Player vs Player: Ultimate Video Game Mayhem

Monkey Madness

A million thoughts raced through Ryan's mind. He'd memorized the level in Dark Deception, so he knew what was about to happen. It wasn't good for them.

As he remembered, there were two doorways in the small room, one in front of them and one to the right, both boarded up. 

No pixels had appeared after they had entered the elevator, confirming this was where they were intended to be.

"So, Dark Deception..." Sean echoed his words, "About how bad a game is it to be stuck in?"

"Very. Very bad." Ryan answered.

"Exactly what's out there?" Mae questioned, approaching the doorway to the right and peering through the boards.

"Monkeys." TJ responded, looking through the other doorway's boards, "Big, angry, human sized wind-up Monkeys. But...where are the shards?"

He leaned towards the boards to see as much as he could. Dark Deception's main mechanic was collecting hundreds of glowing purple 'soul shards' throughout the level, like pac-man. But no shards were to be seen.

Ryan took Mae's place peering through the boards. Something caught his eye as he examined the area, a piece of paper with a crude sketch of a tall figure.

"That can't be right..." he mumbled, examining the paper.

"What is it?" Mae questioned.

"This is a page, like from Slenderman games." Ryan explained. Another collecting mechanic in another popular horror game.

He tugged the page loose from its place on the wall, a misty number 1 appearing for a moment in the page's place before fading away.

"Son of a bitch." he mumbled, a realization coming to him, "He's changed the game. There are no shards. It's pages."

"Wild guess...8 of them?" Sean spoke up.

"Well that's great, isn't it? 8 Pages is a lot less than 200 something shards." TJ commented.

"Technically, except pages will be harder to find than glowing shards, and we don't have a magic tablet telling us where they are." Ryan pointed out, "If we split up we can find them faster. There's four of us and only 3 Monkeys."

"But if the Master Puppet has changed the game around, who knows how many are out there." Sean commented.

"Well, then we do what we do best." TJ responded, leaning on the door frame, "Panic and improvise."

Without warning the boards behind him exploded inward, TJ diving forward out of instinct and scrambling backwards into the room.

With the boards broken, the doorway was clear for a looming figure to enter the room, taking up the entire doorway.

"Monkey!!" TJ yelped, fumbling to his feet and backing to join the others in the other doorway.

As promised earlier, a mechanical wind-up Monkey as tall as a human and fitted with a bright red hotel employee uniform and oversized knives in place of its hands. A creature most gamers are very familiar with, a Murder Monkey.

The Monkey shuffled a few steps into the room before stopping, its unblinking eyes trained in on the four of them. It chattered softly, yet stayed still.

"What's it doing?" Sean questioned.

"Choosing which one of us its gonna chase?" Ryan guessed.

"Well I'm not sticking around to hear Its decision." Mae responded, spurring the four of them to back into the hallway beyond the doorway, finding themselves in a four way cross section.