44. Side Quests Are Always Funner With A Trio Of Warlocks

I ran over from our main base to the public base, jumping from atop a tower and using the Slime King’s Servant’s Nephew’s Neighbour's Necklace to make my way quickly to one of the watchtowers. I flagged down one of the guards who promptly let down a rope ladder for me to climb. I extracted a few pieces of gear from Slimey’s storage, stashing them in my bag before leaving him to farm more loot orbs. I found Josh in the crafter’s hall, sitting amidst a pile of gear like always.

“Hey, Josh!” I called out.

“Heyyyy buuuuddy!” Josh slurred.

“Are you… Josh, are you drunk?”

“I think so! I’m litty bitty in the city, my dude. Some Tam kid gave me some fruit cider.” He wobbled as he reached for his next piece of gear, a leather chestplate. He scrunched his brows, trying to focus as his eyes kept crossing. “Fruit, cup of, hot… No… Drink?” He hiccuped, causing a bit of liquid to spill. “Oops! Dancin’ cider, comin’ through! Dancin’ cider? I don’t even know ‘er!” He cackled at his joke as he threw the breastplate to the side and grabbed a pair of pants to infuse.

“Can you… Josh? Hey, Josh!”

He startled as I called his name again.

“Oh! Théo! What’s up, buuuuuddy?”

I stared at him blankly for a second, realizing that he was far more out of it than I thought. I reached over and gently coaxed the cup out of his hand.

“Hey! I was… Oh, what’chya drinkin’, handsome?”

I passed Josh the pair of boots and the slime pillow. “Can you, I don’t know, make the boots as comfy as this pillow?”

Josh stared blankly between the boots and the pillow for a moment before reaching out and squishing the pillow. “Alter… But not for defense? Alter for… Comfort? Alter for comfort!” With lightning speed, Josh snatched both boots and the pillow and ran off into another room. After half a moment, I heard a yelp. I ran over and found Josh bleeding from a cut on his hand.

“Ah! Blood! How am I bleeding? Théo! Hi. Perfect timing. Can you grab me something for this?” He held up his bleeding hand. It wasn’t gushing, but there was a steady drip of blood slapping the ground. I grabbed a scrap of shirt from the other room and bandaged the wound. Then, I gently took the knife away from the inebriated man. I handed him a water skin and waited a few minutes while he sobered slightly.

“What did you… OH! You wanted me to make these boots comfy or something? Hmmm… I can make things sharper, harder, more durable… More flexible, though… Give it a bit of bounce…” He alternated between squishing the slime pillow and the insoles of the boots. He wobbled less and less as the minutes passed until eventually, after almost an hour had passed, a clear-eyed Josh focused on the boots one last time.

“There,” he said, slumping onto the desk. “Boots are comfy.” He continued to mumble incoherently as he closed his eyes and drooled onto his workspace, apparently deciding on a nap.

I sniffed the cup of cider a few times as I returned to the kitchens. I handed off the cup to Tam as I saw him kneading some dough.

“That one’s dangerous,” I warned, pointing to the cider.

“Poison damage?” Tam asked excitedly.

“No… Too strong. Loopy, time trip. Why? Was there a chance of poison?”

“Nooooo! Hahahaha, it was a joke… Yes, yes, a joke! I’ll write that down in a minute. It was supposed to enhance creativity. Maybe we could use it as a debuff. I’m just glad it wasn’t acidic like the lemon custard we made earlier. Cleanup on aisle everywhere, am I right?”

I shook my head as I made my way to Natalie. She was pouring some liquid over what looked like sizzling peaches. I was forced to take a few steps back as fire shot up from the pan in a pillar of cinnamon-scented flames.

“Hey! I’ve got you some boots,” I said feebly.

“If you get in my way, I’ll show you where to shove them,” chef Natalie said sternly. She walked her flaming pan over towards a side table and threw three small light blue cubes into the pan. A flash of blue light later, the flames had crystallized midair, cooling to an ice blue with a core of red-orange barely visible deep within the edible sculpture. Cheers erupted across the kitchen as people appreciated the sheer artistry.

I went to slap the boots onto the counter, but froze at Natalie’s death stare. I settled with placing them onto the ground instead.

“Ahem. Your boots, my lady.”

Stepping out of chef mode, Natalie gave me a tired smile as she put on the boots. She tested them a bit before giving me a thumbs up. “Comfy as shit,” she confirmed. She quickly whipped me up two crêpes to go with a warning that their shelf life wasn’t great. I thanked her profusely, but she ignored me, going back to wowing the rest of the kitchen with her particular brand of crafting class.

I followed the distant sound of clanging until I found Baz, slamming away at a bright red scimitar with her large square hammer. She had swapped out her normal civilian wear and was decked out in a blue apron with light brown pockets and stitching. She wore a makeshift full plate helm to cover her entire face as she worked. I waited until she plunged the scimitar into a tall bucket of oil before interrupting her.

“Hey, Baz! Got my order?”

“Sure do! Lemme go grab it real quick while the blade cools.” She retrieved a box from the back of the room and handed it to me. I thanked her and handed her a few coins for her time.

“Hey, do you have a skill that enhances armor like Josh has?” I asked, taking out a piece of the leather armor that the assassin had been wearing and showing it to her. She frowned as she turned it over.

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“This is too flowy for me. I could harden it, but it would lose all of its flexibility, which I’d assume isn’t what you’re going for with a set like this. Good stuff, though. Really good. Josh can’t infuse it?”

“He’s a little out of it. Took a bit too much of an experimental cocktail,” I said, wincing. I then explained to her that the armor had been capable of withstanding the full brunt of Slimey’s acid and what my plans were.

“Hmmm…” She mumbled, turning it over. “If you’d be going for pure defense, I’d say I’m your gal. But for what you’re looking for…” She made a sour face. “ I don’t know if he can actually do what he says he can… I’ll tell you what. I’ll tell you who to go see, but you can’t tell him I sent you. He’ll be insufferable if he knows that he can help when I can’t.”

“Deal!”

I found Baz’s archnemesis in a particularly out of the way tunnel beneath the base, along with two of his friends. They were huddled around a table, each tinkering with a portion of a large purple arm that was almost the size of my torso, surrounded in a dome of energy. The one that I was pretty sure was Jackis adjusted his glasses as he furiously wrote notes as text scrolled across a semi-transparent screen hovering in front of him.

“Splendidly done, Bartholomew. Pray, exert your efforts with utmost fastidiousness and discernment, that the flux of mana remains within optimal thresholds. The gestalt appendage, I note with great elation, conforms precisely to the projections of my sagacious calculations. And Sparks, do assure that the field of confinement endures with unflinching resolve and infallible poise,” Jackis said, still writing as if his life depended on it.

The plumper, twitchier member of the trio, Bartholomew, I presumed, nodded slightly as he redoubled his efforts. Mana surged from him and into the appendage. The arm grew at a visible rate, forming what looked like the beginnings of a shoulder.

“Bartholomew, I implore you, cease at once! Verily, your cascadery of mana surges throughout the limb with an unconscionable superfluity of power, a misstep of the most dire nature!” Jackis shouted quickly as the screen in front of him flashed an angry red. Bartholomew, for his part, looked confused as he cut off his skill. Sparks blew her pink hair out of her face as she struggled with keeping the containment field around the arm, reattaching pipes and wires as they blew out of place. After a few more seconds of panic, the arm stopped growing, Jackis’s screen stopped flashing and the containment field stabilized once more.

A sweating Jackis rounded on a sheepish Bartholomew. “Pray tell, Bartholomew, what manner of madness was that? I had instructed thee to maintain thy stable disposition, and yet thou proceeded to behave in an entirely erratic and ungovernable fashion!”

“The… You said g’ding… You g’ding said to exert my g’ding efforts. I exerted,” Bartholomew said nervously but angrily. His left hand cramped and twitched along with his eyes and his nose, though his gloved right hand stayed perfectly steady.

“You are misconstruing what I elucidated, once again, Bartholomew!” Jackis said, puffing up his chest imperiously. “I merely stated that--”

“You could have just told him he was doing a good job, Jackass!” Sparks spat. “That was on you, not on Bart. You’re too busy making up words that you can’t imagine that we don’t know what the hell you’re actually saying sometimes.”

“Is it my fault that my eloquence is unappreciated? I’ll have you know-”

“I don’t think cascadery is a word,” I interjected, cutting off Jackis’s tirade. The trio jumped in unison as they all turned to me.

“THANK YOU!” Sparks yelled, pointing at me. “I knew he was full of shit, pretending to be an academy professor and all that bologna.”

“I, g’ding… I agree with the g’ding stranger.” Bartholomew spluttered.

Jackis balled his fists and stomped a booted foot. “I shall not be bereaved by-”

“Baz sent me because she said you could do something she couldn’t,” I said, cutting the man off before he had a meltdown.

“She what?” Jackis looked at me, mouth agape.

I nodded seriously. “I need this gear enhanced. Josh is down with a bad case of the cider. He cut himself twice trying to make a pair of boots comfy. Baz can only make items as hard as steel, far too inflexible for what I need. She told me to come see you. Sooooo… Are you as good as she begrudgingly says or did she just pretend so that I’d get out of her hair?” I shifted my box of supplies to the side, balancing it on my left hip with one arm as I shrugged my bag of gear off my right shoulder. Jackis ran over and snatched up the bag, laying out the dark leather armor onto a side table. He used a skill to scan the material before nodding to himself.

“Dyed boar hide, boss variant,” Jackis read.

“You mean oh, my dear gentleman, you hath bequeathed unto me the flayed skin of an employer hog?” Sparks mocked, snickering with Bartholomew. Jackis waved her off, annoyed, before turning back to me.

“I am most able to enhance this armor, my good man. As payment, however, I require an exchange. Something of mysterious and magical properties.” He deflated a little more as Sparks and Bartholomew laughed.

“Not your best work, professor,” Sparks called out.

I felt bad. He was trying his best to keep in character, though I wasn’t sure why. I looked through my bags and took out a slime card. “Here. Four of these cards… Coalesce… into a special piece of loot. Well, I don’t know what your chances are or what kind of loot pops out, but I have it on good authority that the end result is pretty good.”

The mad scientist perked up at that. “I would dearly like to study such a phenomenon, indeed. We will inscribe runes onto your gear with the promise that you return with a sufficient amount of cards to initiate the coalescence.”

With that, our bargain was struck. I slipped my second slime card onto the table and watched as Jackis used his screens to project runes onto each piece of gear. Bartholomew hobbled over and removed the glove from his right hand, revealing the monstrosity beneath. Half of his hand was a dark purple, the same color as the gargantuan hand on the table. Black veins snaked halfway up his arm as if gradually spreading the taint to the rest of his body. Only his pinky and his thumb weren’t swallowed up by the… Corruption? Using his index finger, he traced the projected runes on each piece of gear, careful to keep his hand steady. As the wickedly sharp black nail of Bartholomew’s purple index finger touched the boar leather, it sizzled slightly and a small wisp of smoke rose up before dissipating in the air.

I watched in fascination as the corruption slowly receded as Bartholomew continued to channel whatever strange skill he was using. Contrary to my expectations, the black veins drained bit by bit and purple skin reverted to light pink until only two fingers were still fully purple. By then, though, he had traced every line of every rune on the armor set without his finger so much as hesitating. His other hand, though, tucked firmly behind his back, hadn’t stopped moving erratically throughout the entire process.

With the promise to bring back two more slime cards, I gathered my newly-runescribed armor and headed back to my room. As I threw my box into Slimey’s storage, I noted that the entire package was stored at once instead of piece by piece. I also stored the two crêpes, curious if the mana degradation would pause while in storage or not.

I unpacked my box of goodies into my room, feeling as if I were taking out some cross-floor contraband. A blanket, a large yellow glow rock, a pair of slippers, some bedding, a few chunks of chocolate and some dried apples. I quickly set up my bed in my rounded corner, layering it with bedding, slime pillows and my blanket. Satisfied, I set out, heading towards the nearest set of stairs leading upwards. It was time to test out these crêpes, see if they could help me make some headway into Floor 2.