“Welcome, welcome!” the Mimic boomed out. Its voice was impossible to pin down; it sounded like it was coming from every direction. “It’s been a minute since I’ve had any guests over. Lemme make myself more comfortable for you.”
Two padded, regal-looking chairs extruded out from the polished stone floor of the vault, followed soon after by a small, metal table. “You guys want a drink?” the Mimic continued, as two jewel-encrusted goblets similarly extruded out of the table.
Aside from the furniture the Mimic had apparently just created for us, the vault was completely empty – nothing but four walls and the heavy vault door, still cracked open behind us.
“Oh, uh… no thanks. I’m not thirsty,” I lied. I wasn’t about to sip on Mimic juice, or whatever was in those goblets. Nor was I keen on the thought of sitting on a Mimic-flesh chair.
“Whatever man, just thought I’d ask.” The goblets sank down into the table, seeming to merge into it as they disappeared. “Well, nice to meet you two. Don’t get a lot of visitors these days. Quick question for the Succubus: what are you doing dragging this Human around with you? Get too attached to your latest squeeze?”
“No dude, the Human’s in my party. I’m, like, adventuring,” Aeshma said as she took a seat in one of the cushioned chairs. “Ooh, that’s pretty nice actually. Pre-warmed and everything,” she murmured.
“Adventuring? Ooooh, are you Level-farming?” The Mimic laughed. “You’re nuts. Queenie’s gonna eat your horns for breakfast. No offense, of course.”
Aeshma gave a nonchalant shrug and leaned even further back in her chair.
“Well, that’s none of my business, I suppose,” said the Mimic. “So let’s get down to it. Obviously there’s some reason you came here, and surely it’s not to represent those Cellar–”
His statement was cut short as a frenzied pitter-patter rang out from the hallway behind us. General Bimbool and a dozen of her soldiers were charging through the cracked-open vault door.
“Now, my soldiers! The Daiva scenario!” Bimbool screamed.
YAAAAAAARH!
A roar spread through the advancing platoon. They were running as fast as their little legs could carry them, dropping their daggers and reaching up underneath their burlap sashes as they closed the gap and positioned themselves around the vault. An uneasy feeling began to form in my gut.
The sound of tearing fabric filled the room as they all ripped their Flare Disks free and held them in the air.
I tensed and prepared to bolt out of the room, but Aeshma snorted amusedly. She was still sitting in her chair, totally relaxed. “Hey, don’t sweat it, Roland. Monsters can’t use magic items, remember? Dunno what these fellas are playing at.”
I let myself relax, but only a little. It wasn’t nice having a bunch of loaded guns brandished all around you, even if the safeties were on. I assumed. I knew about as much about guns as I did about magic items.
“Hear me, oh vile Mimic, and know that Operation Daiva – not Operation Yazata – has come to pass!” Bimbool shouted. “Prepare to die! Your soul shall descend to the Lowest Cellar, where the Stocker himself dares not tread, while I and my companions, along with the Divine Messengers, will be delivered to the Shelves above – to live out an eternity of silly fort-building and ration-eating!”
“Hah! Whaddaya gonna do, pipsqueaks? Beat me to death with magic-trash?” the Mimic asked, the room swaying with its deep, chortling laughter.
“Platoon – ready!”
RAAAAAAH!
The Gremlins let out a primal warcry and, as one, raised their Flare Disks high above their heads.
“Oh shit,” Aeshma said, wrenching herself up from her chair. “RUN!”
“Where?” There was nowhere to go, no cover to hide behind – and there were at least five Gremlins between me and the vault door.
Bimbool looked at me and smiled before yelling, “Platoon – NOW!”
Aeshma tackled me to the ground. From the floor, half-crushed under Aeshma’s bulk, I saw the Gremlins swing their arms down in unison and throw their Flare Disks hard against the ground. There was the crack of stone-against-stone as a dozen gemstones shattered within their housings.
FWOOOOSH!
A flash of blistering white light swept the room, along with a swell of terrible heat. Aeshma and I were sent flying across the room, tumbling head-over-heels along with bits of Gremlin and their accoutrement. Something – one of the Gremlins’ daggers, probably – struck me hard in the thigh, and I felt a sickening crack and a sudden heat that I worried was my own blood. But there was no pain.
We crashed into what must have been a wall. Except… it didn’t hurt nearly as much as i expected. It felt like there was some give. I only had a second to think about it before I felt my shoulder start to sink in.
The vault Mimic was engulfing us.
Aeshma yelled and flailed her arms as liquid Mimic-flesh flowed around us, dragging us deeper and deeper. No doubt the Mimic was attempting to encase us for a snack later, or move us into its stomach in, or something.
Why, oh why did I agree to come inside the vault? I should’ve known that it was gonna end this way, with Aeshma and me getting eaten. It was too bad I’d only gotten to know her for a few hours. I couldn’t help but feel this was all mostly my fault, for insisting that we try to save the Gremlins. And now they’d gotten me killed, along with the closest thing to a friend I’d had in years.
I tried to reach out and touch Aeshma, to let her know that I was sorry. Maybe we’d go on to the next world together, assuming there was one. Her skin was so soft and inviting, and… wet and ragged, and blistered.
It must have been from the explosion. Aeshma had covered me and had taken the brunt of the damage. I wanted to apologize, but with the Mimic flesh all around us there was barely space to breathe, let alone talk. We sank further in until we were totally engulfed in darkness.
PLOOP
There was a wet squelch as the Mimic-flesh pulled away from us, dumping Aeshma and me unceremoniously back into the vault.
“ARGH! Stupid Gremlin assholes!” Aeshma yelled, writhing on the floor and clutching her burnt back. She could still talk, so that was a good sign.
I flopped to my knees and inspected her wounds. Her back was pretty grisly, but I suspected things could’ve been a whole lot worse. After all, she was still in one piece. I looked at my own leg, at the thigh that had been hit during the explosion. But I was uninjured; only my pocketed Flare Disk had been damaged, its crystal shattered into tiny shards.
“Aeshma, I think we maybe have to get you out of here,” I said, gingerly placing my hand on her good shoulder.
“I’m fine.” She got up on her elbows and clutched her head between her hands. “Ow.”
Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
“Seriously, you look pretty bad. We should get out of here before…” I dropped my voice to a whisper. “Before the Mimic wakes up. The blast must have hurt it pretty bad, for it to have spat us out like that.”
“Nah bro, I’m doing alright,” the Mimic’s voice echoed around us.
Aeshma coughed. “Yeah, you’ve got it all wrong Roland. The Mimic saved us back there. If we’d been in the blast zone much longer, we would’ve burnt to a crisp.” She let out a few more gnarly-sounding, hacking coughs. “Thanks by the way,” she added.
“Yeah, no worries,” the Mimic rumbled back. The scorch marks covering the floor and walls were starting to recede and be replaced by their original color. The vault already looked almost back to normal, which meant the Mimic had energy to spare on keeping up appearances despite having absorbed most of the explosion.
“Oh. Sorry for assuming you were trying to eat us,” I said. “But really, Aeshma, you look terrible. I think we need to get you to a healer, or a doctor, or something. Are there… do doctors exist here?”
“No, really, I’m alright,” she said as she staggered to her feet. Almost immediately, she sank back down to her knees, her horns scraping against the vault floor. “Ah, shit. Maybe I’m not doing so great.”
“Is there something I can do to help?”
“No, just hang on a sec,” she wheezed. She started digging around in the folds of her clothes. After a moment she tugged a thumb-sized, brushed-metal flask from some hidden pocket in her leather chestwrap. As she popped the cork out of the flask, a thick, herbaceous scent flooded my nose.
“Healing potion,” Aeshma explained. “Ugh, I hate the smell of this stuff.” It didn’t smell too bad to me – granted, it wasn’t the cool cherry I’d always imagined healing potion should have. But to Aeshma, it probably just smelled medicinal. She upended the flask and downed its contents in a single gulp. In the span of a few seconds, the potion took effect, and the burnt flesh on her back and shoulder healed, regrew, and knit itself back together.
Back home, those injuries would’ve merited a month-long stay in a hospital, at least. But after the potion did its work, it was like Aeshma had never even been hurt. There wasn’t even a scar left behind.
It was incredible; and with how much danger I’d already been in today, it seemed like only a matter of time before I’d need some healing too. In an emergency situation, having a flask of the stuff in my pocket could save my life. “How many of those do we have in reserve?” I asked, trying to sound casual.
“None. Healing potions are, like, crazy expensive.” She itched at the fresh skin on her shoulder and gave her arm a few test-swings. “Hey Mimic! Thanks again for the save back there. Think you could do us one more favor?”
The room grumbled. In the time it took Aeshma to swig her potion, the Mimic had finished un-scorching its floors and had moved on to absorbing, and presumably digesting, the Gremlin remains. “Y’all want even more help? You haven’t paid me back for the favor I already did ya.” It paused emphatically, enveloping a few more Gremlin corpses in the meantime. “Hm… I know. How about you give me the boy, Succubus? I’ve never tasted Human before.”
Aeshma started to respond, but I held up a hand and cleared my throat. I didn’t appreciate being thought of as a dessert course. Or being called boy, when I was a fully grown man. “Look, Mimic. Uh, Mr. Mimic. I really think you should help us out. The shopkeeper who owns this place is kind of a friend of ours, and–”
“So what? He’s got nothing to do with me. Guy doesn’t even know I exist,” the Mimic interrupted, anger beginning to rise in its voice. “And if you’re threatening to tell him, then I might as well just eat the both of you!” I was glad the room was shaking and rumbling around us, so that neither the Mimic nor Aeshma could see that I was shaking in my shoes.
“The shopkeeper knows that he has some Mimics. And if you eat us, he’ll figure out that his Mimic infestation is waaaaay worse than the Gremlin one.”
“How do you figure?” the room hummed.
“Because…. Aeshma’s too strong for the Gremlins to kill, so something else would’ve had to have done it?” I really hoped that was true. Or at least that it was believable.
A damp chill hung in the air as the Mimic pondered our words. Finally: “What do you want?”
“We just want you to help get the Gremlins out of here!” I shouted.
“Yeah, no sweat.” The room shook with a low, guttural rumble, which was soon followed by the sound of distant clattering tile, creaking wood, and scraping stone. “I thought you were gonna ask for something crazy. Killing a bunch of Cellar Gremlins is pretty trivial.”
“N-no, we want them gone peacefully! Rehomed! Chased away!!”
“You know, I might have been hasty there, and that’s on me,” the Mimic said, sounding slightly abashed. “But you really should have interrupted me. Saying ‘get them outta here’ is totally open to interpretation.”
“What did you do?” I asked. I wasn’t sure that I even wanted to know.
“Wellllll, I let the other Mimics know that the Gremlins are… Monsters non grata, so to speak. That they’re fair game.”
“You… told the Mimics to eat all the Gremlins? Is that what you’re saying?” I asked, horrified.
“Yeaaaaah, I sorta did,” the Mimic groaned. “I guess I didn’t realize how much you two cared about them! But look on the bright side, getting eaten isn’t so bad. They’ll die faster than if, like, an exterminator were to lay out poison for ‘em.”
Aeshma nodded slowly. The more she learned about this Mimic’s power and influence, the more nervous she seemed to be in here. “Welp, that’s that. Nothing to be done about it now,” she said. “So… Roland, I guess we oughta head out. Oh, and thanks again for saving us, Mimic.” She nudged me in the ribs, gesturing for me to say something.
“Y-yeah. Thanks. I guess,” I said.
“Alrighty then! No problem!” the Mimic rumbled cheerfully. “Have fun out there, you two. And don’t forget how much I helped you!”
–
We walked in silence for a while, following the shopkeeper’s map back up to the surface. The cellar felt so much emptier without the pitter-patter of little Gremlin feet echoing through the halls. I could almost imagine the look of betrayal in the Gremlin King’s eyes when he realized how misplaced his faith in us had been, and that our ‘parlaying’ session had condemned him and his people to death.
Aeshma broke me out of my grim thoughts with a clap on the shoulder. “I’m sorry about how that all went down back there, dude. To be honest, I was kinda invested in saving the Gremlins, too.”
We passed a few fresh spatters of blood on the ground – all that was left of whoever was unfortunate enough to be hanging around here when the Mimics were given their command. “I’m the one who should be sorry,” I said. “I really screwed it up at the end there. Not that we had a great plan in the first place, but…”
“Maybe the fact that you wanted to help them in the first place should count for something,” Aeshma said consolingly. “Like, most people here wouldn’t think twice about killing them. I wouldn’t have cared, if you hadn’t arm-twisted me into trying to save them.”
“I don’t think I could twist your arm if I wanted to,” I chuckled.
“No, you probably couldn’t,” Aeshma agreed. “And, uh… well Roland, I’m sorry about what happened on the TRAM. When you thought I was trying to charm you, or whatever..” She cast her eyes down to the floor. “It’s just… kinda built into my class, you know? Part of being a Succubus. It’s not something I can, like, completely turn off. Even if it’d be convenient.”
“Oh. That’s… that’s okay, Aeshma. I’m not upset or anything,” I said. I hadn’t expected her to bring that back up. The subject made me feel kind of embarrassed.
But Aeshma pressed on, her words tumbling out in a rush. “And… I also wanna say that I’m not mind controlling you or anything. Like, I’m not doing anything to make you stick with me. I had to say something because… well, ‘cause that’s how other Succubi would do things. The kinda Succubi who specced into the right stuff and took the right perks. But I’m not like that. It’s not my style.”
“The thought did cross my mind,” I admitted.
Aeshma looked to the side and stared down an empty hallway. “I just wanna make sure you don’t consider it again, is all. I know it’s hard for people to trust us. And if we two are gonna be partners, I can’t have you suspicious of me all the time.”
I quirked an eyebrow at her. “That’s a suspicious thing to say.”
“Hah! Yeah, I guess it is.” She gave me a wry smile that crinkled the corners of her eyes. “You know, you have the makings of a good travel partner, Roland!”
I smiled back – but as we rounded a bend in the hallway, my expression slid into one of horror. “Oh,” Aeshma sighed. “That’s not great.”
We had clearly made it back to Gremlin territory, because the hallway was a grisly scene. Bits of gore and scraps of blood-soaked fur littered the floor. I swore I even saw a few Gremlin-size, bloody handprints smeared across the walls
“It’s horrible, Aeshma,” I whispered. It was bad enough knowing that my failure had gotten the Monsters killed, but seeing the aftermath was so much worse. I hung my head in shame. “I’m so sorry, Cellar Gremlins. I’m sorry I couldn’t save you.”
“Yeah, sorry Gremlins,” Aeshma said, putting a consoling hand on my shoulder. “You were a bunch of cellar-infesting vermin and you tried to blow us up, but you were alright in my book, I guess is what we’re saying now.”
“Do you think… maybe, that any of them escaped?” I asked. “Greebo… he promised to take care of Grick-Grak’s family, right? Maybe he was able to keep them safe.”
Aeshma held me at arm’s length and looked me deeply in the eyes. “I truly doubt it.”
Mon/Weds/Fri both here and over on my , which is 10 chapters ahead of Royal Road.
