Bibliomancer ~ 4!

~ Four ~

Sam came to an eyeblink later, a scream tearing free from his throat before trailing off in confusion. The moment of pain was gone, and so was the giant boulder that had crushed him seconds before. His heart thundered in his chest as he stared around with wild-eyed terror; this whole place was different. The caverns had vanished, the entire landscape replaced by a hauntingly familiar hallway: checkered linoleum underfoot, orange and blue lockers running off to either side, halogen lights overhead. Oh no.

The rolling stone had been bad—abrupt and traumatic—but this was even worse than a quick grisly death beneath a massive Hollywood boulder. This… this was the ultimate trauma: High school.

Sam shuddered as he scanned those lockers.

He hadn’t visited the halls of Laguna Hills Unified since he’d picked up his diploma five years ago, and if he never went back it would still be too soon. Yet here he was, the lights flickering like some bad nightmare, which is exactly what this felt like. Despite that, Sam had to admit that the graphics were absolutely the bees knees, though he couldn’t even begin to fathom how the game had known about any of this. Seriously. He’d taken a brief psych exam before entering, and he supposed it had access to most of his public records—like where he graduated from high school, say—but the detail here couldn’t be coded in the few hours he’d been on site.

However the game was generating this content was beyond his imagining, but it was obviously on the bleeding edge of technological advancement.

There was no prompt this time, nothing telling him what to do, but he couldn’t just stand around indefinitely. After a few more seconds of indecision, he set off toward the right, heading for what should be the exit… assuming this place mirrored the real-world version of Laguna Hills Unified.

He blew through a hallway intersection—the right branch heading toward the science wing, the left leading to the English department—bearing straight and toward the exit. He’d gone another ten feet when he heard a clatter and a grunt of pain drifting out from a door, which stood slightly ajar. A thin slice of light cut across the floor like a straight razor. The bathroom. He gulped but padded forward, angling toward the restroom. More grunts and the muffled sound of voices were clearer now, but still not quite clear enough to make out.

He paused outside the door, crouched on his toes, trying to figure out what to do here. Just move on? Or stick his nose in business that was probably better left alone? A word appeared in the air before him.

Decide.

Of course.

The smart thing to do was move along, find the next prompt, complete it, and ignore whatever was going on behind that propped open door. Except, he couldn’t. He’d grown a lot in college, even took a couple of Judo classes so that he wouldn’t ever be on the receiving end of a wedgie or a swirly whirly, but high school Sam had been a different story entirely. He’d been almost everyone’s punching bag. Too rich to hang with the townie kids. Not rich enough to really fit in with the preps. Just smart enough to be a nerd, but not nearly smart enough to run with the real nerds. Not particularly athletic, or big, or outgoing.

He’d worked hard over the past couple of years to put that Sam as far in the rearview mirror as feasibly possible, but he couldn’t let some other poor kid go through that. Not if he could help. And new and improved Sam? He could help. He would help.

Course decided, Sam shoved his way inside the restroom, urinals and stalls marching off along the left wall, porcelain sinks and cheap mirrors on the right. He was ready for almost anything except what he actually found.

Himself.

Or, at least, himself as he’d been five or six years ago. And surrounding young, fresh-faced Sam were a bunch of jocks in letter jackets, led by none other than Barron Calloway. The same smug Barron Calloway who’d been at his graduation party—who was probably still hanging out in the pool, smoking cigarettes and drinking beers. The bullies pressed in, encircling young Sam like a noose, and as they did, they changed. Shoulders swelled, jackets ripped along the seams, arms lengthened, skin turned an ashy shade of pale green.

They looked like trolls. Though trolls in letter jackets and expensive blue jeans. Sam briefly considered turning and bolting… but no. Not this time.

He’d let Barron get under his skin at the party, but he wasn’t going to let that happen again. Sam had waited years to show these jerks he wasn’t scared of them anymore. Yeah, maybe these weren’t really the bullies who’d tormented him for most of his young life, but they were close enough to count. Sam let the door slam behind him, the sound bouncing off the tile walls. Almost as one, the newly-evolved trolls turned on him, beady black eyes fixing on him, glimmering with barely concealed joy. They were looking for a fight, and they’d finally found one.

“Leave him alone,” Sam did his best to keep his tone light but firm.

“Will do,” Troll Calloway grunted, showing off a pair of jutting lower fangs. “We’ll take a piece out of you instead.”

Troll Calloway broke into a looping gorilla-like gait, his knuckles scraping along the floor as he moved. Sam knew he should be scared out of his mind, but instead he felt a jolt of excitement. He adjusted his posture, knees slightly bent, head centered over his body, feet spread shoulder-width apart. The creature closed with unnatural speed, arms outstretched, its hands now as big as dinner plates. Sam shot inside Barron’s guard, one hand latching onto the lapel of the troll’s letter jacket—pulling the deformed creature down and off balance—while his other arm wrapped around the thing’s head. Sam spun his torso clockwise, jerking down, dragging Troll Calloway up and over his hip in a common Judo throw called, Koshi Guruma.

He’d never actually used a throw against a real opponent—only a training Uke—but he grinned like a madman as the troll left the ground, flipping through the air in a sharp arc.

Before his nightmarish bully landed, the creature in his hands simply dissolved, turning to smoke which drifted into the air and resolved into a new prompt:

Survive.

The high school disappeared just as quickly as it had come, and now Sam found himself in a rugged jungle, stretching out around him in every direction. The ground beneath him was loamy, almost spongy, and covered in thick patches of twisted vegetation and a gnarled blanket of creeping tree roots. Enormous, moss-covered trunks reached up, up, up, and intermixed among them were palm trees with massive fronds and a thousand other types of trees that Sam couldn’t name. The leafy canopy completely blocked out the sky, save for a few errant sunbeams, and the air was hot and sticky—far more humid even than southern California.

All around him were the sounds of a rainforest. The hoot of monkeys, the chirping cry of colorful songbirds, the soft rustle of a breeze through the high leaves. There was a *snap-crack* as something big pushed its way through the foliage, followed by an odd gurgling noise that he couldn’t quite place. He turned, searching the tangle off to the left. Another *crack* in the deep brush and a purple-black blob the size of a minivan rolled into the open. The thing defied explanation—Sam didn’t even have a frame of reference for what he was seeing.

Spoiled Jell-O given sentience maybe?

If he were playing a DnD campaign, he’d say this was a Dungeon Slime, but it didn’t look like any kind of Slime he’d ever heard of.

It had no face. No mouth. Floating inside it, suspended like little pieces of fruit in Aunt Jane’s Thanksgiving cranberry Jell-O salad, were a mishmash of bones. Skulls. Femurs. Rib cages. And not just bones from humans, but from pretty much everything. It had a small army of rudimentary limbs, formed from the bones within, but none of those limbs seemed especially functional. With another gurgle, it lurched forward, moving at a swift trot, though nothing close to a run, its strange limbs waggling manically like one of those wacky waving arm inflatable flailing tube-men. On a purely surface level, this thing seemed far less formidable and dangerous than the troll-bullies from the high school, but Sam had learned his lesson from the first test.

Run meant run. Decide meant decide. And survive meant survive. In this case it also meant run—survive, but book it.  

Since this thing was part of the ‘survive’ portion of the test, then clearly it was a serious threat. Sam had no weapon, and he doubted very much that his rudimentary skills in Judo would work well against a gelatinous blob that probably outweighed him by a thousand pounds and had no proper limbs. Judo was about leverage, and in a fight against that thing Sam would have none. So instead, he turned and jogged away, making his way deeper into the dense bush. Survive, didn’t necessarily mean kill, so maybe he could just run out the clock.

***

And so it went for what felt like the next several hours. Where was the dang clock, anyway?

Sam kept moving, always moving, tripping his way over exposed roots, forging past gently burbling brooks, and trudging through thorny vines that scratched at his skin and ripped at his clothes. The jungle shifted and changed as he moved, but there was no discernable way out, and the blob of goo and bones kept on his trail like a bloodhound determined to bring down its prey. The creature never moved any faster, but it also never moved any slower. It was an implacable hunter, and pretty soon, Sam was sore, tired, and hungry.

But there was no defeating something like that thing, so he pressed on.

He didn’t have access to food or water, but there were berries and other strange fruits dotting heavy tree boughs. By hour eight or so, his stomach was growling in protest and his throat burned. The creature was maybe a few hundred feet back, working to get through a deadfall of downed trees, so Sam risked plucking a handful of the berries and plopping them into his mouth. The flavor was brilliant, like the sweetest raspberries he’d ever tasted. Then he dipped his mouth into a small stream, no bigger than his thigh. The water, like the berries, was crisp and refreshing, curing his raging thirst in an instant.

Another *crack* and *blub* brought his head back up—the overgrown Slime had cleared the trees. Sam turned and jogged off, picking up the pace. He made it all of a hundred feet before a railroad spike of pain doubled him over. He dropped him to his knees while bright barbs of fire radiated out from his belly. When he tried to gain his feet, his legs simply refused to cooperate. He glanced back over his shoulder to find the creature steadily gaining ground on his position. Sam fought to stand once again, but when it became utterly obvious that it wasn’t going to happen, he grit his teeth and proceed to crawl away from the encroaching monster. Pulling himself hand over hand, digging in with his knees and toes.

But he wasn’t fast enough. Not even close.

“Wow, this game is the absolute worst,” Sam growled an instant before the gelatinous bone creep steam-rolled right over the top of him, the purple fluid eating at his skin like acid as he was pulled up inside the monster. No longer able to speak, he could only think, “Yep, the absolute worst. Why in the world would someone make a game like this?”

But despite everything, he wasn’t quite ready to call it quits. He’d already come this far, after all, so he steeled his resolve even as the slime devoured him.

Sometime later, he opened his eyes to find the monster was nowhere to be seen, and the jungle had been swapped out for a classroom. Happily not high school again, thank the lord. This time it was the comforting and familiar seating of a lower-level college class. Unlike many of the higher-level classes—which were smaller and more traditional—this room had stadium-style seating to accommodate large freshmen groups a hundred or more strong. At the front was a wooden podium, though there was no instructor in sight, and behind that was an honest-to-goodness chalkboard.

Written across the board in elegant script were three words:

Do Your Best!

The moment Sam finished scanning the scrawled text, a paper test booklet appeared on the wooden fold-out desk in front of him, the pages filled with a host of questions. There was a sharpened pencil beside the booklet, ready and waiting to be used. Well now, this wasn’t exactly fun, but at least this was something Sam understood. Compared to being crushed alive by a huge boulder, facing down thuggish nightmare bullies, or being poisoned then slowly consumed by a giant man-eating slug, this actually seemed pretty snazzy.

Sam broke the seal on the booklet and dove in with the reckless abandon of a kid fresh out of college, his head stuffed full of useless facts that had few real-world applications. He tore through the English section, answering questions about similes and metaphors; killing the reading comprehension portion, then writing an entire long form essay on classic literature. Next came mathematics, followed by a section of world history, astronomy—which was odd—biology and general anatomy, basic psychology, and even politics and religion.

Whenever he finished one section, it simply disappeared, whisking his answers away with it, until the booklet stared at him with empty pages. There were a few sections of the test he’d struggled through, but, overall, he felt more confident about this portion of the trial than any other he’d slogged his way through. Which made sense, considering he’d died in two out of three trials so far. Finally, after what felt like ages—his mind foggy, his back sore, his stomach grumbling even more—the next prompt appeared.

Time is up! Select ‘proceed’ to begin the next test.

He didn’t know what would be next, but as long as it was better than the jungle-blob-survival-marathon he’d do alright. Sam reached out and tapped ‘proceed.’ In an eyeblink the world shifted around him as he was whisked away to the next area. This time, the room didn’t change, only his location in it. Instead of being in a seat near the back of the auditorium-style classroom, he was now front and center, standing behind the wooden podium with a sheaf of notes neatly arrayed before him. And though the room itself hadn’t changed, there was one rather disconcerting addition: the seats were now filled with people.

A sea of eager faces stared at him expectantly. The notes in front of him wriggled on the edges, dark bold text appearing on the page with his next set of instructions.

Explain the Fundamentals of Trigonometry.

Of all the sections on the test, the mathematics portions had easily been his worst area; naturally, that was the thing he had to explain. And the fact that he was borderline terrified of public speaking certainly didn’t help the situation any. If Sam were honest with himself, this might actually have been worse than the Jungle Slime, though for very different reasons.

He hadn’t given up then, though, and despite the fact that he was rapidly losing patience with this process—this was a game, and one that was supposed to be fun—he wasn’t ready to throw in the towel. Not quite. So, against every instinct in his body, he carefully straightened the papers on his lectern, cleared his throat, and spent the next hour muddling his way through the single worst lecture ever given on Trig. By the end, he felt like a train wreck: his voice hoarse, his palms sweaty, his nerves shot. Yep, he was definitely not having fun. Not even remotely. He’d rarely experienced a bigger surge of relief than when that trial lapsed and the auditorium dissolved, reforming into…

The same stony passageway from the very first trial. The same rough-hewn walls. The same gritty sand underfoot. The scent of salt and seawater tickling at his nose. Except, now the hallway had a fork. Down one path was his mom and dad, both of them smiling as they waved encouragingly. Down the other path was his sister, hands planted on hips, a scowl on her goth-black lips. Sitting beside her was their German Shepard, Max, his doggy tongue lolling out from the side of his mouth. In front of Sam was a lever and hanging from it was a sign that read:

Save One.

There was a thud and a crunch as the Indiana Jones boulder dropped from the air, rattling the ground with its landing. Sam glanced down at the lever, horror dawning on him as he realized just what this test wanted from him. This time around, the boulder wasn’t going to crush him, it was going to obliterate either his parents or his sister and dog. The lever in front of him was essentially a railway track switch, and he was the one who got to decide who lived and who died.

“No,” he muttered, shaking his head. “Nope. I’ve done enough and I’m not doing any more.”

Without a second thought, he broke into a headlong sprint toward the boulder, which was now rolling toward his parents. He zipped between his mom and dad, long legs eating up the distance in no time. The boulder hit him like a wrecking ball, accompanied by a brief flash of pain, and then he was back. Respawned right where he’d started a moment before. The cavernous hallway with its switch and sign, parents smiling at him while his sister scowled and Max wagged his fluffy tail.

The game was going to make him choose—it was testing his morals limits. Instinctively, he knew there was no way to move forward, not without pulling that lever and cosigning one of the groups to death.

And that just wasn’t something he was prepared to do.  

“I’m done,” he yelled at the air around him. “I want to end the trials. This isn’t what I came for. This isn’t fun anymore. This whole thing was never fun, but this? This is too much. Please take me back.”

The boulder dropped with a *thud* and crunched across the sandy gravel on the floor. For a second, Sam envisioned Doctor Strange confronting Dormammu over and over again, suffering a horrific death each time. He just hoped that wasn’t what he’d signed up for. He grimaced, bracing himself to die again, and took off for the boulder once more.