NOVEL SIMPLE Azrael 2: Just Chatting
Ambrose suddenly stepped through a portal in front of her, and she gave him a look.
The Lich rubbed the back of his skull sheepishly. “My bad? I was designing floors and a boss, and got distracted.”
A moment passed, and then Azrael gave him a nod. “You can do your own thing, I just want you to check in every once-in-a-while so I can make sure you haven’t gone insane, alright Mr. ‘I Use Forbidden Knowledge That Drives People Mad?’”
Ambrose quickly agreed, getting a smile out of his Wraith companion.
“Mind if we have a quick chat?” She asked, wanting to know what he’d been up to.
“Sure thing.” With a wave of his hand, Ambrose pulled a pair of stone chairs from beneath their feet. “What did you want to talk about?”
Taking her seat, Azrael thought out her answer for a moment. “Well, it’s been a while since we actually talked. Last time you just popped in and had me give you some energy. Would you mind telling me a bit about the floors and boss you were working on?”
“Oh, sure thing,” Azrael could hear the smile in his voice, even if he didn’t have the lips to express it. “I made a maze with a bunch of portals and filled it with rabbits.”
She raised an eyebrow at that, so he quickly continued, “The rabbits are partly there for comedic effect, but they are dangerous. They have the layout of their floors installed into their brains, so it’s not easy to lose them, and some of the big ones can block off entire passageways. They’re less meant to hurt people directly than to push them into traps. I was originally also going to add Antigos, but I’m starting to rethink that. They’re a bit too horrifying for my cute fluffy murder maze.
“The space magic and portals make it so that it’s pretty difficult to cheat with magic– just trying to detect the portal to the next floor with someone’s own Spatium– or Soothen– won’t really work because you won’t know which portals link where or which one is the exit portal.”
“Ooh, that’s clever,” Azrael commented, leaning forward. She liked it when he got passionate about this kind of stuff; she just wished there were some way she could help more accurately. She felt pretty useless just managing a bunch of grown women who didn’t need babysitting and keeping track of the days.
“Thanks!” Ambrose chuckled a little bit. “The boss is named Carnic, and he’s a humanoid rabbit. Think Fenrir, but replace the wolf with bunny. I can’t tell if it’s cute or unnerving, but it definitely works for what I want from him.
“I was able to pack a lot of energy into his body, and since he was already based on a creature with very powerful muscles, he’s super strong. I was able to give him a weapon that weighs a crazy amount because of it, and mixed that with your Absiete and some runework to make it lighten up a bit while he’s moving it around. It’s basically a huge diamond club. I picked diamonds, specifically, because of a joke that nobody else in this world will ever understand, but I still think it’s funny,” he explained, delving into the details of everything he’d been doing.
Azrael patiently listened to him. Hearing about all of these cool things he’d been up to was always the highlight of her day… or, more often, her week.
“Oh, right,” Ambrose snapped out of his speech and refocused on her. “I want to remake your armor. Also, how long do I have until the year Esheth gave us is up?”
Azrael nodded. “Feel free to do whatever you need with my gear. I’ll always be fine with testing out your experiments. As for the time…” She pulled a journal out of her pocket– probably looted from the adventurer group that I’d wiped.
Azrael’s finger danced across the book, counting them off one by one. She muttered quietly to herself, “Thirty, sixty, seventy, eighty…” She looked up at Ambrose and confidently said, “It’s been 87 days. That means you’ve got another 278 to go.”