Chapter 4: I Find a Big Door

Steve and Alex agreed that we should get moving, and so naturally, Steve sat down.

“Wait...why is he sitting down,” I asked. Steve ignored me. Alex walked over to me to explain. Apparently Steve excelled in two areas of magic: Combat magic and teleportation magic. The former is quite useful on quests, mostly because there ended up being a lot of conflict. The latter, only helped in very special situations, so mostly he just used it on his weapons after throwing them at something. He was passingly acceptable in tracking spells, which he was attempting to do now, so he needed to be at rest and focused on casting the spell.

“Once its cast,” she said, “he can lead us to the point where it will disappear, like it did with the Minotaur. Until he casts it, however, the less distractions there are the better.” So naturally, I set out to be as little of a distraction as possible. I pulled out some mechanical stuff out of my pockets and fiddled. Wait...my pockets were empty. I looked down at them, and sure enough, they were empty. Then from one of my pockets Growlz poked his head out and handed me another piece of metal. My hands worked on their own. Then I realized what happened. I moved all the bits of metal I was using and looked into my pocket. I saw a darkness that the light could not fill, then Growlz floated by, gnawing contentedly on what looked like a metal bone.

Right, no more looking into the pockets or asking questions.

“So, what is in those pockets of yours anyways, do you remember?” Alex asked me. My hands went back to work. I wanted to respond, ‘I don’t know,’ but this was another one of those where my mouth worked without my heads involvement.

“Five or six roast beef sandwiches, same amount of PB&J sandwhiches, metal scraps, Sofy the collapsable electric guitar, normal and godly medical supplies, three water canteens, three changes of clothing, a collapsable tent, binoculars, 20 Arei, $300 American dollars in $20 bills, 2 money orders for $500 each, Jalepeneo & Oil snacks for Growlz, Growlz, and accumulated useless crap I picked up from over the years. Oh, and a letter for someone named Leo Valdez. Not sure where that came from.” Then my brain kicked in again, “and I don’t know how I know all that, so do not ask please.”  My fingers kept on working away.

Alex studied me some more. Steve raised his hand in, palm up, indicating he wanted something. Alex sighed, walked over, and took off her necklace. I hadn’t noticed the necklace before, and I as tried to focus on it I could tell why. My eyes wanted to slide away from it. I forced myself to focus on it, so much so my hand slowed down a little. The necklace was a simple golden chain that ended in a gem that I couldn’t identify that looked like a drop of blood. It disturbed me a little that I couldn’t identify it, but it made me angry. The more I looked at it the more I wanted to find something to fight. Then my finger hurt.

I looked down at what I was making. First thing I noticed, it had thorns, really sharp ones. The thorns were focused near where my hand held it. So I moved my hand. The thorns moved too. Weird. I looked at the top, and saw that it was, for lack of a better term, a golden rose. the thorns followed my hand as I tried to get a grip on it. As I looked at the bottom of the rose’s stem I realized my hands didn’t want to work on it anymore, it was finished. Odd, didn’t know I was working that quickly.

A light flashed from the direction of Steve and Alex. I looked up to see Steve getting woozily to his feet and Alex putting the necklace back on. I moved over to where they were.

“Alex,” she looked over to me. “I think this is for you.” She looked at me strangely, then at the odd rose, noticing how my hands kept on moving to get away from the thorns.

“You want to give me a golden rose that has thorns to prevent me from touching it?” She asked with a frown forming on her face. Steve looked up in surprise, then panic. He shook his head violently, and I must have been looking at him oddly because Alex turned her head to him. When she did so he stopped shaking his head and started looking in any direction but her. She turned back to me.

“I don’t think it will poke you, just, well... I don’t know how to explain it. I make things, not always sure what they do till it needs to be used. When I finish building something I know some things about it. Well, I am not sure of anything really, but that’s how it feels like.” She shook her head and reached for the rose. My hands stopped moving, and the thorns caught me. I dropped the rose, but Alex caught it. The thorns disappeared. She tried to hand it to Steve, just to test it. As Steve reached to grab it, the thorns reappeared where he was trying to grab it. She smiled.

“I like it.” She said. The rose purred. We all looked at it in confusion. I shrugged and pulled Growlz out and placed him on my shoulder.

“Why did it purr?” Steve and Alex asked. Then they looked away from the rose.

“What the hell is that?” they both asked again. Growlz tried to be smart and repeat me with a slight variation. I the hell am Growlz. He said. They didn’t appear to hear it.

“That’s Growlz. He was hiding in my pocket after we took out the Minotaur.” I replied. Steve just shook his head, closed his eyes, and when they reopened, they glowed red. “Golden roses, golden dragonlings, I give up. Lets get moving.” He looked around, and then jumped down onto the tracks, heading in the opposite direction from where the train was headed. Alex sighed, put the rose into the pocket of her jacket so that it could be seen, and followed him. I looked at Cowlz, and then followed the other two.

We walked for what seemed like hours, I honestly don’t know how long it was before Steve stopped. Looking around in confusion. He slung his backpack around, reached inside, and grabbed a sandwich. He stood around, munching on the sandwich and looked around.

“What is it?” Alex asked. She had also taken out a sandwich and was munching on it. I decided to follow their example and brought out a roast beef sandwich and started munching.

“The trail,” he said, “it disappears right here. It shouldn’t. I mean, even if the thief teleported away or something, there would be a sign. It looks like he just walked away somewhere.”

I munched along and decided to take a look around. Now, with all the other stuff that had happened so far since I got up on that subway bench, I shouldn’t be that surprised at all the weird stuff that was happening to, or around, me. But I was.

Looking around I could, I don’t want to call it see exactly, because I do not have x-ray vision - that would be awesome - but I could tell that there was alot of metal around us. I did not mean the train rails, which were made of some sort of copper or bronze by the way, but in the walls. The biggest concentration of metal was about twenty feet to our left, behind what appeared to be a rather solid wall. Since Steve was looking around in confusion and Alex was looking at him like she wanted to break out her bat and practice on his head, I walked over to the wall.

Then I walked through the wall. What I saw was amazing. Bronze torches set into bronze walls in a tunnel that was, you guessed it, twenty feet long. The walls had murals of people and events that I didn’t recognize, no surprise there I don’t have much of a memory at the moment. But I had a feeling that I should recognize some of them. Then I heard Alex calling out for me. I stepped out of the wall, freaking her out.

Steve grunted, then walked past me through the wall. Alex and I followed him. Steve was examining one of the murals.

“I don’t recognize most of these murals. That one there is Zeus sending someone to build this place - but I don’t recognize what is building it. Over there, its not thirteen Gods, but fourteen. The last one, I don’t recognize either.” Steve was saying as we walked in.

“I don’t recognize anything either,” I said helpfully. Steve looked at me in annoyance, but before he said anything Alex walked past him and started down the hall. We followed.

After a few minutes we reached the end of the bronze hall, Steve stopping at every few murals, examining them, then jogging to catch up to us. At first glance, the end of the hall was just that, the end. There didn’t appear to be a doorway. At first glance. My eyes, once I let them loose focus on the wall itself, showed me that it was a very complicated door. We needed to, it appeared, move parts of the mural into correct positions.

“Someone teleported from here,” Steve said. “But not far. Where did they go?” He was staring at a space just a few feet in front of the wall.

“Behind the door,” I said. It seemed obvious that this was a door, even without my metal vision thing.

“What door?” Alex asked, looking at me. In response I walked up, looked at the wall again, and got to work. I moved some of the murals around, to shocked and offended noises from Steve. Zeus moving to the top of the mountain, weird looking critters with eight limbs to the bottom, winged thingies also the bottom.

“Harpies fly dude, they wouldn’t be down there,” Steve snickered, he must have been thinking I was an idiot or something. I actually didn’t know that, and could have cared less. According to the mechanism behind the mural, that is where the harpies went. I moved the last piece into place, and we heard a rumbling. Steve set his hands on fire again and started to look around. I just stood there, watching the wall. Down the middle of the mural a line appeared, and then the doors pulled sideways into the walls, revealing a giant cavern behind it with two tunnels to the right and left of a big secretaries desk. By big, I mean big, and by secretary, I mean secretary. The big name plate on it said so.

“Ooooooh, more visitors. We don’t get too many down here,” a voice dripping with false sweetness said. “Welcome, dearies, to the home of the lost, the rejected, and the needless artifacts of the Gods. Welcome, to the Vault of the Gods.” Chapter 5