Phantasm

Clordian found the trail, which led to the camp. It seemed that the kobolds had been the winners of that fight. He came back to let us know where we could find them.

“Okay then,” I said reluctantly. “Everybody put on their British tags, and let’s approach… cautiously.”

“Are you going to make us look like kobolds?” Felicia asked.

“Not immediately,” I said thoughtfully. “It’s a tricky illusion to keep up for a long period, so if the tokens are enough, I’d like to leave it to them.”

“Why not play it safe and do both?” Kyle asked.

“If we get accepted, and they turn on us after I cancel the illusion, they might remember who we were,” I explained. “If we go in clean and they fire on us, we can back off and come back in disguise.”

There were slow nods all around as they accepted my logic.

“Cautiously, then,” Kyle said. “I guess I’m taking the lead,”

“Cloridan’s taking point, as normal,” I replied, “But you’ll be the first visible team member.”

I wasn’t certain that Kyles's shield, heavy as it was, would stop bullets. But I was pretty confident about my video game logic. Real soldiers wouldn’t have abandoned their companions and set up camp ten minutes walk away. Even if they had to leave the bodies, they would have collected the dog tags and the orders. They had been left for us to find, not by the kobolds, but by Axel.

So I was only a little nervous as Kyle approached within shouting distance.

“Hello, the camp!” he called out. There was a brief flurry of activity; brief glimpses of little lizard-people scurrying about.

“What’s the password?” came the reply. Kyle looked back at me blankly, and I realised the flaw in our plan. Kyle couldn’t understand a word that the kobold had said. I rushed forward.

Seven people in the whole world who can play this game and two of them are here, I thought. The mooks spoke common, so why don’t these guys?

“Give me a drink!” I called. That appeared to be the right answer as they broke out into laughter.

“Come on up,” one of them called. I gestured for the others to follow me into the camp and I got my first chance to use [Identify].

[Identification]: - Bucky, Kobold Private - Threat: 20 - Properties: Skilled

”Reinforcements at last,” one of them said. He was a little larger than the others. “Blimey, you’re a lofty lot, aren’t you?”

[Identification]: - Sarge, Kobold Sergeant - Threat: 21 - Properties: Skilled

“Yeah,” I said, “You’re part of Steel Curtain as well?”

He nodded. “We lost Captain Langford, so I hope you’re ready to take command,” he said.

“Sure,” I said. “Why don’t we start with introductions.”

“Yes sah!” he barked. “Starting with myself, Sarge, the rest of this sorry lot are Bucky, Pip, Titch, Spike, Rusty, Nobby and Rook.”

He pointed at each one as he went, but they were almost identical as far as I could tell. At least I had [Identify] if I needed the names.

“Borys, Kyle, Felicia and Cloridan,” I said, “Aside from Borys and myself, they don’t speak much… English. They’re from the colonies.”

“Ah, darkies. Understood, sah. And yourself?”

I stared at him. I wasn’t sure if he was reproducing the racism of the time or if the game was just adapting to whatever shit came out of my mouth.

“Just Captain is fine,” I finally said.

“Understood, Captain!”

I turned to the others. “Looks like we’re joining up. You can get the names from [Identify] and they seem to have accepted that you don’t speak their language.

I sighed as a thought struck me. “They’re probably going to try talking to you very loudly and slowly.”

“What good will that do?” Felicia asked.

“None whatsoever,” I said. I turned back to the kobolds. “Why don’t you brief me on how the mission has progressed so far.”

“Aye, sah!” Sarge said. He made a gesture, which turned out to be for Rusty to get out the map.

It was a very large map. I wondered where they got the paper for it, considering it was hand-drawn. Did the British Ministry of Defence hand out impractically large, intricately folded blank pieces of paper to its soldiers? A mystery.

Somebody—Rusty claimed to have drawn it, but I suspected the thing had been created by Axel—had drawn out a significant portion of the street grid. Enemy patrols had been marked, both infantry and tanks. The routes were long, complicated loops that began and ended in one of three barracks. Two infantry barracks and one tank… pen, I supposed the correct term was.

“We take out one of those, it will get a lot easier to move around here,” Sarge said. “But it’s a hard ask.”

He had also identified a target.

“Administrative building,” he said. “Abandoned now, but there should be archived records there about the project.”

“Abandoned? So we can just break in there and search quietly for the records we want?” I asked.

“Afraid not, sah. Intel puts the building as being occupied by squatters. And the basement, where the records are supposed to be, is sealed off and alarmed. If we disturb the civvies or set off the alarm, we’ll have patrols on us in no time.”

“I see.”

Sarge started rattling on, talking about how the best plan was to take out the barracks one by one. That sounded like what someone playing a WWII tactical wargame would do, but we weren’t playing a game. We could do something different.

“I can just shadow-walk into a building and search for records while invisible,” I told the others. First, though, I had to explain to them what Sarge had said. If Sarge thought anything of me speaking a foreign tongue, he didn’t say anything about it.

“That puts you all alone again,” Felicia objected.

“I will learn to take others through,” I said, “Just as soon as I have the points.”

“That doesn’t help us now,” she said. “And how are you going to explain this to the kobold?”

“I doubt I’ll have to,” I said. “If I can find the right document and bring it back, he’ll be “oh, we have to go to this location now.” That’s how these war games tend to go.”

I looked over to Borys for confirmation.

“Yes,” he said. “Get the objective and the mission ends. Are you sure Axel will be okay with it?”

“He seems fine with us… bending the rules,” I said. “We skipped a lot of steps on the last floor and he didn’t complain. I think he considers us play-testers.”

“Perhaps,” Borys agreed. “So what are we doing?”

“Backup?” I suggested. “If all goes well, there shouldn’t be a need, but if something does go wrong, you can try and get to me.”

“That will certainly trigger the alarm,” Borys said.

“If you need to get in, then the alarm will have most definitely been triggered,” I said. “We’re talking about a situation where my invisibility isn’t working and I can’t shadow step out of trouble.”

I looked at Felicia. “Which I will do, if I see any signs of something I can’t handle,” I assured her. “I like living too.”

“That’s all well and good,” she said, “But if you do run into trouble, how are you going to let us know?”

I dug out my smartphone from Tokyo-Berlin, or whatever we were calling that floor and dialled Kyles's number. It rang.

“These still work,” I said. “A bit anachronistic, but so are the guns we still have.”

Borys frowned. “That still leaves the question of how we’re going to come to your rescue.” He turned to Sarge, who was still waiting patiently. “How long before they send troops to the hospital if the alarm is tripped?”

“Five minutes,” Sarge said promptly. I doubted that was the sort of thing he would know, but never mind. “Second barracks is further away, they’ll be another ten minutes. The tanks take longer to start up, they’ll take another fifteen minutes to arrive.”

“Will they just set up inside, or will they enter the building?” Borys asked.

“They’ll come inside,” Sarge said. “Once the alarm is triggered, they’ll come and kill everyone in the building.”

“Even the civilians?” I asked.

“Aye. It’s a military building and they’re illegal squatters,” Sarge said. “They’ll kill them.”

Borys must have noticed the look on my face. “They’re goblins, Kandis,” he said. “Monsters.”

“Yeah, I know,” I said. “I just…” I shook my head.

“The smart thing to do would be to set up to hit the first barracks from behind,” Borys mused. “If they charge into the hospital their backs will be open.”

“That will leave the civilians—and me— defenceless.” I pointed out.

“True, but you’re the slipperiest out of any of us. If you can’t get out, we probably can’t get in.”

“And we don’t care about the civilians,” I groused.

“We don’t,” he confirmed.

“Fine,” I said. “I’ll get the mission done without tripping any alarms or endangering any civilians. You can just park yourselves in a building and have a nice, boring, little wait.”

“Uh, you know how this works, don’t you?” Borys said.

“Shut up.”

I went in at night. Less chance of running into a goblin, and more shadows for the finding. The building was lit, excessively so. Didn’t they know there was a war on? From two stories up, on the ruined building we had chosen for an ambush point, I could see other buildings with equally profligate lights shining out the windows.

“Asking for a bombing, I reckon,” I said to Borys. He shrugged.

“It’s a German city. For it to be this damaged, there must have been bombing, but there must be more Allied troops in the city than just our group. It’s being fought over, which makes it dangerous for either side to just drop bombs.”

“Fair point,” I admitted. “You think that means we won’t see any bombs?”

“Oh, no,” he said sourly. “It’ll just be at a dramatic moment, and they will be aimed at us, not any loose light.”

“Well that makes me feel much better,” I said sarcastically, and he laughed.

“We’ll deal with that when it comes,” he said. “For now, get in there.”

I reached out with my shadow sense. I’d decided to start at the top and work my way down, partly because it was darker, and partly because there weren’t any moving voids that meant people on the top two floors. I found an empty space and stepped through.

Wow, they cleared this place out pretty thoroughly, I thought as I looked around. This floor was pretty much one big room. It hadn’t always looked so open, I figured, as the floor was crowded with toppled, empty cabinets that looked to have contained electrical machinery at some point. Only the wires remained. There were still a few lights working on this floor, enough light to see that there was nothing for me here.

This might have held computerised records at one point. Did they have such things back then? But the computers, or whatever they had kept up here, were long gone. I stepped carefully through the detritus, towards the stairway. The stairs continued up to the roof; the door had been left open, which wasn’t doing much to preserve the integrity of the place. I wouldn’t find any records on the roof, so I headed down.

Belatedly, I remembered to cast [Greater Invisibility] before I headed down. I also examined the stairwell. Remembering what Cloridan had taught me, I looked for signs of wires or pressure plates, as well as checking for detection fields with [Mana Sense]. There was nothing, so I headed down cautiously.

Coming out on the fourth floor, I was greeted by a stairway that ran the width of the building. It was lit and there were four doors, two on each side. On the left side, the doors were paired with large windows, one of which was smashed. The closest door was on the right, left open, so I peered through it.

This room was lit as well and contained books. Probably a library before the squatters had gotten to it. Books were strewn all about the place, the ones lying on the floor had gotten wet somehow. This could have the records I was looking for, but all the books I could see were properly bound hardcovers—or had been before they got torn to shreds. It didn’t look like a place where up-to-date records were kept, so I moved on.

The two rooms on the right were labs. It was difficult to tell what kind of labs, what with all the looting and vandalism. Neither of them was lit, but enough light came in through the corridor to make out the contents, smashed up as it was.

The final door of the floor was closed. I could tell that it was well-lit from my shadow-sense, but not much more. No traps as far as I could tell, so I pushed it open a crack and looked for wires. Seeing none, and feeling no resistance, I cautiously eased it open.

It was… probably a storage room. Empty shelves filled one wall, but the place must have held useful stuff because it had all been cleared out. Even the lightbulb had been removed…

Wait. Where is the light coming from, then?

As I looked around, the light started peeling off one wall, like a giant flake of glowing paint. The other side wasn’t dark, it was just as bright, but it held an eye that looked quizically in my direction.

What is that?

My instinctive question was quickly answered by [Identify]

Warning! Demon Detected!

[Identification]: - Elohim Abomination- Threat: Unknown - Properties: Unknown

Warning! Demon Detected!