Museum Core Chapter 32: Welcome to the Jungle! (again)

“How do you think they’re doing out there?” Smith asked, once again driving the car.

“Might be going well, might be going horrible,” Jaclyn shrugged.

“The kid seemed pretty confident, and if he’s read Robinson Crusoe, he might even have the right idea,” Smith shrugged.

“Incompetent people always think they’re amazing,” Jaclyn said. “Did you ever hear the story of the guy who thought a forced suicide was the perfect murder?”

“Maybe?”

Jaclyn laughed. “Then you haven’t heard it, you wouldn’t have forgotten if you’d heard.

“Now, this was back when I’d just started at the precinct, but I basically had front-line seats for that mess. Basically, there was this guy, drug dealer, who wanted to kill his rival.

“But he didn’t want to get caught, so he decided to stage a suicide. No, let me rephrase that, he wanted the guy to actually top himself. A staged suicide works if people believe it, but if someone actually kills themselves and all the evidence supports that, no one digs any deeper.”

“And?” Smith asked.

“See, this absolute genius decided to kidnap his would-be victim’s family and wanted to send a video of them with a gun to their head.”

“Wouldn’t that video be found on the victim’s phone?” Smith asked.

“That was idiocy number one,” Jaclyn said. “The real issue was the way he wanted to avoid witnesses. See, the rival drug dealer would be dead and the death might be dismissed as a suicide, but you can’t have witnesses running around, right?

“Now, we caught this guy while he was filming the video, arrested him, and the superintendent, he was still an inspector back then, asked how he was going to deal with the witnesses. As it turned out, his plan was to just kill them.”

“So to commit one ‘perfect murder’, he’d have committed a bunch more, ones that would have made the ‘suicide’ super suspicious? How does that make sense?”

Jaclyn laughed. “It doesn’t, that’s the point.”

“Oh, wow, that is dumb,” Smith commented.

“How come I never hear any of the interesting stories?” Granger asked from the backseat. “Come on, you’ve gotta have more than just that one. What’s the worst thing you’ve ever seen?”

Jaclyn sighed. Kids, grown-up children. He really should know better than to ask that question, even though he’d barely been on the job for a month.

“When you ask that question, you’re just going to bring up horrible, nightmare-inducing memories,” she turned to shoot him a disapproving look. “It’s a lot better to ask things like ‘what’s the most unbelievable call you’ve ever been on’.”

“And that would be ...” Granger asked.

“I was once asked to arrest a cat for trespassing,” Jaclyn said. “No joke. This guy called in a panic, said his neighbor’s kid was sitting on his back porch and staring through the window and he was getting uncomfortable.

“So I show up and, as it turns out, it’s not a kid being a peeping tom, it’s a cat staring at his pet birds.”

“What did you do?” Granger asked.

“It was a cat,” Jaclyn said simply. “I picked it up and scratched it behind the ears while I carried it out.”

“I’m guessing you’ve got a million stories like that?” Granger asked.

“Thereabouts,” she shrugged. “But do you know who really has insane stories? Paramedics. If you ever want to lose your faith in humanity while laughing your ass off, talk to a paramedic about some of the stuff they’ve seen. People who constantly call in for the same non-issue, who decide to use ambulances as a taxi service because they’ve got friends near the hospital, or ones with allergies who somehow think that eating stuff they’re deathly allergic to is fine if they’re also eating Benadryl.”

“Damn,” Granger laughed, only to suddenly wind up kissing the back of Jaclyn’s seat when Smith stepped on the brakes. A monkey had leaped onto the road, but what had happened after that?

“Where’d it go?” she asked, but Smith just glared out through the windscreen. Small animals that got run over could cause truly astounding damage to cars, and while a military vehicle should be tougher than that, a monster would also be a lot stronger than your regular rabbit, and even one of those could rip open part of the undercarriage if you hit it at the wrong angle.

Then, there was a clanking sound from beneath their feet.

Jaclyn opened the door and hopped out to confront the dog-sized monkey that and gone underneath right as the car had stopped.

The machine gun on the roof couldn’t get at it, obviously, and anyone who stepped outside risked the monkey ripping their feet off.

Well, almost anyone.

She’d thrown herself clear of the car to exit, landing five meters away from it, immediately dropping to one knee, leaning to the side, and drawing her Glock in a single smooth motion, aiming it under the car … where there was nothing.

Ok, what was wrong no- … there was a loud, metallic, tearing sound from under the car. Crap.

Jaclyn ran back towards the car, closing the distance and dropping to the floor a bare meter from the side of the vehicle and aiming her gun at the creature before stopping cold, realizing that with how far the monkey had already burrowed into the guts of the vehicle, the bullet might wind up tearing through the floor and into the passengers. Ah, bollocks.

She’d already deduced what power the monkey had, whenever it grabbed something with both hands and pulled it apart, causing an orange glow to appear and rend the material. As long as she managed to avoid being grabbed by both hands simultaneously, she should be fine. And if the monkey were E-Rank, it wouldn’t need a power.

“Don’t move the car,” Jaclyn ordered Smith as she began to reach under the jeep, only for an oil-and-gasoline-covered monkey to shoot off like a bottle rocket, escaping past her.

“Everyone, out of the car,” Smith snapped, jumping out himself to look underneath. He straightened after a moment, muttering a few curses, opened the hood, and started to swear in earnest.

“Well, this is officially the first time that a vehicle of the British Army has been bitten to death by a monkey,” he sighed. “I’m never going to live this down, am I? Everyone, let’s take the other jeeps.”

Once safely seated in one of the two other cars that had been a part of their convoy, Jaclyn pulled out her notepad and wrote down a brief report. Mainly, she advised that any monkeys be run over, risk of damage to the car be damned, before the monster tore the car’s underside to shreds. She also stressed that any expedition into the jungle should have multiple vehicles, specifically due to situations like the one she was finding herself in now.

And Granger had actually come up with a good hypothesis for why the monkey had acted the way it had. Basically, its ripping power allowed it to do terrifying damage if it got into a good spot, and that would allow it to punch well above its weightclass if it played things smart.

Going for the stomach of a big, lumbering foe could net it an easy kill and feed it for weeks, but it had clearly mistaken their car for an animal, and, well, here they were.

Oh, it would be a fun few weeks till the creatures in here learned that cars weren’t edible.

“And you’re sure you want to go to the Dungeon first?” Smith asked once they were done squeezing everyone into the remaining vehicles.

“Jup,” Jaclyn nodded. “We’ll need to tell Mr. Fields about the Dungeon when we see him, if he finds it on his own, that’ll make future interactions a pain in the ass, but I don’t want the Dungeon to be blindsided by the whole thing.”

“And you think a living haunted house of murderous monsters deserves a heads-up?” Smith asked. “Don’t get me wrong, I respect that it held back for us, but shouldn’t we stick to helping other humans?”

“Look, the Dungeon played it straight with us, and at least seems to be reasonable and intelligent. I’d much rather work with something like that than an immature idiot with superpowers,” Jaclyn informed him.

“Ok,” he shrugged.

And that was that, the remaining two vehicles drove through the jungle towards the Dungeon.

***

The area in front of the Dungeon was … messy. Very messy.

No, that wasn’t correct, in fact, it was the furthest thing from correct, but it was the only description that came to her at that moment.

It was a scene of carnage straight out a horror movie, and not one she’d watched. It was as though someone had poured out a tanker truck’s worth of blood over the scattered trash of a butcher’s shop, covering the ground in filth while blanketing the entire area with an unholy stench.

What in God’s name had happened here?

A lot of creatures had died here, but why? This wasn’t the Dungeon, it was more than capable of cleaning up after itself and actually used that ability.

But why would a bunch of creatures slaughter each other in this specific spot? It didn’t make sense, damnit!

Jaclyn had never seen anything even remotely like it. Sure, she’d been to some rather grizzly murder scenes, and when directing traffic around accident scenes, she’d caught sight of some stomach-turning stuff, but this was incomparably worse.

“This reminds me of hell in DOOM,” Granger commented behind her, sounding surprisingly not-nauseated.

Jaclyn turned and threw him a questioning look.

“DOOM is a video game where you kill demons, it’s pretty gory, and there are parts that take place in hell. Sometimes it’s ruins and stuff, but there are flesh swamps and the like.”

Jaclyn sighed. Sometimes it felt like video games got crazier every time she looked.

As she watched, she noticed a wyvern fly down from the roof, pick up another large piece of meat, and fly it back up to its perch, where it dissolved. So the Dungeon was cleaning up, and this was beyond its domain, which was why there was so much crap left.

It was then that she caught sight of a tiny monkey standing in the entryway, waving.

She sighed and pointed it out to the others and began to make her way over, trying to pick out the path that would leave her the least bloody. In her job, it was hardly uncommon to wind up dirty, but she doubted she’d ever gotten as filthy as she expected to get here, other than the few occasions she’d had to search a dumpster.

And then she realized that she had a few extra abilities this time around, and decided to start jumping from reasonably clear patch to reasonably clear patch. It didn’t work quite as well as it could have, but it certainly kept her cleaner than the people picking their way through the mess after her. And it even netted her a Level in Athletics.

Approaching the Museum’s doors, she could see a clear demarcation for where the Dungeon itself ended. A whole bunch of water had been poured down the front stairs to clean them somewhat, and there was a stark contrast between the still stained and somewhat damp stairs and the sparklingly clean floor of the Museum.

“Good afternoon,” the monkey greeted her and gestured towards a desk that had appeared beside the door at some point between her last visit and now.

Jaclyn could feel her jaw start to drop but stopped herself, instead only raising a single eyebrow questioningly.

“And who might you be?” she asked. “I was talking to a fairy last time, his name was Elias …”

“Elias is my … companion, my partner in crime,” the monkey said, before hastily adding: “I don’t mean crime-crime, just, you know …”

“I’m familiar with the expression,” Jaclyn told him dryly, standing in front of the desk.

“Right.”

“And who are you?” she asked.

“I’m not actually a monkey, for starters,” the little primate said as he scampered to a nearby pile of papers, grabbing a few and returning to her. “I’m the Dungeon itself, speaking through the monkey, and I’d like to talk before you go into the Dungeon.”

The monkey handed over the papers, which were covered in chicken scratch writing. Admittedly, Jaclyn’s handwriting wasn’t much better, but she worked with people proficient in deciphering it. This, on the other hand, was not writing she was familiar with.

Something must have given her thoughts away and the monkey just shrugged.

“Pens are made for human-sized hands, it was either horrible handwriting or fingerpainting with blackberry juice, and that wouldn’t have looked any better.”

“And it’d have stunk to high heaven if I didn’t return soon enough,” Jaclyn added, understanding the issue. “Can you tell me what it’s about, roughly?”

The monkey pulled a couple of sheets off the top of the pile and put it in front of her.

“So, there are a few things I’d like to get that I can’t find in the museum, and what I’d be willing to trade for them. Decorations, a few creatures I’d like samples of so I can have them in my Dungeon, and costumes for my monkeys.”

“Costumes for monkeys?” Jaclyn asked, raising her eyebrow once again.

The monkey just shrugged. “I think it’d be cute.”

That was a pretty good point, actually.

“And the trade goods?” she asked.

“Biological materials, tiger pelts, dinosaur bones, maybe even a familiar token if someone gives me a lot of good stuff,” the monkey said.

“I can think of a few people who’d sell their own mothers for a chance at a pet dinosaur,” Jaclyn nodded.

“What am I supposed to do with someone’s mom?” the monkey asked with clearly fake confusion. “Is that a kind of clothing I don’t know about?”

A peal of laughter rang out from behind her. The others had reached them a minute earlier, but they’d stayed quiet.

“And what is the other stuff about?” Jaclyn asked.

“That is a list of our demands,” the monkey said.

Well, that didn’t sound good.

“Demands?”

“Requirements for letting you guys keep using the Dungeon. Nothing crazy, mind you, I just want someone in a position of authority to ratify the deal we’ve already made, some face time with a lawyer so I can get a proper understanding of the current situation, some law books so I can do my own research, a proper agreement on liability when people get hurt or die in here, stuff like that.”

The monkey sighed at that and gestured at the Museum around it.

“It’s not like I decided to take over the Museum. I’m stuck here, and this place is basically my body. But it also belongs to someone. Do you see what I’m getting at?”

Jaclyn grimaced. Yeah, she hadn’t thought about it much yet, but this would be a can of worms of titanic proportions once the situation stabilized.

“I’ll see what I can do,” she said, then asked, “By the way, what the hell happened out there?”

“Monsters can grow by Dungeon diving, and after your last visit, every monster in the jungle decided it was chow time, but they didn’t get along while they were waiting for their turn.”

As he said that, the monkey sat down in an eerily humanlike manner and held out a hand for her to shake.

“I don’t think I introduced myself. I don’t have a name as humans do, Dungeons don’t have parents to give them their designation, but I think I’d like to be called Daedalus.”

“Inspector Jaclyn Abrams,” she returned, carefully reaching out to shake the monkey’s hand, its leathery hand feeling strange as it wrapped around her index finger.

***

Thomas had gone back and forth on what to introduce himself all last night, but in the end, he’d landed on using a pseudonym that made sense for a Dungeon to pick.

“Anyway, you’re obviously welcome to delve into the Dungeon again, but I do have to warn you, I made some upgrades. You probably shouldn’t fight the sabertooth,” he advised.

Abrams nodded. Thomas was glad to have a proper name for her, he’d been calling her “the cop” in his mind for far too long.

“Thank you. But I need to warn you about something, there’s a cultivator out in the jungle and he might show up here soon. His brother went looking for your smoke signals, and if he got himself killed in the jungle or the Dungeon, you might get blamed.”

Thomas winced, but Abrams wasn’t finished.

“The brother was apparently turned into a monster, so you won’t be able to identify him if you see him.”

Oh crap.

“Haven’t had anyone talk to me other than you and Elias,” he said, which had the benefit of being entirely true in case someone out there had a truth-telling spell. But there’d been that damn Landwyrm …

“That cultivator wouldn’t happen to have wood powers?” he added.

“You know him?”

“Heard of him,” Thomas said. “A few of the people who took shelter in the museum saw him, and they were scared of him.”

Abrams maintained a neutral expression, but one of the people behind her flinched.

“What did your meeting with him go?” he asked.

“He’s a kid with superpowers and delusions of grandeur,” Abrams sighed. “Good luck dealing with him.”

Yeah, Thomas would likely need it.

“Anyway, do want to see what the Dungeon is like?” he offered.

He was glad he’d had this talk with his visitors before they’d gone through the Dungeon, as they might be mad at him afterwards, or at the very least uncomfortable, seeing as he’d have spent the last half-hour or so trying to kill them.

***

Jaclyn internally sighed with relief when the monkey left. The being speaking through it, Daedalus, had been powerful beyond belief, capable of casually creating monsters that could probably tear apart tanks, and apparently, it was only getting stronger.

Negotiations like that were well outside her regular duties.

This though, walking through empty hallways knowing that there might be something dangerous around every corner, was familiar. Admittedly, not very, but still closer to what she’d dealt with before than, well, negotiations with an eldritch being.

The dinosaur was still there on the far end of the entrance hall, but it was likely stronger than the one they’d faced last time, though she didn’t know what its power was, or even if it had, in fact, reached F-Rank and gained one.

She didn’t hear any tigers on the mezzanine, so at least there wasn’t one right above her, so they would go through with the plan as it was.

Meaning, she’d walk right towards the dinosaur while the others gunned it down from between the columns.

Jaclyn didn’t draw her gun, or even fall into a combat stance, just marching straight ahead, waiting on the dino to charge.

And while it did move towards her with ponderous steps, its attack came from an entirely different direction.

Its tail whipped around its side and began to elongate until it was enough to reach her, flying straight at her neck.

Jaclyn’s right arm flashed up to intercept it while placing her left forearm between where the attack was coming from and her neck.

The tail smacked into her right forearm, searing agony making her grit her teeth, and then wrapped around it, scraping along her left arm. Fuck!

But she could use this.

She yanked her forearm back while yanking out her Glock with her left hand, about to press it against the tail and shoot straight into the bone within. That should cut short the damn whip and free herself in the process.

The camarasaurus yanked its tail back, but Jaclyn had already dropped into a low combat stance and was just slowly dragged along the floor. Clearly, the muscles in the tai weren’t quite built to move a human without any windup time.

Gotcha, you fu- …

Suddenly, the tail went slack as the portion just ahead of where it was wrapped around her forearm started to stretch, allowing the tail to gain momentum.

Bollocks.

The tail had almost doubled in length by the time it stopped elongating, and then, all the momentum it had already gathered tugged on her like a runaway bull.

Jaclyn had already been about to shoot the tail but was too slow, and went flying. She managed to get her legs under her and absorb her impact against the far wall, but it dragged her forwards, uncurling around her arm just as she slammed bodily into the mezzanine.

Ow.

That had been … uncomfortable.

And where the hell was her gun? When had she dropped it?

Jaclyn pushed herself to her feet only to find herself face to face with a grey giant and immediately began to back away.

“Nice hippo …” she quietly said in what she hoped was a soothing tone. It didn’t look that nasty with its mouth closed, but she knew the horror show that lay within that maw.

And then, as if her speaking had opened Pandora’s Box, she got a good, in-person look at it.

***

Oh, whoops?

That hippo was one of the two on the mezzanine that Thomas would send out to face a serious foe, or challenge people exploring everything, not meant to face regular delvers.

But the good inspector had inadvertently found herself face to face with it, and now, she’d apparently have to deal with it. Because if he sent it away, it would look super weird and he wanted to avoid that. What he did do was send the other hippo, the one she hadn’t seen yet, away, and ordered the mezzanine tigers to go away as well.

Besides, it looked like she could handle that one hippo.

A swift kick to the bottom of the jaw made the hippo wince, buying her enough time to leap onto its back and hold onto its ears while she worked on finding her “footing”.

The hippo bucked and tried to throw her off, but it was no bronco, it couldn’t quite work like that, but Abrams managed to sit on it like a horse and dug her heels in, superhuman strength denting the creature’s sides.

And then, she slammed her palms on its ears simultaneously. The hippo stumbled, dizzily, but the inspector repeated the action, again and again, until it finally collapsed to the ground, alive but almost unconscious.

That was when she began to kick it, aiming for where a human’s temple would have been, until it died.

In the meantime, on the ground floor, the dinosaur had succumbed as well.

The soldiers had managed to create a good strategy, which involved hiding behind columns to limit the whip tail, then shooting at the tail when it wrapped around the stone pillars.

It worked, but reliance on those guns would eventually screw them. Magic directly scaled up physical power as people gained strength, but it was unlikely to do the same for guns.

And they’d have to fight past quite a few more powerful enemies with whatever ammuntion they had remaining.