The Second Lab
I woke up in the pitch black. Where was I? It didn’t get pitch black anywhere in the forests we had walked through, not even at night. Was I back in the locker? No, the surface I was lying on was soft. The locker had been hard metal. I sat up and was surprised not to bang my head on the lid.
“Hello?”
“Clarence!” I exclaimed.
“Sarah?”
“Oh, good,” said Aaron. “You’re all here.”
“April?”
There was no answer.
“April!”
I checked my pockets for my flashlight. Gosh, I had a lot of pockets! Somehow I had gotten cargo pants. But none of them contained a flashlight. Or anything else. “Any of you have a flashlight?”
“I do,” said Aaron. He flicked it on.
“No can opener this time?” I joked, watching as he shined the beam around the room like a very small lighthouse. He was on the top bunk of a set of bunk beds across the room from me. I was on the bottom bunk of another set of beds. I climbed to the top one and felt around for April. Smooth sheets, a perfectly made bed. No April. “She’s not here.” Hadn’t been here, unless she’d decided to make the bed, which would be completely out of character.
My left arm felt strangely weak as I climbed down. I pulled my sleeve up gingerly and found bandages, extending all the way to my palm. It was a little weird I hadn’t noticed that before, but I think the Cure somehow made us less aware of our bodies when it took away hunger and thirst and sleepiness. Now that I was aware of it, there was definitely a dull ache in my arm, like it was almost healed but still a bit fragile. Healed from what? Prodding the bandages, there didn’t seem to be any bulges on my forearm. No flesh spiral? I tried to check my energy level and got nothing. It wasn’t there!
Last thing I remembered we had all had flesh spirals. We had also had April.
After escaping from the seaside facility, we’d wandered the woods in search of answers. The blackouts kept happening, usually with a side effect of mounds of bodies. We’d debated whether we should even try to find civilization given our propensity for murdering people, but it was kind of a moot point given we had no idea where we were: we couldn’t avoid civilization any more than we could find it. We wandered for what felt like two weeks before coming upon a big city on the coast. Which coast, I don’t know. It might have been the same ocean the facility had been in, but the blackouts pretty much destroyed any idea of the route we’d taken. And we were blacked out a lot – it turned out it had been a month between the day we woke up in the lockers and when we arrived in the city.
The people there didn’t have many answers. Strange things had started happening months ago. Mostly it was the creatures, which they had started calling mons. Short for monsters. Monsters were a big problem because they liked to kill people. If you hurt them enough, they’d either vanish, or turn into colorful crystals. Which would turn back into monsters in about a week. There were rumors that some secret lab was doing experiments with the crystals but nobody had any details, and it was hotly debated whether the lab was a government conspiracy, or a plot to overthrow the government, or if the lab even existed.
We had our own suspicions about the secret lab April had told us of vague memories of sending reports to a different facility, so it could be that. A rival lab was equally plausible, though; and of course it could be entirely fictitious. The rumor did put a damper on our investigations. We couldn’t give too much away about the flesh-spirals since we didn’t want it to get back to the lab. Even though it might have been a sister facility to ours, that was no guarantee they wouldn’t be hostile. Ace, after all, had been on our fellow researcher before he was possessed by the chaos god. Who we couldn’t investigate at all because nobody wanted to speak or write his name.
Since our investigations hadn’t turned up much we’d decided to leave before we had another blackout and started killing people. On our way out of town we’d turned down an alley. There had been some reason for going in there, but I couldn’t remember what. My memories got hazy around then. But there had definitely been a really creepy eye staring at me. And then… what? How had we gotten here? Where was here?
Aaron, having climbed down from his bunk, swung the flashlight beam around the room again and the light glinted off something. Clarence bounded over to check it out.
“Aha!” he said, flicking the light switch.
The lights failed to turn on. He flicked it back and forth a few times to no avail.
“Maybe the power’s out,” suggested Aaron, trying the door. It had a doorknob, and opened, which was a nice change from what we’d come to expect.
But we didn’t want to venture out yet. Not until we were armed. Who knew what we might find out there! I folded up a pillowcase and stuffed it in my pocket. Fabric might come in handy, or a bag. Clarence and Aaron draped sheets around themselves, having the same idea. Aaron examined the beds like he was trying to figure out how to take them apart while Clarence and I riffled through the dresser we found in the corner by touch. There were some nails, and a bag of something. It bounced squishily, like an inflatable pillow. When Aaron shone his flashlight on it, it turned out to be trail-mix. Pressurized trail-mix. Who knew trail-mix went bad? We didn’t need to eat anything, but I pocketed it in case I could throw it at someone. The dresser was flimsier than the beds, so we dismantled the drawers into improvised clubs.
There, now we were ready to face the world. With bedsheet togas and a dismantled dresser and a bag of pressurized trail-mix. We were totally doomed.
There was nobody in the metal-lined hall. And there was a map tacked to the wall! With a clearly marked exit! Unfortunately the exit as on the other side of a large square room with the sun-symbol drawn on it. It looked suspiciously like the arena in the seaside facility. I hoped we weren’t going to find piles of our bodies in there, too.
We were at the last room in the hallway, with two more on the way before we reached the main complex. The room next door was similar to ours, but had a bathroom attached and only one set of bunk beds. We picked up a first-aid kit, as well as about a liter of some translucent liquid called Super Sleepy Solution. It warned that a small amount inhaled or even touched could cause unconsciousness. The first-aid kit might be really important, since no flesh-spirals meant no heal spells. We also found the crowbar. With bloodstains. I didn’t remember there being bloodstains... I wondered who I’d hit with it.
The third room was a kitchen, and it had a wealth of supplies. I started examining the knives while Aaron went immediately to the cutting boards. He took off his shirt and opened the medical kit.
“What are you doing?”
“Armor,” he explained, taping one of the flexible plastic cutting boards across his chest with tape from the medical kit and replacing his shirt. “Want some?” There were two more suitable cutting boards.
I hoped nobody was going to stab me, but there was no reason not to take precautions. “Sure.”
Once armored, we began searching the kitchen and quickly came upon a grate in the far wall. Looking in, the metal shaft went parallel to the hallway, in the direction we would be exploring next. It was big enough to fit a person. Aaron unscrewed the bolts holding the grate in with the tip of a small knife and boosted me in, handing me the flashlight and a medium-sized knife.
The tunnel was just big enough for me to crawl awkwardly on three limbs, my left hand holding the flashlight pointing ahead. It was hard to judge distance, but I thought I’d gone maybe ten meters when the air changed. Looking around, there was a large fan to my left, unmoving, and a vertical shaft reaching up. I could probably inch my way up the shaft if I tried, but that was something to do after I checked out the rest of the tunnel ahead.
After another uncomfortable length of crawling, I arrived at the vent at the other end. It was bolted to the wall. Of course. I shone the flashlight through the slats, trying to figure out what was in the room. It seemed to be an office. I could see a computer, a desk, some filing cabinets, and a swivel chair! I loved swivel chairs. So did April. Where was she? Why wasn’t she with us?
I turned around and started making my way back. I thought I knew which room this corresponded to on the map, so we could just go around. None of the doors around here seemed to be locked. Which was actually pretty weird. I shone my flashlight down the tunnel, trying to judge the distance remaining. There was a scream from the other end, followed by a sort of wet thump, like someone hitting a baseball made of jello. I started crawling faster. Something was happening to Aaron and Clarence and they didn’t have a light source! We really needed to fix that, or stop splitting the party.
As I neared the end of the tunnel, I could see a white blob moving around. It had ten out of fourteen hit points. I could still see hit points? As I slithered out of the vent, I saw the thing grab Clarence and start choking him with a tentacle. This thing had a lot of tentacles. What was it? It screamed as I shined the flashlight at it. Aaron rushed the thing with a knife, and began sawing at the tentacle around Clarence’s neck. It dropped another hit point. I decided it didn’t matter what the thing was, and stabbed it in its large eye.
The thing did not like this, and hit me in the chest with a spike-tipped tentacle, shoving me against the wall. I was glad of the armor, though it probably wasn’t going to be much use now; it had knocked the wind out of me, but I hadn’t gotten stabbed. I saw Clarence drop to the ground, free of the tentacle as Aaron, too, went flying.
We ran at the tentacle-thing again and attacked. It was now hanging at three hit points. Which meant it was still dangerous. I tried to block it with my arm, but lacking armor I was rewarded with a stinging cut.
It was official now: I did not like this thing. I stabbed it again as Clarence whacked it with the metal rolling pin he’d found earlier. The tentacles vanished and something fell to the floor with a clink. We examined it; it was a crystal, the same pearly white color as the tentacle-thing had been. Aaron shrugged and pocketed it. If there was anything we’d learned, it was to keep all plot-relevant items. And also anything else, in case it came in handy. Such as cutting board armor, which had saved us from a lot of injury.
Aaron sat down heavily and I realized that he was more injured than I thought.
“What happened?” I asked as Clarence got the medical kit.
“The thing just… appeared,” Aaron explained. “It didn’t seem to notice us. Ouch!” He winced at the antiseptic I was applying to the cut on his shoulder.
“It really hated the light, though,” Clarence continued. “Once you shone the flashlight out of the vent, it went berserk and started heading straight for the light. So I hit it with my rolling pin.” He held it up proudly.
After patching up Clarence and my minor cuts, we went back to searching the kitchen. Clarence had found a lighter and some vegetable oil. “Rancid,” he said after taking a sniff, “but it’ll still burn.” He took out mugs and started assembling oil lamps out of mugs and napkins.
Light source problem solved, I began checking out some more cabinets. “Cinnamon, nutmeg, fennel, gosh they have a lot of spices here,” I reported. “Flour, although it smells kind of moldy—”
“Flour?” Clarence repeated excitedly.
“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” asked Aaron, a grin spreading across his face.
“Yes!”
“What are you thinking?” I asked. I had a vague recollection of flour doing something exciting under the right circumstances, but it wasn’t coming back to me. Did it make a weird solid-liquid thing? No, that was corn-starch and water….
“Explosives!” said Clarence happily. “If you aerosolize it and get a spark, it will explode!”
“Ooooh,” I said appreciatively. “That sounds like it will come in handy!” I was being kind of sarcastic. But now that we had the option, I really hoped we got the opportunity to use it. An explosion sounded fun! Wait, no, that sounded like blackout-murder-Sarah thinking. An explosion sounded… like a good tactic to have on hand. That was better.
Better armed with knives, oil lamps, and the possibility of explosives, we set off down the hall. Soon we reached the room at the junction of three hallways, just like we’d expected from the map. Trying to get to the office, we turned left and following that hallway, found ourselves in a lab.
There was a lot of familiar equipment lying around, some of it smashed on the floor. One of the upright test-tubes contained a blueish crystal rather, suspended in a greenish liquid. (Colors were kind of tricky in the dark.) Apparently someone was in fact doing research on the mon-crystals. Since we had no idea what they were doing, we decided not to mess with it.
We searched the place for notes, hoping there would be an explanation. Nothing on paper, but there was a computer. It didn’t turn on, of course, but Aaron examined it anyway.
“It’s got an uninterruptible power supply!” he reported happily. “That would have given it enough time to safely store all data when the power went out. It would be completely usable if we could turn it on.”
“That requires getting the power on,” I pointed out. “Maybe we should focus on that?”
“Okay… hey, what’s this?” Clarence held up a watch. “It’s got a date on it and everything. 12/01/905.”
“Huh. A little less than a month and a half.” That was a long time to be asleep. What had happened in the meantime, besides someone removing our flesh-spirals? I examined the door. “The office is through here, I’m pretty sure.” I patted around for a doorknob.
“There’s a card-key scanner here,” Clarence noted. “I think we’re doomed.”
“Hold on,” I said, scanning the supply shelves. “There’s got to be something that will help us break down the door.”
“There’s some acid?” Aaron picked up the jar and examined the label. “Wow, this is strong. Yeah, I think we could make a little hole in the door at least, to see if it even is the office.”
Fifteen minutes later, we had a bit less acid, and a hole in the door two inches across. Eye-sized would have been easier but there had to be room for the light to pass through as well. Aaron and Clarence stood back as I held up my oil lamp near the opening and peered through.
“There’s a Tall Man!” I jumped back out of the way, hoping it hadn’t seen me. We were probably already doomed. It was going to teleport through the door and kill us. It could have already come to kill us, we knew it didn’t rely on line of sight. “Wait...” something about the Tall Man had seemed familiar. I looked again. “It waved at me! I think… I think it’s April’s Tall Man.” The Tall Man had spent time with all of us, but mainly April the past month. Um, the past month I was awake for.
“But how?” Clarence wanted to know, pushing me aside to take a look himself. “April had it on her when the creepy eye showed up. And she’s not here! So why how did it get here? And why is it waving at me?”
“What’s awakening mean?” Aaron asked when he had a turn looking through the hole. “Do either of you know?”
“What?”
“It’s got an awakening of four,” Aaron explained. “Take a look.”
Sure enough, the Tall Man had an awakening of four, as well as being down to two hit points. That last was reassuring at least; it meant it would be easier to kill if it came to that. I really hoped it wouldn’t come to that. “You know what? I’m fine with leaving this door closed for now.”
“Let’s go see if there’s a power supply,” Aaron suggested. “Get the power on.”
“I wish April was here,” I said. “She’d be great if we have to deal with circuit breakers or whatever.”
As it happened, we did not have to deal with circuit breakers. Doubling back to take the right fork instead of the left, we came to a locked door requiring a key-card at the end of the hall, and a hallway branching off to the left which lead to a room containing a generator.
“It even has fuel right here, conveniently located!” exclaimed Clarence, hefting a can of kerosene and passing me his oil lamp to leave outside and away from any chance of interacting with the kerosene. “We didn’t even have to solve a puzzle or fight a monster to get it!”
“Don’t jinx it!” I warned him. “We don’t want to spontaneously generate a password-box on the start button.”
“No, the start button looks perfectly straightforward to me,” said Aaron as Clarence poured one can into the generator. “Except that it’s red. You know what happens when you press red buttons.”
We looked at the button. In the flashlight’s beam, it was clearly a big red button. “It is a red button labeled ‘press to start backup backup generator’ rather than, say ‘press to destroy the world’,” Clarence said reasonably. “That’s got to count for something, right?”
“Fair enough,” said Aaron, and pushed the button. The generator whirred to life and a few seconds later the lights came on. We cheered.
“Looks like this’ll last for fifteen minutes,” Clarence said after reading the instructions on the wall (which were written in regular paint and therefore impossible to see in the pitch darkness, because people are idiots). “We’ve got three more cans, so that’s an hour of light total.”
“Don’t pour them all in yet,” Aaron advised. “We may want to spread the light out over time in case there’s something which absolutely needs power. We know we can deal with the darkness.”
“What I want to know,” I said, “is where the regular backup generator is. This one’s the backup backup, so there’s got to be another generator around here somewhere. Maybe one with more fuel, or instructions on how to get the power back on properly.”
“Yeah,” agreed Aaron. “Let’s keep exploring.”
With the lights on, we realized that the door at the end of the hall had a yellow mark on it, as did the one leading to the Tall Man infested office. Maybe they were helpfully color-coded, and we needed to find a yellow card-key. Or maybe yellow was the signal color for May Contain Monsters, and we should stay out of both rooms.
With the power back on, Aaron tried the computer again. It prompted him for a password he didn’t have. Grumbling, he began searching the desk in case someone had written the password down. “Huh,” he held up a yellow card-key. “I guess we can try out the locked room at the end of the hall. Might have the password in there.”
Privately I thought the office was more likely to have the password, but the office contained a Tall Man, and even if it was Aprils’ Tall Man and had waved at us (I wasn’t sure if this made it better or worse), I didn’t really want to open the door.
Clarence and I brandished our kitchen knives as Aaron swiped the card. The door retracted into the ceiling, revealing an empty room. Empty of living things at least; it contained a small table and a few chairs. But no Tall Men.
“Hold on,” I protested as the others went inside. “Someone should stay out here in case the power goes out, we don’t know what the door will do and I don’t want us to be trapped inside.”
“All doors except fire doors should be fail-open rather than fail-shut,” said Aaron absently. “But of course you wouldn’t expect designers of weird facilities for storing people they kidnapped to follow good design principles… Yikes!”
“What?” I demanded. I darted into the room, grabbed a chair and shoved it into the doorway to catch any falling doors, then joined them at the window on the far side of the room. “Oh!”
We were looking into the large room marked with the sun symbol. In it was a dragon. A really, really big dragon. It didn’t look too healthy, though, and its skin was kind of melty on one side, like it had been in a fire. Weren’t dragons supposed to be good at fires? It was walking in a slow circle around the room, passing by the window around every twenty seconds, and didn’t seem to notice us. Even so, I hoped the glass was fireproof.
“Well, that certainly makes our escape plans harder,” said Aaron in a wild understatement. The exit marked on the map was on the other side of the dragon room.
“Maybe there’s something else around here,” suggested Clarence with little hope. “Maybe there are more rooms or halls that aren’t marked on the map; after all, there was a vent connecting the kitchen to the office, so there might be more.”
Clarence’s hope was short lived when it became clear we couldn’t get very far. When we checked out the other hallway on the way from the kitchen, we were met with a metal door with a blue square on it. Aaron tried the card-key and it didn’t work, not that we had expected it to. Obviously we needed a blue card to open the door.
After ransacking the lab and the generator room, and searching the kitchen and bedrooms again, we determined there was one option left: we had to open up the office and face the Tall Man.
The door retracted into the ceiling with a clunk, and we stared at the Tall Man, waiting for it to attack. Its awakening was now at 6, whatever that meant. It waved. I noticed something on the wall behind it: blurry gray letters spelling out ‘hug’
“It wants a hug?” I asked. “Huh. Should I hug it then?”
“No” said Aaron and Clarence together, giving me identical are-you-nuts looks.
“But maybe that’ll tame it. If we can get it to like us, we can use its teleportation to get past the dragon.”
“Hmm,” Clarence didn’t sound convinced. “It still seems like a really obvious trap.”
“And if it tries anything, you can whack it.” It only had two hit points left, after all. I walked up to the Tall Man, Aaron and Clarence following a bit behind with weapons hidden behind their backs. Tall Men are always taller than the tallest person in the room, so its head would definitely be sticking out like a good target.
I put my arms around its torso. It was cold and hard, like hugging a tree. But its arms came up to encircle me. Was it working? The awakening counter ticked up to 7. What was awakening, anyway? It somehow seemed ominous, and it kept getting bigger. One of the Tall Man’s arms moved up to cradle the back of my head. This was starting to creep me out a little. And then its other one came up to hold my forehead. I recognized this: I had recovered enough memories of Tall Man breaking people’s necks to know when it was getting into position. I drew my knife and stabbed it in the back half a second before one of Aaron’s small knives bounced off the wall where the Tall Man’s head used to be. A jet black crystal clinked to the ground.
“Okay, so maybe that was a stupid idea,” I allowed. “But teleportation would have solved all our problems!” Aaron and Clarence were still giving me flat looks, like they couldn’t believe how stupid I’d been. I kind of agreed with them. “That was actually pretty weird,” I went on, talking to keep from thinking about how I’d just almost died. “I would have expected it to just jump at us, not ask for a hug in order to lure someone in. It doesn’t need to lure anyone, it can just teleport to them when they’re not looking.”
“That is pretty weird,” Clarence agreed. “But it was still obviously a trap.”
Besides the desk, swivel chair, computer (unlocked), and filing cabinets (locked), the office had a closet containing some military-looking garments. I tried to identify them in case this would give us clues as to who was behind the facility, but didn’t recognize anything except a badge on one of the tunics with the sun symbol that is becoming all too familiar.
Meanwhile, Aaron took a look at the computer. “There’s some experiment notes on here,” he informed us. “I’m pretty sure this is the other lab April mentioned. Looks like they were researching the flesh-spirals, and the mons. But mostly something called mediums. I can’t tell what they’re talking about since they assume the reader already knows, but I think it’s some sort of device that has to do with mons. Maybe they’re trying to make non-biological flesh-spirals?”
“Anything on the dragon?” I asked. There had to be, it’s not like they could miss it.
“Nope! Could be on the other computer. Or it could have showed up recently and that’s why there isn’t anyone around here – they all evacuated.”
“And left us here, thanks a lot mystery researchers.” I went back to poking through the closet. Maybe if we layered it it would serve as armor to replace our damaged cutting boards? No, it seemed more decorative than useful. But maybe there would be something useful in one of the pockets! “Aha!” I held up the blue card-key.
Passing through the room at the end of the hall (which was full of uninteresting-seeming crates), we found another hallway. The left branch ended in yet another locked door, this one with a red square, so we continued down the right one.
This led to a medical lab. There was an examination table, a lot of medical implements scattered on the floor, and a body hanging from the ceiling. A body with a flesh-spiral Worried, we examined it but it wasn’t April. It was a man I didn’t recognize. I figured he’d been dead about a week, but it was hard to tell. The flesh-spiral had been a recent addition before he died; the insertion only looked a few days old, as far as I could compare it to my memories of getting my own flesh-spiral put in. The room contained no explanation of what the man had been doing or why he’d killed himself. We did however find a box of flesh-spirals. I pocketed one. I could decide what to do with it later.
“Let’s go to the room across from the dragon,” Aaron suggested. “I want to see if there’s any explanation there.”
Following the map, we left out the other door, passed through a storage room with several doors, and turned left twice. And were faced with another door adorned with a red square.
“Come on!” complained Clarence, backtracking. He led us back down the hall, took two more left turns, and cursed when we arrived at another shut door. We headed back to the storage room and tried the remaining door. The hallway led to the dragon-room, and to a central room. Not wanting to mess with the dragon, we went first to the central room. The light in the hallway was burned out and the darkness, lit by our oil lamps, lent an air of solemnity to our approach.
There was a metal door in the way. But unlike the others we’d just encountered, it didn’t have a red square on it, which was a little encouraging. At least we could have multiple obstacles to be frustrated about!
Aaron banged on the door experimentally. There was a muffled squeak from inside, and the sound of scuffling. “Hello?” he called.
“Go away!” said a woman’s voice from inside. Not April’s.
“Who are you?”
“Why are you?”
“I think you kidnapped us?”
“Oh.” There was a pause. “You’re awake?” she asked incredulously.
“Yeah. We’ve been wandering around here for about an hour. We got the backup generator on so we can get through most of the doors. What happened?”
“Why did you kidnap us?” I demanded. “Where’s April?”
“Why did we kidnap you? Because you were killing people!”
“Hmm, good point,” I had to admit.
“Is that fixed now?” Clarence wanted to know.
“Should be, since we removed your Steve-spirals. Probably. We haven’t done this before, so it’s not totally clear but we knew those were where it started, so...”
“Steve-spirals?”
“We were researching them. Another lab had excavated them. Maybe you should ask them about it. If you head north to shore and then west along the coast a couple days there’s a tower sticking up out of the water, you can take a trolley to get to it.”
“We know the place, we woke up there a month ago with amnesia and video logs of us repeatedly killing each other. Um, two and a half months ago? Whatever. The people at that lab are not going to be any help because they’re us, and we have no idea what’s going on. Where is this place, anyway?”
“We’re on a boat, a couple hours boat ride from shore. It was a good location because–”
“Hey, you wouldn’t happen to have a red key-card?” Aaron interrupted my line of questioning. “We’ve got blue and yellow ones but we can’t find a red one anywhere and we want to get into the boardroom. Or whatever that is.”
“Oh, yeah, I’ve got it.”
“Great! Will you give it to us?”
“No. That would require opening this door.”
“You could… slide it under the crack in the door?”
“Does this door look like it has any cracks anywhere?”
It didn’t. The metal shutter extended into the floor.
“What if we bribe you?” I suggested. “I’ve got some high-pressure trail-mix?”
“Expired trail-mix, no thanks. I’ve got beans.”
“You’ve got beans,” repeated Clarence. “Are you sure you don’t want us to find you some—?”
“Yeah! A two month supply of them. I’ve got six weeks of beans left.”
“What happens then?”
“That’s what I’ve got a gun for.”
There was silence as we digested this.
“Are you sure you don’t want to leave that room?” Aaron asked after an awkwardly long pause. “Taking your chances out here is, you know, a chance at least.”
“No! You all are crazy.”
“I thought you said we weren’t crazy anymore!” Clarence protested.
“Well, yeah, that was the plan. But I don’t know if it worked. You might still have too much Steve-energy and snap.”
“Who is Steve?” I asked again.
The woman sighed. “It’s kind of silly, honestly. But early last year around when the gods went silent, we started noticing these two entities making incursions into our dimension. We, um, gave them nicknames. We didn’t want to say their actual names, obviously. So we gave them nice, normal-sounding names to make ourselves feel better. There’s Steve. He’s some sort of chaos god who makes people really violent. The flesh-spirals are Steve-magic. Everything to do with mons is, we think; they showed up when he did. We’re not really sure what the connection is. Anyway, Steve by himself would have been a total nightmare.”
“And the second entity?”
“That’s Lily. I don’t even know what Lily is. She… makes people want to solve puzzles. And manipulates the world to somehow contain puzzles. It somehow balances out Steve a bit, keeps everyone from killing each other all the time because sometimes they’re solving puzzles, or speaking entirely in anagrams or something. But it gets really frustrating when you have to search for some tiles and arrange them correctly on the door just to get to the other side of the facility. What’s wrong with normal keys?” She sighed.
“Or when you have to find the color-coded key-cards,” hinted Aaron, “only one of them has been stolen by someone who’s locked herself in a room full of beans. Aren’t you worried about angering Lily or something?”
“Look, I have no problem giving you the key-card. Except that that would require opening the door.”
“What if we…. went down the hall a ways and promised to stay way over there, and you left the card on the floor and then locked yourself up again?” Aaron suggested.
“We can bribe you!” Clarence insisted. “Do you want chocolate? I’m sure we can find some in the kitchen!”
“I’m allergic to chocolate.”
“We can bribe you with other things! Whatever you want! You can have our moldy flour! We could give you a flashlight! Or extra batteries!”
“I already have a flashlight, it’s one of the shaky ones. And there’s no point helping you when you can’t get past the dragon. It’ll just melt you, and you’ll die, and I can stay here with my beans in peace.”
“Well we would like to get out,” I snapped, “so if you could tell us anything about the dragon it would be much appreciated.”
“I don’t know! It was asleep most of the time I’ve been here. It breaths fire. When it gets cranky it thrashes around and breaks stuff. No idea what makes it cranky but I hope you don’t do anything to piss it off today. You guys didn’t check how many hit points it has?”
“What?”
“You had Steve-spirals, you can see hit points.” It sounded like she was rolling her eyes. “We’re pretty sure the effects last after removal.” Short pause. “You aren’t hungry, right? Wait, let me get my notebook.”
“What? Oh. No, still not hungry, or sleepy or anything. Except that we slept for like a month, what’s with that?”
“Perfect! The effects probably last. Very useful to know! I’ll just write this up and… dammit, for a second I almost believed anybody cared about my results, or that I wasn’t, you know, trapped by a dragon that nobody has bothered to investigate. Not that it matters, since you’re all doomed anyway!”
“Um. Sorry?” I said. “We didn’t think to check the dragon’s hit points. I’ll read your report if it’ll make you feel better though?”
“You know what,” announced Aaron. “We’re going to go put more kerosene in the backup generator, and check on the dragon, and maybe while we’re gone you can leave us the card? Thanks!” He dragged Clarence and me out of the room.
“But I wanted to ask her more questions,” I protested as we walked back around to the other side of the facility. “She knows stuff, if we can keep her talking, we’ll figure out what’s going on eventually.” Clarence poured kerosene into the generator, increasing the countdown to darkness to 24 minutes, and I walked into the observation room to look at the dragon. It had 123 out of 400 hit points. That was… a lot. I was not looking forward to fighting it. Especially not without an arm full of mons.
When we got back to the locked room, there was a woman sitting on the floor. “Hi,” she said, blinking at our oil lamps. Aaron, apparently having found the light switch for the hallway, flicked it on and the woman screamed. “Too bright! I’ve only had this flashlight,” she explained once he had turned it off again. “Not used to the light. It’s been two weeks.”
“What happened two weeks ago?”
“Oh, it wasn’t anything specific, that’s just when I decided that my coworkers were going crazy and barricaded myself in here.”
“Like the one with a flesh-spiral we found hanging in the lab over there?”
“He killed himself? Oh dear, I didn’t know that. Poor Liam. He’d been experimenting with your Steve-spirals, tried attaching one to himself. It didn’t go well. And we’d all been under a lot of stress after the dragon woke up last month.”
“What’s with the dragon?” I asked. “Is it some sort of over-the-top guard dog or what?”
“No, we found it and built the facility around it to study it. It’s fascinating, really. One of the biggest mons we’ve found anywhere.”
“Why is it all melty-looking?”
“Melty-looking? Oh, right, that happened after it blew up some of the pipes by accident. Apparently it’s not totally immune to fire. There’s gas supply lines in the passage at the other end of the room; the dragon threw a tantrum which ruptured one of them and then everything was on fire for a bit. We managed to get it contained to the exit corridor. That’s the other reason we can’t leave; even if we could get past the dragon, the whole corridor to the exit is on fire.”
“It’s still on fire?”
“Yeah, since it’s the gas lines that ruptured, there’s a basically endless supply of fuel to the fire.”
“You can’t turn it off?” Aaron asked incredulously.
“No, we can turn it off, but the switches for that are in the dragon room. On the far side.”
“Whyyyyyy did you do that?” I moaned.
“It was a convenient place to put them. The dragon was asleep.”
“Not anymore!”
“That’s true.”
“Is there any way we can get past the dragon to turn off the fuel lines?” Clarence asked.
“There’s dragon-surpressing pylons in the dragon-room, those might slow it down enough you can get over there. There might be enough time for you to flip all the switches before the dragon catches you.” She shrugged.
“How do we turn those on?”
“You’ll need to get the main generator working for that. It runs on gasoline. You can find some barrels of it in the dragon-room.”
We stared at her.
“You used the dragon-room for gasoline storage?” said Clarence with a look of horror.
“The dragon was asleep,” the woman said in a tone of voice that suggested this was a totally reasonable excuse.
“You used the dragon-room for gasoline storage? WHY?!?” Clarence was waving his arms wildly like this would somehow help convey the complete insanity of this idea to someone who apparently had no problem at all with the storage arrangements.
“Okay. Look, the dragon was really, really asleep. We built the entire facility around it, and it didn’t wake up. There was no reason to believe it was ever going to wake up. But just in case, we built the pylons and installed the fans.”
“The fans?”
“There’s fans in the ceiling. To disperse the sleeping drug. We’ve only found one drug that works on mons. It doesn’t actually make the dragon sleep – it’s too big for that to work without using gallons of it – but it does slow it down a bit.”
“This stuff?” I held up the bottle of Super Sleepy Solution.
“Yep!”
I noticed one of her legs was bandaged and splinted. “Hey, are you okay?”
“Probably. It’s bandaged, anyway.”
The bandages were stained with dried blood that had seeped through at some point. How long had it been like this? “Would you like some painkillers? We found a first-aid kit...”
“Yes, please!” The relief in her voice was obvious.
“What’s your name?” I asked as we poked through the medical kit in search of the painkillers.
“Lara.”
“I’m Sarah. Um, maybe you already knew that from when you were stalking us.”
“I’m Clarence,” said Clarence, smiling.
“Aaron.”
“And we had a fourth person, April, but we lost her when you kidnapped us. We’re going to have to find her.”
“Do you really want to do that?” Lara asked. “She’s crazy just like you all were. She’ll probably try to kill you. She’s probably going on a rampage right now and killing lots of other people.”
“Oh. Right.” I had been thinking of April as an ally, and approximately as sane as me. Perhaps this wasn’t a good metric given our recent propensity for waking up next to piles of bodies with no memory of why we’d done it. “Then we need to get her over here – well not here, this place is kind of terrible… Could you do the flesh-spiral removal on her if we captured her? We could try to track down supplies for you.”
“Hmm. Maybe. But before you go charging off to find her you should know about the new mediums.”
“Mediums?”
“Mon-summoning devices. Like the flesh-spirals. We were working on copying the useful characteristics without the blackouts and insanity. We’ve got a few prototypes of a new kind that channels the mon’s characteristics into the wearer. They’re stored in the room down the hall.”
“The boardroom?” Aaron asked excitedly. “I knew there was something important in there! Let’s go!” he picked the red key-card up from where Lara had said it.
“Wait!” Clarence held him back. “How do these even work? What do you mean the wearer?”
“There’s a gauntlet and two breastplates. You hold a mon-orb in your right hand and schlorp it into the medium, then transform.”
I was amused that she used the same onomatopoeia I did to describe absorbing a mon into a medium.
“And you can transform back, right?” I asked anxiously. This sounded a little suspicious. I didn’t see why Lara would bother lying to us unless the whole place was a setup, somehow. But getting stuck as a mon was a worrying prospect.
“Yes, of course. It wears off after a while anyway and you have to use energy to retransform.”
“Okay then.” Clarence seemed satisfied, so I decided it was alright as long as one of the other two tried it first.
The boardroom contained a lot of chairs, and a large wooden table, and a cupboard of clothing. It was weird-looking clothing, so I assumed it was the experimental mediums.
Aaron tried the gauntlet on. “North is that way.” He pointed.
“What?”
“North is that way,” he repeated. “I don’t know why I suddenly know this. I’m not transforming, am I?”
“No.”
He flexed his fingers. And still didn’t transform.
“It doesn’t feel like there’s anything in here,” he explained. “There’s spaces where things could go, but they’re empty. Six spaces.”
“I wonder how you put things into it,” said Clarence.
“Me, too.” Aaron looked thoughtful.
Suddenly a thin blue sword made of light popped out of Aaron’s gauntlet. He looked very surprised.
“Ooh, stab something with it!” I encouraged.
Aaron stabbed the wall. The wall appeared fairly stabbable, but thick enough that cutting through it would be tricky. Not that we wanted to cut a hole in the wall – there was a dragon on the other side!
After a few more seconds, the blade faded. “Weird,” said Aaron. He stared at his hand. “I don’t know what that was, but –” he paused. Stared at his hand some more. “I can’t get it to do it again! I’m thinking about making beam swords and nothing is happening.”
“Is it a spell?” I hadn’t encountered this kind of spell, but it seemed useful.
“I… don’t think so? The medium’s at full energy, ten out of ten. So whatever I did, it’s free. If I can get it to do it again.”
“And you still don’t have anything in there?” Clarence asked.
“Nope!”
“Huh.” We checked the cupboard again. On the bottom was a piece of crumpled cloth. No, it was a sphere that seemed like it was made of crumpled cloth, yet somehow maintained its shape. I picked it up. It was lighter than it looked. “Maybe this is the mon-orb she was talking about?”
“Maybe.” Aaron held his gauntletted hand out for the orb, which was schlorped into the medium upon contact with his palm. “Ah! There’s a mon in here now, it costs one energy, let’s see what it does –” He transformed, body becoming stick-thin, eyes expanding to fill most of his head, a reddish scaly substance spreading over his skin.
“You’re a bug?” said Clarence in confusion.
“I am? I guess I am.”
“Hey, you have hit points!” I noticed. “That’s maybe useful. We should ask Lara what happens if you get hurt in mon form.”
“Oh good point, this might be a good form of armor if the mon takes hit point damage for us. I’m already not doing great, I’d like to find a doctor once we get out of here.” Aaron stared into the distance for a few seconds, then brightened. “I think I’ve got some sort of fire attack! You two get out of here so I can try it out.”
Clarence and I went a ways down the hall towards Lara’s room. There was a loud bang. When we returned, there was a large burn mark on one wall.
“Yep, I have a fire attack,” said Aaron, stating the obvious. “I’m going to try putting it away, just to make sure I can untransform.” He did so, returning to his normal humanish state (I say humanish rather than human due to the small differences we’ve noticed, like no longer needing to eat or sleep or breath). “I’m pretty sure I can get it back without using more energy for a while,” he reported. “Seems safe enough.”
“Okay, I’m trying one of the breastplates,” Clarence announced, pulling one off a hanger. “Fasten the back?”
Once it was fastened, Clarence got a faraway look. “Yep, there’s something in here.” he reported. “Takes up two spaces, one energy to summon...” he transformed, shrinking about two feet and growing a long beak. He patted his with claw-hands. “Is this a mask? It feels like a mask somehow, but also part of me.”
I stared at it. “It might be. Maybe it’s like a plague doctor? Can you plague people? Maybe don’t though.”
Clarence waved a hand and a green orb appeared in it. “It feels like I should throw it,” he said, and tossed it onto a chair on the other side of the room. There was a small explosion and the chair flew apart.
“Hey!” I protested. “Watch what you explode.”
“Sorry.”
“Let’s go out of the room,” Aaron suggested, pulling me away from Clarence and out into the hall. It was a good idea; we really should have kept up the precautions from Aaron’s fire attack.
“I’m trying my other attack!” said Clarence from inside the room. A few seconds later, he spoke again. “Nothing happened, but I feel like I’m ready for something. Like I’m holding something back. I’m going to let it go and see what happens.” There was a bang, and a crunch, and then Clarence saying “owwww…”
Aaron and I rushed into the room. “What did you do??”
“I exploded,” answered Clarence, rubbing the top of his head. “I think it would be good for flinging me but there was a ceiling in the way.”
I decided to try on the other breastplate, and chose the last mon.
“You look sort of ghostly,” said Aaron when I transformed. “Skeletal?”
“I guess I’m death-themed or something, I’ve even got a scythe!” It was floating a few feet away, above the table in the middle of the room.
“What?” Clarence looked around.
“Don’t you see it?” I focused on the scythe and it flew into my hand.
“Oh!”
So the scythe was invisible when I wasn’t holding it. I waved it around experimentally, then cut a chair in half. The scythe moved through it in a very satisfying way. I waved it around some more, then threw it at the wall on an instinct I didn’t understand. The scythe whirled towards the wall, spinning much faster than it should have given how hard I’d thrown it, gouged a line down the wall, then boomeranged back to my hand. “Cool!”
“Can you do anything else?” Aaron asked.
“Yeah, I’m not sure what it is but I think I can…”
“You’re turning transparent!” Clarence interrupted.
“Really?” I looked down at myself. I was sort of see-through. “Is it a ghost thing? Am I turning incorporeal?” I tried to walk through a chair and crashed into it. “Oh, well, it was worth a try.”
“You are floating, though.”
It was true; I had hovered up to a few inches off the ground without noticing. “Huh. I think I’m going to put this away for now, it doesn’t seem that useful when we don’t have anything to fight.”
“There is the dragon,” pointed out Aaron.
“I’m not fighting that!”
“But we could blow it up with the flour,” Clarence suggested.
“Come on, we don’t have enough for a really good explosion.”
“If we can set the gasoline off, it might be enough.”
“Ehhhh…”
“But how are we going to aerosolize it? It’s not like we can run in the door, toss the bag at it, and hope that does the trick.”
“The fans?” I remembered. “Lara said there were some for dispersing the sleeping drug, would those work?”
“They might,” said Aaron, and we headed back to ask Lara about it.
Lara’s incredulous grin grew as we explained the plan. After confirming that the fans would probably aerosolize the flour just as well as they did the Super Sleepy Solution, she started laughing and fished a small key out of her pocket. “It was just so tempting so we had to lock it up,” she explained not very illuminatingly. “But here. You deserve this.”
“What?” asked Clarence, taking the key.
“Go back to the kitchen. The bottom of the pantry opens up.”
We went, and opened up the bottom of the pantry. There was a 50 kilo sack of flour. I also started laughing as we hauled it out of the secret storage space. “Perfect!”
After some discussion, we decided that the best plan was to fill the dragon-room with flour, then detonate the gasoline by shooting it with Lara’s gun from the smaller observation room. We would have to make a small hole in the wall to shoot through, but hopefully not much of the explosion would get through. Since I was the best shot, I would start the explosion, wearing the plague/bomb mon as protection since it had the most hit points left. While Aaron went to unlock the room with the fan management system (it required the red key card), Clarence and I switched mons and he used the scythe to carve a slit in the wall of the observation room, then plugged most of it with cloth. We didn’t want extra flour to get into the observation room and explode me.
“It takes thirty seconds for the fans to fill the room,” Aaron reviewed. “The dragon makes a circuit of the room every twenty seconds. So I should start the distribution when the dragon is on the far side of the room, and you shoot the gasoline the second time the dragon comes by.”
“Yeah, yeah, I got it.” I twiddled my fingers, trying to get used to claws. I hoped they wouldn’t throw off my aim – we had ten bullets but not a lot of time before the flour would start to settle, ruining the explosion.
Aaron and Clarence left the room and about a minute later I heard Aaron call “I’m starting the fans!” White powder began raining from the ceiling, drifting around in slow motion. The dragon passed me and headed back to the other side of the room. The flour was filling the room pretty well, and not much had yet gathered on the ground. As the dragon approached the pile of gasoline a second time, I fired at one of the canisters then dropped to the ground.
There was a very loud BOOOOM and the walls shook. Then an angry squeal that went on for a while. I checked the slit. The dragon looked meltier than before, and seemed very put out with its now having only 23 hit points. That was manageable! I took aim at it and it dropped three hit points. Perfect. There were enough bullets to finish it off if I didn’t miss more than once.
There was one problem, which was that the dragon noticed where the shots were coming from, and decided to breath fire at the slit. I ducked out of the way but not before taking a few hit points of damage. Eventually it got bored and started pacing the room again, which was my cue to start shooting. The glass of the window was now fogged and cracked from the heat and explosion. I hoped it would stand up another round of fire because I didn’t think I could get off five shots before the dragon targeted me again.
Clarence entered the room as I took a third shot. “What are you doing?” he asked, coming over to the slit. “Is it – aaaaigh!” he broke off as fire blossomed from the wall.
“The dragon is almost dead,” I explained. “I’m just going to shoot it a little more. And hopefully not get melted.”
And it worked. The dragon shrank down, leaving a surprisingly small corpse with a light blue orb on its back. We went in to investigate and Aaron’s blue sword reappeared.
“I just realized…” he mused. “It appeared before when I was talking about how to insert more mons. I think this is how you do it.” He stabbed the blue orb and the blade schlorped it up. “Yes, I can become a dragon!” And he turned into a small dragon, about ten feet tall and with 25 hit points.
“You can fly us out!” I said. “I’m sure Lara will come with us now.”
Clarence and I went to fetch Lara, and by the time we’d got her onto a swivel chair and pushed her to the dragon-room, Aaron had wrestled the levers into the off position and the fire in the exit hall was dying down. It was still pretty hot, but we didn’t want to wait for something else to go wrong so we had a rather exciting sprint pushing Lara’s slightly melting chair down the hall. And then a ladder up to the surface.
We were on a boat, as Lara had said. The uncannily flat water stretched out in all directions like a mirror for the night sky. We climbed onto Aaron’s back and took off towards shore.