Grey woke up twelve hours later, his yawn echoing with pops at his jaw.
There was dirt in his hair, a beetle crawling up his inner thigh, and a line of drool running from the corner of his mouth all down the side of his cheek. He wiped it off with the back of a wrist and blinked up at the canopy.
"Gross."
He suddenly stopped moving.
Everything felt... sharper.
The leaves overhead weren’t a mass of green anymore. If his usual sight was like a smearing of emerald, now he could feel out every individual vein and shade. He could have counted them if he had the patience, and be sure that he wouldn’t count the same one twice. They were that distinctive.
He flexed a finger and his Neural Frame answered before the thought had finished forming. There was no lag at all. If before his Neural Frame was like some special ability he had just evolved, now it fired just like the rest of his nervous system, moving like any other muscle signal being triggered.
Grey took a breath and exhaled.
The oxygen hit the bottom of his lungs and spread like a shot of alcohol. His blood carried it out to his limbs and every place it landed felt like it lit up like firecrackers. It was like he was blood doping off his own damn lungs.
He took another breath just to feel it again. Then a third.
’Fuck this is good...’
Grey sat up and stretched until his spine crackled from top to bottom.
"I guess sleep does matter a little bit," he said. "I’d sleep some more if I had some bitches, though. My concubines never put out."
"Do you ever stop?" the angel lady’s voice buzzed in his skull.
"Not really, no."
"You’ll never capture a woman’s heart if you act like this. You need to be kinder, less crude, get to know them—"
"Do I look like a virgin to you?"
The angel lady paused, and then blinked. She was used to giving advice to young people, she just kind of assumed.
"You are 17 years old, I can tell. What do you mean by this?"
"Well, get with the times lady. I don’t have any kids... that I know of, but I’ve been called daddy more times than I can count, thank you very much."
The angel lady was speechless. "... Is this what morals have degenerated to...? How many wives do you have already?"
Grey made a weird face. "None?"
The angel lady choked on air, which really shouldn’t have been possible considering the whole lingering ghost situation she had going on.
Her words started to fall out in rapid whispers. It took a bit, but Grey realized soon after that she was actually praying and he burst into a fit of laughter.
She directly ignored him, praying harder.
Grey stood up and dusted himself off, stretching out his legs and looking forward toward the safe room doors.
"Alright, should be good now."
Thi Lan. Amunet. He had to go check on them.
He had left them with Barkeep Ji, but there was no guarantee they’d be able to survive the chill of the rebirth waters. He had been holding back on those thoughts not wanting to think about the potential worst case, but he was going to have to now.
—
[Safe Room Available.]
—
"Good," Grey said with an exhale, at least they weren’t screwing him over too much this time. He pushed and there was a circuit that quickly completed. Even without his Nexis Suit, at this point his Neural Frame was strong enough to reach out and complete it himself without the bridge or convenience of a suit.
He didn’t find what he expected in there, though.
There was a man behind the counter. Another octopus, in fact...
Not the Caldrin kind, though. This one stood upright and came up to about Grey’s chin. He had a soft grey-blue head shaped like a light bulb, a face with tentacles dropping out of its jawline, and an apron tied neatly around the middle of his body which, presumably, was supposed to be his waistline... though it was hard to tell with the rest of him pretty much all being tentacle.
Four of his arms were polishing four different glasses. The other four—or were those legs—were doing things behind the counter that Grey couldn’t see from his vantage point.
Grey looked at him for a long moment.
The octopus man’s suckers all contracted at once when he felt Grey’s gaze. It just lingered for too long. Then, remembering what happened to Caldrin not long ago, the man shuddered and made little wet clicking noises.
Grey burst out laughing and walked straight past the counter without a word.
"Relax, buddy. You’re about a hundred thousand pounds too light to be a snack," he called over his shoulder.
The teleportation room was exactly where it had been before. Grey dropped to a knee beside the pad, flipped a palm, and Prometheus came roaring out of him and dove down into the circuitry.
The glyph lines lit up under his hands. He could see the whole shape of the thing now with that new clarity, every crevice reflected in his mind.
Wet feet slapped the floor behind him, catching him off guard.
"Stop! Get away from that!"
’Shit,’ Grey thought.
He had completely forgotten that not every Barkeep would be in his pocket like Barkeep Ji was. He couldn’t just casually make changes to the teleportation platforms because he felt like it. In fact, he remembered receiving a notification about property damage before. It was just that he wasn’t actually damaging anything right now, he was improving it.
But the octopus guy didn’t know that, and even given his cowardly personality, if he activated something with the Genesis System’s help, Grey would definitely be the one to suffer.
Grey felt it the second the barkeep’s authority reached out, passing through his Resonant Frame. The glyphs he had already twisted started to unwind themselves, knitting back toward the shape they were supposed to hold, fighting his hands the whole way.
’Fuck, dammit!’ Grey cursed. He needed a way out of this. He had just slept for half a day, he couldn’t afford to waste even more time trying to find a way back. ’Think, dipshit. Think.’