Pocket Dungeon 4, page 7
Night Goggles
While wearing the goggles, darkness is as clear as light for up to 10 yards.
It wasn’t the best item I’d seen in a dungeon, but then again, it was only a green item, so it wasn’t that surprising, either. However, despite the sort of lackluster effect of the goggles, they’d still come in handy.
After all, if Iris decided she wanted to head into a dungeon, she could use them, seeing as she didn’t have improved senses. And I really didn’t know the capabilities Liva was packing either, so to speak. Maybe the blue woman would want to use them.
That was, if Liva came into a dungeon with us.
I still couldn’t get a decent feel for the other woman, but I’d dwell on that later.
I set the goggles aside so Trog could look at them before I moved on to the next chest.
Like the first two, there was a mountain of gold coins ready for me as soon as I opened the lid, but I quickly slid them away from the things I was really interested in.
Just beneath the gold was what appeared to be a large tunic. It was made of a pale, not-quite-white material that resembled linen, but when I touched it, it felt cool beneath my fingertips.
The blue text over top of the item marked it as an Elfwoven Shirt.
Elfwoven Shirt
Speed: +3
Dexterity: +2
Stamina: +1
It offered some pretty good buffs, and while it wasn’t quite as protective as armor, I was sure one of us would find a good use for it. Maybe Yasha could use it beneath her armored dress so I could feel a little better about the fact that she insisted her old armor was more than adequate.
I rifled around the chest for the next item and quickly pulled it out.
Unlike the last two items, this one wasn’t something that could be worn.
Instead, it was a small vial no larger than my index finger. The vial itself felt like it was made out of glass, but the inside was as dark as night. It was so dark, that if it weren’t for the fact that something seemed to slosh every time I moved the vial in my hand, I would have assumed it was empty.
The blue text over the item advertised it as A Drop Of Night.
A Drop Of Night
Uncork the vial to release the powers of darkness. It will fill the space and douse any light it reaches. Once uncorked, the darkness cannot be let back in, so use it wisely, as it cannot be used again.
“Well, isn’t that fun and only a little ominous,” I said cheerfully before I passed that to Trog as well.
The large, demonic-looking man took the vial gingerly in his massive hands and held it up to the light as I rifled through the chest once more.
Nothing was left other than a couple of large hunks of gold at the bottom.
Huh, that was new, too. I’d never seen gold in any form other than coins before. I wondered if this was a triple dungeon thing, or if it was just because the level of the dungeons was increasing. One way or another, I was always glad to see more ways to make some money in the real world.
I moved on to the next chest as Yasha continued scooping in our earnings.
This time, I didn’t have to do any digging to find the interesting stuff, because there was only one thing in the chest.
Well, that wasn’t quite true. There were four items sitting in a neat little line at the bottom of the chest, but they were all clearly part of a set.
The text over top of the items marked them as the Blood Ink Quills.
I reached down and picked up one of them. It was heavier than I’d anticipated, and it felt more like an actual pen than what I imagined a quill would feel like.
The feather attached to the ornate-looking metal tip was pitch black, or at least, that’s what I thought at first, but when I turned the quill over in my hand, the feather caught the light just right and I was able to see it was actually an incredibly dark shade of red.
The quill still in the chest looked identical to the one in my hand, but I picked it up anyway just to be sure. Once I was satisfied both quills were the same, I reached down to pick up the small glass bottle of ink.
Or what I was pretty sure was ink. It was filled all the way up to the silver metal stopper at the top of the little jar, and it fit neatly in the palm of my hand.
The ink inside was blood red, and it didn’t take an expert to deduce that the ink was probably some type of blood. I only confirmed my suspicions when I mentally maneuvered over to the explanation of the item.
Blood Ink Quills
Connected no matter where they are. When used together, the quill and ink may write across time and space to whoever holds its twin. The ink will not replenish. Brevity will guide you.
Holy shit.
I stared at the quills and their matching jars of ink. This was the exact sort of thing I’d been needing.
“Trog, look at this,” I said and gestured for him to take a look at the quill and ink set. “If you take one and I take the other, we can actually talk to each other without having to come into a dungeon. I mean, it’s not a perfect system, but it’s better than nothing.”
“HOW INTRIGUING!” Trog declared as he daintily held one of the quills between two of his massive fingers, as if he was going to write in the air.
“I know you don’t take loot from the dungeons,” I said. “But this is different. Think of it as a part of your scholarly pursuits.”
Trog smiled at me, which despite all the time we spent together, was still pretty terrifying to witness.
“I LIKE THE WAY YOUR MIND WORKS, WES THE WISE,” he said and took a jar of ink to go with his quill. “WE MUST USE OUR INK SPARINGLY, BUT IF AN EMERGENCY EVER ARISES…”
“Then we can actually talk to each other,” I agreed.
I was undeniably giddy as I looked back down at the quill and ink. Not only was it one of the coolest things I’d seen in the dungeon ever, it was also my second purple text item.
Sure, I loved the weapons and stuff the chests gave us, but I was also a sucker for the weird magical items too, especially one that was as invaluable as this.
I opened up another chest and peered inside to see what waited for me, and it felt like a really weird life I was living when I felt mild disappointment for a split second at the fact the chest contained nothing but large, glittering stones that looked like diamonds.
That disappointment was gone in a blink, though, because, well, holy shit big-ass diamonds.
There were only two chests left, and I pried open the lid on the one closest to me. Inside, there were two more giant lumps of gold, as well as small gemstones the size of a pinky nail that I thought might have been rubies. But there were a few small items as well.
The first two were simple white text items– a pair of shoelaces for some reason that only boasted the effect of not coming untied, and a pair of iron wrist cuffs.
The stats were fine, but they were nothing to write home about compared to the other items we’d found.
But the last item proved a little more interesting. It was a pair of leather boots, but there was something strange about the leather I couldn’t quite put my finger on until I picked them up.
Batwing Leather Boots
Speed: +5
Dexterity: +5
Stamina: -3
While wearing the Batwing Leather Boots, you will be lighter on your feet than the air around you and as swift as the flap of wings.
“Interesting,” I said. “It doesn’t seem like I’ll be able to fly, but I wonder just how much of a boost these will give me.”
I passed the boots over into Yasha’s waiting hands as the fox woman studied the stats on the blue item.
Then I moved on to the last chest with another surge of excitement. I doubted anything could top what we’d just found, but hey, maybe I would be wrong and we’d pull out something else badass.
But when I popped the last lid, there was the standard gold, another white pair of gloves, and nothing else. Despite the lack of luck with the last chest, I still felt like I was walking on air.
Not only had Trog brought me texts to help research the burgeoning questions in the back of my mind, but we had a way to communicate. This dungeon had gone far better than I could have hoped.
It only took a few more seconds for me to help Yasha get the rest of the gold and gemstones into our little velvet bag, and after a moment’s thought, I had to pry Elaene away from all of the books to slip them into the bag too.
It was a little harder getting the massive books through the relatively small opening of the bag, but we managed to make them fit, and they disappeared inside the sack just like everything else did.
We could probably put a fucking person in there if we wanted. Not that I wanted to do that, but still. It might work.
“I AM EAGER TO GET BACK TO MY STUDY TO FURTHER SEE WHAT THIS QUILL AND INK MAY DO,” Trog told me. “AND I HOPE MY TOMES AID YOU IN YOUR RESEARCH, MY LITTLE FRIEND. IF I LEARN OF WHAT HAPPENED TO OUR MIMIC, YOU WILL BE THE FIRST I TELL. OUR PATHS WILL CROSS AGAIN SOON.”
“You know it, buddy,” I told him with a grin.
I gave him a two-fingered salute and watched as the massive man lumbered over to the ladder that led the way out of his strange, cavernous equipment room, and then, in the blink of an eye, he disappeared.
“What must we do now?” Elaene asked.
The Atlantean looked up at me with a slightly dazed look, like she’d just woken up, or more accurately, like she’d just been forced back into the present after studying the books Trog had given us.
I grinned. “Give me just a second, I gotta switch this room back to ours, and then we can get out of this armor and get back home.”
Elaene and Yasha both nodded, and the two non-human women both shot uneasy glances at the large stone table in the center of the cave, like they weren’t sure if they should be touching it while I enacted this change.
Frankly, I had no idea what to expect either, but I made my way over to the door and pressed my palm against it, just like Trog had said, and closed my eyes for a few seconds.
I knew before I even opened my eyes that the world around us was different, and sure enough, when I blinked, we were back in our own equipment room.
For a second, I’d been worried we’d ended up in the wrong place somehow, but then I’d remembered that our equipment room had undergone a makeover when we’d entered the dungeon.
That was going to take some getting used to.
Both Elaene and Yasha wore matching looks of shock on their lovely faces and glanced around in awe.
“I have never seen something quite like that,” Yasha said. Her ears twitched in delight, and she reached out to run her hand over the more familiar table. “You will never stop finding things to surprise me with in the dungeons.”
“I mean, I hope I do eventually,” I joked. “After all, I don’t know if all the surprises have been good ones.”
“Iris and Elaene were lovely surprises,” Yasha said.
“Thank you,” the Atlantean woman said. Her pretty lips curled up in a smile, and she looked genuinely touched that Yasha thought she’d been a good surprise, though I didn’t think there was a single thing that should have led her to think the contrary.
“You have a point,” I said as I grinned. “But I kind of hope we don’t keep finding wronged women in the dungeons, no offense, Elaene.”
“I am in firm agreement,” Elaene said. “Less surprises, less women hurt by bad men.”
“Amen to that.”
“I do not know what that word means,” Yasha said. “What is Ahh-men?”
“It is a word that’s said in praise to one of the many gods,” Elaene said matter-of-factly.
She said it with so much confidence, I was tempted to ask her if that meant gods were real, like actually real. But the second after the thought crossed my mind, I decided I would really not like to know, come to think of it, and maybe some things were better left as mysteries to ponder and nothing more.
The three of us fell into a contented silence after that strange bombshell I wasn’t about to poke with a ten-foot stick, and it didn’t take us any time at all to strip out of our armor, and in Yasha’s case, put our street clothes back on.
The three of us then climbed up the ladder and out of the crystal without a second thought.
I closed my eyes as I felt the familiar tugging sensation in my gut and darkness swallowed me whole, but when I opened them, I was back in the Benz.
I’d expected to end up sprawled on the ground outside, but I supposed we’d still entered close enough that the crystal decided to pop us back here.
Thankfully, I hadn’t ended up awkwardly flung over the front seat or something, which meant I could keep some semblance of my dignity as I straightened up and readjusted to the way my body felt in the real world.
Yasha and Elaene hadn’t been so lucky, however.
The fox-woman was somehow turned backward in the front seat and was practically perched on the dashboard with her face pressed against the passenger side window.
One of her legs was tucked up underneath her, and if it wasn’t for her hand pressed to the car’s ceiling, I was sure she’d have fallen face first into the seat as soon as she came back to her senses.
Elaene was only slightly less disheveled in her position laying over the center console in the backseat.
“You good?” I asked Yasha as the fox-woman harrumphed and quickly clambered out from beneath the windshield and back into her seat.
“I do not like arriving back into the vehicle,” she said.
“To be fair,” I said. “I wasn’t aware that would happen.”
I quickly opened up the door and hopped out to grab the crystal where it laid a yard away on the ground. I shoved it back into my pocket before I resituated myself in the driver’s seat.
“It wasn’t that unpleasant,” Elaene spoke up front the backseat as she readjusted herself as well, and I started the SUV. “You could have awoken as a slave.”
For a moment, neither me nor Yasha said anything as Elaene’s words hung in the air, but then, the Atlantean woman let out a little giggle.
It was as clear and crisp as the sound of water rippling in a creek, and I felt a wave of relief wash over me. I think that might have been her first time attempting to make a joke.
“You’ve got us beat there,” I said. “Though, we’re never going to let something like that happen to you ever again.”
“No more talk of slavery,” Yasha declared as she leaned forward to fiddle with the dials on the radio. “I wish to listen to my new E-D.”
“CD,” I corrected, and didn’t point out that the letters ED usually meant something much different. “What is it? Iris didn’t tell me what she brought you from Monty’s shop.”
To my knowledge, Yasha didn’t care much about music, but thanks to Iris’ insistence that we all listened to more music, and that each of us had to have some sort of music that, as she put it, made our souls sing, she’d been gifting us all with various CDs and vinyl’s she thought we might like.
Most of the CDs were in the glove box, and I hadn’t had a chance to go through them, nor did I see which one Yasha managed to shove into the player.
Yasha didn’t so much as answer as she did turn up what one hundred percent sounded like someone had recorded the sound of what happened when a fork was dropped in a garbage disposal.
The music was impossibly loud and metallic sounding, and that was before the man started screaming in a language I couldn’t recognize.
Yasha’s golden eyes lit up, and the fox-woman clapped her hands together in delight as the… song, if it could even be called that, continued.
I reached out to touch the volume dial so none of us went deaf, but before I could turn it down to a more reasonable level, Yasha looked over at me with such obvious joy, I sighed and dropped my hand back down onto the steering wheel.
Elaene caught my eye in the rearview mirror, and the two of us shared a silent look of equal parts confusion and dismay, but it was obvious neither of us were about to step in and stop Yasha’s clear delight.
So we listened to whatever the fuck that was the entire way back to the Marquee.
The sounds of the objectively busy apartment building’s lobby felt like sweet, sweet silence compared to that as the three of us made our way into the elevator.
Yasha continued to bob her head like she was still hearing the music, and who knows, maybe she was.
After all, there was still a definite ringing in my ears, which was either tinnitus or the remnants of her death metal.
Or both.
Despite all the extra steps needed to get up to our penthouse, the elevator ride went by quickly, and I let out a long sigh of relief when we stepped into our new home.
I didn’t think I’d ever get used to being able to come home to a place like this.
Iris had clearly been working on unpacking for the majority of the time we were gone, because things already looked far more put together than they had a few hours before.
But that wasn’t what took my breath away.
Liva spun in slow, lazy circles in the middle of the living room with her arms outstretched at her sides. Her crystalline wings moved so quickly, I could barely even register that they were moving, and her bare feet brushed against the ground as light as a kiss.
She also was naked.
Entirely naked.
Like so fucking naked.
Chapter 5
I sucked in a sharp breath and tried not to stare as she rotated back to give us a full frontal view.
Her petite body was toned and lean, and her breasts were each the perfect handful. Her nipples were a darker shade of blue than the rest of her body, and to my surprise, they looked frosted over, like the ice I knew she could create from her hands could also come from her tits.
Could she form ice anywhere on her body?
I quickly turned my gaze away from her as I tried not to drool, but that was something that was definitely easier said than done.
Obviously, I wasn’t blind to the fact that Liva was gorgeous, but it was one thing to know it, and it was another thing entirely to see her doing her own weird version of the Hills Are Alive in my living room without any clothes on.
