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We've finished book 6. My work is slowly getting back to, well, okay, not normal. But I'm starting to be able to sneak in time to write a page here, a page there.
I have to say, finally getting to pull off things I've been setting up for YEARS was pretty invigorating. The look of absolute shock on one player's face when I pulled that trigger was just...c'est magnifique.
"Wait, what did you just say?"
"You heard me."
<cue "Ohshi~!" realization.>
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Just wanted to pop in to say I'm looking forward to seeing you post again. But after having had to work ~50 hours per week (all but the first little bit on the night shift) redeployed to the coronavirus testing lab from the end of March to the end of November, I can understand how that could be difficult.
Even so, I have a character idea you might want to run in a future campaign (especially Shattered Star or Return of the Runelords). Mirror Witch whose "mirror" is actually a cell phone that some mysterious Thassilonian entity(ies) hacked, because this Mirror Witch is from Earth (although arriving by a different means and under different circumstances from Kyle).
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Just wanted to pop in to say I'm looking forward to seeing you post again. But after having had to work ~50 hours per week (all but the first little bit on the night shift) redeployed to the coronavirus testing lab from the end of March to the end of November, I can understand how that could be difficult.
Even so, I have a character idea you might want to run in a future campaign (especially Shattered Star or Return of the Runelords). Mirror Witch whose "mirror" is actually a cell phone that some mysterious Thassilonian entity(ies) hacked, because this Mirror Witch is from Earth (although arriving by a different means and under different circumstances from Kyle).
Yeah, it has been rough. I've got material to write, just...no time to write it at work because they still have me doing two people's jobs. And that's where I like to write. I should maybe do some writing at home, but I generally like to shut down my brain and play some video games on my days off.
That's an interesting character concept.
Return of the Runelords is planned for after we finish Reign of Winter, then do a short "First Colony" high tech campaign - they got me the pawns of Return for Christmas. We'll be kinda working out the story of what happens in Shattered Star without playing through it, and I think one of the other guys is planning to do a write up on that.
I feel your pain about work. From the end of March through the end of October, I was in the coronavirus testing lab, all but the first little bit of that being on the night shift, with most weeks being 50 to 52 hours.
Too bad you don't get to play through Shattered Star, but I'd still be interested to see the writeup.
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Tentatively speaking, things are getting back to normal enough that I'm starting to eye being able to write at work again. Plan is to focus on catching up one campaign at a time, starting with this one.
That said, after playing Cyberpunk, I had a weird idea for a story set in such a world that's kinda taken off into its own thing, and I actually did a bit of writing for it last week(I didn't have my campaign notes, or I might have done some campaign writing). Might end up being a novel. Or three. So the plan is to split my writing time between catch up and that.
Of course, without Kyle's interference and the birth of Lyriana, there are a lot of things on Earth that go unresolved that could have impacts later on.
You're back! Glad to see that you're still okay after the past 1.25 years. Looking forwarding to your next posts.
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You're back! Glad to see that you're still okay after the past 1.25 years. Looking forwarding to your next posts.
Thanks. I'm hoping that now that we're in the Turquoise(because of course that's a color on the scale) we won't slip back to yellow or red like last time I thought things were getting to where I could write.
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Emily was unconscious, but breathing. Burin was attending to her. Terry stared down at the body of his former boss, then shot him a few more times, just to make sure. He turned to see Gregor standing there, arm raised for a high five.
Terry…is not nearly as strong or balanced as Gregor. It was impressive that he managed to not fall down, to be honest. I called Greta and let her know it was over. She sounded excited, almost sexually so, knowing that we’d been victorious.
Burin managed to rouse Emily. The girl got up and walked over to the body of the woman, Kuro. If looks could kill, the hatred in the girl’s eyes would have turned the body to ash. Instead she satisfied herself by ripping off the woman’s necklace.
Greta and Anastasia returned shortly thereafter, and Greta bounded over to me. She kissed me hungrily, then took my hand and pulled me over to Typhon Lee’s corpse. Once there, she stabbed her other hand into the upper part of the old man’s gut. There was a wet, tearing sound, and she yanked out a red-brown mass. Oh, right. His liver.
Her teeth tore into it, blood smearing her face. She barely chewed, simply swallowing the large chunk she’d torn off. She then bit off another piece, smaller, and offered it to me. “You should have some. It’s good for making babies.”
How do you answer that? I stared at her for a moment, and decided to go with the diplomatic approach. “My love,” I said, “If you want me to eat liver, I will do so. Cooked. And from a cow, or a chicken, or a sheep. But I’m not a winter wolf. I’m sorry, I’m just not comfortable eating a person’s liver.”
She cocked her head as she regarded me. “Sometimes I forget,” she admitted. “Of course. But I will slaughter the sheep or cow myself and it will only be barely cooked and then eaten immediately. It is important.”
I nodded. “That’s a fair compromise.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I spotted Emily watching us curiously. Before I could say anything, Terry pulled her away from Kuro’s corpse. “Don’t even think about it. Your mother will kill me if I let you eat people.”
“I wasn’t!” Emily protested, but it was clear she had been considering it.
After picking the corpses clean of any valuable gear, we made our way back to the hut, and Gregor produced the keys. They were a crude pair of dolls, one about half the size of the other. He tossed them into the cauldron and then asked Baba Yaga’s doll. “So, where are we going this time?”
“To the beginning,” she answered. Gregor looked unimpressed with that answer.
“So, you’re made of wood? How’s that working out for you?” Burin asked Baba Yaga, finally voicing a question that had clearly been on his mind for a while. But she didn’t answer.
Exhausted from our day, we all turned in fairly early. I had the strangest dream. At least, I think it was a dream. I hope it was a dream. I REALLY hope it was a dream.
In my dream, I woke up feeling a little hazy. So I got up and went to go grab something to eat, and maybe some coffee. Irish coffee, even, since I was pretty sure my headache was caused by the wine I’d drank before bed.
I heard Emily’s voice, so I stopped in the hallway. “I came close. She beat me. I think the bird lady killed me. Thanks to Mister Burin, though, I came back. But I heard her voice. ‘Remember,’ it said. And I did. I remembered all the times I died when the evil lady had me. It was as clear as the TV.”
“I see,” said the voice of the Coffin Man. “How did that make you feel?”
There was silence for a few moments before Emily answered. “Before, I didn’t get why Dad said he liked to kill people. But I get it now. It felt good seeing her dead.”
The Coffin Man grunted approvingly. “That makes your life easier. Sometimes heroes have to kill people. It’s like that cartoon rat. Micksy, was it? And the war veteran duck. Sometimes heroes save people. Sometimes they execute those who would hurt people. Either way helps.”
I had no idea how to respond to that. After all, my entire short career as an adventurer had involved death on a scale that would have been unthinkable back on Earth. So, I left without saying anything, instead grabbing the last swig from my bottle of wine before going back to sleep.
Like I said. I really hope that was a dream.
When I woke up again, I found Gregor in the common room. His skin collection was spread out all around him and he was looking it over. “Maybe you could make it into a display and charge viewing fees?”
“As some kind of skin circus?” the fighter asked. “Yes, that could work. That way, I could make money from them, without losing them.”
“Where’s Terry?” I asked.
“He’s locked in his room,” Burin answered. “Been there all morning.”
The door to Terry’s room suddenly opened. “While you all have been distracting yourselves – and I can’t blame you, we have basically nothing left to do now – I’ve been hard at work. Behold!” From within the room came a robot about eight inches tall. It just walked in and waved. Terry was beaming. “I’ve managed to make bullets that allow me to take control of the mindless.”
Gregor picked up the robot. “Not practical in fight. Looks…weak.”
“That’s just the test subject. It’s what’s inside that counts. I filled that one with explosives.”
The door to the library swung open, and Emily walked in, bags under her eyes and looking fairly pale. Terry took the robot from Gregor and handed it to her, beaming proudly and ready to explain what he’d made. But the girl just wordlessly took the robot and flopped on the couch, hugging it.
“Should we really let a little girl have a bomb?” Anastasia asked me.
“It’s fine,” Terry answered. “I’ve got more.” He considered it for a moment. “I’m sure even her mom would be okay with it.”
Burin rolled his eyes and got up, taking the robot from Emily and handing it back to Terry. “Come on,” he told the girl. “Let’s go see what we can scrounge up to eat around here.” Wordlessly, she followed him.
It wasn’t too much longer before we finished our trip and the hut came to a “stop”. So we gathered our things and headed out the door into the hut’s new inner configuration. Not too far from us, we spotted a tree that was about eighty feet tall, were I to make a guess. So, since it was the biggest landmark, we headed in that direction.
Below the rocky outcropping holding the tree was a waterfall that dripped into a pool. It was pleasantly warm – at least for me, though the others didn’t seem bothered by the temperature – if perhaps a bit humid. Terry pulled out his little bomb bot and set it on the ground. “I want you to go hug that tree. Go boom if it tries to attack us.”
From within the tree, we heard a woman’s voice, speaking in Russian. “You have come far, wanderers, but the threads of fate have finally led you here to Grandmother’s Cauldron, the root of Baba Yaga’s Dancing Hut. Here was Baba Yaga’s past made, and here will her future be decided. Know then that I am Vigliv, ally and mentor to Baba Yaga, for I am norn, and hold the golden thread of her fate in my hands.
“Baba Yaga has been trapped within the doll you hold by one of her own blood, her own power turned against her to do so. But to free Baba Yaga from her prison and gain mastery over her betrayer, you must pay heed to the wisdom of the universe and homage to its fate. Here, in Baba Yaga’s Dancing Hut, lie the very fundamental essences of Baba Yaga’s being. Should her treacherous daughter recover these, she would gain great power over her mother, possibly enough to destroy Baba Yaga once and for all.
“Therefore, you must seek out these elements of Baba Yaga’s nature first. You must first take the fate of Baba Yaga into your hands, then find her power, her death, and her life. Lastly, you will need the blood of Baba Yaga to finally free the Old Crone. Only in this way can you defeat the daughter who betrayed her, and in so doing, save your own world. I can guide your steps in their quest. Your search begins now.”
As she spoke, the figure of a fey being appeared standing next to the tree. Her skin was green and unkempt, and her skin the color of bark. The little bomb bot, unsure what to do, stepped back a bit, but then held its ground, ready to charge if the tree or the woman who looked like a tree tried attacking.
“Hello!” Burin called out. “We’re trying to help Baba Yaga. You said we need her fate, and you have it, right? Any way we can get that from you?”
The woman nodded. “I will conjure it from its hidden place within the waters. If you watch the water, you may see something of interest.”
We gazed into the waters and saw a crude hut within a clearing. A young woman and her child sat outside. The little girl was playing with a crude ball made of leather, while the woman was sewing something. The woman looked up from her work towards the forest at the edge of the clearing and smiled when she spotted the man walking towards the hut. He was carrying a bundle of wood over his shoulder.
The little girl got up and ran towards the man, hugging him enthusiastically. He scooped her up with his free hand and carried her to the woman, who he kissed enthusiastically. She took the child, and he set down the wood.
The idyllic scene was shattered by sounds within the forest. “Take our daughter and hide!” the man told his wife. They ran into the hut and climbed down into a root cellar whose entrance was hidden by floorboards.
From the woods came a group of armed men. They demanded tribute, and when the man’s offering was insufficient, they beat him unconscious and tied him up. They then searched the house, but did not find the hidden cellar.
So they dragged the man off to answer for his “crime” to the local lord. Sometime later, the woman emerged from the cellar with her child, and wailed in grief at the sight of the blood. Her fingers turned white as she clutched her hands tightly, rage quickly replacing grief. She cut her hand and offered of her blood to any who would hear her and grant her the power to reclaim her husband.
A voice answered, and it sent shivers down my spine. “I will grant you the power you seek. In time, you may nurture it into strength beyond imagining. But my boon does not come without a price. Will you pay it?”
“I will,” the young woman answered, unhesitating.
“Then you know what you must do,” the demon that now stood before her said.
The woman nodded, her face hard as she grabbed the thread she had been sewing with and… I looked away as she did it, though I could not block out the sounds of the woman strangling her own daughter. I doubt I’ll ever be able to truly forget those sounds.
When I opened my eyes, the image was gone and all that remained was a bloody piece of golden thread floating within the water. And I wasn’t the only one who had been unable to watch. Anastasia was still closing her eyes as hard as she could, looking even paler than normal. “I am not entirely sure freeing Baba Yaga is best idea,” Gregor said.
“She has a tendency to kill those close to her,” Burin said. “Do you think we’ll die when she takes back the mantle?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “But if we don’t free her, the world is doomed. So I’m still not seeing much of a choice.”
“I’ll miss its magic,” Burin said as he approached the water. “But you’re probably right.”
“I don’t feel magical,” I heard Terry mutter.
Burin reached out carefully with his axe and fished the thread from the water. He then took the thread and tied it around the matroshka doll that held Baba Yaga. The doll cracked and opened, revealing the smaller doll nested within.
“Hello Miss Baba Yaga,” Emily said, addressing the doll. “Are you okay?”
“I am quite tired, but I feel better,” the crone’s voice answered.
“That’s good. How do we open the others?”
“Vigliv can tell you more. Now let me rest.”
I looked up at the fey creature. “I take it you’re Vigliv?”
She nodded. ““You have taken Baba Yaga’s fate into your hands. You must now reclaim a symbol of her power. I will turn the pool into a portal. Step into it and follow in her footsteps. Witness the site of her first act of strength, as she first brought her wrath down upon those who drew her ire. Claim the crown of the lord whose orders sent the men to her home, and return here.”
We walked into the warm waters and found ourselves standing in a clearing outside of a cave. Young Baba Yaga stood over the corpses of over a dozen bandits. She was holding a severed head by the hair, looking into its eyes. “Why did you do this?!” she demanded.
“Our lord bade us collect tribute, and your family did not have enough to offer. An example had to be made.”
Her eyes burned with hatred. “I will show your lord what I have to offer,” she said, tossing aside the head, which landed with a wet thud. “Demon!” she called out. “I require more power.”
The demonic voice answered. “The power is yours for the asking. You know the price you must pay.”
She nodded grimly and walked over to her husband. The bandits had crippled and blinded him. He moaned in agony as she touched his face. “I promise,” she said, “I will make them pay for what they’ve done to you.” She then plunged a dagger into his heart. There was a crack of thunder and her eyes glowed with a cold blue light as she absorbed a fraction of his soul, the demon taking the rest as his payment.
She teleported away, and then the demonic presence manifested. “Interlopers,” he said, addressing us. “I will not allow you to interfere. This place will be your grave!” So this wasn’t just a vision of the past. We were actually reliving it in some way.
From within the cave came a great roar and a massive crocodile charged forth. Correction. It was no mere crocodile. It was a demonic crocodile, complete with giant wings.
Terry tossed out a couple of his little robots and fired at the croc. “A lizard? This thing is tiny compared to a real lizard! We faced the dragon. You’ve got nothing on him!” The crocodile responded by casting a spell. Blood trickled from Terry’s mouth, and smoke wafted from his ears. “Okay, that’s it. I’m done playing. Emily, summon your mother.”
Emily instead cast a spell, conjuring a tyrannosaurus. An albino tyrannosaurus, at that. “This is a job for a bigger lizard!” she shouted. It lunged forward, sinking its teeth into the croc’s tail. The beast roared in anger and snapped at the dinosaur.
Spotting the opportunity, Gregor and Burin charged forward. The dwarf sunk his axe into the croc’s neck and Gregor punched it several times from the other side, driving it further onto the blade. The hits caused the steel to sever something vital, and the croc thrashed for a moment, the collapsed, bloody foam dripping from its mouth. Terry’s little robots stopped and began cheering at the victory.
Emily walked over and patted the dinosaur’s bloody maw. “Good job,” she said. “You can go back to your pokeball now.” The dinosaur seemed to nod and then disappeared.
“Cute,” Terry said. “Now stop playing around and summon your mom.”
Emily’s eyes blazed with defiance. “You’re just mad because my Zeus actually did something and yours didn’t even reach the fight. You should have left him as a steed. At least he was useful.”
Terry’s eye twitched, but before he could respond, Gregor clapped his shoulder. “Come, I need your help checking the corpses for any indication of where they came from.”
The pair found us a map of the region on one of the bandits. “We could fly there,” I suggested.
“Running would be faster,” Gregor answered.
“Maybe for you,” Terry said.
“Then perhaps teleportation?” the fighter responded.
“That’s a possibility,” I said. “I’ll need fifteen minutes to prepare the spell.”
“We’ll make a pyre while you’re doing that,” Burin suggested. “We can’t just leave them here like this.”
For normal people, making a pyre big enough for a dozen corpses would have taken hours. But we’re definitely not normal. After taking the croc’s skin, Gregor started punching down whole trees, as if this was that game I used to play with Daddy when I was little. Umm…Minecraft, I think it was called? And Burin grew large so he could hew the fallen trees into manageable logs, which he stacked up. Terry went to work scraping the trees to make a sizeable pile of wood shavings to use as tinder while roughing up the logs to give them more surface area to burn.
Emily sat down and watched me as I was readying my spell. She was quiet, doing her best not to distract me. She really can be a good kid when she’s not arguing with her father.
The pyre was just about prepared by the time my magic was ready. So we lit it and teleported to the city on the map where the local lord lived. And boy, were we not prepared for what we saw.
Every building within the city was covered in ice. Baba Yaga had spared no one. Innocent and guilty alike died by her hand. Those that had offered resistance were impaled upon jutting spikes of ice. The rest had simply been frozen.
We made our way to the throne room. We found the lord decapitated, his head nailed to the throne with ice. His guards, lay dead all around him. But they didn’t stay that way. We heard the demon’s laughter as the guards rose to their feet.
But these were no ordinary ghouls or zombies. They were baykoks, an incredibly dangerous form of undead. Had it been normal people, it’s likely that that many of the creatures would have slain them. But, as I’ve already mentioned, we’re far from normal people.
Burin cast a spell, encasing a number of the undead in ice as Terry tossed one of his bots to Gregor, who surged forward with incredible speed. “Better Zeus, I choose you!” Emily called out, sending the albino tyrannosaurus into battle.
Gregor threw the robot at a group of guards near the dinosaur, and Terry took aim. “Remember, Daddy loves you,” he said as he shot the bot. It exploded, destroying several of the guards…and Emily’s summon. “Better Zeus, huh?” the assassin asked.
If looks could kill, Emily’s gaze would have caused her father’s head to explode.
The fight was pretty much over at that point. I lobbed some fireballs. Gregor and, to a lesser degree, Burin hacked and smashed apart the undead. Terry shot them. And Emily pouted.
Once it was done, we thawed the lord’s head and took his crown. And I teleported us back to the giant tree, so we could break the seal on the next layer of Baba Yaga’s prison, though we were definitely all having second thoughts about freeing her now.
Still, it was the only way to prevent her daughter from killing possibly millions of people and enslaving an entire world. So, what choice did we have?
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For the record, my notes for this campaign are TERRIBLE. This last one took me three full weeks to figure out due to such epic notes as "Better Zeus". No, that's it. That's the whole note and I think it's supposed to explain a full half hour of game time.
THE HELL DOES THAT EVEN MEAN?
Anyway, after talking with the guys, I think I more or less reconstructed events of that session. I've looked over the rest of my notes, and my RoW stuff is more or less all like this as far as notes, since I used to do all my writing the day after play and could count on remembering stuff. My notes for CC and GS are a fair bit better, thankfully.
Posting next chapter now. Probably be up by the time you read this.
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“Baba Yaga placed her death in an athame, a witch’s knife, which she then hid in a chest within a corpse, which she buried under an oak tree on the mystical island of Buyan. Even if Baba Yaga was slain, her death would still need to be recovered and released back into her body in order for her to truly die. And so Baba Yaga plucked the island from the ocean and stored it in one of the many hidden realms of her hut so that none could stumble across it, and her death, without first facing her power.
“Now, to free Baba Yaga from her prison, you must go to Buyan, find her death, and bring it back here to her cauldron. She is gaining greater awareness as you free her and will be able to guide you to some extent; heed her counsel. Now go; the death of Baba Yaga awaits you.”
Baba Yaga sent us images, leading to another pool that would act as a portal. “This will put you in the vicinity of where you need to go, but it will still be a journey,” she told us. “There is no surety that you will end up on the correct island. You will need to search for the correct island, and locate my death.”
I considered it. “Is there any way to focus the teleportation effect and ensure we go where we need? That way we can get you out of there as quickly as possible?”
“Scrying usually allows teleportation to be more precise,” Burin offered.
Baba Yaga considered it. “You would need the assistance of one attuned to my death.”
“Mister Coffin?” Emily suggested. “I’ll go get him!”
She ran off to the hut, which was thankfully not too far away, and returned a few minutes later, dragging the daemon behind her. He seemed completely engrossed in the object in his hands… an old model portable gaming console. One that I’m pretty sure existed before Daddy was born.
“Can you help us aim this portal towards what we seek?” Burin asked.
“I am attuned to that which you would reclaim,” he answered. “If you have magic that would allow you to use that link to focus your travels, then I am fine with allowing you to use that connection.”
It wasn’t simple, but with Burin’s aid, we managed to make it work, and soon we were on a tropical island, right on the beach. It was right around sunset. Overhead, we spotted a group of winged beings flying towards. They landed about a hundred yards from us and brandished their weapons, shouting. “They want to know who we are and why we’re here,” Burin translated. “I’ll explain.”
And he proceeded to do so, in Aquan.
“Maybe I should learn that language,” Gregor quipped to Terry. “I am always curious what he is saying.”
As the dwarf spoke and gestured, it was clear that the winged humanoids were getting angrier. “I don’t think I’m getting through to them!” Burin wailed. He dropped his weapon and shield, trying to show them that he came in peace.
Terry tapped him on the shoulder. “Maybe try with that guy. He looks friendly.” We all followed where he was pointing and spotted a hideous creature that looked like a winged cyclops with an overbite flying just above the waves.
The other creatures realized what we were looking at and became alarmed, so Terry decided it wasn’t a friend of theirs and took a few shots. “When in Rome,” I said with a sigh, and launched a fireball at it as well. Then Gregor sprinted towards the water and leapt several hundred feet, punching the creature several times and knocking its lifeless corpse towards us, skipping it off the water like a stone and causing it to come to rest a few feet from us, before teleporting back to shore.
The fighter was looking rather ill and was covered in the enemy’s blood and bits. Emily, without saying anything, summoned a water elemental and had it begin hosing him off. Burin picked up his axe and took a swing, making sure the creature was dead, before waving at the humanoids and flashing his big, goofy grin.
The winged humanoids panicked as he approached. A couple of them broke and ran immediately, but one just cowered and began gibbering in several languages. One of which we recognized. “Hello!” Burin called out in the language of deep places and monsters. “We didn’t mean to frighten you. We’re just here looking for death!”
Dammit Burin. “What he means to say is that we’re here looking for an artifact related to the death of an ancient being,” I said, using my most soothing voice. “As long as you have no desire to stop us from searching for it, there’s no reason we can’t be friends.”
“You mean it?” one of the beings asked tentatively.
“I promise,” I said. “What was that thing we just fought? And by ‘we’, I mean mostly my friends. And by ‘fought’, I mean massacred.”
“It’s an agent of our enemies. We’ve been at war with them for as long as we can remember. Come, our queen can tell you more.”
These creatures, who reminded me of something I’d read about in Daddy’s books called maftets, sphinx-looking people who dwell in ruins, had a palace that was reminiscent of an open air palace from some movie about ancient Egypt.
Their queen, who was fairly hot, I’ll admit, explained that their ancient enemies risen from the waves two days ago and demanded she be sacrificed or they would slay everyone. With a show of force, the enemy had proven themselves capable of conquering the isle, so she was considering going to her fate in the morning in order to placate them.
Obviously, we offered our help. We were given a place to relax for the evening and treated as guests of honor. “Strange that we arrived just in time to be the big damn heroes. You think time travel is at play again?”
Gregor considered Terry’s question. “We did travel through time to face Rasputin, so it wouldn’t be too surprising. Or, perhaps they’re playing through a repeating loop, and we’re just at the beginning of the loop.”
“That could create a time paradox,” Burin chimed in.
“What’s a time paradox?” Emily asked.
Burin launched into his explanation, and it was fairly interesting. Interesting enough that I missed what Gregor and Terry were arguing about. In fact, I barely even registered the argument until Terry pulled his gun and fired. Gregor’s hands blurred as they moved, and he struck the bullet out of the air with his metal bracers.
The bullet ricocheted, striking Terry’s cheek and leaving a rivulet of blood. I rolled my eyes at the men being idiots, and Emily got up, the nanite gun in hand. “You shot yourself in the face again,” she said to Terry.
“He’s getting better at it,” Gregor quipped. At that point, I made the decision that it was best everyone went to bed, and surprisingly, no one argued with me.
In the morning, we went over the plan once more. The queen would act as if she were going through with offering her life to the enemy, and we’d lie in ambush. Bursting out of hiding, we’d down the foes before they had a chance to react.
There was only one dwarf-sized problem with that plan.
As soon as he saw the arriving foes – some nucklavees and water elementals – Burin stepped out of hiding and called out in the language of water elementals. Terry sighed. “What is he saying?” he asked his daughter.
“Just a hello. He seems really happy to finally find someone who speaks that language.”
Negotiations broke down quickly, and we immediately resorted to violence. Terry fired off a rocket, Emily summoned a giant squid. Then Burin froze the surface of the ocean for a mile.
Emily was not happy about “Squidward” getting frozen.
Gregor teleported into the sky and slammed into the ice, shattering it and sending icy shards into our foes, killing them. Emily gasped. “Guys, Squidward says something is coming!” Guess it survived after all.
The thing that came from beneath the waves looked like the unholy mixture of the Loch Ness Monster and a big octopus. It was massive. And as it struck, I remembered something from my parents’ adventures. This thing was what Daddy called a Mother of Oblivion, one of Lamashtu’s servants.
The Mother breathed a cloud of gas at Gregor and Terry as Terry fired a rocket at her. I cast a spell, imbuing the others with the power of flame. Gregor punched himself in his confusion and Terry babbled incoherently. Meanwhile, Emily must have gotten a whiff, and teleported behind me to cower in fear.
I didn’t have time to react, as a rusalka, a type of fey associated with drownings, came out of nowhere and attacked me. I did what I could to protect myself, but I couldn’t flee with Emily there.
The Mother struck Squidward, who was attacking her, and sent him flying onto the beach, where he landed with an undignified splat. Burin charged to help, managing to cut down the fey and calm Emily.
In the end, Terry and Gregor got ahold of themselves and the Mother fled in terror of our might as they began focusing on her. But that would have been too easy for her, and Gregor gave chase, managing to hit her one last time. He says she sunk to the bottom of the depths, and was probably dead.
The queen was pretty impressed at what we’d done, and gladly told us of a legend about a tree where a witch’s death was said to live. So Terry loaded his gun and we made our way over, certain that the death of the Mother would give the maftets’ foes pause.
We approached the tree, which did look suspicious. Emily summoned a fire elemental to threaten hit, proving that the fruit does not at all fall from the tree. “We’re just here for the death. You behave and we won’t burn you.” The tree didn’t answer. “Okay, I’m coming to get it. Don’t try anything.”
Before I could stop her, she marched forward, and was promptly grabbed by one of the skinny, willow-like branches of the tree. Her fire elemental attacked, but to no avail as the tree brought the girl towards its gaping maw.
Burin acted quickly, casting a wall of ice inside the tree’s mouth as Gregor charged it, his fist sending splinters flying. I created magical, spiky balls of force and threw them at the tree, causing a fair bit of damage as well.
Terry…just sat there. “Seems like a good time to call your mom, huh?” he taunted Emily.
She responded by teleporting herself out of the tree’s grasp as Gregor continued his assault, finishing it off. She then stuck her tongue out at her father before dismissing her elemental.
You know, I’m really glad I never went through this phase. I’m pretty sure Daddy would have made me look like an idiot. But where Terry and Emily were concerned, in a battle of wits and wills, they were likely evenly matched. Still, it was odd that his hatred of trees hadn’t caused him to act. I guess forcing Emily to call on her mother was more important than killing a tree.
“Now,” Terry said, “Let’s just see what it was guarding.” He walked up to the base of the tree, where a coffin laid, and pried it open. “Holy s$&$!” he shouted, immediately swinging his crowbar at the contents several times.
I got closer and realized he was attacking some kind of large doll. It seemed inanimate, so there was no threat, so I decided it wasn’t worth trying to stop him. Once he was done, he stood there, catching his breath, the doll’s crushed eye in one hand and a dagger in the other.
“Good, you have the athame,” Baba Yaga’s voice said. “There is a cave nearby that offers passage back. Beware the guardian. But do not try to evade it. You need to dip the blade in its blood before returning.”
The guardian turned out to be a khala, a type of three headed dragon. Emily conjured a T-rex, which grappled it in its mouth and held it. Gregor took the opportunity to get a fresh skin. Real fresh. Like, still alive. Terry didn’t even bother to kill it when he stabbed it with the knife. And Burin reasoned that maybe it had to be alive when it was stabbed, since the blade turned gold when Terry did so.
Yeah. I’m surrounded by sociopaths and idiots. I wonder if this is how Daddy felt when he was adventuring.
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"Yeah. I’m surrounded by sociopaths and idiots. I wonder if this is how Daddy felt when he was adventuring." -- win.
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Yeah, I'm not 100% certain how much of her snark is me being frustrated with the notes and how much is actually from the notes(and adventure) themselves, but I'm certain my frustration has amplified it. :P
Starting work on the next chapter next week, because we're having an event in town and work is kinda super nuts this week. Did manage to find time to bust out a quick short story tonight, so I kinda wish I'd brought my notes with me to work on this instead. Oh well.
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So, that event I mentioned was crazy. You almost certainly saw it on the news. The billionaire successfully made it back, and that's all I'm saying.
Of course, a lot of people quit after that crapshow. But I got a raise, so, you know, that was nice. :P
Anywho, I have 2.5 updates worth of content actually ready. I'll upload one now, one next weekish, and hopefully be done with the third after that.
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Emily rounded on them. “I am NOTHING like him!”
“What the hell’s your problem?” Terry exclaimed. She glared up at him. “We won. Typhon’s dead. Sure, maybe we have his wife and bastard to worry about, but a win’s a win. We checked the body this time. It’s him. He’s deader than dead. And if we’re gonna save your brother from being deader than dead, we’re gonna need your mom. So stop being a selfish brat. It’s time to stop playing with your angels, giant lizard, and squid and summon her, kid. I’m not asking.”
Ooh. Yeah. Not how I would have phrased it. But no one has ever accused Terry of not being an idiot.
“You’re not asking?!” she shrieked incredulously, her face burning red with rage and her thin body trembling. “Well guess what, Dad? I’m not asking either. I don’t need you to answer any questions for me. Because I know everything that you did while you were wearing my body. But if you really, really want, I can summon Momma and we can all talk about how you put a bullet in my brain, nearly killing not just me, but Mister Burin too!”
Terry stumbled back as if she’d hit him. He looked both surprised and ashamed. Yet Emily wasn’t done.
“Or how about we build up to that?” she offered sarcastically. “How about that time you almost shot Miss Lyriana? Or really, how you can’t seem to communicate without trying to shoot or blow people up? If Mister Gregor and Mister Burin weren’t so awesome, you’d have almost blown them up to pieces a dozen times over by now! And that’s what they get for just trying to be your friends. Especially Mister Burin! From the very start, with that time-warping-dragon-thingy, all he’s done is trying to watch out for you! Help you! He doesn’t have a mean bone in his body!”
“I suspect he is secretly powerful dark lord, though he is very good at hiding it,” Gregor said, joking. “What, is wrong time to make joke? Fine, Burin is good guy, even if he needs to train more. He does seem to be even more jovial now that demon has been exorcised.”
“Exactly!” Emily said. Oh God, I was getting “warden” flashbacks just looking at the wild-eyed expression on her face. “Even with his own problems, all he does is try and help people, be their friends. And never once did he give up. And he wasn’t playing F*@*ING UNO while I was kidnapped by Nocticula! No, he and Miss Lyriana went into the Dreamlands and saved me.” Tears were streaming down her cheeks. “And I’m really nothing to them! Just some broken girl they’ve only known for a few weeks. I’m your d-daughter.” Her voice broke on the last word. “And even when you try to ‘help’ people, Dad, everybody suffers. You tried to save me, Mom, and Toby from Aunt Hecate and how did that turn out? Toby’s dead, probably in the Abyss, I was sent there, turned into a demon plaything while you wore my body like a sock, and Momma might be more than half demon now.
“I talked to Uncle Coffin about it. After Mister Burin gave me advice on leveling up, how I can’t take on Nocticula now, at the level I am now. But the more I use my magic, train my Pokémon, I might,” her voice hardened, “I will make her pay. But Uncle Coffin told me something very interesting: human souls can’t become eidolons. Momma’s not just a ghost. She’s being corrupted into a demon.” Emily frowned deeply. “She’s close…Really close…Uncle Coffin isn’t sure, but there’s a chance that every time I summon her, she’ll come back more and more demon until there’s none of Mom’s original self left.” She looked at Terry accusingly. “So while you probably just want her back so you two can…be gross, I’m over here trying to save her soul!”
Terry slumped. “I…I didn’t know,” he said very quietly.
“I love Momma,” Emily sobbed. “I wish it was her and not you here. All she wanted was to be a hero. I don’t think anybody except her understands why she fell in love with you, but she did and now both her and Toby are paying for it.” Her features suddenly became cruel and unyielding, exactly how they would when Terry wore her face. “If you really want me to summon her again, I will. But it depends on you, Dad. Depends on whether or not you think Mom will still love you when I tell her how you gave up, put the barrel of your rifle in my mouth, and pulled the trigger.”
“Are you done?” I asked softly, doing my best to contain the rage building in me.
“W-What?” Emily asked, still sobbing.
“With your tantrum? Has it not occurred to you two idiots to try talking, instead of screaming at each other? Has it not occurred to you two that each of you is hurting and needs the other’s support?”
“That’s not -” Terry said, but shut up as I glared at him.
“Of course it hasn’t. You’re both f&%~ing idiots.” I looked at each of them, waiting for either to try to argue with me. Neither dared. I turned to Terry. “We’ve already talked about your stupidity. You daughter is scared. More than anything, she needs you there to tell her everything will be okay, even if she knows you don’t have any clue whether it will be. Trust me, I’m a daughter. It’s necessary.”
Terry didn’t argue, he just looked defeated and hung his head.
“And you,” I said, turning to Emily. “You have several things you need explained to you. First of all, you’ve been forced to grow up quick, I get it. But you still seem to cling to the idea that your father should be perfect. And you have to understand that he’s just a man, with all the weakness that sometimes entails. Yeah, he tried to kill himself while he was stuck in your body. But as far as he was concerned, you were dead and he had no way to bring you back.
“You think that weak of him? Maybe. Let me tell you about my father. He’s the Runelord, one of the most powerful men alive. But before I was born, he was just an adventurer, unprepared for what he encountered. He once told me he very nearly walked away from it all, that the dangers he faced were too much for him to handle. But he had my mother at his side and she gave him the strength to go on. So yeah, your father took the path of a coward. But he was alone, with no one he thought he could count on and nothing he thought he could live for. He deserves your sympathy, not your scorn. To act otherwise is to act like a spoiled child. You’re old enough now that such behavior does not become you.
“And don’t think I’m done, with any of you. You trust ‘Uncle Coffin’? He’s a DAEMON. They’re EVIL made manifest. They want your soul. Is it possible this one is different than the rest? Maybe. Or more likely, he’s playing a long game, trying to get that which he values with a smile and a handshake. So take what he says with a grain of salt. They have nothing keeping them from lying to get what they want. For all we know, summoning your mother here buys her a reprieve from what she’s going through. Just like when we brought you back, when she’s here, she’s safe. Or maybe summoning her is causing problems, because the contrast between what she has here and what she experiences there is too much for her to bear. I don’t know. I don’t claim to know.
“But what I can tell you is that it doesn’t matter whether she’s turned into a demon or not. WE. WILL. SAVE. HER. Just as an angel can fall and become a demon, so too can a demon rise and become an angel. But you’re going to have to believe in me. You’re going to have to believe in Gregor. You’re going to have to believe in Burin. You’re going to have to believe in yourself, and your mother. And you even have to believe in your father. Because if you don’t…if you tell her what you’re threatening to say right now, out of spite? You could very well be the one who damns her forever. Is that what you want?”
Those last words hit her like a slap in the face. “I-but…” she began crying anew and ran away, bumping into Burin as she ran. “Sorry,” she said to him before running off into the forest.
“What was that about?” the dwarf asked.
“I said some things she needed to hear, though I don’t know that she’ll ever thank me for saying them.” I sighed. “Where have you been?”
“I was talking to Baba Yaga,” he said, handing me the matroshka doll.
“Right.” One headache at a time. “I guess someone should go after her.”
“I’ll go,” Burin said.
“I am not believing you have much choice,” Gregor said, pointing at the dwarf’s beard, which was dancing with sparks. “Girl has become very fast. Perhaps she has been training?”
“She probably teleported,” I pointed out.
He looked disappointed by that for a moment, then brightened up. “Training with magic is still training!” he declared triumphantly as he clapped Terry on the back. “There is hope for your daughter yet.”
“Yeah,” Terry said with a sigh as he looked at the ground. “I guess.” Then Burin disappeared.
We are almost done with Reign of Winter, surprisingly. Then, the bonus half of the campaign.
** spoiler omitted **
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But I wasn’t the only “me” in these woods.
They crept out of the shadows the same way they sometimes crawled out from under my bed or out of the closet in my room I had back at the hut. They never talked when there were other people in the room. That’s why I spent so much time playing games or watching TV with Uncle Coffin. He didn’t really need to eat or sleep or go to the bathroom, so he was always awake and watching over me. The only problem was when I had to go to the bathroom. During these times, I had no choice but to ask Nebula to come with me. It was kind of awkward peeing while holding a magic kitty, but I just couldn’t stand being alone.
But I was alone now. No Uncle Coffin. No Nebula. Just me.
Me and at least a dozen other Emilys.
“Good job,” one of them-the one with half her body eaten away by the hottest acid in the abyss-said sarcastically. “You ran away in a circle, back into Hell.”
“No!” I screamed at her, covering my eyes to keep from looking at her. “You’re a stupid liar! M-Miss Lyriana promised I-I wasn’t in Hell anymore!”
“And who is she to us?” another me asked miserably. I couldn’t stop myself from looking through my fingers. This Emily’s face was intact, but she was missing her arms and legs. They’d been pulled off by the pretty, goofy ponies. She sat against a nearby tree, blood flowing from her stumps. A red pool had already started to form beneath her and was spreading outward, towards me. “You said it yourself. We’re just a girl she’s known for a few weeks. Unlike you, Miss Lyriana’s a real hero. She’s got better things to worry about, more important people to save, than you, crybaby.”
“Stop it!” I cried. I covered my ears but I couldn’t block their voices-my voice-from crawling in and out of my brain like ants.
“Come on,” said an Emily directly behind me. “Daddy had the right idea the first time. You have a gun too. And thanks to him, we know how to use it.” I was suddenly very aware of the gun holstered at my hip. I’d completely forgotten about it. I’d been so distracted trying to level up my magic and my creatures that I’d never bothered using it except for target practice. “It really is as easy as opening our mouth and counting down from three…”
I collapsed to my knees. I could feel them around me. And even though I squeezed my eyes shut, I could still see them now. It was like having dozens of twisted mirrors nailed to the insides of my eyelids. All me, but all different. And just the tip of the iceberg. Nocticula had been creative. When I had first been alive, there’d been a soft but sturdy wall between my conscious mind and all of my memories of Hell. But that evil bird lady had shattered the wall when she’d “killed” me during our fight with Typhon Lee. Little by little, lifetimes of torture had started creeping in…
“…Two,” they said together and I felt my hand sliding downward, taking ahold of the gun.
“…No, please!” I begged. “I…I don’t want to go back!”
“You can’t go back, honey,” said a voice that sounded painfully like Momma’s, “because you never left-”
“Little girl?”
Like a bomb of light, the goofy voice pushed the ghosts away and made them disappear. Tears still streamed down my cheeks as I opened my eyes. Mister Burin was there, kneeling in front of me, looking very worried. He was holding onto my wrist, though he was careful not to hurt me. I saw that I had the gun up by my neck and had begun to angle it towards my mouth. I quickly dropped it and after a moment he let go of my wrist.
“You’re not okay,” he said, his voice gentle. “But it’s okay. You don’t have to pretend. Sometimes crying’s just what you gotta do.”
My body shuddered and I collapsed against his chest. And I cried. I don’t remember for how long, but I knew it’d never be enough. I was a girl made up of ghosts now. And they were all furious that I’d been the one to finally get saved. The one who got to live and be a princess and a wizard. Because of that they’d never stop. And no matter what anybody else did, nobody-not Momma, Dad, Miss Lyriana, or Mister Burin-could save me from myself…But…
“But I have things that they don’t,” I said in a shaky breath.
Up to that point Mister Burin hadn’t said anything. He’d just held me and stroked my hair back. Now he asked, “Er, and what’s that?”
“I have magic. And angles. And Better Zeus and Squidward.” I pushed myself off of him so that I could see his face. “I’m broken, but can hurt them back with my pieces.”
“Who’s ‘them’?” Mister Burin asked, frowning.
“The other mes.”
Mister Burin’s frown deepened. “Um. Okay.”
My body was still trembling and my head still ached, but when I rested my head against Mister Burin’s chest again, it wasn’t so bad. I listened to his steady heartbeat. He hugged me and I hugged him back and everything started to feel kind of real again. Mostly because I doubted that Nocticula could make up the silly awesomeness that is Mister Burin the Dwarf Wizard. “Mister Burin,” I said, “I love you. Please be a part of my life forever.”
“I…You’re going to be alright, little…Everything is going to work itself out, Emily,” he said. “I’ve made certain of it.”
“Okay.” I let go of him and wiped at my face. I looked around at the forest and that reminded me of the reason why I’d run in here in the first place. “Mister Burin, do you think Dad’s a bad person?”
“Yes,” he answered without hesitation.
“I knew it,” I sighed. But I already had more than enough proof. More than I ever wanted. I could recall every kill or cruel act Dad had committed while he’d been in my body. I couldn’t hear his thoughts while he was doing them, but I was actually glad for that. I don’t think I really wanted to know what goes through somebody’s head when they shoot a guy’s penis off, set it on fire, and then used said flaming penis to threaten its original owner. Or when shooting a talking tree first and offering it cake second. Seriously, Dad. What the f*!%?
But Mister Burin wasn’t done. “But I think it’s because he had an unusually bad life. Pain changes you both for the better and the worse. He probably hurts people so that they won’t get a chance to hurt him first. And he’s not really sure how to turn that off.” The dwarf gained a thoughtful expression and said, “Take being the Burin for example. I had sigils to contain the demon carved into my body when I was a baby. I don’t remember it now, so I’m okay. But if did, if I grew up with the knowledge of all that pain, I probably wouldn’t be as agreeable a dwarf as I am now.”
“But you’ve been through more bad stuff since then,” I pointed out. “And you’re not mean.”
“Because I actively try to make people comfortable,” he replied. “I see strangers as friends or allies you haven’t made yet. Terry…Maybe guilty until proven innocent is the best way to describe your father’s view of the world.”
“But he’s so mean to you!” I pressed.
“And?”
I blinked at him. “What do you mean?”
“Sometimes words are just words. And you can always take them back.” He placed a hand on my shoulder. “Or replace them with actions.”
“Wow,” I said. “Dad’s totally wrong. You’re most definitely not a brain-dead idiot, Mister Burin!”
“I’m also not afraid of goats,” he laughed. He stood up and helped me to my feet. I reached down, grabbed the gun off the ground, and holstered it. “Are you ready to rejoin the group?”`
I looked at him and then glanced over my shoulder. They were there, in the shadows, waiting for the next time I was alone. But they’d have to wait a while longer. “Yes, sir,” I said. “We’ve got a job to do.” A hooked my arm through his and together we teleported out of those woods, leaving the shadows and my nightmares behind.
At least for a little while.
** spoiler omitted **
After about twenty minutes, Burin and Emily appeared at the edge of the clearing, the girl looking, well, like I probably looked any time I had to go face my parents after I knew I’d messed up. She seemed to be keeping Burin between herself and me.
I sighed, then smiled at her. “Emily, come here,” I commanded softly. She looked at me hesitantly, then at Burin, who nodded. She dragged the dwarf with her, ready to jump behind him at any moment in case I started yelling at her. I hugged her, surprising her. “Come on, Dumbo,” I said. “We have work to do.”
“Y-You’re not still mad?” she asked.
I patted her head. “I said what I needed to say. Let’s leave it at that.”
We returned to the clearing and used the dagger to remove another layer of the doll, which cause Vigliv to reappear and begin to speak once more. “The death of Baba Yaga is no small thing, and you have succeeded in finding it where none have before. Now that you have secured her death, however, you must also locate and obtain her life. Although Baba Yaga hid her mortality away so death could not find her, to be more than a walking corpse, she must still have life. To this end, she ensured that a wellspring of life would flow in an ever-renewing fountain for her purposes. Guarding and protecting this source of life she tasked to her daughters, the Queens of Irrisen. After one hundred years of rule, these queens rejoin Baba Yaga and take up the responsibility of ensuring that her wellspring of life never runs dry. Now you must face the queens of old to reclaim Baba Yaga’s life and escape with your own as well.”
That wasn’t ominous at all.
“It’s mine and I want it! Get it back from them—they can’t have it! I’ll tell you if you’re getting close. Go now, into the wyrm’s maw!” Baba Yaga’s voice demanded from within the doll.
So, because we’ll do anything to save the world, apparently, we located the corpse of a frost wyrm and walked into its gaping mouth. For some reason, it seemed appropriate to send in Burin first – likely because if this thing was going to eat us, it’d definitely be unable to resist chomping on him first – and we watched as he teleported away. That was good enough for me, so I followed, as did the others.
We were in another wooded area, and a quick search led us to a cottage, to no one’s surprise. On the porch was the crumpled form of a dead dybbuk, as well as a powerfully enchanted besom – look, yes, it’s a s$@*ty broom made of twigs tied to a bigger stick. But I’m not going to write that every time, so we’re calling it a besom. And I don’t mean that it was a little powerful. This was an artifact level piece of equipment. I’ve seen enchanted planes with less magic in them than this twig broom.
Naturally, as a group of highly responsible adults, we allowed the child to grab it.
The inside of the cottage was a battlefield. Someone had gotten here ahead of us and had destroyed everything defending the house. Ensorcelled mannequins, the dybbuk outside, another animated stove, and even a jotund troll had fallen to their might.
Yes, Gregor skinned the troll. I don’t even know why anyone feels the need to question that at this point. Just assume that if something is skinnable, he skinned it. It’ll save time.
Tracks from those who came before us led into a closet. Burin investigated it, determining that there was a hidden path beneath the floor. So we all went in to investigate it. The closet was surprisingly spacious. I mean, it’s not anywhere near the size of either of my closets, but it was big enough for all of us to comfortably fit.
Gregor tried punching through the floor, only to find that it was enchanted to the point of complete resistance to his attacks. So Emily tried smacking it with the s+++ty broom.
Have you ever been in a strange closet with several of your mismatched travel companions, only to suddenly find the floor missing and fall nearly fifty feet before you remember you can fly just in time to slow yourself before you crash to the ground of an icy cave another hundred feet below? Yeah, I can check that one off my bucket list.
Once we dusted ourselves off, we found at least some of those who got here before us. A half dozen men in livery marking them as Queen Elvanna’s elite forces, and they’d died fighting ice elementals. But footprints showed that at least a few others had survived and made it further into the cave.
So, we followed them. Into a magma chamber. Why would the Dancing Hut have a magma chamber in it? I don’t know. I’m not a crazy witch. I mean, I might be going crazy. And I can cast magic. But I’m not a witch. I don’t have a patron. Well…no, Godmother doesn’t count. She unlocked my powers. She didn’t give them to me. Not a witch.
Well, anyway. More of the expedition had fallen fighting a fire giant. But it was clear at least one or two had made it further. So, after Gregor was done skinning him and a couple hellhounds, we followed the trail.
We walked right into something kinda kinky. There was a handmaiden devil with a witch in her tentacle cage, and she had a couple Erinyes helping her torment the witch in ways I’m not gonna describe. Suffice it to say Burin reached over and covered Emily’s eyes.
They were so wrapped up in their “fun” that they didn’t seem to notice our arrival, so we struck first, unleashing a flurry of attacks so devastating that the enemies didn’t have time to react. I knelt by the witch, who begged for death. Which Terry gladly granted.
Burin tried to protest, saying that the kind thing to do would have been to heal her and show mercy. “We came to Irrisen to kill witches, remember, Burin?” Terry asked. “That’s what you kept telling everyone ever since we got here. She was a witch. She’s clearly working for Elvanna. So, she had to die.”
Burin was going to protest, but then thought about it. “I guess you have a point. At least her pain is ended.”
“Unless she went to Hell,” Emily said before she started heading towards the door on the far end of the chamber.
Someone needs to get that girl some therapy.
Maybe all of us need it, after what came next. In the chamber that followed, we finally discovered the truth of what Baba Yaga was doing with her deposed daughters. She was turning them into undead to guard this wellspring of her lifeforce. A hundred years of rulership followed by an eternity of service.
I’d have been angry too.
Over my time adventuring, my powers have developed considerably. From my “well, I don’t mind a little cold” at the beginning to full on immunity to the cold. And thank God for that. I’m pretty sure the ray of cold spell that the undead cast on me would have had the potential to kill me if not. And from what I understand of them, Winter Witches can usually bypass such resistances. To the point that they can slay white or silver dragons, or even ice elementals with their magic.
That suggests that Baba Yaga had drained them of much of their power before turning them into what they were. Not only were they the guardians of the wellspring, but perhaps the source that filled it in the first place.
You know, I’m really starting to wonder if maybe we should leave the old witch all locked up, kill her daughter and let the spell she’s started take its course. Daddy would be able to fix it later. Sure, a lot of people would die. But in the long run, maybe that was the least bad option.
I am far too young to have this kind of moral decision before me. The hardest decision I should be considering is whether I can make it to some kind of exam if I do this keg-stand, or if I should just finish my bottle and call it a day. But no…I just HAD to go on an adventure.
And I’m not complaining about that part. As scary as it has been, it has been great. I don’t mind the danger, or the hard work. I just don’t want to be responsible for the lives of millions if I make a bad call, is all. Though, I guess, with an adventure like this, if you screw up and die, whatever bad call you made that led to your death potentially affects the lives of millions anyway.
I guess I really didn’t think this one through. It was too late to have second thoughts now. I’d rolled the dice, and so far, we were up. So…let it ride, I guess?
Terry hit the youngest of the undead queens with his rocket launcher and was hit with a magical counterattack in response. Meanwhile, Burin transformed into a dragon, Gregor went into melee and Emily…
“Angles!” the girl shouted. “I choose you!”
One of these days, I really need to explain to her that it’s spelled ‘Angels’, and that bralanis aren’t angels. They’re azatas. Either way, I was grateful for their healing magic, as the undead had realized I was immune to ice and had struck me with other attacks. And a couple of them were hitting Gregor with enchanted staves, which looked like it hurt.
Burin ripped them apart, one after the other. Terry headshotted a couple of them, and Gregor ended up managing a two for one decapitation with his throwing hat. Have to admit, that was kind of cool. Also, I burned a couple to ash, because you simply do not get away with throwing ice spikes at me.
Once it was over, Terry whistled as he gleefully cut out the shriveled hearts of the undead. Meanwhile, his daughter had her azatas stand at parade attention and gave them a pep talk of sorts. Thankfully, Gregor decided against skinning them. And Burin helped me feed whatever valuables we could find into the box.
Once we used the power of the wellspring to break the seal on the penultimate layer of the doll, Baba Yaga unleashed a tirade on us, outlining every single one of our faults in her eyes like a pissed off mother-in-law, jumping back and forth between us as new thoughts struck her. I won’t dignify what she said by repeating it here, but I did find the final part interesting.
“…and you smell like feet. I’m stuck in a doll and I can smell it from here! And you, dwarf…suffice it to say that you had better be grateful that I am satisfied with our deal, or I would have it in my mind to chain you to a rock and let a giant crow feed on your liver for eternity as punishment for the sound of your voice and the completely asinine ways you’ve handled encounters with your enemies.”
Burin shrugged. “It’s okay if you’re upset at us. After all, our faults are what make us unique.”
Terry eyed him warily. “Deal? You’re hiding something. I knew you had to be evil.”
Burin looked at him, his face completely devoid of emotion. “You’re right. I am hiding something. I really was the warden the whole time,” he said completely deadpan before turning and winking at me as he walked over to Emily, who was struggling to hold back a laugh.
My vision of these two is that they aren't all that bad. In fact, Elvanna and Typhon Lee's alliance is what saves the planet from Karzoug in a version of the world where Kyle never went to Golarion.
But Lyriana andcompany are doing the best they can with limited information and resources.
I have long been toying with the idea of an alternate version of Reign of Winter, copied and pasted and edited from this thread (which incidentally needs an updated version).
This poses the opportunity for an interesting twist that partially inverts what I just said above: The PCs embark on that path, and somebody else with less scruples signs up with Baba Yaga, and now the PCs have to try to thwart them to keep them from releasing Baba Yaga. Set this up up beforehand if you know ahead of tie that your players like the overall idea of Reign of Winter but will hate the specific idea of voluntarily working for Baba Yaga. Some time after the PC party gets to the point where they would get Baba Yaga's blessing from the Black Rider (and they instead just found a brutally murdered corpse), they find that another party (see below) has already received and accepted Baba Yaga's blessing, and now they have to catch up with the Cheliax party. Not only do they not have to kill the other party, they must not do so at least for a long while, but if they don't eventually thwart the other party's mission, everything is going to go to Hell.
Meanwhile, before they catch up, they could engage in hit-and-run attacks to disrupt things needed for the Ritual of Eternal Winter -- have the mice actually feighting a hard-core guerilla war against the cat. Think Asymmetric Warfare.
And where should this other party be from? That is another twist to add: Since the party is from Taldor (although not directed by the Taldan government), have the other (quasi-PC) party be a party sent by Cheliax (which, when they discover the PC party, at least initially assume that the PC party is secretly operating under instructions from the Taldan government). The opposing (Chelaxian) party must be really well fleshed out -- both with regard to character development (in a PbP, at a minimum, have separate character icons for all of them) and with regard to a high level of optimization at both the individual character and party level (and should be powerful enough and sufficiently smoothly oiled that the PCs risk defeat even if they get the initial upper hand in an ambush) -- but lacking in certain expertise/skills/talents that they need to complete their mission. This opposing party would be a thorn in the PCs side, but would also be necessary for keeping the AP on track, and would also unwittingly need the PCs to keep them from destroying or taking something or someone too soon, and to figure out the various folkloric things in the AP that their Infernal/Hellknight background might blind them to.
If the PC party is sneaking into the Hut on the tail of the Cheliax party, from the Hut's point of view they won't necessarily look like more members of the Cheliax party who just happen to be using Invisibility or something like that, so the PCs are going to have to somehow trick the Hut into thinking that they also have the blessing even though they don't actually have it. Or better yet, they may have to convince the Cheliax party to let them in (Chelaxian leader sayd "hey Hut, we need these mercenaries, but we can't let them in on the secrets of the deal we have, you know"). The Cheliaxian party likely will have lied to the PC party about how they are getting into the Hut, and their Diabolic pride will have a reasonable chance of feeling assured of being able to exploit the Taldor party fot their own purposes. All the better if this happens after a period of Asymmetric Warfare by the PCs against Elvanna's forces (see above), which may have even gotten the attention of the Cheliax party, who decides they want to use the PCs for their own purposes. Of course, when the Cheliax party finds out about and plots to acquire the World Engine later on (and very likely tries to backstab and/or enslave the PC party in preparation, if they haven't already done so), the PC party is going to have to do something about that.
Now, in Cheliax, the Devils are in the Details. If the Taldor party doesn't have Baba Yaga's blessing, they have to depend upon the Cheliax party at least for entry, although being the way they are, the Cheliax party is probably going to try to saddle the Taldor party with as much heavy lifting and risk as possible. Likewise, the Cheliax party depends upon the Taldor party, although I haven't worked that part out as fully. My idea on this is that initially, they want to keep the Taldor party alive to get information about Taldor government plans (initially they mistake the Taldor party for a Taldan equivalent of themselves); later, they find that they need some of the party's abilities, because (even though they won't admit it), their ideology has caused them to shoot themselves in the foot with regard to certain party abilities that the Taldor party has even if they could wipe the floor with the Taldor party in a straight-up fight (for instance, if they are a party of Hellknights, their tactical doctrine that enforces everyone being in Heavy Armor means that they are going to be BAD at anything affected by Armor Check Penalty, even though Hellknight Armor Training partially alleviates this at higher levels, and so they probably won't have members who are highly skilled at these kinds of things; also, their Diplomatic-related skills are likely to be terrible; if they are Diabolists instead, the first problem is alleviated, but the second problem is probably worse except when dealing with actual Devils or allies thereof).
Now, undoubtedly the Cheliax party has additional goals beyond ending the Reign of winter -- and it is likely that they would be happy to end the Reign of Winter in Cheliax and its vassal states but allow it to continue everywhere else, if they could figure out a way to do so, especially if they could figure out a way to offer relief to any state that would capitulate while keeping the freeze on everyone else until they too capitulated. This goal of theirs must be stopped, even if they are essential to stopping the ritual that is ushering in the Reign of Winter. Something like the World Engine would be of enormous interest to them, and even if they can't repair the particular World Engine that is draining Baba Yaga, they have the potential to gain knowledge needed for building another one. This also must be stopped, again even if they are needed for deactivating this particular World Engine.
Actually would be an interesting endeavor to build and flesh out the Cheliax party as worthy adversaries, but ones that you can't just kill without failing your mission, while at the same time they can't just kill you without failing their mission.
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Believe it or not, I'm back with more! This will actually the last "Heart of Snow" entry(more on that clickbait claim after I post the chapter).
To Telos Arhizi.
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I nodded. “I think there’s just the one layer left.”
“You are correct,” Vigliv said, reappearing. “The fate, the power, the death, and the life of Baba Yaga, all
have you claimed. Only one thing remains for you to break her free from her prison and save your world: her blood, which flows through the veins of the ruling queen of Irrisen, her daughter Elvanna.
“Elvanna’s blood is her birthright, handed down from her mother, and represents both Baba Yaga’s and Elvanna’s burning desire to rule their fates and those of others. It is only with Elvanna’s blood, returned to her mother, that you can save your world from the eternal winter that threatens it.
“Even now, Elvanna has sequestered herself in Baba Yaga’s inner sanctum, here in the Dancing Hut, where Baba Yaga formulated her most potent spells and executed her most glorious triumphs, and where Elvanna now works her greatest ritual to cement her power, conquer your world, and supplant her own mother as Queen of Witches.
“Now you must go to this sanctum and face Queen Elvanna before she can finish her ritual. But beware, for time is running short, and Elvanna is truly her mother’s daughter. Her will to power is as strong as the blood in her veins, and she will not give up her desires easily. Heed the guidance of Baba Yaga, however, and you may yet win the day, freeing her and saving your world.”
“Hey, question,” Terry said. “Won’t Anastasia’s blood work? She’s related to the lady in the doll, right? We could have the box whip up a syringe, and I could draw some in a few moments. No harm done and it’s all over with.”
“She lacks the strength of will required,” Baba Yaga answered. “If she wants power, though, I will teach her once I am free. I cannot blame her for my idiot son’s treachery. Now, while I approve of your attempt at thinking beyond the dictates of that which is in front of you – I must admit that I had not thought your meager mind capable of it – I must now require your silence. There are dangers ahead of which I must warn you.”
She told us of the layout of the innermost sanctum, and of the traps that lay ahead. We even got a history lesson on how she’d planted those trees with the edible bark to sustain the people of Irrisen through the cold. I think she just wanted to pat herself on the back about her ingenuity, if I’m being honest.
After the information was given, she rested once more, and we started making ready for our final battle. Anastasia approached Emily. “May I ask a question?”
“Sure,” the girl answered.
“Do you not miss your mom?”
“Of course I do.”
“Then why not summon her? Would you not feel better with her here? I know I’d give anything to have my mother here to comfort me in this terrifying place.”
Emily sighed. “I want her here, but I worry that being here isn’t good for her. Besides, summoning her would make HIM happy, and I still haven’t forgiven him for being an a#@#%~@.”
Terry groaned. “Look, what do I have to do to prove to you that I’m sorry?”
Emily considered it. “Let Mister Gregor punch you in the crotch.”
“What?”
“Three times.”
Gregor looked over at her. “He would not survive more than one, even if I hold back.”
Terry gave him a look. “Come on, man. Not in front of the kid.”
The fighter gave him a serious look. “I punched GAS…and it died.”
The two began to argue, but it didn’t last too long. Apparently Burin had decided it was time to get started on the journey, because Emily teleported away suddenly. Terry and Gregor immediately began following his tracks.
“I…am not sure she truly answered my question,” Anastasia complained.
I put my hand on her shoulder. “It’s probably for the best that you not expect normal from this group. I should follow them.”
“Wait!” the princess said.
“Yes?”
“Surely you can’t leave me here with this…grim reaper, or whatever he is any longer? He kinda freaks me out…”
I sighed. “Okay, fair enough. You can tag along, if Greta thinks she can keep you safe. Just try to stay out of the fighting.”
“I’ll protect her,” Greta said.
We caught up to Burin, who had made it to some kind of tunnel that I suspect was the path to Baba Yaga’s inner sanctum. Gregor and Terry were still arguing when Gregor just decided to punch him to show him how bad it would be.
Terry went flying, landing at Emily’s feet. “That doesn’t count,” the girl said. “It wasn’t your crotch, and you didn’t ask him to do it.”
“Oh, come on!” Terry complained as he dusted himself off.
Through the cave, we found ourselves on some kind of steppes. There was a howling, and we were attacked by a wendigo. Now, you might be wondering why I’m being so blasé about the whole thing, but you weren’t there. I know a wendigo should be a horrifying creature.
But Terry shot at it a couple times, scoring some clean hits, and Gregor teleported to it, unleashing a quick three hit combo to its crotch.
And that was all it took. “See?” Gregor said to Emily. “If Wendigo cannot take three hits, what chance does Terry have?”
“We have nanites,” she said. “We could heal him in between hits.”
Before the conversation could continue, we were interrupted by the sound of riders. A group of giants riding massive beasts that looked like hornless rhinos came bearing down on us. So Burin went dragon and dove in between them, slapping the lead rider off of her mount as he passed. Then Terry threw one of his bots, which wedged into the mouth of one of the mounts and exploded.
Gregor went into his giant form and pinned down one of the riders, so Emily summoned a fire elemental to roast it. I used my magic to turn Nebbie into one of those space dragons so she could support Burin.
A rider tossed a massive spear at Gregor, but the fighter caught it and threw it back, impaling him and sending him flying from his mount. Then it suddenly returned to his hand.
Things generally went downhill for the remaining riders from there. Burin chomped one’s throat, Nebbie grabbed one and flung it into the air like a clay pigeon for me to target. Terry blasted one with multiple rounds from his gun and Emily had her elemental finish the giant off as it fell from its mount. Gregor leapt in, dropkicking one from his steed and punching him to death.
After that, all that was left was for Terry and Gregor to finish off the mounts for Gregor to skin, but first, Terry grinned at his daughter. “See, now that’s how we set things on fire!” She just patted his cheek and went to go thank her elemental.
Of course, we also took anything of value our foes had. Burin got a helm imbued with powerful fire magic stored in gems on it, and most of the rest went into the box.
And then, at long last, we had reached it, The Witch Queen’s Kurgan. Baba Yaga’s Inner Sanctum.
I’m not going to lie. The fight with Elvanna was kinda anticlimactic. But there’s a reason for that. You see, Burin had taken that helm for a reason. “I’m going in first. Trust me, you’ll know when to follow.”
He enchanted himself with as many powerful enhancements as he could, then he charged right in. Moments later, there was a powerful explosion. “I believe I’m beginning to like that dwarf,” Baba Yaga said approvingly from the doll held by Anastasia. “I suspect that was your cue to follow.”
We chased after him, and found the room filled with steam. It took a moment to clear so we could get a look at the aftermath. Burin had been blasted back by the explosion into a wall, but was mostly okay and Elvanna was in the center of the room, encased in ice. The ice melted, and I could see that the queen had taken part of the blast. Her hair was singed, and she was cackling madly.
Gregor charged immediately, and the center of the room became deathly cold. I mean, so cold that even I was affected, and I’m pretty sure I’m immune to the cold now. I teleported back out of the effect as Gregor connected with his blow. Magical feedback struck him, causing him to take some of his own attack’s damage.
“I can do this all day!” he said.
Then a massive T-rex, summoned by Emily, chomped at Elvanna, who knocked away the creature’s massive mouth with a flick of her wrist. “That’s not even remotely fair!” Emily complained, but didn’t have time to say much more as bolts of lightning filled the room, knocking her out.
Elvanna doesn’t hold back, I’ll say that much.
Nanites flared under Gregor’s skin, trying to repair the damage from the lightning. Then Terry squeezed his trigger. The bullet shattered what little remained of Elvanna’s shield magic, and ripped right through her forehead. “LET IT BE KNOWN THAT VIOLENCE ONCE AGAIN SAVES THE DAY! MACHINE OF DEATH!” he crowed.
Like I said, anticlimactic. I didn’t even get to cast a single fireball.
Terry took the nanite gun over to his daughter and healed her. “You okay?” he asked. “I still have some of this old cake if you want some.”
“I’m fine,” she pouted.
We released Baba Yaga, who immediately dispelled Elvanna’s final ritual. “Your world is saved,” the crone said. “As promised for my freedom. The spell was far too rushed, anyway. She threatened to destabilize the entire spell with her shoddy work.”
“Don’t forget our deal,” Burin said.
“Of course, dwarf.” The witch walked over and placed a hand on his head. I watched as she instantly broke the enchantment that tethered him and Emily. She then turned to a statue on the far side of the room. “Take the girl,” she commanded. It roared to life and grabbed Emily, knocking her out again in the process.
But just before losing consciousness, I saw a plea in her eyes. “Help!” it begged.
What.
“That wasn’t our deal!” Burin protested.
Baba Yaga raised an eyebrow. “Wasn’t it?”
“No!” He then blinked. “Wait. S~~*.”
Gregor reacted immediately, teleporting over and striking the witch. “You dare attack me?! I will give you one chance to apologize and beg for your lives!”
I suddenly felt ill as Baba Yaga siphoned the power of the black mantle from us. It was clear that it had hit the others like a punch in the gut as well.
Terry fought through it and raised his gun, shooting the statue’s arm off. “Don’t you dare touch my baby girl!” he yelled.
Burin scooped up Emily and fled the room. I covered his retreat with a pair of fireballs that barely even managed to scratch the old witch. Gregor struck her again, and then he and Terry both screamed in terror and collapsed to the ground, dead.
I got up from my knee, and turned to run…
Then I looked down at my stomach. There was blood there. Why was there blood there? Oh, because of the knife. But why was there a knife? “Greta?” I asked, tears filling my eyes. “Why?”
“You should not have betrayed Baba Yaga,” she warned. “I told you, no one defeats her. And…I’m sorry. I do this for my people.”
She twisted the blade and I fell to the ground. The last thing I saw was my own tears freezing in my eyes.
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Entries that follow will be part of "A Hazy Shade Of...". Well, those that are part of the main campaign. There should also be chapters of our side campaign, "Winter's Doll", which follows the exploits of a resurrected Thora, who serves as one of Baba Yaga's enforcers.
The upcoming couple chapters will actually be written by Terry's Player. There was a bit more to that last fight, but Lyriana didn't witness it. Terry did, for reasons, as you'll see. And then the three boys go on their own little adventure without her. Shenanigans happen. A demon explodes. Fun times had by all. I believe there was cake.
After that, I'll post what happened to Lyriana while she was split up from the rest. I'd actually written that side chapter like two years ago, so it'll be ready when we get to it.
And then...well, there's this little blue planet orbiting a yellow sun halfway across the galaxy from Golarion, and that's where the team will continue their adventure.
There are now three of us living in this house. From what we can tell, Szo's parents blame us for him not taking care of himself. Apparently we should have forced him to not order DashingDoor every single meal. We should have made him exercise. So, yeah, he's living with them and being forced to eat better and exercise.
As for the other missing member of the household. Well, I'm bitterly single now. She was Steve's sister, so he's not taking it well either. We're surviving. But I can't say we're happy. Anyway, enough about that because thinking about it is depressing.
Days we can do Reign of Winter are dependent on the three of us having a morning off together(hard) and getting Szo to come visit(also hard). But the three of us are playing, having started a new campaign.
That means I got to dust off a character concept I was gonna play, which ended up being abandoned after the campaign was scrapped: Lillian, the soul hungry, enthusiastically hellbound summoner whose eidolon is disguised as a tiefling mercenary. Barnaby is DMing(and playing a character loosely based on his FFXIV char, a halfling dragoon) and Steve is playing an oracle who is trying to gather the shards of an artifact and bring Dagon into the world.
If all goes well, Lillian will become the right hand of Eiseth after devouring a solar. Dagon will arise. And Nakoda(along with his donkey/unicorn steed, Donkiote) will find his father(and Donkiote's mother), who was kidnapped by moon beasts.
Oh, and Steve and I have secondary characters who are currently effectively supporting cast. He's playing Paco Bel Grande, a smallish tiefling gunslinger who has an intelligent ankylosaur called Turtle that carries him when he's sleeping(which is most of the time), and I have Sapphire Requiem, an android alchemist who hasn't been awakened yet from the stasis pod she's currently trapped in.
Even though the first book is loosely using Serpent's Skull for inspiration, it's going to diverge wildly after we get off the island, so probably won't be posting that here. Barnaby's posting that on his and Steve's website under "The Ass of Ages", because it's being told from Donkiote's POV.
I have long been toying with the idea of an alternate version of Reign of Winter, copied and pasted and edited from this thread (which incidentally needs an updated version).
** spoiler omitted **...
I somehow missed this. Definitely an interesting idea.
Good to see you back on the air, although the circumstances are terrible.
** spoiler omitted **
Unfortunately, only one of us really needed to catch it before it was going to get us all, vaccines or no. It's the nature of living 5 to a relatively small house.
I've got a Terry chapter or two I really need to remember to upload to my drive so I can post them here. And then I think there's a Thora chapter upcoming after that.
Next Lyriana chapter is already being written as well. Though I still curse my terrible notes. :P
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I looked down. My hands were empty. And semi-transparent.
And identical to those that belonged to the other Terry lying unconscious on the ground beside me. No. Not unconscious.
Dead.
“Fuuuuuuuuuuck,” I groaned. “Again? How?!”
“Terry?” I turned towards the voice. Like with me, there were two Gregors. One already going cold on the ground, and another standing, staring down at his semi-transparent body, confused. The edges of his image were shimmering with silver veins, as if the nanites were trying to keep his very soul from breaking apart and going to Martial Arts Heaven or whatever. The fighter reached out with a degrading hand towards me. “Are w-we dead?” he asked with an uncharacteristic tremor in his voice.
“Apparently, kid,” I said, glowering past Greta, at Baba Yaga. The ancient witch was making some grand speech as she conjured up creatures of night and winter to be her audience. Greta stood nearby, a suit of blackest armor having manifested around her body. The b@%%* even had the gull to hold the enchanted axe that Lyriana had made for her-
Lyriana!
I stepped forward, pieces of myself breaking off as I moved. The girl had fallen onto her side. The knife in her gut had frozen the wound over, caking her stomach in frost and making icy veins spread across her body, freezing her from the inside out. Damn. What a way to go. Say what you will about fire, but eventually, after all the nerves in the body are charred, it’s a generally pain-free way to die.
I frowned at the corpse, confused. Gregor and I had manifested phantoms after…Well, I still wasn’t sure how we’d died. But she was clearly dead and yet there wasn’t a ghostly Lyriana in sight.
“Terry!” Gregor bellowed. I turned back. By this point there was little more than his face and random sections of his arms and chest left. He used a floating, dismembered finger to point. “Burin?!”
No, I thought, gritting the dissolving teeth in my mouth. That idiot!
The last time I’d seen him, the dwarf had headbutted Emily and carried my daughter off to safety, back to the hut. Or maybe to try and get out of the hut now that Baba Yaga had betrayed us. Once she woke up, Emily could summon Persephone and the three of them could…I don’t know. Go back to Melos, try and make a truce with Hercules and Hecate? Or maybe use the magic mirror to contact Lyriana’s dad. Again, I don’t know, I’m just spit balling here!
But no! The dwarf was back. Dragon wings out, he flew over Lyriana’s body and swung his frost-covered axe at Greta. “SHE LOVED YOU!”
The winter wolf just barely managed to get her own axe up in time. The echoing clang of metal striking metal, along with blue-tinged sparks, filled the air as the two weapons clashed. Baba Yaga’s creatures screamed in alarm and rage, but the old witch raised her saggy, wrinkly, probably smelly arm. Her eyes were alight with cruel amusement as she allowed the show to unfold. Maybe she was testing Greta’s resolve?
Well that resolve remained firm as Greta pushed back at Burin, her mouth warped into a fang-filled snarl. “Traitor!” she bellowed. She jumped back, ducked under a swing from Burin’s axe, and slashed upwards with her. The cut wasn’t deep, but a line of blood seeped from the dwarf’s left side. “You’re the one who made the deal!”
“FOR MY SOUL!” Burin roared with as much ferocity as a dragon. “NOT THE LITTLE GIRL’S!”
He released a hand from his axe and used it to shoot a spray of color at Greta. Greta threw her axe up into the air and changed, becoming a giant wolf. The wolf leapt sideways, avoiding the spray. She dug her teeth into the dwarf’s calf, knocking him onto his back. Then, before he could recover, she changed back, caught her axe, and rammed it straight down into his chest. After kicking his axe out of his hand for good measure, Greta leaned in whispered breathlessly to Burin, “Baba Yaga always gets what she’s owed. And right now, she’s owed one lost princess.”
She tore the axe out of him with a meaty squelch. As Burin’s eyes rolled back into his head, she nodded to Baba Yaga. “I promise you, Mistress, that I will find Emily Guiser.”
“See that you do,” the ancient witch replied. “She still has a very important, very tasty part to play.”
“I’m going to kill you!” I screamed, leaping at her. She glanced towards me, seeing me, and then lazily flicked a gnarled finger…
…And someone started whistling.
I opened my eyes and was instantly bombarded with the grinding of rusted gears. But unlike the whistling, the grinding was coming from inside my head. But that didn’t make sense. I glanced down at myself, and everything started making even less sense! First of all, I’d gone from being a ghost to being a crippled automaton! My body was made of bronzed metal. Both of my arms and legs were missing. I was lying on my side in debris-covered dirt. The gears in my head and my chest kept on grinding as I tried to turn myself over.
And then the whistling stopped, and a man’s voice commented, “Ooh! Great! Another robot.”
A pair of hands grabbed my by the shoulders and dragged me over to a large pile of mismatched slabs of metal, propping me up. The hands’ owner then hunkered next to me. He was a stocky man wearing a long, brown coat and big goggles on his forehead. As his coat moved, I spotted metal sections across his torso.
“You seem to be working,” he said with a noticeable accent. He reached into his coat and produced a small oil can. Without asking for my permission, he started lubricating my joints. He then touched my neck, forcing my head slightly to the side. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t get my jaw to move. There was an odd sensation as he pressed a gloved finger into an indention in my neck, as if he were inspecting a wound.
“Ah. The key’s missing.”
With a look of determination, he ventured off. Now that I was upright, I could see that this whole world was just a giant junk heap. I spotted literal mountains of scrap metal off in the distance. The sky was dark yellow, as if filled with poisonous gas.
“Here we go!” the man laughed, running back over. He held up a clockwork key and then inserted it into my neck. Can’t believe I’m saying this, but it was better than any cup off coffee I’d ever had. The gears in my body turned double-time, including the ones in my neck and face.
“Uh,” I grunted, my voice echoing as if funneled through a metal tube. “Thanks?” I sighed, shaking my head. “This must be Hell. Sorry you got dragged into it, man.”
“Not Hell, I think,” the man chuckled, using the oil can to lubricate my joints again. “More like a bad dream.”
“If the dead can dream, than yeah, I guess.”
“Well, I am not dead,” the man replied. “I was asleep.” He gestured to himself. “And now here I am.” He shrugged. “Must have walked into someone’s dream.”
I looked him over. His clothing reminded me of the type of stuff we saw back in the dream version of Lyriana’s home. A pang of remorse and rage filled up my clockwork heart as I recalled the sight of her frozen corpse. “Are you an O’Halloran or something?” I asked. “My friend could do dream stuff like that-Why are you laughing?”
“O’Halloran?” the man giggled, giving me the side-eye. “Surely you jest. I am no character from comic book. You are either wizard or inventor. Not both!”
It was my turn to give him the side-eye. “What the hell’s a comic book?”
The man set down the can. “Book with pictures,” he told me. “Nobody stays dead. The heroes always win.” He made a face. “Which I think is b$&&#*#%.”
I laughed bitterly. “Well, not in this comic book. We won…But also lost. Bad.”
“I also know such experience,” said the man. “Let me find a seat and I shall hear your troubles.” He pulled over a discarded, eroded metal cube and took a seat. He gestured to himself again. “Tell Dr. Hertz.”
“Terry Guiser.” Instead of pouring my heart out, I asked, “This comic book stuff. If I’m just a character in one of those, does that mean that my life…everything I did, everything I went through, doesn’t matter?”
Hertz leaned back on his hands, looking thoughtful. “You must understand. There are many worlds. So many. Incan gods come from different worlds, and I beat them up. And then I go to other world and beat up Vikings.” He made a scribbling gesture with his hand. “So, for all we know, your world is just a different world, and someone has the sight to write down your story.”
“So,” I said carefully, “by that logic, you’d be a ‘comic book’ character to me?”
“Is possible,” Hertz conceded. “Are you aware of String Theory?”
“Yes. But explain it to me anyway so that I know that you’re not wrong.”
He then rambled on and on, using big words and terms I’d never heard before. But, eventually, I cobbled enough of it together for it to jog a memory. “Oh, like that show on the magic mirror…Sliders? Watched some of while I repainted Zeus with-”I jolted forward, nearly toppling onto my face. “EMILY!”
“Emily?” Hertz glanced around. “There is no one else here-”
“She’s my daughter,” I growled. “The dwarf messed up. Made some kind of deal. And now…now that b&++! Greta’s after my daughter!”
I glanced down at my broken body. My metal shoulders sagged. “But I’m dead,” I whispered. I looked at Hertz. “And you can’t help her because when you wake up, you’re just gonna think that all of this was either a dream or comic book.”
He had the audacity to laugh. “If I remember at all.”
I looked him over. “You got kids, Hertz?”
“Doctor Hertz,” he corrected. And then, “No.”
“Wife?”
He considered it. “I got a woman…Let us say ‘accidental slave.’” He held up his hands. “It was either be claimed by me, or Viking rape.”
“At least you weren’t blackmailed into kidnapping a princess,” I said dryly.
“Who blackmailed you?”
“That same princess…And now I lost her. Again.”
"Ah,” Hertz said, nodding. “Classic videogame blunder. You must always know where a princess is. Or she might be in another castle.”
“Sometimes I kind of wish she would have been in another castle,” I retorted darkly. “For her sake.”
“But then you would have no daughter to raise together,” Hertz pointed out.
“Persephone-my wife, the princess-raised her. And my son, Toby.” I couldn’t stop the memories from coming back. But they were memories from before I’d “killed” Typhon. During our time on the farm. Or really… “I’m a murderer, Hertz-”
“Doctor Hertz”
“-not dad of the year. And eventually, once Toby came along, we had to settle down. My boss gave us a farm. Peaceful. Safe.” I hung my head. “Boring. Persephone wanted to be a hero, but she was okay with settling down up until the kids were old enough to adventure with us or go off on their own. But being on that farm was…I don’t know…like being in a giant, cozy coffin. All I had to relieve the boredom was tend to our goats,” I winced, “and chickens and work on my guns. I couldn’t shoot the guns ‘cause they’d make Toby cry. And Emily was so…girly. I lost count of how many times I had to stop myself from setting her dolls on fire after our play sessions…”
I leaned back against the heap, shaking my head. “When I was an assassin, I was out there. Making a difference. Or at least, it felt that way to me. Deciding which s%$*ty people no longer deserved to live.” I scoffed. “How does that apply to raising kids? Look at me…I’m broken. And all I can do is hurt people with my pieces.”
Hertz shrugged. “It takes all kinds of aliens to invade. Sometimes you need hero to save everyone. Sometimes you need villain to kill alien. If you do not have heroes, you have no one to save, and why kill alien if there is no one to save. So what you must do, Terry, is find heroes and form symbiosis."
I considered his words. “That kind of make sense,” I conceded. “Me and Persephone did something like that…and we did okay. Let us survive against werewolves, vampires, and an angel’s cult at least.”
“See!” Hertz beamed, leaning in. “So you mention dwarf? Is he hero?”
“…………………………………………Yes.”
Hertz intertwined his fingers.
“So if you wish to save girl, you should find dwarf.”
I gritted my teeth with such force they cracked despite being made of metal. “I really am in Hell,” I snarled. I rolled my eyes at Hertz. “But how am I supposed to do that?”
He stood up and gestured to all of me. “Well this is dream, so we really must find out how to wake you.”
I nodded down to where my legs should have been. “You think you can make something to give me the decency of being able to walk?”
He snapped his fingers. “I think I know just the thing!” He approached while reaching into his coat again. He then pulled out this glowing, green…thing. He hunkered down tore open a panel in my chest that I hadn’t noticed before. I spotted my metal heart and all of its whirring gears. “I must warn you,” Hertz said, prepared to drop the green thing into my body. “This is nuclear battery. And you appear…clockwork.”
Judging by his apologetic expression, I think I knew where he was going with this “So it’ll either fix me or blow me up?” I laughed humorlessly. “I’m already dead. I’m not even sure that you’re real, Hertz.”
“Doctor Hertz-”
“Hey, man. I got my PhD, too. So as a doctor, I don’t gotta call you doctor. Only basic people have to do that.”
He shot me an odd look. “I don’t think that’s how that works.”
“Tough. Now shove it in me."
Hertz did, slammed the panel shut, and immediately bolted for cover. I watched after him, unsure how to feel. I mean, I was already dead. Was there such a thing as “deader than dead?” Would I cease to exist from any and all planes of reality? Or-
Remember what I said about that key being better than any cup of coffee?
Scratch that.
Nuclear batteries are where it’s at!
Green energy surged into my metal body. Like a giant magnet, the energy pulled in random metal objects and bonded them to my stumps. And then a larger pieces attached itself to my chest. And then my head, creating a helm. But instead of being suffocating or blinding, I was suddenly able to see more clearly then ever before. The grinding gears in my head became a raging chorus. That chorus filled me with the strength to lurch forward, back onto brand new, shining feet.
With my newly improved (and green-tinged) sight, I became aware of movement all around me. But Hertz was gone. Maybe he’d finally woken up.
“Thanks, Doc,” I murmured. “If part of you can still hear me, try and remember this.” Green energy flowed into my back as metallic monstrosities rose all around me. They were big and ugly and here to keep the dead from waking up. “VIOLENCE SOLVES EVERYTHING!”
I flew up into the yellow sky, my arms turning into twin guns as I ascended. Green bullets burst from them, slamming into the monstrosities, making them go boom while I laughed maniacally! Boom! I wasn’t dead! BOOM! I was now more alive than I’d ever been! BOOM! A true machine of death! BOO-
So wake up, sleepy one. It’s time to save your world. You’re where the wild things are. Toy soldier off to war.
I bolted upright and immediately touched at my body. I wasn’t a ghost, or a robot. My super awesome Guns of Untold But Very Satisfying Destruction were gone! Replaced by dark-colored pajamas. I glanced around. Instead of endless junkyard, I’d woken up whole and healed in a bed, in room mostly made of polished steel. I say “mostly” because one wall was one giant window overlooking an endless black sky marred here and there with twinkling stars.
There was knock. I glanced over my shoulder at an oval-shaped door opposite the window.
“H-Hello?” I grunted, my mouth painfully dry.
And a frustratingly familiar, dwarfy voice called through the door, “Hello! Are you okay?”
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He grows up to become a bit of a trickster supervillain who lives for the brawl and the fun of lording his ability over others, but is generally a pretty good guy. Well, as good as you can get while being the kind of guy to go around kidnapping famous musicians to help you make a music video in which you go on a spree of snatching priceless treasures from museums alongside your minions.
He even dated a superhero for a while, but they kinda broke up after they returned from fighting off an invasion of extradimensional ancient Incan(or was it Aztec? I don't remember) gods and she had some terrible PTSD.
Then something happens, and he gets sucked into some kind of portal into a world where two nations are constantly fighting each other back and forth(and having no concept of proper supply lines, so they gain the advantage against their overstretched foe as they get pushed back just a little beyond their borders). Of course, the nation between the two is the real victim of all the fighting, and bad stuff happens to those poor folks.
Well, the faction who he ends up accidentally getting entangled with(vikings who control lightning magic, essentially) is getting their clocks cleaned by their foes(fire magic Roman legions, sorta) thanks to a new sorcerer who fights on their side. And the army who is poised to win the war once and for all is being jerks about it.
And Herr Doktor Hertz hates a bully.
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I see that I've been away too long.
Glad to see you back, even if at long intervals.
** spoiler omitted **
That is an interesting question. :P
Assuming I didn't forget to upload it to my drive, two chapters inc.
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No one was there.
“Burin-Aarrrgh!” My vision suddenly doubled as a pang of nausea threatened to rip my stomach apart. I stumbled back towards the bed I’d woken up in and…and everything changed. Meat. Everything was made of raw flesh. The bed, the walls, door, even the floor I was standing on. And it pulsed beneath my feet, making me fall back onto my butt-
The impact stopped the nausea near instantly. My vision cleared and everything around me went back to normal.
“…Is this Hell?” I asked, eyes narrowed. Had the dream with Hertz been a trick? Emily had mentioned that Nocticula was fond of games like that. Giving hope, letting her victim think they’d escaped, only to yank them back in for another, fresh way of torture.
Something caught my eye. Over on the other side of the bed, my guitar case was leaning against the wall. My breath came out shaky as I got up and slowly walked to it, sure that the bed was seconds from sprouting teeth and pouncing on me. I step kept half an eye on it as I ruffled through my case. Everything except for my rifle and guns were there. Even my bombs and bots. When not activated, I kept my little guys in a case lined with foam. I chose five of them at random and set them down on the floor around them. They’d already been implanted with a special bullet that would allow me to control them. Two of them stretched, one waved up at me, and the last two started fighting.
Attention! I thought down at them. In unison, they all hopped into a single file line and stared up at me, arms straight at their sides.
“Good,” I said. I took our various knives and daggers I kept in my case and gave each of the bots one. The little guys might as well have been carrying broadswords. Without my guns, I looped a few bombs to my belt and took out the Kukri. I sighed down at it. It’s not that I can’t swordfight, but that was always more Persephone’s thing, plus this Kukri made painful memories start to resurface. The only reason I hadn’t traded it away or outright ditched it was out of a respect for a doofus paladin I’d once almost called friend…
“Focus on this story, Terry,” I scolded myself. And so, blades in hand, me and my robotic vanguard approached the door again. It’d closed while I’d been inside preparing. It slid apart again.
“Go out there,” I told the bot directly in front of me. “If there are people on the other side, give me a headcount.”
He nodded and did as told. Dragging the dagger behind him with one hand, he looked back and forth and then turned back towards me, raising four very tiny fingers.
Four. But “four” what? Demons? Enemies?
Well, I wasn’t gonna find out just staying put. So, steeling my nerves, I stuck my head out just enough to see into the hallway waiting on the other side. Unlike in my room, there weren’t any windows, with the walls and high ceiling all forged from polished steel. It was spacious and reasonably populated with humanoids. All of them wore militaristic uniforms in varying shades of blacks and greys. The nearest one, a male with too-wide eyes in charcoal grey, waved at me as he passed by-
“Ah! What?!”
I’d jumped him. I wrapped an arm around his neck and dug the bladed edge of my Kukri against his jugular. Down below, my bots pressed the points of their weapons against they guy’s calves, ankles, or shins.
“Where the hell am I?” I snarled into his ear. Yet, if he offered an answer, I didn’t hear it. Before I could stop myself, I clamped my teeth together and squeezed my eyes shut as the same wave of nausea bubbled up from my stomach and invaded my mind. It lingered as I forced my eyes back open. It took all of my self-control to not cut my hostage’s throat right then and there.
I was no longer holding a man, but a humanoid bug. The face was ant-like, with two bulbous green-black eyes, and mandibles clicking rapidly against each other. I glanced past him and saw that my surroundings were back to being forged from wet meat. Yay.
Suddenly, in my ear, a familiar woman’s voice chuckled, Oh, you’re going for the PG-13 rating. Some scary situations and mild violence. You know, I never would’ve thought a Mighty Ducks and Small Soldiers crossover would work, but I think you’re making it happen.
I turned my head sharply towards the voice. No one was there.
“Did you hear that?” I hissed at my hostage.
“Um, that was the Admirable,” he said, showing me his tiny-barb-covered hands.
I threw him off and grabbed a bomb from my belt. As I did so, I glanced past bug man, to see if the others were coming to help him out. Because of that, I found myself staring across the hallway at fat, tentacle-faced moon beast.
Yep. Bomb Time.
I chucked it at him and prepared to run the other way.
But my bomb suddenly stopped, midair, as if caught by an invisible hand.
And then it turned into an apple. A set of too-white teeth appeared next to it and took a wet bite. They then formed into a wide smile as a face and body steadily unraveled, becoming a pirate. She was tall, wearing a scarlet coat with gold trimming, knee-high black boots, and a horned hat. A six-winged parrot sat on her shoulder. The woman took another bite from the apple and then said through a mouthful, “What? What’re you gonna do? Hit me with that fish?”
I looked down.
Instead of a Kukri, I was now holding a large, freshly-dead fish.
I stared at it, and then at her, and then threw the fish at her.
As it flew, my surroundings shifted again, going from flesh to metal. Bug man and the moon beast also changed back. The latter quickly jumped in and caught the fish before it could hit the pirate lady. Kiss-ass.
I sent a mental command to my robots. They formed in a circle around me, knives out, as I started marching away from pirate lady and her goons, down the hallway. “Nope!” I called back. “A whole lot of nope! I’m just noping out of here!”
“Good thinking!” she laughed after me. “Burin’s down that way!”
At the sound of the dwarf’s name, an uncomfortable ringing filled my ears. It took me a second to recognize it. It was the dwarf’s voice but sped up. I stopped dead and tried my best to focus on my breathing. I’d heard his voice back in the room, as well, but he hadn’t been there. Were we still linked somehow? But wasn’t he supposed to be linked to Emily’s body, not me? And did this have anything to do with how everything kept turning into the inside of some monster’s stomach?
Finally, my mind settled. When I opened my eyes, I fully expected everything to be meat-time again, but no. My surroundings were still normal. Ish. Resigned, I turned to regard pirate lady. “What. Is. Going. On?”
She tossed the apple’s core away and clasped her hands together. “Well, you wouldn’t know this, because you were playing Uno the last time they went to the dreamlands? But you’re in the dreamlands.”
“….Okay.”
She nodded. “Good. Let me explain-Er, wait. No. There’s too much. Let me sum up instead.” She raised white-gloved finger. “So the short of it is that Baba Yaga has your kid. And she’s going to eat her soul. I want to help you because Emily getting eaten would make Lyriana sad. But in order to help you, there are some things I need you to do for me first. So,” she gestured to me and then back to herself repeatedly as she said next, “help me, help you.”
I didn’t have nearly enough self-control to keep my left eye from twitching at the sight of the smug grin she had plastered on. “…Who are you?”
“I’m Batman!” she growled, leaning in menacingly. She then burst out laughing near immediately and waved a hand. “Just kidding! But does who I am matter nearly as much as regrouping with Gregor and Burin-who are both alive by the way!-so that you can all save your kid?”
“Uh-”
She shrugged her shoulders. “Or, I mean, if you don’t want to, I could just tell your wife about it…”
That made me blink. “Wait.” I took a few rapid steps towards her. So rapid that me bots struggled to keep up and the former moon beast shot me a wary look. “You have access to Persephone?”
“Not yet,” pirate lady said. “But I’m sure I have something I could trade for it-Er, her.”
“You mean, you can un-demon her demon-ness?”
“I didn’t say that.” She then shot me wink.
I glowered up at her. “…I don’t like you,” I finally said, my eyes narrowed to slits.
She rolled her eyes. “You don’t like anyone.”
“I like…one or two people!” I exhaled deeply. “It’s fine, it’s fine, it’s fine, it’s-Question: Do you know what a ‘comic book’ is?”
She shot me an odd look. “…Yes?”
My memories of Hertz were still foggy, but gradually coming together. “Because I talked to this guy, and he said we were in a comic book. Something about every alternate reality being an alternate comic book or something…” I showed pirate lady my hands. “I was dead at the time-and a robot-so…”
She scratched at her chin thoughtfully. “I don’t know. Maybe you’re just crazy.” She beamed. “But it’s okay. We’re all mad here-”
HONK!
I jumped back at the noise. I looked around. Pirate lady’s goons look similarly taken aback. In contrast, she just sighed while shaking her head. “I knew I shouldn’t have left him alone in the garden.” She then tapped an emblem on her jacket and declared, “Bridge, beam Guiser and me straight to the Goose!”
And then, without warning, both of us were gobbled up by gelatin. It covered every inch of my body. I tried to scream.
Plop!
The gelatin spat us back out in a completely different room. I landed on my side, unsure whether to scream, barf, or cry. Next to me, pirate lady stood, hands on hips, looking both disappointed and amused. Driven by newfound hate for her, I forced myself to sit up. We were in some kind of garden. It was populated with trees, but they’d been planted towards the outer edges of the garden. At its center was a HUGE circular lake. And at the pool’s center was a giant angry goose with a pair of dwarf legs sticking out of its beak.
There was a tug on my jacket. I looked down. All five of my bots had been transported with me. They all looked at me, and then at the goose.
“…No,” I said, horrified, as the goose shook its head like a mad dog, trying to force its meal down its throat. “You don’t have to!”
My bots looked at each other and then nodded.
“No!” I took a knee. “Not for him! I…I…I can make you stop! I-”
One by one, my robots gave my knee one last, loving pat, and then marched off towards the goose. A part of me, the human part, the part that still felt love, fatherly love, screamed at the rest of me to will them back. But I didn’t.
“Farewell, small soldiers,” I whispered, my eyes stinging. “Farewell.”
With a heavy heart, I watched them jump into the pool, swim over to the oblivious, monstrous goose, latch onto its legs, and-
BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!
Despite its size, the explosions knocked the goose around, sending blood and feathers flying through the air. Because of that, I nearly didn’t catch sight of the emerald fighter flying towards it. He struck the goose in the back of the head, knocking Burin out of its mouth. The feathered behemoth slammed forward, face-first into the lake. A wall of water rose up and carried both Burin to the dry land.
And, at the sight of his stupid face, my vision went red.
Back during the span of time where we didn’t have much to do but wait for the hut to shunt us to wherever we had to go to set Baba Yaga free, Lyriana recommended that Persephone and I have a “date night” to try and ease the lingering tension between us. Percy put on a civil face in front of Emily and the others, but there was a…wall between us now. So much had happened since she’d died. To me it’d been more than three years, but she said it was like waking up from an intense, but short, nightmare for her. Waking up into the body of a monster. Thankfully, her sparring matches with Greta were helping her vent out the excess aggression of her manticore self. Before all of this, she’d been the only person in the world I trusted, who I could talk to. Now it felt like all the sex was more so that we wouldn’t have to talk. And then, inevitably, Emily would go to sleep. Persephone then blinked out of existence, like a bright but painfully temporary light.
So, Lyriana promised she and the others would keep the kid awake (this was after the whole Nocticula ordeal, by the way) while Persephone and I set up shop in the library. She showed me how to use my magic mirror to project images across the far wall. She then sent me a list of Earth movies she thought that we might like.
“So, what are we watching?” Persephone asked. Burin and Gregor had dragged in a couch from one of the other rooms for us to sit on. She’d ditched her armor for a simple tan sundress and sandals. She still wore the magic tiara that allowed her stay in human form for prolonged periods of time. Back in the day, being around her all of the time, I’d gotten desensitized to how beautiful this stubborn princess was. The person inside-as much of a pain and monster magnet as she could be-mattered far more to me than the pretty face and big t++@. But looking at her now, Lyriana was right. A guy like me didn’t deserve to be with someone this hot.
“Don’t know,” I said, cycling through the list. Both Lyriana and Emily had bullied me into taking a bath and ditching my usual gear for something called a “tuxedo.” They’d even confiscated all of my guns and bombs! “How about…this one. This lady’s got a sword and, judging by the title, gonna murder some guy called Bill.”
I hit play and sat back.
…I’m not saying I ignored Persephone the entire time the movie was on. But at one point I was just hunched forward, hands tented under my chin, unable to look away from this bloody masterpiece of intoxicating violence. Our hero, an assassin, hunts down the other assassins who betrayed her, all with the ultimate goal of taking down her old boss, Bill. Every time she sees one of her old “friends”, her vision goes red and horns start blaring through her ears.
So, back in the present, all I saw was scarlet and those same horns screamed through my skull as I watched soggy Burin Frostfist get to his feet. He pushed his wet hat out of his eyes and looked around.
Every fiber in my being seemed to vibrate with rage as I walked towards him
“Oh!” He perked up at the sight of me. “Hello, Terry!”
The horns became thunder as I bent forward and placed my hands on his shoulders. I then whispered, only loud enough for him to hear, “I want to hear why you did what you did.”
He jerked a thumb over his shoulder, towards the dying goose. “I was looking for a way to take this ship out of the dreamlands and into Baba Yaga’s realm, so that we can ram it into her. And then the goose ate me.”
I dug my fingers deeper into his shoulders. If it hurt him, he didn’t show it, and that just infuriated me further. I felt the corners of my lips pull back into a painful smile. “Listen, I am all for ramming metal objects into old ladies, but that is not what I’m referring to, Burin. I’m talking about the part where we all died. The part where Baba Yaga said you traded away my daughter’s soul.”
“No!” Burin cried. “I traded a life. Though, I, um, likely misspoke while making the deal…”
Both of my eyes were twitching uncontrollably by this point. “And you didn’t think to run it by the rest of us?!”
“Like you informed everyone else when you tried to kill yourself?” he shot back.
“That was my life!”
“Yes, and I was giving up my life.” He looked down at himself. “…I was willing to die for her.”
Eventually, you reach a point where you’re just so angry, so enraged, that your brain and body just give up. They just can’t sustain it. You go hollow. I shoved him away. What else could I do? I could throw all kinds of bombs at him, shoot him all day, and he’d probably survive. So, face hurting, my insides feeling cleaned out, I took a step back. I glanced past Burin and saw Gregor approaching, sipping from his flask. He sniffed it and then told me casually, as we both hadn’t just come back from the dead, “This cranberry juice tastes a bit off.”
Pirate lady approached the fighter, sniffed it herself, and then told him, “It’s not cranberry juice. It’s milk. Trust me. You don’t wanna know which kind of creature it came out of.”
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“So,” I said, massaging the bridge of my nose with one hand and using the other to point at pirate lady, “Batman here, who turned my sword into a fish, needs us to do a job, and then she’ll take us to Emily. And she has a way to get into contact with Persephone, apparently, without needing Emily? It’s all very vague and confusing and, occasionally, everything around us suddenly turns into meat.”
“Wait,” Gregor said, “you had a sword?”
“Every man thinks their knife is a sword,” pirate lady whispered loudly.
“…I…have decided that…that for the sake,” I swallowed hard, “for the sake of my family-”
“Are you okay?” Burin interrupted. “You’re talking very slowly. Have he suddenly been hit by a slow spell, Samantha?” he asked pirate lady.
I stared at him, repeatedly clenching and unclenching my fists at my side. “Burin, I need your help to-”
He reached into his coat and offered me a cup. It was already halfway filled with water from his dunk in the lake. “Here. It should clear things up.”
“WHY CAN’T YOU JUST MAKE THIS EASY?!” I screamed.
Instead of responding to my cry, he forced the cup into one of my hands. “Drink up,” he told me. “You might have some mental damage.”
I walked away.
I plopped down in at the edge of the lake. Part of me hoped that the goose wasn’t dead and would come back to eat me…
“Okay, so let’s make this quick, and explain why Burin’s plan isn’t going to work, so that we can move on,” Samantha declared. She snapped her finger. Mercifully, this time the teleportation didn’t involve gelatin. The garden evaporated and she, the boys, and I were suddenly sitting in a giant room filled with rows of red seats facing a giant, wide magic mirror. I think, in Earth terms, it was called a movie theater? Samantha stood up and waved a hand. The disgusting frozen image of Baba Yaga’s gnarled face filled the magic mirror. Behind her, three on either side, were six tall pillars.
Samantha cleared her throat and turned to address us. “So, when you were in Baba Yaga’s realm, you returned her death to her. This means that she can currently be killed. As a stopgap measure, because she cannot remove her death again until the next Witch’s Moon, which is months from now, she needs your daughter fattened up. To fuel the ritual. She needs to fatten up Emily’s soul, store it with enough power for the ritual to work.” She pointed at the pillars. “At the moment, Baba Yaga has tied her lifeforce to these six pillars. So you need to destroy them. But you can’t do that till Lyriana gets back. So there’s something else we need to do before you do that. And by ‘we’ I mean you because I’m not going.”
I raised a hand.
She pointed at me. “Yes?”
“So, you need us to do a thing before we can do a thing before we can do a thing before we can actually do a thing and then do that next thing and then finish the thing so that we can finally save the day,” I said dryly.
“Exactly!” she laughed. “Glad you understand!”
“…And you just don’t want to do it yourself?”
“Oh, no! It’s just if I show up, Baba Yaga will know that we’re up to something. She’ll sense me.”
“And she won’t sense us?” Gregor asked. “Are we no longer her Black Riders?”
“Nope,” Samanatha replied.
“Because she gave the mantel to that b$!~@!” I sneered. “I knew it, guys! You can’t trust a b#*$$…”
“To be fair, the people Baba Yaga would least suspect of stopping her would be the ones she just killed,” Gregor said, a trace of anger in his voice.
“Yahtzee!” Samantha exclaimed. I don’t know why. She just did. She then pointed at me. “Now, imagine you have your robots, and you need to sneak into the farmer’s garden to steal the carrots. You don’t send a giant robot, because then he’d notice and whip out his shotgun. No, you send the tiny versions. You understand yet? I’m the big awesome robot and you’re all the teeny tiny pathetic robots.”
“Gee, thanks,” I replied sarcastically.
“So we’re stealing carrots?” Burin asked.
“No, I’m talking about destroying those pillars,” Samanatha answered.
I raised an annoyed eyebrow at her. “But you just said that we can’t do that until Lyriana gets back from…being dead?”
“Oh, no, Lyriana can’t truly die. She’s just on her own journey right now. She’ll meet up with us…eventually. But never mind that. We’ll burn that bridge when we get there. But now let’s talk about artifacts. Artifacts have certain conditions to be met so that they can be destroyed. What they are is…Eh. We’ll burn that bridge, too. But I happen to know that there’s this one object you’re going to need to destroy the pillars. At some point. So I need you to steal it while I wait here until Lyriana arrives.”
“Uh-huh,” I said. “And what exactly is this magic carrot?”
“Well, do you remember Typhon Lee?” Samantha asked.
“You know I do,” I spat back.
“Well, he was working with a demon lord. She was making some ultimate weapon for him.” She shrugged sheepishly. “I don’t know exactly what it is, but you’re gonna go steal it for us.”
I frowned deeply at her. “You want us to steal from a demon lord?”
“She’s not there right now! She’s busy!”
She waved a hand. Baba Yaga and her pillars were replaced by the image of a grey planet. “The Abyss sometimes sticks to the material plane and infects worlds. This is one of those worlds. There’s a laboratory there, so I’m gonna send you down there, you’re going to grab the ultimate weapon, and then another weapon that I know someone will pay you A LOT of money for-”
“Money?” I interjected. “Alright. We’ll do it.”
Samantha shot me an odd look. “Anyway. It’s going to look like an orb. I don’t know what it does. But you need to get it for me.”
It was Burin’s turn to raise his hand, yet he didn’t bother to be called on before saying, “The dreamlands is a massive place though. So in this analogy of the farmer’s plot, couldn’t this dreamlands have a form of government that could acquire the land and crash this space ship into said land?”
Samanatha stared at him. She didn’t look like someone used to being out…Burined. “Here’s the thing,” she finally said, “doing things like that is like…everybody wants the same land. Gods, demon lords. The Abyss has claim on part of Golarion, there are gods who wanna stop it, some who wanna help it, it’s a thing. So if I reach my hands in there and try to claim the land, there’ll be, like, thirty-two gods who’ll come and kick me in the face. And I don’t want that…So we’re not doing that.”
She raised a finger before Burin could argue. “And even if you did crash land this ship on Baba Yaga, it would destroy everybody else but her because the pillars are still up and functional.”
“Which means that Emily wouldn’t be eaten,” the dwarf countered.
“Er, yes, but she’s still in that area. So the impact would probably destroy her…or warp her horribly.” Samantha turned to me. “How do you feel about your daughter having tentacles?”
“…I am very opposed to the idea. Personally.”
She turned back to Burin. “There you have it. The dad vetoes it.”
All this talk about Emily dying brought up something I’d been meaning to ask, so I did. “Hey, so reviving just one person usually talks a lot of money and top tier magic. But you revived three?”
“I did,” Samantha said with a nod. “Easily.”
“Except Lyriana? Is that part of being an O’Halloran?”
“Hmmm, not really. More of a present I gave her before she was born.” She then smiled with far too many teeth, and the nausea returned. The room warped, becoming goopy meat. Gregor and Burin hadn’t changed and didn’t seem to be seeing what I was seeing. But what I was seeing mattered less than what I was hearing. It was like back when I’d been hearing Burin’s voice in my head, but this time it was a thousand voices in a thousand languages, laughing and screaming until they all came together, converging into one, booming voice.
THAT IS NOT DEAD WHICH CAN ETERNAL LIE.
As soon as the last word was uttered, the world around me went back to normal. Samantha was back to smiling with a normal amount of teeth, conversing with Burin while Gregor drank from his flask.
“…Uh, um, where…where was I…What was I talking about?” I managed to gasp out.
“Me reviving you all and not Lyriana,” Samanatha said.
“Oh. Right.” I swallowed hard and straightened up in my seat. “So, theoretically, you reviving a baby shouldn’t be a big deal.” I raised my hand before she could speak. “Okay. I don’t actually care about the money. I’ll do this. For my daughter. And my wife. But I also want my son, Toby, back. And that should be super easy for you, right?”
Samantha grimaced and sucked in air through her teeth. “That’ll actually be tricker than you’d think. See, Typhon kind of sent your son’s soul to-”
“The Abyss,” Burin said.
“No. Hell. Not the Abyss. The Abyss is easy. They don’t pay attention there. You can just walk in and out. But Hell? It’s all paperwork.” She slapped a hand to her brow and groaned, “There are sooooooo many forms. You have no idea. It’s like the DMV?”
“DMV?” Gregor, Burin, and I repeated.
Samantha rolled her eyes. “Okay. Let me think…Smuggling! You have to have the proper paperwork to smuggle goods from one city to another, maybe grease the right palms…Wait.” She snapped her fingers. “I got it! Okay! I know these guys. Super chill bros. They like saving the innocents. Well, one of them does. The other one likes experiencing new things and having fun. And making pancakes. A lot of pancakes. So I call in a favor…and another favor…And apparently Cayden Cailean is a friend of a friend of mine, so I’ll borrow one of his top guys. Tiefling. People think he walks around naked-”
“But he actually wears armor that’s invisible,” I finished. “You talking about Bard Pitt?”
“Yes!”
“Old friend?” Gregor asked me. “Er, well, considering this is you we’re talking about, ally?”
“Pitt was once a high-ranking general in Lee’s syndicate. Abdicated a year or two before…Well, what happened at the farm happened. I asked Pops to see if he could track him down for help while I was in Emily’s body, but no luck. Guy became a ghost. One who also considers himself to be Cailean’s boyfriend or something.”
“Anyway,” Samantha said, “these three will go on a little bit of a crusade and steal your son’s soul back from…well…” She coughed into her fist, “Asmodeus.”
No one spoke for a full minute after that. We just stared at her in horror.
“…Let me get this straight,” I finally managed to say. “My son, my baby son, was kicked so hard into the fireplace that he ended up with ASMODEUS!”
“…Basically,” Samantha replied sheepishly.
“He’s been with Asmodeus for the last THREE YEARS!”
“…Maybe he’s learning the magic dance?” Samantha leaned back against the back of a nearby seat. “Listen, Pitt and the guys will be storming the gates of Hell in no time. They’ll be out of there in twenty minutes…though time does run differently in Hell, so it’ll likely feel longer for them. It’ll take a bit, but I have plenty of faith that they’ll get Toby out.”
“…Okay,” I said, running my hands across my face. “So, my son is being saved by a naked tiefling and pancake-maker from the evilest of evils.”
“Eh, Asmodeus is more of a big grouch than an EVIL evil,” Samantha said. “I mean, he is so terrible at parties. He gets so mad when you put the bean dip by the nachos. Because apparently the bean dip should go next to the Fritos.”
“What the f$+% are Fritos?” I groaned.
She snapped her fingers. Something fell into my lap. I looked up just in time to watch a band of men with fluffy mustaches bust in, playing guitars. Samantha had also replaced her pirate costume for a poncho and stupidly big, wide-brimmed hat. Atop my lap was a bowl of curved, brown chips. Gregor and Burin had also received a bowl.
Samantha gave us a few minutes to eat and mull over things and then whisked the band away. She then pointed at the image of the planet. It suddenly zoomed in, focusing on a few buildings made out black stones illuminated by magic fire. There seemed to be some commotion going on. I squinted and spotted three…demons? They were running away from the building, carrying various things. Had they just looted the place?
Each demon seemed to be a different type. “By three they come,” Samantha said with a wicked smile. She reached into the image and tapped one demon on the head. He froze in place and the others stopped to look at him. “By three, the way opens.” Her arm stretched and tapped the other two. They dropped their loot, pulled out knives, and slashed their own throats. Blood dripped out and rose up, creating a web of blood that stretched out across the magic mirror. Samantha took back her arm and nodded to us. “Alright then. Time to go.”
“Yeah, alright,” I said, unbothered by the casual demon murder, “but I’m gonna need a new gun, lady.”
“Oh. Right.”
She snapped her fingers.
A giant banana fell into my arms.
Unfazed, I peeled it. And found a new gun inside.
“Now this is just a loaner,” Samantah told me. “We’ll work on getting you something more permanent. But this should be enough for now.” She took a step back, gesturing to the giant, bloody portal she was expecting us to walk into. “Good luck, fellas. And you know what they say: when life give you random vials lying next to the corpses you’re going to spawn next to, drink them.”
Gregor, Burin, and I exchanged looks and then walked forward into the demon planet.
I mean, it’s not like things could get any weirder. Right?
Right?
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Glad to see you back again!
Anyone on the air?
Anyone on the air?
I'm still here. I still need Barnaby to write up some Terry chapters so I can continue on with Lyriana ones, but the boy went and wrote a novel instead.
Still have maybe a half dozen more chapters I can put out, but with Szo having moved out to live in a small town about 30 mins from here, us playing has become even more difficult. I'm still hoping we'll finish it, shortening each of the remaining "books" I had intended into singular sessions. But time will tell.
We're doing a three person campaign that started with Serpent's Skull book 1 and has gone off on its own thing now that we're on Castrovel. Kyle ends up having to deal with the mess the party leaves behind when they get teleported away.
In other news, I'm almost done writing my first novel as well. It's LitRPG harem trash that actually has the MC based on someone I know IRL. Have built the barebones of a simple RPG system from scratch so I can keep track of what characters get when they level.