Rick stood, brushing a smoldering piece of tar from the exploded trap off his arm. He cast Soothing Mist on himself, then the rest of the team one by one. "Holy crap, man, how many more like that do you have?"

Daniel's face fell. "That was the best. The others aren't nearly so -- impressive. I spent half of my supplies just on that one."

"Yeah, that might have been too much," Gambit said. There was a red splotch on his cheek where some burning tar had left its mark.

"I don't know," Daniel replied, still grinning as he stared at the crater. “No kill like overkill, after all.”

“I mean, that was impressive, but it didn’t really do us much good,” Nia pointed out. “Great, we killed one robot. There’s about fifty more out there patrolling.

“No, this will work,” Rick said, shaking his head. “We’ve got a gap in the patrol pattern now. We just have to wait until it’s back.”

Nia muttered under her breath, and they settled in to wait. And wait. And wait. It took forever for the gap to come back around. When it finally did, they rushed forward together, pausing only an instant to gather up bits of the trap and loot the robot’s corpse before dashing onward.

At the bottom of the mesa city, the walls came sheer straight down into the desert. There was a scant pile of debris, likely fallen from the rooms above, but so fragmented there was no way to tell what the items had been. Some of it Rick thought looked like dishes and kitchen utensils.

"Are we far enough from the patrols?" Nia asked.

"I think so," Rick said, "but we should try to get inside quick, just in case."

The mesa itself was not perfectly straight but tilted to the south. The windows on this side sloped down from right to left just a little. Near the party, they were half-embedded in the ground.

One yawned nearby. Dirt and sand had blown against the wall from the desert beyond and filled in up past the window edge. There wasn't anything else to be seen through the dark opening.

"I think this is the right spot," Nia said. "The dot on the map is directly in from here."

Daniel looking at the ground. "I don't see any tracks. If there’s a hermit here, he hasn’t left the place in a while."

They all looked at Rick. Somehow, when it had only been Gambit and Daniel, it hadn't felt like they saw him as a leader. Now, with the expanded group, the dynamic was clear. That was fine with him. He was used to raid calling, and he’d rather be the one in charge than the guy muttering because nobody would step up and take the lead. With four in the group, someone had to make decisions or they’d never get anything done.

"This is the place. Let’s do it," he said and stepped through the opening.

The floor inside was spongy, like a gym mat, but free of dirt, which was a good indication this place had been used regularly. The walls were a mottled gray. It was impossible to tell what color they had originally been. Piles of debris lay in the corners, crumbled and covered in dust until it was impossible to see what they had been either. When Rick inspected it, it just said "debris."

The room was small, the size of a modest living room, and had exits opening off on either side. But the map indicated straight in, so they went for the far wall, which had an opening covered by a door, clearly a recent addition, made of wooden scraps bound by metal plates. The door swung easily under Rick's touch, and they stepped through into a hall. To their left, a door stood closed, sealed, and ancient—so much so that it seemed to have become one with the doorframe around it.

Rick's gaming experience told him that clearly wasn’t the right away. Probably if he touched it he’d get a system message about [This door is barred from the other side]. They started down the hall. All the doors they passed were like that first, sealed and uninviting.

"Ever feel like you're being herded?" Gambit asked.

"What do you mean?" Daniel said.

Rick smiled ryly. “In games a lot of the time the designers want you to feel like somewhere is big and open but they don’t actually want to code up 90% of the space, so they give you sealed doors and blocked corridors. Feels like that. We’re clearly being directed to the hermit, but we might as well go with it.”

Daniel frowned. “Are we worried about some sort of ambush?”

“Probably not until we meet the hermit,” Gambit said cheerfully. “Fifty-fifty once we do it triggers the robots to invade and we have to fight our way back out.”

“Really?” Daniel asked. “Should I leave some traps?”

“Just hang onto them,” Rick advised.

They continued along the corridor as it slowly curved around, and then abruptly came to a place where it had been ruptured. The ceiling was bent downward. Rubble filled the passageway ahead.

There was an opening easily big enough for a man to the left of the doorway. Rick and Gambit exchanged a look. It was clear that was where they were intended to go.

"Do you think there's anything down there?" Daniel asked, peering at the hole.

"Yeah," said Rick. "I would bet on it."

The broken hole in the passage led down into what might have been maintenance spaces. Gambit went first into the narrow passageway. Daniel followed, then Nia, with Rick bringing up the rear. It probably wasn't the best sequence—Rick was much too far back to be able to heal Gambit effectively if they got into trouble, but He knew they wouldn’t get separated if he was the last in line. They stepped carefully over piles of bent and broken pipes and ducked under jagged pieces of metal sticking down from the ceiling, weaving through mesh girders of a colossal scale.

"Wow!" Gambit said as he stepped out of the hole.

Rick came through behind him and caught his breath. The chamber was huge and surprisingly well-lit, giving them a clear view while leaving everything in a faint gloom—just enough light and no more. It sloped sharply downward to the left in long troughs that looked like scaled-up railroad tracks. Far below, it ended in dirt and rock. At the high end of the room, where the rails ended, stood a line of sleek but massive forms. Gossamer wings, many of them broken or bent, were tucked in along their sides. They looked like menacing dragonflies the size of destroyers, each perched at the top of a rail. There were five remaining—three on the left side of the gap and two on the right.

Support the creativity of authors by visiting the original site for this novel and more.

"They're spaceships!" Nia gasped.

"Or something like that," Gambit said. He sounded unconvinced but certainly awed.

"It's a hangar for whatever those are," Rick said.

"The city was supposed to fly in the air, not into space," Daniel pointed out. "And this ramp goes downward. Why would they launch spaceships downward?"

Rick shrugged. "Well, they're certainly not submarines. Their bodies don’t look like pressure vessels."

"There, look," Nia said, pointing. In the empty area where two more ships should’ve been was a area piled with equipment and debris. It looked organized, lived in.

“Let’s go check it out.” Rick started forward along the narrow path and the others followed, dodging around piles of debris.

As Rick rounded another pile, it burst open and a large robot leapt out. Its four arms lashed out toward the party. Rick tried to target it with Force Wave but recieved an error just as its metal hands closed around his body.

[You may not attack a neutral target].

What the hell?

Nia was blowing raspberry noises into her blowgun contraption, and Daniel was struggling with his bow as all were lifted into the air by the giant metal hands of the four-armed robot.

"What's going on?" Daniel cried.

All their health bars remained firmly full, and Rick stopped struggling as he recognized what was happening.

Gambit was calm, too. "Don't worry about it. It's scripted."

"What? What?" Daniel was on the verge of panic. "Why can't I move?"

Rick shook his head as he relaxed. "It's a scripted event. Means there’s nothing you can do about it, but it probably won’t hurt us. Just relax and put your weapon away.”

“Easy for you to say!” Daniel shouted.

The machine lifted them all easily off their feet and strode forward in large strides, deeper into the hanger bay. It came to a broken girder, fallen from the ceiling. It climbed and easily walked across the spindly truss. The beam groaned under its weight. Rick held his breath. The beam held and the robot continued across two of the launch rails before turning and walking up toward the gap between the crouching ships.

When they reached the top, they found themselves in a wide space between the huge rails that had once, apparently, held two more of the ships. Between the rails was a cross between a junkyard and a mad scientist's lair. Equipment was stacked in the corners—metal boxes with dials and control panels on them, some with glowing indicators showing they had power. There were square glass boxes with swirling lights inside and cylinders that looked like they held pressurized gas or liquids. It looked like something between a high-tech refugee camp and a mad scientist's laboratory.

"Welcome, welcome!” A hunched Rork was limping his way across the room.

Her way, Rick corrected himself as he picked up on the subtly different body shape – female Rorks had a sort of waist-line in between their two sets of arms . She was missing both arms on the left side. Even as he noticed, she stopped and picked a mechanical arm off of a pile of equipment, strapping it on without looking as she studied the party. "Spark, put them down. They're our guests."

The four-armed robot immediately lowered Rick to the ground, setting the rest of the party in a neat row. Gambit seemed relaxed. Nia looked around worriedly, and Daniel had his bow up as he looked between the Rork and the robot, as if trying to decide which one to shoot first.

"Take it easy," Rick said.

"We were attacked! Kidnapped!" Daniel protested.

"It's a scripted event. Don't worry about it," Gambit interjected.

"Which means what exactly?" Daniel asked.

Rick sighed. "It means everything's fine. Look, it's hard to explain. It's a game thing. It's just that the plot's on rails right now."

Daniel shook his head. "You're not making sense again."

"Look, we'll explain later. Let's just see what she wants."

The wizened Rork limped over, rubbing together her lower hands—the mechanical one she had just attached on her left and the natural one on the right. "Adventurers! Excellent, excellent. So good to have you. Are you here to learn or to help or a bit of both? Hopefully a bit of both." She babbled on rapidly without waiting for them to respond. "So much to do, so much to do. Oh, but I see you have something for me!" Her eyes lit on the length of robot arm that Gambit still carried. She straightened slightly, ceasing her babble. Her eyes focused on Rick, and she waited expectantly.

"Yes, we're here for information about this arm and whatever else you can tell us." Rick sensed potential quests and didn't want to lock out his options. "If there's help you require, we would be happy to hear about that too."

"Yes, yes, assistance—always too much to do. But first, let me see that." She held out her hand, and Gambit lifted the arm. He hesitated before giving it to her. “It’s really rather heavy.”

"Hmm?" she asked, and then came to herself. "Oh yes, of course. Hang on." She rummaged through a pile of equipment and produced another arm. This one was larger and stronger, and she attached it to where her missing upper left arm would have been. Then she turned back to Gambit. "Okay, now hand it over." The Rork snatched the arm from Gambit's grip and carried it over to a workbench. A combination light and magnifying glass hung from wires above. She pulled it down. Its wire smoothly slid out of a scaffolding above the workbench. She placed the arm over the table and started inspecting one of the arm's elbow joints, making "hmmm, hmmm" noises.

After several minutes, Rick could stand it no more. "Can you tell us anything about it?"

"Oh, certainly. It's definitely the source of the corruption. Well, not this one by itself. All of them, really. There’s lots of these robots buried in the desert out there. It’s not the robots themselves that are the problem, you see. Not anything they’re made out of. The problem is their wax."

"Wax?" Gambit asked.

"Wax?" Daniel echoed. "What do you mean, wax?"

"Foolish boy, don’t interrupt your elder," the Rork snapped. "I mean just that. Wax. They coated these things with a special formula designed to make them unscry-able[KJ1] . Nasty stuff, really. And that’s the problem. The miners don’t bother cleaning it off. They just pick these things up and salvage them or reactivate them. All the while, the wax gets rubbed off or washed off when it rains. Not that that’s very often."

[Quest complete. Trace the source of the corruption. Phase 4. Phase 5. Return to the Farming Village with this news]

Rick let out a sigh of relief. That was it, then. They had what they needed to know. Rick glanced around at the place where they were. It was far too elaborate for such a simple quest. There had to be more here. Time to start trying the conversational options. "What kind of help do you need for your work?"

The strange Rork turned away from her workbench and rubbed her lower hands together. "Oh, yes, yes. My work. Oh, lots of help. I need lots of help." She turned and walked away from the workbench, humming softly to herself. She went to a pile of debris and started digging through it, pulling one item after another out of the pile, examining them, and then tossing them to the side where they clattered along the ground.

Another robot, the size of a six-armed pony, stirred from somewhere in the back. It stepped out from between the piles and began picking up the equipment she discarded.

"Oh, yes, yes. This is it." She held up her prize. It was a broad metal device, with two handles on one side, and a glowing sphere protruding from the other. She carried it over and dropped it on the workbench next to the arm the party had brought.

"This! This is what I need! Bring me this!"

There was a pause as she looked at them expectantly, and they looked between her and the device.

"Um," Nia said, breaking the awkward silence, "it’s right there."

"No, silly girl! I mean, bring me another one just like this, one that actually works. This one’s obviously broken. Look at that hairline crack there!" She pointed at the crystal globe on the side of the thing.

Rick leaned forward but could discern no flaw in the sphere.

"Right. Where might we find one that’s working?"

"Oh, I don’t know. Probably in the secondary maintenance spaces. Up on floor five." She dabbed one of her lower arm’s fingers at the ceiling.

Rorks tended to gesticulate with their lower arms and save their upper ones for lifting heavy objects. It was an odd effect, but one Rick was starting to get used to. He considered asking for more details about the secondary maintenance space, but instead, he pulled up his map. Sure enough, an area was highlighted, but this highlight looked different. Rick fiddled with the map controls a bit to move the map in three dimensions. Previously, he had panned and zoomed and rotated, but now he found he could also move it up and down, and even tilt it to one side or another.

Daniel asked the Rork questions about the maintenance space, while Rick continued to manipulate his map. There were so many floors between them and where she wanted them to go that he was having a hard time visualizing the path they would have to take.

Suddenly, the chamber echoed with a loud voice.

"I am returned at last! Now, the armies of the Indomitable will triumph once again!"

The voice trailed off, and Rick’s map updated with a glowing blue icon. It read: [World Boss: High Smith Ajaz.

"What the heck was that?" Daniel asked.