Chapter 34: AOE Honey Damage

We had chartered flights from the nearest flightpath after evacuating the Grave Grove. Vick5 had proven useful in a new and unexpected way; he had access to a trove of gold. I allowed him to pay our fare, and he had no qualms, deeming it both efficient and logical.

The Cinder Veldt’s charred expanse swept to the north of us, and I thought I spied my swarm of bees far below. But it was a bird murmuration. The bees had a significant head start, but any glimpse of swarm-like movements convinced me it was them. I knew it was more like Relja’s omen theory; I was probably seeing what I wanted to see.

Our sky mounts—a pair of giant umber ravens with gold-flecked, fuzzy plumage—began their descent and a sense of ‘home’ washed over me. The flora and fauna, the ponds and waterways, the gloomy color pallet of the zone, all hit me in a nostalgic way. Strange, considering I spent much of my former graveyard existence seething in anger for my lost bones.

The area where Azwold’s tavern waited was darker and lower-lying than Gnarlroot Hill, and its proximity to the sea made things swampy in places. I wondered why my mage had chosen this place in particular for a hideout, considering its distance from the only flightpath in a wide radius.

Our umber ravens circled, croaking deep caws down to the Bat Master. We descended to Bayou Bunker, alighting on a crunchy patch of gravel among a swathe of mud and scribbles of limp grass patches. It was not much more than several rotting wooden poles with rusty chains and collars hanging, some strapped around the necks of fat bats. The Bayou Bats hung like massive, murky chrysalises from the pole-top spikes, which reached out like dilapidated umbrella ribs.

I gave the Bat Master a look, wondering if I could use Azwold’s detector gadget to scan the NPC. It was staring blankly at a decayed “bunker,” which was more of a shoddy hovel. Empty.

“Alright,” said DarkNeon, “Mount up, chums. Let’s go!”

“Right you are,” I said, summoning the Gremlin. Though the area was wet, it had good roads. I was a novice pilot, but decided it mattered little and got in.

DarkNeon summoned Yolo, Relja summoned Fizzu, and Vick5 summoned his Matte Brown Techno Dune Buggy. We would all ride individually. An acceptable change of pace. We rode.

~<>*<>*<>~

I tried an old iron key from Azwold’s inventory in the lock of the banded wooden door. Had I not found the keyring, we may not have been granted access. Player housing had secure coding to prevent break-ins. I wondered for a moment if the Rogue could have bypassed Azwold’s security measures. Probably. Thankfully, we did not need such skills.

The key turned, and I pulled on the iron ring door handle. It sparked and gave me a shock. I pulled my hand bones back, losing a sliver of HP, but the door had opened. It reminded me of the oubliette, but without phantom pain problems this time. It was normal iron, mayhap enchanted to deliver a shock to would-be trespassers. Not grave iron.

I ushered everyone inside and found the light, pulling on a thin chain dangling from the propeller fan above the table where Azwold had first interrogated me.

The place looked unchanged. Not surprising, considering Azwold and I had been on the go and rarely apart. Alkali Hollow had changed that.

“Now what?” said Relja, wiping dust from a counter.

In the brief silence that followed her question, I detected an answer; one by one, we heard the static-y murmur of countless tiny wings vibrating the air outside.

Relja cranked open a frosted casement window a crack, and we peered out and up. A steady stream of bees entered the tavern’s attic through vent slats near the apex of the wall below its mossy, overhanging shingles. Efficient and organized, the swarm was inside swiftly.

Vick5 moved behind Azwold’s work bench, furthest from the bee cloud.

“Well alright,” said DarkNeon, crouching. “Glad gadget boy was right this time.”

“This time?” said Vick5. “Calculations are void of opinion, largely.”

“Mhm, yeah,” she said. “Just take the compliment, won’t ya?”

“Compliment?” he said.

“C minus for effort on that one,” said Relja.

“Hey now,” DarkNeon crossed her arms. “We still don’t know he’s not a spy.”

“This again?” said Relja.

Their banter faded from my notice in an instant. Looking out the window, what I took for a glowfly or a swamp wisp moved toward the tavern in a golden and glimmery streak. Like a fat, golden bullet, it shot straight for the slats the other bees had gone into.

“The Queen,” I whispered.

“The what?” DarkNeon followed my gaze.

“I know not what this portends,” I said, “but I fear a powerful ally has come to collect her favor from me.”

Stolen story; please report.

The Queen of Bees perched on the target dummy where Azwold had constructed my bone frame. She was still and quiet. Patient.

As she perched, the swarm—my former chest cavity tenants—filtered from the attic, crawling down the walls, squirming between holes where the ceiling had deteriorated, swooping around amidst the stale air.

The entire room was abuzz.

I had little time to consider what was happening. The bees were landing all over me. They crawled along my ribs and, with industrial efficiency, plucked away small chunks of my waxy lung material.

I understood that whatever favor repayment the Queen of Bees needed of me, I should allow it. So I did. My bees deconstructed the entirety of my ribcage waxworks in a matter of minutes while my party watched. They looked dumbfounded and incapable of determining what, if anything, they should do about it. Their simple act of not panicking was enough for now because nobody really knows what to do about a bee swarm.

I was wax-less. I felt hollow. My capacity for speech had dwindled with each tiny nugget of removed wax. It was not only my ectoplasmic animation source which allowed for spoken sound, it was the honeycomb too, like alveoli.

Then, the golden queen rose from her place on the dummy, hovering like a humming bird, floating to circle around me. I stood, uncertain, like awaiting a doctor’s bleak diagnosis. But instead of extracting some final price in body parts, she simply crawled into my [Grim, Dim Purple Coat]’s pocket.

With a shard of [Hive Scepter] glass clutched in her little bee paws, she drifted over to the darkened corner where Azwold had his workbench station.

Vick5 went to stand by Relja.

Unsure, I waited. She came back to me, retrieving another bit of broken scepter from my coat pocket.

“I hypothesize this creature intends to repair your item,” said Vick5.

“Well, let’s not make her do it all herself, ey?” said DarkNeon. “Lay out the parts, Eld.”

“Here,” said Relja. She pulled a dusty cloth free from the table, revealing metal instruments, tools, and Gadget Crafting framework underneath. “There. That’s better?”

I retrieved every bit of scepter scrap from my inventory and laid it on the table. I wanted to say: “Every Telemoon member takes Gadget Craft as their crafting job. Is that not so?” But only faint rasping emerged from me.

I saw Relja staring at me, trying to read me.

“Hey Vic, you’re a Gadget Crafter, right?” she said, somehow gleaning enough. Curious.

“Affirmative,” said Vick5.

“What do you make of this mess, then?” said DarkNeon. “Can we fix the scepter?”

“I do not have maintenance expertise for spirit mage class tools,” he said. “It may be a calculable mistake to attempt repairs.”

“Maybe we don’t have to worry about it,” said Relja. “Look at that.”

We looked on in wonder as my bees set about the work themselves. Faster than seemed possible, they had arranged the [Hive Scepter]’s fragments in a good simulacrum of its previous structure. Then they cocooned it with the wax they had taken from my chest, like an invisible spider working a time-lapse bug wrap. The scepter glimmered a tree sap gold beneath its waxen honey cage.

The Queen of Bees took her place at the scepter’s crown. A golden figurehead, just as I had envisioned her the last time she had perched there, aiding our rust magic on Stonesthrow Island.

Her wings went to buzzing. Faster and louder than the swarm, she cut tiny rifts in the muggy air. Hypersonic rhythms emanated in a short circumference.

Without notice, the wax exploded, sending hardened honey shrapnel across the workbench. The shards stung old glass in the dingy windows and rattled the disused tankards behind the bar.

Every member of my party was feeling their bodies for the waxy shrapnel, having taken mild AOE damage from the blast.

But when I looked back to the worktable, I saw the [Hive Scepter] whole once again, shining along its neon grey geometry, newer and radiating energetically pure lavender spirit tendrils.

The tendrils reached out like a blind cephalopod, searching for the walls of an undersea cavern. The ghostly tentacles shifted toward the target dummy like a kelp forest under the influence of a deep wave. They latched on, wrapped around it, enveloping the form in purplish steamy goo.

While this was underway, I almost failed to notice that my bees were collecting the scraps of wax they had blown all over the room. They set to work, cocooning up the scepter once more.

The complexities of what the Queen and her helpers were weaving escaped me. I turned back to the target dummy to watch.

The lavender slime hung on the wooden bust-form like a see-through aura. It took the shape of a humanoid. The last smoky tendril slithered itself around the shape, and then it took a step away, glopping away from the target dummy, shimmering darkly.

[Azwold has joined the party!]

My mage had returned to the world of the game-living.

“Trade me spots,” he said in a deathly hoarse voice. He grabbed my shoulders, gooping up the threads of my coat, directing me to stand up against the target dummy.

“Welcome back Azzy,” said DarkNeon.

He nodded to her, acknowledging everyone in the room with a glance.

Azwold let go of my shoulders, went to his workbench, grabbed the wax-wrapped pommel of the [Hive Scepter], then turned and shoved the whole thing up under my vacant ribcage. It lodged just so between my pelvic sacrum and my clavicle nubs.

The honey-thick wax reached out like the ectoplasmic tendrils had, but to latch to my insides. My bees swarmed to me, filling up every empty nook within my chest, and set to work rebuilding their honeycombs where my heart had never been.

“There we go,” said Azwold, stepping back to have a look at me. “It was either make the scepter a permanent fixture of you, or leave it broken.”

“You have made the right choice,” I said. “I hope.”

“Me too!” He offered a rare laugh.

“Azwold Spirit Mage,” said Vick5. “I am no longer a Telemoon guild member. All my designations and permissions have been stripped. I require your assistance to mitigate the consequences of severing myself from the collective.”

“Yes,” he said. “Thanks for your help caving in Trojainous and his lackeys. I’m not sure how to get your abilities back, but we’ll figure it out. I haven’t been completely out of the loop while locked in the Spirit Realm. I had a feeling you’d come around, eventually. Would have been better if you left when I did in the first place, but....”

“Ralos has returned,” I said. “I believe you were correct in assuming that Trojainous was an alter ego.”

“So, were all the plunder memories reversed?”

“As far as we can tell,” said DarkNeon, “yeah.”

Azwold quietly contemplated.

“I have formulated a more complete hypothesis,” said Vick5. We turned to regard him. “As I have postulated, there has been a disruption in Telemoon’s hierarchy.”

“Oh yes,” said Relja. “You did say that. I remember.”

“While engaged in combat with my ex-guild mates, assisted by the Beast Budz guild, I observed Ralos. He appears to have assumed a command role. His exploits involving Gnarlroot_The_Eld and Azwold may have earned him a promotion.”

“Plotting power grabs…” said Azwold.

“But more, I hypothesize the Goddess was one third of the Mentalist Troika. With the Prototype’s explosion, a void in Telemoon hierarchy was created. I suspect your rival intends to fill that void.”

“Ralos wants to run Telemoon?” asked Azwold.

“It is conceivable,” said Vick5.