I had never given a proper speech in my life – and I didn’t think of myself as a very charismatic guy. But hopefully, it wouldn’t take too much effort to get the king to evacuate the cellar, particularly with how much he seemed to respect Aeshma and me already as ‘Messengers’.

  “King, the situation with the Mimics is so… uh, dire. So very dire,” I began, trying my best to sound appropriately dramatic and worldly. “Is there any way, any way at all, that we Messengers could convince you to leave… uh, I mean, depart… this realm? Or at least, to stay in just this part of the cellar, and not the part with all the, um, items?”

  Aeshma seemed to be enjoying my speech. She flashed me a sarcastic thumbs-up.

  The Gremlin King noticed and solemnly raised his thumb as well. “And the messengers of the Stocker will first dissuade,” he recited. A hint of wonder entered his voice as his eyes flitted between Aeshma and me. “The Messengers test my faith – just as the prophecy claimed they would! Fear not; our people’s will is unshakeable. We shall never abandon our ancestral home.”

  “I warned you, Roland! They’re single-minded little buggers!” Aeshma laughed. “Listen Gremlin, you and your friends are gonna be Mimic-food if you don’t keep out of the far side of the cellar. And that’s, like, best-case scenario.” Apparently she thought that intimidating the Gremlins would be more effective than persuading them.

  “Then they shall insinuate our unworthiness, to test our mettle!” the King announced. “Just as it is written! Praise to the Stocker!”

  “Praise to the Stocker!” echoed the row of guards along the wall.

  “Messengers, you know what must be done,” the king continued. “The Mimics taint the land itself, sullying it with their false flesh. You must lead the delegation to parlay with their leader! Convince them of their wickedness! Convince them to depart – else destroy them utterly!”

  Aeshma held her face in her hands, clearly exasperated by the new request. “You want us to… parlay with them?” her muffled voice squeezed out from between her fingers. “That’s great. Except, Mimics can’t talk.”

  “I assure you, my lady, this one can. The foul beast speaks not through a mouth, but rather through the stones themselves. It can be heard only in the deepest, most infested parts of our kingdom. It started generations ago, when–”

  “Through the stones?” Aeshma repeated back to him. She threw me a significant glance. She looked nervous, all of the sudden. “I… yeah, okay. Fine. We’ll parlay with the Mimics for you. Just… have your troops or whatever show us the way.”

  “As it was prophesied!” the King shouted. “With your help, this long war will finally draw to a close. After untold generations, my people will be at peace!” He led us back to the war-room, trailed by his retinue of guards.

  When we were definitely out of earshot, I prodded Aeshma in the back. “Hey, what’s up? You’re acting weird,” I said.

  “I am not!” she hissed nervously.

  “You really are. And nice try intimidating the King back there, by the way. I think your social stats might even be lower than mine are. Oh… uh, is there a way for me to check that, actually? Like, to inspect your stats or whatever?”

  “First of all, no I don’t have worse social stats than you. Check these out,” she said, shaking her chest at me. It was very nice, but…

  “Mhm. Well, even with your ‘potent’ Succubus magic, you couldn’t charm me in the shop upstairs. You’ve got eight Levels on me, and even still.”

  Aeshma frowned. “Okay, smart guy. Well the answer to your second question is that you can check your own stats out but not other people’s.”

  I waited for her to expand on that, but she kept her mouth smugly shut. “Are you… going to tell me how to check my own, then?”

  “Mmmmm… no, I don’t think I will. But hey, let me check my own stats out real quick.” Her expression went blank and her eyes focused off into the middle distance.

  Was that all you needed to do to conjure up a UI? I tried to imitate her, clearing my mind and letting my vision go blurry. But all that happened was I almost tripped over my own feet.

  “Well would you look at that!” Aeshma said. “I’m checking right now, and it looks like I’ve got super high Persuasion, and also Beauty, and also I’m really, really smart.” Her eyes refocused. “Roland, what, uh… what are you doing over there, dude? Are you gonna bust a vein or something?”

  “I’ll bust worse than that if you don’t tell me how to check my stats,” I muttered, letting my face relax back into its normal position. Getting information out of Aeshma was like pulling teeth.

  We reentered the war-room, where a fresh platoon of Gremlins was already waiting for us to join them. They were all geared up with bulky, dagger-laden bandoliers and heavy-looking packs.

  “Now, my subjects!” the king shouted. “March! Deliver the Messengers and end this war!”

  YEAAH!

  WOOOO!

  AIEEE!

  Cheers erupted from the platoon and many of the assembled generals. One of them, the venerable Bimbool, approached us.

  “Hail, Messengers. It seems that I shall lead the platoon to escort you during the operation. What a twist of irony that is,” she said. “You wouldn’t know this, of course, but of the Generals I was the only one to openly oppose Operation Yazata. I know from experience that the only language the Mimics truly understand… is violence.” She sighed. “However, as the King wills, I am bound to obey.”

  This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  She turned to the King and bowed. “By your leave, sire?”

  The king dipped his head, and with Bimbool in the lead, the platoon marched in unison down the hall and through the crack in the enormous wooden double doors. Aeshma and I followed a few paces behind, not bothering to walk in step with the Gremlins.

  Aeshma tapped me on the shoulder. “Just so you know, Mimics don’t usually talk. Not unless they’re big. Like, reeeeeeally big. Takes a lotta Levels.”

  “And that’s why you’re so nervous?”

  “I’m not nervous,” she said in a huff. “Well, maybe a little. It’s what the king said about them, like, taking over the cellar itself that’s getting to me. Pick the wrong door, and we could walk into a Mimic’s belly without even realizing it. Until it’s too late.” To drive her point home, she mimed getting eaten, digested, and finally excreted by a giant Monster.

  “Thanks. I wasn’t sure what that’d be like, but you really helped put it in perspective,” I said. “So… do you think we should maybe just leave? Cut our losses and run? I’m sure there’s another shop somewhere that we could try to get starter gear from…”

  “Ehh, I’m actually thinking it might be safer for us to try to shmooze our way out of this one, than it would be to run off on our own into a Mimic-infested wasteland. If the big Mimic’s smart enough to talk, maybe we can convince it to chase the Gremlins outta here.” She smiled. “And if things go south, we use the ‘em as itty-bitty, furry meat shields to cover our escape.”

  –

  We shuffled behind the platoon for a while, marching through the cellar’s innumerable twists and turns. We walked through a number of lobbies still furnished with half-rotted sofas and chairs, all illuminated in the sputtering glow of ancient, dimmed magical-seeming torches. Some of these rooms had metal vault doors set in the walls, closed and still apparently locked up tight.

  I couldn’t help but imagine what kinds of items might still be squirreled away down here. Seeing as I was going to lose my levels to Aeshma as soon as I got them, I was going to want to take any advantage I could get. If there happened to be some high-quality loot lying around in these vaults… well, maybe it was worth trying to crack one of ‘em open.

  I was still fantasizing about the treasures the vaults must have been hiding an hour later – when my thoughts were interrupted by cries of “Halt!” from the platoon. I peeked ahead, and saw that they had stopped in front of yet another vault door. “May the Stocker forgive you,” they said in unison, before turning and resuming their march through the room.

  “Oof, that’s rough!” Aeshma said, before following after the platoon. My eyes had adjusted enough to the dim cellar for me to barely make out a skeletal hand, grasping the wheel of the vault door. And below it, in a heap on the ground, were the charred skeletal remains of the hand’s original owner.

  Maybe thievery was a bad idea after all.

  “Hey Aeshma, wait up!” I called ahead. I figured now was as good a time as any to try to learn something about the new world I was in. Aeshma slowed her pace to let me catch up. “So when do we get XP, anyway?” I asked. “I feel like I’ve been through a lot today and… well, I would’ve expected to gain a Level already.”

  That seemed to puzzle her. It was like the question was so basic she didn’t know where to start. “You get XP for doing… stuff? I guess? Not just running around, like we’re doing now. You get XP for important stuff. Like… doing Quests for people. Finishing Quests, most importantly. But… I mean, it doesn’t have to be like a formal Quest, you know?”

  By the way Aeshma’s brow was furrowing, I could tell she was putting some real work into devising a coherent explanation. “Like when I yanked that Mimic’s heart out earlier, it earned us some XP. But it’s not like you only get XP for killing things,” she quickly reassured me. “Like, I would’ve gotten some XP from scaring the Mimic off, instead of killing it. Uh, not that I would’ve been able to do that, because that particular Mimic probably wasn’t advanced enough to have any real thoughts or emotions. But you get the idea, right?”

  “Don’t worry about who gets the kills or whatever,” Aeshma said, breaking me from my thoughts. “The whole party splits the XP evenly. So for us, that means whenever one of us gains XP, we split it two ways.”

  I paused to consider what she was saying. “So you’re always going to be a much higher Level than me, right? I guess that’s the part I don’t understand. Won’t you get horrible diminishing returns after a while? Like even right now, draining away one of my Levels should hardly be worth anything at all for you. Relative to how much XP you need to hit Level Nine, I mean.”

  She turned to me and grinned. “You caught on pretty quick! That’s the neat thing about Succubi – we take the Level itself, not the XP you used to get there.”

  I was momentarily stunned. That was why Aeshma had been so excited to learn that I was Level Zero; she needed a partner who could Level up repeatedly from the lowest possible amount of XP. And of course, she needed someone willing to go along with her plan, even though it meant they would be forever Level Zero.

  It wasn’t an especially complicated scheme, but I hadn’t taken Aeshma for someone who could figure out how to exploit the system which governed this world. “So you’re planning on exploiting Succubus mechanics? Power-leveling by stealing away my easy Levels?” I asked.

  “Yeah!” she said cheerfully. “It’s super illegal, too. The Queen banned this particular trick by decree.”

  “But isn’t that your… I dunno, like your function as a Succubus? To seduce the Levels out of people? Why would a hack like that be banned?”

  She shrugged. “Dunno. For our own safety, is what they always told us at Camp. A Monster who gains too much power, too fast, draws all sorts of heat – from Humans and from fellow Monsters. Most Monsters end up tithing any Levels they get to the Queen just to make sure they don’t get overleveled for whatever Zone they’re stationed in.”

  “You’ve mentioned some Queen a couple of times now,” I said. “And that Dungeon nearby, ‘The Queen’s Threshold’, it’s named after her too, right? Who is she? And… well, won’t she be mad that you’re not tithing Levels to her? Do we really want someone like that as an enemy?”

  “Ugh, don’t talk to me about the Queen. She’s a royal asshole!” Aeshma shouted, her voice echoing through the crumbling atrium the platoon had led us into. A few Gremlins turned back to look at us, but I gestured for them to keep moving.

  "She demands tribute and always bosses us around,” Aeshma continued. “It’s ridiculous! And if we don't make her a necklace out of baby teeth, or spend all day guarding some musty old Dungeon, or whatever other idea happens to crawl into her thick skull that day, she labels us as heretics!"

  We clambered over a collapsed pillar that had taken a good chunk of ceiling down with it across the middle of the room. We must have been getting close to our destination, now; this part of the cellar was in much worse shape than anywhere else we’d been. On top of that, the Gremlins seemed to be getting antsy. Even Bimbool sounded shaky as she yelled encouragement to the rest of the platoon.

  “How – ooof!” I huffed, sliding down the side of the pillar. “And how does the Queen boss you around? By e-mail, or…?”

  “No dude, she crawls all up into our heads. Like, psychically. It’s freaky stuff.” Aeshma shook her head. “We’re mostly left to our own devices, unless something major is going down. But… ugh,” she huffed, leaping over the pillar in a single bound.

  “I take it you’re not a big fan of hers.”

  There was fire in Aeshma’s eyes as she said, “The Queen sucks, Roland. Someone has to take her down… and I’m gonna be the one to do it!” She jabbed her thumb into her chest. “Oh, and you’ll help too, I guess. But mostly it’ll be me!”