My mind is blank.  All I can do is blink.  I’m getting ready to go out to look around, but I just can’t seem to focus.  I think Isabella raped me this morning.  Maybe.  Would someone call it rape?  I don’t know.  I’m so confused!

Maybe if I start back to when I woke up, I can make some sense of things.  Like a lot of mornings here recently,  I awoke with my better half waking before me.  Like the last few mornings, I could tell Isabella was dealing with his problem, but when I went to sleepily wrap my arms around her, I couldn’t find her right beside me.  Rubbing my  sleep filled eyes, I blurrily glanced left and right to see where she was, and to my half-woken confusion, I didn’t see her.

Finally looking down, her head was nestled below my waste and it was around that point that my lower regions did what they do after a little stimulation.  I just lay there, a bit confused, and finally Isabella slid herself on up my torso and hugged me tightly.

“Good morning,” she whispered in my ear, and I think I just kind of nodded.  When I could finally sort the sleep fully out of my brain, I tilted her chin up with my fingers so I could look in her eyes, and I was shocked to see small flickers of blue lightning sparkle in them.

“I thought.”  We’ve became much more open and discuss things much more easily after all the time we’ve spent together, after all this was our tenth day alone in here with no one else around, but I still wasn’t certain of what or how to say what I was almost thinking.  “I thought I’d told you I was saving myself for the woman I love and that can return that love?”  I had to ask something.

Isabella just giggled and hugged me.  “You did, and you still are.  You can still have your first time with the lucky girl you give your heart to.  All I did was shake Little Buds hand good morning, and then gave him a little kiss on the forehead afterwards.”  She assured me, “That doesn’t count as your ‘first time’ you know.”

“Besides,” she pouted her bottom lip out at me, “I was curious about what I’d told you about the Ka’Leni using the ‘seed of life’ as an alternative source of energy.  I wanted to learn I could about how efficient the process is, and how much energy one can recover with it.  After all, it’s bound to be better than stealing your lifeforce and hurting you every few hours, right?”

“Uhhh…  I guess,” I told her, but I wasn’t certain.  Her words made a strange sense of logic, but I’m not sure.  I’d always thought that something like that would count as a first, but then again, I’d came to accept that a ‘morning handshake’ wasn’t the same as a first.  Was a ‘morning kiss’ the same?  Does it count?  Is it OK?  I can understand why she did it.  I guess.  But why didn’t she ask me first?  If a guy did a woman like that without asking, wouldn’t that she yell rape? 

Mother, help me.  I can’t understand a woman at all.  I can’t even understand myself!

I’m sorry.  Even trying to think it through, I’m still lost.  Isabella is up and bouncing around and doing her thing like usual.  She definitely doesn’t act like it was anything out of the ordinary.  Every so often though, I can see a slight flicker of blue spark inside her eyes.  It’s a little bit eerie, to be honest.

In a daze, I pulled on one of the few dresses we have left.  The thing had been cut so short that it barely covered more than a few inches past my rump; it was one of the ones that Isabella had cut strips off the bottom from when she was wrapping the meat for the fridge.  I guess, since this was white, I probably looked like one of them roman gladiators like you see in the history books.  At least, that’s how I tried to imagine myself looking anyway.  The thought of, ‘look, it’s just a guy in a tattered mini-dress’ just wasn’t as good for my self-confidence, and I didn’t need anything else to rock my self-image right now.

“Do you want me to fry something for breakfast?”  Isabella asked me.

“Naw,” I answered.  I think all I wanted right now was to get out for a bit and think.  “How about I go out by myself right now, and take a look around.  All I really want to do right now is take a look and see where Jello-Muncher might be.”

Isabella bounced over, hugged me, and asked,  “Are you certain?”

“Yah.  Let me take a look and see what I can learn, and you can study your book while I’m gone.”  And I can enjoy a little time alone to sort out my thoughts.  “If I need you, you’re just a party call away.  Right?”

“That’s true!”  Isabella bounced while hugging me, and on a sudden impulse I grabbed her by her slender waist  and lifted her up until her bosoms were at my head, and then I kissed her soundly on one of them.  Let’s she how she likes being just kissed places with no warning!

Instead of boxing my cheeks like I imagined she would, she instead wrapped her legs around my torso, leaned back and then moved her other breast up to my face.  “Here!  This one wants a good morning kiss too,” she giggled.

What the heck Is a guy supposed to do in a situation like that?  I kissed it.  A nice long kiss, and then I licked across it for good measure.  “There!”  I guess that’d show her something, and maybe she’d think about her actions more next time.

Giggling, she unwrapped her legs from me and I sat her down finally.  I suppose lifting things all week long might’ve paid off for something.  She skipped over to the coffee table, grabbed up my makeshift club and handed it to me.  “Come back safe, and you can kiss them both hello as well,” she giggled.

“Umm… I will.”  What else could I say?

Slowly, I walked open and cracked the door to listen for a moment at it.  Since the hallway still sounded clear, I slowly cracked it and made certain that the way looked clear.  Not seeing anything, I finally opened the door completely and glanced out up and down the hallway.  Finally I glanced back to look one last time at Isabella, who giggled and blew a kiss my way.

Have I said it before?  If  not, let me say it now.  I’ll never understand a woman.  If you’ve heard me say it before, I don’t care.  I’ll say it again.  I will never ever ever understand a woman!”

Slowly I shut the door between us and then turned to start down the hallway.

----------------------------------------

Since both ways currently looked clear, I slowly headed down towards the rooftop exit first.  The very first difference I noticed from the last time I’d been out here a week ago, was that the whole place was putrid.  The stench of overripe, rotted flesh lingered as a thick miasma all around, threatening to choke and take my breath away.  My eyes were watering, and after just a few moments being out in the hall, I had to turn and go back into the teacher’s lounge.  It’s amazing what the difference in the two environments were!

Going back in, Isabella glanced back from her “Butt High, Head Low” pose and looked at me with a curious expression.  “Is everything OK?”

“As far as I can tell, but it stinks to high hell out there.”  High heaven couldn’t smell like that, so it had to be an odor which one could only associate with hell. 

I walked over to the corner, where’d we ended up putting my bags of scavenged supplies from the goblin room, and I dug out one of the few  remaining maxi-pads and tore it open.  A maxi-mask wasn’t the best thing to block the smell, but this one might actually do the job better than the last one I’d worn.  Puzzled at the odor it was giving, I read the wrapper and saw it said, “New – pumpkin spice scented” !! 

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I swear, women just get more and more mysterious.  Why would someone make, much less buy ‘pumpkin spice scented maxi-pads’?  Is it normal for girls to lean down and sniff each other there, during that time of month?

Deciding it was a question which I didn’t really want an answer to, I simply turned and walked back out the door.  If women sniffed such things, then I guess this morning must not be such a big deal to them.  Shrugging to myself, I decided that there wasn’t anything I could do about the past anyway, so I just closed the door on that moment when I closed the door to the room once again once I was out in the hall.  What had happened, had happened.  No need to worry about it now. 

At first, I thought the maxi-mask was helping, but after a few moments, I wasn’t so certain.  Pumpkin-spice human- putrefaction odors intermingled to make a pumpkin- putrefaction hybrid that didn’t make things any better at all.  Choking back the disgust in the back of my throat, I slowly started down the hall and towards the exit up to the roof.

I went slow and glanced in every room as I passed it by, but the place was still empty.  Thank goodness.  And, I was grateful of one other thing:  the dead weren’t getting up and moving.  Before The Crackening, all we ever saw or heard was about zombie hoards overtaking humanity and eating our brains.  From what I was seeing here, whoever made those movies was an idiot.  Zombies walking around three months after some plague took out humanity?  Ha!  Just two weeks after The Crackening, and I could see puddles of liquid flesh and moss islanded up around the bodies inside the rooms.  There wasn’t enough person left to even tell it was really a person, except for the bones.   Flies and maggots were everywhere, and by the time I’d made it down to the goblin’s room, my mind had started to go blank.

One thing those movies and such don’t tell you: the human mind can only hold in so much horror and insanity, before parts of it start to shut down.  I went up to the roof in a daze, and tried thinking about anything else.  It was a relief to look out over the ruins of COWtown and just stare at the crumbled, blackened shells of most of the buildings.  Sure, it was a horrible sight, but from what I’d just saw, it looked like Heaven to me.  If I could’ve jumped off the roof and died to go there, I would’ve seriously considered it, but I knew it was a dokey-dokey no travel area.

I made a point of walking the whole length of the rooftop and looked out in every direction as far as I could see – mainly to avoid going back inside for even a moment longer – but all I saw was in ruins and destroyed.   Honestly, I think I stayed on the rooftop for longer than I should have, because if wasn’t for Isabella asking me, “Are you alright?”, via the party chat, I might have stayed out there all morning.

“Yeah.  Just surveying the outside,” I lied through the chat system.  It was funny, but I could see she was now practicing the “Head Between Leg” yoga pose, which I always found funny.  I could just imagine what’d happen if someone had to use the restroom like that!

“I was hoping to see signs of any people, but all I see is just empty destruction from here.  I’m sorry.”  It’s strange to say, but seeing her in that pose through the image of the little her at the side of my vision somehow made me smile and feel a bit better.  I suppose I could forgive her for this morning.  It’s not like staying mad would make anything better after all.

“It’s OK,” she mind-replied back.  “As long as you’re OK.  You looked like something was wrong for a bit there.”

Duh!  I’d forgotten that she could see me with the little image of myself that seemed to float at the edge of her vision.  I resisted the impulse to slap myself upside the head as I slowly walked back inside.  Somehow though, I was feeling even a little more better than I had been a moment ago.  Just knowing another person was seeing the same hell that I was seeing  was some kind of strange comfort.

Finally, taking another deep breath of pumpkin-fresh outdoor air, I went back into the school.  This time I made certain not to lose my focus just to some stupid smell, and I looked around much closer at things.  To my surprise, the spines from the Rat Champion were still scattered down the steps.  These things were large enough that I started to collect them.  The other rat’s quills were large enough to use for needles or even knitting needles, but these were long and thick enough that they could be used as an effective icicle-style dagger or dart.  I wonder if I could learn to throw them at things?   Dammit!  I should’ve came out here and collected them a week ago, and then I could’ve practiced with them instead of just moving furniture.

Ah well.  Can’t undo what hasn’t been done.  All I can do is man up and keep moving forwards.

As I was collecting the quills, something caught my vision at the corner of my eye, from under the remnants of the shattered door.  Curious, I pulled the door and then flipped it over.  Underneath it was a large black quill that was about four inches round and two foot long.  It didn’t look anything like the normal rat spines, but instead looked more like the tip of the rat’s tail!

Carefully, I dug it out from all the splinters around it, and when I did a DING and popup window appeared.

Congratulations!  You have found Champion Rat’s Tail Spike.

Do you wish to bind it?  Champion Rat’s Tail Spike may be binded 1 more time.

A countdown timer started.

Dammit!  Why did this stupid system never give a person time to think!

10.

Shit!  Shit!  Shit! 

9.

What the heck

8.

does binding even

7.

do?

6.

5.

Is it good?

4.

Can I pass

3.

up this chance?

2.

Dammit!

1.

“YES! Oh, God dammit!  YES!”

DING!

Congratulations! 

You have successfully bonded the Champion Rat’s Tail Spike.

Champion Rat’s Tail Spike may be binded 0 more time.

God dammit!  Just what the hell did I just do?