Chapter Text
Astarion’s heart pounded in his chest, racing from adrenaline as he peered around the corner carefully, already jumpy from being smacked in the face by a ball shooting out a pneumatic tube in the first part of the escape room. Their game master had apologized profusely on the screen, saying that was not supposed to happen, but the damage had been done already. From behind, Gale let out a sigh and rounded the corner confidently, pausing only to say, “Oh, hello there,” to the scare actor who must have been skulking in the shadows.
Just when he thought he was safe after the discovery of that scare actor, Astarion was jumped by another from his left as the door they had emerged from swung back towards him. This one was dressed in a horrific clown costume covered in what he hoped was fake blood, wielding a chainsaw that was revving, but the shock of the scare and the noise of the chainsaw were enough to make Astarion scream and dart around the corner to collide into his boyfriend. Strong arms came up to envelope him, as an amused smile formed on the handsome face, brown eyes looking down at him .
“Stop laughing at me,” he grumbled, pushing at Gale’s chest lightly. “I don’t know why I let you talk me into this. Who combines an escape room and a horror house anyway?” he complained.
“I clearly recall someone saying that he would be fine.”
“Well, I would have been, if the room was anything other than carnival themed!” Astarion hissed. In fairness, Gale did not know about his intense dislike for clowns and Astarion had not realized that the escape room would be carnival-themed. Gale pressed a quick kiss to his forehead and Astarion tightened his arms around Gale, unwilling to let him go as he looked around the second room, warily eyeing the scare actors now standing in the corners of the room. This area was stylized to resemble the interior of a circus tent, white and red stripes covered the wall, ‘torn’ in places with purple symbols smeared across, illuminated dimly by lanterns flickering in and out.
To Astarion’s extreme displeasure, there was a skeleton dressed in a ringmaster outfit, a top hat perched precariously on the skull and tatters of a red tailcoat hanging off the frame in the center of the frame, holding a whip in one hand and a box attached to its hand by a number lock. Eyeing the ribcage dubiously, he swore to himself that he would make Gale root around the bones if and when it came time to search for a clue.
Along one wall, there was a chest locked with a five letter lock, a prize wheel next to it, several daggers plunged through the wood. On the opposite side of the room, there were crates stacked upon one another, labeled in the same strange symbols painted across the tent’s interior, next to a table covered in a puzzle. Against the last wall, there is a large cage, the door wide open, with deep claw marks gouged against the floor and bars bent. Astarion suspected that there would be a third room behind that cage. “Where are Karlach and Wyll?” he asks.
“We’re almost out, soldier! Give us another moment!” Karlach’s voice yells out from behind them, down the small hall that they had come from. “Come on, Wyll, give us a boost.”
“Karlach, you heard the rules. There’s nothing in the ceiling.”
Gale and Astarion exchange looks of fond exasperation at their boisterous friend and her ever-so-patient boyfriend. “I expect I’ll need to scramble about the floor searching for clues, now,” he says dryly, making a face. Normally, his role in escape rooms did involve a fair amount of crouching and searching for hidden objects, but in this particular case, he was dreading the idea of reaching under a table. Knowing his luck, there would be an animatronic hand waiting to clamp down on his.
“You know my knees aren’t up to the task, my love,” Gale replies, distracted as he walked over to the desk, ignoring the clown sitting in the corner. Astarion wondered if they would be there the entire time. Gale looked down at the surface of the desk in investigation, before he turned back towards Astarion. His eyes flickered over to the hallway that they had just emerged from. “I’ll go check on Wyll and Karlach. Do you want to put this puzzle together?” The pieces of said puzzle that they had found in their cell clattered onto the desk.
For a moment, Astarion glanced over at the actor in the corner, unwilling to be left alone with them but his pride would not allow him to tell his boyfriend otherwise. “Of course, darling. This should be easy.”
Gale smiled at him and briefly took his hand to squeeze. “I’ll be right back,” he promised.
And then Astarion was left alone. Well, not alone, but based on how the actors were sitting in the corners, he was sure that they would not be open to helping. He took a deep breath and moved towards the desk, only flinching once when the clown made a sudden movement towards him. “Come do this escape room with me, Astarion, it’ll be fun, Astarion,” he grumbled under his breath as he snatched up the pieces of the puzzle and made a hasty retreat to the furthest corner of the room where he had both actors in his line of sight, squatting down onto the floor to start assembling the puzzle.
As he worked on the jigsaw, he grimaced at the macabre image that it was beginning to form of a clearly dead, dismembered clown. But then, he quickly realized that there was only half of the puzzle available. “Do Karlach and Wyll have the other half of the puzzle?” he asked, directing his voice to the open door where they had come in.
There was a loud bang that not only made him jump, but to his vicious satisfaction, made the other two in the room with him jump a bit.
“Oops, sorry, was a little too eager in opening that door.” Karlach appeared a few seconds later, looking sheepish. She was followed by Wyll with the other half of the puzzle in his hands and Gale rubbing his forehead in exasperation.
“Darling, be a dear and root around the skeleton for me,” Astarion requested. Karlach turned to look for him in the dim lighting, before spotting him crouched in the corner.
“Afraid of breaking a nail, Astarion?” she joked, but did as he asked. Wyll knelt down to help him assemble the other half of the puzzle.
“Downright macabre, isn’t it?” Wyll shook his head, a grimace forming on his face as they completed the puzzle. “I think I saw numbers on the back. We might have to flip it over.”
“We found pages in the skeleton. They’re pages from a whistleblower’s diary, from the look of it. There are sentences underlined corresponding to the puzzle on the top of the desk. It’s a logic puzzle,” Gale initially spoke calmly, but then his tone changed, “Karlach, what are you– Oh for heaven’s sake, you won’t find anything under there!” Astarion chanced a glance at her and he couldn’t help the bark of laughter upon seeing that she was flat on the floor underneath the desk.
“You never know,” she replied, sliding out and reaching up. “A hand?”
Gale gave her a withering look. “I’m more likely to dislocate my shoulder than you coming off the ground and we both know that.”
Wyll’s low chuckle diverted Astarion’s attention back to him. “What a group we make, huh.” Astarion couldn’t help but agree, although he would never tell Wyll that. “Help me flip this puzzle over?”
Carefully, they slid their hands under the corners to maneuver the jigsaw, only losing three pieces in the motion. The number 9861 was on display after they fixed it, which Astarion relayed to Karlach, standing by the skeleton ready to input it onto the toolbox lock.
“It’s not working, soldier.” A dark cackling suddenly filled the room, scaring all of them, eliciting a litany of curses from Karlach. “What the fuck was that?” she demanded.
“Time warning; we’ve used fifteen minutes,” Gale replied, pointing up to the screen. “Are you sure you input the numbers correctly?” He crossed over to the room to look down at the lock. “Hm. Try 1986.”
Not ten seconds later, there was a triumphant cheer as Karlach unlocked it. “There’s a key. Is there anything in here that needs a key?”
“Wasn’t there a locked box in our cell, Gale?” Astarion asked, straightening up from the floor, wincing as his knees ached a bit. They never used to do that. Getting old sucked.
“Ah, yes there was!” Gale’s eyes lit up. “Let’s go back and find that together, shall we?”
Astarion was ready to say that he was capable of going by himself, until he caught movement out of the corner of his eye, where Wyll and Karlach were decidedly not standing, and he reached a hand out to his boyfriend. Gale took it, ignoring Karlach’s fake gagging in the background at the public display of affection, and they headed back the door to the small cells they had been locked in initially.
However, Gale paused once they entered the space, instead of looking around for where the key should go, turning to face Astarion. “Are you all right, my Star?” he asked softly, reaching for his other hand. “I apologize, I didn’t–”
Astarion stopped him with a quick kiss. “You didn’t know,” he reassured quickly. “I’ll be fine.”
“We can end this early if it gets too much,” Gale promised.
Fondness and affection radiated from Astarion’s chest at Gale’s words. “You’re sweet, darling. But no, you enjoy showing off just how smart you are and love doing these. And I love watching you show off,” he laughed, squeezing Gale’s hands.
“Oi! Are you two lovebirds done making out yet?” Karlach yelled from the main room, followed by Wyll shushing her. “How long does it take to unlock a box?” was the grumbled follow-up. Stealth had never been her strong suit.
Gale shook his head with a laugh. “Would you do the honors?” He held out the key to Astarion, who took it and with an exaggerated flourish and cheeky wink up at Gale, knelt down on the floor to reach the chest under the bench. He pulled out a number of pages, which he rifled through with a frown. “These are… diary entries from someone named Dribbles. Apparently he was unhappy with the treatment of the animals at the circus.”
Gale took the pages and his eyes lit up. “More whistleblower pages. These are the conditions that we’ll need in order to solve the puzzle on top of the table in the next room. It doesn’t look like we have all the pages, however, so we’ll need to go searching. Let’s go back to Karlach and Wyll.”
When they entered the room, Astarion was unhappy to see that the two scare actors had disappeared. “Where did they go?” he asked Karlach.
“Hm?” She looked around. “Oh, you mean Bozo and Bongo? They were here just a moment ago.” She shrugged. “Maybe they went and hid again.”
Astarion felt his heart race faster at the idea that the two clowns were lurking in the shadows again, but Gale’s voice drew him out of that train of thought. “Are their names actually Bozo and Bongo?” he asked, curiously.
“Nah, but I figured it was easier to name them.”
Wyll shook his head and held out some pages to Gale. “We found these in the crate, along with this.” He showed them a wooden piece that had a strange symbol of a handprint with a skull in place of the palm superimposed on an upside down triangle. It was surprisingly detailed for something carved out of wood and sent a shudder up Astarion’s spine.
“I’ll look around to see if there’s something like that around,” Karlach volunteered.
“It might also be for the next room,” Astarion commented, but Karlach shrugged and continued to search the room. “We’ve looked in the crates, did the creepy skeleton in the middle of the room…” He turned in a circle, carefully surveying every part of the room, less so for puzzles or clues but for any scare actors who would jump out at him.
“We need to open the chest and figure out what this goes to,” Wyll finished.
“And this thing. Did you know the daggers moved?” Karlach prodded one of said weapons sticking out of the prize wheel, twisting it. “Probably need to move several of them.” She began to randomly touch them, only to stop when the room darkened and an ominous voice boomed over the loudspeaker, “ENJOY THE JACKPOT, MEWLING CURD!”, making them all jump.
Astarion hated everything about this. He continued to scan the room, only to see the same symbol on the table. “There.” The other three turned around to look at where he was pointing.
“Good catch, Astarion,” Wyll said, genuine in his compliment, before he walked over and pressed the wooden piece against the drawer under the table popped open, revealing several more papers.
Gale immediately went over to take the pages. “More of the whistleblower papers.” Astarion approached the surface of the table for the first time, seeing a grid atop the table, with the leftmost column and top row filled out.
“Your favorite,” Astarion teased, elbowing his boyfriend gently.
“Hey! Look what I found attached to the other side of the prize wheel,” Karlach brandished another page at them, which Astarion snatched to avoid a paper cut on his nose.
At first glance, the note seemed like a red herring, but Astarion had done enough escape rooms to know that there was something meaningful about the note.
Blast it all to the Nine Hells, the wretched journalist
Ettvard has come sniffing around after that
nasty whistleblower contacted the Flaming Fist, citing
“Justice for the animals!” Now my sales are declining and
I have to figure out a way to shut Dribbles up!
He looked at the note again, checking if there was a secret message encoded into the capitalized letters, to no avail. Then, he looked at the first letter of each line. Off behind him, he heard Wyll and Gale reviewing the whistleblower papers, likely attempting to extract the clues that would allow them to solve it. “Karlach, can you try Benji on the alpha lock on the chest?”
“On it, soldier!” With an enthusiasm that made Astarion jealous, she bounded over and knelt down in front of the chest, fiddling with the lock. After a few seconds, she let out a triumphant noise. “Got it!” That drew the other two’s attention.
“What did you do? How did you do that?” Gale immediately asked.
Astarion waved the piece of paper at him. “You’re not the only smart one here, darling,” he teased.
The only response was a fond eye roll, before Karlach returned, bearing more pages and what looked like two beanbags, like ones that would be used for a carnival game, confirming Astarion’s suspicions that there was a third room.
“This should be the last of them,” Wyll said, taking the papers. “Shall we?”
They crowded around the table, where Astarion saw that Gale had written down the clues of the logic puzzle on the provided notepad. He read through them, and his brain immediately began to hurt. It at least looked like Gale had begun to fill in some of the pieces based on what he already gathered.
“I may not be the best person for this,” Karlach said, echoing his thoughts.
Wyll reached back and squeezed Karlach’s arm reassuringly. “You’re the brawn in this group, love. And you’re great at finding things in the room that the rest of us miss.”
Based on Astarion’s experience, any other girl would have been insulted by that but not Karlach. She puffed up in pride. “I’ll keep searching to see if there’s anything else around.”
Gale was muttering under his breath, filling out the grid using the whiteboard marker provided, occasionally tapping empty squares with the other end. Astarion moved to the other side of him to look at the full list of clues.
- The panther wears the blue collar and lives in between two other animals.
- The red collar owner lives to the left of the orange collar owner.
- The animal in the last cage goes second in performance.
- Buddy lives in the middle cage with a green collar.
- Lucretious trains the animal that lives to the right of the animal Jacob trains.
- Popper is the name of the zebra and does not perform in the first three acts.
- Shadow does not perform first, middle, or last.
- There are at least two cages in between the monkey and the emu.
- Boris’ animal is the last to go in performance order.
- Crimson lives in the first cage.
- The animal Dribbles trains lives next to cage B.
- Scratchy wears a yellow collar.
- The zebra lives in between two other animals, but does not live next to the panther or monkey.
- Lucille’s animal is the middle performer with a red collar.
- The dog performs first.
Astarion wandered away, joining Karlach in hunting for additional clues, although he was sure that he wouldn’t find anything. A few minutes passed before Gale exclaimed, “I’ve got it! Star, pull the prize wheel daggers in this order: green, yellow, red, blue, orange!”
He was already standing by the wheel, so he began to twist the daggers, having to pause to check with Gale what color came next in the sequence twice.
To Gale’s evident unbridled delight, the wall of the cage sprung open. In his excitement, he scrambled through, in a way that Astarion would have described as being ‘with reckless abandon’. Wyll and Karlach high-fived one another before following.
Astarion paused, waiting to see if there were any screams of terror before throwing himself into quite possibly literally, the lion’s den.
“I would follow your friends, if I were you,” a voice snarled from behind him, making him jump several feet in the air, whirling around and throwing his fists up in the air. One of the scare actors stood there, looking quite pleased with themselves. Where the hell had they even come from?
“Fucking hell, you lot need bells or something,” Astarion complained. The clown raised an eyebrow at him and he threw his open hands up in surrender. “Fine, fine, I’m going.” He felt his eye twitching as he ducked into the cage, casting another wary glance over his shoulder at the clown standing there, before he entered the third room.
This room was set up, inexplicably, turned as a jungle, with a carnival game to his right, with various jungle animals moving across the board and flashing lights that threatened to give him a mighty headache if it didn't stop. Straight ahead on the opposite wall, there hung a portrait of someone dressed in the same clothes as the skeleton from the last room– presumably the ringmaster, if Astarion had to guess– proudly displayed on the wall, and on either side, cabinets with glass doors labeled “Extraplanar Curiosities Galore!” on a dilapidated sign over it. The room was too dark for Astarion to clearly see what the cabinets contained from this distance.
To his left, there was one of the psychics in a box that made shivers run up his spine as he locked eyes with the mannequin, a ghoulish looking woman with a red velvet hairband pulling wild white hair away from grayish green skin, emphasizing the large crooked hooked nose. The placard in front of her read “Let Auntie Ethel predict the future, petal!”. Astarion wasn’t entirely convinced that she wasn’t a scare actor wearing very good prosthetics and made sure to stay away from her.
Gale, Wyll, and Karlach had already begun searching around the room. He noticed that the two beanbags they had found previously were resting atop the carnival game. Clearly Karlach had learned her lesson about interacting with random objects after the prize wheel jumpscare. In any other escape room, she would have been gleefully hurling them at the moving targets on the other end.
Gale paused in his search when Astarion entered the room, walking over to him and reaching out a hand to squeeze it lightly. “You all right, love?”
Astarion nodded and leaned over to press a quick kiss to his boyfriend’s cheek, in part for reassurance and in part to ground himself. “Just had a bit of a scare back there but nothing I can’t handle. What are we looking at?” he asked, to take the attention off him.
“I’ve found more bean bags.” Karlach was the first to reply, holding up an additional two bags that joined the pile on the game. “That hag in the corner,” she jabbed a thumb over her shoulder at the psychic, “if you press the button, she tells you that the shelves will reveal the call of nature.”
“Call of nature…” Gale frowned, looking back at the flashing carnival game in the corner. “That must have something to do with the game. But the shelves….” He walked over to the back of the room, accompanied closely by Astarion. “Ah. Each of these have animals carved into them. Help me count them up, love.”
“Counting alligators and… is that a velociraptor?” Astarion asked, squinting at the gold pot in front of him.
He felt a warm presence behind him as Gale hooked his chin on Astarion’s shoulder to see what he was looking at. “That’s an alioramus. Related to the Tyrannosaurus rex , but smaller and less well known. You see the crest? That’s how you know.”
Astarion turned his head to look at Gale’s face. “How long have you been waiting to drop that piece of knowledge?” he laughed in amusement.
“I don’t know whatever you mean,” Gale responded in faux indignation. Astarion felt Gale’s head bump into his own briefly before the other man moved away. “Now, counting animals.”
After a minute or two, they came back together. “I counted five alligators,” he could see his boyfriend’s eye twitch even in the dim lighting and he had to stifle a laugh. “And eight of the dinosaurs on this shelf. And one elephant.”
“So we have seven crocodiles , nine dinosaurs, five elephants, and three panthers,” Gale replied. “Karlach, I need you to hit the animals in this order: panther, elephant, crocodile, and the alioramus!”
“What the fuck is an alioramus?” was Karlach’s confused response.
“The dinosaur,” Astarion replied, before Gale could get a word in.
“You got it!” With almost scary accuracy, Karlach managed to hit the animals in the correct order on the first try. As soon as the dinosaur went down, the lights flashed and there was rumbling around the room that made Astarion jump. A cackle from the psychic in the corner, followed by “the numbers shall reveal the way,” and a loud creak of the portrait swinging open. Behind it there was a safe, which Astarion assumed (and hoped) was the final puzzle.
“The numbers shall reveal the way…” Gale muttered to himself, looking around.
“I’ll go check the other room. There were still the symbols on the wall, correct?” Wyll asked, ever the level-headed strategist of the group. As soon as he ducked back through the door, he called out, “There’s a projection on the wall!”
That spurred Gale into action, springing across the room faster than Astarion had seen him since the time Tara had fallen off a bookshelf. “Sudoku!” he exclaimed. “With symbols!”
Astarion and Karlach looked at one another and shrugged, before joining their respective significant others. On the wall, there was now a grid projected around the symbols that they had seen previously, with some blank spaces highlighted.
“But how do we know which numbers are what? The safe uses Arabic numbers, not… whatever this is.” The script did look vaguely familiar, though, although Astarion couldn’t place it.
“Did you see anything to decode this?”
At Gale’s question, Astarion shook his head. “There might be something we missed though.”
“Well, I can solve the puzzle first using the symbols and then translate it.”
“That seems like a lot of effort,” Wyll said in response. “It makes more sense to find the translation and then solve it.”
Gale was developing the look of stubborn petulance on his face that Astarion was very familiar with, so he cut in with, “While I have the utmost faith that you could do this, darling. It might behoove us to try to save as much time as we can. We are racing against the clock after all.”
The betrayal in Gale’s eyes almost made Astarion backtrack, but then Karlach very conveniently yelled out that she had found the translation in the other room, on the other side of the painting. After a moment, she returned back with a piece of paper, which she thrust at Gale. “Have at it, boy genius.”
As Gale and Wyll worked on the puzzle, Astarion and Karlach retreated to the other room, nearest the portrait (and away from both the still flashing carnival game and the creepy psychic in the corner), ready to punch in the code.
“So when are you going to make our Gale an honest man?” Karlach asked, almost casually.
Astarion choked on his own spittle at that, dissolving into a coughing fit that made Karlach look alarmed and begin hitting him on the back. “What the fuck , Karlach?” he managed to gasp out.
She looked only slightly apologetic. “It’s been four… five years now, right? About time for someone to pop the question.”
Astarion frowned, staring off into space. “I…” With his history, he wasn’t entirely sure if he had ever thought about marriage. The idea was not completely repulsive to him though. Not with Gale. “We’ve never talked about it before.” Then, his eyes narrowed as he turned to his friend. “Speaking of, what about you and Wyll?” They had been together almost as long as Astarion and Gale had been.
To his absolute delight, there was a dark blush that spread across Karlach’s cheeks. “The ring’s being made now, but if you tell him, I will end you, Fangs, got it?”
Astarion held up a hand. “Scout’s honor, the future Mr. Cliffgate will hear of no such plans from me.” He was pleased for them though, genuinely. “He’ll say yes, Karlach. He’d be mad not to.” And as an afterthought, “And if he does temporarily lose his mind and say no, I’ll dump Gale and run away with you and we can live in hedonistic debauchery, doing whatever we want across the world.”
She laughed. “I’ll hold you to that.”
“How long do you think it’ll take them to solve the puzzle?” Astarion asked, turning to eye the clock on the monitor. It was ticking down, nearing twelve minutes left.
“Depends on how helpful Wyll tries to be.”
“Speak of the devil,” Astarion remarked, as Wyll returned from the other room, a chagrined look on his face. “Gale kicked you out, I see.”
Wyll rolled his eyes good-naturedly. “Your boyfriend never learned to share, did he?” he grumbled out, joining their circle in front of the safe. “He’s mostly mad that I talked him out of using the symbols to solve the puzzle, rather than translating them to the numbers. A real stubborn one, he is.”
“You act as if you’re surprised, love,” Karlach remarked. “We’ve done enough escape rooms together to know how Gale gets.”
Astarion shook his head fondly. “He’ll be back in a few minutes. Shall we pick a place for dinner?”
On cue, all three pulled out their phones and they began comparing options nearly. Astarion couldn’t help but glance at Wyll out of the corner of his eye, wondering if he had any idea of what Karlach was planning. The two of them had a rocky start, almost Romeo and Juliet-esque, if Astarion had to describe it, with Wyll being the son of a prominent politician and Karlach working for the opposing party, but now, they were living together happily, having adopted a stray dog named Scratch.
He couldn’t help but think about Gale and Karlach’s question. What sort of ring would he get Gale? What would their wedding look like? Such questions had never been on Astarion’s mind, preoccupied as he was with merely surviving. The image of sitting down with Morena to choose flowers and suits and having Tara walk down the aisle as a cat ring-bearer made his chest clench in yearning.
Then, Gale dashed back into the room towards them, holding the notepad in his hand. “The code is 58149.”
It took Astarion a moment to register what he was talking about, but by the time he turned around, Karlach had already punched in the code and opening the safe. There was a keycard in the middle, which she snapped up and barreled through them to slam down on the reader by the door.
Ominous laughter, several different voices layering upon one another, as fog filled the room and for a brief moment, Astarion thought that they had messed up somehow. But then, the door creaked open and there was a triumphant noise from the loudspeaker.
“Congratulations, you’ve successfully escaped the Circus of the Last Days!” A silhouette appeared in the open doorway, revealed to be their game master as the fog cleared.
“Thank fuck,” Astarion muttered, heading towards the hallway, blinking as his eyes adjusted to the much brighter environment.
Gale followed him, already raving about the room and the puzzles and asking all sorts of questions pertaining to how easily others had escaped the room to the suddenly overwhelmed game master.
“Darling, remember to breathe,” Astarion said, hooking his arm with Gale’s. “You’re the best, we all know this.” Wyll chuckled from behind them. Gale’s competitive streak had taken them all by surprise during their first escape room years ago, but they were all used to it by now.
“Would you like a picture?” the game master asked, as they entered the lobby. “We have the signs there.”
Karlach immediately walked over to start rifling through the signs, pulling them out to hand to people. Astarion was given the ‘ I was the pretty one!’ sign. “Thanks, doll,” he said dryly, but held it up anyways, next to Gale wielding one proclaiming him the ‘ Escape Room King’.
“Hey, at least you’re pretty,” she shot back. Wyll was handed a sign that said ‘ No Room Can Hold Us!’ while she took the one that said ‘ I just like holding signs ”.
As the camera light flashed and Gale’s arm was around his waist, pulling him in closer, Astarion found himself suddenly overcome with contentment at being surrounded by those he loved and those who loved him.