Bioshifter

No, no no no. Oh god. We're going to die. We're all going to die. The cultists had weapons, they knocked us out, we're dead we're dead we're dead. Or maybe I'll be the only survivor. They probably wanted to capture me alive, they wanted me because I'm some sort of valuable monster so they're going to steal me and lock me up and kill my friends to remove the witnesses and—

"Hannah!" someone shrieks. "Hannah, is everything alright!?"

My mother bursts into the room, ignoring the closed door because my room has no lock (I hate that my room has no lock!) and stomps her way to my side. No. Why. I don't want you here. I try to stop her, to shove her away, but my head is still scrambled and my instinct to move gets sent to a limb that doesn't exist. Get out get out get out why are you here.

"Hannah!" my mother shouts again, wrapping her hands around my cheeks. She looks so terrified, it's hard to stay mad at her. She says something else, but her voice is too hard to hear over the awful noise in the room. What's…

Oh, wait. That's me. I'm still screaming.

A few seconds later I figure out how to stop, taking gasping breaths as I force myself to focus on my body. My heart hammers at troubling speeds as I tug around at my own limbs, remembering which is which as I stare my worried, loving mother in the eyes and wish she would just go away. Curling my toes, I feel the foam blocks preventing my freakish talons from ripping apart my sheets. My whole body feels sore, a deep, bone-level ache permeating everything. For all I know, something a lot more horrible than toe-claws is growing on me underneath my blankets. It could be anything. Anything. I have no idea what sort of monster I'm turning into.

"Oh my baby, you're okay, it's okay," my mother coos. "It's alright. You're alright."

"Get out," I croak.

She seems taken aback. A bit offended, even. I suppose I was harsher than I needed to be, but I'm not in the best state of mind right now.

"...Are you sure?" my mother asks. Ugh. Do I look like I'm in the state of mind to want this kind of careful consideration!?

"I'm fine," I say, repeating the easiest of all lies. "I'm okay, I just… I'm gonna get dressed."

"The dreams again?" she asks.

I want to tell her to get out again, but I suspect I've already pushed my luck by being rude even a single time. And you know what, sure. 'The dreams again' may as well be a correct answer. It's certainly all I intend to explain.

"Yeah," I answer. "N-nothing special. I just need a moment to myself."

"Alright," she says, leaning over to kiss me on the forehead. "Church today, be sure to dress nice."

"I know," I tell her, and she finally leaves, closing the door behind her. I shudder and extract myself from bed, flexing my toes again before yanking them free of all the foam. Are they…? Shit. They are. The bone growth has started to crawl up the entirety of the toe, breaking into segments over the joints. It hardly even looks like bone anymore, it's more like… well, an exoskeleton. An ivory-white carapace. Flexing my toes as much as I can, I try to peer into the crack between the joints, seeing what I think might be a hint of skin. Or… maybe not skin, but some other kind of flexible epidermis. It's dark. …Actually, is my whole body getting darker? I look a bit more tanned than usual.

Gah, I can't tell. If it is, it's subtle. I quickly get my shoes on and rush for the bathroom, stripping down to give myself a more thorough examination with the help of a mirror. Ugh, my everything hurts. And I'm itchy! It's from an errant scratching on my leg where I find the next problem: a small section of bone growing from what I think must be my tibia, protruding ever so slightly from the skin. It's not bleeding or anything, it's just… there. In a tiny patch smaller than a fingernail, my skin just stops and there's bone instead. Creepy.

I'm on a time limit, aren't I? I'll have to figure this transformation thing out fast or it's gonna figure itself out all over my metaphorical front lawn. Of course, thinking about time limits is a bad plan, because now I'm back to panicking about my impending death. Or worse, the impending deaths of kind people which I may have just caused.

I jump into the shower out of a need to keep moving. I don't want to be here right now, existing as a human while a crisis is going down in another world. But what am I supposed to do, try to pass out again with my heart beating a mile a minute? I'm on the verge of another panic attack, there's no way I'm going to be able to nap. I'm pretty sure we don't have any melatonin pills or other sleeping aids in the house either. We might have Nyquil or something? I seriously doubt it'll do the job, though. It's nearly impossible for me to nap.

Guess I'll just be a twitchy neurotic mess all day! Last time I nearly flippin' died I passed out in the other world and woke up moments later, even after spending a full day awake on Earth. So it stands to reason that regardless of how short (or long) my nap is in the other world, when I sleep here I'll wake up over there whenever I would have woken up normally. Our timelines aren't in sync.

…Which, y'know, actually has terrifying implications. Is the relative time that passes between universes based entirely on when I zonk out in each one? If so, that would mean I have to be the only person on Earth who wakes up in that world when I sleep, or at the very least everyone else must be synched with me somehow. Or more likely, if there's anyone else like me, they could be going to a completely different world from the one I go to. Nothing else really makes sense.

…Unless time travel is happening. If causality has been ceremonially defenestrated then anything goes. But I hope it's not that. Nothing good ever happens because of time travel.

It's thanks to all these musings that I almost fail to notice a larger patch of skin falling off my leg in the shower, revealing more bone in the process. Unfortunately, I manage to step on the palm-sized mass of discarded epidermis, causing me to start screaming again. It sticks to the bottom of my foot and I flail around in the shower, scratching up the tub with my talons and nearly cracking my head open as I slip trying to shake it off. Aaagh it's too big to fit down the shower drain, oh gross oh no oh ew ew ew ew!

My body shaking, I carefully hold back my urge to vomit as I drop the patch of my own skin in the toilet and flush it down, immediately extracting myself from the shower and carefully drying myself off. The exposed bone of my leg is now large enough that it's clearly not actually my normal bones; there are muscles working underneath. I'm just… growing an exoskeleton, I guess. But it's not very chitinous, it's distinctly bony. I have extra bones. Bonus bones. More bone per bone. I'm going insane and my whole body is shaking and I just… I just can't.

Deep breath. In and out, Hannah. You can and you will, because you have to. That's life. Learn to deal with it. I mean, this isn't anything like most people's lives, presumably, but you have to learn to deal with it all the same. Look at the bright side! You're not bleeding this time! Clearly your aching flesh sack of a body is improving its technique. Which is an idea that I thought was going to be comforting but now very firmly is not.

Whatever. I'm dry. Clothes on. I'm wearing my modest little church-blouse-and-floor-skirt combo so I can cosplay as a straight person. I do not, unfortunately, go to a church with one of the cool denominations who have decided that being gay is a-okay, which is a big part of why I'm still in the closet. Those denominations are funny to me; the Bible is pretty explicit about 'gay is bad,' but it's also explicit about, say, 'divorce is bad,' yet multiple people in my church prove I wouldn't get shamed for that. We should get more people lobbying to make divorce illegal. Not because I think it should be, but because it would be funny to compare the utter lack of traction that gets just because 'people who have divorced' are not a minority. But hey, what do I know, I don't believe in any of it and every day I wake up as even more of an abomination that Yahweh would doubtlessly despise, so the narcissistic, abusive prick can go shove his divine knob into a carpentry saw for all I care. At least it wouldn't be another virgin.

Blasphemy aside, I still find myself shaking in terror as I sit in the backseat of my mom's car, my brother beside me and my dad riding shotgun. My claws are cramped horribly inside these awful church shoes, though after some quick tests they seem sturdy enough to keep my feet contained. The modest breakfast I wolfed down after getting dressed is nowhere near enough to calm my gnawing hunger pains, and I feel achy and sick all over. Maybe I'll burst forth from my flesh during the sermon today. That'd be a fun way to get outed as a demon. The gays were monsters all along! Muahaha! Then I'll eat them, and everyone will be happy.

I bite my lower lip, doing a double-take on that particular daydream. There was something weirdly euphoric about it, and that's… terrifying. Why did my head just go there? Most people in my church are really nice apart from the bigotry thing (and like yeah, that's bad, but we're hardly Westboro Baptists). They're just, y'know, a community of people whose existence makes it impossible for me to publicly pursue a relationship until I'm financially independent from my parents. So there might be some pent-up aggression at my congregation, I guess, but I don't want to murder them. I don't want to murder anybody! If someone stubbed their toe because of me I'd do nothing but apologize for like, six hours. I really hope I'm not becoming a danger to society.

I flex my talons, and even as cramped as they are the movement sends joy up through my feet.

Church is boring. I avoid talking to anyone as much as I can, both because there's nothing I want to talk about with any of these people and because I'm still in the type of panicked state where I might start crying if I attempt to string more than two words together. Thankfully we didn't get here terribly early, and before long we're all in the pews, listening to an old white man ramble on about conscience and the Holy Spirit. I barely pay attention, since my mind is fully occupied with the infinitely-replaying thought of Kagiso getting stabbed through the heart while she sleeps. In my mind's eye I'm using my spatial sense to watch it all, seeing the moment the blade pierces that vital organ, watching it continue to beat over and over, pumping more and more blood out of the new holes now digging through its walls, until it rapidly falters, fades, and ultimately fails. She dies alone in her room, because I was too cowardly to stay and too pathetic to help. I tell myself there's nothing I could have done, but then I start thinking of a dozen things I could have done. If I hadn't messed up and stopped making noise to drown out the spell. Or better yet, if I had been fast enough, smart enough, ruthless enough, I could have dug right through the wall and silenced that Art mage myself. But I can't take a life like that. I don't want to. What other options are there, though? Give myself up? No, of course not, 'letting the murderous assholes win' is not how you deal with murderous assholes. But what else am I supposed to do!?

It's probably too late anyway. By the time my spider-body wakes up, it'll be long over. Automatically, I stand up with the rest of the congregation and mindlessly sing the hymns along with everyone else. I may not believe any of this stuff anymore—haven't for years—but I have to admit that Benediction (May the Peace of God) is actually an unironic bop, even if shortening 'heaven' to one syllable during the chorus kind of grates a little. How are we supposed to pronounce that, even? It's spelled "heav'n" in the hymnal, and like… what? What is that? The closest we tend to get is just saying 'hev.'

The one good hymn soon ends, though, and my musings end with it. It's back to panic mode. I politely excuse myself to the bathroom now that the service is over and spend a little while stretching out my poor, abused monster feet before I once again trap them inside my awful, awful church shoes. I don't take off my tights, but I do run my hand over the front of my leg, feeling out the patch of external bone and shuddering. At least I don't find any more skin falling off. Hmm, that reminds me.

Help, my skin is falling off, I text Brendan.

Almost immediately, those three little dots which indicate a person typing appear, and just that alone is enough to fill me with relief.

Because you're in a holy building, or…? he asks.

Smartass, I chide him. No I mean like my skeleton is straight up hatching, Bren.

I'll get the trumpets and xylophones I guess? he answers, and I snort out a laugh from inside the bathroom stall.

I can't believe you're memeing me right now, I grumble halfheartedly.

Sure you can. Besides, I'm not sure what else to do? I mean, other than scream "holy shit go to a fucking doctor, Hannah!"

But I obviously won't listen to that, I answer.

Obviously, he agrees. You bleeding?

Nah, I answer. It's the benign kind of late-stage leprosy.

Small mercies, I guess? he hedges.

So they tell me.

The next message takes quite some time to show up. No doubt Brendan tried to type something and then deleted it a few times before finally settling on a message.

You streaming today? is all he ends up asking.

Yeah, I confirm. Gotta take my mind off of stuff. Are you finally going to tell me what your Twitch handle is?

Nope. But I'll be watching and commenting! >:D

Curse your shenanigans! I whine. I'll figure you out one of these days!

No you won't! Your chat is too popular due to how great you are!

Nooooooo! Liiiiiies!

Muahahahahahaha! Ok now you should probably put your phone away until you get home.

Yeah ok.

Regretfully, I get off the toilet and return to society. No one thinks much of my extended stay, since normal humans can somehow engage in conversation with each other about topics other than Pokémon, Tabletop RPGs, or horrifying mutations of one's physical form, which is a technique I have yet to master. Still, it means they're all too distracted speaking with each other to try and speak with me, which is just the way I like it. I tolerate the wait in silent panic, but a short eternity later we're back in the car and heading to Taco Bell, which is for some reason our traditional after-church choice of dining. Nothing quite like praising God shortly before your intestines make you wish you were dead, I suppose.

"What do you want, Hannah?" my mom asks, which means it's time to calculate. I'm hungry as hell, but how much of her money can I get her to spend on just me without her questioning it? Probably no more than… fifteen dollars, max? She'll balk at that, but silently. I quickly order some of the larger things on the menu and, to my great relief, she just nods and asks my brother the same question. Mission accomplished, Hannah! Booya! You have successfully minimized social interaction with your own family at this juncture! Great job, very normal and well-adjusted of you!

…Well, whatever. I chow ravenously down on my collection of beefy potato burritos, their cheezy, oozing slosh helping quiet down the chaos in my mind. The increased food consumption is obviously fueling my transformation, but like… what am I gonna do? Starve? Then I would probably just transform into an underweight monster with hunger pains. Let's be honest with myself here: I'm absolutely doomed. I have no control over this situation and I'm too much of a mess to get control over this situation, no matter how much help Brendan tries to get me. I'm stuck on this ride until something catastrophic happens and then I will probably be shot to death by a local coven of rednecks.

But whatever. It doesn't matter. None of this matters, not when I might wake up in a cage with the blood of three good people on my legs the next time I pass out. Everything here is just so pointless in the face of that. What's the use of putting effort into caring about something horrible that will probably happen to me when something horrible is already happening to me right now!?

I'm helpless to do anything about any of it anyway, so why bother to try? Global warming is killing the world, half the country is trying to make sure COVID gets us first, wars are starting up all over the place and I'm slowly transforming into some kind of freakish pandimensional spider-girl. I even have a first and last name that start with the same letter! I'm a regular silver-age superhero! The point is, it's all garbage that's going to keep happening to me no matter what I do. That's just how things are. So my lot is even more insane than anyone else's. So what? Someone has to be the edge of the bell curve. Doesn't give me any more of a right to complain.

We all make it home without so much as a fart endangering us and I swiftly return to my room, closing the door and kicking off my awful, awful shoes. The rest of my outfit quickly follows, leaving me free to select an actually good outfit to stream in today. Hmm… something black, I think, to try to draw attention away from the fact that my skin might be subtly changing color. After a double check of the room and a triple check of my own face to make sure nothing monstrous is happening up there, I put on a bright grin and start the stream.

"Hello everyone!"

Sunday is one of the few times I semi-regularly stream, so chat is a bit more packed than usual. Still nothing huge or impressive, of course, but there were a good chunk of people there right when I started. Just… waiting for me. Something about that always feels good. I might protest and quibble with Brendan over it—I can't let myself get too big a head, after all—but my channel really is growing and I love watching it grow. It means nothing to my family, since I don't even make minimum wage yet, but to me this is beautiful. I get to do something I love, and other people love watching me do it so much that I make an income out of it! Like come on, I'm literally getting paid to play Pokémon. Sometimes it feels like, even if I only just make enough money to survive, that'd be worth it, you know? But that path leads to ruin, unfortunately. Bills will pile up somewhere, most likely from the fucking protection racket that is the American healthcare system. I've got to make a lot more money than the average food service worker or Twitch streamer if I expect to survive with any degree of comfort.

…Unless I mutate into a monster and rampage through downtown instead. One more point in that category, I suppose.

[YaktaurCaptain]: u ok, DD?

[AllTricks]: she'sTHIMKING

[LavAbsol]: Pokémon is a game that requires INTENSE FOCUS

[NougatKin]: DD has achieved zen

[PentUp]: is she even breathing lol

[Lucarivor29]: DD please notice us ;-;

[SwalotRancher]: RIP DD

Oh, crap! A quick glance at my chat reminds me that I've been silent for far too long, which is a quick way to lose my audience. "DD" is me, obviously. I go by DistractedDreamer online.

"Ah! Sorry, chat," I tell them, shaking my head as clear of thoughts as I'm able. "It's been a pretty rough few days, my head's caught up in all sorts of things."

I immediately get a chorus of 'what's wrong' and 'oh no!' and realize my mistake. They're curious. Now I'm expected to explain, and I really, really don't want to do that.

Obviously, I could decline to do so. Nothing stops me except my own obsession with channel growth. Managing relationships, or at least the appearance of relationships, is an extremely important part of my job. I am my brand, and brand loyalty is a big part of how a business grows. I don't want to encourage parasocial relationships, of course—they're as creepy for me as they are unhealthy for everyone else—but it's sort of unavoidable since personal interaction is essential to my job. People caring about me personally, about my life, is what will keep them on my channel rather than migrating to one of the more popular and more skilled streamers. I'll never physically meet any of these people, but I want to try to remember them, recognize them, and form that vague sort of internet familiarity with them because that's going to be the foundation on which more people get attracted to my content.

Streaming is fun, sure, but it's also a job. So… how do I explain? How do I discuss my problems when they all sound like insane fantasies? …Hmm. Well, I suppose there's a pretty easy way to talk about insane fantasy stuff as if it was happening to me.

"Does anyone here play GURPS?" I ask. "The tabletop game? Generic Universal Role Play System?"

I get a few 'yes' answers but mostly 'no.' That's okay. It gives me more story to tell.

"GURPS is wild," I continue. "It's pretty much exactly what it says on the tin: an attempt at a universal role play system, one that can be used to simulate any fantasy or sci-fi world you can imagine. Even the real world, if you're into that for some reason. You can make absurd things with the GURPS ruleset, from eldritch gods to swarm-minds to hyper-advanced robots to ancient magi. It's a phenomenally powerful system, mainly held back by the fact that it goes really hard into physics simulation and realism. If you're not very, very familiar with the rules, you're going to spend literal hours in every single combat encounter, looking up all sorts of wacky edge cases and still ignoring half the game's rules just to make that bearable. I'm not personally a fan of the system much because of that, but I can't deny that it does an absolutely incredible job of accomplishing what it sets out to do."

Time for the small lie, I suppose.

"Anyway, I'm currently in a GURPS game. And it's fun, but it's kind of messing with my head."

I hesitate a bit, trying to think of the best way to frame my life as a fantasy.

"...So, the premise of the game is that… our characters have amnesia. To the point that we don't even know what we are or what we can do. The GM has our character sheets and was the one to make our character. We have to figure ourselves out as we go, and we've got all kinds of weirdos. A human mind mage, a pair of four-armed siblings, and I'm a friggin spider with some sort of space magic. It's pretty wild. Anyway, uh… the last session ended with like, our whole party getting hit by a sleep spell from some cultists. I think they wanted to capture me, but they have no reason to keep the rest of the team alive. And I feel awful. I did what I could to stop it, but it wasn't anywhere near enough. Now I've gotten everyone into a situation where they all might die. The session stopped there, too, right when everyone passed out. We don't know what might happen."

[LavAbsol]: The GM isn't gonna randomly kill you all like that lol

"Yeah, you don't know my GM, Lav," I sigh. "Trust me, it's a real risk."

[AllTricks]: u got space magic right? Teleports?

"Pseudo-teleports, yeah. More like I can step into another dimension for a while. I have to sorta… dig through the other world, I guess? At least in the place I'm in now. But I can make my legs sharp for that."

[PentUp]: OK it sounds like you're spec'd for an ambush character. GURPS is high lethality, so that's good for stealth play. Step into another dimension, wait for a good sneak attack, kill cultist. Step back. Repeat.

"Uh… I don't think my combat stats are very high. Also, I definitely have the Reluctant Killer disadvantage."

[AllTricks]: atk from behind so u don't take the -4 from seeing ur victims face

"I, uh, have some kind of unique omnidirectional sense which makes that impossible."

[PentUp]: Then your build is trash and you're fucked lol

[AllTricks]: ya lol

[Lucarivor29]: big oof

"Wow," I sigh. "Thanks, chat."

I suppose I probably should have known better on that one. Panic starts filling me once again so I drown it out in video games, chatting as much as I can. I'm not doing well tonight. This is a bad stream. This will hurt my metrics. But I keep going, because the alternative is being alone with my thoughts.

Unfortunately, no amount of distraction seems to be enough. What's going to happen to me? Will I wake up in a cage? Perhaps I could escape that easily enough, but then what? I can't even communicate with anyone unless I have Sindri's help. In the best-case scenario, my friends are free and alive, but I'm still probably kidnapped. Will they be able to find me? Will they try? It's more likely that my friends are dead. No loose ends and all that. It would be child's play to kill them all while they're unconscious. Hours pass and the despair just keeps creeping in on me. Maybe they captured my team alongside me? I don't know why they would but they certainly could have. They're cultists, perhaps they want to sacrifice us! But by that same token, maybe they don't want to capture me at all. Maybe they want to kill me and the sleep spell was just their best way of accomplishing that. Over and over, each imagined scenario worse than the last, I torture myself until well after the sun sets and my body starts becoming too exhausted to continue. It's almost a relief when the stream ends, the foam goes back over my toes, and I snuggle into bed, quickly passing out despite my raging heart rate.

I wake to a furious roar shaking me to my core, and blood splattering over my body.

My spider-self has no eyelids to blearily blink open, only a perpetual sense of everything surrounding me, so the chaos hits all at once. A fuzzy arm, cradling me. Pulped and peeled organs, smashed and cut. Blood pooling inside bodies, but outside veins. Death. Pain. Danger. Movement.

Teboho is holding me in the crook of his left lower arm. Another arm holds a large shield. The last two hold a spear, which currently has its point impaled through the neck of the lullaby-spell user. One of the other three cultists has a sword impaled through his belly; he's alive, but likely won't be for long. The other two are busy smashing through walls of stone that have somehow grown out of the wood of the tree. And speaking of the tree, two brand new holes have been smashed in it, presumably by the sledgehammer at Teboho's feet.

Holy crap. Teboho somehow woke up during the sleep spell, blocked the two cultists entering his room with a stone wall, smashed through the wall separating our rooms to stab the cultist going after Kagiso, and then smashed through the next wall in our room to stab the Art mage. Once again, I can't have been asleep for more than a few seconds.

Is this… a best-case scenario!?

A crashing sound rings out as the two upright cultists break through the stone barrier two rooms over. Agh, let's not be hasty here! The scenario is still going! Teboho rips his spear out of the Art mage's throat, quickly stabbing him two more times for good measure before turning back into my room. Kagiso and Sindri blearily blink awake for only a split second before jumping into combat mode, which fortunately saves Sindri's life as he barely leaps out of bed in time to avoid a super-speed stab from one of the cultists. Motion magic, probably? With another furious roar, Teboho hurls his spear into the room, forcing the Motion mage to dodge and giving Sindri time to scramble over to the weapon and pull it out of the far wall. A crack like thunder rings out as the other cultist points his hands at Sindri, though, something striking him in the chest and causing him to let out a hoarse scream. I watch some of the blood vessels in Sindri's arm explode, his whole body seizing painfully for a moment. What was that!? It sounded like lightning! Shoot, it might be lightning, what with how it traveled down his arm and boiled his blood. I have no way to know, I can't see light! Kagiso scrambles for her bow, grabbing arrows to nock, and the chaos escalates from there.

I feel paralyzed by terror, the nature of my strange senses contributing to a feeling that I'm not really here, just watching this horrifying scene in third person. Yet I know that's not true. Each pump of rapidly-leaking blood spilling from the bodies of the cultists near us is a reminder that these deaths are real, and it is only by some miracle that Teboho is the one dealing them rather than the one bleeding out on the floor. Dimly, I realize that I'm restricting his ability to fight by clutching onto his hand like this, so with shaky limbs I dig through the air and hop into an extradimensional cubby, hoping against hope that somehow, everyone will be okay.

It's all I can do.

Teboho seems to notice me scurry off, quickly forming himself another hammer out of thin air and rushing to Sindri's side with the weapon swinging. In the arm that used to hold me, he now has a dagger. Kagiso has finished nocking her first arrow, but she fires it point-blank into the head of the dying cultist at her feet before joining the fight proper, a chilling execution that I'd probably have nightmares about if I was capable of them.

Though I suppose, arguably, this world is my nightmares.

The speedster-cultist jumps into the room with Kagiso and his ally unleashes another crash of thunder, this time hitting Sindri and Teboho. Suddenly, our archer is stuck fighting in close-range while our two melee combatants are held back by a mage. Everything's going worst-case again, and I'm just sitting here, hiding!

Trembling.

I don't want to be a killer.

Step into another dimension. Wait for a good sneak attack. Kill cultist. The recent murderhobo advice rings in the back of my mind, and I feel myself start digging. Kagiso and her enemy are both Motion mages, and though she's struggling she's still defending herself. She probably has some degree of magical speed as well. There's no way I could ambush them. Sindri and Teboho, meanwhile, are getting fried. …And their enemy is standing still.

Can I stop him? How would I even do that? Attack his legs? His arms? He's a mage and the magic of this world doesn't require limbs to use. I'd have to knock him unconscious, but I don't know how to do that safely. I don't even know what to try, and even if I did it'd risk either death or failure depending on how I mess it up. My friends scream as their bodies burn, wracked with deadly magic that I can't even see.

I can save them, though. I just… I just have to kill.

Teboho tries to throw up another stone wall, but the zap-mage focuses him down, leaving him a writhing mess on the floor. My tiny valve of a heart beats as fast as it can, my legs throbbing with power as I dig to my target. My tunnel is more or less suspended in midair, starting from the spot I crawled out of Teboho's grasp at waist height. It doesn't take terribly long to find myself huddled in terror behind the cultist's neck, my claws ready to strike.

"Hana!" Sindri shouts my name in desperation, leaping behind a bed for cover. "Hana!"

I barely hear him, what passes for my ears consumed by the pounding sound of my own blood and Teboho's screams. I don't want to kill. I don't want to kill him. This man in front of me attacked us, unprovoked. He's going to kill us all. He's evil. He's scum. He's more of a monster than I ever could be.

I don't want to kill him.

But I have to. I have to. I'm shaking. I have to kill him. I can't but I have to. The speedster nicks Kagiso in the arm. She's going to die at this rate, but the boys can't help her. No. No, no no. Have to. I have to. I create my tunnel exit, shredding the wood inside my mouth so it doesn't fall out into 3D space and alert my prey. The back of his neck is right in front of me. Exposed. My legs tense, magic filling them and begging for release. I feel the pull, the need to sink them deep into flesh, remembering the ecstasy of cutting things open with my talons back on Earth.

I don't want to kill him. Two of my legs flash forwards, one aiming for the spine and the other for the jugular. I don't want to kill him. My bladed body swims through bone even easier than it does wood. I don't want to kill him. My instincts know what to do, leaping onto his severed neck and sinking my teeth into the wound. I don't want to kill him. He tastes like iron and victory.

I clatter to the floor atop a corpse, tearing into it voraciously as Sindri rushes into the adjacent room to flank the last cultist. The speedster isn't so easily cornered, but he quickly catches onto the fact that he's outmatched, disengaging immediately and rushing out the door. Sindri swears, or at least it sounds like he does, before staggering back into this room—the room where I am currently eating a man that I just killed—to try and drag Teboho to his feet. The dentron is in terrible shape, which I suppose is the natural consequence of being struck by lightning multiple times in repeated succession.

"Hana!" Sindri barks at me, but I ignore him because I'm still very busy eating. Because I killed a man, and now I'm eating him. I killed a man and I'm eating him I killed a man and I'm eating him I killed a man and I'm eating him what am I doing what am I doing stop stop stop stop stop—

Two strong hands reach down and pull me out of the bloody mess of viscera I've ravenously dug myself inside of, and I immediately freak out. Flailing as hard as I can, I hiss with multiple pairs of legs, trying to squirm out of the tight grip. Despite all the blood making my carapace slippery, however, I am lifted up, up, way up until I find my shrieking body placed carefully on top of Kagiso's head.

"Fala hana, nata nata," she coos, tapping the top of my body once for each 'nata.'

Good hat, I intuit. Pat pat.

I stop struggling, swallowing the last bits of flesh caught in my mouth. I'm just shaking now, my body unable to scream or cry. I'm a murderer. I saved my friends, but… god. Oh god. Fuck! I just… I just…!

We need to go, Sindri's mental voice suddenly blares in my head. Now!

Ah. Yeah. The speedster might be getting backup. I don't answer, but I don't need to. I just keep a firm grip on Kagiso's skull, careful not to cut her as she and Sindri each support one side of Teboho and the three of them all flee together, taking whatever they can carry before legging it out of the inn. Outside of the confined spaces, my limited sensory range now feels confining. I see Kagiso grab a stone from a pouch on her side, speak her spell, and throw it… but I don't know what her target was until we run past the corpse of a human woman, face-first on the ground with a hole in the back of her skull. Another cultist, judging by the necklace, but not the speedster that was fighting us. I have no idea what she might have done to earn Kagiso's ire.

The little rest stop village we're in isn't very large, and we're soon at what is obviously the end of it. Multiple human-sized tunnels are dug into the wood at the town's edge, each quickly twisting into an impossible direction. Sindri looks them all over briefly before decisively picking one, and we rush into what I can only assume is one of the wormholes. Once inside, it quickly twists into w=1 space, but somehow enables the human and dentron to follow the path anyway. I can somehow feel the magic here, but I have no capacity to focus on anything right now. I feel as dead as the man I just killed.

Sindri and the others have a brief conversation, and a barely-conscious Teboho makes another wall, sealing off the tunnel behind us. Sindri and Kagiso set him down as carefully as they can, then collapse from exhaustion. Sindri makes everyone clasp hands the way we did when establishing the last communication spell, and I numbly step off of Kagiso's head and add a leg to the mix.

Well, Sindri heaves. I suppose I owe Hannah an apology. The cult… was definitely a problem.

I don't answer.

Brother save us, Kagiso comments. Hat save brother. Good hat.

How did he save us? I manage to ask numbly. Why wasn't he…

I don't manage to finish communicating the thought, but Teboho figures out my question anyway.

I'm a Matter mage, he says. Matter and Barrier. Matter opposes Art. You screeching underneath my bed was enough to wake me up.

Oh. Oh, I'm so dumb! He resisted the spell because of his element. Gah, I'd just learned that, how did I forget?

Thank you, I mentally mutter.

No, thank you, Hannah. If you hadn't woken me up, a blade through the chest probably would have. You saved my life twice just now!

And I ended a life. I ended a life for the first time. I'm still covered in sticky, wet blood. I drank it from him. I liked it.

I'm the only reason they attacked, I answer numbly. I put you in danger in the first place. They wanted me because I'm valuable, right?

Most likely, Sindri confirms bluntly.

That hardly makes it Hannah's fault! Teboho protests. They wanted to steal her like an animal, and kill us to get her! What occurred was nothing but justice against foul men so cruel and corrupt that they doubtlessly would have found a reason to attack us regardless.

Perhaps, Sindri answers noncommittally. But whether they wanted Hannah or not, the important thing is that we stopped them and made it out alive. We should be largely safe here in the worm tunnels, at least for a while. And if they DO come after us here, Teboho and Kagiso can set up an absolutely brutal killzone. So for now, let's lick our wounds and rest.

Lick, lick, Kagiso purrs, having taken Sindri's advice literally and decided to slurp at the gash on her arm. Then she glances at me, takes her arm out of her mouth, and offers it to me.

Hannah want? She asks, motioning to the blood leaking out of her.

N-no! I yelp back at her. She shrugs and goes back to licking herself.

Yes, about that, Sindri sighs. Please don't eat anyone else, Hannah. It's not acceptable in civilized cultures.

I jump a little at that, my legs nervously drumming through 4D space.

I didn't mean—I mean, I won't! I don't want to, I just… I won't. Sorry. I'm sorry!

She saved your life, Sindri! Teboho protests. Leave her be. You aren't hurt anywhere, are you Hannah?

N-no, I'm fine, I insist. I'm fine.

I'd ask the same to him, but I can't bring myself to do so. I can see exactly how bad Teboho is torn up on the inside, and it's horrifying. Less than an hour later, though, I'm back on Kagiso's head and everyone else is back on their feet, staggering up the wormhole to our next destination. I spend the whole trip replaying my kill over and over in my mind. Remembering my panic, my horror, my regret, and my reluctance.

And how it all washed away at the bite.