Calliope: Geez, Unc. Drama queen much?
Taylor: Hush yourself, child. I bet it played great. In fact, I'll bet you one of those creme brulees that you snarfled away at the safe room last floor that the clip shows up on Omusa's next show.
Calliope: Hah! You're on! ...Wait, what do I get if I win?
Taylor: One of those creme brulee desserts that you snarfled away last floor, obviously. Not my fault you agreed without setting different terms. Pay attention, child. *smug grin*
Calliope turned narrowed eyes that promised death and torture and short-sheeted beds upon him.
"Hey, guys?" Drew said, inspecting the charred insect corpse. "Anyone else notice how it says
Newborn Vespa Wasp, but it's already level 7? Also, come loot this thing, Tay."
The dungeon guaranteed a system of 'dibs' on looting privileges; whoever killed a mob had first right to loot from it. The right expired after ten minutes or so, but until then no one could take anything from the corpse until Taylor had either done so or canceled his right. He happily took the
Vial of Vespa Hemolymph that was the wasp's only treasure, then doused the corpse in another two bags of napalm and set it aflame to get rid of the corpse. It was too heavy to lift.
"We need a force multiplier against these things," Taylor said. "Fortunately, I've got just the thing." He pulled the relevant device from his inventory and placed it on its wheels.
Calliope and Drew both stared in confusion.
"How exactly is a vacuum cleaner going to help us, Unc?"
"It's not a vacuum," Taylor said, smiling. "Quite the opposite, actually." He pulled a large bottle of blue goop from his inventory and poured a generous helping of it into the machine, hesitated, then poured in the rest and put the machine back in inventory. "Let's go."
o-o-o-o
Vespa Wasp — Level 12
Vespa Wasp — Level 13
Vespa Wasp — Level 12
Vespa Wasp — Level 12
It was disturbing to look at the minimap and see four red dots cruising towards you, moving faster than a human could run and each one more powerful than you. Taylor, Calliope, and Moose were all solidly into level 11, while Drew teetered at the very top of level 10 and would hopefully level up in a couple more fights. Stack that against flying stab-monsters with full-body armor that shrugged off .45 ACP rounds and abdomen armor that chuckled in amusement at even shotgun slugs; the math didn't look good.
Taylor had been keeping one eye glued to the map, and the moment he saw the dots he broke into a run, charging straight towards them. "Come on!"
Moose was a good boy and delighted to go for a run anytime his person wanted to, so he happily dashed on ahead. Calliope and Drew froze for an instant, eyes wide, but they got themselves in gear almost immediately.
Drew: Not to be the party buzz kill, but why exactly are we charging straight at the terrifying monsters?
Taylor: We need to be close for this to work. I want to be waiting for them at that next corner. Hurry!
The wasps clearly were not aware that the humans were there because they continued cruising at their normal pace even as the ascended monkeys sprinted to meet them. This would be the monsters' undoing.
Sure, a normal human could in no way stack up against one of the wasps physically. Not unfair, since the dungeon-enhanced wasps broke enough laws of physics to make an entomologist sob and an aerodynamics engineer tear his hair out. What the wasps didn't realize, unfortunately, was that there was a reason that humans ruled the planet: they cheated.
The wasps came around the corner, dumb and happy, and found themselves face-to-antennae with Team Trick Shot, and the machine that Taylor had prepared. They had only an instant to take this in before he squeezed the trigger.
The Sun Joe portable pressure washer is a remarkable device. Battery-operated, so no need for those silly cords. A tank that could hold 6.6 gallons, freeing the operator from dependence on those inconvenient water-supplying hoses. A 1 gpm flow rate, allowing for extended operation. A 20' sprayer+hose length to make it easy to get into tight spaces where the device itself would not fit.
And, of course, 1196 PSI.
Due to the dimensions of the corridor, the wasps were flying two by two, their heads about five feet off the ground. Essentially, perfectly positioned to eat a powerful jet of soapy water straight in the compound eyes from a range of three feet.
Taylor nailed the one on his left perfectly, popping both eyeballs and sending the shrieking monster jerking to the left where it slammed into its hivemate and sent both of them into the wall. They tumbled to the ground, gasping and choking as the soapy water plugged up their breathing holes.
Unfortunately, it's hard to rapidly drown something as big as a Vespa. On the other hand, wasps aren't any fonder of getting soap in their eyes than humans are, and they are less capable of dealing with it than humans, since they lack easy access to running water for rinsing or soft flannel towels for drying.
Taylor tracked back to the left quickly, trying to get the second rank before they could react. These two tried to dodge and failed, taking a good load of soap in the eyes and mouth. They replied to this offense by firing blobs of acid out of their stingers and back at Taylor.
Taylor twisted aside with a yelp, dropping the pressure washer sprayer and raising his arms to shield his face. The first blob missed him and the second caught him on the arm instead of in the eyes. He dumped his shirt into inventory before the acid could do more than scorch him, replacing it with a fresh one a moment later.
Calliope's hurled Kruthak Needle flew past to his right and speared one of the still-mobile wasps in the mouth. The monster's health bar plummeted to the red and it crashed, hitting face-first and driving the Needle the rest of the way through its throat, zeroing out its health. The Needle promptly disappeared and reappeared in Calliope's hand.
The last wasp buzzed angrily and zipped towards Drew, who was busy snipping the wings off the downed wasps and had his head turned. Taylor shouted, reaching out a hand in futile defense of his friend—
And Moose was there, bounding onto the wasp's back and ripping its left front wing out with a quick chomp and shake. The dog was now the size of a small horse and weighed several hundred pounds; the wasp would have hit the ground even if it hadn't suddenly lost a quarter of its lift and become unbalanced.
The Vespa were dangerous enemies. They were fast, heavily armored, and so mobile that they could often dodge thrown weapons (when they hadn't been recently blinded with dish soap, obviously). They were equipped with a ranged attack and had a barbed stinger longer than the head of a boarspear. In the air, they were the undisputed masters of their environment.
Moose was unimpressed.
So far as the big dog was concerned, once these bugs were on the ground they were in
his house, and with their stingers and heavily-armored abdomens trapped and unable to curl forward, they just weren't that big a deal. He tore the wings out to immobilize his prey even as it struggled to crawl out from under him, then got his teeth into its neck and ripped its head off.
The humans stood, chests heaving, as they looked around at each other in order to verify that everyone was okay and holy shit had that actually worked? Moose stood atop the downed Vespa, the head that he still held in his jaws failing to mask his doggy grin.
Pitooey. He spat the head away so that he could pant in an almost smug 'good thing I was here, eh? Now hand over the doggy treats' way.
Taylor smiled and held up a stick of beef jerky. Moose bounded over and snorfled the treat down, chomping happily while Taylor rubbed his ears and scritched under where his collar should have been.
"Good boy," Taylor murmured. "Holy crap are you a
good boy."
Moose panted happily.
"How'd you guys do?" Calliope asked, coming over from where she had been stabbing the downed Vespa a couple final times, just to be sure.
"Hm? Oh...right at the top of 11, looks like," Taylor said. "Moose just went to 12."
Calliope snorted. "I can tell." She thumped the dog on the shoulder. He had just now grown another four inches, putting his shoulders at Calliope's eye level. "Man, Brittany would have gone gaga for you, big guy."
Moose turned and slurped her in appreciation.
"Brittany?" Drew asked, wandering over. His voice was tight with the familiar 'not exhaling because my lungs are full of weed' tone.
"Girl in my history class," Calliope said, her voice dropping in the middle of the sentence as she suddenly remembered that Brittany had been crushed to death a few days ago. "She was kinda horse crazy."
"Well,
I think that Moose is better than any dumb ol' horse," Taylor said, forced cheer in his voice. "Moving quickly on, that did not work like I was hoping."
Calliope raised an eyebrow. "Really? Seems to me like it worked great."
"Eh," Taylor said. "The pressure washer blinded the first one really well, but it didn't hurt them at anything other than point-blank range. Calliope, you got a lucky shot with your javelin-sword-thing and it still didn't kill the creature. We had more luck in that it crashed and killed itself. Plus, we discovered that they have a ranged acid attack. I barely dodged the first shot and almost took the second in the face. It hit my arms and would have hurt me badly if I wasn't prepared for it—after the kruthak I had spent time thinking about how to deal with acid spit. Then the last one would have killed Drew if Moose had been even slightly slower."
"Well, when you put it like
that..." Calliope said. "Okay, new strategy time. What are you thinking?"
Taylor forced himself to put on a confident smile, even though it was a complete lie, and mentally crossed his fingers. "I've got just the thing, but we need to get to a safe room first."
o-o-o-o
"Are you sure this is safe, Unc?" Calliope's voice was almost as dubious as her expression.
"Mmmaybe 70%?" Taylor said, dipping the beaker into the ice bath and packing the ice around it. "That's why I wanted to do it in a safe room. If it blows up, we won't be killed. Oh, you probably don't want to breathe the fumes. They'd eat your lungs." He had no idea if the fumes were dangerous, but this exercise was as much for the audience as for the actual product. It was working.
Views: 157 Billion
Followers: 12 Billion
Favorites: 1.8 Billion
Calliope stepped back.
"How do you know how to do this stuff, anyway?" she asked.
He glanced over his shoulder at her. "You saw my YouTube channel. I did yo-yo videos
and DIY—I mean, Do It Yourself videos. I built a fully-plumbed and -electrified tree fort."
"Yeah, but this is...not that."
"Eh. Chemistry is just DIY with liquids. Hardly a challenge." That was totally untrue and he was sweating about the reaction he was currently running. Picric acid was no joke, and he was working from a bunch of YouTube videos that he'd downloaded before coming into the dungeon. He'd done this once before, a test run before the dungeon opened. He'd accidentally blown up the batch. This time around he was making DNP, which was essentially picric acid with a couple of steps skipped. It was a deflagrant, not an explosive, but he wasn't planning on blowing it up.
"I'm making DNP," he explained. "More properly known as 2,4-dinitrophenol but that's a mouthful. This stuff is one of the best insect killers on the planet. The EPA banned it because it's toxic as hell to humans and if you get it anywhere near flame you're going to have a Bad Day. Still, that's what makes it so perfect for this situation: most legal insecticides probably couldn't take down something as big as a Vespa, at least not quickly. This stuff? They'll drop like flies that got hit by lightning."
Taylor: For the record, this is all complete bullshit. Yes, the stuff used to be used as an insecticide and yes, it's banned, but the Vespas are so big that I doubt anything could drop them that quickly. On the other hand, those wasps make no damn sense from a biological perspective, meaning that they only work by dungeon magic and therefore they have whatever weaknesses Borant says they do. We're rising stars who are already earning money on our appearance fees. It's not a big deal for Borant to increase the Vespas' vulnerability to this stuff in order to keep us alive and build up our audience, and therefore the money we make for them.
Calliope: You are devious as hell, Unc. I love it.
Taylor: Yeah, well, let's hope that they agree with my logic.
"Hey, Drew," he said out loud. "Can you go ask the Bopca for about twenty gallons of Everclear? I need to dissolve this stuff in alcohol as a delivery system, which means swapping the water out of the pressure washer in favor of alcohol. We'll want a few reloads." And pray that the pressure washer didn't eat itself from being filled with alcohol instead of water. Speaking of which, he needed to check on the batteries. They were charging in the corner, the charger powered by the barely-portable gasoline-powered generator he'd brought in. He needed to shut it off as soon as the pressure washer's batteries were charged; there was only so much gasoline available and he didn't want to waste it. Perhaps equally important, the battery charger didn't have an automatic shutoff, so overcharging would damage the batteries.
"Hm?" Drew said. The noise was sleepy and distracted. Drew had been toking since they first arrived.
"Everclear, Drew. Twenty gallons of it. Go buy it from the Bopca."
"Oh, yeah. Sure. Ooh, and nachos. I could totally groove on some nachos. You guys want any?"
"I'm in," Calliope said. "C'mon, I'll help you carry."
Drew swayed to his feet, looked around vaguely, and shuffled over to the Bopca.
o-o-o-o
New Achievement: Crafty Bugger!
You have crafted something! Moreover, it's something truly impressive. Most people, their crafting achievement consists of hammering some nails into a baseball bat in order to make a better weapon. You? You made fuck-off poison! Granted, you had a whole chemistry set and ridiculous amounts of industrial-grade chemicals on hand, which is sus as hell, but you did it!
Reward: You have received a Platinum Maker's Box!
The box contained a table the size of a pinball machine. Intrigued, Taylor examined its properties.
Crafting Table: Chemistry
This table may only be used once installed in an appropriate Crafting Studio in a personal space. Personal spaces are available on the fourth floor.
Taylor smiled in delight and tucked the table into his inventory. All three humans had received a variety of Bronze and Silver boxes containing potions, scrolls, and such, but Taylor was the only one to have received a Platinum box in addition. He made a mental note to guide Calliope and Drew through the chemical process in order to get them an achievement. It wouldn't be anywhere near as good, but it would be something. For now, however, it was time to head out. His view count had been ticking up steadily when he started making the DNP, but the synthesis had taken long enough that the rate of increase in his views had dropped substantially. He didn't want to lose all that momentum.
Views: 207 Billion
Followers: 17 Billion
Favorites: 2.6 Billion
"Okay, folks, time to go kill some shit!" he said, clicking the lid of the pressure washer closed over six gallons of 190-proof Everclear with a handful of DNP powder dissolved in it. He had not the faintest clue about how much DNP could be dissolved in this amount of alcohol, nor how much would actually be necessary to kill a Vespa, but this whole enterprise was predicated on getting Borant to wield their bullshit in the team's favor for a change. As long as it looked somewhat plausible, it should be fine.
"Sweet!" Calliope said, jumping to her feet. Across the table from her, Drew yawned and pushed himself up with a groan. He had gotten thoroughly baked very quickly upon arriving in the safe room, more quickly than Calliope or Taylor had noticed. His teammates had forced him to stop smoking an hour ago and he was probably sufficiently sobered up that it would be safe to have him in a fight as long as he stuck with his bident and left his firearms in his inventory.
"Thank you, Mala!" Taylor called to the Bopca. The little gnome had been disgruntled about Taylor doing stinky chemistry on her tables but she had not physically stopped them.
Mala grunted and urged them out of her safe room with a steady gaze and folded arms.
o-o-o-o
Their first encounter with Vespa was a group of nine, with levels varying from 13 to 16.
Internally, Taylor cursed. This was way higher stakes than he would have preferred; there was no way that the team could handle this group at melee range, which is what the pressure washer required. If they tried it and the poison did not in fact work as well as he hoped, the team was dead. At range, maybe they could have done something using napalm but even that would have been a crapshoot. Unfortunately, he couldn't afford to
not engage, since doing so would have meant showing that he had no confidence in the poison he'd been bragging about.
Of course, the point was a bit moot. Given the speed with which the Vespa moved and the relatively small area that the minimap showed, by the time the monsters were on the map it was too late to evade them.
"Sweet," Taylor said, grinning. "You guys ready to frag some bugs?" He pulled the pressure washer out of his inventory and hefted the sprayer.
"Duuuude," Drew said, giving him a thumbs-up. "I'm in, dude."
"Booya, baby," Calliope said, swishing her sword around. "Let's do this!"
Calliope: You sure about this, Unc?
Taylor: Not even slightly, but I don't think we can get away so we might as well go for a Moment of Awesome.
Calliope: You realize that you are never again allowed to criticize me for being too reckless, right?
Taylor: Bah.
The team crouched at the corner of the T-junction, ready to reenact their prior tactics. The Vespa were at the far end of the corridor that led to their current position, not more than sixty feet away, when insight finally smacked Taylor in the frontal lobes. He dropped the pressure washer back into his inventory with a curse and fumbled out a bag of napalm and a jug of DNP-infused Everclear.
"What are you doing?!" Calliope hissed, keeping her voice down.
"Making it so we don't have to bother working through them one at a time," Taylor said. "I can't be arsed." He hoped the words came off confident enough, but he didn't have the attention to spare. He was busy dumping the contents of one of his napalm bags on the floor and refilling the bag with DNP-infused Everclear. The bugs were only thirty feet away as he dropped in a Distributor Cap and the end of one of the remote detonators before fumbling the end of the resealable bag closed.
"Hurry up," Calliope said, stress making her voice into a squeak.
The adrenaline surging through him made Taylor's fingers shake so much that it took two tries to close the bag. He clicked the detonator to start the five-second countdown and tossed the bag a few feet forward so that it landed in plain sight of the Vespa. The red dots on his map hesitated briefly and then accelerated.
"Come on!" he shouted, grabbing Calliope's wrist in one hand and dragging her along down the hall away from the oncoming Vespa. "Hurry up, Drew!" He hesitated just long enough to be certain that his childhood friend was moving in the right direction, then poured on the speed.
Calliope shook her hand free within two steps and ran alongside. "Why are we running?" she demanded.
Taylor shook his head, saving his breath.
The Vespa rounded the corner and surged after them. Seconds later, the remote trigger went off, activating the Distributor Cap. There was a
whump! and the contents of the bag shot outwards into a fine mist that blanketed the hall.
The Cap went off slightly too late and covered an area slightly too small; it caught the five Vespa that made up the middle of the group, missing three in the front and one in the back. The ones that were caught shrieked in nigh-supersonic agony and dropped to the floor, twitching frantically for a few seconds before going still. Their eyes dissolved and fluid leaked from every orifice.
The remaining Vespa buzzed in fury and descended upon Team Trick Shot with stingers and acid.
o-o-o-o
"Fuck those things," Calliope said, breaking the silence for the first time since they had stumbled heavy-footed into the safe room.
The battle had been short and brutal. Taylor's spatially-locked yo-yo had sufficed to block one of the Vespa, resulting in a pileup that bought Team Trick Shot a few seconds to deploy a pair of barricades and start shooting as fast as they could pull the trigger. The barricades were only there to shield against acid attacks, and by the time the battle was over they had been melted to slag. Furthermore, Taylor and Calliope were both out of shotgun slugs and Drew had only a handful left. Drew had taken a stinger through the shoulder but managed to keep the Vespa from biting his head off long enough for Taylor to douse bug and man in flaming napalm. The bug had recoiled, tearing its barbed stinger out of Drew and destroying his shoulder in the process. A quick Pyrophilia spell fixed the burns and the wound better than a Heal scroll could have.
Afterwards, they cleaned up and returned to the safe room to recover. No one had the energy to speak beyond a few grunts.
"Seconded," Taylor said. He didn't bother opening his eyes, much less lifting his head from where it rested against the wall.
"Good thing you had that bug poison," Calliope said. "You were right about that stuff. It is the absolute what for killing those things. Dropped 'em like a bad boyfriend."
"For real," Drew said. "We'd have been dead without it." He paused to sip his hot chocolate; when they arrived, he was the only one of the group with the energy to order from the Bopca. It was only down to his grace that everyone had restorative comfort food—to wit, hot chocolate plus mac'n'cheese for the humans and a giant bowl of steak burger and gravy for Moose. The massive dog's health had been in the red twice during the battle and he looked almost as tired as the humans.
Drew: Careful, Leo. Talk up a lie too much and it starts to sound like a lie.
"Hey, Tay," Drew said aloud. "How the heck do you have a pressure washer on you?
Why do you have a pressure washer on you?"
Taylor shrugged one shoulder, still not opening his eyes. "You never know when you're going to need to clean some graffiti off a wall." Or, more relevantly, want a way to quickly extinguish fires or distribute chemicals, which is why he'd actually brought it. He wasn't going to say that where the audience could hear it.
Speaking of the audience... He dropped into the Social tab on his interface.
Views: 362 Billion
Followers: 187 Billion
Favorites: 17.8 Billion
The boost in social numbers was nice, but he had trouble convincing himself that it had been worth it given how close they had all come to death. His mind kept showing him pictures of the corpses of Martin Wu and Li X, except they had Calliope's and Drew's faces. And, of course, that made his brain spiral off to the idea of Mom and Dad's corpses, mouths slack and eyes faintly open, skin waxy and yellow after the blood pooled out of their faces.
He squeezed his eyes tight shut and dug his nails into his arm as hard as he could manage, using the pain to distract himself from the keening sobs that were about to boil up and out. He swallowed several times and forced his face to smooth out, then made himself imagine the hippopotamus ballerinas from Fantasia. It was such a ridiculous image that it distracted him from the other thoughts.
"Oh, hey," Drew said. "Check it out, I got a new skill. Pain Resistance. Makes it easier to keep going when I'm on fire or stabbed or whatever."
"Cool," Calliope said, picking her head up in interest. "My Thrown Weapons ticked up."
Taylor checked his own character sheet. "I got two new skills," he said, confused. "Incendiary Devices Handling and Dangerous Incendiary Devices Handling. Both are starting off at level 2."
Drew cocked his head in puzzlement. "Is there such a thing as a
non-dangerous incendiary device?"
"Apparently," Taylor said. "At least, in the AI's opinion." The moment the words were out of his mouth he recognized how that might be interpreted, so he hurried to add, "Which is the only one that matters."
"Maybe something like a cigarette lighter?" Calliope suggested.
"I suppose," Taylor said. "Anyway, I hit level 12 and I've got a bunch of loot boxes. You guys?"
"Same." / "Yup."
"Cool. Recap's on at eight; I'm going to grab a quick shower and maybe a catnap, then we can finish our food, watch the recap, open boxes, and head out again."
"We should contact Team Valkyrie," Calliope said. "Let them know how to make this stuff, or offer to make some for them. Charlie's not around so can't do it for him."
"I'm...not sure I have enough chemicals to supply the Valkyries," Taylor said.
Taylor: Let it go, Leo. Apparently Borant is okay to fiddle the numbers in our favor, but they might start getting upset if we spread the stuff around the dungeon and throw off the power curve for everyone.
Calliope looked shocked, but she quickly smoothed it away.
"Shame," she said, digging into her mac'n'cheese.
Calliope: Unc, they might die without this stuff. These wasps are ridiculously dangerous.
Drew: I'm all for saving as many people as possible as a general rule, but I'm with Taylor on this one. If we want to keep them safe then we can team up with them in person, but giving the recipe for this 'super poison' out to other people is just going to make Borant nerf it again.
Calliope looked mutinous, but she said nothing. Instead, she shoved her food into inventory and stood up.
"I'm going to get that shower," she announced. She turned and left, her steps barely short of stomps.
Taylor sighed and rubbed his head. It was going to be a long dungeon.
Voting remains closed for now. I want to get through at least a bit more of the plan.
New Achievement! Discordian Delight
You are invited to drop by the
#dungeon-crawler-you channel in the
Quests and Stuff Discord. (That second link is an invite to the server.)
