BELOW: CRAWL 17 (Patreon)

The air feels cool on my skin. It makes me realize that it hasn’t felt cool in… ever, actually. Only ever cold, hot, or nothing at all, always shaped to be exactly as uncomfortable as possible, as painful and attention-grabbing as can be. 

But the air in here is cool on my skin.

+1 SIN

The floor is smooth. No ridges or scratches, no bumps or lumps, just a pristinely finished, utterly flat surface that puts anything else I’ve found to shame. Even the tunnel I slid down wasn’t like this, though it was similarly clean, because it still had that sloping, semi-organic feel to it that most of the tunnels I’ve found have. 

But I step through the door after turning the doorknob and step onto a perfectly smooth floor. Like walking into a building, its air cool on my body. 

It’s so dark in here. All the shadows look the same, none darker than the rest, painting everything an even and utter black. None of the lines and distinctions I can make out there in the tunnels, everywhere, really, just the darkness of an unlit and windowless room. It is deeply, profoundly unnatural to everything I’ve experienced in hell so far. 

But Lust’s Blinders pulls my attention forward, indicating to me a pathway that I can’t ignore in the surrounding space that I have no choice but to. 

I want to die.

The skill cancels itself out briefly, finding an Desire it literally can’t fulfill. It frees my mind to actually examine my surroundings. 

There’s no breeze in here. No movement in the air at all, actually, save from my own actions. I place a hand to my right and find a wall, just as smooth as the floor, the edge of the doorway I just stepped through marking the line between inside and outside. There’s even a doorframe, however mild it might be, just a raised section between door and wall, further cementing the fact that this place is designed. 

Slowly, I walk my way around the room I’m in, one hand on the wall beside me at all times, acting as my guide in the darkness. I’m forced to navigate entirely by feel, which has at least one advantage– it helps me to tell just how much my increased Desire Aspect has altered me. As I keep one hand free, gently and cautiously moving it through the air to find something, it touches on a bit of stone, erected a bit further from the wall. 

With just that touch, the ways that BELOW has altered me become loud and clear. I know the shape of it, the details of its texture, the way its weight balances and the fault lines in it, however slight, just by touch. The Aspect of Desire rules over indirect manipulation and perception, and this gives me an opportunity to examine how much I’ve changed without the biases of long term adjustment like with my eyes, without my skill overwhelming and manipulating my awareness.

I can tell that I’m touching a couch.

Obviously not a real couch. There’s no softness to it, none of the coarseness or comfort of the materials that a couch is conventionally made from. It’s made of stone, just like everything else, but by running my hand along it, pushing at it just a bit, I get enough feedback that my brain fills in blanks it shouldn’t be able to. 

I’m touching the arm of a couch made of stone. 

As I keep walking, the room becomes clearer and clearer. I see the little desk, the coffee table, the dining room table, even a hanging light fixture, none of them real, all of them sculpted to perfection. Too perfect, if anything– not a single flaw or rough edge in sight. All so smooth that my fingers can roll right off of them with barely any friction. 

A perfect replica of a perfect little home. Well designed, artfully sculpted, and completely drowned in the dark. I cover the entire space, bit by bit, constantly going back and forth from the wall. 

Furniture. An approximation of a kitchen. Two doors, both closed, and, to the left of where I entered, a stairway going up.

I want to go down a safe pathway to the closest source of SIN that I can harvest without being torn apart or eaten or trapped.

Lust’s Blinders comes back “online”, and my mental map of the room narrows down to a path to the opposite side of it, eliminating everything but one of the closed doors. 

It comes open easily, soundless, the door’s mechanisms just as flawless as the rest of this place. Sculpted to perfection, without any of the imperfections that would make this place feel even slightly real. I stretch a hand out slowly, touching the walls to either side, and then a ceiling, tilting down as I let my hand drift forward. 

Crouching, I confirm my theory as I find the spot where the ground slips away to nothing, falling down a good few inches before resuming. Stairs again. Going down this time. 

A basement. Because this place wasn’t bad enough already. I feel like I can’t breathe in here, like I’m suffocating but in a new way, less like there’s no air, more like it’s too heavy, too dense. 

+1 SIN

It’s been barely a few minutes since I walked in. That’s fast for SIN accumulation, I think. I keep breathing– might as well take advantage while I can, at least before I wander down in the dark and… I don’t know, get lost in a forever-maze. My skill is pretty damn useful, but it’s just a skill, and if it can change its mind or modify where it’s taking me as things change, then it’s not all powerful, self-evidently. And even if it seemed like it was, I wouldn’t trust it. Nothing that BELOW offers me is done out of kindness, or out of some source of profound goodness. 

Still, I need to get stronger. Fast. And if I can’t find the right criteria to tell me that this is a bad idea, then I can’t let myself get lost to paranoia, not when there’s power for the taking.

I take a step down the stairs. Then another. Then another. 

The air gets cooler as I go down. Not enough to be painful, but the temperature differential makes itself known. I’ve experienced heat, born of bodies and blood, and discomfort from the air on my skin, but not much else, so the cool, relaxing air of this place still feels alien. It getting colder as I go down is… Well, almost worth it for the novelty alone. There are worse places to suffer than one with air conditioning. 

Step. Step. Step. Each one searching, each one trying to make sure I don’t fall into a hole or stumble upon reaching open floor. The stairs feel like they’re going down for an hour, but I only count fifteen or so before I hit smooth open floor. 

It’s cold under my feet. The sensation of the stone, now changed from its normal temperature, makes me feel weirdly nude in a way I haven’t really taken note of in a while. My Broken Gullet and Expanded Mind WOUNDS only worsen that sensation, creating more open spaces into and on my skin for the cold to seep in from. I feel out of place here, wrong, in a way I haven’t felt before, not since I arrived in hell. 

I don’t let it stop me. Having entered this new space, I put my hand against the wall, repeating the process from the “living room” above me. Again, my higher Desire Aspect helps me to feel and process more information, pulling in a sense of the space. 

It’s matched almost precisely to the contours of the room directly above, equally square, equally smooth. I almost expect to find another couch and assorted furniture carvings, but no, this room is featureless and empty, save for a single door at its opposite end. 

It’s mirrored exactly to the room upstairs. Exactly. The door I just came in from is the door that, upstairs, would lead me higher up. There is an equivalent of the front door on my left, but as I cross my hand over it I easily find that there are no hinges and no doorknob this time.

And there’s another door leading down. 

Lust’s Blinders makes it clear where it wants me to go. 

Sometimes I really fucking hate being in hell. 

I advance, my freshly-attached new arm making tiny little scratching sounds as its claws drag over the stone and guide me over towards where I need to go to meet my Desire. 

The door opens soundlessly again. Again, there are stairs going down. 

Only fourteen of them this time. One less than last time. 

The next room is just the same, except that this time the finish is… rougher. Slightly less smooth. Still seamless, still silky, but like a slightly lower-quality silk, a bit less perfect than before. It makes it easier to walk, easier to feel at home, considering it’s not quite so supernaturally frictionless, but it makes me feel nervous as I approach the next door down.

Three doors in the room. Just an outline of the door heading out this time, with the empty doorframe I came in from and the closed door on the opposite side. 

My Desire draws me deeper. 

Another room. 

And then another. 

Every time, they get a little more functional, less professional than the one above. More awkward grooves, more signs of active craftsmanship, a rougher finish than before. By the sixth room down, it’s almost the same quality as the stone outside the tunnel to the house. There’s always a closed door, though, leading further down than before, straight down, like a drill-shaft going into the earth. 

Except by the sixth floor down, the door is haphazard. Poorly made, with only one working hinge, and it both groans and creaks as I pull it open. 

This time there are only nine steps down, and the ceiling is notably shorter in the following chamber. The doorway, open and dark and yawning, promises me that I’ll have to crouch to avoid beating my head against the roof. 

Easier and harder with my Ossified Jigsaw WOUND. My knees as they are can’t support nearly enough weight, but I can rearrange them, click them into place against each other to make new shapes that won’t hold up to a walk or a run but will most certainly let me crawl more easily. 

The scavenger worm, deeper and deeper into the flesh of this place. Down one more room. 

I let my hand scrape gently against the wall, inch by inch as I crawl oh so slowly into the space. Again, Desire lets me see experience more of the space than I should be able to. 

It’s more of a crawlspace than a room, this time. There are even spots where the ground meets the ceiling in awkward pillars, like someone never finished excavating the whole space. The ground here isn’t smooth at all, in fact rougher than the stone outside, like it was torn apart as it was dug up and no one ever cleaned it up after the fact. It’s smaller than the rooms upstairs too, covering less space. 

And it’s cold. Properly cold. Cold enough that I think, if I could see, I would see my breath before my face. Cold enough that it’s starting to hurt. 

I advance anyways. Lust’s Blinders helps, making the cold, the dark, even the fear easier to ignore. I crawl forward, one step at a time, my one arm used as a third leg to ensure that I always have it ready ahead of me, prepared to strike if I find anything. 

And I do. Right in the middle of the room, sunken into a little pit, is something cold and soft and wet. 

It’s not blood. I would see blood, I think, even in this weird altered space that keeps fucking with my perceptions. It’s something else. My fingers touch it and it sinks in a bit, then springs back slowly. 

I… have no idea what it is, actually. It feels almost like how I think of SIN, like a weird black tar, but it’s gelatinous, springy, kept in a real, actual shape, rather than the slime that I picture in my mind inside myself. I touch it again, and again, nothing. It just sinks, and then comes back. 

Slowly, I push my newly-transplanted Strong Arm That Hates into it, then into it, trying to see if it’ll pop if I press down hard enough. 

Instead, my finger sinks into it.

And then it sinks into me. 

It treats my flesh like a pond, and it’s like a higher-density fluid falling down into water. It slips past my skin, falls into me like it’s being drunk up and absorbed, and it’s so cold, cold enough that I shiver and flinch and spasm. It starts slipping up past my arm, shooting into me, pulling a scream out of me in a gargled sound of panic as I literally feel it climb into me and through me. It falls in and my arm is a stream and it goes downstream towards me and–

Ba-bump

My heart beats and it hurts so fucking bad, like a fist in the middle of me punching all of my veins at once, making my blood move in a way that it hasn’t been. It makes my veins shriek, the tingling of sensation and heat where there usually isn’t any sharp against the cold and against the cold that’s now floating inside my fucking chest, right where–

Oh fuck.

I keep screaming, and I want to curse, because it just keeps–

Ba-bump

Two beats in less than a minute, that’s a new record, fucking shit that hurts so goddamn bad, god, it’s like someone shoving a syringe full of ice-water through my fucking sternum into my fucking organs. I feel heavier all of a sudden, something in my chest literally weighing me down and moving my center of gravity and–

Ba-bump

Oh go fuck yourself, oh my god this hurts so fucking bad. 

Ba-bump

Piece of shit bastard piss of fuck I hate this place so fucking much what the goddamn hell

Ba-bump

I inhale, as hard as I can, and the air is so heavy that it feels like drinking fucking treacle, like molasses in my throat and making my lungs hurt almost as bad as my chest. Still, it counterbalances some of the weight, and the change is enough to push me to action. I get my arm beneath me, my legs kicking, pushing me back the way I came towards the stairs going up. 

Oh goddamnit, it’s going to be a bitch going up these stairs like this. Like I have a block of ice in the middle of my chest. Absolutely fuck yourself to death, BELOW, no one likes you and it’s for good reason you miserable place of absolute bullshit. 

The pain doesn’t fade, but who the hell even cares? It’s pain. It’s just pain. It can’t stop me, and eventually I’ll get used to it. I have forever, and so long as I have this under control in a few days rather than a few weeks or whatever, I’ll be ready for the Home. Not that this helped with anything. Of course the skill fails me, right? Gives me some– ugh. I can probably use this. It’s probably some kind of power, if I just learn how to figure it out. It’s making my heart beat, right? That’s something, I still don’t know why it doesn’t beat when I’m somehow digesting things and somehow breathing at a regular pace. 

SO COLD

Ba-bump

Slower. Slower than before. Ok. it’s slowing down. Gradually. Like a knot that’s all completely cold in the back of my sternum, fucking me over and over as heavy and as hard as it can manage, but gradually the pace is slowing, and becoming just a pure, violent cold. 

I crawl back up the stairs slowly as I feel my heart occasionally spasm, as if fed by or fighting the cold sludge that feels wrapped around it somehow. 

Up one floor. 

Then another. 

Then another. 

Up out of the cold. Up out of the dark, towards the smooth space above, towards the sculpted space that looks like–

Oh. I get it. That’s why it freaked me out so much when I came in. What makes this place so different, what makes it feel so alien compared to the rest of BELOW.

Ba-bump

It’s not a tunnel. It’s not a natural part of hell. It’s… it’s a home.

The cold in me expands, the knot unravels, the shape inside of me breaks apart and fills my veins and my heart beats one last time, so hard that it feels like it’s going to break my ribcage, so hard that my skin breaks open in places and lets out little streams of crimson all around me, tearing me apart. 

+690 SIN

NECROTHURGY ACQUIRED: “Home That Misses You” (Uncommon)

Well. Shit. 

The SIN floods out into every part of me at once and it makes the heartbeat and the earlier cold feel like a cool summer breeze.