"No, just a proper caxrn markxng my fall, here upon Bulge Rock. Mourn, o ye helmskxnked and hxghblooded, for much mustard was spxlled today xn the name of not havxng to cull a bunch of juvxe xdxots aboveground. Alas. Waxt, X changed my mxnd, gxmme some water." It helps. You no longer wish to perish. Much. Feeling expansive, you hook your nerd-nubs into the muscles of her shoulders and give them a mighty two-handed pinch, the kind you know makes her absolutely melt. "Xt sounds lxke statxc and yellxng down here," you observe. "Must be all the sxnxster Brood Stuff they get up to down here."
"You expire there and I'm burying you in rubber quackbeasts. No lie, I got a fuckin collection goin on since I was four, ain't nobody findin' your corpse---NNNGGGHHHhhhhhh oh shit..." That is just not fair, what he's doing. You go all boneless, even your head sagging back. Pinkie, perhaps sensing your incoming demise, starts gnawing on your fingers. "Yeah, I ain't surprised. Lords know what kinda tech they got down here, and if this place is all abandoned, I bet a fuckton of it's all broke and shit..."
==> Nameless lusus: hunt. Yes. You are doing that. There are smells, live warm smells, you can taste them. There are vibrations. The prey were moving but then they stopped moving. You can still feel their voices through your feet, but when prey freezes it sometimes means they suspect you, so you hide yourself in the cracks of the wall, in the convolutions of the ceiling, as you stalk. It might take a long ass time before you're close enough to fang the shit out of them with your super poisonous face, but you kinda don't have much of a sense of time anyway, and it's not like you're getting aNY LESS FUCKING HUNGRY.
Something in a dark crevice is glowing fainly greenblue. You zoom-enhance-zoom-enhance until you can see the thing up close, and it pulls a gasp out of you that makes your sides ache. Fuck, you haven't been keeping up with your rehab, ow. "Dude," you poke LL and the mumbly moaning of a backrub well-inflicted stutters to a halt. She makes a noise. "Over there, in the recess. Glowy mushrooms."
You squint through the haze of happy endorphins and wiggle your shoulders to get him to continue. Maybe if you act particularly pitiful, you can get him to use his elbows next. It's been eternities since you had a good back rub. "Dare me to eat one? ... Shit, you bet my shit would come out all glowy? Hahaha." Somewhere in the back of your head, you feel something uncurl and bristle, all pricklysharp and hungry, and something about it gets your skin crawling like Cloris's long nails against your skin. You grimace and squirm. "Ngh. Think we can get walkin' again soon? Maybe find somewhere quieter?"
"Sure," you betray your sore legs without a moment of regret. "Just don't eat anythxng glowy, that xs bad news wrathbeasts, X don't even care xf you were kxddxng, oh my god ew. And don't speculate on your poop, exther. When you say xt, X have to see xt xn my head. Save me from you."
The prey is on the move. They're not fleeing, just traveling. Good, you have lulled them into a false sense of security. You follow across the ceiling, flowing between stalactites like a wisp of vapor. You are gonna eat tonight.
You erupt into cackles in spite of your exhausted creepy crawlies. "What, you don't like glowy poops? It'd be all radiating this soft light, I could up and put it in a jar and use it as a daylight for the baby. It'd help us, like, bond and shit." Speaking of the baby, you scoop up squirming Pinkie and ignore her fussy churrs. She's already bitten your thumb bloody with shallow little pinpricks, and something about it strikes you as reason for serious concern, but lords, you can't think in here. If shit were any kind of normal, you'd take a knockout pill and sleep until things quieted down, and the absence of that as a feasible option is making you fussy. There's just so much noise and you want to turn everything off and it's making your braincase ache to fucking split. And you have the worst urge to sink your mouthparts into firm yielding flesh and just fuckin' gorge yourself-- You blink out of that train of thought--what the fuck?--just in time for sparking, crackling Pinkie to open her mouth and make a noise you have never heard from her before. It sounds like a thousand panicked, shrieking chainsaws. The pitch of it hits your nerves in a way makes you instinctively want to kill things. At the same time, something sways perilously close to your head, near your right temple. It's just close enough to register as a long, pale shape in the corner of your eye, and that's enough to make you yelp and lurch sideways-- You almost drop Pinkie when you lock eyes on it, and all your instincts scream BUG, IT'S A BUG, IT'S A BIG AS SHITFUCK MOTHER FUCKING BUG, which clashes weirdly with the horrible thing's own creepy bloodlust in your brain. Pinkie is thrashing and it's all you can do to hang on. You can't scream, you can't even open your mouth, leaving you to do nothing but stare at it wide-eyed and thin lipped while your stomach drops into your shoes. In some small mental corner, you decide it's a good thing you didn't eat those mushrooms after all.
Fuck, missed. Prey too good at dodging. You drop off to run at it across the floor. It can't be as good at running as you. You have WAY more fucking legs.
