Apocalypse: Fairy System by Macronomicon (fox in socks read aloud txt) 📕

gaining the strength and time you need to build a home for you and your friends, and you’d never have to see them unhappy ever again?”

“Nuh-uh! Daddy says aging is when damaged ‘Dee Un Ey’ gets copied when cells split; eventually they forget how to fix themselves. He said scientists are about to figure out how to stop aging by fixing ‘Dee Un Ey’ with Crispy but they’re never going to make it pubic because rich people don’t want to share.”

Lenos’s jaw hung open for a second.

It closed.

It opened.

“Uh… Ahem.” The keegan coughed into his fist. “Humans certainly have active imaginations.”

“Nuh-uh! It’s the truth! Daddy’s never wrong!”

“Except the time he got himself killed, I assume.”

Nancy’s face crumpled, her eyes burning with pain, loneliness and shame. She grabbed a pillow off the couch and started sobbing straight into the soft velvet, heedless of the salty tears and snot working their way into the expensive fabric.

“That’s not a…nevermind. Go nuts.”

About ten minutes later, she had post-meltdown clarity and a case of hiccups. Nancy was ready to talk again.

“Anyway, the people of Pharos have found a way to eliminate aging entirely, and I’m going to help you do it for yourself.”

“Why?”

“I lost my home too,” Lenos said, tapping his chest. “I want to give you the time you’ll need to make your own.”

“You’re mean.”

“I’m practical. I’m too old to do it now, but you…” He gestured to Nancy. “You’re young enough to make it past the O’sut Bottleneck.”

“The what?”

“The O’sut Bottleneck. It was named after the scholar O’sut, who discovered that the anti-aging properties of the Body Attribute can be used to provide true immortality at high enough potency, and that the required amount is quadratically higher depending on the creature’s current biological age. In essence, at the age where a normal young man could hope to defeat monsters and gain levels, it is already too late. The amount of levels he needs would take longer to acquire than the aging they would prevent. Sure, he could live hundreds of years, but it would be almost impossible to achieve true immortality just playing catch-up with his own aging.”

Lenos spread his hands. “The O’sut Bottleneck.”

“I don’t get it,” Nancy said, shaking her head.

“That’s alright. All you need to know is that it’ll give you the time and strength you need to make a home that no one can take away from you. If you let me help you.”

“…I could invite all my friends over to my home?”

“Of course,” Lenos said.

Nancy peered at him, her mind dancing with the possibility of lazy days spent reading books while hanging off the edge of furniture, chasing each other around a big house, eating together….

“What do I need to do?”

***Jebediah Trapper***

“Okay.” Jeb breathed quietly, slipping the ring farther up the handle of the hook until he could keep it in place with his right hand.

With his left, he gently placed the very tip of his middle finger against the hook and began feeling around. He used the flat side of the hook to feel for the stitches. From feeling around with his fingertips earlier, he was fairly sure it wasn’t a zipper or legs sunk into his scalp, but stitches securing some wriggling…thing to his skull.

There’s one, Jeb thought, feeling it out using the hook as a medium. He guided the edge to the stitch, took a deep breath, and began gingerly sawing at the material. He kept perfectly still, expanding all his senses outward as he tried to keep track of every tiny sensation.

Damage to the brain won’t register as pain; it’ll register as dizziness or a funny taste, maybe even a sudden change in mood, Jeb thought, his heart thudding out a heavy beat as he sawed.

Pop.

There was a sudden loosening as the hook sawed through the stitch, a relaxing that rippled through his consciousness and his Myst Core. Instantly, the sensations faded, before he could even put a name to what was different.

Da fuck was that? Jeb thought, blinking. He paused a moment to take stock of his mental faculties. I don’t feel like I have brain damage, but then again, who does? No time like the present.

Whatever it was existed in another dimension and was not naturally occurring. Jeb was determined to remove it and anything else that had been soldered onto him without his knowledge or consent.

There’s always a chance this’ll turn me into a drooling vegetable or have me bleeding out on a plane of existence I can’t even interact with…. Worth it.

The ‘eww’ factor was just too high, having something alive strapped to him, possibly influencing his decisions on a level he couldn’t even understand. Nobody wanted to be a cordyceps zombie.

After he tested his smell, taste, balance and ability to count backwards from ten, Jeb resumed the work.

Pop.

Another stitch came loose, accompanied by a quickly-fading sensation of loosening.

Pop.

Pop.

Pop.

The stitches began to move back and forth, making it difficult to work. Frowning, Jeb took the hook away and slipped the ring onto his finger, feeling around the area. The long lump was thrashing back and forth, struggling against the loosening stitches.

Alright, Jeb thought, slipping the ring back onto the hook. It rattled all the way down to the handle.

Rattled? Jeb peered closer at the steel hook and noticed its surface was pitted and worn. It wasn’t rusted out, but seemed as though it had been eaten away by acid, with pinhole-sized pits in the surface.

Worry about it later. Jeb needed to strike while the iron was hot with the lump.

He found his spot again, working from the other side, pushing the wormlike thing down with the handle while he sawed away at the stitches.

Pop.

Pop.

Pop pop pop pop pop pop pop!

Here it