I'm on a roll!
Chapter 2: A Study In Crimson
Cyrus was out exploring, following Garret's advice about finding new biomes and resources in order to increase his chances of survival, especially given the close shaves against the Eye (or Cthylla?) previously. After realizing the true extent of the girl's state, Abigail had established something of an embargo in the main house, with nothing coming in or out except what few medical supplies she sent Garret to fetch. Maybe it was better to be out here than running errands, Cyrus thought.
Then the wind turned, and suddenly Cyrus was nearly sent to his knees by an overwhelming smell of decay and rot, sickly sweet and cloying. He crested the hill he was climbing, and decided errands would be much better than this.
A vast landscape of red stretched out before him, rolling hills covered in pinkish, flesh-like grass, blood red rivers and streams trickling down them like veins. The frequent hills and crests dividing the land were a deep, dark crimson, but when Cyrus saw them nothing could come to his mind but the bones of a creature too massive to truly comprehend, a creature so big that its ribs formed the crests of mountains and its skull a cave vast enough to build a house in. Even as far away as he was now, Cyrus could see the parasites that lived and thrived in this land, the man-sized spiders and strange flying leech-like creatures.
Cyrus decided to find a cave to hide in.
After securely sealing a cave entrance behind him, Cyrus prepared to descend into the depths. He had a sinking feeling of being swallowed, of being subsumed by something so much larger than him that it denied understanding. The small antechamber he found himself in reminded him of a mouth, opening up into a dark gullet. Slowly, he rappelled down.
Soon, he found himself hanging from the ceiling of a tremendous chamber, the rope gentle swaying in the still, stagnant air. This massive room wasn't even the bottom, he realized. Five other caves branched off from this room, and after Cyrus reached the floor of the chamber he choose one at random and began to climb in, fingering the magic mirror he kept in his pocket, in case things went horribly wrong in this land of blood and gore.
Eventually, he reached a dead end, but he couldn't help but get a feeling he was incredibly close to something important… He pulled out his pickaxe and gave it an experimental swing into the mottled red rock of the cave, only for it to bounce off with a disappointing clink.
"Blast it! How am I supposed to get through this? Wait… blast? Oh thank you, thank you Gimli!" Cyrus had, at best, tolerated Gimli's explosive experiments, but now he felt an incredible sense of gratitude. He clambered up to the mouth of cave, lit the fuse of one of the bombs he bought, threw it down the cave, and ducked to the side. The explosion echoed for a few moments, but when Cyrus looked down into the cave he saw a red heart hovering in the air, throbbing to it's own bizarre tempo and glowing with a faint reddish light. Unhooking his hammer from his belt, Cyrus pulled back and swung, crushing the throbbing heart under his hammer.
A burst of foul smelling reddish smoke filled the cave, and when it cleared Cyrus found a pistol sitting on the ground, as well as ammunition. Cyrus figured this would prove to be a very profitable venture. He didn't even notice the faint rumbling of the earth underneath his feet.
Cyrus was on his third heart now, and was growing excited. After the pistol, the next heart gave him a long black spear mottled with red, and he carried it over his shoulder as his third bomb exploded. However, when he crushed the heart with his hammer this time, he was sent to his knees by earth's rumbling, and the strange groaning sounds that echoed in the caves as the flesh shifted and swayed under the stress. Peaking from the mouth of the smaller cave and looking into the broader cave, he realized that he made a major mistake.
Hanging in the air was a vast Brain, orbited by a ring of yellow-irised, unblinking eyes. When he squinted, he could see that the brain was translucent, and Cyrus could see the patterns of the wall behind the Brain faintly.
The eyes rushed towards him, and Cyrus began to jab wildly with his brand new spear, Managing to sink the head of the spear into a pair of the eyes and then flinging them to side. The problem was the swarm of them, coming from every angle just slightly slower than he could fend them off with the spear. All the while the faint apparition of the Brain floated, complacent and uncaring as Cyrus delivered plentiful ocular trauma to its minions.
Soon enough he had fended off the horde, his spear dripping with a foul liquid that Cyrus decided he really did not want to know the true identity of. Then the Brain slammed into him with all the force and speed of a boulder, and the Brain glared at him from a truly horrific eye that stared down at him from a throbbing heart in the center of the Brain.
Swiftly recovering and clambering up the rocks, he shifted into a defensive stance and used the great length of the spear to force the Brain back every time it got too close for comfort, but this was complicated greatly when visions of the brain began to appear in the air around the real thing, confusing the already addled and exhausted Cyrus. With one tremendous thrust he pushed the Brain back, pulled his new pistol from his belt, and fired it directly into the terrible, beating heart.
Just like the eye, the great body of the brain evaporated into a foul pink mist, and when it cleared Cyrus realized that his problems were going to get a lot worse when he saw the body of another girl lying on the crimson crags.
The first thing he noticed was her hair, which was a vibrant shade of pink, but less of a fleshy pink and more of a… cotton candy color? (Cyrus had a sinking feeling that he should know, that he once knew, what cotton candy was, but didn't know anymore. Maybe Garret would know? He was a crafty sort) It was in a complex braid, and tumbled down to the bottom of her back, but it almost looked short compared to the long lab coat the young woman wore, which hid a pale pink sweater and dark pants. A strange, heart shaped necklace with a brain-like pattern hung around her neck, and a pair of glasses covered her eyes, which were closed in a deep sleep.
Carefully lifting her from the rough rocks, Cyrus pulled out his magic mirror and prepared for his life to get a lot more complicated as the mirror warped space to bring him, and his new guest, back home.
Garret and Abigail heard the sound of the magic mirror warping Cyrus home and rushed outside, having long since learned that sound could mean trouble if Cyrus ran into something dangerous while exploring.
Garret started groaning once he saw the new lady in Cyrus' arms while Abigail just sighed and gestured for him to carry the girl in.
"Well guess what, sweetheart? There's someone else like you out there Cthylla." Abigail said, and Cthylla's face broke into a massive smile.
"Really? Another, so soon? Maybe you should calm down a little, Cyrus. You'll gather a whole harem by the end of the week!" She giggled.
Cyrus flushed "Well…. How are you, I guess? I'm sorry that I didn't get to stick around to make sure you're alright."
"Maybe I can forgive you if you can show me around your town? Not like there's much else to do."
"I am truly grateful, though." Cthylla gave Cyrus a bright smile, showing unusually sharp teeth as she wrapped herself around his arm.
"For what… shooting you?"
She sighed and gave him a light slap on the arm "For snapping me out of that monstrous form, of course. Life is a lot better on this scale, I think. In fact, that shield I had when you first defeated old me? You can have it. You'll make better use of it than I could. Abigail says I'm too frail to really fight, probably because I've been in human form for all of a day."
"How's the new body treating you?"
"Very well! The food's good and everyone's so nice… actually, I think Nissa wanted to talk to you. Come on!" she said, dragging him towards the particular neck of the woods where the dryad spent her day.
Cthylla was glaring at him, and Cyrus was trying very hard not to stare. Nissa was, to put it simply, a very beautiful woman, her long legs and tan skin barely covered by a worryingly small amount of leaves. Cyrus wondered if calling her willowy would get him punched. Would it be good to compare her to a tree?
"So, you saw the Crimson. It is one of the two great evils plaguing this world, slowly consuming all that is wholesome and good with their foul auras."
Cyrus froze. "It… it spreads?"
"It can and will grow across the surface of the world. It will be hard to fight it, but keep it far away from this town, at least. Without action, evil will consume the world."
"So… what can we do?"
"Although it may be good for you to rest for a bit, in time you must find the other source of evil in the world, the Corruption, and you will find another powerful beast who rules over that land…. You might even get another random girl out of it, considering the pattern so far"
Cthylla's glare intensified. Cyrus sighed.
"You were gawking at her."
I was not 'gawk..'" Cyrus stopped talking when he noticed Abigail waving them over, and when the two got close enough they heard her shouting.
"She's waking up!"
Cthylla's brow furrowed. "Already? It took me half a day to wake up…" She pouted, and Cyrus was torn between finding her cute and completely comical.
When they got inside, they saw the mysterious new girl sit up, yawning, before she asked "Where… where am I?"
"Well, this little town doesn't have a name yet, but you're among friends" Abigail smiled reassuringly and Cyrus wondered how a woman who was usually so crass had such a wonderful bedside manner. Or maybe she just didn't like him. That was understandable.
The girl pushed her glasses up her nose with a sort of practiced ease that was surprising, given her previous form of a giant, enraged brain. "My name is Medulla. I don't know much about this knew form of mine, so I'll be in your care."
Dinner was always an unusual affair. It was decided that the other town members would share the task of preparing meals, considering how Cyrus was too busy wandering around the world or building to focus on something like cooking, and tonight the group had decided to try one of the many unusual products Harold the merchant seemed to have an endless supply of, an unusual fish dish called sushi that was traditionally eaten with two sticks.
"I refuse to believe this is a real way people eat food. It seems woefully inefficient if the goal is simply to get food into the stomach." Medulla said, glaring at the stubborn piece of sushi which had bravely denied all attempts on Medulla's part to to secure it.
"It's not too bad once you get the hang of it, I think" Cyrus said, and the rest of the group with the notable exception of Medulla were having no issues.
Medulla glanced over at Cthylla, smirked, and said "Well… I don't know. Abigail said I was in such a poor state, after all… maybe you could feed me?"
Cthylla nearly choked on her food, and gave Medulla her patented Eye of Cthulhu death glare. Of course, results were slightly diminished when working with two human sized eyes as opposed to one eye the size of a small tree, but she was working on it, damn it.
"Well, I suppose so…" With all the grace of a skilled warrior, he used the chopsticks to feed Medulla her sushi, as the Eye's eyes watered.
Cythlla grabbed onto one of Cyrus' arms. "Hey! Are you ignoring me? I'm so weak I wouldn't survive out there! I need every ounce of nutrition I can get!"
"But weren't you just eating the sushi without help?"
"Well…. All this arm movement is exhausting. I didn't have arms before, ya' know?" She said, while waving her arms around excitedly.
Across the table, Abigail, Garret, and Gimli tried their hardest to hold back their laughter. Harold sighed and said, "Ahh, reminds me of when I was a young lad…"
"I'd like to give you something." Medulla had pulled Cyrus to the side after dinner. She removed the necklace from her neck and placed it in his palm. "I'd like you to have this, at least for now. I now you'll make a good use of it."
"Well thank you."
Medulla smiled. "Don't mention it. Now, before Cthylla tracks us down…" she stood on tip-toes, and gave Cyrus a kiss on the cheek. "Good luck out there in the corruption tomorrow!" and then she ran off, her face turning a deep shape of crimson that warmed Cyrus' heart instead of sending chills down his spine.
Two girls is the minimum for harem hijinks, and the threshold has been reached. For now, I'm still not sure about a few things. I'm thinking of maybe including the dryad in the harem, but I'm not sure about other NPCs. Do I cockblock my boy the arm dealer? Anyways, corruption next episode, King Slime after that probably, or maybe Queen Bee? As for today's name explanation, the Medulla is a part of the brain close to the spine which deals with involuntary functions. So just like an anime waifu, the real Medulla can make your heart go doki doki. Don't expect updates this frequently, but I do hope to crank more of these out.