After breakfast we set to discussing our adventure for the day. We didn’t have any real immediate concerns, other than maybe getting more food, so we decided to use a hint. If I was smart, I would have been using them every twenty four hours in order to gather the maximum amount of info.
I was an idiot though, and I’d mostly made peace with that fact.
Hint: Areas with unusual activity are worth investigating. Doing so will make you eligible for additional privileges.
So that wasn’t very helpful.
In essence, we’d just been handed an oracle who’s only prophecy was: ‘If you see hornets nest, go poke it. The gods might reward you.’
It didn’t help that we’d most definitely come across just such a hornets nest, and that prior to that moment, I’d been wanting to go give it a prod myself.
The retailer of used media stood there, ominous. Silent and still, except for the occasional demon it regurgitated.
“Well look at that Leo, the display thinks we should go fuck with the game exchange, too.” Madeline jeered.
“Yes, and suddenly I’ve lost all motivation to go there myself.” I replied, glum.
“What, you don’t want to follow the suggestions of some anonymous entity to put ourselves in seemingly unidentifiable danger?” She asked rhetorically.
“I’m not super jazzed about the prospect, no.” I admitted.
“What? Really? I thought it seemed like a lot of fun, personally.” Madeline was clearly enjoying ribbing me. Two could play at that game.
“You know what?” I said.
“What?”
“I’ve changed my mind. Going to find out what’s happening at the haunted hobby shop sounds like a fantastic way to spend a Wednesday afternoon.” I declared.
“Bullshit. Also, it’s Friday.” She countered.
“No, you’ve talked me back into it. We should head across the street ASAP.” I pushed on, undaunted by the fact that I may have forgotten the day of the week. I got up from my seat on the couch and started off towards the door.
Madeline, never one to be outdone, followed me soon after.
And that’s how we ended up sneaking into the darkened video cassette/vintage game emporium that happened to function as the owners poor attempt at funding an ever increasing personal collection of analogue tech and media.
Last I checked, he was barely making ends meet by refurbishing and flipping old walkmans on ebay. Regardless, Tim wasn’t in the building that day. Neither were any of the employees he usually paid to man the counter.
Not terribly surprising given the current state of affairs, but not a good sign either. I gently stepped over broken glass from the previous persons who’d broken and entered in order to open the front door for Madeline.
She’d offered to bust down the door in its entirety for having the gall to block her passage, but it just wasn’t worth the noise or additional damage to the store.
I was going with my psychic knife loadout as per our last outing, and Madeline had gone with the same balance of Strike, Accelerate, and Reinforce that she’d used as well.
The only change was that I had gotten an extra point of ATP, which I had on standby for whatever I might need.
Madeline hesitated to enter the building, getting cold feet just before the threshold. I was happy to let her decide it was time to turn back, but she’d have to do it first.
We were playing chicken, after all.
Miss Madeline eventually decided that her pride was more important than her own safety or good sense, wheeling past me with bravado.
The store itself was quite dark, and I had to retrieve a flashlight from my inventory until I found the lightswitch behind the front counter. We also put up a barrier just in case. The sounds of squawking and quiet winds that had been blowing in from the broken window ceased immediately.
The game exchange was a little worse for wear, but much the same as I’d last seen it aside from some shattered glass on the ground, both from the window and one from one the display cabinets that held a miscellany of old game consoles and handhelds.
The electronics inside that cabinet were mostly unharmed, with the exception of a nintendo wii that had a bullet hole straight through the side.
I couldn’t see any other damages to the place, which was strange considering that we’d heard at least six shots, from what I remembered. I also didn’t find any blood stains to speak of. Nor were there any cadavers, walking or otherwise, in the immediate vicinity. But what we could see was only half the store.
There was another room in the back. We approached the curtained partition that separated the rear half of the place from the front. I opened the curtain with a wave of my hand, invisible force beckoning the black sheets apart.
It looked almost. . . disappointingly normal?
The second half of the game exchange functioned as a hang out space targeted towards the local teens. It was Tim’s way of contributing to the community. He offered a safe place for teenager’s to be with their peers and not get in trouble during the day.
The area consisted of a line of diner style booth seats on one end, where a couple of beginner friendly board games were always available for play. Hidden role games, generally, along with a few entries in a card based escape room series.
On another end was a small arcade of sorts, consisting of a few old cabinets as well as multiple pinball machines. Tim originally had them set to play for free, but that proved to be fiscally unsustainable when the machines broke from excessively heavy use.
They were now set to play for only a quarter or two each. Still way cheaper than most places would dare.
In the third and final corner was a CRT television on a cart, sort of like they used to use in schools. It occasionally functioned as a karaoke machine, but it mostly played old sit-coms from the eighties on its installed VHS. Tim had specific preferences in TV, liking shows that were at least a few years older than he was. The kids had to tolerate whatever he put on in exchange for access to the space.
Mostly, they found that deal acceptable.
I was actually pretty well acquainted with the regulars, which felt a little weird to me. I was a college faring adult of twenty two years, after all, and most of the kids there averaged out at around fifteen. That’s what I got for handing out baked goods, I guess.
I remembered there was one kid in particular that reminded me a lot of myself. Just clearly damaged and desperate to get other people to like him. I made sure he always got an extra cookie.
God I hoped he was ok.
I barely stopped myself from crying, and got back to searching the area. We found little sign of anything strange, aside from a few extra bullet holes in the walls and ceiling. Counting them up, I only found three.
That left two more shots unaccounted for. It turned out my glimmering oculars were of little help when it came to seeing past events. Unfortunately, I wouldn’t be able to make any plays at being a psychic detective.
A shame.
I did see an odd halo around the television though. It was faint, which was why I didn’t notice it at first. It was just the slightest coffee stain of purple glints that floated around the CRT and its stand.
I shared what I saw with Miss Madeline, and her face twisted into a grimace.
“Why do you gotta be seeing so much weird shit, Leo? It’s not good for my mental health.” She complained.
“Oh, I’m sorry. Next time I’ll just keep the weird shit to myself.”
“Would you? Thanks.” She snarked.
We shared a small chuckle.
“Regardless,” she prompted, “Do you wanna poke the haunted television or should I?”
“I mean there’s no guarantee that it’s haunted.” I said.
“Leonardo, my guy, the only thing that’s crawled out of this building in days are burning skeletons and mummified corpses that, according to you, have ghost bugs on them. This thing is definitely haunted.”
“Ok that’s not great, I’ll admit. But it still could be fine.”
“Your idiotic levels of optimism are a wonder, Leo. Never change.” She said, warmly.
“Hey now.”
***
In the end, I was the one to turn the television/VCR combo on. It crackled slightly as it came to life, but the screen was black. A line of static trembling down the screen was the only sign that it was working.
I reached my hand out to turn it off, only for the speakers to blare to life and the screen to suddenly brighten.
I jumped back, startled, though I settled down when no immediate dangers presented themselves. The VCR had just needed some time to figure itself out, apparently. The show that started playing off of the tape was one I recognised, being quite possibly Tim’s favorite. It was a 70’s sitcom, from when television was just finishing the switch from black and white to full color.
The program, called ‘Du-Ranthal!’ centered around the adventures of a German college professor who makes a new home in Austin, Texas. I never hung around long enough to ever watch a full episode, but I knew the basic formula. A lot of terrible accents, equally awful jokes, and a smattering of racism, sexism, and mild bigotry.
Not a program that was exactly to my taste, but Tim liked it for reasons I couldn’t discern. It wasn’t because he agreed with the outdated politics, in his defense. He’d already been interrogated about that by a concerned parent more than once.
Madeline was nonplussed by the opening minutes of the show, turning instead to play one of the arcade machines, her wariness forgotten. I pulled the curtain divider shut, figuring it would be alright to dawdle for a little while. The barrier we’d used would serve to make us basically undetectable anyway.
At least from the usual demonspawn. If there was something else out there, we were fucked. But that was true as much in Madeline’s apartment as it was here. Plus, we’d been cooped up for over a week now. It shouldn’t be a surprise that neither of us were eager to go home, quite yet.
A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.
Thus why we hung out, playing pinball and board games for well over an hour. I had a real knack for pinball in particular, so even though I only had a couple of quarters I managed to stretch those out for quite a while.
It was nice.
After losing my last ball down the drain, me and Madeline were lounging by the TV, watching the incredibly dated sitcom. I was occupying one of the booth seats, my head and arms resting on the table in front of me. Miss Madeline had decided it wasn’t worth trying to crawl in one of the booths, and was just hanging out in her chair.
I noticed then that she wasn’t using her quad rugby chair. This one looked a lot more like the type-four she usually used. It was a different color though, and was a bit bulkier besides. I asked her about it, and she replied that it usually lived in the trunk of her car. She’d grabbed it the other day and stuffed it in her inventory.
That was good. I’d been a little worried about what would happen if her murderball chair broke. Having a backup meant that wouldn’t be the end of the world.
Or I guess that had already happened, hadn’t it?
***
After the tape finally reached its end, The VCR made a clicking noise, and it started to rewind itself. I watched mindlessly as the show played in sped up reverse, until the familiar scenes started to distort. Background sets morphed and shifted, and characters disappeared one by one, leaving static silhouettes in their place.
Eventually the titular Professor Ranthal was the only one that remained. He paced back and forth aimlessly, walking in reverse, but never stopping.
The speakers started to play something that I couldn’t quite make out.
“Leonardo, what the fuck is going on?” Madeline asked, understandably concerned.
“Well Miss Madeline, I think you were right about the TV being haunted.” I replied.
“How do you feel about getting the absolute fuck out of here, then?”
“Capital Idea. Let’s flee at once.” I scooted out of my seat as fast as I could, and we made for the exit.
As soon as we passed through the curtain though, we met with a hitch in our plan. The front door had disappeared at some point. Along with the windows. In their place was a simple brick wall.
We turned back to head for the emergency exit.
The only problem there was that the exit no longer led to where it should have. Instead of spitting us out into the alley on the north side of the game exchange, the door opened to reveal a long hallway with walls and floor made of etched glass. The carved patterns on the walls alternated between loose, spiraling lines and hard angled fractals.
Through the glass I could see streaks of golden, green, and white light. They flashed and weaved through each other in woven tangles, like cabling.
I barely caught the door before it shut behind us. That exit was one way, and I wasn’t sure I liked the Idea of being trapped out there.
“Leo, man, what the hell.” Madeline whined accusatorially, her voice pitching up in that way that it only seemed to when she was truly upset.
“Don’t look at me! I’ve got no clue.” I said defensively, cautiously backing into the game exchange again.
The TV was still playing that same loop. Professor Ranthal walked backwards, muttering, surrounded by hazy figures. It was getting louder too. While the sound had been a distorted, barely audible string of consonants, it was now a sentence chanted with increasing vigor and clarity.
“-Mr President, something is wrong- please cancel my funeral-” it said repeatedly.
“Man, I do not like that.” I spat.
“Me neither. Do you think this will stop if we turn that thing off?” Madeline asked.
“I don’t know, but it’s as good an Idea as any.” I reached cautiously over to press the power button.
A hand made of static and blue flame reached out of the television screen to grab me. I yanked my arm back just in time and slashed at the offending limb with my knife.
“MR PRESIDENT-” The television yelled. “SOMETHING IS WRONG!!!” It didn’t seem to appreciate my sharp rejoinder to its attempt to grope me, but I wasn’t really in the mood to apologize.
As Miss Madeline had pointed out to me, I don’t really appreciate unsolicited touching.
Madeline for her part had dashed over to the nearby outlet in order to unplug the whole thing. She successfully yanked the cable from its socket, but the TV didn’t seem to be affected.
Instead the hand that reached out from the screen continued to extend until a full arm protruded out from the rounded glass. That arm was joined by another, and then a head.
Slowly, a being of fire and azure static pulled itself out bit by bit from its electronic prison. It was all fuzz and heat and blurred edges, barely in the shape of a person.
I cut it again. That caused it to wail and thrash, but didn’t affect it in any other meaningful way. I decided to just keep hacking at it and hope for the best.
Eventually it just started ignoring me.
The entire upper body of the analogue poltergeist had extricated itself from the television now. Madeline decided that the next reasonable step was to try destroying the TV itself. That probably would have been a good Idea, had it worked.
The moment she tried to slash at it, the spiteful-circuit-spirit managed to finally free itself from the scanlines that bound it in one final burst of motion. The CRT was destroyed by Madeline’s sword just a second too late.
The vague form stood tall, its fuzzy edges gaining detail. It had a robe of some sort, and eyes formed on the speckled canvas that it had for a face. Those eyes soon erupted with azure sparks.
This thing was starting to look awfully familiar. In fact I was starting to get this almost overwhelming sense of deja vu.
I may not be the brightest match in the book, but with all these clues, even I could figure out that this was probably the necromancer.
It was staring at me with teal eyes that I’d already looked into twice before. The necromancer started to raise an arm in a manner uncannily reminiscent of that first mongolian revenant that had attacked me so many days ago.
Madeline chose that moment to let it be known that she did not appreciate being ignored. She swung her sword right through his waist in a single dash, skidding to a stop right beside me.
The necromancer's upper body comically folded forwards, landing face first on the ground independent of his legs.
“Did we win?” Madeline asked.
“Don’t fucking jinx it!” I hissed.
“I don’t think-” Madeline was interrupted mid rebuttal by a sound like bubbling oil, and the necromancer’s top half floated upwards on a jet of blue flame, rejoining with his legs.
“Well how was I supposed to expect that would happen!?” She shouted.
“You weren’t supposed to expect anything! You just had to not jinx it!” I squealed back.
Madeline wasn’t given the opportunity to argue.
Mr tall, dark, and static-y just raised his arm with that same deliberate slowness, and thundering clouds swept over us. I was blinded completely, enshrouded in crackling fog. My eyes couldn’t adjust to the darkness due to a number of lights that flashed in seizure inducing patterns. I pulled my googles down from my forehead, hoping that would help.
It didn’t.
The flashing didn’t seem to be coming from any real light sources, the violet color suggesting that it was more like my altered vision was just going haywire. Previously those lights had only shown up when there was danger. The fact that it was all around me indicated that perhaps things had gone very wrong.
Or were about to.
I braced for impact to the best of my ability.
***
After who knows how long, I found myself falling upwards. A familiar looking ceiling with an equally familiar looking hanging light fixture rapidly approaching my face. I flailed a bit trying to right myself, before remembering that I could slow my descent with Psy’s psychic assistance.
I pushed outwards with my arm. I knew from previous experiments that the best way to telekinetically maneuver myself was not to push on myself, but to push on a nearby surface.
Newton's third law applied here, creating an equal and opposite force on my own body. So, I pushed on the ceiling that I was hurtling towards in an attempt to decelerate.
That didn’t go as quite as well as I would have hoped.
I’d basically attempted to halt my momentum with a one handed push up. Luckily, when a force was applied to one of my fields that was greater than I could handle, it just dissipated instead of breaking my arm like the twig it was.
I made another couple of similar attempts, swinging all my limbs midair in a manner that almost certainly made me look like an idiot.
It wasn’t a graceful descent -or ascent, I couldn’t tell- but I did manage to land feet first and without breaking anything.
So that was a win in my book. Examining my surroundings, I saw that I was somewhere similar to that glass hall I’d seen earlier. The surface I was standing on looked much the same, delicately detailed and transparent, but instead of being in one long corridor, I was at an intersection of sorts.
There was a corridor stretching to my left that sloped gently upwards, and another to my right that went down.
Behind me, the path curved sharply upwards until it was perpendicular to the floor. Looking up, I observed that there was no ceiling to speak of. The walls just stretched upwards seemingly infinitely.
The thing next to me that I’d assumed to be a hanging light was actually a standing lamp with an impossibly thin, transparent stem that just disappeared into the floor.
Or ceiling. Whatever I was standing on. The place was so surreal that my sense of up and down just didn’t seem to apply.
I poked the standing lamp. It didn’t budge. I pushed on it with a bit more force. It didn’t bend even a millimeter. I pulled on it with all my might, and it just stood still as a stone.
Striking the lampshade didn’t achieve anything either. The fuck was this thing made of?
Giving up on that completely unproductive experiment, I sighed.
What to do next?
I wanted to go look for Madeline. I hated being alone. But If I ended up missing Madeline because we were both wandering around looking for each other, that would be even worse.
“This blows.” I said to no one in particular. Psy didn’t bother to dignify that with a response.
I probably would have just stood there for a while longer, but I could hear footsteps, and whatever was making them wasn’t going to be Madeline.
I looked around in an attempt to find the source of the noise, eventually finding it above me. A zombie and a couple of skeletons were walking down the side of one of the walls, casual as could be.
I wondered, were they able to walk on the walls because they were special wall-walking zombies? Or was walking on walls normal here?
I was leaning towards the second option. If gravity just applied to the nearest surface, then the path behind me that curved ninety degrees upwards made a whole lot more sense.
I tested it first by throwing a penny at the wall.
The penny stuck.
That settled that then. I glanced back upwards at the pack of undead that were approaching me. They’d noticed me at some point, accelerating from their casual stroll to a brisk jog.
If they just followed the path they were on, they wouldn’t be able to get to me. The wall/alternative floor curved away from my position, leading onto the ceiling of the corridor to my right.
What was the solution there, then? Would they have to stick themselves to an adjacent wall and spiral around? Could they do that?
Just thinking about it was making me dizzy. That combined with the sense of vertigo that I’d been feeling the whole time meant that I was actually holding onto the standing lamp next to me to retain my balance.
I kind of felt like I was about to hurl.
Having to fight those skeletons while sensorily disadvantaged like this seemed like a bad Idea. They were still far enough away that I could probably shoot them all before they got close though.
I pulled out the twenty two long rifle that Madeline had loaned me. She’d even been gracious enough to help me reload the magazine yesterday, so I was topped off.
I started to aim upwards, but promptly fell on my ass. The vertigo hadn’t gone away, and had in fact escalated to a full blown case of the spins.
I gave up standing, and just layed on my back. I braced the rifle against my shoulder in the way Madeline had shown me, and lined up the sights. I missed my first shot entirely. Which was unusual. While my hit rate hadn’t been 100 percent, my aim had still proven to be one of my few redeeming features, and I wasn’t happy to see it fail me.
I focused a bit more, figuring that maybe I hadn’t relied enough on my future sight to compensate for the movements of my targets.
I saw the trajectory my bullet would take in the form of a violet colored, trembling line that was not unfamiliar to me at that point.
What threw me off, I discovered, was that the weird gravity of the place was causing my line of fire to bend and twist in all sorts of strange ways.
Compensating for the pull of a single wall required me to aim away from that wall. Aim too far away from that wall though, and the wall opposite from that one would start sucking my bullet towards it instead.
That feeling, like the world was spinning uncontrollably around me, just got worse. I had a somewhat chronic problem with vertigo to begin with -it was a part of why I was so naturally clumsy- so this was not the greatest environment for me to have to exist in.
I did what I usually did when it got bad, and just chose one thing to focus on. A single, specific point in the environment. There was another standing lamp sticking out of the wall just ahead of the zombies.
That would be my reference point. I’d aim for that, and just open fire when they were close to it.
It took a disconcertingly long time to get my purple aim assist to line up with that lamp. It was like I was having to calculate orbital mechanics on the fly, but I wasn’t entirely unaided, so I figured it out.
After the skelly in the lead approached my target, I shifted my aim ever so slightly to align with his skull. One shot caused it to stumble, another to fall over entirely. I switched to another target while it was down.
And That was basically how I chewed through the gaggle of hellspawn. I focused more on tripping them up with my first couple shots, only beaning them in the skull when it was convenient.
It cost me all but a few of the shots in my magazine, but by doing that I successfully took them all out.
“Call me tex.” I said to myself, letting my arms flop down to the floor beside me.