The kraken was everything Kitty thought it would be. Wet, slimy, enormous, and pissed off as all seven hells. A gargantuan tentacle slammed down less than a meter away from her, its weight sending a ripple through the ground.

"It's not working!" a voice screamed at her. "Try something else!"

Kitty gritted her teeth and leapt away moments before the thick, wobbling appendage skated over the ground where she'd been standing. She tightened her grip on her sword and dashed forward, intent on hacking away the blind, searching limb. Behind the five meter long tentacle, the kraken's bulk blocked out most of the sky, obscuring what rays of sunlight managed to pierce through the storm-tossed clouds raging above.

At least they'd finally managed to lure it from the waves. The beast had too much of an advantage fighting from the sea. Shit, it had too much advantage nailed to a pole. With its blobby head and zombie-like thrashing, the kraken looked too idiotic to even know the meaning of the word 'advantage', but it had hesitated to leave the safety of its murky waters.

Kitty's arrows had been the deciding factor of that dispute.

After several dozen of them had pierced through the semi-translucent skin cocooning its soft and squishy bits, the kraken had emitted a piercing shriek and had hauled its fat ass from the frothing waves crashing down around it.

She'd nearly fled; it had been a close call, then. And William had been close when the thing had finally decided to engage them. Too close. The kraken had snatched up William before she'd ended her cry of victory.

Now, with the thing looming above her, it was time to get up close and personal enough to consider whatever transpired as a first date. And her bow just wasn't the right implement for the job anymore.

Kitty's sword hissed through the air, hacking into the exposed appendage that lay quivering on the chunky gray sand of Chimera's only beach. Although beach was probably not the right word. There was a decided lack of seagulls here. No soft dunes where you could stick in a rainbow-striped umbrella and get sun burnt while fending off ice-cream hawkers.

This beach was ragged. Rugged. And its only concession to its aforementioned ice-cream harbouring siblings was the narrow strip of sand separating its raging waters from the cliffs. But even this was dismally crunchy and littered with the skeletal remains of the kraken's many, many meals.

Kitty's sword didn't do much damage. A pathetic nineteen points, in fact. And from what her hurried scan had concluded of the towering kraken, it still had a few hundred health points to go before it would explode, implode, or vanish. Kitty's gritted teeth parted as she let out a scream and swung away from the tentacle's whiplash parry.

"Use your fire spell!" William shouted at her.

Kitty glanced up at him. The kraken waved him around in the mist flung up from the angry waves. William wriggled and strained, neither action contributing toward his freedom. His horned helmet had been knocked off some time ago — ephemeral fingers kept toying with his his mop of fair hair.

"I used my last fire spell on that enchanted Faerie Hart," Kitty said. "Remember?" she prompted, when William's only response to her statement was rolling his eyes.

"Electricity then." His voice became a wail. "Or air, or, or—damn it, Kitty just do something! I can't attack like this and the thing's gone and poisoned me." William whipped his head around as the kraken emitted a below that could have been voicing anything from a pre-dinner prayer to garbled kraken poetry. "And hurry!"

Kitty opened her mouth to protest, but closed it instead and flicked open her inventory. She had one scroll left... and no idea if the kraken was hiding a ninety percent resistance to whatever the scroll's effects were.

She equipped the scroll. A tattered roll of parchment appeared in her hand, her sword disappearing instantaneously. She lifted her hand, the scrap of parchment seeming too thin and too tattered against the backdrop of the heaving, slimy mountain that was the kraken in all its fury.

"Hey, irrumator!"

The kraken, torn from its intent inspection of William's hair, focused on her with a myopic gaze that she felt all the way down to her suddenly unsteady legs.

"Don't look at it!" William screamed. "It's got the Medusa boon active. Close your eyes, Kitty!"

She did as William screamed at her to do, waving the scroll around and hoping it looked more frightening to the kraken than it did in her imagination.

"Unleash the Violent Vortex!" The words were unnecessary, of course, but it was difficult enough keeping herself under control without the additional effort of trying not to sound like a complete newb.

There was a howl. Not an animal sound, but the pure elemental savagery of air moving at speeds where the human body began unintentionally releasing bodily fluids. Kitty's eyes snapped open, widening as they fixed with horrified fascination on the whirlwind surrounding what had been the kraken. Now, blood-streaked chunks of wobbling flesh spun as the wind slowly pulverised the monster into bite-sized pieces kraken-sushi.

And, between the mess and gore, she could see glimpses of blond hair.

"William!" Kitty screamed.

Or, at least, tried to scream. The whirlwind snatched away her voice before her own ears could hear the cry.

"William!"

Above the whirlwind, garish digits sprang into existence - 57, 159, 241, 573, 72, 319 - on and on the numbers spun, oblivious to the frantic wind. The whirlwind began to move away, spurning the surface of the already roiling sea as it went.

Kitty crashed to her knees. Her sword had reappeared in her hands the moment the vortex spell had been uttered and she gripped it without thinking, her knuckles white.

"Will." The whispered word had no effect on the whirlwind.

A few seconds later, it had disappeared behind a dark bank of clouds where lightning speared the undulating surface of Chimera's sea. And it had taken William with it.

Kitty sunk onto her heels, opening her inventory and sheathing her sword. She opened The Game's chat console - a scrap of parchment here in Chimera - and thought out a message to William.

BAD_KITTY_69: R U OK?

There was no response. She glanced around the empty shore, knowing there wouldn't be anyone around to help her: she'd last seen another player more than four hours ago.

BAD_KITTY_69: WHERE R U?

No response.

Kitty felt the preface of tears putting pressure on her eyeballs. Not here of course, but back on planet earth where she lay sound asleep. Exhaustion pulled at her: a bone-deep ache in her limbs and a leaden weight filling her mind.

"Futue te ipsi." Her hands sunk into the sand as she pushed herself up.

"You hear me?" she yelled, swinging around in an effort to vent on something singular, something that embodied the entire Chimera Rift, the entire sordid affair that was The Game.

"You hear me? Es mundus excrementi! Futue te ipsi!" Her head darted forward, throwing the archaic curses into the brooding storm of Chimera.

"...help..."

"Futue te—" Kitty abruptly stopped cussing. She swung around, her eyes scanning the cold shoreline.

Frowning, she stepped away from the semi-circle her feet had drawn on the sand.

"Hello?" Her voice echoed back to her from the uneven slit in the jagged cliff beside her.

She'd thought it was just an added bit of game architecture the first time she'd seen it. Then the kraken had arrived and further thought about would-be caves had disappeared under an onslaught of thoughts about health potions and unsheathing two-handed weapons.

"...help me..."

Kitty stopped and leaned back. She glanced around - the shore remained empty. It had been more than an hour since her and Will had last seen another player in Chimera. Nothing moved on the shore except the ever-hungry waves biting into its grainy gray flesh.

"Is someone there?" she quavered. Then she cleared her throat and tried again. "Get out here before I send in some huge fiery balls to fetch you out." She ran the sentence over in her mind and added, "Like, scary flaming balls. Not, like... you know... man balls."

There was no reply to her threat except a sound that could have been moaning or suppressed giggles. She pushed her shoulders back.

"Hello?" The snap in her voice made her feel slightly better.

She was by no means a newb, but without William at her side she felt like the left hand of a pair of gloves. They always found ways to harness both their varied skills into a set of moves that drove enemies away, or to the grave, with the minimal amount of fuss and the most amount of mess.

"...please help..."

Kitty's feet dragged through the sand as she forced herself forward. The cave extinguished the dim light of Chimera the instant she was more than a few steps inside the cold crevice.

She dragged a torch from her inventory, its light painting the walls orange. Shadows leapt away, skulking behind a rock outcrop, a few rotting barrels, and a discarded pile of cloth. It was a small cave, but what it lacked in girth in made up for in height; it's roof wasn't within reach of her torch.

Kitty's eyes sped back to the pile of cloth an instant later. It was moving. She swung her torch toward it, her jaw too tight for her to cry out in surprise. The heap quivered and unfurled, a thin, pale face emerging from the rags.

"Please," the man whispered. "Help me." 

. . . 

Music:  Jason Graves - Agamemnon Rising (The Order: 1886)

. . .

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