7.
It was Jubilee's idea to seek out the source of the problem first - Warren's cellphone. "It could be nothing at all," she reasoned as they marched to Warren's bedroom. "Maybe some bookseller or a professor who nicknamed everyone for the sake of memory."
"I hope you're right," Jean said, stealing a glance at Betsy who was five or six steps away in front of them. "I've never seen her look so - wraithlike."
"If you ask me she looks more like walking to the gallows."
"Well, what do you know. We can't find his cellphone here."
"Where else could it be?" Emma said, looking at the room. "Do you guys want to put everything back to its place?"
"Do we?" Jubilee twisted a lock of hair on her fingertips.
"Not me." Betsy tiredly replied.
"Ditto." Jean was already at the door.
"Same here," Emma said as she quickly marched out of the room.
When they were outside Betsy suddenly cocked her head slightly. "Did you hear that?"
"What?" Jean turned about.
"Yeah… it's that Limp Bizkit tune. How does it go? Na… na na…?"
Betsy narrowed her eyes. "That's Linkin Park's 'In the End', stupid."
Jubilee, hated to be patronized, narrowed her eyes too. "I know what I hear, and it's Limp Bizkit's tune!"
"How could you know? All you listen to all day was 'I'm a uh uh slaaaaaaave for youuuu' and all that crap."
"Pink freak!" Jubilee screamed, at a loss for words.
"Well look who's saying to who, little girl with cup size 20-A!"
Jubilee's face was red by now. "I beg your pardon!"
"Both of you should be begging each other mercy if you don't stop now!" Emma said. "Let's look for the cellphone instead of telling all of us here your bra size. Or sizes," Emma added as she noted how full was Betsy's upper shirt was. In fact, fuller than hers. I bet she's using WonderBra.
The protagonists stared at each other in a deadly way before they started to look for the source of the tone.
"I think it's coming from the second floor," Jean said. Already she was halfway up on the stairs. "It's from one of the rooms."
Betsy crinkled her nose in distaste. "I think Hank and Bobby have gone too far this time. It's coming from their room." Just then the ringing stopped.
Jubilee walked toward the door. "You're right," she said, peeking inside the room. There's Warren's cellphone on the bed."
The rest walked in and stared at the cellphone. "I'd wonder how did it get here, but maybe Hank today is in a very perverse mood for jokes. Whatever his reasons would be, I won't forgive them," Betsy said as she reached for the cellphone.
"Hey," Jubilee said as she entered the room, "who left these here?" There were loaves of bread and orange juice lying on the floor.
"I… can't!"
"Try again!"
Logan tried with all his might. "Argh! I still can't!"
Scott looked at him, smiling. "Mutant powers are useless in this place. Don't you notice it by now?"
Logan stared at him helplessly, then tried again. Ray began to giggle. "Why are you giggling, Ray?" he asked sternly.
Ray shook his head. "Nothing. It's only that you look like someone with a bad case of constipation."
A few bumps and cuts and bruises later, Logan gave up trying. Ray was only half alive by then, Logan going into berserker's mode was softened for the fact that mutant powers were muted here. But the result was still terrifyingly real as Ray had personally experienced.
"You shouldn't have slogged him that bad," Bobby chastised him as they rested.
"That boy should have known his limits," Logan growled, still disturbed by his claw-less hands.
"So you really did have constipation in the past," Scott muttered as he lay on the forest floor.
"That's none of your business," Logan said.
"Then what about the day I noticed your pants got very, very yellow on one particular spot and you've just walked out of the toilet?"
"Scott," Ray muttered out, instinctively touching his bruises. "You don't want to do anything of that sort. Trust me."
"Or the day you suddenly walked out of a meeting with one hand in your butt?"
Logan growled.
"Or was it the day that you tried to look for a toilet but all were full so you decided to go to the woods and returned half an hour later?"
Piercing blue eyes were on Scott, but Scott only smiled happily.
"I should have known; toughness takes its toll on you after all. I thought you were invulnerable. Yet somehow you get my old woman. Wonder what will she think if I were to tell her these?"
Logan rose and things would have turned ugly between these silent rivals but Scott suddenly cast Entangle on the spot where Logan was sitting, which in turn affected the rest. "Dammit! Scott! What are you doing?!"
"Nothing. Just a few test of my newfound powers." Scott stood up, not steadily though, but he leaned on his staff and that steadied him somewhat. "Eating that rat gave me disease, and Bobby was good casting Cure Disease on me, but I can still feel traces of it" - Scott tapped his head - "in here. In fact, I can cast this now."
Muttering a few strange words he blew across his palm. Suddenly a few feet from where the three entangled men were sitting the earth split open. A blue-red smoke puffed out, followed by a twisting column of light. Slowly the light became solid, and out of it something that looked like human torso was carved out.
Bobby suddenly became hysterical. "Oh shit! OH SHIT! SCOTT WHAT ARE YOU DOING!? STOP IT, MAN!"
"Bobby," Logan flatly said, "mind telling us what is going on?"
Observing the panicked look in Bobby's face Scott smiled. "I'll tell you. That's Animate Dead spell. I've just turned it to you while I take this chance to run to the big X. I tire of waiting, guys, and I want to get out very quick. I'm not like you geeks who wanted to stay here and fight monsters and whatnots and getting puny experiences for that."
"Animate what?" Logan asked as if he had become deaf all of a sudden.
Instead of answering Bobby pointed to the spot where the light had been. Then Logan nodded in awe. "Oh. OK." Logan looked uncertainly around. "Now what do we do?"
"Don't worry, I'm sure you'll have plenty of time to think of it," Scott said as he turned and left. "When you're all dead, that is." He let out a cruel laughter and disappeared beyond the 'rest area' border.
The three watched helplessly as the undead creature with its grinning skull and a menacing-looking axe in its bony fingers stalked toward them.
"Bobby, do something!" Ray shouted. But Bobby seemed not to listen to him. "BOBBY!"
Logan was meanwhile staring at the creature as it got closer and closer. Ray saw his lips moved but he could not hear what he said. Next Logan turned to him and his lips moved again.
"What did you say? I can't hear you!" Ray said, pointing to his ears. Only then realization hit him in the stomach, and it was not pretty.
In his exit Scott managed to cast Silence unto them. Damn! Think, Ray, think!
Logan was the nearest to the undead and of course he was the one who was hit first. He began blindly hewing at the undead with an axe.
Suddenly the sound of axe hitting onto hard bones slammed into his ears. This new development was so unexpected that Ray found his ears actually hurt for a moment. Trying to recover from the shock Ray turned to see Bobby was fumbling with his spellbook.
"Did you cast Vocalise?" Ray asked, becoming more efficient with the spell names. Bobby nodded, still perusing through the spellbook..
"What had just happened?" Bobby asked him.
"I don't know. But we better help Logan first. He's taking too much damage; his swings gets weaker," Ray noted.
"Give me enough time to cast this Magic Missile and we'll be over it soon," Bobby grinned.
They rested for ten hours, Logan's injuries too serious to be healed with spells. "I thought I never feel these again," he remarked as he drifted off to sleep earlier on. "It's kind of … delightful."
Now as they sat down waiting for Logan to recover Bobby and Ray went through what had happened just now and tried to make sense of it all.
"That rat. That damned rat. It has to be, Ray."
"I don't know. How can eating a rat turns you into a bad character?"
"That can happen," Bobby said as he poked at the fire. "You see, one who has good alignment and did something as opposed to his/her alignment will greatly affect his own alignment." He stared at the darkness beyond the rest area. "But I never knew it could be this bad."
"And Hank. Where did he go while all of this happen?"
Bobby shifted himself so that he was leaning against the crook of a tree massive root. "I don't know. At first I think I am in total control of this game, but clearly that is not the case anymore."
"We have to get out of here, Bobby," Ray said, desperation a jagged edge in his voice. "The longer we are trapped in here, the higher the chance we are getting killed."
"There's always Resurrect spell."
"No. You don't understand." Here Ray lowered his voice. "I think whoever - or whatever, that created this… simulator, means to get us killed. ALL of us."
Bobby shivered inside, Ray's word had the ring of truth in it. "Nonsense," he instead said. "It's just a game."
"Then why Scott didn't come back and say 'Gotcha!' ?" Ray angrily whispered. "Why can't we get out anytime we wanted to? Why can't we willed ourselves to get out and when we did, nothing seemed to happen?"
"SHUT UP!"
At that moment Ray was not looking at Bobby, but something that resembled Bobby with unseeing white eyes and sulphurous cavern as his mouth. His hair was a spray of cold flames of the darkest blue, and his fingers, under the firelight, suddenly elongated to terrifying lengths.
For that one moment Ray was fear-stricken, frozen to the ground where he sat, helpless.
Then the look - or vision, was it? Ray wondered later, because it all was too quick to recall whether the firelight had caused it all or the toll of simply being here had begun to manifest in hallucinations - faded, extinguished from Bobby's face, and Bobby was Bobby again with blue eyes and blond hair.
But Bobby seemed to have sensed it, too, because he quickly looked away from Ray's frightened yet questioning eyes. "Shut up, Ray," he weakly said later on.
They did not speak to each other for the rest of the night.
What is going on? When will the girls come in? And does Jubilee really have size 20-A cup?