Portal Mage - A Viridian Gate Serial Adventure #5

I pulled the ancient door open by the mask-shaped handle. Every other person in the room stiffened as they stared straight ahead. Jen grabbed my shoulder, Kaivai’s forehead creased, and Tarsus turned pale. McClure laughed behind his mask, and Nil grinned with its mouthful of shark teeth. Gnaeus looked at me with surprise and awe, which was probably the most uncomfortable reaction of the lot.

“What?” I asked.

“Check your notifications,” Jen whispered.

I did.

                                                                                  <<<>>>

Faction alert: Discord Incarnate

Citizens, to arms! Senior Mage Jumpin’ Juniper of the Mystica Ordo has accepted an Epic Radiant quest on behalf of the New Viridian Empire! This is a faction-wide event with individual rewards that scale with participation, but beware! Failure may result in the permanent destruction of one or more cities within and without the Empire! Will you shoulder the burden of a hero, or play the villain? You decide!

Current World Boss: The Ruinous Druid

Current City Under Threat: Harrowick

Time to destruction (estimated): 29 minutes and 15 seconds

Note: this is a Radiant quest. There may be more than one way of completing it.

Note: this is a timed event. The quest will proceed even while logged out.

                                                                           <<<>>>

“Oh, shit…” I said.

“There is going to be so much loot!” McClure said gleefully.

“There’s going to be so much looting,” Tarsus groaned. “You might have mentioned something before accepting it.”

“Yousaid, ‘The might of the whole Empire is with you’!”

“It was a turn of phrase to stiffen your nerve. I didn’t realize you’d take it so literally,” the seneschal said with a wry look.

I looked at Jen, and she was rock solid—and by that I mean frozen in place, but she wasn’t running either.

“What does this mean?” Kaivai asked.

I had no idea what to tell him.

“It means the emperor is counting on us to protect his Citizens,” Gnaeus said, recovering before the rest of us. He started snapping orders. “Purifiers to the front! Anyone need a new mask? No? Good! Zara, guard the Portal Mages. We might need them to get back to the surface.” He pulled a shield from his inventory and drew his sword before following the flame troopers down the ancient stairwell.

“We’ll talk about this later,” Tarsus told me, walking by.

“He did what he thought was best, Inquisitor!” Jen snapped.

“Sophia preserve us from the good intentions of Travelers,” Tarsus answered over his shoulder. It came out smooth, like it was an often-used prayer.

A pair of Free Radicals—one alchemist with heals and buffs, one harmacist with poisons and toxins—followed after.

“I think you’re great,” McClure said with a wink. He patted me on the shoulder, then hurried after the others, leaving me, Jen, Kaivai, Zara, Nil, and Gnasher in the hidden room.

Scrape! Gnasher said, wagging his tail.

“What did he say?” I asked Nil.

“You really stepped in it, this time,” Nil answered.

Gnasher grinned with that big doggy-smile.

“How did you get the notification, anyway?” I asked Nil. “You’re not Imperial.”

“My bones are,” the mimic said with a wink. It cracked its neck, then its flesh rippled and it lost two inches of height and gained a foot of width. “We’d better go after them,” it said in a deep, decidedly male voice. “Harrowick’s running out of time.”

“The city could really be destroyed?” Kaivai asked.

“The city’s only two hundred years old. There was nothing here before, there will be nothing here again. The only thing we can do is make sure it’s safe during your lifetimes,” Nil said. It headed down the stairs, the charcoal-colored deerhound in tow.

When the monster was gone, Kaivai asked me, “How old is Nil?”

“I don’t think it knows, but Alan had a few guesses. Old enough to see a few cities fall, and dangerous enough to be responsible for it.”

                                                                                        ***

The stairs led to a small entrance room that was filled with old barrels, shelves, and wooden farming implements. Everything was coated in a thick layer of dust and grit, except for a track that led across the center of the room. The smell of the purifiers, like diesel and burning Styrofoam, lingered in the air. As we stepped out of the light from the entrance, Jen and I opened small portals above our hands and shone light into the room.

“You can cast illusions?” Zara asked, curious.

I smiled at her. “Close. It’s a trick some of the more adventurous Portal Mages learn—open a hand-sized portal to the surface and poof, ‘Let there be light.’”

“So that’s sunlight?” she said.

“Yes, and a little bit of fresh air. It doesn’t cost much in terms of Spirit per second, so why not?” I didn’t explain that having a portal already open had other uses as well. Even the Inquisition doesn’t need to know everything.

We followed the tracks to a second staircase. This one was much narrower and spiraled down into the earth.

We walked down, hand on the dry stone central column. Cobwebs hung in the corners. The purifiers had left a track of black stains on the ceiling—or had they? It seemed like a lot of soot for a single hasty passage. The portal light stayed faithfully above my hand, while its other end was a fixed point in the sky above Harrowick.

It might surprise people to know that active portals can be moved. It’s not something an apprentice mage could do, but Jen and I could do it almost without thinking. When you think about it, everything is in motion—I was walking, the continent was drifting, the planet of Falas Alferri was spinning, and the whole lot was orbiting around the unnamed star that served as the game world’s sun. Most of the targeted spells in the game were referential to either a person or the ground—and if you could really wrap your head around that, you could put a fireball through a specific pane of a third-story window at max spell range.

A Portal Mage and a Firebrand working together could put it through the skylight or pop it up through the basement floor.

“JJ, are you okay?” Jen asked, looking back.

“These stairs just never seem to stop, do they?” I said weakly. The death debuffs from respawning were still very much active, and every step felt like my ankles were made of broken glass, my knees were turned sideways, and my femurs were trying to stab through my hips into my abdomen.

“Here,” she said, stopping to pull a bread roll and a hunk of cheese from her inventory. “Eat something.”

“Thanks.” I anchored the mini-portal to my left shoulder, lifted my mask, and took a bite of the roll. The bread was moist and comforting, and the cheese was some kind of parmesan taste-alike with a pleasant gritty texture that distracted me from the pain of putting one foot in front of the other. No matter how bad the day, the food in V.G.O. always made things better.

We found Nil and Gnasher waiting for us at the bottom of the staircase, and the Inquisitorial party in the next room. We were several levels below the street. A quick check on my map told me that, at some point during our descent, we’d crossed into a dungeon called the Root Cellar.

“We need to pick up the pace,” Gnaeus said, and I agreed, even though it would hurt me.

There were nineteen minutes and twenty-three seconds remaining before the destruction of Harrowick, and we had yet to find a sign of the “Ruinous Druid,” whoever or whatever he, she, or it was.

McClure sidled up to Nil. “Hi!”

Nil narrowed its eyes at him.

“You’re a monster, aren’t you?”

“Yes.”

“And this is a dungeon?”

“It is.”

“How can there be a dungeon in a city?”

“Ask the priest,” Nil said, tossing its head toward me.

“You’re a priest?” McClure asked me, his eyes flicking to the portal perched on my shoulder.

“I multi-classed. It’s not common,” I answered, wondering if the pain I felt in my head was due to the respawn or McClure’s onslaught of questions. “And we don’t have temples filled with gold, if that’s what you’re after.”

I saw some of the interest fade from the finder’s eyes.

“As a priest of Time, Space, and Sundry,” I said, emphasizing the capitalization on each of the words, “I can tell you that as long as the structural load is sufficiently spread and anchored on bedrock, there is no physical reason why there couldn’t be a dungeon under a city.”

Nil smiled widely and sharply, having successfully used me to be a smart-ass.

McClure, however, was undeterred. “Yes, but why is there a—ow!” he yelped, jumping to the side. “Your dog bit me!”

“You’re a good boy, Gnasher,” Nil said, and McClure scowled.

Gnasher looked at me and let his tongue hang out, doggy-smiling with the confidence of a hound who knew he was the best boy in the whole world.

“Master Finder!” Tarsus called from the head of the group.

“Coming!” McClure said, jogging forward.

The conversation with the finder had distracted me. We’d passed through several rooms and were now in a much larger one with a high, shadowed ceiling that swallowed both light and sound. The floor was irregular, with dips, bumps, and missing pavers, as if massive roots were growing under the yellow brickwork. The walls were a combination of sandstone blocks and natural stone that had never felt the bite of a chisel.

“Which path do we take?” Gnaeus asked as my group caught up with theirs.

There were three arches at the far side of the room.

“None of ’em,” McClure announced.

“What?” Gnaeus asked.

“They’re all boring,” McClure said with a dismissive wave. “Unless you like traps. If you like traps, they are rather exciting,” he said, as if he were seriously considering it.

Gnaeus turned red in the glow of the purifiers’ improvised torches.

“We don’t like traps, Master Finder,” Tarsus said patiently, “But we need to find our quarry before the city is destroyed. This ‘Ruinous Druid’ will doubtless have your second artifact. If we give them too much time, they may leave with it.”

McClure looked at the seneschal, all traces of childish boredom gone from his expression, and I suddenly realized it had all been an act. “We’ve been heading toward the Keep. I don’t know how far those passages go, but the arches are trapped. The second artifact is below us. I suspect we’re in for a fight.” He stomped on a paver that looked like it had popped out of place, and something clicked. I heard the sound of hidden gears.

A hole in the shape of a crescent appeared in the middle of the room.

“Let’s get some more light!” Gnaeus shouted.

The purifiers grinned at each other and were happy to oblige. They opened the nozzles of their flamethrowers, putting out a foot-long flame, and I was finally able to see the rest of the room clearly.

The ceiling was crawling with plaguelings. “Look out above!” I shouted.

The scythe-armed dog-sized yellow-and-green bugs noticed us, too, and started dropping, half-formed wings fluttering like dried leaves.

The next thirty seconds were utter madness. The purifiers opened up first, sending sheets of flame toward the living roof and filling the room with the stench of fuel and exploding bugs. Zara drew her swords and pumped her wings, staying below the pall of smoke and spiraling through the air, cleaving three of the giant insects in half. Dozens of plaguelings still made it through, attacking the rest of the party. I yanked Kaivai back by the collar as a two-foot scythe arced toward his chest. Then I cast Warp, ripping a hole the size of a basketball in the creature’s abdomen. It dragged itself forward, and Tarsus stomped on it.

“Sixteen minutes left! Get that door open!” the seneschal shouted.

“Working on it!” McClure answered. The finder seemed to have an almost preternatural ability to not be where danger was. It wasn’t acrobatics or dodge skills; he walked through the room, threading a path between the combatants so that someone was always protecting him. He did it all with the diffidence of someone crossing a highway while looking at their cellphone. “There!” He pushed against one of the stone blocks, and it sank two inches into the wall.

The crescent-shaped hole in the floor widened. The whole center of the room was a door, and it was sliding open.

A man in a red robe and plain wooden mask climbed up from below. More plaguelings—these ones thinner, with four scythe-arms and the beginnings of a blackened exoskeleton—started jumping up into the room from the lower level, but the man stood calmly, drawing his longbow as they poured around him.

Scrape! Gnasher said, startling me from my concentration as he jumped and snatched an arrow from the air with his jaws.

“We’ve got some kind of ranger shooting at us!” I shouted to the others.

“Fall back!” Tarsus said. “We can fight them from the entrance!”

“There’s no time! Push forward!” Gnaeus said, fighting back-to-back with Zara. Every swing of his sword sent a head or limb flying, and his eyes glowed like coals as each kill fed the paladin’s Zeal meter.

For a minute, we fought on, pulled between the two Inquisitors like a string. Two more people in red robes climbed up from below. The bowman snapped another shot at me, but I used my portal to redirect it through a plagueling’s eye. I sent the next arrow back the way it came—but to my surprise, the archer spun, plucking the arrow from the air, and then he strung and loosed it, putting it through our alchemist’s neck.

Then, one of the bugs got behind a purifier. There was a hiss and a scream, and the explosion knocked us all flat. I lost a couple hundred Health points—no big deal, for me—but from the sound of it, some of the others were seriously hurt.

“Get up! To your feet!” Tarsus shouted. The seneschal took a stance, his armor glowed and rippled with blue magic, and he lifted six inches off the ground. “Form up around me! JJ, pull the Templar and his page back to us, please.”

I didn’t know what he planned to do, but there was no time to question his orders. Gnaeus took a blow from a particularly large almost-adult, and I opened a portal beneath both the paladin and his page, pulling them back to our group. An arc of lightning snapped between me and Jen and fried a bug in mid leap. Jen used Stasis to build a wall of bugs on our left flank, supported by the remaining purifier. Gnaeus and Zara held the center, though I caught an annoyed look from him, and Nil fought with foot, fist, tooth, and hound to keep the harmacist safe as the Free Radical threw a series of gas grenades into the mass on the right flank. The green cloud stung my eyes and killed everything that stepped into it.

“Kaivai, to me!” Tarsus snapped, and he reached a hand out to my ward. The young man had the ability to dump someone’s entire Spirit pool into a spell or skill, so I knew that whatever the seneschal was planning, it was going to be violent.

Meanwhile, McClure weaved and dodged his way across the center of the room, pulling a neat little somersault over the crescent opening and running across the backs of several bugs.

“Brace yourselves!” Tarsus shouted. Two spell grimoires floated in the air in front of him. Kaivai was at his side.

My hair stood on end, and then there was an explosion of light and sound as wave after wave of chain lightning swept across the room, ripping the bugs and red-robed cultists apart.

Then it was over. The room went dark, except for the one purifier’s flame. Tarsus and Kaivai dropped in a heap, exhausted by the effort. The floor outside our little circle looked like the inside of a bug zapper and smelled worse. McClure was surprisingly unharmed, blinking within a little fan of untouched ground, although I wasn’t sure if that was because the seneschal had spared him or because the finder had somehow dodged the spell. “Door’s open!” he said good-naturedly.

“Let’s go!” Gnaeus said.

I grabbed his shoulder. “Easy, Templar. There were three people in that mess of a battle, and they had matching outfits. Uniforms usually mean organization and numbers. We’ve lost a purifier and our alchemist. Tarsus and Kaivai are unconscious. We need reinforcements.”

“We’re out of time!” he said. “We have twelve minutes and thirty-one seconds until Harrowick is destroyed, and it took ten to get down here!”

Zara cleared her throat.

“What?” Gnaeus snapped.

“With all due respect, sir, they’re portal mages.”

I gave the page a wink, then looked at Jen. “Would you do the honors?”

“Sure,” she said.

Remember when I said Jen has a different specialization than I do? I watched with great satisfaction as my amazing girlfriend used her maxed-out Split Personality, Multi-Tasking, and Astral Projection skills to split into four phantom images of herself and open four portals to the surface at the same time. “Inquisition chapter house, Free Radicals guild house, Legion main barracks, and the Thieves Union, from left to right,” she said. “I’ll have to stay here to keep these open.”

“I’ll push ahead with the others,” I told Gnaeus. “You get help and make sure nothing gets past us.”

The Templar hesitated, then nodded. “Take Zara,” he said.

We clasped forearms, which is just like a handshake but with more testosterone. Gnaeus might be temperamental and overzealous, but he wasn’t in it for the glory. There were few people I’d trust more to stand between the city and whatever was lurking below.

“Mr. McClure! Find us that artifact!” I said, walking toward the now open passage, barbecued bugs crunching underfoot.

“You got it, Senior Mage!” the finder said cheerily.

“Nil, I need you to tank for the party. Gnasher and Zara, I want you hunting casters and support characters.” I looked at the purifier and harmacist. “You’re on crowd control. Any questions?”

“What will you be doing?” Nil asked.

“Damage per second,” I answered, smiling evilly.

Since the day started, I’d almost been sucked into a giant worm, I’d been cursed and killed by a plaguebringer, and a non-trivial number of people were in respawn or dead. I’d suffered a lot of pain at the Ruinous Druid’s hands.

We had eleven minutes and forty-seven seconds left on the clock, and I planned to repay the pain in full during that time.