Wayward Writer

Disclaimer and Author’s notes:

I played with characters created by my lovely friend Paula, who came up with this bizarre and fascinating little world that I’m thoroughly addicted to. She’s given me her complete permission to do so. This is a piece at the beginning of said universe, a sort of in-between scene happening between the first few chapters. It also is from a point of view not specifically seen in the beginning of the story. I sweat blood try to get this into a format that my teacher liked. My first three attempts were 1) too long, 2) too cliché, 3) too confusing, and 4) looks more like a proposal for an actual novel rather than a short story in and of itself. So here it is I present you with what is in my mind known as the finalbloodydraftthankthegraciousLord. I’ve always been fascinating by the things of Faerie and the Deeping Well is one of them and I thought that given the mix of mechanical and magical that Paula writes about, this little scene would fit in quite well.

The Deeping Well

Tristan sighed; it had been a difficult day. Another one of their candidates had died today. This was the third candidate that they had lost in a month. Something was wrong, either with the Game or with the girls they were using to test it out. None of them were lasting farther than the first level of the game. There was also something off with the process of entering them into the Game. It was simple really, once the candidate was deemed fit enough physically, they were placed in the stasis tube with a crystal cover. Matthias, upon seeing them had christened them coffins, and Tristan had to admit the status tubes did resemble coffins after a fashion. The tubes helped to sustain and monitor the candidate’s vital information while they were ‘inside’ the Game, so to speak.

When a candidate failed, that is to say, died inside the game, the coffins turned black. No amount of any medical assistance could wake them up again. He’d tried. After the first few, he’d realized it was futile. So was trying to talk to his brother or Mr. M, their mysterious benefactor about possibly entering some safety features into the programming code of the Game. He couldn’t do what his brother and the mysterious Mr. M did, lump the girls they used as human test subjects together in the same category as the white lab rats they’d used for their preliminaries. Yes, their work was important, and yes, they were on the verge of a ground-breaking new discovery, and yes, he like his brother would do just about anything to keep it going; but still the same, the deaths bothered him in a way he couldn’t quite define.

He’d tried adding some other non-player characters into the Game, to help take some of the burden off of the candidates, but even that had its limits. So much depended on the candidates themselves, the Game was invented initially to study people’s dreams and how they would react if they were thrust into a world not dissimilar to the ones in their dreams. It was fascinating to see some of the unusual facets that some people had dreamed up. They’d gotten enough information in their initial trials to have a working prototype that adjusted to each different candidate. With each new candidate, more variables were added in, and the Game’s overall performance was upgraded. The screening process was highly selective, only females within a certain age bracket and only the ones who were vivid dreamers. That point was critical, for it was only the dreamers that had imaginations fertile enough for the Game to work with.

They’d just gotten a new candidate in and she looked to be one of the most promising yet. Candidate Twenty-Six, name: Lilith also known as Elle, age: fifteen years old, he typed into the program in front of him. Matthias and Mr. M were ecstatic with Elle’s progress so far. They planned to implement a new trial for Elle in the morning; she’d done so well against the monsters and demons that they’d thrown at her so far. This one was a bit different from the others, however, called the Experientia Dolore or Trial of Pain, if you cared to translate it from the Latin. It triggered some of the pain receptors in the brain, causing the candidate to feel varying levels of pain throughout one or two cycles inside the Game. It was a totally new feature and before he finished imputing it into the Game’s programming, he wanted to run a few tests on it.

Tristan set the Game into standby mode and opened a different program; one that he doubted that Mr. M or even his brother knew existed. It was his own personal side project, a sort of testing ground for the Game. He called it the Deeping Well after some of the stories and old myths he’d heard as a child in the orphanage. It was a program he’d created to show him possible scenarios from the data that he’d entered into it, the various variables and such. In this case, Elle and her possible reactions to the Experientia Dolore, because while he did halfway understand why M wanted to implement it, to see how far they could go, to push the limits of both the candidate and the Game, he didn’t want to see Elle end up like so many others had before her. He also wanted to see what would happen if he interfered in the Game against his brother and their benefactor’s wishes, if it did indeed come to that. He suspected it might and in that case, it would be better to be as prepared as he could be. Cautiously he looked around, making sure that no one was around before attaching the small headset he’d brought with him to the computer and entering into the program himself.

Elle scrubbed at her sword, wiping the blood stains off of it. This last battle had been something fierce and she’d only just made it through. She really needed to find some place where she could hole up safely for the night, take care of that wound of hers and maybe gets a few hours of uninterrupted sleep. Time was rather fluid here in the Game, but she sensed that something big was approaching. She wasn’t quite sure if she would make it through this time. She’d only barely made it through last time and that’d been with Beth’s help. She didn’t know where the petite blonde had gone to, she’d disappeared after killing the monster. It didn’t help that she was still dreaming, even here inside the Game. It was dangerous to dream here, because your dreams had an eerie way of manifesting inside of the Game, almost as if the Game had a direct line to your subconscious. If she slept, she’d dream and the dreams of her death were still the most prevalent out of all her dreams. Finding a small enclave big enough to fit her, she unrolled her sleeping bag and crawled inside of it. Tomorrow would bring another day, another fight, hopefully another win, she told herself, but the growing pain all over her body seemed to counteract any positive outlook she might have. Deep inside, she knew that she couldn’t handle too much more of this.

Pain, pain there was so much pain. It hurt so much just to bleeding breathe, much less fight. But she had no choice because if she didn’t fight then no one else would and this monster would terrorize others. She’d seen what some of the other monsters had done to some of the villages they’d encountered and it sickened her. All that blood, all that carnage, all those innocents slaughtered all for one man’s psychotic game. She screamed as one of the monster’s talons ripped across her back and as she fell to the ground, the last thing she saw before losing consciousness was a pair of concerned green eyes looking straight back at her.

Tristan shakily pulled the headset off, the Deeping Well program had projected for him the most likely scenario based off of the data he’d fed it and he did not like the outcome. He’d also seen what had happened if he interfered with the process. In one, M killed both Elle and Matthias before finally putting Tristan out of his own misery. In another, Elle lived, but not for long. Even escaping into the Game itself and using it against Matthias and M had only bought them a scant amount of time. Each scenario the program had projected for him had ended in death, either his or Elle’s.

Rubbing a hand across his tired eyes, he caught a glimpse of the digital clock blinking at him from the wall.  01:05 a.m. it read in bright red numbers, no wonder he was so exhausted, he’d been up for almost twenty-four hours straight. Putting everything into standby mode for the time being, he stiffly stood and shuffled off to his cot in the corner. He’d figure out what to do in the morning. He’d seen only projections, possible futures, nothing was certain yet. As he closed his eyes, sleep overtook him and wiped the conflicting visions from his brain.