Bioshifter

The tile floor is vaguely cool on my knees in that alien way temperature is now noticeable without really affecting me. Kneeling in general feels unnatural now, an improper state of rest that only exacerbates my discomfort. The human kneecap is a completely independent bone, kept in place with tendons and ligaments so it always protects the joint. I no longer have kneecaps, my closest equivalent being a ridge of chitin connected to the exoskeletal equivalent of my tibia which extends upwards and blocks access to the soft black muscle inside my joints while my leg is fully extended.

The connection means putting pressure on my knees feels more like I'm putting pressure on my shins, not to mention how the unnatural plate strains against the inside of my socks and presents itself as an obvious bulge in my pant leg whenever I bend my knee too much. Even my less-mutated leg looks like that now, with skin remaining only on one thigh, and that's likely due to come off in the next few days, too.

All of this is to say: I really need to stop crying and get up off the floor. I'm not able to bring myself to do that, though, which is understandable because I should also be doing things like not tearing open the insides of my shoes so badly they'll probably be unusable, or not clutching the sides of my head so hard that my ungloved hand is drawing a concerning amount of blood. Yet I'm still doing all of those things, because of course I am.

I'm not good enough for anything else.

It's one thing to have insecurities, it's another thing for those insecurities to be validated by a divine entity that's absolutely tickled pink at the prospect of using those completely correct insecurities as part of some unknown master plan. I'm not good enough. I'm not good enough. The truth rings again and again in my soul. A divine revelation, decreed directly from Goddess to prophet. I'm not good enough. I'm not good enough.

"What's… what's wrong?" a distant voice asks, quiet and fearful. The mugger. The child. The desperate little pup. J-something.

He sounds scared. Which, okay. Of course he's scared. I just declared that I'd done everything I could to heal his mom and then collapsed on the floor crying. Why wouldn't the kid be terrified? I remember the Goddess' hands guiding my soul, though, pulling every contaminant out of each capillary, exact and sure. With Her help, I didn't make the mistakes I feared. The boy has nothing to be afraid of. So I really need to stop scaring him! I guess I'll add that to the pile of fuckups, since as previously mentioned: I'm not good enough.

…But I already knew that, didn't I? Why am I being such a baby about it now? Like, really Hannah? Sobbing over the prospect of not being a perfect little heroine? Boo hoo, you're an entitled, privileged, lesbian disaster simultaneously drowning in both self-pity and arrogance. What part of this is news to you? Quit having a breakdown about it and grow up.

"Sorry," I choke out. "Sorry, it's fine. Everything is fine. That just… took a lot from me, is all."

I glance up, wincing slightly when I notice the small cut I made in J-mom's body is still dripping blood. I use a wordless Refresh to clean it up, re-sterilizing the area and doing my best to keep the blood flowing in the way best conducive to quick and efficient clotting.

Which is… something I know how to do now. Huh.

I swallow, wiping my tears and shakily getting to my feet. I think back on how I flushed the disease and contaminants from that woman's body, micromanaging every cell, every chemical, every solution to its optimal conditions. It gives me a bit of a headache to consider, but… I remember it. I remember knowing exactly—and I mean exactly—what I was doing, and in some fuzzy, hard-to-grasp way I think I still do.

At least it feels that way, but I'm pretty sure I couldn't explain or write down all the knowledge in my head, which makes me suspicious. I tend to assume that if I don't understand something well enough to teach it to someone else, I don't actually understand it very well at all. It's a handy rule of thumb for avoiding being on the left side of a Dunning-Kruger graph, so the rather subconscious nature of my confidence is making me pretty leery as to its actual accuracy.

Then again… this is a divine revelation. I shudder, remembering Her caressing my extra limbs, reminding me of how much I love them, how right they feel. It's not all torments. She's interested in entertainment, and a good story has peaks alongside the valleys. Even a tragedy has moments of calm, beauty, and levity. She likes watching us succeed at least as much as She likes watching us fail, if not more.

I'd argue that still makes Her evil, considering the interest She has in creating the problems in the first place. …But I guess that just makes me the prophet of an evil deity. I don't think I can make an honest argument that I'm anything less. I definitely feel the need to spread Her revelations, if only to warn people. Be entertaining, ye mortals, lest She not bother to dig you out if She buries you in more than you can handle. I wonder if Ida caught onto that, in some intrinsic or explicit way. I'll have to talk to her about that. She seems to be closest to the Goddess among my friend group.

"Y-you're bleeding," the boy realizes, fear in his voice.

I am? Oh, right, I am. I reach my bloody claws up to my temple, wiping at the four wounds I gouged in the side of my head that are, indeed, still doing that fun little head wound thing where even really shallow cuts bleed like an overstuffed jelly doughnut. I briefly channel some of my transform-self spell—which seems like it should pretty obviously be called Transform or Conversion or something, but that can be an issue for another day—to help seal up the wounds, feeling that tug on the line draw my two selves just that tiniest bit closer. I find a tissue and Refresh all excess blood onto it as a dry powder, cleaning myself up before putting my glove back on, making sure to tuck my sleeve underneath it so that there's no chance a slip could reveal my wrist.

I'll put the tissue in a biohazard bag on the way out, and… well, actually, I should definitely steal a bunch of those biohazard bags in case I need to heal somebody else, now that I think about it. Quickly looking over J-mom's cut to ensure I don't need to Refresh her again, I head out to grab more biohazard bags and go home, J-mug nervously following after me.

"Are you expecting me to drive you home?" I ask him, attempting to project a dry, unamused tone to cover up how poorly I'm still recovering from today's most recent panic attack.

"I just… um. Are you okay?" he manages.

"No, but that isn't anything new and there isn't anything you can do about it," I answer frankly.

"Are… are you sure? I mean, I owe you so much for this."

We walk by the desk where the exhausted nurse is tapping away at a computer between bouts of rubbing her eyes to stay awake. She barely nods at us as we depart.

"I appreciate the concern but I don't actually like you and I don't have any expectation of changing that opinion," I say when we exit the hospital. Woah, kind of unnecessarily mean there, Hannah, but whatever. I'm exhausted and angry and terrified and drained and this kid is just one more problem to add to the pile as far as I'm concerned.

"Besides, you don't owe me until you know whether or not what I did actually worked," I continue. "I'm going to give you my phone number. Let me know how things go with your mom, and let me know when you have time to bring her to meet me. She's a Motion mage now, so hopefully she won't accidentally end up casting something while in a hospital bed, but I need you to get her on board with this stuff ASAP, because again, this stuff is crazy dangerous. Got it?"

"Got it," he nods. "I won't let you down."

We make it to my car and I scowl. I very much don't want to spend any more time with this guy. Is anything really bad going to happen to him if I just drive off, though? He's a mugger, not a muggee. Plus he has fire magic. But he's also just a kid. Ugh. I hate this. Hate hate hate.

"Get in," I grumble. "Where do you want me to drop you off?"

It's only an extra fifteen minutes on my commute to drive him to where he directs me before I head back home, but I spend it all seething at myself. For what, I'm not even sure. When I park outside his aunt and uncle's apartment complex and let him out, watching him nervously ascend the stairs like the building is about to attack him, I feel a profound hate for nothing and everything.

I really was going to kill that child over the money in my pocket.

I can justify it to some extent, I think. I was pretty much having a complete mental breakdown over my recent cannibalism, so violence was somewhat on the mind. I wasn't in good shape, emotionally speaking, and then he pulled a knife on me. So yeah, in a moment of panic, I planned to kill him, but then Jet stopped me and I owe her so impossibly much for that. No harm, no foul. Right?

No. I'm not that justified and I know it. I wasn't in my right mind, sure, but ninety-nine percent of the population never escalates to literal murder, even in their worst moments. I didn't have to do anything but hand over my stuff. Objects. Worthless things, compared to a life. It's disgusting. I'm disgusting. I'll never be able to look at that child without being reminded of that, and the fact that I hate him for it just makes me all the worse.

I'm not good enough.

I take a deep breath, finally peeling my eyes away from the kid when he successfully unlocks the door to the apartment and heads inside, safe and sound. …Or at least safe and sound from anything outside the apartment. My face in my hands, I check around me with my spatial sense. Alone in the lot, nothing but me and the cars.

"Hey, Goddess?" I ask softly. "By any chance do you like gossip?"

Exactly as I feared and hoped it wouldn't, Her presence descends upon me with a cheshire grin, surrounding me, invading me, violating me. Gossip, hmm? How deliciously presumptuous of me, to try and gossip with the omniscient. I just want free secrets, and She knows it.

"And yet here You are," I mutter. "Without even a spellcast implied. Considering how You react to Your time being wasted, I assume that means this doesn't qualify?"

The Goddess strokes my hair, cooing and consoling me like I'm a little dog that stepped on a thorn. It will be okay, I am assured. Girls only get punished when they are being naughty, and I have been very good tonight.

By my standards, of course. Not in an absolute sense.

"Okay," I say, resisting my instinct to shudder, scream, cry, or flee. Mustering my willpower, I sit and do nothing, ignoring the casual molestations and focusing on the need to know. "Then I want to ask why he was scared walking up those steps."

She flicks me playfully on the nose, nearly breaking it. Silly and stupid as always. I don't need Her to know the answer to that. It's the same reason the nurse is so okay with letting him stay late in his mom's room. The same reason he has no better plan than theft. He's obviously not the sort of child with a healthy and loving support group, is he?

"Are…" I ask, swallowing a lump in my throat. "Are they going to hurt him?"

She laughs, an infinite pit of echoes and harmonies that drowns me until it finally ends. Her lips by my ear, She whispers the answer, both relieving and damning.

Not tonight.

She departs with a giggle, and ten minutes later I'm finally feeling stable enough to drive myself home. I do so, completely ignoring my mother asking where I've been and why I was out so late and simply collapsing into bed with my clothes on. I wake up immediately as I always do, the mysterious green dark of early morning on the Mother Tree filtering into my vision as Kagiso pokes me awake. I grunt her a good morning, extract myself and my molt from her bedroll, then lean into a friendly pat on my carapace before stepping out into the night to eat my own discarded flesh.

Our camp today is dark and generally featureless, planted as we are on an artificial wooden platform extending barely twenty feet out from the world tree's trunk. Sela lies on its back in the middle of it, staring upwards at nothing. I scuttle over to it and curl up next to its arm, settling in until the sunrise. As I do so, I hear Sela's body start to hum into activity, mechanical thrums and whirrs as its internals wind into full operation. Hmm. Some of its insides are quite dirty, now that I'm looking.

"Sorry," I say quietly. "I didn't mean to wake you."

It turns its head slowly, staring at me with its usual blank expression.

"You can tell?" it asks.

"Well, your consciousness is fairly audible," I confirm. "I can also see inside your body with my spatial sense and watch some of your moving bits spin up. It's kind of beautiful, actually. All nice and sorted and orderly. Human wiring is such a tangled mess."

It narrows its eyes slightly, saying nothing.

"S-sorry," I mumble. "I'm talking too much, aren't I? Sorry."

I lapse into silence, but to my surprise Sela is the one who speaks next.

"The other organics guarded with their backs to the trunk," Sela points out. "Would this not be optimal?"

"Um, not really," I admit. "Spatial sense again. I see in an omnidirectional sphere but it caps out at about fifty feet from my location, so it's better to stay in the middle of the camp. Plus I don't have a back."

"Unit not recognized: 'feet.'"

"Oh. Yeah. It's, uh… about this long? Ish?"

I make two shallow marks on the floor to demonstrate the length.

Its eyes briefly light up in a camera-like flash.

"Reference saved."

"Oh gosh. Uh. That's probably not exactly right. I can try to get you a better reference later?"

"Acceptable. Designating as heuristic measurement."

"Right, okay," I say, drumming my legs hesitantly. "Sorry, were you asking because you wanted me to move?"

"Negative," Sela states flatly. "If you are positioned optimally, then this unit has no complaints."

"Alright," I say. "Well then, I'll stay here. You can't move on your own, so giving you as much protection as possible seems like the optimal play to me. You doing okay, by the way?"

There's a pause.

"My systems have not noticeably degraded since the prior instance of that query," it non-answers.

"If you say so," I hedge. "I notice that there's a decent amount of dust and stuff inside you, though? A bit of lint. Uh. A dead bug, it looks like. I think there's a bunch of stuff getting in through the holes in your chassis. Or maybe the filter for your cooling system? It looks a little damaged, too. Do you want me to clean you? I can get that all out really easily."

Sela says nothing, although its fans rev up speed and start running quite a bit louder. Heh, I wonder what that means. Is it thinking harder? Is it trying to blow the dust out of itself without my help? Is it robo-blushing because cleaning is culturally intimate? Who knows! I sure don't. Gosh, robots are cool though.

"I need you to explain to me," Sela says slowly, "what you know about my systems."

An undercurrent of serious threat boils in those words, but I'm immune to heat and recent situations have made me somewhat inured to weak, damaged things posturing as dangerous. Sela is certainly much more a killer than J-Mug ever could be, but it’s also a ranged attacker with an element I half-resist barely a flick and a thought away from decapitation.

I gossip with the Goddess. I am not afraid of you.

"I have some pretty limited and basic understanding," I say, "but I'm certainly no mechanical engineer. I know you need a cooling system because heat waste is a thing, and the fans in your body that cycle air through your torso and out your head are obviously that. I also see some tubes that might be liquid cooling in your chest, but it looks like that's not distributed around the rest of your body. Since that whole system generates the most heat and seems to have the most armor and insulation around it, I assume that's where… well, you're stored. Your mind."

More systems seem to be spinning up within it, the fans running even faster. Joints spin free for a moment, twisting and testing before locking into place, becoming as ready to move as they're able.

"So, if we ever do get into a fight," I say evenly, "I'll make sure to aim away from that area. I have no intention of harming you, especially not permanently. And I take it by your reaction that you don't want me spreading any of this information around. So I won't."

It seems to totally ignore these words, more and more of its systems heating up, the mechanical parts whirring ever faster. The buildup of heat is so rapid that a burst of steam gets ejected from the liquid cooling system, pushed through a series of thin tubes and rushing out of the back of its hair-vents with a hiss.

I respond to this in the most reasonable way I can, raising two legs in Sela's direction and activating a silent Spacial Rend, coating them in shimmering paradox, space and non-space. One more leg rises in 4D space, out of sight but just as poised to strike.

"Sela," I warn it as calmly as I can muster. "I'm not your enemy. Stand down."

The tense standoff continues, however, which is rather unfortunate for me since my confidence is mainly fueled by exhaustion. Was this the wrong thing to do? I'm not sure. I'm not sure how to be sure. My body goes stiff and my fear grows stronger, but thankfully before that can reach critical mass, Sela starts to spin down, turning its head away from me.

"Maybe you aren't as foolish as you seem, meat," it admits begrudgingly. "You aren't supposed to know that much. No one is supposed to know that much. But I suppose your existence already proves there are cultures in the world the Crafted are ignorant of."

I relax, letting out a breath I didn't realize I was holding as I slowly drop my limbs back into a resting position. I'm tempted to correct Sela about me being from this world, but… maybe we're not quite to that level of friendship yet. Considering how we aren't friends at all.

"Yeah," I say instead. "You don't have to worry. I can guess at the broad strokes, but I'm no mechanical engineer. And even if I was, you're way more advanced than anything anyone in my culture has ever dreamed of."

Sela just responds with a clicking whir that I interpret as a grunt of acknowledgment.

"So," I continue. "Would you like to be cleaned? The magic won't touch any of your components, only the detritus."

A burst of hot air hisses out of Sela's head as a mechanical sigh.

"Fine."

Hehe, yes! A demonstration of trust! Or at least an admittance of vulnerability and resignation to a lack of agency, which is kind of the same thing in practice. I just have to not bungle this cleaning job, which… I mean, I guess that's kind of tempting fate, but surely nothing will go wrong with using a spell I constantly use for its primary purpose, right?

…Right?

Yeah, no, nothing actually goes wrong. A few quick casts of Refresh and all the dust and garbage that managed to get stuck inside Sela's body is pulled out through the gouges in its torso, leaving the inside of its chassis sparkly-clean and its ventilation system running at maximum capacity.

"There you go!" I announce happily. "All clean, even those joints."

Sela's entire body starts to twist and writhe like a horrific contortionist as it tests my claim.

"Hmm," it grumbles. "...Minimal interference detected. Reluctant appreciation: thank you, meat."

"Any time!" I reassure it. "Like literally, just ask whenever, it's really easy to do."

"Acknowledged," Sela chirps. "Setting timer."

Wait. Uh. …Y'know what, this is fine, I offered for a reason.

"Okay, you mechanical dork," I tell it. "Just let me know."

About an hour later, a mechanical voice that had since been silent chimes:

"Clean me, meat."

I sigh. The things I do for genocidal murderbots.

After a couple more cleaning sessions—both of which barely did anything since Sela was already near-perfectly cleaned—the sun finally rises and my companions start to wake up, stretching and dressing and going through their usual routines.

"Morning, Hannah," Helen yawns, stepping out of her tent. "Boring night?"

"Less than it could have been, but nothing worrisome," I answer. "Did you sleep well?"

"Still and steady as a tree," she confirms, walking over to Kagiso's tent and throwing the flaps open so she can drag the dentron out of bed, flailing and biting.

"What about you, murderbot?" Helen says, raising her voice to be heard over Kagiso's whining. "Still with us?"

"Regretful affirmation: yes," Sela grumbles. "I remain trapped with suicidal, irrational sacks of meat insistent on flinging themselves down material chutes like the corpses they so desperately seem to wish to be."

"Well, you know we could always just dump you off the side of the trunk if you prefer."

"Negative, though desirability calculations are re-run at regular intervals. Please ask again later."

"Can do, you fucking maniac. Come on, Kagiso, quit your bitching and pack up your tent."

"Brother's not around anymore," Kagiso grumbles. "Can sleep in if want to."

Silence. Neither Helen nor I dare to touch that.

"Put away your ridiculous sleeping arrangements and strap me to your back already, meat," Sela snaps, having no such tact. "I refuse to spend another night on this trunk."

Kagiso… actually listens to it, thank goodness, and before long we find ourselves back on the slide, me curled up tight in Helen's lap and Sela attached firmly to Kagiso. And so the day drags on much like it did the afternoon before, the Sapsea below us ever so slowly getting closer as we slide down the trunk.

It almost seems like we're going to have a totally uneventful day before we hear—and feel—a terrifying thud from up above us, one large enough to shake the slide quite a bit more than any of us are comfortable with.

"Uh, what the fuck was that?" Helen asks, whipping her head around behind us.

"Aren't you the only one who's done this before?" I ask. "We're kind of relying on you to know that!"

Yet another thud rings out. It's closer this time, harder.

"Acoustic analysis indicates a high likelihood of an incoming arboreal predator," Sela announces. "Or territorial gummivore."

"A what!?" Helen shouts back.

"A scary monster!" I translate.

"Aaaaah, stupid landbound! Look out, look out, look out!" a new voice shouts, immediately stealing our attention. Not just because it's someone we don't know, but the direction the voice is straight above dead, open air.

Because of course it is. The source of the voice is flying. A sciptera—one of the tiny, cute bat people, not one of the huge, scary bat people—is rapidly flapping its way towards us, panic on their face.

"No look at me, rootfeet!" they shriek. "Accelerate! Go, go, g—"

We don't hear the rest of what they're saying because the chute behind us suddenly explodes, smashed into pieces by the fall of a massive, terrifying horror that simply dead-dropped my entire fifty-foot sensory range in an instant, slamming into where we were barely a second ago with enough force to obliterate it.

I only catch a glimpse of it before it vanishes below us, but I can only think of it as a true monster, a real-life colossal horror only imagined in games and stories. Like me, it has ten legs, though each of those legs is thicker than a human and twice as tall. Unlike me, those legs aren't radially placed; the beast has a clear left and right, and the groups of five legs each are connected by fin-like membranes of flesh to glide or direct a fall with. Its back end has an enormous tail tipped with a wicked stinger, and its head is topped with bulbous, almost fly-like eyes, solid black domes that frame a murderous, snaggle-toothed mouth.

I spot it as it redirects its descent into the trunk below us, its many sharp, insectoid legs digging great gouges in the bark as it slows itself down, many of which impact and rip new holes in the chute. Then, with an ear-piercing screech, it scuttles rapidly away, shifting out of sight but never getting so far that we can no longer hear it. Instead, it sounds like it's ascending to drop on us again.

"Welp," Helen sighs. "Make your peace, ladies and bots. We're fucked."

"Clean me, meat," Sela demands.

"Is now really the time!?" I shout at her before addressing Helen. "Can't you just kill the monster!?"

"Maybe if I knew where it was!" Helen snaps back. "It's too fast!"

"I'll help you aim!" I insist. "I think it's approaching from above again, so—"

"No, no no no no!" the sciptera yells. "Be woosh! Use wind, not sword! Ring Racer!"

A faintly glowing circle appears in the air in front of the tiny bat, and the moment the very tip of their ears touches it the sciptera is pulled, thrust forwards at greatly increased speed. They dip down below us, generating more rings around the chutes.

"Fuck the Goddess' side bitch," Helen swears, leaving me feeling vaguely offended for some reason. I don't really have time to process that though, as Helen clutches me in a one-armed death grip, standing up and leaning down low as we approach not a jump, but a sharp turn.

"Kagiso!" Helen shouts, but the crazy albino dentron is already following suit, her tail helping with balance and her feral grin not showing a hint of fear.

We naturally pick up speed as the friction drops, and then we hit one of the magical rings dropped by the friendly bat and we're launched forward like a cannon shot, very nearly killing us as Helen almost trips on the first switchback, which would have sent us careening off to our death. Somehow she barely hangs on, though, and it's a good thing she did because barely a second later the giant monster collapses down behind us, destroying that part of the chute with a brutal roar.

"What is that thing!?" Helen shouts.

"Idiot!" the sciptera shouts back. "Stupid! Stumbled into lair of flonglithorth!"

"Of what!?"

"Designation not found," Sela beeps.

"The mighty flonglithorth shall feast on your flesh, and also bones!" the sciptera cackles. "Stupid landbounds wandered right into nest!"

"How the fuck were we supposed to know that!?" Helen snaps. "I never saw anything like a nest!"

"Jump!" Kagiso announces, pointing to a massive gap ahead of us where the, uh, 'flonglithorth' smashed a huge hole in the slide.

"Taste the wind while you can!" the sciptera squeals gleefully.

"Fuck you!" Helen snaps back, leaning into another boost from Ring Racer before attempting a massive, nearly thirty-foot jump.

We crash back onto the chute on the other side, Helen swearing again as she nearly tears a ligament in her leg. I'm pretty sure she just broke the olympic long jump record, but at this point we're traveling several times the maximum human sprinting speed thanks to gravity and floating magical hoops, so I'm pretty sure she wouldn't be able to qualify.

"IdentifyFuelSource(target.noTarget, 60, false, true, fuelarray[])" the Goddess shouts with Sela's breath, waving mockingly at me as she passes by.

"Predicting incoming attack vector!" Sela continues. "Four, three, two, one—"

Kaboom! The whole slide shakes so violently Helen has to catch herself on the side, tearing a chunk of skin off the palm of her hand.

"Refresh!" I have the Goddess follow up before She leaves, keeping Helen from bleeding, wiping the sweat from her brow, and pushing her hair away from her eyes.

"Target lock retained!" Sela announces. "Target is ascending! Estimated approach vector: directly above! Target attribute: Transmutation! Likely a unique specimen, magically boosted to abnormal size. Minimum thirty flickers until impact!"

"I can fucking do thirty," Helen hisses. "Fuck this. Fuck everything! Kagiso! Brace your ass!"

The Chaos mage grits her teeth, taking a deep, deep breath, and the world gets just a little darker.

"The Girl Was Told She Could Not Be," the Goddess begins. "So Though She Breathed, She Did Not Live."

Helen drops into a sitting position again, slowing herself down with her elbows and feet. All the while, her mouth continues to recite the words the Goddess speaks.

"Hate Was The Wall And Love Was The Chain. She Was Naught But A Prisoner Waiting To Starve. There Had To Be More To An Empty Life, And She Thought Art Would Fill Her Soul."

Coming to a complete stop Helen sets me down on the chute, standing up straight, her arms above her head. Tears flow down Helen's cheeks as the Goddess grins like a hyena.

"Um," the sciptera coughs hesitantly. "What are doing?"

"Joy And Sorrow!" The Goddess roars with Helen. "Skill And Grace! The Power To Be More Than Her Nature's Puppet! What Is Art, If Not Creation? Her Ignorant Hope, Her Vain Defiance! But Her Soul Showed Her The Truth!"

"Meleme!" the sciptera shouts in terror. "Flee!"

"AND SO SHE WEPT! FINDING BEAUTY IN OBLIVION!"

A pillar of darkness devours the sky, silent and cold. Art-fueled Chaos, emboldened by an incantation longer than I ever imagined attempting, consumes indiscriminately, blooming from Helen's outstretched hands and annihilating everything above us, from the chutes we rode on to the bark of the Mother Tree itself. It extends even beyond my vision, a horrible, hungry darkness that annihilates even light, carving a permanent new scar into the very world. The power that annihilated a village.

The power that makes it easy to understand why children are killed. I still don't agree, but understand? Oh yes. Easily.

The light returns and we're deafened by the following shockwave, an explosion of pressure caused by air rushing back into the vacuum of annihilation. Helen staggers, collapsing back into a sitting position on the slide that, miraculously, hasn't completely collapsed as a result of her disintegrating everything above our current section.

"That'll fuckin' learn ya," she slurs, seeming somewhat lightheaded. "Fuck. I needed that."

"Meleme!" the sciptera shouts again, flying upwards towards a falling figure. A second sciptera falls in an uncontrolled spiral, an entire wing missing from their unconscious body. Oh. Huh. I do remember something about sciptera always being in pairs, come to think of it.

"Meleme! Wake up!" the first sciptera begs, catching their partner with their tail and dragging them to a landing spot. "Come on. Look at me! Cast, Meleme!"

"Meleme Biggest Strongest," the tiny little bat—who presumably is Meleme—mutters, flesh twisting and popping on the damaged side of its body until a new wing regrows, at first rather too large and fin-like but quickly twisting back into a normal sciptera shape.

Transmutation magic, huh?

"You just played us," I accuse. "Your friend was the monster!"

"Was just joke!" the little guy screeches. "Stupid landbound! No need big explosion boom!"

"Flonglithorth stupid name," Meleme coughs. "Of course figure out. Dumb-dumb."

"Target appears to have survived," Sela announces. "Requesting follow-up offensive."

"Berebe remember this!" the first sciptera declares, launching back up into the air.

"Was fun," Meleme says groggily. "Bye-bye, friends."

"Not friends!" presumably-Berebe retorts. "Tried kill you!"

"Yes?" Meleme agrees, taking off rather shakily after them. "Fair is fair?"

The two of them bicker as they fly away, leaving us rather flabbergasted.

"Should probably stop them," Kagiso comments. "Know Helen is Chaos. Know Sela is Crafted. Definitely bad."

Oh, right. That's a good point, actually.

"Hey!" I shout after them. "Don't just leave us stranded here! The chutes are probably unstable now!"

"Who fault that!?" Berebe snaps at us.

"Little bug right," Meleme retorts, twining their tail around Berebe's. "They good sport. I carry down?"

"Good sport!? Explosion boom!"

"You fussy," Meleme grumbles. "Go drink more sap. I carry."

Meleme turns around, heading back towards us, and with every flap of their wings they grow just a bit larger, a bit more monstrous, until eventually the massive beast that nearly killed us all is gliding right underneath us, attaching to the bark and skittering up to our level.

"All aboard Meleme express, friends?" the horrific monster rumbles.

My companions all turn to stare at each other.

"...It is a superior chance of survival compared to continued use of the material chutes," Sela supplies flatly.

"Fuck it," Helen sighs. "Why not."