Golden Shells Mystery – The Drunkard’s Shell

Welcome to the Golden Shells Mystery Adventure. It’s time to see how this adventure ends!

There have been three posts before this one, so if you missed them, you can read them (Part 1, Part 2, & Part 3) or here’s a quick recap:

You’re a ranger who hunts down dangerous beasts for the king. You were pulled from home by the King’s Hand and taken to an island where you met five other people also pulled from their lives. You were told you have three days to find three golden shells. Whoever succeeds will earn the island from the King, but not everything is as it initially appears.

When you got the opportunity, you searched the walls and paintings in a bamboo hut on the island. You found three things: a map indicating there are three huts total on the island, a small etching left by the King’s Hand indicating you’re hunting for a poisonous beast, and a hidden passageway under a trapdoor. Readers voted to investigate the passageway instead of following Allen, another of the occupants of the island, to a different hut.

When you took the passageway, it turned out to be a portal to a second hut where you found one of the others, Patricia, dying of some sort of poison. She reveals what she knows about the island and you’re able to find one of the golden shells, which happens to be a magical cure. After saving her, she tells you her theory that one of the others must have poisoned someone close to the king. You focus on finding another shell in hopes of helping whoever was poisoned. Readers voted to look for the Drunkard’s shell back at the hut with the paintings.

Let’s see if you find it!

Golden Shells Mystery – The Drunkard’s Shell

You leave Patricia beside the pool, still weak but steadily showing more color in her dirty face.

Now that you know what to expect, going through the portal doesn’t disorient you quite as bad as it did the first time, but you still emerge into darkness and have to remind yourself, the portal comes out into the underground tunnel below the hut.

After a moment of adjusting, you notice a thin sliver of light peeking past the trap door. Something slides off the door when you lift it, clattering across the bamboo floor.

You pause on the wooden stairs with your head sticking through the hole, startled by the scene in the hut.

All of the paintings are now destroyed with their frames and canvases strewn about in pieces. The smell of alcohol burns in your nose and glass sparkles on the floor along with sticky pools of liquid.

Besides the mess, the hut’s empty. You breathe a sigh and emerge from the trap door.

Perhaps Allen came back angry and, when he found you gone, he ransacked the place. Or perhaps one of the others decided to search the hut in a more—thorough way.

Did they find anything?

It’s a possibility, but whoever it was probably doesn’t know as much about the island and its shells as Patricia.

One lies with the drunkards and their glasses. For the drunkards, cross your eyes.

You tiptoe through the maze of shattered glass and spilled alcohol until you’re standing behind the bar. The ransacker aimed for the bottles of liquor. There’s not a one left on the shelf. But there are a number of glasses, still turned upside down in neat rows, ready for use. The only odd thing is they’re on the very bottom shelf. You kneel until you can look all the way to the back wall of the bar and see the entire collection of glasses, and then you cross your eyes. They blur into a collage of white-clear glass and green bamboo shelf, but you don’t see any gold in the mix.

With the drunkards and their glasses.

A memory floats through your mind of the town drunkard, the one man who can always be found at the bar no matter the time of day. He happens to be a great informant about creatures bothering the kingdom, but if you want a conversation with him, you have to catch him before he passes out and slides beneath whatever table he’s sitting at.

With the drunkards.

Since the ransacker cleared most of the shelving, you don’t have to move anything to stick your head into the shelf beside the upside down glasses. The position’s awkward and instantly puts a crick in your neck, but you turn your head sideways and cross your eyes again.

Your stomach rolls as the world blurs again, but it’s not the glass and bamboo collage you saw the first time. There’s a circular, wavering distortion just above the neatly placed glasses. When you blink and look without your eyes crossed, there’s no such warping. Crossing your eyes again, you reach a hand out and your fingers sink into the hazy circle, disappearing.

You sincerely hope nothing bites you on the other side as you feel the cool ridges of something touch your fingertips. There seems to be numerous rough textured objects. It’s like you’re reaching into a bag of shells.

Grasping a handful, you pull your hand out and blink to see straight again. Black, white, yellow, and red shells fill your palm. No gold. You dump the collection onto the shelf and try again. On the fourth try, a tiny golden shell peeks out of the group in your hand.

The scuff of a boot almost makes you hit your head on the shelf. You clutch the handful of shells and back out of the bar, staying crouched behind it.

“You gave us three days!” Allen complains.

“Things have changed,” answers a voice you recognize as the Hand’s.

“PA!” Allen scoffs. “I should’ve known we never really had a chance.” There’s the thumping of footsteps and you guess Allen stomped away.

You give it to the count of ten before standing up and rolling your shoulders and neck to relieve the crick there.

The Hand, an older man with more white than black in his beard, jumps at your sudden appearance.

He smiles ruefully at his own expense but you see the anxiety adding lines around his eyes. “Did you find anything?” he asks, hope easing some of that tension.

“Haven’t pinpointed the poisonous beast yet,” you admit, “but—” and you hold out your hand, opening it to show the collection of shells there, including one tiny speck of gold.

A true smile touches his lips. “We’ll worry about the beast later.” He beckons you, wrinkling his nose as you bring the smell of alcohol with you since it soaked into your knees.

***

The Hand finds you sitting against the wall just outside the queen’s chambers, waiting to hear if the shell worked. The poison had more time to weaken the queen than it had Patricia and the physician expressed doubt that even a magical cure would help now.

From the relief on the Hand’s face, the physician was wrong. He groans as he lowers himself to sit beside you. You both stare at your feet stretched out on the floor. It’s a strange sight, your well-worn boots beside his polished black ones. His show the dull shine of recent oiling, reminding you you need to clean and oil your own before the alcohol that soaked into them destroys the leather.

“I never value your work enough,” he says softly. “Those shells have eluded us for years.”

“You gave me all the tools needed.” You shrug.

He chuckles wryly. “Patricia wants to hire you to protect her in her travels.”

You shudder, thinking of the woman’s sharp tongue.

“I told her you’re not for hire. The soldiers who retrieved Patricia searched for the other four as well. Marius Jack was found shivering against a tree in full sunlight. He’s recovering now. The other three are nowhere to be found.”

Finally you look over at the Hand. “You want me to find them?”

“I do,” he says.

You simply nod and push off the floor to stand, not asking about who will cover your stretch of the mountains while you’re gone. The Hand takes care of those things. For now, you need to go clean and oil your boots. You’ve got some traveling to do.

The End

Thank you for joining in this adventure and putting up with slightly longer posts. This one could easily be twice as long as any of my usual adventures here on the blog.

I’m taking a short break for the next couple weeks because my editor and I are in the middle of finishing up the edit on my current Work-In-Progress and I need to focus whole heartedly on it. I’ll be sharing more about that book soon. It’s an adventure like The Adventure, but I’ve learned a lot in the last four years and am really excited by how this book it turning out. =)

Until then, blessings,

Jennifer

(For more of my stories, check out either my Choose Your Own Adventure book, The Adventure, or my YA Fantasy novel, Quaking Soul, here on my Website or on Amazon.)