Play of Shadows

2.5: Ready or Not

The game was on as soon as the first player set foot through the door.

“One hour,” K said to the bedraggled group. Then, because he was an asshole even with ninety percent of his personality nerfed behind an NPC persona, he bid, “Enjoy your stay.”

“What are we supposed to be doing?” Frances demanded.

K stretched his lips in a skin-deep smile and didn’t answer.

The players quickly decided to look for a door and a key, in no particular order. There was no time to rest, no time to regroup and strategize – the instance was fit for a game tournament, the best, gritty kind, and Ann would be all over it if it wasn’t also a glitched death trap. She played with her necklace as she thought. A delicate key spun between her fingers, catching the light in flashes of gold.

The key fell against Ann’s chest, disappearing in the bodice of a scarlet dress. She was seated at a dainty tea table overlooking a never-ending garden. The dress and the roses growing on thick, olive vines studded with thorns like needles stood out in splashes of red against a landscape painted in muted colors. Even Ann’s skin was gray, as if covered by a layer of ash.

There was something else in the painting. Something looming in the distance, at the corner of Ann’s vision. It moved when Ann did; no matter how she turned, it remained just out of sight.

The painting was taller than Ann and several times as wide. It allowed her an undisturbed view into her section of the Gallery, a glowing window into a world so colorful it looked garish. There were no players in her section yet – there would be none unless they found the trick to the instance and even then, it was a toss-up on whether they discovered her or the thing that hung on the other side of the wall. Ann didn’t know what the thing was but she felt its presence, a constant shiver up her spine.

There were tarot cards spread over the table. In them, players moved in different parts of the Gallery, stylized in thin, cartoonish strokes. Ann tapped her fingers over one, red lips curling up.

She would be helpful, and give them a little push.

***

The cry hadn’t quite died in the air when a second, shriller one rose – in the opposite direction, quite some distance away.

“What now?” Frances snarled as he kicked a fluffy bundle of teeth and too-long ears into a nearby painting of a meadow at dusk. It promptly bounded through the tall grass and disappeared from sight.

The rabbit was a last of a horde of them. Overly large and gangly, built to run and gnaw and generally be a pest and a nuisance. The group was forced to split under the onslaught, which was likely the point of the little exercise. The painted rabbits were certainly not a danger or much of an obstacle. Easy to trap, too, as long as there was a canvas around to fling them into.

“It wasn’t one of us,” Michael said. “No one touched anything. Something else set them loose.”

Frances grunted. Fantastic.

Michael patted his arm with a sigh and a put-upon smile. “Let’s see what the newbies got themselves into. I take left, you take right?”

“How hard is it not to touch anything,” Frances muttered, but he went, Michael’s laughter at his back.

“Meet in front of the mermaid statue in ten,” the man called.

Frances waved a hand in acknowledgement.

The racket wasn’t letting up. The screams had morphed into shaky whines by the time Frances tracked the source – three very scared, baby-faced players, cornered by a crooked old woman with hands made of dried branches.