A Romantic Vignette In An Absurdly Spacious Sewer

[tbok1992]

I''d like to show all you folks at the Giant a little piece of writing I did, a sort of weird take on the "Superantural Romance" genre, with the same title as the thread. My biggest worry is that it might be a bit too slow-paced, and that I didn't define the characters well enough, but I'd like to see what you folks think of it.

I cut it in to two parts to avoid it being too big a wall of text, and I hope you enjoy it:

The air in the restaurant was notable in how much it lacked the scent of sewage. This was a considerably less dubious feat than you’d think thanks to its location smack-dab in the middle of the biggest, dankest sewer in the tri-state area.

Alright, to be fair, it wasn’t all sewer. It was actually mostly a series of stormdrains, mingling with abandoned train tunnels, cold war bomb shelters and anything else the inhabitants could drill their way into. The aforementioned inhabitants were a gaggle of freaks with sundry and manifold origins, with weird features and strange biologies that wouldn’t look out of place in a Ninja Turtles episode, or a Drainage City chapter with moderately less fornication. And right now a nice cross-selection of them were populating the premises of the largest, swank-as-it-gets restaurant in the place with its paper-and-resin walls and its small projector attached to a VHS currently playing the end of “Mystery Men”.

They had gotten used to that smell, that funky-in-both-senses-of-the-word smell, but the man sitting at the table was not so lucky. Though, in another sense, he was lucky thanks to the cockroach woman sitting directly across from him. That is, a giant cockroach with womanlike qualities, not vice-versa.

She was rather pretty in a odd sort of way. Not in a settle-for-less way, but she could rank at least a 7 out of 10 by human standards with her shining carapace and curvy proportions. Her entire sub-species could say likewise more-or-less thanks to the miracles of convergent evolution accelerated by the various chemicals in the water.

She wore no true clothes over her reddish frame, but she did have several adornments made of strips of aluminum can, woven together into various elegant pouch-covered chains on her carapace and adorning her surprisingly dextrous hands in the form of kitbashed jointed gloves, and a slightly burnt fedora adorned her head in a manner that was both dapper and slightly awkward.

The man sitting next to her on the other hand was not what most would call beautiful. Scruffy would be a more accurate description if one were being nice, with his disheveled hair, skin stained with dust and sweat, and clothing stained with condiments from the packets he’d been living on since last week. His face looked thin and tired, and his hair appeared to be thinning from stress at the ripe old age of twenty-five. A bag lay to the side of his scrap-wood seat, dripping wet except for the tightly sealed clear plastic sleeves containing bundles and bundles of paper.

His first comment was similarly self-effacing. “You didn’t have to take me here you know.”

The man went by the name Richard, though people either called him Rick or **** depending on if the person talking to him was a friend or somebody he owed money .And the latter category had been ballooning each day.

“Whatever do you mean?” said the cockroach-woman in a buzzing voice sweet as a bag of slightly melty Swedish Fish, looking genuinely confused with her large arthropodal eyes.

“You save my life Miss Sisskit, maam,” Rick responded, trying to avoid her concerned gaze out of embarrassment “You don’t need to take me out afterwards”

“Please, just call me Cshisk.” She said “And it’s the least I can do, as I remember you jumping in to save me first.”

There was an awkward silence. Rick glanced around looking at the various shambling mounds of vegetation, giant rats, and humans with various fleshy symbiotes studding their bodies waiting table, wondering when somebody would take their order. The strains of a fuzzy, faded Smash Mouth song involving stars or something like that started blaring in the background, making the silence less silent, but the awkwardness far deeper.

“So, what exactly do you do… Cshisk?” asked Rick, breaking the awkward silence with an awkward question.

“Well,” said Cshick, slowly mulling and rolling over her sentence, “I’m a river-runner.”

Rick looked confused, “What’s a…”

“Oh!” said Cshisk, antennae slightly lifting her antennae looking slightly embarrassed. “I forgot, you’re from uptown, you didn’t know.”

“I’m sorry” Rick said.

“No, no, no, not at all.” Responded back Cshisk “It’s just, I haven’t really met with any one outside the sewers, and I’m new to this explaning thi-Oh look here’s our waitress.” She shifted her sentence as hurriedly as if she was braking before she struck a nerve with her own weight.

Said waitress scuttled forward a bit more. She looked relatively human, with short sandy-blonde hair, brown eyes, and a pair of well-worn jeans. Of course this made the bizarre bits far more apaprent, such as her prehensile toes, the giant centipede-like-appendage coming out of her back and supporting her weight, and the fact that she was completely topless; likely due to said centipedal growth.

Rick tried not to stare, but he didn’t quite stick the landing. His eyes kept darting from the floor to the centipede woman, but to her credit, the centipede woman took it in stride, rolling her eyes and muttering “uptowners.” Richard’s face turned a bright shade of crimson.

She then turned to Cshisk and said “Heyyy Cshisk, howsit goin’?”

“It’s going… okay Candace. I’m just treating this gentleman who saved my life to a round of dinner.”

“So…. A date then?” Candace inquisited jocularly.

“Maybe. Perhaps. I suppose.” Cshisk muttered, her antennae twitching about in embarrassment.

Candace got the hint and said “Kay, so what’s your order hon.”

“I’ll have the pan-fried rat with a side of dough-wrapped Manhattan White, and Rick…” She looked over to Rick to see if he would respond, but he was still trying to avoid the male gaze, “I think he’ll just have the Spamchillada,”

She fished around near her seat and pulled out several chips of lacquered cardboard and handed them to Candace. “I think this’ll cover the meal” Rick looked over to where she was drawing it from, a purse-like bag homemade out of burlap. It was near overflowing with those chips.

Candace counted through the handful. “Maam, I think you might’ve overpaid me by a few chips.”

Csisk just smiled, at least as well as a pair of mandibles could smile, and said “Keep ‘em. You need ‘em more than I do, and besides, I’m not a poor woman.”

Candace gave a bittersweet gaze to Cshisk, which Cshisk gave back. A silent “In some ways” was added to that last statement between the two of them.

Rick still looked confused. “Oh,” said Cshisk, just noticing Rick’s embarassment “t-that’s a symbiote growing out of her back, fuses to ya after a while. Things like that are pretty common around here...”

“Heh, it’s okay,” Rick said half-truthfully “I’ve met a lot of weirdos around town.” That was a whole truth, as the burns from his encounter with that wizard and the scars from that “stellar probe” proved. Cshisk looked down.

“You know, you’re the first human I’ve actually seen down here without… them…” With the sudden realization she was drifting, she threw here head up and said, “Anyway back to river running… I run a few homemade canoes throughout the waterways to find things that your people lose, or flush, let get a washed away or in general lose down here.”

She fiddled with one of the many chips from her purse as she spoke, twirling it almost hypnotically through her chitinous fingers. “It all ends up here in the end. It’s my little operation, picking ‘em up and sellin’ ‘em back to the folks around here. I make a fair few chips on it. I remember findin’ the emcee’s parts, heh, wasn’t that a day… but I’ll stop talking. I don’t want to be a bore.”

“No, no, no, it’s okay.” Rick said, face still covered in residual blushery. He was looking her straight in the eye, though which part of it he should look at was a mystery to him “I… I’ve never known much about the underground,” he said, though he’d heard the (Frankly flat-out wrong) rumors “and I’m always up for a good story, so tell all ya want about your business, I won’t mind.”

Again Csisk gave that strange mandibled smile. “Alright then.” She put her hands on the table, rubbing them together nervously. The rhythmically rubbing chitin on them sounded like a constant skeetching of boots against a tile floor, or perhaps a chant of “Don’t screw this up, don’t screw this up”.

“We get mostly driftwood, cans, plastic bottles, but it’s pretty varied. Heck, most of the stuff in here came from my business, including the emcee.” Ah yes, him, Rick thought. Weirdest damned host he’d ever seen. Though it does explain why they got the good seats.

She gave an aside glance. “I must say, I hope I haven’t given the impression that it’s just my operation.” She drummed her chitinous fingers against the table, more out of nervousness than out of impatience really. “Dad started it years ago with nothing but his claws and a wooden raft. When he died it was barely running, and I was the only one out of my litter of 10 who decided to stay and keep it going. So, I brought in a few friends to try and at least salvage it, things sent out from there, and…”

She made a face like she’d be blushing if she were able to “Well, I’ve made a bit of a name for myself as you can see…” Rick looked back at the purse filled with cardboard chips. “But, it’s dangerous work. There’s the Sprayers, the Crackjaws, the Ghoulie Grabbers, the Rat Kings, the Rat Queens, the Rat Knights, the Rat Jesters, the Rat Popes,”

She shuddered a bit, and her antennae twitched. “Nasty things those Rat Popes, one of ‘em took Saul’s leg, and almost got his head too. There’s also the Deep Crows, the Meatcrawlers, the Manimals, the CHUDs, the Garbagefish and… well I know you got well acquainted with the Chokewhirl Whomper.”

Yes, yes he was, and a twinge of pain emanated from the bruise the ugly thing’d put on his chest when he dove in to save her from the suspicious pile of trash, along with the series of cuts on his arm from when it’d got a parting shot in, after Chsisk returned the favor and rescued him.

“You know, I probably would’ve died if you hadn’t managed to hold its attention long enough for me to get out and whomp ‘im. But,” Cshisk said, looking nervously at Rick’s face for any signs of boredom or restlessness “Enough about me. What is your life like up there, on the surface?”

Rick gave a smirk, and breathed out a heavy sigh. It was the sigh of a man who didn’t want to admit something, but was going to admit it anyway, because You Are A Good Person and That Is What You Do When A Lady Asks.

“Well, I wish I could say my life is as interesting as yours.” He said, his wan cheeks curled in a sad half-smile, “But I’m not much of anything. I’m one of those guys who went to college hoping to make something of myself, only to find when I got out that the big wide world would pound ya into nothing.” He let out a bashful slightly bitter “heh”.

“I know little of this ‘college’ place you’re talking about, except for that it is either a place for fornication and alchohol or a place where disadvantaged youths find extravagant success. And that’s just from the movies.” She looked slightly embarassed

Rick gave a smile, which had been a rarer and rarer occurrence as of late, and chuckled. “That first one’s not too far off from the truth.” Cshisk looked relieved as he continued onward, “But I complain too much. I have a job, even if it is a ****ty one, I have an apartment, even if it is a dump, and I have friends, even if they think I’m a schlematzl. But…”

He paused. The glow of the smile dimmed upon his face. “But, what?” asked Cshisk.

“I feel… stuck. There’s been so many things that I’ve wanted to do, but I’ve done nothing with my life. I don’t feel successful, I don’t feel like I’ve done jack ****, and I don’t think I’m ever gonna do the thing… the one damned thing I’ve been chasing after all my damn life.” The words spilled out of him, painfully, stumblingly like tears down a reluctant cheek.

“And I think if I keep this string-o’-misses up, if I keep falling on my face, if I keep icy road to nowhere, I’ll end up as dust in the god damn gutter…” He paused for a moment, face like a deer in the headlights as he realized what he said. He’d never told anybody the things he’d said before. He wished he hadn’t. “Nobody gives a **** about your whiny first world problems, least of all her.” He thought to himself.

He quickly added a “No offence maam,” to his statement, layered in fidgeting snark in a desperate attempt to save face.

“None taken.” Cshisk said. She didn’t quite get why the gutter was such a bad thing. It brought water and debris and knick-knacks down below for salvage, and often brought some of the most… interesting things that she found. But she didn’t mind. He was only human after all. “But what is that thing you’ve wanted to do?”

Rick suddenly looked very, very self conscious. “Huh?” he said in disbelief.

“I’m curious what you’ve been wanting to do with your life. I mean, I talk to people every day who need somebody to tell their problems to. And you seem like you need it more than anyone else.”

“It’s… nothing” Rick said. His voice was soft, as if he didn’t believe in the words it was forming, and his eyes darted low.

“Tell ya what.” Cshisk said “I’ve got a dream of my own that I’ve always wanted to do. You tell me your dream, and I’ll tell you mine. Deal?”

“Well, if you insist.” Rick said. Her words made him feel strangely at ease. Must be a skill of the trade, he thought. “Well, ever since I could hold a book in my hand, I’ve wanted to do comics, draw ‘em, create ‘em. Hell, I even majored in ‘em,” He let out a sardonic ha as his expression turned relaxedly grim. “Wasn’t the best choice, I tell ya. But, no matter what I do, what I write, what I try to sell. Best I could do is a 47-page webcomic with 47 views. I’m pretty sure they’re all by the same guy”

Cshisk’s antennae rose up in curiosity. “Would you happen to have any on you in that bag of yours?”

“Oh no- I wouldn’t- well- I don’t have any on me at the moment,” He said, eyes darting to the sealed bags where he indeed had them at the moment.

Cshisk’s eyes also darted towards the bags, but luckily Rick was distracted by the sound of a whirring tape recorder and the sound of a videocassette being pitched at high speed slicing through the mumbling. It was the Emcee, striding out on the stage, Mystery Men tape in one hand, and the tape for the next film in the other and spotlight directly on his mechanical patchworked face.

He was a bizarre thing, kitbashed of the parts of a Fats Domino and a Beach Bear animatronic figure from a long-gone “Showtime Pizza Place”, given a brain by the odd assortment of boards and drives jutting out of his back. But, he jerkily strode across the stage like he owned it, and indeed, one silvery mechanical spider threw a piece of her chassis like a housewife at a Tom Jones concert, and a muck-woman gave a wolf whistle as he strode.

Ric’s eyes were glued to the bizarre spectacle of the emcee saunter-jerking onto the stage, just as Cshisk’s chitinous toe seemed glued onto the bag she was scooting towards her seat out of Rick’s notice.

“G-g-g-gentlemen,” the emcee synthesizer-smarmed across the stage, voice skipping intermittently like an old CD. “That was M-M-M-Mystery Men, the third-best superhero movie Uptown has to offer!” The crowd cheered. “and I still want to see a spinoff about PMS w-w-w-woman someday!”

“But now for to-day we witness a night at the opera by those sons-o-guns who brought us Airplane and Kentucky Fried movie, the movie we call ‘Brain Donors’I”

In a swift, jerky motion he chacked the cassette into the player, and pressed rewind, continuing with the speech as the tape whirred backwards. “Now, from what information I could get off the internet I-I-I ‘completely’ and ‘legitimately’ ‘borrowed’ from Uptown by the ‘ever-so-secret’ human cable line about th-th-three-or-so meters above this stage…”

A knowing snicker passed through the crowd of creatures, or at least a burbling, clacking, squawking or beeping noise from those in the audience who didn’t have the capacity to snicker, as if they were exchanging a private joke that was on a certain gaunt somebody who was feeling very much out of place at the moment.

“It’s quite the rare f-f-f-film, debuting in theaters to thunderous silence thanks to the fact that nobody promoted it, not even payin’ a h-h-h-hobo five bucks to walk around with a sandwich board across the street.”

The emcee paced and gestured with his synthesized ballyhoo, psyching up the crowd to a roiling gusto. But he continued, “And it got off the small s-s-s-screen just as fast. In fact, the only thing faster than the film’s flight off the silver screen to the dustbin is the speed at which these gags fly. I tellya folks, we’ve got a r-r-r-real treat for us tonight, one o’ the best things I’ve seen in a while,”

The spotlight turned to Cshisk, now a little nervous. “And that’s why I gotta thank the lovely Miss Cshisk.” He sauntered over close to the table, as she still subtly scooted the bag between her toes, moving it ever closer with a series of small scoots, hoping Rick’s eye wouldn’t wander down to the scooting bag. “Ya know, when ya first sold this to me, I thought ‘There’s no way this could be worth a Rat Pope to get’.”

Rick’s eyes fixed on Cshisk as the emcee said this. “Well, I…” she said, gesturing in an almost exaggerated fashion to conceal the lean in her body as she drew the bag in her toes closer to her chair.

“Of course,” the emcee quipped “Everyone else said that about m-m-m-me when ya found my parts, and look where we are t-t-t-today!” The crowd cheered and she snatched the bag straight to her lap with a jerk of her leg, the sound of the thump drowned out by the applause. She recalled as the applause died down that the acquisition of the emcee’s parts (Well, most of them anyway) wasn’t nearly as difficult as he made ‘em out to be.

She’d actually found the parts in a hive of Black Weepers. Formidable creatures, true, but nowhere near as bad as a Rat Pope. And while there had been a few people who refused to buy, it wasn’t all that difficult to find a down-on-his-luck machinist willing to take a chance on a pile of scrap. But, a compliment was a compliment, she thought as the emcee now went towards Rick.

“And who’s the lucky b-b-b-beau sitting across the table from her?” the emcee asked, sidling close to Rick, metal-fur hand brushing across the table.

“My name’s Rick.” A little sweat came from his forehead “And right now I’m feeling a little…”

“Nervous?” The emcee said, raising an eyebrow and moving a servo in his lips in an uncanny-valley expression of slyness. “Don’t worry boy, I-I-I-I think you’ll fit just fine amongst us f-f-f-freaks!” Rick wasn’t sure if the emcee was insulting him or complimenting him, and from the muttering of the audience they didn’t seem too sure either.

With a flick of his hand and a springing, grinding jump back onto the stage, he said “Now, on with the s-s-s-show!” as he pressed play and glided back to the shadows in a sort of jerky moonwalk.

The words “Coming Soon, To a Theatre Near You” flickered upon the wall as the lights dimmed, and as they faded into previews, the audience watched with rapt attention. They were likely never going to see a fair few of those shown, so they might as well watch the condensed, marketing-ized, and highly spoiler-ized versions of them anyway.

Well, all but Cshisk, who was currently watching something else. More specifically she was flipping through the pages of drawings in the folder, extracted from right below the table. There was a luridness to the stories that was undeniable, psychotronic dramas of sex, violence and weirdness, with a smooth cartoony style contrasting with the deranged drama on the page.

But there was a lushness to it as well, some beautiful life to the stories of sleaze, and the lives of its strange, broken but fascinating characters. Characters like Dolly-X, the cyborg gunner with a heart of steel and a tongue of silver, the old and hateful Chainsaw Boss, mysterious and guileful Trenchcoat Man; who had a ticking clock replacing one of his eyes, the hubristic; social climbing; immensely fascinating Rocco Journeyhead, and the mad; stab-happy; magically cursed Doc Brainknife; who still managed to be the most heroic damned character in this whole mess.

Of course, the creator of that wasn’t thinking much about his work at the moment. His eyes were drifting about the room, not so much enjoying the trailers as thinking about the remains of the day. He felt the usual all-over ache from his work in customer service, which was the deepest and coldest level of retail hell in his opinion, and the wounds from his fight with that… whatever-she-called-it smoldered like embers in a fireplace.

But the one feeling that didn’t plague him was more mental than physical. He felt as though that chewing fuzz of ennui that wrapped around him everyday had been parted by some flickering beacon.

His rambling eyes watched the creatures at work. Amongst others, a rugose abomination could be seen playing a leisurely game of chess with a squamous horror, a vague thing in a hasmat suit was sipping soup through an odd hose coming out of his finger, a winged mole-rat-thing was necking with a creature of moss and driftwood, a very likely blotto alligator-man gulped down a bottle of Mad Dog 20/20, and these were just a few of the oddities that Rick saw as he looked about. Boy howdy was he gonna have a lot of drawing inspiration when he finally got home.

And Miss Sisskit (He still didn’t feel right calling her Cshisk), she had that blend of sweetness and moxie that he found… intriguing. The hope floated to the top of his head that, even when he went home on the surface, they might cross paths again one day. You know, as friends, he thought to himself. But then it just as quickly sank, as most hopes of his these days did.

It was at this point that the comic gave Cshisk away. Specifically, a moment in the story, which seemed climactic yet was only a quarterways through the folio. She couldn’t help but let out a small gasp when she saw the panel revealing who fired the Kannonade at Chainsaw Boss, which led Rick to turn behind.

He wasn’t quite sure what the small, restrained gasp was for at first, though he did see that Cshisk was looking down. Only when he saw the crisp white paper and the black and red ink from the corner of his eye did he realize what she was looking down at.

He looked to the side for his bag, which wasn’t there, then he looked to the thin trail of water from where his bag was, which led near Cshisk, and then he looked very, very mortified when he thought about exactly what she was reading.

“Oh god, please, let me explain!” he said to her. She looked up, eyes as if she’d been caught with her hand in the cookie jar. He continued, sputtering, preparing to flinch as the pages were thrown back in his face like they had been many times before, “I know the violence is kind of excessive, I know it’s pretty dark, and I understand why you might be offended by all the nudit-”

“I liked it,” Cshisk interrupted succinctly. “There’s something nice about it.”

Nice? The damned things were raunchy, violent, crude and bizarre, cute and cartoony yet perverse and dark. How in god’s green earth could she describe them as “nice?” He looked absolutely baffled as a confused “Buh?” quietely fell from his lips.

“Reminds me of when Daddy used to read me Steven King and Dean Koontz stories when I was a little roachette,” she continued. Rick looked even more puzzled. “Oh,” Cshisk asked “Is that uncommon children’s literature Uptown? We get most of our books from whatever drops down here.”

“Nah.” Said Rick, trying to play it cool. “I’m just glad you didn’t ralph all over the pages like some of the other people who’ve seen it.”

Cshisk didn’t know what “ralphing” meant, but she could guess it was a term for something unpleasant Uptown, perhaps involving musk or mucus. “Well, I think it’s wonderful.” She put the pages up and slid them over the table. “Do you want these back?” she asked.

Rick thought for a few moments. “Nah, keep ‘em,” he said. They were copies, and it was likely he’d never see her again, so he might as well give her something to remember him by.

Cshisk smiled “Oh, thank you, thank you, thank you!” She put her hand out to grab the papers back, only to have it grab Rick’s hand trying to push the papers back to her.

Silence rang about the table for a few moments as they held hands, the accidental touch becoming a firm grip. And then a peal of “And now for our feature presentation!” sliced through the silence, as the movie began to play.

They dropped the hand hold as the tones blared, both looking to the sides, looking back at each other (Somewhat sheepishly), and then shifting their view towards the claymation opening titles for the film.

But while they weren’t looking into each other’s eyes, they were in each others thoughts. Rick thought “She… called my art nice. Nobody’s ever called my art nice.” He thought to himself how funny it was that a cockroach woman was the first person who liked his art. An entrepenurial, adventurous, generous, kind, resourceful, gorgeous cockroach woman…

Suddenly the idea didn’t seem so funny. And the realization swirled about him that his thoughts about her may have been a bit more complicated than he wanted to believe.

Cshisk thought “Maybe this is a date. And maybe I am sort-of-a-little interested in him.” She’d never thought that her first date would be with a full-blooded human. “And, thinking about it, I never did think to tell him that dream of mine.” She thought to herself about her dream to go to the city above, about those lights and concrete sidewalks beneath her feet.

About somebody with her, maybe, when she got out of the sewers, holding her hand as she walked through the streets. “Oh well, it can wait until after the movie,” she thought to herself.

And so the movie went on, and the two sat together like an off-kilter Oingo-Boingo-ish note in the symphony of life. Of course, this was not the end for the story of this pair. No, it was but the beginning of a longer tale of intrigue, action, mystery, heroism and true love. But, that story is for another time.

[tbok1992]

Also, I wrote up another part set in that middle part of the book a while back, which'd likely only make sense in the context of said prospective plot above, so I might as well post it here as an attempt to bump the topic. The mutant cat is a character I haven't introduced yet, basically an escaped, sentient test-cat with weird psychic powers and a dislike for humans. Anyway, here its:

The thing that disturbed Rick about what was happening, wasn’t the impending transmogrification by god knows how many types of symbiote wedging itself into his body, but that he was so unafraid of it.

Of course, he felt sick to his stomach, but that was more a consequence of the feelings tunneling through his patchworked; bedridden body. A bandaged doctor fiddled with instruments in the background as Csisk held a wet towel to Rick’s quivering forehead, which was adjacent to the several colorful annelids wriggling in his scalp. They barely poked out as of now, but he could still… Well, it’s hard to call it “Smell” when it’s being done by fleshy appendages attached to one’s head, but that’s what they were doing. And the air, as of now, stank of alchohol and sweat.

That mutant cat was still there, lord knows why. She kept pacing around, with those freaky eyes always rolling in annoyance. And yet she still stayed. He felt an internal twitch on his shoulder, the small graspers of the velvety worm-thing merging deeper into his body. He let out a small wince of pain, and Csisk put her hand up against him as the twinging passed.

The doctor walked over to his bedside. Rick could tell she was female, but not much else from the layers upon layers of bandages wrapped around all but her red, glowing eyes and beaklike mouth.

“I’m afraid there’s not much I can do.” The doctor said to them both, shaking her head. “You’ve gotten lucky in a way. Most normal humans wouldn’t survive being dunked in the Slatterncess, and those symbiotic passerbys stuck to you have gotten rid of most of the parasites you picked up from that muck.”

She walked over and grabbed a series of paper scans attached to some strange contraption that looked to be kitbashed from a copy machine and a few old Playstations, with a wand that looked something like a Tesla coil attached by a cord of insulated wire. “But…” the Doctor said. As she grabbed some papers from the machine, the light dimmed from the doctor’s eyes both figuratively and literally, the way it always did when she had to give bad news.

Csisk grabbed Rick’s hand tight, and Rick returned the favor, despite the spreading, chitionous thing stuck to his chest twitching up a storm. “I’m afraid it would be impossible to remove the symbiotes.” The doctor said. She handed Csisk the papers. Csisk’s eyes got very, very wide as she saw the twisting networks of veins and nerves from the various symbiotes entwining and worming their way together within Rick’s body on the paper.

Csisk looked into Rick’s eyes and started tearing up. Well, it wasn’t so much tears as an imitation of tears her species had evolved to fit in with humanity better. But the emotion behind them was very real. They smelled of musk and old chocolate as they dripped onto Rick’s altered hand.

“I’m so sorry,” she said to Rick, as the tears slowly trickled down “I never meant for you to get entangled in this business, I never intended to get you stuck here with us, I never intended you to become-”

Rick muttered something “Wh-what did you say?” Csisk asked as she grabbed his hand tighter.

“Those who matter don’t mind, and those who mind don’t matter.” Said Rick, smiling a little. The things inside him twitched painfully. “A wise man once said those words.”

He wasn’t being insincere when he said it. The people who would shun him up above already hated him. His holy roller mom and her holly roller new family, his boss at Wal-Mart who worked him on starvation wages for 39.75 hours a week to avoid paying overtime, those bastards hounding him over debts even when he was selling blood to pay for rent and food. They’re the few people who’d hate him for these… extras, and they hated his guts already.

But, on the other hand, his dad was too damn laid back to hate anyone, even his . And his stepmom, well former adventurers aren’t too prejudiced. Hell, she might like him better this way, less of a waste of potential. And Aliester, Ed and the boys (And also Ms. Janine Foster, thank you very much) didn’t abandon him even after he kept having to bum food and money off of them, much as they griped. So why would they abandon him after this?

“Csisk, I don’t blame you for any of this.” He said, as he looked up at the roach girl. There was no cynicism, no self-effacement, no killing edge to his words. There was just love. Pure, honest, love.

And despite all the people he knew up above, who he would contact back one day; no question of that, he’d never felt as much at home as he did down here, with these people. True freaks of nature, just like him. “After I get over this babe, we’ll save the sewer. We’ll beat that bastard Barnes, and his stupid White Suit, some way. Together.”

They embraced, arm in arm, heart within heart, chitin to spreading chitin, and for a moment, time stood as if still.

When Csisk let go, she asked “What about... your home, your career, your life up there?”

“I’ve had more life in these weeks down here than I’ve ever had up there.” Rick said with a whispery chuckle. As he said this, Csisk was digging through the aluminum pouches adorning her body. She pulled out a mirror, or at least a curve-worn shard of one and put it in front of him. He pored it over himself, looking at his new adornments almost as if he were dreaming.

The worms writhing under his armskin shone clear as day in the mirror, and his annelidical hair poked out from his half-bald pate. A lobsterlike creature with one big arm out was fused to his chest, spreading plates of chitin along his torso and left arm. The zuchinni-sized velvety worm fused to his right shoulder twitched as he ran the mirror nearer to it. He looked at it, and tried to puppeteer it, impulse by impulse. It wrapped its small graspers around the mirror at his command, though its grip was feeble, ad it slightly twitched in rebellion.

He looked back up at Csisk “Let me ask you something…”

Csisk looked back at him curiously. “After these things finish growing in, what am I gonna look like?”

She pondered for a moment, picturing him with the great velvety tendril on his arm, the nematodecyst-worms poking like whips from his wrist. She could feel the plates of slick, glistening battle-red chitin-like armor encompassing his arm and flank. She could smell the colorful; slick tendrils of “hair” on half of his head writhing searching for a scent. And she could practically see the warm; white glow from his remaining bare skin, thanks to the cells produced by the small fish embedded, unnoticed, in his ankle.

“You’ll be beautiful.” She said. She meant every word of it.

The cat looked befuddled. “What does she see in that bozo?!” she asked the doctor in eye rolling disgust.

“A man wanting to make a change.” The doctor said. She was currently maintaining a bowl of creamy pigeon-n-rat stew, spritzing at the cat with a seltzer bottle when it tried to telekinetically filch some of the soup.. A good, hearty meal for lovers, and for a coming storm.
I hope it's not too sappy/maudlin!

[tbok1992]

Aaaaand I'm just posting this to show you my second draft of the story, with some added internal monologue for Cshisk to define her character better, a bit more action on Rick's part to make him less of a useless sad-sack, and a fight scene to give more of an opportunity for showing and not telling on the qualities of both characters. I hope you like it!

The air in the restaurant was notable in how much it lacked the scent of sewage. This was a considerably less dubious feat than you’d think thanks to its location smack-dab in the middle of the biggest, dankest sewer in the tri-state area.

Alright, to be fair, it wasn’t all sewer. It was actually mostly a series of stormdrains, mingling with abandoned train tunnels, cold war bomb shelters and anything else the inhabitants could drill their way into. The aforementioned inhabitants were a gaggle of freaks with sundry and manifold origins, with weird features and strange biologies that wouldn’t look out of place in Roger Corman’s nightmares. And right now a nice cross-selection of them were populating the premises of the largest, swank-as-it-gets restaurant in the place with its paper-and-resin walls and its small projector attached to a VHS currently playing the end of “Mystery Men”.

They had gotten used to that smell, that funky-in-both-senses-of-the-word smell, but the man sitting at the table was not so lucky. Though, in another sense, he was lucky thanks to the cockroach woman sitting directly across from him. That is, a giant cockroach with womanlike qualities, not vice-versa.

She was rather pretty in a odd sort of way. Not in a settle-for-less way, but she could rank at least a 7 out of 10 by human standards with her shining carapace and curvy proportions. Her entire sub-species could say likewise more-or-less thanks to the miracles of convergent evolution accelerated by the various chemicals in the water.

She wore no true clothes over her reddish frame, but she did have several adornments made of strips of aluminum can, woven together into various elegant pouch-covered chains on her carapace and adorning her surprisingly dextrous hands in the form of kitbashed jointed gloves, and a slightly burnt fedora adorned her head in a manner that was both dapper and slightly awkward.

The man sitting next to her on the other hand was not what most would call beautiful. Scruffy would be a more accurate description if one were being nice, with his disheveled hair, skin stained with dust and sweat, and clothing stained with condiments from the packets he’d been living on since last week, twirling a cracked mechanical pencil in one hand out of nervousness. His face looked thin and tired, and his hair appeared to be thinning from stress at the ripe old age of twenty-five. A bag lay to the side of his scrap-wood seat, dripping wet except for the tightly sealed clear plastic sleeves containing bundles and bundles of paper.

His first comment was similarly self-effacing. “You didn’t have to take me here you know.”

The man went by the name Richard, though people either called him Rick or **** depending on if the person talking to him was a friend or somebody he owed money .And the latter category had been ballooning each day.

“Whatever do you mean?” said the cockroach-woman in a buzzing voice sweet as a bag of slightly melty Swedish Fish, looking genuinely confused with her large arthropodal eyes.

“You save my life Miss Sisskit, maam,” Rick responded, trying to avoid her concerned gaze out of embarrassment “You don’t need to take me out afterwards”

“Please, just call me Cshisk.” She said “And it’s the least I can do, as I remember you jumping in to save me first.”

There was an awkward silence. Rick glanced around looking at the various shambling mounds of vegetation, giant rats, and humans with various fleshy symbiotes studding their bodies waiting table, wondering when somebody would take their order. The strains of a fuzzy, faded Smash Mouth song involving stars or something like that started blaring in the background, making the silence less silent, but the awkwardness far deeper.

So he did what he always did in these nervous, time-ticking-down situations, absent-mindedly putting pencil to the pulp-paper napkins and doodling. He loopingly, swoopingly brushed the graphite across the paper’s surface, absent mindedly turning curves and shapes into cartoons and caricatures, perhaps influenced by the few hours he’d been here.

He would’ve used his notebook, but that was currently a pile of soggy pulp in some effluent river. But no matter. Some people bit their nails, some twirled their hair, he drew. But, his eyes and the majority of his attention were focused on Cshisk as he wrung his brain for some way to break the silence.

“So, what exactly do you do… Cshisk?” asked Rick, breaking the awkward silence with an awkward question.

“Well,” said Cshick, slowly mulling and rolling over her sentence, “I’m a river-runner.”

Rick looked confused, “What’s a…”

“Oh!” said Cshisk, antennae slightly lifting her antennae looking slightly embarrassed. “I forgot, you’re from uptown, you didn’t know.”

Inside her head she was kicking herself “Ten minutes into your first date and you’re already screwing up!” she thought to herself. Was it a date? She herself didn’t quite know what she’d decided to dive into, whether it was a gratitude-date or a date-date. All she knew was that she’d made a spur of the moment decision to go out on to dinner with this guy who saved her, and either way, she was desperately trying not to botch it up.

“I’m sorry” Rick said. He was used to feeling clueless.

“No, no, no, not at all.” Responded back Cshisk, trying to save face “It’s just, I haven’t really met with any one outside the sewers, and I’m new to this explaning thi-Oh look here’s our waitress.” She shifted her sentence hurriedly, braking before she struck a nerve with that runaway train of thought.

Said waitress scuttled forward a bit more. She looked relatively human, with short sandy-blonde hair, brown eyes, and a pair of well-worn jeans. Of course this made the bizarre bits far more apparent, such as her prehensile toes, the giant centipede-like-appendage coming out of her back and supporting her weight, and the fact that she was completely topless; likely due to said centipedal growth.

Her name was Candace, and she flashed the sort of jocular smile one gives to “one of the usuals” Cshisk’s way.

Rick tried not to stare, but whether because of the partial nudity or the chitinous additions, he didn’t quite stick the landing. His eyes kept darting from the floor to the centipede woman, left hand doodling at a faster pace.

To her credit, the centipede woman took it in stride, rolling her eyes and muttering “uptowners.” She hadn’t been one for a long time, but she knew that she couldn’t help but stare either on her first time down the rat-hole. Richard’s face turned a bright shade of crimson and she chuckled a bit.

She then turned to Cshisk and said “Heyyy Cshisk, howsit goin’?”

“It’s going… okay Candace. I’m just treating this gentleman who saved my life to a round of dinner.”

“So…. A date then?” Candace inquisited jocularly.

“Maybe. Perhaps. I suppose.” Cshisk muttered, her antennae twitching about in embarrassment.

“Never thought you were the dating type” Candace said joshingly. Hell, Candace had never known her as the sitting-still-and-taking-a-break type either. Even during their lunch conversations, she’d always be planning out shipping routes or calculating expenses, even as they spoke about politics or the gossip of the day.

“Neither did I” said Cshisk, very clearly motioning that she would prefer if Candace changed the subject.

Candace got the hint and said “Kay, so what’s your order hon.” Candace saw that same sort of awkwardness in Cshisk that she’d had on her first date with Jimmy the (Literal) Rat, and didn’t want to exacerbate it. After all, there’s a first time for everything, including taking a break from work and looking for love.

“I’ll have the pan-fried rat with a side of dough-wrapped Manhattan White, and Rick…” She looked over to Rick to see if he would respond, but he was still simultaneously trying to both say something and to avoid the male gaze, and thus had that not-quite-sure-what-to-say look on his face. “I think he’ll just have the Spamchillada,” Cshisk said, guessing at his indecision that he might want something a bit more “aboveground” this go-around.

She fished around near her seat and pulled out several chips of lacquered cardboard and handed them to Candace. “I think this’ll cover the meal,” she said.

Rick looked over to where she was drawing it from, a purse-like bag homemade out of burlap. It was near overflowing with those chips, in a few different colors to boot.

Candace counted through the handful. “Cshisk, I think you might’ve overpaid me by a few chips.”

Csisk just smiled, at least as well as a pair of mandibles could smile, and said “Keep ‘em. You need ‘em more than I do, and besides, I’m not a poor woman.”

Candace gave a bittersweet gaze to Cshisk, which Cshisk gave back. They both knew that she wasn’t lacking for money, or friends, or even status, but there was one area she was positively impoverished in, desired in that quiet way a pet turtle desires the sea, but had never given herself the time to have.

Rick still looked confused. “Oh,” said Cshisk, just noticing Rick’s embarassment “t-that’s a symbiote growing out of her back, fuses to ya after a while. Things like that are pretty common around here...”

“Heh, it’s okay,” Rick said half-truthfully “I’ve met a lot of weirdos around town.” That was a whole truth, as the burns from his encounter with that wizard and the scars from that “stellar probe” proved.

“Though, the weirdos seem more lively down here,” he thought, thinking of the rusting, crumbling city of above. He’d put the pencil down by now, as he felt a bit more at ease, and besides the napkin was already completely filled by his etchings. Cshisk looked down.

“You know, you’re the first human I’ve actually seen down here without them. That’s sort of weird for m-” She paused. With the sudden realization she was drifting, she threw here head up and said, “Anyway back to river running… what it is is that I run a few homemade canoes throughout the waterways to find things that your people lose, or flush, let get a washed away or in general lose down here.”

She fiddled with one of the many chips from her purse as she spoke, twirling it almost hypnotically through her chitinous fingers. “It all ends up here in the end. It’s my little operation, picking ‘em up and sellin’ ‘em back to the folks around here.”

There was a sense of pride in her voice. For all that she felt bone-tired from her job, she still thought it was a good job, an important job, a job worth doing. She just wondered if it was a job worth over-doing.

“I remember findin’ the emcee’s parts, heh, wasn’t that a day … but I’ll stop talking. I don’t want to be a bore.” Well that and she really didn’t want to screw this up.

“No, no, no, it’s okay.” Rick said, face still covered in residual blushery. He was looking her straight in the eye, though which part of it he should look at was a mystery to him. “I’ve never known much about the underground, well, much that seems true anyway, he said, “and I’m always up for a good story. So tell all ya want about your business, I won’t mind. Besides,” Rick grinned “if your job anywhere near as weird as this place, it must be one helluva job.”

Again Cshisk gave that nervous mandibled half-smile. She’d never really had an opportunity to show her stuff to an outsider, much less one she wanted to impress. “Alright then.” She put her hands on the table, rubbing them together nervously. The rhythmically rubbing chitin on them sounded like a constant skeetching of boots against a tile floor, or perhaps a chant of “He’s interested, he’s interested, Don’t blow this, don’t blow this!”.

“We get mostly driftwood, cans, plastic bottles, but it’s pretty varied. Heck, most of the stuff in here came from my business, including the emcee.” Ah yes, him, Rick thought. Weirdest damned host he’d ever seen, though he hadn’t seen many hosts in his life. Though he seemed relatively nice, and it did explain why they got the good seats.

“So, does he think you’re his mom or something?” Rick asked.

“Oh, I didn’t build him,” Cshisk said, “I just found the parts. The guy I sold him to programmed him to act like, well, an emcee. So he now acts like I’m the agent who discovered him, which is sort of true. Sort of. ”

She gave an aside glance. “I must say, I hope I haven’t given the impression that it’s just my operation.” Indeed not, otherwise she would’ve worked herself to death rather than half-to-death like she was doing now. She momentarily drummed her chitinous fingers against the table, more out of nervousness than out of impatience really.

“Dad started it years ago with nothing but his claws and a wooden raft. When he died it was barely running, and I was the only one out of my litter of 10 who decided to stay and keep it going. So, I brought in a few friends to try and at least salvage it, things sent out from there, and…”

She made a face like she’d be blushing if she were able to “Well, I’ve made a bit of a name for myself as you can see…” Rick looked back at the purse filled with cardboard chips.

“But, it’s dangerous work.” She added “There’s the Sprayers, the Crackjaws (Gotta listen real close for those guys), the Rat Kings, the Rat Queens, the Ghoulie Grabbers (Only way to get ‘em is whackin’ em with a bible), the Rat Knights (Though their teeth fetch a pretty penny at the market), the Rat Jesters, the Rat Popes,”

She shuddered a bit, and her antennae twitched. “Nasty things those Rat Popes, one of ‘em took Saul’s leg, and almost got his head too. There’s also the Deep Crows, the Meatcrawlers, the Manimals (God that smell of urine), the CHUDs, the Garbagefish (Which I never want to have to eat again) and…” she looked him over, “well I know you got well acquainted with the Chokewhirl Whomper.”

Yes, yes he was, and a twinge of pain emanated from the bruise the ugly thing’d put on his chest when he dove in to save her from the suspicious pile of trash, along with the series of cuts on his arm from when it’d got a parting shot in, after Chsisk returned the favor and rescued him. The rescue was worth the pain to him mind you, and he still would’ve dove in even if he had known the full circumstances, but that still didn’t make it hurt any less.

There was also an equally unpleasant twinge of self-depreciation in Cshisk’s head. She was also very, very well acquainted with the Chokewhirl Whomper, and shouldn’t have gotten caught off guard like that.

It was the kind of stupidity one exhibited when one was tired as a fish-dog but still wanted to make those last; unnecessary rounds “Just in case” before the sun popped its bright head through the upper grates. She’d always thought there was no such thing as overwork, but now she was starting to question that call.

“You know, I probably would’ve died if you hadn’t managed to hold its attention long enough for me to get out and whomp ‘im. But,” Cshisk said, looking nervously at Rick’s face for any signs of boredom or restlessness. “Enough about me. What is your life like up there, on the surface?” she asked, hoping to get a hint of what was in his mind rather than wildly extrapolating on it in hers.

Rick breathed out a heavy sigh. It was the sigh of a man who didn’t have much of a life, or at least a good one, to talk about, but was going to talk about it anyway. No sense in being dishonest to the woman who thought enough about you to save your life, even if she was a bipedal; chitinous creature of the dark. Though, to be fair, he did like that part.

“Well, I wish I could say my life is as interesting as yours.” He said, his wan cheeks curled in a sad half-smile, “But I’m not much of anything. I work at a Wal-Mart, a store where fat people go to buy muumuus and kill themselves with pork rinds and cheese dip,”

He paused as Cshisk raised an antenna in confusion. “Figuratively I mean,” he continued, “and I live in a one-room apartment with such a bad stink that it serves as its own security system.”

He laughed a little. “ If you look at it that way, I’m getting a good deal on rent. I’m one of those guys who went to college hoping to make something of myself, only to find when I got out I made myself the wrong something,” He let out a bashful slightly bitter “heh”.

“I know little of this ‘college’ place you’re talking about, except for that it is either a place for fornication and alchohol or a place where disadvantaged youths find extravagant success. And that’s just from the movies.” She looked slightly embarrassed at her lack of knowledge of the uptown. But there was something about the way he said it that made her interested. There was no whine in his voice, no boo-hooing about “me versus the world,” just sort of a dry; self-depreciating that’s-the-way-it-is wit.

Rick gave a smile, which had been a rarer and rarer occurrence as of late, and chuckled. “That first one’s not too far off from the truth,” Cshisk looked relieved as he continued onward, “but I never got into it that much. I’ve just sort of drifted since, living my sad little life in a sad little city. But I complain too much. I have a job, even if it is retail, I have an apartment, even if it is one-room, and I have friends, even if they think I’m a schlematzl. I think I have it pretty good for an art major, and it could be worse. I could be a bum…” That last statement gave him pause.

“But…” He meandered on. The glow of the smile dimmed upon his face.

“But, what?” asked Cshisk.

Rick paused. “Nah, you don’t want to hear it,” Rick said, trying to keep up that veneer of jadedness. He was veering dangerously close to the one topic he didn’t want to talk about, a topic he could only blame himself for broaching and only blame himself for feeling.

“Come on, there must be something bothering you.” Cshisk said. She knew that look on his face. Even though it was on a human and not an arthropodal face, she knew that look from her own face after she came back from work every day, and realized she had nobody to come home to.

Rick took a deep breath. “Sometimes, I feel like I’ve trapped myself. I did nothing with my life even though I said I would, failed when it comes to that big stupid dream of mine, and just… stagnated. I feel like I shoved myself into the gutter and I’m letting myself rot away into rust.”

The words spilled out of him with that dry, resigned rust like blood from one’s windpipe. “And, the worst part is, I don’t have any idea how to get myself ou-”

He paused as he realized what he said. He’d never told anybody anything that personal. He sighed, and wished he hadn’t said it. “Nobody gives a **** about your whiny first world problems, least of all her.” He thought to himself.

“Oh, heh, but that’s my problem and not yours, and everybody has problems, so I- I- really don’t mean to bother you with my ludicrously tiny problems that really shouldn’t be problems anyway at all.” he said, fumbling around with his words. “Also, no offence at the gutter remark, maam,” he added.

“None taken.” Cshisk said. She didn’t feel it was trivial. After all, lord knows what she would’ve done with herself if she didn’t have her business.

But she didn’t quite get why the metaphorical gutter was such a bad thing. It brought water and debris and knick-knacks down below for salvage, and often brought some of the most… interesting things that she found. But she didn’t mind. Perhaps that metaphor might be more apt than he thought…

Of course, that rumination was interrupted by a rumbling from below the floor, and the cracking of paper and wood as the many patrons backed away nervously from the epicenter of the rumble. There was a crack of splintering wood and a howling, gasping laughter coming from the thing bursting through the floor.

The monstrosity was a thing of naked sinew, its many legs and tentacles covered in exposed, gleaming, meaty muscle, covered in whatever clear slime it was that they really made Chicken McNuggets out of, its face looking like nothing so much as the face of Ronald McDonald with a wide, toothy maw.

It let out that hideous howl-laugh as it scanned the room with its hungry eyes, the strange patrons looking at it more like one would a bear or a cougar in one’s house than the hideous shambling thing that it was. Dangerous, but not unnatural, or even quite that unexpected.

Candace, who was serving a very fussy and fancy man-dodo before the scene, looked with a gaze of angry annoyance at the horror. “Oh no you ****ing don’t!” she yelled, with a secondary set of needle-sharp red fangs extending inside her mouth, yellow venom dripping from her mouth.

She ran at the thing on her centipedeal legs, teeth bared, and bit on one of the tentacles as it lashed near the crowd. The thing saw her and hissed, lashing back and detaching the tentacle, sending Candace flying into a wall.

As Rick ducked for cover, Cshisk scanned the room, the awkwardness of the date shifting back to the comfort of something she’d done many times before. She scanned the room for something she could use as an improvised weapon, kicking herself for not bringing in her saw-toothed oar in.

In a matter of moments she spied a chair with a nice blunt metal body she could use, and lunged for it. Chair in hand, she ran towards the beast, which was currently advancing towards Candace, who was buried beneath the thing’s still writing tentacle.

She smashed it on a part where the nugget-paste-mesh looked weakest from her angle. It didn’t pierce the surprisingly tough nugget-paste, but it did thin it out a bit, but it did certainly piss off the thing it was attached to enough to turn around towards Cshisk.

Rick watched beneath a table as Cshisk darted in battle. There was no nervousness to her stride, none of that shaky wringing of hands that she’d shown at the table, just pure confidence and skill.

But, even as she slammed at the thing’s flesh, the nugget-paste only thinned, slowly chipping away without revealing any weak spots. And she was tiring, dodging between its tentacles. And Candace was doing no better, trying to get in a venom-tinged bite on the thing’s unshielded ugly face, but unable to reach it as she dodged with her centipedal body between the forest of tendrils. It looked as if the abomination might win.

The spot where Cshisk had hit it beforehand was unprotected but nobody was going near it. But none of the freaks, mutants and monsters were daring to get into close combat with the thing. Even the fiercest-looking amongst them (A particularly large land-crab with an even larger brain) stared as the melee continued, knowing full well what that thing could do to them.

Rick reached down to his jeans. There was a flick-knife in his right pocket, clean as the day it was bought, mainly because he hadn’t used it since the day it was bought except to remove a particularly nasty splinter.

“I’ve been bitching about how I’ve done nothing with my life,” he thought to himself, “I’d say this might be a pretty good last something.” He ran out into the field of battle with the crowd looking on in befuddlement at the squishy, pitifully armed humanoid charging at the distracted behemoth. He was aware that he could be Leeroy Jenkinsing himself to his doom, but also aware that it was now time to either nut up or shut up.

The creature was so occupied with the two it was currently “Tenderizing” that it didn’t notice the skinny man with the knife until it hastily sawed across the weak area of nugget mash, exposing the raw meat of the creature to the air just as it fully noticed what was happening to its protective hide.

It let out that laugh howl as it turned around slightly, whipping several tendrils around Rick. Rick let out a small gasp of pain as the tendrils wrapped around him, pushing on the bruises he’d acquired from his last fight and creating whole new ones. But though it hurt like a mother****er, he stabbed at the tentacle’s hide, even though the knife could only get halfway through the non-weakened surface and even though he was moving ever closer to the creature’s fangs.

Candace said “Hang on little dude!” as she dived towards the creature’s face, but it slapped her aside, and looked hungrily at Rick. It opened up its gullet and started spewing out a concoction of what looked like Secret Sauce. Very caustic secret sauce, as Rick could see from the sound of hissing and smell of molten polyester on his shirt. He moved his knife-hand away from the tendrils and started cutting away at his shirt so that the acid wouldn’t get to his skin.

He knew it was slightly futile to do so, as he was likely to be devoured in a few moments. But at least he could know that in his last moments of life he had been proactive. Just as proactive in fact as Cshisk, who had quietly started to sidle around the beast as it was distracted with Rick, trying to avoid its gaze until she could reach the hole in its back.

When she saw it, she leaped into action, dropping down the chair, lunging with her outstretched hand and thrusting it into the meaty cavity. “The best way to drive away these things is pain,” she remembered as she squeezed the raw tendons with her sharp claws. “They fight a good game, but if you hit ‘em where it burns they become cowards.”

And indeed the thing shrieked in agony, dropping Rick as its tentacles loosened and darted for Cshisk. But every time it was about to bring a tentacle towards her, she squeezed bringing the tentacles up in reflexive agony. It moved and writhed back and back towards the hole from which it came as she squeezed at it, Rick watching the rhythm of her hand as if she knew this from god knows how many times actually doing it on the job, and her steadfast grip on the writhing, enormous monstrosity.

Finally, as the creature got down its hole, Cshisk let go of it and it retreated, letting out one last horrible scream/howl. As it scuttled back below the water, Candace shook her fist at it and yelled “Yeah bitch, you better run!”

She put her head back up and looked at the still-shaken crowd. Candace’s fangs retracted back into her gums as she yelled “Nothin’ to see here folks, show’s over, go back to your meals.”

And, surprisingly enough, they did. For, while it was an unpleasant and startling event, it was not an unusual one for the inhabitants of the world below. Monster attacks happen, but things goes on.

Or course, the one person who wasn’t used to this sort of thing was still staring at Cshisk, who looked sort of embarrassed by the whole spectacle. “Sorry,” she said “this sort of thing usually takes me a lot less time to do, since I didn’t have my weapons with me at the moment,” though she forgot to add she might not have done it at all if it weren’t for his help.

“Let’s get back to our seats now, shall we?” she said. They both walked back to their table, slightly nudged from the fight but surprisingly undamaged. She caught a glimpse across the table of his napkin doodlings as they sat down.

They looked quite nice, not just for something doodled with minimal attention for a napkin, but in general, the looping strokes forming landscapes and creatures across the way. The drawings reminded her of the sewers, not a particular place, but in the feel of them, that exaggerated, weird, dark wonder of the tunnels and beasts that made the sewer feel like home. And in her brief glimpse she swore she could see a few doodles of herself in there.

“They’re not my best work.” Rick said, noticing her eye gazing on the drawings, drawing them back a bit in embarrassment. “But you were amazing back there! I can’t believe you took the damn thing down that fast!”

“Only because you were gave me the opening.” She said.

Rick looked bashful. He was only doing what he thought any decent person should do. He didn’t really consider himself a decent person, or even a truly functional; competent or mature one, but he could damn well try a hand at it. Beats holding in your self loathing at least.

“So,” he asked, changing the subject “What was that thing?”

Cshisk didn’t answer for a few seconds. She was looking over Rick’s shirtless body. Even with its many bruises and pale complexion, she saw something beautiful in it. That skin; soft like a bug after molting, the chest breathing in and out; not covered by layers of chitin but visible to the eye in its slender glory, and that face. Even through that mask of scruffiness and sarcasm she could see some hidden spark of life in that face that she found enthralling, like a diamond in the muck.

But then she realized she was drifting and finally replied “Oh, that? That was the Meatcrawler I mentioned before. Rumor says that they’re escaped experiments from some restaurant on the surface that’s supposed to be hideously awful and yet your people can’t get enough of it.

Rick hazarded a guess as to where that was and said, “Well, I know where I’m never eating again.”

Cshisk laughed a little, then stopped and said “By the way, what is that dream were talking about?”

[tbok1992]

Continued, because apparently it's too big for one post now:

Rick suddenly looked very, very self conscious. The topic was shifting “that way” again. “Huh?” he said in disbelief.

“I’m curious what you’ve been wanting to do with your life. I mean, people tell me their problems all the time in my line of work, so why not you? I mean, you seem like you must have something interesting about you.” Her eyes darted down to the paper he was holding, as he instinctively retracted it back.

“It’s… nothing” Rick said. His voice was soft, as if he didn’t believe in the words it was forming, and his eyes darted low. He’d hoped he could avoid that uncomfortable topic, since things seemed to be going so well now.

“Tell ya what.” Cshisk said “I’ve got a dream of my own that I’ve always wanted to do. You tell me your dream, and I’ll tell you mine. Deal?” She couldn’t believe she was being this brazen, especially after she’d been so nervous beforehand. “Doing that must’ve gotten me back my second wind!”

“Well, if you insist.” Rick said. Why not make it a hat trick, he thought, and do three stupid, potentially suicidal things today, “Well, ever since I could hold a book in my hand, I’ve wanted to do comics, draw ‘em, create ‘em. Hell, I even majored in ‘em!”

He gave a sad smile. “Wasn’t the best choice, I tell ya. But, no matter what I do, what I write, what I try to sell. All I’ve been able to show to the public is a 47-page webcomic with 47 views. I’m pretty sure they’re all by the same guy. The rest keeps getting tossed out when I try to submit it.”

Cshisk’s antennae rose up in curiosity. She’d knew of and eagerly read a few comics in her time. They mostly the sorts of terrible ones like Countdown to Final Crisis and Ultimatum that one would let fall into a sewer, but like a bad dime novel she devoured them on the same.

There was something about the creations of picture and word that still intrigued her, that had something outside of anything she’d ever read to keep her going onward. “Would you happen to have any on you in that bag of yours?” she asked, hopefully.

The question caught him off-guard. The response usually he’d gotten when he brought o the comics was usually a tepid ‘Oh, that’s nice,’ or dismissive mockery. “Oh no- I wouldn’t- well- I don’t have any on me at the moment,” He said, eyes darting to the sealed bags where he indeed had them at the moment.

One fifth of his magnum opus to be precise, his baby which he’d been trying to get into print circulation for ages, but had been booed and barfed out of every publisher’s office he tried to pitch it to, never wanting to show it for fear of judgment, but too interested in it to give it up.

Cshisk’s eyes also darted towards the bags, but (luckily for her) Rick was distracted by the many other pairs of eyes darting to a space near the projector, with the sound of an electric hum starting to life. A whirring tape recorder and the sound of a videocassette being pitched at high speed slicing through the mumbling as a felt-covered figure stepped out into the spotlight. It was the Emcee, striding out on the stage, Mystery Men tape in one hand, and the tape for the next film in the other and spotlight directly on his mechanical patchworked face.

He was a bizarre thing, kitbashed of the parts of a Fats Domino and a Beach Bear animatronic figure from a long-gone “Showtime Pizza Place”, given a brain by the odd assortment of boards and drives jutting out of his back. But, he jerkily strode across the stage like he owned it, and indeed, one silvery mechanical spider threw a piece of her chassis like a housewife at a Tom Jones concert, and a muck-woman gave a wolf whistle as he strode.

Ric’s eyes were glued to the bizarre spectacle of the emcee saunter-jerking onto the stage, just as Cshisk’s chitinous toe seemed glued onto the bag she was scooting towards her seat out of Rick’s notice.

“G-g-g-gentlemen,” the emcee synthesizer-smarmed across the stage, voice skipping intermittently like an old CD. “That was M-M-M-Mystery Men, the third-best superhero movie Uptown has to offer!” The crowd cheered. “and I still want to see a spinoff about PMS w-w-w-woman someday!”

The emcee paused. He looked down at the gigantic hole in the floor from the Meatcrawler’s entrance that he had caught from the corner of what was probably his eye. “I see we’ve had an unexpected v-v-v-visitor tonight!” he improvised “Well, at least he was a better guest than some of our regulars!” Most of the audience laughed, a few of them harrumphed in annoyance.

”But,” the Emcee said, “As Freddy the Bard once said ‘The show must go on!’. So go on it shall!” The crowd wildly applauded, though Rick wondered how many of them knew that Freddie Mercury died soon after he recorded that.

“And now for to-day we witness a night at the opera by those sons-o-guns who brought us Airplane and Kentucky Fried movie, the movie we call ‘Brain Donors!”

In a swift, jerky motion he chacked the cassette into the player, and pressed rewind, continuing with the monologue as the tape whirred backwards. “Now, from what information I could get off the internet I-I-I ‘completely’ and ‘legitimately’ ‘borrowed’ from Uptown by the ‘ever-so-secret’ human cable line about th-th-three-or-so meters above this stage…

A knowing snicker passed through the crowd of creatures, or at least a burbling, clacking, squawking or beeping noise from those in the audience who didn’t have the capacity to snicker, as if they were exchanging a private joke that was on a certain gaunt somebody who was feeling very much out of place at the moment.

“It’s quite the rare f-f-f-film, debuting in theaters to thunderous silence thanks to the fact that nobody promoted it, not even payin’ a h-h-h-hobo five bucks to walk around with a sandwich board across the street.”

The emcee paced and gestured with his synthesized ballyhoo, psyching up the crowd to a roiling gusto. But he continued, “And it got off the small s-s-s-screen just as fast. In fact, the only thing faster than the film’s flight off the silver screen to the dustbin is the speed at which these gags fly. I tellya folks, we’ve got a r-r-r-real treat for us tonight, one o’ the best things I’ve seen in a while,”

The spotlight turned to Cshisk, now a little nervous, as the drives whirred in the emcee towards the next part of his speech.

“And that’s why I gotta thank the lovely Miss Cshisk, who made me what I am today!” He sauntered over close to the table as she still subtly scooted the bag between her toes. The audience’s laughter drowned out the wet scooching noise of the bag, as she moved it ever closer, hoping Rick’s eye wouldn’t wander down to the bag of the comics he apparently both loved and feared. “Ya know, when ya first sold this to me, I thought ‘There’s no way this could be worth a Rat Pope to get’.”

Rick’s eyes fixed on Cshisk as the emcee said this. “Well, I…” she said, gesturing widely with her hands to distract from the movement of the bag straight to her chair.

“Of course,” the emcee quipped, patting her on the shoulder like that boisterous uncle everyone has, “Everyone else said that about m-m-m-me when ya found my parts, and look where we are t-t-t-today!”

The crowd half applauded and half laughed, unsure whether it was a self-depreciating joke or not. Cshisk recalled as the applause died down that the acquisition of the emcee’s parts (Well, most of them anyway) wasn’t nearly as difficult as he made ‘em out to be.

She’d actually found the parts in a hive of Black Weepers. Formidable creatures, true, but nowhere near as bad as a Rat Pope. And while there had been a few people who refused to buy, it wasn’t all that difficult to find a down-on-his-luck machinist willing to take a chance on a pile of scrap.

But, a compliment was a compliment, even if it was a smarmy, off-kilter compliment, she thought as the emcee now went towards Rick.

“And who’s the lucky b-b-b-beau sitting across the table from her?” the emcee asked, sidling close to Rick, metal-fur hand brushing across the table.

“My name’s Rick, from… out of town,” he pointed up, his expression one of somebody who didn’t want to be this uncannily close to something this deep in the uncanny valley, “and right now I’m feeling kind of-”

“Nervous?” The emcee interrupted, raising an eyebrow and moving a servo in his lips in an uncanny-valley expression of slyness. “Don’t worry boy, I-I-I-I think you’ll fit just fine amongst us f-f-f-freaks!”

Rick wasn’t sure if the emcee was insulting him or complimenting him, and from the muttering of the audience they didn’t seem too sure either. He did certainly look like he belonged amongst them with his almost waifish, pale, bruised physique. But he wasn’t sure if ‘freak’ was the accurate term. At least, he hoped it wasn’t.

With a flick of his hand and a springing, grinding jump back onto the stage, he said “Now that we’ve gotten our salutations out of the way, let’s get on with the s-s-s-show!” as he pressed play and glided back to the shadows in a sort of jerky moonwalk as he buzzed to a state of sleep.

The words “Coming Soon, To a Theatre Near You” flickered upon the wall as the lights dimmed, and as they faded into previews, the audience watched with rapt attention. They were likely never going to see a fair few of those shown, so they might as well watch the condensed, marketing-ized, and highly spoiler-ized versions of them anyway.

Well, all but Cshisk, who was currently watching something else. More specifically she was flipping through the pages of drawings in the folder, extracted from right below the table. Compared to the comic’s she read before, this was virtually Shakespeare, a dark dramedy in an primal, underground, comix-with-an-x vein, and looking at the art she now knew why he considered those napkin sketches crude.

There was a luridness to the stories that was undeniable, psychotronic dramas of sex, violence and weirdness, with a smooth cartoony style contrasting with the deranged drama on the page. But there was a lushness to it as well, some beautiful life to the stories of sleaze, and the lives of its strange, broken but fascinating characters.

Characters like Dolly-X, the cyborg gunner with a heart of steel and a tongue of silver, the old and hateful Chainsaw Boss, mysterious and guileful Trenchcoat Man; who had a ticking clock replacing one of his eyes, the hubristic; social climbing; immensely fascinating Rocco Journeyhead, and the mad; stab-happy; magically cursed Doc Brainknife; who still managed to be the most heroic damned character in this whole mess.

The world of the comic very much reminded her of her own sewer community, albeit darker and sleazier, perhaps mixed with that nasty city called “New York” that the Uptowners kept using in their films.

Of course, the creator of that wasn’t thinking much about his work at the moment. His eyes were drifting about the room, not so much enjoying the trailers as thinking about the remains of the day.

The wounds from his fights smoldered like embers in a fireplace, the bruises competing for which would make him hurt the most and the re-bared scratches twinging in the open air. But the one paid that didn’t plague him was more mental than physical.

He felt as though that chewing fuzz of ennui that wrapped around him everyday had been parted by some flickering beacon. That all over ache he usually felt after his long days working at the Customer Service department (the coldest and dankest part of retail hell in his opinion) was nowhere to be seen, and the pain he was now feeling felt like a good pain, a pain he could be proud of how he acquired.

His rambling eyes watched the creatures at work. Amongst others, a rugose abomination could be seen playing a leisurely game of chess with a squamous horror, a vague thing in a hasmat suit was sipping soup through an odd hose coming out of his finger, a winged mole-rat-thing was necking with a creature of moss and driftwood, a very likely blotto alligator-man gulped down a bottle of Mad Dog 20/20, and these were just a few of the oddities that Rick saw as he looked about. He to the other side of the napkin and drew at a galloping lip as the commercials played onward, just wishing he could spend more than just this one night to take in more of the place.

And Miss Sisskit (He still didn’t feel right calling her Cshisk), there was that confidence in her. Even if he saw it in flashes and glimpses, he still saw the spark of a woman who could grab life by the long ears and never let go as it ran.

The hope floated to the top of his head that, even when he went home on the surface, they might cross paths again one day. You know, as friends, he thought to himself. But then it just as quickly sank, as most hopes of his these days did.

But, it was at just this point that the comic gave Cshisk away. Specifically, a moment in the story, which seemed climactic yet was only a quarterways through the folio. She couldn’t help but let out a small, shocked gasp when she saw the panel revealing who fired the Kannonade at Chainsaw Boss, which led Rick to turn behind.

He wasn’t quite sure what the small, restrained gasp was for at first, though he did see that Cshisk was most definitely not looking at the screen. Only when he saw the crisp white paper and the black and red ink from the corner of his eye did he realize what she was looking down at.

He looked to the side for his bag, which wasn’t there, then he looked to the thin trail of water from where his bag was, which led near Cshisk, and then he looked very, very mortified when he thought about exactly what she was reading. His masterpiece but also the doom of many a job and friendship, the thing he couldn’t show to anyone but couldn’t bear to throw away.

“Oh god, please, let me explain!” he said to her.

She looked up, eyes as if she’d been caught with her hand in the cookie jar.

He continued, sputtering, preparing to flinch as the pages or the fist containing the pages were thrown back in his face like they had been many times before, trying the defenses he’d tried every time this happened, “I know the violence is kind of excessive, I know it’s pretty dark and I may have gotten a bit too disgusting with it, and I understand why you might be offended by all the nudit-”

“I liked it,” Cshisk interrupted succinctly. “There’s something nice about it.”

Nice? How in god’s green earth could she describe them as “nice?” He’d lost jobs over them, lost friends, even lost an apartment thanks to a landlord seeing ‘em, and she thought they were “Nice”? He looked absolutely baffled, as a confused “Buh?” quietely fell from his lips.

“Reminds me of when Daddy used to read me Steven King and Dean Koontz stories when I was a little roachette,” she continued. Rick looked even more puzzled. “Oh,” Cshisk asked “Is that uncommon children’s literature Uptown? We get most of our books from whatever drops down here.”

“Nah.” Said Rick, relieved that at least that bridge had been crossed without the wagon spontaneously combusting. “I’m just glad you didn’t ralph all over the pages like some of the other people who’ve seen it.”

Cshisk didn’t know what “ralphing” meant, but she could guess it was a term for something unpleasant Uptown, perhaps involving musk or mucus. “Well, I think it’s wonderful.” She paused.

After a few seconds, she said “You know, you’re a better person than you think you are.”

She was telling the truth with what she’d said. For all the literal and figurative rough edges, cracks, chips and dings he had, and my he had a lot of both, she could see hints of the true sculpture underneath. And the statue was a DaVinci in her eyes.

There was yet another pause as his eyes widened and he blushed a little. She put the pages up and slid them over the table. “Do you want these back?” she asked.

Rick thought for a few moments, as much as about that line about being a better person as her question. “Nah, keep ‘em,” he said after several seconds of thought. They were copies, and it was likely he’d never see her again. He might as well give her something to remember him by.

Cshisk smiled “Oh, thank you, thank you, thank you!” She put her hand out to grab the papers back, only to have it grab Rick’s hand trying to push the papers back to her.

Silence rang about the table for a few moments as they held hands, the accidental touch turning into something more personal. And then a peal of “And now for our feature presentation!” sliced through the silence, as the movie began to play.

They dropped the hand hold as the tones blared, both looking to the sides, looking back at each other (Somewhat sheepishly), and then shifting their view towards the claymation opening titles for the film.

But while they weren’t looking into each other’s eyes, they were in each others thoughts. Rick thought “She… called my art nice. Nobody’s ever called my art nice before. Nobody’s ever called anything I’ve done “nice” before.” He thought to himself how funny it was that a cockroach woman was the first person who liked his art, or almost anything he did for that matter. An entrepenurial, adventurous, generous, kind, resourceful, gorgeous cockroach woman who was the first person in a long time who didn’t think he completely sucked.

Suddenly the idea didn’t seem so funny. And the realization swirled about him that his thoughts about her may have been a bit more complicated than he wanted to believe.

Cshisk thought “Maybe this is a date. Maybe it isn’t. But there’s something there.” She’d never thought that her first date would be with a full-blooded human. “And, thinking about it, I never did think to tell him that dream of mine.” She thought to herself about her dream to go to the city above, about those lights and concrete sidewalks beneath her feet.

About somebody with her, maybe, when she got out of the sewers, holding her hand as she walked through the streets. Someone from up there. Maybe she should ask… “Oh well, it can wait until after the movie,” she thought to herself.

And so the movie went on and the two sat together, like a mad accordion note in the symphony of life.

Of course, this was not the end for the story of this pair. No, the story of these two is a far grander tale. But, that story is for another time.


:EDIT: I've forgotten to mention this beforehand, but also I'd like to mention that I'd like some constructive criticism on this particular piece. Particularly on the character of Rick, who has the problem of being kind of a sad-sacka and a loser, sort of a version of the "Bland loser everyman" syndrome a lot of characters suffer from.

I do have an idea of the sort of character I want to portray with Rick, though I doubt the narrative in it's current state conveys this well, and the points of said characterization are below:

-I want him to be down-on-his-luck, partially through his own fault, partially due to unfortunate circumstances, stuck in a terrible retail job.
-I want him to be well aware of his own failings, blaming himself for his problems perhaps more than he should, and use snark and self-depreciating humor as a coping mechanism for a deep dissatisfaction with his own life.
-I want to convey that he has an interest in the weird and maccabre, with an eccentric, artsy streak that sets him apart from most people, aside from his friends, on the surface (Which I pretty much have none of in this current draft, but I think adding it would help his characterization). While he tries to hide it from those people who disapprove, he's bad at it, and feels a sort of isolation from most of the people in the city above (Which is meant to be a decaying urban hell in the vein of Detroit).
-He is quite a good artist, with an instinctive head for visuals in a sort of rubberhose, underground comix-style. I specifically want to emphasize how his visuals have a great feeling of movement and energy, and also their maccabre and weird nature.
-While he has almost no opportunities to do so on the surface thanks to the suffocating nature of his town; his situation; and his job, he is able to rise to the occasion when he sees an opportunity for action, and enough of a good person to stick his neck out for others just for the reasons of "Why not?"
-In summation, I want him to be a creative person in a bad situation, with a strange but brilliant mind and a snarky disposition as a coping mechanism, but also with an altruistic and caring streak and a willingness to act when given the chance enough that one could see something good in him.


So yeah, if you have any comments or suggestions for draft three, especially in the realm of improving or fleshing out Rick's characterization, post 'em if you've got em.

[tbok1992]

Aaaaaaand here's draft three:

Two figures walked beneath the city streets, one human, the other humanoid. Arthropodal hands lead the human through the tunnels and arthropodal legs trod the dimly lit paths their holder had walked many times before. The human, for his sake, followed his guide promptly, for he was the newcomer in this strange land, and she was his guide.

He took in the shadows upon the walls and the cat-sized chitinous things that skittered about the strange maze that was the storm drain community. The path was dimly lit with faint, erattic strings of re-purposed Christmas lights and the kalidescope eyes of the great catfish-things floating about the “rivers” which his guide and now and then had to smack away with the blunt end of the glass-studded oar she kept as a weapon.

The moon peeked its head in now and then, but vanished just as quickly, making it useless as a source of light. After all, they were so far away from the surface world.

The guide’s name was Cshisk Sisskit, a cockroach woman something like if the insects from Mimic had gone up a few rungs on the evolutionary ladder and a woman of great wit and skill. The man’s name was Rick, and he was as bewildered as he was fascinated by this place, these creatures, and the strange humanoid he’d saved leading him on.

And finally, they reached their destination, a restaurant known as the Cinema Club. The entrance at its head was formerly the face-shaped doors for a highly “politically incorrect” (Read: racist and horrible) fried chicken place, painted black and white and gussied up with paper mache in a strange semblance of Charlie Chaplin to unusual effect. The walls were made of what looked like amber-y resin and old; yellowing newspapers, and lights and the faint murmur of conversation flowed outward.

When both figures reached the double-door, they both inadvertently rushed to grab one, open it up, and gesture inwards as if to let the other in. At the same time.

There was a pause, an uncomfortable chuckle, and then finally a concurrent entrance of the both of them.

As they entered there was a moment’s realization on Rick’s side that he was sure as hell not in Kansas any more. Maybe Midian, maybe Wonderland, but not Kansas

He was given pause by the multitude of creatures sitting before him, a motley collection of aberrant and strange forms, some like the nightmarish latex creations of science fiction, some like the eerie phantasmagorias of fantasy. But, if there was fear in Rick’s heart, he did not show it, but instead a feeling of wonder. Like stepping into a whole new world.

Of course, that rumination was interrupted by a rumbling from below the floor, and the cracking of paper and wood as the many patrons backed away nervously from the epicenter of the rumble. There was a crack of splintering wood and a howling, gasping laughter coming from the thing bursting through the floor.

The monstrosity was a thing of naked sinew, its many legs and tentacles covered in exposed, gleaming, meaty muscle, covered in whatever clear slime it was that they really made Chicken McNuggets out of, its face looking like nothing so much as the face of Ronald McDonald with a wide, toothy maw.

It let out that hideous howl-laugh as it scanned the room with its hungry eyes, the strange patrons looking at it more like one would a bear or a cougar in one’s house than the hideous shambling thing that it was. Dangerous, but not unnatural, or even quite that unexpected.

One of the servers, a vaguely centipedal woman who was serving a very fussy and fancy man-dodo before the scene, looked with a gaze of angry annoyance at the horror. “Oh no you ****ing don’t!” she yelled, with a secondary set of needle-sharp red fangs extending inside her mouth, yellow venom dripping from her mouth.

She ran at the thing on her chitinous legs, teeth bared, and bit on one of the tentacles as it lashed near the crowd. The thing saw her and hissed, lashing back and detaching the tentacle, sending the centipede woman flying into a wall.

Cshisk looked on annoyed. She’d gone here to get away from her job, not for more this ****. “Excuse me for a second” she said to Rick as she took up her bladed oar and ran at the beast from behind. As Rick ducked for cover, Cshisk scanned the room, the awkwardness of the date shifting back to the comfort of something she’d done many times before.

In a matter of moments she spied an opening between the forest of tendrils, and lunged for it. She leapt towards the beast’s gooey hide, which was currently advancing towards Candace, who was buried beneath the thing’s still writing tentacle.

With but a slice she tore through where the nugget-paste-mesh looked weakest from her angle. It didn’t hit muscle, but it certainly sliced off a substantial chunk. But it also certainly pissed off the thing it was attached to enough to turn around towards Cshisk, fangs bared. Cshisk smiled and turned the oar around for another whack at it.

Rick watched beneath his overturned table as Cshisk darted in battle. There was no nervousness to her stride, none of that shaky wringing of hands that she’d shown at the table, just pure confidence and skill.

As she slammed at the thing’s flesh, the nugget-paste thinned by slice after slice, a decimation of a thousand cuts. Though she was tiring, dodging between its tentacles, he couldn’t tell from the way she moved. The centipede woman joined back into the fray too, weaving in and feint-biting to give Cshisk another opening to slice.

Rick had a feeling he was not needed for this battle, and there was no sense in him Leeroy Jenkinsing his life away. So he did what came naturally. He took a napkin from the floor and a mechanical pencil from his pocket and he drew.

The lines looped from his hands to form shapes, caricatures of the action, the whirling dervish of Cshisk with the oar, the centipede-woman with her teeth, and the beast with its everything. Rick saw a wild, strange beauty in the motion, and was trying so hard to capture it in his art that he did not notice the stray tentacle coming inadvertently close to him.

He did, however, notice it when it wrapped completely around him, and he especially noticed it when it started to unsheathe several unpleasantly sharp barbs. He stabbed at the thing feebly with his pencil as he tried to wriggle out of his barb-pierced shirt, his skinny body wriggling to get out before the barbs moved out and turned his black shirt a bright shade of red.

But, through a combination of his stabbing and the fact that he hadn’t eaten anything but a slightly stale bread-n-bread sandwich in three days, he wriggled free just in time to hear a wet slicing sound and see the tentacle fall to the ground cleanly severed. Wriggling. He looked up and saw Cshisk, slicing paddle in hand, going right towards the opening near the stump.

Meanwhile, Schsisk had finally struck painful, painful gold, cutting off that last sliver of skin to hit meat. When she saw it, she leaped into action, tossing down the oar, lunging with her outstretched hand and thrusting it into the meaty cavity. “The best way to drive away these things is pain,” she remembered as she squeezed the raw tendons with her sharp claws. “They fight a good game, but if you hit ‘em where it burns they become cowards.”

And indeed the thing shrieked in agony, as its tentacles flailed and darted for Cshisk. But every time it was about to bring a tentacle towards her, she squeezed bringing the tentacles up in reflexive agony. It moved and writhed back and back towards the hole from which it came as she squeezed at it, Rick watching the rhythm of her hand as if she knew this from god knows how many times actually doing it on the job, and her steadfast grip on the writhing, enormous monstrosity.

Finally, as the creature got down its hole, Cshisk let go of it and it retreated, letting out one last horrible scream/howl. As it scuttled back below the water, that weird centipede woman shook her fist at it and yelled “Yeah bitch, you better run!”

She put her head back up and looked at the still-shaken crowd. The centipede woman’s fangs retracted back into her gums as she yelled “Nothin’ to see here folks, show’s over, go back to your meals.”

And, surprisingly enough, they did. For, while it was an unpleasant and startling event, it was not an unusual one for the inhabitants of the world below. Monster attacks happen, but life below goes on.

Cshisk picked up her oar and sighed. This was not a good start to the night. She walked over to where the human known as Rick was, following his scent amidst the chaos with her antennae. His smell was muddled by the dirt and sweat of the day, but it smelled… nice somehow.

“I’m sorry” Cshisk said as she extended her oar to help him up.

“Why should you be sorry? You’re not the” Rick smiled, trying to bring some levity back to the situation. “Besides, the way you beat the crap outta that thing was… incredible, some Daredevil stuff or somethin’!”

“My performance back there was… sloppy.” She said, then realizing “Oh, your shirt!” and Rick looked down. Down on the floor his shirt lied in jagged black tatters from the flailing, severed tentacle. But the old canvass bag was still there, and the drawing was still intact thanks to the fact that down here, “Napkin” could mean anything from newsprint to a giant hamster pelt.

“Eh, it’s just a shirt,” he said picking up the drawing, “I’m just lucky it wasn’t me.” And that was true, given that old t-shirts were one of the few things he didn’t lack. He was slightly embarrassed to have his downright waifish and bruised physique shown to all the world.

Given the sorts of weirdos, mutants and monsters he saw around him, he doubted he was the most conspicuous thing in the room. Like a regular creature cantina this place was. Not that he was complaining mind you. He always liked those “Creature cantina” scenes.

Cshisk looked down at what he had picked up, curious why he’d be more interested in a piece of paper than his shredded garment, which would have cost a pretty penny down there. It was a napkin of simple newsprint, but with raw, thin marks of pencil lining it in curious, fascinating formation. She deftly whisked it out of his hand, asking “What’s this you picked up?” merely as a formality after the fact.

It was a drawing of her fighting the beast, in several positions. The quick strokes of the pencil suggested hastiness in drawing it, to capture the moment like a camera shutter, but it had marvelous stylistic clarity nonetheless. It was one of those pictures that captured the feeling of movement in a still image, with simple pictures that captured Cshisk and the beast’s appearance quite well.

But Rick looked embarrassed as Cshisk looked over it. “Not my best work, I know” he said, thinking of the slightly wonky anatomy and the lack of clarity in which he’d rendered that centipede-woman’s image. He picked up a chair in an attempt at changing the subject. “So, how about we get started with this… ???”

“I’m not sure what it is myself” Cshisk said blushingly as she used the hooked end of her oar to pick up another chair and table “And for the record, I thought the picture was quite good.”

“You’d be the first person to tell me that in a long time.” Rick said.

After a few minutes of each awkwardly trying to pull out the other person’s chair for them, they sat down simultaneously, a moment of silence passing as they gathered their bearings.

In the clear, sodium lights of the restaurant, Rick could see that the cockroach woman, named Cshisk Ssskit apaprently, wore no true clothes over her reddish frame. It was instead did garbed in adornments made of strips of aluminum can, woven together into various elegant pouch-covered chains on her carapace and adorning her surprisingly dextrous hands in the form of kitbashed jointed gloves. It certainly suited her, at least Rick thought, the silvers contrasting against her curvy red carapace.

She got a good look at him as well, a young man of average height, pale sun-starved skin, eyes with dark circles beneath as if grasping for sleep, and a bruised; slender figure currently lacking a shirt. But there was still something interesting about his look. Like a beautiful bronze statue tarnished from crown-to-foot. A bag lay to the side of his scrap-wood seat, slightly moist except for the tightly sealed clear plastic sleeves containing bundles and bundles of paper.

His first comment was similarly self-effacing. “You didn’t have to take me here you know.”

The man went by the name Richard, though people either called him Rick or **** depending on if the person talking to him was a friend or somebody he owed money .And the latter category had been ballooning each day.

“What do you mean?” said the cockroach-woman in a buzzing voice sweet as a bag of slightly melty Swedish Fish, looking genuinely confused with her large arthropodal eyes.

“You saved my life Miss Sisskit.” Rick responded, trying to avoid her concerned gaze out of embarrassment “You don’t need to take me out afterwards”

“Please, call me Cshisk.” She said “And it’s the least I can do, as I remember you jumping in to save me first.”

There was an awkward silence. Rick glanced around looking at the various shambling mounds of vegetation, giant rats, and humans with various fleshy symbiotes studding their bodies waiting table, wondering when somebody would take their order. The strains of a fuzzy, faded Smash Mouth song involving stars or something like that started blaring in the background, making the silence less silent, but the awkwardness far deeper.

So he drew yet again. It always calmed him, helped the miasma of the world cohese into visions of phantasmagoria to put pen to paper and let his subconscious pour out. And, as the loud belch of a giant cat made of tar at one of the other tables reminded him, he was in a world of phantasmagoria.

He would’ve used his notebook, but that was currently a pile of soggy pulp in some effluent river. But no matter. Some people bit their nails, some twirled their hair, he drew. But, his eyes and the majority of his attention were focused on Cshisk as he wrung his brain for some way to break the silence.

“So, what exactly do you do… Cshisk?” asked Rick, breaking the awkward silence with an awkward question.

“Well,” said Cshick, slowly mulling and rolling over her sentence, “I’m a river-runner.”

Rick looked confused, “What’s a…”

“Oh!” said Cshisk, antennae slightly lifting her antennae looking slightly embarrassed. “I forgot, you’re from uptown, you didn’t know.”

Inside her head she was kicking herself “Ten minutes into your first date and you’re already screwing up!” she thought to herself. Was it a date? If so, was it a gratitude-date or a date-date. All she knew was that she’d made a spur of the moment decision to go out on to dinner with this guy who saved her, and she had no idea what she was doing

“I’m sorry” Rick said. He was used to feeling clueless, and he didn’t really feel much more clueless down here than he did up there.

“No, no, no, not at all.” Responded back Cshisk, trying to save face “It’s just, I haven’t really met with any one outside the sewers, and I’m new to this explaning thi-Oh look here’s our waitress.” She shifted her sentence hurriedly, braking before she struck a nerve with that runaway train of thought.

Said waitress scuttled forward a bit more. It was the waitress from the fight, and upon looking at her, Rick saw that she was less of a centipede with woman bits and more a woman with centipede bits She looked relatively human, with short sandy-blonde hair, brown eyes, and a pair of well-worn jeans. Of course this made the bizarre bits far more apparent, such as her prehensile toes, the giant centipede-like-appendage coming out of her back and supporting her weight, and the fact that she was completely topless; likely due to said centipedal growth.

She flashed the sort of jocular smile one gives to “one of the usuals” Cshisk’s way.

Rick tried not to stare, he didn’t quite stick the landing. It wasn’t so much the centipedal bits that kept odding him out, no he was merely fascinated by that, but the almost innocently transgressive nudity just barely pushed it past the point of weird where one can’t help but not look away. His eyes kept darting from the floor to the centipede woman, left hand doodling at a faster pace.

To her credit, the centipede woman took it in stride, rolling her eyes and muttering “uptowners.” She hadn’t been one for a long time, but she knew that the staring was more in fascinated confusion than of perverse oogling. She remembered giving that same stare her first time down the rat hole. Richard’s face turned a bright shade of crimson and she chuckled a bit.

She then turned to Cshisk and said “Heyyy Cshisk, howsit goin’?”

“It’s going… okay Candace. I’m just treating this gentleman who saved my life to a round of dinner.”

“So…. A date then?” Candace inquisited jocularly.

“Maybe. Perhaps. I suppose.” Cshisk muttered, her antennae twitching about in embarrassment.

“Never thought you were the dating type” Candace said joshingly. “Hell, I never even knew you were the taking-a-break-type”

“Neither did I” said Cshisk, very clearly motioning that she would prefer if Candace changed the subject.

Candace got the hint and said “Kay,” clearly remembering the awkwardness of her first date in the community, with Jimmy the (literal) Rat. “So, what’s your order hon?”

“I’ll have the pan-fried rat with a side of dough-wrapped Manhattan White, and Rick…” She looked over to Rick to see if he would respond. “I think he’ll just have the Spamchillada,” Cshisk said, guessing at his indecision that he might want something a bit more “aboveground” this go-around.

She fished around near her seat and pulled out several chips of lacquered cardboard and handed them to Candace. “I think this’ll cover the meal,” she said.

Rick looked over to where she was drawing it from, a purse-like bag homemade out of burlap. It was near overflowing with those chips, in a few different colors to boot.

Candace counted through the handful. “Cshisk, I think you might’ve overpaid me by a few chips.”

Csisk just smiled, at least as well as a pair of mandibles could smile, and said “Keep ‘em. You need ‘em more than I do, and besides, I’m not a poor woman.”

Candace gave a bittersweet gaze to Cshisk, which Cshisk gave back. They both knew that she wasn’t lacking for money, or friends, or even status, but there was one area she was positively impoverished in, desired in that quiet way a pet turtle desires the sea, but had never given herself the time to have.

Rick still looked confused. “Oh,” said Cshisk, just noticing Rick’s embarassment “she’s a friend of mine.”

“No big deal,” Rick said half-truthfully “I’ve met a lot of weirdos around town.” That was a whole truth, as the burns from his encounter with that wizard and the scars from that “stellar probe” proved.

“Though, the weirdos seem more lively down here,” he thought, thinking of the rusting, crumbling city of above. The conversation in the background here was like a series of notes on a theremin, as opposed to the rusty; acid screech of the city above in-between voids of dad silence.

Almost reflexively he turned over his drawing paper, the front of the napkin already completely filled by his etchings. Had he looked down he would’ve seen some surprisingly detailed sketches of the place’s patrons. But his eyes were only on hers. Though her eyes seemed to be avoiding his in unease, though whether it was about her and not him, Rick couldn’t say.

“You know, you’re the first human I’ve actually seen down here without them. That’s sort of weird for m-” She paused. With the sudden realization she was drifting, she threw here head up and said, “Anyway back to river running… what it is is that I run a few homemade canoes throughout the waterways to find things that your people lose, or flush, let get a washed away or in general lose down here.”

She fiddled with one of the many chips from her purse as she spoke, twirling it almost hypnotically through her chitinous fingers. “It all ends up here in the end. It’s my little operation, picking ‘em up and sellin’ ‘em back to the folks around here.”

There was a sense of pride in her voice. For all that she felt bone-tired from her job, she still thought it was a good job, an important job, a job worth doing. She just wondered if it was a job worth over-doing.

“I remember findin’ the emcee’s parts, heh, wasn’t that a day … but I’ll stop talking. I don’t want to be a bore.” Well that and she really didn’t want to screw this up.

“No, no, no, it’s okay.” Rick said, face still covered in residual blushery. He was looking her straight in the eye, though which part of it he should look at was a mystery to him. “I’ve never known much about the underground, well, much that seems true anyway, he said, “and I’m always up for a good story. So tell all ya want about your business, I won’t mind. Besides,” Rick grinned “if your job anywhere near as weird as this place, it must be one helluva job.”

Again Cshisk gave that nervous mandibled half-smile. She’d never really had an opportunity to show her stuff to an outsider, much less one she wanted to impress. “Alright then.” She put her hands on the table, rubbing them together nervously. The rhythmically rubbing chitin on them sounded like a constant skeetching of boots against a tile floor, or perhaps a chant of “He’s interested, he’s interested, Don’t blow this, don’t blow this!”.

“We get mostly driftwood, cans, plastic bottles, but it’s pretty varied. Heck, most of the stuff in here came from my business, including the emcee.” She pointed to a strange thing covered in fake fur and wires, slumped in the corner, covered in and wired in to a wall socket. “He’s recharging.” Cshisk added hastily

“So, does he think you’re his mom or something?” Rick asked.

“Oh, I didn’t build him,” Cshisk said, “I just found the parts. The guy I sold him to programmed him to act like, well, an emcee. So he now acts like I’m the agent who discovered him, which is sort of true. Sort of. ”

She gave an aside glance. “I must say, I hope I haven’t given the impression that it’s just my operation.” Indeed not, otherwise she would’ve worked herself to death rather than half-to-death like she was doing now. She momentarily drummed her chitinous fingers against the table, more out of nervousness than out of impatience really.

“Dad started it years ago with nothing but his claws and a wooden raft. When he died it was barely running, and I was the only one out of my litter of 10 who decided to stay and keep it going. So, I brought in a few friends to try and at least salvage it, things sent out from there, and…”

She made a face like she’d be blushing if she were able to “Well, I’ve made a bit of a name for myself as you can see…” Rick looked back at the purse filled with cardboard chips.

“But, it’s dangerous work.” She added “There’s the Sprayers, the Crackjaws (Gotta listen real close for those guys), the Rat Kings, the Rat Queens, the Ghoulie Grabbers (Only way to get ‘em is whackin’ em with a bible), the Rat Knights (Though their teeth fetch a pretty penny at the market), the Rat Jesters, the Rat Popes,”

She shuddered a bit, and her antennae twitched. “Nasty things those Rat Popes, one of ‘em took Saul’s leg, and almost got his head too. There’s also the Deep Crows, the Meatcrawlers, the Manimals (God that smell of urine), the CHUDs, the Garbagefish (Which I never want to have to eat again) and…” she looked him over, “well I know you got well acquainted with the Chokewhirl Whomper.”

Yes, yes he was, but he said nothing. A twinge of pain emanated from the bruise the ugly thing’d put on his chest when he dove in to save her from the suspicious pile of trash, along with the series of cuts on his arm from when it’d got a parting shot in, after Chsisk returned the favor and rescued him.

The rescue was worth the pain to him mind you, and he still would’ve dove in even if he had known the full circumstances, but that still didn’t make it hurt any less. Though, the conversation was doing its damndest to distract him from it.

There was also an equally unpleasant twinge of self-depreciation in Cshisk’s head. She was also very, very well acquainted with the Chokewhirl Whomper, and shouldn’t have gotten caught off guard like that.

It was the kind of stupidity one exhibited when one was tired as a fish-dog but still wanted to make those last; unnecessary rounds “Just in case” before the sun popped its bright head through the upper grates. She’d always thought there was no such thing as overwork, but now she was starting to question that call.

“You know, I probably would’ve died if you hadn’t managed to hold its attention long enough for me to get out and whomp ‘im.”

“And I’d’ve probably died if you hadn’t done said whomping. So, is that… typical for you?” He asked

“There’s worse, but it’s one of the nastier things ya see in a typical day. I still should’ve been able to deal with it. But,” Cshisk said, trailing off and looking nervously at Rick’s face for any signs of boredom or restlessness. “Enough about me. What is your life like up there, on the surface?” she asked, hoping to get a hint of what was in his mind rather than wildly extrapolating on it in hers.

Rick gave a mumble of uneasiness as he took a heavy breath in. Well, he thought, no sense in being dishonest to the woman who thought enough about you to save your life, even if she was a bipedal; chitinous creature of the dark. Though, to be fair, he did like that part.

“Well, I wish I could say my life is as interesting as yours.” He said, his wan cheeks curled in a sad half-smile, “But I’m not much of anything. I work at a Wal-Mart, a store where the desparate and the cheap go to buy tube socks and the morbidly obese go to buy muumuus and kill themselves with pork rinds and cheese dip,”

He paused as Cshisk raised an antenna in confusion. “Figuratively I mean. It can be fun, though mostly only when you tell the stories after the fact.” he continued, “And I live in a one-room apartment with such a bad stink that it serves as its own security system.”

He laughed a little and gave a smile. “If you look at it that way, I’m getting a good deal on rent.” Ah levity. The nectar of the broke and the desperate. “I went to college to make something of myself, but when I got out I found I made the wrong thing and nobody was buying.”

“I know little of this ‘college’ place you’re talking about, except for that it is either a place for fornication and alchohol or a place where disadvantaged youths find extravagant success. And that’s just from the movies.” She looked slightly embarrassed at her lack of knowledge of the uptown. But there was something about the way he said it that made her interested. The way he said it, rolling it off the tongue matter-of-factly like a comedian, so fast that she almost missed the desperation underneath.

Rick laughed a little. “That first one’s not too far off from the truth,” Cshisk looked relieved as he continued onward, “but I never got into the party scene that much. Unless you count navelgazing as a ‘party’. But ever since, I’ve just sort of drifted, living one day at a time in a city dying one day at a time.” He paused, wondering both whether he was getting too self-pitying and whether he should keep going.

“But I complain too much. I have a job, even if it is retail, I have an apartment, even if it is one-room, and I have friends, even if they think I’m a schlematzl. I’m on a hunt fro a better job, even though I’ve only got called back twice, once as a wrong number. I think I have it pretty good for an art major, and it could be worse. I could be a bum…” That last statement gave him pause.

“But…” He meandered on. The glow of the self-aggrandizement dimmed upon his face.

“But, what?” asked Cshisk.

Rick paused. “Nah, you don’t want to hear it,” Rick said, trying to keep up that veneer of jadedness. He was veering dangerously close to the one topic he didn’t want to talk about, a topic he could only blame himself for broaching and only blame himself for feeling.

“Come on, there must be something bothering you.” Cshisk said. She knew that look on his face. Even though it was on a human and not an arthropodal face, she knew that look from her own face after she came back from work every day, and realized she had nobody to come home to.

Rick took a deep breath. “Sometimes, I feel… empty.”

“Empty?” Cshisk asked, now thoroughly confused.

“Like… what I’m doing… there’s no point in it… Like… there’s nothing but the gutter coming for me tomorror… dream… deferred.” The words came haltingly and sadly out of him with that dry, resigned rust of shame and self-loathing puffing out from every tired syllable.

There was an airless silence after the words had passed between the two of them, him trying to catch his breath and her looking at him. His eyes widened and he paused as he realized what he’d just said. He wished he hadn’t. “Nobody gives a **** about your whiny first world problems, least of all her.” He thought to himself.

“Oh, heh, but that’s my problem and not yours, and everybody has problems, so how about that Rat Pope esh, what on earth is that?” he said, fumbling around with his words, trying to change the subject like a drunk driver changes lanes. “Also, no offence at the gutter remark, maam,” he added fumblingly.

“None taken.” Cshisk said. She didn’t feel it was trivial. After all, lord knows what she would’ve done with herself if she didn’t have her business.

But she didn’t quite get why the metaphorical gutter was such a bad thing. It brought water and debris and knick-knacks down below for salvage, and often brought some of the most… interesting things that she found. But she didn’t mind. Perhaps that metaphor might be more apt than he thought…

“So,” he asked, changing the subject after his subject change, his nervousness making him lose a bit of his track “What was that thing that came into the restaurant?”

Cshisk didn’t answer for a few seconds. She was looking at the tired face before her, pink skin trying hard and failing to maintain a mask of good cheer. She’d never been attracted to any of the human-derivatives down here before, but there was something about that face of his. Unclean and tired-eyed, yes, but there was something underneath it all that she could not help beautiful. And his lithe, lightly muscled, marble-pale shirtless body was giving her other… feelings.

But then she realized she was drifting and finally replied “Oh, that? That was the Meatcrawler. Rumor says that they’re escaped experiments from some restaurant on the surface that’s supposed to be hideously awful and yet your people can’t get enough of it.

Rick hazarded a guess as to where that was and said, “Well, I know where I’m never eating again.”

Cshisk laughed a little, then stopped and said “By the way, what is that dream were talking about?”

Rick suddenly looked very, very self conscious. The topic was shifting “that way” again. “Huh?” he said in disbelief.

“I’m curious what you’ve been wanting to do with your life. I mean, people tell me their problems all the time in my line of work, so why not you? I mean, you seem like you must have something interesting about you.” Her eyes darted down to the paper he was holding, as he instinctively retracted it back. She could see the first outlines of what looked like her face on it.

“It’s… nothing” Rick said. His voice was ramping down and sideways, as if he didn’t believe in the words it was forming, and his eyes darted low. He’d hoped he could avoid that uncomfortable topic, since things seemed to be going so well now.

“Tell ya what.” Cshisk said “I’ve got a dream of my own that I’ve always wanted to do. You tell me your dream, and I’ll tell you mine. Deal?” She couldn’t believe she was being this brazen, especially after she’d been so nervous beforehand. “Doing that must’ve gotten me back my second wind!” she thought.

“Well, if you insist.” Rick said. Why not make it two thirds of a hat trick, he thought, and do three stupid, potentially suicidal things today, he thought. “Well, ever since I could hold a book in my hand, I’ve wanted to do comics, draw ‘em, create ‘em. Hell, I even majored in ‘em!”

“Ya can. I probably shouldn’t have, but ya can.” He gave a smile half bemused half sad. “But, no matter what I do, what I write, what I try to sell, nobody’s buying. All I’ve been able to show to the public is a 47-page webcomic with 47 views. I’m pretty sure they’re all by the same guy. The rest keeps getting tossed out when I try to submit it.”

Cshisk’s antennae rose up in curiosity. She’d knew of and eagerly read a few comics in her time. They mostly the sorts of terrible ones like Countdown to Final Crisis and Ultimatum that one would let fall into a sewer, but like a bad dime novel she devoured them on the same.

There was something about the creations of picture and word that still intrigued her, that had something outside of anything she’d ever read to keep her going onward. “Would you happen to have any on you in that bag of yours?” she asked, hopefully.

The question caught him off-guard. The response usually he’d gotten when he brought on the comics was usually a tepid ‘Oh, that’s nice,’ or dismissive mockery, with the conversation shifting back to its original track. “Oh no- I wouldn’t- well- I don’t have any on me at the moment,” He said, eyes darting to the sealed bags where he indeed had them at the moment.

One fifth of his magnum opus to be precise, his baby which he’d been trying to get into print circulation for ages, but had been booed and barfed out of every publisher’s office he tried to pitch it to, never wanting to show it for fear of judgment, but too interested in it to give it up.

Cshisk’s eyes also darted towards the bags, but (luckily for her) Rick was distracted by the many other pairs of eyes darting to a space near the projector, with the sound of an electric hum starting to life. A whirring tape recorder and the sound of a videocassette being pitched at high speed slicing through the mumbling as a felt-covered figure stepped out into the spotlight. It was the Emcee, striding out on the stage, Mystery Men tape in one hand, and the tape for the next film in the other and spotlight directly on his mechanical patchworked face.

He was a bizarre thing, kitbashed of the parts of a Fats Domino and a Beach Bear animatronic figure from a long-gone “Showtime Pizza Place”, given a brain by the odd assortment of boards and drives jutting out of his back. But, he jerkily strode across the stage like he owned it, and indeed, one silvery mechanical spider threw a piece of her chassis like a housewife at a Tom Jones concert, and a muck-woman gave a wolf whistle as he strode.

Ric’s eyes were glued to the bizarre spectacle of the emcee saunter-jerking onto the stage, just as Cshisk’s chitinous toe seemed glued onto the bag she was scooting towards her seat out of Rick’s notice.

“G-g-g-gentlemen,” the emcee synthesizer-smarmed across the stage, voice skipping intermittently like an old CD. “That was M-M-M-Mystery Men, the third-best superhero movie Uptown has to offer!” The crowd cheered. “and I still want to see a spinoff about PMS w-w-w-woman someday!”

The emcee paused. He looked down at the gigantic hole in the floor from the Meatcrawler’s entrance that he had caught from the corner of what was probably his eye. “I see we’ve had an unexpected v-v-v-visitor tonight!” he improvised “Well, at least he was a better guest than some of our regulars!” Most of the audience laughed, a few of them harrumphed in annoyance.

”But,” the Emcee said, “As Freddy the Bard once said ‘The show must go on!’. So go on it shall!” The crowd wildly applauded, though Rick wondered how many of them knew that Freddie Mercury died soon after he recorded that.

“And now for to-day we witness a night at the opera by those sons-o-guns who brought us Airplane and Kentucky Fried movie, the movie we call ‘Brain Donors!”

In a swift, jerky motion he chacked the cassette into the player, and pressed rewind, continuing with the monologue as the tape whirred backwards. “Now, from what information I could get off the internet I-I-I ‘completely’ and ‘legitimately’ ‘borrowed’ from Uptown by the ‘ever-so-secret’ human cable line about th-th-three-or-so meters above this stage…

A knowing snicker passed through the crowd of creatures, or at least a burbling, clacking, squawking or beeping noise from those in the audience who didn’t have the capacity to snicker, as if they were exchanging a private joke that was on a certain gaunt somebody who was feeling very much out of place at the moment.

“It’s quite the rare f-f-f-film, debuting in theaters to thunderous silence thanks to the fact that nobody promoted it, not even payin’ a h-h-h-hobo five bucks to walk around with a sandwich board across the street.”

The emcee paced and gestured with his synthesized ballyhoo, psyching up the crowd to a roiling gusto. But he continued, “And it got off the small s-s-s-screen just as fast. In fact, the only thing faster than the film’s flight off the silver screen to the dustbin is the speed at which these gags fly. I tellya folks, we’ve got a r-r-r-real treat for us tonight, one o’ the best things I’ve seen in a while,”

The spotlight turned to Cshisk, now a little nervous, as the drives whirred in the emcee towards the next part of his speech.

“And that’s why I gotta thank the lovely Miss Cshisk, who made me what I am today!” He sauntered over close to the table as she still subtly scooted the bag between her toes. The audience’s laughter drowned out the wet scooching noise of the bag, as she moved it ever closer, hoping Rick’s eye wouldn’t wander down to the bag of the comics he apparently both loved and feared. “Ya know, when ya first sold this to me, I thought ‘There’s no way this could be worth a Rat Pope to get’.”

Rick’s eyes fixed on Cshisk as the emcee said this. “Well, I…” she said, gesturing widely with her hands to distract from the movement of the bag straight to her chair.

“Of course,” the emcee quipped, patting her on the shoulder like that boisterous uncle everyone has, “Everyone else said that about m-m-m-me when ya found my parts, and look where we are t-t-t-today!”

The crowd half applauded and half laughed, unsure whether it was a self-depreciating joke or not. Cshisk recalled as the applause died down that the acquisition of the emcee’s parts (Well, most of them anyway) wasn’t nearly as difficult as he made ‘em out to be.

She’d actually found the parts in a hive of Black Weepers. Formidable creatures, true, but nowhere near as bad as a Rat Pope. And while there had been a few people who refused to buy, it wasn’t all that difficult to find a down-on-his-luck machinist willing to take a chance on a pile of scrap.

But, a compliment was a compliment, even if it was a smarmy, off-kilter compliment, she thought as the emcee now went towards Rick.

“And who’s the lucky b-b-b-beau sitting across the table from her?” the emcee asked, sidling close to Rick, metal-fur hand brushing across the table.

“My name’s Rick, from… out of town,” he pointed up, his expression one of somebody who didn’t want to be this uncannily close to something this deep in the uncanny valley, “and right now I’m feeling kind of-”

“Nervous?” The emcee interrupted, raising an eyebrow and moving a servo in his lips in an uncanny-valley expression of slyness. “Don’t worry boy, I-I-I-I think you’ll fit just fine amongst us f-f-f-freaks!”

Rick wasn’t sure if the emcee was insulting him or complimenting him, and from the muttering of the audience they didn’t seem too sure either. He did certainly look like he belonged amongst them with his slender pale physique, multitude of bruises and the sleep-bags under his eyes. But he wasn’t sure if ‘freak’ was the accurate term. At least, he wondered if it wasn’t.

With a flick of his hand and a springing, grinding jump back onto the stage, he said “Now that we’ve gotten our salutations out of the way, let’s get on with the s-s-s-show!” as he pressed play and glided back to the shadows in a sort of jerky moonwalk as he buzzed to a state of sleep.

The words “Coming Soon, To a Theatre Near You” flickered upon the wall as the lights dimmed, and as they faded into previews, the audience watched with rapt attention. They were likely never going to see a fair few of those shown, so they might as well watch the condensed, marketing-ized, and highly spoiler-ized versions of them anyway.

Well, all but Cshisk, who was currently watching something else. More specifically she was flipping through the pages of drawings in the folder, extracted from right below the table. Compared to the comic’s she read before, this was virtually Shakespeare, a dark dramedy in an primal, underground, comix-with-an-x vein, and looking at the art she now knew why he considered those napkin sketches crude.

There was a luridness to the stories that was undeniable, psychotronic dramas of sex, violence and weirdness, with a smooth cartoony style contrasting with the deranged drama on the page. But there was a lushness to it as well, some beautiful life to the stories of sleaze, and the lives of its strange, broken but fascinating characters.

Characters like Dolly-X, the cyborg gunner with a heart of steel and a tongue of silver, the old and hateful Chainsaw Boss, mysterious and guileful Trenchcoat Man; who had a ticking clock replacing one of his eyes, the hubristic; social climbing; immensely fascinating Rocco Journeyhead, and the mad; stab-happy; magically cursed Doc Brainknife; who still managed to be the most heroic damned character in this whole mess.

The world of the comic very much reminded her of her own sewer community, albeit darker and sleazier, perhaps mixed with that nasty city called “New York” that the Uptowners kept using in their films.

Of course, the creator of that wasn’t thinking much about his work at the moment. His eyes were drifting about the room, not so much enjoying the trailers as thinking about the remains of the day.

The wounds from his fights smoldered like embers in a fireplace, the bruises competing for which would make him hurt the most and the re-bared scratches twinging in the open air. But the one paid that didn’t plague him was more mental than physical.

He felt as though that chewing fuzz of ennui that wrapped around him everyday had been parted by some flickering beacon. That all over ache he usually felt after his long days working at the Customer Service department (the coldest and dankest part of retail hell in his and most other’s opinion) was nowhere to be seen, and the pain he was now feeling felt like a good pain, a pain he could be proud of how he acquired.

His rambling eyes watched the creatures at work. Amongst others, a rugose abomination could be seen playing a leisurely game of chess with a squamous horror, a vague thing in a hasmat suit was sipping soup through an odd hose coming out of his finger, a winged mole-rat-thing was necking with a creature of moss and driftwood, a very likely blotto alligator-man gulped down a bottle of Mad Dog 20/20, and these were just a few of the oddities that Rick saw as he looked about.

The images rooted themselves in his mind, the looping penstrokes saving themselves in his mind to wind themselves back on paper, even as he drunk in the quiet wind of the bizarre. The strange, wonderful, malformed yet beautiful things. He wondered about the histories of these various beasts and beings, the likely manifold origins each and every one of them had. There was more life in this one microcosm of a sewer system than he had seen

And Miss Sisskit (He still didn’t feel right calling her Cshisk), there was that confidence in her. Even if he saw it in flashes and glimpses, he still saw the spark of a woman who could grab life by the long ears and never let go as it ran. She, the cockroach woman, was more alive down here than he ever had been in the sun of above.

“Damnit all, the comic” He remembered his bag, or rather, the comic in it. His masterpiece but also the doom of many a job and friendship, the thing he couldn’t show to anyone but couldn’t bear to throw away.

But why should he be afraid of her judgement? Why should he let a stupid hang-up dog him from his dreary existence to this great big, beautiful below. I mean, she never wrote him off as a loser when she spoke to him, and she gave him an ear whereas most people on the surface gave him the finger. It’s a blank slate, a new beginning, why not take the chance, nut up and shut up.

He turned around in the flickering light to look at Cshisk. Cshisk quickly looked up from the table and “Actually, Cshisk” he whispered, “To tell you the truth I… do have that project with me. Right by my side.” He turned to grab it and was saying “I’d be willing to show it to ya, but I wan you it’s a bit-” right before he realized it was gone.

There was yet another awkward silence between the pair as they both stared bewildered, after which she said “Funny you should mention that…” She brought the pages up, eyes as if she’d been caught with her hand in the cookie jar.

He continued, preparing to flinch as the pages or the fist containing the pages were thrown back in his face like they had been many times before, saying “Well, ah, let me give a bit of contex, now I know the violence is –ah- kind of excessive, I know it’s pretty dark and I may have –eh- gotten a bit too disgusting with it, and I understand why you might be offended by all the nudit-” trying the defenses he’d tried every time this happened right before Cshisk interrupted him

“I liked it,” Cshisk interrupted succinctly. “There’s something nice about it.”

“Nice”? He looked absolutely baffled, as a confused “Buh?” quietely fell from his lips. Of all the adjectives, exclamations, and expletives that had been applied to those comics “Nice” was not one of them.

“Reminds me of when Daddy used to read me Steven King and Dean Koontz stories when I was a little roachette,” she continued. Rick looked even more puzzled. “Oh,” Cshisk asked “Is that uncommon children’s literature Uptown? We get most of our books from whatever drops down here.”

“I’m just glad you didn’t ralph all over the pages like some of the other people who’ve seen it.” Rick smiled. It was like a burden had been lifted, as if the

Cshisk didn’t know what “ralphing” meant, but she could guess it was a term for something unpleasant Uptown, perhaps involving musk or mucus. “Well, I think it’s wonderful.” She paused. After a few seconds, she said “You know, you’re better than you think you are.”

She was telling the truth with what she’d said. For all the literal and figurative rough edges, cracks, chips and dings he had, and my he had a lot of both, she little glints of shining steel beneath, something there but not truly shown.

There was yet another pause as his eyes widened and he blushed a little. She put the pages up and slid them over the table. “Do you want these back?” she asked.

Rick thought for a few moments, as much as about that line about being a better person as her question. “Nah, keep ‘em,” he said after several seconds of thought. They were copies, and it was likely he’d never see her again. He might as well give her something to remember him by.

Cshisk smiled “Oh, thank you, thank you, thank you!” She put her hand out to grab the papers back, only to have it grab Rick’s hand trying to push the papers back to her.

Silence rang about the table for a few moments as they held hands, the accidental touch turning into something more personal. And then a peal of “And now for our feature presentation!” sliced through the silence, as the movie began to play.

They dropped the hand hold as the tones blared, both looking to the sides, looking back at each other (Somewhat sheepishly), and then shifting their view towards the claymation opening titles for the film.

But while they weren’t looking into each other’s eyes, they were in each others thoughts. Rick thought “She… called my art nice. Nobody’s ever called my art nice before. Nobody’s ever called anything I’ve done “nice” before.” He thought to himself how funny it was that a cockroach woman was the first person who liked his art, or almost anything he did for that matter. An entrepenurial, adventurous, generous, kind, resourceful, gorgeous cockroach woman who was the first person in a long time who didn’t think he completely sucked.

Suddenly the idea didn’t seem so funny. And the realization swirled about him that his thoughts about her may have been a bit more complicated than he wanted to believe.

Cshisk thought “Maybe this is a date. Maybe it isn’t. But there’s something there.” She’d never thought that her first date would be with a full-blooded human.

“Speaking of which, what was that dream of yours?” Rick asked, “A deal’s a deal you know.”

“Oh! I forgot about that. Well, it’s funny

“I think I’d like that. I think I’d like that very much.”

And so the movie went on and the two sat together, like a mad accordion note in the symphony of life.

I don't expect anyone to much care bout it, but I hope it's at least somewhat decent.