Revealing Project Green

A litrpg with OH MY GOD IS SHE OKAY

CHAPTER 5- Freaks Come Out At Night

Ritchie and I just stare at her. And continue to stare at her. And then, when nothing happens, we stare at her some more.

Maya gets up, wipes a tiny bit of glowing silvery stuff onto her forearm, and wobbles on her feet. “Oh, shit,” she says, and doubles over.

“What–” Ritchie sounds half asleep.

“She drank it. All of it.”

“Holy crimanitely!” Ritchie’s parents don’t like swearing, and it’s kind of worn off on him. He leaps off the bed and slaps her on the back several times. “Throw it up!” He then looks at me. “We gotta make her vomit.”

Maya shakes her head and waves us off, staggers, takes a knee, then gets up and starts coughing and pounding at her chest. This goes on for a little while, and I steer her into the bathroom attached to my bedroom, and close the door before my parents can figure out Maya’s here at… what the hell time is it anyway?

As it happens, it’s 2:30 in the morning, and not because almost-ten-year-old me looks at the clock. That’s what time it is.

The character sheet passes my mind, too, and I try to get a look for where it might be, but I can’t see anything. Instead I throw some tap water in a paper cup and Maya downs it, followed immediately by a second cupful. Eventually the coughing stops.

“What the–”

“Shh! My parents are sleeping. Do you have any idea what time it is?”

“What was that?” she asks, quieter now.

“We’re… not sure,” Ritchie answers after another shared look between us.

“Oh, great. What’s it doing in a Pepsi bottle next to your bed, idiot?”

“How did you get in here?”

“Your window was unlocked and open.” Then she jumps up, as if she’s just been jolted by a bolt of lightning. “Oh! Oh my gosh, you guys, there’s… you’ve gotta see this!”

We follow. It’s the least we can do, given that she just mistakenly drank the ogre and zombie creation juice. The stuff that messed up the electrical works at Ms. Gina’s weird art science lab.

We all go out the window, pause in time for Maya to heave several times and appear to get ready to throw up, then get on our bikes when that passes. She takes another moment before we get pedaling, and I’m pretty sure a brief bit of numbers and words flashes to life behind her head, but she lets out a mighty belch this time. That seems to be it; several thumps against her chest later, she nods and gets moving.

Ritchie’s already seen it.

Just north of us, by maybe a few hundred yards, strange lights are bursting to life in the night.

“What the…” We seem to be saying that a lot. If I’m going to make this into a book worthy of sale, I’m going to have to think of some other ways to express our amazement and semi-disbelief.

“Maya, did you bring your backpack?” Ritchie asks. Always thinking, that’s Ritchie. Clumsy and a little uncoordinated, but brain like a samurai sword.

I’ll fix that in a later draft.

Maya does indeed have a small pink backpack covered with flower patches, but she jerks it away from Ritchie’s grabbing hands. He retreats from her hostile glare, then follows her gestures with his eyes and gets another look at the strange lights.

The graveyard isn’t far from my house (our house) and we can see the bizarre lights floating around without traveling anywhere. It’s three blocks over there. My brain tries to work through what I’m seeing as we bike, but it’s clearly not a spotlight, and it’s not aliens. They’re chaotic, and all manner of colors: an angry reddish hue sometimes, other times a pukey green, and still others a chalky color.

“It’s been…” Maya stops and clutches her stomach, then belches again. She follows this with a pained groan. “It’s been like that for an hour. I thought it was… oohhh… I thought it was teenagers.”

Are you sure you’re okay, I want to ask. I don’t. Maya is, of the three of us, and I hate to admit this as a kid, but she’s definitely the toughest. It’s not even a close thing. Compared to us she’s the Hulk. She would never admit she’s not okay, unless it was really bad. And I’m honestly terrified of it being that bad.

I should be more concerned with the lights we’re closing in on.

It’s ghosts. It’s floaty ghostly images of humanoid forms hovering here and there, with some of them doing wild aerobatic maneuvers. Several are having a fist fight. None of them exactly have feet, since their bodies disappear just below the stomach, but others have legs that vanish into nothingness around the knees. One, then another, and finally a third closest to us turn in our direction, and their gazes fix on us.

“Oh fuck,” I mutter. If you can’t use your best words when you’re faced with the restless dead, when can you?

Ritchie nearly drops his bike. “Donny, what’d you do?”

“What’d I do? What’d you do? You could’ve stopped me.”

“Come on, we gotta get out of here.”

“Well how about we get out our weapons and fuck these guys up?”

It doesn’t even cross our minds that no one is up and about. No cars passing in the night, no police have noticed this, nobody out for a late night walk with their dog to let them pee or whatever.

“That won’t work,” Maya starts, then stares at the hatchet. “Where did you–“

I walk forward and roll some dice. Somehow. Whatever I roll, it’s a failure. It goes about as well as you’d imagine, what with trying to hack apart something that’s made of ectoplasm with a plain old hatchet my parents bought at a hardware store. Ritchie doesn’t even get his hatchet out.

But the ghosts keep coming toward me, and the one I tried to slash goes right through my weapon, and touches my hand. It’s like a sudden gust of winter. Frost forms on my knuckles that are touching it, and it burns. It burns for 3 points of damage, actually. I jerk my hand away and turn to go, but as that happens it raises a hand and touches the side of my head. It’s honestly the worst feeling I’ve ever felt, which is appropriate because it’s using a Fear Attack. My knees start to buckle, but this time I can hear the dice rolling behind me. These can be none other than Will dice, and I have 3d6. These end up 2, 3, and 6, totalling 11, and I can’t tell you how I know that, but I know that. It’s not a mental image. It’s just there in my mind. And I get a Domain bonus for Bike, so my 6 rolls again. I’m a tad sad for it, because 6’s are obviously the best, but when it rolls again, the 3 I get is added to the toal, for 14. This means I’ve accomplished a moderate success, which brings me only a hint of relief. I stagger away from the oncoming ghost rather than get rooted to the spot in fear. However, the second of my hit point boxes gets filled in with a squidgy scaredy cat face, so I’m at -1d6 on all actions.

Not cool. Not cool at all. At least Bike is good for me. Re-rolling 6’s is goodish.

“Come on!” Ritchie is shouting.

But I’m slow to get pedaling. My foot keeps wanting to slip right off the pedal. You know the feeling.

I’m grabbed from behind, by Maya, as it turns out, and dragged off my bike and to the nearest house. She tries the door and finds it unlocked. Greensville you beautiful safe little island you. We scramble inside and shut the door, probably not thinking, in our ten year old panic, that this won’t stop an incorporeal being.

“I just… rolled dice,” I pant.

“Good for you, doofus,” Maya says.

Ritchie, however, is on this. “What did you roll?”

“Will… I got an 11, but then Domain kicked in an re-rolled my 6, so I got 3 added on.”

A lot goes on in Ritchie’s mind. You can see the gears turning, the boiler packing the steam in there, and all that.

“I just rolled too!” he cries. Before I can ask, he says, “Insight. 5, 3, 3, 2, and I get a plus one all the time. 14. Moderate success, but no Domain. I figure–”

“What are you talking about?” Maya demands, “We have more important–“ but all talk ceases then, when not one but two ghosts fly through the door and into the house. One goes rocketing to the second floor, where we can now see a lightswitch has been flipped and someone’s moving around upstairs. Probably because of us.

The second comes through the door with exaggerated slowness. It’s the same woman that attacked me before. She’s wearing a tattered dress without feet emerging from the bottom, and only has suggestions where her eyes should be, no nose, no mouth, just stringy hair floating around her head like she’s under water.

I back away. First off, I’m not on my bike anymore. Second off, I’m a die lower on all actions because of the fear. It’s an icy grip in the middle of my guts, clenching at me. I’m in a game. I’m living a game, and clearly these things matter.

Maya doesn’t seem too worried. Her hands suddenly glow with purple energy and she reaches forward and blasts the ghost right in its expressionless face. Now, for the first time, I can see the numbers, the stats, the dice, all of it. Maya has the choice of Insight (3d6) or Will (3d6+1) to do this, and has the Weird Domain handy. In addition, the Characteristic Lucky gets checked off, which will give her the ability to re-roll 1’s for the rest of the scene.

She gets 5, 3, and 1, but the 1 re-rolls several times, coming up 1 again and again until it finally becomes a 3. With her +1, it’s a 12. Lower than a Moderate Success? No, apparently not. It’s a blast that does 12 damage, which is way higher than this ghost has the ability to handle, because a red HP bar suddenly materializes, then the red meter is sucked down to zero. The ghost puffs out of existence in a heartbeat, with only a tiny wail of protest ringing in my ears.

Huh.

Unfortunately there’s a second status bar Maya has to deal with, a PPP bar for Psychic Power Points, and she’s solidly into the second box, so all her actions will be =1. What? What’s that? All my rolls are -1d6, not -1. Lame.

I demand a refund out of this garbage game. Maya got the superpowers and I got supernatural fear.

“What was that?” Maya is staring at her hands in horror and some admiration.

“It was a psychic power. Can we look in your backpack now?”

We don’t have to fish through much. The prime find was a hardcover diary locked up tight with an actual lock, not one of those ones you buy for like fifty cents with the key that’s basically just a straight line. After that she had a wallet with a dollar and some change, and a character sheet.

“See?” I say, and wave it at her.

“What is that? Where’d you get it? Wait… that was in my backpack?”

Her statistics are pretty good. Apparently she’s a better fighter than me, with a Skirmish of 3d6+1, and she has Scrappy and Fierce as two of her three Characteristics. Lucky is the third. No idea what those mean, but it sounds like she’s more bodacious than I am.

Note to self: ask the publisher about whether to use eighties slang. It sounds really dumb in my head.

Below Maya’s HP track and six boxes is another set of boxes, for her Psychic Power Points. She’s just spent 12, and has 25 left, which means eight slashes run through the first box and fill it in totally red, while four more slashes go through the second box, and have replaced the 7 with a 3. She’s -1 on all actions, and I find myself hoping the penalties stack up if she gets actually injured as well.

I banish that thought. I don’t want any of us to get hurt, especially if she has the power to blast ghosts out of the air.

Ritchie bends and picks up a gleaming something off the carpet, below where the ghost had been.

“What is it?” I ask.

He doesn’t get to answer, because a moment later a wild-eyed old man in a dressing gown, fuzzy slippers and tight briefs is screaming down at us. And by wild-eyed I mean glowing with reddish, supernatural power. Oh, and he has a shotgun in one hand, with the butt propped up against his pale, veiny old man leg.

“Yer on my prop’ty!” he yells.

“Blast him, Maya!” Ritchie says quietly.

“But what about that man?”

That man doesn’t wait for us to finish having this discussion, but instead racks his shotgun, plants one bony leg on the bannister above us, and props his elbow on his knee to steady him. It’s time to roll Moves. 6, 6, 4, and 2, with my plus one, for a total of 19. Hell yeah, I am one quick little bastard.

Ritchie has 4d6 and rolls a pathetic 8. I know this because he gets a shotgun blast for 3d6 damage. And a 6 on the damage roll, gives him an exploding die, totalling 12 damage.

It looks worse than it actually is. Which is not at all true, but I’ve got to believe it if I’m going to survive the next few seconds. I hurl the hatchet at him, and this apparently doesn’t go off Skirmish, but Moves, so I’m rolling 4d6+1. Nice! And would you look at that, three 6’s and a 4 (plus my random tacked on +1) for a total of 23. I see a roll in response happening, and fast, but this old codger has only 2d6+1 in Moves, and even though he rolls a 6 and a 1, and even though he’s in his Domain of City and re-rolls for an extra 4, that’s still a total of 11 and nowhere even close to my result. The shotgun goes flying, which I’m psyched about. The ghost also comes flying… out of the guy’s mouth and eyes, which is less cool. It dives out of the old man and down the sort of balcony where he’s been, through this large living room and towards us.

Maya’s helping to get Ritchie out of the house, arm slung over her shoulders and halfway out the door, so I’ve got to think fast. Once again, since I somehow refreshed my Characteristics, Quick gets used and I dive into the ghost’s path. None of my abilities have ‘ghost puncher’ or ‘spirit killer’ in the name, but I roll Panache with an extra die for Quick, 5d6+1 for a total of 17. It’s enough to get through this thing’s Will of 3d6, which ends up a measly 6. Yeah, that’s right ghost, focus on me and not my friends!

“Wait a second…”

And this is how I get possessed.