Master of puppets a litr.., p.5
Master of Puppets: A LitRPG Adventure, page 5
I frowned, but I didn’t make a noise. I tried to show that I didn’t know why we were being quiet.
He pointed up the hill.
So I started crawling up the hill, and as I got to the crest of the hill, I could see a group of creatures down on the other side. Maybe ten or fifteen of one type of creature in a vague circle around a little creature of a different type.
The little creature was still slightly larger than me, I estimated. He bore a striking resemblance to Shrug, just miniscule. And he was more dark blueish than dark greenish. But he had the same long arms, big eyes, and small, round ears.
The creatures making the circle were far more terrifying. They had smoother skin, lighter in color, with big, pointy ears that went out almost horizontally to their heads. They had wide mouths filled with sharp little teeth and fingers ending in knife-like claws. There were bits of hair coming out from points on their bodies, or maybe tendrils, because they were the exact same color and texture as the rest of their skin. It was disconcerting.
“Food,” Shrug said quietly. Well, as quiet as he got, because it was definitely still a low rumble.
The grosser of the creatures, the mostly hairless ones, chittered with excitement, moving around quickly as the furry creature in the middle did its best to keep the whole circle in view. Which, obviously, wasn’t working.
“What do we do?” I asked Shrug.
But he was gone.
Chapter
Thirteen
My stomach sank with an overwhelming fear that Shrug abandoned me. Which didn’t make much sense, considering I’d barely escaped the thing eating me. Twice.
A shadow passed over me, followed by a thundering sound. Shrug was running down the hill, roaring.
The creatures in the circle turned to see Shrug. Some of them ran away, and others wet themselves. One just dropped over, like a fainting goat.
Shrug drove through the first ones, pulping one and pounding it into the ground with his foot. He grabbed another and shoved it into his mouth, already grasping a second one in his other hand.
The furry guy in the middle dropped into a fetal position, maybe trying to blend in with the moss. Which was kind of hopeless being a blue thing trying to disappear in green stuff.
I briefly wondered if creatures here had different ways of seeing color—maybe blue and green blended together for them.
Shrug didn’t care.
He ignored his furry little doppelgänger and chased down the other creatures, happily and greedily grabbing them and shoving them into his beak-shaped snout. There were cries of pain, sprays of blood, and raggedy splotches of creature jam left behind. Shrug chased the remaining skin creatures over the hill, and he was gaining on the few that were left.
I waited a second before wandering down, stepping gingerly between the gore left behind.
“You okay there?” I asked. The blue furry head popped up, his big ears and eyes opening and looking around at me and then at the rest of the situation. “What happened?” he asked.
“My buddy Shrug was hungry, and he ate your friends.”
“These no my friends,” the furry guy replied. “Gratsits. Gratsits come to eat. Gratsits come to eat me.”
“Gratsits?” I asked.
“Yes, gratsits. Those are gratsits. What are you?”
“Del. I’m Del. You Del?”
“Never heard Del? What is Del?”
“Me? Del is my name.”
“Oh, name. Flybait.”
“Your name is Flybait?”
“Flybait, yes. My name, Flybait.”
“Okay. It’s nice to meet you, Flybait. My buddy Shrug is over that way.” I pointed away from the mountain, where you could still kind of hear the screams of the gratsits.
“You friend with big phark?” Flybait asked.
“Big phark?” I replied, confused. “What is a phark?”
“Me, phark. That one.” He pointed in the general direction of Shrug. “Big phark. You friend with big phark?”
“You know, I guess that makes sense. You guys are the same thing. Pharks.”
“Yes, we phark.”
“Okay, you are a phark. He is a phark. Just, you look different.”
“Are different. He is he, I am I.”
“Are you a child?”
“Child? What do you mean, child?”
“Like a baby.”
“Me baby phark? No. Me phark. That big phark.”
“Okay. Both pharks. Got it.”
“No, phark. Not gratsit. Big phark go eat gratsit.”
“What?”
“Big question, what you?”
“You know, I don’t know. I’m new here. I just blew into town, I guess. Dropped, maybe? I don’t know. It’s a bit of a blur, and—”
His eyes, which were already big, somehow went a little wider, and his beaky mouth went into a bit of a smile.
“Oh my,” he said. “Maybe it is Flybait’s lucky day.”
“Why is it Flybait’s lucky day?” I asked, suspicious.
“You,” he said, pointing at me. “Zardling. Yes?”
“I’m a zardling?”
He nodded enthusiastically.
“I don’t know what a zardling is,” I said. “I guess that could be me, but—”
“You maybe zardling, huh? You come brand new? From where?”
“I don’t know. I, look, so I was in this place called Phoenix.”
“You Phoenix?”
“No, no, I was in Phoenix.”
“Phoenix ate you?”
“No. I was not. Ah crap, I had just moved to Denver. I’d been in Phoenix for a few years, then I got shifted to Denver, and last I remember, I was in Denver, just outside. Listen, I was in Phoenix. And then I moved to Denver. Not that long ago. I bought a house. They said I was going to be there for a while, but I wasn’t sure. And I was—”
“You definitely zardling.”
“What do you mean, I’m definitely a zardling?
“Oh, Flybait, you have good day today…” he said shaking his head and smiling. He looked over at me and nodded. “All these strange words. You come from nowhere. You suddenly here? You zardling.”
“A zardling?” I asked. “What is a zardling?”
“You, you zardling. Where is friend? Where is big phark—friend?”
“Shrug. Shrug is the name of my friend. I think I hear his destruction happening over that way.”
“Come. We need big phark to protect us.”
“Why do we need big phark to protect? Are there more gratsits?”
“Oh, always more gratsits. But many worse than gratsits here.”
“So we should get moving?”
“Yes, good to move. Follow Shrug. Big phark, you make Flybait friend of Shrug. Then Flybait and Shrug take care of zardling and help zardling live here.”
“Okay, two questions. Where is here?”
“Right now, in moss-lands. Mountain. You, yes?”
“Okay, but where is here?”
“Near mountain. You, yes?”
“Okay, but where am I?”
“Is the moss-place. Flybait just told you. Why you no listening? Is going to be problem if you no listen to Flybait.”
“I am listening to Flybait! I just don’t really understand Flybait.”
“Oh, that could be a problem. Yes, no problem for now. We go find Shrug. Big phark, right? Then we go talk about problems.”
“Okay, fine. Let’s go find Shrug.”
Chapter
Fourteen
It wasn’t hard to find Shrug. We just followed the screams of the dying gratsits.
There was plenty of blood splattered about, as well as quite a bit of left-behind guts. Flybait took the opportunity to grab a few flesh remnants and pop them into his toothy mouth as we walked by.
I bit my lip to keep from throwing up.
Except that wasn’t necessary, because I didn’t have a throat I could vomit out of. I didn’t have a stomach that was filled with anything. But somehow I still had the feeling of a queasy stomach.
I’d been hunting plenty of times. I’d gutted fish, deer, and boar. I’d seen cadavers and helped patch wounds in the two operations I went on where bullets were fired. But this was different. This was feral, brutal. There was something so alien and gross about the furry guy next to me, Flybait, casually eating raw meat that had fallen out of the mouth of another, larger furry guy.
I could see Shrug maybe fifty yards ahead, stopping to chow down on two handfuls of gratsits. He had a third trapped under his foot, squirming, trying to get away from him.
“He very big phark, your friend,” Flybait said. “Yes? Where you meet big phark-friend?”
I looked back, trying to figure out where we were. The gratsits seemed to have been curving Shrug back toward the mountain because we were really near the humongous pile of trash, and I could see the vague hole in the sky above the top of the mountain. So while I knew exactly where I’d entered this world, I couldn’t at all figure out where I’d fallen or where I’d met Shrug. Not in any actual way, at least.
The area we were in had quite a bit of extra trash that had fallen off the mountain. Little mounds, not quite like hills, but some would approach that. If you accepted the basic premise that this trash was a mountain of trash, which I believed it was, then some of these piles could be described as hills. Mounds of trash, hills of trash. There were plenty of those around, and the gratsits seemed to pull Shrug, and therefore Flybait and myself, toward the mountain and into the collection of mounds of trash. I tried to remember if I had seen them before from my higher vantage point, but I didn’t. I couldn’t remember anything like them. All of this area just seemed completely new to me.
So I just pointed at the mountain.
I said, “I fell from up there, the top of the mountain. When I landed, I found this cave. And Shrug tried to eat me, but I didn’t let him. We came to an understanding that I would help him find food, and he would not eat me.”
Flybait looked at me appreciatively, nodding as I explained what I knew.
He chewed on something that looked suspiciously like a length of intestine and scratched at the fur on his arm.
“So maybe you and Shrug, not that good friend, eh?” he asked.
“I don’t know. But he seems to understand I’m not food, and I guess he’s probably had enough to eat by now. So I think, you know, he won’t try to eat either of us.”
“Yeah, at least until early light, yes, when he try eat Flybait and you. Because now is breakfast and he hungry.”
I smiled and shook my head. “I don’t think he’ll be like that. He’s, uh, I think he’s…”
Flybait looked at me, still chewing on his little morsel of gratsit intestine, and shook his head again. “Big phark always problem when big phark hungry.”
“Do you think that he’s going to eat you?” I asked Flybait. He sighed and nodded.
I said, “Does that mean pharks are cannibals?”
“What is cannibal?” Flybait replied. “Phark eat what phark eat. Phark eat everything. Whatever phark can get out here, phark eat because it’s a way to survive.”
“So you just eat anything, including each other?” I asked.
Flybait nodded.
I sighed, starting to run through the issues we would inevitably face if Shrug was probably going to look at my new buddy Flybait and see breakfast. I watched Shrug pull the leg bones and sinews of one of the gratsits out of his teeth, then snap a femur to suck out the marrow. But then I saw one of the piles of trash, a mound that was larger than Shrug, move.
It moved lightning fast.
A limb stretched out, followed by a second. Then the body pushed off the ground, with a huge mouth full of teeth that reflected the dim light as if they were shiny, or metallic, maybe? The whole thing just sort of leapt out and crashed down on Shrug.
Shrug immediately fought back.
I don’t think he really knew what he was fighting against. And in the maelstrom of it all, I couldn’t tell either.
Flybait knew immediately that something was wrong. I could tell because he tripped me, then he went sprinting in the opposite direction from Shrug and whatever was happening there.
Now, I can’t say for sure that the tripping was on purpose. It was possible that I was just in the way between where he wanted to go and where the danger was.
That seemed plausible.
And yet, it also seemed likely that he tripped me just in case whatever was in the midst of eating Shrug wanted a secondary snack: there I was. He wouldn’t have to worry about it. Normally, I wouldn’t have just let this asshole do something like that and then try to be friends with him.
But I only had one real lead to figure out what the hell was going on. And that was the furry blue asshole running away from me.
Even though I was super exhausted, the fear of what was happening to Shrug and the weight of the unknown worked together to juice me into running as fast as I ever had in this new form. To the point where I was catching up to that asshole.
Flybait was maybe five yards in front of me, and I was closing in. I shouted, “Where are we going?”
Flybait glanced over his shoulder. His eyes went wide, and his left foot just came in enough to clip the back of his right leg, sending him to the ground, tumbling.
I slid semi-baseball style, going down to a knee, and helped him to his feet. We kept going.
“Where are we going?” I asked again, talking and running.
Flybait just shook his head.
I guess it’s possible he couldn’t do it.
I didn’t want to be mean. He didn’t seem like the smartest furry guy. I mean, he was light years ahead of Shrug, but in the grand scheme of things, Flybait was just okay. His name was kind of an indication: not the smartest guy.
Still, he was all I had. I followed him.
We ran, going deeper into the moss, skewing kind of away from where the mushrooms were and toward what looked like a dark and boulder-strewn area. I thought maybe there was a pattern as we ran toward them, but then we got to them. It just seemed haphazard. There were boulders that were big and kind of rectangular, almost like cubes. They were significantly taller than me, massive, and all the same dark gray stone.
We wove through them for a few minutes until there was a little spot where it looked very much like someone had taken the time to stack some rocks to make it look like there was no way through.
But if you were carefully observant, you could see that there was a scratch pattern where you could slip through the scratched-out area and get under the rocks.
Flybait, without pausing, dove for that spot at full speed. He didn’t quite fit—his feet stuck out. But with a grand amount of flailing about, he managed to force himself inside.
I wasn’t sure if anyone was behind us. I didn’t hear anything loud, like I imagined the trash heap monster thing would have to have been, but regardless, I didn’t give it a second thought. I knew it would be better for me to go into the cave and follow Flybait into his hidey-hole, rather than see whatever might be outside. So I did as Flybait had done, and I dove headfirst, slipping right through the hole with no problems. I didn’t get stuck like him. I was taller than him, but he was stout. He was filled out. I had skinny little legs, and not just like I skipped leg day. It’s just that the concept of leg day never appeared in my head, and frankly, neither did arm day or chest day, because it didn’t seem like I had any muscles to speak of. Not in any way I could actually see. I could tell my arm to flex, and that happened, but there was no bulge of a muscle. It was ridiculous.
I scrambled to my feet in the darkness and continued to sprint in the same direction.
Immediately, I hit my face on a wall and dropped like a sack of potatoes.
Pulling myself up the wall, I realized I’d hit it because of a tight right turn. So I made the turn and saw that a depression had been dug out under the edge of one of the giant boulders, making something of a cozy nest or den. Flybait was sitting on a pile of what looked like soft moss, chin in his hand as he munched on something.
There was a little bit of light coming from lichen growing on the walls, which, while it provided illumination, made everything seem really flat. It was disconcerting.
A few crudely made baskets were in corners, and a tendril-y fungus grew out of a basket hanging off a peg driven into the rock.
“Nice place you have,” I said.
Flybait spun around, a pointy stick in one hand, waving it at me. “What you do here?”
“I followed you here.”
“Why you follow? You think you can fight Flybait? You think you can take Flybait?”
“No, I—”
“Flybait strong,” Flybait barked, shaking his pointy stick at my face. “Flybait fight you!”
“I don’t know, man—I haven’t seen you do much of anything,” I replied. “Except run. You didn’t run very fast, but you run well. I’ll give you that.”
“Why you come if not fight? Did you come to steal Flybait’s house?”
“Is this Flybait’s house?” I asked. “You’re really—”
“What do you think it is, chuba?”
“Where do I… I don’t know. It looks like a hole in the ground. With a rock next to it.”
“Is Flybait house,” he snapped. He started pointing at things. “Is Flybait bed. Is Flybait light. Is Flybait baskets. Flybait makes baskets.”
“Well, I’ll tell you what, Flybait—you make some really nice baskets.”
“Thank you.”
“I’m not here to hurt you. I’m not here to kill you. I thought, you know, we were working together. As a team.”
“You team with Flybait?”
“I mean, I thought we had that idea. I thought it was going to be you, me, and Shrug. And then, well, I guess something happened to Shrug.”
“Yes, Flybait knows something happened to big phark-friend, Shrug.”
“Do you know what happened to him?”
“Yes, Flybait just say Flybait knows what happened to big phark-friend, Shrug.”
“What?”
“You have trouble hearing? Things stuck in ears? Where are your ears?”
