Chapter 149: Take one Please

The next morning, Travis was back safe and un-possessed, much to everyone’s surprise. Of course, Travis didn’t actually sleep that night, so it made sense he was still alive. Upon being informed that falling asleep probably would’ve gotten him killed, the Master Decoy just shrugged and said he was already operating under the assumption that falling asleep on his own in a zombie-infested Floor was a bad idea. Travis brought back a few souvenirs from his time alone. Mostly strange ‘convenience’ relics, rings that heated and flavored food, anklets that made the body lighter and repaired arthritis…that sort of thing. If it was valuable, Will wasn’t sure Travis would’ve shown them. The Decoy wasn’t against them, but he did have a streak of self-interest. Will thought, scanning the Party as they travelled. None of them were completely saintly, except maybe Anna, and she represented an idealized caricature of what Brianna thought she should’ve been. As for Loth, they practically had to drag her away from the addictive joy of her infinite Zombie launcher, but after some whining and pleading on both sides, they managed to get her away from the trap and back on the road again. The blob of splattered zombies outside the building was getting big and beginning to make some concerning moves. Namely, moving. A few hours into their travel, Will caught Loth designing some kind of zombie-powered threshing machine in her notebook. When she noticed him looking, she then spent the next hour describing how the mindless energy of the undead could be harvested to make life for the living better. “So all the foreman has to do is stand there, and the zombies walk towards them on the treadmill, which turns the wheel, which powers the thresher, or whatever else you care to automate.” Loth said, tapping the different parts of the diagram. “So umm…are we going to export zombies or something? Because nothing grows on Floor.” Loth’s eyes went wide for a moment before narrowing as she realized how much of a hurdle her zombie-power revolution faced. “…Foo.” Loth ripped her design out of her book and tossed it aside. Will caught it and teased her about hanging it up on the mantle. After Loth gave him ‘the look’, Will backed off and turned his attention to the time, glancing up at the sun, barely visible through the purple haze. Will caught Jason’s attention and waved him over. “Hey Jason, according to Charnesa, we still have a day before we hit Ghoul’s Stronghold, and I had an idea for something you could help with.” “What’sup?” Jason asked. “You notice how all these buildings are about the same, and they’ve all been picked clean of anything cool by generations of Climbers?” Will asked, gesturing to the endless ocean of massive glass towers gliding by underneath them. “Yeah?” “Well, I’d like you to pick our next landing spot. One with something cool, if you can.” “Eh?” Jason grunted, looking up at Will. “How?” “With your cantrip.” Jason’s eyes widened and his face lit up. “Right away sir!” Jason said, snapping off a sloppy-but-enthusiastic salute. “I’ll find us a spot with so much goddamn treasure we won’t be able to carry it all!” “Just pick a spot,” Will said, patting him on the shoulder. “More than we can carry is useless.” Jason gave an ominous chuckle and rubbed his palms together before pulling out a gold coin. Jason pointed at the nearest building and flipped the coin. Tails. Jason pointed at the next one. Tails. Will let Jason do his thing when it became obvious that it might take quite some time for him to find a good spot. About four hours later, Will was playing go with Loth and losing horribly when Jason came back to him, tugging manically on his sleeve. “Will, Will, Will!” “You can just tell me what you got,” Will said, turning his attention to the excited prophet. “That building right there, has some loot.” Jason said, pointing. Will squinted to see through the omnipresent purple haze. “That shorter one by the bridge?” Will asked. There was an empty riverbed and a squat building beside it. ‘Shorter’ was relative, since the building itself was still about eight stories tall, which had previously been taller than the biggest building Will had ever seen. “Is it dangerous?” Will asked. Jason frowned, turning to stare at the building and flipping a coin. The coin landed heads in his hand. “Yeah.” “I guess everywhere is ‘dangerous’ here. Is it gonna get us killed?” Will asked. Jason flipped the coin again, and this time he missed the catch, causing it to tumble down to the platform of air beneath them. The coin landed on its side, slowly rotating in place. “…Answer uncertain, try again later.” Jason said with a shrug as he glanced back up at Will. “Can you find us a place close to it that’s safe to spend the night?” Will asked as Jason stooped to pick up his coin. “Sure.” Will sent word to the wagon drivers and they began veering towards the empty river. Once they were parked, Loth started setting up defenses again, and they tested the area for night terrors. Thankfully they hadn’t run into another group of them despite crossing a rather large distance. Will hung around for dinner, then got himself ready and snuck over to the squat building beside the bridge. Perched on a windowsill high above the building in question, Will could see that there was a clear patch of zombies around the squat building, seemingly uninterested in approaching. Will took a button from his shirt and flicked it down into the empty area. Nothing happened at first, but the sound seemed to attract attention from some of the undead, who began wandering closer. Without warning, a round nodule of iron hanging off the underside of the building’s entrance – that Will had previously dismissed as a stylistic choice – twitched, orienting a little black circle towards the zombie. A moment later, the zombie toppled to the ground with a smoking hole in its chest. Patches of the zombie continued disappearing in gouts of the nasty black smoke, which slowly drifted around the empty courtyard, gradually coalescing into the form of the demon that had been possessing it. The smoke demon had mostly congealed when the nodule twitched again, and another hole was opened up in the smoke-creature’s chest, followed by its head, and limbs. Eventually the smoke-demon was scattered, the ominous black smoke sinking to the ground and lingering there, seemingly drifting through a grate in the ground that led the to sewers. A few minutes later, the courtyard was pristine again. Will couldn’t see any dead Climbers around the building, but between dead bodies being possessed and walking away, and whatever Ability the steel nodules were using to vaporize bodies meant that there wouldn’t be any sign that combat had ever happened. Now that he was alerted to people getting vaporized, Will squinted, scanning the courtyard. There were more than a few all-or-mostly-metal Relics scattered around the courtyard here and there, a few simply shoved into the gutters by wind and the shuffling of zombie feet. The only sign that other Climbers had died here Scanning the gutters, Will could easily make out half a dozen Relics that had been durable enough to survive…whatever that thing was. If they dug through the clogged gutters, they’d probably find another dozen at least. Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings. It would be an excellent score, that much was true, but Will’s curiosity had been piqued. What was inside that building that magical defenses potent were being employed? How many people had actually made it inside? Was whatever it was guarding still there, and still valuable eight thousand years later? then Will’s heart was pounding with the excitement of testing himself against a new challenge, but he forced himself to sit down cross-legged while he did the boring part thoroughly. Will thought, leaning on his palm as his snakes began digging through the gutters, pulling out loot and delivering them back to the caravan. Attracted by the motion, the zombies clustered around the gutters, but they couldn’t see Will’s Phantom Snakes, and inanimate objects floating away wasn’t quite enough to keep their attention. Will wondered to himself. He truly did enjoy it now, despite everything, and despite having vivid memories of the terrifying dread of near-death. It might be. It was the tantalizing that seemed to be motivating him to go in there, more than simple greed. Will briefly considered destroying the metal nodules on the outside of the building, even going so far as to come up with a plan where he used the zombies as test dummies to trigger the traps. That idea was scrapped. Not because he couldn’t do it, but because the outer layer of defensive nodules with their invisible Nuker Ability were the only thing keeping zombies from flooding in behind him. If he had to explore the basement, a flood of zombies entering the building behind him might complicate things, or even get him killed. Will looped Pinky Snake around his waist and Middle Snake around that of a zombie, lifting it up into the air. Will set the wriggling zombie on the building’s roof. A half-dozen nodules rose out of the floor and twitched, but the zombie didn’t die. Will frowned, squinting. Each nodule’s little black hole at its front seemed to be shattered or broken in one way or another. Will cautiously lowered himself to the rooftop, keeping his eyes open for any hint of movement beyond the twitching of the Nuker Nodules that he’d already seen. The zombie reached out for him, its legs wiggling in midair as it tried to shamble towards Will. But other than that…nothing. Will took his Zombie trap-checker and pushed him ahead of Will until he came to a doorway that led further into the building. It had long-since been cut open by previous generations, and Will felt a tremor of disappointment as he entered behind his decoy. Until he glanced up and saw the sign carved into the stone beam stretching across the hallway. Will’s brows rose as he blinked off the surprise, the disappointment lifting like The Tower’s unnatural sun breaking through the unnatural clouds. Will tossed the zombie a few miles away where it couldn’t make it back before forgetting what it was doing, then he went back inside the building. Will carefully explored each floor with Phantom Eye as he descended the staircase, looking for more seemingly prescient notes. Strangely, there were no more signs. Each floor was nearly identical to the building he’d been in before: Little desks with black-glass boxes on top of them. Will got to the first floor and found another sign. Rather than a note, this one was a simple arrow, painted in some ancient, flaking substance, pointing straight down on a metal box seemingly embedded in the side of the building. Frowning, Will approached, noticing that the metal box had a seam in the center. Will put the blade of his axe in the center and twisted it. The two slabs of metal moved rather easily, strangely light for their size. Will got his fingertips in between the two metal slabs and forced them open, revealing blackness. There was a stone shaft that seemed to descend deep into the bowels of the earth. Will walked down the side of the shaft, Aspect creating stone platforms for him as he descended. Once he was at the bottom, Will found a small hatch in the floor. He glanced in and identified a small room with steel slab doors identical to the ones he’d pried open above. Will dropped himself in and carefully pried open the doors, making sure not to put his whole body in front of the doors. He could easily imagine himself getting hit by another one of those nodules, a big hole vaporized through his chest. Once the doors were open, Will peeked out into the hall beyond. More broken nodules on the ceiling. Doors along a long hall that turned off to the right. The walls were sterile white, as was the floor. The doors lining the hall had strange symbols on them, each with vibrant colors and shapes. Will thought as he crept further into the basement, his heart hammering. Being underground was quite possibly the most hair-raising experience a Climber could experience, because the simple fact that there was only way out made everything more dangerous. The sign was right: Bringing a zombie down here would just add to the number of things that could go wrong. That refreshed the obvious question in Will’s mind. How in the did a know Will had a zombie he was using as a trap-checking ten-foot pole? Will peeked in doors as he snuck through, finding little but more desks and the occasional shattered glass cabinet, anything of value already stolen. When he got to the corner at the end of the hall, Will’s hyper-sensitive eyesight picked up a faint glow coming from beneath the door at the end of the hall. Because he wasn’t stupid, Will checked all the doors on the way by, making sure nothing was waiting to kill him in any of the rooms. Will finally arrived at the final room, finding that the door’s lock had long since been cut out by a razor-sharp blade, allowing the door to swing open freely. Inside the room, Will found something eerily familiar. In the center of the room was a sphere of brightly glowing miasma, about the size of Will’s fist, with a metal altar beneath it and little tubes running beneath that dipped down into the floor. It was all suspiciously similar to the setup in Tek’tut’kanlay’s crypt, albeit only a tiny fraction of the size. Will glanced past the glowing sphere to the wall, eyes widening when he noticed writing above a nearby empty glass shelf. Beneath it: Will’s eyebrows rose again as he inspected his hand in the cold blue light of the sphere in the center of the room. He didn’t see anything wrong with his hand, but that didn’t mean much. Will wasn’t going to blindly cut off his hand because a note on the wall told him he should…but now that it was brought to his attention… It didn’t exactly have the protection of his Stats and Abilities, did it? He’d keep an eye on it. Will walked over to the empty shelf where the notes on the wall were written and inspected it. The shelf seemed to be designed to hold those pale blue spheres. They each had a metal ring identical to the one the blue sphere floated above. Will thought, turning back to the glowing blue orb. Where would there be extras? Why wouldn’t they be on the shelf to start with? Will knelt and ran his fingertips along the floor tiles around the machine. There. He could pick up a nearly-undetectable divot where a sphere had fallen from a height of about three feet onto the floor, marking its departure from the altar above. So unless someone had been here and taken them recently, only one of…whatever the orb was, had been created since the last person to come by. That was a problem, but did Will really care about the next iteration of himself? leaving some for the next guy was basically just assuming he was going to die and the Coil would keep grinding them down to nothing only for some bright-eyed young Deceiver with one hand to take his place. Will thought, Inspecting the sphere. A moment later, the System bounced back with something that made him frown. Will peered at the machine, that didn’t seem to be anything. If he squinted, he could maybe make out a pinprick of light at the base of the machine, but it would probably take over a thousand years before it created another seed. Will’s gaze followed the tube that descended into the floor. Will’s eye twitched as he remembered the undead being vaporized far above them, the black smoke harboring an evil spirit filtering down through a grate. Will hadn’t thought much of it, but what if that had been intentional? What if that grate was to catch and collect that black smoke? Will’s gaze darted back to the tube going directly into the floor. He thought. Will created a Phantom Eye and followed the tube straight down until a glimmer of miasmatic light caught his attention. There was a small room beneath him where all the demon-smoke was pulled in and captured, concentrated high enough that miasmatic light was being created. Even now, a trickle of the black smoke was falling through the grate above. There was a massive paddle-like machine that seemed designed to stir the gunk, refine it and force it up some familiar tubes. Will traced the door in the room below to a staircase that lead to a secret door on this floor in another room that was only marked by an odd lump sticking out of the wall. It was some kind of maintenance room, with heavy iron pipes and strange black tubes, heavy tools that had long since either corroded or stopped working. Most maintenance was just cleaning and patching. Will had intention of going down there in person, and instead used Phantom Eye and his Phantom Snakes to assess the damage. It was mostly just clog. The entire mechanism feeding refined undead up the pipe was covered top to bottom in tar-like black substance that had frozen the paddle in place. Will thought, peering up one of the pipes, which had been shrunk from wrist-thick to nearly a pinhole. It was surprising got through with that level of clog. Will turned the armor on his phantom snake into a pipe-cleaner and began dragging out the muck. Once he had it all in the same place, he would gather it up and transport it somewhere far away, but it didn’t make sense to move it until he dragged all the gunk out of the major areas. Will thought to himself, scraping a long tube of sludge out of the pipe and onto the tar-covered floor beneath it. Will thought, frowning as he felt a vibration through the Miasma around him. He turned his Phantom Eye to scan the room and spotted a humanoid figure rising from the tar-like pool on the floor. It was looking straight up. At Will.