BELOW: CRAWL 01 (Patreon)

Welcome to the beginning of the second arc of BELOW! We'll be keeping it up to match the pace of the release on RR, kinda-sorta! Not quite so intensely, we should end the next two weeks about 20 chapters ahead of the public chapters though!

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I don’t know how long I spend down in the stone. Long time. Long enough that it gets comfortable. When I fall out of that rocky cocoon, it’s almost as bad as crawling into the wall was to begin with, an alien thing that makes me shiver and ache with fear and strange new sensations. All of the claustrophobia I was holding back, that I’d learned to cope with, explodes into a horrific amount of relief, followed by a feeling I don’t recognize at first.

Fear. Panic, because there’s so much space, because I can’t touch walls or a ceiling or a path forward with my arm, because I don’t feel compressed anymore, because my torso’s malformation from the cramped confines suddenly feels so much more noticeable. I check and see, and no, I haven’t burst open, but I feel like I’m bloating, like I’m spreading out until I’ll dissolve and come apart.

When nothing comes to kill me, and after I’ve forced myself not to start digging straight down into the ground beneath me, I have the time to identify it. To recognize the fear, though it’s the first time I’ve ever felt it myself. 

Agoraphobia. The opposite of claustrophobia. A fear that comes with feeling trapped, that comes with feeling terrified, but from wide open spaces. 

It’s laughable to call the tunnel I’m in a wide open space. It’s no more or less familiar than any of the other tunnels I’ve been through in the time since I’ve awoken. Just another place of misery and darkness and claustrophobia, except not anymore, is it, because there’s too much goddamn space here.

I open my mouth, and for the first time in a long while, I do something other than gnaw or puke or swallow. 

I breathe. 

In. Out. In. Out.

It still hurts. It still feels like breathing needles rather than air. 

But damnit, if that’s not a hell of a lot better than breathing rocks. 

And there are most certainly rocks in my lungs. Not everything made its way down my gullet, just, you know, the vast majority of it. Once I have more of myself fixed up, I can rip open my ribcage and pull the rocks out of me, or hell, pull the fucking lungs out of me and get new ones. In the meantime, I just breathe.

In, out, in, out. 

Faster than I’d like. Painfully fast. Loud, too, echoing up and down the dark spaces I’ve emerged into. But fuck me, if it doesn’t feel good. Organs unused, kept still, for who the fuck knows how long I was down there, and now I’m breathing again, and oh, what relief. 

In out in out.

Ba-bump.

I spasm, panicked, uncertain as to what’s just happened. It hurts, a pain I’m not used to, a pain I haven’t had in a while, and–

I laugh. It comes out strangled, a weird little wheeze. 

I’ve forgotten what my goddamn heartbeat feels like. 

Just like breathing, it hurts. Down here in the BELOW, everything hurts, but when you’re used to it, pain is a hell of a thing. Pain’s designed to warn people, to tell an animal that something has gone wrong, but when everything’s wrong and everything hurts, it’s no fucking use, is it? It’s a fucking joke. It’s just there to hurt you. To hurt me. 

And when you get used to it, you can ignore it. It just becomes part of the goddamn background, a thing that you can neglect, that can be a nothing-joke that doesn’t fucking matter. It starts to turn into something no different than touch or taste or even sight, doesn’t it? 

I think my heart beating is something useful. It happens when I breathe, and breathing gets me SIN, and that’s… 

Ha. Hah. SIN. A good thing to have. A good thing to want. What a fucking joke, huh? What a laugh riot. 

In. Out. Slower. Steadier. Slower. Steadier. 

+1 SIN

How long since I saw that little notification? It’s been a while. I didn’t get any while I was eating and digging and eating, I just got progress forward. Eating stone, at least as I am now, doesn’t give me anything. 

But I wonder about that. The tunnels seem so… not quite organic, not quite artificial. I could see it being something dug out by hand and claw, stranger ones than what nature can create. Or maybe they’re just made this way. Just a series of circumstances that happened to put things into the shape they are now. Is that natural? Is that how nature is defined?

Does natural and artificial have any distinction here? Does it mean anything at all, when all the world is both designed, alien, and oh so intimately designed to hurt what I would understand as human?

Who the fuck knows. 

My body isn’t shaped right. Nevermind the dysmorphia of it, or the weirdness of this place, there’s the fact that I’ve been smushed into a fucking miniscule little tunnel for long enough that being in a regular tunnel has me feeling like I’m about to fall into an open sky. I’ve got a missing arm and missing legs, my torso is weirdly bloated and weirdly stunted both, and I’m pretty sure that if I could see myself in the mirror, my head would be similarly misshapen. 

I’ll probably heal, given time, but I…

Heh.

Part of me doesn’t want to. 

Another part of me doesn’t want to heal back that way. I don’t want to look how I did. I don’t want to be what I was. A Hungering Ghoul.

The evolution didn’t even fucking work out, did it? Because I worked so very fucking hard not to eat people, and when I did, it was the stuff that the Cult Bitch, the Masked Father, gave out to the wretched masses. As minimal as it got, really. Sure, maybe it influenced my SIN gain a little, but not by enough to be anything impressive, certainly not by enough to make me a threat. I’m certainly not the only SINner that’s eaten flesh, hell everyone in the Home was, so I’m not the only one that must have been offered a cannibalism-based evolution. Which means they’d never allow that sort of thing to be enough to be a threat. Ever. 

But it did change things. Not being enough isn’t the same as being nothing. 

Once I breathe enough, I’ll be more. 

Once I eat enough, I’ll be more.

Ain’t that somethin?

Alright. Enough time just thinking. Enough time getting my shit back together.

One arm is enough for me to start crawling. 

I’m a worm. Or maybe a poisonous snail. My Suffering Stomach WOUND has acid vile enough that it would be a risk for anything to eat me without being careful, and my Broken Gullet WOUND allows me to dig into a retreat if need be. I’ve gotten a lot faster about it. 

Hand goes forward. Smack into the stone. Drag myself forward.

Into the pitch black. Barely different than the dark of being inside the stone. Just black on black, shadow on shadows. 

But there is forward, and there is back, and there are the walls. I can go through anywhere I so choose, now, if I’m only willing to go through more time in the stone. And I need to keep going. I’ve been in the stone for a long time, for at least days, and while I did my best to move in a straight line, I didn’t exactly have any way to measure it. I’m sure I’ve deviated back and forth here and there, shifted in ways that make my path harder to follow. Best way to be unpredictable is to not have any idea what the fuck is going on or what you’re doing, right? 

And none of that means that I can’t be found. 

There are so many ways that I might still be found. So many skills and weird magics and strange powers that might lead my pursuers directly to me, and the moment I start to feel any kind of way, the moment I detect even a hint that someone might be approaching me, my priority is to start digging again. In the meantime, I have to keep moving. The more distance I put between myself and the Home, the better off I’ll be. 

That’s not the same thing as safe. Maybe there is no safety down here, not really. Maybe it’s all just monsters and horrors.

Whatever. I keep crawling. 

This place should not be. 

Doesn’t matter.

This place will not be.

Don’t think about that yet.

I will break everything and anything and everything if it means that I can break this place. 

I still remember that first message. The first thing this place said to me when I dragged myself out of nonexistence and into suffering. 

YOU HAVE BEEN JUDGED

If anything has any right to judge anything at all, it’s me. It’s the victims of this place, of which I number one out of hundreds of billions.

I judge it, and I find it wrong. 

Hell is unforgivable and impermissible.

Keep moving. One step after another. One grasp after another. 

My hand reaches out, grabs at the stone, and pulls me forward. 

Forward. 

Breathing all the way. Accompanied by the occasional heartbeat, reminding me that though I am dead, and though I wish I were deader, I am alive. 

+1 SIN

+1 SIN

+1 SIN

Damn. 

It’s lonely down here. Down in the dark. 

Eventually, my body heals back a bit. I don’t bother moving the SIN around inside me, don’t bother trying to use it for anything other than building it up. I don’t have enough of it to waste on healing or playing with, now that I have the opportunity to actually build it up again. I let the “natural” healing processes of the weird rules of biology in this place to put things into order. 

One arm becomes an arm and a half. An arm and a half becomes an arm with a hand, one without, and two thighs to push with. 

My body still feels weird. I try to avoid thinking about it, but every time I focus on it, I know that it’s not right, that it’s not me. Is that another layer to this hell, I wonder? Is the act of constant physical pain not enough, and this place also designs itself, designs me, to make the suffering just as psychological as not. 

Who the hell knows, right? That sounds like something this place would do.

As I crawl, until I get very nearly to the point of full regeneration, I check my stat screen.

HUNGERING GHOUL: LOWEST TIERTHAUMIELSIN: 137ASPECTS:

VIOLENCE: 14One’s ability to cause Harm and Suffering

DESIRE: 11One’s ability to Perceive and Influence indirectly

CONSUMPTION: 11One’s ability to Devour and Endure

COWARDICE: 9One’s ability to Avoid harm and find Escape

TYRANNY: 10One’s ability to Command and Dominate

SALVATION: N/AOne’s ability to Exist

COMMANDMENTS:YOU POSSESS NOTHING. YOU ARE NOTHING. SUFFER AND BECOME.

GNOSIS:MANIPULATION OF SIN (2nd TIER)One’s being is defined by SIN, but through comprehension, through will, a SINner may shape that definition, turning their acts of un-grace into specific steps, specific changes, and further distance from the ABOVE. More than just a thing to imbibe, the true manipulator can wield SIN as fuel, as lubricant, as multiplier of harm.

WOUNDS:BROKEN GULLET (COMMON)Shattered pieces of what was a face, what was a throat, forcing one’s hunger to overwhelm and allowing them to shovel anything into the wound that causes it.SUFFERING STOMACH (Uncommon):Torn open and made to drench flesh in pain and acid, an organ birthing violent digestion that burns through living and Still matter just the same.

MANIFESTATIONS:YOU POSSESS NOTHING. YOU ARE NOTHING. SUFFER AND BECOME.

TITLES:“ONE WHO ENDURES STILLNESS” (COMMON)Trapped, unable to move or even breathe, this SINNER has maintained their consciousness, has kept their sanity and self, refusing the erosion of Stillness.+1 TYRANNY+2 CONSUMPTION+15% STEALTH WHEN PERFECTLY STILLSIN DEGRADATION SLOWED BY 7%

Close to another evolution. I’m tempted to dump more into my Aspects, honestly, to power-level myself somehow. Maybe I could find a little hole, or dig another one, and just sit and meditate for a while. That would probably be the ideal solution, actually, the “right” thing to do, to enter isolation and breathe until I have filled up every possible bit of my “stats”. Except that I don’t know how much that maximum would be. For all I know, I could get every Aspect into the hundreds before I reach some sort of cap, if there even is one. 

But even if I knew, even if I had some kind of time-table or understanding of this place, it would still demand of me that I stay in a goddamn hole. Alone. 

In spite of everything, I still don’t want that. In spite of my experience of community in this place being a goddamn nightmare, I still crave it. Part of the human condition, right? An eternal desire to connect. To be a person amongst people, above all else, above even meaning sometimes.

Maybe my self-assigned purpose would be best empowered by infinite patience and infinite meditation, power through breath and inaction. 

But fuck that. Fuck that. 

I can make up just as many counter-arguments for the other side of the debate. Maybe I’ll get better evolutions by being more active. Maybe some areas have more SIN than others, and I need to find better places to breathe in. More people mean I’ll have more opportunities to learn, to get more information, to figure out another GNOSIS and more about how the system works, and more and more and more. 

And at the end of the day, as much as I need knowledge and context and resources, as much as isolation might better protect me, as much as all possibilities have advantages and demands, two things stand out.

I will not let this place define me.

I don’t want to be alone. 

So when I find the claw marks in the wall, dug deep into the stone like hand-prints, I don’t hesitate to turn and follow them up the tunnel and further into the dark.