INTESTINAL 5.09

And we're back! Slight delay between this chapter and the last, apologies for that, but I'm shooting for one more and maybe an edited RfR chapter before bed today. Should be 3-4 total VISCERAE chapters at least before we're back to my main squeeze, and I'm tryna make them good ones.

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I wonder sometimes about how alive a thing is. I have been told by some more… academically inclined members of my order, as they call themselves, as you all call yourselves, reading through these journals I leave behind, that there are infinite infinities. That there is an infinite depth between the numbers one and two, just as there is an infinite between nothing and everything. I believe that, perhaps, we might ascribe a similar existential virtue unto our works. There is an infinity between the crawling creations I made when I began and the honed projects I create now, just as there is an infinity between my projects and myself, and an infinity between myself and the true Artist Divine I envision.

Perhaps that is why I find myself so discomfitted by their presence at times. Or uncomfortable with my own. I try to reconcile this supposed fact with the idea of just how close, how barely-different at all everything is from every other thing, and I… I do believe that both are true. 

I worry, perhaps, that one might be more true than the other. 

-Tenth Scripture, fourteenth of the books of  Lo-ahnn Daughtler, First Architect of Artistry

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She dreams of eyes again. 

The skitter through her walls, carried on legs sharp and strange, and when they come close enough, pulling up through the floorboards and out from behind the plaster, she sees them bleeding. Raw, ragged organs, pulsing with thick gelatin and trying to press themselves out of their sockets in a hunger to look.

They never get close enough to see me fully, I think. Whenever they get close, rolling eyes shifting to focus on me, the dream changes, and I am in another room, sitting or laying or standing somewhere that I was not but am now. The walls shiver, they groan, and I feel… lonely.

It’s a foolish thought, because I’m not alone. 

I wake up exhausted, but less so that last night, which is what matters. 

The decisions I made remain firm in my mind, ready and loud. I need to have an objective. Maybe not as valuable as a direction, not overall, but every journey is made of small steps, and my mistake is in running before I learned to walk. Stumbling through the dark, trying to figure out where the walls are, without ever taking the time to make a torch or a walking stick to help me explore the space. 

Understanding the dangers, experiencing the world, figuring out the boundaries- that all comes next, and is still absolutely on the docket. But first- I’m goddamned tired of not having the tools to deal with shit. 

I wake up, the Glove twitching and scratching at itself with its fresh dose of power. It’s as eager to work as I am, the feeling running through it like a heat. 

I breathe deep, and then let the breath back out.

No hour scrolling on my phone, no time wasted- I wake, I breathe, and I get myself up to my feet. And then, I look over at what I have to work with.

A functioning Glove, for one thing. Most important factor. Wall-meat, if I’m willing to carve deeper yet again, which… is debatable. Two overflowing containers of grey mass, grown past their original sources, but still recognizably growing from their original hosts of spiders and mouse. In theory, I could go get that… skittering little mess I made and left in the doctor’s office.

Yeah. Yeah I think I will do that- later. The idea is solid, but like the rest of how I’ve been acting, I overreached. 

First, I have to prioritize.

My home isn’t safe. 

If Michael follows some string to me? If the Big Guy changes its mind and decides to carve through my walls? If whatever is planting eyes around town decides to be a little more proactive, decides to do more than just infest the few skulls it’s gotten into and hunting me in my dreams? I’m fucked. 

Tools. Flesh. Crafting. These are what I have. This is what I can do. 

Pipe-bombs were nice. Making that little automaton, leaving it to skitter through the vents, was… fine, but not my best idea. In the end, the only invention I can say that’s truly mattered, truly been at the level I need, is the Glove, and even it is still just a… draft. But it’s the thing that works. The direction I need. 

I’m not a machinist. I’m not a tarot-reader, or a puppet, or a giant, fucked up super-monster roaming the woods. What I make, when I choose to make it, is alive. 

I can work with that.

I lean down under my desk and pull both of the containers out, leaving some of their growing mycelium and fuzz along the wall. I don’t need all of it, don’t need every piece, and I see no harm in leaving some to grow. So far, at least, it hasn’t gotten through the drywall, and despite its spread, the wall-meat seems unbothered.

Which is good, considering what I plan to do. 

The Glove twitches, hungry and alive in a way it usually isn’t, less a part of me and more a part of itself than ever before. I feel it, pieces coming apart and back together, flexing to un-form what used to be fingers and are now something more. They twist and curl and shape themselves, clacking and creaking as tendons and bone and sharp-edged implements and complex little tools emerge and retract. 

I feel it, staring at what’s before us like a hungering thing. I feel my heart beat in my chest, lonelier than I’d like, but still fresh, still loud, still mine. 

I think of myself, and think of what I need to make. 

A quick review, forming from the back of my eyelids as I focus on what I am and what I have.

{MANIFESTATION OF [00000000]}

GENUS: HOMINIDAE HOMINIA HOMO 

SPECIES: SAPIENS

STATS:

ADAPTATION

CANALISATION

EVOLUTION

SYNCHRONICITY

🔺

🔺

🔺🔺🔺

            ORGANS: 

·        CUTANEOUS

o   HOMO SAPIENS SKIN

·        SKELETAL

o   HOMO SAPIENS BONE

·        MUSCLE

o   HOMO SAPIENS MUSCLE

o   HOMO SAPIENS TENDON

·        CIRCULATION

o   HOMO SAPIENS CIRCULATION

o   HOMO SAPIENS HEART

·        RESPIRIUM

o   HOMO SAPIENS LUNGS LUNGS

·        GLANDULAR

o   HOMO SAPIENS LIVER

o   HOMO SAPIENS PITUITARY GLAND

·        NEUROLOGOS

o   HOMO SAPIENS CEREBRUM

o   UNDERDEVELOPED [0000000000]

·        SENSORIA

o   HOMO SAPIENS SENSORIA

·        DEGUSTATION

o   HOMO SAPIENS DIGESTIVE TRACT

SKILLS:

·        GLIMPSE BEYOND ⦽⦽

MUTATIONS: N/A

SYMBIONTS:

·        DIVINE BLOODLING

·        THE GLOVE

Three tools matter more than most out of them all. It’s good to review, and there’s going to be lots of changes if I can manage it, but three pieces that matter more than most in this moment. The Glove, my SYNCHRONICITY, and the one thing most inherent to me, born of my own power and under my own will. 

I push into my own mind, push into my eyes, and see.

The Glove starts to move, scalpels emerging and perching over what lives and what is to be changed. 

It’s not fungus. Fungus is just what it’s made of. Like a shadow is made of an absence, like a song is made of noise- but it’s not what it is. In each container, I sense a hunger, a desire, a want. The mass that grows from within the rat-corpse, the thing that grows from within the spider, it wants the quiet and the stillness to grow, and it wants the food to do so. It wants to call things into itself, and spread further, and have the dark and the quiet and the safe in which to do that.

I SEE. 

I SEE myself, staring back up at me. Animal and fungus, both just… shadows. Part of desire. Part of patterns deeper than what can be touched. I see my faces staring up at me, matching my eyes, staring back lethargically from where I sit, cradled in little tupperware, starving and spiraling and spawning. 

I don’t need to know how to change this material. I don’t need to understand how spores and mold and fungus work, because this isn’t spore, or mold, or fungus.

I’ve carved into myself. I’ve sculpted into myself, if only just, here and in MEAT. 

I can do the same here. 

I know what I want to make. I know what I need to be. What these things that aren’t me but might as well be, might as well be mirrors in a way strange and deep, need to be. 

I reach down, and I begin. 

I blink, and I’ve finished. 

I-

Skill Acquired: INTERPRETIVE CRAFTSMANSHIP

That- that’s… 

That’s the first skill I’ve acquired outside of MEAT.

I don’t… remember exactly what I did. I don’t think I… I’m not sure how I did it. It didn’t feel like before, carving up cold cuts and shaping tendons and putting together pieces. I…

The Glove pulled and twisted and nipped and cut deeper than before. I try and recall, and it’s like… like picturing a dream. Like trying to pull back together a memory long gone, in a style of thought I don’t recognize. I think I remember myself, a hundred tiny little me’s, being put into position like a puzzle, all of me’s starting to shuffle and shift, made of slime and silver and grey. I remember putting their hunger into a place, and teaching myself to step, and-

I shake my head, clearing the fog, shaking out some of the confusion that it brings along with it. I’m still not completely sure what I did, but it felt right, and as I look down with clearer eyes, I see what I’ve made.

The mold spawned from out of hosts, specifically the spider and mouse that I collected back at the mill. It took their shape and filled them out and expanded out from there, but the original shape remained, calling to its like. 

Now, I’ve made more of their like from the shape that came free of it all. 

Seven spiders made entirely of fungal material, like dolls crafted out of putty, sit strangely upright and still on the table, balanced on their own sets of legs. Beside them are three mice, not rats, not quite the same as their original source, with exposed skin and veins made entirely of soft, fuzzy material, shaped delicately into function. They all look up at me, strangely still, unlike the animals I shaped them to be- but the shape, and the form, and the material, are all just kind of… 

Not meaningless, but close. 

I let out a breath, feeling some pain in my throat from how badly I was holding it. The creatures / fungal clusters / equipment I’ve crafted on the table turn to follow the path of the moisture and the heat leaving my mouth. As it dissipates into the air, one of the spiderlings steps forward, lifting a little limb to touch on the air in front of it- and shivers. 

“Well shit, little fella. Y’all thirsty?” 

In spite of their appearances, none of the constructs have lungs, or breathing organs at all, really. I think maybe they breathe through their skin? Do they breathe? Point being- they don’t make any vocal noises, but there’s a sequence of shuffling, wiggling movements from the group. 

I chuckle at that. It takes me less than a minute to go to the bathroom and get back with a glass of water for them, and in that little time, they’ve barely moved, but moved they have. Several of the little spiderlings have wandered over towards the edges of my desk, and one of the fungal mice has planted its face directly against the far wall and just sort of stopped there, squishing its spongy self against the plaster.

Still, they move slightly back towards me as I approach with the water, several of the spiderlings waving their little legs. I let a little puddle out onto the desk, and they cluster in close, absorbing it through their skin / surfaces. 

Huh. It’s kind of cute. If you don’t look too close. Because if I do, I can see the weirdly fibrous membranes, the spongy tissues, the mass of what might be shell made of condensed material… 

Huh. Actually no, it’s still kinda cute. And weird. And also kind of fascinating. 

They finish absorbing up the puddle, and I made a second one, and then a third. By the third, they’ve started to slow down, and leave a few droplets behind, which I take to mean that they’re satisfied on that front. They’re not connected to me directly, not as far as I can tell, not like the Bloodling or the Glove, so I can’t quite read them, but… the skill pulses in my thoughts. I think I know that whatever it did, however it helped me to do what I just did, it worked as intended.

Speaking of.

I lay my regular, human hand out flat on the desk, and without prompting, a handful of little spider-things crawl aboard. I shiver at the ticklish sensation, but by both expecting it and watching it happen, I manage to keep control of the shuddering and anxiety-driven revulsion. Just… focus on the fact they’re yours, and kind of cute.

Also, don’t think about the texture. They are way too soft and moist to be skittering.

I swallow hard, pushing down my gag reflex, and start walking to the corners of my room. Against two of the upper corners of the walls and one little nook beneath my bed, I place down the spiders, then come back for more. I repeat the process again, then again, trying to find isolated, hidden spots throughout the apartment. I definitely doubt my roommates could see exactly what they are, but that they could see a bunch of spiders? That’s more believable. I put them on top of cabinets, under furniture, that sort of thing, spreading them out until every one of the little critters has some sort of home. 

I don’t know how effective of a tool they’ll be, but as I prepare to repeat the process with the mice, I process to myself the plan.

Every time I dream, I dream of being watched. My home isn’t safe. I have no defenses.

Solution- early warning systems and minor security.

I doubt the little mice and spiders will stop the gargoyle out in the woods from coming through my walls, but maybe they can affect my dreams, make me feel less watched, and provide some degree of… well, not stability, per se, but a network. I’m not convinced it’s the best idea, spores being liable to spread and all… but I had that fear in mind when I made them. I didn’t design them to reproduce like regular spores, I designed them as traps and safeguards, like the ones back at the mill. I have to trust that my newly-acquired Skill isn’t going to fuck me over completely so very soon. If the craftsmanship is “interpreted”, then it should “interpret” that I’m not trying to plant seedlings in my own house to grow through the walls.

Well. With one exception. 

One of the mice, the only one I keep in my room, I put into the wall-meat.

The little creature shivers, then takes a small bite out of a nearby fiber. The wall seems not to care, not so much as twitching, and I watch as the my little construct makes something of a burrow to one corner. As soon as it hits any resistance in the form of tougher fibers, it stops, then curls up on itself, its eyes pointing determinedly deeper into the wall as if guarding an entrance.

…I’m pretty sure that the little wet orbs in its sockets aren’t eyes, though. Right? No material to make eyes with. No gelatin. 

I’m… going to have to check on that someday. Soon. Figure out more of how the skill works. 

Later.

With my resources low (just a bit of the original fungal masses left, growing on my plaster), my funds running dry, my available-for-carving meat well on its way out, my options are limited. Still, I’m happy to have put this little system up, and the rewards are obvious.

Ok. Inhale. Exhale. You’ve got this, me.

Next thing is getting back that skittering little homunculus I put into the clinic’s vents. Then? 

I think my next move should be going back into MEAT.