Backrooms 2: Kiosk Kingdom - Chapter 47

Forty-Seven – Community Garage Sale

We stepped out of the elevator and into the cramped cement stairwell of the Sunnyside Tiny Tots Preschool facility. Harsh lighting buzzed overhead and after spending a couple of hours away, the tight confines of the walls felt claustrophobic, while the oppressive atmosphere of the floor itself seemed to press down on me like a giant hand. It hadn’t been twenty-four hours yet, so I couldn’t remove the door plate—not that I wanted to.

Not if there was even a slim possibility of Mr. Wiggles being on the other.

The stairwell terminated at another steel door, simply labeled “Exit,” which wasn’t so different from the one we’d entered through—though, notably, this one had a rectangular Plexiglas window that gave us a glimpse at what lay beyond the stairwell. The subbasement was dark and dimly lit, but it looked to be some sort of overflow storage area and when I consulted my mini-map I didn’t see any red blips or signs of obvious danger. Not like with the preschool above.

“Here goes nothing.” I pressed the metal release bar, and the door popped open with a loud groan that echoed ominously through the cramped confines of the stairwell. Even though I knew that physical strength was my weakest ability by a long shot, I still pulled my hammer free and clutched it tight. Don’t get me wrong, magic was fucking awesome, but there was just something deeply comforting about having a weapon in one hand—ready to brain anything that jumped out at me.

Unlike the preschool with its squishy floors and oddly organic walls and fixtures, the rectangular room was exactly what it appeared to be on the surface. Just a run-down storage basement. Drab gray concrete, questionable lightning, and huge metal shelving units covered with janitorial supplies along with a heap of other miscellaneous bullshit.

A heavy coating of dust lined those shelves and cobwebs clung to the corners, though, whatever spiders lived down here appeared to be of the mundane variety and not of the giant, toddler-faced sort. There wasn’t any sign of life and my Spelunker’s Sixth Sense remained quiet, which was a blessed relief after facing down the terrors of the preschool above. It looked as though Ed had been right after all. It really was the vestigial remains of some long-forgotten time before the HOA had ruled this level with an iron fist.

I pulled out my Maglite and splashed the cone of yellow light over the assorted items decorating the nearest set of shelves. Although there were several plastic bins filled to overflowing with basic maintenance equipment or various janitorial cleaning supplies, most of the stuff appeared to be left over garage sale items. There were even a few weathered and creased yard signs, leaning up against one wall advertising a “Community Neighbor Yard Sale.”

“Mein Gott,” Jakon exclaimed, while picking up a Porcelain Hummel doll from a nearby shelf. Well, maybe not an actual Hummel, since the figurine in the Cendral’s hand appeared to be a little boy impaled by a white picket fence with bloody tears running down his face. “This is a Relic. Cursed Keepsake,” he said. “It is not so different from the Doodle Buddy Relics we found down on the seventh floor, though significantly more powerful.” He tossed it to me with a flick of his wrist and I snagged it effortlessly with a strand of telekinetic power.

I whistled through my teeth. Holy shit, he was right.

The creepy figurine allowed the user to summon a three-foot tall, level 15, Victorian-era murder doll. Like Chucky but made of porcelain and brimming with infectious tuberculous. Literally. Spreading tuberculous was its main attack. The summoned minion had a twenty-minute shelf life and then would crumble into a fine powder.

I carefully handed the Relic back to Jakob, then turned to regard the remaining items. Most of the shit was just useless, progenerated bullshit, but there were several more Relics and a couple of decent Artifacts mixed in with the rest of the refuse.

An Uncommon Artifact in the form of a clunky, retro soda fountain dispenser conjured a never-ending supply of ol’ timey sodas like sarsaparilla, root beer, cream soda, and cherry phosphate. Whatever in the hell cherry phosphate was. The drinks all offered very mild buffs—+1% movement speed for 10 minutes or a -1 second cooldown on Relic abilities for 5 minutes—and though I didn’t really need a soda dispenser, I figured it would make a nice addition to the concession stand.

Into my Storage Space it went.

An Uncommon Relic, called Static TV Projection, let the user project a very simple illusion. The catch was the illusion would be in black and white and subtly distorted with static. Nowhere near as powerful as some of the other illusion-based Relics we’d come across, but it could still serve as a decent distraction under the right circumstances.

There was almost a dozen more Relics and Artifacts like that.

Greaser’s Grit, minorly boosted Toughness and Athleticism. An aura called Pin-Up Power, temporarily increased the self-esteem of any female ally in the area of effect. Rockabilly Rollout, was a stamina-based charge skill, not so different from Jakob’s Cow Catcher ability. Most had limited functionality—at least for Delvers at our power level—but there were two particularly interesting items that called out to me like sirens, luring sailors to a watery grave.

The first was Atomic Age Timeburst, a Rare-grade Relic that resembled a 1950s starburst wall clock—garish and gold and extremely retro. With it, the user could create a time pocket, capable of either slowing down time or speeding it up for all of a single second. In the grand scheme of things, one second wasn’t enough time to do… Well, damn near anything. Plus, the time pocket was tiny—only twelve inches by twelve inches. In its current form, the Relic wasn’t particularly useful, but it was the first legitimate time-based Relic I’d ever come across.

That alone made it an invaluable discovery and I was sure that given enough time and patience, I could forge it into something much, much better. I was also sure that I could find a way to use it with Runic Resonance Trap to start manufacturing time-based traps or Spell Cards.

The second item of note was a bowling ball, covered in swirls of blues and greens and purples, with the human skull embedded in the center of the prismatic resin.

Bowling Ball of Rolling Momentum

Rare Artifact

Type: Kinetic Amplifier

Once this humble bowling ball starts rolling, it’s like a snowball from hell—absorbing kinetic energy and growing deadlier with every second it’s in motion. What starts as a tiny nudge quickly escalates into a rampaging wrecking ball of doom, capable of turning even the sturdiest foe into a smear on the pavement. Forget finesse, this baby’s all about momentum. Just give it a shove and let physics do the dirty work.

The Bowling Ball of Rolling Momentum deals 20 points of base bludgeoning damage. For every additional second the ball stays in motion, however, its damage increases by 10%, until it reaches its max kinetic velocity (1,000% of initial base damage), for a total of 220 points of bludgeoning damage. Be sure to aim wisely, because this thing is like a freight train and once it’s in motion, there’s just no stopping it.

The bowling ball wasn’t an ideal weapon for most people.

It was cumbersome, unwieldy, and even though it built kinetic force over time, the ball would have to be rolling for over 25 seconds to hit its max velocity. Which made it a neat trinket with little actual combat utility. For most people, anyway. But for me? For me it was an entirely different story. I could use a strand of telepathic power to start the bowl “rolling” and then just let it orbit around me, building more and more momentum with each pass.

Psychic Sovereignty effectively transformed the bowling ball into a single shot artillery canon and thanks to my Weapon of Opportunity Title, the damage increased by an additional 5 percent. True, an extra 5% wasn’t much, but every little bit counted and at max velocity, I was confident the bowling ball would punch a hole through a brick wall.

Even better than the cast-off, garage sale Relics and Artifacts, was what Temperance found in a nearby adjoining room.

“By providence,” she said, her voice bouncing off the concrete walls, “you all must come see this…”

A single hallway snaked away from the main storage room which would theoretically take us directly to the subbasement of the community radio station. But protruding off the from that hallway was a secondary storage room, which was even dustier and more run down than the first. The room was dark, but I found a light switch on the wall, and when I thumbed it on, overhead lights weakly buzzed to life. The room was filled with a variety of bulky shapes all covered in white drop clothes, like the kind you might use for painting.

Even covered as they were, however, I could tell a pinball machine when I saw one. But not just pinball machines. I saw several covered pool tables and the lever of what appeared to be an old timey slot machine peeking out from beneath another canvass tarp.

“What the hell is this?” I asked, shooting a glance at Temp.

“Unless my eyes deceive me,” she said, sounding extremely smug, “I believe this is the remnants of an old Loot Arcade.”

My mouth went dry at the mere thought.

I’d accumulated some powerful Loot Arcade Tokens and I’d been meaning to pay the Jungle Gym Jamboree a visit for weeks, but just hadn’t been able to make the time. I’d briefly stopped by an Arcade down on the third floor, but the place had been bristling with Arcade Specters and not one but two Mobile Murder Munchers—floating, nearly indestructible, Pac-Man-esque nightmares.

“I know we’ve got places to be, but we can’t pass up an opportunity like this,” I said, venturing deeper into the room. “Let’s get these things uncovered.”

Working together, it only took us a few minutes to get all remove the drop clothes and reveal the haul in all its glory. Temperance had been right on the money. Although this room wasn’t a Loot Arcade in the traditional sense of the word, it was obvious these machines had all come from a Loot Arcade at some point. Though how they’d ended up in a derelict subbasement beneath a preschool was anyone’s guess.

Ed reverently ran a shaky hand along the glass top of a vintage, alien-invasion themed pinball machine.

“I haven’t seen one of these in probably thirty years,” he said, the ghost of a smile on his gaunt face. “Back before the Bowl-a-rama’s moved in and the HOA took over, the Loot Arcades on this floor used to look like vintage, 1950s pool halls. The kind of places my dad would take me as a kid. He worked in a steel mill, my dad,” Ed said, glancing up at me.

“Heavy drinker,” he reminisced, “and not much of a talker. But every Friday he’d take me to this smoky pool joint just outside of Gary, Indiana. Terrible place, especially for an eight-year-old. But I didn’t realize any of that at the time. I’d spend hours playing pinball while he drank beer and traded war stories with his VFW buddies.”

I half listened to the story while I perused the rest of the abandoned equipment. On top of pinball machines, there was also an entire row of antique slot machines. Though these weren’t the newfangled slots with LED screens and blinking lights; these were hulking contraptions of wood and metal with a long lever sticking out like a chrome arm. There was a vintage horse racing machine that allowed users to gamble Loot Tokens on miniature mechanical horses.

There were also other, older arcade games that I was only marginally familiar with like a bulky Strength Tester, the Love-O-Matic, and even an off-brand fortune telling contraption called Mystic Morty.

Instead of the Temporary Tattoo or the Gashapon machines I was accustomed to seeing, they had coin-operated Winston cigarette dispensers and several vintage gumball machines with metallic coin plates that corresponded to the different Loot Token types. Copper and Silver, Gold and even rarer colors like Ruby or Diamond. Inside of each of the glass-topped bubbles were plastic toy capsules filled with potentially powerful items.

A nearby Token-operated Jute Box allowed you to select from a variety of songs that would grant temporary buffs to up to five listeners.

“Great Balls of Fire” by the eminently talented Jerry Lee Lewis increased all Fire-based damage dealt by 8% for eight hours while “Why Do Fools Fall in Love” randomly buffed one Stat by 3% for five hours. One of my favorites, though, was “Yakety Yak” by the Coasters, which increased the effectiveness of all mind-control and fear-based spells for two hours. The strength of the buff and its overall duration could also be increased by spending more powerful Loot Tokens in the jute box.

Best of all, the machines all worked—even though they weren’t connected to any obvious power source—and because there were no Dwellers anywhere close to us, I could annex the entire room and tack it on to the store without any obvious repercussions. Having our own Loot Arcade, even if it was a small outdated one, would be an enormous value add for the store. Before I did that, however, I intended to pick up a few items for myself in preparation for our inevitable showdown with the HOA.

Especially because I had a metric ass load of tokens burning a hole in my pocket.

Coppers were the most common, but those were only redeemable for the most basic bitch items—stuff I already had plentiful access to through the store like food, water, or non-magical survival gear. The silvers were a little better and would typically earn a Common-grade Artifact with an empty Effect Slot or decent one-offs. I cashed in a tube sock full of Silver Delver Tokens, earning a bunch of random items. A pack of enchanted matches that would light under any circumstances. A canteen that purified water. A goldfish in a bag—eating it granted the ability to breathe underwater for an hour.

A Silver Acrobatics token bought me one of those green plastic parachute figurines. The kind I’d tossed off the roof of my house as a kid. Their little parachutes would unfurl as they fell and then they’d meander and drift to grassy expanse of the front lawn. Unless an errant breeze picked up, and then the parachute man was just as likely to end up hopelessly mired in the neighbor’s rose bushes.

The parachute man was a one-time-use Artifact. When activated, it allowed the user to float gently and safely to the ground instead of splattering like an over ripe tomato.

I had three gold tokens—Septic, Outlaw, and Trap Smith—though my two big prizes were the Sapphire Binder Token I’d earned from killing Funtime Frank and the Ruby Slayer Token, which had come as a reward for the toddler mimic massacre.

When I popped the lid off the Golden Slayer capsule, a pulsing green stone with a silver rune carved into the surface tumbled into my palm.

A sigil stone.

These could be affixed to any appropriate Artifact with an empty effect slot, granting the item a permanent ability.

The sigil was called Stench Cloak and could be inserted into any appropriate piece of “defensive” armor—which included everything from my bathrobe to my work boots. Problem was, the spell was god awful. Well, that wasn’t technically accurate. The aura was actually great on paper and reduced enemy attack accuracy by 25% whenever the enemy was within ten-feet of the wearer. Stench Cloak accomplished that truly remarkable feat by exuding a rancid aura so unspeakably foul that attackers couldn’t properly focus.

Which meant that if I used it, I’d constantly reek like an old jockstrap. I didn’t have a lot of standards, but not smelling like ball cheese was among them.

My Trap Smith Token earned me an upgraded Journeyman’s Pry Bar. It expanded my ability to dissect and disarm a wider range of traps and, best of all, let me overlay two compatible spell effects when crafting Runic Traps. If I managed to get my hands on a Master Level Pry Bar, I had the sneaking suspicion that I’d be able to create more lasting effects or even, potentially, start crafting my own sigil stones. The possibilities had me practically salivating, but unfortunately those experiments would have to wait.

The Golden Outlaw Token—though not nearly as good a prize as my new Pry Bar—was a significant step up from the Stench Cloak.

It was a one-off elixir called the Potion of ‘YOLO’ –“You only live once. Unless you don’t”—which quadrupled every single stat for 30 seconds. According to the flavor text, the elixir was perfect “for when you need to punch god right in the fucking mouth.” The caveat was that after the thirty seconds elapsed, every stat was reduced by quadruple for one hour and you promptly fell unconscious for five minutes. So it was a real, win-the-day-or-die-instantly kind of thing.

My two rare Tokens, however, turned out to be just as good as I was hoping for.

The Sapphire Binder Token earned me with something genuinely unique—a Rare-grade Artifact called the Gauntlet of Fist-Shaped Problems, designed to be equipped to any summoned minion. Although my Taxidermied Horrors were powered by Relics and could wield Artifact-based weapons, I’d never seen an Artifact specifically created for summoned creatures before.

Hell, I couldn’t even use the damned thing, since I wasn’t an “appropriate” host.

The Gauntlet was a hulking glove of pitted black steel, easily twice the size of my head with huge spikes extending from the knuckles. Once equipped to a summoned creature, the gauntlet doubled the summoning duration and increased all unarmed damage by 250%. It also came with a limited-used spell called Knuckle-Knockback, which could be activated at-will three times per day. When triggered, Knuckle-Knockback unleashed a thunderclap of raw power, capable of hurling an opponent back by ten feet.

Drumbo seemed like the obvious candidate for the Gauntlet, since Synthia didn’t technically have hands—just a chainsaw and an oversized crab claw. I summoned the hulking mountain of chitin and meat, then shoved the glove onto his single remaining hand. The gauntlet morphed as it slid over his blocky fist, growing and changing until it truly fit like a glove. Drumbo stared down at the item, opening and closing his hand then flexing his fingers.

A glint of intelligence seemed to burn in his inhuman eyes, and I got the sense that Drumbo was… excited, maybe? I couldn’t really think of a better word.

“Soon, pal,” I said, tapping the Horror on the forearm before banishing him back into his Subspace Storage locker.

Last but not least was the Ruby Slayer Token, which earned me a new Gable-grade sigil stone, which was a purple so dark it was nearly black.

Bone Break Ripple could be attached to any blunt weapon Artifact with an open effect slot. When that weapon fractured a bone, there was an automatic fifteen-percent chance that the break would “ripple” outward, fracturing a connecting bone in the process. And when that second bone broke? There was a fifteen-percent chance another ripple would proc, potentially snapping bone after bone after bone, in a cascading chain reaction. Although not quite as powerful as Gavel of Get Fucked, the ability seemed custom made for my hammer.

19 oz Vaughan Hammer – “Foe Bane”

Rare Artifact

Type: Blunt Weapon, Personal Significance (Enhanced)

Victory through superior Hammer power!

Behold, the mighty 19oz straight claw hammer! This legendary tool is the perfect blend of elegance and functionality, ideal for smiting your foes or hanging a picture frame. Crafted by the finest blacksmiths of the Vaughan Manufacturing Corporation, this versatile tool can pry open treasure chests or rip the arms off the Faceless Ghouls on the First Floor.

It’s the perfect addition to any arsenal.

But this simple appearing tool is also more than it seems. Used to strike a critical blow against the Flayed Monarch, this hammer has garnered additional Significance, transforming it into a Legend in the making…

Effect 1: The Bigger they Are

Effect 2: Gavel of Get Fucked

Effect 3: Bone Break Ripple

Effect 4: Empty

Paired with my shiny new Domino Rally title, the hammer was truly turning into a legendary weapon and a force to be reckoned with.

While the others finished their own business inside the dusty corpse of the former Loot Arcade, I took the liberty of pulling up my Blanket Fort interface. At 3,200 square feet, the room was larger than I’d initially expected, and a full thousand square feet bigger than the Spin Cycle. Not that I really cared. It wasn’t like I didn’t have the space. I could claim an additional 2,500 square feet worth of Backrooms real estate for each Variant Assimilation Level I unlocked.

At level 35—even after all the space I’d already claimed—I currently had just a hair over 70,000 square feet of available space left. That was enormous. More room than I even knew what to do with.

Once I’d ushered everyone back into the hall, I selected the entire room, then sliced it out of existence entirely.

You’ve selected 3,200 square feet of eligible Progenerated Material Resource Space. Would you like to use Corvo’s Blanket Fort to convert the selected material into a Personal Superspace Dwelling? You will have 66,897 available square feet remaining at your current Variant Assimilation Level. Proceed Yes/No?

As I hit Yes, and the room vanished—gone as though it had never been there at all.

I thought Ed’s jaw might legitimately hit the ground.

“That is one hell of a neat trick,” he grunted in awe.