Stabbed him with the Relative Time Knife. Don’t worry, it’s something more like a skinning knife, delivered with care at leisure. The goal isn’t to kill him.
His relative experience of being stabbed will last at least half an hour. I feel dizzy just being in the presence of his misaligned reactions.
“Wish there was a relative time pill I could take to experience his yelling, shorter. It is annoying.”
“It’s called a house. A nice house away from it all. With thick walls.”
Jetty nicked herself on a RTK once. Just a small cut, but it did not fuck to endure such a thing.
“I’ll get a house,” she says. “I’ll find the secret gold of the furries.”
“There’s no actual gold. They just want us to kill for it.”
Big bad feelings coming up. Right out through my meager chest, flowing through the aureoles like dry ice. I’m thinking about the social conditions. The social conditions of life. The social conditions of life on this planet. Oh, god. God!!!!!!
The HUD virus is everywhere now. There are some seamless losers in bunkers with filters strong enough to keep it out, but pretty much everyone else gets what you say when you’re like, I need to punch you in the face for an intangible currency which corresponds to an aerial power. Company scrip baby…
I punch Jetty in the face.
“The fuck,” she says.
“It’s a mood swing,” I say helpfully.
“Are you getting anything out of it?” She looks above her right shoulder even though only I can see it. The numeric value that is assigned to punching someone in the face.
“I should have got more than that.”
She rubs her jaw. “How much you get?”
“10.” That classic Black Iron prison decimal. They never accounted for the bug girls of the Black Iron Prison, the Black Iron Prison hentai boobs and dicks.
“So? That’s the usual amount.”
“Yeah…”
“You think I’m worth more?”
“Uh.”
“Explain!”
Now she’s got me. Sussed out what I couldn’t admit to myself. That I think she has a certain quality to her. Rare girl drops. I don’t have the CHA to conceal my feelings.
She sucks on a standard ice cream ration. We earn resources from the sky in exchange for our great labor in punching faces and torturing people with the Relative Time Knife. It’s the free market. It’s the law of supply and demand. It has turned us black and turned us white, given us medicine and food, given us ampoules of angel gas and badguy vapor. That’s why we have these Chain3 teeth. Chain2 teeth are only strong enough to crunch through the ration crackers. That’s right, you have to punch ten guys just to eat the food that falls from the sky. That’s how they get you. Teleologically, anyways.
At first, me and Jetty didn’t punch anyone. It isn’t easy going up to strangers and using your knuckles to collide with their bone geometry and seeing what they’ll do in response, all the faces people make, and it’s worse if they don’t get mad, just really pathetic and sobbing and freaking out. But we got so hungry we were actually like, wow, starvation real. This actually happens to people. So we lay down in a ditch and punched each other ten times.
Chain3 teeth! For crunching ampoules! The first time you break glass in your mouth you hesitate, it’s scary, feels shitty, but then you get over it. The glass is more like a sugary crystalline thing anyways, not window glass.
Jetty stares at the Skinner sky. I know that look. Even the pain isn’t grounding her. And when you lose that, what do you have left?
Does she think real life is too much like the flat shapes in the computers and phones littering the indoor deserts? I’m not first person, I’m her’d person, ugh, simp pov, I wonder always what she wonders, I’m not curious about my own point of view, I’m curious about how I can serve as a surface for her powerful anime light, and if I am ever clever it is to function as a better mirror. So that when she talks she does not feel alone.
But she is alone
Because I am hollow as a cistern
But I can’t let her know that
Or she would be lonely
This guy is still screaming in slow mo. Does he know how dumb he looks?
I leave a ration for him. His teeth can’t crack it, but it’ll build character to have to beat someone for the teeth to eat the crackers.
Some guy runs past hype on ampoules and Jetty spits out an ice cream bone. This guy has got some crazy Chain because I can’t even see his teeth.
His face is like a mile above
Just screaming in the air
I try out my new effect, try to sandbend some shit
It goes up my nose
This ain’t the golden age of Hollywood baby
Fortunately he doesn’t fuck with us
He’s got a fixation on something in that building over there. Half off at Shitman Alley. Free Dumbobucks at Clod Palace. Buy one get two turds free. Premium Stupid Balls.
But there’s a reason we got scared
We know the score
Because it floats in the sky
And we’re pain beggars in a world of torture millionaires
We need to get powerful so someone doesn’t torment us
Relative Time Knife is a baby rattle
Some of the Chain10 guys
That decimal again
They hunt bug gays for a living
They know if we get enough to eat that we fight flashier than them in any arena, red, black, or white
So they have to shut us down
With evil toys
They want to direct the sequel to pain
With our bodies
I’ve got no character arc
And I live in a world of moral relativity
But I still have to learn to sandbend
Fuck that
Fiending for a level up
“Let me cut you in a place you don’t show the sky”
Can’t let that CHA stat dwindle
“We’re going to get so powerful”
“So true besty”
Some guy with a Chain0 BitchKnife runs at us indecisively and Jetty attains full spiritual expansion from ten minutes with his feet alone
He’s a nice looking guy, I don’t think he intended to live in a world with a weird virus. He’s lucky we found him first. Getting fucked up by some low level bug bitches will give him really useful instincts.
He won’t be walking until reset
And I, the hollow, do the karmically taxing work for her
Of cutting holes in him at scientific increments
So that we level up off him ambiently
Days and miles later
Popping sparkles in the middle of slurping face, scaring each other by leveling up as we sleep, illuminating for one second a mineral formation in the GameStop Cave System
I hate waking her up
I should have been careful to only put the same amount of pain in the world as her
So we’d erupt into graphical flourishes at the same time
But pain is complicated
Even on the decimal system