Honesty: The Next Fallen Child

Patience Part 2

Lilly walked into the room to find six buttons on the floor and a piece of yellow chalk under a sign. Curious, Lilly walked up to the sign. It read 'Only the fearless may proceed. Brave one, foolish ones, neither walk the middle road'

"What does that mean?" Lilly looked from the sign back down to the buttons on the floor, where she noticed a worn patch down the middle over two of the buttons with two on either side of the path.

"Neither walk the middle road" Lilly said, looking at the buttons again and stepping in a serpentine pattern over the buttons, not pressing the ones on the worn middle path. The door next to the sign opened with a creak, making Lilly jump. With a little hesitation, Lilly entered the next room.

The next room was a long hallway with multiple levers. A sign like the one in the room before was hung off the path in the corner. Five words were on it, and Lilly read it before she stepped off the well worn trail. 'Stay on the Path'. Lilly quickly withdrew her shoe from the edge of the trail.

Looking ahead, Lilly saw spikes as tall as her shins blocking the entrance to the next room. Looking to the left of the spikes though, Lilly saw some levers and well-worn paths up to two of the three levers. Walking up to those levers, she flipped them with little effort and the spikes retracted into the ground, allowing Lilly to enter the next room.

A winding path snaked though the next room, leading to a small hallway with a sign on it, then more of the shin high spikes, this time a whole row of them. Walking to the hallway, Lilly looked up at the sign, which read 'The western room is the eastern room's blueprint'

Looking back and forth between the two rooms, Lilly took a tentative step forward where the middle of the path in the other room was. The spikes retracted when she got close. With a smile, Lilly picked her way across the spikes, every once and awhile looking back at the far room to make sure she didn't miss step. 'It's like a game!' Lilly thought with a giggle as she made it to the far side of the room with a little hop.

After a room with a tipped over dummy, which Lilly righted, and long hallway with nothing but a pillar at the end, Lilly entered a room with a bowl of candy. 'Don't take candy from strangers Blueberry' With a slight nod, Lilly moved on to the next room, which had four switches and four rocks. Not needing the sign to figure this out, Lilly tried to push the first rock, but couldn't. She tried again, grunting. Still the rock didn't move.

"Please, move!" Lilly shoved, and surprisingly, the rock gave way, moving all the way to the switch.

"You just needed to ask honey" a western female accent echoed from the rock, making Lilly scream.

"You-you can talk?! Can everything in this place talk?" Lilly asked, exasperated.

"Almost sugar. All of us monsters can. And us monsters can look like ordinary objects here in the Ruins and other parts of the Underground" the rock responded, still on the switch. Lilly nodded, logging away that she was in a place called the Ruins. After a few seconds of staring into space, Lilly remembered she needed to keep moving.

With a slight blush, she spoke to the other rocks "Um, hey rocks? Can you sit on the switches so I can move on?" A chorus of western "of course!" echoed through the room as the other rocks moved onto the switches, clearing the way of spikes.

"Thanks rocks!" Lilly called back, as she passed over where the spikes once were and into the next room. The adventure from all of the puzzles and monsters had almost made her forget about her brother, almost.