The door swung shut and disappeared from reality, banishing the image of the fiery room with its passing.
Check. Bold, not greedy. He’d have to keep that in mind for the next pass through a golden door—though, admittedly, his silver buckler was a pretty slick prize. He stood, brushing himself off, and examined his new shield in all its glimmering glory. The gem was fiery red and, if it was real, probably could’ve paid off his mortgage back on Earth. Delicately etched golden runes encircled the outer edge of the shield, the script flowing and beautiful. The shield thrummed with a soft power that seemed to radiate up through the metal, down his squishy arm, and into his center.
His core.
With a thought, he focused on the tenuous connection between shield and core, and abruptly a flickering dome of red light blossomed from the gem. He wanted to cackle. An energy shield! Like magic. Real magic. The light flickered after a matter of seconds and disappeared, leaving a sense of hollow exhaustion behind. So, there was definitely a catch to using this stuff, but still, what a find. Maybe a little greed—in moderation, of course—wasn’t such a bad thing. Logan slung the shield over his narrow shoulders, letting it rest on his back, and turned his attention to the colored tiles room.
This one turned out to be a relatively straightforward puzzle room, and not a terribly complex one at that. There were two doors—this time combat crimson and lucky gold—each on opposite sides of the enormous room. The walls were bare gray stone, though the floor was covered in hundreds of multicolored tiles in a riot of hues. Reds and orange here, blues and violets there. A spattering of greens and yellows. Overhead, an enormous crystalline prism hung from the high ceiling; it glowed with a gentle white light, projecting a wavering riddle into the air. Just a single sentence: The prism reveals the truth and lights the path to victory.
After scanning the floor for a few seconds, Logan quickly came to the solution. The prism was the key to solving the riddle. Since it didn’t actually shed any light, Logan knew that the answer was more likely metaphorical than literal. Thing was, Logan knew that a prism had a very specific purpose. His mind instantly flashed back to the cover of the classic Pink Floyd album, Dark Side of the Moon. Prisms broke up light, revealing the colors of the rainbow. The same colors as the tiles decorating the floor. He even remembered that silly little mnemonic device he’d learned in his freshman applied sciences class, ROYGBIV.
Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet.
Honestly, he didn’t remember a lot from high school—he’d never used calculus and the importance of the War of 1812 had never come up in real life—but he did know three things: the quadratic equation, that the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell, and that the colors of the rainbow are named Roy G. Biv. Sweet, sweet education for the win.
All he had to do was follow the correct colors of the rainbow and walk his way to either door. Easy.
He grinned like a maniac as he effortlessly blazed through the pattern... right up until he got past the G. That’s where things went sideways. It was right about the time Logan discovered that fungaloids were apparently colorblind—at least partially. Try as he might, he could not tell the difference between the last three colors. They all looked like slightly differing shades of blue. Normal blue. Dirty blue. Light blue.
Colors had never been his strong suit, even with human eyes. An old girlfriend had dragged him to a fabric store to pick out curtains. He’d not been helpful.
Logan squinted and took a chance. Light blue.
That was a hard no.
He narrowly avoided being skewered by deadly spears that launched from the walls—only his ridiculously short height saved him there. He stumbled forward because it was too late to turn back. A section of the wall opened to cough out a blast of fire. He dodged the flames, but felt like a marshmallow on his way to S’moresville, USA.
Another wrong tile took out the entire floor near the golden door. Maybe if Logan had been taller or more athletic, he could’ve leaped his way into the clear, but as a sponge on legs with the vertical jump of a wobbly toddler, he didn’t stand a chance.
So instead, he made it to the crimson door more or less in one piece.
Logan equipped his pilfered shield, slipping his arm through the straps, then pulled free the pitiful pitted dagger. It honestly looked like a short sword in his pudgy hand. Better that than nothing, Logan supposed. He took one last longing glance at the golden door across the room, then pressed his free hand against the bloodred door. He was dreading this part, but he’d known in his gut that he was going to have to do battle sooner or later. Looked like sooner it was. Steeling himself, Logan stepped through into the unknown, ready for the first fight of his fungaloid life.
Time to roll for initiative.
Chapter Eight
LOGAN STEPPED INTO a gloomy, rocky cavern filled with towering stalagmites and stalactites like the teeth of some monstrous creature. Flittering bugs, each the size of a quarter, buzzed lazily through the air, shedding witchy green light from glowing abdomens. The light bounced off the slick stone columns and rippled across shallow-looking pools of water dotting the ground in pockets. Logan instantly felt a rush of relief. If all he had to do was swat a few bugs, he’d be golden. Maybe this won’t be so bad after all, he thought.
As a landscaper, he was well familiar with bugs of every variety and had no problem serving up justice with the bottom of a metaphorical shoe.
That thought fled a heartbeat later as he caught the scrape of hooves on stone and movement blurred in the corner of his bulbous eye. Across the cavern, loitering in a pool of murk, was the biggest hog Logan had ever seen. Boar was probably a more accurate term, though even that wasn’t quite right since this thing had a thick gray hide, blazing red eyes, and curving tusks long enough and sharp enough to shish-kabob him straight through. The thing was the size of a small car with a mouth as big as a manhole cover. It snorted its piggy snout, and its eyes narrowed as it caught sight of the interloper.
Logan glanced down at his pitiful rusty dagger, then back up at the rabid, genetically altered Pumbaa out for blood. Of course it would be a pig—probably a truffle-sniffing boar hellbent on his destruction. No way did he stand a chance. Not in a straight-up fight.
The monster boar snorted again and pawed at the ground, lowering his head—clearly preparing to charge.
An idea slithered through Logan’s mind.
What if he didn’t have to fight this thing at all? What if he could somehow get past it instead? The doors didn’t require a key, so if he could just avoid being impaled, he might be able to escape to a more favorable room.
Logan stowed the knife and exchanged it for the rope and grappling hook. Thinking fast and working faster, he whirled the rope round-round-round and tossed it up, aiming at a crevice near one of the hanging stalactites. The grappling hook clanged loudly and dropped to the ground. The boar chose that moment to charge, flying toward Logan, hooves kicking up rooster tails of water in passing.
Logan wondered if mushrooms in France felt like this when the pigs came sniffing. He frantically spun the rope again, hurling it up, muttering a silent prayer under his breath. Clang! This time the hook caught, and when he applied pressure to the rope, it held. Grabbing it with grubby arms, he wormed his way up the rope, coiling it around one leg to make the work easier going. As a fungaloid, he didn’t have much upper body strength, but thankfully he also weighed next to nothing. Plus, climbing a rope was really more about technique than raw strength, and thanks to his time in the military, he had that technique in spades.