?kniht uoy t'nod ,ylrae tib A .detcepxenu ...saw tahT .lleW .hO

It feels wrong here. Alien.

Ironic, right? That's almost silly to think about. To consider this place an alien thing, when I am already as alien as I can be, visiter to a strange land. But it's true.

The Grey feels alien.

It takes a while for my lungs to adjust properly to being used as lungs again. ADAPTATION is a hell of a thing, and without it, I'd have had to restart the whole run, but the transition from being forced into using brand new organs to loop back around to the originals is a fucking trip. I have to cough up a shitload of fluid out of my lungs, the material thick enough with the fungal materials in it that it felt more like vomiting than coughing.

Only once I recover do I actually get a chance to look around and take in the place I'm in, and realize just how alien it is.

It's stone.

Not meat. Not cold fungus. Not some sort of strange, alien materials, something supernatural that cannot and should not exist in their current state, but stone, lit intermittently by strange sconces that vaguely remind me of torches.

Bricks, to be precise, pale grew and tinged ever so slightly green and grey by the mold and fungal colonies growing on them. The floor, ceiling, and walls are all the exact same brick, somehow completely identical to each other.

The forest from before is gone, as is the strange impression of whalefall. It's like it vanished, or changed to something else while I was distracted by remembering how to breathe. Which… hmm. If I squint…

Maybe. There's… there's something, something tickling the back of my mind, right around the same place as when I was seeing through the illusion of the Mill.

I shake my head, wincing at the way that it feels like it's knocking my brain around my skull. Focus. See what you can see here and now.

Strange marshlands of decay and growth have vanished entirely, as if they were never there in the first place- with one notable exception. Besides the shit coming out of my lungs, obviously. Behind me, a slimy trail from my body to it, is a crack in the wall. It looks like the kind of damage that might come from a mix of time and impact, aged mortar torn apart by something with a sledgehammer and a desire to use it liberally. Beyond it, I can see the same fluids I was just swimming in, the smell an awkward love-child of sewage and an algae bloom's after-effects.

And yet, it is the only organic-seeming thing in the room besides me.

Which leads to my next realization.

I am not a fleshling here.

I try, but am incapable of figuring out when and how the gills and other mutations disappeared. No additional limbs on my spine, no organically integrated blades, no hyper-dense fur or chitin or additional limbs.

I'm… me.

The human me. Kind of. The… the thing that is most historically "me".

I can feel the brick on my legs, exposed as they are from wearing a set of boxers and t-shirt and nothing else. There's no headset, none of the mechanical tools that I have to wear to come into this world, nothing except the skin on my bones and the clothes I was wearing before.

In spite of the clothing, I'm more naked than I've ever been, drenched in the not-sewage of the depths of the Grey marshland and now freezing cold against the harsh bricks of this place.

Inhaling "clean" air for the first time in over a minute, I immediately call up my character sheet.I don't know if it'll be the pseudo-illusion of the swimmers in my eyes or what, but whatever the fuck is going on, I need to-

The bubble pops back up, the meat-like-static making an audible pop sound as it appears in front of me.

I stare at it, taking in what it's telling me and trying not to panic.

{MANIFESTATION OF [00000000]}

KINGDOM: ANIMALIA

STATS:

NUTRIMENTUM

AQUA

🔺

🔺🔺

SKILLS:

GLIMPSE BEYOND

SWIPE

FOREIGN BODY

EQUIPMENT:

DIVINE BLOODLING

THE GLOVE

It's maybe a third of the size of my normal sheet, and I can't help but feel a mounting sense of dread at that fact. It's alien. It's wrong. It's… It's not even what it says that have me trying not to re-inhale some of the shit at the back of my throat, it's that it's changed.

When you have so very, very little to hold onto, even the smallest source of stability, of ritual, of normalcy can be a fucking lifeline. I've been around the ride to trauma-town enough times to know that nothing helps a brain lock the fuck in like recognizable stimuli and repeatable, stable pillars to grasp onto.

My character sheet has never changed before. Neither in the real world, nor in MEAT. It's always been one-to-one exactly the fucking same in its formatting, even when so much about it changes as I go from body to body, moment to moment, transformation to transformation. Here, now, in this place, it is alien, it is new, and to a scared, wounded animal, anything unfamiliar or new is something to be fucking terrified of.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.

It's fine. It's fine. Let the animal meat try and squirm and beg and panic and find someplace to hide and demand that I turn back the way I came, that maybe all the mutations and other things will just magically re-appear if I exist back through that crack in the wall. I can leave. I can leave. I have-

I have no evidence that the transformation that made me like this won't turn me back the moment I leave. Which means, since that crack is still there, that I can leave.

I can leave whenever I want.

I'm not trapped here. The familiar is right behind me.

Breathe. Slower. Slower. Don't hyperventilate. It tastes like shit in here and the last thing we need is to aspirate that into our lungs.

It takes me way the fuck too long, but eventually, I manage to calm down. The animal in me gets successfully distracted by the act of breathing, slow and deep, because the brain is a complicated neural network of connections and nothing more. If you're being chased by a tiger, you can't breathe calm and slow or eat or drink, so doing any of the above is one of the faster ways to trick your brain into slowing down an anxiety attack. Old therapist's trick I picked up.

So breathe. Don't think about eating this gross shit, but breathe. Nice and slow, until you feel a little lightheaded, and then just a tiny bit longer.

Ok.

Ok.

Check the changes.

First thing's first- the sheet no longer mentions my species, neither family nor genus. It just says the kingdom of "animalia", which I… think is the official name for like, all animals, from bugs to humans to blue whales and reptiles. Much, much broader than "homo sapiens", that's for fucking sure.

Second: the stats have changed. The grouping of four that I've gotten familiar with has shifted into a more binary format, something that vaguely strikes me as latin-ish. Nutrimentum and Aqua, which, using basic-bitch language skills, points me towards "nutrient-something" and… well, water.

Third: the full list of organs is just gone. Nothing remains of it, not even a modified version like the rest. It's just gone. Skills remain, though, and reflect the same ones that I had back in MEAT: Glimpse Beyond, I had back in the real world, but Swipe I only picked up in the game itself. And on top of that, there's a new one- Foreign Body.

Last but most certainly not least- while all of the symbionts I created in the game are long-gone, both the ever-loyal Bloodling and the Glove remain, carried over from the real world to this new space.

Losing shit isn't nearly as informative as what's been gained. New stats and a new skill, as well as a modified title.

It's still a game. It's still a character sheet, with everything that implies.

But… it's not the same game. Similar, but not the same. Not as clearly an RPG as it was before, but it has equipment in place of Symbionts, and still has skills, still has all the important shit that most RPGs have, and…

Huh.

Older RPGs used to only have two stats too. The old, old ones, before the conventional "strength, agility, intelligence" stats became a mainstay. The arcade games of yore, where you could pick up equipment and skills but only had two stats.

Health and Mana.

Nutrients and Water.

Foreign body.

This is someplace alien. I am in someplace alien, and like any outside object placed into a pre-existing living system, I am a foreign body. And, as opposed to most "higher-tier" living organisms (a stupid way to talk about it, but useful enough shorthand) they're not nearly as bothered by the concepts of evolution. For a mushroom, that sort of shit happens over a much longer period, because mushroom species can survive almost anything as is. Fungal species can survive the sort of apocalypses and environments that most animals would find themselves obliterated in, and even thrive there.

Fungal species like those with moss, spores, and other mycelial goodies. Like those of the Grey.

I entered a place that was alive, but not in the red and pulsing way I'm familiar with, and came back out with a piece of it. I entered into the world of MEAT with that material in the same room as me.

I don't know which part of it specifically brought all this about, but at least one of them did, and now, here, in the game that was once all pale and crimson and dark, there is grey. There is a fungal marshland at the far end of the valley I begin at, growing between the mountains that promise the limits and potential exit from that place, and I dove in as deep as I knew how.

And now, I am somewhere new. Somewhere where my character sheet is different. Where the game is different. Where the world is different, and new, and alien.

Assumptions. Truly a shitload of assumptions, top to bottom. It's a mangled hypothesis fused out of a mix of gamer instincts and guesswork and magical thinking, and it's the best that I've got.

I traveled through MEAT to reach the end of the valley, dove into a new and invasive landmark distinct from all around it, and have found myself someplace entirely distinct.

Slowly, I force myself onto my feet, appreciating the added grip that the Glove gives me with the longer joints and extra grip-points. The ground is cold under my feet, borderline painful, but I block that out for now- nothing I can do yet.

I'm someplace new. I have a process that I might be able to replicate, and absolutely should work to experiment with properly.

The sconces are at head-height now, and I see in them fungal towers that wave abruptly in the air, letting loose glowing spores that mimic the way torches work. There's something about the way they look, though, like they're not really trying to imitate fire per se, but an approximation of fire. It almost looks…

It almost looks pixelated.

I reach over, grab the sconce, and pull as hard as I can, yanking it off the wall with a tug. The brick crumbles, the material thick and hard as stone, but brittle, reminding me of something like coral. And then, to complete this particular experiment, I pull up my character sheet again, appreciating the familiar strangeness of the box of not-meat popping audibly into existence.

EQUIPMENT:

DIVINE BLOODLING

THE GLOVE

Mycelial Torch

Lowercase this time, but absolutely present. Didn't even need to stab it into myself to get it to show up on the sheet this time. Maybe that means it's not as "real" as my other two additions, both of them "Symbionts", so I guess I'll need to see if it stays with me or vanishes when I leave.

I look ahead, out into the dark of the brick hallway that seems to go on forever.

I look behind, out into the dark of the brick hallway that extends forever out that way too.

Two directions, neither one of them particularly promising- and a

I look down at my feet, to the crack along the intersection of wall and floor, barely larger than a sewer grate but large enough to fit me back out through.

I push myself, pushing deeper into the part of my mind that echoes with the GLIMPSE BEYOND skill, demanding it that it bow to my will and come awake.

For a moment, the bricks waver. The crack widens, and at its edges I can see soft and rubbery tissue, strange textures intermingling organically into a blend of flesh and material. Whalefall, deep beneath the sea, rotting in an ocean of self-devouring, self-growing All.

I blink, and it's gone again, replaced by a soreness behind my eyes.

I look back up and away.

I've come this far.

I start walking forward into the dark.

If you find any errors ( broken links, non-standard content, etc.. ), Please let us know < report chapter > so we can fix it as soon as possible.