Chapter 129 (Patreon)

Apologies in advance for the minor cliffhanger at the end of this. Chapter 130 is almost done and will be posted in a few days.

Chapter 129

Donut, Mongo, and I scrambled to follow Katia through the electrified doorway and into the hallway made out of glass.

Entering the Sand Castle of the Mad Dune Mage.

Zzzzt. I cringed as the door vanished behind me. The walls didn’t collapse, but the doorway disappeared. We were now stuck in the castle. Darkness encompassed us.

“Light,” I whispered, and Donut cast her Torch spell.

“Gah,” we all cried out as the brilliant light became unbearable. The torchlight bounced off the walls, changing colors, blinding us with a prism of hues.

“Turn it down!”

“This is the lowest it goes,” Donut said a moment later. The spell was now just a tiny ember floating in the air, causing the glass hallway to glow brightly and with a rainbow of light every time the ember moved. I took a step forward, and the glass floor crunched under my feet. It didn’t break, nor did it visibly crack, but it felt as if the floor rested upon an uneven dusting of gravel. The walls and floor were warm to the touch.

A long, thin hallway spread before us. The hallway was made of a cloudy, white and blue glass filled with cracks and imperfections and lightning-patterned streaks of black that sparkled in Donut’s light. The ground and walls were uneven, as if they were almost a natural formation. A t-junction appeared at the end of the hall.

Katia was forced to shed some mass in order to stand upright.

“How’s the map look?” I whispered. Whispering felt appropriate.

“It’s a bunch of rooms and a few stairways, both up and down,” Katia said. “I see the level stairwell. It’s below us in the basement. I don’t see any monsters at all.”

“Do you think he might be dead?” Donut asked. She rode upon the back of Mongo, who was using his front claw to scratch curiously at the wall. It sounded like nails against a chalkboard. “That seems to be the theme of this bubble, doesn’t it? Chris’s boss, that submarine captain hobgoblin fellow was dead. They had to fight a robot holding his head in a jar or something. We know the necropolis guy is dead. Bonnie’s dad was also dead when we arrived before we had to fight that goose with the awful bonnet. And now this guy has turned himself into sand. Perhaps he’s dead as well. That’s why nobody has seen him.”

“Maybe,” I agreed. “But even if he is, we’ll still probably have to fight something. It wouldn’t make sense for this place to be completely empty.”

“Look, look, I found something!” Donut said, jumping from Mongo’s back to the floor. She poked at a small lump with her paw. It was a glass mouse. The tiny thing was frozen in time, running along the edge of the hallway. Its feet were melded with the floor. She reached forward to touch it, and it broke into dust.

“Ew, ew,” she said, returning to Mongo, wiping her paw on his feathers. “It just exploded!”

“I think this place used to be real,” I said. “I mean, like a real castle, and that guy did something that turned everything into sand. Or glass. I’m not really sure what’s going on here.”

The hallway was too thin for us to stand side-by-side. Katia went first, Mongo second, and I held up the rear. If we got attacked from the front, Donut would leap to my shoulder. We had just under two hours, and this place wasn’t that big. We decided to quickly clear this floor and the upper floors first before descending to the basement with the throne room. We hit the first junction. The right led to an up and down stairwell, and the left turned to a large room with a fountain and statue within.

Everything in the room was made of glass, frozen in time, including the fountain. I stepped forward to examine it, wary for monsters or traps. There was no movement or sound other than the crunching under our own feet and Mongo’s nails scratching upon the glass.

The statue was human-sized, and it depicted a robed, female figure holding her arms out while she stood in the middle of the round fountain. Arcs of sparkling, crystal-clear glass sprouted up from the figure’s feet, raising to about waist height before curving downward again. The glass gave the impression of movement. This statue and fountain, before it had been turned to glass and frozen, had been of a woman standing in a bowl, arms outstretched in a Jesus pose, legs planted in a wide stance, her mouth wide open, as if she was belting out a tune. The fountain’s water flowed upward from all around her feet. It would’ve appeared that she was standing amongst a crashing wave. Or maybe atop a geyser.

Upon closer examination, I realized the glass statue did not depict a human. Her large eyes and small nose looked somewhat familiar, but I couldn’t place it at first. A pair of sharp teeth poked from the tops of her large lips within her wide-open mouth. Then I saw the gills on her neck, and I knew.

I’d last seen Tsarina Signet on the third floor. The half-high elf, half-naiad elite was the catalyst for the whole circus quest. When—if—I got down to the next floor, I still had a contract to fulfill. She was part of a third-party drama that used the production’s setting to create their show. It was called Vengeance of the Daughter, and it involved some story involving high elves, naiads, and genocide. I was obligated to participate in the program when and if we ever made it down to that level.

This robed creature depicted before me was also a half-naiad… a water nymph. A fairy-type creature that lived in the water. But instead of being half elf, it appeared this one was half human.

“Look,” Katia said. She reached down and broke away a piece of clear crystal, revealing a small, glass plate on the side of the fountain. The words were impossible to read, but when I examined it, the system happily read it for me.

Ahh, an old, crystalized figure with a cryptic description. How very convenient for those of us who are wondering wtf is going on with this storyline.

When the glass wizard’s research facility was transmuted, everything within was also transformed, including what you see before you now. At the base of this display is a small plaque. If you squint really hard, you can make out the faded words. It reads:

Lika, my love.

My sun and stars. My wife. M’lady, I will move the heavens so we can be together. I will burn and bury and destroy any who try to stop our love.

“Well that’s ominous,” Katia said.

Mongo leaned over to sniff at the statue. What had once been water was made of the clean, translucent glass. The statue itself was made of the same dirty-looking, multicolored glass that composed everything else in the castle. The dinosaur suddenly screeched and swiped at the statue. We all hopped back as it toppled over and shattered. The sound was like a gunshot in the large room.

“Whoops,” I said.

The shattered glass mostly turned to dust, like the mouse. The hooded, glass head of the naiad remained mostly intact, though part of her chin was now chipped. I took the head into my inventory along with a few of the larger, intact pieces of glass, which the inventory called fulgurite. For the head, the description read:

Decapitated glass head depicting Lika from Troubadour’s Bounty.

It’s sticky.

Before I could figure out what in the hell that meant, I received a message.

Gwen: Hey bomber guy. I’m trusting you’re not dead yet. Tran reports that your hunch was correct. The electric line perfectly matches up with the wheel and the contact at the bottom of the tower.

Carl: Okay. Have him hook it up to the wheel, but not the tower. Then have him standby in case I need him to attach it.

Gwen: You know if lightning hits it, it might, you know, electrically open up the release valve. You probably don’t want that happening while you’re standing in the castle. It’d be like stepping in front of one of those trains from the last floor.

Carl: Yeah, I am aware. So please don’t connect it unless I ask.

The valve opened when you physically turned it. I suspected electrifying the metal valve actually did something else, but I wasn’t certain just yet. I hoped we wouldn’t have to test it while we were standing in the middle of the castle.

Gwen: All right. You are a crazy fucker. I’ll give you that. But you guys better hurry.

“Come on,” I said to the others. “Let’s keep moving.”

We explored the rooms on the first level of the castle, but they were all empty. There were paintings on the walls and furniture made of glass, but I couldn’t tell what they’d once been, and the furniture turned to dust or broke into pieces when I tried to dislodge it from the floor. The paintings were nothing but squares on the walls.

We went up the stairs, and it was more of the same. There was a table full of potions. I touched one, and it also turned to dust. It was finally dawning on me that there might be a way to turn all of this back, and we were destroying potential loot. Outside, we could hear the sandstorm blowing loudly through the walls. Lightning continued to crash.

“Let’s stop touching shit and get this rolling,” I said.

“Agreed,” Katia said.

We moved to the basement. The ceiling here was low. It was only a few inches over my head. Katia had to widen her hips and lower her height to continue. At the base of the stairs was a small, round room with a large, wooden door against the far wall. The door was wide and went all the way to the low ceiling. It wasn’t made of glass or sand, and it wasn’t magical. It was just a regular door, and it was the first non-glass item we’d seen since coming in here. I paused, examining it for traps. Flashing light streamed from underneath the door.

This was obviously the boss chamber for the castle.

“It looks like it’s just one big room on the other side,” Katia said. “There’s just one small room beyond that, and it’s the level stairwell.”

“I see the stairwell,” I said. Now that I was on the same level as the exit, it finally populated into my map.

“I don’t see any monsters,” Donut added. “Nothing. But I hear voices.”

“Peeping Tom,” I whispered.

“We decided to call it Peeping Mongo, remember?” Donut said.

“Just do it. Turn the light off first.”

The torch snapped off, and a small hole materialized in the door. I waited a moment and then peered inside. I couldn’t see much. The ceiling wasn’t any higher in this room. There were piles of books and magazines lying about along with several smaller statues on a display case. None of the items other than the walls and ceiling were made of glass, though I could see the floor was covered in sand, as if the room was built atop a beach. There also appeared to be several piles of clutter strewn about the room. Most of it was clothes. There was an odd mix of black and pink clothing spread everywhere, though all of it was on tables. The mess wasn’t as bad as the Hoarder’s chamber on the first floor, but an awful stench permeated through the hole.

I couldn’t see the source of the flashing light. If I didn’t know any better, I’d guess it was from a television. Or a videogame. Same with the sounds.

I took a step back. “Abort,” I whispered.

“What’s wrong?” Donut asked, also whispering. She was about to cast Clockwork Triplicate on Mongo, which would make the two dinosaurs appear within the room. But I couldn’t shake the feeling if we straight-up attacked whatever was in there, we’d miss out on learning what was going on.

“Change of plans. Look through the hole and use your Astral Paw spell to knock a pile of magazines or something over. I want to see if anything in there reacts. Sometimes we can get the boss to show itself before we get ourselves locked in there with it.”

“We don’t call moves if we’re going to abort the move, Carl,” Donut grumbled. “That’s the reason why we have a system in the first place. So we don’t have to think about it.”

Donut leaped to my shoulder to get a good view through the hole.

I patted her on the head. “We call it ‘Peeping Tom’ so I can look through the hole first and see if the clockwork Mongos are necessary. That’s the point of the name.”

“Peeping Mongo. Really, Carl. If you’re going to get the names wrong we’re going to need to spend an extra half an hour a day training with the move system, and that’s going to conflict with my brushing schedule. It’s not that difficult to remember. Katia always remembers the names.” Before I could say anything, she peered through the hole. She made a face. “Oh my, this mage is quite messy. It smells like old chicken and stale vegetables. The sand on the ground is really cold. He’s watching television. I don’t recognize the show, but it sounds like a cartoon. Okay. I’m going to knock over a pile of magazines.” She pulled back from the hole. “I did it. Honestly, I don’t know how it’ll make a difference. You never noticed when I knocked stuff over.”

“I noticed. I was just used to it.” I returned my eye to the magical peephole. The unseen show had paused, and silence filled the chamber. I couldn’t see what Donut had done. I didn’t see anything on the sandy floor.

“Is someone there?” a voice called.

The moment the voice spoke, a single white dot appeared on my minimap, just to the side of where I could see. A person appeared, shuffling through the large room. This was a human male wearing what appeared to be a bathrobe. For one confusing second, my brain thought this was Louis, but of course that didn’t make sense. This was an unkempt, overweight, 20-something guy with long, stringy hair. He moved to the middle of the room and looked down at the sand. He grumbled something I couldn’t hear, and turned back toward the television. Before he could leave my field of view, I examined him.

Ghazi – Human. Level 43 Glass Mage

Known by most everyone in the area as The Mad Dune mage, Ghazi came to the area for the same reason as the bugbear submarine captain, Shamus Chaindrive: to seek out the hidden treasure that is said to be buried within the Necropolis of Anser.

As a glass mage who specializes in the study of both transmutation and teleportation of energized particles, Ghazi told his colleagues at the Larracos College of Magecraft that he was seeking out the Gate of the Feral Gods to study its potential use in stable, long-distance teleportation.

This was, in fact, a lie.

His real purpose in seeking out the fabled artifact was for reliable, controlled access to the Nothing in order to converse with Yarilo, the banished god of Lust. He sought but a simple boon in exchange for freeing the god.

Ghazi wished for Yarilo to make the famed Lika fall in love with him.

Lika is a half-naiad trobairitz. A trobairitz is a bard cleric who has taken a vow of celibacy. She is also the fictional main character of a popular series of stage plays that are often performed in the Larracos theater district. She was never real and has been portrayed by dozens of half-naiad thespians over the years.

In other words, Ghazi was trying to summon a god in order to turn his waifu into the real deal.

Funny thing about summoning creatures from within the Nothing. They’re all crazy. They all want out. Some of them are very good at pretending they’re somebody they are not.

Yadda, yadda, yadda. The entity Ghazi summoned is not Yarilo. And now the glass mage is trapped in his now-transformed castle, cursed with the knowledge of what he’s done and what he’s unleashed onto the world.

He has an escape. He is too much of a coward to do it. But there is one thing that will throw him over the edge. You probably don’t want that to happen.

“Shit. It’s just a dude,” I whispered. “He’s not made of sand or anything like that. It says his wife isn’t real. It doesn’t make sense. He’s like a neckbeard who tried to cast a spell making a fictional chick fall in…”

“Shell!” Katia cried as I felt myself fly back from the door. Donut leaped away, calling for Mongo to follow just as my back slammed the stairs. I didn’t know what was happening, but I banged onto Protective Shelljust as Donut’s Wall of Fire burst up inside the room

The door exploded the moment I cast my spell, which didn’t make much sense. The diameter of the protective shell burst deep into the room, beyond the level of the door. It shouldn’t have exploded.

The fire spell immediately caught the piles of books and tables aflame.

“Hey, hey!” came the shout from within the room. Ghazi ran into view. He ran through the wall of the protective shell, looking around frantically. The wall of fire had trapped him on this side of the flames. His eyes got huge when he saw us staring back at him.

His dot is still white. The spell won’t protect us.

It was Katia who had pulled me back from the door. But why? What had happened?

And then I saw it. The sand on the ground was all pushed back, revealing a glass floor, as if I had thrust it away with a broom. The protective shell had tossed it back with the casting of my spell. Suddenly the entire room was red on my map.

The sand is a mob. The floor is a monster.

“Keep the spell going!” Ghazi yelled, rushing toward us.

I stood. Mongo screeched, ready to attack.

“Hold him back,” I yelled to Donut. “The spell is going to run out in a few seconds,” I said to the fleeing mage.

The man looked over his shoulder at the flames. He spied something on a table in the room, just at the edge of the protective shell. The table itself was on fire. The bathrobe man cursed. He returned to the room, grabbed the item—a leather bag—and then returned toward us. The spell was going to run out in five seconds. The bag was on fire. He threw it down, patted the flames out and then scooped it up, holding it against his chest.

“Go up the stairs! It won’t follow up the stairs!” Ghazi wheezed.

I made a quick decision.

“Do you have the winding box? The college needs it to save the world!”

The man looked at me incredulously.

The spell snapped off. The sand started pushing toward us, moving quickly, bubbling like gray lava. It’s a slime, I realized. The floor of the room wasn’t covered with regular sand. The room was covered entirely by a slime, and for some inexplicable reason, the mage guy was living on top of it.

“Answer him, you fool!” Donut demanded.

“It’s here,” Ghazi said, patting the bag. “I knew the council wouldn’t abandon me. I…”

I punched the mage in the face, and I took the bag. The man collapsed, but Katia reached out and caught him. She threw him over her shoulder. We turned, and we ran up the stairs as the sand slime oozed toward us.

~

“That was unexpected,” Donut said. Mongo screeched uncertainly, sniffing down into the darkness. Despite the man’s proclamation, I could see that the slime or ooze or whatever was slowly inching its way up the stairs. It’d take a while for it to get to us, but it was coming.

We stood at the top of the landing. Katia placed the unconscious man on the ground. He’d wake up in 90 seconds. I hadn’t formed my gauntlet, but the punch had knocked him out cold. His health bar had gone down by 2/3’s. His dot remained white.

“College? Where did that come from?” Katia asked.

“Examine him,” I said.

“Oh,” she said after a moment. “He’s from Larracos. That’s the big city on the ninth floor, right?”

“That’s right,” I said. “The dude came here so his fictional girlfriend could be turned real.”

Donut scoffed. “Can you imagine? You’re a famous, beautiful adventurer and suddenly you’re in some smelly scientist guy’s basement? Just bringing them to life isn’t enough. You’d have to make them like you. And let me tell you, if you’re the type of guy who is living in a putrid cellar trying to bring fictional people to life, making them like you is a tall order. It’s weird, and it’s creepy.”

“So what happened down there?” I asked Katia as I opened up the leather satchel.

“While you were looking through the peephole, the sand started oozing through the bottom of the door. It was moving its way up the wood when I noticed it. You cast the shell, and it pushed it back, blasting the door to pieces.”

“If we actually went into the room, it’d probably have triggered a boss battle,” I said. “It’s almost identical to what happened in the air castle. There’s a boss and an NPC.”

I peered into the bag. There were two objects within. Letter from the Council and Mysterious Box.

I examined the winding box. It was a thick, wooden case with a glass window. It was heavier than it appeared it should be, and the dark wood of the box felt old. Inside were two little knobs and two round cutouts, one for each watch. I wasn’t exactly certain how these things worked. You placed the watch inside, turned it on, and it spun the watch, which somehow kept it ready to go. Or something.

Mysterious Winding Box.

This strange box hums with arcane power. There is space for two watches. What happens if you place the watches within and activate the box? You should try to find out!

I knew this guy had figured out how to get the thing to half work without the watches, so I didn’t want to mess with it. I placed it into my inventory. The last watch remained inside the necropolis somewhere in the hands of Juice Box’s brother, Henrik. We should have taken it from him when we had the chance.

I examined the letter. Donut read it from over my shoulder, gasping when she read the last part. When I was done, I handed it to Katia.

Ghazi,

We received your correspondence with no little amount of alarm. Upon looking up the creature you described, we have determined she is a banished lesser deity named Psmanthe. She is the only of the listed banished who is accompanied by the ooze familiar you describe. Happily, your ineptitude whilst summoning the creature may be our saving grace.

The scholars believe your failure made it so she was only corporeal long enough to gain a foothold, and the behavior you describe suggests she has not fully passed over. She will seek the most powerful sub-conscious entity in the vicinity and will occupy the creature. Thankfully, because of her non-physical form, she will only be able to occupy a creature equally between worlds. And it is clear who that will be considering your location.

So in summary, the council believes Psamathe duped you. She pretended to be this Yarilo you so foolishly attempted to resurrect. She then likely took control of the ghost that is known to haunt the necropolis. Queen Quetzalcoatlus.

You only have one choice. You must use the winding box to banish yourself and the entirety of the necropolis into the Nothing. You must not let Quetzalcoatlus gain corporeal form. If it were to happen, Psmanthe will be fully resurrected, and the true gods would be forced to react. That would bring a level of chaos and death not seen for an age.

Your failure has caused your name to be removed from the Tome of Scholars.

May the gods have mercy on your soul.

It was signed by a group of twelve different names.

Below the letter, written in a different script was an additional note.

Ghazi you fucking idiot. I told you this was going to happen. The second I found you with that thing, I knew you were beyond saving. You have ruined everything. I hope it was worth it. Scolopendra will never be defeated now. We needed that artifact, and all you could think about was your cock. I will never forgive you. I was here the whole time, but I guess I wasn’t enough. Fuck you. I hope you die in pain. Do the right thing.

- Tish.

Jesus, I thought. If the changelings had managed to turn that ghost back into a physical creature, it would’ve been game over one way or another. Either the ghost would’ve gotten out of the necropolis or Ghazi here would’ve binned the whole bubble using his winding box.

“This is distressing,” Donut said. “He had Tish all along, and he left her so he could pursue a fictional woman? I am appalled. This is just outrageous.”

I grunted. “Donut, we don’t know anything about the story except what the description and the letter says. You’re reading too much into it. The important part is that they’re saying if that Quetzel however you pronounce it gets out of the necropolis, yet another goddamn god is probably going to show up and splatter everyone in the area. But more importantly, it also confirms we can use this winding box as a weapon. And the artifact can be somehow used against the final boss.”

“Maybe,” Katia said. “Or they just wanted to use it to run away.”

“You’re not from the council,” Ghazi said, sitting up. The large mage’s robe opened to reveal a massive chest tattoo of Lika. He put a hand to his head. “You punched me really hard.”

“How could you?” Donut demanded, jumping on the NPC’s chest. He started to scramble back, surprised at the cat’s vehemence. Donut hissed and spit.

“What? How could I what?”

“You had Tish all along, and you left her for Lika! And she’s not even real! Look what happened!”

The man’s eyes got huge. “Tish? So you are from the college? How did you get in here?”

We had approximately one hour before the sandstorm ended. When that happened, the glass halls would collapse and turn to sand, burying us. We didn’t have time for this drama bullshit.

I grasped the confused mage by his bathrobe. “Okay, I am going to ask you a series of questions, and you are going to answer them. Do you understand?”

“What is going on? What do you want?”

“What is that thing down there? And how do we kill it?”

“It’s… killing it won’t matter. I’ve killed it a dozen times. It just comes right back.”

“What is it?”

“She… it. It’s a sand ooze. The familiar of Psamathe. Psamathe is not a god, but a lesser deity. She, uh, escaped during my research. As long as Psamathe is in this world, the ooze can be recreated by a single grain of sand, so it is impossible to kill it fully. You can burn it away, and freeze it, or dilute it. Or shock it with electricity. It shrinks, but it never dies. To remove it, you’d have to remove all the sand from the world.”

Damnit, I thought. We should’ve brought that electrical line in with us.

“Okay, why is it in the room with you?”

“Are you guys going to tell me who you are?”

“No. Answer the questions. If I get even the hint of a spell being cast, that dinosaur behind you is going to bite your head off. I’ve seen him do it. Do you understand? Now why is the slime in the room with you?”

“She’s… she’s my wife, and I think she’s in love with me.”

“Your wife? The slime is your wife?”

“It’s an ooze. Not a slime. There’s a difference. And yes, the ooze is my wife.”

Donut made a disgusted noise. “If Tish could see you now.”

“Yeah, you’re gonna have to elaborate. But make it quick.”

Ghazi looked back and forth between me and Donut, obviously bewildered. He focused on Katia, who stood at the edge of the stairwell, keeping an eye on the encroaching ooze. She shook her head, telling the man she wasn’t going to help him.

“Look,” I said. “Let me speed this up. We know you came here to summon the lust god and have him turn some lady from a play into your sex slave. And you got tricked into summoning this Psamathe creature instead. And now Psamathe is inside the necropolis, hitching a ride within the body of that pterodactyl ghost. That seems to be the theme of this whole damn bubble. We know if she gets out, the gods who are now in charge might take issue with that. We also know that winding box I just stole from you can be used to suck all of this away, but you haven’t done it yet. And now you’re never going to get the chance because I have it, and I am not going to give it back. Right now, I don’t care about any of that. I just want to know everything I can about that ooze that is coming up the stairs, because I need to get rid of it long enough for me to occupy that small room in the back of your chamber. And I need to do it before the sandstorm outside ends.”

The man looked at me, open-mouthed.

“This is where you speak,” Donut prodded.

“It’s halfway up the stairs,” Katia called.

“Okay, okay. But she isn’t some lady from a play. She’s real. I wasn’t turning her into a sex slave. I brought her with me. It’s not like the others say. She’s trapped, frozen in her body. She speaks to me. She’s the one who told me to come here and do this. I’m trying to save her. Tish didn’t understand. Nobody understands. When I thought I’d summoned Yarilo, he made Lika real. He told me that I had to marry her for the magic to keep her alive, so I did. Right away. He performed the ceremony right then and there. It was only after the consummation did I leave the chamber and find that Lika was still in her cleaning pod. The entire castle had been crystalized when I used the spell to summon Yarilo, but it hadn’t been enough power.” He paused, suddenly sad. “I screwed it up, like I screw everything up. But that’s how I knew I had been tricked. Lika hadn’t been saved at all. She was still there, crystalized like everything else. And everything outside my protection spell was turned to sand. The deity I’d summoned made me a wife, but it was a wife of sand. That is why the ooze remains nearby. After consummation, it fell in love with me.”

“Uh, Carl, does ‘consummation’ mean what I think it means?” Donut asked.

Again, we were getting off track, but I now had more questions than when we’d started. “You banged the ooze?” I asked. “And you didn’t notice it wasn’t really a naiad?”

“I was drunk,” he said sheepishly. “And really excited. Plus it was dark.”

“Does it talk?” I asked.

“Well, no. She takes the form of Lika when the sandstorm isn’t raging outside. When the storm starts, she… it returns to ooze form, but I turn to sand. You see, it required a lot of power to… you know what, it’s not important. I only return to my human form during the sandstorm, but she is in her Lika form the rest of the time, so the only real quality time we’ve spent together was right after the wedding. She remains buried in the castle, and she consumes me. Every day. She eats me while I am made of sand. That’s how oozes tell you they love you.” He shuddered.

“What the fuck,” I whispered.

“So that’s why you keep trying to kill her?” Donut asked.

“A marriage built on lies can never last,” he said. “But I gave up trying to burn her away a long time ago. Now I just live with it. As long as her master remains in the necropolis, we are fine. I don’t age. I have this amazing magical panel with thousands of hours of programs on it, and I don’t know where it came from. But it keeps me entertained. I can only watch for two hours a day except during the red equinox, which is coming up soon. There’s this program called Inuyasha that I plan on finishing… Anyway, the ooze doesn’t allow me to leave the room very often. It’s jealous of the real Lika.”

“‘Real’ Lika,” Donut grumbled under her breath.

“Wait a second,” Katia said, interrupting. “When you say you found Lika in her cleaning pod, what do you mean by that?”

Ghazi chinned toward the large chamber behind us. “She’s there, in that room. But the room only appears during the storm, and that’s the only time I can leave the chamber. But my, uh, wife doesn’t usually let me leave. I’m working on a spell that’ll reverse what happened. The castle has been crystalized. I made a protection spell, but it didn’t work. It wasn’t big enough, and it wasn’t powerful enough. Most of the castle is sand, but some of the interior turns to crystal during the storm. Both me and my workroom return to their real form during the sandstorm, but that is it. Once I undo the spell, I will have Lika back and we’ll try again.”

“How are you going to undo the spell if you spend all of your free time watching nerd cartoons?” Donut asked.

“Uh, so she’s in the fountain?” I asked. I exchanged a look with Katia. “We saw her before. We thought she was a statue.”

“She’s a personal companion device made in the likeness of Lika. But she is real. There is a soul trapped within her, and that is how I came to be here.”

We’d all connected the dots, but Donut was the first to say it out loud. “Oh my god, she was a sex doll? You had a sex doll tell you to come here? And you stuck her in the fountain to… clean her? And that’s what…”

“Is in the fountain right now?” I interrupted.

The shattered pieces of the apparently possessed Lika sex doll were scattered all over the other chamber’s floor, though I had the head in my inventory. We needed to keep this guy out of that room until we finished this.

“Again, we’re getting off track,” I said. “Tell me how you killed your wife the last time you did it. I only need her dead for a few minutes, then we can get the hell out of here.”

***

Hello all! I hope you are doing well. Chapter 130 is well on its way, but I didn't want to make you guys wait for another chapter.

While we are here, I have 10 U.S. and 10 U.K. Audible codes for the Dungeon Crawler Carl audiobook to give away. In order to claim one, you have to 1) Live in the US or UK and 2) promise to D/L the audiobook and give it a review on Audible when you're done. If you want to claim one, post below with either US or UK, and I will get it to you via message here on Patreon with the instructions on how to redeem.  Please only claim if you're going to D/L right away because we can't get future codes unless the ones we give out are used.

Also, there is a poll coming up in a separate post. I already have a list of forms to add to the poll, but I would like to add some of your ideas as well. I will only pick feasible ones/my favorites, but ultimately you guys get to choose.  

If you've seen Ghostbusters, you might remember at the end they are forced to choose the form of their destruction. And Ray thought of the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man. It's one of my favorite movie moments of all time.

This is kind of like that.  

If you are, hypothetically, in a giant bubble, and a massive kaiju-like monster that is almost the same size as the bubble itself is suddenly summoned, what form would you like it to take? A giant slug? A pile of body parts with tentacles? Some of the existing choices will be monsters stolen directly from my other book Kaiju: Battlefield Surgeon. (Namely the Shrill, Tem, and Colo-Colo. Don't worry. You don't need to have read the book. I'll explain what they are when the poll goes up.)  I'd love to hear your ideas.