Mad Mutagenist’s Mansion II

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After finishing with the Boon Vendor, the same NPC woman who had given the original Dungeon Quest showed up and prompted them to go to their new room. Said room was located behind the same upstairs door that had led to their old room, but it was undeniably a new room.

Not only was it larger, it had decorative elements and luxuries like curtains, a bathtub, and an armchair. The bunk bed had also been replaced with a single queen-sized bed. John could practically feel the Developer’s smirk as he noticed that detail.

They didn’t have to lie down and pretend to go to sleep, though. As soon as they closed the door, the lighting outside went through a fast timelapse of what remained of the sunset, followed by the night and the early morning. The end of the timelapse was marked by a rooster’s call.

As if on cue, which it probably was, the rooster was immediately followed by a knock on the door. “Good morning, brave adventurers. If it is not too much of an imposition upon you, the Retired Watchman would like to have a word with you over breakfast. It seems someone found a bunch of tracks at Hubert the Hunter’s cabin.”

The only tooltips on that line was the hunter’s, which was the same as “yesterday”, and the Retired Watchman’s which was a smidge of backstory about him once being a city watchman in Townsburg. So, down to see the Watchman they went.

“Good morning, adventurers. Thank you for saving the village yesterday. We didn’t end up meeting, but I was coordinating the people on the first floor and that was some solid fighting on your part. Unfortunately, we’re not out of the woods yet, and we could still really use your help. I think the villagers can hold the proverbial fort well enough with some organization, now that we ain’t getting taken by surprise. But we need to find out where these creatures came from and how to stop more from coming, and the only local who might’ve been able to pull it off is missing. There is a trail of trampled underbrush and mixed footprints out by Hubert’s cabin, though, leading into the forest. I reckon it’ll probably lead to wherever the monsters came from.”

The only tooltip in that was Hubert’s again, but once the Retired Watchman was finished speaking, a Quest window popped up as well.

“So, either we were right about the hunter being a trap or there was a branching plot depending on whether we went for him early or not. Also, I’ll bet the reward for the second Bonus Objective includes 50 DP.”

“Yeah,” Qhila nodded, “and it looks like you were right about no more defense scenarios too.”

With nothing further to add, they left the inn and went to the cabin, with Fred and Sosig joining them on the way. In true RPG hand-holding style, they were given a path to follow on the minimap and everything.

The cabin was a mess, or rather the area outside it was. It was covered with smashed bits of wood, that Observe revealed to have been one or more racks for hanging small game or drying meat, and dried bloodstains, and so thoroughly trampled over that separating out individual footprints was impossible.

The trail continued into the woods in an extremely obvious fashion. So after taking a look inside the cabin in case there were enemies, hints, or secrets to be found, they entered the forest.

Rather than going for an actual walk through it, however, they were immediately met with a leaf-green void with a brown loading bar projected onto it. Progress in said bar was represented by crude stick figure renditions of himself and Qhila, judging by their relative heights and the short one having a tail.

“Really? A loading screen?”

“Loading screen?” The inquisitively quirked eyebrow was audible in Qhila’s tone, even if she hadn’t turned away from studying the loading bar.

“It’s a thing that some games use when changing between levels, especially older games. Originally, it was because a computer had limited resources and could only hold so much in memory at a time and load it so fast. A lot of games would’ve been straight up impossible to make for the hardware of their time without them. Nowadays, I think it’s mostly a style choice or because the [developers] don’t want to spend time and money optimizing.”

That bit of explanation was all it took for the “loading” to finish. The void was replaced with a location still inside the forest, by a rocky hillside. Behind them was the trail of trampled undergrowth, and in front of them was a tunnel into the hill, supported by wooden beams that looked old. On the ground next to the opening was a weathered wooden sign with the text “Whitestone Mine”.

“Whitestone Mine? Some of the old people talk about it sometimes, they used to mine chalk here. I’m pretty sure Cora’s fiance died in an accident in there, shortly before it got closed…” Fred commented. A tooltip on the name of the mine confirmed that Cora’s fiance did, indeed, die in a mining accident, and that the mine was closed 50 years ago.

“So we might have to deal with a ghost or an undead miner. Maybe as a secret or bonus boss or something.”

“Only one way to find out.” Qhila shrugged.

They headed inside, with John taking point, flanked by Sosig, while Fred followed Qhila. The pig and farmboy duo had two stances to choose from. Split up was the defensive one, in which Sosig would focus on knocking down enemies close to the other party members, while Fred used a slingshot to harass the foes. This stance also left Qhila in charge of the pair’s one special ability, an acorn throw on a cooldown that would trigger a boosted charge from the pig. In the aggressive mounted stance, they would be spamming it at every opportunity instead.

The mine shaft curved slightly, causing it to grow dark quickly. This was a non-issue for Qhila and, apparently, Sosig, while John and Fred solved it with a dose of cat’s eye elixir. Shortly afterwards, they came upon a bit where a larger chunk had been mined out forming a room.

Inside were two owldogs, flanking a new mutant. A brown, feline body with an extra set of thin, chitinous legs sprouting from the sides and an insect-like head with large, faceted eyes, segmented antennae and mandibles big enough to fit around John’s arm. The punnily named antlion was a combination of black ant and mountain lion traits, taking their size from the latter according to Observe. Beyond that, the only thing setting it apart from past mutants was that it was Level 15.

The mutants spotted them immediately, leaving no room for John and Qhila to strategize. John opened with a spray of alchemist’s fire. The owldogs broke their charge to evade, but the antlion simply pounced through.

Even braced for that possibility, the beast came with enough **** to knock him to the ground. Reflexively, he put up his hands to hold it back, leading to its mandibles snapping shut in the air in front of his face.

This mutant was significantly stronger than the others had been, and John plainly lacked the leverage to keep it at bay for long. Which was made worse by it having the claws on its front paws hooking into his jacket, making it hard to try to slip away, while it still had four legs on the ground making toppling it a daunting pros-

Sosig slammed into the side of the antlion, knocking it over. The hog still dealt very little damage, but what it did just do was much better anyway. Seizing upon the opportunity, John moved on top of the mutant, straddling its side.

He opened the counterattack by punching the Alchemfist spike into one of its eyes and injecting acid. The beast started flailing wildly, almost throwing John off. The Gamer wasn’t about to surrender the advantageous position though, holding on with one hand while raining down flame-fisted blows with the other.

The antlion had the claws and the flexibility to deal damage even while pinned beneath him, but it was as much upper hand as he could get when kiting wasn’t an option. So he powered through and kept attacking, turning it into a DPS race. One that he won handily, but being down 79 HP over a regular encounter was not a good look.

Fortunately, him locking down the main threat had given Qhila and Sosig plenty of room to handle the rest of the encounter. One owldog was downed and twitching, still alive with a sliver of health but incapacitated, presumably by poison darts. Sosig was effectively using the other one as a pinball, with Qhila standing back.

He was just about to ask his kobold companion if she’d decided to leave the mutant to a **** by a thousand tackles when she flicked one finger and pointed at a spot on the floor with the other.

Fred threw an acorn at the spot where she pointed. Sosig kicked up his pace a notch, barreling over to gobble up the treat. In the process, the pig hit the owldog hard enough to send it skidding across the cave floor. It stopped half a kobold pace from Qhila’s feet. Before it had time to regain its bearings, and footing, the kobold alchemist stepped close, slid a dagger from a sheath in her outfit John hadn’t noticed, and slit its throat.

They swiftly dispatched the other one as well, and spent a few minutes healing up. Besides John’s lost HP, Qhila had a light bruise worth a few HP and Sosig had some scratches worth a handful more.

The next room held to the pattern of one larger, new, and punnily named mutant flanked by two familiar ones. This time, it was a pair of beavergoats and a “bullfrog”, a frog large enough that it might have been able to swallow Qhila whole with a pair of wickedly pointed, bovine horns.

Rather than the previous pounce and maul approach, the frog did vertical leap-charges trying to gore people. In between, there were pauses as it reoriented and lined up a new charging lane.

Once again, John took the brunt of the damage, this time by way of being off balance at just the right time to take a hit from the frog. Its mode of attack being fairly predictable came with the tradeoff of it hitting very hard.

Otherwise, John wrecked the goats in melee with Sosig’s help while Qhila poisoned the bullfrog. Then, with the goats no longer making dodging the frog challenging, they finished it with alchemist’s fire and acid darts.

As they were healing up from the second bout, Qhila remarked, “I can’t set traps if we keep just taking them head on like this.”

“Yeah, I was hoping to spot them before we reached their [aggro range] and set up, but either it’s long, the mine is designed to prevent that, or they’re just not running on that bit of video game logic.”

“[Aggro range]?”

“The maximum range that mobs will engage you at.”

“Short enough to matter in these tunnels??? That sounds bloody crazy, why would they do that?”

“I guess it’s mostly tradition and genre expectations at this point.” John shrugged. “Originally, it was because of technical limitations, working in tandem with leashing. In part, it stops people from piling so many active mobs in the same place that the game crashes. In part, mob AIs are bad at countering unorthodox strategies, so it stopped people from gathering up a whole bunch of mobs and killing them in one go with a glitch or terrain they weren’t supposed to interact with or just more massed area of effect damage than you were supposed to be able to feasibly concentrate.”

“Mystic Echoes don’t have technical limitations,” Qhila remarked dryly. “At least not in that sense. We should probably assume they don’t have an [aggro range] until something suggests otherwise. For the next one, I’ll sneak ahead alone and see if I can find them without being noticed. Then I’ll backtrack a little, set a tripwire, grab their attention and bait them into the wire. Then you and the hog can…” she paused, looking like she was thinking hard for a moment before breaking into a smirk, “[go ham] afterwards.”

John chuckled at the pun and nodded in agreement, resisting the urge to reach out and give her a headpat. The monstergirl encyclopedia had revealed that the pin-like objects in her hair that would make this uncomfortable were, in fact, not objects at all. Instead, they were part of her hair, which was technically not hair at all but a type of proto-feather modified to look like hair.

Qhila’s approach was easier and led to them taking less damage, which in turn came out to faster as well once you factored in healing time. That held up even when the 4th group shook up the formula by being in a tunnel instead of a small chamber and consisting of swarms of rattipedes and… mongeese.

The latter were monkeys a little bit smaller than Qhila, with feather covered torsos and goose heads. They were stronger than the swarm types introduced in the previous Segment, being slightly weaker than what he had previously thought of as big mutants. Now, with the antlion and bullfrog, those were reclassified as mid-sized mutants.