Critical Failures VI (Caverns and Creatures Book 6) Read online

  Critical Failures VI

  The Good, the Bad, and the Neutral

  By Robert Bevan

  Copyright 2018 Robert Bevan

  Special Thanks to:

  My editor, Joan Reginaldo.

  My wife No Young Sook.

  My cover designer, No Hyun Jun.

  My ARC team.

  My fans who like my Facebook page and subscribe to my newsletter.

  (Even if the latter only do so to get a FREE copy of Multiple Orc Chasms)

  Chapter 1

  “What the fuck?” said Cooper. Katherine, Tim, the pegasus, the big-ass beanstalk, they were all gone. They'd just blinked out of existence, leaving behind an untouched expanse of sun-bleached sand. “Where'd all those vines and shit go?”

  “Did it just get darker?” asked Chaz.

  “Where did those mountains come from?” asked Julian.

  Captain Righteous looked at Cooper like he had dicks growing out of his nose. “Do none of you know of the Crescent Shadow?”

  Cooper, Julian, Dave, and Chaz gave non-committal shrugs.

  “Bits and pieces,” said Stacy. “We've heard about it in passing.”

  “You're aware, at least, that it's the island we're currently suspended from?”

  “I did know that.”

  “It's a retirement community for wealthy and powerful wizards. It periodically blinks to random points above the Fertile Desert.” Captain Righteous squinted at the distant purple mountains. “If I had to guess, I'd say those are the Haunted Highlands, which would put the city of Totino just to the southwest.”

  Cooper's mind wandered away from the Captain's geography lesson, distracted by thoughts of delicious pizza rolls. He grabbed the bars on either side of the open part of his cage, then squatted so that his ass was hanging outside.

  “What are you doing?” asked Julian. “You're making me very nervous.”

  “I've got a big one brewing. I want to see if it's visible from way up here when it splatters on the sand.”

  “Didn't you shit, like, eight times on the way to Minswater?” asked Stacy.

  “Excuse me. I didn't realize we had daily shit limits.”

  “I was just wondering where it all comes from. Have you even eaten anything since then?”

  “I don't know,” said Cooper, now getting annoyed that everyone's attention was focused on him trying to take a dump. “Unlike you, I haven't been keeping fucking records of every time someone eats or takes a –” He grunted as his bowels constricted and his cargo bay door opened, releasing his parapoopers over hostile foreign lands. It came out like farty machine gun fire.

  Cooper closed his eyes, imagining himself as a ball turret on the underside of a B-17, blasting Nazi shitheads out of the air. He waved his ass from side to side, splattering his payload all over the windshields of imaginary enemy aircraft.

  “Get a Luftwiffe of that, Nazi bitches!”

  “COOPER!” cried Julian. “The decanter!”

  Cooper opened his eyes just in time to catch the Decanter of Endless Water rolling between his legs.

  “Shit!” He let go of the bar on his left to catch the decanter, but so much of his weight was outside of the cage that he lost his balance and fell out completely. His right hand slid down the bar and hit the cage floor hard, but he hung on, and even managed to catch the decanter between his knees. He thought he'd finished shitting for the time being, but this little brush with death made him carpet bomb the desert one more time.

  “Cooper!” said Stacy. “Are you okay?”

  “My hand hurts, and I may have just shat out my large intestine. But I'm hanging in there.” Cooper grabbed the decanter with his left hand, then inserted the neck into his mouth like a big ol' silver dick. Holding it tight with his thick meaty half-orc lips, he pulled himself up one-handed until he could grab the cage floor with his other hand. After a bit of a struggle, he pulled himself back into the cage.

  Chaz pressed his face between two of his bars and glared at Cooper. “You need to be more careful!”

  Cooper gave him the finger. “Thanks, Mom. I can take care of myself.”

  “I don't give a shit about you. That decanter is the only thing keeping us alive if we can't figure out a way to get someone to come and rescue us.”

  “Hey, Cooper,” said Dave. “Why don't you hose us down once more, just to reset the clock in case you decide to do anything else really stupid.”

  Cooper pressed his back against the bars on the left side of his cage, and his feet on the bars at either corner of the right side. Seeing him do so, everyone else likewise braced themselves.

  He unstoppered the decanter, aimed the mouth at Dave, and spoke the incantation. “Geyser!”

  A torrent of water gushed out of the decanter, hosing Dave right in his fat bearded face, and launching Cooper's cage backwards, crashing it into Stacy's.

  When everyone had had their fill of water, Cooper deactivated the geyser setting, then tipped the decanter above his own open mouth, letting water flow normally.

  “Great,” said Stacy. “Like Dave said, the clock is reset. Now what? We can starve to death over three weeks rather than thirst to death over three days. Personally, I think we should do something a little more proactive than wait around hoping to be rescued.”

  “Do you have any ideas?” asked Captain Righteous. His pudgy little sidekick looked up hopefully at Stacy.

  Stacy frowned. “No.”

  Cooper had been thinking about an idea, but he was timid about saying it aloud. It sounded pretty stupid even to him, and he knew that he was already pretty stupid. And even if it worked at all, he wasn't sure if it would work for everyone. Then again, maybe someone else could take the idea and tweak it a little. It would be a shame for everyone to starve to death because he hadn't spoken up.

  He cleared his throat. “I've got an idea.”

  Chaz rolled his eyes as he wrung water from the bottom of his shiny pink tunic. “Oh, I can't wait to hear this.”

  “Step one,” said Cooper. “Chaz eats a dick.”

  Julian sighed. “Do you actually have an idea? Or was that just a setup to tell Chaz to eat a dick?”

  “I've got kind of an idea. It's a little far-fetched, maybe. But as long as nobody else is coming up with anything.”

  “What is it?”

  Cooper held up the Decanter of Endless Water. “I could hose down the ground until there's enough vegetation to break our fall.”

  Captain Righteous shook his head. “No amount of cabbages and tomatoes would make an appreciable difference from this high up.”

  “I think it's a fine idea,” said Chaz. “I'd recommend you give it a shot if we didn't need the water.”

  “How about I give your mom a shot?”

  Chaz clapped his hands. “Brilliant comeback. Your mom shtick is getting old. That wasn't even an insult.”

  “Guys,” said Julian. “None of this is helping. You can bicker with each other once we're not dangling from a floating island.”

  Cooper looked down through the bars at the bottom of his cage. “I'm sorry. Chaz is right.”

  “It's okay. We really need to –”

  “I can do better.” Cooper unstoppered the Decanter of Endless Water, lifted the front of his loincloth, and inserted his dick into the mouth.

  “Ugh!” said Stacy.

  “Mercy of the gods!” said Captain Righteous.

  “We need to drink from that!” said Dave.

  Cooper ignored them all, thrusting himself repeatedly into the decanter. “How do you like that, Chaz's mom? Oh? Even better than any of the four dozen top contenders for Chaz's bi
ological father? Thank you very much. It's kind of you to say so.” His balls made a nice splashing sound with every thrust against the water pouring out.

  “Cooper,” said Julian. “Please stop that.”

  “She's almost finished. She said she's had every kind of dick in the world, from Korean to kangaroo, but she's never had a half-orc dick in her before.”

  Chaz gave Cooper the finger. “You're such a fucking asshole.”

  “Oh... oh... almost there.” Cooper needed to cut this short because the constant trickle of water on his junk was actually starting to arouse him. “Guess what, Chaz. Mom's a squirter.” He removed the Decanter of Endless Water from his dick and aimed it at Chaz. “Geyser!”

  The force of the water sent Cooper's cage swinging, so it required some effort to keep the stream focused on Chaz, who writhed and twisted in a glorious shower of dickwater. “Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck –”

  SNAP

  Chaz's cage fell. The chain it had hung from, now unburdened, swung wide.

  “Chaz!” cried Dave.

  “Oh, shit,” said Cooper. He deactivated the decanter, secured it tight against his chest like a football, and let himself fall out of his cage.

  “COOPER!” cried Julian and Stacy.

  Cooper tumbled through the air at about the same speed as Chaz's cage. He needed to catch up. After lining himself up so that his head was pointed toward the cage, he pointed the decanter toward his feet. “Geyser!”

  Much to Cooper's surprise, it worked exactly like he'd hoped it would. It was like a jetpack, except with water instead of fire. That was fortunate, because a fire-based jetpack would be burning his dick off right now.

  “Is it a bird? Is it a plane? Fuck no! It's COOPERMAN!”

  Chaz had apparently gotten over the dickwater thing, because he pushed himself out of his cage and opened his arms to intercept the rocket-propelled Cooper coming at him.

  When they collided, Chaz nearly knocked the decanter loose from Cooper's grip, but Cooper held on as Chaz clung to him like an insecure girlfriend.

  “Geyser off,” said Cooper. The water stopped flowing, and they were free falling right alongside Chaz's cage.

  “What are you doing?” cried Chaz.

  “We have to point it down.” Cooper shifted the decanter so that the mouth was pointed straight at the rapidly approaching desert. “Try to stay balanced.”

  Chaz nodded.

  “Geyser!”

  They weaved and wobbled a bit, but managed to keep from flipping over. Cooper was hoping that this would work like one of those vertical landing jets, slowing their descent to a soft landing, but it felt like they were still falling pretty fucking fast.

  Then again, Chaz's cage was falling away from them, so they must have slowed down some. Cooper hoped it would be enough to survive.

  Hugging Chaz as tightly as Chaz was hugging him, Cooper wasn't able to look directly below them. He didn't know what kind of vegetation they were about to splatter into. He hoped it wasn't something hard like a giant coconut or pineapple. That would be a bitch.

  CRASH

  He'd lost sight of the cage. When he finally heard it hit the sand, it sounded just as loud as if it had landed on solid concrete. A trickle of liquid warmth came from Chaz's crotch. He knew it too. They were both so fucking –

  SPLAT

  Pain. So much pain. Everything hurt. But pain meant that he was alive, right? He opened his eyes.

  Holy shit. It was so much worse than he was prepared for. He was in a sea of gore. Dripping blood and flesh everywhere. His brain must have been pumping out dopamine or whatever to ease him through his last few seconds of life. He'd seen this shit on the Discovery Channel.

  Chaz groaned. Fuck, he was alive too. The decanter had been a mistake. This was going to be so much worse than a quick splatter on the desert floor.

  “My fucking back,” said Chaz, struggling to sit up.

  Cooper shoved him back down with his right arm, which was dripping with tendrils of red slimy flesh. “Don't try to get up. Just let yourself go.”

  The decanter was lodged in an enormous chunk of flesh, possibly Cooper's ribcage or something, spraying a gushing stream of water horizontally over their heads.

  “What is all this?”

  “It's us,” said Cooper. It was hard to believe there was so much of them. It was like they were inside an exploded whale.

  “I don't think this is us,” said Chaz. He raised his hand into the water spray. When he pulled it back out, it was whole.

  “What the fuck?” said Cooper. “The water healed you?”

  “No, it didn't heal me. It washed me.” Chaz sat up, grabbed a small chunk of gore, then tasted it.

  Cooper cringed. “Dude! Do you even know if that's part of me or you?”

  “It's neither. We're inside a giant tomato.”

  Chapter 2

  “You stupid hillbilly fuck!” Katherine grabbed a squash from a nearby vine and hurled it at Randy. “You fed my brother to your...” She looked at the horse-sized eight-legged eyeless reptilian monstrosity standing next to him, searching for the right word but coming up empty. “... whatever the fuck this thing is?”

  “His name is Basil.”

  “I don't give a shit what his name is. Cut him open and get my brother out of there.”

  “Your brother's gone, Honeytits,” said the dwarf woman dressed in a bean-pod diaper. “I don't care how tough he was. Don't nobody survive that kind of fall, then getting eaten by a basilisk.”

  Butterbean growled at her.

  “I understand you're upset,” said Randy. “But Denise is right. Killing Basil ain't gonna bring Tim back.”

  Katherine wished she still had her vampire powers. She could have so easily beaten the shit out of these dumbass rednecks and torn this deformed dinosaur thing apart from its asshole. Acknowledging that those options were currently off the table, she took a deep breath and tried explaining.

  “I understand that Tim didn't survive having his throat slit, falling from a island floating five hundred feet in the air, and getting eaten by...”

  “Basil.”

  “Thank you,” Katherine said curtly. “Basil. But we are in a fantasy game, and there are ways to bring dead people back to life. I would like to go into the city and find someone who can do that, but I need Tim's body in order to do that.”

  Denise grimaced. “Even if it's all chewed up and digested and shit?”

  Katherine felt tears welling up. A few minutes ago, she'd had herself convinced that Tim's death was no big deal, that getting him back was just going to be a minor inconvenience. Now the realization that she truly might never see her brother again was rapidly dawning on her.

  “I've got to try.”

  Randy opened his arms to her. “Come on.”

  Katherine supposed there was no point in trying to hide her emotions. She allowed him to embrace her and sobbed against his chest. “I can't... believe... he's gone.”

  “I know, darlin'.” Randy hugged her tightly. “He's at peace now.”

  That much was true. Tim had been following a figurative downward trajectory long before he entered the literal one which smashed him into the Fertile Desert. Bad luck with women, low self-esteem, terrible businessperson, anxiety, depression, drinking. All that had only gotten worse since they'd gotten themselves stuck in this game. Maybe he was better off now than if he'd continued on as he was going.

  “Ol' Basil here might have found some middle ground for you,” said Denise, walking out from behind the massive lizard and carrying a platter-sized cabbage leaf from the bottom with both hands.

  “What you got there?” asked Randy.

  Denise dropped the cabbage leaf. It thunked down hard on the sand. On top of it was a long, grey turd in a rough figure eight pattern. It was as thick around as Denise's dwarven forearm and smelled like one of Cooper's shits had taken a shit. “I reckon it's Tim.”

  Katherine pushed Randy away and glared at Denise. “Is that s
upposed to be funny?” She stomped toward her, half wishing she had a weapon, but also relishing the thought of pounding this squat banjo-plucking bitch with her bare fists. “Give me one reason I shouldn't kick your fat hairy ass.”

  Denise backed away from her. “I'll give you two. First, I'm pregnant.”

  Katherine stopped and glanced at Randy for confirmation.

  Randy nodded.

  “Did you...?”

  Randy shook his head.

  Katherine turned back to Denise. “How'd you get knocked up so quickly?”

  “A scorpion lady injected her fertilized eggs up in my cooter.”

  “Oh,” was all Katherine could think to say in response.

  “And the other thing is that I wasn't joking. I reckon there's got to be some of your brother in there. I saw folks get fucked up pretty bad when them guys in the flying boat stormed the city with all the dragons, and they went back to perfectly normal when Randy's blasphemy monster hosed them all down with blood.”

  Katherine couldn't see how this related to her brother being a lizard turd, but she was willing to listen to a little more. “Go on.”

  “They had arms burnt down to bones, missing fingers, hair all burnt away. Then when they came back to life, they looked good as new, like they ain't even been touched. If there's magic in this world that can do that, who knows how much more it could do, given just a little to work with.” Denise looked down at the turd. “I reckon there's got to be at least some of your brother in there. It couldn't hurt to ask.”

  Katherine put her Bag of Holding on the ground next to the turd leaf, lifted the top of the rim, then slid the leaf in. When her brother's remains were safely in the bag, she stood up.

  “Randy, you've got a little bit of celebrity pull with the temple folks now, right? I need you to come with me.”

  Randy shrugged. “I don't know how much pull I got, but I'd be happy to join you.”

  Denise twirled some hairs on the side of her short beard. “I wonder if they might be able to sort out my situation as well.”