Lluvia City
I asked Rupert how he felt about being Revived. With most people, it’s a pretty safe bet that they would want to be brought back, unless they have specific religious preferences like the Penitent do. But Rupert simultaneously doesn’t want to be conscious and doesn’t want to stop being conscious, so it’s quite plausible that having become dead, he would want to stay that way so as not to become conscious again. It’s also plausible, given his reaction to temporary post-death memory loss, that he would come back with an entirely different personality. That bit was his idea, invented in drunken ramblings: he doesn’t remember anything about who he was before he met us, so he may not be the same Rupert as he once was.
When I asked him about Revive, Rupert looked extremely concerned and started muttering to himself. And now his Tall Man keeps sneaking up on me. I’m not sure if it’s revenge for asking an uncomfortable question or if even tamed Tall Men just do that. Rupert has been eagerly experimenting with his new medium. After the surgery we gave him a Gauntlet Launcher (he complained vigorously about how it didn’t launch gauntlets) and loaded it up with some of our spare stuff. He persuaded us to let him have Mind Crush, that spell the Champion used against us, but I’m not sure that was a good idea. Rupert doesn’t seem particularly stable, and it seems a little stupid to give him a spell he can use to hurt people without their being able to block it with mons or armor or anything. I would be happier if that spell doesn’t exist, really.
The other thing Rupert is excited about is, apparently, Tall Man. He likes the creepy faceless bastard, with its teleportation and sneakiness. He likes teleportation so much that he’s also got a spell for it, called Zip, which we found in his dungeon. Luckily, Rupert is sensible enough not to practice teleportation on a moving cloud. He is, instead, playing with Tall Man’s Antimeme.
We already knew that Tall Men become sort of invisible, and now we’re getting to see it up close. Or rather, not see it. Or rather, we see the Tall Man, but then sort of dismiss it as a tree (even though there is no reason for there to be a tree on this cloud) or as someone else’s problem. It’s very disconcerting when Rupert finally turns Antimeme off, and there’s the Tall Man we’d all forgotten about. At least Antimeme isn’t all-powerful; Tall Man can only stay properly unnoticed if it spends all its time being antimemetic. Otherwise it does stuff about half as fast as it normally would, and flickers in and out of view every ten seconds or so. The flickering in and out of view isn’t as much of a drawback as you’d think, since you just think you’re seeing things. But it might alert you enough to search the area for antimemetic creatures, which does work. If you can remember to search for something that you keep forgetting exists.
Jacqueline is trying to fix this problem. “I wonder if I can learn to automatically detect Antimemed things,” she said a couple minutes ago. “Maybe if I constantly search for them until it becomes a habit. Or maybe I can use the flickers, and train myself to punch Tall Men whenever I think I see them. It would be fast enough I’d be moving before I forgot why. I’d probably end up punching a lot of trees, though…”
She has been flinching for no visible reason and punching thin air. I don’t think she’s going to figure it out before we reach Lluvia City, which is where we’re headed. The Chaos Emerald we were tracking when we found Rupert has stopped moving. Sorin is making a delivery to Lluvia City, and we are flying there to intercept him and ask him why he’s doing this.
Getting into the city was surprisingly easy. They glanced at our Vidriot-issued id cards, quickly checked our mediums (Clarence had carefully rechipped them on the trip from Gotita), and waved us onward, then took Rupert to an official building for a longer interview. After an explanation of his origin in a Stevenite dungeon, a discussion about whether he should be held accountable for any past Rupert’s actions, and a minor crisis about the meaning of an identification card when the entity it was supposed to identify could become yet a different Rupert in the future, the bemused guard issued an id card for one Possibly-Rupert. I think it fits him perfectly.
“Get that all the time?” I asked the guard, who had taken Rupert’s brand of strangeness very well.
“No.”
“Anything interesting lately?” I fished.
He shrugged. “There was someone in a bird mask.”
“Were they by chance made of worms?”
“What? No.”
“Or wearing a trench coat and a fedora?”
“No.” The guard was giving me a look. “Why?”
“Never mind.” No record of Sorin here, unlike in Vidriot. Did that mean something?
Leaving the office, we made a beeline for the emerald. There was no time to lose—Sorin had arrived hours ago and might be getting ready to leave. Locator led me to an upscale apartment building, and some discrete hovering on Citrine’s Glamoured wings pinpointed it to somewhere around the 23rd floor. Now, how to get in? Breaking in through the window was simple, but not might set the right conversational tone. We stared at the building from across the street, trying not to look suspicious.
“Would anyone care if you just walked in?” Jacqueline wondered.
Rupert immediately set off across the street, taking a direct approach to the rhetorical question. The rest of us ran after him, trying to look nonchalant as he strode into the lobby with surprising confidence given the proliferation of marble and fancy-looking chandeliers.
“Sir?” asked the lobby guard. “Excuse me, sir?”
Rupert tried flashing his Lluvia City id card at the guard while continuing towards the elevators. The guard was having none of it, and bounced around in front of Rupert, trying to stop him from going onward without actually touching him. “Which apartment are you going to?”
“23C,” said Rupert. I hoped the building used letters for apartments.
“Uh huh.” The guard pressed some buttons on the device on his desk.
“Hello?” said the quavering voice of an old woman. Not Sorin. Also probably not expecting us. We started edging toward the bank of elevators. Maybe we could get in one before the guard turned around.
“You have visitors,” said the guard.
“Oh, goody! Send them up right away!”
“Will do,” said the guard, turning to find us furiously hammering the elevator call button. He sighed at our surprisingly unnecessary attempt to bypass his security and waved a hand to go ahead.
“So, what’s the plan?” Rupert asked, standing in front of 23A, the apartment containing the emerald. “We open the door and ask them to hand over the emerald?”
“That sounds like a good plan,” said Citrine approvingly, knocking. There was no answer.
“I could break down the door as Leviazizmoth,” I offered. “But I probably shouldn’t.”
“I’ll Zip through the door and unlock it,” proposed Rupert. “If I scream once, break down the door and save me. Actually, any amount of screaming should signal that you need to come save me.” He vanished without any flashy effects, just suddenly gone. A second later the door was opening, revealing a darkened hallway with oddly textured wallpaper. There wasn’t enough light to see by once the door was closed, so I took out my flashlight and looked around. What I had taken to be wallpaper was Ranger uniforms and badges, stapled to the plaster in an overlapping pattern. I was relieved to see they weren’t riveted on as April is wont to do, but it was still quite worrying. Unless the Rangers sold souvenir uniforms and whoever lived in this apartment was a huge fan?
Another Otto appeared next to the original, and began glowing. “No point in looking nonthreatening when we already broke into their house,” he pointed out. So both of him were charging their hyperbreakers, in case we had to fight.
By that logic, I turned into Leviazizmoth and checked out the apartment with Tremorsense. Ahead of us was a room with a couch, and two smaller rooms leading off it to the right. One seemed to be a bathroom, and the other one had a table. To the right of us were two more rooms, which connected to the mystery room but not the hallway we were standing in. The closer one contained a kobold: Sorin, at last! The farther room contained a humanoid, who was pacing around. Checking Locator several times, I found that the emerald was moving back and forth, indicating it was the human who held the emerald.
“So, I think we should go talk to Sorin,” I concluded after explaining the situation in a whisper.
“No,” Otto countered. “We should secure the emerald and get out. Talking to Sorin is secondary.”
“How about I Antimeme the Tall Man, Blink him in to steal the emerald, and Blink him back out,” Rupert suggested. “Easy.” Shrugs all around. It was worth a try. “And if you have to decide between getting the emerald and being seen, go with staying Antimemed,” Rupert advised the Tall Man. “Now go.”
The Tall Man vanished. We waited in the darkened hallway. I focused on the room containing the emerald, trying to sense what was happening. But wait: searching for an Antimemed creature breaks the Antimeme. So I needed to not focus on finding the Tall Man. But would focusing on not focusing break the Antimeme? I tried listening to the rhythm of six other heartbeats in the hall with me, instead of the vibrations from the other room where…. No! Not thinking about it! It was like not thinking of a blue owl. Actually, a blue owl was the perfect topic, not being at all like a Tall Man.
The Tall Man reappeared, empty-handed. Had it ever even left? We couldn’t tell. “What happened?” Rupert asked, causing the Tall Man to start doing some sort of interpretive dance. A very loud interpretive dance, as Tall Men’s joints sound like snapping twigs when they move, as if they are made out of sticks. (Maybe they are made out of sticks. The one I hugged felt sort of like a tree.) Rupert ushered it out into the hall so as not to give away our presence, and it drew a smoky stain onto the wall: a gem inside a heart.
Indra? Or someone like him. Only with a Chaos Emerald for a heart instead of just a medium, which sounds much more dangerous.
The emerald continued moving around the apartment as we tried to decide what to do. The emerald-bearer didn’t show up on my Tremorsense for a bit, but the emerald didn’t seem to have gone anywhere. The kobold moved counterclockwise around the apartment, stopping in the living room. Someone was going to notice the chairs had moved, after Otto had used one to block the front door while we were trying to steal the emerald. Rupert knocked on the door again. Again, nobody was answering the door. The TV in the hallway was displaying static.
Wait, since when was there a TV in the hallway?
“It must have been Antimemed in,” said Rupert, shrugging.
“That’s how April keeps finding us!” I burst out. “She’s been following us around this whole time, Antimemed!”
“What? Wait, there might be more of them!” Jacqueline swept the room with a gaze of concentration.
And suddenly there were two more Tall Men that I was sure hadn’t been there before. I really, really hate Antimeme.
“Hi, do you think we could be friends?” Citrine was banging on the door. “I think that would be more fun than fighting.”
Clarence joined her. “Let’s just talk, okay? I don’t really want to fight you. Could we talk this out? But if you’re set on fighting, we’re going to put up a fight back at you,” he added in an attempt at threatening which was slightly helped by his scorching the wall with an X-Bolt. It was partly successful: one Tall Man punched Citrine, but the other one vanished, reappearing inside the apartment.
Neon green tentacles burst from the TV, waving angrily. They didn’t seem to hit anyone but still felt very ominous. I pushed it to the other end of the hall with a blast of wind, then started banging on the wall. “Sorin, come on, we know you’re in there! Can you please come out and explain what’s going on?”
Sorin and the Tall Man vanished.
“Sorin!” I yelled in frustration. “Why are you always—”
There was a flash of green light and suddenly there was a quivering jellylike lump on the floor and the apartment door was open with Jacqueline draped around a tall woman with red hair and a green glow shining through her shirt, biting her neck. What?
Rupert reacted first, sending his Tall Man to grab the TV and Blink them both out the window. The woman with the emerald in her heart broke free of Jacqueline’s grip and ran back through the apartment, the rest of us on her heals. She flung a hand at the boarded-up window, which shattered, then jumped through the hole. Citrine dove after her as there was a crash of TV and Tall Man hitting the pavement, but as we watched the woman vanished halfway between the window and the ground.
“What just happened?” Otto asked. “Did the TV do something? I remember seeing those tentacles in Citrine’s dreams but I couldn’t make much sense of them.”
“Were you biting her?” I asked Jacqueline. “Why?”
“Yes, I was. Her blood was nasty.” She wiped something off her face and looked at her fingers. “And green, apparently. You all were frozen, except me and Citrine. I think the TV did it, your eyes were glowing the same green as its tentacles. The door opened and there was that woman with the green glow and some sort of flat plate on her chest. So I thought, I’m a vampire, why not try drinking some blood? Maybe that’s what’s wrong with my arm. I’m not sure I want to repeat the experience, though, if all blood tastes that bad.”
“It’s a Botfly, by the way, not a normal TV,” said Clarence. “That’s all I got from Analyze, and it’s not in the database.”
“Hang on, what is TV anyway?” Jacqueline asked. “I knew the Botfly looked like one, but now that I think about it I can’t remember what they actually do.”
“Huh, I guess they don’t have TV anymore.” Although Otto apparently knew what they were, so they were still around 50 years after the Cataclysm. “They’re like computers but they only show videos broadcast from elsewhere,” I explained.
“Mostly they’d do fictional events,” Clarence added. “Not like the logs we found in the power plant, those were probably real. There was also ‘reality TV’ which was totally fake despite the name. You’re not missing much, a lot of it was kind of terrible.”
“Remember Sandwich Emergency Disaster?” Jay had made me watch it with him back at the lab.
“That show made no sense, why would anyone need a team of ninja caterers to infiltrate their wedding? Anyway, we should search the apartment for clues or anything else useful.”
The desk yielded a creepy-looking key with a skull on the handle and a rolled up map of the continent. Vidriot and Penitencia were marked with colored pencils, yellow and purple respectively. And they were dated, six months ago and a year ago. The a color indicating which emerald delivered and the date it arrived. The power plant had had an emerald for twenty years, the white one had been in the Tall Woods for 75, and the dark blue one had been on the island of Roto-Mar (far northeast, across the Chasm) for 50 years. The green dot next to Lluvia City was dated 13/07/1159. Yesterday.
“He’s been delivering them,” I concluded. “But it still doesn’t explain why. Or what’s up with April’s castle.” The location had no date, just two dots (orange and blue) and the label ‘shadow world fortress (?)’. “I really wish we could have talked to him...”
“Gosh that’s a lot of blood on the floor,” came Citrine’s voice from the next room.
“What?” Clarence rushed over, then froze as there was a knock on the door.
“Relax, it’s not Sorin or the emerald-lady,” I told him. “It’s a man, about my height. Human. Probably the security guard from downstairs.”
After switching the Glamour so it covered his armor instead of the original Otto’s, Otto’s clone went to answer the door. “Hello, can I help you with something?”
“Just investigating a noise report. Is everything okay in here?” said the guard from downstairs.
“There’s been a bit of a problem here, yes,” said Otto, surprisingly not denying everything. “We came here investigating a possible cursed artifact…” And he explained what had happened, leaving out the details of Chaos Emeralds and making us out to be some sort of magical artifact containment service.
There was a long pause and then the guard said, “Wait right here, I’ll call the authorities.”
“Sounds good!” said Otto cheerfully. “By the way, do you have a description of the person who usually lives here? We have reason to believe the people we found arrived recently.”
“A small blonde woman, I think. I’ll be downstairs if you need me.”
Which was not the description of either Sorin (obviously) or the emerald-lady, who was a redhead and fairly tall. Unfortunately, Clarence had an idea of what might have happened to the small blonde woman. “This basically looks like a torture-slash-interrogation setup,” he said, gesturing to the small room where the emerald-lady had been pacing. “Bloodstains on the carpet, indentations from a chair sitting here for a while, marks on the walls from hanging bloody tools: it’s pretty clear.”
“The timeframe’s wrong,” Otto objected. “They got here yesterday, right? Sounds to me like it was the small blonde woman made the interrogation setup.”
“I wonder if it’s April. It doesn’t sound like her description, but she’s got a Glamour. Really, she could be anyone.”
“Anyone?!?” Rupert was horrified at the suggestion. “You mean I could be April?”
“I don’t think April could pretend to be you very effectively,” I assured him. “You’re much too weird. And anyway, it’s easy to tell that you don’t have an extremely overgrown flesh-spiral.” I patted his arm to prove it. “And neither do I, feel? Glamour only does visuals, it can’t cover up the shape of your arm to someone touching it.”
“Anyway!” Otto’s clone interrupted the arm-patting party. “We need to figure out what to do with the authorities. I propose I stay behind, in case they turn out to be hostile. You all can leave on the disguised cloud.”
“Or we could go after the emerald-lady right now,” I suggested. “She’s about directly above us, probably on the roof.”
The roof access stairway came with a lot of signs warning us not to use it, all of which we ignored. It also came with a panic-alarm lever, which would politely ask the residents to evacuate by screaming at them. This one also came with dire warnings as to what might happen if you pulled the lever without a proper emergency. Figuring a rooftop battle was sufficient emergency, Otto’s clone pulled the lever as the rest of us burst through the door. The alarm began screaming, making a high-pitched wail while saying unhelpful things such as “emergency detected!” and “panicking is optional.”
As Tremorsense had shown, the emerald-lady was in the middle of the roof next to a Blighted Lord. Other objects of note were four water towers in the corners, which we would want to avoid damaging if possible. In the spirit of not damaging the building more than we had to, I turned into Plaguelock.
Otto opened the fight by shooting at the Blighted Lord, which blurred out of the way, becoming slightly transparent. The rest of us focused on the emerald lady, who very quickly became dead. Which was really not what we meant to do. That it was possible with chipped mediums confirmed my theory that the chips don’t regard emerald-possessed people as humans, which is interesting. Unless it was Mind Crush that did it.
“I didn’t mean to,” said Rupert, looking surprisingly unconcerned at having killed someone. “I was just going to Mind Crush her a bit so we could threaten to kill her as a negotiating tactic.”
It sounded like something Otto would come up with (or April even), not Rupert. But now was not the time to interrogate him about his new kill-happy philosophy.“Quick, get the stuff out of her medium! We can Revive her and ask what’s going on.”
“Maybe we should get out of the city before we do that,” Clarence suggested, dragging the corpse over to the rest of us.
“Sure, fine, but we need to empty her medium now!” I picked up a limp arm and fumbled for the button that would release the contents of the Gauntlet Launcher. The medium looked kind of wrong, pieces of it bulging like someone had tried to inflate it. “Otherwise we lose the option to Revive her. Hey wait, where did the emerald go?” Her chest wasn’t glowing anymore.
Clarence slashed open her shirt with a knife-tipped tentacle. A glass plate ringed in metal covering an empty space in her chest. “Huh.” His screen flashed. “This is just a corpse, not even a corrupted one. Nothing about an emerald.”
“But it was there! She’s got a hole in her chest where it used to be!” I could see muscles and veins and an exposed piece of heart. That could not be healthy, even with post-Cataclysm biology.
“Look!” Jacqueline was pointing at the northeast water tower, which was bulging ominously. Had the whole thing been a trap? But how???
The water tower exploded, covering the uneven rooftop in deep puddles and revealing a Tall Man, an Angercycle, and the woman we’d just killed, emerald glow visible through a white shirt identical to the one the corpse was wearing. The Angercycle was also glowing with an ominous red light.
“Aiiigh! It’s glowing! Kill it! Kill it!!” Apparently Clarence had something against Angercycles. “In about fifteen seconds it’s going to make a really big laser,” he added, which explained his reaction to the glowing.
With seven of us (counting Otto twice), it is easy to gang up on smaller groups, even if they contain seemingly immortal women with Chaos Emeralds who can apparently summon multiple mons at once. Soon, the three mons were gone, leaving us with the emerald-lady.
“Don’t kill her this time,” I warned. “If we do, we’ll probably just get another one of her.”
Clarence looked thoughtful as the Ottos pinned the emerald-lady to the rooftop. “Good point.” He turned in a circle. “Yeah, I think you may be right: there’s a phylactery in each of the other water towers, along with more mons. This doesn’t sound good at all.”
“Oh, dear,” I said. Phylacteries are on the list of things you shouldn’t mess with, and if you do have to you wear very durable gloves and a helmet. It did explain where the second copy of the emerald-woman had come from: she’d regenerated out the phylactery that had been in the northeast water tower. So there were a finite number of her, but they came with mons that would want to kill us.
“That one’s got a Botfly in it,” Clarence pointed at the three intact water towers in turn, “that one’s got three Blighted Lords, and that one’s got a Leviazizmoth and a Vitalis Rex. Since they’re all staying put for now, I recommend we don’t open them.”
“Sounds like a plan,” I said. I looked around for anything else that might be preparing an ambush and found Jacqueline lying on the ground. Her Puppet Reaper had full hit points so it was unlikely anything had hit her. This was just like what happened a couple days ago, in Rupert’s dungeon. “Oh no, is more of her arm dissolving again?”
“I wonder what would happen if I threw my Ooziel at one of the water towers,” Citrine said. Without waiting for a response, she lobbed her Ooziel at the tower full of Plaguelocks, yelling “explode!”
The emerald-woman snapped her fingers and a beam came out splitting the flying Ooziel into two, both of which exploded when they reached the water tower. Kind of counterproductive if she was trying to stop the explosion, since it had instead doubled it. There was a sloshing sound, but the water tower remained intact. That sort of made sense, Ooziel explosions damage mons but not humans, so perhaps they don’t damage physical objects at all either. If we were lucky, the physical barrier wouldn’t have stopped the double Fission from taking out the three Plaguelocks.
But there was no time to check, because the emerald-woman snapped her fingers, bringing back the Angercycle, which was still glowing. Still charging its laser. I wasn’t sure how much time we had until it went off.
“We didn’t actually come here to kill you,” Otto remarked to the woman as he released her and chased after the Angercycle, which was doing wheelies near the far edge of the roof. “Why can’t you offer us the same courtesy?”
In response, the woman snapped her fingers again, making the Angercycle damage resistant. We really needed to keep her from snapping her fingers. Or using her medium at all. I reached for my wirecutters but, deciding the Angercycle was the more imminent threat, instead joined Otto in tossing the Angercycle off of the roof. Just in time, since seconds later a thick red beam of energy shot up from the side of the building, spearing harmlessly into the sky.
There was a small explosion from the center of the roof, and panicked screaming. Otto and I turned to find that everyone else was slightly on fire. Clarence later explained that Rupert had tried to stop the emerald-lady from using her medium, which had caused a spell to explode all over everyone.
Rupert was especially on fire, which he was not taking at all well, to judge by the screaming. “AAAAA THIS HURTS! NO NO NO! FIRE! WHY DOES IT BURN???”
By the time I got back to the middle of the roof, Otto had put the fires out by shooting a hole in one of the water towers, causing it to dowse the general area. Jacqueline and Clarence were sitting on the emerald-lady, accompanied by a Nullified copy of the emerald-lady. The glass plate on the front of her chest had fallen off and the hole had filled in, making her look like a normal dead person. The live one still had a metal-ringed opening into her chest covered by a glass plate, through which I could see a green gem entwined with a pulsing heart.
“You can do surgery, right?” Clarence asked, holding up a tentacle with a drill on the end. “I can get the plate unscrewed.”
I transformed back to human and disabled her medium with my wirecutters, then started poking around in her chest-hole. On one hand, we couldn’t use healy doodads to pre-heal her because it made the chest-hole shrink. On the other, she didn’t seem to have any ribs in the front, which was quite handy as it made for much easier access to her heart (but also quite worrying). The surgery went about as well as you’d expect for digging a gemstone out of someone’s heart with a pocketknife while they try to escape and the gemstone flings sparks at you. The sparks weren’t a defense mechanism, they were just the emerald’s normal behavior as a massive energy source: as the emerald lost contact with the woman’s heart, it had to put the energy somewhere so it recharged the mediums of those next to it.
The woman stopped struggling when I finally pulled the emerald out of her chest, falling unconscious. Somehow not dead. To make sure she stayed that way, Jacqueline dumped a few healy doodads over her and the hole started closing up. I could see ribs regrowing as well, which was reassuring. She wouldn’t have a squishy and unsupported torso.
At this point, I noticed Rupert, who was lying on the ground, curled up into a ball and muttering incoherently. “What happened to him?” I asked.
“He tried to run away, so I tripped him,” said Clarence. “Jacqueline dumped a healy doodad on him. Then he curled up and wouldn’t respond to anything. I’m not sure where he was trying to run to, there’s nowhere to go but off the edge of the roof.”
So we carried Rupert on the cloud when we decided it was time to leave. The authorities would be here soon for the panic-alarm if nothing else, and we didn’t really want to explain. We took the two emerald-ladies, one living and one Nullified, and left behind the three identical corpses the phylacteries had produced when I removed the emerald. We’ve tied the unconscious one up in case she’s hostile. I hope she wakes up soon and has a really good explanation for what’s going on.