by Ramy Vance
The grimpon forced its searching fingertip into Suzuki’s mouth as Suzuki gagged. Suzuki bit down as hard as could, but the grimpon didn’t seem to mind. The only sign that it acknowledged Suzuki’s teeth was a quiet moan that escaped its mouth and the increasing brightness of its glowing skin as it clicked its tongue. The grimpon opened Suzuki’s mouth with its other hand and tried to force both of its hands down Suzuki’s throat while he tried to keep from vomiting, the sickly-sweet smell from the grimpon wafting into his nose, making him feel dizzy but surprisingly awake and alert. He was getting used to the grimpon’s hands in his mouth, propping his tongue, gently piercing the sides of his mouth.
Beth screamed, and Suzuki felt the grimpon withdraw its fingers from his mouth. The light of the room dulled as the grimpon slowly retreated into the darkness. The sweet scent stayed in the air. Suzuki could taste it on his tongue. He realized his mouth was full of something mucus-y and sweet. The realization made him gag, and he spit it up so that it trickled down his chin.
“Jesus fucking Christ, Suzy, that fucking thing just fist-fucked your face,” she whispered, her voice tense with desperation. “That was so fucking disturbing.”
Suzuki shook his head, confused. “What the hell happened?”
“Are you serious? Did you not see any of that?”
“I guess I did. I don’t know. My brain feels fuzzy. It’s hard to think straight. I’m actually really tired.”
“Don’t you fucking go to sleep on me.”
“There was something…something in my mouth, right?”
Suzuki felt the world around him slipping for a second.
He really wanted to go to sleep.
His body was exhausted, and he was extremely thirsty. Whatever he had spit up on his neck was getting warmer.
He wished he could wipe it off or rub it into his skin.
That was what he wanted to do.
Rubbing it into his skin would be best.
That was the last thought he had as sleep rose up and crashed upon him, sending him spiraling into the darkness of his nightmares.
Sandy sat in her collapsed tunnel, meditating. Stew was mumbling in his sleep at her side. He hadn’t shown any signs of waking up, but he also hadn’t shown any signs of brain damage. This wasn’t reassuring Sandy at all. She still hadn’t figured out a way to start moving any of the dirt out of the way. Most of the magic that she knew was extremely explosive. Even her sigil and rune work tended to focus around trap magic that could cause massive elemental damage. There didn’t seem to be a way for her to start digging herself and Stew out of this mess without killing them both.
As Sandy meditated, she let her mind wander. Each spell she had ever read stretched out before her like a tapestry, an endless number of possibilities, yet nothing was clicking. It seemed there were too many options. This was the problem that Sandy had had when she first started playing Middang3ard with the Mundanes. The magic system that the game had been programmed with had always been extremely flexible. Newbs who were magic users had as difficult a time deciding what they could cast as what was available to be cast. In retrospect, Sandy could see that it was good training for getting to real Middang3ard. There were almost no mana restrictions because of her close bond with her familiar. The most she really had to worry about was making sure she didn’t burn herself out. She’d noticed that since receiving so many magic upgrades, her casting seemed much less to deal with her mana and more to do with her physical stamina and creativity.
Creativity, however, was what she lacked at the moment. It was just like when she first started playing Middang3ard.
Sandy shook her head in frustration. She looked down at her wraithlike hands, the dust floating between her skeleton fingers gripping her wand. What good was all this magical power if she didn’t know how to use it? Her head was full of spells, and so far, it hadn’t been enough to get her and Stew out of this mess. She would have cried out of pure irritation if she currently had tear ducts. Here she was, wearing the enchanted armor of a renowned mage and it was going to end up rotting underground because she couldn’t figure out a reasonable way to use magic to do anything other than electrify or burn things.
Come on, Sandy, she thought to herself. The tunnel was starting to feel smaller, the walls constricting around her. She was glad she didn’t need to breathe in this form. Otherwise she would have been hyperventilating. That was just one more thing that wasn’t going to help the situation. How the fuck did Suzuki deal with these kinds of situations? Granted, he did have three people to back him up, but Sandy had always been impressed with how quickly he seemed to come up with solutions. And here she was, incapable of even finding a useful spell.
Sandy’s mind continued to wander over her insecurities and anxieties, her meditation causing flashes of random or tangential memories to cross between her closed eyes. Then there was something more than just a flash. She felt wind on her skin. When she opened her eyes, she looked down at her hands. They were covered in skin. She looked around, trying to place where she was. It was a garden, one not too different from the garden that her father used to take her to to meditate. There was a cherry blossom tree in the middle of its spring bloom sitting beside a sand garden. Monks walked back and forth through the garden, tending the flowers or meditating quietly by themselves.
“This is what suffocating feels like.”
Sandy turned to the source of the voice. Suzuki was sitting at her right. He was dressed as a monk and smiling softly, his eyes closed tightly. “Or I imagine it’s what suffocating feels like,” he mused. “I’ve never done it before. But I imagine this is the closest you’ve ever been as well.”
“What the fuck is going on, Suzuki?”
“I believe you are having a near-death experience. This is what you’ve conjured to make sense of your impending death.”
“You’re saying that I imagine you as a guru?”
“I don’t make the rules, Sandy. I am only a manifestation of your subconscious. You need to take your visions up with yourself.”
Sandy sighed and ran her hands through her hair, pulling it so that she could feel her scalp stretching. “I don’t have any fucking answers.” She sighed, exasperated. “And I can’t believe that my last moments alive are going to be stuck getting lectured by you. This fucking sucks.”
“Technically, you’re lecturing yourself.”
“Fucking great.”
“Why do you think that you would see Suzuki as your guide to death?”
“I don’t fucking know why I’m seeing Suzuki.”
“Does Suzuki know why you are seeing him?”
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
“What does that mean, indeed?”
“What are you trying to tell me? What the hell are you trying to say?”
Suzuki opened his eyes and continued to smile. He slightly tilted his head as he pointed to the cherry blossom tree. “Trees bloom,” he said. “That is what they do. Painters paint. Writers write. The earth grows and it dies. What is it that you do?”
Sandy was close to tears. She didn’t realize that they were gathering against the back of her eyelids until she had to choke them back. “I don’t fucking know what I do!” she shouted. “I don’t fucking know what I’m supposed to do! Stew is going to die. He’s going to die and it’s my fault, and all you can fucking do is give me riddles about what I’m supposed to do? What the fuck do you do?”
Suzuki shrugged, and he closed his eyes again. He inhaled deeply and exhaled slowly. “Button mashing is for newbs. Do you remember when I told you that?”
“Yeah, I remember. And?”
“You don’t have any buttons, yet you are still behaving as if you do. Why do you want to have buttons?”
Sandy gasped and her eyes snapped open. She was back in the tunnel. Stew was still sitting against the wall, snoring softly. “Fucking button-mashing,” Sandy muttered to herself. Then it clicked. She didn’t know why she hadn’t figured this out before.
The answer was in front of her the entire time.
It didn’t matter how many spells she knew. It didn’t matter how quickly she could whip them out and mash them together. That was just insecurity. Anxiety. Fear. If she was going to get through this, she was going to have to act like what she knew she was.
A mage. A badass mage.
Sandy stood and raised her hand. Her wand disappeared and was replaced with a gnarled wooden staff. She didn’t know why, but she felt that it was a better choice. Then she grabbed Stew and dragged him away from the wall, into the center of the tunnel, by her side. When she felt she was ready, she took a deep breath. Then she focused her mind on one thing. Expanding. The whole world around her growing farther and farther away. The walls being pushed back. And at the same time, she felt the outer tunnels, the ones that she was cut off from getting closer and closer. The tunnel that she was in rippled with energy. Sandy did not stop focusing. Her body suddenly felt very faint and light. But she did not stop focusing. And reality pulsed around her.
Diana and José were digging as fast as they could. They had created a system. Diana would cover the walls with runes and sigils, breaking down the earth so that it was easy to move, expanding their tunnel outward for structural integrity, and José would shovel.
José had stripped off his armor and was double axing in a straight pathway toward where they both had assumed Sandy and Stew were.
The MERC leader worked with a grim determination, his face almost as rough-hewn as the stone he cut through. His axes rose and fell with the constant beat of a metronome. One ax rose as the other fell, chipping the stone away, sending sparks flying up into the air as José’s labored breathing mixed with the sound of cracking rock. The man worked with an urgency that had not been present over the last few days. It was as if he were possessed. His eyes hardly turned from the burgeoning tunnel in front of him. He only occasionally turned to ask Diana to recast Find Target so that he could be assured that he was moving in the right direction. Once the golden light of Diana’s arrow faded, José would return to his mad cutting away of their potential death.
It had been a long time since Diana had seen this side of José. Between his flippant attitude, brash arrogance, and gambling, she had forgotten that beneath all of that bullshit, there was a man who was a MERC. A MERC who took his job and their party seriously. It was a pleasant change. It was also unfortunate that it had taken a near-death experience to bring this out of him.
That being said, José was a beast. He was moving faster than a mechanical mining machine. There was no magic either. It was all muscle and sheer will, breaking straight through the heart of the mountain. It was no wonder that José was seen as God by many of the MERCs, not just the newbs, the vets too.
Diana coated the walls with another round of sigils. They were making headway. She knew that one of the reasons that José was cutting through the rock so easily was because her sigils were softening up the earth. They were a team working as it was meant to. They had slid into their roles so effortlessly.
Somewhere out there was Chip, playing the hardest role of all. Diana knew she was going to come through, though.
José slammed his ax into the rock and sighed heavily as he leaned over and tried to catch his breath. “How much longer do you think we’re gonna be at this?” José asked.
Diana pushed past José and covered his wall with sigils with a wave of her wand. “Don’t know,” she finally admitted. “They can’t be too far unless they’re digging in the opposite way. I hardly doubt that Sandy’s forgotten how to use Find Your Target. We should be coming up on them in a little bit.”
“She could be panicking. Something fucked could have happened to Stew. They could—”
“You need to calm down. You’re not helping anyone if you go into ‘worried dad mode.’ Keep it together, all right?”
“I’m not—”
“You are. This isn’t the same thing as… It’s not the same. Do you understand me?”
Diana placed her hand on José’s shoulder and he looked up at her. His eyes were heavy and full, little brown pools that seemed to stretch down infinitely into his soul. “I understand.” José sighed. “Let’s go find these kids.”
José turned back to the earth, his axes hanging heavy, as if they were a responsibility. A weighty, sharpened guilt.
Suzuki awakened.
His eyes were stuck together, his eyelids plastered with some kind of mucus. The feeling had completely gone out of his feet and his hands. It was as if he were a suspended head, cut off from the rest of his body. The only feeling that remained was in his mouth, which was held open by what seemed to be a web. Whatever it was, it was strong. A sense of horror slowly crept up Suzuki’s spine. He forced his head to move and his eyes to open a crack. The room was no longer as dark as it had been. The dim, glowing, yellow-green light had returned, and it had multiplied.
Twenty grimpons encircled Suzuki. Suzuki checked his HUD. Seventeen percent chance of surviving a head-on fight. Shit.
The monsters were crouched down, their legs up against their chest, their arms wrapped around the perversely long appendages. Their sickly white eyes eerily mirrored the luminescence from their skin. They were clicking their tongues in some odd percussive symphony that sent Suzuki’s head reeling. He tried to look away, but he could hardly move. His eyes kept working, though, and he tried to take in as much as he could. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see Beth, who was also cocooned. Her eyes were closed. Whatever the grimpons had given Suzuki to put him to sleep, they also must have slipped to Beth as well.
The space Suzuki was in was larger than he had initially thought. Now that there were so many grimpons lighting the area, he could see that they were actually in some kind of cavern, although a very different one than the dragon’s. This did not appear to have occurred naturally. The walls were covered in bizarre etchings and drawings.
If Suzuki could find a way out of the cocoon, he thought he’d be able to take the grimpons. They looked frail enough. Generations of living under the mountain and scavenging food probably hadn’t caused them to evolve into particularly good fighters. That must have been why they had captured him and Beth while they were sleeping. They were opportunists at best.
The grimpons continued to click their tongues. It sounded as if they were praying or singing. And somewhere, in the darkened, cavernous tunnels, something large moved. Suzuki could hear it scraping against the sides of the tunnels. The scraping mixed with the clicking and Suzuki suddenly felt he was going to need a change of plans.
The thing moving in the dark screeched. It was the sound of a thousand voices, of hunger and lust mixed with anguish and despair. Suzuki tried to pull away from the sound as it bored into his brain, but he was stuck. All he could do was listen, trying to catch a glimpse of whatever approached.
He saw the thing coming in the dim yellow light as it moved with a jitter of its emaciated body, its skin hanging over its thin arms and legs like a sack of wet clothes laid over a chair to dry. Its hair hung over its shoulders in ratty clumps, its scalp bare in patches. The clicking was growing louder and louder. Its eyes were sweeping over everything in the cavern, shooting forth rays of dead yellow lights as if some sort of demented light bulb were glowing behind that pale, stretched, and yellowing skin. It was gibbering as it clicked its tongue, slobber and drool trickling down its chin as it gummed its toothless mouth together with a smacking, jabbering repetition that set Suzuki’s nerves on fire.
Suzuki looked at the mucus that had covered and hardened around his hand. It was of no use. His fingers were incapable of moving. His body was useless to him.
Only his eyes still had purpose. And that purpose was to behold the grimpon king as it dragged his heavy, hairy palms across the ground like a great white ape once lost in the hills, lost long enough to have wasted away to a skeleton of its former strength, to have sat by ponds and rivers, coughing, hacking, trying to remember its name until it could only recall the soun
d of coughing, of clicking, of small, silver fish torn in its hands and swallowed in haste.
The grimpon king took Suzuki’s head in his hand, much like the other grimpon had earlier. He moved Suzuki’s head around as if he were surveying a piece of fruit. Then the grimpons surrounding Suzuki and Beth converged on him. Suzuki felt fingers pulling at his face, the small suction cups on the grimpon’s fingers pulling at his skin, piercing it, letting the blood flow free. Suzuki screamed and regretted it as he felt the grimpons tugging at his lips, holding his mouth open as he gasped for air. The king grimpon’s solemn face was before Suzuki, his huge sagging lips hanging nearly off the bone as he stretched his mouth open, his tongue slinking out from behind those toothless jaws. His tongue was covered in hairy bristles as if a host of small spiders had taken up residence on it. The grimpon king ran his fingers across Suzuki’s skin as he pulled himself up to his full height, towering over Suzuki as if he were some ancient and grave calamity set to befall the world beneath him, holding his arms together in some old and forgotten sign of prostration. The hall was now silent; all was silence other than the clicking of the grimpon king’s tongue as the skin across his face peeled back so his jaws could be seen as they split open. The gaping maw stretched all the way down his throat, lined with small bulbs that glowed with the same feeble light shooting forth from the king’s eyes, which were held on a swivel now that his face had broken apart. His hairy tongue was searching for Suzuki’s mouth as Suzuki tried to pull away, his eyes wide with terror, his screams filling the cavern.