Cave Story: A Novelization

by JackmanB

A novelization of the popular freeware-PC game created by Daisuke Amaya a.k.a "Pixel".

9. Chapter 9

He didn't find the Doctor behind the door, as he was expecting. He didn't see Misery or Balrog, and he didn't see any 'throne', or anything of that particular sort. All he found past the door was yet another stretch of cave, leading deeper into the island. He didn't find himself too surprised by the revelation, however; he had come to accept that there was a good chance any door on this rock will just lead to another network of veins for him to spelunk through. He entered the cave and shut the door behind him, feeling a particularly odd draft breeze all around his body as he did so. It was awfully chilly, but he led himself to believe that it meant there was a way out of these infinite walls somewhere nearby.

The ceiling was low and the walls were narrow, but he had walked through plenty of congested paths before and he wasn't intimidated by this one. The lack of light wasn't too much of a challenge either: he had grown accustomed to working by feeling and was making plenty of headway just by feeling along the walls and the floors, careful to keep his balance and take things slowly in case he wound up tripping over something. The familiar pattern didn't hold for long, however, and his near-blind trip through the cave soon took him into some waist-deep water. The water was fairly warm, but it was otherwise not too unusual; he waded forward, his knees sloshing against the thick fluid with only minor drag.

The water level did not drop, as he was expecting, but after only a short wade through the pool he came up on the other side of the miniature shore. So far this little cave was fairly tame, in all respects: there weren't a lot of twists or turns or rises or dives, and he hasn't had to dip his upper-half into any water yet. He thought that maybe the Doctor just preferred ease-of-access between his throne and the Plantation. The one thing that kept bothering him was the steady increase in room temperature – it wasn't hot enough to make him nervous yet, but it was constantly climbing the farther he walked in. When he rounded another easy corner, he understood the reason why: this cave, unlike anywhere else on the island, had shallow pools of lava stretching for only a few metres, but still longer than he could jump by a good margin.

The temperature from the molten rock stretching out in front of him singed his skin and wrinkled his clothes, and he was still a good distance away from the actual liquid itself. On the other hand, at least it illuminated the walls easily enough, showing him the exact distance he had to jump and any obstacles he might have to avoid if he didn't want to take an unexpected plunge. There was a pair of stalactites hanging between him and the next safest area, but other than that it seemed like a fairly straightforward leap.

He planned out his action before taking it, thinking his options through carefully before he took the risk of crossing the pool. The heat alone was pretty extreme the closer he got to it, and he knew it'd probably be so hot as to be distracting when he finally makes the jump. The two stalactites over the pool weren't necessarily in his way, but he'd have to make a very precise jump to avoid them both without risking using the Booster for any more manoeuvrability; considering how quickly it overheats, he could use every little bit of leeway he could.

Lining himself up as best as he could between the two inverted spires, he calmed his shaky nerves as best as he could before running full-tilt towards the lava pool. The heat climbed and escalated massively with each long stride, until he made the jump straight over the pool. The temperature climbed up and danced through the legs of his pants, up and out his shirt, charring every little bit of his steel skin it touched. The heat of the rocket up the shaft was comparable to the heat of the lava, only it hit every part of him instead of just his fringes along the platform.

Halfway through the flight, before he could begin descending, he kicked the Booster active, pointing his right foot in the direction he wanted to fly. Reliably, the jetpack responded, propelling him the remainder of the journey while perfectly level with the lava below. He had to twist his shoulders slightly to avoid the spires, and the heat rising from below was making his head spin, but he devoted every last bit of focus he could muster on just passing through this one little obstacle. The ceiling slanted downwards sharply at the end of the pool, which he didn't notice until he bumped his forehead off it, but otherwise he managed to cross it safely. He continued down the cave, in a hurry to leave the lava, and its rising heat, behind him.

The light of the lava followed him down the tunnel a short distance, illustrating to him the layout of the next little bit into the artery. The rocks were jagged all over the entire path: the ground was flat, but the rest of the uneven cylinder contained sharp spikes surrounding the entire path. He couldn't tell if they were unnatural or not, but the slightest brush against his hard skin caused even his durable steel to scratch. The glow only followed him so far, and when it became just a little too dark for him to see clearly, he nervous shuffled along the floor, not daring to reach out and feel along the walls to find his way out.

Eventually, after slowly but calmly running his feet along the flat floor to find his way out, the caves began to light again from the familiar ominous glow of more lava pools. It was a particular pattern this cave displayed: a room filled with lava, followed by a narrow tunnel with sharp rocks and poor lighting. Each pool of lava got more complex and risky to clear, while the tunnels stretched for longer distances, spiralling in any which direction they felt like: the walls seemed alive, purposely bending and shuffling their paths into trickier jumps and thinner passageways simply to dissuade him from continuing down his path and towards the Doctor. And when his careful resolve refused to waver, they'd mix up their patterns by tossing in narrow walls with lava pits and almost-blind jumps straight down into more deadly spikes. His walk become more a dance the farther down the road he continued, his jump heights carefully planned and coordinated and the Booster on his back responding to each upward and sideways command it received as he progressed.

His cuts and scratches built the longer he stayed in the cave, tearing along his arms and legs with each unlucky scrape against the stones. He was far too along within the cave to stop or turn around, however; he pressed on, doing his best to not build upon any of his current injuries. The cave itself grew more and more irate with his progress, throwing in deep drops straight into lava that he was forced to take down and boost his way forward once he cleared a certain depth, or pillars going straight up that were lined with the odd spires that snaked its way left and right as it went higher. More than once he had made a mistake with either his own abilities or with his handling the Booster, and he had to pay the painful price in the form of an unsightly gash through his skin or a charred heel of his shoe. He didn't know how he was going to fix his wounds later; he was pretty certain his skin wasn't going to patch itself together. At the very least, he had no blood to spill, although flexing any part of his body with an injury was still quite painful.

The cave began to get creative as he continued down its depths: among all the other threats of the cave, it showed to him another simple pool of water, leading him to believe that he could just walk through it like last time. He paused just before entering, though; while the water wasn't boiling, there was still a steady rise of steam, telling him that the water was nearly as dangerous as the lava was. After clearing it no differently than any of the other pools and passing through yet another corridor with the spikes that bobbed and waved in every possible direction, he emerged in a slightly larger room with platforms suspended from the ceiling by a series of rusted chains, with the only obvious exit out several stories above him – far too high for the Booster to reach alone, so he was forced to climb the platforms, which were often laden with more of the spikes that seemed to be growing out of them like a kind of moss. He knew he must have been getting close to the end of the cave, however, since the chains keeping the platforms aloft had to have come from somewhere.

He had been keeping track of his time in the cave via the scope on his missile launcher since he cleared the second vat of lava; he had so far spent a little over an hour trying to navigate this cave. It was around mid-morning by now. He moaned and flinched as he shifted the weapon back over his shoulder, his aching wounds stinging harshly with each movement he made. The cave itself seemed to be growing just as exhausted, as its final obstacle was a single pillar with a narrow opening going straight up, with more of those spikes lining its sides. The opening led straight outdoors and out of the cave – there was a steady stream of sunlight washing into the cave directly above where he was standing, and a welcome, refreshing morning breeze wafted through the room and cooled his burnt skin. The pillar was pretty high up, but if he could squeeze enough juice out of his Booster, he should be able to at least grab onto the final ledge and pull himself to safety.

Taking as great a leap as his tired legs could manage and pushing the Booster to send him straight up when he reached the height of his jump, it was a fairly nerve-wracking final few seconds until his hands reached up and groped for the outer rim of the exit. He managed to dig his hands into the calm grass above him just as his jetpack gave up, overheated for the moment. His legs dangled uselessly over the long, long drop, his entire body and all his armaments supported only by his grip on the open ground above him. His cuts flared, his muscles shook, and he groaned a low, powerful groan as he used all his strength to lift himself out of the hole, slowly, until first his head came over, followed by his elbows and then his chest. With most of his weight already out of the pit, he pulled up his waist and his legs, lifting his body out of what he hoped was the final cave and crawling across the grass for a short distance to get away from the open pit going straight back into that incredible challenge.

He lay on his back, leaning against his jetpack, staring up into the cloudless blue-grey sky with the sun beating down on him, still rising from the eastern sky. He had seen the night-sky a few hours ago, and he marvelled at the light of the moon and the twinkles of the stars. The light of the day was considerably less marvellous, to him, but he never imagined the sky to be a shade of blue. He imagined it to be more of a solid grey, or perhaps no colour at all like the night. And it was difficult to admire the sun as he had the moon, since he could never look directly at it for more than a second before feeling his eyes begin to burn.

A light constant breeze swept over the area, always heading in one direction or another and soothing his hot skin with each brush. Aside from the wind, the outside area he lay in was totally bereft of any noise at all as he lay calmly on his side. He could see over the edge of the island from his viewpoint, and he could see the infinity that the clouds underneath the island stretched into so many miles away before ending on an invisible line where the clouds below met the sky above. It was just like when he climbed the outer wall, only the wind had calmed down since then and the temperature was a charming lukewarm instead of the frosty chill of before.

Each of the cuts on his body were still aching, and he didn't know if they were ever going to stop or how he could help himself heal. His limbs were still exhausted and difficult to life, but his duty was more important than his relaxation, and he forced himself onto his feet. All along the ground he was standing on were ruins of some kind – many broken arches and finely-chiselled statues remained littered across the ground in groups and blocks, and judging from how smooth and weathered their surfaces were, they had been destroyed for a while. Just to his west was the remainder of the mountain on top of the island; he could see the peak from where he was standing. It wasn't very high up, considering all the climbing he'd been doing lately. Flush with the ground he was standing on, however, was an entrance into the mountain itself. Quote knew that there was no other place the Doctor could be: if he wasn't in that final cave, and if he wasn't out here in the open, then he must have been hiding in there.

Between him and the mountain were very few obstacles: the grassy hills dipped and rose softly in several places but otherwise it was a calm walk. Between the hole he came out of and the mountain, however, was a peculiarly shaped helicopter. It had two small wheels on its rear and a much larger one on the front. It had a very odd shape with a bulbous cockpit and an elongated rear that seemed to stop abruptly behind it, as if it was only half completed. It had a mismatched paintjob to accompany the thought as well, with the rear taking on a lighter-brown tone than the front. Considering the helicopter was so close to where the Demon Crown must have been at one point, the Doctor must have arrived in this vehicle, along with the Sakamoto's.

Another peculiar feature was a cabin with a single glassless window that was nestled on the ground only a stone's throw from the helicopter. It was made from clay and stone with a concrete base – it looked like it was capable of taking a hit. It wasn't expertly hand-crafted, and it even lacked a door, but it seemed fairly new and still in decent shape. Inside was a single bed and a single bookcase with a single shelf; without a whole lot of features, whoever built this little hut obviously didn't plan on staying for too long. The bookcase contained only a few books, and none of them were particularly voluminous, but each title of each book contained a name that he recognized. Each of the Sakamoto's had one; Professor Booster had one; Itoh had one; and Date Fuyuhiko had one. Clearly, it was their own journals or possibly their reports and findings with the island, and this cabin was their shelter. How they all managed to fit into the single bed was a mystery.

He knew it was amoral to peek into their diaries, but there still might be some kind of hint for him to find concerning the Doctor, or maybe even the Demon Crown if he was lucky. Kazuma's and Momorin's journals were mostly just business and their progress with their own fields of study and expertise, offering a very narrow look into their own lives. Sue was considerably more outspoken in hers: she was no scientist and so she had nothing to report, so instead she wrote about how much she hated being the island and how she resented everyone she worked with. Each dated entry of hers contained at least one sting towards someone on her team; how Kazuma was physically frail and Itoh was a snivelling coward and how the Doctor was just out-and-out creepy. Still, she did admit that the adventuring and exploration was entertaining and exhilarating, and in the very first entry she noted how much fun it was to ride in 'the chopper'. Her handwriting was very legible and clean, compared to the letter she had scribbled to him in the Plantation.

Itoh's journal contained very little in the way of words, but each page contained remarkably detailed sketches and blueprints on the next invention he was thinking up. Quote couldn't figure out what drawing was supposed to go with what description or instruction, and Itoh seemed to write in his own private code that Quote couldn't begin to hope to decipher, containing seemingly random letters and numbers and sometimes symbols.

Professor Booster was fairly even with his own personal thoughts and feelings with the island along with his progress and reports with his work. Exploration of the island's interior would be more effectively accomplished, his second entry wrote, had we equipment to facilitate aerial movement. Thus, I have duly begun development upon the "Booster", a small, fuel-efficient jetpack with sensitive and highly responsive manual inputs. Development of this flying apparatus will take place in two stages, versions 0.8 and 2.0. Quote found it odd that Professor Booster specifically skipped all the other versions in-between and picked an incomplete revision to be the actual landmark, but he wasn't a genius like him, so he didn't bother to try and understand it. My plans call for version 0.8 to be the first useable version and to allow for a certain amount of hovering. I'm sure I can complete version 2.0, provided I live long enough. It promises to be even more acrobatic and useful.

The last journal to leaf through was the Doctor's. His handwriting was very clean and easily the most legible of the six, although his sentences were very brief and direct. Second day, found fresh water. Drinkable alone but chlorine tablets recommended. That was the entire second entry in the journal. Third day, Kazuma twisted left ankle. He's to keep off it for three days. Made contact with civilization underground, call themselves 'Mimiga'. Rabbit-like, or possibly dog-like, in appearance – out of my practice. Still no lead on DC. It looked like Sue was telling the truth, about the Doctor being responsible as far as being a physician went. Fourth day, rations emptying faster than expected. Island exploration assumed half-complete. Found a vein leading into the mountain rather than deeper underground – keeping it a secret. Possibly DC? His journal ended there, and everybody else's journal ended on the fifth entry as well. He could probably guess how the rest of the story went.

There was absolutely nothing of interest left in the cabin for him to find. When he left the cabin, he heard some low thumping noises and some deep groans and growls off in the distance. Peeking around the corner of the stone cabin, off in the distance was a pair of frenzied Mimiga – he didn't know how long they were there. One of them was huge, easily larger than Toroko was, while the other was half the size but twice the aggression. They couldn't have been there long; he only spent a few minutes in the cabin. Nonetheless, there was no time left to mess around. He jogged his way back towards the mountain, having spent enough time dawdling and lazing already, his arms and legs having recovered a decent amount of energy although his cuts and scratches still stung with each flex on his skin. He steered clear of the two frenzied Mimiga, keeping himself out of their sight and not risking their attention as he ran past. They seemed too interested on staring each other down to notice him as he ran his way into the mountain, thankfully enough.

The inside of the mountain seemed quite a bit more hollow than he imagined. The room was massive and flat, each of the walls a huge distance apart and each made of expertly-laid stone bricks of all shapes and sizes. All along the circumference of the room was a series of elegant stone pillars; many of them were still in decent condition, although some of them were destroyed near their tops. The entire left side of the mountain, or at the very least the room he was in, was gone: in its place was a grated steel wall, like an enormous fence that stretched from the ground to the ceiling, giving him another clear look out into the open sky. In the far end of the room was a spiral staircase that led straight up, into another floor of the mountain's interior. Between the entrance and the far staircase was a simple, featureless, uncomfortable chair made of stone, and floating just above the throne was a familiar white-skinned woman with blue hair in a green suit and a wooden staff with a balled end.

He knew there wasn't going to be any way to try and talk or resolve his way out of this one. He pulled his machine gun over his right shoulder, gripping it tightly in both his hands as he approached Misery. She made no movement or sound as he approached. The simple clacking of his shoes were echoing off the walls of the throne room, providing the only ambience. She watched him approach, and was amused when he didn't open fire immediately after walking himself into range like she thought he wound. "Hey there!" she welcomed warmly, dropping down from her hovering, standing straight in front of him with both her feet on the ground as he neared. He was nearly within arm's reach before he stopped. He hadn't yet raised his sights onto her – if she had anything in common with Balrog, she'd want to banter before engaging with him, and since she hadn't opened fire either, it was a pretty safe bet – and his weary arms and legs could use every second of rest he could buy.

"You really are a tenacious one, I'll give you that." She gave him a sort of look that he couldn't immediately figure out. A peculiar, dismissive type of admiration as she said her words. "I suppose you're here to destroy the Core?" The Doctor came first, but the Core was next on his to-do list. He nodded; no point in hiding his objectives. "I appreciate honesty. It's a difficult trait to find nowadays." She gave him that weird look again, as if she wanted to think highly of him, but didn't want to want that at the same time. "I used to consider you merely an out-of-control robot. I was there for the war ten years ago, so I know how a robot is and isn't supposed to act. But clearly, I misjudged you. You posses thought and understanding; maybe even emotion. You can solve puzzles and sort problems. You're very nearly a human, in all respects."

She paused, her eyes drilling holes into his own. He stared back, unmoving and unblinking, his trigger finger lazily hanging over the lever. She took a deep sigh, looking out over the moving clouds of the sky through the steel grate in the side of the mountain. "You know, I have no love for this island. I'd leave if I could. But it is simply my fate to obey the one that wields the Crown. If the Doctor tells me to jump, I actually do have to ask him how high he wants me to. If he tells me to stand guard at the entrance of his laboratory and kill anyone who tries to get in…well, here we are, aren't we?" They both stood still, waiting for the other one to make the first move. Quote's loose red scarf flapped whenever the winds from outside picked up and rustled through the room. "I have one last question before we begin, though," she stated, her expression and her tone softening. Her sudden demeanour surprised him, although he refused to let down his guard. "Do you know where Balrog is? I haven't seen him since our meeting in the storehouse in the Sand Zone. As dumb and near-useless as the brick is, he's the closest thing I have to a friend on this rock, and as much as I hate to admit, I'm worried about him."

He didn't expect to hear Misery say or ask something like that, particularly right now, of all times. He searched his memory, thinking as far back as he could to when he last met Balrog. It was in the Labyrinth, and he remembered promising Balrog that he wouldn't tell anyone that he helped move the boulder for him and Curly in that chamber. But that was a long time ago; he had no idea where Balrog could be now. He shook his head, trying to remain as emotionless as possible. "I see," she finished, looking a little despaired at his answer. It was difficult not to feel sympathetic for her, as much as he needed to be. "Well, in any case," she said loudly, her mouth breaking into a wide grin, "prepare yourself!"

With a blink of an eye, the balled end of her staff emanated a quick burst of off-blue light, and Misery had vanished. He lifted his machine gun so his eyes were level with the sights and quickly spun himself around, trying to predict where she might reappear. He wondered why she didn't just teleport him back to the Mimiga village or something, since an enormous setback like that would virtually guarantee that the Doctor's plan would succeed. Would he have to stand still for a spell like that to work? Or did she actually want to give him an opportunity to succeed? She was an oddball to figure out, but he had other priorities at the moment.

She was floating in the air nearer the entrance to the room, facing him, going through some odd hand-motions and her mouth was uttering some imperceptible incantation. Before he could run himself into range, a volley of black bubbles, almost like the one she had used on Toroko when they first met, emerged from her staff and soared through the air towards him. They each moved at an impressive speed, but none of them were totally accurate, and most of them missed by less than a yard. They each popped with a loud bang, and he could feel a sudden rush of wind from each burst, so he knew it wasn't what they were made of that he shouldn't be worried about.

Just as he shot a round of his own in response, she vanished in a flash of blue light once again, his own shots fizzing into nothing as they passed through the very spot she was hovering in. She reappeared to his right, in front of the grille fence, and went through the same motions again before another round of bubbles appeared from the end of her staff. They moved slowly and erratically, however, and they floated limply high up in the air, a safe distance away from him. He wasn't sure what she had in mind, but he knew better than to expect her to make a mistake, and ran around their flight path, giving them a wide berth before lifting his gun again and opening fire some more. He didn't land as many shots as he would have liked, but from the sound of her pained flinching, he had at least managed to make a hit before she teleported herself behind him once again.

It was difficult to keep up with her movements or to predict what she'd do next. As she reappeared, she was standing on the ground instead of floating in the air. Her left hand was moving in quick circles in front of her while she lipped her spells as quickly as she could, her bracelets jingling against each other with each quick swing of her arm. She traced circles in the air in front of her, and in a moment, a pair of odd black, wheel-like symbols appeared in front of her, rotating around her front slowly. Quote approached as quickly as he could, getting into range and opening fire with as many shots as he could get in before he would inevitably be distracted or forced to relocate. The sting of the cuts on his skin flared with each movement, but he wasn't about to let them bother him.

The wheel-like things she had summoned had a gaping hole in their centres, so he thought little of it as it fired, expecting his shots to go right through them. He was surprised when each shot that hit their centres dead-on simply vanished, disappearing into nothing without a single one breaking through and getting to Misery. Not all of his shots were aiming for the rotating shields, and a few more hits managed to slip their way between their cracks, scoring a few more hits directly onto Misery's face. She flinched and recoiled, groaning in pain by the end of the volley, but ultimately she felt more irritated than hurt this early in the battle.

Rather than warp away like she had been doing, she pointed the end of her staff towards a seemingly random part of the wall, moving the staff very slightly with her right hand as her left was moving more vigorously in the wind, when a steady streak of faint, easy light erupted from the ball on her staff and zapped into one of the thick bricks she was pointing to. All the while Quote was keeping up as much fire as his gun could give him, pausing very occasionally to keep it from overheating, and while most of his hits were absorbed by her orbiting shields, she kept her focus with a steely resolve whenever she was struck by the ones that did connect. It was obviously hard; her movements would sometimes pause or veer unnaturally to the side, and her lips would stop their moving, but she managed to finish her incantation even under the pressure.

She gripped her staff with both hands and pulled backwards on it with all her strength, as if she were pulling some kind of invisible rope. It wasn't an act either, considering the strain on her arms: her staff really was being awfully difficult to pull, and the stinging feeling of that constant rain of fire on her wasn't helping her. But with enough effort, the brick she had zapped broke the caulk around it and finally slipped free; it moved in which ever direction her staff pointed, as heavy as it was. It followed each movement, either up in the air or side to side, although even out of its wall, it still wasn't a very light object to whip around. Her swings were clumsy and often dragged too far, but the flying brick linked to her staff by her magic was still an excellent weapon, causing Quote to dive forward in surprise, the brick just barely clipping the soles of his boots.

When the block hit the far wall at the apex of her swing with a booming thud, her arms and her staff came to a very sudden stop as well. The vibration of the impact disoriented them both; Misery pulled herself together first and swung the rock in the opposite direction, hoping to catch Quote and crush him against the wall in the second swing. He came to his senses shortly after she did, though, and saw the attack coming with more than enough time to react. He leapt backwards a distance, the brick passing harmlessly in front of him, and the whooshing sound of the huge chunk of rock hammering the air rang in his ears.

The low boom erupted in the room as the brick hit the other wall, drowning out the sound of some light cackling above him. The slow, erratic bubbles Misery had fired were still limping their way towards him, and the moment he unwittingly jumped right underneath one of them, it burst, ejecting a miniature, makeshift bolt of lightning straight down and right through his entire body, flushing itself into the ground through his feet. He wasn't prepared for the hit at all, and the feeling was crippling; he immediately hunched over in pain, feeling an ecstatic stinging sensation all through his spine, making his arms and his legs go numb. Misery had dropped whatever spell she had on the rock, and had warped somewhere else in the throne room while he was distracted, taking her shields with her. He hobbled towards where she last was as quickly as he could, doing his best to walk out the pained feeling he just experienced, his machine gun still held loosely in his left hand.

She was hovering over the throne again, a short distance away and out of his firing range. His body straightened and strengthened with each step, although the peculiar, unwelcome sting of the bolt hadn't left him entirely yet. He couldn't get himself into a sprint, but he still managed to half-jog his way back to Misery, the machine gun unbalanced and unsteady as he kept up the fire with just his left hand.

He had no idea what other tricks Misery might have in mind for him. He was no warlock, himself, but he assumed that if she could just imagine it, she could probably do it. He remembered Jenka having a spell just for fixing her roof, and teleportation was a favourite of Misery's, so there was no real way to prepare himself for anything she might have in mind. She fired another rapid string of bubbles like she had the first time, then warped herself farther back in the room, towards the spiral staircase, putting some distance between them both.

He briefly considered using his missile launcher on Misery. It would definitely cover the distance, but if he was hoping to conserve some of his ammunition for the Doctor. He remembered Curly's stories about how the wearer of the Crown threw stuff at them that she couldn't even guess beforehand, so he would like to put an end to him before he had the chance, and the machine gun wouldn't have that kind of hard-and-fast offensive strength. He picked up the pace, the pain from the bolt slowly leaving his body and his feeling in his limbs returning with each step.

She was in the middle of another incantation when he finally managed to get into his maximum distance, his finger pulling the trigger long before he ran himself there. She felt the burning sting of each quick hit as they landed all over her body, marking her face and ripping her clothes, but she couldn't allow herself to get distracted. Her orbiting shields took the brunt of the hits anyway. With another spell completed, another set of orbs appeared in a circular formation around her, hovering and rotating in a clockwise fashion until there were six of them. They each burst, and from each of them flew half a dozen bats; they were each as long as his arm, each barring long teeth and sharp claws on the joints of their leathery wings, and they were each headed straight for him as Misery warped herself somewhere safer.

It was the first time he saw magic conjure up a creature; it was normally object manipulation or some kind of ethereal summon that could summon an explosive bubble or whatever. Were these bats real? Were they not conjured at all, and instead teleported in from some other section of the island? What other creature could she make up if she had the time and the energy? He would have felt guilty gunning them each of them down if they weren't trying to catch themselves in his skin and distract him from Misery. They were fast and small, but he managed to snipe a chunk of them before one of them managed to hit his machine gun head on with surprising force. His gun was knocked out of his hand and hit the ground with a clank, skidding across the stone for a few yards and well out of his reach.

Seamlessly, he reached for the sword on his left hip, unsheathing it and whipping the blade through the sky, trying to catch some of the nuisance bats in his edge. He managed to get one of them in the wing, but he didn't waste any more time with the distractions and turned around, pointing himself back towards Misery, standing on the ground just in front of the exit to the room.

She was readying another spell as he sprinted as hard as he could toward her, his sword gripped tightly in his left hand. Before he could get close enough to use it, she raised her staff – balled end of it glowing that familiar blue – high above her head, before swinging it back down as hard as she could muster onto the brick floor. From where her staff struck, a series of cracks spread forward and branched out, covering a good deal of the floor in front of her and right underneath Quote's feet. He didn't really spare it a thought, until the ground seemed to rupture and quake all through the many branches along the ground. The stone seemed to explode right out of the ground wherever the cracks touched, heaving up clumps of earth with surprising force.

The enormity of the spell made the entire floor volatile very quickly. He had to avoid chasing after Misery; with the detonation floor fast approaching, he had to take to the air, keeping himself airborne with the Booster while the spell passed under him. He wasn't safe in the air either, with the ejected earth being slung up into the air, as if they were chasing after him. The only safe places to hide were where the ground had already burst, and because of the spell, the entire area was a mess to stand on: there was no even ground to stand on any longer. With some dextrous timing he managed to avoid taking a serious hit from the wave, although he couldn't help bit clip his left ankle in one of the rising clusters, causing it to twist painfully under the sudden force.

Misery had disappeared from sight once again as well, running to some other area in the room. Quote suddenly had a thought; if she was as bound to the Demon Crown and whoever wore it as she and Balrog had claimed, then…was she even capable of using the attack on the throne? Could she really cause the ground to erupt underneath the seat her master was supposed to sit on? His sword remained tight in his grip as he spun around, facing the throne, tracing the cracks in the ground as they proceeded towards the staircase in the back wall. As he had hoped, the lines seemed to avoid the throne entirely, going in a small, uneven circle around the stone chair's legs. He aimed his jetpack towards it: it seemed like an obvious place to keep oneself safe from such a spell, and he was banking on the fact that Misery would think the same thing.

The Booster got him there faster than his legs would have been able to, especially now that his left ankle was in such pain. He chased after the spell as it exploded along the ground, staying safely behind its eruptions as he neared the throne. She hadn't reappeared anywhere in the room yet. He took a guess and simply made a wild swing with the sword through the immediate area of the seat, not sure if he was going to hit anything at all.

An off-blue flash filled his eyes just above the throne itself, forcing him to shut his eyes in surprise, shielding them from the sudden light. He didn't know where he was aiming or what he was going to hit, but he still managed to hit something, and it wasn't the stone throne. A womanly shriek rang through the air the moment his blade hit its target, and he felt resistance with the blade as it cut into its target. He opened his eyes just in time for another flash of blue light to fill the room.

The Booster had overheated just as he passed over the throne, bringing him down to the floor in a harsh, clumsy landing. The cracks along the floor had exhausted their leeway, finally ceasing the carnage as they came up to the wall in the far end of the room. He pulled himself back onto his feet as quickly as he could; his left foot hurt and ached from the weight, but he managed to stand on it, if a little lopsidedly. Misery reappeared on the floor at the foot of the stairs; she immediately collapsed onto her left side, her wooden staff clanking to the floor along with her, her conjured shields dissipating the moment she dropped her concentration. He gripped his bloody sword in both hands, ready for whatever else she was going to toss at him among the ruined floor, when he noticed the look on her face. Her face was dirty and a little bloody from the shots he managed to land on her from the machine gun, but she was obviously in a lot of pain from something else. With her right hand, she gripped her green pants down her right leg, and pulled it up to just a little bit below her knee. She had an enormous, deep gash in her leg, and it was bleeding sheets of blood, soiling her dress and dirtying the ground under her. She was breathing hard and making pained whimpering with each breath, trying to keep her composure, but the splitting pain and the sight of her blood was making her lose herself.

She let go of her bunched-up, bloody dress to reach for her staff. Quote readied himself again, paying close attention to her every action; she heard him shift his feet noisily among the debris, and she looked up at him as she gripped her staff weakly. She looked hurt, she looked mad, she looked scared, but with her concentration so utterly shattered, it was clear she wasn't going to pick any more fights with him. She tapped the bottom end of the staff against the ground meekly, and the same blue light engulfed her, instantly warping her out of the room.

He kept his sword at the ready. After a hit like that, he didn't really expect Misery to recover immediately and keep the battle going until one of them was assuredly dead, but he wasn't sure what to watch for from a woman that could seemingly bend the space around her. He stood tense for a minute, his ears listening for any movement, and his eyes paying close attention to the slightest fidget in the room, looking for anything that might tell him Misery was still there and was preparing another strike. He was finally convinced that he was alone in the room after an uneventful few moments. He sheathed his sword and began looking over the room for his dropped machine gun. Fortunately, it was only half-buried in the debris of the ruined room, its butt-end sticking up from between two heavy clods of rock it was wedged between. Its bright red stood out easily from the dull brown of the dirt.

Having had a chance to calm down, he slowly became aware of all the wounds he had been accumulating. His cuts from that last cave still hadn't healed over, and he wasn't sure if they were ever going to. His ankle still hurt, although it was already beginning to feel better. His arms were tired and it was a little more difficult than it should have been to dig out his weapon, but all the same, he managed to unearth the other half and wrap the shoulder strap over his right shoulder. Since Misery said she didn't know where Balrog was, the only obstacle between him and the Doctor was a single flight of spiral stairs. It was conquered easily enough.

The second room was almost exactly like the first room in its shape: large and flat with a flight of stairs spiralling upwards in the other side. The same wall from downstairs was still missing, replaced with an enormous chain-fence – he wondered what the possible purpose for it could have been. But unlike the downstairs room, there were cages lining the walls all over, forming a sort of box around the rest of the room. Some were resting on the floor; some were suspended from the ceiling above; some were stacked one on top of the other. They weren't especially large individually, only about four metres high and across, and their only feature were the iron bars that replaced the one wall that faced into the room.

Each cage held at least three Mimiga of all ages and sizes and even some of different fur colours; some held many more than that. He looked into some of them as he walked past, seeing if he could recognize any of them. The only ones he really knew that were still alive were Jack, Mahin, Sue, and Kanpachi, but he didn't see any of them among the crowds. He recognized some of the dirty, ripped farm clothes from some of them in the Plantation, and he managed to catch sight of the same four young Mimiga from Curly's orphanage, but he didn't know any of them by name. A hushed stir began to rise in the room as they saw Quote climb the stairs – many of them pointed fingers and talked to their cellmates in whispered excitement as he strode past, speculating just what he what he had in mind and what he was going to do, as well equipped as he was.

In the far end of the room, just before the stairs, was a long, flat table, chiselled expertly out of stone with many emblems and insignias along its thick base. Vines were sprouting from underneath the table, climbing up and around its heavy bottom, and at their tips they each bloomed the same familiar red flower as the Sand Zone. Standing at the edge of the table, facing away from him, was a man in a long white coat, a peculiar hunch in his back, and a tall blue helmet upon his head. Quote drew his machine gun from his right shoulder, his muscles aching and groaning with each flex, reminding him of just how tired he was. He didn't plan on giving him the same courtesy he gave Misery earlier, and stopped when he knew he was in range, raising his machine gun's sights to his eye.

He heard the Doctor give a low, menacing chuckle as he approached; over what, he didn't know, and didn't really care at the moment. "It's done!" he laughed, straightening his posture and bringing his arms back to his sides. His hands were visibly shaking in giddiness. The Doctor turned to face Quote – he looked exactly as Quote had last gotten a good look at him in the Sand Zone's storehouse, right down to the gleam in his glasses and the grin on his mouth. Quote's finger tightened on the trigger, ready start firing with just a quick pull.

"Administering red flowers to a Mimiga causes it to fly into a violent rage," he began, looking right at Quote but ignoring his weapon entirely. "The reason for this, in fact, is quite simple, really. The flowers contain a not only a substance that draws out one's aggression, but also crushes one's very faculties of reason. Ever since I got those seeds, I had been busy here, working hard on finding, extracting, and concentrating that substance, and thanks to the time Misery bought me, I've been successful. Would you like to see it?"

Quote didn't think the Doctor was lying when he said that he had only arrived a few minutes too late to stop whatever he was doing, although the realization didn't sit very well with him. The moment the Doctor turned around to retrieve whatever was lying on his table, Quote opened fire, each airy shot fired from his gun hitting the Doctor dead-centre – although, each hit seemed to vanish into nothing before it could hit the Doctor's body, just like the shields Misery had conjured. He couldn't see what was causing it, though. Had the Doctor expected the onslaught, and set up some kind of aura around himself that absorbed the hits?

"Now, now," the monster said calmly once Quote released the trigger, "we'll get to you soon enough. No need to cut in line." He lowered his aim, looking over the Doctor's coat to see if it had any of the telltale burns anywhere on it. Not so much as a scratch. "As I was saying," the Doctor continued without missing a beat, turning back around to face Quote. In his right hand was a large ruby, the size of his head – it seemed to pulsate an eerie red glow in his hand, as if it was synchronized with his heartbeat. "The substance I had concentrated from the red flowers can be seen in the physical form of this red crystal. Unlike the flowers, which can only affect Mimiga because of their weaker immune systems, this crystal will affect humans as well. And hey, I'm no expert in magic or sorcery, but who knows? It might just work on robots as well." He looked back towards the crystal, his toothy grin faltering for only a moment as he stared deep into it, seemingly mesmerized by its sheen.

"It's wondrous…" he murmured, almost totally captivated by the crystal, his eyes watching the gleam of the crystal's hard surface pulsate. "I somehow doubt you truly appreciate the splendour of this achievement." The crystal levitated from his hand, and, surreally, began to orbit around his body, the same way Misery had made her spells circle around hers. His body became cloaked in the crystal's light, bathing him in a light-red tinge that covered him from the tip of his crown to the bottom of his shoes. "Allow me to demonstrate."

In a blink, the Doctor had disappeared from where he was standing, in a light-red flash of light, with only the crystal remaining. Quote replaced his machine gun across his shoulder, knowing that it probably wasn't going to be doing so well against the man here. He stepped forward to where the Doctor was as he simultaneously reached for his missile launcher, switching on the high-tech scope. It was fully loaded since before the Plantation, and he'd been itching to finally use it on the man.

The Doctor wasn't reappearing anywhere in front of him, but the red crystal quickly hovered over his shoulder, towards the rear of the room. He followed it, keeping his weapon raised and his eye through the sight. It locked onto the crystal itself, displaying an estimated time between launching a missile and collision, thankfully not tracing onto any of the Mimiga in the cages at the same time. He didn't know if that was a feature or a mistake or what, but at least he wouldn't have to worry about any of the missiles locking onto the wrong target.

The Doctor reappeared in the air, just a short distance away from the steps, and promptly, gracelessly, fell back to the ground. He raised his hand, running his palm across the red crystal as it reunited with him, and, without any incantation or spell, the crystal pulsated once more, sending a visible wave of red energy soaring through the air towards him. It gyrated vertically and unpredictably as it approached, making it difficult to time to avoid, but with a spring of his strong legs (eliciting a painful spark from his ankle), he managed to clear the wave without any injury, quickly retaliating by lifting his missile launcher and launching a few the moment he ran the scope over the Doctor's body.

It was the first time he really had a chance to see the new launcher work its magic since he got it way back in the Labyrinth. The targets on the scope flashed a menacing red when he pressed that button, the many numbers on the screen quickly ticking down as a small volley of missiles were sent on their way. The Doctor was keeping up, of course; he simply raised his hand, and the red gem on his crown began to glow its own spooky red. Within an instant, each missile began to detonate in the air, the earliest one only a few feet away from its destination. Because of the missile's size and design, most of their damage was supposed to be derived from the actual impact rather than the proximity of the explosion, and as a result, the Doctor only felt a slight rush of hot wind from the bursts. He quickly warped away, on top of one of the stacks of cages, the red crystal following close behind.

Quote kept his aim on the Doctor, but couldn't fire any more missiles – aside from the Doctor likely just batting them out of the sky again, he might hit the Mimiga cage, and by extension the Mimiga themselves, if he did. He had to think quickly; his machine gun was pretty useless against the Crown, since they'd just get absorbed into some kind of ether that was wrapped around the Doctor's body like a protective cocoon. He figured that the missiles might still have a chance to do some damage if he could catch the Doctor unawares, but there wasn't much chance of that unless the Doctor himself made a screw up somewhere.

Just as the crystal came back to orbit around him, he extended his hand and rubbed the glass-smooth side of it once again, sending out another pulsating wave of the energy. It extended across the sky, missing him entirely at first, but just as the wave reached the other wall, it descended down towards him, covering the air in a type of sheet as it approached the ground. It was quick, but it was thin; a simple side-step got him out of the way, and the Doctor once again disappeared from sight. The crystal told Quote exactly where the Doctor was going to reappear again; he didn't know if the Doctor knew the crystal was giving him away like that.

It seemed like a fairly simple game of cat-and-mouse so far to Quote. Given Curly's stories about how the bearer of the Crown was hitting them with attacks they could hardly imagine much less anticipate, he was expecting the Doctor to do something incredible, like bend the very space around him, or control his limbs with hardly a movement, but so far, nothing of that sort. Had the Doctor simply not figured out how to use the Crown effectively? He was lucky, if that were the case.

The Doctor reappeared on top of the table he was working on earlier, and with the same movements, he sent out yet another simple wave of red energy for him to avoid. He had near-infinite power at his hands, with a gem that could amplify his own abilities by several times, and the most he could think up was a single, simple-but-unpredictable wave of the same energy every time, followed by teleporting himself to some other area of the room. It was hardly a physical fight, and more like a high-stakes game of attrition between the two. Given how the Doctor could simply push away each of Quote's efforts with a wave of his hand, though, he was currently winning.

The Doctor caught onto his own pattern, apparently, and mixed in something else: after warping away from yet another of his similar attacks, he reappeared floating in the air, in a curled ball, clutching his stomach as if he were in pain. Quote saw the window of opportunity and raised his missile launcher once again, the scope quickly locking on and readying the weapon to fire with the press of a button. Before he could, the Doctor unfurled himself explosively, straightening himself out and, at the same time, unleashing a spherical wall of the same red energy in a quick, massive blast. The sphere was more like a series of short, quick lines, like lasers, that bounced off of everything that they hit. Quote's first concern was the Mimiga in the cages; if one of those lasers bounced their way between the bars and into one of their cages, they wouldn't be able to dodge away. He wasn't confined to the narrow, cramped space of one of those boxes, and he was having enough problems dancing and flexing his way between each of the shots, some of them narrowly grazing his shirt or nearly knocking the hat off his head. He didn't have eyes on the back of his head, however, and one of them had rebounded off the wall behind him, coming back to strike him in the back.

He didn't feel any pain from the strike, peculiarly, but the moment he felt the blow, his vision was instantly distorted and undecipherable; his eyes filled with a grey, lifeless static, devoid of any shape or colour. He saw various blacks, whites and greys, all in thousands and thousands of dots and pixels, all jumbling around without direction in his eyes as they were literally taken offline from the hit. At the same time, he felt an unfamiliar burning sensation in his head, and he decided that he didn't like it. In fact, he hated the feeling; his confusing eyes and his burning head began to make him angry, causing him to thrash about mindlessly in his rage, not caring who or what he struck just as long as he could get the pain to stop.

Just as quickly as they were brought offline, his vision came back to him in a blink, but everything was in a colourless grey. He could make our the Doctor hovering in the air just a little distance away, that crystal still swinging around his body as if it were an excited moon to his planet. At the same time, his vision was beginning to cloud with words: simple lines of text that typed themselves into the bottom of his vision at a rapid pace, and with each completed line, the page of text would push itself up and cover more of his sight. The text said a lot of nothing to him at the moment – all he was concerned about was lighting up the Doctor. He lifted his missile launcher, and, without thinking clearly, pressed the launch button several times, the hot, refreshing feeling of the missiles firing over his shoulder and towards his opponent.

The scrolling text in his eyes continued, but after only a moment, all the colours of the room began to ease back in, replacing the monochrome from before. The painful heat in his head slowly eased up as well as he recovered, and as it left, so did his rage, clearing his mind once more. The Doctor was right, at the beginning: he had somehow made the red crystal so potent that it could affect robots as well, and for a moment there, he experienced what it was like to fall under the rage it induced in its victims.

The Doctor had easily intercepted each of the missiles he had fired in his fury, that grin on his face widening further after seeing Quote's pathetic display as he vanished once again from the Crown's magic. He was about to drop the missile launcher's sights to follow the crystal some more, when he noticed a peculiarity with the scope's radar. There were many, many blips all being highlighted at once, and all of them were from the scared Mimiga surrounding the room. But there was one blip that moved quickly from one end of the radar to the other – faster than he could remember seeing anything run. He followed the blip as it moved separately from all the others, knowing that it could have only been two things that could have made the radar display what it was, and the red crystal was following too far behind to have possibly been it. He looked up when it had stopped moving, seeing the Doctor stand on top of another stack of cages as he extended his hand once again, ready to make another swing with his red magic.

Quote couldn't ever catch the Doctor with his guard down because he moved to quickly and unpredictably for him to get a shot in. Knowing where the Doctor would reappear was easy enough with the crystal following him like a puppy, but it would move too slowly for him to react in time. If he followed the radar instead, he might just have a chance.

The Doctor reappeared just next to the staircase leading to the floor below, and let off another of his predictable waves. A simple leap away and the attack was dodged easily, followed by the man disappearing once again to jump to another spot and try the same strategy over again. His eyes were firmly on the scope, however, rather than the red crystal this time. The only blip that moved that quickly flew right up to the centre of the radar, veering just to the right a little. Quote glanced to his right; there was the same stack of cages, each with a handful of Mimiga, and each of them in the cage on the floor flinched and whimpered when they saw him looking in their direction. There wasn't much else the Doctor could have reappeared except for on top of the stack; with a powerful kick, he flung himself as high as he could and got the Booster to carry him the remainder of the distance.

The red crystal was floating high up in the air, meeting Quote halfway and travelling with him up the cells, confirming where the Doctor was going to reappear. The moment he cleared the top of the final cell, he just picked a spot towards the wall over the roof of the final cage and began unloading, waiting for the Doctor to rematerialize right into his fire.

Two of his missiles passed through nothing and collided with the wall harmlessly, but the third and onward made direct contact with the Doctor as he reappeared just to the left of Quote's aim. A minor adjustment wasn't a hassle, and each missile he fired from then on hit the man dead-centre. Quote couldn't see his face through the small explosions, and he doubted the Doctor had the breath or the reaction to begin hollering in pain, but he could clearly see the blue helmet over the cavalcade of munitions, and the scope of his missile launcher had locked onto something that wasn't the crystal. He knew he was ripping the guy apart with each successful hit.

Finally, the Booster had enough and couldn't stay up any more, dropping Quote back to the floor. He still had some missiles left to use, but he was too close to the cages to risk firing any more, if he didn't want to catch any of the Mimiga in his shots. He could hear the Doctor moaning in pain, although…it didn't really sound like he was moaning because of the missiles he had just taken. His throaty noises sounded less like the tired, defeated groans a person makes when he's been beaten; they sounded more urgent, like something was happening painful was happening to him from the inside, and he couldn't bear to keep it in. Quote kept his missile launcher pointed straight up, watching for either the Doctor to show himself over the edge, or for the red crystal to tell him that he had warped someplace else, or for his radar to say that something was moving very quickly. His pained yelps deepened and got more aggressive as seconds ticked away with no sign of movement.

Quote considered firing the Booster back up to take a look, when a large, unsightly hand crept over the edge of the cage, gripping onto the edge, followed by another. The Mimiga in the cage that he was grasping each yelped and cried in surprise, the sound of their little feet running across the cold metal to the back of their cell. The ceiling above them depressed under a sudden strain, and the sound of a body crawling itself harshly across its surface grated loudly on their ears. The Crown came into sight, followed quickly by the Doctor's face; his entire body had gained quite a bit of size all around, making him a few feet taller and his muscles took on a tangible amount of definition. His face had mutated into some kind of toothless monstrosity: his nose had extended and scrunched, looking like a pig's snout, and his cheekbones had risen to begin covering his eyes – his irises had turned blood-red, and his chin had elongated with his nose to make a peculiar cone-like shape. The Crown also seemed to grow in size to accommodate the Doctor's larger head, surprisingly.

He said no words – Quote didn't know if he could still speak at all – as he launched himself from the top of the cage using only his arms. His shoulders and biceps had taken on a very muscular appearance, each bulbous muscle nearly the size of Quote's head, and his hand had inflated practically to the point where he could easily crush his whole body if he managed to catch Quote in his grip. His legs had beefed themselves up proportionately; his feet had grown far beyond what their shoes could contain and he tromped about barefoot. His lab coat, and his undershirt, were all torn and destroyed from the onslaught, although his tough, chiselled skin and hardened six-pack abs hardly seemed scratched underneath.

The new Doctor soared gracelessly through the air, hitting the far iron bars on the other side of the room with a resounding thump, denting the bars and caving the walls they were attached to from the impact, frightening the Mimiga inside. He clung to the bars like a spider, gripping the steel hard enough in his hands to cripple the metal, before dropping back down to the floor onto his feet, causing another loud boom and shock through the walls from the landing.

The Doctor stood, staring at Quote, although he seemed perplexed rather than aggressive at first. He looked over his hands, frowning at how ugly they looked, but his eyes trailed from his wrists to his elbows to his shoulders, marvelling at each muscle. He gave an approving chuckle as he flexed his arms and legs, feeling the pure, raw strength his body now had to offer. His laugh was thick and low and almost sounded forced, as if he couldn't laugh naturally anymore.

Quote's sights were still kept on the Doctor, but he didn't want to risk pressing the button since the Doctor was standing right in front of the Mimiga cages, and a single missed shot might be disastrous. The red crystal loyally hovered back down to the Doctor and began to circle around his enormous form again, and once the Doctor saw it, he disappeared from sight, warping to another part of the room, the crystal adjusting its flight path accordingly.

Quote expected him to teleport to a distant area of the room, or on top of one of the stacks of cages once again, like he had been doing. But instead, the Doctor reappeared only a few feet away from him, and before he could react or retreat, the Doctor gave him a devastating left hook practically to his whole body. Quote had taken hard hits before, but with the Doctor's impressive new strength, he was lifted right off his feet and sent soaring into the bars of one of the ground-floor cages, dropping his missile launcher the moment he was hit. His back hit them with a harsh clang, but at the moment he felt more disoriented than in pain.

"Look out!" he heard one of the Mimiga inside the cage shout. He straightened his focus, trying to pinpoint where the Doctor was. Charging right for him, one heavy foot hitting the ground in front of the other with inhuman force, was the Doctor's solid mass of muscle, his right fist reared back over his shoulder, ready to strike again. He was still dizzy from the last hit, but he knew well enough to run away before his circuits were wrapped around his knuckles. With a quick dash to the left, he avoided the haymaker; the Doctor's huge fist instead hit two of the iron bars, immediately snapping them in half and throwing the broken remains into the cage from the force, leaving a sizeable gap between the other bars. He couldn't tell from his angle, but he hoped the Mimiga inside the cage were okay.

The missile launcher was too far away for him to risk diving for it, so, with few other options, he drew his sword once again, Misery's blood still dripping from its edge. He imagined himself in King's position in the storehouse: against an opponent easily three times his size, armed with just the sword, and still managing match it blow-for-blow with an impressive show of swordsmanship and dexterity. He knew he was a novice with the sword in comparison, but with his machine gun useless against the Crown, he didn't have a lot of alternatives and squared bravely against the man as he began to charge towards him once again.

The sword was held tightly in each hand, his metal joints straining as they nervously put more and more force into his grip. The Doctor was getting close again, too close for his comfort, but he remained still, intent on trying to mimic King's style. The Doctor took a short hop in the air once he got within a few metres of Quote, both hands together over his head and both of them coming back down when he did, hammering into the floor with all the force he could muster.

His body might have been enhanced beyond either of their expectations – and it looked like he managed to keep his mind in the process, unlike a frenzied Mimiga – but that didn't mean he learned how to fight with the transformation, fortunately for Quote. The sting from the last hit rattled his head and hurt his back from the collision with the cage, but he could still read the Doctor's moves and intentions well ahead of time. Before the Doctor landed, Quote evaded to his left, bringing the silver blade up as he moved, across the Doctor's strong bicep, and then quickly back down, across his shoulder. The sword made both hits, but they felt as though they hit solid brick instead of flesh.

The Doctor's balled fists hit the floor with a resounding boom, rattling the cages and breaking a hole in the floor with just his own power. His arm was cut open where the sword had landed, but he didn't move like he had felt anything more than just a sting. He spun around, facing Quote again, and charged again, swinging both his arms heavily with his stride. Quote made short hops back, trying to keep his distance while he thought up a new strategy to use against the giant man. He skipped right over his missile launcher, not noticing it until it was too late.

The Doctor was keeping up with Quote; every time he'd get close enough, he'd make a swipe with his arms, sometimes open-handed, obviously without any practice or direction, much like how Toroko had fought when she was frenzied. Little drips of blood ran down his flexed muscles from the cuts Quote had made, but his movements didn't slow at all. They continued as they were; the Doctor approaching and making a hard swing, narrowly missing Quote as he leapt back to widen the distance some more, until his back was to the table at the end of the room. The Doctor came in, both his hands wide open and closing in, about to make a thunderous clap against Quote's body and cutting off both sides of his escape. Thinking quickly, he hopped backwards, onto the table just as the Doctor's enormous hands came together, the room erupting with sound as the loud slap echoed off the walls. Quickly, Quote jumped forward, right over the Doctor's extended hands, swinging the sword below his feet to slice open the man's skin as he passed overhead. He managed to get a cut across the backs of his right hand and across both his forearms, and he would have gotten the man in the skull if the Crown didn't get in his way.

He started up the Booster for that extra push away from the Doctor on his descent, trying to increase the gap between them some more. He looked over his shoulder once he thought he was safe enough, to see that the Doctor wasn't there, and that the red crystal was on its way just past him. Just as he realized his mistake, he felt the Doctor's large fingers wrap around both his legs at once and brought him back down the floor. The Booster gave out once Quote's foot was held still, swinging him helplessly down as the Doctor beat him against the ground like a club once, and then swinging him up across his shoulder, winding up to toss him across the room with all his strength.

Quote managed to keep a hold on his sword the whole time, but dropped it once he hit the spiral staircase on the other side of the room with enough force to chip the stone. He grunted and groaned as he lay on his stomach at the foot of the steps, trying to pick himself up onto his hands and knees, to keep fighting, but his entire body felt as though it were on fire from the pain. His ears rang and his mind was unfocused, unable to think any single thought at one time. His bones and muscles creaked and tightened as he tried to stand; he needed to get back onto his feet, to keep fighting the Doctor. He hadn't come all this way for nothing, but he simply couldn't muster the strength. "Get up," he heard a Mimiga say somewhere, although whether the voice was near or far was beyond his immediate grasp. "He's coming, man, you need to get up, or he'll kill us all."

He could still move his arms and his legs, incredibly, but each limb felt as though it was under hundreds of pounds of pressure, and any movement at all was a chore. Lifting his head from the floor was difficult; his shoulders were bruised and his neck was strained. The sound of the Doctor's footsteps were the only thing he could really define in his state, his eyes searching across the ground and he tried so hard to at least sit up to see the man's bear feet, each step thumping loudly in the air. He wasn't running to Quote to finish him off, as he expected, but he seemed to be strolling towards him, as if his victory was all but assured by this point. And with how much difficulty Quote was having with just lifting his head, it might just be.

Quote reached for the hilt of the sword with his right hand, trying to get a grip on it before the Doctor got too close. He was nowhere near the blade, though, and he wasn't able to pick himself up and crawl himself to it. The Doctor stood motionless in front of Quote for a moment, between him and his sword, letting himself bask in the feeling of his victory and his godlike strength – he accomplished what Balrog, nor Misery, nor even the Core could accomplish by finally beating the android soldier from the surface. He had to admit to himself that he could understand why the soldier seemed so unbeatable: it learned and thought like a human, and had all the precision and reflexes that he expected a combat android to have. His new gift from the red crystal was a blessing, in a way – if he hadn't had the boost, the soldier probably would have gotten the better of him.

But he wasn't so high on power that he thought he could entertain himself by stringing the soldier along. He bent down, picking up Quote with a surprisingly gentle left hand wrapped around his entire waist, lifting and turning the robot upright in the air so they could look each other in the eyes. Quote was dirty, torn, ragged, and beaten, and could hardly stand to look the monster in his half-shut eyes. The Doctor's clothes were in much worse shape than his, and his arms and shoulders were bleeding in numerous places, but it was obvious who the victor was either way. The Doctor made some kind of low growl as he stared his defeated opponent down, conveying a sort of unfriendly congratulation for making it this far.

The Doctor placed his other enormous hand over Quote's skull, his entire palm easily wrapping around Quote's head and flattening his cap against his scalp. With a simple clockwise twist, he was going to pop the robot's head off like a cap from a bottle, and that'd be the end of that. He could feel Quote struggle against his vice-grip, pressing and squirming against his fingers, and he derived a sort of sick pleasure from feeling the helpless kicking and clawing robot try to keep fighting in his position with his strength.

Just when Quote really thought he had bitten it this time, the Doctor removed his hand from Quote's skull. He had regained enough focus for him to understand what was going on around him, but the reason why the man hesitated was still unclear to him at the moment. "Let him go!" he heard someone yell, and suddenly he saw a small, green object fly through the air from a high angle, hitting the Doctor in the cheek. It bounced off him harmlessly, but it got the Doctor's attention. In one of the cages, stacked up high on top of the others, was an adult Mimiga gripping the iron bars to his cage with both his hands. "You monster! You killer! Let him go!" he shouted, lifting his right leg up to his hands so he could toss his other shoe.

The Doctor was about to respond by tossing Quote as hard as he could against the cage, when he felt something else hit him in the neck. He turned around, looking down to see a simple button from a shirt rolling across the ground. He looked up, spying the cages to see who had the audacity to throw something at him, and seeing a younger Mimiga pulling each button off his shirt one by one to repeat his offensive.

The first throw sparked a wave of courage in the other Mimiga; after seeing their potential hero get downed so harshly and their captive about to put an end to their last chance of escape, they all got the same idea to pitch in and help Quote however they could. They each threw all they could spare – shoes, belts, house keys, hats, shirts, bracelets, lipstick, necklaces, anything they were carrying – as hard as they could at the Doctor, each of them shouting obscenities and curses at the Doctor all the while. None of them knew what was going to come next or what they would do once they all ran out of things to throw, but that wasn't as important as getting Quote free right now.

None of what the Mimiga threw really fazed the Doctor physically; they each just bounced off his skin harmlessly. He could hardly feel them strike him at all. But it was the principle of the matter: he was their new master and leader. He had worked hard and pulled so many strings to get to his status as ruler of the island, and he alone had risen to such incredible power using the Crown and the red crystal in tandem. They should fear and revere him, not throwing their everyday baubles at him like he was some kind of bottom-rate trash. When one of the Mimiga's thrown earrings managed to get him in his eye, he really started to get mad. He'd rip open the bars on each individual cage and break each and every paw he found before subjecting them to the crystal and rewiring their destroyed minds.

He had dropped Quote in surprise after he felt the sting of the earring in his eye, reflexively bringing both hands up to rub the pain away. When he managed to open his eyes once more, he saw three Mimiga each standing in the centre of the corridor; they were in the cage he had snapped the bars in half from when he transformed, and the open space between the bars was more than enough for them to squeeze through. Two of them held the large, orange missile launcher up, the missiles pointed right at the Doctor, while the third one was desperately searching for a way to fire them.

"He's looking right at us," one of the two Mimiga holding the weapon said worriedly. "Hurry up and find the switch!"

"I'm looking, I'm looking!" the third one said franticly, her paws running over the missile launcher's buttons and levers, trying to find one that would shoot one of them like they had seen Quote do earlier. There weren't a whole lot of buttons on the weapon to begin with, but none of them were clearly labelled and her eyesight wasn't great anyway. "They all look the same to me!"

"Just press any of them, Chaco!" said the other Mimiga, trying to keep the weapon steady and pointed squarely at the Doctor, who was now beginning to run towards them. "He's coming right for us!"

The booming sound of the monster's footsteps was enough to confirm that. He could have teleported next to them, but he wasn't thinking clearly between his rage at the Mimiga and the need to intercept those three with the weapon. She just pressed any button and flicked every switch she found – among turning the scope on and off, she did manage to find the button that launched a single missile from the weapon. It flew forward with incredible speed, locked right onto the Doctor's incoming body, and collided full-force with him, stopping him dead in his tracks as he recoiled from the blast. "Keep doing that!" one of the other Mimiga said, and Chaco complied, simply pressing the same button over and over, launching missile after missile, and the Doctor was too busy reeling from the first hit to dodge any of the others.

They couldn't tell if the missiles were actually doing anything other than slowing him down, though. He was still standing once Chaco stopped pressing the button (stopping before the weapon ran out entirely), his clothes tattered and his chest was torn open badly. He was in poor shape, but he kept going all the same, his mind clouded with vengeance against the critters that defied him his position as their king. He began picking up the pace again, charging towards the three – they weren't worth turning into frenzied soldiers, he decided, and it would have been better if he just killed them all right there.

His own heavy footsteps drowned out of the sound of quick, lighter ones from behind him, awkwardly dashing up to his back as quickly as they could lopsidedly run. Just as he began to start jogging towards the Mimiga, he felt a sharp, penetrating sting in his upper back, just between his shoulder blades. The strike powerful thrust had pierced into his spine, cutting into his bones. He couldn't turn around to see Quote holding onto the other end of the sword jutting out of his back; in fact, he found he couldn't move at all, and all he could feel all over his body was pain.

The Doctor let out an inhuman, low, shrill shriek once he could register the pain firing all over. The pierce he felt in his back began to bleed profusely, only he didn't bleed blood, oddly: it looked like blood, but the colour was too light, and it almost seemed buoyant as it shot out of his body, seemingly hovering momentarily in the air before falling to the ground. And it didn't splash, or pool, like a normal liquid, but instead it seemed to just disappear the moment it hit the ground.

The Doctor's scream was cut awkwardly short; Quote looked up at the man to find that he seemed to be evaporating into the same odd liquid that was pouring out of his back. His Crown disappeared with the rest of him, along with his skin, his hair, his eyes and nose and ears, all the way down to his feet. None of it splashed onto the ground or all over him, and it all just vanished the moment any of it collided with something solid. Only his clothes and his shoes remained, which Quote found odd, since the Crown melted away with the rest of him.

The sword fell to the ground with a clang as the metal bounced against the stone once the Doctor evaporated, and the red crystal flew away once its bound host had vanished. The entire room was silent as they all saw the monster disappear, the heap of his laundry among all the trinkets and accessories the Mimiga had thrown at him the only thing remaining to prove that he even existed at all. The room was as silent as the night when the last of the Doctor's weird blood hit the floor and vanished, having witnessed a spectacular death for a horrible man. Once Quote remembered how much pain he was in, he slumped to his knees, exhausted, and in every cage, each Mimiga – possibly the island's entire population, each crammed into tiny boxes stacked on top of each other – began applauding raucously, clapping their paws and stamping their feet, elated whoops and congratulations shaking the very room once the Doctor disappeared for good.

The happiness and celebration in the room was nearly tangible, from one Mimiga to the other, knowing that the tyrant – the sole man responsible for all the sick science experiments and various kidnappings at random times and random places all over the island – was finally gone. Their earlier appreciation for the Doctor back in the Plantation had all but disappeared, probably once they saw what the red flowers did to Mimiga; Quote remembered seeing the two frenzied Mimiga outside of the mountain, and they had to have gotten there somehow. One cage of Mimiga broke out into a celebratory song: the lyrics were about the dangers of Mimiga life, and how a hero would come to their rescue from their turmoil. The song was probably about Arthur, originally, but Quote didn't mind. He had fulfilled his promise to King by putting an end to the Doctor. With his own sword, no less. He could only hope King was satisfied, having been avenged by an outsider, but avenged nonetheless.

The song spread to the cages surrounding it, and to the cages around those, until each cage was singing the same song in praise to their new hero, their collective voices carrying all throughout the mountain in cheer. The three Mimiga that had used the missile launcher dropped the weapon and began undoing the sliding locks on each of the cage doors, letting out every caged Mimiga to spill onto the floor. Some of them immediately head down the spiral steps to find their way home; some of them stuck around to pick up the belongings they had thrown at the Doctor in their desperate attack; but most of them crowded around tired Quote, lifting him onto their shoulders and surfing him along the crowds. None of them knew his name, but they cheered for their 'surface soldier' all the same. Many of them patted him on the shoulder in thanks, and many of them had all sorts of questions for him about where he learned to move the way he had and what he was thinking as he fought. He barely heard any of them over the general ruckus the crowd was making, though, and he was busy keeping his eyes peeled through the crowd, looking for Sue anywhere among the Mimiga, but he couldn't spot her blue sweater and her short body anywhere.

After parading him around the room once in a sort of victory lap, they set him back down where they had picked him up. One of them had picked up his sword and offered it back to him, and the two Mimiga that held the missile launcher gave that back to him as well. His machine gun hadn't left his shoulder the whole time, and with his sword back in its scabbard and his missile launcher back across his other shoulder, he was fully equipped once again. The missile launcher still had a dozen or so missiles left to use.

"What are you going to do next?" he heard someone ask. They all clamoured for his answer, huddling around him excitedly. Some of them wanted to go back to their own unique villages, or back to the Plantation, while others not-unkindly suggested he head back to his own home, wherever it was, and take a break. Many of them wanted to stay on the island, since a good deal of them had not known a hero like him in their generation, having succeeded Arthur by a good deal of time.

He answered by looking behind him, to the spiral staircase leading up and into the third floor of the mountain. He remembered what Kazuma had told him before he had scaled the outer wall: if he wanted to prevent something like this from ever happening to the Mimiga again – if he wanted to assure the safety of the rest of the world from the threat of an invasion from an army of frenzied Mimiga – he'd have to destroy the Core of the island. But he and Misery both said that doing that would cause the island to plummet from the sky…

He spotted the chip in the stone he had made when he was thrown against the steps, and it reminded him of just how much pain he was in. He managed to forget it for a while from being too wrapped up in the celebration and the cheering earlier to notice, but as he remembered that he still wasn't done, his injuries became apparent again. His torn skin still hadn't healed over, and he was still aching all over from the hits he had taken just a few minutes ago. At least his ankle didn't hurt from his encounter with Misery anymore, or else it was just so slight compared to the rest of him that he just didn't notice.

Quote glanced back to the crowd, motioning towards the staircase, to confirm his answer their question. Some of them pleaded for him to stop and rest; he was nearly broken, and he had taken such a terrible beating for their sakes already, although none of them knew just what was waiting for him at the end of those stairs. Others understood that he had a mission, and putting an end to the Doctor was just one of his many objectives to complete. He turned around, keeping his stance as straight and as 'heroic' as he could, to assure the others that he was fine when he wasn't particularly. There was no handrail for him to grip as he climbed the flight, one step after the other, but it wasn't too much trouble without it. The throng of Mimiga still in the room cheered and applauded as he climbed the steps, chanting 'surface soldier' repeatedly as he went, letting him know that his sacrifices wouldn't go unrecorded for as long as Mimiga existed.

Their words and praises echoed far into the upper floor of the mountain, travelling with him with each step he took, echoing off the walls as he climbed. The grated half the mountain stopped very suddenly, finally surrounding the shaft he climbed in natural stone. The stairs went on for much longer than the last one, and the more he climbed, the more distant the chants became until they were nothing more than just whispers in the wind. The visibility darkened and dimmed considerably as he went, eventually blacking out entirely; keeping him from seeing the steps he was supposed to be walking. The sound of his footfalls were the only thing keeping him company as he continued in the darkness, feeling along the wall bumping each step with his heavy boot before climbing it to know there was still a step to climb.

Finally, there was a source of light at the end of the long staircase, letting him see where he was going as he continued. His injuries became less and less obvious as he went, his body becoming accustomed to the pain while he climbed, seemingly walking the pain away. He climbed the final step, allowing himself into the enormous room at the top of the mountain. The source of the light wasn't immediately obvious, but that wasn't his first concern: lining the walls were those smaller beasts he had fought with Curly in that heavily-defended core of the island. They looked exactly as he remembered them: the shape of an egg, large enough for him to stand on, with a small opening in one end leading into an opaque darkness. They seemed different, though; the moss that covered their bodies was a kind of light-blue instead of the traditional mossy green from the core. That, and, there were quite a bit more of them than just five.

In the very back of the room was the larger, main beast – the Core. It looked just as he and Curly had found it in the core of the island, from the dimples in its visible skin to the way the moss hung off its enormous egg-shaped body. The opening in its front was sealed in that same unsettling, toothless grin, showing very little of its pitch-black innards. Its size still intimidated him, no matter if it was active or if it was idle, but he approached the beast without pause, not allowing himself to falter now, of all times. With the Doctor dead and Misery gone, all he had to do was light the beast up, no troubles or snags, and he could be on his way. He brought his machine gun back over his shoulder and into his hands as he approached, ready to begin firing at the thing.

"That's far enough!" He stopped dead, surprised more than anything over hearing a voice in this room when he thought he was absolutely alone. He recognized the voice right away as well, and on cue, Misery warped herself into the room, hovering in the air between Quote and the beast. While her pants were still bloody, it was apparent that she had done something about the bleeding itself, although he couldn't see any bandage or cast wrapped around her leg under her clothes. Her hair was all out of shape and she was still bleeding in places across her face. She normally just let herself drop to the ground, her strong legs just shaking off the pressure from the landing, but this time she eased herself to the ground very gently. She was gripping hard onto her wooden staff, leaning on it for all its support when she landed, wincing in pain when she finally touched down.

Quote wasn't about to let Misery stand in his way of finally putting an end to all this. He would have felt guilty if this were anyplace or anytime else, but she was literally the only thing half-standing between him and the Core, and she didn't have the strength to stand under her own power. With the Demon Crown gone for good, she shouldn't be bound to the Doctor anymore either, so why was she till here, defending the man's ideals to the very end? He pointed his machine gun right at her, less as a threat and more as a warning: he'd rather anything else, anything, than to kill Misery, and he sincerely didn't want to pull that trigger, but he couldn't stop now.

The balled end of her staff began to glow that off-blue glow once again, and he expected a spell or some incantation or something for him to look out for. But instead of her conjuring up more animals for him to snipe down, or for her to change and adjust the very space around them, she simply warped in someone else, in front of her, unconscious. The short figure and the blue sweater immediately told him it was Sue.

"If you value her life," she grunted, still putting up with the pain, "then step away from the Core." She was gripping a fistful of Sue's fur of her head and putting more weight onto her staff as she spoke. He didn't know if she needed the staff specifically to cast spells, and his weapon was already raised, but he couldn't take the chance against Misery. Although he couldn't simply leave the Core, for now, it would be better to do as she said; he lowered his weapon and took a step back, eliciting a surprised smirk on Misery. "You're just a box of surprises, aren't you? Any other robot would have just shot through the girl to get to me."

Misery took a few hurried breaths, trying to keep her strength up. "I never would have dreamed that you," she paused, taking a few huffs, "that you would defeat the new king. Nobody's ever stood up to the Crown, let alone succeed. I've seen 'heroes' come and go, and fight the kings with all their strength, but you're the first to actually prove himself better." Quote sure felt inferior when the Doctor had him in his hands, ready to pull off his head, but he was the one still alive all the same. "I know to pick my fights," she continued, "so let me offer you a deal instead. You can go through both of us, destroy the Core, and die with the island once it smashes against the earth with you, and all the Mimiga and the Gaudi and the Drolls and your other human buddy-buddies still inside…" She was practically salivating venom with all the names she rattled off. "Or you can turn around, walk back down those stairs, and find some way to leave the island, never come back, and forget you ever came. If you do, I can guarantee this one's life. I don't know who she is and I don't really care, but you and all your human friends seem to find her important. Otherwise–"

The room suddenly began to tremble, very slightly; the beast and its smaller children weren't about to be dislodged from their secure holes in the walls, but it was still enough to rattle them on their feet. Misery nearly collapsed onto her knees, her stability uneven as it was. The tremor only lasted for a few seconds; once it passed, a disembodied, deep voice began to call from nowhere. You shall not escape, it said, the voice sounding like it came from everywhere around them, broadcasting straight into their ears. It was unmistakably the Doctor's voice, although he sounded very…calm.

"Who's there?!" Misery demanded, looking around the room vainly to find whoever was speaking to them. She looked up and down, behind Quote and behind herself, but there wasn't anyone around other than the three already there. She knew that the voice belonged to her recently-deceased master, but she would really rather not believe it was actually him – he was dead in the ground, after all. The Crown alone didn't have the power to revive anyone, as far as she knew, or else the first king would still be alive.

The voice laughed, not sinisterly or in a demeaning way, but just amusedly. The voice had this ethereal echo to it; the sound repeated itself unnaturally late, each repetition a little lower in pitch than the last, adding a very surreal feel to the voice. Have you really forgotten the voice of your master? Behind Misery, a red cloud of some kind of buoyant liquid seeped up from the floor along with the red crystal itself, and began to collect itself in the air, taking a formless shape as the material seemed to spill upwards. Quote frantically pointed behind Misery, getting her attention: she turned around, and gasped in shock from what she saw. Not that she knew what she was seeing, but it was a wholly unnatural thing to see all together.

The voice laughed again, although this time it was very condescending once the entity saw Misery's expression. All the light-red blood-like liquid had finished collecting from the floor and began circulating in the air, each individual drop flowing freely among the rest of them in an enormous bubble. Sue began to blink her tired eyes open, although with the Doctor still 'alive' and in such an intangible form, she was all but forgotten to the other two. The power of the red crystal is wondrous indeed, it remarked. It imbues me with incredible strength and heals me when I am wounded. It fills me even now; my body may be destroyed, but my consciousness has never been more distinct. Sue nearly called out to Quote, seeing him stand there just a few feet away, when she noticed his hard stare at whatever was behind her. She turned around, first noticing Misery and her bloody dress, but behind her was that fog of red, rotating and pulsating with each word it 'spoke'. She got the better idea to pick herself up and run behind Quote for protection. It feels as if I have become a superman!

Misery was furious at the Doctor – she was free for all of five minutes from the wearer of the Crown! She wouldn't have had to put up with the man and his total lack of empathy any longer now that he was dead and gone. She still remembered the sting of his hand on her when she brought back the wrong Mimiga from the village. She was counting down the days towards who died first, and she had won! She had earned her right to be free from this man! She wanted to lash out, to strike the Doctor's essence with all the magic she could muster, her injury in her leg totally veiled behind her anger towards the Doctor.

Neither of them spoke for a moment – the Misery was too angry to speak, and the Doctor was gauging her reaction to his reanimation. What's wrong, Misery? he asked. She could feel his eyes stare down at her, that omnipresent gleam in his glasses and his superior toothy grin etched into her mind now. The Doctor was different from all her other masters; she never felt like she was alone as long as he was in charge. Wherever she went, his shadow would follow, his paranoid need to be in control of everything, all the time, never giving her a moment's piece of mind. Does my form frighten you? he continued, knowing exactly how she felt about him and how she resented him.

She didn't feel the controlling pull of the Crown from anywhere nearby, which meant that she was not bound to the Doctor any longer since he was not physically wearing it. "Why aren't you dead?!" she screamed the way only a scorned woman could scream. "Why won't you die?! Why won't you leave?!" She slammed the dull end of her staff into the ground between them, the balled end glowing a much deeper blue than normal as she let loose a flurry of the same black bubbles she had used against Quote earlier. The barrage was considerably more aggressive than what she had used against him, though, and continued for much longer. She vented her fury at the Doctor as best as she could, trying to strike away his new ghostly form, although each hit simply passed through the cloud harmlessly, bouncing off the beast's tough hide behind it.

Tut-tut-tut, he pronounced phonetically, having no tongue to click the way a parent disapproves of a child's actions. A fool who would forget her own master does not deserve free will. The cloud began to expand itself, covering a wider area than it was before. Misery. You will be my puppet until the day you die. With frightening speed, the cloud overtook Misery, wrapping her in its mist. She gave a frightened shriek once it overcame her, loosely trapping her in a spinning column of the red stuff. She tried some more spells and magic, frantically trying to get herself out of the whirlwind, but after only a few seconds, she felt herself begin to change. Her mind clouded and her voice deepened; like the Doctor, she began to grow in size from the red crystal's properties. She was naturally short and frail, so her transformation wasn't nearly as big and intimidating as the Doctor's. She nearly doubled in height and her arms and legs lengthened appropriately, but her muscles saw fairly little build. Her ears extended away from her head; her hair grew down to her back instead of her shoulders; each hand lost a finger; and she spontaneously grew a long tail just above her rear. Her most drastic change was to her face; she grew a bird-like beak and her nostrils disappeared into her upper lip, and her eyes practically disappeared into her sockets, making two black depressions in her skull.

Quote could see all these changes occur to her through the fog of the liquid, but was too freaked out from Misery's broken and discordant screaming to open fire on her before she could become a threat. Sue was just as shocked from the transformation, which did not occur slowly, but she came to her senses before he did. "Hey!" she yelled, tugging at his shirt to get his attention. "We gotta get out of here!" She pulled away from him and immediately ran for the stairs in the opposite side of the room. He hesitated – if he left now, he might not get another chance to destroy the Core. But against a 'frenzied' Misery and the Doctor still alive (in a sense), he had to admit that escaping would be the smarter option. He could maybe come back with Curly, and they could team against the Core, just like last time, and he could use the time to restock on missiles.

The red crystal flew past him as he turned to follow Sue. It immediately caught up with the small Mimiga and cut her off with itself, stopping her in her tracks. Its glow pulsated once in front of her, and she suddenly felt herself enraptured with the jewel, unable to move under its lustre. Quote began running towards her; he didn't want the crystal near anybody after what it had done to the Doctor and what it was doing to Misery. But he was too late: Sue began to undergo her own unique transformation. Her body began to expand and elongate and shift under the red crystal's spell, although her transformed body looked decidedly unthreatening. Her tiny sweater couldn't contain her building body for too long, and ripped to shreds after only a few seconds. She retained her fur all over her body, except for her face and between her elbows and shoulders, revealing a dark tan skin underneath. She grew until she was only a little bit taller than Quote, compared to the gigantic Misery, who still wasn't done her own metamorphosis. Her ears looked a little jagged as she changed, but they otherwise generally looked the same. Her face looked extremely human: human nose, human mouth, and human eyes. Changing a Mimiga that was once a human must have that effect on the crystal. Sue's transformed self looked nearly cuddly compared to what he expected her to turn out as.

Quote began swatting at the red crystal, trying to shoo it away before it could do something even worse to any of them, but the damage had been done. The cloud around Misery unfurled itself from her and reuniting with the red crystal before melting back into the ground as they had done before. She stood strong on both her legs; the cloud apparently seeing it fit to heal her injury before it finished changing her. She had dropped her staff to the floor before the change, and decided that she didn't really need it, simply leaving it there. The Doctor's voice rumbled through the room with a gleeful laugh, apparently very pleased with how Misery and Sue both went through their changes. You're not leaving this place alive, boy! he shouted. His voice shook the Core awake – the familiar opening in its side slid open. Last time, in the core of the island, that opening revealed to Quote a series of blue eyes that stared back at him. This time, he saw an enormous red human skull; it had no flesh, no nose, and no eyes. The fleshy skin of the Core surrounding the opening indented between the sockets of his eyes, giving the bloody face a perpetual frown, and the face's mouth was locked permanently open. Quote had no idea just what was inside the Core.

He stood between Sue on one side, with Misery and the beast on the other. The beast squirmed in its holding space in the wall, eventually sliding itself free with the same, shrill shriek that he remembered it made in the Labyrinth. Each of its many, many smaller children were awakened with the noise, each of them beginning to circle protectively around their 'mother'. He was tired; he was hurt; he was low on ammunition. He took all his odds and his poor position in stride: moving his machine gun to hold in his left hand so he could easily draw his sword with his right, he stood defiantly against them all, ready to fight. The Mimiga from the cages below had called him a 'hero' – it was time for him to be heroic.