Threadbare Volume 1

by Andrew Seiple

  “Hey! Something’s coming!” He heard Jarrik call, and sped up, overjoyed to hear the half-orc’s voice.

  “I see it... Threadbare? Is that you?” Celia called. Threadbare stopped and jumped up and down, in joy. They were all right! They were alive!

  “So that’s how you get down into that chasm. I thought there was a way.” Jarrik said. “Hang on, I’m lowering a rope.”

  Threadbare picked his way through the stalagmite field, to the side of the wall which wasn’t a wall at all, but a sheer cliff up to the ledge of a deep chasm, a chasm which he was at the bottom of. He grabbed the rope, gave it a few tugs, and got hauled up.

  And then he was in Celia’s arms, and everything was okay.

  Golden light flared, and she said “Oh!”

  You healed Celia 70 points!

  Your Innocent Embrace skill is now level 7!

  Threadbare rubbed his head, as thirty-five more sanity drained out of him. But what looked to be a bunch of scrapes and bruises and cuts along Celia’s arms were now gone, so that was fine.

  “Right, that’s done then,” Beryl said. “Let’s... ah... ”

  “What?” Celia said, turning to look at the dwarven girl.

  “What the hell is he wearing?”

  Celia put him down, and Threadbare waved to the group, dragon hat flopping on its loose stitches, resplendent in his panty tunic and paws button cape.

  Your Work It Baby skill is now level 2!

  And then there was nothing but laughter, as the exhausted children sat there giggling, deep in the heart of the dungeon.

  CHAPTER 12: CATASTROPHE

  Eventually, the laughter faded. Beryl resumed her resting scowlface. “All right, fun time’s over. Jarrik, do your thing, okay?”

  “On it. Camouflage,” he whispered, and faded, as his skin took on the colors and patterns of the surrounding rocks and darkness. Threadbare could just make out his outline, as he jogged toward the winding tunnel exit that led into darkness, at the end of the chasm.

  There were two more exits out of here, the little bear saw. Both had daylight filtering down into the tunnel. The bigger one had a massive grate set across it, with glowing red runes carved into it. SEALED BY ORDER OF THE CROWN a nearby sign instructed.

  “Jarrik’s going to go see if the boss we just beat has respawned. Well, bosses, I guess,” Celia said, as she brushed dirt and dust from Threadbare.

  “Boss,” Beryl said. “My Ma told me about the Cataphracts. They think and fight as one. Which is why we can’t go back through there again unless—”

  Jarrik faded back into view. He did not look happy. “They’re back.”

  “—fuck a duck we waited too long.” Beryl rubbed her eyes. “I wish you’d been a little earlier Threadbare.”

  Threadbare walked over and gave her a hug. Beryl glared down at him suspiciously, then deigned to rub his head. In some ways the dwarf reminded the little bear of Pulsivar. Lots of noise and swagger, but good to have at your back.

  “Well. Now what?” Celia asked.

  “First things first, get those dumb clothes off of your bear. I can’t look at him without laughing. Second, let me think...”

  “We could always run past the Cataphracts,” Garon suggested.

  Jarrik shook his head. “Naw. They’re set up in a formation that puts most of ’em between us and tha exit. And they’re spread out enough I can’t camo past them and go get help. They’d detect me an’ well, SHUNK.”

  Shunk sounded pretty bad to Threadbare.

  “And even if we get through, there’s tha rest a tha dungeon. Tha other bosses will ’ave respawned. An’ most a tha monsters.”

  The group chewed their lips. The odds were very, very bad.

  “How about the chasm Threadbare came out of? We got rope,” Bak’shaz pointed down into the pit.

  Garon shook his head this time. “We’ve got rope but nothing to attach it to. That grate will fry anything it touches, and the closest tie-off point is in the Cataphract room. And even if we did, those Stalagmites are set really close together. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I haven’t been grinding agility. They’d flat out kill me if I fell on them. And if they’d kill me, sorry, but they’d turn any of the rest of you into gibs.”

  “And there’s no telling what Threadbare went through to get here,” Celia said, stripping off Threadbare’s ‘clothes’. “His sewing kit’s out of all the patches that came with it, it looks like he had to resort to cutting patches from, uh, from... ahem.”

  “What?” Garon asked.

  “Nevermind,” Celia hastily tucked away the frilly remnants of her best set of panties. “Oh hey, he made little packs for himself. How cute!”

  “Smart bear.“ Garon sighed. “Beryl?”

  “Coming up empty. It kills me, Clerics get Divine Transit at level ten. That would solve all of our problems! But I’m one level short, just one friggin’ level!” She pounded her chainmail skirt, with a jingling clash. “If only we had a couple of decent fights, or maybe one big one, I could get there. But there’s no monsters in here. And the Cataphracts are too tough. We burned up all our coins so Garon can’t use his twisted rage blood is gold combo, so there’s no way we’d get the experience without fatalities. They’re just too smart and too tough.”

  Threadbare walked over and tugged on Garon’s leggings, then pointed to the remaining exit.

  “What? No. That goes to a puzzle, but I don’t think we have the components for it.”

  Threadbare started ambling that way. “Oh gods! No, hold on!” Celia said, and gave up sorting through his clothing as she hurried to catch up.

  “Don’t go far!” Beryl yelled.

  “Relax, it’s just a catapult,” Garon said. “Nothing else out there.”

  The cave opened up onto a high ledge, far up the second mountain. It overlooked the final mountain, about five hundred feet away. On an opposite ledge, some sort of large tarp secured to a matching cave entrance flapped in the wind.

  To the side, Threadbare could see a long stone bridge, stretching over to another, larger entrance into the mountain. A pair of Flaming Tygers paced back and forth there, not that they had anything to guard against. Judging by the angle of the bridge, it led to a corridor that ended at the runed grating.

  Sitting on the ledge, pointing toward the opposite cave, was a heavy wooden device. It had a bunch of ropes rolled up on a tightly bound crank, and a wooden arm with something like a huge spoon on the end. However the spoon had no back to it, just a bunch of hooks on its inner rim. It was like a ring on a stick.

  On its side, burned into the wood, was the word RACKET.

  “I’ve seen pictures of these in books,” Celia explained. “Beryl’s a tinker, she knows machines, and she thinks it can throw people across, but it’s broken.” She tapped the ring. “We don’t know how to fix it. It’s probably a shortcut to the Dungeon’s Master, so I don’t know if that would help our situation any even if it was.”

  Threadbare ambled to the edge of the ledge, knocking a pebble with his paw, as he did so. It tumbled off the cliff and fell hundreds of feet, disappearing into fog.

  “Yeah, that’s probably instant death,” Celia said, keeping a careful hold on his arm. “Come on, let’s go back inside.”

  “Oh!“ She said as she got in. The rest of the group was huddled around Threadbare’s packs, sorting through his loot. “Hey, that’s...”

  “Keep your knickers on. The few you’ve got left, anyway. We’re looking for something to help us survive this,” Beryl snapped.

  “Of course, that’s fine. What did he pick up, anyway? I didn’t look too closely.”

  “Well, he got a kick-ass dagger for you to animate, so you’re getting that for now,” Beryl slid it across the ground to her, and Celia picked it up and frowned at it.

  “Status. Oh, wow! Yeah, this will be great for an animus blade.”

  “It improves our chances a bit. Let’s see...” Beryl slid open the scroll, and her eyes went
wide. Her gauntlets shook, rattling the chain mail sleeves coating her arms as she surveyed the paper. “This is a tinkering recipe! Holy fucking shit he found a tinkering recipe!”

  “Really? That’s good?”

  “Those things are really rare,“ Garon explained. “Beryl’s a tinker, and most of the rest of her family are smiths and tinkers. That recipe, whatever it is, is worth a whole lot of money to them.”

  Beryl whooped! The dwarven girl shot to her feet and literally jumped for joy. Maybe. It was hard to tell under the chain mail skirt. “It’s a flying machine!”

  Instantly Jarrik laughed and scooped her into a hug, kissing her passionately. She kissed him back, grabbing his ass as she did so, and still laughing into his mouth.

  Celia turned beet red and looked away, clearing her throat.

  “Get a room,” Bak’shaz whined.

  “Bitch, I’ve got a cave and no reason to keep quiet so don’t tempt me,” Beryl said, popping her mouth off of Jarrik’s. “Okay. If we’re really lucky, let’s see... here... well, shit.”

  “What?” Jarrik said, squinting at the paper.

  “It’s a single seater. And it takes wood and cloth. Lots of wood and cloth.”

  “Well.” Celia said. “We’ve got our clothes. And the wood from the catapult.”

  “And it takes a flight skill to manage.”

  “Um...”

  “Yeah, I didn’t know that was a thing either.”

  “I did,” Garon said. “Mom can shapeshift. She told me if I stuck with shaman I’d learn that skill eventually.”

  “Ah-huh. And how many crashes did she say you’d have when you were starting out?”

  “Let me put it this way. She said the best way to survive and learn the skill is to cast slow regeneration before I tried.”

  “Doesn’t matter,“ Beryl sighed, as she read further down. “It also takes a Mark I Fizznocker engine. This is too high end for me to build, guys, even if I had the parts. Hell, it might be too high end for my Da. Which is a pity, because we’ve been looking for something like this for years.”

  “Won’t the guards just take it like the other magic items?” Celia asked.

  “Nope. It’s nonmagical. Their wizard’s scan won’t detect it. Yeah, technically this belongs to Threadbare since he’s not in the party. We’ll have to do some formal negotiations with you Celia, see if we can buy it from you. This is too valuable to us, no matter how much it’ll cost Da.”

  Celia considered. They’d had a pretty big argument, when she tried to convince the dwarf to help save Threadbare. Technically, Celia’s conviction had been the one to land them in this situation. So... “Then it’s yours for free when we get out of here, no negotiations necessary.” Celia decided.

  Beryl’s jaw dropped. “What? You... you’re just GIVING it to me?”

  “Yes.”

  “But... I...” Beryl stared straight ahead, and for a second Celia thought she’d done something wrong.

  Then Beryl lifted up in her strong arms, and hugged the hell out of her. Celia squeaked, and tried to avoid being grated like cheese against the other girl’s chainmail.

  “Thank you,” Beryl choked out. “We owe you a debt. Know now you’re a friend to clan Wirebeard.”

  “Can she do that?” Garon whispered behind her.

  “Sssh,” Jarrik cautioned.

  Finally, Beryl put her down. “Right. Right, ahem.” She cleared her throat, mopped away something that she stoicly pretended wasn’t a tear, and glanced back to the little pile of loot. “What else do we have?”

  Oblivious to the drama, Bak’shaz had kept sorting through the loot. “A tigerseye gem. Worth some money but no help. Unless you can blood is gold it, bro?”

  “Nah. Only works on coin,” Garon shrugged.

  “Um, we got his cape. Which sized to him when he picked it up. I don’t think we can wear it.”

  “His cape does something?” Beryl asked.

  “Yeah, bullet time. It’s the Paws Time cape because this dungeon is silly.”

  Jarrik’s eyes got wide. He snatched up the little blanket, tried to button it around his wrist. “Nothin’. Damn. Woulda been nice.”

  “Yeah, he’s the only one who can use it, so...” Bak’shaz handed it back to the little bear, who put it back around his neck with a gravitas he hadn’t had before the model job.

  “Bullet time is really that good?”

  “It would let bro here dodge a massive spell,” Bak’shaz hooked a thumb back towards Jarrik. “Or let him stop time, fire a dozen arrows, then start time and the arrows would all hit at once.”

  “Wow.” Celia studied Threadbare, who waved back. “What’s a bullet, anyway?”

  “Beats me,” Jarrik shrugged.

  “The only other thing he’s got in there is these.” Bak’shaz held up the two balled up tangles of intestines.

  “Ick. Why did you even touch those, Threadbare?” Celia made a face.

  Threadbare shrugged. It had seemed like a good idea at the time.

  “Wait, hold on,” Garon said, leaning in. “I found one of those on that Lion Eyes midboss we took out. I left it there because I thought it was just a tanner component—”

  “It is. It’s catgut,” Bak’shaz interrupted.

  “—right, but it looked exactly like these. I think we’re looking at a key item, here. Key items, anyway.”

  “Key items?” Celia blinked.

  “They open up new sections of the dungeon, or you need them to solve puzzles,” Beryl said. “It’s a long shot, but maybe there’s a hidden puzzle around here.”

  Celia stared at her. And behind her eyes, gears turned, and the young animator’s eighty-nine intelligence earned its keep. “Beryl?” She asked, very carefully, “this dungeon is big on puns, right?”

  “Yeah, it’s one of the silly ones. They do stuff like this.”

  “What if that catapult isn’t a racket. What if it’s an unstrung racquet?”

  Celia’s grin shone in her moment of triumph.

  The rest of the group was silent.

  Finally Beryl asked “What’s a racquet, then?”

  *****

  Not far away from the dungeon, the mother sat in a sweltering room and saw the world. Steam filled the room. Steam filled the world, and gusted and eddied, and pooled in Zuula’s vision. Herbs smoldered in their pots, mixing with the hot, wet clouds and soaking into her as the sweat left, breathed in, not just by her lungs but her very pores. And as the steam billowed, the walls of the lodge expanded, fell away, became darkness and stars.

  And Zuula drifted in the darkness, turning in the sheltering heat of the steam, peering down upon the green and white and blue, seeing the patterns that ran through.

  She saw, and she grieved. Ah, that is how it is, she thought not with her mind, but with the soul that was all she was now, for she’d left her brain behind in her other body. Where she was, you didn’t need fleshy eyes to see. Or a brain to think, for that matter.

  Slowly, once she was sure of what she saw, she began the long drift back to her body. Oracles really had it easier, she thought. Gods were oddly small, in the grand scheme of it all. They could throw easy puzzles at their Oracles, symbols and hopes and visions. Dream quests were much more difficult, because the grand sweep of nature not only had no real interest in things that weren’t it, it didn’t bother to adjust its comprehension so that smaller things could understand it. How could the ant comprehend the elephant, or the pebble comprehend the mountain?

  The bottom line was that dream quests did better with natural things, and stuff that disturbed them. Which is why she knew the Oblivion would fall, in five years or twenty-seven. She knew that the wild animals around here would get a population boom soon, and with a sick feeling she thought she knew why that was so.

  But the thing of being a shaman, is that to do so you had to put yourself into nature, but keep a foot back in the world of people. You had to stand in the middle, and nature being what nature was, it got int
o you, grew outward, made you more of a part of it then you would be otherwise.

  Which was why Zuula knew for certain the time of her death. And precisely how many worms would eat her corpse after all was said and done.

  Nude, she left the sweat lodge, trekked back to the house, and dried herself by the fire. Flipping up the loose board beneath the hut, she withdrew her good club, the one she hadn’t turned in to the king’s men when they demanded that her family register all their magic items.

  Then she stared up at the totem mask. It stared back, purring with restrained power, holding all the primal emotions she’d poured into it through the years. Fear, rage, and lust, mostly. Easy stuff to work with. Powerful stuff, when all was said and done.

  Mordecai had thought she was just into rough foreplay. Well she was, but like most things she did, it served a deeper purpose. High wisdom let you do that sort of thing, after all.

  With both hands, she took the mask down, feeling it writhe within her hands, the painted wood becoming more than wood, stretching to her face. Put me on, she heard within her mind. Her own voice, but not a part of her that normally bothered speaking, just doing. Put me on, it whined again, and Zuula shook her head.

  “No just yet,” she sighed, staring out the door of the hut. Her death she’d seen, but others were far, far from decided. “No just yet. Soon...”

  Everyone was pebbles, and the ocean was life. One would sink and be gone for none the wiser, but perhaps others would remain ashore. All she could do was hurl herself into the future, and go out fighting.

  *****

  Twenty minutes later, the children finished stringing the catgut through the hooks around the enormous catapult’s ring.

  “Wait!” Garon said.

  “What?” Celia asked, her throat dry. It had taken about five minutes to explain the concept of badminton racquets and another five to sell them on the notion of, well, this.

  “Just so we’re clear, we’re hurling ourselves across the gap to fight the boss, in hopes that he’s less of a lethal fight than the Cataphracts were, in the hopes that he’ll provide enough experience to level Beryl up so she can cast her dungeon escapey spell.”