While Cal was the first one through the door, he soon found himself in the middle of the pack as Audit Team Six fought their way through the dungeon. Actually, they did very little fighting and a great deal of walking. As they went from room to room, Cal collected data on the Parlours of Shading and Shadows. Yes, there were multiple tattoo parlours, but each one was a little bit different than the other. As he went, Cal added the little bit of info to his quick scan matrix. Since this was an enemy dungeon, he couldn’t get much from his Triple A spell, but he got some information.
He and his team, along with their boss, stood outside the big set of dual iron doors that would take them to the inner sanctum. They hadn’t hit every room in the dungeon, but they had found a path through to Cell 12E, where Perkle said was the heart of the trouble.
Cal went through his list of the rooms they’d hit so far.
<<<>>>
Triple A Quick Scan of The Parlours of Shading and Shadows
Entrance
Quick Name: Room of The Receptionist’s Annoyance
Quick Note: Why are you here? Do you have an appointment? Are you sure you want to get that tattoo? Would your mother want you to get that tattoo? Whatever. Kelly Ryan doesn’t get paid enough to deal with the likes of you. Save your drama for your mama, whose name you will ink into your flesh in some sort of hateful tribute. Speaking of hateful, Kelly
Ryan hates you. It’s true. Don’t kid yourself. Only, she’s amazing and beautiful and won’t give you the time of day. You’ll give her the time of day, though. Because, yeah, she’s a subtle trap.
* * *
Parlour #1
Quick Name: Hepatitis Alley
Quick Note: From out of the reception, go down a short hallway, and through another set of scratched up glass doors. Behold! Six chairs, each filthier than the next, with bad artwork on the wall, and some skeletons sitting in chairs. The skeletons are only for show, but why are there so many skeleton tattoos? And skulls. Or skulls and bones. Is it the idea that the living can defeat death by marking their bodies with symbols of mortality? Anyway, the mirrors are cracked here, and the lighting is bad. There probably should be monsters here—wait, the names of the artists are on the wall. There’s Mystical Mekal, Chrizz NuNu, Zolliver Kepp, Evad Naravvo, Dotey Dote Dote, and Ashley Slayer. Some of those names are the Inkmages. This was probably their lair. It’s kind of edgy to put a floor boos room up front and center.
* * *
Parlour #2
Quick Name: Dozen Machine Hallway
Quick Note: Down a hallway of decades of graffiti, layers and layers of paint, you’ll come to two doors. The door to the right? Another hallway. More of that graffiti. More cracked concrete. Exposed ceiling pipes and wires. And sticking out the wall are tattoo machines with needles exposed. Some shoot needles. Some shoot ink that blinds you. Some just gleam with rainbow colors. Good thing Gwen has her wand and lucky she has her Basic Advanced Gadgetry skill because not only can she detect the trapped machines, but she can also dismantle them. That’s how you waltzed right through here without too much trouble. There was a door at the end of the Dozen Machine Hallway, but you double backed through the other door to the left.
* * *
Parlour #3
Quick Name: The Shaded Stables
Quick Note: Going through the left door, you enter a wide room where there are more tattoo stations. Chairs and machines and heavy metal audio crystals in custom holders. But interspersed are what look like horse stables. Keeping horses underground? Bold move! But these aren’t typical horses. These are Inke’s Little Nightmares. You have Leather Tuskadero, Princess Shadowspy, Midnight Blue, Painbow, Sparkle Pretty, and who can forget Rainslicker? Inke can lug them around, sure, but when he’s protecting a Celestial Node, he needs them out and about, murdering raiders. Or in this case co-workers. What is a co-worker? Not a friend. Not an enemy. Someone you are forced to deal with, like a relative you don’t really know, that you only see every five years during a family reunion. Weird. One thing is for sure, if co-workers are like family, romance isn’t recommended in either case. At the end of the stables, there’s a passageway that curves around and ends at a door.
* * *
Room #4
Quick Name: Weird Tiled Room II: The Next level Down
Quick Note: Notice, this is a room, not a parlour. This is exactly like the circular room up on the first level—vent on the wall, drainage on the floor, but nothing in the ceiling, so it’s not connected to the upper floor. Or is it? It is in the same relative place, or so both Audit Team Six’s interior decorator and structural engineer posited. They both have an excellent sense of interior landscapes. Something else was odd. You heard clanking through the vent. Distant clanking. I could make a “drums in the deep” joke but you might not get it, especially if you didn’t get Kelly Ryan’s “secret flame” joke.
You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.
Additional Note: The vent is still sealed closed. Looks like magic to me.
* * *
Parlour #5
Quick Name: The Pirate’s Parley Parlour
Quick Note: Go down a long hallway with a wooden floor and wooden walls and through a door with a little stained-glass window up top. Then? Into a room. Pirate themed? Like the pirate captain on a ship? What is this now? It’s a whole room of pirate memorabilia including cutlasses, those flintlock pistols, and a treasure chest or two. You heard the creaking of ropes, and you smelled the scent of the ocean? Or was that raw sewage? Maybe a bit of both? But you did fight shadow pirates here, and there was some gold. People get pirate tattoos almost as much as they get skull tattoos.
Additional Note: This felt like a dead-end, but Gwen found the secret trapdoor under the carpet. This led down to a crawlspace with a single light bulb that brought you to another trapdoor which brought you to the next room.
* * *
Parlour #6
Quick Name: Handsey Hideout
Quick Note: Pinups are pictures of beautiful women that sailors (the more recent kind, not the pirate kind) hang up on the hulls of their destroyers to pass the time. Or that’s what the legends say. Here, in this very clean room, with very white walls, and lace doilies on the tables, and lots of polished steel fixtures, there are pictures of beautiful women on the walls. No actual women. Just pictures. And Inke’s Five Finger Death Punches, running around like -five-legged spiders with wrists. I could make a “Thing” joke, but I won’t. Your party killed a dozen of the hands without even breaking a sweat. You also left smudges on the walls and the furniture. Someone is going to have some cleaning to do.
* * *
Room #7
Quick Name: The ABC Room (Antechamber of the Biker’s Club)
Quick Note: On some worlds, there are entities that employ motorized vehicles to transport their bodies through space (and therefore time) to get to where they are going. These motorized vehicles say a lot about the person who employs them. Some such entities, who ride motorized bicycles, are called bikers. Many have tattoos. In this room, there are various bikes resting on the floor, and the place smells like leather, cheap cologne, and the ghost of burned tobacco. Also, body odor. Which goes well with the leather and stale tobacco smoke. Each bike is next to a tattoo chair, and there sure are a lot of them. Gwen found, though, that the motorized bicycles are for show only, since they don’t have engines. There would’ve been monsters here, and given the size of the room, and the spiked leather on the seats, handlebars and sable bags, it would be something that would throw those motorized bicycles. A dragon maybe. Lots of dragon tattoos. Less popular are frost giant tattoos. Not sure why.
Additional Note: This used to be Room 12, back when this was just a subbasement with five rooms (12A-E) Connected to it. Now, there is just the one room, 12E, through two very big and very solid steel doors.
* * *
Inner Sanctum
Quick Name: Inke’s Inner Parlour
Quick Note: I can’t tell you anything else about the inner sanctum until you go through the doors.
<<<>>>
Gwen gestured. “Okay, Cal. What’s in the inner sanctum? So far, this dungeon has been a ghost town with only a few ghosts. That doesn’t include my new best friend out in the reception room. Was it me or was she like super friendly? Like, it was almost embarrassing how we clicked.” The rogue sighed.
Cal had to note that Gwen wasn’t being sarcastic about the receptionist. Kelly Ryan had stolen all of their hearts. “I don’t know what’s on the other side of the door, but all the Apothos is flowing right into that room. There must be something big in there, right? My Triple A mentioned something about frost giant tattoos, and the rarity of said tattoo. Could there be a frost giant there?”
“I hope so, Calcannis,” Helga said in her normal voice. The snail tattoo was gone. “I cannae wait for a fight. It was murder on me, going so slow. Murder.”
Kronke’s eyes brightened. “Someone say murder? Pinkie like murder.”
“We know!” Gwen shouted. “Dad. Er, Dave. Could you just go in there already?”
“It would be my pleasure.” Dave threw open the door, threw a web onto the ceiling before swinging out of sight.
Kronke turned into his Reaper Knight form, face thinning to a skull as the pink cloak billowed out around him. He and the scythe entered next, followed by Hurricane with his mistress on her back.
Gwen shot Cal a smile. “Finally, our soldiers can soldier, and we can hang back in the shadows where it’s safe. Not a lot of safety in our jobs so far, boss man. I signed on to audit, not to fight.”
Cal thought for a minute. “Every audit is a war, and every number is a battle, in our endless struggle against the forces of evil and chaos.”
Gwen looked at him for a long time. “This is why Kelly Ryan likes me more than you. Let’s just, uh, go.”
Cal entered the room and immediately went Off the Books. Gwen followed, melting away as she used her Shadow Stealth to keep herself hidden.
At the center of the room was a single light shining down on a reclining chair marked by a number and a letter—12E. Inke’s core gem floated above, glistening with a green light. The 12E chair was the pedestal. Next to the chair was a tattoo machine and a stool where the artist would’ve sat. Only there was no artist nor anyone else.
Cal cast Triple A, and he saw the amount of Apothos flowing both into and out of the Celestial Node. It was a gorgeous color, but mostly Umbra and Vita, which must’ve been the two Apothos energies that Inke had an affinity with.
Twelve alcoves, lost in shadows, circled the room. Filling the alcoves were tattoo chairs, covered in dust and cobwebs. Across from the steel entrance doors were the steel exit doors. From the flow of the energy, Cal could detect another stairway leading down to the third floor.
Dave was above them, in his webs, while Kronke stood towering over Helga and Hurricane, right on the edge of the central light shining down from the ceiling.
Dave sent Cal a message.
Cal reached out to Gwen.
Before she could answer, from out of the shadows emerged a massive figure, the shadow of a certain troll they knew. Inke’s shadow was a good foot taller and three feet broader than the troll had been, and it rushed across the room and took Kronke, and threw him across the room into an alcove chair. Straps immediately lashed out and tied the paladin down.
Helga fired her musket, but the round went through the giant troll. In seconds, the shadowy figure was gone.
Kronke struggled and grunted at the straps. “Can’t break free. Pinkerton bad for cutting straps. Would need pocketknife. Kronke no have pocketknife. Let me try Smell of Freedom.”
The smell of cinnamon apple crisp boiled out of Kronke, filling the entire room, but Cal knew it wouldn’t work. Inke’s potpourri pendant had broken at the same time his guardian form had been destroyed. Kronke’s magic had to work on something that could smell, and Inke’s core gem couldn’t smell.
They couldn’t free Inke like they’d freed Dave.
Cal had the sinking feeling that the only way to beat Inke was to crack his core, and that was something he didn’t want to do.