by Ian Rodgers
“That shouldn’t be too hard to locate. Can’t be that many tents,” Gaelin mused.
“Found it!” Dora shouted, pointing towards a distant green blob on the horizon. It was close to the edge of the Floor itself, built against the sheer stone wall that enveloped the ever-descending settlement.
We quickly flew towards it, landing outside of the tent but not before catching a glimpse of several warehouses surrounding the locale, no doubt where the actual wood was stored.
“Do you have any Shadow wood that’s been aged about a thousand year or so?” Dora asked as we entered the tent. The owner – some sort of centaurian insect, his lower half that of a termite, the upper half like that of a humanoid ant – flinched when Dora spoke, and tensed up when Gaelin entered. Only when he spotted my presence did the lumber merchant’s expression take on a look that was not one of worry and fear.
“What’s up with him?” the halberdier asked aloud.
“Gaelin, take off your helmet,” I suggested. He shrugged but complied, removing the black metal helm. When the shopkeeper saw he was a human, he finally relaxed, but only slightly.
“Let me guess, you thought Dora was a member of that Iron Bristle or whatever gang?” I asked the man, and his antenna flailed wildly.
“Yes, very worried,” he replied, his voice shrill and sounding like the buzz of a wasp’s wings. “Orcs make big messes! Big messes on Floor! Be mean to shopkeepers, steal goods by calling it ‘price of protection!’”
“Well, we’re just here to buy some wood. Like Dora here said, Shadow wood that’s a thousand years old, please. In planks, if you have it like that.”
“Shadow wood? Yes have some. How much do you want?”
“A hundred pounds of the stuff, my good man!” I said.
“I am woman.”
“Erk! Uh, sorry,” I replied. Gaelin and Dora both snickered at my misfortune. The owner of the lumber depot didn’t seem that bothered, thankfully, and led us to one of the warehouses ringing the tent.
“Here! Finest Shadow wood, cut from the Elemental Plane of Shadows and transported straight here to Down for processing! No pesky import taxes here!” the insectoid buzzed happily.
“Very good quality,” I said, running a tendril along the surface of the dark grey planks that were stacked up around us. It felt almost like petrified wood to my touch, though there was a great deal of potent Shadow Element mana within each piece of lumber. “How much for a hundred pounds?”
“Five thousand Crumbling Jade,” the store owner stated. I winced at the price.
“Would this be an acceptable substitute?” I asked, holding up Grandor’s emblem. There was no recognition in the black, compound eyes of the merchant, though.
“High class customers? Or agents of one?” she asked us.
“The second option,” I stated. “We were told this token could be used as a crediting tool. Do you not accept these here?”
“I sell to many lordly types on the lower Floors, so I am aware of this method, but I do not recognize the sigil used. Who do you represent?” the owner asked.
“Lord Grandor the Hollow Stone,” I replied, and her antenna wavered up and down.
“I see! I have heard of him. No worries of default on payment, either. Dwarven pride not allow that. Come, then! We shall make transaction back at tent,” she assured me, and we made the deal. She used some sort of magic clay to take an imprint of Grandor’s emblem, and when the clay turned blue, the insectoid buzzed happily and informed us that that was it.
I went back to the warehouse afterwards and stored the wood in my Dimensional Pocket. Then, I asked her about a teleportation station.
“There is one here on the Fifth Floor,” she informed me. “You can find it near the center of the Floor, near the Diamond Bank and the Maladur Embassy.”
“Thanks!” I said happily.
Once we left, I turned to them. “Okay, that went well. Was a bit worried there at the end, though.”
“Yeah, no way we could afford that on our own,” Dora agreed, shaking her head. “I mean, I have no idea what the exchange rate here is for Eraforian coins, but my meagre savings wouldn’t be enough.”
“At least you two actually have money,” Gaelin said despondently, head bowed in misery. “I lost my coin pouch when fighting the World Rebellion Apostle. Or, rather, he destroyed it. Lost everything inside…”
“There, there, Gaelin. You’ll find a way to make more money someday,” Dora comforted him, patting his back fondly.
“Yeah, that’s true. All I have to do is get back to Erafore and take some gold from the tomb,” he agreed, feeling better.
“Yup. Lucky you,” Dora said, shaking her head enviously at the sheer wealth he had access to.
“Hey! YOU!”
“Don’t worry so much, Dora! Things will get better,” I promised her. “If you need, we can grab some gems or something from around Lord Grandor’s forge and sell them for you.”
“Hey, I’m talking to you!”
“That’s a sweet offer, Jellik,” Dora said, nodding in thought. “Yes, I suppose that’d work. I still have a couple of rough diamonds, though those are for spellcasting purposes only.”
“Did you not hear me?!” A rough green hand abruptly landed on Dora’s shoulder, squeezing tight, only for Gaelin to fly into action, swinging his halberd and violently severing the offending limb at the wrist.
Screaming in pain, the assailant staggered back, blood gushing from the stump. It was an orc, but its green skin was marred by numerous piercings, giving him an oddly unsettling tribal look.
Dora reached out, hands glowing silver, and quickly healed the wound, though, she didn’t go so far as to reattach the severed limb. She, like Gaelin and I, had sensed the hostility within him.
“You-! You dare?!” he snarled, clutching his healed stumped to his chest, glaring at Dora, but there was a great deal of fear as well as the orc glanced at Gaelin’s imposing presence.
“Who the hell are you?” Dora demanded, glaring at him. There was a crowd gathering, but I wasn’t worried yet. No hint that any sort of peacekeepers or guards would be summoned at the moment. Just amusement and curiosity, like the crowd was watching an impromptu theatrical play.
“Where’s the rat?!” he screamed at her in response. Dora’s eyes narrowed and she lashed out, punching him square in the jaw.
The iron-studded orc fell backwards, dazed, and just lay on the pavement. Glaring down at him, the mint green-skinned Healer’s expression switched to one of realization.
“I think I recognize him now!” Dora said excitedly.
“You do?” Gaelin asked her, surprised.
“Yeah, when I first arrived in Gaeum, my friends and I stopped off in a bar. We helped this nice young woman who was being harassed by some orcs and trolls. One of them looked a lot like this guy, all covered in metal piercings,” she revealed, folding her arms. “And they called themselves the Iron Bristles.”
“Well, that’s nice,” I sighed.
“Do you think the ‘rat’ he was talking about was the woman you helped?” Gaelin wondered, and Dora nodded.
“Since Long-Tail-Shadow was a humanoid, bipedal rat-person who was last seen with me, yes, that seems likely,” the half-orc said with a frown as she stared at the downed thug.
“Well, not our problem,” I declared.
“Actually, I think it might be,” Gaelin said, pointing over into the crowd where a group of nine metal-studded orcs were shoving their way towards us.
“Oh, yeah, I definitely recognize that one at the front,” Dora said, pointing to the orc leading the group. “He was the same one bullying Long-Tail!”
“What should we do? Fight them? Or fly off and get to a teleportation station?” Gaelin asked me.
I wobbled indecisively. Fighting sounded like a bad idea to me. We didn’t want to confront any of Down’s peacekeepers, and a brawl would attract them. And it’s not like we were obligated to confront them, either.
&n
bsp; “Flight,” I declared, and hovered up into the air to show I was serious. Dora and Gaelin nodded and got their items ready for departure. Seeing us preparing to leave without paying them any attention caused the lead orc to turn bright red and he pushed his way through with greater force and violence.
“Let’s go!” I shouted, zooming up into the air. Dora rose up next to me, when Gaelin darted in front of her and blocked a knife with his body! It clanged off of his Berserker armor without so much as causing a scratch, and he glared at the orc who’d thrown the dinky little blade up out of the crowd. It was none other than the boss of the orcs, and he was glaring hard up at us.
“Bowel Distortion,” I growled, and cast the most embarrassing hex I knew at the offending green-skinned thug. It struck him, instantly doubling him over as his intestines rebelled against his own body.
Cries of disgust rose up from the crowd as the hex kicked in and the orc lost control of his bodily functions. He glared at us with promises of death in his eyes, but we ignored him completely and flew off.
Unfortunately, it didn’t occur to us that they too might have had flight capable magic tools. A screech of battered air was the first sign our departure was being impeded. Without any warning a ballista bolt shot through the sky, clipping Gaelin and sending him spinning through the air and crashing heavily through the roof of a nearby building.
“What in the Hells?!” Dora exclaimed, looking over her shoulder at where the projectile had come from.
“How’d they manage to strap an entire ballista onto a flying carpet?” I wondered aloud as my senses detected our pursuers. “I mean, the weight of the siege weapon alone, even with advanced spells, would make such a thing nigh impossible. Unless they used Gravity magic to reduce the weight… interesting.”
“Be impressed later!” she hissed out, glancing worriedly down at the building Gaelin had smashed into.
“He’ll be fine!” I said, waving away her worry with a tendril while also casting anti-projectile spells around us. “It’ll take more than brute force to put him down! See?”
The flying carpet armed with a ballista suddenly faltered as a blade of silver energy slashed through both carpet and weapon. The threads unraveled and the flight spell faltered. And when the siege weapon was cleaved, so too were the spells reducing its weight to an acceptable level.
With a scream, the orcs flying the carpet plunged down into the Fifth Floor, not all of them being lucky enough to have a house or even street to break their fall.
Plaster and brick cascaded off of a familiar shiny black form as Gaelin rose up from the roof he’d collided with. His halberd was buzzing with silver energy and he gave it another swing, unleashing a Bladewave onto several of the next set of pursuers: a quartet of orcs wearing strange waxen wings that were allowing them to fly.
The Bladewave scythed through two of them, limbs severed and blood spraying as the orcs plummeted. The remaining two winged orcs were armed with crossbows. Nothing special at first glance, but I was detecting something smeared across the bolt’s tips.
‘Poison, probably,’ I guessed. ‘Paralytic too, since they seem to want Dora alive.’
I passed that information on to her, and she scowled.
“Don’t they have anything better to do?” she demanded angrily as she cast antidote spells on herself preventatively.
“Doesn’t look like it, no,” I said as I spotted another group of Iron Bristle orcs, this time riding on strange deer-like monsters who had vibrant yellow wings in place of their horns, as well as above their hooves.
These mounted soldiers, armed with lances, joined up with the winged orcs who were trying to get past Gaelin.
“This is getting ridiculous!” he snarled, decapitating a winged deer with such ferocity the animal’s head flew off and dented the skull of its own rider. Both beast and orc were dead before they hit the pavement.
“Get over here, Gaelin! I’m about to do something reckless!” I shouted at him. Even as I spoke, I was gathering mana and intoning the incantations in my mind.
Sensing the power I was about to unleash he flew back quickly to my side. And just in time, as my spell activated a few seconds afterwards.
“Gravity Burst!” I intoned, and the air around the flying orcs turned thick and heavy. A crushing pressure descended upon them, forcing their bodies to fall from the sky and crash into the Floor below.
My wall of altered gravity didn’t just hurl the orcs in the air to the ground, but it also created a blanket in the sky where arrows and other projectiles were utterly useless. This gave us a chance to keep flying unhindered towards our destination.
A deep, keening roar trumpeted through the Fifth Floor, and we all faltered in our flight, stunned by the sonorous boom that had shaken us and everything nearby.
“What in the Hells was that?” Gaelin griped, shaking his head to stop the ringing sound in his head.
“More trouble,” I griped, glancing towards the source of the noise. Off in the distance in the direction where we were headed, assorted beings in silver and ebony armor stepped forth from a teleportation array wielding spears bedecked with the banners of the city of Down: a black, upside down tower on an iron grey field.
“I think the city guard have been called on us,” I muttered as some of the soldiers took up a defensive perimeter around the exit. Others fanned out, heading our way towards the source of the commotion the Iron Bristle gang had started.
“Well, crud,” Dora sighed as some of the guards noticed us and began gesturing furiously to land.
“Are we going to follow their orders?” Gaelin asked, and I wobbled back and forth.
“No, we don’t have the time to waste even if Dora wasn’t a wanted criminal here as well,” I replied grimly. “No, we’re finding another teleportation array to get us out of here.”
“Why not fly down to the Fourth Floor and use the one the Dark Dwarves had?” Dora suggested, and I nodded in thought.
“Might work,” I conceded. “And I don’t have any other ideas at the moment. Gaelin?”
“Nah, I’ve got nothing either,” the halberdier replied with a shake of his head.
“Fine. We’re heading back down. First, though, we should land. Make it harder for Down’s troops to find us,” I suggested, and we all floated down to a dark street the city guard hadn’t yet searched.
As soon as we set foot on the ground, however, a hairy arm lashed out from the shadows and grabbed onto Dora. She yelped and we all spun around, Gaelin raising his halberd to strike.
“Why friend return-hide to Down?” a scratchy voice demanded, and Dora blinked.
“Long-Tail-Shadow? Is that you?”
A bipedal humanoid rat with dark fur emerged from the darkness, right hand clamped onto Dora’s left shoulder, while her left hand was bandaged up in rags.
“I ask twice-again-” the rat person began, but was cut off as Dora hugged her fiercely.
“I’m so glad you’re okay!” she cried out. The poor woman tried to escape the half-orc’s grip, but Dora held on tightly.
“Help!” the rat woman pleaded of Gaelin and I, but we wisely stepped back.
“Just let it happen,” Gaelin said with a chuckle, though he didn’t relax his battle-ready stance. Long-Tail-Shadow sighed weakly and gave up, allowing Dora to crush her with hugs.
Chapter 12: An old friend
“This is amazing! What are the odds we’d see each other again?” Dora wondered aloud, still firmly attached to the rag-wearing rat woman.
“Careful, Dora, you don’t want to squeeze her so hard she pops,” I pointed out, and the Healer laughed in embarrassment before letting her ‘victim’ go.
“It’s been a while! How are you, Long-Tail-Shadow?” Dora asked, and the rat sucked in a deep breath of precious air before responding.
“This Rakkar has been doing good-fine,” she replied, rubbing her chest slightly. “Though I was not aware that being hug-crushed was a common form of greeting.”
; “Sorry,” Dora apologized sheepishly. She then brightened. “But really, it’s great to see you Long-Tail! I never thought we’d meet again after we went through that portal on the Thirteenth Floor!”
“Neither did I, if only because I thought-assumed you being kill-eaten by demons,” the Rakkar responded flatly. She then looked around the alleyway and beckoned for us to follow. “Quick-quick, can’t let orcs or soldier-guards find us!”
“Can you get us to the Fourth Floor? It’s important,” I asked, and the rat-woman stared at me before nodding slowly.
“Yes-yes, I can get slime-squishy and friends down to Fourth Floor. Tricky, but doable,” she replied. Long-Tail-Shadow scratched her chin in thought.
“Need to seek-find building with a green lotus on it. Get inside, and walk-descend to the basement. That leads to an old-old section that connects to the Fourth Floor,” the Rakkar revealed. “Come-Follow, I show you the way.”
We began to sneak through the streets, following Dora’s friend’s directions. We evaded several roving members of the Iron Bristle gang as well as patrols of grim-faced guards with their spears crackling with stun spells.
After we passed one of them, I paused, before turning to our guide. “Miss Long-Tail, why are the orcs searching for you?”
Everyone turned to her, and the Rakkar sighed. “After I return from lead-guiding Dora to the Abyss’s portal on the Thirteenth Floor, I decide to punish-revenge the Iron Bristles for betraying me. So, I reveal-sell information on their activities. After all, they’d hired-bought me to steal from other gangs for them, and now the shoe is on the other foot-paw.”
Dora snickered at that turnabout. “Good job, Long-Tail! That’ll show ‘em!”
“It’d also make them mad,” Gaelin added, not unreasonably. “Don’t you think that’s why that one thug tried to grab you, Dora? Because they recalled you were her friend and wanted to use you as leverage?”
“Huh, yeah, that might explain things,” Dora agreed after thinking it over.
“Yes-yes, but I knew you would be gone-away so I wasn’t worried,” Long-Tail-Shadow replied. “That is, until I saw you twice-again!”
