Interlude: Attaboy

“My colleagues can be a little short-sighted at times,” the hairless man was explaining. “I suppose you could say they were blinded by the excitement of discovery.”

Attaboy could only nod. So far, much of what the man had said to him didn’t make much sense. It almost seemed as if he was apologizing for something.

“I, on the other hand,” the man continued, “like to take a longer perspective. To get things right, greed should be deferred. Wouldn’t you agree, young man?”

Attaboy figured he was the young man in question, so he nodded again.

“I can only assume you are very tired of staying in this cell. How would you like to take a little walk with me?” the man asked.

Attaboy nodded enthusiastically.

The mans face was calm, and his dark eyes rested on Attaboy’s face. There were several seconds of silence and Attaboy began to feel uncomfortable.

“Yes,” he said, when the tension had become too much. “Walk is good.”

The mans continued to stare at him impassively before the corner of his mouth twitched. “That’s excellent. I’m glad you feel that way. My name is Doctor Quimia.”

“Attaboy.”

The man's hairless brow furrowed momentarily. Then a brief flicker of comprehension crossed his face. “Your name is Attaboy?”

Attaboy nodded.

“I do wonder where you acquired such an interesting name. Can you tell me?”

“Tribe.”

“And what tribe would that be?”

Attaboy stared blankly at Doctor Quimia, who stared back at him. After a few moments of thought, he attempted an answer.

“Tribe by the Piles. No other name.”

It was not the first time someone had tried to find out where he was from. The family that had taken him in for a night had asked him many questions, for which he had few answers. He had a dim memory of angry men yelling questions at him and beating him on several occasions since he had been captured. Somewhere between the beatings and his mysterious illness his memory had become crumbly, like a mud pie dried in the sun, cracks and clods falling off unpredictably.

Doctor Quimia took a deep breath and inspected the ceiling. Attaboy wondered if he was looking at the same stains and patterns he had spent so many idle hours turning into the faces and forms of his tribe. He wondered who Doctor Quimia would see.

Chapter 20: Fuzzy

The Corrupted Village of Mittleburg must have been charming at one point. A cobblestone path led to a small village square, surrounded by quaintly thatched homes. A fluttering banner strung between the houses flanking the path read “Welcome to Mittleburg: Try Our Pie!” Several farm carts lined the edges of the square, which was decorated by sheaves of wheat and corn arrayed around the tall gnarled posts that marked the edges. Ropes with tiny colorful flags connected the posts overhead, flapping idyllically.

Yes, Lilijoy thought, if it weren’t for the thin layer of black slime that coated every surface, Mittleburg would be a wonderful place to sit on a hay bale and dig into a nice slice of their famous pie.

Unfortunately, the slime stank of moldy death and was clearly eating everything it touched. The thatch on the homes dripped and bubbled. The cobblestones were slick and emitting a faint hissing noise. Drops of slime oozed off the fluttering banner and the little flags, plopping thickly onto the square. The ropes holding the flags were drooping and frayed, with long tendrils of slimy snot hanging down in parody of the formerly colorful flags.

And then there were the rats. Corrupted Rats that was. At a glimpse they looked fuzzy, like soft puffballs as they scurried from place to place or climbed along the hanging ropes. Then Lilijoy had made the regrettable decision to look closer. The fuzz was mold, great swaths of white-gray mold emerging from every bit of their bodies.

“You’re going to love this!” Rosemallow had said. “It’s a total classic, almost a nostalgia piece. Town’s been around forever, always the same, at least it is once it resets. Before you go in, let’s kick your Unarmed Combat up a notch. You’re going to want to focus on kicking and hitting for this first bit. See what you can do with a little Magi skill power in the mix.”

“So I should raise it to Upgraded?” Lilijoy had never spent her points before and felt inexplicably nervous.

“You are a fast one, aren’t you? Yes, of course that’s what I’m saying. Umm… and let’s raise that Vitality up a point too.”

“But didn’t you say that was a junk stat?”

“I say a lot of things, kid. Just do it, and I’ll explain later. Now, go have fun, and come back here when it gets freaky.”

Lilijoy had spent her points, raising her Unarmed Combat to Upgraded Apprentice and adding the extra point of Vitality, raising it to fourteen. Her total health points, (Strength plus Endurance plus Vitality) now came out to ninety-four.

She tried hard not to think about what ‘freaky’ might mean to Rosemallow.

She had scouted the village carefully, though her stealthy approach was somewhat ruined by the occasional call from Rosemallow in the background.

“Enjoy the pie!” had been one of the more confusing of the shouted encouragements.

Now she was sitting, watching six moldy rats the size of cinder-blocks crawling around haphazardly. She could see why her trainer had suggested kicking and hitting. Not only would grappling with rats be weird, it would also be a dirty business. Not that she was bothered by a little mold. It had been a constant presence throughout her childhood, especially during the rainy season, when Night’s Safety would sprout with mold and fungi.

She used her Scan II ability on the closest one.

Corrupted Rat: Level 2

HP: 20

Not bad at all. She could do six points of damage with an average strike, maybe more if she got lucky. More importantly, she doubted the rats could do enough damage to get through her Invulnerability trait. It would be a great opportunity for her to train against multiple opponents without much worry of being seriously wounded.

She felt bad that she was about to fight, kill really, her original favorite animal. On the other hand, these rats looked like they were on the way out anyway. Poor rats.

She planned out a quick strategy, and then moved into Flash. Sprinting for the square, she leapt into the air and came down with both feet on a rat that had paused in its movements around the little market square. She winced at the crunching crackle of tiny bones fragmenting underneath her weight as her knees bent to prepare another leap.

Instantly a cloud of caustic spores enveloped her and her eyes and nose burned. She was already on the way to her next target, a rat moving along the ropes about four feet overhead. She hit it with her palm, knocking it off its perch and into one of the carts, where it exploded into another billow of spores. Catching the rope with her other hand, she pulled it down with her and it snapped, destroying part of the threat from above. The last thing she needed during the fight to come was moldy rat bombs falling on her.

She fell to the ground, trailing the smaller cloud of spores caused by her palm strike, and crouched, assessing the reaction of the remaining rats. Her skin burned and tingled everywhere it was exposed to the mold spores, and her eyes were watering and blurry. Fortunately, she had managed to avoid breathing too many of them, but she felt the same sensation in her nose and the back of her throat, along with a powerful urge to sneeze and cough. Echolocation showed the rats as fuzzy blobs slowly turning in her direction.

She had assumed that their attack would be rapid and decisive, but the rats moved lethargically. One of them hadn’t even noticed her assault, and another wove its way toward her in a dizzy amble. The other two were coming for her more directly, but at a speed no faster than she could jog.

A message crossed her internal awareness.

You have suffered mild topical exposure to Fuzzy Fungal Blight

-5 VIT, -5 INV, HP now 89

She felt a flash of irritation with her trainer for the lack of warning. Rosemallow seemed to feel that lessons learned the hard way were more memorable. In Lilijoy's grumpier moments, she wondered if that implied it would be best not to have a teacher at all.

Well, it’s nothing I can’t handle, she thought. Just need to keep out of the clouds. Now how am I supposed to do that without a weapon?

The thought of retreating to find a nice long staff crossed her mind; even thrown stones would probably suffice against her addled opponents. She imagined that Rosemallow would be annoyed if she did though, so she flashed across to one of the less incapacitated foes and kicked at the knee-high rat as she ran by, keeping her exposed skin as far away as possible. It slid a few feet across the slimy cobbles, trailing spores. As she retreated, she congratulated herself for avoiding additional exposure, but cursed when her scan revealed she had only inflicted two points of damage. The rat was already on its feet and moving by the time she stopped herself on the far edge of the square.

That’s going to be a lot of kicking.

With four, no, five rats remaining (the rat she had knocked off the ropes had dragged itself out of the farm cart), she had almost resigned herself to running back and forth across the square a hundred times, when a thought occurred to her. Shouldn’t she have some new kind of magical power to go with her physical attack?

After several more trips across the square, kicking rats and avoiding their spore clouds, as well as the lingering clouds from previous encounters, she knew for sure that she wasn’t using any magical energy. How was she supposed to figure out a completely new combat technique while sprinting back and forth across a slippery surface and keeping track of five opponents?

Even as she thought that, more rats arrived, issuing forth from between the cob walled buildings and emerging from the decaying straw thatch of their roofs. At least another dozen.

Is this ‘freaky’ yet? she wondered. She decided it was more a pain in her ass than rising to the level of freaky. Rosemallow freaky, anyway. She ran down the street to create some space to think, leading a surreal parade of rambling moldy rats.

While she jogged, she thought things through. When she used her Charm based skills, the magic component was mostly a matter of intent. Clearly, that wasn’t enough with a martial skill, or it would have already happened. With Flash, she had initially needed to say the word ‘Flash’. Perhaps that was the key here? She led her parade of infected fuzzy critters around the village and back to the square. Perhaps due to to differing degrees of moldiness, they moved at different speeds and had become spread out, so she was able to experiment with the leaders for a few passes.

“Kick!” she yelled, kicking the fastest rat as she ran by. The attempt produced nothing more than another cloud of spores. Plus, she almost lost her footing and flipped onto her back. That would be disastrous, as the rats were not so slow that they wouldn't be on her in a second or two were she to fall.

She tried ‘Strike’, ‘Mana kick’, and in a fit of annoyance, ‘Magical mana power attack death strike!’. That last one took so long to say that she was only to the ‘power’ part when she actually reached the rat, and felt ridiculous as she finished. By this time, the bulk of the rats had caught up, so she took her followers on another jog around the village and wracked her brain for another idea.

She remembered that when she had first learned her Meditation skill in Professor Anaskafius’s office. She had imagined pulling Mana from her surroundings, a glowing vortex of light converging on her center. What if she could somehow reverse the process and send Mana out as part of an attack? She thought back to all the old videos she had watched during her unarmed combat training. Some of them talked about Chi, or Qi, as an energy field that permeated the body, which could be harnessed and directed for healing or attack depending on the will of the practitioner. After seeing several ridiculous videos where obviously complicit or self-deluded students hurled themselves away from their teacher to demonstrate his mighty Qi powers, she had filed it away with all the other nonsense she had discovered in her studies of twenty-first century knowledge and culture. It was a really big file.

But now it occurred to her that Inside, Mana and Qi might be synonymous. Or at least similar. As she jogged along, she imagined her Mana as a ball of energy at her core and practiced pulling power from her core to her hands and feet. She couldn’t tell if she was doing anything, but she thought she felt a warm sensation at her extremities. Ideally, she could project the energy outward from her attack, maybe even far enough to avoid the horrible spore cloud.

She pulled her train back around to the station and ran past the lead rat, launching a kick as she tried to project her gathered energy. The effect was… unimpressive. There was no magical force projected from her foot, no burst of energy, just another weak kick that pushed her opponent back a few feet and did minimal damage. Really, the creatures were so fragile, she could probably sneeze on them and have about the same results.

A few more tries didn’t improve things. Another failed idea. The thought of spending the next several hours kicking away at the corrupted rats filled her with frustration, and another thought occurred. Maybe she was trying to do too much, running in Flash and trying to use a new technique at the same time. She moved to the farthest side of the square and set her feet. It was time to stand her ground.

This time, she didn’t use Flash. Instead she sped her thoughts as she had on the Outside. Since her mind was the same Inside and Out, it only made sense that she could. Now she could feel clearly the extra bundle of Qi she was pulling from her core. She realized that Flash used Mana, Qi, whatever it was, distributing it to all the moving parts of her body, and the little amount she was trying to use for the strike had been sucked into that flow of energy instead of moving into her foot as she intended. The rat was approaching her in slow motion, tufts and tendrils of mold flowing gently around its opening jaws. She could see its hind legs gathering for a leap.

Instead of kicking, she squatted, legs apart and pulled back her hands for a double palm strike. As she did, she brought every ounce of energy from her core she could muster and thrust it into her hands. She brought it forward directly into the rat’s face just as it left the ground.

She thought she saw a flash of yellow light, and watched as the rat’s moldy snout compacted in waves, an inch before her hands reached it. More impressively, the spores blew off as if the rat had encountered a wind tunnel, forming a horizontal plume away from Lilijoy, into which the rat’s body flew, spinning and twisting.

Critical Hit!

Qi Strike does 3x Damage (18 total)

She would have fist pumped, but the next rat was already on her, and another two were behind that one. Only her accelerated thoughts allowed her to continue to funnel Qi into her strikes quickly enough. The first took a kick to the face, while the next two received palm strikes in quick succession. No more notifications were forthcoming, so she assumed she had done a normal amount of damage, apparently six points. More importantly, the spores continued to be blown away from her.

Soon she had established a rhythm. Punch or kick a few rats, run to a new place before she was surrounded, or the spores reached her. The rats were vicious, but also feeble and predictable. Even though she only had one more critical hit, she was still dishing out damage at a good pace, and the wounded rats were slower too. She kept an eye on her blue mana bar, noting that each hit used about two points, so she was burning through her reserve faster than she replaced it, especially with her Gathering impeded by all the activity. Still, she thought she might be able to finish off the rats in another two or three minutes.

That was when the door to the house across the square from her opened, and the moldy cats came out.

“Go get those nasty vermin, my sweets,” came a creaking, bubbling voice from behind the door. Six huge cats slunk out and tore into the remaining rats. Lilijoy froze, unsure where all this was going. Was she supposed to fight the cats now? Like the Rats, they were covered in thick puffy mold, though they moved much more quickly.

She began to back away slowly. Even if she needed to fight the pitiful, frightening creatures, she wanted it to be on her terms. She could already tell that jogging around the village was not going to be a viable strategy. One of the cats, without a rat to occupy it, made a yowling gargle and approached her, its big yellow eyes peering out at her from behind bangs of mold. She thought it might have had black fur at some point.

“Good kitty?”

The cat sat down and began to lick its… mold. Spores rose up in puffs with each pass of its raspy discolored tongue. Lilijoy backed away some more, and the cat stood abruptly and walked up to her. She couldn’t bring herself to kick it away; if it hadn’t been for the horrifying context, she might have even thought it was being friendly.

“Grawrble,” said the cat.

“I hope you don’t expect me to pet you,” said Lilijoy.

The cat moved to rub against her legs, well waist really, and Lilijoy was forced to stumble back. She had no wish to be engulfed in another spore cloud, friendly intentions or not. The cat yowled again, and then another came over to investigate, a tabby pattern dimly visible underneath its gray and white coating. Soon Lilijoy was walking rapidly around the square, trying to avoid several overly friendly, horribly moldy felines. The cats were yowling pitifully, almost caterwauling, when another door opened.

“Go git em boys!”

From the door burst the creatures of Lilijoy’s deepest and most primordial nightmares. Predators. Dogs.

And yes, they were moldy.

***

I wonder if this counts as ‘freaky’, thought Lilijoy.

The second the baying, slavering heaps of fibrous fungus formerly known as dogs charged into the square, the cats made themselves scarce, climbing the posts and bounding onto the rooftops. There they sat, looking down at the three dogs and hissing. Lilijoy had also decided that discretion was the better part of valor and leapt to the nearest cat-free roof. However, the mold had penetrated the thatched straw deeply, and she found herself in a light cloud of spores, which forced her to hold her breath.

Thus her time out of reach of the corrupted canines was rapidly coming to an end. She scanned the largest.

Corrupted Dog: Level 4

40 HP

While their health was only twice that of the rats, she had the feeling that the dog’s defensive abilities were several notches better. If they had an Invulnerability stat, or the animal equivalent, she could find herself doing almost no damage again. Plus the dogs were big, relative to her anyway. She guessed they might weigh as much as fifty or sixty pounds, so they would be able to knock her down if she wasn’t careful.

After considering the situation, she decided it was time to return to her trainer. The buildings around the square were close enough for her to jump between the roofs. As she was preparing her first leap, another message appeared.

You have ongoing mild topical exposure to Fuzzy Fungal Blight

-5 VIT (4), -5 INV (26), HP now 84

I wonder what will happen when my Vitality hits zero? she thought.

With no time to waste, she crouched and leapt to the next roof. She hit and scrambled for a hold on the slimy woven straw, still holding her breath against the latest cloud of spores that rose from her impact. Her fingers plunged through the sodden materials of the roof, and she was able to arrest her slide just before falling off the edge into the space between the homes.

She pulled herself to all fours, beginning to feel dizzy from lack of oxygen, or possibly from her exposure to the toxic mold, and clambered over the peak. One more house, she thought, and then home free. Unless the dogs were faster than she expected.

The far side of the roof was another challenge. Here the slime had eaten deeply into the straw, creating fuzzy slime filled pits and trenches over the entire surface. Her dizziness increased as the last of her air ran out, and she decided to go for it.

She threw herself down the surface and planted both feet to launch herself onto the next house. Instead of pushing from a solid surface, her legs plunged through the straw. She could feel it scratching her calves, and then her thighs, and then the whole section gave way and she plunged down with moldy sodden straw falling all around. She hit the floor solidly and the shock of the landing made her gasp, inhaling a lungful of corruption as the thatching fell around and on top of her.

You have severe internal exposure to Fuzzy Fungal Blight

-4 VIT (0), -16 END (39), -20 INV (6), HP now 61

Her head spun and she was wracked by rib shattering coughs. Disoriented from the fall, she scrabbled at the dirt floor and pulled herself half up to a sitting position. She looked frantically around her, through the beams of light from the new hole in the roof that were filtering through swirling clouds of dust and spores. For just a second, she was struck by the surreal beauty. Then she saw the horrific being approaching her.

It must have been human once. The head was topped by a swirl of gray hair that blended into the mold growing over the face and neck. It wore an apron with tiny blue flowers over a cotton dress and fuzzy slippers. Whether the slippers were originally fuzzy she didn’t want to speculate. In its hands, it held a round dish topped by a crown of gray mold. The contents of the dish sloshed and bubbled, independent from the creature’s lurching movements. It thrust it toward Lilijoy’s face.

“Would you care for some pie, dearie?” It asked in a wet, creaking voice.