The all-out sprint doesn’t last for long; Emi’s lungs can’t yet produce oxygen at the pace the churning of two pistons—which in this case are legs—requires. The metallic taste on her tongue quickly becomes too much to ignore. Behind her, the slapping of feet is approaching faster than she’d hoped for over the freshly watered ground. The door at her back, number 392610, welcomes her in with open arms only after she knocks it in with her rounded metal foot.
Maybe this whole companionship thing isn’t so bad after all.
“You’re welcome.” Queen Bee gloats.
Inside, a glistening naked man sleeps on the metal table, until the chrome surgeon jerks its head around in surprise—and drops the spinning saw from his hand—at the door being opened with such force. The movement costs the patient his life, rather than just a new liver and ribcage.
“Inmate: 392610. Status: Deceased. Kills 6 / Deaths 1. Balance inherited: -￥12,980. New Bal—"
What? How is that my fault? And I thought he had over a million yen last time we saw him!
The robot-surgeon looks like it is made of identical parts to Nygil, including his voice software. “His balance was -￥1,254,739. Cost of transportation to his operating room was ￥10,000; water-bill and cleaning fee ￥2,980. Then I performed life-saving surgery on him for a generous price of ￥1,254,739. And I don’t make mistakes.”
No medical malpractice discount?
“He’s not a medical doctor, remember?”
Her knee groans. “What does dead man’s hair look like? I can’t see in here.”
While Emi bends down and rolls her left pant leg into thigh-high shorts, Queen Bee takes over the robot’s voice and runs a hand through the dead man’s meticulously placed hairs. “A few stiff strands combed over to ineffectively hide the truth: this man was bald.”
“Yuck, greasy.” The spitting tongue tickles the tip of Emi’s thigh, making her shake out the whole leg.
The robot looks at Emi as if trying to read her, then at her left leg with the same goal. “I have top quality limbs available for purchase.”
How much?
Mumbling from her knee, “No matter what I do, I’m never good enough for you.”
Standing in a prison worse than hell, covered in blood and surrounded by enemies who require more, Emi smiles as she remembers. and for the first time understands why her own father made her work so hard for approval.
You need thicker skin, kid.
The cybernetics surgeon stares blankly at her, as if she never responded to his trade proposal. Emi walks, or rather clanks, to the terminal at the back of the refrigerated operating room, lifts her shirt just high enough to plug herself in. The touch of the cold tip makes her jump in shock. She lifts it to her mouth, blows hot air from deep in her chest which comes out in a puff of black smoke, then reinserts the cord.
How much for improving the leg situation?
The Nygil clone reads the transfer of data. His response is directed at the terminal. “Show inmate’s balance.”
Her negative balance, which includes damage done to the merchant shop she recently left along with a more than fair cleaning fee/water bill, appears on the screen: -￥100,917,826.
The chrome man starts to act busy, moving to the corpse on his operating table and measuring body parts. “Never mind. I just remembered my schedule is full.”
Her lungs rejuvenated to their full level (Level 0), she shoves past him with her four-hole-punched right hand, ripping the cord from her RibPort without grace as she goes.
Queen Bee’s voice is stifled, as if she is talking underwater, when she announces from the robot’s body where it’s been pushed facedown with its mouth just inside the corpse’s enormous incision. “Warning: Movement Detected.”
Emi presses an ear to the door, the cold stinging her cheaply made synthetic skin. The muffled sound of arguing between loot-hungry inmates jostling for position in the waiting line on the other side of the door accelerates her heart rate.
The surgeon stands awkwardly with liver now spotting its face, reading Emi’s health stats. Queen Bee continues to borrow the voice box. “You sure you’re not a robot?”
Can you not feel my heart beating?
“Yeah, I see it—looks to me like something just turned you on.”
Emi can’t help herself from smiling at the juvenile joke, nor can she deny the accusation. She was born and bred for violence.
With a hard kick of her left leg, this time the unprepared foot pointed straight ahead rather than curled up like a foot, the door flies open. Or rather, a peep hole is left behind when the hard-skinned companion is finally pried out of the perfect circle it just created.
The voices, of three males whisper on the other side, as if suddenly caring if Emi knows they’re there.
“I’m not looking, you look.”
“You wanted the front of the line.”
“That’s before I remembered we should be lined up alphabetically.”
“Why not numerically?”
“Because it would be tough to decide if we should be in ascending or descending order.”
“Oh, well of course, how silly of me.”
“How is that any different from deciding if we should be in alphabetical or reverse-alphabetical order?”
“Who does anything in reverse-alphabetical order? I should kill you for being so stupid.” A saw spins as if carving a misplaced exclamation point at the end of the sentence.
“I don’t hear anything. Someone should see if she’s still in there.”
“The purple waypoint is sill above the door, and there’s only one exit. Where exactly do you think she went?
“And did you not see her leg just stick through the door?”
“I don’t know, maybe she killed herself once she saw us. I know I would if I was only able to wear one shoe.”
“You’re not wearing any shoes…”
“Who are you to talk? When is the last time you looked at yourself in the reflection on your operating table? You ain’t scaring anybody with that limp neck with that silk sheet hanging from it like an apron. Can you not feel the breeze slapping you on the cheeks?”
Emi can’t help herself, she pokes an eye in the hole, giggles at the way Antoine has turned his cape to the front to not have to cover his manly bits with his hands anymore.
The inmates go silent at the sight of the blue light shining from the hole in the door.
Antoine, now at the front of the line, yells when the light pulls away. “We know you’re in there asshole.”
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Everyone in the room giggles at the irony of his insult.
He doesn’t hear them. “Pretty uncalled for the way you laughed at me when I first woke up…it’s cold in here if you didn’t notice…and what you did to me while I was in the terminal was even more rude.
Queen Bee laughs from the speaker on the wall behind him. “Then why didn’t you lead with it?”
He whips around, “We’ll see if you’re still laughing after watching the KillCam of me having my way with your limp body the way you did with mine.”
Emi shakes with rage, which makes her companions do the same. The robot behind her whistles for her attention. She turns and catches the saw, not bothering to wipe away the spare parts of Inmate 392610 still dulling the blade. As if smelling something Emi doesn’t, her left foot lifts into the air and pushes its tail through the hole in the door.
On the other end, Antoine screams. “Help! She’s inside me!”
Teeth disengaged, her left leg disconnects, as if sucked through the door. Antoine’s high-pitched screams are cut off by the thud of his body hitting the ground. When the leg worms back through the door, Emi recoils at the smell.
Do we have something to wipe her down with?
Overhead, Queen Bee turns on the cleaning protocol.
Standing in the white rain, Emi plugs the saw’s power-cord into her port, giggling at the faint shock.
“Health Status: 23%. Personality Trait Confirmed: Masochist.”
Emi sticks out her left thigh, winces when the teeth re-attach themselves just below the rolled-up pant leg. Who? Me or the kid?
Queen Bee’s chaotic response is to pull a wire from her current body and bite down on it to electrocute herself. Her voice shakes with her body. “I meant all three of us.”
Sounds like the opening to a joke. Three masochists walked into one body…
Queen Bee, her wires sizzling and steaming, walks to the terminal. “…And the three stooges who found it, were dumb enough to hit on her.” She enters a command, disengaging the locked-door protocol.
Emi slams open the door, breaking the jaw of the already unmoving inmate who won first position in the corral but is already lying face down, exposed ass up, leaking on the ground. The next in line presses himself flat against the wall, trying to escape the crazy women by moving to the back of the line.
The inmate now in front of the line smiles, as if finding something funny. “The last shall be first.”
Having felt the power of the pointed kick, Emi tries it again. This time, the outturned button in the chubby man’s belly is pushed all the way inward until it grazes his boney spine. He tries sawing off Emi’s metal leg but only succeeds at burning his bulging eyes. Eyes and jaw now clamped shut, his tongue falls to the floor, pinched off by his own teeth.
As if expecting the pink thing to crawl away, Emi picks it up off the floor and walks to Inmate 392666, the one Velcroed flat to the wall and unwilling to peel himself off. Emi clanks towards him, saw spinning in her hand. She sticks the severe tongue between her lips and gives a wide closed mouthed smile; he frowns in well-placed fear and confusion.
Queen Bee explains his error from the speaker. “Oh, shit. Now you’ve done it. If a clown tries to make you smile, you’d better smile quick.”
The man starts to force a smile. Too late. Pretending to take offense at him not smiling at her joke about her wavering sanity, Emi crosses her eyes to focus on his lips while the borrowed tongue hanging from her own drips bloodied saliva. Her body shakes, sending the tongue to the floor, when she raises the saw and tries carving a smile onto his face; her broken wrist gives out and she gives him two faces instead. When she's done with the act, her face warm and red with blood, both inmates are breathless.
Off to her left, doors begin to open. Emi drops her bloodied saw to her side, sprints uphill past the waking inmates that might as well be enemy reinforcements.
At last, a door stops her progress, signaling she has reached the top of the dungeon. The sound of a dozen inmates finding their footing clap behind her. She squeezes through the door and slams it shut on the wispy white tail of escaping cold air that has already turned to clouds of water vapor in the warm air. As if a flashbang just went off in her face, even her enhanced vision—on the current setting of her eyeballs—is blinded for several disorienting seconds by the bright light shooting through the glass walls circling the room. By the time she bumps into the big spinning blue spotlight in the center of the room, fists pound against the door behind her. She adjusts to the sunshine enough to make her way onto the narrow deck circling the edge of the lighthouse like thin lips—the decorative railing more like aesthetic braces than protecting anyone from falling loose in case of overcrowding.
The inmates inside have gone quiet, meaning they’ll soon be back with heavy objects to bash down the door.
Emi runs in an unsteady circle around the deck, warm air trying to blow her free like a fleck of ash from the tip of a cigarette.
“Lighthouse Discovered. Recording the landscape from this height will create a map of the surrounding area.”
How are we supposed to get down?
“Try flying.”
Trying to kill me?
“Only if you can’t fly.”
Record. She walks around the lighthouse for a third time. On one side of the lighthouse, the green ferns and fountain palm trees fall away where the baren cliff face runs into the ocean. Off in the distance, surrounded by sparking blue, a small green mountain juts from the water. On the backside, lush greenery extends endlessly, broken only by a single visible road, until a large volcano stops its progress where it reaches up and touches the only cloud in the sky.
“Map Updated. Region Discovered: Nazumado Coast.”
Give me a waypoint to the way down.
A red waypoint marking her main objective appears at the rocky beach far off, and far below.
Not helpful.
The waypoint disappears.
Then, she sees it. The long electrical wire on the underside of the balcony she stands on, the wire responsible for powering the blue light she bumped into earlier. She knocks on her left knee, asking Futakuchi-onna to open her skull.
Guess the only way to escape is to chew off my own leg.
The child mumbles, “Better be knocking because you have food.”
Emi pulls a few strands from Nadia’s wig where it still hangs on in her waistband. The mouth releases, nearly taking off Emi’s fingertips in its hunger. Emi holds the child’s snakelike body in her hands, scoots her leg over the edge beneath the insufficient railing. Blood trickles towards the canopy of trees like raindrops blown across the Pacific Ocean from the American Wastelands.
The door slams open in the glass room behind her. The room fills first with light, then with white clouds from the open door of the cold dungeon. “Ah! I can’t see shit!”
Realizing what is about to happen, the mouth stops chewing on hair and screeches. “Wait!” The glass shatters behind her, sending the inmates ducking for cover with their hands over their ears and adding a manmade cloud—one that pales in comparison to the thick cloud hanging around what the updated map teaches us is not a mountain but a volcano—to the otherwise blue sky. The child takes a last gulp of hair before proceeding to wrap her flexible body around Emi’s hands like handcuffs. Then, extending her neck, she clamps her rotting mouth around the wire.
Emi feels the electrical current the moment the stolen fangs in the roof of the child’s mouth pierce the wire.
“Luckily they’re designed to absorb electricity.”
But she doesn’t know that…maybe she’ll give them up.
Emi, her hands still cuffed, points at her own missing teeth. The child hesitates, fearing betrayal.
Damn. Out of time.
The other inmates are only steps from her back. Emi closes her eyes, which annoys Queen Bee, and tips forward. A lunging inmate who was planning on a 125-pound body stopping his momentum swipes at thin air, then flips over the railing and continues flipping at least two hundred more times over the course of the next two hundred feet. His freefall ends only another ten feet after the crisscrossing arms of the forest below botch the catch like the world’s least effective net.
Emi’s fall is much less free thanks to the handcuffs holding her hands above her head in welcome surrender to the rush of hot air slapping her face. To Emi, this is the equivalent of being held in a warm embrace—for which her father is to blame, like most nuances of her personality.
In her head, epic music starts to play like a theme song as she soars increasingly faster towards the ocean waves. Where is that music coming from?
The music cuts off. “Your memory. Welcome to Hachijo-Jima Island.” The music resumes.
In her overlay, Sponsored by His imperial Majesty the Emperor, followed by a list of the government officials who created the game rolls upward in an orderly line. Warm blood and warmer air encasing her body, the fangs she holds so dear grind the rail overhead, leaving a trail of sparks while the music continues to blast in her head. Behind her, white fog climbs from the shattered glass room of the lighthouse like white smoke escaping from a chimney.
The opening credits are just now rolling? We’re like two days in.
Queen Bee is silent while the music plays, prioritizing the music over correcting her on having missed over a decade in her count of time spent in the first dungeon. Meanwhile, her companion’s mouth is occupied with holding on. Despite the beauty of the prison masquerading as a free and open world around her, Emi distracts herself with the endless overload of information popping in the corner of her eye.
Dungeon Cleared: 1 / 4
Time to Completion: 90,894 hrs
Loot: -￥100,917,826, Wig of Inmate #392688
Weapon (1/5): Handsaw [Tier 1]
Outfits (3/5): None | (White) Silk Sheet | Hachijo Prison Uniform
Kills: 9 Deaths: 1
Moves (1/5): Constrictor’s Grip
Specialty Move: Kiss of Red
Companion: Futakuchi-onna [Accepted – Bonding Level 1]
Specialty Rank: Assassin [F]
Cybernetics: Ocular Implant x2 [T10] | BCI [T100] | RibPort [T3] | Respiratory Module [T1] | Voice Module [T1] | Synthetic Skin [T1] | Wiring [T3] | GPS Implant [T100]
Followers: 12
Total Views: 999
Popularity Ranking: 60,539
Skill Points: 3 / 10
Kiss of Red. If you have enjoyed what you've read, please consider leaving a positive rating or if you have the time, a written review. Emi's story has picked up minimal traction thus far, and any reviews will go a long way to upping her viewer count (which will only make the story better/more fun). The game has just begun and the world is about to open up in a major way. I hope if you stick around, you'll find Emi's story has teeth that bite just as sharply as the game she must play.
