You Can't Spell Funnel Without Fun

Chapter 4. Touch My Butt

"Oh shit! Suze!" I ran back out the door into the hallway while brandishing the spider-gut splattered mannequin arm in front of me in what I hoped was a threatening manner. Only the balljoint whirled and the arm flopped over pathetically.

The lights bobbed in my wake like balloons following a child.

Suze sat in the middle of the stone hallway with a wan expression on her face. In shock, she stared at the webbing wrapped around her while her expression turned into one of confusion.

"Suze? Susana?"

"A spider just wrapped me in a cocoon?" It was a question, but also a statement at the same time. Her Brazilian accent was thicker than normal. There was fear on her face along with that confusion.

"Yeah, I killed it. A baby giant spider."

"Baby spiders can't spin." Suze said in her pedantic way that she did when I said something dumb. Usually it was over the cool fun science facts that people forwarded from TikTok that Suze always claimed had very little proof behind them, but made for a great byline so the media liked to post them. "It didn't have a spinneret. How did it spin this?" Suze touched the silk and then she gasped. "I just had a voice ask if I wanted to loot spider silk."

"Loot it!" I shouted and tsked in case my lights gave out.

"How do I do that?"

"I dunno. Say yes maybe?"

"Yes?" Suze was more asking a question to clarify if that was what I meant, but it didn't matter the context. The affirmation was enough. The spider silk disappeared.

She shrieked, scrambling backwards and smacked into the stone wall. Then groaned and rubbed her head.

"Where'd it go? Do you have an inventory?" I looked her over, trying to discern if there was anything different about her. But the woman looked the same. Same white overalls covered in splatters of paint. Same ridiculously pristine white running shoes, despite the rest of her clothes being covered in all kinds of paint colours. She looked like she typically did.

"Kaylee. What the shit is going on?"

"You heard the guy?"

Suze nodded. "Mmhm. The one who sounded like a used car salesman?"

"Yeah. Him." The lights disappeared. "Wait a minute." I tsked and they came back to life.

"What the shit is that?"

"A spell. A cantrip. I learned it right away. I bet you can learn it too. Just think let there be light. And then there is. The command word seems to be tsking." The globes flared brighter in response for a second, but then back to their typical brightness. "This would be so much easier if I had UI or a HUD or something."

When I said that, my vision went blank in blackness and then pixelated squares cleared out like a terrible PowerPoint transition until I could see again, but this time my vision held a rudimentary UI that not was dissimilar to the unmodded UI of Realms. It'd been so long since I saw it in that form, that it was likely to be the unmodded UI of Realms.

I felt that ping. That feeling I got when I watched a crime show and saw the person that we'd later find out was the killer. If there was audio attached to the feeling, it'd be deep and foreboding. Something right out of that Inception movie soundtrack.

I ignored it because when I tsked some light into existence, I got an alert.

Level up! Cantrip Minor Globes of Light. Somatic and verbal components required. Duration of 40 seconds at this level of the spell.