BELOW: CRAWL 04 (Patreon)

Using the skill is easy, if that is what it is. A skill, I mean. There’s a lot of overlapping systems of power, and part of me is sort of glad that I don’t have anything from the other categories yet. If a WOUND is a physical change that empowers as it harms, and GNOSIS is my understanding of SIN and such, then the skill feels more intrinsic, something that doesn’t have any clear signs of physically transforming me.

But almost immediately I’m hit by the realization this might not have been the best choice. The others may have been way shittier, but this one really lives up to its name. 

Everything outside of what I’m actively thinking about feels… dulled? Or blurry? I want to follow the beast right now, so its back and the tunnel itself feels incredibly clear, but if I change my mind to “find the way back to the legionaries”, then all of a sudden it gets hard to keep track of the way forward. My awareness of the space behind me gets so much louder, my memory of the steps and twists and turns taken so much clearer, and thinking of the beast ahead of me or noticing anything feels like trying to keep track of a dream. The vague overview is there, but nothing else, not unless I start “wanting” something else.

My first thought about my choice is regret. Like, real regret.

Then, as an experiment, I think broader.

I want to find someplace safe.

My attention diffuses, wildly. Suddenly I feel like I’m too aware of too much, unable to properly focus but also taking in everything. It’s too broad, pulling my attention every which way, making me focus on going forward and back. I feel like there’ll be a turn to the right somewhere, and that there’s somewhere else, down the tunnel further, much further. 

It’s vague, too broad, and not really very clear at all. Not like when I’m thinking of the beast or of the legionaries. Maybe I need a specific goal, or maybe knowing more about things makes the Desire clearer. 

I don’t spend any SIN on it yet. I need every single drop I can get my hands on. 

Every drop I get from breathing goes straight into my Aspects. 

Not that I have much. It’s terrible, how dramatically the mind adjusts to things. One fresh bout of cannibalism, and suddenly, all of that breathing and all of the SIN it brings feels so, so slow. It’s been hours upon hours, and I’ve spent all of that time breathing, unlike before. 

+24 SIN

That’s like four, five bites of someone, and it’s taken me close to…

Well, time is hard in the dark, with no real changes to take note of. I think I’ve gotten worse at it too, after my time in my tunnel carved into the stone, away from the place calling itself Home. But I estimate, vaguely, that it’s been a little over five hours. Just moving directly, without hesitation, forward. 

If not for the fact that everything hurts literally all of the time, I might even be feeling exhausted right now.

I spend the walk experimenting and allocating my SIN points, which comes out to three Aspect points.

I spend one, putting it into into Cowardice. Avoiding harm and finding escape are pretty good priorities right now, and running away strikes me as a bit more likely to succeed than using Violence to kill this thing, or Tyranny to try and control it. And that last Aspect is… not my favorite, even now. 

It’s all fine. It’s fine. The fear of the beast is enough to keep me present, and I’ve gotten very used to spending time doing repetitive actions in the dark. It tides me over until the beast stops. 

After a half-dozen twists and turns over hours and hours of walking, it pauses. Stops at an intersection, where the tunnel goes on in one direction, a jagged, slanted hole slips out one side of it, and a hole, dark and slim, opposite that wall. Its head turns, just enough that one of those dead black eyes stares at me from over its too-wrong shoulder joint. 

And then it turns, offering no more acknowledgement than not murdering me, and reaches up into the hole. With a flex of its many-jointed limb, it;s climbing up, and from one clawed limb to the next, it vanishes into that space above. 

I want to find the closest safe place that I can stay at close to this beast.

Immediately, my perception slips and turns towards a little crevice, a divot in the almost-organic tunnel’s winding shape. Everything else becomes harder to notice, trying to slip away from me, trying to become unimportant in the face of the absolute focus that slams into me about that divot. 

Everything goes away but that. 

I want to be aware of where I am.

All of that supernatural awareness disappears almost instantly, leaving me a bit disoriented from the rapid shifting of perspectives. But one thing was clear enough– the tunnel where the beast disappeared into was completely and utterly erased from my mind until I let the skill go. 

So fuck me, this skill sucks right now. If it destroys my ability to perceive danger whenever I’m looking for safety, doesn’t that just…

Of course, there’s still no fucking way back. The skill’s chosen, and even when I try, I can’t find that cold water, that dark place of the fugue that I went to when it was asking me how I wished to change.

Ugh. It’s fine. It does seem to do what’s promised. 

I can refine what I’m asking for, the things that I want. The skill is, theoretically, pretty damn powerful, but the way it absolutely destroys my awareness of my surroundings and of things I’m not actively thinking about is a goddamn problem. But! When it changes, my perception rushes back in, and tracking the empty spaces, the ones that I can identify, anyways, tells me everything opposite of what I was looking for. 

Which means that this divot is, in fact, the “closest safe space that I can stay at close to this beast”. Any closer to the hole it disappeared into is fucking scary-gone from my awareness, and the rest of the tunnel, plus that big fuckass crevice in the wall, were pretty vague to me. So. No closer to the little hole, or it stops being safe real quick. 

The divot is just large enough that I can curl up in it. It hurts to touch, my skin feeling overly sensitive or the rock feeling overly sharp against me, but it’s no different than absolutely anywhere else. I’m just noticing it because I’m laying down against it, letting my body slip into the space and quieting myself. 

The claustrophobia comes back. Like an old friend, helping my heart race, metaphorically speaking. Very metaphorically, considering that my heart only beats once every few minutes, which is once every few breaths. 

I lay there against the ground, quiet as can be, and just focus on my breathing. 

Can’t sleep. Can’t get any real rest. But I can breathe. 

Which means I can accumulate SIN. Which means I can play around with my new skill. 

Every time I try to push SIN into the skill, which feels sort of like pushing it into the Aspect but not quite, it slips off. Not enough to really grab on to. It flows in, then back out. In, then back out. 

I wait. And I wait. And I wait. 

Eventually I hit 40 SIN. Enough for two new Aspect points if I wanted it. And that’s literally always useful, goddamnit. 

But I wait. 

I hit fifty. 

Ten hours, almost. Enough for a full sleep, and then some, if only I could still sleep. At least if I’m going by the idea that I’m breathing at a steady rate, which I’m not, but when it’s the only fucking way I have to tell time, well. It’s good enough. 

Enough for three Aspect points. And every time I try to push it into the skill’s active manifestation, it does nothing, like the engine won’t even start.

I try modifying my questions. Reframing my desires. Every time, my awareness shifts wildly, but I trust, for now, that I’m still safe enough to experiment. So I keep trying.

I want to find someone weaker than me that I’m capable of eating

My attention divides and comes apart, drifting along multiple directions, but when I try to push into it?

Not enough SIN.

I want to find a bed

A narrower band of perspective, one that points me back the way I came.

Not enough SIN.

I want to find something that I can use as a weapon

Broad, and again, not enough SIN.

It goes on like that for a while. 

And then–

I want to find something that will get the beast to keep me around for longer

COST OF SIN: 57

I don’t even hesitate. I pay it immediately. 

And suddenly, it’s like the version of the skill I’ve been using so far gets overwritten. I fall into a sort of hole in myself, where every single angle, every single possibility, reduces down to a narrow focus. I couldn’t look away from it if I wanted to, because it’s all I can see at all. 

The hallway has shifted down to nothing except a thin band of space between one wall and the other. The divot I’m in, my body, the shape of me, every single thing has come apart and gone away except the pathway to my objective. Like I can’t even see anything anymore, a multiplied version of how the skill has worked so far. 

I know, know, fundamentally, that if I go down the tunnel in the direction it is pointing me in, then I will find what I have asked. What that thing is, if it’ll kill me, or literally anything else in the world?

Gone. 

It’s terrifying. It feels like someone’s scraped out my own brain. Like they’ve hollowed me out of everything except that one horrific purpose, that one absolute and untouchable reality, where every single part of me points only to one place. To one want. To one idea.

It’s horrific.

I can’t bring myself to move. 

It’s like a hyperawareness of every single part of myself. Every single action I can take. I should get up like this to preserve energy so I walk like that, one step then the next, and then I go forward for approximately this many paces and then I–

Cancel. Cancel the skill. Cancel the goddamn skill. 

COST OF SIN: 29

Half of the amount it took to activate it, rounded up. Lovely. Fucking lovely.

I manage to keep myself still. It doesn’t actually force me to do anything, just tells me what to do, or what I can do, or what I “should” do(?). Thank every god that’s listening and that’s real and that isn’t that I’m not forced to act, that it doesn’t make me do what I ask of it. 

There would be advantages to that, part of me thinks. Ways that that could be helpful, even. I’d have to be incredibly careful with it, obviously, but–

Gods the fucking horror.

I stay and breathe until I have enough points. Hours and hours later, I pay the cost.

My vision expands, the overwhelming scream of what to do finally fading away, leaving only its lesser, perceptual version behind. Instantly it’s like my entire mind opens back up, like that self-imposed lobotomy suddenly healed, and oh it is a relief. 

Just the normal stuff. Just the normal, overwhelming, horrifying way that my perception is forcefully shifted every time I think about anything.

I hate it.

It makes me want to die. 

Instantly, the skill breaks, opening wide and turning to nothing. It vanishes.

Nothing. 

Like there’s no limitations on my awareness at all. No alterations to my ability to perceive things, nowhere my mind is forced to look, nothing dragging my attention down a myopic pathway.

I don’t know if I like that. I like it very, very much, and I don’t know if I like that.

I felt that I wanted to die, and the skill that tells me where to go and what to do to get there vanishes from me.

I can deactivate it. I have a way of neutralizing the way that the skill neuters my sense of self and my sense of the world. 

And the fact that I can deactivate it like this means that the skill does not know, will not say, or cannot find any possible way for me to die. 

I keep thinking I’ve already gotten used to the ways this place hurts me. The way it breaks little pieces of me and reassures me that it’s going to keep them broken, and break them worse, and there’s absolutely nothing at all I can do. 

Again, it tells me. Again, the ABYSS whispers to me what it has already told me before. 

I can’t die. There is no dying here.

I’m here forever. We’re all here forever. 

There is no dying. Only suffering. 

I take a little while to recover. A little while to remember how to breathe, and that I should. Eventually, I come back to myself. 

What a goddamn waste of eighty six goddamn SIN points. What a fucking waste. 

Except that I learned. I learned a lot, and got reminded of something even more important. So it’s not a total waste. No matter how much it feels like it.  

Ok. 

Ok. I know how it works now. I can handle this.

The beast hasn’t moved. I think I heard it shift once, maybe twice, the entire time that I’ve been here, beyond the few hours where my awareness got crippled. Just the lightest little scraping sound up there. 

I want to know how long it will stay in there.

Heh. Hehehe. That’s funny,

The skill points me directly into the hole. 

Yeah. Yeah, that’ll tell me how long it’s staying in there, especially if it stops staying in there to come and fucking kill me.

And it might do that anyways when it comes out if I have no SIN to give it. Always a goddamn gamble, isn’t it? Always risking everything, because I have nothing less to risk.

Another ten hours or so pass me by as I keep breathing.

I want to find something weak enough that I can defeat it with minimal risk that I can bring back within a few hours to feed the beast and convince it that I am worth keeping around.

COST OF SIN: 22

Ok. More specific means becomes cheaper, then? 

Cancel the skill.

COST OF SIN: 138

Alright, so more specific means easier to activate, harder to cancel. Good to know. 

Though I’ve sort of absolutely fucked myself, right, because unless I sit here for days and manage to keep SIN circulating around my core to push it past the THAUMIEL threshold, I can’t cancel this one. 

Cool. Well. I was sort of intending to follow through on this one anyways, so fuck it. 

I crawl out of my divot, every action guided and my understanding of every other possibility excised away from me.