I wanted to try to tell this all nice and neat, but I can't. I tried, I really tried to pretend this was no big deal, I've been dead. This was nothing new. She.Took.My.Arm. I can't finish writing this entry, so I'm going to leave it incomplete for now. While I try to get my shit together. Anything below in italics are my current thoughts.
This tower kept changing as I climbed up it. Spirally upwards endlessly. I think it was probably pretty wise of me not to open rando doors, because well...that's borrowing trouble, and I've done enough of that as it is. The floor changed again, to copper plates, with bronze pipes and marble. The metal plates were cool against my feet, and numbed my feet a bit as I moved on. It got to the point where I wasn't sure i was moving at all. I ended up leaving an empty can (Dr. Pepper, the nectar of whatever gods are left) on one of the steps, and continued upward. Again the flooring changed. First to wicker of all things, and then to...I shit you not...unfolded cardboard boxes.
Like, if you were to go to the post office, and get some boxes for transport. No particular identifying marks on them, but yeah, cardboard. It seemed pretty thick, and really I had nowhere else to go. so I risked it.
Cardboard went to tightly packed fish netting about me. It seemed to be nylon or plastic, I'm not sure really. It just sufficed as stairs before I reached a ceiling. Thank a merciful god that there was a hatch on top, as I was not inclined to tread back down after all this invested time.
I thought about Twenty-Six, I thought about that pinchy machine I named 'Mr. Clicky' that I had found.
Even now it was an age ago.
not that ages have meanings anymore.
I don't know. I mean, am I back in the thick of things again? Am I just slowly dying now, letting a single moment play out over weeks or years?
What if I'm still on that fucking Path.
Always on that path
What if I just now finally snapped? I mean, I know I've exaggerated. I've talked about how 'hyuck hyuck, I must be loopy! time to cackle into the darkness and fillet a tree stump with a knife, yuck yuck yuck."
But I mean, the classic line is 'If I were crazy, how would I know?' for a reason.
Why even bother, I guess? Why bother if I've crossed another line, or had a mental break? It doesn't get me any further on my current goal. And that goal is to understand what happened to Matchbook.
Whatever, man, answers are needed. Maybe I can do one good deed and finish this damn post.
The hatch opened up into another 'far too large room' I didn't even give a shit about spacetime getting fucked in the ass anymore. Obviously the rules HERE were not the same as THERE, and I was okay with that as long as I could make reasonable assumptions.
The ground was worked stone, those big blocks that are reminiscent of castle stone. Which was fitting, because I climbed up into Frankenstein's lab.
No tesla coils, but there was a shitton of weird machinery, and glowing tubes that networked across the room. Giant gears slowly moved back and forth, chains on the ceiling. Hoses, and one of those spoked wheels you'd use on a ship to pump water. It slowly turned on its own accord, rotating forward and back.
it was at this point that I just couldn't continue writing so casually.
I stared at the page before me, and I couldn't continue. I wrote piecemeal parts of it below.
I saw her. The thing that Twenty Six called Dal Matia. This large, hunched over creature of metal and organs. It turned to me. Its face was a hollow mask of metal. Inside I saw motion, but I was not sure what. It rolled as its body turned, but it was this jerking strange motion. I heard the snap of what sounded like bone. It was unperturbed. But it was NBD to me. Just another creature. Twenty Six warned me.
What I didn't see was that Twenty Six was splayed out on a table, disemboweled to the point of cut in half. Nope, that'd have been handy to see before I started mouthing off.
I threw that damn clacking mecha-organ onto the stone floor of her tower workshop. The thing skittered around on the ground, little prongs and levers actually causing it to crawl about six feet before it gave up. "You dropped this." I said in my level best. As always, she was engrossed in her work, using some sort of overhead machine to cause sparks, like she was soldering. It couldn't be that. That was understandable, and we can't have that in Undertown. Eventually, she turned her head towards me without her body turning. There was a sickening snap that came from within that armored frame of hers. I had heard that one before, when a deer broke its neck trying to commit suicide next to me. Yeah, I've lead an interesting and terrifying life. I repeated myself, with some clarity. "You put this thing INSIDE someone. He then went on a killing spree. I took his head off." The next words came out very crisp. "And. He. Got. Back. Up." She swiveled around, then curiously looked at the accusing evidence. Long spindly fingers picked it up. She regarded it as if it were the first time she had seen it. "Unfortunaete. It wuz meant fur a more pruper alighning."
The next sensation I felt was a coolness. I awoke to blurry vision, and a lightheaded feeling. I was floating, or perhaps laying down on the stonework. I must've still been in her lab. I noticed what had to be Dal Matia's face hovering over me as I lay there. I could barely move under my own power, my frame twitching just a bit. Whatever had happened to me, I had lost all ability to move, and most of my ability to feel.
I realized then, that she was talking to me as she peered down over me. Her words, dull and muted, took several seconds to tune in to. She was saying something about 'procedures' and 'upgrades'. Suffice it to say, I was suitably alarmed. A sputtering cough came from my mouth as I tried to wheeze out a 'no', anything to get her to stop her from whatever it was she was up to.
My ears kicked back on as I gasped for breath, staring more straight up than at her. She spoke in her standard matter-of-fact thoe, that metal mask of hers occasionally looking up at me. "...simply incogruitous with the rest uf your beeng, but there are risks an rewurds with every medicul praktise." There was a bright beaker in her hand, I had seen her mixing it when I spoke to her minutes ago. It glowed a sickly green in her metal hand. Unceremoniously, she dumped it on me, as she explained what she was doing. Ever the teacher, ever the mentor, ever the sadistic piece of monster. "Feel now pain, even now. Thees will not take too lung to repair. We just most make room for the new limb."
New limb? It was my worst fear, the same thing she had babbled about when I first met her. She was going to mutilate me, and there was nothing I could do to stop her. I managed to weakly rasp a scared "Don't", but she wouldn't listen. I was going to have to be awake as she operated on me, and there was nothing I could do about it.
I tried to will myself to pass out, even as I felt jostling and movement from my left shoulder, my heart raced, even as the rest of my body was in perfect contention. She spoke as she maimed me, "Hoomans are very frashile creetures overall, but thees is the nature of my wurk, to find yur truuth." There was a noise, a noise that I could never have heard before, but I knew it had to deal with her ripping me apart. I prayed for death, I prayed for that death I so wanted, that I was denied repeatedly.
There was a tearing sound, and I knew I had heard that one before, at any time you are trying to cut up tough meat. My shoulder shifted again, as she placed something up on a metal pan of some sort. I saw fingers. I saw my own hand up there, just at the edge of my vision. She kept working, I tried to scream, tears welling up in my eyes, as I couldn't keep my terror in check. Impassively, Dal Matia looked up at me and had the nerve to chide me. "Stop skwurming, I weel make it better soon. You will see."
There was the sound of something light and rigid hitting the stone, like a stick. It had to be bone. It had to be what was left of my forearm being removed piece by piece. "This...this was bad surgery. Dead you really think yu could kill such an abknormalety like a Bleeding Three with your own arhm?" She tsked at me, her fingers covered in my blood.
I could only whimper and beg for death.
she took my arm.
