by Ramy Vance
At the bottom of the stairs was a large room that was lit by candles and lanterns. There was a table in the center of the room holding several books and a few unique wands . One was of birch, long and gnarled. Another was deep cherry oak, stout and wide with three holes cut into it. Diana selected one of the wands, a twig-like thing that looked like it could easily be snapped. She grabbed one of the books from the table and thumbed through it for a bit before snapping her fingers and exclaiming softly. “Got it. Your friends will be back to normal in no time.”
Diana waved her wand over Sandy’s head first, then Stew’s. “All is fun with dicks and cum, chocolate and cherry bubble gum, but in the end, this we know is true. Humans must be humans, that’s all they know to do.”
There was a bright flash of red light, and the room filled with the smell of candied popcorn and Ben and Jerry’s Cherry Garcia ice cream.
When the light faded, Stew and Sandy were standing next to each other. Both of them were naked. Suzuki quickly covered his eyes. Stew screamed and covered himself as fast as he could before running into a corner of the room.
Sandy looked up at Diana, folded her arms, and bowed slightly. “Thanks. Ahhh, you got any extra robes?”
Diana scrolled through her HUD, and a pair of robes materialized in her arms. She handed one to Sandy, who threw them on quickly. Sandy took the other to Stew. “We didn’t fuck any Humpa Lumphads,” Sandy called as Stew got dressed. “We just got a body massage.”
“Chocolate is Humpa Lumphad sexual fluid,” Diana explained.
Stew’s face went white. “Are you saying that they covered us in chocolate jizz?”
“Something like that.”
Sandy sat at the table and started to play with the wands. “Kinky. Stew, we just had our first group sex experience. Chocolate bukkake.”
Stew felt his face gingerly. He smiled and nodded, obviously happy with the results. “I think my acne’s a little bit better.”
Diana prodded Stew’s face with her wand. She was looking him over with the care and intensity of a doctor. “Yes, human skin does respond fairly well to Humpa Lumphad fluids. Next time, just take one of these with you.” Diana waved her wand, and a vial of purple liquid appeared in her hand. “Drink it first, and it’ll keep your genetic makeup stable.”
Sandy grabbed the vial and pocketed it. “Thanks. We’ll definitely go back. It was surprisingly cheap.”
“Oh, I know. How do you think the Four Horsemen keep our saintly glow?”
Suzuki cleared his throat and stepped forward. He figured it was a good idea to just get the whole thing over with regardless of how awkward it felt. But then he remembered that asking for help probably wouldn’t be nearly as awkward as having someone reset your DNA after finding out you were covered with Humpa Lumphad love juice. “I know you just did us a solid, but I was wondering if you could help us out with something else too?” Suzuki asked.
Diana sat down at the table in the center of the room, crossed her hands, and leaned over her desk like a college professor. She was obviously interested, which the other people from her party hadn’t seemed to be. “A quest, right?” Diana asked. “Why not just ask José?”
“We tried asking José. You were there.”
“I meant one-on-one. Nines tries to be impressive when he’s around other people, the whole ‘little man’ syndrome—except he’s a fluffy cutie pie, so it’s a thousand times worse.”
“We just need—”
“I know what you need. I heard your sob story. It was actually a pretty good sob story, if I’m honest. I’m sorry José didn’t want to help you guys. Me, on the other hand, I’d love to give you a chance. The only problem is, I’m all out of quests. The Chipmaster has a few, but trust me, you don’t want any of hers, not unless you want to go pull dragon’s teeth.”
Stew eyes flashed with excitement. He pushed to get closer to Diana, his mouth moving before words even came out. “I could totally take a dragon! Where is it?”
Sandy pushed Stew back to restrain his excitement. “No, you can’t. None of us can. So we’re shit out of luck?”
Diana shook her head. “Not quite. José does have a shit-ton of quests. He collects them. You just gotta convince him to give one to you.”
Suzuki shook his head as he folded his arms. “We already tried that. You saw how that went.”
“He was just testing you,” Diana said, putting the book back. “He pulls that shit all the time. He tells people it’s their cross to bear, but he’s really trying to figure out how badly they want it.”
Sandy’s hand shot up as if she were in school. She looked at it sheepishly as if she had no idea how it got there. “Like Buddhists do. My granny told me a story about when she was trying to become a monk. She had to hike hundreds of miles, and when she got to the temple, they told her that she wasn’t going to be accepted, so she left. Then she found out that all the monks had had that said to them when they first arrived. Anyone who got accepted to the temple had to stand outside for almost a month before being let in.”
“Like Fight Club,” Stew exclaimed.
Sandy grabbed Stew’s chin with her hand. “Sure. I mean, if you want to diminish a historical, cultural practice of over a thousand years, yeah. Just like fucking Fight Club.”
Stew avoided Sandy’s eyes as Suzuki burst out laughing. It was always good to see Stew get put in his place, especially by Sandy.
Diana chuckled before gesturing to Sandy. “By the way, you messaged me earlier about checking something out for you. Where is it?”
Sandy pulled up her HUD and the mask they’d found on the last mission appeared on the table. “Yeah, I wanted to see if you’d look at this before I used it.”
Diana grabbed the mask and pulled out a microscope. She thumbed through a book that magically appeared in her hand without bothering to look at the pages. “I’ll take a look at it. In the meantime, you three need to figure out how you’re going to catch José’s attention. Be creative. Unless you want to sit around for a hundred years. Pro tip: don’t forget about Nines. He might be an asshole, but he can still be wooed, and the quickest way to José’s heart is through Nines. Now get going. I’ve got research to do.”
Diana shooed the Mundanes away, and they ascended the stairs. No one looked particularly happy with having to figure out how to catch José’s attention.
When they got to the top of the stairs, Sandy’s eyes nearly popped out of her head as she saw the number of books in the library. “Holy shit! I did not see all of this when I was Humpa Lumphad-ed. I’ll meet you guys back at the Lion later tonight. I’m gonna do some reading, maybe find something to help us.”
“All right,” Suzuki said as he and Stew headed toward the exit. “Good luck.”
Stew and Suzuki left the library, walking in silence as Suzuki tried to figure out what to say. He really wanted to think about what to do to make José help them, but he was exhausted from trying to get Stew and Sandy back to normal. He felt his whole body was made of chicken wire.
“Hey, buddy, you okay?” Stew asked.
“Just freaking out a little bit, that’s all.”
Stew pulled out the vial of purple liquid Diana had given them. “We could get a massage. It’s really fucking relaxing.”
“I swear to God, Stew, I will never understand you.”
“Greatness is hard to understand, my friend. Even I don’t get it half the time.”
Chapter Seven
Later in the day, the Mundanes gathered in the bar of the Red Lion, and Suzuki noted that it was becoming a habit for them to eat together, like a family.
Then again, there was nowhere else to eat unless they wanted to venture to the Last Ale. Suzuki had persuaded Stew to take a raincheck on their Humpa Lumphad man-date. Instead, they had spent the afternoon brainstorming how they were going to attract José’s attention. Suzuki had even gone the route of crowdsourcing the MERCs in the bar about what past recruits had done to get a quest from him.
; That yielded nothing. From what Suzuki had gathered, José didn’t like to waste time with recruits, or most anyone for that matter. He seemed like a man who valued his time. Suzuki could appreciate that.
Stew, on the other hand, had decided that José was to be treated as a deity. When Suzuki asked how to impress him then, Stew just shrugged, “Worship. Build a shire? Sacrifice a goat? How the hell should I know?”
Suzuki wasn’t sure how to worship a fellow MERC. It felt like brown-nosing to him.
So Stew and Suzuki sat at a table, waiting for Sandy to show up. They were cleaning their gear in the meantime.
An assortment of weapons covered the table, most of them Stew’s. Suzuki only had one sword and shield, as he’d been very careful to sell anything that he wasn’t using for extra coin.
Stew, on the other hand, was hoarding as many weapons as he could. Suzuki would have said something earlier if it didn’t seem apparent that Stew meant to use each and every blade that he had acquired for killing. Daggers, short swords, a few battle axes, and a heavy greatsword were covered in myriad kinds of dried blood.
Stew washed a short sword delicately with soap and a rag. “You know what I could go for? A mace. A real mace. None of these little tiny things. Something half the size of my body with a good swing on it. Then maybe something to actually use it on.”
Suzuki buffed a scratch out of his sword. He held it up to the light to check its sharpness. He wasn’t satisfied, so he took out a whetstone and got to work. He never would have thought maintaining his own gear would be one of the most satisfying parts of Middang3ard, but the simple act of cleaning and sharpening made him feel connected to his sword, to his shield.
“Dude, you got to upgrade,” Stew said, handing him a longsword they had gotten on one of the useless missions. This one was similar to Suzuki’s but had a gem on its hilt. When they got it appraised though, they’d discovered that the gem was worthless.
They had found a handful of other swords as loot, but none of them seemed to be worth trashing his first sword for, and Suzuki wondered if there was a way to enchant any of the gear he already had. That would make sense. Most of the veterans had enchanted gear, and it seemed unlikely that everyone just happened to find upper-tier stuff.
But like most of the magical world of Middang3ard, Suzuki was fuzzy on the details.
Stew appraised the menu on the chalkboard hanging on the wall behind him. “Grub’s on me tonight. To say thanks for, you know, making sure that I wasn’t punishing naughty children for the rest of my life.”
“You mean like a krampus? I didn’t know Humpa Lumphads did that?”
“Yeah, didn’t you ever see “Willy Wonka.” The Oompa Loompas … aka the Humpa Lumphads—”
“Adjusted for copyright issues,” Stew added.
“Exactly. Anyway, Humpa Lumphads only come out when a kid fucks up. Then they take the kid away to be processed into candy or something.”
“Yeah, like, uh…Pete, Black Pete, or something. He was the one who punished the kids in the old krampus stories, I think. I’m a little foggy on my Eastern European folklore.”
“Only you would say that like it was a bad thing. So you don’t have anything in that giant nerd brain of yours to figure out how to convince Jesus to help us?”
“He’s not Jesus, you idiot. His name is José. That’s not even kind of like Jesus.”
“They sound pretty close.”
“ ‘Jesus’ is etymologically closer to Joshua. And José is a Latin name used in cultures that often have the name Jesus as well. If he was meant to be named Jesus by his parents, he would have been named Jesus.”
Stew tapped Suzuki’s forehead with his oversized pointer finger. “Does your head ever hurt from being so full of useless shit?”
“Fuck you.”
Stew picked up a dagger and threw it at Suzuki. It hit the wood to the left of Suzuki’s chair. Suzuki didn’t even flinch.
Stew whistled, impressed, reached over, grabbed the knife, and tossed it back on the table. “Damn dawg, you’re getting nerves of steel out there fucking around with spider-babes. But seriously, what do you think we could do to catch not-God’s attention? If you were God, what would you like?”
“A god,” Suzuki corrected. “Even if José was Jesus, he’d probably be a part of a pantheon of gods. Fred’s mentioned the Elder Ones a couple of times. And the elves have their gods too. I wouldn’t be surprised if every race had tons of their own gods.”
“Wait, what? I couldn’t hear you.”
“I was saying—”
Stew lifted his hands, cutting Suzuki off. “I couldn’t hear you over all of the boring shit coming out of your mouth. Why don’t you just ask your familiar if he knows about all these gods and things?”
“Fred said that if he were a god, he’d want all of Middang3ard wiped of infidels and false prophets. So yeah, that’s not helpful.”
Sandy walked up to Stew and Suzuki’s table, balancing three beers on a plate. She slid the plate onto the table, kissed Stew, and grabbed a seat. “What’s not helpful?”
“We still can’t figure out how to get José to pay attention to us,” Suzuki said.
“If he were a hottie, what would you do?” Sandy asked.
“What does José being hot have to do with anything?” Suzuki asked.
Stew dropped the sword he was sharpening. He picked it up quickly and fumbled with it again. His voice cracked when he spoke. He sounded like he was just about to start puberty again. “Yeah, what does it matter if he’s hot?”
Sandy threw her arms up in exasperation. “For fuck's sake, Stew, I don’t like José.”
“I know, I know. You just think he’s hot.”
Sandy pointed at Stew and her eyes narrowed. She looked like she was ready to chop off an orc’s head. “Do not start with me now, Stew. Anyway, if José was a hot chick you wanted to talk to, but she was too busy with her friends and shit for you, what would you do to catch her attention?”
Stew shrugged. “Can’t help you there. That’s unfamiliar territory for me.”
“Stew, you messaged me for almost a month before I talked to you, and I only did that to stop you from annoying me.”
Stew smiled smugly and crossed his arms. “Like I said, unfamiliar territory.”
“I don’t know,” Suzuki said. “I’d probably try to make some big declaration of my feelings, like something that could fit in a decent 80s romance movie.”
“You mean like Sixteen Candles or some shit like that?” Stew said. Sandy nodded appreciatively. “First off, I’m impressed you like Sixteen Candles.”
“I didn’t say I liked it.”
“Sure, you didn’t,” Sandy chuckled. “Secondly, yes. I’d Sixteen Candles it.”
“How?” Stew asked.
Suzuki scratched his chin as he nodded. That wasn’t a bad idea. It beat just waiting around for José to decide that the Mundanes were worth his time. This way, they could show José that they had whatever it took to take care of any quests he might decide to give them.
“We’ve just got to impress him,” Suzuki said. “If we can get him to understand what we’re about, that we’re serious about all of this, then we’ve got a better chance of him helping us.”
“So we’re Sixteen Candling someone who might or might not be Jesus.” Stew shrugged. “Shrine?”
Suzuki shook his head. “No, Nativity Scene. Let’s throw José a birthday party.”
Sandy nodded. “Sounds like the best plan we’ve got right now.”
Suzuki raised his tankard of ale, and the rest of the Mundanes clanked theirs with him. This was the plan. And they were going to find a way to make it work.
The Mundanes walked through the portal from the Red Lion and came out in the middle of a city. They had asked Wendy to send them to the closest one. Suzuki was instantly overwhelmed with the bustle of the city, regretting they hadn’t done a bit more research about the surrounding area.
The streets were crowded w
ith elves, pushed nearly shoulder-to-shoulder, trying to get to wherever they were trying to get to. He could hardly take it all in. It felt as if he had just been dropped in the middle of Times Square.
Horses galloped down cobblestone streets past the Mundanes, drawing carriages filled with elvish noblemen and women wearing ruffled shirts and elegantly-patterned dresses. The clothes of the people walking through the streets were plainer, mostly cotton tunics that hung loosely on their bodies, covered in the dust kicked up from the carriages speeding through the town. Feudalism was alive here.
Suzuki jumped out of the way of a carriage that screeched around the corner. He’d barely missed being trampled by a dozen hooves. “What the fuck is this shit?” Suzuki shouted.
Sandy grabbed Suzuki and Stew’s hands and dragged them out of the middle of the street. She waved away the dust as she hacked up her lungs. “I guess this is what city life is like. Can’t say that I like it much.”
Stew jumped out of the way of a crowd of posh elves who rambled down the street. He shook his hands at them like an old, angry man. “Okay, what the hell are we here for and how fast can we get back home?”
Suzuki pulled out his map and looked through the notes that he had scrolled on it. The map was extremely detailed, pointing out the shops and residential areas of the town. This would be easier to navigate than the last few missions when they had been relying on sketchy maps. “This map is great,” Suzuki finally said. “How did you even manage to set up a little field trip to an elf city?”
Sandy took the map out of Suzuki’s hands and gave it a once over. When she was satisfied, she scanned the map into her HUD. She turned around, trying to find her bearings. “As I said before if you’d been paying attention, this isn’t an elvish city. It’s a refugee city the MERCs built. It’s kind of like a pocket dimension that some upper-level MERCs have access to visit. I promised Diana few favors, and there you go. We can get supplies for the party from here. Or at least some of the supplies. This is the wine stop.”