Canta stares up at her face. It looks stiff and pliant. Her too-pristine skin is like the color of wet bones, verging off from a paper white and almost moving into a blueish-gray. It makes the expressions that a human face should make as she smiles down towards him, finishing her greeting. But there is something a little muted about the movements of it all. As if the small indents on the outside of her lips don’t sink as far as they should when she speaks, as if the tiny wrinkles next to her eyes don’t compress or stretch as deeply as they should, when she blinks. As if these acts of her body were simply an imitation of something that it had once seen, rather than something that it, that she intrinsically knows how to do, as would a human-animal belonging to the natural world.

Alleluia makes an expression that he can’t quite place, as she lays her metal hand onto his face and covers his eyes. “Are your eyes still broken? Do you have to stare?” she asks, sounding somewhat annoyed and bothered.

Canta lays there for a while, as his eyes remain covered. “Are you going to eat me now?” he asks sarcastically, feeling the bones in his legs pop back into place.

“After seeing what your insides look like, I have decided against it,” replies Alleluia dryly.

He laughs, but then stops as he feels the ache in his shattered ribs. “I’m not sure if I should feel insulted,” says Canta, feeling the gnawing hunger grow in his stomach rather suddenly as the shredded thing is put back together. He feels the hunger, painfully so. More painfully than the hurting of his bones, of his tattered meat which is still patching itself together. He’s hungry.

He’s so hungry.

Canta’s eyes shoot open again, staring at the darkness that covers them. Before he knows what he’s doing, his broken right hand shoots up, grabbing her wrist. He lifts her hand off of his face and bites into the side of it.

There is a ringing in his head, it almost sounds like a high-pitched whine of steam pushing itself through a tiny hole, if only for the briefest moment, as all of his front teeth shatter.

Alleluia stares at him, somewhat surprised, but not in the least of pain. Turning her head around, she reaches behind herself into a bowl and pulls out a dead spider. Canta’s eyes, already wide open, shoot towards the spider as he continues fruitlessly gnawing on her hand. Spit runs down the sides of his mouth, as fragments of his broken teeth get caught inside of his throat.

She says something, her face signaling annoyance, as she lowers the dead spider down towards him. Canta grabs her other hand, pushing the spider into his mouth. Alleluia tilts her head, watching curiously, as he chews and swallows it, together with the fragments of bone behind his tongue. Reaching behind herself, she grabs another one from the bowl with the spit-covered hand he had been gnawing on.

Dungeon Spider ~100g Calories: 115 *Protein: 19.3 g Fat: 4 g Carbs: 1.3 g Fiber: 0.5 g Sugars: 0 g Rich in ZINC!

“I hope you don’t mind that some of them are a few days old,” she says, her voice finally reaching his mind again. She drops the next spider into his waiting mouth. “There are a few of them here, so I tried to catch some for you. For when you arrived.”

Canta lays there for a while, his body regenerating, while the odd clockwork-automaton feeds him the dead, curled up spiders that she had caught. They aren’t very nutritious in and of themselves, being small creatures. But there are enough of them that he starts to lose the edge of his cravings. Some of them are also clearly a few days old, the warm juices inside them having become cold and coagulated. But the more of them he eats, the more he appreciates even the old ones. Each and every one of them is a bounty for which he is grateful. The fuller his stomach becomes, the less tense his feral eyes become.

Alleluia had apparently caught a lot of spiders. But the woman stops feeding him for a moment, causing him to glare in agitation, as she reaches behind herself, stretching to awkwardly wind up the crank on her back again.

“So?” he asks, swallowing the spider in his now fully regrown mouth, as he looks up at her sharp features and the small bits of bronzed metal visible on the sides of the bottom of her neck where there is no ‘skin’ to cover it. Her head is adorned with what looks like a wire-mesh bonnet that holds her strands of long, fake hair out of her face. “What’s all that about?” he asks, gesturing towards her slender metal body, partially obscured by a long, dark-gray dress with white frills on the bottom and on the cuffs of her sleeves. “The metal?”

She glares down at him as she finishes winding the crank and then letting go, as it starts slowly turning back the other way by itself. “You’re so rude!” says Alleluia in a huff, looking down at him scornfully. Rather abruptly, she gets up, pushing his head off of her lap. Canta notices as she stands there before him that she is at least a full head and a half taller than himself. “If anything, I should ask you what all that’s about,” scoffs the automaton, pointing down at him. Canta, following her gaze, yelps as he grabs his blanket from next to himself and covers himself back up, rising upright to sit cross-legged.

“There’s a lot of blood moving around down there right now, okay?” he says, looking back towards the giant, broken door to his right.

“I’m sure,” says Alleluia, nudging the bowl of spiders over towards him with her boot and walking away. “I even got my nice dress dirty for this…” she grumbles, walking down and away between a row of pipes to the left.

Canta stares at the shattered wooden door, at the bent metal chains that are half-pressed in through the broken wood. On the other side, he can hear the whirring of the boss who is still present and ‘alive’. Getting up onto his weak legs, he heads over towards it. There, just in front of the door is a giant heap of rubble with a bloody smear that leads from the spot to where he was laying. She must have dug him out of the wreckage. Canta rubs his head, wondering how long that took her to do. He should try to be less rude. They’re friends, after all.

He stops, thinking about that last thought for a moment. Friends, huh? He doesn’t remember ever having a friend.

Turning around, he stares at her backside just as she vanishes into the pipes that separate the chamber. Then, his eyes wander down to the bowl of spiders still there and he dives down towards it, sticking his face into it before loudly eating the remaining spiders like a starving animal. All the while, his eyes and his gut are filled with gratitude.

Once he has finished eating, Canta walks across the chamber. This side of the space is entirely empty except for the giant door. The middle of the chamber however, is filled with pipes. Dozens of pipes, hundreds of them, all rising vertically from the ground before diverging off in all directions, giving the space above him the appearance as if he were walking beneath the crowns of the trees of a metal forest.

Flicking one as he walks past, simply out of habit, he supposes this is why she always needed a little bit of time to find him when he went to a new area. He can picture her here, running around the room, pressing her head against every pipe and listening for any sounds.

As he walks through the pipes though, he notices that most of them are engraved with drawings. Though the drawings aren’t very good, there are a lot of them. It must have taken a very long time to do. A very, very long time. Every bit of section within reachable height is marked with something and there are some other spots that are even higher up still, that she must have climbed to get to. He can’t help but notice that some of the stick figures, no, a lot of them -

No… that all of them have the same exact appearance. They look like…

Him?

Somewhat worried at this clearly foreboding omen, Canta walks through the pipes, staring at hundreds of depictions of himself, thousands of them. The details of the character are indistinct, the artist not being the most talented, but he notices that they carry every single feature of his body that he had told Alleluia about, exactly as he had described them.

Every feature.

And she is present in a lot of the drawings as well. With haunted eyes, Canta moves through this cursed pipe-forest that goes on for a little bit, wondering if he hasn’t unleashed some horrible demon into the world after all. Some creature, driven mad by aeons of entrapment far down beneath the world? Maybe it’s time to go? Maybe they both just need some fresh air and some sunlight? That should do the trick.

Soon enough, he reaches the other end and looks through the ‘tree-line’ out to the other side.

This side of the room is noticeably smaller than the other half, yet the ceiling is just as high. There are sparse furnishings that look like they were hand-made, if they could be called ‘made’ at all. The bed is a crude frame laid together out of unfastened scrap-wood that is filled with a heap of old clothes and fabric, rather than a mattress. There is, what he supposes is a chair, made out of a wooden box next to a flat section of pipe, which he assumes is the table, where the single bowl probably came from. There isn’t anything else on it now.

Canta looks around the blank-space, trying to figure out where the shortcut to the surface, that he was promised, could be. As his eyes wander, he sees Alleluia to his left, her dress dropped around her feet. Sensing his staring, she glares back at him. “What?” asks the clockwork automaton in an agitated huff. “Your blood is going to make me rust,” she explains, turning her head away in annoyance, as she picks up her dress and hangs it up over a pipe. “I’m just metal anyways,” she grumbles, apparently having taken his question very personally.

Still feeling a bit embarrassed about the odd body horror that is befalling him rather abruptly, he does his best to turn his eyes away from the extremely detailed recreation of a human body standing only a few feet away from him, as he pretends to be interested in looking at the pipes. “Thanks for the spiders,” he says, realizing that maybe he was being rude again before, by asking her about her body. Maybe that is an odd thing to ask a ‘stranger-friend’, or whatever the two of them are, about.

He isn’t very good with people or at thinking about what he says before he says it. Canta makes a mental note to work on that, much like the other stuff he’s working on to become a better person. “Sorry for being rude,” he says, running his fingers along some of the stick figures hand-etched into the pipe, probably with a rock. “You know I’ve been trying to be less dumb. I don’t think right when I’m hungry,” he explains. “You have a perfectly normal and nice body,” he says, trying to settle her insecurities and to let the conversation end like that, so that they can get to the more important topic of the shortcut.

He can hardly wait to see the surface. He’s been down here for a while, so he wonders if it’s different? It’s not like he remembers what it was like to begin with, but… it has to be nicer than being down here in the dingy, empty, lifeless dungeon where there is no food, no light, no sensations of warm touches or of the loud voices of others, right? There are no smells down here but dirt and wet.

The surface must be full of food, it must be full of colors. Ah! He’s so excited! Canta clenches his blanket tightly, wondering what he’s going to do first. Eat, probably.

Something that isn’t a spider or a slime. Maybe meat? Real meat! Yeah, that’s it! He’s going to get some meat and let it char really nice and long over a fire, until the fat on the outside gets a crunch and then…

He’s so excited and lost in his daydreams that he doesn’t even hear the bare footsteps approaching him from behind, at least not in his conscious mind. He doesn’t even notice Alleluia standing behind him, until he feels her cold metal body pressing itself against his back, her arms sliding under his blanket. Surprised, he turns his head around and looks up at her fake, yellow eyes, as she stares down towards him.

“Uh…”

“Thank you for coming to release me,” says Alleluia, her hands wandering beneath the blanket. “I’ve been waiting for someone to come and finally let me out,” says the metal person, her body filled with winding mechanisms and whirring gears and small clockwork chains.

“Uh… what uh, what’re you doing?” stammers Canta, but Alleluia simply shakes her head, smiling a smile that makes him feel deeply troubled. There’s something off about it, something about the corners of her mouth which don’t seem to stretch as far as they should, something about the cold, hard hands that don’t let go of his body as they travel, something about the crazed, unblinking stare of her terrifying eyes that makes him realize that perhaps he really has made a miscalculation.

Though that last one is perhaps the most obvious sign of trouble, looking back on it.

“You said you liked me,” says Alleluia, leaning down towards him and as she approaches with her face towards his, with her hands towards his lower body, Canta can’t help but feel like he is going to become one of the many skulls lying outside of the door in just a moment. He knew he should have asked more about that little detail. “I like you too.”

“…A-are… are you evil?” asks Canta, repeating his question fearfully, as she arrives at both places, her cold, lifeless lips on his, her cold, lifeless hands on him.

“No,” says Alleluia in a huff, sounding somewhat offended. “I’m just misunderstood.”