Dreaming in the Dark

11

The sisters were separated, Jo and Ange were shepherded to another laboratory where they could create their own monster.

"Stupid!" Ange said, hurting her foot when she kicked a metal stand. "How could she do that?"

"It's going to be alright." Jo said, "Dez was just trying to help."

"By giving herself up?" Ange shouted, "If she wanted to lose her heart, I could have ripped it out for her!"

"Don't say that." Jo went to the main console, a collection of monitors and keyboards that meant nothing to her. She pressed a button, and a robotic arm twiched across the room.

"Do you know what you're doing?" Ange said.

"I really don't." Jo said, poking at a screen. "But I'm sure I can figure it out."

Ange crossed over a bundle of cables, pushed a chair out of her way, and stood beside Jo.

"Can't you read?"

"I can't," Jo said. "But I feel like I've almost got this figured out." She pressed three buttons, and moved the cursor. The three dimensional printer went into action, generating a large brown frog in a matter of minutes. It burped at them.

"See!" Jo clapped, then pressed another button.

A red flash of light reduced the frog to bubbling goo.

"Oh." Her face fell. "That's progress, I guess."

"Let me try." Ange shouldered her out of the way, and swiped icons at random. "Some of these pictures make sense." She said. One of the screens crashed, but another opened an inventory of pre-generated beasts, allowing them to scroll through them.

"Look at the one with wings." Jo said.

"I like fangs better." Ange said.

"But wings will let it fly over the bad one!"

"Not when they get ripped off."

"That one's pretty." Jo said.

"It doesn't have claws."

"What about her?"

"Why do you think it's a her?"

"I can tell. Her name is Esmerelda."

They searched through a thousand images of monsters terrible and strong, but none were as large or as fearsome as the beast they had seen under construction in the other lab.

"Stupid." Ange said. "They're all stupid."

"What are we going to do?" Jo put her hands on her hips, and something crinkled in her pocket. It was the schematic she'd folded up in the trash room before meeting Spiders.

DitD -13 - 9:53

The paper definitely had something interesting on it, a ship, or several machines that could be put together into one. It wasn't exactly a monster, but if they could build it, they didn't see how it would break any of the Game Master's rules. They tried drawing it on the screens, which failed dismally, and pressing it into various slots and nooks they thought might read it. The paper was a mess of crinkles and crumples, but the pale blue lines of the schematic were still visible. Finally, Ange snatched it from Jo and pressed the image flat against one of the screens.

"Read! Stupid! Read!"

The screen shone white, and a bar of light passed under her hands. When she took the paper away, there was an image on the screen, and it was not exactly a ship.

"Ange!" Jo cried. "You're a genius!"