by Ryan Rimmel
“Sorry, that’s a skill I never learned,” I said and started fiddling with the bat again. Taking my knife, I began to peel off a few stray bits of material.
“So, even though you are a Remort, you didn’t learn Disguise?” she asked.
“No,” I answered distractedly. In my mind, I heard Shart scream, “Idiot!” Instantly, I knew I’d fucked up. She had very good timing. Julia’s smile widened.
“So, you are a Remort,” she said excitedly and with confidence. “I knew it! You have to help me!”
I frowned, standing up and walking to the other side of the cave. I could claim I misspoke, but Julia probably had the Sense Motive skill. She might very well see through my lie. She had the kind of face that made you not want to lie to her. Mainly because, if she caught you, there would be consequences. I decided to stick with the truth, for now. “I don’t have to do anything. I have my mission.”
“My mission is more important,” she argued, looking at the opening to the cave for a long moment. I was about to reply, but she continued. “I think the Dark Overlord might have awakened.”
The Dark Overlord sleeps in his Tomb of Shadow.
Darkness wreathed a smiling man whose body spoke of endless misery.
A flash of golden hair, descending into nothingness.
I shook my head as Shart screamed, “Don’t tell her what you know about the Dark Overlord, you nitwit! She’s just guessing! A few of the signs are there, but she’d need a major divination artifact to figure it out.”
I wasn’t going to tell her about the Dark Overlord, AKA Charles, AKA Grebthar, even without a warning from Shart. That was something dumb that Old Jim would do, not O’Really. He would keep this stuff close to his chest. When O’Really was ready to spring, the Dark Overlord would have to be wary.
She watched the expressions play out on my face for a long moment. “You are the first person who hasn’t instantly denounced me for my stupid notions.”
“Well, so what? Who cares if the Dark Overlord is awake?” I finally responded.
“So what? The Dark Overlord is going to destroy the world,” exclaimed Julia. “He’s going to raise his minions and kill everyone!”
“Not if I kill him first,” I muttered.
Julia heard. “You are just going to kill the Dark Overlord? Yeah, right! I don’t care if you are a Remort! If the Dark Overlord is back, we need to find Grebthar.”
“Grebthar isn’t going to help us,” I said.
She rolled her eyes. “I don’t need to hear that again. If evil rises, then Grebthar will rise to fight it,” she said. I heard her add more quietly, “And if not, I have a contingency plan.”
“Maybe you should stop believing in old stories,” I said.
Julia glared at me. I needed to remember that Grebthar had not only spawned a religion, but that it was the main religion on the planet. He was a holy figure, right up there with any sacred entity you’d care to think of, and I was challenging that religion’s core beliefs. Only a handful of people knew the terrible truth. I could almost see Julia counting to ten in her head, before she fixed her eyes back onto me.
“If you honestly think you can kill the Dark Overlord, I happen to know someone who could help you,” she responded dryly.
“Who could possibly do that?” I asked, intrigued. I wasn’t aware of anyone, aside from Grebthar, that could take on the Dark Overlord. I was curious what half-baked idea this princess had to save the world from the Dark Overlord.
“I have a mission,” she said haughtily. “I am going to summon an Elder Demon!”
Chapter 11 - The Perfect Plan
“I don’t see how this is a problem,” I told Shart. “I’ll just convince her to summon you instead of your partner. Boom, problem solved!”
“My partner is on summoning cooldown, so that won’t be much of a problem,” grumbled Shart. “Your plan is stupid, and there is a high chance something terrible will go wrong.”
At least I had a plan. Julia shut right the hell up once she saw the calculating look in my eye. It was my firm belief that as soon as you sell someone something, the best strategy is often just to shut up. Julia followed a similar mindset, unfortunately. That meant that I didn’t know what her exact plan was to summon an Elder Demon, but she was confident she could pull it off. Shart was also confident she could summon him back to the real world if she could get to a Summoning Circle.
Real world.
Ordinal was still weird, but I’d gotten over it. I think.
“Make sure she does it right,” ordered Shart.
“What do you mean?” I asked. “I thought you said you were sure she could do it!”
“The ritual for summoning me is a bit complicated, and I’m only able to respond every 100 years,” stated Shart. “If she screws it up, I’m going to be stuck in Limbo for a while.”
“Then, we are just going to have to make sure she doesn’t screw up, aren’t we?” I responded.
The next morning, we got up early. Julia’s spells had ended sometime in the night, and she hadn’t bothered to wake up and reset them. It had been bitterly cold overnight, and she was wrapped up in every fur she had taken from the lodge. I’d gotten by on an Endure Elements spell and by settling on simply being uncomfortable. Shart had assured me that no adventurers were in the area, aside from the two of us, so I’d been reasonably confident that we were safe.
“How do you know adventurers aren’t sneaking up on us?” I asked. Shart’s detection powers from Limbo were still kind of nebulous.
“Remember when I said that if the
“Yes,” I replied. I understood that. Some skills did not report either successes or failures when used against other skills. If someone successfully snuck by you, you didn’t get a Perception failed check popping up in your menus. If the
“Well, this is why,” said Shart. “I’m checking the
“You should use that more often,” I said. That sounded like useful information to always have on hand.
“Hardly, Dum Dum,” replied the demon. “The only reason I can manage it now is that I’m in Limbo. I have different access to my console here. I can make some checks that I can’t normally make when I’m with you on Ordinal. Also, if you were moving around, I would miss something. Mostly, I can’t see much of anything, though. Like, I know there are some bears in the nearby forest. That’s about it for lethal predators.”
“But you can’t give me a direction or anything?” I guessed.
“Nope, I don’t have any idea where the bears are in relation to you. I can just see that there are a few of them near you,” replied Shart.
“So, you are checking the area I’m in, but not me specifically?” I asked.
“The dum dum gets a cookie,” stated Shart. “Well done!”
I glanced around. The cave we had slept in was pretty shallow, but the area we were in seemed like prime bear country. There weren’t any bear droppings in this cave, though, and I didn’t recall seeing any bear tracks while we were outside.
Because the snow-covered them up, dumbass.
Well, we made it through the night without becoming bear chow, so there was no sense worrying about it. That left me with one more thing to do, now that it was light out. I activated my Administration skill and reached out to Windfall. I’d tried it before, of course, but the Administration skill only worked in a safe area. The lodge had not be
en deemed safe by the skill. The secondary issue with communicating with the Town Hall was occupancy. I was pretty sure the building was typically unoccupied in the middle of the night, leaving me no one to communicate with.
I went straight to Mar’s office, which was surprisingly empty. I was unused to him not being there in daylight hours. I flipped to my office, which I seldom used anymore. Based on the boxes of paper, stacks of velociraptor flags, and hat racks galore, I assumed someone was using it for storage. On a lark, I switched over to the main podium room and found it full to the brim with screaming people.
I’d seen the main room with people in it before. It was a broad hall with multiple rows of benches running across the room. The town’s podium, the very place I stood when I had claimed the town, was front and center. The room was only ever used for scarce town meetings, of which I usually avoided. They were boring as hell, so I left Mar to run them. From what I could tell from my clerk’s reports, the sparsely attended meetings always seemed to go off without a hitch. This time, though, the room was full of townsfolk. Mar and Blots stood at the podium.
“Jim’s gone,” stated a voice, “And at the worst possible time!”
There were calls of ‘Here, here,” from many other voices.
“Jim was thrown through a Demon Door. He will return to us soon,” responded Mar, visibly sweating.
“If he could have returned, he would have done so yesterday,” came another voice. I recognized this one. It was OttoSherman, verging on panic.
“No one has Remorted in ages! No one knows the process anymore,” exclaimed Blots.
“I want Jim back as much as anyone else, but that dungeon practically destroyed our entire crop of adventurers,” stated OttoSherman, his voice rising as he spoke. “Sir Dalton and SueLeeta are gone! We all know about Fenris! Jarra is dead, and Glorious Robert won’t leave his new ship.”
“We need a new mayor,” yelled someone else.
“What about Zorlando?” called another.
Suddenly, a figure stood, his cape billowing around him. The man took a moment to reach up and straighten his mustache, nodding to the woman seated to his right. “I, Zorlando, will remain, but not as your mayor,” fired back his loud, clear voice. Zorlando strolled into the middle of the room. His angry eyes found several targets as he paraded around. Zorlando was laying it on with his swagger, daring anyone to come at him. His walk was more purposeful, more mature than I had ever seen it before. “I know what I saw with my own eyes. Jim WILL be back. I can sense him now, trying to return to us at all possible speed!”
“Thanks, Zorlando,” I said gratefully.
“You are welcome, Jim,” replied the former Mercenary. There was a gasp, because, of course, there was. There was also a lot of frantic murmuring. Apparently, me using the Remote Administration skill in the main hall caused a ‘holographic’ representation of me to appear before the podium. I could even look around the room and see everyone. It was as close to physically being there as it could be.
“How did I miss that?” grumbled Shart, followed by a storm of typing on his console.
Mar slumped down in that instant, and an ugly couch arose in the back. I assumed the sofa to be a gigantic animal carcass or a dead dog, but it turned out to be a War Badger. Badgelor rushed to the podium. “Where the feck are you, Jim?”
“Falcon, near Angwin,” I replied.
“I know where Falcon is!” exclaimed Badgelor. He turned and expanded into his Ultimate Form, before rushing out of the room. In case you were wondering, his Ultimate Form did not fit through the door without causing a need for considerable repair work.
“Great, you found Badgelor,” said Shart sardonically. “Hurray. Isn’t that grand?”
“Jim, things have gone poorly since you went through the Demon Door. We are under attack,” stated Zorlando.
“They are attacking the Western Gate Fortress?” I asked. The might of the armies of HarCharles and TimSimons must have been fighting just outside our walls.
“No, there were more trolls. They are attacking us from the east. I am the only adventurer here. While I am doing my very best, the enemy is quite tenacious,” answered Zorlando.
“When will you be back?” asked Mar.
“I don’t know. I’m going as fast as I can,” I replied, explaining the situation as quickly as possible.
By the time I’d finished, the townsfolk seemed reasonably placated. I had learned that the trolls were occupying the Eastern Gate Fortress and making strikes into Windfall Valley. Zorlando had been using the Dashing Dandies to oppose them directly, but it had been slow going. Trolls were fast on their feet and could take a lot of damage. That meant their usual tactic was to rush in, smash something, and pull back without suffering severe casualties. Right now, only the strength of the Dashing Dandies was keeping Windfall safe.
I wanted to ask where SueLeeta and Sir Dalton had gone, but that seemed like a poor question to ask in the middle of the town meeting.
Digging through the building menus, I found something interesting. Windfall Valley was broken up into four provinces. Windfall was in the western province; my control usually stopped there. Now, I had an option to build in the southeastern province.
“Am I to understand you are attempting to claim the adjacent province for Windfall?” I asked Zorlando.
He nodded. “It seemed to be the best strategy. We have defensive advantages when fighting on home territory.” I considered that. The trolls were occupying that chunk of land, but they hadn’t tried to take control of it. It was possible that they couldn’t take control of any territory. I double-checked my maps. Zorlando had personally claimed the southeastern territory for Windfall.
If someone affiliated with the town claimed a province, then I, as mayor, gained building privileges in the territory. Since the province was contested, those options were limited. Glancing through them, I could build a few basic resource extraction camps. Then I found military camp and realized what Zorlando was shooting for.
“Should I be making you some sort of camp in the adjacent territory?” I asked, checking my build menus.
“I was hoping you would ask that,” stated Zorlando. He proceeded to give a long, rambling speech about his many accomplishments while fighting the trolls. His oration included his many trials and tribulations while returning his poor, wounded men back to the Barracks for healing.
Searching through the build menu, I found an Outpost and an Advanced Camp. Scrolling through both, I learned that the Outpost was for exploring a territory, while an Advanced Camp was for exploiting the area. Selecting Advanced Camp, I found that it had several add-ons that I could use to expand the structure. I chose a palisade and a lookout tower before selecting ‘build’.
“Strange, it didn’t ask me for any resources,” I whispered to Shart.
“It won’t. Advanced Camps are simple to build. The
“Excellent!” exclaimed Zorlando. “I shall have it built without delay. You have my word!”
I felt like I had accomplished something. In my absence, the town had continued leveling up. Many of the townspeople had hit Journeyman and beyond with their skills. The Wind’s Saw was running at full capacity, finally, since CarpenterJohn had advanced his Carpentry skill. HankAlvin had further increased his Armor Smithing skill and was cranking out much better, flashier armor for the Dashing Dandies. Had it just been trolls that we were dealing with, Windfall would have been just fine.
Of course, it wasn’t just the trolls, and there were still things the town couldn’t manage.
A haggard woman ran into the main hall, which had been steadily clearing out as Zorlando gave his rambling report to me. Her eyes locked onto mine. In a furious scream, she shrieked, “What did you do
to my husband?”
“Dum Dum, hide. It’s a banshee!” warned Shart.
AvaSophia charged the podium. Zorlando stepped back, allowing her to walk right over to my hologram. She went to hit me, swinging her hand right through my face. “He’s broken!” she cried out as her hand missed. “You broke my Fenris!”
“Oh, never mind. It’s just her,” Shart sighed. His typing resumed.
I didn’t know what to say to AvaSophia. She was sobbing now. Ashe ran up next to her. She looked up at me with piteous eyes. I’m sorry. She heard you were here.”
“How bad is he?” I asked dumbly.
“Compound spinal fracture,” said Ashe. “Not to mention the stuff that was ground into powder. AvaSophia is positive that Jarra could have helped him, but I don’t think she could have. I know I can’t. SueLeeta went with Sir Dalton to find a healer who can fix something like this, but it is going to take a massively high-level healer. We are talking about one with highly specialized skills.”
“And he’s not doing so good,” whispered Zorlando, pained by the admission.
“I’ll… do something,” I said numbly. Helping the Woodsman was not going to aid me in killing the Dark Overlord, but Fenris was my friend. I had to do something for him, didn’t I? Besides, if I fixed Fenris, then he could help me kill Charles.
“See that you do,” said Zorlando quietly. “And Jim… hurry.”
Zorlando’s hand moved over the podium. Suddenly, I was back in my own body. I had suffered some serious wounds before, but it sounded like the Dark Overlord had destroyed Fenris’ spine when he hit him. I knew lost body parts could be regenerated, but Ordinal did have permanent injuries, too. I couldn’t cut off Fenris’ head and regenerate the rest of his body.
Looking over at Julia, I saw her quietly watching me. As soon as she saw me watching her back, she readjusted herself, turning her gaze to the ceiling.
“Julia, you are a Zealot. Are you any good at healing?” I asked.
“Decent, I suppose,” she replied, gesturing toward her collar. “At the moment, I’m kind of restricted. Why, do you have a boo-boo?”