Level One

  The room full of beehives wasn’t hard to find since it was only like three hallways over from the Grapevine Room. Cooper didn’t know a ton about beekeeping, but he had seen a nature documentary once about how blowing smoke on bees makes them fall asleep. Apparently that’s how beekeepers get the honey out of the hive without getting stung to death. As long as that was how it worked, he figured that collecting some honey wouldn’t be that hard. As it turned out, that nature documentary left some shit out. Like the fact that beehives are extremely flammable. If Cooper had known that maybe he would have done things differently, but as it was he spent like three minutes in the Beehive Room before he found himself running out again, hair singed, half-dead of smoke inhalation, with a single, quarter-sized piece of honeycomb in his left hand, and a swarm of angry, scorched bees in hot pursuit.

  Luckily for Cooper, those big, fat bees weren’t particularly strong fliers, so by the time he got back to the Grapevine Room he had pretty much lost them.

  “Fucking bees,” Cooper said, hacking and coughing as he wiped his eyes, which were beginning to swell up on account of all the bee stings. He popped the piece of honeycomb in his mouth. It was fucking amazing. Probably not quite worth being stung in the face that many times, but still pretty great. Cooper had just pulled out his canteen to take a quick drink and was beginning to think about trying to sleep again when suddenly he heard a familiar growl from the hallway.

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake!”

  It could have been a different black bear this time, but Cooper was pretty sure it was the exact same one. It had the same thin, doglike body and the same glassy eyes. The bear shuffled around the corner, Its nose twitched as it stared up at Cooper expectantly.

  “I don’t have any flatbread,” Cooper said firmly. “That was a one-time deal.”

  Cooper suddenly realized that his fingers were still sticky with honey. He put his hand behind his back, hoping the bear wouldn’t notice. The creature sniffed at the air. Then looked up at Cooper, its lips pulling back in a snarl.

  “I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about,” Cooper said, taking a step back. The bear snarled again in reply, taking a step forward. Cooper raised the snake stick like it was a samurai sword.

  If there’s any right way to fight a bear with a stick, Cooper had no idea what it was, so under the circumstances he thought he did just fine. Every time the bear came towards him, Cooper stepped back and gave it a whack on the nose. That enraged the bear, but when it came at him again, he would just whack it again. After three or four of those the bear started to get wise, keeping its distance and swatting at the stick with one enormous paw. So the good news was Cooper wasn’t about to get eaten any time soon, but the bad news was he was trapped. The bear was between him and the doorway out to the hall. So they were at a standoff. The bear couldn’t get past the stick, but Cooper couldn’t get past the bear.

  Maybe if he’d just been more patient the bear would have gotten bored and wandered off, but unfortunately it was right about then that Cooper had to go and get an idea. By that point the bear was three or four feet into the Grape Room. Also, the doorway of the room was fairly wide to begin with. And the bear itself was fairly small, at least by bear standards, so Cooper felt like if he could manage to get it going one way, it should be no problem for him to slip past on the other side. It wasn’t anything you’d ever want to try if you didn’t have an invisibility ring in your pocket, but for once, Cooper was in luck.

  The first part of the plan worked out fine. Cooper flicked the edge of the snake stick toward the bear’s ear a few times, annoying the shit out of it, until it finally the bear lunged left, snapping its jaws. At that exact moment, Cooper slipped on the naked chick ring and dipped right, running like hell.

  It was only after he got through the doorway and out into the hall that Cooper discovered the two major flaws with this plan. The first was that bears have an amazing sense of smell. Or maybe invisibility rings just don’t work on bears. Whichever it was, the bear was not fooled by Cooper’s trick for one instant. The second problem was that it turns out that bears are incredibly fast. Cooper had a pretty solid head start, but as soon as the bear got going in the right direction, it came at him like a fucking freight train. Cooper himself was no slouch. He had briefly been one of the co-captains of his high school track team before getting kicked off (over some bullshit). But that bear closed on him like he was nothing.

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  Luckily for Cooper, the tile of the hallway was a bit slick, and the bear misjudged the first turn, skittering around the corner like a Labrador Retriever on a newly waxed floor. That bought Cooper a few extra seconds, but a moment later the bear was back on its feet and charging. At the second intersection the creature did much better, stumbling only a little bit before pointing its snout at Cooper and accelerating like a bullet. It wasn’t quite close enough to run Cooper down in that second hallway - or at least he hoped it wasn’t - but it was clearly just a matter of time. With a sinking feeling in his gut, Cooper realized what he had to do.

  The third intersection was a T-junction where Cooper could turn either right or left. To the left was a part of the maze he hadn’t been in yet, or at least one he didn’t recognize. To the right was a hallway full of smoke haze and angry bees. With the bear right on his heels, Cooper faked left, then turned right, dashing through the cloud of angry insects and right back into the smoke-filled Beehive Room.

  The next two minutes sucked dick. That’s really the only way to say it. But when Cooper did finally re-emerge from the smoke, the bear was nowhere to be seen. He could still hear it roaring and snarling somewhere in the room behind him, but whatever it was so angry about, it seemed to have forgotten him for now. Still, woozy as he was from the smoke, and despite his left eye having now swollen completely shut from yet another round of bee stings to the face, Cooper stumbled forward, coughing and sputtering, as fast as he could, managing to put 5 or 6 hallways between himself and the burning beehives before his legs finally gave out.

  By that time, Cooper was once again at the end of his rope. The good news was he probably wasn’t on the verge of death this time, despite all the bee venom, but his smoke-filled lungs refused to go any further. Also, his right eye was slowly swelling shut too now, which meant that pretty soon he would be completely blind. Which obviously would not be great ifn any bears or Bible Campers or gladiators happen along.

  It occurred to Cooper that the last time he had found himself in this kind of jam, the snake stick had saved his life, or at least he was pretty sure it did. Also, all the times the Bible Campers had broken his feet, it was the stick that made them good as new. So why wasn’t it doing that now? Was he not injured enough? Or was there some kind of secret password?

  Cooper raised the snake stick above his head. “Heal,” he commanded. Nothing happened, other than him feeling stupid. “Heal!” he said again, like he meant it this time. Once again, nothing.

  Remembering the coal, Cooper closed his eyes, mentally picturing a wave of healing energy pouring out of the stick and into his body. Clearly that was the right call because the moment he did so, the stick vibrated in his hands and he heard a rushing noise. Almost immediately, he could feel the swelling in his face decreasing, the ache in his lungs fading away. Cooper opened his eyes. Once again, there was a shimmer in the air between him and the stick, like heat over a desert road.

  Also, there was now an enormous glowing circle hovering in the air over Cooper’s head, roughly the size of a hula hoop. The top part of the circle, from about noon to 4pm, was black. The rest was green. As the snake stick did its work, the black slowly filled in green, like gasoline filling a tank. There was obviously no way he could know for sure, but Cooper’s intuition told him that once the circle was entirely green, he would be entirely healed.

  He probably should have just been patient enough to wait, but the circle was filling really slow, and Cooper was in kind of a hurry to get out of that hallway. So rather than continue to wait, Cooper closed his eyes again, imagining a massive blast of energy filling the circle to the top in an instant. And the moment he did that, the snake stick bucked in his hand, and Cooper opened his eyes to find that the circle was now up to 2pm.

  He only a second to be impressed with himself before he passed out cold.

  * * * * *

  Name: Cooper of Vancouver

  Gender: Male

  Affiliation: None

  Age at Entry: 29

  Current Level: The Labyrinth (1)

  Jing: 6/10

  Qi: 2/14

  Shen: 0

  Status: Poisoned, Cursed (3)

  here.