A new dungeon prompted a meeting, as the group needed to decide if they were going to go up the stairs the paintings had lead them to, or if they wanted to regroup. So they stood around an empty living room and started hashing it out.
Corvayne stepped forward. “I say no. Not until we make sure Hari and Mosh are safe. I wanna make sure Grunt gets home, too. I also want some time to talk over some of the stuff that happened in the tower. Finally, I think we need to fight that monk.”
Nyxion laughed, flapping his cape a little. “We need the resources in the tower even if we turn around and fight. You and Wick and Mister I are richly adorned. I've got what, a belt? Also, if the man has some way to track us, we've lead him right to our way out haven't we? Better to move fast and lose ourselves in this other realm, come back when we can actually win a fight. Unless you value the elf and booger more then all our lives?”
Corvayne narrowed his eyes. “I do value Hari and Mosh. A great deal.”
“And you mentioned the monk pushed a clone of himself into the gate into the forest tower, right?” Nyxion folded his arms. “Going to talk to them will doom them if we run into the monk on even ground. If they know the monk is dangerous, then perhaps Mosh and Hari will rightly avoid getting into a fight in the first place. We don't know the first thing about our enemy, except that he exists and he's aware of you three.”
Corvayne sighed. Nyxion had a point. They needed more info. “Can you learn who he is?”
“I have a theory, but I'd like to do a little probing.” Nyxion sounded guarded about it. “I still think we escape then worry about it.”
Mister I raised a hand. “If it ends up being a one way portal, we will be stuck in there, cutting us off from our allies forever. I also want to go home and take a shower.”
Lady Blood Claw gestured at the portal, skin turning orange. “It seems silly not to explore it now. Given the time difference, it would be, what? Two hours for a day in there?”
Corvayne decided to put a trump card down. “We know there's another entrance then, because our other set of paintings.”
Wick looked at LBC. “Lady. How hard is it go across places in these towers?”
“It's not one hundred percent sure to happen. If you have a space ship, it's easier to go from A to B that way.” The alien woman frowned, turning charcoal. “I never did cross planet moves. It was implied you can move to a different planet, do big sideways moves through doors, but I've heard you are more likely to walk out of a tower elsewhere on Cascadia then bore through worlds. The bigger problem is if we get bounties. If the empire knows about you, they can use that as a way to keep it's agents running into you inside the tower.”
Wick swore. “I really needed to sit you and that innkeeper down and get better info. How do I look for a bounty?”
Lady Blood Claw gestured to the stairs. “You go in, run to floor 5, and half the time before a fight you end up in an inn. It's a weird shared space in the tower. The theory was that things that run the place are some sort of gods. There's a thing there that accepts cash to post bounties. You can look up if someone is hunting you, at least.”
Wick folded her arms, and turned to Seru. “I think you're the last person to speak. If we leave now, it might be a long time before we come back. Got anything to add?”
Seru looked like she was thinking then looked up. “Let me define the thoughts you have. Corvayne wants to fight. If you have a defensive battle, you have options that don't exist otherwise. Corvayne had a trap right?”
Wick groaned. “Grunt has those nuclear batteries. Fuck! The big oaf just screwed us out of a pretty good trap. Hey Corvayne, do these other batteries work for it?”
He adjusted his new ring. It was nice to only have weapons out. “I don't think you can overload those with tools we have. Anything here would just break it. You would need a device that both sets it off, limits the output, and directs it. I don't know how to make one, and I do not care to try. I would rather use them to build a ship. We don't need to go to a space port to get off world.”
Mister I held up a finger. “You can build a ship, but can you build a navigation computer?”
Seru had a notepad. “Sounds like no trap, ship is limited to buying time? I guess Corvayne still wants to fight. Nyxion is all for just flat out running. That loses you some allies, but that might not actually be a problem if you haven't triggered whatever this guy really is after, yet. You didn't see him in the portal the first time, right?”
Wick nodded at Seru, who was furiously scribbling this all down with a pad of paper and pen. She tapped her lip with her pen then spoke. “Okay. So that further breaks down into where you're running. If we go into the tower and we are tagged by bounties, how fast does a pursuer find you Miss Claw?”
Lady Blood Claw thought about it. “I honestly don't know enough about how it works. It was used by the apprentices training me to catch someone who ran away while on rift tour, hoping to escape. All I know is that they eventually caught the girl and killed her, but it was only much later that I asked someone about it. They may have just lied to discourage me getting any ideas.”
It was like a switch had been flipped in Seru as she pointed with her pencil. “But it only works in the tower? That it somehow tells people where the target is? Or helps them find them somehow? We need info about the way the system works. We need powers and ideally something that makes him unable to just pick us off. We need to confirm this is an escape route at all. How fast did you guys clear lower floors if you were just going directly to the stairs?”
Mister I shrugged and looked at Wick, who looked around. “I think if we are lucky, we can go up a floor in twenty minutes. At the long end, eight hours of exploring at least for something like floor three. So average it at four hours a floor?”
Wick stopped, seemingly thinking about her own figures. “Okay! We go in. I wanna see this damn bounty thing. If the monk put bounties on all of us or some of us, then we exit and fight. If not, we decide if we bolt or stay. I know a few people will probably want to stay. Mister I, perhaps Seru?”
She looked annoyed, the business face she had dropping. “It's freaking complicated. You guys are clearly on the rise, but also like, it's not cool for me to just vanish on mom and dad. This sucks! It's a really hard choice!”
Corvayne followed what was said. “I think if the bounties are clear, we lay low and see if we can use this place to get into the other dungeon somehow, and pull our friends out. Otherwise, here we go again.”
The broke to go back to the car and gather their things, as well as to move the van to a different block so if it was found it didn't point the way to the right house.
Corvayne lead the group up the stairs, spear ready as the stone steps wound, and the air changed. The stairway didn't disappear, but morphed into to a sort of white bone color with blue glass or crystal running through it in lines. The walls looked like the same blue stone common in the other dungeon.
Corvayne turned a corner and saw the path pass out from an arch into a bone white space. It looked like a large roughly cubic room, a few hundred feet in all directions with varying light. There were tunnels and pillars that supported what looked like tubes with windows in them that suggested they were bridges. Everything was smooth, and it smelled faintly of limes and plastics. A faint wet noise came from ahead.
He scanned the room. No monsters, but his eyes saw an extra thick line of blue that glowed faintly, recessed a few feet from the rest of the flat floor. There were also lines of glowing white in the room, which is how the space was lit it seemed. Walking forward, he saw the blue line was a flowing stream of translucent beads, faintly glowing and gleaming. It was hard to tell if they were in a slimy liquid or just flowing over each-other through the room. He tapped the river with his spear, and it seemed to be very shallow, at most a foot deep where his weapon reached. No damage to the spear.
Corvayne called for his allies. “Looks clear unless there's a hidden monster. Also looks like a river.”
Wick came over and looked with him. “Those beads look slimy. Also look, the way back isn't locked!”
Mister I saw the arch and stepped through it, then walked back. “Be right back! I want to see if it really goes back.”
Nyxion activated his shield and tried wading into the beads, pushing them aside. He had to step out. “I can push my way through, but they move the shield with the current.”
Corvayne bent and had a shadowy hand pick up a bead. It was soft, about the size of an orange. He let it fall back into the slurping flow.
“Okay, I think we follow the river and go up when we can. No reason, gut instinct.” Corvayne shook his shadow hand. The beads had a thin layer of something oily. Maybe they were alive? Or just leaked oil. He did a pinky test next, touching a bead. The residue didn't sting and didn't smell like anything.
He didn't trust that everything was safe, as he had read books with dungeons stuffed with deadly traps and walls dripping with super lethal poisons, as well as space ruins exposed to vacuum or flooded with radiation. He was going to have to bank on his ability to detect danger and maybe a little bit of super human vitality to keep him from accidentally cooking himself if he stepped into a floor made entirely of plutonium or something equally crazy, like a floor designed to resemble the surface of a star. At least with that, it seemed the threshold of floors gave him a few steps where it eased into the conditions ahead.
That didn't help the others if they ran into something they couldn't tell was hurting them. “Wick do you have a radiation detector?”
She laughed. “Of course!” She slung her pack off and pulled out a bulky looking object. “I'm glad we didn't lose it this time. They cost a decent chunk of change.” He felt a little bit of tension leave him. Maybe he was over-thinking it. After all, the castle in one area warned them that it was dangerous for small groups.
Lady Blood Claw and Seru were both also looking at the river of beads flowing across the room, from atop an arched bridge. Seru bent down and made the sign of Gygax, then frowned. “Not able to tell me anything aside from what I see.”
Lady Blood Claw smirked and bands of bright blue flickered across the her otherwise charcoal arms. “Maybe we should have asked your mom to come instead. Wasn't she the one dragging you to church?”
“Pfft! I'm going to go tomorrow if you guys don't kidnap me to another world.” Seru said while glancing between Corvayne and Nyxion. He was getting used to her looks, but he was starting to think Grunt and Mister I not getting entangled with in-party relationships made them wiser then he was.
The monk returned and Wick clapped her hands. “Let's go, we are still burning time in here, even if it's like a tenth the speed outside.”
That got everyone to gather behind where Corvayne was standing, the rounded tunnel the river cut into. Looking further down the tunnel he saw it was not like a sewer, in that there was no way to follow it without stepping in. He frowned. “Okay, before we wade in this stuff, maybe see if there's a route up?” He turned and could see what looked like three distinct floors of exits from the room.
Lady Blood Claw shook her head. “We can't get up to those ledges and tunnels from down here, unless we climb.”
“Okay, lets cross and follow the river without wading in it. At least, I don't trust it to be monster free even if it's safe.”
Leaving the large room, the tunnels were about twenty feet tall and seemed to start round then gradually become a sort of hexagonal shape. The path came to an opening that looked to be a sort of chasm. Coming out of it, Corvayne quickly looked all around to make sure nothing ambushed them from above nor below. It looked like they were on a bridge thirty feet above another blue bead river, running along a huge gash in the bone white rock. The walls of the chasm were rougher, forming shapes that made him think the material was some sort of crystal or mineral. He couldn't see the top of the chasm as it faded to inky darkness above. The few points of light were bands of glowing white under more bridges crossing the chasm far above them. Next to the bridge they were on, a slightly lower and thicker one carried the river across the gap. To his left, the chasm went quite a ways, possible to the horizon as the glowing line of blue vanished. On the right, he saw what looked like an end to the walls.
“It's pretty.” Lady Blood Claw had gotten closer then Corvayne expected, and he realized he had stopped.
“Ah! Yes. Sorry, didn't mean to hold us up.” He crossed the rest of the way over the bridge and back into the tunnels. Wick snickered a little, but when he looked over she schooled her face into what he guessed was her version of a poker face.
The first fork in the path was a small dome shaped room that had three branches, letting him follow the path he was on, follow a tunnel that curved downwards, or one that sloped upwards. He noted that the floor had banded blue lights like the entrance stair did, pattered in a spoke shape connecting a small circle into a larger one. It reminded him of a bike wheel. The only objects in the room looked like broken rods of the dungeon wall-stuff left in a few neat piles. He poked them with his spear to make sure some sort of monster wasn't hiding in them, but it was just innert stone. Seru picked a piece up and swung it, then tried hitting the wall with it. It made a dull clacking sound but didn't break.
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“Pretty sturdy.” She tossed the piece she had and found a walking stick length one. Nobody else commented, though Mister I took a smaller bar shaped piece. Corvayne lead the way up the ramp. The path curled slightly as the climbed for about five minutes. The path came out to an open chamber with a view of what looked like a park. The trees looked like a mix of Cascadian pine trees and some alien tree with corkscrew leaves and bright blue fruit. The ceiling or sky was dark, so he couldn't tell if it was outside or not. Did that matter in the tower?
Wick tapped his shoulder and pointed him off to the side, at a stone path leading into the woods. “See it? Near that light.”
Impressive. She had spotted what looked like a volley ball sized blue bead with four white, stick-like legs. It quivered a little as it strutted over to a plant and dropped on it.
Seru huffed. “Is that supposed to be a slime? It looks more like a robot then a monster. Slimes should be cute.”
Nyxion looked at her like she had a screw loose. “What? The word slime implies that something is inherently disgusting. Why would a quivering blob be cute?”
Lady Blood Claw shook her head. “I think it looks cute. It's got tiny straw legs.”
Corvayne kept his spear ready and went down stairs to the forest area, ready for the monster to notice him and attack. It seemed to sense him when he was within ten feet, jumping and scuttling at him. He shot his spear out and the thing splattered like a water balloon, drenching the ground with water, stick legs falling over, and leaving behind a few chewed up plants.
He looked back at a frowning Lady Blood Claw and Wick who shrugged. He backtracked to the group and lead them along the rim of the room. The forest-park had real water features as well as a river of the blue beads running through it. The river followed the direction they were going, and Corvayne oriented himself along it as they left the green space to enter another tunnel, taking them back to the same chasm they first crossed but further over and higher up. He saw two of the stick slimes patrolling the bridge. They lept like they were surprised when they got closer and started scuttling, still slowly, at Corvayne.
He popped one with a spear jab, stepping back to avoid getting goop on his shoes, then used the butt of his spear on the other, seeing how hard it was to push them away.
The blunt end of his spear barely touched the thing and it started leaking, then fell over dead as it collapsed into a film between the legs.
“Okay, so that's gotta be poison or acid or something, right?” Wick pointed at the slime it left behind.
Seru walked up to it and looked at it. “I could try praying to Gygax.... I've never done it to a monster.”
Kneeling down, she made a dice rolling motion then put her hands over the puddle. “I take 20, which you gave freely so that others may have it.”
There was a faint glow about her, which faded. Seru stood up, looking at something in front of her that they couldn't see. “It's not poisonous or acidic. It does not combust. It might cause someone to slip on a smooth surface. It's juice can be concentrated by a lyer to add a lime scent to soap. No other info.”
Corvayne lead them across the bridge to another tunnel to find another pair of the slime-walkers approaching them. As an experiment, Corvanye walked up to one and let it attack. The little monster bashed him with about as much effect as a toddler hitting him with a pillow, then tried to whack him with a leg. The little stick legs might leave a mark if he let it hit him a few hundred times. Corvanye crouched and flicked the monster with a finger. He punctured it, causing it to start to bleed and deflate.
He stood, turning to the party. “These things are... really, really, really weak.”
Wick came up next to him and actually picked the other monster up. It feebly tried to bash her, which cradled in her arms was even more futile. “Yes they are.”
“Are you going to take that thing home?” Corvayne asked, a little alarmed.
“I wanna see what happens when we drag something out of the tower. So yes?”
“As long as you get a cage for it...” The image of him in bed with Wick while having a slime on his shoulder poking him with stick limbs while he tried it ignore it came unbidden. Corvayne did not need a monster attacking him during sex, no matter how pitiful a monster it was.
The pattern of finding open spaces and threading their way back and forth upwards got them to an open room with ramps up and down as well as a side passage with blue stairs.
As he made his way up the stairs to the second floor, Corvayne turned to Lady Blood Claw. “Could you tell us more about the Towers? I'd like to know more of what you know.”
She walked a little faster to climb the broad steps on Corvayne's other side, opposite Wick. “There's a couple places like the Inn. Since our goal is to visit the inn now, I'll tell you about them once we get there, so we don't end up in another one because you're thinking about it.”
She tapped her mouth, thinking. “The rumor was always that towers have a hundred floors. It's based on guesses, however. They get more dangerous as you go up. Some of the rifts are pointed downwards and tend to have more traps and be nastier in general. I went on six runs, mostly as a kid they were dragging through to try to trigger a magic gift. If you want a particular skill, you are more likely to get it thinking strongly about having it, and thinking about what you'd do with it. So I was told to try to imagine myself enchanting things. I messed up, because it formulated self enchanting almost exclusively.” She turned a color of electric blue. “All the other runs reinforced that instead of getting what the master wanted.”
She stopped talking and Corvayne saw the stairs were ending. She nodded at him, and Corvayne took point.
He stepped out to a bright blue sky with pink tinged clouds drifting through it. They were on a wide platform, a few hundred feet wide. It looked like it was suspended above a huge ocean of blue beads, dotted with other bridge connected white bone towers. A huge pillar of blue shot up from the ocean, a geyser of beads blasting into the air. The stream looked large enough to ride, but jet past the platform they were on. Looking up, he could see other towers and bridges floating above them with no obvious connections that perhaps the geyser was rushing towards. A few were very faint against the bright colors of the sky.
“I bet it would be fun to ride a geyser!” Seru said, pointing.
Mister I laughed. “Before I did that, I'd ask how the landing is. Perhaps if beads absorb energy better then diving into water?”
Corvayne heard Wick say “Bleh!” and whirled around, to see her holding four sticks and covered in blue goop from her chest down.
“The damn thing is too weak! Ugh, I smell like lime now... I guess it's not to bad. It's a fruity smell at least.”
Corvayne tried not to laugh at Wick, turning back to look for anything above or below that might be a threat as they walked forward across the platform, looking to reach the nearest tower jutting through it nearly a mile and a half away. He didn't see any obvious monsters so turned to Lady Blood Claw.
“Lady Blood Claw, if you don't mind more questions... You knew how to fish for powers, but it didn't give you what you wanted?”
“As far as I know, powers are tied in some way to class. They manifest as soon as the boss dies, but you have no way of really forcing something you want. Eventually we decided to bank on my enchanting evolving.”
Corvayne frowned. There was an implication there that changing powers was difficult. “Can you ask or wish to shift the powers you have? Or is it just trying to get new powers where you influence it?” He saw her rub the bone spurs lining her arm as she looked away from him, skin shifting to a light pink color. What was the thing that triggered it?
She didn't sound unhappy at least when she spoke, so the pink was probably a good color. “Oh. I think it has to do with class, which is a subject that was, when I learned about it, mired with problems and contradictions because the line between a class ability, a power, and a weapon based attack blur in places. The theory was that you defined your class at some point by what you wanted to do. Anyone who wanted to be a warrior got more out of two hours of sword practice, more so then someone who wanted to be a baker but also fight with swords. The only thing taken for granted was classes existed and gave people an edge in doing various things. The other thing we knew was you had to go into a rift, I mean, a tower or be influenced by one to start really building essence.”
Wick was wiping her shirt down while she listened. “So you could have used something like Hari's skills real bad? It sounds like you were just shooting darts at a board, no offense.”
LBC nodded vigorously, pink turning a sort of pinkish gray. “Yes. I also wanted to learn more about how Mosh had three powers without a boss kill, and how they were unrelated to priests or crafting. Hari just wanted to spend time with Corvayne, and quite frankly didn't seem to like me all that much. Perhaps because she didn't like Nyxion?”
Nyxion laughed and Corvayne looked back at the three walking in line behind them. “Getting bitter over one loss. I'd never stoop that low.”
Mister I poked his arm. “Of course not. Were you not just saying you wanted to pull Mr. Argyle's spine out of his mouth?”
Corvayne turned back to Lady Blood Claw, ignoring Nyxion's numerous calls to flay Argyle alive. As if they'd have time to do anything but kill the monk and be done with it. He cleared his throat, then asked his next question. “So the powers from clearing floors are almost always related to your class, even if you don't know it? Hence Mosh being unusual.”
Miss Blood Claw nodded. “Right. I have to repeat, a lot of this is inference. The Magus was next to useless. Our job as apprentices was mostly to follow his whims when he didn't actually want to commit to doing them. There wasn't an official listing of classes because people with access to a rift or two were fiercely protective of the rifts and often policed the use of their energy. As in, people manifesting power would make other groups wipe them out to avoid producing more rivals.”
Corvane caught that hesitation, but wasn't going to press her on it. She was turning emerald green with sort of blue waves moving along her skin.
Nyxion spoke up. “If you don't feel like talking about the past, don't let anyone bully you into it, Lady Blood Claw.”
She held up a hand over her shoulder to let Nyxion know she didn't need his help, then took a few deep breaths and Corvayne understood she needed a moment. Her colors faded back to gray, which he was starting to think was neutral.
LBC then continued. “I'm just trying to stress that until Seru showed me how to request my own information, I had no idea what my class really was. There were only a few archetypes that were given a name. Mostly we just called people fighter, caster, or crafter as a class name. The names we did have were stupid, like 'Spear Jumper' or 'Shield warrior' because there were a few apprentices or minions that developed similar skills. I think you learn some things by doing them, like spells or how to swing a sword, then going in solidifies it. But that's also why he'd take people and run them through the tower with his groups, trying to pick out and develop magic users. Hence getting a spell setup was good enough for me to keep... keep getting runs to try to refine it. But my magic is focused on aiding my own skills or hampering others.”
She stops for a moment as a geyser of beads erupts past the edge of the platform they are walking near, scattering beads onto the ground where they roll around randomly then start to flow with a slight downhill slant towards the direction they came from. Corvayne crouched and touched one. Not hot, which is what he wondered. Was there a purely mechanical function that made them erupt?
He tossed it aside as Miss Blood Claw cleared her throat. “Sorry, I don't usually talk this much. So I've been on six runs. Four were marches with a leader and two fighters, then me and two other kids. We had armor and a weapon to ward off monsters but we followed our leaders in far past where I'd feel comfortable going alone today. We were only to
try to absorb magic talents. I remember that we swapped sideways through doors, then only ascended and killed monster in a particular tower with lots of rainbow colors and glass bridges that you could bend by melting or freezing a side. So four runs like that, one run where I was an enforcer helping the leader, and one run that was ten floors in the base tower to put a bounty out for someone doing something elsewhere in the galaxy who had hit a dead end.”
Wick sighed. “So you were probably given limited info, and you mostly saw floors one through five?”
LBC shook her head. “No no, we went up about 15 floors in the tower. Higher floors, more danger, better rewards.”
Corvayne thought about this. “Any advice for us from someone schooled to be a leader?”
“They gave me a pretty shitty map, a pair of apprentices, and some total newbies. My advice from that run is to never goof around near ledges. As far as I know, that apprentice is still falling. What I learned about considering traps, moving through doors, the ghosts in the lobby, treasure, and powers is all stuff I got from knowing people who did it more frequently. It's sometimes hard to give you advice because you seem to understand what the towers are testing.”
Mister I added. “Care to enlighten us?”
She nodded. “First, the tower is looking for combat skills as you cannot advance past sets of five levels without a guardian challenge, and they are almost always combat related.”
That comment reminded Corvayne to look up and all around for a potential threat. Still nothing but blue skies, pink clouds, and a blue ocean of beads. “What else can it be?”
Lady Blood Claw frowned. “If a lone child, for example, was the sole survivor of an expedition that reached a five fold floor, the tower might decide a combat challenge isn't appropriate and instead do something like a simple puzzle or a quiz.”
Mister I shivered. “I would prefer not to imagine how one learns that.”
LBC nodded, her face grim as her skin turned orange a moment before it returned to a gray color. “The towers want flexibility. Each floor is different, the monsters require more variety in tactics to deal with, and because you can't be sure what you are going to get in terms of treasure and powers... being able to improvise aids you. That ties in with preparation and planning... you can't predict what a tower is the first time you step into it, but once you know the goal of any exploit run is to have answers to everything in the tower and the boss you are aiming for.”
Corvayne caught how she described a planned run. “You say 'aimed for'... do you mean that you run the segment trying to fight the same monster every time, as in 'our expedition is going for the dragon' or do you mean you can go up a floor or into a boss fight and get something different depending on luck?”
LBC coughed a little. “Both, but glitched stairs let you retreat if you see from the threshold it's given you a 'wrong' floor. I've never had a boss swap happen to me, however I suspect that the two types of dragons you fought included the alternate to the green fire-breather. It extends to things like suddenly having a floor where there are traps in a tower that is normally just enemies and environment.”
More things to worry about, but they needed to know that running down and out of a tower floor without looking ahead could get a person lost really fast.
Wick bumped into him as she tried to step out of a shower of falling beads. Corvayne felt a few hit him, leaving lime-smelling oil. Nyxion simply blocked the barrage with his shield. Wick held her hands above her head. “Ack! Sonofabitch! I guess you're going to tell me awareness is a factor too?”
Lady Blood Claw nodded. Some of the sharp and gruff inflection she carried with her voice had been slipping off. “I'd say information gathering. Both from skills that tell you what your tools and skills do, the ability to sense hidden traps and enemies... and networking at the inn or bar we are hopefully going to find.”
Seru perked up. “I bet I'd be good at that! I got a bunch of people who didn't want to do collabs to do interviews.”
Wick nodded. “I'm sure you're quite good at jumping on people who told you 'no' over and over.”
Lady Blood Claw continued, her skin color starting to turn random gently flowing colors. “The last point is the one the Magus's students failed at, and it's cooperation. One would need a protean skill set to clear entire towers alone. Hmm, Corvayne's might fit the bill once he develops better ranged attacks and self recovery... but when a group of apprentices tried to actually farm bounties they lost nearly every member of a six person group to a duo of adventurers that were rated as 'extremely low threat'. It's part of the reason I did most of my work out of the towers, all the delvers that worked under the Magus all wanted to become strong enough to become the boss so they never supported each other. It's what I like about you guys. Nobody else I've worked with would care about missing party members.”
She stopped talking and kept walking, skin turning blue when she saw everyone was looking at her. “What?”
Nyxion stopped walking a moment, looking at her. He then shook his head. “I never suspected it.”
“What?”
Nyxion smirked. “I didn't know you could say that much all in one day.”
Lady Blood Claw looked flustered and her blue color ripened. Her voice got gruff again. “Stuff it!”
Corvayne kept walking down the bridge, keeping his smile to himself. It was good to have friends.