Bien feels disconcerted by the unfamiliarity of his surroundings.
"… Spooky. What is this place?" he says, still addressing Ava. "It… sounds different."
A dark, ink-liquid starts leaking out of the radio's crevices, prompting Bien to respond in confusion. "… Ava?"
The liquid continues to pour out before taking form as viscous tendrils, approaching Bien.
"Huh…?!"
Swoosh
Blood drips into a small pool. The tendril, slightly stained with blood and resembling a thorny vine, extended past Bien to the electrical post behind him, the liquid spreading over a 'Help Wanted' poster.
Bien stares at it, motionless from surprise. Blood continues to drip from the small cut on his cheek where the tendril grazed his face.
The tendril pulls itself back, taking the poster with it. It coagulates into a blob on Bien's soldier, the piece of paper being consumed within it, before the gelatinous shape takes form as a crow-like bird.
"Huh," Bien reacts.
"Help," the bird croaks out, sitting awkwardly on Bien's shoulder and staining it with ink.
"My dad used to shoot at these things back home all the time," Bien remarks.
"Help wanted," the bird says, in mimicry of the poster.
"He says these things are magic or something, but I never really got what they actually do…" Bien looks at the bird sitting on him, too confused to know what else to do about it.
"Help."
"Well, except talk about nonsense."
"Help wanted."
Bien sighs. "This raises more questions than answers, though," he says to nobody in particular as the bird pecks his cheek.Bien doesn't notice more of the inky tendrils behind him, but they disappear as suddenly as they came.
"Were you scared of the stairs?"
Bien looks beside him to see an unfamiliar person. This person was dressed strangely in a saturated, prep-punk outfit, with eccentric features like heterochromatic eyes and split black-and-white hair highlighted with a neon green steak on the left side of his face.
"… What?" Bien asks, still processing what's happening. "Uh… no."
"You should thank me," the enigmatic character says. The bird flies from Bien's soldier and climbs up the other person's arm.
"… Thanks," Bien responds cautiously. "Do I know you?"
"You can call me Sar," the newcomer answers, with a friendly smile and a hand placed on the chest for emphasis. The bird settles on Sar's shoulder and stares back at Bien. "It's short for Anthony."
"… No it's not?" Bien raises an eyebrow.
"Help wanted," the bird interjects.
"You would know, Bien," Sar says. "You're notorious for knowing things."
"And so am I," Sar leans towards him in a playful motion, before quickly shifting behind Bien, raising a hand over Bien's head. "Wanna see a magic trick?"
The bird dissolves back into a trail of fluid, crawling up Sar's arm and around his fingers. Before Bien can even respond, Sar pats him on the head, the action slow and ominous…
"Ta-dah~!" When Sar's hand is lifted with a swirling gesture, Bien's hair is dyed black.
"I could have made you feel an excruciating pain just now, but I didn't," Sar says. "Say thank you."
"Thank you," Bien responds automatically.
The two are silent for several moments, Sar observing Bien's reaction while Bien touches a lock of his hair, looking at its new colour.
Bien slowly lets go of his hair, looking down on the floor, his reaction hard to read.
Sar shrugs casually. "I guess it's not that impressive. I was expecting more questions."
"'Who are you exactly?'[1]
"'Where is this place?'[2]
"'What do the birds do?'[3]'
"The last one was a brain scratcher for me for a—"
Sar suddenly stops talking. Still retaining a smile, Sar looks at Bien from the periphery as heaps of blood pour out of Sar's orifices out of nowhere.
In a flash, a lateral cut splits Sar right through the centre, the two halves of Sar's body separating and falling apart.
"My dad isn't going to recognise me like this," Bien says, looking mildly irritated, his Demon wings and tail manifested, and his more humanoid appearance shown.
Bien lowers his blood-stained tail as Sar falls to the floor.
"Hmm…" Bien pouts. "Looks like I can only cut down halfway through."
The extent of Bien's destruction wasn't restricted to Sar: across the landscape, the electrical post, the plants, the walls: in a straight line perpendicular to Sar's position was one clean cut, the space existing between the two halves of the cut not merely damaged but flat-out gone.
"Didn't even nick the floor at all," Bien observes as he notices the cut only reached down to Sar's torso, the floor littered with blood but otherwise without a single scratch. Sar, kneeling on the floor, uses an arm to try and stop Sar's own organs from spilling out.
"I guess… I'm still not as good at this as my father was," Bien mutters, more to himself than the stranger besides him. "I wonder if he's gonna be disappointed."
He walks a few steps away and sits down on one of the stair's steps, slouched with his elbows resting on his knees. He wraps his tail around the radio placed next to him. "I should stick to using weapons, I guess… What do you think, Ava?"
"Your radio can't get a signal here," Sar says. "It's too far away from Maldevara."
Bien stares at him silently. The precision of his attack can be observed from how surgically clean the cross-section of Sar's organs are.
"You look familiar…" Bien observes, "though I can't recall who you look like—"
"That was a neat trick," Sar cuts him off, the smile never disappearing or even wavering. "It hurt."
"Hmm…did I make a mistake somewhere?" Bien passively asks, resting his cheek on one of his hands. "You should be dead."
Sar looks back at him, not speaking for a moment. Blood keeps leaking all over.
"I 'should' be?" Sar finally says. "You don't tell me what I "should" be, Bien."
Bien's expression shifts from apathy to a repressed confusion.
I tell you.
Sar, unscathed, sits on the step Bien was sitting on, face resting between Sar's palms. With the same gentle smile, he looks at Bien: now in Sar's previous position, kneeling on the floor, wide-eyed with his body split in half, the insides of his corpse a hollow, pitch-black void.
[1] Sar. [1.1]
[1.1] It's short for Anthony.
[2] Gdyskoti, Anselir. [2.1][2.2]
[2.1] I was born here.
[2.2] I was laid to rest here, too.
[3] If you feed them, they talk and do funny tricks. Like most birds, except for stupid ones. [3.1]
[3.1] An example of a really stupid bird with no concept of gratitude or doing funny tricks is Jacques Emfoi.
A more elaborate explanation can be seen in the "Results and Discussion" section in Intermission 1 - Part 5.
You get several of your silly little comic updates today, earlier than intended, courtesy of me. Say thank you.
How the pink bunny got into the claw machine is an enigma, seeing as the rest of the toys within it are capsules: opaque orbs of *Schrödinger's nature. It's probably a manufacturing error of sorts. Either way, it makes the plushie unwinnable, because it doesn't fit through the prize hatch, so the rabbit remains until the play centre closes down from poor profit margins.
The makeshift arcade was a dingy, haphazard barely-legal six-by-seven sqm. corner of the first "mall" (if you would call it that) of a first-class municipality that barely registered as first-class from how intechnological it was, but over the years as urbanisation grew it became prudent to establish an actual mall, with an actual Quantum Playground. It was the first real competition for luxurious third spaces in this semi-rural town over the twelve years of the first mall's existence, and the rest was history.
i took a lightspike and didnt even bother with the safety cause i was mondo pissed off anyway and i plugged it directly into the subject's hand and it screamed FUCK which is the first profane word its managed to spit out. i checked the screens if that changed anything and unexpectedly the fluctuation was minimal but the curator predicted the subject's longstanding animousity towards me might have gradually levelled the bar higher and higher by each passing day that exclaiming it through a word out loud might be an emergence of anger instead of something where anger emerges. the bitch continues to be very bad at precise erasure. in the simulation today i felt nice enough to offer a big target, a whole-ass mcfuckingmansion, and the resulting damage spanned three provinces wide. tell media we need a bigger budget