Vidriot
Even from a distance, the ziggurat at the center of Vidriot is quite visible. Its four sides are covered in steps leading to the top, sticks up above the rest of the city, about 60 meters high. Also, it glows green. A glaring, ominous lime green which makes you think that someone is doing forbidden rituals with citrus, and your eyes are going to pay for their misdeeds. We could see the glow upon leaving the forest and entering the desert, about about an hour away from the city by cloud.
Approaching the city, there are towers spread out in the desert, with lookouts obviously posted. Deciding not to antagonize them, we landed the Stormnimbus and proceeded on foot, trying to look nonthreatening. This ruse was aided by the Glamour spell Citrine has, which turned her into a normal-looking human and turned Jacqueline’s hat invisible so nobody would suspect she was a vampire (I’m still not sure how this makes the hat at all effective, does it shadow her face but then the glamour render her face as unshadowed?), as well as disguising the fact that Otto was wearing a suit of Penitent power armor.
As we neared one of the towers, a man jumped off of one, tossing something into the air in front of him. A bird appeared below him and he flew down to meet us. Upon landing, the bird vanished and he caught a playing card in his hand before stowing it in a device on his belt.
“Greetings!” he said, giving a small bow. He wore the same uniform as the Rangers we’d found in the power plant, but with the addition of a small green hat perched precariously on his head.
“Your ominous green glow is so pretty!” enthused Citrine.
“Ahem! Yes, it is quite nice. Now, please show me your arms.”
We revealed our non-spiralled arms and he seemed satisfied. He took out a notebook and pen and began taking notes.
“Who are you? Name, where you came from.”
“I’m Citrine. They found me in a power plant!”
“Unusual.” He wrote something down. “Okay, next?”
He was fine until he got to me. “You’re from before the Cataclysm?” His eyebrows rose skeptically. “I’m going to mark that under ‘other’.”
“And what’s this all about?” I asked, interrupting. “Why are you checking people’s arms?” I knew why I would check people’s arms, but I was curious what the people of Vidriot knew about the spirals, flesh and metal.
“Oh!” He seemed pleased to have a question he could answer. “We have to make sure you don’t have those helixes. Fleshy ones on the left hand or metallic ones on the right. Very dangerous if left on. Nowadays everyone has them removed at birth, but there’s a lot of people coming out of dungeons who still have them. You all seem safe enough, though.”
Citrine looked thoughtful. “I’m just thinking that if you’re asking to look at people’s arms to tell if they’re safe, you might not be able to tell completely.”
Which was entirely true, since we’d just fooled the guard into thinking Citrine was a human, and had arms instead of tentacles. But we didn’t really want to go there.
“Yeah, they might have a flesh-spiral inside of them!” Clarence elaborated, shooting Citrine a frantic shut-up glance which she completely missed, in typical Citrine fashion. “We ran into some wolves on the way here that did that. They had helixes, they shot down our cloud!”
We’d thought nothing on the ground could harm our cloud until one of the pack of wolves chasing us opened its mouth and out shot a beam, vaporizing the cloud. So we’d had to fight them. The wolves had more tricks up their sleeves: Ooziels, healing spells, and a really nasty creature called a Red Shadow which trapped Otto and Clarence in some sort of shimmery cloud. When we autopsied one of the dead wolves, we found they had a flesh-spiral wrapped around parts of their digestive tract, ending on its tongue. I’m not sure if it’s because they ate someone with a flesh-spiral, or if it was the result of a more deliberate effort on someone’s part.
“Oh my. I haven’t heard of that before, that’s quite worrying.” The guard flipped through some more pages as if looking for the Evil Superwolves form, then gave up. “We’ll cover all this in the proper interviews when you get registered. Come on.”
“Registered?”
“Yes, we’ll interview you about your background, then issue you an id card. Everyone entering for the first time has to do this.”
I was a little worried what the interviews might turn up, especially in the case of Citrine, but we could deal with that later. We followed the guard towards the city. As we walked, he gave us some background on the history and culture of Vidriot. The ziggurat’s been around for thousands of years, and the city sprung up around it a while after the Cataclysm. Deserts are a lot more hospitable if you don’t get thirsty or need to grow crops, I guess. The people of Vidriot use cards to harness mons and spells, and often duel for fun. Although the culture of dueling had gotten out of hand in recent times, the guard hinted darkly before catching himself and going on to more tourist-friendly topics like how glowy and green the central ziggurat is.
Inside the city, we got a taste of the dueling culture when we passed by an arena. One of the duelists was standing behind a very strange creature, a dragon with three feathery wings on its back and a red glowing patch on its front. Water streamed off the elbows of its comically short arms and pooled at its feet before running up its legs to complete the cycle.
“Leviazizmoth,” ordered the duelist standing behind it. “Use wave!”
Leviazizmoth stood straighter in anticipation but the other duelist brandished a card and then tossed it into the air. “I activate the Pot of Recalling Ancestral Greed!” he paused dramatically. “Let me explain what it does!”
“Ah, but while you were pausing dramatically, I activated my trap card!” the other one retorted, indicating the card he’d just tossed at his opponent. “Let me explain the trap you have tragically fallen into!”
“But I was explaining!”
The guard who was accompanying us rolled his eyes and pulled us onward.
“How does dueling work around here?” I asked. “Is there a protocol for challenging someone? Can you refuse a duel or are you just stuck? Can people even challenge us since we don’t have cards?”
“Refuse a duel?” The guard looked surprised. “Of course! What did you take us for? Barbarians who would simply lock eyes and demand someone fight you with no way to back down?”
“I hadn’t thought that exactly, but I had heard people were pretty into dueling here, I just wanted to make sure!”
The guard scowled. “Some people lately might give that impression,” he said sourly. “Dueling is a perfectly fine passtime but they are taking it much too far! You should stay away from them.”
And he refused to say anything else for the rest of the walk.
We arrived at the registration center, and were set to the task of filling out forms about ourselves. Given we’d already been escorted inside the city, I wondered how easy it would have been to distract the guard and slip off without registering. Maybe if we yelled something about a Pot of Ancestral Invisibility he’d have to pretend he didn’t see us. But now we were here in a building full of Rangers who would probably be upset if we tried to leave.
After partly filling out the form—most of the questions had to do with emerging from dungeons, and didn’t make sense for me—I got called in for the first interview. The interviewer quickly stuck on my being from before the Cataclysm. People emerging from dungeons are pretty commonplace, and often come from the past, but the earliest they’ve found anyone is 36 years after the Steve and Lily showed up. There isn’t anyone who remembers what life was like before the gods went silent.
“You’re from before the Cataclysm?” he repeated incredulously, frantically scribbling. “What was it like? How did it happen?”
“I can’t tell you that much,” I said regretfully. “Clarence and I were part of a team of scientists studying the early effects, and ended up with the first flesh-spirals. But we didn’t manage to find out much before the murders started.”
The guard nodded, familiar with the murderous tendencies of those with spirals. After some more questions, he seemed about done with me. “And we’ll just check your medium now.” He took a device out of a drawer and plugged one of its many cords into the hole on the front of my breastplate where I can put mons or soulfruit in. “Hmm. This doesn’t seem to be chipped.” He frowned.
“I didn’t think so, this is a prototype from about a year after the incursion started. Nobody was worrying about safety features.”
“That’s okay, if you’ll just take it off, we can get it chipped for you.”
“You’ll give it back?” I asked worriedly. “And you won’t hurt it?”
“We’re just going to put a chip in it to prevent you Perfect Summoning anything.” The bureaucrat seemed mildly annoyed with my obstinance.
“Sounds reasonable.” I started undoing the straps that held the breastplate on. “By the way, what happens with transform mediums if you do a Perfect Summon? I’ve been really curious but didn’t want to try it since it sounded dangerous.”
“That was a very good decision; if you’d tried it, it would have killed you. A Perfect Summon from a transform medium turns the wielder into a mon, who then attacks the people around them. Once the mon is killed, it leaves behind a human body, charred and mangled. Not a pretty sight.”
‘In that case, chipping sounds very sensible, I approve!” I handed him my breastplate, feeling very vulnerable without it. “One other question, what happens to the people who come out of the dungeons with spirals?”
“The helix mediums? We remove it, give them a safe medium, and send them on their way.”
“And they’re safe?”
“We don’t hold them responsible for what they did while in the madness.” He gave me a stern look, like I was being overly harsh.
“No, I… Lara removed our flesh-spirals but she didn’t know if it would do anything or if the blackouts were be permanent from the exposure. It’s only been about a week since we woke up and I was hopeful, but…” Could I really stop worrying that we were going to wake up somewhere else leaving a trail of bodies in our wake?
“Removing the helix is a sufficient cure for the madness,” he confirmed, and sent me back to the waiting room. Otto was ushered into the room I left, and started talking overly loudly about what we’d found in the power plant. Ah, he was making sure we heard what he said so we could keep our story straight. That was a good idea. We hadn’t had time to discuss anything on the way here so we’d have to play it by ear.
Walking over to the opposite side of the room, I could hear Jacqueline being interviewed in the room on the other side of the wall.
“Skeleton labor?” I heard the guard say. “We are talking about the risen dead, yes? Most people don’t take to it due to its morbid nature, but I don't see that much of a problem with raising the dead, since they weren't using their various bits after death anyway. I hear that skeleton labor is a more standard practice down in Nazgoth. But allowing for skeleton labor creates some poisonous incentives where you're incentivized to kill people so you can use their corpses for cheap labor.” He paused. “Why do you ask?”
“I’m conducting a study,” said Jacqueline.
I was pretty sure she could handle it. She could quite plausibly avoid giving anything away simply by being confused about everything and unable to give an answer without so many qualifications and restrictions on the conditions of its veracity that they would be unable to glean any useful information.
Otto, however, was having some trouble. He’d given a thorough report on our encounter with the flesh-spiralled wolves, but when the ran into problems when they tried to examine his medium and found that the Gauntlet Launcher he apparently wore was fake. There was the sound of fists knocking on metal, and a very confused technician asking “Sir, do you mind?”
“Here, I’ll plug it in for you,” Otto said helpfully. The armor has a port on the left side, a few inches below the arm joint.
“That’s not what I meant! Whatever you’re doing, could you please stop it!”
“No.”
“Sir!”
(It’s funny how they all called Otto sir. They didn’t do titles for any of the rest of us. But I have to agree: calling Otto sir doesn’t seem strange at all.)
“Look, it’s power armor originally from Penitencia. Given their reputation, I didn’t want to go around looking like I was from there, see?”
“No, I can’t see, that’s the problem. The device says it’s chipped but we still have to do a visual inspection. Can’t you stop doing that thing where it’s invisible?”
“I think it might break the glamour if I take it off,” offered Otto wearily. “Ugh, it’s so much trouble to get back on…” There were sounds of clanking from the other room as he removed the pieces of armor, which evidently satisfied the technician since there were no more complaints.
Some more officials gave my breastplate back, then took me to another room to have my picture taken and handed me an id card. When I got back, Clarence was looking anxious.
“They asked about the glamour and since Citrine was the only one left who could have the spell, they wanted to know why it was her. So I had to tell them about her looking scary. I hope they don’t decide she’s dangerous! Although the rest of us may have been weird enough that they don’t care anymore. I hope.”
“They didn’t suspect me at all,” said Jacqueline proudly. “Nobody knows I’m wearing an invisible hat! Or that I hid my box of dead Rangers inside of it!”
“Good thinking.” Although maybe she should have said it a little more quietly...
“Otto came up with it, he put Anathema in his pocket before getting called in. We figured they might cause problems if the officials found it.”
“I couldn’t hide this thing anywhere,” Clarence hefted the toolbox, which he had reshaped into a kettle-bell, “but they bought my explanation that we don’t know what it is but we’re carrying it around since the mons seemed to think it was important.” He brightened. “Also! They want to hire me to fix their power armor! They’ve got a whole pile of it I can work with!”
Jacqueline and then Clarence got called out as Otto returned lugging a pile of power armor and started laboriously putting it back on. I perused one of the pamphlets which had been left on a table; it detailed various emergency procedures. Vidriot, despite being a desert, was occasionally visited by the Rain Bird, so it was important to know the locations of emergency shelters. But more often the problem was something called Hangmon, which sounds sort of like Puppet Reaper, only the Puppet is a giant dragon corpse, and the Puppeteer is some sort of skeleton-spider-hand. I hope it doesn’t show up while we’re here; if it’s on level with the Rain Bird I really don’t want to meet it.
After getting out with no further mishap, we wandered the streets of Vidriot, trying to glean what information we could. We’d been warned to stay away from the ziggurat as it was the center of the dueling fever, which had been slowly building and was quickly reaching a boiling point. There was also something about the library, but nobody would tell us what, just that we should probably stay away from it. Since we needed to enter both those places—the ziggurat for the Chaos Emerald there, according to Locator; and the library for information about the emeralds—we wanted to get as much information as possible about the dangers there.
But while we got the impression that most people thought the duelists were overly aggressive and kind of culty, and the ziggurat Champion was the worst of them, there wasn’t much in the way of concrete threats. There was, however, funnel cake. It was being sold by a man in an apron and a Damn O’ Klees with a matching one, both of whom were dancing enthusiastically. I guess you need the extra push to get people to buy food just for the experience, since there is no hunger to satisfy.
Standing behind the funnel cake dance duo was a very tall man, more than a head taller than anyone else in the crowd. A Tall—no, he had a face. I checked again. He still had a face. And he didn’t have hit points. But he was way too tall to be anything but a Tall Man. And standing next to him was April. Staring at us. She smiled and took a bite of funnel cake.
It was way too late to run away.
“Hey, guys!” bubbled April, bouncing over with her Tall Man in tow. “How have you been? Seen any spooky-looking rocks? I’m starting a collection!”
I had been staring at her bare arms, which were very obviously free of flesh-spiral (she had a Gauntlet Launcher on the right one), but at that comment I switched to not-staring really hard at the Chaos Emerald container Clarence was carrying.
“Why?” Citrine asked.
“It seemed like the thing to do,” said April vaguely.
“What have you been doing the past 200 years?” I demanded.
“Oh, you know, stuff, things.”
I scowled. April was doing that thing again. Answering questions in the vaguest way possible. Not lying. I think she has a thing about lying, she’s never said anything about it but I can’t remember her telling a direct lie. She’s just incredibly evasive sometimes. It was probably not a good sign that she was doing so now.
“You’ve been out and active for 200 years?” Otto asked with interest.
“Yep!”
“Where’s your flesh-spiral?” Clarence asked suspiciously. “Did you have it removed?”
April held out her arms as if to demonstrate that the spiral was absolutely not there. Not actually saying she had.
But I had a way to test it! “April! It’s been so long!” I held out my arms for an extremely awkward hug. April let me wrap my arms around her, and I could feel the end of the spiral pulsating invisibly on the back of her neck. And on her left arm, which was wrapped around my neck. Wait, maybe this wasn’t such a good idea…. I tried to step back. April held on. Uh oh. I was starting to wonder if I was going to stab her like I’d stabbed the Tall Man when she let me go.
I have really, really got to stop hugging things I know are dangerous.
“Where did you get your glamour?” Clarence asked, having surmised from my expression that April’s flesh-spiral was still present.
“Around.” As she spoke, the Tall Man’s face flickered, revealing its true lack of face. Then it went back to eating funnel cake. How? It didn’t even have a face! I’d seen one absorb blood off of surfaces, but funnel cake was solid! Where was it going? There was enough powdered sugar on the cake to make it fairly sticky, so maybe it was just sticking layers of pieces of invisible funnel cake to its lack of a face in order to give the impression that it was eating? Why???
“April, what are you doing here?”
“It’s a nice city, they’ve got a lovely ominous glow!”
True, but still not answering the question. “Can we see this spooky rock collection you’re so excited about?” I tried. “Have you been building it this whole time?”
“I could tell you about it, or on the other hand, I could not.” April laughed, somehow managing to make a giggle sound maniacal.
Otto looked confused. “I thought you were those guys’ friend, did I misunderstand?”
“We were friends, once upon a time,” replied April. “A very long time ago. So,” she turned to Clarence and me, “are we still friends, guys?”
Uhhhhh. I might have said yes if I thought we were going to stop April by teaching her the true meaning of friendship. But this is April. And we’re much better versed in accidentally destroying things than we are in demonstrating the true meaning of friendship.
“What are you doing and what are your plans?” Clarence had decided to ignore April’s challenge.
“Told you: rock collection.”
“And how scared should we be about this? Scale of one to ten.”
“Hmmm… I’d give it maybe a nine.”
Extremely worrying.
Clarence did disappointed puppy. “That doesn’t seem like a good thing for friends to be doing.” Apparently he was going for the true meaning of friendship angle.
“What are you doing with the rocks, anyway?” I asked, because the friendship angle was going to be useless.
“I’m installing them in my castle.”
“You have a castle?” I wanted a castle!
“It’s been 250 years, why wouldn’t I have a castle?”
“You’ve got a point there,” admitted Jacqueline, also a fan of castles.
“Are you expecting to be besieged?” asked Otto, who does not get the point of castles at all.
“Can we visit your castle?” I interrupted.
April stopped to think about that. “Maybe, if I feel like arranging a visit. It would help if you brought me a present.”
She definitely knew we were carrying around a Chaos Emerald.
“Where is your castle, anyways?”
“Not here.”
There was a pause, which lengthened into an awkward pause and kept going. The Tall Man smacked its fake lips and bought another funnel cake.
Jacqueline broke the silence, pulling something out of her pocket with a flourish. “I summon Jacqueline!”
Nothing happened.
Jacqueline looked at her id card suspiciously. “I’ve got one card in this city that’s famous for card mediums,” she complained. “Vidriot is not living up to its reputation!”
The silence continued.
“Well, good luck finding your spooky rocks!” Jacqueline tried again.
“Thank you! Have you seen any, by the way?”
Jacqueline started ticking off options on her invisible-glove-clad fingers. “I might have seen some but not realized they were spooky. Or not realized they were rocks. Or they might have been invisible, which would have been spooky but I wouldn’t know since I didn’t see them. Or I might have seen one and forgotten, which would be spooky as well.” She paused as if trying to come up with more possibilities. “In conclusion, I don’t know how many spooky rocks I have seen.”
April looked kind of stunned. It’s really entertaining watching people interact with Jacqueline when she goes into full confusion mode. She rather sensibly directed her next question to Clarence. “Why are you carrying that kettle-bell around?”
“I have my reasons.”
“Not gonna tell?”
“We could tell you,” replied Otto in a much better imitation of April than Clarence had managed, “or we could not.”
April recognized the mockery and laughed. “Well played.” And she left, somehow managing to melt into the crowd despite being accompanied by a creature a foot taller than anyone else around.
“We should tell someone,” Otto stated after April was definitely gone. “The authorities need to know how dangerous she is. And that they’ve got a massive flaw in their security system, anyone with the right glamour could just walk right in.”
And there was a debate. Telling the authorities about April could get a lot of them killed if they decided to go after her. But if April was going to start something—and it was pretty likely she was going to go after the Chaos Emerald in the ziggurat—then they would be safer if they knew what they were up against. And Otto had a point about glamours being a gaping hole in the security system. We’d gotten Jacqueline’s vampire nature through undetected and could probably have smuggled Citrine if Otto’s invisible power armor hadn’t given it away. They needed to know about that, at least, and how could we explain it if we didn’t include April?
The conversation went surprisingly well. “She’s been active for 250 years?” asked the official we talked to. “We know the madness gets worse over time, I don’t even want to think about what might happen after that long. But I guess we may have to, if she does something disruptive.” It didn’t sound like there were any plans to storm after April, likely resulting in a lot of casualties. They didn’t seem to appreciate my warning not to hug her, though; they thought this should have been obvious to everyone.
Warning taken care of, we discussed what to do next.
“I have an idea!” I announced. “We know April is here, so her castle is probably unguarded. We should steal her emeralds while she’s busy in Vidriot.”
Otto looked skeptical. “And do what with them? We’re not that well prepared to defend ourselves against April, so she might just take them back. We’d only be antagonizing her.”
“Defending ourselves against her is easy: we also steal her castle!”
“Sorry, what?”
“Once we’ve broken into her castle, “ I elaborated, “it will be easy to take it over and use it ourselves. Then we’ll have good defenses.”
“Now that’s really antagonizing her,” muttered Clarence, shaking his head.
“I don’t think you understand how castles work,” Otto objected. “There will probably be some secret entrances April knows about, we won’t be able to find them all. And then we’ll be fighting April in her own castle.”
“Come on!” I pleaded. “I’ve always wanted to steal a castle! A castle! What do you think, Citrine?”
But Citrine wasn’t there.
“Oh no, where did she go?” moaned Clarence.
“I guess she wandered off and got lost in the crowd?” Jacqueline suggested, hopping up and down to see farther over the tops of people’s heads.
We waited for a while, but Citrine didn’t return and there wasn’t really anything to do. She’d seen the hotel the Vidriot officials had gotten for us on account of their hiring Clarence, we could just hope she’d turn up there eventually. At least the glamour on Otto and Jacqueline seemed to be holding up to the distance. After some more discussion about what to do, Jacqueline asked for directions to the library, since we definitely needed more information on Chaos Emeralds. Clarence had noticed the kettle-bell holding the emerald was getting a little warm to the touch. He wasn’t sure how long it had been going on, so we couldn’t tell whether it was due to proximity to the Emerald in the city, or if the Stabilization Oil was degrading. Either way, we needed to know more about how to safely contain multiple Chaos Emeralds.
The neighborhood around the library was much quieter than the central district where we’d encountered April, and more ornately decorated. There were few people, most of them Rangers or city workers using cards to maintain the intricate carvings decorating the sidewalk, which would otherwise have been worn away by foot traffic in short order. The library itself was four-story building with Vidriot’s typically simple architecture. I would have expected a famous library to look more imposing, but all the facade sported was a staircase leading up to an archway, with two gargoyles flanking it. They each had one hit point, so I assumed they were just for show. Inside it was bright and open-feeling, with a massive skylight reaching up to the roof. Bookshelves lined the walls and made a maze in the central area under the skylight; and I glimpsed even more books behind the railings of the upper floors.
Someone was staring at us. A tall thin man wearing a purple robe and a very intense look, like he was trying to bore holes in our heads so all our knowledge would fall out and he could slurp it up. “Well?” he asked upon seeing us notice his stare. “What is your purpose here? Do you seek to vanquish your eternal ignorance or are you mere curiosity-seekers in search of an amusing tale?”
What was his deal?
Clarence recovered first. “We’re looking for information on gemstones. And chemistry. Also the Cataclysm, if you’ve got anything.”
“Hmmmm,” said the librarian, and called over an assistant to help “these visitors with their prying eyes and voracious minds”, who found us some books on gemstones and mythology. As for analyzing or duplicating a mysterious substance (we hadn’t given specifics on the Stabilization Oil), we were advised to seek the help of a chemist.
So we got library cards and retreated to our hotel with armloads of additional books. The emerald container had gotten a little warmer, and when Clarence poked a hole in it to check on the emerald, some of the liquid spurted out, pressurized by the increase in heat.
“It might have been running the whole power plant,” Otto mused. “And now the energy’s got nowhere to go. Maybe that’s why it’s heating up?”
“If that’s the only problem, we may as well dunk it in a bucket of ice water,” Clarence said, and went to look for ice. But nobody sells ice in Vidriot, because there’s not much reason to keep things cold. There’s not much water, at all, it being a desert inhabited by people who don’t get thirsty. But we made do by chilling some sand with Clarence’s Blighted Lord, and putting the emerald container in a bucket of it. While we were at it, we got several buckets of chilled sand to carry around as decoys, and put one in Jacqueline’s box and one in the hotel room. Just in case.
Next, we went to find a chemist. Most people we asked had no idea where to find one, but eventually we met someone whose neighbor’s uncle was a chemist, and got directions to his apartment. A very short old man opened the door with an enthusiastic greeting, and seemed delighted with our request of duplicating our mysterious vial of substance. “Allow me to analyze this substance and determine its origin!” he gushed, snatching up the vial and twirling around. “Just like I determined the origin of the ziggurat!”
“What,” said Clarence.
“The ziggurat is millllions of years old!” explained the old man, making his way into another room. “No, that’s a lie, it’s ten thousand years old. I’m a compulsive liar. Don’t tell anyone.” He put the vial of Stabilization Oil in a centrifuge and turned it on with a wave of a card. After a few seconds, he retrieved the vial to reveal the layers of component materials: mostly yellow, with a layer of cyan at the top and some sooty substance gathered on the bottom.
“This is very interesting!” The chemist turned the vial around and held it up to the light. “I think this may be some sort of coolant.” He dipped a finger in the mixture and licked it. I flinched. Rule one of chemistry is to not eat your experimental subject. This also applies to most science that isn’t chemistry. “Definitely antifreeze!” he reported proudly. “It’s pure poison. I’m going to die now. No, that was a lie, it’s fine. Just really disgusting.” Dip. Lick. “Yep, this tastes terrible!”
“Will you please stop eating that?”
The chemist gave me a look like I was spoiling all his fun. “Fine. This contains vegetable oil, antifreeze, and for some reason, graphite.” He dipped a corner of another card into the vial, nodding in satisfaction when frost spread across the paper. “It’s bonded together with some crystal magic to make a coolant. I don’t know why the graphite is in there, but maybe that’s one of the uncomfortable truths about physics I just don’t want to know.”
“It just makes things cold?” Was that really all there was to it?
“Yep!”
“Could you make us some more of it?” Otto asked.
“Ehhh,” the chemist dithered. “Probably not, I don’t have anything with really powerful crystal magic. You can get the oil and graphite anywhere but I’ll have to make you some antifreeze from scratch. Nobody sells it around here, it’s disgusting. I can have it ready in a couple hours, sound good?”
“Sure. Oh, hold on, I think we’ve got something else for you to analyze. Jacqueline, do you still have the weird cylinders we got at the power plant?”
“Don’t give one to him, he’ll just eat it!”
“If he ate everything he came into contact with he’d be dead by now, I’m sure he has better sense than to eat it if it’s dangerous.”
The chemist whistled innocently like he was absolutely not listening in on our conversation (which we were having in his apartment, so fair enough for listening in).
It took some doing to get the cylinders out of the box without revealing we also had some undead corpses, but soon enough one of the cylinders emerged from the huddle blocking the box from the chemist’s view.
“You can keep this as long as we can watch you analyze it and you tell us everything you find out,” I said, handing it over. “Okay?”
“Perfect! Wait no, this sounds like a trap. Eh, it’s probably fine, give it here.” He turned it over several times, licking his lips before remembering that he was supposed to be analyzing, and not snacking. After putting it through the centrifuge to no effect, he tried connecting a cord between it and his medium. The medium did something and a third of the liquid in the cylinder vanished. “A portable resetting station!” he declared. “Very nice! I have no idea how it works, and I don’t think it’s rechargeable. Thank you for a very interesting afternoon! I’ll see you in a couple hours to pick up your antifreeze.”
“Sure, if you give me a bit.” The chemist shrugged. “I’ll have to make my own antifreeze, nobody sells that stuff anymore. Don’t blame them, it’s disgusting stuff. I can have it ready by tomorrow, sound good?”
Conscious that April might make a move at any time, we headed for the ziggurat. Nobody stopped us from entering the plaza leading up to it. Nobody stopped us from walking inside. The welcome desk in the lobby was abandoned, looking forlorn despite bright colored posters proclaiming the rules of the ziggurat. One Challenger at a time! Challengers must face the other members before facing the Champion! Harming other humans will result in immediate disqualification!
I looked closer. What I had taken for overexuberant decorations was red pen crossing out all the rules. That was a little weird, I wondered who had done that. And why there was nobody at the welcome desk. But it did make just walking in to steal the emerald that much easier.
The next room was pitch dark. Then a light flickered on, revealing three green-clad people in a line, posing in a huddle.
“We have visitors!” cackled one.
“Challengers!” added another with obvious delight.
“Woah, whoah, what?” Jacqueline objected. “I’m not here to challenge you, I’m here to talk!”
The three ignored her, drawing cards in unison and tossing them to the floor to summon an Ooziel, an AngerCycle, and a really spiky thing I didn’t recognize.
“Glorious battle!”
“For you see, you have stepped into the ziggurat!”
“And you don’t step into the ziggurat unless you want to fight.”
“Now we will do glorious card-based combat!” they cried in unison, forming a human pyramid.
Clarence turned into Parasonico, spreading his tentacles to show that he didn’t have any cards.
“Well then we will do combat which may or may not involve cards?” the one on top offered tentatively. “But glorious nonetheless!” he added quickly.
These guys reminded me of Vectronians. Being excited about cards and dueling instead of Vectron didn’t make them any less annoying.
“How does this work?” Otto asked, fiddling with the settings on his armor. “Is this some sort of one-on-one thing or do we all fight you at once?”
“Hi!” interrupted Jacqueline. “I’m from the Nightly Herald! Which is definitely a real newspaper. Care to tell me about your experiences in the card-battling league?”
The effect on the trio was instantaneous: they deconstructed their pyramid and put away their mons, then stood up taller and started fussing with their hair and straightening up their robes.
“She’s here to inspect us!”
“An inspection!?”
“Shut up and stop panicking! We must show them the entire facility! Only then will they comprehend all the glorious things we do here!”
“That’s very obliging of you,” said Jacqueline sweetly, opening the notebook she’d just stolen out of my pocket and poising the likewise-stolen pen above it. “What’s first?”
“We will go to the next challenge room, where we will show you how the Tester deals with challengers. He’s amazing, he stores all of his knowledge in his large head!”
“That’s… nice?” I said.
“We’d better show you, he’s even more impressive in person.”
The lights were off in the next room as well, which when turned on revealed a man standing in front of four large cardboard boxes. A man with a very large head wearing a lab coat. His head was disturbingly large, extending almost as wide as his shoulders, and covered in thick, pulsing veins. His neck looked comically small in comparison; I half expected it to droop under the weight of the massive head perched atop it.
“So it seems you have overcome the first challenge,” he declared in a nasal, high-pitched voice.
“No, boss, this lady is an inspector.”
“An inspector, you say?” The man in the lab coat ran a suspicious gaze over us.
“Yes, she’s an inspector.”
“Hmmmm. Have you checked your pamphlet lately?”
“My pamphlet?”
“Pamphlets are good sources of knowledge,” reprimanded the large-headed man who was most likely the Tester. “Do none of you have the pamphlet?” He sighed. “Shall I read the relevant passage? Ahem. We do not have inspections. Ever.”
The trio looked embarrassed at this pronouncement.
Jacqueline tried to salvage the situation. “I’m a journalist, not an inspector. It sounds like you’ve made a deliberate decision not to have inspections, could you tell me a bit more about the rationale behind that?”
“Of course I can!” crowed the Tester. “I wouldn’t want prying eyes to interfere with my research, now would I? I have learned many interesting things! And now I arrive at the pinnacle of my achievements: I have figured out how to summon without a person attached to the medium! Minions, leave! I want to show these intrepid intruders what I have created.”
The three green-robed minions scuttled out of the room, probably to resume their dramatic pose.
“The door was open…” Jacqueline objected to the intruders comment.
“Feast your eyes on these!” the Tester declared, gesturing to the cardboard boxes. His head quivered on his skinny neck.
As far as I could tell, they were just plain old cardboard boxes.
“Behold! My rrrrrrroboduelists!” He rolled the R at the beginning of the word for dramatic effect.
And the boxes opened to reveal… people wearing rather low-effort robot costumes: cardboard boxes covered in foil.
“Beep boop,” said one.
“Beep beeep beep,” added another.
I wondered if they were trying to make fun of the Tester, or were just terrible actors.
“Can you feel their excellent power?”
“This statement is false,” said Clarence mildly.
The roboduelists somehow looked confused despite not having movable faces.
“That is a paradox,” snapped the Tester. “Roboduelist 3, check your pamphlet about paradoxes.”
The roboduelist with a 3 painted on its front picked up a pamphlet and flipped through it. It was holding it upside down. “Paradoxes. Are not. Real. Sir,” it read.
“Very good. Now fight them!”
“Beep boop. I am a robot. Behold my powerful metallic frame. Beep boop.”
“No, we do battle!” the Tester directed them. “Rrrrroboduelists, summon your creatures! Without the use of a medium! Or a human!”
“Summoning…. Cards…” the roboduelists said in unison, and each dropped a card on the floor and summoned a Monitor.
Clarence turned back into Parasonico. “I am the lead robot here,” he declared.
“This Monitor. Is better. Than. Ours,” lamented roboduelist 4.
“There are four of you, you fools!”
“Four is a. Greater number. Than one,” said roboduelist 1 happily. “The square root. Of four is. Two. I can. Do. Math.”
“What’s the square root of 79.2?” Clarence asked.
“Twelve. Beep boop, I am a robot.”
After a few more questions, Clarence had confused the roboduelist completely. “Consulting pamphlet,” it announced. “Consulting... consulting...” Its Monitor lay on the floor next to it, seeming disgusted with having to work with such a pathetic excuse for a robot.
“There’s still three of you, you outnumber them!” growled the Tester.
There was a flash of light as Otto cloned himself. The clone was visibly wearing armor, the glamour evidently not extending to people not present when it was cast. “Are you sure you outnumber us?” he asked roboduelists 2, 3, and 4. And then we took down two of the Monitors with only minimal damage to Clarence, who had turned into the Blighted Lord.
“I activate. Green Vest,” declared roboduelist 3. A green vest appeared on the remaining Monitor, which suddenly looked much cuter and friendlier. Then time seemed to slow down. “This card allows me to protect my mon from some damage,” said the roboduelist in surprisingly fluent and nonrobotic tones. There was the sound of a giant heartbeat and then time snapped back to normal.
“Summoning. Vengelus,” said the two other roboduelists as Clarence stabbed the vested Monitor with claws that shot out of his hand. The Vengeluses (Vengeli?) were red demonic-looking men with blue tattoos, which floated about an inch above the ground. One started shooting at Clarence, which had very little effect.
The two Ottos took the opportunity to tackle roboduelist 3, whose Monitor had just died, stealing its deck. “My deck,” said the roboduelist in a flat voice devoid of emotion. “I shall. Avenge you, deck.” Its cardboard torso was caved in on one side.
“What!?” spat the Tester, outraged. “I believe that is against the rules!” He began flipping through his pamphlet.
The Vengelus that had been shooting Clarence started shooting the original Otto instead, possibly because he didn’t look like he was wearing armor. “Hey!” I objected as the darts pinged off his invisible shields. “Isn’t that against the rules too? You can’t hit humans!” Ottos and Clarence started attacking it as the Tester continued reading his pamphlet.
The other Vengelus scooped up Clarence, who popped back to human, before throwing him to the ground in a shower of lightning. “That is super against the rules!” yelled Clarence, eyes leaking tears of pain and fury.
“Can we have a referee?” Jacqueline asked.
“Okay, everyone!” announced the Tester. “I found it in the pamphlet: it’s crossed out. All the rules are crossed out! We can do whatever we want, unbounded by the laws of mortals!”
“Exterminate,” said roboduelist 4.
“Exsanguinate,” agreed roboduelist 2, then added “Vengelus. Use. Rising Demon.”
This caused the healthier Vengelus to start shooting me with darts. They didn’t do much damage but for some reason they made me float. I tried to get away but gravity was not cooperating. I threw a bomb at it and landed on the ground just in time to see Jacqueline pull something out of her pocket and yell, “I cast Vidriot Public Library!”
There was a flash of darkness, a thunderously loud heartbeat, and cracks appeared across the surface of Jacqueline’s library card, spilling an eerie yellow light. This seemed distinctly ominous.
I looked around to see if anything else had happened. The other Vengelus had vanished, presumably defeated, and the two Ottos were sitting on roboduelists 2 and 4, holding their decks. “The enemy’s gate is down,” said the clone, smugly. Whatever that meant.
“My roboduelists!” wailed the Tester. “They have been deprived of their decks!” He began flipping through his pamphlet but stopped as he realized that he couldn’t invoke its rules any more than we could. “That was very rude,” he concluded. “Alright, you win, you may face the Champion. Please return the decks. Do not worry! Everything is going according to plan!”
“What plan?” Clarence asked, echoing my thoughts.
“I don’t have to tell you anything!” The Tester crossed his arms and turned his face to the ceiling in defiance, veins pulsating. Yellow liquid started leaking out of one eye.
Orginal Ottos crossed his arms, too. “We also don’t have to return the decks, or not disassemble your robots.”
“Noooo! Not my roboduelists!”
“No, daddy,” said roboduelist 2. “I do not want. To be. Disassembled.”
“Fine, what do you want?” the Tester snapped, veins standing out prominently. I hoped they wouldn’t burst, the yellow leaking was already a sign that something was wrong with his physiology.
“We want to know what are your plans, and what’s going on.”
The Tester threw up his hands. “I just work here! I was hired to challenge duelists with my amazing dueling prowess.”
“So essentially you’ve been hired to duel people and you have no idea what’s going on.”
“I know everything!” And he started spouting a lot of nonsense. Nobody else seemed to know what to make of it, either.
“Where do cards come from?” Otto’s clone interrupted.
“The Heart of Cards, it disgorges them.” The Tester rolled his eyes, both of which were now leaking the yellow fluid. Was he crying? Were these his normal tears?
“The Heart of Cards? Like… an actual heart?”
“Yes. It is about the size of your torso.” He indicated the original Otto, who appeared largeish but not massive since his power armor was still invisible.
“What, with blood?”
“Obviously.”
“The ziggurat has blood!?”
“There is a… spacial anomaly around the Heart. The veins just seem to lead elsewhere.”
“So, these roboduelists of yours,” Jacqueline prompted. “I take it you approve of the role of robot labor in society.”
“Oh, yes!” the Tester cackled. “Much better than nasty skeleton labor!” The yellow fluid was leaking from his nose as well.
Clarence took over the interrogation, trying to get actually useful information about the roboduelists. After convincing the Tester to let us open one up—revealing a man with silver circuitry painted on his chest and a blank look in his eyes, who clearly believed he was a robot—they had a discussion about the origin of the roboduelists. The short version, as I understood it, was that they had been the Champions idea, after he returned a few months ago. And that the Tester seemed to think he had really created robots who could use mediums, and not mind-controlled some humans in cardboard boxes. Maybe he was also mind-controlled, but by who? The Champion?
“Feel free to use the resetting station in the next room,” offered the Tester, sitting heavily on the floor. His nose was leaking the sparkly yellow fluid as well. It was rather worrying.
“What’s up with my library card?” Jacqueline asked as we turned to go. She showed it to him in all its yellow-glowing-cracked glory. “Is this normal?”
“Aaaaagh!” the Tester screamed. “Do not be alarmed, that is simply knowledge entering my brain. It appears that your card is alive. That’s what these veins mean, it is alive. Just as I am alive.” He patted the card weakly. “Now take care of it, be sure to give it a name.”
“Are library cards usually alive?” Jacqueline pressed worriedly. Oh, no, was she going to start asking everyone about library card labor?
The Tester shrugged, laying down. “If this one is alive, they I hypothesize they all are. I am going to take a nap. With a brain as mighty as mine, naps are essential. Do not be alarmed, this is a perfectly normal response…”A pool of sparkly yellow tears spread out from his resting head as his eyes closed.
“The resetting station. Is right through there,” said roboduelist 1, apparently having recovered from its mathematical crisis. “Victorious champions.”
Resetting takes a bit, so we discussed strategy.
“We’re just here to take the emerald,” Otto stated. “Should we straight up kill the Champion?” He paused and reconsidered. “But he’s probably under its influence, so he might thank us if we take it away. Or try to kill us.”
“I’m pretty sure the emerald’s what’s powering the Heart of Cards,” said his clone. “He’ll probably be upset if we steal it even if he’s not possessed.”
“We could try trapping him in the Fountain of Nightmares,” I suggested. I’d wanted to try this ever since I saw the wolves use it on us. “One of us has a Red Shadow, right?”
“No, it’s in storage.”
“Aaaaah, it would have been perfect! We summon a Red Shadow, get it and Otto’s clone in the same area as the Champion, and he’ll be stuck with them for 30 seconds. That’s enough time to grab the emerald and get a head start. Uh, sorry for sacrificing you, clone-Otto, I’m not sure Fountain of Nightmares works without an enemy to fight.”
“Quite alright,” said the clone. “I am disposable; Otto can make another one of us whenever he wants. The problem is that we might not be able to get near the emerald in the first place.”
“How about we try to talk our way close to the Heart of Cards, and see how it goes from there,” Jacqueline suggested. “We might not have to fight, but we’re ready if it comes to that.”
“The emerald is that way,” I added. Up and forward, the direction the stairs on the other side of the room pointed. “It’s probably in the arena. Let’s go.”
The stairs came out in a large room near the top of the ziggurat, in the center of the south wall. Unlike the locations of the previous fights, it was well lit though I couldn’t see any light sources. The other three walls also had entrances, and balconies above them, empty at the moment but with room for a lot of spectators. The floor was covered in a couple inches of sand, and in the center of the room was a slightly raised dais.
The Champion, a tallish man wearing a blue jacket and pants, was standing on the dais, talking to Citrine. She noticed us and waved. “Hi, friends!”
“How did you get here??”
Citrine shrugged. “I got lost, and I found some funnel cake, and then I got more lost, and the pyramid was really shiny! Then I met this guy, he’s kinda neat.”
The Champion turned and waved us over. “I was just talking to your friend, telling her about the history of this place.”
“History is neat!” Citrine chimed in.
“But I wouldn’t want to bore you, I know you’re here to duel.”
“No actually, we’d be quite interested in the history of the ziggurat,” Clarence tried. “Maybe you could give us a tour?”
“Yeah,” I added. “You have this Heart-thing?” I couldn’t see it, though I’d thought the Heart of Cards was supposed to be here. The emerald arrow sure seemed to be pointing to the center of the room, but I couldn’t see it anywhere.
“You want to see the Heart of Cards? That is usually something I show the victors.”
“Are there many?” Otto asked.
“Not many per se, but some certainly. It wouldn’t be much of a test if no one could pass it.”
Otto and his clone laughed. “That’s what I should have said to some of my instructors back at the academy!”
“And some of mine as well,” agreed the Champion. “Now: we duel!”
“Can I have a clarification on the rules?” I asked. It was a very different kind of battle if we were expecting him to go after us and not just our mons.
“The rules are… duel!!!” A card appeared in his hand without him seeming to move. “I activate Magical Hats!” An enormous top hat appeared over him, brim floating a few inches above the top of his head like an umbrella.
Citrine raised a hand. “Am I fighting you, too?”
The Champion grinned. “Well, the rules say... duel!!!” The hat landed on the last word, covering him completely, and split into four which sped to the four corners of the room.
With our opponents apparently being four hats with one hit point each, we spread out. Citrine flashed her wings at the northeast hat while the rest of us transformed, and the two Ottos sprinted in opposite directions to cover the south side of the room. One of them stabbed a hat, which dissolved in an appropriately dramatic puff of smoke.
“He’s in the northeast hat!” Clarence yelled, having Analyzed the room. At this the Champion peeked out from under the hat in question, looking dazed (apparently Citrine’s wings are fascinating even through a magical hat). He tossed a card and the dais exploded in a spray of light and fire, knocking Citrine, Clarence, and Jacqueline’s Puppet Reaper to the ground and resolving into a Leviazizmoth. Then he got back under the hat and the three hats shuffled around the room, coming to rest by the east and south doors, and on the north balcony. I hoped he wasn’t in the north hat, it seemed kind of unsportsmanlike to hide out up where we couldn’t reach him (if sportsmanship had any kind of bearing on this place, which I highly doubted).
By now we were onto his strategy; Clarence quickly informed us that the Champion was in the south hat, and Citrine and Jacqueline destroyed the two others, along with the Leviazizmoth. I formed a vat of purple bubbling liquid above the hat containing the Champion. (I still have no idea what this liquid is. I’ve been meaning to take a sample but when I’m Plaguelock I’m much too excited about exploding things to think about science.)
The Champion was not phased by this, and popped out of his hat to flick a card at Jacqueline’s Puppet Reaper, announcing, “Change of Heart!” The vat fell, and the Puppet pushed him out of the way. Then the Reaper got in the way of one of the Ottos’ shots, and died. The other shot hit, though, and I blew up in the Champion’s face with a blast I’d stored earlier.
“There aren’t enough traaaaaaps!” the Champion crowed as I ran back towards him from where I’d been flung. His face was a bit singed and there was a gash on his arm but he seemed very pleased with the three enormous cards lying face down in front of him. Otto responded by shooting one of them, and Citrine slapped the Champion with one of her tentacles.
“Surrender and I’ll heal you!” I offered. The Champion ignored me, grinning arrogantly. Which was extra annoying, because I still really didn’t want to kill him by accident. We shouldn’t have been fighting him against us. This is what they invented chipped mediums for, to prevent people from hurting themselves or each other with mons so easily.
Otto, having no qualms about hurting his opponent, leaped over the cards to tackle the Champion, except that the cards were gone and clone-Otto switched places with him so Otto was tackling himself. The Champion’s eyes glowed yellow as he pulled out another card. “Refresh,” he said calmly, and suddenly looked much less beaten up. Was that why he didn’t want my healing, huh? Well, I’d show him! I’d throw bombs at him!
Or I could throw bombs at the thing he’d just summoned, which was apparently called a Slime Birthing Machine. (I kind of want one, but I don’t really want to turn into one. What would happen, would I create a bunch of slimes that were all me? Otto doesn’t seem to have this problem with his clone spell, but I feel like turning into a herd of slimes is kind of different from turning into two of your normal self.) It was large hemisphere covered in tubes, with an orange opening on one side. There was a “splort!” and the machine threw a blue blob with a sweet innocent-looking face. I attacked the machine. By the time Citrine and I had destroyed it, the slime was gone and the Champion was hopping around, evading the Ottos. His nose was bleeding and he was trying not to move his left arm very much so the others had been successful at beating him up if not containing him or stealing his deck. However, his amazing acrobatics were no match for both of the power-armored Ottos tackling him and then sitting on him.
“Uncle,” said the Champion, a tired grin on his face. I had been about to throw another bomb at him but paused in confusion as the Ottos shrugged and got up from their complicated two-person wrestling hold. Oh, he’d surrendered. “I should have known…” he groaned from the floor, “that I couldn’t go… one on six. Had to try, though.”
“You are remarkably sturdy,” I congratulated him. “Now would you like some healing? Don’t bother answering, I’m going to heal you anyway.”
“Would you like a hug?” Citrine offered.
“I would like both healing and hugs, if you’re offering.” He continued lying on the floor.
After two Heal spells, he could stand, and finished healing himself with a card Jacqueline passed him, still not entirely trusting him with a full deck. He waved his arms a bit, then cracked his neck, looking much more comfortable. Then his hands flew to his head, clutching it like he had a sudden terrible headache. There was the sound of a colossal heartbeat and the room darkened for a second. “Well,” he said, slowly lowering his hands as Citrine continued to hug him and stroke his back with her tentacles (which must be weird given her tentacles were still invisible). “That was weird, I—”
And he was enveloped by a column of yellow light. The room darkened from daylight to a strange twilight like the one brought on by looking at Steve’s sun, and the floor rippled, the sand turning into a sea of blank cards. The Champion began to transform. His hair got spikier and the symbol of an eye appeared on his forehead. His limbs lengthened, growing extra joints, and cracks spread across his skin, spilling a yellow light like that in Jacqueline’s library card.
Citrine, being Citrine, continued hugging him.
“This could be normal for this person,” Jacqueline noted. “But it’s probably bad. Oh, no!” She turned away.
This last was due to the massive heart which had appeared in the center of the room, floating about five meters above the ground. It was certainly larger than even a power-armored torso, just over a meter across, and covered in glowing yellow eyes. Veins flowed out from it disappearing into the shadows around the edges of the room. There weren’t walls anymore, although I could tell where they had been from the balconies floating seemingly in midair. The heart beat once and the veins pulsed, moving blood from nowhere to nowhere. Ah, that was why Jacqueline was avoiding it: the blood. She still thinks she’s a vampire.
Since the Champion appeared to be possessed, and possibly causing the room to be weird, I threw a bomb at him. In return, he exploded much more impressively, knocking all of us back. Except for Citrine, who had evidently decided that explosions meant he needed more hugs, and the Ottos, who have power armor and tenacity.
This turned out to be a bad move for the Ottos, since the Champion waved a hand at one of him and he doubled over in pain. Even though his armor has shields that should have protected him. And Jacqueline was still holding most of the Champion’s deck since we hadn’t gotten around to giving it back before he started exploding. But the floor was covered in cards and even if they were blank—the next moment, a card floated off the ground and symbols started appearing on it at a wave of the Champion’s hand. Stealing his deck wasn’t going to work this time, unless we could steal the whole floor.
“It’s the Heart of Cards, the source of cards,” Clarence reported, having decided now was the time for information gathering and not panicking or hugging or tackling (as the Ottos were now doing to the Champion). “It’s engorged, it’s got chaotic corruption, and enables mind-crushing, which sounds really worrying. It’s got zero out of five cards in its hand.”
The Heart of Cards could have a hand? Okay, switching targets, that thing was way scarier than the Champion. But it was too high in the air to reach unless I was flying. While I was trying to think of a plan, the Champion waved a hand at me and light flashed around me, inverting the shadows into bright streaks. Somehow he’d damaged my human body even though it wasn’t currently present. So I wasn’t clear which of the two was scarier, but I’d just come up with a plan for getting close to the Heart.
I Knockbursted myself into the air near the Heart and created a vat to land on. It would float for a few seconds, during which I could attack the Heart, or maybe knock it into the vat to trap it. The original Otto left his clone to continue choking the Champion, running over to join me on top of the vat, leaping with armor-assisted legs to catch the top of the vat and climb on. I could hear Clarence and Jacqueline trying to distract the Champion by flashing confusing patterns of lights and covering him in slime.
The heart beat, the sound thundering in my ears and messing with my perception of time, and it grew larger. Almost two meters wide, much too large to fit in the vat. Otto stabbed the Heart but was knocked off the vat by the Vengelus which had just appeared on the vat with us. I hit the Heart with a Ghost Bomb then knocked the Vengelus into the vat as we started to fall, the shower of mysterious purple liquid mixing with the blood dripping from the Heart. It was more than dripping, but not really gushing or pouring. What’s the word for bleeding steadily, but not a lot at once? I mean, it was a lot of blood since the heart was more than a meter wide. But not that much blood compared to the size of the heart. It was bleeding even more in the time it took me to fall, since Citrine had begun shooting ice beams at it, as well as flashing her wings, in case that would make it stop doing unhelpful things like letting the Champion summon a Tall Man when he already had a Vengelus out.
Things were not going well. The Champion managed to summon a Damn O’ Klees on top of the others, and Otto set the floor on fire in retaliation. (He said that this was to deprive the Champion of more cards, but I still think this was a stupid thing to do, even if he claims he’s a master of strategy. At this point it was quite believable that the Champion didn’t need physical cards to do anything. And anyway all the exits had vanished. You don’t set the place on fire when you can’t leave!) He and his clone were trying to choke the Champion into unconsciousness (he couldn’t summon more mons if he was unconscious, right? Right???) but the Vengelus was very good at knocking them away, and the Champion had gotten surprisingly strong and could easily escape if one Otto was holding him. The Heart was for some reason not dead, despite being covered in cuts and burns. Leaking red and yellow fluid and beating really fast, but not at all dead. It was very frustrating. Also the floor was on fire. I’m going to yell at Otto about that again later.
The Champion went unconscious as Clarence shocked the Vengelus, killing it. “Bye, Vengelus,” he said wearily. “You shall not be avenged. I hope. I really hope.” (I love how Clarence can make puns even while we’re fighting a giant monstrous heart and a guy covered in glowing yellow cracks.) Then he noticed that the floor was on fire.
“It’s there!” I interrupted, waving a hand at the Heart. “The emerald is in there. We need to get it, or kill the heart, or something, because THE FLOOR IS ON FIRE.” I glared at both Ottos. “Any ideas?”
“If Citrine stood on my shoulders, she might be able to reach inside the Heart,” he suggested.
“Or I could just fly,” said Citrine, and flew over to the Heart and plucked out a glowing yellow gem. “Gosh, it’s pretty!”
And everything went back to normal. The light came back, the Heart vanished, the walls reappeared, and most importantly the floor was made of sand and was not on fire. The Champion’s limbs telescoped back to their normal proportions and the cracks on his body sealed up. Citrine tossed a Healy Doodad on him and he opened his eyes, then rolled to his side and started vomiting. It was a sparkly yellow fluid, the same shade as the cracks on Jacqueline’s library card. And of the gem Citrine was still holding.
“What happened?” he asked after he’d finished. He looked utterly lost.
We looked at each other. What to tell him and what to keep hidden? “You were affected by a mind… thing,” said Clarence. “We managed to fight it off.”
“Are you okay?” Citrine asked concernedly.
“I’ve never felt so bad in my life.”
“What’s the last date you remember?” Otto asked.
“I don’t know. I remember yesterday… I remember fighting. Oh my! Very against tournament regulations.”
Clarence had sat down on the floor and was opening up the emerald container to add the second one, which he took from Citrine with his hand wrapped in the bottom edge of his shirt to avoid skin contact. Then he asked Citrine to beam the sand in the bucket to cool it down again.
“What’s that?” the Champion had been watching the proceedings with interest.
Clarence made a face. “There was a magic gem that was in the Heart that was causing some problems. I hope the Heart is okay, we had to do a lot of damage to it to get it out.”
“I can test it, where’s my deck?” But he shrank back when Jacqueline offered it, thinking better of it. “I’d better get checked out first. Oh! There’s so much I need to check on, things have been terribly wrong lately!” He rushed down the stairs with us on his heels. “Treyaaaaa! Are you there? Are you okay?”
“Eeeeh,” said the Tester when we entered the room. His now normal-sized head was lying in a puddle of yellow sparkly liquid and his skin looked baggy and stretched-out. The Champion crouched down beside him, looking concerned. The roboduelists had taken off their boxes and were standing nearby, wiping the paint off their chests and faces.
“Sorry, sir, Treya seems to be incapacitated,” reported one of them. He gestured at his paint-streaked chest. “Do I want to know?”
“Probably not,” said the Champion wryly. “I don’t know myself, yet. For now, get the radio. We need to make some calls.” He turned to the rest of us. “Thank you for all the assistance you’ve given to me and to the people of Vidriot. We’re going to clear up what happened, and get checked for mental influence. There’s going to be an investigation into how this started. I’d like you all to explain what you know about it, but there’s more urgent matters to deal with now. Please stay while I get the most pressing business sorted, and then we’ll talk.”
He deposited us in a sunny room full of comfortable chairs, offered us coffee and fruit juice, and left.
It’s been two hours. I’ve been writing down everything I know so far in order to figure out what kind of explanation to give the Champion and the rest of the Vidriot city officials. It hasn’t really helped on that front, but I still feel better having a record of what’s gone on today. But now I want whatever answers the Champion can give, and he’s been gone an awfully long time. Did something else happen while we’ve been waiting?