In a way, this area was a bit more fun than others. When I did it have a pounding headache I actually found it quite enjoyable to dance around and feel my weight shift around like I did once on a field trip. All the twisting metal corridors were really fun to sing or shout down to play with all the acoustics, too, and while the random noises and bangs of indeterminate origin were hell to Vincent’s senses, I for one loved the little breaks in monotony. The novelty didn’t last long however, as I quickly grew bored again, wracking my brain for ideas of how to get out of here now since Amand has an actual doohickey that could help us both. It took a bit of thought, but ultimately, the solution seemed simple to me.

“I have an idea.” I declared.

The short redhead turned to me, raising an eyebrow in questioning. We had been wandering the halls for a week by now. Without the Vincent mask/persona thing, I could no longer bullshit and push all the hard math onto Amanda, which was just another point of many that made the both of us painfully aware of just how potent the mind fuckery had been in making us brush past details.

“So, how uncomfortable would you be if I tried to put a mask on a dead body?”

“Substantially.” She deadpanned.

Fuck it, “When I was Vincent I could sense the higher dimensions, and I think I was able to manipulate the hotspots too.”

She blinked, opening her mouth in protest before pausing, uncertain. The hotspots were what we had taken to calling the little cracks in space -or was it spacetime?- that allowed stuff to slip through. We had actually found two more of them in a fit of luck just this last week, but the buggers were either going away from our HSN-decided travel route, or they shrank away before we could do anything about it. In other words, we couldn't figure out how to actually jump through them.

“I… don’t want just to puppet someone’s corpse around if we don’t have to. Reanimating them. It’s, just… wrong. And we have no idea how your powers work anyways.” She said, uncertainly.

I felt a tinge of exasperation at her sleepiness. I’d played around with corpses like barbies on a playground for years at this point.

“What’s dead is dead. If someone wants a cold dry bussy they can commit necrophilia on me for all I care.”

She flinched back, staring at me with wide eyes. “Wha… what about your girlfriend? What if someone did that to her?”

I hmm’d, thinking seriously about the question. “Obviously I’d kill the creepy fuck, but that’s just cuz I care. If Faith’s dead she’s dead, she won’t give a fuck unless she becomes an anomaly too. If I’m dead, I won’t be able to care either.”

“Y-you…” she sighed, “Nevermind. I still don’t want to use a dead body. But you're also right, that it’s a valuable idea. So…” She stopped walking and looked up from her device, meeting my black eyes with her steely brown ones.

“…You want me to use it!?” I said, shocked. But confusingly, Amanda shook her head no. If not me, then who?

“I want you to put Vincent’s mask on me.” She declared, answering my unspoken question.

Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.

For a full second I was fully shocked, my brain failing to process the words I’d just heard. And then I blurted, “Hell to the fuuuuck no!” She frowned, but I continued before she could open her mouth and spew even stupider ideas. “I’ll suck the stinky dick of a no-showering twitch simp so wide he’s four dimensional before I ever let your pretty face anywhere near my little DIY brain scrambler.”

She looked just as taken aback as I was now, our roles reversed. “What’s a twitch simp?” She muttered before shaking her head.

“Anyways. I see your point. I just don’t want to put your mask on a corpse, and I really don’t want you putting it on yourself so…” she shrugged.

I sighed, “Hey, I know. You’re not wrong for wanting to preserve the dignity of the dead, as much as I don’t care for it. If I were to rob a grave and do whatever with it, people who knew that person would rightfully be pissed at me. But those people aren’t here. It might not have sunk in for you since we aren’t in too much danger, probably, and you weren’t alone for as long as me. But we’re in a survival situation.” I hesitated, before tacking on, “People like me might be shit at a lot of things, but we are good at survival. Heck, we tend to thrive in all sorts of emergencies. I once talked to a friend online, and they talked about how they were actually super depressed because they knew they would never feel as ecstatic as they did back when they were actively fighting on the frontlines, bullets flying left and right.”

She looked at me incredulous, “How would- that doesn’t make any sense!”

I looked dead into her eyes, “You’re right, it doesn't make sense for anyone but us. That’s why most people can’t relate to us.” Honestly I didn’t know for sure if he was like me, but he sounded similar enough and there weren't any good tests to actually diagnose so I could only guess. Well, most mental disorder diagnoses were hideously faulty in the first place, but it’s substantially worse for us. But I wasn’t going to explain all those details when I just needed to make a point.

When she didn’t say anything, I reached out to tentatively grab her hand to put the final nail in the coffin, “So, can you trust me, please? I don’t want to lose you to testing an unknown anomaly.”

Her shoulders slumped, and inwardly I jumped up and down with my victory dance. “Fine.”

I smiled, gently thanked her, and walked ahead, showing no sign that I was shouting “Yay, corpse time!” in my head.

I heard a rather explosive groan as Amanda started walking behind me, but I ignored that as I began my search for our new test subject. While I didn’t exactly appreciate this level’s damp tangle of pipes aesthetic in general, I had to say I was thankful for the increased “spawn rate” of the corpses. Maybe it was because the city and urban area had big empty streets to walk down, while here was basically a whole network of little areas and rooms. In any case, it only took about two weeks before we found one of the poor souls, in the meantime of which we continued our little game of compare and contrast with our parallel worlds to pass the time.

“Oh, crap, we found one.” Amanda exclaimed in the middle of her story about one of her world’s funnier history tidbits. She was clearly trying not to overreact but it couldn’t be helped; this was only her tenth corpse, if my molasses-memories were to be believed, and she’d always needed to take a break upon encountering even the bloodless ones. She’s a sensitive gal.

When I happened upon the room with our lucky contestant thought, I couldn’t help but sigh in relief that I’d gotten here first. The middle aged woman with graying blonde hair and a mild case of thigh-obesity was sprawled out dead on the kitchen floor, an example of one of the people who dropped dead for mysterious reasons. She also had a journal in her backpack, which I quickly yoinked for light reading later while Amanda was still recovering from the jumpscare and unwilling to directly look at the body. The less she knew about this person, the less she would protest using their corpse as a Subject Zero. Or was that terminology only for viruses? I only remember that term because of a class lesson on Covid and other epidemics from one of my homeroom teachers who annoyingly cared about teaching sometimes and didn’t just let us do whatever with our free period.

In any case, I swung my bag to the floor before Amanda could say anything and quickly slapped our good ol’ Vincey-boy on the woman’s face.