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"Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also."
-Matthew 6:21
Treasure
by Roland 'Jim' Lowery
"Good morning, Mr. Cobblestreet."
"And a fine morning to you, Mrs. Lightbottle!" Sam replied with a chipper smile and the slight doffing of his cap.
And a fine morning it was, he reflected as the two of them went on their way. The smell of grease and the feel of electricity was in the air as it was recycled through the airflow system. The bright fluorescent lighting shone down as workboot-clad feet tromped happily on metallic ground, and the sweet sound of canned music lilted gaily from hidden speakers in the city's walls. It was truly a good morning to be a gnome.
It was truly a great day to be alive and well within the safe and sturdy walls of New Gnomeregan.
Sam continued his regular patrol - or what had once been his regular patrol and had just recently become so again - deep within the lively metropolis that he and so many others of the gnomish race called home. It was his job as captain of the city guard to keep an eye out for ne'er-do-wells and nogoodniks, but he couldn't help feeling that no such unpleasantness could possibly be on tap this day. It was too beautiful . . . the city restored, the troggs go-
For just a moment, Sam's vision wavered. Nausea surged up from his stomach at the very though of the horrible beasts that had occupied fair Gnomeregan until not too long ago. The hatred for those . . . things . . . had festered in him for so long, it was suddenly hard to remember having felt any other way. His ears thundered, his eyes watered, and he could almost . . .
But as suddenly as it had come upon him, the feeling passed. He resumed walking, having lost only a few strides to the momentary spell. His cheerful mood had been marred, but only somewhat. And it was to be expected, really. Such terrible things would never really leave him or his people, no matter how far into the past they receded. All they could do was try to remain focused on the prosperity of today and banish the specters of yesterday as well as possible.
Stepping into an intersection, Sam took at right turn and suddenly found himself unsure of exactly where he was. The throngs of returned gnomes that had surrounded him merely moments ago were gone. The lights were dimmed, and the machines all around him sounded . . . well, not dead, but certainly dying.
It was the troggs. This was their fault. He knew it. He knew it. They'd gotten in again somehow. Filthy troggs. Filthy nasty barbaric disgusting scumbag EVIL GEARLESS SONS OF WHORES AND BASTARDS, THEY
Even through the building storm in his head, Sam still felt the sharp line of pain that had wrapped itself around his throat. He'd been right. They were back, and he had to get help. He had to let someone know. He had to tell Thermaplugg. He tried to shout, and then to scream, but it only came out as a messy gurgle. He clawed desperately at his neck with his grimy green fingers, but to no avail.
The wire cut through his flesh, and then through his windpipe, sending blackish blood spilling to the floor plating below. Darkness descended upon Sam for the final time.
Once certain that the leper gnome had ceased struggling, the shadowy figure dropped him to the ground and began a cursory examination. The sensors in the figure's goggles, a combination of the arcane and the technological, confirmed that all but a few autonomous life functions had cease, and even those would be gone in just a few moments. The corpse was carefully and quietly dragged out of the intersection and into a small side corridor before being dumped through an open doorway.
Hysterian Sojourner stared down at the body, the night vision capabilities of her goggles allowing her to pick out several details.
Samuel Cobblestreet.
She had known this man, years ago. The last time she had seen him was when she had been a child, long before the events that had destroyed the city of Gnomeregan. He was wearing the tatters of a captain's uniform, but when the two of them had last met he had been similar to what the humans called a "beat guard". His patrol route had taken him by the Sojourner apartments in the residential sector, and he had often stopped by to chat with her parents on the rare occasions that the family was actually in the city. It was little surprise to find him still in the area, keeping up the habits he'd once held onto so dearly.
He'd been such a nice man. He'd given Hysterian a motorized lollipop once, an invention of his that he had been sure would pay for his children's techschool tuition and more.
But then the radiation bomb had been detonated. And those gnomes who hadn't died outright had turned into crazed monsters, virtually incapable of telling friend from foe, building insane death traps and other destructive machine, and living in filthy, diseased squalor.
They were more like goblins now, really.
Hysterian felt no sorrow for what she had just done. Sam Cobblestreet had died long ago. She'd simply dispatched the creature that had been walking around in his skin since then. The most gnomane thing to do had been to put it out of its misery. She wrapped her garrote back into place on her belt, slowly walked out of the room, shut the door, and activated the lock. The storage closet she had placed the corpse in had apparently been unused for quite some time, and it was possible this sign of her passage would be discovered only long after she had left the city.
Hyst normally wasn't like this, and she reflected on this change in her demeanor as she silently crept through the shadowy halls of Gnomeregan. She had killed, certainly, and sometimes quite often and without feeling even a little bad about it. One hardly got to be a death-dealing rogue without dealing a little death now and again. Stabbing a few backs. Slitting a few throats. Shivving a few ribs.
But this calm, cool, rational chill that she felt . . . that was something different, and it seemed to her that it always settled on her when she entered this desecrated city. Because her family moved a great deal when she'd been young and she herself had continued moving about once she'd struck out on her own, Hyst hadn't spent a great deal of her life within these walls. But just like every gnome, she still felt a connection to this place. It was still somehow, fundamentally . . . home.
It was jarring, was what it was. A feeling of culture shock overlaying a horror that only the familiar made unfamiliar could supply. It wasn't just that evil itself now rested within the city's heart. It wasn't even necessarily the presence of invading armies of troggs, or the rumored alliance with iron dwarves. The worst part probably was that leper gnomes were simply not the best caretakers in the world. They were sloppy. And that just wasn't right.
The basic patch repairs that could be seen here in there amongst the machinery irked Hysterian. As an inventor of some small renown herself, the crude methods used in the obviously leper-made constructs she ran across clashed with her sensibilities. It was an affront to her and to all gnomekind. It was blasphemy. It was madness.
It. Was. But enough of that,
The sector she was creeping through at the moment was one of the many residential areas in Gnomeregan, and she had to be especially careful not to be seen here. Not just by leper gnomes, troggs, or iron dwarves (if there actually were any), but by anyone else as well. This particular block of flats just happened to be close to the biggest of the so-called "clean rooms" that dotted the city, and that particular clean room was headed by a foul little nugget named Chas Thinbolter. Hyst primarily knew him through his rather nasty reputation, but on the very few occasions she had met him personally, she had seen no reason not to believe any of the stories.
Thinbolter made even the most anal retentive and detail obsessed gnomes want to tear out their gearboxes in frustration. His very existence seemed to carefully crafted around being a stickler for the rules. And if the rules said no authorized personnel were to proceed beyond this point, then by all that science and technology holds dear, they would not be crossing that point.
Hysterian disliked boundaries. It was one of the reasons she enjoyed learning how to pick locks . . . locks were specifically designed to either keep people out or keep people in, and Hyst wasn't particularly fond of either one of those scenarios. So when she heard getting into this section of Gnomeregan wouldn't be as simple as a precious gem or clever gadget being pressed into the hands of the right person, she'd found an alternative path. It had been a little more dirty and a little less giant spider-less than she'd hoped for, but it had gotten her in and she'd be damned if she was going to let any of Thinbolter's geek squad find her and throw her out.
After what had seemed like hours of creeping in the dark, Hysterian had finally reached her destination. It wasn't guarded, but then there was little to guard around here. It was highly unlikely that any of the lepers or troggs would find the treasure Hyst was searching for to be of any real value. But then that was just one of the many reasons to consider them insane monsters.
The door was unlocked, but rusted mostly shut. An explosive charge could easily loosen it, but the stealthy nature of Hyst's visit precluded the use of any such device. She didn't want to try and pry it open, either, because that might cause some rather nasty scraping metal noise of its own. She gave brief consideration to trying to find an air vent to crawl through, but the space between the door's edge and the jamb seemed just wide enough to be inviting. Hyst sucked in her gut and tried to flatten out as much as possible as she started squeezing through the gap. Her upper body was fortunately rather smallish to begin with, and she had already wrapped herself down a bit before she'd entered the city, a typical precaution of hers when she thought things might get physical during a job. Even so, she thought for a moment that she was stuck, but a brief struggle finally deposited her on the other side of the obstruction.
The reason for the door being a little open was immediately apparent. Anything that the lepers would have considered valuable had already been carted off, and what was left had been completely trashed. Hyst wasn't worried, however. There was no way they could have gotten hold of her objective. She quickly moved through the rooms within, absolutely sure in her step and zeroing in without hesitation on her destination.
In a small room, far in the back, she knelt next to one of the bulkheads and ran her fingers along the rusted metal. The secret panel that she quickly located was a cunning little door, but she deftly deactivated the trap that lay just on the other side. She could sense the mechanism powering down, even through an inch of hardened steel, which brought a smile to her face. The independant power source built into the panel had still been functioning. Good design, and a sure signal that her prize was still safe.
Pulling the panel away revealed a small bundle of cloth, the obvious edges of something inside imprinted on the weave. Hyst reached in, snagged it, and deposited it in her satchel. Mission accomplished, she returned to the forward room and once again pushed her way through the door.
As soon as she was fully free of the busted contraption, she stopped short and stared in surprise. What looked to be about twenty or thirty slightly glowing yellow eyes glared back at her, eyes filled with pure malevolence.
"Oh."
Hysterian groaned inwardly as she realized her mistake. Leper gnomes were not exactly quiet creatures most of the time. Almost the entire time she had been following Cobblestreet around, waiting for just the right time to get him out of her way, he had been babbling incoherently to himself, ranting and raving about everything under the mountain. It hadn't been any noise that she had made that had gotten this group's attention, but the lack of noise coming from Cobblestreet.
The leper standing at the front of the unwelcoming committee brandished an arclight spanner at Hyst and growled, "A puppet! Of the demonspawn Mekkatorque! Here to torture us yet again! To bring us low! To destroy our homes and families and mechanical ingenuity! DESTROY HER!"
"'Kay," Hyst finished, then swiftly put her hands into her jacket.
As the lepers advanced on her, one hand came back out, bristling with small throwing knives. Each knife had been sitting in specially sewn pockets in her jacket that contained small doses of poisons, making each fully ready for use the second they were drawn. She flung them in a wide arc, hitting at least three of her opponents that she could tell, sending two staggering back and the third to the ground, clutching at the blade protruding from his throat.
Her other hand emerged from the folds of her coat holding a handled grenade. She twisted the top just a fraction of an inch and yelled "Catch!" as she tossed it into the middle of the approaching mass. Because Hyst had set the grenade for a short burn, the lepers didn't have time to react. It bounced once on the ground and then exploded, sending five more of their number to their deaths and momentarily scattering the rest.
Hyst leaped from her protective crouch and immediately sought the safest route through the chaos she had just instilled. One of the leper gnomes had recovered a bit faster than the others and managed to snag the rifle strapped across her back. Her daggers were out in an instant. She plunged her left blade into the attacking leper's belly, then pulled it out and pushed both knives into his chest. She then twirled, the magical blades cutting through bone as easily as flesh, and cut him completely open, spilling some of his vital organs to the floor just before the rest of him followed.
Free of the obstruction, she was just about to resume her flight when she heard a familiar mumble of dark phrases. A quick glance over her shoulder showed Hyst a leper glowing with purplish light and tracing shadowy arcane runes in the air, confirming her fear . . . she never would have believed it possible, but one of the lepers was a warlock.
Warlocks were not generally known for their mental stability in the first place, and unfortunately the more insane the warlock became, the more power the demons they summoned had over them rather than vice versa. Leper gnomes were naturally crazier and less stable than most warlocks, so whatever beast of the deep this horrible combination was about to conjure would almost certainly be wickedly powerful, extremely evil, and absolutely, positively out of control.
Hyst swung her rifle around to her front, cocked it, and aimed as carefully but as quickly as she could. The metal corridor rang with the sound of the blast as she fired, but the bullet only grazed the warlock's shoulder. She hadn't aimed carefully enough, it seemed, and had only caused the warlock to falter, not stop completely.
Another of the lepers, singed from the blast of the grenade earlier, was suddenly upon her, ruining any chance at a second shot. Unfortunately for him, however, Hyst's rifle was a Khaz Modan model. She pushed him away with her shoulder, grabbed the stock of the rifle with both hands, and swung the sledgehammer built onto the barrel of the gun straight into the side of his head, causing bone to crack and blood to spatter.
Hyst looked back to see that the warlock had finished her summoning ritual. A huge, oppressive shape began to fill the air between the two of them, a shape that Hyst knew all too well. It was a voidwalker, massive and strong and almost impossible to kill even under normal circumstances, which these most certainly were not. As soon as the demonic beast had fully formed, it turned on the leper gnome that would have been its master, picked her up, and tore her in two as easily as a child might pick the limbs off an insect. Its bellow of rage rebounded off the walls, hurting Hyst's ears and causing the few remaining lepers left standing to flee in terror.
Seeing that she was the only living thing left in the vicinity, the voidwalker's burning white eyes focused directly on Hysterian and it began to advance.
"Whoa, whoa, hold up!" Hyst said as she started backing away. "Aren't you voidwalkers supposed to be absolutely loyal to your summoners, no matter what? I mean, a fel guard or succubus turning, I get, but-"
"SILENCE," the demon intoned. It might have been the only word it knew in any language but its own - voidwalkers were notoriously inscrutable - but Hyst wasn't in the mood to stick around and find out. Seeing that reasoning with the huge, scary monster wasn't going to get her anywhere, she immediately turned, activated her nitro boots, and blasted down the corridor almost literally like a rocket.
Hyst had been right . . . voidwalkers were one of the very few warlock pets that were supposed to be unswervingly loyal to their summoners, no matter what. She wondered momentarily if that was why the leper 'lock had tried for one, or if it had been just a coincidence. Either way it was just her luck that the crazy leper gnome had to go and summon a crazy voidwalker.
Her nitro boosts gradually wore out and went into recharge mode, but Hyst continued to run full-tilt through the passageways of her ancestral home. She'd been lucky enough not to meet up with any more surprises so far, but she still had quite a way to go before she was out, and her luck was sure to run out eventua-
Sure enough, she turned a corner and ran almost face first into an alarm-bot being followed by several of its far more lethal mechanical cousins. The alarm-bot set off in a glorious show of red a white flashing, rotating lights as it blared a warning broadcast from both its squawking speakers and transmitting antennae. The deathsquad behind it began to make several harsh screeching noises of their own as various weapon systems began to power up, sending buzzsaws spinning and chain guns clacking.
Fortunately, Hyst had thought ahead, which allowed her to act quickly. She pointed the universal remote control strapped to her left arm at a random 'bot in the troop and activated it. Almost instantly it was under her spell, as it were, and she frantically tapped in instructions before making her escape. The Hyst-controlled 'bot turned and began to tear into its brethren. Suddenly faced with a more powerful adversary than a simple little gnome, the other 'bots fell upon the rogue construct and ignored Hyst's retreat entirely.
Only the alarm-bot had the presence of clockwork mind to dash after her, a situation that did not help her in the least. It continued to blast its warnings at the top of its metal lungs as it ran after her, most certainly calling the attention of everyone from the top to the very bottom of Gnomeregan. Unable to outrun her implacable adversary, Hyst decided to take a different tact.
Hysterian liked to primarily rely on her own physical and technological capabilities to get her out of scrapes, but like many rogues she had dabbled in matters magical and come up with a few neat tricks that helped her in her trade. As she leaped into a nearby corner that was a bit more shadowy than others, she activated one of those arcane abilities and disappeared, only to reappear a few yards back, directly behind the screeching robot. She thrust her daggers deep into the construct's back, severing several vital systems within. The alarm-bot fell forward onto what passed for its face and went deathly silent.
After one last kick to the offending 'bot's side, Hysterian resumed her mad dash. She was close to the end now, finally running up to the tunnel opening that led back to the surface.
The tunnel was largish - for a gnome, at any rate - but was filled with a variety of scrap parts and other detritus. It was unsurprising really that it had not been completely sealed off before . . . a cursory glance would have convinced anyone that it already was sealed off by all the crap that had been stuffed inside. But Hyst knew better and dug her way through the trash to re-traverse the tiny openings she had previously discovered.
Halfway through, she stopped, pulled another explosive from her pack, set it, and gingerly set it in a small nook of the tunnel. She'd set the fuse much longer than she had on the grenade earlier, but she still worked to get away as fast as possible. With the poor shape that the tunnel was in, there was no telling exactly how much devastation her demolition charge might cause. Hopefully it would be enough to seal the entrance for good but not enough to seal her in for good.
Either way, the explosion was necessary. It wasn't that she didn't ever want to get back in to Gnomeregan again . . . it was simply best not to leave another opening for the leper gnomes, troggs, and other denizens of the deep to get out. The dwarves and gnomes of Dun Morogh had enough trouble keeping them from swarming en masse from the front gates, let alone keeping them from coming out secretly from little side exits like this.
Hyst managed to pull herself out of the small exit tube that protruded from the side of the mountain just as the explosive went off. She fell a few feet to the snow-covered slope below as a small flick of flame darted out behind her, burning the end of rope she had tied to climb up to the tube earlier and sending it reeling down on top of her. She popped out of the snowbank, spluttered a bit, then collected her rope and activated her universal remote again.
One of the nearby dunes of snow suddenly exploded outward as camouflage net covering her gyrocopter retracted back into its casing. Hyst vaulted into the seat of the machine and started powering it up. After letting it sit and warm up as long as she dared, she extended the rotors and took off.
After gaining a decent altitude, she nudged the gyro forward and then set the automatic pilot to take her back to Tinker Town in Ironforge. Finally able to relax, she sat back in her seat with a relieved sigh. After getting herself collected, she reached into her satchel and pulled out the treasure that she had worked so hard to retrieve.
And a treasure it was. There was nothing in the world at that moment that meant more to her. Not gold, not jewelry, not fine blades or good ale. She slowly opened the package and withdrew the object within from its wrappings.
The tome was old. Not ancient by any means, but it had seen some rough times over the years. The leather that bound its covers was cracked and well worn at the edges, the end result of much time spent in loving hands. Hysterian ran her hands over those smoothed areas now, taking comfort in the familiarity of each one. Looking at the edge, one could tell with but a glance that the pages within the book were creased and wrinkled from the constant rifling of an ardent reader.
Settling back even further, Hysterian opened the book to its cover page. There, in crisp gnomish lettering, was the title of the book:
"Baby's First Technical Manual"
And underneath it was Hyst's name in her mother's sloppy handwriting.
Hyst smiled softly to herself and turned the page as her flying machine carried her swiftly away from the vast underground city of Gnomeregan.
END
Roland 'Jim' Lowery
esn1g(at)yahoo(dot)com