by Dante King
“As rough as an onyx dragon’s foreskin,” Igor said amiably. “Thank you so very much for asking.”
The scruffy figure seemed suddenly to realize where he was. He was gazing about the spacious hall with a sort of dreamy delight plastered across his face. A grin unfolded slowly from under his bushy lip rug, and he gave a little sigh of admiration.
“This old place is just as full of character, elegance, and menace as the last time that I set foot in it,” Igor said wistfully as he looked around the frat house.
“You’ve been here before?” I asked, surprised.
“But, of course, dear boy,” Igor said. “Tell me, does the bedchamber on the second floor—the one next to the smaller of the two libraries—still have the wonderful pattina of flaked and melted plaster up the wall that is closest to the bed?”
That wasn’t my room, and I had no idea. But before I could answer, Damien chimed in.
“Yeah, man, it sure does,” Damien said, in a bemused voice. “Those are my digs. How the hell did you know that? Did you used to live here or something?”
“Well, I was accustomed to passing out here on occasion, you know,” Igor said, with a Delphic smile. He turned to me. “Oh yes, I spent many a pleasurable evening ensconced around the fire with your parents and our friends. Drinking, talking of future plans, drinking, dreaming, and drinking.”
“What are the marks on the wall?” Damien asked. “Did you used to use that room to cook up some sweet-ass potions or something?”
Igor gave Damien a soulful and meaningful look. “Those marks were made by no potion, Dave,” he said.
“Damien,” Damien corrected Igor.
“Those marks,” Igor continued unabashedly, “were made by the fierce seed of my climax!”
Damien’s jaw dropped open, Nigel winced, and I said, “There’s something I didn’t need to imagine.”
“Yes, boys,” Igor continued, misinterpreting the look of horror on Rick’s big, honest face, “fertility potions or aphrodisiacal drafts are not to be toyed with lightly. Let’s just say that it’s a good thing that the faun was adamant about me pulling out, otherwise the dear sweet doe would have been through that ceiling in a jiffy! Take it from me, think twice before administering a Panty-Dropper Potion to yourself rectally, then pulling the trigger on it.”
A stunned silence followed these words. I looked at Damien and saw disgust, outrage, and alarm all vying for pole position over his features. Like all good frat bros, it was all I could do to stop pointing and laughing at his discomfort.
Igor was looking around the group, as if making sure that his message had sunk in. “Ah,” he said, his gaze flicking from Rick to Nigel, “I see that two of you at least know what I am talking about.”
Rick, Damien, and Nigel studiously avoided one another’s eyes. On the night that we had used a Panty-dropper Potion on Arun and the rest of Frat Douche, the trio had sampled the potion with some fairly saucy and hilarious results.
“Yes, imbibing such things takes more than a little thought,” Igor said sagely. “And, if you want my advice, avoid mixing such things with Lag Powder, Venomflakes, or Nose Marbles. That is, unless you fancy tripping balls for the next nineteen hours and sporting the sort of erection that you could moor a three-masted galleon to.”
“So, you knew this place already, obviously,” I said, hoping to steer the conversation out of these turbulent and jism filled waters. “And you knew my parents?”
“Oh, yes,” Igor said, his face taking on the look of a man taking a pleasant amble down Memory Lane and liking what he saw. “Yes, indeed. I spent much of my time here with your father, Zenidor. This was way back, when we were kids like you. We’d stay up late, ingesting whatever the hell either of us had managed to get our hands on that day—Angel Orbs, Crow Mushies, that sort of thing—and talk about anything and everything. I remember, not long after he married your mother actually, that we’d managed to take possession of some really first-class Goblin Daydream pills one night. We were sitting under the table in your kitchen, diligently building a fort made of crackers, peanut butter, and those plastic bits at the ends of shoelaces, when we got chatting about the merits of genocide…”
I looked at my frat bros who seemed to be hanging on each and every one of Igor’s words. It was always interesting, to all of us, gaining little insights into the lives of the parents that I had never known. I had, until having the revelation told me by Enwyn Emberskull—the smoking hot Admissions Officer of the Mazirian Academy—believed that my parents had been humans killed in a plane crash. However, as it turned out, they had actually been two of the most powerful mages ever to grace the pages of Avalonian history.
“Yes, that age-old conundrum was one of your father’s favorite topics of conversation when we were riding the trippopotamus,” Igor said.
“What age-old conundrum is that?” I asked.
“The question of whether it is acceptable to take one life in the pursuit of saving many,” Igor said as he continued to gaze around the hall and back in time, “and whether, using that logic, it is acceptable to sacrifice many lives in the pursuit of saving the magical world.” He tailed off, then said, “Those were some bloody good pills now that I come to think of them. I truly believed, for quite some time, that I could excrete rainbows.”
“That’s some crazy shit,” Damien muttered, breaking whatever spell had Igor in its grip.
“Hm? Crazy? Of course, it’s crazy. But everyone is crazy when they’re young, you know—or at least they should be. Most people’s mad dreams fizzle out and fade as they age, of course. Though this was not the case for your father or mother…”
“Igor,” Nigel chipped in, “how is it that you are able to recall Justin’s parents? Why are you not affected by the glamor that the Arcane Council cloaked basically all of Avalonia in to erase their history?”
“Forget the Twin Spirits?” Igor said, using the name that I knew my parents’ followers had been apt to use when talking about them. “Ah, that’s easy enough to explain, boys; I’ve been perpetually goosed—that is to say, under one drug-induced glamor or another for decades.”
I pondered on whether this was how Igor’s cousin, Reginald, had managed to escape the Arcane Council’s purge of everything to do with my parents. Then I realized that Headmaster Chaosbane, as cracked as he might appear, would not have been elected Headmaster of the Academy if he wasn’t packing some serious magic of his own.
“At the time that the Arcane Council were doing their thaumaturgical Spring cleaning of history,” Igor went on, “I was sunk deep in the midst of a meditation that relied exclusively on the smoking of Dried Wyvern Feces.”
“Dear gods, what kind of drug is nicknamed Dried Wyvern Feces?” Bradley asked, pulling a face.
Igor looked briefly confused. “Nicknamed?” he asked.
I held up my hands. “All right, fellas, how about we actually escort Igor down to the dungeons so that he can get to work?”
There was some muttered acquiesce at this suggestion.
Igor clapped his hands and looked around with eyes that were, I thought, as clear as they were likely to get. “Yes,” he said, “time waits for no man, and all that jazz. Let’s get these regeneration runes carved and then you gentlemen can get to practising.”
I led the way across the hall, through the nondescript door, and onto a spiral staircase that corkscrewed down into the bowels of the fraternity house. We descended the staircase and continued down the corridor until we reached the iron-studded door that opened into the dungeon proper; the area of the frat house that was designated for training. We were unable to use the space yet as we had no poltergeist to regulate the monsters that came through the portals from the raw magical realm.
“Right, gentlemen,” Igor said, nonchalantly pulling a small leather purse from out of his duster pocket and tapping out a couple of brightly colored pills that were about the same size as a quarter each. He popped them into his mouth and washed them down with a slug
of something from a hip flask that smelled like it could melt your tonsils given half a chance.
“What were those, friend?” Rick asked.
“I’m not entirely sure,” Igor replied calmly, “but I’m sure they’ll help.”
“So, will this take long, Igor?” I asked.
“Not long, no,” the mustachioed Rune Mystic replied, “but I will require all of you to watch my back—and my front and sides, top and bottom, come to think of it.”
“Shotgun not watching his bottom,” Damien said.
“Your loss,” Igor replied seriously. “I’ll have you know that my posterior is highly regarded amongst the Gorillantaur orgy circle.”
“Anyway,” I said, ”regardless of what angles you need covering, you can rest assured that we’ll keep you safe while you work.”
“Splendid,” Igor said.”There’s nothing like being savagely mauled to death to put a crimp in your plans for the evening. Shall we?”
I looked at my four fraternity brothers; two Fire Mages, an Earth Elemental, a Wind Mage and myself: the Creation Mage.
“You know the drill, boys,” I said. “This isn’t your first rodeo. Whatever the hell comes through that portal, you kick ten shades of shit out of it, you hear me?”
The other four nodded grimly. The light of battle was in their eyes, mirroring how I felt myself.
“Well, all right then,” I said.
I turned, booted the door open, and led the way inside.
Chapter Two
The dungeon was still in some disarray from the last fight we had had in here. That had been another unexpected and rather hairy affair against a manticore, which had been brought about, once again, by our lack of poltergeist. There was no corpse in evidence thankfully—it would have been smelling pretty ripe by now—because the manticore had been slain (for the second and final time) in the hall above. However, there was a great mess of wrecked wooden targets, splintered tables, and smashed glass littered about the place. The dedicated potion brewing area of the vast underground space had fared particularly poorly. A smattering of melee weapons—maces, spears, and warhammers—lay strewn across the floor where they had been knocked from their racks on the wall. All in all though, the dungeon looked just how I remembered it: the sort of space that Professor X might have knocked together had he been taking interior decor tips from Merlin and Madame Xanadu.
It took all of twelve seconds for the unchecked and untamed magical forces within the dungeon to react to our presence. As Igor bent to his task and pulled out a long-stemmed Churchwarden pipe, which I took to be his vector, twin portals opened in the air above us.
The violent way in which these portals appeared always made me think that they should be accompanied by some apocalyptic tearing sound, but their sudden emergence was entirely soundless. One moment they weren’t there, the next they were. Briefly, I caught a glimpse of the beautiful chaos that was the swirling, multicolored world of the pure magic realm; the place from which all magic was drawn.
“Here we fucking go,” I said to Bradley, Nigel, Rick, and Damien.
I spared a quick glance at Igor. He was using his long-stemmed pipe to carve the beginnings of intricate designs into the dungeon’s stone floor. Where the mouthpiece of the pipe touched stone, a star-bright light appeared, like the pure blue-white light at the end of a welding electrode.
Then, in the blink of an eye, the portal openings were full of swarming winged creatures. They looked, basically, like obese basketballs, with stubby wings, amber eyes, orange warty skin, and leering mouths.
“Nigel,” I called to the Wind Mage, who was hovering a few feet off the ground to my left, “those are imps, right?”
“Precisely,” the halfling genius called back, squinting through his thick glasses. “Acri Imps to be exact.”
The imps buzzed angrily out of the portals like a swarm of bees that’d eaten all the pies. They divided into smaller groups and hovered over us, looking down and chattering among themselves in their unintelligible language. Their thin tails, topped with what looked like knobs of spiky bone, whipped to and fro behind them, with the same sort of menacing sway that cobras employed when they reared up.
I wasn’t going to waste breath on introducing myself to these heinous things, so I fired a Blazing Bolt at the group nearest me. I had thought of starting off with a Storm Bolt, but why mess about in a situation like this? The objective was to protect Igor and that meant taking this hoard of imps down as efficiently as possible.
The Blazing Bolt, a crackling red sphere of magical energy about the size of a beachball, punched into the group of hovering imps and fragmented into sizzling shards. Lumps of orange imp meat and sulfur-yellow blood rained down as the explosion tore through the ranks of the Acri Imps. Instantly, the pitch of their chattering rose so that the dungeon reverberated with the furious droning.
“And we’re off!” I yelled, exhilaration coursing through me as a bunch of the creatures zoomed down from on high toward me. “Give ‘em hell, boys!”
I took off running, hoping to draw at least a portion of the enemy away from Igor. I knew from Beastiary classes that your average imp, as a general rule, was as dumb as a post, so I was glad to see a group of them sheer away from the rest and start to chase me.
These Acri Imps had stubby wings, which didn’t bestow the monsters with much in the way of speed or agility. As I watched them coming for me, flying low to the ground, I formulated a quick plan of attack. It was simple, and it was bound to be messy. I smiled wolfishly as I imagined how it’d play out.
I sprinted away across the huge open space of the training dungeon, leading my fat flying followers away from Igor. As I boosted off, I cast an eye at my frat bros and saw them scattering, each pursued by a gaggle of imps.
Something whizzed past my right ear and embedded itself in a training mannequin as I ran into a small thicket of the practice dummies. Then another and another of the projectiles flicked past me, thunking into the dummies ahead of me. As I ran past, I saw that the missiles were round and spiked, like the end of a morning star, although they had a definite organic quality to them. Thinking that I had enough of a lead on my quarry to see what the hell it was they were firing at me, I spun about but continued to jog backward.
The twenty or so imps flying after me, slowed in midair and, as one, raised their tails and whipped them forward and through their squat little legs. What I had just taken to be adornments at the end of their whippy tails turned out to be spiny missiles. Without breaking my backward stride, I conjured a Flame Barrier and incinerated the missiles in mid-flight. The imps dodged over and under the barrier and continued chasing me.
I turned and continued leading my band of imps through the mini forest of humanoid-shaped targets that were intended to be used for shooting spells at. As I went, I conjured Arcane Mines and stuck them onto dummies as I ran past them. When I had left a trail of about half a dozen of these deadly little bastards, I magicked a Crystal Magma Bomb into my palm and tossed it over my shoulder.
The magma bomb went off with a sharp ba-dumph. The detonation of this magical device set off the Arcane Mine closest behind me. A lacerating shower of earth and white-hot lightning burst forth, slaying the speediest of the Acri Imps that were on my tail. This explosion also, in turn, set off the mine behind, and this one set off the one behind, and so on. In the blink of an eye, the maze of dummies through which I had just run became a killing floor. Carnage ruled. Imp limbs and heads flew in all directions, propelled on clouds of earth and forked lightning.
Of the band of imps following me, only a solitary pair emerged from out of the destructive haze that I left in my wake. The two imps—ugly little pricks and angry as hornets now—sped toward me with their fangs bared. Just before they were due to smack into me like a pair of flabby dodgeballs, I initiated my Flame Flight spell and soared over them. I twisted and flipped in mid-air when I was about ten feet above them, cut the spell, and let gravity retake its hold.
A
s I fell back to earth, I let loose with a couple of Fireballs—served up extra-hot. The fire spells caught the imps from behind and instantly turned them into a cross between a couple of pieces of popcorn chicken and something that Venom might’ve coughed up after a hearty lunch.
I didn’t wait around to observe my handiwork, but made my way back across the room to where my fraternity brothers were busy making the lives of the rest of the imps a living hell. I would have used my Flame Flight spell to get back into the fighter all the sooner, but I had learned that that particular spell—and more so its upgraded version, Greater Flame Flight—too quickly sapped me of the mana I needed to fight. It was the same with my Metamorphosis spell, the self-incantation that turned me into a Lesser Gemstone Elemental for a limited time. They might be all right when you knew how long a scrap was going to go on for, but I didn’t want to run out of mana before Igor had finished inscribing the regeneration runes.
I arrived back just in time to see Nigel swoop down out of the rafters. The halfling Wind Mage hit a trio of imps, who looked as if they had been making a beeline for the bent back of Igor, with a localized hurricane. The three unfortunate monsters were sent spinning across the room at about Gale Force Twelve, smacked into the far wall, and burst apart like a threesome of ripe bananas hurled by an irate giant.
“Nigel, you bad man!” I yelled as I spun left and avoided a spiny tail missile flung at me by an imp hovering about twenty feet above me.
I retaliated with a Paralyzing Zap, a Storm Magic spell that did exactly what it said on the tin. The spell locked the muscles of the imp as effectively as a Taser. It fell out of the air like a big fat rock and Bradley, who was kitted out in his enhanced Crimson Titan form—a Flame spell that furnished him with plates of thick gelatinous armor, as well as enhanced size and strength—caught it with a perfect punt just before it hit the deck. Such was the force of Bradley’s magically enhanced kick that the imp simply burst apart in a spray of yellow gore.