SUBCUTANEOUS 1.6

Woohoo! A longer one this time, and a mix of actual plot starting up with some questions finally being raised in a way that needs answering. Enjoy guys!

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Double, double toil and trouble, fire burn and caldron bubble. There’s just something so fun about figuring out how a thing works and then making it your bitch.

In Ilia’s case, her latest bitch is the crafting system. Or, more precisely, the corpses of her victims, which is even better. Adding the Twitching Digits and Digestive Sludge to her ‘inventory’ (metaphorically speaking, of course- she has a necklace of a shitload of fingers and a bowl she carved out of the trunk of a bone tree for the slime) has allowed for quite a bit more creativity in her constructs. 

By the time she hits LEVEL I, she’s gotten a few dozen twitchy leg-bits, and just as before the body of her Fleshling character molds with them perfectly. Besides the haptic feedback of the game screaming at her when she does it, and the -50% debuff to her limb health, recreating the Twitching Claw-Glove was a breeze, and worth every moment it took. Both of her arms now end in hands that look distinctly unnatural, molten-wax skin and a variety of darker, sharpened fingers moving constantly from the half-digested flesh. With both, she lost some of the plumage on her forearms, but the +2 buff to her strength stat and +2 to sensitivity is a hell of a boost for an aesthetic change and a health debuff.

And it’s made it damn easy to swing her shrapnel bone club around. In fact, it even highlighted a special thing she hadn’t known before. 

The crafting system allows for upgrades.

With a bit of the sludge and a half-dozen gut-fingers, the hilt of her club now actually holds her hand when she swings it. Makes it a lot easier. 

The Sludgelings, at this point, basically can’t fight back at all. The added reach and sharp points that the club gives her make the whole thing easy, and they’re clearly the very basic starter enemies. The Sludgelur’s still put up more of a fight, but they’re not fast enough to avoid harm, and not tough enough to keep the spikes of her club from tearing them open. 

She swings for the third time in the fight, her shrapnel club ripping into the Sludgelur. The three-foot ball of slime with spider-limb eels makes a gurgling noise, half growl, half teakettle full of gelatin, and she grins at the way it simply falls into pieces, the acidic sludge its kind are known for melting into the scab-gravel burning the skin-ground beneath.

It’s all very dramatic, but she’s already using the club to sift through the debris for pickups.

Unlike sludgelings, while they still give off the the same titular sludge, they don’t leave Twitching Digits (Low Grade); they leave Twitching Digits (Mid Grade). Not much of a difference in the name, but boy howdy is there a difference.

Adding them to her growing amount of finger jewelry, she gets up, nice and slow. Her character model is reaching the area of feeling overencumbered, but not quite there yet. Still, the fact that it’s a sort of proportional slow is another point in the game’s favor.

Ilia’s been playing for almost nine hours straight, and at this point, she’s starting to get…

Well. Not worried, per se, but something is going on. Frankly, she’s reached a point where she’s not sure that this game could be real. Her doubts from earlier are starting to become more and more clear, but this time, they’ve had time to stew.

On the one hand, she’s playing the game right now. It’s real, present, she’s in it, interacting with it, and unless she’s experienced the most random and undiagnosable psychotic break in the history of ever, that’s not something that someone can fake. It’s like with the moon-landing; it would technically be more effort, and less technologically possible, to fake the landing than to just do the real one. Which is absolutely fucking nuts, but true nonetheless.

On the other hand, while VR tech has been around since the late 2010s, the model she’s using didn’t come out until the mid 2020s, just a few years back, and to make a regular videogame on, say, a playstation, can take four to six years. To build this game after the console for it was made, without having the specs beforehand, and in only, what, three years? When it has better graphical fidelity, better haptics, better programming than anything else she’s played from the most expensive-ass corporate brands in the world?

It’s just… it’s not feasible. It’s like finding out that a brand new company with fifty employees and a singly factory somehow outperformed boeing in the commercial airplane market. Sure, they never fund their R&D departments properly, and they’ll kill anyone who says so, but they still have plain more resources and information than anyone; to outperform that, so late in the game, starting from nothing, isn’t a thing.

This game shouldn’t exist. And yet obviously, empirically, it does. The money left her bank account, the package is still off in the corner of her room, and there is a cartridge in the game console. It exists, same as she does.

She comes out of her reverie to another alert from the game.

CRAFTING EXP GAINED: +30

CRAFTING RANK UP!

Not a level, then- a rank. Do those stick around post-death, just like the traits? 

Either way, it seems like each category used to gain xp has its own ranks, probably extending towards Abilities as well. So general levels, ranks for categories and abilities. Probably.

She’ll figure it out eventually.

In the meantime, she looks down at what her avatar has been idly crafting as she zoned out.

In her avatar’s many-fingered hand is a single long, almost tendril-like limb, the individual spider-parts and the weird flexibility they hold making for a many-jointed and incredibly gross looking appendage. She’s tied each joint together with the hair-grass and used the digestive sludge to force the materials to bond, and it twitches like a snake in her grasp.

Twitching Limb (Low-Grade). Enough to prompt her Crafting to rank up.

She doesn’t exactly have a list of things, but… well, it almost feels like just looking at the limb is disappointing now. If she fuses with it, it’ll probably be a huge boon, and it’s much more complicated than the haphazard mixing of bone bits, hair and fingers she’s used so far, that’s true, but it feels… lackluster. As if the rank-up tells her she could have made it a higher grade. The hairs are wrapped too tightly in certain spots, the sludge undiluted enough to damage some of the useful tissues… it’s not broken, but it could be better.

Is it the game? Highlighting minor imperfections through art design, camera filters, something like that?

This game shouldn’t exist.

And yet, as she upgrades the limb with a variety of black, insectile finger-things at the far end… it works. It continues to work. It continues to feel real.

Her torso haptics buzz angrily as she takes the scab-gravel mixed with the digestive sludge, diluting and adding in fresh material, and slathers it along her shoulder blade. Less than a minute later, once she’s sure the flesh has softened and the acid won’t damage the new addition, she plugs the twitching limb into her shoulder.

The heads up display flickers.

Just once. Briefly. Not so much that it felt intentional, but just enough that she might just have run into a processing issue or a disguised loading screen. No big deal.

But then- alerts.

UNIQUE MUTATION ACQUIRED: MULTI-LIMBED

ORGAN EQUIPPED: TWITCHING LIMB (LOW-GRADE)

Distracted by the sweet dopamine of surprise and accomplishment, she selects the first alert almost by instinct.

MULTI-LIMBED: While most entities possess more than one limb, through modification or accidental mutation you have acquired a limb which exceeds your conventional limit. Fleshlings, usually possessing the bare minimum amount of humanoid limbs, receive a substantially higher increase in dexterity and utility than creatures with a higher starting amount, and your brain has been modified to integrate this movement directly into your skillset.

The moment she’s done reading, she switches over-

TWITCHING LIMB (LOW-GRADE)(ORGAN): Unlike lesser modifications, organs are whole additional systems added to the user’s base capacity. While most entities that acquire, integrate or create new organs require a higher upkeep, they can maintain a variety of additional functions and usually act as a direct upgrade in some way.

The TWITCHING LIMB (LOW-GRADE) counts as one (1) additional limb atop the regular total, and can extend out, grab, impale, grapple, or manipulate objects. This one has been modified with additional dexterity in the form of Twitching Digits (LOW-GRADE). 

• +1 AGILITY

• +2 SENSITIVITY

A substantial upgrade. On top of that, a big boost to the next time she wakes up, at least if she can bring along either one of her newest additions as part of the character creation options like she could the prior mutation and skill. It’ll be hard to buildcraft if she tries to take too much, but it offers a dizzying variety of possibilities.

She stands up in the game, watching as the black, spiked tendril she’s created reaches over her shoulder, its movements jerky and awkward. It looks intimidating, kind of like a sleeker version of a xenomorph’s tail coming into her field of view, but more than that, it’s almost like she can feel through it. Haptics on her ribs and lower back tremble ever so slightly as it moves, but they do so constantly, non-stop. She tries to use the controls to move the limb, but there’s no button or option to select it- it seems to just kind of hover, moving out of the way of her swipe attacks and moving towards anything she tries to pick up with her regular limbs.

In short- it’s incredibly cool.

And it shouldn’t be real.

The game is incredibly fun, and there’s something a lot like body euphoria for Ilia to be able to modify her “flesh” like this, but it’s starting to get uncomfortable. She sighs, long and loud.

“Ok,” she whispers in her room. “Time to fuck around and find out.”

She starts walking.

None of the Sludgelings or Sludgelurs she’s met so far have been a threat to her this playthrough. They’re slow, her mutation blocks off way more of their potential acid damage, and she’s got a weapon she literally designed to take them out. On top of that, she starts to notice something almost like sonar- the more she gets used to the vibrations from the feedback, the more she starts to realize that they sort of shift. It’s only when she diverts her path directly towards one of the sludgelings she’s noticed that she realizes what it is- the buff to sensitivity, mixed with the new limb, seems to vibrate her haptics louder in the direction of the nearest enemy.

It borders on the edge of not being something the game should be able to do.

The forum got deleted, she hadn’t met the person she bought the game from anywhere else on the website, and the game is literally too good to be true. Literally.

So she keeps walking. Towards the nearest of the mountains.

The whole valley of bone trees and prairie-hills of reddish fur is surrounded by mountains on every side, but they’re not so far that they can’t be reached. She figures maybe a few minutes of walking in a straight line, ignoring the goblin in her brain hungry for loot and to explore every side objective, and the game has to let her reach them. Or at least tell her when she’s reached a boundary.

In theory. In theory. It’s theoretically possible that someone crazy enough, or more likely a group of people truly insane and being paid six figures (or chained to their desks) could code this. In a practical sense, in any way realistic, there’s no way this could exist, but it could theoretically exist.

But then there’s the limitations of the software itself.

If it’s a one-in-a-million product of a one-in-a-million supergenius game designing team, it could have the crafting system, the haptic coding, the graphics, the smoothness of the game’s movement. It could. It’s possible, in theory. But there’s limits to what a game can be, and functionally, no game is a true and perfect open-world, because every open world ends. There’s only so much space in any one program or, in this case, game cartridge, and eventually, she will run into a hard-coded wall where the game ends. Or at least a message, telling her that she can go no further, or a glitch to fall through the map, or something. 

And if she can’t find it…

That’s a different issue. Something she can figure out if it comes to it. Maybe there’s a nascent AI somewhere that got incredibly lucky with its dataset, found a way to hyper-compress stuff, or is generating new terrain in live time, or something, but that’s a different issue.

Ilia keeps walking.

It takes… more than a few minutes. In a straight line, she walks for almost ten minutes, dodging around sludgelings and between the hills of the bone trees, heading towards the closest mountain.

Even with the help of caffeine, she’s getting tired. It’s been 9 hours straight of staring into bright pixels, and she’s been standing up and getting lightly tazed the whole time. Even on fuzzy carpet, even sitting in her desk chair sometimes, she’s still starting to get sore and sleepy. Ten minutes walking in a straight line? Not exactly a fun or particularly effective way to keep herself awake and focused.

Maybe she should sleep on this. Get some rest, try again tomorrow, when she’s better rested, after she’s digested what’s happened here-

Bzzz.

Feedback from a torso-pad, the ones tied to her new limb. On her back, right near a ticklish spot.

She turns around, looking for… for something. She’s not sure what, but the buzzing gets a bit louder, starting to make the right side of her stomach a little sore.

BzzzZZ.

Getting closer. But she sees nothing, no unnatural movements from the grass, no evidence of sludglings or their bigger cousins, not even anything she can see in the sky, highlighted against the tooth-stalagmite-things that grow from the ceiling far above.

Annoyed, she goes to take off the patch, worried it’s going to start actually hurting soon-

BZZZZZZZ- CRACK.

The ground in front of her breaks open, the lower side of a hill suddenly bulging and then popping like a zit. Blood comes with it- thick and arterial, bright enough that it reminds her directly of her health bar up in the top corner, like it reflects the gorgeous crimson of her own character’s life force. The scab-gravel muddies the crimson as it flows, as it stains and weighs down the fur-grass, and from the popping pustule of flesh… there’s a sapling.

It looks like a bean, if a bean was made of bright red gelatin. The stalk that emerges from the ground holds the bean at its far edge, but as the polyp rises, so does the stalk / sapling. Instead of leaves, it seems to have dozens of branches of veins, which branch further, their ends damaged like they’ve been torn up out of a body (or, in this case, out of the ground). 

The ground stabilizes, the haptic feedback from movement growing dim. She stands there, staring at the massive, alien tree, bowed under the weight of its fruit, hanging like a crimson droplet magnified a thousand times over. 

In the brightness of the crimson, she notices movement. A shifting and lurching thing, from inside the droplet. It bulges out in place, like-

Like a pregnant belly. Like a womb, holding something inside that is trying to tear its way out.

There is a sound like the tearing of leather, wet and thick and harsh, a gushing of fluids bubbling forth out of the wound ripped into the world. The polyp dims slightly, the crimson losing potency like its life-essence is being drained by the violence done to it, and then, with a final heave, it is ripped open.

Out of it falls a body.

Not a collection of snot and insect-fingers, but a real body. Humanoid, but… not entirely. It has massive, bulging musculature, malformed and misshapen, and it looks like there are cancerous shards or miniscule shark teeth growing out of every inch of the creature. Its head is massive, almost half the size of its body, and as it slowly lifts itself off the ground, the cylinder of malformed skull atop the homunculus body slits open down the front, revealing eyes clustered like pomegranates. 

A hand comes up as that horrific head stares at her. If there is a mouth, she can’t find it. Just a pillar of meat atop a body that looks like a bodybuilder was grown entirely out of shark-skin and off-white scar tissue. It pushes against the ground, raising itself higher, and the way that the muscles move beneath the skin is wrong, like they’re connecting and disconnecting in sequence, as needed.

A moment later, it has one of its feet under it, and it stands up tall.

At least eight feet. Maybe more. It towers over her, three times as broad, screaming with physicality aline the threat of violence. From between its legs, growing from its tailbone, she sees a long, serpentine form, borderline obscene and clearly phallic in shape if not in location- until it splits open at the tip, unzipping along three different lines like a banana and revealing dozens and dozens of serrated fangs, burbling with purplish-yellow liquid.

Is… is this a boss? A random mob? Something designed to show up before you reach the edge of the map, a more immersive way of blocking progress?

And then it appears. Her HUD updates, showing her a name floating above the creature’s head.

{MANIFESTATION OF [00000000]}

GREATER FLESHLING

Greater Fleshling is interesting on its own. It makes sense, after all- she’s marked as part of a species, not as an individual creature called by that name. Of course there could be others out there, and ever since freaking pokamin it’s been common sense to put evolutions as a form of upgrade. It makes for a cool bit of worldbuilding, potential hints to a narrative, a challenge that she has to evolve to be able to fight.

But that’s not the part that draws her focus.

Up above the species name is a line she hasn’t seen on any other creature so far. A line of writing she’s only ever found in her own character sheet.

It’s not just a fleshling, it’s a manifestation of something. Something blurred out, replaced with black bars and hazy lines, kept secret. 

…Another player?

Slowly, Ilia raises a hand… and waves.

The pillar of flesh replacing a head tilts to one side, like a curious puppy. It tilts to the other, and then back again.

And then it raises a distended, hypermuscular arm… and waves back.

And then there’s a pixelated blur on her screen as something moves faster than her eyes can track, and a single burst of vibration across her entire body at once- and the screen goes black.

Stunned, she can only stand there in shocked silence as words gradually reform on the screen.

MEAT

BEGIN.

Slowly, she reaches up to her face and pulls the headset off. 

It sticks for a second, the grunge of sweat against plastic straps making for a slight hesitation in coming off, and then she’s free, opening her eyes to the darkened room around her. It’s lit by a lava lamp in the corner, a regular lamp on the far side, and the hint of streetlights coming in through the blinds.

It’s almost dark enough to disguise the way the headset she’s staring at seems to wriggle.

She very gently puts it down on the floor. Slowly. Carefully. Like it’s a wild animal, about to bite. She sits down backwards, falling onto her butt and crawling back against the floor until she feels the cool of the plaster wall behind her on her back.

And then she stares at it for a while.

Waiting to see if it moves.