To most travelers, a spooky abandoned castle off the side of a long-forgotten road was a clear warning sign to stay far away. However, the duo of Belnades and Belmont saw such a foreboding place as an opportunity to gain knowledge and to embark on yet another adventure!

    At least, one of them thought that.

    "Are you done with your shopping trip yet?" Trevor moaned. He and Sypha had been looking through one particular room of the castle for hours at this point, and while the whip wielding hero had grown tired of trinkets after about half an hour, his magician companion was only about halfway done combing through the arcane treasure trove.

    "Shopping?" Sypha was clearly unamused, "If you knew anything more about that whip of yours than how to swing it, you'd realize that there's all sorts of amazing magical artifacts in this room! Quite the sorcerer must have lived here before we arrived!"

    Trevor gave the bits and bobs strewn throughout the place a halfhearted glance. "Well, just knowing how to swing it has gotten me this far." 

    "Ah, the life of a simpleton," Sypha teased, "I suppose being able to wave a big string around is more interesting to some people than being able to shoot jets of fire out of your hands, or the ability to instantly freeze the air around you, or to be able to harness the power of lightning in your fingertips."

    "...It's definitely a lot more than a string..." 

    Sypha gave Trevor a chuckle. "If you're really that bored you can always go back to the cart and keep the horses company."

    "Since whoever used to own this place hasn't jumped out at us yet, I think I'll take you up on that. Maybe even get a nice long nap in for once without your tossing and turning..." Trevor continued to mumble to himself as he exited the room, leaving Sypha to explore the horde uninhibited.

    Looking through the scattered belongings made Sypha feel like a kid in a candy store. She was vaguely familiar with many of the objects in the room from her time studying magic as a Speaker, but there were still many others she had no idea about. After a bit more rifling, she decided to check out some writing that was scribbled onto a nearby wall.

    "Hmm... Looks like some sort of telekinesis spell," she mused to herself, "but for moving a specific part of the castle. Oooooh, maybe it's some sort of secret passageway where this guy was hiding his really interesting magical items!"

    Feeling the familiar tingle of adventure, Sypha threw caution to the wind and recited the spell on the wall, clapping her hands together to finalize it without even thinking about it. Instantly, she heard the grinding sound of stone moving against stone. After a moment of self-congratulations, she turned to see what was changing.

    "Heh heh, Sypha you are too goo- eep!" Sypha's brief sense of victory was interrupted by a huge slab of stone coming to meet her face to face.

    Squelch!

    THUM!

    Sypha was able to open a hidden door in the room. However, what she didn't anticipate was that the door would swing open right next to her, and that she would be standing right in the way of the magically moving hunk of stone.

    Before she could even process what happened, Sypha felt an unbelievable weight pressing against her entire being. An extreme tightness fully engulfed her as she felt every bit of her body squeezed way more tightly than she ever even imagined was possible. Surprisingly, this wasn't really all that painful, though it was quite uncomfortable to be pressed so tightly. With her vision being blocked by the slab in front of her, she could only really focus on the tactile intensity of the compression. And, as she pondered what exactly just happened, she came to the utterly baffling realization that it felt like she only had two sides of her body.

    Luckily for her, she didn't have to wait long before the pressure of the hidden door was removed. As the dim light of the room once again filled her vision, she couldn't help but notice the pressure was only slightly relieved. And that she couldn't seem to move any part of her body but her eyes. And that, now that half of her felt the cool stone of the wall and the other half felt the open air of the room, she really felt like she had two sides. Her eyes darted around the room for a bit, until they settled on a mirror placed along a nearby wall that was conveniently positioned so that she could catch a glimpse of her self.

    "Am... Am I looking at what I think I'm looking at?" She thought to herself. What she was looking at was a flat image of herself mid-flinch stuck to the wall, so thin as to be completely flush with it. What she wasn't expecting was that what appeared to be a wall decoration in her likeness was moving its eyes in the same way she was. A few more seconds of cognitive dissonance and she realized that she had somehow been smashed completely flat!

    One part of Sypha's mind was telling her that being reduced to a 2-dimensional object was impossible, another part was theorizing how some sort of magic might have made her body more malleable than usual, and another part was just desperately trying to move. She had been flattened at the moment when she saw the part of the wall come at her, leaving her hands slightly raised in the first few moments of a defensive posture. Aside from her eyes, her face was stuck in an overexaggerated grimace of unpleasant shock. In a different situation she probably would have found the sight of herself funny, but only being able to twitch with an oppressive tightness across her dampened her sense of humor.

    She struggled for a while longer, but found that the unexpected door had pressed her into the wall way too thoroughly for her paper-thin body to resist. She pouted to herself as she gazed helplessly at all the mystical stuff she could be studying if she weren't uncomfortably smushed against the wall.

    "Shit... Well, at least I'm alive and ok... I think." Sypha attempted to reassure herself, "I guess I have to wait for my knight in musty, worn out old armor to come save me from the castle. Ugh, I can't believe I'm just helpless and waiting for him to save me!" Sypha sighed to herself. "Then again, having a big strong man like him coming to save me isn't all bad..."

    Sypha wasn't normally the type to give in to such fantasies, but something about how sensitive her ultra-thin body was made the thought... enticing. The more she thought about it, the more her flattened form tingled with excitement.

    Looking back at her reflection, Sypha noticed her flattened face was getting redder by the second. "Good thing I have lots to think about while I wait!"