Wesley

  "Here's the rub," Mongrel said as he stomped across the room, then spun on his heel to pace back the other way, "we've been caught in a semblance. Now, I'm no expert, but I do know some things about them.

  "It being a semblance means it's on a strict time limit, so if we just hunker down and survive long enough, it should disappear on its own. Additionally, semblances are subject to certain rules, which is why, even though the mansion itself seems to have some agency of its own in ensuring our demise, it can't just drop the ceiling on our heads or what have you. That wouldn't be playing by the rules, and semblances can only exist by virtue of those rules.

  "That being said, here's what we'll do. We stay put in this room, make it as defensible as possible, and run out the clock. It shouldn't be too much longer now, anyway."

  Number One signed something, and Mongrel nodded.

  "Okay," Wesley said.

  And so they waited. Mongrel did not have his chimp use any applicable Builder skills to reinforce the room at the moment, reasoning that the house might just reshuffle the walls anyway, making it a waste of AP. Wesley wondered idly why the man always delegated his skill use to his familiars instead of doing it himself, but he quickly dropped that train of thought, as he had somewhat more pressing matters to concern himself with at present.

  Not thirty seconds had passed when all three of them were roused by a sharp noise. A door set into a long end of the rectangular room retracted, shifted, spun away with a quiet murmuring of invisible gears; another, nearly identical door replaced it, sliding into place with a sharp click.

  Then all was still.

  "Whatever's on the other side of that thing, it can't be good," Mongrel said, his sword pointed at the door. "Grinner bait, you feel anything?"

  "Nothing," Wesley replied.

  "Fucking fantastic. All right; One, Reinforce that door. Oatmeal, fetch a chair to wedge under the handle. If something tries to get through, we'll Barrier up as well."

  When Wesley did not act quick enough for his liking, the old man began whistling and snapping his fingers without more than a glance in Wesley's direction, keeping his attention on the door.

  Wesley moved to do as he was told. He sheathed his sword and spun to find the nearest chair, nearly tripping over one that stood just a step behind him atop the rug in the center of the room. He bent to grab the backrest with his one working arm.

  Then, all of a sudden, the chair had sprouted eyes and teeth, and before Wesley could so much as blink in surprise those teeth had clamped down on his hand, drawing blood and splaying his fingers with strained tendons.

  The chair worried at him like a dog with a prime cut of meat, and strained against him when he tried to pull his hand back.

  Wesley screamed.

  He couldn't even fight back, really, with his free arm already injured, so his only defense was to kick somewhat ineffectually at the living piece of furniture, which did not accomplish much at all.

  Everything was happening too quickly, and Wesley found that he could not keep up, couldn't do much of anything beyond expelling a faint whimper and continually tugging in a vain attempt to get his arm back. Then Mongrel was over by his side, and his sword was moving up and down, and specks of black blood were going everywhere, hitting Wesley in the face.

  The monster released its hold, having morphed from a chair to something more like a warty, upright squid. It tried to scuttle away on spidery little fingers at the ends of its legs, but Mongrel cleaved one of the unjointed limbs off so that the creature toppled on its side, then swung away at it until it was a mess of roughly hacked-apart bits bubbling with dark sludge.

  "A mimic," Mongrel muttered, toeing at the dismembered corpse. It did not stir. "Whatever the Devil Queen is smoking to come up with this shit, she needs to lay off the pipe for a while."

  Wesley staggered up against a wall, and was clutching his injured right hand desperately to his chest in some feeble attempt to stem the bleeding. Mongrel came over, tested the nearby desk with a few pokes of his sword before setting the weapon down on top of it, and drew a belt knife instead. He cut a section of Wesley's tunic free, then pulled out his bloody hand by the wrist to wrap the length of cloth in a makeshift bandage.

  "Will I be all right?" Wesley asked shakily. "They're not… p-poison or anything, are they?"

  "Fuck should I know?" Mongrel muttered, retrieving his sword. "I've never been unlucky enough to see one of the little bastards, let alone stupid enough to get bit by one. You're probably fine, though."

  As reassurances went, 'probably fine' was a pretty bad one.

  Something began pounding on the door that had just been switched in. Mongrel went and fetched a normal chair to stuff under it, and Number One erected a Barrier to help keep it closed. The rhythmic thumping continued, but the door held. Rendered effectively useless without his arms, Wesley sat down on the desk and let the others work around him.

  "Well," Mongrel said, combing through his thin gray hair with his fingers as he stepped back, "at the risk of jinxing us, I'd say we're doing all right. Can't be much longer we need to hold out now."

  With a dislocated shoulder, a chewed-up hand, and trousers heavy with cold piss, Wesley could not claim to agree that things were going 'all right'.

  Without warning, the walls on both short ends of the room lifted up and away, revealing a formless black void on either side until two new rooms came and slotted in where the walls had been; set the floor shaking twice as the first one collided, then the second a moment later.

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  In one adjoining room, the blubbery thing responsible for Price's death had spread out over the floor like a puddle of runny snot, a sort of central body rising up with its numerous eyes wheeling into place to regard the sudden influx of fresh food items. On the other side, a very tall, pale, gangly figure stooped to fit beneath the ceiling. It was vaguely humanoid in body plan, but with a too-big head shaped like a lumpy potato, and arms so long its knuckles brushed against the floor.

  "You're shitting me," Mongrel muttered, then quickly clapped his hands together. "All right, change of plan! We run like hell!"

  Without wasting a second, the old man yanked Wesley off the desk, ignoring his pained protests, while Number One released the Barrier he had been keeping over the door to raise a protective dome around them instead.

  "You getting anything with Detect yet?" Mongrel asked. "Because we could use a bit of good luck at the moment."

  Wesley shut his eyes and prayed and fumbled around inside his head. There was nothing. All still. All quiet. Or, well…

  "Maybe?" he said. "I don't know, though…" He couldn't tell if he was just seeing what he wanted to see, but there seemed to be a very faint sign of life in the distance.

  "Girl wonder or boy genius?"

  "Genius, I think. It feels like it's on the bigger side."

  "Good enough. Point the way."

  Wesley did as he was asked, opening his eyes at the same time, and found that he was pointing directly at the door still rattling in its frame from something knocking on the other side.

  "So much for good luck," Mongrel grumbled. He sighed. "Whatever. Let's do it."

  As the gangly thing and the blubbery thing began making their way into the room, Mongrel had his chimp toss the blocking chair aside from the door. A split second later, Mongrel booted the thing with all his strength, sent the door swinging free of its splintered frame to hopefully catch what was on the other side unawares.

  Except there was nothing on the other side. Just a dark, empty hallway.

  Seeing no cause to question small fortunes at the moment, the three of them hurried through the door, though Number One was forced to release his Barrier dome in the process. Mongrel swung the door shut after them, and the chimp repaired the damage done to the lock so it wouldn't come open quite so easily.

  Once closed, they all saw what had been causing the thumping on the door. A large brass clapper was still swinging of its own accord, had the surrounding wood shaking each time the arm struck the base.

  "Tricky little bitch," Mongrel snarled between clenched teeth. "It was just trying to distract us; keep us pinned down in one place." He looked up and down the featureless hallway. "Well, if the house didn't want us to go this way, I reckon that means we're headed in the right direction."

  Rather than try any of the other doors on either side of the hallway, Mongrel had Number One use a skill to simply tear down the wall ahead of them, momentarily revealing that same black void from earlier before a room swiftly slid into place. They continued like that, going through walls to progress from one room to the next. Wesley was struggling to hang onto his cast of Detect, and the sign of life he had sensed was continually moving around on him, but it was nonetheless becoming clearer and closer the further they went.

  Then, quite suddenly, he caught a flicker on his left as they entered a new hallway, and there at the far end of it was Sam Darling. She was still locked in combat with the albino werewolf, the two of them rolling and snarling and wrestling for supremacy, blood from both parties smeared liberally along the floor and walls, even up the ceiling.

  Wesley was about to call this out to Mongrel when the hallway rattled violently, and there was a sound like a ship groaning under stress, and a wall shot down with force to separate their half from Sam's. There was a violent tug as the two halves were ripped apart, and Wesley went sprawling on the floor, flopping with his useless arms until Number One helped him up.

  "Looks like the house is trying to keep us and the girl separate," Mongrel said, kicking at a rumpled carpet that had nearly tripped him up. "Pretty clever. It knows she's the biggest threat."

  "It's not the troll?" Wesley asked.

  Mongrel just shook his head, his focus elsewhere.

  With his last guttering vestiges of Detect [Life], Wesley sensed Sam Darling's signature rapidly dwindle and drift away from them until it was no longer perceivable at all. On the other hand, the house's movements seemed to have brought them even closer to the troll's signature. Maybe the old man was right after all, if the house was willing to facilitate their rendezvous with the troll in order to keep them from Sam Darling.

  Just how strong could she be, exactly? She was only Level 8.

  Then again, Magpie was 'only' Level 15, and he had seen her do some things that simply should not be possible, whatever the level.

  After breaking down one last wall, they entered out into a large room very much alive with commotion. Gug the troll was engaged in close combat with the gangly thing, the monster leveraging its superior reach to keep Gug at bay while the troll skillfully dodged most lunging swipes, rolling stray hits off a meaty shoulder as he maintained a tight, sidelong guard.

  The troll spared them one brief glance as they entered through the roughly circular hole in the wall. "Assistance would be appreciated," he said in that low, harsh rumble that suggested his more cold-blooded personality—Nug—had taken over. "Hamstring back of knee or ankle tendon, then stand back."

  Number One looked to his master. Mongrel nodded, and the chimp took the man's sword before waddling, without any apparent fear, into the raucous fray underfoot of two giants even as they were sending broken furniture crashing around the room with their frantic movements.

  Number One rolled between Nug's legs, came up beside the gangly thing, narrowly avoided being stepped on as he slipped behind the back of the creature, and hacked at the ankle with one crisp two-handed swing. Leaving the blade embedded deep inside that pale flesh, the chimp scrambled swiftly away as the creature let out a chilling howl and toppled backward onto its behind, the long calf muscle on the injured leg bunched grotesquely with no tendon to stretch it taut.

  Gug gave a grunt of thanks. "Power Word [Fall]," he said, and the monster promptly fell flat on its back.

  The troll stood straddled over the supine monster. He pinned one of its arms against the floor under his boot, and bumped the other flailing limb out of the way off his shoulder as he stooped down and grasped the creature's oversized head in both hands. The gangly thing let out a second cry, this one in defiance rather than agony, that was swiftly cut off as the troll snapped its neck.

  Once the monster was no longer trying to get up, but only flopping around spasmodically, the troll gave a few hard stomps to the head until it was squished appreciably flatter. The monster went still, then, after one final twitch.

  "It is good to see you," Gug said as he turned his attention to Wesley and the others. He snatched a discarded tablecloth off the floor and began wiping the bloody soles of his boots with it. "I am surprised. I expected most of you squishy humans to be dead by now."

  "Yeah yeah, we're all shocked and amazed to be here," Mongrel replied dully, and accepted the sword back that Number One had just extracted—with some difficulty—from the monster's corpse. He gazed up at the troll, one rheumy eye pinched shut. "You being the genius and all, I don't suppose you've thought up a way to get out of here?"

  "I have, actually," Gug said. "You're lucky to have come across me before I made my escape. I would be amenable to taking you along, if you can keep up."

  Mongrel let out a dry chuckle. "Well, you get points for confidence, at least. All right then, let's hear it."