I wish I could say that things seemed more clear in the morning, but I was as confused as ever. Part of me clearly had no problem looking at Sorel as a romantic partner. But what if she ever turned back? I don’t think I could take that degree of awkward. And every time I thought I had my mind made up about the situation, a little nagging doubt brought me right back to my state of confusion. Worse, my confusion was starting to have an effect on my professional life. I fell into a pit trap and nearly skewered myself on a javelin that fired out of a door. Good thing I ducked—it was dripping with poison.
Well, we finally opened the trapped door so that we could explore the last (and tallest) tower. We find a lab filled with alchemical equipment and a library with hundreds of books. A little bit of the old Sorel emerged and she practically started drooling at the knowledge she could gain from this place. She did not even have a second to explore when the owner of this place made himself known. It was a lich, taking a chemical bath in a vat the size of a rowboat. That’s right. You heard me. A fucking lich.
Well, I did my best to be polite, as the last thing we wanted was to make him angry. He was already pretty steamed at the way we barged into his private abode, so we told the story of how Sir Runic gave us ownership of the place. Well, the lich’s attitude changed after that. He was also a Rump, Ridwick, but his claim to the Manor ended when he died. He said there had to be a living owner of the manor, but as long as we left him alone to his rest and research in the tower, we had nothing to her from him. Qual wanted to put conditions on the promise, like no experimenting on sentient beings, but I knew when to cut a deal, so I cut the dwarf off and shook the lich’s bony hand. Oh, there was one other little condition we had to recover a stone for him called the Heart of Darkness that had been lost under the manor. Seems he can’t go look for it since his teleport gate only functions for the living.
Well, of course I had misgivings, but I would have agreed to anything in order to get out of there. Old Ridwick could have toasted us in less than a minute, and we could not even have made him break a sweat. So Ridwick leads us up a few levels in the tower to a magic mirror in his quarters and we all step though. When we step out, we are in a cold damp chamber, doubtlessly deep underground.
Our first priority was to find a way back up. Our plan was to find the Heart then go have it evaluated. If it was not some key to an evil plan that would blot out all life in the planet, we would keep our word and turn it over to Ridwick. Otherwise, we would toss it in the ocean and leave Tegel for good.
So the dungeon turns out to be something of a pushover. We run into a bunch of skeletons and zombies that take us all of ten seconds to put down. We find some stairs up and a tribe of goblins. In a way it was cathartic to be fighting goblins again. We butchered several dozen of them without taking any serious injuries. My dragon scales were pretty secure protection, and just to change things up a bit I played at being a fighter for a while. The goblins guarded an escape tunnel that led to the beach, so we were double sure that we had a way out.
We also found some stairs down, and since we were all still feeling pretty good, we decided to press on. On the next level down, we started meeting some serious challenges—ghouls, a wight or two, and a pack of boars. No idea how the pigs survived in this steamy hole, but they proved to be the toughest of the lot. I took some pretty bad hits, and Ev was torn up pretty bad, too. I think I’m done playing fighter for a while.
It was about this time that we noticed that Golem had gone. Sorel said good riddance, but I felt kind of responsible for her. I wanted to go look for her, but the others thought that she wasn’t worth it. That made me kind of mad. Just because I brought her to life didn’t mean that she wasn’t alive, or that she wasn’t worth saving. The others pointed out that she hadn’t done a whole lot to help us, and I said that wasn’t the point, since Ev barely did anything to help us and we kept her around. Well, I meant that as a joke, but Ev gets all upset. Naturally, Aleandra sides with Ev and they both turn into unicorns so they can wave their big horsey asses at me. Sorel sides with the amazon twins since she never liked Golem in the first place, and Qual sided with the girls since he’s been kind of a dick since the whole werebear incident.
So I set off on my own to find Golem, just to show that I could have principles, too. It took a while, but I found a secret door that she must have slipped through. That door led down into some kind of natural sauna, where a pool of boiling water surrounded a small island. There, in the center of the little island, was Golem. She must have flown out there, because it looked too far to jump. She seemed happy to see me, but no amount of coaxing could get her to fly back to me.
So I decide to jump out to her. It was a stretch, but I’m pretty athletic, and I knew that I had jumped greater distances before. I sailed across the boiling water with no difficulty, landing right next to Golem. The one thing I hadn’t counted on was the slippery rock on the island. I remember seeing the look of surprise on Golem’s face as I slid right past her, completely out of control until I plunged into the boiling water on the far side.
I remember intense pain, pain that shot through my entire body, making me spasm in agony to such a degree that I could not muster the control needed to swim to the surface. I could feel my skin scald and blister. I screamed, and with the scream boiling water entered my body and began to cook me from the inside out. Then it became too much, and all of my sensations just dissolved into a white light that washed over me, ending the pain and the feeling of being cooked alive.
And then, a moment later, I was looking down at my body through the water. I could no longer feel the heat or steam in the chamber. All I could feel was sadness at seeing my dead, blistered body under ten feet of boiling water. Then I felt anger that my brilliant career had ended in such a clumsy and ignominious manner. Then, I felt confused, since I was dead and still having these thoughts. There was no “step into the light,” no greeting a warm and welcoming divinity. I was still here, in this world. And I was quite clearly still standing in the island, with a real physical body, staring down at my corpse past my…
Breasts. Big, round beautiful naked breasts, of the sort I used to love to ogle. But there they were, hanging on my own chest, and a little farther down, there was a small patch of blonde pubic hair where my “Dagger of Piercing” used to be. I knew the body that I now wore, although I had never seen it from this angle. I had become Golem.
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