Friday! That means flash fiction! This piece is based on a dream I had last night. Check it out:
“Hey… hey, look…”
I felt Tam’s hand tapping on my shoulder but didn’t want to turn away from my book. “Mm…” I said.
“Hey look!” she said again, louder now, and I sluggishly raised my head. Her eyes were wide as she slowly raised her hand to point. I traced the direction with my gaze, and my heart skipped a beat.
A Beholder! An actual goddamn beholder, globulous, floating body and eye-stalks and all. It was hovering just above the next picnic table over, slowly coming closer. Where the fuck had it come from?
In the corner of my eye, I was aware of Tam fumbling for her wand in her bag. Pulse drumming in my ears, I got mine out of my pocket and pointing at the beast in one fluid motion. “Fireball!” The firey globe lept from the wand’s tip at once, crashing into the Beholder in less than a second. It let out a hair-raising shriek, then shrivelled under the flames and began to shrink.
“Holy shit…” Tam mumbled beside me. “You got it… you fucking got it!”
A Beholder… with one fireball. That shouldn’t even have been possible. Yet there was the golden glow surrounding it, erasing it from existence in a confirmed kill and being replaced by the glowing message: “Victory! 25xp.”
“Twenty-five?” I said, wand still raised.
“That’s…. generous…” Tam sounded skeptical, though her face was still flushed with the excitement of what had happened.
“Twenty-five?!” I said again, lowering my wand. “For a Beholder! What the fuck?! That’s some zombie cat level xp right there.”
“That has to be a glitch,” she replied. “It has too. You should report it…”
I sighed, shaking my head. “Yeah, I will… goddamn, that would’ve been so cool. An actual Beholder and it’s a fucking glitch.”
“I mean… I guess technically it could just’ve been really weak. Can Beholders teleport? Maybe it bamfed away from a fight.”
“Maybe…” I conceeded. “But then there’d be people coming after it…”
We both looked around. There was no-one else in the park.
“Maybe it has really long distance teleportation…” Tam didn’t sound too convinced. I didn’t feel too convinced.
We looked around for a bit longer, waiting to see if anyone turned up.
“Oh well… guess it was a glitch after all,” Tam said, back to her cheerful self. “Wrong skin render, maybe.”
“It had Beholder animations, though…” I said. I pulled my phone out to ping the location of the glitch in the customer service app. “Come on, let’s go back,” I told her. I didn’t feel like sitting and reading anymore.
“Hey, look on the bright side,” Tam said as we slung our bags onto our backs. “If that thing had been real, chances are we’d both be dead by now.”
She said it so cheerfully that I couldn’t help but laugh. “That’s true. In a couple of levels though…”
“In a couple of levels.”
In the dream I defeated a beholder with a wand way too easily and for a strangely low amount of XP. Then I fought a Rattata, which was a lot harder. Yay franchise-mixing dreams!
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