Descend- Coming Together

by David Burke

  Still Meikiyo was quiet for at least a minute until she finally said, “I could never hate you. In fact I probably feel the opposite, but I know you don’t want us to say words like love. I’m not trying to trap you in any kind of relationship. Oh and just so you don’t have to worry, I splurged and bought the standard birth control so I’m safe up to when you pass level 30.”

  Jay wasn’t sure what to say. If he was honest with himself, he had been feeling a confusing jumble of emotion about each of the girls. Amelia was the most clear, but he felt like he was falling for each of them. When he didn’t say anything more Meikiyo continued, “I am sorry if that word upset you. Please know that I care about our entire team and I want you to be happy with both of them too. I don’t mind sharing. You are an amazing guy and somehow it seems like there is enough of you for all of us.”

  “I do feel something for you. Apologies that I haven’t sorted it all out yet. Just give me some time, okay?”

  “Of course.”

  “Now sadly, we should probably get back to the others,” Jay said.

  “Do we have to?”

  “Even with the partial clearing we did, it probably isn’t the smartest thing for us to stay outside all night and you know they will worry,” Jay responded.

  “Oh that isn’t what I meant. I just meant do we have to go now? Are you up for it once more or don’t I entice you enough?” Meikiyo asked as she got up on all fours and looked back over her shoulder at him with a crooked grin on her face.

  He immediately sprang to attention and said, “Oh, it wouldn’t hurt if we stayed out here a little longer.”

  Chapter 5 - Adopting New Rhythms

  It took six days before Jay was able to make it back to the dungeon again other than for the partial clearing that they performed each night. Most of the time was spent training and organizing teams of people. The rest of it was spent trying to integrate the newcomers. Truthfully, Jasmine did most of that but Jay had to keep some watch on her because he didn’t completely trust her.

  When he was with her, he fought against the sense that he needed to trust her and the overwhelming desire to be pleasing to her. It didn’t help that he still found her to be hot even if he had started to think of her as manipulative. Then when he wasn’t with her, his mind would feel clearer.

  One of the main things that he had been looking out for was to see if she tried to latch onto either Tyler or Miguel. Both the guys were good company, and he spent at least an hour each day split between a bit of joint training and sharing a drink. The girls of Team Jay were awesome, but there was no replacement for having the proverbial beer with the guys.

  Surprisingly despite not being able to fully bring Jay under her sway, she showed little to no interest in the other guys. Jay realized that it might be because he was now leveled up to 15 from his training and both of them were level four, but it still shocked him that she didn’t at least make a run at one of them.

  In fact she seemed to be the only one of the girls outside of his team who hadn’t made a run at them. They both had a revolving door and seemed to sleep indiscriminately with different girls every day. Not that Jay was complaining. Their presence eased some of the pressure off of him. Some of it, but not all of it, as he still had girls trying to find their way into his bed. If anyone had told him that he would have a problem like this even a month ago, he would have laughed his head off.

  Not that Jay wasn’t getting enough even as he stuck to being faithful to his teammates. A part of him wondered if you could call it being faithful when you were with three girls, but each day he had a morning rendezvous with Amelia. They would train before the sun was even up and then fuck like minxes. She was insatiable, and he took a particular joy in making her beg.

  It wasn’t that he didn’t also romance her in a way. Those morning training sessions became his daily attempt to crack her shell. He would ask about her past, her interests, even what she expected from the future. Jay came to truly appreciate how pragmatic she was. She had a true realist’s view of the life they found themselves in and had adopted a carpe diem philosophy.

  Each midday with Huong was different. He would get reports from her about her medical efforts and what she was planning in terms of training a couple of the others who had skills that could be used for healing. They had failed to build a clinic. All the wood that they cut down was reset each day. Repeated attempts to build a structure all failed and after the 3rd day, Jay was ready to give up.

  Huong though never gave up on trying to please him. She took a particular delight in displaying her willingness to satisfy him however she could. He would almost say that she had an oral fixation but who was he to complain. The trick for him with Huong was that Jay wanted her to learn to take their time as an equal relationship. He wanted to make her happy and went out of his way complimenting everything about her.

  He found that little gifts like flowers he could buy from the terminal were a sure-fire way to win her over. They were simple enough for him to obtain for a handful of credits but seemed to mean the world to her. He remembered something from a psychology class that he had taken freshman year about there being different ways that people received and displayed love.

  The presence of things like flowers, candies, even jewelry all for relatively low costs were an issue of some frustration to him. Who would create a system that made it impossible for them to build functional housing but thought that it was important to put such trinkets in the shop? He did learn to be careful about the gifts he bought though because on the second day he had bought Huong a necklace with a small jade flower. She had loved it and ended up showing it off all over, which sparked an increased fervor in a variety of girls all trying to convince him that he would never regret taking them into his circle as most of the others called their team.

  Meikiyo had made special mention of it that evening when he had his time with her. She had been rushed again by an increased number of requests for being put in Jay’s bungalow that evening and it had even come to blows, apparently. It was hard for him not to laugh about it and Meikiyo had a way of putting him at ease enough that he could laugh in front of her even while comforting her after the stress it had caused.

  Each night, the time that he spent with her was the most relaxing. Amelia kept him on his toes and he appreciated that more than words could say. They verbally sparred and had fun doing so. Huong was fun even though it was a strain sometimes the way she wanted to dote on him. Maybe it was because he had grown up most of his life without a mother that he didn’t know how to handle that sort of reaction from a girlfriend. He felt it was safe at the least to call her that. She was a lover certainly and more but it was clearly not just physical.

  In contrast to both of the others, Meikiyo was the girl he could just lie there quietly with and look up at the stars without speaking. Holding hands or spooning after other activities, it didn’t matter, being with her was peaceful. They did talk, but there was never the pressure to say words just to fill space or to prove that he was able to keep up with her. The words they shared were fewer but more meaningful for that.

  In fact it was the quiet time that he spent with her that gave him another clue about what was happening to them. He knew that he had learned something before back in the jungle, but couldn’t remember what it was. It was like it was in his head but just out of reach.

  Then as he lay there cuddling with Meikiyo on what felt like a warm summer evening with a pleasant breeze across this shirtless frame, he saw it. Whatever it was took him a moment to process. Then he started putting pieces together. He remembered how each time the reset occurred that there was almost a sense of things glitching. Like when there is a graphics error in a game.

  Up in the sky amidst the stars, he saw the same thing. A cluster of four stars that he just happened to be looking at flickered. He stared, and it happened again. He ruled out that he had just blinked. When it happened, a third time, he became sure that it wasn’t something that he was imagining.
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  No, the actual stars in the sky were appearing and disappearing. He was no astronomer, but he was pretty sure that wasn’t possible. At least it wasn’t possible if these were real stars.

  That caused him to start running through other possibilities in his mind. His first thought was to wonder if he was lying somewhere on Earth plugged into a virtual reality machine and being used as a tester. Perhaps he had been seriously injured in an accident. The thing was he didn’t remember being in an accident, but then would he? He wasn’t sure.

  The other option that came to mind seemed more farfetched, but then again some of the people here still insisted that they were in some form of purgatory and that the testing was about if their eternal souls got to move on from here. Jay didn’t know what he believed about all that spirit and soul stuff but he preferred a more physical solution.

  So he began to wonder if they had all been kidnapped by aliens. They would have to have an astounding level of technology. The ability to modify the human test subject and stimulate their brains, perhaps even evolve them. The technology or some type of meta-science approaching magic in its application which could create such an amazingly convincing environment around them. Heck, they would need some type of Time Lord Technology to make the huge jungle fit inside the tower. That or perhaps the doors were portals to other worlds. Either way it was astounding.

  The more he thought about it the more he decided that it was more likely that he was in a coma and attached to a machine. He wondered if all the others were likewise hooked up to machines and their brains were interacting or if he was somehow the sole test subject in his own private world. Maybe it explained how he was the center of so much. He just didn’t know. It was telling though that he enjoyed his time with Meikiyo so much that he didn’t mention any of it to her; not the flickering stars and certainly not his theory that this was some virtual reality world. He simply enjoyed the peace and quiet with her too much. This time was an emotional release for him.

  Equally, his love making with her was more emotional, slower paced and more deliberate. By the end of the day it was just what he needed. It was one of her favorite things to stare into his eyes as they lay together and he couldn’t seem to get enough of it either. The bonds that he was forming with each of them confused him because each felt genuine and he had always wondered if he would be able to create a lasting relationship with one woman, let alone three.

  He couldn’t have asked for better teammates though. They all worked hard at their tasks and Amelia for all her complaining about helping the entire world had them each leading a team through the dungeon each day at least once.

  On the morning of the sixth day after the newcomers had arrived, they were starting to feel like it was all one happy cluster. There were family squabbles but nothing that got out of hand. Then something happened that scared the daylights out of Jay, Tyler, and Miguel and forged a unique bond created out of shared trauma or challenge.

  The reset went just like normal. Everyone was knocked out and the changes they had made to the environment were all altered back to the defaults. What was different afterward though was the notification that Jay got. While he got some of the standard skill-ups for the things he had worked on during the day, there was still no level increase.

  He wondered if it was was more difficult to gain this next level because this was another threshold. Honestly, remembering how unpleasant the last threshold had been he wasn’t in a huge rush to repeat the experience. His speculation about that however quickly fell away as he read the other notification.

  All F units in the cluster will experience a syncing of their menstrual cycle over the next two daily cycles. This process is for the convenience of all test subjects. Note that crossing thresholds will alter the way that menstrual cycle occurs and how the body processes it. Emotional instability will be at a high during the syncing process and test subjects should be careful with how skills are used.

  Jay honestly felt a moment of panic go through him. He was now essentially trapped in a limited space with 34 already emotionally needy women due to the chemicals in the water. Now their hormones were all going to be out of whack as they were forcibly synced. The thought was more terrifying at a primal level than the dungeon monsters.

  Before he even thought about it Jay decided he needed some space and didn’t want to be around while the girls were all coming to terms with this. A part of him felt cowardly about it. He even felt like he was letting his team down. He would take a lizat claw to the face for any of the three of them, but this was something that they needed to deal with on their own. Not having grown up around women at all, this part of the female experience had always mystified him.

  Apparently as he ran for the ziggurat and the dungeon entrance, he wasn’t the only one with that thought. As he neared the stairs, he saw both Tyler and Miguel running up. Both had their gear flung on indicating that they had been in a hurry. Jay laughed, “I take it the dungeon sounded safer than this to you too?”

  “Oh hell yeah. Back home whenever my girlfriend was getting a visit from Aunt Flo, I always needed to study for a test at the library,” Tyler said.

  Miguel simply said, “This place is gonna be loco. They are gonna all either want to cry on our shoulders or scream at us and blame us for everything. I’m pretty sure that the two of us can handle most of the stuff in the dungeon, but if you come along, then it will be easy. You up for joining us?”

  Jay shrugged and said, “Why not. If we are gonna be stuck here for the rest of our lives, we might as well learn how to fight together.”

  They had been climbing the dungeon and then working their way down the stairs even as they were talking until now they were in front of the entrance to the first floor. “After you,” Tyler said.

  Jay grinned and stepped through, marveling again at how it was bigger on the inside. The thought crossed his mind that perhaps it wasn’t that it was bigger on the inside. Perhaps it was that he was being teleported to another place when he stepped through. The oddity of that though was that he could stick his head through the door while his body was still on the outside. It was time for another classic Jay shrug though because whatever was going on, it was clearly technology far beyond anything he understood.

  Once inside Jay said, “Okay, so I learned the hard way before that we need to have a brief rundown about what each of us are capable of doing. That way we can work together better. I will go first.” Jay explained about several of his powers without going into everything. He left out his Formation skills as he was still working on those and even though he had made significant progress, he still didn’t feel as competent with them as the others.

  Tyler said, “I have thermal sensing, enhanced strength and durability, psychic drain which I haven’t really perfected but seems to drain mental energy, regeneration, and mimic formation which allows me to duplicate a nearby object.”

  “Cool, that psychic drain seems like it might be more useful in more of a PvP setting but I can already think of ways we might be able to use your mimic formation. What about you, Miguel?”

  “If I wasn’t forced to fight for my life in some experiment with captors that I have never seen, I would be pretty psyched about my powers. I have a sonar-type sense, enhanced speed, aerokinesis, regeneration, and body modification which I have learned to grow wings with,” Miguel answered.

  When Jay heard what Miguel’s skills were he laughed inside that the guy had chosen to carry a mace-like weapon. It was almost as if the guy was trying to be Hawkman from the old DC comics. He kept the thought to himself though as he didn’t want to mess with their ability to fight together. This might not be Team Jay but they were the team that he was stuck with till whatever was going on topside ended.

  “So what now?” Tyler asked.

  “Now we start hunting and see how much of this we can clear. I am going to let you two fight and only use my offensive abilities if we get in trouble. Since we all have regeneration, hopefully we can manage this with
out a healer. Ok?” Jay said.

  “Yeah, soloing with my hunter was always one of my favorite things. No healing so I felt really alive. If I screwed up kiting something, then I bought it,” Miguel said.

  “You do realize that this is real life? How many times have I tried to remind you of that?” Tyler asked.

  Jay grinned at the friendly banter back and forth. He understood the temptation to treat this like a game but Tyler was right it was deadly serious. That was even true for those that weren’t getting weird dreams talking about dire things if he didn’t get his act in gear.

  “Yeah, yeah, I know. Sometimes it is just more fun to think of this as a game rather than be terrified all the time,” Miguel replied.