They traced their way back to the central keep. The whole lot of them were tired and sweaty, but also eager and motivated. The end of this damnable quest was upon them and they could feel it. It loomed large upon them. There was an air of finality to everything. The buildings had been looked through, the big baddies had been fought, and nothing new rose up to meet them in arms. The party marched up to and then through the gates of the central keep, weapons ready but relaxed. Carric even whistled. They still, though, made sure to lock and block the gate behind them.

The interior of the keep was in wet and moldy ruins. Green slime rimed down from a crack in the ceiling and against the walls. Rugs and banners mouldered away, or what was left of them at any rate. The air was bottled and fetid, the way an aquarium must feel to the fish stuck inside small bottles or baggies at a festival. And, as usual, there were zombies.

The party let out a collective groan and limbered up their weapon arms, getting ready for yet another battle in this place of unending strife and striving. But none of the shambling beings, servants by the look of the tattered uniforms that clung to their bodies, paid them any mind.

“Huh,” remarked Carric, mentally crossing off lines from the ballad that he had been composing in his head about this present adventure. They hadn’t been pretty.

“Ya know, it works for me,” Yenrab grinned. The door behind them banged loudly as, presumably, another bunch of undead protectors rose from the ground and tried to attack the intruders. “We might want to get a move on, though, and find some other place to be, because the undead outside certainly aren’t as live and let live as these ones are.”

“I don’t get it,” Bern said, looking puzzled. “Why aren’t they chasing after us and trying to eat our brains?”

“Bro,” Char croaked out in the middle of a long and obnoxious huff, “who cares? We just got served lemonade. My party got served lemons. Maybe if we go deep enough into this farknotter we can find an off switch to all of this magic and just be done with it all. Pull the lever, hear some bells maybe, and this whole thing is munted!”

“Whatever the heck that means,” Carric sighed, but he nodded in probable understanding.

They clumped together, deciding on a tactical order. Char would put Wex up on his back and stay in the rear and Yenrab would take the front while Bern would remain just a little to his side and behind, Tracy in the middle, and Carric to the left. And then they pushed forward.

Walking passed undead who just ambled was strange. It gave people the jitters. One sloughed by Carric, leaving a sticky tricep upon his own. Another straight up collapsed under its own decay after bumping into Char Man Dar in the rear. And every one of them feared a trap or some sort of trigger. They wished that there were some sort of warning, like a trigger warning, that would tell them all of what sort of thing might set them all off. But they didn’t attack, even when Yenrab tried to get his arm out of the way of one and accidentally knocked off the head of another. Familiar echoes in their head faintly suggested something that sounded like free xps, but a stern voice reminded them that such was reserved for overcoming danger, not simple dispatch. That sounded about right, though they all were beginning to suspect more and more that they could be quite powerful indeed if that Chief Gamer, the Game Master or GM, wasn’t such a jerk.

“So which way,” Yenrab asked the rest of them, an axe in each hand and dark circles beginning to show under his eyes. They were all showing the strains of constant battle and adventure.

Bern nodded at the question and gave him a salute, looking left at one door, then right at its opposite in decision. His eyes widened and he made his way to the right hand door, running his hands over and around it as he searched it for traps.

“Safe, mates,” he told them, giving a bow. “Let’s do this.”

Yenrab strode forward with a confident gait, well eager to just get this all done with. He threw open the door with a grunt and surveyed the hall beyond it. The party peeked around his silhouette to do the same.

“Three doors on the left, two on the right. Ya know this would be so much easier if the lord regents had just given us a map,” the big guy groused. Char Man Dar chuffed behind them in laughter or agreement, or perhaps simply in disgusting presence.

Tracy spun around and smiled.

“That’s a door for everybody! Back in the Freemeet we all shared doors as well. They are so useful!” the sorcerer gushed, as Bern began his ever familiar annoyed stare. “You can lay them down on the ground and, there it is, a table! Or a floor!”

“Or a grave marker,” Bern warned with a dour voice.

“That too!” Tracy beamed, looking at his friend with happy enthusiasm. “Or a door into the ground!”

“Or a stretcher for a fallen comrade,” Bern fired back with a short and sharp laugh.

“A stretcher, eh?” Char Man Dar snorted and belched, turning in a circle to show off his burden. “Choice bro. Yenrab, rip off a door and let’s tie Wex here to it. I’m sick of hanging him off of my back.”

“There’s nothing you can’t do with doors!” Tracy clapped with a cheer. Bern couldn’t help himself and he began to laugh maniacally.

“Tracy, mate, that head of yours is golden. Stupid but brilliant at the same time.”

***

Bern Sandros, assassin in training and rogue of the people, examined each and every door thoroughly and with great care before he opened them. He did not mince about and watching him was a master class into the world of the dungeon delving rogue. His movements were precise and minute without any of the sort of shake and tremor common to us regular folk. So it should not be any surprise that when he stepped back, fully confident and happy with his inspection, the party proceeded to open the rooms and search them through.

Unfortunately a rogue that is good at spotting and disabling traps, while being a tremendous asset to the party, is not necessarily a failsafe at avoiding dangerous surprises. In the midst of these rooms full of mold, slime and the goopy stuff that makes even orcs say eww, amidst the broken and rotted remnant of valuables and bathed in the humid air scented slimy green by algae was a surprise. One that was dangerous.

A pool of liquid silver schlorped over the hand of the bard as he absentmindedly splashed his palm down into it, seeking a favorable angle from which to sift through the room’s debris.

“Aah!” Carric screamed, leaping off of the floor as his hand burned with white-hot pain. He looked in shock with wide-eyed terror as the pool of liquid rose up with him and began to spread across his arm.

“Get it off me! Get it off me!” the half-elf yelled, flinging his arm about wildly. It bulged and slipped, slopping off with a wet flap onto the ground, then it oozed away quickly and with purpose, its means of locomotion a mystery.

“Fleer of Villages!” Yenrab cursed. Everyone looked at him in strange surprise.

“What?” he asked. “It’s colloquial.”

A blade clanged down on the mass, a slice of it shearing off and desiccating into a sticky gunky mess.

“Cuz! It’s killable,” Char spat, his reptilian rasp liquid with mucus. He spat at it as well, a gob of yellow green landing on top of it, but all were quite sure that this attack did no damage.

“Tracy, do your flame stuff!” Yenrab commanded as he ambled side ways, axes in hand, watching the blob squidge this way and that.

“You’re fired!” the sorcerer responded, his corny one-liner the newest verbal component to the simple attack cantrip. Everyone else groaned.

“I’m not sure I even want us to win anymore,” Bern complained, giving the Freemeetian the stink-eye. “Got anything new and funny bro?”

Clang! The sharp point of a rapier stuck through the writhing mass of silver. It reacted, parting around the point and swishing with haste to the leg of its hapless bardic attacker.

“For all the treasures of the Mage College! This thing is nasty!” Carric yelled to them, booting it away with a juicy kick to the wall. It left behind pieces of itself, and was noticeably smaller, but it darted away fast and globbed onto Char’s leg.

“Bad move, bro,” the red-scaled dragon man gargled down to it as he peeled of the gunky mess of a monster and dropped it down his gullet. The others stared. Carric retched.

“Not that bad,” the fighter noted, chewing and swishing his mouth about. “But one thing I can definitely tell you is that it does not taste like chicken.”

***

All of this poking about was boring. There was nothing worth pocketing and that made Bern Sandros grumpy. It wasn’t that he needed to have treasure at that specific moment. It was just that he felt like he deserved it at that specific moment. And so, while the party poked about, he went over the walls of the two armories, with a very specific thing in mind. There’s gotta be a secret vault for those officers.

He looked over at the party, poking and prodding through piles and heaps of garbage and broken building. Then he slid over, slowly and carefully, against a wall at the end of one of the armories. The scraps of this one indicated it was once the place to store and repair suits of mail and perhaps even plate. Now, though, it was littered with mold, slime, and even little tufts of grass. Still, it all looked too normal. Something in the human’s head rang out in warning. There is more to this than there seems to be. There has got to be.

His hand ran over the irregular and damp surface, probing every dimple and clicking at any depression the fingertips fell into. The others finished up what they were up to and came over to watch.

“Did you check that corner?” Tracy pointed, trying to help out.

“Yes,” Tracy fired back over his shoulder.

“Are you sure? Because I think I see something.”

“I’ve been over that corner at least twice, Tracy. What do you think you see?”

“A secret button. It radiates magic.”

The rogue stared at the sorcerer, a grimace riding his face as he probed again. Then his face fell and he looked for all the world like a sodden cat just waiting to get dry again.

“Mother of a demon,” he whispered in anguish, pushing the thing with an audible click. The wall groaned and shook before falling into the floor, revealing a few quite shiny items untarnished by the humid disrepair of the keep.

“Dibs!” called Wex weakly from his litter on the floor. Everyone looked back at the bruised and battered figure, then shared a collective shrug and a laugh. Whether he was in the fight or not the elf sure had a head for treasure.

“Yeah, why the hells not mate!” Bern Sandros yelled to him, his humor improved.

Yenrab moved into the pile of things, separating the still shiny and obviously magical stuff from all that had gone to rot. Then he held them up, one by one, for the elf to choose from.

He shook his head at the mace, sword and shield. But when the big half-orc raised up a glittering and ringing suit of chainmail, he smiled broadly and gave a weak thumbs up, then collapsed back down into snores.

“Well we got that taken care of,” Yenrab said, putting his arms out wide in supplication. “Paper rock scissor for the rest?”

***

The weapons were shiny. Better than that they glittered and glowed, sparkled and danced in the eyes of their beholders. They were the kind of treasure that made Gamers go wide-eyed, and the party wanna go ooh.

“Ooh!” the party said, as they sorted through the stuff. The mace flared hard as Bern Sandros picked it up and swung it. Its gems flared and sparked.

“That feels tight!” he enthused. Probably a +2 weapon. Sweet. The Gamer added.

Char Man Dar huffed and puffed, the second winner of the group. His scissors had been vanquished by Bern’s rock, but his previous battalion of rocks and papers and beaten the rest for second place.

“Mates, this looks my speed, eh?” the big dragon man gasped and hacked as he lifted up a tremendous great sword.

“Chur!” he added as it flared with magic, feeling light and friendly in his taloned hands.

So is that, like, a +2 also? Gamer Nick asked.

Get it identified. The Chief Gamer told him.

Rob didn’t get his identified.

He doesn’t know what he has.

He said he has a +2!

He’s guessing. Just wait for the adventure to end, throw out some coins, and get it all identified.

“I guess I get the shield,” Yenrab muttered, not looking so thrilled about it. It flared as the half-orc picked it up and swung it about. He wasn’t really into shields but maybe it would come in handy. Or maybe he could swap it for a nice bear trap someday.

***

The companions left the armory together, limping and tired. The quarters had been searched, the secrets found and the armories looted. There was just one more place to go. Leaving the hallway for the broad entryway, the crossed and opened that last and final door, peering in with weary eyes.

A pew in front sat a few humanoid figures, dried out and drained of essence. Their faces looked on, contorted in horror. Despite the expectations of the players above, though, they did not move.

The party pushed forward, moving past the line columns of rows of pews and well ready to face whatever this keep had to offer them. They soon got their wish.

“Greetings, adventurers. Welcome to my keep,” a voice boomed out. The sound came from the altar, and they moved with tired staggers in that direction.

“What’s your name?” Tracy asked as an apparition appeared, a tall and thin man bespectacled and garbed in the arms and armor of a lord commander back during the days of the rebellion. He seemed oblivious to the ghost’s angry scowl and burning eyes.

“I am Ianon Heppenstaller, Lord Commander over Cadorna Keep.”

“Hi Ianon, I’m Tracy!” the sorcerer exclaimed. All of his former fatigue had vanished in this discovery of a new friend. The others, though, bristled and stared. They did not like the look of this at all.

The specter’s eyes narrowed. Bluish-white flame flickered about the sockets.

“How fares the Republic? Did we win the war?”

“Oh yeah!” Tracy gushed, coming almost within arms reach. The spirits face seemed to pinch with effort and the shade flickered momentarily, a glimpse of a rabid and hellish other caught just for a second by the attentive eye. Ianon’s eyes widened.

“Then our sacrifice is good. Twenty years ago we stood here, keeping longboats and ponies for raids against the Nemedian Armies. And Twenty years ago the Nemedians swept the Great Lake of opposition and ended our raids, sieging us here in this very castle.”

Tracy moved closer and sat down, his face rapt as he was enveloped into the story. Ianon against flickered, longer this time, and the sorcerer jumped back up to his feet in skittish worry. The spirit seemed to struggle though and smiled.

“It is a side effect of the curse, my friend. Relax and hear my tale. Only then will I be able to depart.”

The rest of the party spread out and moved closer with exercised caution. The spirit flickered again.

“I cast a scroll, a fail-safe, to keep us fighting on so that the Nemedian Empire could not hold this place. It was a powerful magic that was unleashed, one that ensnared the souls of all who die here and resurrect them over and over to fight for the sanctity of this keep.”

A click sounded from the back of the room. The spirit and everyone else looked over to the sound in surprise. Carric raised his crossbow, a glowing bolt locked within, a fired. The bolt exploded as it struck the spirit in its translucent forehead, ending its existence.

“Your fight is over, Ianon,” Carric smiled, the others staring.

“Was that the right thing to do?” Yenrab asked in confusion.

“Look if he was a ghost turned evil it was good to release him from this material plane. And if he was telling the truth and he was a good spirit then he was going to release himself after this speech and I just expedited the process.”

“Bold, mate,” Bern admired. “Well done.”

“Damn right,” Carric said with a confident smile. “Well done indeed.”