Chapter 220 (Patreon)

Chapter 220

Donut gasped. “Hi, Juice Box! I’ll tell Louis we saw you!”

“Hello Donut. Hello Carl,” she said. “Gotta talk fast. Experience tells me I have but moments before they swarm the place.” Her gaze turned to Prince Stalwart. Her form shifted, and she turned into a facsimile of the angry orc, but with an arrow poking out of his eye. “Do you remember this one? I bet it hurt. Next time, I’ll get your other eye.”

Stalwart growled.

“Anyway, how’s Louis?” she asked.

“He’s sad because Firas died,” Donut said. “But he’ll be much better when he hears you’re still around!”

Juice Box turned to her human form, and she looked genuinely sad. “Firas? Poor kid. But I’m glad Louis is okay.” She looked sharply over her shoulder at something we couldn’t hear. “Anyway. I see most of my family members have arrived in town. Thank you, Carl. I knew I could trust you. I haven’t been able to talk to them because apparently they’re a part of your team. I can’t join it because it means I won’t be allowed to kill these assholes. I gotta tell you, these rules are ridiculous, but I’ve been learning.” She thumbed over at Luke, the small goblin guy from the Lemig Sortion. “Your castle landed in his territory, and it turned a bunch of his friends into zombies, but that’s mostly taken care of now. Your guys are in a tough spot, shoved between the blobs and the snakes. The orcs and the blobs are working together and are massing on the border. Your team has started building a castle on your behalf.”

“Do you see this?” Epitome Tagg shouted at Cascadia, who looked more tired than angry. Tagg was now on his feet. “They’re talking. Planning. Right in front of you! She’s obviously a part of his team.”

“I am my own team, thank you very much, but I’m glad you brought that up, baldie. I’ve been listening to all y’all talk. I know how this works now. I know what I am. I only understood part of it before, but I get it now. I see the whole picture. I know what I am, and I know what you are.” She turned into the faceless, default form of a changeling. “I’m my own team,” she repeated.

“There are no other teams,” Epitome Tagg said. “It’s nine teams. Eight, really. Plus the chaff. That’s what you are. You’re not even real.”

“Real? Here’s how I see it,” Juice Box said. “If you want us to stop knocking down all of your pretty structures and killing your army folks, or to let you finish draining Larracos, there’s only one way to do it. I want you guys to make a new rule. I’ve overheard your conversations. I know you can do that. I want you to add my people as their own team, afforded all the safeties as the rest of you. I want regeneration for all of us.”

A moment of silence passed.

Luke of the Lemig Sortion grunted with laughter. “Becoming self-aware, you say?”

“Your own team? That’s not going to happen,” Tagg said to Juice Box. “That’s not even possible. We can change some of the rules, but we can’t just change the nature of the game.”

I said nothing. I wasn’t certain how I felt about the idea of the NPCs going fully rogue. I’d sent her to the ninth floor to help rally the NPCs to our cause. Not to go out on their own. But it made sense to me. I didn’t know if this was just Juice Box talking a big game or if she’d actually managed to wake up all of the floor’s NPCs. I put myself in her shoes, and I knew I’d being doing the same thing. Either way, we had a common enemy.

The fact it was pissing off the sponsors was enough for me.

“I propose a new action item,” I said. “A tenth team populated with NPCs, afforded the same protections as the rest.”

“And with full voting rights,” Juice Box said.

“And with full voting rights,” I added.

A moment passed. Urkel, the mexx robot, dinged. “Action item added to the queue. Voting is now available.”

“This is orcshit,” Tagg said. “It’s not possible.”

“Yeah,” Luke of the Lemig Sortion said. “I think we’re gonna bail, if the people let us. There’s some seriously bad juju going on this season, and the people have been trying to get us to quit for a while. I’ll put the proposal before the high congress for us to evacuate.”

“Good luck with that,” Empress D’Nadia said.

“Nobody is going to vote for this,” Prince Stalwart said. “This is a complete waste of time.”

Juice Box suddenly had a device in her hand that I immediately recognized as a hobgoblin pus detonator. Uh-oh, I thought. She clicked it.

Ten seconds.

“You can vote no. But then this will keep happening. Tell Louis I send my love!” She poofed and turned into some sort of translucent bat creature and disappeared. At the same moment, several of the remaining participants jumped from their chairs. Tagg, D’Nadia, and Luke bolted, disappearing. Stalwart, Rishi the Naga, and the green blob thing next to me remained in their spots.

Bam! The blob guy next to me exploded in a shower of green goo. It was a small explosive, possibly just the detonator material itself, but it was enough. And it was loud. We all jumped at the explosion. Donut yowled and leaped from her chair. Cascadia shrank back. Even Stalwart cringed. The blob was the only one to explode. The cube-shaped area of his illusion went pitch black while an alarm sounded in the distance before blinking and disappearing, reverting to a blank, clean table.

Rishi the naga was the only one who hadn’t reacted.

Stalwart composed himself. “You mudskippers are a disgrace,” he said to Cascadia. “Pitiful. This is unacceptable. Everything is falling apart. Why does this keep happening? At least my security... gah!” The orc didn’t finish. He collapsed forward on the table, a magical arrow sprouting from his eye. The blue arrow sizzled. I had no idea where it came from, or who had shot it. It hadn’t been Juice Box unless she’d learned how to teleport.

His feed blinked and shut off.

The only ones left at the table were me and Donut, Rishi the naga, and Cascadia.

“I guess the meeting is over,” Cascadia said, sighing heavily. “I’ll give everyone until tomorrow to regenerate, and then we can try to schedule another one.”

“Weren’t we supposed to vote for stuff?” Donut asked. “That was hardly a meeting. At least it wasn’t boring. I was afraid it was going to be boring.”

“We got further than last time,” Cascadia said.

Rishi shook his snake head. “This changeling is getting better at infiltrating the castles. Usually, she only kills one of us. She has helpers now. She always knows when we’re going to meet. If we vote for her to have her own team, she will surely dominate the game, and I do not think that is a good idea, unless we put some limits. But we should give her something. I will put forth a compromise. If you are somehow in contact with her, Carl, I think you should attempt to convince her. I propose that the unaffiliated NPCs are given invulnerability this season and a safe area where the rest of us are not allowed to enter. In return, she will stop her terroristic attacks.”

“Something tells me that won’t be enough for her,” I said.

“The sultanate is quite versed in dealing with terrorism,” Rishi said. “This changeling may not enjoy how harshly we respond. The sultana has been hesitant to react in such a public manner, but I will convince her she no longer has a choice.”

The way he said it sent a chill through me.

“You can discuss it next time,” Cascadia said, waving her fish arm. “I’m going to take a nap.”

And just like that, the room blinked, and she was gone. Rishi was gone.

“This whole meeting could’ve been done over chat,” Donut said. “I mean, really. Probably would have been less decapitations.”

~

Donut: YOUR FIANCÉ HAS GOTTEN VERY SCARY. YOU BETTER NOT EVER UPSET HER. MAKE SURE YOU TELL HER SHE’S PRETTY EVERY DAY. AND DON’T EVER EAT POTATO CHIPS IN BED. CARL USED TO DO THAT, AND IT MADE MISS BEATRICE REALLY MAD.

Louis: She really ripped the guy’s head off?

Donut: IT WAS VERY BLOODY AND GROSS. AND SHE DID IT WHILE SHE WAS DRESSED LIKE THAT ELF GUY’S MOM. IT MADE HIM SCREAM A LOT.

Louis: Great. Just great.

Carl: I see the Desperado Club. Are you guys going in?

Imani: We still haven’t found one.

Elle: It’s a total snooze fest over here. It’s all churches and boring monsters. I got my squatchy and gumberoo and batsquatch, and everything else sucks. We don’t even have any quests. We’re moving to the outskirts of Portland to see if there’s anything interesting down there.

Carl: Okay, be careful.

Li Na: We are already inside the club.

Katia: We’re inside, too.

Carl: Okay, going in.

The club was right where the bopca said it would be, several miles south along the main drag of a small town, about halfway toward our destination of the swamp with Samantha and the boss spider.

Speaking of spiders, they now showed themselves on the map thanks to the quest from Huanxin. They were everywhere, all tiny, little mobs, no different or more dangerous than real spiders. We only needed to kill five a day between the two of us, but Donut was taking great pride in slaughtering them by the dozens. She would cast Why are you hitting yourself? on one and laugh and laugh as it spun in circles, trying to bite itself. It was kind of fucked up, but it was also training the spell.

We’d been killing and grinding on several different mobs, most of them various forms of talking birds, but nothing had been flag worthy. We both managed to level. I hit level 65, and Donut level 57. I also maxed out my Scavenger’s Daughter bar three times and drained it using melee attacks. The attacks were noticeably stronger already.

We collected several other cards, including one more snare card, a card called Hole in the Bag, which drained a totem’s mana. Unlike our Hobble card, this one was not consumable. We also found a rare mystic card called Force Discard, which picked a random card from the opponent’s hand and tossed it to the discard pile.

Also, on Donut’s insistence, I spent a good hour reading directly from my Bahamas book and transcribing it into my notepad, which I was simultaneously copying to the cookbook and to Pony in chat, who didn’t even thank me. He only responded when I inquired if he was actually getting my messages, and even then the asshole only responded to point out a few typos in my translation.

Per Mordecai’s request, we found a saferoom right next to the Desperado, which would allow him to venture out and get inside to buy supplies. We still hadn’t really discussed the whole thing with Ruby and the rest of the changelings, but now that the secret was out, Mordecai was letting them wander out into the main guild area. Donut made the mistake of telling Mordecai that they were making a movie out of his fostering of the six children, and he’d been especially grumpy ever since.

The entrance bar to the Desperado was empty of customers, but a it featured a gnoll bartender and a pair of facing pianos, like it was supposed to be a dueling piano bar. Donut put Mongo away, and we pushed through, coming face-to-face with Clarabelle the crocodilian door guard who refused to make eye contact with us. She let us right in without saying a word.

Entering the Desperado Club.

We entered on the middle floor, which we’d only been able to briefly visit on the previous floor. The main room was actually a large, sit down style restaurant with a dance floor, much cleaner than the floor above. This was our first time in this particular room. It was only half-full, and the vast majority of the people here were the generated NPCs. Elf waitresses zipped in and out of the room. Several hallways led off into different directions, including an open casino floor that was much larger than the one above. This one had actual slot machines. A cheer rose from that room as some NPCs apparently won a prize.

Multiple crocodilian guards wearing tuxedos stood around the room. One of them watched me sullenly. I recognized him as one of the guards we’d tangled with at the end of the previous floor. He’d been forced to call his boss, Astrid, because we’d trespassed on this floor when it was off-limits to us. Donut gave him a wave.

I caught sight of a large table in the back of the main room with several, familiar crawlers sitting around it. Donut jumped from my shoulder and bounded toward them. It was Katia, Bautista, Louis, Tran, Britney, Li Jun, Zhang, Li Na, Chris, and, to my surprise, Florin, whom I wasn’t expecting to be here.

“Hey guys,” I said as I sat down. Donut had jumped right to the middle of the table and was making a round of bumping heads with everyone except Li Na, whom we couldn’t touch.

There were several cards on the table, and everyone was sorting through them. Donut was trampling over all of them.

“Do you need a menu, hun?” a waitress asked, dropping off a pair of plastic-coated menus without waiting for an answer. Donut started poring over the choices. I caught eyes with Katia.

Carl: How are we going to do this with everybody here? We can’t let them know who our assassination target is.

Katia and I needed to figure out how to find and kill the club’s assistant manager, Astrid, and then we needed to get her body to the Guild of Suffering, the entrance of which was one floor above us in the Penis Parade strip club. But we couldn’t let the others know who our target was. That was part of the deal.

Also, even though, technically, we had until the end of the ninth floor to get this done, we pretty much had to do it before the end of the eighth. As of right now, the one and only Desperado Club entrance on the ninth floor was still fucked, and since I was a faction wars Warlord, I would be kicked out of the city almost right away, meaning I wouldn’t have access until there were only two teams left. So we had to make sure this happened before this floor collapsed.

Katia: We’re just doing a look see right now. We need to figure out how to get her out of the back before we can even start to plan.

Carl: We’ve gotten her to come out a couple of times. Once was when that guy tried to kill Donut and the second was when Donut and I sneaked down here, and we got caught. She’s like the head of security.

Katia: It says she’s also the head of that Naughty Boys Employment Agency. You’re a member of that, and I’m not. Maybe she hangs out in there. You should go in there to check it out.

Carl: I can’t just go into it. It’s a social upgrade addition to our saferoom. It costs like 500,000 gold just to add it.

Katia: Shit. Why didn’t I know that? I thought it was a secret society like the Guild of Suffering with a hidden entrance somewhere.

Carl: If there is another entrance, I don’t know where. We’ll have to cause some sort of distraction here in the club and get her to come out. That probably won’t be too hard. I’m more worried about how we’re going to take her out once she does make an appearance. She’s a level 125 bloodlust sprite. She knocked my ass out through a closed door last time. She has something called cardiovascular magic, and she can make my blood boil at the snap of a finger. Plus she’s always surrounded by a bunch of guards. And she’s a fairy. Because of my stupid goblin tattoo, she does even more damage to me. It’s too bad we can’t get Donut to help with the fight. Her new Mute spell would really come in handy.

Katia: Okay, I think I have a plan. It’s a little messy right now. It involves using my card deck. Let’s just lock down how and where we’re going to get access to her first. We need someplace where we won’t immediately get swarmed by guards.

I gazed across the room, my eyes catching a side hallway that read Bathrooms, Guilds, and the Badger Bar.

Carl: I think I know a place where we can do it. We just need to figure out how to lure her in.

I gave her some additional details about the last time we’d visited the club, including information about the secret passage between the club’s floors in the women’s bathrooms.

Katia: If there’s one secret passage, there’s probably more. We should try to find them. What about her office?

Carl: I don’t know. I’ve been in the back a few times talking to Orren the liaison, but he’s not back there anymore. That’s where she comes from, but I’ve never seen another office door. I can try to sneak back there and look. If I get caught, though, I might end up banned from the club. I’m already on thin ice.

Katia: Okay. You work on how we’ll get to her, and I’ll work on how we’ll kill her. Give me some time to put my plan together.

Carl: We’re heading out to retrieve Samantha, and we might not have access to the club for a few days. We’ll come back this way after, and then we’ll do this.

“Oh, honey, it’s not so bad. Really,” Donut was saying to Britney. The Ukrainian woman just stared down at the cat. The entire left side of her face was badly scarred. The skin was healed, but it had that stretched, glossy, uneven sheen of burned skin. It had happened at the end of the previous floor. “I can barely notice it. Plus, scars are beautiful. It goes well with the whole barbarian aesthetic you’re going for.”

I couldn’t remember what level Britney had been before, but she was now level 55. She’d risen significantly up the ranks. She had no emotion to her normally-sour face. She had a new tattoo under her eye. And extinction sigil. She’d killed all over something.

Next to her was Tran, the thin, quiet, but always-friendly Vietnamese man who’d been really good friends with the late Gwendolyn Duet, whom we’d also met on the bubble level of the fourth floor. Tran had lost both of his legs during the Butcher’s Masquerade. He now had an Odette-style magical wheelchair that allowed him to float, though I couldn’t see it now. He was leaned over a drink at the table, not looking up. I examined the three crawlers we’d met during the bubbles, sitting side-by-side. Britney. Tran. Louis. All three had been devastated by the events of the previous floor. Of the three, only Louis was pretending to be okay.

After shaking hands with Li Jun and Zhang, I turned my attention to Chris, who was currently based in Hong Kong with Li Na’s team. I hadn’t talked to the lava rock creature in a while.

“How are you holding up?” I asked.

“I’m solid,” he said. I just looked at him, trying to determine if that had been a joke or not.

Florin grunted with laughter. The crocodilian was sorting through a pile of utility cards.

“Florin,” I said. “How about you? How’s it going?”

The intense man looked up and met my eyes. “I’m surviving. My squad is already full up. It’s just me and my six totems.”

“What about Lucia?” I asked.

“She’s only talking to me sometimes,” he said. “I still don’t fully understand what’s going on there, but at least she doesn’t attack me on sight anymore. She’s built up her deck, too. She got some weird, fucked-up monsters in there. She and that dog are keeping their distance for now. Our area is mostly jungle, just like the last floor.”

“Did you, uh, catch that guy you had the quest for?”

“I did. Flagged him. He’s pretty powerful too, but I ain’t keeping him. I already have six good’uns in my deck, including a saber-toothed tiger and a giant crocodile.”

“You have a crocodile card?” Donut asked. “Isn’t that a bit redundant?”

Florin laughed. “It’s actually called a giant caiman. His name is Roy.”

“You’re really thinking of getting rid of that other one?” I asked. “Why?”

“Because he’s a right cunt, that’s why. My charisma ain’t high enough to control him when I summon him. I tried pulling him in combat earlier today, and the fucker shot me right in the stomach. My own damn card shot me. Almost killed me.”

“Wait, what’s this?” Donut asked.

“Yeah, Florin has a unique totem card he’s not keeping,” I said.

“And he has a gun? We’ll take it,” Donut said. “We still have three open slots!”

I was a little hesitant. We already had Asojano, who I knew was going to be a handful. It was important to have powerful cards, but anything too powerful might not be worth it if they didn’t do what we said. Even if we could control him, I’d been hearing reports that having two headstrong totems summoned at the same time could result in them fighting each other.

Florin shrugged. “Might not be a bad idea with Donut’s charisma. Maybe you guys can keep him in line. If it doesn’t work out, you can always rip the card in two. You might want to practice in the simulation room with him at first.” He pulled the card from his inventory and slid it across the table to Donut. “Good luck, mate.”

Donut stared down at the card. “Wow. Level 140? Are you sure you don’t want to keep him? How did you trap him?”

“He’s just too powerful for me. Flagging him was easy. I had a quest to stop him. He was terrorizing some village, raising a bunch of zombies from the local cemetery. They completely ruined the whole memory simulation. He was raising them up for fun. It’s just what he does. He’s not outright hostile, though he’s a cocky bastard. Turned an entire river into wine because he was thirsty. I walked right up to him when he was falling down pissed and gave him a supreme healing potion and said his dad wanted him to drink it. He thought I was an angel and drank it right down. He's undead, so it dropped him onto his ass, and I stuck him. He has a mouth on him that’d make my grandma proud.”

I laughed. “They say it’s a unique card, but there’s like ten different versions of this guy floating around already.”

“Yeah, I seen that,” Florin said. “They’re the same guy, but they’re like way different. As far as I can tell, this one’s the most powerful, except maybe the hippie one some bloke in California got. Mine’s the only one that’s armed with a gun.”

I picked up the card and examined it. It was orange-colored, signifying it as a unique.

The card depicted an anime Jesus in a white robe with a red sash, complete with a little floating halo over his flowing, brown hair. He screamed while he fired a goddamned uzi. I shook my head at the absurdity of it. I thought of Sister Ines. She would absolutely lose her mind if she saw this.

T’Ghee Card. Unique.

Totem Card.

HeyZoos. Uzi Jesus.

“I am the way, motherfucker.”

Level: 140.

Origin: Ecuador

Summoning duration: 180 seconds.

Constitution: 200.

This is an undead mob.

This is a ranged mob.

This is a healer mob.

Notable attacks:

Blood into Lead

Resurrect Totem

Bullet Hell

+20 additional skills and spells.

Examine in the squad details tab of your interface for full stats and skills and spells.

Warning: You have empty slots in your squad. Collecting this card will automatically activate and place this totem into your squad. You may not remove or trade squad members until your squad is full. If you wish to remove a card before your squad is full, you will have to tear the card.

“Holy shit,” I said, laughing. “This is so ridiculously offensive.”

“Yeah, wait until you meet him,” Florin said, “He’s something else. He really thinks he’s the real deal. I’d love to see what would happen if he meets another version of himself. But you see that resurrect totem skill? If you can control him, that one right there makes it all worth it. He can bring your killed cards back to life. Plus, he can raise actual mobs from the dead to fight for you, too, kinda like Donut’s Second Chance spell. The trick is getting him to do any of it.”

With the addition of Uzi Jesus, we now had four of six totems. The other three were the monk seal, the donkey snake ghommid splitter, and Asojano. If we could actually control them, it was a good mix. The seal was a solid tank and melee fighter. Both the splitter and Asojano were good at dealing debuffs. Heyzoos had a ranged attack and could heal, in addition to several other attacks. If we could get another magic-based totem and maybe a magic counter totem, we’d have a good mix.

“Donut,” I said, standing. “I’m going to poke around a little, maybe check out this floor’s version of the silk road and grab some supplies. You stay here and sort through and trade some cards. When I get back, we’ll go find to the jeweler and get your tiara taken care of.

She’d received something called a Flawless Jeweler’s Gem in a legendary box way at the beginning of the floor, but we couldn’t see what it did until we got installed into her tiara. There was a shop in here somewhere where we could get that done.

After she’d lost the Crown of the Sepsis Whore, Donut had gotten a replacement, a white Tiara of Mana Genita, which raised her intelligence. That’s what she usually wore, and that was what she was wearing right now. She’d had and lost another tiara at the end of the last floor that had temporarily doubled her charisma. She also had a red beret she’d taken from a mob earlier on this floor, and I didn’t even know what that one did, but she’d been putting that one on from time to time. She had a collection of literally hundreds of hats in her inventory. Sometimes I’d come into her room in the personal space, and she’d have several of them lined up in front of the mirror, or she’d have one on Mongo who sat there patiently while she clucked over it. She had an unenchanted cowboy hat I’d gotten way on the first or second floor that actually fit him really well, though it would fall off if he did any sort of jump.

She even started decorating the personal space with a few hats here and there. It made me happy to see she had a hobby of sorts, even if most of them were basically hunting trophies.

This gem was likely something really good, but it was a yellow-orange citrine, and Donut had a thing about that color, so she wasn’t too enthusiastic about it. She had patches of fur that kind of matched it, but she insisted it would clash.

“Okay, Carl,” she said, looking up from the menu. She was in the middle of questioning the waitress on what sort of side dishes came with the halibut. “Don’t take too long. We have to go rescue Samantha after this.”

“Don’t remind me.”

~

~

I'm almost done with the next chapter, too, but I need to rework it, so hopefully soon. Also, I just started posting over at Royal Road. I included a recap over there that isn't here if you're interested. Thanks so much for all your support.

Lots of stuff going on in the background. I know it seems like I'm slacking, but right now I'm busier than I ever have been. I can't wait to show you all some of the stuff I've been working on.