Two weeks and change later, Dania stood outside the cabin, moonlight streaming through the high, wispy clouds and painting the trees and snow in shades of silver and black.
She looked around, her breath puffing out into the icy air that bit at her nose and cheeks. She tucked her bare hands into her jacket pockets and took a step forward, snow crunching under her boots.
I'm glad I thought to put on a jacket and boots…and this hat, Dania thought as she continued forward toward the treeline. There was something there she had to find…but just what, her mind couldn't place.
"DANI!" Jake's scream ripped through the night. Fear flashed through her, and Dania threw herself forward into a run. Between one breath and the next, she was deep in the trees, branches slashing at her face and neck, catching in the fabric of her hat…no…in her unbound hair as it streamed behind her.
"Jake!" she shouted. Or tried to shout, but the sound came out as nothing more than a whisper. She drove her legs against the snow-covered ground, but all of a sudden, it was like she tried to run through deep sand, or thickened water. No matter what she did, she couldn't accelerate, and Jake's screams rang out again and again, getting ever more distant each time…
Dania sat up in her bed with a gasp, the fingers of her good hand coming up to her chest and pulling her deck out of nothing more than pure instinct. Twisted blankets and sheets tangled around her legs, and light from the half-moon streamed through the wall of windows to her left, throwing stark shadows onto the wooden floor.
The cabin. I'm in the cabin. Jake is fine. He's asleep. It's just a dream.
But the fear wouldn't leave her. It wrapped around her throat, pushing into her brain, holding her in place as her breathing accelerated again, despite her attempts to slow it down.
Something slithered against the wooden floor. Dania opened her mouth to call out to Jake, but just like in the dream, she couldn't make a sound.
Darkness flickered at the corner of her eye. It took every bit of her will, but Dania slowly forced her body to obey as she turned her head to see the shadows on the far side of her bed gather and coalesce into…something.
"Deckbearrrrrrerrrrrr."
The whispered word slid against her skin like an icy blade. Terror built within her chest, clawing up the inside of her throat. Her mind screamed as her body sat paralyzed in the bed.
The shadow figure unfolded, revealing a vaguely humanoid shape that reached out with clawed, too-long fingers—
"DANI!"
Jake's panicked scream cut through Dania's terror paralysis and galvanized her into action. With a flick of her wrist, she touched her center card and it flashed into tawny light that flowed into the form of a Scimitar Cat. The extinct feline let out a feral yowl and leapt at the shadow figure looming over the bed.
A figure that Dania suddenly realized had stats floating in the air above it:
#
Hush, the Monster Under the Bed
Shadow / Psychic [Dream]
Overland Monster
Health: 16
Attack: 7
Defense: 6
Magical Attack: 7[Psychic*]
Magical Defense: 6
Special: Doors in the Palace of Dreams: This creature can move between the undersides of two different beds (defined as pieces of furniture upon which people or animals sleep) in a single 30-second period, regardless of the distance between the two beds, and this may be done as an action that voids the current combat round.
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Special: Overwhelming Fear: This creature’s Magical Attack is non-lethal. If total non-lethal damage is higher than the target’s health, the target collapses, unable to act from a massive anxiety attack as dark visions overwhelm them.
Special: Dream Shield: This creature may negate psychic damage to any other entity instead of attacking.
Overland monster? Those are supposed to have cards!
Dania filed that thought in the back of her mind as she rolled away from the snarling confrontation between her beast card and the nightmare monster and landed in a crouch on the opposite side of the bed. She needed to save Jake—everything else was secondary. She could finish this monster off later.
Dania could make out the sounds of scuffling combat coming from down the hall. With grim purpose, she reached inside the biometric safe on the nightstand and grabbed the Walther 9mm that Berto had brought her during his last supply run and hurtled herself at the door.
She heard a defiant yowling scream behind her, and a stream of tawny light flowed back to her, telling her that the monster was unopposed at her back. But it didn't matter. She sprinted down the length of the hallway and burst through Jake's door, bringing the 9mm up as she did.
Jake lay flat on his back in his bed, unmoving, his eyes wide with terror. Machairi must be back in the deck because he was nowhere to be seen. What she did see, however, was something so bizarre and amorphous, she couldn't quite fully wrap her head around it at first. Tendrils of shadow drifted off from it in weird patterns—perhaps Jake had wounded it.
Like the monster she'd left behind, this thing appeared to be made of solidified shadow. Unlike the thing in her room, however, this monster didn't seem to have much in the way of physical form. It was just a giant, writhing mass of shadowy tendrils. It, too, had stats that appeared as Dania concentrated on it.
#
Nightmare Shadowling
Shadow / Psychic [Dream, Shadowling]
Overland Monster
Health: 7
Attack: 8
Defense: 1
Magical Attack: 8[Psychic*]
Magical Defense: 7
Special: Amorphous: Each physical hit to this creature always inflicts exactly 1 damage
Special: Dream Paralysis: This creature's Magical Attack is non-lethal. If any single hit inflicts damage that is higher than half the target's health, the target is paralyzed for 1 minute.
Special: Dream Card: If this creature is slain, it will drop an uncommon card 20% of the time, and a rare one 5% of the time. If that card drops, 50% of the time it will be a [Dream] card.
"The things that go bump in the night are mostly harmless. Mostly." —Machairi, son of Nyx
#
Dania glanced at the two cards in front of her. With a grimace, she tapped the Tar Pit. The sudden stench of burning oil assaulted her nose, and a giant bubbling pit filled half the room. The Tar pit cost two of Dani’s three power, but gave her three more—trading a round to increase the power she could use. That done, she fired into the writhing mass of darkness.
"Jake!" she called out. "Jake, are you hurt? Pull your deck, kiddo!"
Jake didn't move, and Dani cursed and fired another burst into the shadowling monster. Each hit was doing barely chip damage, thanks to the creature’s special. The monster recoiled from her momentarily, but then more of the shadow tendrils emerged from the center of its mass and twisted and waved toward her with renewed aggression.
"Jake!" she yelled again, and then pulled her support hand to swipe her cards and tap her Short-Faced Bear into the fight—the only four-power card she had, which she could only play with Tar Pit out. As the ancient, extinct mammal reared up with a roar and swiped its giant clawed paw at the Nightmare Shadowling, Dania re-aimed her pistol and fired another round before it clicked empty.
"Fuck!" she shouted. She hadn't grabbed a spare magazine from the nightstand. Lesson learned.
If they survived.
The Short-Faced Bear swung another massive swipe at the dark tentacles that snaked out to wrap around his arms and legs. The nightmare creature flinched, contracting inwards for a millisecond before the darkness exploded outward in an overwhelming rush of blind, silent paralysis that washed over Dania in one terrifying instant before dissipating into nothingness.
Dania gained a notification telling her the creature was dead, and it had counted as level six {?} and she had gained 230 experience, pushing her to third level.
*
Dania gasped, her chest heaving for the split second it took her to register that the fight was over. Then she dropped the empty gun and ran to the bed, bending to check that Jake still breathed.
"Dani?"
"Hey, kiddo," she said, a tired smile creasing her face. "It's okay. We're okay. The nightmare is gone."
"Notttt entirrrrrrely…"
Dania spun, overbalanced, and sat down heavily on Jake's mattress. She scrambled backwards, putting her body between Jake and the eerie, disproportionately tall and skinny humanoid figure of Hush, the monster she'd left unguarded at her back.
The notification that Jake pulled his deck behind her flashed in front of her vision for a split-second before she dismissed it with a thought. Machairi's laugh came from somewhere in the darkness behind the monster, and Dania felt, more than heard, her bear's rumbling growl.
Mantle up, kiddo, she thought, hoping against hope that he'd gotten the right card in his first pull as she swiped her own cards. I'm not sure what this asshole can do, but he's a named monster…and that can't be good.