11 B 2 2

Vertigo. The steel cage was moving again. The floodgate opened and I bothered to look what kind of monster it was today.

I snickered, for it was a massive snail. Absolutely grotesque, coppery thing that slithered and left red trail after itself. Multiple stalks swayed to some beat I did not hear but my fingers joined in. It wasn't a shy one either, slimy critter wasted no time passing threshold into my cubicle. Great, I'll be squished underfoot. And by that I mean not great. Entirely awful. I whimpered and prayed to pass out or get a heart attack.

A stem stretched towards me instead of the whole thing steamrolling me. It hovered and continued to twitch in a manner I could not decipher. Morse code? Nervous tick? I kept staring and looking for other signs to indicate whatever was going on. Snail kept drastically redecorating my room whilst keeping that one tentacle near my face.

Fine, I'll bite. I sat up – or tried to, and failed. Sighed and gave up.

"Welcome," I muttered stoically. "Make yourself at home. Help yourself to the just slightly rotten meat – hope it wasn't ripped out of your buttock… Mm… Doesn't look like it, you seem to lack a backside." Snail slipped sideways and even further up. Gravity, what gravity? Stalk swayed in front of me.

 "Right, right. How rude of me," I took a hold of the squishy skinless tissue to shake it and successfully did not shudder - had no spare energy to. "Hello, my name is… Well, just call me handsome devil."

The appendage twined around my hand with unexpected vigour. I felt it go beneath my skin and up the arm and that time I did shudder, although it must have appeared more like a convulsion. Unlike my devil, the snail did not disengage when I tried to back out of my failed joke. Sensation was intrusive and painful, as though every nerve got brushed along the way. Fool, what did I think would happen? Getting assimilated probably beat getting slowly crushed. Probably. To be seen, very soon.

I smelled him and it forced me to calm down. Him. The specific sort of electric fleshiness. It wasn't remotely how the snail first wafted. I racked my brain for what that could mean when I started to take notice of the persistent odd thoughts that kept cropping up. Especially since they didn't seem to be attached to anything.

I cleared my head and concentrated.

Image of me, handless malnourished heap on the floor through many, many eyes. Monster snail was trying to communicate, but I could not grasp what it was trying to say.

It showed me a nose. Smell? Was I the one who smelled of brain matter? The notion solidified on its own, although there was a lot more nuance to the scent than I could ever describe. Insistent images stopped. I must have guessed right. How does one communicate with alien snails? Was I to fart and imagine something negative in reply?

"No, I am not him," I eventually settled on whispering. Wait, did it even have ears?

A close-up of my parched mouth. Did not need to see that. Seeing chapped lips increased thirst by about a thousand percent, give or take three.

"Nope, not a mouth either."

It had to have some access to my thoughts to do this, right? I concentrated on showing devil restoring my hands. Perhaps me being a mouth was the only thing that stopped me from getting eaten, but at this point, what's the worst that can happen? Well, considering monsters – a lot. But I was past caring.

I remembered field covered in white gas and horned corpse. "He's dead," I clarified just to be especially clear. I felt a surge of surprising amount of anger. How dare he? Just peacefully fucked off and left me to deal with yet another imprisonment.

Snail's body started quivering as it worked hard toward making fresh new streak of paint. Was it sad? Happy? No idea.

Concept of something massive. Continental. Underwater. Floating. Charged. Dangerous. There were many, many branches of a dead forest reaching towards the sky. Nuances of the scent started crystallising into something akin to gargantuan slumbering brain matter.

Fear and awe blossomed in my chest and heart did dangerous flutter for someone this malnourished and exhausted. Were those my feelings or alien creature released some cocktail into my system? We'll never know.

But I did figure out what it was saying. There was no way the wee little puff neutralised something that sizeable. That sprawling landmass was Parkinson's body. Real one, not the human sized ant he marched around for fun.

As soon as I worked that out, I got an image of underwater forest clawing through the landscapes of this planet, wiping mountains in its path and then opening this underground joint like a tiny can of singular bean. Snail showed something a little different, but I preferred less gory visual.

I mean, I could understand why monster like that would just fearlessly stroll into an armed encampment and be so brazen the whole damn time, but… why would it bother coming here?

Snail recycled an image of my arms getting restored.

"So?" I said sceptically. His good deed of the day was done.

Image of a nose.

I did not understand logic of monsters, and was too tired to bother to. "If you say so," I muttered and closed my eyes. If horned devil (no longer horned? spiky rolling landmass?) decided to be clingy enough to come around and seek me out…

I waited for my knee-jerk reaction of wishing to be dead and long gone by then, but instead hope sprouted in its place. I curled tighter into myself. I just wanted to be anywhere but here. This cold coffin was awful. I wanted him to keep his promises. I wanted to be able to stop clawing onto survival with all my might and let somebody else take care of it for once. There was nothing I could do here to save myself anyway.

Snail must have been doing more sensual dancing for I felt the part which connected to me twitch too. It then showed me my deaths. The restless, thrashing creature which would just stomp me to pulp without meaning to. The other slug which speared its victims and lugged them around like a shell, all still somehow living and screaming. The beautiful plant room with shapes of animals in it. The…

"Geez, enough, I get it. Fuck," I tried to pull my hand back, not wanting to see anything else. It did not let go.

It then showed itself eating me… Oh, great. I groaned, but it went on. Snail then regurgitated me upon Great Nervous System's arrival. One way or the other, it beat slowly dying of thirst and this creature deigned to ask first.

"Okay," I said and sent it unclear instructions to have me sleeping through the unpleasant part. I hoped it understood and meaning wasn't lost in translation, I very much...