“You’re back,” he said. “Sorry, dinner isn’t ready. Growler Gary seems to be low on supplies. Someone drank them all.”
He didn’t know we’d killed him, but he did remember us. I sighed.
“Hey Gary,” I said. “I’m really sorry about this.”
He looked up at us, wiping his hands on his fur. “Sorry about what?”
Mongo leaped across the tavern, landed on the counter, and chomped him right on the head. It sounded like a walnut being crunched.
Five minutes later, we had the first of the portal carts turned on. We started the engine and positioned it in front of the third portal. Number 17 on the list was the Sinopia Line. The DungeonWerx portal selector was nothing more than a pair of handles with numbers. I put the first to one and the second to seven. The little selector changed to 17 on the dust-covered screen.
We turned a switch, turning on the front portal. The blade in front of the cart hummed, and a large, tunnel-shaped portal appeared, throbbing. It looked a little different than the static-television-channel style of most open portals. This was like a frosted mirror, allowing us to see through it. Sort of.
“Hopefully the act of pushing a portal through a portal isn’t like dividing by zero or anything,” I muttered as I moved to the front of the train to investigate the magical doorway. I had a horrifying thought of it blowing up. There was a section on portals in my book, but I’d only skimmed it and hadn’t seen anything like that. I did remember something about arrows with small portals at the end of them. If they didn’t cause an issue with being added to inventory or passing through doorways, hopefully this would be okay too. Hopefully.
Ultima Corp DungeonWerx Subspace Heavy-Duty, self-adjusting Clean-up Portal.
Type: One-way, selectable portal.
Can you pass this portal? Yes.
Environment on other side of portaclass="underline" Warning. Drill down for more information.
Visual Analysis? Yes/No.
The portal was switched onto the abyss, and I pulled up the screenshot. It looked as if it just jumped things in the middle of the air over the pit. So anything that got caught up in the portal would fall a good half of a mile before it hit the ground. I clicked on the environmental warning, and a new page of numbers appeared. Elevation above solid ground was highlighted, confirming that was the issue. I went back to the cab and switched the selector to the trainyard instead of the abyss, and the environmental warning went away.
I put the portal back to the abyss, and I went to remove the hands so I could start the next train.
The moment I pulled one of the hands away, the train shut off. I’d been hoping once the train started, it no longer needed the hand keys.
“Fuck,” I said. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”
“Mongo,” Donut said. “Back to the bar.”
In the end, we had to collect a total of 14 left hands from Growler Gary. We could have stopped at 12, but I wanted to have an extra pair, in case we needed to drive that seventh cart.
Gary only fought back the first few times. We were too strong for him. He hid in the back of the bar each time, huddled into the corner, holding onto his spear. He whimpered like an injured dog, and the sound hurt my heart.
“I’m sorry,” I said when we came for the fifth hand. He jabbed at Mongo, who screeched gleefully as we approached.
“If you’re sorry, then why are you doing it?” he said. “Get back! Get the fuck away from me!”
The floor of the back room was slick with blood. Upon regeneration, every body part remaining in the tavern disappeared except items we placed into our inventory. But the blood remained, and it was everywhere.
“Everyone stop,” I said. “Mongo, wait.” The dinosaur looked to Donut, who waved him down. He squawked with disappointment.
“I’ll tell you,” I said. “You deserve to know why we have to do this.” And I explained it to him. I told him exactly what we were doing and why we were doing it. He stared up at me, wide-eyed and afraid as I told him we’d have to kill him ten more times.
“So you need Growler Gary,” he finally said, looking down at his own hand. “Gary never realized that was the problem with those carts. Jumping Jen-Jen and the other drivers were always complaining, but he… I didn’t understand. That was why they never went out. The hobgoblins took their own carts instead, but they couldn’t clear the crashed trains without the portals. Gary’s not a driver. Hadn’t realized it worked that way.” He looked up at me. “Ten more times?”
“Ten more times,” I said.
“And this is to get the people who killed my friends?”
“Yes.”
“Do you have any alcohol on you?”
“I do,” I said.
“Will you give me some when it is done?”
“Absolutely.”
He put the spear down and walked back to the bar. He cracked his neck. He looked over at Mongo and said, “Do your best to make sure it doesn’t hurt.”
27
“He ended up being really brave,” Donut said as we lashed the last hand to the pedestal. “Especially for a dog. It’s kind of sad.”
“Kind of?” I said. “Everything about this sucks. God, we really need duct tape for this.” We had to use rope to keep the hands in place. If one of them fell off then all of this would be for nothing.
Katia, who hadn’t participated in any of this, had returned to her human shape. She was beating herself up over her inability to get the carts started on her own, though in the end it hadn’t mattered. Our plan to hit the crawlers stuck at the abyss with portals required six trains to work, and no matter how she looked at it, we would’ve still had to collect several of those hands.
Bautista had fought his way up to the correct station, though he’d lost almost fifty guys during the battle. A few of the crawlers could fly short distances, but apparently there was some sort of black hole effect on the pit the closer you got to the middle. They’d flown off the walkway to fire arrows and spells at the lizards—called wall monitors—and gotten themselves sucked in. Several more died when one of the gangways collapsed.
Now that we had a portal straight to the abyss, we’d been brainstorming alternate plans in case this didn’t work, but so far everything that seemed viable at first kept fizzling out. None of our plans were feasible, especially since there were so many people trapped there. We couldn’t use a flyer to go through the portal and bring hats. We tried a rope attached to a weight, too, with thoughts maybe we could dangle a bag over the massive hole and Bautista’s crew could try something to get to it. But the moment we started to feed the test rope into the portal, the rope went tight for about a half of a second and then started to tingle. Surprised, I dropped it, and the whole thing disappeared. I was lucky I hadn’t gotten dragged in with it. We decided to stop experimenting after that.
I announced I needed to use the rest room and went to the personal space and pulled up the chapter on portals in the cookbook.
<Note added by Crawler Milk. 6th Edition>
Portals are hard to understand. It seems like there are dozens of different types that all work in different ways. Sometimes they’re like doors, and you don’t even know they’re there. Sometimes, like the entryways between floors, you just need to touch them and they work. Sometimes you have to put your hand through, and you start to feel like you’re getting dragged. If you let yourself go slack, you get pulled in. But you can still break free. It’s not consistent. Sometimes you have to be big enough to fit through it to work, and sometimes a portal the size of a button will toss you into a monster den. Teleport traps are the worst.