I spent the next fifteen or twenty minutes chatting with Hekla, telling her what had happened and asking her to pass the message on if they happened to meet Chris, who apparently was now a giant rock monster called a Coal Engine. She asked incisive questions about Carl and Donut and Mordecai—how they were reacting, how they were treating me, what their plans were, and so on—and made suggestions on what I could do to help them through this. The basic answer was 'not much'. Carl was likely to wobble between anger and grief for the next few days so the best I could do was to keep my head down so as not to provide the 'anger' phase a target. It reminded me uncomfortably of my last relationship, but I didn't share that.
Finally, Donut and I went into the training room. Carl was beating his fists bloody on a wooden training post wrapped in hemp rope. Above the post a sign counted down Bare Knuckles — 38:42. The room was large enough that we were able to work on our own skills without being near him, so we moved off to one side.
Choose Skill to Train the system demanded.
"Catcher," I said.
Defend the target. 1:00:00 remaining.
A holographic puppy shimmered into existence. Ten meters away appeared a four-armed alien with a head that was mostly a mouth full of teeth. The alien held a rock in each hand. Before I could move it shrieked and hurled one of the rocks at the puppy, striking it in the side. The puppy yelped in pain and was knocked back.
I jumped in front of it and deflected the next rock, and the next. The fourth one caught me in the face and when I flinched the fifth one got past me and struck the puppy again. I gritted my teeth and tried to move faster.
o-o-o-o
Carl spent his full hour smashing his fists into the training post. He alternated, opening his right hand each time he struck with his left so that his gauntlet disappeared and he could punch the wood with his bare fists. His knuckles had been split before I came into the room and the ropes tied around the post were sanguine pointilism by the time he finished.
The moment the bell dinged he walked out of the room without a backwards look. Donut and I glanced at each other nervously, then went back to our training.
After I finished showering off again (this time keeping my arms up in front of my chest with the awareness that trillions of aliens were likely watching me and masturbating right now), I met up with the others outside. Carl was in the crafting room, Mordecai and Donut were in the outer room. The toad man was scrolling through something in his interface while Donut was sitting on the back of the couch staring at the closed door of the crafting studio.
"Should we go check on him?" I asked.
Donut shook her head. "Let him be. He always gets like this. He just needs to work it out and then he'll be fine."
"Okay." Mordecai was on the left end of the couch, so I settled onto the chair next to him. I bit my lip, thinking how to ask it. "Mordecai?"
"Hm?" he said, looking up from his reading. "What?"
"The aliens...they're watching us, right? All the time?"
"Sure, why do...oh. The shower?"
I nodded.
"Yeah, sorry. The only place they can't see you is in the toilet stalls. Also, I can't be sure but I think they don't depend on visible light. If you're in pitch blackness I'm pretty sure they can still see you. Maybe not in full normal color, but even that I can't say for certain. If you need to wank, do it in the stalls. Oh, and I'm not sure if they can hear what happens in the stalls, so be quiet while you're doing it."
"Oh." That was not remotely why I was asking!
"What is Carl doing in there?!" Donut burst out.
"He's crafting," Mordecai said. "We installed his alchemy, engineering, and sapper's tables and he dumped out all the stuff he has that's labeled an alchemy ingredient. Once he's done the two of you should do the same, but let's give him his space right now. After you guys leave I'll start brewing up some potions and a few other things."
"Do you know what he's crafting?" I asked.
Mordecai shrugged. "Dunno. I was in there for a few minutes before deciding I didn't want to be near ground zero anymore. It was big, metal, and square-ish." He went back to his reading.
I fidgeted, not sure what to do with myself. Finally I pulled out the hand-sized piece of mirror and started working on my appearance, trying to make my hair more lifelike. The strands were too thick and too stiff. I pulled a hank of hair around in front of me so I could see it and isolated one strand. With a little focus I was able to split it in half lengthwise, then split it again. The splits weren't even and part of one strand snapped off, but I tried again and managed to get it the second time. I concentrated on the flexibility, reusing what Mordecai had explained about making my skin move correctly. After a few moments the hair softened, becoming more natural. I lightened it to straw blonde, then pushed the changes through the rest of my hair, feeling it sweep across my scalp in a wave of realism.
Hekla: How are you, Katia? How are the others?
Katia: Hekla! Hi! I'm doing okay. How are you guys? By the way, I forgot to say this before: Congratulations on being #2 on the Top-10 list!
Hekla: Thanks. Not sure it's a good thing; people are going to be hunting me for the bounty. Eva's already had to kill several people and I don't want her to need to kill more because they are bounty hunting. Hopefully you can bring Carl, Donut, and Mordecai to us. If we all link up we'll be a lot safer—people should recognize that trying to take on any of us means taking on all of us and not want to risk it.
Katia: I'm working on it. Where are you guys?
Hekla: We're at station 125 on the lavender and indigo lines. We learned something useful. Mobs get on at some stations and not others, but they always get off at stations ending in 5, leaving the train empty. Same with stations ending in 0—they always get on at those stations, although they sometimes get on at others too. We're looking into 125 now to see where they're going. It's a bunch of caverns and tunnels; I think it will let us loop back to the intervening stations. Ask Mordecai if he knows why the monsters would be patrolling in a circle.
"Mordecai," I said. "Hekla says the mobs get on at stations ending in 0 and off at stations ending in 5, and they probably loop back to the intervening stations. Any idea why?"
He shook his froggy head. "No clue. Ask her what station lines and intersections she's seen so far. Chat the results to me so I can put them on my scratchpad."
"Scratchpad?"
"Look under the 'Utilities' tab in your interface. You can write notes there, copy stuff to and from the chat system, draw pictures, and so on."
Neat. I passed the message on to Hekla and received a list in response. The Daughters had been moving up the Indigo line, stopping at each of the transit stations to put together a list of which lines connected to which. As Carl had said, there were a lot of transit stations and there didn't seem to be a pattern. The Daughters had appeared at a station 81, just as we had, and had gotten off at 83, just as we had. It was six stations before they saw their next transfer stop, then eight after that, but then only four. From then on they were closer together, with almost every other station being a transfer up until 113, at which point they hadn't seen another one before they decided to get off at station 125 in order to find where the mobs were going. I sent the list over to Mordecai as requested.
Katia: What sort of monsters are you seeing?
Hekla: Hold on.
There was a gap in the conversation and I worked on getting my nose right while I waited for her to get finished killing whatever it was. Noses, it turned out, were more complex than they seemed and I was having trouble figuring out what exactly was wrong with mine.
"You should buy a makeup table," Mordecai said suddenly, looking up from the list he'd been scrolling through. "It's a crafting table that sounds like it was specifically designed for doppelgangers and other free-form shapeshifters. It says that 'All deleterious effects of shapeshifting are suppressed at this table', which I think means it won't hurt."
"That would be a relief," I said. Shifting slowly or only making small changes hurt less, meaning that what I was doing now was merely uncomfortable instead of outright painful. Still.
Hekla: Going to be busy. Stay safe, keep Carl/Donut/Mordecai safe and join us ASAP.
Reading on Amazon or a pirate site? This novel is from Royal Road. Support the author by reading it there.
Katia: Will do. Good luck.
Silence fell across our little group as Mordecai and I worked on our projects and Donut obsessed more and more over Carl. She eventually got to the point that she was stalking up and down the back of the couch, tail lashing back and forth.
Of course, when the crafting studio door opened and Carl came out, she instantly sat down and starting washing her paw with a great show of unconcern.
"Hm? Oh, Carl, it's you," she said. "Are you done so soon?" Her class, Former Child Actor, suddenly made a great deal of sense, since her actual acting was distinctly at the 'nervous six-year-old' level.
"Yeah, I'm done. Let's get out there. I want to see what's going on at Limp Richard's and then get on one of the trains and grind for a while." He moved for the door, not waiting for me or Donut. We scrambled to follow.
Outside our personal space, Wendita was waiting with several alien dishes for me; I scooped them into my inventory with hurried thanks and chased after Carl. I was honestly worried that, as angry as he was, he would get on the train without noticing that I wasn't beside him. I needn't have worried. He was in Limp Richard's and clearly not about to leave.
Limp Richard's was a normal general store—inflated prices when we wanted to buy, lousy prices when we wanted to sell, and most of it wasn't useful. Carl found one thing that intrigued him, the Battery Fabricator. He examined it for a minute and then set it aside. I managed to scoop it up while he was discussing it with Limp Richard the mole man. I examined its properties.
Battery Fabricator — 75,000 gold
I don't really know how this thing works. It was taken from a dwarven automaton factory. You pour a handful of mana potions in, stick an empty battery in, and a charged battery comes out on the other side. Comes with a box of 50 of the battery things. Price not negotiable.
I browsed around, only half paying attention as Carl and Limp Richard moved from discussing the fabricator to discussing the science fiction book that Richard was reading. Carl apparently had a bunch of science fiction, horror, and westerns in his inventory (because of course he did) and ended up doing a 5-for-5 swap with the mole man.
"I don't know if we'll be back this way," Carl said to the mole man, "but if we are, and if you like the books, I'll trade you the rest of the ones I've already read."
"Okay," Limp Richard said as we left. "There are a lot of my kind on this floor. Don't give them away to any of those other guys. They're all book hogs!"
"You should have asked for more," Donut said once we were outside. "You're a terrible negotiator, Carl."
"Oh don't worry about that," Carl said. "If I learned anything from my time in the Coast Guard, it's the value of entertainment to a bored man who's run out of books to read. In a couple of days, he'll be jonesin' pretty hard. Once we figure out how to backtrack on the rails, we'll need to swing by this place again."
o-o-o-o
The Nightmare Express tracks were wider than the colored lines, there was no electrified third rail, and the platform was twice as long.
Carl: Mordecai, I'm looking at the map for the Nightmare Express. It's a figure-eight pattern instead of a straight line like the red line. It stops here, then station 283 on the mauve and purple lines, then 436, then 283 on the green and yellow lines, then 83 on the tangerine and plum lines, then back here.
Mordecai: Got it. I'll add this to the list. Oh, and Katia got a bunch of stops from Hekla. Between that and the ones you got from Bautista I'm starting to put things together a bit.
"They weren't kidding when they named this thing 'the Iron Tangle'," Carl said. "My head hurts already. I hate math."
How was math relevant here? Maybe he was thinking superstring theory or knot theory? Well, not going to call him out for it. "I'm not a fan of math myself," I said.
I pointed to the relevant point on the map. For me it was blank, since the map only showed the figure eight and a dot labeled You are here. Station #83. "You said up here is the green and yellow station? That means it crosses the yellow line twice. That seems important to know." What it actually meant was that we could backtrack but if I said that he might get angry that I was being too smart. Better to let him figure it out.
"Maybe," he said. "I guess if we ride the yellow all the way up to 283, we can hop on this Nightmare train to backtrack. But the stairwells are at 12, 24, 36, 48, and 72. So we need to find one of these loops that goes lower than 72."
He stared at the map a moment longer and then we headed over to the yellow line. He checked the map for it; once again, all that Donut and I could see was the shape of the line, an upside-down fishhook, and another dot also labeled You are here. Station #83.' I went into my scratchpad and drew an approximation of the map's shape for future reference.
"Do you see other stops?" I asked Carl. I was hesitant to speak up since he was still sparking anger everywhere, but the information was important.
"Yeah," he said. "Same as on the red line. They go from 11 to 436 and stop. The transfer stations are circled."
"Can you get the numbers?" I asked. "Hekla gave us a bunch so it would be good to know if they match."
Wordlessly, he shot a text over the party chat. The numbers were identical to Hekla's: 83, 89, 97, 101, and then every two or three stops until 113, at which point they started being farther apart. I stared at the list, frowning. I felt like there had to be some kind of pattern there but I couldn't see it.
My ruminations were interrupted by the train pulling up. The doors opened and the monsters inside roared.
Cave Mudge Bonker. Level 19.
In the hierarchy of Cave Mudge society, the Bonker is about as high on the list as a commoner can get. These odd, war-like creatures are said to have once been a star-faring nation, but something happened to cause them to regress back to the stone age. Probably too much reality TV. Don't let those skinny legs fool you. When these guys get to bonkin', they can be pretty darn quick.
There were four of them. They were squat and gray-skinned with no neck, a shark-like mouth, and a pair of black, beady eyes with oily pipe-cleaner hair scraggling out of their heads. Their spindly legs barely seemed capable of holding up their fat, pot-bellied bodies. Unlike the things we'd met until now, they were smart enough to use primitive weapons. Two of them had wooden clubs filled with nails, the third had a metal pipe, and the last was holding a brick.
I looked down the train. Every car that I could see had something in it, mostly more Bonkers but a sprinkling of lion-headed nagas.
Two Magic Missiles lanced out from Donut's eyes, headshotting the Bonker in the doorway and dropping it. The doors slid closed and the train began slowly gathering speed.
"Hey," Carl said as the train rolled away. "I can't believe that actually worked. We can get them, but they can't get us."
The words were actually cheery and the aura of wrath was fading, so I decided to prioritize 'be seen as useful' over 'do not be a lightning rod'. "I spoke to Hekla earlier, and she said she and the others spent a bunch of time on that this morning, racking up a lot of experience. She thinks it's a bug. You can also pull them from the doorways onto the platform and that kills them, but you don't get the experience."
"Hmm," Carl said, thinking. "I think she's wrong. I don't think it is a bug. It's more of a time trap, designed to get you to sit tight and snipe all day. If these were stronger monsters, I'd say we should definitely spend the day doing this, but there's only so many we can get in the few moments while the door is open. Experience-wise, we're better off jumping onto the train and killing them."
"She also says that the monsters all get off every 5-numbered stop. If you follow them out, it's all tunnels and she thinks they lead back to the earlier stations in that block. She said it looks like the monsters are constantly migrating in a circle."
"Tell her we'll check it out. Also tell her to collect all the route info she can from all of her contacts and report it back to you so you can pass it on to Mordecai. I hope to have a better idea of this place by this time tomorrow."
"Okay." I passed the message on.
o-o-o-o
Having just said that we shouldn't sit here and shoot monsters, Carl changed his mind and had us sit here and shoot monsters for two hours. Donut and I didn't say anything.
In fairness, it was a good chance to check what monsters there were in the area and what loot we might get from them. The answer was that they were always the same—the Bonkers and the 'Shock Chompers'. They dropped not much, just a few coins and occasionally a body part that was labeled as an alchemical ingredient. I kept grabbing the corpses and shoving them into my inventory because it was easier for me than looting individually the way Carl preferred. My inventory now had a tab labeled Morgue that was filling up.
The monsters were all level 20, one below me and six or seven below Carl and Donut, and they came in small enough numbers that they wouldn't have been much challenge even in a fair fight.
Eventually we had killed enough to satisfy Carl so we jumped on the next train, getting onto car #2 at the very front after killing the two Shock Chompers inside.
Carl turned right, looking for more threats, while I turned left and examined the door into the engine car. It was a solid block on my minimap, showing no detail of the inside.
"It says we need a Yellow Line Engineer's Key to open this door," I said. "How do you think we can get one of those?"
"We need to get the driver to come out somehow, I guess," Carl said. "Then we gotta take it from him. Either that or maybe we can figure out how to break into the car from the outside."
Before I could say anything, the far doorway slid open and five Bonkers came in from car #3.
"Ahh, shit," Carl said, backing up. "Formation one."
Carl and Donut had been briefing me on their 'playbook'. Formation one was simple: We backed up to the doors where the lack of seats or support poles meant there was a little space. I stood in the 'portside' vestibule—Carl had insisted that we use the nautical terms 'port' and 'starboard' to refer to the left and right sides of the train as you faced front. It made sense, but I wasn't sure why we also had to say 'fore' and 'aft' instead of 'front' and 'back'.
I stood in the portside vestibule, Mongo in the starboard one, Donut sat on Carl's shoulder, and Carl himself hung back slightly so the monsters would be funneled into a killbox between us. I shifted, trading height for longer and more muscular arms. Carl watched me change with an expression that combined interest and a bit of shock.
The Bonkers saw us prepare and looked daunted. The one in front tried to stop and backpedal but the ones behind pushed them ahead with much caterwauling.
Perhaps unwisely, Donut dropped the unwilling Bonker with a Magic Missile headshot. The next two roared and stampeded over his body, swinging their clubs down at Carl. I let go of my axe with one hand so I could use my Catcher skill to deflect one of the attacks. The monster stumbled as the misdirected swing forced it off balance; Carl jumped forward and hit it in the chin with a vicious uppercut from his spiked gauntlet. The Bonker went to the floor in a heap and Carl stamped on its head. Blood and brains shot out the sides as it flattened, splashing over my feet and ankles.
I jerked my eyes up, suddenly realizing that I'd let myself get too focused on what was happening beside me so that I didn't keep an eye on the full picture.
The last two Bonkers were picking themselves up off the floor, the wounds in their chests suggesting that Donut had given up on headshots and was now shooting center mass to compensate for the train's rattling and Carl's unpredictable movements. Carl jumped forward and kicked twice, causing their heads to explode.
"That's really gross, Carl," Donut said.
Carl ignored her. "Are you okay?" he asked me while wiping his foot on a rag from his inventory. He pointed above my head to where my health bar had appeared. "That was pretty slick."
I nodded. "Fine, thanks. "I got pricked by one of the spikes on his club, but it mostly scraped against the metal part of my arm."
"Okay, good," he said. "Just be careful. I almost accidentally punched you and not the monster."
Really? How about if he was more careful about where he was punching?! Still, I settled for a neutral, "Yeah, it's hard in these close quarters."
Four more Bonkers entered the car and came charging at us.
"Well the good news is we can try this again," Carl said with a sigh. "Reset the formation."