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StLQ Chapter 11 - Fun
🕑 Added 2025-08-10 11:17:19 +0000 UTCThe ghoul froze in place. The eyes behind the layers of makeup opened wide, faced with Luna’s deadly magic.
“Luna, no!” I said, lifting my hand over her spell.
Luna was the surprised one this time. The concentration of mana calmed down, dissipating harmlessly to the air around us. A less skilled mage could have panicked, releasing the spell anyway. Luna controlled it perfectly.
“It’s a play, Luna, no magic allowed…” I said. How could I express this without making her feel like a total idiot.
“A play?” Luna asked, confused. “What’s that, then?” She pointed at the ghoul, who looked like he was on the verge of pissing himself.
“It’s me!” said a voice I recognized. “Higu! From your class! Gods, you could have killed me.”
Luna leaned back, realizing what she’d almost done. She looked at me, then at Higu and said, “But you're the one who attacked us?”
“Yes, we’re in a haunted house!” Higu argued. “Attacking and scaring people is my job!”
“And we can’t fight back?” Luna asked.
“I think we were supposed to run,” I said. “The rules say no magic, and no fighting. Our job is to survive the attacks, get scared, have some fun.”
Luna looked thoughtful for a second. “Oh. Okay. Sorry…”
I wore a funny grin. “Admittedly, Higu could have done a better job scaring us. What was up with that scream?”
“I practiced that a lot,” Higu said. “And it still hurts my throat.”
He tapped his hand on the sawblade, running his fingers across the rusted blades. He turned his back to us and walked a few steps away.
Then he turned around and charged us like mad, screaming again.
“Oh fuck, run!” I said, running to the door before the next room.
Luna followed me, running rather calmly. We slammed the door shut, listening to Higu pounding and screeching at us like some monster.
“So we’re supposed to get scared?” Luna asked again.
“The house is trying to scare us, and we’re supposed to get out without anything wet or dirty on our clothes.” After a pause, I added, “And preferably, we’ll do that without blasting anyone dead with magic.”
“Okay,” Luna said. “I think I understand now.”
I nodded, then headed deeper into the haunted house.
The next scares consisted of more screeching noises, kids charging at us, a body bag on a swing hitting us from a tree, a maths problem written in glowing light at the door to the next room, creaky stairs, flashes of light.
Luna, despite promising no magic, kept her night vision active. She seemed to sense every scare coming before they hit. Each time, she let out a little yelp, clearly intentional, as if to show that she was very much scared.
Only one scare managed to get an actual flinch out of her: a loud crack from the building itself, as if the roof was about to collapse. That was followed by another chase, this time from three kids in tribal outfits. Luna ran from them at full speed for a few seconds, until she must have remembered it was all fake and she calmed down again.
After around ten minutes of escaping from all sorts of fun killers, the next door led us back to the lounge, where Marcus was busy selling his fabled two percent alcohol lemonade to two juniors.
“Alright, we survived,” I said, catching my breath. “How did you like it?”
“It was… interesting,” Luna said. “It would have been more useful if there were actual monsters.”
“I don’t think Bob is allowed to hire actual monsters,” I said. “He’ll be pressed with lawsuits if children actually get eaten alive in a haunted house.”
Luna looked thoughtful. “I suppose that’s true…”
She didn’t look impressed. I began to worry. The haunted house had definitely been the wrong place to take Luna to.
The two kids at the counter were dared into the haunted house with their lemonades in hand. They reluctantly agreed, and the counter was freed. “Hey, Bob, is the escape room still open?” I asked.
“Sure is,” Marcus said. “That one is not free, though.”
I placed my ride ticket on the table. “This one is for Luna, and I’ll pay for myself. Three marks right?” I placed the coins on the table. “What was the time limit again?”
“Stay there for more than an hour, and I’ll drag you out,” Marcus said. “And since it’s your second time, no discounts for completing it fast.”
“Sure, that works,” I said. I grinned at Luna. “This one is an actual good ride. Bob actually puts effort into the paid ones.”
“What, are you saying my haunted house was bad?”
“It was… mildly acceptable.”
“Well, fuck you, then, I’m changing the codes for the escape room,” Marcus said, though he appeared to be smiling. “Blindfolds on, you two. I’m going to kidnap you now.”
Luna cast an apprehensive look at me. I nodded. Marcus put the blindfold on me first, then Luna.
“Alright, you two idiots, come with me,” he said, pulling our blindfolded asses into a room next door. “Sit right there, and don’t even think of getting up.”
I was placed down into a chair. Marcus then wrapped ropes around me, locking me to the chair. He did the same to Luna. This time, she didn’t use any spells to blast him into orbit.
With both of us locked up, Marcus entertained us with his brilliant evil laugh. “Well, then. Two mages fresh out of the academy. A lovely catch. You two will stay in this basement as my slaves. I’ll make sure to have loads of fun with you for the remainder of your short lifespans. Just give me sixty minutes, and I’ll be back for some fun activities. See you!”
Marcus closed the door aggressively, leaving us with blindfolds, tied up on the chairs.
“Kai?” Luna asked, voice hesitant. “Did you, um, get us kidnapped?”
“I did indeed,” I said. “It looks like we have sixty minutes to escape until Marcus comes back.”
Luna was silent for five seconds before asking, “Is this another play?”
“Yes,” I said. “But this is a good one. And it’s actually difficult. Joshua and I took over fifty minutes to complete it. Higu and Isaac did it in just under forty. I believe the fastest time is around twenty-seven minutes, although I think that bunch cheated.”
“Our goal is to escape?” Luna asked.
“Yep,” I said. “Do you know how to get these ropes off?”
I twisted my wrist a little bit to pull on the ropes. Marcus hadn’t actually tied a proper knot, and he hadn’t tightened the simple knot that he had tied. Even the most arthritis-stricken wrist could pull the knot loose without much of an issue. If this part was any more difficult, Marcus would probably receive complaints from parents whose kids were stuck on a chair with blindfolds on for an hour.
With my wrists freed, I unwrapped the ropes around my chest and took off my blindfolds. I opened my eyes around the same time as Luna.
We found ourselves in a candle-lit room with old wooden floorboards, shelves filled with odd tools. As always, Marcus put a lot of effort into his attractions. The wooden floorboards were installed on top of the fancier floor underneath just to recreate the atmosphere of a basement. The escape room followed the theme of actually escaping a kidnapper’s basement.
“Did we do it?” Luna asked. She glanced around herself. There were two doors in the room. A larger door, and a smaller door at the end.
“Time stops when we get out of this room,” I said.
“I see,” Luna said. The first thing she did was test the handles of each door. The larger door was locked. The smaller door led us into a dark closet with nothing inside.
Then Luna examined everything around us. There was a locked chest, a birdcage with a case inside, a random chess board on the shelf, an old safe, and a bookshelf.
“Maybe we can find a wire to pick the lock,” she said.
Luna began by checking the shelves for tools. I stayed silent. I had already completed the same room in my previous life. It had been a long time ago, but some of the solutions were already coming back to me just from seeing the props.
There were no crowbars or convenient wires to use for picking locks. The objects were a lot more random, like a single chess piece, a broken key, and some tape. The closest thing was a weird device that I later learned was a thumbscrew used for torture. Luna eyed it oddly, but placed it back.
I was afraid that she’d say something along the lines of, “This is stupid,” or “Did you really think I’d enjoy something like this?”
But she actually looked focused. She checked around the room for clues, even ducking under tables to see if anything was hidden. I checked everything after her to pretend to be useful without ruining the puzzles.
Eventually, Luna found something taped to the back of the chest. “A nut?” she asked, inspecting the walnut shell. She tapped it. “It feels hollow.”
She tried to pry it open with her hands. It didn’t budge.
I watched her for a bit, wondering if I should give some sort of tip, until mana welled up in Luna’s hands, and she blasted the nut open, revealing a note inside.
I let out an awkward laugh. “Uh, I think we were supposed to use the thumbscrew. But that works?”
“They didn’t say magic isn’t allowed,” Luna said. “And I didn’t kill anyone.”
Right, I thought. “What does it say?”
“It says… King to E2?” She glanced at the chess board. “How is that supposed to help?”
“Maybe it’s a magical magnetic chess board,” I said. That didn’t count as too much of a hint, did it?
Luna wore an expression I hadn’t seen before. She actually looked serious. A lot more serious than in the haunted house, at least. She noted that the only chess piece they had available was a pawn, so they couldn’t fulfill the instructions on the note. She continued searching.
“If the chess board is magnetic…” she eventually said. “Maybe I can manipulate it with magic?”
“I’d be impressed if you could,” I said. “It’ll probably just break.”
Luna looked determined. She picked up the board and held out her finger over the E2 square. Mana surged into her finger, then through, into the chess board.
A click sounded from inside the birdcage. Luna glanced her head toward the direction. The case in the cage had opened.
And there goes a third of the puzzles.
I saw what I thought was a vague, a very slight smile, on Luna’s lips. She moved to the cage and tried to see into the case through the slight crack. “The cage is still closed.”
“Looks like we need another key.”
Luna was already on the move. I watched as she moved to search for the next clue. She didn’t speak her thoughts out loud, but she seemed to be enjoying herself. Or at the very least, she was invested in solving whatever puzzles there were.
I kept myself busy by solving the now-useless part of the puzzle: finding the king piece for the chess board, which I knew was hidden inside one of the books on the shelf with a clue written on the bottom of one of our chairs. I solved it slowly, mostly keeping my eyes on Luna.
Her way of solving puzzles bordered on cheating. She tried to use magic to forcefully open the lock of the birdcage, until I told her that we’d be disqualified for cheating and breaking stuff. She looked like she wanted to argue but eventually agreed to solve the puzzle without breaking stuff.
So she decided to blast the bird cage with non-destructive wind magic.
Wind magic itself usually took years to learn. Luna was proficient enough at it to concentrate the force of wind into a single spot. Most experienced mages couldn’t do that, me included. She focused the spell on the case inside the cage. This flipped the case upside down. Something metallic fell from within, clinking against the birdcage. It was the blade section of a snapped key. Luna pushed at the key with wind magic, sliding it past the bars of the cage.
And that’s two thirds of the puzzles skipped… I thought, wondering if I should have stopped her. I didn’t. Luna seemed to be having fun. So I gave her a smile and said, “Nice.”
Luna went to the other half of the key on the shelf right away. She taped the two pieces together. “This is too small for the doors,” she said. “The chest?”
She slid the key into the chest’s keyhole and twisted. After battling with the old lock for a bit, the chest opened. The hinges squealed, showing us a chest full of colorful orbs.
Right away, Luna began pulling the orbs out to see if anything useful was at the bottom. Amongst the orbs were two items. A note, and an empty beer bottle. Luna frowned at the bottle, as if it was some piece of witchcraft. She pushed it aside and opened the note.
She read, “Reminder to self. If the victims cry, read the funny princess book.”
Luna’s eyes went to the bookshelves right away. “Princess book?”
Most of the books on the shelf were tomes with brown covers. None particularly stood out by appearance. Only when reading the titles did anything stand out. Luna started skimming through the titles.
After about a minute, she found a book called, “Fun magical adventures in Fantasia: how to become rich - written by Bob.”
The first few pages of the thick tome had a short story about princesses handwritten into the pages. I remembered reading it when Joshua and I did the test. We didn’t find any clues, but we did laugh at the opening sentence, which was, “So it turns out the Princess didn’t like the brick weed I smuggled into her city, which probably wasn’t a great sign for my business, but fuck it, she had already paid me.”
Luna skimmed through the story, expression fully serious. The story was only a page and a half long, after which the book had hundreds of empty pages. Luna began skimming through the empty pages.
Around halfway through, a short section read with a small font, “Three blue, one red, five green. The darkness likes them bottled.”
Luna required no hints to move straight to the orbs and the beer bottle. She quickly found that the bottleneck was the perfect size to slide orbs into. She slid the colors in the right order.
Then she placed the bottle into the dark closet, closing the door.
A grinding sound came from inside. Luna waited patiently, listening, until a sizzle came from inside. The sounds stopped, and she opened the door.
The bottle was gone. In its place was a key.
“I always wondered how that trick worked,” I said. “Some kind of spell?”
Luna shrugged. “Maybe there’s a ghost inside.”
I couldn’t have guessed whether she was being serious or making fun of me. She had, however, completed the escape room. Luna slid the key into the door leading outside. “Isn’t our kidnapper waiting here?” she asked.
“He’s probably busy selling lemonade,” I said. “Let’s see what the time was.”
We exited the room, back into the lounge. “Done!” I said.
Marcus paused his conversation with the group of three sophomores from a different class at the counter. He went over to his clock and said, “Twenty-one minutes, and maybe some seconds, not sure.”
“Twenty-one?” one of the kids asked. “Isn’t that a record?”
“The returnee record is three minutes,” Marcus said. “You two are off the record by quite a few seconds.”
“Oh, nevermind, they’re returnees,” the kid said.
“Luna figured out the puzzles,” I said. “I didn’t need to give tips.”
The three studied Luna with furrowed brows. Even outside our class, Luna had a reputation for being a little weird. People had asked her out from many different classes as a challenge, even seniors. Luna just shrugged and looked away from the prying gazes, as she always did.
I always thought Luna’s shrug was mysterious, cool even, as if she was dismissing those below her. After spending a few days with her, however… I figured she was probably just awkward.
The three sophomores headed into the haunted house. With them gone, Marcus grinned at Luna and I. “How’d you like it, Miss Genius? The storyline, I mean.”
“Your book was…” Luna said. “Interesting?”
Marcus laughed. “That one is an absolute masterpiece. I’m thinking of selling it to a publisher. It’s based on a true story, by the way.”
“Good luck,” Luna said. “Maybe it will sell?”
Marcus shook his head with a funny grin. “I’ll give you a discount on my brilliant lemonade for those smart words. Two marks for two glasses.”
“I… don’t have money,” Luna said.
“Do you want one?” I asked.
Luna looked at the lemonade container. She definitely looked like she wanted one, but she probably wouldn’t dare ask.
I placed two coins on the counter. “Two lemonades.”
“Smart man,” Marcus said. He spun the lemonade cup on his finger before gripping them, opening the faucet with precise movements. Lemonade poured in, and he slid the cups on the counter. “Hold still,” he said and picked up straws. He went into stance, as if throwing darts, and tossed the straws.
The first straw landed cleanly in my cup. He missed the second throw, hitting Luna’s uniform. “Shit,” he said before throwing another. This one landed in the cup. “Kai, pick it up, please.”
I sighed, but knelt down to pick up the fallen straw. Marcus gave me an apologetic smile and said, “Don’t get too drunk.”
Lemonade in hand, I headed to the seats at the back of the room. Luna held her cup carefully, following me. The seat was more like a section of rock jutting out from the wall, conveniently sized for sitting with the wall itself as a back rest. I sat underneath one of the ambient lights. Luna sat to my sides in the darker section.
For a while, Luna watched her cup, lost in thought. Something was definitely running in her head. I knew that from her expression. Guessing what those thoughts were felt impossible. I couldn’t call her look bored or displeased. Perhaps longing was the word. She almost looked like something was troubling her.
I tasted mine. “It definitely has too much lemon. I don’t taste any alcohol, though.”
Luna took a sip, savoring it for another short while. Then she said, “You never planned on studying today.”
“I’m a firm believer in breaks,” I said. “Studying is a great way to grow as a person. But if you only study, you miss the time of rest required for growth to happen. Studying turns into a means of survival.”
Luna sipped her lemonade, not looking in my direction.
“Did you have fun today?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” Luna said. “I might have?”
I checked the clock. We still had just over an hour remaining before Luna’s mom would start having problems, five of which we’d need to spend walking back home. “I’m sorry for tricking you, and thanks for spending one of your free days,” I said. “I won’t try to argue whether it was worth it or not, but I’m happy you came.”
“It wasn’t a total waste,” Luna said. “I guess…”
“I did also have something more serious I wanted to talk about…” I said. My heart started to race a little. Now was probably the time. “Luna, I need to talk to you about liches.”
