Me: What could that possibly mean?
Frances Euphoria: I think his puzzle was to figure out a way to … um … satisfy everyone. I may be mistaken, but he did say that the tardigrade was especially hard.
Me: Is that the exact way he phrased it?
Frances Euphoria: Yes, why?
Me: Never mind. What happened after he solved the puzzle?
Frances Euphoria: He has been transported to a place called the End of Time. It is OMIB-ish, but different. He’s been given a scrap of parchment that reads: Hero of Alexandria lifts his weights.
Me: WTF does that mean?
Frances Euphoria: Don’t know yet. That’s all it says. Maybe it will make more sense once you and the others finish your puzzles.
“Excuse me,” a plump pixie with wings three sizes too small for her girth flutters past me. From what I can tell, there are more banquet-goers at the back of the room than there are upfront, so I may have a better chance of hiding out back here while I figure out what the hell is going on.
I equip my Deathly Hallows Invisibility Cloak, item 90, and move to the wall. After some fancy legwork, I find a clear space behind a winemaid in a short skirt and pointy heels. I see an empty wine crate and I use it to give me a better vantage point. Maybe I should have gotten the lay of the crowd beforehand, but fools rush in and get their ass beat repeatedly, thank you, thank you very much!
For where I stand, it’s apparent that most folks are congregated at the back with the finger food, buffet table, and free drinkies – and really, why wouldn’t they be? Up front, upon an ornately decorated dais, a gaudy, ostentatious, stereotypical throne with the usual carved, gilded, tuck-and-roll purple velveted appointments expresses the haute bourgeois’ disdain for the plight of the proletaria … wait, what? Anyhoo, the big fancy chair is flanked by two lesser, but still gaudily bedazzled specimens of sitting device, with large violet velvet draperies embroidered with griffins rampant, griffins couchant, griffins supporting, griffins gorged and chained – really, the only griffin it doesn’t have is Peter Griffin – as backdrop.
The Knights in White Satin stand before the dais, their eyes scanning the crowd.
“So the point of this puzzle is … ?”
Frances Euphoria: I think the point is to think outside the box!
Me: Go on …
Frances Euphoria: Sophia is trying to embrace her loving, nurturing, motherly instincts.
Me: You are talking about our Sophia – Sophia Wang, right?
Frances Euphoria: Yes, really! She’s singing lullabies in Mandarin to the goblinets, and that appears to be soothing them some.
Me: And that’s working?
Frances Euphoria: Seems to be. Oh crap! One of the baby goblins bit her boobie!
Me: Screenshots.
Frances Euphoria: Sophia is no longer embracing her motherly instinct.
Me: And Doc?
Frances Euphoria: Doc seems a bit hard-headed, not unlike yourself. He’s still killing the zombies as a means to eradicate them.
Me: Thata boy. He’ll get them, the infected too.
Frances Euphoria: It’s not working. I keep telling him this, but he’s gone berserk. Something about zombies really gets to him.
Me: We all have our thing.
“What’s with the not especially invisible cloak of invisibility, your Lordship?”
It’s the winemaid from earlier. She has cat eyes – did not see that to begin with – and dangly earrings hanging from her tragi.
“No one’s here,” I tell her.
“Everyone can see you, you know. Watch.” She catches the eye of a patron at the front of the table and jerks her thumb over her shoulder to point me out. He’s a tremendous, bare-chested barbarian with a smallish horned helmet and fur kilt, who stands next to a small blue dragon and a pink-haired, pigtailed warrior princess in a green cloak. He quaffs a mighty draught from his mug of … milk, nudges the battle babe, and points at me with a chocolate chip cookie. She snorts milk out of her nose, wipes it off on her leathern gauntlet and gives me the pinkie wave. The blue dragon rolls his eyes, shakes his head, and returns to his drink.
“See?”
The hooch the winemaid has been serving is a suspiciously unwinelike frothy white liquid, I notice.
“When did you start serving vanilla malts, and where can a thirsty warrior get a properly ethylated bevvie?”
“It’s Drorikh, silly.” she tells me, “fermented dragon’s milk. If you want booze, it’s on the other side of the room, at the table with the big banner that says BOOZE.”
People begin murmuring at the front of the room. The milkmaid claps her hands and bounces on her toes. “Oh, wonderful, here she comes now!”
A lush drape parts and twenty attendants march out. They place their hands behind their heads, stick their elbows out and squat. They bow their heads forward as the center attendant unrolls a rectangular swath of fabric and clips it to small latches on the squatting attendants’ wrists and covers their shoulders so that connected, they form a long running table.
“Is this some sort of yoga routine or something?”
“De-cloak and I’ll tell you,” says the milkmaid.
“Alrighty,” the cloak goes back into my inventory list only after I step off the crate, which severely limits my ability to see what’s happening up front. I step up again; naysayers be damned.
“They’re forming a griffin runner table,” the milkmaid explains. She turns the spout on a crate next to me and fills another goblet with fermented dragon’s milk. “What?” she asks. “Never heard of Drorikh in a box?”
I turn my attention back to the front to see two miniature griffins being carried on white pillows. The pillowbearers stop at the back of the griffin runner table, and the two fantasy creatures stand. One yawns and they both step onto the connected table made from the shoulders and forearms of the kneeling servants.
“This is ridiculous,” I say just loud enough for a Thulean warrior broad – not my Thulean warrior broad – at the front of the milk table to twitch her ears and half-turn towards me.
“It’s tradition,” says the milkmaid.
The griffins make their way to the end of the table, where they’re again greeted by the pillowbearers. Once they’re back on their white pillows, they are quickly taken to the small thrones flanking the Empress’ empressing perch.
I ain’t gonna lie – my trigger finger is just about as itchy as it can be. I could probably take out everyone up front with a single blast from my Reason Railgun, item 459, but methinks this isn’t exactly what the Sage had in mind when he instructed me to solve his puzzle.
“Cool it, cowboy,” I mutter to myself.
Frances Euphoria: Sophia is doing it! She’s done it!
Me: She solved her puzzle?
Frances Euphoria: Yes! She’s spawned at the End of Time with Rocket.
Me: How’d she solve it?
Frances Euphoria: She killed all the goblin children.
Me: She did what? Sophia ‘Save the Digital Whales’ Wang? That’s not like her!
Frances Euphoria: She tried everything else, from taking care of them to trying to contact their parents. Finally, she wrang their little necks. It broke her heart; she was still crying when she respawned, I should add, as these were an endangered subspecies of goblin that still spoke Ancient Thulean. Her riddle piece is coming now. It reads …
Voices in the crowd pick up as Empress Thun enters the room.
“Maybe I’m supposed to kill her,” I say aloud.
The milkmaid gives me a funny look. “What do you mean?”
“That line wasn’t for you, it was for the friend in my head,” I tell her as I tap at the side of my dome.
Frances Euphoria: As I was saying, here’s Sophia’s part of the riddle: Resistant bodies keep dreams alive. And no, I’m guessing you aren’t supposed to kill the Empress.
“Too late.” I leap off the crate and hit the AA boost. Charging forward with my buster sword, it
em 572 in one hand and my Model 1928A1 Thompson Submachine gun, item 247, in the other, I jump from shoulder to head and aim most of my fire at the front of the crowd. I can see the big, heavy .45 caliber slugs spiral through the air in slow motion. They impact with graphic effect; tissues tears, blood splatters, glass shatters as I wield my trench-broom to clear my path to the Knights, to the Empress.
I bring the sword down on the lead knight, who, with an infuriating nonchalance and a shit-eating grin meets me with his shield, kicks my feet out from under me and pushes me backwards. The floor shakes as a steel barred cage drops down around me.
The drum goes empty as I try to shoot my way out; the ricochets and bullet fragments off the bars knock my life bar down by 20%. No joy from the Chicago Typewriter; time to do this the old fashioned way. The bars ring like tubular bells and sparks fly in a solid stream as cold steel meets cold steel. With one last supremely powerful strike, nothing happens.
“Dumbass,” the Chief Knight smirks, “That all you got?”
Despite all my rage, I am still just a rat in a cage.
I equip my bazooka, item 82, and aim it at the Empress – and then lower it as gravity drags it down from my suddenly nerveless hands. My mouth goes Death Valley dry, my stomach drops and my pulse pounds in my temples.
“Dolly?”
A red scarf binds her hair into a Carmen Miranda-style affair sans the fruit; a tight white bustier displays her rack to full advantage and accentuates her wasp-waisted figure. She turns to me as the White Knights form a protective cordon around her with swords drawn and pointed right at my very soul. Her piercing black eyes lock onto mine without the slightest trace of recognition.
“How did you get in here?” I whisper. “Why are you the empress?!”
No answer. Even the patrons behind me have stopped murmuring.
“Doll, it’s me, it’s Quantum.”
She opens her mouth to speak and at the very moment her lips part, a portal opens up above the dais and Reapers drop out like maggots squeezed from a pus-filled boil, weapons blazing into the crowd. They hoot and holler their pretend war cries, and flex and pose and vogue like they’re at a shoot for ‘Wanna –B’ magazine. A surprising amount of return fire blazes past me, and not all of it is world appropriate swords and arrows and thaumaturgic energy. Though there’s dozens of them with mutant hacks twisted up their arms and they’re killing the hell out of the crowd, it’s still not quite the cakewalk they’re used to.
It’s who I see next that really lights a fire under my ass.
Strata Godsick is the last of the Reapers to come out of the portal. His reaper mask is the same as it was in Steam, a mangled skull with antlers, but he’s no longer wearing his getup with the red jewel in the center, as cliché as that was. Instead, he levitates in a jet black robe that hangs well over his feet, which is twisted at the end into small curls. He focuses on Dolly, paying absolutely no attention to yours truly.
As his henchmen take on the knights, as they blast their hacks indiscriminately into the crowd, Strata’s form slowly morphs into a thick black smoke. Tendrils of dark energy form in the air around him, twisting their ways up and down what’s left of his arms and legs.
I equip my Mars Attacks ray gun, item 491, and blast at the cage until the weapon overheats. I toss it aside and equip item 63, my Annihilator 2000, America’s premier survival, home and travel security unit.
“Dolly!”
Strata is now a few paces away from Dolly with his smoky hand extended in her direction. Dolly makes no response, takes no defensive action, doesn’t even acknowledge Strata’s presence.
I know the gun ain’t gonna work until I’m out of the cage; a quick scroll through my list and I stop at item 101, the portable hole. I slap it against the bars, it sticks, and I dive through into a shoulder roll that puts me on my feet with the Annihilator 2000 pointed right where Strata’s miserable, twisted Grinch heart should be.
The bullets sail right through his insubstantial ass; no effect. From out of nowhere, a mahoosive, steel-clad fist rings my bell big time and rearranges my boyish good looks.
My cheekbone crunches, my vision pane grays out and comes back with my life bar down by another 15%, and I spit out two of my favorite teeth as I turn and ventilate the chickenshit bastard Reaper who just sucker punched me.
Strata is still moving in on Empress Dolly, and she still makes no effort to escape, evade, or defend as I launch myself at them. My AA bar comes up and item 579, my Bustermarm, fills my hand. The sword grows and grows with every air-step, and from ten feet out, I ram it into his body.
No effect, the blade meets no resistance, and I overbalance, tumble, and go flat on my face.
Meanwhile, I got another one of Strata’s bones-leather-and-metal clad knuckleheads coming at me full speed with a whirling Ginsu chainsaw hack, and I don’t roll out of his way in time. He gets my arm about shoulder high, and that’s pretty much me done. Never mind Griffin Festival – so far today has been nothing but a Dismember Steamboy festival.
Bustermarm comes up as I complete my roll and I partition Mr. Texas Chainsaw Massacre from hip to shoulder. My life bar is rapidly heading for the red and I one-hand the Annihilator 2000 as best I can, just as another Reaper I never even see picks me up by the back of the neck and gives me the Bane chiropractic treatment.
I hear the snap, feel my body disconnect, and watch my life bar drop to zero.
Chapter Twenty-Two
“You got some nerve,” I tell the Sage. “Some NERVE!”
For his part, the Sage does the inscrutable Obi-Wan, Master Po, and Yoda knowing silence thing, which really, really fries my ass more than it’s already fried.
“Well that’s IT then, you smug bastard!” and item 100, the BFG 9000 materializes fully charged and ready to go. I feel the plasma chamber build a charge, and my skin prickles with spillover ionizing radiation as I hold the trigger down and – nothing happens. Reset, recharge, and – more nothing. I curse and blaspheme, bounce it down hard, kick it, and hurt my tootsies.
The Sage radiates silent amusement.
Item 83, my 125th Anniversary Verdun Commemorative Model Flammenwerfer, should be just the ticket. The igniter sparks, the fuel fooshes through the hose, and I brace myself for the roaring wall of fiery vengeance that I’m about to blast into the very face of my tormentor and … nothing.
“MOTHER PUS BUCKET!” I howl, as I strip the tank assembly from my back and pound it with the wand.
Frances Euphoria: What the Quantum are you doing?
Me: Actualizing my inner child. I’ll be better in a minute.
Okay – item 274, the aluminum Festivus pole – no moving parts. I scream like a Reaper with a paper cut as I rush in and repeatedly smash the pole against the Sage’s unyielding tree-like self. Neither the Sage nor the pole are any the worse for wear by the time I work through my hissy fit, and I must say that the Festivus pole does indeed have a high strength-to-weight ratio.
Frances Euphoria: Feel better?
Me: No, but I feel less bad.
The Sage of Gotha closes his eyes and takes a deep, satisfied breath. He exhales and pollen filters off his foliage in a cloud of arboreal dandruff. Blips of light like Tinkerbell with a firefly up her ass shine through his branches casting myriad arcs across the neverspace. “You have much to learn, young Steamboy.”
His body begins to fade away, leaving only his Aslan facial features. Soon, I’m back in the banquet hall surrounded by guests, my Festivus pole still in my hand.
I’m still pissed off, but like Doc always says, Better pissed off than pissed on!
The Sage has me by the cojones and is using Dolly and Strata to push my buttons, even if they aren’t really them in the sense of the word. The Sage is in my head, and if I could put a gun to my dome to get him out, I’d squeeze that trigger faster than a zitso on a sebaceous cyst. I have to keep telling myself that this is a game, a puzzle to be solved. Ain’t nothing but a thang; I can hang.
Fran
ces Euphoria: Okay, so now what’s your plan?
Me: My plan? Still working it out.
Hee haw go the centaurs and har har har go the hopped up warlocks and the penguin-suited orc. I slip through the crowd, past the spidery woman with creepy peepers, around the conman using his legerdemain to try to unlatch a young vixen’s chastity belt, towards the fermented milk vendor side of the banquet hall. I know there isn’t a lot of time for scheming, and I’ll still have to keep my eyes on the crowd around me. The Thulean She-Hulk is out to get me, no matter where I spawn or what I do.
“I’ll have two, please,” I tell the full-bosomed milkmaid.
“The limit is one at a time per customer,” she says with a thin smile.
I almost equip my 7-Eleven 128 oz. Super Mega Triple Gulp, item 85, and tell her to fill ‘er up, but I decide to keep things copacetic. “Then I’ll take one.”
She hands me the frothy white dragon’s milk and down my neck it goes. I almost toss the glass over my shoulder but I reconsider and waggle it towards her.
“And I’ll take another,” I tell her.
She raises an eyebrow at me. “You have to use a new mug; Tritania health standards.”
“Let me guess, DRAIDS or the Corrupted Blood Incident?”
The milkmaid seems genuinely surprised. “A combination of both. How did you know?”
“It’s what I do: I drink and I know things,” I say as I down my second mug and return my focus to the situation at hand. The fermented milk adds a touch of blurriness to the corners of my vision pane, but it does nothing to calm my nerves.
Frances Euphoria: Are you done drinking? Empress Thun will be coming soon!
I note how Frances does not refer to the Empress as Dolly. There will be a time to address this in the future, but now isn’t the time for any sort of relationship drama. Back to Strata: it’s abundantly clear to me that I need to kill him. If I kill him, I’ll save Dolly and I’ll solve the puzzle. Bada bing, bada boom.
“You just gonna stand there at the front of the table, mister?” the milkmaid asks.
Maybe I’m supposed to kill the milkmaid. Likely not, but it would be satisfying.
The Mechanical Heart: (Book Five) (Sci-Fi LitRPG Series) (The Feedback Loop 5) Page 22