Peter logged in to find himself lying on the cold brick floor and was immediately hit in the forehead by a cold drop of water. He sat up, blinking the brackish water out of his eyes and looked around the room. Nothing had changed, the room was still lit by the three red lights over the doors and the red glow from the disc on the pedestal. DB had climbed up on the disc and was currently asleep with his face planted on the smooth gem-like surface. Peter smiled and eased him off with one hand, tucking him back into his hood.
Picking up the disc and rotating it into the correct orientation to open the doors, Peter checked his clock. Not even lunch time yet, good. The doors hissed open and he returned to the map room to wait for his companions to arrive. He gave his party ring a rub, in the hope that Dani was available but since he didn’t even know what school she went to there was no guarantees. She’s probably still in her exam.
It didn’t take long for Warren and Pham to arrive, the bulkhead door screeching open and slamming closed again. “You! This is coming out of your share!” Pham stalked over to loom over Peter. “I had to bribe the smith to let us down here.”
“What? Why?” Peter cringed back. Pham offline was the least imposing figure you could imagine. At the moment though, his tall, lean, muscular body held a subtle menace that suggested he would gladly push you into one of his traps just to see if it would work. “Oh. The badge. Didn’t you guys get the Defender’s badge?”
Warren made sure the door was shut firmly and came over to place a calming hand on Pham’s shoulder. “Averton isn’t our starting town Peter. I did the side quest to get the Defender badge for Schmaltsburgh, where I started, but you’re the only one who’s got access to these tunnels. We could have waited for you to realise and come and get us, but we’re on the clock here.”
“You’re right, and I’m sorry, I didn’t realise.” Peter apologised. An idea struck him, two birds, one stone? “Perhaps I could offer you something better than money?” Peter unlaced his bracer with his teeth, spitting out the horrible taste, and nosed his inventory button.
“What the heck happened to your arm?” Pham demanded.
Peter fished around in the dimensional pocket until he found what he needed. “Long story, which I will tell you some time. Maybe tonight if we’re all online? A-ha! Would you accept this as payment?” He handed the schematic to the pale mechanist.
Pham scoffed at first, then stared at the sheet. He read it, flipped it over to read the back, flipped it over again and then rolled it up and put it in his own inventory. “That, that will do nicely.” He flicked at Peter’s arm. “Not exactly an altruistic gesture, but there’s so much in that schematic I can use and adapt. Plus, I’m guessing you won’t mind playing guinea pig.”
Chastened, Peter ducked his head. “It’d be nice to have two hands again.”
“I’m sure it would. Now, what do we have here?” Pham wandered over to the map on the wall and began tracing the many paths that the glowing liquid could take. “This is perfect. Ok Peter, you got a chair in your inventory?”
“I do,” Warren offered, pulling out two fold up camp chairs. They were made of wood and leather that unfolded into a three legged stool. Warren’s creaked alarmingly when he lowered his bulk into it but held.
Peter thanked him and sat as well as Pham began to explain how combinations worked.
“See here,” he pointed to a section of the map they hadn’t reached yet. “Where this pipe splits into three? Now, one of the pipes goes right to this junction here.” He pointed to a gem a meter to the right. “This pipe goes to this junction, splits into two and they both go to the far junction. You with me so far?”
“I think so,” Peter nodded along with the lesson.
“Good, now this pipe,” Pham indicated the third pipe leaving the first junction, “goes to this junction here where it splits in two as well. But, one of those connects to this pipe here from the second pipe, and the other goes straight to the far junction. Combinations are pretty simple, it’s just a question of how many ways can we get from here,” he poked the left hand gem, “to here,” he poked the right hand one.
Peter stood up and approached the wall. He traced out the ways the liquid could get from the left to the right, counting them off out loud. He looked at Pham after each one, who nodded assent, and tried another. “Is that it? They spent a whole term learning to count the ways you can make it left to right?”
“Nah, next you’ve got permutations. It’s sorta the same, but this time the order matters. Imagine if every time you picked a pipe it went red. Can’t be picked again. How does that change the answer?”
Tracing the paths again, Peter tried to understand the concept. “So, if I take this pipe here, that one there and this join, that’s ok. But if I go this way…”
“Eeegh,” Pham mimicked a klaxon sound. “No dice. Now if you’re going to math it instead of counting on your fingers it looks like, um, hey you got any paper?”
“Yeah, here,” Peter reopened his inventory awkwardly and extracted some parchment and a quill.
Pham took the writing implements and leaned up against a smooth section of wall and wrote down the notation and symbols. “Now, you got the basics but there’s some things you have to watch out for.” Pham explained patiently how to determine the combinations of a whole group and how to determine the number of permutations of loot assignment were possible from a limited chest and a large raid party.
“That sounds suspiciously specific,” Warren piped up from behind them. “Did someone miss out on loot a few times?”
Balling up a sheet of parchment Pham flipped it offhandedly over his shoulder, bouncing it off Warren’s helmet without even looking. “Quiet you. Now,” he turned his attention back to where Peter was screwing up his eyes trying to assimilate the knowledge, “do you think you can get this down this afternoon? Or do you need another example? Or a break?”
“A break would be nice,” Peter admitted. “My brain feels like it’s on fire right now.”
“How about we try triggering another one of the red gems?” Warren stood up and tossed the chairs back into his inventory. “Last time there was some baddies and chest. You can play math games with the loot afterwards.”
“Deal.” Pham’s eyes raced over the map and he jabbed a finger at a gem just to the right of the three-way junction he had been using as an example. “That one.”
Seeing the trouble Peter was having with his arm, Warren took over and laced the armour up for him. “Why that one, Pham?”
Pham pulled out a contraption from his inventory and placed it on the floor. It unfolded itself into a weird automaton resembling a turret with spider legs and started to circle Pham’s legs. “It’s only a couple of junctions away so we can get there fast, and it looks like it has the most number of nearby connections. That suggests the programmers would have put a stronger boss in there and therefore the best loot. Make sense?”
Peter winced as Warren pulled the ties too tight. “It does, but can we take a stronger boss? Woz and I nearly got out butts handed to us by the last one.”
“Woz, eh?” Pham crooked an eyebrow, “when did that happen? Anyway, we have the four of us with Webby here and Woz can pop out some gearlings if we get into trouble.”
“Peter showed real grit there, he’s earned it don't you think?” Warren slapped Peter’s bracer, checking the fit. “And you know how much spawning a gearling costs. They’re a last resort, not like your wanna-be pocket monsters and traps. We doing this or what? Some of us have tests this afternoon.”
The three Travellers made their way through the maze, Pham taking only a second at each pedestal to find and fit the disc that opened the path they had decided on. In each room the disc turned blue and though some doors opened that they didn’t investigate, not once did monsters emerge to delay them. Peter’s nerves tightened with every empty room despite Pham’s confidence. Finally they reached the room they had been searching for, the labyrinthine twists and turns having completely disoriented him only adding to his tension. When Peter moved to pick up the disc and place it on the pedestal, Pham laid a hand on his shoulder.
“Hang about a sec,” he pushed the disc back onto its mount. “Gotta set up first.” He sauntered over to the door where they expected the horde to emerge. While Warren and Peter paced anxiously, he placed several devices around the door. One adhered to the roof with a clang, one screwed itself to the floor and the other two had to be attached to the wall with some sort of pungent adhesive. Pham breathed heavily through his mouth while pouring the viscous liquid onto the flat base of the contraption and even though they were on the far side of the room it made the other two gag slightly.
“Ghah!” Warren coughed. “D’yer havetae use that stuff? It’s enough tae burn the hairs offa stoat’s ass.”
Pham glared at his armoured friend. “Do you have to do that accent? I know your dad still wears his tartan around the house, but you’re as Scottish as I am.” He leaned against the contraption, ensuring a firm grip on the wall. “It makes you sound like one of those stupid role player knobs.”
“Better’n soundin’ like onna dem leet haxorz.” Warren shot back good humouredly, limbering up his sword arm.
Pham finished affixing a wire rope pulled from one of the devices to the wall on the other side of the door. “If you were as elite as I am, you wouldn’t need to pretend to be an oversize dwarf.”
Peter watched the exchange, unsure what to do. There were clearly some old inside jokes being tossed about, with meanings and subtext he could only guess at. He tried to watch how Pham was setting his traps so that he didn’t accidentally trip on in the coming melee. “Won’t that one just go off when the door opens?”
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Measuring three steps towards the centre of the room, Pham bent down and drew an arc on the floor with chalk. “That’s the idea.” He took two more steps and drew a pair of circles, pressing heavily on the chalk to ensure there were no gaps. “Don’t go any closer than that line until it does, and if whatever comes through the door gets past it, step into the circles.”
With a quick step over the chalk line, Peter measured the circle with his feet. “That’s not a lot of room. What happens if I’m not entirely inside the line?” He flexed his wings to demonstrate.
A shrug was all the explanation he got. “Do your best, it’s just a guess anyway. Woz, you ready?” Without waiting for the answer, Pham placed the disc on the pedestal, then put his mechanical follower on top of that. “Sic ‘em Rex.”
As the lights changed and the ominous grinding preceded the opening of the doors, Warren shook his head incredulously. “You called a metal spider thing ‘Rex’?”
There wasn’t time to discuss it however, as the trapped door reached its apex and the first trap popped, releasing a cloud of white smoke that hung across the doorway like a shroud. From somewhere in the murk a disturbing moan issued. A lurching figure shuddered into view, each step splashing on the brickwork with a wet clinking sound.
“What the heck is that thing? Woz, I thought you said it was a slime skellly-thingy. This is not a skelly-thingy.” Pham cowered behind the pedestal.
The cloud dissipated to reveal a centaur. That is, if a centaur were comprised entirely of blue ooze turned purple in the light. The clinking in its footsteps came from the accumulated coins in the bottom of its feet. The part which would have been human on any regular centaur was still humanoid, in the way that a half-sucked jelly baby was humanoid. The most striking feature was its head. Or, at least, where its head should be. Hovering above the smooth blue shoulders devoid of a neck or even neck-like appendage was a crystalline skull. The eye sockets glowed with the same red malevolent light the slime knight had, then tilted back to emit a deafening scream fuelled with hate and hunger. Several hollow plops alerted them to an impending threat from behind as well.
Pham spun around, placing his back against the pedestal and trying frantically to extract his oversize wrench from its holster. “Rex, designate threat at five and nine o’clock.”
The little machine whistled cutely, reminding Peter of the repair droids in the movie he’d watched recently. A loud “phut” noise, repeated twice, the machine ejected white globs that hit the slimes menacing Pham and bound them to the floor.
An azure beam cut across Peter's vision, bringing his attention back to the slime-taur. "Pham! The trap didn't work. What do we do now?" He readied his weapon, his eyes wide with fear.
“Well of course it didn’t work!” Pham’s voice echoed weirdly as he crawled across the floor to the immobile slimes. “I came prepared for things with bones in them. Not whatever that thing is. The next one should have some effect, get in the circles!” He rocked back on his knees and stated to rain overhand blows on the nearest enemy. “Die, you sticky bastard. Die!”
The last wisps of the cloud wafted away, revealing the monster's entourage pouring through the door behind it. While it had somehow managed to miss every other device, the followers weren't as lucky. As the amorphous body flowed through the device on the floor a small spark zapped between two points in its heart and a burst of light rippled out across the floor. Peter and Warren dove for the circles, Warren landing in the traditional superhero pose, Peter in a ball of arms, legs and wings. The tip of Peter’s left wing was still touching the floor outside the circle when the ripple reached him, conducting the effect through the limb. He screamed as what felt like an electric current coursed through his body, adding his voice to the cacophony as even the mouthless regular slimes managed to squeal in pain, though they were not a patch on the roar the slime-taur uttered. The massive creature slammed a foot down on the device, cutting off the effect like a switch and allowed Peter to gather himself into a twitching ball inside the circle.
Warren dashed across the room and planted himself between the slime-taur and Peter’s foetal form, not a moment too soon as well. The creature glared at them, the intense beams slamming into Warren’s hastily raised shield and driving him back onto the back foot and nearly causing him to fall over Peter. “Get up, ye wet Nellie!”
Marshalling his spasming muscles, Peter jammed the butt of his scythe into the ground and forced himself to his feet. “I’m fine,” he gritted out, “thanks for asking.”
“I ent asking, I’m telling.” Warren leaned forward, bracing himself against the shield as a massive slimy foot splashed against it. “Get around that thing and take out the little ones while I keep the bastard busy.”
Peter took the hint and dashed around the flank of the slime-taur, dragging his scythe along the ground. Rather than try for a big swing, he pulled it through the semi-liquid bodies of the lesser slimes as he ran past, watching the weapon leave glowing marks where it ‘cut’. His thigh muscles juddered with the aftereffects of the trap but he powered through the pain, pivoting ponderously and heading back the other way.
The slimes tried to ball up a portion of their bodies to swing at him, but were similarly afflicted and the improvised weapon kept melting back into their mass mid-swing. Suddenly, one thrust a ball of its mass straight up then sucked it back down. The resulting force caused a ring of spikes to jerk out from the rim like a crown of thorns. One of the thorns stabbed into Peter’s stomach, simultaneously piercing and chemical burning him.
Peter felt the familiar anger begin building and focussed his efforts on the monster that had inflicted the agony. He slid his hand up closer to the blade of the scythe and stepped in, hammering the tip into the centre of the slime and raking the blade through its body. The glowing line indicating the damage inflicted was much wider this time and the blade dragged pieces of undigested loot through the surface to tinkle on the ground behind him. The slime keened once more, then lost cohesion, dribbling away.
A loud “phut, phut” sound from the machine on the pedestal reminded him that Pham was still under attack and he could see Warren braced against the back of his shield as the slime-taur did its best to drive him into the floor with both of its front feet standing on the shield. Peter wrapped the rage around himself, feeling the cold spread quickly as he gained proficiency in controlling the Avatar granted skill. The burning pain in his gut subsided as the cold swept past it, though the wound remained open and dripping blood. Why are my wounds so realistic, and yet the ones I inflict are so fake? The thought distracted him briefly, until the second slime thrust itself upwards sharply. Rather than wait and get impaled again, Peter whipped the butt of the scythe around, knocking the ball off centre so that when it smashed back into the main mass of the slime it did so on an angle and the thorns shot out of one side only.
Fortunately for the Travellers, that side was the one facing the slime-taur, were longer than last time and more concentrated, jamming into the boss monster’s ankle region. The crystal skull ratcheted around to face its rogue minion. As the thorns slowly retracted, the eye sockets of the skull began to glow again. Two azure beams lanced through the slime’s core and it fell apart.
Unwilling to take his eyes off the threat in front of him this time, Peter called over his shoulder. “Pham, you good back there?”
The grunts and banging paused for a moment. “Could be better, but I’ll survive. How’s Woz?”
“Down to just the boss.” Warren put his weight behind the shield and leapt at the slime-taur, the impact sending a massive wave through the whole thing’s body. “You want to stop messing about and come help?”
“Not messing about,” Pham continued hammering from the far side of the room. “These things aren’t exactly weak to blunt damage. See if you can get that thing under the last trap and I’ll trigger it.”
“I’m on it,” Peter called, slipping between the puddles of slime coated items. “Let me take aggro for a minute.” He wound up and swung for the fences, his scythe shearing one of the slime-taur’s legs clean off. Temporarily. The two ends flowed back together, leaving only the glowing line where the blade had passed through. Despite the lack of obvious damage, his actions had the desired effect, the floating skull training its gaze on him. “Okay, target angry! Target very angry!” He threw himself to the side, the beam only searing his thigh instead of boring through his chest. Hitting the ground, he rolled towards the door the beast had entered the room through, grinding his teeth as his injured leg scraped on the bricks. The cold barely muted the agony.
Warren disengaged and pulled back, keeping a wary eye on the direction the skull was facing. “Right Pete, you’ve got its attention. Keep it!” He kept as much of his body behind his shield as he could in case the slime-taur turned back to him, but it continued to lurch towards Peter. “Need a hand Pham?”
“One left, but I don’t want to redesignate Rex until it’s down. Is the biggun in place yet?”
“Nearly,” Peter called from the floor, dragging himself backwards over the lip of the doorway. He flailed ineffectually at the creature, inflicting a small nick on the foot closest to him. “Don’t do it Woz, it needs to get closer.”
Warren lowered his sword, the flames guttering. “I’m the tank Peter, you keep aggro and it’s going to stomp on you. You’ll die.”
Grunting with the effort, Peter tumbled into the next room and twisted around. “I keep this thing’s attention and maybe we don’t all die here.” He rotated the scythe as it lay along the floor so that the blade pointed up, up into the bottom of the slime-taur’s descending foot. It screamed again, Peter had to release the shaft of his weapon and clap his one good hand over his ear.
Phut.
Phut.
Phut.
Phut.
Four white gobs bound four feet to the floor.
The glittering eyes began to glow once more. Peter braced for the pain. Braced for a respawn.
The head snapped around and twin beams turned Rex’s innards to slag.
“Oh my god, it killed Rex!” Pham falsettoed.
“You bastard!” responded Warren in a similar pitch. “Trip the damn trap,” he continued in his normal voice, “unless you want Peter to respawn.”
“Fine.” Pham lobbed a steel ball over the top of the slime-taur. At the top of the ark it stopped following the normal parabola and shot straight up into the trap affixed to the roof. Most of the device detached itself, falling straight onto, then into, the thing’s body. Deep in the monster’s body the device detonated, a cloud of roiling blue bubbles expanded, doubling the thing’s size for a moment, before contracting just as rapidly. The jingling piles in its feet shot upwards, adding their glittering to the chaos in the core. The swirling, bubbling mass burst, wetting everything in the room with disgusting acidic gel.
Warren was mostly protected, and Pham ducked back behind the pedestal and only caught the spray. Peter rolled over and spread his wings, covering his head as best he could. The hissing of dissolving brick faded quickly, leaving only a horrible, sucking, sloshing sound.
“How are you not dead yet?” Pham wailed.
Sure enough, the four legs of the ex-slime-taur were still wobbling about, slowly but surely glooping their way across the floor towards each other. Hovering just off the ground in the centre of the congregating slimes the crystal skull glowed bright blue.
Warren pointed with his sword. “Look out, it’s regeneratin’!”
Peter climbed unsteadily to his feet. He wedged the head of his scythe under his arm as a makeshift crutch and hobbled back into the room. With every step he took the pain and turned it into rage. The searing of his leg numbed. The stabbing in his guts eased. The burning of his wings floated away. Coldness flowed from his eyes, back over his scalp, into his chest and out to his limbs. As the pain vanished, his steps became more confident. He limped between the gelatinous monsters, his foot brushing one and the lick of burning agony only accelerating the spreading cold.
“Get oota there!” Warren roared. “It’s too tough for us. Pham, you got a portal?”
Peter dropped to his knees beside the glowing skull and looked into its incandescent depths. “YOUR SOUL IS MINE.” He drove the tip of the scythe through the crown of the skull. The glow winked out instantly and the legs stopped their movements, dropping to the bricks and washing away. Relief flooded through Peter, washing away the cold of Bani’s skill and bringing back the pain of his damaged body. “Ow. Owowow.”
The ringing of steel on brick drew all eyes. “What the hell was that?” Warren’s sword was laying on the ground beside his shield as his hands opened and closed reflexively.
As Peter keeled over into the mess on the floor, Pham laid a comforting hand on Warren’s shoulder. “Yeah, he does that sometimes. How about we all log off for now and sort the loot out later?”