Critical Failures VII Read online

  Critical Failures VII

  Septapussy

  By Robert Bevan

  Copyright 2019 Robert Bevan

  Special Thanks to:

  My editor, Joan Reginaldo.

  My wife No Young Sook.

  My cover designer, No Hyun Jun.

  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

  “Should I ask why you're naked?” said Tim, his expression difficult to read with the flickering torchlight illuminating the slimy sewer wall behind him.

  Dave covered his junk and glared at Tim. “I'd rather you just find me some clothes and let me out of this cage.”

  “Here. Use this.” Tim tossed his hair clip through the bars, which Dave sacrificed half of his coverage to catch.

  Wondering if his requests had somehow been misinterpreted, Dave examined the clip. It was silver, with an engraving of a face which looked like it was formed from two halves of different faces. No immediately obvious uses for it came to mind. Was he supposed to try to pick the lock with it? Was his hair out of sorts? There was no point in overthinking it when he could just ask.

  “What the fuck am I supposed to do with this?”

  Tim sighed. “It's a hair clip, genius. You put it in your hair.”

  “I don't need fucking pigtails,” said Dave. “I need something to cover my dick with.”

  “Believe me,” said Tim. “Nobody wants to see your dick less than me. That's a Hair Clip of Disguise. While you're wearing it, you can look like whoever you want to look like. So just put it in your hair and imagine yourself as someone who's wearing some goddamn clothes.”

  Dave reached around to the back of his head and slid the clip into his hair. Looking down, he discovered that while he could still feel his junk in his other hand, it was obscured by an illusory pair of cargo shorts.

  “Hey there!” Tim said cheerfully. “Blast from the past. It's normal Dave.”

  “That really worked?” Dave patted his face and could still feel his big bushy dwarf beard, but his sandals, shorts, and faded old Star Trek t-shirt made him suspect that he would be seen as clean-shaven. “Do you have a mirror?”

  “Slow down there, Narcissus. Your view of yourself might be a few pounds lighter than reality, but you're hardly a Leonardo DeCockenballs. Also, you probably don't want to walk around in this world dressed like the Virgin from planet Douche.”

  Dave was starting to look back fondly on when he thought Tim was dead.

  “How would you prefer I dressed?”

  “Like someone from this world. Just change yourself back to dwarf Dave with all your armor and shit on until we can find you a robe or something.”

  Dave pulled the hair clip out.

  “Jesus Christ!” said Tim, shielding his eyes as if Dave's dick were the sun. “You could maybe give me some warning first.”

  Taking care to make sure it was fastened as securely as possible, Dave put the hair clip back in his hair while imagining himself with his armor on.

  “How's that?”

  Tim cautiously opened his eyes, then relaxed his raised arms. “Better. Now if I let you out of that cage, do I have your word you're not going to try anything stupid?”

  “Would you even entertain the idea of letting me out of you didn't know you were holding all the cards?”

  Tim grinned. “Probably not.” He produced a black iron key from his pants pocket and took a step toward the cage.

  Dave took a step back to make himself as non-threatening as possible while Tim unlocked the cage door. After a loud click, the door swung open about an inch.

  Tim pulled it the rest of the way open, leaving Dave free to walk out. “Come on. I'll introduce you to the rest of the gang.” He grabbed the torch from the sconce on the wall and walked out of the room.

  “What gang?” asked Dave as he followed Tim into the sewer tunnel outside. When he tried to look back through the doorway to his cell, he didn't even see the doorway. Just crumbling brick sewer wall. “Where are we? Where the hell have you been this whole time?”

  Tim walked hurriedly ahead of him. “That's a lot of questions to dump on a guy at once. How about you slow down and fire them one at a time?”

  “Fine. Where are we?”

  “Roll a Perception check, Dave,” said Tim. “We're in the fucking sewer.”

  “I can see that. I meant where in the sewer?”

  “I don't know. Do you need an address? Maybe, like, half a mile from the Whore's Head Inn.”

  “Whoa, hold on.” Dave stopped walking. Was that what Tim had meant about making things right? Was that the gang he was referring to? “Is that where we're headed right now?”

  Tim didn't slow down. “Fuck no. Those guys can suck a dick.”

  Dave picked up his pace to catch back up with him. It was strange being able to jog while he appeared to be wearing armor. “Then where are we going?”

  “I told you. I'm going to introduce you to the gang.”

  “What gang?”

  “The Rat Bastards.”

  “Hold up,” said Dave. “You mean, like, a real gang? With leather jackets and motorcycles and shit?”

  “Sadly, we don't have motorcycles. Not yet, anyway. Think of it more like a Thieves' Guild, except that all the members are wererats.”

  Dave followed Tim around a corner, then stopped just short of nakedly tackling him. “What happened? Why'd we stop?”

  “Listen.” Tim nodded ahead.

  Just beyond the torchlight, half a dozen dire rats hissed at them from further down the tunnel.

  “Are those the new friends you wanted to introduce me to?” asked Dave, hoping that Tim didn't interpret it as some lame attempt at sarcasm.

  “I don't think so. But it's probably a good idea to make sure.” Tim held out the torch to Dave. “Hold this for a second.”

  When Dave accepted the torch, Tim cupped his hands around his mouth and made a series of high-pitched bird calls.

  The rats hissed more angrily as they crept forward into the torchlight.

  “Nah,” said Tim. “Just regular ol' dire rats.”

  “Like the kind that gnawed your feet off?” said Dave. “I thought you were terrified of those.”

  Tim gave Dave a wicked grin. “That was before I went gangsta.” He turned to face the rats and threw back his cloak, revealing two shiny black handguns in holsters on either side of his chest. Crossing his arms, he drew them simultaneously and pointed them sideways at the approaching rats.

  “What the fuck?” said Dave as Tim mimed the motions of shooting the rats. When the rats started screaming as blood spurted from holes in various parts of their bodies, he suspected Tim might actually be doing more than miming. “What the fuck?” was all he could think of to follow up his original question.

  “How do you like that?” Tim shouted over the rat screams as he continued his curiously silent assault. “You shit-eating, disease-ridden, flea-infested pieces of shit! Fuck you, and you, and you!” Even when every last rat lay dead beyond question, he continued shooting, only stopping once the clips were empty.

  Dave frowned as Tim loaded fresh clips into his weapons. “I guess you're still not over the whole foot-gnawing thing.”

  Fortunately, Tim holstered the guns instead of pumping more rounds into the dead rats. “Did you ever hate something so much that you're glad it exists just so you can hate it? That's how I feel about dire rats. In fact, I'm thinking about taking a level in Ranger so that I can choose them as a favored enemy and hate them even more.”

  “Hey,” said Dave as cheerfully as he could muster, trying to set a less sociopathic tone as th
ey walked past the bullet-ridden rat corpses. “I couldn't help but notice you've got yourself some new weapons there.”

  Tim grinned. “Did you see how I was holding them sideways?”

  “I did see that.”

  “Generally speaking, that's a terrible way to fire a gun. But you can get away with it if you've got a high enough Dexterity score.”

  Whether it was because the events of the past couple of weeks made him even more self-absorbed, or because he just wanted to fuck with Dave, Tim was making it clear that he wasn't going to take any hints. So Dave asked him flat out.

  “Where the hell did you get those guns?”

  “Walmart.”

  Dave's heart skipped a beat. “Holy shit. Did Goosewaddle open a Walmart here?”

  Tim laughed. “No, no, no. That would be a disaster. I stole them from the Walmart in Gulfport.”

  “You stole them?”

  “What the fuck else was I supposed to do? I mean yeah the gun laws are pretty lax, but even in Mississippi you can't just waltz into a Walmart looking like a goddamn girl scout, lay down a couple of gold coins in a foreign currency, and expect to walk out with a shopping cart full of semi-automatic weapons. Use your head, Dave.” With that, Tim took a sharp right turn and disappeared into a nondescript part of the wall.

  “Tim?” Dave called out. He didn't expect Tim to reply, and he wasn't disappointed. He poked at the wall where Tim had walked through, and sure enough his hand disappeared into it. It was just like the illusory door leading into the chamber where he'd been kept in a cell, except he could feel this one. It offered no more resistance than the surface of water, but it wasn't wet on the other side. Waving both arms to make sure the secret door was tall and wide enough for him to walk through, he closed his eyes and stepped forward.

  On the other side of the barrier, the air was cooler and didn't smell so much like shit. Opening his eyes, he saw that the brick walls were cleaner and less crumbly. The floor was covered in a thick hemp rug, the weave of which felt so rough against Dave's feet that he was reminded that he wasn't actually wearing boots.

  It was a small passage, furnished only with a single wooden chair. Maybe it was meant to serve as a guard post or something. At the other end of the passage was a heavy wooden door, which Tim must have gone through because he sure as shit wasn't in here.

  The rough carpet had an exfoliating sensation on the soles of Dave's feet as he walked to the door. When he reached for the handle, his hand went right through it. The entire door was made of that same film of pseudo-existence. Starting to get a little annoyed at Tim's fuckery, he shut his eyes and walked through the door.

  The air here was a few degrees cooler still, bordering on pleasant. Dave breathed in deeply, unable to detect even the slightest trace of shit. He opened his eyes in the hopes that they might be as pleasantly surprised as his skin and nose. Instead they were met with confused and hostile glares from more than a dozen strangers. A few he recognized as the captors who had tended to him during his incarceration before Tim showed up. None of them, unfortunately, were Tim. Even more unfortunately, each of them was armed to the teeth with all manner of firearms, and they were all pointed at him.

  “Tim?” Dave barely managed to squeak out.

  After a few seconds of anticipating his flesh exploding in sprays of bullets and blasts of buckshot, he noticed the glares melt into scowls, and they weren't meeting his eyes. They were focused lower.

  Dave looked down to find his dick retreated so far back into his coarse red pube-nest that it was barely visible. Suddenly more freaked out by his non-augmented nakedness, he clapped both hands over his junk.

  “How did you find this place?” asked the petite human woman Dave had started to fancy. She had an assault rifle that might weigh more than she did pointed at his hands and, more importantly, what they were covering. “What have you done with Tim?”

  “My... I was... We...” In addition to losing the ability to form a coherent sentence, Dave found that he'd also lost the ability to control his bladder. His hands were suddenly warm and wet as the sound of urine trickling on the floor below him echoed in the otherwise silent chamber.

  “Mercy of the gods,” said a half-elf, shaking his head and lowering his Glock.

  “And there it is!” said Tim's voice. He appeared suddenly off to the side of the others, well out of any of their lines of fire, pulling a silver ring off his finger. “I'm surprised you held out so long. For a second there, I thought they really might shoot you.”

  Another glint of silver drew Dave's attention to Tim's other hand. The magical hair clip. It was possible that it had fallen out, and Tim had picked it up, but Dave strongly suspected Tim had intentionally removed it. He had probably been standing on that chair and pulled a Sleight of Hand right before Dave walked through that illusory door. What a little shit. Still, he had to ask.

  “Can I have the hair clip back, please?”

  Tim grimaced. “Fuck no. You've got piss all over your hands.” He turned to the rest of his militia, or whoever the fuck these people were. “Can someone grab my friend Dave here some clothes?”

  The half-elf smiled at the piss puddle Dave was standing in. “And maybe a diaper as well?”

  Chapter 2

  While Katherine recognized that she and Tanner weren't exactly the Guests of Honor at the Whore's Head Inn, she wondered if anyone would object to her helping herself to a beer. She was going to have to break the ice with Frank at some point. This was as good an opportunity as any.

  “Would it be alright if I –”

  “You two have got some nerve showing your faces in here after what you did,” said Frank, fuming over his beer as he scowled at them. He and his two closest confidants had been muttering sullenly at a corner of the bar ever since Mordred had been taken down to the cellar.

  Tanner, who was wearing only a pair of Katherine's jeans that he'd found in the Bag of Holding, cleared his throat. “In my defense, I was carried here against my will. In a bag.”

  “Give me one good reason why I shouldn't tie you both up and leave you to die while the Whore's Head Inn burns to the ground with you inside it.”

  That was a question Katherine hadn't been prepared for. “It seems kind of over-dramatic, for one. I mean, you could just stab us or something. Why waste a perfectly good bar?”

  Frank rubbed his temples, as if that were the very question he'd been trying to find an answer around. “Because we have to abandon it, and it's a perfect place for Mordred to move in and set up a trap for any of ours who happen to come wandering back.”

  “It's not enough that we'll probably never get back home now,” said Rhonda. “Now we'll have to spend the rest of our lives here wandering around without any home at all. You and your brother really screwed us over when you stole those dice. I hope you're satisfied now.”

  “Tim and I didn't steal shit.” Katherine really hated to throw Tanner under the bus while he was no doubt still coming to grips with being alive again, but she had to take this opportunity to clear her and her brother's names.

  Tanner stood tall, his silvery-white hair hanging down to his bare black chest. In her jeans, he looked like a photo negative of one of those guys who used to hang around the reservoir behind the Chicken Hut smoking cigarettes while Skynyrd blared from their pickup trucks.

  “Katherine speaks the truth. My actions were mine alone. I acted entirely of my own accord.”

  “Bullshit,” said Frank. “I know that drunk little shit put you up to this.”

  Rhonda gasped. “Frank! For Christ's sake, she just lost her brother.”

  Katherine glanced at Stacy and Julian who, sure enough, were staring right back at her. She looked back at Frank, who was moping sourly at his beer again. Was now a good time to go for that beer? Probably best to hit them with the big news first.

  “That may not actually be true.”

  Cooper perked up and pulled his finger out of his ear. “What are you talking about?”

/>   “Honestly, I have no idea.” Katherine turned to Tanner. “Do you think you could fill in some of the blanks? What happened after I left you and Tim with that little nun woman. What did she call herself? A medicine woman or something?”

  “A Sister of Healing,” said Tanner. “In actuality, she was a Rat Bastard.”

  Katherine frowned in confusion. That seemed like a colloquialism ill-fitted to the setting of this fantasy world, as well as to the tone he spoke it in. “Did she cheat you out of money or something?”

  “The Rat Bastards are a gang,” Stacy explained. “Julian and I tried unsuccessfully to infiltrate them when we were hunting for Tim.”

  “Looking for Tim,” Julian corrected her. “We actually left one of their members tied up with Butterbean when we found him fiercely guarding what looked like a bag of snot.” His eyes widened, as if he had suddenly remembered something. “Did you ever find that guy and cut him loose?”

  “I found him,” said Katherine. “But I thought he was Mordred, so I turned him over to these guys.” She nodded at Frank and his buddies.

  Stacy cringed. “Oh dear. Did you...”

  “He escaped before we could interrogate him,” said Frank.

  “Phew,” said Stacy, wiping imaginary sweat from her brow. “Dodged a bullet with that one. So what was the snot bag all about anyway?”

  “It wasn't snot. The bag was full of fenberries. They have some specific medicinal qualities when properly refined. But in their natural state, they're highly toxic.” Katherine caught Frank glaring at her. “Sorry, Frank. You didn't leave me any choice.” Then she turned to Tanner. “The berries were meant to treat Tim's dire rat wounds.”

  “The berries were a diversion,” said Tanner. “The Rat Bastards are nothing if not a cowardly group. Lissa, the so-called Sister of Healing who sent you to find the berries, would have much preferred to send us both, but you were unwilling to leave your brother alone.”

  Katherine clenched her fists. “I knew she was up to no good. What kind of medical professional wanders around in shitty neighborhoods looking for injured people to crawl out of sewers?”