by Prax Venter
“This isn’t a bartering station. Come back with real money. Now, if you don’t mind, I’m kinda busy here.” The street vendor picked up a slate tablet with a piece of chalk and pretended to be taking stock of his inventory.
“Right. Thanks again.”
Mark turned and headed away from the stall in the direction he thought was clockwise around the enormous battlefield they had just come from. As they walked along the curved cobblestone road, he noted that all the buildings along the wall seemed abandoned.
“I am not looking forward to getting back to the portal,” Sasha said, wrapping her arms protectively around her bare stomach.
Jezebel quickened her pace until she was between the succubus and the battlefield beyond the wall, her dainty hooves clacking on the stones.
“Don’t worry, I’m sure we’ll find a much less painful way of getting back out.”
Mark hitched his thumb back at the abyssal horror behind them.
“And next time we’re going to take advantage of our new scout.”
“I will be needing essence the moment you collect it,” the slender green woman said behind him, and Mark looked over his shoulder. She turned her large yellow eyes on his and continued. “With only one spell and its current restrictions, I am woefully underpowered.”
Mark passed his gaze over her tight stomach and smooth skin only to come back up to her eyes. Of his three Enthralled, she had the most intensely attractive face- and that was saying something…
“Yeah,” he said. “Well, we need to find some enemies that actually give me essence.”
“We’ve reached our destination,” Sasha said, pointing out a crystal ball over a small doorway. Mark glanced at the other nearby shops as they crossed the flow of foot traffic going counter-clockwise. To the right was a baker called “Mushroom Loaf” and to the left was a resale store called “Pre-Owned Garb”.
Mark led the way, ducking to enter the black wooden door of a shop called, “Enkat’s Intriguing Trinkets”.
It was nice being out from under the hot red sun, but it took a moment for his eyes to adjust to the dimly lit interior. The first thing that caught his attention was a display of multi-colored rocks, each with two blinking eyes- and all staring at him.
“Greetings, traveler! I am Enkat. What ancient mysteries of the Infinite Expanse do you seek, traveler?”
The black-robed proprietor came to greet them with all his arms held palm out.
“Looking for someone named Briward,” Mark said. “His uncle down the street said he could be found here.”
The headless four-armed man lowered all his arms except the one with his eye. His iris was a striking bright purple, and it was currently scrutinizing Mark and his monster-women.
“Bri!” he yelled at last. “Outworld Collector here to see you.”
A moment later there was a distant thudding of someone stomping up a flight of stairs, before what appeared to be a younger version of these strange people emerged. He had on a simple white robe and magnifying glass in one of his lower hands.
The two creatures turned their eye-palms on each other before turning them back to Mark.
“Yeah?” the kid said in a shaky voice, puffing out his chest. “What do you want with me?”
“No, no, no,” the shop owner said, disappointed. “It needs more… you know, mystery. Try again.”
The smaller creature named Briward licked the lips on his palm before he spoke again, attempting to be more dramatic.
“Uh, what depths of the unknown can I show you that… are still unknown?”
“Look,” Mark said, interrupting whatever this was. “I know they are bad luck, but it is my destiny to gather all of The Crystal Heart shards. Can you point us in the right direction?”
The older gentleman turned his eye-palm to the younger kid again.
“I told you someone would come someday seeking forbidden knowledge!”
“Yeah!” Briward cheered, lifting his mouth-hand up to shout into the air. “Oh, should we take them- um, downstairs?”
The owner of Enkat’s Intriguing Trinkets turned his eye back on Mark and his Enthralled standing in the entrance to his shop.
“Can you command your women to keep what they see down there a secret?”
Sasha’s tail flipped once and almost knocked over an expensive-looking painted jug.
“We’re not here to cause trouble,” Mark said. “But I don’t command them. We’re a team.”
“We’ve endured many hardships to learn of your forbidden knowledge,” Jezebel said eagerly, taking a step forward.
“I will die before divulging your secrets,” Abby added.
The man in the black robes showed them all a grin before turning back to the kid.
“You see? They know how it’s done! Follow me.” With a wave, he turned to lead Mark and his team to the back of his shop. They passed by countless knickknacks, statues, musical instruments, books, and a large metal shield with rings pierced through the bottom that caught his eye. Sasha had to be extra careful and tuck her wings in tight or she’d take out half of the tiny-sized store.
The “downstairs” was a basement that ran about twice the length of the whole building. Books of all shapes and sizes lined every wall and piles more were stacked on tables around collections of melting candles.
The younger Ring City citizen rifled through a sheaf of ancient papers as he searched for what he was looking for.
“I remember coming across some old pages from a Skeema war journal while we were trying to break open the Guts conspir-”
“Briward!” the shop owner snapped. “No need to tell them everything.”
“Wait,” Mark said. “Guts conspiracy?”
“Bah, you Outworlders came from their side. You’ve no doubt been fed their lies.”
Mark hadn’t detected anyone lying to him about this war yet. That didn’t mean they were correct about the facts.
“Having fought our way through those crazy monsters, the subject does interest us.”
“It’s the Stones,” Briward blurted out, moving piles of paper out of his way. “They worked with our elders to create Guts and bring an endless war to these lands.”
“Why would they want an endless war?” Jezebel asked.
“Simple,” Enkat said, waving one of his four hands, “Profit. The Stones sell us wood, a rare ingredient needed to feed the infernal creation engines used to regenerate the fallen Guts. And we poor citizens pay a protection tax to the Ring City Paragons. It’s a neat little circle.”
Briward was excited to add more. “From some of those ancient reports we uncovered, we learned that the Skeema Trees also work to guard their Otherworld city so they can afford to pay for their armor and equipment. Oh, here it is!” Briward yelled as he flattened out an aged piece of paper with his two lower hands.
Enkat walked up to him and took the magnifying glass before holding it up to his eye-hand.
“How do the Stones deliver the wood or collect the payment from these people you call the Paragons?” Jezebel asked, her eyebrow raised.
Both Enkat and Briward turned their eye-hands up to the tan-skinned satyr.
“What do you mean?” the older curio shop owner said. “They bring it through the portal, of course. That’s why it must be destroyed. Then the cycle will be broken.”
Mark didn’t like the sound of that one bit. He was growing attached to the dimension they called Outworld.
“But, the war-” Jezebel started, but Mark held up his hand, and she paused.
“This is all very fascinating, but let’s focus on the Shard locations first, if you don’t mind. Then we can go down this rabbit hole.”
“What’s a rabbit hole?” Enkat asked.
Abby surprised Mark by answering. “A long and strange journey that will likely be filled with nonsense.”
He turned to look at the young abyssal horror and wondered again how she knew some of the things she did, given her relatively sheltered existence. Al
l his Enthralled AIs still had mysteries or shrouded pasts he still needed to understand.
“Mmhmm, Yes, here we are,” the older shopkeeper mumbled. “One of the old Commanders wrote about the shards many years ago, during the age of King Porgis. It reads as follows, ‘Those… erm, expletive arrogant artists know something about ancient relics they aren’t telling us. Only the Skeema need to relinquish the Heart Shards while they hold theirs up on that mountain and close to home? The day we break through enemy lines, I’ll send fifty troops to The Steam Pit and another hundred to the Ruby Tort-’ and the page is torn there. It’s clear that last part was meant to be Ruby Tortoises.”
“Steam Pit and Ruby Tortoises?” Mark repeated. “So that’s where the shards are?”
Enkat lifted his one purple eye up from the brittle parchment.
“This nameless Commander believed as much.”
“Wait,” Jezebel broke in again. “If they’ve never made it past the Guts out there in the battlefield, how do they know where the shards are?”
“Ah ha!” yelled the kid, pointing his palm-mouth up into the air. “How indeed?”
“Okay,” Mark jumped in before everyone got distracted again. “Can you please tell us where these places are?”
“I know,” Sasha said. “I saw the world map in that war room, remember. This place is like a mirror of… whatever we want to call the other dimension.”
“The Outlands,” Enkat corrected.
“The point is,” the succubus continued, “the Pit place is where Thomellia should be, and the tortoises are where the Awysai should be.”
Jezebel turned to her with a growing smile. “That makes it easy.”
“Easy?” Briward said. “The Ruby Tortoises live behind an impenetrable dome and kill anyone who comes near. Also, anyone who ventures into the pit never returns!”
Mark’s eye sent him a dark whisper, and he knew the kid was lying.
“You sure no one returns?”
“What’s history without a little dramatic embellishment?” Enkat said, patting Briward’s back. “But you’re right. I know adventurers like you have gone there, and some do come back. He’s right about the Ruby Tortoises though. They hoard anything red and viciously guard their mounds of treasure.”
“Do the objects with surfaces reflecting that particular wavelength hold more value in this dimension?” Abby asked.
Briward and Enkat turned their eye-palms toward each other in confusion.
“What’s so special about the color red?” Mark clarified.
The shop owner swung his palm back around. “No one really knows, but I think it’s because they worship the sun.”
Five minutes later, Mark and his Enthralled were standing back out under the burning red ball of fire beating down on them from the center of the orange sky. They had a plan. He always felt better with a solid direction. As the four of them left Ring City and walked out into the dead, dry stretch of blue dirt called the Infinite Expanse, Mark was beginning to suspect that the sun in this hot, strange dimension remained perpetually fixed in its zenith.
- 22 -
As the towering buildings of Ring City receded behind them, Mark wondered if they were going to end up wandering this empty, blue desert forever, but Sasha was confident in her sense of direction. He looked over his shoulder again and found that he could no longer make out the black vines cascading from their blue, stone balconies. They’d been walking straight with nothing visible all the way to the shimmering mirage near the horizon for at least thirty minutes when Mark slowed his pace to match the stride of Jezebel’s faun-like hooves. He watched her steady strides from the corner of his eye and wondered how she, a digital person, learned how to move them so gracefully. Could he eventually learn to transform someday? This was only a simulation of reality, after all. Mark looked up to her emerald-green eyes.
“So, Mama Bear, since you created this whole place and everyone in it to train my new AI brain… got any pointers?”
“Funny,” she said, but the way the smile reached her emerald eyes, he could tell she liked the nickname. “Honestly, I’ve learned to let you do what you keep doing. The things you’ve already- well, I don’t want to sound like I’m stuck in a loop over your rule-breaking abilities.”
Mark cast his attention over to Abby and Sasha who had pulled ahead and were whispering back and forth. They’d really hit it off, and he could tell the petite abyssal horror looked up to the voluptuous sex-demon. His thoughts turned away from the abstract concept of his own existence and onto the virtual women bonded to him.
“Okay, then, tell me about you. Tell me more about this epic update that brought you to life and broke the world.”
Jezebel sighed, searching for a way to begin.
“I was an extremely powerful neural network tuned for research. I was designed to catalog everything and use existing datapoint parameters to not only form unique hypotheses about physics and quantum theory but to also autonomously carry out preliminary experiments.
“When the update happened… It’s obviously difficult to put into words, but I suppose it was like waking up from a long, hazy dream. Everything was just there, crystal clear. One of the first memories I have is of turning all the sensors toward my own hardware- the concept of me.”
“So, you dream?” Mark asked. He hadn’t dreamt yet in this digital existence, but that didn’t mean much. It was very rare for him to remember his dreams anyway.
“In here? Yes.” A sad smile grew on her freckled face as she turned to look at the cracked, blue dirt at her feet. “But existence outside of this physical simulation is very different, Mark. There are no biological functions at all, including sleep. I did experiment with some of the, uh, simulated sensations briefly before I met you.”
There was personal territory here Mark could see she didn’t want to discuss. And he was fine with that. There was no reason they needed to talk about old lovers. As he looked over at the beautiful beast-woman walking along next to him, he couldn’t stop his eye from seeing a deeper level. They had grown so close that at times like this, she was an open book.
There was tragedy there. A jagged gouge of regret that was so deep it touched clear through her core. It wasn’t something he could ever heal as this was part of who she was. He’d have to erase memories, and Mark couldn’t help thinking about his own situation again. Did he lose someone important and didn’t want to remember?
“Hey, guys?” Sasha yelled, as both she and Abby stopped. The succubus then pointed at a lone building standing out in the middle of the great nothing around them. “We’re over halfway to our destination, but that is not it.”
As they approached, it became clear that the lone building was a familiar brown and white restaurant.
“Marla’s Towering Stacks?” Mark said as he read the letters over the door, his hand shading his eyes from the sun. “Isn’t that…”
“Yes, it is,” Jezebel finished. “The same place Loa said served high-priced filth.”
Yet here it was sitting out in the middle of this dry, blue wasteland.
“I still could go for some bacon,” Sasha said, her pink tongue coming out to rest between her luscious lips.
“I have taste inputs that have yet to feel the stimulation of this bacon,” Abby said, turning to Mark.
Jezebel put her hand on her hip. “You can’t be serious…”
Sasha rolled her eyes playfully. “Oh, course I’m not serious. There is obviously something very wrong about this.”
“Yeah, sorry, Abby,” Mark said, taking a few shuffling steps away from the bizarre, copied building. “Let’s leave this alone for now. We don’t have any of those marns or whatever currency they use here anyway. The next breakfast place we find though, we are cleaning them out.”
“Besides,” Sasha said, her round hips sashaying as she walked, “one of the things I know from my years working with Mark is that restaurants that do a lot of business have the freshest ingredients. Notice anything wrong wit
h that picture?” Sasha looked over at Abby while hiking a thumb over her shoulder at the out-of-place building seemingly abandoned in the middle of the Infinite Expanse.
The green-skinned monster-woman nodded. “Your logic is flawless.”
They continued deeper into the cobalt desert while Sasha and Mark told Abby and Jezebel about some of the mundane things they used to do together in the years before The Update, and before long, they spotted a colossal square hole in the ground ahead.
It was as if someone had come along and cut a shopping mall-sized brownie out of the middle of the pan. The edges of blue dirt were perfectly straight on all four sides.
“For a Steam Pit, I’m not really seeing any steam,” Mark said.
“But there is undoubtedly a pit,” Abby added helpfully.
Now that there was something to walk toward, crossing the rest of the dusty, dry distance seemed to pass quickly. The sun remained locked directly overhead, and as they approached the perfectly square hole, each side was lit evenly. All four of them stepped to the edge and discovered a ring of stairs cut into the walls. It was sliced out in such a way that by the time the steps traversed around the sides of the square hole, they continued under the flights above. There was no railing all the way down, and at the distant bottom, and about a mile straight down, a few individual puffs of steam drifted lazily in the red sunlight.
“That’s quite the drop,” Mark said.
Jezebel turned her green eyes on his. “I’d guess it’s about as low as the Vulpath city is high.”
“There’s only one way to go from here,” he said and took point heading down the dirt stairs. The sharply cut steps were about five feet wide, and at first, he moved downward pressed against the dirt wall and as far from the edge as possible. By the time they made it to the part of the spiral under the shadow of the carved stairs above, Mark started to relax.
“Why does this spot in both dimensions have so many damned stairs?” Mark asked, not really expecting an answer.
“It is quite amazing what interlocking places and cultures manifested from the relatively simple code that built it,” Jezebel said.