The Bathrobe Knight: Volume 3

  The Bathrobe Knight

  Volume 3

  Written by: Charles Dean

  Edited by: Joshua Swayne

  Copyright © 2015 by Charles Dean

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Table of Contents

  Prologue (Welcome to Stub City)

  Chapter 1: It’s Not Delivery

  Chapter 2: Don’t Eat Yellow Snow

  Chapter 3: Homewreckers and Party Guests

  Chapter 4: Flap Protection Saves Lives

  Chapter 5: Cape Not Included

  Chapter 6: She’s Still Not Dead?

  Chapter 7: Coming Clean Feels Dirty

  Chapter 8: Dungeons and Pandas: Dice, Die and Die

  Chapter 9: Crap, I died. Hit the Reset Button!

  Chapter 10: Save and Continue

  Reliquary

  (Monsters, Races, Characters, Random Drops, Cheat Codes, Bosses, & Gamer Lingo)

  Prologue (Welcome to Stub City)

  A certain stillness could be felt as morning light crept through the windows of the simple childlike bedroom and began its slow and steady siege upon the woman’s peaceful sleeping face. The stale, dead air of a room with little ventilation and lots of dust would, at first glance, have appeared to be unoccupied if it weren’t for the wheelchair tracks that carved tracks through the dust connecting the four major parts of the room: the bed, the computer and dive machine, the bathroom, and the exit. Past that, nothing in the room was ever touched. It was as if everything other than those four places served no purpose at all. Those odd square inches of walk space, the book shelves, the nightstands and old dressers filled with a teenage girl’s clothes would only ever have any utility again if the owners of the house ever decided to sell and move.

  They hadn’t always been useless and unused. In fact, at one point, every inch of the room had constantly changed to serve a new function. The drawers, now filled with clothes that hadn’t been touched in ten years, had once been emptied and reloaded on a regular basis as an excited child grew through multiple sizes and phases. It was just that, after the tragedy, the parents hadn’t had the heart to touch any of it. The girl hadn’t asked. Some set of mixed emotions had twisted in her head and told her that they were precious, and letting go of those things was letting go of everything, and the parents had never offered. The room was just a set of belongings and a few random patches of empty space now that were to be continuously preserved as if they were exhibits an unstaffed museum.

  The stillness persisted as it did every morning, and the woman’s face twisted and contorted into a frown as it did every morning. This was a happier day than usual, but a smile on her face in this world was as infrequent as a meaningful moral message on reality television: it never showed up, and when it did, not even the messenger would realize what had happened.

  “Go away,” she mumbled under her breath, turning over to let her long black hair serve as a shield against the assailant rays of supposed joy and wakefulness. “Let me sleep. I don’t have anywhere to be,” she pleaded. A fact in and of itself, as between her finished homeschooling and her lack of employment and her full stomach from yesterday, even drinking water today was optional. At most, the only thing she would need to get up to do was use the bathroom.

  But the ever glowing annoyance, silent and steadfast, continued to nudge and pressure her against her will to move. To wake up and experience life. To wake up and take a walk outside. That troll of a sun, she moaned as the thought hit her, finally giving in and rubbing her eyes. You want me to go outside, but I’m just moving this body from one world of darkness to another. She groaned to herself as she finished cleaning her eyes of awkward yellow stuff that somehow managed to manifest in every empty crevice of her eyelids the second she closed them for even a simple nap. After her eyes were clean, she leaned up and moved to swing her legs down and begin the same trite routine that she followed every morning. This time, however, the stillness was broken. The silence that only ever occasionally had to fight off the sounds of deep breathing or awkward rustling was cracked and shattered.

  “OWWEEEE!!!” she screamed, grasping her leg that had somehow stumped its toe during the shifting. “OWE!!!” she yelled again, the pain still sharp and annoying.

  “What is it? Are you okay? Dear? Is something wrong?” Her dad slammed through the door within thirty seconds of her uncharacteristically loud bellowing. “Should I call the doctor?”

  “I’m here, I’m here! What’s wrong? Is everything okay? You look a little paler than usual, are you feeling alright?” Her mom barged in immediately after the dad, panicked and gasping for breath.

  “I’m fine, I’m fine, I just stubbed my toe and it hurt like the dickens,” she said, still trying to puzzle out what she had stubbed it on. She finally managed to roll her legs forward and sit up and properly to face her parents. “I said I’m fine,” she repeated, “it was just me stubbing my toe.” She winced at the annoying tingling of pain that still remained as she noticed her parents unwavering eyes and realized that both of their faces had suddenly turned more static and unmoving than any part of the room had ever been. They were staring at her with a hollow, unwavering looks that could have been the masks in a Halloween shop. “Mom, Dad, really, I’m fine. It was just my toe,” she tried again, but they just stared at her.

  “Your . . . toe?” the dad asked first.

  “Yeah . . . just, my . . . to . . .e, had . . .” The woman trailed off mid-sentence as she started to realize why her parents had gone quiet, why they were so shocked. “I just stubbed my . . .” She tried to finish the sentence, but it was no use. The shock had struck her like a thunderbolt of clarity and left her brain fried and sizzling in the aftermath of the insight.

  “Call the doctor. Call the doctor right away,” the mom said as she freed herself from the static cage of stunned bafflement. “We have to tell the doctor, call the doctor right away! THIS IS GREAT!” she cheered, her old wrinkled face ironed clean with excitement as youthful joy swept over her and the father. “You felt your toe!” She hugged her daughter, tears streaming down her face and onto the daughter’s pajamas.

  The father was part of the hug as soon as it was made, the two doting parents unable to contain themselves, but no sooner had he hugged the two women than he had also made it uncomfortable as he reached into his pocket with one hand and started fishing out his cell phone, without ever leaving the hug. “She felt her toe!” he exclaimed excitedly before standing up to make the call.

  The mom, finally freeing her daughter from an embrace that would have made a bear proud, held her daughter by the shoulders and stared into her eyes. “This is great news. The doctor said you would never have feeling there again! This is great!”

  The daughter didn’t move. The whole event had left her with a case of paralysis that seemed to prevent even blinking as she gazed back into her mother's eyes--a mother who was crying through a smile.

  “Valerie, when did you start wearing red contacts?” the mother asked out of the blue.

  Red contacts? I’m not wearing any contacts?

  Her father interrupted her before she could make sense of the thought, however. “I got the doctor on the phone! I got the doctor on th . . . Yes, Doctor Anderson, we need an appointment right away. Valerie can feel her toes!”

  Chapter 1 – It’s Not Delivery

  Darwin:

  “Why are you being so nice?” Darwin finally cut to the chase as his eyes darted back and forth between Stephanie and Charles. “You couldn’t have had this welcome feast prepared j
ust out of the kindness of your heart.”

  Charles laughed. “Kindness of my heart? Oh, dear. That is rich,” he chortled at the idea. “No, I’m doing this to help you out. Not out of kindness, but out of familial love.”

  Darwin blinked. “You’re . . . not my dad, are you?”

  “Well, actually . . .” --Charles stared at his guest of honor-- “Darwin . . . I am your father.”

  “No. This is a joke, right?” Darwin started scooting his chair back from the table, his brain refusing to comprehend what he had just heard. The news was too much to take. It couldn’t be the case. Could it? He knew he wasn’t human, but he had never met another demon outside of Tiqpa. Charles didn’t have red eyes, he wasn’t exceptionally muscular, and his tan was far too impressive to match the complexion of the demons he had met so far. There is no way that Charles could be like me. Is there?

  Stephanie burst out laughing, clearly unable to contain herself. “Darwin . . . the look on your face right then . . . priceless.” She managed to get the words out even as she doubled over in a cackle fit, her eyes watering as she fought to regain her breath.

  Darwin let out a sigh of relief. So it was just a joke. “Alright then, why are you giving me the royal treatment?”

  “When I told you to do the joke, I told you that you were supposed to do the robotic breathing! Without that breathing, the line totally fails,” Stephanie, who was turning red from laughing too hard, chided Charles.

  “Ah. So it was like that.” Charles’s face bore a pensive expression for a moment, but he assumed a good-natured air as he looked at Stephanie. “You still owe me. I kept up my end of the bargain.”

  “Right. It’s all yours, old man.” Stephanie pulled out a small, black object no bigger than a golf ball and tossed it to Charles.

  “Yeah, so I may have lied about the father part, but we are family. I’m your brother-in-law,” he smiled, pocketing the item Stephanie had tossed him. “You’ve probably already met my wife, Eve--your sister--in Tiqpa.”

  Darwin smiled as the memory of meeting Eve surfaced in his head. It was a conversation he would likely never forget. It had lead him both to Stephanie and the Creation Stone, set him on the path to create the new StormGuard Alliance within Tiqpa and was the first time that he had known that someone else out there was like him. It had been a great and unexpected comfort in a world that tried its best not to offer him a moment to breathe. The only thing he couldn’t put together was why Qasin, during the beach battle, had told him that Eve was trying to save him from the Stephanie--especially since Darwin’s new personal cheerleader was working with Eve’s husband.

  “Yeah, I did.” Darwin looked at Stephanie, still trying to make sense of the fact that no-one was turning into stone on her account as he continued to address Charles. “But if you two are married, why isn’t she here?”

  Charles’s good humor seemed to sour just slightly as his face hardened for an instant. It was a small change that would have been entirely unnoticeable if it weren’t for Darwin’s keen eye. “We’ve had differences of opinion, you might say. To this day, we have different ideas on how best to take care of certain things: like our daughter, for example.”

  I have a niece? Eve is a mother? Darwin was getting bombarded with one revelation after another, leaving him shell shocked and a little too overwhelmed to come up with a proper reaction.

  “Don’t forget my part. Family ties or not, you still might not have helped him without me,” Stephanie said as she tossed a piece of candy up in the air and caught it in her mouth.

  “What? There is more?” Darwin wasn’t sure if he wanted to know. He remembered someone saying that there was still stuff to discuss before the fourth member arrived.

  “To our relationship? No. You’re my brother-in-law, and that’s the end of it,” Charles said flatly. “What she means to say is that another reason we’re here is because she asked me to help you. I don’t know much about her personal history, but we’ve worked together a great deal professionally. I owe most of my fortune, the development of Tiqpa and the completion of our AI models to the aid rendered by Stephanie. So, naturally, when she asked me to help you, I knew that I wasn’t in a position to refuse.”

  Darwin closed his eyes for a minute. “Wait . . . How old are you, Stephanie?” He had to ask. He knew he should have asked more important questions: How did she know he would need help? What had she asked Charles to do for him? But, for some reason, the age question was the first one to pop into his mind after listening to Charles, and it instantly took priority.

  “What? Can’t date an older woman?” Stephanie just laughed. “Well, if you must know, I’m over a century old. For our people, demons and all . . . I’m actually kind of young. Don’t go ditching me just cause I’m a little older than you--especially not after all the trouble I went through to help you.”

  “Wait a minute. . . What exactly did you ask Charles for help with? Was it just getting us out of Tiqpa?” Darwin put down the drink he was holding and shifted uneasily in his chair. He was starting to feel like a rat in a cage. He had trusted Stephanie, but now he was finding out that more and more bits and pieces of the story he had been fed weren’t exactly right. She had never said she was young or that she wasn’t a demon. He had simply taken those things for granted--and for a number of different reasons. She spoke and dressed like she was ten years his junior, and she had explicitly stated that she was a Gorgon when he first met her, a claim which had been backed up by the statuary she left in her wake. Of course, Darwin still knew all that could have been just Steph’s in-game character, but what had really convinced him his girl was closer to eighteen than thirty was the fact that she had said he was her first. True, there were women who made it to fifty, or even to the grave, without ever having a boyfriend, but it hadn’t even crossed Darwin’s mind to put her in that category. The way the information was being handed out piecemeal here and there didn’t feel right too, and things weren’t fitting together correctly--something was missing.

  “She hasn’t told you? Hmm . . . I suppose that if I were stuck in Tiqpa, I would wait until I was free too before giving the you the rundown about your condition.” Charles took the napkin from his lap and neatly wiped the crumbs from the corners of his lips before continuing. “Well, this is directly related to the matter I wished to discuss with you, so we might as well put it on the table now: Darwin, you’re going insane. You’re slowly going to start feeling the effects of an insatiable bloodlust that is genetically passed down from one male to another throughout your kind.”

  “I’m going insane?” Darwin mouthed more than spoke. “Bloodlust?”

  “Bloodlust. Battle hunger. There are quite a few words that we could use to classify it, but the end result will still be the same. You’re going to find it increasingly more difficult to control your craving for bloodshed as time progresses, and, eventually, you will find yourself entirely incapable of distinguishing friend from foe.” Charles explained this all calmly, sipping his root beer as if it were a finely-distilled whiskey. “I’m sure you’ve already begun to experience this to at least some small degree.”

  “I have.” Darwin nodded, the memory of his irresistible urge to kill during the last fight still fresh. “It was rather intense.” He studied his beverage with a sullen resignation as if there were answers in the soda that weren’t to be found anywhere else.

  “About that, Dar Dar,” Stephanie said, once more tossing a piece of candy in the air and catching it in her mouth. “That’s just the start. You’ve only had the symptom for, what, a week?”

  “Isn’t it game-related though?” Darwin had to ask. He had to believe that the only reason he was feeling that type of thirst for violence was because of that awful skill in the game. It’s not like it would necessarily exist outside of Tiqpa. I never had any issues with it before I went there.

  “A bit . . .” Stephanie’s face contorted as the third attempt to catch candy in her mouth failed, and a piece of milk chocolate
struck against her left nostril before bouncing off and landing on one of her now-closed eyes, “But only in the sense that there are soul charges, a timer and a health bar quantifying its effects. Otherwise, it would be much harder to monitor and nearly impossible to manage.”

  “If you knew all of this, how come you didn’t say anything sooner? Why didn’t I meet you before Tiqpa?” Darwin was still desperately trying to make everything fit together in his head.

  “Well, that may be because your sister kind of hates me. Like, to the point where she wants to kill me. Maybe both of us . . . I don’t know. Charles, did you forget to send her chocolate chip cookies this year for Christmas?” Stephanie joked as she wiped the dark trail of shame off her nose and eyelid with the back of her wrist.

  “I doubt that any amount of cocoa-filled treats will make her hate me less.” Charles said it in such a flat and matter-of-fact way that it almost felt like he had no personal attachment to the matter. “Tiqpa only added a timer and some other mechanisms to your hunger so that we would be able to measure and monitor the symptoms. It didn’t change the condition’s fundamental properties at all.”

  “How is that even possible?” Darwin couldn’t decide if this science-fictionesque plot device, blood rage being harnessed by a video game, was more cliché or more ridiculous. Stephanie’s explanation was definitely both, and everything was starting to become harder to swallow than an uncracked walnut.

  “Darwin, we can talk about all the details later. There’s still more to the big picture. You’re going insane. Stephanie and I built Tiqpa specifically for you, and it’s there to help you curb your rage so that no real people get killed. That’s why, eventually, we’re going to need you to go back.”

  “I need to go back?” Darwin looked at the delicious food in front of him, then to Stephanie and Charles and finally at the portal. When Stephanie had first mentioned that all the NPCs in his faction could be brought through the portal, he had just assumed that he wouldn’t have to continue risking his life in Tiqpa to take care of them. He had thought that he and his people would be safe and happy, spending their hard-earned gold in the real world.