by Macronomicon
“Oh yeah, I pocketed it before the shit went down. Guess I forgot.”
He patted around his clothes for a moment before paling. “Ah, shit. Sorry, it looks like it was attached to my belt, which was attached to my armor.”
“Which was on fire,” Jeb said with a nod.
“Okay, listen up,” Jeb said. “We need to get Casey Thompson the Third’s Body up to eh, the twenty or so range by feeding her every Body potion we find, so we’re going to be boss hunting for a little while.”
Jess narrowed her eyes. “Why?”
“So the baby can withstand more than fifty G’s of impact force without suffering long-term damage, obviously.” Jeb said as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.
“Listen up, people, I’ve got a plan, but it’s going to be the equivalent of being shot out of a cannon. We need to slay some bosses, raid some dungeon, replace our gear, and especially make sure our precious cargo is tough enough to survive a little rough handling.”
Casey clutched her baby tighter to her chest, giving Jeb a suspicious look.
“You want to shoot my baby out of a cannon?” She demanded.
“Casey,” He said, putting a gentle hand on her shoulder and looking into her eyes.
“This is gonna work.”
***Days Later***
You are now level thirty eight!
Jebediah Trapper
Mystic Trapsmith, Level 38
Body 21 +2
Myst 71
Nerve 26 +3
Abilities: Mystic Trigger
“Are you sure this is gonna work?” Amanda asked, looking at Jeb’s contraption.
“Positive,” Jeb lied.
Sitting in front of them was the pyramid shaped construction, the most complicated Trap Jeb had ever put together, with thousands of If/Then statements woven together, allowing it to engage in a sophisticated manner above and beyond any of Jeb’s previous traps.
He’d tested it, retested it ad nauseum, until they began pushing close to the deadline of the wipe. It was good to go.
Hopefully.
The construction was about two feet tall, topped with a space generating lens, and filled with some of the hacked up guts of the Scrivener. When he’d removed the shrinking lens, the entire thing had ballooned out to about the size of a football.
Right next to the space generating lens was the remains of the void lens, to deal with the treasure chest.
The contraption itself remained nameless.
Jeb didn’t know exactly how much the people who ran the show were paying attention, but he didn’t want the description of the item to roll across someone’s desk and raise flags.
He also kept the details of the plan close to the vest, in case the System was listening in.
Paranoid, but…after everything he’d seen, Jeb felt like a little paranoia might go a long way.
“Alright, is everybody strapped in?” Jeb asked, glancing around the clearing.
One by one, they nodded, checking and double chacking their harnesses, making sure they had all their gear. Casey nodded, with her daughter swaddled up in a tiny metal cocoon. The baby didn’t like it, but that was tough titties. Last thing they needed was a dead baby.
“Alright, Jess. Do the thing.” Jeb nodded at Jessica, who stood above a struggling giant lizard monster thoroughly nailed down to the ground with telekinetic force.
Jessica swung Razorback down with enthusiasm, decapitating the restrained boss monster.
Ding!
Your party has cleared the eastern plains dungeon! Please take your rewards.
And here… we… go. Jeb thought, his heart trembling in his chest as he waited for the sphincters to show up. Moment of truth.
There was a whistle of air behind him, and Jeb turned to see the copper-tipped spear being jettisoned away from him, caught by his anti-missile trap.
The copper creature’s warleader ducked under his own missile, snatching it out of the air as he charged Jeb, moving like a streak of shiny orange despite being down a foot.
“Shi-“
The creature tackled Jeb across the midsection, throwing him across the clearing as the treasure sphincters appeared above them.
Jeb’s creation followed its programming.
The instant the portals began manifesting, the pyramid shot itself underneath the nearest one in an explosion of movement, then drove a beam of void energy up through the sphincter to hollow out the contents, I.E. the treasure chest.
Then Jeb’s construction grabbed everyone nearby and reeled them in at car-crash speeds.
Naturally, this included Jeb.
Jeb didn’t even have time to grunt as a wave of force smacked him hard, tossing him up into the air above the pyramid, the maddened copper insect man still attached to him like an angry spider monkey.
Once all seven of them were crushed together by a tube of telekinetic force ensuring they were in the right position, limbs be damned, the shrink lens blinked on, creating extra space inside the tube as it contracted, small enough to fit.
Then they got shot out of a cannon, straight up into the magical anus.
They weren’t quite small enough to fit through the hole in the wooden box, but Casey tucked herself around her baby, and everyone else tucked themselves around her, sheltering them from the wooden shrapnel sharing a lane with them.
As a family unit, the eight of them slammed up against a stone ceiling with enough force to crush a normal man’s bones.
Jeb felt like he’d been attacked by a giant sandwich press, but on the bright side, the presence of a ceiling meant the plan was a success:
They weren’t in the death wilds anymore.
“Oh gods!”
“What in the Roil?”
Jeb hit the concrete ground, still wrestling with the tribal warrior desperately trying to stab him with his broken spear.
“What’s going on!?”
“Who are these people?”
Jeb injected the creature’s chest with Myst, its resistance not nearly enough to stop him.
The copper-skinned warleader noticed it instantly, locking its sharp talons around Jeb’s arm and neck. The look in its beady eyes screamed ‘shove me off, and I’ll take these with me’.
Jeb redirected his attention to the hand on his neck, grabbing the creature’s fingers from the outside and prying them away from his jugular.
“Get off!” Jess shouted, a heavy iron boot manifesting on her foot as she kicked the creature’s midsection.
The fingers on his neck were sufficiently pried off, but the ones on his arm dragged through the flesh as the warleader was kicked away, putting several gouges through Jeb’s upper arm.
The copper skinned humanoid crashed into two stock boys gawking at them from beside a treasure chest they’d been hauling up to a circular platform.
The insect-man slammed them backwards with a spray of blood. Together, the three of them hit some kind of big red button below a code displayed in glowing runes.
“Get away!” one of the men said, shoving the insect man off, while his buddy clutched a bleeding hand, moaning in pain.
Jeb got a glimpse of a severed finger before the platform turned into a tube, allowing the treasure box and the finger to fall through.
That…already happened.
Jeb didn’t have more time to think about it as the copper skinned creature launched itself to its feet, eyeing Jeb with unmistakable focus.
“Jeez, Jeb, what did you do to piss this guy off?” Smartass asked from her nest in Jeb’s hair.
“Killed his whole village,” Jeb muttered, putting pressure on his bleeding arm.
“Yeah, that’d do it,” Smartass said, resting her elbows on Jeb’s scalp and kicking her tiny feet. “You do seem to leave a trail of destruction in your wake. You might be cursed.”
“Find a control room or a way out while I deal with this guy,” Jeb said to the rest of his team. “We don’t have time to screw around-“
The hars
h sound of a klaxon filled the air, and the whole warehouse of treasure boxes was bathed in a harsh yellow and red light.
Taking the opportunity, the copper-skinned creature flung itself forward, aiming for Jeb.
Jeb splayed his fingers wide, and the shield trigger popped in front of him, catching the warrior in midair.
Jeb jumped over the shield, aiming over it with his finger.
“Juggernaut!”
Over the next four seconds, a hundred Mystic triggers sent out their payload, packed tiny fractions of a second apart from each other.
The warleader tried to dodge, but the sheer volume of telekinetic mind-bullets pinned him down and tore him to shreds.
Jeb watched as the eyes that bored into his slowly lost their life.
“I thought you said we didn’t have time for this!” Jess shouted in his ear, dragging him away from the dead guy trying to avenge his family.
“Right,” Jeb said, shaking it off.
I’ll wallow later.
The stock boys looked like your typical car mechanic. They wore overalls, had grease stains on their hands, and a weather worn look about them.
Where they differed was the fact that they were pale, skeletal, seven feet tall, and had no lips, giving them a horrific visage.
They seemed like nice folk, though. The stock boy was helping his friend keep the pressure on his bandage.
Despite their imposing looks, they cowered as Jeb and company approached them.
“WHERE ARE WE?” Jeb shouted over the klaxon.
“IMPOSSIBLE TREASURE SHIPPING ROOM!” The skeletal laborer shouted back. His words hit Jeb’s ears as harsh consonants and snakelike hissing, but by the time it made it to his brain, it felt like English.
“Is there a control room for the Impossible Tutorial we could access from here!?” Jeb asked.
The skeletal fellow pointed to a nearby door.
“Take a right!” he shouted, pointing a shaking hand.
“Much obliged!” Jeb responded, nodding toward the large double doors.
Brett kicked the doors open, leading the group into the tight hallway.
Moments later they heard shouting and the stomping of boots coming from down the hall.
Rounding the corner were a dozen of the pale lipless men, dressed in solid steel plate, sporting standardized swords and a single crest on the front of their steel plate.
“Humans! Surrender immediately or we will have no choice but to use lethal force.”
“I’ll show you lethal fo-“
Jeb grabbed Jess’s shoulder lightly.
“What happens to us if we surrender? Prison?”
They hadn’t actually killed any of their people, so if they locked him up for a misdemeanor, then let him go a few months later, that was still a technical victory over the Impossible tutorial’s lethal consequences.
“You will be returned to your designated zone.” The leading soldier spoke with ironclad confidence.
“Well, that’s unacceptable,” Jeb said, channeling his Myst into two planes of force that ran through the center of the hall.
He moved the two planes of force to either side, parting the troops like Moses, grinding them against the stone walls.
“Unf…Guh,” The leader was only able to speak in guttural grunts as Jeb’s team passed through the hall.
Jeb took a moment to put a Myst trigger on each of them. He didn’t want to kill anyone, but he also didn’t want to leave these guys alive to come back and bite him in the ass.
“I’m going to be watching you,” Jeb said, nice and loud, so everyone could hear.
“If your body leaves contact with this wall, I’ll explode your head,” Jeb said. “I’m sure one or two of your bravest, or perhaps stupidest co-workers, are going to do you a favor and prove that this is a real threat, so my advice to you: Don’t be that guy.”
They passed through and made their way to the control room. Jeb released the planes of force once they were past, and cocked his head, listening.
Pop! Squish! The distinctive sounds of a head exploding and a body slumping to the ground sounded from around the corner.
“Can’t save ‘em all buddy,” Smartass said, patting Jeb’s head as he hustled to catch up with the rest of them.
Jeb was expecting something like holograms in the Control room, but it looked a lot more like a switchboard operator’s setup from the nineteen twenties.
The optic cables he’d seen that relayed Myst were being switched in and out of little holes in a honkin’ big box that dominated most of the room. The thing was probably chock full of lenses and Myst generators.
Jeb’s mouth was watering before he caught himself. There was no time to crack the box open and study it. They had a job to do: Find a way to get out alive.
“Good afternoon!” Jeb said upon regaining his sanity. “We’re commandeering this room until such a time as we can all safely leave the premises.”
His voice was drowned out by the sound of the klaxon.
“Shut off that fucking alarm!” Jeb shouted.
One of the switchboard operators blanched and pulled a plug, plunging the room into silence.
“Thank you.” Jeb said, clomping forward so he could see every operator. So they could see him.
“Here’s how this is going to go. I’ve got three rules. Rule number one: Anything we ask you, you answer immediately. Two, anything we tell you to do, you do immediately. Three, don’t do a single goddamn thing we didn’t tell you to do. You follow these simple rules, and we’ll be out of your hair in minutes, and you’ll be none the worse for wear. Break them and we’ll snuff you like a candle.”
“Is that understood!?” Jeb demanded, adopting his sarge voice.
The operators nodded enthusiastically.
“Alright, first question. Can we get to Earth from here?” Jeb asked.
The operators glanced at each other hesitantly, staying silent.
“Are you breaking rule number one already!?” Jeb demanded.
“Well, it’s just…Earth as you knew it…doesn’t exactly exist anymore,” one of the operators said, cowering.
Jeb’s heart sank into his stomach.
“Explain.”
Chapter 22: The Nick of Time
The long and short of it: Earth’s landmass got quilted onto another planet. It had been torn into bite size chunks, and placed wherever the ‘gods’ deemed appropriate.
Meaning the U.S. and every other major human government had just been broken into pieces and redistributed.
Even if they wanted to launch the nukes, the people upstairs would have to find them first. That and no satellites had made the transition, so comms were down across the globe, even if some genius hacker could map the new planet.
There was no possible way Jeb’s country could tolerate being torn apart like that. Just like that, Jeb saw the inevitable death of the U.S. on the horizon, seizing his stomach in an icy fist.
The second piece of great news: The fuzz was already on the way since the klaxon went off, and there was no escaping them. The control center for Jeb’s Tutorial was in a piece of pinched off spacetime, and there was no leaving until the shift was complete.
As much as it felt like it, the lack of exits wasn’t simply to make things harder for Jeb, it was so that the controllers could cover six weeks worth of tutorial in about eight man-hours. To these people, the tutorial started about six hours ago, and they had only two hours until they automatically clocked off.
There were some time shenanigans going on here.
The ‘fixers’ were men and women approaching demigod status, and it was entirely up to luck whether the one you got was a reasonable fellow, or a crazy bastard that pulled the wings off of flies.
There were more of the latter.
Reasonable people don’t obsessively accumulate power their entire lives.
“Here’s a very important question,” Jeb said, sitting across from the head operator.
“If I were to dest
roy this console,” Jeb said, patting the massive switchboard. “Would it shut the Tutorial down?”
The man shook his head. “The console is just for us to interact with the System’s bells and whistles. Nonessential stuff. Prizes and naming artifacts are mortal Keegan inventions to help inductees, but the test itself…that’s a higher power.”
“Huh. And how long do we have until your fixer joins the party?”
“Ten minutes, give or take.”
“Does he or she know what we look like?”
The skull-faced alien shook his head vigorously. “No.”
“Well, let’s keep it that way,” Jeb said, dropping a mystic trigger under his feet before grabbing the operator by the arm and leading him out the door, past all the soldiers leaning against the wall, glaring daggers at him. Jeb tried not to step in the brain of their bravest member.
As a precaution, he pinned the angry soldiers against the wall as the group passed through.
“You see those?” Jeb said, pointing at the platforms for delivering treasure. “Those deliver rewards to anywhere and any time they’re needed.”
“Yes…?” The head operator said questioningly.
“What happens if I say, jump in and transport myself into the tutorial’s very beginning? Are there any Time-Cop paradox Cronenberg cautionary tales I should be aware of?”
“What?” The gaunt alien asked, thoroughly confused by Jeb’s pop-culture studded question.
“Are there negative effects for creating a time paradox? Jeb demanded.
“We don’t handle paradoxes here.” The operator said, shaking his head. “That’s a higher power. All I can say is that there is some infrastructure in place to resolve it.”
“Can anybody read these symbols?” Jeb asked, pointing at the glowing labels above the platforms.
Jess, Casey, Amanda, Brett and Ron shook their heads.
“Ooh, ooh, I know, I can read them!” Smartass shouted, jumping up and down on his head.
“You brought a fairy in here?” the operator said, aghast. “You tamed a fairy?”
“Hey!” Smartass shot back. “Nobody tamed all this raw sexual energy,” She said, running her hands down her decidedly flat body. “We have a business agreement!”
The operator glanced back and forth between Jeb and Smartass, his lipless teeth rattling in confusion.
