evil wizards are so annoying. See, faculty told me I had to evict an evil wizard from one of the outer towers again - honestly I'd ask why they can't do something with those towers instead of just leaving them vacant and letting evil wizards take roost in there like migratory birds, but I'm not paid to ask tricky questions - and as usual I'm pretty overleveled for it but I invite my buddy Exa along anyway. Never a good idea go to adventuring alone.
We get in there and it's got all the standard evil wizard tower defences: y'know, big spider, eldritch tentacle pit, bucket of evil liquid suspended over doorframe, that kinda thing. Exa dodges out of the way of a Beam That Makes You Regret Your Major Life Decisions - they're really popular these days and I'm amazed the wizard council hasn't banned them - and they dodge right into me, I trip, and I activate a teleportation rune. My fault honestly, this is why you shouldn't stand too close to your party. The rune sends us to this rinky-dink escape room (what is it with evil wizards and escape rooms?) and the evil wizard entomes at us over the PA: "for each year you spend in this room, you will find yourself magically one minute older!". Ok, magical voice-throwing spell, not "PA", same thing.
Of course it doesn't matter cause we're out of there in like five minutes: Exa is really good at puzzles and I'm really good at quietly bashing padlocks open while pretending to be just guessing the numbers. I know, even mundane escape rooms these days have worked out how to use electronics and such to provide a more immersive experience, it's a bit ridiculous that he put everything behind padlocks. Anyway when we finally get to the top floor of the tower we don't even really get to fight the guy because he, apparently, spent all his mana activating the Escape Room That Makes You Old. We also learn that he didn't misspeak when he said we'd age one minute for every year in the room, he just accidentally cast the spell with the wrong polarity and hoped we wouldn't notice. And he didn't even lie about it because the evil wizard moral code forbids lying. Honestly. At least we got to keep his big spider, and it looks a lot healthier now than it did in that gloomy tower.
Oh, no, all the towers here are built to code. Normally plenty of natural light; he just blocked out the windows. Typical evil wizard behaviour.
