"What devil did you sell your soul to for this thing Old man?" Ester muttered under his breath as he used his newfound strength in tandem with his mechanical hand to pry out the several layers of twisted metal gnarled flower petals around a stone spike denting the entire driller inwards.
Grunting as he pulled the last of the gnarled petals from its place in the ceiling, Ester let the petal clatter against the ground as he stared at his hand and recalled how the action of removing even a single sheet of metal would've taken him an entire minute at best.
And that's with his right arm doing most of the heavy lifting.
Now he only needed to take a couple of seconds to rip it off the rest of its fellows thanks to the star grey slurry Eva injected into him running through his arteries.
From a minute to a number of seconds in the 20-30 range didn't sound like much, but it was nearly twice or even thrice the effectiveness of what he was doing before he was injected with the unknown slurry.
Void below, his legs which were in a state second only to Eva's, recovered to the point that he was already up and about!
And from Eva's words, it only took 3-4 hours for it to heal his legs to their original state which was a whole lot better than the projected three days it would've taken for it to get some semblance of movement back in.
The cost of such a transformation was still unknown, but besides a desire to cannibalize Eva, there were no other side effects.
And besides, the whispers to cannibalize the girl testing out her new legs could be attributed to the hunger speaking to him again.
It wouldn't have been the first time that the whispers to cannibalize his drill mate started.
Which reminded Ester. After he checks on how Eva was adapting to her legs, he should probably find something to eat that wasn't Eva.
Food wasn't exactly easy to find on a planet where trash continued to bury what little life sprouted there in the first place. Especially since the life here grew up on eating colonies of curses and bacteria transported from the many different planets in the system.
It made for an interesting time cooking when you had to purify the food of Curses nipping at your hands and bacteria tainting the meal with nothing more than boiled water and the overheated engine surface.
As an example, that Gorcher egg Eva cooked a while back had to go through four separate processes for it to be safe to eat. Whether it tasted good was another story.
"Yo Eva, how's the food situation looking like?"
Poking his head into the Engine/ Kitchen, she glanced back before her mechanical voice streamed out. [Would you like to hear my honest opinion?]
Ester grimaced while looking at the room which was a mess of things not screwed down in place properly, the new water filter having gained a sizeable dent that he could maybe buff out.
The growth pod was a lost cause though.
"What's the verdict?" Clambering over the knee length barrier separating the rooms, Eva let out a mechanical hiss in reply as she revealed hands sticky and glistening with an unknown clear liquid.
[Well everything is tainted and fucked in all sorts of ways.] Eva wiped her hands onto a cloth while gesturing at a pile of unidentifiables. [And unless you want to eat floor weed with a side of curse and bacteria then by all means]
"I mean..." Ester eyed the pile of unidentifiables while pondering the upsides and downsides of eating the bacteria laden and floor flavored thing before he succumbed to the urge of cannibalism. "Can you kill out the Curse?"
[Nope.] Swiftly covering the pile of multicolored mush before Ester could have any funny ideas, Eva pulled herself up with both of her hands before awkwardly realizing that it was a lot harder to do when you had a pair of legs on your lower body.
[All the cooking medicine's cracked.] She pointed at the littering of glass on the ground, the faded labels of companies advertising lingerie on the medicine bottle grinning at Ester. [And unless you can whip some Aether proof medicine out of your ass, the Curse is just going to have to stay.]
Hissing as if in understanding, the black mold curse lookalike shifted over the cracked remains of a Gorcher egg, its inky like coating slowly but surely spreading to the rest of the unidentifiables before it met a similarly furred Curse but of a different color.
Hissing at the red furred intruder, the Aether infused bacteria raised its furred head right before biting at the red furred creature devouring the tic weed crackling with anger.
[Yo] Eva snapped her fingers in front of Ester's eyes snapping his attention away from the Aether powered bacteria battling it out for dominance over the Gorcher egg yolk. [Planet to Ester, do we have a read? I repeat. Planet to Ester, do we have a read?]
Ester rolled his eyes and swatted her hand away from his face. "We have a read Houston, what were you saying earlier?"
Eva rolled her eyes in response [I was saying that you've done a shoddy job on my legs. But I guess you don't care about them that much.]
"Wait what?" Ester frowned before launching his full attention at Eva's new legs that although weren't on the level of factory new should've been made from the same materials as his arm, and it hadn't failed him as of yet...
'Well maybe except when it failed me all of those times before.' Ester frowned as he recalled the latest malfunction which occurred when his arm approached the drop pod where the dead couple lay. 'Now that I think about it, it's very possible that the crash damaged the legs somehow.'
Last he checked, the nerve shell protecting the delicate innards was intact and worked well enough that outside of one replacement needed, full nervous assimilation should've worked properly.
But just because the delicate pieces seemed fine, it didn't mean that the other parts were working as evidenced by the fact that Eva's speaker was broken for the longest time due to a twisted section of nerves and blood.
Albeit it was a lot easier to check for problems in a limb when you didn't need to worry about spilling the crimson red fluid of life everywhere and killing someone.
"Sit down for a microsec." Grabbing her legs and lifting them with no concern for the woman who those legs were connected to, Eva let out a hiss of surprise.
[I was joking! Jeez Ester!] She waved her hands rapidly in an attempt to balance herself, eventually settling for pressing down onto Ester's head as he pried open the panels with his right hand. [I was just joking about my legs! It's perfectly fine!]
Ester shot an unamused look her way as Eva sheepishly laughed, her fingers curled around his grey locks of hair. [I was actually talking about what other drugs we had left before you tuned me out earlier, so I did what any normal girl would do and told a joke.
Ester continued to stare unamusedly at the abashed girl his age, her ears flushed slightly.
[Hey. It's not my fault that you took my joke so seriously.] Eva hurriedly defended herself. [You know that you're on a different level from that hack DocMod who butchered your arm modding in the first place.]
Ester pursed his lips before slowly nodding his head as he recalled the first time he went to a DocMod.
It was a couple years back when he had first lost his arm, the pain of the procedure still appearing at the edges of his mind like echoes of a past long gone.
Having traded a pound of unknown meat for a Body Mod, when Ester woke up later still groggy from the procedure, that hack of a DocMod butchered the connections between his arm and body, causing a psychic backlash to travel through the Runic Cipher to slap his mind with the same effectiveness as a spiked stick slamming into exposed flesh.
Safe to say that it wasn't pleasant in the slightest.
Growling at the recollection of the DocMod, Ester was pulled out of his memories by a light tugging of his head.
Looking up at Eva who still held onto his grey hair, he raised an eyebrow. "And what are you doing?"
[Playing with your hair until you release my legs.]
"Ah"
It's only now that Ester realized that he had a death grip on the steel around Eva's legs, letting them go and revealing small indents on its Glyph reinforced surface.
[Good boy.] Patting Ester on the head, he instinctively growled and slapped her hand away from his head as she hiss-laughed it off, skipping off to a different section of the upside down kitchen right before she got back to rifling the cabinets for anything unbroken.
Staring at Eva's back as she adapted to her brand new legs quickly, when he looked back at the pile of unidentifiables, the black furred curse seemed to have won the battle against the red furred curse, its hisses of dominance reaching his ears.
Staring at the Curse hurriedly devouring the remaining bits of curse so that it could feast on the egg yolk, Ester watched as the bolt sized colony of Aether infused bacteria slowly eating the yolk, wholly unaware of the fact that the world underneath its feet was hurling towards impending doom.
And why would it? In the curses eye equivalent, that little egg yolk was its entire world.
'I wonder if this trash planet will stay my entire world?' Briefly entertaining the thought of failure, Ester absentmindedly watched as the little black curse slowly stretched its tendrils into the cracks in the ground, soon disappearing into the ground in search of more Organic material to consume.
Snapping out of his revery, Ester watched with curious eyes as the Curse snuck into the cracks where a brand new and unknown world awaited it with danger separating it from every meal 'I guess that egg yolk didn't stay its entire world for long...'
'Heh' Ester laughed to himself in surprise at how much he was projecting onto the colony of Aether fueled Bacteria. 'I wonder what the new world for that little curse is like?'
Seeing himself in the Little Curse's shoe equivalents, Ester got up and dusted himself off. 'Welp, no use in doing nothing if even a little Curse like that guy is courageous enough to brave danger for the unknown'
Ignoring the fact that courage was probably the furthest thing removed from the unthinking colony instinctively doing what it deemed best, Ester stretched his legs and vaulted over the small wall, the small black curse waving its black tendrils in the air as the last of it slipped through the broken Drillers panels.
Right into the unknown.
---
"So are you prepared?" Ester asked while adjusting the straps of his frame and making sure that the straps weren't broken.
[As prepared as I can be] Eva replied, her eyes locked onto the Respirator locked onto her chest. The several valves humming and hissing as they sucked in air and spat it out with every breath. [How's the outside?]
"Same old same old" Ester grunted while pulling on several more layers of clothes to shield him from the harsh environment outside. "Cold as death, Violent as a drunk and Angry like I just killed their mother."
Eva adjusted the Respirator so that it lay snug against her flat chest. [You think that the giant rocket fire that Zee person was talking about made it hotter?]
"I wish." He rolled his eyes towards the makeshift sled formed from the warped metal carrying most of the things that he felt comfortable with abandoning if things got rough.
"Higher chance that the Rocket blasted a hole in our atmosphere and what little heat's still here is making a break for it."
[Mhm] Giving a acknowledging hum, Eva rechecked her belt filled to the brim with various drugs with similarly various effects. [Nothing you're forgetting?]
"Nope" Confidently replying to Eva's question, Eva swiftly shattered his confidence.
[Then how do we get out genius?]
"...."
If Eva had a mouth to smile with, the one that would be on her face would be a smirk from all the teasing she could do.
"I suddenly feel the urge to hate you."
[Bitch, you love me.]
---
1 DAY SINCE THE PLANET STARTED TOWARDS DESTRUCTION BY VOID
+++
Part 1 of the fruit of my efforts for forgiveness from my poor as hell planning
Tree