Chapter 11: People Goop

Entering through the front door— seeing as it's unlikely the spiders have a concept of ‘front door’ and won't exactly be guarding it— Mato and I take a look around the tavern floor.

The inn so far resembles the stereotypical fantasy/medieval inn you'd expect: Dark and empty sconces and candleholders once lighting a bar with tapped wooden kegs. Behind it lies a webbed window into a kitchen, and to its left are the stairs to the second story– likely the actual bedrooms. The tavern floor has several round wooden tables, with a few in dark corners, perfectly placed for lone wolves to mysteriously brood.

The inn is well within expectations of cliché, with a few exceptions: a shredded map barely hangs, tattered, on one wall. A colossal stuffed creature stands by a coat rack. At first glance it looks like a bear, until you see the white and brown zebra stripes, and the two matching heads; one white, one brown. Torn stuffing through several punctures shows how the spiders reacted to finding the creature. And, of course, the final thing that makes this place different than one would expect from a rustic roadside inn: The ever-present webs, interspersed by dangling, person-sized cocoons. A single, smaller spinner spider tends to them, rewrapping and adjusting their positions.

Mato's arm shoots out to halt my movement when he spots it, simultaneously slinging his crossbow into his other hand— but from what I can tell it isn't reacting to us. Perhaps at this size, it is still juvenile, not expected to hunt but only to maintain the “hive”, so it doesn't react to vibration. I suck in a breath to explain this theory to Mato, but he nearly puts me in a headlock preventing speech.

Rolling my eye, I have a sudden idea and wrench my arm free from Mato's grip. His stern gaze warns me not to try anything, but I defy it.

Despite the protests in my gut and the gnawing, growing exhaustion in the core of my being, I summon a small [Minor Illusion] above my free hand. Opaque blue boxes with white words in the default sans serif of text messages appear above my hand. As if it were the chat bubbles on a phone, I create an illusion explaining my theory. Mato releases his hold on me, and replies with some kind of hand signaling. I've never read a sign language dictionary, if that's even what that is, and tell him as much through the illusion.

Mato's expression turns to tense exasperation, and after training his eyes on the diligent spider, he whispers to me.

“You may be right. But, we still need to kill it, and we won't be able to handle it if there's another 10 of these and my bolt alerts them. How many more spells ya got in you?”

“Conservatively,” I reply, “2 [Magic Missiles], 1 brief [Minor Illusion], or 1 unmodified [Tripping Roots]. I can probably do [Light] all day no problem.”

After a moment of assessment, Mato makes a decision.

“Alright,” he says, grabbing a loose chunk of wood, and cutting it into a wedge. “Imma get that thing into a spot I can hit through the door. You n’ I are gonna stand outside, with the doors wedged almost shut. If nothing comes, we move in.”

His plan is agreeable, and not overly cautious, but the way he says these things– as if he knows better– rubs me the wrong way a little. Nonetheless, it's a decent plan, so I step outside.

With the door wedged open just a crack, a luring toss of a stone into the spider's head, and the crack of the crossbow firing, the juvenile spinner dies.

When a second wave of the horde doesn't come skittering out to kill us, Mato un-wedges the door, and we re-enter the inn.

Slowly traversing the labyrinth of webs on the tavern floor, getting stuck or having to backtrack several times, we eventually verify that it's clear. Silently, Mato gestures with his crossbow towards the kitchen, then nods at the stairway.

“I'll check the kitchen, you watch the stairs so I don't get snuck up on.”

I grit my teeth at the command he gives me, not even asking my input or preference. Admittedly, he is the one better suited to clear the kitchen, with his [Lightfooted] skill, and I am better to guard the stairs, not having to move and my magic not needing to reload. So I obey, like a dog.

After a brief wait, Mato emerges from the kitchen with a thumbs up.

Letting Mato keep an eye on the staircase, I follow him as he walks towards one of the cocoons adhered to the nearby wall. He pulls out his hunting knife and tries to cut it open, only really managing to get the knife stuck within the sticky webs. He tears the knife free then grabs a long plank, stabbing around and trying to find purchase.

Growing tired of watching some incredibly amateur Pokin’, I gently tap Mato to move out of the way. Then, wedging my Pokin’ Stick behind the edge of it to get proper leverage, using the lip of the kitchen doorway as a fulcrum and putting my full weight on the other end of the lever, the cocoon tears off from the web. The corpse and I go tumbling into the webs on the floor.

Thoroughly miffed and sticky, I meet Mato's unhappy gaze as I wipe my hands on my magically self-cleaning dress.

“What?” I ask, a snap of challenge to my voice.

“This is a dead body, someone's loved one. Be respectful.” He demands.

“What, are you gonna cut down every single sac here and give them a proper burial? With what shovel? Besides, these tutorial levels have been modified by The Great Work, in all likelihood these people aren't even real.” I reply.

Kneeling now, taking the serrated bit of his knife and beginning to carefully cut into the sac, Mato looks back at me with… I'm not entirely sure. The look he gives I can only register in the “angry” category, but there's a taint of sadness in there too. From context, I'd guess it to be a look of disdainful disappointment.

“If you start categorizing people, determining whether they qualify as ‘real’ people, pretty soon you find yourself justifying some unforgivable things just cuz they'd been done to folks that don't matter.” He says, with a weighty certainty.

“And no, I ain’t gonna bury em.” He tears open the sac, and the smell hits us first.

“I'm gonna burn em.”

The sight that greets us from within the sac has long ago stopped being considered a corpse. What remains is a sort of Person Goop: A red, white, beige and grey slime with loose, necrotic skin buoyed aloft by bones in a broth of liquefied organs. The edge of some tattered leather clothing is visible from the bottom of the soup.

“Great, green, gobs…” I begin singing under my breath.

Mato looks up and takes a breath as if he's about to start giving another order, so I quickly cut him off.

“If we're gonna be here for any length of time we'll have to cut or burn any of the web bridges leading inside and seal as many entrances as possible. We can cut people down as we go. You can keep working on this floor and I'll start on the upstairs.” I lay out.

“Be careful, we—”

“Yeah, yeah, we haven't cleared upstairs yet so there might be stuff up there. I know.” I cut off Mato as I draw my shortsword and begin ascending the stairs.

***

One by one I clear the bedrooms, burning away the webbing with chemicals and shutting the windows. I cut a few websacs down and find mostly more People Goop. Eventually I start sifting through it with my Pokin’ Stick to check for any loot, finding some horrifically stained gold, silver, and copper coins, as well as a few absolutely disgusting health potions.

I'm likely to boil my hands after this.

Eventually I come to the last 3 rooms at the end of the hall. They each lack numbers, so aren't the rooms for rent. One has a crescent moon symbol carved into the wood, and if my knowledge from Shrek is correct, that means it's likely the bathroom. Unless I think I'll find Wizard Cocaine, safely ignored.

Opening the right, I find what seems to be a master bedroom. More than likely was the innkeeper’s. Decorations are sparsely seen beneath the webbing, but for furniture there is a wardrobe, bed, and desk. Checking the wardrobe, I find basic clothing, even some better quality stuff that might be used for fancier events. Whoever owned this inn looked to be a single, overweight man. His boots are the wrong size and his pants are too big. So, no spares for me.

The desk has various writing implements, a tin candlestick, some parchment and a leatherbound journal full of profit figures for the inn. Fairly boring stuff. Except, one of the larger bottom drawers is locked. If this is the proprietor's private room, that may be the equivalent of the safe.

Chopping up the various pens and brushes and the tin candlestick, I make myself a simple set of lockpicks. Clearing away some loose webbing, I begin to pick the lock. As I work, an idea creeps up on me, and instead of thinking of it as picking the lock, I begin to think of it as poking the tumblers until they stick. With a shift, I feel [Tool proficiency: Pokin’ Stick™] take a dampened and lesser effect. My movements are marginally more dextrous as the lock clicks open.

When I slide open the drawer, two things happen in quick succession. First, a jumping spider– barely older than an infant– leaps at me from the open drawer. Second, the rusty spring-loaded trap finally fires off. The end result is me swinging on empty air as a speared dead spider slaps against my face.

Thanking my luck and using my stick to poke around the drawer for any other surprises, I put the small pile of gold, silver, and copper into my satchel. The satchel already being at maximum capacity makes this a precarious endeavor, especially considering my intention to not tell Mato about any of the money I found.

All told, I have about 32 gold coins, 9 silver, and 15 copper. Cleaning off some of the gross coins, the symbols on them are not consistent. Some might have a floral depiction of a dragon, while others have a ship in the grip of tentacles erupting from the sea. Might be hints at where they were minted. I wonder if there are magical means to test fakes, [Detect Counterfeit]?

Can't wait to find out how much these are actually worth.

The final room, across the hall from the innkeeper’s room, has a door that is actually locked. A bit more pokin’ and I get it open.

Having learned my lesson, I push the door open with my Pokin’ stick from 5 feet back and down the hall. Carefully peering around the doorframe, I examine the room.

An ornate rug, ruined by webs and… fluids. Magical lighting slowly overtakes the setting sunlight, illuminating a– suspiciously web-free– desk in the far corner, covered in papers, tools, and apparatuses.

Curious, I step into the room, scanning left to right.

I am 3 or 4 steps into the room by the time my head swings round to the right corner, an area not visible from the doorway and— up until my head turned to it— in my blindspot.

In that corner are 3 websacs, 1 that was being studiously tended to and rewoven by a juvenile spinner spider. That is, until the moment we simultaneously turn our shitty eyesight and have a brief Looney Tunes moment of staring at each other.

The room explodes in movement as, at the same time that I punch out a hasty [Magic Missile], the spider pivots in place, spinning its ass to moon me and shoot out a clump of webs from its pressurized spinnerets.

The webs impact my chest near my center of mass, allowing me to follow through with the [Magic Missile] but messing with its aim. The missile spears into and through one of the spider's long spindly legs before hitting the floor and dissipating. The spider quickly closes the distance and its remaining legs hold me still and attempt to rotate me as it begins trying to spin me into a cocoon. The instincts of a juvenile making it treat me like prey already subdued.

My hands shoot out and grab hold of two of the legs trying to spin me. Potentially used to dealing with feisty meals that don't yet know they're dead, the spider does what it would normally do: it bites down hard, and pumps more venom into its prey.

A choked scream of burning pain and faulty neurons of fear and survival instinct almost overwhelm me until I force myself to act. Instead of dropping the legs to push it off from its center of mass, as instinct would have me do, I pull wide and yank two of its legs off from its body.

Its fangs leave my shoulder as it loses its balance and falls to the ground. I fumble with the satchel, trying to pull the sword as it flops and flails trying to find its footing. I win the race of clumsiness and manage to free the sword before the spider can stand.

I stab and chop repeatedly until it stops twitching. I take a few heaving breaths as the adrenaline flares in my veins, before peeling the webbing off of me.

The webbing comes off the blue dress easier– that self-cleaning magic doing its work– but still pulls the stuck cloth with it for a moment. That single moment of the dress being yanked slightly has my body contort in pain, leaving me making desperate “Hah” sounds with each breath. I quickly realize that this is because, when the spider bit me, its fangs did not pierce the cloth, but the force of it still stabbed them— and the dress— into my shoulder. So, instead of my shoulder wound being full of venom, it's instead full of cloth. Painful, but preferable.

I arduously pull the dress from the divots in my flesh, taking an empty bottle to messily catch some of the spider venom that had pooled in the cloth pocket of the wound.

One man's venom is another man's alchemy ingredient. Or something.

Pouring a bit of potion into the bite, gritting my teeth from the uncomfortable warmth and sudden relief, I set about to cracking open the cocoon lootboxes.

The first is the standard people goop, interspersed with some red scarf and strips of a matching robe. Fishing around with my Pokin’ Stick, I also find a strange empty leather holster. Its not shaped for a knife or a gun or anything, but for a thin 8 inch rod. Either for a wand, a big pen, or a very long cigarette.

So yeah, wand.

Of which, there is no sign of.

The second sac of the 3 is an oddity. At first, just another healthy serving of people goop. Bones, skin, some clothing, and a metal breastplate. But it is as I'm pulling out and drip-drying the breastplate to perhaps [Eye-dentify] and see if it's magic, that I realize what's off.

The breastplate has 4 arm holes.

The whole thing is oddly shaped to accommodate that fact.

Confusedly, I begin pouring out the goop, and sifting through the bones. Now, I am no doctor, but I've seen a diagram or two of the human skeleton. Whoever this was only had two arms.

The corroded boots are oddly shaped too, having a strange bend to them and the sole being half the size. I remember diagrams of other animal skeletons, the way the ankle was farther up the leg. Digitigrade. But, this skeleton is definitely human. Another point towards these places being “borrowed” from something real in the Wider World, and edited to better ease us in. Unless this person was just a really dedicated furry and the spiders took their fursuit. But that seems less likely.

The third sac, the one the spider had been working on, is heavier. Well, not quite heavier, but bulkier– or… more rigid.

I cut it down and the cocoon clunks weightily to the floor. I stab the shortsword in to begin cutting it open and feel a resistance I hadn’t before, as the sword slides into flesh.

“Fuck.”

I quickly withdraw the sword and begin urgently peeling the webs from the body with my bare hands; the fluids within burn me. Slowly, I reveal the bloodless skin, bright red in places where the acidic contents have eaten away at it, of a half-digested corpse of a young woman.

I see the hole my sword left in her right shoulder, deepening the armpit until it hit bone. Gelatinous blood lazily stumbles out of the hole and joins the caustic soup in the bottom of the cocoon.

I gag, and say “well, if you weren't dead before, you are now.”

She has short black hair, done into a side-shave. Her clothes are a sort of light fur armor, ending at the shoulders and paired with a fur skirt and leather bracers. What parts of her skin I can see— and aren't digested— are covered in tattoos of punk bands, snakes, spiders, and skulls. Her face is locked in a rigor mortis of a snarl, stuck halfway to relaxing, halfway to letting go. The faded and smudged memory of goth makeup are shadows under her closed eyes. I don't know if the makeup was such a deep part of her that it came with her here, like my eyepatch, or if she just took some charcoal and worked with what she had. Either option is pretty goth.

The recency of this cocoon and its still-solid contents compared to the liquid people in the other ones leads me to believe that this— she— was one of the people here that died at the same time as me.

A potential ally, and one that was pretty damn punk rock at that, dead before we met.

It's alright. I was never very good with people anyways.

The Pokin’ Stick feels… disrespectful, so, pulling the dress sleeves over my hands, I lift her body from the sac. A limp corpse is damn heavy and the venom and bile she laid in burns like hell, but I manage to set her aside.

“If it's any consolation,” I say to her corpse, “dying fighting giant spiders as a badass barbarian chick while tryna become a god, is a fuckin’ metal way to go.”

After checking her body for any loot (without removing her armor or anything, I'm not an animal), I wrap her up in one of the webby sheets from the nearby bed, to be burned later.

I burn away the last web bridge on the 2nd floor, and tightly shut the window, before turning to the final point of interest in the room: the desk.

Papers, books, vials, pencils, and strange objects litter it. The ones most of note are two small glass bottles of swirling, syrupy liquid glowing a cobalt blue, and a 3 foot leather cord with red gemstones cut in a peculiar shape braided into the leather every few inches along its length.

I will obviously be taking that stuff, but by now I know you always read the thing on the desk.

Shifting my eye to the parchment placed conveniently at the top of the pile, I begin reading a very straightforward explanation of a spell. [Firebolt].

The parchment describes how [Firebolt] is the first stepping stone any pyromancer takes, as it teaches a fundamental truth about flame: you can't throw fire. But you can throw something flammable.

The caster would essentially use pure magical force to collect flammable fuel and oxygen from the air surrounding them, then compressing and pressurizing it into a small ball or “bolt”, igniting the inside of that bolt, tossing it, and letting the ignition burst when it impacts. The page recommends the caster use a material component— a small bit of dust, a flammable gas, or potent resin— as the air around the caster isn't guaranteed to have enough particulates to make good fuel, and supplying your own cuts down on mana costs.

It honestly seems that creating the pocket to contain the oxygen and fuel through pure magical force is the hardest part. I begin to practice.

Watching the bits of dust dancing in the last beams of sunset get yanked towards me is damn entertaining. But I can't quite keep it all contained, pressurized, and throw it. Sort of a “pick 2 of the 3” scenario. But after a good 20 minutes of practice, and using up some of the ethanol from my pack as well as the meager amount of mana I had recovered, I manage to launch a small ball of flame, which bursts when it impacts the corner. And quickly ignites some of the incredibly flammable webbing lining the room.

The idea echoes in my head as I urgently stomp out the flames.

***

Spell learned: [Firebolt] (tier 1)

***

“Woo!”