“No, Doc. I’m not gonna go all the way to the library basement just so you can read about snails all day,” Brown said.
“AGH! I’ve told you once before! Zat book iz very important to my studies!” Ernst replied.
The boy groaned. They had just done an experiment on snails last week. It was bad enough that he had to deal with them once, but if the doctor got his hands on an entire encyclopedia about the animals, there was no telling what he’d do with all that information. He wouldn’t be cleaning the slime off the walls again on his watch—which he still had to clean off, as well.
“I don’t even get why you want to know so much about snails in the first place. Don’t tell me you’re gonna do any of that bioengineering crap like last time.”
“Oh, of course not! You know how vell our last attempt vent! Zat vas such a failure, haha!” Ernst recalled. “But if you must know, zhere’s a special enzyme snails make for their mucus zat I must know how to replicate! I’ve been asked by a certain colleague of mine to mass-produce zis mucus for her to use for ze so-called ‘haunted house’ of her creation! You know how much I love ze novelty of such attractions, haha!”
Of course Carrie was involved, Brown thought. He hardly met the girl, but he could still remember that ungodly mask. He suspected she would be up to something this time of year.
“Alright, fine then, Doc. So what if I get this snail book? To begin with, they put that in the basement for a reason: nobody reads the books down there, and you need special permission to get in. And besides, what would I even gain from this?”
“Hm, yes, vell, let’s see… Alright! I understand you celebrate Halloveen?”
“Halloween? Yeah, I’m still kinda in the spirit.”
“Wunderbar! Then for you, Brown, I shall have James design you any costume you desire! I’ll even make one for any of your friends, right James?”
“What? Oh, heck yeah,” James said, passing by from his corner of the lab to the closet to pull out another lab coat.
Brown thought it over. It was just a book, right? Some book that he had to grab from the empty part of the library. Better yet, he’d be granted any Halloween costume he wanted for himself and anyone else he wanted. He knew the two eggheads wouldn’t disappoint; like his watch, they tended to add some pretty awesome technological features to their creations. He thought of the possibilities of what they could do with his costume, then finally gave an answer.
“Ok, doc. I’ll get your book,” he sighed.
“You vill?! Danke, Mr. Brown! You von’t regret zis decision!” He gave a bow, which looked a bit more like a curtsy. “Just two conditions, though. First, I vant zis book by ze end of tonight, since my colleague vill be here to pick up ze slime tomorrow afternoon! And secund, I vould prefer you be accompanied along vith your companion vile you partake in zis mission.”
“Huh? I can’t just say who I want to give the other costume to when I’m done?”
“VELL, I believe zat one should be rewarded through hard vork, haha!”
“Fine, fine, I get the idea. I’ll drag someone along with me.”
James made his way back to his lab corner. “Hey, how come you never offer to make me a Halloween costume?”
“Oh, hush, you,” Ernst said.
The air grew much chillier as October cast its autumn blanket over SPL Academy. The leaves were turning yellow, the trees started to shed, and the students began to layer themselves with their appropriate attire. Brown himself had followed suit–he had put on a pair of jeans for the first time this year, and was wearing his jacket normally as opposed to tying it around his waist. As promised, he made his way to the library accompanied by his friend, who sported his usual yellow hoodie.
“Wait, so what does that crazy doctor want you to do again?” Saki asked.
“I swear, all you heard when I called you out of the dorm was me talking about the costumes,” Brown sighed. “I said that we have to check out a book for Ernst about snails, and bring it back to him by tonight.”
“And why did he want me to come with you?”
“He said you gotta work for your reward.”
“Alright, bro. Lemme stop you right here,” Saki said, stopping Brown right there. “You don’t have to do this just because some mad scientist told you to. I’m fine without a costume this year, we can back out of this right now.”
“Look. I’m, like, his only lab assistant right now, and the man really needs my help. What I don’t understand, Saki, is why you detest the guy so much.”
“Did you forget what happened the last time I met him? He destroyed our room, dude! If anything, I can’t see why you don’t see a problem with him. Bad things always happen when you trust a guy like that.”
Brown continued walking. “If he was so untrustworthy, he wouldn’t do stuff like this for us, would he?” he held up his decked-out watch the doctor had fixed for him not too long ago. “Just have some faith in Ernst. He cares about our well-being more than you think.”
The duo passed under the rooftop, witnessing Splats mark up a chunk of the wall, painfully close to Magnus’s memorial stone embedded into the brick. The graffiti boldly depicted a deformed, orange squash with a knife sticking out the side and a top hat askewed onto its stem, under the flashy neon words, “FUCK PUMPKINS!” She sprayed more layers onto the paint faster than it could dribble down.
“Yo, Brown!” she called, turning her head to face him and Saki, “Skyber’s gonna be sooo pissed when she sees this!”
“Ok, Splats. That’s nice,” Brown deadpanned. Saki shook his head.
“You should join me! You never hang out with anyone else except that twink, ya dork! Where are you heading off to, anyways?”
“Somewhere where you aren’t!” Saki called out. He dragged Brown along, who wasn’t planning to stop, anyways.
The two had made it to the outskirts of the garden, about halfway between their dorm and the library. There, they could see Pearl sat on a small bench, playing around with her synth while Leaf watched next to her. Saki couldn’t help but say hello, much to his friend’s impatient chagrin.
“Hey Pearl! Whatcha up to?”
Pearl brought her head up to her boyfriend, giving a warm smile. “Hey, Saki. I’m just composing a song. My music class wants me to make something that sounds like Halloween.” She played a few menacing chords on the synth, which was currently set to Organ Mode.
“A Halloween song? That’s so cool! How does it go?”
“I’m not done with it yet, silly. Leaf’s been helping me out with the melody.”
The fox matted down the fur on the back of his neck. “Oh, I-I don’t know too much about music. I’ve just been listening to her work for a little bit, and I thought she might use some help, is all. If you don’t mind me asking, what are you two up to?”
“We’ve got a book to check out in the library. Something about snails,” Brown said.
“Oh, for a science project?”
“You could say that,” Saki answered. “One of Ernst’s crazy experiments.”
“Wait,” Pearl cut in, her smile turning into a frown, “the book wouldn’t be in the basement section of the library, would it?”
Brown squinted. “Yeah, that’s what I heard. It’s supposed to be in the basement.”
The wind gusted, picking up a pile of browned leaves. A dark blotch of clouds creeped in front of the sun, blocking its light. The air grew yet colder. The leaves seemed to be circling the group. Pearl and Leaf gave each other a knowing glare.
“Guys…” Pearl’s voice started to waiver, “I wouldn’t go there, if I were you.”
Uh… what’s this all about? Brown thought. What, is she trying to scare us?
“Pearl, what are you trying to say? This isn’t funny.”
“Shhh! Let her finish!” Saki nudged him, completely invested in whatever she was about to say. Brown rolled his eyes.
“I went to the library myself, just yesterday morning,” the girl began. “I was looking for a cookbook on mushrooms, and the only copy was in the basement. But when I asked the librarian for the key, she told me something really, really strange happened down there. No one’s been in that room since… Everyone’s too afraid to check until the guards investigate tomorrow.”
“S-She’s telling the truth,” Leaf added, fiddling with a small icicle he created. “They said the same thing to me when I went yesterday, too. Not that I wanted to go down there, or anything. Basements freak me out, anyways.”
“Well, we don’t have until tomorrow. We’re kind of on a time crunch here,” Brown mentioned, emphasizing the last part directly to Saki.
“But Brow-”
“Let’s go, dude.” And with that, the boys continued on their way, one much more hesitant than the other. Saki turned back one last time to Pearl, her eyes meeting his with a look of disappointment and worry. The leaves fell dead onto the cold, hard dirt beneath them.
Saki closed the library door behind him. It had been a while since he had last visited the building, and upon gazing at the festive scenery, he wondered why he hadn’t come sooner. Students lay bundled in chairs and benches, some enjoying a hot tea or coffee while others read to themselves in silence. A couple students he recognized as Knowledge and Lucas sprawled out over a sofa, sleeping in front of a mess of papers and textbooks on the wooden table. An assistant hung up black and orange streamers on the top corners of the ceiling, dressed in all black and orange herself. A couple could be seen sharing a computer screen and a pair of headphones, catching up on the latest season of their Netflix show. Seemed like a perfect date to bring Pearl to, he imagined. Well, aside from the echoed shouting of a particularly angry student.
“The fuck do you mean, ‘I can’t go to the basement’?! The hell do you think I came here for?!”
Brown and Saki grimaced. They had recognized his voice from anywhere.
“Please calm down, sir,” the librarian began softly, “You’re disrupting the people around-”
“Fuck do I care about a bunch of wimps? They can plug in their headphones if they want to!”
“That’s not the issue, sir. I’m trying to tell you that the basement is closed until further notice right now.”
“Just give me the key already, lady! It takes two seconds to grab a damn book!”
Brown was the first to walk up to the frustrated student. He swiveled around, confirming himself as the duo’s third musketeer.
“Xander, what the hell is going on here?”
He scowled. “Ugh, what do you two want?”
“He asked you first,” Saki chimed in.
The delinquent pointed at the librarian over his shoulder. “This bitch thinks I’m too good for horror novels.”
“I never said that,” she corrected. “I said the collection of H. P. Lovecraft is being held in the basement, which is off limits right now.”
“What part of, ‘I want to check out a Lovecraft book,’ do you not understand?! I hate repeating myself, so I’m only saying this one more time: When I say I want to read Lovecraft, I’m gonna read fucking Lovecraft!”
“Yeah! Fuck Lovecraft!” a boy with spindly, stretchy limbs called out from across the floor. He obviously completely misunderstood the context of the argument before butting in.
Brown walked up to the librarian, while Saki attempted to quell Xander’s rage from a distance. “Sorry for the trouble our dormmate caused, Miss…” He peered down to her office nametag. “Miss Hikari. I think what he wants to know is why we’re not allowed in the basement. My friend and I kinda need a book from there, too.”
“Have you heard what happened from others?”
“Only a little bit.”
Hikari’s head dropped. “I should’ve known better then to give the spare key to those kids…”
“Kids? What happened?” Saki asked. Now that Xander was now longer yelling, the building got much more silent.
“Well… it was two days ago. Three students came into the library that night. I was just about to end my shift when they asked to check out a book from the basement. I thought nothing of it when I handed over the copy, but when I came to check on them half an hour later…” She stopped, shivering in her heels. The sensation caught onto Saki, who was remembering the warning Pearl gave them.
“I called security as fast as I could,” Hikari continued. “I could have sworn I saw a monster in that room…”
“A monster?” Brown inquired.
Hikari nodded. “Whatever I saw down there, it was huge. It had this bumpy, porous skin all over, and crawled around like it was just some massive blob of yellow mass. It burned everything it touched.” She closed her eyes, breathing heavily.
“And Ernst wanted us to go down there?” Saki whispered to Brown.
“Let the lady finish,” he whispered back, turning to the librarian. “Go on.”
“Right. When security came, they caught the three students still in the basement and brought them in for questioning. I’m not allowed to disclose their names, but all three of them admitted to being responsible for the monster’s creation.”
“Buncha fucking hooligans, if you ask me,” Xander commented.
“Not like you were any better just a minute ago,” Saki quipped.
“Fuck off.”
“Hey, knock it off, you two,” Brown said, the story catching his intrigue. “How did they manage to bring this thing to life?”
“They mentioned using their abilities. Again, I can’t disclose information about the Electi responsible. But, I can safely say they won’t be out of detention for a very long time.”
“Sooo…” Saki began, “is everything fixed?”
“Hm? With the students, yes,” Hikari answered.
“Oh! Then what are we worried about?” Saki let his tense, guarded position down. “If everything’s taken care of, then we have nothing to worry about, right?”
“That’s what I’ve been trying to tell her!” Xander yelled.
“W-wait, I didn’t say-” Hikari began.
But it was too late. Saki’s shadow, Drip, had already returned to his master, carrying the last set of keys from under the main desk. “C’mon, guys! Let’s get our books!” Saki said.
Hikari stood dumbfounded. She wanted to pull them back, but stood frozen in her tracks. Any thought about the monster prevented her from moving from her post. As Xander followed the shadow boy down to the floor below them, Brown turned around, seeing if the librarian would object. He shrugged, heading down the stairs with his dormmates.
The basement was much larger than the trio expected. The expanse of the dim, open space really brought into perspective how large the library was as a whole. The trio headed downwards, closing the unlocked door from behind them. Xander overtook the lead ahead of Saki, followed by Brown soon after. One flight of stairs later, they sized up the shelves ahead, and went to search for their books.
“You two, stay out of my way. I don’t need a couple babies following me around like I’m their mommy,” Xander said. The other two weren’t planning on it.
Brown and Saki split up after a minute of exploring the room. The former insisted the books were categorized by author, while the latter argued they were stacked by genre and title. Xander, of course, did his own thing. They searched for their books like needles in a haystack—except, the needles also looked like hay.
This was not the only problem; the longer they spent in the basement, the more they lost track of time. Even Brown, with his upgraded wristwatch, kept forgetting to check his wrist. The room started to lose its shape in the confusing expanse of the halls the shelves made up, and every twist and turn made the endless room seem more and more like a hedge maze from a scientist’s lab rat experiment. The room seemed to spin the more and more they went in circles.
The buzz from the worn-out LEDs ahead flickered and sputtered, the lights exhausting their nauseating, dull yellow glow. The wooden flooring, with its countless scratches, dents, stains, and char marks, hypnotized the boys the second it caught their eye again. Soon, they lost sight of their objective, and soon after that, almost lost sight of reality.
Saki turned to find another distraction. Encapsulated, he creeped over, eyeing down the figure as he cocked his head.
“Hey, little buddy,” he whispered. “What’s your name?”
He reached out a finger to touch what he had discovered. It was…
A snail?
“What’s a little guy like you doing down here? Here, I’ll get you back up to the surface.”
As the snail slowly slinked onto his finger, a small, near-unnoticeable sound could be heard if he strained hard enough to hear. Confused, Saki looked around, thinking maybe there was a gas leak in one of the walls. Finding nothing, he averted his gaze back to the snail.
The bloody, steaming snail.
“GAH! What the hell?!” Saki yelped out of his trance, furiously shaking off the organism from his finger. It fell to the floor, landing on its shell. The body convulsed and retracted from the blood covering the creature. Then, from the miniscule cracks, another mass emerged out of the shell, slowly but surely. Covering the area in sticky slime, the mass slumped fully out of its hard-exterior host within the minute, breaking through a hole it had created from the inside, as the horrified boy stared on. The slime started to steam up, the red from the blood dissipated, and the wood turned black underneath. Then, the crack on the shell miraculously closed up along with its bored out hole, and the snail inside reemerged. Likewise, the mass next to it started to take its shape, copying its host down to the last spiral on its newly-formed shell.
“Brown! Get over here! Please!” Saki started to panic. He looked around to find his friend, but only came across a book face-down on the floor, covered in chars and stains. The title read, “A Definitive Guide to Snails, Slugs, Mollusks, and Gastropods,” by some author’s name in the fine print. With no other option, Saki crawled to the book, his hand shaking as he reached out for the hardcover. He soon realized that the blood had not come from the snail, but rather his own finger. The skin had peeled back, and the entrance from where the would should have been clotting by now kept letting fresh blood flow down to the floor, adding to its endless collection of stains.
Saki could do nothing but grit his teeth and bear through the pain, mustering his courage to flip over the book, page-side up.
The entire page was covered with living, steaming snails.
Saki screamed. “BROWN! HELP ME!!!”
The boy mentioned, now out of his own trance, raced into view. “What the hell happened here?”
“Snails! They’re freakin’ everywhere! They bit my hand, they’re on the book, they’re-”
“Hey, hey! Calm down! What’s gotten into you?”
Saki pointed straight at the snails on the book. “They’re… they’re…”
Brown picked up the book, shaking off the creatures on top. Wiping off the page with the sleeve of his jacket, he inspected the contents of the page, albeit with several holes where the text used to be. “I think this is the book Ernst was looking for. It’s a bit damaged, but I’m sure he can manage. You didn’t have to freak out to call me over here, you know.”
Saki trembled. “No… it’s not…”
“What, you’re not afraid of snails, are you?” Brown mocked. “If you told me that, I wouldn’t have brought you to find a snail book, would I?”
“Brown… your arm…” Saki stuttered.
“Huh?” he checked his jacket sleeve, the one he used to wipe away the slime. The cotton steamed, bleaching the fabric of color. Soon, there were several holes where his sleeve sizzled away.
“Woah, Jesus Chirst! What the hell is with this slime?!” He shook off the steam, which only served to exacerbate the holes made in the sleeve.
“C-check the book! Maybe it’ll say something about the snails!” Saki suggested.
Darting his eyes through the broken information from the burnt pages of the book, Brown frantically flipped to one page in particular, matching the general look and description on the cluster in front of them. He read aloud.
“Ok, I think I got it. The name’s been burned out, and there’s no picture on it, but I think this is the right species. It says, uh, they tend to travel in clusters, they’re extremely resistant to acidic properties, and they reproduce faster than any other of their kind.”
“Does it say anything about the slime?”
His eyes darted through again. “No, nothing. Doesn’t mention it on the other page, either.”
“Then why does their slime keep doing that?!”
“Saki, look out!” Brown’s eyes dilated, and he snapped his fingers. Saki one-eightied, seeing a meter-tall clump of yellow, porous mass locked to the floor, just about to reach his pant leg. He screamed again, reflexively pulling back the leg.
“EROS!” he summoned, the shadow forming a hammer with his fists and bringing it down upon the creature. Or perhaps, creatures. On impact, the lifeform simultaneously crunched and squished, fragments of shell and streams of mucus flying through the air, snails breaking apart from the animal. It lay still, the slime steaming off the surfaces it touched. As the debris settled, the two peered over.
“What… what was that thing?” Saki said.
“…I think that was the monster,” Brown answered.
“Woah, woah, what?! You mean, the monster the librarian talked about?!”
“Look at it, dude. It fits her description to a tee.”
“B-but, didn’t she say it was taken care of already?”
“I think she meant only the students were,” Brown realized. “She must have cut out the fact that the monster was still in the room.”
“Oh, God,” Saki brought his hand to his face. “Why is it that every time I come with you to one of your stupid adventures, we both almost die?!”
“You think I wanted to do this today? Be stuck in an endless basement with a snail monster that I thought was already dead? Just be glad it’s over with already. We can take this book back to Ernst and get our costumes tonight.”
“It’s not even about the costumes anymore,” Saki curled up into a ball. The words stuck to his friend, who just sat in silence for a minute. They could still hear the slime sizzle through the floor and shelves. Brown flipped through the book again, merely out of curiosity, then made a concerned face.
“Hey, Saki?”
“What?”
“You don’t think the snails were made by the students’ Electi, do you?”
Saki uncovered his face. A small stream of blood trickled down his cheek, where his damaged finger rested. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, that’s what that Hikari lady implied. Doesn’t all this strangely add up? Like, why would slime burn through stuff like that? And look here, why is there a blank space on the page where a picture of the snail should be?” He held up the page. There was an oddly placed emptiness on the top-left corner, which never occured on any other page. Then, a realization struck Saki like a moving train.
“Y-you don’t think one of the student’s abilities brought the snail to life from the page, do you?”
“…Holy shit. You might be right. Turning a drawing to its closest real-life counterpart. That may explain the slime, too.”
“How is that?”
“It doesn’t say anything about the slime on the page, but it says that they’re extremely resistant to acid. Or at least acidic properties. So here’s the theory I’m getting at: After the first student summoned the snail from the page, the second student must have tampered with the snail to make its slime produce acid, instead!”
“What! Why would they even do that?!”
“Beats me. Maybe they thought they could be the next Frankensteins. It’s nearing Halloween, after all.”
“So this is all just some attempt to be famous, huh?” Saki slunched down. As the two conversed, they failed to notice the monster move again.
“But, hold on. There’s still one thing I’m confused about…”
“Yeah…?”
“Before you came, I saw something that happened when I dropped the snail on my finger. There was something inside its shell when it cracked, and when it came out it turned into another snail. Does the book say how this species reproduces?”
Brown read the page again. “Just like most other snails. It needs to lay eggs to have offspring. It can’t reproduce asexually.”
Saki gasped. “Of course!”
“Of course what?”
“That’s the third ability! When the kids made the acid snail, they must’ve dropped it like I did, but that time it was on purpose! Then, when they had it damaged, but not killed, it grew another acid snail from the wound!”
“Like a Hydra with its head cut off…” Brown added. “That must mean the original snail is still alive.”
“Oh my God, you’re right! And if that snail survived, and if it made more snails…”
Saki turned around without moving a step forward to face the 2-meter wall of yellow, bumpy, translucent sludge not even inches from his face. Bits and pieces of shell embedded themselves into the grotesque, malformed amalgamation of hiveminded, acid-bearing snails. The eyestalks of each one jutted out from each and every direction, making the wall look hairy and flagella-like. The skin behaved like boiling water, solid mass oozing out of every fracture and hole of the shells, bubbling and growing into more snails, which held on tightly to their Mother. The monster had resurrected. Multiplied. Reformed. Evolved. And it was just about to engulf Saki’s face.
“SAKI!” Brown leapt to save his friend, barely pushing him out of the way as the wave of snails crested and crashed down to the floor. The slime splashed down around the vicinity, burning through the floor, and the sole of Brown’s shoe.
“Wait, where the hell is Xander?!”
Just as Brown said that, the lights above could handle no more, and offed themselves from their duty, overwhelming the entire basement with the absence of much-needed light. They could see nothing anymore. Not even their impending doom.
“Fuck! Brown, where are you?!” Saki called out, summoning Eros into the dark, twisted environment. “I don’t wanna die here!”
“Follow my voice! We gotta find Xander and get out of here!”
Saki reached out with his hands. He half-stumbled, half-skipped his way around the place, bumping into walls, shelves, and eventually, a vertical puddle of sticky fluid. Saki’s gasp turned into a cry of agony, as burning acid corroded his palms. Eros retracted, pulling out Softy in his place, catching his master from falling backward. How did it come to this? Saki thought. I should never have come here!
He crashed into something again. He thought for sure he ran his way into the monster’s deathly embrace until the monster said, “Ow! Saki? Saki, is that you?”
“Brown?”
They frantically pulled themselves up, noises of squishing, squelching, sizzling, and crunching surrounding their every direction.
Then, in the corner of their eye, they saw a light. A small but unwavering light, tossing and waving about from the opposite side of the room. As they looked on, they could recognize the light from anywhere. No, it wasn’t a light at all. It was a flame.
“Xander’s flame!” They chorused.
Blindly chasing their only ray of hope, they stumbled across stray books, over slimy puddles, through clusters of acid snails, until they could see his figure silhouetted against the fire coming out of his fists. They saw him punching through the wall, where a group of snails had gathered. The flame alone illuminated several meters around him.The sound of the two’s footsteps caught his attention.
“You two?!” He exclaimed. “What are you still doing here?”
“Xander! Those snails are toxic!” Brown explained. “The kids from the day before made all these snails, and turned their slime into acid. If you don’t kill them instantly, they reform and clone themselves!”
“Shit, that explains a lot! I thought you guys would’ve pussied out and abandoned me.”
“We’re not letting a member of the trio die again!” Saki said.
“Heh. You guys should’ve ran. Honestly, I appreciate the sentiment but- wait, what do you mean, ‘again’?!”
“Holy fuck!” Brown yelled, pointing at the ceiling. The other two craned their heads to a grueling sight.
The largest, ugliest, most deformed gastropod they had ever laid eyes upon slugged its way across the ceiling. Its meter-wide shell looked like a malignant tumor, pulsating and twitching in time with its body. Snails surrounded every inch of its body, raw, bubbling masses crawling its way out of the million cracks and crevices of its dry, withered body. Its stalks crinkled to judge upon the terrified trio, and then, like a giant suction cup losing its traction, popped off the ceiling to land right on top of them.
The boys cried out, once again just barely dodging their fate against the old gastropod. In the back of their minds, they knew it was the original snail. The True Monster of the basement.
“We have to get the fuck out of here!” Xander said.
“We’re right behind you!” Saki cried.
The trio sprinted to find the exit, which thanks to Xander’s fire could be spotted much quicker than they expected. Practically crawling up the stairs on all fours, they finally reached the exit. As Saki checked the two over, he noticed Brown’s shirt had a gargantuan hole in the middle, stained red around the edges. His abdomen had nothing but blood on it. Worried, Saki quickly turned to assess Xander, who had several splotches of blood on his face, neck, and legs. Together, they tried and shook and rattled the door. They bashed it, kicked it, struck it, and attacked it with all their might.
But to no avail.
“Why the fuck is it locked?!” Xander yelled.
“Maybe the door relocks when it gets shut from either end!” Brown said.
“Just use your power to unlock it then!” Saki exclaimed.
“It doesn’t work like that!” Brown answered.
The snails were getting closer.
“Who was the last one with the key?” Xander called out.
“Last I checked, Saki had it!”
“Oh, fuck, right!” he said, digging his bloody hands through his clothes and striking metal in a hoodie pocket. But as he pulled it out, he gasped, then grimaced, then teared up. A snail had coated the end of the key in acid, eroding away the bumps and ridges.
The snails were climbing up the steps.
“God fucking dammit! You’ve killed us all!” Xander shouted.
“Better than nothing!” Brown swiped the key from Saki’s reddened grasp and jammed it into the socket.
It broke instantly.
The three collapsed in defeat. Brown began hyperventilating. Xander punched the wall. Saki started crying. This was how they died, they thought. They never expected it would come to this. As the sizzling came within earshot, the three had accepted their doom. Facing the abyss with the door behind them, Xander held out his fist in his last stand.
The Monster faced back, ready to claim its prize.
Saki screamed.
Brown screamed.
Xander screamed.
“We all scream for ice cream!” Nova said from behind the door.
The door burst open from behind the trio, knocking them all the way back across the room, thankfully into a space free of snails. They were utterly perplexed at what just happened, and at what they soon saw.
Nova was the first to fly into the room, shielding the three from Carrie’s third eye behind their wings. Once the snails were discombobulated, Lady Skyber burst in. Her eyes as cold as ever, she grabbed the Monster by the shell, flying up with it before demolishing it onto the ground. Careful not to fry the books, her breath exploded into an ocean of purple flames, much brighter and stronger than Xander’s, who failed to, quite literally, hold a candle to the fire that spread over the snails.
“Oh, my God! What happened to you guys!” a voice called from behind Nova’s wings. Blue electricity coursed through the endless room, and soon the lights were back on.
“P…Pearl?” Saki muttered.
The blue-haired girl rushed in to embrace her boyfriend, whose blushing face froze when he saw her. “You’re hurt! We have to take you guys to the nurses’ office, right away!”
“Heh heh, It’s just a flesh wound,” Saki tried to play it off. Brown, with his open, bloodied chest, tried not to gag.
“Where the hell did you guys come from?” Brown wondered. Xander was still struggling to get up.
“Pearl told us everything. She thought you guys would be in trouble, so she called us over to help!” Nova said, turning to face Xander. “Howdy, there. Haven’t seen your face ‘round these parts.”
“Bite me,” Xander replied.
“He’s our roommate, Xander. You’ll have to excuse him,” Brown introduced. “God, we would’ve actually been done for had you guys not shown up. You saved our lives.”
“Which seems commonplace for a young boy like you,” Skyber interjected, dusting off her polished suit after finishing off the Monster. “I wonder. Why is it that whenever chaos ensues on this campus, you can always find Brown in the center?”
“That’s a good question, Skybie!” Nova said. “But to answer that, we should first… Consider the Following!” Somehow, they were now wearing a pair of safety goggles, letting Brown explain himself.
“Okay. First of all, none of this was within my control, so you can all stop pointing fingers at me while you’re ahead. Second of all, I wouldn’t even be here if Carrie hadn’t told Ernst to make me pick up a snail book, just so he could get her goddamn slime for her stupid haunted house!” He pointed to the masked woman in question.
“Ah! The Misplaced One accuses me!” Carrie defended. “And you are mistaken, young one, for I no longer need the doctor to attain my goal!” She scooped up a large pile of snail acid, burning through her gloves almost instantly. She did not seem to mind the corrosion on her skin. Pearl winced, then gently coaxed Carrie to move the slime back down to the floor. She promised to come back to collect the slime later, though.
“Hey, how did Carrie even find us here, anyways?” Saki asked.
“Leaf told me to bring her!” Splats jumped into the room, spraying the rest of the living snails with a salt-like substance from her graffiti can, killing them almost instantly. “That furry was too much of a wuss to show up himself, though! Anyways, ‘sup, losers?”
Saki groaned at her presence. Brown just shook his head. “What a mess I’ve gotten into,” he said. “All this for a Halloween costume for me and Saki. ‘Reward comes after hard work’, the doc says. I’ll show him hard work.”
Xander stood up. “Well, this is a stupid library. I’m going home. Don’t bother me for the rest of the week, you two,” he said to the trio’s other two members. He pushed past Pearl and Carrie, and made his way to the door again.
“Hey, don’t you want your copy of Lovecraft?” Saki called out. Carrie’s face—or at least the mask—seemed to light up.
“Nah, fuck that. I’ve had enough horror today to keep me up for weeks. I’m good,” he headed out the door.
“Wait, Cultured One! Allow me to join you! We have much to discuss about our Messenger!” Carrie yelled, chasing Xander down.
“Man, she’s crazy,” Splats said. Pearl and Nova giggled.
“For once, I agree,” Skyber replied. “Now, then. Shall we pay a visit to our dear friend, Doctor Ernst? I believe he and James have a lot of Halloween costumes to design.”