INTESTINAL 5.11

Alright! Swapping back to RfR for a bit, I think- still a nightmare to maintain momentum between the two, but I liked the, what, 7-9 day run VISCERAE just had? And feel like it stops here in a pretty juicy place, lol. Dunno if we'll jump into arc 6.00 next or have a few chapters left of 5, but I liked this twist as it formed- been wanting to do something along these lines for a bit, lol.

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Mother, mother... Mother of me,

I know I know I should not miss you so, but mother of me, I do. Your pained breaths that rasp'd and reverberated in your rusted iron tomb... The blood of your breast that nourish'd me and warmed me in its caress, when corpse and cruelty were all I witnessed...

 Mother, mother... Mother of me,

 I know I know you would hate me so, and mother of me, I do too. But I would not feel, not think, not dream, were it not for you in my rusted iron womb... Your tortured love brought me to this war, that I could take the heart of another, and need you no more.

-A poem whispered in a Hell that never was, incomplete.

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I place the construct on the table where, just an hour or two earlier, I crafted the fungal infestation I’ve spread through the house, spreading its weight over the wood. It doesn’t seem to be in pain, not as far as I can tell, and its movements are jerky and cyclical, like a machine repeating cycles. Even still, it hurts me to look at it, the same way it does to pass a failing family business or graffiti partly painted over- it’s the decay, the destruction of something made with intent and a genuine dream for the sake of time or uncaring circumstance.

I toss the folder onto the bed behind me, not thinking about how the slime from it is definitely on my sheets now, and focus on the creation in front of me.

A long spine and the skull of the road-killed raccoon I used to build it remain at its center, but multiple parts of it have fallen off or semi-liquified, smelling of that sickly sweet scent of death. Not as much as I expected, though. It’s less like it has necrosis, more like pieces of it just… stopped being alive. Stopped having anything to support them. I don’t know if it’s in its nature as a construct, rather than something I considered truly “alive” when I made it, but it’s clear that it needed something that it didn’t get while I… while I neglected it, leaving it in the clinic’s vents and working on other shit. 

No more. 

It might not be alive (it certainly doesn’t seem to be in pain, per se, didn’t react when its inanimate portions got jostled in the drive home), but I made it, I neglected it, I owe it.

I’m not sure that makes sense, but I don’t care. I can fix it, and it’s my responsibility, so I should.

I… I think I can fix it. I think so. 

Carefully, as its remaining limbs judder awkwardly against the table, clicking listlessly, I wake the Glove. I let it extend its tools forward until it looks more like a branching tree-thing than the hand it was modeled after, long tines and sharpened tips hovering over the construct, and let out a slow exhale.

Slowly, the sharper-tipped pieces of my Symbiont cut away the inanimate chunks of the crawler, pruning away the pieces of grey and pale wrongness. I move them to the side of the table, keeping them for now, but as I carve the depth of the decay gets clearer. My construct ends up with less than half of its original biomass, and in spite of the lost weight it doesn’t seem to be any more active or any more capable of moving itself. The rib-limbs it has built in don’t seem able to hold its weight, and the whole construct is wildly unbalanced, far heavier on its front-right side than anywhere else on its thin frame. 

A few minutes after I’ve started, I finish, leaving the little flesh-machine barely functional. The empty sockets of its skull are turned towards me, expressionless features staring up at me.

“It’ll be alright,” I tell it, believing it as best I can. “It’s messy, but it’s important. I can’t fix you without taking out the parts that don’t work.

It doesn’t respond, obviously. I don’t know what I expected- a nod of the head? A tilt? Thing’s probably not even sentient. 

I put the annoyance away. It’s not helpful, and I don’t much like it anyways.

I leave it where it lies, turning to the few pounds of greyish meat. I keep thinking of them as decaying because they’re “no longer alive”, and that inactivity was spreading through different chunks of it, but in truth, they’re remarkably preserved. No signs of bacterial growth, no black necrosis- just gray, listless, unappealing meat, like it’s been left out of the fridge for a day. Not something you’d want to cook and eat, but not like something that’s been left out for multiple days in exposed conditions. 

I tilt my head at this pile of discarded tissue, thinking through how it… feels. As unscientific as it may seem, my SKILLS seem to operate on a more intuitive than quantitative level, offering me insights and guiding my creation process through me rather than through a series of tangible stats or numbers. INTERPRETIVE CRAFTSMANSHIP is particularly complicated in that way- the last time I operated with it, it almost seemed to pull from my GLIMPSE BEYOND’s ability to give me impressions and insights beyond the material, using that to craft what I wanted rather than what I factually “know” how to make.

So… I do the same thing again.

I feel my brain sort of… percolate? Tingle, at least, as I pull up the parts of myself I associate with my SKILLS. That space in my mind feels a bit heavier, as if the addition of another major tool has increased the size, and for all I know, it has, literally adding a little growth to my grey matter. I decide not to think about that too hard.

I push myself to see, and stare at the slimy, greying meat which has not rotted.

It’s… colorful.

That’s the first thought I have with which to describe it. Colorful. I see streams of an almost iridescent oil, running through it like little rivers that cut into and out through the patterns of muscle fibers. Grey clusters, coming in a dizzying shades of off-white to not-black, populate the material like a 3D diagram of a city, streets layered on streets and infested with buildings. Veins of a bright crimson and a deeper sort of… other color thread through the whole thing like veins, as if actively holding the framework together, sneaking in through cracks I can’t quite see.

The idea sort of… cements in my mind as I stare at it. Like seeing a cutout of an apartment complex, with multiple floors laid out for one to see. I can almost see the different units, each one identical and distinct from the next- if I let my eyes wander in deeper, I can see how one of them has a little bundle of something like a dust bunny inside, while another has a puddle of inert red blood cells, the size and shape of a cuddle-pile of cats, while another has-

Too close. I feel something start to run down my nose and onto my upper lip, hot and coppery, as I pull back the SKILLs from how deep they were taking me. Focus. Keep it to the broad strokes.

Slowly, I move the Glove, its tools already long awoken and moving towards the strange not-building the meat is in my mind. I think I glimpse it from out of the corner- something like a coral reef, and a hand, and a series of twisting mechanical pistons and steam valves and-

Focus. Fuck. It’s hard to stay on topic, hard to control. Like trying to keep your eyes locked on a single point in space- kinda-sorta doable, but they’ll spend the entire time drifting away, forcing you to constantly have to re-focus them. 

I start to pluck and slice, pushing and pulling at the materials, shifting and altering them step by step. I bridge some of the hallways, move around furniture, try and blend more of those red-lined cracks deeper into the material. When they seem to have run dry, I feel myself touch my own face and then let the fluid collecting there drip onto my material, multi-hued oil paints and brighter crimson beneath both falling onto the canvases as I design.

It’s kind of like playing the Sams. Building up each little house, planning out city streets, making different structures match each other in a sort of weird pattern that makes more (or less) sense when you pull back. 

Slowly, I wind the loose, discarded cuts back together into something more viable, something more interconnected. It’s not easy, and it takes fucking time, but it seems to work well enough, and I can see some of the greyness fading as I move the blocks they grow in to meet each other or be drowned out by the red fluid in the material respectively. 

I don’t know how long I spend like that, but when I blink, my eyes hurt, and as I come out of the trance, my back is aching, like I’ve been hunching over for hours. 

When I come back to myself, the material has transformed. Severed chunks of grey matter have woven together into something like a de-boned limb, a functional tube of meat that wriggles as I look at it. It’s like a scarf made of tassels, like the body of a shark surrounded by cleaner fish- and missing a head.

I don’t even need to ask, don’t need to bring the poor thing over. The construct responds as if it was waiting for this, as if it already understands. For a moment, the mechanical nature of its movements diminishes, the way that it drags itself across the table speaking of an enthusiasm or desperation that feels very much… aware.

It struggles at the final step, so I assist it, turning its body so the spine is facing the right way, and watch carefully as it sort of… wriggles inside itself.

A sheath of grey flesh, pulsing with renewed energy, slowly deforming as the pointed edges of bone and malformation ooze into it, inch by inch. The ribcage of my construct makes a sort of clicking noise as it shuffles backward, bright and loud against the wood of my shitty little desk, and which are gradually replaced by a squelching, moist and heavy, like listening to an animal roll in clay.

And then it reaches the end of its modified form, and something sort of… connects.

The renewed construct shivers, and then coils, its bones stabbing into its own flesh to anchor it, to allow the fresh infusion of energy to connect the disparate pieces. Slowly, it pushes forward, like a weird caterpillar, thicker and less skittery than its precious form- but it makes up for it with a fluidity in its movement, allowing its spine to function as a support rather than the load-bearing entirety of the entity. The streamers of additional flesh squirm forward and back, each filament bending and unbending until its exterior looks like it’s covered in fur- only when they move can you see the individual tendrils, taking the shape necessary to move my creation.

It’s significantly weirder than the little meat-construct I made. That, I could see being a proto-flesh-golem in a videogame or something. This… this looks like a fuzzy caterpillar got magnified, had all its pieces dipped in flesh, and replaced its mandibles and eyes with that empty animal skull currently staring at me. 

Bits of bone clatter against each other inside the skull, making a sound almost like a rattle, or maybe like chittering. Slowly, the thing squirms towards me, getting familiar with the hyper-mobile, hyper-delicate tissues it’s using for mobility, still recovering from their inertness. 

I… reach out and give it a pat.

Again, the trilling of bones inside a hollow skull. It… nuzzles into my hand, dragging itself closer if I pull the Glove away. 

I give it a scratch, and laugh a little as it squirms wetly in an approximation of purring. 

Ok. 

Ok. 

I… I wanted it more alive. More functional, more cohesive, more self-contained, less of a slapdash invention. And… apparently INTERPRETIVE CRAFTSMANSHIP took that very literally indeed. 

Which, to be fair, is sort of in the skill’s name. 

I sigh, exhaling long and slow and inciting a weird little shiver in the creature on the table. And… it is kind of a creature, isn’t it? The change in behavior is distinct, turning from something awkward and mechanical to… well, still awkward, but much more organic. It still seems to sort of freeze up when I move my hand away entirely, going static until, I assume, it receives new orders- but it’s still night and day compared to before.

Imitating the actions I can take in MEAT led to me making lackluster, barely-functional versions of the “biotech” from in the game. The Skill is something more. I never made anything like this in the game, and, frankly, don’t know how I’d go about it.

It’s alive. Functional. Hardly full sentience, not even animalistic, maybe, but it’s the difference between a toy and something you’d enter in a robotics competition. 

That’s what it does, isn’t it? The Skill. It adds my intentions into the creation process, allowing me to create things that fit what I hope for rather than what I have the resources for. What it adds, or how, I don’t know- I don’t think I could make something from nothing, for example. But now it feels like I could make something that follows different rules, at a level of complexity approaching something… kind of scary to think about. 

I sigh.

Yeah. Ok. Fair enough. 

All the more reason to go into MEAT again, right? More resources, more skills, potentially, more to explore. 

I… should probably wash my bedsheets. And my table. And find a place to put my new creation, cause an arm-sized meat-caterpillar made of roadkill is not as easy to hide as teensy little mold-mice, and there’s an upper limit to what people’s “frequencies” will cover up. My roommates might not be able to see or understand what the… “Meaterpillar” is, but I’m pretty sure their brains could pick up on the fact of “giant chunk of dead meat lying around”.

I…

I don’t want to.

All of those are very real issues. Very practical issues. Things I could do to improve things now, more or less.

But they don’t help me feel safe. Or strong. Or feel like I’m moving forward.

Like going back to MEAT would.

How fucked is that? It’s been, what, two, two and a half weeks of having this thing, and in spite of every horrifying death and agonizing self-modification, I’m already craving another hit. Consequence-free self destruction with a side order of progression. Leveling. Learning.

It’s fine. Don’t think about how hard her heart is beating. It’s ok. There’s glass between me and that. I can still breathe just fine. 

I can think harder about it later.

I should probably think harder about it now.

Would I learn anything new if I did? Or would I just go in circles with shit I already know about how powerless I am, about how it feels to exist in my body, about how I’m in a world I can’t explore without strength I don’t have, how being in the game addresses every one of those issues, no matter how much it hurts or how dangerous it might be?

And, a small part of me reminds me, maybe it’ll give me something that can help the Bloodling, still silent inside me.

The Glove twitches, the same nervous infusion of energy in it making the whole thing feel borderline spastic with my current thoughts.

Inhale. Exhale.

Get behind the glass.

It’s a good idea. It might be leading to unhealthy attachment, but for now, it’s more logical to use it, and the benefits far outweigh the harm. 

I should check on Jay.

I should check on my job.

I should make sure my room doesn’t stink of old meat and juices.

I should go back to MEAT.

I’m turning to the headset before the thought finishes, the anxiety pushing up at me demanding action even as I continue calmly and rationally debating with myself about-

The headset’s gone.

The thought doesn’t process for a second. It can’t be gone. If it’s gone, I must have misplaced it. If I misplaced it, then it’s in the room. If I-

I didn’t move it. I didn’t displace it. Did someone come into my room? One of the roommates? Did-

Sarah. Infected by my presence. Her nightmares.

I have more than one roommate. I-

Two young 20-somethings. I don’t remember off the top of my head, I have to think, digging into myself even as I feel my throat closing from the cold in my chest.

They- 

Fuck. I don’t remember their names. Freshly moved in, we never interact, they send the rent and I pay the landlord, we don’t see each other, I don’t-

My heart is beating wrong. It’s too cold from the panic. Too cold from the adrenaline numbing every part of me.

Not all of the pads are gone, but most of them. Not all of the controls are out of place, but the gloves are gone too.

Someone took it. Someone-

I leave my room, heart pounding pressure behind my eyes, praying I’m not too late, hoping that-

I don’t even make it to their door. The person who I live with who is a stranger who I barely remember who I’ve barely spoken to. Now that I’m looking for it there’s a very mild heat coming from the door, like a radiator going off in their room, like a room with a bunch of people, like something feverish, too warm, too…

I touch the door, and I feel it shiver beneath the Glove.

Like it’s alive.