Revealing Project Green

A litrpg with CUPCAKES, blobbies, and heroic blasts of music

By Nolan Locke

CHAPTER 9- The Salvation of Minor Cupcakes

“Oh God oh God oh God,” I keep saying, over and over. My body’s thrumming, trembling, and… slipping.

I never hear the clack of wood or the thumpety thump of someone tromping over the gap, but I certainly feel it when my foot slips, and it’s caught by Ritchie. Dice are rolling, Might dice, and Ritchie’s feeding extra dice from his Easygoing Characteristic into it so I don’t plunge to my death.

“Grab… the… ladder,” he grunts.

He’s set it down next to me, over the gap, and I lunge over to grab at it. I expect it’ll flip, but Ritchie carries my foot over so my body’s half draped over the ladder. The ladder which, by the way, is far longer than it was when we pulled it out of the chest. Maya’s still got a hold of my other arm, but after I get my other leg onto the ladder and scootch my body over, she lets go. I flash her a grateful smile, probably half covered with green sludge, but she returns it. She’s probably just happy to have another pool of hit points to soak up damage from enemies, but it doesn’t change the result.

I get shakily up onto the ladder and scoot my butt back until my feet get algae stuff under them again, and I feel Ritchie’s reassuring hand. Then I back away from the near death experience.

Maya makes her way over the ladder as well. It’s… transformed, kind of. The rungs are thicker, the spaces between them smaller, so it’s more like a bridge than a ladder like this. And as soon as Maya turns to grab it up, it returns to its previous tiny, pathetic ladder form. I don’t mean it slowly transforms, or some of the wood melts away. Instead, one second it’s a bridge, the next second it’s back to normal.

I breathe out, long and low and relieved.

“No more jumping gaps,” Ritchie says, “Okay?”

“All right, all right. We got the ladder for a reason,” I say, in between panting.

The next room doesn’t contain plain old zombies in it, but three bobbing blobbies of greenish, brownish sludge. I don’t know what else to call them, except blobs. They look like half-melted snowmen composed entirely of pondscum, with two depressions for eyes, and they’re just wobbling up and down. Once we enter the room, though, their wobbling up and down is decidedly in our direction. Lucky for us, maybe, one of them is stranded on the other side of another gap across part of the room.

This room also has square columns of bright golden light in a strange pattern. The blobs are barely visible behind them, and they’re almost blindingly luminous. I poke at one with the RUSTY SWORD and discover it’s solid. Either that or metal resistant.

“Get ready, Donny,” Maya calls, and sure enough the first blob rounds the corner into my sword. My Skirmish ends up rolling 5 and 6, and the blob’s 1d6+2 Moves can’t cope. Even though it rolls a 6, the follow up 2 still isn’t enough, and it takes 5 damage, enough to slice it in half. Some of the gelatinous yuck melts away, but now there are two little blobs instead.

Ritchie’s there for me, stabbing forward with his Skirmish of 2d6, and scores a 7. Lucky for him, the little blob rolls a 4 and quickly dies. They’ve got only a single hit point I guess. The second lunges at my ankle and… bites me I guess. It deals 2 damage. Maya can’t move past us to attack the second blob, and by the time I’ve killed the second mini-blob it’s on me as well. After a garbage Moves roll of 11, the blob overcomes my defenses with a Skirmish of 11. Not sure what sort of sense that makes, but I don’t have a choice.

Ouch. I take another 2 damage, then hack it in half. This time instead of staying put, I march into the gap I’ve created and let Maya and Ritchie pop the little blobbies into regular glops of pondscum.

Three more HP and I’ll move into -1d territory, which I can’t allow. My Skirmish will be 1d6+2, probably not enough to handle anything in this dungeon, let alone a boss monster.

Maya plops the ladder down over the gap in the middle of the floor. Now that we’re further into the room, I can see now that this room has larger sections of abyss. The section of floor leading to the doorway isn’t much, just a sort of dock area with ominous darkness surrounding it. Shudder.

Maya doesn’t mess around this time, and instead unleashes alien goop powers to blast the blob into nothing from a distance. One of its mini blobs flies off into the darkness, while the other one gets shoved over by the door, where Maya stomps forward and punches it into oblivion.

The moment that happens, a tiny bit of music chimes from somewhere close by. Instead of coins this time, a cupcake appears, perfectly frosted, with red sprinkles. Maya makes a face at it, but picks it up anyway. It reads CUPCAKE (minor). She continues with the face-making, and gives us a look. We’re not paying attention.

“You hear that?” Ritchie and I ask each other at the same time.

We find the source (possibly) a few seconds later: a small chest that doesn’t need a key. When we prod the lid, it bursts open, full of golden light, and a pair of daggers. They hover to about waist height for a moment before the golden light fades, and they begin to fall. Ritchie’s already caught them by the handles, though.

“DAGGERS,” he says.

“I hope you figured that out before you read the description.”

“Shut up.”

“Anything special about them?” I ask, though I already know the answer to this. We won’t be getting any good loot for ages, if we’re stuck in the game I think we are. Ritchie confirms this with a shake of the head.

“What about your sword? What’s the durability rating?”

“The what?”

I peer down at the sword again, and see an extra bunch of information pop up in a side menu. It hovers in the air as I examine all the pits and flakes of rust on the blade.

*Magic properties: none

*Durability: 16/50

*Gem slots: 0

I stop reading, since none of the other stuff applies: no knockback, no bonus to disarm, no resistances, none of that stuff.

“Great. It’s more than halfway broken.”

“How far do you think we have to go before we get items with gem slots, and then gems with any kind of special abilities?”

I have no answer to this. I hope we’re not down here long… my mom said we were having sub sandwiches for lunch. I’m already tired, thirsty, hurt, and now adding hungry to that list of debuffs.

The remaining room is the key room, and while part of me is hoping it’s empty, another part is really getting into the idea of hacking down monsters left and right. Zombies shouldn’t be around any longer.

So when there are four zombies in this room, spread throughout, I’m on this. I leap into action at the nearest zombie and hack it down with my RUSTY SWORD. The others have turned to face me, but their slow movement is marvelous. I get a free attack before them every single time. Ritchie and Maya have each taken one down by the time I’m at the last remaining one, and the dice rolls keep working in my favor. The final zombie crumples at my feet, and I scoop up the copper coins while its body fades out of existance by blinking a few times.

And another chest appears. This one has a large key in it, which again comes alive in a blast of bright golden light and hovers, once more, up to about waist height for us to collect. Ritchie snatches it up and holds it above his head. Wouldn’t you know it, a heroic blast of music ensues.

While it’s not exactly the same as the shrimp key as before, the resemblance is striking. Maybe the shrimp is looking the other way, or it has more detail, but one thing is for sure, the head is much larger. The part that engages the tumblers. That part would normally be about four inches square, except there’s a hole in the middle shaped a whole lot like another stylized shrimp.

“They have this thing about shrimp,” Maya says.

“It’s the number two industry in town,” Ritchie says.

“Let’s get a move on,” I say.

Five rooms, a zillion dice rolls, ten zombies, six blob things, and twelve mini-blobs later (including Maya and I having taken a bunch more hit points of damage) we have arrived at the door to what can’t be anything but the boss chamber. We’ve used the ladder to traverse three more horrifying drops into an abyss that swallows all light, with no apparent end (Maya kicked a zombie down there and we listened for the thud, but it never came). We’re in the neighborhood of twenty copper richer, another CUPCAKE (minor), and another RUSTY SWORD, which is good, because mine has 3/50 durability remaining. Those blobs apparently really like to rust the crap out of your sword.

“We break here, and heal up,” Ritchie announces.

Maya and I declare this a great idea, because we’re at -1d already, and that’s not cool. She passes me a cupcake that was in a blob, while she takes the cupcake she fetched out of a clay pot. Realistically, these should be moldy, or hard as rocks, or poisoned or something, but she pops it into her mouth and instantly gains 3 HP back. I watch for any signs of a second head popping up, or horrible sweating followed by vomiting up her entire insides to the outside, but it doesn’t happen. I follow suit, and heal up 3 HP as well. It’s still not enough to break out of -1d, but the sandwich from Ritchie does the trick. I’ll be at full capacity for at least a little while. Maybe long enough to get in a stab or two on whatever shrimp-themed boss is inside.

“The question is,” Ritchie says, and adjusts his glasses up his nose, “whether this boss is going to follow the Battle at Black Cliff style of game, and we’ll just hack at it until it’s dead, or this boss will follow Legend of Zelda conventions and have a weak point.”

Maya and I exchange confused looks.

“It’s clear to me,” he goes on, “that this is something of a hybrid. The dice we have are more like out of Black Cliff, or really Small Town Strangeness, but the dungeon so far has been more like a Zelda style format. If that’s the case, we’ll be looking to hit a specific spot over and over again.”

“I’ll distract it,” I say, without any idea why. “You use psychic power on it, and get whatever best weapon we have for the most damage. Ritchie should use those extra dice to attack after that. I’ll keep its attention.”

I don’t know if Charismatic will work like that, but one thing is for sure: Maya has the Weird Domain active, while Ritchie has Wild, and I’m pretty sure that’s for wilderness, and we’re definitely in one or the other. My Domains, Bike and School, are worse than useless here.

I wish it wasn’t so. I wish I could rush into that room with my nearly-broken RUSTY SWORD and hack it to death, but that won’t work. I need to draw attention, then duck, dodge and dive.

“Do you want to do the honors, Mr. Target-on-his-back?” Ritchie asks.

“Oh yeah.” I take the key, which is honestly heavier than it looks, but I don’t drop it or cry out. Instead I heft it up and slot it into the center of the massive door. Seriously, the door here seems to slope inward it’s so big. I take a deep breath and let it out, then turn the key.

The heavy rumble of stone over stone causes the whole place to tremble and shake a bit, and a mist of dust puffs out from the doors as they pull apart to either side. I back off, wait for the dust to settle, then start forward.

“Wait!” Ritchie cries.

I jump about a foot in the air and whirl on him. “You scared the crap out of me. What is it?”

“We have to go in together.”

“Why?”

“The boss room will seal shut when you go in. It’s how every boss battle starts.”

That makes sense. The Mario and Zelda games both go like this. That’s why this time we crowd close and move as a unit.

He’s right, too. As soon as we cross the line, the doors slam shut faster than any of us can react.