by A. J. Markam
As soon as we were clear of the saloon doors, I summoned Balrog and jumped in the saddle. Stig and Alaria climbed on along with me.
“Well,” Alaria started, “that was – ”
“I don’t want to hear it.”
“All I was going to say was, if we did that well against a bunch of hayseed farmers, I can’t wait to see how we fare against a master warlock.”
“I said I didn’t want to hear it,” I growled as we galloped away.
But at least we had the last word – or at least Stig did. As we rode out of town, he stood up on the saddle, turned back towards the inn, and fwap-fwap-fwapped his finger through his other hand.
“Fuckoff!” he yelled at the top of his lungs.
And that was the last that little shanty town heard of the fearful Warlock and his two demonic minions.
8
We were twenty minutes out of town and the sun was setting when Alaria said, “This is it.”
“What is?”
“Orlo’s lair.”
I looked around in surprise. After Saykir and his grand palace of ice, and Odeon’s massive plantation house, I was expecting something a little more…
Well, to be honest, I was expecting something. Anything.
But the only thing around us for miles upon miles was gently rolling grassland.
“Are you seeing something I’m not?” I asked, confused, as I reined in Balrog and we came to a stop.
“You’re forgetting he’s a gnome,” Alaria said as she slipped off the saddle and landed on the ground.
“Shit, that’s right.”
In OtherWorld, gnomes were basically a subterranean race. All of their living quarters were underground, which was why we weren’t seeing anything taller than knee-high grass.
I dismounted Balrog and flicked my hand, and the horse dissolved into a cloud of black smoke. “Where’s the way in?”
“There are several – but I have to find them, first.”
Alaria peered intently at the ground as she walked through the grass. Her black thigh-high boots had to have been stabilized magically, because she was as steady on her stiletto heels as a Dutch girl in wooden clogs.
“You don’t remember the way in?” I asked.
“I didn’t exactly spend a lot of time aboveground. Wait – here’s one.”
I walked over to see what she was pointing at. In the side of a small knoll, half hidden by the grass and the shadows cast by the setting sun, was a cave entrance three feet in diameter.
“Seriously?!” I exclaimed. “Who has a door that small?”
She looked back at me disdainfully. “A gnome.”
“Oh yeah… is this a back door or something?”
“It’s a door. I don’t know if it’s a back door.”
“Well, IS there a back door? I mean, we don’t exactly want to walk in through the front hallway.”
She pointed at the sky, which was orange and pink on one horizon and a deep purple on the other. “Since the sun is setting, and since somebody ruined any chance we had of getting a room for the night – ”
“That wasn’t my fault!”
“ – I suggest we take whatever door we can find rather than rooting around in the dark for hours trying to find another one.”
I glared at her. She just gave me a sweet, mocking smile in return.
“Fine,” I said. “But if we get killed going through the front hall, that’s on your head.”
“Sort of like the gun the bartender was pointing at your head?” she asked in an amused voice.
“That wasn’t – I didn’t – just get in the damn hole!”
As I spoke the words, I realized what was coming out of my mouth, and immediately added with a snicker, “That’s what she said.”
Both Alaria and Stig looked at me like I’d lost my damn mind.
“No I didn’t,” Alaria said.
“She didn’t, boss,” Stig agreed.
“No, it’s a joke. ‘Get in the damn hole’ – ‘That’s what she said…’ get it? Like the hole is a woman’s…”
I trailed off, unwilling to explain EVERYTHING.
I waited for some sign of comprehension, but all I got were blank stares. So I tried again.
“It’s a double entendre – ”
“A what?” Alaria asked.
“It’s French. It means – ”
“What’s French?”
That was a valid question. There was no France in OtherWorld, after all.
“Never mind. It’s a double meaning – we’re talking about the hole in the ground, but when I say ‘That’s what she says,’ it sounds like we’re talking about – ”
And here I did the fwap-fwap-fwap gesture with a finger through an OK sign.
“Hey, that’s my thing!” Stig barked.
“I taught it to you!” I snapped.
“…still mine,” he grumbled.
“Forget it,” I said crossly. “Let’s just – ”
“I think I understand,” Alaria interrupted. “When you said ‘hole’ you meant the hole in the ground, but when you say, ‘That’s what she said,’ you’re implying that ‘hole’ also means a woman’s pussy, and that an imaginary woman is telling her lover to put his erect penis in her vagina.”
Jesus.
“…that’s more or less it, yes.”
Alaria wrinkled up her nose. “That’s a terrible joke.”
“When you have to EXPLAIN it, yeah, it kind of ruins it!”
“That’s what she said,” Stig croaked.
“No, that’s not how that works,” I snapped.
“That’s what she said.”
“NO, that’s not – okay, that actually does kind of work – ”
“That’s what she said.”
“STOP, it’s not funny anymore – ”
“That’s what she said.”
“SHUT UP AND GET IN THE DAMN HOLE!”
“That’s what she said.”
“I ALREADY SAID THAT!”
Alaria butted into our bad comedy routine. “Why don’t we have Stig go in front of us, since he’s shorter? He can scout ahead.”
That was actually a really good idea.
“Get in the hole,” I ordered Stig, “and DON’T SAY ‘THAT’S WHAT SHE SAID.’”
“Mrm,” my imp grumbled, but he parted the grass and waddled inside.
“Well?” I asked.
“It’s dark,” he complained, his voice muffled.
“Use a fireball to see.”
I heard the customary fwoosh of flames firing up –
“But don’t throw it!” I yelled.
“Oh,” Stig’s voice said. There was a pause, followed by, “Too late.”
I grimaced and waited for a horde of angry demons to come charging out –
But nothing happened.
Maybe we had lucked out and found a back door that nobody was monitoring.
I got down on my hands and knees and called into the tunnel, “Stig, I’m coming in.”
“That’s what she said,” the imp’s voice floated back to me.
“THAT’S AN INCORRECT USE OF THE JOKE!” I yelled angrily. “THAT WOULD BE ‘THAT’S WHAT HE SAID’!”
“Maybe we should keep our voices down,” Alaria suggested, completely deadpan, “so as not to alert the person we’re here to kill.”
“Sorry,” I grunted, then said into the tunnel, “I’m entering the – I’m going in the – fuck it, just don’t do anything else stupid.”
“Yes,” Alaria called out, “don’t hog all the stupid to yourself, Stig.”
I glared back at her. “Not helpful.”
“No, just true.”
I muttered under my breath as I went in after Stig.
I only had to crawl about four feet until the tunnel widened to a diameter where I could comfortably stand.
Up ahead, Stig’s fireball was gradually dying out on the rock walls of the tunnel. I could see my imp silhouetted against the flames.
“Do another fireball,” I commanded, “but this time, don’t throw it. And DON’T say ‘That’s what she said’ again, or I’ll send you back to Limbo, got it?”
“Okay, okay,” Stig grumbled.
He held out his hand and a small sphere of flame appeared in his palm. It was just big enough to act like a small torch and cast light all around us.
The cave was nothing special – just a standard-issue OtherWorld tunnel made of rocks and soil. We could see about ten feet by the light of Stig’s fireball, and then everything tapered off into shadows and complete black.
Alaria crawled in after me and stood up. “Did I miss anything?”
“Nope. Do you remember this tunnel?”
“They all look the same. Some are a little better lit, and some have more room, but the general decor is the same.”
“All right, I guess we lucked out and got a back door. Let’s go investigate.”
As we walked through the tunnel, Alaria lit a fireball in her own palm so that we had two sources of light.
We eventually reached a giant room that was 20 feet high, 60 feet wide, and God knows how long, since it quickly disappeared into pitch-black shadows. Unlike the uneven walls of the tunnel, the room was all 90-degree angles. Not only that, but something felt different beneath my feet.
“Stig,” I said as I crouched down, “gimme some light so I can take a look.”
I inspected the floor by the glow of Stig’s fireball. The ground was still made of rock, but it was dotted with holes about one inch in diameter and spaced about three inches apart. That grid pattern stretched across every visible square foot of the floor until darkness swallowed it up.
If the rest of the shadowy room was the same as what I could see, then there were probably thousands of holes in the floor. Maybe even tens of thousands.
“Alaria,” I said uneasily, “give me as much light as you can.”
She summoned a fireball in each hand and cranked them up as bright as they could go.
Sure enough, the same honeycombed pattern of circles covered the walls and ceiling, too.
That wasn’t good.
I got a mental image of vicious wasps emerging by the thousands from their circular hives. Or tongues of flame lighting up the floor like the world’s biggest gas grill.
“Guys,” I said, “watch your step – ”
I’d barely gotten the words out when we heard the first sound: a metallic sssshhh, like highly polished steel surfaces gliding past each other.
What the hell?
A metal pole shot up from the floor just a few feet in front of us and glinted in Stig and Alaria’s firelight. It headed for the ceiling, where the rounded tip entered another hole and locked into place with a solid THUNK.
It was like the world’s tallest stripper pole.
I half expected colored lights to turn on and “Pour Some Sugar On Me” to start blaring from hidden loudspeakers.
Hey fellas, please welcome Brandi to the main stage! This is the first song of a two-for-one special, gentlemen, and remember – tip your dancers well!
Suddenly a chorus of metallic shhhhhh sounds erupted all around us, and rods began popping out of the walls, floor, and ceiling.
That’s when I realized we were in trouble.
“Guys – RUN!”
I sprinted for the other end of the room, dodging and ducking the poles shooting out from every side. I felt like a football player running for a 98-yard touchdown as a thousand thin, metal opponents tried to take me down.
Stig was way better at it than me. He was smaller and faster, and could scamper between the spaces between the pipes.
Alaria decided to take to the air. Unfortunately, her large wingspan made her more of a target. Within seconds she was boxed in ten feet above the ground.
As soon as I saw her trapped, I became terrified that the next wave of rods would tear right through her. I fired off a Darkbolt at the metal beams, but my magic did absolutely nothing to affect them.
I turned back to save her, and that’s what sealed my fate.
Rods slid between my arms and torso, behind my back and in front of my stomach, under my chin and just over the top of my head.
I was pinned inside a puzzle box of stripper poles.
And then, once I could no longer move, I watched in horror as the rounded tip of a single rod headed straight for my left eye. I was sure it was going to blast through my skull like an ice pick through an eggshell.
I closed my eyes and grimaced in pained anticipation –
When all the sliding sounds in the room suddenly ceased.
I opened one eye hesitantly, and saw that the metal pole had stopped just inches away from my eyeball.
It took me a second to figure out what was going on. I had been expecting a deathtrap, so I had never even considered the possibility that it might just be a plain old regular trap.
“Are you guys okay?” I called out.
“I’m stuck ten feet above the floor with a bunch of giant poles poking into me from all sides,” Alaria said. “I wouldn’t call that ‘okay.’”
I couldn’t resist. “I thought you liked giant poles poking into you from all sides.”
“Really? Jokes? Now?” she said indignantly.
“You’re not hurt, are you?”
“No…”
“Stig, what about you?”
“Trapped,” the little imp croaked.
“But not hurt?”
“No.”
“Alaria, was this thing here when you were Orlo’s slave?”
“You think I would deliberately lead us into a trap?” she asked angrily.
“No,” I said patiently, “I’m hoping you know how to get us out of it.”
“Oh,” she said, chastened. “No, I’ve never seen anything like this before.”
“Of course you wouldn’t,” a nasal voice rang out through the room, “because I just invented it last year!”
I couldn’t place the voice, but it sounded incredibly familiar. It belonged to a man, but it was whiny and on the higher-pitched side. And it was stupendously arrogant.
Was it somebody I had run across in the game before? Maybe in the dungeon outside Exardus?
No… even though I couldn’t exactly place it, the voice felt like an echo from the recesses of childhood memories…
Overhead lights turned on, and the previously dark room was revealed in all its glory. Thousands of gleaming rods jutted from every angle – up, down, and sideways.
I had a roommate back in college who was majoring in computer science. One of his hobbies was collecting old screensavers from the last forty years and running them on an emulator on his desktop. There was one where a bunch of colored pipes snaked their way across the screen, twisting and turning so much that they would’ve given Mario and Luigi nightmares.
That’s exactly what this room looked like – that old screensaver. Except the ‘pipes’ were rods, and they were made of gleaming steel instead of red, yellow, green, and blue.
The metallic sliding sound started again, and the poles began to reverse and slide back into their holes. Not all of them, mind you. The ones that had pinned me so neatly in place stayed where they were, but hundreds of others retracted, leaving vast open spaces.
I heard the click click click of high heels on stone. For a second I wondered how Alaria had gotten free, but then I looked up and saw that my succubus was still trapped in her own prison of gleaming metal Pick-up Sticks.
The footsteps circled around me, and I found myself looking at a gnome and a succubus. That was where the clicking sound had come from – her high heels.
The succubus wasn’t quite as beautiful as Alaria, but she was still plenty fucking gorgeous. She reminded me of Matthew Broderick’s girlfriend Sloane in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off – that is, if Sloane had plum-colored skin, bat wings, horns and a tail, and had worn a black leather corset and little else. The diamond-studded choker around her neck was pretty snazzy, though.
The gnome only came up to her knees. He was a homely little bugger, with a fleshy face and a huge honker of a nose. Unlike what most people picture when you say ‘gnome’ – ceramic figurines in gardens with conical hats and shaggy white beards – the OtherWorld variety was basically just a shorter, pudgier dwarf. But unlike dwarves, most gnomes lacked facial hair of any kind.
This one definitely fell into the clean-shaven category, and also looked like a prospective candidate for the Hair Club for Men. A fringe of brown hair curled around his otherwise bald head, and he peered up at me with a smug, self-satisfied smile. He wore black clothes and a black cape, sort of like a hopelessly uncool version of Robert the QC Warlock.
He might not have been cool, but he was terrifyingly powerful: Level 90.
Fuck me…
“Welcome to my lair!” the gnome grinned. “I am Orlo, although I suppose you already know that, seeing as you are in the company of my former succubus!”
Wait – NOW I recognize that voice!
As a kid I must’ve watched The Princess Bride a dozen times. I was betting the game designers had too, because this guy was a dead ringer for Vizzini. You know, the short bald guy who says, “Inconceivable!”
Unlike Hark Silo – the craptastic parody of Han Solo I’d met in Kvartos – Orlo was a perfect recreation of the Princess Bride character, just shrunk down to a foot-and-a-half tall. I guess he was less recognizable than Harrison Ford, so the game designers hadn’t bothered altering his appearance. Whatever the actor’s name was, I wondered if he was getting any royalties for the use of his likeness.
And his annoyingly! peppy! voice!
“In fact,” the gnome continued, “I have to thank you for intruding upon my domain! Otherwise I would have never had the opportunity to fully test my invention. I see it works perfectly, just as I knew it would!”
I frowned. “Wouldn’t it have been easier to put up a wall of bars at both ends of the room to trap us, rather than shooting them off at random? That way you wouldn’t waste as much – ”
“Oh ho!” the gnome chuckled as he turned to his succubus. “Listen to the master trap-builder, Soraiya!”
That must be her name – Suh-RY-uh.
Other than her beauty, Soraiya’s most noticeable quality was how silent and stone-faced she was.
“I don’t believe you ever met your replacement, Alaria!” Orlo said chipperly. “I must say, she’s far better than you in oh so many ways.”