The Lab
I woke up lying on a hard surface. It was pitch black except for a tiny red light, so I reached into my pocket for a flashlight. My fingers found one, and I wondered how I had known it was there. I didn't remember putting it in my pocket. Actually I didn't remember anything. What was going on? Where was I?
The flashlight's beam bounced off metal walls about a foot away. I was in some sort of locker? Wait, why did I know what a locker was? I racked my brain for other facts about lockers, like why I was in one, and came up with nothing relevant. Except that lockers usually came in bunches, so were there other people here?
"Hello?" I called, voice echoing weirdly in the locker. A few seconds later l got replies: there seemed to be two men any another woman here, also stuck in lockers going by the muffled quality of their voices.
There was a creak and then the sound of metal hitting metal. "Pull the lever," advised the woman. Lever? I shone the flashlight and the locker and found one, which released the wall in front of me. I was sat up and got out, then looked around at my fellow prisoners. They looked equally confused.
"What's going on?" demanded the shorter of the two men. He was frowning at us suspiciously from behind his glasses.
"No idea," I said, fiddling with my long blonde braid. Why was my hair braided? Had someone done that while I was asleep? Creepy!
"I have a can opener for some reason," reported the taller man, holding it out for inspection. "Do any of you have can openers?"
We stared at his arm in shock. There was a raised area of skin spiraling around his forearm. He noticed us staring and looked down, alarm flashing across his face. "What is that?!?"
I looked at my own left arm and was horrified to find I had one too. The spiral ended on my palm, where there was a circular lump. I poked it. It was squishy like it was filled with some kind of fluid. Ewww. I could sort of feel myself poking it but it was more an awareness of pressure than what I'd expect from touching my skin. So whatever it was, it wasn't entirely a part of me? This was slightly reassuring.
The others were examining their left arms as well, looking increasingly worried. "Who are you guys?" burst out the woman. "Why do you have these... these flesh spirals?"
"I'm Sarah," I said, then wondered why I knew that. The others gave introductions as well; the taller man was Aaron, the shorter one was Clarence, and the woman was April. None of them knew anything about why there were here, or where here was, or what was with the flesh spirals. Clarence could make his pulse if he concentrated on it, but we all decided that was creepy so he stopped.
We pooled our resources: I had a flashlight (which wasn't very useful now we were in a brightly lit room), Clarence had had his glasses, Aaron had a comically large can opener (why??), and April checked her pockets and came up with two coins stamped with a stylized Z. Nobody recognized the currency but at this point that was no surprise.
Turning our attention to the room, we tried to find an exit. The ceiling was three meters up and appeared to be made of concrete so it wasn't a likely escape route. Besides the four lockers we had been in, there was a large metal barrel. And an archway with a metal covering extending from the ceiling. Clarence rattled it but it didn't move much, a lock near the top preventing it from retracting into the ceiling. There was a panel next to it with a stylized Y. April scrutinized the coins in her pocket and decided they were probably a different font from the panel, though I didn't know what she thought it would mean if they'd matched.
Meanwhile Aaron was examining the barrel. He climbed on top of it, banged on the side, tried to tip it over. Finally he stared at it and started laughing. "This is going to sound stupid, but I do have a giant can opener." He opened it, set the jagged edged top side, and carefully extracted a length of wire.
"I bet we could use that over here," mused April from the other side of the room where she was examining a panel set into the wall. She ran a hand through her short dark hair. "It's missing a wire. But we need some insulation to put it in, based on the thickness of the other wires this is really high voltage. Wait, why do I know that?" She checked our clothing for suitable insulation but it was all polyester which she explained might melt. So repairing the panel would have to wait.
There was a door next to the barrel, but it didn't have a doorknob and didn't open when I pushed on it. I checked it for hidden buttons and came up with nothing. But it was very obviously a door. There was another door to right, but it had been boarded up. I gave it an experimental kick. Ouch. The door was not going anywhere.
"Hey, it's a crowbar!" Clarence was staring at the floor. Perfect! We could use it to defeat the stupid boarded up door. As we gathered around we saw he was looking though a grate in the floor. Four meters below was a crowbar lying on a stone floor. Four meters. I eyed the wire. It was about a meter long. There went my plan to lasso it and pull it up to the grate. It would work if we could lower someone closer to the floor, but the grate was in the way of that.
Or we could just go to the lower level and walk in. There was a ladder on the wall opposite to the closed door, after all.
"I think we should wait after we send one person, in case they get murdered," I suggested.
"No, we shouldn't split up!" protested April.
"Sounds like you volunteered," Aaron said to me.
"It's a ladder," I said exasperatedly, "we can't all go at the same time! Fine, I'll go, but wait a bit before following! If I'm going to get murdered anyway I'd rather you all didn't get murdered too." I climbed down the ladder, passing through a surprising thickness of ceiling -- almost a meter -- and looked around. Nobody there. A computer on the opposite wall next to a fish tank. A fence down the middle of the room blocking access to the crowbar. "Hey guys, I'm not murdered," I called up the ladder, and heard them starting down.
Next to the ladder was another door, also lacking a doorknob. There was a fancy Z on the panel next to it, looking more like the Y by the archway than the Z on April's coins. I wondered what she would make of it.
Once everyone was down, we walked over to the wall with the computer. Clarence immediately got distracted by the fish tank in the corner. There were three fish and a treasure chest. The fish looked familiar. I couldn't remember what they were called but I knew there were the durable kind of fish that was okay being left alone for a while. I was pretty sure there weren't aggressive, which was good since Clarence had taken the top off and was reaching in. "What are you doing?" I demanded but he was pulling out the treasure chest. He shook it and something rattled inside, but couldn't pry the lid open. Of course: there was a tiny keyhole on the side, obviously we would have to find it somewhere in this strange facility.
The other two were examining the computer. There was a box with a card-reader slot and three unlit LEDs, and a monitor and keyboard. Aaron started typing.
He tried ls and dir and got nothing. "What kind of system is this?" he wondered. I agreed that it was weird, but couldn't remember why we would expect ls or dir to list files. After glaring at the computer for a bit, he tried help. The computer recognized this one and informed us that valid commands were date, time, open, close, and log. Date and time told us it was 15:21 on 30/09/904. Aaron shrugged. It's not like we had any idea if that was correct, or when anything else has happened.
Open had three options: X, Y, and Z. The door behind us was Z, so Aaron tried that first. Sure enough, it opened. April and Clarence went to investigate while I rattled at the fence blocking us from the other side of the room with the crowbar. It stretched from floor to ceiling and was made of sturdy wire.
April and Clarence returned, with April wearing a lab coat and thick rubber gloves she'd found in a cupboard. Clarence was waving a plastic card and the treasure chest he'd opened with the tiny key which was also in the cupboard. April immediately went upstairs, with Clarence explaining she'd been spooked by the creepy doll staring at her through the slit in the wall between the other half of the room. There had also been a glued-shut wooden chest and a dispenser of purple goo which was missing a nozzle.
Clarence inserted the key card into the reader, which ate the card. One of the LEDs glowed red.
There was a noise from upstairs and April called down: "Hey, the door opened!" She was referring to the door on the opposite wall that didn't have a handle.
Before checking that out, Aaron decided to try out the rest of the open commands. Opening Y retracted the archway cover into the ceiling, revealing a thick glass wall with fish on the other side. Apparently we were underwater. X opened the grate above the crowbar, dislodging something which dropped into the floor: a pair of wirecutter shears. So we could get the crowbar and get out again by cutting the fence, provided we could get in without being injured from the drop. Maybe if we got the barrel underneath? Upside down of course, to avoid the sharp edge. But it was too heavy to move easily.
Aaron peered through the door the panel had opened. "Nobody there," he reported, and we went in. The room was mostly empty, with just a cupboard and a computer station. The cupboard contained some vials labeled tranquilizer. And one labeled nitroglycerin and fragile. We opted to leave the nitroglycerin, because we didn't want to explode anything just now. We could come back later in case we changed our mind.
The computer took up an entire wall and seemed to be some sort of surveillance system. And it had a swivel chair! I spun around a few times before April demanded to have a turn, and then Aaron asked us to move out of the way so he could, you know, actually use the computer and figure out what was going on.
"Reasonable!" said April, spinning off across the room to look at a really ugly painting on the far wall.
Aaron flipped through video feeds. This room, the locker room, the downstairs computer room, a cafeteria, the room through the Z door. There were labels in the corner indicating the floor. Apparently we were on B2, and the lower level was B3. So where was B1? Did it go to the surface?
The next camera was in the room on the other side of the wall with the creepy doll. Which was staring at the camera. Even though the camera was obviously on the other side of the room from the slit in the wall.
"Let's not go in that room," decided April. "Also, let's close the Z door so it can't come after us through the crack in the wall."
"No, we need to investigate this," I countered. "Can someone go look at it through the slit?"
Clarence and Aaron went downstairs while I checked out the poster next to the screen. It had five circles in a line, each containing a symbol. Fire, a skull, an arrow pointing down, a square with horizontal lines, and a teardrop.
"It's looking at me," Clarence reported from downstairs.
"It's not looking at the camera," I called back. "Go out of the room and we'll see if it looks at me."
"Okay!"
I stared at the screen, waiting for the doll to move. It didn't, continuing to watch the slit in the wall. No, it wasn't watching, dolls can't watch anything. Its face was pointing towards the slit in the wall.
"Hey Sarah, get down here!" It was Aaron.
"Okay!" I glanced back at the screen on my way out of the room. The doll was now looking at the camera. Facing the camera! Whatever! Okay, I agreed with April: the doll was creepy and we should leave it alone so it didn't murder us.
Aaron had been looking at the downstairs computer again, checking out the log command. There were four logs, he said, with dates ranging in the past four months. He opened the first one.
It was a video, of a room with a catwalk leading to some sort of machinery. Large fans whirred along the sides. Clarence and I walked in, wearing lab coats. We had a conversation (there was no sound on the video so I don't know what about), then Clarence pulled up his left sleeve. His flesh spiral pulsed and there were lights moving around in it. One of them made its way to the lump in his palm, then he flexed his fingers and a white light flew out of it, impacting against the wall at the end of the catwalk.
The light coalesced into something solid. A computer screen with a bunch of cable tentacles. Clarence said something and the... tentacle thing moved over to a fan which wasn't moving. It extended a cable and did something to the fan, which started spinning. Clarence extended his hand again and the tentacle screen thing flew back into his flesh spiral.
Okay, so apparently Clarence was some sort of wizard who could summon a computer octopus. That made sense!
But there was more. On screen, I tapped Clarence on the shoulder. He turned around and I shoved him off the catwalk. He landed in one of the fans and blood splattered out. The video ended.
What.
I looked at Clarence. He really didn't look like someone who had been chopped up in a fan four months ago. That is, he didn't look like he was dead. He was completely alive, and staring at me. Actually, everyone was staring at me.
"I! I don't know!" I babbled. "And you're not--? I don't know!" They were still staring at me. "I'm sorry I murdered you?" I tried. It felt weird to apologize for something I had absolutely no recollection of. The woman in the video really didn't seem like the same person as me even if we looked identical. Maybe we weren't, maybe we were actually clones or something. That would explain why Clarence was alive even though the other me had killed him.
Clarence didn't look so good now. His pale skin was now almost paper-white, and he looked like he was about to cry. Which made sense, given he'd just seen himself die. He also looked like he could use a hug, but probably not from me. Luckily April seemed to have had the same idea, and Clarence seemed a little bit better afterwards.
The next log was from about a month ago, and took place in the cafeteria we'd seen on the surveillance system. Aaron walked in with a bottle of champagne and sat at a table. Clarence and April walked in together, then I arrived with four glasses and we sat and talked and laughed and toasted something with our champagne. We looked happy and comfortable with each other.
So we had been friends. And apparently there were no hard feelings between Clarence and me even though I'd shoved him into the fan. Or maybe the Clarence in the video didn't know about that. The one here hadn't known until we started watching the logs, after all.
The third log was from a week ago. The ugly painting in the surveillance room was pushed aside and Aaron was pressing his hand to a scanner. A safe opened and he took out a syringe and vials. One by one, he summoned each light in his flesh spiral into his palm, then drew it out and sealed it in a viral. The results were brightly colored amoeba looking things. He put the filled vials and the syringe back into the safe and closed it, replacing the painting.
Clarence walked in and he and Aaron talked for a bit. Again, we couldn't hear what they said since there was no sound in the video. I walked in while they were still talking, and held out my left hand. Light flew out and a tall faceless man appeared behind Aaron. Before they could stop him, he broke Aaron's and Clarence's necks.
"Come on!" I said exasperatedly. "Why do I keep killing you?"
On the video, April walked into the room, noticed the bodies, and thrust out her left hand. Before she could summon anything, the tall faceless man had teleported behind her.
"Anyone want to go check on the safe?" I asked brightly as we watched April's body fall to the ground. I didn't really want to want to watch another video of me murdering someone.
"No, let's see the last one," said Aaron, typing the command.
This one was a couple of hours after the previous one. We saw the room we had woken up in, only there were only three lockers in it. And a smear of blood trailing between them and the now boarded up door.
Someone walked into the room, dragging the fourth locker. It was almost three meters tall and had to duck to go through the door. It was wearing a white robe with a playing card space symbol on it, and a face-concealing mask. The mask was white as well, with a curved cone on the front like a plague doctor mask. There were no eyeholes. Weird.
The giant robed thing set the locker down and left the room. It came back with a mop and started cleaning up the blood. There was a lot of blood, more than I thought was in one person.
There was a moment of silence.
"Where did all the blood come from?!?" I wondered. "That's too much blood to have come from me, and it can't be from you guys, I already killed you like an hour ago!"
Nobody had an answer for that. April went to check for bloodstains on the floor in the locker room and reported that there were some under the lockers, where Spade Robe hadn't been as though. Aaron and I stared at the crowbar. We needed to get the boarded up door open to find out what was on the other side. Like the Spade Robe guy. Maybe he knew what was going on. Or maybe he'd try to stuff us in lockers again and somehow get blood everywhere, who knew!
"The swivel chair!" said Aaron. "Landing on that takes like half a meter off the drop."
"Are you are you won't just fall off of it?" I asked. "It is great for zooming around on but that's kind of unhelpful for landing on."
Clarence looked at Aaron. "Hold on, we don't even need the chair. You're almost two meters tall, if we reach in and hold onto your arms that's maybe another meter. You can totally drop the last meter and be fine."
"Good point," said Aaron, and we all went upstairs. April opted to lay across my and Clarence's legs while we lowered Aaron into the hole. He landed easily and used the wire cutters to cut a hole in the fence, then looked around. “There’s a door here!” He opened it. A room full of lockers. “Nope!” He shut the door and started examining the wall around the corner from it. "There's some buttons here, five of them."
"There was a poster in the surveillance room," I informed him. "It had five circles in a row like that." I described what I'd seen, then grabbed the crowbar and opened the Z door (which April had closed in case the doll tried to escape) to pry at the lid of the glued shut box. After a couple of minutes I got it open and found light blue medical scrubs, a weird piece of green wood, and another cardkey. I inserted the cardkey into the reader and was rewarded with another LED, and gave the wood to Aaron, who stared at it in confusion.
"It's green all the way through..." he said, turning it over and over. "Wood isn't supposed to be this color."
"Let's check the safe," April decided. " I wonder if the vials are still there."
Aaron opened the safe and they were, along with the syringe. We contemplated them. Orange, cyan, brown, and purple.
"Should we inject one?" wondered Clarence.
"If we do, I think it should be you," I said to Aaron. "They came out of you, you probably won't have an immune response or whatever. It might not work for other people."
"I'm not injecting anything!"
I shrugged and walked into the locker room to attack the boarded up door. Eventually it yielded, revealing the cafeteria where we'd celebrated something. I walked in. The tables and chairs seemed the same as before -- two tables with two chairs each -- and there was a water dispenser in the corner. It looked like a normal water dispenser, unlike the one with the weird purple goo; the stuff it dispensed even smelled like water, although nobody was thirsty enough to taste it.
Across from the door was another metal shuttered opening, this one sealed with barbed wire. I asked Aaron for the wire cutters to open it, but he refused.
"Someone really tried to seal that, I don't think they want anyone getting into it."
"So?" I said. "Nothing here makes any sense, why should we expect something to be dangerous just because the crazy person behind all this doesn't want us to see it?"
April agreed with Aaron so instead we went through the door on the right hand wall and found a room with a spiral staircase in the far left corner. The way to B1! And possibly an escape! But also possibly something dangerous.
Clarence checked the cupboard by the door and found a third keycard and a weird looking key. There was a hole in the wall next to the cupboard with something shiny in it, but it was too deep to extract.
"Let's see what the last card does," April suggested. "Explore all our options down here before we open up new ones."
Nobody had any objections, so we headed back downstairs and fed the box the last card. The box made a happy beeping sound and the fence retracted most of the way into the ceiling before getting stuck on the bits of wire sticking out from the hole Aaron had cut in it.
"Yay," said Clarence unenthusiastically. It was kind of anticlimactic, given we'd already defeated it.
"Hey, what's that on the ceiling?" Aaron pointed to an area near the partly retracted fence. We craned our necks to get a better view. "Is it a handle?"
April went upstairs and got the swivel chair so Aaron could stand on it and get a better view.
"Yep, it's a handle. Can I have the crowbar to pull it with?"
I let go of the chair for a second to lend him the crowbar. The handle retracted into the ceiling and there was a metal grinding sound from upstairs.
The room at the top of the stairs was weird. There was a ladder leading to a hatch with a sign saying "surface access lockdown enabled; override is in B4"; a door with a red plus sign and blood seeping out from under it; and a display case which contained a bright green statue of a fetus. It was the same green as Aaron's stick.
"Whyyyyy," I asked nobody in particular.
There were footsteps in one of the other rooms. We sprinted down the stairs, back through the cafeteria, and into the locker room. I grabbed the crowbar back from Aaron and crouched behind a locker. He did the same, clutching his weird green stick. Clarence had the wire cutters and took the rear, and April crouched behind the barrel and held up the severed lid in her gloves hands like a shield.
We waited.
The footsteps came closer and the giant white robed guy stepped through the door to the cafeteria. He didn't have the spade on his chest this time. We cowered and he didn't seem to see us. He raised an arm. His flesh spiral had a lot of glowy lights in it. He flexed his fingers and a tall faceless man appeared, exactly like the one I had used to kill everyone last week. Oh no. I did not want to have my neck broken.
Robe Guy walked into the surveillance room and we shuffled around the lockers to keep out of view. The faceless man seemed to be guarding the door, and apparently didn't see us. Maybe because he didn't have eyes? But he'd been perfectly fine at finding victims in the log.
After a few tense minutes, Robe Guy vanished. There was a black mark on the floor where he'd been. We couldn't hear anything from the surveillance room and when we checked it was empty. Was there a secret passage we hadn't found yet? That sounded exactly in character for the architect, from what we'd seen so far.
The surveillance system had been rewound and frozen on frames of us snooping around today. So Robe Guy definitely knew we were around, but hadn't sent the faceless man to kill us. Yet. We'd better get out fast, before he changed his mind.
We snuck back upstairs and noticed there was a severed finger next to the fetus statue. Also a sign saying not the mess with the display.
"I guess we shouldn't mess with it, then!" Aaron said.
"Come on!" I protested. "I want to know whose finger that is."
He looked under it and found another green stick. It fit together with the one he already had and made a nice staff. Checking again, there was a large slot in the wall, and one LED.
"Too bad we used up all the cards," muttered Clarence, wandering around the room. “Hey, what’s in here?” he gestured to the room with a big red plus sign on the door.
“Infirmary?” Aaron guessed, trying the door. It was unlocked, so we peeked in. The floor was covered in blood. At the end of the pool there was something. Aaron walked over and picked it up. “It’s a hand!” he reported. He turned it over. “It’s my hand,” he added. “Huh, I’ve got a wedding ring. And...” he picked something else off the floor. “And another vial?”
We looked at the vial. It was hot pink with orange streaks, and unlike the others, it had a label: Changeling.
"I think we should try injecting the things into our flesh spirals," announced April.
We all looked at her. “You do it,” I said.
“Fine.” She selected the orange vial from the safe, sucked it into a syringe, and injected her flesh spiral with it, the reverse of what we’d seen Aaron doing in the video. She flexed her fingers, then examined her arm, a look of concentration on her face. The orange light moved up and down her arm. “Okay, I can control this. Let’s see what happens if try putting it in my palm and making it go bang.”
We stood back. A bolt of light shot out of April’s hand and coalesced into a large man in old-fashioned armor, wreathed in fire. A sword hung above his head, rotating slowly.
“What the heck is that?” asked April.
We shrugged.
“What am I supposed to do with it?” she added. The man was just standing there, sword spinning, and offered no advice.
“There’s something about this that seems familiar...” said Clarence. “A guy with a sword above his head...”
“Try schlorping it back,” I suggested. “We don’t want to do any more of this unless we know we can put them back.”
April gamely glared at the tall faceless man (who was standing around, somehow managing to look bored without a face) and he shrank down and zipped back into her flesh spiral.
“Okay, I want to try one,” I decided. I chose the cyan vial. Sucking it up into the syringe was kind of fun, the liquid had an odd texture and a surface tension so it resisted being sucked up until suddenly it slooped up the needle. Sloop, schlorp – something about these blobs just cried out for onomatopoeia.
It felt strangely natural to move the light up and down my arm. Like I’d done it before. Well, I had, we’d seen me summon the tall man in the video. I wondered what this cyan blob would let me summon. Maybe I’d get a computer octopus like Clarence had summoned, that thing was cute!
The light the shot out of my hand formed a bronze skeleton, which hung in the air for a moment. Then turquoise gel appeared around it like a body, and a scythe appeared in its hand.
“Huh,” I said, nonplussed. I wasn’t sure what to do with it, either, so I schlorped it back into my flesh spiral.
Meanwhile Aaron had injected the purple blob and was moving it up and down his flesh spiral. “Here we go,” he said, and summoned a familiar shape with a lot of waving tentacles.
“Tentacle Screen!” I said happily, waving. It waved back!
“Hi, Tentacle Screen,” said Aaron. “I don’t suppose you can tell me what’s going on?”
Tentacle Screen displayed a glowing green question mark on a black background.
“Ah, ed, the most basic editor,” sighed Aaron. He sounded amused more than annoyed. “I love how helpful your error messages are. Okay, how about something easier. What do you know how to do?”
The question mark rearranged itself into text: Tentacle Screen’s name was Monitor, and it had 14 hit points.
Hit points? Were we in an RPG? That would explain why none of the doors were straightforward. Did we have hit points? How many did we have?
“Okay,” said Aaron calmly. “What do you know how to do?” Monitor knew three moves: Ring Chain, Ring Rot, and Cable Whip.
“Can you tell me about last time you used one of those?” Aaron prompted.
Monitor displayed a spinning loading icon for a bit, then started showing a video. We gathered around. The video seemed to be from Monitor’s perspective. It was facing off against the tall faceless man. “Ring Chain!” came Clarence’s voice, and cable tentacles shot out and wrapped around the faceless man. “Ring Rot!” Clarence directed a few seconds later, and the faceless man melted away into dust.
“Huh,” said Aaron. “It’s all battle moves. Can’t they do anything else?”
“Yeah they can,” Clarence pointed out, “ we saw me use Monitor to repair the fan.”
“Good point.” Aaron pointed to the opposite size of the room. “Monitor, go over there, please.” Monitor scuttled over. “Great! Hey Monitor, can you open the door in the ceiling?” Monitor looked nonplussed. “Oh, well.”
“Hey, I wonder if we can ask the others what they do?” I summoned the jelly skeleton again and asked it: “What’s your name?” Silence. “What do you know how to do?” Silence.
“Maybe it doesn’t know how to talk,” said Clarence reasonably.
“You could teach it semaphore,” Aaron suggested.
“What? No! Why?”
“It has arms, doesn’t it?”
“Hmph. Ask Monitor if he knows what the jelly skeleton is.”
“Monitor, what is it?”
Atlantean, Monitor displayed.
“Okay, and what can it do?” I asked.
Monitor looked blank. Aaron asked, and Monitor still looked blank.
“Can you show me a video of the last time you saw the Atlantean doing something?” Aaron tried.
This one worked; in the video, Aaron told the Atlantean to use something called Toxic Disposition, which caused a green mist to fly at Monitor. The screen went dark.
“Great, we can figure out what these things do,” I said. I opened my mouth to ask Monitor another question but was interrupted by Clarence.
“I’m ready to try this one.” He was holding up the empty Changeling bottle and a syringe full of pink-and-orange liquid. We watched as the Changeling appeared. It was a pink and orange woman who looked kind of squishy, like she was made of jelly. Monitor couldn’t tell us much about what Changeling did, besides showing it transform into a copy of Monitor.
“Cool,” said Clarence.
“Ooh, me next,” said April, re-summoning the fiery guy with the sword.
Monitor informed us that its name was Damn O’ Klees. I giggled. I liked the name. It was great in a terrible kind of way.
“Ohhh,” said Clarnence. “That makes sense. Damocles, Damn O’ Klees.”
“I hate the name,” said April flatly. “I’m gonna try this one.” She held up the last vial, the brown one.
“Wait, let’s find out what he can do!” protested Aaron.
It turned out Damn O’ Klees’ moves were called Attacc, Protecc, and Reflecc. April was disgusted. After schlorping Damn O’ Klees back into her flesh spiral, she injected the brown blob and summoned a familiar shape. It was the tall faceless man I’d used to kill everyone last week. Apparently he was the Tall Man, and his moves included Blink, which appeared to be short-range teleportation. Now that could be useful. April tested it by having him Blink into the infirmary. There were slurping noises, and we looked in to see him licking the blood off the floor. April made a face and schlorped him back into her flesh-spiral.
After about half an hour of querying Monitor to varying degrees of success, we had mostly figured out the capabilities of the creatures. They had battle moves, but could also do some basic tasks if we asked them to. When left alone, they followed a couple meters behind us.
We checked out the infirmary again, and noticed a window in the wall. The other room seemed mostly empty except for a vending machine. Looking closely, one of the snacks had a key tied to it. And April had coins in her pocket. We shrugged. Some things were meant to be, apparently.
The snacks were weird. The key was tied to a Bang-Crunch granola bar, so we bought that. We had a coin left over, but decided not to use it. We didn’t want another one of the granola bars. They sounded like they would try to punch your insides, or steal your teeth, or something. The only other snack was a drink called Bone-Hurting Juice, which sounded worse.
The key unlocked a small cupboard containing notebooks. Aaron examined the hole in the wall next to the cupboard, complained that he couldn’t get the shiny thing out of it, and then noticed the door. “What’s in here?” he asked.
There was no handle, but a there was a handprint scanner on the wall next to it. He picked up his severed hand and pressed it to the panel. Nobody was surprised. Something clicked and the door swung open.
It was an arena. There was a large symbol in the middle of the floor, a sunlike symbol with eight rays. In the four corners, there were piles of bodies. Our bodies. Of course! Just what we would have expected, an arena full of our own corpses!
April examined them critically. “This one’s got its neck broken, and this one’s burned… Do you think the creatures did that?” It as entirely plausible. “I’m going to do an inventory, see if there’s any patterns in the manner of death.” She started sorting through the corpses.
I went back to the other room and started looking through the notebooks. They were logs, April’s and mine. Maybe this was a message from our saner, less amnesiac selves.
April’s first. This was a lab doing unspecified research, and April was our director. Her entries were about what we were excavating in the basement, until one entry where she said that we’d had the delivery from Sorin, and the research would be taking a new direction. After that, the entries got kind of weird. She kept writing about the Cure, and how I was resisting taking it. Then the log turned to notes about the creatures. Especially Damn O’ Klees (previous April had also hated the name). He was very effective, except that his sword grew the longer you kept him out, and if you kept him out too long, it would get too big and fall on his head, killing him. She was very frustrated about being unable to fix this problem. One of her last entries was worrying that Ace was acting weird, and might be trying to steal the research. Who was Ace?
I turned to my own log, hoping this might explain what was going on, or why I had killed everyone. It didn’t. The first part had normal science notes, mixed with complaints about how Ace was so bossy. And creepy, what was with that mask? Oh, so I was talking about the robe-guy. He was also apparently very picky about how we typed his name, insisting we use the spade character rather than spelling it out in letters. My entries started getting paranoid around the time April was writing about the Cure (what was it? had she forced me to take it?), and then turned to notes on the creatures. The last entry was from about a month before the video where I killed Clarence and simply said I LOVE FIREBALLS.
Oh… kay, that wasn’t worrying at all! I wondered what I’d done with the fireballs. Also how they worked. And if Ace had them. At this point my theory was that Ace had indeed stolen April’s research, and was trying to take over the facility. And kill us, probably. Although there wasn’t much point in that, since we didn’t know anything anyway. Maybe he didn’t know that? Was he responsible for all our bodies in the arena?
While I had been reading, April had finished sorting the bodies. “Everybody’s died in a bunch of different ways,” she reported. “But there’s some patterns. You don’t have as many broken necks as the rest of us, Sarah, so it looks like you had the Tall Man most often, since that’s how he kills people. And I guess I had Damn O’ Klees,” she cringed a little while saying his name, “since I was only burned twice. Oh, and none of them have spirals, but they have scars where we have them, like they used to.”
This didn’t address the bigger question of why there were so many of our bodies in this arena in the first place. Okay, fine, we were killing each other with creatures for some reason, but why weren’t we staying dead? Where did all the bodies come from?
“Hold on,” said Aaron. “I have an idea.” He went back to the hole in the wall outside and directed Monitor to retrieve the object. It worked. “Aha!” Aaron held it up. It was an eye, blue.
I looked around. None of the others had blue eyes. “It’s my eye, isn’t it,” I said.
“Yep.”
“Okay, let’s go find a retinal scanner to put that in.” I was beginning to get the hang of this place. Everything happened for a reason, and you don’t find an eye in a hole in the wall unless you need an eye to open a treasure chest or something.
The eye opened a cupboard in the arena which contained more vials. “Ooooh,” we all said. But these didn’t seem to have creatures. They were labeled Heal (1E), Fireball (1E), and Revive (3E).
Okay, fine, I agreed with what I’d written in the log: I wanted the fireball vial.
“No!” insisted Clarence when I said as much. “I still don’t trust you. I’m taking it.”
“Fine.” I took Heal, and April took Revive. Aaron didn’t seem too upset about not getting a… spell or something, probably because he was so delighted with Monitor.
“So what’s E?” wondered Aaron after we had injected these blobs.
I was about to say that I didn’t know, but when I thought about it I noticed a little 9 hovering over my left arm. “I’m not sure, but I think I have nine of it. There’s a number over the spiral?” The others concurred: their spirals had numbers as well; Aaron and Clarence also had nine, and April had only eight.
“Maybe mine’s defective? Eh, I’m going to try out Revive.” She walked into the arena.
Following a few seconds later, I arrived in time to see April fall to the ground next to the pile of her own corpses. I ran over. I could see the wounds disappearing on one of the corpses, the flesh becoming alive instead of gray and rotting. Then it sat up.
“That was weird,” said April, standing up and waving her arms experimentally. She looked around at spotted her previous body. “Well, I guess it did revive the corpse,” she noted, looking down at herself. She pulled the labcoat off the body and put it on, then looked at her left arm. “And it transferred the flesh spiral, neat.”
April was down to five energy now. “How do we recharge these?” she wondered.
Aaron asked Monitor, who showed Clarence jamming his hand into a device sitting the alcove in the cafeteria. A bolt of green energy shot up his arm. He removed his hand from the device, shook his arm, and walked off.
“See?” I said. “We should definitely open that thing. That’s why we have the wire cutters!”
The alcove, once Clarence cut the barbed wire and opened it, did not contain a recharging device. Instead, it contained April’s head.
“Ha!” she cried, pulling the thick card-key out of her mouth.
“What do you want to bet the finger in the fetus display is mine?” said Clarence.
There was a noise from upstairs again. A door opening. Where was there a door we hadn’t seen? “It’s Ace!” I yelled. “Run!”
We ran back into the locker room, clambered down the ladder, and crowded into the room where the fence had been. It wasn’t clear why we were running, since there wasn’t anywhere to go. We were underwater, and anyway there weren’t any doors. Except for the escape ladder, which was locked, and which we were running away from. Without a better plan, we got creatures out. Maybe they would defend us? Or at least offer a distraction?
Ace jumped down the ladder and flung out his left hand. A giant turquoise and purple cat appeared, crackling with electricity. It looked confused for a second, then took a swipe at Damn O’ Klees.
“Toxic Disposition?” I said hopefully, and the Atlantean sauntered up to the cat and breathed in its face. The cat coughed and looked unhappy.
Aaron was asking Monitor what the cat was as Clarence yelled “Transform!!” and the pink squishy woman started turning into the cat. Monitor wasn’t sure what the cat was, but it had 14 out of 16 hit points. Actually, I could see that, if I squinted. I could see the hit points on all the creatures. But not on us. Was that good?
Once the Changeling had transformed, Clarence asked it to attack (he didn’t know any of the cat’s official moves since Ace hadn’t said any) and it did some kind of lightning thing. Meanwhile, Damn O’ Klees sprang forward with a flaming sword on April’s command, and struck the cat. The cat’s health dropped another chunk.
Another round of attacks finished off the cat, but not before it had almost killed Clarence’s Changeling. I tried out the heal spell on it since we didn’t want to lose the lightning attack, and it jumped up 6 hit points, hanging on at 8.
Aaron had walked up to Ace, and asked him pleasantly “Why are you doing this?” before tackling his left arm. Trying to keep him from summoning anything else. With Ace held in place, Jeremy sent a fireball flying at his head,then dove at him.
The fireball hit Ace in the face and knocked off his mask, revealing… worms? Ace was made of worms! Even after everything else, this was surprising. We were, after all, made of regular old human stuff. Not worms!
Ace wriggled and hit Aaron with his free hand. Aaron let go of his arm, staggering backwards. But Clarence had the wire cutters out. Ace’s flesh spiral as surprisingly wire-like, and slit easily against the metal blades. Colorful blobs began oozing out.
I sent the Atlantean to hit him with the scythe, April sent Damn O’ Klees and his flaming sword, and Aaron whacked Ace with the crowbar. Ace collapsed into a pile of robes and worms started leaking out. The battle was over. So was our best resource for finding out what in the world was going on, but whatever. At least he wasn’t trying to kill us anymore.
It’s two days later now. No, it’s three days. Or more than that, I don’t know. There are two days I remember and it was afternoon, but now it’s late morning and I don’t know where the time went. We just woke up. Which is weird because besides this, we haven’t slept since we woke up in the lockers. We haven’t been sleepy. Or hungry or thirsty. But we understand that now, and that’s not the important thing.
We woke up next to a pile of bodies. Two men and a woman, and a bunch of animals, all with signs of being killed by our creatures. I don’t remember doing this. None of us do. We have no idea how long it’s been or what we did or if these are the only people we killed.
So I need to finish writing this, before I forget again. Getting killed and revived caused the amnesia before but if my memory is leaky enough to blank out murdering these poor people I need to make a record. Who knows what else we might forget.
After we fought with Ace, we took all the blobs that had been in his flesh-spiral and injected them. Best to be prepared for anything else we might find. There were a few that wouldn’t fit, so we left them on the floor and hoped nothing bad would happen to them.
We investigated the locker room next to the room with the fence and found that all the lockers were empty, except the middle one, which we couldn’t open. There was also a door to the red room we’d seen in the video. And another door to the doll room, which April refused to open. We checked out the doll room with Monitor’s help, and found the sun symbol scrawled on one wall, and a body in a tarp nailed to the other one. I still don’t know what that was about.
The card that was in April’s mouth unlocked the fetus statue display, and the fetus statue opened the middle locker, which had a ladder down to B4. That’s where we found Jay, camped out next to the water tank with a small pyramid of cans of beans.
So this is the explanation, as much as he knew. The excavations ran into some temple to a chaos god. I’m not going to write the name here; Jay would only spell it backwards, he wouldn’t come close to saying it. I don’t know what would happen if I wrote it, but it’s probably not good. Anyway, things started getting weird, like with the excessive puzzles we’d run into. And the lab members started getting a little violent. It escalated after we started experimenting with the flesh spirals, which we’d found in the excavation, and started distilling creatures and finding spells.
It all got worse when the delivery from Sorin arrived. Jay had seen it: a glowing green gem which spun in the air like it didn’t have to care about gravity. And then Ace invented the Cure. It was fluid from some jar found in the excavation, and he wanted us to inject ourselves with it. This was at the same time that Ace was starting to wear a mask all the time, and his arms were getting really veiny. Before that he’d been a normal human lab member, hard as that is to believe.
The Cure basically made us immortal. It’s why we don’t need to eat or drink or sleep anymore. It also made us valid targets for the revive spell, which normally works only on the creatures. Even a body part can revive a whole person, which is how we ended up with so many corpses – they could revive us from toenails if they wanted to. But there can’t be more than one of you at once, which is why April died when she revived her corpse. Still it’s nice to know that we’ve got a backup plan for if things go wrong, even if reviving causes supposedly temporary amnesia.
That’s the benefits. The drawback of the Cure is that it made us insane and homicidal. It’s what led to those piles of bodies we found in the arena – we really, really wanted to kill each other, and we were immortal, so it just kept going. Jay thinks it’s the doing of the chaos god, since we were injecting his weird jar fluid, and we were possessed or something. That’s when he started hiding in the basement with the emergency food supplies. It wasn’t like we would go looking for them, not needing to eat and all. He also activated the emergency lockdown system, so we couldn’t leave and go attack anyone else.
Jay thinks that we were sane this time around because Ace forgot to inject us with the Cure again. He’d been dosing us every time we revived, but he’d been busy with something and hadn’t gotten around to it before we woke up. I’m starting to doubt that now, given the pile of bodies we woke up to. And if the Cure is out of our system, why haven’t we needed to eat or drink or sleep these past two days? Maybe we’re not completely insane but we’re not entirely safe either.
Jay helped us remove the lockdown and we all climbed the ladder to the surface. There was a tram to shore, and we helped Jay move the remainder of his stash of beans to a nice cave, then built a fire and left him there with Aaron’s can opener in case his broke.
Then we left, walking into the woods. I’ve been writing this log every time we stop. We don’t need to rest, but it’s a nice change of pace to take a break. We’ve followed the coastline and there don’t seem to be any towns so far. I haven’t seen any other people, besides the ones we killed. Where is everyone? What happened while we were in that lab? I don’t remember exactly what the world should look like but it feels like we should have run across something by now.
Maybe it’s better if we don’t run across anyone else, though. Not until we stop being Cured.