POV Alex

  Location Antarctica

  …So without further ado, let the fun begin and let the wheels spin!]

  Rapidly swirling colours invade my retinas, causing my already malnourished body to feel increasingly nauseous. 'This can't get any worse,' I cry out in my mind, careful not to make a noise that would attract the animated corpses outside of the bathroom. 'Powers I can't use without hurting myself, locked in a bathroom and stuck in a research centre in the middle of the least hospitable continent on the planet. Now I have to deal with whatever fresh hell this will bring.' I silently sob as I watch the wheel slow down 'I don't know how much more I can take.'

  Once again, all the options were blurred until it finally landed on a section of deep navy blue. Before I could read the long line of text, it disappeared before another announcement filled my senses that, if my theory was correct, translated directly into information for my brain to process.

  [ Event: Endless caves.

  …

  Please enjoy :) ]

  I sit in silence, digesting the information, trying to figure out what to do. By the sound of the spirits tangled and twisted within the animated corpses screaming in agony, they are still wandering the corridor outside. 'Their increased intelligence does not appear to take into account things they knew before. Otherwise, they would be banging at the door until they tore it off its hinges.' I continue to sit with my back pressed against the thin white plastic door, chewing on my thumb, not noticing how the fear has caused me to redevelop a habit from my early childhood.

  Taking my thumb out of my mouth, I look around, trying to locate the source of a low rumbling that had started to reverberate throughout the small bathroom. 'It's coming from underneath me?' Realising what was happening, I quickly got away from the doorway as the ground began to give way. The smooth vinyl floor begins to sag in on itself before disappearing altogether, revealing a large circular hole about 2m in diameter. Its walls were a coarse stone-looking substance that travelled down at a slight angle into its eerie dark depths. Most importantly, it removed half of the door, allowing the animated corpses and their screaming souls a way into my little refuge.

  "Oh no." Despite my best efforts, a slight gasp of horror escapes my lips as they, too, were attracted by the tunnel forming, and are now less than a metre away, staring at me with deranged eyes and outstretched hands. "Oh no."

  In a panic born from the desire to be anywhere but a small enclosed bathroom with a hole that goes who knows where with a group of animated corpses, I activate my second ability and teleport. It's based on line of sight, and I lose all sense of balance and depth perception when I arrive in the narrow corridor, surrounded by animated corpses on all sides, with no way out.

  "Noooooo." I manage to whine as I tumble from the teleportation's side effects. My ability to predict attacks goes wild as I see ghostly outlines of clawed hands reaching out to strike me just before the real things grab me, causing me to feel the pain before they even touch me. Their blackened nails tear into my skin and pull me towards their open maws, where their deformed, jagged teeth wait to rip into my flesh.

  Blood gushes out of my shoulder as it is torn into, and my final ability tries to form the red liquid into a blade to stab through its skull, but it's too weak. The sight of my blood and pain almost makes me pass out, but I manage to teleport once again. I pop in and out of existence and appear outside the group of walking corpses. But in a twisted sense of irony, without them holding me up and supporting me, I fall onto the floor, smashing my nose into the cold, hard vinyl in the process, smearing its dull blue with bright red.

  The world spins, my stomach aches from starvation, and my body is battered and bleeding from my undead tormentors. "Please…" I try to plead as I hear them come ever closer. Lying in a pile of my own blood, I let out another whimper as the first of my attackers falls on top of me before biting down on my already bloody shoulder.

  "We were friends", I sob out as more and more of my former colleagues fall onto me to begin their feast on my flesh as I cry out in sorrow and pain. With tears streaming down my face and blood pooling in my throat, I take my final breath before oblivion takes me.

  [You have died. Due to being one of the 7, Earth, model 626, timeline B13's inhabitants will now gain a boon to help them towards their goal of survival. Thank you for playing the Gods game. We hope you enjoyed your time on the show.]

  As what I can only describe as my soul slowly dissipated into nothingness, I watched my body convulse violently before rising up and joining the very things that killed it.

  POV Jacob

  [One of the 7 has died. There are 6/7 left within the show]

  Swam through my mind as I tried to stay conscious long enough to make a plan. It was like trying to wake from a living nightmare, attempting to force myself awake as my body tried desperately to shut down to help the healing processes. I catch one last glimpse of the vast outside world before blacking out, only to force myself awake to experience being shoved unceremoniously up and down the creature's smooth, rubbery gullet before passing out again. Once inside, the flying monster's tentacle must have finally let go of my leg, as when I woke up moments later, I was allowed blessed relief from the constant electric shock therapy, only to find myself sliding down the rubbery surface and deeper into the transparent flesh tunnels that started to become slick with slippery mucus.

  When I next came to, there was a mild burning sensation seeping into every part of my exposed flesh, causing my eyes to groggily open and see a dark skinned woman with braided hair, a few years older than me, staring down at my confused face as I tried to understand what was happening.

  "So one of the 7 is dead? That's not a good sign for the state of the world," I hear off to the side somewhere, but when I try to turn my head, I discover that I'm submerged in a thick, acidic-smelling liquid. The only reason I wasn't entirely under the strange liquid was because of the lady staring down at me, who I now realise is supporting my weight with one hand while pouring a seemingly never-ending bottle of water into the pool surrounding us with the other.

  "Are you… Diluting the stomach acid with water?" I ask while slowly taking my weight off the nice woman with a wince and looking around the fleshy chamber. We appeared to be in a large organic fleshy bowl the size of a swimming pool, filled with a weak acid and bordered with steep sides that glistened with the same slippery mucus as before. Seeing the situation looked relatively stable, I took out a couple of painkillers and pill-shaped glass beads from my inventory and popped them into my mouth. The pain from the miasma-infused water was immediate, as it was intense, but I managed to inhale the toxic energy, allowing its tainted power to fill my stomach and lungs, fuelling my body forward.

  This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

  "That's your first question?" She answers with a tired-looking smirk.

  "Well, I assume we are in the stomach of the high-budget Japanese porno monster, and if there was an easy way out, we would already be heading there." I hiss out in pain as I try to put pressure on my leg, only for it to immediately buckle, causing me to fall back into the waist-high acidic drink. Or I would have if the nice lady hadn't grabbed me at the last moment. "Thanks," I managed to groan out through the pain.

  "Your leg looked pretty messed up when you fell in here. Looks like you at least put up a fight." She comments, seemingly not minding me using her for support. Now that I had finally stood up I could look around at the other ten, make that eleven people, in the stomach. The most recent arrival came up for air after falling off the edge of the bowl. Most stood around looking helpless, while a few were actively trying to escape through whatever means they could think of. Which mostly consisted of trying to climb out of the stomach or punching the walls… The last guy may have just been pissed off if his expression was anything to go by. 'But if the new girl, oh number thirteen. If the new people come from different places, does that mean it has multiple mouths…Oh, the lady is looking at me.'

  "To be perfectly honest, I'm pretty shit in a fight, only just started learning. I had a looooot of problems before Wheel face healed me." I started rambling to try and distract myself from the pain, but saw my words were not helping as the helpful lady's face dropped. "But killing things is a lot easier, maybe, usually." I put more weight on my good leg and slowly raise the one used as an electrical stress ball, only to hiss at the sight. It was screwed. The motocross armour had melted and fused to the burnt flesh that peeled off and oozed a cocktail of blood and pus. On the plus side, the branching electrical marks coiled around my leg looked like they would leave a cool scar. Although, with the way the lady looked at it, that thought may not be universal. Not able to hold the leg up much longer, even with the help of my shaking hands, I slowly lowered the scorched limb back into the acid with great reluctance, hesitation and a pain-fueled curse.

  "Sooooo how good would you be at killing this 'high-budget Japanese porno monster' with your body fucked up and balls deep in acid?" The unnamed woman asks in a slightly mocking tone in response to my earlier bravado, but if she truly intended to hurt my feelings, she didn't show it when I let out a barking laugh that got the attention of the rest of the people being slowly digested. Stealing my social anxiety for a moment, I call out to the group, "Can anyone heal or help with injuries?" My only response was in the form of a very angry "Fuck off!" from the now confirmed angry man, punching the walls of the stomach to no avail.

  "Well, that wasn't particularly helpful," I mutter before changing the topic to try to brainstorm my great escape. "So I assume you've been so kind and helpful because you thought I put up a decent fight and might be able to get out in a last-ditch effort to preserve hope?" I ask the lady whose name I should have learned by now.

  "Yeah, pretty much, I don't mind too much being a cane, though. Might as well die doing a good deed, right?" She bitterly responds. "I was only outside to say goodbye to Mux. Now Zara's alone, and I'm going to be slowly eaten to death." She states like it was a given fact that we were going to die, which is a pretty poor prep talk, but I don't usually make it a habit to base my future suicidal plans on others' emotional state, and I wasn't going to start now.

  "Well, that sounds like a boring way to die, got to at least take the bitch out with us," I mutter, summoning my stolen kayak to act like a table. "So what is it that you can do? I doubt it's endless pouring water from a cheap plastic bottle with the cap still on. If it's producing water from a sauce, I have a much bigger jug you can use. I summoned the cumbersome 6L bottle of water I planned to use to hide that I didn't need to drink anything. It was a bitch to hold, but I eventually got it onto the kayak while leaving space for the next part of the plan.

  "Huh, I can do more than make more water." She pauses momentarily before finishing with "But you first." She gives me the side eye while taking the significantly larger bottle and begins to endlessly pour it into the acid around us with seemingly little effort, helping cool the endless burning against my skin. 'Ah, so that's what my paranoia sounds like to others. No wonder I'm dying alone hahaha.'

  "I can make things and have various tools that don't play well with living beings. Other than that, it's irrelevant in this situation." I carefully take out a large power bank, gutted from an electric scooter and charged with solar panels, to sit next to the sideways water bottle. The kayak wobbles as it becomes unbalanced, but the lady holds it steady after it is clear I have more to bring out. "The problem is the fall once it's dead. If it stays floating, I have a single parachute we can try to share as a thank you. But if it falls, we may be fucked." I bring out a heavily modified rose steel circular saw. It's like something out of a survival apocalypse game with the blade and guard attached to something that looks like an electrical chainsaw. Sadly, I couldn't find an actual chainsaw, but rose steel should compensate for any shortcomings. I hope.

  "The last challenge said to kill this significantly less charismatic jellyfish, even brought us up here without killing us in a stomach that feels like it would take days to digest us…" I attached the power cord to the large power bank.

  "And its body is squishy, like an enormous bounce house. Do you think it would be enough to break our fall?" She asks before carrying on. "But even if it could, this open acid-filled space wouldn't." She looks at the saw again. "But the thick jelly-like stomach lining might work…" She trails off, looking at the saw with renewed interest. "I can copy none living matter, solid or liquid. It keeps the battery life and is pretty much the same, but I can't copy a copy. Oh, and my name is Jasmine. It's nice to meet you, legman." She finishes off with a playful smirk.

  I freeze. Nobody had ever given me a nickname before. I had tried in the past, but I was far too generic and plain for one. And giving myself one didn't work, even if it was an overly terrible one; in the effort, someone would take pity and make a better one. But it didn't work. All three times I tried. 'Wait a fucking minute, did she just say she could copy things?'

  "Okay, completely off topic, but can you copy this?" I handed her a small part of the wraith sinew I collected yesterday and tied around my wrist a few times to remind me to do something with it. She paused her endless pouring of water to gingerly take the strand of fleshy fibre.

  "What the hell is this thing? I can copy it, but it will take a LOT out of me. It doesn't feel... normal?" She goes to hand it back, but I just shake my head and take out two spheres, one of iron housing a rose steel core and one of thick glass holding, but separating, miasma and salt-infused water. They were prototypes that didn't work, but could be perfect for this unique situation. I hand a confused Jasmine the two balls and a lump of silver and get back to setting up the power tool.

  "What are these things? Where did you get them? Why are they sooo… probably not the time. What do you want me to do with them?" She asks, sounding less bitter and more than a little intrigued.

  "When we crawl out of this corpse, ideally we'd work together, but realistically we need to find our own people for… various reasons… But if you wanted to work together, I would pay for copies of those things with the points from this challenge. They are a bitch to make." I explain my thoughts and look over to my new… escape… associate?

  She snorts, "You get us out of here alive, and I will make these for free. How will I find you?" She asks. I tell her an address close to where I used to live and directions from a local landmark she recognises, all of which she writes down with surprising enthusiasm. "Okay, I'm game and will try to meet you there after this cave shit. But what is the actual plan to get out of here?"