Creature Girl Creations - 03, page 2
part #3 of Creature Girl Creations Series
“Really?” Roy smiled. “I kinda love skeletons.”
“Well, you better bone up on your bludgeoning skills.”
Roy sighed. “Hal, no puns. Hey, how come you haven’t restored your full self yet? It’s been a month.”
The A.I. laughed. “So you hate acronyms and puns? Where’s your orderly sense of humor?”
“I left it in my other body.” Roy walked to a spiraling staircase that dropped deep into the depths of the planet.
Hal had her other drone running recon. “Okay, at the bottom of this staircase, there’s a crypt, with a bunch of skeletons holding—get this, ha—swords and plasma rifles. Oops. One just blew up my drone. Dammit.”
Roy grinned. “Good. I didn’t want any spoilers. How big is the room?”
“Domed,” Hal responded. “About twenty feet tall at the center. Are you going to run into the thick of it?”
“No,” he replied. “I’ll pick off a few and play it safe. I’m here for a reason, not to play hero.” He switched over to full comms to communicate with the rest of his family. “Okay, girls, it looks like we’re going to be fighting skeletons. This is going to be an undead dungeon, but different than the zombies we faced before.”
Toxy was the first to respond. “Darling, I brought my niddies so they could devour prey. Correct me if I’m wrong, but skeletons have precious little blood. Am I wrong?”
Tails growled. “Let’s just get this over with. I want a nap and some chocolate chip cookies with milk. After elk jerky.”
Roy didn’t blame the moody fox girl—his elk jerky was delicious. “You should go home, get some jerky, get some cookies, and take a nap.”
“No.” The fox girl’s sigh created static on comms. “I don’t wanna miss out.”
“I will arrive momentarily,” Joey spat.
“But you’ll mate for me, right?” Chrissy asked.
The panther goddess couldn’t help but groan and correct the satyr. “Wait for you? Yes. Fine.”
“I like the idea of people mating, darling,” Toxy put in.
“Me three,” Halcyon said. “You fucking people have only just begun going through all the kinky combinations.” Then there was a sigh.
The poor A.I. was sad she didn’t have a body so she could join in the mating.
Joey and Chrissy came down the hallway, the lights on their plasma rifles illuminating the mossy stones of the corridor. Joey’s ears were back, and she was more scowl-y than ever. Underneath Chrissy’s goggles, the satyr’s eyes were wide, showing her pale blue irises. Peanut’s red eyes were also wide, clutching an Effexium strap on her left shoulder with all eight of its little squirrel legs. The strap had an Effexium tube she could hide out in during combat.
Farther down, Toxy and Tails, along with the niddies, were creeping down the corridor behind them.
Roy addressed their rear guard. “Keep your eyes peeled.”
“We have a lot of eyes back here to peel, darling,” Toxy said. “We’ll be fine.”
“Yeah, we’ll be fine!” Arra added.
Nida was there to contradict her. “No, we won’t.” A second later, “Maybe we will, but I still want prey!”
Roy had to grin at his monster babies. He needed to completely clear the area of any unfriendlies because he didn’t want them anywhere near a fight.
With Joey and Chrissy at his back, and Halcyon’s drone behind them, they walked the spiraling staircase to the bottom. The landing led into the dome of the crypt. From his vantage point, he could see the shelves of skeletal bodies, which appeared to be resting with their swords and rifles clutched to their chests. Dust and webs covered them, which again, had all been manufactured to give them a certain look.
“How old are these bodies?” Roy whispered.
Hal answered. “We have sub-layer satellite images of the launch silo and the surrounding areas. This wasn’t here a week ago, so yeah, this is new.”
The rude girl had done a perfect job on the crypt, as far as he could see. If she didn’t kill them, and if he didn’t kill her, Roy would want her on his design team.
Roy knew he should’ve just started hurling fire and taken out the enemies a few at a time, but he couldn’t help himself. He wanted to have the cinematic experience of seeing a crypt full of skeletons come alive.
He strode into the room, becoming taller and wider with every step. In the center of the domed room, he stood in his Infinity Juggernaut form. Liquid fire dripped down from his wrist, filling his steel hands with flames. He was twelve feet tall and nearly three feet wide. His goggles and suit expanded with his body.
The fire flickering from his hands perfectly lit up the crypt.
Ten sets of shelves, five rows per set. Fifty skeletons sat up. The ones on the top turned their creaking skulls to face him. The ones on the bottom slid out, entangled in webs. Dust clouded them from their yellowed bones and burial shrouds. A dry smell, like old leather cracked in the sun, stank up the crypt.
Roy saw how each skeleton moved with such precision, following code, which was probably buried somewhere in their heads. But these skeletons weren’t androids. No, they must’ve been printed out of Effexium since there were no muscles or tendons. Halcyon had mentioned the CPM, but not the Effexium, so maybe the rude girl had her own supply. Regardless, the Effexium animated the bone, which meant the undead creatures were using some kind of friction to move. It was a testament to the awesome talent of the Pelerine team.
“I will never get tired of this life,” Roy whispered. Then he got to work.
He hurled flames at the top rows of skeletons. His fireballs hit with a splash, igniting the old cloth and consuming the bones. The jawbones of the skeletons opened as if to scream. That wouldn’t be possible. They didn’t have vocal cords.
Bottom-shelf skeletons bustled forward with swords. Top-shelf skeletons started firing their plasma rifles. From the back entryway, a collection of robed figures entered the room. Their hands glowed green. Did they have skin on their hands? Roy couldn’t tell, but first things first.
Roy used his Cellular Modification ability to turn his arms into big steel mallets. He stomped forward and brought a hammer hand down on a skeleton, caving in its skull, which, yes, did have some kind of gray matter inside. It was like a moldy old sponge wrapped around what had to be a download chip. But unlike with Roy and his monster girls, the gray sponge stuff was just for show.
He stormed forward into the room, hammering skeletons, breaking swords. The old, rusted blades snapped across his body. It almost tickled being hit with the dull-edged weapons. It was interesting that the rude girl had chosen to give them rusted swords for the full effect, though giving the skeletons plasma rifles shattered the illusion. Roy, however, enjoyed the cognitive dissonance.
The hyper-heated rounds struck his skin but didn’t pierce him. They hurt though, and the pain pissed him off. He thought about casting webs, but instead, he just bashed through the sword skeletons to get to the rifle ones.
He liked the feel of his hammer hand cracking through the bones, sending jawbones skittering across the floor, exploding skulls, or caving in rib cages. He swiped off the top halves of some of the skeletons, leaving them standing on bony legs without a thorax. The legs and pelvic bones then teetered and fell to the ground.
Behind him, Chrissy let out a deep bellow. She transformed into a monstrous goat woman, as tall as Roy but hairier, with huge curling horns poking out from her helmet. Peanut leapt from her shoulder and scurried up the wall to hide on a newly vacated shelf.
Chrissy would use the squirrel to see, but she also could tap into cameras inside the helmet. Or she could use Halcyon’s drone. The drone swept into the room, and the plasma barrels on either side of its square body flashed. The twin cannons blasted the skulls of several skeletons while the drone weaved around, avoiding enemy fire.
Joey entered the battle, a bit of darkness going so fast she became a blur. From that blur came plasma bolts, which crashed through the skeletons, taking them down one by one in sizzling bursts of heat.
“Stay behind me, Joey!” Roy roared.
The panther goddess listened. She switched from using her rifle to using her Effexium claws. In a flash of silver talons, she sliced off the head of a skeleton, turned, and slicked off another skull.
Chrissy was less subtle. Her metallic hooves gleamed, as did her horns, and she went through the room, kicking skeletons, or stampeding them, ripping through the bones and grinding their skulls underneath. A pair of undead riflemen were blasting at her, but like Roy, those attacks weren’t going to hurt her. She lowered her head and crushed them against a shelf.
Roy then felt something strike his chest in a flash of green lightning. It broke through his suit as well as his skin. It hurt. The crackling green energy was from the robed figures in the back. Up close, Roy saw that they had snake tails emerging from their robes. These things were nagas! Scaled three-finger hands were tipped with claws. Those hands glowed with green energy. More Effexium monsters.
Roy also noticed the runes on their robes, glowing green against the black material. He recognized the language that he’d created for Dungeon Core I with a team of linguists. These robed figures were necromancers, according to the storyline, and they’d resurrected the skeletons to act as guardians. They guarded a secret underground temple, a place sacred to Set, the snake god. Yes, he’d borrowed liberally from both Egyptian myth and the Conan stories.
Roy morphed his mallet limb back into a hand and grabbed the nearest skeleton. He hurled the bones into the robed figures. He hit one of the priests, impaling it with the skeleton’s bones and knocking it to the floor. The rest of the priests slithered into the next room as a massive stone slab started to slide down, rock grinding against rock.
Roy wasn’t about to let that stone slab seal off the room. He pounded forward, the rock floor underfoot crumbling beneath his weight and momentum. He trampled the impaled priest and caught the slab before it could slam completely. It was heavy, but not bad.
One of the fleeing priests turned and slithered back toward Roy on a long serpentine tail. It struck at him, trying to bury its fangs in Roy’s leg. The naga priest never had a chance. A blizzard of webs caught the monster and dragged it out into the skeleton room. Then three driders—one big woman and two little spider girls—went forward, threw silk up onto the ceiling, and hoisted the priest up. The monster wriggled and hissed in protest as Toxy finished rolling him up in her webs, while her spider daughters looked on with glistening eyes.
The spider queen poked one of her long legs through her webs and into the priest’s side. “Hush now, darling. Perhaps if you tell us all you know about this place, we won’t eat you.”
Arra frowned. “But I thought we were gonna eat him, Mama. We are going to eat him, right?”
For the first time, Nida didn’t contradict her sister. Her six eyes were black and wide, adorably hopeful. She nodded. “Yeah, Mama, can we eat the snake person?”
Toxy laughed. “In time, my darlings, in time. But first. Let’s see if he’ll talk!”
By this time, Tails had come in raging in her human form. Her nine tails flung fire until nothing was left. Smoke hung in the ceiling, and the place smelled like a skeletal bonfire. However, there had to be some ventilation because there was still oxygen to breathe.
Chrissy walked quickly forward and squeezed herself under the stone slab. She then hefted with her leg muscles. With Roy pushing, they jammed the stone up into the ceiling. The crunch of the rock smashing into some kind of housing was very satisfying.
Roy transformed human, as did Chrissy, pulling her helmet off. She was sweaty and smiling. “I like to break things.” Cute and innocent, it was a surprise to hear that coming from her, but her shining face showed it was true.
“Me too, Chrissy,” Roy agreed.
He went over to the dangling snake priest, who was whispering, over and over, in a slithery voice. “We serve Set. Set serves us. All praise the high priestess of Set. We serve Set. Set serves us. All praise the high priestess.”
Tails came striding up. She looked pissed. She swept her nine burning ends under their prisoner. “Enough talk. Tell us the name of the high priestess. Right fucking now.”
Halcyon’s drone flew over, gun barrels still glowing red. “Wow. Gangsta.”
Roy didn’t understand the word, but it was pretty clear it involved a take-no-shit stance.
The wriggling webbed creature screeched a single word. “Suzanne!”
Roy sighed as he wiped sweat from his brow. “I better get used to fucking puns if Suzanne is around.”
Toxy frowned. “Please, watch your language, people!”
“Sorry,” Tails said, throwing some chocolate-covered almonds into her mouth.
The niddies weren’t paying attention. Both Arra and Nida were gazing at the wrapped-up naga priest like he was something better than chocolate.
Chapter Three
HALCYON’S DRONE LEFT to run recon. But she could still weigh in on the big reveal since she was the ultimate multitasker.
Tails leaned against the wall, licking the last of the chocolate off her hands. She looked very pissed off and pregnant. She rested a hand on her belly, not saying a word.
“Suzanne?” Joey growled, green eyes narrowed. “I thought I killed her along with my lizard man body.”
“Wanna comment, Hal?” Roy asked.
The A.I. took a moment. “Uh, well, if Suzanne’s consciousness was uploaded here after her death, that would explain the network traffic during the Morcom tower fight. Could the rude girl have uploaded her consciousness? Maybe. We did with you, Roy, but then it took months to get you online. We talked to Suzanne that very day. It’s all pretty unlikely, but it’s not outside the realm of possibility.”
Chrissy held her helmet under an arm. Peanut had scurried back onto her shoulder. “Is this the snake girl? She was scary. And very yellow if I remember right. Yellow. I think that’s the right color, the right word, but, wow, it was fun killing the skeletons. Are we going to try to capture Elaine?”
“Suzanne,” Joey hissed. “And no, we are not taking her alive!”
Toxy slithered over to Roy, who had unzipped his Effexium suit to check his wound. His skin was blackened and there was some dried blood and a bruise surrounding the blistered flesh. “We’ll deal with Suzanne when we get to her. I’m wondering what the green lightning attack was.”
“It was some kind of Effexium blast,” Hal answered. “I’d like to take the naga back to the Hub and do some analysis.”
“Will it need its blood?” Toxy asked.
The snake priest was still murmuring on and on about Set.
“Blood would be nice,” Hal answered. Her drone’s lights shined on the webbed creature. It also reflected off of Arra’s and Nida’s fangs.
Toxy laughed and skittered over on her many legs. “That will not be possible, darling. My niddies need a snack. You all go on.”
“I could use some elk jerky,” Tails complained.
“We’ll get there, Tails.” Roy zipped his suit up. The wound hurt, but it wasn’t going to kill him. Next time, he’d simply have to dodge that Effexium lightning. “Just stay back and be safe. I want you safe.”
“I’d be safer at home, eating. Maybe a nap.” Tails yawned. Her fox face was impossibly cute.
Chrissy put her helmet back on. She was ready.
Joey slid a fresh clip into her plasma rifle.
Toxy smiled at her daughters as the little driders continued to eye their webbed meal.
Roy rushed the rest of the women out. “You don’t want to stay for this part.”
They crossed through another chamber, a square stone room, twenty by twenty. The stone slab was behind them. There was an archway to the left, to the right, and on the other wall. All the corridors led off into darkness.
Halcyon was there to help. “I did some recon, and the archway to the left leads to a trap room. If you step on the central tile, the entire floor cranks up and you wind up impaled on spikes. I don’t suggest you take that route.”
Roy grunted. “But I kinda want to see the trap room.”
“It wouldn’t fucking work on you, Boss man,” the A.I. returned. “You’d just go all heavy metal and ruin the rude girl’s trap fun.”
“You’re not wrong,” Roy said.
Toxy and the niddies came crawling into the room, legs a flurry.
Tails finally found a smile. “Well? Tell us how your meal was!”
“Delicious!” the niddies said in unison.
Toxy, ever the proud mother, caressed her satiated babies.
Roy had to laugh at the weirdness of his life. Well, at least three people were having fun on this dungeon dive.
Joey scowled.
Tails sighed.
Chrissy had put her helmet back on, so it wasn’t clear if she was having a good time or not. Peanut the squirrel seemed happy.
“So to the right is a dead end. What about to the left?” Roy asked their A.I.
“To the left are more skeletons. I got out of there before they could blow up my drone. Best bet is straight ahead. You’re going to love what that snaky bitch did with the place.”
Halcyon’s drone returned to the room through the archway in front of them. Water dripped off the metal. So wherever they were going was wet. “It’s not a water level, is it?” Roy asked.
“A what?” Hal asked innocently.
“A water level. You know. Where the characters have to fight underwater, even though that’s completely ridiculous, and they’re always the worst.”
“How would you breathe underwater?” Hal asked, dodging the question.
Roy narrowed his eyes. “We might just have to work on that at some point.”
Roy led the way through the archway, down more stairs, until he reached a ledge. What he saw made him love his life all the more.
He stood on the precipice of a vast room where a dozen waterfalls came roaring out of the rocks and splashed down into a whirlpool at the center of the room. Torches burned in scones set in the walls between the waterfalls, throwing light on the mossy marble tiles of the cavern, which was hundreds of feet wide, hundreds of feet tall, with a ceiling far overhead.
