Chương 419: Book Eight, Chapter 86: By Torchlight

However far down we had gone, I was finally able to examine the underlying structure of the cradle. When exploring alien architecture, one often ends up describing it using insect comparisons. Is it like a beehive, or more like an ant colony? Did termites dig it out? Do the hallways and passages open wide enough for a human to pass through, or were they made for slithering things? Whatever these creatures were, eldritch entities or otherwise, I thought the same framework could apply.

Unfortunately, when I finally saw the underlying structure, it resembled a parking garage more than anything else. Although the early sections of the cradle had been recently excavated, the areas we encountered later didn't need any digging. I had only scratched the surface. We attempted to evade capture by delving into large, empty lots that could easily have stored valuables the size of ships, but were only half-full of various junk.

As much as I wanted to investigate the junk, mostly I wanted to find a way to get away from the action for a little bit. As the main character, finally having my debuff canceled out, my exploration ability would be the best it had ever been. To that end, I knew that wherever I went, I would find something worth seeing. Normally, it might be a hassle to find the right rooms, the important plot devices, and significant settings; in this storyline, they would come to me. And so they did.

After passing by mountains of garbage, I eventually felt I was far enough away to stop and sift through it. The piles around me that I had first described as junk were anything but. The crates that had been stored in were so decayed that they almost looked like giant stacks of trash, but that didn't mean they were. The next time I was On-Screen, I had Danny point his camera at one of the piles as I sifted through it gently, revealing a statue of a cat made entirely of gold.

"This does not appear to be recent craftsmanship," I said. I didn't have the words to sound like a proper archaeologist, but even just staring at it, I could see it was thousands of years old, and it wasn't alone. I began to brush away the wooden debris, revealing that these stacks had collapsed into literal piles of jewels and precious metals. There had been scrolls, perhaps, at one time, but they were gone now, with only the faintest traces that they ever existed.

"Why would they store all of these treasures away in a remote part of the cradle?" I asked.

"Why would they not maintain the storage and preservation of these objects? Who are they to begin with?" After a while, I was genuinely in awe of what I was seeing. This was an incredible fortune just sitting out in the open, and as I moved from pile to pile, I realized that not all of them came from the same place. Some looked vaguely Egyptian, while others seemed Greek, and some appeared Chinese, as best as I could tell.

Still, there were other piles that I couldn't recognize the style of, even if you put a gun to my head. All of this was just lying in some vast cargo bay, unguarded and uncared for. Eventually, I opened one of the crates, which was to say that I brushed the crate away as it turned to dust and fell onto the floor, and I saw something I had never properly seen in a storyline before. It was my silver dagger, the one that I had forged from a silver spoon in Stray Dawn.

It had a trope attached that let me detect sharp edges and prevent me from accidentally cutting myself. I had brought it into nearly every storyline I had been in since the werewolf movie, but I had never been able to use it because it always disappeared from my pocket.

At the end of the day, it was hard to take weapons into storylines and even harder to take silver ceremonial-looking daggers, so Carousel would always pilfer it and place it somewhere in the storyline that I would never find, except in this storyline, I did. I grabbed for the knife. It was nice and long and thin. The funny thing about this blade was that I could actually store it in my pocket without worrying about cutting myself when I reached to grab it because of the trope it had on it.

I kept it in my hand as I moved forward. I doubted that these things, whatever they were, were allergic to silver. That would be too convenient, but it was still nice to have it. Suddenly, I heard a noise in the distance and saw the flicker of a torch. Danny and I moved quickly to be out of sight as we watched three men as they searched the perimeter, probably looking for us. I couldn't tell because they weren't speaking English. It was good to know that these things couldn't see in the dark.

In fact, they seemed as limited physically as any human would be, which was odd. The scary thing about a shape-shifter isn't that it can do what a human can. It's all the things it can do that a human can't, like turning into a giant beast or your best friend, and so far, the only hint I had seen of these enemies' power had been when our captive had unfolded himself into some sort of giant aquatic tumor. I had not seen them change shape from one human to another, as one would expect.

I had my No Stab in the Dark trope equipped, which meant that even with their meager torchlight, we were fairly safe at a distance. It prevented important plot events, like death, from happening in poor lighting. I decided to move in to get a closer look at the men when I realized that one of them didn't look right. His arms were a little too long, and his left leg dragged behind him a bit and didn't seem completely connected to his body.

I stared at his face and realized that I was looking directly at the very same man whom I had seen unfold into the aforementioned tumor days prior. From what I could tell, he seemed to be in good spirits, but when he had turned back into his human form, he wasn't quite perfect. Suddenly, he stopped and got the other men to stop as well. The one carrying the torch turned it back toward the direction they had come from, as if that would somehow direct the light from the fire, and funnily enough, it kind of did.

Carousel was always having fun with the lights. Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings. And it was only when he did so that I realized that our formerly tumorous friend had something trailing off his body. I didn't know what it was, and I can't describe it well. But it was almost as if he were leaving trails of his essence behind him as he walked. My eyes didn't want to report on this information, but I forced them to.

There were little cracks in reality seeping out of the man's misshapen body. Was he falling apart? Was he dying? No. It turned out he was setting a trap. As I looked down, I saw that I had nearly run right into it. Some small portion of the man's essence, like a ghost of a tentacle, was inches from my left foot as I hid behind some of the debris that had been stored on this level. He was sensing my presence, maybe my breath, maybe my warmth. He had sent out feelers. Was it too late for me to move?

I didn't know, but I had to try. I slowly and carefully moved backward, urging Danny to do the same, but something in our movement wasn't right. Maybe it was too loud, or maybe we accidentally stepped on some little trail of fifth-dimensional nonsense. But the man let out an inhuman screech, and his compatriots began to run in our direction. The chase scene indicator lit up, and we began running into the darkness. It was a bit of a low-tech trap for a being from beyond, but what could I expect?

Carousel had to give the players some kind of chance. Whatever the case, I was scared out of my wits, so that made what I did next a little easier. I pulled a small bundle of paracord from my pocket and handed one end to Danny as we each hid behind crates on opposite sides of the row and waited. Whatever these things were, they really did have human weaknesses, including our perceptual pitfalls.

We left the line slack when the man with the torch ran past it, but then quickly picked it up and held firm when the next man right behind him tried to get through. The second man fell onto the first, and they both ended up on the ground. The truth was, I couldn't take any risks. If these were proper Nazis, I would have punched them out like Indiana Jones, and that would be the end of it, but what they were wasn't even in my vocabulary. Whatever they were called, they still seemed pretty human.

Maybe they could die that way, too. If they couldn't be killed easily, the sooner I knew that the better. I worried that I hadn't seen enough of their monstrous forms to justify dispatching them. Logically, my character would know that whatever these things were, they had to be taken out, but movie rules usually dictated you have to confirm that a person is a monster before you can kill them. Wearing a human face is a very good defensive decision for all sorts of creatures. I didn't have time for that.

I quickly picked up the torch that the first one had been carrying, held it to the men, and proceeded to stab my silver knife wildly. Unfortunately, my own trope could work against me if I didn't do this in the light. I was quick and efficient about it, not gruesome. A few quick stabs apiece, and the men stayed down, dead, though their forms began to collapse a bit, confirming that they were indeed monsters.

I quickly wiped the blood off the silver blade and extinguished the torch like a cigarette, which somehow worked. I hoped I wouldn't get punished for going lethal so soon. Surely I wouldn't, but if I didn't worry, I wouldn't be me. Next, I had to take care of the original fifth-dimensional being, wherever he had gone. Danny and I slowly made our way back toward the front of the room where we had seen him last, but it appeared he had gone, probably to go get more men. We needed to leave this place.

The exit wasn't far away, but suddenly I heard a clamoring behind me as a pair of strong arms wrapped around me from behind. All I caught was a glimpse, but I knew who it was immediately. It was the two men whom I thought I had just killed. One of them had grabbed me from behind, and the other one had grabbed Danny. They were laughing with each other.

I knew I had killed them (or at least done enough to kill them if they were human), but it made sense they would have some trick up their sleeve, and it could never be that easy. The one holding Danny threw him, and being a cameraman, Danny instinctively protected the camera as he rolled away. Afterward, the one who had grabbed Danny took out the torch that I had extinguished and lit it again, revealing to me that not only had he survived the stabbings, but there was no evidence he had been stabbed at all.

So that was what kind of shapeshifter we were dealing with. Not some type of lizard person, something else altogether. I wasn't exactly surprised, but I thought we would get more than a few minutes of freedom. It turned out I was very wrong. It also turned out that while these men were capable of surviving a stabbing, they were not happy about it. I looked over at where Danny had rolled and found that he had disappeared. No doubt he was Off-Screen somewhere in the darkness, filming me.

The shapeshifters didn't seem to mind. Their focus was entirely on me. One held me firm as the other walked closely to me and held out his fingers, all bunched together as if he were trying to make a point. His hand got close to my head as his fingers began to unfold, just as the tumor had on the boat. They didn't turn into anything in particular, but I couldn't see very well. They began to envelope my face.

As confusing as this process had been for my eyes, it was far more confusing for my skin, as the man's hand, or what had been his hand, started to unfold into my nose, mouth, over my eyes, through my skin, as if it wasn't even there, expanding, suffocating, causing intense pain in ways I had never experienced before. Was he assimilating me? I couldn't tell, but whatever he was doing, it was painful, and not only painful but lethal.

My status indicators began lighting up one right after another, and all I could do was panic. Despite whatever advantages I had received, it was clear that I was able to be killed even before the finale, before Second Blood. I didn't expect it to happen this soon. I could feel him in my lungs. I could feel him wrapping himself around my heart. I could feel a breeze somehow coming from his tendrils. I pushed back, sure I did, as best I could.

Antoine had brought his Willpower Is Magic trope, but all that did was allow me to resist foes in exchange for great pain and suffering, and that's what I was doing: suffering. I began to black out, and in that moment, I heard a voice.

"You have to survive," Cassie said from somewhere.

"You have to go deeper into the cradle. You have to save them." It was a ghostly voice. It was a dream. It was a visit from the dead granted by Cassie's Get Up trope. I was blind. I couldn't breathe. And yet somehow her message gave me power, or maybe it only reminded me that I had power, that vague psychic kind. So I stopped merely pushing back with my willpower and started pushing back with my mind. I wasn't even screaming words at it, just ideas. Back away. Retreat. Don't touch me.

These were some of the powerful concepts I was trying to drive into the mind of this ancient monster before me. And somehow it was working. Not well, not even sufficiently, but he began to pull his arm back enough that suddenly I could see again. I took a deep breath as soon as his hand gave me even the slightest passage of air. He had this stupefied look on his face, confused, as if he didn't understand what was going on. At that moment, I heard something rolling across the stone floor.

I looked down out of the corner of my eye and saw a white stone. No, not a stone. With a sudden surge of inspiration, I pushed back against the man restraining me and shoved my knee into the guy who had just shoved his hand through my face. He backed up just a step, but in doing so, his foot landed on that round object that had been rolling toward him. It was a cue ball. The man tripped and fell backward onto the ground.

Just as he did, a woman came from the shadows with a large spear in her hands, looking me in the eye. I held on to the arms of the guy behind me and twisted my body as she rammed the spear into his head. Then she grabbed what appeared to be a large splinter of wood and stabbed the man who had unfolded his hand into my face right in the throat, leaving the wood there in the gaping wound as he lay on the ground. She looked up at me.

I was still recovering my breath, trying to figure out if my face was intact, and it was, mostly. A few cuts and scrapes were there, sure. I could see her by the torchlight.

"Ramona Mercer," I said. She nodded and then asked, "Who are you?"