#semi imortal whumpee

[clickerflight]

October 2023 - Sandstorm: Part 23

Almost didn't get this out today. My organs are so so angry at me for eating candy yesterday. I'm swearing off candy for months.... or until the next time I see a twix

Masterlist

Part 22

Content: Mer whumpee, human whumpee, pain, amputation, torture, salt in the wound, escape attempt

...............................

Matsu tried not to think. All that would cross the stage of his mind was Laurance on the floor, burned by a demon circle purposefully built to hurt him, Kira’s pale look of shock and horror, Anisha in a cage, swathed in bandages and gagging. 

All because of him. Or, more exactly, because of what had been done to him. 

And if those thoughts weren’t there, the next set was. 

Half submerged in water, arms bound uselessly above his head as someone grabs him firmly by the end of the tail. Writhing desperately, trying to get away from what was surely going to come next. The deep biting pain of a cleaver into flesh, ruthlessly and meticulously carving everything off the bone and leaving his spine and a little bit of connective tissue behind. Just to be a spectacle. 

Matsu had been sick in waves, blood loss getting to him as his body tried to produce blood fast enough to keep from passing out or dying, especially with how little he had been fed and everything he and Laurance had gone through. It was a miracle that he had survived. 

Even now, he wasn’t healing as fast as he was supposed to, even while being suspended in his element. Matsu let his head lol against his arm, still dizzy from the pain which increased at intervals as nerve endings grew back in, causing him to flinch and cry. He needed out. He needed this pain to be over. He needed to be home and he needed to eat and sleep and wear soft clothes and go to his favorite coffee shop. 

He wasn’t even sure where he was anymore. It was dark outside his tank with only a soft glow of enchanted lights ringing the bottom of the tank, lighting him up like he was an item on display.

He hated this. He was a person, not a twice forsaken pet fish. He was a person, not just flesh to harvest and eat. He was a Person. 

Matsu stared into the darkness as the pain swept in on waves, increasing with every hour as his healing approached a complicated set of nerves that always took hours to regenerate properly. 

And just as he knew it would, it burned, like tiny lines of lightning shooting through him, like molten metal or fine powdered glass sent through his veins. He wanted to pass out. He wanted the pain to send him somewhere far away where it could do its work in peace, but he couldn’t. Usually during this part of the process he would have passed out. He would have been peacefully and blissfully unaware in the most terrible way, but here he was laid out and fileted at the molecular level and he just. Wasn’t. Passing. Out. 

Matsu screamed again, his vocal chords always healing, always letting him tear them apart again. If the glass wasn’t enchanted, he was sure he would have shattered it. 

It took so much longer for the pain to pass since his healing was so dramatically slowed. Hours that felt like they stretched on to days in this quiet darkness, nothing there to distract him but the images of his family in pain in front of him, sickened by his misery. 

Only pain, and screaming, and pain, and screaming, and pain, and screaming, on and on and on without his throat even giving up to give him any notion as to how much time had passed. 

And he still didn’t pass out. It was impossible, and some tiny fraction of Matsu’s brain slowly pieced together that there was something in the water. Some drug that kept him aware and conscious and screaming forever. Who would do this to him? He didn’t even know any of the guests he had seen. He didn’t even-

Matsu’s tentative train of thought was smashed to pieces as another wave of pain crashed into him, causing him to wail. His voice box wasn’t enough anymore. He needed some other outlet. He felt as though screaming were some second dimension thing that could not express his third dimension pain. 

He needed to scream, but he had no mouth. But he had a mouth, he was screaming. What was the next step? How do you open your soul and cry out for mercy to people who are so needlessly cruel and debased that they wouldn’t even be able to hear it in the first place?

When the nerve finally developed, the pain didn’t stop but it decreased drastically, graciously giving Matsu his sight and hearing back.

He dropped his head against his numb arm, still strung up above his head, and groaned. He wondered how much of the water around him was his own tears. 

He opened his eyes, staring into the darkness, seeing his own reflection in the glass. He had a good portion of his muscles back, and his tendons were doing fine. He was still hours away from being done and he was starving. If they didn’t give him proper food and rest, he was going to die if they took his tail away again. 

Matsu shivered, the phantom pain of a cold metal cleaver sinking into his flesh, soon warming up as his blood coated it, passed through his mind and he narrowed his eyes, trying to see into the darkness, just for the sake of having something to do.

He was rewarded when he saw a sliver of light flash through the darkness, fading away quickly enough, but then a figure appeared in the light of his tank, dressed in heavy robes. Matsu balled his fists in rage when he saw the mage who had turned him over to the cook who had cut him to pieces. 

“What do you want?” Matsu asked, too enraged to care that the mage probably couldn’t hear him through the water properly. 

The mage didn’t seem to understand him and smiled cruelly, pulling out a notebook and scribbling things down into it as he looked at Matsu’s regenerating tail. Matsu hated being so on display like this, but there was nothing he could do. 

The mage raised an eyebrow and looked up at Matsu curiously. He pulled something white and out of his coat and tossed it with magic, sending it up and down into the tank. It started to dissolve as it hit the water, raining little white crystals down around Matsu. Matsu couldn’t really tell what it was until the taste hit his gills, and then pain burned through his regenerating muscles, now forcibly contracting as the salt touched the exposed muscles. 

Matsu screamed as he jerked, all of his raw nerves screaming in pain as the salt got into every crack and crevice in the fibers, forcing them to jerk and shudder in response to the chemical reaction. 

The Mage simply wrote some more notes down in his notebook, and turned to leave. 

…………………………..

The four of them were all in the same place, and none of the other three were in any state to get out of here. Anisha was starving, Matsu had been… Kira didn’t want to think about it….. And the mage knew enough about demon circles to keep a weakened Laurance here easily. 

So, Kira had to be the first to act. She was the only one with the energy and the resources. She just hated it. She only had the one arm and without her toys, she was at a strong disadvantage against enemies, but she’d have to make do. 

Kira completely ignored the duchess’s projects, focusing solely on the ones she had been preparing for this day. She hefted tools into her metal box gently, the metal of the ‘strap’ she’d made for the hastily welded metal purse biting into her bad shoulder, but it wasn’t anything compared to what her husband had been through. 

Kira hissed angrily to herself, grabbing several other items before turning to the door. She was going to make them all very much regret what they’ve done to her team. 

She sealed her mask to her face and, after jimmying the lock awkwardly with a specially made tool, she got both doors open and rolled a small pipe into the hall. It popped open when it hit the other side and smoke poured out as guards called in alarm, but they soon passed out on the floor as Kira rushed to get through the smoke and down the hall. She didn’t actually have a filter in her mask so she only had a few breaths of air to get to the other side and take it off so she didn’t suffocate. 

She turned a corner and loosened the mask, still running as smoothly as she could to keep her precious resources from being jostled too much in her bag.

She slowed down, coming around a corner and passed servants, dropped her mask loudly enough to cause many of them to flinch, though they wisely decided to ignore her when they saw the purpose marked in her step. She only had the one gas bomb. She didn’t need to carry the mask anymore, and with her limited carry capacity, she needed to be smart about what she could afford to keep. 

She made her way to the banquet hall, walking upright and purposefully, which got her past servants who were definitely not paid enough, if they were paid at all, to deal with whatever she and her metal bag had planned. The guards she was more careful with, getting off to the side or in an alcove when she heard their stomping feet. 

As she reached the doors to the banquet hall, she found two men standing guard at the doors, chatting quietly to one another. This was at once a good and bad sign. If they were standing there, it meant that they were guarding something, most likely Anisha. But if they were standing there, that meant Kira had to find some way past them. 

She decided to take a moment to catch her breath and readjust the metal case, listening in on the guard’s conversation. 

“Were you at the banquet last night?” the one on the left said. 

“Yeah, what about it?”

“I can’t… well, I can’t stop thinking about it,” Left said. “I mean, did you see what they did to that mer?”

“Yeah, they’re royalty. They could have our legs on a spit too if we upset them,” Right replied, unconcerned. 

Left frowned. “Come on, Ferro. That was really really messed up. And they made his friends sit there and watch-”

“Their prisoners, Sammy. High value prisoners. Nothing we could or should do about it. Leave it alone. You’ll only get yourself killed trying to get involved with that.”

Sammy fell silent, looking a little sick at the idea. 

Kira finally decided on something, and if it failed, she brought a heavy wrench with her. 

She came around the corner, walking as though she hadn’t been listening in and like she was meant to be there. “Morning,” she said with a nod to the two of them, trying not to show any signs of worry or anxiety as they stiffened up when they saw her. 

She felt so bare without her arm, and her armor, and her toys, and the bags under her eyes. Sammy seemed to be a sympathetic guy so she decided to lean into the emotions she’d been bottling up and let the exhaustion and horror and worry leak out a bit. 

“The duchess wants me to fix the chandelier in here,” she said, letting her tone convey another meaning. ‘The duchess wants me to be back where I saw my husband eviscerated and displayed in front of me and I’m too exhausted and scared to escape.’

Sammy glanced at Ferro but he was already nodded. “Course. I’ll grab the door for you-”

“Shouldn’t there be a guard with you, slavie?” Ferro asked sharply, earning a dirty look from Sammy and Kira. 

“Does it look like I’m going to go anywhere?” Kira asked, gesturing to her missing arm. “Look, I want to get this done and go back and steal a nap in my cell. Is that too much to ask?”

“I hear ya,” Sammy said, rolling his eyes. “Come on, Ferro. It’s not like she can leave the room without anyone seeing her.”

Ferro sighed and let Sammy open the door and let her through. “I’m really sorry,” he whispered to her as she passed through and she simply nodded in reply. 

Part 24