“Yeah, whaddaya want, creep?” she said, crossing her arms, making her breasts so smooshed together that I had trouble remembering the answer to her question.
“I, uh, wanted to invite you on an assignment,” I began.
She perked up a bit and cocked a naughty eyebrow. “Oh, that could be fun! Just you and me?”
I swallowed hard. “Actually, Carmilla and Dahlia will be there, too.” The door slammed hard in my face. “Come on, Mimi, hear me out.”
The door opened again, this time slowly. She looked up at me with an indecipherable look on her face. “What did you call me?”
“Oh, sorry,” I said. “Mimi felt natural enough.”
“Only my dad ever called me that,” she said, eyeballing me with a predatory look now.
“I won’t call you that again, then. My bad,” I said. Awkward.
She shook her head and grabbed me by the collar. It was surprisingly intimidating despite her height. “No. I want you to call me that,” she growled. “And I’ll call you Daddy.” She licked her lips subtly. She pulled me close enough to feel her hot breath blow in my face. Smelled like cinnamon.
My awkwardness quickly skyrocketed to near-lethal heights as I fumbled over word after word in my attempt to respond to that. Memento didn’t seem to notice. She just kept looking at me like she was a wolf and I was a haunch of rabbit meat.
“Umm, will that really be okay, though?” I said finally.
“Why not?” she pouted. “Are you embarrassed by me, Daddy?”
I cringed, but I couldn’t lie to myself. It was oddly hot. “Well, it’s just that… in public, some people might—”
“Fuck your insecurities, satisfy my daddy issues,” she said in a very different tone.
“Roger that,” I said with a gulp. “But what about Carmilla?”
Her whole mood changed in an instant. I was surprised to see her react not with annoyance but with fear. The look on her face spelled doom. She didn’t appear to take the threat idly, and it was at that exact moment that she took a step back and released my collar from her surprisingly rugged grip.
“Come inside,” she said, looking down the hallway with a paranoid glance. I followed her in, and she locked the door behind her. I chuckled as I noticed a bunch of cloves of garlic hanging above the door, too. “How much time do you think we have to talk?”
I shook my head, “Let’s just talk about the question,” I said. “Are you coming on the assignment or not?”
“Carmilla would never let me,” she huffed.
“Dahlia is making her give you a chance.”
“Really? Dahlia? The white-haired chick who was fake-ass crying into your chest at breakfast yesterday?” she asked in shock. “I figured her for a lunatic, but it sounds like she’s the reasonable one.”
I chuckled. She had Dahlia totally wrong, but I could see why she’d think that way about her. She was a bit unusual, for sure. “I’ve learned that I have a type, and the main two bells they all ring are ‘psycho’ and ‘crazy hot’.”
“Checks out,” she agreed. “And I easily fall under that umbrella as well, don’t I,” she inched closer, “Daddy?” she teased in a sultry whisper.
I pretended it was funny or cute and just sort of smirked, but by now I was as hard as Dark Souls 3. “Anyway, are you down?”
“When is it? What is it?” she asked.
“I’ll get the details for you later, but I believe it’s the day after tomorrow.”
She nodded. “I should be able to handle it. But you’d better raise me from the dead or something when that psycho vampire bitch kills me,” she said, wagging her finger aggressively.
“Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that,” I started to say, but then I chuckled. “You’ll make a delightful skeleton, though,” I teased.
She scowled at me, but then she looked like she suddenly remembered something important. “Speaking of minions, follow me,” she said as she suddenly disappeared around the corner into the section of her room that, if anything like my room, was where the bed would be. I sweated from the anticipation of what might be offered next.
Nope. Wasn’t what I thought.
When I turned the corner, I saw the homunculus we’d stolen, or at least its many severed parts, spread out on the bed. Some were still twitching. A bloodied bone saw and some other “tools” rested on the nightstand next to the bed.
“This is why I was naked,” she said. “I didn’t want to get my clothes messy.”
I shook my head at the bizarre reasoning. “What the fuck are you doing with that thing?” I asked.
She looked at me like I just spoke another language out of the blue. “What did you think I was going to do with it? Play dress-up? I’m trying to figure out what makes it tick on a biological and magical level,” she said, exasperated by my apparent stupidity.
She groaned. “Anyway, it doesn’t have any internal organs, so that’s the most interesting part. It’s just meat and bone held together by magic. Even the ‘skin’ is synthetic, some alchemical approximation of human flesh, but it’s tougher and more, umm, plastic-like to the touch.”
“Does any of this information help us?” I asked.
“Hold on. Yes. Watch this.” She reached into the chest cavity of the homunculus, which had earlier been sliced open, and pulled out a stony lump.
“Okay, cool. What’s that?” I asked.
“It’s a fucking rock, Liam, what does it look like?”
I cocked my head. “Come again? What’s a rock doing in there?”
“Take a look at this,” she said, handing the stone to me. I hesitantly grabbed it, knowing full well where it’d been, but I didn’t want to chicken out. Peer pressure always worked on me, especially when goth chicks with pinup model proportions were involved. I took a look at the stone and noticed a series of runic inscriptions.
“So this is its control center?” I asked, guessing. “Kind of like a heart and brain rolled into one?”
“Basically,” she confirmed. “I still have to research some of the runes, but I think this thing will be the key to us creating our own advanced flesh golems or even homunculi, maybe making our minions permanent,” she said.
Whoa. That was a prospect. Permanent minions, maybe ones that could regenerate when inside of an area of protection, like the ones still in the stadium. I almost shivered at the possibilities.
“I must say, Mimi, you’ve outdone yourself,” I admitted. “This could be huge.”
“Did I do good, Daddy?” she asked, licking her lips again and rubbing her thighs together suggestively. It was like a game to her, maybe a joke, but a game or joke she clearly enjoyed on a few levels. In the interest of transparency, I’ll confess that I didn’t hate it either.
“You did very well, sweetheart,” I said, patting her on the head.
“Fuck,” she mumbled in frustration, clenching her little fists. A look of irritation spread across her face.
“What’s wrong?” I asked, puzzled by the sudden change in her tone.
“I have to be careful with you,” she groaned. “Because of you-know-who.”
I nodded, “Yes, I’d better go before your sense of self-preservation is outweighed by how badly you want my dick.”
Her eyes shot open wide, and her cheeks flushed bright red from the comment. “Oh fuck you!” she said, tossing a pillow at me. I laughed, but then a thought occurred to me.
“Shit, please tell me you haven’t placed any severed body parts on that pillow,” I pleaded.
Her wide-eyed silence spoke volumes.
“I’m going to go take a shower,” I said.
“Good idea,” she agreed.
I unlocked the door and opened it. “See you the day after tomorrow?” I asked.
She nodded with a heartfelt smile. “Bye-bye, Daddy,” she cooed with a wink.
“Bye, Mimi,” I winked back. I walked out of the room and into my own, pleased that that interaction at least went many times better than our previous o
ne. I hopped in the shower and tried to sort out my thoughts.
I had to head out on that solo mission as soon as the crystal came. I planned to lean on Uther for that one. And then I needed to check in with Dahlia and Carmilla and see how their time in the library went. After that, there’s the big mission with the three girls. I had a busy couple of days ahead of me, but I was flourishing. I was starting to feel a bit hopeful that everything might work out after all, and maybe just being the best damn necromancer I could be was my new purpose in life.
And maybe one of my girlfriends won’t brutally murder another one of my girlfriends in the next forty-eight hours.
Chapter 25
Solo Mission, Go!
Uther stood beside me, shoulder to shoulder, and growled to signal his readiness for the leap of faith that always kickstarted every assignment. I patted him on the head and took a deep breath, closing my eyes and exhaling—reflecting on how far I’d come to get to where I was at that moment.
The life I had before seemed so far away, but every once in a while, in a quiet moment, it’d haunt me. I couldn’t let that happen on this mission. I dismissed the dark thoughts and leaned against Uther for support as he affectionately nuzzled my side.
Are we going to stare at the cliff all day? he asked.
Cheeky bastard. I shook my head. “Let’s go.” As though we’d practiced it, we took off in unison. We were so in sync by this point that we leaped together off the edge of the cliff, tumbling side by side as I crumbled the crystal mid-descent. The portal opened up, and we toppled and twisted through it.
We hit mossy soil on the other side. Grass and moss, gravestones were everywhere, etched with names written in Romanian or some language along those lines. This was Earth! This was my world!
I was so excited from this epiphany that it took me a moment to notice that I scarcely felt any of the usual portal sickness. “I guess I’m getting used to portal travel,” I figured.
Might be because this world is similar to your own, Uther mused.
“This is my world, Uther,” I said. “This is Earth. These names are in a language I can recognize.”
He shook his big white head, and stardust sprinkled out of his eyes as he did. No, he said. That’s unlikely. There are millions if not billions of versions of Earth scattered across the multiverse. The odds that this is yours is positively minute, he explained.
I furrowed my brow, taking it in. That information didn’t clash with anything else I’d learned, but it did raise more questions I wasn’t equipped to answer right now.
The brief that Professor Whately gave me stated that the assignment’s objective was to exterminate some manner of corruption in the tombs beneath a crypt that had a statue of weeping devil knelt in prayer in front of it. I could already make out the specific statue on the other side of the small graveyard. “Do you think I should raise a few zombies or skeletons before we head into the crypt?” I asked.
Uther looked at me quizzically, cocking his head sideways in a way that would be cute if he weren’t so huge. Of course. Why wouldn’t you?
“Maybe it’d be disrespectful to the people buried here,” I shrugged.
It would be, he confirmed. But who cares? On a cosmic scale, you could blow up the planet and it wouldn’t matter. This world represents less than a hundred-trillionth of a percent of the humanoid population spread across the cosmos. Do you think anyone is going to notice you exhume a few graves in one graveyard?
“Well, when you put it like that,” I sneered as I raised my hand, “Fine, have it your way.” The soil beneath three graves surrounding us shifted and vibrated, and within moments a few bony hands emerged from the soil, Return of the Living Dead style, and slowly pulled their skeletal bodies out of their graves. Uther, growing impatient, helped to dig them out himself.
Shall we?
“Minions, and familiars first,” I teased.
Uther led the way while my three skeletons surrounded me in a protective formation. They weren’t the most impressive minions I’d ever summoned, but I couldn’t raise the whole graveyard for a single narrow crypt.
When we got to the front door of the crypt, I stopped outside to examine the door and best appraise how we might go about opening it. It didn’t have a knob or lever of any kind—it was merely shut with no apparent mechanism to open it. I tried to examine the script written on the tomb's door but was quickly frustrated as it was all scrawled in something like Romanian, and I couldn’t make heads or tails of it.
“This mean anything to you?” I asked. Uther shook his head. “I was talking to the skeletons.” The skeletons stared forward blankly, as I knew they would. I sighed.
“There are some symbols on here. They look to be the symbols for the four elements,” I said.
Yes, it’s a riddle, Uther said. But how about I just bust down the damn door?
“Be my guest, be my guest, put their stonework to the test,” I sang with a reference to a 1990s Disney film that I was sure went over the heads of my skeletal minions.
Uther leaned back, poised to pounce, and then leaped into the air, colliding forcefully with the door, shaking it, but he was repelled backward so quickly and abruptly that I only narrowly had time to dodge out of the way. One of my skeletons wasn’t so lucky.
“Are you okay, buddy?” I exclaimed with concern, rushing over to him. He picked himself up and rattled in frustration. “Maybe we need to find another way in.”
No, he insisted. I felt it give way. One more try, Master.
“One more try,” I agreed, holding my index finger up for emphasis. “Just one more, and then we’re trying my way.”
My way turned out to be unnecessary. Uther charged into the door, and this time his force was beyond the absorption capacity of the protection spell on the door. I watched in awe as the door crumbled before him.
“Showoff,” I said.
Bitch, Uther retorted.
We walked through the crypt entrance cautiously, skeletons in tow. “Where did you learn to use the B word like that?” I asked in amusement.
I heard Randolph say it once, he confessed.
“He’s a bad influence on you,” I laughed.
On the main floor of the crypt, I saw no stairway leading down into a lower level. I only saw three stone coffins laid out, each securely closed.
“The entrance must be under one of those,” I said.
Uther nodded his agreement. The skeletons made rattling and clattering sounds against the stone floor of the crypt as they waited for something to do.
“Exploding skull!” I shouted, jutting my wand out in front of me. A red flaming skull was conjured from the tip of the rod and flew at the first coffin, causing it to detonate into hundreds of tiny pieces—a couple which smacked me on the chin and the chest.
I have a note, Uther said with an audible sigh. Do you have to announce the spell?
I laughed at the adorable question. “Actually, I worked hard to get this one to the point where I didn’t need to utter the original incantation out loud.”
So you could scream ‘Exploding Skull?’ If you’ve never seen both irritation and befuddlement expressed on a fox’s face at the same time, I highly recommend it. True chef’s kiss material.
“Correct, my fine foxy friend,” I said. “Exploding Skull! Exploding Skull!” I fired off two more shots, one for each of the remaining coffins. This time the skeletons were ready, dramatically diving to protect me from incoming debris. By the look of it, the wreckage wouldn’t have hit me anyway, but I sure appreciated their gumption. A few pieces glanced off of Uther, but he didn’t seem to notice.
There, Uther said after a deep sniff. The middle sarcophagus. No body. And my nose tells me something else is different.
I nodded and gestured for the skeletons to make themselves useful. They went over to investigate and pulled loose debris and tile away to reveal a winding staircase beneath the ruined coffin. I flashed them an approving thumbs up. Their vacant skulls stared back bla
nkly, and they did not reciprocate the gesture.
“I wish my skeletons had more personality,” I complained.
Please don’t spend mana on that, Master.
We descended the staircase, and as we did so, torches lit themselves with every five steps we went down.
“We may have just lost the element of surprise,” I noted.
I think ‘Exploding Skull’ took care of that, Uther cleverly pointed out.
“I think you breaking down the crypt door didn’t help much, either.”
At the base of the stairs was a long, narrow corridor with more self-lighting torches, leading down a damp and dusty pathway. An impressively dense ecosystem of fungus, rats, spiders, and lesser vermin had made their home down here, and now and then I could make out the sound of skittering rodent paws and dripping water. The stink was awful, exactly as you’d expect it to be from that description.
After several minutes of walking down a particular pathway, we finally came to a larger chamber with three doors. One door had a painting of a bottle of wine, another bore a picture of some kind of spiky crown, and another had an image of a scepter.
“Now what?” I asked. “Is this another riddle?”
I think it’s just a choice. Which door do you want to go through?
I thought about it for a moment, but quickly settled on an answer. “The crown,” I said. “If that’s a magical item, it must be powerful. And I already have a wand, so no need for a scepter.”
Well-reasoned, Uther said. In any case, maybe we’ll have the opportunity to double back and investigate the other two doors when we finish the first.
“I’m hoping so,” I said. I noticed a hole in the wall between the doors. “Look at that,” I said.
A rat hole? Uther asked.
“Maybe,” I said. “If rats can puncture it, then I think you’ve got this, buddy.”
Say no more. Uther charged the door with the crown on it, collapsing and crumbling it with ease.
“For the record, I think ‘Exploding Skull’ could have handled that one, too,” I said.
We walked through the broken door, but no torches lit themselves here. I held my wand up, lighting the ruby focus like a little red light bulb, which gave the room a rather sinister quality.
Esoterica 1: Liam's Awakening: A Lovecraftian Fantasy Harem Adventure (Esoterica Chronicles) Page 20