A Gamer's Guide 400 (Patreon)

Silently, unable to bear to look at the city anymore—at the rats and the rats and the rats and the rats—she moved away from the ledge and over to the door. She was just about to start walking down the stairs when she began to hear groaning behind her, turning around just in time to watch as the mound of rats that wore pink glasses began to twitch, tremble, and stagger into a somewhat humanoid shape. The squeaking of the rats had conjoined into a single voice, pitching down, down, into something that was almost human but not quite. The voice, if that is what it was, moaned in near-human pain. 

An arm composed of interlocked rats reached out to her. 

It was disgusting. 

She crossed the distance between them, took the bloated, furry hand in hers, and watched as the rats burst into white flower petals, the air filled with the scent of warmth and freshly baked cake and vanilla soap, and then Kitty was back, naked, but alive.

He staggered into her arms and puked over her shoulder. “Oh, oh, God,” he gurgled. “This was horrible. Why did I do this? I am so fricking dumb of course a miracle that turns everyone who doesn’t love me or hope me or faith me or whatever into rats is going to turn me into rats. Shit. Why do I never think these things through? Or am I just that idiotic? I should be jailed for one million years and blown up with a bomb. No, two bombs. Urrgghhh…” 

She patted him on the back, which made him burp and puke up a bit more… 

Her eyes fell to the floor behind her. 

…Glittergel? No, it was runnier than that. Like—like unicorn snot or something. As she watched the glittery goo pool behind her, a bit of it slipped into the cracks between the rocks that made up the tower, only to then emerge as a beautiful white flower in full bloom, despite the incongruent season. Before she had time to choose whether to be awed or appalled, a rat ran up to it, ate it, and then scampered off. 

His arms still locked around her, he sniffled a bit, only to then suddenly draw in a deep, nasal breath. Sniff, sniff, sniff. “Oh. Oh, no. Gecko, I—” He pushed himself out of her arms and began sniffing the air, eyes moving erratically as his brows sunk over them. “Shoot. Shoot. That wasn’t supposed to…” His feet carried him back to the railing. Below, the city had gone quiet, deathly so. “How many survived? How many…?” Upon realizing the answer, his face flashed back to her, his death’s-head wrinkling up like creased paper to form a mask of what she could only describe as sheer desperation. “It’s not that bad,” he told her. “Not everyone died. All of Leion’s soldiers are fine. And—and a lot of the civilians did survive! At least, somewhere around…” His voice fell to a whisper, and as he whimpered, “Ten thousand,” he shrunk back, as though expecting her to strike him.

Rafiloe’s head-counting had never been that good, but she could at least do basic addition and subtraction. Seventy-thousand minus ten-thousand was sixty-thousand. Sixty-thousand plus forty-thousand was,

“Huh,” she muttered. “A hundred thousand people died just now?” But the air wasn’t choked with the stench of blood. The smoke and the screaming was dissipating. Down below, countless rats swarmed the streets, but even if she had wanted to make an attempt to have the proper emotional reaction, there was simply no way to connect the scampering rodents to genuine lives lost. The memory of two men, two soldiers, so confused and uncertain, collapsing into piles of rats was a fresh memory, but not even that felt real. There had been no blood, and no pain. No harm. One moment they had been alive, and then they had been rats. 

She could not fathom the loss, but she could fathom the fact that this battle had been ended so quickly and decisively that, now, there was a chance that…

Rafiloe pulled up the group chat and checked Maggie’s profile. 

She was still alive. 

She was alive, and now, since all of the enemies were rats, she would be okay. She’d be fine. They could simply go down, meet up with her again, and everything would be perfectly fine. The thought brought hot stuffy warmth to her cheeks and she found herself stumbling into Kitty’s arms, wrapping her arms around him, and sobbing into his chest, saying, “Thank you, thank you, oh, oh, thank you so much,” and she had only barely had time to cross her arms across his back, one over the other, when he slipped out of her arms, and phased down through the floor beneath her feet. 

…Again. 

She watched the spot beneath her feet for a moment or two, wiped the glad tears from her eyes, and eventually decided that if she was anyways going down, she might as well pick him up on the way. 

She paused at the door heading downstairs. It hadn’t gotten everyone. Maybe there was still someone out there, waiting for her to emerge? In return for her paranoia, all she received were the anxious squeaks of thousands of rats. She opened the door to find a mass of rats, swollen and interlocked, each one atop another, lazily turning and squeaking and flicking tails. They didn’t heed her even slightly as she gently stepped over them, glossy black eyes following her gentle tread downstairs with lazy curiosity. A few rats were also going down the stairs, not minding her company. 

Floor by floor, she descended, each floor filled with rats and rats and rats and rats. She kept an eye out for Kitty, but floor by floor, she couldn’t spot him. Hopefully, he hadn’t fallen all the way down into the basement. That’d be such a bother. 

Luckily for her, Rafiloe found Kitty splayed out on the bottom floor, beneath the arch of the main entrance, surrounded by a small troop of soldiers who seemed far too reverent to be enemies. After all, they couldn’t even muster up the courage to approach him where he laid, thrumming with white, pulsating power. Sighting internally, Rafiloe elbowed her way through their little gathering, and there she found him, atop the stone floor, his hand absently touching his breast, the plush carpet half-phasing through his back, a number of rats trying and failing to scale his bare chest. 

What a drama queen, Rafiloe thought to herself, going down on one knee next to him, picking up the rats trying to play on him and depositing them a few feet away. 

“It’s gone,” a melodic voice muttered. 

“What is?” Rafiloe asked, absently pushing away one of the rats trying to get closer to him again. 

His white, glowing hand reached out and grabbed hers. Somehow, she was able to keep herself from flinching. Letting go of the rat, she allowed him to guide her hand to his chest. She could touch it. Even though he was glowing and translucent and not-quite-there she could touch him. “Do you feel it?” His skin felt warm. Warm like an incandescent light bulb. “My brands,” he said, his voice broken but harmonic, trembling and pathetic and humming all the while, “my brands are gone.”

They were. The deep, harrowing grooves that used to adorn his chest and back were gone, replaced by smooth, sheer skin. Worse than that, though, now that she was looking at him properly, now that she looked at him, instead of at the rats and the city, she saw that his face wasn’t quite right. It was almost right. A near-perfect replication of what Kitty was supposed to look like stared up at her, brows pinched up in entirely non-physical pain, his eyes set just a little deeper than normal, his cheek-bones only slightly more pronounced than they had been an hour ago. “What is…?”

“I’m scared,” he said, voice rumbling but beautiful and gentle. “I don’t think I came back right.”

“You’re okay,” she said, even though she didn’t know. She didn’t know anything. “But, I mean…” She chanced a chuckle. “You did reform yourself from rats?”

Her attempt at humor thankfully hit home, as his trembling lips—thinner than they should have been—broke out into a small, almost imperceivable smile. “Yeah. Yeah, that’s—” His chest caved in on itself, imploding, his upper body rearing off the floor in a soundless, wide-mouthed expression of sheer utter pain, and then, just as quickly, his chest exploded, ribs cracking open in a colourless blood-eagle as snakes and rats and bony limbs and flowers and knotted tree branches and broken arrows and ropes of intestine burst from within him, a kaleidoscope of nonsensical images all in white. The things flew out, more and more and more, until the whole lobby seemed filled with them, hanging mid-air for all of three seconds before suddenly snapping back into place, returning into Kitty’s chest, the ribs closing back up, the leaves of a venus fly trap sealing its prey. 

Only when this was finished did Kitty scream. Rafiloe had never heard someone scream like that before. She clutched her ears shut but his wail still somehow pierced through her chest, crushing the breath from her lungs. Around her, the soldiers who had previously merely watched, enraptured by the events, fell over in clattering heaps, their muskets dropping from their hands. Were they dead? Had they died? She couldn’t tell. She didn’t care. 

Kitty thrashed before her, clutching desperately at his head, claws scratching at his own face and eyes, banging his temples against the cold stone floor, legs kicking and chest heaving like a felled animal’s death throes.

It took five seconds for Rafiloe to recognize that she had to do something.

Without knowing why, without knowing if it would even help, she made a grab for his wrists, tearing them away from his head with so little difficulty that it gave her pause. That wasn’t right. He was strong. She knew he was. And yet, as he writhed in sheer agony, she could easily wrap her arms around him, keeping his limbs pinned, pulling him off the floor to keep him from banging his head against it anymore. “It’s okay,” she said, not feeling it, not feeling it at all, but still saying it, “I’m here. You’re okay.”

He fought against her. Animal, shrieking, flailing his whole body, he fought. But he couldn’t escape her. She held him fast. And slowly, like the dying of a record, fading, fading, his scream died down. He sputtered, she shuddered, but in the end, he quieted down, and after what felt like an eternity, she held nothing but his still, immobile body. 

She drew a long, slow breath. Finally. 

She turned to find his eyes trained on her. Dark blots on the world. Swirling, shifting. His face that wasn’t his face—not quite, not anymore—twitched.

<The God of Hope sees you.>

Something cold and slimy crawled across her back, between her shoulder blades, up the nape of her neck, all the way into her skull. Her hands, still holding him, still holding Him, began to shake, weak and brittle. It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay, she chanted listlessly, trying to remember what Kitty’s face looked like normally, warm and smiling, not like this, not a death-mask brought to life, plaster still unmoving, pale and nothing and inanimate. Not eyes like pits. His eyes could be dark sometimes, but they still had light in them, a little glimmer that told her that even though his hands were cold and his heart failed to beat and his lungs were dead, he was still alive, still human, still a person, despite it all.

Not now. She held a body but the eyes weren’t alive. They were something more. 

A rush of footsteps tumbled down the stairs behind her and she jerked her head around in time to face a heap of rats falling down, closely followed by a number of wide-eyed, shaky officers, the same ones that had been shouting about sieges and fire taxes only an hour earlier. Now they stumbled over one another, muttering about the rats and the rats and the rats because what else would they mutter about? Last of the group, Prop stepped out, holding a hand to his chest and the other guiding his descent by the handrail. He turned an infinitely tense face towards where she knelt. What she held.

She followed his gaze to find Kitty, fleshy and technicolor and fully naked. 

“Ah.”