Drill Spirits

Drill SpiritS

Devon Xavier Williams

A rotund, bulbous creature, clad in a large pair of goggles and nothing more, runs through a desert. It is afraid for its life, run out of its home by sinister invaders from another world. Its primitive brain is far too simplistic to understand why its opponents are after it—all it knows is that they are dangerous, not to be trusted and that they are under orders to kill it and its friends on sight.

The creature watches in the shadows, in its subterranean home, as a giant metal man scans through the caves for it. The creature has observed the metal man slaughter all of its friends. It tunnels through the dirt above, aware that it is being followed. It could stay behind to fight the metal man. It has no weapon, but it could knock it over and crush it to death with the weight of its massive body. But what good would that accomplish? The metal men are not infallible. They could be destroyed. But they never. Stop. Coming.

A rumbling shook through the cave. The creature hopes that its mechanical opponent is crushed to death, but even its animalistic instinct knows that will not be true. The subterranean world that they called their home is far from the most stable. Dig in the wrong sections, and you are liable to get trapped in a cave-in, a quirk of the environment that the metal men were ready and willing to exploit at any possible opportunity. Indeed, it finds a lizard, squashed flat under the weight of a giant boulder. They are their protectors, using their flaming breath to incinerate all intruders to their caves. But they could not protect them from the metal men.

It is an overwhelming vivacious sound of terror. Children screaming and mothers crying, running in a dazed panic towards an exit, as a harsh sound of metallic footsteps rings out through the cave. Large mining robots are sent down into the caves, with genocide and pillaging of fruit as their singular objectives. They are equipped with a strange weapon, attacking by firing a harpoon into the creatures and inflating them until they burst, their insides violently rupturing on the cave floor.

*Dig Dug — Insert Coin to Start*