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Episode 01x31 - Hideous Creatures

Malex:

Our prospects were not good. We were trapped in a badly-architected cage by natives, who, cute as they were, were probably going to eat us or something.

So yeah, another normal day.

I looked around at my companions. Thubthub was hard at work trying to dig under the cage, but his progress was too slow to be useful. Icepunk, Boof, and Poo were trying, for some reason, to get some mushrooms that were growing outside the cage just beyond their reach. Echofly - whose dinner of bugs and moss had apparently disagreed with her - was recuperating in a corner. Linus was exercising his newfound ability to manipulate the makeup of his virtual body.

I sat, quietly observing the environment. We were still on a giant tree, but it was different somehow. The ground was almost black here, as if the tree had some disease that was spreading outward from the trunk. The air was thicker and warmer too. Altogether, quite unnatural.

I watched as Linus figured out how to arbitrarily alter his size. He grew and he shrank at will. Suddenly, I had an idea.

“Linus,” I called quietly.

“Yeah, what?” he responded.

I tossed a pebble at his feet. “If you shrink to the size of an ant, can you lift that?”

He looked at me curiously. “Why?”

“I want to know if the system forgets to scale your lifting ability with your size. If your strength is relative to your size, we can break out of here as soon as the natives are asleep.”

He nodded his head, shrank to the size of an ant, struggled with the pebble for a minute, and grew back to normal size. “Yeah, if I can’t lift as much as usual when I’m smaller, then I’ll be able to lift much more as I grow. I’m sure I can bust us outta here.”

“Good,” I said. “Let’s wait until later, when the natives should all be sleeping, then break out and leave via the portal. They can’t catch us if they’re all unconscious.”

Later, after night had fallen, I gave Linus the word. We needed to get out of that stupid cage and return home quickly before anything else went wrong.

Linus grabbed the bottom of the cage and tried to lift it. When he made no progress at normal size, he grew and kept pulling. Slowly, the cage rose, tipping upward on its primitive hinges. Soon, the ropes that anchored it to the ground grew taut against their stakes. Progress halted, but Linus grew even larger and exerted more force. Soon, the stakes began to bend and creak against the wood of the tree in which they were embedded. Without warning, both stakes slipped from their moorings and shot upward with surprising velocity. Swinging in a wide arc, they both cracked Linus’ abnormally large skull from opposite directions. He groaned and toppled forward, unconscious.

Without his concentration to keep the virtual reality system confused, Linus’ body suddenly shrank back to its normal size. The cage, no longer being supported by Linus, fell right on his unconscious body with a sickening crunch.

“Well well,” Icepunk said. “Linus may be dead, but at least his lifeless body is keeping the cage off the ground just enough to squeeze under-”

“NO!” I screamed, very nearly hysterical. “LINUS CAN’T BE DEAD!”

Echofly walked up to me and put a comforting hand on my shoulder. “I’m so sorry...”

“I’m... not... dead...” Linus said haltingly. “I’m just quite crushed. This will take a couple of minutes to sort out, so feel free to squeeze under the cage while my broken body is still propping it up.”

After a few minutes, Linus used his mastery of the system to put his internal organs back together, and immediately extricated himself from underneath the huge cage.

“Good,” I said. “Now that we’re all together, in one piece, and no longer on the breakfast menu, we can all go home.”

With this new hope firmly in place, we ran for the portal.

We arrived at the shrine and stopped. “There it is, people!” I exclaimed. “Let’s go home!”

Linus ducked past me, “Last one through is a rotten egg!” He leapt through the portal’s watery, mirror-like surface. Instead of leaving this reality for the real one, however, he hit the tree behind the portal full-force. The apparently faux portal, having now been exposed for the fake that it really was, flickered out of sight.

There was a sighing sound as the wind around the tree started to blow. Suddenly, we heard the sound of a thousand voices screaming.

Linus was just getting up after leaping face-first into the tree, and had not quite recovered yet. “Whoa! I just hit my head really hard, and there are thousands of voices screaming.”

“That’s not just in your head dude, it’s coming from the village.” Boof said urgently.

“That sounds like the villagers! We’ve gotta help them!” Echofly yelled.

“Let’s go,” I said grimly, starting toward the village.

Icepunk:

In the eerie darkness of the tree, we head for the village, stumbling and occasionally cursing. Strange sounds are coming from the direction of the village even though the screams have long since stopped, most likely because the people making them are dead.

“Whoa!” I exclaim as I trip over a pile of dead natives, which tells me we must be in the village. I scramble upright and inspect the bodies. “These little guys were ripped to shreds by something.”

“Something like that, you think?” Malex screams, pointing at a vampiric bat swooping toward us. “For the love of not being dead, run!”

We run into the village with the unholy creature screaming like the undead. A few of the remaining warriors have apparently started a bonfire and are defending themselves with spears. With Malex in the lead, we dash into the fray, picking up the spears of fallen warriors.

With our backs to the fire and our spears ready, we anxiously wait for a foe to come within striking range.

A bat lands in front of us, and in the flickering light of the fire, we see that it is indeed a giant bat - a bat with a grotesque perversion of a human head.

“Say, that bat looks familiar...” I say, absently prodding it with my spear.

It shrieks in annoyance and starts moving toward me ever so slowly.

“Wow Icepunk,” Malex says, scrambling back a bit - trying to prepare for the bat’s impending pounce, “you’re just about as sharp as your spear.”

The bat - whose face I suddenly recognize as Robb and Bobb’s - lunges and tries to gnaw my face off. Thubthub, Malex, and Linus make short work of it with their spears while Boof and Poo hide behind Echofly. “You know,” Malex continues - looking on as the bat rapidly withers, “Robb’s and Bobb’s nearly identical facial features are ugly enough without this perversion. I wonder what in the world they’re up to?”

Just then, the tree rumbles and shakes, and a piercing wail emanates from the center of the tree. As though a command had been spoken, a bat swoops in, grabs Echofly and carries her off toward the trunk of the tree before any of us can stop it. The remaining bats cease the attack and head toward the source of the wail.

“Gee, swell. Echofly’s just been kidnapped,” I say sarcastically.

“My ancient slang is rusty. Is ‘swell’ a dirty word?” Poo asks.

I hear a chattering behind me. I turn and see the warriors leveling their spears and moving toward us with an obvious intent to cause us undue harm. Not wanting to injure, maim or slap the superstitious natives, we run for the tree trunk to rescue Echofly.