Chương 86: Chapter 85 - Pangaea, pt. 2

2 The lobster woman leaned down and asked, "You want to dance with me?" With her arms and legs pinned in place by the lobster centaur woman's four claws, Atzi nodded rapidly.

"Uh-huh!" The lobster woman let go of Atzi's arms. Then she raised her two claws to her face and smiled.

"Nobody has ever asked me to dance before," she said.

"Sure, weird lizard. Let's dance." She let go of Atzi's legs next, and Atzi scrambled to stay upright, limbs flailing. In a bid for stability, Atzi grabbed onto the woman's lower claws. Her efforts were successful, and suddenly she had an idea. Keeping her hands around the base of the lobster claws, where the wrist met, Atzi began their dance. Atzi danced very quickly. The lobster woman did not, lumbering side to side with heavy steps every few seconds.

"This is hard." Atzi hopped foot to foot as she tried to figure out if there was a better way.

"I'm sorry, I'm not very good at dancing..."

"Neither am I!" Atzi let go of the lobster woman's arms.

"I only get to do it at parties and I don't go to many of them, ha-ha-ha!"

"You don't get to go to a lot of parties?" The lobster woman's antenna drooped.

"That's so sad… We party here every week, at minimum."

"I lived in the slums! Then my house fell down and now I'm here-" Atzi blinked.

"Every week? Wow. Wow!"

"It's great fun. I just…" The giant lobster woman shuffled several legs awkwardly, crushing the earth.

"Can't dance. I mostly talk to the Goddess. I love the Forest. Have you tried her paste?"

"I tried the yellow one and it made me an idiot, and now I'm on the red one!" Atzi shouted far too loudly for how close they were. The woman nodded.

"You should try the blue one, connect with her."

"I'll do that!" Atzi looked over towards where she remembered the pastes to be.

"What happens if you eat different kinds at once?"

"Just all the effects at once. Except the purple one, of course. With that, whatever you take with it, it's just more puking."

"What does the black one do? Cory wouldn't tell me!" She thumped her tail. The lobster woman mirrored her, thumping her tail as well.

"It puts you into an unstoppable lust."

"Wow! How do I find the girls who ate it? Ha-ha-ha-ha." The lobster centaur woman pointed a claw to a group of people fucking, off to the side.

"Oh yeah, that makes sense! Have you tried it?" She raised a giant claw, and scratched her cheek awkwardly.

"The last time I did, I killed my partner."

"Really? Really?" Atzi asked in curiosity, eyes wide.

"Smothered him to death as he fertilized my eggs."

"Ohhh. Wow." Atzi blinked.

"I don't wanna be fucked to death again, sorry, I'll have to pass!"

"Again?"

"Ignore that!" The lobster woman laughed.

"Okay."

"Anyway it was fun dancing with you, I'm going to go now, bye!" Before she could hear a reply, Atzi ran off. She had way too much energy to dance slowly. She wanted to go faster, to wring every ounce of speed out of her body. So she interrupted another group, already forgetting about the shark woman.

"Hi! I'm Atzi! I ate a lot of the red paste! I've got dragon's blood so it didn't work until I ate a whole load of it!" Those gathered turned to eye her. A large wolf woman with white fur was the tallest of the group, smirking. Next to her was a purple-furred cat woman, chewing on cooked meat she held up to her mouth. A centaur woman with long spotted ears looked down on Atzi, and a goat woman beside her crossed her arms and huffed. Finally, a cheerful deer woman waved.

"Hello, Atzi. Nice to meet you."

"Dragon blood?" The wolf asked.

"That's rare… do you have any kin I can hunt?"

"You can kill my mom! Just kidding." Atzi paused.

"Maybe." The cat lowered her food and swallowed.

"Your mom is a dragon?"

"No, no no no. No. No, but she's got slightly more than I do, 'cause it was great-grandma that screwed a dragon." The goat uncrossed her arms, making a circle with two fingers on one hand, and a fist with the other.

"How did it fit?"

"No idea! I asked once and got yelled at!" The centaur laughed. Everyone laughed with her. Atzi laughed, too.

"Anyone wanna dance? Or something else? I'm having a great time!" The cat tossed her food on the ground, before raising her hand.

"Oooh, me, me!"

"Okay!" Atzi walked closer to grab her. As soon as she did, an overwhelming combination of smells assaulted her. She blinked, and her eyes began to water.

"You didn't get time for a bath, either?"

"Huh?" The cat woman sniffed.

"Oh! No, I'm an alchemist. This is just what happens from working with weird plants all day. I could bathe for three days and it still wouldn't come out."

"Ohhh." Atzi grabbed her hand.

"Alright, let's dance!" Atzi led her nearby, and began to lead her into a dance. The style which Alana had taught her. Even hyper, Atzi could work through the motions. Though the longer they danced, the worse the smell got. Atzi's senses were being overloaded. I need to stop dancing with her before my brain melts. Or maybe brain melting is good. Actually, brain melting is good.

"Hey do you wanna have sex?!" The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings. The cat alchemist shouted, "Sure!" and immediately began pawing at Atzi's clothes. - Atzi laid on the ground, sighing in relief.

"That's it…?" she heard the cat woman ask.

"Eh?" Atzi sat up.

"What do you mean, that's it?" She looked furious.

"That took less than a minute! I didn't even cum!" Atzi struck her palm against her forehead.

"Oh, right, ah-ha-ha. Okay, let's keep going!" The cat woman fixed her with a stare.

"You know what, nevermind." She stood up, grabbing her clothes.

"Nice to meet you." And then she ran off.

"Eh…?" Atzi flopped back onto the ground, wondering what just happened. Wait, am I sobering up? Things she didn't want to think about started to take shape in her mind. I don't wanna be sober! No, no, no... Atzi quickly threw her clothes back on. Then she sprinted over to the pastes. The red one's coming down, I need a new one. That nice lobster lady said blue, and I need something. Atzi scooped a big handful of blue paste, and then devoured it messily. Everything cut out as Atzi found herself in a familiar void.

She was impressed, before idly noting how similar it seemed to what she saw whenever she died. Exactly the same, in fact. Horror slowly dawned over Atzi.

"... No. No, no!" She began screaming the word over and over again, and sank to her knees in the nothingness. Suddenly, the void shimmered, and then it was filled with countless bodies. The endless blackness had been entirely replaced with one woman, copied myriad times into a sphere of bodies entirely surrounding Atzi. Her skin was a shifting, shimmering rainbow of colors.

She had six arms - two raised above her head, holding up the self above her, two linked with those on her sides, and two below that held a copy of her own head, severed. Her short, scruffy hair alternated in colors between adjacent bodies, between black and white. The head in their hands was always the opposite color. Atzi shouted in surprise at first. When she got used to what she was seeing, she sighed in relief, gasping for air as her panic receded.

"Not dead... not dead..."

"Greetings, young Lizard," the woman spoke from all her heads at once. Even the severed ones. Atzi was startled again, yelping slightly.

"H-hi! I'm Atzi."

"I am the Forest. I know of the deed you performed to help my children. For this, you have my gratitude."

"... Thank you. I... where am I? Am I still at the party? Is this in my head?"

"This is the liminal space between yourself and your god. You should be familiar with it, seeing as you are already a prophet."

"I am, but what does that mean? Is my body still there? Is it here? I don't know anything about what this place actually is."

"It is not a physical place. But yours is not as it should be," the Forest spoke.

"The blackness is wrong. There should be more here. Light, at least. Possibly an entire other world, if you or your god were adept at matters of the mind." Atzi thought about the void she was used to.

"There should be a whole world here...?"

"It depends. For my followers, they visit a forest. Yours is blank. More empty than even a newborn god should have." Atzi slowly nodded.

"That's probably 'cause she's barely alive." The Forest replied, "It is possible." Atzi sighed, arms dangling.

"I guess I'm not much of a prophet."

"Be that as it may, for your aid to my children, I shall grant you a boon. Speak your desire."

"I..." I can ask about what happened in Hasen. But this might be a unique chance.

"Can I ask a question or two first?"

"If you wish for knowledge, that may be your boon. Ask your questions and I shall deem if they would require the boon."

"It's just... the problem you guys have is Hasen, right? If you had a way of getting your old homes back without the Sostra stuff, that wouldn't be necessary, would it?"

"We seek total annihilation of this 'Hasen'. To reclaim all our land."

"And a big war with Sostra's the only way to pull that off?"

"It was what we settled upon after centuries of failure." Her voice turned angry.

"They butchered my people, even when we only tried to run from the trees they felled. We did not always fight back. We began when it was clear they didn't regard my people as anything more than obstacles and carpets." Atzi thought for a moment.

"You're a god of nature and nature is healing stuff, right? I have an idea for a boon if it's possible."

"Speak it."

"Could you see if you could help heal my goddess? She's lost her memories and she needs to sleep a lot. And... other stuff, like this place being a void."

"I will assess. Bring her out."

"Okay. Um... I only ever see her in the void, so I hope she's here.... Are you awake?" Atzi called out to the Saintess. For a moment, there was nothing. Then, the Saintess appeared beside Atzi, between all the copies of the Forest. Suddenly all the bodies of the Forest flinched back in unison, as though afraid.

"Uh, is something wrong?" Atzi asked.

"This is wrong! You must die! You must die!"

"What?! No! What's wrong? What? What did I do?!" Atzi's vision swam, and suddenly she found herself back at the party, head throbbing.

"Bugeh!" Everything else in the party had stopped. There was no motion, no music, not even a single noise. Only deathly silence as all others glared towards Atzi.

"Wh-what's wrong?" Atzi asked.

"Kill her!" the prophet of the Forest shouted.

"No!" Atzi had no opportunity to run. Countless Pangaeans surrounded her. She was grabbed by her arms and legs and mercilessly torn apart, limb from limb. - Atzi screamed in the void, in anger as much as pain.

"Why?! Why did she react like that?!"

"... I don't know," the Saintess said.

"Why don't you? Why can't you know anything?" Atzi growled.

"If you could just tell me this stuff I could have avoided that for once! I…" No longer affected by the drugs, the full depth of what Atzi had done hit her.

"Oh fuck, all those people, a-and it was... I didn't even... I didn't even find out… No, no!" She curled up into a ball and began to sob.

"... am I useless?" the Saintess asked, voice quiet.

"We both are!" Atzi screamed.

"I screwed up! I... I can't do that again. I can't ever do that again. No way. I can't."

"Then… what should we do?"

"I don't know. I-I need to fix this, I need to figure something out, I need to..."

"Need to...?"

"I need to find Jem. I... I let her..." Atzi clutched her head.

"Why did I do that? Why did I think this was a good idea? It's such a stupid idea!"

"I do not know much, but I do know I know little," the Saintess said.

"So perhaps you are the same. You did it because you did not know."

"How do I stop being an idiot? How do I know what the right thing to do is?" Atzi hiccuped.

"I bet if it'd been anyone else, they'd have figured everything out already, they'd have stopped this war, and saved Sostra, and they'd be living in a huge mansion with all the jewel beetles they can eat, and they wouldn't die in stupid, stupid, ways over and over!"

"... I don't know."

"I just... wanna lie here, I don't wanna wake up in the street again..." Yet, despite Atzi's pleas, the Saintess faded away into the darkness.

"Out! Out!" Atzi growled in frustration, "Not again... not again," as she writhed in the street.

"Get up you lazy bastard!" The old woman thwacked Atzi with her cane.

"Ghk!" Atzi pushed the cane away.

"Don't do that! Leave me alone! Let me just lie here!"

"Get out of the way! Sleep somewhere else!" The old woman waved her cane threateningly.

"Bum! Druggie!"

"Shut up! Argh!" The old woman hit her again. Atzi got up and ran off. She was frustrated. Furious. At herself, and at all the Pangaeans. She was not letting what happened, happen again. No matter what. She was going to the Pangaeans' hideout to confront Cory.