Chapter 5

Blackheart gaped at me.

“I was waiting for, like, a whole year to use that line,” I said, cheerfully, twiddling my psi-sword slightly, drawing slow circles in the air with the glowing, humming point.

Blackheart spluttered. “You waited to use that line, you jammy bastard?”

“Yeah, it’s from Princess Bride!” I said.

“I-” Blackheart spluttered even more, lowering the pistol from Kira’s head. As the pistol lowered from her head, Kira immediately brought her elbow slamming down into Blackheart’s gut. The impact of her elbow was audible and satisfying, and it drove every bit of air out of Blackheart’s lungs. He poofed out and staggered backwards, but Kira wasn’t done. She kicked his wrist, sending his gun skittering away from his hand and towards me. I kicked it into my hand, twirled it on my finger, dropped it, and sent a blast into the piloting console. A shower of sparks flew into the air and the autopilot started to make guttural duregar noises.

Kira, meanwhile, had just flipped Blackheart over her shoulder and was stomping on his face.

“Kidnapping me? Kill my bestie’s dad!? Use your shoddy duregar orbital mirrors to kill innocent people?!” She grabbed him and started to shake him now, his head wobbling up and down, his nose dripping blood along his split lip. “I could have knocked out that mirror by myself in five minutes with a slingshot, and it took your entire freaking clan to build it, didn’t it? Didn’t it!” She shook him fiercely. Blackheart mumbled something that sounded a bit like ‘six hours.’

“Six hours!?” Kira shouted. “And you call yourself a-” She stopped. “Do you smell smoke?”

I coughed, then glanced at the sparking, sputtering console, then looked at her. “B-Blackheart shot it,” I said, quickly.

Kira sighed. “Well, we can still get down thanks to your fl-” she stopped, going pale.

“Don’t worry!” I said, holding up my hands. “We have time to jerry rig a new control system!”

A crackling sound came from the console. I and Kira hurried to it and I saw that it was a communication message from an unidentified ship. I tapped at the keyboard, flicking a few switches, and then smiled at Kira. “I bet it’s the vampires calling us!”

A sneering black face that would have been beautiful if it hadn’t been for the expression of pure, malicious evil spreading across her lips peered out at us. She had ruby red eyes and knife-sharp ears and pale white hair that had been decorated with spider pins and pendents. Her clothing looked as if it had been painted on – so taught and so tight I could see her hard puffy nipples. She was sprawling on a throne made of metal spiders, interlocking legs forming the support struts. Behind her stood a shirtless black skinned elven male with a gimp mask and a huge whip, which he held in his hands. His chest had definitely been oiled.

“By the many legs of the dark queen, Lloth...” the drow purred, quietly. “A hu-man in a duh-gar starship. How fascinating. When I intercepted Lord Darkeye’s message and learned that the duh-gar had decided to try and kidnap the Princess Kira, I never expected to see a hu-man in her pre-sense! Hu-mans are ruled by their men which makes them weak and helpless. Unlike we, the dr-oh, and unlike I, the Dread Corsair Queen, Tizit!” She cackled, her fingers going to her chest. Her gimp uncoiled and whipped the air with a loud crack.

“Oh, so, it’s pronounced dr-oh? I thought it was pronounced dr-owe!” I said, nodding.

The Dread Corsair Queen Tizit’s eyes narrowed slowly. “Do you mock me, hu-man?”

“No, I just never knew for sure!” I said. “I guess it’s pronounced dr-oh!”

“Stop!” Blackheart groaned from behind us. I turned back. He was sitting up, clutching at his nose.

“Shut up, dingbat!” I hissed. Then, turning back to Tizit, whose face had actually changed very little. She wasn’t flushing, and she had already looked murderously psychotic before I had said anything, so I was pretty sure that I was cool. I beamed at her. “So, uh, dr-oh, I’ll just tell you right now, I’m not a hu-man. I’m also not human either!”

“Missile crews...” Tizit snarled. “I want you to nuke that shuttle into radioactive ash!”

Then she clicked off the screen.

I blinked.

“She has a speech impediment, you idiot!” Blackheart shouted, his voice sounding muffled, due to his hand closed around his nose.

“Oh...” I blinked. “Oh no! I must have hurt her feelings.”

And that was when the missile target lock alarms started to squeal and howl and scream. I looked at the console and saw that, like, fifty red dots were glowing around every single edge of the scanner array. I gulped and quickly checked the rest of the console. The duregar ship had absolutely no point defense systems. But it did have planar shields. Unfortunately, those were set to open up to ten simultaneous portals to the demiplane of ash. Basically, any laser or missile that hit those portals would zip through and explode harmlessly in another plane of reality. Now, I wasn’t the best at math, but I was pretty sure fifty was bigger than ten.

“Okay!” I said, grabbing onto Kira’s arm, then tugged her close. “Lets go!”

I sprang over to Blackheart. He recoiled, but I grabbed him by his beard and focused. The three of us teleported with a snap. Now, I couldn’t teleport from my Aunt Lisa’s house to the nearest high school. And while Princeton Prep did have field trips to the moon, that didn’t mean that it was close to Earth’s moon. So, I wasn’t able to just blip from the shuttle to the surface of Necronox. Instead, we dropped about a hundred feet and tumbled. But I wasn’t done. I gritted my teeth and teleported again. And again. And again. And again. Each time we blipped, we were in thicker and thicker air, falling faster and faster.

So, I carefully started to bleed off momentum with each teleport. This left my teleporting bit feeling increasingly achey and hurt, my brain feeling like it was being squished and set on fire, all at the same time. I gritted my teeth and fought through the pain, trying to ignore Blackheart’s screaming and swearing, and Kira’s howling in terror. She was, at the very least, not trying to punch me in the face. She was just clinging to me.

Blip.

The city was sprawling beneath us.

Blip.

The wind was roaring.

Blip.

We appeared right beneath the curve of a dome that sat atop a skyscraper, plunging through the air and landing slap bang into a huge pool. Water went sloshing and vampires went screaming and running away in shock. I shook my head as I kicked up and out of the pool, surfacing. Blackheart and Kira surfaced next to me, both gasping. Blackheart looked around himself, then started to swim for the edge of the pool. I, meanwhile, was gaping at the incredibly pale, perfect peach rump of a vampire in a bikini bottom so skinny that it basically vanished between her cheeks. Kira shoved me and I shook my head, blinking at her.

“Hey. Ow.” I winced, feeling a pang shooting through my head.

“Brash, focus,” Kira said, her arms flaring wide.

That was when a brilliant flare of light announced the atomic immolation of our shuttle. I looked up, wincing as I peeked through my fingers. Fifty thermonuclear warheads was a little bit excessive, even in the exceedingly nuke happy field of interstellar warfare. I mean, come on. It wasn’t even that big of a shuttle.

Kira, meanwhile, was swimming to the edge of the pool. I turned and watched her emerge. Her dress was now very filmy and very very transparent. It clung to her golden brown skin like a layer of gauzy paint, clinging tight to her full, round rump. Her skin shone through the now soaked fabric and I felt my throat go as dry as my swim-trunks got tight. Then Kira grabbed Blackheart, who had been rushing for the door, and slammed him back into the pavement. He started to cower as she glared down at him.

“Nnnh, that’s so hot,” I whispered.

“Brash!”

P90’s voice boomed in my head.

“Yeah, what?” I asked, swimming to the edge of the pool.

“See, told you he was fine,” P90 said to someone else, even though I could still hear her. “Where are you and Kira?”

“We’re on a skyscraper. Track my GPS!” I said, cheerfully.

“Brash, don’t!” G282 shouted.

“Why?” I asked, scrambling from the pool. “It’s not like ... oh right, the drow...” I slapped my hand over my face.

“We’ll be there in two minutes!” P90 said, but then the communication link clicked off. I looked around the former pool party. The vampires had gone running, but it was clear we were far enough from where the orbital mirror had been focused – they hadn’t even known that, half a planet away, millions of vampires had been in threat of a Final Death. Which, I supposed, was a good thing. But this dome didn’t exactly strike me as easily defensible. However, before I could even mention the idea of leaving, the doors into and out of the dome shut with a clattering crunch and the dome itself was sealed in a rattling, extending array of Bat-mobile style future armor. Like on Voyager, during the finale!

“Oh boy,” I said.

“It looks like riot defense stuff,” Kira said, shaking her head. “Did P90 contact you?”

“Yeah, the Rusty Dragon will be here for pickup in...” I checked my dripping, watchless wrist. “Two minutes.”

Kira snorted, then suddenly flushed and covered her chest with her arms. Her cheeks flared even darker as she saw that I had shifted my clothes to a simple swim trunks. “I-I’m going to, uh, pop behind that, uh, planter, and I’m going to, uh prestidigitate my clothes dry.” She nodded and then scurried off.

Blackheart panted. “Tizit is going to be sending Driders, you know?” he asked. “She has a whole colony of the buggers.”

“Driders ... those are drow who ride pink ponies, right?” I asked.

“No,” Blackheart said, flatly.

“Well, it was worth a shot!” I said, then started to look around for some kind of weapon. In the end, all I found was a spritzer that was used to add bubblies to blood. I was frowning at the spritzer when Kira stepped out from behind the planter, dry as she had been when this adventure started, and the first drow boarding torpedo smashed through the dome’s metal covering and glass interior. The nose crunched into concrete and sent pool chairs flying. Kira lifted up her palm, her fingers spreading as she started to incant. A magic shield flared to life around her.

“Nice!” I said, turning to face the torpedo, which was starting to groan and click as the exterior door whirred open. “What other spells you got?”

“Cantrips,” she said, shyly. “T-That’s my only spell slot. You?”

“I really need to memorize actual combat magic eventually!” I said as the door opened and the first drider emerged.

He was not riding a pony.

Basically, take a drow elf dude. Sexy, right? All black skinned and leanly muscled, with those cute as heck elf ears? But, like, evil looking, so that made them even sexier due to the law of exponential mortality-sexual dynamic inversion? Now, take the lower half of that drow elf dude and replace it with a big ass honking huge spider butt. And legs. Lots of them. This guy looked like he was mostly black widow down there, and he was dressed in the sleek black combat armor of most drow. He held a curved cutlass in one hand and a shock-pistol in his other hands. His head was contained in a sleek combat helmet, which quickly swept the room.

“Hi!” I said, leaning down infront of him – having leaped onto the torpedo between the door starting to open and now. “Joker style!” I shouted, then sprayed spritzer right in his face. It, unlike the Joker’s flower, was not acid. Which was good, have you ever used acid against someone in combat? Don’t! It’s fucking monstrous. The spritzer’s frizzy solution started to spread across his visor and the drider recoiled as I flipped around, landing right before him, and tried the age old tactic of punching him right in his spider nards.

The drider made a sound somewhere between “Lloth!” and “Ffuck!” and doubled over. Which let his helmet meet Mr. Knee! I grabbed his helmet and bounced him off Mr. Knee. After that short discussion, the drider decided to visit sleepytown. As he sprawled on the ground, I grabbed him and shoved him back up into the boarding torpedo. His legs twisted and tangled up as he was squished up into the doorway, his drider buddies crying out in shock and irritation as they tried to get past him.

“Go Brash!” Kira cheered.

Crunch!

That was the sound of boarding torpedo two punching through. This one actually landed at a lower angle, meaning that the front door was more properly situated to just swing right open. Two driders rushed out as quickly as they could. Both were carrying shock-pistols in both hands and were firing them off like Old West Cowboys, but evil and made of spiders. Sparking lightning bolts shot through the air – one skimmed along Kira’s shield spell, causing the shield to flare with the impact and forcing her to dive for cover behind the drink stand. Bottles of fine blood – prolly doctors and stuff – exploded in sprays of red mist as lightning bolts struck the glass and flash boiled the blood.

Blackheart, meanwhile, had rolled behind a pool chair and was leaning over the plastic and rubber frame, holding a backup laser pen. Take a laser pointer, and make it more shooty. That’s a laser pen. They were supposed to be used to mark metal you can’t just scribble on with ink cause you’re in a vacuum. Blackheart used it to sweep across the chest armor of the driders, causing steams of ablated armor to bust into existence. The driders continued their charge.

But, as my theme song said: I could never fail!

Which is why, despite not having flight speed, I delivered a perfect flying missile drop kick right into the side of one of the driders. The downside was, without having flight, I ended up sprawled on my back. The upside was I still hit the drider with enough force to send him staggering into his buddy. The two went down in a pale. But then another drider was rushing towards me – a longsword in his hand. He swung it at me and I manifested my psi-sword. Blade met blade with a crackle and flare of sparks.

Turns out, darksteel crafted in the half-baked underdark of some backwater crime planet was not on par with your average adamantine reinforced steel, let alone the psychic power of a flipping dragon. Hence why the drider jerked back with a smoldering stump of a blade, rather than his weapon. He looked at it.

I lashed out at my palm. “Summon cuddly creature!” I shouted, and fired off one of the spells I did have memorized. Hence why a celestial kitten was yanked from the Outer Planes – likely the Beastlands – only to find itself flying through the air and right into the face of a very surprised drider. The drider recoiled, and the bright white kitten with the golden halo started to claw and hiss and claw some more. The drider fell back into the water. The kitten spread his tiny angelic wings and soared away from the water with a disdainful hiss.

Crunch. Another boarding torpedo.

More driders.

“Come onnnnn!” I groaned.

But this boarding torpedo suddenly veered and rocked forward, dragging a line of damage along the much abused metal shield of the dome. A squeal and crunch and crackling sound filled the dome and the boarding torpedo slipped free from the dome and fell into the pool with a splash that nearly swamped all of us. This left a big old opening in the dome – and through it, I could see the slightly battered looking Rusty Dragon, its side door opened, P90 standing in the back, with a grappling hook in one hand.

She swung it at me. I grabbed it. Kira grabbed me. I held out my hand. “Blackheart!” I shouted.

He looked at me.

“Fuck that!” He shouted.

“But-”

“Fuck you!” He shouted.

“I-” I started, but then I was dragged up and away by the Rusty Dragon soaring into the sky, dragging us out past the dome and into the killing cold of Necronox’s eternal night. I looked after me as the driders moved in, rushing towards Blackheart, his laser pen winking and glittering as he swept it about ... until there was nothing but dark armor and raised blades.

“Blackheart...” I whispered.

The Rusty Dragon soared away from Necronox and we no longer could all fit into the cockpit. There was a solution, one that Cindi revealed with a slightly sheepish air.

“You have your own demiplane?” I squeaked, walking through the door and into the large, green field that swept towards a gorgeous mansion. “I mean, my mom owns a demiplane, and she’s a freaking dragon space princess of a space dragon empire! How rich is your dad?”

“He’s not that rich,” Cindi said, flushing as she crossed her arms over her chest. “it’s a super cheap demiplane!”

Fog roiled in the forest that surrounded the mansion. My brow furrowed as I looked at the swirling gray fog that spread between the trees. In the distance, I could hear a hooting owl, and the sky looked infinitely blue, shading to almost black. It was faintly chilly. Cindi continued: “This is just my ... family’s ... backup mansion.”

A rumble of thunder echoed from the distance and a single line of lightning sketched across the sky, illuminating the mansion in stark colors, drawing attention to just how big and foreboding it looked. It was three stories tall, after all, and had leering gargoyles on every edge. I frowned, rubbing my chin.

“There’s something definitely odd about this place...” I said.

Alex, who was floating through the air, sniffed. Then she sniffed again, her nose actually shifting into an almost bat-like nose to better sniff with. It made her look even more cute. Her eyes narrowed slowly. “Something smells familiar,” she said.

“Lets just get inside,” G282 said, starting forward across the grass towards the mansion. In the distance, a wolf howled. I shrugged, then walked with the rest of the girls to the mansion. But there was this teeny tiny complaint in the back of my mind that was trying to say something was slightly off here, about this misty, foggy demiplane. An almost dreadful feeling was growing in me. We walked in through the front door and I saw that the main entrance of the mansion was decorated by a statue of a stern looking man in a high collar, standing and glaring down at all who entered, as if they owed him something. The walls were decorated with paintings of sad women, ravens, and castles on lonely looking hills.

“Dedicated to Count von Zarovich...” I read off the plaque on the statue’s base. “Hmm. Lots of fog. A faint feeling of dread. Loads of ravens?” I asked. “Holy crap! We’re on the Sword Coast!” I exclaimed, swinging around and pointing my finger at Cindi.

Cindi spluttered.

“You took the Princess of the Diamond Asteroids to the demiplade of dread!?” G282 shouted at Cindi, grabbing her arm and squeezing it. Cindi hissed, grabbing her wrist, trying to lever himself free. Cindi squirmed as G282 continued to shout at her. “Are you insane? What is wrong with you!? Most people who enter this place never leave!”

“That’s why the land values are so low!” Cindi squealed. “And it’s a planar gate, we can just walk out!” She pointed at the front door. “See? It never ever closes!”

Alex snickered. “Also, Strahd’s aight. He won’t bug us, my Dad got him a wedding gift.” She grinned ... but it was a sad grin. “He said that it was the first and last time he ever saw Stradh crack a grin.” She shook her head. “Come on. I need a freaking drink.”

We all gathered in the slightly dusty, cobweb strewn kitchen and sat down. G282 forced Cindi to talk first.

“We just own one tiny plot of land in Ravenloft, that’s all,” she said. “You can buy an entire mansion in Ravenloft for the same price you can buy a single person loft in the Silicon Valley! It was very economical, doubly so when paired with a permanent planar gate.” She sounded a bit defensive. “A-And the locals aren’t even that bad, so long as you stay on the path, don’t leave during the full moon, and never ever go near Castle Ravenloft.”

“Oh, is that all?” P90 asked, her voice set to level 9 angry gruff warrior girl sarcasm.

“Hey, honey?” Alex asked, leaning up close to me. Her hand grabbed mine under the table and squeezed – cold fingers interlocking with mine. “I know we’re not married, but can you get me a drinksie, pwease?”

“Uh, sure!” I said, nodding. I may have been tricked into an arranged marriage so that Alexandress the Vampire Princess could annoy her Dad, but just because it had almost gotten me killed three times was no reason to hold that against her. Because she was so cute!

Alex beamed, then chomped down on my neck.

I’m a mega-damage creature. That means that most small arms fire bounces off me, and I’m immune to a remarkable amount of things. But one of those was not the fang-points of a vampire’s chompers. So, those fangs sank up to the gums in my neck and that was when I learned why vampires were so popular at parties. Being chomped felt amazing. Pleasure throbbed out of the contact point and I squirmed and gasped, my leg kicking out and bumping against an empty chair across and to the right from me. My eyes widened and my mouth opened as I made a noise that sounded a bit like ‘awwwahuuhuahmmghahhhghgh!’