TS6 - Chapter 22

“Kat!” Kaleek called out, his voice echoing through the catacombs as he draped an arm over her shoulder.  “What has you so distracted?  Usually you’d have a quip or  comment by now, but you’re as quiet as a tomb.”

She looked back at him.  Cocking her head to the side slightly as she looked around at the moist clay and decaying arches that filled her surroundings.  After a second, she squinted.

“Are you saying that because this is-” she began incredulously only for Kaleek to finish her sentence for her.”

“Yep, it’s a tomb.  Pretty good one right?  I thought of it halfway through that last dungeon and I’ve been saving it up ever since.”

“I don’t know if I would use the word ‘good,” Kat replied dryly.  “It was certainly an attempt at a joke.  The idea and form of one at least.”

“Tough crowd, eh Dorrik?”  He asked.  “You thought it was funny, right?”

The lokkel looked up from the map that he was consulting.  “I do not understand the joke.  The dreamscape is an alternate reality.  There are no bodies buried in these halls so we are not in a tomb.  Even if we were to consider the structure that this was modeled after, I doubt that this was originally a crypt.  Although there are side chambers, I have seen no spots for bodies to be interred.”

“Oh come on!” Kaleek responded, throwing up his arms.  “We’re deep underground in the dark.  Everything is decaying and spooky.  How can this not be a tomb?”

“Because no one is buried here?”  Dorrik answered, perplexed by the question.  “I am not sure I understand what you are asking.  If I must be honest, given the wide and interconnected hallways, I suspect that we are in a lost civilization’s sewer system.”

“Spiritually it’s a tomb,” Kaleek said grumpily.  “You can’t be such a stickler for specifics.  Sure there aren’t any bodies around here, but look at how creepy things are.  Look at the decaying bricks here.  Look at how decrepit and moist the clay is.  Nothing gets this spooky on its own.  A lot of hard work went into making this place as tomb-like as possible, and it is positively an affront to the craftsmen that invested their sweat, tears, and dreams into perfecting this ambiance.”

Kat snorted.  Neither the gloom nor her previous poor mood could hold up in front of Kaleek’s antics.  She’d seen him genuinely angry once or twice, but there was just something about the desoph that was all but immune to stress or provocation.  If the tower threw the three of them into a bottomless pit, it felt like his response would just be grunting and saying “big bummer,” and the attitude was infectious.

“It’s certainly as dead as your jokes in here,” Kat replied, cracking a smile.

“There we go!” Kaleek replied, once again slapping her on the back.  “At last we see a crack in Kat’s gloomy and moody exterior.  GIve me a couple weeks and I’ll have her completely back to normal.  I just need to say something confident and charge into a pillar of fire or something in the middle of a battle.  That always works.”

She shook her head, smile growing.  

“Please do not charge into danger,” Dorrik responded.  “Saving you can be difficult, and fire in particular is a problem.  The scent of burning hair is unappealing to say the least.”

“Now,” he continued, turning to address Kat.  “Miss Kat.  You appeared excited when you reappeared and then disassociated for about a minute.  Am I correct to assume that you’ve picked up a new ability?”

“Light Three,” she replied.  “I picked up a variable output laser.  I haven’t gotten a chance to play with it yet, but it looks like I finally have a ranged attack that can do more damage than my crossbow.”

Dorrik paused for a second, his mouth moving silently as if he was talking to himself.

“Improved Laser?” He asked, waiting a second for Kat to nod.  “That is one of the trickier but better choices.  At the third tier most elementalist abilities begin to transition away from being ‘powerful’ from the beginning and more toward those that require training and modulation.  Improved Laser is an interesting ability because it takes a certain amount of time and skill to find the correct intensity and focus to use.  Once a caster develops to that level, the next step is usually trying to develop and time pulses from the spell in order to maximize damage.”

“Gravity Three would have been the same sort of struggle had you developed into it,” Dorrik said, crossing his arms as his voice once again took on the tone of a scholar delivering a lecture.  “I would have suggested Micro Singularities or Gravity Tunnel as your first spell.  Neither would do more damage at first than Gravity Spike, but Gravity Tunnel would let you drastically improve the speed of moving objects, including both your projectiles and yourself, and Micro Singularities creates a number of tiny points of extreme gravity that you can use to rip open a target’s armor and flesh.  It won’t cause anywhere near as much internal damage against a large foe as Gravity Spike, but it can open a tough enemy up for attacks giving the rest of the party options that we might not have already had.”

“Sorry,” she said, wincing.  “I should have consulted with the rest of the party before dropping Gravity in order to expand my domain, but-”

“There is nothing to apologize for Miss Kat,” Dorrik replied, shaking his head.  “Domain empowerment skills are even rarer than domains.  Receiving one before level sixty is a storied feat.  You must have done something to impress the tower.  Turning down the skill would have been the height of foolishness.”

“Your domain may level slowly, but can you not feel it Miss Kat?” He asked, crest waving gently in a nonexistent wind.  “You are already stronger than you were the day you sacrificed your magic.  Inside your domain, enemies without extreme strength and equilibrium are at an extreme disadvantage.  You might not be able to drop a dungeon boss the way you used to, but so long as your enemy has a body, you can all but disable them, delivering death by a thousand cuts while they’re helpless.”

“More than that.”  Dorrik nodded at her, “You’ve just developed the solution to your problem.  Improved Laser has the potential to be a powerful ranged skill, one that you can use in concert with your domain.  The hardest part of learning to use it will be the modulation, but on that front you’re in luck.  Lasers are a commonly studied topic so even scientists without mana can explain the basic principles to you.  In short, a powerful enough laser will sublimate the target it hits into a gas or plasma, creating a minor explosion and expelling debris that will interfere with the laser itself.  Many unskilled users attempt to keep their lasers constantly on which means that the debris from their attacks weakens the spell itself.  A properly trained caster will pulse the laser, giving the shrapnel from the laser blast time to clear the wound before sending in another high power blast.”

“As long as you have enough mana, you can do some pretty serious damage,” Kaleek agreed. “I can get you some of the tables once we wake up, but different types of materials require you to change the speed of the pulses, but once you get a proper hold of it, you should be able to use it as a pretty effective cutting beam.”

“Of course,” He said wistfully, “it’s a shame that you don’t have the ability to turn your mana directly into a couple mega joules of energy without it burning out your entire mana pool.  That would basically just detonate whatever it shot.  Of course there would be massive problems with energy bleedoff due to ionizing radiation, but that doesn’t matter all that much when you can literally turn a fist sized chunk of your opponent’s armor into explosively expanding super heated plasma.”

“I’m going to be honest,” Kat replied.  “I wasn’t expecting the lecture on physics from you.  That seems to be more something that falls within Dorrick’s purview.”

Kaleek grinned, his white teeth forming a cheshire smile in the darkness.

“What can I say?”  He said, shrugging.  “Using high energy physics to destroy things is my passion.  I like blowing things up.  The two of you should try blowing things up too.  Get all of that stress out of your system.  It’s cathartic.”

“It sounds like I’m going to have to do some testing with Improved Laser anyway,” Kat responded.  “I’ll be sure to get some fun targets before I cut them apart.  You can tag along if you want.”

Dorrik sighed, folding up the map.  He began walking down the long crumbling tunnel in the opposite direction from the way the three of them had arrived.

“Would it hurt the two of you to at least pretend that Kaleek was somewhere other than Earth?” He asked.  “I understand that human society seems to treat minor violations of the law as an artistic medium, but it would be helpful if you at least let me maintain some ambiguity for the day when I inevitably face an inquest over your collective antics.”

“Yeah Kaleek,” Kat continued, trying to keep her voice as serious as possible.  “Once you get to Earth we’ll find something explosive and fun to cut apart with lasers.  Don’t worry, if we keep hitting dungeons at this clip, that should be pretty soon.”

“I’m sure I can find something fun in my ship,” Kaleek replied before Dorrik silenced him with a glare.

“When I land of course,” he finished, his voice stilted and awkward.  “I am surely not on Earth at the moment.  The second I land we can figure something out.  Maybe in that big flat area south of Chiwaukee?  There doesn’t seem to be much going on there.  A handful of major craters wouldn’t really change anything.”

“What about the Springfield Badlands?”  Kat asked.  “There isn’t really anyone living there ever since GroCorp’s failed cybercow tests forty years ago.  More than that, there are plenty of abandoned buildings for us to use as targets.  We could bring some food.  Make an entire day of it.”

“Cybercows?”  Dorrik questioned suspiciously.  “I thought those only existed in Chrome Cowboys.  Why haven’t I heard anything about actual cybercows.”

Kat shrugged.

“Grocorp tried to cover them up because they went rogue,” she replied.  “The scientists made a lot of biological modifications to them in order to increase their meat and milk production.  That wasn’t anything new, but when they tried to add cybernetics in order to regulate them and let them operate more independently in order to cut down on overhead such as farm employees, well that’s when things went wrong.”

“The entire test herd escaped.”  Kat shrugged.  “As best we can tell, the cows figured out that some of them were going to get eaten and decided that they would prefer to live their lives as something other than steaks.  Apparently they’re something like four paces tall at the shoulder and immune to most small arms.  The herd trashed the laboratory, killed the scientists and escaped with a bunch of equipment.”

“Escaped with-”  Dorrik cut himself off, frowning.  “Wait.  Miss Kat.  Are you saying that there is an entire other species of sapients on Earth?  Ones that can reason and use tools?”

“I guess?”  She replied.  “There are only a couple hundred of them and they mostly leave us alone so long as we leave them alone.  They haven’t really used Springfield after they drove out all the humans so I doubt that they will bother Kaleek and I if the two of us head down there and blow up a couple of buildings.”

“Please tell me you are not hunting and eating the cybercows,” Dorrik responded seriously.  “Ingesting a sapient is one of the few crimes that will actually bring in outside observers from the Galactic Consensus.”

“A couple too many run ins with voracious hive minds for people to take that sort of thing lying down,” Kaleek said agreeably.  “Klittik Hive, Dikitit Authority, Lettik Commune-”

The desoph cocked his head to the side, eyes cloudy as he dropped deep into thought.

“Come to think about it,” he remarked, “all of those examples are insectoid races. Once is a coincidence, twice is worrying, but three times is a pattern.  What is it with insectoids deciding to consume their neighboring planets and use their bones to create giant ivory nests?”

“Kaleek,” Dorrik said sternly.  “You can’t say that.  It’s speciest.  Not every race that consumes other sapients is an insectoid.  Apparently humans do it too so that’s at least one mammalian example.”  

“No one I know has eaten a cybercow,” Kat replied.  “Maybe one or two executives, but there are also a handful of cannibals out there too.  It’s hardly something that’s common or standard.  I’ve read the research documents on them.  No one wanted to make the cybercows sapient.  There wasn’t any money in that.  They just wanted to make them smart enough that they wouldn’t over or under eat and so that they would come inside when it started storming out.”

“The real issue is that the scientists that made the cybercows seem to have managed to hit the bovine equivalent of the Wierzbeck limit with a couple of them,” she continued.  “The bulls have gone completely mad and have a tendency to attack anything that comes near one of their herds.  It has led to some pretty bloody encounters with the local scavengers, but more often than not the cybercows have come out on top.  These days, people just leave the entire region alone and the herds are slowly eating up all of the vegetation which is why the area is called a ‘badland.”

“You gave your cows cyber dysphoria?”  Dorrik asked, incredulous.  “What is the next grand human plan, to give ducks schizophrenia?  To give cats depression?  Maybe you wish to give geckos anxiety?”

“Doesn’t seem necessary,” Kat replied.  “Geckos are already pretty anxious.  The slightest movement around them and they’re gone.”

“That was a rhetorical question Miss Kat,” Dorrik said huffily.  “I was seeking to make an improbable and ridiculous statement in order to illustrate how strange I find your people’s actions.  I did not mean for you to take my words so literal-”

Kat stopped, raising a hand sharply.  Instantly, the vaguely jovial mood disappeared.  Dorrik cut himself off mid sentence and weapons appeared as if by magic in all three of their hands.

In the distance, Kat heard whispered voices.

“-this is where they are?”

“The tracking spell says so.”

“Well how accurate is the tracking spell?  We didn’t manage to grab anything physical, just a mana impression when we saw them.”

She glanced at the rest of the party, making eye contact with Dorrik before tapping her mouth and then her temple.  The lokkel nodded slowly.  A second later, his eyes flashed purple and Kat felt a probing connection as her companion’s mind sought her own.

“We have company on the way,” she thought at Kaleek and Dorrik the second their minds were connected.  “Adventurers, and it sounds like they’re looking for us.  I wouldn’t be surprised if they were those fish people from before.  I honestly don’t know anyone else that would know that we were out here, and they seemed suspicious last time as well.”

“You did say that they were reporting back to someone when we last encountered them,” Dorrik replied, his lips unmoving.  “That would seem to be a reliable guess.”

“Then where are they going?  There’s nothing out here but ruins and tunnel shamblers.”

“Maybe they know we’re coming and they’re making a run for it?  You did say they are moving, right?”

“They’re absolutely looking for us,” Kat said silently.  “It looks like they’re arguing with each other right now and trying to guess where we’re going.  Apparently they’re trying to track us by our mana impressions, and I don’t think that they’re going to want to sit down and share a cup of tea with us if they can find us.”

“I see two options,” Dorrik replied.  “The first is that we make a rush for the waypoint.  There is a good chance we reach it before them and our pursuers are forced to awaken at the Adventurer’s Hall once again, leaving them a half day behind us.  The other involves my abilities.  If they are tracking us by our mana impressions, I can create a psychic residue that will shift our location slightly.  No more than two hundred paces, but-”

“AMBUSH!” Kaleek shouted mentally before remembering himself and modulated his thoughts.  “I pick the ambush! We should absolutely hide somewhere and beat the stuffing out of these guys.”

“Miss Kat?”  Dorrik asked.  “I do not have any strong opinions, but if you are interested in ambushing our opponents, I would not oppose that decision.”

“Pick ambush Kat,” Kaleek said excitedly.  “That last fight was awful.  I had to spend the entire time creating a boulder for you to throw at the boss and I didn’t even get to stab anyone.  Give me a chance to hack something apart.  Please please please-”

“I think we should see what our pursuers are after,” Kat responded, ignoring Kaleek’s constant begging.  “After all, I don’t know for sure why they’re after us, and that’s the sort of thing that I don’t like not knowing.  We should leave one alive and then ask them whatever questions we have.”

“Ambush!”  Kaleek cheered mentally.  “Finally! I actually get to fight something fun!”

“We have no idea if this is going to be a fun fight,” Kat replied.  “For all we know, they won’t know what hit them and the entire thing will be over in ten seconds.”

“Or there will be twelve opponents and we will be forced to flee rather than fight,” Dorrik chimed in.  “An ambush is a good idea, but we must be wary lest we be ambushed ourselves.”

Kaleek sulked for a second before rebounding completely.

“Nope!  I’m not going to let the two of you get me down.  We’re about to have a good fight with just the right amount of challenge for me to get a good workout in before we handily slay our foes and you can’t convince me otherwise”

He turned and began walking away.  Kat swore she saw him skipping.

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