I know, it's a cliché. But I really wanted to scream at someone. I wanted to yell, "I didn't sign up for this!"
And, I was pretty sure I hadn't. Clearly, I should have studied the fine print more closely; I would have remembered a clause that would allow them to stick me in a game.
Putting my self-recrimination aside for the moment, I focused all my effort into moving my legs as fast as they could go. My bare feet slapped painfully on the sun-baked dirt; the stubbly grass poked the tender bits between my toes, and the dry air burned the back of my throat.
No, I don't make a habit of running barefoot. When this whole ordeal started, I had been wearing my favourite shoes, a pair of cute leather slingback heels. Great for dates, like the one I had been headed to the day I went for the last mind scan, terrible for running in. I lost them the first time I ran for my life, and they had been eagerly devoured by the little monsters that were on my tail.
I just needed to get to that rock up ahead. My previous experience with these creatures had taught me they couldn't climb. This was my fourth time running away from this threat. I just wanted to make sure this wasn't going to be my last.
I nicknamed these things lanperanas-land piranhas. Not fish, maybe rodents, they scurried like hamsters on crack. Individually, they were laughable. Together? A terrifying fuzzy carpet of death.
The first time I saw them out on the plains, I was holding my shirt up over my nose and skirting around a rotting carcass that had been lying there long enough to swell up like an overripe melon. There were enough flies in attendance to create a steady buzz in the air and were drifting around in lazy clouds, obscuring the corpse.
Then the grass darkened. At first, I thought it was a shadow from a cloud, the way it swiftly swept across the grass.
But shadows don't ripple.
The swarm poured across the corpse in a wave of chittering bodies, squeals, and wet, tearing sounds rising like a sick parody of applause. I gagged and stumbled back. By the time they scurried on, nothing was left but a pile of bones still slightly pink from blood, and a tuft of fur snagged on a rib. They had managed to consume even the smell of rot.
I shuddered, horrid things.
I felt a searing pain in the back of my left calf. I slapped my leg, dislodging the creature.
Fucker!
The pain gave me the adrenaline shot I needed to leap up and start scrambling up the short rock face in front of me.
After reaching the summit, I flopped back, gasping for breath and bleeding slowly into the sparse grass on the top of the rocky hill. My feet hurt, my lungs hurt, my fingers hurt from gripping sharp rocks and climbing — actually my everything hurt at this point.
My calf had throbbed as if it had been branded with a hot poker where the evil carnivorous hamster had taken a chunk.
Little squawks and screams of frustration and dismay came from below, along with the small thumps as the bodies of hungrier lanperanas hit the rocks.
Persistent little blighters. Sighing, I should at least try to get some XP out of this. Sitting up, I searched for a large rock. Finding one that was sufficiently hefty, I struggled not to drop it on my knees as I twisted and thrust it out over the edge, watching it descend.
Thud!
It landed right near the centre of the swarm. The faint squish and crunch sounds were gross, but it was the sound of hundreds of mouths feeding that turned my stomach.
7XP!
The XP notification blazed across my vision. Instinctively, my hand flew up in an attempt to bat the message away. The first time it had happened, I was so startled I stumbled and sat down. Sitting down near a lanperana swarm is a stupid thing to do.
Seven XP - not bad; this meant I had killed 7 of them. They weren't worth much. I tossed another rock. This time, they were looking up, and a few managed to dodge.
3XP!
I watched as they swarmed over the rock I dropped, eating the remnants of their erstwhile friends and licking the object of death clean. This world was disgusting. I lay back, hoping that if I were still, they would forget about me and move on.
For like the 437th time, I wished I had a weapon—even one of those over sized hammers, but a nice sword would be preferable. I had little experience with any type of weapon outside of a video game, but how hard could it be to bash something with a club or poke it with a sword?
Lying there in the hot sun I daydreamed about having an impressive sword and slicing the murder rodents to bits. Slashing and lunging, the tiny monsters couldn't escape my blade.
Eventually, a breeze picked up, chilling my skin that had gotten used to the sun, and shadows were slanting across the grass. I couldn't stay here forever, I sat up and looked down to check on the lanperanas, most had wandered off but there were still a few down there. Their little beady eyes glinted in the evening sun.
I dropped another rock.
1XP!
I had no idea what the XP notifications meant. I mean, I know that XP stood for experience points.
What I didn't know was what that meant in the context of anything useful. How many points to a level up? I was in a computer simulation; that much was obvious, and not as big a surprise as one might imagine. But where was my stat screen? I had tried everything I could think of to find and open it. What was the point of XP if you couldn't track your progress?
Also, it was terribly unfair for pain to feel so real, thought as pain bloomed as I stubbed my toe getting to my feet. Dried blood had glued bits of yellowed grass and dirt glued to my calf.
That felt disturbingly real, too.
I could see far out onto the plains in every direction. Even the stone circle I had woken up on was dimly visible in the distance. Standing there, I couldn't help but remember my small apartment, which was messy and chaotic, but it had running water and a coffee maker. I could really use some caffeine. It felt like another world.
Well, it was another world. The real world.
A pang of loneliness hit me, it wasn't just my home with it's creature comforts; I was craving human interaction. I hadn't seen a single sign of human habitation since I arrived.
Not wanting to spend another night alone, I scanned the horizon to pick a landmark I could walk towards. What I wanted was to find a safe place. What I wanted was other people.
Making my way along the top of a small ridge as it snaked along above the plain floor, I kept an eye out for threats. A few of the little lanperanas hopped up and down excitedly, paralleling my path. I wasn't worried; they were pretty cowardly in small numbers. I Stomped at them and they fled, only to return moments later.
Fine let the stay. I figured anything bigger would eat them first. I could use that distraction to start running.
There seemed to be trees in the distance. I liked trees.
Trees gave you shade from the blistering sun. Sometimes they provided you with a snack in the form of sweet fruit hanging from their branches. Trees could shelter you up high, away from nasty ground-dwelling predators. And, perhaps most importantly, you could make a club out of a stout branch.
I kept trudging along as the sunset at my back, the line of trees slowly getting closer.
Darkness fell and I kept walking. I was tired, but I wasn't sleepy, which was odd as I hadn't slept the night before. Was walking towards the trees the correct option? Now that I was getting closer to the forest the trees loomed and darkness hid at their feet.
Be real, I told myself, in this game, things were going to want to eat me wherever I went, might as well try the trees.
But what level was the forest? What if I wandered in and found out it was filled with high-level monsters? I stopped in my tracks. What would happen if I died in here? Would I be really dead, like dead dead?
With pain feeling this real, I had no desire to find out what sort of death awaited me.
The twin moons rose overhead, bathing the landscape in pale, cool light. One hung low and large on the horizon, the other, smaller was higher in the sky. Was smaller is smaller, or perhaps further away?
It was odd; the twin moons, more than the murder rodents, hammered home the point this wasn't earth.
I had to admit the silver gilt landscape was quite beautiful. This would have been an enjoyable hike, had I been better prepared. I stopped for a moment just to admire the view. The cold night air filled my lungs, a clean, sharp feeling. My eyes swept across the plains, searching for any hint of movement, but there was only stillness—just the distant rocks, stark silhouettes against an impossibly vast sky.
My shoulders slumped in disappointment when I finally reached the trees. Not in the trees themselves, they were a stunning example of their kind—huge and majestic, like the old redwoods on the West Coast. And just like those trees, there were no branches anywhere within reach of a human.
What I did find was a trail—no a path. It looked too wide, too intentional for it to be an animal track. I followed it. Logically, the path's existence implied the presence of people. Why else would there be a well-maintained path here winding through the woods?
The lack of darkness on the path caused me to glance upward. There was a sort of path that wove through the treetops above. An open space that mirrored the path below. I squinted up at the tree branches. The trees all twisted back on themselves exactly at the point where their branches reached the spot above the edge of the path.
That was creepy. Though I wasn't complaining, as it let the moonlight through. The forest on either side was velvety blackness behind silver-kissed trunks.
The moons were high overhead when I heard a snap in the woods beside me. I froze, my skin going cold. That sounded big.
Should I run? Would running make a difference? I decided it would make me feel better; I started jogging.
Crashes and the snap of broken foliage erupted behind me. I couldn't help it. I bolted down the path. My tired legs and aching feet taking one for the team as I pounded further into the forest. Gasping big gulps of air I could taste the tang of rotting undergrowth in the back of my throat.
My breathing was so loud now.
Or was that my breathing? I wanted to turn and look behind me, but I was afraid of stumbling. What if I were running away from something harmless? Don't be silly. Nothing that sounded that large out here would be harmless.
There was that time I had almost had a heart attack walking home from a party late at night. I thought it was a coyote or at least a mugger coming at me through the bushes. But it had just been a raccoon. Maybe this was just a big trash panda?
A flash of fur blurred past to my right. The shape and the way it moved reminded me of a wolf. But its back was the height of my head. Okay, so not a raccoon.
From the corner of my eye, I caught glimpses of another one as it flowed through the shadows on the other side of the tree line.
Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit.
I was going to figure out what happened when I died here, wasn't I?
I didn't want to know what those jaws would feel like. Pumping my arms, I ran harder.
Silently, a massive wolf ran beside me easily, keeping pace with my inferior number of legs. I looked over and immediately regretted it.
The creature was like a wolf in the same way that a T.rex is like a chicken.
The creature had massive fangs, resembling those of a sabre-toothed cat. The long tongue that lolled out was covered in fine serrations. It looked at me with one eye; the other two kept looking ahead. Three eyes, and that was only on one side of the thing's face. I could only assume the other side looked the same.
Then it ran off up ahead. I wondered if I should stop, go the other way. I couldn't understand why they weren't leaping upon me. Were they driving me somewhere?
Slowing slightly to think about my options, I was about to turn around, but then heard one snarl behind me. I turned my head and felt its hot breath as it snapped at me. Stumbling towards the other side of the path, I resumed running full tilt.
The path turned up ahead. I tried to slow down to make the corner, my feet sliding in the dirt.
Certain death waited in those shadows. An uncertain death on the path was preferable.
I tripped and slid right at the corner.
I saw a flash of white and cream.
Then red.
A lot of wet red.
Shocked, I sat there trying to parse what I saw.
That had been another creature, it had been cream and white. So not one of the wolves as they were shades of grey. And it had run full tilt into—something? Nothing? Then exploded?
I tried to play back those few moments in my head. It made so little sense. I looked down at what was left of the animal. Parts of it seemed familiar, though it was hard to tell what exactly it had looked like pre-explosion.
If those were wolves, then this was a rabbit. By which I mean the idea of a rabbit as sketched by only the most twisted horror-loving artist one could imagine. Still horrified, I examined its remains. It looked to have been the size of a large dog, maybe mastiff-sized. There were long rabbit-like ears; the tufts of fur I could see looked plush and soft. But this rabbit, like the wolves, had too many eyes.
I shuddered in disgust.
One of the wolves loped up and grabbed the carcass, snarling as another charged in and grabbed a hold of the rabbit's head, and a gruesome tug of war began.
They were preoccupied with this macabre game and ignored me as I got to my feet. The third wolf joined, grabbing the carcass by a massive, flopping hind leg. After much growling and the whole body yanking canines do when playing tug, they each dismembered a section of horror bunny.
Two ran off to eat their prizes in peace, but the first one, the largest one, lay down right there to eat. The whole time it crunched and tore at the flesh and bones, it kept one of its six eyes on me.
What had I just witnessed? That rabbit thing had ran at the path and then... burst? It looked like it had run into a solid wall. I looked up at the trees again. None of the branches extended over the path. Was it protected? Like by an invisible barrier?
The wolf stood up and licked blood and gore off its lips. For the first time, I noticed that it wasn't just furred; there were large, flat scales along its neck. Dragon wolves? It walked right up to the edge of the path, watching me with 3 pairs of eyes.
It wuffed at me.
The rancid breath stirred my hair. I stood my ground, not out of bravery but because my brain offered up the options of fight, flight, or freeze, the latter selected by my burgeoning terror. Because my brain selected freeze, out of the fight flight or freeze options served up by my burgeoning terror.
The wolf pushed its nose towards me—and it bent like a dog pushing its nose up against a sliding glass door.
I felt dizzy and sat down before I could faint. A giggle bubbled up from somewhere deep inside me. Hysteria, most likely, none of this was remotely funny.
The wolf wuffed again, as if it disagreed and found the whole thing hilarious and then turned and walked back into the forest.