“So, what you’re saying is that last time you were in this region was about a week after launch?” Peter asked as they drifted along the road in no particular hurry. Everyone was in or on a mount but they weren’t pushing for a land speed record by any stretch of the imagination.
“Thereabouts, yeah,” Pham replied, looking out at the peaks of the mountains as they approached the foothills. He shuddered before continuing. “Woz has been back, as you can see, but I never wanted to return. Some bad memories buried in them hills.”
“Does that mean we’re close to your starter town?” Dani asked as her horse whickered and shied away from a rock spat out from under Pham’s tyres. “I’d like to see where this bromance began.”
“Whit's fur ye'll no go past ye,” Warren responded, “but we’re not headed in that direction today.” He pointed up towards a speck on a low hill off the main road to the north. “That’s our destination up there.”
With Peter’s persistent lack of transportation situation temporarily solved in the form of a cart being pulled by Pham’s mount, they’d made great time. Peter had initially griped about the cost of the cart, the rickety construction, his misgivings about riding in another vehicle he had no control over, the lack of brakes, the colour of the sky and anything else he could think of because he was in a griping mood that day, but even with the rigid suspension transmitting every bump up through his spine to make his head rattle it was honestly better than being stuck at home in his grandmother’s house.
It was Peter’s worst nightmare. All of his aunts and cousins were visiting from the mainland and all his cousins were girls, ranging in age from two years younger than him to eight years older. The few uncles he had, as most of his aunts were either divorced or had wives, had remained at home. Probably luxuriating in the short holiday, being able to eat and drink what they liked and wander the house sans pants, Peter thought. I wish I could.
Due to the crush of bodies in the tiny house that morning he’d been forced to eat breakfast alone in his room, as all the seats in both the dining room and lounge had been taken, then berated for a solid thirty minutes for dripping milk from his cereal on the hallway floor by multiple women, passed from one to the next as they all had to get their ten cents in. It didn’t matter that it was a tile floor and took the work of seconds to wipe it up. It had been an utter relief that today was a Saturday and he was able to escape the house the moment he could slip away unnoticed and make his way up the hill to his favourite login spot. Still, a portion of the black cloud had followed him. One without any visible silver lining, he still had to return before dark.
An itch on his arm prompted him to check his character sheet, where he found that he’d both learned and earned several increments in the skill Teamster. As virtually every action he took in The Age of Steam and Sorcery seemed to be correlated with a skill, Peter was starting to find that his list was getting so long as to be almost unmanageable. In the end he just sorted it from highest value to lowest and elected to ignore anything that didn’t make the first page. Much like a Google search, he thought. “So, what’s the plan?” he continued out loud. “I was party leader before because I was the only one who had the Geas, but now that we all do, shouldn't one of you guys take over?”
“Depends. What’s your level now?” Pham called over his shoulder.
“Uh, three?” Peter nearly tumbled forward out of the cart as Pham slammed on the brakes. The other two brought their mounts to a more respectable halt.
Pham whirled around in his seat. “How the frak are you still only level three after all that we’ve been through?”
“Take it easy,” Peter complained as he righted himself. “It’s not my fault we’ve staggered from crisis to crisis. We’ve played with our new gear exactly once. The only downtime we’ve had recently has been when we went shopping and even then we were essentially running non-combat quests. Like this armourer we’re off to see. It’s great that we’re getting new equipment - but did it have to be from a shady operator who lives all by himself on a random hill in the ass end of nowhere?”
“Herself,” Warren corrected. “And yes. We are going to need some very specific resistances built into our armours and she’s the only one I know of that can do it.” He spurred his mount into motion again.
“What’s with tall, dark and surly today?” Dani asked Pham, bringing her horse in close to his contraption. “In fact, did everyone take grumpy pills this morning? I expect that sort of thing from Warren, but even Pete’s cracking the sads. Did something happen?”
Pham tapped a gauge on the cluster in front of him as he thought about how to answer. “Pete’s a whiner, I thought we all knew that. Well, when he’s not some terrifying abomination with eyes that are windows into the void between dimensions that is. Netflix probably cancelled his favourite show after one season or something. But what happened to Woz, and me, that happened a long time ago. Woz’s tale to tell, but. Not mine. We weren’t on the best of terms the first time we visited The Archology. Decisions were made. Prices were paid. And not all by him.”
“I’ve said I’m sorry a thousand times Pham,” Warren rumbled without looking back. “I don’t know how to make it better.”
“And I’ve said I don’t blame you. It was the only way.” Pham reached into a pouch at his waist and extracted two small spheres. He popped one in his mouth and expertly bounced the second off of Warren’s helmet with a dull clang. It landed in the dirt and Peter recognised it as a sweet of some sort. “We agreed at the time and nothing changed since then.”
“So, you going to tells us about it?” Peter asked. All the mystery was exasperating him. “Before we walk into the Underdark and face Drow armies with Aussie accents?”
“There’s no Drow, it’s an Ancient dungeon. Look, I can’t do this, not right now,” Warren kept looking dead ahead. “It’ll make more sense when we’re inside the Archology.”
They rode the rest of the way up the mountain trail in silence. The only sound was the creaking of the wheels, the clopping of hoofs and the hissing of the winds whipping through the tall grasses that bordered the road. They’d left the treeline behind long ago and the cold of the breeze that had sprung up was finding every crack in Peter’s armour. His already dark mood soured further. I could have stayed home and had the same experience, the little voice in the back of his head muttered. At least I’d be warm.
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Eventually they reached the end of the path where it terminated in a slate hut with a hitching rail outside and a great chimney in the centre of the roof belching black smoke into the sky. It looked like a civilised volcano.
Warren dismounted and secured his mount, motioning for the others to do the same. The second they had, the front door of the hut slammed open, allowing a scorching gale to pass over them. Peter blinked rapidly to re-moisten his instantly dried eyeballs. They waited for something else to happen, but when nothing did they entered the gloomy building. Inside the door the air was even dryer and smokier than what had rushed out, the interior one large open space with a massive glowing forge in the centre that lit everything with a hellish glow. The walls were lined with many and varied devices and pieces of armour. The most normal ones were brass inset leather vests, helms and bracers. Attached to the brass bits were tools like screwdrivers and spanners, some on chains so they couldn’t be dropped, some on actuated arms that looked to be able to move on their own. Again, these were the most normal pieces. The more esoteric items had functions he could only guess at.
A ratcheting, clicking noise came from below a wrap-around workbench on the far side of the forge. The part of the device visible above the worktop looked to be a comfortable leather armchair inside a cauldron. A sleek steam engine sat behind the back of the chair with the smoke stack protruding a foot above where the occupants head would be. Peter was reminded of Thomas The Tank Engine’s evil twin they’d fought beneath Averton, but much smaller. And lacking the murderous intent.
The source of the clicking ratchet extracted themselves from underneath the workbench. A four-armed vision straight from Geiger’s nightmares greeted them. Its black, chitinous skin of its limbs reflected the glow of the forge, and a wasp-like bulbous head protruded from a patchy cloak stained, burned and torn in so many places it barely covered the monstrous form. “Hello there!” it greeted them in an incongruously cheerful voice.
“General K’Gnobeh,” Warren bowed.
“Pshaw,” K’Gnobeh dismissed, waving the arm with the socket spanner in it. “I left the military a long time ago. It’s just K’Gnobeh now, or Armourmaster if you want to be extra formal. What brings you to my neck of the woods?” Were it not for the slightly extended sibilants and pronounced glottal stops, it could be the voice of someone in a London alley trying to sell you a “Rolex” that would stop working before the end of the street.
“Armourmaster, I met you in the first Faction Wars, ‘just’ is not a word I’d use to describe you,” Pham spoke up from the doorway. “It was said you died in the artillery barrage on the keep.”
“We met, did we?” One insectoid hand reached up to tap at his chin while another returned the spanner and socket to their assigned positions on a nearby toolboard. “Wait! The pale elf! Yes, I recall your face. You were the most inquisitive Traveller I’d ever met. Still are, in fact. Did you ever get that mechanical man working?”
“I did, Armourmaster. And thank you for all your help,” Pham extracted his mech from his inventory and placed it on the ground. He polished a non-existent smudge from the domed top proudly. “I couldn’t have done it by myself.”
“You’re welcome, but it is the last you’ll get. That was the deal I struck with your kingdom, few know I lived past that day and none bar the king can know how. Now, come in, pull up a pew and we’ll have a cuppa and speak of happier times.” K’Gnobeh stepped around the workbench and they saw that his bottom half was made from a dark, polished metal that, while it resembled the chitin of his torso, didn’t have the lustre of the live skin. Looking closer, Peter realised that K’Gnobeh’s lower left arm was made of a similar metal as well, the segments cennected by ball joints with a greater range of movement than the natural elbows. K’Gnobeh used those extra degrees of freedom to snag mugs from the shadowed pegboard as he passed and laid them around a small wooden table. “What brings four such Travellers to my door? Not my pretty face, is it?”
The four arranged themselves around the table and watched as the armourmaster poured the tea. Peter still had zero clue as to what species he was, and didn’t want to offend by guessing. He took a tentative sip, expecting tea made in a forge to taste metallic, but found it an excellent Assam blend that didn’t even need milk. Warren dumped four lumps of sugar in and then topped the cup up to the brim with moo juice. Pham added a tot from a hip flask before offering it around, which everyone declined. Dani just cradled her cup and breathed the steam.
“K’Gnobeh, we’re going to need protection that you alone are qualified to provide,” Warren began, “we’re headed into the Archology. Again.”
K’Gnobeh’s face was already difficult to read, but now it took on an even more inscrutable expression. “Are you pulling my leg? It’ll come off, you know.” When it became obvious that Warren was serious he continued. “You know what’s in there, right? I don’t think, even after all these years, that anyone has ever defeated The Wight in The Black. Travellers have mostly given up even trying.”
“That’s why we’ve come to you.” Warren put his cup down firmly, looking off into the distance as though the walls of the forge had turned entirely transparent. “We know what’s down there, well, Pham and I do. You’re the only one I know of who can make us these.” He pulled a set of blueprints from a pouch on his belt. The scrolls they were written on looked old, cracked and faded.
Pham drew in a sharp breath. “You kept those?”
“What are they?” Dani asked.
Warren flattened the designs out across the table, aligned so that K’Gnobeh could read them. “The Archology was intended as the last holdout of the Ancients in their war against… something. We never found that out. But their defences were on par with stuff in the real world. Physical damage we can soak up with normal armour. Elemental damage can be negated by potions and such. The Ancients had access to something like nano-tech and radiation. After the Wight killed us, I was… obsessed, I’ll admit it, with getting back at it. For what it did to me, and to her. Pham drew up designs for protective clothing, to be worn under armour, but we could never find anyone with the skill or materials to actually make them. Eventually we came to terms with the fact it was beyond us. Max level players with full raid parties have gone in and never come out.”
“And you think this is a good place to grind for levels?” Peter asked incredulously.
“Nothing says you have to go all the way to the bottom,” Pham pointed out, one finger raised in the traditional ‘point of order’ position. “In the upper levels there are some really good grind points, with places to rest and even vending machines with health potions, and if we hadn’t challenged Warren's cousin in a race to beat the dungeon that’s where we’d stay.”
“That’s why we need the protective gear,” Peter nodded, understanding dawning. “In order to beat that ass, we’re going to have to be the first to clear the dungeon.”
“It’s why he picked it, the skunner.” Warren crossed his arms as his face darkened. “Death in that place comes nasty. Even though there’s a chapel on the first layer to respawn, I don’t know anyone who’s ever come back and tried again. He thinks I’m not man enough to see it through.”
“Well, death doesnt’ bother me,” Peter shrugged. “Armourmaster, sir, can you make these for us, please?”
The armourmaster took the blueprints to his workbench and began sifting through drawers and cabinets around the room. “I reckon I can. It’ll take a day or two, but I’ve got all I need here. One issue, I can’t cover your wings when they’re out. Can you fold them in tighter? And do you want your mechanical arm covered?”
Peter wriggled and twisted in his seat, pulling his wings in closer. He tucked the tips in alongside his legs and folded the rest as close to his back as he could. “Can you make the back loose enough to cover them like this?”
“Surely can, and the arm?”
“Covered, please. The less customisation the better, I think.”
K’Genobeh returned to the table with a measuring tape. “I’m already going to have to allow for this one,” he flicked the tip at Warren, “a looser back and a clipped off arm are nothing.”