They found Brax standing guard at the cave entrance with his sword drawn. Lisa suspected he had probably been playing with it.
"Any trouble?" Brax asked, placing his sword in the scabbard.
Lisa and Doc dropped the body of the mind flayer.
"You mean other than almost having our brains sucked out by old squid-face?" Sandra said. With her hands full of treasure, she did not point, not that it was necessary. Their former adversary was the already the primary focus of attention.
Brax gazed at it with fascination. "It's definitely a mind flayer, but it looks kind of scorched…and dead. It looks entirely dead."
"Doc had to shoot it with a flare gun," Sandra said.
"A flare gun? That's risky. You can't really aim one of those things."
"He was less than three meters away at the time."
Brax's eyebrows rose. "He fired a flare underground at something a few meters away. Wow! That's gutsy, Doc."
"He had no choice," Lisa added, knowing Doc disapproved of violence. Having to inflict it must be upsetting him, although he hid it well. "The gas didn't work on it, and talking to it did no good."
"Yeah, mind flayers are like that in games, too," Brax said.
"What about you?" Lisa asked him. "Any problems out here?" She glanced around the cave entrance where bound orcs lay scattered. A few were beginning to stir.
"No, most of them are still out cold. That general was by here a few minutes before you came out and said his men were almost done tying up the ones outside. He told me to tell you that your spell is still active in the caves, though, and he's stopped sending his men inside because they keep falling down. He wants to know when you will dispel it. He said he'd be back."
Doc shook his head. "Unfortunately, reality doesn't work that way. I'm sure it's safe to remove our masks outside now, but the gas in the caves and tunnels may linger for a while longer. It seems to be a bit more potent than I expected since it's still affecting the soldiers. I'd suggest giving it another twenty minutes or so. The orcs inside will probably be suffering the effects a bit longer, but I'm sure it will be dispersed enough by then so that people going inside won't succumb to it."
"So I can take this thing off?" Brax said, fingering his breathing mask.
Doc nodded.
"Good," Brax said. "I think it's giving me a rash."
Sandra dropped the bags she was holding. "Not so fast, big guy. Leave it on. I need you to go back down there and help me haul up the rest of the treasure."
"Treasure?" he said, his eyes widening and his mouth stretching into a broad grin like that of a child presented with a jumbo chocolate bar.
"Yeah, didn't you wonder what I was carrying in these sacks?"
"Well, no, actually. I figured it was… To be honest, I didn't notice."
"You are a charmer, Brax. Not being noticed is exactly what women crave."
"You're being sarcastic, right?"
"Are you?"
"Would you like me to be?"
"Now you're learning. Come on. Give me a hand."
"Bring my staff up too, please," Doc said. "I had to leave it down there to help carry the body."
They disappeared into the cave. Lisa cautiously removed her mask, took a sniff, and suffered no immediate ill effects, although the air was heavy with an unpleasant order not unlike burnt calamari. She glanced at the mind flayer's corpse.
"Why do you think it continued to go for me after you hit it?" she asked Doc. "You were the only one down there with any kind of weapon."
"What surprised me was that it seemed to suffer very little from my attack. I hit it on the head quite hard with a very solid staff. A blow like that should have dazed or possibly even killed it. But, in answer to your question, I think it continued to see you as its greatest threat. According to Brax, clerics, which I apparently seem to be to the locals, have comparatively few powerful offensive spells. Clerical magic is most often defensive. You, as both leader and sorceress, might still have had a magical trick or two up your sleeve."
"But I didn't have any magic. None of us did."
"Well, Milton assures me that the staff is magical, although I don't suppose that matters. A big stick is always a big stick."
"And a flare gun is always a flare gun."
"It's real, and reality works whether you believe it or not."