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  .?w?n я????d b?? I ??iw I

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  The weirdest part about living in fear is how comfortable it is. How familiar.

  I don’t really talk about it with people much anymore, but for all my loneliness and strained comfort in my current life, things are very close to being the best they’ve ever been. Well before I even knew I wanted to transition, I knew something was wrong, felt it deeper than my bones, and a lot of the people involved in my life didn’t exactly help.

  I keep an eye on the sun as I drive home, careful to make sure it’s nowhere near the horizon, and marvel at how familiar it feels.

  I still get uneasy when I hear someone open the front door. I still remember what it was like, living every day worried that I might be hurt in a way that wouldn’t even be recognized, let alone understood. I still remember what it feels like, living every day wondering if today was the day I’d finally just… let go.

  The fact that death would come from without rather than within nowadays is a point of pride, but it still aches just the same.

  Part of the reason it’s so familiar is the monotony of it. Being depressed doesn’t mean that you’re allowed to just stop- I still had to go to school, go to work, do all the things most normal people do every day, even at my worst. If I didn’t there would be consequences. Being unable to get out of bed, paralyzed by ennui and apathy, only takes you so far, and eventually, you either give up and die, or you have to go pay the damn bills, eat food, shower now and again. Though that last one’s usually the first to go, when things get really, really bad. In the end, though, it’s killing yourself or dying, and seeing as I wasn’t doing the former, I wasn’t allowed to do the latter, either.

  This feels much the same. At any moment, conditions might change enough that I won’t make it, that I’ll die and have nothing at all to show for it- but I still have to pay the rent. I still have to get food. On occasion, I even still have to shower.

  I learned my lesson the first time, at least. No more double shifts. I show up in the morning, and I leave by three, before the sun has time to dip low, before the shadows have time to get proper dark. Death becomes a certainty and distant possibility at once, and that state of mind, that constant hyper-awareness of danger, feels as comfortable to slip back into as any other childhood habit.

  It’s been two days since I died.

  On both days since, I have gone to my job. For both days, I have served drinks, disregarded comments thrown my way, and cleaned a bar that reeks of old sugar and badly-disguised gunk. Every day, Chuck and his friends come by, pay me with better money than they’ve ever had before, and brag about just how wonderful they are, pillars of the community that they’ve become. I prep for service, I organize, I clean, I serve, I even find it in me to smile every now and again, and then I go home.

  And I do the real work.

  The headset remains untouched where I left it. I haven’t gotten back on the forums since I last posted there. My research on the game has stalled out. I have other priorities.

  I close my car door with the usual heavy thud of impact, walk up the front steps, and pick up the bags left on the porch. Delivery apps; the fees are a bitch and a half, but when it could literally kill me to be out of the house after night, it seems like a good price to pay.

  My next check is already going to be pretty light, but I can’t skimp on this. Not now.

  I don’t bother stopping by the fridge with my groceries, trekking straight up to my room instead. I have to open the door carefully, just to make sure I don’t bump anything out of place, but I’ve done it enough times that I’m pretty familiar by now, and I make it inside without any issues. Until I see what I’ve left on the floor, of course.

  I have to take a long, deep breath. Febreeze and plastic wrap can only do so much in the end. It still smells like meat.

  On the floor, carefully placed atop a bed of plastic-wrap and improvised preservation, is the work.

  Of all my stats, the only one that even kind of matches what I had in the game is my SYNCHRONICITY. CANALISATION is only useful in theory, if I’m in danger of mutation, and EVOLUTION, according to its description, is worthless without the ability to “pass things on”, something I couldn’t do in the game without dying and can’t do here without, at the very least, fucking. Not really in the cards at the moment.

  But SYNCHRONICITY? That’s the good shit.

  I had a crafting build, back in the game. Making Symbionts and modifying myself through them, gaining additional features only through my ADAPTATION. In the game, it allowed me to create tools, mechanisms, and modifications by using biological materials I could find about the terrain. Here, my scavenging has to be more thorough.

  The work, for now at least, looks like an art-piece focused on what biohazardous waste might look like. On one side, there’s a small set of three improvised organs, meat wrapped in and around itself, pinned into place by bits of bone until they look like baseballs. Beside them, wrapped extremely tightly with plastic wrap to force it to conform to shape, is what might, in a cronenbergian nightmare, be considered a glove.

  And between the both of them, woven together almost entirely of hair and spit around a set of chicken bones, is what might be generously called a shrunken head.

  It has not been fun sleeping in the same room as these fucking things.

  I set the grocery bags down and start pulling out the ingredients.

  If it has a bone in it, it went into the shopping cart. While wider cuts of meat are useful, they’re almost always exclusively made of meat and fat, which have their uses, but also their costs. As I take out chicken wings, thighs, drumsticks, bone-in beef stew chunks, and two t-bone steaks, I pull out most of the knives we have in the house, and get ready to work.

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  There are more ingredients in the bags, gradually warming, but that’s not what I need right now, not yet. Anything butchered with the bones still included comes with more than just meat and bone. Tendons and ligaments are crucial, I’ve discovered- without them, energy is wasted by the muscles having to hold things together by grip, and hair isn’t as good at binding things together as I’d like. I need more than just raw muscle mass for this to work.

  But it is. Working. Bit by bit by terrible bit.

  I do as I have for the last two nights, and take apart the flesh, so I can put it back together again.

  Two bottles of hand sanitizer come out of the grocery bags, and while I make absolutely certain that I don’t let any of it touch the meat, I do use it and wipe it off before I take out my notebook or my laptop to cross-reference.

  I don’t have the abilities here that I had in the game. I can’t just vaguely slap things together, or go off pure intuition, and make them work as if by magic. Additionally, it’s not like the meat’s fresh- none of it’s butchered in town, none of it’s alive in the traditional sense by the time it gets to me. All in all, it’s nothing like it was in the game, and my first few attempts to make something have completely failed.

  But now, it’s close.

  A gun would be useless. I’ve never fired one, I don’t have the know-how to translate something that mechanical into something this improvised, and I wouldn’t have the resources to blindly fire stuff off even if I could. Melee isn’t an option either- until I figure out how to make an entire goddamn exoskeleton, the “big dog” is always going to be stronger, faster, and more at ease with its weight and speed than I am. I have to improvise something else.

  Ergo, the grenades.

  Each ball of tissue is wrapped tightly, contained by the highest-density muscle I could buy and pinned into place by sharpened bits of bone. Inside, I’ve filled them with shattered chicken bones, broken glass and, most importantly, nails.

  I don’t know if they’ll work… but I can hope. In theory, if I can activate them, I can make the muscles constrict violently enough that the bone pins snap, forcing the whole thing to convulse, pop open, and launch the shrapnel like an improvised frag. First and last recourse, and I’m not exactly more experienced with frags than guns… but in theory, they’re easier to use.

  And in the meantime, I have the other pieces.

  The hair-and-bone implement looks like some kind of arcane totem more than anything, shaped into something old and runic and wildly improvised. I wanted to find roadkill, but all I managed to get my hands on was a dead bird I found by the side of the road, its organs long-since decayed, but its bones intact. I mentioned not being able to make things out of instinct, which is true, but some things do feel more… right than others. Like some pieces should, in theory, more or less fit. This project is one such case, allowed to develop as it wants.

  It feels like it’s missing… well, a lot. But it’s… something. I can feel the shape of it, the sparrow-skull wrapped in human hair, bound together with ligament and spit, and it feels… kind of like spaghetti art. Like something recognizable, made by a toddler with no idea how to make the original art, but imitating it. It is to this that I dedicate most of my focus, adding two more grenades over the course of a few hours before I focus on it wholesale.

  I put more and more bones into it. I yank out more and more of my hair, wrapping up the new material tightly, binding chicken meat and ligaments beneath it, and then more on top of that. I make an improvised sort of spine-shape out of beef chunks with bone, make little legs out of chicken thighs, ribs out of wings, and wrap more muscle around that in turn.

  It won’t work in the shape it’s currently in. I can’t just put the chicken thighs as thighs. It won’t work for this. I don’t know why, and I don’t know how I know, but I know.

  By the time I’m done, the floor is covered in fresh grease, the plastic wrap bunched up in places and slimy in all of them, and I’m covered to my elbows in the stink of the dead. Even with the hand sanitizer and alcohol, I’m almost guaranteed to have gotten salmonella on my nice hardwood flooring.

  But it’s done.

  The grenades are… simple. Basic. Sort of desperate, if I’m being honest. The most efficient method I have beyond making pipe bombs, which would have to involve more expensive and more eye-catching sorts of online purchases.

  The glove is… complicated. I’ll come back to that.

  But this?

  I look down at what might best be called a muppet made of meat.

  It’s a necromancer’s first children’s toy. A madman’s loose attempt at making some kind of weird centipede. It is, by far, the grossest, most horrible thing I’ve ever seen, and I am entirely certain that it should not be holding together as well as it currently is.

  The skull of a bird, turned nearly black by the human hair wrapped around it and greased to high heaven, leads down into a mess of parts, vaguely aligned into something like a spine. There’s nothing threaded through it, no way to properly secure the improvised ribs or awkward, poorly-made replacements for its internals, but using the rest of the rotted remnants of the bird and the “fresh” ingredients, I’ve gotten most of the way into making…

  Fuck.

  I get up out of my room, stagger through the hallway, and just barely make it to the toilet in time to vomit.

  I haven’t eaten today. All that comes up is bile, stinging the back of my throat and making my eyes burn.

  I don’t stop until my diaphragm is sore and my mouth tastes like battery acid, and even then, it takes most of what I have not to keep going. I take long, slow breaths, trying as best I can to feed oxygen into my system.

  It’s disgusting. The thing I made is disgusting. Hair and spit and gunk, organic string and dripping, wet muscle, slimy bone and weirdly slick fluids.

  But it’s whole. It’s done. A muppet and a giant hand and an artistic rendition of a centipede made of gristle and food waste.

  When I manage to pull my head out of the toilet, I catch a glimpse out the frosted window. It’s night. I don’t know how long I spent working on that thing, how long it’s been since the sun went down, but it’s been at least two, maybe three hours. Maybe more. Hyper-fixated on the task, I don’t even remember if I’ve had water or stopped for a break since I started.

  I take long, slow breaths again, trying hard not to be sick.

  Two days ago, I died.

  Five days ago, I woke up into a dream that I think, but cannot prove, is reality.

  Am I even still me?

  I couldn’t have made that thing before. Even with the sheer nausea that coming out of my hyper focused state brought about, I know it’s better than it would have been before all this. I wouldn’t have been able to spend ten minutes in that grim art studio, never mind hours, and I would never have been able to properly weave all the pieces together into something that works.

  Fuck. What will it look like when it works?

  I haven’t even finished the glove yet, either.

  …Fuck.

  Downstairs, I hear someone knock on the door.

  Thunk Thunk Thunk.

  Heavy knocks. Not angry, per se, but heavy, like from someone meaty who doesn’t much care about being delicate with that weight.

  “Hollow Springs’ Sheriff’s department! Anybody home?”

  Fuck.

  It really is one of those days, isn’t it?

  +8 (officially! KEEPS GROWING!) chapters on Patreon (one more than last week AGAIN! The value increases!), and more to come!

  And just for funsies, here's the discord!