Boiling Isles RPG

Amity’s POV

Once Kikimora had made it to the end of the hallway, she’d activated some kind of safety protocol and two clockwork soldiers had risen from the ground, immediately alert to their presence and ready to fight. Gus drew his shield and took the first three hits, making a strangling noise in his throat as he realized how much damage these things did. Fortunately, Amity thought fast and cast Thunderwave which stalled them out long enough for Gus to run and hide behind a pillar along with Amity while Willow used her flying speed to get on top of one of the chandeliers, out of sight of the clockwork soldiers.

Knowing these things respond to sound, they’d told Gus to stand still while Willow, not wanting to alert them with a loud spell, used her shortbow, a crappy but stealthy weapon to take out their heads leaving them only sound to go off of. Then, the second one of them took a step forward, the other one became alerted to the sound and attacked. The second soldier was able to defeat the first one, and after taking another hit, Gus was able to hit the remaining one enough times to kill it. Only, its dying animation involved hunching over and exploding into a burst of electricity that did even more damage to Gus and Amity who were standing within a few feet of it.

They’d fought tough monsters before, but this was on a whole nother level all together. They were fast, observant, and hit like a truck, so the party decided early on that they’re best method of moving forward was stealth. Not the greatest thing in the world when the player with the highest dexterity bonus was a druid who specialized in noisy nature spells.

They’d eventually managed to find their way into the main area of the mansion, finding healing potions and fire artificer glyphs, and took that to mean that they were heading in the right direction. As quietly as possible they went after the human guards that were patrolling, they used the switches on the walls to alter the rooms and switch off a weird spire in the middle of one room that was sparking with electricity. Unfortunately, with Gus’ heavy armor making even his sneaking noisy, it didn’t take long at all for the enemies to notice their party. “How did we get past my armor in the past?” Gus had asked as he sliced through the guards and held off three clockwork soldiers while Amity and Willow dove for cover to help from a distance as they were pretty sure they couldn’t take too many real hits from the clockworks like Gus could.

“We used the spell Silence,” Willow called out, casting a fire spell that didn’t seem to do much damage to the clockworks but did finish off the few remaining hit points on the human guards in the area. “Amity, do you have it prepared?”

Amity scrolled through her spell list, then hit one of the clockworks with a Lightning Bolt. “No, that’s not a wizard spell. Do you have it?” The clockwork that Amity struck suddenly turned from its engagement with Gus and began charging at Amity. “Oh no, uh, guys?” It swung at her and she wasn’t able to duck away in time, the blade took out a huge chunk of her hit points before Amity was able to cast Misty Step to get on top of one of the chandeliers and avoid the thing being fixated on her. It immediately returned to Gus who had called out that he was getting low on hit points as he managed to kill one of the three in front of him. Amity was out of Mana and Willow was trying to shoot the heads off with her bow but was missing badly as it wasn’t really something she specialized in.

Another clockwork soldier entered from the other side of the room and went straight to Gus as the spell casters were still hidden. Amity scrolled through her inventory as her mana regenerated much too slowly, when she landed on the fire glyph. Raking her mind, Luz had once told her that when the game gives you a lot of supplies all at once, it usually means that you’re about to need them. She held the glyph out over the fray below and let it drop and thanks to video game mechanics it fell straight down and landed right in the middle of the scuffle. About five seconds passed when suddenly one of the clockworks stepped on it. There was a burst of force and fire and the three of them cheered into their headsets as the two clockworks that had been beating Gus began their death animations while the third that had just entered lost its head. Then, as the two exploded into bursts of electricity, Gus’ suddenly shouted “Wait, no!” as the residual damage finished off the last of his HP.

“Oh crap, Gus!” Amity said as his avatar fell to the ground and the final clockwork went idle with the absence of sensory input.

“Damn, guess I was lower than I thought. Those things hit hard.” She could hear the frown in his voice.

“Do you want us to restart?” Willow asked as she used the lack of movement from the clockwork soldier to properly aim an arrow and fire it at an oil tank that had been exposed by the blast from the glyph, the resulting explosion of the whale oil doing enough damage to finish it off.

“Nah, you know that Silence spell you guys were wondering about earlier. It’s a ranger spell. Lazura was the one who always cast it.” He let out a soft chuckle, “It’s kind of funny actually, this mission would be a full on playground for her, but I don’t think there’s much place for an attention drawing paladin. Also, because I was curious, I just googled The Raven Lady and apparently she’s a theory that’s been kicking around the artificer wiki for a while. Some symbol that keeps popping up with helpful information and they’ve been assuming she’s being held captive somewhere.”

As more shouts sound from down a hallway, Amity and Willow duck out and find an empty room to hide in while guards rush past to find their comrades dead bodies surrounded by busted robot parts.

“What I’m saying here is that we’re at a bit of a disadvantage without Lazura. We don’t know the lore, nor have the specialties to do what’s needed for this mission. But if I’m the guy in the chair, answering your guys’ questions I can fill in the gap.”

The thought of Gus filling the gap that Luz left when she wasn’t around made Amity feel uncomfortable but, focusing on the mission, it did make sense. “Okay, so now what?”

“Well, according to what Kikimora said in her monolog, she’s got The Raven Lady holed up in the assessment chamber.” Gus spoke up, “we saw where that was on the map so it shouldn’t be too hard to get to.”

“Okay, but what about the Artificer’s Staff? Isn’t that our main goal for this mission?” Amity pressed the information tab on her item selection screen and saw that her mission goals had been updated with a new slot beneath ‘Retrieve the Artifier’s Staff’ and ‘Eliminate Kikimora’ which was labeled ‘Rescue the Raven Lady’. “Oh, jeeze.”

“This is my best guess, but I have a feeling that the staff will probably be in the laboratory, that’s where an inventor would keep their best inventions right?” Willow asked, her avatar opened the map and was peering at it intently. “Oh, boy. It looks like the lab is located on the other side of the mansion from the assessment chamber.”

“So, which are we going to do firs-” Before Amity could finish her question, the door opened and some guards walked through, spotted them in the middle of the room and immediately drew their weapons. Thinking quickly, Amity cast Thunderwave, forcing them back into a set of windows, giving them enough time to run out of the room.

Willow flew ahead, zooming through a hallway while Amity struggled to keep up until an alarm sounded and an electrical barrier burst to life in front of Amity. She had barely enough time to skid to a halt when Willow turned back, not sure what to do. The red cord that they’d figured out connected artificer machines, like the barrier, to power sources went through the wall so there was no way either of them could turn it off.

“Keep going, I’ll figure out my own way.” Amity said, quickly backtracking down the hallway, knowing that clockwork soldiers and guards were going to be swarming to her location any second. She wasn’t very fast, or very quiet, and she definitely couldn’t take too many of those things at once. She wiped a drop of sweat from her forehead as she looked around when she looked back at the guards that she’d blasted back into the windows. In the distance she could hear the pounding of running metal feet. Wait, windows? She looked at them more closely, they were opaque, not like the windows she’d seen elsewhere in the mansion that showed through to the outside or into the next room.

Amity got closer, expecting them to be blocked like other areas of the map that weren’t places players were meant to go, but to her surprise, the windows could be selected and had the label ‘open’ on them. Without wasting another second, she hit the enter key and the window slid open. She crawled through and slid into a weird metal crawl space before shutting the window behind her. Before she could even fully process her surroundings, a scroll of text appears at the bottom of the screen like the game does whenever you enter a new section of the map. The Space Behind the Walls.

“What the hell?” Amity muttered to herself as Gus gave Willow advice on how to rewire something called an… arc pylon?... with a tool they’d found earlier.

She was in a cramped corridor, exposed pipes and plywood floorboards dotted the space in such a sharp contrast to the polished mansion they’d been exploring. Amity crept forward slowly, careful not to make too much noise. There were storage containers, pieces of art leaning against the walls, a drawer like many she’d seen before with a few snails stuffed inside for her to take. The corridor took a turn ahead of her and she peaked around it, half expecting to see some guards ready to pounce, but there was nothing. Wait, no. Not nothing. There was some light creeping through through a series of grates on the walls and she peeked through to see the main foyer, only it was below her. She saw a few guards running around while a clockwork soldier patrolled, and none of them were alerted to her presence.

The Space Behind the Walls. The words ran through her head. The whole mission was full of moving walls, shifting scenes, pockets in the floor for things to drop into…

A smile grew across her face as she released herself from the crouched position. Something told her she didn’t need to sneak any more.

“Okay, so when it turns around, throw two grenades as fast as you can.” Gus said and Willow gave a sound of agreement. She was in some kind of maze or something and it was clearly taking up a lot of focus. Amity didn’t feel the need to distract them from whatever was going on with her revelation. She pulled out the map of the mansion and had time to mull it over for the first time since they’d snagged it off a wall. She still wasn’t sure how to get to the laboratory, but something told her that Kikimora’s bedroom would be a good place to start.

It took longer than Amity would have liked to admit for her to navigate the twisting corridors, steep climbs, and hard drops of the area. At one point she found a dead body covered in poisonous flying insects and almost died from the stings before she blasted them away with a gust of wind that definitely cost more mana than was necessary to kill a few flies, but she’d panicked. Eventually, she managed to find her way to the correct floor that was far enough away from her party’s earlier rampage that the clockwork soldiers were still sitting in idle. Slowly she slid open the window that led from the crawl space to the main area and slipped through. Then, using the Knock spell, she was able to open the door to Kikimora’s bedroom without any hassle, and close it behind her before the patrolling guard was any wiser.

Somehow, Kikimora’s room looked exactly like she’d expected it to. There were parts of inventions scattered around, the bed was messed up, and there was an idle clockwork soldier standing in the corner like a statue, but Amity knew from experience that it would wake up at any loud noise. Her eyes scoured the room, there were some levers that looked like the same ones that moved the walls earlier, but she wasn’t sure if their sound would be loud enough to wake the soldier.

Amity shrugged, better safe than sorry. Still in stealth mode, she snuck in front of the idle clockwork soldier and placed a fire glyph on the floor so that when it stepped forward, it would activate it and take damage. Then, after remembering that one glyph hadn’t been enough to fully kill them at full health, she placed another right next to it and to her surprise, they overlapped instead of going to the side. Luz had told her they wouldn’t do that. “Interesting,” she muttered as Gus and Willow continued to talk. Willow had apparently found the Raven Lady and they were joking about how she kind of looked like Vice Principal Clawthorn.

After walking a safe distance away, Amity decided not to waste the mana and simply picked up a glass bottle and chucked it at the soldier. It woke up immediately, spotted her, took a single step forward, and boom. She looked down at the glyphs in her hand as smoke drifted off of the piece of metal that had landed at her feet. These things weren’t half bad.

Amity probably flipped all of the levers at least three times before she was sure that she’d picked up every useful loose piece of equipment and eventually found an entrance to what was clearly a laboratory. She dropped into stealth mode as she heard the telltale banging of the clockwork soldier’s feet, though, since it wasn’t running, Amity could only assume that it was patrolling.

As carefully as possible, she snuck forward and found herself on the lower of two floors of a circular room with the upper floor as a balcony. She could hear the soldier moving above her and assumed that that would be where she would find Kikimora as well, but so long as she stayed below the balcony and was quiet she would probably be safe from being spotted by the soldier. There was tons of loose equipment in front of her, more glyphs and some specialty arrows. Artificer things, Amity realized.

“Enemy Spotted.”

“What?” Amity barely had time to look before a clockwork soldier dropped from the balcony and was charging at her. That doesn’t make sense, Amity thought as she misty stepped to the other side of the room, ducking under a table as Kikimora laughed from the balcony above, I was right beneath-!. Then, before she could finish her thought, the soldier she’d been beneath also dropped from the balcony to join its peer in searching after Amity managed to hide beneath a lab bench which made the first one lose track of her.

The soldiers slowly patrolled the room, alerting to every tiny movement to the point where Amity’s hand shaking on the mouse accidentally made her avatar twitch and one of them immediately turned to face her direction. There was nowhere for her to misty step that wouldn’t put her in a position where one of them wouldn’t be able to see her and they were getting closer. Damnit, she’d been so close too.

Amity sighed, accepting her fate and simply allowing her avatar to stare forward until the soldiers would inevitably come and cut her in two, when her camera focused on something. A bunsen burner.

An idea sparked in Amity’s mind. There was no way she could take on one clockwork soldier by herself let alone two, but she looked at the single fire glyph left in her inventory, maybe there was a way she wouldn’t have to.

As quickly as she could, she conjured up an Attack Abomination. It was slow, stupid, cost practically no mana, and was perfect. It bubbled to life in front of her, immediately alerting the two clockwork soldiers to its presence, but before it could run towards the closest soldier, she slapped the last fire glyph on its chest and crawled out from behind the desk in the opposite direction. Right on cue, the soldier that had been further away leaped towards the position that the abomination had been summoned from and Amity flicked through her spells and cast a pretty high level lightning bolt right as it landed with a thud in an area that would have killed her three seconds ago.

The lightning bolt struck the clockwork soldier, shattering its headpiece at the same time as the other soldier pierced her abomination with ease only to result in it exploding in a blast of fire right in its face.

Amity didn’t dare move as the two headless soldiers stood still, not knowing what to do without having any motion input. Kikimora, was still kackling above them, ever faithful that her inventions would function just fine the second that Amity made any noise, but of course, that was exactly what she was planning on doing.

Slowly and carefully, Amity reached forward and grabbed a test tube from off of a lab bench and threw it at one of the soldiers. It shattered against the wood paneling and the other soldier attacked. Amity ducked away as the two beautiful machines went at each other until the last one was teetering on its legs as Kikimora screamed from above. An ice knife was all it took for her to be done with the final soldier and a misty step to the upper balcony revealed Kikimora, in all of her short demonesque glory, standing proudly with what must have been her precious Artificer Staff in hand.

“You! You truly think you can defeat me?!?!” Kikimora screamed from where she stood, pointing the staff accusatively at Amity. “Well, I’ll show you!” She raised the staff above her head, like she was about to slam it on the ground to do something. “I’ll show you-”

Amity cast sleep on the artificer without letting her finish her sentence. It was mostly just to see if she could, Luz always thought it was funny how you could cut some monologs short just by jumping ahead and attacking and Amity knew that artificers didn’t usually have the most health out of the different classes. She was a little surprised how Kikimora pretty much dropped like a brick once the spell was cast and didn't have a second wind or anything. Then again, most artificer levels were more about the strategy than the boss themselves.

She approached the gently snoring body of Kikimora and gently took the staff from where it had fallen on the floor next to her. A burst of bright purple light enveloped her and she found herself laughing as the mission objectives ‘Retrieve the Artifier’s Staff’ and ‘Eliminate Kikimora’ came up on her screen with bright red checkmarks next to them.

“Oh my god, Amity, did you do it?” Gus shouted over his headset in disbelief.

“Yeah, it was so awesome!” Amity said. She’d be lying if she’d said she wasn’t proud of herself. But first things first. “How are you doing Willow?”

“On my way out with The Raven Lady, I don’t think the objective is complete until she’s out of the mansion.”

“Sounds good, I’ll meet you outside then.” Amity responded as Gus cheered them both on.

It only took them a few minutes to make it out of the mansion which was really crazy compared to the hours it took for them to get through it. Then only a few more minutes for them to say their goodbyes because, as much as they didn’t want to think about it, they all still had school the next day.

Amity found herself slumped in her desk chair after Gus and Willow had logged off, her headphones still over her ears. Willow had been right about them all needing this, she wasn’t as on edge as she had been during the day, but she still felt bad that they had played without Luz there. They’d been so off balance without her, and even though they’d made it in the end, it wasn’t like any of it meant anything. Luz wouldn’t care that they were able to finish the mission without her help, she’d probably already played it through ten times on her own.

Amity’s hand slowly reached out and took the pin that had been sitting on her desk the entire night. The edges digging into her fingers were beginning to feel familiar again.

Why couldn’t everything just go back to the way it was before?