Homebrew (Metagamer Chronicles Book 1)

by Xavier P. Hunter

  “The answer is nine,” the priestess said.

  Zeeto frowned. “That doesn’t make any sense. Why would there be sixteen celestial realms if there are only twelve gods?”

  “Twelve gods in your people’s pantheon,” Braeleigh said. “There are other religions out there. Get woke.”

  Beldrak twisted the dials to divide and plus, respectively.

  Gary smirked. For all their disparate backgrounds in-game, they were all math dorks to some degree. The seminary graduate, the meathead holy warrior, and the trail guide shouldn’t have been able to split a bar tab without pencil and paper. Their rogue shouldn’t have been an actuary or anything, but the ability to compound interest on protection money should have made him the only one with a working knowledge of basic math.

  But as players, they averaged more than one college degree per person.

  When the next door opened, there was no discussion of heading back. They all tromped up the next set of stairs.

  This chamber was like the others. Its statue was of a wolf, fangs bared. Caspian whimpered and hid behind Braeleigh.

  “It’s OK, little guy,” Braeleigh said with a reassuring pat. “He’s just stone. Can’t hurt you. Promise.”

  Zeeto cleared his throat. “Those elven scribbles over the door aren’t going to read themselves.”

  “Right. Sorry.” Braeleigh proceeded to explain the next puzzle.

  TORTOISE TOES

  7 3 2 6 2

  “Woah,” Zeeto said. “That’s a lot of math to get some scaly-ass boot-fillers.”

  “Hath not the tortoise flippers where feet wouldst find a turtle?” Beldrak asked.

  “Other way around,” Braeleigh said. “Turtles are the swimmy ones.”

  “Who cares? How many toes do they have?” Sira said.

  Braeleigh shrugged. “It can vary by species.”

  “Lame,” Zeeto singsonged. “Puzzle with no right answer. Let’s call it a night, crack these statues loose, and sell them back in Durrotek for money to hire a curse-breaker.”

  Sira reached up and tried turning one of the dials. Braeleigh slapped her hand.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” Braeleigh demanded.

  “Solving the puzzle by brute force,” Sira said. “There are four answers on each dial and four dials. That’s only two hundred fifty-six combinations. Plus, I think it’s safe to assume they’re mostly not multiplication since turtles don’t have anything close to two hundred fifty-two toes.”

  Zeeto held up a finger on each hand. “Yeah. You do that. The rest of us are going to go back and try the other direction. Right now is the right time for the right side. Right?”

  Sira started in on the dials, but Braeleigh slapped her hand away again. “Stop it! That’s not how this is supposed to go. We’re here to prove ourselves worthy.”

  “Slap my hand one more time, and I’ll ask for a little divine guidance on worthiness,” Sira warned.

  Zeeto whispered an aside to Gary. “I so wish there was such a thing as popcorn right now.”

  Gary could hardly believe his ears. “Marty?”

  Zeeto’s sidelong, conspiratorial glance turned perplexed. “Huh? What’s ‘Marty’ mean? He some guy who knows what popcorn might be?”

  Shit. Gary had offhandedly mentioned the spectator-friendly snack casually over dinner one night and forgotten.

  “Never mind.”

  “If I want to spend my time solving this puzzle with sore wrist muscles and boredom, that’s my business,” Sira said.

  “We can’t risk the temple deciding we’ve cheated it,” Braeleigh countered.

  “How about we all go back to the first room together,” Gary suggested. “If we get stuck on that side, too, we can try Sira’s way.”

  “’Twould be best to remain together,” Beldrak said. “Neither trap nor fell beast hath trod our path hitherto, but let vigilance be our byword.”

  “Loot,” Zeeto said. “Better byword. This place has been a bust so far. As least the dwarves put stuff behind their puzzles. If we don’t find something worth stuffing in our pockets I’m seriously going to consider hoisting these damn statues out of here.”

  “I’m not helping you carry them,” Sira promised. The others nodded their agreement with the sentiment.

  “Fine,” Zeeto said in a huff. “Let’s just get on with this.”

  Back to the foyer and the unicorn statue they trekked. At the right side door to the room, Braeleigh relayed the riddle overhead.

  UNICORN HOOVES

  7 3

  Zeeto glanced over his shoulder, pointed one by one at the statue’s feet, and pronounced, “Minus sign. Man, this one was dumb.”

  Sira locked in the symbol, and the door opened. “You want hard, or you want loot? Because until we get to the heart of this temple, I doubt we’re getting much of anything.”

  Stairs led upward on this side as well. Zeeto took the lead with an air of impatience, stomping his tiny feet on each marble step. “Oh, look. A fox.”

  The fox statue was unremarkable compared to the more majestic or fantastical creatures depicted in the other rooms. It was also larger than life, scaled up to fill the room in much the way that the wolf or eagle had.

  The halfling snapped his fingers. “Translate, bitch!”

  Sira slugged him, sending the halfling sprawling.

  “Thanks,” Braeleigh said. “Saved me the trouble.”

  “Watch that mouth if you like your innards on the inside,” Sira warned. “Because I’m the only one here who can put them back if something tries eating you alive again.”

  “Got it,” Zeeto replied as he gathered himself from the floor.

  Without further snide commentary, Braeleigh read off the next puzzle.

  SCHOOLS OF MAGIC

  7 6 3 2

  Sira folded her arms. “Well, we’re up for brute force either way. I suppose this one only has three dials to align, so we might as well try 64 combinations instead of 256.”

  “Schools of magic where?” Zeeto mused aloud. “Elven schools? Worldwide? Leigh, is this something elves are supposed to know? You just said your mom was a wizard.”

  “I was little. She didn’t talk work.”

  Gary couldn’t take it anymore. Had Zane not gone off the reservation, Aster would be here to answer a basic question about the Path of Arcana. Instead, it fell to him. “A school is a discipline. Same as ballads or folk songs are sub-categories of music, magic is broken into eight schools—at least, according to the old scholars of Palo Alto.” He hastily amended the last.

  Zeeto huffed a sigh. “Good a guess as any. How can you make eight out of that mess?”

  “Plus, plus, divide,” Sira said, already working to enter the combination. “It presupposes that elven mathematics ignores the conventional order of operations, but it’s the only way the result can be eight.”

  Gary’s cheeks warmed. Math wasn’t his deal. He could min-max with the best of them—well, maybe not the best—but he wasn’t the grind-it-out, Sorcerers-and-Spreadsheets kind of player. In his blunder in designing the puzzle, he may have doomed the elven people to a reputation for mathematical incompetence.

  The solution worked, of course. It wasn’t that elves had their own mathematical stylings. This was just Gary’s screw up in action.

  The door slid open silently, and Gary hung back at the rear of the group as they ascended to the next room.

  “Okie dokie,” Braeleigh said when she was first to the next chamber. “We’ve got a tortoise statue.”

  “Count toes!” Zeeto shouted.

  They all scrambled to surround the statue—all but Gary, at least. He didn’t know a damn thing about tortoises aside from them being land turtles that lived a crazy long time and that some were great at kung fu. He’d looked up a reasonable number of toes on Wikipedia. The sculpting was all fill-in-the-blanks world-building by Katie’s French-speaking elves.

  “Ten,” Sira stated firmly.

  Beldrak nodded. “My co
unt doth agree with thine.”

  “Not it!” Zeeto said, tapping a finger to the side of his nose.

  Sira yanked the hand away. “We’re all going back.”

  “Awwwwww.”

  “Want to try this riddle first?” Braeleigh asked, indicating the inscription above the tortoise-room door.

  ONE MOON CYCLE

  7 3 6 1 2 10

  Zeeto snickered. “I’ll leave this one to the—” but he stopped when Gary shot him a warning glare. “To the lunar expert, our resident elf.”

  “Twenty-nine,” Braeleigh said, ruffling Caspian’s neck. “This one likes howling. Hard to miss when there’s a full one.”

  Beldrak tapped a finger to his lips. “So simple…” He wandered over and turned all the randomly set dials to pluses. The door slid open.

  Up the next flight of stairs, they found a room with a bear statue and an inscription that Braeleigh translated as:

  EAGLE FEATHERS

  10 12

  “Oh, the ever-loving…” Zeeto muttered. “We’ve got to go all the way back to the eagle now?”

  Sira marched over, set the dial to multiply, and the door opened. “Really. Do you even imagine it’s possible for an eagle to have negative two feathers? What about 0.83 feathers? Twenty-two… OK, maybe. But this was two tries at the worst.”

  The door slid open, and the party climbed onward.

  Gary smirked.

  Zeeto muttered under his breath. “I really hate this place.”

  36

  Five more puzzles like the rest had worn the party to the bone. It wasn’t that the solutions required great feats of logic, trivia, or mathematics. Mostly, it was the walking. Gary cursed himself for having the two branches of the temple wind up opposite sides of the tower-like structure. Would the place have felt any less special for having been a low, flat structure, maybe even equipped with magically propelled people-movers like the larger airports had?

  “I swear I’m going to kill someone if this is another dead end,” Zeeto said when the second-to-last door opened to reveal yet another puzzle. On the opposite side of the temple, they’d opened one that was closed off with a lattice of silvery metal bars. They could see the final puzzle while still having to backtrack the entire circuit of the temple to pass through a door that wasn’t barred.

  The lattice-barred door and the one with the puzzle that had asked about owl talons looked onto the same room with windows that looked out over the forest.

  “If I’d climbed up, think how much less walking there’d have been,” Zeeto said.

  Sira snorted. “Once those monkey-handed insects were dead, you were welcome to try again.”

  “You’d have liked that, wouldn’t you? Get injured, and whatshisname demands that you heal me,” Zeeto said. “I get skewered brains-to-butthole by some roof demon’s spear, you’re off the hook.”

  Braeleigh cleared her throat and read the last puzzle.

  LIT BY STARS AND SUN SO BRIGHT, THE COUNTED SANDS OF DAY AND NIGHT

  7 1 6 3 12

  “Fie!” Beldrak swore. “Perchance not another inventory of wild game?”

  Zeeto put up his hands. “I’m out. I don’t know where we were supposed to see a beach, but I’m not counting sand. Sister Sira can have fun dialing in every combination until her wrists fall off.”

  “Hourglasses,” Gary said. “Twenty-four hours in a day.”

  Zeeto cocked his head. “But how can you be so—?”

  “Checks out,” Sira said, squinting at the numbers. “Minus, multiply, divide, plus.”

  Braeleigh ruffled Gary’s hair the same way she did Caspian’s fur. “Look at you, being all smart.”

  Smart wasn’t the right word for it. Gary had run himself ragged over the course of hours on a series of puzzles that could have been finished in a fraction of that had he not inserted pointless busywork in his puzzle design.

  The final door opened, and a grand marble staircase led down into a central courtyard that they’d been running circles around all evening.

  “Still think you’d have climbed past the puzzles?” Sira asked, pointing up to a crystalline dome that caught the faintest light from the twilight sky.

  “Nah,” Zeeto said. “I’m over that. Let’s just get our butts in gear and get what we came for.”

  Gary slunk along at the back of the group, chugging down the last of the water from his canteen. He had plans too.

  Braeleigh jogged ahead, Caspian accelerating to keep pace with her down the stairs. At the center of the courtyard, a fountain burbled, still running after untold millennia of operation. The ranger unstoppered her canteen and poured the contents into the lush grass that had no business growing in a place that existed only at twilight.

  “Shouldst we saveth any of this liquid balm that we might hedge against future calamity?” Beldrak asked.

  “Why?” Zeeto replied. “We can always come back for more. Heck, now that we know the answers, we can just gallop up the left side straight to the end. Or I can toss a grappling hook and sneak in through the window, go… what was it…?” He looked vacant, and his fingers twisted in the air a moment. “Minus, times, divide, plus. Boom! Miracle water.”

  “All good!” Braeleigh announced, holding up her canteen. The hand that had dunked it dripped precious healing water down her sleeve.

  Sira looked up into the sky through the crystal dome. “Light’s fading. We ought to get out of here.”

  “Anyone stopped to think what will happen to us if we don’t?” Zeeto asked.

  “Stuck until tomorrow night, right?” Sira replied with a shrug. “Lousy place to spend a day, but we wouldn’t starve.”

  “Who’d sing to open it?” Gary asked.

  They were silent. Then, a beat later, everyone bolted for the stairs.

  Perfect.

  Gary made a quick check of his character sheet.

  Player Name: Gary Burns Character Name: Gary Burns

  Level/Path: Bard 1,2,3B, 4A XP: 4,326/8,000 Race: Unknown

  STR: 7 DEX: 9 CON: 8 INT: 18 WIS: 17 CHA: 18

  To Hit: +2 Weapon: Hair Splitter (1d8+1)

  Armor Rating: 11 Armor: Leather (+2)

  Path Powers: Inspire (+2), Lullaby, Fascinate, Historian

  Skills: Persuade (+8), Music (+8), Study/Search (+8)

  Tricks: Fast Talk

  Profession: Cook (+1)

  Wow…

  He’d made 300 XP even from those decapedes. There’d probably have been another lump sum upon escaping the Temple of Twilight with the sacred waters. But first, Gary had a little drinking to do.

  Filling his own canteen, he took a chug from the fountain.

  His head swam, but when the sensation passed, his thoughts cleared.

  1d6: 3 (Permanent Intelligence Gain)

  Damn. Of all the times for a mediocre roll…

  Player Name: Gary Burns Character Name: Gary Burns

  Level/Path: Bard 1,2,3B, 4A XP: 4,176/8,000 Race: Unknown

  STR: 7 DEX: 9 CON: 8 INT: 21 WIS: 17 CHA: 18

  To Hit: +2 Weapon: Hair Splitter (1d8+1)

  Armor Rating: 11 Armor: Leather (+2)

  Path Powers: Inspire (+2), Lullaby, Fascinate, Historian

  Skills: Persuade (+8), Music (+8), Study/Search (+8)

  Tricks: Fast Talk

  Profession: Cook (+1)

  It had cost him 150 XP—50 for each point of INT he’d gained—but never had there been a bargain so good. Even if he’d rolled max, the XP hit of 300 wouldn’t have dropped him back on the Path of Power.

  But that sweet, sweet INT. Gary’s mind was like a carbureted muscle car that hadn’t been run hard in a while. Stepping down on the gas and spiking the tachometer had blown out the carbon gunking the cylinders. Gary’s brain felt clear, clean, and fast.

  His legs, not so much.

  Running up the stairs winded him. Gary trailed after the party with their massive head start. “Hey, guys! Wait for me!”

  37

  “Think it’ll work
?” Zeeto asked sleepily as they finished setting up camp at the edge of the clearing.

  Night had fallen, and with the last of them out of the Temple of Twilight, the building had faded from sight. No trick of mere invisibility, a hand passed right through where a wall had been only moments earlier. Now, only the corpses of the decapedes—kept well downwind of the campsite—showed any evidence that their adventure had been anything but a dream.

  That, plus 750 XP for getting out with water from the temple fountain.

  “Of course it’ll work,” Braeleigh said, lying against a tree with Caspian already sleeping draped across her lap. “It’s elven.”

  There was no argument from Gary. Suspect logic aside, Braeleigh was right. This was the easy cure for Miriasa Starlight’s stasis. Had she succumbed to the magic of the Gem of Eternity among her own people, they’d have known just what to do. Instead, living among the dwarven defenders as they fought a rearguard action to evacuate Gelzhearth, she was left to the well-meaning yet inept ministrations of her hosts.

  Gary sat first watch along with Beldrak. The two of them seemed most awake after the night’s activities. Beldrak, because of an innate hardiness and stalwart devotion to vigilance; Gary, because he was used to getting to bed at 2 AM and sleeping until noon.

  The two didn’t speak much. Slumbering comrades were a guilty reminder that silence was the best gift they could offer after a harrowing day.

  For his part, Gary passed the time with eyes cast upward. He’d mentally inventoried the monstrous encounters available for the woodlands surrounding the Temple of Twilight. Canopy lurkers were the worst of them.

  Name: Canopy Lurker Hit Points: 28 Damage: 1d12+7

  Nocturnal predator species of avian mammal. Body resembles a jaguar or panther. Wings allow gliding but not flight. Climbs into tall trees to wait for prey. Prefers to drop down on sleeping creatures. Bonus +10 damage against unaware targets.