by Ian Rodgers
“According to the Clock spell, only eighteen hours have passed since we left Argyle to get to Targua and then the Resort,” the Healer revealed. “Not sure what the time dilation between Gaeum and Erafore is, or between Erafore and the Lost City.”
That caused a subdued mood to settled onto the shoulders of the group as they thought about the implications.
“We accomplished so much, yet no one will ever believe we managed to do all of this in the time we’ve been gone,” Enrai lamented, echoing the thoughts of his teammates.
They walked in silence some more, until Dora slapped her forehead. “Oh! Why didn’t I think of this earlier?”
Enrai and Ain turned to her, and she pointed at the elf of the pair. “Isn’t your mentor an X-ranked adventurer?”
“Err, yes, Tein Huntersteel is indeed X-ranked,” Ain said. “Glad you remembered, I guess.”
“No, no! If he’s that strong, surely he’s visited other dimensions or planes before!” Dora said excitedly. “Do you remember if he’s ever said anything about Gaeum or any of the other realms?”
“Uh… huh, why didn’t I think of that?” Enrai muttered to himself. Meanwhile, Ain had a poleaxed look on his face, before he shook his head in disbelief.
“I cannot believe I’d forget his words of wisdom so quickly,” he chuckled. “Yes, he’s told me a few stories about the different planes, let me see if I can recall any of them.”
He stood still, hand on his chin, as his mind raced and picked through all of his memories with his teacher.
“Okay, I remember a thing or two,” Ain announced after a bit. “There were three places he’s visited before, here in Gaeum. One is called the Chasm Hall, and is where Kazuum, head of the dwarven pantheon, dwells. When he’s not spending time in the Heavens, that is. The second is the Carved Castle, and it’s where the ruler of all of Gaeum dwells. Both locations have cities built up around them. The last place was called Down, and he referred to it as ‘an ever-spiraling pit of greed and foolishness.’ I got the feeling he didn’t like it, much.”
“Okay, that’s helpful!” Dora exclaimed happily. “Now we know there is, in fact, civilization around here! And that we should avoid Down, whatever or wherever that location may be!”
“Yeah, but how hard is it going to be to find them?” Enrai pointed out, dampening their spirits. “We don’t know where we even are, let alone how far either of those locations are from us!”
“Calm down, Enrai,” Dora said, patting his back reassuringly. “We’ll get out of here! Lady Nia wouldn’t want us to be here if she didn’t have a plan!”
“I suppose,” the Monk sighed in agreement.
“Great! Now, onwards!” Dora declared, only to stop as she stepped in a pile of something squishy and gross. “…Eeeewww…”
“What did you step in?” Ain asked, bewildered, as a pale yellow glow began to suffuse the area where Dora’s foot had landed.
Grimacing, the blonde half-orc called her Dancing Lights over to her, where they helpfully added some illumination on the matter.
“Looks like a mushroom of some kind,” Enrai noted, bending down to get a better view. “Sort of like one of those round ones without a stalk.”
“Detect Poison,” Dora intoned, and sighed when the goop coating her foot pulsed in the affirmative. “Great, I’ve got toxic mushroom guts all over me that are also bioluminescent. How pleasant.”
“Where did it come from?” Ain wondered, looking around. His words prompted Dora and Enrai to also examine the area. It was extremely odd for there to be only a single mushroom in the middle of a tunnel headed to nowhere, since the last one they had seen had been at the entrance to the cavern.
The group began to explore their surroundings, until they found a hole in the tunnel wall a dozen feet behind them, which had previously been hidden due to the shadows cast by the Dancing Light orbs. And they only found the hole by following a series of lichen studded stones and squishy moss-covered patches of floor that had been near the popped mushroom.
All sorts of non-glowing fungi could be seen inside the hole in the wall, which led to another tunnel, heading deeper into a mushroom infested section of Gaeum.
“How did we miss this?” Dora wondered, peering into the unexplored tunnel.
“This passageway we are in might lead to other, branching paths,” Ain suggested, looking at the tunnel they were in more closely. “Who knows how many secondary tunnels there might be that we missed as we were walking!”
“You think this is why the rats didn’t bother to keep chasing us after that flashbang Dora gave ‘em?” Enrai mused.
“We must have run past the real entrance to their den, which is why they didn’t bother to keep going after us,” Ain agreed. Dora nodded.
“That makes sense. But the real question now is: do we go down this new tunnel and see where it leads, or do we want to stay the course?”
“Fungi and their spores can be dangerous,” Ain pointed. “Walking through unknown lifeforms is just asking to be infected with some sort of deadly affliction!”
“Yeah, but at least they’re something to look at! I’m tired of darkness and bland, boring rocks,” Enrai contested.
“You’d rather risk death than remain bored?” Ain asked incredulously.
“Yes! I mean, no! I mean… argh! This place is just getting to me!” the Monk complained, punching the wall.
“We’ll flip a coin to decide where to head next,” Dora decided, reaching into a pocket and withdrawing a copper coin. “Heads, we stick to the current path. Tails, we try something new. Okay?”
“Letting luck decide? Sure, why not,” Enrai chuckled.
“Letting the gods choose for us? I like that idea,” Ain added, folding his arms and waiting for the currency to be tossed into the air. Dora obliged, and sent the copper coin flipping into the air.
After it did five complete turns the coin fell and pinged onto the stone floor, where it bounced five times and spun about five times before finally landing and going still. The trio bent down to look, and found a faded image of a five-pointed star pointing up towards them.
“Tails it is!” Dora announced, scooping up the piece of copper. Enrai smirked at Ain, and the Grand Elf simply sighed before rummaging through his pack for a handkerchief he immediately tied around his face to cover his mouth and nose.
“No toxic spores are going to ruin my day!” the Spellsword declared as they entered the fungus lined tunnel.
“That’s not a bad idea,” Dora murmured, and she followed suit, wrapping some spare cloth around her head to block out harmful biological matter.
Enrai looked between the two of them, snorted, but ultimately decided to follow along.
“We look like bandits with our mouths covered up like this,” the Monk mumbled, his voice slightly muffled. The trio then shared glances with each other before cracking up, laughter spilling out of them.
“Oh my god, yes! Yes, that is so true!” Dora howled with mirth. “What should we call ourselves? ‘The Bad Band?’ ‘The Terrible Trio?’”
“‘A human, elf, and half-orc walk into a bar!’” Ain suggested as their group’s name, causing the group to burst into even more laughter.
Their amusement echoed through the fungal side chamber, and several mushrooms began to wiggle and jiggle in time to the sounds. Further into the tunnel, a number of insectoid creatures looked up, surprised and curious by the noise. However, they simply chose to wait for the source to come to them.
Which, unknowingly, Dora and her team did, still chuckling slightly and wiping away tears of laughter.
“Phew! That was a rush,” the blonde Healer stated, shaking her head in amusement.
“Yeah, haven’t laughed so hard in ages,” Enrai agreed.
“I suppose we all really needed it,” Ain pointed out, smiling faintly under his mask.
“They say laughter is the best medicine,” Dora said. “As a Healer, I can’t exactly confirm that. But it was nice to just let l
oose with the laughs.”
The trio were chatting happily away, the oppressive air of being trapped underground having been blown away by the laughter. They felt upbeat and ready to face whatever came their way!
Fate seemed to take that as a challenge, as the small, cramped tunnel gave way to wider spaces and more exotic looking fungi. Glowing patches of familiar mushrooms began to crop up alongside strange and alien examples. Some looked like tiny heads, complete with working eyes that followed the group as they walked past. Other mushrooms oozed acid at anything that got too close to them. It was a wonderland of freakish biology, but for the trio it seemed less horrific than it might have been an hour or so ago.
“We have company,” Ain whispered, alerting the group. They didn’t stop moving, but they did silently prepare for combat.
“What kind?” Dora asked, readying another Burst Flare spell to blind her foes. She held it in her right hand, keeping her fist closed until she needed it.
“Bug,” the Grand Elf stated, to Enrai’s mute disgust.
Ain ignored his friend’s despair over fighting insects, and spun around to face the oncoming monster, his saber lashing out. There was a squealing sound, and Dora’s Dancing Lights moved over to illuminate the scene.
A grotesque insectoid monster had been impaled by Ain’s blade, piercing its carapace and pinning it to a bulbous mushroom. The insect was vaguely spider-like, but it had the wings of a fly and was almost a foot long. What was most unsettling about the creature was definitely the fact that it had a canine face, but still possessed compound eyes and mandibles. It twitched futilely on the saber, bright pink goo seeping from its wound.
“Gross,” Enrai spat out, glaring at the bug. Dora’s own expression was not friendly, either. She could feel a wrongness hanging around the creature like a foul stench.
Ain nodded in agreement and sent a jolt of electricity through his blade and into the monster. It spasmed violently before going limp. After a second Ain removed the saber from its body. He wiped it clean, eyes darting around the darkness while his ears twitched.
“There are more of them,” he said slowly, trying to locate additional insectoids via sight and sound.
“Did they flee when their buddy got killed?” Enrai asked hopefully.
“…No,” Ain said, tensing. “They just regrouped.”
“Cover your eyes!” Dora shouted, and she raised her right hand into the air. Ain and Enrai both followed her instructions, looking down and covering their faces. She unfurled her fist, and the Burst Flare spell went off with a crackling pop.
A chorus of screeches and pained yips rang through the cavern, followed by a few thuds. Blinking their eyes open, Dora and the group saw dozens of writhing shapes in the shadows. Ain wasted no time, and darted forwards, his curved sword slashing through numerous monsters, spilling their ichor everywhere with every swing.
Enrai let fire wrap around his feet, and he began stomping on as many downed spider-flies as he could reach, occasionally knocking a monster out of the air by using Wind magic to drag them to the ground so he could crush them beneath his boots.
“What’s wrong? Don’t want to get your hands dirty?” Dora asked, smirking at her friend as she provided magical support. The spider-flies were exceptionally weak to her Light magic, their carapaces cracking and steaming wherever her mana struck them. The Monk snorted at her accusation.
“I’ve fought giant bugs before! You don’t know ‘messy’ until there’s rancid guts spilling all over your hands!” Enrai retorted. “There’s a reason why I prefer using Fire magic! You burn them to ash, and then there’s no mess left behind!”
In time, the spider-flies were all wiped out. Some had fled, most had perished. Panting, Dora stamped heavily onto one final insect monster, her boot covered in a myriad of colors from all the gore and slime caking the ground.
“Last one,” she muttered victoriously. She glanced at her friends, concerned. “Everyone all right?”
“A few bites here and there. Luckily, these vermin aren’t very poisonous. I was able to burn it out of my body when they did manage to sink their fangs into me,” Enrai announced, scratching a collection of swollen lumps on his arms. Dora hastily checked him over, and sighed in relief when she found no poisons swirling around his veins.
“You dummy,” she scolded, lightly slapping the back of his head. “Try not to get bitten next time! How about you, Ain? Any bites or scratches?”
The Spellsword shook his head. “None, thank you for worrying.”
Dora nodded, relieved, before glancing at the squashed remnants of the monsters. Several of the corpses were starting to disintegrate into an oily black substance, while a few of the bodies had tiny mushrooms popping up out of them, spores having latched onto the remains during the fighting and begun growing at an accelerated pace.
“What were those things?” Dora wondered aloud. “They have too much magic in them to be natural creatures. And that Dark magic…”
“They were demons that crawled out from the Abyss, and tried to make their nest here in my home. Such incursions are annoyingly common, and unpleasant,” an echoing female voice called out, and the trio stiffened.
“Ain?” Dora whispered, but the elf shook his head.
“Nothing! I didn’t hear anyone approaching us!” he asserted.
“I come and go as I please. Here is my domain, and all in it under my control,” the voice stated. “However, as thanks for freeing my cluster of those pests, I shall reward you with my presence.”
As one, every single fungi around them lit up in an orange light. Their surroundings free from darkness, the trio finally got a good look at the area they’d been traversing through.
The wide-open space was far larger than they’d expected. It stretched out far into the distance, to the point that even with everything glowing, they still couldn’t see the edges of the cavern.
From the ceiling dangled coiled ropes of fungal matter, tiny luminous buds acting like fake stars shining down upon the chamber, while in the distance massive mushroom stalks were as thick and tall as trees. Here and there were large lumps of fungus, acting as what Dora assumed were bushes, or their equivalent.
And standing in front of them, having appeared from nowhere, was a tall, feminine humanoid creature. It looked like a pale, naked elfish woman, but she had no visible sexual organs, or a mouth or nose. Only a pair of pure green eyes stared at the trio with a sparkling of intelligence. Instead of hair, atop the being’s head was a red and orange striped mushroom cap.
“Um, hello?” Dora said, trying to be polite. The creature inclined its head in response.
“I am the mistress of this cluster. You have trespassed in my home,” she informed the party.
“We did not mean to,” Ain assured her. “Had we known this place was owned by anyone, we’d have asked permission.”
“You caused no harm to the cluster, and even went so far as to defend it from these parasites,” the woman declared, glaring at a spider-fly’s dissolving corpse. “As such, your transgressions are forgiven. However, I wish for you to depart from my home. Fleshlings are not welcome.”
“Err, we’re actually kind of lost,” Dora admitted. “We don’t know where we are, or where to go.”
The mushroom capped woman looked at the half-orc with a gaze filled with condescending pity. “Perhaps you should not venture into realms you know nothing of, in the future.”
“Would if I could, ma’am, but Fate seems to hate me,” the Healer sighed. The creature snorted but nodded in understanding. She then gestured to the side, and several mushrooms began to glow green.
“Follow the glow, and it will lead you to another portion of the Endless Earth; an intersection marked with a metal grave. From there, simply follow the hottest tunnel all the way to the end, and you will find a settlement of fellow Fleshlings sitting on the edge of an underground river of magma. They might help you find where you need to go,” the bizarre woman stated.
“
Thank you for your kindness!” Dora said, bowing her head towards the strange yet helpful being. She nodded mutely, before walking over to and passing through the ‘trunk’ of one of the massive mushrooms.
The orange glow that had heralded her arrival dimmed, and darkness rushed back in, leaving only a trail of faint green mushroom creating a path to escort the trio out from the fungal domain. With no other choice, the group got up and fled the area, keenly aware of being watched as they did so.
∞.∞.∞
“Hmmm, is that so?” a rainbow cloak muttered to itself as it listened to the chittering of a weak little demon. A foot-long spider with the wings of a fly on its back and a distinctly lupine face abased itself before an upside throne that writhed with the darkest of magics.
Normally a Lord such as itself would never pay attention to the whining of a pitiful peon like the one in front of it, but it had sensed the essence that had clung to its charred carapace. Powerful Light magic had burned it, and within that Light, almost undetectable, was the faintest hint of a lily.
At least, that was what it was to its senses. Demons could perceive magic in a variety of ways, and the sensory abilities of a Demon Lord were leagues above their servile kin.
Within the Light were the thinnest traces of divinity, and it recognized them well. The magical essence was exactly what it’d been searching for!
“You did well, bringing this to my attention,” Vivid praised, patting the puny demonic vermin with an invisible hand.
It preened, and barked happily, only for it to be completely crushed the next moment as the undetectable hand applied a planet’s worth of pressure upon it, reducing it to a thin paste that was rapidly absorbed by the throne nearby.
The Demon Lord Vivid did not even spare a second thought for the senseless execution of one of its own, and simply floated away to make some calls. After all, it had just been informed that the same mortal who had dared to raid Targua had ended up in the Elemental Plane of Earth. And while Demon Lords might not be welcome there, it knew a number of other beings who’d be more than happy to perform a mission on his behalf.
