Quoted By:
>All in
Yeah, you'll show him who's boss. Even if it throbs like hell.
>[-1 ID: 2/14]
You don't feel great after you're done, even if you've shoved Everard way deep. Maybe it's the exertion. Maybe it's Casey's watchful eyes. Maybe it's the fact that you're in a man body, something you're trying to not unpack until... ever, preferably. If you're lucky, nobody will ever find this out, and nobody will bring it up. (You know you did Rudy, but nobody saw you in Rudy!) Anyways. Squeamishness now will only get you killed or worse, so you better stick it out until you find a better body or blow up Headspace— you know, whichever comes first. Hopefully the latter.
Onwards and upwards!
—
>[SOMEWHERE ELSE]
When you're beetles, things don't hurt as much.
You're Gil Wallace. That's how you survived, by the way. It had nothing to do with grit, obduracy, any special love for life, nothing. It's because you were beetles. Talk about irony: you spent six months at a slow crawl wanting nothing but your body back, but if you had your body back you would've shot yourself. That's the other thing about beetles. You can't shoot yourself.
But back to the first thing. It's not that you always feel good. It's not that you don't feel anything. It's not that you don't feel anything physically— that's the goo, and real different. The goo dulls things. Puts the jitters on low-vol and slow-mo. Which is good overall, since you'd like to function like a regular person and not a jumpy fucking freak, but it's an obvious change and kind of distracting. (You have to imagine Pat is so used to it she forgot what real feelings are like. That's why she shot you in the face.)
Being beetles doesn't dull shit. You feel things plenty strong this way, which is why you came out of hell like <span class="mu-i">this</span> instead of normal. The difference is more subtle: when you're beetles, you have lag time. Not much. Maybe milliseconds, if you're close together. But it can't be surprising, right? Information travels slower between bodies than it does inside of one. This means you're fractionally stupider when you're beetles (sadly not enough to explain matters). It also makes your feelings fractionally slower to register, but not just slower: incremental, diffuse. In your old body, things hit you like a punch to the gut. When you're bugs, the punch lands before you feel it, and when you do feel it, it's not your gut that aches. Everywhere aches, less. Altogether it adds up to what you would've felt anyways— but it means that pain gets <span class="mu-i">abstracted.</span> If you apply yourself, you can almost pretend it's not pain at all.
(1/4?)
