When Warren finally released Peter and Pham, they were in what appeared to Peter’s eyes to be a massive modern foundry. After a bomb had hit it. Twisted walkways that went nowhere spider webbed the walls. Pipes spewed various coloured gasses into the air. Rivers of hot glowing metal flowed through raised aqueduct like structures to fall into pools far below, splashing molten gobbets onto the walls and floors. Through it all, conveyor belts and suspended tracks carried parts to and from machines that rippled the air around them with heat.
Despite the industrial vibe, the room also felt analogous to something biological. It’s like being inside the chest of a Transformer, Peter thought, right after taking a mace to the ribs.
Everywhere the damage warred with a repair effort. Tiny ten legged mechanoids the same colour as the defence robots crawled through the wreckage. They were bolting together parts, or welding plates, or sometimes just creating new bridges with their bodies as their compatriots ran along them carrying resources.
Sometimes they succeeded, Peter watched the bots mending a massive crucible that was sent to catch metal pouring from overhead instead of melting another hole in the floor.
Sometimes they failed. A pressure vessel ruptured, sending bot parts bouncing off the far wall to rain down around the Travellers.
It was a delicate balance of order and chaos, as the swarming bots were being manufactured only just fast enough to keep the damage from preventing the factory from shutting down entirely. As they stared in wonder, the factory held steady for a little longer than average and was able to build some of the security bots and send them whizzing off into other parts of the Archology through darkened openings in the walls. The situation didn’t last long, a moment later a conveyor belt let go and partially built repair mechs spilled off to the side, never to be completed. Bots rushed to repair the line, others gathered up the bits and tossed them into smelters to be recycled.
“It wasn’t always like this,” Warren reminisced. “The first time we came in here the factory was running like a well-oiled machine. We nearly didn’t make it past security.”
“We also nearly didn’t make it out again,” Pham pointed out. “That’s why it’s like this.”
Looking back to where Warren had carried them through the massive door into the foundry, Peter could see the remains of where a room might once have been. Or, maybe rooms? he thought. Multiple?
The clear area around the entrance was bounded by a rectangular scuff mark on the floor. There were circular holes the size of Warren’s thumb punched into the metal plate underfoot which, on closer inspection, were threaded. Peter hadn’t paid much attention to them as they were irregularly spaced and had been relegated to background information but now he was looking he could see that the places where there should be holes but weren’t had slightly shinier circles of sheared metal in them. “What the heck happened here?”
Instead of an answer from his team, a shout from the room before made his head snap up. “They’re in front! Get ‘em!” Warren’s cousin’s people had made it through the pipe room and were holding off the globlin invasion. For now.
“Boll… er, blast!” Warren almost cursed. “I thought we had an hour at least.” He pointed to a room far above almost lost in the darkness against the celing. Suspended from the rock roof by thick metal cables and met by a walkway from either side, the room resembled a demountable building from a construction site that had been hauled into the air by a great mechanical spider and hung in its web. “We need to get up there. Get climbing.”
Dani leapt onto the wall and scrambled up it like a spider monkey. Pham extracted a backpack from his inventory with a pair of grapnels attached to winches on the shoulders and put it on, tossing the first grapnel as high as he could and using the winch to ascend. When Peter remained where he was, uncertain as to how to follow, Warren tossed him into the air like a paper plane. Peter’s sudden projectile status snapped him out of his funk and when he neared the wall he latched onto it and started climbing too. While nowhere near as skilled as Dani, the species Peter had chosen had very light bones and muscles making the climb almost effortless.
A roar and thud from below made him pause for a second. After launching Peter, Warren had wedged himself behind the massive door to the room, back against the wall and feet on the metal and heaved. Despite several people throwing their weight against it the door had ponderously closed and locked itself from their side.
“Tha’ won’t hold them long!” Warren bellowed. He squatted and jumped clear past where the other three hung, landing on a horizontal piece of walkway jutting from the wall. “Move yersaels!”
Pham ascended the wall quickly, walking vertically like the Adam West version of Batman. Every time he reached where a grapnel had attached, he unhooked it and lofted it past where the other one had hooked on, leapfrogging his way along. Dani moved in fits and starts, scaling parts of the wall gripping handholds Peter would have thought impossible had he not seen it himself. Warren’s path was the most winding, as he jumped from one flat spot to the next the way the Hulk did in the old 2D cartoons.
Even so, Peter was the slowest to rise as his teammates called encouragement to him. He regularly had to pause to get his breath back, as almost effortless was not zero effort and this was not something he had ever had to do before. While he huffed and heaved he appreciated that he was able to take this opportunity. He flashed back to a quest he’d undertaken to move some heavy bolts of material, getting them where they needed to go before the rain ruined them. He had literally worked himself to death achieving that goal. Now he had friends to lean on, people who knew his faults and not just accepted them but respected them.
“Oi mate, head in the game!” Dani shouted, pointing towards ground level. Sparks were shooting from a gap between the wall and the door and the enourmous hinges were glowing a dull orange. “We’re about to have company.”
Peter grabbed the nearest handhold and gave it his all. He caught up to Dani, who was waiting on the edge of a busted pipe. “Thanks, I…”
“You zone out, we know,” Dani clapped him on the back and indicated a hanging section of walkway. “Think you could make that if I give you a boost?”
Peter nodded, not trusting his voice, and Dani interlaced her fingers and held out her hands just above her knee. Peter ran at her and used Dani’s assist to launch himself into the air. Dani hadn’t counted on how light he was and Peter smacked face first into the walkway, a full body length higher than intended. The stars in his eyes didn’t stop him from wedging his fingers through the catwalk but he did have to hang for a second to get his stamina back. “Ow!”
“Dinna be such a wean!” Warren shouted, landing above Peter on the horizontal part of the walkway. “We’re no even halfway there yet.” He grabbed Peter by the hood and pulled him up. “How are you so light? I swear a third of your mass is rat with DB in there.”
Peter’s hand flew to his hood where DB was curled up against his neck. He realised that he hadn’t put the helmet back on and his hood was flopped out the collar. There hadn’t been any globlins in this room to worry about but the oversight bothered him a bit. “Hey, DB is not fat. He’d just big boned.”
“We’re all going to be boned if you don’t get moving,” Pham swung past, suspended between two wire ropes. “They’re in. Chad’s not going to let us get up there without a fight.”
Sure enough, several floors worth of wrecked foundry below, the door was hanging by a single melted hinge. Every time a repair bot tried to approach it, the bot was blasted away with a heavy metal sphere or bolt of fire. Chad stood in the middle of the open space, hands on hips and a smile on his face.
The smile of someone who knew something Peter didn’t.
On the other hand, Peter was used to people knowing things he didn’t. It was the baseline to his life at the moment. He flipped the double bird at the group below and took off running, leaping from crosswalk to conveyor belt to fallen girder. He didn’t have Pham’s tech, or Warren’s strength, or Dani’s skill. He could only use what he did have. He paused for half a breath and pulled the top of the suit off, swiping up his arm to open his inventory and stash the unneeded armour. He shook out his wings and flexed them, the strange phantom limb feeling fading very quickly. They were truly becoming part of him now, so much that he missed them in the real world. Probably not enough to fly up there, he thought, but absolutely enough for some glide time.
What Peter had that his friends didn’t, was an utter lack of fear of death. As each of them took the path they were confident in, Peter took the fastest path. From the tip of the girder, he leapt and ran along the wall, using his wings to generate downforce to let him dash across the vertical surface as though it were a garden path. He tucked his wings around his body and flipped, landing on top of a conveyor belt leading to a series of part molding presses. After a second to judge the timing, he ran through the machine, narrowly avoiding becoming jam as each press slammed down behind him. He pulled out his scythe as he ran along the belt on the other side and used it to pole vault from the end of the belt, the parts behind him falling into a bin below as his wings unfurled again and he glided to to top of a row of columns that had been shorn off. He paused on the third as Warren landed on the fourth and leapt again, then resumed his run. Jumping from the last column he threw out an arm and grabbed one of Pham’s wire ropes and redirected his inertia before throwing himself into a barrel roll between two streams of molten metal. He flicked his wings out to cancel the roll and glided to the wall where he hung from a cable ladder to get his breath back.
Down below, Chad’s people hadn’t been idle. A guy with a pair of cylinders strapped to his back was launching heavy metal balls up at them. Some punched holes in whatever they struck. Some exploded into puffs of gas or fire. Another guy in blue robes covered in snowflakes threw slow moving fireballs that engulfed a sphere nearly a dozen meters across, leaving behind blackened and melted metal. An amazonian princess archetype hauled herself up the walls, much slower than Dani had but implacably like a juggernaut. She had a mace slung from her belt and a tower shield on her back.
The shield in particular was effective in warding off attacks, as the repair bots had not taken kindly to their intrusion and subsequent murder of their compatriots. None of the combat bots were being deployed in the foundry, to everyone’s benefit and relief, but that didn’t mean the repair bots were defenseless. They deployed arc welder tools and brazing torches to shock and burn as well as drills, hammers and saws on top of their obscenely strong hands being used to try to crush, grip and throw their opponents.
That didn’t mean the repair bots weren’t a concern for Peter and his friends. Peter’s unconventional route had kept him well clear of the climbing bots swarming the room, Dani’s skill and speed let her avoid them and Pham seemed to have a localised method of shutting down any that got close. Warren either landed on or punted any that came near, coming in like a wrecking ball.
Drawing so many of the bots away from the damage in the room was destablising the repair efforts. A nut the size of Peter’s fist arced through the air and buried itself in the wall not far from his head. A conveyor belt went overspeed, launching parts through a molten metal pour and spraying everything below with scalding metal. Chad lifted his sword from the holster on his back and blocked the falling metal, the globs spattering on the blade like steel rain. He gave a sharp gesture and a figure standing behind him in fur lined robes flicked back their hood to reveal long, pointed rabbit ears. They raised their arms to shoulder height and brought up with a shout. Two spectral hares the size of rottweilers emerged from the floor to sit at their feet, forelegs raised as though begging. With a whispered word inaudible over the roar of the foundry the hares dashed off, streaming along the ground so fast they left an afterimage.
Peter reached inside his hood and lifted out DB. He gave his companion a whispered message and held the rat out so that DB could reach the slats of the cable tray and begin climbing. After a moment’s pause to ensure DB was moving confidently, he flicked around and backflipped off the wall onto a passing crane hook. He swung back and forth to gain momentum and at the apex of the swing threw himself into a short glide that ended on the rising side of a massive cog. Before the cog could mesh with the teeth of the gear higher, he swung out onto the face of the metal ring and ran along it, grabbing the tooth of the gear above as it unmeshed with the cog he’d ridden up. Peter looked around once more as he ascended slowly, and found that he was slightly above Warren at this point and a very long way off the floor. Chad and his retinue were as ants by now, with Chad himself simply standing in the middle of the open area - sword once more on his back and hands on hips. It was only because of his size being comparable to Warren’s that Peter was able to make out these details though.
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Much closer, the ghostly rabbits were using their speed to run up the walls in a spiral motion. Despite being clearly magical and faster than any corporal being could hope to match, they did seem to have to obey at least some of the laws of physics. They were using this to their advantage, relying on centripetal force to adhere to the walls as they flowed over any obstruction towards their prey.
Dani, as the one lowest at this time, was the first to meet their charge. She hooked her legs around the chain she was climbing and began pulling throwing daggers from her bandoleers. Metal sparked off stone as her blades struck the walls left, right, up and down but never hitting the rabbits. As they got closer she abandoned the tactic, drawing two kuris and holding them along her forearms, crossing them in front of her. The first rabbit shot through the gap between her and the wall, not slowing at all. The second flowed over her, barely slowing but giving her a nasty kick across the cheek as it narrowly avoided being cut by her blades. Both creatures shot off around the walls for another lap.
Dani sheathed her blades and rolled upwards, in a move that Peter barely believed despite having seen it. She unhooked her legs and accelerated, pulling herself upwards hand over hand at a speed that was as incredible as it was unsustainable. At the top of the chain Dani mantled up onto the beam to which the chain was attached and walked quickly along it, arms out for balance and clearly struggling for breath. She was halfway along the beam when Pham shouted “look out!”
The rabbits had completed their lap at a pace that would make Barry Allen jealous and were approaching the point where the beam was attached to the wall. The first one seemed to stumble, then tumble against the wall. Then it burst forward again, having reoriented its momentum through ninety degrees without slowing at all. It streamed along the beam and just before hitting Dani it rolled itself into a ball, Sonic style. While it lacked the blue hedgehog’s spikes, it still had his signature speed and crashed into her midsection as she turned to see what Pham had shouted about. Dani folded like a cheap lawn chair, arms and legs horizontal as she sailed backwards. Then the second rabbit hit her at head height and her top half snapped backwards. By some miracle of balance Dani landed on the beam, sliding backward but not off as the rabbits reversed their run, kicking off her body and leaving clawmarks in her suit.
Dani sat up by letting her legs dangle on either side of the beam and pull her upper body vertical. She wiped the blood from her face with the back of her hand and looked at it angrily. “Ain’t no way I’m getting my ass kicked by a pie filling!” She rolled acrobatically to her feet as she drew the kuris again and set herself in a fighting stance on the beam.
It helped that the rabbits could only approach from one direction. The other end of the beam was unsupported, the thick wire rope that once anchored it to the roof reduced to a meter long stub that hung loosely from the tip and jiggled ever time the beam swayed under her weight. Dani quickly scanned the room to see how far away the agressive lagomorphs were and ducked a fist sized ball of brass that would have brained her otherwise. She tracked it upwards after it missed and smiled as an idea came to her.
The murderous bunnies made their physics defying turns again to leap onto the beam a second time. This time they were much closer together, almost nose to tail as they streaked forward towards Dani. Dani held her stance until the last moment then threw herself backwards into a cartwheel then a short hop to flex the beam and use the stored energy as a springboard to launch herself into the air. As the rabbits barrelled past underneath her, Dani latched onto the repair bot descending on a wire rope from pulley far above. It was feeding out the rope from a reel in two of its hands while holding a shackle on the other end in two others. She kicked the shackle free of its grip and shot upwards as it fell.
Unable to arrest their charge the rabbits shot off the end of the beam and into space. They dropped slower than expected, their legs still pumping as the drifted through the air until they toughed down at ground level and sped off towards the walls once more. Dani let out a scream of frustration but kept climbing.
Peter tore is eyes away from the scene below to concentrate on his own ascent. He’d caught the bottom edge of a scaffold still attached to the wall and he took advantage of the inclined planks inside it to run up and give his arms a rest. By the time Peter had reached the top he found himself two thirds of the way up, approaching the gantry that ran to the suspended room.
He was also the lowest of his team. Dani had sped past him as he ran up the scaffolding, Pham was already on the gantry and tossing traps out to slow those below. Warren was crouched in a bucket up to his neck, as the marksman below peppered the underside with round after round and made it ring like a bell. The bucket was being hoisted up, one in a chain that disappeared into a gap in the roof. As the bucket passed the gantry he leapt from it to the elevated walkway. One of the rounds clipped him in the leg as he flew, spinning him around and making for a hard landing but he still made it. Warren lay on the metal walkway groaning and holding his shin as more rounds clanged off the underside. Dani vaulted the rail and put two needles into the gap in the armour at Warren’s knee.
“Walk it off” she said nonchalantly, “ we’re about to win this.”
“No you’re not,” the amazonian Traveller with the shield on her back landed on the catwalk with a clang. “You’re about to get respawned.”
Warren got to his feet slowly. He rose and kept rising, coming to his full height to loom over even her. “Dani, the deal was it only takes one of us to win. Get that door open,” he drew his sword and held it in front of him. It burst into flame. “I’ll keep this one occupied.”
Dani took one look at the two titans and decided to put her whole attention into unlocking the door. The fight behind her made the entire structure rock, making it difficult to work the picks and rakes. Nevertheless she persevered.
On the other side, Peter swiftly scrambled up the wall as Pham covered him. Well, Pham’s bot did. By creating a series of barriers with its adhesive launcher it prevented the rabbits from bodying him off the wall. It also harassed the mage far below, not enough to prevent him from launching fireballs completely but enough to ruin his aim even further. The spells exploded off the roof and raining everyone and everything below with dust and pebbles.
Pham uttered a noise like a car crash. “-ing wizards!” He shouted, lobbing a molotov cocktail. “I can cast fireball too!”
The smell of cinnamon alcohol drifted up around Peter. “Did you use literal fireball just to make that joke?” he shouted over the cacophony.
Pham just grinned and tossed another bottle.
Peter hauled himself over the rail, falling in a tangle of arms, legs and wings. Feathers scattered around as he landed, several of them singed black. The walkway rocked as a metal ball ricocheted off the kick plate. “Having fun yet?” he wheezed.
“Funnily enough, I am,” Pham grinned at him. He wound up like a baseball batter with his massive wrench and swung at a dropping repair bot. It resulting strike wasn’t much, the disparity in mass was too great, but for the bot that was trying to land on the handrail an inch might as well have been a mile. It landed on a conveyor belt on its back, rolled off, bounced off a glowing boiler and exploded. The blast destabilised the boiler, which ruptured and sprayed boiling water, steam and embers over everything below. The bottom half of the room vanished in a roiling cloud of smoke and steam. “Woo! C-c-combo!”
“Come on, let’s get inside,” Peter pulled himself to his feet using the handrail. He dashed unsteadily over to the door to the suspended room and tried the handle. When it turned out to be locked, he tried hammering on the heavy wood with the ball of his fist.
“Knocking isn’t going to get them to let us in,” Pham said from behind him, making Peter jump. “I’ve already tried that before.”
“I-I knew that,” Peter stammered. “I was just hoping… Nevermind. You got anything in that bag of tricks that WILL open the door?”
“Short answer yes with an if…” Pham pulled out a small pyramid of red cylinders with string coming out one end, “long answer no with a but.”
“No Rico, no boom,” Peter waved him off. He unslung his scythe and looked at the big gem. It was dull, uncharged. He sighed. He hadn’t defeated anyone to charge it, so that was out. He sighed and banged his head against the rough surface of the door.
The door clicked.
Peter tried the handle again. This time it opened. “I guess knocking DOES work.”
Pham stood there slack jawed. “How?”
“Magic,” Peter grinned. He stepped into the room and felt something run up the back of his leg. He spun around to show Pham his hands. “Ta dah! Nothing up my sleeves!”
“Nothing in your head either,” Dani said, opening the door on the far side of the room and stepping in. Behind her Warren was still fighting a delaying battle with his opponent.
Peter blew her a raspberry and flipped her the forks.
A whirring sound and a rhythmic thumping drew all eyes to the far end of the room. Past the alchemical equipment and workbenches. Past the monitors and machines in pieces. Past the desks and chairs. It was a room straight out of a wikipedia list of mad scientist tropes and at the far end was a hole in the floor. Rising through that hole on four steel wire ropes was a mechanical monstrosity of a throne. Seated comfortably on that throne was Chad, clapping slowly. To either side of the throne stood the mages, looking incredibly smug.
“Well, well, well, look who finally showed up.” Chad’s voice echoed weirdly, coming not just from his face but also from the speakers mounted to the monitors around the room. The monitors lit up, black and green alphanumeric characters becoming Chad’s face with a strange shadow lagging behind with every movement. “You thought you had won, didn’t you?”
“Uh, kinda, yeah,” Peter shrugged. “We were here first.”
The wizard in the blue robes stepped forward aggressively. “Like hell you were, we’ve been here the whole time.”
“Then you cheated,” Pham leaned on the wall by the door. “You knew the bet was a sham from the start.”
Chad leaned forward and put a hand on the wizard’s back. “Relax, I’ve got this.”
The movement drew Peter’s attention to a brass plate on either of Chad’s upper arms. At first he’d assumed they were part of his armour, looking much like Warren’s did. However, three clear pipes snaked from the plates to the throne. On closer inspection, there were two more plates and attached pipes on Chad’s shins. He pipes all vansihed into the throne somewhere, but didn’t seem to restrict his moement at all.
“The bet was made outside the Arcology,” Chad sat back, crossing his legs. “And we raced to this room. No stipulation on how to get here. I know you took an… unconventional route, probably thinking it gave you a leg up.” He leaned to the side and gave an upnod to the two joining the congregation. “Cousin, what say you? Do you concede?”
Loud clumping footfalls heralded Warren and his opponent’s entrance. Warren stopped with his friends, the tall woman strode confidently to stand by the throne. “You weaselly skunner,” Warren growled. “You may have won, and because I have honor I will concede it, but you did so in a dishonorable way. We’re not going to let you get away with it.”
“Let?” Chad laughed. “You don’t get to let me do anything.” He began to swell. He was already as big as Warren, but as he stood and flexed the rest of his armour bar the four plates fell to the floor. “This is MY house.”