Chapter 29: Hiding in Plain Sight
Blah stepped back, looking up at his latest accomplishment: a large, dark brown brick building (mudstone, to be exact; crafted from dirt and stone, the two most abundant building materials ever) with a pointed gray brick roof. This latest addition to Blahtown didn't take very long at all with Hailstorm, Seraphina, and Broshi's help.
It was large enough that Blah was able to fit a bed, a dresser, a table and several chairs, as well as a grandfather clock, not to mention the typical crafting workstation of a workbench, furnace and anvil, and a handful of chests, into which Blah stuffed all of the remaining building material and his old weapons. He even used copper chandeliers to light it up. There was a large area of the room intentionally left empty.
"This'll probably be the house I use to enter the game with," Blah explained. "I'll also probably get a new NPC soon. An Arms Dealer would be perfect..."
"Yeah yeah," panted an impatient Hailstorm, "how long until we actually get to that game, anyway?"
"Astra will ping me every time a new player enters the medium under her watch," Blah answered. "When Astra herself enters, that's when you'll go back to your place and connect to her friend... and I just remembered I forgot to find out what his name is... or his chumhandle for that matter..."
Blah fished his laptop out of his backpack. "Speaking of which, I should probably figure out some way to keep my battery charged... and make sure everyone has their strife specibus and fetch modus... you can't really do alchemy without captchalogue cards..." He cycled through some more obscure terminology and various ways to prepare for them as he opened his computer and booted it up.
Hail waited about 30 seconds before becoming bored and interrupting Blah from his latest ramble. "Ok, stop for a second," he ordered, "and just tell us what we should all do first."
Blah stopped for more than a second as his computer sorted out its programs. "Well, er... Weapons, we all need to pick a type of weapon to start with. I'll stick with my hammers, and lances too if I can."
"I am in no need of a weapon," Sera denied. "My skills as a psychic Pokemon have served me well, and will continue to do so."
"But... you can't upgrade psionics in this game," Blah warned. "You'd best get used to something physical or else you won't be able to keep up when the real fun starts. Like, a staff, maybe."
"My body is too physically weak to use such objects effectively," the Abra contested. "Besides, all Pokemon level up and increase in strength naturally."
"Oh... fine," Blah pouted. "We'll cross that bridge when we come to it I guess. Hailstorm?"
The pegasus jolted up from staring curiously at Blah's screen. "Uh, crossbow?"
"Right, right, crossbow," Blah acknowledged. "And that leaves Broshi..." He turned towards the Yoshi, or in this case, the spot where the Yoshi used to be. "Wait, where'd he go?"
"I... wasn't paying attention," Hail admitted, still trying to make sense of Blah's wallpaper.
As Blah turned his head a second time, he suddenly found himself staring at the business end of a gold broadsword, a few inches away from his nose. He froze up, afraid to make any sudden movements, until he realized that the blade was being held by Broshi, also wielding a confident smirk. Cody the Guide was standing right behind him.
"He asked me how to make a sword, so I told him," Cody spoke through a mischievous grin.
"He... asked you?" Blah repeated, confused and still caught off guard by the weapon's proximity to his face. "And you understood him...?"
"I know a lot about this world," the guide said matter-of-factly as he walked casually back towards his wooden house, which was now dwarfed by the three more advanced buildings nearby.
It took a few seconds for the idea to click in Blah's head. "Wait, that must mean..." He rushed up alongside him. "Can you tell me how to make a generator for the laptop? And also how to get a fetch modus or a strife specibus?"
"He never explained what those even are..." muttered Hail under his breath.
"Heh... of course," Cody affirmed. "It's just a simple crafting recipe." He held up a large green book entitled "Data Structures and Advanced Machinery from Scratch".
"Wow..." Blah grabbed the book and flipped through a few pages showing complex diagrams, composed of familiar item pictures. "Where did you even pick up on all of this? I never had access to any of this high-tech crap when I played Terraria..."
"I never had access to any of these books before, either," the guide reflected, taking back the book. "Let's just say I know a guy. Or girl, in this case."
It only took Blah a few seconds to make the connection. He laughed joyously. "Twilight, you are the greatest. Ok, let's start with the generator... what do we need?"
"40 iron bars, 30 copper, and 10 meteorite."
"That's it? I can live with that..." Blah fished the materials out of his storage chest. After a few minutes of Cody relaying instructions, Blah had fashioned a relatively small hand-crank generator with a stationary plug that fit into the power intake of his computer. "This is... eerily compatible," Blah noted.
Cody chuckled. "Hey man, I don't make the rules. I just read them."
Blah began turning the crank... and turning, and turning, and turning, keeping an eye on the battery indicator on the laptop, currently sitting at 74% and unmoving. Blah persistently kept cranking, however, and just before he was about to give up, the bar rose to 75%. It had taken him a good 15 seconds to make any sort of impact on the machine.
"Er..." Blah crunched some numbers in his head. "This'll take half an hour of straight cranking to charge it up from zero to full..."
"Hey man, the rules, I don't make them," repeated Cody.
"Well, you could use the exercise, am I right?" Hailstorm joked. "A little manual labor never hurt anyone!"
"Unless they kept at it long enough to make them sore," Blah riposted. "Let's move on to the other stuff... how would I go about making a fetch modus?"
Cody laughed again. "One does not simply make a fetch modus."
"What, what are you talking about?" Blah panicked. "How am I supposed to carry and alchemize items...?"
"Here," Cody said, picking up and handing Blah one of the leftover iron bars. "Store this in your backpack."
Blah stared down at the bar for a while. "Ok, haha, very funny," he sarcastically droned, reaching for the iron bar. "I know I can store stuff in my backpack, but I can't see codes without cards and I can't create items without codes." As he talked, the bar disappeared from his hand. He didn't realize this until well after he had finished. "...wait."
He reached into his backpack, thinking that perhaps he had spaced out for a moment and forgot that he put the bar away, but he did not feel anything bar-shaped. Instead, he felt something else, something new. He pulled out a small card with a brown outline and a zigzag shape cut out of the top right corner. On it was a picture of an iron bar.
"...whoa," breathed Blah. Hailstorm was equally shocked.
"The Backpack Modus," mused Cody, "the fetch modus you have been using this entire time. You can access any of the top ten cards, and store up to 30 more under them. Quite an impressive modus, really, the only downside is that strife cards take up slots in the backpack."
Blah casually flipped the card over to see a whirling spectrum of colors, covering distorted and barely legible text which read "YObwEuYd".
"Wow." Blah stuffed the card back in his backpack. "I guess that means I have a bunch of different strife specibi already too?"
Cody nodded. "Warhammrkind, lancekind, and crossbowkind. You can't see them, but they're there."
"And me?" cut in Hailstorm. "Do I already have some of these fetch... strife... whatchamacallits?"
"You don't have a fetch modus on you, but you do have crossbowkind and hoofkind," Cody explained. "Do you have some kind of portable storage item at home?"
"Some saddlebags, but..."
"Great, the Saddlebag Modus," the know-it-all continued, "works a lot like the Stack Modus, only you have 2 stacks and your cards are divided among them evenly. In other words, you can only retrieve the top item of each stack and the others are trapped underneath until you use the ones above it." Hailstorm blinked, trying to process all of the information being thrown at him at once.
"Gee, now you're going to tell me that Broshi has some kind of egg modus..." Blah guessed.
"You're wising up already," Cody complimented, at which Blah facepalmed. "Works like a Queue, wherein the first item put into it is the first item that can be retrieved. This particular sylladex is one of the easiest to weaponize. Broshi also has bladekind." The orange reptile glared testily at Cody as if he had already known all of this.
"Ok ok ok, we get it." Blah sighed. "Basically just everyone keep doing what you've been doing and don't worry about the finer details too much."
"Heheh. You could've saved everyone 10 minutes by just saying that," remarked the guide.
"Wah, you done? I've been waiting for ages here for SOMEONE to notice me..."
Everyone turned to look at the new, squealy voice. It belonged to none other than Waluigi.
"Waluigi? What are you doing here?" asked Blah.
"What does it LOOK like," the tall wafer snapped, indicating his suitcases. "I'm-a moving in! You strike me as the type of guy who loves a good kaboom every now and then, wah?"
"Well I guess but-"
"Shut up, you know that's true, you already bought 10 bombs from me and blasted a path straight to Bowser with 'em." He dropped the suitcases onto the table, pulled out one of the chairs and leaned back in it, making himself at home rather forcibly.
"Ohhhh, I see, you're the Demolitionist," Blah identified hesitantly. "Welcome aboard then... I think..."
"Wah!"
**Waluigi the Demolitionist has arrived!**
"So, it's just you?" Blah asked curiously. "No Wario?"
"Don't-a mention that name around me!" detonated Waluigi, a strange fire in his eyes. "We've went our separate ways... wah..." He looked away, folding his arms.
Blah promptly decided not to press him, instead turning back to his laptop and firing up Pesterchum. After a terse and, on her part, hasty conversation with Astra, Blah added the chumhandle of his final co-player to his chumrole and sent him an introductory message...
- desultoryMonarch [DM] began pestering discotasticJubilation [DJ] at 9:38 -
DM: yo, DJ
DJ: yo yourself, broski! what's shakin? 8D
DM: not much man, just making sure we're on the same page about the game and all
DM: everyone's sort of in a rush so let's make this as fast and painless as possible
DJ: DJ isn't sure what all kind of hurtin a friendly conversation can do, but DJ digs
DM: first, introductions
DM: the name's Blahsadfeguie, but you can call me Blah
DM: and yes, I know it's kind of a strange name
DJ: that's totally cool, Blah dawg
DJ: hey, can DJ call you Brosadfeguie? 8P
DM: hah, sure go ahead :L
DJ: sweet like a beat!
DJ: DJ usually goes by the stage name of DJ, but his real name is just as hyped~
DM: and that would be?
DM: uh, hello?
- discotasticJubilation [DJ] has lost connection -
DM: o~o
How conveniently inconvenient. And just when Blah was getting to like the guy too. He supposed that people with real internet connections were still perfectly capable of getting real connection problems.
"Hmph." Blah dejectedly set the laptop on the table. "Well, I guess there's another thing I could do to prepare... I sure haven't done any solid spelunking in a while. Maybe I'll try and get enough gold to fully armor everyone before the big game."
"Now that's something I can understand," Hailstorm volunteered. "I'm in."
"The more the merrier, as they say," Seraphina opened up.
"Yoshi," agreed Broshi, picking up his sword.
Blah looked at the Guide and the Demolitionist. "Can I trust you two to keep this laptop powered and respond if DJ comes back online?"
"You CAN," Cody answered rather ambiguously.
Blah sighed. "WILL you keep this laptop powered and respond if DJ comes back on?"
"Wah, whatever," Waluigi complied. "I'll be bored either way."
"Thank you. Now, let's get to digging! I'm sure there are a few branches in this cave that I haven't explored..." Blah and his three companions left the small town to enter the familiar cave.
SP: Wow... You really weren't kidding about the chairs...
Astra sat in her rather large, one-room living quarters propped up against a particularly massive broken rocket engine. Her high-tech computer, which did not originally belong to her, was currently showing a complex game interface around a clear vision of a castle interior. The room was filled with so many chairs of different color, design, and era that one would find more places to sit than to walk. The room reminded her of her own room, which was equally occupied by gigantic hunks of scrap metal that looked as hard to carry around as they were to repair. The two collections rivaled each other in size.
AD: It's great that you're admiring my chair collection, but I think we have more important things to do.
SP: Right... sorry... where did you go?...
AD: I am in the great hall. Please deploy the equipment as quickly as possible and as close together as possible.
AD: And don't worry about breaking too much stuff. It kind of happens. I'll deal with it.
Astra, still trying to familiarize herself with the interface, fumbled around the castle, spying rooms filled with medieval-styled weaponry and armor, small rooms that were probably meant to serve as soldier quarters, a sparring room, and a mess hall. A few extra chairs had been stored here and there, but the entire structure was run-down and devoid of intelligent life - maybe a few cockroaches, but nothing else. Eventually, she stumbled into the largest room of the castle: the great hall, where she found her first sentient being. The sight of this life-form took her completely by surprise.
A bulky, green-scaled dragon lounged in the middle on the faded ornate rug, curled up in front of a small obsolete computer that looked as ancient as the building it was housed in. She (if Astra hadn't already known, discerning this reptiloid's gender would be quite a task) was at least 10 feet tall/long and looked far too big to sit in most of the chairs she had collected. Bellia gazed at the screen neutrally, with just a hint of suppressed impatience.
SP: Is that...
AD: Yes, it's me. Not as cute as you thought I was, huh?
The indication of a dragon typing on a keyboard with the efficiency of a human teenager was enough to rouse a slight chuckle from Astra beyond the bewilderment.
AD: Anyway, the 'Deploy' menu should be the third from the left. The starting machines are in there, as well as a pre-punched card.
Astra manipulated the game's octagonal cursor to select the various machines in turn and drop them unceremoniously around the great hall, followed by the aforementioned card.
AD: Cool. Watch and learn, you'll need to do this eventually.
SP: Okay...
Bellia immediately sprang into action, pulling a metal folding chair out of nowhere and smashing the lid off of the tubular machine with a valve. A countdown displayed on the machine, starting at 1 and just 1 second shy of a half minutes. A patterned, glowing sphere emerged from the device, followed closely by a pale green, shiny cylinder upon a turn of the crank. As she set the cylinder into the apparatus that resembled a sewing machine, she kicked a dead cockroach at the flashing sphere, replacing the patterns upon it with an abstracted image of a roach head. The events were being executed nearly faster than Astra could take mental note of them.
SP: I'd say slow down, but I'm not sure if you have the time for that...
The countdown now read 0:59 as the dragon carefully inserted the card into a slot on the sewing machine, causing a needle to descend and carve peculiar curves and chasms into the cylinder. As soon as the cylinder stopped moving, Bellia removed it and set it on top of a side platform of the biggest device. An arm extended, curving around to scan the cylinder with a small red laser. There was a flash of light, and upon the great round surface of the machine was a simple green chair that matched the hue of the cylinder. Bellia paused for a few seconds to revel in its beauty.
SP: ...so I just helped you make a shiny new chair?...
Snapping out of it, the dragon snatched up the chair in both hands, turned around, and to Astra's astonishment, smashed it to pieces on the floor.
The screen went black.
A trail of bones, slime, and shredded bats, illuminated by the warm red glow of scattered lava pools, led to a squadron composed of a potpourri of different species, slashing, smashing, and shooting their way through the depths of the underground. The human was quick to snatch up any traces of the sparkling yellow metal with his pickaxe as his companions, the pegasus, the Abra, and the Yoshi, took out any slimes, skeletons, and bats that would dare try to interrupt his mad material-gathering motion.
Building a brisk barricade in a corner of the cave, safely stowing all four of them inside, Blah took a moment to check his current stash while the others took a much-needed breather.
"A couple hundred pieces so far..." mused Blah, tallying up the numbers on his captchalogue cards (a much faster action than counting each piece by hand). Each card capped out at 99 chunks of gold ore, so Blah did his best to limit the other forms of loot that he had picked up. He did, however, manage to shatter 3 additional life crystals, which he was quick to share with his team. He had already forgotten how he used them in light of the amount of trouble his first one gave him before, but nobody was complaining.
"How many will that suit?" Hailstorm asked, stretching his legs and wings.
"Well... bars are made from 4 ore each..." Blah recalled. "And one full set of armor requires 90 bars total."
"So for one person, we'll need 360 pieces of ore," Sera calculated, quick to aid with the math. "To fully equip all three of us lacking gold armor, we will need 1080 ore total."
"Yoshi..." lamented Broshi, who was already exhausted from the venture.
"Jeez, I don't think there's enough gold in this neck of the earth for that..." Blah leaned against the rock wall.
Suddenly, there was a click from behind him. Before anyone could question the noise, a large section of the rock detonated, destroying the wall and a lot of the floor. Everyone, including Hailstorm who was too taken by surprise to react, fell through the newly-created chasm from which a sinister red light pulsed.
"What the heeeck?!" Blah shouted, his words echoing eerily about the ashen cliffs as the crew fell past them and onto an island surrounded by a sea of magma. The heat engulfed all four heroes without sparing them a second, and none of them found the strength to get up.
"Wh-where in Celestia's name are we...?!" Hailstorm asked, breaking into a heavy sweat - and not just from the heat. The dark caves loomed far above, and below was an endless ocean of molten rock dotted with isolated chunks of ash and red hot rock, and the occasional purple-bricked structure sticking out of the lava. In the distance, some large, dark figures with visible pointed wings flew about ominously.
"This... This is the Underworld..." Blah stuttered. "Also known as... Hell."
- spacefaringPioneer [SP] began pestering desultoryMonarch [DM] -
SP: Blah...
SP: Bellia is in.
SP: Are you there?...
DM: wAH THIS IS Wahluigi blAHSAdfegwAH IS NOT HERE RIGHT NOW
SP: ...
DM: SORRY I KEEP WAhcking cAPS LOCK BY WAhccident
SP: ...
DM: wAH
SP: ...
DM: Wah
SP: ...
DM: Sorry about that. Watching him type was physically painful.
SP: I felt it too...
SP: Wait, who is this then?...
DM: Cody. The Guide.
SP: Ah...
DM: Blah figured he could get some last-second mining in before he entered the game.
DM: I'll give him the scoop when he comes back.
SP: Okay... Also... I've been trying to contact DJ, my server player... but he's not online...
DM: He apparently lost connection while Blah was talking to him.
SP: Weird... That never happened before...
DM: Interesting.
SP: How is it interesting?...
DM: I'm interested in a lot of things.
SP: You made it sound like you know something about it...
DM: I know a lot of things.
SP: Well... okay, how about this: do you know what's up with DJ?...
DM: He's a vegetable.
SP: ...
DM: Don't you have a client to manage?
SP: ...
SP: I'll talk to you some other time.
- spacefaringPioneer [SP] ceased pestering desultoryMonarch [DM] -
"Wow, what's her deal?" the Guide said with a laugh. "She'd know that if she met him already."
"Know wah?" Waluigi was huddled in the corner of the house, playing some game on his 3DS.
"Nevermind," dismissed Cody casually. "Say, is it getting warmer in here?"
I had more written, but it was getting kind of long so I decided to break at an earlier point and post it. Next chapter may be up sooner. Or not. Who knows!
And if you're reading this in the future when all of this is irrelevant... where the hell is my flying car?!