"Do you have much firsthand experience with Phase Shift Instability, Salazar?" Tapper asked, but the other occupant of the decontamination chamber didn't give a direct answer. Salazar had stopped using words altogether approximately 35 minutes ago. Now he mostly just groaned slightly while he slowly thudded his head against the wall, but thankfully Tapper could fine-tune his social parameters for any client. Now the robot could nearly decipher Salazar's responses in the pitch and severity of his moans, so Tapper kept using the mercenary as a soundboard for their recent adventures.

Salazar groaned a moderate, neutral amount.

"I understand why you tend to avoid interacting with those energies. Instability is in the name, after all! But I have to agree with Ricky's plea that we seek out areas of Phase influence. Especially for their unique effects! Although they only seem to directly affect us some of the time but not others, like the cornfield."

The groan rose to a frantic pitch for just a second.

"The cornfield was indeed quite scary, my friend! I am quite positive the haunted forest was larger inside than its circumference would allow, which I have only witnessed in areas of high instability. And yet, it did not grant me… my programs with any increased growth." Tapper caught his near slip and internally chastised himself. One drawback of using a companion as his soundboard was that Tapper's customer service parameters would automatically deprioritize if they weren't used, taking with it their filters for inappropriate subjects. Tapper was effectively growing too comfortable around friends that didn't know about his magic, so he needed to watch his wording.

Tapper missed the first part of Salazar's groan, and what he caught said either "I don't understand" or "I don't care." Surely his friend meant the former, so Tapper hurried along.

"I mean from the monsters or trials presented by the cobwood, I did not learn anything from it. So the main question is: Are the cornfields a unique form of Phase Shift Instability that I cannot sync with, or have I merely not met the requirements to pass its tribulations?"

The lights suddenly snapped on, and Salazar started sobbing in his gas mask. "Thank you, thank you! Decontaminate and let me out, please!!" He held his hands up reverently as the wall vents coughed to life and started spraying its fumes, only for the lights to snap a harsh red an instant later.

"Warning: Genetic mutation threshold surpassed for human classification," the pleasant female voice intoned. "No security override detected, switching to containment mode."

Salazar balled his outstretched hands and slammed them against the door, growling with indignation. "I did the damn security check, you fucking b–"

Every surface in the chamber electrified at once, cutting off Salazar's rant as both occupants seized up. Multijointed arms folded out of the walls and grasped Salazar, holding his twitching form aloft as a seam split down the middle of the floor, and a slice of blinding light cut through the room. The scanners didn't acknowledge Tapper's presence in any form, including when he fell through the floor and bounced off a set of machinery hard enough to dislocate a leg. Tapper landed in a painful heap that gave him a sideways view of Salazar's plight, as the arms set him down on a raised narrow bed directly beneath the trap door. One of the arms snaked around the bed, binding Salazar to it with a long strip of black tape right as he broke out of his fugue state.

They had dropped into a medical examination room, with the tattered remains of plastic privacy sheets littering the dusty floor. A separate bundle of medical limbs hung from a shared node in the ceiling and positioned itself at the foot of Salazar's bed, hovering like a giant metal jellyfish. "Genetic anomaly saturation: 72.3%. Parameters met for harvesting: Prehensile tail, eyes, tongue, teeth, skin, fingers…" The pleasant female voice continued to list a majority of Salazar's organic components as the subject wailed, and Tapper attempted to tune both of them out so he could glare at the message in his vision.

[Status debuff: Stunned Twirling stars not included. You can only use one action per round, have no reactions, and are considered flat-footed. Anything that disorientates in a way that scrambles your senses, like a flash of light or getting knocked too hard on the head, can cause a stun, but they usually aren't true injuries. This effect lasts until you pass a Constitution check with a difficulty equal to half the attack roll which caused the debuff.]

Tapper and his friends had not yet found the time or privacy to test out system terms such as "Action" or "Round," but Tapper suffered under the stunned debuff often enough to gather some context clues. Anything and everything he tried to do while stunned felt like he was operating at half capacity, unless he focused entirely on only doing one thing at a time. So Tapper could put himself back together, and he could possibly fend off the medical machine, but doing both before it started harvesting carried extreme risk.

One of the medical arms twitched and drew Tapper's attention, watching as its attached IV bag filled with medicine. Maybe that was the medgel they were here for! "Beginning euthanasia sequence, please wait," the medical drone said instead, and Salazar's panic reached a crescendo.

Tapper's predictive algorithms instantly shut down most options for rescue, leaving only something he had theorized but not yet practiced. He spared enough processing power to aim his sprayer spindle, and everything else went to focusing on the spell's shape and feel. Or, how he theorized the spell should feel.

"Make do until you get due! Twisted ankles and sour grapes, Curdled milk in all your crêpes. Broken mirrors reflect bad luck, Discombobulate by SPRAY SUCK!"

The new magic burned a path through Tapper's spell space. He struggled to prevent the computer parts of his mind from collapsing the matrix by calculating every variable, instead holding its shape by feel alone. It helped that Tapper was already familiar with how it felt to cast Suck as a debuff, now he simply needed to take that internal feeling and externalize it. Spray the very concept of numb limbs, the dizzying sense of vertigo…

The circle clicked, and a line of mana shaped by his will shot out of Tapper's center. Magic flowed down the path he set for it and erupted from his spritzer, spraying a cone of visual distortion across the room for a moment before Tapper shut off the spell. Even while looking in from the outside the twisting visuals made Tapper's eyes lose focus, but the medical drone caught in the spell's epicenter fared far worse. Sparks erupted from old joints and every limb spasmed in a different direction, tangling the robot up in a massive knot. The drone writhed against itself as the pleasant female voice blared an alarm of different error messages, giving Tapper enough time to shut down his own debuff and put his own limbs in order.

The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

Tapper stepped around the thrashing medical drone to free Salazar, until he noticed that the other was barely moving. And when did Salazar stop shouting? Now Tapper could barely hear a choking sound underneath the drone's alarm, and he rushed to remove his friend's gas mask. Salazar's reptilian snout dropped open and his long tongue flopped out, eyes rolling as he gasped for breath.

"Salazar! Are you alright? And… is now an appropriate time to play music? Or an appropriate volume?" Tapper asked. Now that he held the gas mask up, Tapper could hear its internal speakers blaring high-energy pop music loud enough to fear for any organic ear.

"I di'int!" Salazar slurred, without using the tongue still hanging out his mouth. "Thoni's gli-thing… gli… bwoke! Ugh, ewwything ith woozy…"

"Ah, you mean that Soni is glitching!" Tapper nodded with understanding. "But why would your AI assistant suddenly… oh."

Salazar mustered the energy to glare at Tapper and slur, "Wha' did yuw DO?"

"Well, you see, I meant to just… hack the medical drone, but my own systems were still suffering from a debuff after the electric trap triggered," Tapper explained, averting his gaze slightly. "I couldn't trust my aim for a targeted attack, so I set it to more of a wide angle dispersal and I seem to have possibly, accidentally, caught you in it as well."

"Tappah!"

"I apologize, Salazar, but rest assured that the affliction should run its course soon. Though I will admit, I've never used that hack at this strength level before, so I'm not entirely sure when — "

"Tappah, behin' yuw!"

Tapper spun around just in time to see every scalpel, syringe, and instrument on the medical drone activate at once. "Error! Cannot verify — Error! Beginning harvesting — Error! Ta-ta-take it all." A few of the drone's limbs shot out in random directions, jabbing at any instrument or wall panel that it could reach. The one that came the closest to Tapper sported a wedge of hardened light on the end, its edge glowing with enough excess energy to make the air around it blur. Tapper shoved it away and the light blade whipped into the wall, gouging out a wide arc before it got stuck.

"That did not last as long as I hoped!" Tapper wailed, kicking at the medical bed's rusted wheel locks. The medical drone wrenched its arm free and swiveled back around, its main sensor sweeping back and forth as it struggled to focus on Salazar. Tapper whooped and said, "Nevermind Salazar, the drone is still beleaguered! We just need to… move!" His voice warbled as Tapper strained to wrench the medical bed free, swinging it sideways as a medical arm snapped in Salazar's direction.

Tapper crawled onto the long dashboard of instrument panels that ran along the rear wall, using the higher vantage point to maneuver Salazar. So long as Tapper kept feinting and spinning the medical bed then the medical drone couldn't keep track, and the rest of Tapper's limbs acted on their own to deflect any spindles that randomly slashed in his direction. The lone door out lay on the other end of the operating room, and the only way to it meant going directly underneath the drone's many flailing limbs. Tapper needed to calculate the perfect opportunity while constantly shifting his angle, and Salazar's wailing was not helping.

"Thtop thpinning! I'm gonna puuuuke!"

"Nary a moment more Salazar, thank you!" That moment came when most of the drone's limbs billowed in one direction, and Tapper kicked off the rear wall to launch the medical bed forward. He hunched over it to protect Salazar's body with his own as they sailed under the medical drone, and when one spindle got too close his ARM feat countered it. The deflection added momentum and they crashed out the door, shooting into a larger medical suite with multiple rows of larger instruments and work stations. Tapper couldn't spare the time to see what they held, as the door banged open a second time with the medical droid charging after them.

Tapper yelped and spun the medical bed, pushing it down a random aisle as fast as his legs could move. "Persistent little thing, isn't it?" he asked, forcefully keeping his tone conversational.

Salazar shouted something incomprehensible back, and what context Tapper could glean was not fit for translation.

The medical drone quickly caught up to them, swinging with reckless abandon in the more open space and forcing Tapper to make a snap decision. He leapt back onto the medical bed and rode it like a surfboard, offering all of his limbs to parry the onslaught. The drone still wasn't aiming for him, but so long as Tapper kept in the way then his body responded to the threat. It helped that, even though the drone had twice as many limbs as Tapper, only one or two of its cutting tools actually posed any real danger to him. But every single instrument could potentially terminate Salazar, so Tapper only withheld enough attention to keep the bed from crashing into any walls and focused everything else on defense, letting the kinetic knockback of their blows randomly push the bed around the room.

He managed to hold the dome of protection over Salazar until Tapper started to think he had the hang of this, and then the drone grabbed him. It was the same spindle that secured Salazar to the bed, only instead of a neat trailing tape it sputtered a thick tarry wad that stuck to Tapper's arm and yanked him off the bed. The medical drone swayed under the sudden additional weight, careening through a shelf of glass jars before it adjusted for a second pass. Tapper grabbed as many spindles as he could hold, yanking his body to jerk the drone around and keep it from moving anywhere in a straight line.

"Cease operation! Subject is not for harvesting!" Tapper shouted, but the drone didn't respond. "Confound it then, Drill!"

He couldn't reach the drone's main hub, but he could reach the spindle holding the light blade. Tapper's spell supercharged his drill hand and he slammed the point into the spindle's joint, shattering it in seconds. He grabbed the spindle before it could fall off and spun his hand around, jabbing the light blade directly into the center node. The drone started shouting more error messages as its spindles doubled their frantic flailing, whipping Tapper in every direction before it suddenly exploded.

[Widowmaker Willow lvl 5 defeated! +7 XP for participation]

Tapper landed on a human anatomy statue and sent the plastic organs bouncing around the lab. He double-checked that he still had all his limbs but found a new addition, with the glue trap spindle still attached to his arm. It dragged along as Tapper ran to check on Salazar, finding him unharmed but overturned. And immensely annoyed that he was still taped to the medical bed.

"Get me. Off this thing. Now." Since they were safe Tapper could carefully sever the bindings, and Salazar gratefully flopped to the floor. "Whole body still feels numb," Salazar grumbled, smacking the feeling back into his tongue has he slowly pulled himself upright. "Now you are going to explain exactly what the… you did…" Salazar's voice slowly trailed off, and Tapper followed the other's stunned gaze down the aisle.

He was staring at a large container in the middle of the laboratory. Specifically, Salazar was staring into the lone viewport on the container, and the jewel glittering inside. The round window warped dimensions so Tapper wasn't sure how large the jewel was, but he could feel the magic emanating from it in waves and wagered that it dwarfed the trinket Jellico had pilfered. If Tapper could claim that treasure then he would surely become the strongest adventurer of the wastes!

Salazar took one step forward and fell flat on his face. He knew this was foolish with his body and his tech still out of whack, but he couldn't look away from the biggest score of his life. If that Phase-cursed gem still had enough energy to power this building then Salazar could sell it for enough to pay off all the damages from this damned adventure. Gods, he might even still come out ahead!

"Okay, bot. I mean, Tapper," Salazar said, very slowly. "You are going to listen to me, and you are going to do exactly as I say…"

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