Standard drill. Clothes, information, water, food, protection, weapons and supplies in that order. I’m in a boiler room cum storage room cum prison that served as an underground transit area before an earthquake collapsed piles of rubble into the previous exits. The monster I just killed and her victim presumably weren’t down here when the rubble dropped. They got down here somehow. The mutilated corpses in one room and incinerated remains within the belly of the furnace attest to what that monster wearing a too slender woman’s guise was doing. Why I and the other three were locked up down here is anyone’s guess.
I cobbled together a passable kit from the junk scattered throughout the level, including someone’s lost viol with a slip of paper rolled up inside it. I’ll look at that later, it’s decision time. Within the furnace wide vents lead upward. Not a bright idea if something foul within the furnace were to suddenly awaken it and incinerate me. This leaves the chute from the upper floor as the safest exit.
Using ash and charcoal from the furnace’s fuel bunker I alter the current coloring of my kit. Canteens of water, wandermeals to last more than a week, bandoliers carrying flasks of acid, 2 coils of rope, hammer, iron spikes, a crowbar, the assorted kits adventuring types require to function. A pair of daggers loaded into spring-release wrist sheathes for emergencies. A pair of fingerless gloves. Two light crossbows and 20 quarrels in their cases. A half-dozen chakram to cover the gap between crossbows and melee. A combat axe for melee work. A pickaxe for tearing down barriers and killing sleeping enemies very, very thoroughly.
Draining a canteen and wolfing down a wandermeal I find myself missing tobacco and khave. Whoever tossed me down here thought that my stash was worthwhile enough to keep for themselves.
I quietly climb the carcasses in the cellar and ascend the chute, using the tight space’s geometry to make the climb laughably easy. I would be concerned were I wearing banded mail and a shield or carrying too much gear.
The metal door at the top of the chute lets out into an overgrown courtyard. Thunder peals overhead as a driving rain lashes across the place, leaving the only option to use the one exit I can see, a wooden door lets me into a hallway running south to north with south to my left.
I step quietly enough into reasonably bright light too close to a manned barricade. Three crossbows, locked and loaded, take aim. “Captain, we got another one!”
“Another what?” I turned slowly, raising my empty hands. Movement, the rustle of crude padded armor, the stink of body odor and a fourth face. The supposed Captain.
“Draw no closer or we’ll mow you down where you stand. Leave!”
“And go where, numbnuts.”
“North whence you came.”
“You guys aren’t too bright, are you. What’s going on here?”
“How do I know you’re not a shapeshifter, mmm?”
“What, like that monster in the boiler-jail I just came out of?”
The three guards tightened their grips on their weapons, knuckles going white. Wrong question.
“Begone! Come back with three of your ilk to prove your innocence. The entire place is overrun by lunatics and monsters, as if you didn’t know.”
Moron. “I’ll come back with slain shapeshifters, but they’re not my ilk. Not even close.”
Sighing, I turn around, head back to the boiler room and drag the one shapeshifter’s corpse I know of back up and flop it onto the pavers close to the improvised barricade. Steely eyes watch me, not wavering from their sight line down their crossbows.
Making my way up the hallway each door and the rooms behind them are to be dealt with. The first, the main floor extension of this building’s boiler system, held a simian-limbed tentacle-faced rodent with glowing eyes and a pair of dog-sized attack rats.
Next up, a storage room with a couple of delectable giant centipedes. Fresh dinner, properly prepared, if I knew how to cook anything more complicated than tavern breakfast fare. I left the carcasses and bundled up the barely noteworthy items. Might come in handy later.
Continuing northward faint fleshy tearing sounds, as if someone was peeling off a particularly disgusting sock. Treading as carefully as possible, I locked and loaded both light crossbows, cradling one in each hand. The sounds continue since it takes a while to flense a corpse without ruining the skin. Five human and three shapeshifter corpses litter a rubble-strewn chamber cluttered with wrecked desks and toppled lockers. The shapeshifters’ corpses are riddled with bolts, presumably by the quartet of meatheads guarding the barricade forty yards to the south.
Hell, if those knuckleheads could handle these things, I can too.
A shapeshifter wearing a gore-stained white doctor’s coat methodically flenses one of its own. “Doctor Latchkey needs new skins, yes it does.”
Thwack! clatter Thwack! clatter.
Both of my quarrels find their mark easily enough with the advantage of shooting it in the back. Fighting fair is for the occupants of coffins. Squealing from the pain from the bolts sunk in its back, the creature clambers over the debris, clawing at a wooden door on the western side of the hallway some ten yards away. I step forward and fling a chakram at the monster, the spinning steel disc decapitates it, viscera fountaining all over the door, ceiling and hallway.
No time like the present. I boot the door open, chakram in hand. Ahead, three figures securely manacled, a door to the left and south. I heft the axe in my other hand and keep going, shattering the door.
A rasping gasp of surprise to my right, feminine and inhuman as with the first shapechanger in the basement below. I slash a stained curtain down and hurl the chakram at the first target of opportunity, only wounding the “doctor” as she was finishing her climb off a stepladder. Suddenly, she vanished from sight.
Under typical circumstances, this would probably be the death of me. A floor littered with gore, on the other hand, makes dealing with invisible monsters a much easier proposition. That the creature reeked of death doesn’t help it either. Between sound and smell, with misshapen footprints in the grue on the floor, this should be manageable.
Or, it might get me gutted like a fish and fed to whatever lay in that tub of hers.
Her first blow caught me off guard, albeit not quite as well-aimed as it could have been. She came into view as her blade lashed out, slicing through my tunic beneath the poncho and drawing a nasty cut down my left flank.
This thing is more nimble and a bit better trained than the one fought earlier in the basement, narrowly avoiding a whirling swing of the combat axe.
The shapeshifter vanished from sight once more, her toes squelching in the gore while she attempts to position herself behind me. I back to the side of the oversized basin adjacent to her ladder.
This time when she appears from another bit of invisibility she feints, pulling me badly off-guard and out of balance, opening a matching vent through the right side of my tunic. The blood loss is starting to be a concern.
“Thanks, now my tunic matches.” I continue to miss, slipping in the mess. She feints once more with that dagger of hers, but this time my counterattack connects, opening up the front of her smock from collar to waist, inflicting but a shallow cut instead of the disemboweling stroke that it would have been.
Hissing with the pain, she goes to the well one time too many, feinting to the same side. This time, I’m ready for her, but my swing clangs against the side of the basin next to me. The blow numbs my hand, tumbling the combat axe to the floor.
“Lunch time, yesss!” Her tongue flickers forth, tasting victory. She lunges, thrusting her dagger forth as if to run me through.
Instead, her thrust is avoided by stepping inside of her reach, permitting a pair of vicious headbutts to connect with the creature’s visage.
Smack! CRACK!! Now a ruin of shapeshifting flesh, she staggers back. We’re about evenly matched once more. She attempts to flee, making her way to the door in a desperate bid to flee. A chakram lops off her left leg below the knee resulting in a boneless sprawl against the shattered door frame.
I drive my pickaxe through her skull to finish the job, wrench it out and collect my weapons before claiming her dagger and meager belongings.
A small stoppered vial filled with effervescent red liquid - a healing potion. Shrugging against the possibility of it being poisoned, I down the contents. Seconds later the lacerations on my flanks close as if they were never there.
Clambering up the stepladder lets me see a maimed flesh eater, a ghoul in commoner’s parlance. Gluttons for flesh, yet deriving no sustenance from so doing, the creature within the basin mewls piteously at its state before a flask of acid dissolves its skull.
Conversing with the “prisoners” - a lunatic dressed as some kind of a cultist, a corpse and a ghoul that has been steadily devouring the corpse - was brief and unproductive. Euthanizing them took two swift packaxe strokes. Searching the remains is as usual a grim task, albeit somewhat rewarding.
Lashing the shapeshifter corpses together with rope makes the process much easier, permitting me to drag them stacked atop a larger table top back south along the hallway to within five paces of the barricade.
“Satisfied?”