Dungeon Crawler Carl Book 2

by DoctorHepa

  I laughed. “What? They’re earthbound. Aren’t they?”

  “Yeah, so, they believe the skyfowl are angels. They believe all flightless creatures are so jealous of us… of the Skyfowl I mean, that all humans and everybody else without wings want to destroy them. They believe when Scolopendra unleashed that nine-tier attack, one of the tiers was a spell that made the earthbound want to kill the Skyfowl. That’s absolutely not true. People want to kill Skyfowl because Skyfowl are assholes. They don’t need a spell to make people hate them.”

  “But, why?” I asked. “Why do the elves care?”

  Mordecai sighed. “It’s kind of a long, complicated story, and we’re brushing on a subject I was going to bring up at a later time. We’ve touched on it before. Gods and goddesses. In-game deities. We’ll get to what they really are later. You don’t need to worry about that on this floor. Anyway, all you need to know is that elves worship the Oak Mother, the mother of all gods. Her name is Apito. And in one story about Apito, it is said that in order to maintain the path to heaven, her angels must remain free and alive. And in a completely separate story, Apito is said to have called the Skyfowl ‘bless-ed.’ And in a third, apocryphal story, Apito said only the angels are ‘blessed.’ In that same story she says any violence against angels is to be stopped, and if it continues, she will destroy all the worlds. Ergo, a batshit crazy, doomsday cult sect of banished elves now dedicate themselves to protecting the Skyfowl in anticipation of the day when the tree goddess destroys the universe.”

  “All-righty then. And what do the Skyfowl think about these guys?” I asked.

  He paused. “Skyfowl in general are a diverse people, like humans, but the ones on this level are a little different. They’re mostly non-religious. They are, as a rule, negatively inclined toward any flightless creature. They think of you as a servant class, that you’re beneath them. In the mythology of the volcano levels, the Skyfowl were the ruling class of the Over City, and the High Elves were the ruling class of the forested regions of the Hunting Grounds. So when these elves show up in their cities, oftentimes falling to the ground and slobbering all over themselves as they offer obeisance, they’re treated as an amusement, a joke. Nobody takes them seriously. They have their stupid uniforms and their play-acting, but I’ve never seen anything come of it in all my time here. This angel thing is their main motivation, but they also have all sorts of weird theories and beliefs. Everybody makes fun of them. I’ve never known them to actually inflict violence.”

  “Well we’re going to find out what’s going on,” Donut declared. She stood stiffly. She’d put the picture of Bea into her inventory. “I’ve decided that we’re going to follow through with this quest, and there’s nothing you can do to stop us, Mordecai.”

  “Is that so?” Mordecai asked.

  “GumGum died because of us. And Carl, Mongo, and I have decided to make it right.”

  Mordecai just looked at her, then he shrugged after a moment. “If that’s what you’re gonna do. I ain’t your dad. I’m your manager. You know how I feel about quests on this floor. But as long as you spend as much time grinding and killing as possible, then so be it.”

  Donut looked surprised then triumphant. I could tell by the non-plussed look on Mordecai’s face that he’d already decided we were stuck with this quest whether we wanted it or not. We’d already been sucked it, much the way we’d been sucked in when Signet had kidnapped us.

  “GumGum is dead? Did I hear that right?” Fitz said, looking at us with wide eyes. “GumGum the orc?”

  “I’m afraid so,” I said. “She was killed by a group of Krasue.”

  “Oh, oh no,” the barkeep said. “I… I gotta sit down. GumGum dead. I can’t believe it. She was m’best customer, she was. Krasue. I knew they’d get her one of these days.” The man wandered back into his kitchens.

  “I’m going to get him blackout drunk tonight,” Mordecai said. “Then I can peek at his stores and the newsletter.”

  “So we’re doing this, then?” Donut said. “We’re doing the quest? And this time I will be awake the whole time? Excellent. Let’s solve this mystery. What do we gotta do next?”

  “Okay,” I said. “Let’s work through what we already know. We have dead prostitutes from outside the city falling from the sky. These women have corpses that suggest they’ve been twisted to death. Furthermore, they have wounds on their shoulders that indicate they’ve been held aloft by something with talons. Possibly a skyfowl. And just a few hours after we said we’d do something about it, the woman who gave us the quest ends up dead. We’re attacked by that crazy elf dude from that gang along with three scary ghost ladies with their guts hanging out. What else?”

  “You have those two pieces of paper,” Donut said.

  “Oh yeah,” I said, pulling them both from my inventory. The first was Mysterious Letter. It was a folded piece of paper stained red with blood. I opened it.

  It was a relatively-short letter, written in a language I didn’t understand. The text was all squiggles and triangles. I examined the letter’s properties.

  Mysterious Letter.

  GumGum the orc had this blood-soaked letter in her possession. It’s in an odd language. Is it a clue? Is it a grocery list? You can’t fucking read it, so who knows?

  I slid it over to Mordecai as I examined the next slip.

  Gate Pass.

  When one walks about the streets of any town within the Over City, the mindless Swordsman guards tend to get a bit squirrely if you’re carrying a corpse with you. When it comes to their black and white view of justice, the rule of law is absolute.

  Unless you have a gate pass.

  This letter gets the city guard off your back as long you’re not being too overt with your current criminal enterprise.

  Pass only works within the township in which it was issued.

  The paper itself said, “Gate Pass. The holder of this pass is doing this on my orders. Magistrate Featherfall.”

  “That is not what I expected,” I said, putting it back into my inventory. It was basically a Get-Out-of-Jail card.

  “I recognize this text,” Mordecai said, still looking at the mysterious letter. He sounded nervous. “I can’t read it, but I know these squiggles. It’s necroscript. It’s something an undead magic user would write out. This is probably a type of scroll. But you can only read it if you have proper skill in the language.”

  “So it has something to do with a necromancer?” I asked.

  “Maybe, maybe not. But when I say ‘undead magic user,’ I mean that literally.”

  “Those Krasue head things were undead,” I said. “The system said they were ghosts.”

  “Krasue are usually henchmen, errr, henchwomen, for something else. I’m thinking you two might have a lich problem.”

  “What is a lich?” Donut asked.

  I answered. I knew this from playing DnD. “It’s usually an undead magic user, obsessed with eternal life.”

  “Sort of,” Mordecai said. “They’re pretty nasty monsters. They tend to be smart, too.”

  “Hmm,” I said, thinking. “What does a lich have to do with those 201st Security Group assholes?”

  “Hey, Fitz, Darling. Can you come back here please?” Donut called.

  The pub owner appeared from the back, rubbing his eyes. He’d obviously been crying. “Yes, your majesty?”

  “You said you were afraid that GumGum would get hurt by one of the Krasue. What did you mean by that? How did you know about those things?”

  I looked at Donut, impressed. I chose not to say anything.

  “She told me,” he said. “She was looking out for them fallen women. But she said sometimes she’d hear one, and she’d go into the alleyway even though it was still night. I’d tell her not to go in there. It ain’t safe. But she’d go, and she said sometimes she’d see the Krasue in the shadows. She was afraid of them. She had nightmares. But she cared about them women. She had nightmares about one of them falling from the sky and no
t being dead, and just sitting there and dying, and nobody being there to hold her hand and tell her it was going to be okay. GumGum’s mom had been one of them ladies, you see. A lady of the night I mean. And she’d died after getting stabbed. GumGum had found her the next morning. Just sitting on the stoop to their house. She’d crawled home and died right there. She’d left a red streak a half kilometer long, and nobody had helped. GumGum had to grow up mighty fast after that. That’s why she had a soft spot for those ladies. The nicest orc you’d ever meet. She smelled something awful, but I really liked her.”

  “So Krasue are a normal monster for this town?” I asked.

  “There’s no such thing as a normal monster for this town,” he said. “But it’s unusual for the undead to rattle about, the magistrate being a black cleric and all. He can control the undead, so I reckon if he knew about them, he’d banish them floating lady heads right quick. GumGum said she’d complained, and all he did was give her permission to move the dead bodies.”

  I exchanged a look with Donut. “Magistrate, huh?” I said. “Do you know where this guy’s office is?”

  * * *

  Donut insisted on placing the picture of Bea on the small table next to her cat tree as she slept. Mongo didn’t appear nearly as thrilled about the framed photograph as Donut. He actually hissed at it a couple times before Donut admonished him.

  “Good boy,” I said later, scratching the top of his head. He chomped at the air, electricity sparking from his enchanted fang caps.

  I decided not to read. I had those Louis L'amour books, but we had to get up early. Our interview was earlier than usual, and I wanted to check out this magistrate guy before it was time to go. Still, I pulled out the mysterious letter. I stared at the symbols, trying to memorize them.

  Even though I’d set up the cat tree on her insistence, Donut jumped straight onto my neck and settled in.

  “Goodnight, Carl,” she said.

  “Goodnight, Donut,” I said, patting her head.

  “Promise me you won’t let me die alone like GumGum’s mom,” she said. “Or GumGum. I guess she died alone, too. She was probably really scared.”

  “Don’t worry, Donut,” I said. “We’ll find out who’s responsible, and we’ll make them pay.”

  Thwump. Something hit the roof of the inn, directly over our heads. It slid off the rooftop and crashed loudly into the street.

  In the morning we’d discover the body of a naked, twisted human prostitute, sprawled out in the alley next to the inn.

  Scrawled onto her back in torn, bloodless flesh were the words, “No, you won’t.”

  A note from DoctorHepa

  A day later than I anticipated... Sorry about that. There was both hell and highwater in the form of massive civil unrest. I am far away from the action, but many of my friends and one of my children are not, unfortunately. All is well now.

  * * *

  Chapter 65

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  “We’d like to see Magistrate FeatherFall please,” Donut said, using her sweetest voice.

  Getting to this office had been a chore. The town’s administrative buildings had no first or second floor, and we’d had to utilize Donut’s Puddle Jumper spell to teleport from the rooftop of a knife shop to the landing entrance of the town hall. She’d recently hit level five with the spell, which had solved the line-of-sight issue. It basically added support for jumping up to a higher elevation when you couldn’t see the ground above you. It was a minor addition to the spell, but one that made it much more useful. The casting delay was also much shorter, now only two seconds instead of ten. Still, hitting level five hadn’t decreased the five-hour cooldown, which was the worst issue with the spell.

  But we did it. We zapped into the building’s third-floor entrance only to come face-to-face with two of the village swordsman guards. They stood stoically, ignoring us as we proceeded deeper into the building.

  “How did they get up here?” Donut asked.

  “I have no idea,” I said. “Weird.”

  Donut had protested, but I talked her into putting Mongo into his carrier for this excursion. We were headed into the legislative chamber of this town, and the last thing we needed was the murder chicken to go a’murdering when all we wanted to do was talk. “We’ll keep him in reserve,” I’d said. “Our secret weapon in case we have to fight our way out.”

  That seemed to appease both of them.

  Mordecai had said that every one of these towns had a different type of leadership structure. Before the cataclysm, the Skyfowl were in charge of the whole Over City. Now, their settlements were scattered, but the remaining eagle-controlled villages such as this one still maintained a similar structure as before, but without the previous oversight.

  As a result, this Magistrate Featherfall guy was the big boss man of this village. In the old days, he would have answered to a regional governor, who in turn would answer to the royal chancellor, who in turn would answer to some dude in some sprawling capital city that was on the ninth floor.

  This third floor was actually a high-end shopping mall of sorts, catering only to Skyfowl. The administrative building and home to the magistrate was directly above this floor, but anyone visiting had to first walk through this section. The shops reminded me of the type of stores one would find at the airport. Filled with expensive crap, like silken robes and fancy hats and scrolls. And even though the sparse customers were all the eagle folk, the clerks and assistants were all non-eagles, most of them harried-looking young women human and elves, rushing about, being snapped at and verbally abused by the Skyfowl shoppers.

  We walked down a long, wide hallway, flanked by the shops. A red carpet stretched from the landing to a stairwell at the end of the hall. I was relieved to see it was stairs and not another vertical flyway. As I watched, a human carrying a blue folder filled with papers rushed up the stairs.

  “They have to have stairs so the help can get up there,” I said.

  “That still doesn’t explain how they get up here in the first place,” Donut said.

  Paintings of eagles fighting elves and other oddities adorned the walls. This particular building was one of the largest in town, second only to the Desperado Club. From the outside, it was camouflaged well. The exterior walls of each section were shingled in a different manner, making it look like a group of medieval buildings pressed against one another. This higher-end, more opulent interior made the whole façade seem like something one would find at Disneyland.

  We passed multiple guards, a couple of eagle shoppers who startled at our appearance, and a handful of other bird-like creatures called Chickadees, whom I’d originally mistaken for juvenile Skyfowls. These guys only came up to my waist and were like dwarven versions of the larger birds.

  We approached the stairs without being stopped or questioned. As we ascended, the human who’d rushed up earlier rushed back down, almost running directly into us.

  “Pardon me,” she said. I looked at the name over her head. Burgundy. The woman had an odd look about her. She was young, dark-haired and pretty. But she had one pale blue eye and a brown one, like a Siberian husky.

  “No worries,” I said.

  She paused. “Are you lost? We don’t see too many of your kind up here.”

  “We’re on our way to see the magistrate,” I said.

  She snorted. “Good luck.” Then she continued back down the stairs.

  We continued up and walked straight into a reception area.

  A large desk sat in one corner, pressed against the far wall, which contained another door. On the desk were piles of papers, what appeared to be an oversized bento box filled with sushi, more papers—including the blue folder Burgundy had just dropped off, and a colorful line of small, stuffed animals, from bears to goblins to eagles to sharks. Behind the desk was a row of shelves containing more
of the colorful collection. These things were the dungeon version of Beanie Babies, I realized. There had to be a 300 of them lined up upon the shelves. Most of them still had tags on them. A few from the top shelf were protected by individual glass cases.

  Behind the desk, instead of a chair, there was a perch. And upon that perch rested an elderly, female Skyfowl. Her feathers were tinged gray, and her large beak was cracked and crazed like brittle, old pottery. She smelled like Icy Hot. She glared at the intrusion with a who-the-hell-are-you-and-what-the-hell-are-you-doing-here? look upon her sour face. I examined the NPC’s properties.

  Miss Quill – Skyfowl. Level 30.

  Assistant to the Magistrate.

  Cerberus. Heimdall. Aniketos and Alexiares. Qin Shubao. Lev Yashin. Some of the greatest gate guardians of both history and mythology. But none of them, not a one, was as dedicated to their work as Miss Quill.

  If she doesn’t want you to see the magistrate, you ain’t seeing the magistrate.

  “Do you have an appointment?” she asked Donut.

  “We don’t,” Donut said. “But we have a matter of great importance to discuss regarding the safety of this town.”

  “And what is that matter?” she asked.

  Donut leaned in. “Murder. Murder most foul.”

  Miss Quill did not appear impressed. “Was it a Skyfowl?”

  “The suspect?” Donut asked. “We don’t know yet, but…”

  “No, not the suspect. Put that down!” I quickly placed the lemur Beanie Baby back on the desk. The little stuffed creature wore a bandolier of knives, just like the real version. “Were any Skyfowl murdered?”

  “No,” Donut said. “Not that we know of.”

  “Then he’s not going to care,” Miss Quill said. “And if he’s not going to care, I’m not going to disturb him. Because he will care about being disturbed.”