by A. J. Markam
“ – so I can sleep?!”
“Yes, okay, you get a Get Out of Jail Free card.”
Stig stared at me.
“It’s an expression,” I said. “From Monopoly.”
He looked even more mystified.
“It’s a board ga– never mind. You get one free time when we want to have sex, and you can tell us not to.”
“I didn’t agree to this,” Alaria said indignantly.
“Shhh,” I shushed her, then turned back to Stig. “Deal?”
“Should be ten times,” he grumbled, but he followed along behind us.
We went down the hallway towards the dining room. Even at this ungodly hour of the night, there were still servants in black robes and mirrored masks walking around, toting things silently from one end of the compound to another.
Again, I was filled with the unmistakable sense that I had seen all this before. And not knowing where I’d seen it filled me with a nameless dread. Like encountering a box with creepy scratching sounds coming out of it, but you have no idea what the hell is in there.
Curiosity got the better of me as we were passing by one of the figures in the hall.
“Hold on,” I said to Alaria and Stig, then turned to the black-robed servant. “Excuse me – can you talk?”
The robot walked right past me without acknowledging me at all.
I ran past it and got in its way. “Hey – I need to ask you a question – ”
The mirror-faced robot tried to go around me, but I stepped back in its path. “Hey, I need some – ”
And then the thing just walked right over me.
Okay, it didn’t exactly trample me, but it did barrel right into me, shoving me backwards and nearly knocking me onto my ass.
Which pissed me off.
“Hey!” I barked. “Not cool!”
I pushed it in the chest like I was ten years old again in a playground fight –
And was shocked when I felt not hard metal beneath its robes, but soft, yielding flesh.
“What the hell?” I muttered.
The robot acted like I hadn’t even touched it and just shouldered right past me.
I spun around, followed close behind it, and ripped the hood off its head. The mirrored mask was attached to a black metal housing that covered the back of its skull.
“Guys, come here and help me!” I called out.
Alaria and Stig came running over, propelled more by curiosity than anything else.
I bearhugged the robot/servant/whatever the hell it was from the back, pinning its arms to its torso. It immediately began to struggle.
“See if you can take off its mask!” I ordered.
Alaria frowned. “Why?”
“Just do it! I can’t hold him much longer!”
It was true – the robot was now beginning to thrash back and forth in my arms.
Alaria reached out and grabbed the silver mask, and there was a cracking sound as she pulled it off.
Alaria and Stig immediately backed away in terror, and one of Alaria’s hands went up to her mouth as she gasped. The mirrored dome slipped from her other hand and shattered into a dozen pieces on the ground.
“What?!” I yelped. I was still behind the thing, so I could only see the black housing still attached to the rear of its skull. “What is it?!”
“It’s not a robot,” Alaria whispered in horror.
I let go of the servant, which immediately stopped thrashing and began walking slowly down the hallway like nothing had ever happened.
Alaria and Stig stepped out of its way, and I circled around to get a look.
Alaria was right – it wasn’t a robot, but a blue humanoid demon.
With electrodes covering its bald head.
It looked like somebody had woven a bird’s nest of wires on top of its skull, with metal contact pads attached to its temples and forehead.
And its eyes… instead of glowing yellow like most demons, its eyes were a glassy white, unseeing and dim.
It still wore the collar of a slave, though – black leather dotted with semi-precious stones.
Like a cheaper version of the diamond-studded choker that Soraiya wore.
The demon didn’t even notice we’d taken off its mask. It just continued to shuffle down the tunnel like a zombie.
“What the hell?” I murmured.
“That’s what she said,” Stig whimpered.
I didn’t bother to correct him. Instead I looked over at Alaria. “Do you recognize that guy?”
She nodded. “Sterj. He was here even before I was.”
“Shit… that means Orlo didn’t get rid of his demons. He’s still got them around – but they’ve lost their minds or something, and he’s just passing them off as robots.”
And then it hit me why the black robes and mirrored masks had all seemed familiar.
There was an old Disney movie called The Black Hole. It came from a time when Disney made more than Marvel movies and cutesy animation pictures, because The Black Hole is pretty damn scary – at least for a seven-year-old. My dad showed it to me when I was in first grade, and told me that it scared the crap out of him when he saw it in theaters when he was a kid.
In the movie, a small band of space explorers find a ship long thought lost. It’s hovering on the edge of a black hole, just out of the reach of its gravitational pull. When the team boards the ship, they find a captain with a bunch of robot helpers. The captain claims the original human crew all abandoned ship, and he is the only one left to study the black hole.
One of the major twists (spoiler alert) is that the robots are actually the missing crew members. The captain apparently lobotomized them and turned them into undead automatons to do his insane bidding.
The thing about the ‘robots’ in The Black Hole?
They’d all worn black robes and mirrored masks – just like Orlo’s servants.
The gnome had enslaved his demons once, then done something to their minds and enslaved them all over again. The first was bad enough, but the thought of all those poor creatures forever trapped in a state between life and death… that was even more horrifying.
“But why would Orlo do that?” I wondered out loud. “The demon was already his slave! Do you think there was a rebellion or something?”
Alaria shook her head. “Not unless another warlock came in and freed them, no. There’s no way they could rebel against the collars. Well, maybe one could attack him, but it’s unlikely.” Suddenly Alaria’s expression went from fear to outrage. “That bitch lied to us!”
“What are you talking about?”
“Soraiya said that he got rid of all the demons and created the robots a couple of years ago. She didn’t mention anything about him turning them into robots!”
“So she is playing us…”
“I told you we shouldn’t trust her,” Alaria growled.
“If she was lying, then we could be walking into a trap.”
Stig did an abrupt about-face. “I’m goin’ back to bed.”
“No, we still need to know what the hell is going on around here. Let’s not go exactly where she told us to go, but we can still look around.”
“I agree,” Alaria said.
“Fine,” Stig groaned.
Instead of continuing on our route towards the laboratory, we decided to backtrack and take another tunnel. It led us to the kitchen, which was dark and still at this time of the night.
We returned to the dining area and took another route – which led to a bunch of storerooms filled with barrels and burlap bags and other mundane stuff.
Every time we hit a dead end, we would backtrack and try another route. Most of the results were unremarkable – until the fifth attempt, when we found something entirely different.
It was a gigantic cave at least 20 feet tall – maybe more, though it was hard to tell. To keep our presence as inconspicuous as possible, Alaria reduced her fireball to a single flame in the palm of her hand. Beyond its limited reach, everyt
hing turned to pitch black.
“Guys,” I whispered, “give us some more light.”
Alaria and Stig produced fireballs in both hands and lit up everything within ten yards.
I had underestimated the size of the cave. It was more like 50 feet tall, and might have been as big as an airplane hangar. I couldn’t tell for sure because we could only see so far by the firelight.
But what we could see was mind-blowing.
The flickering light revealed half a dozen massive metal robots towering above us, with even more of them dimly hinted at in the shadows. They stood silent and still, like terracotta warriors in the tombs of ancient Chinese emperors.
The robots were humanoid in shape, with two arms and two legs – but not two hands. Every left arm ended in a metallic, barrel-sized cylinder that looked like a jet engine turbine. The right arms had articulated metal hands with fingers as big as fire hydrants and palms the size of car doors.
The robots had heads, too, but they were tiny in comparison with their bodies – like walnuts sitting on top of a mannequin’s torso. Their small, round, glass eyes glinted in the firelight.
They were also heavily armored, with metal plates that would have looked right at home on a Sherman tank. They had massive iron shoulders, oversized forearm gauntlets, Mack-truck-sized chests tapering down to ridiculously thin waists, with smallish thighs that connected to gigantic conical calves and feet that looked like teepees made of copper.
More than anything they looked like anime steampunk robots – not sleek and futuristic, but clunky and unwieldy, like something a mad scientist might’ve constructed in Victorian England if he’d had the technology.
The game had flying pirate ships, so massive war robots wasn’t that big a stretch. However, I’d never seen anything even remotely –
“SEIZE THE HUMAN!” a familiar nasal voice rang out behind us.
The glass eyes of every single robot in the hangar lit up at once, and the closest machine lunged at me far faster than its hulking size would have suggested.
If I hadn’t been taken by surprise, I might have had a fighting chance – but before I could react, cold metal fingers wrapped around me and hoisted me 15 feet into the air. With my arms pinned by my side, I was helpless to cast any spells.
“Ian!” Alaria screamed.
“Aah, aah, aaah!” Orlo chided. As he waddled out of the tunnel behind us, another figure appeared behind him –
Soraiya.
At first I wanted to kill her for her betrayal, but I couldn’t help noticing how unhappy she looked as she followed her master.
Orlo wagged one finger at Alaria. “Those are my war golems, and if you attack them, it’s exactly like attacking me!”
War golems?
In OtherWorld, golems were clay statues that dark Mages animated with magic, usually to serve as guards or foot soldiers. They were strong but dumb as fuck.
Had Orlo come up with an improvement on the original concept, but made them out of iron and copper?
“As for you, my little imp,” the gnome continued, “if you so much as teleport, I’ll have my mountain-sized minion crush your master like an egg shell!”
Stig looked up at me fearfully, as though asking what to do.
I paused, then shook my head no.
Orlo grinned. “Wise choice – for a fool!”
“You BITCH!” Alaria screamed as she charged at Soraiya, summoning her flaming pitchfork in her hand as she ran.
But before she could get anywhere close to the other succubus, a concussive wave of black energy exploded from out of nowhere and knocked Alaria ten feet through the air and onto her back. As she lay there stunned, Orlo waved his hands, and bands of burning flames formed into glowing ropes across Alaria’s body.
“Somebody forgot about the Hell Oath she swore not to attack me – which includes my minions!” Orlo said in a singsong voice. Then he switched into gleeful lecturing mode. “Now, now, don’t blame Soraiya. She was merely doing what I ordered her to: finding out why you’re really here!”
I frowned at him. “But… you know why we’re really here.”
Orlo got a triumphant look on his face. “Hahaha – yes, I DO know! Who are you working for?! Who’s paying you to steal my creations?!”
“No one!”
“LIES!” the gnome raged. “Tell me the truth or I’ll pull out your tongue with a grappling hook!”
“You idiot,” Alaria snarled from her fiery bonds, “we’re here to kill you – just like we did with Saykir, Jastoth, and Odeon!”
“Then why are you skulking around in the middle of the night, searching out my war golems?!” he crowed, like he’d just proven Alaria’s mendacity.
“We found them by accident,” I said. “We were just looking around.”
“Oh, yes, that’s entirely credible!” Orlo scoffed.
“Well, we weren’t going to follow Soraiya’s advice and come attack you – not after we figured out she was double-crossing us.”
Orlo laughed condescendingly. “And how did you make that brilliant deduction?”
“She said you got rid of your slaves a couple of years ago and started building robots instead. But we ripped the mask off of one of your ‘robot servants’ and found out it was a demon. Which meant she was lying, so we didn’t trust her enough to go attack you in your laboratory.”
Orlo froze, speechless. The look of shock on his face was priceless.
“Vastrix got your tongue?” Alaria asked mockingly.
“Well – I – I still got the best of you!” Orlo spluttered, then gradually regained his jocular arrogance. “Admit it – you fell for Soraiya’s wiles, just as I knew you would!”
“NO, we knew she was a spy,” Alaria snapped.
“No you didn’t – else your entire story about figuring out her ruse by snatching off my servant’s mask was a LIE!”
“No, we really did figure that out,” I said.
“But that means, of a necessity, that you fell for her story to begin with! ADMIT IT!”
“But – ”
“ADMIT IT!”
I sighed. “Alright, fine. I’ll admit, it was pretty convincing to have her come in and have a threesome with us.”
Orlo froze again, his smug smile still plastered across his face. “…what?”
“Yeah, having a threesome with us kind of gained our trust. I’ll give you that.”
Orlo still didn’t move or change his shit-eating grin. “…threesome?”
Alaria burst out laughing. “You mean you didn’t know?! HAHAHAHA!”
Orlo’s face flushed bright red, and he turned to Soraiya with a look of fury.
The plum-colored succubus smiled apologetically. “You said to convince them… so I convinced them.”
“I DIDN’T SAY TO HAVE A THREESOME WITH THEM!” the gnome roared.
“Don’t worry, Orlo – even though your succubus is a lying bitch, she’s still a great fuck!” Alaria jeered.
Orlo turned back towards Alaria, his face twitching with rage.
“I especially like the way she sounds when she comes!” Alaria taunted him further.
Orlo’s hatred turned to shock, and he whirled back around to Soraiya. “You CAME?!”
“Four or five times!” Alaria called out gleefully. “At least!”
Orlo looked crushed as he stared at Soraiya. “You told me you couldn’t orgasm!”
“Sounds like somebody was lying to you, too!” Alaria crowed.
Soraiya scowled unconvincingly at Alaria. “I was just faking it.”
“Reeeeaaally? That’s quite a trick, being able to fake squirting!”
“You FEMALE EJACULATED?!” Orlo screamed at Soraiya.
Soraiya gritted her teeth. “She’s lying.”
“No I’m not!”
“All of my reactions were fake,” Soraiya insisted to Orlo. “All of it.”
“Darling, I know fake versus real, and that was real,” Alaria said sweetly. “I certainly felt your cont
ractions around my tail.”
Orlo looked over at Alaria in alarm. “What did you do with your tail?!”
In answer, Alaria wordlessly slipped her tail between her legs, doubled it up, and started pumping her hips obscenely. She looked like an outrageously endowed porn star fucking an invisible woman on top of her.
The whole time, she grinned and never broke eye contact with Orlo.
Orlo gasped in horror, then turned back to Soraiya. “You did THAT with HER?!”
Soraiya shrugged. “I had to convince them…”
“You should’ve seen what she did to convince Ian,” Alaria called out.
“W-what?” Orlo asked, his voice filled with terror.
Anal, Alaria said silently, then howled with laughter.
Orlo flipped out. He turned back to Soraiya in panicked outrage. “YOU DID – ”
Anal?! he mouthed.
“Well, I didn’t enjoy it – ”
“Oh yes you did, you lying whore!” Alaria laughed. “And I know for a fact that you loved it when Ian came inside you!”
Orlo clutched his chest like he was about to have a heart attack. “You – you let him – oh… oh no… I’m going to be sick…”
“Alaria,” I whispered harshly. “Cut it out!”
Humiliating Orlo would only make things worse for us – but Alaria didn’t care. If she couldn’t kill him, then this revenge was almost as sweet.
Unfortunately, my whisper drew Orlo’s attention, and he stared up at me with overwhelming hatred. “So, you think you bested me, eh? Think you came into my house and played me for a fool, eh?”
“No, no, not at all,” I said hurriedly.
Orlo began to nod furiously, an insane gleam in his eye – like he was listening to a little devil on his left shoulder whispering into his ear. “Yes… yes, I think that’s precisely what we’re going to do!”
He pointed at Alaria.
“I’ll handle you later – but first I’ll deal with YOU!” he screamed at me in rage. “War golem – CRUSH HIM!”
The metal hand around me suddenly contracted, and there was a series of crunching pops! as every bone in my torso broke.
I screamed in agony, but the pain only lasted for a second.
Then everything went black.
16
