I started paddling toward shore. Donut sat there glowering, completely flattened out and soaked through. She had a piece of seaweed attached to her tiara. While she’d appeared almost majestic and fairy-like underwater, up here she looked like a dead rat that’d been resurrected and then run over by a garbage truck.
“That was pretty awesome,” I said once it was clear we were safe from the sharks.
“Go fuck yourself, Carl,” Donut said.
“This is an outrage!” Donut cried when we were back at the home base. She’d showered and was once again dry and clean. “I was buried alive, shot out of a water cannon, drowned, and then almost eaten by a shark, and I didn’t even get a boss box for that? We won the level. The slime thing died, and we get nothing? Carl, the game is cheating again.”
Mongo made a chirping noise, agreeing with Donut’s outrage.
“The ooze isn’t dead. We’d melted it down, but then it got washed away.”
We’d had to track a quarter turn around the land quadrant before we could get to a town that’d take us in. It was me, Donut, Katia, Louis, and Firas. The town was called Pandinus, and the occupants were half human, half-scorpion centaur-like creatures called pazuzu. They were all dressed in ridiculous, post-apocalyptic gear: punk-rock style leather and tassels and goggles and chains and dreadlocks, like they were all heading out to a Mad Max convention.
Louis and Firas went off to get some sleep. Louis grumbled something about not being able to drink alcohol as we left them to enter our personal space. Gwen and her team remained at the site of the castle. Even though we’d defeated the quadrant, the stairwell was now buried. It was directly under the spray from the necropolis drain, so they were going to turn it off and then dig it out. I sent a warning to the tomb raider guys that it would fill back up with water. They hadn’t moved yet, so it didn’t matter.
We knew the stairwell remained because those with the pathfinder benefit could still see it sitting there. Once the team dug it out, they’d attempt to put a roof over it and maybe dig a separate tunnel to it. Or at the very least, seal it off. We’d have to turn the drain back on, especially after we turned the submarine’s pump off. That was the only way to fully empty the necropolis of water.
Apparently the sand slime wasn’t fully “defeated” and was still hanging around somewhere. It was probably floating around as a single grain of sand somewhere in the ocean where it wouldn’t be able to properly regenerate. If that was the case, we’d never see it again. And because it wasn’t dead, we’d gotten screwed out of the boss box. I wasn’t too worried about it. On the first two floors, the bronze and silver boss boxes held great loot, but the boxes were now shit compared to how they’d been on the earlier floors.
The good stuff would now only be had in the city boss and above boxes.
Still, I’d received multiple achievements and other loot boxes for that last stunt. The notable ones were:
New achievement! Milquetoast!
You somehow managed to win an important boss battle without actually killing the boss. That’s like paying money to a prostitute just so she’ll cuddle with you.
Reward: You’ve received a silver Pacifist’s Box.
New achievement! I was in the pool!
You spent more than 60 seconds fully submerged underwater, and you didn’t die! Parts of you may have experienced shrinkage, but otherwise you’re okay. You’re now an honorary mudskipper!
Reward: You’ve received a Bronze I’m Wet Box!
The I’m Wet box contained an additional ten scrolls of water breathing for each of us. Donut’s box, for some unfathomable reason, was silver instead of bronze, and she received an additional item: a Belt of Buoyancy. It was a simple belt that wrapped around her stomach that’d keep her from sinking. It only worked in the water, and she spent a good three minutes bitching about it, about how she was never going back there again.
The silver Pacifist box contained a skill potion for Donut that raised her Dodge skill by one, taking it to 10. That was a big deal because she’d been training with it for a while now, and the skill had been stuck on nine. That happened a lot with certain skills. Now that she’d hit level 10, she had a permanent Deflection buff, which caused both magical and physical missiles to be less accurate when they were shot at her. Mordecai said it wasn’t complete protection from arrows, but it halved their accuracy. It also meant they were more likely to go into either me or Mongo if she was nearby.
In my Pacifist box, I received two potions that gave Mordecai pause.
“Don’t use those,” he said the moment he saw them.
“Why not?”
He didn’t answer for several moments. “Because the last time I saw someone drink that potion, they accidentally killed half of their party.”
Potion of Bloodlust
It’s like giving yourself a PCP enema after spending the day riding the Night Train Express.
Drinking this potion gives the following effects for (Constitution) seconds.
Strength times two.
Movement speed times two.
Dexterity times .5
The Where the Fuck Am I? Who the Fuck Are You? Debuff
Constitution times .5
For every crawler, NPC, or mob killed by you while this potion is active, your movement speed increases by an additional 25%.
“So, it’s like a berserking potion?”
“That’s exactly what it is,” Mordecai said. “But that debuff makes it so you don’t remember where you are or why you’re fighting. It’s too dangerous to use.”
I put the two potions away. I agreed with Mordecai. The last thing I wanted to do was take a potion that would make me lose control, even if it greatly enhanced my strength. I’d look in the cookbook and see if it had any advice that’d make the potion more useful.
Gwen: That was easier than I thought it’d be. We found the wall to the stairwell chamber. We’ll finish digging it out, seal it up tight, and then we can figure out how to do this last part.
Carl: 10-4. Watch out for any remnants of the ooze.
I pulled out the two pieces of the artifact. The winding box and the watch. I placed them on the table. I was a little afraid of the winding box now that I knew there was a way to use it to open a portal to the Nothing. And that things would come out when you did.
Katia wordlessly handed me the note she’d gotten off the Mad Dune Mage when she’d been forced to fight him. She wasn’t certain if he really was dead or not. She’d gotten experience, and she’d looted his body, but he’d turned to sand. I didn’t know if that meant he was dead or not. Either way, the system said we’d defeated the quadrant, and that was the important part.
The note was several pages long. The first few pages were a note to Tish, the same person who’d chewed him out in that other letter we’d found. The remaining bulk of the pages were lists of words followed by a set of numbers. The final page was filled with drawings.
Tish,
I know you hate me, but please listen. Hope is not lost. They asked me to use the box to destroy this entire island and to suck it into the Nothing. Doing so is a mistake. All three pieces of the artifact are in the area, and all three pieces would end up in that alternate dimension. It is too dangerous for the feral gods to possess, even in pieces. So instead, I have a plan. If the ghost of Psamathe ever leaves before I can implement my fix, I will be forced to destroy myself, but I hope it will never come to pass.
I have discovered something useful. This familiar of hers, the ooze, has split loyalties. I truly believe it loves me, as odd as it sounds. It knows of my affection for my now-frozen Lika, and it is jealous. I can use this. I don’t yet know how.
I still conduct my research during the times when I have a body and am able to work. Here is what I’ve learned.
The gate of the feral gods is both a complicated and a simple device. You first dial to a time, which represents a place. Both watches are connected magically. If you dial a time on one watch, it is mirrored on t
he other. This time represents your destination, and how this works is a byzantine process that I do not yet understand, though I have determined multiple destination and time combinations, even without a watch of my own. I have included those notes with this letter.
Once you have dialed into a location, you place both watches in the box, and you activate the winding process. The second watch will start ticking and moving. This is the only time the two watches will be out of sync. Once the time on the second watch syncs up with the time representing your current location, the alarm will go off on the second watch, and it will stop ticking. The box is now armed. This process can take anywhere from a simple moment to a full turn of the watch, depending on the distance you wish to travel. You cannot move the box from its current location, or it will reset. You remove the two watches, and the portal appears.
The portal is one-way, and it will last about twenty minutes or until the winding box and the watches are brought through. Once that happens, the exit closes at the destination location.
However, you must beware. The portal lingers at the location where it was opened, and it is now a two-way portal into the Nothing. It remains open until a creature comes through that horrible dimension. And, believe me, they will come through. It will be fast. Oftentimes, this will be a feral god. Depending on the god that escapes, or its level of power, there may be great destruction. And if certain gods or minor deities—like Psamathe—make it through, the current pantheon may be forced to react.
It is also said that those who use the portal, those with weak constitutions, mustn’t linger as they pass through. Even close proximity to the open door is enough to touch their weak minds and paint them with the feral madness.
But I have also discovered that the winding box itself is a conduit to the Nothing. All one must do to open a passage is open the lid, wind the box, and send a stream of charged energy into the device, and a portal will open directly to the Nothing.
Yes, this is dangerous. I know, I know. But love makes us do the most dangerous of things. Isn’t that the way of the worlds?
This is how I opened a portal to seek out Yarilo, banished god of lust. This is how I was tricked by Psamathe into marrying her familiar. My beloved Lika remains banished in her own version of hell because I was fooled. And now Psamathe is free in the necropolis, where she has supposedly usurped the ghost that is known as Quetzalcoatlus.
Here is what I am going to do to defeat her. If I am successful, I will die, but you will receive this letter along with the winding box. Then you can send another expedition to seek the remaining two artifacts. I believe they are…
The note ended there. There was a missing page.
“So,” Katia said. “I was looking at the page of numbers, and they are all locations we can travel to using the gate, but it looks like they’re all in the area surrounding the city of Larracos. Once we have the second watch, we just move the watch to the time representing the location, stick it in, and wait for the alarm to go off.”
“Are you saying we can open a gate directly to the ninth floor?” I asked.
“That’s right,” Katia said. “Also, I think I can make a map of the ninth floor with these notes.”
“Don’t get too excited,” Mordecai said. “You might be able to open a gate to the Plains of Larracos, but you won’t be able to go through it. Crawlers can’t hop floors. There’s a gate right there in the Desperado Club in the casino, but it’s closed to you. So if you get the grand idea of opening a gate, you won’t be able to go through, and when it closes, you’ll have to deal with something awful coming through that will surely kill everything in the entire bubble.”
“Maybe,” Katia said. She shuffled the papers and pointed to a note on the last page. It was multiple drawings of the two watches and the winding box along with two gates, depicting various scenarios. The first depicted the three items on one side of the gate, and the second depicted just the winding box on the far side. It went on from there with each possible combination, indicating what would happen. All but one of the scenarios ended with a monster emerging from the gate on the opening side. That last illustration was circled, and it depicted one watch on each side of the gate and the winding box inside the portal. “It looks like if we do this last way, we’ll lose the box, but no monsters will get out.”
Mordecai grunted. “It’d be a waste. You ain’t using this thing to hop floors no matter what.”
I barely heard him. I was focused on the second-to-last scenario. Holy shit. Holy fucking shit.
I shook my head, and I decided to focus on the problem at hand. “Do you think if we summon one of those feral god things it’ll be able to travel outside the bubble? Or break the bubble wall?”
“I don’t know,” Mordecai said. “Some of them are bigger than the bubble. Summoning them usually resizes them, but this isn’t a true summoning. It’s them, in their true form, without a time limit. It’s them escaping imprisonment. You’re all getting ahead of yourselves. You don’t even have the last watch yet. And if you do get that watch, my advice will be to stick it in your inventory and not do anything with it until you’re strong enough to deal with whatever comes out, which will be never. Now if you need me, I’ll be in the crafting room. I think I’m onto something with that yam you received earlier.”
I glanced at the level timer as Mordecai walked away. We had just over four and a half days left. “Is there a Desperado Club in this town?”
24
Before Katia could answer me, I was interrupted by a message.
Gwen: We’ve dug out the stairwell. Something odd happened when we entered. The whole room was made of glass, but the moment I sent Tran in, it all flashed, and everything turned to…
A loud error message blocked out the rest of her note.
Warning: An item in your catalog is no longer eligible to be held in inventory. It will be forcibly removed in five seconds.
“What the hell?” I said. I immediately thought of the last two times this had happened, both times to Katia. The first was when all the blood in her inventory had exploded out of her because of the container patch. The second time I hadn’t seen. It was when she’d placed the whole house in her inventory, and Borant had changed the rules. It’d destroyed a tavern when the house appeared and effectively got her banned from the town, which was why we’d had to trek an extra mile to get to this settlement.
Both of those had happened immediately after the recap episode, which was when Borant applied their updates and patches. We still had a few hours until the episode, so I had no idea what was going on. I gritted my teeth and waited for it to happen.
The crystallized head of Ghazi’s sex doll popped out of my inventory and splatted onto the floor.
Only it wasn’t crystallized anymore. It was still the decapitated sex doll head of a half-naiad named Lika. The chin had chipped badly when Mongo had knocked over the statue, and the frozen, life-like head of the doll had a big chunk taken out of its latex chin.
“Uh, Carl,” Katia said. “You dropped a head on the floor.”
I have seen a few sex dolls in my time, though I wouldn’t consider myself an expert. I knew, at least on earth, they ranged in quality from the cheap, inflatable kind all the way to the AI-controlled RealDolls who could talk and move and looked at least moderately realistic.
This was about halfway between those two extremes. It was a latex-like dummy head that was clearly once attached to a sex doll and not just a run-of-the-mill mannequin. The head was stuck with an open mouth and wide eyes. It was slathered with hooker-tier makeup. Two sharp-looking fangs hanged down from its mouth, vampire like. The head had a full-head of bone-white, silky-looking hair. Its full lips were painted bright red. A half set of gills cleaved either side of its neck, cut short right at the point of decapitation, giving the cut an extra jagged appearance. The bottom of the neck hole was just solid latex.
It had a sparkly barrette in its hair that read, “Wet for you.”
“My goodness
is that thing ghastly,” Donut said, sniffing at the object. She made a face. Mongo shrieked. “Carl, do people really use these things?”
“Yeah, they do,” I said. “But they’re usually attached to bodies. People get lonely. Don’t judge Ghazi too harshly.”
“Oh, I’m judging him. Miss Beatrice had a drawer full of sex toys, but she never sailed off to the other side of the world because her vibrator told her to.” She cocked her head. “Actually, you know what? That is kind of what she did, now isn’t it? Only her sex toy was that Brad fellow.”
“Why isn’t this eligible to be in my inventory anymore?” I asked, trying hard to ignore Donut’s jab. I picked the head up, grabbing it by a handful of hair. All the description said was Decapitated Lika Sex Doll Head. I touched one of the teeth, cringing at the idea of fangs in the mouth of a goddamned sex doll, but the sharp tooth bent easily under the press of my finger. It was made of a soft, flexible latex. The jaw was hinged, so I could open and close it.
“Mmmm hmmmm fck offa me.”
The voice came from the head.
“Jesus fuck,” I exclaimed, dropping it on the floor. It bounced once, and it cried out in surprise.
Donut yowled and scampered back. Mongo shrieked and was about to attack, but I yelled for him to stop. The moment the thing started talking, a white dot appeared on my map.
The head continued to shriek with outrage, but I couldn’t understand a word it was saying.
“So, I guess this thing is still possessed,” I said, poking at it with my foot. I wasn’t too worried about it attacking me or casting a spell since we were in a saferoom. “Gwen’s team broke the crystallization spell when they entered the stairwell chamber. So everything that was made of glass is now back to normal.”
The Gate of the Feral Gods Page 35
