Chapters 131 and 132 (Patreon)

Chapter 131

Stage 4 of 4.

The Necropolis of Anser

One morning, back when Bea and I first moved in together, I decided to make pancakes. Bea was still asleep, and I thought it’d be a nice thing to do since she’d been doing most of the cooking.

I was still getting used to the idea of sharing a home with a woman and a cat, and there was a lot I didn’t know. Even though I had known Donut since she was a kitten, I’d never actually lived with a cat before, and things like changing the litter box, not leaving the window open, and finding vomit on my pillow were all new.

So I had a bowl of flour, a cup of milk, and a single egg sitting right there on the edge of the counter. I was foraging through the refrigerator, looking for the missing syrup container when suddenly there was a huge crash behind me. Donut had come out of nowhere, knocking the flour, milk, and egg off the counter, splattering everything onto the floor. She then turned to run, touched the very edge of the hot burner on the oven, yowled, rocketed into the air, and then landed on the floor, covering herself with a little bit of everything while she did that Scooby-Doo scramble in the slippery mess, everything flying everywhere while her legs pumped several times before she actually moved.

“Goddamnit, Donut,” I’d cried, chasing after the cat as she squealed, running away into the living room, trailing it all onto the floor. She jumped up into her cat tree and started growling while she furiously licked at herself.

Bea was going to lose her shit when she saw the cat, so I figured I’d mitigate the damage.

I’d mitigate it by giving the cat a bath.

After quickly cleaning up the kitchen, I went into the bathroom, and I turned the water on, filling the tub with several inches of warm, soapy water. And then I went to retrieve the cat.

I picked her up, holding her with two hands while she squirmed. I went into the bathroom, I closed the door, and while holding her gently but firmly, I placed her in the bathtub.

A few hours later while I sat in the emergency room waiting to get my hand, my arm, and my goddamned ear stitched up, I’d described, to the unimpressed nurse, the noise Donut had made the moment she’d entered the water. “Man, it was like a screeching, amplified baby combined with an outboard motor revving at a high rpm. I’m not even joking when I say it was one of the loudest, most terrifying things I’ve ever heard. Holy shit.”

That memory came to me now in the moment Donut awakened from unconsciousness to find herself fully submerged in the water.

But this time. Man. Her scream was enough to wake the dead.

AHH AHH AHH RAWR AHHHHHHHHH, Donut squealed, twisting and turning and lashing out with her claws, like she was trapped in a dishwasher. I let her go after she almost caught my arm in her slash, and she started to sink like a rock, still twisting and fighting and going absolutely apeshit.

“Donut,” I cried. “Donut. It’s okay!”

Below, the shadow that was happily munching on the falling corpses paused. It started to lazily circle upward, vectoring itself toward our position, stopping to eat everything along the way.

It’s the quadrant’s janitor mob.

“Donut,” I called again. “Calm the fuck down!”

Carl: Donut. Chill. You’re sinking. There’s a mob coming.

Donut: AHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

Carl: MONGO NEEDS YOU.

Donut quit twisting, her hair fluttering around her. She quickly looked about, still in a panic. Strange lights flashed under the sunglasses that’d become a fixture on her face whenever she left the saferoom. She tried kicking her legs, but the best she could manage with her stubby Persian paws was an inefficient tread. She could not swim. She was about to start flipping her shit again. I swam down and grabbed her, pulling her into the crook of my arm. I started pumping my legs upward as she dug her claws into my chest. Her ears were pinned to the back of her head. She breathed heavily, her head on a swivel, looking about with terror.

“Carl, Mongo is in his carrier. You lied to me! We’re drowning! Help! Help!”

“Calm down. We have company. You need to be quiet. Deep breath.”

“How can I take a deep breath when I’m drowning, Carl?”

“The water scroll, remember? Keep an eye on the countdown. You’ll need to renew it soon.”

A pair of bloated corpses floated past, sinking. These were pink-skinned, naked human-like creatures, but they were covered in wrinkles, and their heads were like that of a naked mole rat. Their eyes were white and bulbous, like onions. Their mouths hung open in death, revealing large, yellow, and rotting teeth.

Corpse. Tuco. Nude Glaber. Level 30. Killed by drowning.

The Nude Glabers were the NPCs who lived in the settlements within the necropolis. I’d never seen one, but one of the tomb raider guys had described them. All of these corpses must’ve been from one of those settlements after the temple filled with water. They’d been described as “undead,” but I didn’t realize an undead creature could drown. It was probably an inaccurate description. Most of those necropolis guys didn’t know what they were doing.

Donut squirmed in my grip. Her voice sounded distant and hollow even though she was right next to me. “That’s a shark down there. A shark. I can see more coming. They are everywhere. This is not acceptable. I told you I am not to be brought into the water. This is a betrayal worse than when you gave my pet biscuits to that danger dingo.”

“You take a shower every five minutes,” I grunted as I swam. “This is practically the same thing.”

“This is quite obviously not the same thing, Carl. Get me out of here this instant.”

I was furiously pumping my legs, swimming upward. The rushing noise of water streaming from the necropolis was getting louder. I didn’t think we could just swim right into the stream. It’d be like stepping into a tornado. But what could we do? The monster—apparently a shark—was still lazily circling toward us. We were being sandwiched between the current and the mob. The creature crunched on the corpse of Tuco and some other debris. When it opened its mouth, I could hear the distinctive beat of “Jump Around” blast out into the ocean. It’d eaten the goddamned alarm trap.

“Please, Carl. I’m sorry. I don’t like this. Can we go? Please?”

None of my explosives with exposed fuses would work, at least not well, under water. I was pretty sure dynamite would work, but I’d have to use the inherent instability of the explosive and not the wick to set it off. I’d seen enough blast fishing videos in my time to know that you didn’t want to be anywhere near any such explosion. I didn’t trust in our ability to swim away in time. I had a few ideas for depth charges, but I couldn’t work on them now.

My impact-detonated hoblobbers would probably be effective against the creature, but there was all sorts of debris flying about down here, and again, I couldn’t guarantee we’d get away in time.

The corpse of yet another creature floated past us. This was a dolphin thing, and it’d been pierced right through the head with a glass shard.

Lootable Corpse. Bubble Beluga. Level 29. Killed by getting her brain pierced by a spear of glass. It hurt a lot, too.

“Are you calm? Donut, listen to me. I’m gonna need you. Are you good?”

“No I am most certainly not good. I am really far from good, Carl.”

“Listen. Hekla,” I said, pointing at the corpse of the beluga. “Send them after that thing coming up. Do it now.”

This was Donut’s favorite one of our moves. We’d originally called it “Slime Time,” but it had somehow evolved to “Hekla.” Katia thought it was distasteful and a little fucked-up to call it that, and it was, but it was also pretty damn funny.

Donut, to her credit, didn’t hesitate. She cast Second Chance on the beluga corpse and then immediately cast Clockwork Triplicate, creating three of them. The two copies appeared with glass spikes through their heads, which was a nice touch. Donut sent them after the monster while I swam under the rushing current. I had to slam on a third water-breathing scroll.

Almost immediately, one of the clockwork belugas exploded underwater. I felt it mostly in my ears, like I’d just blown them out. The mob roared, lion-like as it was injured by exploding shrapnel. Before I could compose myself, the second clockwork exploded behind us.

“Carl, watch out!” Donut cried.

“Holy shit,” I gasped as two more sharks rushed in out of nowhere. They swarmed right past us, skirting the bottom of the fast-moving current. They ignored us and headed straight for the injured shark. Christ that was close. Each was about fifteen feet long and jet black with glowing red eyes. Other than the terrifying color and eyes, they looked much like a typical tiger shark. I caught a glimpse of their description.

Concierge Shark. Level 41.

These psychos are of the bite-first, ask-questions-later school of underwater diplomacy.

Also known as the “Death’s Welcoming Committee Shark,” the Concierge Shark is one of the fastest and most voracious of the ocean’s predators. They’ll eat anything. ANYTHING. Even those circus peanut candy things. It’s really kind of gross.

They are attracted to the scent of blood, making them the most common death dealers of any water-themed dungeon.

The two newcomers barreled into the first shark, who’d been injured in the explosion. They started ripping at each other, causing a cloud of blood to bloom under us.

“There are more coming,” Donut hissed.

“Let me know if any follow.”

Since I couldn’t swim up, I swam across and below the current, attempting to get to the other side. I kept pumping my legs, swimming with only one arm while Donut clutched to me, whimpering. A school of small fish rushed past, cutting through us like a hailstorm, but they came and went, not doing any harm.

Above, the sense of rushing water eased. I put more distance between us and the shark fight. Donut said more were coming, all headed straight for the plume of blood.

I swam to the surface, poking my head above water. Donut popped up next to me, unnecessarily gasping for breath. Her whole body trembled. I had to keep her from sinking back in.

“Oh wow,” I said, looking off at the blast of water pouring from a hole in the side of the necropolis. It was pitch black outside, but multiple lights, mostly from other crawlers, stood near the castle’s remains, lighting up the area. The castle was just gone. The walls surrounding it were obliterated. All that remained were the lightning rod towers that stood on either side of the entrance, the tops of which glinted in the light like twin obelisks.

We were about a quarter of a mile offshore. I warily looked about for mobs. Far to our right, splashing rose in the night air. It was a feeding frenzy. First there had been one. Then three. Now there were dozens of sharks fighting each other.

I weighed our next move. We needed to get to that submarine. The Akula. We had to turn off the pump. But I knew the sub was located on the opposite side of the ring-shaped water quadrant, and we sure as hell weren’t going to swim there from here. I decided to put Donut out of her misery and take her back to the shore for now.

I had a kayak in my inventory from the floating house’s garage. I pulled it free, popping it out onto the surface. I lifted Donut and placed her within. I pulled myself into the kayak and pulled the double-sided paddle. I figured this would be faster than swimming.

My water-breathing scroll ran out, and I suddenly vomited just as I pulled myself in. Dark, brown water rushed from my lungs. I hadn’t even realized it was there. It felt as if I’d been kicked in the stomach while breathing fire. A moment later, Donut also vomited, loud and long, the retches traveling across her body like a sine wave. The amount of water that came out of her seemed to be way too much. When it was finally over, she gave out a little whimper and then vomited again, and this time a little fish fell out of her mouth and started flopping around on the top of the kayak.

I started paddling toward shore. Donut sat there glowering, completely flattened out and soaked through. She had a piece of seaweed attached to her tiara. While she’d looked almost majestic and fairy-like underwater, up here she looked like a dead rat that’d been resurrected and then run over by a garbage truck.

“That was pretty awesome,” I said once it was clear we were safe from the sharks.

“Go fuck yourself, Carl,” Donut said.

~

“This is an outrage!” Donut cried when we were back at the home base. She’d showered and was once again dry and clean. “I was buried alive, shot out of a water cannon, drowned, and then almost eaten by a shark, and I didn’t even get a boss box for that? We won the level. The slime thing died, and we get nothing? Carl, the game is cheating again.”

Mongo made a chirping noise, agreeing with Donut’s outrage.

“The ooze isn’t dead. We’d melted it down, but then it got washed away.”

We’d had to track a quarter turn around the land quadrant before we could get to a town that’d take us in. It was me, Donut, Katia, Louis, and Firas. The town was called Pandinus, and the occupants were half-human, half-scorpion centaur-like creatures called Pazuzu. They were all dressed in ridiculous, post-apocalyptic gear: punk-rock style leather and tassels and goggles and chains and dreadlocks, like they were all heading out to a Mad Max convention.

Louis and Firas went off to get some sleep. Louis grumbled something about not being able to drink alcohol as we left them to enter our personal space. Gwen and her team remained at the site of the castle. Even though we’d defeated the quadrant, the stairwell was now buried. It was directly under the spray from the necropolis drain, so they were going to turn it off and then dig it out. I sent a warning to the tomb raider guys that it would fill back up with water. They hadn’t moved yet, so it didn’t matter.

We knew the stairwell remained because those with the pathfinder benefit could still see it sitting there. Once the team dug it out, they’d attempt to put a roof over it and maybe dig a separate tunnel to it. Or at the very least, seal it off. We’d have to turn the drain back on, especially after we turned the submarine’s pump off. That was the only way to fully empty the necropolis of water.

Apparently, the sand slime wasn’t fully “defeated” and was still hanging around somewhere. It was probably floating around as a single grain of sand somewhere in the ocean where it wouldn’t be able to properly regenerate. If that was the case, we’d never see it again. And because it wasn’t dead, we’d gotten screwed out of the boss box. I wasn’t too worried about it. On the first two floors, the bronze and silver boss boxes held great loot, but the boxes were now shit. The last boss box we’d received—the silver box for killing Denise the goose—hadn’t been anything good for either me or Donut. Just some magical shirt I gave to one of Langley’s guys, some gold, and some random potions.

The good stuff would now only be had in the city boss and above boxes.

Still, I’d received multiple achievements and other loot boxes for that last stunt. The notable ones were:

New achievement! Milquetoast!

You somehow managed to win an important boss battle without actually killing the boss. That’s like paying money to a prostitute just so she’ll cuddle with you.

Reward: You’ve received a silver Pacifist’s Box.

New achievement! I was in the pool!

You spent more than 60 seconds fully submerged underwater, and you didn’t die! Parts of you may have experienced shrinkage, but otherwise you’re okay. You’re now an honorary mudskipper!

Reward: You’ve received a Bronze I’m Wet Box!

The I’m Wet box contained an additional ten scrolls of water breathing for each of us. Donut’s box, for some unfathomable reason, was silver instead of bronze, and she received an additional item: a Belt of Buoyancy. It was a simple belt that wrapped around her stomach that’d keep her from sinking. It only worked in the water, and she spent a good three minutes bitching about it, about how she was never going back there again.

The silver Pacifist box contained a skill potion for Donut that raised her Dodge skill by one, taking it to 10. That was a big deal because she’d been training with it for a while now, and the skill had been stuck on nine. That happened a lot with certain skills. Now that she’d hit level 10, she had a permanent Deflection buff, which caused both magical and physical missiles to be less accurate when they were shot at her. Mordecai said it wasn’t complete protection from arrows, but it halved their accuracy. It also meant they were more likely to go into either me or Mongo if she was nearby.

In my Pacifist box, I received two potions that gave Mordecai pause.

“Don’t use those,” he said the moment he saw them.

“Why not?”

He didn’t answer for several moments. “Because the last time I saw someone drink that potion, they accidentally killed half of their party.”

Potion of Bloodlust

It’s like giving yourself a PCP enema after spending the day riding the Night Train Express.

Drinking this potion gives the following effects for (Constitution) seconds.

Strength times two.

Movement speed times two.

Dexterity times .5

The Where the Fuck Am I? Who the Fuck Are You? Debuff

Constitution times .5

For every crawler, NPC, or mob killed by you while this potion is active, your movement speed increases by an additional 25%.

“So, it’s like a berserking potion?”

“That’s exactly what it is,” Mordecai said. “But that debuff makes it so you don’t remember where you are or why you’re fighting. It’s too dangerous to use.”

I put the two potions away. I agreed with Mordecai. The last thing I wanted to do was take a potion that would make me lose control, even if it greatly enhanced my strength. I’d look in the cookbook and see if it had any advice that’d make the potion more useful.

Gwen: That was easier than I thought it’d be. We found the wall to the stairwell chamber. We’ll finish digging it out, seal it up tight, and then we can figure out how to do this last part.

Carl: 10-4. Watch out for any remnants of the ooze.

I pulled out the two pieces of the artifact. The winding box and the watch. I placed them on the table. I was a little afraid of the winding box now that I knew there was a way to use it to open a portal to the Nothing. And that things would come out when you did.

Katia wordlessly handed me the note she’d gotten off the Mad Dune Mage when she’d been forced to fight him. She wasn’t certain if he really was dead or not. She’d gotten experience and she’d looted his body, but he’d turn to sand. I suspected we’d seen the last of him. Either way, the system said we’d defeated the quadrant, and that was the important part.

The note was several pages long. The first few pages were a note to Tish, the same person who’d chewed him out in that other letter we’d found. The remaining bulk of the pages were lists of words followed by a set of numbers. The final page was filled with drawings.

Tish,

I know you hate me, but please listen. Hope is not lost. They asked me to use the box to destroy this entire island and to suck it into the Nothing. Doing so is a mistake. All three pieces of the artifact are in the area, and all three pieces would end up in that alternate dimension. It is too dangerous for the feral gods to possess, even in pieces. So instead, I will keep guard. If the ghost of Psamathe ever leaves, I will be forced to destroy myself, but I hope it will never come to pass. I watch over her, and her familiar, the ooze, watches over me. I am now its husband thanks to my stupidity and blind trust. I am also its prisoner. If I can destroy it, or escape it, I most definitely will, but I do not think it is possible.

But I have discovered something useful. This familiar of hers, the ooze, has split loyalties. I truly believe it loves me, as odd as it sounds. It knows of my affection for my now-frozen Lika, and it is jealous. I can use this. I don’t yet know how.

I still conduct my research during the times when I have a body and am able to work. Here is what I’ve learned.

The gate of the feral gods is both a complicated and a simple device. You first dial to a time, which represents a place. Both watches are connected magically. If you dial a time on one watch, it is mirrored on the other. This time represents your destination, and how this works is a byzantine process that I do not yet understand, though I have determined multiple destination and time combinations, even without a watch of my own. I have included those notes with this letter.

Once you have dialed into a location, you place both watches in the box, and you activate the winding process. The second watch will start ticking and moving. This is the only time the two watches will be out of sync. Once the time on the second watch syncs up with the time representing your current location, the alarm will go off on the second watch, and it will stop ticking. The box is now armed. This process can take anywhere from a minute to a full turn of the watch, depending on the distance you wish to travel. You cannot move the box from its current location, or it will reset. You remove the two watches, and the portal appears.

The portal is one-way, and it will last about twenty minutes or until the winding box and the watches are brought through. Once that happens, the exit closes at the destination location.

However, you must beware. The portal remains open for an additional full minute at the location where it was opened. While it is opened, a creature will come through. Oftentimes, this will be a feral god. Depending on the god that escapes, or its level of power, there may be great destruction. And if certain gods or minor deities—like Psamathe—make it through, the current pantheon may be forced to react.

It is also said that those who use the portal, those with weak constitutions, mustn’t linger as they pass through. Even close proximity to the open door is enough to touch their weak minds and paint them with the feral madness.

But I have also discovered that the winding box itself is a conduit to the Nothing. All one must do to open a passage is open the lid, wind the box, and send a stream of charged energy into the device, and a portal will open directly to the Nothing.

Yes, this is dangerous. I know, I know. But love makes us do the most dangerous of things. Isn’t that the way of the worlds?

This is how I opened a portal to seek out Yarilo, banished god of lust. This is how I was tricked by Psamathe into marrying her familiar. My beloved Lika remains banished in her own version of hell because I was fooled. And now Psamathe is free in the necropolis, where she has supposedly usurped the ghost that is known as Quetzalcoatlus.

Here is what I am going to do to defeat her. If I am successful, I will die, but you will receive this letter along with the winding box. Then you can send another expedition to seek the remaining two artifacts. I believe they are…

The note ended there. There was a missing page.

“So,” Katia said. “I was looking at the page of numbers, and they are all locations we can open up using the gate, but it looks like they’re all in the area surrounding the city of Larracos. Once we have the second watch, we just move the watch to the time representing the location, stick it in, and wait for the alarm to go off.”

“Are you saying we can open a gate directly to the ninth floor?” I asked.

“That’s right,” Katia said. “Also, I think I can make a map of the ninth floor with these notes.”

“Don’t get too excited,” Mordecai said. “You might be able to open a gate to the Plains of Larracos, but you won’t be able to go through it. Crawlers can’t hop floors. There’s a gate right there in the Desperado Club in the casino, but it’s closed to you. So if you get the grand idea of opening a gate, you won’t be able to go through, and when it closes, you’ll have to deal with something awful coming through that will surely kill everything in the entire bubble.”

“Maybe,” Katia said. She shuffled the papers and pointed to a note on the last page. It was multiple drawings of the two watches and the winding box along with two gates, depicting various scenarios. The first depicted the three items on one side of the gate, and the second depicted just the winding box on the far side. It went on from there with each possible combination, indicating what would happen. All but one of the scenarios ended with a monster emerging from the gate on the opening side. That last illustration was circled, and it depicted one watch on each side of the gate and the winding box inside the portal. “It looks like if we do this last way, we’ll lose the box, but no monsters will get out.”

Mordecai grunted. “It’d be a waste. You ain’t using this thing to hop floors no matter what.”

I barely heard him. I was focused on the second to last scenario. Holy shit. Holy fucking shit.

I shook my head, and I decided to focus on the problem at hand. “Do you think if we summon one of those feral god things it’ll be able to travel outside the bubble? Or break the bubble wall?”

“I don’t know,” Mordecai said. “Some of them are bigger than the bubble. Summoning them usually resizes them, but this isn’t a true summoning. It’s them, in their true form, without a time limit. It’s them escaping imprisonment. You’re all getting ahead of yourselves. You don’t even have the last watch yet. And if you do get that watch, my advice will be to stick it in your inventory and not do anything with it until you’re strong enough to deal with whatever comes out, which will be never. Now if you need me, I’ll be in the crafting room. I think I’m onto something with that yam you received earlier.”

I glanced at the level timer as Mordecai walked away. We had just over four and a half days left. “Is there a Desperado Club in this town?”

Chapter 132

Before Katia could answer me, I was interrupted by a message.

Gwen: We’ve dug out the stairwell. Something odd happened when we entered. The whole room was made of glass, but the moment I sent Tran in, it all flashed, and everything turned to…

A loud error message blocked out the rest of her note.

Warning: An item in your catalog is no longer eligible to be held in inventory. It will be forcibly removed in five seconds.

“What the hell?” I said. I immediately thought of the last two times this had happened, both times to Katia. The first was when all the blood in her inventory had exploded out of her because of the container patch. The second time I hadn’t seen. It was when she’d placed the whole house in her inventory, and Borant had changed the rules. It’d destroyed a tavern when the house appeared and effectively got her banned from the town, which was why we’d had to trek an extra mile to get to this settlement.

Both of those had happened immediately after the recap episode, which was when Borant applied their updates and patches. We still had a few hours until the episode, so I had no idea what was going on. I gritted my teeth and waited for it to happen.

The crystallized head of Ghazi’s sex doll popped out of my inventory and splatted onto the floor.

Only it wasn’t crystallized anymore. It was still the decapitated sex doll head of a half-naiad named Lika. The chin had chipped badly when Mongo had knocked over the statue, and the frozen, life-like head of the doll had a big chunk taken out of its latex chin.

“Uh, Carl,” Katia said. “You dropped a head on the floor.”

While I’m no connoisseur of sex dolls, I have seen a few in my time. I knew, at least on earth, they ranged in quality from the cheap, inflatable kind all the way to the AI-controlled RealDolls who could talk and move and looked at least moderately realistic.

This was about halfway between those two extremes. It was a latex-like dummy head that was clearly once attached to a sex doll and not just a run-of-the-mill mannequin. The head was stuck with an open mouth and wide eyes. It was slathered with hooker-tier makeup. Two sharp-looking fangs hanged down from its mouth, vampire like. The head had a full-head of bone-white, silky-looking hair. Its full lips were painted bright red. A half set of gills cleaved either side of its neck, cut short right at the point of decapitation, giving the cut an extra jagged appearance. The bottom of the neck hole was just solid latex.

It had a sparkly barrette in its hair that read, “Wet for you.”

“My goodness is that thing ghastly,” Donut said, sniffing at the object. She made a face. Mongo shrieked. “Carl, do people really use these things?”

“Yeah, they do,” I said. “But they’re usually attached to bodies. People get lonely. Don’t judge Ghazi too harshly.”

“Oh, I’m judging him. Miss Beatrice had a drawer full of sex toys, but she never sailed off to the other side of the world because her vibrator told her to.” She cocked her head. “Actually, you know what? That is kind of what she did, now isn’t it? Only her sex toy was that Brad fellow.”

“Why isn’t this eligible to be in my inventory anymore?” I asked, trying hard to ignore Donut’s last statement. I picked the head up, grabbing it by a handful of hair. All the description said was Decapitated Lika Sex Doll Head. I touched one of the teeth, cringing at the idea of fangs in the mouth of a goddamned sex doll, but the sharp tooth bent easily under the press of my finger. It was made of a soft, flexible latex. The jaw was hinged, so I could open and close it.

“Mmmm hmmmm fck offa me.”

The voice came from the head.

“Jesus fuck,” I exclaimed, dropping it on the floor. It bounced once, and it cried out in surprise.

Donut yowled and scampered back. Mongo shrieked and was about to attack, but I yelled for him to stop, and to my astonishment, he actually did. The moment the thing started talking, a white dot appeared on my map.

The thing continued to shriek with outrage, but I couldn’t understand a word it was saying.

“So, I guess this thing is still possessed,” I said, poking at it with my foot. I wasn’t too worried about it attacking me or casting a spell since we were in a saferoom. “Gwen’s team broke the crystallization spell when they entered the stairwell chamber. So everything that was made of glass is now back to normal.”

Katia and I stood over the head, looking down at it. It continued to scream and holler. “Carl, examine its new properties. It’s been updated.”

Lika Love Doll Head.

This item is possessed with the Withering Spirit of Psamathe.

Psamathe, or Samantha as her friends used to call her, is a minor deity who was banished to the Nothing by her father after he found out she was kicking around with some ancient king guy. She’s usually accompanied by her trusty sidekick, a sand ooze familiar who also happens to be the cursed child of her union with the king. You know, typical god stuff.

And if you think that’s peculiar, you ain’t seen nothing yet. Those guys hanging out in the halls of the Celestial Ascendency on the 12th floor get themselves involved in some serious whackadoodle business, let me tell you. You ever see a guy give birth to a fortune-telling, snake-headed cow out of his thigh? Or a woman whose menstrual blood is sentient? That’s the sort of shit that’s waiting for you down there.

Psamathe is as intelligent as she is quick-tempered. Unfortunately for her, her first escape attempt from the Nothing resulted in a split, and half of her essence was forced to take refuge in the closest unoccupied naiad vessel she could find, which happened to be a sex doll based on the fictional Lika, who, oddly enough, was actually based loosely on an inaccurate history of Psamathe. She’s had to live in the doll for many years, unable to move until the rest of her spirit could be reunited.

The story gets kind of weird from there.

“All righty, then,” I said.

Carl: Hey, Mordecai. What’s a withering spirit?

Mordecai: Why?

Carl: We have a visitor.

Less than five seconds later, Mordecai burst out of the crafting room and stopped dead, looking at the creature on the floor, his eye wide. “By his left tit, where did that come from?”

“Carl had her in his inventory!” Donut exclaimed

He moved closer to examine it. He bent over, moving his beak inches from the head. He tapped at her. “Sometimes the soul of a creature can get… split… into two halves. When a body is split, the two halves will always try to reunite, like magnets coming together. They have to do it in a proper vessel. But if something goes wrong during the reunification, what you end up with is a withering spirit. They’re not alive. Not dead. In fact, it’s kind of hard for them to die now, but they’re mostly harmless. The vessel has to be similar to their original body, and if it’s not, this happens. They haunt the object, but they have very little power. It’s a bit messed up. They use withering spirits as quest-giving NPCs a lot.”

“It sounds similar to Remex the skyfowl from the end of the third floor,” I said.

“Yes. Remex was a soul leech capacitor. That is a much more dangerous type of withering spirit, one purposely built by a powerful mage or necromancer designed to hold power and suck souls away from people. These are a more stable version of the same thing. It’s terrible for her, but she’s in no position to harm us directly. Several seasons back, they had an entire level where every weapon found on the floor was possessed by a withering spirit. She’ll need an exorcism to get free now. Plus she’s a minor deity, which complicates everything.”

“Does that mean she’s like a demigod? Half human or whatever?”

The head spit in anger.

Mordecai shrugged. “It could be, but probably not. She’s clearly not 100% ascendency material, either, or else she’d never have been cast away to the Nothing. Think of the pantheon like a rich guy’s country club. She might have a famous dad, but her mother was probably from the wrong side of the tracks, so to speak. We don’t want to get involved in her story. We have enough of this bullshit to deal with already.”

“I know what happened,” Katia said, snapping her finger. “It said that when she escaped the first time, she ended up in the body of the love doll, right? It was probably the closest thing she could find to her real form. That means she was the one who talked Ghazi into coming here in the first place. She’d been lying to him the whole time about who she really was. She wanted him to open the Nothing. She told him it was to find that god of lust, but it was a trick. The moment the Nothing opened up, her second half flowed out along with the sand ooze. But something went wrong. Ghazi screwed something up during the process, and the love doll, the vessel holding her first half, got turned to glass. She had to use the ooze to keep him here until something came along and de-crystallized everything. Everyone thought she went into the body of Quetzalcoatlus but they had it wrong because they didn’t know she’d been split in two, and they didn’t know Ghazi had her other half on him the whole time.”

“And she would’ve gotten away with it if a certain little dinosaur hadn’t knocked her over and shattered her into a thousand pieces,” I said.

“Good boy, Mongo!” Donut said.

It’d been a trap, I realized. If we had managed to keep the castle intact and cancel out the glass spell, the sex doll would’ve woken up, but she’d have been a full-powered minor deity.

I wasn’t sure if we’d gotten lucky or not. Mongo had barely touched the thing when it’d fallen over and broken. I had an ominous feeling we were still on rails here, heading toward a manufactured confrontation.

The head continued to muffle-scream at us from the floor.

Donut batted at the head, and it rolled. “Carl, I just realized something! This is just like the plot of those Child’s Play movies with that Chucky doll,” Donut said. “This Psamathe lady is Chucky, but she’s only a head, and she can’t move.”

“I was thinking it’s more like the horcruxes from Harry Potter,” Katia said. “But in this case, her soul was only broken into two pieces.”

“No,” Donut said. “Definitely Chucky. That lady who wrote that wizard movie stole all of her ideas from those ridiculous 80’s horror movies Carl always watched. I only saw one of those wizard movies, and it had a dog in it. Disgusting.”

“They were books before they were…” Katia stopped. She made the wise decision not to pursue it.

“It doesn’t matter. She’s probably batshit crazy by now,” I said. I went down to my knee and poked at her. She growled. “There’s only so many ways the game can tell us that spending time in the Nothing makes you insane.”

Donut nodded. “Yes, I supposed you’re right. Plus part of her was frozen in that doll all this time. That probably wasn’t good for her mental health, either. I’ve watched you abuse yourself more than once, and I know it wasn’t good for mine. I can’t imagine what it would’ve done to me if I’d been forced to actually participate.”

“What are we going to do?” Katia asked. “We can’t even understand what she’s saying. Do you think a real god is going to come down and try to attack her? That’s why those people from that college were so alarmed in the first place.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Mordecai?”

He shook his head. “You guys are blazing new trails with this one. I don’t know what in the hell is going to happen. I’ve never seen so many cross-floor storylines before. The fact they’re using Larracos and the Ascendency as a plot point on a fifth-floor quest is just astounding to me. Based on everything I’ve seen, I suspect the moment she leaves the safe room, her presence might summon an angry god. But maybe not. After all, she’s not fully resurrected. If they even know she’s here, this might be preferable to them.”

“Let’s let Mongo eat her!” Donut said. “Or we can burn her away. Or we can just toss the head back into the Nothing. We don’t have to do it here. They have a Nothing gate at the casino, too. Remember?”

“We’d have to get her out the saferoom first before it’ll let us do anything to her,” I said. It was starting to dawn on me that her existence was going to be a bigger headache than I first thought. “We can’t stick her in a pet carrier. At least I don’t think it’ll let us.”

“Probably not,” Mordecai agreed.

“We can just dump her in the tavern,” Katia said.

“That’s not a bad idea, but that scorpion guy will probably punt her out the door, which might cause issues.”

“Then what? Keep her in the safe room?” Katia asked.

“Hang on,” I said. I picked the head back up by her hair. The jaw on the thing was posable. I pushed it closed all the way. She continued to wail, but now it was completely muffled. I grasped the chin and pulled down, moving in increments until I could understand what she was trying to say.

“…Going to kill your mother. I’m going to find where she lives and set her on fire and then kill her and then get a necromancer to bring her back from the dead and then kill her over and over again and make you watch while I…” She trailed off once she realized I’d moved her mouth to just the right position where she made coherent words, like I’d tuned into the proper radio station.

“Hello,” I said. “My name is Carl. Can I call you Samantha? I’m going to call you Samantha. Your real name is a little too weird for me.”

“Where’s the rest of my body?” she demanded. She could move her lips. Sort of. She sounded as if she was talking through clenched teeth. “Do you know how long I worked to reunite myself? Do you know what I had to do?”

“Oh, honey,” Donut said. “We were just talking about it. It must’ve been awful.”

I adjusted her chin slightly. “Yeah, so your body got shattered into dozens of pieces and then swept out into the ocean. I would guess at least half of you is currently being digested by a very large shark.”

I couldn’t read any emotion on the head. The eyes were unblinking, and it kind of freaked me out. “My child. I can feel her. She’s alive, but she’s unable to reform. I only had moments, and I made her marry that idiot. He’d used too much power and flash-froze everything, including the vessel. I only had a few minutes. That’s the last I can remember. My child. My child. Oh, my sweet child.”

She was talking about the sand ooze, I realized.

“She’s probably in the ocean. She’ll eventually end up back on shore. Her husband might be a little dead, though.”

“I’m going to kill your mother.”

“Uh,” I said. “Look. What do you want us to do with you? I can’t take you with me. Do you want us to toss you back into the Nothing?”

“No. Please. No. Not that. I want you to go find my pieces and put them back together. I worked so long to escape. I need a physical form.”

“That’s not going to happen,” I said.

“So you tricked that guy into coming here?” Donut asked. “I must say, I am impressed. Men are so easily tricked, but still. Bravo. I’m always tricking Carl here into doing things for me, but you talked him into opening a different dimension for you. I do feel bad for Tish, however. She really seemed to like him.”

“Tish? Tish almost ruined everything. Take me to her. I’m… I’m…”

“Going to kill her mother?” I asked.

Samantha started bawling.

“All right,” I said, standing up and dropping the head back on the floor. “This isn’t going to work. I’m either going to toss you out the door or risk letting Mongo eat you or something. What’s your pleasure?”

“Take me with you,” she said. She stopped crying just as quickly as she started. “We can go on adventures together. There’s this naiad who lives in the Hunting Grounds who might be able to help me.”

And there it was. This was how they were going to write this goddamned talking sex doll head into our story.

“I already have a talking cat, a dinosaur, a Katia, and a grumpy eagle guy in my party. The last doll we had didn’t work out. I mean no offense, but the inn is full. Especially for a creature who is probably going to get us murdered by an angry god at any moment.”

“I’m going to kill your mother.”

Mordecai: I’m really going to regret this, but I have an idea. I think we should keep her. We can keep her in the saferoom, so she can’t hurt us. If she doesn’t leave, she won’t summon a god. This is a minor deity, so she may have some valuable knowledge. She’s probably the one who taught Ghazi how to cast all of those spells. If I can get some potion knowledge out of her, it would be worth it.

Carl: She’s a talking sex doll head, and she keeps threatening to kill my dead mother. Besides, how can we keep her? Won’t she disappear when we go down a level?

Mordecai: Like I mentioned before, we can hire a few NPCs. It only lets you do it to certain kinds, but I can guarantee it’ll work on her. Donut can hire her using the personal space menu. You have a slot for a trainer and a cook right now. Hire her as a trainer, and she’ll live in a corner of the training room. On the next floor, we can get a new module that’ll allow us to hire mercenaries and additional staff. We can stick her in one of those slots.

Donut: I LIKE HER. AND I DIDN’T KNOW WE CAN HIRE MERCENARIES! CAN I HIRE SLEDGIE?

Katia: I think it’s a terrible idea, but if keeping her in the room keeps us safe, then we can give it a go for a little while. The game obviously wants us to keep her.

Carl: Yeah, that’s what I’m worried about.

I picked up the head, pushed the mouth all the way closed, and I opened the door to the training room. I rolled her inside and closed the door.

“We’ll deal with her later. We have four and a half days left. I want to get that fourth castle taken care of as soon as possible because as soon as that’s done, we’re going to start rescuing as many people as we can.”

~

“What I’m saying is you take two sometimes three showers a day. That’s water. I don’t understand how that’s any different than going into the ocean.”

“It’s not going to happen again, Carl. No. Take Katia. Or Louis. Or Gwen. Or Samantha. I don’t care. It is not happening, and there is not a thing in this world you can say that will get me to change my mind.”

I reached up and scratched her. Her entire body was tense. “It’s okay. I’m just teasing you. You won’t have to go into the water this time. I will need you to float over it in that house, though.”

We’d taken a nap, spent some time in the craft room, and reset all of our buffs. Zev had messaged us earlier and reminded us that our normal appearance on Odette’s show was canceled. Zev still spoke to us in her robotic, Stepford Wife voice, but Donut had greeted her cheerfully and no longer seemed concerned about her condition. There was more going on there, but I couldn’t ask her about it.

I’d gone into the training room to work on my Powerful Strike. It was currently at 14 with my gear, but only eight unenhanced. We needed to find a guildhall for it. It was one of those stubborn skills that didn’t like to move up no matter how much I trained. We really needed to find a place to just grind and kill mobs without gods or quests or distractions.

Mordecai said the sixth floor would have plenty of that, but I already knew if we made it down there, we were going to be very, very busy.

I’d taken the Psamathe—Samantha—head and placed her in the corner. She started squealing at me while I trained, so I turned her around and threatened to stick her in the bathroom or seal her in a bucket if she didn’t shut up. She stopped after that, though I occasionally heard a few random growls from her.

Afterward, it was time to start planning our next move in earnest. The first step was we needed to get to the submarine, get inside, and figure out the pump system. Gwen was going to meet us with the two other survivors from that quadrant in an hour. In the meantime, they turned the drain back on. I sent a message to the tomb raiders and told them they really needed to start carving a path down to the water line. I was hoping we could avoid most of the traps, but Katia said she’d been going over the map, and most of the lower entrances still required us to go up before we could go down. It’d be much preferable if the path was mostly cleared by the time we got there.

If those assholes refused, and I feared they would, I had a secondary plan in place, but I wanted to avoid it if possible.

Outside, we were hours from the start of the equinox where the sandstorms would last twice as long, and the days would be mostly dark.

“You know what,” I said to Donut. “When was the last time you checked your social media board? You know you can do that now again since Zev has gotten her job back.”

Donut lit up. “Carl, you are a genius! Mongo, come on, let’s see if Fleek-Otter12 got people to sign up for the unofficial fanclub!”

Katia watched her run off. “So she really can’t swim?”

“She sank like a rock.”

Katia laughed. She was, on my direction, leaning over a piece of paper and drawing out a map of the ninth floor. Mordecai wandered into the room, muttering something.

“Hey, Mordecai. Come here a second,” I said.

He seemed distracted. “I think I need one more ingredient, but I don’t know what it is,” he grumbled. He was talking to himself. He did that a lot while he worked at his table. “What do you need?”

I pulled the map from Katia’s hands and flipped it over. The map looked like a flower with the large city in the center. I already knew some of what I was about to ask, but I didn’t know everything, including one crucial piece of information.

“Is this an accurate depiction of the ninth floor?”

“Guys,” he said. “Do not worry yourselves about something that is very far away.”

“I know,” I said. “But I’m curious. Especially since the sixth floor is coming up. They’re all part of that weird volcano storyline, and I just want to be prepared.”

“You’re not going to get to the sixth floor if you spend all this time worrying about what’s not right in front of you.”

“Indulge me, please,” I said.

He sighed and hopped up onto the table. He picked up a pen and drew lines on the map, creating nine petals for the flower. “This is pretty close. Larracos is in the middle, and the nine faction areas surround the center. This whole area is mostly rolling hills and pre-dug trenches. There’s a forest that surrounds the whole thing. The deeper you get into the forest, the more difficult the monsters are, but they’re usually hunted to extinction by the time you get there.”

“So how does it work?”

“Back when the third floor opened up, each of the nine factions arrived at their designated area. Each spot is randomly picked with one exception. The previous winner is allowed to choose where they start. From there, they start building their army and their defenses and their fortifications. Once the sixth floor opens, they have access to the market, and they can start buying armor and magical supplies from the crawlers. They can only bring one large chest of supplies, and it’s not enough to outfit their army. Everything else has to be purchased or looted. They aren’t allowed to fight each other until the crawlers arrive. But before that happens, they make the officers fight and grind in the forests, leveling themselves up. Plus they all bring several cheat potions to buff themselves.”

“Where do the armies come from?”

“They all start with fifteen thousand troops, and there’s a pool of mercenaries they can hire. The additional mercenaries are all collected via games and gambling and trades up until the ninth floor opens. By this point, though, the armies are mostly set. All that’s left is fortifications and collecting gear. Then gambling and drinking.”

“But they can’t really die?” Katia asked.

“No. Not on that floor. It’s like a game for them. The system holds some of their health in reserve and teleports them away before they can die. They feel real pain, though. The troops are mostly NPCs, but the richer of the factions can pay for their own people to fill the ranks. They are equally protected. The real people can respawn too, up until the time you guys arrive. The NPC troops cannot.”

I felt my heart quicken. “How many of the fifteen thousand are outside people usually?”

He shrugged. “A rich faction will bring maybe two hundred. It’s not very many because it’s expensive. A poor faction, like the Blood Sultanate will only bring about twenty. It’s a little like the dance floor for the Desperado Club. For every person they bring in, one of the NPCs is removed, so there’s no major tactical advantage to bring too many people in unless they’re well-trained already. And these guys usually aren’t.”

“So they have to build all of their fortifications from the ground up?”

“That’s right,” Mordecai said. He pointed to one of the petals at the top of the flower. “This petal comes with a pre-built, fortified castle. The King’s Point. It’s a more narrow area, but with steeper hills. Most previous winners choose this so they don’t have to waste time and resources building, and it’s naturally defensible.”

I nodded. “Okay. So with the sixth floor, how does that work in conjunction with the ninth?”

“The Hunting Grounds are a different sort of thing. The factions can, and sometimes do, send people to the sixth floor to collect gear. But it’s dangerous because they are not protected. It’s the only place in the game where they can really die. And like I said before, they do die. Most of these guys are rich assholes who treat the whole thing like a weekend excursion. Though in reality, a lot of bets are made regarding the outcome of the faction wars. So if there’s an upset, a lot of credits can change hands. Plus there is a cash prize to the winner.”

“But,” I said, “The people who do decide to hunt on the sixth floor, they can bring gear back to the factions?”

“Yes,” Mordecai said. “Someone on the ninth right now can go down to the sixth and return. But more often, the hunters are people who aren’t a part of any faction. They come to win gear. Things like that ring you still need to ditch. Then they sell it to the factions.”

“Okay,” I said, thinking hard. “One last question. When can someone decide to participate in all of this? Say I’m a random guy floating around in a spaceship, and I decide tomorrow I want to get in on the action. Can I?”

“Yeah, if you have the credits and can get here in time. Hunters can sign up until the opening of the sixth floor. The guys on the ninth floor are a different story. They had to have arrived by the closing of the third floor, so it’s already too late to participate in that. It’s not too late for ninth floor guys, or any of the tourists and party-goers on the 18th for that matter, to wander down to the sixth if they dare. But most of the hunters are already there. It would be dumb to go now.”

“Why is that?”

“Because all hunters start out as level thirty. They can start arriving when you hit the sixth. There are appropriate mob areas for them to train, so they can be pretty strong by the time you arrive. Especially since the lethality doesn’t get turned on for them until you lot arrive. The hunters tend to be around fifty, though with the shortened timers, it might not be that high. In fact, I’m willing to bet my tailfeathers they won’t be that high.”

“Thanks, Mordecai,” I said.

“Carl,” Katia said as Mordecai returned to his work. “Why do I get the feeling you’re about to do something really stupid?”

I grinned. “Let’s get the bubble popped up first. Then we’ll worry about how stupid or not I am.”

*****

Two chapters tonight. I hope you're all doing well. Thanks so much for continuing to be a patron! I'm juggling this and the editing for the third book, but I ain't complaining!

I can't believe it was a year ago today when I finally realized my entire schedule for the year and probably most of the next was screwed. I have credits for over 20 (!) conventions and shows to attend, and they're finally starting to drop dates. We'll see what happens. I won't believe it until it happens, honestly.

Sorry that this ended up being a little info-dumpy at the end. I really try to avoid it, but it's necessary. Very necessary.

Thank you for not picking the turkey.