by Prax Venter
Before anyone could answer, he walked over and stepped up onto the spinning platform, easily adjusting his balance to the change in momentum.
Mark grabbed on to one of the poles and watched his Enthralled stare at him with wide eyes as he rotated away from them. On his return trip, all three of them moved to join him on the ride. His girls handled the change in speed better than Mark thought they would, but then again, they were all seasoned warriors. They could handle a ride made for a child. But watching Vale slither up onto the spinning platform and tighten her stomach muscles to lift her long tail so it didn’t drag along the concrete was a special kind of treat.
Smiling, Mark jumped on a painted horse and found that the size was larger than he expected. Shortly after, Roo hooted and hopped onto the one behind him.
“These spinning fake horses are part of the real world?” Vale asked, a bit farther back. She was holding onto the two poles between a creamy palomino and a shiny black stallion, obviously way too big to ride on any of these horses. Mark was getting the vibe that the giant naga was feeling a bit queasy.
“Yep,” Mark said, grinning.
Roo leaned forward on her horse and shouted, “And you said it was boring!”
He saw Ahnix teleport to the horse next to him, and he looked over as she rose and fell, her furry muscular legs clamped on tight. Her tail flipped around at first, but then she locked her eyes on his and just gave in to the motion.
Mark could see her features melt into contentment and the small smile creep back onto her lips. He could really get used to seeing his noble cat-girl’s smile.
The image of content happiness she sent him was violently severed when a white projectile impaled her yellow-furred shoulder.
Ahnix's face twisted into rage as her eyes focused on something behind him. In the time it took Mark to turn his head, the enraged cat-girl vaulted off the carousel and sprinted into a cluster of gore-covered creatures. Her speed was astonishing.
Mark could feel Ahnix's terrible, burning agony erupting from the object lodged in her shoulder as she slashed her claws into one of the attackers, turning it to dust. They looked similar to the inside-out people they had seen in the city, but these had fleshy tubes for arms.
As Mark and the others jumped down from the spinning merry-go-round, Ahnix teleported instantly to another previously unseen group of three attackers and she barely dodged the projectiles fired by their nightmarish, fleshy arms. Activating Assault Rush, she wiped out all three with her claws and then Retracted back to the original two she had left behind. Then she instantly dispatched another.
The final attacker was about to sink its teeth into the cat-girl's neck from behind when a sewing needle sprouted from its head, and the creature vanished into swirling dust. Ahnix hissed and spun to face what she still thought was a threat as Roo's sharpened metal rod clattered to the ground.
Ahnix, in her hate-fueled rage, had taken out five of the six attackers, but she slumped to her knees as the toll on her body sunk in.
Mark rushed to her side while Roo and Vale swept the area for more enemies. The cat-girl kept her head down and her eyes on the asphalt as he inspected her wound, agony radiating out of her shoulder with every breath. The white, slick object lodged deep into her fur looked like a bone.
Mark looked her in the eye. “I'm going to pull this out on the count of three.”
She nodded.
“One-” he said, and yanked out the sharpened bone, blood spurting out after it. She hissed loudly, but Mark quickly enveloped her with his pleasurable healing power and the cat-girl relaxed again, a soft moan escaping her lips. Moments later she was fully healed and back on her feet.
“New enemy types,” Vale said, standing protectively near Ahnix.
Roo took the projectile from him and turned it over in her hands. The tip of the sharpened bone was still coated in Ahnix's red blood, and Mark felt hot, boiling anger fill his mind at the sight of it. Every drop belonged inside of her furry body at all times. How dare they-
His thoughts were interrupted by Ahnix's warm hand on his shoulder. She sent him the idea of agreement, but that she was okay now, thanks to him.
“Bone needle,” Roo said, throwing the short, pointed bone to the ground near her longer, iron needle.
“Okay, playtime's over,” Mark said. “Let's find this Eddy and get out of here.”
They all silently agreed. Roo and Vale left their stuffed animals on the spinning carousel, and they all moved down the path toward the dark spot they located from on top of the Ferris wheel. With new focus, they quickly moved past all distractions along the way and stood face to face with a giant painted ghost, laying on its side with a door for a mouth. Its amorphous hands were pressed into the cheeks of its white face and held what seemed like a frozen expression of pain. Dark letters spelled out 'Other Side Fun House' along the ghost’s body, and Mark noticed that the brick, windowless building extended a good distance away from the entrance. The place was huge.
“It doesn't look fun to me,” Roo said, and although Mark had never seen her eyebrows, he could tell they were pulled down now.
Ahnix's tail hopped once. “He's in there,” she said with certainty.
Vale slid forward, not looking back. “Only one way to be sure.”
Mark followed the heavily armed giant naga inside and found themselves in a small room that came to life as they entered. The light was coming from an animatronic fortune teller on their right. Velvet ropes cordoned off the area around the intricate scene of a man slumped behind a crystal ball, resting on the ornate table before him. The crystal ball held weak arcs of glowing electricity and the whole scene had an aged, cheap feel to it.
“Greetings!” a dramatic voice said as the life-sized puppet lifted its creepy-looking head.
Mark flinched when a three-foot iron needle thunked through one of its animatronic eyes. The head stopped moving, but the arms started to shift around the crystal ball with awkward, shaky jerks.
“Allow me to show you the other side!” Undisturbed by the needle in his head, the fortune teller's voice continued from an ancient speaker near the floor. They all turned to look at Roo.
Her answering shrug was accompanied by a 'why risk it?' vibe along their bond.
The tinny voice continued. “The veil has been parted, and a tear into another world has been opened! Step through if you dare!”
One of the shaky, wax-like hands lifted and indicated a black curtain that led deeper into the building.
Vale led the way again, and she approached the sheet of fabric covering their way forward. With an armored fist, she gathered a large portion of it and pulled the curtain down with one yank.
She tossed it to the ground and Mark saw the universe spinning on the other side. After his brain caught up to what his eyes were seeing, he realized it was a simple spinning tunnel. The inside was painted with highly realistic stars and galaxies, all whirling around a suspended walkway. The effect was deceivingly well-designed and quickly disorientating. Mark felt like he was looking up while spinning in place.
They followed Vale out onto the walkway and everyone but Roo pulsed out green nausea into their bond.
Roo, however, was back on board with the Other Side Fun House. “This is amazing,” she whispered, apparently immune to the effects.
They made it through and came to a long, metal stairway that vanished into the darkness below. Vale held out her hand to Ahnix who wordlessly pulled out the flashlight tucked into her tight leather shorts and tossed it to her.
Vale clicked it on and spilled a beam of light down the straight stairwell. It was far away, but there was a doorway at the bottom. The giant, armored naga went first. Then Mark, Roo, and Ahnix followed further behind.
They made it to about the halfway point when the stairs all moved at once with a metallic clunk, shuttering into a perfectly smooth slide.
As Mark and Roo collided with Vale's sturdy tail and stopped, he wondered how many kids broke their ankles
on this part of the “funhouse”.
He and Roo untangled themselves from Vale as the giant naga lifted the end of her tail a bit so they had something to hold on to as they continued their descent. Mark looked back over his shoulder and saw that Ahnix was having less of a problem with the smooth angular surface because of her padded feet and claws.
He expected to see a pit of spikes or some trap at the bottom, but only a frayed, red carpet and dark hallway were there to greet them. Vale's light shone on a series of animatronic scenes as they moved through the hall, each showing a twisted version of children's fairy tales.
In one, the wolf was sitting in the straw house, built by one of the three pigs, eating him. As they passed, the wolf raised his head and silently tracked their movements, his muzzle dripping with red liquid. In another display, a broken egg-man by a stone wall tried to scoop his plastic guts back into his broken shell with shaky, animatronic arms.
“Uh...” Roo said, back out again.
“Just keep moving and be ready for anything,” Vale said.
Passing the horrible scenes, they moved through a doorway into a room with one big mirror as the back wall and bright, colorful lights pointing down from the ceiling. In the center of the mirror wall was an arched hole that was difficult to see past with all the ambient light in the room.
Mark watched his girls’ beautiful reflections as they approached the arch and peeked in.
“Yup, a mirror maze,” he said.
Just as he finished his obvious statement, a bone shard zipped past his ear, ripping a part of it off. Blinding pain washed through the side of his head as Vale shoved him over and fired her massive shotgun.
Mark heard several mirrors break and a slight flutter of essence enter him as he healed his throbbing, torn ear.
“Are you okay?” Vale asked, moving so her body covered his.
“Yeah, I'm fine,” Mark said as he finished regenerating his earlobe. “Just nicked me.”
They waited for another attack, but none came.
Mark let out the puff of air he had been holding. “I guess we're on the right track.”
“Mark, please fire your crossbow through the holes I made,” Vale said.
“You see a bad guy?” he asked, raising his crossbow.
“No,” Vale said calmly. “We're not going to be stupid and actually go in there. Break them all.”
Keeping the crossbow level on the hole Vale made, Mark's eyebrow raised as understanding washed over him. He smiled and squeezed the trigger.
His glowing orb sailed over two broken mirror walls and landed at the base of a third. Glass exploded everywhere, and Mark had to cover his face as shards of mirror showered him. It was at that moment he remembered that breaking a mirror was back luck.
The moment passed, and he felt the burst of essence from multiple slain enemies. He spun away from the opening and checked the status of his other girls.
Since it was only himself and Vale in the doorway, he was the only one needing minor laceration healing. Mark waited for his heal to recharge again as he felt and heard Vale shoot another blast, taking out another section and a few more hidden attackers. He had to admit- this was a brilliant plan.
“Okay Roo,” Vale said, “Your turn. We need precision. Think you can bounce a ball in there to break the remaining mirrors?”
Roo strutted up next to Vale and held out her soft arm, taking careful aim and growing an iron ball in her hand. Mark watched over her shoulder as she shattered every last mirror with a carefully executed ricochet.
Mark suddenly saw the flaw in Vale's plan. Ahnix was the only one whose feet (or snake-half) wasn't protected somehow. But she'd thought of that, too.
“Ahnix, get on my back. I'll carry you over the shards.”
The cat-girl didn't hesitate and ran up the base of Vale's armored tail. Ahnix hooked one arm on the giant naga's shoulder and leaned out, searching for attackers as they moved in and over the razor-sharp broken mirrors.
Their feet crunched through the wreckage of the mirror maze as Vale used the flashlight aligned with her shotgun to check the room.
Now that all the mirrors were down, they discovered that there were two ways out of the maze.
One was the obvious, clearly marked exit that led back outside, and the other was a door with a padlock. Ahnix slashed the lock open with one swipe of her claws, and they found themselves in a large warehouse lit with fluorescent overhead lights.
They entered the open area and scanned the stacks of cardboard boxes and folding tables for threats. As they searched, Mark's eye was drawn to a table with piles of cash on it. Not that cash had any real value here, but his brain had been trained to covet the light green currency.
One of the folding tables was different and laying on its side, and Mark eyed the red powder bags that had been scattered over the floor as a result. As they approached the flipped table, everyone stopped as a bone-covered creature rose up from behind it. One blood-red eye squinted at them from inside thick layers of curved, bone armor plates. The creature's arms were two skeletal tubes as if someone had severed its limbs just below the wrists, and it didn't wait a second before firing bone-shard bullets as if sprayed from a submachine gun.
Vale closed the distance to the hulking creature, taking the hits from zipping projectiles on her shield and armor as she surged forward. Ahnix backflipped off Vale’s snake-half to get away from the spray of bone bullets as flanking clusters of hidden enemies made themselves known by kicking over stacks of cardboard boxes.
Mark felt a hot sting on his arm as a shard of bone tore open his flesh from the side, and he ducked and rolled to the floor as more shots whizzed around him. He looked up in time to see Ahnix snarl and vanish, reappearing in the middle of the group on their right. Roo took a hit in the leg and went down, but as she hit one knee, she threw her hands up and screamed “Metal Rain!” at the attackers grouped on the left.
A concussive blast from Vale's Judge 559 pulled Mark's attention towards the armored bone creature who seemed to be stunned, holding its arms to its head. When she realized that her point-blank laser blast was absorbed by its armor, she whipped her head to face Mark.
“Hit him with magic!”
From the floor, Mark brought up his crossbow and squeezed the trigger, wishing he had taken more time to aim.
His shot was true, however, and Vale hid behind her shield as the blast from Mark's magical energy attack struck the smooth, white creature in its chest.
The bright explosion forced Mark to turn his head away and saw Ahnix still dealing with some of the lesser enemies advancing on them from deeper in the warehouse. Her blue-trailed claws spun and slashed as she dodged bullets and punches alike. Her toned form was stunning to watch.
Movement in the corner of Mark's vision brought his attention back to the bone-covered boss that was somehow still standing. Mark watched in horror as it recovered from the Shield Bash stun and turned his one red eye directly at him. The thing that just had to be Eddy the Eye raised his bone tubes on Mark. Vale tossed her gun and shield down and lurched forward to grab his weaponized arms with her mailed fists, pulling them up just in time for the sharpened projectiles to zip over Mark's head instead of through it.
He could see Vale struggle against the creature's strength. The thought of one of those bone needles passing into his skull gave him an idea.
“Roo,” he called out to the wounded velvet-girl and targeted the rip in her leg with a burst of healing energy. She looked up, and he saw her face relax as her pain was replaced with pleasure. Now that he had her attention, he put one finger high on his cheek and continued.
“The eye!”
She nodded, focusing on her target while Mark got up and focused on his Vale. His mind locked on her dense core muscles and infused them with a rich blast of enhancing energy. He saw her violet eyes go wide as she struggled with the monstrous Eddy.
“Face him this way!” Mark called out, finishing his boost.
Vale
put her newly fortified back into it and twisted the creature’s arms, forcing him to turn with her. Using her tail, she encircled his legs, anchoring herself to the bone-armored creature and pulled him down toward the floor. His one grotesque eye was now perfectly exposed.
Mark turned to watch Roo hold out her soft hand and line up the shot. With expert precision, she launched a three-foot metal shaft directly through his one weak spot and deep into his armored head.
Eddy the Eye instantly began to disintegrate like he was being consumed from the inside by a glowing light, and Mark felt a large rush of essence pour into him from all over the room- but when he checked his reserves, he found that he was only a quarter full. He sighed. This was just a mini-boss within the Adventure Dome, after all.
Ahnix cleaned up the last of the weaker monsters in the warehouse and walked back over to Mark and Roo, panting- her small tongue pushing in and out through tiny fangs.
Ahnix’s exotic eyes locked on his forearm as she approached, and he had to look and see blood covering his hand like a red glove before Mark remembered that he was wounded.
“I'm fine,” he reassured the cat-girl. “Heal's on cooldown.”
“Great plan Mark and nice shot, Roo,” Vale said, weaving herself up to the group. “And I found his necklace on the floor.”
The giant naga grinned a bright smile as she held up a grape-sized crystal ball dangling from a silver chain.
- 8 -
“Good,” the mysterious man said, taking Eddy the Eye's necklace from Vale. “That psychic bastard sure didn't see that one coming. Follow me.”
Mark and his Enthralled followed the stranger in the trench coat around shipping containers, wooden crates, and warehouses until they came to a rusty door. The man looked both ways before taking out a key from his pocket and twisting it into the keyhole.
Once inside, he flipped a switch, and a bare bulb hanging from the ceiling buzzed to life. They piled into a small office with one desk, two chairs and a cork board with pictures of various individuals pinned onto it.