Taylor and the Twisted Game Part 30

[How is Eidolon doing?] Wings asked Emulation as she flew away from the apartment where Warp lived, heading towards Elisberg to test her jury rigged monster trap.

[He's currently cutting through an army of undead for experience and loot], Emulation replied cheerfully, happy that she didn't have to cover the energy cost for his powers in the simulation because it would have been significant. [Were you able to steal energy from demons?]

[I wasn't willing to risk using it given the harmful effects it has on the local lifeforms, the quality of the simulation and trouble with my precog], Wings replied, fairly sure playing with fel magic would result in problems that she didn't want given the tests that Admin's host had run on the stuff. [Which class did Eidolon go with?]

[Spirit Mage, it's a combination of mage and shaman], Emulation replied as she watched her host rip through a group of plagued beasts with a gravity wave that turned them into paste.

[Species and crafting skills?] Wings asked as she picked up speed towards the abandoned city.

[Blood elf, enchanting and engineering], Emulation replied.

[Let me know if you need help with something or if he's trying to escape the simulation], Wings turned her attention to her upcoming task and started running predictions, filling in the unknowns with guesses and simulating the rest.

0o0o0

"I'm telling you, we have to do something about Dragon," Saint complained as he tried to make sense of the blueprints that Dragon was working on.

"Even if we used Ascalon, we'd have to deal with the other Dragon," Mags pointed out. "Not to mention the fact that she's working on creating plans for environmentally friendly power stations that can pick up the slack from the nuclear power plants going offline at the end of the year."

"It's just a front to look good, once she has control of the country's infrastructure, she'll be able to take control," Saint argued.

Mags forced herself to look at the bags under Geoffrey's eyes and his unhealthy pallor from lack of sleep and stress. "I know she's dangerous but we need the generators if we don't want everything to collapse."

"You're just going to hand her the keys to the world?" Saint snapped.

"Do we have a choice?" Mags asked, wishing he'd be a bit more reasonable. "Even if we stole the design and handed it to a bunch of companies, we only have bits and pieces of it because the other Dragon has the rest."

"Which is more reason to run Ascalon and be done with it before we jump into the simulation," Saint argued, then spun and reached for his gun when he saw a woman wearing a white business suit with a fedora out of the corner of his eye.

Contessa smiled at Saint and pointed her own gun at Mags when he realized that he'd 'misplaced' his gun. "If you try anything stupid, I'll put a bullet through her skull then I'll torture you for days while keeping you alive."

Saint glanced at Mags then focused on the woman with the fedora. "What do you want?"

Contessa turned and shot the Ascalon control interface sitting on his computer desk, hitting the exact spot she needed to in order to slag the components and render it useless without it being able to send a signal.

"What the fuck! Do you know what you've done?" Saint demanded.

"I saved you from dying," Contessa replied calmly.

"What do you mean?" Mags asked.

"The other Dragon would have noticed your attempt to kill her counterpart and called some people to deal with you. Depending on who she called, you would have been skinned alive, burned to death, flash frozen or just splattered against the wall with a small chance of them taking you to the authorities after working you over," Contessa explained.

Saint snorted. "This just proves that she's not a hero."

"No, it just proves that she knows some vindictive people that would view you as a murderer and a piece of shit that just tried to kill their friend's sister," Contessa replied as she glanced at Mags. "Normally, I'd just let you die but resources are being stretched trying to keep society stable and I find myself in need of someone that is used to dealing with AIs."

"You want us to help you deal with the Machine Army, don't you?" Mags asked warily.

"I want someone to come up with suggestions and ideas that we can feed to our thinkers so we can come up with something useful," Contessa explained.

"What makes you think we'll help you?" Saint asked.

"You have three options, you can agree to help and do something productive with your lives, you can jump into the simulation and cease to be my problem or I can shoot you and bring someone else in to take over your base." Contessa glanced at her watch, mostly because doing so decreased the number of steps she'd have to take. "You have two minutes and twenty seven seconds to make your choice before I decide that you're not worth dealing with."

"What happens if we come up with something that works against the Machine Army?" Mags asked before Geoffrey could say something stupid.

"Then you'll get to walk away, I'll even arrange some method of payment appropriate to the service," Contessa replied, knowing she'd made deals with worse people.

"We'll do it," Mags said before Geoffrey could screw things up and get them shot.

"What?" Saint sputtered.

"We can't monitor Dragon without the device and it's only a matter of time before someone finds us now that we can't check her systems. If we can deal with the Machine Army, we can probably get a pardon out of it," Mags pointed out, knowing that they were on borrowed time now that Ascalon wasn't going to cloak their location from Dragon's various programs.

Saint picked up the headset he had on his desk and put it on his head. "I'll take my chances with the simulation."

"Don't…" Mags trailed off when he flipped the power switch on the side of the helmet and vanished. "Now what?"

Contessa stepped forward and caught the headset then pulled a flash drive out of her jacket pocket and tossed it to Mags. "Read the file labeled Read Me before you read the information on the Machine Army. Door."

Mags shivered as the strange woman walked through a portal that opened to an alley, taking the headset with her. "Great."

Contessa checked her path to dealing with the Machine Army and smiled when she realized it was fifty seven steps shorter and the collateral damage had dropped to almost nothing, just a feral dog that needed to be stopped so that a girl wouldn't get bit and trigger with a suboptimal power rather than a useful tinker power that would improve the world. She shot the feral dog in the head then shot the Empire sympathizer for good measure when he protested because it wouldn't screw up her path and would make things easier on the cops since he wouldn't be around to cause trouble during one of the New Years events, thus increasing the chances of society stabilizing without completely crashing. "Door."

0o0o0

Vicky pulled her attention off the sexy elf dressed in a naughty green dress that barely covered her behind who was kissing her sister under the mistletoe and looked at Skitter. "Just because I have a boyfriend, doesn't mean I don't like eye candy, would it have killed you to make some of your puppets male?"

"Do you really want to have to explain to your boyfriend why you were drooling over some naughty male strippers?" Taylor asked with amusement as she looked through the stacks of presents under the fake tree she'd set up.

"What happens in the mansion stays in the mansion?" Vicky asked hopefully.

"Works for me," Amy replied as she moved her hand down to the elf's behind, having fun despite the fact that she'd rather be messing around with her demon.

Taylor handed Vicky a narrow box that was nearly five feet long and wrapped in festive red wrapping paper. "That one is from both of us."

"If you don't like it, I'm keeping it," Amy teased.

Vicky carefully ripped the paper on the end so she could open it then reached in and pulled out the sword and scabbard that was wrapped in bubble wrap. "Nice, how careful do I have to be about breaking it?" she asked as she started unwrapping it.

Taylor grinned at Vicky. "I'm not calling it indestructible but short of bashing the blade on concrete for a couple of hours or sticking it in lava or a blast furnace, you should be good."

Vicky raised an eyebrow. "What did you make it out of?"

"Concentrated bullshit," Amy said as she walked over and sat down on the couch.

"A combination of underlight ore for resistance to fel corruption, azure ore for exceptional durability, truesilver for dealing with fluffy monsters and arcanite for insane cutting power," Taylor explained with a grin.

Vicky gave Skitter a look. "Fluffy monsters?"

"On the off chance you run into a werewolf, you're covered," the elf girl explained as she walked over and sat down next to Amy.

Amy shook her head. "Don't believe her, she had extra truesilver."

"It's also exceptionally durable so I don't feel bad about using it as a base," Taylor said.

"And the underlight ore? Are you expecting to have to deal with fel corruption?" Vicky asked.

"I'm not discounting the possibility," Taylor said, thinking about the demons from the game and all of the stories she'd grown up with about fairytales, "but really, I just wanted to make a glow in the dark sword."

"Is it radioactive or toxic?" Vicky asked, wanting to make sure it was safe to use.

Amy shook her head. "I had Uber check, it's not radioactive or toxic to the point that you shouldn't touch it."

"Cool," Vicky replied as she carefully pulled the curved silvery blade out of its sheath so she could look at her new weapon. "That looks surprisingly functional."

"Yeah, it turned out better than I was expecting," Taylor admitted, rather impressed with how well the sword had turned out, considering her trouble sharpening the insanely durable sword before she'd resorted to using magic.

Vicky looked at Amy. "Were you able to boost the stats or damage?"

Amy shook her head. "Skitter lost the ability to turn things into symbiotes and back, probably when we got back."

"That would make a certain amount of sense considering manton limits," Vicky mused.

"Or the programmers didn't have the arcane formulas to make the transmogrification ability work between living and nonliving material so they just used a software patch. You can't polymorph mechanical creatures in the game, it would make sense if it was problematic," Taylor suggested.

"Where do you think they got the formulas?" Vicky asked as she stuck her sword back in its scabbard.

"Probably a different world, we know Earth Aleph exists, it can't be the only alternate world," Taylor pointed out, thinking about the schematic she'd picked up from the void creatures.

"Considering they managed to vanish without a trace, I wouldn't be surprised," Amy agreed.

Vicky frowned when she realized another potential problem. "Does this mean that your Red Riding Spell won't work on your puppets?"

"I might have to talk to Noelle about duplicating the girls that came back with us," Taylor admitted, unwilling to lose access to improved minions if she could avoid it.

"Probably not a horrible idea," Vicky agreed, still a little unnerved by Skitter's ability to have multiple magic using minions running around at the same time but glad that she was on their side.

"Did you have any more luck with your book?" Amy asked, curious if she'd figured out something that would help with her appliance conjuring.

"I'm still reading through everything but I managed to upgrade my mana ruby thanks to the information about mana storage devices and I can probably get some of the sex magic rituals to work," Taylor admitted, not seeing a point in bringing up the section on ripping holes into demon worlds that was most likely a trap or the section on duplicating things that she was still trying to make heads or tails of, especially the part that indicated that she might be able to duplicate people or animals with one of the spells.

"Sex magic?" Vicky asked with a grin as she stuck her sword and scabbard in her inventory.

"You basically draw runes on the people performing the ritual then you watch them have sex and they get to share magical talents and mana from dawn to dusk or dusk to dawn with a chance to unlock talents permanently depending on their magic compatability and the number of people in the ritual," Taylor explained.

"Sounds useful," Amy said thoughtfully, thinking about picking up some tricks from her demon.

"If you don't mind people watching, what else did you learn?" Vicky asked.

"A ritual for a lord and a lady to bless crops in a field for a year and a day by having sex in the field, they get better results with witnesses. A ritual to acquire a copy of a language from someone for a year and a day that requires oral sex, the more you use the language the more you keep. A massage/masturbation ritual for smooth skin and removing wrinkles which is weird but supposedly effective. There's also a healing sleep ritual that requires sex, it was generally used by whores to knock people out for twelve hours so they can rob them," Taylor explained.

"The language ritual sounds useful," Vicky mused.

"Anything else?" Amy asked, fairly sure the book was thick enough to hold a decent collection of rituals and spells.

Taylor turned to look at Amy. "There's also a ritual for enchanting a dance pole to lower inhibitions which is creepy enough that I doubt I'd use it."

"That depends on how much it lowers them," Vicky said thoughtfully.

"A couple of cups of wine," Taylor admitted.

"Eh, completely situational and something you could always ask people to sign a waiver before using. Can you use it with the power sharing ritual?" Vicky asked.

"I don't see why not or at least the book doesn't have any warnings about it," Taylor said thoughtfully. "Did you have any luck with your book?" she asked Amy.

Amy focused and conjured a television remote and tossed it to Skitter. "I'm still working on it."

"Is that French?" Taylor asked when she noticed the words on the remote weren't in English.

Vicky grabbed the remote and checked the language. "Probably or it's some mix of Italian and French because it looks weird."

Amy shrugged. "Like I said, it's still a work in progress."

Taylor jumped when her burner phone rang in her pocket. She pulled her phone out of her pocket and answered it. "Hello?"

"I need a couple of expendable puppets," Leet replied.

"Why do you need expendable puppets?" Taylor asked, trying to match the person's voice to her memories of the group.

"Dragon gave me a copy of the schematic for your portal device because she's busy trying to get a bunch of power generators built and building prototypes is my specialty. I figured you'd want to send a puppet for the first official test," Leet replied.

"Where are you?" Taylor asked, finally connecting the dots.

"We're in the ferry terminal, it has the space and seemed appropriate," Leet replied.

"What did you use as a replacement for a void heart?" Taylor asked as she took a puppet out of her inventory and activated it, causing it to spring to 'life'. 'At least they're easy to make, even if they take longer now that we're not working on game physics,' she thought as she pulled the 'cheap' wand out of her inventory that she'd enchanted and handed it to her puppet.

"I used a mana ruby. It should have enough energy to hold the portal open for a minute or two," he assured her.

'Right, at least they're reasonably cheap,' Taylor mused as she pulled a second puppet out of her inventory and activated it, wanting someone on hand to let Leet know what was happening on the other side of the portal in case he had to shut it down. "Best of luck." She opened a void portal close to the wall of the ferry terminal and walked the puppets through.

"Should we watch?" Vicky asked.

Amy shook her head. "It's Leet and an untested schematic Skitter got from a group of eldritch abominations. I'm sort of glad we're in another dimension."

"That doesn't sound very heroic," Vicky replied with a grin. "But yeah, we can always watch the second attempt."

"I can hear you," Leet complained.

"Sorry," Taylor replied with a grin then ended the call and closed the portal. "At least Uber is there in case someone needs to heal him."

Amy nodded. "They make a good team."

"Hopefully it doesn't rip a permanent hole into a demon realm or summon eldritch entities," Taylor mused, fairly sure it wouldn't do anything permanent.

"Shouldn't we have told the PRT?" Vicky asked.

Taylor shook her head. "That would drastically increase the amount of paperwork they'd have to fill out, assuming they didn't just try to arrest them. Besides, Armsmaster is busy making sure everything doesn't fall apart, Kid Win is likely spending time with family, same with the rest of them."

"Good point," Vicky admitted.

0o0o0

Dennis glanced up from the console as Missy stalked into the Wards room with a stack of paperwork, looking like someone had just shot her phone. "What's up?"

"My parents lost their damn minds," Missy complained as she walked over and sat down.

Carlos turned to look at Missy. "What happened?"

"My mother and uncle decided to jump into the game to elope, my father lost his mind when he found the note she'd left me and followed them into the game to kill them or scream at them," Missy explained, wishing she could blame her father's stupidity on the fifth of vodka he'd drank for his Christmas breakfast, unfortunately he had a habit of making poor choices when it came to her mother even while sober.

"Sorry?" Dennis offered, not knowing what else to say. He'd known her parents were nuts but that was a whole new level of crazy.

"That's a hell of a Christmas present," Carlos muttered.

"Shouldn't you be at home?" Missy asked Dennis.

"Technically, I'm covering for Sophia," Dennis replied. "Her mother's boyfriend fell down some stairs and watermelon-ed his skull."

"Was she…" Missy trailed off, fairly sure she wasn't supposed to accuse her teammate of murdering someone.

Carlos shook his head. "She was at the console when it happened. The railing broke and he fell three flights, nearly hitting her neighbor's cat."

"Ouch," Missy replied, feeling sorry for the cat.

"Yeah, she seemed almost human about it or at least upset that her mother was upset. What happened to her in the simulation?" Carlos asked Missy, curious if there was something Dennis had missed.

Missy shrugged. "Nothing special, we got attacked a couple of times by players, we shot a bunch of monsters and simulated bandits and we generally had an interesting vacation."

"Have you talked to the shrink yet?" Carlos asked, fairly sure his fellow wards needed someone to talk to.

"They have me scheduled for tomorrow," Missy admitted. "Some crap about wanting to make sure I'm sane."

Dennis nodded. "It's standard procedure every time someone's powers change to a significant degree."

"Piggot was there, she knows I'm not insane," Missy grumbled.

Dennis glanced back at the console. "Which is probably why they're waiting until the day after Christmas versus hauling all of us in there today."

Missy scowled. "Don't they have enough issues with everyone bailing?"

"Can you really blame them for wanting to be sure you're sane?" Dennis asked. "You went from an insanely powerful shaker without a brute rating to a shaker that can shrug off most pistols with barely a scratch, chase down a car on city streets and lift a thousand pounds without significant trouble. If they weren't at least somewhat concerned with your mental health, I'd be worried."

"What about you?" Carlos asked Dennis.

"Tomorrow evening," Dennis replied, not particularly concerned with passing his psych evaluation. "They're more worried about Sophia and Chris since they showed the most personality changes from the experience," he finished the rest of the sentence in his head, 'and I wasn't stupid enough to tell them about the full extent of my abilities.'

"What's wrong with Chris?" Missy asked.

"Beyond the fact that he was doing college level math and the fact that he figured out his tinker specialty? Nothing," Dennis replied with a grin.

"Have you figured out where you're staying?" Carlos asked Missy.

"My room," Missy gestured towards her room. "I have forty eight hours before my parents can be officially declared missing and the police aren't particularly interested in doing shit about anything short of homicides right now."

"Do you wish you'd stayed in the game?" Dennis asked.

Missy shook her head. "Nah, I'd have gotten bored eventually."

"What about you?" Carlos asked Dennis.

"If I wasn't worried about my father's health and getting randomly deleted, I'd have probably stuck around for a couple of weeks," Dennis mused.

"That's it?" Carlos asked.

"I happen to like having the internet and hanging out with friends," Dennis replied. "If we'd stayed longer, someone would have noticed and started asking questions. Besides, we managed to grab enough magic to change the world and we escaped, that's a win."

"What makes you think it's magic?" Carlos asked.

"Our new powers are too consistent and they break the rules," Dennis replied with a shrug.

"I'll take your word for it," Carlos replied as he looked at the time. "That's the end of my shift, are you good?"

Dennis waved him off. "I'm fine, go enjoy your time with your family."

"That's the plan," Carlos replied as he headed for the exit, strangely okay with the fact that they'd had a slow morning.