So I'll start off this recounting of my brush with death facing off against the rabbit-fairy Chyllu-llamaia by saying that when a skill breaks, or really when anything breaks, it fucking hurts. And, I'll go ahead and answer a question I raised earlier this way: my skill didn't break because of something that she did to me. As soon as I flexed my Telekinesis, I could feel something inside of me reaching out somewhere for something that it didn't find.

It had never failed to find it before--not in the Dungeons, and not on Earth. But here, it reached out, and out, and found nothing, and then it broke.

Now, I'd been warned about this, and so I took the action of flexing the skill, non-aggressively, as soon as the rabbit made it clear that we were about to start fighting. But the way that the skill was broken was vastly different from how I'd only just reforged it when I was preparing for this fight. Because sitting there in my room, I'd basically ripped apart the controls for my skill. I'd destroyed and rebuilt the pieces that were right underneath my fingers, the ones I twiddled with and poked at, peered at with my mind's eye and grabbed tenaciously to when I wanted to desperately amplify my power.

The pain was the same, in a way, but the problem was very different. What had broken was the source.

Now, the rabbit fairy was in no rush, getting slowly up from her desk (which made no real sense, because she had no chair and the desk was hanging in midair), but of course I wasn't going to count on her good graces. If the skill was broken, I needed to fix it; I'd been told that. But the piece that was missing was not what I'd expected. When I'd broken the skill on purpose, I'd broken the piece I knew the best, but the source... all I really knew about the "feel" of the broken piece was that it had been behind me, beneath me. Even Merry, momentarily, was startled, and she showed me a mental image of the skill suddenly having a loose end.

She'd originally envisioned, for me, my Dungeoneer's Key as a big toothy engine with a throne on it where I sat, and the skills were loops of power that came off of the engine--but now, one end of those loops was cut off, jagged like a piece of shattered glass, and when she looked for the place where it was supposed to attach--there simply was none. No matching shattered piece remained on the engine. I frowned, and flailed for a long moment trying to put the skill about where I thought it belonged--but the feeling I had for the source of the power was so vague, and I just didn't understand.

"A newbie, huh? I'll give you... two minutes." From nowhere obvious, the rabbit-fairy produced a comically oversized pocket watch, which if I'd been paying attention would probably have reminded me immediately of Alice in Wonderland, but I was kind of busy.

How about this, said Merry, as she studied what I was doing. It's not about where on the engine you connect to--the skill is its own thing. It's more about connecting to it at all, right? About knowing that you have an engine, knowing that it's there beneath you.

That made more sense, and I tried to brute-force attach the skill to what lay within me--and it worked, immediately. The problem was, when I reached for my skill... I didn't find it quite where I had found it before. It was there, just... out of position.

And when I reached for it, I found a second problem--when I stopped holding the skill in place and instead grabbed the controls, it broke off again.

Now, you know me well enough to know that those two problems were not going to be the death of me on their own. I figured out right quick that I needed to do two things at the same time, and I'd done far more than that while using telekinesis, so pretty quickly, I was in the position I wanted to be--using the skill, holding it in place, able to focus on what was in front of me, finally.

Chyllu-llamaia looked at me for a long minute, and nodded satisfaction. "Your friend had the right idea. Good. Now for the fun part."

And she raised both arms up like she was T-posing, but with one foot down like she was trying to be a martial artist in bullet time preparing for a snap kick, and her eyes glowed, and the walls of glass to either side of her opened up, and there was a strange humming, and then a scream.

That scream started from far away, and as it came closer, I could vaguely hear intelligent speech mixed in--"What is that?" "Oh god!" "Please, please...!" and so on. And I felt my heart grow cold as I thought I understood what was about to happen, and I was only about half right.

Something that looked human, and I wish to this day I knew that it wasn't, was flung through the window at incredible speed, only to split into a spray of gore, its organs separating midair into bands of whirling flesh that streamed around the fairy in the center of the room, while the blood continued on out a window on the other side as though it were completely irrelevant.

The rabbit fairy focused her will on the rotating bands of human entrails and inhaled. And those entrails, as though they had caught on fire, became sparkling bits of smoke and ash that floated on the breeze--where the breeze was a tornado that funneled it all into her mouth.

Her eyelids fluttered, and she smiled like she was enjoying herself.

Well before she had used her whole lung capacity--I'd just seen how big it was--she suddenly flung the entrails around the room, discarding them, and suddenly a set of weapons, mostly polearms, appeared in midair and thrust at me. I, shocked and horrified but not so much that I was going to stand there dumbly, dodged.

I held tenaciously to my skill, using it to throw myself well clear of the attack, and watching for more. It was a little disconcerting having to focus on this new challenge, holding the skill together while using it, but... well, I'd had worse odds. At least, assuming this was a "fair fight" like they'd said.

I admit, the slaughter of some random person really threw that into doubt for me. Weird, right? I can be so unreasonable sometimes.

Now, she hadn't actually given me any specific directions on what it took to "win" this fight, and I my instincts just had me materializing a weapon and throwing myself at her. Only, of course, my Class ability to materialize weapons also broke immediately when I reached for it, which left me charging at her undefended, and she had never lost sight of me, and didn't look at all scared of me. I shifted mentally and instead just tried to use Telekinesis as a weapon, since I had been working with that enough lately that I was pretty confident in my ability... for someone of my level. So, while her level was probably way too high for me to damage her, I could at least say that I'd struck her and feel good about it, right?

Chyllu-llamaia reached up with two fingers and--according to my telekinetic sense--made a shield the size of a postage stamp right where the point of my attack was directed. I was almost too shocked to redirect the attack, but the moment I moved it to the left, the postage stamp moved to block it. The moment of impact, with all of my weight and power (well, okay, not all of my power, but you know what I mean) set behind a mental spear thrust about the size of a pencil, that postage stamp, as thin as paper, might as well have been a mountain.

I even glimpsed something as I hit it--a vision of true power, if you want to call it that. As deep as a mountain, as tall as the ocean... those weird, twisted images contrasted with a fairy's face looking troubled and uncomfortable just in that moment, like she was sitting on an uncomfortable chair and just hadn't been able to find a way to rearrange herself so that she wasn't sitting on a lump. But that mental image also came with a flash of insight that--and we all had a hard time believing this at the time--I understood and neither of the fairies did.

Chyllu-llamaia hit me with the heel of her cyborg palm in a fairly casual strike that sent me careening across the room. Where I smashed into the back wall, on the side I'd first come from, the fake bricks blew out, stopped by nothing at all as they arced slowly down into the void. I, perhaps only by luck, was stopped by the impact, though, and didn't have to worry about catching hold of anything.

"I suppose I ought to tell you the goal," she said, pulling her hookah out and taking a draw. "Just get to the door on the other side and we'll call you good. But, if you could draw this out until I get another hit, I'd really appreciate it. Take your time on your Class, that's a little trickier than the skills. I'll give you a minute."

And then she pulled the main body of her hookah out, uncapped it, and all the gore that she had splattered on the walls turned to ash and started flowing in.

Merry, I noticed only after a long moment of silence, was entranced by her, or maybe by the violence. I didn't really know or care, at the moment. Because really, while I maybe could have gotten by without her on a stretch, something about this whole situation was ten kinds of wrong and anything entrancing her here was a scary prospect. Merry, I need you to focus.

She's...

Merry, PLEASE!

My fairy companion finally shook herself. Yeah... right. And then, she (with due credit to her for being able to get back into the right mindset quickly) turned and immediately began inspecting something that she didn't actually want to visualize for me--my class.

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There was a murky mental image that came with her refusing to properly visualize it for me--and it involved things sticking into my body as I sat on the throne atop the engine. So, yeah, potentially understandable that she didn't want to show it--or she thought I wouldn't want to see it. But, either way...

Okay, how about this. The Class isn't a loop outside of you--I mean, the details are, kind of. But the core of it connects you to the engine, and the engine to you. And then she visualized something that I had, in fact, seen before--well, a version of it, anyway. It was an old form of mysticism, from India I think; an energy that ran up your spine, meeting several vital points along its length, from the base of your spine to the crown of your head. Well before the Dungeons arrived, people had theorized that "awakening" this energy led to psychic powers.

Which was fine, and apparently I had psychic powers, such as they used to be, but there was no real magic back then. It took a massive star and some kind of huge alien engineering project to make that happen.

In her visualization, though, the core plugged in to the base of that energy band, and class abilities were attached to it at various points along its length. Although I couldn't have told you exactly why, some part of the organization made intuitive sense; it didn't align, I later confirmed, with the existing mythology of the kundalini, but whatever system the Labyrinthine Star developed, it was close enough that it somehow made sense.

It still took, like fifteen tries before I was able to manifest items, but I mean, it could also have taken hours, or days. I think I did okay.

In that time, the rabbit had just kind of... sat there, getting high, I guess? Was the smoke real, powerful somehow? Merry hesitated to answer, and I put it out of mind, because I was sure it would just distract me.

"You're pretty good," she said after a minute. "I'd figured it'd take you at least twenty minutes, maybe longer. Do you want to try that attack again? I won't get mad or anything."

I tried that attack again.

This time, I was probably holding six things together, including the item template itself, while also actually using my Skill, and putting my sword in the right place. I didn't actually realize until I got into position to strike at her that Assassination, which I used to enhance critical hit damage, was also a skill; it flopped loose as soon as it was triggered, but I ignored it, just putting everything I had into a swing.

The difference in our powers was clear to me not in how she blocked the swing--I knew she would do that. She lifted a single finger to block my other Skeleton Lord's Flambard, which I used because I had no enhancements on it and didn't care if it broke. In the instant, the fraction of an instant after she stopped my blade, something weird happened that I only understood looking back on it.

Once my blade stopped, she moved her finger around to the rear of the blade, moved it in the direction I'd been trying to force it so fast that it passed by her too early, and then casually flicked it, accelerating it faster than I could handle away from me. The blade was flung completely out of my grip, smashing into a far wall somewhere, and I was completely shocked to find myself plowing into the fairy shoulder-first.

Now, obviously, she let me hit her, and I'm equally certain that the fact that her boobs ended up cushioning the blow was entirely intentional. I'll also point out at this stage that while Chyllu-llamaia was not, like, a foot-tall fairy, she was not exactly me-sized, either; she was maybe the size of a very young person or a midget, maybe 3-ish feet tall. So, it's not like I ended up with my face buried in her silk-covered cleavage or anything. But none of that stopped me, personally, from feeling scandalized and like I had just had a hand in something dumb, because I'm a fucking idiot, but it really doesn't matter because my immediate and correct reaction was to throw myself away from her with my magic, and her immediate reaction was to call those floating weapons to strike where I'd just been with a gesture.

"Not bad, not bad. Keep your eye on prize if you want to win." She got back up, and the weapons all formed a pinwheel behind and above her, spinning ever so slightly around a center point, just enough to be pretty without really affecting anything. "You keep surviving these attacks and I may have to move up the scale. Considering your level, that's quite a feat."

I eyed the door on the opposite side, but instead mentally rearranged things, grabbing the Assassination skill and readying myself. Because, frankly, in spite of the infinity in every direction that I could fall into by mistake, and the terrifying fairy that was smoking man-guts, I felt more alive than I had in quite a while. "Just once more."

I threw myself at her and accomplished nothing, as you would reasonably expect. She countered, and I managed to deflect the worst of the blows she threw at me, but one blade did give me a good cut on its way past. And that, ladies and gentleman, was a bigger thing that I had expected.

Unlike every blow I'd taken since I'd become a Dungeoneer, this cut stayed, and it was not trivial.

Now, I'm not a complete sissy, but I did generally try not to get hit, so it's not like I had an advanced immunity to pain. The cut was through a good section of my arm, and I immediately felt my Dungeoneer body, a part of my class, start trying to repair it. But, like everything in this place, my regeneration immediately broke; I reconnected it, and it started to heal.

But that thought had me looking at my UI, and it became suddenly clear to me that I was burning mana, and none of it was recovering. Telekinesis, summoning my sword, and healing my body, all of them were drawing from a pool that I had not really gone out of my way to expand all that much, instead preferring to improve my mana recovery--which didn't work here. In short, I'd been borrowing time from the start, and I didn't have nearly as much as I thought I did.

I dispelled my sword instantly and stopped the healing before it was really completely done.

"Yeah, I think you might've fucked yourself a little bit," the fairy chuckled, her high pitched voice entirely wrong for her crass vocabulary. "This is what it means to be a fairy, shithead. We live in the dark-ass ruins behind reality, and there is no life here that we don't take from others." The rabbit fairy raised one hand, and the weapons behind her shifted into a menacing formation, like a top row of teeth hanging above her head. "When you run out of energy, there's no second chances. But go on, pop a potion, I'm happy to wait. We can play as long as you'd like."

Which reminded me immediately of a piece of Herman's advice, and thinking of the little spider fairy only reminded me of that thing from earlier.

"Quick question," I said--and again, I couldn't read the sign out front, so I was kind of guessing, since she was a rabbit, and had something growing inside her. "How do you pronounce your name?"

She paused, completely confused by the question. "My name? Chyllu-llamaia."

I squinted, trying to recall, but it sounded right. "You know Herman?"

She tilted her head. "Just because you've met another fairy doesn't mean--"

"Did he talk to you about the eggs thing?"

The rabbit fairy stopped entirely. Mentally, I prodded Merry, asking her to check to see if she could find a way to steal energy from anywhere, but I kept my face calm.

"What eggs thing." Her voice, suddenly, was cold as hell.

"I don't remember the name. He said something about... oh, ess-something. Who had laid parasitic eggs in you and you didn't notice." I genuinely could not remember the details, but as I fumbled around in my head, one detail made its way to the surface. "The guy was also arguing with Herman about the photocopying machine."

The rabbit-fairy's eyes narrowed on me, and the word that came out of her mouth, aside from being too-high pitched, could have been spoken by a demon in hell for all that it seemed to portend egregious violence. "Sziel-ma'al."

I snapped my fingers, my face instantly brightening. "Yes! I think that's the one."

What I was definitely not prepared for was for the rabbit fairy to immediately take a sword and stab it into her own guts, then reach in with her other hand and start sorting through her intestines, or something. When she pulled out what was clearly something a lot like the Fairy Gem that Merry had been in--but without the crunchy energy core around it that had kept her sealed, and probably safe, until I'd unlocked it.

She crushed it with a single hand, and reached back in to dig around for more.

Now, this was all very macabre, but I also recognized that this was clearly the best possible time to move over to the other side where the exit was, which was proof that I had "won". I did, and she didn't stop me, and I'm sure that's not entirely because she was busy. Most likely, that rabbit could, if provoked, do what she was doing while playing the piano and also slaughtering dozens of Dungeoneers--I assumed, of course, that she was really, really holding back on her attacks, and I wasn't ever going to assume that she wasn't. But for all that she clearly let me by, I also didn't want to restart this conversation with me not by the exit... just in case.

But I also didn't leave. She'd been... uh... reasonably fair? I guess? So there was no reason to be rude. Besides, this place was interesting, and I toyed with breaking loose, and reconnecting, a few other skills, and then looked out the window at the infinity below, as she got to about the eighteenth egg that she extracted from somewhere in her body.

"Useless lousy layabout lout, of all the indescribable indignities I've ever even examined... truly treasonous trash... gross gutteral gypsy of a foolish philandering fairy..." I blinked as I returned my attention to her, to find that she had extracted something from her stomach that was, as far as I understood it, completely impossible.

She'd removed a wound from her body and held it in her hand.

It sat there, a section of skin with a stab wound on it, attached to nothing. The skin around the wound was inflamed and leaking pus, and the pus was crawling with what looked like tiny worms, and I could swear that the tiny worms themselves were somehow unhealthy, though I couldn't quite tell you how. Chyllu-llamaia glared at it with a look of intense hatred, for a very long time, and when she let out a deep and frustrated breath, I could swear that down her throat I saw the fires of hell flickering.

She took the lump of diseased flesh and threw it into the sky, gestured at it with the star attached to a bracelet on her wrist, and a degree of magical annihilation that I didn't know possible struck out at the flesh, rendering it no longer a part of existence.

"Go on, get lost," the rabbit fairy said to me, finally. "And don't come back."

I moved towards the door, but paused. "Actually, I was already planning to come back this way."

"Well, I'm not playing favorites. You come back, I'll fight you again. Got it?" She looked my direction, and I realized that tears were pouring out of her eyes--not just one or two of them; she was genuinely crying. And she... the look on her face was more in line with those tears than with the naked aggression in her high pitched, squeaky voice.

"It's fine. It was an interesting experience anyway. I wish you the best of luck, Mrs... uh..." I blanked on how to pronounce her name, and honestly wasn't entirely sure that it was a better idea to attempt it and fail.

She sniffed, and just shook her head. "I know, it's not one of your human names. Just get lost already."

I opened the door and found another black silk elevator/cable car. After spending so much time in the transfer station with its solid floors, it was just as disconcerting as it was the first time to sink half a foot as soon as I stepped in.