This wand was the tits.

I flung it forward overhand, watching in satisfaction as a dark purple glob with crackling electric-orange lines sailed forward and smacked into the giant ugly bat-thing charging me.

Batguy gave an unholy screech that had me clapping my hands awkwardly to my ears, wand handle pressed against my cheek. The purple slid down his abdomen and burned its way through fur and skin and organs. He stiffened where he stood, still screaming, the orange energy flitting across his body and preventing him from moving as the acid worked.

I heard the mimic before I saw it in my peripheral, thumping along as it clunked forward excitedly on its horrible chonky feet. I still didn’t trust it at all… but we did make a pretty great team.

Batguy’s eyes widened as it approached.

What had once been a sad and pathetic little pile of wonky tryhard treasure storage had, in the last several hours, morphed into a handsome wooden chest that gleamed in the light of the sputtering torches along the stone walls. Its metal straps had changed to pewter, then bronze, then silver. The woodgrain gleamed like it just had oiled beeswax applied. Its legs had new layers of muscle and sinew and were starting to resemble the lower half of a tailless mini T-Rex.

It crouched when it was a few feet away from the bat-thing, who now wasn’t paying any attention to me or the acid currently eating through his body. Batguy still couldn’t move, but his eyes held terror, rolling and showing the whites.

The mimic leapt. It swung its lid open wide as it came down on Batguy, red tongue lolling out as it swallowed him whole. It thumped down upturned, lid splayed out in front of it, legs kicking wildly in the air.

I snickered at the sight. And it was funny… the same way a bear scratching its back on a tree might be funny, or a mountain lion getting scared by its own cub. Deep down, though, I was fucking unnerved. It had been with me for maybe five hours, tops, and was now better-looking than any of the mimics I’d encountered in this dungeon. If I was an unwary adventurer and it had been sitting innocently against a wall, I’d probably already be dead.

At the moment it wasn’t trying to eat me —  it seemed to be attempting to grow stubby little raccoon-hands to push itself upright again, because I wasn’t about to go near enough to it to help it up —  but, and I can’t stress this enough, this thing was probably one of the top five most dangerous enemies I had encountered in my cumulative dungeoning at this point. I would be stupid to be incautious.

I glanced down at my slightly-cracked arcane wand and then slipped one strap of my bag off my shoulder, sliding the whole thing in front of me. I dug out my shitty air wand while keeping the mimic in sight as it struggled to right itself, then cast a ball of wind at my new murder-stick. It shuddered and gleamed like new.

God, that was useful.

I stuffed my air wand back and righted my bag. The mimic had finally figured out how to get back on its feet and was turning towards me, patiently staying about ten feet away. I turned my attention to it and blinked.

It was no longer wood. The straps around it gleamed gold. The rest was a dark pewter, legs included. The arms had retracted back into its pitted metal surface.

That… that was new. I’d never even heard of a chest on this side that wasn’t made of wood before, much less encountered one.

“Dude.” I choked out. “What the fuck are you?”