Hey there dear readers. Oh you cool, awesome, great, smart and handsome readers of mine~

You wouldn´t be... annoyed with me because of this tiny, almost unnoticable delay, would you?

No, you are my magnonimous readers after all hehehe...

I reaaaaally wanted to write but something that starts with p and ends on rocrastination held me up hahah, umm, sorry? Or not. Well, I never gave an updating shedule for this exact reason.

I think I´ll stop talking now before you explode in fury~

Happy reading and please tell me about any mistakes you may find!

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My head was hurting, some woman was laughing and the rest of my party was enchanted. Well, could it get worse? Yes, of course it could.

I rubbed my aching head and steadied myself. I didn´t feel all that ready to approach the house of the siren again.

Instead I waited until Felicity had her fill of humiliating me and simply shoved her towards the door.

"If it´s so easy just go ahead. It´s your turn."

And so she did as I asked her to and nonchalantly approached the door. She knocked and politely waited for an answer.

The door opened within seconds to reveal a pretty siren with violet and black scales, long fishtail and long strawberry blonde hair.

It couldn´t have looked more feminine had it been born an actual female. However, I knew for a fact that mermaids and sirens are gender neutral.

This creature was a trap meant to lure fishermen astray. It was petite, adorable and everything a sailor who had been starved for women for months could wish for, had it not been for her sharp teeth that is.

Felicity seemed momentarily stunned by the beauty in front of her eyes.

"Hello?" The siren greeted her after Felicity didn´t manage to say anything for some time.

"N- Nice to meet you, my name is Felicity. I wanted to ask you to stop the spell you put on my comrades over there."

Eh? Wait, that was totally unnecessary. The spell would fade away after a couple minutes, depending on the siren´s might. Looks like I forgot to tell her.

However, instead of correcting her misunderstanding I chose to wait and see.

"Oh? Those guys intruded all on their own you know~ why would I help them now?"

"You owe us one. My friend is the one who lifted your petrification." Now she pointed at me.

"Really?" The siren´s eyes lighted up when she spotted me. She recognized my race just as easily as I recognized hers.

"A mermaid out of water! How are you sister of the sea?"

"It´s brother if you have to call me something. I also have a name you know? I´m Murphy." I said as I slowly approached them, wary of the door the siren still held onto with one hand.

"Brother of the sea? That sounds weird! I´ll just call you Murphy then. Now what did you actually want?"

"As I said we want you to release-" Felicity started but I interrupted her.

"Felicity, there is no need for that. The others will be waking up in a couple minutes anyways. What we came here for was a treasure, remember?

Oh I soooo hope it´s a magical item that can turn people into frogs, oh no it should turn them into chickens! No maybe make them mistake right and left!" I mumbled some more into my nonexistent beard while the girls(?) exchanged the usual looks.

"Why didn´t you tell me earlier that this enchantment isn´t permanent? I was worried sick about them!"

"Oh, oops! Tehe~ I forgot."

"Next time I have sweets I might also forget to tell you."

"You´d keep them to yourself either way."

"Now, that´s what you´d do!"

"Oh, yeah? Prove it~"

"You know that I´ve been on the run for weeks now! Where would I get sweets?"

"So you finally show your true self! It doesn´t matter now anyways. What were we talking about again?"

"You wanted to rob me I think." said the Siren with a raised hand and cheery tone.

"Oh, yes that too, but before that what´s your name, sister of the sea?"

"I´m Coralle, nice to meet you all." She said with a devilishly sweet smile. Yet instead of being drawn in by her seductive air I couldn´t help chuckling about her name.

"Aren´t we all a bit coralle?" Thoughts of a certain cartoon filled my mind as I stupidly grinned.

"I don´t follow?"

"Don´t mind him, he´s an idiot. Coralle, how did you end up as a fountain statue?"

"You want to hear my story? Alright I will te-"

"No, don´t bother, just tell us where the treasures are." I interjected.

"Murphy! Shut up."

"But she´s gonna start a drama scene, I know it! Let´s just get the treasure and freely explore this mysterious ghost city ~"

"Drama scene? How rude, I wouldn´t just make a scene in front of a bunch of strangers for no reason at all!

If you really don´t want to know how I ended up in this forsaken city I´ll simply keep it to myself."

Coralle the siren didn´t seem fazed at all as she brushed her voluminous her out of her face.

Maybe she was not out to bore people with the usual nonsense and I had just crushed the chance to get some answers to the questions that had been piling up at the back of my mind… oops>

"If he´s really bothered by this, he can leave. Please tell me how you ended up here." Felicity tried to get answers once more.

"What´s your name again?" Coralle asked Felicity.

"I´m Felicity, nice to meet you."

"The pleasure is all mine." Coralle politely waved with her fishtail.

"I will tell you how I got here then.”

She gave me a pointed look, probably my cue to leave but I just waved her off and made myself comfortable on the floor.

“One day while I was happily swimming in the sea my latest prey still in my arms but already so out of breath that he didn´t bother struggling anymore, I was approached by a strange being.

I still can´t put my finger on what exactly it was but it looked like a humanoid creature without face or hair. I was disgusted by it so I swam away.

It´s not like I was afraid or anything!

That would have been the end of my story if the fake human wasn´t an even faster swimmer than me.”

She blushed at this point and looked down as if she was embarrassed that a creature without fin could best her in the sacred art of swimming.

“The thing… it easily caught up to me and grabbed my fishtail like some barbarian. So I tried to sing but the thing wasn´t affected at all! I struggled and bit it! But the moment I tasted its blood I fell unconscious.

When I woke up again I was here but the city was different back then. There were many more like me here. Everybody was kidnapped by one of those ugly fake humans.

We discovered caves around the city that lead to a maze like structure with weird black walls and runes on them but nobody could find the way out of there at all.

The maps we drew were different every day so we soon found out that the maze was changing its layout all the time.

Obviously I wasn´t all that useful in the caves so I tried to concentrate on finding out the secret behind this city. We searched for a hint of who brought us here and who built the city, though. There were no treasures to be found by the way-“

“Did the others have similar stories like you?” I asked.

“Yes, they were all captured in a similar way by the strange monster. There were all kinds of races by the way, but only one of each kind. We soon found out why…”

She grew silent for a while and neither I nor Felicity had the heart to interrupt her pondering. Her facial expression told tales of sadness on its own.

“There was no food you see…”

“Oh, no…” I whispered, already figuring out the end of this tale. She gave me a grim nod.

“On the third day, we found a stone tablet in the central square of the city. There was a message written down in countless languages and scriptures so absolutely everyone could understand it.

“Kill or get killed,

Eat or get eaten,

In this deathmatch

there can only be one victor.”

I´m not the most mobile person on land as you might know so I immediately grabbed the Donkey that was also transported to this place. The others had treated it as their last resort, the only food around, but in that moment of confusion I swung myself on its back and ran off with it.

I knew that I had to get away from the group. I just expected the fighting to erupt then and there and I sure as hell wasn´t wrong.

The ogre made short work of the slower people, the Tigerman then killed the ogre and hunted down the fleeing people. It was a massacre as the mighty picked of the weak opponents. Once I got around the corner I could only hear their cries…”

Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator.

She shook her head helplessly. I raised my eyebrow at her acting. She was a siren. She ate people so murder had to be second nature to her. Was she lamenting the fact that she didn´t get to eat those corpses? It was more likely that she wanted us to let our guard down.

“Later, later on… I was hungry and exhausted, but what I needed the most was water so I went to this fountain to rest. Little did I know that the basilisk had the same thing in mind. Well, the rest is history. I was petrified together with the donkey. I don´t know what happened to the others though they must be dead if nothing major happened. What would I know. Maybe the last one is still alive somewhere…”

After listening to this unusual tale I felt the need to search for this last survivor. It might be the same creature the sand had warned me about.

“Thank you, for finding me I mean.” Said Coralle in a very sincere tone of voice.

“Thanks for crushing my nose.”

“Umm, that wasn´t on purpose…?”

“Like hell it wasn´t on purpose. Girl, you smashed it. Felicity is it still crooked?”

“It looks better this way, haha”

“It looks better when bloated and purple? Your taste is peculiar but…I already knew that anyways.” I said with a glance at the Sprout she had eloped with. I mean, purple bark? Really? Well, there´s a fetish for everything.

“Does it still hurt?” Coralle asked.

“Of course not. Why would it hurt?”

“´Cause it´s destroyed? Do you by chance enjoy pain?” Felicity answered.

“Haha, sure, just who the heck likes pain? I don´t feel it anymore that´s all there is to it.”

“Hmm strays really are unfair.” Felicity sighed.

“Coralle, do you have an idea why we could have been brought here?”

“No.”

“Nothing at all?”

“Nope.”

“A guess?”

“Stop asking already, if I knew how to get out or to get a treasure for that matter I would tell you!”

“But you´re our only hint-“

“The donkey!” Felicity exclaimed.

I quickly looked around hoping to see the ungrateful bastard that had run me over after I painstakingly freed it from its petrification but to my dismay there was no donkey in sight.

“Felicity, that´s not funny. Tsk, getting my hopes up for no reason~”

She had a thoughtful look on the other hand and didn´t seem to be listening. Coralle on the other hand yawned and stretched leisurely as if she didn´t care at all.

“By the way Coralle, why didn´t you enchant Felicity as well?”

“Enchant her? You know that siren songs don´t work on females right? Didn´t you notice that before?”

“Oh, right there was that rule… hehe. I didn´t know because my family has always been living on land and singing in places where females can hear you is taboo in the first place.”

“I will never understand how your people could leave the sea in the first place.” She shook her at this folly.

“I don´t know either. It sure as hell wasn´t my decision.”

“True, oh your comrades are waking up.”

I looked towards the rest of the group and watched in glee as Midas lost his balance and fell on his ass.

I thought as I watched Eisul tumble on top of Midas and squash the petite boy.

“Hahaha.” I started laughing silently but then even Stephen joined the heap with a pathetic “Uwaaaa” sound.

BlueSky managed to fall to the side of the Midas-Eisul-Stephen sandwich to my dismay.

“Hey you look like you´re having so much fun! Let me join you~”

And thus I ran full throttle towards my panicking teammates, jumped into the air and landed with the sound of wails accompanying my graceful landing.

“Ugh” was Eisul´s only comment to this matter.

“My back!!!” shouted Stephen into my ear.

“Can´t breathe…” came a silent whisper from the lowest level of our tower.

“Get off!”

“But I´m just getting comfortable here~”

“Murphy I swear I will teleport you into the closest volcano if you don´t get off now!”

“You know what? I think I´ll take the risk. That spell of yours is pretty unreliable after all. Maybe you´ll target yourself instead of me~”

“That´s enough.”

With those words I was lifted off my comfortable pillow by BlueSky. He immediately tossed me to the side with weakened strength due to the periodic chuckles that got through his serious façade.

The others quickly untangled themselves. They were pretty confused by the situation. Apparently they didn´t remember anything that happened while they were enchanted.

“Felicity!” Stephen ran to his beloved and another drama scene erupted.

I used the opportunity to sneak back to Coralle and try to persuade her to sing again and stop this drama madness but I was yet again interrupted by the ultimate PVE and the laws of the universe, namely, my game capsule that forced me to log out.

10

“Ahh not again! I don´t wanna stop now!”

9

“What´s the matter Murphy?”

8

“My time is up. I´ve been playing until the limit

7

and the capsule is throwing me out.”

6

“So you´re leaving. When will you come back?”

5

I cringed at that. When indeed? The game would progress even without me there. Would I even find them in the game if I didn´t give them a concrete time now?

4

Let´s just do this.

3

“Hey BlueSky, let´s be friends ok?”

2

He looked at me in surprise, as did the others.

1

“What do you me-“

YOU HAVE REACHED THE TIME LIMIT. IN ORDER TO ENSURE YOUR HEALTH YOU WILL BE FORCEFULLY LOGGED OUT.

I closed my eyes as the familiar view of my group became murky and blurred away in a storm of pixels. I slowly counted until 7 to open them again and spotted the ceiling of my room above me.

I took a minute to calm down. Unthinking, unmoving, I just waited.

Once I was sure I could face reality I got up.

The room was bare, painfully so. It looked nothing like a teenagers room would normally look like. There were no posters, no scattered clothes, no unfinished homework on my desk. It was tidy, eerily so.

My face was frozen tranquil, my thoughts were liveless calm. It was time to return to reality for a while. Oh, how I dreaded it already. For a moment I wondered what I would find when I returned. When I became Murphy once more. Would I even find them again? Well, it was fun either way.