EVENTS:

Pierre: "Settle down, mademoiselle. I'm still myself - Or at least, enough of myself, for now. This place, it has a bit of an effect on people."

He turns towards the light, letting you see the left side of his body, which seems to have partially melted into a tumorous amalgamate of Rosa body parts. Nascent arms and legs flail meekly on boneless joints, and blank-faced heads mutter brainlessly as they drag on the fleshy floor.

Pierre: "It's growing slower on me - Maybe because I wasn't fully dead, maybe because of Mother. This whole situation feels strangely nostalgic, in more ways than one.

Let's get going. Based on what happened to the others, you have an hour left, maybe two."



_________________________________________________________________



The thumping gets louder. Whatever its source may be - It's definitely approaching. The air seems to get heavier around you, and all present seem to wait in a pregnant silence.


Klimt finds himself being gently brushed by Malia's threads, and his mind is enveloped by her smothering, invasive presence - Though the sensation seems to gradually morph into one of contentment and trust. If she says they can handle the situation, then it surely must be true. Malia is a good friend, and she'll take care of him.

He is worryingly aware of the sudden change.

EVENTS:

Pierre: "I don't think, there is a way out. I've looked everywhere, but this place... It loops in on itself, and keeps drawing you further down. It's too dense, for anything to leave.

Still. I think there's still something to be done. While you're still yourselves enough to remember the outside, at least."


Rosa looks down at herself. She's... A lot smaller than she's used to, being back to a relatively tall, lithe girl. Her body seems normal down to its waist, when her torso suddenly ends, floating seamlessly above a sphere of mud and tentacles. Even further down, there's... She can't be sure. It might be a tail, or it might be a pair of legs - One of those two, though the outline seems to change whenever she blinks. Or maybe something in between?

Instinctively reaching for her guns, she unholsters a pistol out of thin air. Or, was it a rifle? The same blinking phenomenon seems to happen, where her gun is whatever she feels would be most appropriate for her to be carrying. Weird.

She scratches her back, feeling the weight of the thick bundle of umbilical cords stretching out of her spine, ending in a little over a dozen miniature copies of herself, hovering next to her shoulders. They could almost be cute, if not for their obvious deformities and plethora of missing parts, like old, discarded dolls found in the trash. The closest one bites its lip and waves, looking a bit embarrassed.

Echo: "Uh. Hi there, Main Rosa. Come here often?"
Echo2: "Holy mackerel you're the worst at introductions."



Eigla gets up, dislodging her body from the sticky floor with a slurping sound. She feels... Stiff, and mildly uncomfortable. Touching her arms to her face, she is greeted by the familiar sound of a teacup being placed on its saucer, and realises her skin seems to be made of porcelain. Cracks seem to have developed at her joints, allowing her a degree of mobility, but the delicate human form is still small and constraining.

Through every hole in her brittle shell, copious amounts of moss, tendrils and invertebrate life are visible, briefly probing the outside world before crawling back within the safety of her body. Most notable of all, the front of her torso seems to have burst outwards completely, giving way to two large, pulsating masses of blood-red worms and maggots, like nightmarish burls on the bark of an ancient tree. She feels compelled to reach inside, and draws her sword and shield from within her abdomen, despite the apparent lack of free space inside.

They are part of her, after all. The vines within quickly entangle her arms, securing her weapon and bulwark against the strongest of hits.

EVENTS:

Echoes: "Yes. Uhm. In some sort of, weird dream manner. I guess we-"




"͋̎̿̽҉̢̫͇̖͞R̶͎̯̅̌̂̅ͧ̋ͣ̉́Ọ̟̣͔̓̃̑͊̋ͅO͑͒ͦ҉̸̮̟Ǒ͇̯̮ͮ͊Ỏ̡̊͏̲̯̬͉̪Óͪͭͩ̇̈̈҉̺̳S̳͕̪͈̈́̀ͨ͢͝Ã̪̮͚̣̞͕̬ͨ̑͞͝Ä̏͂͋͌͏̭̠͕̣̟͎̕A̫̮͚͒ͦ̓͌̍͂A̷͕̼̝̔͋̐̈́̎̎̂̽ͭ͘A̵̢̭͔̞̳̼̫̽ͧ̚A̯̰̞̭̬̋̋̔ͦ̃ͧ̌ͪͥ͢͜Ȧ͚̦̜̬̥͇̐̽͌̀͘!̣̞͉̃ͦ̒̀ͦ~͓̬͚͖̲̹͒ͮ̿̾͐"̢̖̙͙̻̮̈́̒ͨ̓̽



You're momentarily interrupted by the deafeningly loud, loving cry coming from Eigla's throat. She seems to have broken her face in two, the jagged porcellain edges serving as impromptu teeth and allowing her to voice effect with unimpeded potency.

EVENTS:

Eigla's challenge falls upon deaf ears, the thick flesh walls muffling the sound before it even has a chance to echo. She yells until her throat goes hoarse, but there is no response.


Pierre: "Save your breath. None of the Rosas here seem coherent enough to listen, much less understand what you're saying.

If you really want to reach her, we'll have to go deeper in."



One of the Echoes gathers the courage to speak again, after making sure Eigla's ear-piercing cacophony is over.

Echo: "I mean. This is her mind, right? And our mind too, I guess, in a way. What we see of ourselves. So really... Have we changed, or is this just what we really were, all along?"

EVENTS:

The Echo is silent for a moment.

Echo: "Maybe the swamp ball was a swamp ball, before we came along."


Eigla contracts the vines within her limbs, closing up her joints and entering MAXIMUM ARMOR mode. Together with Rosa and Pierre, she crawls out of the cave, trudging through the fleshy, rugose floor. The light from outside grows brighter with every step, and they're momentarily blinded as they cross the threshold.


When their eyes adjust to the light, they're met by a nightmarish vista, anathema to sanity and reason. A gigantic flesh cavern yawns wide, hundreds of kilometers across in every direction, lit a sickly red by floating bladders of slowly-burning gas, like ghoulish chinese lanterns upon a blasphemous harvest festival. Looking closer, it's still possible to see shrivelled limbs and organs hanging from the bottom of each one, vestiges of the Rosas they once were.

Every surface seems to be lined with body parts of disparate sizes and proportions, either hanging limply or quivering in torturous, rythmic dances. Obscene orifices disgorge rivers of blood and half-grown Rosas, falling into bottomless crevasses between foetid folds of flesh. Thousands of faces and mouths feast ravenously upon one another, as the walls repeatedly grow and discard new ones like vile, humanoid pustules.


A humungous flatscreen monitor is embedded in one of the walls, flickering as fluids drip upon its surface, momentarily shorting rows of pixels in showers of sparks. After a moment, the girls recognise it as the outdoor panel from the stadium, though greatly enlarged in scale. Initially, all that can be seen upon it is grey mist, but then a bright flash appears, and the screen goes dark. After a moment, half the picture is occupied by a truck-sized, undetonated artillery shell, until an even larger hand pulls it off with little effort and discards it to a side.



????: "So, we've finally found you. Took your sweet time getting absorbed, hm?"

A tall, blonde woman looks at you through cracked rimless glasses, standing a few dozen meters outside the cave you emerged from and weighing a tire iron in her hands. She points down towards a side of the cavern with her head.

????: "Over there. The heart of this madness. Your heart too, in a way."


Indeed, far in the direction she pointed, the terrain looks different. The flesh floor suddenly drops off into an unknowable chasm, crossed by bridges of steel cable and rotted sinew. A thousand winged Rosas perch upon the broken parapets of skyscrapers, stuck to the pulsing walls like concrete teeth on the maw of an antideluvian lamprey. A broken highway descends into the abyss, twisting in non-euclidean curves that defy comprehension.



_______________________________________________________________________________



Klimt looks around. Sally, like everyone else, seems paralyzed with anticipation. Something itches in the back of his mind, a primal fear that kept thousands of generations of his ancestors alive long enough to reproduce, in an unbroken chain stretching back to the very beggining of life itself. A mad desire to flee, to dig a burrow and hide within the great womb of the earth, and wait for the storm to pass.


It would not pass.


A huge foot emerges from the mist, crushing cars and dead mud kings beneath its sheer girth. Unlike the pillar man, there is a real sense of weight in this member, and the ground quakes like a dinghy in a tropical storm, as hundreds of gallons of muck are flung outwards in the impact, coating all in a mixture of tainted blood and foul-smelling sand. Soon enough, the foot's owner is revealed as well - A perfect copy of Rosa, taller than a large building, eyes filled with righteous purpose.


There is another distant boom, and one last shell flies through the air - However, instead of the expected explosion, only a dull thud sounds, as the dud projectile embeds itself deep within Rosa's ocular cavity, sending out a blood jet like a broken hydrant on a hot summer day. The giantess does not slow her pace, grabbing the shell with one hand and pulling it off with a disgusting sucking sound, before carelessly discarding it to a side. Two of Sally's crew are caught beneath the truck-sized bullet as it falls, being instantly crushed into oblivion.


For what seems like an eternity, the meatblob's new form walks before you, though in reality, it was just seconds. Soon, she disappears again in the mist, surely headed for the Rig.


Sally: "Shiver me timbers..."