by Prax Venter
“Finicky treasure, this,” the skeletal sailor said before tucking the parchment away again. Porter then picked up his rusty shovel and walked away from them.
Mark looked around at his girls all holding polished iron shovels and shrugged.
“Hey!” he called after Porter, quickly catching up with him. “Where are you headed?”
The skeleton pointed with the tip of his rusty spade towards one of the many crumbling bits of brick building around them.
“Gotta dig here now.”
Ahnix caught up and matched strides with Mark as they hounded after their quest NPC.
“Buried treasure doesn't just move,” she said, her tail flipping behind her once.
“This'n does,” Porter said. After he spoke, the skeleton straightened slightly and quickened his strides, as if he just realized something. “Mmm, many hands dig fast. Catch this one, sure.”
When they made it to the pillar of broken and crumbling brick, Porter aligned himself with the larger ruin farther away and took ten measured paces outward.
“Here. Now,” he said and slid his shovel into to the dry, loose sand.
Mark, Ahnix, Vale, and Roo exchanged glances but silently agreed to give this one more shot and began to help dig. This hole was a lot more difficult to clear for two reasons; the dry sand did not cooperate, preferring to slide back into the hole, and since Vale had removed her armor, the jiggling of her heavy breasts and the rippling, toned muscles under her smooth dark skin were seriously distracting Mark. She seemed to always be wearing her full-body armor recently, and he longed for the early days when her massive melons were barely packed into her leather harness.
Eventually, they cleared out enough sand for Porter to toss his shovel down in disgust and pull out his parchment again.
“Thought this was it,” he mumbled as he consulted its contents. When Mark tried to get a peak, the suspicious skeleton twisted the parchment away.
“Enough,” Ahnix said tossing her own shovel down. She took two steps to stand next to Vale before she teleported in front of the skeletal sailor, quickly touched his map, and Retracted with it back to where she started next to the giant naga.
“Hey!” he shouted before Mark raised his polished iron shovel in front of the single-minded crewman's rib cage.
“No,” Mark said, his tone clear. “You have my word we will take nothing from you. But let my very smart girls give this a shot before we waste any more time digging pointless holes.”
He turned his empty sockets on Mark and then nodded once. “On your word.”
“Porter, right?” Mark said, changing the shovel to his other hand and extending his right to the skeleton. Porter nodded and shook Mark's hand with his fingerbones. “On my word.”
“It seems simple enough,” Vale said. “X marks the spot. And that spot is now over by those two crossed palm trees near the water.”
“Sea fills that hole in quick,” Porter said, and Vale snapped her vivid eyes up to him from the map.
“You've dug here before?”
He nodded.
“How many times?”
“Thirty?”
“Why do you keep trying?” Roo asked, her voice soft.
The shirtless skeleton turned his empty sockets on the velvet girl, and Mark could feel her shudder under the intensity of his hollow gaze.
“I'm no quitter.”
“Yes. And neither are we,” Vale said. “Here's the plan. Ahnix, take the map up to the top of those towering ruins. Keep your eye on us, and the 'X', as we dig. Look for changes in the sand- shifting and the like. If the map changes, call out the new location.”
Roo looked down at her feet. “You think there's something under the ground moving the treasure?”
“Maybe,” Vale shrugged. “But that wouldn't change the map.”
Ahnix nodded and took the map from Vale. She looked over her shoulder to what had to be a ruined bell tower and instantly appeared atop one of its narrow edges.
“Handy,” Porter said, his jawbone gaping up the cat-girl standing confidently one hundred feet in the air.
“She's priceless,” Mark said, and he could feel Ahnix's mental caress in response. She then sent him the image of a shovel.
“Alright folks,” Mark said, turning to the group. “Let's go dig a hole.”
They all moved to the shore where the two palm trees leaned on each other like drunken friends. Shells covered the beach near the ocean, and most were broken, but Mark could feel Roo lose focus as vibrant colors and sparkles drew her jet-black eyes.
“Here,” Porter said, stabbing his shovel into the wet, cake-like sand. Mark watched as the frothy water washed over the spot they were supposed to dig into and knew this was going to be tedious.
“Um,” Roo said, taking a step back from the water.
Mark grabbed his iron shovel in both hands. “What? What do you see?”
“I just don't want to get wet.”
“Watch Ahnix for a sign,” Vale suggested, digging her own shovel into the sloppy sand.
“Right.” The fabric girl nodded and walked a few steps up a nearby dune to get a better view.
Mark had only dug out one load of heavy sand when he was hit with a message so clear- it was like Ahnix was right next to him.
“She sees something!” Mark shouted and threw down his shovel. Ahnix was sending him images of barely perceived shimmers, slowly moving nearby, and it took him a moment to resolve his own sight with the overlay from the cat-girl perched on the ruined building.
When he crested the dune, he saw the five humanoid outlines slowly moving with a ghostly chest held between them. The sensation of Ahnix's flapping tail was so strong as passed along their bond that Mark almost checked to see if he had sprouted one himself. He smiled as he drew his crossbow. It actually felt calming- no, steadying to have a tail.
“Watch out Roo!” he called, and the velvet girl made a few steps away as he leveled it on the unsuspecting spirits moving the ethereal treasure. He would have never been able to see their shimming outlines if it wasn't for the cat-girl's super senses linked to his own.
Mark squeezed the trigger and just before the ball of glowing energy impacted one of the glowing creatures in a spectacular explosion, he felt Ahnix tell him to wait. But it was way too late.
The creatures and the chest all became much more substantial, and he instantly regretted his decision to fire into them. All five apparitions spread out and surged right for him and Roo.
They looked like the ghostly wisp creature they faced in the swamp, only dark gray. They were like human-shaped, translucent holes in reality, and radiating short, angry bolts of red lightning into the air around them.
“Back!” Vale shouted, joining him on the hill with her armor already deployed.
Before Mark could move, a towering inferno engulfed one as Roo hit it with a Combustive Glance. The creature shrieked into the sky as it was consumed, but Roo's attack drew all four of the remaining ghostly entities onto her. Mark popped his shield on Roo just as they reached her.
“Get ready to run if this doesn't work!” Vale yelled over the crackling red energy enveloping Mark's shield. The giant naga held out her massive Judge 559 and fired on the group wearing down his bubble with impossibly intense energy. Right by his face, the concussive blast was almost enough to make Mark lose his focus and drop the bubble on Roo.
But it didn’t matter. Vale hit the bubble with part of her shotgun blast and, combined with the four shadow creatures sapping his power, the shield went down.
Ahnix appeared by Mark’s side as Roo dropped to the ground with a high-pitched, horrible scream. They could all feel a shadow of the unimaginably horrendous pain she felt as red electricity penetrated deep into her fabric body.
“No!” Vale yelled, but Ahnix just growled and held out her fist with the customized hacker tool.
Her cloud of orange electricity shot out to hit two of the four attackers, reducing them to piles of dust, instantly. Mar
k had forgotten she could even do that, much less think an Electromagnetic Scramble Pulse would- then he remembered. Everything in this Adventure Dome was formed from a swarm of miniature machines.
He pushed the thoughts out of his head as the remaining two broke away from the sickeningly-motionless Roo and came straight for them.
“Run, now!” Vale commanded and all three of them sprinted away from Roo as she lay sprawled awkwardly in the sand. Mark cast a glance down at Porter who was just dumbly staring as the battle unfolded, his iron shovel still in his skeletal hand.
“Mark! Circle around! Get to her. Ahnix-”
“Yours will be ready first,” she growled, knowing the question before it was asked. Mark felt anger radiating out of the cat-girl as he swerved right and knew some of it was aimed at him.
Mark dug his feet into the sand and ignored her for now as his only priority was to get to Roo. Unfortunately, he was not being ignored. One of the shadow creatures split off to intercept him, and there was nothing anyone was going to be able to do before it reached him.
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Ahnix sprint toward him at a seemingly impossible speed. She leapt into the air and yelled, “Doom Kick,” her voice breaking from the force of her rage. Thrusting her leg upward into a flying snap kick, she trailed a black rip after her foot and only succeeded in temporarily disrupting the shadow creature chasing Mark.
Unlike an ethereal ghost, it seemed to morph around the area of damage, instead of passing through. The attack force slowed it down slightly, but it didn't change its target and continued to chase down Mark much faster than he could run.
Ahnix landed in the sand and looked on helplessly as the evil gray spirit reached out and touched Mark's back.
It felt like the creature ripped out his spine as electric agony lit up every pain receptor in his body. He fell to one knee and time seemed to stand still. His jaw was clenched so tight it felt like he was going to shatter his own teeth. Mark began to lose his sanity.
A concussive blast behind him signaled the end of the creature chasing Vale, and that small relief allowed Mark to hold onto the wispy, rising smoke that was conscious thought a moment longer. He forced his eyes open to look over at the limp fabric girl, face down in the sand and willed his resulting rage to fill his mind, trying to override the nightmare of unending suffering that was his existence now.
A web of bright-orange energy passed through his body, and the pain instantly stopped. In the back of his mind, he knew Ahnix had just saved him, but his primary focus was on Roo.
Every nerve in his body was fried, but he forced his numb limbs to move him forward. Thinking what Roo must have felt with four of these horrendous pain creatures attacking her all at once caused his stomach to squeeze solid like a fist. He was supposed to protect her.
Suddenly Ahnix was over him and touched his shoulder. He thought she was going to help him to his feet, but instead, the universe whistled by, and he found himself directly next to his silent velvet girl.
He reached out a hand to her back and felt nothing. Mark flooded her body with his mind, looking for the damage, ready to unleash his healing power the moment he found it. She wasn't breathing, but she didn't need oxygen, so he wasn't sure if that was important right now.
He searched from mask to toe, but he didn't find any physical damage.
Yet she remained... gone. It was like she was shut off. Panic begun to rise in his mind as he searched for a way to fix his broken fabric construct. Echoes of his own frantic worry struck him from Ahnix and Vale as they stood nearby. Mark could feel the giant naga slip into unfettered dread over thinking her wide-scatter shotgun blast was to blame for breaking Mark's magic shield.
“Flip her,” Mark said, wanting to get her face out of the sand.
Vale immediately bent down, carefully lifted her limp body up and gently set her back down. Tears were streaming down her elfish face as she rested her hand on Roo's stomach.
Using his own recent experience with the electric, ghostly creatures, he focused on Roo's mind instead of her physical body. There he noticed a faint channel of energy that served as their bond- to himself and his other Enthralled. Mark tried to follow it into the blackness beyond but found that he just wasn't strong enough to push through. It was as if she clenched herself off from the world.
Mark took a deep breath and tried to steady his mind for another attempt. Mark pushed himself to his knees with shaky arms. To break through into her mind, he would need serious focus. Absentmindedly, Mark closed his hand around the iron necklace Roo had made him and ran his thumb over the faces of his three loves etched into its perfect, polished surface.
Then it hit him. Mark released the necklace and held out both hands to his girls.
“Come,” he whispered. “Together we can do anything.”
Both Ahnix and Vale felt his intention through their bond and linked hands, encircling the comatose velvet-girl.
Mark felt his fingertips graze the palms of his two loves. He closed his eyes and was suddenly reminded that his real-world fingers were useless lumps of flesh that could never feel Ahnix's wonderfully sleek fur or Vale's smooth, tight skin. He sighed and bent his mind solely on fixing Roo.
Within the deep blackness behind his eyes, Mark focused his whole being on his pool of enhancing power. With laser-like control, he peeled a tendril of its energy outward, then looped it back on itself. He bent another tendril off and directed the second channel into his healing ability.
Mark had never attempted something so complicated- and with barely contained energy swirling around inside his body, he activated a multi-target enhancing/heal combo on their interconnected bonds.
He felt his cat-girl and his giant naga both suck in sharp breaths as his power connected them like never before. Then the heat from the blazing sun above and the solid sand below him were gone.
Mark opened his eyes within his mind and saw that Ahnix and Vale were with him, naked. An oppressive, whispering blackness surrounded everything which included a swirling, wispy portal a short distance away. Long chains of glowing energy connected their wrists, and all links converged into the center of the gateway of light before them.
Vale searched their surroundings, and her pure white hair flowed as if it were underwater- like they were in a dream.
She turned back to Mark, her violet eyes wide, and asked, “Where are we?”
“We're at the edge of Roo's mind,” Mark responded solemnly. “We're here to rescue her and pull her out.” He lifted the chain that vanished into the white portal ahead of them, giving it a small tug. The white portal rippled in response. “She's sealed herself off.”
“I'm so sorry,” Vale said, sorrow vibrating along her chain. “I forget how imprecise that projectile weapon is. This is all my fault.”
“No,” Ahnix said while crossing her arms and frustration rippling along her chain. “It's Mark's fault for attacking the creatures without a plan. We've learned that much from you.”
Mark wrapped his hands around both of their chains, absorbing the negative emotions and nullifying them. With a pulse from his heart sent to both girls, he willed them to focus on what was important.
“None of that matters now. We're here to fix what is broken in Roo.”
Ahnix dropped her arms to her side and both she and Vale nodded. They were all on the same page and turned in unison to face the portal that led deeper into Roo's mind.
“What now?” Vale asked.
Mark began to walk forward. “We go in.”
The chains that connected them were more an idea or a representation rather than any kind of hindrance, reshaping their length as they moved, and the three chains that disappeared into the portal remained taut as they drew closer.
“I didn't know you could even do something like this,” Vale said, still in awe of their surroundings.
“Neither did I,” he said, touching the portal with his hand. “I just sensed that I needed you both to help heal her mind. Let's go
. Roo needs us.”
Determined, the three of them each put their hands into the portal and the world inverted.
Instead of being surround by shifting blackness, they were surrounded by swirling bright white nothingness- and string. Everywhere Mark looked, there was string.
The taut white fibers extended in all directions and seemed to go on forever, coming from random angles. It was as if they were in a dense spider's web that had no rhyme or reason.
“Watch out!” Vale called out and instinctively held her arm out to protect Mark as an iron needle came at him from nowhere in particular. A translucent, round shield formed on her arm at the last moment and blocked the attack, shattering both the needle and the shield into a million pinpoints of light.
Vale looked down at her arm in astonishment as Ahnix searched for the source of the attack, her tail flipping behind her.
“What-”
“I don't know,” Mark answered the giant naga, knowing the question before she asked. “I think none of this is real.”
“That word has lost all meaning,” Ahnix said, slicing into some of the string in front of her with her claws.
“I'm with you, but if we die in here...” Mark broke off, astonished at how similar their thoughts were becoming.
Vale took a deep breath and pointed straight ahead. “We follow her glowing bond. That's where we'll find her.”
As they moved deeper into Roo's mind, the string became denser, and the attacks from the edges of their perception became more frequent.
Vale surprised Mark when she blocked a needle aimed at her head and then activated Perfect Cover to also defend him. Ahnix spun to dodge a needle aimed at her chest and Doom Kicked another out of the air with perfect precision.
Their naked bodies became a blur around him as they acted to deflect attack after attack. Mark found it easier than it should be to ignore Vale's bare tits and Ahnix's perfect ass, but figured it had to do with the fact that he didn't really have a body while they were here.
Instead, his focus was straight ahead where the glowing chains indicated an active connection to the center of Roo's mind.