Her hands clench as hard as they can. She can only watch in horrified disgust as her hands crush it's hand and throat of their own volition, the flesh squeezing through her fingers like clay.

Both of her hands are almost balled completely into fists before she regains enough feeling in her body to let go.

"Ew, ew, ew, ew!" She shakes her hands vigorously.

"Oh god, oh god, that was stupid!"

"Oh god..." She catches her breath. "Wait!" She transforms back and forth. She's completely clean now. "Phew, that's much better."

She glances down at the thing she just killed.

"So what the hell are you?" She gingerly shifts the body with a foot, it's surprisingly light.

The head doesn't roll with the body, and she feels a flash of visceral disgust as she averts her eyes from the neck area.

The robe is dead simple: Green silk with gold trim. It's what's under the cloak that is more interesting. Or more accurately, what there isn't. Legs, or a waist, or even a torso. It is like somebody took the arms, shoulders, neck and head of a person and decided that everything else was superfluous.

"I get you bell-boy. Internal organs are for chumps."

"So how the heck does this bell work?"

The light has gone out, which makes it easier to make out simple bell made of polished, silvery metal. The handle is a loop of string, the odd-looking clapper rests against the metal side of the bell.

"So are you going to hurt me if I ring you?" She gingerly pokes the bell, then gently unwraps it from the quartered man's hand while doing her best to not look at the wrist. She then tosses it some distance away. It clatters with a small metal noise.

"I don't know if I should be relieved or disappointed." Maybe she can still figure out how to make it works somewhere down the line, she picks it back up and tries to ring it. The bell's sound is weird, like the clapper isn't metal at all. "Huh?" The clapper is leathery, a long chunk of something, narrow and flat. She holds it up between her fingers to examine it better in the light.

"Y'know, it almost looks like..." 

A mummified human tongue. "Wah!" She drops it like it's on fire.

"Fucking ee double-u! Are you kidding me?" She wipes her hands vigorously on her dress, then thinks better of it and transforms back and forth a couple of times.

"Goddammit!" The magical girl spins around, nothing hostile on this floor. She's still safe. She shifts her head so she can peer into one of the cells and take a peek at one of the trembling prisoners again. She looks pointedly at the bell.

She turns back to the quartered man. "Let's take a look at that mask!" Her voice is a little louder than she intended. The head is on its side, the mask is a smooth white porcelain, there is no string or any visible way to affix it to the face, the impact has cracked it in the corner. When she pokes the head, she can feel something stir inside of her. She holds out her hand and pulls.

Wisps of purple flames phase through the head and are pulled into her waiting palm. She feels a warmth surge inside her, which vanishes as she holds her hand palm up and focuses. Her purple flame appears, its a little bigger now.

So these quartered men have fires that she can take. It's not a lot, she feels like this isn't enough for her purposes, but its a start. She closes her fist over the flame, and feels the warmth return to her chest.

She carefully directs her gaze back to the mask. It's probably not important, right? She can probably just ignore it.

The bell isn't rusted at all, which makes her think that its either silver, or it has been reinforced by the purple flames. She knows that she can do that, if she had enough, so it's not unreasonable to think that others could as well. The mask could theoretically be magical. She doesn't know if curses are possible with the purple fire, but she figures that if anything would be cursed then it would definitely be those masks.

She peers down to the floors below. She now knows that its in her best interest to kill the other bell-keepers. But frankly it sounds like a pain, melee is deeply inadvisable here, she can't think of a way to do it that doesn't end with her seizing up. Her ranged options are limited, though she does have them. She grabs the bow she stole from the archery range back at Lesbos. She nocks an arrow, then points it at the floating figure on the opposite end of the gallery a floor below her. She looses it-

-and it goes completely wide. It seems to have noticed her. "Shit."

"Eek!" She falls to the floor to avoid a speeding green projectile. It slams into the wall behind her with an eerie sound. "Ok! Noted!" She moves towards the wall and crouch walks to avoid its line of sight. "Dammit, how hard could archery be anyway? It's just launching pointy sticks! This is bullshit."

She risks a peek to the floors below. Its not there. The ones on the floors below that are still patrolling, but she has lost sight of the one she fired at. "Did he hide?" She tries to get an angle to view the floor below her, her hair dangles over the sheer drop. "Where did he-?"

She hears the ring of a bell to her left, she turns just in time to be hit dead center with something green and painful.The impact robs her world of all sound, she can't hear herself scream as she tumbles over the edge she was just dangling over. She falls face first into the stone floor and it all goes black.

YOU DIED

"Oh come oooooon! What the hell was that?" Maybe she wasn't cut out for this, she can't help but feel that most competent people wouldn't need a bunch of extra lives to get through this place.

"Where did he even come from? I didn't see him coming!" The man had somehow gotten up to the floor she was at. She had taken her eyes off of it to take cover, then didn't pay attention to her surroundings as she hung over the edge of the walkway like an idiot.

This time she walks very carefully, taking every step with as much caution as possible. The creature has retreated from this walkway, though the corpse of its brethren is gone. The bell too, but she doesn't lament that too badly, she's more relieved than anything.

Her paranoia leads her to making sure nothing has line of sight to her, and tries to be ready to teleport away. The fact that she has been teleporting non-stop for days now, she still doesn't have it mentally available as a reaction to danger. She hasn't really practiced dodging with it. The second-long wind-up would probably make using it in such a way difficult either way, though. She risks a peek and sees the light on the floor below, so it has probably resumed its previous patrol.

This time she takes the time to properly circumnavigate the walkway, peering into every cell. It turns out that only most of them are occupied, but not all of them, some are empty. When she reaches the corner opposite of where she came in does she realize that there is a doorway there, with stairs leading down.

"Of course." She gave herself away, then crouched which meant that she completely missed it rushing towards the staircase, coming up and then shooting her.

She is truly privileged. Most people who die stupidly don't get to learn from their bumbling mistakes. When she peers down, she sees a little purple light. "A purple fire?" She whispers to herself. She cranes her neck, but she can't tell if its clear. "Well... It's probably worth the risk..." She teleports down.

The floor seems mostly empty, there are doorways here, and cells. This floor is considerably bigger than the ones above it, where there were walls above there are pillars supporting it here below. The purple light that she saw was a stain of purple flames licking the floor. She blinks, holds out her hand and sucks them into herself. They feel familiar. "I dropped this. This is where I died." Her hand passes over the stone where she previously brained herself. No trace of her. Not that she really wanted to see a dead version of herself. Maybe a live version, but definitely not a dead one. "Ok, I leave behind the flames I collect and can pick them back up."

She looks around. Seemingly nothing is trying to kill her right now, so she should probably explore.

The cells are less populated down here, she only spots a couple of people in their cells. She wonders if any of them could respond to her if she called out, but she's a little afraid of what might happen if she causes too much of a commotion.

Instead she directs her attention to a room that seems to have furniture that has survived all these years. The door was considerably wider and taller than the surrounding ones, the centerpiece of the room was a huge stone desk, almost as tall as she was, and a proportionate stone chair. The drag marks on the floor suggested frequent use. She didn't like the implications here, she already wasn't keen on meeting anything that needed furniture this big and robust. But she was extra disinclined to meet such a person who worked here.

The only other feature was a bookcase which was predictably em-