CYOA – Life and Death Situations (Patreon)

Chapter 3 – warnings: beginnings of a panic attack

Rather than trust the creature and show it the knife, Jesse decides to try and calm it down first by pulling out the chocolate bar...

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Jesse unearths the chocolate bar. He takes a deep breath.

He figures offering the creature something to eat might calm it down enough – or at least distract it enough – for him to be able to free it and let it go back into the water.

There is a little part in the back of his head reminding him that it is dangerous to let it go back; that he is probably putting the lives of other people on the line… that he should maybe… call authorities (or Lúcio, at the very least), but in the end he puts his little backpack to the side and crouches down, holding the chocolate bar in front of himself and making a show out of opening the plastic wrapping for the creature.

When he glances up, he sees the eyes of the creature… man… directed at the chocolate bar. His face is stony and focused, making him look simultaneously mad and uninterested, weirdly enough.

“There you go,” Jesse murmurs as he has opened it enough to show the chocolate underneath. “It’s something to eat. You’ll like it.” He hopes, at least. He hopes he is not poisoning the man.

When he does not react other than flicking his gaze up to Jesse when he speaks, Jesse dares to come a little closer. He has to get on one hand and his knees, crawling with his arm outstretched, offering up the chocolate bar.

“Go on… take it,” he croons, slightly waving it in the creature’s face. 

He is not quite sure what triggers the man; whether he has been planning all along to just lull Jesse into thinking he is complacent… or whether the waving of the treat annoyed him – but all of a sudden the man lashes out, swiping at Jesse.

Jesse cries out, letting the chocolate bar fall to the wet stones as he instinctively throws himself backwards and out of reach. Sitting on his ass, he is staring right into the wide-open maw of the creature as it roars at Jesse. It looks like it has managed to unhinge its jaw like a snake or some shit. There are rows of sharp teeth in its mouth and its throat is just a black, hungry maw.

Jesse’s heart is racing painfully fast in his chest, thumping against his ribcage and making him feel nauseous as he just stares at the creature, frozen in place, unable to do anything for a few long seconds. Then, finally, he springs back into action and lifts his arms hectically to look at them; everything has happened so fast... too fast to let his head catch up with any pain – yet when he sees the bleeding scratches on the fleshy inside of his left forearm, he suddenly becomes aware of the searing pulses of agony pumping through him.

The wound doesn’t look like anything major; the scratches are shallow and only bleeding mildly, but there is a dark green substance smeared all around them that makes them burn like fire.

His first thought is that he’s been poisoned. He looks up, trying to see any of the substance on the creature’s sharp nails, but can’t make out anything. 

He begins to panic. Is he going to die? He thinks of all the toxins that can kill a man within a few heart beats. He stares back down at his arm, curling the other one up and pressing it against his heaving chest to try and calm himself.

He can feel himself teetering on the verge of a full-blown panic attack – frightening in and off itself as Jesse usually is as laid back as they come – when the painful burn throughout his whole body begins to subside just as quickly as it had come up.

Beneath his disbelieving gaze, the dark green smears around the wounds seem to… sink into his skin. Like a salve they begin to dry up, leaving first tacky wet spots behind, before those, too, are simply… gone. His head is pulsing painfully with an all-encompassing headache. He finds himself wondering if his panicking brain just made the green smears up in the heat of the moment.

He carefully flexes his fingers into a fist, and then relaxes them again. Everything is in working order. Even the bleeding, sluggish in and off itself, has stopped already. If it weren’t for the four jagged slashes down his inner forearm, he would have thought he had imagined the whole thing in the first place.

While he sits there, a strange feeling of vertigo expanding in his belly, the man in front of him moves.

He hears crinkling and looks up. The man has plucked the chocolate bar off the ground and is sniffing at it carefully, slitted eyes still fixed on Jesse – first his face, then his arm.

There is a pause in the man’s demeanour, then. His face might not be entirely human, but it is enough so that Jesse can clearly read some kind of intrigued confusion on it. The man cranes his neck, trying to get a better look at the wound, and Jesse reflexively curls his arm against his chest to hide it from him.

The man looks… hilariously annoyed but for some reason does not seem hostile anymore. Not friendly, either, but not spitting mad at least as he lifts the chocolate bar again and pretends like he is very interested in it when Jesse is pretty sure he is thinking the same thought Jesse is.

Why is he not dead?

Jesse takes a deep breath. He roots around his little backpack and grabs the bandana he had stuffed into it earlier that week. He wraps it awkwardly around his forearm, hiding the wounds and hopefully shielding them from any sand for the moment.

He grabs the Swiss Army knife and takes another deep breath. He is not quite sure why he is even still considering helping this bastard, but he’s come this far, he might as well… right?

He opens the knife and holds it up, showing it to the uninterested creature. The man is leaning on one elbow while carefully eating the bar of chocolate. He seems bored now, of all things.

When Jesse carefully comes closer, the man does not react one way or another. He seems like a king waiting for his subject to attend to him.

Jesse still is cautious, nervously eying the upper half of the creature, waiting for it to suddenly lash out again as he reaches out for the first tangle of the heavy net that is ensnared around its lower body.

Nothing happens other than the man occasionally turning to glance at him, so he has to let him out of his eye to look at what he’s doing. His heart is still hammering, but there’s a sort of calmness draping over him as Jesse tries not to hurt the man’s greyish body when he begins to saw at the sturdy lines tangled about it. The endeavor is shitty and then some.

The net doesn’t feel like anything he’s ever dealt with, and he begins to understand while the creature hadn’t been able to free itself even with its sharp claws. It must have gotten panicked pretty quickly.

The work is slow going, and with every minute that passes, the creature seems to get more impatient which, in turn, fuels Jesse’s nervousness. He gets frustrated halfway through and gets to sawing harder – until his blade slips. His heart instantly sinks in the split second he has, watching the blade slip down and against the man’s greyish body – but the blade simply glances off of the sturdy hide. 

Jesse glances up at him. He does not seem worried one way or another – if he had even felt it.

Jesse begins to wonder if he should have just held the knife aloft from the very beginning; the creature must have known that the blade wouldn’t be able to penetrate the thick scales, but… hindsight is 20/20.

As he works, he can take stock of the body in front of him. The abdomen is indeed an impossibly long tail; the most part of it even still lying in the grey, murky water, shielding it from view.

What surprises him most are the two short legs that he finds. They look like the fat, sturdy legs of a komodo dragon. When he frees the first, he finds himself grabbing for it, studying it in his hands, the deadly man attached to them forgotten for a moment as he spreads the toes and finds webbing between them.

Just like the man’s fingers, his short legs are adorned with wicked, curved claws.

A sound shakes him out of his thoughts and has him look up to see the man having twisted his upper body around, glaring at him with narrowed eyes. Jesse flushes and quickly lets go of the foot.

“Sorry,” he mumbles thoughtlessly. He’s not sure if the man understands his words but he does turn back and keeps on ignoring Jesse.

Halfway through freeing him, when most of his… tail… is no longer ensnared in the net, the creature suddenly convulses and throws Jesse a good foot away onto the pebbles of the beach. 

He cries out in shock and pain as he hits the ground, body already aching with what he knows will be a good batch of bruises.

There’s the sound of shuffling, and when he pushes himself somewhat up to see what is happening, he can just about make out the last bit of the creature as it drags itself back into the water, the rest of the net peeled off like a snake’s skin.

Jesse is left sitting and staring, wondering if he imagined things but knowing that he didn’t. The evidence is all around the beach: the upturned swath of rocky sand; the now empty husk of the net. The empty wrapper of the chocolate bar.

His vaguely pulsing forearm.

He slowly lifts it and stares at it even though his bandana is still wrapped about it. There is a soft trilling sound and when he looks up, he sees the eyes of the man peering at him from just above the water’s surface a good few feet away. They look cool and calculating; watching him watch the wound he has received just by trying to be fucking nice.

And then the eyes are gone, and Jesse is left sitting there all alone.

.o.

“Do you want to talk about it?”

Lúcio’s voice jerks him out of his reverie. He is staring at his forearm, now wrapped in some clean bandages after he’s got back to the HQ and told Aaron some shitty story about an animal being caught in plastics.

There’s nothing weird about the scratches any longer, but Jesse still remembers the searing, pulsing pain that had quickly spread through his whole body. He feels… tainted somehow. Weird.

He looks about his little apartment, blinking blankly at the TV running.

“Jesse? Still there?”

Jesse flinches somewhat; he has the phone pressed against his ear so hard that it hurts a bit.

“Ah. Yeah. Sorry. Uh… listen. How ‘bout we meet up? Haven’t seen your face in too long. You always cheer me up.”

He can hear the big smile in Lúcio’s voice when he agrees to meeting him.

He hangs up after a few more pleasantries, and sits for a long while at his checkered little table, nursing his slowly warming beer and thinking about the weird creature.

.o.

“Louis? Uh… We should drive out there. Immediately. The ‘bot is starting to drift too far out of our control. I don’t even have visuals anymore.”

“Wait what? Ahh fuck… Is that thing kidnapping it or something?”

“Seems like it. He definitely has caught a liking to it him.”

“Stop saying ‘him’. It’s a goddamn robot.”

“I dunno. I think he’s really cute. He has some personality, you know.”

The two scientists are hastily starting to pack bags as they bicker back and forth, nervously eying the radar and how far the little dot has wandered by now. On another screen, the last grainy picture that the robot had been able to communicate, is visible: The curious face of the sea monster, it’s algae green hair gently wafting about its face.