I hadn’t had a chance to do a residency. I looked out over the ward of unconscious bodies and wondered at the changes of our lives. Four years of medical school, and then we’d been set for a residency at the VA where a friend of mine had, um, connections. That is to say that my great friend, Shirley, was crazy as a loon and had introduced me to her psychiatrist who had been so impressed with my work with said friend that he’d promised both my daughter and I a residency if we went to medical school. That had been the plan. I couldn’t help but think we’d been sidetracked off the path and dropped into the deep end of insanity.
Had I snapped? Was this just some delusion? Had my mind finally flipped into Shirley-land? Was I actually in some rubber room somewhere drooling out of the side of my mouth while my mind escaped into this unreality? If so, these were some pretty awesome drugs they had me pumped up on. You didn’t think I’d spend too long on that type of rumination, did you? I had rounds to do in this medical ward, and then I had a dragon to slay. If I didn’t snap out of it, Dom wouldn’t leave me any throats to slit!
Yeah, I know, I’m supposed to be gallant and heroic, but there is simply something so satisfying about watching jugular veins send up geysers of blood like we’d dropped Mentos into Cherry Crush! It’s cathartic to watch the health plummet on a counselor who had told me to unmask and then asked Dom to translate for him because my lisp was too pronounced for him to understand.
I know I’m supposed to be compassionate and learn how to be more caring toward my fellow man through this hero’s journey, but maybe that wasn’t my journey. I’d spent fifty years putting on a mask of being kind, caring, and understanding. I’d started at the end of the hero’s journey, and I was working my way back to the asshole who just didn’t care anymore. My old world had beaten me up so badly that my body had been broken, my mind exhausted, and my sense of self almost non-existent. Maybe Dom had the right idea. Maybe I was a serial killer at heart and was an antihero. Maybe I was the horrible person who would line up a bunch of dead guys who were all trying to be good guys and slit their throats.
Pontification +5
Exp +50 (3,154,271/5,985,462)
For one moment, my stomach clenched, and I couldn’t cut the next throat. I worried that I’d infected my daughter with this psychopathy too as I watched her playfully dance between the beds with her father. Should I be worried about her? Who were we? What had we become?
I looked down into the face of the dying priest in front of me. I plunged my dagger into his lying, pompous, ambition-soaked heart like Dexter after a long dry spell. Fuck ‘em. One roomful of NPCs who were coded with the ideals that an AI gleaned out of our common sit-com world did not get to make me the bad guy. People are complex. We are both full of heroic idealism and such scarring trauma that we are capable of the highest morality and the deepest depravity and everything in between. If there is a God, I prefer to believe that it is a being who loves us for our faults as much as our moral nobility, and I insist that my God be more than the wishy-washy Chuck of no spine. If not, I’ll see you and everyone else in the world in Hell right next to me.
Will +1
I cast Clean on my dagger and looted the corpse for a few coins and got a pleasant surprise. Within the loot was a spell scroll for Resurrection. Seriously? I tucked the scroll into my inventory and contented myself with trailing behind my family casting Clean spells and looting bodies that they missed. It had to be Sammi or the Engine’s way of telling me that I wasn’t the bad guy. I didn’t think about it too hard because I didn’t know what Fizzie would be reading, but my mind raced with possibilities.
It was weird what Sammi remembered from reboots and what they didn’t remember. The Engine had to know. I remember that it was that moment of cleaning yet another puddle of blood that it occurred to me that the Engine was on my side. It could have closed up the loophole of professions and levels so that this was so much harder. It could have nerfed my spells, made them harder to find and level up. It could have made this a hard fight with harsh sacrifices that would make the reader feel like I’d earned my victory. Instead, it had given me the one thing that eased the last of my family’s worries. Resurrection. The only price I had to pay was the trauma of living through what was around me and demanded of me.
Intelligence +1
We placed two of Dom’s best thieves on guard duty for the empty medical ward. I kept them well supplied with cupcakes and cinnamon rolls and they were paid in scrolls for Cup of Joe, a very popular spell nowadays in the Underground. Imagine thieves that could work a day job as a cover and still have enough energy to pull off heists of our foes at night.
An hour later, my little family lounged in the High Priest’s chamber, trying to decide what to do in the time we had before I had to initiate my Nemesis Quest. It hadn’t taken the full ten days to pull off the decimation of the church. We had four days left on my timer. Kat sat on the floor with a lapful of glowing stones we’d nicked on our way up to the High Priest’s bedchamber. Dom cast Poison on the High Priest again and I followed it up with a Charm spell, followed closely by Sleep. We were keeping the High Priest a few health points above death, delaying only because we were trying to delay the inevitable. None of us knew what could be the final straw for godly interference.
“We could use them to light the escape tunnels?” Kat suggested, referring to the tunnels our people had been digging under the castle and cathedral.
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The bedchamber was straight out of some gothic portrayal of Dracula’s bedchamber, complete with canopied bed draped in pristine white, lace-rimmed bedding that would make a beautiful clash with the blood that would soon splatter across it. There was a mannequin in a corner that was decked out in the High Priest’s formal garments. I just knew that my Catholic mother would be mortified if she ever read this, not that she would because she had no interest in my kind of writing. Dressing tables and wardrobes gleamed with gold trim that we could have flaked off and used to fund the whole magic school of my dreams.
“How long do you think they’ll glow?” Dom picked up one of the glowing resurrection stones.
“I’m trying to figure that out,” I frowned at the scroll in my lap. It was so complicated for a spell scroll. “This thing reads more like a ritual than a spell and I can’t just absorb it like I do with normal spell scrolls.”
“Maybe that’s because you’re not a priest class,” Kat dumped her pile of glowing resurrection stones into a hat and came over to read over my shoulder. We’d finally raided the vault of resurrection stones. More than half the stones were glowing, as they were the ones that represented the dead priests we’d killed. There were no labels on them. We couldn’t tell which one might be the king or just a petty noble who had contracted the church to keep them alive. We had one pile of unlit stones and one pile of lit ones.
“Knock yourself out,” I handed Kat the spell scroll. Something itched at me. Why had I thought it would be hard? I was missing something.
“I think I get it,” Kat frowned in concentration and the spell scroll disappeared.
“Great!” Sammi poofed into the room. “Now I hate to rush you, but I really need to rush you!” Their entrance was punctuated by a peal of thunder that reminded me why the hell I thought things were a little too easy.
“I’m ready.” I bounced to my feet, my finger on the reboot button.
“No, I know I gave you more time, but we really can’t wait any more,” Sammi fussed at me.
“I said okay,” I told them. The sky outside the window was darkening ominously. “Do it!”
“Oh, yeah,” Sammi caught up with what I was saying instead of what they’d expected me to say. “You know I’m talking about your next Nemesis Quest, right?”
“Yes, I said yes!”
“Yes?” Sammi looked at me blankly for a terrifying moment. The one thing we didn’t want was to have to deal with Fizzbarren as a god.
“I’m initiating my next Nemesis Quest!” I clarified, knowing we had as long as it took for Fizzbarren to complete his theatrics and that was it.
Nemesis Engine engaged. Nemesis found... Transporting...
Well, it rained, but the thunder stopped. We were on the clock. Our lazy ruminations were abruptly abandoned for carefully prepared plans. Kat grabbed the resurrection stones. Dom killed the High Priest. Within a minute, we were headed down to the wine cellars where the escape tunnels waited for us. We were silent for the most part, our teasing on hold as we tried to get this right the first time, so it was a surprise to me that Kat spoke up on the back stairs to the kitchen.
“I need to make a detour,” Kat whispered, her tone intense, her eyes unfocused as she studied something in her tabs.
“Now is not the time,” Dom muttered in our mental link.
“It’s important,” she insisted, taking his cue to take the conversation mental rather than out loud. “It’s for Mom.”
“Lead,” Dom grunted his reply.
Kat slipped in front of me. She could have explained, but that would have required finding the right words, and that would have taken more time.
“Stone room,” Kat gave what sparse words she could, and I trusted her. Pressuring her for more information would be as useless as pressuring me to do so. It would just gum up the process and make the detour take even longer.
We only took a minute, but Kat rifled through drawers in the chests that ringed the room until she found several velvet bags. Dom and I kept watch at the door, but other than the rain coming down outside, the cathedral was eerily quiet. She pocketed them all but kept one stone in her hand, muttering to herself as we ducked back down hallways and continued our route to the cellar. She pitched the first stone in the cellar and pulled another one out of her inventory as she stumbled on the first step of the cellar tunnel. Dom moved behind Kat, while I led the way down to the Underground where we would wait out the changes going on in the city above us.
All I could think was that we were as prepared as we could be. We were as powerful as we could get. If we weren’t ready now, would a reboot even help? My nerves were tight because it was a first run for us and it had so many variables to try to predict and figure out. I was always calm on the reboots because I knew what to expect and I’d had enough time to think of clever solutions that wouldn’t occur to me in real time. My autism made my mind stumble in new situations, and I swallowed the lump of fear.
“Got it,” Kat grinned into the darkness around us, and I glanced back to see the stone in her fingers glowing lightly.
“Niiiice,” Dom drawled, and I felt the tension leave them.
“It’s your resurrection stone, Mom,” she explained, and I felt tears prick my eyes. I hadn’t thought of it. I mean, I had but I’d thought I had to do it, or it wouldn’t get done.
The last piece, the last stress, and the last worry lifted from us, but my mind is very cruel. “Where do we put it?”
As far as I knew, everything in our inventory disappeared upon death. If Kat had it and she died, we’d have lost our insurance and the same was true for Dom. If I had it and I died, it was gone for sure. Our pets? Would they exist without us? Why hadn’t we tested that? My mind raced.
Intelligence +1
“The king,” Dom said, and I was considering how the king having the stone would help us, when he nodded behind me.
“Spite or Malice alerted me,” the king’s resonate voice boomed into the silence that was the sewers, and all my stupid mind could think was that the king must have been working on his Move Silently skill to have sneaked up on me. “Don’t tell them this, but I can’t really tell them apart.”
“They work hard at that,” Dom smirked.
“The king isn’t a bad idea though.” My mind was slow on the conversation. Allowed to plan in a timely way, I can be quite clever, but forced into a timetable or give me surprises and I’m useless.
“Okay,” the king said, making Kat giggle. “I’m glad I’m not a bad idea?”
Dom shouldered me to the back of our pack and hustled the king down the passageway. “Ignore her. She’s a little shocked that things are going so well.”
“I’m not,” the king smiled kindly at me.
I gave him a lopsided smile and followed, sending my communication to Kat and Dom mentally. “I mean the king might be the best person to hold my stone.”