- Location
- The INTERNET!
- Pronouns
- He/Him/His
Unfortunately, events have played out per Canon until Coil instructed Lisa to blow off her appointment with Taylor, so Taylor and Armsmaster's first meeting went per Canon.
Why Yes, I am an Evil Lair. (Worm/Dungeon Core) (No Longer A Quest)
- Thread starter Automatonation
- Start date
- Location
- Earth Prime
The canon details we have is that Lung almost died because Armsmaster didn't properly account for nor report the bug venoms' combined effects with his tranqs.
Wrin
Not an Owl
- Location
- United States
Thank you. I find canonical Worm to be too grimdark, so I refuse to read it. Having a SpaceBattles account makes it almost impossible to avoid the fanfic though, so I've been getting a feel for the common elements for a while.
FYI, Worm WoG was that Taylor, at the point of canon start, would be very unlikely to have taken a Ward membership, because she was practically speaking, incapable of trusting authority figures due to the circumstances of her Trigger(which is not an uncommon thing with Master and Stranger triggers).
She has to either feel in control(her later canon 'joining' the Wards was most certainly seen to be on her terms, and she evidently had negligible loyalty) or be coerced correctly(which Alexandria WOULD have done in canon if they didn't wind up putting her in the perfect scenario where Taylor had just enough access to bugs to fight back, but not enough bugs to give indicators on where her stress levels were).
Or a third possibility is another big shock shakes up her worldview a bunch. Teenagers change a lot.
I.e. no recruitment pitch in good faith would have worked at canon start, though Armsmaster's desire to raise his personal status most certainly didn't help with managing her as an independent hero versus basically going villain.
She has to either feel in control(her later canon 'joining' the Wards was most certainly seen to be on her terms, and she evidently had negligible loyalty) or be coerced correctly(which Alexandria WOULD have done in canon if they didn't wind up putting her in the perfect scenario where Taylor had just enough access to bugs to fight back, but not enough bugs to give indicators on where her stress levels were).
Or a third possibility is another big shock shakes up her worldview a bunch. Teenagers change a lot.
I.e. no recruitment pitch in good faith would have worked at canon start, though Armsmaster's desire to raise his personal status most certainly didn't help with managing her as an independent hero versus basically going villain.
Chapter 5
- Location
- The INTERNET!
- Pronouns
- He/Him/His
Tattletale sat near the door to the cell block where Coil had stored his little problem, flipping through PHO on her smartphone and trying not to tap her feet to the catchy beat of the zombies groaning within. It wouldn't do to antagonize the pair of mercenaries manning machine guns behind sandbag barricades. The man who had just gotten back on shift was fuming with frustration already, and he had only been back for a few minutes. Dead mercenaries were friendly with him, feels bad for empathizing with the prisoner, feels guilty for enjoying music. Well, that would do it. Lisa shifted in her seat, suppressing a grimace. She had been sitting here for six fucking hours, and her cute little butt wasn't meant for a hard folding chair like this.
It was typical of Coil, really. Call her in, making her drop everything, just to sit and do nothing. Their shot at recruiting the lonely bug girl was done. Gone, like a fly out the window of opportunity. Lisa snickered and enjoyed spotting a mercenary twitch. Still, it didn't make a tremendous amount of sense to expect even a Thinker of her prowess to gather information staring at a closed door. There was some good information, true. She suspected that whatever was controlling those singing zombies enjoyed music, but couldn't actually remember any, because the groaning, while technically skilled, didn't quite match any song that she had ever heard. So, that, according to her power, meant amnesia. And THAT, combined with the prisoner being a stone statue, according to the one paragraph dossier given by her boss, meant a Case 53. Which had all kinds of interesting connotations that she had only let her power run away with once, before shutting down to avoid another debilitating migraine. The realization that her boss had ties to someone performing experiments on people with powers…. Well, the saying is that Knowledge is Power, and Tattletale was a firm believer that power that no one knows you have is the best of all. She tucked that little tidbit away for later and tried not to worry about it more.
Still, the hints of a headache had faded a little quicker than normal, and she was feeling better than she would have expected for sitting in place for hours. Her power refused to comment, which was telling, in and of itself. Tattletale stiffened slightly as she heard footsteps behind her. "Tattletale. Ready to move in?" A bored voice asked her. Lisa turned to spot Jake Draven, a slender, dark-haired man in black combat gear. He was… well, pretty, like a grown-up version of Alec, and any other girl her age would have been all over him.
Lisa smirked. "What took you so long?". She let her eyes flit over the other three members of Jake's Delta squad. A stocky middle-eastern woman with a nasty look in her eye, one hand in her pocket, the other cradling a containment foam nozzle. The hefty backpack was covered in pouches, all filled with grenades of some kind - incendiary, both napalm and thermite. Ah, lovely. That was Issani Iladris, wanted for at least two counts of suspected arson. And the burly bald man in the back, who was nearly seven feet tall and easily four hundred pounds of grotesque muscle, was The Russian, officially considered a Brute 1 by the PRT, despite not actually being a parahuman, due to his abuse of Tinkertech steroids. Nicholai, she thought, but that likely wasn't his birth name. The mountain of a man hefted a rotary minigun of all things, something she thought wouldn't have actually existed outside some of Alec's games. A Brute, but… rather dim. The fourth member of the squad was a stocky, overweight, balding man who seemed to ooze slime. Ted Johnson was fucking leering at her again. The bastard. A nasty, devious mind, with a broad vicious streak and not much in the way of morals, Ted was one of the worst of Coil's goons. Not the worst, by far, unfortunately, but one to avoid. He hefted a shotgun with the ease of long use.
"The boss wants you to wear this." Jake droned. Dislikes Coil, wants to quit. Well, don't we all? Lisa took the proffered skin-tone patch, big enough to conceal a small transponder and microphone. Also includes a heartbeat sensor, to indicate termination of the wearer. How useful.
"Thank you, Jake," Tattletale replied flippantly. "Nice to know he cares." Jake didn't quite flinch, but Tattletale let her smirk grow wider, and inclined her head slightly. Yeah, I don't want to be here, either. "We going in? Been getting bored out here."
"Well, wouldn't want that, would we?". Jake turned to his squad. "This is exploratory only, protecting the asset while we try to gain information. Eyes and ears open, be ready to evac. Nic, I tell you, you grab her and run."
The Russian nods. "Da. Pick up girl and run." God, he had to be trying hard to be that stereotypical.
"Ted, Issani, if you shoot first, I'm shooting you dead right there." Jake leveled a gimlet stare at Ted. "Remember Fred?"
The pair of mercs reluctantly nodded. It was something that Tattletale had noticed, that the squads seemed to be composed of monsters and bastards, but led by someone that could keep them in line. She idly applied the sticky patch to her neck, right over her jugular, all the better to get her pulse.
Jake turned to Lisa, his eyes cold. "Tattletale, you're in the middle of the formation. You figure out anything important, or if you decide it's time to bug out, let us know right then." Has secondary orders to terminate you if you attempt to betray or defect, her power interjected. Betrayal expected. Not looking forward to killing an underage girl. Will do so anyway.
With the ease of long practice, Lisa kept the nerves under control. Was she expected to defect? Defect to what? In the middle of Coil's lair? "Got it, you're the Boss." She chirped. "Got a weapon for me?"
"You're Thinker support, not a combatant. You don't need a gun." Jake drawled, his eyes not quite meeting hers. Yep, expecting betrayal.
The macabre chorus of zombie groans reached a crescendo, and then faded out. With a shrug, the mercenary captain beckoned his troops forward, and Lisa reluctantly followed him. At least Ted was being professional enough to avoid staring at her ass. Why did she decide to make her costume tight spandex, rather than comfortable sweatpants?
Well, that was fortuitous. Just when I have an empty MP pool, I get a chance to fill it again. How lovely. I shook myself. Don't get cocky, Dungeon-Man! Just because I am a fresh level five and have all these shiny new units and rooms is no reason to get over-confident. Still… If I had teeth, I would be baring them in a savage grin. Undead teeth gritted, slimes bubbled, and turrets whirred on their bases. I was ready. The heavy double doors of my entrance slid open, and light filled the dark room. I had intentionally left Cell Block A visually unchanged, just to throw off intruders, and I had better places to put the turrets that had originally flanked the doors. Before anyone stepped inside, one of the mercenaries, I couldn't tell who without any visibility outside my entrance, threw in a pair of clear plastic orbs, just a bit larger than fist-sized. As soon as they rolled to a stop, the pair of balls began shining brightly, illuminating the shadows that weren't already cleared by the light coming from outside the dungeon. Clever.
Five figures moved quickly into my walls, and I immediately start playing a mental game of 'which of these things is not like the other.' The four mercenaries - three men and a woman, but only one with a foam sprayer this time - surround a slender blonde girl wearing a tight purple and black garment that clung to her skin. A mask covers the upper part of her face, around her eyes, but leaves her head otherwise uncovered. What is she doing here? She's unarmed, is she important? She's wearing a tight bodysuit, similar to the one Coil was wearing, but in purple and black. Do people indicate their importance with the tightness of the clothes they wear? No, that's not right.
As I muse, the mercenaries swing around, carefully checking the illuminated corners for turrets, and move to one of my cells. Cell A-2, one of my new Mana Taps, which gives me an extra 25 MP every hour. The massive man carrying a rotary minigun squares up in front of the door, the girl in the tight costume peeking around him as the barrels start spinning. The slender mercenary kicks open the door, before diving out of the way.
"There's no one there, boss." The girl says with a smirk, which fades as she steps around the mountain of a mercenary in front of her. "It's empty, but…"
The slender male mercenary rubs his eyes. "Get to the point, Tattletale." A code name?
"That's just it, I can't quite tell. The sink is on, but the water is…. Blue? It does something, something important for the cape." Tattletale is examining the sink. I wish I could turn it off, but something about the process of turning a room into a Mana Tap results in the need for a constantly running fountain - which in this case turns out to be the sink - which produces a minor MP potion. I'm not sure what would happen to someone without any native MP if they were to drink it, but my interface indicated that it could be used to restore depleted mana in anything outside of my dungeon. The liquid is slightly thicker than water, translucent with a bluish tint, and glowing faintly. "It's meant to drink, but not by him or anything he makes…." She grimaces, one hand going to her forehead.
The mercenary glares at the fountain for a moment. "Issani, sample container." The female mercenary, presumably Issani, fishes a small test tube with a screw top out of a side pocket and hands it to him. He carefully collects a sample, without touching the glowing fluid. "Does it actually expect us to drink this glowing shit?" He asks. Well, I don't, personally, but yes, it's meant to be drunk.
Tattletale shakes her head. "It's not… intentionally poisonous? I don't think it's meant to hurt us." She blinks, as something seems to click, and then starts to giggle. "It…" snickering. "It's a fucking mana potion."
How. The FUCK. Did you know that? I mean, I did everything I could to make it less obvious. I had to manually absorb four hundred glass flasks before my damn system figured out that I didn't want people to just drink my fluids. And you work it out with just a little bit of thought? I groan, and my zombies groan with me, the sound echoing through the dungeon.
All five of the intruders stiffen, guns raising. "It's listening." Tattletale whispers. "No, watching. It sees all within its range." Fuck you, girlie. Ruining my fun.
"What's the range?" the mercenary leader growls, gesturing to the opposite door, cell A1. I tense, but don't let my units react. Cell A1 is where I have the hidden passageway to where I assimilated Cellblock B, and I can't afford to tip my hand there, I'm not quite ready. Oh, I have defenses, but right now, stealth is my primary shield. I just didn't anticipate some bloody girl who can apparently pull information out of fucking nowhere.
"This cell, at least." Tattletale replies flippantly. "Likely the whole block. Possibly more. The phrase 'Ruler of all it Surveys' comes to mind."
"Shit." The mercenaries make their way to Cell A1, and kick the door open, before looking inside. I didn't install a Mana Tap in this room, didn't want anything unusual to draw the eye. "Nothing here, right?" The captain asks, and Tattletale - and boy was that name appropriate now that I think about it - glanced around. I could swear that her eye pauses on the faint seam between the fake cinderblocks hiding the door and the wall, but she shakes her head.
"Not that I can see, Jake. Just an empty cell, nothing weird." The mercenaries move on and slowly clear the next few cells, alternating back and forth. Three of those cells are Mana Taps, and Tattletale insists on getting samples, winding up with four samples of my mana potions tucked into a pouch at her waist. Every once in a while, she winces and gingerly touches her temple. Headaches? No matter.
The mercenaries group up at the door to Cell A8, and moved into a formation around the door, Tattletale in the back, with Jake by the door and the other three positioned to wipe out anything inside. Through random chatter and orders, I had attached names to the remaining mercenaries, Nicolai for the muscular brute with a minigun and Ted for the shorter man with a shotgun. Jake carefully pushed the door open with one hand, keeping out of the firing line of Nicolai's minigun. "Ah, Boss?" The giant rumbled in an odd accent. "There's nothing in there."
My core was no longer there, of course. I had excavated thousands of square feet of rooms to get to level 5, and there was no way I was leaving my one true vulnerability in such an accessible location. So, naturally, I did what dungeons do, and dug out rooms and tunnels. A metal door, identical to the one leading into the cell, was set onto the bare wall, towards the empty expanse of unused space behind Cellblock A.
"Another door?" Tattletale whispered from the back of the group, before shaking her head. "Boss, I have a suspicion about how this works, but I need more information, and I can't get it without knowing what's behind that door."
Jake glances at his mercenaries briefly. Nicolai shrugs, muscles moving like boulders, and Tedc and Issani nod in return. "Stay at the back," he orders, and carefully pushes the door open. The room beyond is only twice the size of the cell block, a bare ten by twenty cinderblock room, with unlit fluorescent lights, generated automatically by the existing dungeon theme, set into the ceiling. It looks exactly like the rest of the cellblock, except it was never on the plans. At the opposite end of the room, set into the far corner, is another metal door. Otherwise, it's completely empty. This does not appear to reassure the intruders.
"It's too big, to go further we'll have to all go inside. I'm not leaving anyone behind." Jake states grimly. "It's been too quiet, and that's not a good thing. Zombies jumped the last squad before now, and I haven't seen anything resembling gun turrets." He turns to Tattletale. "Anything?"
She grimaces again. "No… I can't…" Shaking her head, the girl glares at the wall. "There's something making this too difficult to make out, something that either it's hiding or I don't know."
Ted snorts. "Typical Thinker bullshit. Not worth shit once the chips are down."
"I'm docking you a day when we get out of here, Ted." Jake retorted. "Remember who the boss is."
"And where the hell is he, huh? Sitting pretty in his office, steepling his fingers at people while wearing fetish-wear?" Ted retorts. "At least the other bloody capes go and get their hands dirty. Thinkers all act like they're too good for honest work."
Tattletale opens her mouth to retort, but Jake cuts her off. "And that's why you're going through that door first, Ted. Hell, if you survive, I'll throw in a grand out of my own pocket." Jake smiles, but there is no mirth there. "Or would you rather I tell the boss what you think of him?"
Ted blanches, but moves ahead, fingers white around his shotgun. I grin, as he examines the door. "The only handle's at the bottom, I think it's a vertical sliding door." He squats and grabs the handle, pulling it up with a heave. The door slides up smoothly, until it catches, well above head height. Beyond is a long, narrow corridor, only five feet wide but fifty feet long. The floor is slightly recessed, and a thick grayish sludge fills the floor of the corridor. It's pitch black, no lights at all, and the walls are the same cinderblocks as the rest of the prison block. Ted carefully steps forward, stumbling slightly as his foot drops into the sludge. "Jesus. The hell is this?"
Tattletale shrugs. "I can't tell. It's not sewage, thank god."
Ted sneers, and moves forward slowly, squelching slightly with each step as he pulls his boots out of the ooze, his shotgun and the underslung light panning back and forth along the corridor. Issani follows him, grimacing. Jake glances at Nicolai. "Stow the gun, it's a liability in close quarters."
"Da." The massive man slings his gun over his back and pulls a massive machete from a sheath on his back, testing the edge with his thumb. He moves into the corridor, ducking slightly to avoid hitting his head.
The mercenary captain takes a long look at the corridor. "There's something that just isn't right here," he mutters, before turning to Tattletale. "And you don't have a clue what's going on?"
The girl winces. "No, and it's giving me a splitting headache. It's like the cape is…" Her eyes widen. "Oh shit."
I grin internally, and drop the door, trapping the three mercenaries who had entered the hallway. The three concrete-infused Slimes, which had gained the attribute Sturdy from all the stone they had consumed, coalesced around the three mercenaries, trapping them waist-deep in goo before starting to quickly dissolve their clothes. And skin. Screams echo from the corridor as the mercenaries start thrashing, trying to swat away the acidic ooze, but it's thick, sticky, and resists cutting and slashing, trapping flying hands and etching away at blades and guns.
Jake darts to the door as soon as it drops, but I don't have an obligation to make entry easy - and this hallway isn't actually leading to my core. The door is locked firmly to the ground, and while he could pick the lock, there's no way he can make it through in time. Already, the screams are beginning to die down to gurgles, and I drink in the rush of Mana as Ted succumbs to the fast-acting acid.
"He's baiting us." Whimpers Tattletale. "He wanted us to come in deeper."
"Fuck that," growls Jake, and he pulls his pistol, quickly locating the lock and firing a quick pair of shots at the metal. It isn't quite enough to actually break the lock, but I decide to be merciful and unlock the door anyway. The captain heaves up the door, only to stand, transfixed, as he sees the slime climbing down Issani's throat, drowning out her screams into gurgles. Slime acid works quickly on organic material, and Ted is already dead, flesh melting away to bare bones, the slime gradually losing interest and joining the feast that Nicolai had become. The giant is blind, swinging his machete wildly, bellowing incoherently in a language I cannot understand. One errant strike splits Issani's head like a coconut, and she collapses. I drink in her mana. So obliging, these mercenaries. Tattletale is staring, transfixed at the grisly scene, but Jake doesn't say a word, stepping back away from the hallway of death, backing towards the door. Pity.
I move my final pieces. The zombie I made from the corpse of Brad Winston, flanked by two of my generic zombies, lurch into the room from the cell block. Casually, he lays one rotting hand on Jake's shoulder. The mercenary turns and has enough time to gape in horror before the rusted knife in the other hand guts him. As I feel the mana surge from his death, echoed by Nicolai finally giving into the damage dealt by the slimes, my zombies turn to Tattletale.
The costumed girl immediately drops to her knees, hands behind her head. "I surrender!"
What?
AN: Sorry about the delay, folks. Had stuff happen. Once stuff was done happening, more stuff happened, and so on.
It was typical of Coil, really. Call her in, making her drop everything, just to sit and do nothing. Their shot at recruiting the lonely bug girl was done. Gone, like a fly out the window of opportunity. Lisa snickered and enjoyed spotting a mercenary twitch. Still, it didn't make a tremendous amount of sense to expect even a Thinker of her prowess to gather information staring at a closed door. There was some good information, true. She suspected that whatever was controlling those singing zombies enjoyed music, but couldn't actually remember any, because the groaning, while technically skilled, didn't quite match any song that she had ever heard. So, that, according to her power, meant amnesia. And THAT, combined with the prisoner being a stone statue, according to the one paragraph dossier given by her boss, meant a Case 53. Which had all kinds of interesting connotations that she had only let her power run away with once, before shutting down to avoid another debilitating migraine. The realization that her boss had ties to someone performing experiments on people with powers…. Well, the saying is that Knowledge is Power, and Tattletale was a firm believer that power that no one knows you have is the best of all. She tucked that little tidbit away for later and tried not to worry about it more.
Still, the hints of a headache had faded a little quicker than normal, and she was feeling better than she would have expected for sitting in place for hours. Her power refused to comment, which was telling, in and of itself. Tattletale stiffened slightly as she heard footsteps behind her. "Tattletale. Ready to move in?" A bored voice asked her. Lisa turned to spot Jake Draven, a slender, dark-haired man in black combat gear. He was… well, pretty, like a grown-up version of Alec, and any other girl her age would have been all over him.
Lisa smirked. "What took you so long?". She let her eyes flit over the other three members of Jake's Delta squad. A stocky middle-eastern woman with a nasty look in her eye, one hand in her pocket, the other cradling a containment foam nozzle. The hefty backpack was covered in pouches, all filled with grenades of some kind - incendiary, both napalm and thermite. Ah, lovely. That was Issani Iladris, wanted for at least two counts of suspected arson. And the burly bald man in the back, who was nearly seven feet tall and easily four hundred pounds of grotesque muscle, was The Russian, officially considered a Brute 1 by the PRT, despite not actually being a parahuman, due to his abuse of Tinkertech steroids. Nicholai, she thought, but that likely wasn't his birth name. The mountain of a man hefted a rotary minigun of all things, something she thought wouldn't have actually existed outside some of Alec's games. A Brute, but… rather dim. The fourth member of the squad was a stocky, overweight, balding man who seemed to ooze slime. Ted Johnson was fucking leering at her again. The bastard. A nasty, devious mind, with a broad vicious streak and not much in the way of morals, Ted was one of the worst of Coil's goons. Not the worst, by far, unfortunately, but one to avoid. He hefted a shotgun with the ease of long use.
"The boss wants you to wear this." Jake droned. Dislikes Coil, wants to quit. Well, don't we all? Lisa took the proffered skin-tone patch, big enough to conceal a small transponder and microphone. Also includes a heartbeat sensor, to indicate termination of the wearer. How useful.
"Thank you, Jake," Tattletale replied flippantly. "Nice to know he cares." Jake didn't quite flinch, but Tattletale let her smirk grow wider, and inclined her head slightly. Yeah, I don't want to be here, either. "We going in? Been getting bored out here."
"Well, wouldn't want that, would we?". Jake turned to his squad. "This is exploratory only, protecting the asset while we try to gain information. Eyes and ears open, be ready to evac. Nic, I tell you, you grab her and run."
The Russian nods. "Da. Pick up girl and run." God, he had to be trying hard to be that stereotypical.
"Ted, Issani, if you shoot first, I'm shooting you dead right there." Jake leveled a gimlet stare at Ted. "Remember Fred?"
The pair of mercs reluctantly nodded. It was something that Tattletale had noticed, that the squads seemed to be composed of monsters and bastards, but led by someone that could keep them in line. She idly applied the sticky patch to her neck, right over her jugular, all the better to get her pulse.
Jake turned to Lisa, his eyes cold. "Tattletale, you're in the middle of the formation. You figure out anything important, or if you decide it's time to bug out, let us know right then." Has secondary orders to terminate you if you attempt to betray or defect, her power interjected. Betrayal expected. Not looking forward to killing an underage girl. Will do so anyway.
With the ease of long practice, Lisa kept the nerves under control. Was she expected to defect? Defect to what? In the middle of Coil's lair? "Got it, you're the Boss." She chirped. "Got a weapon for me?"
"You're Thinker support, not a combatant. You don't need a gun." Jake drawled, his eyes not quite meeting hers. Yep, expecting betrayal.
The macabre chorus of zombie groans reached a crescendo, and then faded out. With a shrug, the mercenary captain beckoned his troops forward, and Lisa reluctantly followed him. At least Ted was being professional enough to avoid staring at her ass. Why did she decide to make her costume tight spandex, rather than comfortable sweatpants?
Well, that was fortuitous. Just when I have an empty MP pool, I get a chance to fill it again. How lovely. I shook myself. Don't get cocky, Dungeon-Man! Just because I am a fresh level five and have all these shiny new units and rooms is no reason to get over-confident. Still… If I had teeth, I would be baring them in a savage grin. Undead teeth gritted, slimes bubbled, and turrets whirred on their bases. I was ready. The heavy double doors of my entrance slid open, and light filled the dark room. I had intentionally left Cell Block A visually unchanged, just to throw off intruders, and I had better places to put the turrets that had originally flanked the doors. Before anyone stepped inside, one of the mercenaries, I couldn't tell who without any visibility outside my entrance, threw in a pair of clear plastic orbs, just a bit larger than fist-sized. As soon as they rolled to a stop, the pair of balls began shining brightly, illuminating the shadows that weren't already cleared by the light coming from outside the dungeon. Clever.
Five figures moved quickly into my walls, and I immediately start playing a mental game of 'which of these things is not like the other.' The four mercenaries - three men and a woman, but only one with a foam sprayer this time - surround a slender blonde girl wearing a tight purple and black garment that clung to her skin. A mask covers the upper part of her face, around her eyes, but leaves her head otherwise uncovered. What is she doing here? She's unarmed, is she important? She's wearing a tight bodysuit, similar to the one Coil was wearing, but in purple and black. Do people indicate their importance with the tightness of the clothes they wear? No, that's not right.
As I muse, the mercenaries swing around, carefully checking the illuminated corners for turrets, and move to one of my cells. Cell A-2, one of my new Mana Taps, which gives me an extra 25 MP every hour. The massive man carrying a rotary minigun squares up in front of the door, the girl in the tight costume peeking around him as the barrels start spinning. The slender mercenary kicks open the door, before diving out of the way.
"There's no one there, boss." The girl says with a smirk, which fades as she steps around the mountain of a mercenary in front of her. "It's empty, but…"
The slender male mercenary rubs his eyes. "Get to the point, Tattletale." A code name?
"That's just it, I can't quite tell. The sink is on, but the water is…. Blue? It does something, something important for the cape." Tattletale is examining the sink. I wish I could turn it off, but something about the process of turning a room into a Mana Tap results in the need for a constantly running fountain - which in this case turns out to be the sink - which produces a minor MP potion. I'm not sure what would happen to someone without any native MP if they were to drink it, but my interface indicated that it could be used to restore depleted mana in anything outside of my dungeon. The liquid is slightly thicker than water, translucent with a bluish tint, and glowing faintly. "It's meant to drink, but not by him or anything he makes…." She grimaces, one hand going to her forehead.
The mercenary glares at the fountain for a moment. "Issani, sample container." The female mercenary, presumably Issani, fishes a small test tube with a screw top out of a side pocket and hands it to him. He carefully collects a sample, without touching the glowing fluid. "Does it actually expect us to drink this glowing shit?" He asks. Well, I don't, personally, but yes, it's meant to be drunk.
Tattletale shakes her head. "It's not… intentionally poisonous? I don't think it's meant to hurt us." She blinks, as something seems to click, and then starts to giggle. "It…" snickering. "It's a fucking mana potion."
How. The FUCK. Did you know that? I mean, I did everything I could to make it less obvious. I had to manually absorb four hundred glass flasks before my damn system figured out that I didn't want people to just drink my fluids. And you work it out with just a little bit of thought? I groan, and my zombies groan with me, the sound echoing through the dungeon.
All five of the intruders stiffen, guns raising. "It's listening." Tattletale whispers. "No, watching. It sees all within its range." Fuck you, girlie. Ruining my fun.
"What's the range?" the mercenary leader growls, gesturing to the opposite door, cell A1. I tense, but don't let my units react. Cell A1 is where I have the hidden passageway to where I assimilated Cellblock B, and I can't afford to tip my hand there, I'm not quite ready. Oh, I have defenses, but right now, stealth is my primary shield. I just didn't anticipate some bloody girl who can apparently pull information out of fucking nowhere.
"This cell, at least." Tattletale replies flippantly. "Likely the whole block. Possibly more. The phrase 'Ruler of all it Surveys' comes to mind."
"Shit." The mercenaries make their way to Cell A1, and kick the door open, before looking inside. I didn't install a Mana Tap in this room, didn't want anything unusual to draw the eye. "Nothing here, right?" The captain asks, and Tattletale - and boy was that name appropriate now that I think about it - glanced around. I could swear that her eye pauses on the faint seam between the fake cinderblocks hiding the door and the wall, but she shakes her head.
"Not that I can see, Jake. Just an empty cell, nothing weird." The mercenaries move on and slowly clear the next few cells, alternating back and forth. Three of those cells are Mana Taps, and Tattletale insists on getting samples, winding up with four samples of my mana potions tucked into a pouch at her waist. Every once in a while, she winces and gingerly touches her temple. Headaches? No matter.
The mercenaries group up at the door to Cell A8, and moved into a formation around the door, Tattletale in the back, with Jake by the door and the other three positioned to wipe out anything inside. Through random chatter and orders, I had attached names to the remaining mercenaries, Nicolai for the muscular brute with a minigun and Ted for the shorter man with a shotgun. Jake carefully pushed the door open with one hand, keeping out of the firing line of Nicolai's minigun. "Ah, Boss?" The giant rumbled in an odd accent. "There's nothing in there."
My core was no longer there, of course. I had excavated thousands of square feet of rooms to get to level 5, and there was no way I was leaving my one true vulnerability in such an accessible location. So, naturally, I did what dungeons do, and dug out rooms and tunnels. A metal door, identical to the one leading into the cell, was set onto the bare wall, towards the empty expanse of unused space behind Cellblock A.
"Another door?" Tattletale whispered from the back of the group, before shaking her head. "Boss, I have a suspicion about how this works, but I need more information, and I can't get it without knowing what's behind that door."
Jake glances at his mercenaries briefly. Nicolai shrugs, muscles moving like boulders, and Tedc and Issani nod in return. "Stay at the back," he orders, and carefully pushes the door open. The room beyond is only twice the size of the cell block, a bare ten by twenty cinderblock room, with unlit fluorescent lights, generated automatically by the existing dungeon theme, set into the ceiling. It looks exactly like the rest of the cellblock, except it was never on the plans. At the opposite end of the room, set into the far corner, is another metal door. Otherwise, it's completely empty. This does not appear to reassure the intruders.
"It's too big, to go further we'll have to all go inside. I'm not leaving anyone behind." Jake states grimly. "It's been too quiet, and that's not a good thing. Zombies jumped the last squad before now, and I haven't seen anything resembling gun turrets." He turns to Tattletale. "Anything?"
She grimaces again. "No… I can't…" Shaking her head, the girl glares at the wall. "There's something making this too difficult to make out, something that either it's hiding or I don't know."
Ted snorts. "Typical Thinker bullshit. Not worth shit once the chips are down."
"I'm docking you a day when we get out of here, Ted." Jake retorted. "Remember who the boss is."
"And where the hell is he, huh? Sitting pretty in his office, steepling his fingers at people while wearing fetish-wear?" Ted retorts. "At least the other bloody capes go and get their hands dirty. Thinkers all act like they're too good for honest work."
Tattletale opens her mouth to retort, but Jake cuts her off. "And that's why you're going through that door first, Ted. Hell, if you survive, I'll throw in a grand out of my own pocket." Jake smiles, but there is no mirth there. "Or would you rather I tell the boss what you think of him?"
Ted blanches, but moves ahead, fingers white around his shotgun. I grin, as he examines the door. "The only handle's at the bottom, I think it's a vertical sliding door." He squats and grabs the handle, pulling it up with a heave. The door slides up smoothly, until it catches, well above head height. Beyond is a long, narrow corridor, only five feet wide but fifty feet long. The floor is slightly recessed, and a thick grayish sludge fills the floor of the corridor. It's pitch black, no lights at all, and the walls are the same cinderblocks as the rest of the prison block. Ted carefully steps forward, stumbling slightly as his foot drops into the sludge. "Jesus. The hell is this?"
Tattletale shrugs. "I can't tell. It's not sewage, thank god."
Ted sneers, and moves forward slowly, squelching slightly with each step as he pulls his boots out of the ooze, his shotgun and the underslung light panning back and forth along the corridor. Issani follows him, grimacing. Jake glances at Nicolai. "Stow the gun, it's a liability in close quarters."
"Da." The massive man slings his gun over his back and pulls a massive machete from a sheath on his back, testing the edge with his thumb. He moves into the corridor, ducking slightly to avoid hitting his head.
The mercenary captain takes a long look at the corridor. "There's something that just isn't right here," he mutters, before turning to Tattletale. "And you don't have a clue what's going on?"
The girl winces. "No, and it's giving me a splitting headache. It's like the cape is…" Her eyes widen. "Oh shit."
I grin internally, and drop the door, trapping the three mercenaries who had entered the hallway. The three concrete-infused Slimes, which had gained the attribute Sturdy from all the stone they had consumed, coalesced around the three mercenaries, trapping them waist-deep in goo before starting to quickly dissolve their clothes. And skin. Screams echo from the corridor as the mercenaries start thrashing, trying to swat away the acidic ooze, but it's thick, sticky, and resists cutting and slashing, trapping flying hands and etching away at blades and guns.
Jake darts to the door as soon as it drops, but I don't have an obligation to make entry easy - and this hallway isn't actually leading to my core. The door is locked firmly to the ground, and while he could pick the lock, there's no way he can make it through in time. Already, the screams are beginning to die down to gurgles, and I drink in the rush of Mana as Ted succumbs to the fast-acting acid.
"He's baiting us." Whimpers Tattletale. "He wanted us to come in deeper."
"Fuck that," growls Jake, and he pulls his pistol, quickly locating the lock and firing a quick pair of shots at the metal. It isn't quite enough to actually break the lock, but I decide to be merciful and unlock the door anyway. The captain heaves up the door, only to stand, transfixed, as he sees the slime climbing down Issani's throat, drowning out her screams into gurgles. Slime acid works quickly on organic material, and Ted is already dead, flesh melting away to bare bones, the slime gradually losing interest and joining the feast that Nicolai had become. The giant is blind, swinging his machete wildly, bellowing incoherently in a language I cannot understand. One errant strike splits Issani's head like a coconut, and she collapses. I drink in her mana. So obliging, these mercenaries. Tattletale is staring, transfixed at the grisly scene, but Jake doesn't say a word, stepping back away from the hallway of death, backing towards the door. Pity.
I move my final pieces. The zombie I made from the corpse of Brad Winston, flanked by two of my generic zombies, lurch into the room from the cell block. Casually, he lays one rotting hand on Jake's shoulder. The mercenary turns and has enough time to gape in horror before the rusted knife in the other hand guts him. As I feel the mana surge from his death, echoed by Nicolai finally giving into the damage dealt by the slimes, my zombies turn to Tattletale.
The costumed girl immediately drops to her knees, hands behind her head. "I surrender!"
What?
AN: Sorry about the delay, folks. Had stuff happen. Once stuff was done happening, more stuff happened, and so on.
Zeuseus
KNEEL BEFORE YOUR GOD!!
Welcome back. This should be interesting. Loved TT's reaction to the mana potion.
- Location
- South Carolina
No contracts! No Surrenders! All enemy's of the dungeon must die and be converted to forces of the dungeon master!
Nice update my dude!
Nice update my dude!
- Location
- United States
I'm honestly stunned Coil was willing to put an asset like Tattletale at risk like this.
We Just Write
Blatantly Plural
- Location
- New England
- Pronouns
- Plural
He's still in the "Oh, I can just savescum" mindset.
- Location
- The INTERNET!
- Pronouns
- He/Him/His
Just wait until she drinks one. I was honestly considering having her call Regent to ask for his vidya game expertise, but decided that it wasn't a great idea, at least partially because I wasn't sure Alec would answer her call, and having Tats ask her team-mates questions would cause issues with her Thinker image.
yeah, Dungeon me is not thrilled with Tats at the moment. it's a coin toss, really.
Offscreen is Coil sending Tats in every thirty minutes, only to lose her immediately to zombie guards in Cell Block A and closing the timeline.
- Location
- Boston
This was really good. Taking TT as a contract would give the dungeon a massive boost in Intel and general knowledge of the world.
Thats the least of it. Tattletale as a Thinker should be conferring some kind of Strategy or Command bonus to units.
And theres oh so many units....
chrisleech
The Finder of Things Left Behind
- Location
- Jacksonville, Florida
Imagine if Tattletale gets to view his menus. She'll be able to see so many efficiencies and synergies. It will be great.
Seriously? Because accepting her as a new minion should be an obvious choice. She hasn't personally done anything against the dungeon yet and is clearly, blatantly valuable.
- Location
- USA
What would be kinda funny would be if tattletale entered just as coil dropped his second timeline and had yet to bring up another because of a thinker headache.
Well, he is an Evil Lair, how he handles the first morally unambiguous situation he's faced with will tell us how true that is.
Hopefully, he's not a morally unhinged omnicidal gorn machine.
- Location
- The INTERNET!
- Pronouns
- He/Him/His
Details will be coming in the next chapter, but I will state that contracting with the Dungeon would not give TT Gamer or Gamer-lite abilities, or the ability to view the Dungeon's screens. As I stated over on SB, I do not intend to turn TT into a caster mage.
The unlock requirements vary, but because Slimes are cheap, the Tree is not unlocked based on the number of units.
The unlock requirements vary, but because Slimes are cheap, the Tree is not unlocked based on the number of units.
- Location
- Earth Prime
I have to say, I am not sure why dungeon-you is particularly annoyed with Tattletale. She gave away some secrets of his, yes, but it's not like anybody who heard her is coming back out.
Unless he knows the transmitters are there and working.
And even then, turning an asset is always better than simply denying an asset.
Unless he knows the transmitters are there and working.
And even then, turning an asset is always better than simply denying an asset.
Psychopaths aren't very interesting as protagonists because they either become inconsistent and therefore unrelatable, or they become unlikable and therefore unrelatable. Either way, audience interest drops.
Only people that want an ego trip will stay. There's too much of a difference between a person that acts like a psycho because that's the most expedient way to achieve his goals and a person that acts that way because it is the only way to achieve his goals.
Only people that want an ego trip will stay. There's too much of a difference between a person that acts like a psycho because that's the most expedient way to achieve his goals and a person that acts that way because it is the only way to achieve his goals.
ScottotheUnwise
Verified Crack (fic) Dealer
- Location
- Mulberry, Fl
Accepting a temporary contract would allow him to determine the usefulness of entering contracts in general. Plus.
If she fails to live up to it, she can still be converted to mana/fodder. Plus.
He takes her away from Coil as a resource. Plus.
He has to listen to Tattletale blather. Minus.
Eh, it still looks a little on the plus side, even if it just means Mr. Savescum cheats back to an older point. My suggestion would be for Coil to drop the timeline as she enters the contract, then Tattletale still finds herself under a binding contract despite never having entered the Dungeon --IE it Trumps the timeline thing. Then from outside the dungeon, TT could prove how useful she is as an ally...
- Location
- The INTERNET!
- Pronouns
- He/Him/His
It's mostly frustration that she keeps knowing things, about something that could be helpful to the invaders, and Dungeon-Me spent a lot of time making it as unhelpful as possible.
Not a psycho, just a blank slate with a hint of a decent moral background that he can't quite remomber, countered by pavlovian pleasure/food conditioning when he consumes people and a strong desire to defend himself. Having something to counter-balance that would be good.
While that's an interesting concept, I went in a slightly different direction.
Well, it's not anything he can't get information from, and he can make it so it never happened, so why not hold onto it until he milks the microphone for everything he can?