by Troy Neenan
David picked the one card that Zellio'zeri had been coveting. While she had picked by luck, he had been scanning her emotions, watching her expressions. She cursed herself for her stupidity.
The Dungeon Core examined his future prize and to Zellio'zeri surprise, frowned, “Great, acorns. You got four of my car tires and I got ten acorns.” David shook his head.
This time Zellio'zeri kept her expressions neutral. She was a tree, a tree does not cry out, nor does it shout out in rage. Her opponent obviously didn't realize what he intended to win, thinking that urkron seeds were just normal acorns. Good.
“Now that we have established that I am to gain the most from this game's outcome. How do we proceed?”
The Dungeon Core looked down at the board and saw that there were already three cards present. One had the image of Da Vinci’s Vitruvian man, the other had something like a diseased and misshapen humanoid, and the other had some sort of Asian word printed on it. Despite the lack of words, David knew what they were. It did not look good.
He began, “The monster we make has six basic attributes. Monster type, knowledge, weapons, environment, status, and other. First is the monster type.” The Core pointed to the Da Vinci card. “Human is the basic animal type.”
“Human?” The tree searched her memory but found nothing, “I am unfamiliar with this creature.”
David made a hand gesture and a two legged creature appeared before Zellio'zeri. It was approximately the size of a Barbie doll and was female in gender. It was hairless except for a tuft of fur on its sex and head. The creature, while ape-like did not appear to be healthy.
Zellio'zeri got to experience her first feeling of revulsion as she stared at the thing. “This is what we will be fighting with?”
David was staring at something invisible, which was most likely his own human doll. “Yeah. The cretin card. That's my fault. The child isn't exactly healthy. I sort of made it by accident.” He tapped on the second card, “Both our monsters will be mentally and physically handicapped. There is also a higher chance of a mutation happening.”
“And the third card?” Zellio'zeri dared to enquire.
“Anti-magic. The creature will be immune to all forms of magic.”
“Another handicap?”
“Yes and no. Will she be able to create a magic shield? No. But she could walk right through a barrier. You could turn her blood into an anti-curse potion, and she could easily kill wizards.”
“A sorcerer killer,” Zellio'zeri mused. This deformed monster just suddenly got interesting. There could be a use for such a creature. “Go on. What next?”
David placed one of the cards that he held onto the spaces below the disease card. Zellio'zeri leaned over. The card displayed the image of a brain, a section of which was highlighted blue.
“What did you just do?”
“Supramarginal gyrus. It's the part of the brain that dictates empathy. Now, instead of mentally challenged human, I have redirected the damage. Now she will not understand other people's emotions while retaining all of her intellect and rational.”
Damn. She had not been expecting that. To change a weakness into a possible strength? This young dungeon was indeed a crafty one.
The tree looked at her cards. If she had a hope of getting anywhere, she will need to fix the deformity.
An idea struck her. She placed down the brlee card next to the cretin card.
The brlee was one of the tree's failed experiments. It had been a large squid-like creature that had been meant to tangle around its victim and then slowly drain the life from them. While this had worked against other smaller animals, the pig-nosed enemies had treated the brlee as a delicacy and had hunted them to extinction.
Zellio'zeri had never resurrected the species because of how useless they were against primitive weapons like spears.
The doll on the table underwent a small seizure. Her back arched and the woman's eyes went wide in horror. The change had to be unbearably painful as the creature's arms exploded with muscles. There were more than practical changes as the monster's teeth needlessly turned crooked and her brow sloped.
Instead of fixing the deformity, Zellio'zeri used it as fuel, creating a simple animal with the body of a hairless gorilla. Primitive and powerful, something that was easy to control but could prove a dangerous enemy to encounter.
The tree, unable to help herself, smiled. While David would continue to fix this poor creature, she would concentrate on building a new weapon in her already bloated arsenal.
“My turn,” David said and placed another card onto the table.
Nearing the end of the game, David was the only one who still had a single card in his hand. He seemed happy with his creation and did not want to spoil it, or that had been what he had claimed.
The tree, not one to waste anything had used her entire hand on this one creature. She looked down upon her creation and felt a sense of accomplishment. Whatever humanity had been once present was now promptly stripped. Only a savage and unthinking ogre remained.
The creature was covered in colourful blue green hair, its face was ape-like and its size had nearly doubled. It was capable of swimming in the most turbulent of rivers and it held a giant club. But despite its appearance the monster was strictly an herbivore that preferred to eat a particular weed in her forest.
Such a creature would have taken thousands of years to make, and that was if Zellio'zeri ever would have thought up the idea. She had never created anything like this beast.
David sat back in his chair and looked exhausted. He looked down at his side and there was a crimson stain on his shirt. He had been stabbed repeatedly.
Zellio'zeri cocked her head at the wound, “You are still in the middle of battle, David. You should return to your world. Heal before they burn you and cut you down.”
“Yeah. I should.” David said. He looked at the cards that he had assembled, “The problem is, I don't think I'll get to the door. I need a distraction, something to get their attention away from me.”
“You hope to use your creature to save yourself.” Zellio'zeri approved. It was the duty of her monsters to protect the forest, because while the forest could live without the beasts, the beasts would find it difficult to survive without the forest.
“I need this, Zellio'zeri Crat. I need this.”
“Then you had best win it against me, little cave.” The tree responded.
David was getting desperate; he was a wounded beast, trying to placate the lion which was orbiting around him. Zellio'zeri didn't feel an ounce of pity for this fool; he had created his own downfall. He had separated himself from his place of power just to feel a sense of freedom.
David held his hand up, “I can give you both cards right now and toss in an extra random card.”
“And in return I give you this fight?” Zellio'zeri shook her head. “No, David.”
“You don't need it.” he shouted, “You can still get something out of this.”
Zellio'zeri felt a piercing sting of fear when David raised his voice. She did not like the sensation and she retaliated, “No more random rubbish David, show me all your cards. Let me pick three from your collection.”
David thought about it for only a second, “And you'll forfeit the game? You walk away with three cards and I get the creature?”
The tree's eyes glanced towards her creation. It was an unusual monster. It could make for an interesting tool in her garden of horrors and dangers, but her ecosystem was in perfect balance at the moment. There was no need to introduce an unknown and untested alien in her paradise. “Agreed.”
A window hung in the air above the table.
The dungeon Zellio'zeri Crat has agreed to forfeit the match for three of David Mascoff's cards.
David pushed his deck to his opponent, he was not happy, but there was little about his day that he was excited about.
As he watched, impotent to do anything as Zellio'zeri searched through his collection, David half expecte
d the hot African queen to put on a strap-on and tell him to bend over. He wasn't a hundred percent sure what he exactly had, but as he saw the goddess select her first card he wanted to openly weep.
Zellio'zeri admired her three cards and purred like a cat that got the cream. She did not find much in the young dungeon's arsenal, but she did discover a few gems.
She placed down the three cards. “You surprise me Dungeon. I will have to prepare myself for our next encounter.”
David examined the cards and looked confused. There was something called a swarm golem, several seeds that he did not recognise, and his memories of dull classical music. Beethoven and Mozart. Music that he had listened to but had otherwise no interest in. As far as he was concerned the woman had just helped him clear up space. As for the swarm golem, well... That wasn't his problem.
Overall, it could have been worse. David had lost none of the research that he had painstaking collected and none of the drugs that he had synthesised.
The dark skinned woman vacated her seat, looking very much like she had just taken David's balls and was about ready to string them into a necklace. “Good luck in your battle, David. I do hope that you invite me to play in this little game of yours again.”
Not sure exactly how to escape this place but needing a grand exit, Zellio'zeri walked into the world of smoke and shadow.
Chapter Thirteen
David woke up feeling like a window glass plane had hit him in the head. This was starting to turn into a habit.
The drug addicts had gone to work on him. Two of their number had stabbed him repeatedly while another had used her hypodermic needle to jab him in the eyeball. Also, judging from the amount of shattered glass that was around him, one of the arseholes had broken a beer bottle against his noggin'.
But despite getting stabbed, stomped on, beaten up, and turned half blind, he didn't feel a thing. His research into the mysteries of pain and emotion had allowed him to modify his own brain chemistry. Which was a really, really good thing, because judging from how far the needle had been inserted into his eye, it probably would have stung a bit.
David wriggled his lower body and was thankful that he was still wearing pants, getting sodomised by a drug addict was not something high on his wish list.
He opened his mouth in an attempt to complain and bitch to God about his current bought of stupidity. What had he been thinking following two dipshits who had just mugged him and then willingly gone into a crack house? Even when he was drunk off his arse he wasn't that dumb.
Again David attempted to speak but was unable to so much as gurgle or groan. That was the problem with shutting off the pain sensors; you couldn't tell what was broken. Well, at this point in time he wasn't going to turn it back on. Especially as the hypodermic needle was still lodged in his damn eyeball.
He should have been scared shitless. The very thought that he could die should have burned through his survival instincts. Instead, the Dungeon Core felt incredibly stupid. The police officer who found his remains would probably suspect that he had died of being retarded.
Warning. You are damaged. Return to your domain for repair.
Thanks for stating the obvious you son of a bitch. David thought.
He intended to remove the hypodermic needle but there was something wrong with his hand. Later he would discover that some unsavoury bastard had used the heel of their shoe to shatter several of his fingers. For being a bunch of unemployed stoners they had definitely been thorough about beating him up.
His brain working calmly and efficiently, David came up with a horrible idea. He knew that this particular theory measured about a ten on the idiot scale, he knew that it was probably going to be a mistake, but he wasn't exactly in a position to do much else about it. He opened up Forge.
The mini-game was just as useless as it had been before. No tutorial, no real interface, just something that looked like a circuit board on drugs, but it at least took his mind off the fact that he would most likely end up in a landfill.
During his escapades, David had used this system to create his drugs and he felt that he had gotten some control over it. He could now scan an object and create a copy of its structure. It always made him feel both hungry and tired afterwards, but considering that he was rearranging an object's molecular structure, that was just the price he had to pay. But this wasn't a simple cut and paste job.
He looked at what he had to work with. Stainless steel, plastic, and... he shuddered. It looked as though the needle had been used. Well it made sense, why kill a guy with your stash of clean needles when you had a bunch of used ones just lying on the floor?
David stared at the game, not sure what he expected to happen. He had wanted the needle gone. There was no saving his eyeball without some heavy duty surgery.
A window appeared.
Do you wish to use this object to repair yourself?
David was dumbfounded. “I can do that? Shit. Do it man.” If he knew that he could use Forge to repair his body he would have done so weeks ago.
After a short loading screen and an advertisement for a new line of women's shoes, the style of the board changed, transforming from a sheet full of holes in it and into something that the Dungeon Core actually recognised. It was a printed circuit board.
A spiderweb of metallic tracks lead outward, touching empty slots where capacitors and transistors should have been. It was still nonsense to David, but it was at least something better than the mess before.
Above the screen three stick figures appeared, and to the right there were a collection of multi-coloured transistors. The transistors were likely a symbol for the materials he had to deal with, there were hundreds of the things and only thirty slots to put them in. To the left was 0/20 number system, what it was supposed to represent was anyone's guess.
“Can I at least get a tutorial? No? Fine.” David picked up one of the transistors and put it in a random slot.
***
David opened both of his eyes and to his amazement, not only was the needle gone but he could see out of both his eyes. It was fantastic.
The game had been a bitch and a half to play. It turns out that the 0/20 was how many sockets that you had to get correct. Of course, it doesn't tell you which ones are correct even when you put them in the right socket, no, that would be too easy. A hundred different components and only twenty out of the thirty sockets actually mattered.
Three lives had not been enough. David had gotten up to 9/20 but was unable to get any higher. In his honest opinion his score wasn't half bad. Nearly half on a first go. Sadly, his vision had suffered for it. Everything was blurry on his left eye and he was sure that he was now colour blind. Somebody was going to pay.
“She'la?” The boyfriend was down on his knees, holding his hands above his mummified girlfriend's swollen abdomen as if he could somehow heal her.
David tried to turn his head, but his neck was not listening. He had no choice but to play forge continuously until he could move again.
While he couldn't see the person who was pacing back and forward, the Dungeon Core definitely felt him. He closed his eyes and played the game again, meanwhile the arseholes who had attempted to kill him were hovering around the undead skeleton with the beanbag for a stomach.
What was left of the woman was gone. Her skin was stretched so tight around her skull and ribs that she looked vacuum packed. Her eyes along with her internal organs had shrunken to the point that a box of raisins looked healthier.
“That shit don't look right.” A thirty year-old with an ACDC bandanna said. He paced back and forth, debating if he should leave or shoot up.
The oldest member of the ten surviving junkies poked at the woman's abdomen with a nicotine coated finger. “My wife was huge but not like that. Feels like a... zit or a stress ball.”
A seventeen year-old runaway gave him a smack, “we should get her to a hospital. Jesus. What did that sick fuck do to her?”
None of the men or women in the room
had ever seen anything like this. Even in their stoned nightmares the most that they ever got were zombies and clowns. Several of them suspected that they were out of their mind high and that this was an acid trip.
“Damn, and she was a good fuck too.” One man said mournfully.
The man who David had assumed was the woman's boyfriend stroked the female's skull, his fingers accidentally pulling away a patch of skin like it was plastic wrap. There was just enough liquid left that gooey red strings followed parchment thin skin.
The boyfriend flicked the piece of flesh to the floor and promptly threw up. He didn't know what was worse, seeing the bloody slime covered bone that lay underneath the skin, or that it was still warm.
The other junkies stepped back, cursing.
They continued to shout at each other like children, thinking that the louder they screamed the better that their peers would listen to them.
They didn't notice that David was looking right at them. The Dungeon Core had lost one of his shoes, but the result had been worth it. It turned out that one of the drop-kicks had slit his throat and severed his vocal cords, which explained why he couldn't so much as moan about what just happened.
The Dungeon Core lay there, fuming and wanting to kill each and every one of these pricks. His anger slowly began to recede and horror take hold as his eyes lay upon the woman he had been studying. He had done this to her. He and his stupid powers.
Then he felt it.
The dungeon's essence was still inside the woman. It had treated the mother like a man treated a can of beer, it had drained her of everything and then it had tried to go further. The essence had transferred all of her nutrients from the mother into the thing that was inside her womb. But that wasn't just it, David saw something else in there, a piece of something foreign and yet strangely familiar to him.
Unsure what to do and having very few options, David tried to visualise a tiny chick bursting free from its egg. He focused on every detail he could, the creature's drive to break free of its prison, the urge to breath, to set up a Netflix account, anything that would give David the distraction he needed to get out of there.