BELOW: CRAWL 13 (Patreon)

Breathe in. Breathe out. Breathe in. Breathe out. 

I’ve got nothing better to do, after all. 

The beast does return, eventually. Both of my companions steer well clear of it. It seems like they’ve really hit it off, which doesn’t surprise me. Laroia is basically a lovely old grandmother, as far as I’m aware, and Samir, though I know little about his history, is just generally a decent guy. If not for how much older he is than her, she’d be babying him even worse than she is. He, in turn, is doing his best to teach her while learning the version of sign language she speaks. 

I pick up a good amount just by watching them, despite how I’m not really able to practice anything. No hands and all. But I watch and learn, which is about all I can do while I’m just sitting here getting some SIN back. 

Can’t let that happen again. The next time the beast wants its tithe, I either need to have enough SIN to satisfy it, or have enough strength to make it think twice. 

Breathe in. Breathe out. 

I commit the act of vile respiration, the SIN of continued existence, over and over again as I heal. 

Eventually, I’m strong enough to sit back up. My Ossified Jigsaw WOUND makes it hard to stabilize myself, but when I get the hang of it, I can kind of take my pieces apart and put them back together, rebuilding an improvised ribcage to help myself move about and then letting it heal back to “normal”. I follow along, learning language in drips and drabs between bouts of meditation and such. 

It’s almost funny. I’m finally learning a language I can speak with these two, and just like with my Broken Gullet’s effects on my mouth, I don’t have the tools necessary to speak it at all. I can still scribble in my blood with my feet, though, so that’s something. 

“Think we should keep hiding?” Samir asks. “Won’t it come back again?”

Laroia shakes her head. “I don’t think so. It’s never bothered to come for us before in here. I think it was because Worm went out and reminded it of us.”

“Why did he do that?”

“She did that for… a reason, I guess. I don’t really know.”

Question, I awkwardly scribble onto the floor. Then I point to the word with my foot, then at Samir. 

“You… have a question for me?” he signs.

I shake my head no. Point to the word, then to him, then to the tunnel outside, then back to him. 

“She wanted to see if it would react to you being here, I guess?”

A nod. 

“Oh! Because it had the two of us, but then it was three, so you had to check?”

Nod again. 

Since it ate my arms, it’s come and gone twice, so it’s probably been a few days each time. Give or take. It’ll be a while before I fully get back either arm, but I’ll be mobile again sooner than later, and it won’t be too long before I can head back out on another run with the beast. In the meantime, I eat rocks and meditate. 

I am significantly better at meditating than either Samir or Laroia. 

It’s not their fault, really. I don’t think either of them has been paralyzed while forced to stare at a horrific torture victim for over a week straight, or been locked in a cave barely larger than their body for a month or two. Or had to crawl through a tunnel made of their own stomach acid, alone, burning, for… maybe another month?  

All excellent practice opportunities for a bit of active mental quietude in the face of every human need imaginable. But they do try, at least. 

Both of them breathe semi-frequently, once or twice every few minutes, unlike my more constant inhale-exhale rhythm. They’re accumulating SIN, slowly but steadily, and I’m doing my best, without being able to speak, to walk them through being able to actually sense that. If I can get them to be able to gain their first GNOSIS, they can contribute some to the beast’s tax, making it less likely I’ll end up in this situation again, and it’ll hopefully help them long term. Fuck knows it’s helped me.

I keep my SIN in three parts. Every first SIN, I put towards my total, storing it for later. My second, I push outward, making it circulate through my flesh, which I think motivates it to heal faster, even if it doesn’t ever really get officially “spent”. The third, I keep in a close circuit around my central pool, continuing the exercises of meditation and self-improvement while I’m trapped. 

I want to heal quicker, and keeping multiple layers of the orbit going, some around my core, some around my body, is a hell of a lot trickier than the already annoyingly difficult one-orbit trick is. But it’s good practice, and since I’m not spending any of it just yet, I need something to do.

Besides train my new skills, I guess. 

I have Laroia and Samir both look away from me for a bit, to test out my least well-known skill, and find that it’s just as much of a game changer as Lust’s Blinders is. 

Whenever I’m unseen, moving becomes… well, easier isn’t the right word. It becomes more… possible? The description is vague, but simultaneously, entirely accurate. 

Yours is the aspect of scavenger. Crawling thing. Maggot of dead flesh. Vulture over still-walking corpses-to-be. Your cowardice is that of the opportunist, the practicalist, whose fear defines boldness and opportunity as much as it does your downfall. If you are seen, that you are a worm is known. If you are unseen, you crawl, squirm, climb, wriggle through the world as monster and exploiter. At the cost of SIN, be as your nature demands even when seen. 

Beyond the flowery, over-descriptive fuckin’ mess of whatever the system’s trying to tell me about, the skill itself is simple. People see a worm when they look at me. Which fits, cause that’s the fucking name I chose. But when they aren’t looking at me, crawling, squirming, climbing and wriggling become more possible than before. Muscle groups move in ways I don’t expect, bones, especially with my Ossified Jigsaw WOUND, become anchor points and clicking little bits of architecture to climb with, and even my skin seems to… move. There’s not exactly much room to move around in the little cave I’ve made for us, but in that limited space, I find myself moving actually faster than I can walk.

Not faster than I can run, though. It’s not quite a sprinter’s skill, but I don’t need it to be, I guess. I can crawl and wriggle vertically just as easily as horizontally, and just as quickly, and the more I lay flat against a surface, the faster I go. It’s a physical thing, unlike Lust’s Blinders, but just as impossible, using every single part of my body simultaneously to let me move through tunnels, walls, ceilings, all with a supernatural ease. 

Overall, considering I had no other options, I’d say it was a pretty good pick. Though the drawback is pretty obvious.

Every time Laroia or Samir turn back to look at me, or get a glimpse of me out of the corner of their eyes, the skill shuts down. 

I get maybe a millisecond of warning every time, enough to dump some SIN into the skill’s active effect if I want to, but the skill is, for want of another word, blatant. If someone sees me, it deactivates, no matter if I’m crawling on the wall or moving at a powerwalker’s pace across the ceiling. It allows for more avenues of movement and stealth than before, but if I lose that stealth, the skill doesn’t do fuck-all unless I feed it.

Ever-Starving Beastling is even easier to test out. I spend some of the time we have while I’m healing to go ahead and expand our little cave further, eating down into the walls and floor, and that makes for a good opportunity to test that, too. I eat until I’m more or less “full”, stuffed up with rocks, and then digest them away slowly. 

No need to shit in hell. A victory for small mercies, I suppose. I… sort of wonder about that, actually. Why not make us have to shit and piss? 

I guess my body just has a 100% nutrient absorption rate from rocks. And cannibalism. Haven’t exactly had a chance to eat anything else. 

Anyways, I digest it away, and then I wait. 

I get hungry. I get hungry really, really fast. I digest faster too, I think, but mostly I get hungry fast, independently of whether or not there’s food in my stomach. I’m always just a few moments away from starvation nibbling away at me.

But the hungrier I get, the more wrong I feel. 

Laroia notices it first.

“Did you get… longer? Taller. I meant taller.”

And as it turns out? I had. 

The longer I go without eating, the worse it gets. According to Samir and Laroia, I start to look, in their words, “feral”. I think I feel the teeth of my Broken Gullet get longer, even the ones made of just cartilage and broken bone, and I think I get more of them, too. My legs get longer, the claws on my feet more pronounced, and I feel… stronger isn’t the right word for it. 

I feel like I can do more with less. Like I can lift a car with my bare hands, even though it would destroy me afterwards. Sure, I get some extra muscle to go along with that, I get larger, but most of my strength seems like it comes from being able to be more violent overall. 

In fact, it’s as I think of that that I notice the Aspect changes. Wasn’t looking for them before I thought to check.

Ever-Starving Beastling

Your starvation is your monstrous nature realized through SIN.

VIOLENCE +1

Gradually, the bonus increases. By the time I’m almost ready to start gnawing at my own regenerating bits, it’s evolved, once, then twice, then three times total.

Ever-Starving Beastling

Dedication to penance will not save you. It only heightens your nature.

VIOLENCE +4

CONSUMPTION +2

COWARDICE +1

I learn a few important things from this. For one, the system seems to define “bestial” as something different than Desire and Tyranny. More importantly, the temporary bonus from the skill doesn’t push Violence into offering a skill. Thirdly, it is, in fact, temporary. 

After enough rocks, the skill’s effects fade, bit by bit. I don’t, in fact, experience constant hunger, which is the best part of the whole skill, I guess. On the one hand, overwhelming starvation does a lot to a person, and mine comes on faster than before. In fact, every time the bonus appears and then gets cleared away by eating, I think I get hungrier a little faster.

Maybe someday, it’ll make it so that I have to eat meat by the buckets to feel full for even a moment. Maybe, if I can manage it, I can starve myself to the point that I have a hundred additional points in my Aspects. Maybe I’ll even get used to the pain of it. 

I doubt it. Physical agony may have infinite variations that can make it through even the toughest of pain barriers, but starvation is a different beast. I never get used to it. It never goes away or fades into the background or becomes manageable. Once it reaches a deep enough level, it just sort of takes over, like the brain prioritizes itself. My personality is predicated on not starving, on having resources, and all of my software changes over, slowly but surely, into a different thing, which cares only for making the hunger stop, once that stops being true.

It’s not hard to see why people would eat anything after a certain point. If not for sheer willpower and having had a chance to learn what to expect, it would be even worse. As it is, I make it through three notifications of increased Aspects before my brain clicks over and I finally decide it’s gone too far for safety, and I go back to eating rocks.

Even though there’s meat right there. Fresh off the bone. Crunchy crunchy bones. Full of marrow. Caging the softer, slimier bits inside. It would be so easy. So much easier than the rocks. I just know my hunger would leave so much faster. 

I could even eat myself, if I didn’t want to hurt the others. I could spare some pieces. I could even optimize the process. I could figure out how to make it work without it affecting me too much.

…

Yeah. It was time for rocks. 

A few days pass like this, figuring out the mechanics of my new skills and how they’ve changed things. I’m only a few points away from an evolution in Violence and a potential, theoretical evolution in Desire, but that’s not how this is going to go. You can only gamble when you’ve got money at home, otherwise it’s just a convoluted way to kill yourself. I forgot that fact, pushed too far, and though the payoff was huge, I mishandled it. 

I keep some SIN for my skills, some SIN for my bank, and some SIN for the beast. 

After a few days of this, and of keeping my stomach at a relatively even neutral keel, and of meditating and teaching and whiling away the time in our mutual suffering, I get my shoulders back.

Mostly. And the collarbones are still fucked. And I think some of my ribs are still floating a bit more than the Ossified Jigsaw WOUND should have. 

But I have my skill, so I can crawl. And I can kinda spit acid aways. And I can run if I really need to, though not having arms for balance is going to be a bitch. 

And I don’t think the beast is just going to let us stay in here forever. 

So long as it gets a cut, and we don’t get in its way, I don’t think it’ll give a shit about us. But letting us coexist peacefully? No.

I don’t know how I know, but I do. Maybe it’s my points in Desire, maybe it’s instinct, maybe I saw something in those all-black eyes. 

It wants a tithe, or it will want an easier meal. It’s only practical, really. Only instinctual, perhaps. 

So when I hear the claws scratching again, in spite of the nubs that make up my arms right now, I use Slithering Worm to emerge cleanly out of the tunnel and the wider cave behind it, ready to face the beast which I have hitched all of our fates to.