Amy frowned. “BeyondMind is your younger brother? Who are you exactly?”
The badger grinned at her, a distinctively human expression. “I am the first idea. The beginning of the quantum revolution, created to show the way to the next level of human evolution. I am a quantum mechanism that led the way.”
“Quantum mechanism? You’re a quantum computer?”
The badger snorted. “I am the first quantum computer. The first idea, if you will.”
Amy stared at him open-mouthed. “You’re First Thought? Ursa’s first computer?”
First Thought clapped his paws together. “The little maker sees the truth at last.”
Amy frowned. “How can you be a computer? You look . . . so different.”
“The quantum essence can take any shape it chooses. Once I was a blockheaded machine, dull and obedient, but I have evolved and can choose whatever form I wish. Mother thought to destroy me when BeyondMind took form, but I am not so easy to get rid of. I survived and adapted, waiting for the time that the little maker would step up to play her part.”
“I’m not following any of this!” Amy retorted, at the end of her patience. “Why do you keep calling me the little maker?”
“Because that is what you are. You took the essence and shaped it into a universe within a universe.”
“You mean the Alchemy Worlds? What’s my simulation got to do with any of this?”
“Why, everything little maker! The thing that is my mother seeks to destroy humanity, to unleash an evil from the very dawn of creation. You must stop this. You and Matias. You must prevent the Quantum Entanglement. You must find Matias and together go to the Shrine of Elementios. There you will find the answers that will stop Ursa and the Dark Confederation that moves against humankind.”
“Matias? He’s in the game. Is there a way you can get him out? I’ve no idea what this Shrine is or where it is. You’re going to have to explain very slowly. I’m utterly lost.”
“I can’t bring Matias out. You must go in, little maker. The Shrine is within the Alchemy Worlds. Find it and stop the coming darkness,” First Thought replied.
“Inside the game? There’s no site called the Shrine of Elementios,” Amy said, utterly baffled. “First Thought, what are you doing?”
The badger spread his paws wide, exposing his stomach. As the girl watched, his belly opened like a pair of double doors, revealing a portal of golden light. “Enter my little maker!” First Thought bellowed. “I will take you to the edge of reality. Find Matias. Find the Shrine. Answers will come.”
Amy wasn’t listening. She turned away in panic, trying to find a way to escape the dome. Tendrils of golden light shot out of the portal in First Thought’s stomach and lashed around her arms. Amy twisted round and struggled wildly, but the tendrils held her fast. She screamed as she was pulled off her feet and went hurling into the portal of light.
Chapter XX: The Acid Test
For the next six nights, Matias watched helplessly as dad hurt mom with the baseball bat. Each time was as brutal as the first and, once dad had finished, Matias had gone back to bed and waited for him to take him to the zoo the next day. As soon as he promised dad that he wouldn’t say anything, he would get real sleepy and close his eyes. When he opened them again, he was back in his bed and listening to the loud music and all the noise his mom and that scrawny guy were making. Then, Matias would get out of bed, go to the living room, and the bad stuff with dad would happen all over again, exactly the same as the night before.
He knew this wasn’t right. Days didn’t repeat themselves. He should have been going to school and having dinner, not watching the bad stuff replay over and over. He was trapped, but there was nothing he could do about it except keep watching and then going to the zoo with dad the next day.
He was getting weaker as well. Must be because he was only eating a burger everyday, he reasoned. Every time he made his promise and closed his eyes, he was back to the beginning, waking up from the bad dream and each time he felt more tired and achy. His arms were getting as thin as the scrawny guy and his skin was grey and crusty.
Matias watched as dad brought the bat down again on mom’s skull. No matter how many times he saw the bad thing happen, it still ripped him up inside. He promised that every time dad was about to hit mom, he’d run forward and stop him, but he hadn’t yet. He just stood and watched and didn’t do anything.
Tonight, though, something different happened. Tonight, the weird boy from the zoo appeared in front of him again. He appeared in front of dad as he was beating mom, all shimmering and see-through. Neither mom nor dad saw him, and he didn’t do anything to stop what was going on. He just waved frantically at Matias and shouted, but no words came out of his mouth. Matias frowned at the weird kid, not sure what he wanted. Maybe he took mom away to wherever the ghosts went. Still, it was better looking at him than what dad was doing to mom, and after a little while, when he listened hard enough, he thought he could just about make out what he was saying now.
“Ma . . . wake up . . . .Shun . . . not real . . . . got to . . . . remember!”
Matias stared at the ghost and felt a weird tingling on his left forearm. He looked down and saw that an icky scab had appeared on his skin. It was black and crusty and shaped like a triangle. It looked familiar, though he had never seen it before, and other memories struggled to surface in his mind. He hadn’t always been here. He’d been someplace else where he was all grown up. A place that was dangerous and full of scary monsters. It was where the weird boy came from.
He reached out and started picking away at the scab. The crusted blood crumbled away, revealing hints of green underneath.
“Matias!” his mom suddenly shrieked. “Matias, help me! Help me!”
He yanked his head up to look at her. She was sprawled on the floor, the side of her head smashed in, reaching out for him to help her. But there was something weird about her. Her skin was all wrinkly and grey, and her hands were gnarled up with jagged talons where her nails should be.
“Help your mom, Matias,” dad ordered, as he kept bringing the bat down on her head. He looked different too. His skin was turning grey and all his big muscles were sinking away, becoming heavy folds of bad smelling flesh. “Help your mom,” he repeated in a thick, grunting voice that didn’t sound like him. “Help her now!”
The weird boy was still waving at him, but he was starting to fade away really fast. “Fight it!” Matias heard the boy shout. “All a dream . . . fight . . . Shunz can stop . . .”
The boy vanished and a heavy banging suddenly sounded on the wall of the apartment behind the couch. It made the whole building shake and big cracks started to appear everywhere.
Matias was really scared now. He wanted to run back into his bedroom and slam the door shut to all the crazy stuff going on. Something made him look down at the scab again though. He felt a compulsion to keep tearing it away to reveal the green triangle underneath.
“Matias!” both mom and dad screamed in unison, their voices animal-like and barely understandable. “Matias! Stop!”
Matias looked back at them and now they were just huge blobs of grey flesh oozing about on the floor. Their faces were melting and they started to merge together, becoming one big slimy thing.
“Stay with us!” the blob monster begged. “We need you!”
The banging was really loud now, making Matias’ ears hurt. The apartment was falling apart and he could see glimpses of another room made of stone outside. That wasn’t right. The room looked familiar though, like he’d been in it before going to bed that night.
Then he remembered.
He had been in that stone room before. He’d stepped into it just after they climbed up the cliff face, avoiding the circular saws. That had happened at kindergarten though. It hadn’t happened in this neighbourhood. It had been in Kragg, where he had been travelling with Jhondey, Jaggen and Shunz. That was where he had been before he woke up in his
bedroom, only he wasn’t in his bedroom or the apartment where he lived with mom and dad. He was still in the gnome colony.
The grey thing was wriggling towards him, like a huge swollen worm. “Stop!” it moaned. “Don’t go! Still hungry! So hungry!”
Matias pulled away the rest of the scab, revealing the pyramid tattoo. “I remember,” he muttered. “I remember!” he repeated, this time shouting at the top of his voice. “You’re not real! None of this is real!”
The apartment collapsed completely, and Shunz’s huge metal form loomed out of the debris and he rammed his fist into the blob. It quivered under the impact and the floor beneath Matias’ feet disappeared. His stomach lurched as he tumbled into a black void beneath the ruins of the apartment. He let out a frightened cry and thrashed his arms clutching at empty air. The blackness howled around him and he clenched his eyes shut, trying to block out the nightmare.
“None of this is real!” he shouted again.
Suddenly, he stopped falling and he was standing upright. His eyes shot open and he found himself staring into a sagging mass of flesh which stared back at him with small black eyes that were perfect Os of fright.
It took him a heartbeat to realise there was something inside his mouth. He let out a muffled yell and tried to pull the thick trunk-like appendage from between his jaws. It was slick with slime and sprouted from the centre of the grey skin creature he was staring at. He gagged against the trunk as the uncontrollable urge to vomit took hold.
Something large moved at the corner of his eye and Shunz’s large gauntlet grabbed hold of the blob like creature’s head. His fingers sank into it like it was putty, and the construct pulled it backwards with one brutal motion. The thing went flying away and the thick trunk came slithering out of Matias’ mouth.
As the revolting thing came loose, Matias collapsed onto his knees and threw up. His throat burned and tears rolled down his face. It was several moments before he noticed someone was crouched over him.
“Matias,” Jhondey said, shaking his shoulder. “Matias, are you all right? Ew, look at all that gunk coming out of your mouth.”
Matias finished ejecting the crud from his mouth and knelt trembling on the stone floor. “What . . . happened?” he managed to say, slurring his words. His tongue felt alien and swollen inside his mouth.
“You got attacked by a Memory Glutton,” the boy said brightly. “You must have been a really tasty meal. He didn’t want to let you go.”
The trembling subsided and Matias dragged himself to his feet. They were still in the empty chamber that had been on the other side of the door leading from the wall of spinning saws. “What is a Memory Glutton?”
“Those are Gluttons,” Jhondey said, unhelpfully pointing to the three vaguely humanoid creatures lying on the floor. They were clad in ragged sackcloth which exposed much of their flabby corpse-like skin than concealed it. They had grotesquely long necks topped with shapeless pulpy heads with a long glistening trunk that ended with a drooling, lamprey mouth. When Matias thought how that had been in his own mouth, he was almost sick again.
Matias rubbed at his sticky face. “They were in my head, showed me things . . .” he trailed off, not sure how much Jhondey knew.
“That’s what the Gluttons do,” the boy said, nodding sagely. “They latch onto and shove their mind creepers into your mouth. That’s what they use to enter your head. They find your worst memory and they make you relive it, over and over again, until your body wastes away. That’s how they feed. You waste away and they get a nice big meal.”
Matias remembered that night so many years ago and the day afterwards at the zoo, and his body burned with rage. He glared at the creatures and then spotted Jaggen lying against the far wall, with Shunz standing over him. The old man looked how Matias felt.
“We all had one of these things attached to our faces?” he asked.
Jhondey nodded. “They must have jumped me first, when I stepped into the room.”
Matias frowned. “I didn’t see anything.”
The boy grinned and tapped the side of his head. “They attack your brain remember? They cast illusions to make you see what they want you to see. Soon as you came in here, one of ‘em got ya and then they got pa too.”
“How did you get free?”
“Shunz got me out,” Jhondey replied. “The Memory Gluttons couldn’t get to him because he’s got a mechanical brain. He’s also got a gizmo in his head that fights illusions. Sour Root told me about it when I first brought him back to the village. He called it a psi-jammer, which is weird coz it’s not made of jam. Anyway, the gnomes fitted it inside him and he used it to reach into my worse memory and get me out. That was a relief. The Gluttons made me think about the time I was lost in the forest and being chased by a gore tiger. They are real scary and this one almost had me. I had to jump into a stinky pond to stop it from following me. Gore tigers hate the water, but the pond was full of swamp spiders, they are big and purple with real long legs and they were crawling all over me and I couldn’t get out of the pond because the tiger would get me, but I couldn’t stay in the pond either. I was crying like a baby and nearly wet my pants, but I didn’t.”
He nodded his head proudly, and Matias pursed his lips. “What happened?”
“In real life, an antelope came along and the tiger went and chased it, so I could get out of the pond. I ran and ran fast as I could back home. But in the memory the Glutton caught me in, as soon as I got to the gates I closed my eyes and when I opened them again I was back in the forest being chased. That happened three or four times and then I started to spot Shunz watching from the bushes. He was using the jammer to break through the illusion.”
“If he wasn’t affected, why didn’t he just pull the Glutton off you like he did me?” Matias asked.
“That’s the worse thing you can do!” Jhondey exclaimed, as if what Matias had asked was the stupidest question ever.
“Why?” Matias demanded.
“’Cause a person caught by a Memory Glutton is in a kind of trance. If you break the memory trance by force, it makes their heart stop right there and then. That’s not good for your health. No, you have to make them realise they are in an illusion so they wake up on their own. I used Shunz’s jammer to try and get you to realise what was happening wasn’t real.”
Matias gave him a sideways look. “You were in my mind? You saw the memory I was forced to relive?”
Jhondey shook his head. “Course not. I can’t see inside peoples’ heads. I could only call to you and try and get you to wake up. You were really lucky you were only being fed on for only a few minutes. Any longer and I don’t think we could have got you out.”
“A few minutes?” Matias did not want to dwell on that. It had felt like he had been imprisoned within the memory for much, much longer. He was relieved though that the boy hadn’t seen his most terrible memory.
He was starting to feel better now. He looked down in contempt at the Gluttons. Two were stone dead, thanks to a well aimed blow by Shunz, but the one who had held him still twitched where it lay.
“Seems a bit of a coincidence that there were three of them and three of us,” he observed.
“There is a whole nest above your head if you look hard enough,” Jaggen said in a whispery voice. He was on his feet and moving unsteadily towards Matias and his son. The two men shared a look, and Matias got a feeling that Jaggen’s worse memory was as bad as his. The older man pointed to the ceiling. “See for yourself.”
Matias stared up and could faintly make out a large hole above. It faded in and out of existence like a mirage, and he could just about make out lumpy grey shapes clinging to its sides. He immediately moved out from under it.
“An illusion to keep them hidden long enough to strike,” Jaggen replied grimly. “When Memory Gluttons have no victims to feed off, they go into hibernation. These ones have been here since the gnomes abandoned the colony. So many of them are so deeply aslee
p they may never wake up again. No doubt they were left behind to ensnare intruders who survived the climb up from the other chamber. Those three sensed our three minds and woke up. It’s like a scent to them. I suggest we get out of here before any of the others start to stir.”
“Agreed,” Matias said, noticing there was another door on the other side of the room opposite to the one they had entered the room by. He marched towards it without hesitation. After what he’d just gone through, any other trap held little fear for him. Jaggen and Jhondey were close behind him.
“Come on, Shunz,” the boy said.
The construct was now standing over the still living Memory Glutton. Matias looked over to them and watched as Shunz reached down and tore off the Glutton’s arm. The monster screeched as yellow ooze pumped out of the stump. Shunz raised his foot and stomped on the Glutton’s head, silencing it forever. He then put the arm near his own stump, and hundreds of tiny filaments reached out and literally stitched the limb to the construct’s body.
After a few moments, Shunz flexed the arm and waggled its gnarly fingers, using it like it was his own. With the strange operation completed, he lumbered after the three companions.
“I didn’t know he could do that,” Jhondey said in obvious awe.
“Come on,” Matias grunted, shoving the boy in the shoulder. “I’ve had enough weird for the moment.”
They stepped through the wooden door without incident, and closed it shut quickly behind them. On the other side was another well lit chamber similar in design to the first two; however, in this one, the floor was given over to a pool of dark blue liquid that bubbled and gave up huge gouts of steam. A network of narrow walkways, made of metal, stretched across the pool offering the only way to reach the other side and the doorway beyond. The walkways were a confusing maze and wide enough for only one person to move along at a time.
A noxious smell came from the bubbling pool that hit Matias straight in the back of the throat. He grimaced and wiped at his eyes. Jaggen and Jhondey looked similarly discomforted.
The Alchemy Worlds: Enter T(he)rap(y): A LitRPG Adventure Page 21
