Impstar, Dadycoool: You two are bad and you should feel bad.

Greensword101: Patience, young Grasshopper, patience. Yes, I will expand on Harry and Dudley's past, but not for a few chapters yet.

Prodigal Knight, MidnightFenrir: Luna actually won't appear in this story at all. I know, le gasp. I had some ideas for what to do with her, but it isn't something I could introduce without going far out of my way. Better just to let her go off and do her own thing.

Tenzo51: The Transition (the ritual that screwed everything up) took place in January 1987. Harry and Dudley were six, and that was ten years ago. Now, as for "everybody forgetting about the old Earth"… Not even close. That's actually going to play a very big role in the story as soon as I've finished the setup.

Chapter 3
Fetch Quest

The village of Scunth, in Harry's eyes, might be large enough to warrant the description, but if so it was just barely. It was really more a few large extended families who worked together to share the burden of farming the wheat he could see growing in the fields. The highlight of the area was the square set in front of a large mill and storehouse, and if the staring children were any indication, they rarely had visitors at all, let alone in the numbers that were riding through today.

Still, their business was not in the town. The information that had been poured into their heads when they accepted the contract instead led them down a long-overgrown path along a patch of woodlands that had yet to be slashed and burned to increase the size of the fields. It was perhaps another kilometer or so down that path that they started seeing clumps of Adventurers standing around and waiting for someone to explain things. No one had tried to get a jump on the job yet, mostly because it became obvious once the entire crowd was in sight that the manor they were supposed to search had somehow vanished.

"Looks like he got the full sixty," Dudley remarked, looking over their competition.

"With the kind of money our mysterious employer offered? I'm surprised nobody's getting beaten away with sticks." Pulling on the reins of his rented mustid, he guided the oversized ferret to a nearby cluster of saplings so he could hitch it. He had heard growing up that people used to ride horses to get around, and then they were replaced by the automobiles that he only vaguely remembered, but both of those things had been wiped away by the Transition ten years previously. On Gaia, if anyone wanted to get around quickly they needed either to walk or ride a mustid.

Mustids, unfortunately, were carnivorous, so if they were not tied up they would run off in search of prey. Since these were rented out for this journey, if they went back to Glasgow without their rides, they would be forced to pay to replace the mustids, and the beasts were not cheap by any stretch of the imagination.

The assembled Adventurers were starting to get antsy when a cart pulled by a couple of bison came around the corner and rolled through the group only to stop at the far side. Three men hopped out of the back, presumably bodyguards if their thick leather vests and the broad swords at their sides were anything to judge by, though what use three guards would be if a couple dozen Adventurers decided to attack Harry had no idea. Another young man dressed in a gaudy cape climbed over the front seat into the back of the cart, and Harry's assumption of the guards' purpose was confirmed.

The blond man who now stood in the cart adjusted his floppy hat and thumped his cane between his feet. "Good morning! I'm glad you all showed up. You should have read the contract thoroughly before agreeing to it, so I will be brief. Your job is to find artifacts within the manor and bring them back to me. Of utmost importance, you are looking for wands." He bent down to pick up something at his feet, and when he straightened up he held a wooden box. A vigorous shake let them all hear the rattle of metal on metal. "This box contains two thousand dimma. I have five of them, one for each wand. How you acquire the wands is not my concern, only that you bring them back here to me. And before anyone gets clever, I will be able to spot a fake. I have no interest in any cons. I want the wands and the other objects inside. Does anyone have any questions before you begin?"

"Yeah, I got one!" shouted a voice from near the back. "You keep talking about this manor of yours, but I don't see shite!"

The client reached up to rub the bridge of his nose for a moment, then he lowered his right hand to his mouth and whispered something. A ring on that hand glowed with a pure white light, and he held it up over his hand.

At the edge of the woods, the air squirmed and exploded into a whorl of purple smoke. The smoke swept backwards into the forest, and when it faded away it was to reveal an entirely different scene. A manor house indeed stood before them. It was not the most inviting place Harry had ever seen, however; once it might have been beautiful, but it had clearly been abandoned and left to fester. It was now dilapidated and all the more imposing, its shadow burdened with the threat of violence.

"Any other questions?" the client asked, drawing their attention back to him. "Preferably intelligent ones this time."

"What is so important about these wands in the first place?" a knot of Sorcerers asked.

"They are valuable to me, and I am the only person who will pay you for them as anything more than a curiosity. They do not work with offensive magics, so they are of no use to you. There is nothing else about them is relevant to your task. Find them; bring them to me. That's it."

A bald Monk next to Dudley coughed once. "Any idea what kind of beasties we're going to find inside?"

"Finally, a decent question. The last time I was here, I encountered several zombies and ghosts. I expect there are many, many more where those came from." A groan came from the group at large at the thought of facing off against a horde of the undead. "I would also advise you not to make assumptions of the layout based on the outside of the house. The interior was completely different last time from the time before, and there were rooms that should not physically fit within the outer walls. I do not know how large the inside actually is."

Bigger on the inside than the outside? That would make the search more difficult. At least it also meant there would be plenty of room for everyone. From the outside, Harry would have been sure that there would be fights between the parties in short order as they fought over the finite number of artifacts. Now it would just be the monsters they had to contend with.

"I hate undead," he muttered with a sigh after a few more inconsequential questions had been asked and answered.

"You and me both, cuz."

Harry snorted at that. Dudley was scared of ghosts, had been ever since they were kids. He personally just thought hacking through them all would be tedious. At least the fact they were undead meant he could throw white magic at them and hurt them instead of heal them, but every drop of magic he used offensively was magic he could not use to patch them up later. "Just make sure you don't get yourself cursed again."

"One time," Dudley growled. "I've been cursed one time, and you never let me forget it."

"That's because lugging your fat arse around afterwards that one time was more than enough for the rest of our lives. I don't have a spell to get rid of that, remember, and holy waters and panaceas are worth their weight in gold." The items were expensive to the point that they had a grand total of one panacea in their possession. It, at least, would get rid of any and status ailments, from the lowly blind and mute that interfered with sight and spellcasting to the more exotic effects like confusion, which made humans indistinguishable from monsters. Holy water was only good for the curse status, and the undead that were capable of casting such a spell were rare.

It was just their luck that they were about to head into a pit of exactly that.

Dudley hefted his axe, and Harry drew his rapier. Cold steel was not the most effective weapon here, but it was the best defense he had. His Wall spell would take some of the hits any lucky zombie scored on him, but that would cost him mana that would be far better used Curing everything to death. He would instead have to keep his wits about him and be able to block anything that got too close. And speaking of cold steel… "Dud, watch my back. Zombies and ghosts are one thing, but if there's a wight or heaven forbid a lich running around, they're going to come after me as soon as they realize I'm throwing around white magic."

"No problem."

The gate sealing off the manor slowly opened with an eerie creak, and the Adventurers poured inside. The dumber of the parties moved first around the grounds, presumably in the hope of finding a special artifact or even a wand on the grounds, but Harry and Dudley moved with the larger group into the manor itself. Their client had implied that he had been here before; anything immediately accessible he had already whisked away. They trailed into the first room and stared.

From the outside, the manor had been two stories high, maybe with some attic space on top. The entrance hall by itself was half again that tall, and Harry could see stairs farther back that went higher even than that. A multitude of doors were arranged in a random pattern between the front and the first of the stairs, as though someone had hacked up a number of houses into pieces and hastily glued them all into place. Glancing behind him revealed that those three stories of height each came with their own windows where again the outside had possessed only two, and the windows rattled with the rain that poured down on top of them. A boom of thunder echoed through the gigantic space.

As soon as the last Adventurer crossed the threshold of the manor, the doors slammed shut to block out the sunny day outside.

"What do you think?" Dudley asked, nodding his head towards the back of the room. "Stay down here, or head up?"

A very good question. Harry looked at the groups ahead and where they were moving. "Up, I think. It looks like most people are starting on this floor, which means more competition. As for the rest—"

"Yeah, I think I know what you're thinking. They're starting at the top and working their way down. Which means both of them are saving the stuff in the middle for later."

A nod, and they headed towards the stairs. On the way up Harry looked up and sideways a little bit. "Only four floors, it looks like. We start on the third and get what we can." They would have company sooner or later, but that was inevitable, even with all this space divided among sixty Adventurers. Not that it really mattered, though. Both he and Dudley carried belt pouches that could fit objects inside them no matter the size, but those bags were nonetheless limited by the total weight they could contain. Between just the two of them, even if they were the only ones on their floor, they still would not be able to pick up everything.

The other Adventurers would have the same limitation, which made this more than an issue of grabbing everything they could get their hands on. They needed to find smaller and lighter artifacts in order to carry out the most money at one time as they could, and they needed to prioritize the search for the wands. Opening the door on their landing and trying not to think too hard about the already open door ten feet or so to the side, they stepped into the hallway beyond.

"Harry?" Dudley asked, looking at a painting on the wall near the door. The man in the painting, amazingly enough, was looking back at him and sneering. Not 'the man was painted with a sneer on his face'. The man was actually moving inside the painting and changing his expression. "Do you think this is what the guy meant when he was talking about special objects?"

"It's… Probably?"

"Okay. I'm taking it." With a touch of Dudley's hand on the frame, the entire portrait exploded into a rainbow of sparks that were sucked into the mouth of the pouch.

…Or they could just stuff whatever they ran across into their pouches without concern for the weight. But as a point in Dudley's favor, he had to admit that this was all but guaranteed to be one of the worthwhile artifacts, and it gave them an idea for what characteristics to focus on. Harry looked down the hallway again, this time focusing on the holes randomly knocked out of the walls. There had been nothing threatening in the main hall, which meant it was just about time for them to start running into monsters. "Dud, you see what I see?"

"Yeah, I see it. Want me up front?"

He shook his head. Better for him to be up front, at first anyway. It would make it easier to aim his spells if he did not have to fire them around his cousin's armored bulk. Besides, they had fought zombies and such before. Undead, the dumber ones anyway, tended towards either massed rushes or ambushes. They knew what to expect.

They walked down the hallway to the first hole, and Harry took a small breath before he kept going. His rapier's tip bobbed up and down, but he knew striking right now was useless. He could not say exactly where the first enemy was, even if he was all but certain where it would come out.

A skittering came from the wall.

He chanced a glance behind him and watched Dudley saunter past the hole as though he had not a care in the world. A rotten face surged out of the hole, the zombie launching its surprise attack, but they were prepared. Dudley planted his right foot on the ground and spun, his axe whipping out and circling back around. The steel landed squarely in the zombie's head, cleaving its skull in two. A dry, dusty rattling emanated from its chest, the heavy blow not enough to finish the thing off, though another swing was. Its semblance of life stripped away, the bones and wretched flesh collapsed into dust.

Harry turned around and clicked his tongue at the five – no, make that six – zombies crawling out of the walls ahead of them. Sometimes he hated being right. He raised his sword into a guarding position with his right hand; his left, on the other hand, traced out a quick five-pointed star in the air. "Blessed starlight, restore and refresh," he muttered, lining up his shot.

Magic, barring a Bard's songs and the odd not-quite-magic melee classes like the Knight enjoyed, was 'spun' into existence through the use of gestures and shapes. Each spell also had an incantation, though only the spell's name itself was necessary. The incantation took longer, but it also added power to the spell. A useful trick when he just needed some extra punch, or when he was splitting a spell up to hit multiple targets.

"Cure!"

A ball of pale green light formed in his left palm and split off as four jets that trailed sparkles in their wake. Those jets hit the zombies coming for Harry and Dudley square in the chest, and Harry forced himself not to look away from the disturbing sight of torn flesh rotting away at a thousand times normal speed. Skin and muscle fell away from bone to reveal dark, necrotic organs. In any living thing, the loss of so much of its body would have stopped it and sent it to the ground, but the foul magics that sustained the walking corpses were not so easily overcome.

Dudley ran around him and planted himself between Harry and the zombies, heedless of Harry's previous refusal. "Armor Up!" he yelled, and an ethereal second suit of armor flashed into existence around his body for just a moment before fading away. It was the most basic skill of a Knight, the ability to further decrease the impact of blows for a time. It would not be enough to withstand the zombies' attacks forever, but it would let him last a little bit longer.

It also gave Harry time to continue his casting without worry.

More jets of healing light flashed past Dudley and smacked into the undead, and now that they had something else to focus on Harry directed his spells at individual monsters. One blast, sometimes two, was all it took now for them to collapse into dust just as the one Dudley killed did. The blows his cousin dealt on his own did not hurt.

The last zombie fell, and this time Harry directed a healing spell at Dudley. Unlike the zombies, the scratches and blood on Dudley vanished as though they had never existed in the first place. "You didn't need to jump in front. I had it handled," he reminded the blond Knight.

"Sure you did," Dudley replied with a cocky smirk. He rolled his shoulders and started kicking the piles of dust, stopping to pick up the rare ethereal bone that had not completely disintegrated with the rest of the monster it had been attached to. These bones would do neither of them any good, but Alchemists and apothecaries were always happy to buy reagents or trade them for a discount on their wares. "Except we both know that you would've spent so much time defending yourself you'd get nothing else done. I don't tell you how to cast spells, Harry. That's your thing. Being big and buff is mine."

He shook his head. It was that exact insistence on attracting all the monsters' attention that had gotten Dudley cursed that first time they went hunting undead. "Fine, fine. Have it your way. Now if you're done picking through what scraps they left behind, we need to—"

Harry's words were cut off when a high-pitched scream came from down the hall. That was no zombie's cry. It was far, far too human.

This chapter was supposed to be longer, but I didn't exactly have the zombies' first appearance planned out until I started actually writing it, so it took longer to get to this point than I really wanted.

But hey, shorter chapters mean a faster turnaround. Hopefully.

Silently Watches out.