The Eerie Room

Still, he would hopefully be able to find some weapons left behind by knights who had failed on this quest before him and minions of the Dragon that had been killed by some of the more antisocial things living in these caves. The carriage he'd been using had clearly been built for humans, so hopefully he'd be able to find some clothes near here too. He was certainly not going to face his hated enemy naked. And now he had another weapon in his arsenal. The transformation potion and the water flask, which seemed to be incapable of melting, had both refilled. So he could transform into a lava man at will.

This could turn out to be very useful. The lava men were said to be very powerful--he had heard that according to some philosophers, they were the first beings to emerge in the universe, born in the primordial storm of fire and ice at the beginning of the world. Unlike their bretheren the muspel, the lava men were no more or less malevolent than humans were, but there was little contact between them. Humans could not survive where lava men lived and vice versa. They could only meet in caves which were hazardous to both. But if Fred could visit the land of the lava men, perhaps he could seek their aid. Of course, he couldn't survive as a lava man for too long without finding another one, for he had no idea what lava men ate.

Before he did anything else, though, he needed to find food to replace the provisions which he'd burned away. Perhaps there was something under the trapdoor? Fred yanked the trapdoor open and ducked into the passage beneath, leaving behind the potion and the water bottle inside one of the carriages.

The trapdoor lead to a tight crawlway which seemed impossibly hard to squeeze through. Fred wasn't too happy about having to go through it naked, but there was a faint light not far off, so it wouldn't be too far. Fred gritted his teeth and prepared for the inevitable pain in certain parts of his anatomy. But as began to crawl, he felt a faint rumbling beneath him. The rock in this passage was not stable. As Fred reflexively jerked back, the rock crumbled beneath his feet and he was sent plunging downward.

To his surprise, Fred felt something slowing his movements. He drifted down like a leaf. When he was on his faint, he found himself in a large room where everything seemed to be made out of reflective black stone. Everything in it was coated with dust, and it clearly had not been used in years, perhaps centuries. The Dragon had not always lived in these caves. Perhaps this room came from an age before he had.

The room was lined with bookshelves, and filled with an odd, musty smell. As the few books he had seen were made of parchment, Fred could not have known that this was the smell of old paper. At its corners Fred could vaguely glimpse machines made out of a silvery metal, which made an eerie whirring sound. What they did he had no way of knowing. The room was lit by a bright column of bluish light in its center. And inside that column of light, suspended in midair, was

1. A beautiful woman, of course. But not a naked one. She was wearing a strange, colorful skintight outfit.
2. A book with odd writing in it. A faint mist seemed to rise from its pages.
3. A female lava man, encased in a block of ice. Even though he was in human form, Fred found her attractive.

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