Corbin used his level up points in Strength and Endurance again. The boost in HP was very much needed. He also wanted to deal more than a single point of damage and assist in the fighting.

They took down another pack of cave gibbons, this time only four of them, which put his silver tally somewhere around 250. Still no ability cards. A certain portion of him really wanted to get a better look at the cards, since he knew so much about them. The collector in him maybe. Another part of him felt bad for this sociopath educator for having such a bad time of it here.

In the deepest part of this dungeon/forgotten temple/ancient mine/whatever it was, the floor had been flattened with magic or tools, while the walls and ceiling were full-on cave. He still had no problem seeing, both with his eyes and with his ears, a weird sensation. He could hear dripping from stalactites and form a mental map of the room, or use the tiniest amounts of bioluminescence to fill out the rest of the cave.

Prissy figured out, after only cracking her head once, how to see through his eyes and navigate. It was easiest, since she was pretty bad at this, just to sit on her shoulder or head. Otherwise, if he took off, she’d believe she was ten or twenty feet further on than she really was. This led to a lot of stop and go reconnaissance, where she just plonked down in the middle of a terrifying cave and watched him swoop around looking for the dungeon boss.

Eventually they found him.

About three ‘rooms’ further on, the cave curved around to the right and the Survey skill gave him his first success: someone talking to himself in the deep darkness.

“Yes, yes! Of course. We make them pay for all the pain. All the pain and the blood. They’ll stare into our eyes this time, and choke to death on their own fluids. Yes!”

Corbin wondered what this loony was going on about.

New Quest received! – Clear the Forgotten Temple

Rid the dungeon of its true master.

What revolting evil resides in this place?

Reward: 500 xp

Secondary Quest: Separate the master from the servant

Secondary reward: unknown reward

He relayed this back to Prissy, who then waited for him to come back rather than trust herself crawling through the cave totally blind. Slowly, ever so slowly, they approached the ‘master’ of this place.

This room had been converted into a makeshift workshop, but before that, it had been something else entirely. He couldn’t place what. Dark pools of water sat in the depths of the place, while others nearer glowed not with bioluminescent blue, but sickly neon green. The whole place seemed bathed in a sheen of irradiated puke. As for the laboratory, someone had trucked large wooden workstation tables down here, and set up flasks, vials and beakers of all sorts. Some contained various colored liquids, some were stoppered, others open. Some wafted steam or worse into the cavern chamber, while others didn’t. Along one wall was a large bookshelf taken up with a few tomes, a scroll case, and a medicine cabinet with little drawers like he’d seen once in… Korea? When had he been in Korea? Each of the little drawers was labeled with some alphabet he didn’t know.

It didn’t matter. Other empty spots on the shelves held pickled creatures or organs staring eerily out at him. That jar of eyeballs looked delicious.

“Don’t,” he told himself.

Lording over all this was a man in what appeared to be armor made of terracotta pottery. It was as if you took all the mass-produced red pots and vases, cut them expertly down the center, and fashioned them into a kind of wonky full plate. The helmet especially looked to be made of a full on plant pot, except that it had been etched with runic magic symbols. It had no holes at all, but instead a large eye etched in the center, with three comical eyelashes and some carved capillaries in the eye. It was painted deep red, the iris and pupil anyway, with the white of the eye painted solid black. The capillaries were unpainted and showed up dull orange against the black.

“What in the bloody ‘ell is that?” she breathed.

“A crazy person.” It was better to inspect it though, so he did.

Success! You have inspected the dungeon’s inhabitant:

Oozomancer

Level 8 human wizard

250/250 HP

More information is not known. Why not level up your Perception or your Inspect skill?

Ewwww.

“Wot. The. ‘Ell.”

“Oozomancer.”

“Oy ken read, bird.”

“Ah.”

“‘S jes bloody disgustin’ is all.”

“Wanna turn back?”

To be fair, she did give pause. “Ee’s got a card or two. Mebbe more.”

He shook his head. Greed never failed to trump common sense. “He’s… going to summon some ooze and slime. Also spells. That armor looks magical. We’re going to need to get through it somehow for your spectral blade to work.”

“It might jes do the trick anyhow, eh?”

He sighed. “Okay, let me get his attention.”

“We know you’re out there!” the crazed wizard called. “Come on then, let’s have a look at you.”

So much for the element of surprise. Corbin launched himself off her shoulder and into the room, where he landed a little ways away and knocked over one of the beakers. The red liquid inside made a horrid shrieking sound, and tried to gather itself up, but after a few struggling seconds, it collapsed into a puddle and stopped moving.

The wizard shrieked in hilarious rage. “Do you know WHAT YOU’VE DONE?”

“Put something out of our collective misery?” he ventured.

Runes flared to life on his armor, and Corbin distinctly heard a bloop! sound. In seconds, several of the pools of green disgorged a hideous green jelly-like substance that wrapped itself around him. Where it surged up around his legs, the runes flashed with red-orange magic energy, until it climbed up his waist, his torso, his shoulders and finally his entire head. More gooey glop surrounded his arms and formed ropy tentacle fingers a good foot long each, three to a hand.

Success! You have inspected the dungeon’s previously hidden inhabitant:

Green Goo

Level 10 ooze

325/325 HP

More information is not known. Why not level up your Perception or your Inspect skill?

Now with double the ewwww.

“Well that changes things,” Corbin said, and knocked over several more vials before getting airborne. He watched the ooze man and his ooze… shield? Powered armor? Luckily, though it was big and had plenty of HP, there was only the one, and it sure did telegraph its intentions. The wizard in the flower pots reared back and shoved a whole bunch of the green goo forward, which went sailing well wide, where it splatted against the cavern ceiling.

“Hang on,” he told Prissy. He lifted one of the vials of steaming substance and threw it at the oozomancer, and relished the prompt that appeared.

This compound is toxic to the green goo. You deal 32 damage.

He wished he could identify more of those, but it wouldn’t be possible without inspecting all of them, and that just wasn’t going to happen. He dodged another slow attack which left more ooze hanging from the ceiling.

This time the guy swung his arm wide, which turned the ooze into a wide paddle. And it was much harder to dodge it. His Agility chose this moment to shit the bed. He took 14 damage off a glancing blow (on a Kismet success, which halved the damage), but the damage disappeared into Priscilla and he swooped around for another vial.

But which vial? Some were milky pink, others clear and red, one congealed white with threads of black like blue cheese. All were utterly revolting (except that jar full of eyeballs… that looked perversely tasty), so he grabbed up one and dumped it on the wizard.

This compound is neutral to the green goo. The attack fails to deal damage.

He cursed, and flew in a tight loop, and tried to Inspect both wizard and monster more closely. He got no further information, except that the wizard hadn’t taken any damage, and the ooze was just under 225 HP. Not ideal for a sneak thief.

But...

“When I say go,” he told her, “you get behind the lab equipment. Anything that looks bad, you get ready and throw on the bastard while I distract it.”

“Cheerio!” was her reply.

This entailed some fancy flying, and also dodging some more of the ooze attacks, but he did his part well. With the wizard fully turned around, he gave her the signal and got a brief image of her progress in between dodging ooze attacks. His new Survey skill told him he needed to be on the lookout for attacks from Minor Green Goo. He wasn't sure what that was all about until one of the bits on the ceiling lunged at him and slapped onto his wing.

“It can be divided!” he told Prissy.

He flew this way and that, back and forth. Splat, splat, the ooze threw itself at him over and again. The layer of slime surrounding the human, the master, had thinned. That stupid terracotta eye kept staring at him. In fact… he was getting another idea.

“Now! Attack it now!”

The main bulk of it had to be around a hundred and fifty or so HP when she tossed several more vials onto it. Several dealt damage (29, 46, 34 and 18) but one of them bolstered and enraged the thing. It shuddered and went purple, and gained 75 HP. As for the wizard: bupkis. He was still at full health, with lots more ooze all over the place in here.

The wizard roared and turned away from the mostly harmless obvious distraction and toward the human who’d just dealt over a hundred damage. Oozomancer and green goo table flipped the biggest workstation, which had to be over four hundred pounds of wood and granite top. Prissy threw her spectral dagger, then closed her hand and summoned it again.

It was not a winning battle.

“Prissy, listen carefully–”

“Cilla, ya devil bird!”

“That doesn’t matter!”

“Muh name matters, ya git.”

He would’ve bit his lip, grit his teeth, and punched her in the face if he’d had any of the required anatomy for doing all those things. But without lips, teeth or hands, he could only swallow his pride and call her Cilla.

“Cilla–”

“Better.”

“Listen to me or we both die!” he screamed. And wonder of wonders, she did. She listened, and backed off as instructed. Meanwhile Corbin engaged his third and final Unsettling Aura of the day. The bass dropped, rippling the pools of water and shaking some of the green goo off the wall. He gave a great caw.

The jelly goo surrounding the wizard shuddered and kept flowing out after Prissy, while the wizard threw out another arm after Corbin, who dodged aside and further into the cavern. Then, when the layer of green ooze was thinnest on the wizard, he abruptly changed course and charged straight into the lion’s mouth. With all the goop going after Prissy, he finally had a clear shot at his target. He extended his talons, hoped against hope he had the strength for this now, and grabbed onto the wizard’s plant pot helmet.

A thin layer of ooze burned at him, but Prissy absorbed the first five damage no problem. He flapped as hard as he could, channeled damage to his partner, and still nothing.

And then, like yanking a boot out of mud, he felt the first iota of change. After that, he racked up twelve, eighteen, and up to twenty-seven damage before the schlorp announced the helmet had come free. Prissy was screaming. Corbin was screaming.

And they’d done it.

All the ooze sucked back in towards the shocked, terrified wizard’s face. For a few seconds, he had brilliant green eyes and dull brown hair, but a few seconds later the ooze had eaten his entire head, spat his skull into the darkness, and poured down through the armor to get at the rest. A geyser of human bones erupted out of the armor’s neck hole.

You have defeated Oozomancer!

You gain 450 xp.

Loot from this creature has been absorbed by Green Goo.

For a few moments, all was stillness. The suit of armor folded in half and seemed to wilt in slow motion, only to suddenly rise up, flex its fingers, and have a purple blob of a head appear out of the neck hole. A sheen of ooze dribbled out and covered the armor, but the runes failed to flare to life.

Quest Progress! – Clear the Forgotten Temple

The oozomancer is dead, but the forgotten temple’s real master remains!

Defeat the ooze to complete the quest

Reward: 500 xp

Extra Reward: unknown