System error… incorrect parse // Retry?
Retry aborted. Running safety diagnostics… Maintaining System Stability…
Sally blinked.
The barest amount of moisture rubbed over her dry eyeballs as they struggled to focus. A strange cold, weighty feeling ran through her body, receding gradually as feeling returned to her extremities.
It was daytime. A rough haze of amber filtered in through windows - she must be... indoors? Shadows intertwined with the wave of light now reaching her brain. A few more blinks and whatever blur that remained washed away, now leaving her lethargy to slowly process where she found herself.
Tables and chairs next to a long counter with stacks of cups and cutlery behind. All of it a polished light wood, the slight discolourations of split… food maybe, and the waning light reflecting across the glossy surfaces sought to illuminate a word in her currently very blank mental dictionary. Diner.
This was a diner. The sole thought sat in her lethargic brain like a hotdog in a bowl of porridge. Familiar, but wrong. But, why was it wrong? Why was it familiar? The questions pained her bowl, cracking it. Threatening to leak the tasty porridge across the floor. Dark shapes shuffled into view, breaking her from the terrible food analogy.
She was not alone. As her ears joined the fray, the groaning and shuffling of these others surrounding her solidified that fact. Shambling figures of pale, decaying skin and glowing red eyes slunk around her - seemingly paying her no heed. Sally tried to move her head, the muscles in her neck painfully reluctant to do the task.
Sally looked down at her hands.
At this point is where she would have expected her heart rate to start pounding in her chest, to fill her hearing with the drums of fear. Instead, she stared down at the pale grey skin that now ran from her fingertips all the way up to the shoulders of her sleeveless top.
“Wowzers.” Her voice came out dry and cracked. She looked down at her feet and wondered why she had been sleeping standing up. Or, was it even sleep?
“You shouldn't be able to talk,” a harsh, rasping voice echoed around the diner from behind her.
Startled, Sally spun around on resistant legs, almost toppling over one of the undead occupants of the building. With sore eyes, she saw the one responsible for the statement hovering about six feet off the floor. A disembodied skull, enveloped in an eldritch purple energy.
“Who are you?” Sally croaked once more, yapping her mouth to try and get some moisture into her desert-like talking box.
“I am an Observer,” the skull responded, seemingly frowning despite not being able to do such a thing, “and zombies aren't supposed to talk.”
Zombie. There it was.
“Hey, skullhead, I have a lot of questions,” Sally glared around the room for some kind of liquid, eventually locating a half-full glass of something dark. “But let's start with… what are you observing, and why?”
“Technically, I have already broken the rules by talking to you.” The skull hovered a little lower and looked over towards the window by a barricaded door. “Observers aren’t meant to talk either.”
Sally followed the gaze as she gulped down the stale mouthfuls from the glass. “Something out the front?”
“What? No? Stop observing me - that's not your job.”
“I don't think I have a job, not anymore.” The memories of her past life were itchy, and she scratched at her tangled blonde hair as she walked over the window. Did she even have a past job?
“Stop, stop, stop!”
Sally pressed her nose up against the window, flaring her nostrils out. A woodland took up the majority of the horizon, with a handful of other buildings that sat lifeless over to the left of her view. The pathway from the diner led alongside patches of grass which perhaps at one point held verdant greens and collections of vibrant flowers - but now was just dry and desiccated.
Perhaps the most interesting thing of all, however, was a trio of figures standing about thirty feet down the road.
“Who are they? And why do they have numbers over their heads?”
Sally crouched down further so that just her eyes peered above the windowsill. A thin layer of dust and grime encrusted the edge of the glass, slightly obscuring the group with a mottled filter of brown and grey.
“You… can see the numbers?” The voice from the observer sounded more confused than aggressive this time.
“Mhmm,” Sally narrowed her eyes as she focused on the strangers. “There's a little symbol too.”
There was a brief pause as the skull floated down slowly beside her. “Tell me what you see.”
“There are three people there. Two of them have a plain circle with the number One. Then the other guy has a number Three, and his symbol is… holy looking?”
“Two Novices and a Cleric. The numbers are their class levels.”
“Huh. Adventurers?” More familiar but blurry words slid behind the spotlight of her understanding.
The observer said nothing, turning away from the eyes of Sally to look around the diner. She followed suit.
The maybe dozen fellow zombies wandered aimlessly around the room, unaware of the situation. Now that she focused, she could see numbers above the heads of the other undead. Zero point five.
“Seven hells,” she whispered, “are we a beginner quest? The Cleric is hoping to power-level his friends by killing us?” Her sluggish mind started to race, gathering speed as if having clambered over the apex of a hill to find nothing but rapids behind.
“This is highly unusual. Zombies aren't supposed to be able to talk or see power levels. That would only be possible if you were…” The skull tilted slightly as if trying to get a better read on the woman.
“What's my level and class?” Sally looked around, trying to find a number above her head, but only the faded wooden panels of the ceiling returned her scouring glare.
“Odd, I can’t access it. You should just be an unnamed zombie, zero-point-five,” the Observer hovered up higher in the room, almost perching atop the candle chandelier. “No class.”
“I have a name; it's Sally,” she snapped, somewhat unsure on how she remembered that name, or if it was even the statement was true. “And I can be classy,” she pouted, taking the comment out of context on purpose.
The zombie girl folded her arms across her chest and tapped her foot on the stained floorboards. It was only a matter of time before the adventurers would come burst through the door and kill all the dead inside. For what? Exp and loot? Is that how this sort of thing worked?
“Hey, you!” she accosted the nearest zombie, once an older gentleman in his sixties with a long greying moustache and tweed suit with matching hat. “Do you understand me? Stand over there if you do.”
The aged deceased stopped in his current aimless tracks and turned to regard the woman now demanding things of him. With a brief hesitation, his glowing red eyes turned to the side, and he began shuffling over to the area indicated.
“Yesss!” Sally hissed but tried to celebrate too loudly in case the figures outside heard her. Now she could make a plan!
“This is highly, highly irregular,” the observer buzzed to himself from up on high.
The Cleric sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose. “For the last time, this is really simple. You hit the zombies, I will heal you if you are hurt, and once they are on low health, I can Holy Nova to finish them off.”
“That'll level us up, yeah?” The male Novice, a gruff redhead, stood waving his sword around in the air like a sparkler. “I want to choose my Class already.”
“It's kind of scary - what if we get surrounded?” The second novice was a timid blonde-haired girl, holding her sword as if it was a particularly smelly piece of garbage.
“It's a simple building; we just have to go out the door if there is any issue.” The Cleric drummed his fingers on the end of his mace. This was the third group of novices he had agreed to boost for gold, and so far the most problematic by half.
“What about if we don’t level, or want to level higher?” The male novice planted his sword into the grass and frowned hard at the darkened diner ahead of them.
“We can do another building, but that will be more coin,” the Cleric shrugged. “For now, worry about the task at hand. Enter together and focus on one zombie at a time, support each other, and most important of all - don't panic.”
Sally waited behind the counter, her back against the wooden shelves as she sat on the cold floor. Most everything was cold, but perhaps that was just her current undead condition. It stood to reason that if her heart wasn’t beating then the warm, tasty blood wasn’t also circulating her body. Tasty blood?
“I want to advise you not to do this,” the observer called from the ceiling, “but I'm not really meant to interfere either way.”
“Well, at least keep your voice down, Mr Spooky-skull,” Sally hissed, distracted from any further self-reflection.
“I am Observer unit HM-3.3.”
“I'll call you Humphrey then.” Her smile was sinister in the shadowed recess of the back side of the diner.
The skull hovered down beside her behind the counter. “I'm not sure we should fraternise, but that is a suitable name.”
Sally furrowed her brow at the empty sockets of the Observer. “So you're here to watch the adventurers kill us? Then what?”
“It is my job to report the balance of the world. Seeing who comes out on top.”
“Report to whom? Stop telling me you’re not supposed to talk to me, but then still do it.” As much as she wanted answers, if you were going to draw lines in the sand, you should stick to them.
“Survive this encounter, and I might tell you.” Humphrey somehow grinned as he floated back away, seemingly unable to shut his skeletal trap.
Pretty annoying for a floating head, Sally thought. Just what had she woken up into? Her life before this was a blur. Did she work at the diner? Were adventurers and levels a thing from the world where she had been a living person?
As this thought crossed her mind, she stopped as if frozen, her grubby ears picking something up. A sound filtered in from outside, gradually increasing in volume - footsteps getting closer. The good guys were making their move.
“Okay, get ready everyone!” She whispered as loud as she felt safe to, the boots of the eager adventures nearing the door by the second.
There was a pause, as a deathly silence cast its shadow across the diner. No breath was taken, and no groans were uttered. The anticipation grew into a lump in Sally's stomach.
With a loud crack, the door burst open, shattering the quiet as three figures stood silhouetted in the fragmented opening.
“Huh, where are the zombies?” The red-haired novice bemoaned as he took his first steps inside.
Hastily.
Unprepared.
System error… incorrect parse // Retry?
Retry aborted. Running safety diagnostics… Maintaining System Stability…
Sally blinked.
The barest amount of moisture rubbed over her dry eyeballs as they struggled to focus. A strange cold, weighty feeling ran through her body, receding gradually as feeling returned to her extremities.
It was daytime. A rough haze of amber filtered in through windows - she must be... indoors? Shadows intertwined with the wave of light now reaching her brain. A few more blinks and whatever blur that remained washed away, now leaving her lethargy to slowly process where she found herself.
Tables and chairs next to a long counter with stacks of cups and cutlery behind. All of it a polished light wood, the slight discolourations of split… food maybe, and the waning light reflecting across the glossy surfaces sought to illuminate a word in her currently very blank mental dictionary. Diner.
This was a diner. The sole thought sat in her lethargic brain like a hotdog in a bowl of porridge. Familiar, but wrong. But, why was it wrong? Why was it familiar? The questions pained her bowl, cracking it. Threatening to leak the tasty porridge across the floor. Dark shapes shuffled into view, breaking her from the terrible food analogy.
She was not alone. As her ears joined the fray, the groaning and shuffling of these others surrounding her solidified that fact. Shambling figures of pale, decaying skin and glowing red eyes slunk around her - seemingly paying her no heed. Sally tried to move her head, the muscles in her neck painfully reluctant to do the task.
Sally looked down at her hands.
At this point is where she would have expected her heart rate to start pounding in her chest, to fill her hearing with the drums of fear. Instead, she stared down at the pale grey skin that now ran from her fingertips all the way up to the shoulders of her sleeveless top.
“Wowzers.” Her voice came out dry and cracked. She looked down at her feet and wondered why she had been sleeping standing up. Or, was it even sleep?
“You shouldn't be able to talk,” a harsh, rasping voice echoed around the diner from behind her.
Startled, Sally spun around on resistant legs, almost toppling over one of the undead occupants of the building. With sore eyes, she saw the one responsible for the statement hovering about six feet off the floor. A disembodied skull, enveloped in an eldritch purple energy.
“Who are you?” Sally croaked once more, yapping her mouth to try and get some moisture into her desert-like talking box.
“I am an Observer,” the skull responded, seemingly frowning despite not being able to do such a thing, “and zombies aren't supposed to talk.”
Zombie. There it was.
“Hey, skullhead, I have a lot of questions,” Sally glared around the room for some kind of liquid, eventually locating a half-full glass of something dark. “But let's start with… what are you observing, and why?”
“Technically, I have already broken the rules by talking to you.” The skull hovered a little lower and looked over towards the window by a barricaded door. “Observers aren’t meant to talk either.”
Sally followed the gaze as she gulped down the stale mouthfuls from the glass. “Something out the front?”
“What? No? Stop observing me - that's not your job.”
“I don't think I have a job, not anymore.” The memories of her past life were itchy, and she scratched at her tangled blonde hair as she walked over the window. Did she even have a past job?
“Stop, stop, stop!”
Sally pressed her nose up against the window, flaring her nostrils out. A woodland took up the majority of the horizon, with a handful of other buildings that sat lifeless over to the left of her view. The pathway from the diner led alongside patches of grass which perhaps at one point held verdant greens and collections of vibrant flowers - but now was just dry and desiccated.
Perhaps the most interesting thing of all, however, was a trio of figures standing about thirty feet down the road.
“Who are they? And why do they have numbers over their heads?”
Sally crouched down further so that just her eyes peered above the windowsill. A thin layer of dust and grime encrusted the edge of the glass, slightly obscuring the group with a mottled filter of brown and grey.
“You… can see the numbers?” The voice from the observer sounded more confused than aggressive this time.
“Mhmm,” Sally narrowed her eyes as she focused on the strangers. “There's a little symbol too.”
There was a brief pause as the skull floated down slowly beside her. “Tell me what you see.”
“There are three people there. Two of them have a plain circle with the number One. Then the other guy has a number Three, and his symbol is… holy looking?”
“Two Novices and a Cleric. The numbers are their class levels.”
“Huh. Adventurers?” More familiar but blurry words slid behind the spotlight of her understanding.
The observer said nothing, turning away from the eyes of Sally to look around the diner. She followed suit.
The maybe dozen fellow zombies wandered aimlessly around the room, unaware of the situation. Now that she focused, she could see numbers above the heads of the other undead. Zero point five.
“Seven hells,” she whispered, “are we a beginner quest? The Cleric is hoping to power-level his friends by killing us?” Her sluggish mind started to race, gathering speed as if having clambered over the apex of a hill to find nothing but rapids behind.
“This is highly unusual. Zombies aren't supposed to be able to talk or see power levels. That would only be possible if you were…” The skull tilted slightly as if trying to get a better read on the woman.
“What's my level and class?” Sally looked around, trying to find a number above her head, but only the faded wooden panels of the ceiling returned her scouring glare.
“Odd, I can’t access it. You should just be an unnamed zombie, zero-point-five,” the Observer hovered up higher in the room, almost perching atop the candle chandelier. “No class.”
“I have a name; it's Sally,” she snapped, somewhat unsure on how she remembered that name, or if it was even the statement was true. “And I can be classy,” she pouted, taking the comment out of context on purpose.
The zombie girl folded her arms across her chest and tapped her foot on the stained floorboards. It was only a matter of time before the adventurers would come burst through the door and kill all the dead inside. For what? Exp and loot? Is that how this sort of thing worked?
“Hey, you!” she accosted the nearest zombie, once an older gentleman in his sixties with a long greying moustache and tweed suit with matching hat. “Do you understand me? Stand over there if you do.”
The aged deceased stopped in his current aimless tracks and turned to regard the woman now demanding things of him. With a brief hesitation, his glowing red eyes turned to the side, and he began shuffling over to the area indicated.
“Yesss!” Sally hissed but tried to celebrate too loudly in case the figures outside heard her. Now she could make a plan!
“This is highly, highly irregular,” the observer buzzed to himself from up on high.
The Cleric sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose. “For the last time, this is really simple. You hit the zombies, I will heal you if you are hurt, and once they are on low health, I can Holy Nova to finish them off.”
“That'll level us up, yeah?” The male Novice, a gruff redhead, stood waving his sword around in the air like a sparkler. “I want to choose my Class already.”
“It's kind of scary - what if we get surrounded?” The second novice was a timid blonde-haired girl, holding her sword as if it was a particularly smelly piece of garbage.
“It's a simple building; we just have to go out the door if there is any issue.” The Cleric drummed his fingers on the end of his mace. This was the third group of novices he had agreed to boost for gold, and so far the most problematic by half.
“What about if we don’t level, or want to level higher?” The male novice planted his sword into the grass and frowned hard at the darkened diner ahead of them.
“We can do another building, but that will be more coin,” the Cleric shrugged. “For now, worry about the task at hand. Enter together and focus on one zombie at a time, support each other, and most important of all - don't panic.”
Sally waited behind the counter, her back against the wooden shelves as she sat on the cold floor. Most everything was cold, but perhaps that was just her current undead condition. It stood to reason that if her heart wasn’t beating then the warm, tasty blood wasn’t also circulating her body. Tasty blood?
“I want to advise you not to do this,” the observer called from the ceiling, “but I'm not really meant to interfere either way.”
“Well, at least keep your voice down, Mr Spooky-skull,” Sally hissed, distracted from any further self-reflection.
“I am Observer unit HM-3.3.”
“I'll call you Humphrey then.” Her smile was sinister in the shadowed recess of the back side of the diner.
The skull hovered down beside her behind the counter. “I'm not sure we should fraternise, but that is a suitable name.”
Sally furrowed her brow at the empty sockets of the Observer. “So you're here to watch the adventurers kill us? Then what?”
“It is my job to report the balance of the world. Seeing who comes out on top.”
“Report to whom? Stop telling me you’re not supposed to talk to me, but then still do it.” As much as she wanted answers, if you were going to draw lines in the sand, you should stick to them.
“Survive this encounter, and I might tell you.” Humphrey somehow grinned as he floated back away, seemingly unable to shut his skeletal trap.
Pretty annoying for a floating head, Sally thought. Just what had she woken up into? Her life before this was a blur. Did she work at the diner? Were adventurers and levels a thing from the world where she had been a living person?
As this thought crossed her mind, she stopped as if frozen, her grubby ears picking something up. A sound filtered in from outside, gradually increasing in volume - footsteps getting closer. The good guys were making their move.
“Okay, get ready everyone!” She whispered as loud as she felt safe to, the boots of the eager adventures nearing the door by the second.
There was a pause, as a deathly silence cast its shadow across the diner. No breath was taken, and no groans were uttered. The anticipation grew into a lump in Sally's stomach.
With a loud crack, the door burst open, shattering the quiet as three figures stood silhouetted in the fragmented opening.
“Huh, where are the zombies?” The red-haired novice bemoaned as he took his first steps inside.
Hastily.
Unprepared.
