CA Chapter Sixteen (Patreon)

Of course, the first area they found looked like what Vexxx had described. Alpha felt her heart sink when the shapeless rock columns that peppered their path began to develop noticeable facial features, but she continued in spite of an urge to turn around and try the left-hand wall instead, leaving the boy to his own devices. When the features became distinct, and the first stone head opened its eyes to look at her as she walked by, she knew she had to be getting close.

“Wait, Mistress,” Toggle said softly, holding up a hand as they started to walk past yet another of the disturbing but apparently innocuous monoliths, and Alpha froze instantly. The gnome had already found and disarmed eight traps, and they’d only been exploring for a little over twenty minutes.

Edging close to the blocky head, Toggle ducked down as its eyes opened with a soft grinding of stone on stone. This time, when it looked at Alpha, its mouth also opened, and Toggle’s hand darted inside. The mouth snapped shut, moving faster than Alpha had seen any of the things move before, but Toggle was faster, and he triumphantly held up a small dart with a glistening tip.

“Poison,” he said, handing the dart to Alpha. She looked at it.

Poison Dart - A simple dart, with some kind of poison coating the tip. It looks painful. Weight - .1 lbs Rarity - Common

Alpha put it in her inventory, and smiled at him gratefully. As a vampire, she was immune to minor poisons and had resistance to stronger ones, but she didn’t know what category this fell into, and didn’t want to find out the hard way. Glancing at her stat sheet, she saw that she would need to ask Toggle for some blood soon, anyway, since she hadn’t had any since Vexxx had joined them.

“Hey!” A voice called, sounding somewhat muffled, but not too far away. “Alpha? Is that you?”

Speak of the devil. Alpha sighed and raised her voice in answer. “Yes, Vexxx. Where are you? Have you recovered from your debuffs yet?”

“Oh, uh, yeah,” the boy replied. “A while ago. I’ve been wandering around, and, uh, I’m kind of… stuck.”

Alpha’s brows knitted in confusion, but she gestured for Toggle to continue on. “What do you mean, you’re stuck?” she asked.

“It’s… You… You’ll see when you get here. Just hurry up!” Vexxx yelled back.

Toggle came to a corner and paused, looking back at Alpha as he gestured to the opening of another corridor further on. “I think his voice is coming from there, Mistress,” the gnome murmured quietly, “but the path turns right here. Should we keep following the wall, or go on ahead?”

Alpha felt a vindictive impulse to go right, since Vexxx was the one who was so insistent that they follow his plan, but she sighed and shook her head. “I’ll mark the path, so we know we didn’t go down this passage, and we’ll go try to find him. We can come back and check this one later.”

Digging through her inventory, she pulled out a bottle of black dye. It was an uncommon drop from the Black Roses that grew around Bloodhaven, and Alpha often farmed it when she needed some extra money, and she couldn’t get a job as a Mule, keeping other player’s items safe while they adventured.

She didn’t have a brush or anything else that immediately seemed like it would work to apply the dye to the wall, so she dipped her finger into the bottle and drew a large, black X on the wall where they should have turned. She vanished the bottle back into storage and turned to Toggle.

“Ready,” she whispered, though she wasn’t sure why she bothered. If Vexxx’s yelling hadn’t drawn in any wandering monsters, then the odds were good that there weren’t any nearby.

Toggle nodded and led Alpha, trailed obediently by Amy, past the dark opening of the skipped hallway. At the next intersection, Alpha called, “Vexxx?”

“Yeah?” Vexxx answered, sounding much closer this time. He also sounded more than a little stressed, and Alpha wondered exactly what he’d managed to get himself into. As she walked down the dark path, she made out the flicker of light from beyond the next turn, and when she looked that way, her questions were answered.

Vexxx was hanging upside down from the ceiling. A stone head stared out of the walls on either side of him, and stone hands gripped each of his ankles, looking as if they’d been carved in place. His voluminous purple mage’s robe fell around his head, exposing his skinny brown legs and his default white underwear. If the robe hadn’t been belted on, the garment probably would have just fallen to the floor below, leaving him all but naked. A sparking ball of lightning hovered near his head, and scorch marks on the ceiling gave silent evidence to the fact that he’d tried breaking the hands that held him.

Vexxx was clutching the edge of his robe so it didn’t fall into his face, and glared at Alpha with an ‘I dare you to make fun of me’ look. She opened her mouth to do exactly that, but hesitated. As annoying as the brat was, he was a member of her party now, and, more importantly, the more she pissed him off, the more likely he was to head straight to the forums and tell everyone about the dungeon the next time he logged off.

Alpha looked down at Toggle. “Do you have any suggestions?”

Vexxx opened his mouth, probably about to say something obnoxious about Toggle being an NPC, but he stopped when the gnome nodded so vigorously that his pointy hat nearly fell off. “Can you lift me up there, Mistress?”

Alpha eyed the distance from the floor to the ceiling. It was probably around nine feet, so if the three-foot-tall gnome stood on her shoulders, he should be able to reach the ceiling, though he might have to stretch a bit. If she actually lifted him up, she could probably even get him a little higher. Nodding, she crouched down and scooped him up, lifting him to sit on her shoulders. Her two hundred and seventy points of Strength made it easy, and Toggle squeaked as he rose through the air faster than he’d probably expected.

Toggle’s red felt hat fell to the ground, knocked from his head by the speed at which he’d been moved, and he stared down at it with a tragic expression for a moment before struggling awkwardly into a standing position atop Alpha’s shoulders. “A… A little forward, Mistress,” Toggle instructed, and Alpha took a step toward Vexxx, then another, until she was uncomfortably close to him, with his face somewhere near her belly button. Reaching down, she yanked the robe out of Vexxx’s hands and dropped it so it covered his face, feeling instantly better.

“Hey!” the boy yelped, pulling at the fabric.

Glaring down, Alpha snapped, “If you want my help, leave it.”

With a last grumble, Vexxx did as he was told, and a few seconds later, he dropped to the ground with a painful-sounding crack as whatever Toggle was doing worked. The ball of lightning winked out of existence.

“Owww!” Vexxx weakly waved his arms, trying to fight his way out of his robe, while Alpha gently lowered Toggle to the ground, where the gnome instantly scrambled to grab his battered hat and return it to its place on his head.

When the boy didn’t immediately sit up, Alpha crouched down beside him, tentatively plucking thick folds of fabric away until she could see his face, which was scrunched up in pain. “Ah, man,” the boy mumbled, lifting trembling fingers to gingerly prod a rising lump on his forehead. “Ah gotta cushion.”

Alpha frowned. “A cushion? You mean you needed a cushion?”

He opened one eye to give her a dirty look. “Con-cushion,” he said, slowly, before closing the eye again.

“Concussion?” She winced. She’d heard that was a particularly painful debuff, though she hadn’t ever had one herself. That explained why his light went out, though. Mages couldn’t cast when their brain had just been scrambled inside their skulls.

“How long?” she asked, sitting cross-legged on the floor beside him.

“‘Unno,” he mumbled, sounding like he had a mouthful of cotton. “Innerface’s all fuffed. Can’t read’t.”

“Carnation,” she muttered. They couldn’t just sit around and wait for who-knew-how-long until the debuff wore off. There was only one thing to do.

Climbing back to her feet, she leaned down and scooped Vexxx up into a princess-carry. His arms went around her neck instinctively, even as he howled in pain.

“Oh, stop being a baby,” she told him, jerking her head back the way they’d come, letting Toggle know it was time to move out. “You’re younger than eighteen, so your pain settings are twenty-five percent, at the most. It can’t be that bad.”

“M’eighteen,” Vexxx protested, wriggling in an attempt to escape her grasp. His Strength stat was at least a hundred points lower than hers, if not more, so he had no chance.

“If you’re eighteen, I’ll eat Toggle’s hat,” she said, following the gnome back down the passageway. At her words, Toggle glanced back over his shoulder at her with a mildly horrified look.

Vexxx fell silent and stopped writhing in her arms, allowing Alpha a moment of peace before he started talking again. “M’steen,” he muttered, and she glanced down at him.

“Sixteen? Yeah, I guess I could buy that,” she replied absently, as Toggle led them back down the hall to the passage they’d skipped. When they reached it, she halted, staring at the spot where she’d painted the black X on the wall.

“Daphne it,” she swore. “Where’s my mark?”

Toggle poked his head back out of the dark passage. “I’m sorry, Mistress. Most maze dungeons have some way to prevent people from marking a path. I hoped that this one would be an exception.”

She sighed, wishing she had a hand free so she could rub her eyes. “It’s okay, Toggle. Nothing we can do about it now. Good thing we weren’t planning on using that trick again.” Not much, anyway, she thought wryly.

::Heads up that the dungeon gets rid of any marks you make on the walls,:: she said over party chat, hoping to prevent Tess from trying it and getting any more lost. Myles, of course, was doubtless still sitting wherever the portal had left him, probably with a Mai Tai and a pile of pillows. ::And I have Vexxx.::

::Oh,:: Tess answered promptly. :: Yeah. There are these purple worms; Acid Worms. They’re kind of cute, until they spray acid all over any marks you make. I guess I should have mentioned that, huh?::

Alpha sighed, but said, ::It’s okay. I was just trying an experiment, so no harm done. Anything else you’ve figured out about this place?::

::The walls are really, really hard,:: Tess replied, sounding aggrieved. ::All dwarves get [Mining] during their tutorial, and I happen to have a pickaxe and some time, so I figured I’d try tunneling through. Make a shortcut, you know? It, ah, didn’t work, and I broke my pick.::

Alpha wasn’t sure if she just imagined a snorted laugh that sounded like Myles, but since she didn’t hear anything else from him, she said, ::Good to know.:: She looked up as Toggle stopped to disarm yet another trap. Glancing around, she saw that the stone heads seemed to be growing fewer and less distinct again, and hoped they were getting out of their area.

::Tess, can you see anything that might tell us if we’re heading in the right direction to get to you?:: she asked. ::Toggle and I found those stone heads Vexxx mentioned, so we knew we were in the right area.::

::I don’t think so,:: Tess said dubiously. ::This place looks like a standard dungeon to me. Gray brick walls, gray brick ceiling, gray brick floor, torches just far enough apart to let you be in darkness for a few steps before you cross back into another lighted area. A few of the bricks are brown, and some are blue, but there doesn’t seem to be any pattern to that.::

Alpha looked at the rough stone that surrounded her. ::That’s perfect. No bricks here at all, and definitely no torches. If I didn’t have [Darkvision], I would have had to use a glowstone.::

::Ugh,:: Tess replied. ::I would have been out of luck, then. I only have [Low Light Vision], since I’m just a half-dwarf. I usually sell my glowstones to free up a slot in my inventory, since everyone else always has some.::
::I thought you had [Darkvision],:: Alpha said, surprised. ::You were fine in the tunnel under the mountains when we were on our way here.::

Toggle stopped so abruptly Alpha almost tripped over him, barely managing to catch herself. Vexxx mumbled a protest, but he still seemed to be pretty out of it, so she didn’t bother answering. Tess was saying something, but Alpha only listened with half an ear as Toggle turned to face her. Raising a finger, the gnome pointed to a faint line on the floor, then pressed the finger to his lips, indicating that they needed to be quiet.

Alpha bent her knees, squatting down beside Toggle, and murmured, “Trip wire?” into one big ear.

He nodded, and whispered, “Summons a monster. May be magical, may be nearby.”

Alpha nodded back, indicating her understanding, and stood back up. Toggle bent to disarm the trap, and she debated if she should put Vexxx on the ground, just in case. ::Toggle says he found a new kind of trap. It summons a monster, and he doesn’t know if it just lets a creature nearby know we’re here, or if it will just make a monster appear.::

::Okay,:: Tess said, though she sounded worried. ::If you get attacked, should I try to come and find you?::

::No,:: Alpha said, watching closely as Toggle tried to disarm the trap. ::This place is a minefield. You could fall into twenty more traps on your way, and still not find us. We’re just lucky we have Toggle.::

At that moment, two things happened simultaneously; a piercing shriek echoed through the hallway in front of them, and a spear shot from a crack in the stone wall, stabbing deep into Toggle’s leg. The gnome cried out, clutching at the wound, and fell backwards, as a patch of deeper shadow separated from a wall further down the passage ahead.

Stone Golem - Level 90.

“Son of a begonia!” Alpha said, dropping Vexxx beside Toggle as she leaped forward, placing herself between the monster and her injured companions.