[Adelie]

It's not like it wasted anything. A little extra effort in finding a scroll for the spell, a little time spent finding space in one of her many spellbooks and categorizing it, a little overhead for when she was looking for a specific spell.

But one of the benefits of the particular skill tree she'd chosen was the ability to cast anything, as long as she had the spell written down. Sure, she could only cast it at level one with the bare minimum of spell effects, but having that kind of versatility, that kind of access to whatever she possibly needed – that was definitely something.

Not something that often paid off, but it was worth the effort for moments like this.

[Adelie]

One of the worst things about playing a game is there's no drama.

Not in the theatrical sense – although there were rumors, a little while back, that the game might receive an anime adaptation – or in the player-made conflict sense – which it certainly had more than enough of – but in the sense of accomplishment.

It's like how characters in martial arts series will shout out the name of their final moves, or how dramatic music will chime in at the most opportune moments. There's just something fundamentally exciting about a moment like that, no matter how cheesy it feels.

There's nothing exciting about just pressing a button.

[Adelie]

But hey, that's how it goes. She hits the button unceremoniously, her character performs some action that she can't see in this darkness, and – fiat lux.

Meager light, flickering like a candle in a gale, emanates from her character's hand; in its fragile beam, she can make out the dim outlines of stone columns and carved reliefs. Familiar outlines, too. There's the sharp edges of a looming stone tiger statue on her left, as she remembers it; there's the glitter of light off a particularly shiny patch of stone.

So it is as she expected, she supposes. It's all still here – just obscured in darkness.

[Adelie]

'So, did you try something?' Aster asks. 'Please report back before we report you to the missing persons department.'

Chi startles a little at this – maybe it's just the darkness of her screen combined with the darkness of her own room, maybe it's just how sleepy she is, but she's almost almost forgotten that she was doing all of this for a purpose. 'Yeah,' she says. 'So everything's the same so far – it's just dark.'

'Dark?' Nebula asks.

'Come through and see for yourself,' she responds. 'Also – do any of you have a better light spell? Mine's level one and it's kind of hard to see anything.'

[Adelie]

'Not really,' Aster says. 'This character's a little short on skill points, and I haven't had the time to work on her.'

'Yeah, that's fine,' Chi says – it's not like she really expected anyone to have put valuable skill points into a generally useless spell like creating a light source. 'Or do any of you have a lantern in your inventory?'

'I might have one,' Ven says. 'Can't remember – I'll check once I get out of this loading screen.'

'Is it taking forever for you guys, too?' Chi asks. 'It did for me, which was pretty weird. Thought I'd crashed or something.'

'Maybe the real villain of this event is lag.'

[Adelie]

'Honestly,' she says. 'I would fight that boss to the death.'

'To your death, probably,' Nebula says. 'It'll be a slow, painful one, too - you'll see your inevitable death coming for hours, if not days, but you won't be able to do anything about it.'

'That's so morbid,' Ven says. She's the first of them to actually appear on the scene - Chi sees a faint sparkle where her character materializes into existence, fading into darkness. 'Okay, let me see if I can find that lantern. I'm pretty sure it's in here somewhere.'

[Adelie]

It takes a few moments and a little hmming from Ven's end as she digs through whatever distant recesses of her inventory she'd been carrying around indefinitely and completely forgotten about. 'I don't know how my character does it,' she says, finally brandishing a staff with a fish-shaped paper lantern on the end, lit with warm orange light. 'She's probably carrying around a few hundred pounds of junk, and I don't think she even has pockets.'

'Magic, I guess,' Chi says, by way of explanation. Ven's lantern isn't particularly more useful than the little ball of light she's been porting around - but at the very least, it's not flickering terribly and it does provide more than a little bit of illumination.

[Adelie]

And there they were - after so much time spent telling stories and generally not-getting-things done, they'd finally made it back on track. At this point, honestly, she's seriously regretting the assumption she'd made that they could possibly get this done in a reasonable timeframe and that she could get even a meager amount of sleep before she had to wake up tomorrow.

After all, they'd only just made it to the boss room - and considering something definitely seems different about the run, there's no telling how long this fight would take.

Even with strategy and planning, she'd estimated this might be an hour-long fight to begin with. Hopefully, for her sleep schedule's sake, nothing would go wrong.

[Adelie]

'Okay, okay,' she says. 'Everyone ready?'

Not that she's actually going to wait for anyone to say they're ready or not ready, at this point. If you've come all this way, after waiting this long - you'd better be ready. Instead, she fishes through her inventory again, looking for the three different reagent items that she'd prepared previously for the actual boss-summoning ritual. If they hadn't had them, they could've gotten them in this room through another miniquest and a little NPC murder - but why bother with that when you could get them ready ahead of time?

[Adelie]

A crimson feather from a winged snake. That one slots neatly into the top of the stone triangle; a little splash of color, lit in warm light, against the dark recesses of granite and marble.

A nugget of polished quartz. She's always wondered if it's a scripted interaction that she has to struggle a little, try a few times before it actually sits in the bottom-left corner of the stone triangle, reflecting specks of light in intricate rainbow patterns, prism-like.

A vial of blood from an eldritch reaver. Uncorking the glass vial, she tips it over, letting thin black liquid - so very un-bloodlike - pour out into the bottom-right corner of the stone triangle. This step always has to be done last; as the blood comes it, it fills out the grooves along the summoning circle.

[Adelie]

As one end of the stream of liquid meets the other and the circle - or rather, summoning triangle - is completed, there's a noticeable prismatic glow from the middle of the altar.

'Stand back,' she says, more out of instinct than anything else; everyone's done this run enough times that they know the dragon will spawn right in the middle of the altar and that if you happen to be in the same location as where it's supposed to spawn, you'll clip out and take significant damage before being teleported to a safer location. 'No idea what to expect, if anything's different because of this event.'

[Adelie]

So far, so good.

The dragon spawns as expected, appearing in a veil of colorful light - it doesn't aggro onto anyone, just yet, but rather just sits there, halfway like a imperious cat, halfway like a coiled snake, waiting to strike. 'Anything look different so far?' she asks.

'Nothing much,' Ven responds. 'I don't know if we'll have trouble because of the low light, though.'

'Yeah, that's true,' Chi says, looking through her inventory and discovering absolutely nothing useful. 'Are you sure none of you have another lantern? Might come in really useful, since right now it's just Ven and I with a light source.'

[Adelie]

'No lantern here,' Nebula says. 'But you two are mostly going to stay in the same location, right? Since you're ranged and all? So we should be able to work around that.'

'Yeah, probably,' Chi says, checking her inventory once again to see if she has anything she can lend out. 'But neither of us have great light sources, and I just don't want to be caught unprepared if something happens.'

'Makes sense,' Nebula agrees.

'I've got something, I guess?' Aster offers, presenting a wrought-iron lantern, reminiscent of something you might see on a streetlight, but much, much smaller. 'Totally forgot I had this.'

[Adelie]

'That'll do,' Chi says, making a quick once-over of the lantern. It's not much of a light source, either, but it's actually the best and most steady of what they've got so far. 'So that settles it - we'll just have the three of us stand in different corners, and hopefully our dear tank will be able to see enough to dodge the attacks.'

'That's a lot of responsibility you're putting on me,' Nebula cautions. 'I'd like to remind you that I hate playing tank and I'm utterly god-awful at it, so please don't blame me if we end up wiping.'

'Honestly,' Chi says. 'I kind of hope we do, so I'll have an excuse to go sleep.'

[Adelie]

'Then if we wipe, I'm blaming it all on you,' Nebula says. 'Who needs sleep, anyways? Next thing you know, you're going to be saying you can't play because you're busy eating or doing work or something like that.'

In response, Chi just yawns, loudly. 'Sure. I'll deal with it in the morning.' She'd say something more - but she realizes that they're coming awfully close to once again spending all their time talking about nothing in particular instead of actually completing the task at hand, and that's only prolonging the estimated time until she can crawl her way into the welcoming recesses of her bedsheets. 'Start?'