Prisoner freed, I was now in a great deal of trouble, though most of the trouble was in my lack of things to do. I had freed the crazy man, my new gland humming in my head and I pulled it back to not over expose myself to the new stimulus.

It was surprisingly similar to turning off the radio, so I dialled it down until it, for lack of a better word, clicked off, and the nodule at the base of my skull shrunk until I couldn’t feel it. Besides, I had no fucking clue how to use it to help in the current situation, and now that the man was out, I didn’t need to use it.

Practice came later, but so far, I would say it was kind of cool to have a radio in my head… Hopefully, it didn’t come with ghost broadcasts.

…

Now that I think about it, maybe I should keep it off.

And besides, I had something else to do.

“Lilly, can you inform Pinky that, I’m stuck in a hole with a dude? Presumably she’ll either be fighting or-” I started, only to be caught off by a shake. “Or perhaps its over and she’s ready to extract us.”

“She is, if nothing else, very adept at sending messages even while she’s fighting. She’s replied, ‘KK, STBY. HRU BFF? WBTSOL.’” She told me.

The response was like a brick to the head. The… String of letters, made not only no sense to me, but made so little sense, it made my head skip for a second, as if I could double take a purely verbal conversation.

“What. What? What the hell did you just say to me?” I asked her.

“I have no idea,” she said, “I just recited each letter as it appeared.”

“Are those? What are those? Do they stand for something? Are they a kind of shorthand?” I asked her.

“I have no idea!” she told me emphatically, “I have no idea what the hell any of that means. Oh. And now she’s sending some kind of tiny pictures. Gah, this is so weird, they’re generally used for talking not… Whatever this is.”

I tried to puzzle it out, but it was rather impossible. The closest thing was old-time signals, which relied on shorthand messages like SOS, YAR, or Oh Fuck, which stood for a distress call, Pirates, and exactly what it seemed on the surface.

This, of course, was none of those, though it might have been like SOS.

Was Pinky in need of help? Could I help her even if she was in need?

“Who are you confusedly talking to, finger?” the man asked.

“I’m communicating with-” I started before a bang cut me off.

It was a sharp, concussive bang, like a gunshot or the shattering pop of something like a fuze. It came from the entrance, and I and the confused and irritated man turned to the tunnel in time to catch a sliding, ghostly yellow stagnant goo flowing down the tunnel and into the room with us.

And with it came a, “Hey, BFF! You alive down there and in one piece?”

“Yes? I think. What’s a BFF?” I called back.

“Nothing, Nothing. Don’t worry yourself about it.” She called down before the sounds of goo sloshing reached the room.

“More? More of you? Oh dear.” The man said.

“Oh, and the thing holding the wound open is down here,” I called back to her, “You weirdo.”

“Hey, don’t go calling me weird. That’s a vast understatement of my phenomenal power. Also, you’re weird? I prefer baffling! Stupefying, or even perhaps…” she said, stopping for dramatic effect and peaking her head around the wall. “You’re saviour… Oh gah, that thing? What is that thing? Why does it have arms?”

“I don’t know. It makes about as much sense as your weird letters and pictures.” I told her.

She stopped, walking out of the tunnel, sword apparently sheathed, feet stepping through the thinned layer of goo. Turning back to me and looking a bit embarrassed, looking down, fingers poking one another in front of her.

“It's just something I saw one time. I guess it doesn’t work so well if you don’t understand it,” she confided.

“Yeah.” I told her straight, “Use your words, for now; I don’t speak Pinky. You’ll need to show me what it means first… Now, what do we do with this thing?” I asked her, giving the profane monolith a finger gun.

“I don’t know, we kill it with fire. And we do it fast, because I think I heard extra stuff coming from below.” She said quickly.

From… Below? Below what? There was lower?

I sucked in a breath and frowned, and Pinky squared up with the monolith, presumably because I was useless in this exchange.

In the corner of my eye, I could see the man have a conniption at the idea of ‘Killing’ his prison with fire.

But he watched on as Pinky lit up multiple beams, not strobing but continuously firing pink strands at the thing.

It hit but took some ten seconds to start doing damage; each beam focused on where its heart would be. First, the figure started turning red, like it had a rash, though that quickly went from rash in incandescence to the ‘skin,’ glowing red. Then, like sheet metal, it lightened, first into yellow, then up into white, and then it started to run.

It started to melt.

And then, when it pooled on the ground, it rapidly cooled, returning to flesh.

“Pinky? Won’t it just keep living if it can just melt at will?” I asked her.

“Of course it will. The hand made it in a way we can’t possibly comprehend!” the man said, his fear dissipating, seeing the thing decide to just not die.

“Hmm? Oh nah, I just need to get the core and it’ll die. I don’t know what they do, but breaking them works good, its what I always go for.” Pinky said chipper and lightheartedly.

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That made the man next to me seem to shiver and take a step back, but he had also basically had the truth of the matter slapped in his face. Maybe it would help him in whatever came next, knowing that his ‘hand’ had been fallible.

I stood there, head swivelling slightly to listen for any approaching noises, but none came, and then Pinky got to the ‘core.’

It was familiar.

Very familiar.

I figured that out when the core was revealed, a scintillating shape in the corner of my eye getting my head to snap around to it, as did the man's head, both of us staring at it.

I could feel my mouth water a little, and my head buzz. My hand twitched, and I licked my lips.

Pinky, remained unaffected, but I started to tip toe towards it. I tip toed, and so did the other man.

“Back up, you two. You don’t want to get hit,” she called, and I reflexively turned my head to face her for a moment.

The second my eyes were off of it, the pressure abated, though it didn’t disappear. I could feel it, hear the call of the thing like a distance sirens call that made my mouth still water, though not as badly as it would have otherwise.

The man ignored the call, but Pinky wasn’t perturbed. The glow in the room… changed.

There was a snag in the heavenly chourus, and I snaped my hands down over my ears, the noise reverberating through me, and the red faded, the blue intensifying.

“Back up, it's going to shatter,” Pinky called out, a callout I followed, if reluctantly, every neuron in me wanting to turn around and rush for the heavenly stone, my ankles like lead weights.

The room began to strobe as I pushed away from the monolithic humanoid body at the center of the chamber, the blue growing brighter and brighter. Then, there was a second shatter, and the blue fell away in a flash. The room grew yellow, brightening before shattering a third time.

With each of the transitions, the room changed how it felt; while blue, everything seemed to stretch on and on, and while yellow, I felt the urge to simply lay down, to stop moving at all, and simply fade away.

The room than grew red again, growing brighter and brighter. My skin crawled, the fibers of my muscles and strands of connective tissue taking on the feeling of mending, only mending continuously.

It spread from the inside out, my skin wriggling like it was a carpet fo worms, my heart slithering, and then, as if by devine commandment, the feeling was gone, and I was none the worse for wear.

Behind me, there was a shatter, like a pane of glass breaking.

The draw of the heavenly chorus disappeared, the weight lifted, and I sucked in a breath, gagging from the stages of terrible light.

Pinky shouted something, and it took me a second to realize what she was shouting.

I turned, and spotted the man picking up a small red shard, but while I tucked it away for later, that was just me getting my bearings, because Pinkys shouts were more pressing.

The wound was free.

The wound was closing.

I stood up and quickly made my way to Pinky who was shouting at the two of us, “Lets go, lets go. Everyone out, stores closed!”

“Pinky, stop shouting and pull out your sword!” I shouted, somewhat hypocritically.

“Stop shouting and let me pull out my sword!” she shouted back, though with a smile, a response for which would grant her in the future an arm bump when said arm bump wouldn’t lower our chances of survival.

Pinky reached into her chest and, like magic, retrieved the hilt of the sword.

I turned and shouted to the man, “Get your ass over here before I leave you to die in the lobster cave!”

He obliged, slipping the shard he held in his hands into his pockets and making his way over to us, a newfound determination in his step.

“Ok, so for the three of us to get out of here… Well, it's going to be a bit of a tight fit,” Pinky said.

“No shit,” I said.

“What is tight about this? Where does it go to make it tight?” The man asked.

“Heh, that’s-” Pinky started, only for me to cut her off with a, “Its not where it goes, its how were going to stand on it. Pinky, get it floating already!”

My voice, I could tell, was a teensy bit harder than it probably needed to be, but Pinky, being Pinky, simply took it with an “Aye, Aye, Captain.” And dropped the sword, letting it float a step from the ground before stepping on.

I slipped behind her, pushing up against her to make room and definitely not holding on for dear life. The confused, maladaptive primate behind me simply balanced like his feet were magic, and he had no fear…

Which, considering he had been pined up by something beyond my comprehension, was also entirely in the realm of possibility.

“Oohkay Pink, were all, “ I tried to get out.

I shouldn’t have bothered. Pinky didn’t need me to tell her that we were on board; she very obviously knew we were on board.

She was the great and mighty Pinky, the magical girl of sparkling bubblegum or whatever.

She cut me off, letting out a short “Onward And Upward!” before accelerating us so quickly that I bit my tongue and held on reflexively.

My arms cinched around her waist so tightly that my right arm held her left hip and vice versa, her belly squishing a little as her transformed state, in all of its softness, deformed for my panic.

My teeth clacked together in my head as she flew us around and up the shaft, my eyes graced with a set of boreholes, one stone one carved from the flesh of the grate beast that had stuck us in here.

It was a tight fit and Pinky crouched down, letting out a whoop of glee, and me a cry of, “Oh Fu-,” though with how tight I held on, she bend enough for the both of us, my feet holding firm to the blade as we passed through the distance so quickly there was a whoosh of air that left my robe flapping, the belt that had held for so long going slack and leaving me pressed into Pinkys clothes.

They were surprisingly sloth. She was obviously a person of texture and class when it came to textiles because this probably cost as much as my repeating coil carbine.

It wasn’t until I looked behind us that I noticed that the man was bent backwards at the waist, holding it with the kind of core strength that he just didn’t look like he should have.

He looked very cartoonish then, bent backwards like he was.

Like an action hero.

You know, only with crazy eyes, like he could dodge a bullet, but not his own fractured mind.

Pinky ‘s driving continued, taking a turn so sharp my entire body reorganized internally as we stretched out like an animated short, a good old stretch and squish that left me near pissing myself as the wall seemed to blur in towards me like the blade of an axe, only for it to squish back, never having moved.

I felt like I was a pinball getting knocked around, zig-zagging around like a fly hooked to a motor as Pinky went full speed.

I got about 1/6th of a second to watch the carnage of the room, the remaining behemoth having a crater that marked out most of its midsection, its wiggly bits still twitching, but its body well and properly dead, or dead enough to only get one punch out towards us, which moved with such ferocity that it ripped a chuck out of its front half, the blade whizzing off into the cavern wall as its body literally tore itself in half while Pinky simply wove out of the way with such grace I could only dream and fear it.

We blasted through the rooms leading up, a small host of mid-range shrimp centipedes blurring past in the sense of yellow stagnancies as they fought for dominance or engaged in some perturbed mating ritual.

We rocketed up in a curve that made the blood in my brain evacuate to one half of my head, my drool flying off and sticking to the walls of the cavern borehole.

I could feel us racing up and up, fast as fast could be, skin pulling away from my face and my hair flapped, the wound pulling free from the monolith below.

My eyes got spots as I started to black out, and the wound tightened, pulling free from its latch, and it snapped back up towards us, reeling in like the snap of an elastic.

I could feel the space of it, the great displacement of the wound shrinking, the edges widening ever faster until it felt like it was a blade against the back of my neck, close enough to shave my hair as we shot out of the wound and back into reality.

A sonic boom echoed our arrival, Pinky flipping our feet out so our forward momentum was taken by our legs we came to such a rapid stop that I felt my soul final return to my body.

She brought us down into the remains of the curved nest, one wall blown out, the remains of shattered crates leaving their contents as shrapnel, the glass of the warehouse gone, reduced to sand.

In the distance, the doors blasted from their hinges, the force of so much displaced air literally blowing them clean from their frames.

And then… All was silent, and Pinky let us down in time for me to fall to the ground as a gibbering mess and just my robe to a measure of modesty, bare toes flexing on the strands below me.

I looked up in time for the wound to snap closed. The two edges fused, creating a scab in moments as they forced the cosmic goop out in a spray.

“And there we go. See Bandit. I told you it would be fine.”