Chicks in Chainmail (41 page)

Glorian looked at me for a moment. "I
will
carry your treasures for you, but not your weapons and your other, shall we say, impedimenta."

The word
treasures
I liked. "Great. I can deal with that, then. One thing I
would
like, honey, is could you please
stop looking like my Mom
? And like right now! It's driving me crazy."

There was this little wibbly blur in the air where Glorian was standing, and then my Mom sort of turned into—this is going to sound omigod weird—
Brad Pitt
. Like that Glorian character had
read my mind
about the white sand beach and the daiquiris and everything. And now I was going to have to spend this entire exploit with a semi-real know-it-all who looked just like
Brad Pitt
.

I truly felt that I was up to the challenge.

"The second important rale is that you begin the quest with five hundred pieces of gold That's all you have. You must decide how to spend it here in the town. You may purchase anything you like, of course, but what you choose may seriously affect your chances of survival."

"
Ha
," I go. "I've survived
this
long, haven't I? I think that snows that I can manage for myself, thank you very much."

"Maureen, everyone alive today has survived this long. None of them seriously believes he'll live forever."

Well, I wasn't about to tell him that I suspected that I was immortal. Bitsy, it's
true
. I
mean
it. I think I
am
immortal. All right, stop laughing. You just don't know what I know.

Blusher. What do you have in the way of blushers? These aren't
my
tones, after all, but you're seeing the real Maureen pioneering spirit at work here. I guess I can fake it with a layer of Vent du Désert and some Pêche aux Chandelles smushed around on top. That'll look tuf on my nipples, too, huh? Oh, grow
up
, Bitsy. Hey, you don't have one of those big Ping-Pong ball-shaped sable brushes? Never mind, I'll use my thumb.
Resourceful
, sweetie, fighting women are
always
resourceful.

Anyway, I decided to peek around in all five of the shops before I shelled out a single gold piece. I started making up a shopping list. It was pretty tough, though. I. saw a
million
things I wanted—it was like, oh, say your mother gives you a thousand-dollar gift certificate to Tiffany's, and you go in there all excited and everything, and you find out that all you can afford are two silver cigarette cases or
half
a pair of the earrings you
really
want. See what I mean? Perspicuously bogus, huh?

Fortunately, it turned out that the major expense for your average hero-trainee is the weapon. Most begin with a puny dagger and hope to trip over something better during the quest itself. I, of course, came pre-armed with my
most fab
broadsword, Old Betsy, so that meant I could spend more on other things.

I took Glorian's advice and bought food and water and a lamp. Evidently it was dark where we were going. The lamp was this cheesy brass Aladdin-looking thing. It
burned
all right, and it gave off a bright enough light, but when I shook it, nothing sloshed inside. I checked it out, and you know I couldn't even find a place where you'd put oil into the damn thing. "Magic," Glorian goes. I figured
what the hell
.

Finally, I've got about four hundred pieces of gold left. I was going to invest it all in a nice suit of steel plate armor, but Scrupulously Honest and Fair Aethelraed wanted two thousand for it, and I couldn't haggle him down any lower than seventeen five. I finally walked out of his crummy shop wearing a hard leather-outfit studded with metal points—I mean, wow, I would've been a big hit back in the French Quarter bars, but
oh no
! like I wasn't
there
anymore. And I didn't have a whole lot of confidence in the leather gear, not when it came to protecting me from scrabbling claws and gnashing teeth.

So this is how I began my adventure: with the swell groovy kicky bitchin' North Beach Leather ensemble—out nothing much in the way of special hand, foot, or head protection—and a small shield, also leather, but brown. Brown! Who wears
brown
leather?

Oh. Well. On
you
it looks good, honey.

I had the stupid genieless lamp and Old Betsy and five portions of food—Glorian chose them for me, on the basis of nutritional value, wholesome ingredients, and his own idea of a cost/benefit ratio. I asked him, "What
kind
of food is in those packages?" He goes, "It's
food
. Just
food
. The kind you get at a wayside inn. You know, you sit down at a big table and they bring you
food
. I also had a wooden canteen filled with drink—"

"Just
drink"
he goes—and a modest selection of magical items.

I hadn't wanted to spend money on magic. I figured me 'n' Old Betsy ought to be a match for any kind of monster we were likely to meet. Glorian disagreed. I could
always
count on him to disagree. What a
feeb
.

We book it on out of town—the place was five huts big, so
out of town
was maybe a hundred yards down the road—and Glorian goes, "Close your eyes. Please don't ask, just do it."

I closed my eyes like a good girl.

"Fine," he goes. "Now you can open them."

Well, I look and suddenly there's a
cave
beside the road. There hadn't been a cave there before. There hadn't even been rocks for a cave to be
in
. Now there was a bunch of rocks and this like danksome cave. "And this is?"

Brad Pitt looked all blond and solemn. "Caverns measureless to man," he goes.

"Down to a sunless sea," I go. Wow, one of those days I was awake in Mr. Salomon's class finally paid off in The Real World. Anyway, Glorian's eyebrows raised a little. Score one for the Muffster—and don't you
ever
call me that!

"Please, Maureen," Glorian goes, "after you." So, with Old Betsy in one hand and the lamp in the other, I ducked into the cave and started down a long, winding staircase
hewed from the living rock
and like all covered with this
funky
wet green gunk.

"What
is
this place?" I go.

"It's a MUD, Maureen."

"Hey, it's got water dripping down the walls and the place
reeks
, but at least there's no mud. I don't
see
any mud."

"No, not
mud
. MUD. An acronym meaning Multi-User Dungeon. It's a term used by people involved in online computer role-playing games."

Bitsy, I was steamed. "
Games
? Is this a
game
? I don't nave time, for
games
, Glorian! There are poor, suffering women and children out there who need my help!"

Glorian-Brad frowned. "You'll soon find out that this is no game. This is very serious.
Deadly
serious."

"Good," I go. "I don't want to waste valuable killing time on pretend enemies. I haven't even
seen
any monsters yet."

"Soon."

"No
treasures
, either, pal." Hardly had I gotten those words out of my mouth, when I followed a sharp turn in the passageway and entered a big, high-vaulted subterranean chamber. Overhead there were stalactites in every goddamn color you could think
of—stalactites
, Bitsy. No, you're wrong. I made up a mnemonic like fully
years
ago. Stalactite comes alphabetically before stalagmite in the dictionary, and you read from the top to the bottom. Stalactites hang.
Trust
me.

Well, just
forget
it, then, honey. The
important
thing is the chamber wasn't entirely empty. There was this gooey thing in one corner, radiating a kind of sick pink glow. In a horrible way, it reminded me of those pink marshmallow Peeps you see around Easter time. You know, the ones you let get stale and then you microwave 'em. That's what we always did. I'm sorry,

Bitsy, I guess you just missed out on
whole lots
when you were a kid.

I looked more closely at the monster. "
Yuck
," I go. "What
is
that thing?"

"It's a Pink Gooey Thing," Glorian goes. I
know
, Bitsy. He was just
terribly
helpful like that through the whole miserable adventure. I asked him what I should do, and he goes, "You could kill it."

Aw, don't give me that, Bitsy. It looked lite it really
needed
killing. Besides, it would probably have shot me full of monster death rays in another tew seconds. This was like nothing that zoo lady ever brought out to show Johnny Carson.

Johnny Carson
. You know, the theoretically funny guy who comes on right before David Letterman.
Huh
? You're
kidding
. I can't keep up with all that stuff. It's a good thing that like I really
don't care
.

Anyway, I started walking forward, wielding Old Betsy, but then I decided to try out one of my magical weapons. I figured it would be good to get familiar with them before I faced, you know, the evil, terrible Nightmare Critter that guarded the Treasure Beyond Counting. That was my ultimate goal, Glorian had told me. If I lived that long.

I had several scrolls and one magic wand. I felt kind of, oh,
stupid
waving the wand I heard these little mouse-voices in my mind singing "Bibbity-Bob-bity-Boo," but I did it anyway. It was a Wand of Basic Blast, the poosliest magic weapon in the shop, but also the only one I could afford.

The wand made pretty Tinkerbell dust in the air, and then there was a distinct
zapping
sound and I smelled something awful like the time Daddy's fan belt broke on I-95 but he didn't realize it for a few miles. Where the Pink Gooey Thing had been, there was now nothing much except a few pretty red stones.

"Well done, Maureen!" Glorian goes. "You've slain the Pink Gooey Thing. You've gained five Experience Points, and you find two hundred and fifty gold pieces worth of rubies."

"Tremendous," I go. "Let's hurry back up to the town and buy some more of this delicious
drink
, I'm so sure."

"Ha ha. Your Wand of Basic Blast has nine charges left."

"
Say What
?" I go. "Nine charges? You mean these things have to be
reloaded
? What kind of magic is that?"

"I forgot to tell you."

"And what's an Experience Point when it's at home?"

"You wouldn't understand."

I stopped in my tracks. I almost Basic Blasted his supernatural ass right into my next adventure. "Glorian," I go, in my Dangerous Voice, "did I hear you correctly?"

"Um," he goes, doing a speedy reconsider. "When you collect enough Experience Points, you're promoted to the next level and you're rewarded with a greater Hit Point quotient and a larger Hex reserve. Hex Points are what you use to cast a spell without a wand."

"I don't know any spells, Glorian."

"You will," he goes. "Let's just move along now. There's probably another supernatural guide with another hero up on the surface, waiting for us to clear out of here."

I shook my head. "You make this sound like Disneyworld."

He nodded. "A lot of the same people worked on it."

"Uh huh. Well, I just hope I won't have to chop an Abraham Lincoln animatronic to pieces down here. That would be just so ill."

We followed the underground path a little further, into the second vaulted chamber—Glorian preferred to call them "rooms." It was a lot like the first one, complete with a monster waiting for
me. Jeez
, Bitsy, if they really wanted to kill me, you'd think they'd get together and jump on me all at once, instead of spreading themselves so thin. Hey, it was okay by
me
if they were too dumb to live.

This one was a Giant Flaming Grasshopper. Try to imagine it for yourself, because I'm having trouble with these false eyelashes of yours. Where do you buy your accoutrements, honey? Lamston's? I mean,
hell
. I've found better makeup on worlds that hadn't made it into the Industrial Revolution yet. No offense. Hand me those little bitty scissors, okay? I have to trim the ends of these lashes or they poke me in the corner of my eye and
drive me crazy
! Thanks, Bits.

The Grasshopper? Easy, I took Old Betsy to it. Three whacks, that's all. Without sweat. And when I slew the sucker, it disappeared, and there was a curled-up parchment scroll on the ground. I picked it up. "What's this?" I go.

Glorian took a peek. "You have a Scroll of Locate Bathroom. Save that one—you'll want it later."

"Gotcha."

"And you have seven more Experience Points."

"That's just
so
exciting, Glorian. Now c'mon."

In the next dozen rooms, I killed a dozen more monsters: an Inedible Lump, a Hound From Hell, a Blue Blob, a Magenta Blob, three or four more giant insects, a couple of Spooks—one Quilted and one Plaid—and finally the most unspeakable—a Zombie Mallwalker. In return, I scored about fifteen pounds of precious and semi-precious stones, one of the worthless daggers, and a Wand of Shrieking. I also found three other magical items: a Scroll of Gain Weight, a Scroll of Blindness, and a Tonic of Cure Poison.

I dropped the Scrolls of Gain Weight—don't say a
word
, Bitsy—and Blindness. Glorian said there were a lot of booby prizes around in these caverns, mixed in with the valuable stuff. He also said that sometimes what looked at first like a booby prize could turn out to be worth keeping. I thought about what he said for a few seconds, and then I dropped the dagger and the Wand of Shrieking also. It turned out later that he'd been right—aw hell, he was
always
right—and that the Wand of Shrieking would've been very useful against two or three monsters I came across further along.