Characters: Vic, Eric, Cain; Mundo, Isaac, Grandpa, Quentin; Malkav, Adam, Fayrelin, Captain Jargon, Exthame, Blackthorn
Location: Various locations
Time: Day 4 - 5:20 PM
As for the guys, they had worries of their own. The sun was setting, casually bleeding over the horizon of the Enchanted Forest like a slow cut in the sky. Vic watched it, his sword on the ground next to him and his elbow resting against his raised knee. A few yards away, Eric stood knee-deep in the trickling stream, fishing with his mighty bow. He managed to nick one fish under the gills, but the arrow didn’t stick in far enough and the fish got away, leaving a small trail of blood in the water.
Meanwhile, Cain was chopping the roots from a tree, trying to gather enough firewood for the night. Mosquitoes the size of airplanes flew around him, but he swatted them away with his axe, gathering up bundles of roots and bringing them over to Vic. None of them spoke while they worked. They hadn’t spoken in quite some time. Speaking would mean thinking and thinking would mean remembering… And none of them wanted to remember. Only forget.
But Joan, she was on all their minds. They had spent over fifteen minutes in her stomach, feeling the acids against their bare skin, sure of their own deaths. They had remembered the darkness. It was coming again now. Lynne and the other Blades, the deadly ninjas of Kaligar, they were coming, stalking the forest, hunting down the innocent. They couldn’t be outrun any more than the coming night. And they would do to our heroes what they did to Joan.
“We’ll have to take turns sleeping tonight,” Vic said, though he doubted any of them would be able to sleep. The Enchanted Forest was swarming with all kinds of dangers, creatures hungrier than Women. Snakes, birds, even insects—all enormous denizens of destruction now—and Men were at the bottom of nature’s food chain. There was a reason the only Men to live in the forest were the Elves. They were the only ones who could survive longer than a day. But even with the pointy-eared Eric on their side, the Men’s faces were grim, understanding their fate lurked in every shadow of the forest, their bodies destined to become one with this magical land forever…
Many miles away, in Ellewyn’s capital city of Felwinter, a bright light began to shine through the cracks of a local outhouse. As the light intensified, the outhouse shook and a small rift opened inside, spitting out four screaming bodies. Then, as quickly as they appeared, the light and the rift spiraled into nothingness, leaving the victims alone in the bowels of the outhouse.
They coughed, wiped the muck from their faces, and stared up at the disappearing light as it faded with all their hopes.
“Shit,” Isaac said.
Mundo lifted a leg and shook his foot clean. “You said it.” But he had nowhere else to put his foot down. Sighing, he stepped back into the gunk and ran his hands along the dark, rigid, soiled walls. “The portal is gone. The NQIM room doesn’t even exist anymore.”
“How the hell can it not exist!?”
“The same way nothing in this world really exists. The virus is probably getting rid of all access to the real world, just like it did by fusing our minds into the game. In a sense, our reality is turning into Neverquest.”
“At least we still have our sanity.”
“Hey, guys, I found a pool of nothing but chocolate,” Quentin said, licking his fingers.
Grandpa looked up. There was a small porthole looking down on them like a skylight, but it was at least a couple hundred feet over their heads. “We’ll never make it out through there. These old bones weren’t made for climbing.”
“That’s okay,” Mundo said. “We can wait for someone to come along and rescue us. Since everyone in Neverquest is so nice and all.”
“And we’ll have plenty of food to eat,” Quentin added.
“…Yeah.”
“Screw that,” Isaac said, digging his nails into the wall. “I’m getting out of this shithole.”
He didn’t get far. A few handholds up, the dirt crumbled away and he slipped, landing on his back in the brown goo. It oozed over him like wet clay, but he didn’t get up. He continued to lie there, staring up at the porthole, breathing slowly through his cold lips. “…We’re never going home again, are we? We’re just going to be here forever. There’s no end to this. There’s no escape. We’re screwed, all of us. We’re screwed, a million times over.”
“A man is not screwed until he finds a hooker with nothing better to do,” Grandpa said with that ever-glowing twinkle of wisdom in his eye. “We are not yet screwed. We have not yet begun to fight. We are the Men of the future and we will find a way! You’d be surprised where a twenty spot can get you in this world.”
“Grandpa, you’re full of shit.”
“Only as much as you, my boy. Only as much as you.”
Far out at sea, Malkav stood with the salty wind in his hair and one foot on the pirate ship’s stern, gazing out at the sun as it melted into the horizon. Next to him, Adam leaned with his elbows against the railing and his chin against his forearms, never saying a word. They stared into the sunset and saw their reflections looking back, glistening off the surface of the water like silverfish.
Captain Jargon remained at the wheel, but he now looked as sober as a Monk. The time of pleasure had passed. He was in the Tethys Sea again, facing all too familiar waters. Dark waters, he called them. Dark waters that would take you under for the rest of eternity. Dark waters that forced the rest of the crew into the cabins below, to cry tears of blood and rum alone. Dark waters. They were the worst kind.
“I know you,” he kept whispering under his breath until he sounded like a madman. But his eyebrows were pulled down over his nose like heavy curtains and he sailed into the coming darkness with a face straighter than his ship’s course. “I know you, demon sea. Yarr, I know you all too well…”
Closing his eyes, Malkav raised his arms until he looked like a bird. He let the wind take him away, let his worries and cares drift away like loose confetti. But they stayed. Chained to his heart, they stayed, holding him down, holding him back.
Slowly, he lowered his arms. “…Why are we here, Adam?”
“Because we have nowhere else to go?”
“…I am almost killed her.”
“Who”
“Siarra. I was going to… I would’ve done it. If you hadn’t stopped me…”
“It was nothing.”
“That wasn’t a thank you.”
Adam looked up. “You know, you were one of the lucky ones. Not a lot of nerds could say they had a girlfriend in high school.”
“I was more of a slave to her than a boyfriend. She used me for just about everything.”
“You said you used her too.”
“Isn’t that what love is?”
“Not between me and Natalie, no… What we had was real.”
“Had, huh?” Malkav nodded, sliding down next to Adam.
“Things have changed.”
“Tell me about it.”
“It’s more than Neverquest… It’s… Ugh, I don’t know. Maybe it is this game’s fault. Ever since I started playing the beta version, Natalie and I have been drifting apart… Sometimes I feel like a tiny ship lost at sea. I don’t understand love.”
“Neither do I. You want to go get drunk?”
“I don’t drink.”
Suddenly, Fayrelin appeared with three unopened bottles of beer in her hands. “You boys thirsty?”
Malkav stared at her outstretched hand. “…Were you listening to us?”
“Aren’t I always?”
“I guess so…” He took the bottle and rolled it in his hand like a dry cigarette. “Fayrelin, you’re a girl, right?”
“That’s what I was told.”
“Would you… Do Men and Women still…”
Fayrelin cocked her head to the side.
“What’s love like in this world?”
“Love?”
“Between two people.”
Laughing, she bit the cork off her bottle and spit it to the side. “Between what two people?”
“Any two.”
“That’s rather vague.”
“So is love.”
“Perhaps it is,” Fayrelin said, taking a swig of beer, “but how would I know? I don’t love nobody and nobody loves me. It’s a beautiful two-way process and I wouldn’t change it for the world.”
“But what about the other people of this world? The Women, say—they can love somebody, right?”
“Any fool can love, Malkav.”
“…Can they love a Man?”
“It doesn’t happen often, but it’s possible. Men aren’t so bad. You reek like something awful most of the time, but I guess a Woman could love one for a while.”
“Only for a while?”
“Well, until he gets stepped on,” she laughed. “But yeah, sometimes a Woman will adopt a Man and welcome him into her family. In that case, he becomes a ‘son’ to her and a ‘brother’ to her daughters. Fancy words, but they’re really only different names for a pet. He has no standing in the family and spends most of his life on a leash. I’ve heard it’s quite awful. They do the same thing with pygmies.”
“That’s terrible,” Adam said.
“Ha, I suppose it would be.” She tried to pass Adam the last bottle of beer, but he wouldn’t take it.
“But that’s not the kind of love I mean,” Malkav said. “Isn’t there…any sort of deep, intimate love between a Man and a Woman?”
Fayrelin took another casual sip of beer, looking away. “Maybe a long, long time ago. Sorena ruined that for many people. But I don’t think I could imagine a world where Men and Women could fall in love and…and what? Live happily ever after? Sounds like a fantasy world to me.”
“Maybe it is… Maybe it is.”
And they looked again to the horizon, lost in a sea of blue.
Giantess World
