The Beast stared down at Steven’s unconscious body lying in the mud. Before, it would have already stabbed the half-naked, half covered in mud, man. Well, stabbed again. Something had changed in the best. It’s whole existence used to be a two step process. First, find something to stab, second, stab. But now, now there was this weird middle step that got in the way. A step that said consider what it is you’re stabbing. Suddenly there were branches in thought. Should the beast Stab Steven? Almost definitely, but almost definitely isn’t always, and so the Beast’s world shattered.

What if he found something to stab, considered, and decided not to stab? What came next? Why was he stabbing in the first place? Was stabbing wrong?

The beast looked down at its pile of sharp metal. No, it would do no good to break the very core of existence, he needed to have a foundation and what better foundation that the act of stabbing? But the after, that still bothered it. The Beast needed answeres, and who better than the one that gave him the question? Only when it looked down, the answerer was being very unhelpful, laying face first in the mud.

The beast rolled Steven over out of the mud, and was surprised to see that the stab wounds, while covered in mud, were still there. It was making connections now, between the lifetime of stabbings it had given others it had run into, and their habit of laying down. He applied his logic, now modified with an extra step, to Steven.

The beast looked over his body, eyes drawn to the stab wounds. He considered those, his thoughts on unstabbing before had been from a younger, naïve perspective. You could never unstab what had been stabbed, the only logical solution came from a series of more stabbings. Small slivers of metal coalesced in the palm of the Beasts hand. His making of these instruments of stabbing had confused the Beast and Steven alike. It had taken a nearly ten stabbing instruments from thin air Beast was before it realize something odd was at play. After a pile nearly as big as it was, the Beast understood that stabbing was the natural order of things, and that it need only concentrate on how it wanted to stab, and it would be provided.

The beast took the thin weapons and threaded them through Steven’s wounds and then stabbed the two ends back at each other in a way, that seemed to close them. It did this two all three wounds, getting much better as it went along. The beast stabbed another regular wound into Steven, who coughed a bit, and then wound that one up in metal as well, just for the extra practice. It did better this time, but had ideas for how the process could use more creative stabbings. The beast looked stevens body up and down, it had plenty of space to perfect its new art.