As my soul crashes into that of Wash I am prepared for a titanic battle. Maybe a metaphorical one in a dream realm where we create avatars and battle it out. Perhaps a battle of pure will as we both wrestle to be the victor. Could be a more physical battle where we bodily- soulily? Claw and tear at each other with intangible weapons.

No dice.

It’s more like pouring rum into coke. We just hit each other and then suddenly we is I. How… Anticlimactic.

Do I still feel like Zeke? Well, I didn’t particularly feel like Zeke before. Old software on new hardware. All sorts of human things don’t make sense when divorced from human organs and hormones. What is the role of the soul in all this? Don’t fucking know. Maybe it only became active after leaving earth? I was pretty sure the science was rather strongly anti-soul. Well whatever.

I’m woolgathering so I’m as much Zeke as I ever was.

I can also feel the Wash in me, the addition of a relentless drive, the thirst for growth, an immense engine powering me. I just want to DO. You know when you’ve had too much caffeine and just have to MOVE? Kinda like that, but I can concentrate. What I do doesn’t much matter, I think, so long as I’m doing something. It’s kinda nice actually. In the rum and coke metaphor he’s the rum- there’s not much of him compared to how much there is of me, but what there is, is quite potent.

Other than that… I think about violence and gore and feel the same as I ever did. I still think Wash was a horrible little monster. However, I want to do the same thing. I can feel-taste-hear the patterns in the blood and they call to me- I have to know, I have to experiment. Maybe it does matter what I do after all. I won’t be the same as him though. I’ll do better, I’ll… Use anesthetic? Temporarily disable the pain centers of their brain? Suck their souls out so there is nothing left but the empty firing of nerves with no being to feel it so I can do experiments that would otherwise be inhumane?

Killing a few rodents and sucking up their lil souls doesn’t upset me, but sucking up lil souls before they die feels a bit off. Speaking of which, I should reattach that tube. There, done.

My vision is far clearer and covers a much broader area than it did. I can see the entire cave and a bit outside it. It’s more like fog of war than seeing with an eye though- it just cuts off in midair rather than being blocked by line of sight or fog or whatever. I can also see inside everything with much greater clarity. My own body is far more complex than I thought, being filled with a variety of weird little magic things floating in the goo. Spectral organs, perhaps. Also, below me, in the place where the roots emerging from my spine go, there is power.

A great river of power flowing in a tube of strange stone. It glows lightlessly. If mana is part of essence this is where the other half comes from. It feels like chaos, like change, like danger. I could go on all day. If I had arm hair it would be standing up. I do not think I should be fucking with this stuff- but there’s already a steady flow being sucked up my roots. Seems like it’s food for dungeons.

In any case, time to work. Even now I have thousands of ideas running through my head. A dungeon! A real dungeon! All mine to fill and customize as I wish! Should I start small or start with a bang? Make something new, something never before seen in this world (not that I’d know), something truly glorious? A long-cherished wish of mine. Something which haunted my daydreams since the moment I first saw them…

A trash gryphon.

First of all I need a basic body plan. I choose the jerboa- they’re not actually jerboa but close enough, hoppy rodent thingies. This is because they are plentiful. I think they hunt in packs- they keep arriving in the dungeon in groups. I reach out and try to do what Wash did- just shove a couple of tendrils in them and order them over. I connect through the skull to a dim spark of a soul and I’m able to speak to it as I did Wash- it seems to have little power to resist. I order it to stay near my core.

Next I grab… A BUG! Some sort of cricket feasting on the plentiful moss filling my cavern, lush and green without any visible source of light or water. A mystery. For later. Wash always ignored these- they feel disappointingly small? I think dungeons have a minimum size requirement. In any case I don’t do anything with the cricket directly, just hold it up close to my core where I can see it in incredible detail and run my tendrils through its little body to feel the patterns.

I have memories of every terrible little experiment Wash ever tried, including bonelessness. I could… Well, first I hold it up to my ‘mouth’ and suck, forcing the soul out of the thing. It’s quite bland. Maybe because it’s such a simple creature? Birds and rodents and small lizards all have particular flavors but this is sorta like drinking water. Then I experiment. After a few hundred quick tests I release the jerboa I had collected before because this is going to take some time and the poor thing might starve to death if I have it wait around the entire time. Also I begin to learn what parts of the pattern correspond to rodent bone. In summary: trying to set up a 1:1 correspondence between a cricket and a rodent was a waste of time.

I did learn a vast amount about cricket, uh, DNA? The patterns must be DNA. I learned about cricket DNA. That was nice. Like finishing a three hundred page book about the history of trains and then realizing that it was a nice book but you don’t give a shit about the history of trains.

I spent my life productively.

Anyways, the process of how I change things was even more interesting than the things I learned about crickets. I alter the pattern, perhaps changing the dna itself, and then, uh, inflate the pattern with essence. I pour essence into the pattern inside the creature and the creature becomes what it would have been had it been born that way. Cept for most of these changes that would be ‘dead’, but then I can just reverse the changes before it dies. I went through a few crickets anyways.

For my third trick I grab a bird. This is a bit difficult because the bird doesn’t want tiny filaments to be jammed into its brain. Can’t blame it really. I end up having to weave my thousands upon thousands of mini limbs into a sort of net. I use a scarf knitting pattern to do it. I’m weaving not knitting because I’m not using needles. This took a bit but then I was able to go out with my new tool and catch a bird. It’s much easier this time because it’s become night and the bird is asleep and also I have a net. A net that I use to catch the motionless sleeping bird.

I’m not bitter because this is a lesson learned and because in the future this technique may be useful when I need to catch a bird without waiting for it to fall asleep.

This time pressing the bird to the mouthhole and inhaling isn’t enough to suck up the soul, so I have the improvise. I grow a second soultube and then yank it off me, which hurts like hell, then pass it through a hole I drill in my shell. Next I attach it to the outside of the mouth. Reconnecting it is a fiddly business because I have to grow entirely new nerves. The bird wakes up and flies away while I’m working. Finally I make a little needlebeak on my new appendage so it can jam its way through bone into the skull and suck out the soul directly.

Henceforth this will be referred to as my trunk. It’s more of a proboscis really, but I don’t want a proboscis. Having a trunk is far more palatable.

The net I reweave is very useful and entirely justifies the time I spent learning to make it when I catch the bird again- the same bird. It’s been the same bird all three times. This time I’m able to spear the little fucker in the brain and suck out his soul- then I hold my breath. What if…

I patch up the hole between my old little subcore and my main core, then stab through my own shell and blow the bird soul into it. Bird core get! It has no idea what’s happening.

Finally I’m free to explore the many wonders of birb, except that something great and terrible is approaching. Each footfall sends shudders through the soil. A truly massive creature is approaching, something I’ve only seen once before, twice. Once before but two of them. That’s right.

The humans have returned.