SUBCUTANEOUS 1.10 (Patreon)

Aaaaand we're back! Today has not been my favorite day, but I'm pushing through, not just in me personal brain but in the brains I'm making out of gross lil word-goodies on the page for y'all.

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God is dead, and we killed him. According to some dickhead by the name of Nietzhe, anyways. Frankly, I think that anyone who calls God “he” can’t really be all that smart- as if something as small as that could contain anything really divine. As if the divine is something capable of fitting in the weak little thing we weak little people call a mind.

But he was right. Annoyingly, he was right.

God is dead.

Long live God.

-Unknown, carved into bones found by Dr. Liona Silverstein, in an archeological dig dated ~230 BCE

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Everything hurts. Everything feels wrong.

The dysphoria is so, so much worse. Worse than anything I’ve ever felt before, worse than when I had a beard. Everything is twisted and turned round wrong, the joints too long, the skin all bunched up in weird places, everything is itchy, everything feels covered in slime and sweat and gunk and-

Fuck. Fuck!

My eyes open and it’s like being blind, even with all the lights and colors. Everything is shaped wrong, like a field-of-view slider turned all the way out, like staring out into the world through a fishbowl covered in oil. 

And in that fishbowl view- a bubble of crimson.

My hands shoot up as I try to get the headset off- and instead let out a honking noise, something like pain but through an alien throat as my hands hit my eyes.

My eyes.

Those are my eyes.

This is not my body. This is not what I am. What is-

I feel something in my forehead, back behind what feels like my skull, vibrate. It sends a ripple through me, like someone pressed a button behind my eyes, and I make a sound that would be a whimper if this were my mouth, if this were my lungs or my body-

And then I can see.

It’s like being at the eye doctor, seeing the change in the lens they’re using as it shifts the world into perfect clarity. Something just clicks, and suddenly the impossibly strange viewpoint resolves into something that I can recognize.

I stare at what looks like a blood cell the size of a small dog as it bumps against my “nose”. 

It feels wet and warm. Almost hot to the touch, actually.

My first instinct is to scramble backwards, but… it looks practically piteous. Like a scared pup, wondering why its parent is lying down on the ground, unmoving.

So, instead… I reach out a hand, and pat the blood cell lightly on the… membrane.

It’s not really a surprise when my hand comes into view, long and pale and with far too much skin. Not a human hand. Not my hand. A Fleshling’s hand.

The bloodcell thrums, rotating in a perfect circle. It… doesn’t seem to have eyes, or really any features at all outside of vague shadows squirming around inside it. 

I sit up, looking around, and…

Yeah. I’m here.

I’m in the MEAT.

Rolling prairie-fields of red grass and bone trees extend out nearly as far as the eye can see. At the actual horizon, mountains of deep maroon-red are like upturned teeth, holding the world around me in a bowl. 

And there, in the sky above…

Words. Glowing bright, woven out of white threads that float in the air weightlessly, hovering like clouds.

OBJECTIVE: LEAVE THE VALLEY

SIDE-MISSION 1: FEED

SIDE MISSION 2: GROW

I reach up to my face one more time, waving a hand in front of my face. I can feel the way I force the arm to move, the way that the neurons translate will into action- and how that action feels so deeply wrong, alien in a way that feels like wearing a suit of strange mush and woven patterns. I feel how the skin moves, how it has far too much looseness to it- and how it feels absolutely nothing when I wave it over where the headset should be. Feels nothing as I track the back of my head, where the strap should be, feels nothing when I shake my head around and try to feel its weight.

I’m here.

This isn’t me. This isn’t my body.

But I’m in it. I am inside of it and its in my control and it feels disgusting and wrong but it is all I have here, and-

Fuck. Fuck! FUCK!

The amount of work I put into that body, into liking my body, I-

No.

That’s not a useful thought. Bury it. Address it later.

I am in the wrong body, and I am in danger. I have had this experience before, if not in the exact same style. I know how to deal with it. You bury it, you keep walking, and eventually, you find a place where you can stop and process. Or you make one.

Until then, you prioritize.

It takes me a while to get to my feet. It’s distinctly uncomfortable doing so- it reminds me of all the difficulty I had with first starting the game, how the movement controls always felt a bit off, except now it’s so much worse. 

But I make it to my feet, and I know where to go.

There’s a corpse out there with my name on it, and a shitload of useful kit. If I can make it to the body before whatever that thing was respawns, or find a way to avoid whatever triggered it, it’s my best bet to get as strong as I can be as fast as I can. 

On a whim, I try to see-

There.

{MANIFESTATION OF [00000000]}

GENUS: ESURIATIO AUTONOMIA 

SPECIES: FLESHLING

STATS:

ADAPTATION

CANALISATION

EVOLUTION

SYNCHRONICITY

🔺🔺🔺

🔺

🔺🔺🔺🔺🔺 (-🔺🔺)

SKILLS: N/A

MUTATIONS: N/A

ORGANS: 

• CUTANEOUS

  • FLESHLING SKIN

• SKELETAL

  • FLESHLING BONE

• MUSCLE

  • FLESHLING MUSCLE

  • FLESHLING TENDON

• CIRCULATION

  • FLESHLING CIRCULATION

  • FLESHLING PUMP

• RESPIRIUM

  • FLESHLING LUNGS

• GLANDULAR

  • FLESHLING LIVER

  • FLESHLING ADRENAL

• NEUROLOGOS

  • FLESHLING BRAIN

  • PARASITIC INFESTORICA

• SENSORIA

  • FLESHLING SENSORIA

• DEGUSTATION

  • CYCLIAL DIGESTER

The same sheet as before, appearing in the same manner, like a wall of twitching text that appears out of nothing but swims forth like out from behind a hidden surface. It shows all the same numbers, with one notable exception- the SYNCHRONICITY.

The… the red pyramids? Or whatever they are? Whatever I have in place of numbers for stats, they’ve stayed the same with the few runs that I’ve done. Better to understand what I’m messing with before I need something novel and want to explore, and the balance has been fine so far. I haven’t changed where I allocated the starting “allowance” since I began.

And yet, here, now, the SYNCHRONICITY stat is at… five instead of three pyramids. And, in parenthesis, minus two. 

…Why even bother showing it at all, then? It still evens out to three pips, even with…

Is it because I’m here? Is it influencing me somehow, or… maybe I’m influencing it? Whatever it is, Fleshling, “parasitic infectorica”... Entity?

Fuck. 

Bury it until it’s useful. Bury it until it’s useful. Think about it in the fucking background. 

I start walking, listening to (and, admittedly, smiling a bit) at the little blood cell that could, chasing after me with sounds like a little burbling creek. 

The temperature is oddly warm, and definitely more human than I find comfortable. It’s like the moment you walk out of a sauna, except everywhere, all the time- not the worst thing in the world, but definitely unpleasant. Still, it gets easier and easier to move, the adjustments coming a lot quicker through actual sensation than through the (admittedly weirdly realistic) haptics. Pretty soon I’m jogging, and then I start to run.

My ankles don’t hurt when I run. The flesh which is not mine and does not feel right is strong, fast, faster than I’m used to. The strides lengthen, and it feels like I’m walking in some kind of insect-limbs, but they move in longer steps and with far more force than I’m used to.

It feels…

I can handle this. Take the other parts and bury them- for now, for here, I can handle this, as I bury the rest of it down deep. 

I crest the hill, and there it is.

A patch of grass, flattened in a straight line- and ending in a wet, messy splatter of blood and limbs.

It’s not a body, but… I recognize the shape of the hills, and the distance between where I’d been standing and where the other thing had stood. It’s not hard to figure out after that who it is that those scattered pieces of meat once belonged to.

In particular- me! Lovely, that, isn’t it.

But still, even from here, I can see the piece I came here looking for.

I move as slowly as I dare. Step by step, holding my breath whenever I possibly can, I walk one step at a time through the grass.

I don’t know what’ll happen to me if I die like this. I would much rather not find out, frankly. I wait until the grass around me goes dead still before I take another step.

It takes me more than an hour to go down the hill, and another again to crawl through the valley over towards the pile of torn-open meat that used to be… me, I guess.

Still nothing. No movement at all, except for a wiggly little blood cell crawling along beside me, occasionally making little bubble noises as it swims atop its ever-flowing bloodstream. 

I reach the site of the corpse.

The smell of it is… fuck. If the rest of the world smells like steak about to hit the grill, this is the smell of a butchered animal, shit and a smell of iron so loud it’s practically screaming. I can practically see the shape of it through the air, how it gets pulled at by the wind as it goes, how it radiates from the body.

It’s actually kind of helpful that in so many ways it isn’t a body. It is, at best, a chunked pile of ground meat, the head and torso annihilated so completely I can’t even tell which part was molded into what. Each of the five limbs I had is torn off, like someone hole-punched a section of the world right around where the limbs connected- or, judging by just how far the impact crater of viscera is spread out from them, like the body was annihilated so completely that the limbs simply didn’t have anything to receive energy from, falling flat instead of going flying.

Which is, to put it mildly, fucking terrifying. I couldn’t even see the fucker move, and I was just gone. 

Still no sign of him.

Moving very, very slowly, I grab hold of what I came here for.

SYMBIONT ACQUIRED: TWITCHING LIMB

It’s damaged, but intact. The base of the arm, where it connected to my shoulder, is torn to shreds, the compilation of sludgelur guts barely held together by runny tissues and what’s left of the materials I used to tie it all together. In spite of all that, it’s still technically in one piece- and as I touch it, it does as it is named to do, twitching.

Still alive, then.

I remember the trait that I got, the last time I equipped it, the way that the system reached out and pushed the words into existence- an ADAPTATION was formed, called MULTILIMBED. The description is one I can only vaguely remember at this point, but one thing stood out- it mentioned having more limbs than the usual number. More than what a body is originally designed for.

I look at the neatly severed pile of my own limbs on the ground, drenched in the mulched insides of what was once me. Sort of.

…

I mean… when in rome, right?

The little blood cell at my side burbles I reach over and grab my arms, dragging them slowly over to me. 

Why not, right? When I’m in this much danger, better to do all that I can. And when the body feels this wrong anyways, what’s a little more wrongness? 

And if it works… well, who the fuck knows. Might as well try it and find out. 

I’m in this deep already, right? Like I always say- now all that’s left is to follow through.

Slowly, I crawl back out of the valley, back around the hill I came from. The process takes… fuck, it takes hours, in grand total, and the whole time I can feel a strangely-shaped heart beating in my chest, flush with adrenaline and the hyper-awareness of how little it might take for that other being to come back and kill me dead.

And then… nothing. I’m around the corner, and safe enough, at least in my mind, to start running. 

So I do.

I still don’t know if it was equipping the right gear or getting too close to the edge of the prairie that caused it to spawn, but I can eliminate at least one of those possibilities. I make my way back the way I came, towards the center (or what I think is the center) of the map. I pass the still weirdly-pixelated scab that I got my little blood-buddy from, pass the bodies of a few more creatures I killed, and then…

Well. If this isn’t far enough away, then I’m fucked as is. There’s nowhere to hide on the prairies, nowhere to run to except towards the distant line of mountains that surrounds everything. I have yet to find any sort of cave, or even any hill tall enough to cover my entire height standing upright. Outside of wasting a few more hours, or who the fuck knows how long I’ve actually been trapped here for, there’s only one way forward.

…No haptics this time. Nothing to separate me from the act. 

And no other way to go that doesn’t involve standing still, in one way or another. 

I take some slime, mix it in with the scab-gravel on the ground, and before I can hesitate, before I can realize how it’s already starting to cut into my hand and sting like alcohol in a fresh wound, I slap it hard against my shoulder.

I don’t want to scream. Screaming would be bad. Screaming would make everything worse, would put me in danger, would attract anything outside the range of the already-dead creatures all around. 

I don’t want to scream.

My back hurts so fucking much.

It’s tingling and crackling and buzzing, like it’s going numb and being lit on fire at the same time. Each little bubble of sharp gravel and acid feels like ants crawling through me, little creatures stabbing down with sharp little legs and biting down into me more and more and-

I slam the connection home, the damaged joint touching on the damaged body and starting to-

Oh fuck. 

Oh it gets so much worse.

My skull starts vibrating like a goddamn phone, buzzing and screaming and hissing behind my eyes so hard that it makes any migrain I’ve ever felt be like a passing fucking little ache. The pain is enough that I can’t scream now, couldn’t even if I wanted to, like my lungs aren’t listening and my head is full of screaming bees that are stinging and-

And then relief. My head goes quiet- and the limb at my back twitches. 

It feels…

Ironically, it feels more mine than the rest of the body. The “conventional” body I’m in, it’s… it’s not mine, not me, but somehow, this combination of twisted organs and spasming, improvised limb, feels almost natural.

I let out a breath that I didn’t know I had, from lungs that feel like sacks of tofu in my chest- and look at the two other limbs strewn on the ground.

Nothing’s killed me yet.

And I already took them.

The choice, in that sense, feels made already. 

Now to follow through.

But fuck if this isn’t going to hurt.