A Romantic Vignette in an Absurdly Spacious Sewer

A Romantic Vignette in an Absurdly Spacious Sewer

Two figures walked beneath the city streets, one human, the other humanoid. Arthropodal hands lead the human through the tunnels and arthropodal legs trod the dimly lit paths their holder had walked many times before. The human, for his sake, followed his guide promptly, for he was the newcomer in this strange land, and she was his guide.

He took in the shadows upon the walls and the cat-sized chitinous things that skittered about the strange maze that was the storm drain community. The path was dimly lit with faint, erattic strings of re-purposed Christmas lights and the kalidescope eyes of the great catfish-things floating about the “rivers” which his guide and now and then had to smack away with the blunt end of the glass-studded oar she kept as a weapon.

The moon peeked its head in now and then, but vanished just as quickly, making it useless as a source of light. After all, they were so far away from the surface world.

The guide’s name was Cshisk Sisskit, a cockroach woman something like if the insects from Mimic had gone up a few rungs on the evolutionary ladder and a woman of great wit and skill. The man’s name was Rick, and he was as bewildered as he was fascinated by this place, these creatures, and the strange humanoid he’d saved leading him on.

And finally, they reached their destination, a restaurant known as the Cinema Club. The entrance at its head was formerly the face-shaped doors for a highly “politically incorrect” (Read: racist and horrible) fried chicken place, painted black and white and gussied up with paper mache in a strange semblance of Charlie Chaplin to unusual effect. The walls were made of what looked like amber-y resin and old; yellowing newspapers, and lights and the faint murmur of conversation flowed outward.

When both figures reached the double-door, they both inadvertently rushed to grab one, open it up, and gesture inwards as if to let the other in. At the same time.

There was a pause, an uncomfortable chuckle, and then finally a concurrent entrance of the both of them.

As they entered there was a moment’s realization on Rick’s side that he was sure as hell not in Kansas any more. Maybe Midian, maybe Wonderland, but not Kansas

He was given pause by the multitude of creatures sitting before him, a motley collection of aberrant and strange forms, some like the nightmarish latex creations of science fiction, some like the eerie phantasmagorias of fantasy. But, if there was fear in Rick’s heart, he did not show it, but instead a feeling of wonder. Like stepping into a whole new world.

Of course, that rumination was interrupted by a rumbling from below the floor, and the cracking of paper and wood as the many patrons backed away nervously from the epicenter of the rumble. There was a crack of splintering wood and a howling, gasping laughter coming from the thing bursting through the floor.

The monstrosity was a thing of naked sinew, its many legs and tentacles covered in exposed, gleaming, meaty muscle, covered in whatever clear slime it was that they really made Chicken McNuggets out of, its face looking like nothing so much as the face of Ronald McDonald with a wide, toothy maw.

It let out that hideous howl-laugh as it scanned the room with its hungry eyes, the strange patrons looking at it more like one would a bear or a cougar in one’s house than the hideous shambling thing that it was. Dangerous, but not unnatural, or even quite that unexpected.

One of the servers, a vaguely centipedal woman who was serving a very fussy and fancy man-dodo before the scene, looked with a gaze of angry annoyance at the horror. “Oh no you fucking don’t!” she yelled, with a secondary set of needle-sharp red fangs extending inside her mouth, yellow venom dripping from her mouth.

She ran at the thing on her chitinous legs, teeth bared, and bit on one of the tentacles as it lashed near the crowd. The thing saw her and hissed, lashing back and detaching the tentacle, sending the centipede woman flying into a wall.

Cshisk looked on annoyed. She’d gone here to get away from her job, not for more this shit. “Excuse me for a second” she said to Rick as she took up her bladed oar and ran at the beast from behind. As Rick ducked for cover, Cshisk scanned the room, the awkwardness of the date shifting back to the comfort of something she’d done many times before.

In a matter of moments she spied an opening between the forest of tendrils, and lunged for it. She leapt towards the beast’s gooey hide, which was currently advancing towards Candace, who was buried beneath the thing’s still writing tentacle.

With but a slice she tore through where the nugget-paste-mesh looked weakest from her angle. It didn’t hit muscle, but it certainly sliced off a substantial chunk. But it also certainly pissed off the thing it was attached to enough to turn around towards Cshisk, fangs bared. Cshisk smiled and turned the oar around for another whack at it.

Rick watched beneath his overturned table as Cshisk darted in battle. There was no nervousness to her stride, none of that shaky wringing of hands that she’d shown at the table, just pure confidence and skill.

As she slammed at the thing’s flesh, the nugget-paste thinned by slice after slice, a decimation of a thousand cuts. Though she was tiring, dodging between its tentacles, he couldn’t tell from the way she moved. The centipede woman joined back into the fray too, weaving in and feint-biting to give Cshisk another opening to slice.

Rick had a feeling he was not needed for this battle, and there was no sense in him Leeroy Jenkinsing his life away. So he did what came naturally. He took a napkin from the floor and a mechanical pencil from his pocket and he drew.

The lines looped from his hands to form shapes, caricatures of the action, the whirling dervish of Cshisk with the oar, the centipede-woman with her teeth, and the beast with its everything. Rick saw a wild, strange beauty in the motion, and was trying so hard to capture it in his art that he did not notice the stray tentacle coming inadvertently close to him.

He did, however, notice it when it wrapped completely around him, and he especially noticed it when it started to unsheathe several unpleasantly sharp barbs. He stabbed at the thing feebly with his pencil as he tried to wriggle out of his barb-pierced shirt, his skinny body wriggling to get out before the barbs moved out and turned his black shirt a bright shade of red.

But, through a combination of his stabbing and the fact that he hadn’t eaten anything but a slightly stale bread-n-bread sandwich in three days, he wriggled free just in time to hear a wet slicing sound and see the tentacle fall to the ground cleanly severed. Wriggling.  He looked up and saw Cshisk, slicing paddle in hand, going right towards the opening near the stump.

Meanwhile, Schsisk had finally struck painful, painful gold, cutting off that last sliver of skin to hit meat. When she saw it, she leaped into action, tossing down the oar, lunging with her outstretched hand and thrusting it into the meaty cavity. “The best way to drive away these things is pain,” she remembered as she squeezed the raw tendons with her sharp claws. “They fight a good game, but if you hit ‘em where it burns they become cowards.”

And indeed the thing shrieked in agony, as its tentacles flailed and darted for Cshisk. But every time it was about to bring a tentacle towards her, she squeezed bringing the tentacles up in reflexive agony. It moved and writhed back and back towards the hole from which it came as she squeezed at it, Rick watching the rhythm of her hand as if she knew this from god knows how many times actually doing it on the job, and her steadfast grip on the writhing, enormous monstrosity.

Finally, as the creature got down its hole, Cshisk let go of it and it retreated, letting out one last horrible scream/howl. As it scuttled back below the water, that weird centipede woman shook her fist at it and yelled “Yeah bitch, you better run!”

She put her head back up and looked at the still-shaken crowd. The centipede woman’s fangs retracted back into her gums as she yelled “Nothin’ to see here folks, show’s over, go back to your meals.”

And, surprisingly enough, they did. For, while it was an unpleasant and startling event, it was not an unusual one for the inhabitants of the world below. Monster attacks happen, but life below goes on.

Cshisk picked up her oar and sighed. This was not a good start to the night. She walked over to where the human known as Rick was, following his scent amidst the chaos with her antennae. His smell was muddled by the dirt and sweat of the day, but it smelled… nice somehow.

“I’m sorry” Cshisk said as she extended her oar to help him up.

“Why should you be sorry? You’re not the” Rick smiled, trying to bring some levity back to the situation. “Besides, the way you beat the crap outta that thing was… incredible, some Daredevil stuff or somethin’!”

“My performance back there was… sloppy.” She said, then realizing “Oh, your shirt!” and Rick looked down. Down on the floor his shirt lied in jagged black tatters from the flailing, severed tentacle. But the old canvass bag was still there, and the drawing was still intact thanks to the fact that down here, “Napkin” could mean anything from newsprint to a giant hamster pelt.

“Eh, it’s just a shirt,” he said picking up the drawing, “I’m just lucky it wasn’t me.” And that was true, given that old t-shirts were one of the few things he didn’t lack. He was slightly embarrassed to have his downright waifish and bruised physique shown to all the world.

Given the sorts of weirdos, mutants and monsters he saw around him, he doubted he was the most conspicuous thing in the room. Like a regular creature cantina this place was. Not that he was complaining mind you. He always liked those “Creature cantina” scenes.

Cshisk looked down at what he had picked up, curious why he’d be more interested in a piece of paper than his shredded garment, which would have cost a pretty penny down there. It was a napkin of simple newsprint, but with raw, thin marks of pencil lining it in curious, fascinating formation. She deftly whisked it out of his hand, asking “What’s this you picked up?” merely as a formality after the fact.

It was a drawing of her fighting the beast, in several positions. The quick strokes of the pencil suggested hastiness in drawing it, to capture the moment like a camera shutter, but it had marvelous stylistic clarity nonetheless. It was one of those pictures that captured the feeling of movement in a still image, with simple pictures that captured Cshisk and the beast’s appearance quite well.

But Rick looked embarrassed as Cshisk looked over it. “Not my best work, I know” he said, thinking of the slightly wonky anatomy and the lack of clarity in which he’d rendered that centipede-woman’s image. He picked up a chair in an attempt at changing the subject. “So, how about we get started with this… ???”

“I’m not sure what it is myself” Cshisk said blushingly as she used the hooked end of her oar to pick up another chair and table “And for the record, I thought the picture was quite good.”

“You’d be the first person to tell me that in a long time.” Rick said.

After a few minutes of each awkwardly trying to pull out the other person’s chair for them, they sat down simultaneously, a moment of silence passing as they gathered their bearings.

In the clear, sodium lights of the restaurant, Rick could see that the cockroach woman, named Cshisk Ssskit apaprently, wore no true clothes over her reddish frame. It was instead did garbed in adornments made of strips of aluminum can, woven together into various elegant pouch-covered chains on her carapace and adorning her surprisingly dextrous hands in the form of kitbashed jointed gloves. It certainly suited her, at least Rick thought, the silvers contrasting against her curvy red carapace.

She got a good look at him as well, a young man of average height, pale sun-starved skin, eyes with dark circles beneath as if grasping for sleep, and a bruised; slender figure currently lacking a shirt. But there was still something interesting about his look. Like a beautiful bronze statue tarnished from crown-to-foot. A bag lay to the side of his scrap-wood seat, slightly moist except for the tightly sealed clear plastic sleeves containing bundles and bundles of paper.

His first comment was similarly self-effacing. “You didn’t have to take me here you know.”

The man went by the name Richard, though people either called him Rick or Dick depending on if the person talking to him was a friend or somebody he owed money .And the latter category had been ballooning each day.

“What do you mean?” said the cockroach-woman in a buzzing voice sweet as a bag of slightly melty Swedish Fish, looking genuinely confused with her large arthropodal eyes.

“You saved my life Miss Sisskit.” Rick responded, trying to avoid her concerned gaze out of embarrassment “You don’t need to take me out afterwards”

“Please, call me Cshisk.” She said “And it’s the least I can do, as I remember you jumping in to save me first.”

There was an awkward silence. Rick glanced around looking at the various shambling mounds of vegetation, giant rats, and humans with various fleshy symbiotes studding their bodies waiting table, wondering when somebody would take their order. The strains of a fuzzy, faded Smash Mouth song involving stars or something like that started blaring in the background, making the silence less silent, but the awkwardness far deeper.

So he drew yet again. It always calmed him, helped the miasma of the world cohese into visions of phantasmagoria to put pen to paper and let his subconscious pour out. And, as the loud belch of a giant cat made of tar at one of the other tables reminded him, he was in a world of phantasmagoria.

He would’ve used his notebook, but that was currently a pile of soggy pulp in some effluent river. But no matter. Some people bit their nails, some twirled their hair, he drew. But, his eyes and the majority of his attention were focused on Cshisk as he wrung his brain for some way to break the silence.

“So, what exactly do you do… Cshisk?” asked Rick, breaking the awkward silence with an awkward question.

“Well,” said Cshick, slowly mulling and rolling over her sentence, “I’m a river-runner.”

Rick looked confused, “What’s a…”

“Oh!” said Cshisk, antennae slightly lifting her antennae looking slightly embarrassed. “I forgot, you’re from uptown, you didn’t know.”

Inside her head she was kicking herself “Ten minutes into your first date and you’re already screwing up!” she thought to herself. Was it a date? If so, was it a gratitude-date or a date-date. All she knew was that she’d made a spur of the moment decision to go out on to dinner with this guy who saved her, and she had no idea what she was doing

“I’m sorry” Rick said. He was used to feeling clueless, and he didn’t really feel much more clueless down here than he did up there.

“No, no, no, not at all.” Responded back Cshisk, trying to save face “It’s just, I haven’t really met with any one outside the sewers, and I’m new to this explaning thi-Oh look here’s our waitress.” She shifted her sentence hurriedly, braking before she struck a nerve with that runaway train of thought.

Said waitress scuttled forward a bit more. It was the waitress from the fight, and upon looking at her, Rick saw that she was less of a centipede with woman bits and more a woman with centipede bits She looked relatively human, with short sandy-blonde hair, brown eyes, and a pair of well-worn jeans. Of course this made the bizarre bits far more apparent, such as her prehensile toes, the giant centipede-like-appendage coming out of her back and supporting her weight, and the fact that she was completely topless; likely due to said centipedal growth.

She flashed the sort of jocular smile one gives to “one of the usuals” Cshisk’s way.

Rick tried not to stare, he didn’t quite stick the landing. It wasn’t so much the centipedal bits that kept odding him out, no he was merely fascinated by that, but the almost innocently transgressive nudity just barely pushed it past the point of weird where one can’t help but not look away. His eyes kept darting from the floor to the centipede woman, left hand doodling at a faster pace.

To her credit, the centipede woman took it in stride, rolling her eyes and muttering “uptowners.” She hadn’t been one for a long time, but she knew that the staring was more in fascinated confusion than of perverse oogling. She remembered giving that same stare her first time down the rat hole. Richard’s face turned a bright shade of crimson and she chuckled a bit.

She then turned to Cshisk and said “Heyyy Cshisk, howsit goin’?”

“It’s going… okay Candace. I’m just treating this gentleman who saved my life to a round of dinner.”

“So…. A date then?” Candace inquisited jocularly.

“Maybe. Perhaps. I suppose.” Cshisk muttered, her antennae twitching about in embarrassment.

“Never thought you were the dating type” Candace said joshingly. “Hell, I never even knew you were the taking-a-break-type”

“Neither did I” said Cshisk, very clearly motioning that she would prefer if Candace changed the subject.

Candace got the hint and said “Kay,” clearly remembering the awkwardness of her first date in the community, with Jimmy the (literal) Rat. “So, what’s your order hon?”

“I’ll have the pan-fried rat with a side of dough-wrapped Manhattan White, and Rick…” She looked over to Rick to see if he would respond. “I think he’ll just have the Spamchillada,” Cshisk said, guessing at his indecision that he might want something a bit more “aboveground” this go-around.

She fished around near her seat and pulled out several chips of lacquered cardboard and handed them to Candace. “I think this’ll cover the meal,” she said.

 Rick looked over to where she was drawing it from, a purse-like bag homemade out of burlap. It was near overflowing with those chips, in a few different colors to boot.

Candace counted through the handful. “Cshisk, I think you might’ve overpaid me by a few chips.”

Csisk just smiled, at least as well as a pair of mandibles could smile, and said “Keep ‘em. You need ‘em more than I do, and besides, I’m not a poor woman.”

Candace gave a bittersweet gaze to Cshisk, which Cshisk gave back. They both knew that she wasn’t lacking for money, or friends, or even status, but there was one area she was positively impoverished in, desired in that quiet way a pet turtle desires the sea, but had never given herself the time to have.

Rick still looked confused. “Oh,” said Cshisk, just noticing Rick’s embarassment “she’s a friend of mine.”

“No big deal,” Rick said half-truthfully “I’ve met a lot of weirdos around town.” That was a whole truth, as the burns from his encounter with that wizard and the scars from that “stellar probe” proved.

“Though, the weirdos seem more lively down here,” he thought, thinking of the rusting, crumbling city of above. The conversation in the background here was like a series of notes on a theremin, as opposed to the rusty; acid screech of the city above in-between voids of dad silence.

Almost reflexively he turned over his drawing paper, the front of the napkin already completely filled by his etchings. Had he looked down he would’ve seen some surprisingly detailed sketches of the place’s patrons. But his eyes were only on hers. Though her eyes seemed to be avoiding his in unease, though whether it was about her and not him, Rick couldn’t say.

“You know, you’re the first human I’ve actually seen down here without them. That’s sort of weird for m-” She paused. With the sudden realization she was drifting, she threw here head up and said, “Anyway back to river running… what it is is that I run a few homemade canoes throughout the waterways to find things that your people lose, or flush, let get a washed away or in general lose down here.”

She fiddled with one of the many chips from her purse as she spoke, twirling it almost hypnotically through her chitinous fingers. “It all ends up here in the end. It’s my little operation, picking ‘em up and sellin’ ‘em back to the folks around here.”

There was a sense of pride in her voice. For all that she felt bone-tired from her job, she still thought it was a good job, an important job, a job worth doing. She just wondered if it was a job worth over-doing.

 “I remember findin’ the emcee’s parts, heh, wasn’t that a day … but I’ll stop talking. I don’t want to be a bore.” Well that and she really didn’t want to screw this up.

“No, no, no, it’s okay.” Rick said, face still covered in residual blushery. He was looking her straight in the eye, though which part of it he should look at was a mystery to him. “I’ve never known much about the underground, well, much that seems true anyway, he said, “and I’m always up for a good story. So tell all ya want about your business, I won’t mind. Besides,” Rick grinned “if your job anywhere near as weird as this place, it must be one helluva job.”

Again Cshisk gave that nervous mandibled half-smile. She’d never really had an opportunity to show her stuff to an outsider, much less one she wanted to impress. “Alright then.”  She put her hands on the table, rubbing them together nervously. The rhythmically rubbing chitin on them sounded like a constant skeetching of boots against a tile floor, or perhaps a chant of “He’s interested, he’s interested, Don’t blow this, don’t blow this!”.

“We get mostly driftwood, cans, plastic bottles, but it’s pretty varied. Heck, most of the stuff in here came from my business, including the emcee.” She pointed to a strange thing covered in fake fur and wires, slumped in the corner, covered in and wired in to a wall socket. “He’s recharging.” Cshisk added hastily

“So, does he think you’re his mom or something?” Rick asked.

“Oh, I didn’t build him,” Cshisk said, “I just found the parts. The guy I sold him to programmed him to act like, well, an emcee. So he now acts like I’m the agent who discovered him, which is sort of true. Sort of. ”

She gave an aside glance. “I must say, I hope I haven’t given the impression that it’s just my operation.” Indeed not, otherwise she would’ve worked herself to death rather than half-to-death like she was doing now. She momentarily drummed her chitinous fingers against the table, more out of nervousness than out of impatience really.

“Dad started it years ago with nothing but his claws and a wooden raft. When he died it was barely running, and I was the only one out of my litter of 10 who decided to stay and keep it going. So, I brought in a few friends to try and at least salvage it, things sent out from there, and…”

 She made a face like she’d be blushing if she were able to “Well, I’ve made a bit of a name for myself as you can see…” Rick looked back at the purse filled with cardboard chips.

“But, it’s dangerous work.” She added “There’s the Sprayers, the Crackjaws (Gotta listen real close for those guys), the Rat Kings, the Rat Queens, the Ghoulie Grabbers (Only way to get ‘em is whackin’ em with a bible), the Rat Knights (Though their teeth fetch a pretty penny at the market), the Rat Jesters, the Rat Popes,”

She shuddered a bit, and her antennae twitched. “Nasty things those Rat Popes, one of ‘em took Saul’s leg, and almost got his head too. There’s also the Deep Crows, the Meatcrawlers, the Manimals (God that smell of urine), the CHUDs, the Garbagefish (Which I never want to have to eat again) and…” she looked him over, “well I know you got well acquainted with the Chokewhirl Whomper.”

Yes, yes he was, but he said nothing. A twinge of pain emanated from the bruise the ugly thing’d put on his chest when he dove in to save her from the suspicious pile of trash, along with the series of cuts on his arm from when it’d got a parting shot in, after Chsisk returned the favor and rescued him.

The rescue was worth the pain to him mind you, and he still would’ve dove in even if he had known the full circumstances, but that still didn’t make it hurt any less. Though, the conversation was doing its damndest to distract him from it.

There was also an equally unpleasant twinge of self-depreciation in Cshisk’s head. She was also very, very well acquainted with the Chokewhirl Whomper, and shouldn’t have gotten caught off guard like that.

 It was the kind of stupidity one exhibited when one was tired as a fish-dog but still wanted to make those last; unnecessary rounds “Just in case” before the sun popped its bright head through the upper grates. She’d always thought there was no such thing as overwork, but now she was starting to question that call.

“You know, I probably would’ve died if you hadn’t managed to hold its attention long enough for me to get out and whomp ‘im.”

“And I’d’ve probably died if you hadn’t done said whomping. So, is that… typical for you?” He asked

“There’s worse, but it’s one of the nastier things ya see in a typical day. I still should’ve been able to deal with it. But,” Cshisk said, trailing off and looking nervously at Rick’s face for any signs of boredom or restlessness. “Enough about me. What is your life like up there, on the surface?” she asked, hoping to get a hint of what was in his mind rather than wildly extrapolating on it in hers.

Rick gave a mumble of uneasiness as he took a heavy breath in.  Well, he thought,  no sense in being dishonest to the woman who thought enough about you to save your life, even if she was a bipedal; chitinous creature of the dark. Though, to be fair, he did like that part.

“Well, I wish I could say my life is as interesting as yours.” He said, his wan cheeks curled in a sad half-smile, “But I’m not much of anything. I work at a Wal-Mart, a store where the desparate and the cheap go to buy tube socks and the morbidly obese go to buy muumuus and kill themselves with pork rinds and cheese dip,”

He paused as Cshisk raised an antenna in confusion. “Figuratively I mean. It can be fun, though mostly only when you tell the stories after the fact.” he continued, “And I live in a one-room apartment with such a bad stink that it serves as its own security system.”

He laughed a little and gave a smile. “If you look at it that way, I’m getting a good deal on rent.” Ah levity. The nectar of the broke and the desperate. “I went to college to make something of myself, but when I got out I found I made the wrong thing and nobody was buying.”

“I know little of this ‘college’ place you’re talking about, except for that it is either a place for fornication and alchohol or a place where disadvantaged youths find extravagant success. And that’s just from the movies.” She looked slightly embarrassed at her lack of knowledge of the uptown. But there was something about the way he said it that made her interested. The way he said it, rolling it off the tongue matter-of-factly like a comedian, so fast that she almost missed the desperation underneath.

Rick laughed a little. “That first one’s not too far off from the truth,” Cshisk looked relieved as he continued onward, “but I never got into the party scene that much. Unless you count navelgazing as a ‘party’. But ever since, I’ve just sort of drifted, living one day at a time in a city dying one day at a time.” He paused, wondering both whether he was getting too self-pitying and whether he should keep going.

“But I complain too much. I have a job, even if it is retail, I have an apartment, even if it is one-room, and I have friends, even if they think I’m a schlematzl. I’m on a hunt fro a better job, even though I’ve only got called back twice, once as a wrong number. I think I have it pretty good for an art major, and it could be worse. I could be a bum…” That last statement gave him pause.

“But…” He meandered on. The glow of the self-aggrandizement dimmed upon his face.

“But, what?” asked Cshisk.

Rick paused. “Nah, you don’t want to hear it,” Rick said, trying to keep up that veneer of jadedness. He was veering dangerously close to the one topic he didn’t want to talk about, a topic he could only blame himself for broaching and only blame himself for feeling.

“Come on, there must be something bothering you.” Cshisk said. She knew that look on his face. Even though it was on a human and not an arthropodal face, she knew that look from her own face after she came back from work every day, and realized she had nobody to come home to.

Rick took a deep breath.  “Sometimes, I feel… empty.”

“Empty?” Cshisk asked, now thoroughly confused.

“Like… what I’m doing… there’s no point in it… Like… there’s nothing but the gutter coming for me tomorror… dream… deferred.” The words came haltingly and sadly out of him with that dry, resigned rust of shame and self-loathing puffing out from every tired syllable.

There was an airless silence after the words had passed between the two of them, him trying to catch his breath and her looking at him. His eyes widened and he paused as he realized what he’d just said. He wished he hadn’t. “Nobody gives a shit about your whiny first world problems, least of all her.” He thought to himself.

“Oh, heh, but that’s my problem and not yours, and everybody has problems, so how about that Rat Pope esh, what on earth is that?” he said, fumbling around with his words, trying to change the subject like a drunk driver changes lanes.  “Also, no offence at the gutter remark, maam,” he added fumblingly.

“None taken.” Cshisk said. She didn’t feel it was trivial. After all, lord knows what she would’ve done with herself if she didn’t have her business.

But she didn’t quite get why the metaphorical gutter was such a bad thing. It brought water and debris and knick-knacks down below for salvage, and often brought some of the most… interesting things that she found. But she didn’t mind. Perhaps that metaphor might be more apt than he thought…

“So,” he asked, changing the subject after his subject change, his nervousness making him lose a bit of his track “What was that thing that came into the restaurant?”

Cshisk didn’t answer for a few seconds. She was looking at the tired face before her, pink skin trying hard and failing to maintain a mask of good cheer. She’d never been attracted to any of the human-derivatives down here before, but there was something about that face of his. Unclean and tired-eyed, yes, but there was something underneath it all that she could not help beautiful. And his lithe, lightly muscled, marble-pale shirtless body was giving her other… feelings.

But then she realized she was drifting and finally replied “Oh, that? That was the Meatcrawler. Rumor says that they’re escaped experiments from some restaurant on the surface that’s supposed to be hideously awful and yet your people can’t get enough of it.

Rick hazarded a guess as to where that was and said, “Well, I know where I’m never eating again.”

Cshisk laughed a little, then stopped and said “By the way, what is that dream were talking about?”

Rick suddenly looked very, very self conscious. The topic was shifting “that way” again. “Huh?” he said in disbelief.

“I’m curious what you’ve been wanting to do with your life. I mean, people tell me their problems all the time in my line of work, so why not you? I mean, you seem like you must have something interesting about you.” Her eyes darted down to the paper he was holding, as he instinctively retracted it back. She could see the first outlines of what looked like her face on it.

“It’s… nothing” Rick said. His voice was ramping down and sideways, as if he didn’t believe in the words it was forming, and his eyes darted low. He’d hoped he could avoid that uncomfortable topic, since things seemed to be going so well now.

“Tell ya what.” Cshisk said “I’ve got a dream of my own that I’ve always wanted to do. You tell me your dream, and I’ll tell you mine. Deal?” She couldn’t believe she was being this brazen, especially after she’d been so nervous beforehand. “Doing that must’ve gotten me back my second wind!” she thought.

“Well, if you insist.” Rick said. Why not make it two thirds of a hat trick, he thought, and do three stupid, potentially suicidal things today, he thought. “Well, ever since I could hold a book in my hand, I’ve wanted to do comics, draw ‘em, create ‘em. Hell, I even majored in ‘em!”

 “Ya can. I probably shouldn’t have, but ya can.” He gave a smile half bemused half sad. “But, no matter what I do, what I write, what I try to sell, nobody’s buying. All I’ve been able to show to the public is a 47-page webcomic with 47 views. I’m pretty sure they’re all by the same guy. The rest keeps getting tossed out when I try to submit it.”

Cshisk’s antennae rose up in curiosity. She’d knew of and eagerly read a few comics in her time. They mostly the sorts of terrible ones like Countdown to Final Crisis and Ultimatum that one would let fall into a sewer, but like a bad dime novel she devoured them on the same.

There was something about the creations of picture and word that still intrigued her, that had something outside of anything she’d ever read to keep her going onward. “Would you happen to have any on you in that bag of yours?” she asked, hopefully.

The question caught him off-guard. The response usually he’d gotten when he brought on the comics was usually a tepid ‘Oh, that’s nice,’ or dismissive mockery, with the conversation shifting back to its original track. “Oh no- I wouldn’t- well- I don’t have any on me at the moment,” He said, eyes darting to the sealed bags where he indeed had them at the moment.

One fifth of his magnum opus to be precise, his baby which he’d been trying to get into print circulation for ages, but had been booed and barfed out of every publisher’s office he tried to pitch it to, never wanting to show it for fear of judgment, but too interested in it to give it up.

Cshisk’s eyes also darted towards the bags, but (luckily for her) Rick was distracted by the many other pairs of eyes darting to a space near the projector, with the sound of an electric hum starting to life. A whirring tape recorder and the sound of a videocassette being pitched at high speed slicing through the mumbling as a felt-covered figure stepped out into the spotlight. It was the Emcee, striding out on the stage, Mystery Men tape in one hand, and the tape for the next film in the other and spotlight directly on his mechanical patchworked face.

He was a bizarre thing, kitbashed of the parts of a Fats Domino and a Beach Bear animatronic figure from a long-gone “Showtime Pizza Place”, given a brain by the odd assortment of boards and drives jutting out of his back. But, he jerkily strode across the stage like he owned it, and indeed, one silvery mechanical spider threw a piece of her chassis like a housewife at a Tom Jones concert, and a muck-woman gave a wolf whistle as he strode.

Ric’s eyes were glued to the bizarre spectacle of the emcee saunter-jerking onto the stage, just as Cshisk’s chitinous toe seemed glued onto the bag she was scooting towards her seat out of Rick’s notice.

“G-g-g-gentlemen,” the emcee synthesizer-smarmed across the stage, voice skipping intermittently like an old CD. “That was M-M-M-Mystery Men, the third-best superhero movie Uptown has to offer!” The crowd cheered. “and I still want to see a spinoff about PMS w-w-w-woman someday!”

The emcee paused. He looked down at the gigantic hole in the floor from the Meatcrawler’s entrance that he had caught from the corner of what was probably his eye. “I see we’ve had an unexpected v-v-v-visitor tonight!” he improvised “Well, at least he was a better guest than some of our regulars!” Most of the audience laughed, a few of them harrumphed in annoyance.

”But,” the Emcee said, “As Freddy the Bard once said ‘The show must go on!’. So go on it shall!” The crowd wildly applauded, though Rick wondered how many of them knew that Freddie Mercury died soon after he recorded that.

“And now for to-day we witness a night at the opera by those sons-o-guns who brought us Airplane and Kentucky Fried movie, the movie we call ‘Brain Donors!”

In a swift, jerky motion he chacked the cassette into the player, and pressed rewind, continuing with the monologue as the tape whirred backwards. “Now, from what information I could get off the internet I-I-I ‘completely’ and ‘legitimately’ ‘borrowed’ from Uptown by the ‘ever-so-secret’ human cable line about th-th-three-or-so meters above this stage…

A knowing snicker passed through the crowd of creatures, or at least a burbling, clacking, squawking or beeping noise from those in the audience who didn’t have the capacity to snicker, as if they were exchanging a private joke that was on a certain gaunt somebody who was feeling very much out of place at the moment.

“It’s quite the rare f-f-f-film, debuting in theaters to thunderous silence thanks to the fact that nobody promoted it, not even payin’ a h-h-h-hobo five bucks to walk around with a sandwich board across the street.”

The emcee paced and gestured with his synthesized ballyhoo, psyching up the crowd to a roiling gusto. But he continued, “And it got off the small s-s-s-screen just as fast. In fact, the only thing faster than the film’s flight off the silver screen to the dustbin is the speed at which these gags fly. I tellya folks, we’ve got a r-r-r-real treat for us tonight, one o’ the best things I’ve seen in a while,”

The spotlight turned to Cshisk, now a little nervous, as the drives whirred in the emcee towards the next part of his speech.

“And that’s why I gotta thank the lovely Miss Cshisk, who made me what I am today!” He sauntered over close to the table as she still subtly scooted the bag between her toes. The audience’s laughter drowned out the wet scooching noise of the bag, as she moved it ever closer, hoping Rick’s eye wouldn’t wander down to the bag of the comics he apparently both loved and feared. “Ya know, when ya first sold this to me, I thought ‘There’s no way this could be worth a Rat Pope to get’.”

Rick’s eyes fixed on Cshisk as the emcee said this. “Well, I…” she said, gesturing widely with her hands to distract from the movement of the bag straight to her chair.

“Of course,” the emcee quipped, patting her on the shoulder like that boisterous uncle everyone has, “Everyone else said that about m-m-m-me when ya found my parts, and look where we are t-t-t-today!”

The crowd half applauded and half laughed, unsure whether it was a self-depreciating joke or not. Cshisk recalled as the applause died down that the acquisition of the emcee’s parts (Well, most of them anyway) wasn’t nearly as difficult as he made ‘em out to be.

 She’d actually found the parts in a hive of Black Weepers. Formidable creatures, true, but nowhere near as bad as a Rat Pope. And while there had been a few people who refused to buy, it wasn’t all that difficult to find a down-on-his-luck machinist willing to take a chance on a pile of scrap.

But, a compliment was a compliment, even if it was a smarmy, off-kilter compliment, she thought as the emcee now went towards Rick.

“And who’s the lucky b-b-b-beau sitting across the table from her?” the emcee asked, sidling close to Rick, metal-fur hand brushing across the table.

“My name’s Rick, from… out of town,” he pointed up, his expression one of somebody who didn’t want to be this uncannily close to something this deep in the uncanny valley, “and right now I’m feeling kind of-”

“Nervous?” The emcee interrupted, raising an eyebrow and moving a servo in his lips in an uncanny-valley expression of slyness. “Don’t worry boy, I-I-I-I think you’ll fit just fine amongst us f-f-f-freaks!”

Rick wasn’t sure if the emcee was insulting him or complimenting him, and from the muttering of the audience they didn’t seem too sure either. He did certainly look like he belonged amongst them with his slender pale physique, multitude of bruises and the sleep-bags under his eyes. But he wasn’t sure if ‘freak’ was the accurate term. At least, he wondered if it wasn’t.

With a flick of his hand and a springing, grinding jump back onto the stage, he said “Now that we’ve gotten our salutations out of the way, let’s get on with the s-s-s-show!” as he pressed play and glided back to the shadows in a sort of jerky moonwalk as he buzzed to a state of sleep.

The words “Coming Soon, To a Theatre Near You” flickered upon the wall as the lights dimmed, and as they faded into previews, the audience watched with rapt attention. They were likely never going to see a fair few of those shown, so they might as well watch the condensed, marketing-ized, and highly spoiler-ized versions of them anyway.

Well, all but Cshisk, who was currently watching something else. More specifically she was flipping through the pages of drawings in the folder, extracted from right below the table. Compared to the comic’s she read before, this was virtually Shakespeare, a dark dramedy in an primal, underground, comix-with-an-x vein, and looking at the art she now knew why he considered those napkin sketches crude.

There was a luridness to the stories that was undeniable, psychotronic dramas of sex, violence and weirdness, with a smooth cartoony style contrasting with the deranged drama on the page. But there was a lushness to it as well, some beautiful life to the stories of sleaze, and the lives of its strange, broken but fascinating characters.

 Characters like Dolly-X, the cyborg gunner with a heart of steel and a tongue of silver, the old and hateful Chainsaw Boss, mysterious and guileful Trenchcoat Man; who had a ticking clock replacing one of his eyes, the hubristic; social climbing; immensely fascinating Rocco Journeyhead, and the mad; stab-happy; magically cursed Doc Brainknife; who still managed to be the most heroic damned character in this whole mess.

The world of the comic very much reminded her of her own sewer community, albeit darker and sleazier, perhaps mixed with that nasty city called “New York” that the Uptowners kept using in their films.

Of course, the creator of that wasn’t thinking much about his work at the moment. His eyes were drifting about the room, not so much enjoying the trailers as thinking about the remains of the day.

The wounds from his fights smoldered like embers in a fireplace, the bruises competing for which would make him hurt the most and the re-bared scratches twinging in the open air. But the one paid that didn’t plague him was more mental than physical.

He felt as though that chewing fuzz of ennui that wrapped around him everyday had been parted by some flickering beacon. That all over ache he usually felt after his long days working at the Customer Service department (the coldest and dankest part of retail hell in his and most other’s opinion) was nowhere to be seen, and the pain he was now feeling felt like a good pain, a pain he could be proud of how he acquired.

His rambling eyes watched the creatures at work. Amongst others, a rugose abomination could be seen playing a leisurely game of chess with a squamous horror, a vague thing in a hasmat suit was sipping soup through an odd hose coming out of his finger, a winged mole-rat-thing was necking with a creature of moss and driftwood, a very likely blotto alligator-man gulped down a bottle of Mad Dog 20/20, and these were just a few of the oddities that Rick saw as he looked about.

The images rooted themselves in his mind, the looping penstrokes saving themselves in his mind to wind themselves back on paper, even as he drunk in the quiet wind of the bizarre. The strange, wonderful, malformed yet beautiful things. He wondered about the histories of these various beasts and beings, the likely manifold origins each and every one of them had. There was more life in this one microcosm of a sewer system than he had seen

And Miss Sisskit (He still didn’t feel right calling her Cshisk), there was that confidence in her. Even if he saw it in flashes and glimpses, he still saw the spark of a woman who could grab life by the long ears and never let go as it ran. She, the cockroach woman, was more alive down here than he ever had been in the sun of above.

“Damnit all, the comic” He remembered his bag, or rather, the comic in it. His masterpiece but also the doom of many a job and friendship, the thing he couldn’t show to anyone but couldn’t bear to throw away.

But why should he be afraid of her judgement? Why should he let a stupid hang-up dog him from his dreary existence to this great big, beautiful below. I mean, she never wrote him off as a loser when she spoke to him, and she gave him an ear whereas most people on the surface gave him the finger. It’s a blank slate, a new beginning, why not take the chance, nut up and shut up.

He turned around in the flickering light to look at Cshisk. Cshisk quickly looked up from the table and “Actually, Cshisk” he whispered, “To tell you the truth I… do have that project with me. Right by my side.” He turned to grab it and was saying “I’d be willing to show it to ya, but I wan you it’s a bit-” right before he realized it was gone.

There was yet another awkward silence between the pair as they both stared bewildered, after which she said “Funny you should mention that…” She brought the pages up, eyes as if she’d been caught with her hand in the cookie jar.

He continued, preparing to flinch as the pages or the fist containing the pages were thrown back in his face like they had been many times before, saying “Well, ah, let me give a bit of contex, now I know the violence is –ah- kind of excessive, I know it’s pretty dark and I may have –eh- gotten a bit too disgusting with it, and I understand why you might be offended by all the nudit-” trying the defenses he’d tried every time this happened right before Cshisk interrupted him

“I liked it,” Cshisk interrupted succinctly. “There’s something nice about it.”

 “Nice”? He looked absolutely baffled, as a confused “Buh?” quietely fell from his lips. Of all the adjectives, exclamations, and expletives that had been applied to those comics “Nice” was not one of them.

“Reminds me of when Daddy used to read me Steven King and Dean Koontz stories when I was a little roachette,” she continued. Rick looked even more puzzled. “Oh,” Cshisk asked “Is that uncommon children’s literature Uptown? We get most of our books from whatever drops down here.”

“I’m just glad you didn’t ralph all over the pages like some of the other people who’ve seen it.” Rick smiled. It was like a burden had been lifted, as if the

Cshisk didn’t know what “ralphing” meant, but she could guess it was a term for something unpleasant Uptown, perhaps involving musk or mucus. “Well, I think it’s wonderful.” She paused. After a few seconds, she said “You know, you’re better than you think you are.”

She was telling the truth with what she’d said. For all the literal and figurative rough edges, cracks, chips and dings he had, and my he had a lot of both, she little glints of shining steel beneath, something there but not truly shown.

There was yet another pause as his eyes widened and he blushed a little. She put the pages up and slid them over the table. “Do you want these back?” she asked.

Rick thought for a few moments, as much as about that line about being a better person as her question. “Nah, keep ‘em,” he said after several seconds of thought. They were copies, and it was likely he’d never see her again. He might as well give her something to remember him by.

Cshisk smiled “Oh, thank you, thank you, thank you!” She put her hand out to grab the papers back, only to have it grab Rick’s hand trying to push the papers back to her.

Silence rang about the table for a few moments as they held hands, the accidental touch turning into something more personal. And then a peal of “And now for our feature presentation!” sliced through the silence, as the movie began to play.

They dropped the hand hold as the tones blared, both looking to the sides, looking back at each other (Somewhat sheepishly), and then shifting their view towards the claymation opening titles for the film.

But while they weren’t looking into each other’s eyes, they were in each others thoughts. Rick thought “She… called my art nice. Nobody’s ever called my art nice before. Nobody’s ever called anything I’ve done “nice” before.”  He thought to himself how funny it was that a cockroach woman was the first person who liked his art, or almost anything he did for that matter. An entrepenurial, adventurous, generous, kind, resourceful, gorgeous cockroach woman who was the first person in a long time who didn’t think he completely sucked.

Suddenly the idea didn’t seem so funny. And the realization swirled about him that his thoughts about her may have been a bit more complicated than he wanted to believe.

Cshisk thought “Maybe this is a date. Maybe it isn’t. But there’s something there.” She’d never thought that her first date would be with a full-blooded human.

“Speaking of which, what was that dream of yours?” Rick asked, “A deal’s a deal you know.”

“Oh! I forgot about that. Well, it’s funny

“I think I’d like that. I think I’d like that very much.”

And so the movie went on and the two sat together, like a mad accordion note in the symphony of life.