Outside Influences

Beth reacted to the snarling scratte instantly, jabbing a dagger through its throat and turning its snarls into wet gurgles.

Bel tore her eyes from the sight, brandishing her short sword as she jumped next to her brother, who was still fumbling around as he tried to disentangle his bag from the end of his fighting stick. She couldn’t fight like her sister, but she could at least point her weapon at anything that tried to get close to them.

The light from Beth’s hat bounced madly as the assassin danced through the chamber. It was so distracting that Bel missed a scratte until it was almost upon her, only warned at the last moment by its sudden snarl. Bel reacted before she was fully aware of the danger, awkwardly slamming her weapon at the source of the sound. Miraculously, her blade bit into something – but from the immediate counterattack she couldn’t have hit anything vital.

The stone knife wasn’t very long, but it was wickedly sharp and easily sliced through Bel’s sleeve and her skin beneath. Pain raced from her forearm up to her elbow of her offhand, but with adrenaline coursing through her arteries Bel hardly noticed. She frantically plunged her blade into the slightly darker blob in front of her until it collapsed. Then she knelt down and stabbed it once more for good measure, performing what James always called a “double tap”.

As she stood, Bel became aware of James cursing from behind her. She looked up to see that he was swinging his stick through the air in front of him, doing his best to keep another pair of the waist-high horrors at bay. Without a thought, Bel tackled the nearest of the attackers and shoved its face into the dirt. She grunted with effort as she stabbed it through where she thought the kidneys should be, aiming for an unprotected spot where she’d stabbed innumerable straw practice dummies. As her victim weakened, she grasped its disgusting scalp and pulled its head back. The loose skin squishing disgustingly in her hand as she slit its throat.

That dealt with, and with the sensation of the creature's scalp in her hands forcefully shoved to the back of her mind, she pushed herself to her feet and looked for her brother.

He was fine, or at least looked uninjured. He was breathing heavily, but from what Bel could make out he’d caved in the skull of his own scratte without taking any injuries.

“You kids okay?”

Bel nearly leaped out of her skin at Beth’s sudden question and then nearly hugged Beth with relief when she realized that all of the scrattes were dead.

James turned away from the nearest bodies and rubbed his stick in the dirt to remove the gore, his look of disgust comically stretched by the shadows from his candle. Beth tapped him, sending a pulse of her disinfecting darkness over his body, and then did the same for Bel. Bits of scratte and her own blood were momentarily cleaned, but another thudding heartbeat sent more blood dripping from the open cut on Bel’s arm.

Beth clicked her tongue and reached for her bag. “We’ve got to staunch that before we go, or we’ll be leaving a trail that screams ‘dinner’ to the rest of them.”

Bel’s snakes twisted in alarm. “The rest of them?”

Beth nodded. “Yeah. This group was probably meant to pop up behind us, but they couldn’t restrain themselves, not after we stood around talking for so long. They’re smart for animals, but not that smart.”

Beth wrapped Bel’s offhand in an uncomfortably tight cloth bandage before giving a satisfied nod. “Right, good enough. Let’s go kids.”

“But what about the cores?”

Beth hesitated. “Fine, snag a couple of them. Then we’ve got to go.”

Bel bent down and touched the loose skin of the second scratte. Her core swelled as she took its essence, and she felt another pair of petals unfurl. She touched the next one, but its essence wasn’t quite enough for her to advance. She bent down and touched yet another, and was finally rewarded with the satisfaction of another swelling sensation.

Beth tugged on her arm as she started heading for one more. “How about living instead? I can hear the noises of angry little feet, but if we’re lucky most of the newcomers will fight over the scraps here instead of following us.” Beth gave them each a quick shove. “Now, go!”

Beth forced them to run through several dark and twisting passages. The light of her lantern dipped and bobbed as she moved, and with each divot or bump in the ground Bel tensed as her imagination replaced the passageway’s dimly illuminated features with crouching creatures and hungering maws. Beth never hesitated, pushing them forward until James tripped over a small dip and sprawled onto the ground. His legs quivered and his chest heaved as he gasped for air.

Bel looked over him, frowning with worry as her snakes tensed over her head. She hadn’t realized it, but her improved lung capacity and healed body were making a huge difference. Her body was still sore from running, but she’d barely gotten short of breath. James didn’t have anything to help him out though; he was clearly at his limit.

Beth clicked her tongue. “So frustrating.”

“Beth, don’t be mean!”

“I’m not being mean, it’s just frustrated to be run down by a bunch of scrattes. They’re barely smart enough to bang two rocks together.” Beth crossed her arms with frustration. “One of them must have gotten an ability that makes it smarter,” she grumbled.

James wheezed from his spot on the ground. “Where’d they even get the rocks to make their knives? There’s nothing down here but dirt.”

Beth gestured vaguely around them. “Oh, some of the side passages drop down to deeper levels. The Labyrinthos alternates between constructed levels like this and more natural caverns, at least from the rumors I’ve heard. There are all sorts of downward leading offshoots from a tunnel like this.”

She started rummaging in her bag and pulled out a pair of candles. “I’ve heard people say that they’re for drainage. Not relevant now though. James, replace your candle, that one’s about to burn out.”

“Wait,” James interrupted, “maybe we could use a drainage passageway.”

Beth narrowed her eyes. “The natural caverns are far more dangerous than travelling through the Labyrinthos proper. Not a good place to hide.”

“How about a trap though? How steep are the drops?”

Beth opened her mouth to respond but paused. Her hand went to her chin as she frowned in thought. “Okay, sure, I see what you’re getting at. We can cover one of the drainage holes and make a pit trap. We need to hurry though. They aren’t the best runners, but scrattes are damn persistent.”

Beth straightened up and wiped the sweat from her brow. “Well, that’s as good as we’re going to get it. You kids hop in and I’ll cover the rest.”

Bel didn’t like the plan. Oh, it sounded perfectly reasonable, but something about hiding in a hole while monsters rained down on her made her uncomfortable.

Her brother gave her a reassuring pat on the shoulder. “C’mon Bel, this’ll totally work. The goblins will go straight for Beth, fall down the hole, and break their legs.” He brandished his stick. “And then we’ll finish them off for easy levels. You’ll be OP in no time.”

“What?” Bel mumbled. “I have no idea what you’re saying.”

James had a bad habit of falling back to his strange speech patterns when he was stressed, but Bel could still mostly follow that he meant to reassure her. The plan felt haphazard though, so she couldn’t help but worry that something would go wrong.

The pit wasn’t actually a pit; it was a wide, steep channel for drainage rather than an actual hole into the abyss. They didn’t even have spikes to put at the bottom, so Bel and James were going to have to wait there to finish the job. Worst of all, the drainage channel only covered about a quarter of floor of the tunnel, so, unless the scrattes really bunched up, Beth was still going to be attacked by at least a few of them.

“Let’s go kids.” Beth held up a corner of the tent that they had used to cover the hole and shooed them inside. The other corners were held down with tent stakes and the other half of the tent was already covered with dirt, but Beth couldn’t finish hiding it before they’d gone under the tarp.

Bel felt her eyes tear up a bit as she looked at Beth. The woman gave her an awkward thumbs-up in return.

“Don’t worry kiddo, I can always make a strategic retreat if things get too dangerous. You just worry about yourself and your brother.”

Bel tried to put on a confident face as she nodded and slipped under the raised flap. She slid down the chute on her butt to avoid falling and made it to the bottom without a problem. From above, she could hear the sounds of Beth covering the rest of the tent with dirt, sealing them down below.

“Bel, help me toss some of these rocks over there. No reason to give them a soft landing, right?”

James had already lit a few candles and shoved them into cracks in the natural wall. The light made it easier to see the piles of loose, head-sized rocks that he was talking about. The debris looked like it had been eroded from the natural cavern walls as it widened below the drainage passage. James was tossing the pointiest rocks the area at the bottom of the chute, changing the soft, sandy surface into something less comfortable.

Bel helped him out for a few minutes, throwing the sharpest and edgiest ones that she could find into the path where the scrattes would hopefully be falling from above. She even smashed a few of them to remove any relatively smooth, flat surfaces.

“Good enough for government work,” James quipped.

“Huh? What’s that mean?”

He shrugged. “I dunno, it’s a joke my dad used to say.”

Bel nodded, not understanding his meaning but understanding his mood. He must have been stressed to mention one of his parents though. She bent down to pick up another rock, but she wasn’t looking at what she was grabbing. Instead of something solid, her hand closed around something thick and leathery.

Bel looked down to see that she was holding an enormous shed skin. She dropped it with a shudder.

“Ugh.”

“Gross,” James agreed. “More than anything else, this world is filled with gross stuff.”

Bel nodded and grabbed another rock – looking first this time to be sure of what she was grabbing – and tossed it onto the pile.

They heard a shout from above as they were examining their finished handiwork.

Bel pulled her short sword free of its sheath and tensed her body.

“What if the tent doesn’t fall?” she whispered, her last moment anxieties suddenly overwhelming.

“That’s why Beth tied the rope to the stakes, so she could pull them out herself.”

“But what if she’s distracted?”

“Well, it’s too late for that now. She’ll probably be fine anyway, goblins are the weakest mob.”

“What's a gob–”

Bel’s question was interrupted by the thumping of feet reverberating from the top of their trap. A moment later, a shower of dirt and twisting limbs fell into the dim light of their candles. The scrattes shrieked on the way down, but their noises were brought to sudden halts when their bodies smacked into the pointed rocks.

Bel was about to step forward and check for survivors when another couple of scrattes fell down on top of the others. Those were followed by a few more. Each batch landed on the ones before, smashing them back down into the rocks in return for a softer landing for themselves. The last few to fall picked themselves up after only a moment of confusion.

One threw itself at the steep slope and attempted to climb back up, but three more caught sight of Bel and James. They licked their hairy lips and a hungry gleam shown in light reflecting from their eyes.

Bel immediately stepped forward and swung her weapon through the side of the nearest one’s neck. The other two shrieked with rage and the climbing one abandoned its attempt, sliding back down towards them. James stepped up beside Bel and delivered a heavy blow to one of their skulls, preventing it from flanking her.

That left two. The humans and scrattes stared at one another for a moment, until James spun up his sling and launched a small rock at one of the creatures. It tried to dodge, but caught its foot on the uneven ground and sprawled onto the floor instead. The last one, the one that had been attempting to climb away, reached into a ratty-looking pouch that hung at its side and pulled out a faintly glowing orb.

Bel looked at it and hesitated.

James looked at it, frantically lobbed a small rock at the scratte, grabbed Bel, and dove in the opposite direction.

The rock hit the scratte in the shoulder. It didn’t do much harm, but the scratte flinched and stumbled. It stepped back onto a sharp, unstable rock, and went sprawling, tossing the orb upwards as it flailed its arms.

The orb glowed angrily as it spun through the air. When it hit the ground it exploded, turning Bel’s vision white and making her ears ring like the Technisday bells.

Bel quaked with fear as rocks and pieces of scratte were tossed in every direction. The world groaned around Bel as tons of rock were loosened from their resting places on the walls of the cavern. Bel’s heart was thudding so violently that it took her several seconds to realize that the shaking and rumbling had stopped.

Miraculously, one of the candles that James had shoved into the walls flickered back to life a few seconds after the blast, although Bel couldn’t see much through the shifting dust. After coughing her lungs out for a minute she looked up again and saw that the entryway to the drainage chute had been completely choked with rubble.

“Shit,” she gasped. “We’re trapped.”

Bel stared at the impassible rock that now separated them from their sister.

James eventually broke the silence. “On the plus side, the plan worked perfectly.”

He grinned at her tiredly. “And now there’s plenty of XP–” He waved his hands at the bits of scratte scattered about. “–essence, I mean, for you to absorb. Yay.”

Bel snorted at her brother’s attempt at good cheer. His attitude had gotten the two of them through years trapped in Technis’ temple – what was a little time spent in a dark cavern?

“Sure,” she hummed as she knelt down to see if any of the corpses still had intact cores for her to extract.

Most of the scrattes were smushed beyond usefulness. A creature’s core wasn’t a wholly physical thing, but, apparently, being blown into tiny pieces could still destroy them. Still, there were enough scratte scraps to advance her by another three thresholds.

As she knelt next to the last corpse her hand brushed again a small, bristly clump of something strapped to its upper arm. Her nose wrinkled with disgust, and she lifted a candle closer to see what she had touched. It looked like a small, crudely crafted figure of a person with a spider-like head. As she stared at it she felt the familiar sensation of something staring back.

Bel shuddered and jumped to her feet.

Her brother appeared at her side. “You okay, Bel?”

“Yeah, I’m great,” she rushed. “My core grew. I could get some ability, maybe one of them would help.”

“Cool, how many slots do you have?”

“What?” Bel raised her eyebrows. “Strokes, James. Beth calls them strokes.”

James thunked himself down on the ground. “Sure. Whatever. Got anything new?”

Bel cast one last uncomfortable glance at the dead scratte’s disturbing yet familiar figurine, before turning her attention inwards. She concentrated on the unfurling flower that was her core and the constellations of abilities hanging over it. She concentrated upon her gorgon abilities – Beth wasn’t around to object.

“Um, I can toughen my skin and hair and nails,” she announced after a moment.

“AP bio kids would call that your integument.”

Bel shrugged. “Sure. I can make my integument tougher. Or I can turn my nails sharp and metallic – like bronze, I think?”

“Weird,” James quipped. “This world is weird.”

Bel nodded. “Those were from the gorgon abilities. I guess I should look at the other ones too…”

She frowned. “Well, I can make the little things that cause sickness weaker or I can make them stronger. I can also make things corrode faster. That’s Lempo. Hard pass on those, I think.”

“The pathogen thing almost sounds like an ability that a healing goddess would grant.”

Bel’s snakes curled with frustration. “I’m sure she’s a goddess of something else, I just can’t remember what.”

James waited for her to say more, but Bel still couldn’t remember. “What about the others?”

“Kjar has an ability to improve my vision, especially when I’m looking at someone wicked. I think. And another that lets me pounce better.”

James laughed. “Is she a cat?”

Bel tilted her head. “That’s the cute animal that Old World people worship, right?”

“Yeah, something like that. Short snout, fangs, rotating ears, whiskers on its face.”

Bel thought about it. “Yeah, maybe she’s a cat. She was scary, I can see why people would worship her. Do you think her being a cat is a good thing?”

James spread his hands. “I mean, cats are awesome, so sure.”

Bel nodded. Maybe she’d get better abilities from the goddess of retribution later. She felt around to see what the spirit had to offer. “Eh, Dutcha only has some weird ability that influences something strange – probability maybe? – to make me warmer or colder.”

“So you can mess with thermodynamics?”

Bel scrunched her nose. “If you say so. Anyway, these abilities aren’t useful here. Not unless I want to take that ability that lets me turn into a gas.”

James looked at her. “But you can’t turn back, right?”

She nodded. “I think that maybe I’ll take the one that toughens my skin. I like the idea of being tougher.”

“What about the cat vision one?”

She shook her head. “I can only fit one, and we’ve already got candles.”

Bel copied what she’d done when she got improved lung capacity, following the strokes of the toughened integument ability with her mind as she carved them into the free capacity on the petals of her core. It covered ten of them, but she felt safer as the mana from her new ability suffused her skin and snakes.

Afterwards she stared at the rubble pile, waiting for something to happen.

“I guess she won’t be able to dig through that?” Bel lamented.

“No. Probably not.”

There was a long silence before James spoke again. “She’s probably fine. You know that those goblins – those scrattes, they couldn’t have caught her. Maybe she’s looking for a different route to reach us.”

Bel ground a pebble into the dirt with the toe of her frayed sandals. “So should we wait?”

James looked at Bel’s previous discovery, the enormous shed skin. “Do you think that’s safe? This is a dead end, and there’s got to be enough stone there that it would take a day to move it.”

Bel tried to picture whatever creature had shed that skin. She instantly regretted it, as her mind supplied her with images of oversized serpents swallowing her whole. “I suppose having a direction to run would be better than being stuck here.”

Bel smacked herself in the forehead, sending her snakes darting about. “Ah, all of our food and water is with Beth. And we’ve got, what, five candles? Where’s my lantern?”

He gestured to a few scraps of smashed metal that may have once been her lantern. “We’re basically boned. Well, there’s only one direction to go, so I guess that we should just get to it?”

Bel shrugged. “I suppose.”

James nodded.

Bel took a deep breath to steady her nerves. “Well. Let’s get to it.”

They turned slowly and began picking their way through the small cavern.