Then, there was Maryon. Kreston’s mother had been watching me from a distance, not saying anything even as she ate and ate, singularly ravenous. She’d already eaten a quarter of her mattress, and showed no sign of stopping.

“They think they’re turning into demons,” I whispered.

Kurt’s eyes widened. “Are we…?”

I shook my head. “Please, Kurt—not you, too.”

He shook his head. “I’m sorry. It’s—”

I raised my hand. “—No, you don’t need to say it.”

Given all the evidence, concluding we were turning into demons seemed downright reasonable. Really, I was the one who didn’t want to hear it. Because, if it was true, then—

—I shuddered.

Was everyone turning into demons? Or was it just Kreston and the other ghosts—ghosts that I’d failed to protect from the horrors of Hell.

“You were right about needing help,” Kurt said.

“You have no idea,” I groaned.

“Speaking of stuff of which I have no idea…” Kurt lowered his voice, “what’s up with the magic powers?”

“That’s…” I smirked awkwardly. “That’s a kinda blithe choice of words, don’t you think?”

Kurt shrugged, his head and neck bobbing from the motion. “How else do you expect me to say it?” He frowned. “Doc, I’m trying to keep myself from going over the deep end again.” He flicked his tail onto the bed. It curled up beside him like a large pet dog.

“Again?” I asked, concerned.

Kurt sighed. The sound was like a clarinet in a requiem, low notes, somber yet plaintive. “Back when they gassed us,” he said, shaking his head, “I was in a dark place.” He glanced down at his hands-turned claws, and then gandered at his tail at his side. Then he looked me in the eyes.

“That first night I was here, after the shooting.” He looked down at his lap. “It was awful.”

“What happened?”

“Everyone wanted to talk to me. Reporters. Police officers. The victims’ next of kin. Everyone called me a hero, all because I opened a couple of gates on a construction site to give people a safe route to run through to escape the maniac with the assault rifle.”

“How was that awful?” I asked. “Your actions saved many lives, Kurt. I’d say that makes you a hero.”

He shouted: “No, it doesn’t!” He flicked a claw in anger, and his tail flopped beside him. “I’m not a hero. I’m just a guy who did the sensible thing. If I was a hero, all those people Wognivitch shot dead in cold blood wouldn’t have died. A hero would have fought through the Diet and the courts to get something done that would have prevented a madman from walking into a general store and buying a weapon of war.” He shivered. “Every time someone called me a hero, all I thought of were the people I failed to save. If all you need to do to get called a hero is hold a goddamn door open, either there are no heroes left, or the bad guys won.”

I gulped. Kurt saw the world through a crystal clear lens. He was absolutely right, and that made it all the more difficult for me to console him.

I looked him in the eyes. “You’re not wrong,” I said, “but… what you did still matters. It made a difference. Don’t ever let yourself forget that.”

He nodded. “I won’t. I don’t want to be useless—not again. So… I’m trying to stay lively, even if I feel like death warmed over.”

“I completely understand,” I nodded. “Really, I do.”

“So…” Kurt looked over the others, especially Letty and Werumed-san. “What’s up with the magic powers?”

I wiggled my fingers. “From the looks of things, it seems all transformees are going to develop them.”

“What are they, exactly?” Kurt asked.

“Psychokinesis,” I said, “the power to move objects by thought alone. I think it is in everyone’s best interest—especially yours—that you try to master it as quickly as you can, even if it’s only to learn how to keep your powers under control.” I shook my head. “There’s no telling what kind of damage—or panic—you’ll be able to cause.”

“How does it work?”

I gave him a run-down of the three-step process Andalon had taught me: conjure the power with your will, shape it with your intent, and then let it fly.

Kurt closed his eyes, and—to my astonishment—in mere seconds, the blue and gold strands of a plexus quivered into being in front of him in roughly spherical shape. The strands gathered into interwoven clusters; others plexus threads crystallized into fractal forms. The fractals fluttered within the sphere, like disembodied wings.

Kurt’s eyes blasted wide the instant he opened them. “Hell!” he yelped. “What is that!?”

I gasped. “I… we’ve been calling them plexuses,” I said. “But… you can see it?”

Kurt glared at me, eyebrows arching. “Can you see it?” The light-show dissipated as Kurt’s focus turned from the sphere to me.

“I… uh,” I twiddled my bowtie in between my fingers. “I’ve heard that some transformees can see it.” I cleared my throat. “Eating fuels the powers as much as it does the changes in your body. Best guess, the more you eat, the more you’ll be able to do, but, be careful: if you do too much, the hunger will bite back at you with a vengeance.”

Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

If I had to guess, it wouldn’t be long before everyone in Room 268 would be capable of seeing their plexuses, especially with their recent meals.

Glancing around, I looked for the nearest unoccupied pillow, and found it on the bed behind me. I pointed at it and then locked eyes with Kurt. “Try to move it.”

Kurt strained with concentration, lips puckering on his blunt muzzle. The plexus sphere reappeared without any trouble, though it took a couple minutes of grunting and grumbling before Kurt let out a gasp of success as he launched the compressed orb at the bed behind me. As the orb struck, the pillow flew across the room, as if it’d been kicked.

Kurt stared, mouth agape. “Holy shit…”

I smiled. “It seems you’re a natural.”

“This…” Kurt nodded vigorously, “this could be pretty useful.” He looked at his clawed hands once again, but there was a sparkle in his eyes, as if he saw new possibilities.

“But be careful,” I reminded him, “you’ll get hungry if you use it too much.”

“I don’t think I’ll need to worry about that anymore.” Kurt shook his head. “If I can eat a hospital bed mattress, I can eat anything.”

A scream shot out from the other side of the room, and I hopped to my feet to attend to it.

Kurt pulled the sheets over the edge of his bed as his tail spilled onto the floor behind him. His tail swished from side to side as he waddled along after me.

The shriek had come from Maryon. Her meal was starting to really kick in.

“Please, Mrs. Palmwitch, you have to stop screaming!” I raised my hands in alarm. “The mascot doesn’t like noise!” I hissed as loudly as I dared.

It was like I could feel Werumed-san’s gaze burrowing into my back.

Unfortunately, they ignored my warnings.

Maryon let out a fresh yell as she skittered across what was left of her mattress and locked her shining green eyes onto her right arm. She hadn’t seen the exposed springs sticking out from where she’d eaten her mattress down to the bed frame, and so tumbled on and over it, careening onto the floor. She’d had her eyes locked on the digested bedstuff that was worming its way through her skin. Biomass migrated—maggot-like—in rivulets that bulged beneath her hospital gown.

Her whole meal was going straight to her right arm.

Maryon’s arm swelled in length and thickness, an explosion in slow motion. Andalon’s influence intervened as the fungal tissue encroached her skin, modifying the growth. Instead of devouring Kreston’s mother, the fungus tiled her arm in minute wyrm scales, dark blue—though slightly paler than Kurt’s. Mrs. Palmwitch’s sleeve ripped open at the seams as her arm grew and grew. As the new flesh secreted into being, her right arm became as long as her left arm and leg combined, and nearly twice as thick as her thigh. Yet for all that, her hand was still perfectly human; a dainty, comical afterthought at the end of her gigantic arm, the weight of which kept her pinned to the ground. New muscles tugged and slid as she tried to move her massive limb, though all she could do was make it twitch.

Eventually, she gave up. She curled up against one of the legs of her bed and sobbed, and as I rushed over to her side to calm her, another scream split the air.

I whipped around to see Nathan’s head rising like a bottle jack. Growth pumped up his chest and neck, ratcheting them higher and higher. He moaned for aid while trying to hold his head down with his hands, but the growth pulled it out of his grasp.

“Please, everyone…” I reached out with my arms and pled. “Just breathe. Let’s try to stay calm.”

“Calm?” Nathan sputtered. “C—”

—But then he yelped, seeing his hands begin to twitch and spasm. He watched his hands, even as his neck and chest grew his eyes away from them. His thumbs and first two fingers grew to sausage size, and then some, and his palms followed suit. Meanwhile, the two smaller fingers shrank, dried, and sloughed off, crumbling away. Nathan’s swelling digits darkened like gangrene, puffing up with fungal flesh as Night-black wyrm scale weltered across his developing hide. After half a minute, his remaining thumbs and fingers were nearly a foot long, and as thick as his still-human arms, affixed to palms almost half that size. Wicked claws sprouted from his remade digits, pushing off his flimsy human fingernails like scabs. The claws stabilized at almost half his new fingers’ length. Their unexpected weight pulled him over the edge of his bed. Nathan braced his hands on the floor as he spilled off his bed, carving furrows into the varnished wood floor as he flexed his new claws.

Werumed-san darted toward us faster than I could react. I didn’t even see his legs move. It scared the belasses out of me; I skittered back in a crouch that ended with me falling onto my back, painfully pinning my tail beneath me. The mascot reared up, towering over me, his hot, wet breath washing over my PPE visor. My F-99 face mask barely took the edge out of his breath’s sweet, putrid stink.

With a scream, I scrambled back on the floor. Splotches of fungal flesh and black wyrm scales covered the Werumed-san costume. It was no longer a costume; no, it was a part of his body.

Was there even anything left of Charles Johnathan Twist?

If only Andalon was here! I could have used her transformee-mind-reading-power. Maybe I could have reasoned with him!

Oh, who am I kidding?

A shiver ran down my neck. Plexus strands coalesced around me. It took me a second to realize they were mine. I’d summoned them on instinct. Realizing that whipped my fight-or-flight response into high gear.

I scowled, ready to knock the fudging mascot flat on his back with a fistful of psychokinesis—only for Kurt to charge at him.

He was getting pretty good at that!

Kurt had swathed himself in an aerodynamic plexus shell; a swirling filament in the shape of a bullet of blue and gold. He plowed into Werumed-san and knocked him to the floor. That dragged the mascot’s body out into the middle of the room for all to see. And see, we did! It took a moment to process what we saw.

Werumed-san had grown, to put it mildly.

The mascot’s body was longer than anyone else’s. Starting from the middle of his chest, Werumed-san’s body had grown into a thick, winding serpent. Black-scaled wyrm hide intermingled with scattered strips of white felt all along his torso-tail’s length, dead-ending in a stumpy cartoon of slacks capped by buckled black shoes. We hadn’t seen it until now because the part of his body the mascot had reared up off the floor was about as long as his original height. The rest of his grotesque length had been hidden, threaded beneath a row of disarrayed beds.

The part of the mascot that Kurt had tackled folded back as the freakish serpent recoiled and flailed. His length wriggled beneath Kurt’s weight. Flexing his claws, Kurt let out a polyphonic roar as he slashed Werumed’s-san puffy pancake head, tearing through the mascot’s face like pie crust. There wasn’t any sound of fabric tearing. Instead, Kurt’s slash revealed the fungal filling that had replaced whatever might have once been beneath the costume.

With a twitch, Werumed-san rolled his body to the side, moving it like a single limb, flicking Kurt off. The mascot’s nightmare mouth opened wide and bellowed.

The sounds smeared across the air in a choir of different pitches.

“WER-U-MED SAAAAAAAAN!”

He slithered across the floor like a nematode.

“NOT MY FACE NOT MY FACE NOT MY FACE NOT MY FACE!”

The mascot kept going until he reached the wall, and then he stuffed his tangled body into the gap between the corner of the room and the nearby cabinet.

“PRETTY FACE. MASCOT FACE.” His arms flicked like spastic antennae. “HAPPY FACE. FAAAAAAAACE.” His knotted tangles twitched.

Everyone stared, too afraid to move. Eventually, a shout from across the room knocked us out of our collective daze.

“Goddammit! The screen’s still busted!”

Rolling over, I pushed myself off the ground until my head was high enough to turn toward the sudden noise.

“Perfect,” I muttered, clenching my eyes shut, “just perfect.”

Letty was up.