Chương 257: Book Six, Chapter 19: The Fever Dream

I was there, in the pit. I had thought about it since the beginning of the storyline, since before I knew that Hell was a literal, physical place. Somehow, I had known I would have to go there. Maybe I had seen it in a dream. Maybe I had known what was going to happen. Because, as I came to my senses at the bottom of a very long slide, I started to realize that I remembered far more of my nightmares from the previous nights than I could have recalled initially. Everything was familiar. Too familiar.

I looked behind me as I stood up. There was no slide. I'd never seen a slide. But I had the sensation of riding down one as I fell into Hell. Above was only darkness, and behind me was a dark cavern with arcade games stuck in the walls, as if they'd been excavated halfway by some very confused archaeologists. Hell was a fever dream, the kind you have, and then you wake up needing to puke. The arcade games were live and beeping, playing their music into the darkness.

If I had been brave enough to try, I was sure they would have been functional. They looked so real. Hell was a dark inversion, a mockery of the world above, or at least this type of Hell was. It was not a spiritual Hell, although that place seemed to exist in this lore as well. It was a trap that I had just dove into. I looked all around. It wasn't all arcade games.

There were tables, the exact same ones that were used in the restaurant above, stacked on top of each other and fused together, leg to tabletop, as if they had grown out of each other. And maybe they had.

"Riley," a voice called out to me. Ramona's voice. This was a physical place, so it made sense that we would be near each other, having entered one right after another. The voice came from beyond the giant stack of tables that grew one from another.

"Ramona," I called out. We were Off-Screen. I did not need to be too careful. Or so I thought. I started contemplating how I, or she, might be able to crawl through the thicket of table and chair. It was densely packed. More like a jungle plant than furniture. I observed it carefully. There was something so strange, not just in the fact that it was logically bizarre. I felt a deep unease in my stomach, staring at the mass of plastic checkered tablecloths.

The canisters of red pepper flakes and parmesan cheese were stuck to the tops of the tables, even the ones that were upside down. I knew I should be walking in that direction. I had just heard Ramona. But something stopped me. Something that I had never been particularly good at listening to. But now, there was nothing left to drown it out. My grandmother's gift, of course. My background trope gave me slight psychic powers. But that was meaningless in and of itself. It didn't list out the abilities of those powers.

They varied from storyline to storyline. That was the hazard of being a psychic: you never knew what you were going to get. Something told me to be very afraid of those tables. And I realized, as I stared at them, that I could not see them on the red wallpaper. Worse, I realized I couldn't see anything on the red wallpaper. Nothing at all. That must have been a trope. I knew I might have missed some.

Trying to remember things that you dreamed the night before was difficult enough; needing that information in a life-or-death circumstance the next day was a cruel joke. Had I dreamed of a trope that would turn the red wallpaper dark except for the glowing of my status indicators? Since I had seen the red wallpaper in person, I knew that what had happened was that the lights that shone down on it had been turned off. And I couldn't see anything posted there.

It was darkness except for those status indicators, which always looked like elevator buttons to me. I wasn't Written Off. That was good news. I wasn't Dead, nor was I Captured. But I suspected that beyond the darkness, there was a poster there, for some type of monster that looked like a perfectly innocent amalgamation of props. A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

"Riley," the voice called out again.

"Where are you? I can't see. It's dark. I can't move. I need you." Ramona would never say that.

"Don't," another voice called out from over by the arcade machines, where they stuck out like little gems in a loaded mine, beeping and blasting soft, dreary game music.

"I'm over here," that second voice called again—still Ramona's.

"Well, now I'm starting to grow suspicious," I said sarcastically. Hell wasn't just a trap; it was filled with traps. If I couldn't go toward the tables, and I couldn't go toward the arcade machines leading down the dark cavern, my only other option was to go out a doorway behind me. Perhaps I was silly not to have considered it before, but then again, the furniture was calling to me. I slowly backed away, keeping my eyes on the tables, and headed for the door. The jig was up, and the tables knew it.

Because whatever ability allowed them to look like tables suddenly allowed them to look like themselves. And themselves was horrific. They looked like a spider, but at the end of every leg was another spider. And multiple spiders would lead to the same spider. That's how my dumb brain interpreted what I was seeing as the tablecloths changed color and grew hair. It was one beast, like some hairy latticed worm, but with all the charm and grace of a centipede. Luckily, striking out toward me was not its goal.

Instead, the mass of hairy legs and bodies withdrew into the dark place beyond the tables. I didn't stick around to see much more of it or try to see what the arcade amalgamation turned into. I was through the door and walking on black and white checkered tile, the same that we had in the back kitchens. In fact, I was walking through a maze made of back kitchens. The details were remarkable. The only thing they were missing were the ovens.

"Riley," a voice called out to my right as I started walking down the hall, in the direction my gut said to go. My immediate instinct was to move away. After all, statistically, 100% of the things that had said my name so far in that hellhole had been some sort of disguised evil. So when I moved away from her, she was shocked.

"It's just me," Ramona said. And it did look like her, but I couldn't see her poster on the red wallpaper like I should have been able to. However, I could see her status indicators glowing in the dark, just like mine. What did my gut say? It was mostly worried that she would be upset.

"Is that really you?" I asked.

"Yes," she said.

"Is that really you?"

"Yeah," I replied. Then, after a pause, I said.

"We're good at this."

"Naturals," she agreed.

"Should we ask each other questions to make sure it's really us?" I thought for a moment and then said, "Ramona, the gum that I stuck on the ice machine two days ago is right there." I pointed to one of the many copies of the ice machine.

"It's on all of them." She looked to where I was pointing.

"If this place can copy what's above, who's to say it can't copy us?" I stared at her. She had really dressed for her emotional meltdown road trip: sweatpants, a trucker hat, and a denim jacket because they handed those jackets out on street corners in this decade.

"That's true," she said. And then she attacked me, literally tackled me. She got me to the floor, but just because she surprised me, that's all. My Grit was high enough that she couldn't hurt me. Maybe if she had the knife still… but—"Stop! It's really me," I said. She did stop, eventually.

"It's you," she agreed, after wailing on me a few times.

"If it weren't, then we would be in a fight scene right now, and that light would have flicked on on the red wallpaper, and we would have seen it."

"Clever," I said.

"But you know, you could've gotten that same information from chasing me or, you know, planning." Both of those had lights on the red wallpaper that could have lit up. And would only have done so if we were both players.

"Yeah," she said.

"But if you were an enemy, I would've gotten big buffs for fighting you all by myself, right? Might've been better to get the jump on it." That was true. She had a trope called Just Us Monsters that made her much more formidable in a one-on-one fight, without any help from allies.

"I think you just wanted to hit me," I said, as she stood up and helped me to my feet.

"Why would I wanna do a thing like that?" she asked with a laugh, looking around.

"Now let's get out of here." We started walking through the maze of kitchens, and our Exploring indicators lit up. I wondered if that meant anything. Would that light still flick on if I were walking through this hellish labyrinth with an impostor? Who knew. Probably.

"Look," I said after we had walked for a while, "you know I couldn't help you when they were throwing you down here, right?"

"I know," she said.

"In fact, you're not even here now, are you?" My character wasn't officially.

"I'm sleeping in bed like a good little boy," I said.

"Gotta be refreshed for work tomorrow."

"So if we go On-Screen…" she asked.

"I'm not here," I said. We weren't alone in that maze. But like the giant pipe-cleaner-shaped centipede-spider-worm, nothing was attacking us. And the only reason I could think of for that was: this wasn't a story where you could die. Maybe I was missing something. It was a fate worse than death, but it clearly didn't have to be. Things that looked like props were hiding all over, and sometimes they moved. They could have shredded us.

There was a knife pack, the kind where a chef might keep all of their knives that unfolded into a belt-looking thing, hanging from the ceiling. But when I wasn't staring at it, it and all of the knives it contained seemed to serpentine their way along the metal support beams and out of sight. Most places didn't have a ceiling. It was just darkness above. Ramona and I were too afraid to even mention the things we saw, as if talking about them would make them real.

Eventually, we found our way out of the back kitchen labyrinth and were led to a long hallway. It was the hallway that led from where I worked in the back all the way up toward the offices, and then to the arcade on the left, the central lobby on the right. Except this hallway was far too long. When we got to the door, Ramona looked at me and shrugged her shoulders. I shrugged back. That was the kind of communication I strived for with the people closest to me.

We started walking down the hallway, and I began wondering if this was all just a fever dream or if there was some narrative to it. Eventually, I found something of an answer. We found Madame Macabre the palm reading animtronic. We found what was left of her, at least. She had been beaten, her glass broken, and the mannequin inside was all but destroyed. Her mouth remained intact, and was trying to speak, but the speaker on the machine was busted.

All I could hear was a thousand screaming whispers, as the thing that had possessed this machine screamed in agony.

"What happened here?" Ramona asked. I wasn't sure exactly.

"I get the feeling that someone may have busted this thing up with a wooden pizza paddle," I said. Hopefully, that person was still okay.