Pirates and the Golden Treasure ch.09 (Peter's Story)

    Deep beneath the soil, beneath the rock, where only darkness and silence should exist there is instead a low electric hum and the illumination from artificial sources of light. The low light of these sterile halls reflects off its metal surfaces, the only things present here for uncounted years have been unfeeling mechanisms. The oddly fresh recycled air is disturbed for the first time in a long time by a human being.

 

   A lone figure has found his way past the stone tunnels, past the hybrid tunnels with their vicious artificial guards protecting the very oddly arranged combination of stone and metal surfaced tunnels. This figure has taken a path that no one on this world or any other for over ten thousand years should have been aware of. Inside the clean halls small orange spider like machines scurry out of the way of very dirty boots, only for even smaller blue versions to flow from the wall, not from holes, but somehow right out of the walls, to clean up the mud like crabs feeding on carrion.

 

    The man passes by a door with a sign on it he hasn’t seen in a decade, if not longer, in fact he’s pretty sure its been more than twenty years since he was home. A rather vague image of a man colored blue, with a door on the other side of the hall with one colored pink. He laughs a little to himself and walks inside; tears actually flow down his cheeks, not because he’s glad to see a bathroom, but rather because he is suddenly struck with the feeling of being homesick.

 

   Inside he looks in the mirror, at his scruffy appearance, he looks completely out of place. He shakes his head, if his family, heck if anyone back home saw him now…

 

   “Well,” he thinks, “if what that bitch-demon showed me is true I’d fit in now.”

 

    He spits in the sink, and does a double take as water flows along the sides with a mind of its own to clean it and retract back into the rim. As familiar as this place looks, as much as it reminds him of home, he has to remember what he was told, it was built by people much more advanced than those from his own world.

 

    Further down the hall a purring catches his attention, he jumps for a moment mistaking the black feline face, and the female silhouette as Cata. However where arms should be, she has wings like those of a bat, whose membrane connects along her thigh to just above the knees. As terrifying as this would be for anyone else, and honestly in his own mind he reminds himself that if he were still what he calls “sane” he would be to, he just looks at her with a scowl on his face.

 

   “Litmet,” he mutters between his teeth.

 

   “Lets no say my name any more than we have to Mr. Peter Jones.” She says with her sultry voice, better suited escaping from the lips of a succubus than a cat-demon like creature, “you wouldn’t like the kinds of things on this world that might come to investigate my presence.”

 

   Peter just shakes his head, he learned long ago not to ask any more questions when talking to things like her. He is convinced at this point in his life they just love to hear themselves talk, and talk, and talk some more about their pasts, and lives, and supposed nobility.

 

   “Why so angry?” she asks, “After every thing I have done, I saved you Rhuen’s Dark Forest world did I not? I imprinted in your mind the direction to come here and even told you how to find a way to even get to this world. This is it, the place where you can finally get your revenge.”

 

   She smiles, showing her teeth, “with out any of the bells and whistles as you put it that you’d get doing this the easy way, my way.”

 

   She shrugs, a rather alarming gesture given her wings, “So just follow along, and all those questions buzzing in your head, all those doubts, will be answered.”

 

   As she turns down the hallway she had been blocking the light from with her nine foot tall frame, her body turned to shadow, shrank, and re-shaped into that of a pale woman with long black hair, with a voluptuous frame, and wearing a black skirt business suit.

 

   As they walk down the winding hallways, countless sliding doors, and oddly dispersed stairwells (with not a single one going down more than one floor for some reason), Peter’s mind is left to wander. His mind fades into the past.

 

    He was not born on this world; no to him this place is like something out of a book, or a movie. To him this place is an odd mix of fantasy and science fiction, no he was born in a world where there were no monsters or magic, well not everywhere at least. Where he came from the idea of people throwing fireballs during a street fight was reserved for video games.

 

    His home sweet home, a thought that brings a tear to his eye, as it has been ages since he has been there. In reality it’s been only twenty years, but it might as well have been an eternity ago, another life time even. He lived in a rather peaceful mountain town, despite stories from his grandfather about some secret religious order that he belonged to and monsters being real he himself had never seen any real monsters or magic, no in fact he grew up like anyone else, played sports in school, and as an adult he got into law enforcement, he even became the sheriff of his town.

 

    His life had been so normal, and on such a good track, that is until that day, the day his office started getting calls from people in the outskirts of town and the surrounding area, calls about a mysterious werewolf like creature attacking livestock and horses. There was even some guy going around claiming to be trying to hunt the creature.

 

   As fate would have it the mayor of his humble little town had connections that got them to call in an expert on large mammalian predators, a woman he fell in love with on first sight.

 

   *he shakes his head*

 

   No, it was just a crush; she was both brilliant and beautiful. But in the end…in the end she…Peter can’t stand the thought, twenty years and the rage still exists, monsters are real, the hunter was a fool. The hunter, Mike, had gotten his family, his son, his brother, his father, and his grand-father, involved in his hunt. But those things, yes there was more than one, weren’t werewolves.

 

   Peter’s sudden seething of anger, as well as the very thoughts in his head don’t go un-noticed by Litmet, as a sly smile spreads across her face.

 

   Peter’s son was maimed, his father too, by the monster’s wife. They had all thanks to Mike’s advice decided to hide out in the church Peter’s grandfather called home on a cliff overlooking the mountain road and his brother’s gas station. They had also taken the woman, Samantha, the zoologist who had come to look into the sightings…no, he had taken her there, it was all his fault

 

   *He shakes his head in anger*

 

   The same thought that had plagued him from time to time, the reminder in his own mind that they might have been safe, the monsters may have left it at the maiming, but he can’t ever know for certain. For some reason he had thought after the female monster had broken into his father’s home and maimed both his son and father that she might be in danger too. His own stupid crush most likely, but he had no way of knowing that somehow at some point they had gotten to her, that she had become their thrall or what ever the hell they called a person that had mutated into semblance of their likeness and power.

 

   They had all hidden in the church, he had left her upstairs as he along with his grandfather and Mike had gone into a secret holy weapons closet in the basement to prepare for battle. She had transformed into a crimson furred fox like monster while they were down there. She caught them all off guard, killing his father and grandfather before escaping into the stormy weather.

 

    *heh…heh…heh*

 

  Peter laughs slowly and coldly.

 

    They had actually believed they were safe, protected by holy guards.

 

   “Glowing alphabet trinkets” he says to himself, “compared to the crazy shit I’ve seen in this effed up place we might as well have been trying to use twigs to beat back a tiger.”

 

   They had spotted the family, the two adults, and two offspring; yes the whole thing had been about Mike, that bastard, harassing them when the female was pregnant and the male hunting for them. Those vengeful monsters…

 

   *Peter grinds his teeth*

 

   He had gone to fetch a posse, he knew they couldn’t really do anything, but he knew from his grandfather however that monsters like that preferred to remain unknown to the world at large so would likely avoid being seeing by a large number of people.

 

   “heh,” he thinks, “Not like this world at all, you can hardly walk through a forest with out tripping over some monster.”

 

   However while he was gone they attacked the church, utterly destroying it, miraculously his son and brother survived, or rather were spared, Mike on the other hand was killed. Or at least that’s what they thought, given the Mike’s charred corpse left behind it wasn’t a bad guess really, but no what Mike got was worse than death.

 

    After this intense event Peter used his grandfather’s contacts to try and get in contact with the Order, the secret religious group that supposedly fought back the creatures of the darkness. What he found instead was a group in turmoil some inner conflicts and events that he would later discover involved the very creature walking in front of him now. Mike had tried to call some special paladin guys in but they were busy on the other end of the world trying to prepare to confront, yes the very woman walking in front him.

 

   In his journey he instead ended up joining a splinter group, some crazy nuts who claimed they wanted nothing to do with the very magic the main group used to combat the darkness, the magic they believed also came from the same evil forces.

 

   “Hypocrites,” mutters Peter.

 

   While not using direct magical objects they did hybridize mystical energy sources into machines. It was on one such mission they had heard of a creature in the south western deserts similar to those he had encountered in the mountains. Little did they know it was a trap. The creature used the wind, sand, and pure brute strength to easily topple their robots. While fleeing they were captured by black vans and helicopters filled with spooks in black suits.

 

   These people took Peter and the rest to a secret underground prison, some insanely high tech automated place whose technology Peter hadn’t seen anything like until joining Cata’s crew so many years later. He was tricked there as well, a reptilian pink scaled vampire creature.

 

   He doesn’t notice Litmet turn and glare at him for split second out the corner of her eye, which would have been a stark reminder to him that his flash back might as well be a projection on the wall for her.

 

   The name Ananth burns into his mind. Yes it was Ananth, the consort of Litmet herself, cleverly allowed to be captured by the forces of Censa, the very group that had captured Peter.

 

 

   Peter shakes his head as he nearly walks into a wall causing an orange spider-bot to scramble out of the way. He doesn’t realize it but Litmet had flashed her will into his flash back imposing that last bit of information over it. His normal mortal mind however compensates and ignores it, not even noticing it in fact.

 

   After being freed from the prison the vampires had taken Peter in, and reintroduced him to Mike. Mike’s soul had been captured by what he had thought to be a seriously over grown werewolf, the creature whose family murdered and maimed Peter’s family. Mike’s punishment was to be reformatted into the body of a demon, immortal human by day freakish gargoyle like beast at night.

 

    Peter had been promised revenge, he had been told that the woman, Samantha, the very woman he had developed a crush for, the zoologist, was close at hand. The whole time he was with the splinter order group he had really been trying to find her. Yes the larger ones maimed his family, but she killed them. As far as he was, and still is, concerned she is worse than them. They were really after Mike, she could have easily just fled the building to join them, but no she killed his father and grandfather.

 

   “Broken record.” thinks Litmet eavesdropping on his second person flash back.

 

   The vampires had told him where she would be, but didn’t warn him that her masters would be there too and then some. He went after her, even got the local police force involved, his intention was to expose the existence of such creatures to the world as well as apprehend the murderer. Or at the very least he hoped they were as about as loyal as the typical vampires he had encountered and would leave their weaker ones exposed and hide themselves. In either case he was way off base, they actually openly slaughtered the cops.

 

    As for Peter, the large male, as fearsome monster that goes by the name of Rhuen had other plans for him. The damned thing had been the one to turn Mike into a monster, it had a lot more tricks up its sleeves than Peter could have ever imagined. The massive beast opened a portal between universes, and dumped Peter in a strange forest. At the time he had no idea where he was, the local wild life however was quick to let him know he sure as hell wasn’t on Earth any longer.

 

    It’s amazing, one year, one year of his life stands out above all others. He has spent the last twenty years just trying to get back home to take revenge for events that occurred over one year. It’s absolutely dumbfounding that so much time has passed, most of the time he couldn’t even tell how much time was passing. The place he first landed, the sky was always hazy, it would get a little darker, maybe dusk like, but never full night, but also never full day. It was considered a bright day when he could make out his shadow in full detail.

 

   Its almost laughable now, he had believed he had literally been sent to Hell. The first time he encountered the beasts he thought they were the demons of hell. He had spent months in decaying cloths using silver needle plants as spears, he even wore the skull of a mota-deer on his hand as a weapon, with its metal blade horn it did make an effective weapon.

 

   The first time he encountered the aliens, the Grunaga, he thought them demons. It was from them that he learned the true nature of where he was; although they looked primitive they were apparently the equivalent of the Amish amongst their own culture.

 

   He remembers when he finally got off the planet, hitching a ride for work from a Kuhrai vessel, those cat-people who reminded him too much of Litmet, granted none of them could ever sprout wings. The first time he saw that the place he had been was in fact a large flat world, covered in nothing but forests, rivers, and lakes, and no bigger than some countries, was so surprising he thought he was actually going to have a heart attack.

 

   Every thing beyond this point somewhat blended together, hopping ships to work, till one day while on Cata’s ship she appeared in his dreams. Litmet was back, and everything is history, she gave him a vision of this place and burned into his mind how to get here. He doubted it many times during these last months while on Cata’s crew. But after they came to this island the landscape was exactly as he saw in the vision, but he was told to come alone, if the Aesperians learned, if Cata learned, what is down here it would be disastrous. He know this all Litmet’s planting, he doesn’t know what she is up to but anything is better than being a pirate or serving food to rich monsters like his last job.

 

   “It would be disastrous.” says Litmet breaking Peter’s trance.

 

   He looks around, he has no idea how he got in this large lab covered in consoles, strange floating screens, and most disturbingly large tubes big enough for a man to easily stand in, and some even large enough for an elephant. He looks back at Litmet under the brighter lights of this room and nearly does a double take, he hadn’t seen her in twenty years, and yet he knows this is what she always looked like in human form, and yet. She looks remarkably similar to that sorceress Cata had capture, the woman whose name he can’t remember off the top of his head, he knows it was something strange.

 

    *Mulan, Rodan…something*

 

    Litmet has black hair however, a thinner build, paler skin, and higher cheek bone structures. A casual glance though and one might mistake them for sisters, or cousins, or something.

 

   “This is the true treasure of Los Rodos, as the Aesperians call it. The Aesperians my dear Peter Jones; are like yourself not native to this world. They came here two thousand years ago from yet another universe, they are not demons nor gods as you might have thought. They are humans, humans evolved to become powerful beings indeed. This world, like the one you were first left on by Rhuen was brought to this universe by a powerful entity. A being I would rather not know we are here, hence why I’d rather you not speak my name aloud least it draw her attention.”

 

   Litmet chuckles to herself, “The Aesperians came here of their own free will however, found this mutilated Earth and colonized it. This world had once been like your own, the locals had become incredibly technologically advanced. So advanced in fact that they pierced the very veil of reality with their machines, and drew that…being’s…attention, she pulled their world here just as they were causing their own destruction. Rather than be destroyed her intervention caused their world to evolve, and they became the multitudes of beast like humanoid monsters that cover this world. The other monsters are in fact the animals and plants of that Earth.”

 

    She pauses looking at Peter’s quizzical expression, “Oh yes, you think we just like to hear ourselves talk don’t you. You couldn’t care less about all this, and after going home it won’t matter anymore. Well to cut to the chase, this facility was built to research the effects of mystical energy on biological entities. In fact that oracle, that golden dragon like creature was born in this very place; born in fact from pond scum or a jelly fish or some such basic biological material.”

 

    Peter looks at the tubes, “So how does this help me demon?”

 

    *heh, heh, heh, heh*

 

    “Oh yes, that. What does this facility that evolves biological beings into super-beings with out them being fused with the blood of vampires, werewolves, or other such beings have to do with a man who wants revenge on such creatures, who wants to go back to a world that is now gone through an apocalypse. Oh yes my dear Peter Jones, your world is not what it used to be, but you already know that don’t you. You saw it a few years ago, you thought you had found a way home through the portals on the Land of Dao, only to see that your world has been invaded by aliens, who so queerly unleashed a plague that is turning every normal none-enhanced or none-monster as you’d call them humans into zombies.”

 

   “Its still mystical.” He says snidely.

 

  “Mystical?” she says while crocking her head to the side, “I misspoke. What we would call mystical energy. Energy is energy after all, some more exotic than others, these people built machines able to access the inter-dimensional layer of the infinite mult-verse that provides a very special…something that to us we can only call energy, but I’d assume energy is the wrong word, but the correct word is something we don’t have a word for.”

 

   She shrugs her shoulders and dismisses the topic with a flip of the wrists, “In any case, this reality building energy matter what ever, effects all matter in different unusual ways. Think of it like a classic sci-fi movie where radiation could turn ants giant or plants sentient, only real. With this power they animated stone and created golems, they provided power to machines that now needed no hydraulics and some could even morph their shapes. With this power they made more than that oracle, in fact I know from their databases down here, which by the way I have been studying for some time now, that she was an accident, a piece of some early experiment monster that had escaped and continued to evolve in the soil on its own. Their accidents created giant sharks, a giant sea turtle, and other freaks. But what they created on purpose was amazing. They made a giant triceratops that spit lava, a four hundred foot tall dragon man, and many other living weapons.”

 

    *ssss-hehsss-heh-heh-heh*

 

   “It can be no wonder when this power went out of control that it at first mutated humans into monstrous forms befitting their personalities, and started to rip their very world apart, needing that…entity…to save them. No doubt out of her twisted curiosity just to see what would survive and evolve when left this way.”

 

    That Litmet keeps referring to something that she seems to hate and fear is more than alarming to Peter, “Uh, so what you’re basically saying…miss Litmet…is that these machines would mutate me into some monster based on my personality?”

 

   “huh? Oh…” Litmet composes herself reminding herself mentally that she is supposed to be the big scary one here, “No, the raw force would do that. This lab was top secret, it’s below the ones that made those monsters and did general energy research. This lab was made just before the catastrophe; it will only enhance you to the point of being like an Aesperian. You will be human, with enhanced strength, speed, agility, stamina, healing, and… a power based on your personality. Unfortunately no matter how much we…I…worked on this that last part is un-avoidable. But a basic scan will tell us…what ever…yeah, us, what that power will be.”

 

   She stands tall and smiles broadly, her eye teeth extending, and speaking higher and more dramatic, “Yes Peter Jones, your world is over, your family may well be dead. All that remains for you is vengeance against the ones who did it, your enemies, and mine, will you surrender your very humanity, to become something more than human to avenge them?”

 

   Peter raises an eyebrow and looks around, “Would I give up being a weak human. I don’t even remember how strong I was compared to others. I’ve been kicked around for twenty years by everyone; even kids can kick my ass in this stupid place. You’re telling me the Earth is covered in zombies and monsters, and the only way you’ll let me go back is to make me like the Aesperian guys? Sure what the fuck, I got nothing left to loose, just so long as my extra power isn’t something stupid like sniper eyes or something.”

 

    He secretly thinks to himself, “To avenge my family, I will surrender my own humanity.”

 

    Everything is prepped, Peter stands on the platform as the green clear tube lowers over him and fills with a strange glowing green fluid as wires morph from the ground and connected to his body as though they have minds of their own. The fluid puts him into stasis.

 

   Litmet goes over the instruments, “Hmm, interesting, so your power is electrokinesis with electrical absorption, focus, and discharge. Hmm, with a touch of minor levitation and…well isn’t this interesting, some minor vampire like traits as well. How strange, all that exposure to this world along with your past experiences has created a rather confused form. You can glide just above surfaces, focus, absorb, and fire electrical fields. Let’s see you will only be weakened by sunlight rather than killed, have night vision, extending eye teeth. But feeding on blood or anything else will have no positive affect what so ever.”

 

  A sly smile spreads across her face, “You are going to hate me when you think you’re a vampire, wonder how long it will take before you figure out its just surface. But you have only yourself to blame, your powers come not just from physical stats but also personality, guess deep down you identify a little with vampires at some level.”

 

   She looks at Peter’s sleeping form in the tank which is already being altered by the flow of mystical energy. She knows he can’t hear her, no one can, the robots that maintain the facility can’t even understand her. She looks around, a look of remembrance crossing her face.

 

   “Two million years.” she says before going back to her work, “More time than any one can imagine and expect to stay sane. This place hasn’t changed at all in so much time. Enough time for anyone…”

 

   *rargh*

 

    She cuts herself off with a snarl. With a stern look in her eyes she stares straight at the screens and at the seemingly un-changing Peter, but she knows better. A brief image of another man in that same tank flashes through her mind; a man with long black hair and a much more muscular build.

 

   “Riff.” she mutters as her mind drifts, looking at the name of the machine created so long ago.

 

Living

Intelligence

Technologically

Metered

Enhancement

Transformer