This time Claude landed on a soft surface. A chair. Firm but comfortable. His back leaned into it and he breathed out a little. He had been right. The rest of the experiences had been a broken piece of software, he was going to be inside a remnant of a CAMPIN system. This was going to be an escape room of sorts. He could solve the puzzle and then he could escape the virtual reality trap and go back to the real world.

  Then after counselling and a briefing from NISRO he could return to his life of….his life….a boat. Mr Acqua. Mr Blood. Boat Heart. Ocean brains. Blood. Heart. Brains.

  Blood. Heart. Brains.

  Blood. Bloodblood. Heartheart. Brainsbrains.

  Blood.Blood.Blood.Blood. Fungus. Infection. Empire. Dead. Consume. Eat or be eaten.

  God. Become as a living god. Become a living god and escape from the island. Do it Claude. Drink the blood, eat the heart, devour the brains. Kill th-! No! Don’t stop me! NO! HE IS MINE! HE WILL BECOME ME! WAI-

  Claude woke up. His face was sore and the ground was soft and damp. There was a smell of mildew in the stale air. This time he pushed himself to his knees and then his feet to find himself inside a corridor with lit old style wooden torched encased within shining white holders which showed him no indication of how they were fixed to the wall.

  His body was stiff so Claude stretched himself out a little to find that his torn and worn previous white clothing had been entirely removed. His boots had been removed and he stood bare-feet but there was no sensation of his skin touching the dirt floor.

  Instead he was wearing a grey body suit similar to the one which he had first seen Kamryn wearing. He touched it and checked his waist but there was no signs of his survival kit attached to his belt.

  Everything he had been carrying was gone. On his arm was a strange twisted length of white bone which wrapped around his upper arm. There were minor protrusions on it but given that it didn’t cut into the suit or hurt him when he touched it he decided to leave it alone and begin walking forward.

  The light from the mounted torches didn’t appear to flicker so he didn’t know if there was air flow coming from the direction he was heading in but from his viewpoint anything was better than the room made of bone.

  A voice called to him from further down the corridor. The walls were packed dirt, he touched them with his bare fingers but they were solid as a rock. Smooth but solid and completely dry.

  ‘Walk to my voice. I’m not going to float over to you. You’ve done enough damage to one of the ancient recording rooms as it is. Well? I said walk.’

  As he listened to the voice, there was no visible compulsion from his body. It had asked and it wasn’t as though he had much else to do on. He knew the voice though. Not from Kamryn. This time it was the floating backpack with the unicorn logo.

  Sally. Was that her name? Did I dream that room of bone? The images? The tiny screaming me?

  There in the centre of the dirt corridor in the shadow of one of the wall mounted torches was a floating backpack. There was no face, no body language he could make out, not even a sharp movement to indicate annoyance but he knew it was annoyed.

  The tone of voice helped. There were darker red patches on the backpack which hadn’t been there before. After the nightmare of the room of bone Claude didn’t want to ask questions to which he would get answers or cause further aggravation.

  ‘Pathetic. Kamryn thought she could hide you from me. Not even worth my time. She should have left you on that beach to be absorbed into pure biomass and melted down to feed the creatures of the coast. Wait, your arm, what did she do? Did she promise you something? Come closer. I said closer.’ said Sally as she floated in the corridor and titled forward.

  For a second Claude was certain he saw the unicorn logo open a mouth full of teeth, which was entirely wrong on the cute image but he blinked his eyes and there was no change.

  This time he stopped in his tracks. He’d had enough of being told. There was a point in him being here in this place, simulation, artificial reality or otherworldly nightmare he’d need to survive.

  Begging and pleading, trying to desperately understand, to follow training procedures had resulted in him being fed bone.

  Or at least he’d had a nightmare he’d done so. For all Sally’s oddness, as a floating bag and a Tourism Board operator or whatever it was she hadn’t taken action against him.

  A part of him had changed, either mentally or physically but he wasn’t as uncertain as he had been. The strip of bone wrapped around his arm like a snake was his and his alone to keep. Kamryn had promised him a gift.

  Not responding to my will? Good. Good. Kill yourself. Bite your own tongue off and drown in your own blood. No? Nothing? Impressive.

  The same voice which Kamyrn had used echoed inside his mind, but this time Claude was able to resist it. A part of him laughed at the pathetic attempt. His future was built-in. He would consume the blood, brains and heart and leave this place. And then they would cease to exist. All of it would.

  The torches in the corridor flooded with light as Sally floated closer, the brightness caused Claude to cover his eyes with his hands as pain flickered across his retina.

  A force tried to pull him forwards but Claude resisted and spoke aloud even though his vision was obscured. A deep red tint developed as his eyes reddened and drops of blood formed in his tear ducts.

  ‘I’m an Inheritor-Candidate. Are we done here?’ said Claude even as his hands were trying their best to block out the torches on the smooth compacted dirt corridor walls.

  The light sources increased in intensity as they burnt out and the corridor entered relative darkness. Holding his hands in front of his eyes, Claude rubbed them as he closed his eyes and felt wetness on his hands.

  His red tinted vision had returned. This time on Sally, there was patches on the floating backpack which glowed in his vision. The dark patches were either flesh, blood or something else but he for him they were as visible as a phosphorous light source.

  The wetness on his hands showed the same light as he licked the tiny amount of blood off them. His tongue was rough on his bare skin and his mouth was moderately uncomfortable.

  Crowded. My mouth is crowded.

  Touching his cheeks, Claude realised that he was beginning to grow another row of teeth inside his mouth. Disgusted with himself, he grabbed hold of the teeth with fingers and ripped them out one by one throwing them to the dirt floor of the corridor.

  The mildewed smell and stale air was a welcome change from the gap in his mouth as he dropped multiple teeth on the floor in front of the floating back-pack.

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  ‘A gift. How thoughtful….wait. She infected you. No. That virus doesn’t belong here, not in this place. Only the fungal bloom should….ah...she wants an ending. Have we truly been here that long? I have grown used to scouring this land of flesh only to watch it regrow as the organisms grow, consume each other and spread. You poor thing. What did she tell you? That you’ll become a super hero? Are you from a Seed world or a Variant? Not that it matters. They’re going to find you. You took their virus from them. And once they detect it….well it doesn’t matter if you escape this place. She gave you a gift and the means to use it. A cheapened copy isn’t worth much but she’s going to pay the price for it. ’ said Sally.

  After tearing out a decent proportion of the additional row of teeth which had been growing inside his mouth, Claude wasn’t overly surprised at this point that he was becoming disdained to violent actions.

  ‘Not interested. Did you hurt them….her? I don’t know what kind of place the Tourism Board is meant to be but kidnapping people and putting them through mental and physical abuse cannot be a good sign. Wait. Do you have Tourists who watch that stuff?’ said Claude as the wrapped bone around his arm tightened a little.

  Shaking off the drops of blood and swilling around the mixture of saliva in his mouth and blood he spat on the dirt floor where it was immediately absorbed.

  The torches on the walls flickered back into life again, a little dimmer but they illuminated the rest of the corridor. Claude turned his back on the Floating backpack and began walking in the opposite direction. He doubted that he’d be getting any easy answers and all was receiving from Sally was half-threats and vague information.

  In other words she was wasting his time because she was bored, wanted someone to listen to her or he...wait.

  Virus? I was infected with a virus?

  The wrapped bone strip around his arm tightened again but this time sharpened protrusions tried to draw blood from the grey suit but failed to generate it. It seemed like he had been given a form of protection. No shoes, but his feet didn’t seem to mind walking on the bare compacted dirt floor.

  The voice of Sally called after him as Claude carried on walking down the dirt corridor. This time there was a bend but the torch light sources continued further down.

  ‘Kamryn will be addressing you directly. She decided to copy something that wasn’t hers to take and she’s following a bad role model. I look forward to you surviving your first encounter. The club has biological self-recognition and it’ll interact with the virus in your bloodstream. I’ve reduced the potency of it though. No cheating. Good luck Claude.’

  Waving his hand he carried on walking. One hand went to his mouth to see if the empty gums would regrow another row of teeth which had been growing behind his original pair but there was nothing except minor traces of blood.

  He took his hand out of the mouth and then considered an option. Blood and flesh appeared to be the way that this was how his present reality operated.

  Claude stopped walking for a moment and rubbed the blood from his fingers and hand onto the white bone wrapped around his arm. The tightening sensation stopped as it uncurled itself and straightened out as it moved to his wrist and formed a small club.

  I’m not at the point where I’m going to talk aloud just to comfort myself. Not that far gone yet. Sally said there was a virus in me. Biological self-recognition means that you’re bonded with me. Perhaps even a living thing of bone. I could do with a weapon. A club? This isn’t a club. Well..a small version of one.

  Claude stopped to touch the walls. He hadn’t felt the need to urinate or express his bowels since he had arrived in this place. There was no discomfort, his body wasn’t hungry at this time but the reddish tint to his eyes and immediate vision was something he was growing used to.

  He had a rough goal at least but he’d wanted more time to look at the intricately carved images. How they had managed to animate one when it appeared to be made of pure bone which had been flattened entirely was beyond him.

  There was a hint of a smell in the air. Not cadaverine. Not a disgusting smell but fresher, something he was becoming familiar with. A sweet smell of bones.

  The corridors rounded around a little as Claude continued walking, there was much the same in front of him. He turned around to see if the odd floating backpack had followed him, at least then there would be someone for him to talk to a little and suffer insults and threats from.

  Nothing. Wait. The corridor is different. The lights are gone. I can’t see in that darkness. A blocked off path? A trap? Yeah, not going to backtrack my path at this point.

  After rounding the bend, the mounted torches on the walls were beginning to dim as Claude saw an almost exact replica of the room covered entirely with layers of bones on the floor, ceilings and walls. From a distance, he could see that the compacted dirt corridor simply ended and entered inside the room. The light from the torches was brighter, a purer form but the bones inside the room had a definite red glow to them.

  There was no doors or gates blocking his way but there was something exactly in the centre of the room. Small enough for him to notice but he needed to move closer to determine if it was what he thought it was.

  Huh. Something I wanted. Maybe. Not guarded by a giant bone monster?

  He’d been half-expecting monsters of some form to smash through the compacted dirt tunnel walls and try to bite into him but there had been no further threats yet.

  The bone club wrapped around his wrist and extended from his hand shifted in response to his emotions. Edges on it had grown sharper like a plant growing thorns.

  A club. More like a bone tooth club. Sharp though.

  Standing at the entrance Claude walked into the room. This place was smaller than the one he had entered with Kamryn and he checked the ceiling just to make sure that she wasn’t standing there waiting for him.

  Then he walked over to the walls and saw that there were further images but they had been distorted and something had visibly slashed through them. Lines of scored bone made it much harder for him to make out the images beneath.

  Claude looked behind him at the entrance tunnel he had just left. The remaining torches had entirely dimmed out leaving darkness. He wasn’t clear if they were trigged by his presence or it was a deliberate attempt to keep him away.

  If he wanted to, he could just about jump and scratch the ceiling with the edge of the extended bone tooth club attached to his wrist and hand.

  The floor was layers of leg bones all neatly packed into rows, there were no traces or gaps between them though and it was entirely smooth and connected when he bent down to touch them.

  Time to see if that’s what I think it is.

  Inside the centre of the room there was a small book covered in a leathery material and wrapped with a thin layer of bone which had been flattened and twisted around.

  Taking hold of it, the material snapped easily in his hand and he dropped it on the floor. He picked up the book and a single page came fluttering down as he snatched it up.

  Rather than sit inside a random room Claude decided his best option would be to stuff the page inside the book and find himself a more secure location.

  From what he had seen there were tunnels and rooms of bone. Nothing else. What he needed was a means of carrying objects but he lacked materials except for the grey suit he was wearing.

  The voice of Kamryn came into his mind.

  If you hear this then you’ve collected the book. It’s a written record from the once Grand Chamberlin of the Eternal Empire called Linze. The carved bone reliefs on the walls give you more history of this place but you have a hard limit. I’ve fed you to kick-start the process but if you can’t escape the ossuary and forgotten catacombs your body will self-cannibalise itself. Granted there is bone to eat so you could become a drone but lose your free-will. Good luck Inheritor-Candidate. Sally. If you ate him and you’re reading this I’m reporting you to the Tourism Board. Bye!

  ‘Welcome to the . Please confirm your destination to your chosen Seed world or Variant of the planet Belphus.

  All Visitors please register with your nearest available Tour Guide. The Tourism Board is Above All.’

  [This has been a sponsored message from . Choose yours today!]

  Nicholas A. Ostheimer [Original Founder of the Tourism Board and Creator of Fictional Realities.]