“Your face is a mess, Hiccup.”
The goblin uses his brass arm to wipe his lips and somehow manages to transfer some of the lemon pepper sauce to his pink topknot.
Damn goblin.
Orange haired Zaena with her dragon features and slim physique is beside herself. She’s pacing, her shoulders tensing and untensing as she plots her revenge. “We can return now,” she says without greeting Ryuk. “We will kill Tamana. I will personally see to it that–”
“Ha! You already said that, Liz.” The goblin returns to his tray of food and greedily wolfs down another dragon wing. “From what I recall, you were the first one to die, or was it FeeTwix?”
She turns to him and her eyes narrow. “Choose your next words carefully.”
“Yeah? Well fick you too.” He waves his hands in the air, tossing lemon pepper sauce onto the wall. “Any-fickin’-hoo, Tammy will get hers, as soon as I get mine.” He pops another dragon wing in his mouth. “And boy fick, are these good! I’m telling you guys, this place has one helluva chef!”
“Riptak jatla blanktakh boomboom morrha.”
“My mother wasn’t a whore, at least on the weekdays, and a prerequisite for being a goblin is to be greedy and filthy, as I’ve told you. That said, I’m far from stupid, Liz, and seriously, if you’re that fickin’ mad at Tammy, why don’t you walk your scaly ass down to their guild, let yourself back in, and again have your ass handed to you by someone practically half your level.”
Hiccup’s platter of dragon wings flips up into the air, scattering the sauce and the food onto the bed. A short ax appears in his hand and he points it at Zaena.
They hold each other’s gaze for a moment and she’s the first to look away.
Zaena huffs, her eyes turning to little slits. Hiccup starts picking his wings off the bed and eating them. “Got to eat them while they’re hot,” he reminds Ryuk.
FeeTwix: You want to take the lead or should I?
Ryuk: I got it.
Skill level up!
Skilclass="underline" Inspire Others
Level Two: By inspiring others, you induce them to follow your orders. Higher levels allow for manipulation of enemies and random strangers.
Requirements: LUCK > 8
“There are a number of things that need to be discussed,” Ryuk tells his guildmates, “and before we get to Tamana, and what happened, I’d like to share with you what I witnessed in the basement of the Shinigami’s guildhall. I think it’d be best to start there.”
“I was going to ask about that,” FeeTwix says, his eyes blue as ever.
“It was a door.”
“A door?” Hiccup uses his clawed finger to scoop a hunk of lemon pepper sauce off his chest armor. He sticks the finger in his mouth and sucks on it for a moment. From there, his finger goes into his nose, where he digs around briefly, finds something worth examining, examines it, considers eating it, reconsiders, and flicks it in Zaena’s direction.
“It was a door to another dimension, a portal of sorts.”
“The room was?” Zaena asks.
“No, the room was empty; the door was in the center of the room. Imagine a door right here in front of us.” Ryuk points at an empty space. “The door was open, which is why I could sense so much algomagic. Inside was a completely empty void filled with stars. That’s not all … a voice spoke to me from inside this space.”
Hiccup’s eyes go wide. “Gee fick, Marbles, don’t scare me this late at night!”
“What did the voice say?” asks the Swede.
“It beckoned me forward, asked me to enter the space.”
“For fick’s sake, that’s the last thing I would have done.” Hiccup starts biting the nails of his one good hand. “Fick, I hate ghosts.”
“Don’t worry, Hiccup, I’ll protect you,” FeeTwix offers.
“Yeah? Good. At least someone cares.”
“I don’t know if it was a ghost or not,” Ryuk says. “I couldn’t see it completely, but what I could see looked like a giant snake that for some reason – and this may be my imagination here – she seemed human.”
“The snake was a woman?” Hiccup nods to Zaena. “Everyone knows female snakes are especially evil. Just look at Liz over there. She’s practically half-snake!”
FeeTwix steps in front of Zaena and stops her from lodging one of her throwing knives in the goblin’s throat. “Relax, babe,” he says. “We’re all upset right now in our own ways. Hiccup,” he turns to the goblin, “keep your bullshit to a minimum. Otherwise, I’ll equip the haunted doll I have in my inventory list and let her play with you.”
The color drains from Hiccup’s face. “That doesn’t sound like a good type of play.”
“Believe me, it isn’t.”
After his guildmates have settled, Ryuk continues. “The woman used her power to pull me towards her. I fired a black marble at the doorframe just in time and the door slammed shut. That wasn’t the end of it. As soon as it shut, it was like a hurricane had spawned in the middle of the room or something. Tiles were flying and I barely, barely made it out in time.”
“And then you ran up the stairs and found us battling the final mage,” adds FeeTwix.
“That’s exactly what happened.”
Hiccup grimaces. “And then that bitch Tammy stabbed us all in the back. What, Marbles? I can’t call her a bitch now? Don’t cringe at me!”
“You most definitely can,” Zaena seethes, “and I will call her much worse when I stand over her lifeless corpse.”
“Talk about Viagra for a goblin – I love it when Thulean gals get aggressive!” The pink dollop of hair on his head ruffles. “Not the hair, Liz! Keep your goddamn ghost limbs to yourself!”
“There’s more.” Ryuk steadies his gaze on FeeTwix. “My hallucinations have also returned.”
(0)__(0)
Ryuk takes a moment to tell them about the Attla spider in his room, how his hand passed through it and how the hallucination didn’t disappear this time, as the Thulean warrior did when he had his first hallucination.
FeeTwix’s eyes go wide.
“What is it?”
“How much does Tamana know about NPCs trying to take people’s iNet feeds in the real world? What did you tell her?”
“She knew it was happening through resetters,” Ryuk says. “That’s it.”
“Listen carefully to what I’m about to ask you next: did she know about the experiments in the 2050s? Remember those? The one you told us about in which an NPC actually took a humandroid’s body. Did you tell her this?”
Ryuk shakes his head. “I don’t think so.”
“Either you did or you didn’t, Marbles, answer the man!”
“Stop yelling, Hiccup, and no, I didn’t tell her. I know I didn’t. We were so wrapped up in other things that it never came up. Tamana doesn’t know, unless you guys said something.”
He glances from Zaena to Hiccup to FeeTwix. All three shake their heads.
“Good, then she doesn’t know about that. Thankfully.”
Hiccup finds another dragon wing on the bed, jams it in his mouth, and strips it clean. As he chews he says, “So let me get this straight: there was a crazy fickin’ serpent chippie in a portal at the Shinigami’s place, Tamana betrayed us, and after she skewered your ass, you had another digital hallucination in your world. Sound about right?”
Ryuk nods.
The goblin licks his lips and waves goodbye to the rest of the guild. “This, my friends, is why I’m announcing my retirement from the Mitherfickers as of tonight – shit is about to get crazy.”
“Really?” Zaena looks at him coldly. “Coward!”
He snorts. “Take it easy, Liz, I’m just fickin’ with you. To be honest, kiddos, I’m ready to level up and get the fick to Polynya. We really need to pull some strings with the Knights of Non Compos Mentis, in my humblest of humble opinions. And by we, I mean you, Marbles. You need to get us some face time with Sophia.”