Snuggles The Symbiote

"Okay," I explained, "Arcade's kind of a pathetic loser. He gets off on murder but gave up a career as an assassin to try and murder superheroes with themed deathtraps. The only time he ever actually succeed in causing a hero's death was when he kidnapped a bunch of kids and ripped off The Hunger Games and that was because he flat out murdered one of them without his gimmick and two of the other ones were sociopaths."

"For one," Arcade up on the giant hologram screen began with a very annoyed look, "I didn't rip off The Hunger Games. For two, you're a very brave child, insulting me when your life is in my hands..."

"You think I care? I've already died and come back once this month and I'm a lot harder to hurt now than I was then," I talked back, "I have more power in my finger than you've ever had in your entire life. You're just a loser who has to pick on kids to have any semblance of a chance at succeeding."

"I am the world's greatest assassin whose name strikes fear into the heart of every hero who has fallen into my clutches." The man replied.

"You're having a contest where you measure a certain something with a ten-year-old girl right now. That pretty much sums up how pathetic you are." Arcade had an ego. If I kept him talking and got him upset, he'd get sloppy and—

"Whatever you say, Apocalypse Girl." Darn it, it didn't work, and... Darn it, he called me Apocalypse Girl. "Since you're clearly not concerned about yourself, what about your friends?"

I scoffed, "Weaver's a Spider-Person, and we all know that the best superheroes are spiders. Gallant is literally his world's Thor, Ms. Mystic is the Sorcerer Supreme of that world," if only because she was the only sorcerer in Earth Bet but he didn't need to know that, "Vista can warp space-time and she's a Red Hulk, and Grace has a healing factor that's stronger than Deadpool's. Face it, jerkface, we're out of your league."

"So those other children that were with you when you first came to this reality werren't your friends?" Arcade asked with a cocked head. "The swiss girl from the Runaways and the boy in the wool cap that went through the Krakoan portal just before you went on your little rant? Turn on camera two."

There was a click, a flash, and then a picture-in-picture effect showing Klara, with a mechanical collar on her neck and a cloth gag in her mouth. It might have been in my head, but seeing the look on her face and the tears in her eye I thought I could smell how scared she was.

"You know," Arcade said smugly, "I considered taking her the last time I put a bunch of kids in a Murderworld, but I figured her plant control powers would let her grow food and that would undermine the whole point. I could have slipped a mutant suppression collar on her like I did this time, but then I've got a twelve-year-old girl in a fight to the death with near adults and where's the sport in that?"

"You're going to let her go this exact second," I said slowly while feeling that heartburny feeling I'd come to associate with the Hell-Mark, "or you're going to wish you were dealing with Apocalypse instead of Apocalypse Girl or whatever the internet is calling me."

"You're not really in a position to make demands, Kiddo—"

"He'd only kill you," I finished with a glare. Then I made a show of licking my daggerlike fangs with my long lizardlike tongue.

"Ashley, for crap's sake stop antagonizing the psycho!" An I'd upset Vista. Now I had heartburn and a pit in my stomach.

"Yes, please listen to Red She-Hulkling," Arcade said in a bored tone. "I'm not giving up the hostage. The whole reason she's here is insurance to make sure you cooperate."

I spent the next few seconds trying not to imagine what Arcade's brain would taste like while Taylor asked: "What do you want?"

"It's all simple enough," Arcade explained, "right now, everything you say and do is being recorded and broadcasted live on every major Broadcast station and streaming service on both this Earth and the Alternate Earth Bet Reality, stream archives on Murderworld dot Com. The six of you are going to split up into six separate chambers where ou will each face a distinct scenario, modeled strictly or loosely on a classic or modern Video Game. Once each of you either passes your challenge or is killed by it, the survivors, if any, will reunite and progress to a final challenge." Arcade took the time to look at each of us through the hologram screen. "Should the final challenge be defeated, the survivors, as well as the hostage, will be released back to your points of origin, free as birds. However, should all six of you be slain... Well, plant girl gets mulched."

Suddenly six golden glowing portals appeared on the walls around us and started rapidly rotating around the dome while making a loud buzzy sound.

"All the while, I and my new friends will be providing commentary on your progress for the benefit of the viewers at home." Whatever camera they were using suddenly zoomed out and Arcade was sitting on a large couch in between those Uber and Leet guys. In front of them was a table full of snacks, soda, beer, and liquor. "We might be here a while." The spinning portals stopped while Arcade poured gin into a martini glass. "Behind you is a portal to your randomly assigned challenge. You have thirty seconds to enter your challenge room. Attempting to enter someone else's will result in both of you being immediately... disqualified." He took a sip. "Have fun."

Not seeing any other choice, I turned around and walked into my portal.

I was immediately met by the smell of blood and the light of a sunset. Turning around, I could see that the portal was gone, no going back.

I think I was on some kind of mountain? There was a path and a stone staircase that I followed up until I found a gate. And in front of it was a man... No, smelling him he didn't smell like a man. Too clean, with bits of plastic and metal. Arcade used robot versions of people all the time, it's probably one of those.

The robot was dressed in victorian age looking leather clothing with a wide-brimmed pointed hat. He was holding some kind of club or sword thing. My spider-sense tingled in time for the man or machine to scream "Blood now!" and rush me, his sword-club-thing unhooking and becoming some kind of huge whip thing and swinging at me. Fast.

I was just barely able to dodge out of the way and shoot a photon thingy from my finger into the robot's chest. Getting close felt like it'd make for a bad time right now.

The machine stumbled back... And then my blood ran cold as it pulled out a huge freaking needle and jammed it carelessly into his hip which made the damage I'd inflicted vanish before my eyes.

I could feel in my bones that this was gonna suck.

Snuggles The Symbiote

Ashley had apparently not learned her lesson about rushing in without thinking. I mean, it wasn't like we had much time but she just ran into her portal without saying anything and I didn't like that.

I'd have a talk with her about if we got out of this in one piece, but I needed to get out of here alive myself and... As much as I hated to admit it, she kind of had a point. She'd lost to Taskmaster but she was surprisingly resilient and if where I'd found myself was the best this Arcade guy could do she was in no danger.

A brownstone hallway, no turns, with fireballs and cartoonish turtle robots slowly marching towards me. There were no bugs for me to control and I doubted that my spiders would be of much use here, but it wasn't much of a disadvantage considering the lack of challenge: Mario could only see so far ahead of his face and while he could jump as well as I could, he didn't have a spider-sense to warn him of when it was safe to jump and couldn't just stick to the ceiling and spider-crawl across it to avoid the very simple AI operating the enemy robots.

It took me maybe five minutes to get to the rickety rope bridge over the pit of 'lava' that would have fried me from ambient heat if it was real lava. The giant turtle with spikes on its shell, a red mane, and cow horns fell from the sky and started jumping for me. I dodged under it, made a mad dash across the bridge to the other side where I grabbed the battle-ax and cut through the ropes and sent 'Bowser' down into the 'lava.'

"So you're just gonna phone it in with these simulations?" I don't even play videogames and even I know this is how you do it.

I walked down the victory hallway and instead of either a princess or a mushroom person telling me I was in the wrong castle, I found another portal, which I stepped through and found myself in a small town in the middle of a simulated winter. It was full of Asian people walking around in simple, seemingly predetermined patterns and the looks of their outfits and the occasional vehicle I saw made me feel like I'd gone back in time to the 1980s.

A holographic screen like the ones from earlier appeared in front of me, showing Arcade and Uber and Leet on their couch. "Congratulation... Weaver, was it?" Arcade asked, but didn't let me respond as Uber had nodded first. "You're the first contestant to pass their challenge. This is a... Pardon."

Another portal opened up and Ms. Mystic walked out. "So was that supposed to be a challenge?"

"You were supposed to prove yourself innocent and find the real killer less you be executed while playing the role of your own lawyer," Arcade said with a glare. "Instead you shouted 'objection' during the prosecution's questioning of the first witness and then blasted the heads off of the persecuting attorney, the judge, and half of the witnesses. If it hadn't been for that fact that one of the witnesses happened to be the actual killer—"

"Yeah, I figured that out within the five minutes of getting to the courtroom," she explained in a bored tone. "I just wanted to make a point of not engaging with your bullshit."

"Such defiance when a young girl's life hangs in the—"

"Yeah, no. Klara Prast is a mutant. That means that she's, in the eyes of the law, a Krakoan diplomat per that whole deal they've got. If you hurt so much as a hair on her head whatever country ends up capturing you after this will be falling over themselves to give Krakoa your head, lest they piss off an entire country of powerful superhumans or risk cutting off the supply of miracle drugs by giving the impression that they're shielding you from justice for the crime against said nation." She sounded almost bored as she gave the summation. "And that's assuming that the Runaways don't get to you first. From what I've been told they've already got plenty of reason to hate you, and well... Mike, that boy in the wool cap? He was made using Bruiser's DNA and from what he's told me, she's much stronger than him. And he took out the fucking Siberian in one punch. I'll let your friends explain to you exactly how that means you don't want that particular little girl pissed off at you specifically."

The fact that Leet's expression changed to that of a man who looked like he was resisting the urge to piss himself more or less summed up what he was about to explain to Arcade better than any words could.

"The truth is, you don't have the balls to hurt her. Kidnapping her was just a complicated bluff to scare us into submission and it only worked because the kid is overly emotional and you didn't give us enough time for me to call it."

Arcade didn't answer.

"To be fair to Tattletale," Uber changed the subject, "there is not a single Ace Attorney game that didn't have at least one case that made me wish I could do what she did."

"You are currently located in a hub," Arcade said without acknowledging Uber. "The purpose of this hub is so that you can rest, relax, or exercise while waiting for the others to either complete their challenges or die. There's a fancy house with an attached dojo at the top of a hill to sleep in or practice combat, a park for exercising, a video arcade, several simulated bars, restaurants, and vending machines for food, or if you're feeling adventurous you could go play with forklifts down at the dockyard. Once everyone has completed their challenge or died, the survivors will be given eight hours here to prepare before the final challenge because I want you all at your best when you face."

Then the screen vanished. I turned to my recently-criminal teammate. "So I don't trust that anything here is—"

I was interrupted by an elderly Asian man who was probably a robot loudly and randomly saying "Years ago... I was Chinese."

I blinked but Ms. Mystic just shrugged. "They probably rigged it to repeat a gag from whatever game this is based on. Anyway, I'll be able to figure out what is and isn't safe. Now we should probably find somewhere near here to camp out because if yours and my experiences are typical the others are going to be here soon."

Snuggles The Symbiote

After the fourth time it slammed me into the ground, the flaming antlered werewolf giant from Hell let me go and I rolled down the stairs back to the front of the church.

" Dear Ma'am I write this note to you to tell you of my plight, and at this time I'm writing I'm a far from pretty sight. My body is broken and bruised, my face is turning grey, so I hope you understand why Ashley's not at school today... " And then I sat up and shook the bells out of my ears. Why the hell did I sing that? I don't even go to school.

So to recap, I wandered through a ruined city that had a Gosh-darned river of blood and corpses while fighting off blood-thirsty monster hunters with powerful guns and complicated weapons and also a bunch of freaking werewolves, all of whom were at least Spider-Man level fast and strong and the hunters could all trigger a repair function with huge scary frick-off needles. Eventually, I find my way to a church guarded by a bunch of werewolves and two hunters with a big flaming ball trap, figure that it's obvious that the well-guarded church is important, manage to fight my way through the guards, almost get sucker-punched by a Cthulhu looking giant jerkface holding an ax made from a church bell because my spider-sense hadn't turned off since that first fight, and now this.

I climbed to my feet, gritted my teeth, and jumped back in the fight with the flaming werewolf that had been asleep when I got in here past the scary even-more Cthulhu statues. I had the feeling that this was gonna be a lo~ong night.