Pity he didn't have pen, pencil, or paper, only all these pouches full of gewgaws he didn't know how to use.

Thinking of which…

Rod peered down at himself a little ruefully. It wasn't all that heroic a sight. He looked, well, moth-eaten.

His once grandly-sinister armor was now nothing but a web of half-melted patches of metal, shaped something like the black markings on a black-and-white cow, and he could find nothing that seemed magical about his heavy war-gauntlets.

He'd snatched up a lot of stuff from Ult Tower, though, and not all of it had fallen or melted away with his armor.

He wore baldrics slung over both shoulders, to cross on his chest. Sheathed along them were a few daggers and something that looked like a hooked metal claw with a whip attached to it, plus some tools.

Then there were the belts. Three of them, one bearing only a water-skin and an empty scabbard. Sheathed on the second was a sword of some sort, whose pommel glowed from time to time all by itself. The third belt, now sagging low on his hips, was the one he'd threaded six pouches of various sizes onto.

There were four little thong-drawstring soft leather bags full of what had been glowing, sparkling dust, in the end pouch. The next one along held a fine neckchain-almost certainly jewelry that had no magic at all to it-that he'd hastily clasped through seven finger-rings while racing through Ult Tower. At least five of those rings had been glowing various hues, at the time he'd snatched them from the hands of sculpted Ult Tower figures. Finely sculpted, life-sized bare women, they'd been, their faces carved in the same vacant, disinterested pouts he saw on fashion models strutting down runways in the real world. On television, of course, not in person; Rod Everlar's "real world" wasn't quite that glamorously unreal.

The third pouch was the largest, and it was stuffed full of a chain about a dozen feet long that ended in two ornate bars with runelike symbols graven all over them. He thought he'd seen a similar chain, earlier and somewhere else in Ult Tower, standing stiffly out from a wall like a flagstaff, with garments hanging from it. So perhaps this one could be made to go rigid and defy gravity, too.