The inside of the Temple of Pep was dark, and the few cracks in the boarded up windows cast solid beams of light through air choked with dust. Varn surveyed the grounds before him. In the gloomy half-light, he could make out dozens of tall shelves carving the area into narrow hallways. He didn’t like how tactically disadvantageous the layout was. He could walk right onto a killing floor without realizing it; run through with a score of spear thrusts through the shelves or coated in burning oil from above. With a heavy sigh of resignation and determination, Varn set one foot in front of the other.
“Now where in this blasted place do they keep the spee kurrz,” Varn wondered. He could see all manner of sand-caked packages on the shelves. It would be the work of 10 men to go through them all in a day. With a stroke of luck, then, Varn saw signs at the tops of the shelves. He could not read the runes of the Old Age, but he did recognize one of the signs as bearing some of the same marks as his box top. He sheathed his club and pulled the parchment out of his satchel. Scanning the faded cardboard, he smirked at his own cleverness when he saw the symbols that matched the sign. He held the box top up to the sign to compare. Some of the symbols had worn off of the sign, but even with the missing runes he could see that “CA_ SPE_K_RS” was a reasonable match for “car speakers” on his box top, so down the hall he went.
Boxes of many shapes and sizes littered the floor and shelves. Some were empty, some had their contents strewn about the ground in shattered fragments. As he searched the shelves for the closest match to his box top, his ears pricked up in warning. Breathing. He could hear the breathing of… several things. Gingerly, Varn pushed a stack of boxes to the side and peered through the shelf. “Of course,” he thought. “Of course the mutants are sleeping in a large pile on the other side of the one shelf I need to search. My luck would have it no other way.
True enough, he could see almost 20 bestial, malformed bodies sleeping in a dogpile that stank of sweat and dry blood. They wore ragged tatters of stolen clothing if they wore anything at all, and gelatinous saliva oozed from slack mouths too full of gnarled teeth to ever close properly. Glossy, lidless, black fish eyes stared at nothing and everything while slow, shallow breaths were the only thing helping reassure Varn that they were in fact asleep.
“This doesn’t change anything,” Varn told himself with some concern. “Just get the artifact and get out of here.” Quickly, he peered over the boxes again, moving a few with quiet precision. Finally, he found one that looked close enough and in decent enough condition that he could be reasonably certain Fidik wouldn’t ask him to come back and do this all again. The only problem was that it was on the far side of the shelf. The side the mutants were sleeping on.
Varn unsheathed his hooked club and, bracing himself against the wobbly shelf, stretched it forward until he could catch the lip of the box with the hook. The package made a soft scraping sound as Varn slowly pulled it closer to him; every inch feeling like a mile, every scrape sounding like a lion’s roar. At last, with the box close enough for his fingertips to touch, he grabbed the box and exhaled a breath he hadn’t been aware he was holding.
Had he been able to read the ancient sigils on the box, he’d have seen it contained the NX-769 6 Way Ultra Performance Car Speaker, a model even more impressive than the one it was replacing. With a thicker 30mm high temperature aluminum voice coil, 40 oz magnet, and 30-22KHZ frequency response, the NX-769 had more power and greater range with which to blast the frequencies that were untenable to mutant ears. The rubber butyl surrounded edge would ensure that this speaker kept the village safe for many more years.
The artifact was in his possession, and all he had stirred was dust. Unfortunately, dust was still too much, and every muscle in Varn’s body clenched as he heard one of the mutants in the pile stir in a fit of coughs. With bated breath Varn stood completely still in the shadows of the hall, waiting to see if the creature would go back to sleep. After what felt like forever, he pushed himself onward in the hopes that silence meant safety. As he approached the last few feet of the hallway, something told him to look up.
A mutant perched atop the high shelf, cocking its head and examining Varn with an appraising eye. Varn tightened his grip on his hooked club and the boxed artifact as the mutant reared it’s head back and screeched.
to be continued!
June 9th, 2010 at 2:30 pm
[...] Continued from part 2… Varn! Look above you! [...]