James A. Hunter
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Wasteland Warlords Episode 3: Chapter 1 - Relics of the Past
🕑 Added 2022-11-11 18:00:16 +0000 UTC“If you’re not ready to lay it all on the line out here, you won’t make it a week. The wasteland’ll chew you up and spit you out.”
Clay Jaeger finally has the chance to become the spellslinger he always wanted to be—the one his family needs him to be to survive the dangers of the wasteland. A teacup pig claiming to be a cursed Great Blue Wyrm has offered them a quest to take out a dungeon lord with the exact power set Clay’s been looking for.
There’s just one problem. The dungeon lord can steal the souls of his enemies and summon them to fight his battles for him.
Clay is more than willing to lay down his life to protect his family, but is he willing to risk his eternal soul on a gamble they might not pay off? Time to roll the dice and find out…
***
“There it is!” Bacon Bits squealed, curly tail wagging with excitement. “My dungeon.”
Clay looked off the overpass in the direction of the teacup pig’s chipped hoof as Alex, Joe, Chonk, and Griff crowded around him in a semi-circle.
Down below sat the ruins of a sprawling shopping mall. Unlike most of the urban decay they ran into out in the wasteland, however, this place might not have been destroyed by the Merge and the subsequent twenty years of human abandonment. At least, not entirely.
The wings looked as if they’d been demoed to make way for new construction, then forgotten about. A little off center, at the edge of what might’ve once been the food court, stood a massive, obsidian plantation house straight out of a horror movie about the back streets of New Orleans. It was cheesy antebellum architecture at its finest, complete with a huge double decker porch held up by cracked columns, and a gabled roof crowned with a squared cupola. There was no way in hell that had been an original part of the mall.
Clay had read about places like this before coming to the Wasteland. They were called Artifact Structures.
Twenty years ago, their world had collided with Hearthworld, one of the most popular VRMMOs ever created. Los Angeles had been at the epicenter of the Merge and according to legend, it hadn’t just been monsters that poured through the rift. Buildings, villages, dungeons, even landscape features like mountains and caves had been rudely smashed into the world like a hail of asteroids. The closer the Jaeger squad got to LA the more these Artifact Structures would appear.
Still, this particular structure had clearly undergone some significant design changes in the years since its arrival.
Where the parking lot should’ve been was a lush rolling green field dotted with gnarled trees, cracked stone mausoleums and aboveground vaults covered in kudzu vines and Spanish moss. A thick ground fog swirled through the out of place graveyard, drifted over its leaning steps, and climbed into its shattered windows. Remixed synth music thumped out of unseen speakers, and corpse candles floated over the graves, flashing neon colors in time with the bass. A black fence topped in iron spikes ran around its perimeter, skirted by an uneven cobblestone road that looked like it’d been worn smooth by centuries of horse and foot traffic.
The iron sign over the carriage gate read Haunt Topic.
Joe whistled. “Well, I’ll give the big bad Voodoo Daddy this—he’s got style.”
“No, he doesn’t!” Bacon Bits snapped. “He appeals only to the lowest common denominator pop culture ideal of a voodoo dungeon. There is not an original scale on his body.”
“If that’s what works for you…” Joe shrugged.
Clay ignored them, studying the graveyard barring their path. In order to make it to the front door, they’d have to follow the winding cobblestone street through the displaced cemetery. Problem was, that cemetery wasn’t empty. Creatures shambled and danced around in beat with the unseen music. At first glance, Clay thought they were bright neon skeletons dressed in ancient emo and gothic-hip apparel, but on closer inspection, he realized they were humanoids covered in black grease paint and Dayglo skulls and bones.
“What type of creatures are those?” he asked Bacon Bits, keeping his voice low.
“Hauntsters. They spawn here in droves and spend all their time fawning over the leather corsets, specialty suspenders, novelty shirts, and fingerless gloves.”
“Do they have any special abilities?”
Bacon Bits turned up her snout. “If you consider amassing hoards of minor accessories from something called ‘anime’ a special ability. Many wear pentagrams and carry Voodoo Dolls and Chicken Blood Bombs, but they are only emulating our fool of a dungeon lord.”
“I haven’t had much dealing with the Voodoo school of magic,” Griff said, watching the skeletal rave below with his one good eye. “Wasn’t a part of Hearthworld’s original system. But I’d say treat anything with Bomb in the name as particular dangerous.”
“Same,” Clay agreed.
Seeing they didn’t share her scorn, Bacon Bits turned to Alex, who had become her best friend in the short time they had been helping her.
“I ask you, Alex, is there anything more cliché than a haunted house? When I am on the dungeon lord’s throne, I will return dignity and terror to the office, beginning with a complete renovation from the ground up.”
Alex smiled down at the little pig. “What kind of dungeon will you make it into?”
“Oh, the most formidable and intimidating Wyrm Farm!”
Clay raised an eyebrow. “You might need to reconsider the name.”
“You could call it the Bait Shack,” Joe suggested. “Clay and me used to get worms from a placed named the Bait Shack out on I-44 all the time. Excellent night crawlers. They had this worm casting pile out back, and for twenty bucks—”
“It will not be that type of worm farm!” Bacon Bits snapped. “It will be a battleground for the Draconic Grubs that spawn here to evolve into Great Wyrms of any color they choose, not just the colors the Lizardman believes set off his gothic ambiance. Why, they could even become Great Dull Gray Wyrms or a respectable Taupe.” She sighed. “Imagine the variety!”
“By the way, obvious grammar violation,” Alex said, pointing at Joe. “It should’ve been ‘Clay and I got worms from the Bait Shack.’”
Joe looked at her like she was crazy. “But you don’t even like to fish.”
“I’m talking about how you should have phrased it. Clay, tell him.”
“Let’s focus,” Clay interrupted. This wasn’t the time to play games. Before they’d hit the sack last night, Bacon Bits had dropped the bomb on them that her Voodoo Shaman dungeon lord could steal a soul and turn it into his zombified slave. Clay had been turning over possible scenarios since then, trying to come up with something in their arsenal that would protect them against a spell of that caliber. Unfortunately, all the sleepless night had yielded him was that they needed to take out the dungeon lord before he managed to get off that hit.
He pulled the Camera Obscura out of a drop pouch. It looked like one of those old-fashioned wooden box-style cameras, except it fit in the palm of his hand and was steampunked out with shining brass gears and embossed telescoping lens caps.
╠═╦╬╧╪
Camera Obscura
Durability: 27/49
Properties: Grants a 30-ft circle of invisibility, hiding user and all allies from enemy spy engines, scrying technology, and underlings for up to 20 minutes per charge.
To activate Camera Obscura, press the shutter button.
Charges: 5/6
To charge Camera Obscura, user must kill an elemental chimera of at least level 1, attach a rune of power, or plug in to a 110-volt electrical outlet.
“What you see isn’t always what you get.”
╠═╦╬╧╪
The Camera had come from the Sooq as part of a quest reward. They’d gone after it with the intention of hiding from the drones of the Gearhead Incant Flynn Lynes, but with him out of the picture, they were free to use its magical stealth technology on the spies or lookouts of any enemy they might face.
“Once this is activated, we’ve got twenty minutes undetected.” Clay looked at Bacon Bits. “Is that enough time to get us to the Lizardman?”
“More than enough,” she said. “It is a small matter of getting through the boneyard unmolested by the Hauntsters and taking the passage beneath the Weeping Angel. From there, a short series of unguarded underground corridors will let us out just behind Saurian’s throne. We will meet no resistance until we are face to face with him, then we shall launch a quick and brutal assault, flanking him on all sides before he can cast any of his ritual magic.”
Bacon Bits sounded confident enough, but Clay had his doubts. There were a hundred ways this could go south.
But they did need to take out another Dungeon Lord and they probably weren’t going to get a better chance than this.
Clay knelt down by a stretch of sand that had drifted onto the overpass and started sketching out a rough map. “Here’s the throne. Griff and I go in first—I’ll go right, Griff, break left—guns and magic blazing. When we have his attention over here, Joe and Alex, you come around the back of the throne and hammer him from behind. If everything goes right, we’ll keep the Voodoo Daddy off balance enough to finish him before he gets his bearings and starts firing off that zombie curse at us. While we’ve got him distracted, Bacon Bits, you find your cursed claw—”
“And when I am restored to my true form, we will see how Saurian enjoys fighting the Terror of Santa Clarita, the awakened and furious Great Blue Worm of Vengeance,” Bacon Bits said, her beady little pig eyes flashing in a chillingly draconic way.
“So basically, the plan is to go in heavy and hit him with everything we’ve got.” Alex grinned and cracked her knuckles. “I’m down with that.”
“You would be, Katotes,” Joe said. “Chonk and me are a little more sophisticated. We’re going for less ‘Hulk Smash’ and more ‘Lumberjack Buddies Save the Day’, aren’t we pal?”
Chonk chittered and revved his little hedge trimmer arm in agreement.
Everybody checked their loadout. That job used to take a lot less time back when the Jaegers first came to the IZ and had barely anything but their guns and the body armor on their backs. Now Joe was clanking around in a mech suit, Alex was kitted out with armored samurai sleeves called kote that boosted her already insane Incant Constitution and Strength, and Clay had his trusty Cinderscale Cuirass that granted him +2 Strength, +1 Con, and a passive +18% Fire Resistance Bonus. Even Griff had leveled up his jacket to a brown leather duster with a better armor rating and +2 to Magicka.
They weren’t the same tumbleweeds who had rolled into Camp Liberty a month before, not by any stretch of the imagination. Hell, at the time, taking on a Tier 4 dungeon would’ve been suicide. A total party wipe. But now, with two of them wielding Incant powers, a former NPC on their side, and a bunch of stat potions helping Clay keep up, they were just the squad for the job.
Clay hated that he was their weakest link, but he wasn’t going to let himself get caught up in that. If everything went well today, he just might come out of the Haunt Topic an Incant himself. And they could really use a spell caster to round out their party. Griff had some ranged spells, but he was a melee fighter at heart and better with a sword than he was with an Arcana ball.
“Also, Joe, Alex was right before,” Clay said, now that everybody was on the same page and ready to rock. “It’s ‘Chonk and I.’ The pronoun has to make sense by itself if you take the other person’s name out.”
“Boom,” Alex said, opening her hand as though dropping a mic.
“Huh-uh, you don’t get that point,” Joe protested. “Only grammar violations with official rulings at the time of violation can be counted; it’s not retroactive. As my bank used to say before they closed my account, ‘No backdated checks.’”
“If we are ready, then let us be on our way,” Bacon Bits said cheerfully. “The sooner begun, the sooner Saurian will have his comeuppance.”
“All right, everybody squeeze into the shot,” Clay said, putting an arm around Alex.
Joe leaned over Clay’s shoulder, sticking out his tongue and making rock’n’roll horns at the Camera Obscura. While Griff edged in the side and Chonk climbed onto Joe’s head, Alex snagged Bacon Bits and tucked the teacup pig under her arm.
“Cheese!” everybody said.
Clay thumbed the shutter.
The miniature Edison-style flash bulb went off, sending up a curl of smoke. With a whine, the Camera ticked down to 5/6 charges. Something stabbed into Clay’s palm. Out of a thin, scrollworked slot in the bottom of the box an old-timey photo printed, square and glossy. Somehow the photo managed to capture everyone’s worst side. It floated to the dirt.
“Did the rest of you guys just get a notification that you’re obscured from enemy spies for the next twenty minutes?” Alex asked, her eyes losing focus as she read unseen text.
“Aye,” Griff said.
“Yep,” Joe nodded, and Chonk either agreed or was just nodding to mimic his owner.
Clay checked his Active Effects with the Monocle of True Seeing just to make sure he was covered, too, then slipped the eyepiece back into a pocket on his vest.
“All right,” Clay said, “let’s do this.”
“Hold up!” Joe snatched the photo off the ground and dusted it off. “Aw! Group pic. Now we can look back on this day and say, ‘Remember how young we all were right before we whooped that big bad Voodoo Daddy’s ass?’” He slipped it into the pocket on his sleeveless flannel shirt, then waved his hand to summon his mech suit. He took a deep breath and blew it out with a satisfied grin. “These are the days we’ll cherish forever. Always take a keepsake—write that down, Chonkie, it’s the key to a long and happy life.”
“If you are finished waxing poetic,” Bacon Bits grunted, “then follow me, squadmates.”
The teacup pig led them down an off ramp and around the Haunt Topic’s street level.
As they approached the strange aboveground cemetery, Clay eyed the moss and vines strangling the black iron gate. The greenery was sprinkled with brilliant black, white, and purple striped trumpet flowers. A mundane lizard scampered out of the street, probably following the scent of standing water in the boggy Haunt Topic yard, but it never made it through the fence. The second it brushed a violet-colored petal, it was instantly chomped in half with teeth made of razorblades.
Clay’s eyebrows shot up.
Next to him, Alex said, “Um, do those flowers have teeth made of those emo necklace razors? I swear I just saw a heart on one.”
“They are ridiculous, aren’t they?” Bacon Bits said, rolling her eyes. “What have razorblades to do with voodoo? The theme does not fit. I suspect he just found what remained of the store which stood here earlier and reused it. Much less point-spend that way. When I am the dungeon lord, the Wyrm Farm’s flowers will shoot flame or some other breath attack, and hang the cost. I intend to stay entirely on brand.”
Despite their vicious nature, the snapping vines ignored them as Bacon Bits trotted up to the gate. It was like they didn’t exist at all. She hiked up onto her back hooves and hopped at the gate latch until Clay reached over and opened it for her.
“This is very embarrassing.” Bacon Bits grunted. “I am normally more than equal to the task of opening my own gates. I am very adept at flying, and in my natural form I am many times larger than this ridiculous little potbellied body.” She gave an adorably flustered headshake that made her ears flap. “However, thank you for helping me, Clay. I extend my gratitude.”
He shrugged. “What are squadmates for?”
“Indeed!” She wiggled excitedly. “Oh, I am very much enjoying being part of a team.”
As they skulked in through the gate, Clay kept an eye on the gyrating ravers painted up like Dayglo skeletons. Thanks to the Camera Obscura, none attacked or even seemed to notice as they passed by, but he couldn’t quite make himself relax. He felt like he was in the middle of a circle of claymores, staring down the words FRONT TOWARD ENEMY.
Luckily, Bacon Bits didn’t mess around. She led them straight to a cracked aboveground tomb topped with a weathered statue of a weeping angel.
“Here I must prevail again upon one of you giants,” she said, looking from Clay to Joe. “Stretch your freakishly long arms up and shake the angel’s left hand.”
Joe followed her directions, the gears in his mech suit whirring with the motion.
With a stony rasping sound, the weeping angel’s wings flared out wide and the lid on the vault scraped back, revealing a set of worn stone stairs leading down into darkness.
Alex eyed the staircase skeptically. “You’re sure this entrance is never guarded?”
“Oh, never,” Bacon Bits assured her.
“It’s more an exit than an entry, lass,” Griff said. “Least, that’s the way they used to design ’em back in Hearthworld. The heroes used ’em as a shortcut out after defeating the dungeon lord. I s’pose folk weren’t interested in fighting their way back up through the levels. It was just the way of things. Sometimes old traditions like that’re hard to shake.”
Alex, Griff, Chonk, and Bacon Bits all had dark vision as part of their power sets, and Joe had a pair of ridiculous, rusty goggles that looked like a scientist high on bath salts had tried to redesign NVGs from old junk yard parts. Clay didn’t have dark vision, but he did have the same old workaround humans had been using for centuries: a flashlight. He clipped it to his M4, cast Control Lights, and dimmed it until he was sure the beam wouldn’t reach beyond their circle of Obscurement.
One by one, they filed down into the underground passage, Bacon Bits leading the way.
A weird smell immediately got Clay’s attention. He took a deep breath to make sure he wasn’t mistaking it.
“Is that patchouli?”
“Yes.” Bacon Bits snorted indignantly. “The fog is scented with patchouli incense. Saurian believes it will draw in the ‘right crowd’ of humans to die in his dungeon. I told him that if it has not drawn in anyone in twenty years, it will not begin now, but he refused to hear my words of truth.”
“Artists,” Joe said, shaking his head. “We’re a fickle yet stubborn lot. I remember one time I put together this flamethrowing chicken kaiju for the local Chic-Fil-A, and when it was done, they didn’t want it. They wouldn’t even pay me, if you can believe it!”
“They hired you to fix their drive-thru speaker, and you made them a giant flamethrowing chicken statue instead,” Alex said.
“One,” Joe said, putting up a finger, “show me somebody who thinks a kaiju chicken squawking fire ain’t cooler than a dumb drive-thru speaker and I’ll show you a big fat liar. Two, that’s my point. We artists can’t be trusted to go with the market when the market goes all boring and mundane against our natural inclination to make flippin’ cool stuff. Voodoo Daddy just hasn’t matured as far as I have in my artist journey yet.”
Clay snorted. “That was like a month before we left for the IZ. Didn’t you tell them they could shove their speakers up their ass if they didn’t want the chicken?”
“Yeah, but I’ve grown a lot since then, and I realize now I could’ve made something that made me happy and the customer happy too. Like a giant flamethrowing chicken with the speaker built into the side. Oh! And maybe it lays eggs, but the eggs are your order in an egg-shaped bag!”
Clay and Alex exchanged looks that said exactly how far they thought Joe’s artist journey had progressed, then quietly continued down the passage. Cobweb covered alcoves lined the way, filled with shelves holding an assortment of random plastic junk in ancient yellowing clamshell covers and motheaten cardboard.
“Huh.” Alex leaned in to look at a bright yellow squishy puff ball with a face. “I used to have a Velcro wallet from this anime. Tomagoyama was the adorable sidekick they made all the money on.”
Clay’s flashlight beam fell on a chibi figurine from a Saturday morning cartoon he and Joe had watched when they were kids.
“Check it out.” Clay picked it up and tossed it to his brother. “It’s Hey Doug.”
“Aw, hell yeah!” Joe scanned the shelves. “Do they have one of his dog, Meatchop? Chops was the best.”
With one scarred finger, Griff poked an MCU LXIX: Avengers vs Disney Princesses collectible bobblehead.
“What’re ya supposed to do with ’em?” the old weed asked.
Alex shrugged. “Put them on your shelf or clip them onto your backpack so everybody else at school knows you’re cool. Collect them all.”
“Aha,” Griff said. “Then once you complete the quest and you’ve found all the pieces, they combine to give you a magical ability or special achievement.”
“Nope.” Clay shook his head. “You never find one piece of the collection, you grow up, move out, your mom gets sick of tripping over them, and she sells them all at a garage sale.”
Joe chuckled. “Somebody’s still mad about his Total Metal Alchemist minis.”
“They were collectibles,” Clay growled. “Worth way more than twenty-five cents a bag.”
Alex patted his arm. “It’s okay, nerd. When we’re done with this Saurian guy, we’ll loot you some replacement TMA merch. With all this junk from other shows, they’re bound to have it.”
They passed memorabilia, jewelry, posters, and socks covered with references to Attack on Giant, That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Goo, My Champion Academy, Gabimaru Sumo, and a dozen other old shows. Farther in, racks were set up featuring t-shirts screen-printed with pop, screamo, and metal bands that had been popular twenty years ago or more. They still carried Misfits shirts, which had to be considered classical by now.
Joe rifled through a few racks. “They never have any country-metal bands. Talk about not catering to your audience.”
“Pretty sure country-metal’s audience is just you,” Alex said.
Griff squinted his one good eye at the shirts. “Guess none of these have any magical properties, neither?”
“You could say they give you +2 Cool,” Clay offered, shrugging one shoulder.
“Squadmates, we must focus!” Bacon Bits stomped her chipped hoof on the flagstones. “These worthless miscellanies will give us no aid in defeating Saurian!”
The sharp reproof snapped Clay out of his nostalgia-fueled daze and seemed to do the same for Joe and Alex, too.
“She’s right,” Clay said, a little embarrassed at having gotten so caught up. “We’re here to take a run at a level-20 dungeon lord, not go back-to-school shopping.”
“If I absolutely must say one good thing about Saurian’s décor strategy, it is that these worthless pieces of loot often have this exact effect on humans,” Bacon Bits grunted begrudgingly. “For whatever reason, little bits of plastic serve as an excellent distraction. Every floor of the Haunt Topic is littered with such trinkets. Perhaps I will not dispose of that tactic when I establish the Wyrm Farm.”
Clay cleared his throat and scratched the back of his head. Talk about a sobering look at their species. No wonder humans got so lazy and bogged down in stuff that didn’t matter back on the other side of the wall.
Leaving behind the shrine to consumer culture, they headed deeper into the incense-scented passage. Silence descended upon them as they refocused their attention on the upcoming fight.
After a short time, the floor began to slope steadily upward, and Clay caught sight of light peeking through the cracks of a door ahead.
He turned back to his family and friends. “All right, Griff, you’re with me. Joe and Alex, remember to keep clear of the line of fire. I don’t care how much HP Incants have, I don’t want any accidents. Everybody ready?”
Once everybody had responded in the affirmative, Clay grabbed the door handle.
“Let’s do this.”
