Dr. Morbid's Castle of Blood (Masks)

by Hayden Thorne

  By the time the skeleton died by exploding in a rain of shattered bones under my weight—yeah, that was how skeletons died in this game—I’d already used up my energy, and I was sweaty and panting.

  Around me the battle continued, with the heroes either blasting the skeletons with fireballs or pummeling them with power punches. I had to stumble back to my feet, my grip on my knife tightening, as I scanned the area for another monster to destroy. I found one that was emerging from behind Ridley, and I ran toward it, tackling it like before, and straddling it while stabbing its life points away.

  By the time the dust cleared, we all stood pretty scattered, surrounded by piles of shattered bones. It didn’t hit me till then that I’d just destroyed four skeletons, though I knew the heroes mowed down twice as many each.

  “Okay, now what?” Ridley asked, breaking our tired silence.

  “Weapons exchange!” I said, hurrying over to a pile of bones when I spotted something lying on the grass next to it. It was a sword this time. I dropped my knife and claimed that without even bothering to think about it. I mean, duh. It was about three feet long, with the blade much, much broader, and it was fairly heavy but still easy to swing around.

  I couldn’t help but think that the more points I earned, the more masculine I was becoming, judging from the increasing lengths of the swords I was bound to pick up along the way. What a totally Freudian game this was.

  I joined everyone else, picking our way through the carnage and looking for clues or whatever else that we needed for this “mission.” Freddie found a couple of bottles filled with healing potions, which we agreed we didn’t need since the monsters attacking didn’t do us any physical damage beyond exhaustion. Peter found a bottle of magic potion—or at least we decided it was something like that, given the amount of sparkles in the liquid—and it was an elixir of some kind that would’ve empowered a mage when drunk right out of the bottle. I found a leather jerkin, but I didn’t need it, obviously.

  “Hey, guys, check this out,” Wade said, appearing from a cluster of trees, half of which she’d mildly destroyed using her fire balls. Thin black smoke rose up from partially charred branches and leaves. She held a scroll that she’d just unrolled.

  Peter took it from her and read it out loud. “‘I can communicate this way. Keep fighting to uncover more messages. Sentries are now working with me to get you out.’”

  We exchanged excited glances. “Althea!” I said. “This is great! At least she can guide us like this, right?”

  Peter nodded, scanning the message. “This is cool,” he said, grinning. “I guess when you mess around with a simple game, there’s only so much you can do. Althea’s way, way too advanced as a walking computer to be kept out so easily.”

  “Found another!” Ridley crowed, pointing at something lying under the carcass of a werewolf that joined in the fun earlier. He ran over to the rolled piece of paper and snatched it up. He read it on his way back to us. “It says, ‘This is like the nerd’s ultimate version of Twitter. Can’t talk too long when I access. Totally sucks ass.’ There’s also a post script,” he said. “Looks like we’re in Sleeping Beauty’s cursed kingdom.”

  “Yep, that’ll help.” Wade looked around, grinning and rubbing her gloved hands together. “Okay, I’m ready to move forward. I can’t wait till we reach the castle and destroy Sleeping Beauty. I’ve always hated that fairy tale and that useless doormat of a princess.”

  Girl fight! Yes!

  The massive battle earned enough points for the heroes to add to their built-in arsenal. Both Ridley and Peter went a step above just super strength. Ridley got some of his defense power blasts back, and Peter’s hyper speed ability was there, but it wasn’t at its normal levels yet. Wade got her fire whip, but it was also not as potent as it usually was. Freddie could mask himself more quickly, and while he could access a few more masks he had in his archive thingie, they weren’t the ultimate kickass ones that he used for big battles.

  And I had a very large sword in my hand. I never felt so manly in my life.

  We suspected that, because the ambush we just had was pretty massive and harder to fight off than before, we were getting close to a “safe place” for players. After walking for another ten minutes, we emerged from the forest and found ourselves in a gypsy camp of some kind.

  There were colorful caravans parked all over a massive open area beyond the trees. Horses had their own little corral type of thing outside the camp, and a dozen or so gypsies moved around. It was so cool. We all stopped and scoped out the place.

  “I guess this is where players would normally tank up on stuff,” Freddie said. He’d switched back to his normal self after fighting off skeletons as a ninja with no weapons. Seriously, whatever the hell was Freddie thinking when he decided to create a ninja mask with no über cool weapons? Fail! “You know, buy and sell weapons and gear, stock up on supplies, get a new mission, have sex with one of the locals…”

  “Dude, I’m not too sure it’s a good idea to share your kinks,” Wade said, staring at Freddie, who only gave her a shit-eating grin. She grimaced at that and then flapped her hands at him like she was warding off flies. “Oh, my God, stop planting that idea in my head!”

  I looked around me, scrunching my face. “What, no hot gypsies anywhere? What a sad program this is.”

  So true. Everyone looked like each other up close, the only difference being their costumes. The only things that made some characters stand out were beards for guys and babies being carried around for girls. I wondered if the zombie baby that tried to eat my kneecap used to be a normal baby from this camp. Maybe some witch stole a few and turned them into gross-looking but totally ineffective little monsters to kinda-sorta terrorize the countryside. Yeah, right. Terrorize, my pasty, bony butt.

  Peter being Peter, he’d already marched up to someone who looked old and wise and was most likely the camp’s leader or something and was talking to him. Or was attempting to, anyway. Peter talked, and the old man just looked at him and then went back to what he was doing, which was stand in front of a tent and smoke a pipe. I didn’t know till then that gypsy leaders toked out like that. I should ask Dad and Mom about my granddads and what they really used to put inside their pipes back in the day.

  “Looks like the game characters can’t talk to us,” Ridley said as we both stood nearby, watching Peter. Freddie and Wade had wandered off to check out the rest of the camp and look around for more scrolls. “I wonder if that hacker creep did that on purpose.”

  “Or maybe this is one of the limitations of Althea’s hacking,” I replied. “She wasn’t able to stay in the game long enough to mess with it even more. I can only imagine how things would be if she did.” It would’ve been so cool, I was sure.

  Peter sighed, glanced back at us, and shrugged. He then disappeared inside the tent, most likely to see what was there, which only made me wish that we had our own private tent to escape into. But life’s never fair, and mine sucked.

  “How do we find our way to the castle, then?” I asked, moving on and taking a lazy stroll around the camp with Ridley next to me.

  “I’m guessing that the road would be pretty obvious. This game’s a basic one to begin with, so I wouldn’t be surprised if everything’s going to be straightforward and easy—or obvious,” he said.

  It made sense. That’d be a score in favor of lazy thinking by the game’s programmers.

  We eventually joined Freddie and Wade, who were both standing just outside the gypsy camp, talking and pointing at different spots in the horizon. Right before them was a big dirt road, which could only mean the way to Sleeping Beauty’s cursed castle. Or haunted. Or possessed. What the hell ever. Come to think of it, it wouldn’t be accurate calling the princess “Beauty,” considering what had likely happened to her. Man, I couldn’t wait to see what she really looked like.

  “We’re moving forward,” Peter said, panting, as he jogged up to us from behind. “I tried to see if I could communicate
with any of the others characters, but no deal. Looks like we’re on our own.”

  “We checked for scrolls and other things that Althea can use to contact us with, but there’s nothing here. I guess we’ll have to get those along the way, post-carnage,” Wade replied.

  I looked at everyone. “Are you guys getting bored yet? I am.”

  They all exchanged glances and either nodded or shrugged. “The fact that we can’t get hurt is a good thing,” Wade said. “But the game’s so linear and simple that there’s not a lot of excitement even during the fights.” She paused and then backed off, raising both hands up. “Not that I’m saying we’re better off getting all hacked up and maimed, of course! I just have a feeling that this is going to be a long adventure for us—if you were to call it that.”

  “I’m with you,” Peter said, looking sheepish. I amazed myself sometimes at how well I was able to read heroes’ faces so well even with their masks on. I mean, you know—totally amazed. “We’ll have to hack and slash our way to the castle and through it till we get to Sleeping Beauty herself.”

  We started walking forward. “I wouldn’t even call her Beauty anymore,” I said when Peter took my hand, and we again fell behind the others. “I mean, can you picture what she looks like right now, being cursed by a demon or something? She probably looks like the love child of a vampire mummy and demon poop—the diarrhea kind.”

  “Oh, come on, man!” Freddie snapped from the front without looking back. “I really didn’t need that!”

  I rolled my eyes. “That’s like normal conversation at my dinner table every day,” I said. “By the way, you guys should come around and meet my family and have lunch or something. My parents would be so thrilled that I actually have a social circle beyond Peter and Althea.”

  My friends answered me with a scattered, “No thanks.” Man, for superheroes, they sure were wimps about diarrhea talk at the dining table.

  * * * *

  We went over a stone bridge, which led us to a new area that was completely covered in snow. It was kind of hard still trying to wrap my mind around the fact that we were inside a game, not just playing it, and I had to stop and look behind me to observe what the previous land or kingdom looked like since the snowy landscape we were in now took me by surprise. Yeah, it was all summer-like beyond the bridge.

  I wondered if the game programmers were inspired by global warming.

  “I don’t know about you guys, but I’m so tempted to make a snow angel,” Freddie said. He’d stopped and was now looking off to the side, staring at the snow, which rose up to Freddie’s height in some places. Sure enough, it wasn’t cold at all. “I’ve never been to a place with snow before.”

  “We can’t mess around, Freddie,” Wade said. “We’re in a hurry here. Okay, we’re bored and in a hurry, but still—there’s no time for playing around.”

  “Two seconds? It’ll only take me two seconds.”

  “It takes you way longer than that to make a snow angel.”

  “Oh, come on, Wade…”

  Wade just sighed, shaking her head. “Look, if we let you mess around like this, chances are, someone else will want to do it, and then another, and then another—”

  “And it’s all chaos and death,” I said.

  Freddie frowned at us. He actually frowned. Then he nodded at something that was behind me. “Then how come he gets to mess around in the snow?”

  I whipped around, suddenly realizing that Peter wasn’t standing beside me. Sure enough, about ten feet away was Peter, putting the final touches on a snowman he’d just made. And judging from how complete and impressive it looked even without the eyes, mouth, scarf, and whatever, it was pretty safe to say that he used his hyper speed (whatever levels he’d managed to regain, anyway) to get things done. He was also grinning the whole time he carefully dusted off excess snow and stuff. Okeedokee.

  He stepped back, resting his hands on his hips, and surveyed his masterpiece. Then realizing that he was being watched, he quickly turned, his hands dropping to his sides, the loopy grin on his face fading.

  “Oh. Hi,” he said. “Sorry. I couldn’t help myself. Been a while since I played in snow.”

  He trotted over to us, all flushed and embarrassed but apparently tension-free. Note to self: go through with my plan to buy a custom cottage somewhere in the wilderness, where it snowed, so my husband-to-be could enjoy making snowmen and give me all kinds of awesome fantasies about him and winter.

  “I hope that helped get some toxins out of your system,” I said when he joined me, and he shrugged, the loopy grin returning. What a dork.

  “Well, Peter’s got hyper speed powers, so if he wanted to mess around, it’d be okay because he wouldn’t be taking up too much time, and—” Wade’s words faltered when Freddie let out a loud whoop and threw himself on the ground, rolling around till he was lying face up. Throwing his hands and feet out, he started making a snow angel.

  “It’s chaos, Wade,” I said dully. She stared at Freddie and then me. Then she shook her head.

  “Screw it,” she said, running off the path to an area that was deep in snow—well, knee-deep, anyway. Bending down, she started gathering snow and shaping it into a ball. She turned, spied Ridley who stood across the way from her, and instantly started a snowball fight with him.

  “It’s total chaos,” I said, pursing my lips as I watched a bunch of superheroes play in the snow and in full costume, too. Including Freddie, who’d transformed himself into a generic vampire count—all dressed in black with the long cape, his fangs poking out as he grinned, still flailing against the snow and completely destroying his snow angel. I think at that point he was so caught up with the energy of the moment that he didn’t give a rat’s ass about what mask he’d just put on and was playing.

  When I realized that Peter had vanished from my side, I sighed and turned around to find him finishing up another snowman, which stood beside the first one he made. Again, thanks to his hyper speed power, he was able to make one in a matter of a few seconds.

  The area was filled with happy yells and catcalls from my friends as they continued to mess around for a few more moments. I alternately frowned and then grinned, scratching my head, as I watched them. I guess this was badly needed. They’d been working non-stop since they all came into their powers, and this moment of craziness was something that was bound to happen when you gave them the day off. Eventually I loosened up and watched them like a mom—okay, dad—laughing whenever someone did something stupid or silly. Which was, actually, all of them all of the time.

  Before long all four superheroes were engaged in a nutty snowball fight, though no one took sides. Strange, but I somehow felt as though this was their moment and theirs alone. I could’ve joined in the fun, but my gut told me that this momentary craziness was kind of sacred to them, so I held off and quietly explored the area. They didn’t notice me, which was perfectly fine. I didn’t want to take them away from their de-stressing moment. I tried to pick my way around them, inching along the periphery and poking my sword between branches of thick shrubs, looking for scrolls or clues or anything to distract myself with.

  I didn’t see anything weird at first. There was a mountain off to the left of our path, and I followed its base, humming to myself while poking around like the trapped-but-bored gamer that I was. The snow didn’t feel cold—like everything else since we started, it was room temperature even though it felt and handled like snow. Every plant and rock was covered with the stuff, and even the mountain’s ridges and crevices were dusted with white.

  I was just about to go back and rejoin the others when I peered through a large and thick bush that grew at the base of the mountain.

  “Oh, check this out!” I said, setting aside my sword and reaching in, hoping that there weren’t any dumb zombie babies or small creatures of the night hiding in the shadows.

  With a sigh of relief I grabbed hold of the small chest that I’d spotted sitting behind the branches and pulled it out
. It looked like a pirate’s treasure chest, the way it was designed, but it was about the same width as one of those larger laptops. It was made of wood with discolored metal designs and whachamacallits. It didn’t feel heavy, either, which made me suspect that it kept something important. Of course, it could also be totally empty.

  “Hey, guys, look at this!”

  I carried the chest under one arm and picked up my sword. The others had stopped their game time and were now seated just off the main path, resting. The snow around them—more like within a fifty-mile circle around us (Radical? Radius? Rad, like, totally? Rodent?)—was completely destroyed. There were bald patches, irregular piles of snow, and all kinds of crazy patterns here and there that meant a lot of rolling around had happened. Peter’s two snowmen had been practically obliterated, with nothing left but half of what used to be their bases. The heroes themselves were a mess, all dusted with white as though they’d all developed a pretty severe and incurable form of dandruff.

  “What’s that?” Ridley asked as I sat next to Peter, setting the chest on the ground. “Pirate treasure?” He looked around, a little confused. “Boy, the game’s programmers went all over the place in putting this thing together. Pirates in the snow? Yeah, I can see that.”

  The treasure chest wasn’t locked, and I opened it to find a scroll inside. I took it out and showed everyone. “Ta da! Here’s another message from Althea!”