Page 32 of Looking for Group
Drew zoomed in and out and spun his camera around. He’d never been up here either. Now he came to look at it, someone had put a lot of love into this place. Arachnia’s chamber was a tall dome like the inside of a pepperpot, the walls crisscrossed with webbing as intricate as old lace. Cocooned bodies were strung in spirals from floor to ceiling.
To [Solace]: omg, there’s a dead kobold up there.
To [Solace]: look at its little feet poking out
Drew put his head in his hands. That had been about as suave as one of the suave options inAlpha Protocol7. Here he was, with a cute girl at the top of an enormous spiderweb, talking about dead kobolds.
[Solace] whispers: Ohmigod, kobold feets!
[Solace] whispers: Is it wrong I find that cute?
To [Solace]: probably
[Solace] whispers: hee
At dead-on twenty minutes, Morag called the raid together and they climbed out of Arachnia’s domain and into the Halls of the Torturer.
[Yell][Tortured Victim]: AHHHH! NO! MAKE IT STOP!
[Yell][Vilicus]: Be grateful. To live is to suffer. To suffer is to live.
They passed beneath another archway of thorns and roses into a fairly generic tower of crumbling stone, and fought their way through Vilicus’s twisted, tortured guards.
“You know what I don’t get?” mused Dave.
Magda: “I keep thinking I do, but there always turns out to be something else.”
“What I don’t get,” Dave continued, unperturbed, “is what this big stone tower is doing in the middle of a hedge maze.”
Ialdir: “No, no, this is really cool.”
[Raid][Prospero]: Oh God, you’ve started him
[Raid][Ignatius]: Run awaaaaaaaay!
“About two-thirds of the way intoLegend II,” Ialdir—or Jacob, Drew still wasn’t sure which he preferred to be called—began, “Raziel goes to speak to this man named Vilicus, who studied the secrets of immortality with the dark elves. And this is basically the tower he hangs out in.”
“Yes,” added Bjorn, “if you played the original games, which you wouldn’t because you were a foetus, there’s lots of things you’d recognise.”
“Yeah, but why is it in a maze.” Dave still didn’t sound convinced.
Ialdir sighed. “Because Vilicus betrayed Raziel, which meant the Ritual of Torment Raziel was using to try and save his homeland went wrong, and they all got sucked down into the underworld.”
“Oh right. But why is it in a maze?”
“Because,” growled Bjorn, “it will allow us to get phat loots. Now shut up and hit things.”
They shut up and hit things, and finally arrived at Vilicus’s torture chamber. It was a vast, circular room with grooves cut into the bloodstained floor, chains hanging from the walls and ceiling, and gruesome, improbable-looking torture devices scattered around like socks on laundry day.
Vilicus himself was a tall, dark-haired man in a blood-red robe. Drew knew that up close his face was a horrible patchwork of scars.
[Yell][Vilicus]: Immortality is found through pain. Come, friends, and I will make you immortal.
Morag sighed. “Okay, so Vilicus is a three-phase fight. I don’t know how you did it in Anni, Drew, but we normally three-heal this one. We only need one tank, so I’m going to go Endurance. Everyone give me a tick while I switch specs and change into my healing pants.”
Anni’d had Vilicus on farm for the last couple of months. They’d taken to using this really cheesy strat where they’d had one healer, one tank, and everyone else on DPS to grab the damage buff and burn him down as fast as possible. Unfortunately, you could only get away with that if you were already ridiculously overgeared. Drew had sort of forgotten how to do the fight properly and, in a way, was looking forward to trying, because while it was a total pig, it was also one of the most interesting fights in the dungeon.
Morag had swapped her platemail for slightly different-looking platemail and a slightly gentler-looking sword. “Right. So, in phase one, Drew, can you tank him in a circle so Tainted Blood doesn’t spread too far? Melee DPS, seriously don’t stand in the shit. If you get Curse of Blood, run the fuck away. If you get Curse of Flesh stand the fuck still and let everyone stack on you. If someone gets Curse of Bone, all deeps on them, and get them out again. Phase two, same, but don’t stand in blades. Phase three, all that stuff, but we need to get him down before we get too many Tormented Spirits. Bjorn and Jargogle, you’re our top DPS, so run to the torture equipment and grab Glory Through Pain ASAP.”
