New System, Who Dis?

Saturday, April 27th, 2069

“White Goblins incoming!” Smegma shouted, as he phased through the ceiling. I stared at him for a long moment before what he said registered, and then I shot to my feet.

The others were still passed out from the lunch of Fish, and admittedly I was on my way to joining them before Smegma sped back into the room. My Mental Fortitude Skill stopped me from taking off in a random direction, thankfully, but just barely. Instead, my panicked gaze moved from one sleeping body to another, desperately trying to think of a way to save them.

“Calm down,” Smegma chuckled. “I meant they’re at the lip of the cavern studying the place. It will be a little while before they make it down here. They seem scared of the place.”

My eyes transferred to the Demon with a hateful squint. “You said—“

“I know, my bad. But they are coming! I’m not sure why they’re here now, but my guess is it has something to do with your earlier cooking, or maybe your Mana usage?”

I looked to the room with the smithy that I had used to cook. Could it have caused smoke? No, we’d burned Crystals which produced no emissions we knew of on Earth—well no emission other than heat…

I toggled on my Heat Sense and instantly saw the change. The stones in the room which had been as cold or possibly colder than the surrounding cave now radiated with the tiniest traces of heat. Most of that was concentrated in the smithy room, but I could tell that not only had some of that heat spread to the walls, but a glance up showed me a rather phallic shape that was still holding some residual heat.

“One of the columns is an exhaust!” I exclaimed, and then motioned to the walls and next room. “Whoever designed this place likely piped the hot air through the walls, and eventually out into the cavern above through that stack.”

“So, the White Goblins came to investigate because of the heat?” Smegma asked rhetorically, and then zipped back through the ceiling. A moment later he popped back into the space beside me. “That explains why they are standing on the ridge scanning the stones! Plus, I saw a few from closer in the village, and they had milky white eyes! They probably can’t see anything but heat signatures.

“Can you see them up on the ridge? It’s probably a couple hundred meters that way.” Smegma pointed to clarify his question.

I shook my head, and Smegma nodded while cupping his chin between two of his fingers. Only a few seconds passed like that before Smegma concluded, “If you can see the stacks and their vision works like yours, then once they get down to the courtyard you’re all screwed.”

“What can we do? Going up the stairs and out the Stalagmite is only going to bring us closer.”

“When you look at the lake what do you see?” Smegma asked.

“Black, with some heat signatures where there are fish,” I answered and then instantly saw the solution he was thinking of. “If we are in that room, and they know the place they will probably not see anything amiss!”

Even as Smegma confirmed my conclusion, I was rushing from sleeper to sleeper and waking them up with mild shakes that morphed to violent ones in the cases of Dave and Jarred. My dad and Willa opened their eyes almost instantly, and just in case, I gave them the universal stay quiet sign with a finger to my lips.

I did the same for Jarred, but Dave either didn’t see it in time or wasn’t as used to being in a Portal because when he awoke he shouted, “What the husk?! Oh I need to be quiet…” at least he turned his shout into a whisper toward the end. In an even lower whisper he asked, “What’s going on?”

Since he was the last one I woke up, I gave them all a whispered explanation. No one spoke after learning of the White Goblins, and I added, “Prioritize speed over quiet. I don’t know when they’ll get to the courtyard. We need to get to the lake fast. Got it?”

Everyone nodded and we took off. Thankfully we went through the room with the Huge Frying Pan, which I quickly put in my Necklace of Holding. I hoped they wouldn’t make it all the way down here, but with the heat concentration—they might be motivated to give it their best shot.

We were only two rooms from the lake, so we arrived in less than half a minute. My dad pointed to the water, “Do we need to get in?”

I looked to Smegma who was tapping a talon to fang. He oscillated a hand a moment later before pointing along one wall which had a ridge above the water. “You saw the fish you pulled out of this thing. There’s no telling what else might be in this lake. Let’s avoid going in unless it’s a last resort. For now, try to head that way as far as you can. Hopefully it leads out of sight around a corner somewhere.”

I moved to follow but Smegma held up a hand in front of me. Sure I could have phased through it, but he was acting as the leader and other than the accidental scare on announcing the White Goblins, I thought he was doing a fantastic job. Sure enough, what he said next I also agreed with.

“You stay here, so I can scout. If the Goblins come this way, then we’ll head down and join up with the group.” Smegma only waited for me to nod before he zoomed away into the facility. Once again I was left standing with nothing to do, as the Demon moved around.

Spinning, I watched as the others followed his direction, surprised to find Jarred leading the way. I would have expected him to reject the order, or at least argue, but a near death experience would have affected my priorities. So, maybe it did his?

Or maybe I was going to hear all the complaints after the current crisis…

To call the progress of the group along the ridge slow-moving would be doing a disservice to snails. Due to the extremely low light of the chamber, each person was forced to feel for handholds, even though oftentimes they used the same ones as the previous individual. I realized I was watching them through heat vision at some point, which further explained just how dark it likely was for them as they moved further from the lights near the shore. I didn’t exactly have it easy either, since the only things that stood out in my thermal vision were the people in my group. However, their hands left heat imprints on the rungs that caused them to stand out which made the pathway look easy to follow from my vantage.

When Jarred turned a corner and became far harder to see with my heat vision I smiled. I could still feel his heat source if I toggled the Skill to senses other than my eyes, but I could also feel fish. Not to mention seeing the creatures in the lake. It took a count of two hundred before the rest joined Jarred on the other side of the bend, but I did get a thumbs up from my father who was the last one around the corner.

I hoped that meant there was a better space to stand over there, since the heat outlines did seem to spread out more. I squinted, trying to see if they were still latched to the walls—

“They’re following the heat from the Smithy,” Smegma said as he popped into the space beside me. I jumped but thankfully managed to not cry out. Heart hammering, I nodded and motioned to the pathway the group took.

Smegma oscillated his hands again. “It’ll take them at least five minutes to get down here. I think they came down the chimneys, like you first did. Right now they’re moving through the facility to the staircases.”

Nodding, I sent Smegma off again. Now alone again, with my heart hammering its warnings I will admit I continually inched toward the ridge and the others. Once I caught myself doing it I managed to stop but could feel my legs twitching in a desire to continue. Thankfully, Mental Fortitude quashed what little fear I had, and allowed me to trust in Smegma to give me fair warning.

That fair warning came a minute or so later, as he popped up and pointed to the ridge. “Time to go. They clearly have a better heat sense or vision than you. They’re eerily accurate in their pathing.”

I didn’t wait for more and sprinted to the ledge I’d watched the others use. Thankfully, I was faster than the group, not because of the heat traces, since they’d vanished. Why I was faster I could only guess. Either because I’d watched them or because of my Strength Stat. Regardless, in less than three minutes I was around the corner.

The others weren’t gripping a wall anymore, it turned out. Instead there was a rocky shelf high above the water level. The shelf was probably only eight feet deep and maybe ten feet wide, but it definitely would make hiding here more comfortable. Still, everyone in the group was faced away from me, looking out over ther water.

I followed their gazes and didn’t see anything but a vast expanse of relative darkness with a large concentration of glowing moss in the distance. I looked at the group and turned off Heat Vision, thinking it might be too dark for them to have noticed my arrival. Everyone stood so still they could have been statues.

Wait, why could I see so well without Heat Vision—

Just like the bend in the wall, the lake continued to the left of the original Fishery cavern. Like everyone else had seemed to, I froze, staring at the massive accumulation of green moss above the water. The group freezing wasn’t only because of the bright illumination.

It was the shape the brightly glowing moss formed.

My heart, which had been hammering, decided that it could beat even faster—but somehow my face and hands got colder despite the increased blood flow.

There, in the distance, was a huge coiled creature. It was so large that at first, the distance became hard to gauge, right up until I scanned from the ledges’ edge across the water and then to it. It was likely five hundred meters away, but was so massive that the scale of the thing made it seem as if it could have been right atop us.

The ledge was deathly silent as everyone continued to stare at the coiled snake. It turned out that the earlier artist had depicted the creature very well in the mural we destroyed. Smegma popped into the air, hovering out over the water, and opened his mouth.

My arms waved frantically to stop him from speaking, and I actually was fast enough to interrupt the Demon. His eyes narrowed and he looked at me but then took in everyone else’s pale-faced stares as well.

Slowly he spun, until the Snake’s light first illuminated his face, and then washed over his spinning torso and legs. I saw the moment he realized it was a snake, because his jaw dropped open.

The moment stretched for untold seconds, all of the group standing stock still and staring. Taking in the terrifying beast.

I couldn’t speak for the others but I was cataloging things on its body and near it. First, the scales were a deep green or black on top, and white on its belly—at least if my color palette wasn’t too skewed by the moss. Second, each scale was easily as large as an ATV, and likely just as thick in depth.

The next discovery I made gave me an ‘ah-ha’ moment, but not in a good way. The snake was resting atop the water, but it wasn’t on an island as I initially thought. No it was atop a heap of fishbones and—wait, was that a humanoid skeleton?

Another one! Okay, so now I had some idea why this lake was so well stocked by the previous inhabitants, and probably why the Goblins had been so hesitant to come down here in the first place. The snake's head wasn’t visible, which either meant it was on the far side from us, or coiled in on itself.

My brain finally relaxed my tense muscles when it realized that the moss growing on the snake meant it hadn’t moved in a very long time. It of course re-tensed muscles when I realized that could also mean it was due to move at any moment.

Smegma thankfully snapped all of us out of our stupor as he whispered, “The Goblins are on the shore.”

I shook myself silently and inched back to the rounded edge of the ridge. I peeked around the corner and found five large humanoid figures staring out into the water. At first I thought they were twitching their heads forward and back. Until I realized they were sniffing the air repeatedly. I took a testing sniff myself and found that I could still smell a hint of the Mirror Fish scent.

Still, it either had clung to my clothing or had wafted this way—and it definitely wasn’t as strong as it would be in the previous smithy chamber. The White Goblins from this distance looked small, but having seen my father and the others turn this corner with Heat Sense—I knew that wasn’t the case.

Each one was easily as tall as Jarred, our shortest member, but they were far wider than anyone I’d seen before—looking more like gorillas than humans.

They continued to sniff the air, but now added grunts at each other in between. Then a conversation occurred with a great deal of grunts and gestures before they eventually turned back around and walked through the archway to the pens.

I leaned back from the edge of the ridge, and began to sigh in relief. Until I remembered the far larger threat of the snake—and nearly choked as I tried to simultaneously stop my sigh and exhale quietly. It caused me to swallow a lump of saliva, and I coughed extremely loudly.

I looked up to find many eyes staring at me in horror. I only had eyes for the moss covered snake, which thankfully wasn’t moving. We waited on the ledge for our best estimate of thirty minutes, allowing Smegma to scout back into the facility—before we eventually concluded that we had to move back to know more.

And get away from the hibernating terror Snake.