Quoted By:
<span class="mu-r">“I’m gonna try and make first contact. Wait here.”</span>
You slowly began to walk over, carefully stepping over thick roots and slithering vines, sweeping past your feet like snakes. You tried your best to ignore them, and to not make any sudden movements. You weren’t sure if this thing could tell the difference between you and the zombies, and you didn’t want to give it any reason to think of you as a threat.
The plant-creature’s blue eyes stayed fixated on you the entire time, and you tried your best not to meet its eyes for too long. You remember seeing something in a movie about wild animals not liking eye contact.
Instead, you let your eyes roam about the room. There were far more bodies in here than you’d initially realized. There must have been a lot more zombies roaming around in this wing before you came along. You tried not to think about whether all of these corpses had been undead or living before they were killed and made into fertilizer for this thing’s twisted garden.
At some point, you found yourself unable to move forward. At least, not on the ground.
Your Spider-Sense flared up at just the right time, allowing you to avoid being bitten by a bound, decomposing zombie. The floor was lousy with them!
<span class="mu-r">“Ugh. Maybe I should’ve packed a shovel.”</span>
You took a step back, jumped up, and stuck fast to the ceiling, continuing your steady advancement towards the plant-creature. This involved more than a few uncomfortable brushes with its slithering tendrils and the mushy moss that had clung to the ceiling long before you arrived. Your advance was forcefully halted, however, when one of those vines wrapped around your waist. You stopped dead in your tracks, waiting to see whether you should try to defend yourself or let it do its thing. After about a minute, it loosened its grip a bit. When you tried to move forward again, it compiled around your waist again and held you firmly in place.
The message was clear.
<span class="mu-g">“I only trust you enough to get ‘this close’.”</span>
Instead of trying to fight it, you decided to descend on a webline, meeting the plant-thing on eye level, albeit from an inverted point of view. Slowly, you reached your hand out towards it, silently praying that this thing didn’t have any hidden teeth to bite it off.
In response, the creature extended a tendril to meet your hand, allowing you to touch the tip of its tendril with your index finger. It flinched back for a moment, but then became more brave as it went back in to try again. You suspected that this thing hasn’t experienced a friendly touch in a long time.
Without warning, the creature’s tendril wrapped around your wrist and started to slowly creep up your arm. You just barely managed to stifle a gasp, and tried your best to sit still during the uncomfortable process.
(Cont.)
