Skip Dialogue (Part 2)

"She's waking up! How are you feeling?"

As I focused my vision on Dan's gentle smile right beside me, the smell of something cooking traveled to my nostrils.

"Where is Grace?" I asked faintly, as she raised her cinnamon-colored arm from a distance.

"Right here!"

"You're tougher than you look, Taylor," Charlie said, approaching me to hand me a steaming bowl. "Eat this. It'll help you recover your strength."

I looked at its contents. It was soup and smelled of chicken and tomatoes.

"This looks great! Um, by the way, where are we, guys?"

"We're still in the mansion, in the kitchen to be more precise," Dan said after sipping from a mug. "Charles got rid of the Cook, and Steve and I fought a pair of creepy twin maids." He shivered. "They could turn their heads 360 degrees around! What about you? What did you encounter?"

I looked at the place I was resting, someone had prepared for me an improvised bed with a bunch of flour sacks and a blanket. "Some sort of librarian? I'm not sure since I interrupted his presentation."

"Hey, that's rude."

"Oh! And we also stumbled upon something else. Someone huge, carrying chains."

"That's the Housekeeper," Charlie said from his place near a stove. "We're hiding from him."

"I see. What happened after I lost consciousness? How much time have I been out?"

"You got severely poisoned, and you were out for a whole night," Dan said, pointing at Grace. "You can thank our mage for her quick thinking. She saved you."

I glanced at her, who put her bowl aside to puff out her chest. "I concocted an antidote! Am I great, or what?"

"An antidote?" I asked, frowning. "But how…?"

"Believe me, it wasn't easy! I tried to suck out the venom, but it was worthless, so I rushed to the library's PC to search for the right book, and ta-dah!" She materialized it out of her inventory. "Hear this title, 'The Many Deadly Creatures of the Eurola Region and how to fight them'! But I can't take all the credit. After messaging the boys, they rushed to the library and Steve carried you all the way here, while Charles helped me get the antidote's ingredients."

"Everything was here, inside the mansion," Charlie said while bringing me a cup of coffee. "I suppose that whoever designed this challenge wanted players to survive."

"But only as a team," I whispered while watching my soup. "Did you prepare this?"

Charles grimaced. "Steve did. He's like the feet of this team, carrying us all."

I glanced at him, too concentrated on his food to gaze at me.

"Thanks, Steve, for helping me," I said aloud. "The soup is quite tasty too."

"It's nothing," he replied without looking in my direction.

It was painful to see him still act like that.

"Okay, guys, now that Taylor is awake, listen up! We have defeated the three stationary bosses, but since we spent the night here…"

"Yesterday you mentioned something about a boss respawning," Grace interrupted.

"Yes. When I mentioned it, it was nothing more than a theory, but I corroborated it yesterday. On my first visit here, my team managed to kill the Cook, but he was very much alive when I arrived here again. So I'm pretty sure that the three already defeated bosses will respawn in a matter of hours if we waste more time." Charlie crossed eyes with every one of us. "We must not lose our progress."

I checked the time on my User Interface. 7:08 am.

"I'm sorry, Charlie," I said in a tiny voice. "You told us to defeat the boss before nighttime…"

"We were on a tight schedule anyway," he said, giving me a fatherly gaze. "Don't worry about it. The most important fact is that all of us have survived. I genuinely believe we can do this."

I felt terrible for compromising the quest, but I felt even worse because no one seemed to blame me, not even Steve. I wanted to be of help, but what could I do? I was pretty much useless against the damn librarian.

"What's our next target, then?" Steve asked softly.

"As you have seen, the Housekeeper roams the entire mansion, but won't get inside the other bosses' rooms. We could ignore him, but in the worst-case scenario, he could attack us while fighting the butler."

"I got a new skill!" I rushed to say, beaming. "I can detect enemies' presence through walls." I paused, looking expectantly at everyone. "Come on, guys. This is the time when one of you comes up with a plan."

While everyone remained silent, Dan slowly smirked at me. "That certainly gives me some ideas."