A Gamer's Guide 426 (Patreon)

“Alright, alright. But in that case, I think he’d like to go back to sleep.”

“What are you…?” By pointing a finger at him, I’m able to illuminate the facts for her. Fido yawns, nuzzles his head against her hand for a moment more, and then turns away from her, slithering gently towards my bowels. “No… No, please, Fido… Don’t leave me…!” But she knows he has to go. Bitter tears staining the floor, she has no choice but to let him slip out of her grip, burrowing himself back into my body, below all the maggots. She hiccups. “Fuck. Fuck. So this is the true price of paradise…?”

“All the greatest pleasures are fleeting,” I say. “That’s what makes them so sweet.”

Groaning, dejected, she continues rummaging through my bowels for a bit, but in the end, milk and maggots stuck to her skin all the way to her elbows, she leans back out, unsuccessful. “Nothing but Fido, all coiled up.”

“That’s a shame. Normally, you can get liver, stomach, kidneys, appendix, and a bunch of other neat stuff out of the bowels. But a snake is cool too.”

“His name,” she says, pulling off the little maggots stuck to her arms, “is Fido. Respect it, or taste my wrath.”

“Right, right. Well, in that case, I guess you’ll have to check my chest. I didn’t think there’d be anything really good in there anyways.”

“Your chest, huh…” Scootching closer to my head, she reaches out, wiping off the maggots that nestle between my ribs, sweeping them into my mostly open bowel-area. She pokes one of my ribs. “I don’t want to break your bones, though. I doubt they’d be easy to heal… Hmm…” Face scrunching up, she leans in closer, until my ribcage is mere inches from her face. “Hang on.” Scissor in hand, she quickly slits up one of my arms, and with a maggoty, milky flourish, she pulls out my humerus. 

“Ha-ha, very funny,” I say, but my joke totally flies over her head, since she’s way too focused on inspecting the bone in question. She sniffs it, feels it, looks it over, and finally gives it a lick. Her lips dip down into a frown. “What is it? What’s wrong with my bone?”

“It isn’t bone,” she says. “It’s got a lot of divinity, but… Not bone. Not porus like bone.” Experimentally, she bonks the bone against the floor. Tok tok tok. “Doesn’t sound like bone, either.”

“My bones aren’t bone?”

“I can’t be totally sure, but… I think it might be coral?”

“Coral? Like, the stuff in the seas?”

“Yeah. Except, this doesn’t seem to be alive. Live coral is way more colorful… But it turns white when it dies. Like this,” she says, helpfully waving the bone in the air. “And, before you ask, no, I’m not eating coral. I don’t want to break my teeth, after all.”

Coral bones. Uhuh. Yeah, sure, that sounds reasonable, all things considered.

“It’s a shame you can’t automatically recover anymore. I would love to have your bones.”

“If I figure out how to heal myself, you can have all the bones you like.”

“Hooray, yippie,” she says blankly, stuffing my bone back in its proper place. Crossing her legs, she gives my exposed ribcage a long look. “Do you think I could get in there if I go from the bottom?”

“Absolutely. It’s surprisingly effective for pulling out hearts.”

“Great,” she says, stuffing her hand through the bottom of my ribs, rooting around in there for a few seconds until she finally pulls out a handful of milk-drenched cotton. She frowns at it before putting it in the bucket. Hand goes in, cotton comes out. It’s a surprisingly nice feeling. When I do it, people usually scream, but now that it’s happening to me, I’m actually quite enjoying it. Maybe being disembowelled isn’t actually such a big deal after all? 

“Are you finding anything?” I ask, watching as she pulls out another handful of soggy cotton. It drips all over the floor before going in the basin. “My heart might be a small thing, but I’m sure it’s in there somewhere.”

She digs around. I can feel her nails scraping the inside of my ribs. Hand on one side of my body, kneeling over me, her other arm stuck up to her elbow in my chest, grunting with exertion, she searches the entire inside of my chest. “I can’t—hnng—find it,” she says, finally. “Are you sure it’s in there?”

“I mean, it…” Why wouldn’t there be? Sure, I’m missing most organs, but… The heart is the important thing. It’s the thing. “Are you certain? Maybe it’s stuck to the spine, or the scapula or…”

Crawling off of me, she sits down properly. I’m pretty sure she’s got milk up to her armpits. Maybe it’s a good thing my blood isn’t red or else this would be a pretty grisly sight. “There’s nothing,” she says. “I’m sorry. I really tried, but…” She shakes her head. “Hey, who knows? Maybe you can grow one. I dunno.” Her eyes find their way to the washbasin, filled with equal parts milk-soaked cotton and maggots. “I’m not eating cotton, though.”

“Yeah. Yeah, okay. That’s…” Scootching out from under the mirror apparatus, I sit up. My chest is hollow. I don’t feel anything. I haven’t got a heart, and it makes me feel exactly nothing. Hm. Even more worrying, though, is the fact that I’m not worried about it at all. I don’t care that I don’t care that I don’t have a heart. Shoot. Isn’t that a bad thing? I lean my head into my hand, pressing my elbow into my knee. “Alright. Cotton, snake, maggots, coral… Is there anything else? I can’t come up with anything else. Isn’t that it?”

She looks at my face, but not at me. At my eyes, but not my gaze. My head. “I wonder,” she says, her voice low, soft, almost melodic, “what’s going on in that big noggin’ of yours?”

My jaw gapes open. Not waiting to receive any sort of permission or consent, she grabs hold of my jaw and leans in, holding my mouth open, her eyes less than an inch from my wide lips. “Auuuhh—?” She sticks a finger in my mouth and molests my teeth. “Aauuhhh!”

“Feels rough,” she mutters, unheeding of my resistance, lost in the reverie of dissecting every part of me. “Could be teeth, could be something else. Unsure. Tongue…” She grabs my tongue, which is totally not okay, but I also can’t stop her, nor do my nonverbal vocalizations mean anything to her. “A slug?”

“Auh hug?”

“Might be,” she says, finally letting go of it, releasing her grip on my mouth as well. To show my unhappiness, I rub my jaw just a little, but she doesn’t seem to catch it at all. “Nothing edible. In that case.” She looks at my eye. I blink at her. Before I have time to blink at her again, she plants one hand on the back of my head, and then shoves her fingers into my eyesocket, popping my eye out of its socket with ease, the only proof that it belongs in there at all being a number of long, white strings connecting it to my head. “Ew, slimy. Strings appear to be mycorrhiza, and the eye…” Squeeze, squeeze, squeeze. 

I don’t like this. My vision’s all messed up. “Hey, Gecko? Would you mind—”

She licks my eyeball. 

I flinch, but her hand is still keeping me in place, immovable. My skin is crawling. Literally? Figuratively? I don’t know. But I want to shed it and run far, far away. 

“Seems to be a fungus, maybe a witch’s egg, but the only way to know for sure, is,” she retrieves the dagger from her inventory and moves to bisect my eye, but I’m faster, just a little, snatching the eyeball from her hand and clutching it to my chest. She looks down at her open palm, dagger in hand. “Where did…?”

“No,” I say, firmly. “I did not like that. That was not nice. I like you, you’re a good friend, but please don’t…” I fumble for words. What the hell did she just do? Why did it make me feel like jumping out of the window? The way she was looking at me… The way she’s looking at me right now… It’s like I’m not even here. Like I’m not a person. Like I’m… “Don’t treat me like a piece of meat. We’re doing this together, okay? You’re not doing this to me, so please don’t charge ahead without me.”

“Oh, you weren’t…?” She lowers the knife. “I—I’m sorry, I just… I thought you were on board.”

“I probably would’ve been if you warned me beforehand,” I mutter. “Not the eyeball-licking though. Don’t do that to me ever again.”

“Shit, I’m… I’m sorry, man. Do you want to take a break, or…?”

“No, it’s fine, we can keep going. Just try to keep in mind that I’m here too, okay?” Smiling, I hold out my eyeball to her. 

Her hand stalls, inches from it. She gives me a little glance. I nod to her. Drawing a small breath, she grabs the eyeball, and holds it in her open palm, the knife still in her other hand, gripping the handle so hard her knuckles are turning white. “Do you, um… Do you think I should open it up?”

“Honestly? Probably not.” Her expression falls, but I’m not cowardly enough to reassure her. “As we discussed, I don’t have any way to regenerate these things. If you mess up my eyeball, it’s gone. It’s finished. Sure, maybe in the future I might be able to fix it, but right now? Nope. That’s the only one I have.”

The hand holding my eyeball starts to tremble. “Shit,” she hisses. “Shit. If you hadn’t stopped me—”

“Hey, it’s fine,” I say, taking a gentle hold of her trembling arm. “You just didn’t think it through. It happens. But now you know to be more careful, okay?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I will.” She turns my eyeball over in her hand. From my end, I can see a silly little split-vision thing—on the one hand, I can see the side of her face, pouting down at the eyeball, softly frustrated. And then I’m also looking up at her, being the subject of her botherment. Interesting. I wonder if I could use this for spying purposes? It is attached to a string, after all. Contrary to the look on her face, Gecko musters a chuckle. “You sure do find the weirdest tangents to go on.”

“I must,” I say with all the solemn grace of an undertaker. “Someone has to entertain the people in the audience. If I don’t think silly goofy stuff, who’s to know what’ll happen? They might riot, and break their way onto the scene!”

“That’d be bad,” she says, buffing out a muddy spot she noticed on my eyeball with the sole of her palm. “We barred the fire-doors last halloween and forgot to unbar them. If there’s a riot, no one will be able to escape.” Eyeball in hand, she turns to me. An unsaid question shines across her face. 

I lean in closer, giving her full access to my face. “Oh, it wouldn’t be too bad,” I say, letting her pry open my eyelids, stuffing the white thread back inside my eye. “A few thousand fewer theatre-goers in the world, a dozen actors less… Isn’t that a net plus for the world as a whole?”

“Are you sure you want to say that to the one putting your eyeball in?” she says, and in a single moment, I’ve got a memory lodged sideways in my head, bringing a lopsided grin to my face.

“You were Hamlet?” 

She carefully pops my eyeball back in place. “Yep, sure was.” She leans out from me, giving me space to roll my eye back into position. Dang, feels nice to see normally again. “‘Cept I only got to do the show once before the nerves got to me and I ended up with a forty-degree fever.”

“Ouch.”

“Something like that. But, still… That one night…” She sighs wistfully. I can feel it. The warmth of the spotlights, the coldness of an empty stage, the breathless stares of the audience… “Boy, what a night.”

I’m so envious I could die. She put herself out there, found her people, discovered a context where she was welcome, and was rewarded for it. It’s everything I never knew I needed but the worst part is that I’m sure, as sure as I am of anything, that even if my school had had a theatre club, I wouldn’t have been in it. I would’ve walked by the posters asking me to join them in their production of Death of a Salesman and I would’ve been chewing my nails hoping nobody had usurped my spot on the leaderboards while I was at school. Like a damn idiot.

“Okay,” she says, eyebrows pinched, fingers folded across her lips. “Your eyeballs are most likely witch eggs—that is, the juvenile stage of the stinkhorn mushroom. I’m pretty sure of it. I wouldn’t be totally against eating an eyeball, I do like mushrooms, but you’re kind of using them for the whole seeing business, so I think you’d best keep them. Which leaves us with two options. Firstly,” she holds up her index finger, “I drink a shitton of your milk, and eat your fingernail or something. That would technically get me to the amount needed to be your apostle, properly.” She folds up her middle finger as well. “Secondly…” Her eyes drift up, away from my eyes, up to my forehead.

“My noggin’, huh…” I scratch my cheek. “On the one hand, if there’s going to be something interesting, then it’s gotta be up there. But, on the other hand… I didn’t have any heart-equivalent. Why should I have a brain one? We could just end up opening up my skull for nothing.”

“It’d be a gamble.”

I look at her. She looks at me. I grin. “What say we shoot for the jackpot?”

She punches me on the arm. “That’s the spirit, cowboy.”