Hangry Games, part six

The girls have penetrated the machine of the foe while the guys keeps company with the dead. A dangerous plan tohas led to Satan's tmeple, where will this lead our unfortunate friends?

                Anna and Niamh opened a door that they had found in on the edge of the tunnel in the mysterious teleportation device. Within the low light behind that mysterious ingress shapes began to resolve themselves. A dim corridor filled with pipes and cabling become visible, but also a mechanical movement could be heard whirring and clicking.

                “What’s that?” Niamh whispered nervously.

                “There!” Anna pointed at the ceiling and a copper camera could be seen, rotating slowly on some internal cog to face the door. Moments before it had been clearly watching the opposite direction but now the sound of the opening door had registered and it was clicking about to face the two.

                They ducked quickly out of sight and closed the door again.

                “What now?”

*

                In a dark cliff the temple of Satan loomed before two humans and five spirits. They listened with bated breath for the riddle that would decide Angphu’s fate. I’m not really sure what the spirits were bating for, having no purpose for breath in their lungs. I suppose one keeps these functions out of habit when the mysterious beyond is upon them.

“Answer my words in tangled encryption,

Name the unnamed of my brief description,

Describe the object that is brown in hue,

An item that's often-called sticky too.”

                Thusly spoke the deep voice of the temple and the friends fell to discussing the answer that had so weighty a fate on one of the heads of their number.

                “What was all that about encryptions?” Tan-the-Man looked puzzled.

                “I think that’s just a fancy way of opening the riddle.” Someone answered

                “It’s a BLOODY STUPID riddle.”

                “I don’t understand how this helps me get to badgers.”

                “I think the first couplet is just the opening.” Dave mused. “The real riddle is in the second pair of lines.”

                “What were the last two?” Tan-the-man asked.

                “Can we have the riddle again?” Tan asked the temple.

                “No.” replied the voice.

                “Oh, go on. We just need it one more time.”

                “NO.” The temple responded adamantly.

                “It’s okay Tan. Weren’t the last lines about something brown and something about sticky?”

                “Oh. Does that just mean it’s the old joke; what’s brown and sticky?”

*

                Niamh and Anna stood by the door, wondering how to cheat their way past the mechanical sentry. Also clinging firmly to the arm of the child Nambila, who wanted to get back on the big fun moving floor that formed the road-wide conveyor belt.

                “If they see us walking in, we can’t tell what they’d do.”

                “Yeah.” Niamh agreed. “But how do we get in? That camera will be on the door now, we can’t just sneak in.”

                They continued the discussion, frowning and trying to puzzle a clever way through the entrance unobserved.

                In the stress of the moment they hadn’t really thought deeply about their present surroundings. It didn’t really occur to them that a defence system rarely uses just one camera. They had not tried to squint at the dark corners of the tunnel that housed the conveyor belt. They would have been hard pressed anyway, to spot the fisheye lenses tucked away in the shadows up there.

                Another system was frowning and puzzling over two clever foes who had penetrated where they were not meant to reach and how they would swiftly need distracting before they made further progress.

                                                             * 

                The ghost and human party congratulated themselves on having cleverly solved the riddle. Angphu turned to the temple and spoke confidently.

                “I believe the answer you are looking for,” He pronounced knowingly. “Is a stick.”

                “No” The building replied.

                Horror doused the group like cold water.

                “What?”

                “Oh no!”

                “If that’s not the answer then what is?”

                “Poo.” Intoned the mighty temple.

                “No!” Angphu cried out desperately. “That’s not how the joke works! Check anywhere that’s not the answer!”

                “POO” The awful voice thundered insistently.

                This would perhaps have been very funny under different circumstances but the golden symbols on building had begun to glow white hot, giving off the stink of burning metal. Heat seemed to ripple and crack across the surface of the temple. All the glow of the fire converged like water droplets gathering on a window pane until there were only two intense spots of fervent temperature which travelled to the armoured statues. It lit them like beacons of death and they turned towards the group.

                “No!” Angphu screamed desperately. “Check the internet. Please, you have to check, you’ve got it wrong.”

                The visors on the helmeted heads of the statues opened up and everyone had to shield their eyes against a glare more severe than the burning sun.

 *

                I feel like this is a great moment to interrupt the narrative and talk about a cracking guy named Seamus. Seamus is the boyfriend fiance of Niamh and let me tell you, if you’re in his company you’re having good craic. I want you to picture a tall fellow in glasses who always had an air of graceful relaxation about him.

He wasn’t able to attend the tea party so he had not been swept up into the games. At that moment the man was driving along a winding road in the beautiful land of Ireland, thinking Irish thoughts (not potatoes you xenophobe he was dwelling on the HSE and all the drinkers gathering in cork to spread their germs) when the tunnel appeared around him. Startled, he slammed on the breaks.

Niamh and Anna had been talking quietly about the best way into the heart of the teleporter. They had both come to the reluctant conclusion that they would just have to run past the camera and hope for the best when the car appeared.

“Oh my God! It’s Seamus!”

Niamh felt a leap of joy at seeing his car. She recognised a feeling of joy and comfort when she saw that car. Seamus being there also made her feel happy but then she felt horribly guilty. She had just realised that she had been joyous that the man was in this nightmare scenario alongside all of them.

While Niamh was lost in these thoughts Anna had something much more practical occur to her.

“What if he gets out of the car? Human flesh gets burned in here”

Niamh swore and then panicked. She tried to get onto the moving road but in her haste, she fell down hard. Everything disorientated her, suddenly she seemed to be still and the pavement was in motion. Her armour felt heavy upon her and she simply could not pause to think.

Seamus spotted someone on the roadside who had fallen over. The someone was dressed in metallic garb so he did not realise he was looking  at his girlfriend fiance. Still though, no self-respecting Irishman can move past a fallen figure without checking to see that they are okay so he reached for the door handle to the car.

* 

The other party was cringing under the awful brightness of those two statues facing them. The living felt the heat but for the dead it was worse, they felt heavy. It was as if they were at the top of a hill and those fire-bright faces were at the bottom. They tried to cling desperately to their barely understood floating power but the feeling of being on a hill was turning to something more like the edge of a fall, flailing for a balance that could not be found.

Angphu had fallen to his knees and was shielding his eyes with his forearm. Robert too was blinded, squealing in pain. Not his most manly moment but masculinity is often forgotten in the face of terrible danger.

One of the statues turned its face towards Angphu. It seemed to cough and splutter, molten power spewing out, singing the rockface. It cannot be known what kind twist of fate caused it to cough and splutter so, had the glowing substance struck any human flesh then they would surely have perished for the globs were already eating their way into the rockface. Thick and toxic smoke billowed from the holes they left behind.

The second of the two pointed its glowing head at Angphu and the iron of its chest-piece seemed to strain, almost as if it were drawing a deep breath.

The atmosphere was black, the bright enemy only visible via the fury through which its deadly visage burned. Robert’s eyes were stinging and his arm was roaring furious pain at him. His lungs sucked and blistered as he was caught closest to the stream of dark gas. Through all this one fact was at the front of his consciousness.

This statue would fire and its aim would be true. If he did not get out of the way to Angphu then he might catch some splatters of bright substance and die.

What happened next is not clear. All the spirits were trying to float but the ability was becoming more and more like grasping a fading dream, only by not concentrating on it could they hope to hold one. Angphu was futilely shouting about the rules of riddles whilst scrabbling about desperately on his knees.

 The head of the foe spat at the exact moment that Robert’s body was between fire and friend. Maybe he remembered the moment Angphu had leapt into the fray of the dance to save his friend. Perhaps he had had enough of pain and terror and decided to spend one last moment for the sake of love and friendship. It is more than possible that he simply crossed through the volley of death quite by accident.

In all events the effect was clear. The substance buried itself hallway into his sternum and caught short a choked scream of pain. He collapsed and the substance ate its way through his body and the surface beneath the body.

The statue collapsed as if it some unknown lifeforce was now spent. Its companion was on hands and knees coughing. The spirits fell toward the power that travelled through the rock face and Angphu was left choking to death.

            *    

               Back in the teleporting device Anna hesitated for a vital second between Niamh on the floor and Seamus in the car. She decided the car was the more imminent danger and hopped carefully onto the belt and ran towards the car. She waved her hands desperately motioning stop and stay.

                “Don’t get out of the car!” She shouted desperately.

                Seamus frowned. His hand was on the door handle and he vaguely thought it would be a good idea to step out of the car and talk to her. She had finished her short and heavy jog though and had slammed her body against the car door. He lowered the window and looked at her, confused.

“Don’t open the door.” Wheezed Anna. Seamus lowered the window.

“Didn’t quite catch you there?”

Anna raised her voice to project it through the flat metal in front of her mouth.

“Don’t get out of out the of the car. Also, don’t put your hands or anything outside of the car. There’s something electric in the air.”

Seamus was about to ask another question but they had reached the flickering lights at the tunnel’s end.

They flashed through into a completely new location. They found themselves on green grasses. Four or five hundred yards away behind them the land fell away abruptly, starting again after a wide gap. To their left the lazy tumbling roar of the ocean could be heard. To their right English looking countryside stretched away with its usual assortment of hill and trees and such like things.

Much more capturing to casual curiosity was the large white marquee in front of them.

Groaning, Niamh picked herself up from ground. Seamus got himself out of the car. Anna tried to get her breath back.

Everyone realised Nabila was not with them.

* 

It is hard to describe the thoughts and feelings of a ghost tumbling towards an unexplainable gravity. Especially when we do not know if that ghost is a familiar friend or some kind of minion masquerading as a loved one in order to persuade people to approach perilous fates and temples of dark domains.

I like to imagine there was confusion in their beat-free hearts. They really didn’t have a great deal of time to think about it too deeply because as they fell towards whatever power had been spat out by those armoured statues they seemed to be caught by a different much more weighty gravity. The five of them landed painfully (nerve endings in the afterlife, who knew?) on the threshold of Satan’s doorstep.

Most of the group were very interested in the extent of their own injuries and orientation but Dave’s ghost leapt almost immediately to his feet.

“Angphu!” He shouted.

A gasping reply was audible, but smoke lay so heavy in the air now it was hard to pinpoint an exact location. It is worth noting that while the smoke was doing its level best to spread out and rise as is befitting within the laws of science it did not quite manage to penetrate the open door of the satanic temple. Cold air was drawing it up like a plunger and the well-lit room displayed an obvious and easy safe place to get away from it.

“Angphu,” Dave tried to wave but it’s doubtful that he was seen. “You need to get out of the smoke. Come towards my voice.”

It was a nail-biting moment. There was no way of knowing if Angphu heard. There was also the alarming reality of the fall to the river below them. In such tense circumstances it could not be known if a minute was a minute or simply a few seconds stretched unbearably thin.

There was simply no way of knowing if the man was alive or dead.

* 

Nabila has many useful qualities. Curiosity and energy are chiefly among them. We won’t dwell too much on her empathy skills and the less said about her hide and seek strategies the better.

She is also not brave.

Don’t worry though. I don’t want you to think of her as scared at this moment in time. Sometimes you have to be quite smart to realise you are in danger and when you're that age no one's asking you to be that smart.

She was distracted in her own little world. The door handle was mildly entertaining so she opened it and walked through. The dimly lit corridor did not look too inviting but she felt curious enough to walk in. The pipes and cables briefly distracted her so she tugged and touched them. She started counting them, but she got bored between somewhere between fifteen and twenty. (She got bored, okay? Don't you tell me she couldn't count any higher)

The mechanical eye was watching her in a lazy computer kind of way. Another system was crunching the strategies around the small one. A lot of RAM space had been assigned to keeping the little child safe from harm.

There seemed to be a lot of moisture in the room, gathering on surfaces and dripping down. She became quite distracted by a heavy drip that fell ponderously from an overhanging pipe.

The truly exciting moment came when she spotted a device that had an array of buttons on it.

* 

It was a moment of vibrant relief when Angphu stumbled pathetically out of the darkness of fumes and into the temple. He had squeezed his eyes tight shut when hot ash surrounded him and the purple bruise on his head seemed even more noticeable than ever now. He dizzily followed the voices of his companions into the temple itself.

He suddenly realised he was unable to open his eyes. They had seized as they were, the small muscles around his lids rigidly holding in place.

“Hey Angphu,” Dave grinned. “Remember when you asked how we ghosts could help save your life, even though we can’t touch anything?”

Angphu did not remember the exact moment that this exchange had happened. All he could think about was the pain and the blindness. Dimly in his subconscious he could remember assuring his friend Robert everything was fine when he had been saying that they should not go to the temple of Satan. He was ignoring this thought, it was too heavy with guilt and sorrow to carry right at this moment.

“Where am I?”

“In the temple.” Tan-the-man explained. “It’s all one room. A large hall, circular. There are candles mounted on brackets all over the wall All around are concentric circular benches tiered like a theatre around the middle. In the middle is an altar.”

Everyone felt a different emotion. Tan felt tense but ready, like a rabbit caught in a trap ready to leap out and save her daughter at the right moment. Tan-the-man felt incredibly stressed out, not knowing where his child was or anything about his own surroundings felt alien to his normal sense of control. Oscar was still under the curse of being an Unvollendetgeist, so he felt like someone who had come to the wrong place for the wrong reason. Alicia was letting go of her fears and sadness, using the rage of a poltergeist to clench her fists and ignore the other emotions. Dave was trying to wear his cheerful face but still desperately afraid that the burning acidic sensation would return.

“I’m sorry this is going to sound dense, but why am I in a temple again?” Angphu sat down heavily. It had been a hell of a day.

“They who would seek to walk the path back to the realm of the living must seek the temple of Satan the Evil One”

“Right. How does that work?”

Tan-the-man shrugged in the easy kind of way he frequently shrugged.

“Let’s phone Bob and find out.”

The call was made.

“Hey Bob. We’re at the temple now.”

“Didn’t phone me just to catch up then eh?” The sounds of the sea came through alongside Bob's words.

“Wha- No, don’t be daft, of course we want to know how you are. Um. How are you?”

“Oh really, we’re going to do this? Well I’m dead and drifting in the ocean, how are you?”

“Ah. I’m in the temple of the enemy of all my religion watching one of my friends die.”

 “Alright Mr Tan, it’s not a competition.”

Tan snatched the phone impatiently off of her husband.

“Listen, we’re at the temple. How do I get back to life so I can look after my baby?”

“Alright sure. I’ve read the footnote." Bob began his explanation. "Strangely the more you read it the more words write themselves into the book. So, there’s a couple of tasks to perform for the pantheon of Satan. It says there’ll be a riddle of two answers-”

“Yeah we know about that.”

“-You’ve got to go for the answer that is least expected.”

“Wish we’d known that.”

"So you waltzed up to the temple and din't phone the guy who has actually read the instructions?" Bob kept his tone of voice neutral.

Everyone felt incredibly stupid for not consulting with Bob before entering the temple. All resolved to make sure he was part of all decisions moving forward.

“What do we do now?”

“Well… There is a way in here to bring back a large group of people at once…”

“That’s brilliant, what is it?”

“You’ve got to sacrifice a virgin… Is Alicia still around?”

“That’s a dig.”

“OH, SURE EVERYONE LAUGH AT THE ALICIA. Is now really the best time to be cracking jokes? HOW COULD YOU JOKE ABOUT SACRIFICING ME? IT’S NOT VERY FUNNY!”

“Alright, moving on…” Bob hastily moved past the joke “You’ve got to find the gong.”

“Heh, gong.” Through the tension Tan and Bob shared an inside joke. (Naturally it was a joke about getting laid)

Everyone else fanned out to find the gong.

“Hey guys I found it!” Oscar had come up with a rather clever way to defeat his badger obsession. I don’t know if you’ve ever had a really annoying job to do and then managed to convince yourself that it can’t be accomplished unless a thousand smaller tasks are completed first. He had somehow convinced himself that he had to get back to life before he could find the badger. The genius had found a way to use procrastination to his advantage.

The group gathered around the gong, carefully leading Angphu in the right direction with their voices. It was at the head of the alter.

The gong was relatively small, maybe a handspan and a half in size.

“Okay guys, next to the gong there’s should be a drumstick, it’s about six inches in length.” Bob read the directions to them.

“Just like my-”

“Not now Oscar.” Tan snapped.

“How do we pick the gong up?”

Five ghosts looked at one another and shrugged. Angphu was delighted though. He had been worried that his blindness would rob him of the ability to assist his friends but here was a prime example of how he could aid them. He reached out and groped around the gong, finding the six inches he sought relatively easily.

Dizzy with this small success (or possibly dizzy with his head wound) Angphu picked up the stick and struck the gong.

“What do the instructions say to do after we’ve struck the gong?” Dave asked through the phone call.

“Actually, they say whatever you do, don’t strike the gong.” Bob warned them,

“Oh.”

“Oh dear.”

The candlelit hall began to tremble as if a giant earthquake shook it in its enormous fist.

* 

Nabila tried standing on tip toes to reach the bank of switches in the control room. She could not quite get there so she cast around looking for something to stand on. There was nothing to stand on but she spotted a climbing route that might lead her to actually sit on the bank of switches. She clambered on up but then a voice interrupted her.

“Nabila! Don’t do that its dangerous.”

The processing power that was looking after Nabila in the servers had decided to imitate the child’s mother in attempt to protect her from falling down. The voice was a perfect imitation and creepy as hell. The attempt to protect the child might have worked but listening to what Mummy has to say had never been a favourite pastime of Nabila’s. She climbed up to the bank of switches. If the algorithm had emotions then I’m sure they would have resembled fear and anxiety.

She got where she was trying to get without any difficulties though.

Among the bank of switches there was a touch screen. There was a pie chart showing that sixty five percent processing power had been assigned to the protection of Nabila. The pie chart was pretty and she did try and make her section smaller but the system asked for an eleven-digit password.

The metal switches were more mechanical than software driven though, so she happily started flicking them back and forth. She flicked a switch that said "Surface" and something heavy could be heard rotating on an enormous turret. A klaxoon sounded warning all staff that surfacing was in progress. The sound startled her but she vanished before she had time to cry.

* 

Between panic for Nabila and the scenerio in general Niamh was trying to explain the situation to Seamus.

“Some kind of organisation called SufoenO has kidnapped us and threatened to put a nuclear bomb somewhere unless we all play the game. We’re supposed to be killing each other one by one like in that film the hunger games. We’re not really playing along though. Everyone except Anna, Robert, Angphu and me is dead. Robert and Angphu got teleported away from the dance arena so for all we know they’re both dead.”

“SufoenO has a teleporter unfortunately,” Anna joined in. “We worked out that if we’re encased in metal, we can move around in inside the teleporter between locations.”

“Ah, so that’s why you’re dressed as robots. What happened to Nabila?”

“She has some kind of force field. She should be fine…”

As if in answer to their words they heard a grizzling within the large white tent.

They dashed in, seeing twelve ovens and kitchen work surfaces. In the middle of all this was the small brown child, peering into a cupboard. They ran to her in relief.

At the edges of the room guns mounted on tripods rotated and faced the three adults and one child. A voice that sound suspiciously like a man faking a woman’s voice spoke in an awful imitation of Sue Perkins.

“Welcome,” the voice came from a speaker behind a cut out cardboard cut out of Sue Perkins. “To bake off.”