If you've found this, then I guess you've been listening. I'm flattered.

Then again maybe you've just run out of options. It's not fun, is it? When people are so willing to throw you away rather than hear you out? How hard did you try and push before you got "officially" discredited? How long until they took what you said as evidence of madness, rather than evidence of possibility? Not long, I imagine.

I know. It must hurt, doing all this. It's always scary. But remember what I told you about death. Or… will tell you. I think I haven't carved it yet, but… I know you've read it. Weird how that works.

So again. I'm flattered. Apparently, I was worth the cost of giving up whatever the hell else it is you have going on. I'm making some assumptions here, I freely admit; I'm pretty sure that to follow the clues, you at least need to know about carbon dating, as well as having the mindset and resources to have dug up the "originals". By the time these get dug out naturally, erosion-style, the words will be worn away entirely, so it requires some manual excavation.

All that together, and I'm guessing that you're a scientist of some kind. Professor, archeologist, if I'm lucky.

Loots of guesses, right? All this assumption, that these bones get found, that they're found by someone who can track down the rest of them, that that someone decides to continue following me through time like this. Even after the world starts accusing you of faking it, and your peers start to look at you wrong, and you start to think you're crazy.

But… if you're reading this, then I guess I was right. I won't know, but it's nice that someone will.

I think we've gotten past the point of being bashful. Poems and metaphors and winding diatribes. Carving hurts the wrist, you know, and I've only got so much patience.

Buckle in. Turn the bones. We're just getting started, and you've got more stops to make. I hope it was worth whatever it cost you to follow me, because it gets more expensive from here.

Unknown, carved into bones found by Liona Silverstein, stolen from a construction digsite, undated, estimated approx. 230-BCE

The appointment goes well. Dr. Hills seems nice enough, though he does stumble on his words a little, here and there. I don't blame him- considering the demographics of the town, I'm more than likely the only transwoman he's ever met in person. Likely the only trans person ever, honestly. He does his best, and that means more than if he didn't try at all, or tried to actively insult me with the wrong choice of words. A lack of cruelty means a lot, even if it's not always enough.

I get a basic checkup. I've got a glove on over the Glove, which, despite being a tight fit, seems to be enough to keep up the block that keeps people from noticing it, and other than that, my health is in tip top shape.

Besides the seizures, of course.

A few pointed questions later, and I realize it actually wasn't a seizure, most likely. He thinks that it was, because a seizure can be any number of events, but when I push him for specifics on causes, ask about bleeding in the brain, he clears up a misunderstanding of mine.

I had a stroke.

He doesn't know that, obviously, but I do. Pressurizing the blood in my body, the Bloodling's attempt to help me and boost me to superhuman levels, caused too much pressure to build up in my cranium. I don't… think that the veins popped, but the swelling is what caused the impaired thoughts, the damaged processing, and eventually, the unconsciousness.

And then… something.

The Bloodling undid the damage, somehow. Pulled me back together like it did my arm. Maybe it pulled blood away from the brain, forced the swelling down, maybe I did pop a blood vessel and it patched it, but I know it was more than just a mild stroke I happened to recover from. It altered me one way, and then, when it saw that it hurt me, it altered me back.

But I can't help but think about the fact that my arm still has seams, half-healed and unscabbed, held together by something supernatural. That it didn't know any better than to half-detonate my brain, that it needed to wait until after I fell unconscious to put me back together…

Dr Hills gives me some medication options and a pamphlet on dealing with epilepsy, and offers me a follow up appointment for next week. Considering the thing I can feel, like a phantom limb that skitters and echoes back to me from inside his walls, I accept it, and sign it up.

The co-pay hurts, but I pay it. The sensation of pulling away from that phantom limb hurts, but it's like a soreness, and it never gets worse than past a certain point.

The thought of wanting to drive past Jay's house and check on him, see how he's doing, spend time, hurts. But I keep driving.

I'll send him a text after I get home. I have things to do.

I pull into my parking lot and head upstairs, shedding layers like second skins as I do. Jacket, shoes, sweater, pants, bra, until I'm half-naked and almost comfortable. Almost.

Still hurts.

If I have another stroke like that, I could die. Even with the Bloodling doing its best to put me back together, its nature is blood, life, not… surgery. I don't know, maybe it fucking can, but I look at my arm and I see that it's still in the process of healing, rather than magically fixed. The blood flows through it as it should, and all the muscles pull together and the skin holds taut… but only one of those things feels certain. The fact I can pull at the seams and re-open them, past the mild scabbing that keeps growing inside them, means it's not some perfectly certain magical regeneration. If it pulls blood out of my brain after over-pressurizing it, that doesn't mean it can put neural tissue back the same place as before. It doesn't mean damage doesn't happen.

Another new ability- that I can't use, for fear it'll tear me the fuck apart.

Two steps forward, one step back. Since this whole fucking mess started, it's always, always two steps forward, one step back. Weeks of it. I get a power, it becomes a danger. I meet a person, I meet a monster. I live, and something new hunts me. And now we've got the feds, obviously, cause things weren't bad enough.

More dangers, always. And more mysteries, too. I still don't know what that eye in the back of Jay's head is, what the Mill is or what made it like that, where the games came from, what that house in the woods was… fuck, I can't even tell what that dream of mine was, the house with too many rooms, with things scurrying through the walls. There are connections, I know that for a fact. There's through-lines here. All real things connect, that's what makes them real, and these things are connected.

I sit on my desk chair, the soft backing of it holding me as I spin to face the bed. I shiver, and it's not because of the autumn chill.

Three-and-a-half pounds worth of visor, wires, and connecting materials. Two cartridges plugged in, one of them designed in such a way that no connection should be possible.

But it's connected. So it's real.

It's waiting for me. I can feel it, like a pull. If I put on that headset, I don't just keep skimming the surface, I dive deeper. I'm already plenty deep, but I'll dive deeper, and it'll hurt, and it'll change things.

And if I do it right, I'll come back stronger. More capable. More… enlightened.

Behind me, I think I hear a soft little squelch. The sound of meat, moving, twitching, flexing in the open air. I look over my shoulder at it to see, and trace my eyes up the crack in the wall.

It's gotten bigger, I think. I imagine that trend will only continue when I dive back into the world of MEAT. I stare at it, watching as this clear, real sign of supernatural manifestation, and of its ongoing infestation into my home.

I wonder… if it grows big enough, will I be able to step inside? Travel through its veins like long corridors, walking alongside blood cells the sizes of hands, avoiding the attention of an immune system worse than any horde of locusts.

Will things be able to come out? From that other place, that place that is my house and is not my house and is flesh and is something beyond?

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Will I let them? Will I let them out into the world?

I turn back to my bed, and the window behind it, shining light in from the streetlights across the way.

I know if I look out that window, past the headset and the things it implies, demands, manifests, I'll see the construction site next door. I'll see the wooden struts that support the empty skeletons of would-be houses, and the craters dug through the first few of them. I'll see the place that should be coated in my blood, and is instead bare of it, wrapped in police tape and the illusion of something being done.

There's more places to check out, here in the real world. Leisha and her "partner", that Dani John Silvester, the other construction sites around town, the empty houses in suburbia, and more- but what if they're just more of the same? More opportunities to be hunted and beaten and threatened and killed, and no guarantees that I'll figure out the underlying logic in time to protect myself again.

No. There are three options, counting the one I just discarded. Go out unprepared, get myself killed or hurt or infected or whatever- no. Stay here and hide, take time, try to protect myself by being small… and wait for something to come and find me, because they will. The feds, the "big dog" if and when I inevitably slip up, the things from the Mill, whatever fresh horrors in the world I'm not seeing or haven't met yet.

Or, option three- I be proactive. I go back in.

My last trip there got me the Bloodling. The trip before that, it got me my character sheet, floating behind my eyelids and ready to inform me of whatever stats I have in this world. It got me the GLIMPSE BEYOND skill, and the crack in my wall, and the ability to craft impossible things out of what was once living and is still, in its own way, alive.

Whatever else may be the case, whatever other supplies I've gotten from other entities and circumstances, my power, my widening awareness, comes from this. From the game.

MEAT.

I sigh, closing my eyes and watching the glowing little swimmers in their jelly come into focus.

{MANIFESTATION OF [00000000]}

GENUS: HOMINIDAE HOMINIA HOMO

SPECIES: SAPIENS

STATS:

ADAPTATION

CANALISATION

EVOLUTION

SYNCHRONICITY

🔺

🔺

🔺🔺🔺

ORGANS:

CUTANEOUS

HOMO SAPIENS SKIN

SKELETAL

HOMO SAPIENS BONE

MUSCLE

HOMO SAPIENS MUSCLE

HOMO SAPIENS TENDON

CIRCULATION

HOMO SAPIENS CIRCULATION

HOMO SAPIENS HEART

RESPIRIUM

HOMO SAPIENS LUNGS LUNGS

GLANDULAR

HOMO SAPIENS LIVER

HOMO SAPIENS PITUITARY GLAND

NEUROLOGOS

HOMO SAPIENS CEREBRUM

UNDERDEVELOPED [0000000000]

SENSORIA

HOMO SAPIENS SENSORIA

DEGUSTATION

HOMO SAPIENS DIGESTIVE TRACT

SKILLS:

GLIMPSE BEYOND

⦽⦽

MUTATIONS: N/A

SYMBIONTS:

DIVINE BLOODLING

The same as before, with one notable exception- the Skills tab.

Beside the only skill present there, I see something new. Two small red triangles, bright red against the not-color of the back of my eyelids. Something new.

I remember back in the fungal mill, that un-voice that echoed in the back of my mind as I pushed myself to see.

GLIMPSE BEYOND HAS GROWN

Twice, those "words" popped into my head, and now, here- two symbols against it. Vaguely circular, but also… vaguely something upward. Not quite like the red pyramids in my "stats", and I wonder- what's the difference?

I don't know.

More and more and more that I don't know.

I look down from where I've been staring at the back of my eyelids, opening them to face the bed once again.

Three pounds of technology, and a few added notes of something other. Waiting. Waiting to offer me something. Waiting to offer me everything.

Is it wrong that I want it?

It's more than just the fact that I miss gaming. That it's been a coping mechanism and hobby and genuine joy for so, so much of my life, and especially the last few years. It's more than just the desire to let myself be someone else, to escape and be empowered and grow and become more.

I want to go back there. I want to see that sky that is not a sky again. I want to feel the way that a new body moves, one that's not my own. All I've ever wanted from a game, multiplied- because it's real. It matters.

And it changes me.

For that last fact alone, I would want it. Simply for the fact that it would allow me to be more, as I crave, even if it hurts, even if it feels wrong for a while, I would want to go back to it.

Is that wrong?

I chose this. I keep choosing this. Even if I tried to convince myself otherwise, here and now, I already know I'm going to go back.

If Jay asked me to, would I stay away? Actively, vocally asked me, out loud, to my face, without even the slightest moment I could misinterpret or convince myself around.

I don't know. I… I don't know if anything could.

The fact that it helps me cope with reality, with fear, with the ongoing powerlessness I'm facing, here and now… even without that, I think I would still want to come back to it.

I know myself. I know my wants. I know what I care about, and what I need, and how, in the limited way that all living creatures do, especially humans, I've misaligned myself towards those things. The difference between adapting a coping method, and maladapting something that works as a coping method, is often razor thin, and I have a history with that particular subject.

And still, I want to go back. Even though I'm scared. Even though my body already hurts, tensed up at the thought how much getting hit in there will hurt, at how weird it will feel to be in a body more dysphoric than even this one.

I want to go back.

At certain points in my life, I've also wanted to die. Doing what I want isn't always in my best interest.

And yet… the excuses rile themselves back up.

I do need power. I do need more understanding. I do need more and more and more, because as I am now, for all my cleverness and hard work and creativity, I am a step away from not being, at the whims of… so fucking much.

And I want to go back.

I take a long, deep breath, and exhale, and step forward out of the chair. Out of the soft embrace of the seat, into the cold air of the room, illuminated by the harsh white glow of the fluorescent lights outside.

And slowly, like going through a ritual, I arm myself.

Haptic feedback pads go on my arms, shoulders, legs, stomach. The gloves go over my hands, my very own Glove shifting and warping and somehow… fitting into the smaller mechanism, like it was meant to. Folding in on itself, until one Glove becomes part of another and both hands rest, clad in black and circuitry and the embrace of something I do not understand.

And then… the headset.

I wonder- if I didn't plug it back in, let the battery run out, would it still wake? Does it even need electricity anymore, or would I feel a heartbeat behind its casing if I put it on, free of outside interference?

I don't know.

I plug it in anyways.

And then… I lift it onto my head.

And descend upwards again.

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