“It is a great day to be alive!” Steven said despite how he’d woken up under a bush twice, the second time littered in stab wounds that had been covered by metal stitching. It was a special type of cognitive dissidence that Steven had. He had a unique way of filtering out the bad and focusing on the good that went to such an extent that it drastically lowered his life expectancy. But even Steven, as far gone as he was ignoring negative thoughts, could occasionally see parts of life that needed improvement. In essence, though it had been freeing to an extent, Steven now desperately wanted cloths. He didn’t have much memory of his old life, but in it Steven was the type that didn’t even like walking the little hallway from his room to his bathroom naked. Not even with pants on. The man got fully dressed every time. It was a huge waste of time if you thought about it, maybe weeks all added up.

“Mr. Beast, sir, may I have a second of your time?” Steven asked the Beast, who did vaguely understand out of all that that Steven wanted to get his attention, “Do you happen to have any more of those?” Steven pointed at the Beast cloths; the Beast remained focused on Steven’s hand. “No, not my hand look, where my finger is pointing. No, don’t look at my other hand… this is just, these-“ Steven reached out to touch the Beast’s rags wrapped around it’s body when the Beast started to growl. He immediately drew his hand back and checked his body for stab marks, just in case.

“This is going to be a whole thing, isn’t it?”

Forty five minutes later, after the most stressful game of Pictionary of Steven’s life, he was so close he could feel the cloths he’d be getting.

“Yes, you see my finger, you notice it’s pointing at you, but not just you. I am pointing at the part of you that is your cloths, yes that’s- no we’re not done, stay with me. Okay so this has to do with me, and your cloths, NO no- I’m sorry, please keep them on. I’m not mentally prepared to see what’s under those. Let’s try again. Me. Cloths. Need. Not yours.”

Steven could tell, in that moment, It clicked. The beast pointed at Steven, up and down at how naked he was, and then shook his head. On some level, that hurt Steven’s feelings, but he needed to see where this went. The Beast then pointed at himself, and nodded, rather smugly in Steven’s opinion, but then shook his head slowly. Then pointed at a rag around his lower body and nodded.

There were other ways Steven might have taken the implication of what the Beast had implied last, but he remained positive.

“Yes, exactly that!” The Beast smiled and wandered off. After a quick second of hesitation, Steven followed the strange creature through the foreign woods, and a few minutes later found himself hiding a distance away from two deer with oddly branching horns. He looked at the beast, who was now sporting two lumps of metal, that were longer, sharper, and more angular than he had remembered.