Hangmon
We have about one third of an explanation, which is more than we had when we arrived.
Once it became clear that we were in for a long wait, we sent Otto’s clone out to retrieve the antifreeze from the chemist and buy the other ingredients of Stabilization Oil. Upon returning, he reported that there had been more incidents of sparkly yellow vomiting. About one in five people near the ziggurat, and fewer as he moved farther away. Our theory was that the dueling fever that had been growing in Vidriot in the past months was some sort of mind control caused by the emerald’s corrupting the Heart of Cards, and the afflicted people were now throwing it off the same way the Champion had. By vomiting out a physical manifestation of the sparkly yellow corruption.
We weren’t really sure how to make the stabilization oil, so we ended up temporarily duplicating the oil we had by removing the two emeralds and having Otto clone himself while holding sand-bucket the oil-filled kettle-bell, giving us two emerald-cooling systems. Probably good since the sand had quickly returned to room-temperature and the kettle-bell was heating up in the presence of two emeralds. We need to figure out how to make more oil soon.
After three hours, the Champion returned. “Things seem to be under control for now. I’m not sure what lingering problems there might be but I suspect finding out what you know about it is going to be crucial. I’ll start by explaining what I know. This started six months ago, when I returned to this ziggurat as its Champion. I’d been traveling for several years in search of inspiration and to see the world, and when I returned the city was as it had been when I’d left.” He poured himself a cup of coffee and resumed his story. “Shortly after returning, I was approached by a small lizard-person.”
“A kobold?” I asked.
The Champion shrugged, flipping through his notebook. “He wasn’t a mon,” he explained, displaying a sketch of a kobold in a long coat and hat. “I believed him to be an eccentric, and I didn’t want to judge. Anyway, he offered me a yellow gemstone, a heliodor he called it. Yellow beryl. Said he’d found it in a dungeon, and thought it might be useful to me. It’s not that surprising; people find strange things in the dungeons all the time, and Vidriot is a place where people seeking the strange tend to congregate. They’re usually harmless enough, and we’re happy to take anything they offer us to store it away just in case. This particular gemstone, though… I decided to take a closer look at it. That may have been a mistake. I don’t remember placing it inside the Heart where you say you found it, but there’s a lot that’s hazy about these past months.”
“Your memory might come back,” Clarence reassured him. “Sarah and I completely lost our memories after encountering a similar gem, but they started coming back after a couple weeks.”
“You’ve said you have experience with this sort of thing. And you appear to have a containing device.” He nodded at the pair of kettle-bells. “In that case, there’s something I think I should show you. If you’ll follow me downstairs?”
We followed, through a maze of hallways that descended through the ziggurat and farther. Below the ground, as far as I could judge from the steps traveled, as well as the damper, staler feeling to the air. There were carvings on the walls, reminiscent of those we’d seen on the sidewalk near the library, growing more intricate as we descended.
“Here we are,” said the Champion, leading us around a corner to reveal yet another wall made of green stone covered in carvings. “This section of the carvings depicts these gems we’ve been talking about. As far as we know, they’re ten thousand years old just like the rest of the ziggurat. But unlike the other carvings in here, the ones we show on the tours, these ones seem to mean something. We can’t read them, but this diagram very clearly shows a gem just like the one I was given.
“So you can see why I was suspicious that this lizard-person said he’d found it in a dungeon. What a coincidence that it matched these diagrams which were carved ten thousand years ago! Not that we can read any of it, nobody knows what language they’re written in. I’ve had some experts in to take a look and they figured out the numbers but that’s about it. Oh, and some of them were fairly certain that with the technology back then, such a cut of gem wouldn’t have been possible, so the creators of the ziggurat must have been using warp magic, which is of course lost to us. So how did a gem matching this description come to be here today?”
The mention of warp magic reminded me of something Kyosha, a rather strange assistant librarian, had said when we were searching for information on magical gemstones earlier in the day.
“Now in ancient times there was the Warp,” he’d told us from atop a ladder. “Before the Incursion people relied on this chaotic force to work their magic, but that doesn’t work anymore. But you already know that. What most people forget is that in the ancient times before the ancient times, the Warp was everywhere. Very hard to get anything done. Imagine!” He flung his arms out, balancing on the ladder. “Demons everywhere, jabbing people in the ribs!” He waved his pencil, sparring with something invisible. “And torturing souls,” he added as an afterthought. “But the jabbing people in the ribs is the most grievous of sins!”
Kyosha tucked his pencil behind his right ear, where it joined a pen, two highlighters, and a crochet hook. “Somewhere around here, there’s a book that mentions gems being used to seal the demons into the warp and make life livable. Society hadn’t really taken off until that point.”
“Because of demons poking people in the ribs?” Clarence asked seriously.
“That was a joke,” Kyosha informed him smugly. “For humorous effect. Laugh!” he commanded.
“Ha, ha,” said Otto obediently. I laughed more genuinely. Kyosha was definitely weird, but not in a bad way. Just in a making-your-life-bizarre-for-a-few-minutes way.
Satisfied, Kyosha continued sifting through the books stacked on top of the shelves. “It’s all in this book. The story about the eight pieces of beryl that were used to seal the Warp. Only I can’t think where it’s got to…” his eyes narrowed in concentration, then widened as if remembering something important. “You may want to check out the ziggurat,” he advised. “There’s something in the lower levels that might help you.”
Except that the Champion had just told us that this section of the engravings were off limits to the public. So how had Kyosha known? Was he one of the experts who’d been invited in? And he’d known there were eight of them, and made of beryl….
“Hold on, these have been here for ten thousand years?” said Clarence skeptically, interrupting my thoughts. “Why haven’t they just worn away? I’ve seen people maintaining your streets but don’t tell me you had people maintaining the carvings for all that time, Vidriot has only been around for a couple hundred years.”
“It regenerates. No, don’t ask me how it does it, we have no idea. The whole ziggurat’s like this, if you chip off a chunk it’ll grow back eventually. Pretty handy stuff, if we could speed up the regeneration it could be great to build houses out of. If you don’t ever want to remodel.”
“What would happen if you cut the ziggurat in half?” Clarence asked with an expression that suggested he was trying to figure out where to get a big enough knife for the job. “Which side would regrow?”
“Would they both regrow??” I chimed in excitedly. Two ziggurats were better than one, right?
The Champion gave us a look. “Someone thought of that, but we decided not to, because we like our ziggurat the way it is. Anyway, the cut-off pieces don’t regrow, so I don’t think we’d get two ziggurats out of it. But this part isn’t what I wanted to show you,” he added, pulling a flashlight out of his pocket. He slotted it into a circular hole next to the diagram and turned it on. Another carving appeared behind the first, done in lines and shades of illumination. “It’s this layer. There’s probably more but we haven’t figured out how to activate them.”
The mural depicted a humanoid with arms upraised. Spirals rose from each arm and joined in the middle forming a double helix. Like DNA? Or like the combination of Lily and Steve? The second seemed more likely, given the presence of Steve’s Barbed Wheel and the less familiar Star of Oblivion which represents Lily. Eight tiny brilliant-cut gemstones orbited the humanoid’s head, and demons swarmed around its feet, cringing. Unintelligible writing filled the empty spaces around the figures.
It’s April, isn’t it. April at the end of the world in a pyramid which is not this one. She had a flesh-spiral so we assumed she was Steve’s pawn. But we didn’t see her right arm. It might have had one of those metal spirals Otto and Jacqueline woke up with. Maybe it’s April and Lily and Steve at the end of the world. And it’s prophesied from ten thousand years ago, so good luck to us in stopping it.
Although, wait, this means Lily and Steve ending up here was prophesied as well. Who were these people who made the ziggurat carvings?
“What reminded me of these carvings was the cut of the gem. The one depicted here is quite common for diamond, I’ve been informed, one that refracts light into an shape with eight points if you look at it one way, and eight heart shapes if you look at it from the other side. This wasn’t a diamond, but it had the same pattern. The shapes remind me of the separation of the Materium and the Warp, many thousands of years ago. Of course, it could also be interpreted as the Barbed Wheel and the Star of Oblivion. I may be jumping to conclusions with either theory.”
“The other army had the emblem of a heart…” muttered Otto. He’s recently remembered more about the time just before he was put into the dungeon, including the wars between factions following Lily and Steve, as well as some who still fought against both the Incursion powers. Otto and the other Khornites had grudgingly joined Steve’s side when it became clear that standing against both was no longer an option.
“Hey! What are you doing down here?” A guard approached at a run, looking concerned. “Oh, they’re with you. Sorry, sir.”
“It’s fine,” said the Champion.
“We heard there was something about a kettle-bell,” the guard explained. “I was sent to take it into custody.”
The Champion frowned. “I don’t think that’s wise. That thing mind-controlled a fifth of the population, I don’t really want it anywhere near here. Do you truly think you can contain it?”
“Probably, but no promises,” admitted Clarence. “We’re learning more about it all the time. I think this setup will do for now, especially since we’ve worked out a sand-based cooling system.”
“I’d consider destroying it,” Otto said. “But I’m not sure that’s even possible. And if it is, it might tear a hole into the Warp.” Obviously he’d made the connection with Kyosha’s story as well.
“Well, I feel alright with leaving it in your hands,” said the Champion, turning to leave with his guard. “Thank you for un-mind-controlling everyone, that was very helpful. Please stay in town for a little longer, I’ll send someone over with a radio so we can stay in contact.”
As soon as he was out of sight, Clarence turned into Parasonico. “Time to Analyze everything!” he announced. “Huh, you really are a vampire,” he said to Jacqueline. “Vampire, first stage. It doesn’t say any details about what that actually means, sorry. Right, I was checking on the wall. It’s regenerative beryl, oooh nice, this gives me a graph of how various conditions affect its regeneration rate. It’s not giving me anything useful about the words, I guess it doesn’t know the… Huh.” He stared at something in midair. “It says ‘language not in database, download?’ And there’s a prompt. I can say yes or no. Should I?” He looked conflicted.
“Sure!” It probably wasn’t cursed. And if it was, we could just stab him until he was back to his normal human-Clarence self.
“Okay, then.”
And Clarence collapsed on the floor.
Turning him over revealed that his screen read ‘updating….’ with a progress bar. It wasn’t moving very quickly, but it was moving. All we had to do was wait for it to finish, and hope that Clarence wasn’t permanently broken.
After ten very tense minutes, Clarence sat up, Citrine’s tentacle slipping off his head. “That was weird, why am I on the floor?” He blinked. “Hey! Why did they move that button? How dare they!” Several complaints about interface changes later, Clarence directed his Analysis to the wall once again. “Yeah, I can read this. It’s instructions for a ritual that makes these emeralds and summons two axiomonads from another universe to use as a catalyst. Damn, I updated but I still don’t get an explanation for what an axiomonad is?”
“Whatever Steve and Lily are, probably.”
“Well, yes.” He continued examining the wall. It was a ritual in the old traditions of warp magic, and a really complicated one at that. None of us could make heads or tails of it; Clarence and I were the only ones who could have been exposed to it firsthand but we didn’t have much to contribute. Not that it really matters, since there can only be eight emeralds at a time. (The carving neglected to say what happens if you try to make one when there already are eight.)
Regarding the emeralds themselves, they’re pretty much indestructible, regenerating much faster than the beryl of the ziggurat does. “And they’re basically a source of Warp power,” Clarence summarized. “A spellcaster could use them to supercharge their spells—” Otto gave a snort of derision. “But it’s not a great idea, since the emeralds can and will corrupt the minds of those who use them, unless they do it sparingly.”
“Sounds like Anathema,” I commented. Doctor Mila had examined Otto after we got back from the power plant, and said he had a bit of mental corruption, but that it should go away eventually. Otto glared at me. For someone who still scorns magic, he’s taken surprisingly well to this new world of mon combat.
“Anyway, the recommendation is to use them to power machines instead, since machines don’t go insane.”
“That we know of,” said Jacqueline reflexively.
“And we’ve got some practical suggestions for containing them,” Clarence plowed on. “Keeping them apart is good, since they get more powerful when they’re close to each other. We also might want to look into getting some lead lining in these kettle-bells, to prevent the corruption from passively reaching out just from us carrying them around. It doesn’t mention anything about Stabilization Oil in here, but I’m starting to suspect that the oil itself is going bad. I don’t know why we’d need it at all...”
Looks like Clarence’s theory turned out to be correct. He made some new stabilization oil and catalyzed it with Citrine’s ice beam and it seems to be much stronger than the oil we took from the power plant. They also tried making a small batch containing some used oil from the funnel-cake stand, and it didn’t work as well, so he’s concluded that the freshness of the oil has some effect. Although there’s a possibility that traces of funnel-cake batter were causing a problem.
As for whether the oil itself is necessary, that’s still unclear. Clarence tried using water instead of oil, since water has a lower freezing point and should be able to get colder while remaining a liquid. The problem is that the graphite powder sinks to the bottom of the water and won’t stay mixed up long enough to crystal-beam it. He’s come up with a list of alternative bases for the stabilization liquid, but I don’t think it’s really worth it: substituting water for oil is helpful since water is easy to obtain quickly in large quantities (that is, in places that aren’t the desert), but all his other suggestions are much harder to get than oil, even if they turn out to be more effective.
Clarence started repair work on the power armor yesterday, and got a small advance on what they were paying him. He used it to buy a bunch of scrap metal and spent most of the night forming eight more kettle-bells. So the two emeralds each have their own container, and we have a bunch of decoys, each filled with stabilization oil in case of more emeralds. We’re each carrying one around—I’ve attached mine to a string harness so I don’t have to carry it by hand—and put the rest in Jacqueline’s box; it would be very convenient to store the emerald-containing ones in there but keeping an emerald in a medium seems somehow suspicious. Too close to using it to power Warp-magic, even if the Warp isn’t accessible to us anymore. The new oil works well enough that we can chill the kettle-bells in sand-buckets a couple hours a day and not have to carry around an entire bucket.
We’ve also left an empty decoy in the hotel room, in case April decides to pay a visit. Since we can’t keep the emeralds in Jacqueline’s box, it’s going to be pretty clear to April or whoever else might be interested that these kettle-bells are important to us. Spreading out this many decoys we’re going to have some warning if they make a move to steal them. Hopefully it’ll be the hotel one first. But the decoys we’re carrying is to keep them from knowing who to target if they decide to go after us. Unless they get really lucky, we’ll have the option of getting the emeralds away when forming a rescue plan.
Although I feel like if these precautions turn out to be relevant, we’re already kind of doomed.
We tried interviewing Rafael Still. He had thawed completely when we checked on him this afternoon. Actually, he was warm to the touch, almost like he was alive. No matter that it has not been nearly long enough for a piece of meat that large to thaw. Whatever. Why do I even care about thaw rates when we’re talking about undead corpses?
Rafael did not look correct for a dead person. His eyes no longer spilled a purple light, but that was only because the eyelids had fused shut. Sort of like the eye sockets of the reanimated skeletons. His lips had drawn back, baring teeth that were a little pointier than I remembered, and his skin had a greenish hue. He didn’t smell at all like decomposition, which was bizarre given that he’s a dead body hanging around in a warm climate.
“Hi, Rafael,” said Jacqueline. “Can you tell us what happened to you?”
Rafael didn’t say anything.
“I command you to speak!”
Rafael made some noises with his mouth. It sounded more like he was breathing out while moving his mouth than any real attempt at specific words.
“Say hello, Rafael.”
“Hello.”
“So he can talk! Rafael, what is your opinion of undead labor?”
Rafael was silent.
“I have an idea,” I said. “Ask him to greet us, don’t give him specific words to say.”
Jacqueline did so. Rafael made mouth-noises.
“Okay, I don’t think he can really talk. Just repeat what you said if you ask him to. Maybe try yes-or-no questions?”
“Is your name Rafael Still?” Jacqueline asked.
Rafael stood there like he had no idea what we wanted from him
“Nod if your name is Rafael Still.”
Still nothing.
“Nod if your name is not Rafael Still?”
Still nothing.
I shrugged. “I guess we can’t talk to him. I wonder what happened to him, though...”
So that’s a dead end. We could visit the Ranger station he came from, which is near the fenced-off forest we passed on the way here. But somehow I don’t think they’re going to have any more idea how he ended up in the power plant freezer than we do.
The books we got from the library do mention magical gemstones but they’re incredibly vague. There’s a plenty of instances of mages using gems as power-sources, which sounds like the amplifying-Warp-magic thing the engravings talked about. But then there’s the weird ones. An island which floated in the sky due to a gemstone at its core. A gem that would stick itself back together whenever it was shattered. A really sparkly rock which created a disco dance dimension. That last one, the editor noted, was probably a really distorted description of the Eternal Rave on Sigil.
There’s one outlier. A story about a man finding a rock and then wandering ranting in response to normal enough disasters. Everything had changed, he insisted, he’d changed things and they were different now.
“Sounds like a time traveler,” said Jacqueline when I showed it to her. “Someone who skipped ahead like we did.”
I’m not sure what the rock he found did, but it sure resonates. Once Sorin brought us that gemstone, Ace started making the Cure and it changed everything. Like the entire human species.
Citrine just brought me a new food she’d found. She’s been having a lot of fun trying the local cuisine, and the wide selection of food carts are happy to oblige. This time, she announced that she’d found a jelly donut. I haven’t found a decent bakery this side of the time freeze, so I was excited to sample the pastry. Although this one looked a bit odd…
“This is a rice ball,” I announced after biting into it. A very tasty rice ball, but definitely not a jelly donut.
“It’s a jelly donut,” Citrine insisted. “The man with the twirling Ooziel assistant said.”
“It doesn’t even have jelly in it!” I objected. The filling was quite excellent, though; I wonder what it was. “And it’s not a donut! It’s a rice ball!”
“Hmm,” said Citrine. “Okay, we’ll have to find another jelly donut, then.” And she left in search of one.
It is Sorin behind all this. Probably.
I realized something weird about what the Champion said. He talked about a kobold giving him the yellow Chaos Emerald. Except he didn’t say kobold, he said lizard-person. Like he’d never seen one before. And now that I think about it, there aren’t any kobolds here, not that I’ve seen. Or elves or anything except humans. The weird modern-humans. I hadn’t noticed before because most of the population was humans before the incursion, and I was distracted with the absolute ridiculousness of modern human biology.
So if all the non-human races vanished, what are the odds that there’s more than one kobold hanging around here helpfully dispensing cursed gemstones? I went to the registration office we went through when we came in and asked to see their records. Six months ago, a lizard-person (the record-keepers were quite confused by this being) called Sorin came to visit. They showed me a copy of his picture, which didn’t look unlike the Sorin I met, but I can’t be that sure. I’m not very good with faces, and my memories are still hazy. And it’s been several kobold lifespans since he delivered the green gemstone to our lab, so that’s another strike against the theory.
But I’m pretty sure it’s the same one. For all I know, he could have skipped forward in a time-bubble like we did. Or been altered by the cure to be basically immune to aging. And he’s got the same name, and the same trench coat and fedora. All the other kobolds vanished somehow, so if there’s one still around, he’s probably got a really good reason and a lot of resources. Which sounds about right for someone whose mission is to deliver Chaos Emeralds into the hands of unsuspecting humans, for unknown reasons.
Unless Sorin is a common pseudonym used by kobolds, and it’s a conspiracy of trench coat-wearing Sorins wreaking havoc on our world. Oh dear.
It happened again. Another disaster and we run right towards it. We’ve really got to get out of Vidriot before we accidentally destroy it, or save it a third time and get appointed official city heroes or something.
We were at the front desk of the hotel, politely asking questions of the receptionist. Someone had finally gotten around to stealing the decoy we’d left in our room, and we needed information! Well, obviously it was April who had stolen it. But we had to make sure there wasn’t someone else after our Chaos Emeralds. Had they seen anyone suspicious? No, but they weren’t sure what we meant by suspicious exactly. You know, someone with a creepy laugh accompanied by an uncomfortably tall man eating funnel-cake? No, we weren’t joking. Okay, how about someone they hadn’t seen because they’d teleported in, bypassing the front desk’s veneer of security?
The receptionist had gotten pretty fed up with us when the alarm went off. A wailing siren coming from multiple directions outside the building. For once, this was not at all our fault; we quickly found out that Hangmon was approaching and we were encouraged to go to the nearest shelter.
But that wouldn’t do when we could fight it instead! Only there was some reason that was a bad idea, what was it…
I grabbed a pamphlet off the desk and skimmed it as the others tried to get the fleeing hotel patrons to tell us what was going on exactly. Hangmon, as I’d remembered, was a giant, terrible version of Puppet Reaper, which had a giant dragon corpse as the puppet. It had been reported as having 450 hit points usually, and had a gaggle of loose eyes which had 50 each. The reason it was so hard to fight was that it could use its strings to take control of nearby mons, including those which were transformed humans, and redirect their attacks away from it.
“That’s fine,” said Citrine when I finished explaining this to everyone. “We can just attack it with Ooziels.”
“What?”
“They explode, right? How’s it going to redirect an explosion? And it’s vulnerable to alien-type damage like Ooziel Fission is. So, 12 damage per Ooziel explosion.”
“So we need like 40 Ooziels.” Which we didn’t have.
“That’s why we convince the militia to help us! Someone said they were forming up over there.”
If it was that easy, I wondered why they hadn’t killed this thing before. But there wasn’t any reason not to at least suggest it to them.
We soon ran into a small group of people making their way towards the main group of defenders. They hadn’t tried anything like massed Ooziel Fissions before, and while it sounded promising, there wasn’t time to coordinate. They didn’t even have many Ooziels. We could do it if we wanted, but they were busy right now. “But if you can take out the eyes, that would be a big help,” said one of them before running off after her companions.
“This isn’t going to work, we can only have five Ooziels total, even if we had that many,” I protested. “Which we don’t. That’s only 60 damage and then what do we do? Maybe we’ll only make it angry!”
“It’ll take out the eyes. And anyway you just get two Oozielets when you blow them up,” Jacqueline explained. “You can turn them back into a big one later. They’ll be fine as long as we detonate them all at once.”
So I hadn’t known that much about Ooziels prior to our deciding to take on Hangmon. Mostly I was a fan from a distance.
“And as for having sufficient Ooziels,” said Otto, heading off in a seemingly random direction, “we can buy back the ones we sold last week to pay that crazy chemist.”
We could now see Hangmon approaching. It was indeed a giant dragon corpse held aloft by strings which extended up through the clouds. It had many pairs of wings, each of them from a different winged creature: butterfly, bird, bat, and one that I think was from a flying squirrel. The flying squirrel one seemed pretty useless as a set of wings, but it didn’t really matter since all the wings lay limply against the dragon’s back. A cloud of eyeballs danced around the dragon, also attached to strings of the faraway puppeteer, Skymaster. They appeared to be shooting some sort of projectile, like explosive tears. The dragon’s head was also up to something: it lolled just like its wings did, but a blue light grew in its mouth like it was preparing to fire.
“Hold on, we’ve got another problem,” I noticed as we hurried towards the shop, which Otto, who has a sense of direction, had been leading us to all along. “Clarence and I transform, setting aside the turning-into-two-Ooziels-when-we-explode thing, at some point we’re going to run out of hit points and turn back into humans falling out of the sky.”
“It’s okay, I can catch you!” Citrine assured me. It wasn’t very reassuring.
The store was abandoned but the door was unlocked. We grabbed the Ooziels and after a short debate left our remaining money on the counter. We could pay them back later. Or sell them back the Ooziels. Whatever. We also found some Gauntlet Launchers for Clarence and I to use so we wouldn’t have to turn into Ooziels.
Since the Ooziels took a while to process for those of us who hadn’t previously had one, we had a few moments to observe Hangmon after reaching the roof of the building the shop was in. It had arrived, and was flying around over the edge of town nearest to us. Several buildings started leaking snowy-looking air and then a blue beam from the dragon’s mouth dragged across the street, causing extremely large and very sharp-looking ice crystals to erupt from the street and poke out the sides and roof of nearby buildings. So that was why they’d evacuated the people. I wondered what the militia’s plan was. Also how long the dragon took to recharge its ice beam.
The dragon corpse and its flock of eyeballs was now close enough to send our own colorful flock of Ooziels after them (mine is purple, it’s super cute!). Step one of the plan went off without a hitch, and the Ooziels exploded in unison once they’d reached the dragon, the ten resulting Oozielets falling to the ground since they can’t fly with only one wing. The eyeballs screamed as they disconnected from their twin cables, seeming to disintegrate. Success! We just had to do that, uh, seven more times, and Hangmon would be dead.
There was one slight problem, which was that the roof we were standing on was quickly becoming covered in frost. Clouds of cold air escaped from the windows of the stories below us. Which meant that our rooftop was about to turn into a field of very stabby ice-shards. Was it because it knew we were there? Otto grabbed Clarence and hopped to another rooftop, and Citrine picked up me and Jacqueline and took flight on beautiful, green, and for once quite visible wings (her modified gauntlet has very low capacity, so she’d removed the Glamour spell in favor of an Ooziel), barely getting clear of the shower of ice spears coming up through the roof.
The cables formerly attached to the eyeballs had dipped down below our field of view and now rose up, holding our Ooziels. Clarence’s, Jacqueline’s, and mine had fused back into full Ooziels as we’d ordered them to, and the rest remained Oozielets with one eye and one wing each. All were connected to Skymaster by the cables, whatever that signified. We tried Chain Lightning to free the Ooziels. It didn’t work, but the electricity crackled up the cables. Hurting Skymaster? We still don’t know, since it was too cloudy to see its hit points from that far away. We can hope. As we building-hopped again to avoid another ice-explosion, it became clear what being attached to a cable did: Citrine’s Oozielets and Clarence’s green Ooziel floated over in the direction of the defenders, trying to hinder them in their efforts to launch a massive but slow-moving fireball. Maybe it can only control so many things at once, because it left Jacqueline’s Ooziel and mine next to it, so we blew them up again. This detached them from the cables, but left them on the ground in Oozielet form.
At this point, the plan had kind of fallen apart, but things were still not going terribly. It took a turn for the much worse when some of the eyeball-cables whipped over to us and started waving around as if looking for something. They didn’t find it on Citrine, but one attached itself to my gauntlet. Lights on the gauntlet blinked as something began emerging, the added weight of its armor pulling us out of the air. A Damn O’ Klees. Its armor was still there, but it was about to melt off since this was Perfect Summoned Damn O’ Klees that was going to try to kill us.
I was going to warn Citrine and Jacqueline of our impending deaths but instead I yelled, “Aaaaaigh get it off!” My accompanying slaps did nothing to break the Damn O’ Klees’ grip on my arm, and I stopped because its armor was hot. Citrine managed to land us on a roof which was free of ice, but not gracefully enough to keep us upright. The Damn O’ Klees tumbled ten feet away from us, the sword staying fixed near the top of its head even as its body turned. As it stood up, its armor shattered, pieces falling off and vanishing as soon as they’d lost contact with the fire beneath. At least we didn’t have to worry about getting hit by armor. Instead, I got to worry about the glowing double-barreled shotgun the Damn O’ Klees was now pointing at me.
“Get over here and goo that thing!” I called to one of my Oozielets who were hanging out below the dragon, thankfully still free of cables. The Oozielet did not manage throw any goo, but did protect me from the shotgun blast the Damn O’ Klees sent out just after it arrived. The black Oozielet Jacqueline pulled over slammed the rogue Damn O’ Klees to the ground and Citrine threw several ice-beams at it, and it dissolved into an strange-looking soulfruit. Hollow-seeming. I put it in my pocket as Citrine picked me and Jacqueline up again.
The fireball finally hit, charring some of the dragon’s wings. It did 30 damage, which wasn’t bad at all for a single spell. The flaw was that it had taken so long to arrive and the defenders’ countdown was at ten, indicating we’d have to do a lot more ourselves if we wanted to stay alive.
“Target the cables!” Otto called to us. He and his clone were shooting them with their Hyperbreakers to snap them off the dragon’s back, and its front end was tilting downwards.
Jacqueline and I fused our two Oozielets that were lying in the street below the dragon corpse, forming a purple-and-black swirly Ooziel that we could both control. We floated it up, then covered the dragon in goo, hopefully delaying its extremely destructive ice-beam. Then we tried Chain Lightning on some cables. Apparently one shared Ooziel can move a lot faster than one controlled by only one person.
The ice-beam went off shortly thereafter, or perhaps a different variant of it. A jet of blue-white light shot out of the dragon’s mouth and into the sky, then divided into eight smaller beams which struck different buildings, filling them with meter-long ice-shards. The buildings weren’t anywhere near us, as if the targeting was random. I think that without cables connected to eyes or to our mons, the Skymaster can’t tell see what’s going on in with its puppet.
Clarence’s Parasonico (his Oozielets had exploded a while back, and Oozielets aren’t immune to explosions) tackled the dragon, trying to rip cables off. This turned out to be a bad idea, since the first cable it grabbed snaked up its tentacle and attached to the back of it as the dragon dropped a few feet from the loss of one more supporting cable. Parasonico’s screen lit up with the image of the eye and a group of loose cables shot out, targeting Citrine and Otto. The rest, undeterred by the fireball which splashed against the dragon’s hindquarters, began reattaching themselves to the dragon’s spine, pulling it back to its usual height. Otto’s clone got cabled and tackled him, but Otto managed to get the cable off him quickly and they returned to shooting.
Citrine was less fortunate. I’d exploded the shared Ooziel to knock out Parasonico and deprive Skymaster of its eye on the situation, but the cables still found her and somehow managed to attach to one of her tentacles. She dropped us. Luckily we weren’t over a patch of ice spikes, but it was still a good four meters to the ground. Jacqueline landed with her usual grace, but I fell awkwardly and there was something very wrong with my legs. Legs are only supposed to have one bend in them, at the knee.
Looking back, I’m surprised at how much it didn’t hurt. To be clear, it hurt a lot. But not as much as I would have expected. Maybe I was in shock and it hadn’t fully hit yet? Or maybe modern human bodies don’t feel as much pain. Also I was a bit distracted at how I was way too close to the dragon-corpse which was now on the ground held up by four strings, and my legs didn’t work so I couldn’t run away. But I could use a Heal spell, and my legs rearranged themselves into the correct shape. Much as I may complain about how the future doesn’t make any sense, and how Steve and Lily ruined everything, Heal spells this effective and castable by anyone are a huge upside.
Now that my legs weren’t horribly wrong, I could focus on what Clarence was yelling. “Blow them all up! All the Ooziels! It’s almost dead!” So I told one of the shared Oozielets to Fission, and the other shared Oozielet went off as well as the two green ones of Citrine’s that Jacqueline had Revived, accompanied by Clarence’s triumphant shout of “Kablooie!”
At this, the dragon-corpse started glowing red. Was it going to explode? We didn’t have the misfortune of finding out, because its 16 hit points were easy to chip away between Citrine’s beams and the Blighted Lord Clarence had summoned after Parasonico died.
The cables detached and the dragon began disintegrating from the inside out, collapsing in on itself. It was weirdly silent as we watched the corpse melting away. It soon vanished completely, leaving a point of light floating just above the ground, which sparkled in the air for a moment, reminding me of the mote of Time Citrine had captured, then melted into the sandstone of the street. The street shook and cracked as a tree emerged from the spot the light had entered, spreading out branches heavy with soulfruit. A shimmery film cloaked the tree as if protecting the fruit from prying hands.
“Hangmon Pawn corpse, 352 soulfruit,” read Clarence. Jacqueline had revived his Parasonico when he’d asked it to Analyze the situation it extruded a plastic rectangle and threw it at him. “You can schlorp it but none of us are going to be able to summon it, it takes over a hundred energy and about as much capacity to use it.”
“I’ll take it,” said Citrine. She reached out her gauntletted tentacle to touch the membrane and it shuddered, then flowed into her gauntlet with surprising speed. “Hmm. I feel… full. This is strange.”
There was something falling out of the sky. It landed, stabbing deep into the street. A needle, the height of a person and as big around as one of my fingers. Tied to it was a cotton scrap of cloth.
“Watch your back,” it read.
We were still trying to get over the all-consuming paranoia this warning had brought on when the Champion arrived with an entourage on one of those six-winged birds the city guards use. “Is it… dead?” he asked, looking concerned.
“Probably?” replied Clarence. “Well, the Pawn is. The puppet.”
“Don’t think Skymaster is, though. It sent us a warning.” I gestured at the needle with its ominous flag but it had vanished. “Watch your back.”
“Oh. Oh, dear. It’s never done that before.” Now the Champion looked downright worried. “That can’t be good.”
“Sir,” said one of the guards with an air of extreme anxiety. “Sir, remember what happened last time we destroyed one of its puppets?”
“Yes,” said the Champion shortly. “But it was several years before it returned with a new one. We have ample time to prepare.” He turned back to us. “Now, why didn’t you collaborate with the defenders?”
“They didn’t want to listen to our plan, said we could go do it ourselves if we wanted and they’d do their own thing. Now,” Otto went on, warming to the topic, “I have quite a few strategies to suggest beyond our original plan with the Ooziels. If you’ll just let me talk to your military strategists—”
“Send a report on what you’ve learned,” the Champion interrupted. “We could have done with a lot more coordination in this battle. The standard plan is to lure it away while keeping it occupied, so it does less damage to the city. Provoking it just leads to more destruction. But you didn’t know that.” He sighed. “We thought you were buying us time with a distraction. A very costly distraction.” He waved a hand at the torn-up street and damaged buildings. “But you’ve bought us years instead of minutes, so I suppose it was worth it.” He frowned. “Although I don’t like the sound of that warning…” He mounted his bird and took off again, his guards following.
We joined the long line of defenders waiting for a turn at the nearby resetting station. They were animated, chattering about the defeat of Hangmon and the mysterious group of people who’d done it. When they noticed us, they started whispering frantically.
“Are you the guys?” one of them asked. “Look, it’s really them!”
After an eternity of furtive glances and excited whispering, we arrived at the resetting station. There was another note waiting for us inside. “Congratulations,” it read in April’s handwriting.
This is really an excessive amount of ominous notes for one day.