Calypso knelt before this girl. A girl with unsightly insectoid traits that were exaggerated to sin. Two crippled wings that grew under her shoulder blades, a right arm that was more hairy fly fore leg than arm, yet was clutched by her only human hand all the same. A mess of hair, chitin, and skin…

But Calypso was ready, was willing, to treat her like a woman. A human. Something people haven’t done for her--for what seemed like a long time.

The skeletal monster girl expected the silence to continue, so she kept speaking.

“This isn’t me trying to make things up, suddenly make amends to soothe my ego… Not anything like that—to act like, to… Use the excuse of not knowing you, so excuse how awful I’ve been. You’re within your right not to speak and… Give up, so to speak. But this… This is me opening up, in response, in exchange. This isn’t me posturing anymore.”

The agonized girl stroked at where the humanity ended and the transformation began—at that space of her arm, during the confession. It took a while, before she stopped.

She slowly rolled onto her back. She… Had a greying, shaggy pixie cut. Her face soft, round. And her trademark goggles hung around her neck.

But her eyes were somehow the worse of the merge. Irises still that crimson shade, and the right one was multiplied by 10. She blinked at Calypso, staring at her.

“…Holy shit. You’re not bullshitting me…”

She proceeded to close her eyes, “Though, you managed to bullshit enough to not get us killed… Whatever. I’m both physically and mentally checked out. As you can obviously see.” She waved both her arms lightly in a tight circle, and let them fall as soon as she was done.

“I saw…” Calypso was mindful to maintain her sorrowful tone. “Sorry for the intrusion, by the way.”

The agonized girl shrugged with her entire body. “Not like I had autonomy ever in my life. What’s one more for the road, eh?”

Calypso was going to offer yet another apology but pursed her lips to stop it.

This girl is like her. She knew how the word “sorry” can quickly render itself into nothingness, despite the heartfelt intentions behind it.

“...It’s just that,” Calypso bobbed her head, side to side, weighing the gambit she wanted to perform. “I got exactly what I wanted, and some change… Now I’m sat here wondering if there’s some kind of cosmic return policy?”

There was a pregnant pause, before the girl huffed curtly in amusement. Calypso tensed, if ever so slightly.

“And here I thought you’re a humorless psychopath…”

Calypso smirked, “Nah, I’m an absolute bore. It’s just that with insanity, everything can end up amusing at an angle and if it’s funnier if the subject suddenly gets hit by a car or not—"

The girl made a very interesting sound, which caused her body to suddenly move in a burst. A mix between a huff, snort, and the word “Jeez”.

“And I wonder why you’re so good at being a Consumed and why my previous boss wanted you so bad…”

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

There was an instinct, for Calypso to slap that sentiment out of the air. But she had to inquire…

“Since we’re… Marginally on the same foot now,” Calypso looked at the girl with a ponderous gaze. “And it’s established that I’m the worst… What did you do?”

The girl opened her eyes, angled her head as much as she could to truly study Calypso.

“You’re smart. You understand what I’m getting at here… I narrowly avoided your fate myself, if it wasn’t for knowing someone that would skin my aggressors alive, so… This isn’t me judging you. I genuinely wanted to know what happened there. You should’ve gotten away with it… Or did you?”

“…Holy shit, um,” even blinking, it was unsightly due to the girl’s multiple irises in the one eye. “This is uh. This is new for me—”

Calypso’s offered her bony prongs that were barely considered a hand. A hand and a smile that wavered due to underuse. “Come on. Regale me of the details, if it’s not too painful.”

The cluster of eyes darted from that hand, to Calypso’s expression, back to the hand, the face again.

The pair didn’t really gauge the amount of time that passed—or had to pass—for the agonized girl to rise from her spot. But before either of them knew it, she sat there, and hugged her legs. Didn’t really meet Calypso’s empathetic gaze.

She pulled at her goggles and fashioned them on instead. Calypso assumed immediately that she wanted to cut her away from her already exposed humanity, not letting her in further yet.

“Of course, it started with old fashioned gaslighting—y’know, stalking them—quickly getting away… Some nights, changing that up—chucking things and moving the opposite direction away from them. Rotating nights between the different members of that crew, doing double the work once they got so paranoid that they created this dumb buddy system to look out for each other.”

The girl fidgeted in place, once again did a rapid-fire staring contest between her and Calypso. “Sorry—usually—y’know just—both never… Confided before and when I do—normally people don’t believe me or just tell me to can it—moving on…”

“Then came the undermining—snuck into their homes to steal the things they put so much stock into, only to return them fucked up in the same, specific way—ruining their meals when they least expected it—came back into their rooms to disturb their sleep schedules… So when I did appear before them, they were all convinced they were losing their collective minds.”

The girl laughed, with a very tight grin etched on her face, with her feeler raised. “Got to the point that they thought every fly was me, somehow. Now they weren’t the smartest assholes in the room—but maybe the sleep depravity eroded the little that was left… But I did it. And I was gonna finish it. The grand finale that would’ve tied every sweet thread I lied out for months…”

The girl rubbed at her forehead, before letting her hand droop to her cheek, cupped it all the while.

“Didn’t account them being so privileged and rich that… They’d simply move away. Get the hell outta dodge… Not only leaving the town—but leaving me with a costly operation that I was in too deep in.”

She gestured at each section of the body she began to describe, acting out the effects.

“Sold the fact that I was losing back rows of teeth, making way for the pincers. Skin on my hands flicking away and most of my mornings trying to pick the shells growing there. Getting used to the splitting headaches because I felt my skull deforming each and every day. And surprise—Fly Guy was a cheating bastard and left out the part he was getting powerful the more this progressed—cue me getting eaten and fighting for my life in the end, y’know, soul stuff…”

“Really?” Calypso made her sarcasm very, very clear in her tone. “He was such a nice guy…”

“…I guess that was the insidious deal of it all,” the girl hugged her knees closer to her chest, looking downward. “The more and more my skin flaked off, lost more of my teeth, started to count the ribs I started to see on my chest week to week… It was less about being rightfully weary, thinking up the backup plan or just straight up ending things… It was more about ‘me’. That I needed to survive, that I’m ‘above’ these monsters and humans… Sound familiar? But when that stopped becoming me and that was him? When was the exact point where we merge?”

With a heavy sigh, she looked toward Calypso. “Was there even a merge at all? It was practically a match in Hell. Such a perfect marriage, you nailed what my actual name is.”

Calypso’s eyes honed in on the girl. Her mouth agape as she absorbed the implication.

“You didn’t hear it, when you watched my thing but… ‘There she is! Nasty Nat! Nasty Nat! It’s Nasty Nat~!”

The girl called Natalie laughed, strained and pained. “So it was kinda funny how eerily on point you were. I wasn’t even hurt.”