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Dark Lord Rob's DarkForce
The Key, The Hole, The Whole DealNathan was pointing the flashlight at a spot on the ceiling down the tunnel. The light glinted on a glinting patch of what appeared to be a shiny sort of metal on the tunnel roof - an odd thing in an odd place in an even odder place. "What is it?" I asked, as if he might know. "Not sure," he replied. "But let me try something..." "Something" turned out to be basically giving me a big ol' shove out of the way, which I responded to with an articulate "Hey!" But then, as always, there was madness to Nathan's methods, and my jaw dropped when I saw what happened next. "It's like a laser beam!" I exclaimed. And it was. I mentioned that the light streaming through the keyhole had seemed laser-like as it streamed through the dust in the tunnel. But now that Nathan had jostled me out of the way I was able to see just exactly how much like a laser it actually was; and the answer was "quite a damn bit". The keyhole focused the light generated by the soul jars and aimed it directly at a spot on the tunnel's ceiling (which it was able to do owing to the slope of the tunnel). This spot harbored reflective sort of metal piece, which had carvings on it that I couldn't quite make out from that distance. Hitting that metal, it was projected further down the tunnel, where it seemed to meet up with another reflective metal piece, which kicked it still further down the tunnel, whereupon we lost sight of it. "Notice anything else?" Nathan said. I grunted in the negative, but then it dawned on me; the noise from down the tunnel seemed to have stopped. As if - "As if the light stopped whatever was down the tunnel in its tracks," Nathan said, quietly. "That's what you were thinking, isn't it?" "Well..." Nathan chuckled. "Well, I suppose it could have been a goblin army on the march, stopped by the sudden appearance of the enchanted beam. But more likely it was a natural phenomenon, once which coincidentally ceased at the same time the light beam hit the reflective piece." I gave him a skeptical squint. "Isn't there some sort of saying to the effect that the simplest explanation is usually the correct one?" "Yeah. That's called 'Occam's Razor'." "I don't care if it's Occam's friggin' Barbasol shave cream, the bottom line is 'Goblin Army equals simple solution'; 'Nathan's mysterious natural phenomenon with coincidence dressing equals not very damned simple at all'!" "Whatever," Nathan retorted. "Goblin army or collapsing tunnel, it's still a good idea that we get the heck out of here." I kind of wish I'd said, at the time, something like "We need to get out of here in the worst way," 'cause that's exactly what happened next. |