Laios's Heart Game

[myhungryass]

It's dark, and you are not quite conscious. You have the sense that you are climbing; that you have been climbing for a long time. You can feel the burn in your thighs, the ache in your calves. You're a little too hot, and what you're wearing is a little too heavy. You have the sense of taking a last weary, heaving step onto a plateau.



You find yourself in a dark, blank place, dominated by a huge, dead monster, building sized, as big as a tower. Each of its enormous heads that you can see laid out before you is easily the size of a ballroom. There is blood on its lips and nostrils, blood crusted around its empty eye-sockets, but there is a feeling of hollowness about it. On second thought, you're not quite sure if it's a corpse or a moult.

There is no sign of the stairs you vaguely remember climbing. You are standing on the surface of some opaque black liquid. It feels almost completely solid under your feet, springy, but your footsteps leave ripples spreading out in rings... all around you is a velvety, impenetrable darkness. The only thing you can see is the vast, lifeless beast in front of you, illuminated as if by spotlights, though no actual light-source can be found.

Its orifices are mostly clogged with blood, but somehow, as you stare at it, one vaulted nostril on the wolf's head begins to seem like an archway... the lolling tongue hanging out of the rhinoceros's head like an entry ramp... the exposed, hollow eye-socket on the eagle's head like a portal...

Of course, if you're not quite ready to step inside a monster, you could keep walking around its body and see what you find.

Comments

[girlsniktdoor]

[Laura watches it fondly as it follows her. Like a big strange puppy. She is going to wave at it as she climbs the stairs upwards.]

[myhungryass]

It makes an awful hissing noise that somehow she knows is affectionate.

She climbs up. Up and up and up, far further than she went down. Eventually, she steps through an open archway onto what should be a balcony...

...and finds herself standing on the bony ridge of the bottom of the eagle head's eyesocket. At least it's broad enough to make a sturdy perch.

[girlsniktdoor]

[Surpised Laura face. How high up is this? Not that it matters too much, she is jumping down. Just gotta know if she breaks a bone at all when she lands.]

[myhungryass]

Is she jumping down to the surface of the dark water, or down into the eagle's skull?

[girlsniktdoor]

[Surface of the dark water. She thinks she found a shortcut.]

[myhungryass]

She jumps down about twenty feet onto the surface of the dark water. It's a bit springy. Ripples spread out where she lands, but just as when she was here before, she does not sink. She's back at the entrance to the heart, in front of the three large monster heads—wolf, rhino, eagle.

[girlsniktdoor]

[She's going left to right then. Started at wolf, now to rhino.]

[myhungryass]

The tongue is a little spongy underfoot, but it makes a surprisingly good ramp. As she steps between the monster's teeth, the smell of blood gets heavier and stronger... but also more appetizing.

Her stomach growls. Her mouth floods with saliva. It smells good in here. As she walks into the red cavern of its mouth, she'll only grow hungrier.

[girlsniktdoor]

[Frowning. She continues forward. Hunger is no stranger to her.]

[myhungryass]

Strangely, it's better lit in here than it was outside. The walls of the mouth are vivid pink and red, the clear pathway down the esophagus easy to see.

As soon as she steps up to it, there's an enormous gulp, all around her, and she's swallowed. There's nothing she can do. One moment she's pushing carefully forward, and the next she's sliding helplessly, rushing along, squeezed down by that powerful contraction of muscle, slick fluid making it impossible to find purchase.

As she's dragged along, a memory washes over her.

She lands with a thump in a dark, cavernous space, on a flagstone floor. Before her are three large archways. Between her and the archways sits a familiar figure.

It's Kabru...? He is almost cross-legged, one knee up with the foot planted on the floor. There's a slightly dangerous light in his blue eyes. Also, there's a big ol' hickey on his neck and he is not wearing a shirt.

He doesn't speak.

[girlsniktdoor]

[Pale and incredibly shaken by the vision of Falin being devoured
What...Kabru!

[She rushes to him and then stops when she sees that what she assumed was a deep bruise is not an injury]

O-oh...

[myhungryass]

He smiles up at her, eyes crinkling. "Hi, Donna."

[girlsniktdoor]

H-hey. Are you okay here? I think...we may have been eaten.

[myhungryass]

He nods. "That's right. Don't worry about me, though. I'm right where I belong."

[girlsniktdoor]

...in a monster's stomach? That does not make any sense. Get up, I will cut us a way out of here if I have to.

[Snikt]

[myhungryass]

He does get up, and grabs her wrist. "This monster is Laios. I'd rather you not try to cut through this part of him."

[girlsniktdoor]

[Unsnikt]

This is...Laios?

[Growing incredibly pale]

He...ate me?

[myhungryass]

He cautiously lets go of her. "In a way. Don't be afraid. He won't absorb you into himself. He swallowed you, because that's the only way to get into this part of him. But you'll still be able to leave in one piece."

[girlsniktdoor]

[She does her best to relax her breathing.]

I do not even know if I can be digested like that...if I got swallowed by something I might just be stuck. Being dissolved and regrowing.

Do I just have to...move through his system then?

[myhungryass]

"That's certainly one way out of here." He gestures behind him to the shadowed archway on her right (his left). "But there might be one other route."

[girlsniktdoor]

[Sitting down with him. She still thinks this is just normal Kabru btw. Trusting him implicitly.]

What is it?

[myhungryass]

He jerks his thumb back at the central archway right behind him. "What he desires most is in there. There's something wrong with it, though. Because of the way it's messed up, it'll probably send you somewhere different if you try to get close to it."

[girlsniktdoor]

[She nods and stands up. Going into the rear chamber.]

[myhungryass]

She steps through and feels a jolt, like missing a step on the stairs. She finds herself in a dark pit, an archway of light far away up above. Her appetite is overwhelmingly strong in here. It's not painful—she's not starving. But it's hard to think about anything else. It feels like she could never be satisfied.

Floating in the air in the center of the pit is a twenty-sided gem, bright and gleaming. It looks so tasty.

[girlsniktdoor]

[If that thing is any smaller than a palm fruit she's swallowing it. No hesitation.]