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A Horse With No Main (Book One: ARcade)
Like a Platypus in a Dollhouse

Like a Platypus in a Dollhouse

The platypus stood over Pea with his sword in a furry, webbed hand. Glowing red and longer than Pea’s arm, the blade should have taken two hands to hold it steady, but he handled it with one as if it was made of foam.

Acidic fear flooded Pea’s brain, burning away every other thought except that she needed to escape.

Sure, she was in a video game, and maybe being killed would only reset her, or even wake her up in the real world, but fear didn’t care about that. It could see the sword, it could feel the plastic whip lashed tight around her arms and torso, and it could anticipate the agony of being sliced into bits.

Besides, he didn’t just say kill, he said destroy. Pea was pretty sure that wouldn’t be an easy process.

She wriggled like a landed fish, trying to scrape off or loosen the whip by rubbing it against the thick black carpet.

“Pod! Please help me!” A tiny part of Pea was deeply embarrassed by the shrill tone of her voice, but she couldn’t have changed it if she tried. “Junebug! He’s going to kill me!”

“Calm down,” Matt said. “I’m just going to check your inventory first…”

Boom.

The escape pod juddered as Junebug threw itself against it. Pea, all trussed up on the ground, bounced as the floor fell away from her. Unable to catch herself, she rolled face down.

Unfortunately, this time Matt didn’t move an inch. Instead he smirked and fished out a pendant from under his shirt that looked a little like a complicated spinning top. It was glowing a gentle pink that frosted the strands of blue fur around his neck.

“I haven’t had to use this in a long time,” he said. “Since my ship has proper inertia dampers, but I figured it might come in handy again someday.”

Junebug slammed into the ship again. A muffled squeak of pain, filtered through static, managed to pierce the fog of panic that was clouding Pea’s mind. She found herself on her back again, staring at the ceiling, having landed a few feet away from Matt.

“Junebug, stop!” The companion yelled. She gulped and took a deep breath to try and calm herself. It was difficult to pull in enough air when she had plastic rope compressing her chest.

“Pod, let me talk to Junebug.”

“Connection restored,” the crisp voice announced.

“Junebug, honey, don’t hurt yourself.” Pea tried to make her voice steady. “He’s got a… an Item or something, some kind of gyroscope that means you can’t move him. Just go.” Her voice, which had been doing so well, cracked. Every part of Pea was screaming that she needed to tell the little alien to help her, save her. Somehow her voice ignored all of that.

“I know it’s hard, but try to find your own way home.”

“I’m not leaving you!”

“Oh for ARC’s sake,” Matt said. “I don’t know what kind of lame tearjerker your player was working on but this is ridiculous. Whatever is in that ship isn’t a person. It can’t ‘go home’, it’s in a sandbox. It’s like you’re… like you’re a doll in a dollhouse telling a toy car to find a way home.”

He shook his head and rubbed a webbed hand over his eyes. “I don’t know why I’m even talking to you. I’m getting sucked into this nonsense.”

“Maybe it’s because you’re starting to realize that I’M A PERSON,” Pea snapped at him. That was better. Anger was the thing she needed. “We’re people. I don’t remember how I got here, and I don’t know what’s going on, but I’m a real person and I just want to leave this stupid game and go home.”

Tears began to leak from her eyes. Pea was tempted to ask Junebug to slam into the ship again so at least she could wipe them on the carpet. Instead they trickled down the side of her face and soaked into her hair.

Matt stared at her for so long she wondered if he was looking at his HUD again, but then he shook his head.

“It’s time to get out of crazy-town,” he muttered to himself. Pea didn’t even try to wriggle away as he approached her again.

“Now, be sensible and this will be a lot easier on both of us.” He grabbed her by the whip and hoisted her like a sack of potatoes over his shoulder. He was tall and seemed somewhat muscular aside from the furry, blue belly that poked out over his shorts but even so, lifting an adult woman should have been an effort. Instead, he handled Pea with a supernatural strength that she guessed was from leveling. She might have even been impressed if he hadn’t been abducting her.

When he adjusted her body using a hand to push her butt, it made Pea want to rip up the rest of the couches.

“I’m just going to take you back to my ship to look at your inventory. Then… well, we’ll see.”

“I bet you’re enjoying this you perverted arsehole,” Pea said and tried to kick him in the stomach. He grabbed her ankles just in time to save himself.

“What, ‘you’re not bad, you’re just drawn this way?’ Yeah, right,” Matt said. “It’s pretty obvious what your player wanted a Bright Companion for, and I don’t think the main reason was trite space opera roleplay.”

“I’m not Jessica Rabbit, I’m a real fucking person,” Pea said, and started kicking as hard as she could. They were in the rec room now, and in a few moments he was going to take her onto his ship and god knew what would happen after that.

Pea managed to work a leg free and caught her captor a glancing blow in the gut.

“Ugh,” he grunted and grabbed her ankle again. “You know, you don’t need legs for me to check your inventory, you…”

Crack!

“What the fuck was that?”

Matt dropped Pea without a second’s hesitation. She fell from his shoulder and landed on her back, wooshing all the air out of her lungs.

This is the shittiest game ever made, she thought furiously as she struggled to pull in oxygen. Why the fuck would anyone ever want to play this?

Dots were swarming her vision by the time she managed to gasp a tiny breath, and Matt had completely vanished down the hatch by the time she was breathing normally again.

“Pod,” she whispered as soon as she could form the word. “Pod! Close the hatch. Lock the… docking, door thing…”

“A Captain’s assignment is required to lock the hatch.”

Pea wanted to slam a fist into the floor but settled for kicking the ground like a toddler and screeching with rage. She let herself do it for all of two seconds before she drew in a breath and pulled herself together.

“Junebug,” she said, coughing. She squirmed her way into a sitting position and scanned the plastic rope, trying to find the end of the whip. Maybe she could unwind it before he got back.

“What happened?”

“I smashed his ship, Mother Pea!” The big, coppery alien child twirled above the dome. Pea was so grateful to see it, she barely felt at all nauseous looking straight up at her would-be savior.

“I didn’t want to at first, in case it was a Child, but… But it wasn’t, right? I just hit it a little bit…”

“Well, that’s just great. Now I’m going to have to go get my ship repaired.” Matt appeared through the hatchway before Pea managed to make any progress on the whip.

She swore a blue streak, as he picked her up again, this time letting her dangle like an enormous sports bag from one hand.

He started to walk, awkwardly, past the couches towards the open hatchway and Pea scrunched herself up in anticipation. You don’t carefully lower objects that you’re going to destroy anyway.

You just chuck them in.

Boom.

The sound was softer this time, and Pea could hardly blame her young friend. It had already been crying out with pain before it crashed into Matt the Egg’s ship. Pea tried to take comfort in the fact that she had a friend who was still trying to save her, no matter how futile that attempt might be.

She hoped Junebug would figure out a way out of the dollhouse.

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Her morbid thoughts were abruptly interrupted by the shrill, head-splitting cacophony of the alarm.

“We are on a collision course. I recommend evacuation.”

“What the hell is it now?” Matt looked up as if the answer was written on the inside of the dome. Pea twisted her neck and strained to look up as well. Junebug had vanished.

CRACK.

The sound echoed up from the hatchway, penetrating even the eye-watering alarm.

“The Setting Moon has put to space.”

Once again the companion was dumped on the ground, although this time she was close enough to it that it didn’t hurt as much.

“Watch it, dipshit!” She said through a mouthful of carpet.

“What the hell is going on?” Matt ran to the hatch as it slid closed. He scrabbled futilely at the seamless tiles. “What happened to my Ship?”

As the Pod computer cut the alarm and began her monotonous countdown, a melodic giggle floated around the rec room.

“If you want your ship back, you’d better let Mother Pea go,” Junebug said, as she rose above the horizon of the dome like a lumpy moon.

Pea cheered and renewed her effort to find the end of the whip.

Matt ran past the trussed up companion and back into the control room, just as she managed to find it. She squirmed, rubbing the metallic tip against the carpet and slowly worked it out from where it was stuck amidst the loops of plasticky rope.

Pea almost had it loose, when Matt reappeared and slumped down on the nearest couch.

“That little shit pushed us into the debris. There’s about six big pieces that are heading straight for us. And my ARC-damned ship is going to need at least 10,000 units in repairs.” He managed to look mournful, despite the ridiculous beady eyes and long bill that Pea was quickly coming to despise.

“Serves you right,” Pea said. The countdown was almost at the two minute mark again. She never thought she’d be so happy to hear it, but on the other hand she didn’t know if Junebug had really thought this through. If they actually did crash into debris, Pea was much more likely than her captor to be injured, considering she didn’t have a magical gyroscope, or whatever else that platypus might pull out of thin air.

The whip finally loosened and fell and the companion sprang up and threw herself away from Matt. Unfortunately, she did not account for the fact that the moment the hatchway closed, Pod began filling the spa up with water again.

For the second time, Pea fell into the hot tub.

“Is this… is this hell?” She heaved herself to her feet in the middle of the spa, as water streamed off her. A dark, sour despair overwhelmed her. “Did I die? Am I being punished? Was I Hitler or something? ”

“Don’t even joke about that,” Matt said gloomily. He was surprisingly stoic in the face of the countdown. “That’s the worst kind of exaggeration, comparing someone to Hitler. You’d barely qualify as… as a grade school bully.” He pressed a sarcastic hand to his chest as he mocked her. “Oh no, you got a little bit wet, obviously you’re being punished like a Nazi. Please.”

“Oh so now you’re talking to me like a real person, huh?” Pea ignored the water that was dripping everywhere and perched herself on the couches directly opposite him. If there had been somewhere else to go, she would have, but it seemed ridiculous to try and escape in such a tiny ship. It was better to keep an eye on him. They were about ten feet apart, with the spa pool between them.

Acting calm is my best bet, she figured. I need to act like I think Junebug would actually go through with it.

“I don’t know what the hell you guys are,” Matt admitted. “Some kind of rogue AI, I guess. An NPC gone insane. And you’re apparently going to cost me a level and probably my whole ship for no good reason.” He glared at her with a spark of anger amidst his general gloom, and raised his middle finger. “So fuck you, stop talking to me, and let me die.”

Pea stared at him with her mouth open for several moments until it struck her. He didn’t really care if he died because he wasn’t really going to die. His game character would die and then it would immediately respawn somewhere else. So he was obviously pissed off, but he wasn’t feeling a fraction of the fear that Pea felt a moment ago with his sword pointed at her throat. Matt the person was sitting in the real world somewhere, perfectly fine and probably ordering pizza for dinner while he sat out the countdown.

“Junebug, I don’t think it’s going to work,” Pea said. “You might as well just push the ship clear of the debris again.”

Matt perked up, but looked like he didn’t quite believe her.

The countdown continued. Pod had reached the 60 second mark and kept right on counting.

“Uh… Junebug? Honey, are you there? You’re cutting it very close now…”

Pea tore her eyes away from the platypus that was sitting on the couch opposite her, and raised them up to the dome. The child-alien was nowhere to be seen.

“Pod, please connect me to Junebug.” Pea felt like she was struggling to breathe again. The hot spa water had dried on her skin, leaving her bare legs and arms uncomfortably itchy. Like hell a grade school bully would be dressed up like this as punishment, she thought murderously, trying to stoke her anger. I’m a high school bully at the minimum.

“I am unable to comply.”

Fear stabbed Pea in the belly, sharper than before. “What happened to Junebug? Is it OK?”

Pod, apparently too busy counting to answer trivial questions, continued her run-down to zero.

Pea glanced at Matt, who somehow managed to roll his expressionless eyes and slumped back into his defeated posture.

Swearing, Pea ran around the edge of the couches to the control room. She never even got a chance to eat her breakfast mush today. She never got to have a proper conversation with the little sentient space ship that somehow cared so much about a stranger. She never got to chop off the stupid mane of unnatural blonde hair that bounced around like it wanted to shame Shirley Temple.

It was not going to end like this.

Unfortunately, there was still absolutely nothing she could do in the control room. Pounding on the touch screens was pointless, screaming orders at Pod got her nowhere, and there was no sign of Junebug.

There was, however, a chunk of rock and soil and trees headed straight for them, helpfully outlined in the usual neon green. It looked like a giant excavator had taken a massive shovelful of parkland and flung it into space. The chunk was so close that Pea could count the daisies in the grass.

“Ten, nine, eight…”

Entranced by her own possible doom, Pea noticed the big platypus boy trudge into the room from the corner of her eye. He slumped into the other command chair.

It was almost like they were a real spaceship crew, in a science fiction movie, waiting to be saved from disaster by some kind of last minute…

The parkland exploded.

For a second, Pea thought it had broken up completely on the shields, and that Pod had just been being dramatic about the danger. However, bits of rock and dirt flew from the explosion into the shields, which were a few feet closer to the viewscreen.

Someone had shot the chunk of debris.

Did Junebug have weapons?

“Can you hear me, Escape Pod A?” A smug, female voice sounded in the room, making Pea jump. The voice was husky and Pea couldn’t pick out the accent. “Looks like you had a close call there.”

“Oh no,” Matt said, and somehow managed to look even more gloomy than when he had been facing down his death.

A ship floated into view of the control room. It was bizarre, even by Pea’s limited standards. Spangled with spokes like a Christmas star, each topped with a different colored light, the inner part of the ship was a long oval, the dark green-blue of an emu egg. The effect was something like an exotic flower, and something like a porcupine at a rave.

Junebug was twirling around the newcomer in ecstasy, as if all its birthdays had come at once. The chunky potato-like alien was less than half the size of the emu egg, and orbited the whole spiky mess like a barren moon around a spectacular gas planet. Pea saw all of this through a haze of blue sparks as dirt and leaves and pebbles continued to kamikaze against the pod’s shield.

“Sorry for the drama, I was just saying hello to this little one here,” the woman said. “I didn’t realize that stuff was so close to you. She’ll push you out of the way of the rest of the debris, won’t you poppet?” The woman paused then spoke as if talking to someone Pea couldn’t hear. “Oh you aren’t a she? How about a they?”

Pea strained but couldn’t hear what Junebug- she assumed- was saying. Surely a ship AI is capable of a three-way phone call, she grumbled to herself, but didn’t dare ask Pod to change anything in case she lost the link to the woman.

Whoever she was, Matt didn’t like her, which made her Pea’s new best friend.

“Alright, you’re an it until you get older. Got it.”

“Until she becomes an Older,” Pea interrupted in spite of herself, then clapped a hand to her face. All she needed was for this woman to take offense and make a bad situation worse.

“Ahhh, so you’re both already friends,” the woman said, matter-of-factly. “That’s wonderful. I’m very happy to meet you, companion. Is it OK if I dock now?”

Pea opened her mouth and a croaking sound emerged. It took her a second to get her voicebox working again. Was this … him? Did she remember it wrong? Was the him in her memories actually a woman? How else could she have known that Pea was a companion?

“Please do,” she finally managed to say. “You’re very welcome here.”

Matt was shaking his head glumly. “I guess there’s no way to convince you not to let her on board,” he said. “But you’ll probably regret it. She’s a piece of work.”

“More than I regret letting you on board?” Pea snapped. “Besides, it’s not like I could stop her. She asked because she isn’t a complete arsehole.”

Matt shrugged with a sour look on his inhuman face. He sighed and stuck his bare, webbed feet up on the touch screen. Pea itched to slap them off, but didn’t want to get within arms reach of him.

“She’s even more crazy about eggs and bugs than I am, and I’m literally called Matt the Egghunter. That’s why she’s here. She’ll have you boxed up and stuck in an inventory somewhere before you have time to blink. You and your little potato-bug thing out there.”

“Aditi Raine has docked with Escape Pod A.”

A tendril of unease uncurled in the bottom of Pea’s stomach but she willfully ignored it. She wasn’t going to listen to that jerk, right after he basically tried to kidnap and murder her. Besides, Junebug seemed to like this newcomer, which was good enough for Pea.

Of course, Pea suspected Junebug would like anyone who said more than a single kind word to it, but that was beside the point.

“Platypuses don’t eat eggs, you idiot,” she said and flounced out of the room.

“Yeah, like you’re the first one to say that to me,” he shot back. Pea ignored him. The spa pool was draining again.

Pea hoped that virtual water was cheap. Then again, it wasn’t like she was footing the bill for this.

The hatchway slid open, the lights brightened and a short, slender figure rose up out of the hole in the tiled basin.

Pea was relieved to see that this person was fully human at least, but she wasn’t the sweet, motherly type Pea had been expecting after listening to that husky, confident voice.

Braided hair swung almost to Aditi’s waist and was dotted with tiny lights in the same rainbow of colors as on her ship. Her dusky skin was streaked with a filigree of blue tattoos and she wore heavy silver and black jewelry of the spiky variety. In contrast, her clothes were simple, a heavy black denim jacket and jeans over a blood-red singlet.

“Come here, you!” The woman said, her black eyes lighting up as they lit on Pea’s face. Her smile flashed so wide, for a second Pea worried she might be swallowed whole.

The woman strode across the distance between them and hugged Pea, who was so startled she just stood stiffly and accepted it.

“It’ll all be alright now,” Aditi said.