SUBCUTANEOUS 1.11 (Patreon)

And we're back! Vacation, timing and exhaustion struggles, famtime, etc etc, you've heard it already, but here we are! We're gonna have maybe one, maybe two more chapters trapped as we are, and then it's back to that sexy urban horror / fantasy baybeee!

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Why did you bring her here? What for? You have me. You have all of us. All these little ants, bowing down to whatever piece of you we struggle to know. You didn’t need a new one. Why do you want a new one? She doesn’t-

I know. I know you can’t hear me, that you don’t understand. But please. Please. 

…Too late anyways, isn’t it?

Just like the rest of us. A little sugar water and we climb out from the dirt, desperate for more. 

God, grant me strength of your flesh, given freely unto me. Grant me the will to protect those who do not deserve you, and to slay those who take from you more than they have earned. Bless me with your madness, that I might find my faith within you.

Where There Is Life, There Is Flesh.

Amen.

-Whispers on the wind, heard by no one at all. 

Except you.

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The pain fades surprisingly quickly. It doesn’t feel like it’s healed, not by a long shot, but it sort of fades to the background, becoming a general soreness rather than something sharp.

The discomfort, on the other hand, lasts a lot longer.

Unlike the Symbiont, the two “original” limbs I’ve borrowed feel terrible, all wrong-edged and weird to be in. Something with the Fleshling, maybe, something inherent to the body itself, or perhaps to my inhabitation of it. It still feels itchy, as unpleasant as wearing a bag of warmed-over tofu, but there’s not a lot I can do about that for now.

Three new limbs added, equaling a grand five total. The three additions tend to sort of flex and coil intermittently, refusing to stay still- all the better, as they’re not exactly well-aligned with my posture or the musculature beneath. Still unpleasant, though. 

The more interesting part is how easily I can interact with them in the first place.

The buzzing in my skull refuses to fade now, intermittently getting louder every time I try to use my new limbs for something. It’s giving me a hell of a headache, but at the same time, I’m pretty sure that without it, I would either be comatose or carrying around three useless new sacks of meat rather than functional limbs. When it buzzes, it’s almost like… like something smooths over between what I can do and what I am doing, streamlining the thought process until I can almost use more hands at once.

It’s not exactly clean- for one thing, I’ve never been ambidextrous. At best, the new limbs feel like a bunch of left arms that got tacked onto me- they can grab things, throw a punch, do all the basics, but even if I stopped moving any other part, I still don’t think I’d be able to write or do any tricks.

And yet, as the buzzing behind my eyes sings, I remember the trait.

ADAPTATION ACQUIRED: MULTILIMBED

MULTI-LIMBED: While most entities possess multiple limbs, through modification or accidental mutation you have acquired an addition which exceeds your conventional limit. Fleshlings, usually possessing the bare minimum amount of humanoid limbs, are usually incapable of acquiring this mutation, and your brain has been modified to integrate this movement directly into your skillset.

There it is. Plain as day. “Your brain has been modified”. 

Buzz buzz, goes the thing behind my eyes.

Bury it for now. Don’t think about it. I can’t fix it, I can’t change it, and it’s what I’m working with; any other thoughts about it are, at this point holding me back.

I am in this place. I am being modified. Until such a time as I wake up on a fresh doze of Risperidone, high off of drinking bleach and full of hair I’ve swallowed, I am here, and it is now, and considering how badly things hurt in this place, there’s no reason not to treat it as real for now, if only to avoid further harm.

Time to go.

A little bundle of blood and weirdly realistic cellular walls bumps into me, seeming to give some encouragement, and I pat it gently on its top, thoroughly not enjoying the goopyness of the feeling- but appreciating the warmth. It really does act like something almost cat-like, hovering constantly by my legs and bumping into me whenever I slow down, even as it seems to have no eyes, no senses, no… well, nothing. There’s some sort of organelles floating around inside of it, but otherwise it really is just a photo-realistic blood cell, floating on a liquid mass of crimson it constantly exudes.  

It’s… so weird.

But so is the rest of this place, so whatever.

Either way, I figured out something new; apparently, it wasn’t my acquisition of a cool new symbiont that triggered that creature. And, while it is possible that it just didn’t count if I didn’t have things equipped past a certain point, I did end up pretty much exactly where I was previously, so maybe distance doesn’t cover it either.

This is… less helpful than I’d like. For one, it means my theory about why it spawned in was wrong, or at least inaccurate, which means I’m back to square one in terms of figuring out where the fuck it came from and why it chose that particular moment to show up. Either way, I’m apparently safe from it for now, but if it’s not about going out too far or about equipping higher-level abilities, then I don’t really have any way to predict if or when it’ll show up again.

So… that sort of leaves only one option.

I have to try again.

As I walk, I imagine this must be what a prey animal feels like. The constant, twitching awareness of my own body, hypervigilant and flooded with adrenaline in the constant and screaming hope that I’ll catch sight of what I need to see before it kills me. And it will kill me, that much is guaranteed. I’m under no illusions that having extra arms will help me against that thing, considering how it moved so fast I literally couldn’t even see the moment between being alive and being pasted mulch.

Because hey, here’s the issue: I don’t know what’ll happen when I die here.

Yes, when. I’m not so arrogant to think I’m not going to get merked here, and hey, worst case nightmare scenario that is currently ringing in the back of my head like an oncoming train, I’ll live long enough to die of old age here. Which, considering the system’s descriptions of a Fleshling, might be next week for all I know. I’m going to die here unless I find a way out, and I don’t know what will happen.

Maybe I’ll wake up in an asylum. Maybe I’ll wake up on the floor of my room, bleeding out of every hole. Maybe I’ll wake back up at the character creator, or, hell, maybe I just won’t ever wake back up at all ever, and it’ll just be whatever’s left of me without a living body and the void all around. 

I leave here, or I die. I get poisoned, or beaten to death by pikimon’s weirder, grosser cousins, or that thing pops back up out of the ground and turns me to so much slurry spread all over the ground. 

So I keep walking, because the alternative is to give up and die. 

I have to try again.

Not, like, now, obviously. No reason to leap straight back into the location that killed me last time, that would be stupid. Crazy, even. 

No, I’ll have to go back there eventually, or to some equivalent point from the center of the valley somewhere else around the circumference of it, but for now, my best chance to get out is to get stronger.

Which is why I have so much hair in my mouth.

I walk in more or less the opposite direction of where I last died, at an angle from where I originally woke up. The bodies of the creatures I fought remain where they lay, and I collect what I can from them before my path diverges, but I need more than just leftovers, I need fresh prey. More materials to build symbionts with, and fresh limbs to practise them on- but more than that, I need them for experience. I’ve fought as part of the game before, but this isn’t a game, this is as close to real life as it gets, and I could absolutely get killed if I go into a fight thinking I already know how to handle myself.

And in the meantime, I am doing my absolute damndest to make use of my ADAPTATION stat. 

It’s the only mechanic I put to the same tier as synchronicity, which I think is… mostly just the ability to create Symbionts and use them, but also probably has something to do with how realistic everything felt (and, maybe, a factor in my getting sucked into the game). Adaptation granted me a few modifications before, namely the increase in fur to protect against acids, and if I can get those sorts of advantages in any other arena as well, it’s going to be a boon.

Ergo, the hair.

Except, of course, that I’m not playing through a VR headset this time. I have to taste it.

Surprising no one, it tastes a lot like hair, if said hair were wind-dried, twice as thick as usual, and had a vague aftertaste of fatty oils. 

It is, by far, the worst thing I have tasted in my life.

I crunch down on some fresh filaments, wincing with every squeak-crunch from my molars, when a little burbling sound down by my feet pipes up, drawing my attention to my travel-companion.

“What’s up, little guy?” I ask, through a mouthful of fur.

The blood-cell puppy shoots a spurt of blood out in what seems like a random direction- until I see the grass moving, and notice what it saw first.

A sludgeling trundles its way through the underbrush, oblivious to my presence.

Ok then. As planned.

Fucking hell, this is going to suck so badly.

My latest Symbiont, the Twitching Limb, makes quick work of the weak little digestive enzyme, the abominable legs and core beneath the acidic ooze coming apart. One limb, then, is more or less immune to the acid.

But… well. I kinda need it to be more than one.

I take a very, very deep breath, in and out, and then in and out again. I can do this. I can do this.

My hands blister and scream at me like the worst sunburn in the world as I pick up the slime in a bundle and dump it over my chest and shoulders.

I try very, very hard not to scream. I bite my lip, feel blood from the pressure of it, feel every muscle and piece of loose skin and fat and tendon go taut under the tension I’m forcing onto myself, feel myself flinch so hard I fall back onto the ground.

But, you know what they say- sometimes you try your very best, and still don’t succeed.

By the time I come back to myself, my voice is hoarse, my throat raw with the taste of my own blood and the trembling soreness of crying out so loud it damaged my vocal cords a bit. I haven’t spoken much in this form, but even exhaling comes with a raspiness that wasn’t there a moment ago now. 

And yet, for all the torment, I do see what I wanted to see.

Floating in front of me, a series of archaically carved words floating in the air.

ADAPTATION ACQUIRED: SKIN DENSITY.

The burns have already started to fade, scarring supernaturally fast and turning my previously pale, droopy surface into something more like a waxy honeycomb. It’s most notable on my torso and the burned areas, but there’s still effects on the rest of my body, the skin pulling a bit tighter to the musculature beneath and bringing with it a sense of weight. 

But… I need to confirm what it does.

So I stick my hand back into the acid anyways.

I am… pleasantly surprised by how little it hurts. Once again, there’s a feeling like a too-hot sunburn, the kind just about ready to peel- but now it’s just that, rather than the more overwhelming sort of agony it was a moment ago.

I do my best to leave one of my “spare” hands in for a while, but eventually it really does get to be too much. Maybe I can make it last longer next time, try to find some kind of acid immunity down the line, but for now, it’s… mostly enough.

I chew on a fresh clump of grass hair, and as soon as I force myself to finally swallow, I get the notification a second time.

MATERIAL CONSUMED: Decorative Filament

ADAPTATION ACQUIRED: FUR

Again, it’s both the same and much worse than the last time she got the adaptation. As thick, short hairs bloom all over my body, matching themselves to the color of the prairie-grass, I feel each strand bursting through dense, waxy skin, and it itches. Like my entire body has suddenly been swarmed by a colony of insects, all of them skittering and nibbling on my skin until my whole body is a mess of feeling that makes me want to scratch hard enough to tear at my skin.

And then it’s over. 

I gasp, letting in air at last, forcing my hands to still from where all five of them were randomly jittering and trying to claw at myself. Looking down at them, I see that even the Twitching Limb, all black and made of those juddering spider-eel parts, has tufts of purplish fur coming out from between some of the joints in its armor.

Ok. Two adaptations acquired. Both of them defensive, both of them crucial- and both brought about because I did something with a material I acquired, adding it to my body or consuming it.

I take a long, deep breath. Center myself. Get ready.

I’ve already made my choices. Now to follow through.

I lean over the dead body of the sludgeling, where the twitching digits shrivel and do as their namesake with their main body dead… and bite down on alien flesh.