And my, but wasn’t it a rough trip.
13.8K words. …Jeeze.
The skelecrab was slow, but wasn’t fooling around; chips of stone, dirt, and bone went flying when one of its pincers landed. “Can you throw a fireball at it?” Le yelled as they dragged Bigwave to something resembling safety.
“Never use fireballs underground!” I yelled back as I tried using an arcane tail of force to smack bits off. “There’s never enough room!”
“Earthquake?”
“Didn’t you hear him? We’re underground!” Jim bellowed. He was taking the pragmatic approach of going after joints, on the sound principle that making the skelecrab pick up bits of itself was a net benefit for the fight.
“Mudslide?”
“Again, underground — no, wait, that’d work,” I admitted as I dived for cover, a giant pincher swinging just above my infinitely precious scales. “If I knew that spell.”
Trying to finish this up today, so I can go do movie (I want to see what my wife thinks of BARBIE), beers, and game.
“Yeah, well, it’s not my first time dealing with a possession,” I said while trying not to look at the runes. They were written in the kind of alphabet that looks back at you. “The body language is all wrong, you’ve got a different accent now, and Bigwave doesn’t have enough magic to command skeleton squads. You a spirit?”
“Nay. Nor am I what the heathen call a ‘soul.’ Liken me to one of the fabled deveeds of the Before Times; memories, written in stone and poured out into this vessel. I am this Bigwave of yours, and yet not.”
Great. He’s a talker. That was mixed news: talkers take forever to get to the plan, and they tell you everything before they do — but they take forever, tell you everything, etc. etc. etc. I was also trying not to judge the mind-parasite or whatever for the mixed metaphors. From his accent, Old American wasn’t his birth-speech any more than it was mine.
Waking up!
Speaking of stuff from my line of work, there’s a protocol for waking up from being knocked unconscious. First you look at your feet, and see what you’re on top of. Second, you look around, and see where ‘here’ is. Third, you look carefully, and see who’s watching you. There’s always somebody. So, when I staggered to my feet and wiped my eyes, I could see that I was smack dab in the center of the obligatory ‘circle of green-yellow glowing runes,’ so I wasn’t by any means safe. I was just dealing with somebody who was a talker.
My second look told me I was in a high-ceilinged cave with more green-yellow torches, an underground stream flowing through the middle — and an altar that hurt to look at directly. Fresh air was coming from somewhere, so we weren’t too far from the surface. Stuff was definitely growing around here, too. That gave me at least a good idea of in which direction to run.
My third look? That’s when I started counting the collection of walking skeletons surrounding the circle (none close enough to touch). I do mean collection, too: there were six of them, and no two skeletons had the same number and type of bones. It’s not my field, but I recognized human, cow, pig, and wolf bones in the mix, like they had been made with whatever was still in the storage bins after the real skeletons had been put together. That didn’t make any happier, though. “Skeletons,” I muttered. “Why did it have to be skeletons?”
Gonna work more on this today, but it’s moving along now.
“You think that charm he’s got is letting him through?” Jim ground out through gritted teeth as he pushed back on a descending saw, its spinning blades inches from his head. Halflings are stronger than they look, thank Yig. “And how is this thing even working?”
“Magic,” I huffed back (I was holding back the other saw, you see). “Best maintenance program there is, right up to the second the spells go sour and suddenly you’ve got saw-monsters. Ev, how’s it going?”
“Just about ready. When I say shove, shove. Put your backs into it.”
“You’re joking.”
“I’m not.” I professionally respected the amusement in her voice, while personally objecting to it. She wasn’t the one with the shaft of a metal and wood deathtrap pushing against her shoulders. “We need space for the wedges. So… shove.”
Traps!
Magic’s funny. One second, I couldn’t see the pale, writhing strips of dark light swaying in the breezeless hallway in front of us; the next second, I could. That wasn’t the weird part. What was hurting my brain was how I now knew those strips had always been there, and I could remember the way we brushed them aside casually. I didn’t even have an urge to do the same now. It was just something that I would do, as a matter of course…
I assume the trap would have worked if I was an actual human. It might have trapped an elf or dwarf, too. But since I was instead just wearing a human skin, I managed to recognize the compulsion in time, stopping my hand from moving with just a small amount of visible trembling. “Don’t touch anything!” I human-hissed. “Hands in pockets.”
“Screw you,” Jim growled, rough enough for me to take a look. All three halflings looked weirdly pissed, but they still had their hands shoved in their jacket pockets. Good enough.
Iterations!
Thus warned, I gave a look down the hall. “I don’t see what you’re seeing, Captain. I’m going to carefully move up. Is it safe?” Bigwave nodded, so I came forward.
“All right, Captain. First things first.” I handed him a towel, after tossing another glowball at the ceiling. “Cover the artifact, block the light. Can you still see whatever it is?”
“No,” he replied. “It winked out when I covered the tracker.”
“Right. Next thing. Do you feel confused, dizzy, nauseous, or feverish? Any odd tastes in your mouth, or buzzing in your ears? A sudden feeling of crushing weight?”
“I know the side-effects of mind-warping spells, Doctor Jones,” Bigwave said peevishly, then grimaced. “I’m sorry. You have to ask that.”
A door!
“Keep going. Be ready for anything.” Behind him, Jim rolled his eyes. “Is the door trapped?”
Le looked up. “It’s not even locked. Nothing’s showing as magical, either. Just preservation spells against rust and warping.”
“So, use the door?” I asked her.
“Use the door. You’re going through first?”
“Somebody has to.” I was already moving, my digging tool in hand; when you decide to open the door, you don’t shilly-shally about it. It simply doesn’t help. If you’re not ready, don’t open the damn door until you are. There! Free life lesson from an Adventurer. A lot of people died in the making of it. You’re welcome.
Post-apocalyptic definitions of ‘value!’
We did take it slow as we checked every other room at ground level, which yielded nothing of interest to Bigwave and only mild interest to me and the halflings. The inhabitants had a taste for unadorned gold bracelets and rings, with the occasional piece of aluminum jewelry for lucrative variety. I let Jim act as bagman for those, since it’d all get sold by the pound anyway.
“Weird how they all got scattered across the floor,” he mentioned as I checked for secret passages and/or cubbyholes. There weren’t any, and I didn’t expect any, but you have to check. “Nothing’s in a desk drawer or bag.”
“Well, there aren’t any desks,” I pointed out. “All the furniture’s been rotted down to mush.” Still, Jim had a point. People don’t just leave jewelry out where anybody could grab some. If they were stored away, some of them would have been mixed in with the rotten wood and hunks of rust. Also, why were they even on the floor to begin with? Did somebody run in, randomly empty a bag of jewelry onto the floor, and run out again?
Cultural chauvinism!
“One, at least. Maybe two. See these murals?” I was using a stick the point out details, because this close there was just the faintest whiff of evil coming from the walls. “It’s Second Age work, like the rest of the temple, but it’s using pre-Discovery religious iconography. Like, really old pre-Discovery. More than fifteen hundred years old.”
It took Bigwave a moment to work it out. “Fifteen hundred? Isn’t that from when the ancestors of the Old Americans showed up?”
“Yeah. This is stuff from the indigenous religions. They were a mixed bag, but the ones in this part of the continent? They didn’t always play nice.”
