My everything hurt, and there was a man calling out in a mad rave that I just couldn’t care about at the moment. I was too busy both relieved and in pain.

I had run a gauntlet, been slammed by a colossal crustacean, and I was being casually called “Finger” over and over again by the nutcase that was trapped in here.

How a Lunatic got in here, I had no idea, but he was nuttier than squirrel shit from his exposure, and I could see a padded room in his future.

Despite my great urge not to continue breathing after the run, I couldn’t deny that it was a way to get the blood pumping and hormones flowing.

Fighting was the kind of thing that could leave you cold, but when you took people out of the equation, it was… Well, it's not enjoyable. It was all the thrill, without any of the moral objections, or civys or people who didn’t deserve what they got.

It was enough to make a girl feel alive in all the wrong ways.

I groaned, my body one great big regenerating bruise. My soft skin was utterly fucked, sticky with sweat, and also dry from the punch, several bruises developing like film. Muscles twitchy and the next best thing to naked, the bathrobe, the soft fabric torn, crusty and generally unwearable, some of it torn off me.

I looked like a damsel, ready to reach out in the moment before my death to spur a hero to action after being mauled by a mindless monster.

Which… Yeah, I was kind of the last part. I suppose it fits.

Sadder than that, none of those things had happened as I had wanted them to happen. I could honestly say that if it had happened tonight with the attractive Mei instead of an overgrown seafood patter, I would have been happy instead of annoyed and just as breathless.

It ground my gears something fierce.

“I suppose, even all on my own, I can get myself hot and sticky,” I mumbled to myself with a groan, both at my own joke and the pain of moving the bruise that was my body.

“First. That was looow hanging fruit, try harrrder. We both know it's how you use it, and your grasp of wordplay is limp. It’s about timing and skill, and you're all quick, rough and unsatisfying,” Lilly told me in an innuendo-laced pur like she was a stereotypical seductress.

I whistled. Purposely ignoring the other voice, setting it aside for later us to deal with, and blissfully, Lilly also ignored him.

“That. That was something. That was…” I started

“The culmination of several hours of planning,” Lilly said, her pride evident.

I mean, she had obviously been waiting on me to make a joke to spring it. The fact that she had required several hours to build that line was off to me, but at the same time, she had managed to speak in a way I don’t think I had ever spoken. I was more of a bad pickup line at a bar kind of gal.

“I’m rubbing off on you in the worst ways,” I told her sardonically, “I’m starting to get worried about you. You’re far too innocent to make that many innuendos.”

“If you're so worried about me, you should avoid making crass jokes,” she told me, “I’m rather impressionable. I’m only like a week old. Won’t you think of the children?”

Ahh.

This made more sense.

It had taken her three hours to come up with a way to try and get me to stop being a crass horndog by appealing to my moral code, my own personal ethics.

Unfortunately for her, my code was more of a set of guidelines at best. Unfortunately for me, I was also getting to the end of the healing period. My skin wiggled and pulled shut where I was cut or where exposed skin had taken the heat that had radiated off the shrimplet’s punch.

The bruises numbed before they gave an itching feeling, and the muscles melted back into functioning tissue. It was far from instant, but it was damn quick. I stopped breathing for a second, holding my breath to shock myself and drag my stupid head out of the gutter, my out-of-control mind and its imagery from my mind.

Calming myself as well as I could, I asked, “What do we do now?”

“Not die and hope Pinky digs us out?” Lilly suggested.

“I mostly meant-” I started before the unwelcome voice shouted.

“Finger? Are you in conference with the hand? I would so love to converse with one.”

The man spoke like he was at a picnic, instead of in a personal sized hell, but I had one more thing to do before I sat up and reengaged with the world at large.

I lit a smoke because I couldn’t be fucked.

I sucked down a calming breath of smoke and got up.

The nook had been a kind of tube, a passageway made for things my size, not demon lobster-sized. It hurled me down the tunnel with its dying act, and as I got up, I had to step a few feet to bring myself from the tunnel and into the room. The lighting had been splashed over.

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I immediately wished I hadn’t.

“Perhaps… Perhaps putting him out of his misery?” Lilly said, her voice one of quiet horror.

The room was a sphere and within, lay a gargantuan form that spun off, fusing with the room around the walls.

A gargantuan, humanoid form, though only its torso, no neck, no legs, just arms and a featureless chest. It stood twenty feet tall. Its milky white form appears more like marble than man. More like marble until you noticed the lub-dub of the fused form. Without shoes, I felt its slow rhythm through the souls of my feet as the room beat like a misshapen monstrous heart.

It made every hair on my body stand, goosebumps prickling across my skin as I felt it like I was stepping onto something profane.

The man hung there. Not by a rope, that would at least be spooky; it would vindicate the feeling of the place.

No, the man hung there as if floating, arms outstretched, ankles pressed together, head hung loose, as if he had no strength to hold it.

He had been crucified, crucified to the horror by the wound's edges, the lines seemingly passing through his form, and yet, they never seemed to touch him as if his body and the wound bent away from each other.

The sight was wrong in a million ways, not least of which was just how pristine the entire place was. It was absolutely spotless. Worse perhaps than the place being without a speck of dust was that there were no wounds on the man. There was no blood, no nothing. It was as if he were perfectly fine as if it were a perfectly normal occurrence. He smiled, like a dog when their owner came home, a big dopey grin on his face as if my existence was the most fascinating thing in the world.

A terrible part of me wanted nothing more, wished for nothing more than for the man to suddenly scream and start bleeding like he should be, but he just… Didn’t.

The man was… An extradimensional door stop. A person is reduced to a foot in the door. Stolen away by extra-dimensional, magical, alien shrimp monsters, the Lunatic, and he was a Lunatic, I was sure at least that much, sat there like he had dropped in for tea.

His fucking hair was combed!

“Lilly, am I having a brain aneurism?” I asked her, my eyes blinking rapidly, “Because I feel like I’m having an aneurysm.”

“No. No, you are not. You're just confused, and I don’t blame you,” Lilly told me.

“What the fuck am I even looking at here? It looks like…”

It looked like an alter.

It was so horrific, so terrible in its presence, that I had missed the colour.

I could see colours other than sepia. They weren’t colour colours, but the same non-colour that the monsters bled. The room had tones of Blue, Yellow and Pink-red.

It was a multi-hued thing, and recognizing that set me off even worse than the rest of the room did. I had seen blue in the nightmare hounds, each of which could burrow through the side of reality, and I had now seen the stagnant yellow of things that sat in the dark for far too long, but I had never seen two colours together, and I had never seen a fusion of colour, nor three colours together.

The heartbeat, the colour that permeated the room, the alter… It was just… It was, to my eye, akin to them in some way. It was like spotting a familial resemblance, only that resemblance was something so alien that it manifested as a pure gut instinct and animal fear.

I took a toke, aiming to settle my nerves, but it did little to settle me.

“Finger? Where are your gestures? Where is your hand? You are alone, and yet you speak.” He asked as if he expected me to come to free him with a retinue.

I ignored the madman and murmured, “Does any of that make sense to you, Lilly?”

The man spoke quietly to himself as Lilly gave it a quick thinking on.

“We are no Lilly, We are just another finger. Like you. In that, we are very alike,” he spoke, first confused, then joyfull again, like it was a funny joke.

“I have no idea what he’s going on about. There never was a good way to tell exactly how people would break, but many did so in accordance with their exposure. Perhaps he feels like a finger, an extension of a hand? Bing held here as part of that… Thing. This guy is a servitor. Who knows what his malfunction is? Crazy is crazy, and he has it in spades... Perhaps increased instability from unrestricted breeding or-”

Lilly was starting to let her conditioning get to her again.

“I don’t think this is,” I told her simply, “I think this is one of those good old cases of crazy.”

He looked at me, his head tilting like a bird, but I ignored him.

How to get him out? How to get out of this myself. I could wait for Pinky, but she had said once you killed the thing holding the gate closed it would snap shut. I could perhaps pull buddy here off, but that was just as likely to close the gate, he looked… Important in that regard.

I could probably slip out once it closed if I could get back to the entrance regardless, but I didn’t know if I could bring buddy here with me, and if I closed it now, Pinky would be forced back to the entrance.

I was stuck here, and I would be until the tunnel cleared.

Stuck here with a crazy person and a living monument to sin.

“Any chance you know what would happen if I pulled your ass off that thing?” I asked him.

He laughed, chortling to himself, “If it were so easy, Finger, and what a strange finger you are… If you could but see the ties that bind us, you would know it's not possible. Maybe if you had a hand, but a finger alone could hardly carry the burden.”

If we went with the crazy, a hand would be something that could boss me around. He had mentioned gestures, too.

If I humanized it a little, a gesture was a mook, a finger would be an enforcer, and a hand was the boss. What that meant for the alien crustaceans, I had no idea.

“Well, I hate to tell you I am more than aware of you being held there by the wound. In theory, I could try to pry it off, but I would need to know if it closed the wound first,” I told the nutcase.

Perhaps he would know. Perhaps the madness encompassed unsolicited advice of the incomprehensible.

“But… No. No that makes no sense. You are no hand; you can’t grasp it, not without fingers to call your own,” he said in incredulity.

“My fingers work just fine,” I told him, taking a drag of my cigarette.

He looked at me, his head lolling back and forth before he started laughing.

“You had us going there for a moment. We thought you might be a hand. If only. We do miss our hand so. Does your hand treat you well, finger? We miss ours, its guidance and succour.”

His words unnerved me somewhat. Whatever the thing that brought him here’s deal was, I wouldn’t trust its succour or guidance. They sounded like things not even a ten-foot pole could protect you from.

“I’m not a- Forget it. Listen, I doubt my partner would want to leave you behind once we're done clearing this place. I can’t get out of this hole on my own, not as I am now, at least, so I need the wound to not shut. SO. If I pull you off of that… that obscenity, will it close? Are you holding it open, or is it? Can you tell?”

He chortled again.

“A small thing like us? We could not hold such a thing. But it is a thing of fine make. Our hand wove it through us, its all we have left of them.”

He seemed unwilling to part with the wound, but that was not my concern. He was crazy, he wasn’t in his right mind, and quite frankly, I didn’t care about that, I cared about getting out of here, and Pinky would want to get him out, so I would get him out and speed this whole thing along.

“Ok then,” I said, “Then lets rip it apart.”