The chair was hard and uncomfortable. It was one of those chairs from a dining room table set, with a metal frame and some wooden pieces that were bolted to it. Why couldn’t I have been tied up to a nice recliner instead?

I was tied to the chair with my hands actually cuffed to the chair behind me. If this had been some action movie I would have been strong enough to break free of the chair and cuffs, but that wasn’t going to happen. Not unless I could somehow get some extra points to slot into strength.

At the moment, I was in a small hotel room, one with surprisingly thick walls between the rooms. I would have tried screaming for help anyway, but the gag in my mouth made that a little difficult.

There were three people in the room with me, and three…not people. The only person I recognized was Frank, who was currently dressed in a professional looking suit. However, the large axe that she casually held in one hand suggested that she was currently interested in a more violent kind of business.

A stocky man with dark hair and a short beard stood nearby, staring at me with an almost hungry expression that made me shudder. However, he didn’t actually seem interested in me, but in my armor.

And then there was the last person in the room, a man in a suit similar to what Frank wore, but instead of holding an axe, he had a staff. He was black man with a bald head and a nicely trimmed white beard. That gave the impression of him being old, but his muscular build and the lack of wrinkles or lines on his face indicated otherwise. From that, I guessed that he was probably in his mid-thirties at most. At least, that was what he looked like since real age could be hard to tell with respawned players.

Behind the man with the staff, stood the three wooden mannequins. Now that I had a chance to look at them, I thought that they looked a bit more like giant featureless puppets without any strings. However, each of them also had an aura around them, one that was very similar to an enchantment. This was very close to being enchantment magic, but not quite.

When I looked around the room, I didn’t see any signs of Jag. After they’d ambushed me and brought me here, she’d taken off. Or at least, she seemed to have taken off. For all I knew, she was still there, hiding behind one of her illusions.

“I appologize for this,” Frank told me. “But my associate, Michaelangelo…” She gestured to the stocky man, “has a deep interest in soulbound artifacts, and I would much rather him study yours than mine.” Her eyes went down to her axe.

I stared at her axe. I hadn’t known that it was soulbound until that moment. If I had, I probably would have asked her a few questions about soulbound artifacts in general.

“It pays to keep your allies happy,” Frank continued. “Especially when Iexpect to benefit from her research. This isn’t anything personal. You’re just…an investment opportunity.”

With that, Frank turned and stepped out the door. Her axe vanished as she did so, perhaps going to the same place that my armor did when it wasn’t activated.

“Interesting artifact,” the stocky man…Michaelangelo mused, still not taking his eyes off me.

“Will this suit your purposes?” the man with the staff asked.

“Definitely,” Michaelangelo responded with a satisfied chuckle. “Of course, I would have preferred an unbound one to study, but I can make this work. In fact, this might give me an opportunity to study HOW the whole souldbound thing works.”

“The downside,” the man with the staff mused, “is that we can’t have the artifact with the souldbound player attached.”

“True, Maestro,” Michaelangelo agreed. He looked up into my face, right into my eyes which were glaring right at him, and he chuckled. “Keeping her around will be inconvenient.”

For a moment, I was tempted to deactivate my armor, just to spite them. Let them see how well they could study my armor when it was gone. However, I wasn’t about to make myself butt-ass naked in front of two strange men.

My eyes darted to the corner of the room where my staff was leaning up against the wall. My kidnappers had taken it with when they’d captured me, probably because they hadn’t wanted to leave such obvious evidence behind. Too bad it was well out of my reach.

I strained against the handcuffs that held me, trying to keep my expression neutral so that they didn’t realize what I was up to. Damn, I really wished I could ‘Hex’ them both. Unfortunately, I needed to gesture at my target before I could hit them with an enchantment. That was probably the main reason that they’d tied my hands up behind me.

Michaelangelo came closer and removed my gag, giving me a curious look. “I have questions for you,” the man told me. “Questions about your armor. If you cooperate, this will go much easier for both of us.”

“Bite me,” I responded immediately. Then I looked to the other man, the one who Michaelangelo had called Maestro. “You’re an animator.”

Grayson had told me about animators, and about how they were very similar to enchanters. According to him, animators could place auras on inanimate objects in order to move them around and control them. He even thought that animators and enchanters might just be two variations on the same type of magic, and that the two classes might even share some kind of class ancestor.

“I am,” Maestro responded evenly.

I continued straining against my cuffs, thinking about a conversation that I’d once had with a few other guys in similar lines of work. We’d been talking about how we could get out of handcuffs in order to escape if the cops had ever caught us. Everyone had different ideas, and most of them were pretty stupid. Learn to pick the cuffs. Keep a spare key on you at all times. Dislocate your thumb so you could squeeze your hand out. And my favorite, the one that I was currently working with, was tense your wrists up as much as you could when they put on the cuffs, so that when you relaxed, the cuffs would be a little looser than could have been.

I was desperately trying to pull my hand out of the cuff, but it was too tight. Even with that tiny bit of extra space I might have gained, my hand was still too big. Still, I worked on pulling my hand through, no matter how badly it scraped the skin.

“So,” I asked the animator. “Do you have a Pinocchio fetish or something?”

“What?” he blurted out in surprise and disbelief.

“I mean, are you a puppet fucker?” I asked with a smirk. “Do you sit on their faces and say ‘lie to me puppet boy’?”

Maestro glared at me, clearly not amused. Michaelangelo snorted and had the faintest hint of a smile, though his expression remained otherwise blank.

“Put the gag back on,” Maestro ordered.

I grimaced, silently cursing the fact that my hand still wasn’t free. I couldn’t just blast them with a ‘Hex’. However, I did have other options. I blasted a ‘Cursed Ground’ directly beneath me.

Michaelangelo was suddenly moving slowly, but in spite of that, he still tripped and barely caught himself before he landed flat on his face. He immediately grabbed one of the four scepters that hung from his belt, but he fumbled with it and it slipped out of his hand and fell to the ground.

“What the hell is this?” Michaelangelo demanded.

“Frank warned me about this ability,” Maestro responded. He was right at the edge of my ‘Cursed Ground,’ but still caught in the effect. “It interferes with our movement but is otherwise harmless. It should wear off in several minutes.”

Michelangelo snarled as he reached for another of the scepters on his belt, this time being slow and methodical so as not to lose his grip on the weapon. This added to the existing slowing debuff and made it almost look like he was moving in slow motion. Then, once he had the other scepter in hand, he moved towards me again, still going in slow motion.

“Fuck,” I muttered, wishing that I could just blast him already, but that wasn’t an option yet.

Since I couldn’t unleash a ‘Hex’ on either of my kidnappers, I had to use the one option that I did have available. My latest ability, the one that I hadn’t been able to really test out just yet. And with that, I touched my own sleeve and activated ‘Cursed Object’. A moment later, my armor was covered with a faint black and purple glow. I would have preferred to hit Michelangelo’s scepter or Maestro’s staff, but this was about the only target I could hit.

Michaelangelo grabbed my shoulder, then froze for a moment. The black and purple aura that covered my armor spread out and covered him as well. He let out a gasp and slowly pulled away. The bane on my armor was still present, just weaker than before, but a part of it had been left on the kidnapper.

“I feel…dizzy,” Michaelangelo gasped, right before he stepped onto the scepter that he’d previously dropped. His foot came out from beneath him and he dropped to the floor with a thud.

The contagious bane now covered Michaelangelo and was stacking with the effects of my ‘Cursed Ground’. Then, the purple aura seemed to copy itself so that the kidnapper now had two stacks of that on him, in addition to the effect of ‘Cursed Ground’. He struggled to get back up but could barely seem to even move.

I just stared at Michaelangelo for several long seconds, trying to understand exactly what was happening. This was the first time that I’d used ‘Cursed Object’, and though I had an instinctive understanding of what it did, I still had to wrap my head around it.

‘Cursed Object’ could only be cast on an object, but it didn’t actually do anything to that object. Instead, the cursed object just acted as a carrier which could spread the bane on contact. That was what had happened to Michaelangelo. By touching my armor, the bane had spread to him. But ‘Cursed Object’ did more than just spread. Whenever it infected a new target, it took the form of a random bane, and if there was already a bane present, it spawned another copy of an existing bane.

“Holy shit,” I whispered.

One of the reasons that I’d chosen this ability over the other two that I’d been offered, was that I simply had a good feeling about it. There had been a strange certainty that it was a powerful ability, and one that I’d want to have. Now I understood why.

“It’s almost like I had it in a past life,” I mused wryly.

At this point, I was finally able to pull my hand free of the cuffs. It was scraped and sore, but that was a small price to pay for my freedom. As soon as my hands were free, I fired a ‘Hex’ at Maestro. Michaelangelo wasn’t currently a threat while the animator was already sending his three puppets towards me.

Maestro gasped in pain and then staggered where he stood. Since he was already caught in my ‘Cursed Ground’, the effects stacked and hit him harder than they would alone.

I quickly scrambled to free myself the rest of the way from the chair, being thankful as I did so that I was immune from my own enchantments. That meant, I could wear cursed armor without any problems while also moving around my ‘Cursed Ground’.

“Thank you for your invitation,” I told Michaelangelo as I stepped over him, “but I am going to have to politely decline.”

“Bitch,” he spat out, trying to raise his arm and one of his scepters towards me.

I kicked Michaelangelo’s hand, knocking the scepter out of it. At the same time, another dose of my ‘Cursed Object’ was transferred to him, adding yet another stack of bane to his situation.

“Get her,” Maestro ordered his puppets, even while he grimaced in pain.

Two of the puppets were already inside my ‘Cursed Ground’, and they were moving slowly as a result. However, I noticed that their agility and dexterity weren’t being affected. Probably because they were just puppets that were being magically controlled. That was probably why my ‘Hex’ hadn’t worked on them earlier too.

I shoved my way past the slow moving puppets, only to see another dose of my ‘Cursed Object’ transfer to one as I made contact. But to my surprise, the aura didn’t just cling to the puppet. Instead, it transferred down the magical connection that it had to its animator, and infected him instead.

Maestro yelped as another bane settled onto him, adding to the stack. I wasn’t even sure what this one did since it was random, but it couldn’t be good. But then, yet another one appeared, this one copying the effects of ‘Hex’.

“Damn,” I gasped, both horrified and impressed at the same time.

I was tempted to give the Maestro a swift kick and add even more to his stack of banes, but I held back. I once killed someone by accident, and I didn’t want to risk doing that again. Instead, I slipped around the second puppet, then grabbed my staff from where it rested in the corner.

“Come to mama,” I said to the remaining puppet, the one that had been outside the ‘Cursed Ground’ the entire time.

When this puppet came at me, I swung my staff but kept it low. I knocked the puppet’s feet out from under it, causing it to fall to the ground. Then, before it could get up, I simply walked out the door and left.

Now that I’d escaped that room and the immediate threat, I realized that I wasn’t safe yet. Frank and Jag had both been involved in this, and they were still running around nearby. Then my heart sank.

“And Stine,” I whispered.

If Stine’s teammates were involved, then he probably was too. Was that why he’d asked me to lunch? So he could set me up for an ambush?

“Fuck Stine,” I spat out, feeling betrayed.

I barely made it out of the hotel when I saw Jag, hanging around out in front. It looked like she was just sitting on a bench and taking in the fresh air. For a moment, I thought that I’d be able to slip past without her noticing me, but then she looked up and caught sight of me.

“What the fuck?” Jag exclaimed as she jumped to her feet.

Jag came at me fast, suggesting that she’d slotted a couple points into agility. She ran into me a couple seconds later, using her shoulder to try knocking me over. I stepped to the side fast enough to avoid taking a direct hit, but not enough to avoid it entirely.

I was spun around from the impact but managed to keep from falling to the ground. Somehow, I avoided dropping my staff too.

“Shit,” Jag snarled with a grimace. She now had a dose of ‘Cursed Object’ on her, though I didn’t know what the random debuff on her was. Her eyes narrowed and she squinted at me. “Why are you so damn blurry…” She quickly looked around and gasped, “Everything is…”

“Perception,” I mused. “Maybe just vision. I don’t know…”

Jag drew one of her knives and swung it in my general direction, though she wasn’t close enough to actually hit me. My heart jumped up into my throat at the attack, then I smiled faintly as I realized that she was now half-blind. That would make her a lot easier to deal with.

Before I could take advantage of this, Jag glowed and there were suddenly three of her standing there. Two of them were illusions, which was obviously intended to make it hard for me to target the real one. However, there was one thing she didn’t take into account… I blasted a ‘Hex’ at the Jag on the left, the only one of the three who actually had an enchantment on her. She yelped in pain and staggered as the bane took effect.

“I don’t know how you got out,” Jag said with a sneer. “But you’re not leaving until we’re done with you.”

“Well, I’m done with YOU,” I responded, swinging my staff at Jag. She didn’t see it coming in time to move out of the way, though she reacted fast once hit.

Jag lunged towards me again, though I backhanded her, catching her with the back of my arm. Another dose of ‘Cursed Object’ transferred to her and that spawned yet another bane, one which seemed to copy the first dose as she now staggered around as though completely blind. Then, she tripped and fell flat on her face.

I thought about kicking Jag while she was down, but I held off for the same reason that I hadn’t kicked Maestro. She was no longer an immediate threat to me and I was afraid of accidentally pushing my banes too far and killing her. Especially since I remembered fighting beside her back inside the Labyrinth.

At this point, enough of the ‘Cursed Object had been drained away from my armor that there was barely any glow left. I suspected that I would only be able to infect one more target before it ran out entirely.

“Better save it for now,” I muttered, remembering the fact that Franka and Stine were still out there and might show up at any moment.

With that, I turned and started running to where I’d left my friends, back at the lodge. I hoped that I could reach them before anyone else came after me.