The moon shone down on the metal wall, as did a sky bursting with stars. The village walls gleamed silver before him. Corvayne had not been expecting to see his home ever again. It was so unexpected and unpleasant that he wanted to just turn and walk away. It was a different kind of terrible to actually dying or waking up alone convinced everyone you cared about was dead.
Corvayne looked away from the front of his village to make sure he wasn't alone in some sort of dream as well as to try to come up with some way to explain the dread he had about exposing them to the whims of The Watchers. Wick was beside him now, tugging his sleeve.
“You okay? You look like you've seen a ghost, I mean, one you couldn't kill effortlessly.” Her concerned tone snapped him out of his daze.
“I'm fine Wick. But be ready... this looks like my village. If this is just a floor based on it, we might have to walk a long way across a desert full of vicious monsters. Or face down things like my old masters.”
Lady Blood Claw strode past him, her skin turning some shade that made it look pitch black under the blue moon. She sounded agitated as she asked over her shoulder. “Corvayne, where is the Magus?”
He picked up his pace, calling after her. “Slow down! You'll die if they think you're hostile. For better or for worse let me lead, they at least know me so they won't blow my head off before I can talk.” He said with less confidence than he actually projected. He looked back. Grunt had a determined look on his face. Nyxion was rolling his eyes and gesturing him to get on with it. Seru was not paying full attention, looking back at the stone marker that was rising out of the road at the stairway back down. He looked over and saw the road back looked as familiar as the town ahead of him.
Mister I was looking around, but met Corvayne's stare with a look of concern. “It looks very real, save that stairway. How safe do you think we will be if it's drawing from your memories?”
“If it's my memories? It would honestly look worse.” Corvayne took a deep breath. He felt Wick take his hand. She squeezed it.
“If you don't want to do this, we can find a different floor.” She said quietly. She then looked down at their hands and in a panic yanked hers back. “Urf.” She held up a hand. “Sorry... It's my own damn fault this time.”
Lady Blood Claw was already halfway to the gate, so Corvayne jogged to catch up to her. He heard Seru behind him asking Mister I if it would be wrong to maybe take one goblin with them. He wasn't paying full attention as he scanned the moon lit dunes all around him. If this was based on his town, there were any number of monsters who would pose a real threat to the group should they be lurking in the sands, or have found their way into the village.
The monk laughed. “Oh miss Seru, I think you will have your fill of amiable goblins sooner than you think. But I would advise you not to use my friend Mosh as a seat. The results might be a disaster for BOTH you.”
Corvayne smiled at her voice squeaking a little with outrage. “I nearly died!”
The monk behind him took a sanctimonious tone. “And it was a team effort to keep you alive. Looking at it through the lens of mirth I feel is better than a pointless lecture on getting blindsided.”
Corvayne looked back at the village but heard Seru say. “Fine uncle-I. It's a very funny joke. Ha Ha. The goblin would get hurt too. Except, I am VERY in shape.”
“Ah! Your sense of humor as well as your temper are making a suspended recovery I see!”
Lady Blood Claw had only slowed enough to let Corvayne catch up as she walked to the gate.
Corvayne started talking as he tried to keep up with the alien woman. “Look, they don't like me. This is going to go really poorly I know already, and all the villagers are stronger than me...”
LBC didn't turn, her silver hair bobbing as she kept walking forward. “If the Magus is here, I need to see him. I want to know why he picked me, changed me, and threw me away. If I have to beat every villager here in combat to do so...”
Corvayne tried to get ahead of her. “No no no. I'd put them all on even footing with that guy with the staff who smoked us. I'm not ready to take them on myself, truth be told.”
Lady Blood Claw stopped. Her skin flickered between dark colors. “I realize... I'm not considering you what you want. Corvayne, I want to ask you to muster your courage....”
They didn't have much of a chance for any mustering. Grunt surged forward, leaving the two of them in his dust.
Wick was calling after him. “Grunt what the hell! Stick together people!”
The big man slowed as he stepped into the gate and looked about, then gestured for everyone to follow him. Corvayne didn't even notice he had been leaning against Lady Blood Claw. He stood up straight, and looked over at the tall woman. “Sorry about that... being back I'm feeling off balance.”
Lady Blood Claw was hard to read, but she seemed to make an effort to soften the glare she had been wearing. “Corvayne, we both have people in there who owe us answers for our past.” She offered a fist and he smiled and bumped it as she continued. “This time you are not alone, no matter what happens in there.”
Wick had run up next to him. “Yeah, I'll give them a damn piece of my mind about you! Those bitches especially!”
Feeling more confident from his sparring partner and lover standing at his side, Corvayne crossed the village boundary again, then was struck by how dark it was. No signs of people. Open doors, black empty windows. Even at night there should have been lights, patrols, people who lived and worked at night visible as lone figures or pairs. The oasis was there, but buildings were shuffled from what he remembered. A mix of relief and disappointment swept into him. This wasn't his village, which meant both avoiding the confrontation he had been fearing, but also missing a confrontation that he had tried to tell himself he didn't need.
“It's okay, I don't think this is really my village. It looks like it, and I see the eye sigil the Watchers used in their designs... but the streets are wrong. Like... my house isn't here. It's like a memory of a different village. See, I see my dad's house, the elder's place, but it wasn't around the oasis. It was back there by the wall.”
Wick of course ran forward as soon as he said this.
“Wait! Check for monsters!” He called out as his mind painted the image of a dune-lurker and a sand-reaver and a coiled up cobra-wurm all waiting for her to open the wrong door.
He followed her into his darkened and empty kitchen. It was odd, the details of some houses were designs he had never seen, or weird color patterns that didn't match anything he could remember, yet his kitchen was rendered perfectly. Wick was waiting for him, grinning.
“You said you lived in... was it the closet under the stairs, no! Attic!” Wick started running up the stairs.
“Wick stop! We don't know if there's monsters!” He ran after her, hearing her laugh as she started opening doors on the third floor until she found the smallest room. He stepped into his old room. It looked like how he had left it. It wasn't in the right place, but it had the makeshift bar across the door and a window with a field generator along the bottom. It was off, letting cool night air flow into the room.
She had sat on the bed, but Corvayne just folded his arms.
“You afraid your dads going to find us?” She wiggled her eyebrows at him while pulling her robe off her shoulders, revealing the straps of her tank top and bra.
“I'm not going to taint my good memories of you with the bad ones from this room.” He did step in and look around. He opened the small closet out of curiosity. Nothing in there. His other thought had him crouch and reach under the bed. He smiled as he closed his hands around the rough fabric of a spare cloak.
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“Did you want one of these?” He offered it to Wick.
She showed off her blue robe she was wearing. “I like these robes, even if I need to wash them... you really don't want to break in your bed? Pretend I'm one of the girls you didn't like?”
He felt sick at the very idea, and was about to get angry when he saw she had pulled her glasses up and was smiling at him. She made the room better than it was. “I really appreciate the offer and I always want you, but we got a bunch of people with us. And Lady Blood Claw is...”
“Here.” She strode in and looked around. “I take it this isn't where the Magus is?” She looked at the cloak in Corvayne's hand, then at Wick with her glasses up. Wick gave her the same eyebrows motion she had given Corvayne.
“Want a spare?” He offered the cloak to Lady Blood Claw and she didn't hesitate a moment to take it and throw it on.
“As always you keep things very weird.” She said with a hint of amusement in her tone. Corvayne watched bright greens and blues and yellows form bands across her skin as she pulled her hair up through the collar of the cloak and shook it.
He offered a hand to Wick then lifted her off his bed. “We'll gather every one then go see if the Magus is here. I doubt it, I think this is just a reflection of my old home. A pretty good one, as it's missing the second moon that Cascadia has.”
Lady Blood Claw stepped aside and they walked back downstairs and out to the Oasis. Grunt was standing on the end of the dock scouting, Nyxion was examining the mosaic on a nearby home, a strange perversion of the usual crow or eye motifs the watchers sometimes used to represent themselves. It was of two crows fighting each-other. He saw Mister I crouching by some reeds, pulling out a flashlight to shine it into the water. Seru was standing pretty close to the middle of the group, taking a few pictures with her phone.
“Hey.” He called out. His face flushed, as it felt wrong for him to speak out in the open in the village at all. When was the last time he had wanted someone to see him standing in front of the water of the Oasis? “This place resembles my old village, but some of the details and buildings are off. I don't think it's a memory thing, I've only been gone about a month and a half by my personal time-table. I don't know if we've hit some sort of free floor, but I think our goal is to find the stairway up rather than linger and soak up the atmosphere. That said, I'm going to throw a bone to Lady Blood Claw and show her to the place where the Magus was before we do anything else.”
Wick raised her hand. “First let's go to the workshop of Space-Rent-Anew... I mean, I assume he isn't home but maybe you could borrow something useful from him?”
“Spaces-Torn-Asunder you mean? I suppose... Oh yes!” Everyone looked at him shocked. Whatever! He remembered something he'd wanted from the shop. “It's this way if it's like how I recall!” He started walking quickly to the industrial row, only slowing to make sure everyone was following him.
The roads were a little different, and he found that there were extra branches. The rock circle around the oasis seemed larger and added entire roads he didn't recognize between ones he knew well. On an entirely odd looking road he spotted the library standing exactly as it was the day he left. There were enough land marks close to where he remembered them that he found the workshop after a little wandering. The entire time he walked he had hoped to reach some sort of catharsis by strolling through the empty town, but instead he just felt the urge to leave again. Whatever change he wanted, it would have to wait for when he faced the other Watchers. If that ever came to pass.
He knocked on the door to the workshop in case someone was hidden inside, but the dark windows didn't change after thirty seconds, so he pushed the door open then flipped the lights on, bathing the entire shop in florescence. He saw the same four tables he had worked at, as well as most of the machines used to fix parts placed off on the far side of the workshop. Three tables were kept open and the fourth was where unfinished projects and parts were placed. It was a compromise that Spaces allowed himself for tinkering balanced against having enough room to do something like properly take an engine apart and put back together again.
Corvayne's pack was close to full, but he crouched by a drawer and pulled out the two angular batteries there, as well as a bread-loaf sized warp drive. He stuffed the drive and a battery into his pack, then offered the other to Wick.
“What is this?” She opened her hands to accept it.
“Battery pack for either a hover-cycle or a hover-truck. It actually might be more accurate to call it a tiny power plant.” He dropped it into her hands then crouched by a different cabinet and rubbed his hands. Please be there. He'd been thinking about them for on and off a week, with the plasma battery he found on floor 6 making him anticipate finding the real deal. He closed his eyes, open the door, looked with a single open eye, He couldn't help but grin evilly as he pulled out two fusion batteries. Grunt had followed them into the shop, the big man looking around and smiling as he accepted the batteries Corvayne handed him. “Nuclear batteries.”
Grunt's smile faded a little as he looked at the two black boxes with leads in his hands.
Wick held up a hand then pointed at Grunt, who had some sort of epiphany then started grinning again. “Wait a second. Those are nuclear?”
“That's mostly why they are so heavy. The batteries are basically doubled up optimized shield belts. You'd have to hit them with a direct rail cannon shot to break the outer shield that protects the inner shield. Then hit it again to make it pop. It's how you make really small nuclear weapons with controlled detonation for warfare.”
“Yeah, but what happens then?” She had put her other battery away and was pointing now at the two Grunt was holding.
“Oh. Depends on how much juice the battery has. Really good ones you could vaporize a city block. The container makes the reaction efficient. These are about one fourth of the charge.” He tried not to think about how much energy the first two batteries he looted actually made, nor what would happen if the nearly indestructible material they were forged from failed.
He met Wick's eyes and gave her a sly smile. “I also know another way to break the containment.”
“What, is it some sort of special attack you have? Why would you WANT to do that?” Wick took a step back from him, then thought about it herself. Corvayne might love his spear, but when it wasn't enough he had been trained to think outside the box. Grunt seemed to have got what he had in store for the batteries. Wick figured it out too. “Okay. But how would you even set that up so it's not hitting you as well?”
Corvayne frowned. “That's why I was going to ask you about setting up a trap... let's not get too far ahead of ourselves. Magus stuff next.” He looked past the workshop door where LBC was folding her arms and nodded to her.
As with many things in the village, the Magus's giant stone was in the wrong spot having shifted from north of town to south of it. The tower otherwise had been recreated faithfully, down to the odd glass-work clinging to it. The usual field around the base was down so Corvayne walked right in. The stonework outside was the same, but on the inside Wick's flashlight lit up scenes of battles, huge buildings being built, carvings of spaceships burning, and a man with a broken crown, sitting on a throne, face in hands. The last scene, carved above the door into the Magus's chamber and in a more yellow color of stone, was the same man on the throne and seven warriors walking away, arranged in a semi-circle.
He stopped. There were lots of carvings of monsters up and down the tunnel, but he was pretty sure he had seen the blob with a spear before. There was also a dwarf-looking figure who might have been Mugs-Empty-Again given the axe. He saw someone with tentacles next to them, then a spiked golem with a horn on it's forehead with a huge sword, then a slim figure in an apron he was pretty sure was Spaces-Torn-Asunder. The second to last figure was a then a figure with horns, and the last was a hooded figure, carrying a book.
Seru took a picture. “That looks like the kinda stuff they put up at my church! Well, they would all be stealing gems out of a big statue rather than running away.”
Corvayne pointed at the figures. “One of them looks like my axe trainer. He's second to the left. The figure to the middle of the right is Spaces-Torn-Asunder.”
Wick squinted at the stone image. “It looks so old. Why the stone carving? I guess it's a tower thing?”
“It might have be that it picked something up from me, and this floor is pulling things from my subconscious. I had a weird dream where I saw that weird thing on the far left.” He was trying to remember what else happened. He had one where he was greeting a dragon... he pushed his head up and continued down into the Magus's chamber. Next time, write everything down.
The interior of the Magus's cave was different too. It was empty of anything aside from a single recliner, surrounded by piles of those weird cylinders the man had been carving. All of them looked scorched or melted. No signs of anything else. Nor the Magus.
Lady Blood Claw crouched and picked up a slightly melted carving. “He was here... a long time.”
“Be careful. The same tower also makes floors that are needles with ski lifts. I'd take this all with a grain of salt.” Corvayne bent and picked up a figure as well. They looked machined with how well made they were.
“Do you know what these are?” She held the little stone object up she had picked up and shook it.
“No clue. I just saw him making one in his chair when I walked in on him.” Corvayne caught LBC's eyes. The tall alien woman frowned, her skin settling into an olive green color.
“They are magical amplifiers. This many fed into a spell would be cataclysmic.” She dropped the blackened object back to the ground. The clacking of it settling into the pile matched Seru taking a picture.
Corvayne could see there was more cave down, and so he started walking to the stairs down into the cave. He could see more and more layers with water flowing into a stream that went deeper and deeper, but the first layer of the cave had a stairway up.
Lady Blood Claw stood by the path deeper under the rock. “I want to see where it goes, first.”
Corvayne nodded. He looked back at the group. Wick shrugged. “We are well rested, and I wonder if what's down there is the point of this place.”
Mister I was looking all around. “There also may be natural treasures in such a cave...”
Nyxion rubbed his hands. “Or just treasures. This is that insanely powerful wizard you worked for, right Lady?”
Grunt shook his head, looking down. He looked at Corvayne, and mimed taking a watch off and throwing it behind his shoulder: Waste of time I bet.
Seru prodded Corvayne's side. “Yeah, if it goes down for more than what, fifteen minutes or starts branching like crazy, we just come back, right? Same for monsters. Right?” She looked for any sort of agreement from the group. “Right guys?”
Taking the first step down chilled Corvayne's exposed arms and made his eye itch. He tried to not let it distract him: The wild looking cave and it's melted wax appearance with stalactites and stalagmites everywhere could hide any number of creatures. Each sub floor wasn't very large, mostly just a ledge with the underground stream running through it, and slightly curving to the next stair down to a ledge.
He counted sixteen sets of steps down before he was standing in front of a vast underground lake lit up in cloudy blue colors from below. The calm water was neat looking, but the walls of the cave cut the section they were in off. There was nowhere else to explore unless someone wanted to swim across slightly glowing waters or dive into the lake. There were a few objects strew about the chamber. He saw empty supply crates, a bedroll, and dried up painting supplies as well as several canvases. Each was attempting to paint a woman wearing a blue robe with clouds on it, sitting in a garden or a room with ornate shaped wood. Around her neck was a brass necklace with silver storm cloud and lightning bolt symbo Something about the woman's face, looking both amused and annoyed, struck Corvayne and made him stare.
“Dead end?” Wick looked past the pictures at the lake. She then looked at the picture. “Is this a Watcher?”
“None I know of... at least they didn't usually dress in robes like these. It would be stifling hot in the desert. If she was painted angrier... I might recognize who it was.” He tapped his chin, and tried to find some detail in the picture, a hint of why it was striking him.
Wick took a picture, then pulled on her own blue robe. “I could probably pose like her... maybe with less on under my robe?” She nudged Corvayne.
Corvayne shook his head. “I'd like that, but that's not the mood I get out of this painting.”
Wick frowned. “So did the Magus paint it?”
Lady Blood Claw looked and shook her head. “Not a chance. He thought making art was too boring, and he'd not try the same painting twice to get it right unless there was something in it for him.”
Corvayne kept looking at the painting. Was it something a Watcher knew about? Looking at it, he felt his thoughts clouding. He blinked his eyes. “If we come back, I might take one of them with me next time...” Turning away from it, he felt himself waking back up. Maybe he'd skip messing with the image if was messing with him. LBC had mentioned the Magus cursed people. Why not a painting too?
“Come on, let's trek back up and get out of here.” Corvayne watched as Nyxion, last down, huff and turn and start walking up.
Lady Blood Claw sighed as she looked at the lake. “A disappointing dead end to a disappointing trip into town.”
Corvayne shrugged. “It wasn't all bad. I didn't see anyone I knew.”