Soulforged Dungeoneer

As I lay there on the floor, surrounded by shattered table, my mind came back again and again to one common refrain: I was really glad that the Administrator had, eventually, relented and told all the boss monsters to turn around and stop watching the two of us have sex. And yes, that's exactly the kind of low bar thing that a person shouldn't have to be thankful for--I agree. But this woman, if you really want to call her a woman... she did not operate by the rules of common sense. Perhaps that was first made clear to me when I faced off against the giant pygmy trapdoor boar, or perhaps the entirety of the Harpy biome could have done it. One way or another, at this point, I kind of figured it was par for the course.

Even so, every now and then, noticed a bit of motion out of the corner of my eye as one of the four boss monsters sipped their tea, each sitting backwards on their Barbarian Chairian and looking out at the burning jets of firey air that came off the roof of the gazebo, and I just said a silent prayer of thanks that I didn't look up to catch them staring at me, laying naked with what I could freely admit was a psychotic and dangerous humanoid creature born from humanity's nightmares and forced by a higher power to lure humanity into an ever-escalating death trap as some part of idiotic test that we had to pass in some unspecified time, or else our entire species, or at least civilization, would we wiped off the face of the Earth.

Said humanoid creature was, currently, curled up into a very tight fetal ball next to me, breathing quickly and shallowly, like a puppy that was resting without relaxing, recovering without sleeping. She was, I was pretty sure, not actually in there right now, but there was no question that I'd had her attention for a little while.

Merry had found things to do in the meantime that avoided distracting either of us, but I'm pretty sure she was also doing everything she could to leverage having an Administrator's avatar here in the flesh. For now, she was sitting atop the Marionette, playing with a bunch of what I'm pretty sure was some kind of Dungeon crap; I could only vaguely sense it, since I wasn't using the fairy sight, but there were vague distortions there not unlike those I saw and sensed around spiritual phenomena.

A moment later, with a rush, I felt the Administrator's attentions return, although the avatar remained curled up. She didn't even bother to open her eyes, and I wondered if she was just soaking in the feeling of being next to another body, but I quickly put it out of mind and spoke.

"What's it like?" I asked, not really sure exactly what I was asking, except that I wanted to both find an excuse to end this, and also get as much out of a frank discussion with an Administrator as I could.

The pale woman's eyes snapped open, but she didn't move. "What is what like?"

"The job. Being an Administrator."

She stared for a while, not that I was really looking at her eyes, but she didn't move at all. "It will be different," she said, and I wasn't entirely sure that I understood.

Merry spoke up from her perch above. "You mean because Administrators will become unlocked, or whatever."

"Because you're real, and because you'll be allowed to be real." The Administrator suddenly levitated off of the floor, her arms and legs transitioning from fetal position to limp as she began to lift off like a puppet suspended by her upper back. Eventually, though, she rolled her shoulders forward and began to stretch, hanging naked in midair, and her long bangs slid away from the face. What was under there was... a lot less stressed, and the crazy behind her eyes was subdued, but it wasn't gone. "I'm not allowed to be. Maybe I will be allowed later on, but not now."

I looked at her, trying to ignore her nakedness and study her face. I had never really hated her, but somehow, the crazy that was hidden behind those bangs felt more like I was looking at a less fortunate, female me, than anything I'd ever seen. "Is there another way?"

She lifted her head and gave me a strange, tired, toothy smile, but said nothing.

I just shook my head. "You know more, but you aren't allowed to say."

"I can tell you this," she said, levitating herself backwards and to one side with a form of telekinesis that I couldn't sense at all. "and only because I figured it out myself, I was never told. God is the wrong word, perhaps, but Administrator is the right one. Only we don't administrate places, but tests."

I frowned, sitting up and reaching for my discarded pants. "Tests to prove that we know how to advance."

"There is something you must do," the Administrator said, her voice suddenly becoming strangely sing-song. "To defeat the monster-true. It will not come out of the blue, but I can't yet give a clue."

I considered her words for a minute, then snorted and returned to dressing.

"That's why you can give rewards," said Merry, suddenly. "Why all dungeons give rewards. Because everything in every dungeon is a test."

The administrator turned to Merry, smiling her sad, but still fairly creepy toothed smile, and kind of glided over to her. "I like fairies," she said, apropos of nothing. "Even the fairy queen that did this to me. I don't hate her, you know?" She leaned in and ...started sniffing Merry? I got my boots on and stood, glancing around to make sure I hadn't left anything, half-wishing that I knew it was safe to get between the two, but really... it probably wasn't. The Administrator turned her face up, looking at my fairy as though in love, and then backed off. "She is everything that I want to be. You are what I want to be."

"And what's that?" I asked, not waiting for Merry to ask, since she seemed a little freaked out, herself, as she damned well ought to be.

"If you know what I am, and what they are," the Administrator turned to look at me, "then you already know."

I thought about that for a minute, my brain kind of tiredly making the connection. If the Administrators had been born of the world's--my world's--ghosts, and if fairies were originally spiritual creatures from another world... then what they were now, was some kind of ascended spirit that could live independently, at least as long as the system existed. Or perhaps, they were spirits that had gotten their revenge by burrowing themselves into the Labyrinthine Star until they could no longer be dug out. The administrators, though, were just things originally created to be destroyed, replaced. I felt a stab of some kind of emotion in my head, and shook myself a little bit to clear it. "I suppose so."

"Hey, tell me," said the Administrator suddenly, and I looked back to see that she was hovering in midair, legs crossed, in front of Merry. "Have you had any mischief? Have you won against anything? Was it fun?"

Merry and I shared a worried glance, but Merry shrugged. "I mean, I'm having fun just being with Jerry, mostly," she said, "but we're still trying to get stronger. I guess we cheated in a couple things, but not, like... against the Star."

The administrator seemed to actually be disappointed in that, her shoulders sagging, as she lost some of her animated nature. "Well," she said, "you'll get your chance. Once you defeat the bad guy... heh." She grinned. "I bet the fairy queen will hate you for that. Are you ready to face her? Probably not, right? At your level..." Her face fell, again. "At your level... no, that's not how it works. And you're not..." she glanced from me to Merry and back again. "You're not ready, are you? For him."

"I was going to get used to my skills some more," I said, "I didn't come here today to fight him, no. I think... I think I'm going to be strong enough, but I'm not, yet, and I know it."

She nodded to me. "You aren't," she said. "But I'll tell you what you need to know." And she set herself down on the balls of her feet, walking strangely over to me, as though wearing heels but not, or perhaps like a marionette only just lightly being allowed to touch the floor. "He put everything into speed and strength. His skill was once high, but he is lost. He does not know how to do anything any longer except raise those two stats, because he has lost his mind and his will to live. He is nothing more than a puppet knight." She leaned in towards my face, her hair still parted so that around half of her face was visible, and her now-animated facial expressions were, I admit, distracting... in an upsettingly charming way, given the circumstances.

Still, I tried to stay on topic. "Can he be saved? With a skill, or something else... something I haven't thought of yet?"

The administrator glanced away, as though seriously considering the question, but only for a moment. When her glance fell on me again, she adopted a coy expression, one that reminded me more of Pixar movies than of any person I'd ever spoken with face to face. "Can I?" she asked, as though the answer to the question should have been obvious, and she turned her head slightly without losing eye contact, then suddenly pulled away from me, her eyes shifting to something else.

And I stood there, understanding the several messages she had delivered in two simple words--that she couldn't be saved, that he couldn't, and that the power behind Bo, the Fairy Queen, was as far beyond me as the Lord Beneath was. And that... and that she had completely accepted her nature as a disposable prop, a toy, a nothing and a nobody to be someday defeated by a human that the rest of the world would pretend was a hero. Somehow, she could accept that all and keep her humor... even if that humor was dark, the gallows humor of a woman in line to be hanged. She was, I realized, a woman who wore her madness proudly; she was a source of chaos in a world where the natural order of things was crushing everything and everyone.

Somewhere in the depths of my mind, a mirror image of me with her face sneered at me, and said, what's the point of being sane if this is where sanity has gotten us?

I shook my head to clear it, really really not wanting to confront that thought right now.

"You know," said the Administrator, and I turned to find her standing on one foot on top of the Lord of All Chairs, arms raised above her like she was dancing, her hair back down and covering her face. "I could give you whatever you want, whatever you need to defeat him. It's only strength, only power." Her hair parted again, and she studied me, disappointment already written on her face. "But you won't, will you? You aren't ready."

"No." I wouldn't have come up with the answer as quickly as she did, but once she said it, I knew she was right.

The woman's bangs collapsed back on her face, and with an odd flex of her knee and toes, she hopped and spun, remaining perched on the back of the chair. If I hadn't suspected her of cheating, it would have been very impressive. "Because," she said, "you aren't ready to stop being human."

I... hadn't put it that way in my head, but it wouldn't surprise me if she was right. So, I asked again. "What is it like?"

And she half turned and held a hand out to me, and after a moment's hesitation, I stepped forward, putting one foot on the golden chair, stepped up, and took it. And when I did, there was a flash of darkness, only just for a moment, a flash that spoke of hanging in a void surrounded by stone blocks, of a thousand rings of light, and of hundreds of millions of strings all tied up in knots, all tangled together in a massive spiderweb, dense enough to be a cocoon. All this hung around a woman, isolated and alone, an iron collar around her neck, dry tears on her face. Although the flash only lasted a moment, when I tried to recall that momentary thought, I found that the memory changed.

And in that memory, in that moment that should have been frozen in time, the chained woman hanging in that web turned slowly in my direction, and I didn't hear her voice, because she had never spoken, not in that memory, but I recalled it just the same. What is it like? she didn't say. It will be different for you. You're allowed to be real. I am not.

And then, with a sick thrill of fear, I felt the claws coming for me out of that memory, and I felt something actually sinking into me. I want to be real, the voice said, and the woman's face was suddenly a mummy's, with insects crawling out of her eyes and mouth, teeth dripping with black ichor. I want to be real. I want to be real. I want to be real...

I might have lost, if not for Merry, but not for what she did here, or now. Because my instincts came back, sharpened as they were from creating a skill in the same self-image I'd had back then--a skill originally honed to fight ghosts, to fight rotten, dead things in the darkness. Because I had forced myself to confront the thought that it was real, that it had made me strong--because of all of that, those instincts were not as far gone as they might have been.

And in a spiritual place that hadn't seemed real a moment ago, my fingers pressed against her rotting face, and I pushed her away from me, with more force than I'd ever had as a mere human being.

I was brought back to reality by a laugh, and found myself thrown to the floor. The Administrator remained perched on her golden chair, looking down on me, and her bangs were out of her eyes again, and--to my surprise--there really wasn't all that much insanity in those eyes. They were cold, yes, and unkind, but not mad. "I had forgotten," she said, in a tone that told me she hadn't. "You were one of the ones who knew. You've been tortured by ghosts before, Jerry Applebee." And she leaped down from the Lord of All Chairs, and suddenly, there were no boss monsters in the gazebo with us--instead, there were eight spears, each a different color and shape, all hanging in midair, and all of them vibrating, their edges sharp and hungry. I used my skill to force myself to my feet and away from her, and Merry, in a panic, rushed back into my head, as well.

The Administrator just grinned, smugly, and all eight spears suddenly lanced into the floor behind her, and between them grew a nasty mess of blackened flesh, a bulbous growth that became a giant black sack, and her eyes grew black and multiplied, and her hair flew up, and I shuddered as I watched the woman I had seriously just been banging turn into a horrific, giant black spider with a woman's upper torso.

"I don't want to fight you," I said, as much because I had actually kind of liked her as because I was absolutely fucking terrified.

"You know what I want," the spider-woman hissed, and with a two-handed gesture, the space around us shattered into glass shards, the fake gazebo being replaced by an infinite starry sky complete with vast and beautiful, if distant and uncaring, nebulae smeared across it. That moment, which seemed to me to last forever, reminded me of nothing more than a JRPG final boss fight--honestly, to such a degree that it almost took me out of the moment. Almost, but... not really, not after that fucking horrific transformation.

"I want to see you go through hell," the spider hissed at me, and somehow, both Merry and I caught the echo of her thoughts as clearly as if she had spoken them. Because you're real, she said, and I will never be.

I looked at her, my heart pounding in my chest, and somehow, I let a chaotic instinct grab hold, and I smiled up at the spider, and asked, sweetly, "Can I take a moment to equip my armor? I'm sorry, I'm still not used to these things."

The spider-administer avatar, which the system description said was [ Arachne, Queen of All Monsters - Lv 300 ] paused for a moment, then sighed, stopped posing tensely, crossed her arms, and sulked.

"Thirty seconds," she said, and I rushed into my Slenderman suit.