Ten Zero

As I bring my saw to the wall, making my best attempt to cut into the meat, my brain rejects the motion. "Oh, I have got to be doing this wrong," I think, awkwardly trying to slice in a straight line. I have no muscle memory for this; I've never skinned anything before, but even if I had, I'm unsure if it would be applicable. The motion of cutting into the wall feels almost like construction, due to the prevalence of the flesh. "It's just so arbitrary," I think, as I struggle to slice downwards. "I could just be cutting anywhere, really. I could probably even make my own tunnel, I bet. Well, long term, anyways." As I continue slicing, part of me is expecting a sign of pain, or any sort of reaction at all, but as alive as the Unum is, she makes no reaction to the cut. "I mean, I get it. I'm one out of hundreds. Can she even feel this?" I wonder, sawing back and forth. "Can she just turn parts of her sensory system off? Man this is weird."

I stand there for a moment, looking at my blade in the wall, watching the blood drip down from my awkward cut. As I watch the blood, it runs down the surface of the wall, and collects in the craggy textured meat floor I'm standing on, sort of but not quite pooling near my feet. I look at the blood for a moment, before I'm struck by a thought. "Wait," I think, remembering the glass bottles I had seen in the shop the day prior. "Oh, shit, this is... temple kuva, isn't it? Am I supposed to collect this? Does it get sold? Do the priests want it?" I pat my pockets as though expecting to find some receptacle to hold the liquid within, but of course the only thing I have on me is my badge. Finding nothing to collect the kuva with, I reach out to touch the wall, sliding my fingers across the slick surface to let the red drip over and around my fingers. It's warm, and paradoxically it sends a shiver through me as I notice. "Kuva gives you... powers or something... right?" I think, bringing my hand towards my face, my mouth slightly ajar as I do so.

As I do, however, the shifting of my weight causes me to slip ever so slightly, and it's enough to knock me out of the brief fugue state. "Wait, what the hell am I doing?" I think, looking at my hand covered in blood, feeling slightly disgusted. "Don't they feed temple kuva to the animals on the plains so the Unum can see through them or something? Was I about to mind meld with the tower or some shit?" I look for something to clean my hand with, but quickly realize there's nothing around except for the cloth of my outfit. "Shit, rags were so cheap too. I should've picked some up," I think, drying my hand the best I can on bottom of my shirt. I shift my attention back to the wall, and look at the cut I've made so far. My saw is stuck deep in the flesh, and there's a slice about six inches down, but otherwise there's nothing else. "Okay, actual focus time," I think, grabbing onto the handle of the blade.

I make a sawing motion, maneuvering it downwards, and within a few minutes, I have a cut that stretches two feet tall. "Any lower and I'd need to start crouching," I think, as I pull the saw from the wall, ignoring the vitality spilling out onto the floor. I go to place my saw back up near the top, and as I do, I can't help but cringe at the feeling underneath my fingers. "I'm almost for sure doing this wrong. It feels less like I'm cutting the muscle fibers and more like I'm tearing them apart with brute strength." Still, I don't know of any better method, and so I continue my sawing motion, until suddenly, my saw catches on something. I can feel the wires in my mind cross briefly, as I panic about my saw having hit a water pipe or electrical wire, but I'm quick to ground myself. "It's probably the golden bone material," I think. "Gold is supposed to be soft, right? I don't have any special tools to cut it, so maybe I can just brute force my way through it."

It takes more than a few minutes before I end up admitting defeat. "Okay, so either gold isn't really actually soft, or this isn't gold, or or this saw sucks the absolute most. ...or I'm just really weak," I think, doing my best to untangle my saw from the porous structure. My blade only has a moment of respite before I send it right back in, this time doing my best to cut around the material. However, this is easier said than done, and I need to take out and reposition my saw over 10 times before I'm able to finish with my horizontal cut, and the path taken around the bone is rough and awkward. Looking at my handiwork, and wiping the sweat off of my brow, I can't help but chuckle. "This is so much harder than I thought it would be," I say out loud. It's been nearly 30 minutes so far, and I'm only half way done with my first cut of meat. I start in on my third cut, parallel to the first, doing my best to keep it even in length to it's partner. Luckily, no bone interrupts it's path, and I take a step back after finishing to examine my handiwork.

"Yikes," I think, looking at the awkwardly curved cut. Instead of a nice straight line, this cut curves in towards the first one, meaning that instead of a rectangular piece of meat, I'll be ending up with a long trapezoid of tower flesh instead. I just shake my head at the hack job, then start in on the bottom slice, this time making sure to focus on keeping it as straight as possible. However, half way through the cut, I notice that the first and third slices aren't actually as even in length as I had thought they were, and so I need to recorrect to make sure that this cut actually connects them. "This has got to be newbie bingo, I don't think I could've fucked this up more," I think, finishing up my now awkwardly shaped pentagon of tower flesh. As I do, I stand up and back, before I'm hit with a thought. "Wait, why is it still attached to the wall?"

"In retrospect," I think, as I stare at the still unobtainable piece of meat, "I actually screwed this up in multiple ways. After that third cut, the meat should've flopped over, and then I should've cut it off at the fold. The fact that I didn't need to do that... ah, whatever." I approach the meat, and get the impulse to reach towards the upper left corner to try to tug it off. Instead, I realize that I have no where to place my saw, and after a moment's deliberation, choose to just place it in the ever growing pool of blood on the floor. With both hands free, I do my best to get a firm grip on the upper left hand corner, and with my feet set, begin tugging. The connective tissue holding the flesh to the wall tears in fits and starts, and I can feel more through my hands than see with my eyes that I'm screwing it up. "This is gonna be a sad scrap of meat," I think, yanking and tugging with every iota of strength I have. My grip on the meat is awkward and slippery due to my blood slicked hands, and the connective tissue is incredibly tough, forcing me to fight for every inch.

The flesh itself though doesn't seem in much danger of tearing, and as I engage in tug of war with the skyscraper, my mind wanders to consumption of her flesh. "How do the Ostron prepare tower flesh? Like, it seems sort of tough for a meal, but I've had it a bunch and it's always been really really good. Like, almost melt in your mouth sorta kinda. Is that the same flesh as this flesh? Wait, am I cutting the wrong flesh? Is that why there's no one over here? Should I be in a different area?" My hands fall free of the meat and I take a careful step back, doing my best to catch my breath. "Okie dokie..." I say in between big gulps of air, discarding the casual musings and panic my mind had been providing. The polygon of meat is now looser than it was before I had started, but it's still clearly connected to the wall, and my arms are on fire from the tugging. "Wait Spongebob, we have technology!" I mutter, as I reach down for my saw.

Unsurprisingly, it is covered in blood, and as I hold it, I feel a twinge of concern about my grip. I go to wipe it off on my outfit, my soft red and yellow outfit becoming darker with every wipe. Eventually, I feel secure enough to use the blade without catastrophic mishap, and so I pick the same corner as before, attempting to pull it back from the wall with one hand as far as possible. Then I take the saw in my other hand and do my best to get it between what I was arbitrarily defining as 'my meat' (as compared to the meat of the wall behind it). Unfortunately, I'm unable to get the saw in a position any better than 'oblique' and so with a mumbled "Fuck it", I begin carving away small chunks, forming a new, tiny tunnel that can only fit my blade. Eventually, I generate a small pile of tower flesh tartare, but my saw is able to fit vaguely between slab and wall. My blade finally in position, I begin slicing away, focusing every drop of my attention on keeping the blade as flat as possible as I cut the connective tissue.

Of course, like much of the cuts I had made before, it feels awkward and jagged, as though I'm tearing and ripping as much as I am cutting and slicing. Still, I manage to make progress, and it's about one third of the way through that I start to realize my blade is getting uncomfortably close to the surface of my meat. "Shit," I think, doing my best to correct course. "I literally knew it would happen too, and I was explicitly trying not to do that and then I went and did it anyways, DAMN IT." My dreams of a perfectly cut slab of meat are dashed into so many pieces - much like the pile near my feet - but I'm already nearly finished, and so I press on. Finally, after what feels like 8 years but is more likely only an hour, I manage to free my 20 pounds of flesh. At this point though, I'm too tired to really comprehend the physics involved, and so the second the final cut is made, the entire slab splashes into the puddle of blood beneath me.

At the same time, nearly a full second after the meat had begun to fall, I had tried step back from the meat, so that it wouldn't fall up against me and knock me over. In an ironic twist of events, this is exactly what causes me to lose balance, as I step awkwardly on a fold of flesh, slipping and falling on my ass in the tunnel. I sit there for a brief moment, desperately trying to take in air, sweat dripping down my body, my pants and the bottom of my shirt minorly soaked in blood. "Thank god it's not like... 2 feet deep like it is in the game. Also, this is fucking hard," I think, as I look at my handiwork. The slab of meat is an irregular and misshapen mess, and only half the size of the meat I'd seen being worked on at the beaches. As I examine my less than stellar handiwork, I can feel the temple kuva drying on my skin, pulling and tugging in uncomfortable ways. "God damn, I don't even have soap or a towel to really clean with once I get back," I think, taking the moment to try to catch my breath.

There's a moment as the thought passes that my brain tries to form another connection, and I can't immediately tell what it is until I get the impulse to move on to my next step. "Oh, wait," I think, looking around the fleshy tunnel. "I need a cart too. Where do I get one?" I make my way to my feet, doing my best to prevent my legs from slipping out underneath me, and once I'm upright, I start walking back towards the entrance of the tunnel. "I could ask one of the other workers," I muse, as I pass them on the way out. "I won't do that, cause eww talking to people, but I could. I might need to, if I can't sherlock it once I'm out of here." Reaching the entrance, I feel a subtle temperature drop stepping out into the hallway itself, but before I have a chance to acknowledge it, I see a worker pulling an empty cart towards me. As she approaches the entrance, she gives me a wave, and says, "Something wrong?" I just shake my head. "No, I am just on my way out to grab a cart."

"Ha! You're either hungover or it's your first day," she says with a grin on her face. "Yea just go ahead and kill me now," I think, with a smile on mine. "Yup, you caught me. It is my first day. Could you point me in the direction of the carts?" Still chuckling, she points to a door roughly 60 feet down the hall. "They're stored in there. Just grab any old cart, there's no priority or anything," she says, as she maneuvers her way past me. "They get restocked by workers later, so no need to worry about bringing it back after you're finished with it." I just nod my head, mumbling a quick thanks, already making my way over to the storage area. I open the door to the room, and other than the sea of nearly identical carts, the room is just a square box. I head in and grab one, following the path of the woman, and eventually renter the tunnel, noticing a slight temperature increase as I do. "Oh wild, it is warmer in here."

I do my best to drag my cart over the bumps and crags of the tunnel floor, the wheels occasionally slipping and sliding over the slick surface, as I approach my worksite. "This shit needs crime scene tape; this looks less like a work site and more like the site of a massacre," I think as I reach my flesh pile. The misshapen slab is barely identifiable as a one that could be sold in the market in Cetus, and the chunks of meat from my hack job litter the area, indicating my lack of skill. "Oh shit," I think with a spike of awkwardness. "I never saw the lady on the way in here. She for sure walked past this. Ohhhh mmyyy gooodd there's no way she didn't put two and two together. That's so embarrassing." Doing my best to shove the feeling into a box, I bend over to pick up the meat and throw it into the cart, making sure to bend at my knees.

As I do so, I look at the amount of space taken up by the slab, and mentally compare it to the images of people pulling carts piled high with their handiwork. "Shit," I think, somewhat despondently. "I'm not even vaguely close to hitting that. How long did this take me? An hour maybe? If I get like 8 to 10 more of these, I won't even get close to filling the cart. If every slab is like this I'd literally need to be here all day." I take a moment to consider my next course of action, immediately discarding the small pile of chunked meat settled near my feet. "I need to do more with less. I need bigger, deeper cuts. I need to be more precise, and... honestly, I might need to ask for help." From my position in the tunnel, I can't immediately see anybody else, but most people I had talked to seemed generally affable, so I'm sure that someone nearby would be willing to give me a few tips.

"Although... I'd rather not, if at all possible. I'll... maybe try it myself a bit more. See what I can learn on my own before bothering anyone else," I think. There's a moment of self reflection as I stand there, saw in hand, as I stare at the gaping wound my work had left. "I'm making up excuses to be a loner. ...but that doesn't change the fact that I don't want to talk to a stranger. I get at least today to be emo, but by tomorrow, if I'm still whiffing it, I have to reach out to someone." With my mind made up, I stick my saw deep into the wall, as I make a new incision, dragging the saw down much like before. The movement still feels awkward, but maybe a fraction of a hair less than before, and that's enough to convince me to keep going. An hour later, and I have a whole new slab, not all that dissimilar from the first one. An hour and a half later, and another slab is created, this one better than the first by some small amount. On and on I go, making slight changes as I work, losing myself in the repetition, doing my best to improve with every cut, deep inside the innards and flesh of the Unum.