Chapter One
Virginia stumbled back against the lopsided hull of a small pontoon boat, recently beached on the grassy shores of Lake Not Too Far, so creatively named as a result of locals who responded to out of towners and tourists who asked how far to the lake with the unhelpful, if technically accurate response of, “Not too far”. Virginia, herself one of those out of towners, though working as a counselor at the local summer camp, rather than a tourist, trembled as she slid down the side of the overturned boat, ignoring the fire that improbably burned away at the far end of the boat’s waterlogged frame. Shaking, she dropped the silver-bladed knife, the blade covered in both the ancient runes of the indigenous tribe that had once lived in this area, and the foul green blood of the Blood Drinker Queen, who was slowly sinking below the surface of the lake, her hideous and bulbous body writhing desperately against the mysterious forces that inexorably pulled her down.
Virginia glared at the creature out of one eye, blood from a deep cut at her hairline covering and gumming shut the other one. “Go back where you belong. To… Below!”
The creature gave a final furious and agonized screech, it’s one remaining eye meeting Virginia’s with a surprisingly clear expression of hate on such an alien creature. It’s other slit pupiled eye was a mess of bright green gore, matching the traces on the silver ritual knife laying in the mud next to Virginia. It maintained it’s hateful gaze, never looking away until the dark and murky waters of the lake closed over it, the creature leaving behind only a brief series of ripples and bubbles as it disappeared.
Letting herself relax, Virginia slumped back against the hull of the boat, the back of her skull coming to rest against it with a surprisingly loud thunking noise. It was finally over. She had survived. As the horror of the last couple days played back behind her closed eyes, Virginia felt a sensation of vertigo and lightheadedness wash over her. She could see herself in her mind’s eyes, covered in blood, both green and red, and black mud from the bottom of the lake. A short and slight woman, wearing a similarly bloodied tank top with the almost unrecognizable logo for Camp Muddy Paws, a brightly grinning anthropomorphic dog giving an enthusiastic thumbs up. Her dark hair, normally kept tied back in a short ponytail, was fanned out and matted against her neck and shoulders, various bits of foulness gathering it in clumps. The feeling of vertigo intensified, and she felt herself growing strangely distant from the image of herself in her mind, her viewpoint steadily pulling back and panning out, the darkness of the night outside of the meager light provided by the still burning boat she leaned on pressing in on the edges of her vision making her feel like she was going to pass out.
But she didn’t.
Instead, she lay there, motionless aside from deep and regular breathes for several minutes, before a strange thought entered her mind.
This boat is really uncomfortable.
The oddly mundane nature of the thought jarred her back from her sense of vertigo, and the blackness at the edge of her vision receded. She opened her eyes and frowned. The thought felt strange for some reason. Not just because of the seemingly inconsequential nature of a bit of mild discomfort in the face of the sheer horror she’d been through in the past few days, not to mention the last few minutes. No, the thought felt strangely distinct. Different somehow than her thoughts in the preceding moments, the alternating waves of terror and determination that had continuously flooded her mind since her life had turned into a constant parade of nightmarish monsters and horrific violence.
Maybe I’m going into shock?
That would make sense. Honestly, it was more surprising that her brain hadn’t shut down in the face of the mental and physical abuses she’d undergone in the last couple days. She didn’t feel like she was going into shock though, not that she’d ever gone into shock before to say for sure. Instead, her thoughts felt oddly clear, like she was able to consider things that she’d been too busy focusing on surviving to think about before.
Now what?
She considered the question with a certain incredulity. Now what indeed? Surely the police, or someone, would be by shortly. She touched her forehead gingerly and winced. Maybe an ambulance. How much blood have I lost? The answer seemed to be quite a bit, based on the state of her face and clothes.
Shouldn’t the police be here already?
Deputy Baker would surely have reported what was happening to someone at some point in the last couple days. Virginia swallowed heavily as she recalled the earnest old deputy’s final moments, as one of the creatures shattered the window he was peering out of, ignoring the shallow injuries inflicted as he mechanically fired his service weapon into the writhing mass of tentacles even as they dragged him out into the night. His surprisingly high-pitched scream had cut off with a wet sounding crunch, and a spray of blood against the shattered window frame that she and Johnny had stared out from, shocked and horrified.
Why did he do that?
Virginia frowned again as she considered the deputy’s final moments, leaning forward as she did to spare her spine the rough wood she’d been slumped against. Deputy Baker had seemed to have a better grip on himself than almost anyone as their circumstances grew increasingly nightmarish. He’d fought off one of the creatures just in time to save her and Johnny after it had cornered them in one of the abandoned cabins. He’d stunned it with a few swift blows from a nearby discarded canoe paddle, then finished it off a single shot from the same service revolver that had been utterly ineffective against a nearly identical creature less than an hour later. Virginia’s frown deepened, and she drew her knees up to her chest as she considered that.
…Did I really just say ‘Go back where you belong… to Below!’?
Not the below, just Below. Thinking, she could clearly hear the capitalization in her voice. Thinking about it now, she didn’t know why she had said that, much less with such a sense of dramatic finality. The utterance, like all of her thoughts and actions prior to the strange thoughts that now plagued her, felt strangely indistinct and distant.
Now that sounds like going into shock.
She stared out over the surface of the lake silently, strange thoughts and questions continuing to flood her mind, faster and faster. She felt good. She considered that and then shook her head. No, she didn’t. She was tired, her skin was sticky and filthy with dried blood, these ridiculously short shorts that were part of the counselor’s uniform had begun to chafe horribly, and her ribs and head ached dully. She didn’t feel good… but she should have felt a lot worse. She pressed her hand to her side, and then hesitantly lifted up her tank top to inspect the skin underneath. A wicked looking bruise covered most of her side, the faint pattern of the tentacle that had wrapped around her and attempted to squeeze her to death recognizable.
Like… yeah that hurts. Feels like the day after you go too wild at the gym and all your muscles are screaming at you.
But Virginia had seen that jerk Rodney literally explode from being squeezed by those same tentacles, his blood and insides spraying out from his stump of a neck like a horrific and pressurized tube of toothpaste. She remembered coughing up a mouthful of blood as she was being squeezed to death, but nothing felt broken now.
These thoughts were strange, and many of them seemed unimportant. But a lot of what happened in the last couple of days had seemed unimportant, or ridiculous at the time, and turned out to be anything but. The lesson to keep an open mind felt as fuzzy and distant as the rest of what had happened over the last couple days, but Virginia had a feeling it was true, nonetheless.
“What’s going on?” Virginia didn’t realize she’d spoken her question aloud until her words carried over the stillness of the lake, loud enough to make her startle in the silence around her. Even then, she wasn’t expecting any kind of answer.
So, when a blue box appeared in front of her, widening from a thin line of light like a cut in the air, she leaped back, slamming against the hull of the still smoldering boat roughly.
* * *
Welcome, Hero!
You have been called forth by the belief that you can stand against the monsters of the Depths! (You should find a way to thank the kind souls who volunteered you for this later!)
As a Hero, your power will be greater, and you will be granted a template to follow and guide you on a path to gaining even further power!
As a Hero of Story, your newly created form shall now be assigned appropriate STATS and a TEMPLATE based on your story or legend (Or terrible B movie, in your case!)
Now calculating your starting stats, powers, and assigning an appropriate template…
Love this novel? Read it on Royal Road to ensure the author gets credit.
Name: Virginia Christianson
Race: Human (Story)
Age: 18 (0)(34)
Template: Final Girl
Path: Not Yet Selected
Health: 280/280
Mana: 80/80
STRENGTH: 6
REFLEXES: 9
SPEED: 11
VITALITY: 10
ATUNEMENT: 8
IMAGINATION: 10
WILLPOWER: 12
FAITH: 4
CHARISMA: 10
AWARENESS: 12
LUCK: 12
Conditions: Bruised, Filthy, Grace Period
Abilities:
Passive:
Worse Than It Looks (Lvl 1)
Horror Survivor (Lvl 1)
Final Girl (Lvl 1)
Survivor’s Will (Lvl 1)
Active:
Lucky Strike (Lvl 1)
Flee (Lvl 1)
Skills:
First Aid (Lvl 1)
Improvised Weapons (Lvl 1)
Running (Lvl 1)
Short Blades (Lvl 1)
Swimming (Lvl 1)
Virginia stared at the blue screen in front of her with a blank expression, idly rubbing at the back of her head where she could feel a knot forming where her skull had slammed into the hull of the boat. For a minute, she just continued to stare blankly at the screen. This was too much.
She shook her head slowly. No, that wasn’t quite right. She glanced over at the still surface of the lake. That thing, and everything it had done to her and those around her over the last two days, that had been too much. Too much was a line that had been crossed when the sticky red mess that humans usually do such a good job of hiding inside themselves had sprayed out over her face… the first, but not last time it had happened. This was something new, different, and even more unsettling and confusing for it. It was like if a zombie apocalypse had broken out, and just as you’d gotten accustomed to the new and horrifying insanity your life had become, a leprechaun had jumped out from around a corner and said they were there to take you to the moon. Two different kinds of craziness, that didn’t go together in any meaningful way.
Maybe I am going into shock. My mind is certainly bouncing all over the place. Virginia shook her head again. Leaning forward and ignoring the ache in her ribs, she stared at the blue screen in front of her, then hesitantly reached up and poked at it with one finger. It passed right through the screen, the words blurring around the obstruction until she pulled it back.
Apparently, craziness is more than the sum of it’s parts. I’ve finally gone over the edge.
That was comforting, in a way. Insanity seemed like a normal, predictable response to her situation. Far more so than the odd calm and seemingly irrelevant intrusive thoughts from earlier.
A Hero? To stand against the monsters of the Depths?
She discarded the bit about being a Hero almost immediately. She didn’t feel like a hero, of story or any other kind. She felt like a filthy, aching child, who was too tired to even cry after witnessing the death of her boyfriend and several other friends over the course of the last day. The part about monsters made her glance out at the surface of the lake that the creature had disappeared below.
A bit late on that bit. She thought sarcastically.
Her eyes lingered on the capitalization of “The Depths”. She wondered if that had to do with the “Below”, that she cursed the creature to in it’s death throes. Scanning the screen in front of her again, she frowned as she considered the section with a variety of characteristics apparently assumed a numerical value.
This part seems weirdly familiar. Like that game Wallace was always getting the kids to play.
She felt that same oddly muted pain in her chest as she considered the short and lanky fellow counselor. He’d always spent more of his free time with the kids at the camp than with the other counselors. She got the impression he was used to being picked on as a nerd, and just gotten used to avoiding interacting with his peers as much as possible.
Crypts and Creatures. That was what it was called.
Virginia remembered Wallace leaning over a stained old card table in one of the cabins, gesturing wildly as he described a damp and moldy cave full of giant rats to a group of twelve-year-olds who stared at him with wide eyes. That same faint pain came again. Wallace had been the one who had found the dagger used to kill the creature, babbling about some kind of ancient ruins beneath the lake and gesturing wildly with the dagger, right before the barbed tip of one of the creature’s tentacles had exploded out of his chest. Johnny had grabbed the dagger from where it fell from Wallace’s limp hand, even as the two of them had fled, scrambling and screaming out of the building.
I’ve hit the point where I need to stop and take a quick mental tally before I know how many people I’ve seen violently killed in front of me. Probably not a good sign.
She shoved yet another odd and intrusive thought from her mind, and forced herself to focus on what she could remember of the game Wallace had been playing. She recalled that each of the kids had a sheet of paper in front of them, with various things that bore a striking similarity to the blue screen in front of her. A name, a class (which was apparently like your job according to Wallace), your hit points (which were your life force, you were dead if you lost all of them), your skills (kind of self-explanatory), your alignment (whether you were a good guy or a bad guy, sort of), and your abilities. Some of the sheets had other things on them, like spells and weapons and various other details that Wallace had been too engaged with the game to explain. She considered the blue screen.
Well, there’s my name. And then my race is human… story?
Race had been another thing on the sheets she remembered from Crypts and Creatures. There had been things like “elf”, “dwarf”, “half-gnome-half-orc”, and a few just “human”. Certainly, none of them had “story” listed as their race, even in parentheses. Considering that made that light-headed sense of vertigo start to build up inside her again, so she quickly continued down her “sheet”.
It is mine, isn’t it? My name is listed right at the top.
Her age was similarly strange. First her actual age, eighteen as of three months ago. Then thirty-four, which was closer to her mother’s age than hers. And then zero? Her face scrunched up for a minute, and then she let out a short burst of air between her teeth that might have been a laugh at some point, but had gotten lost on it’s way up from her lungs.
I certainly have a lot of expectations of logic and reasonability from what is likely a trauma induced hallucination.
Her “template” was listed as Final Girl. Was that like her class? It certainly seemed less straightforward than “Fighting Man”, or “Thief”, or “Wizard”. She frowned at “Path”, below Template, currently listed as “Not Yet Selected”. Or was that her “class”? If it was, how did she go about selecting it? Reaching up, she poked at the screen again, then blinked as this time, it reacted. As her finger pressed through the word Path, she screen shifted, stretching out and growing as new words appeared to replace what had been there before.
You appear to have questions about your: Path! This is perfectly normal and understandable, which is pretty pathetic on the low bar for “normal” on our planet.
Your Path is an extension of your Template. While your Template defines what you are, and is something you have no control over, your Path defines who you are. And nothing defines who you are like your choices! For your Template of: Final Girl, you may choose between the following Paths:
Chosen One:
You survived because you were meant to survive. The ultimate fixation of the evil that hunted you, a reincarnation of another hero, or the subject of a prophecy, the story that is the world you live in revolves around you to some degree. You’ll survive, because you are important to the “story”, and it needs you in it… but what role you’ll end up playing may end up out of your hands.
Monster Within:
You survived by becoming just as monstrous as what you fight. Alien DNA, a vampire’s bite, or an ancient and indiscriminate, you survived by surrendering your humanity in the name of survival and strength. You more than any other Survivor, are likely to become even more powerful than any monster you face, but what will you be at the end?
Survivor:
You simply survived. Maybe you were lucky, maybe you had another hero who was willing to lay down their life for yours, but for whatever reason, be it virtue or good fortune, you survive when all others perish. You may not ever be the strongest, the smartest, or even the most important… but you will always be the last one standing.
After her initial surprise at the sudden change in the screen, Virginia leaned forward again, reading the words that appeared with a growing sense of incredulity and annoyance. Ignoring the choices of Paths presented to her, she paused and considered the mocking tone of the first part of the explanation. Thinking about this thing as a magical version of the sheets of paper from Wallace’s game suddenly felt less accurate.
Someone is writing this.
There was a person, or monster, or thing, on the other side of this screen. And it’s reaction to everything that had happened, and it seemed like everything that was going to happen, was a condescending and mean sense of amusement. That probably didn’t mean anything good for what lay in store for her moving forward.
She felt the irrational urge to shout at the screen, to demand answers. Like she had with the intrusive thoughts, she firmly pushed that urge down, instead returning to the explanation of Paths and reading over the options presented there. She grimaced when she was done.
Why are all my choices focused around being a survivor?
She thought for a second, and then hesitantly reached out again to poke next to “Template” on her sheet.
Template: Your Template is what you are. Not your job, which is what you do, not your name, which is who you are, and not your Path, which is what you choose. One cannot choose their own Template any more than they can choose the circumstances of their birth. A Template may be complex, or surprisingly simple. Many people may have the same, or similar template, but be very different people as a result of a multitude of factors, from choosing different paths, to having different histories and life experiences.
Note: As a fictional character from a story, your Template is more straightforward and easily understood than most. All creatures are characters in a story, you just happen to be more honest (and now more aware!) of that fact.
Final Girl: You are the Final Girl. An example of the literary and cinematic trope of the same name, you are the sole survivor of horrific events beyond understanding. A monster, or monsters, be they human or otherwise, came into your life, and one by one, everyone around you died. Friends, loved ones, rivals, all struck down, probably in a horrific and bloody manner. “You are a character from a horror movie, after all.”
Virginia startled, the growing sense of horror and disbelief shattered as the last line was read aloud, whispered directly into her ear. She twisted about and away, scrambling back through the muddy lake shore as she stared with wide eyes at the source of the voice.