by Eddie Patin
He was painting Riley's key red, Gliath's purple, and Morgana's pink. He used some old acrylic paint that he had left over from painting miniatures back in his DnD days with Amanda, Tom, and Ben. There was no telling whether the paint would hold onto the strange metal or quickly rub off, but Jason wanted to try.
"If it doesn't work out," he told himself while carefully painting line after line of pink with his little brush, "I'll just spray-paint them."
It was a little before dusk.
The doorbell rang.
Jason looked up, instantly annoyed. Was it Ben? He didn't want to talk to Ben about the infinity charger thing again yet. Hell, back on Earth, it had only been two days perhaps since he'd seen Ben last. Jason quickly painted another line, then another line. He was almost done covering that side, and was loathe to walk away from the project without the key being all pink.
The doorbell rang again.
"Goddamnit," Jason said, standing. He was about to carefully put his brush down when Morgana energetically appeared in the doorway. Her dark hair swished. She was wearing a soft t-shirt and beaming.
"I'll get it," she said. "You keep doing ... whatever it is you're doing."
"Um, okay," Jason said, slowly sitting again. "I don't know who it might be, so just holler if it's something weird."
"Okay," Morgana said, then disappeared.
Jason immediately felt stupid. He should have just answered the damned door. Morgana wasn't from this world. She had no frame of reference for 'something weird' or anything else.
Still, Jason sat and resumed his painting. He heard Morgana open the door. Her voice was too quiet to understand, but she was having a relaxed conversation with whoever was out front. He heard a man's voice. It didn't sound like Ben.
"Who is it?" Jason called.
There was more talking then Morgana called back. "He says it's a delivery."
"Okay," Jason replied. "Just take it if he doesn't need my signature. Does he need my signature?"
There was no sound for a moment. Then, Jason heard something very strange. The man's voice was suddenly a little deeper and a little more ... layered.
He said to Morgana, "Go take a nap."
Jason stood, weirded out and wondering what the hell was going on. He reached for the Glock 26 that he had in his shoulder holster as if to make sure that it was still there. It was.
A few seconds later, Morgana walked past the doorway of Jason's computer room, distracted and staring at nothing. She turned the corner to his bedroom and let herself in.
What the fuck?
Jason immediately walked after her and stopped at the corner as she slowly, intently, climbed into bed.
Then, he turned and stalked into the living room.
The delivery man was there, standing in the middle of his home. Jason felt a flush of adrenaline. It was just a guy: average, about his age, a little fat with dark hair and blue eyes and a stubbly almost-beard. He was dressed in a brown delivery uniform with a company jacket, though he didn't hold one of those electronic clipboards like Jason had expected to see.
When their eyes met, Jason was suddenly transfixed by the sapphire blue color. The man's eyes were far bolder than any man's should have been. There was something wrong about the guy.
Jason's hand immediately went for his Glock's grip. The delivery man seemed unfazed.
"What's going on?!" Jason asked. "What are you doing in my house?"
The delivery man smiled. He seemed to have too many teeth in that smile, and it sent a quick shiver up Jason's spine. The sapphire blue of his irises almost glowed.
"Please," the man said. "Kindly remove your ring and I will tell you."
Ring? Jason thought. The ring that would protect him from mind attacks? What a weird request.
"What ring?!" Jason asked. "Get the hell out of here!"
"The ring with the small ruby on your left hand," the man replied. Jason realized when he spoke that he had no tongue or wet, pink mouth-flesh at all past his teeth. All was black inside.
Not a fucking chance...
"Get out of here before I shoot your ass!"
Jason felt his skin turn hot. He was furious with this strange man for doing something weird to Morgana. He wanted to charge and shove the guy out of his house, but under the surface, Jason filled with fear and didn't know why. There was something about the delivery man that didn't belong to this place—something that didn't fit in his living room or in that uniform—and Jason was terrified to attack it.
The man scowled. His blue eyes turned fierce.
"Remove your ring!" he bellowed. "Take it off right now!"
Jason felt something strange wash over his fury; a numbness similar to what he felt when the giant had tried to put him to sleep but failed. His joints suddenly felt like jelly, but Jason growled in anger until he felt back to normal.
"No! Fuck you! Get out of here!"
"That's it!" the man replied, twisting his pudgy face into a leering mask of rage. He seemed to grow, then loom, and Jason suddenly felt very small. "You will obey me, Jason Leaper! You will sit, and you will heed my words!" With a rush of terror coursing through his blood, Jason suddenly realized that he was hearing the words with his ears, but they were also repeating in his mind. It was like talking with the giant all over again. The man was echoing his speech telepathically, but what Jason heard in his head wasn't just a human male's voice. It was something dark and ragged at the edges. It dragged hooks through his brain and left tiny, searing slices. "You will submit to me!" the man roared in Jason's ears and head. "Sit and obey! You are mine! I do not need your ring to be removed, Jason Leaper! But for not obeying me when I was polite, I will now eat your fingers one by one so that you may never wear that fucking ring again!"
It was a nightmare. One second, Jason had been painting Morgana's focus key halves pink. The next, he was in his living room—with Morgana under some kind of spell in the next room—and this creature was looming over him.
The delivery man was no longer a delivery man. It was a tall creature that reminded Jason's shocked mind very much of Gliath. Gone was the brown uniform and 5 o'clock shadow. Standing before him now, with the edges of reality crackling around it as Jason looked out from a pit of darkness and despair, was a seven-foot-tall bipedal tiger-creature. Her body was like a hybrid of a beast and a tall, curvaceous woman, much like how Gliath's was in warrior form, but this monster decidedly female and colored orange, black, and white like a Siberian tiger. She wore yellow silk-like lingerie over her form coated with sleek fur. A long, orange, black, and white tail whipped around as she flexed hands with wicked claws that didn't make sense. Her hands were upside down! Sizzling, green strings of saliva dripped from a dark mouth full of long, white fangs. The tigress's eyes stayed the same: burning pits of sapphire blue surrounded by a demonic feline face twisted into rage.
The monster loomed over Jason, very real. The rest of his living room around her was blotted out. He could only see her. Jason took it all in and reeled with horror. It felt like he was taking in a breath, but couldn't take any more air into his lungs and was stuck trying anyway. The edges of his vision pulsed black. His eyes darted around at the tigress's full, scantily-covered breasts, yellow lace panties over a completely fur-covered pelvis of orange and white with black markings, then again at her long claws and backwards hands. He found himself stuck on her leering face. The blue eyes burned into him and he watched the long fangs seem to grow longer. Green saliva flowed down from them like venom. The black-hole mouth seemed to stretch wider, opening into something ghastly. He imagined the monster bending down and literally biting his head off. She definitely could. He wanted to call out—wanted to reach up and rift out of there, or rift her into lava world from his living room—but Jason was terrified out of his mind and could do nothing.
He realized that he was sitting in his armchair.
Jason didn't remember sitting down.
A stinging pain started up on his left knee, and he saw that the
green saliva dripping down from her mouth was burning his leg. The monster hovered over him: a female tiger-demon, all claws and fangs and heat; fiery colors and stripes and a powerhouse of aggressive sexuality and rage forced onto him with powerful magic and gluttonous desire...
This was real.
This was the end. The fangs were in his face. Jason stared at the burning blue eyes and the vacuous, black mouth right in front of his nose. He heard a constant, jarring growling and felt the acid burning his leg again...
He thought of Morgana in his room and wondered if the tigress would kill her next...
There a sudden there was a flash of red.
Jason felt heat in his face.
The tigress-monster looked up and behind him, spreading her backwards fingers and claws and her arms wide, suddenly even more furious and bathed with red light. The flash of red came again. Jason felt like he was emerging from a pool. His ears had been muted as if he was buried in mud. Now, he could hear Riley's voice calling out and the sizzling, burning sounds of the cyborg's Zeeker X46 blaster.
"Use the new one, Gliath!" Riley shouted from the kitchen. "Don't set the house on fire!" Then, he added, "Jason! Jason!"
The room suddenly flared with orange-red fire. Jason felt the heat blast his face again and he saw a bright beam cross from out of sight behind him to hit the tigress-monster squarely in the chest. The heat and sizzling energy dissipated across her body, flying through her fur like a wildfire, but the monster seemed more annoyed then pained. She focused on Riley and Gliath, sneering, flinging a line of green spit across the room as she whipped to the side to face them.
Then, she vanished.
It was like Jason was blinded by a sudden flash of light—but without the flash itself—and the tigress was the afterimage, hazily dancing across his vision until fading away entirely.
When she disappeared, she left with a long, cackling laugh that seemed to fly around the room like a trapped bird then echoed in Jason's head until gone.
Jason found that he could move again. He was scared shitless and his knees started shaking the instant he stood to help put out the fires in the front of the room, but he could move. He, Riley, and Gliath all rushed to pat out the flames set in the carpet and on one wall by the laser weapons. God damn—his house was going to burn down at some point at this rate. Then, Jason looked with horror at the lines burned into the carpet before his armchair by the monster's dripping spit. The carpet was still sizzling.
"Morgana!" Jason called, rushing to his room, hoping to find her sleeping but half-expecting the monster to be back there, eating her on the bed.
He found her sleeping.
Jason sighed and shook her awake.
"What...?" she started, groggy and confused.
"Morgana, are you okay?" Jason asked. "Wake up. Are you alright?"
She sat up. Jason grasped her shoulders to steady her, terrified that the creature might have harmed her with its magic. There was a moment as Morgana contemplated her answer. Jason heard movement behind him and looked back to see Riley watching from the doorway and Gliath in the hall.
"I ... I guess I'm okay...?" Morgana offered. "I don't know what happened. He ... told me to..." She trailed off.
"So, Jason," Riley said from behind. "I guess you didn't hire some sort of demon weretiger hooker to give you a lap dance?" The smirk in his voice was evident.
"No!" he shouted back, climbing to his feet. The acidic spit still burned on his leg. "What the fuck was that?!"
"That was not a Krulax," Gliath said.
No shit.
"I don't know," Riley said.
Jason's mind scrambled for answers, and his huge mental databank of mostly-fictional information settled on one word:
Rakshasa.
It was the backwards hands. Jason's DnD group had never encountered a Rakshasa before in their years of gaming—Tom had never bothered to use one—but Jason had absorbed enough from his obsessive studying back then to remember that detail.
"Let me through," he said, making his way through Riley and Gliath down the hall to his computer room, where he immediately went for his DnD Monster Manual. Cracking open the well-worn book, Jason quickly found the entry of the same name and looked at a picture of something like a male weretiger dressed in medieval finery. Decorated in silk and jewelry, the Rakshasa in the book stood surrounded by human skulls with backwards hands and some sort of magical flowing energy-stuff emanating from its palms. "Living room," Jason said, then led the way.
Everyone followed.
"What just happened?" Morgana asked.
"We were attacked by something," Riley replied, holstering his blaster. "Hey, the new rifles work great, by the way."
Jason's first impulse was to sit in his favorite chair, but he'd just been there being hovered over by a she-demon tigress that had scared him out of his damned wits. He stood instead.
"There was a man delivering a package..." Morgana muttered. "He said to—"
"It was a rakshasa," Jason said.
"How do you know that?" Riley asked with a smirk.
Jason read a portion of the Monster Manual entry quickly in his head, then spoke up. "It's a kind of demon—a devil actually—that has the form of a tall tiger-person, kind of like Gliath, and has a shitload of resistances and magical abilities." Jason pointed at the picture and turned the book around to show everyone.
"What is that book?" Riley asked. "Jason, isn't that whole thing fiction? Didn't you say that it was a game? I know your expertise has come through for us at times with your monster knowledge, but you can't treat your game like it's the fruking truth, man..."
"Yeah, I know that," Jason replied with a frown. "I'm not an idiot! But a lot of the monsters from this game were designed from folklore. I don't know much about rakshasas specifically, but I think it came from something in Indian mythology?"
"I don't know what 'Indian' is," Riley replied.
"It's another country on my planet. The point is a lot of the monsters I know about from this game I played for years originally came from stories through time. Folklore, like I said. Myths and stuff. Look at this!" Jason casually moved his fingers over the words and the picture. "The backwards hands. Even acid spit! That thing burned my leg with her spit! She cast some sort of spell and made Morgana 'go take a nap' and tried to make me take my mind protection ring off. When that didn't work, she totally freaking dominated me magically! I was scared to death!"
"Well, we spooked the bitch away easily enough," Riley said.
"I don't think you hurt her," Jason said. "Now, I know that a real rakshasa isn't going to be exactly like the freaking game stats. We're not actually in DnD. But a rakshasa is a kind of devil, and they're immune to fire. According to this, she's also immune to all normal weapons. Rakshasas can only be harmed by a piercing weapon wielded by a good person.
All eyes went to Morgana.
Riley scoffed. "This is ridiculous," he said. "You can't just have instant data on a monster from that stupid fiction book. Maybe you should check your OCS, man. That's real."
"The OCS just draws data from lore," Jason said. "It calculates all of the stories, lore, pop culture, and mythology of the universe where it's attuned to—this one—and assigns percentages. My 'stupid game book' is lore."
"How do you know that?"
"I..." Jason started then stopped. He just rattled that out without putting it together before. He knew that he'd come to fully understand that device eventually. In time, he'd be able to remove Jason 113's block. "I just figured it out, you know?"
"Well, at any rate," Riley said. "That fruker was scared off by blasters. We'll do it again if we need to. Now, I reckon we're going to that manticore bounty in the morning, right? So, let's settle down, have something to eat, and get everything ready for tomorrow."
So they did.
Riley seemed confident that the monster wouldn't be back—not that night, anyway—but Jason and Morgana both figured that it would be better to stick togethe
r.
Jason finished making his focus key necklaces for everyone. He gave Morgana the pink one and Riley the red one. He didn't bother attaching Gliath's purple key to a necklace on account of the Krulax's shapeshifting. Instead, he tied the painted piece of metal to the side of the leopardwere's back armor in a place where it was unlikely to ever get torn off. The paracord was rated to 550 pounds, but Gliath was powerful as hell. Jason had no idea whether or not the leopardwere might ever tear it off by accident.
Heading to the garage, Jason tested each key, making sure that he'd be able to rift to each of his friends in case of an emergency like what had happened in the Shattered Swamp.
He added the red, purple, and pink focus keys to his focus key pouch, then prepared his gear for the next bounty. Hitting his crafting stash, Jason made sure that each Reality Rifter had a spool of paracord, then he replenished their radios' batteries. He grabbed an old set of binoculars from his bins of hunting gear and added it to his pack.
They all cleaned their armor and equipment. Jason put away his AK-47, magazines, and extra ammo. He'd be taking a laser rifle in the morning, along with his lightning gun and his backup Glock 26.
After loading up on other basics like more water, snacks, making sure that he still had toilet paper, a new towel, and other little things, Jason's loadout was ready for the morning.
As the others finished with their own stuff, Jason played with his enchanted OCS, pulling up data in his head and experimenting with his new mind-meld interface. That's exactly what it was: a mind-meld. It was the most bizarre and the coolest thing ever! All Jason had to do was touch the OCS, and it was as if he was skipping the need for a screen—even the need for his eyes—and went straight to his brain interpreting the data. Amazing.
After a while of playing around, he scanned the focus key to the manticore world.
Jason was surprised to see that the focus key's origin was a universe that was already catalogued in his OCS! It was universe 81. The bookmark was named "Pristalline Paradise". It was a world very similar to Earth with a similar atmosphere and many biomes. Pristalline was a kind of ore—something crystalline in nature, but also malleable. As Jason browsed the data in his head, he skimmed over facts about the mineral; that it was superior to steel and titanium in many ways because of its toughness and durability, while also being lighter and easier to work under the right conditions. When he started reading data about starships and space stations that used pristalline for sections of their structure and certain components, he stopped, and looked up manticores instead.
