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It starts, as many things do, on the Vault Hunters server, in a vault.
Really, Iskall thinks, he should know better by now. Not about vaulting; no sir, he will greed until the timer runs out, he will die of it, and he will not learn! He will not learn today or any other day, and anyone who has a problem with it can go through him! Not even about bringing his friends vaulting. Chaos, certainly, but what good is life without a bit of chaos, yes? It’s why these days, any vault can be co-op. The gods, they tend to agree with Iskall that a certain amount of chaos is good, and having to make specific co-op crystals, that meant it was harder to bother your friends. So no, none of those things are what Iskall regrets.
Technically, the thing he should be regretting, it is doing an altar without asking his teammates, but really. They all would also, when they’re trying to get enough favor for the cool armor. Everyone likes the cool armor. They’re going to reset soon, so Iskall doesn’t have forever to get the cool armor! Doing an altar without asking, well, their group is used to such things. Normally Iskall is good enough at the game that it doesn’t matter, and if it does matter, the idea of having to do the vault with the punishment of the gods is actually pretty fun, usually. That is why the gods do it: so their hunters can face the challenge, the thrill, the… the pizazz!
The problem is, it’s a little hard to deny he should know better by now when he sees the consequences.
He only fails the Wendarr altar a little bit. Just by a tiny bit! It is hardly his fault that the altar had asked him to defeat champions and none had spawned. It had wanted him to defeat five. Five! Either he finds five dungeons, or he spawns five champions randomly, and the odds of that, as everyone knows, are tiny. Wendarr has asked of him an impossible task! He says so in chat with four minutes left, because he isn’t a monster. He gets the predictable sort of complaints back, and he takes them like a man. It’s close, though; he’s good at finding dungeons, nearly having their spawn locations memorized at this point, and while he two of the four he finds are a little too high difficulty for him to risk it, two of them he clears very little trouble, and he even spawns another champion!
The other bemoan Iskall’s decision in his ear. Jordan says he’ll meet up with Iskall to give him a talking-to in person. All in good fun, all in good fun, besides, who knows when two more champions will spawn, yes? He could find two more in the last thirty seconds!
He runs around the room. Abe makes a comment about how the whole vault is going to be harder for no reason, why did you do it at the beginning, Iskall? Pete says something about ‘get good’ that makes Hbomb laugh despite it not being that funny. Iskall says that it’s late at night by his measure, you can judge him, he is sleepy, yes? Hbomb repeats the comment about getting good. Kara starts laughing as well. Iskall despairs that his friends are so mean to him—
Silence.
Iskall takes a moment to re-orient. He looks around. He pulls his communicator out. The message tells him he failed the altar and says that he’s gotten the effect where some mobs are glass canons. Okay, that’s fine, that happens. There are no messages from the other hunters.
“Um,” Iskall says out loud. “Check, check, is the microphone working? Normally I admit our voice chats work better than this, but it is possible there is a bug?”
Silence. It’s almost eerie.
“This is not a usual vault effect. This is a funny new failed altar effect. Someone put it in without telling me. We should blame Hellfire for the nerf, right?”
More silence.
“Hahaha, cool prank, guys!” Iskall says. “You can come out now.”
The silence is getting annoying, actually, and Iskall checks back the chat logs frantically. He then nearly gets his leg gnawed off by a tank he’d forgotten to fully kill while checking the room for dungeons or champions, and gets rather distracted doing what he assures is a very cool fireball move to kill it, and certainly isn’t him panicking and using the first skill that comes to the tip of his fingers at all.
He then whips around. “No one saw that!” he says loudly, expecting Jordan, who had been coming to tease Iskall in person (and possibly hand over some scav items) to pop out at any moment.
He doesn’t. The vault is eerily, weirdly silent.
This is when Iskall realizes what the thing he should have known better is: that things will not go wrong on a new update.
He takes a deep breath. Beta mode. Developer mode. Where is the error? It may be in the chat system, since no one is responding, but Iskall’s timer, it is steadily ticking down, so important game information is still being sent. It could be with the voice system specifically—maybe things went quiet for everyone else? He starts playing with it. With the voice and chat systems misbehaving, he probably shouldn’t contact any of the vault gods until he has left the vault, which means that he might have to leave early.
Then again, the crystals at this stage are hard enough to create. They have everything set to grindy, and even given some of their big farms, Iskall doesn’t always have everything he needs, especially for some of the plants. No one will sell him their botany pot items unless they get to come on the vault. Plus, even without Jordan’s help, he’s doing pretty well at this scav! He just needs to meet up with the others to let them know of the little malfunction, and everything will be fine.
He starts singing out loud so that Jordan can find him—silly man must be lost—and wandering through the dungeon. Surely, at least one of his fellow hunters will find him here soon, yes?
The vault is still quiet. The next room has clearly had a hunter through it—no mobs are spawning anywhere, there’s blocks marking the center, and out of the corner of his eye, Iskall can see one of the swamp hoard mobs that had escaped the hunter’s grasp. There’s not many chests, and a faint glimmer in the air from where a valuable chest had been.
“Hallo? Anyone?” Iskall says.
He hears something.
“Aha! I have found you!” he says brightly. “You have tried to be hiding, but you cannot hide from a Vault Expert like me!”
He happily runs over to where he’d heard the noise. He isn’t quite sure why one of his fellow hunters would be hiding behind a pile of chests, but he is not going to allow whatever prank is inevitable here to ruin his day, even if he did accidentally ruin the vault.
“Alright, I’m coming over—”
“RAWR!” says a tiny voice, half-filled with tears. Iskall reels back as a very tiny shape appears and appears to sneeze at him.
Iskall stares at the—the child? The child stares back.
“R—rawr,” the child says, tearing up visibly. He attempts to sneeze at Iskall again. Small wisps of purple smoke and flame escape his lips, but no true fire.
Iskall only knows one ender dragon. And, actually, thinking about it, isn’t that child wearing a red coat? Red and gold, like a friend of his? And the markings on his cheeks from his dragon-ness, the scale pattern, Iskall would know it anywhere!
“Jordan?” he says, baffled. “Why are you short?”
The child promptly bursts into tears.
This is what makes Iskall finally think that maybe he should know better by now.
Iskall doesn’t know what to do with a crying Jordan. It’s really disconcerting, since Iskall has never heard Jordan cry for real once in his life. Fake crying, yes! Make silly noises, whine, complain, oh yes, constantly. But cry? No no no, not Jordan. Not Iskall’s Captain. He is the Captain! He is big and brave and bold! He is a dragon!
This little Jordan is also a dragon, but he’s tiny.
Iskall is big enough to admit he panicked a little as a result.
“No, no no no, do not cry! I am your friend Iskall, I am good, do not cry!” he says, desperately looking around for something to prove his friendship. He doesn’t end up coming up with anything good, but when he doesn’t hurt Jordan like one of the vault mobs, Jordan seems to decide Iskall might be safe after all. He throws himself at Iskall’s legs. Nervously, Iskall picks up Jordan in his arms. The small Jordan starts truly sobbing now, babbling incomprehensibly about being scared and not knowing where he is. Iskall makes soothing small circles on Jordan’s back, whispering sweet nothings about how it’s okay because his big brother Iskall is here to save the day now.
He hopes Jordan remembers this. Big brother Iskall, big and strong and brave. Much better than remembering whatever else is going on with the vault.
Carefully, with one free hand, he pulls out his communicator. He flips to the page he is not supposed to use unless it is an emergency, his direct line with the vault gods. With one finger, he types out:
> WHAT DID DOWSKY DO LOL
He pauses. This does not convey the urgency of the situation, he feels.
> JORDAN IS LEAKING?????
This also, he thinks, doesn’t convey the urgency of the situation.
> I DO NOT KNOW HOW TO VAULT WITH A BABY
> with a what
Thank goodness, someone is taking this seriously. He takes three tries to turn the thing into a voice call and hold it up to his head. It wouldn’t do to fail to explain how bad it all is because tone is lost over text.
“Iskall,” says one of the booming voices of the vault gods.
“Help me, Jordan is a baby,” Iskall says.
“I’m not a baby, I’m four,” Jordan informs Iskall. His eyes are wide and almost offended.
“He’s not a baby, actually, he’s four,” Iskall amends.
“Jordan is what,” one of the vault gods says. Iskall can never tell which one it is over comm; this is why he normally prays to them at altars like a normal player or makes Dowsky and Hellfire do it.
“He’s four! I found him hiding behind a chest! I finished an altar and then everyone was quiet and then I went looking and now Jordan is four.”
“I’ve always been four,” Jordan says.
“He’s—what, no, that’s not how that works,” Iskall says. “Haven’t you had birthdays?”
“Yeah, four of them,” Jordan says. He holds up a clawed hand. “See? One… two… three… four!”
“You are holding up five fingers,” Iskall says.
“Oh,” Jordan says. “No I’m not.”
“Yes, you are?” Iskall says.
“No, I’m four,” Jordan says.
“Are you arguing with a child,” another vault god says. This one is definitely Idona, because it is too sarcastic to be anyone else.
“No, I would win an argument with a child, I am arguing with a Jordan,” Iskall says, and feels strangely gratified when Jordan laughs at it.
“I see. Regardless, we will look into what is happening. Do not move. We will pause the vault timer.”
A shudder runs through Iskall’s body. Jordan looks up at Iskall and whimpers.
“It is okay. That is a good thing, a good feeling,” Iskall says. “It feels strange in your tummy, but it is—it is just the gods stopping us from getting hurt.”
“You know gods?” Jordan says.
“They’re really more like janitors,” Iskall says.
“What’s a janitor?”
“They clean up and cause messes. It is silly you don’t know that.”
Jordan looks very hard at his hands. “I don’t think I have a janitor.”
“That’s okay, you are one person. One person does not normally have a janitor by themselves.”
“Oh, okay,” Jordan says. “Can you put me down now? There aren’t scary monsters anymore. I’m not good at fighting scary monsters yet, but if there aren’t scary monsters then I think that it is okay.”
“Okay, okay,” Iskall says, putting Jordan down. He immediately clings to Iskall’s leg, making it difficult to move. Iskall is going to have to tell him to let go before he dashes next—wait, can he dash with a child with him at all? If he tries to dash, will the child not simply get left behind or worse, dragged along with him? This is a problem that Iskall does not know how to solve, and he thinks he might panic about it. But no, he will not panic, he is an Iskall. He will simply be bravely concerned about having a baby with him.
It’s sure taking an awfully long time for the vault gods to fix this, he realizes.
Oh no.
“We have bad news,” a voice says. This is Tenos. Iskall does not like hearing that Tenos has bad news.
“Don’t tell me,” Iskall says.
“Everyone has now been reduced in age to a child who was with you. You will need to retrieve them. They are lost,” the god says.
“I am lost,” Jordan says, starting to tear up again.
“No, no no no, don’t start crying,” Iskall says. “It is alright, for you are with me!”
Jordan looks very skeptical.
“We also have good news,” says Velara. “Wendarr can fix it.”
“Yes. But only if you leave the vault with all of the children. I can revert them to the state they were before they entered the vault. But be warned: if you do not exit the vault in time, I will not be able to fix it until you come back to the nest to do a great deal of bug fixing.”
“What? How long do I have then? You paused the timer! I should be fine on time!” Iskall says.
The gods are silent for a long time.
“You will figure it out,” Wendarr says, and promptly hangs up the call.
“HEY!” Iskall says.
“Don’t shout,” Jordan says, covering his ears. “Don’t shout, don’t shout, don’t shout, too loud, too loud—”
“Oh. Ohhh,” Iskall says, and he scoops Jordan back up in his arms. The boy wiggles, but it only takes a moment for him to settle down. Iskall looks down at his communicator and tries to remember everything the other hunters had told him while they were in the vault about where they were going and how they were going to get there. Iskall doesn’t know exactly where to start looking, but hopefully…
Iskall stops himself from wondering how hard it can be. He is a fool, certainly, but he’s not that kind of one.
Iskall doesn’t quite consciously make the decision to try to find Kara first. The others certainly need him just as much, and it’s not as though he actually knows where anyone is for real. If he had the ability to find whoever he wanted whenever he wanted, he’d probably have tried to find H first. H has a tendency to take strangeness in stride; perhaps that would also be true of H as a child? That, or H was getting into danger.
But the child who keeps getting overwhelmed by noises in the vault and has nearly set Iskall on fire twice just exiting the room, it is the Captain. And Iskall assumes that babies can perhaps echolocate one another. They had all been teasing each other, after all, so someone must have let slip where they were going. And even if the Captain didn’t seem to know Iskall was Iskall, exactly, he had started trusting Iskall almost immediately. That level of trust must mean that, somewhere, the Captain had some memory of what had happened.
Therefore, it is perfectly logical impulse that leads to Iskall asking: “So, baby Jordan—”
“I am still not a baby,” Jordan says.
“You are still smaller than the Jordan I know,” Iskall says.
“Oh,” Jordan says.
“So, small Jordan,” Iskall corrects to, and Jordan seems fine with this. “I am looking for your friends in the vault. They are apparently all around. But I have forgotten which direction they may have gone, because they are also lost. Do you know what direction we should go to find them?”
Jordan closes his eyes. He purses his lips together. Iskall tries very hard not to laugh. He just looks silly, is all; he looks like someone trying very hard to pretend they look like they’re thinking. It’s cute and silly and makes Iskall want to take a million pictures. Curse him, not bringing his camera into vaults! In the future, he will be bringing his camera everywhere, so that if his friends get turned into babies again he will never again get caught unprepared.
Finally, Jordan opens them.
“That way,” he says, confidently pointing. Iskall decides that trusting the child is about as good as trusting anything else in a vault and follows Jordan’s directions. Jordan seems to mostly be pointing them in a straight line, and Iskall doesn’t know if that means that he’s making things up or if he’s actually got some idea of where any of the others are, but the worst that can happen is that he runs into a wall or they accidentally activate a room another hunter had not been in yet.
Neither of those things before they find the person that Jordan has been directing them towards, though. It’s funny in hindsight: Iskall could not think of anyone else that the little dragon would have been able to lead them to so unerringly. Even as a baby, it would seem, Jordan knows how to find her.
“Kara,” Jordan says.
“Kara? Where?” Iskall says, staring at the puzzle room they’ve walked into.
“Kara,” Jordan says more insistently.
“Yes, yes, but Kara cannot—ohhhh,” Iskall says, looking down with Jordan. There, at the bottom of the room somehow, next to a three-high stack of blocks that must have been her attempt to climb out, is a black-haired little girl in a cute dress, staring up at them with a slightly impatient expression.
“Get Kara up?” Jordan says.
“Oh, um, yes,” Iskall says. “Let me just—”
He starts to carefully peel Jordan off of himself so he can jump down the pit. Kara had likely landed there while still her fully-grown self, after all.
Jordan suddenly clings onto Iskall so hard that Iskall nearly falls over.
“Woah, woah!” Iskall says.
“No,” Jordan says.
“No?” Iskall says.
Below them, Kara is still mostly just staring. It’s a little disconcerting. Iskall isn’t used to being stared at by Kara quite so intensely.
“No. It’s scary. Stay here,” Jordan says in what passes for a commanding voice when coming from a four-year-old.
“I can’t stay here,” Iskall says.
“Stay,” Jordan says.
Iskall groans. “I can’t jump down with you holding me.”
“I have wings!” Jordan says.
“Can you fly with them?”
Jordan thinks for a minute. “No,” he says with great confidence.
“Well, I have magic feet, and this room, it does not have any mobs in it. You will not have to fight any scary monsters, and I will go get your friend. It will be good, yes?”
“…promise?” Jordan says, looking up at Iskall with wide eyes. Iskall’s heart melts a little.
“Oh, I couldn’t possibly be mean to someone with such cute eyes! I promise,” Iskall says.
“Mkay,” Jordan says. His eyes are welling up again. Iskall is struck with the sense that baby Jordan is perhaps a little bit of a crybaby. He will have to tell Jordan this; Iskall thinks his reaction will be very funny if he hears that. Carefully, Iskall perches baby Jordan on the top of the central dias of the puzzle room. Then, with a deep breath, he jumps down the pit to get Kara.
He only remembers approximately right as he hits the ground that stonefall also causes knock back.
“Oh no,” he starts to say, and then Kara is thrown a short ways across the room, hitting the ground with the tiniest “oof”. Iskall goes running over to her. “Oh no, no no no, I did not mean to do that, you are meant to dodge, it is not meant to knock back party members. That is friendly fire, only fireballs do friendly fire, I have not fired a fireball! No, that is not supposed to have happened—”
“Ow,” Kara says, and she stands up. “Fell over.”
She’s not crying, Iskall realizes. She’s not crying! Jordan, he would be crying already, but Kara mostly just looks very confused.
“Yes, yes, fell over, agreed,” Iskall says. “How many hearts do you have?”
Kara looks down at her hands, tries to count for a moment, looks up at Iskall, and shrugs. “Fell over,” she repeats. “Ouchy.”
Iskall nods. “I will give you a carrot. It will not heal you much, but it is better than nothing, since I don’t have group heal.”
Kara wrinkles her nose and shakes her head. Iskall tries, mentally, to remember what food he has that is not carrots—ah, yes, of course. They are not good for saturation, but they are everywhere in a vault, and his backpack feeds him them anyway, so he’d forgotten.
“Do you want a few sweets?”
Kara considers for a moment before holding out her hand. Iskall places a vault sweet in it. Kara considers it for a moment before stuffing the entire thing in her mouth at once. Oh, a true vault hunter already—Iskall’s proud.
Kara makes a face.
“It too sweet,” she says.
“What? No!” Iskall says.
“Bleh,” Kara says. She then walks over to Iskall and points up at where Jordan is waiting above. “Jor.”
“I’ll get you to Jordan, don’t you worry,” Iskall says. “I am being IskallMAN. To the rescue!” He grabs Kara in his arms. Kara makes a face like she doesn’t like it, but also seems understanding enough. She wiggles less than an unamused baby Jordan, Iskall realizes. That will make this next step easier.
“And… dash!”
“Ah!” Kara says as the power of Iskall’s dash ability sends them flying back to the top of the room. As soon as their feet touch the ground, Kara wiggles out of Iskall’s arms and runs over to Jordan. Jordan is staring at them both with wide eyes.
“You don’t have wings. You aren’t allowed to do that,” Jordan says.
“That is a power the gods give me,” Iskall says.
“Rude,” mumbles Kara, hiding behind Jordan.
“I will protect you! Kara!” Jordan says.
“Jor,” Kara says. She points at Iskall. “Him die.”
“What? Eh?” Iskall says.
“Noooooo,” Jordan says. “No, he’s not a scary monster. Helped me get to you.”
“Oh.” Kara looks at Iskall and makes a face. “Sure?”
Iskall feels very insulted.
“Mhm,” Jordan says.
“‘Kay. Protect you, Jor,” Kara says.
“There are scary monsters. We will both protect,” Jordan says.
“What about me? I can protect you too! Did you know I can throw fireballs?” Iskall says.
“You’re not a dragon. You aren’t allowed to do that,” Jordan says very authoritatively. “I will do that.”
He sneezes again. Kara, very supportively, claps.
Iskall considers whether or not his pride has been wounded enough by a baby child that he needs to demonstrate his fireball-throwing abilities right this second. He then remembers the stonefall incident. It’s not Iskall’s fault for not realizing stonefall knockback would affect Kara, since it doesn’t normally affect other hunters, but he happens to know for a fact that fireball does splash damage to both friend and foe. Perhaps, Iskall thinks, it’s best to leave the fireballing to when there are not small children around.
“Now, if you two come with me, I am going to find more of your friends, okay?”
Kara frowns at him, but Jordan follows willingly, and that seems to be enough for Kara. Iskall can only hope whoever he finds next is just as easy.
Unfortunately, neither Kara nor Jordan have some unerring radar to lead them to the next hunter. Finding each other, it seems, is their only neat trick. When asked, Kara shook her head, and Jordan pointed again, but the direction Jordan pointed to lead to a wall after only one room. Iskall is a bit concerned. Vaults, they are not small. A dedicated hunter could quickly check every single room in a vault if they had to; Iskall has done it before, albeit normally with the hunter skill active and for the sole purpose of finding specific types of chest. However, it typically takes far too much time to do effectively, and it requires liberal use of the dash skill to do. Iskall could do it, but he’d have to leave Jordan and Kara behind.
They have both taken to clinging onto his shirt already as he leads them through two more (thankfully already cleared) normal rooms in the vain attempt to follow Jordan’s incorrect directions. He cannot dash safely like this, not when they both seem to need him nearby. This is despite Kara inexplicably having decided to dislike Iskall, too; when he asks her about this, she simply says “You die” and doesn’t explain further.
Iskall thinks she might be using him as a meat shield? He didn’t know four-year-olds were that ruthless. Maybe, though, she’s just scared and looking for an excuse. It’s funny; he wouldn’t have guessed a baby Kara would be anything like the quiet, monosyllabic, mistrustful girl that’s only following Iskall because ‘Jor’ trusts him. It strikes him that it’s very possible people were very different as children than they are as the adults he knows.
It’s very cute, but it also makes him both feel lonely and conscious of the unknown time limit Wendarr had given him. He wants Kara to like him again, and he knows he could make that happen if he had baby Kara with him. She’s very cute and he once again mourns that he doesn’t have his camera with him. But he wants his friend Kara back, and he thinks it feels sort of irresponsible to be friends with a four-year-old.
…he assumes she’s four?
They walk into another room. “Kara, how old are you?”
Kara gives him a look and holds up both of her hands.
“Um,” Iskall says.
She nods and goes back to whatever she’d been doing with Jordan’s wings.
“You aren’t quite that old,” Iskall tries.
Kara holds up both of her hands again, considers, and then very slowly, as though Iskall can’t understand basic reasoning, says: “Five.”
“Oh, okay. That’s very big. Bigger than Jordan, even! I wouldn’t have guessed,” Iskall says.
She nods, and this time her face lights up slightly.
“You will be brave for me until we get you out of the vault, yes?”
She nods.
“Good. I need plenty of big five-year-olds.”
Kara marches with renewed vigor, occasionally turning to Jordan and making what seems like an attempt to mimic his dragon snarl. He snarls back. They do this back and forth several times through the next few rooms.
Iskall pulls out his communicator.
> Tenos at least give me a camera in the next chest I find I am dying of cuteness
It does not respond. Typical.
They don’t so much find the next of the children so much as he finds them.
Iskall stumbles across a mine room. He’s about to run through it again—empty and silent—when he realizes it is neither empty nor silent. The groaning of the vault mobs around them echoes. Iskall pulls out his sword. Jordan and Kara both hide behind him.
“You are allowed to bite any mobs,” Iskall says.
“Gross,” Kara says.
“I have really sharp teeth. Mama says I’m not allowed to bite things,” Jordan says.
“Well, I say you are,” Iskall says.
Kara sounds far too considering when she says: “Okay.”
Iskall breathes in through his nose. It’s fine. If Kara wants to bite him, well, apparently he deserves it somehow to the Kara Corvus Baby Brain, yes? He will simply deal with it. He waits for the mobs to appear before making a startling discovery: they’re all closest to the door opposite to them. It’s almost as though they were following someone.
He puts his sword away and scoops up both Kara and Jordan. Kara clings onto Iskall while Jordan wiggles. “Do not let go until I tell you to, and you can still bite, okay?” Iskall says, and then he dashes into the next room. Kara screams, upset. Jordan, however, starts laughing. Good to know, but not worth worrying about right now. None of the gods had clarified what happened if someone died in the vault like this, but given that Iskall had been told to go get everyone, he only has horrifying guesses! They’re babies! They’re only babies!
He follows the trail of zombies one more room in, Jordan and Kara in his arms, only to be stopped when the mobs are in the way on the main floor of the room. He prepares to dash over their heads when he’s interrupted by a battle cry.
“YAAAAAY!” yells a tiny voice, and Iskall watches in amazement and horror as a small child wearing red flannel and a demon-shaped vault helmet far too big for his head falls from the top level of the vault right onto the zombie. The zombie proceeds to die as the child wedges a sword into it, popping into experience right there on the ground. He stands up again. Iskall notices that he’s not just carrying a sword but also what appears to be a bucket of slime. Iskall doesn’t know how the slime is relevant.
Iskall stares for a moment.
“Yay! To the rescue! Let’s go!” Hbomb says, and he points his sword at the next door and starts running.
“No, wait!” Iskall says. “You’re just a little child! That helmet probably isn’t even the right level for you! How are you wearing it?”
“Adventure!” Hbomb says, and Iskall has to resist the urge to dash again to catch up. For a child that surely cannot see out of his helmet and with tiny legs, Hbomb is pretty fast. It doesn’t help that, as he is not an adult vault hunter, he has not actually been clearing the rooms as he goes, meaning Iskall is trying to avoid the straggler mobs that Hbomb has left everywhere in his quest. The result is that the remarkably fearless young Hbomb manages to make it into the next room and start running around on the lower level before Iskall can catch up.
The next problem is that Iskall can’t really put Jordan and Kara down now. Jordan has started to cry again, and Kara is holding onto Iskall’s shoulder so tightly he thinks it might bruise. They’d also get hurt by the vault mobs the moment he left them to roam, and he can’t allow that. His easy solution of just dashing in, scooping up Hbomb, and going is gone, but he has to get Hbomb soon—
Well, there’s nothing else for it.
He pulls blocks out of his inventory and builds a four-block high noob pillar. It’s the only fast solution he can think of. He quickly pulls out blocks to make a platform at the top of it. Meanwhile, Hbomb is terrifyingly running around the room, opening chests and looking so deeply in them that he nearly falls over, pulling out random items, and throwing them at the mobs. The number of times a mob nearly harms him makes Iskall want to scream. This is a high-level vault! That helmet alone is not adequate protection!
He puts Kara and Jordan down on the platform. “Stay here,” he says. He dashes across the room and picks up Hbomb in the middle of trying to spin in a circle with his sword. The sword lodges slightly into Iskall’s own chest piece, but vault armor is very strong. It holds up against the sword well enough.
“Oops,” Hbomb says.
“That’s very dangerous,” Iskall says.
“Okay. I am on an adventure,” Hbomb says.
“I am also on an adventure. A—a rescue adventure, too. See those two? They are very scared of the monsters.”
“I can fight the monsters!” Hbomb says, excited. Iskall winces.
“You don’t have to fight, no. You have to help protect them, yes? There are two others, and I need to find them. To rescue, yes? Which means you can have your rescue adventure as we go.”
“Oh,” Hbomb says. “But I like the treasure.”
“I also normally like treasure, but it’s, um, a very adventure thing to do! A very very adventure thing to do to leave the treasure here.”
“That’s not true,” Hbomb says.
“No, no, it is! Cross my heart and hope to die, and I will die a lot if you don’t come with me.”
“No! Rescue!” Hbomb says.
“So come with me?” Iskall asks, praying that it’s convincing.
“Hm. Don’t die. I rescued. Don’t wanna stop adventure,” Hbomb says.
Iskall desperately combs through his head to try to come up with something that will be convincing to baby Hbomb. He has unrolled armor in his inventory, but he really doesn’t want to give Hbomb more armor that doesn’t fit him. He has plenty of vault loot, but he needs that—the player gems he’s gotten from this vault are good, and he needs so much of all of the vault materials if he wants to continue working on his base. He has—oh wait, of course!
“Do you want a sweet?” he asks, holding out a vault sweet. “I’ll give you these if you come with us.”
“Candy?” Hbomb says.
“Well, no, we don’t have the candy in the vaults anymore. The chocolate bars, they were too powerful,” Iskall says.
“Oh. I don’t want that,” Hbomb says.
Iskall panics. “Except this is like even more powerful chocolate, yes? Sweeter! Sweeter than any chocolate bar. Sure, it doesn’t give you speed, but who needs speed when you can have a candy you can eat in one bite? It is a perfect snack for vaulters! That is why it is in my backpack. Unless you would want a carrot more, but I think you want the candy. And you only get candy if you help me rescue the other kids!”
Hbomb considers this before holding out the hand holding the sword. “I want the sweets,” he says.
“Good, good,” Iskall says, and he dashes up to the platform and puts Hbomb down on it. He gives Hbomb the candy before taking the sword and putting it in his inventory. He’d have preferred Hbomb trade over the slime bucket—much harder to hurt yourself with your own sword, Iskall thinks, than with a slime—but he’ll take either. Hbomb eats the candy. His eyes widen. For a moment, Iskall is afraid that he’ll be like Kara and not like it.
“Want more,” Hbomb says. Iskall sighs.
“Yes, but only if you come with me. I can’t carry all of you, so…”
“I’ll follow you and beat the bad guys!” Hbomb says.
“…dead,” mumbles Kara.
Jordan hides behind Iskall’s legs. “Loud,” he mumbles. “Loud loud loud. Stop being loud.”
“Oh, sorry,” Hbomb says. He is trying to whisper, but since he’s too young to understand how whispering works, it comes across a bit more like shouting while pretending to whisper.
“Loud,” Jordan says, looking at Iskall pleadingly. “We’re going away now. You’ll take me.”
“No, I’m protecting! It’s an adventure!” Hbomb says, and then a tank mob that Hbomb had gotten the attention of finally catches up with their platform and Iskall finds himself being forced to aim a fireball at it. Two takes it down. All three kids peer down the platform at the fireballs.
“Woah,” Hbomb says.
“That’s not allowed!” Jordan says, and he stomps his foot. “You aren’t a dragon! That’s not allowed!”
Iskall gets the sense that three children will be harder than two.
The hard part about having Hbomb with them as they check rooms is that Hbomb will wander ahead if Iskall doesn’t hold onto him, but doesn’t like being held onto and slips away startlingly easily. While Jordan and Kara are both limpets, Hbomb wants to wander and explore. It’s clear that Jordan also doesn’t want to tell Iskall when Hbomb has decided to wander off, because he’s taken to using his hands to pretend to be both himself and Hbomb when it happens. It’s not very effective, but it’s most certainly an attempt to let Hbomb go away and to get Iskall all to himself without the “loud” child.
It’s kind of endearing that Jordan is getting jealous and upset over another kid encroaching on their thing. It’s also a pain in the neck. Luckily, Kara doesn’t try to do anything like that, although she does kick Hbomb in the shins once. It does laughingly little due to the protective effects of Hbomb’s omega demon lord helmet, and Hbomb takes it as a joke as a result. This, in turn, seems to endear him to Kara a little bit, and they start talking some.
(Well. “Talking” is a strong word. Hbomb says a bunch of nonsensical things about the adventure they’re on, and Kara occasionally nods or adds one or two words of additional ideas.)
Jordan hates this even more. He starts sneezing at Hbomb. Hbomb does not take this as the threat to set him on fire that it’s clearly meant to be and continues on his merry way.
“Are you sure you don’t know where the others are? There are three of you now, and there should be five,” Iskall says.
“Four,” Hbomb says.
“Huh?” Iskall says.
Hbomb nods. “Not three. I’m not three.”
“Oh, okay,” Iskall says. Hbomb had misunderstood. That’s fine; these things happen from time to time.
He’s about to try to clarify when he notices something strange about the map on his communicator. Iskall has only been using it some—vault maps do not show the entire vault, but are instead localized to the area immediately around a hunter, mostly intended so that none of them get lost within a single room. They do not help much with strongholds in village rooms, but other than that, they can be very useful for making sure a hunter knows their surroundings enough to not die of getting lost.
This map is showing that there is an open dungeon. Iskall wants to hope it’s one of the ones he opened when he was running through the vault earlier trying to kill champions; if it’s not that, he wants to hope it’s one of the dungeons he’s sure the other hunters must have opened.
“I’m going that way!” announces Hbomb, and Iskall only barely manages to lunge and grab his shirt before he goes to wander off in a room that could still have a champion in it.
“You should go. I’ll stay here,” Jordan says to Hbomb.
Kara frowns. “Play,” she says.
“No, my Kara,” Jordan says.
“Jor play,” Kara says.
“I want to go! Adventure!” Hbomb says. “Play there!”
“No,” Iskall says.
“Aww,” Hbomb says as Jordan grabs Kara and gives Hbomb a stink eye. Kara wiggles out of Jordan’s grasp and makes a very annoyed huff at him. Iskall is suddenly struck with the sense that he should somehow be parenting this situation, but he doesn’t know how. It’s not very nice to be possessive, he knows, so he should tell Jordan that. It’s also, however, not very nice to get a playmate killed, and that’s absolutely what Hbomb is doing if he drags Kara into a dungeon. It’s also also not very nice to not explain things to people, like what Kara does. A good parent could figure this out.
Iskall is not a parent. Iskall is stressed.
“Okay, okay. I think that you all should pretend to be nice, okay? Then we will get out of the vault, and then you can fight.”
The three of them don’t seem to understand it.
“I will give you big candies to eat?” Iskall tries.
They all pay attention to him then.
Yep. Definitely not a parent, Iskall thinks, and he turns some vault sweets into blocks, towers the three of them up into a platform with railings the kids shouldn’t be able to get over, and gives them vault sweet blocks. He hops down from the platform as they eat. Hopefully, they either get so distracted eating that they forget each other, or, less likely but still possible, they work out their problems.
He squints at the dungeon. It is probably one he opened, yes?
“Help me!” he hears from inside.
“Oh no!” Iskall says. “Oh no, oh no, oh no! You three, stay safe,” he says, and he runs into the dungeon.
The dungeon is mercifully mostly empty. Iskall breathes a deep sigh of relief, but that doesn’t last long: it’s a spider dungeon, the worst kind of dungeon. Oh, why did he let the vault gods make spider dungeons? Yes, the spiders are faster targets, and a bigger challenge, and can climb pillars so a hunter cannot simply noob pillar, but they are scary! They have often killed Iskall! He doesn’t like spider dungeons!
He takes a deep breath.
“HALLO?” he shouts.
“Help,” says a little voice, and Iskall decides that for this, he will simply not care that spider dungeons are scary. Sword out, he barrels through the dungeon. Vault swords inexplicably don’t cut cobweb well, so he gets caught up several times, but that doesn’t matter: what if one of the kids is in danger? Oh, he’d never forgive himself if a kid turned into a kid forever because they got hurt!
He turns the corner. This is a champion’s room. Oh no, oh no, oh no! He can’t let a kid fight a champion—
There are no mobs. Upside-down in the cobwebs is a black-haired child wearing a hat. He is the most stuck Iskall has seen anyone get in his entire life.
“Help me,” the kid says sadly.
Getting Abe down from the cobwebs is extremely slow work without the correct tool, and the correct tool for it is hard to come by in vaults. Instead, Iskall is forced to slowly and painfully chip away at the cobwebs while Abe pitifully wiggles at Iskall.
Iskall attempts to keep the mood bright by talking.
“And what is your name?” he asks, even though he already knows.
“I’m Abe,” Abe says.
“How old are you?” Iskall asks.
“I’m four,” Abe says.
So far, talking is not working. The questions he is asking, Iskall suspects, are somewhat too uninteresting. Iskall is faced with the possibility that he is slightly boring. He’s not sure he’s a fan of that discovery.
“Um. How did you get here?” Iskall asks.
“I didn’t mean to,” Abe says.
“I know, I know! You are not in trouble, I just wanted to know,” Iskall says.
“I didn’t mean to,” Abe says again more insistently.
“I do not think anyone would mean to do that,” Iskall says without thinking.
“I’m not anyone. I’m Abe,” Abe says.
“That is not what that word means,” Iskall says.
“Oh,” Abe says.
Iskall manages to hack away another layer of cobwebs. Abe lurches suddenly. Iskall panics and grabs him. His hands briefly get stuck in the cobwebs himself. For a moment, Iskall considers that this may be how the rescue attempt ends: stuck in cobwebs because he had tried to rescue Abe. Thankfully, his hands finally pull away again after a moment. His hands smart from being pulled away from the adhesive spider webs so fast, but he’s a brave Iskall and a brave vault hunter. He definitely doesn’t yelp at the fact his hands sting.
“I will get you down soon. I just wanted to know why you were here,” Iskall clarifies.
“I didn’t mean to,” Abe said. “It just looked tasty.”
Iskall stops what he’s doing for a moment.
“It looked tasty?” Iskall says.
“Mhm,” Abe says.
“The spiderwebs?” Iskall asks.
“Mhm,” Abe says.
“How did that get you so stuck?”
“It looked tasty,” Abe says, clarifying nothing.
“Okay, okay, it looked tasty,” Iskall agrees. “No going after tasty things without asking, okay?”
“No,” Abe says.
“Um,” Iskall says.
“I didn’t mean to,” Abe says.
“I mean—you don’t want to mean it next time either, so you have to ask before going after anything, okay?”
“No,” Abe says. “I am going to fall.”
“You are going to—ah!”
Iskall catches Abe in his arms. Abe shakes his head several times, as though to try to knock the blood flow the spiderwebs had made weird back into place. After he’s satisfied he gives Iskall a very polite look.
“Thank you,” he says.
“It’s no problem,” Iskall responds.
“I’m going to take a nap now,” Abe says, and Iskall considers stopping him for a moment. If Abe starts napping, Iskall won’t have any other free carrying space in his arms. Abe, however, is just too cute while taking a nap. Iskall supposes he can let the child nap in his arms. He had, after all, just been trapped in the spider webs for who knows how long. Iskall doesn’t know, that’s for certain! That has to be very scary and very tiring for a kid.
Slowly, carefully avoiding touching any additional spider webs, Iskall takes Abe out of the dungeon.
By the time Iskall gets back to the platform he’d left the other three children on, they’ve started wrestling, and they’ve somehow multiplied.
Iskall stares.
“Why is Pete here now?” he asks.
“I had him in a bucket,” Hbomb says before tacking Jordan.
“I was in a bucket,” agrees Pete.
“Stop,” Kara says plaintively, gesturing at where Hbomb and Jordan are wrestling.
Iskall sighs.
Iskall decides it would probably be cruel to a child to put him back in a bucket, even if it seems like Pete liked the bucket well enough and it really seems like it would be easier. He’s not sure what Pete would end up doing if they made it out of the vault portal with him still in a bucket, but it seems like the sort of thing that a good big brother wouldn’t allow.
Breaking up Jordan and Hbomb’s wrestling had been a matter of saying it in a firm enough voice that it brought back Jordan’s crybaby tendencies and Hbomb’s determination to go on an adventure to protect everyone. Kara, at least, is relieved they’ve stopped fighting, and Abe is still asleep in Iskall’s arms. Pete is following along beside all of them quietly.
“We are doing one last adventure, okay? We are going to follow my compass to a rainbow door, and you all will go in it one at a time. After that, we will be done, and you all can do whatever you want.”
Kara’s eyes narrow. “Whatever?” she asks.
Iskall sweats slightly. He sure hopes he hasn’t tripped that invisible time limit. “Yes, whatever,” he says. “Now, come along!”
Thankfully, the remainder of the way back to the vault entrance is relatively uneventful. Iskall uses this time to try to commit the last of the children who he’d accidentally created in this vault to memory: Pete. Pete isn’t talking much and seems to walk partially by bouncing. He’s still just a baby slime, Iskall realizes. He does not know yet how to be shaped like a human and is therefore trying to move a little bit like he’s still a slime. Iskall has never seen a cuter thing in his life.
“So, Pete, how come Hbomb put you in a bucket?” Iskall asks.
“I like buckets and wanted an adventure,” Pete says. “I like adventure. I like buckets, too.”
Iskall nods. “That is a good reason.”
“Do you like buckets?”
Iskall considers this. “I think buckets are useful.”
Pete nods solemnly. “I will put you in one later.”
“Ah, no, humans, we do not work like that,” Iskall says.
“Why?” Pete asks.
Iskall stops. Jordan, hanging onto his shirt, nearly runs into him, and Kara gives Iskall a dirty look for it. Iskall quickly gets moving again before Hbomb can get too far ahead of the crowd.
“We have bones,” Iskall finally settles on.
“What are bones?” Pete asks.
“What are—how do you not know what bones are?” Iskall asks.
“Why?” Pete responds, which isn’t an answer, but appears to be the main interrogative that Pete knows how to say.
“Well, I mean, most things have bones.”
“Oh. If I have bones then that means I can put you in a bucket,” Pete says.
“It doesn’t really,” Iskall says.
“Yes, it does,” Pete says.
“No, I don’t think you have bones,” Iskall says.
“You said everyone did,” Pete says.
“I mean, everyone but you,” Iskall says.
“Why?” Pete asks again.
“That’s okay. I won’t have bones either,” Jordan says, trying to be supportive.
“Ah, no, you have bones,” Iskall says.
“Well, I won’t now,” Jordan says.
“That’s not how that works,” Iskall says.
“Why?” Hbomb asks, apparently now also invested in the conversation. Iskall is just grateful that Abe is still apparently sleeping. Having another child who doesn’t understand what bones are would be too much for Iskall. At what age do kids learn about bones anyway? Iskall thinks he’s probably always known about bones, right? He doesn’t remember ever not knowing about bones.
“Well, not having bones would hurt,” Iskall says.
“I don’t hurt,” Pete says.
“So I won’t hurt either,” Jordan says. “You will make sure I don’t have bones. For Pete. So I can bucket.”
Iskall considers continuing to try to explain. If they exit that portal and everyone is an adult again, it will not matter. If they exit that portal and they’ve missed the time limit—well, in that case, Iskall decides, he is going to make Harry explain what bones are. He’s sure Harry knows how to.
(He’s not actually sure. He just thinks that Harry deserves it after the last vault they ran together. It’s only natural.)
With that game plan in mind, Iskall says: “You know what, I’d love a Jordan in a bucket.”
“I will do that,” Jordan says.
“Dead,” Kara says, and Iskall’s not quite sure who she’s directing it to.
Pete turns to Jordan and starts explaining the finer details of being inside of a bucket, and the ways that let him have an adventure even though he was tired and being tired makes him goopy. He goes on a tangent into a description of some of Hbomb’s exploits that Iskall’s heart might have done better with not knowing, especially knowing that Hbomb had Pete in a bucket, defenseless, the whole time. Next time Hbomb is a child in the vault, Iskall thinks, he is getting a babysitter. Is this what other hunters and the gods feel when Iskall leaves the timer down to a bare few seconds?
…nah.
At last, the six of them reach the door. Iskall sighs.
“Well, now you—wait,” Iskall says. He looks at the ground.
There is a camera. There is a note on it. The note reads: “It was Wutax’s fault. This is our way of saying sorry. Don’t vault again for two days.”
Iskall beams.
“Before we go through, I have an important thing to do! Everyone, line up.”
He takes back every unkind thought he may or may not have had about the vault gods this whole trip. He’s cool with them. They can turn his friends into babies anytime. This camera even has a tripod and a timer! It’s perfect! They can all take a picture together!
Not caring for wasted time, Iskall takes the next fifteen minutes trying to get everyone still enough for a camera shot. He doesn’t succeed, but that’s alright. He’ll always have the memories, and the chaos is a lot more like his friends than any perfect picture would be anyway.
Tubbo shows up in Iskall’s base the next day.
“Next time I have siblings and one of them is my other dad you bring me,” Tubbo says.
Iskall does not stop laughing for the next five minutes.