What the Crowd Was Cheering For

The chest with the goo in it was not a chest.

His notes give no moment of discovery. They begin with the creature already known: Mimic has baton stuck in it. Then, a line below, And my battlestaff. That second line is the closest he comes to complaint in the whole record, and he keeps it to three words.

A mimic is a patient animal. It takes the shape of something a traveller will want to open, and it waits, and its skin is an adhesive that holds whatever touches it. The baton had gone in earlier and been taken for a stuck tool in a strange liquid. Now the staff went the same way. A druid's staff is not easily let go of, and I imagine he did not let go of it easily.

The fight was short and close. Some blows found it and some slid off its hide, and the notes keep a careful tally of which. The heavier, physical strikes had the harder time. Energy got through more readily. Someone laid down a harrying fire to pin it and open it to the others, and after that it did not last long. Killed the mimic, he wrote, and moved on.

The Field Canon has an entry built from this, though few novitiates know where it came from.

ON PREDATION — ambush forms that imitate objects (later additions)
A thing that is wanted is the best disguise. Chests, doors, supplies.
Sticky contents in a container are not contents. Treat them as a mouth.
Do not test with a tool you cannot afford to lose. It will be kept.
A tool lost to it is not lost for good. Kill the animal; the grip ends with it.
Its hide resists the blow more than the burn. Prefer energy where you have it.
Pin it with covering fire. A held predator is a slow one.
It does not pursue. Its range is its reach. Step back to think.
Where one object is false, check the others before you rest beside them.
Note where it was placed. Something chose to leave it among the prisoners' gear.
(Kopalo, from field notes; the room of braziers.)

— the Field Canon, on Predation, later additions

A few of these lines go a little past his notes. He never says whether the staff came free, or whether the other chests were checked. The Canon's compilers were practical people, and they wrote down what they would have done. I leave it in because the first line is entirely his, in spirit if not in words. He had already noted, before he knew what it was, that a baton had stuck.

---

The fight made noise, and something answered it.

From beyond the door came the sound of a crowd. It was cheering, and it carried. Grek heard it and was put in mind of robot fighting leagues. Hugh heard it and thought of battle arenas. Between them they reached the same place: There's an arena somewhere. Taeon wrote that down as a conclusion, not a guess.

Past the door was a lava tube. I have walked a few, in safer places. The stone in them is smooth where the flow ran and rough where it cooled, and they hold sound the way a throat does. This one was thirty feet across and lit with large torches on either side. About two hundred feet ahead stood another set of doors, ten feet wide and fifteen high. The cheering grew louder as they went. Under it he picked out chains, and growling, and howling. These were not people's voices, but they were close to the people.

You will notice, as I did, that he lists the sounds in order of what they tell. The crowd tells you there is an audience. The chains tell you something is held. The howling tells you what.

Through the doors was an antechamber, and the way narrowed to fifteen feet. The notes then say Portal teleporting and nothing more. I can't tell you who stepped through what, or where it put them, and I won't try. After that comes a single word, Boom, and the next door was open.

The crowd's roar fell away to a lull. Then, outside, something large hit the ground.

The records stop there. I have read that last line many times. It does not say what fell, or whether it fell towards them. He wrote it down as plainly as he wrote down everything else: a sound, its size, its direction. Then, I expect, he stood very still and listened for the next one.