Monster Girl Base 6 Chapter 1

“You can speak?” I gaped.

I couldn’t remember if any of the others had ever spoken, at least not in English. That could just be the translator pill doing its job, but something about one of the Cthulhu creatures talking made a shiver run down my spine. His voice was hoarse like he gargled salt water every day for fun, and his tentacles moved as if they had a mind of their own.

“Don’t listen to a word he says,” Miri said. “They do nothing but spin lies. My father thought that they walked on water, but all they ever did for us was bring fear and a few trinkets.”

The golden haired princess swayed where she stood, and I noticed her long locks were stuck to her damp forehead and the glow of power had left her eyes. The thin blue dress she wore clung to her curves as if her whole body was drenched in sweat, but she stood her ground and stared down the creature. She’d left her own people because of the Ilquenya, but the Cthulhu monsters had followed my girls and I through different dimensions.

Miri had been a princess in a world where elves existed, but she’d been engaged to a twat, and her father and brother had turned on her as soon as she’d chosen to help me escape. They’d planned to hand me over to the Cthulhu creatures that had hunted my father and then me for the Dimensional Engine, Patent Pending.

“Ah,” the creature said and reached up to rub his short neck like it hurt to speak. “The runaway princess. Your father paid heavily for your unexpected departure. But we still have plans for you. My people will reward me for bringing you back.”

“Over my dead body,” I said and stepped between them.

A sound like a choking dog came out of him, and it took me a second to realize that it was a laugh. The creature threw his head back, and his tentacles curled inwards towards his chin. His laser gun was down near his side, but his grip was still tight enough that he could point it at any moment.

“Dave,” Fela whispered from my left. “I do not think we should listen to him. Miri has said they do nothing but tell lies. He is a predator. We should kill him and be done with him.”

The sabertooth woman’s black tufted ears were pressed against auburn locks of hair. Her yellow-green eyes were almost consumed with wide black pupils, and her tail swished behind her irritably. The leather mini skirt she wore crept upwards to reveal muscular thighs that were tight and ready to pounce, and the matching tube top barely held in her heaving breast.

Fela had joined me in the first world that I’d been taken to by my father’s Dimensional Engine, Patent Pending, and had been with me as we navigated through each world after that and tried to figure out how to pick which world we wanted to go to. Her pet wooly mammoth, Floppy, had been helpful when we needed to get supplies for the moving base, and the two were a major part of why I was still alive.

In the sabertooth woman’s world humans had never evolved, but there were several humanoid animals like Fela. The bear people had almost killed me, and there was a giant sloth that thought I would be his next meal. She’d followed me onto the base right as the DEPP powered up, and decided that she liked me enough to have me as her mate. Her survival instincts had saved my life more than once, and she’d been eager to learn more about the other worlds that we visited.

“I know,” I said and risked a glance at her. “He still has his shield though.”

“Then we will attack at once,” the catwoman said. “I will circle around, and then you can shoot him with the laser gun that Sol has made for you.”

“It only worked on the others because they were shooting at the same time,” Emma said. “They had to drop their shields in order to fire.”

The raven haired woman watched the Ilquenya as he contained himself. Her icy blue eyes sparked with her lightning, and electricity crackled along her pale fingers. The proper Victorian woman had joined Fela and I on the second world we’d visited, and had come to our rescue against some electric powered wolves.

Emma’s world had been destroyed when Nikola Tesla had decided to release an electrical pulse into the atmosphere without a faraday cage. The plan had been to give the world free power forever, and it had worked, but it’d also killed almost every living thing. The survivors had been given electric powers, though most of the humans had become cannibals, and the raven haired woman had managed to avoid them for years.

“Right,” I said with a nod. “Emma and Fela, you two go around the sides. I’ll shoot him, and when he tries to shoot me back, then you attack him.”

“What are you talking about?” the creature asked and narrowed his beady black eyes.

“Just about how I’m going to kill you,” I said and lifted my laser powered gun.

The last world’s version of my father had been a high priest for the creatures and had created the weapon to combat them. He’d also created the invisibility shield that had kept us hidden from them until the asshole in front of us noticed that something was off. Sol was crouched down near the dining room table, and the look on his face was the same one that my father had gotten when he was about to do something stupid.

“You were lucky--” the Ilquenya started but then stopped as a round of coughs interrupted him.

“They can’t speak much without their equipment,” Sol hissed. “And those foot soldiers aren’t expected to talk.”

“Then he’s of no use to us,” Miri said and leaned against the table. “Dave, I don’t have enough strength left to help. And there isn’t enough light in this world for me to draw on.”

“It’s okay,” I said with a reassuring smile. “You should rest. We can kill him.”

A breeze drifted through the trees like the world around us could feel the fight. The tips of the tall pines bent towards the base, and the cool air dried the sweat on my forehead. No stars twinkled down, and heavy clouds drifted across the sky towards a thin moon tinted with red.

The last world we’d been on had been nothing but heat and sand that found its way into every crevice. Pyramids like those in Giza had risen above the dunes, walled in by a city, and guarded by priests that served the Cthulhu creatures. The people had served the ancient gods of Egypt and had even replaced parts of themselves with cybernetic enhancements that they believed made them closer to the gods.

The contrast was like night and day as the chill of the dark world sank into my bones. It should’ve been dawn when we arrived, and the darkness made it harder for Miri to use her powers over light, but the rest of us wouldn’t be taken down by one of the tentacled bastards. We’d already beaten his comrades, and all there was left was to kill him.

He lifted his laser gun, aimed it at my chest, and the entire world slowed. My eyes never left his beady black orbs, but I knew every step that my girls took away from them. They circled outward like raptors while I lifted my own laser powered pistol.

It was like we were in an old western at high noon. I wasn’t the best shot in the world, but my version of Sol had taken me to plenty of gun ranges, and there was no way that I’d miss at this distance. My hand steadied, my mind cleared, and the shimmer of his shield caught my attention.

He squeezed the trigger of his laser gun and a blast of blue light shot towards me. I let out my own but his protection had already reformed, and it bounced off to hit the ground at his feet. The shimmering shield moved away from his hand as he released another round. I fired another right at his weapon, and let out a sigh of relief when it hit its mark.

The blue light disintegrated his hand and instantly cauterized the horrible wound, and the creature let out a scream as he dropped the hot gun. The soldier reached for a second weapon on his hip with his other hand, but didn’t have time to pull it out before Fela leapt onto his back. His hand clasped her hair, and he tilted forward to throw her over his shoulder with a strength that I didn’t know he had.

My sabertooth girlfriend let out a howl of pain and anger as the Ilquenya tossed her onto the ground. Her back slid in the dirt until she slammed into the wall of crates where we kept our jars, and her yellow green eyes closed as her head slammed into the edge of a wooden box. She slumped into a ball of limbs, and my heart stopped until I saw her take a breath.

“That was a mistake,” I growled and turned back to the Cthulhu creature.

He let out another choking laugh, and his beady little eyes glimmered with joy. His gun was pointed at my chest again, but my focus was solely on the weak spot on his hand. He’d pulled out his other gun, and the shield couldn’t protect where it touched him.

I let out a round of shots at his hand and chest. The protections shimmered but reflected the shots towards the trees, the ground, and right back at me. I dodged to avoid one while the creature let out a few rounds of his own, but my plan worked since I had baited his shield and that should have left him vulnerable to my girls’ attacks.

Emma wasted no time with her lightning, and blue streaks of energy arched towards him. Her icy blue eyes glowed from her powers, and the loose strands of her ebony hair floated in the air. She hit her mark, but the Ilquenya had let his shield reform, and the attack rebounded towards Raz.

The alien slime woman had joined us a few worlds back and had adapted fast to the different worlds we visited. While she was in the camp she wore the form of an oil slick colored woman, but looked like a combination of Emma and Fela when she tried to appear human. Her amoeba-like body could adapt to almost anything, but if she had any weakness it was to electricity, and the energy reduced her to a pile of goo on the grass.

“Raz!” Emma shouted and covered her mouth in horror. “Oh my, I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to. Please tell me that you’re okay.”

“I will be fine, Emma,” the blob of goo whispered and started to bubble up.

“Dave,” Sol hissed from near where Fela fell. “Dave, the shield… it only covers the front of him right now. He’s using it to protect himself from you, but it’s taking all of the energy it has. He’ll need to recharge it soon.”

“So we just keep hitting him?” I asked and let out another blue bullet to keep the creature occupied. “That’s not practical.”

“No,” the last world’s version of my father said and rolled his eyes. “I’m going to attack him from the front, and you can get him from behind.”

“How?” I asked and glanced at the girls. “He’s a lot more powerful than us.”

“But we have weapons,” the genius said and pulled out a knife with pure white light around the edges.

“Okay,” I said and took a deep breath, gritted my teeth, and channeled all of my rage and focus.

Sol darted forward with the knife in hand. His scream broke through the quiet of the night, and the Ilquenya spun to look at the mad high priest. The knife sank into the shield, but the protection did its job and folded around the blade. The crazed man forced the Cthulhu creature to turn, and I let out two shots the second that his back was to me.

The first one hit the thin shield harmlessly, but it shimmered weakly, and the second went straight through. The Ilquenya let out a screech that felt like it pierced into my eardrums, stumbled forward, and then collapsed as Sol lunged away. Steam rose from the creature’s back from where the laser bullets had struck his flesh, and the smell of burned seafood filled the air.

“Is it dead?” Emma asked from where she crouched next to Raz.

The alien woman had already started to reform, and most of her body had solidified. Her durability had kept her alive when most of us would’ve died, but it had still sent panic through me when she’d been electrocuted. All she needed was a few cells and everything would be fine.

“I think so,” I said and took a few tentative steps forward, stopped, and watched the creature’s body.

His tentacles twitched a few times and stretched out like they could crawl away from him, and he tried to reach for a knife that had fallen nearby but collapsed with his fingers in the dirt.

“Now he’s dead,” Sol said and pushed himself up.

The older man had collapsed into the dirt when my final shot had struck the Ilquenya. The clothes that he’d borrowed from me were stained with the deep Michigan soil that made up the main part of the base. His gray streaked hair was messier than usual, but a smile tugged at his worn face, and he looked like a weight had been lifted from him.

“He was harder to kill than the others,” Fela said as she woke. “The others were not skilled hunters. Dave, are you sure that he is dead? I have known some predators that pretend to be so that they’re prey will let their guard down.”

I lifted my laser gun, but the lights on the barrel flashed red like a warning that the weapon was empty. I sighed, tucked it into my belt, and reached for the pistol from my world. It still had a few bullets left since it hadn’t been used much during the attack, so I shot a couple into the body for good measure.

The corpse jerked with the impact, but the Ilquenya didn’t try to reach for the weapon again. The shield spread out slowly over the body like it wanted to protect him, blinked a few times, and then faded into nothing as the battery finally died.

“If it wasn’t dead before, then it is now,” I said with a smile.

I walked over to Fela, offered her my hand, and helped the muscular sabertooth woman to her feet. Her hair was matted to the back of her head where it had made contact with the wooden box, but it wasn’t bleeding, and I let out a sigh of relief. I thought that she’d been seriously hurt when it had knocked her out, but the sexy woman was stronger than a normal human.

“I am okay, Dave Meyer,” Fela said with a smile that showed off her fangs. “It is nothing that I have not endured before. It will heal in a few days, but I will need sleep and meat to hurry my recovery process.”

“I think I have some meat in that solar powered freezer,” Emma said. “There’s not much left from the world with the cult leader Sol.”

“Cult leader?” Sol asked and ran a hand through his hair. “I’ll need to know more about him later. Why didn’t he come with you? Were the creatures not after him, too?”

“He hadn’t worked out interdimensional travel,” I said with a shrug. “And he had his own vendetta with the governments of his world. Apparently, they were responsible for Doris’s death. They made it look like a lab accident, but he knew better.”

“And the cult?” the high priest asked.

“Remember how I told you he created the Dimensional Engine, Patent Observed?” I asked and pointed towards the sliding glass doors in the shipping container. “Well, it solved homelessness and pollution almost overnight. And that made him a lot of enemies, and a lot of followers. He had more money than he knew what to do with, and he used some of it to help people.”

“And started a cult,” the last world’s version of Sol said with a smile. “I sometimes surprise myself. Though, I didn’t think that I’d ever want to have a cult. Having the people look to me as the high priest was annoying enough, but it gave me access to the Cthulhu creatures. And after they killed Doris… being in the public eye was worth it if it meant that I could take those assholes down.”

“And we will,” I said. “We just need to figure out where their home dimension is. And how to kill them.”

A pair of gleaming red eyes in the treeline caught my attention. The shadows of the forest made it hard to see what, or who, they belonged to, but they weren’t alone. Another pair appeared a few feet away, and then another, and another until it looked like the base was surrounded.

“I cannot smell them,” Fela said and flexed her hands to release her claws. “I should be able to smell them, but the only smell is rot and blood.”

The sabertooth woman scrunched up her nose and shook her head like that would get rid of the stench. Her black tufted cat ears twitched on the top of her head as she listened to every sound around us, and her tail swished back and forth irritably. She took a few steps towards me, but her eyes never left the treeline.

“They appear to be leaving,” Raz said from where she stood a few feet away.

The alien woman had completely reformed, and her oil slick colored hair moved in the light breeze. Her feet were pressed into the dirt so that she could sense the movement around us, and her head was tilted to the side like whatever it was she felt had confused her. She frowned, looked at me with deep emerald eyes, and then walked over to us.

“What is it?” I asked. “Are they big?”

“No,” the oil slick colored woman said. “They’re fast. It’s almost like they aren’t even touching the ground.”

“I don’t like that,” I muttered and looked around.

All of the red eyes had disappeared into the night like they’d never been there at all. We’d fought dinosaurs, giant sea creatures from prehistoric times, and even Aztecs, but super fast with glowing red eyes was new.

Of course, Miri was an elven princess, so apparently fantastic beings weren’t off the table, and so I figured anything was possible. I looked up into the night sky to see the clouds drift lazily overhead. It should’ve been daylight, but each world had its own set of rules, and it could just be that the sun didn’t rise until later.

“They’re gone now,” Sol said and walked over to the body of the Ilquenya.

“Right,” I said. “Raz, can you keep an eye on the ground and let us know if they’re coming back?”

“Of course,” the alien woman said with a nod. “But it is difficult to sense their movement, and I am not strong enough right now to create the dome around the base.”

The alien woman had stretched herself to make a shield over the base when we’d been in the trash world. Of course, she’d had plenty of giant irradiated roaches to consume so that she could become larger, and it had been awhile since there’d been a meal that large. She’d also taken a direct hit from Emma’s lightning and would need to recuperate with Fela.

“Then we’ll go into the DEPOs,” I said. “We could all use some rest and sleep right now anyways. We’ll just lock ourselves in the bedroom and take shifts for the watch.”

“I will take the first watch,” Fela said. “It is important that I do not sleep for a few hours. One of the women in my old pack had a head injury and went to sleep, but when she woke her mind was broken.”

“She probably had a concussion,” I said. “I’ll stay up with you, just in case you need anything. I think you can go to sleep after a couple of hours.”

“I will be fine, Dave Meyer,” the sabertooth woman said with a smile. “You should sleep so that you are fully rested and can protect our pack.”

“I’ll stay up with her,” Raz said. “I can put part of myself to sleep to rest, and the rest can keep an eye on Fela. We’re in the middle of a season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer anyway.”

The amoeba-like woman had taken to the technology that the Magpies had given us in the ‘80s dystopian nightmare world. The corporations had taken over everything and companies like Quicken Loans forced people into indentured servitude to pay off the loans that they had to take out just to live. The Magpies had been a rebellion group that we’d helped to deal a blow to the company’s servers, and in turn they’d shared their off-the-grid technology, plant growing techniques, and even loaded a ton of movies and shows onto the NAMSHUBs.

The NAMSHUBs were what the corporations had used to track everyone and charge their bank accounts for ridiculous fees. Riggs had hacked into a pair for me and had made it so that I could connect to any satellites in any world we landed on. The little digital version of the hacker would get into the computers and tell us what we needed to know about the new place so that we’d know what we were walking into.

The girls had taken to the movies and the TV shows, though Raz was the one who took to it the most. Her style had become her own since she’d started to binge the popular entertainment, and even her speech patterns had shifted to include more modern slang.

“I like Willow,” Fela said. “She’s a strong woman and protects her pack.”

“She does,” I said and grinned at the two women. “If you two notice those red eyes coming back, then I want you to wake me up right away.”

“Of course,” the alien woman said and flipped her hair over her shoulder. “Though if they are not much of a threat, then we will let you sleep. We are both strong.”

“And injured,” I pointed out.

“Fair enough,” Raz said with a smile.

A breeze drifted through the trees and wound its way through the base. The chill made a shiver run down my spine, and I wracked my brain for what season it should’ve been. If I was right, then it was almost spring, though the cold of the dark world reminded me more of winter.

“Raz,” Sol called from next to the dead Cthulhu creature. “If you’re looking for a meal, then you can have him. I’m almost done stripping him of his tech.”

“That would be helpful, high priest,” the oil slick colored woman said. “I should be able to recover faster once I’ve eaten. And he is very large. Fela, did you want some?”

“No,” the sabertooth woman said with a shake of her head. “I do not like the smell of him. There is something wrong with his flesh.”

“I don’t sense anything,” the alien woman said and walked over to the body. “Can you smell something specific?”

“It’s like a fish that has been out in the sun for too long,” Fela said with a shrug. “My stomach is upset with just the scent of it.”

“Okay,” Raz said with a shrug. “I shouldn’t be damaged by that, so I’ll take care of his body. Sol, are you sure that you don’t need anything else? Once I start to consume him, I’ll eat all of the organic material including his clothes.”

“I have everything that I need,” the high priest said and grabbed his armful of tech. “I think I can refashion some of this stuff.”

He held up something that looked like a taser and broke out into a huge smile like a kid on Christmas morning. The joy on his face reminded me of my own father when he’d found something to play with. It usually ended in some kind of explosion, and I was suddenly much more grateful that he had a DEPO of his own for his experiments.

The Dimensional Engine, Patent Observed doors all looked like they were just a normal sliding glass entryway, but each of them led to their own pocket dimensions. The rooms were made of concrete and were large enough to house an entire family, and the Sol that had created them gave us four of them before we left his world. One of them was our bedroom, another was a weapons and cash store that Sol had given us, another was the pantry for our food supplies, and the last one had become the high priest’s lab and bedroom.

The doors could be opened from either side and only took up as much room as a window, so we could access them from the base, or from the inside of the shipping container. We’d cut a whole in the top of the metal storage box for the chimney of Emma’s stove, and the rest of the area had been made into a living room with sofas, pillows, and plenty of blankets.

It had taken a while for us to make a stable house, but it had finally worked out when we found the shipping containers in the trash world. We even managed to snag a drone wench and a drill bot so that we could dig into the base. Our little home had finally started to take shape, and there was room enough for each of us to grow and thrive.

The drill bot was needed for the garden that Emma wanted to grow. My Sol had created the Dimensional Engine, Patent Pending that he’d embedded in the engine of a rusted blue Lincoln, but the way that it held the base together made it hard to dig more than six inches into the ground. So far we’d managed to put in some solar stills for fresh water, and the garden was at least marked off, though the plants still hadn’t poked up over the soil.

“I think this bracelet is what he used to travel between dimensions,” Sol said and tore me out of my thoughts. “If I can figure out how it works, then I might be able to choose what world we jump to.”

“That would be fantastic,” I said. “We could put a stop to the Ilquenya and then find a nice world to settle down in.”

“We could even go visit your aunt,” Emma said with a bright smile. “I’d like to meet the woman who raised you.”

“That would be amazing,” I said with a glance at my girls. “I’m sure that she’d love to meet all of you. And hear about our adventures. Though, we should probably downplay the danger.”

My aunt had raised me after my mother had died during childbirth. My father hadn’t been able to cope with the loss of his beloved Doris, so I’d been raised with my aunt as my mother and my father as my uncle. It had been a shock when I’d listened to the message that my Sol had left for me, but it did explain why he’d spent so much time with me, and why we had so much in common.

“Hold on,” the high priest said with a frown. “This looks like a communication device.”

“Did he send a message before he died?” I asked and walked over to stare down at the foreign letters.

“No,” the older man said and shook his head. “But there are a lot here. I can translate most of these, but it’ll take awhile.”

“Then I’ll make you a pot of coffee,” Emma said in her southern tinged accent.

“I’d appreciate that,” Sol said and followed after her into the storage unit.

“Don’t forget to get some sleep,” I said and started towards the DEPO that led to our bedroom. “We don’t know what the hell was in the woods, and I don’t like that it moves too fast for Raz to track. For all we know, they could be some mythical creature that none of us have heard of before, and we need to be ready to defend ourselves if they come back.”

“I’ll be fine, kid,” the last world’s version of my father said. “Besides, I did get some sleep last night. You should be the one that goes to bed since you took the night watch.”

“He is right, Dave Meyer,” Fela said and wrapped an arm around my waist, kissed my cheek, and then nipped at my ear. “You need to rest. Raz and I will take the first watch.”

“Okay,” I said and then stole a kiss. “Miri, you and Emma should join me since you’ve used so much of your powers.”

“That sounds lovely,” the elven princess said with a yawn. “I’d volunteer for a watch, but the darkness of this world seems to be stealing my energy. Hopefully, the sun will rise soon.”

“Hopefully,” I said and led the girls into the bedroom, locked the door, and then changed it so that it opened into the shipping container.

“I’ll be in as soon as I make Sol some coffee,” Emma said when I pulled open the door to check on her. “You go ahead and get some sleep. I’m right behind you.”

Raz and Fela set up the projector and put on an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer while Miri and I climbed into bed. Our pets opted to stay on the floor with the girls and watch TV, though the five foot tall wooly mammoth did have to scoot over so that his giant head wasn’t in the way, and the young cassowary wanted to play more than sit still. I watched for a few minutes, but something outside caught my attention.

“Do you see that?” I asked and slipped out of bed.

“I do,” Raz said and walked over to the door. “They’re back.”

“How many are there?” I leaned against the cool glass and tried to make out pairs of eyes.

“It looks like more are coming,” Fela said with a gesture towards the woods on either side of the base.

I narrowed my eyes and peered out into the inky blackness of the night. It was still early in the morning, but the sky was still as dark as when we’d arrived, and I started to wonder if it would come up at all. My mind raised with all of the creatures that would thrive in a dark world and hoped that whatever it was, that it didn’t have a craving for fresh meat.

Especially since there were so many of them.