Chapter 64 (Patreon)

Chapter 64   

I examined the corpse of the elf. I really wished I’d done it before, as the amount given was much less once they were dead. 

Lootable Corpse. Vincente. City Elf. Level 16. Killed by Crawler Grand Champion Best in Dungeon Princess Donut with an assist by Crawler Royal Bodyguard Carl.

“Ha,” Donut said. “I got credit for the kill.” 

“Well, you did blow his head off. All I did was kick him in the nuts.”

“Yeah, that wasn’t very manly of you, Carl. I thought nut-kicking was a big no-no amongst guys.” 

“It’s not something I want to make a habit of doing,” I said. “But if it works, it works.”

Zev: Yes, Carl. Try to avoid that if you can. A few viewers have made some snide comments.

Carl: For fuck’s sake. I can really do without the random peanut gallery comments. 

Donut: I BET THE SYSTEM AI LIKED IT.  

Vicente the city elf had almost 1,500 gold in his inventory. He only held one other item. A scroll, which Donut took. It was for a spell called Meat Hooks. It was the spell he’d been casting that had caused Mongo to rush into the alley. 

“I knew he was good boy,” Donut said. “He’d been summoned. He couldn’t help it!” Mongo, still chewing on the elf’s head, grunted in agreement. The spell summoned all nearby carnivorous pet-class monsters away from their owners and to the source of the burning-stench. 

“You’ll want to hold onto that one,” I said. “You never know when it might be useful.” 

“He knew our names,” Donut said, looking down at the corpse. “And did you see those gross floating things?” 

“Your light scared them away,” I said, looking up into the night. “Keep it going.” 

The elf didn’t have anything else in his inventory, but he did wear an oddly familiar shirt. This was a military uniform, and it looked out of place here in this town. It was a black button-up, and had it been blue I would’ve sworn it was a U.S. Coast Guard ODU, the same type of shirt I’d worn every day on active duty. 

“Carl, look,” Donut said. “There’s a patch on his arm.” She peered closely at it. “There’s two patches. A sew-on and a heat transfer. The arm one is hand-sewn with a chain stitch. It’s good work, but it clearly wasn’t made on a schiffli like the nameplate on the breast.” 

“What?” I said, looking down at the two patches. “How do you know so much about sewing? What the hell is a schiffli?” 

“Huh,” Donut said. “I just know. A schiffli is a type of embroidery machine. I must’ve watched a show about it or something.” 

The patch on the shoulder was in the shape of a shield, and it held a crossed lightning bolt and a magic wand being grasped by a talon. It looked very much like a typical US military unit patch, but with the text in Syndicate Standard. It read 201st Security Group – Magical Ops. The second patch was a nameplate. It read Vicente. That was it. There was no grade insignia or anything else on the shirt, including any sort of indicator of what army this 201st Security Group was a part of. That particular missed detail made the shirt look fake, like it was more of a movie prop than a real uniform. 

I pulled the entire black shirt off the headless elf and tossed it into my inventory. I’d show Mordecai when we got back. 

We moved to examine the corpse of GumGum the orc. We’d seen her just a few hours before, piling the bodies of the prostitutes out of town. Her eyes stared straight up, almost accusing. I’d told her we’d help, but I hadn’t meant it.  

Lootable Corpse. GumGum. Orc. Level 5. 

It didn’t say what had killed her, but based on the injuries—a ripped open chest, and no blood—I suspected she’d been killed by those three Krasue things. I shuddered.  

“Why did that weird guy say he’d been training his whole life to fight us? We’ve only been on this floor for a couple days,” Donut asked, mirroring my own thoughts. 

“It’s obviously a clue in that quest. All of this is some sort of ham-fisted setup to get us to investigate further.” 

Sure enough, GumGum’s inventory held four gold coins and two pieces of paper. One was entitled Gate Pass and the other was Mysterious Letter. I sighed and took them both. 

“She was a nice lady, for an orc,” Donut said. “She was doing the right thing. We have to finish the quest now.” 

“Why?” I asked. 

“Because they killed her. And they probably killed her because we got that quest,” Donut said. “If we hadn’t, she’d probably be in the bar right now waiting to ask someone else to help her.” 

Goddamnit, Donut. She was right. Of course she was right. The orc’s lifeless eyes shone in the reflection of Donut’s Torch spell. She’s not real, I thought. She’s a prop, an extra in a high-stakes game show.

But that wasn’t true, was it? She was a real, biological creature. What she believed to be real was fake, an illusion. But she was still flesh and blood, an innocent. And she was dead simply because it was part of the story. Just like with all these prostitutes.

You’re not going to break me. Fuck you all. 

“I think I liked you better when you didn’t make so much sense,” I said.

“I’ve always made sense, Carl,” Donut said.  

~

We made our way back to the inn. I didn’t want to spend any more time in the alley. We missed the end of the show, and the announcement boomed over the city loudspeaker as we walked. It wasn’t anything new or interesting. Another day, another few bugs. Some druid spell was causing the supposedly indestructible wooden floorboards to evaporate, creating sinkholes and sucking people away, causing them to fall off the map and disappear.

The inn was the same as the previous nice. Where GumGum had sat the previous evening was now occupied by a pair of human NPCs, an older man and female couple who quietly ate and talked amongst themselves. Fitz the barkeep grinned at us. “Returning customers!” he exclaimed. “Your majesty. It’s always an honor.” 

Mordecai was plastered by the time we teleported to the inn. He drunkenly instructed me in creating the Hair of the Dog potion. My first attempt failed, but it worked the second time, garnering me a level three in alchemy. 

“I went too far the wrong way,” Mordecai said, shaking his head after he drank the potion. “But I was only expecting to be there for a few minutes. Did you see that centauress by the bar? She offered to buy me a few shots. Why’d you two take so long?”   

I told him what had happened as I made a few additional Hair of the Dog potions. Fitz offered us free room and board for the night in exchange for three of them. I had plenty of supplies. Since it didn’t require boiling or any higher-difficulty emulsifying, I could make the potions without a table.

“A military uniform?” Mordecai said. “That’s odd. Let me see it.” 

“No,” Donut said. “We’ll show you in a minute. And then we’re going to tell you why we’re finishing out that quest whether you like it or not. But Carl and I have fan boxes to open. My people have spent a lot of time and effort on voting for and choosing this. So I’m opening it now.”  

I exchanged a look with Mordecai, who’d warned us both a dozen times now that the lower-tier fan boxes were usually crap. While the boxes wouldn’t contain anything awful or physically harmful, the system-generated list of possibilities was often filled with random and sometimes nonsensical items. Trolls oftentimes got in on the voting, and the prize was usually the most ridiculous or useless item on the list. Mordecai said he’d received a skyfowl sex toy in his first box. Later, the fan boxes would be more significant with better items. This was a gold box, which meant fans had to have us on their favorites list in order to vote. But even these boxes were often corrupted. Fans had to pay actual credits to vote for the contents of anything above a Platinum Fan Box. That fee to vote was next to nothing, but it was enough to keep people from casually gaming the system. 

“Here I go,” Donut said. I braced myself. 

The box opened, and Donut gasped. “Oh my gosh, Carl, Carl, look!” she said excitedly. 

I felt my stomach drop. You assholes, I thought.

It was a small, framed picture. Of Bea. The square photo had been taken directly from her Instagram. It was the same photo that caused me to break up with her. In the picture, Bea wore a bikini. She was laughing. And she was sitting on her ex-boyfriend’s lap, her arm draped around his shoulder while she took the selfie. Brad was the guy’s name. He worked construction part time and modeled part time. I knew that because that was the only line of information on his profile. His Instagram handle was Brad_the_Chad69, possibly the douchiest name in the history of the world. He always did the male version of a duck face in his photos, and since I’d never met the dude in real life, every picture I’d ever seen of him made him look like he was taking a shit.  

“It’s great!” Donut said. “Oh my gosh. I love it so much! Zev was saying she wanted to see a picture of her. Look, Mordecai! It’s Miss Beatrice and her friend! Look, Mongo! It’s your grandmother! Fitz, come here and look at Miss Beatrice. Isn’t she pretty?”  

Mordecai didn’t look at the picture. He stared directly at me, a worried expression upon his face. 

I was expecting it to bother me. It didn’t, I realized. At the time, I’d been upset. I told myself I didn’t like drama, and I dumped her. Which was the right thing to do. But I was still upset. Of course I’d been upset, and I lied to myself about how upset I was. But that was gone now. Really gone. After all that had happened, how could it possibly not be gone? And the realization was like a weight that I didn’t even know was there lifting off my shoulders. 

Donut’s reaction to the gift was more than a little worrying, but at least she seemed to enjoy the prize. It could’ve been much worse. 

I grinned, looking directly up at the ceiling. I gave a very deliberate shrug. “You really think I’d care about that? Nice try.” 

“Carl, open yours! Maybe it’s another picture!”

I sighed, and I selected my box. If it was something awful, something designed to upset Donut, I was prepared to toss it into my inventory before she could see it. 

I wasn’t expecting the basket.  

“What the hell is that?” Mordecai asked the moment it appeared. He examined it, his eyes going wide. “Oh,” he said. “You got a good prize. The rabble-rousers must have spent all their effort on Donut’s gift.” 

“What are you talking about?” Donut said. She looked at the strange wicker basket. It looked like a large, banana-shaped scoop. A group of buckles along with an unfamiliar strap were attached to the end of the object. “What is this thing?” Donut asked. She read the description. “I don’t get it. What’s… how is that pronounced? High lie? 

I didn’t need to read the description. The moment I saw the item, I knew exactly what it was. The buckles were unusual, but my brain was already processing how it worked. This was a good prize. In fact, this was a great prize. 

“Hey, Fitz,” I said. The barkeep had wandered over to look at the picture of Bea. He still clutched it in both hands, and he was rubbing a finger down the glass, stroking the image of Bea’s breasts. “Do you have any oranges?” 

He appeared startled, as if he realized we were still there. He quickly placed the photo back down. “I reckon I do,” he said. 

“Give me four or five of them please,” I said. 

While he went to the back, I picked up the large basket. I ran my hand down it. While it appeared to be made of wicker, it was really made of a light, metallic substance. My mind raced with the possibilities. It was so strange. This knowledge was from that Earth Hobby Potion. It all came rushing to me. 

The skill I’d received had been in something called Cesta Punta. I’d thought it was a martial art. It wasn’t. It was a sport. A sport more commonly known as jai-alai in the United States. It was a complicated, fast-paced, squash-like game where people wore scoops on the ends of their hands and thrtew balls against a wall. It was dangerous as fuck, and even with helmets, those little, hard balls bounced and flew fast enough to knock your damn head off. 

The gift I’d received in my fan box was called a xistera. It was the scoop one normally wore on their hand. Normally there was a leather sleeve along the back of the handle that you could tighten, which would keep the basket from flying away. You used the scoop to catch and toss the ball, and because of the shape of the basket and weight of the ball, you could throw very hard and fast, especially if you spun and swung your arm in just the correct manner.

I’d never played it in real life, though I knew a senior chief who had something similar designed to lob tennis balls great distances. The thing was really for dogs, but he’d used it to toss cherry bombs off the side of the cutter out onto the glacial ice of the Arctic Ocean. He’d let me do it once, and I remembered how far it’d flown. 

And at that moment, I realized that small memory, of me tossing firecrackers onto the ice in the middle-of-nowhere was likely the impetus of the chain of events that led to this prize. Whether the system really knew my memories or not, they did have a rather obvious plan for me. I no longer needed the slingshot with this item. This was better. Much, much better. 

I strapped the xistera onto my wrist, awkwardly using my teeth and left hand to fasten the first set of buckles. The second set went just before my elbow. The rounded scoop extend about two and a half feet past my right hand, almost like a single, massive fingernail. It felt natural on me. I wouldn’t be able to punch or summon my gauntlet while it was on me like this. But I could feel the plastic-like slit just above my palm. Anything I summoned into my hand from my inventory could be pushed directly into the scoop. And conversely, I could make a claw and remove the item in the scoop. 

The xistera wasn’t magical, at least it didn’t say it was, but it was mechanical and made with some pretty neat technology. It had a trick. The second strap just below my elbow had a small pull-ring. I pulled it, and the entire scoop yanked in on itself, forming and twisting over my right forearm like a metallic bracer. The motion was quick and smooth. Once the scoop was retracted, I formed a fist to make sure my gauntlet would still work. It did. In fact, the gauntlet fit snuggly over the end of the bracer, like it’d been made for it. Now the missing right arm of my jacket didn’t look so ridiculous. 

“Here’s your oranges!” Fitz said, piling five of them on the table. 

I picked them up and pulled them all into my inventory. I eyed the entrance door to the safe room, which I knew was the most unbreakable thing in here. I extended the scoop. 

I pulled an orange into my hand. I was worried it’d be a little too fat for the xistera, but it automatically widened itself. Hey, that’s pretty cool. 

I spun, arcing my arm over my head. The orange rocketed out of the scoop and smashed right into the center of the door. The fruit completely disintegrated. 

“Hey!” Fitz said. 

“Wow,” Donut said. “That’s delightful! Do it again! Fitz, get him some apples and plums!” 

Fitz stopped complaining and ran to comply. I attempted to hit the exact same spot. My aim was just a hair off, but I could already tell that as my skill in this grew, I’d get more and more accurate. I really needed to get outside and try it for distance. I could now sling projectiles fast. I knew with a rock or a metal ball, it could do some serious damage. 

I also realized I was going to have to start tossing a few points in dexterity here and there. I’d been planning on a strength and constitution build, but if my accuracy became an issue, a dexterity boost would help.  

I tried tossing some of the small ammo I had for my clurichaun slingshot. The little rocks weren’t uniform enough in size to properly lob. While the scoop tried to make itself thinner, it didn’t get nearly thin enough. Their aim was unpredictable because I couldn’t control their passage through the scoop as I swung. 

Carl: You win, Zev. No more slingshot. 

Zev: Yay! People are pretty excited about this. I’m glad you got it. It was a close vote with something utterly inappropriate. 

Carl: What was it?

Zev: You know I can’t tell you that. 

“I’m going to need regular ammo and more of those hob-lobbers,” I said after I finished. The human couple who’d been sitting in the corner got up and ran out the moment I stopped fruit-ninjaing the door.  

“That’s just the tip of the iceberg,” Mordecai said. “You’ll be able to make yourself smoke bombs, and I can fashion tossables, like poison bags and pretty much anything else you can think of. I know a recipe for a rubber-like substance that breaks apart when it hits something. We’ll need a table for it, though.” 

I nodded. I pulled one of the hob-lobber bombs out of my inventory. I examined its properties. 

Hobgoblin Hob-Lobber – Wick Lit.

Type: Fragmenting Tossable.
Effect: It blows shit up.
Status: 150. Fortified. 

A mainstay of the Hobgoblin Hob-Lobbing Lobbers, the Hob-Lobber is a stable, mostly-predictable, more practical and tactical solution to dynamite. All right? But if you toss it, make sure its wick is lit. While not guaranteed to do a premature blast, it’s better than nothing, innit? 

“Your rhyming scheme is all off,” I muttered. 

The round bomb was the perfect size for my xistera. This kind of hob-lobber had a wick that needed to be lit. A minor inconvenience. I could go back to crazy Pustule the hobgoblin and buy the impact-triggered ones. Though, thinking on it, there was a lot I could do with this kind. A lot. Especially once Mordecai got his hands on that alchemy table.  

I tossed the heavy bomb in the air and caught it. Everyone in the room, even Mongo, looked at me with a horrified expression. The item’s stability was still at 150. I could punt the item, and it wouldn’t go off. Besides, this was a safe room. Still, they were all looking at me like I’d lost my mind. I had a quick memory of a goblin bomb bard who’d been doing something similar as we passed by. I remembered thinking he was crazy at the time. I put the bomb away, smiling sheepishly. 

“I worry about you sometimes,” said Donut. 

~

“Oh, I know what this is,” Mordecai said the moment I handed him the shirt. “You said this was on a city elf, right?” 

“That’s right,” I said. “I didn’t get a chance to read his description before Donut and I killed him. So what’s the deal?” 

“You shouldn’t see any real uniformed military on this floor other than the guards, or maybe some of the mobs. You will definitely see an organized military presence on the ninth and maybe on the sixth. And you never know what’s going to happen on the others. But the only jackholes who organize themselves like this are the city elves. They’re a gang, and they called themselves the 201st Security Group.”

“Ohh,” I said. “I thought that was a unit patch.” 

“They’re morons is what they are,” Mordecai said. “You’ll find them mostly in the larger cities, but also in the medium-sized ones that are governed by the Skyfowl. I should have known they’d be here.”  

“Are they mercenaries?” I asked, taking the shirt back. 

“They’re nutjobs,” Mordecai said. “There are a lot of types of elves. High elves, like your elite friend’s family. Those guys are the forest-dwelling magical beings you’re probably most familiar with. There are dark elves, wind elves, goblin elves, and a dozen more. And then there are the city elves.” 

“He looked like a normal elf to me,” Donut said. “But he was a little crazy. He knew our names.” 

“Yeah, I don’t know why he knew your name,” Mordecai said. “But anyway, on earth, you had a small segment of society who believed really crazy things. Like aliens walked among the people and that lizard folk had taken over the highest levels of government. You know what I’m talking about, right?” 

“I do,” I said. “But they don’t seem so crazy now, do they? You guys were walking around among us.” 

Mordecai scoffed. “Yeah, but not the reptilians. Those guys run a shadow government? Please. The last reptilian I knew couldn’t even properly run a fantasy football league. Anyway, I’m talking about crazy, conspiracy nuts. People who believe the government is trying to use mind control on them, secret societies, gay frogs who shoot tracking microchips into you using cellular towers, and so on and so forth. Not your run-of-the-mill conspiracy theorists, but those who go the extra mile. Tin-foil-hat-wearing, silver-drinking nutjobs. The kind of people who cover their vehicles with crazy, schizophrenic text about radio signals coming from toilets.”

“I know exactly what you mean,” I said.  

“That’s a city elf. They are designated as a separate race because their stupidity is so outstanding, the high elves consider it a genetic defect and kick them out. All elves originate with the high elves, who are big on banishing and wholesale genocide. It’s what happens when you live forever but still keep having babies. So the city elves gather in the cities. The young and especially stupid ones always find their way to the 201st. It’s a big, poorly-organized militia that considers itself a proper military outfit, and it has only one goal. To protect the Skyfowl from the earthbound.” 

I laughed. “What? They’re earthbound. Aren’t they?”

“Yeah, so, they believe the Skyfowl are angels. They believe all flightless creatures are so jealous of us… of the Skyfowl I mean, that all humans and everybody else without wings want to destroy them. They believe when Scolopendra unleashed that nine-tier attack, one of the tiers was a spell that made the earthbound want to kill the Skyfowl. That’s absolutely not true. People want to kill Skyfowl because Skyfowl are assholes. They don’t need a spell to make people hate them.” 

“But, why?” I asked. “Why do the elves care?” 

Mordecai sighed. “It’s kind of a long, complicated story, and we’re brushing on a subject I was going to bring up at a later time. We’ve touched on it before. Gods and goddesses. In-game deities. We’ll get to what they really are later. You don’t need to worry about that on this floor. Anyway, all you need to know is that elves worship the Oak-Mother, the mother of all gods. Her name is Apito. And in one story about Apito, it is said that in order to maintain the path to heaven, her angels must remain free and alive. And in a completely separate story, Apito is said to have called the Skyfowl ‘bless-ed.’ And in a third, apocryphal story, Apito said only the angels are ‘blessed.’ In that same story she says any violence against angels is to be stopped, and if it continues, she will destroy all the worlds. Ergo, a batshit crazy, doomsday cult sect of banished elves now dedicate themselves to protecting the Skyfowl in anticipation of the day when the tree goddess destroys the universe.”    

“All-righty then. And what do the Skyfowl think about these guys?” I asked. 

He paused. “Skyfowl in general are a diverse people, like humans, but the ones on this level are a little different. They’re mostly non-religious. They are, as a rule, negatively inclined toward any flightless creature. They think of you as a servant class, that you’re beneath them. In the mythology of the volcano levels, the Skyfowl were the ruling class of the Over City, and the High Elves were the ruling class of the forested regions of the Hunting Grounds. So when these elves show up in their cities, oftentimes falling to the ground and slobbering all over themselves as they offer obeisance, they’re treated as an amusement, a joke. Nobody takes them seriously. They have their stupid uniforms and their play-acting, but I’ve never seen anything come of it in all my time here. This angel thing is their main motivation, but they also have all sorts of weird theories and beliefs. Everybody makes fun of them. I’ve never known them to actually inflict violence.”

“Well we’re going to find out what’s going on,” Donut declared. She stood stiffly. She’d put the picture of Bea into her inventory. “I’ve decided that we’re going to follow through with this quest, and there’s nothing you can do to stop us, Mordecai.” 

“Is that so?” Mordecai asked. 

“GumGum died because of us. And Carl, Mongo, and I have decided to make it right.” 

Mordecai just looked at her, then he shrugged after a moment. “If that’s what you’re gonna do. I ain’t your dad. I’m your manager. You know how I feel about quests on this floor. But as long as you spend as much time grinding and killing as possible, then so be it.” 

Donut looked surprised then triumphant. I could tell by the non-plussed look on Mordecai’s face that he’d already decided we were stuck with this quest whether we wanted it or not. We’d already been sucked it, much the way we’d been sucked in when Signet had kidnapped us. 

“GumGum is dead? Did I hear that right?” Fitz said, looking at us with wide eyes. “GumGum the orc?” 

“I’m afraid so,” I said. “She was killed by a group of Krasue.” 

“Oh, oh no,” the barkeep said. “I… I gotta sit down. GumGum dead. I can’t believe it. She was m’best customer, she was. Krasue. I knew they’d get her one of these days.” The man wandered back into his kitchens. 

“I’m going to get him blackout drunk tonight,” Mordecai said. “Then I can peek at his stores and the newsletter.” 

“So we’re doing this, then?” Donut said. “We’re doing the quest? And this time I will be awake the whole time? Excellent. Let’s solve this mystery. What do we gotta do next?” 

“Okay,” I said. “Let’s work through what we already know. We have dead prostitutes from outside the city falling from the sky. These women have corpses that suggest they’ve been twisted to death. Furthermore, they have wounds on their shoulders that indicate they’ve been held aloft by something with talons. Possibly a skyfowl. And just a few hours after we said we’d do something about it, the woman who gave us the quest ends up dead. We’re attacked by that crazy elf dude along with three scary ghost ladies with their guts hanging out. What else?”

“You have those two pieces of paper,” Donut said. 

“Oh yea,” I said, pulling them both from my inventory. The first was Mysterious Letter. It was a folded piece of paper stained red with blood. I opened it. 

It was a relatively-short letter, written in a language I didn’t understand. The text was all squiggles and triangles. I examined the letter’s properties. 

Mysterious Letter. 

GumGum the orc had this blood-soaked letter in her possession. It’s in an odd language. Is it a clue? Is it a grocery list? You can’t fucking read it, so who knows? 

I slid it over to Mordecai as I examined the next slip. 

Gate Pass.

When one walks about the streets of any town within the Over City, the mindless Swordsman guards tend to get a bit squirrely if you’re carrying a corpse with you. When it comes to their black and white view of justice, the rule of law is absolute. 

Unless you have a gate pass. 

This letter gets the city guard off your back as long you’re not being too overt with your current criminal enterprise. 

Pass only works within the township in which it was issued. 

The paper itself said, “Gate Pass. The holder of this pass is doing this on my orders. Magistrate Featherfall.” 

“That is not what I expected,” I said, putting it back into my inventory. It was basically a Get-Out-of-Jail card. 

“I recognize this text,” Mordecai said, still looking at the mysterious letter. He sounded nervous. “I can’t read it, but I know these squiggles. It’s necroscript. It’s something an undead magic user would write out. This is probably a type of scroll. But you can only read it if you have proper skill in the language.”

“So it has something to do with a necromancer?” I asked. 

“Maybe, maybe not. But when I say ‘undead magic user,’ I mean that literally.” 

“Those Katsue head things were undead,” I said. “The system said they were ghosts.”  

“Katsue are usually henchmen, errr, henchwomen, for something else. I’m thinking you two might have a lich problem.” 

“What is a lich?” Donut asked. 

I answered. I knew this from playing DnD. “It’s usually an undead magic user, obsessed with eternal life.” 

“Sort of,” Mordecai said. “They’re pretty nasty monsters. They tend to be smart, too.” 

“Hmm,” I said, thinking. “What does a lich have to do with those 201st Security Group assholes?” 

“Hey, Fitz, Darling. Can you come back here please?” Donut called.

The pub owner appeared from the back, rubbing his eyes. He’d obviously been crying. “Yes, your majesty?” 

“You said you were afraid that GumGum would get hurt by one of the Krasue. What did you mean by that? How did you know about those things?” 

I looked at Donut, impressed. I chose not to say anything. 

“She told me,” he said. “She was looking out for them fallen women. But she said sometimes she’d hear one, and she’d go into the alleyway even though it was still night. I’d tell her not to go in there. It ain’t safe. But she’d go, and she said sometimes she’d see the Krasue in the shadows. She was afraid of them. She had nightmares. But she cared about them women. She had nightmares about one of them falling from the sky and not being dead, and just sitting there and dying, and nobody being there to hold her hand and tell her it was going to be okay. GumGum’s mom had been one of them ladies, you see. And she’d died after getting stabbed. GumGum had found her the next morning. Just sitting on the stoop to their house. She’d crawled home and died right there. She’d left a red streak a half kilometer long, and nobody had helped. GumGum had to grow up mighty fast after that. That’s why she had a soft spot for those ladies. The nicest orc you’d ever meet. She smelled something awful, but I really liked her.” 

“So Krasue are a normal monster for this town?” I asked. 

“There’s no such thing as a normal monster for this town,” he said. “But it’s unusual for the undead to rattle about, the magistrate being a black cleric and all. He can control the undead, so I reckon if he knew about them, he’d banish them floating lady heads right quick. GumGum said she’d complained, and all he did was give her permission to move the dead bodies.”

I exchanged a look with Donut. “Magistrate, huh?” I said. “Do you know where this guy’s office is?”   

~

Donut insisted on putting up the picture of Bea on the small table next to her cat tree as she slept. Mongo didn’t appear nearly as thrilled about the framed photograph as Donut. He actually hissed at it a couple times before Donut admonished him. 

“Good boy,” I said later, scratching the top of his head. He chomped at the air, electricity sparking from his enchanted fang caps. 

I decided not to read. I had those Louis L'amour books, but we had to get up early. Our interview was earlier than usual, and I wanted to check out this magistrate guy before it was time to go. Still, I pulled out the mysterious letter. I stared at the symbols, trying to memorize them. 

Even though I’d set up the cat tree on her insistence, Donut jumped straight onto my neck and settled in. 

“Goodnight, Carl,” she said. 

“Goodnight, Donut,” I said, patting her head.  

“Promise me you won’t let me die alone like GumGum’s mom,” she said. “Or GumGum. I guess she died alone, too. She was probably really scared.”

“Don’t worry, Donut,” I said. “We’ll find out who’s responsible, and we’ll make them pay.” 

Thwump. Something hit the roof of the inn, directly over our heads. It slid off the rooftop and crashed loudly into the street. 

In the morning we’d discover the body of a naked, twisted human prostitute, sprawled out in the alley next to the inn. 

Scrawled onto her back in torn, bloodless flesh were the words, “No, you won’t.”