Darktown Funk: A LitRPG/GameLit Adventure (The Bad Guys Book 9), page 1
DARKTOWN FUNK
ERIC UGLAND
Air Quotes Publishing, Inc.
V 1.2
Copyright © 2022 Eric Ugland
Cover by Sarah Anderson/No Synonym
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This is a work of Fiction. Of Fantasy. All of the characters in this novel and series are fictional and any resemblance to people living, dead, or undead is purely coincidental and surprising. Mentions of places are incidental, accidental, and mostly inconsequential. The magic and spells have been researched in absolutely no way whatsoever, and any ill-effects after you attempt to cast them are completely on you. Kobolds are tiny dragons, not dog-like things.
Also, none of these gods are real gods, they’re all made up and they didn’t make me say that on pain of disintegration, that’s pure hearsay.
Hammy H. Mouse -
Sorry I had to work so much,
But I needed to tell a good story.
How about we go play now?
1
“There’s land,” Harpy said. “Under those clouds.”
We altered our heading to nearly straight north, and as the sun slid to its zenith, we could see an island. And as we got closer, everything just got stranger, until I didn’t quite understand what I was seeing.
It was an island, for sure, and there had definitely been a city there at one point. A very large city on an island that seemed to have everything you might need for a city, basically in the middle of nowhere. There was a gentle hill that had a wide, easy river coming down to the sea. There were white sand beaches and wide open grasslands. There were beautiful canals carved into granite, making it seem like it would have rivaled Venice.
But everything above ground level was gone. Perfectly gone. Not one building remained. Not even one brick from a building. No dust, no garbage, nothing. All the trees were gone. Hell, all the shrubs and bushes, gone. And it was done with absolute perfection. Not one trace of how or when it had happened.
It was as if it had been shaved off the face of the planet, leaving everything underneath in place and in perfect condition. Which itself was odd. Despite the waves, nothing was eroding. The stones making up the foundations of the city, perfect. The bridges over the canals were beautiful arches, curving elegantly up and down, with no railings, but also no defects. There was nothing growing in the canals or on the pylons. No barnacles or the usual sea creatures.
We dropped anchor about a hundred yards from shore, and every soul on board just stared at the remains of whatever had been here.
“This is it?” I asked. “This is the City of Darkness?”
Lux nodded, again smiling.
A cry rose from behind us.
As one, we turned to see a smaller ship emerging from something like a field of invisibility, a wild-looking creature standing at the bow. A furry fellow that looked an awful lot like an otter, except bigger. Much bigger.
“Do not go ashore!” the creature yelled in Carchedonian. Then it repeated the phrase in Imperial Common. Then again in Plains Tauren, Pirate Pidgin, and a few other languages.
“Got the message,” I shouted back.
“It is a cursed land,” the creature replied.
“Picking up on that,” I shouted. “Who are you?”
“I am Svart!”
“I’m Clyde. What are you doing here?”
“We protect the City, and we protect those that seek to visit the City.”
“What city?”
“The City of Darkness. It is death to any who go ashore.”
I sighed.
“Guess it’s time to die again,” I said.
“Bit melodramatic there, lad,” Harpy said.
“They said it’s death, and I have to go over there. Therefore, you know, death.”
“You still dare to go there?” Svart the otter-looking thing yelled.
“I don’t have a choice.”
“You will likely die.”
“Yeah, you said that.”
“You will still go?”
“Look, can we stop with the yelling? Maybe talk together on one of our two ships here?”
“Meeting? Why?”
“I want to know more about that island.”
“It is death—“
“Got that part.”
“—to all who step ashore.”
“Death, got it. But what else?”
Svart seemed confused. He looked back over his furry shoulder at the other otter-like members of his crew.
“It is cursed?” Svart called out.
“Cursed and death. You’re really nailing those two points,” I said. “But why is it cursed?”
“Because you will die.”
“So I’ll die because it’s cursed, and it’s cursed so I’ll die?”
“Yes.”
“What if we just anchor here and do some fishing, resupply, that sort of thing?”
Another pause as Svart tried to suss things out.
“The waters around here are not cursed, no,” Svart finally said.
“And the fishing?”
“Good? We like it.”
“Great. We’re going to pause here for a bit to fish. Maybe have a rest, maybe even have a party. You can come on over and we’ll feed you and talk about the cursed island that will kill us if we go ashore.”
I got nothing but confused looks in return.
“So,” I said to Harpy, “want to go fishing?”
2
The otter folk were right about the fishing, at least as far as I could tell. I didn’t really know much about fishing — I’d never done much of it, and didn’t bother starting at that moment — but it certainly seemed like anyone who dropped a line in was pulling in fish at a decent clip. The Black Spread Eagle’s cook, a hard-scrabble dwarf with one leg and one eye who only ever went by Cookie, eagerly stumped about the deck, grabbing the fish and hauling them back to the galley.
All the while, the other ship hung off the stern. They were fishing too. Well, some of them were. Most of them were kind of standing around and watching us.
Harpy sat on the edge of the deck, his legs hanging over the water, leaning back with his craggy, bearded face up to the sun.
I dropped down next to him.
“Should I go over?” I asked.
He opened one eye and looked at me.
“No,” he said finally, closing his eye and resuming his sunning.
“You want to expand on that?” I asked.
“If’n they want to say more’n what they said, they’ll come over.”
“Noted, but what if they know something about the City of Darkness?”
“Assume they know. Be weird if’n they din’t.”
“So shouldn’t I go over and find—“
“Look, I get you bein’ interested. But p’raps you be lookin’ round at what the others aboard be doin’, eh?”
“You really just relish supplying vague, partially helpful questions when you could just give me a straight answer.”
“Well I got this weird feelin’ you ought be learnin’ how to be in this world without someone t’hold your hand. Now look.”
I rolled my eyes, feeling over the Socratic banter we always fell into. Still, after rolling my eyes, I looked around the ship, paying attention to the sailors and their activities. It looked like a normal stopover. Granted, we hadn’t really done much of that during this trip, considering that moment was our first stop since leaving port in Faraway Chain. Some of the sailors were fishing, some were swabbing the deck, even more were engaged in basic repair of some kind. Stitching sails, pulling off wood and replacing it. Slapping paint on the hull, those sorts of activities. Notably, the lookout was still up in the crow’s nest.
The only person missing was Alistair, the captain. Though that wasn’t particularly unusual, as the captain seemed to spend most of his time in his cabin, or by himself. But in looking around, I realized that everyone else on the ship kept an eye on our neighbors. And not a ‘hey those guys look like cute otter people’ look. This was more of a ‘these otter people might just decide to beat us down’ type of look.
“Why is everyone scared?” I asked.
“Them’s seadogs,” Harpy said so softly I could barely hear him. “First time I ever seen ‘em not trying to take everything what’s not their’s.”
“Pira—“ I started, but he snapped his fingers so sharply I shut up.
“No need to invite trouble!”
“I can’t even say the word?”
“Rather you didn’t.”
“But that’s what you mean, right?”
“I mean they got better hearing than you’n’me. And if you were to say some disparagin’ remark, it might be in our best interests to not.”
“I’m not saying nothin’.”
“That’s right.”
“Still—“
“Them’s nice, right now,” he whispered. “Might’n’be they waiting for some fuzzbrain to waltz on over and present ‘imself for kidnappin’. At which point, those of us stayin’ here’d need to figure out what we can part with for said fuzzbrain. Get it?”
“Got it.”
“Good.”
We sat th
ere for a moment in the sun, pretending we were just relaxing.
“But I still need to learn some more about the City of Darkness and all that.”
“Agreed.”
“Tips on that?”
“Volunteers?”
“For what?”
“Settin’ foot on that there island.”
“I’m not asking one of the sailors to potentially die by going—“
“’Praps volunteer weren’t the right word. ‘Praps forced volunteer. Like a crab or somesuch what ain’t got a say in it.”
“You want me to throw a crab on the island?”
He smiled and shrugged. “Got a better idea?”
3
As it turns out, I did not. So I found Rose and the two of us hopped in one of the Black Spread Eagle’s tender boats to go hunting for things we could ‘volunteer’ to chuck on the island.
First up: a jellyfish. We saw one floating along — you know, as jellyfish do — and I grabbed it out of the water.
It didn’t sting, which made me feel a little bad when we maneuvered into throwing range of what had clearly been a pier at one point.
But I still chucked the jellyfish.
It bounced on the granite once, twice. Then it vanished.
I blinked, staring at the space where the jellyfish had been. I could still see the splotch it’d made on impact.
Nothing.
Just a wet spot drying quickly in the sun.
“Not exactly what I expected,” I said.
Rose just stared at the spot a moment longer.
“What did you expect?” she asked.
“They said death. I thought it’d be death. That was, I mean, disappearance?”
“Could still be death.”
“Sure, that’s a definite possibility. Just, uh, not the type of death I thought we’d see.”
“How far out do you think that particular death extends?” she asked. “You think it only happens on the worked areas?”
“I don’t know. Let’s find another jellyfish.”
And so we did.
We rounded up a few more jellyfish, gathering them into a sad little pile in the boat’s bottom. Then we got within throwing distance of the sandy beach.
I threw one on the beach.
It plopped onto the sand like a drunk tourist.
And just like its gelatinous brethren before, it disappeared.
Rose took another of the jellies and really hurled it. The slimy siphonophore sailed straight past the sand into the grassy area beyond.
Same thing. Almost like the island sucked it into itself. Except there was no, like, sucking. No motion of the jellyfish into something else. It was more like it just flipped to a different dimension...
“Huh,” I said, leaning back and then falling into the boat. I’d been sitting on a bench, so there was nothing to lean back against.
“What just happened?” Rose asked.
For a heartbeat, I thought about saying something that wouldn’t make me look like an idiot. But in this state, where weird things could very well equal death, it seemed better to be honest and foolish instead.
“I forgot I was sitting on a bench,” I said. “But I did have a thought. It almost seems like there’s, like, a dimensional or, um, planar shift happening. You know?”
“I am not particularly well-versed in that area of magic,” she said, “but I will take your word for it.”
“Well, see how there’s no— I mean, it’s not like something invisible is eating the jellyfish, right? It just vanishes. What if anything on the island turns invisible?”
“Got any string?”
Pro-tip: tying up a jellyfish is an excellent endeavor to work on your patience. Eventually we got a jellyfish tied in such a way where it wouldn’t slip out and wasn’t being cut in half by the string, and then we threw it onto the nearby pier. For safety, we tied the other end of the string to the boat instead of ourselves.
The jellyfish plopped onto the pier and remained there a moment. Then it vanished, leaving the string to drop into the water.
We pulled it in carefully and saw that it had been neatly severed.
“Now that’s weird,” I said. “I mean, this whole thing is weird, but that’s just, you know, a little weirder.”
“Not invisible,” Rose said.
“Nope. So I’m back to planar shift. Or dimensional shift. Like when I went to the Shadow Realm. I don’t remember it looking like that, though. Granted, I never actually saw myself doing it, so maybe that is what it looked like. I wonder if there’s some big spell on the island that, you know, pulls things into the Shadow Realm.”
“Would make sense, given the name.”
“Right? What if the City of Darkness is in the Shadow Realm? I mean, that would really suck because I’m probably, um, very dead if I step foot over there. But that might be the answer to what’s going on here. In which case, it’s not exactly death if you step on the island so much as going over to the Shadow Realm on a permanent basis. But, then again, I have a spell that lets me bounce over there and come back, so maybe...”
Something bugged me about that spell, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it.
I popped up my spell list and immediately remembered I’d lost Shadow Step when I changed patrons.
“Nope,” I said. “Forgot I got rid of that. If it is the shadow realm... We’re in trouble.”
“You already said that,” Rose quipped.
“Just reaffirming the badness of that situation considering I’m definitely on the persons-we-don’t-like list for the Shadow Realm.”
“Badness noted.”
“Thank you.”
“Do you think it applies to the sand under the water?”
“What?”
“The death. Or shift. Whatever.”
“Maybe?”
In unison, we leaned over to look down at the sandy bottom below.
It was kind of relaxing to be in a place where the water was so clear, and had there not been the weird island with nothing alive on it mere yards from us, it probably would have felt a bit like paradise. As it was, looking down, we saw sand. Some sea grass. And then, darting from a rock to a clump of something greenish, a little pale crab.
“You see that?” Rose asked.
“The crab? Yeah.”
“I’m going to get out and touch the bottom.”
“Not sure that’s a good idea.”
“It—“
“You’re wearing armor.”
“I can take it off.”
“Can we just do a little more experimenting with things we don’t care about before we use people?”
She looked over at me, eyes narrowed. I swear I could feel her getting ready to ask if I meant that I cared about her. Not a conversation I wanted to deal with.
“Let’s do a circuit of the island,” I blurted, “see if there’s any difference between where we toss the jelly fish. Or see if we can find a rocky outcropping somewhere in the water. Maybe you need to be in the air. Lots of questions still need answering.”
Before she could answer, I grabbed the oars and pulled hard to get us moving.
4
It was not a big island. I’m not exactly an island expert, but I grew up near a few islands, and I can safely say the City of Darkness is smaller than Long Island. Probably even smaller than Manhattan. Or, rather, not as long, but a bit wider. More circular, so the size was difficult to compare.
There was a bay on one side, a spot where rocks and other features gave some protection from the winds and waves. That’s where the main thrust of the city had been built — the area with the docks and piers and all that fun stuff that was completely flat and devoid of even the slightest hint of life. There was grass, and some bushes here and there, but no trees. Which, you know, could have been the way the island just was. There were plenty of treeless islands. At least I thought that made sense. In any case, no trees, some bushes, lots of grass, and nothing whatsoever anywhere there’d been something built. Lots of foundations, though: roads, piers, docks, quays, all sorts of ground-based things left in place. But anything above ground level? Gone. Although there were also some open pits I’d spotted from the crow’s nest, probably areas where there had been a basement.
So we started in the bay, tossing jellyfish here and there, experimenting with all the various surfaces we could find, both near and far from shore. One of the weirder ways I’d spent an afternoon, for sure.
