“So...” said the green man. “What do you do for fun around here?”
Attaboy snorted. “That wasn’t funny the first time you said it either.”
“That’s the whole point,” Mo explained. “If you take something that’s not funny, and repeat it enough, it becomes funny, like our own little in-joke.”
Attaboy made a disgusted noise and retreated to the back of the cave.
“I think it’s funny,” he heard Maria say as he left.
The last few days had been weird. A gob, a serf, and… whatever the hell Mo is, all stuck in a mine. Sounds like a joke.
“Hey!” Mo called. “When’s Snow White coming back to the mine, Grumpy?”
Attaboy didn’t bother replying. The green man was always bothering him, asking him questions he had already answered, or worse, asking him questions he wouldn’t answer. He wanted to know when Nykka would return too, though. She had muttered something about ‘restarting her clock’, after she brought Mo and Maria to the caves of the old mine. Mo had convinced her, against what Attaboy could only hope was her better judgment, to hide them from Sinaloa.
Not soon enough. I’ve got to get out of this place. Head north, he thought out of habit, before catching himself. No. Southeast. Lilijoy.
He felt torn, caught between two selves. One wanted to go north and damn the consequences. The other wanted to see Lilijoy, the real Lilijoy, and not the version he talked to on the Inside or through virtual meetings. One wanted to be thoughtful, careful, to plan for the best method of accomplishing the long and dangerous journey, the other wanted to start, to move and feel like he was no longer pinned under tons of rock.
He wasn’t even sure which self was which. Atticus was uncomfortable with Lilijoy, the Emily-not-Emily, while Attaboy was uncomfortable with the changes to his oldest companion, and even more uneasy with the reflection of himself in her eyes.
And then there’s that other problem, he remembered. The Gatekeeper’s warning. Too bad he didn’t warn me not to take that door.
He grimaced as he thought back to the moments after he entered the Inside for the first time. He had been so sure he knew what he was getting into, so confident that hundreds, maybe thousands of hours of virtual reality gaming would provide him an edge over anyone from Earth in the current era, only to fall on his face, metaphorically speaking for the most part, over and over.
He grimaced again when he thought of the look that kept crossing Nandi’s oddly expressive bovine face during their one and only conversation. The look that said Every word coming out of your mouth is some combination of dumb, offensive and pitiable. Of course, that was much more clear in hindsight. At the time, he had taken the giant bull for some kind of character creation guide, and acted accordingly. He was still kicking himself for that.
He hadn’t fully trusted his Atticus memories since. The entire experience, that and the ensuing Trial, had somewhat tainted his enthusiasm for the entire Inside endeavor.
Though it is pretty cool being some kind of chosen one, he reflected. Like something straight out of an anime. I just need to get a kick-ass sword.
That was something both parts of him could agree on. He was a bit more conflicted about the supposed downside to being a ‘Child of the Great Mind’, as both Lilijoy and his advisor insisted on calling it. Everything he knew from his inherited memories told him he had nothing to worry about, at least relative to a thousand other, far more tangible threats. The real people surrounding him on all sides, with real weapons and real power would be more than happy to render the issue moot. Even putting that aside, it was only Lilijoy who seemed worried about the whole thing. Dean Reunification had brushed away his attempts to broach the subject as childish fears.
“Certainly the Children of the Great Mind are never seen again in the Garden,” she had said with a sniff. “They become something much too great to fit within such cramped confines.”
Attaboy wasn’t in such a hurry to discard Lilijoy’s fears though. He knew in his heart that she was the only one he could trust. Except he wasn’t entirely sure that was still the case, with all the changes they had been through. Also, Nandi had warned him that his journey must not include her. He was still trying to figure out the implications of that too.
He heaved a sigh. Why did Nykka have to bring these random people here? I can’t even kill time by going Inside.
He didn’t feel comfortable allowing himself to be vulnerable with the green guy around. For most of the past few days, he had hidden himself deep in the mine and cultivated, avoiding any interaction with the pair, only emerging to check if Nykka had left a message. He just hoped that she wasn’t going to collect any more strays.
Okay. Check once more, then go cultivate. Or sleep. Maybe watch an old movie.
He moved to the portion of the tunnel where the ceiling had collapsed, allowing access to the sky. Immediately the message from Nykka came.
It’s go time. Gather up the supplies and get the others ready.
***
Probably not one of my finer moments, thought Lilijoy as she ran full tilt down the hallway, doing her best not to spring too high off the bouncy surface. She could barely hear the grottenolms behind her, their strides frighteningly quiet.
“They’re salamanders,” she called ahead of her once more, now that she could see her friends, and the surprisingly not-startled looks on their faces. Skria was already in the process of forming a spell, and Jessila had her heavy ironwood club out and teed up like a baseball bat. As soon as Lilijoy ran past her, Skria let loose a cloud of caustic gas that stopped the grottenohms cold, and in fact caused them to rear up, grasp the ceiling and reverse direction, now inverted. They ran along the ceiling, their broad feet easily gripping the fungal mat, retreating until they were out of sight.
Jessila made a sound of disappointment and let the tip of her club drop to the floor.
“We had a bet,” Skria explained. “I thought it would be only a few minutes before you came running back with the monsters chasing you. Jess thought it would take longer.”
“That was the only disagreement? How long it would take?”
“I thought maybe you would be riding one,” Jess offered.
“Very funny.” Lilijoy was amused to realize such conversations went on in her absence. “Anyway, that’s not a bad idea. The only problem is that those things are tough. If they got on top of us, I don’t think it would go well.”
“Hard to see, fast too,” Jess offered.
“They were pretty timid about my burning gas though,” Skria said.
“I’m sure their skin is very sensitive. It probably didn’t hurt that they’re full from all the roaches they ate,” Lilijoy replied. “We’re still going to need to get past them one way or another.” Another thought occurred to her. “We should talk about what happens if one of us, or two of us respawn before we try though.”
Skria pulled at her fur, removing bits of dried blood. “It is a problem, isn’t it? I did not like that feeling, before you used your Charm. If you are gone, it might return.”
That gave Lilijoy pause. She hadn’t actively considered the scenario where she respawned and the others didn’t. Another blind spot. I’ve only died in the Trial and at the Academy. Once again she resolved to be more thorough in her modeling of… everything.
It’s back to the architecture of thought problem, she realized. I can’t model every eventuality, so I rely on assumptions and shortcuts in my thinking. That’s where the blind spots and cul-de-sacs come from. Even if I have multiple consciousnesses working on a problem, they’re still only informed by the same pool of knowledge and experience.
She supposed that the specific scenario of her respawn without the others had been subsumed into the general category of being separated.
“I just realized something,” she said. “If I respawn, it’s important you don’t come back for me. The strife effect gets stronger the closer you are to the beginning, so far, anyway.”
“You die, we wait,” Jessila summarized. “We die, you come.”
Skria nodded. “We take longer to respawn anyway, so you, or you and Jess, or you and me, could make it back in time, hopefully.”
“It means we need to clear as we go,” Lilijoy added. “If we sneak past anything, it will just be between us.”
Jess shook her head. “It won’t be that easy. Master won’t let it.”
Lilijoy could only agree with that. She could imagine many different obstacles Rosemallow might have designed to separate parties, or to make it difficult to reunite. “We can only do our best if that’s the case,” she said. “Hopefully, my counter-Charm will last, even if I respawn. In fact…” she pulled out two of the bracelets she had woven from cattail reeds, the peace-weaves, Rosemallow had called them. Thankfully, they didn’t leak mana when not in use. “…take these. You can wear them if we get separated. They should help, at least a little. If we have a chance, I’ll try to make some that are a little more specific to our situation.”
You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.
Skria and Jess took the peace-weaves, and they resumed their cautious advance, as ready as they could be to battle the grottenolms. They crept up the hall, stepping over as yet unconsumed roach carcasses.
“There!” Skria whispered, pointing at the ceiling up ahead. They could see the sessile cave spider, a nearly flat presence on the ceiling, almost entirely hidden within the fungal growth. “I think it’s still alive.”
The spider marked their farthest advance as a party, and soon after they reached the olm’s feasting area. Legs and bits of dark carapace littered the floor, silhouetted against gently flowing pastels. Lilijoy winced each time Jessila stepped and sent a new ring of mauve rolling ahead of them. She traced each footfall to the farthest reaches of her vision, hoping to catch the moment its boundary would conform to a shape other than the lump-strewn floor.
They avoided another dangling thread, giving it wide berth by pressing themselves against the wall.
“Do you think the spiders eat the salamander things?” Skria whispered.
Lilijoy shrugged. “Maybe when they’re young?”
Jessila shushed them. The slope of the floor rose more and more, and with it their tense anticipation of attack. Lilijoy’s echolocation, fed by the occasional tongue click, revealed no giant grottenolms on floor, wall or ceiling, nor did it reveal steps underneath the fungal mat. She tried not to worry about what this might mean as the hall became steeper still.
Complicating her ability to sense the upcoming area were the mounds rising from the floor. They were all reluctant to damage the fungus any more than absolutely necessary, but it was becoming obvious from smell alone that the mounds were the remains of decomposing creatures, covered with a layer of fungus.
Skria, from her perch on Jessila’s shoulder, was unable to contain her anxiety. “Do you think the floor is going to eat us?”
Lilijoy had fears along those lines as well, not helped at all by the feeling that they were traversing an immense glowing gullet. “Let’s hope they were already dead.” She stepped over a flowing centipede the size of her arm. “There are too many animals for it to be actively carnivorous,” she said. “Right?”
“Stop shrugging, Jess, I’m going to fall off,” was all Skria had to say.
As they proceeded, the hall became wider, and the ceiling dropped closer. Lilijoy began to have trouble seeing the stone of the floor, as the fungal mat grew thick and full of debris. She could just make out evidence of tunnels and channels underfoot, most of them no wider than her arm. There were more of the sessile cave spiders lurking above, a now familiar peril that they avoided with relative ease, especially since the wider hall gave them plenty of room to avoid the dangling threads. Most of the spiders were also smaller than the first they had encountered, some not even half as large.
Several times they heard distant sounds that sounded almost like calls or cries filtering down through the length of the upward curving tunnel. Otherwise the environment was utterly silent, aside from the scuffs and brushes of their own movement. The moist air and pervasive stench, combined with the need for constant vigilance, drained their energy almost as much as the ever increasing slope. The ground, or floor, or whatever it was, was becoming softer, perhaps due to the multitude of small tunnels and pockets, and where before it was resilient, now it was soft, giving underneath each step like a horrible mountain of pillows, forcing them to raise their knees higher on every step.
I knew this wasn’t going to be easy, Lilijoy thought, but I didn’t imagine it would… suck so much. This place literally sucks all the energy out of you. I’d rather be fighting endless waves of enemies than this.
As if invoked by her thought, something came bounding down the hall at them. As was often the case, she had more time to perceive than physically react, to notice the round object hurtling into sight first by the splotches of circular yellow light it left as it bounced, then to see the mass of tendrils streaming behind it, curling and whipping through the air as it spun, and then to make a composite of all her impressions and realize it was a head. She dodged to the side while Jessila and Skria were still in the earliest stages of realizing anything was happening at all and the head passed by them and continued its bouncing, rolling journey down into the darkness.
“What was that!?” Skria asked.
“Spell. Now.” was all Lilijoy had time to spit out as she pulled the evil knife from her inventory.
But it was too late. Chasing after the head, like a dog chasing a ball, a grottenolm came into sight, its many legs churning as it almost flew down the steep corridor after its treat. Unlike Skria and Jessila, Lilijoy was primed for action. She leapt to one side and hacked at its flank as it blew past. Even with its charge assisted by gravity, the grottenolm was slow-moving compared to her, and she felt the knife connect and drag for several feet before she was forced to fall back, spinning away from the creature’s momentum. She checked the damage notification as her body was still following through the movement, anxious to get any clue that would help.
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Slashing strike (Grottenolm): 23 H.P. inflicted
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Could be worse, I suppose. It was a long cut, but not very deep. Probably doesn’t have much Invulnerability.
The olm’s hasty passage had knocked Jessila rolling down the slope, but Skria had managed to leap away at the last moment, catching her tumble on outstretched wings.
“I’m going after Jess,” Lilijoy said as quickly as she thought legible. “Prepare your spell, in case there’s more following.”
She started down the hall before she was done speaking, cursing every effortless bound as it undid the last minutes of laborious trudging. The olm’s blood didn’t react with the floor, but she could hear sounds of struggle even before she came upon Jessila. The olm had wrapped its body around her, pinning one arm, and was attempting to clamp its wedge shaped jaws over her head. Jessila was fighting it off with her free arm, slapping each lunge away.
It was an ugly stalemate, one that would have ultimately been broken by the many clawed feet flailing and gouging around Jessila’s torso. It worked in Lilijoy’s favor though; the olm’s singleminded dedication to conquering Jess left it entirely exposed to Lilijoy’s first attack. She made the most of it. Leaping into the thrashing fray with her sense of subjective time augmented to its fullest extent, she caught the olm in the neck as it reared back for a strike at Jessila, plunging the knife in as deep as it would go.
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Critical Hit!
Stab does 3x damage (79 total)
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The knife made a sound in her head like a heavenly choir, which Lilijoy found even more disturbing than its usual smug jubilation at drawing blood. It also refused to withdraw as she completed her movement, its curving edges clinging to the inside of the olm’s throat like a toddler clinging to his father’s leg, forcing her to abandon it in place as she rolled away.
The olm arched its body in a silent spasm, and Jess used the moment to free her other arm. She immediately began to whale on the olm with both fists. Before Lilijoy could return to help, she heard a cry of warning from Skria, and then two more olms barreled down the hall like black comets, their bodies steaming and trailing flaps of skin.
They couldn’t stop in time to avoid the gas attack, she realized. The two olms didn’t stop for her either, continuing down the hall until they were beyond her senses. It wasn’t an ideal outcome, since now the two olms were behind them, and potentially between them should a respawn occur, but she didn’t have time to belabor her frustration. There was still one enemy to finish.
She leapt to Jessila’s aid, only to witness a final blow cave in the olm’s skull. Jessila was covered in blood, glowing yellow where her blood and the olm’s mingled.
“These are tough,” she said. “They heal too fast.”
Lilijoy took a few squishy steps and retrieved her blade, which now withdrew from the wound compliantly. It radiated satisfaction and a sense of satiety. The evil knife was an ongoing mystery to Lilijoy. She had used Scan on it several times, and never pulled more information than Obsidian Knife.
She preferred her own name for it.
Much as she would have liked to examine the knife yet again, she needed to tend to her friend. Fortunately, Jess was quite tough, so while she had received many gashes and scratches from the olm’s claws, most were shallow. The many layers of cowhide she always wore had helped too, though now they were ripped and tattered.
“Skria?” Jess asked.
“I heard her warn us about the two that just passed,” said Lilijoy, even as Skria glided down to them.
“Sorry I could not stop them,” she said. “Gas is not so good at that.”
“That’s okay. But... we need to decide if we should go back down to hunt them,” Lilijoy said, hating to even suggest it.
“Let’s rest here,” Jess suggested. “Maybe they come back up to us.”
That sounded like a great plan to all of them; even a small chance to avoid going down and then back up the squishy terrain was a relief. Lilijoy began to heal Jessila’s wounds, while Jess herself pulled out an oversized bone needle and sinew thread to begin repairs on her protective garments.
“At least they’re badly hurt,” Skria said while the other two worked.
Jess grunted, a half laugh. “Probably not anymore.”
“Jess thinks they regenerate,” Lilijoy clarified. Then another thought struck her. “Did you guys see the head that bounced past us?”
“Was that what that was? I didn’t get a good look at it. This place is so hard to see in,” Skria replied.
“I’m pretty sure,” Lilijoy said. “It had hair and everything.”
“Strange,” Jess offered.
Skria shuddered. “That means there are people. With heads. Maybe they roll heads down the hill for fun.”
“Or the olms caught someone, and their head came off. Or something in between. I’m starting to think that this place may be a dump of some kind,” said Lilijoy.
“Smells like it,” Jess said.
After a few minutes, Jess was healed, and the party had to make a decision. Lilijoy was in favor of hunting the olms, but the others wanted to keep climbing. She didn’t argue much, as she wanted to be done with the climb too. They continued up the passage, walking until it became too steep, then proceeding on all fours, somewhere between a climb and a crawl.
Skria’s job was to keep her spell ready on a hair trigger, in case the olms, or anything else came at them. Lilijoy was using her evil knife as a climbing aid, stabbing it into the thick fungus to pull herself along. She probably could have climbed more easily without it, but having the knife in hand made her feel much better, especially when she was able to fight off a centipede as long as her body and send it tumbling into the darkness.
The climb went on and on, a brutal exercise of sweat and stench and disgust. Here and there they found humanoid remains, half covered with fungus. There weren’t any intact corpses, just rot and bones, from exactly what kind of person it was impossible to tell, especially since each scattered rib cage or somewhat intact limb was a food oasis for a million tiny scavengers. Skria was regularly suppressing gags, while Jessila was stoic as always, but Lilijoy imagined she must be suffering as well. For her it only required a few simple adjustments, lowering her internal disgust reactions and turning off her sense of smell completely, for the arduous climb to be tolerable.
“This is so, so horrible,” Skria said, almost sobbing, after another half-hour of relentless climb.
“At least it’s getting too steep for the bodies to stick,” Lilijoy said. “That’s something, right?”
The slope was past sixty degrees of inclination, and with that, there were far fewer remains. It also meant that they were about two thirds of the way through this particular corridor, or so Lilijoy hoped anyway. She kept that to herself, though, as it was always possible that the corridor would not follow the pattern of the previous, downward slope. Jessila was now using a sharpened stick in either hand to keep herself stable, and to avoid grabbing anything living.
The fungal mat was helping, more than hurting, allowing their feet to sink and gain purchase but Lilijoy had concerns that Jessila’s weight would become too much for it as they approached even steeper grades. The ceiling, if it even made sense to call it that anymore, had been receding for a while, as the material where they were climbing became thinner. Lilijoy could see the stone again, still a couple feet away through the fungus. She didn’t know if the thinning was because it had less food, or because of the increased inclination, and she didn’t really care to know.
They were stopped for a rest, when something fell from the dark heights above. It bounded from the wall just over Jessila’s head and then swung through the air to dangle in Lilijoy’s line of sight. Hanging from a crude knotted cord that pressed against the far wall and stretched into the darkness above, was a foot.