by Ramy Vance
Dakota walked up behind Lindsay as he scrolled through his HUD. “You guys check any of these readings out?” he asked.
Dawn brought up her HUD, which read 36% chance of success. When she looked at the pathway on the left, the percentage jumped up to 69%. The right had a success rate of 23%. What the hell is that supposed to mean? Dawn asked herself. She had already figured out that the rate of success applied to the likelihood of her survival. But she didn’t know what was dictating those odds, let alone how the machine was able to tell. “Looks like I have a 23% on the right side,” she said.
Robyn scratched his head as he looked through his HUD. “That’s really interesting,” he murmured. “I have 80% for the right side. But only 12% for the left. Do we all have different readouts?”
“Maybe it’s class-based,” Lindsay offered. “However, the HUDs figuring that information out doesn’t matter. It still gives us a leg up on what to expect.”
“What do you mean?” Dakota asked.
“Well, for one, we know there’s something down both those pathways that has the potential to kill us. We also know that some of us are more likely to survive one pathway than other, so that means we have a pretty good understanding of our odds. Even if we don’t know what’s going to pop out and try to kill us, we at least know how likely it is that we can take the son of a bitch. Sounds like good news to me.”
“You have an interesting definition of good news.”
Dakota paced nervously as he twirled his daggers. “I don’t like it,” Dakota finally said. “Still feels like we’re walking in blindly. How does this shit work, anyway?”
“Who gives a crap how it works?” Robyn shot back with a bit too much tension in his voice. He took a deep breath and continued, “As long as we know it does. That’s the only thing that matters.”
“And how, exactly, do we know it works?” Dakota asked.
“Why would Craig have given us an important plot device that was broken?”
“That’s what makes it an interesting plot device!” Dawn offered. “Kind of like an unreliable narrator.”
Lindsay raised her hands as she stepped between Dakota and Dawn. “I know you guys are really enjoying your lit theory conversation, but I for one would like to hurry up and get the hell out of here. I’m supposed to be at a marketing seminar later this weekend, and I already bought the tickets. They’re non-refundable, and I am not losing out on that investment.”
Dawn nodded as she folded her arms. She was annoyed at being spoken to as if she were a child, but Lindsay was right. They didn’t need to be shooting the shit for half an hour when there was a dungeon to be explored. “All right, so how about we split up, based off of who has the best percentages for which path?” Dawn asked. “Sound reasonable?”
No one disagreed. After comparing percentages for a few minutes, the Wordsmiths figured that Lindsay and Dawn had the highest likelihood of success if they teamed up to take the path on the right. Dakota and Robyn would fare better with the left path.
Satisfied, Dawn rested her hands on her sheathed daggers. “Now that we know which paths we’re taking, does anyone have the slightest idea of what we’re supposed to be doing?” she asked.
Robyn took a seat at the foot of the stairs and ran his fingers through the grass. “I think we’re looking for another door,” he suggested. “The only thing I’ve noticed as a common theme is that we keep coming across doors with runes on them. Since the doors keep opening for us, I’m assuming we don’t have to solve any puzzles based on the runes. It could just be a simple Legend of Zelda kind of thing—kill all the enemies, and you get a key or something.”
“Kill all the enemies? I can get behind that. Good luck on your path.”
“Yeah, same to you.”
The Wordsmiths ascended the stairs and split up, the two groups each walking down a moss-covered path toward their assigned rooms.
Dawn and Lindsay stood before their door, while across the hallway, Dakota and Robyn stood in front of their own. Dakota cast a coy look at Dawn before turning back to his door and kicking it open. Dawn tried to open her own door with the same amount of enthusiasm, but it was marred by her apprehension about what they were going to find inside. She hadn’t forgotten about the gravestone that bore her name on the door painting. Even if she knew on some level that the whole point of this dungeon was to kill her, seeing her name clearly spelled out felt more like a threat than anything else. There was something watching them in the dungeon, and whatever it was, it wanted them dead.
The door slowly opened, and Lindsay and Dawn stepped into the room. The first thing that happened was, all the lights went off. It was as if they had walked into a vacuum. The air grew cold, and Dawn imagined that she would have been able to see her breath in front of her if it hadn’t been so dark. She instinctively reached out and grabbed Lindsay’s hand.
“Don’t worry, I got this,” Lindsay said. A white light floated in the darkness and grew brighter until Dawn and Lindsay were encased in an orb of light. “All right, let’s figure out what we need to kill to get these doors to open,” Lindsay said.
The two writers inched their way through the room, Lindsay shining her wand on whatever she could as they passed. Dawn could tell that Lindsay was trying to establish context for her surroundings, but the few things they could see confused them more. There was a lot of furniture, but none of it was placed for actual use. A dresser was pressed against a wall, and a splintered bedframe was next to it. If anything, the little bit Dawn could see of the room reminded her of a poorly managed thrift store. Clothes were thrown all over the floor, and there was a table with an excessive number of knickknacks cluttering it.
As Dawn and Lindsay explored the room, Dawn could feel the ground shifting beneath her. It was not shaking. No, it was an entirely different feeling, one that Dawn had never experienced. It was almost as if the ground were a carpet that was being beaten. The effect made Dawn instantly nauseated. “Come on,” Dawn said as she tugged on Lindsay’s arm. “The faster we get through this shit, the better. I feel like I’m going to throw up.”
Lindsay nodded and raised her wand higher. “I’m going to try to extend this,” she said. “Try to make it easier to see.”
The white from the wand intensified, then there was a bright flash. A glowing orb of light nearly the size of Dawn’s head floated above Lindsay and her. Dawn smiled excitedly. “That’s much better,” she said.
Now that the room was brighter, Dawn could see that her initial impression had been right. It didn’t look like they were in a thrift store as much as it looked like a thrift store had been torn apart by a tornado and dropped in front of them. The ground was covered with broken glass and wood, and pieces of banisters shoved into broken mirrors and frames. Dawn was instantly reminded of a graveyard for some reason. That was when she noticed the smell—the one from earlier, but stronger. The scent crept into her nose and was almost overpowering.
Lindsay had plugged her nose. Her eyes were watering, and she looked like she might vomit. “What is that smell?” she wondered aloud.
Dawn partially stepped out of Lindsay’s sphere of light, taking a second to appreciate that whatever part of her body was outside the light was invisible. “Not sure, but I think it’s safe to bet it’s not going to like us very much,” Dawn told her.
“You think it’s a monster?”
“Has to be. We’ve been smelling it since we got here. The only heavier foreshadowing I’ve seen so far were those lame-ass tombstones.”
“Those didn’t scare you?”
“Hardly.”
“They scared the crap out of me.”
Dawn’s bravado fell away for a second. The moment of sincerity from Lindsay reminded her of how terrified she had been when she saw her name etched in stone. “We don’t have anything to be afraid of,” Dawn finally said. “We can handle ourselves.”
The air grew colder, and there was a breeze from where no breeze could come. It stood all the hair
s on Dawn’s neck on end. Then the room suddenly brightened.
Thousands of candles were floating above. Each candle was painted with a rune, but there were so many that Dawn couldn’t tell them apart. A thick fog covered Dawn’s and Lindsay’s feet, nearly coming up to their knees. Somewhere in the vast expanse of the room, there were people singing. What they sang could not be made out, but beyond a doubt, there was a choir.
Dawn drew her short bow. “Guess we know which direction we’re heading,” she said. “Straight to the goddamn music.”
Robyn and Dakota walked down a brilliantly light, red-carpeted hall. Ornate, early seventeenth-century candle-holders lined the wall. Small brownies dressed in tuxedos walked up and down, holding silver platters and plates of hors d’oeuvres. None of the brownies gave Robyn or Dakota the slightest bit of attention, moving as if they were robots performing a programmed action. Robyn and Dakota were greatly perplexed by this, and when they saw the brownies, both drew their weapons.
The brownies didn’t seem to notice. They just continued walking back and forth as if they were waiting to help a guest who was doomed to never arrive.
There were multiple doors on each side of the hall. The few Robyn and Dakota had checked had left a strong impression on both writers. Robyn opened the first door and peered into the room, but there was nothing there.
That was not to say that the room was empty.
There was no room to be empty. The door had swung out into empty space.
Perplexed, Robyn shrugged, grabbed one of the wine glasses the brownie butlers were carting around, and tossed it into the dark. The glass fell and fell until neither of the writers could see it any longer. After trying two more doors with the same result, Dakota thought it would be better if they just left the doors alone. “Might as well just see where this hall leads,” Dakota said. “Seems like it goes on long enough.”
Robyn stopped to look at the candle-holders on the walls. They were beautifully crafted, the kind of work one only saw from a master, and here they were in a dungeon that probably hadn’t been explored for years.
Yet the candles didn’t give off any scent.
Not of fire or wax. Or if they did, the scent was buried in what was occupying all of Robyn’s olfactory receptors. What he did smell was something sweet, almost like rotting fruit. “Do you smell that?” Robyn asked.
“How could I not smell it? I’m surprised you’re only just now mentioning it.”
Robyn covered his nose. “Guess I wasn’t paying attention before. That’s fucking horrible.”
“Yeah. I’m assuming it means we have to go find out what it is.”
“That’s a pretty safe bet. Come on, let’s get this over with.”
The two writers jogged down the rest of the hall until they came across another door, this one right in the middle of the corridor. It did not have any runes on it, and they wasted no time getting the door open. Once they had stepped through, they stopped in their tracks.
In the middle of the room was something like a geyser. Some might have thought it more appropriate to call such a thing a fountain, but Robyn would have been hesitant to apply that word. The thing was similar to a fountain, there was no disputing that, but instead of being made of concrete or clay, bones were the primary building material. Skeletons had been shoved together and bound with twine, the bones melding into each other. Some of the femurs and knuckles were covered in moss and vines, and the whole thing was topped with a skull, sitting there slack-jawed and smiling with green sludge pouring out of its mouth. Occasionally such a violent surge of slime shot forth that it looked to be some sort of decomposed volcano.
The sludge filled the pool the skeleton fountain sat in, and there were more skeletons in the fountain, some covered in decaying flesh.
The entire room reeked of death and decomposition.
Robyn shook his head as he used his shirt to cover his nose. “That’s disgusting,” he said before flicking through his HUD. “Wait a second… I’m getting a percentage off that thing.”
Dakota checked his HUD as well. “Yeah, me too.”
“I don’t even want to know—”
The fountain spouted sludge from its skull again, then the skeletons began to move, their hands and legs convulsing until finally the shivers left them and the skeleton fountain leaned forward. The vines covering its body tried to hold it back, and sludge gushed from the skull like some perverse comedian.
Dakota drew his longbow and took aim, but Robyn pushed it down. “What the fuck are you doing?” Dakota shouted.
Robyn still hadn’t drawn his sword. He approached the slime-gushing pile of bolted-together skeletons. “Maybe we don’t have to fight him,” Robyn said. “My percentage of survival was pretty high. Maybe we can just talk this out. All those bones probably have unfinished business. Violence doesn’t have to be the answer.”
Dakota took aim at the creature’s skull again once Robyn was out of the way. “I don’t know, Robyn,” he shouted. “That thing is giving off very strong monster vibes.”
Robyn reached for the skeleton fountain. He took a knee as if he were trying to pet a small dog. “Hey, we aren’t going to hurt you,” Robyn coaxed. “We’re just looking for a way out of this place. Do you have any unfinished business you’d like to take care of? Maybe something like guiding a bunch of adventurers out of the place where you died?”
The skull of the skeleton lazily looked at Robyn as the fountain approached, its whole body shuddering under its weight. Without warning, the fountain vomited more of the green sludge, but this time, the sludge was piping hot. Robyn jumped out of the way as the sludge splattered where he had knelt. The sludge quickly ate through the carpet of the floor, and the air sizzled as Robyn backed into Dakota.
Dakota fired an arrow that knocked off one of the fountain’s arms. “Does killing us constitute unfinished business?” Dakota shouted at Robyn.
The fog was nearly too thick to see through. Even with Lindsay casting tornado spells, the fog refused to disperse. Both Lindsay and Dawn had accepted that whatever they were walking toward would have to remain a mystery. They allowed themselves to be guided by the chill and the eerie song that reminded Dawn of a nursery rhyme they couldn’t quite place. She knew she had heard it somewhere, but every time she thought she had the answer, the title and place slipped away.
Dawn was so preoccupied with trying to remember the name of the song that she didn’t notice when Lindsay stopped walking, nor did she notice the break in the fog. The only thing she noticed was tripping over her own feet, rolling, and hitting her head on something hard. When Dawn finally managed to shake off the cobwebs, she sat up.
A pool stood before her. It was sunk into the ground and had stone pillars at its four corners. Two bloated bodies floated on the water’s surface. Dawn didn’t want to look, but she couldn’t help herself. Her hand was moving on its own, reaching out, grabbing the clammy, cold flesh and pulling it closer as Lindsay walked up behind her. Lindsay’s hand covered her mouth as she tried to suppress a scream.
Dawn had nearly pulled the corpse out of the water before she turned it around. Her own face, swollen and blue, eyes white, and hair falling out in clumps, stared back at her. Dawn wanted to scream, but there was no sound in her throat. All she could do was stare at her corpse as it stared back at her. “I’ll give you two guesses who else is in the pool,” Dawn squeaked.
Lindsay turned away from the pool and its dead bodies. “I don’t need to see what I’m going to look like when I’m dead,” she said. “I have an active enough imagination. Let’s keep moving.”
“Are you serious? You’re just going to walk away from a dead version of yourself like it’s not a big deal?”
“Seeing as I’m still alive, yeah, I’m going to do just that.”
Dawn thought it over. She didn’t know why she wanted to hold her own dead body so much, but Lindsay was right. Whatever was in the pool was dead. She was alive. Moving was probably going to be the only thin
g to keep that from changing. Dawn let go of her corpse and watched as it began to float away. She stood up, ready to leave, buoyed by an odd peace at having let go of her own death. She wasn’t prepared for bone-cold fingers to wrap around her wrists. As her eyes widened and she opened her mouth in a scream of pure terror, her own delicate fingers dragged her toward the water.
Dakota and Robyn were busy trying to keep from being covered in acidic slime. None of the arrows Dakota managed to shoot into the skeleton fountain had any effect. They either passed right through the odd combination of bones, or they were dissolved by the acid frothing from the now-many-headed fountain.
Robyn took cover behind a pillar of stone as Dakota ran behind him. “This is ridiculous!” Robyn shouted. “Who ever heard of a skeleton fountain? This would be so much easier if someone had conveniently mentioned how to kill this thing earlier in the quest. Are you sure you didn’t hear anyone talking about skeletons? No one?”
Dakota peeked out from behind the pillar and fired two arrows. “Yeah, I told you…your guess is as good as mine. So, you got any ideas on how to take care of this thing? ‘Cause arrows are not doing the job.”
“I got an idea. Follow my lead.”
Robyn’s HUD told him he had a 60% chance of success. He wondered if the HUD could also tell what he was thinking since his rate of success had been substantially lower prior to his formulation of a plan. That would be something to check into if he survived what he was going to attempt. HUDs that could read your mind were either a very good idea or a very bad one. That was a problem for another day too.
