Chapter 21- Dungeons and More

The inside of the dungeon looked surprisingly like it did back on Ordinal.  The entrance and exit both fed through the same area, but the exit was typically closed unless someone had defeated the dungeon recently.

Which was not the case here, I glanced at the wall where the exit should have been and Shart started waving his hands.  A moment later the hidden passage opened up, exposing the chamber just outside the dungeon core.

Where Jarra went missing.

“There’s nothing here, she might still be around,” I offered and started walking towards the spot.

Shart said nothing, and Badgelor hopped down to start sniffing.

“Not many people come into this room,” said Badgelor as he searched around.

“I’d imagine not,” I said.

“Only good thing about the Shadow Realm is no one comes here so scents tend to stick around damn near forever,” said Badgelor.

The room was bleak, in a bleak place.  It was so grim here that I felt the hairs on the back of my neck standing up.  This was a place where people came to die.

I walked over to where she’d been teleported, assuming that Shart was correct.  There was a single, oddly warped spot directly where I’d seen her vanish.

“After effects of the teleport?” I asked.

“Yes,” said Shart, hopping off and looking at the spot.  “He’s doing a very dirty planar shift, so the underlying reality is badly warped by the passage.  She would have landed around here.”  Shart didn’t get far away from me as he was trying to stay inside the anti-magical field I was using for stealth.

I dropped the field and waited.

“This is a bad idea, Jim,” said Shart before he vanished into my Mindspace.   Unlike Badgelor, who had his own form of camouflage that seemed to work, Shart was essentially naked and vulnerable down here if he was outside of my protective aura.

The shadows in the room darkened and seemed to become more solid.  The air got thicker and finally I reactivated my stealth and moved away from where I’d been standing.  Two pulsing tentacles of shadow reached to where I’d been, covering the ground in inky blackness.

As one pulled up, I caught a glimpse of something golden.

“Bad idea,” yelled Shart as I drew BioLightning to my palms.  The two streams merged into one and severed the entire tentacle, but its companion tracked the source of magic and slashed at me.

I hit the ground, bounced, and got back to my feet before the follow up attack could reach me.  Switching into Badger stance, I tore into the tentacle with my suit’s claws.  The tentacle had the consistency of gelatin, and I carved out several large chunks.  A spike of shadow flashed off of the tentacle and pinged off of my armor.

A flare of pain followed the hit, indicating that it somehow bypassed my armor. That was concerning but I was already drawing the mana out of the mass that stuck to me. The pain stopped and the creature snarled.

With a few more slashes, I’d taken off enough of the tentacle that whatever it was retreated further into the dungeon.  The other tentacle I’d severed was melting into shadowy smoke that the nearby stone was eagerly drinking up.  Soon all that was left was a few strands of Jarra’s hair.

In the deepest, darkest parts of my soul I knew she was dead.  I always knew that.  I knew this was a fool's errand, and that there was no way I’d ever see her again.

“Jim,” whispered a voice, a desperate hopeful voice.

I turned and saw Jarra, tears streaming down her cheeks.  She looked different than I remembered, her clerical robes were gone, replaced by some shadow spun outfit.  Jarra took a half step towards me.

I said, “I always knew you’d make it.”

Jarra ran to me, leaping into my arms.  She smelled exactly like I remembered she did and hugged me so fiercely that I wanted to forget for just a second.  Maybe I even did.

“You came,” said the beautiful, golden-haired woman.

“Of course,” I said sadly pushing her away. “You are a dirty penny, you always turn up.”

“What,” she said.

“Bashara, do you know if Jarra lived?”

***

Bashara’s time in the Shadow Realm had been horrible, by any measure.  She had appeared in the chamber of shadows nearly on top of the creature that attacked us, and it was only through luck that she’d managed to get away.

“And that’s when I figured out if you ate enough flesh from the local animals, most of the creatures would ignore you,” she finished. I could see the tiny weblike lines flowing away from her eyes marking her as shadow tainted. They almost looked like crow’s feet, but if you focused on them you could tell.

“About Jarra,” I continued.  Bashara looked ashamed for a moment.  She had been without human contact so long that all of her social graces had vanished.

“I don’t know,” she said finally.

Nodding, I stood up.  “Well, I’m going to find her.”

“Take me with you,” she said.  Her voice quavered at that.  She’d been at least attempting to keep her game face on up till now.  Bashara hadn’t done a very good job of that, but the effort was there.

“You nearly killed me,” I said, not looking at her.  It wasn’t that she had tried to kill me, I might have been able to forgive that. She had left me in a constricting magical trap that only failed because she had been sent to the Shadow Realm.

Bashara said nothing for a long moment as I watched her clinically, “Please don’t let me die here.  If you die here, your soul is lost.”

Do I care?

I shook my head, “I can’t trust you around me.”

“Please,” was her only response.

“What do you think?” I asked Shart.

“You can’t honestly be entertaining the idea of bringing her along,” said Shart.  “She’s just going to betray us again.”

“Obviously,” I said, gathering my will.  “Badgelor, you’ve been quiet.”

He looked pained, and I wondered if that was mental magic or something else.  Sighing, I held open my palm and started gathering plasma into it.  I didn’t want to kill her, but the Jim that put up with her antics was long dead.  Bashara winced but said nothing.  One clean shot at this range and I could put her out of my misery.

I hadn’t promised anything.

It happened in a blur; I finished the spell just as Badgelor leapt into the way.  The shot struck him in his chest, exploding back at me in a fury of lightning and fire.  He was in his War form and glared at me for a moment before shrinking back down.  I’d always wondered how he survived my earlier plasma shot, now I knew.

Of all things on Ordinal, only War Badgers were naturally resistant to Plasma.

Badgelor shook his head, “I will not let you kill her.  She was my friend.  She was my… Pillow.”

“Pillow,” I said, closing my fist and putting aside thoughts of violence, “That’s what you called her back in Windfall.”

“I knew Bashara when she was a child, I remember her smell” said Badgelor looking distant. “I remember too many smells. They all blend together after a while, but I remember her.”

I walked back over to stare at the young woman.  We were in the most terrible place I could imagine, and she was still standing there looking more pathetic than anyone I’d ever seen.  The scar actually helped her out for once, making her despairing look even more depressing.

“Do you remember him?” I asked Bashara, gesturing to the oddly sedate Badgelor.

“He’s your war badger, you call him Badgelor but Badgelor died a long time ago,” Bashara said.  With my Master Perception I caught something, a twitch, a slight rise to her voice.  She wasn’t sure.

“I was at the magical college, there were quite a few Bashara’s on the board, all of them looked nearly identical to you,” I said.

Bashara looked at Badgelor again, “The college was strange. I always found it familiar, but I never quite fit in. Only professor Badgington ever really understood me. “

“Professor Badgington,” I said and looked over at Badgelor, puzzled. He turned away and I tried to figure out why he’d do that.

“Everyone knows that Professor Badgington showed up at the college seeming at random,” said Shart. “Whenever he did, it always caused a stir so of course an impressionable girl like Bashara would be impressed. Who wouldn’t be?”

“Professor Badgington was always there when I was attending,” said Bashara, confused.

And the whole time Professor Badgington was Badgelor in disguise.

I looked down at Badgelor and thought at him, “How often did you go back to Zentarim?”

Badgelor shrugged, “As often as I needed to.”

“Did you need to every time Bashara was there?” I asked.

Badgelor looked away, “She never remembered me, and she couldn’t see through my disguise. I had to keep her out of trouble.”

The Sphinx hated professor Badgington because he constantly thwarted her plans. He knew of her plans because of Bashara? Had he stopped the Sphinx not out of some great loyalty to the world, but because of a little girl he barely remembered?

“Why?” I asked.

“I was lonely, Jim,” said Badgelor. “I remember her smell.”

Badgelor was the last war badger, he had literally no one for centuries. He was a loner, to be certain, but so was my father and while he wanted to be alone, he also wanted to know people important to him were safe. Bashara was never safe.

“You threatened to kill her,” I said.

“Because she was going after you,” said Badgelor, the same forlorn expression cut through his features. “A war badger is nothing if not loyal, but I wouldn’t have been able to go through with it.”

Badgelor was loyal to a fault. His loyalty drove him to kill Charles because Charles betrayed what he once stood for. Badgelor was in effect loyal enough to the memory of a person that he was willing to stand watch for a millennium. That was a psychological onion I wasn’t going to be carving through anytime soon.

“What do you know about your childhood?” I asked. Bashara looked confused, as if anyone would care about her youth.

“My childhood was a blur,” said Bashara.  “My father was a great man, but he left me. I always wanted to find him, to show him how worthy I was.  I never knew my real mother. The Sphinx was the closest thing I had to a mother, and she only loves power.”

That was interesting, but I was really watching Bashara’s expressions. She wasn’t certain about anything she said, though she tried to act like she was. For a moment, I wondered if she was lying to me but then I realized the problem was that she didn’t know if what she was saying was true. If Bashara looked conflicted, Badgelor looked even more so. The smoking blemish on his chest was already gone and now he just sat on his haunches looking depressed.

“You tried to kill Grebthar,” I said into the silence.

“Yes, I worked for the Sphinx. The whole job was built around helping the Dark Overlord to take over the world,” said Bashara, eyeing me uncomfortably.  “The Mayor opposes the Dark Overlord, if you haven’t heard.”

Badgelor sat next to Bashara, and she unconsciously reached her hand almost touching him. I wondered if she was using some mental magic on him, but he had nearly as much Mental Resistance as I did.

“The Sphinx is dead,” I said.

Bashara looked into my eyes for a moment and nodded, “you killed her?”

“No, the Dark Overlord did.”

Bashara turned her head away from me, “I always knew that if she somehow found him, he would betray her.”

“She betrayed him,” I said, causing Bashara to look at me again, “Because she found out he sent you here. She believed you were her daughter.”

Bashara paused, then snorted, “You almost had me there.  The Sphinx might have been the closest thing I’ve had to a mother, but there was nothing maternal in her. She only cares about what you can do for her. I may have been one of her more reliable agents, but she certainly doesn’t care that I’ve been sent here.”

“She tortured me to get your location, and her last words were a plea to recover you,” I said.  “That is a bit much for a reliable agent, don’t you think?”

Bashara watched me, uncertain. I did not like that expression on her. I was used to her being sure and confident, and she was just scared and confused. She reached up and fingered her scar, before pulling her hand back.

I thought back to the Academy and all of the plaques of Bashara.  Her face had an identical structure in each, but each of them had a scar on their face.  It struck me as odd that they wouldn’t have had that healed, especially if it bothered them which it clearly did.

Mentally erasing the scar, she was one of the kinds of children where you could easily tell who their parents were.  She had the Sphinx’s eyes and Grebthar’s jawline.  She strongly resembled Julia, for that matter, but clearly had a different father.

Because she did.

“I’m going to try something,” I said, taking her face in my hand.  She placed her palm on the back of my hand and nuzzled it while casting her most powerful Mental Manipulation magic on me.  After dealing with some of my more recent foes, it was still quite impressive. If she’d done that to me back when I’d first met her, I’d have been in real trouble.

“I thought we said no more doing that?”

She didn’t release my hand but nodded.  A few moments later she even stopped.

First, I drained the shadow out of her. Shadow mana was burning away her soul and too much of that was unhealthy. Even that tiny amount was poisoning the rest of her mana. After I drained it there was a slight gap in her essence that didn’t refill.

“Did her soul shrink?” I asked, unsure of what to call the damage.

“Yup,” replied Shart examining her. “You can afford to lose a bit of your radiant mana, just not too much. If too much gets corrupted, the results are always unpleasant. The only way to refill it is to detach the soul from the body but that requires a trip to the soul sucker.”

“Great,” I muttered as the absence of shadow suddenly made her detectable again. I expanded my anti-magic bubble further, shielding her while I tried to figure out what was going on.

Next, I activated the Treatment skill.  A simple facial scar should have been easy, but of course there was a curse there.  As Shart said, scars were the dumping grounds for curses.

“Any idea what this does?” I asked as I activated the Cursebreaking skill.

“Looks like an amnesia curse,” said Shart. “Very well made.”

Of course it was, I made it.  It was a Walker special.  Toomen and Badgie begged me to make the thing.  When Charles found out he was pissed, of course.  He hated being shown up but eventually he used it on an unhelpful king, removing his memory of a cultist who later turned out to be the dark overlord. I didn’t realize that any copies survived, let alone Leia kept one. She hadn’t even changed the password so with a few simple twists I pulled the curse apart.

I pushed away the alien though, breathing deeply as I continued my work.  Walker's thoughts were leaking in too often anymore.  The were unfortunately extremely helpful, and the curse came undone.  With the curse removed, Bashara’s eyes went wide.  I fixed the scar while I was there, because why not?  It no longer mattered.

“What did she do to me,” uttered Bashara, tears streaming down her face as lifetimes of memories crashed into her.

“Something terrible,” said Badgelor as he sank down next to her.  Bashara’s hand slowly reached over and scratched Badgelor behind the ear.  “She did something terrible to all of us.”