Corbin had two fervent wishes as he dove aside: one, that the acid goop would head in the direction he figured and splash into the burning pile of webbing Kyessy had just come from, and two, that it would burn real fast.

The first wish came true a second later, when he noted the new strings of webbing splash into the burning pile.

He swung down and around, then up into the danger zone again. The hope was to keep the thing spraying out acid webbing, more and more of it, giving the guttering pile of flaming webbing a chance to roar up and into the thing’s face.

Two seconds later its whole head was engulfed in flame, and it was swinging it back and forth, spraying out fire from each of its eight or so spinnerets. He did one last attack on it, looping around and underneath to where the legs emerged, and used the Entangling Razor Vine one last time. The ropy green vines, full of thorns, spread out every which way, and were instantly set ablaze as well. Damage notifications came, and then came, and then kept coming. Luckily with its face on fire, the frillux was blinded and panicked, but it still walloped him across the everything when it scrambled around in circles and flailed one of its many legs into him.

You have taken 18 damage!

Take cover!

He did, and called after Kyessy. She was alive, he was pretty sure at least, but not responding. He hadn’t yet received any messages like ‘hey idiot, your master is making death saves’ or ‘Kyesiara has died’ or anything. She was probably just pissed off at him.

About fifty more burning damage messages later, he finally received the notification that the thing was dead. It collapsed in a twitching heap. From it, they got a skull, roasted innards, two minor healing potions, and a card Eyes of Shade. Another Scoundrel card, most likely. But a pile of 25 gold appeared, the largest haul ever. It seemed like an incredible amount… until he remembered the shop with that one mana regen card costing them 30 gold.

“It’s dead now, you can come out.”

She immediately surfaced well over there, away from the giant acid spider, and stalked over towards its dead body. She was naked except for the Wight Hood, and shivering, with several slashes on her arms, aside from the overall burns.

“I had to fight a tenrill down there,” she muttered.

“Sorry.”

She shook her head. “It’s fine. I mean we are doing this so a warlock and a magistrate can perform a ritual that will sap four souls worth of energy, which is… what was your expression…”

“Sketchy af.”

“What is af?”

“As nerf.”

She nodded, downed the two minor healing potions, and picked up the loot. “Sketchy as nerf.”

Quest Progress! – Ritual Components

So far, you’ve collected:

echocrystals 4/4 frillux skull1/1

[tap here to see the components you’re still missing]

Secondary objective: still unknown at this time

Secondary objective reward: also still unknown at this time

Why not increase your Intelligence or Knowhow (Quests) to learn more?

Level 11 was still a ways off… maybe an entire hive of marsh yims, and even then, he didn’t think Knowhow (Quests) would come in handy like Serendipity or Inspect. He hadn’t even known that skill existed until just now.

He tried for a mental shrug. “If I were a magistrate and I suddenly found I could take all my core cards out and start again, I’d definitely do that. You don’t have to join in if you don’t feel comfortable. Unfortunately this is the price for changing me back.”

“I know.”

He peered at the stairs. “You want to go see if there’s a secondary objective buried in this thing’s dungeon?”

“Ugh…” She retrieved her bow and quiver from her inventory; they magically popped into being. “Let me get my sleeping bag first. It’ll need to dry out… if I try and put it in my inventory wet like this it’ll come back out wet.”

“Good thing that inventory exists like that, eh? Now you can stow your items and you don’t have to worry about getting them melted into goo puddles while you’re asleep.”

“Yes, I merely have to worry about my flesh melting into a puddle.”

“That’s the spirit.”

Corbin expected to descend into a place full of acid puddles, horrific smells, thousands of tiny white spider things that would swarm them and eat them, or swarm them and inject their eggs into Kyessy’s stomach and she’d explode in a week or so–

He shuddered and stopped making assumptions. It wasn’t doing him any good mentally. Or literally.

You have entered a mid-level dungeon!

And so soon after you just fought the frillux. Got something to prove, hmm?

He wondered idly if the AI that wrote these prompts was somewhere out there having a sadistic, fifteen year old laugh at Corbin’s expense. He was pretty certain everything in the world was, at any given time, the butt of a teenage joke. This was a fundamental law of the universe that should probably have a capital T Theorem with his name on it, like the Rules of the Internet.

Corbin’s Theorem of Universal Immature Jokiness.

“Nah,” he muttered, and flapped his way down into the dungeon proper.

Three sets of stairs later, he emerged into a place that was mostly thick stone columns. Of what remained, it was mostly the sepulchers of ancient, long-forgotten royalty. Perhaps this castle was once called Swampfell, and then according to Kyesiara’s Theorem on Predictive Naming, it literally did what was in the name.

Further on, they started to come upon the puddles of liquefied bones. He knew this because a few bone fragments remained outside the puddles.

Needless to say they skirted these.

Luckily this frillux hadn’t had thousands of face-hugging eggs all situated down here, ready to hatch at the worst possible moment. They did put an end to a couple of flying amphibian things with spinning rotor-like tails that secreted their own acid, but didn’t live long once Kyessy started putting arrows into them. Corbin could barely inspect one before it had an arrow exploding it into a pile of fire.

These were called marsh veldras. Veldrases. Veldrasi? He wasn’t sure on the plural.

Much of the place down here had collapsed and/or flooded. The stairwell down revealed nothing but water a few steps down, and he wasn’t about to go testing the death rule by seeing what was there until he drowned. However, he discovered three rooms off this main tomb, and only one was collapsed. Still, in the parts that weren’t collapsed he discovered a couple of items… and the secondary objective.

Quest Progress! – Ritual Components

Hidden Objective: discover the nature of He Who Slumbers

Hidden Reward: Knowledge. Isn’t knowledge itself enough of a reward? Fine, there’s a skill point in it too. (+bonus hidden reward! OooOOOooohhh!)

Okay that was all fine and dandy, but this secondary objective just wasn’t hidden any longer. He hadn’t actually discovered anything. The knowledge of the nature of He Who Slumbers was still hidden down here, presumably. They were getting warmer.

“There’s a book down here,” he said.

She didn’t respond. This made him instantly suspect, that she’d gotten ambushed by a nest of acid spiders or acid copter frogs or something, but no, she was just standing there, mouth agape.

“Come on,” he said.

“No.”

“What?” He hopped back over, to find her trembling, but safe. He did another Survey, but either the psychic attack was much higher level than them, or it wasn’t a psychic attack at all and she was trying to handle some PTSD.

“What’s going on?” he asked, as gently as he could. With a Charm of 3 it probably came off as ‘What the nerf’s wrong with you?’ or whatever they said in this world.

“No. Let’s just leave whatever book is here. Or better yet, let’s throw it in the swamp. Let him slumber, okay?”

“Don’t poke the marsh yim hive, huh?”

“You get it.”

“That was a trick question!” he cried. “We have to poke the marsh yim hive! There’s no choice! And I bet, when we get the information, we’re going to discover this Vethros guy–”

She hissed and made a complicated sign with her hands.

“–is secretly infiltrating all the leaders of the world, giving them all rings. You know, five rings for the tieflings, three rings for the dwarves, two rings for the fae, that kind of thing.”

“Those numbers make no sense. And why rings?”

“I have no idea. It doesn’t matter. What does matter is, one, getting another skill point. Those things are really a lot more valuable than I thought they’d be. Second, every baddie has a fatal flaw, okay? If we’re the ones who figure it out, we could end up heroes. The ones who toppled the ultimate force of darkness in the universe.”

She wouldn’t budge.

He tried, “There’s probably more money and ability cards in here?”

Nothing. She headed through the room, clearing out more rotor amphibians and avoiding the white puddles that used to be adventurers. Oh, and she obviously avoided the three rooms containing whatever traps, monsters and hidden knowledge this place had on offer.

He hopped to it instead. The first room had ony a fragment of a scroll, which he read. Luckily she was still in range, because reading it wasn’t an issue, even though he’d never seen these runes before.

The second room seemed much better at first: an office or study, with bookshelves and scroll racks, and a writing desk he was sure had to be full of fun baubles and treasure and secrets.

Turned out it wasn’t enchanted against the moisture down here, or the enchantment had run out, like on Kyessy’s mocassin boots. The desk itself was lumpy and warped, full of patches of black mold. He managed to pry one drawer open by basically ripping the front panel off, but inside was nothing but blackspore lung.

The books were nothing but mush. He tried pulling several out with his beak only to have clumps of mushy fibrous stuff come off and flop wetly to the floor.

He remembered another dumb bit of his former life: a series of Youtube videos where everything was really made out of cake. It didn’t matter what the actual object was, it looked real but the Youtuber cut it and revealed cake inside. Oh, and the Youtuber also gasped like it wasn’t possible this fortieth thing was also cake… but it was!

The books were like that.

He hopped into the third room without much expectation… except that the quest prompt had appeared. There had to be something–

The entire bookshelf lit up like Christmas when he entered the third room. Not like Christmas. It lit up… like a lazy metaphor, anyway.

“Shut up,” he told his brain, and went to grab Kyessy.

“I won’t–“

“It’s a secret entrance behind a bookshelf.”

He’d said the magic words. Apparently all you had to do was hide the forbidden knowledge behind something cool, like a revolving bookshelf, and she was in.

She pulled at the books for him, because he couldn’t, and he made sure to stay close by. Thus, when the bookshelf and part of the floor swung around, leaving them in complete darkness.

Corbin’s eyes adjusted immediately, while Kyessy relied on his eyes to make out the tunnel they’d found themselves in.

They advanced slowly and warily, on the lookout for traps even though his True Sight flawlessly revealed them. Meanwhile the place began to glow with a bluish radiance. The one upside was the heavy moisture of the rest of this place hadn’t infected this particular secret tunnel. Apparently nobody had found it… ever.

The tunnel opened out in a round room about twenty feet across, high ceilinged and somehow filled with soft blue light.

“I still don’t like this,” she whispered.

“You don’t have to whisper, you know,” he said directly into her head.

“Telepathy is uncomfortable.”

That was true enough. It felt like his brain was being squeezed every time she talked with him.

A swirling ball of blue energy erupted in front of them, which formed into the specter of a bearded wizard, floating and legless, like a genie. The bespectacled and bearded human regarded them imperiously. In one hand he held a thick spectral tome, while in the other he had a wand.

“You there,” he said, sounding very much like the first headmaster at the magic school in England. “I see you’ve come looking for the nature of the one known as He Who Slumbers.”

“Yes, my companion and I–“

“The knowledge is perilous,” the wizard continued.

“Ah, prerecorded message,” Corbin muttered.

“For knowledge is power, and that power will put you on a path towards confrontation. He Who Slumbers does not abide the knowing lightly, you understand. His agents will find you, and they will attempt to hamper your every effort, by attempting to kill you. He is evil in the purest sense.”

Kyessy turned and started walking back out. “I don’t want to be here for this.”

“He Who Slumbers is the direct descendent of the race known as the felchinder.”

“Did you say felch?” Corbin shouted. “You did not say felch!” He couldn’t help it, and started laughing, and missed the next bit of this wizard’s magically recorded speech. He hoped desperately that this wasn’t a one off, that the wizard would repeat everything over again, because he could not help himself.

“–as such, He Who Slumbers has the capacity to wreak untold havoc on the world, should his acolytes ever stir him to wakefulness.”

Kyessy had stopped and was staring at the wizard, mouth open.

“No,” Kyessy whispered.

Corbin had gotten his giggles under control.

“The only way to defeat He Who Slumbers is, of course, a paradox: first he must be awoken. Before that is to happen, his every shrine and temple must be laid low. His acolytes and avatars must be defeated, and thus he may wake in a weakened state. His true position will be revealed once these objectives are completed.”

It sounded a whole lot like this guy was saying belief made this thing more powerful. Corbin didn’t like the idea of destroying temples. People who weren’t at all invested in those temples tended to get a bit upset for no good reason, on behalf of people they had no emotional stake in. Ideas were tenacious, even for people who didn’t hold any faith in them.

Quest received! – He Who Slumbers

Lay low the temples and the shrines…

Eradicate the acolytes and the avatars…

Thus may He wake.

Reward: +5 levels, champion status throughout the lands, and safety in the knowledge that you have eradicated a source of pain and suffering for millions.

Pro tip: this quest is not recommended for low level adventurers. Only those of level 80 and above should seek to undertake this task, or a raid fellowship of at least twelve high level adventurers.

Bonus: for activating this quest, you have received knowledge of His present state of wakefulness. Note the bar in your character sheet. This marks you as an Opponent Of Vethros.

“Take this knowledge with you, and pass it along to any and all who would join the fight against the tyranny of He Who Slumbers. And take this.”

From within a luminous, magical blue sleeve, he produced a very real… card.