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The Gamer Chapter 1688 – Chase for the Cure 6 – The Past reaching into the Future
🕑 Added 2024-05-30 17:24:18 +0000 UTC
“The Abyssal Aztecs separated their territory into spheres of influence. Their rulership class was headed by three god-warriors that were supposed reincarnations of the lords of the north, east, and west. They, in turn, were underneath their ‘equal but superior’ in the form Huitzilopochtli who would refuse to sit on the throne he inherited from the old pantheon. The god of sacrifice kept the Giant’s Puss at bay, but in return required mass, well, sacrifices. In order not to exhaust the lands, the four courts travelled the Mesoamerican civilizations a sphere at a time.”
“Alright… but did ya hear anything from Lorelei yet?” Rave asked.
The Gamer turned a piece of particularly shaped stone in his hands. Its angles and size indicated that it was supposed to slot into something. “Not yet,” he answered and put the item into his inventory. Velka had dragged it to him, so it had to be important in some way. Observe suggested as much as well.
John could hear Rave’s question coming. “I know, I want to focus on getting her back too, but we got to keep our feet on the ground. Right now, we can deal with this.” He gestured at the temple around them.
They had found a larger outpost of the Diseased Knives shortly after leaving the tiny road marker that they had first discovered. Because every one of these complexes was filled with the tireless undead, they had survived the years without issue. This was fortunate for Momo, since there was a lot to explore. It was also fortunate for John, because it meant that, while the road may have been gone, he could follow the Illusion Barriers like a trail of breadcrumbs.
“I’ll trust ya,” Rave said, reluctantly. “Okay… so what else important is Famine telling us?”
“The Giant’s Puss was too virulent a disease to ever be stomped out fully. It waxed and waned depending on how much the people had to sacrifice. For those that got infected, the Diseased Knives offered a solution.” John descended a steep staircase, following Aclysia. The dragon maid in turn followed Velka and kept her safe from the various mummies crawling out of hidden corners. “The people of this tribe were learned in a way to draw the disease from a target and bind it in themselves. They then carried it but wouldn’t shed it. The disease did not advance in them either, unless they took on more of it. Basically, they sacrificed themselves to cure others.”
“So that’s what these necklaces are about? The whole ‘the Purple gets devoured by the spring water monster’ thing?”
“I would guess so. In any case, the Diseased Knives got incredibly wealthy and influential. Famine says that Huitzilopochtli rewarded them with undeath and eternal servants for their self-sacrifice… but it doesn’t make sense…”
“What do you mean, Master?” Aclysia asked.
“The mummies and Mummy Lords are monsters, by Gaia’s standards,” he explained. “The Grim Reaper’s minions, the run of the mill skeleton and zombie aside, still have the Character Observe windows. These Mummy Lords may have some memories of aspects of personality remaining, but they are not the eternal life promised. They’re animated puppets of Huitzilopochtli, apparently.” He rubbed his chin. “And I still don’t get how a disease that’s plagued a civilization for thousands of years just disappears the moment the Spaniards take over. There’s a rot here. Either Huitzilopochtli was duplicitous from the start or someone even higher up is manipulating information on a massive scale.”
“Ain’t something we can learn unless we meet the god in question,” Rave said.
“Right… but we’re in the western part of this sphere of influence,” John said. “Which means this is the land of Xipe-Totec.” He gestured at a wall painting they passed. Like the one found in Tathnuachan, its paint was still bright. It depicted a warrior of red and yellow skin, covered in an equally red armour.
“Anything we know about that one, Master?”
“Confusingly, in myth he’s the lord of the east, and Quetzalcoatl is the lord of the west, so that is switched around,” John answered. “As for what he embodies, he’s the struggle against nature, the cycle of death and rebirth, and majorly associated with plagues. You can see how that would fit the tribe that sacrifices themselves to overcome a disease… he has a very particular title though.”
“Which is?”
“Our Lord the Flayed One. He’s also the god of skinning people.”
“That’s… wow.” Rave shook her head.
“And goldsmiths.”
Rave gave him some serious side-eye. “Are ya taking the piss?”
“No, it’s just a very long list of things he’s associated with. We’re not going to be looking for him though. We’ll be looking for this Purple Vault. Nahua-xoco-atl-xolotl, that’s what’s sealed there.”
“Atl-xolotl… axolotl?”
“Translated that roughly means ‘Spring water monster girl’,” John said.
“Ah, monster girl, I see why we are looking for her first, “ Rave joked.
“Yes, it’s that part, not the ‘spring water monster’ bit, which keeps cropping up.” John rolled his neck. “Truth be told, if she’s just another Mummy Lord who happened to be good at what she does in life, we won’t get anything out of this. I’m grasping at straws here for a cure that they did not have. The best they ever got to was transferring the disease… but transferring the disease would be a start. Now, what are you up to?”
The question was for Velka. Had it not been for the Magryph, John would have vacated this barrier already. They had deliberately left some of the mummies alive so that the Illusion Barrier wouldn’t collapse in their absence. It was more convenient than to wait for Lee to elevate it to a Protected Space.
Slaying the local Mummy Lord had been about the only notable event. The entity had been level 98. Unlike the first Mummy Lord they ran into, that one had been immediately aggressive. Dispatching of it had been a little more difficult because of various magical mechanisms connected to it that would have collapsed the temple if they had simply torn it to shreds. After teleporting into and dismantling these mechanisms, John had given Aclysia the clearance to kill it.
Which brought them to the current situation.
Velka warbled at the wall. She clawed at it, standing on her hindlegs to do so. She pecked at it, tried to find any gaps in the stone and kept on producing frustrated noises.
John positioned himself next to her. He put his forehead on the wall and concentrated on his additional senses. “All I feel is stone,” he mumbled and backed away. “Either these walls are extremely thick or extremely dense.”
Dropping back on all fours, Velka went to gallop down a hallway. A mummy tried to jump at her, only to have its throat reduced to mincemeat by her talons. The pet was still twice as dangerous as the average Abyssal fighter, by raw Stats.
The rest of the party was fast on her tail, staying close enough that any genuine threat could be neutralized if need be. In her search for shinies, Velka placed a paw on a pressure plate. Aclysia grabbed the swinging blade before it could even leave the wall fully. Velka meowed in gratitude, then continued down the hallway.
Two more times she inspected places along the wall. Then she finally found what she was searching for. The Magryph pulled a loose stone, no larger than a finger, and carried it in her beak to the last place she had been scratching the wall. There, she pressed the stone into the slot, causing a larger piece to become dislodged. That was then carried to another one of the series of spots.
The piece that became loose then was the size of John’s torso. Velka warbled, pecked at it, then ran up to John. “Clever girl,” he complimented her and gave her a few head scratches. A few of them, Velka let pass, then she caught his hand and impatiently dragged him towards the stone. “Guess I have to do it.”
“As you say, Master.” Aclysia pulled her hands away from the stone. Letting himself get dragged to the stone, John picked it up, then followed Velka to that first spot. The painting on the wall sported a gap that the stone fit into.
‘Now what are they hiding here?’ John asked himself and pushed the key into the slot. The wall slid aside, revealing a long corridor. Its walls, ceiling and floor were formed from retreating segments that had previously locked into each other. Stone folded into stone.
Velka sprinted towards the mountain of gold that was piled up at the end. Purring and warbling, the Magryph rolled around on top of the coins and various other items. “You can take one,” John told her. Immediately, the bird-cat turned to him. The intensity of the motion made her ears wobble. “Don’t look at me like that, we can’t carry all of this and Momo will have a brain aneurysm if we move things unnecessarily.”
“Hey, John, I think this is interesting.”
The Gamer turned towards his girlfriend, then looked at the wall before her. “Oh, wow,” he muttered.
Before him was a massive, stylized map of the area. The temple they were in was clearly marked. It laid on the western spoke of the eight-segmented wheel that was painted underneath the other icons. At the centre of the wheel was a massive temple. It was surrounded by a three-segmented wall. The symbol of the dagger and the Giant’s Puss were on it, alongside one that John could not understand. It was some kind of bird in the process of dying but not completely gone yet.
“A hummingbird?” John wondered. “In Aztec culture that’s a bird that stands for renewal. A dying bird of renewal….”
“’Hope for the dagger that absorbs the Giant’s Puss is not yet dead’, maybe?” Rave suggested.
“Or the hope is dying,” Aclysia supplied a more sombre interpretation.
John wasn’t sure. His eyes instead turned to the south-eastern of the spokes. It was painted with the most detail out of everything in the picture. Crimson and with a texture of interwoven branches, like a wicker carpet, it appeared. A representation of the same kind of material that they had found in Tathnuachan.
“What is it,” John wondered.
“A siphon,” Nia answered.
The trio of explorers turned to find the elusive blonde scratching Velka behind her ears. The Magryph was warbling in a complaining tone, then meowed most miserably.
“One item,” the pariah insisted, much to the shock of the chimera. Giving the black-white pet a gentle nudge, Nia sent Velka to forage and turned to John. “They’re siphons. Remember the Ichor Stakes?”
John nodded. “You went back to them?”
“Yes. The stakes they drive through the heart of their buried, they’re supposed to be rammed through at the last moments of life not after they have perished.” Nia stood up, then directed her gaze at the ceiling. “We are standing in the shadow of something enormous.”
“Another Death Zone?” John asked.
Nia shook her head. “Larger. Different. Monstrous in another way. I do not know, but I feel hungry eyes all around us. We are standing in a sphere of influence.”
“…What particular choice of words,” John mumbled. “Then these carpets of stakes are mass burial sites?”
“I am not certain. They are siphons, I was able to confirm that much. The Ichor Stakes use them wrong but they make them right. They draw the soul from the body.”
“Strong souls leave behind a strong husk… the Mummy Lords.” John put the pieces together. “Huitzilopochtli’s sacrifices.”
“Maybe. I went into the cenote. There were signs of a ritual there too. Dropped obsidian daggers and paintings on the wall. A blue warrior dead at the foot of an empty throne. I think the blue warrior is Huitzilopochtli.”
John thought back to the painting in Tathnuachan. If Nia was right, then the picture there had been Huitzilopochtli vomiting out of the Giant’s Puss, with some kind of bird crawling out among the mist. “I hate pictographs…” he mumbled. “Letters make everything so much easier.”
Velka meowed and presented a coin to John. It was made not of gold but obsidian, shaped with a level of precision via magic that even Gnome would have found impressive. Holding it up to the light that his Companion Cube created, he inspected it more carefully.
“You absolutely brilliant bird,” John muttered.
On the coin was a map. Symbols, so tiny John would not have been able to read them had he not been beyond superhuman, surrounded the rim of the coin. The same two symbols were repeated on the entire length: an empty circle, a hole, and a full circle. It could have been understood as simple decorations. It was too intricate to just be that.
Observe confirmed what John was hoping for.
“This the hole,” he said excitedly, whirling around on his heels. “The hole in the map. The people did something there that they did not want the gods to know.”
“Why not?” Rave asked.
“Probably because they thought that they had something to do with it. Whether they’re right or wrong hardly matters, only that there was a last hope worth hiding.” John placed the coin safely in his inventory. “There’s a map on that coin. Between our map, the wall here, and this, we can find this sealed area.”
John was not surprised to find Nia at the top of the steps that led back out of the ziggurat. That she had just been behind him was more a suggestion than anything else. She wrapped her arms around his neck, stopping him from keeping up his urgent stride. A slow smile spread on her face. She had just remembered to show her happiness.
They exchanged a quick kiss, the Gamer and the pariah. She held onto him, swaying to an unheard music. He danced with her in little circles atop the great pyramid. “We won’t see each other for a while?” he guessed.
“Yes,” she confirmed. “The entity observing you is blind to me. I will use that to our advantage.” Nia placed a hand on the side of his face. She smelled like nothing, but her touch was still warm. “Do not be too harsh on my former countrymen.”
With that, the pariah was suddenly gone. Her warmth lingered and John sighed. He turned around and was actually surprised to find that Nia was still there. The pariah was taking a moment to give goodbye kisses to the other two haremettes. “Are the Illuminati in the area?” he took the chance to ask.
“I have seen some of them during my wanderings,” Nia confirmed, then actually was gone for good.
‘I wonder if she has the habit of dropping cryptic hints because she was raised by the Rat,’ John thought. ‘Would be far from the first bit of communication issues she has because of that particular parent.’
And at that moment, he finally got a message from Lorelei.
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