Chapter 119: Chapter 119: The Legendary Trial of Ink.
The silence that followed was worse than before. They slumped in perfect unison—fairy, elf, rogue, warrior, and plush knight—all crushed beneath the absurd weight of a single, missing bottle of ink.
For a long time, the only movement in the room was the silent, mocking pulse of the glowing form on the wall. Gilda, having put her head in her hands, had become a statue dedicated to a headache.
But a rogue can only endure so much quiet inaction. It felt... unprofessional.
It was Pip who finally broke the silence.
"Okay," he whispered, reaching into a hidden pocket in his boot. "I have... a backup." He produced a tiny, corked vial filled with a thick, murky, and deeply unappealing black liquid.
The team leaned in, with a tiny spark of hope in their eyes.
"It’s... uh... giant squid ink," Pip admitted, his face turning a pale shade of green. "Got it from a back-alley merfolk alchemist in a port city. Traded it for a pearl that may or may not have been cursed. It’s for marking escape routes on damp cavern walls. It works well, but... it smells a bit."
He uncorked the tiny vial for just a second. The stench that escaped wasn’t just a smell—it was an ambush. A wet slap of rotten fish and old socks that seemed to suck the very air from the room.
Zazu, with his sensitive elven nose, visibly recoiled, his face a mask of pure, aesthetic horror. And FaeLina made a tiny gagging sound and seemed to turn a shade greener than her usual leafy attire. Even Pip, who had presented the vial with a hint of pride, looked pale, as regret was already shown on his face.
Gilda, however, didn’t flinch. She just lifted her head, her expression completely flat. "So we’d be filing seafood-scented paperwork," she grunted. She had a brief, very satisfying mental image of a Bureau clerk sniffing the document and fainting clean off his chair. "Perfect."
The tiny spark of hope died with a quick, fishy-smelling death.
"Ink, at its core, is merely a pigment suspended in a liquid binder," Zazu murmured, ever the scholar, rubbing a small amount of dust from the floor between his fingers, his eyes gleaming with academic fervor. He looked at Pip’s vial with disdain. "A much more elegant solution would be to create our own. If we could just find a suitable binder, perhaps with a little... spittle—"
"No," Gilda cut him off, her voice so final it could have cracked stone. "We are not using spit-ink to write on the magic form."
"...Even hypothetically?" Zazu asked, looking genuinely wounded. "It would have been elegant spit. The kind used in ancient treaties, mind you—very ceremonial."
"No."
Sir Crumplebuns, seizing his moment, stood dramatically upon Gilda’s knee. "AHA! I SEE! THIS IS NO ORDINARY QUEST—THIS IS THE LEGENDARY TRIAL OF INK!" He raised his Spoonblade high. "FEAR NOT, FOR I HAVE PREVAILED IN MANY SUCH TRIALS! THE TRIAL OF THE CRACKED CUP! THE TRIAL OF THE STICKY DRAWER! EVEN THE FEARSOME TRIAL OF THE UNSORTED UTENSIL CUP! THIS TOO SHALL FALL!"
"Sit down," Gilda muttered, shoving him back into place before he could attempt to heroically prick his fluffy finger on his own spoon.
FaeLina’s voice cracked into a wail. "Don’t you all understand? The ’Request for Writing Implements’ is Form Q-11! Which means—" She gasped, wings trembling with outrage. "Separate requisitions! Next they’ll want a Form Q-12 for ink storage approval, and a Q-13 for feather maintenance, and don’t even get me started on the carbon-copy enchantments!"
"So we just ask the slot for a new form," Pip said, his voice full of a dawning, weary resignation.
Sir Crumplebuns, however, took this as a heroic call to action. He puffed out his chest, his button eyes gleaming with the thrill of a new adventure. "AHA! A NEW QUEST!" he announced in a loud stage-whisper. "THE TRIAL OF THE UNSIGNED FORM! THE TRIAL OF THE REJECTED FORM! THE TRIAL OF... THE FORM TO REQUEST MORE FORMS!"
FaeLina, who had been on the verge of a full collapse, suddenly shot up, her eyes wide with a new and even more profound terror."STOP GIVING THEM IDEAS!" she shrieked, lunging forward and clamping her tiny hands over the plush knight’s mouth before he could accidentally invent a new layer of bureaucracy.
The team had officially run out of ideas. It was in that moment of absolute despair that a soft, expensive-sounding whir echoed in the room.
The slot in the wall slid open again.
The team flinched in unison, bracing themselves for a new horror. But instead of a voice, a small, elegant tray glided out. On it sat a single, tiny, exquisitely crafted glass bottle, filled with a shimmering, silver ink.
A new, deeper, and infinitely more tired-sounding voice droned from the slot. It was the voice of a being who had been a supervisor for a thousand years and had hated every single minute of it.
"Your escalated ticket has been reviewed," the voice stated, its tone dripping with a weary, cosmic boredom. "The Supervising Adjudicator for Preliminary Processing has, in the interest of... moving things along... pre-emptively approved one provisional ink dispensation. And no, before you ask, this doesn’t make you special. It means Filbert at reception began weeping uncontrollably into his scrying-orb, a sound which, I assure you, is both magically amplified and deeply unprofessional. It was interrupting my daily meditation on the nature of beige."
The team just stared, a slow, disbelieving hope dawning on their faces.
"You will also find attached," the voice went on, pages audibly flipping somewhere in the void, "Form Q-12: Ink Usage and Allocation Request. Please complete this form in full before uncorking the bottle. Failure to comply carries a standard penalty of three goats, one abstract concept, and a handwritten apology."
The team just blinked.
"Three goats?" Pip asked weakly, his rogue’s mind already trying to picture the logistics of smuggling livestock through an interdimensional lobby.
"Never mind the goats," FaeLina hissed, her managerial brain short-circuiting on a much bigger problem. "How do you even hand over an abstract concept?"
Sir Crumplebuns, perched proudly on Gilda’s knee, raised a tiny plush hand. "I VOLUNTEER HONOR!" he declared. "TAKE MINE! IT WEIGHS HEAVILY UPON ME—TRULY, I HAVE TOO MUCH HONOR!"
"Sit down," Gilda grunted.
A new, smaller, but no less terrifying glowing form materialized in the air next to the ink bottle. The tray glided forward, placing the ink and the new form side-by-side on the pedestal with a quiet, final click before retracting into the wall.
The slot slid shut, sealing them in with their new reality.
For a long moment, no one moved. The two items sat there together: the prize and the lock, the solution and the new, even more infuriating problem.
They had the pen. They had the ink. And they had a form that required ink to request permission to use the ink.
Pip, however, saw a different kind of challenge. A speed trial. Before anyone could react, he crouched like a sprinter, muttered, "rogue instincts, don’t fail me now," and lunged, his hand darting out to snatch the tiny glass bottle of ink.
His fingers were an inch from the bottle when the glowing Form Q-12 instantly expanded, creating a solid, unbreachable wall of light between his hand and his prize. The wall hummed, glowing with a faint, smug satisfaction.
Pip growled. His professional pride was wounded. A wall was a wall, and walls, in his experience, had weaknesses. He pulled his finest lockpick from a hidden sleeve sheath, a delicate tool of elven design. He jabbed it at the wall of light. The tool hummed, glowed red-hot, and disintegrated into ash.
A tiny, prim voice chimed from the wall of light. "Unlicensed tools are not permitted."
He tried a second pick, a cruder, tougher goblin-made model. It disintegrated faster, releasing a faint, smug ding.
Finally, in a last, desperate act, he produced a small, lead vial from his belt. "Weak acid," he explained, uncorking it. "Good for simple hinges and... well, this." He splashed a single drop onto the wall of light.
The drop sizzled, turned a brilliant shade of pink, and then was instantly neutralized by a tiny spritz of lemon-scented mist that seemed to emerge from the wall itself. The wall chimed again, its voice dripping with a polite, passive-aggressive cheer. "Cleanliness is a Bureau virtue. Please refrain from unauthorized chemical applications."
Pip slumped back, utterly defeated. "Yeah," he muttered. "Worth a shot."
Gilda watched the whole, sad, and frankly impressive display of uselessness without moving. "Smooth," she grunted. "Next time try juggling it. Maybe bureaucracy respects talent shows."
The silence that followed was worse than before. It was the kind of silence that felt like someone had stapled shut the very concept of hope.
The team held its breath, waiting for the inevitable. Sir Crumplebuns raised his spoon, inhaling deeply, clearly about to declare something heroic and incredibly unhelpful about the philosophical nature of walls. "FOR ALL WALLS ARE BUT BARRIERS OF THE MIND, AND IF ONE SIMPLY—"
Gilda didn’t even look up.
"Don’t."
___________
Author’s Note:
And the bureaucratic nightmare escalates! Just when you think they’ve found a solution, the Bureau hits them with another, even more infuriating paradox. You have to love a system where the supervisor finally helps you, not out of kindness, but because your collective whining has been officially flagged as "psychological cruelty to staff."
This Chapter was so much fun to write because everyone’s terrible ideas got a moment to shine. Pip’s "emergency" squid ink, Zazu’s deeply wounded pride over his "elegant spit," and Sir Crumplebuns’s heroic offer to bleed courage all over the paperwork... our team is truly a disaster, and I love them for it.
But Gilda’s final, weary "Don’t" is the mood of the entire Chapter, isn’t it?
They’ve been defeated again, not by a monster, but by a paradox. How will they possibly get out of this one? Thanks for reading!