Chapter 74: 68. First Official Meeting

Jay figured Hailey deserved credit for handling the fallout of Emily’s ill-advised declaration of being evil. Hailey talked her way through a storm of loud Champion personalities and fielded the idea of discussing Emily’s issues on Thursday.

Her opponents–Frank, Mike, and Dennis–demanded a greater explanation from Emily tonight rather than later. Obviously, Team Divine prepared to go to war for Emily to keep the pressure off their disturbed sister. Jay felt responsible since he might’ve triggered Emily’s mental descent because of his words at lunch earlier.

The great decider turned out to be Brit.

“Thursday,” the Holy [Medium] said. “We’re finna discuss it openly. Until then, Emily will see me and talk about this [Medium] to [Medium]. In a safe and private space.”

“Are you sure?” Emily asked shakily. “I’m your evil counterpart.”

“Evil, sugar, ain’t a label you can slap on whenever you feel bad,” Brit said, holy light pulsating from her body. “We’ll talk about it more later.”

“I still have my concerns,” Mike said.

“Yeah,” Dennis agreed.

“I need a better scope of how widespread and dangerous Death Affinity can be,” Frank said. “Because we’re going to school like we aren’t living weapons that’ll kill countless kids if any of us go mental.”

“And isolating ourselves would make it better?” Brit asked, incredulous.

Frank held his tongue as the Holy [Medium] exuded more light. It was uncomfortable to be around the Holy Affinity when Brit made it hostile toward you. It was like getting frowned upon by quasi-divine powers.

“I wish to be involved with your talks with Emily,” Lilith said to Brit. “Would you have me?”

Before Brit could answer, Jay interjected.

“Lilith should be there. She has a divergent way of thinking. It might reveal holes you can fill or angles you haven’t considered,” Jay supported before turning to members of Team FAAHI with contained anger. “And don’t start throwing Affinities under the bus, Frank. The first feeling you get when someone annoys you is to light their pants on fire.”

Frank kept his mouth shut as his throat glowed orange.

Jay glared over at the rest of his team. “And didn’t we play with fire when we accepted Kleo as one of us?”

Mike and Dennis shrank in their seats.

The rest of the Champions regarded Jay with awe. The [Freak] gave a weighted look around the room.

“Nobody should ever alienate a Champion without fully understanding the situation,” Jay warned, filling the room with heavy gravity, his Affinity leaking out. “That line of thought will be challenged and changed.”

A moment of silence.

The Junker Twins were the first to break it with Rick leaning over to his brother. “We should’ve brought popcorn.”

Tim nodded vigorously.

“Well, I’ll be damned, Jay,” Brit said, sounding breathless. Her holy light dimmed. “I’m shook.”

Jay shrugged before looking at Casey. “Your crawl experience, please?”

Casey nodded stiffly and glanced at Hailey. Since Emily wasn’t in the right mental state to narrate, Hailey took over and did an adequate job. As the school’s Event Planner, Hailey was a natural public speaker.

She was description-heavy, which vividly constructed an alien magitek dumpster world in Jay’s imagination. The challenges Team Divine had to overcome to get from zone to zone highlighted Macy’s contributions in dealing with mechanical obstacles in spur-of-the-moment bursts. Then the whopper of an ending–one pair of the Divine fighting the optional boss while the other brought down a giant hanging platform to kill the main boss and a bunch of monsters astounded all of the Champions. It also brought to light Team Divine’s strangeness as a dungeon-crawling team.

“You girls are weirdos,” Jay said. “Like, seriously. You put on a good front. But you’re as weird, if not weirder, than the rest of us.”

Case in point, Macy.

They did not contradict Jay.

Team Booty Bandits went next, having Brit describe more of their tale that Jay hadn’t heard before. Rick would interject for flavor. Lilith would join in for clarifications. Tim sat back and let the others talk, remaining as silent as a watchdog.

It was a hodgepodge effort to tell their story, but it was an effort that covered all the bases well enough. Jay and some other Champions leaned forward in their seats as Team Booty Bandits described the Ratling Bog Dungeon as a dark, swampy, and foggy place with patches of high monster activity, dead forests filled with poisonous plants, and threatening townsfolk called Ratners–rat people of the dungeon.

The Ratner towns and villages were stuck in constant Conflicted Zones where purchasing items could be difficult. Rampant acts of murder, betrayal, and corruption from the bitter rivalries between Ratner Zealots, Ratner Bandits, and Ratner Nobles made the populace hostile toward everyone. It was unlike the rubbish people of the rubbish dungeon being hostile toward only the crawlers.

Then the Booty Bandits’ story became even more thrilling when they talked about some of their harrowing escapes from a roaming dungeon boss. The Ratling Boss Monster hadn’t been restricted to a boss room. There were no dungeon rooms at all. The entire dungeon was one big boggy environment on a leveled plain. So the boss was free to hunt the crawlers from the start regardless of their levels. The boss sought food constantly, eating Ratners or its own ratlings if it couldn’t find crawlers. It would heal ridiculously fast from cannibalizing its own dungeon monsters. Cannibalism was a common practice in that dungeon. Meat was meat to them. Ratners and ratlings would eat their own children or themselves if they had to.

“It was when I reached my breaking point,” Brit said solemnly, “that I turned to the most vilest Champion here.”

Lilith’s face brightened like a happy girl attending Sunday school.

“I made a deal with the devil,” Brit said.

Lilith licked the front of her teeth, throwing aside the mask of a happy innocent girl to flash everyone a wet and sadistic grin. Most of the Champions shuddered in response, Jay included.

“I sometimes regret it,” Brit continued. “But I’m becoming more and more okay with it. I don’t think we would’ve survived if I didn’t say yes to Lilith’s offer. But the price….”

“I wanted everyone made by the dungeon to be exterminated,” Lilith said. “Ratlings, Ratners, bandits, guards, zealots, merchants, beggars, children, mothers, elders, everyone.”

A natural pause allowed Lilith’s words to soak in.

“My goodness,” Dennis said in quiet awe and disgust.

“I offered Brit salvation,” the Alchemy [Crafter] said, “if she’d allow me to play into one of my fantasies. A bringer of absolute death.”

“It started with one corpse,” Tim said.

“And it spread from there!” Rick cheered.

“Not so fast,” Lilith interjected since Brit fell into a morose silence. “Let’s walk them through the process.”

Lilith was more interested in storytelling now, and Jay could see how excited Lilith felt. The way her eyes glimmered, her mouth twitched up, or her tongue swiped over an incisor displayed the inner glee she was feeling even if Jay couldn't tell through emotional gravity. He was happy for her and also very horrified with her.

Lilith explained the process with a quick and efficient narration. Team Booty Bandits had stopped running and fighting. They’d started researching. It had begun with interviewing the Ratners for natural means to hurt a ratling. Then the Booty Bandits continued with interviews about what Ratners found poisonous. Even if their interviewee was being difficult with the Booty Bandits, they found a way around that by using Rick and Tim’s darker experiences from growing up in Junkside as gangster royalty.

Lilith took the assembled information, picked out the necessary ingredients from the poisoned forests, and went to work. Once she’d crafted her first raticide, she tested, remade it, tested, and improved upon her initial breakthrough while pushing her alchemy to the limit. She created a great raticide poison–a Rank 3 item while she was a Rank 1. And she created the antidotes for her team.

Then Team Booty Bandits piled up fresh ratling corpses dusted with the great raticide on the edges of the most conflicted towns. The poorest Ratners feasted first. Then the ratlings came and scared off the Ratners, or caught some of them, and feasted from the piles. And in a matter of hours, an entire town and the surrounding area filled with rat creatures became sick. Most died quickly. Those that remained, Tim, Rick, and Brit would execute.

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From there, they methodically slaughtered their way from area to area, leaving poisoned corpses behind them. The raticide came in the form of a powder, required a mere touch to be absorbed, and had little effect on the crawlers thanks to the antidote. And in the wake of their genocidal run, they found the boss terribly sick and weakened.

Killing it was a mercy. The System Admins congratulated them just the same. But Rick swore they were calling Team Booty Bandits worse than the Ratling Bog monsters in between the lines.

“And I thought I was traumatized,” Jay said, shaking his head. “Brit, are you okay?”

The [Medium] shrugged. “Regardless of how I feel, I remain holy in the Multiverse.”

Emily stared at her holy counterpart as if Brit had turned into an angel of death. Those two were going to be fast friends without a doubt.

Hailey gently urged Team FAAHI to go next.

Jay nodded. He glanced at his own team. None of them wanted to go up at first. They were still reeling from hearing the genocidal destruction of a dungeon. Lilith’s focused attention on Team FAAHI seemed to frighten Dennis the most as if she was the most monstrous person in existence. Emily paid close attention to Lilith, too, since they were both Champions of death in different forms.

But Jay supposed Lilith and Team Booty Bandits had their time to shine. The [Freak] figured he could tell the tale. A lot of it involved his freakish madness, after all.

Jay started to stand when Frank grabbed his shoulder and pushed him down.

The [Fighter] stood up. He retold a bullet-pointed list of events with a few expanded parts. It gave the gist of Team FAAHI’s crawl experience. It was fast. It was efficient. It was minimalistic.

Jay felt a little cheated because it didn’t go into depth about all the great experiences they had. But he let those feelings go since Frank had done a good job highlighting the main points. The Toyreveler Dungeon cheated a lot like a bastard. Frank withheld from pushing the quick-exit button. Mike and Dennis did good work. Jay’s incredible use of Chance helped a bunch. And Kleo was clutch.

In conclusion, every team did incredible things to win their dungeons–but Team FAAHI’s crawl seemed the most alluring. Despite Frank’s brutally bare tale, the heart of Team FAAHI’s crawl surrounded a dungeon monster killing a dungeon master for the crawlers. Then that dungeon monster became a [Faerie]. But that was just one big notable point.

“I’m going to find a way to get your arm back, Frank,” Brit declared. “I wasn’t sure about you at first, but you really put yourself on the line for the others. You’re okay in my book.”

Frank nodded in appreciation.

“What if… what if, what if?” Macy clacked her seemingly dirty nails together. “What if I make him a new arm? All that loot we got. We can use it for the best things.”

“We have some Skill Books that you might be interested in,” Mike said. “Crafter orientated, too. A Construct Designer Skill Book and a Small Transmutation Skill Book.”

“We got Skill books for [Fighters] if Rick and Tim don’t want them,” Brit informed.

“Skill Books for [Mages] if Mike’s interested in one,” Hailey admitted. “And lots of good loot, really.”

The conversation veered toward the loot. The Old Dwarven Rubbish Dungeon presented lots of magic metals, mana stones, power units, magitek gizmos, and all sorts of materials that could be refurbished or broken down for recycled uses. The Ratling Bog Dungeon presented lots of pelts, bones, teeth, poisonous herbs, strange wood, methane-like magic gas, preserved venomous critters, and lots of putrid blood samples and chunks of flesh filled with diseases. The Toyreveler Dungeon was the smallest pickings in loot, but the polymer chunks, bundles of twine, stuffing, the boss’s wicked barrel of toyblood, and the Adaptive Workbench of Crafting Tools among other things interested the [Crafters].

“What do you think the monster cores are for?” Mike asked Lilith and Macy.

“I’ve used them as catalysts,” Lilith said. “It drains the core of power and leads to core disintegration after repeated uses. But they help considerably.”

“I’ve used them for extra power,” Macy explained. “Like if a bridge won’t budge cause it lacks the juice. I wham wham with my hammer. Zap, sizzle, vroom with my other thingies. Then I push and click and tap, tap, tap and run far away. And I pray to YoAnna for that little extra pizzazz, you get me?”

Jay glanced slowly from Macy’s gleeful face to Lilith’s dumbfounded expression. The look on the Alchemy [Crafter's] face was priceless, but Jay kept the humor to himself or Lilith might snap.

“We will be,” Lilith said with a hauntingly sweet voice, “the best of friends, my fellow [Crafter].”

“Hailey, she’s scaring me,” Macy whined, her mood flipping.

“I’m sorry, Macy,” Hailey said. “I can’t protect you on this one.”

Macy broke into a fit of tears. Which was impressive since Macy would usually cry three to five times a day. And this was the first outburst so far.

“There will be a great amount of testing and cross Class experimentation to be done in the coming weeks,” Lilith declared. All the [Mages], [Mediums], and [Crafters] (even while crying) agreed.

“Hm, this doesn’t bode well,” Rick said. “We can’t let the fancy, schmancy, woo-woo Classes outdo us. What must we [Fighters] do to grow up and be better badasses?”

“Kill things,” Tim offered.

“Practice our Skills, maybe?” Dennis offered.

“Train hard,” Casey answered quietly. She’d been mostly in the background like some of the other [Fighters].

“That’s something I want to talk about, but it’s a Thursday subject,” Frank grunted.

“Please wait for the selected days,” Hailey cheered brightly. “It’s to keep us on target and remind us that we can’t rush everything. We just need to be consistent, okay?”

The Champions agreed with various levels of enthusiasm that were subpar.

Hailey remained cheerful, clapping her hands. “I think that concludes tonight's meeting except for all the juicy tidbits Jay has on our dear and lovely thirteenth crawler, Kleo!”

In the end, mostly everyone expressed their curiosity regarding Kleo. They wanted to meet her officially and learn about what she brought to the table for Jay. Hailey looked like she was going to drool over anything Jay had on Kleo's fairy nature.

She had a thing for fairies and fantasy, apparently.

Jay deflected since he needed his familiar here to talk beside him. He also missed her a lot. Speaking about her now would hurt more than he liked. He got Hailey to promise she’d teach Kleo to read if Jay allowed Hailey to play with his [Faerie].

The deal was struck.

By the time the first official meeting concluded, Jay was ready to run back to the motel, hug his mom, and cuddle Kleo. But on their way out, the Champions had to face a black-ops squad of CWG agents hurrying down the hallway and past late-night custodial staff.

Apparently, Hailey’s Silent Room spell and Brit’s Respite of Security incantation worked a little too well. Their powers completely removed the Champions' presence from the CWG’s surveillance equipment.

It took the CWG a while to deploy people. The CWG was more hesitant to move actively in the presence of moody, crazy, magical teenagers with a bone against authority. And it was a major public school. Students could still be active for whatever reason. Even if it was late at night.

Hailey proved her worth more and more. She talked down the excitable CWG agents and kept a fight from breaking out. Meanwhile, Brit calmed the most aggressive and blood-thirsty Champions with a touch of her Holy Affinity. She held the Junker Twins back before they set themselves loose to punish the obvious breach of boundaries by the CWG.

Jay watched in the background, amazed. Mike was there, playing his usual role as an observer.

“These are our Champions, saviors of the universe, huh?” Jay asked.

“We are walking calamities, one and all, bringers of woe to the Multiverse,” Mike concluded.

"Should be good fun,” Jay said. “The Multiverse is probably filled with assholes that deserve calamity and woe. We can share it around.”

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