Chapter 47 - Puzzles
"Hmm~" Rosa hummed at the sight before Scarlett and the others. "It might just be me, but I'm starting to suspect space is a bit weird in this place."
"I think you might be right," Allyssa mumbled, looking up at the giant moon above them.
Scarlett saw a small grin on Rosa's face in her peripheral. "I do have that tendency, don't I?"
Fynn pointed to one of the groups of small humanoid figures that flew past only a few meters away. "Are those also fairies?"
"They are," Scarlett said. "However, there is no need to fear these. They should not be as aggressive as their relatives, assuming you do nothing to provoke them."
You could fight all the fairies in here—they weren't particularly strong either—but it wasn't necessary. It also felt unnecessarily cruel, and would probably clash with her current plans.
That hadn't stopped her from doing it in her second playthrough, though.
She stepped through the open doorway onto the first circular platform inside this 'room'. The floor of the platform consisted of bent and wiry roots that were intertwined over each other. An arching wooden bridge extended out from the platform towards another platform just like it. The small yellow lights that protruded along the side of the bridge reminded her a bit of streetlights.
Scanning across the room, with all the different platforms and bridges floating above the water, there appeared to be no clear way of getting to the large tree at the center of the room without swimming. Several of the platforms looked like dead ends, and there were dozens of them. The main tree was also a decent distance away from their current position.
As she examined the room, one of the fairies—this one glistening with an almost magenta color—approached Scarlett curiously. It floated around her, stopping a few times to get a closer look. It was about the size of her head, and when it stopped she could see that—while it wasn't wearing any clothes—the intangible shine that seeped out from its body looked like a flowing dress, starting from its shoulders and drifting down to the knees. The fairy's hair was long and almost translucent, with its skin being a pale blue with tufts of white strands growing here and there. Its face had slightly alien features, with large round eyes that blinked as they watched her like a child would a new toy.
It stayed like that for a while, simply observing her, before it finally seemed to grow bored and fluttered away to join a passing group of fairies.
A few fairies had approached the others too, and Scarlett saw Allyssa move closer to the edge of the platform, slowly spinning around as she took in their surroundings and two fairies that moved near her head. She let out a small chuckle when two more fairies joined in and they all spun around her in an assemblage of colors. "So what is this place?" she asked, looking towards Scarlett.