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Chapter 3: Steam Fish
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Skill: Menu (Level 1) [Provides a platform for viewing an assortment of information and from which the inventory, status, active effects, map, catalogue, skills, and settings pages can be accessed.]
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Logan flailed wildly. He could hardly see anything, his vision filled as it was with murky grey and beige. He choked on hot water. It invaded his mouth and throat, filling his lungs. He snorted it, feeling its sting in his nostrils and sinuses.
His knee smacked into something hard, and he yelped, which only resulted in him swallowing even more water. Reaching out with a hand, he searched desperately for whatever he’d banged his knee on, and upon finding something hard and flat, pushed off of it.
His head broke the surface and he sputtered triumphantly. He gained his footing and stood, finding that the water rose only to about waist height.
A voice laughed at him inside his head.
"You almost drowned! In, in-"
The laughing returned with newfound vigor. He had an image of a boy, doubled over, crying with laughter. He felt ashamed by the cackling.
"You survived travelling through a rip in space and almost died," the voice paused, struggling to restrain more laughter, "drowning in water that doesn’t even reach your chest."
The voice, losing control once again, continued to chortle.
“Mikey?” Logan asked.
“Mikey!”
"Yup! That’s me!"
The celestial had regained a modicum of composure. Somehow, Logan was not surprised that Mikey's first reaction was to laugh at him.
Still dripping and gasping for air, he said,
“a rip in space? And don’t laugh; I almost died, again. Wouldn’t that have just made more work for you?”
He coughed out more water and blew his nose vigorously.
"That’s exactly why I’m laughing! And yeah! A space portal, or something. I don’t really know. We’re definitely not on Earth though."
The voice resonated inside his skull, similar to the sensation of his own internal monologue, but distinctly different at the same time: foreign.
Mikey is in my head, he thought. He wondered if Mikey could hear his thoughts, too.
“Mikey,” he tried, thinking to himself.
He tried focusing on the thought, making it loud, projecting it outwards.
"Yes! That’s me! Good job, looks like we can talk like this, too. That’ll be useful for sure!" the excited celestial said, his voice ringing inside his head.
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“Could you hear what I thought before I… thought that?”
"Hmmm, no. I don’t think so anyways. I’ve never shared a body before, but it feels like I’m riding passenger and you’re driving. We can talk, but I can tell that we still have distinct identities."
Logan could sense the honesty of what Mikey was saying, like he knew, somehow, with unmistakable certainty that what he said was true. He could sense his presence there inside of him, now that he paid closer attention to it. It felt intimate, like a familial bond of trust and inherent understanding, but deeper, more profound.
“We’re not on Earth?” he asked, aiming the thought at Mikey’s presence, both inside him and next to him.
It was an odd sensation, but it was quickly becoming familiar.
How long has Mikey been inside me? I think I was unconscious for a while, but I can’t tell for how long.
The thought made him cringe uncomfortably.
Mikey felt Logan’s soul shudder and squirm fleetingly.
"What is it?" he asked.
“Oh nothing” Logan responded, too quickly.
He suddenly had an image of Mikey in his original adolescent form, narrowing his eyes and examining him quizzically.
“You mentioned we’re not on Earth?”
The image of Mikey's face passed, and Logan looked around for the first time.
He was standing in a steaming pool of water ensconced in a stone basin. He stood towards the edge and could see the stone shore not too far away. Looking towards the middle of the pool, he saw that it expanded outwards into the mist.
He couldn’t make out any of the other edges from where he stood; the water continued on until it disappeared in grey steam that rose from its surface and lingered in the air, clouding his vision. It was a natural hot spring, he realized.
Certainly, there were none of these near his home, but that didn’t exclude them from being on Earth.
"Not Earth! GET DOWN!"
Logan immediately dropped to his knees, nearly submerging himself once again.
He’d reacted before even processing what Mikey had said, as if his body was reacting to Mikey's intentions themselves.
Half a second later, a massive fish, its scales the same ash grey as the rock forming the hot spring, flew through the air above him where his head had been a moment before, its impossibly wide jaws agape, rows of thin razor teeth, each easily six inches long, packed tightly together in the creature’s mouth.
They glistened cruelly in the sun’s light as the fish landed back in the water to his right with a splash like a person doing a belly flop. It was easily eight feet long, and thick.
The fish looked like a kindergartner’s drawing of an oversized bluefin tuna that had combined with Edward Scissorhands, come to life, and developed an appetite for human flesh.
“What the hell is that thing!” he yelled, this time out loud, as he got to his feet and sprinted through the water to the pool’s edge.
The water that’d once already almost been his demise now threatened to do him in for good as it weighed heavily at his pants, slowing his escape to what felt like a crawl.
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Steam Fish, Level 3
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The text floated steadily a foot or two in front of his face, its edges shining with a faint, tranquil blueish glow that seemed mockingly juxtaposed to the panicked urgency of his present predicament.
Its sudden appearance startled him, causing him to lose his balance and fall face first into the shallow water, where he barely managed to catch himself with an arm before his head hit the rock below.
Putting aside the strange window, he picked himself back up and redoubled his efforts, visualizing the creature—the steam fish—that must be just seconds behind him.
The text was still there, floating peacefully unperturbed, maintaining the same distance no matter how he moved.
He didn’t have time to worry about it yet; it was just one more item on a rapidly growing laundry list of impossibilities he now faced.
He could sense the fish only a few feet behind him, and with a mad dash, he leapt for the shore.
He landed on his stomach, the rough stones cutting up his exposed arms, and scrambled to the side. Without knowing why, he’d been convinced that the steam fish would leap after him.
It did, and went sailing out of the pool a few feet above the stone where he’d landed moments before, dodging.
"Twice! You’re more slippery than the fish, Logan!"
“Not the time, Mikey!” he shouted in his head, rolling to his feet, and backing away from the fish as it flopped wildly on the ground.
The eyes on the right side of its head—Logan noticed with horror that there were three, evenly spaced in a slanting line—glared at him.
He could feel its rage, its hunger, its insatiable desire to kill him. He took an unsteady step backwards, but he couldn’t look away from the monstrosity.
This creature wanted to kill him, and if he had stayed in the water, it would have. There would’ve been nothing he could do about it, either. He suddenly felt overwhelmed by dread, and an unshakable feeling of helplessness.
He turned his attention to the name that now floated out of the way in the top right of his vision.
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Steam Fish, Level 3
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An arrow struck the fish in the topmost eye, followed closely behind by a second, which imbedded itself just below the middle eye in a soft patch of skin unprotected by scales.
The creature flailed erratically but could do nothing more to defend itself.
A third arrow planted itself in the last visible eye, and the flailing of the huge fish came to a slow, but final end.
Its large tailfin and head lay heavily on the stone, limp. Thick blue blood oozed from its eyes and pooled around the front of the corpse, bubbling and steaming, spitting like hot oil.
The text disappeared from his vision as if it’d never been.
Still stunned by the near-death experience, Logan continued looking at the dead fish in a daze; only when roused by Mikey’s excited pleas did he turn to look at the source of the arrows.
A man of middle years and a boy whom he guessed to be his son stood some twenty yards away with lowered bows in their hands, looking at him.