We were in a nest.

What a great word. Nest. Weren’t they the best?

The best at making my skin itch, perhaps, keeping things in, less so.

The point of a nest, after all, was to keep things out, but only until it was time to let the contents spill out into the wide world. This wasn’t a wasp nest or a spider nest; however, it was a nightmare monster nest, one that had taken captives and that I was sorely ready to combat.

I was in a robe. A bathrobe. With a pocket box and a single-hand gun.

I was ready for a calm walk through a parlour, or perhaps in a bedroom, not a waltz through a nest next to a gaping wound in the side of reality where monsters that had shrugged off armour-piercing sabots like they were love taps after getting hit by a grenade that would have turned a person into chunky salsa and had broken my eardrums from behind a door.

“I have a feeling you're trying to get at something with that comment,” Pinky told me, “But unfortunately, I can’t fly through this thing window to protect its chastity… Though… We will have to go in if we want to close it.”

“Go in? As in, go in there? Into the nightmare hole? Why?” I asked.

“Because I’m not going to leave that!” she said, pointing toward the hold, “Open to disgorge whatever is on the other side.”

I looked at her.

“Pinky, you pulled me away in this getup,” I told her, “I look like I’m about to grab cheese from the fridge, not fight.”

She looked at me and waved, saying simply, “I know you well enough to know you brought your guns with you, and armour does little against monsters anyway, or at least metal won’t.”

“I don’t have all of them, though,” I complained.

“What? Why not?” She asked, the idea of me not having guns on my person at all times confusing to her.

“I couldn’t fit everything in these stupid tiny pockets,” I complained again.

“Tiny pockets?” She asked, “That’s your weakness? Normal-sized pockets?”

“Have you seen the pockets on my coat? I could fit a fucking kitchen sink in there,” I told her, “Or two guns, my ammunition, healing, et cetera,” I told her, reaching into my pocket and retrieving a cigarette from my fancy case before pulling out a second round of shot and Pinky’s bo-bo-begone and storing it in my pocket. My very poor pocket is swelling with stuff.

I also retrieved Righty, my brilliant little friend, my lover, one of two I slept with and gently cocked the hammer back.

I cleared a few of the chambers, which was a right bitch and loaded two plasma shots I had pulled out, unexpected but appreciated, and loaded the hard shot with a spicier load, pinching off extra putty and pressing it in. It would be harder to control but not that bad, and the energy would be appreciated.

I discarded two empty shots on the ground, the sacrifice for greater power. I had enough for some extra shots.

“You do have big pockets,” Pinky admitted, “maybe you should get a hand bag.”

“A handbag?” I asked her, cigarette balanced on my lip, “That’s highly impractical. I would need to carry it and junk.”

Pinky sighed something about my lack of femininity that chafed a little, but I could tell it was mostly superficial. It was more like Pinky was moping that I didn’t fit the feel she liked. I wasn’t girly enough to fit into her magical girl fun time.

Speaking of magical girl fun time, Pinky skipped forward, carefree, as I got my shit in order, moving toward the bound targets.

There were many of the people wrapped in the vine-like spindly threads of the spider egg structure.

“Are they alive?” I hissed over to her, unsure if it was bad for them to live or for them to be blissfully dead, the face of the man half turned to beast. I shuddered.

She walked over, peered over them and chirped, “Yep. They’re all good. Stable, even. They’re sleeping. We should get to closing the monster hole first, in case removing them wakes them up. I would hate to see them go coo-coo and get thrown in the loony bin because we did things the wrong way around.”

Trying to keep the fear from my voice, I let out a little chuckle, one I did not feel. “Ha. Monster hole.”

“Not so funny when you go inside of it,” she said.

I stopped.

“Inside? Why would we go inside?” I asked her, walking up to the gaping wound.

I felt at it in that weird way the alien trait inside me required, feeling at the mental mouth with my tongue, seeking the tooth that the thing should have been but wasn’t.

Could I close it by hand? Pull at the folds, tug them shut like curtains? I reached out as if to touch it, and my hand simply passed through the plane, refracted up like by a pool of water.

The wound itself was… Halfway. Not here, but not over there either. Pressed like a flower between the pages of a book.

It was a weird thing for sure, kind of like an illusion or a mirage.

“Because we have to thin whatever on the other side, thin them and find whatever is holding this thing open.” She said with a sigh. “Last time I did this, it was a chore but not so bad.”

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Not so bad, and the nightmare monster nest did not go hand in hand.

I looked at the woman, and she looked back.

“You sure there’s nothing wrong with your head?” I asked her, “Because you look the weirder half of serine right now, and that’s just weird.”

“That… Hey!” She complained.

She came over and poked me, but I just asked, “Must we?”

She nodded with an agreeing “M-hum m-hum” instead of ‘uh huh.’

“Cool,” I told her, slipping an arm around her before, with as much grit and gumption as I could, pulling the two of us through.

I don’t know what I was expecting. A repeat crawling through the hole, or perhaps some other fresh hell, but the only thing off was a flash of multi-coloured light in the corner of my vision. It was as if I had just sped through a tunnel filled with coloured lamps, but all at once. The distance covered with one-half step.

Our feet taped down on the viney, uneven surface of the place that was not a place. Stagnant salty air filled our lungs, and musty smells of dry rot tickled our noses. Other briny notes of wet rot seemed to hint at moisture that the dry air could not have aided in.

It was an environment I had never been in. Some kind of arid swamp, if that was even possible.

Best not to think about it too much, lest I get a headache.

Pinky sneezed, a tiny little “Acchoo.” And it echoed lightly down the borehole, loud in that way things were loud when the world was quiet. Or like when you dropped something in a proper shower, and it clattered as loud as a gunshot.

“Sol, this place echoes; what are the chances they can hear then?” I asked, Pinky only shrugging before pulling away.

“Nothing for it; we just have to kill stuff until we find the thing that opened the thingy. Don’t worry; we’ll feel it when it happens.”

I nodded as I oriented myself and felt something.

In that empty mouth I had felt, there was now a tooth.

The wound was open over here… It was just… Stretched.

The wound had been pulled into here, the edges of the fold that led beyond, the invisible lips of the passage had been stretched like an elastic.

They dragged around us, four lines like tensed cables hooked it, drawing it open. And they led away, stretching down the passage away from us. Toward the unknown. Toward the target?

“Pinky, I think I know where to go if you're willing to trust me on it.” I told her.

Pinky gave me a look then, a kind of disbelief, and I caught a look somewhere between intrigue and distrust. I had told her I had nothing.

“I have a weird kind of extra sense. There are edges that lead away from it, like fishing lines. It’s almost worthless for anything but making me paranoid, but I think if this thing is being held open, then it will lead us right there.” I told her.

“But you never mentioned it,” she said.

“Because it’s weird. It’s not a-” I caught on the word I was going to use, but I sucked it up and suppressed the feeling of cringing I felt before saying, “Magical thing. It’s a talent.”

She looked at me and didn’t think I was lying, but she knew there was something more. I should have told her before, I had just forgotten to. I had forgotten, and it was going to bite me in the ass after this.

Pinky, the ever-gleeful, pointed at me and said, “You kept a secret, a super special secret power? No fair. I’m the head of the super special secret powers club.”

I spluttered, but as I did, she gave me a single look. It spoke of disappointment; it was, for a moment, just a single moment, a terrible look on her. My form hissed at me, the back of my mind telling me every distinct mark on her face, every muscle and curve.

It stung me, and then it was gone.

“Let’s go,” she said, her tone less chipper.

“I… Yeah. I’ll show the way.” I told her, her joke not lessening the blow of her face, burned into my memory.

I had done one of the things I didn’t do. I had hurt a good person. Even if only slightly, I had, and it was more than just another failure because most of my failures were by accident but it was often in pursuit of something good. Like when I had killed the woman with the black box on her neck while aiming to kill her captors.

I had done an ill without righting a wrong.

I took it and placed it with the others, took the weight that held my heart, and placed it in a cubby.

I had no time to myself right now. I had a reckoning coming, but it was time to do something that would be bigger than myself. There is no time for selfishness or just enough to push my feelings under the bed, push them into my callous nest of a heart, and forget about them till later.

The world spun on without me, even if it felt like I had been filled with a thousand pounds of lead.

I moved my leg, the soft slipper blissfully quiet on the tangle as it fell. I made to hold Pinky's hand and stopped. It would be best not to, not now.

So I made my way in, Pinky following me into the musty borehole.

It wasn’t hard to find our way. Side passages split off, and we avoided them, their dry air and must and spindly forms leading off into a sepia-tinted unknown. Everything lit with even light made it easier, but it was still a tripping hazard, not a place that could be run from.

Periodically, we found our way into what looked like a room. Each had a pool that reeked of brine and leaked a faux light. Each pool had what looked like rocks next to them, but rock’s didn’t move. They shifted, unaware of our presence or uncaring; they basked in the brine, scaly dry skin shed as they lay there.

They had a look that made my everything itch, somewhere between shrimp, centipede and spider. Killer shrimp with limbs like tentacles, fangs and too many things near their faces. They were horrors, larger than the dogs by half, but sedate and so we moved past them.

We moved on from the rooms, stepping carefully around the edges of the first room and then the second, which was larger and had two pools. Upon slinking into the third room, it became apparent that there was no war forward.

It had four pools, and while it was larger, it wasn’t large enough. Not for the size of the things that rested in the pools. Beings that could rival buildings resting in the pools center. Smaller shifting shapes around the edges told of more than a hundred.

We could not speak any further, and we were not prepared to fight this.

Pinky did not get the memo, muttering, “Whoa. Those guys are big…” Before taking out some of the strange vials, she had used at the machine gun nest.

“Pinky? Pinky, what are you doing? There's no way those can kill,” I said too late.

Pinky, hearing me but not listening, pulled out something new, a vial that seemed to shimmer with a light similar to the pool, the movements letting the shimmering liquid effervesce lightly.

And then, as I protested, she flexed the tube until it made a cracking noise and hurled it toward one of the big shrimp.

“I have become a chef and a fryer of rice, and it looks like shrimp is back on the menu!”

The forms turned at her proclamation as the tube she hurled cleared dozens of feet further than Pinky should have been able to with her noodle arms that couldn’t even open a pickle jar.

It hurtled toward the furthest giant crustacean, and lightly, a sound like the shattering of glass echoed back toward us as the vial hit.

The smell of ozone followed as what looked like a black portal to nowhere tore the area to pieces, and all hell broke loose.

The world twirled, the shapes of the room, the water, and the foes stretching, elongating. Pinky laughed as the world at the far end came undone. The world shimmered, the entire cavern caught in what looked like a heat haze. It spun slowly, growing and growing as the world seemed to still for a short time, sucking at the cavern like a hungry maw. Some things fell in, and the distortion grew. It grew and grew until it had seemingly pulled a third of the room in and stopped, stilling for a moment and forever before there was a snap or pop of cessation that sounded like a chime, and the world returned to normal.

‘normal.’

It was like the whole area had been turned into noodles and hurled into a microwave, reeking of ozone, ionizing radiation, and, strangely, seafood takeout.

I had not come ready to fight, but Pinky had, and she seemed like she wanted one.