James A. Hunter
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Wasteland Warlords Episode 3: Chapter 2 - Voodoo Throw Down
🕑 Added 2022-11-11 19:00:08 +0000 UTCSurprise! In honor of Veterans Day, here's a bonus chapter coming at you and there's one more on the way later tonight. Happy Friday here's hoping you have a great weekend. Thanks to all the vets who served out there!
Clay swung the door open. The throne room was dimly lit with can lights, set high in the ceiling overhead, and more spook-rave music was pulsing in the background. Incense cones burned inside the sort of grim reaper, wizard, dragon themed incensors he used to see in gas stations on I-70, pouring waterfalls of smoke down to cover the floor in a thick patchouli-scented fog.
Barely a yard in front of the door loomed a massive red and black velvet wingback chair. Definitely the Haunt Topic throne. A long, thick leg encased in black skinny jeans and a thick-soled warboots buckled all to hell hung lazily over one arm of the chair while a scaly green tail curled around the back.
No question where the dungeon lord was, then.
Griff darted past Clay and hooked left around the throne, faster on his feet than a guy his age had any right to be, hands burning cobalt with balls of arcane flame.
Clay tucked the butt of his M4 into his shoulder pocket and broke right. With his Hatchling Naga’s Band of Quickstrike, keeping up with Griff’s head start wasn’t a problem. His eyes locked on the voodoo daddy dungeon lord.
In addition to those giant boots and skinny jeans, the Lizardman was wearing a bloodred A-frame under an undersized vest. Whether he was showing off his massive guns or the intricate network of glowing tattoos covering his arms, chest, and neck was hard to say; both were equally impressive. Perched on his head at a jaunty angle was a worn tophat decorated with a rattlesnake’s fanged skull backed by dozens of hair-covered tarantula legs. It looked like something off a My Chemical Romance album cover.
Apparently, the guy had been kicking back with what was either a goblet of blood or an especially dark cab-sauv. He blinked at the sudden appearance of intruders in his dungeon, reptilian lids slicing across his eyes from the side.
Clay opened fire before Voodoo Daddy could move, sending three rounds straight for his chest. Blue light strobed as Griff lobbed one of his magical bombs.
With a sound like a rattlesnake warning its predators to back off, a shell of ghostly energy surrounded the lizardman, absorbing the M4’s rounds and detonating the arcane fireball harmlessly.
As if he was barely inconvenienced, the lizardman stood up to his full eight-foot height and tossed back the last of his drink.
Clay didn’t like to waste ammo, but out of the corner of his eye, he could see Joe and Alex waiting for their chance to come up from behind. He and Griff just needed to keep the dungeon lord distracted. He fired again, while Griff lobbed another fireball from his corner of the room.
The blue fireball and first two shots bounced off that force field with a rattlesnake sound, but the third of Clay’s shots sliced through, shattering the ghostly wall like it was made of glass.
It seemed the protective barrier only had so many hits it could take. Clay swapped the M4 for his Wand of Lesser Inferno. Time to see how much damage he could get through before the lizardman repaired his magical shield.
The Voodoo Daddy dungeon lord saw the weapon swap and chuckled, showing rows of needlelike teeth. He reached into his vest. Out came a little clay pot.
Clay fired off an Inferno Lance, the first of its eight shots for the day.
With his free hand, the lizardman made a sweeping gesture and a wave of force slapped the Inferno Lance aside. It skittered off target and slammed into a wall, almost taking out Griff in the process.
Before Clay could fire again, Voodoo Daddy flipped the lid off the clay pot with his thumb claw and dumped a toxic-looking green powder into his hand. Taking a deep breath, he blew the powder at Clay.
Clay didn’t know what the powder was, but he damn sure knew he didn’t want to be hit with it. He tucked and rolled. Where he’d been standing, a cloud of hissing green fumes ate into the stonework of the wall and disintegrated a wizard-themed incent holder.
A crackling blue ball of energy arced through the air from Griff. It slammed into the lizardman’s side, staggering him, but still not taking him down. Voodoo Daddy grabbed a second clay pot and lobbed it at Griff. It shattered musically on the stone floor, and the powder swirled into rumbling lightning storm. The old weed tried to dodge a brilliant green bolt, but it caught him between the shoulders. With a startled shout, Griff went sprawling.
Bertha roared.
“Eat chainsaw, Komodo breath!” Joe raced around the throne, mech suit clanking, wielding the Poulan Pro Classic overhead.
The Voodoo Daddy dungeon lord didn’t even blink. He pulled a blowgun from his hip and brought it to his scaly mouth with the practiced smoothness of a lifelong competitive shooter. Pfoom. A black-feathered dart whispered out of the barrel and planted itself in Joe’s neck.
Black poison raced through the veins of his throat, visible even through his skin. Joe stopped in his tracks, Bertha wavering overhead. Her engine idled out, then died off. Slowly, like a felled tree, Joe collapsed forward. He landed with a racket that sounded like someone kicked a trashcan full of pots and pans down a stairwell.
Chonk leapt off the top of the throne, chittering, and landed on Voodoo Daddy’s scaly head, denting in the top hat with his flabby little body. For a couple seconds, the lizardman was caught up trying to tear a rabid trashpanda off his face.
Seeing the opportunity, Clay cast Sludge Slick on the spot where the dungeon lord stood.
[A thin sheen of oily sludge, appears within line of sight of the caster and lasts for 1 minute before evaporating. The sludge is extremely slick and has a small chance of causing those in the Area of Effect to slip.]
An unseen force ripped the magicka out of Clay like a pitbull tearing meat off a bone. Casting spells without the benefit of Incant powers was no cake walk, but a puddle of oil appeared beneath Voodoo Daddy’s boots.
The lizardman slipped and skidded in the oil as he wrestled with the angry mechacoon. Finally, one boot shot out from beneath him, and he slammed down onto his back in the sludge.
“Havoc!” Bacon Bits’s voice echoed through the throne room.
The lizardman ripped Chonk off his head and tossed the mechacoon aside… just in time to see Alex sprinting around the throne with the teacup pig riding shotgun in her vest pocket.
Clay couldn’t get off another shot without potentially hitting his wife or Bacon Bits. He cussed under his breath and took off running, trying to get a better angle on his target.
Meanwhile, Voodoo Daddy was reloading his blowgun.
At the edge of the puddle of sludge Alex leapt, cocking back the kama end of her kusarigama like a nightstick.
“Havooooc!” Bacon Bits squealed again, pumping one chipped hoof as she and Alex flew through the air.
Without batting a reptilian eyelid, the lizardman fired off the dart.
Alex twisted out of the way in midair. Except the dart didn’t miss. It made an impossible right-angle turn and slammed into the meat of her deltoid between the samurai kotes and her body armor vest.
“Alex!” Bacon Bits wailed.
Clay’s gut knotted instinctively, even though he knew Alex would be all right. When she’d become an Incant, she’d inherited Immunity to all poisons, diseases, and filth from Katotes. It was going to take more than a little blow dart to put her down. Instead of dropping like Joe had, Alex snapped out her kama and cracked Voodoo Daddy in the jaw. He slid backward in the sludge while Alex and Bacon Bits landed in a three-point crouch.
“How—” the lizardman hissed, but the flaming spiked flail at the other end of the kusarigama slammed home just then, knocking him back even farther.
Right at Clay’s feet.
Clay aimed the Wand of Inferno, point blank.
With a chuckle, Voodoo Daddy hissed out a curse that shook the whole throne room and turned Clay’s stomach, the whispered words booming like thunder.
As the Inferno Lance sliced toward the lizardman’s face, a theremin wailed out an eerie note and howling ghosts exploded off the Voodoo Daddy’s skin, absorbing the brunt of the impact. The Inferno Lance detonated. The force of the blast kicked Clay in the chest like an angry mule, knocking the air from his lungs, and throwing him back several feet. For a split-second, his skin seared, then everything went black.
Next thing Clay knew, he was staring up at the can lights in the throne room ceiling. It felt like somebody had taken a baseball bat to his ribs and swung for the fences. He groaned and rolled onto his side, fumbling in his drop pockets for a health potion.
“I might have known it was you, ᵶᶓᶉ⸞ᴞᴥᴪᵑᴎᴔᴚ†,” the lizardman sneered. Bacon Bits’s real name slithered off his forked tongue in a sound like rustling scales. “You were a fool to return.”
“You were a fool to believe the Great Blue Wyrm of Vengeance would never return to you, Saurian!” Bacon Bits stood, tiny and mostly helpless, but clearly not cowed. Her beady eyes flashed with a draconic anger way bigger than her teacup pig britches.
It looked like she was trying to block Alex’s body from the Voodoo Daddy with her own teacup-sized potbelly. Why Alex needed protection, Clay couldn’t figure out at first. His wife was still on her feet, but she was surrounded by some kind of mini forest of yellowed twigs.
Wait, was that—? Clay blinked and looked closer. The twigs were bones. Skeletal hands had emerged from the floor and were wrapped around her ankles and calves, dragging her backward, away from the lizardman. Alex tried to smash her way clear with her fist and kusarigama, but for every pair of bony hands she crushed, a dozen more took their place.
“Fool I may be, but at least I am no coward,” the teacup pig sneered. “I have come to challenge you as a true dungeon lord ought to—face to face, tooth to claw—while we are both awake.”
Voodoo Daddy threw back his scaly head and laughed. “Hard to call it tooth to claw when you have a small army doing your bidding. Tell me of your heroics when they are serving me.” Again, he reached into his seemingly bottomless vest.
What he pulled out looked like somebody had grabbed it off a 3D printer unfinished. It was made of gray-white plastic and had an oversized head and chibi body, but otherwise its features were completely blank.
“Now, Joe!” Bacon Bits squealed.
With a roar of afterburners, Joe rocketed across the throne room and slammed into the lizardman’s side, bearing him to the ground. They rolled across the stone floor, mech clanking and lizard tail slapping in turns.
Bacon Bits sprinted, hooves clopping, toward an alcove filled with knickknacks. On the highest shelf, Clay spotted a huge, scaly blue dragon’s claw. That had to be the token used to curse her, trapping her in the body of a tinny piglet instead of the Great Blue Wyrm she claimed to be.
He didn’t see the problem until Bacon Bits skidded to a stop in front of the shelf. The teacup pig only stood about two feet high, even on her back hooves. That claw was way out of her reach. Clay could never make it there in time to help, Griff was down for the count, and Alex and Joe were both entangled with their own fights.
Thinking quick, Clay shouldered his M4. With the eagle-eye skill he’d developed thanks to a boost from several stat potions, he took aim and shot out the bracket holding up the left side of the shelf.
Without the support, the shelf slanted down a good foot and the claw, a stack of incense sticks, and a half a dozen of those completed chibi figures like the one the lizardman had pulled out of his jacket slid off and toppled to the floor.
Bacon Bits’s eyes lit up when she saw her lost claw within her reach. She leapt for it, hooves stretching out in front of her.
A sound like a semi crashing head-on into a steel guard rail screeched through the room. The lizardman had thrown Joe halfway to the throne. The lizardman was a bit worse for the ware, however. He was bleeding from his mouth and had some new road rash showing through a rip in his skinny jeans. And boy did he look pissed.
“I should have zombified you years ago, you overambitious little Grub,” he snarled. Holding the blank figurine high, he roared out a curse that made dust and rubble rain from the ceiling. “Damned souls at my behest, doom one more soul to my eternal service!”
Just as Bacon Bits’s chipped hoof grazed the draconic claw, a massive ghostly green hand erupted from the blank figurine and snatched her up off the floor, huge fingers wrapping tightly around her petite form, squeezing out a startled oink
The claw clattered to the floor and shattered.
“No!” Alex screamed, hacking and slashing at the skeletal hands, trying to get to her tiny pal. “Bacon Bits!”
“Alex, run!” the little pig cried.
Clay fired off round after round at the lizardman, but the laughing Voodoo Daddy casually conjured another shield and every shot bounced harmlessly away.
The spectral hand dragged the squealing Bacon Bits through the air and sucked her into the blank figurine clutched in the Voodoo Daddy’s palm. In a flash of cancerous emerald light, the teacup pig disappeared, and the figurine shifted from a mostly formless humanoid to a cartoonishly adorable Blue Wyrm with an oversized head, giant eyes, and rounded fangs.
Leathery hands grabbed Clay under the arms and hauled him to his feet, his shattered ribs screaming at the movement.
“We can’t win this, lad,” Griff barked. “If she’s truly bent to his will now, we’ll be fighting a dungeon lord and his enslaved Great Blue Wyrm.”
Clay’s hand finally found a magicka potion in a drop pouch. He downed it, making a quick scan of the room.
By the throne, Chonk slapped Joe’s cheek, waking him from that last impact. Joe groggily shook his head and stumbled to his feet. The spell of skeleton hands ran out at the same moment, and Alex lurched forward as if she hadn’t been ready for the sudden freedom.
Voodoo Daddy shot them a toothy grin and pulled another blank figurine from his pocket.
“Who wishes to become my next ZombiePop?”
For a second nobody said a word.
Clay cursed under his breath and snatched a magicka potion out of a drop pouch. Using up every bit of his magicka at once, he cast Beguiling Call, Control Lights, and another Sludge Slick.
His head spun and his body went limp, but Griff caught him before he hit the deck. Hanging onto a tenuous thread of consciousness, Clay plunged the throne room into pitch black darkness and whispered a message to Joe and Alex.
“Retreat immediately, no arguments. Out the same way we came in, before Voodoo Daddy makes it out of that sludge puddle.”
It looked like Alex was going to argue, but thank God, Joe scooped her tiny form up before she could throw herself at the dungeon lord. His mech suit whirred and gears smoked as she fought to get free, but the steel and magic managed to hold, even if just barely. Joe dragged her kicking and screaming out the back door.
Clay and Griff limped to the door, which was being held open by a chittering, scolding Chonk. When they made it to the passage, the mechacoon spun around and scampered into the darkness after Joe.
Clay shot a look over his shoulder before following Griff out. He couldn’t see the lizardman in the pitch black, but he could hear his smug chuckle ringing off the walls of the throne room.
Scowling, Clay ducked into the passage, leaving behind their friend’s soul trapped in a plastic ZombiePop and enslaved to the dungeon lord she despised.
