimes these do nothing and sometimes these explode as a fire trap, doing ~5 damage to the party. I can take a few hits before healing, so it's not life-threatening. At one point I find a diamond-shaped area where everything is shown in inverted coloring. Coincidentally, I try to heal here and discover it's a no-magic zone. There's a smaller section in the middle walled off, with identical doors on all four sides that I don't have a key for. 
     

Theory: anti-magic fields are generated by blacklights.

   

We wander for a bit, hoping to stumble into anything useful. The sound of opening and closing doors becomes maddening. Eventually I luck back into the starting square and can elevator myself home. I'm going to need to try again with a very meticulous mapping session.

     
But first, since I've already been to Level 12, why not see if I can just end this? We take the elevator to the bottom of the dungeon. A short hallway takes me to stairs that lead back up to a large room on Level 11 that I didn't see before. I find another golden apple and a scroll of "Fyr Striken," a 9th-level fire storm spell. There's a fight with a large pack that includes two reavers (who unequip items) and two deaths. I only make progress by throwing axes, but that does the job pretty well. A plaque gives me cleric recipes for what turn out to be "No Potionis" (cure poison; a thing I've seen once) and "Gifan Shift" (cure blindness; a thing I never experience in game).

    
The apple funds training for Caltrop and Wort, getting the fighter and cleric to 9. Maybe because I'm using more low-level spells for the cleric, I have close to 20 useful spells memorized, where I can only memorize one large and maybe two small spells for the wizard.

     
I have a theory that one of these new spells, either "Anti-Magic" or "Terror," should take out the mantrees that killed me so many times on Floor 9. Neither spell helps at all, but I'm able to keep on top of them by spamming "Haelan Al," and the fighters make quick work of them. At least I can stop worrying about stumbling across that group now.

      
This is also the last time raw damage poses a threat to me in the game. When foes hit, it's only for 1 or 2 at a time, and even if a fight drags on for ages, a simple "Haelan Al" or two will keep everybody completely healthy. No other foe will cast any significantly-damaging magic. The only thing that will cause an interruption is a status effect, mostly unconsciousness, rarely a level drain or the reaver's force-unequip spell. I won't know this until it's over, and I'll stay on edge until then, but in retrospect, it's pretty disappointing. Combat has become almost entirely trivial, except for when it's extremely dangerous and I have to switch to the "one weird trick" of throwing axes to take out the most lethal enemies.
     

The game gives me these two recipes twice and all other spells once, but it never gives me the recipes for the Level 6 spells "Dispellere" and "Awake," which are listed in the hint book. I assume this is an error or bug.

      

As I start hopscotching over endless floor pits back to the elevator, I realize these obstacles are also the answer to one of my problems. Floor 9 is riddled with pits, more than 50, scattered everywhere. Conveniently, "everywhere" covers a lot of ground. There are lots of places on Floor 10 I can't reach because of enchanted doors, but the pits from 9 provide me access to most of them. I drop into five different fairly large rooms from above. Most have one or two fights. One seems to possess an unlimited number of spiders. Since Siobhan can only memorize one "Risan" at a time, I have to drop into the pit, clear it, then re-memorize the spell. I'm not usually attacked, though occasionally a wandering monster finds me.

     
There's one plaque with some cleric spell recipes, but I realize it's a duplicate of the one I saw before, for "Gifan Shift" and "No Potionis." I'm not sure whether this is a bug or intentional, but while I've found recipes for spells leveled 4 and 5, and then  7 and 8 twice, I still haven't found hints for spell Levels 6, 9, or 10.

     
I find an enchanted bastard sword for Mulk, his first magical weapon, and also pick up a dragon shield that ends up being cursed. After uncursing, it's worth 5,600 gold, so not a bad prize. I can afford to train Jexica, DV, Wort, and Caltrop after this outing.

     
On 9, about a quarter of the floor was unmapped and I was about to gripe there aren't any pits on 8 to get me down there, but of course I can reverse the technique I've been using and go up from 10 for a few spots. I've gone from "most of this isn't reachable" to "most of this is solved" with two new tricks, so that's actually pretty clever. (Note from afterward: Again, it's not actually clever. It's a poor interface that I'm failing to figure out, but cleverly working around. The manual hints at treasures in the rooms I missed, plus another copy of the elevator key.)

      
When I'm done, I've been able to reach several more rooms, and still have six doors with unaccounted space behind them that I can't find a way to crack. That means there's probably another way to beat these doors, but when I try the Level 9 spell "Blast Portal," it does nothing.

     
That said, the last three hours have felt generally unimportant overall, more like sweeping up crumbs than making progress. The only possibly interesting find is a slate. It doesn't appraise for much, isn't usable, and I don't have any idea what to do with it, but it's something new. Otherwise, I've filled in squares on the map, but the added gear is trivial. The gold for leveling up was nice, but the XP earned outpaced it. I don't feel any closer to finding the villain or beating him, and don't think I've found any important new clues or quest items in ages.
     

[Ed. We will end things on that bleak note, but since the next entry is the last one, clearly the situation turns around.]

    

****

   

Previous entry in this series

   

Next entry in this series

10/06/2026 

Citadel: Meditations in an Emergency

 

The heart of a dead star? Your mom? Pizza?

       

[Chet here. Sorry that I delayed the rest of Quirkz's entries. There are probably two more after this one, which will carry us through most of the coming week, when I will be traveling. I should be back to my own schedule by next weekend (10-11 October). Quirkz has been shy about linking to his non-CRPG Addict material, but given the favor he's doing for us, a little promotion is in order. See Quirkz's web site here, where you can learn about his various projects and publications.]

      

Guest post by Quirkz: 

      

As this session begins, I go use the wand I found last time (the second one) on Lady Synd. Some more of the crystal dissolves. 

    
Now that I have the elevator key, there are new paths in front of me. It will grant me access to several of those previously dead-end locations on six and seven, plus provide entry to every floor below that. I'm feeling pretty buff from my recent level increases.

       
The first ones to get it are those squirrels on the sixth floor, which turn out to be black dragons. Their breath bypasses my invisibility, but only occasionally. Caltrop beats one of them while accidentally dual-wielding one sword and one sack of coins. 900 gold is a sweet reward, but training is now up to 2-4,000 for one character, so I need much more than that.

     
I try the seventh floor next. I've been here before but had not been mapping. The interconnected tangle of corridors sprawls over the entire western half of the floor. Either I've missed a secret door, or the eastern half is detached. Other than maneuvering around a bunch of floor pits and finding one staircase down at the far end, there isn't much to it.

     
There is one unsolved riddle from a talking head. "What was once hot, then cold, serves good and evil alike, and can bestow death and honour?"  I tried IRON and STEEL with no luck. Maybe I should have tried SWORD. 

         

At one point, I am standing by a closed door, looking at the map, when the door bursts open and three cutthroats attack me. I didn't realize monsters could open doors, but clearly they can.

      
I'd rather use the elevator than the stairs for now, so I backtrack and take that to the eighth floor. The elevator gate here is not locked, unlike almost all the other floors, which makes me wary. I know an ominous invitation when I see one.

    
Most of the walls on this floor are see-through, like thick glass. There's a vague haze in the air showing where they are. It's not exactly hard to navigate around them, only slightly disorienting. The map tends to put ceiling holes at junctions, which does help spot them as you move. The main feature is you can see more things in the distance, sometimes tantalizing things you don't know how to reach.

     

There are walls on both sides of the square in front, plus a pit in the ceiling.

          

I find some black platemail and an hourglass. The shopkeeper doesn't offer much (especially for the armor) so I sell it unappraised and see it listed in the shop afterward as a cursed item with a 4 AC penalty. Good riddance. Not sure what to do with the hourglass, I stick it in a backpack. It has the feel of a quest item.

     
I belatedly discover a hidden room in the corner of the sixth floor that seems like a lost armory. It's loaded with gear, most of it low-value, including too many arrows. But it's got a couple of pieces with promising descriptions. For example, of three long swords, two have plain blurbs ("gray iron with leather-bound grip") while the third's info pane reads: "gold filigreed blade, jeweled hilt." We haul it all back to sell but end up keeping a lightly enchanted long sword, a shield +1, and a ring that lowers AC by 2. The ring goes to the wizard, of course, who was walking around at an unimproved AC 10. There's also another suit of plate mail in the shop finally, so I buy that to replace Wort's ring mail, improving his AC by 4.

      
Back at the eighth floor, I am busy prepping a new page of graph paper when we're jumped by enemies. It's a large, mixed group: two vampires, four elementals (earth, air, fire, water), and a giant lizard just for kicks. The vampires attack immediately, triggering some kind of visible and audible alert, but I've missed what it was. I have my invisible characters square off with them while the others spread out and take on the elementals. I get the message window open and see that the earth elemental is trying to suffocate me and the water elemental is trying to drown me. I become more wary, because while these might just be the wording of their attacks, I'm not sure if there's a chance of an insta-kill. It's a long fight with a lot of missed attacks on both sides, and it grants over 3,000 XP, two or three times more than the next largest battle I've seen. When it ends, I confirm DV was level drained, twice, and is now level 1. I check in town but there doesn't seem to be a restore option at the temple, and I don't have the money to mess with this, so I reload.

     
I take a look at the party's armor status and realize Mulk in the back just got all the upgrades and is -1, while DV up front is 3 and Jexica 5. Invisibility has been helping so far, but it's not everything. Knowing I'm likely to run right back into the same group of enemies in a minute, I retool and give DV the best stuff, hoping that will get him through the next fight unscathed. I also have the clerics memorize a "Faer" and a "Fortis Al" for combat benefits along with some "Gestuns" for damage. I haven't needed to rely on spells other than healing so far, but this seems like the time to get prepared.

    
Naturally, the next time I visit, that group is nowhere to be seen. I fight battles with some other common monsters and earn about 900 gold. This is enough to level Caltrop the fighter to 5.

     
On another outing, I have a disastrous mis-click in what should be an easy fight. Two characters are overlapping each other, and while trying to move one I instead end up activating Jexica's weapon and dragging it away from her, which in the game interface causes it to be thrown. You can throw almost anything, but in this case it hurls the +4 rapier in the direction of Siobhan and kills her in one hit. Sheesh. That's a reload. (It's also the second time this has happened.)

      
There's a plaque that lists the symbol-words for three fifth-level cleric spells, "Cural" (improved party heal), "Sanctifis" (extended bless), and "Freosan" (freeze foes). The manual only gave the words for the first three levels, but plaques have now provided the next two levels of spells for me. (The hintbook has them, too, but I'm ignoring that for now.)

   

Exactly twice, we will face these enormous white dragons. It seems like an under-utilized capability of the game. The big ones don't turn into tombstones when they die. They just sit there, which is confusing.

          

While I'm on the subject, this is my third core memory from the past. The game will eventually give me most of the other cleric rune combos, but it will confusingly leave out a couple that are in the hint book, plus there's an upcoming event that will make me think even the clue book is incomplete. So I set out to discover the secret spells on my own. I methodically made a list of every combination, starting with all the 2-letter words, and working up to every possible 7-letter word in the game (EEEEEEE, EEEEEEA, EEEEEEF, EEEEEEW, etc.). The short words were easy to do on the fly, but I kept losing count on the long words. So during a tornado warning, while we crouched in the dorm's basement hallway for an hour, I wrote out by hand the entire list. Then I went back to the game later and tried every single combination. Just memorizing that many elemental runes took decades of in-game time, and my characters aged tremendously. (I don't remember if this did anything.) What I do remember is I didn't find a single new spell.

       
I have wasted time doing more misguided things in my life, but this one is pretty well up there.

     

One locked door has a circle on the ground in front of it, like that fire trap from earlier. Wise to its ways, I fire an arrow at it, but nothing happens. Maybe I did it wrong? I shoot another arrow across the square to the door, and then one aimed at the circle's edge. Nothing. Gritting my teeth I step forward and it still doesn't trigger. What gives? I don't have the right key for the door and have to leave it for now.

      
In one corner I see foes lurking through the glass. More dragons. They're hazy but far sight pulls them up in sharp detail. I never find a way to get to them, though. 

      

Dragons, like undead, are best seen from afar.

       

Fights come along at a decent pace. Not frequent, but you can't let your guard down. Post-combat looting averages 400 gold pieces these days—an improvement, but managing the inventory is challenging. I no longer run home for healing, but now I have to run home every 3-4 fights to offload gear. Sadly, 900 cash won't even cover a third of a training session. One fight with four elementals (but no vampires this time) delivers 3,300 XP. Everyone might be ready to go up 2-3 levels; they just need gold. Very frustrating.

     
On the north side of the floor there's one 3 x 3 block of solid rock, with stairs going up on all four sides. One of these leads up to the down stairwell I found on 6 but didn't use before. I'm guessing the others lead to fragmented sections covering the remaining half of the seventh floor. I skip them for now.

      
The second half of the floor goes quickly, and again finding ways to carry gold is the only obstacle. I decide I'm going to leave helms and gloves back at camp, because they don't give much protection and take up a full inventory slot that could be a bag of gold. I get firebombed by the same laughing magician a couple of times. 

    
We find another magical shield and a "boomerang axe." Damage is listed as only 1-6, which is low for a weapon, but if it's reusable and can replace a bow (which consumes arrows, a limited resource that also takes up too much inventory space) it might be worth it. When I test in combat, the axe is consistently doing 6 and hitting often, while a few tests with bows do 0 damage. I'm not sure if some monsters are simply immune, but Siobhan is still using her starting dagger and doesn't have enough spell slots to be effective as a caster yet, so I give her the axe. Her aim isn't great (the line jiggles like crazy) but since it boomerangs she can do this repeatedly from outside melee range as long as no party members are too close to her.

     
I pop back up to 7 and try the riddle door one more time. It was SWORD after all. A secret door slides open.

     
Beyond it, I'm charged by some vaguely salamander-looking creatures with a weird name like "lermenysty." Nobody can seem to hit them, and it's 30 rounds before one lucky strike kills one. I start having characters try to throw their axes, and that seems to work better. I have a fuzzy memory of doing this in tight spots back in the 90s. I think there's something weird in the differences between melee and ranged combat, and for whatever reason missile weapons connect more often.

     

$10 for anyone who can figure out the etymology of "lermenysty."

            
If I had to speculate, I would guess that melee combat uses a typical D&D-style to-hit table, and my low-level characters are mostly whiffing against tough foes. But when it comes to throwing objects, since the game interface provides a visual interpretation of bad aim (low level and low dexterity make the throw line jump all over the place) I think that stands in for the to-hit calculation. If you miss a throw, it's because you literally missed the correct angle, but if your line of sight is true, it hits, regardless of your level or ability. That said, thrown axes do miss some of the time, but it's less than 25%, whereas melee attacks might only hit 5% of the time.

     
I return to 8 and try the other three stairwells back up to 7. I think what's going on here is on the 8th floor, the stairs are separate, but on the 7th it's one square that behaves differently depending on which direction you approach it from. (Looking at the hint book much later, it talks about a weird pyramidical staircase, which I guess is supposed to represent this, but I can't figure out how that's morphologically possible.)

      
I explored the north side before, so I go up from the west and end up in the east. It's a compact, zig-zaggy zone with a lot of mirror symmetry and floor pits laid out like the five pips of a die in one spot and a diamond in another. You need "Levitas" to hit all the squares, but you can loop through most of them with checkers-style jumping.

       
Fights seem tougher, even though I trained recently and have also done the other half of this level already. They hit me a little more often. I miss about 80% of the time. But it's still a slow bleed, easily fixed by a "Haelan" or its full-party version. As I've leveled up, it's started doing 4-6 per casting more often (rather than 2), and in a few more levels it will be healing 8 or 10 HP on some castings.

     
After a fight with a bunch of air elementals or dervishes, I get a scimitar called Defender, which conveys -4 AC and 10% magic resistance in addition to doing 2-10 damage. Pretty good. I give that to Jexica, who needs the armor boost, and move the +4 rapier to DV.

     
The section traces a long, winding path and ends in a floor pit, with not much else to show for it. Suspicious. I check the map for the floor below, and this pit lines up with an unexplored box, probably a single square. I don't like it, but I save and jump in.

    
On the ground is a skull wand, so this is clearly a necessary visit. But I can't get out! I try Levitas and check every command and option three more times, also scouring the game manual for any other suggestion, like a higher-level flying spell, but there's nothing. Maybe there's an item that will let me fly? I know I could "Wish" myself back home, but then the elevator would be trapped on the wrong floor. I think I could probably get back down via pits, but the whole idea feels both risky and unnatural. I have to be missing something. For now, it's a reload. I mark the spot for a future return.

    
I try the other stairwells. One takes me to a single empty square. Huh.
       

The fourth set leads to a winding zone with lots of pits to jump. The far end is a 7 x 7 section filled with pits. Far sight shows me something lurking in the middle of one solid square. I "Levitas" over and find two scrolls of "Levitas" (think you're funny, do you?), a statue, and a spell book. This is my third. It has a lot of spells filled in, including spells from levels 4, 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10. Powerful stuff, if I can ever gain the levels to use it.

     
Another branch in this section leads to a single pit. This one, like the wand pit above, seems to be positioned over an unexplored square.  

      

I reconnoiter from the eighth floor. Peering through clear walls into this spot, I can see waiting treasure.

          

I feel like this is going to be another waste of time, but I have to check. In the hole there is an ivory gargoyle and three scrolls: "Cista" (magic chest), and two "Risans."

     
What the hell is a "Risan"? It's not in the manual, which is weird. Based on the name, it sounds an awful lot like it might be a flying spell. Is this what I've been looking for the whole time? I curse at the game for making this so obscure, and for the bad luck in jumping into the wrong pit first.

     
Like D&D, you can cast a scroll one time, which consumes it, or use the scroll to scribe it in the book, whence you can memorize it as many times as you like. Only a fool would allow a limited-edition, secret item to be destroyed. 

      
Siobhan studies "Risan." As the hours tick by, we get attacked by vampires. During the fight, DV is level-drained twice again, putting him back to first level. Worse, in the aftermath we find that the spell didn't make it into the book but the scroll is gone. It was destroyed by the interruption.

      
The manual told me there'd be days like this. You better believe that's a reload.

     
Back in the pit, I think smart and try to thin out the wandering monsters by having my clerics memorize some spells first. I'm interrupted three times in a row. They are tough fights, but no vampires. I'm seeing mind flayers and scanners—beholder ripoffs—along with other repeat enemies. The mix does seem partly randomized. After three interruptions, I try to scribe "Risan" again—it takes more hours than expected, like half a day—and I'm done! Now to memorize it.

     
Well, it's level 9. Siobhan is only level 5. She can't learn it. What the heck?

     
I guess that's why they gave me two of these scrolls. I invoke the remaining one, get out of the pit, and step clear. Two humanoid figures called "mantrees" attack. I've fought off some before, and they're dangerous because they sometimes cast a damaging area spell, "Flaming Hands." This time the two spam it so quickly and consistently half the party is dead before I know what's going on.
     

When the game has you cursing at it four times in ten minutes, it's time to step away for a while.

    

After a reload I ascend again without getting attacked this time, and rush home to save.

    
In camp, the gargoyle burns Meanie when he tries to take it for appraisal. I think this is an alignment thing. It's the first time I've seen it applied.

     
I sell the other statue for 2,900. I have to give the gargoyle to a neutral character to sell. It appraises for 8,000 but I can only sell it for less than 6,000 due to lower mien. Still, this is the most money I've seen in about three floors and three game hours. Everyone is so far behind on training it's not funny.

     
I have enough money to train either three base classes (cleric, fighter, wizard) from 5-6 or to get two premium class characters from Levels 3-4. I'm starting to regret the premium classes. I figured the greater XP requirements would slow them down but didn't imagine cash would be such a bottleneck. I pick the larger group.

     
Caltrop goes from 33 to 42 HP, Wort from 21 to 26. Siobhan gains a single point, up to 17. I'm worried her health is going to be a real problem. I confirm all three could go to Level 7 already if I had the money, and I'm guessing it's really 8, maybe close to 9, which is the level I need to be to memorize "Risan."

     
It's time to review my to-do list. With a few minor exceptions, I think I have explored all of floors 7 and 8 now. The remaining items include one locked door I can't get past and the pit with the wand. It bothers me that I still have roughly a third of the sixth floor remaining—the part with easy fights, lots of gold, and a magic dagger—but I can't get back out of that section without "Risan" or a "Wish."

     
It starts to dawn on me what the game probably intended for the order of my exploration. I was supposed to lose access to the elevator early. Doing the first five floors more or less in order was correct. As I ventured into floor 6, I would have regained access to the elevator. Then, because 6 and 7 were blocked, I was supposed to use the elevator to skip them and investigate floor 8 and proceed through it, climbing back up into 7 from there, only getting the elevator key right about now. The elevator grate being unlocked on 8 wasn't a trap: it was a feature. None of this requires a "Wish," either, and it flows fairly naturally, other than it offends my sensibilities to be doing things out of order. I guess that's how I know the big bad Nequilar is evil.
    

****

   

Previous entry in this series

   

Next entry in this series

10/07/2026

Citadel: Prism Break

What does it feel like to be 20% non-imprismed? Somehow that seems more dangerous than being fully enclosed.

       

Guest post by Quirkz:

  

[But a note from Chet first: I broke the last entry in a weird place. Quirkz was in the middle of exploring Level 5 of the dungeon. He was so engrossed in reading plaques on the wall that he missed the fact that he was approaching a key plot element. We pick up with his narration.]

    

After reading 10 walls of plaques, we turn around and realize Lady Synd is right there!

    

I see that the south end of this chamber lines up with the locked door next to the "break glass" pane I couldn't get through earlier. I circle back and discover the door isn't actually locked, it's just buggy. It takes 2-6 clicks to open, sometimes even giving a notice that the character tried and failed to open it, but then on the next attempt it works. It's very annoying.

     
I can approach the queen from three different directions, and for a while I think we will be curing her in stages, once from each direction, but I'm pretty sure I'm mixing that up with another game. [Ed. Maybe Chaos Strikes Back?] I take a look at that skull wand again, and it has a "brandish" button in the interface. I brandish. A chunk of gem dissolves. The wand turns into a "broken item" but the description has a suspicious wording: "This is now junk, or is it?" I keep it in the party stash for now.

     
The only part of the level we haven't explored is a detached chunk, the lower section of the queen's chambers. We go there and find a large room. There are a bunch of arrows and a bow in the corner. There are also new alcoves, which I click out of reflex. One of these also collapses, revealing a cave and confirming one of my three core memories from 1995.

        

I've heard of a wishing well, but a wishing wall?

       

I try to enter but am given a stern warning: "To win her gift or meet your fate only one may pass this gate." It takes me a minute to remember that the manual says it's possible to split the party, and another minute to figure out how to do it. I have to select a character and pick "leave behind" which kicks him out of the party and amusingly leaves him as an icon on the floor.  

        

Taking the advice of strange voices in dark caves is what adventurers do.

      

I send Caltrop in on his own. Because someone else is holding the light source, it's too murky for a screen shot, but I am in a dark square facing off against three opponents who look just like him, except he is invisible and they are not. He finishes them all without taking a hit. Combat ends with 0 XP rewarded, and then I'm kicked out of the cave, but there's now a scroll on the ground next to the icons of the party. It's a scroll of Wish.

      
The game from this point on can be completely broken, if you want, because this fight is repeatable, and with invisibility it's trivial. Without invisibility, it's a lot harder, fighting three of yourself at once, and I think the fight is designed to include a lot of misses and parries (the hint books make it clear there are four mirror images, sharing one mind, aware of each other's actions). 

     
I'm not going to play like a jackass, but I figure "three wishes" is a trope, right? So I collect two more.

       
Back in camp, I invoke one of the scrolls. I'm asked which character to pick and then given a large range of options to improve, including all six character stats, my health status, my hit points, my level, my armor class, and my magic resistance. There's also a grayed out "map" and "teleport to town" option, which I assume would work in the dungeon but not in camp. I'm not sure why "cash" is grayed out, but I'm guessing it results in literal moneybags that only appear on the dungeon floor.  

     

Where's the "more wishes" button?

       

There is a "bank" option. Because I'm desperate for funds, I try that and get 2,000 GP. It's a reasonable sum, but then I sputter in rage when I have Meanie appraise another scroll and it comes in at 10,000. Why does the Wish, the most powerful thing in the universe, give me less gold from its power than people will pay for the unused scroll? Oh, actually that's probably a reasonable valuation. As useful as my wish is to me, someone else might have a different wish that's more valuable to them. Deep.

      
Well, the scroll is gone, and the 2k is at least enough to uncurse the pentacle necklace my cleric has been stuck with. That costs 500 GP. I'm not sure if uncursing will make the item beneficial now or merely unlock it, so I pay to identify it and see it still gives +1 to armor class (which, like classic D&D, is the wrong direction). However, the amulet is very valuable, and Meanie pawns it to the shop for 7,500 GP.

     
I now have enough money to train everyone up to Level 3, and I suspect most of them are barely short of the XP required for Level 4. I also find that once any of the base classes hit Level 3, they're automatically invited to switch to a premium class. I allow Jexica the thief to become a ninja so she can wear better armor and be a stronger fighter. Letting the fighter DV change classes is obligatory (see my novel, The Eight-Bit Bard for a proper explanation) so he becomes a knight and gains access to priest spells. These promotions reset their level to 1. I leave the others at 3. My party is now a fighter, a knight, a cleric, a shaman (that's the cleric-fighter combo), a ninja, and a wizard. That's three prestige classes and three baseline ones—I want to keep the one pure fighter strong and I still really want to get some spells out of Siobhan one of these days.
       

This seems like an offer I should not refuse.

       

Speaking of, I finally figure out what's going on with the wizard spells. I was putting scrolls in my inventory and then checking the spellbook to see if I could memorize them, but they weren't showing as available. What you actually have to do is drag the scroll from your inventory to a special scroll icon on that screen, which loads the scroll into a hidden scroll slot on the character. From there the character can cast the scroll or, as I wanted, transfer it to his spellbook.

      
You can also transcribe spells above your level. Siobhan gathers the Level 2 spell "Divine" (an identify spell, I think); the Level 3 spells "Gestun" (light damage to all foes), "Spice" (conjure random item; I recall this being next to useless and not worth the time), and "Sumos" (summon monster companion); and the Level 4 spells "Fortis Al" (party defense) and "Locatus" (mapping location). I cannot yet memorize any of the Level 4 spells, but they're waiting safely in my book.

      
I realize I had confused "Locatus" earlier with "Levitas" (levitate) but I've got enough money that I can just buy the latter from the shop. It's 2,000, but I know I need it. It goes in the book as well, and I immediately memorize it, twice.

     
Something appears to be up with the wizard spell slots, because after that I can only memorize one "Haelan," which is level one, and previously I'd had two. A little experimenting gets me thinking that wizard spells have a sort of encumbrance component. I think Level 1 spells are small and only take up one slot, but higher-level spells take up several. Later on I'll find, for example, that I can memorize either exactly one Level-4 "Locatus" or 8 Level-1 "Haelans." I guess it's up to me to mix and match. 

   

The state of the party. Mulk is finally getting some HP, but Siobhan's health is concerning.

      

Back in the dungeon, characters now sometimes attack twice per round. This isn't just Caltrop, the Level 3 fighter, but also Jexica the ninja and DV the knight, both of whom reset to Level 1. I finally discover a hidden combat message window, which shows me the monster names and damage amounts I've been missing all this time. That's handy, but because it lies directly on top of the combat window and takes up a ton of space, it's impractical, and I mostly leave it closed unless I want to see what a new monster is called. In this case, it also helps me realize Jexica is dual wielding, attacking with a sword and then ineffectively with an empty bow right after. I unequip the bow, but she then begins attacking with her bare left hand. I eventually stick another sword in there and solve the problem.

     
I also start to rethink strategy, because I see now that my characters can successfully mob enemies. For instance, three of them might be able to attack in sequence before the enemy retaliates once. I'm not sure whether it's the added levels, the premium classes, or something else going on in the background. I try to keep an eye on it from fight to fight, adding or removing members from the mob depending on how the pacing seems to work. The Level 1 characters miss a lot more than they used to against tougher foes, and I know I need to level them up again, fast.

     
With "Levitas" in mind, I return to the pit with the Venus flytraps, hungering for the piles of easy experience and gold and especially that elevator key, which will be much more convenient than dashing through the twisty passages every time. I mop up on XP. I grab bags of gold until my inventory is bursting, plus a golden flute I'd forgotten about. I drop one more level, snag that elevator key, and backtrack to the portal in the ceiling. I cast "Levitas" and . . . nothing happens. I flip through all the menus and icons. Surely there's a "go up" button, right? Even The Bard's Tale had that! I try jumping. I try stepping away and back. But no, there's no way to ascend. "Levitas" keeps you from falling but does not make you fly.

     
Crud.

    

Quirkz's map of Level 6.

    
I roam Level 7, looking for another way out, but the problem is I still don't know anything about the sixth floor, either, so I don't know what I'm looking for. I turn the corner, bump into a pack of eight monks all casting some kind of area damage spell, and before I know it my party is dead. I guess all this loot will need to wait a bit longer.

     

It occurs to me a "Wish" spell might be necessary here to do the run and make a clean exit, but I don't want to resort to that yet.

      
I still have one obvious path forward: a set of stairs near the main landing on Level 5 that takes me to unexplored territory on Level 6. The landing offers a trio of doors facing east, each one into a different hallway. In front of each door is a pit. I can jump forward into the hallway but the door will close behind me, so "Levitas" will be mandatory if I want to return. Sneaky.
       

I take the southern branch and see in the distance a magic mouth, speaking, "Come closer, I can't hear you." At this point I find a menu item for "far sight" that a couple of my characters apparently have, and I discover that it slightly magnifies things in the distance. Huh. I step up again and the mouth begs me to come closer. This has "trap" written all over it, and indeed when I approach the mouth gives a giant windy breath, like it's blowing out birthday candles, and then wraps up with a toothy smirk. Except I'm carrying a glowing orb, not the torch, so I am totally unaffected. Take that, mouth! 

     

Could you BE any more obvious?

          

I have a fight with an arch devil, a mummy, and a medusa. The medusa appears directly in the middle of my party and I move everyone away in a reflexive panic. I'm not sure if petrification or paralysis are a thing in this game, but I'm not in the mood to find out. I let an invisible character take her down, hoping maybe if she can't see them she can't stone them, and it doesn't take long for her to fall. The arch devil holds out for a long time, though, mostly because my characters miss so much. Maybe it wasn't smart to make the two invisible fighters Level 1 at the same time. Eventually we win out.

      
The path leads down to Level 7. This is potentially scary stuff considering what those monks did to me, but I chance it. I find a big empty room, full of nothing.

     
In one far corner there's a coat rack with a key on it. Picking up the key closes off an open wall to my right and opens up a closed wall to my left. I worry at first I've been teleported, but putting the key back reverses the walls again. It's just a secret passage.

      
In this next room, there are a trio of jail cells, all unlocked, with skeletons shackled against the far walls, padlocks visible on their wrists. The interface makes this unintuitive again, because clicking on them, even with the character holding the key, does not work like it does on doors. Eventually I hit on the right combo, selecting the key in the inventory, clicking a "use" button, and then clicking on the padlock. In two cases, there's a flash and I find myself in combat with a cave wight and a masked figure. The wight makes me nervous (level drain? paralysis?) but goes down easy. The masked figure is hard to hit and takes a while.

      
In the middle cell, instead of a fight, a "body" appears on the ground. I kick DV out for a minute and add it to the party. Despite appearances, it's not dead: it's a living character, a dwarven clerk named Burliman. Out of the kindness of my heart, I decide to rescue him. I have to put the key back on the rack to get out of the room.
       

The key bone's connected to the . . . lock bone. The lock bone's connected to the . . . wrist bone.

       

Back in town there's no real recognition of the event or anything. He goes into the tavern and is a recruitable character, but is only Level 1 with bad stats. He has 300 gold on him and I assume he's grateful enough to give that to my party in thanks. According to the hint book, he can identify items for the party, but I missed that. Then I return and claim DV, who waited patiently in the jail cell. (The bartender in the tavern did indeed know about the missing DV, and guessed he was still alive, BTW.)

     
Past the jail cells there's one more door, this one locked, and none of our keys work. I'll have to leave it for later, and in fact never figure this one out. The cluebook suggests I missed a way of unlocking it, and I might have had free rein of Level 7 much sooner.

      
Back up on 6, I try the middle path, to the Buddha's delight. It is a short jump to a loooooooong hallway, 10 steps east and 18 north, expanding into a large, irregular room. There's a door to the north, and when I peek inside I see a book on the floor and a vaguely grim-reaper-looking monster moving around. It attacks when I step inside for the book.

      
According to the window, I am literally fighting Death, or at least a death. He hits hard and often, even invisible characters. None of mine hit him even once. I give it 20 rounds, but this seems like a foolish battle, so I pull my characters back to the edge of the screen and activate my second of three core memories about this game from 1995. I withdraw from a fight, which works as advertised, playing a short clip of "Run away!" from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. I probably should have tried it sooner, but I was looking in the wrong pull-down menu for the wrong words, and also failed to remember the character had to be disengaged from combat and at the screen edge.  

     

Combat with a wight, some bat-men, and some skeletons. Monsters turn into tombstones when you kill them.

       

Running away pulls you out of combat, but leaves the opponent a square away. If you're slow, they can re-engage. I grabbed the book and backtracked through the door as if death were literally on the doorstep.

The book turns out to be a second spellbook. This one even has several spells already saved into it, though Siobhan also has them all. 10 hours feels too long for the chance to bring a second useful magician into the game, but considering we're all still only level 3, going on 4, maybe not? I'm tempted to add a magus (the fighter-wizard) to the mix, but for now things are working well enough that I don't want to mess with party composition.

To the west of us there's a narrow passage and then another 3x4 chamber. It seems empty, but as I circle it checking for invisible walls there's a sound like something grating or moving. At first I'm not sure what's happened and worry I was teleported. The room looks the same, but the exit is missing. As I panic about being trapped I'm attacked by a wight and some critters. The fight is easy, but afterward I'm still confused about my location and since I appear to be trapped I keep checking for secrets. It turns out the entryway is still there, just covered by an illusion now. It's really confusing for a minute, but after some thought I have to give the developers credit for making it exciting.

I find myself impressed by the variety of mechanics and interactions I've seen lately. There's been a teleport, a false teleport with a deceptive illusion, the on/off secret passage from the keys, some illusionary walls, and a body to rescue with a split party. While some of the interface choices have been hard to figure out, it's got me using items in several different ways to find surprising outcomes. Honestly, not bad.

Back in camp I heal up and take stock. Money is the problem again. All of my characters can go up at least one level, but I can only afford to train the level 1 folks and one more. I pick Siobhan the wizard because I know I need more mage spell slots, and also because her HP are by far the worst. I'm pleasantly surprised when she goes from 10 to 14 HP, and also happy to see Jexica and DV get modest gains. I wasn't sure if they'd gain health while rehashing levels they'd already gone through once. I really hope being level 2 again helps with their accuracy.

Siobhan is only 200 XP from level 5, but I'm nearly broke. I don't even bother checking the others.
     

On the sixth floor there's only one path left, so I take it along a snaking, non-branching tour of the entire northern half of the level. A note on the wall gives me the recipes for a couple of cleric spells, "Faer" (fear, basically, weakens attackers) and "Fortis Al" (party defense). At the end I find stairs up, which lead through short stints on each floor before ascending again, all the way to the top. All told, it's probably 100 steps from the door to the final room.
       

A mage cannot cast spells while wearing armor. Despite some hints at other restrictions, this is the only one I've observed in-game.

      

I approach a skeleton, and as I do a wall in front of me disappears when I'm two steps away and reappears when I get one step closer. It takes me a minute to realize this is a basic pressure plate. Gear is not enough, though; I have to leave a party member behind. First I poke at the skeleton, which exposes a helmet and another skull wand. Sweet! I leave the shaman behind and step forward. The secret door slams shut behind me. I find myself facing the gate to the elevator shaft.

     
Uh, something was supposed to be here, right? Looking at the hint book, I see that this is how you're supposed to reclaim the elevator if you take it up to the first floor and then fall through the trap door. Except I didn't bother doing that because Chet had documented it in his walkthrough. So I've got no elevator to retrieve, and I've just locked a party member at the wrong end of an infinite corridor for nothing. Adding injury to the insult, I have to talk to the giant head and let the trap door send me down a floor because that's the only way out.

     

Chet's screenshot of this moment, for reference.

      

I always feel a little rushed and nervous with a split party, so selling some extra gear or using the wand isn't an option; it's an all-out sprint down through levels 2-6, taking the normal route. Critically, there's an interruption in the real world. I save and quit, take care of things, and come back—still antsy to make the party whole before I mess up.

       
Back through the north door, jump over the pit. 80 steps of snake tunnels to the stairs, climb 5 flights. There's Mulk, just waiting for me. I turn around and reverse the process. Stairs, stairs, stairs. Serpentine, serpentine. The hall straightens and the door is in front of me. I've been clicking fast to get through all of this and I run straight up to the door and smack into it.

      
And then I fall. Because these are the doors with the pits in front of them, the ones you need "Levitas" to make it back the other way. In my hurry, I've forgotten, and now I'm back on the seventh floor, in the same dead-end zone where two other valuable runs have already led to party wipes and full resets. I still don't know how to get out of here. It may not be possible. And of course because of that brief save, I'm not sure how far back my prior save goes. Probably just to when Siobhan leveled up. Without the need for mapping, it's probably only 10 minutes of game time to redo it. But crud, how annoying.

      

Rather than immediately reloading, I push on, hoping that since I'm stronger I can find an exit. I am not mapping. I'm being pretty sloppy, really. And it's a big level, so I'm running around kind of lost. I find the elevator key and figure why not take it a third time before I die? I hit the same battle with the 8 monks (wizards, actually) and this time I don't have much problem. My three spellcasters have picked up "Gestun" (light damage to all foes) and this seems a perfect time to try it out. It damages about three quarters of them on each cast; I assume the others resist. Gestun doesn't kill anyone, but the invisible characters mop up. I take a little damage, but not much.

      
I roam long hallways, occasionally getting into fights which all end well and give great XP and some bags of gold. I find a golden apple, which is clearly going to be valuable one way or another. There's a rapier, and the description says it's mithril, which has to be a good thing. We are running low on health, not so much from the fights but because we've run into a couple of traps or scripted events where a wizard—the villain Nequilar, presumably—teleports into the square in front of us, laughs, and blasts us all with fire. I've run all over the place and have found no stairs at all. Nothing but floor pits, if I want to go down to the eighth floor. From there I'd still need to find a way back up to 7 to get out.

      
I'm starting to think I'm doomed, but then I remember I'd picked up one more Wish scroll for testing purposes. I also started thinking, I've been down here so many times now, and I've been told there's no exit, and I can't find one. It might actually be true. I consult my maps and realize I have exhausted every path I know on the higher levels. Maybe I've missed some hidden walls or something, but my only next step is to jump right back down here anyway and map until I die or find my way out. As cheesy as it is, maybe the Wish scrolls are the intended way back?

     
Well, screw it. I'm stuck and this doesn't feel fun. I zap home.
      

The golden apple sells for over 9,000. I don't see a way to use it, and decide it's probably intended to be treasure rather than a quest item. I really don't need to start a 10-year war in Asia Minor right now.

      
I appraise the rapier and realize it is the best weapon in the game. It does 5-15 damage and confers 20% magic resistance. Very nice. I give it to Jexica, who dual wields it with another sword.

     
With the money, I can train my ninja and knight up to 3, get the others to level 4, and Siobhan, who was already 4, goes to 5. That should help tremendously. Everyone has enough XP to go at least one level higher, maybe more, but there's no more gold. Back into the breach.

     

****

   

Previous entry in this series

   

Next entry in this series

10/04/2026