by DoctorHepa
On the way there, we passed the roulette table. The guy running the game was human, and the NPCs playing were a mix of elves, human, and orcs. I noted that the symbols on the table were not two different colors and numbers, but a strange mix of four different colors and different symbols, like bones and knives, and a ringed planet.
The wheel of fortune was a vertical, round wheel filled with random prizes. A little more than half of the spaces were red and with labels such as “Nothing!” and “Get stabbed in the stomach by the croupier” and “Get poisoned” and “Vomit blood for ten minutes straight.”
Some of the good prizes, however, were very good. They were “A new pet” and “50,000 gold” and “A Legendary Weapon box.” Others weren’t great, but they would still be considered a prize. Like “Unlimited Free Handies over at Bitches or Penis Parade.” The others were mostly Platinum and Legendary boxes. Most of the spots were the same size, except the Nothing! spot took up two spaces and one of them, 500,000 gold, was a tiny sliver with “Spin Again” on either side.
“Oh fuck this,” I said, looking over the list of items. I wasn’t about to risk landing on a red spot. The cost of a single spin was 10,000 gold. “Let’s wait until Mordecai comes back and…”
“I see you got a chip,” the human running the wheel said, interrupting. The bald man was named Tito, and he was huge. He was taller than me and looked like he came out of central casting for a mob enforcer. He only had one tooth in his mouth. It listed him as Desperado Club Wheel of Fortune Croupier. Also, the guy who will stab you. “The comp chips are for a hundred grand, which is the maximum bet. Every bet over the minimum removes one of the red spots and adds a positive one. So if you use the comp, only two red spots will remain, which leaves 22 positive results. It will be the Nothing! spot and one more.
“Which one?” I asked, my eyes focusing on one that said, “Every hair on your body turns into a snake for five seconds.”
The large man pulled out a large, serrated knife and stuck it into the table. “Guess.”
“Don’t do it, Carl,” said Donut. “You’re going to get stabbed in the stomach. This game never plays fair.”
“Hey,” the man said, sounding offended. “This game is 100% on the up-and-up.” I looked over at Bomo, who shrugged. One of the good prizes was a “Choose any skill to level-up potion.” I’d love to get my hands on that one.
“Is your dagger enchanted?” I asked, peering at it.
“Nope,” he said. “Nobody has ever died from me stabbing them. And that’s the god’s honest truth.” He smiled sheepishly. “Nobody playing the game, I mean. I stabbed plenty on me off time.”
I calculated the odds in my head. There were 24 spots. It was 25, really, since the Nothing! spot was a double. Assuming the game was fair, which Mordecai said it was, then I had a what? Slightly worse than a 10% chance of not winning a prize? And really, it was only a one in 25 chance of a terrible result. Getting stabbed would suck, but the odds were no worse than anything else we were doing. I plunked the chip on the table. “Let’s do this.”
Tito slapped his hands together. “Excellent.” He looked up at Donut on my shoulder. “You’ll have to step back, I’m afraid madam.”
Donut grumbled and jumped to The Sledge’s shoulder, who showed no reaction. But a moment later, the rock monster reached up and gave her a surprisingly gentle pat.
“All bets are in!” Tito announced. The wheel flashed, rearranging itself. Several spots changed. Two red spots remained on the wheel. Nothing! And Get stabbed in the stomach by the croupier. He reached up and gave the wheel a mighty spin. It started clicking loudly as it spun.
“Come on! Come on!” Donut cried from The Sledge’s shoulder, her voice rising in excitement. “Big money! Big money!”
I relaxed. This was the real reason I’d done this. The wheel spun for an absurdly long time. It eventually started to slow. It passed the “Get stabbed” box, ticking slowly to a spot. It approached the thin spot awarding 500,000 gold.
“Carl, Carl!” Donut cried. “Carl we’re gonna win big!”
Click. Click. Click.
“No!” Donut cried.
It’d stopped on Spin Again.
“Spin again!” Tito shouted. He reached up and spun it again.
Behind me at the roulette table, an NPC screamed. I turned to see the floor open up underneath him, and he fell, disappearing in the hole. His screams got quieter and quieter as he fell. Additional, ethereal screams emanated from the hole, and a ghostly, clawed arm rose up from the darkness before turning into smoke and dissipating. The trap door slammed shut.
“What the hell was that?” I asked.
Tito shrugged as the wheel started to slow. “They also got a Nothing! spot on the roulette wheel. Works a little different though. You have to bet that you won’t land on the spot. But if you do, you’re fucked. That game is much safer than this one, but I got the better prizes.”
“Wait, what?” I said, alarmed. “That’s what happens if I land on ‘Nothing?’”
Tito grinned. “Yeah, the Nothing sure is something.”
I watched in horror as the wheel started to slow, perilously close to Nothing! Click, click… The little needle hung onto the last spot, and I held my breath. The needle settled on a green spot. Holy fuck. That would have served me right.
“Winner!” Tito shouted. I landed on Scroll of Upgrade.
It appeared on the table in front of me. A twenty-minute countdown timer appeared. I’d received one of these before. I had twenty minutes to read it. It upgraded a random one of my currently-equipped items. Mordecai had warned me last time not remove anything before reading it as the system tended to fuck you over if you did that. The last time I’d done this, it had added to my boxers.
I picked up the scroll, took a breath, and read it.
I felt my foot buzz. I looked down to see my toe ring glowing.
Enchanted Toe Ring of the Splatter Skunk. (Upgraded)
The item has been upgraded once.
Imbues wearer with +10 Strength and gives +5 to the skill Powerful Strike. Also, it’s a toe ring. It’s probably uncomfortable and it makes you look like one of those hippie assholes who sit around in a field juggling and hula-hooping all day.
The toe ring had gone from +3 in Strength to +10, adding 7 points. But more importantly, my Powerful Strike skill went up two additional skill levels. I had a base of seven with the skill, so with the plus five and the one more from my gauntlet, I had a skill of 13, which meant after all my other skill upgrades with punching and kicking, my damage was now multiplied by 13. Just two levels more before I started to see some serious upgrades and benefits. The closer I got it to 20, the more godly my damage became.
“Want another go?” Tito asked.
“Yeah, no,” I said. “I think my gambling days are over for now.”
Tito appeared disappointed. He looked forlornly at his knife. “Suit yourself.”
“What’re we doing now?” Donut asked.
“We’re going back to base,” I said. “We have an hour of training to do, I need to build a few things at the table, and then we’re going to crash the shit out of a train.”
A note from DoctorHepa
Happy weekend! I just watched the movie Vivarium on Prime, and I really liked it. Most people seem to hate it, but I'm a big fan of weird movies about aliens. Though that kid made the kid from Babadook seem pleasant. Seen any good scary or sci-fi movies lately? Give me recommendations!
* * *
Chapter 83
We returned to find Hekla sitting on the couch in our base drinking an Arby’s milkshake.
“What do you think?” she asked, jumping up the moment we appeared. She held out her arms. She spilled some of the shake onto the couch.
“No eyeshadow,” Donut said. “She doesn’t wear makeup. And she’s a lot bigger. But you did a really good job.”
Only then did I see the name over her head said “Katia.”
“Wow,” I sai
d after a moment. “That’s really good. If I was Hekla I’d be weirded out right now, but that’s great. Are you able to change the name over your head?”
“Sort of,” she said. “It’s an ability called ‘Walk in Their Shoes,’ and my race came with a level-5 in the skill. It only lasts for five minutes, and I can only turn it on if my appearance matches their appearance by at least 90%. This Hekla is only 65%. It’s the best I can do.”
“It looks a lot better than 65% to me,” I said. “It had me fooled.”
“I’m working on it. I bought a new table that Mordecai told me about. It’s called a Makeup Table, and at level three, I can superimpose the face of any monster or crawler or NPC I’ve met on the glass, which makes sculpting much easier. Plus it doesn’t hurt when I sit at the table, and now I can save three designs and call them up on demand. Once I get it to level five, it supposedly comes with a full-sized mirror so I can do the rest of the body just as easily.”
“Level three? You used your upgrade coupons?” I asked, trying my best not to sound horrified.
“Yes I did. It is so much easier now. I think I’ve perfected my blocking build, too.”
Mordecai was going to be pissed. I knew he wanted to talk her into using the two upgrade coupons on his own alchemy table. I supposed they were her coupons. Still, using them on upgrading a skill that was only moderately useful seemed like a colossal waste. But now that she had it, we were going to have to get creative with her shapes.
“We have some more armor for you,” I said as Donut piled the greaves, shoulder pads, and helmet onto the ground. These were all from the assassin. They gave a combined upgrade to +8 in her Strength and +4 to her Dexterity. But more importantly, it added to her mass.
“Where did you get this stuff? Oh my God, Donut. What happened?” She’d finally noticed the skull over the cat’s head. Her form shifted, and she returned back to her normal self, her real version I’d only seen up in the production trailer. The only difference was she kept her purple mohawk instead of her normal black hair. And the knee-high boots. She was also much taller, thanks to her increased mass.
“Oh it was but a trifle,” Donut said. She licked her paw, as if it truly was nothing. “A poor crawler thought he could keep up with me, and I accidentally had to rip his throat out. Honestly, I barely remember the incident. I did have a cherry or two too many. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have training to do.”
She flipped her tail and walked into the training room.
Katia raised an eyebrow and looked at me. I shrugged. “I’ll tell you about it later. We have a busy day ahead of us.”
* * *
I used my hour to train my Bare Knuckle skill. I really needed to work on my Powerful Strike, which was a more general, catch-all fighting skill than the punching-only Bare Knuckle, but since I’d practiced it the day before, I wanted to see if training it two days in a row would level it up. It worked. My skill moved up to level nine just before my hour was up. Donut spent her time practicing her Dodge skill, leveling it up to seven, which meant she now had access to that training guild.
From there I spent another hour working on a few different items at the engineering bench. After, I moved to my sapper table. I utilized my Demolition Workshop tab for the first time, which allowed me to remove bombs from my inventory and examine them, pulling up schematics and information about the bomb’s content and yield. It also told me an item’s rate of decay under different stress environments, something that would be important to know. It was a lot to take in. I dared going to use the rest room twice, both times to quickly consult my book. I experimented my bomb deconstructing skill by taking apart several fused hob-lobbers. The fuses themselves could be useful. The stability of bombs and explosives did not degrade at all when I stood at the bench, allowing me the freedom to cut sticks of dynamite in half or bundle them together.
While I did that, Donut spent the time attempting to ride Mongo. After about ten minutes of coaxing, she finally managed to leap onto the saddle. The moment she landed on the dinosaur’s back, a translucent strap appeared, wrapping around Donut’s waist, affixing her to the saddle.
Mongo screeched and bucked like a bronco, causing me and Katia to stop what we were doing and laugh. While Donut was magically attached to the saddle, but there appeared to be a limit to the adhesiveness, and she was thrown multiple times. Eventually, he calmed down, but he looked miserable. He didn’t move from his spot in the middle of the crafting room. He just stood there, eyes pleading. The dinosaur gave me a look that said, get this thing off of me.
“How are you going to control him?” I asked. “There aren’t any reins.”
“Mongo and I have a psychic bond, Carl. You’ve never been a mother, so you wouldn’t understand.”
Mongo suddenly squealed and bucked, tossing Donut halfway across the room. She hissed, poofing out before landing on all fours atop Mordecai’s alchemy table, causing vials and supplies to scatter.
“Mongo, bad!” she cried as Katia and I howled.
Mongo grunted in derision and rolled onto his back in an attempt to dislodge the saddle.
“You’re gonna need more than a psychic bond,” I said.
* * *
After chatting further with Imani, we ended up taking the yellow line down to the transfer station at 149. We spent most of the time in carriage number five, chatting with the conductor, a woman dwarf who reminded me of Eunice, the dwarf mother of one-armed Ricky Joe. She didn’t have any more information than the last two conductors, but she insisted on making us tea, which ended up granting an additional 5% buff to our intelligence stat for the day.
We spent the trip doing hit and run raids on the monsters entering the car. One of the groups were flying snakes, encased in metallic, scaled armor, like worms stuffed into bendy straws. They were called Frying Eels. They had a heat attack. They didn’t shoot actual fire out of their mouths, but they would open their jaws wide, and anything close would melt. Luckily, we could snipe at their wings from afar, and the act of falling usually killed or stunned them. Their fragile wings were ridiculously tiny, and the corpses of the eight-foot-long snakes had to weigh upwards of a quarter ton. By the time we reached stop 149, the interior of some of the passenger cars was a melted and scorched mess. I took all of their armor tubes into my inventory.
Earlier, Imani and crew had spent some time “interrogating” one of the conductors on the Beige line, getting a list of all the joining trains on the upcoming transfer stations. Bautista did the same on the Canary line. After spending some time writing it all down, we’d come up with a plan.
Station 149 intersected with both the purple and ochre line, making it the perfect location for our catch-an-engineer plan. After we were done with our little experiment, which we’d inflict onto the ochre line, Donut and I could take the purple to 283 and catch the Nightmare Express, which would allow us to check out this mysterious stop number 436, which was one higher than the “end of the line” stop 435 of all the colored lines. Since the Nightmare Express was one of the rare trains that moved in a loop, we could return to the red/yellow station 83 and start over if it turned out to be a bust. At the same time, team Meadow Lark were currently working their way through stop number 250. I was waiting for their report. Their next transfer station after that—251—also intersected with the ochre line, which would be important.
Bautista meanwhile was making his way to the almost-end-of-the-line stop number 433 on the Canary line, which also intersected with the Ochre line along with almost two dozen others, including a few non-colored lines. We assumed this last transit station would be big, bigger than normal. What we found today would determine his next move.
“What I really need is a multimeter. One at the end of a long stick,” I said as the four of us stood at the platform to the ochre line number 149. I leaned over to stare at the three rails down on the track. “We don’t even know if this is really electrified or not. But that third rail is raised off the ground and uses insulators
. There’s a possibility they’re fucking with us. Or worse, the grounding is jacked to hell, and anything that goes down there will catch an arc.”
“So how are we going to figure it out without getting ourselves zapped?” Katia asked, also leaning over to peer out onto the track.
“Do you want me to send a clockwork Mongo down there?” Donut asked.
“No, but that’s a really good idea,” I said. “I want to test these things first.”
I pulled a curved metal rod from my inventory with the wired hob-lobber fuse. I’d made several of these earlier for just this sort of thing. I tossed it out onto the tracks, connecting the two main rails with the third rail. Pop! The hob-lobber fuse blew the moment it hit the metal. The metal stick continued to crackle and glow. A moment later it vibrated itself off the third rail. It finally stopped crackling. I didn’t see any arcing.
“Well, something is hot down there. And we know the fuse works.” I repeated the experiment, tossing the fuses onto each of the three rails, just to be certain. The only time the fuse blew was when it hit the third rail and something else. That made me reasonably certain that the hot line was the third rail, as it should be. I still wasn’t confident we wouldn’t get a shock if we touched the main track, but the fact the tracks were physically grounded suggested we would be fine. Famous last words, I thought.
Just to be extra certain, I allowed Donut to cast Clockwork Triplicate on Mongo. She’d leveled the spell up to five, which now allowed the two duplicates to exist for 10 minutes. The robot dinosaurs both had little saddles on them now. She then ordered the two dinos down onto the tracks. The moment one of them touched the third rail, it exploded, showering the platform with little gears and springs. Both Mongo and the other dino squawked with concern.
A train pulled up, bumping and crunching over the metal on the track. I cringed as it hit and destroyed the second clockwork Mongo. Since this was the ochre line, it was full of mobs we hadn’t seen yet. They ranged from lumpy wolf monsters with tentacles to small, fairy-like skunks that clutched onto butcher knives three times bigger than themselves. Donut blasted a pair of the skunks as the door opened. While she did that, I spray-painted a big X on the side of the carriage. We stepped back as it pulled away.