The simply fact is that, while skill is as crucial and essential a component to an artist’s work as one’s blood is to their body, just as a body suffers with a weak heart, so too does a sculptor suffer with a poorly made chisel, the painter suffer with poorly mixed colors. It takes an artist to elevate the mundane to something more, it is true, but if that was all it took, then we’d never have made tools in the first place, now would we?
-Sixth Scripture, Thirteenth verse of the books of Lo-ahnn Daughtler, First Architect of Artistry
_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________
I’m lying on the floor of my room.
I’m awake.
My hand hurts- but less. A lot less than before.
Blinding agony has fallen to something quieter, a pulsing ache that I can feel in my bones, and I can move it. I curl it inwards, and six fingers lift off the ground, off of the puddle of bloody matter and half-dried blood that still clings to it faintly.
Six fingers.
It’s not shaped like a human hand, but then, I didn’t design it to be. The fingers are thicker than normal, but have visible, off-white seams to them, where tendons and ligaments form additional connections and points of articulation. It’s distinctly alien from anything human, muscle groups that don’t exist in nature curling and writhing against each other as I move it.
In theory, I should not be able to move this. I’ve been right-handed my entire life, and even with familiar limbs that I’ve experienced every moment of every day for my entire life, I still can’t properly write with my left. To have an entire limb overhauled, rewritten, altered in ways so fundamental, and still be able to control it, would be an unrealistic expectation.
I feel like the back of my mind is running through every one of these reasonable, realistic thoughts as joints and sharp-edged bones shift and roil under my command. Like I know, know, how the world works, and am facing something that makes that fact nonexistent.
There is something agonizing about a loss of control like that. I used to have nightmares of the same- facing a world that I should understand, but do not.
It feels comfortable. Ball-sockets that didn’t exist a few short hours ago let me roll each digit in different directions, only resetting after two full rotations add a strain on the joints. I touch the back, and then front, of my hand, palm and back both easily folded over and caressed. I stretch, and watch as the white lines of ligaments that come from outside a human body extend, woven into and through each of the digits until they are two, three times longer than before.
I made it.
It feels… mine. In a way that the Fleshling body didn’t, couldn’t.
Still alien. Still off. Not quite right. But… in the same way that the weight around my gut, the movement of my neck, the shape of my face all feel off. Still dysphoric, but a comfortable, familiar kind of dysphoria, different from the sort that tore me apart in the game and almost killed me when I was younger.
Just to confirm, I pull up my character sheet, feeling the minor discomfort of something squirming in my eye as the little swimmers there rearrange themselves into shape, focusing on the parts I care about.
{MANIFESTATION OF [00000000]}
GENUS: HOMINIDAE HOMINIA HOMO
SPECIES: SAPIENS
STATS:
SKILLS:
- GLIMPSE BEYOND
MUTATIONS: N/A
SYMBIONTS:
- DIVINE BLOODLING
- The Glove
There it is, under my tab of Symbionts. The Glove. Not quite as fancy a “font” as the BLOODLING, but admittedly, I don’t think it compares. Beyond the fact that I built it out of supermarket groceries rather than an eldritch, interdimensional videogame, there’s also the simply fact that without the BLOODLING, I wouldn’t have even bothered to try it.
It stood to reason that if it could hold my torn-apart arm together, then it could do more. I wasn’t noticing any strain on it, at least. It’s nice to be proven right, even if it cost me a fair share of pain.
There’s no pain now. None at all. As ever-so-slightly off as it feels, there’s none of the pain that one might expect from having one’s body re-pulled apart and implanted with all-new, all-inhuman flesh.
I let out a breath, and slowly, slowly, get back up off the ground.
The Glove keeps acting up as I do, ticks and strange feelings accompanying me as I use it to pull myself back to my feet. Fingers extend, bend, twist, turn, fold and unfold, far more dextrous and steady than poor leftie, and I give it a vigorous shake, testing durability and the sensation of it at once.
I roll my wrist and watch as it bulges in new, weird places, more material under the skin than there should be. It’s my own skin, mostly, the raw flesh of my hand, blood and nerves unfolding and folding around themselves until it fits into the subcutaneous membrane of my wider arm.
I start laughing.
It starts as a chuckle, a little giggle, and then it gets louder, a cackle pulling its way out of my throat. And then I’m really laughing, a loud and strident thing that I can hear echoing off the walls of my room and traveling through it, out my window, out into the hallway, out beyond even that. I put my hands up to my mouth, up to my face, as if to muffle it, but all I manage is to keep laughing, louder now, the exhalations cradled by a clammy palm and the moist, feverishly hot material of my creation.
Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
It’s funny, isn’t it?
It’s hilarious. It’s a laugh! A gag! A jest, even!
Fuck!
FUCK!
I’m laughing now, and my hand is starting to twitch, to move in odd ways, alien ways that should not be familiar, should not be possible under the common understanding of biology.
I did it.
I did it.
It’s here. A Symbiont, just like the game, just like I could craft there. I don’t understand how it works, or why, or what I’ve done to it to make it work, how I made beef and chicken and wall-meat into functioning architecture that shapes itself like a six-fingered hand, sharp-pronged and raw of skin.
And the fundamental fact of the matter is that if I can make this, I can make more. More than just theoretical meat-grenades, which also were impossible but not nearly as much. It means that the bits of roadkill I’ve cobbled together into something like a totem aren’t just something I’m going to have to throw away later, but rather the beginning of something, the weakest possible version of it.
My chest hurts.
I realize, belatedly, that I’ve been laughing for long enough that it doesn’t sound like laughter anymore. It’s not mirth, if it ever was- I’m just exhaling, just short of sobbing, just breathing in the agony of being right and being safe.
The last time I went out of my house at night, I was attacked. I was killed. And yet, I managed to evade the fucking thing, to swipe at it, to track and move in such a way as to trick it and stay ahead of it, if only for a few moments. What can I do with actual tools? With real mechanisms, tricks and weapons?
Still no goddamn supplies with which to make things, but hey. One thing at a time, hmm?
I exhale forcefully, one last time, pushing myself as hard and as loud as I can, the first thing that feels like a choice I’ve made in a good few minutes. My diaphragm shrinks, my ribcage falls inward as the bellows of my lungs forcefully push inwards and breathe out.
The laughter dies, and I wipe my eyes. Maybe those laughs got closer to crying than I thought.
Fucking estrogen. Tears are so damn easy nowadays, ugh.
Ok. Ok. Focus.
I put my hand out of mind for a moment. It swings a bit awkwardly, larger in size and difference in center of gravity, but it still feels so faux-familiar that I can push the thought aside, at least for now.
I take a slow, deep breath, and turn to the next steps.
First things first- I check my phone.
Seven missed calls, all of them from a number I leave uncategorized- True Blue’s. Sal’s probably pissed, though I don’t-
Ah. Right above the notifications is a big bold set of words and numbers, punctually informing me that it is seven in the afternoon on Friday.
I slept for a little over twenty-four hours.
Fuck. I really am going to lose my job, aren’t I?
Fuck it. I would say I have bigger things to work about, but… well, I do still need to pay for where I’m living, don’t I? And I did in fact recently lose two-hundred dollars out of my savings account, which is shallower than I’d like as is.
One thing at a time. That’s the important bit. One thing at a time.
Something important I need to check.
I raise my left hand up to the Glove… and pull.
It hurts.
I blink, and I’m back on the ground.
I… I don’t think I screamed.
But it hurt enough for it.
I wipe my face again, fresh tears and blood from where I bit my lip staining my face. Fuck. Fuck.
Ok.
That’s… that’s more or less what I expected. A change that foundational shouldn’t be something changed back quite so easily, should it? It’s not like I ever tried to remove a Symbiont in the game.
I have changed myself.
I have changed myself once again, and like every change, it doesn’t fade away so easily.
One thing at a time.
Ok.
Glove is done. Symbionts are, in fact, tied to one’s body, who’d have thought. I am alive and have a tool.
Next thing: testing.
I walk back over to the crack in my wall.
It stares back at me as I move, a small space excavated from where I pulled materials from previously. It’s widened, even though I see no sign of plaster or other bits of wall having flaked off.
I reach forward with the Glove, extending my fingers into the long, sharp-edged instruments I’ve transformed them into… and push my hand in.
It’s warm.
I can feel through the Glove, which isn’t surprising, really. Its current design isn’t something I really decided on, but it feels right, as if it’s in-line with my thought process from when I was making it, and I always intended for there to be some kind of tactile sense to it. The wall-meat is pretty still, not reacting to being slit apart and pushed into, but it has the warmth of living flesh to it. I don’t detect any sort of clear pulse, but I can tell that it does move here and there, little twitches or shifts in places.
I push my hand in further.
It’s up to the palm now, a solid six inches of pointed digits extended into it… but I don’t feel the opposite wall. There shouldn’t be any space in the house with walls that thick, but I feel nothing but more flesh on my hand.
I push further. And keep pushing.
I make it almost all the way up to my elbow before I come to terms with the fact that I’m not sure I’m going to find an opposite wall.
Least impossible thing I’ve done today, if we’re being honest.
(It really, wildly isn’t, but what’s one more blatant disregard of the laws of physics on the list?)
Slowly, I curl my fingers, cutting through some of the material I can sense deeper into the wall, and-
The whole room groans.
Like a house settling, only a hundred times louder, loud enough that for a second I actually worry that the roof might collapse… but no. It quiets, the shiver in the floorboards and the crackling of the wood in the walls calming back down to nothing.
Ok. Not doing that again anytime soon. I’m not sure if it’s hurting the house, doing a metaphysical equivalent of cutting off a piece of a support pillar, or just making weird noises, but I’d rather not fuck up my living space too badly just yet.
Instead, through the Glove, I retrieve the supplies I’ve already taken, and pull them back out.
A long, slender string of muscle fibers comes out with me, wrapped and coiled around my fingers, and it takes only a thought and a strangely instinctive flex of will for them to begin coiling around themselves. Like playing with shadow puppets, except the weird ways the shadows are moving are just the ways the joints of the Glove work, interweaving and twisting and turning and whispering against each other as they move-
And there. It’s done.
I look down at the fourth meat-grenade.
I didn’t have any bone shards for it, but it still works as a point of reference compared to the others. The three that I made un-altered look like art projects, meat wrapped around itself and pinned in place like a caricature of a heart or bicep.
This fourth one is more like a gordian knot, a series of fibers wrapped around each other so tightly that I can feel the tension in it, coiled tight and ready to tear apart at just the right touch- and they move. I can see them, compressing each other, wrapping tightly against themselves, and can see the ways that the Glove followed my intent more than my knowledge, pinning the shape into place as a functioning structure.
It’s still just a bundle of meat, only the size of my more human palm, but compared to the first three, it’s alive.
Tech tree unlocked. First research tier acquired.
I have changed myself, and through it, I change more.
Smiling, exhausted despite having only just woken up, I fall back into bed, close my eyes, and am unconscious by the time I realize I probably shouldn’t be laying in bed with a bloody, gooey grenade still in my hand.
+8 chapters on Patreon and more to come!
And just for funsies, here's the discord!