Alright, let's go folks. Your trusted Narration won't be doing anything this lengthy on the regular, let alone any that would take one of your "months" or more, but we're about to solve one of your little problems in one big burst here...it just has to make narrative sense, and we're all fortunate this narrative you've followed has littered itself with so many convenient tools for a Narration of such an intellectual caliber as that which whose presence you are now graced. No need to keep thanking it! Please! One at a time, tops! But without further ado...

  The Ramblin' Evil Colorectal Polyp, which we're just going to call "Paulie" from now on, and the Larval Kidney Stone, which we're going to call "Amber" from now on, had been enjoying a pretty cushy ride in Fern's item inventory up to this point. When the grey-zoner remembered that either of these stowaways existed, they still weren't asked to do all that much, and nobody usually remembered that they existed at all, as was the inherent weapon of all multihyperparasitic conceptoids, from the humble ingrown nail (nice guy when you get to know him) to suppurating exospinal metagangrene (sexy, but a little annoying about it).

I'm not here, their concept-cores whisper to yours. Forget me, and maybe I'll just go away.

  Unfortunately, it was by this very process of antiperceptual mnemonouflage that such entities were all but guaranteed to slip through the cracks of an already ailing reality, and as Fern's consciousness had been jerked from one of her living humanthingy vessels to one of her living-adjacent slobmonster vessels and back again, the two maladies had essentially tumbled out from her inventory and landed in the microcosmic endozone of the Dead Monster Fern, and found themselves smack in the middle of the zone's control center before a certain fungoid-concept and bacterioid-concept.

  The fungus one - Maya was it? - drew her keratin saber as the two fearsome monsters manifested in her control room, bravely putting herself between the unknown threat and her mushy bacterial wife, or whatever it was that they were to each other.



...She roared, not so much with anger or fear but with the zealous excitement of anyone who always keeps a sword on them for just such an occasion but has gone too long without a reason to show off, which she twirled through the air with a series of impressive wooshing sounds of ambiguous origin.



...Maya slumped a little, disappointed that she wouldn't get to show off her sweet moves for the newcomers. After a brief pause,she gave a slow-motion nod as she sheathed her sword, in a way that said "I'm not required to listen to my wife on this, but I choose to anyway and I hope you think that makes me look cool."








...The little kidney stone tugged on the polyp's stem with one of her ragged shards, obviously distraught.






...Paulie kicked a little at the clingy kidney stone...though not nearly as aggressively as he was capable. It was more of a half-kick half-push, really, a "cat in the middle of the hallway when you're in a hurry" kind of kick.







Maya returned to the control console, retaking the reigns of the warped fern-carcass they called home...just in time to dodge another blow from the pernicious thing currently accosting their party in the Planks. Something like a giant slab of cheese could be seen on the monitor, oozing with bloodied maggots as it engaged in a rather grisly slap-fight with the Neckslob and its present company.

  A circular conversation continued between bacterioid and polyp, but you could probably already surmise where it was headed. Paulie wanted strongly to leave, but he could not leave as long as an "unknown intrusion" was keeping even this relatively humble zone in protective lockdown, and Staph wasn't willing to send any more of their crew into uncertain doom, especially before they could even find out what they were actually contending with.

   What luck, then, that they now had two entities on hand who had never been crew, did not belong in this zone to begin with, and just so happened to have an innate ability to evade perception. It was, surprisingly enough, much more Paulie's idea to volunteer his services, though certainly not by the goodness of his core. He was simply just the right combination of being very, very impatient to get out of here, confident in his ability to identify things without getting obliterated by them, and grossly underestimating the possible danger level in what many entities would consider something like a "backwater" subzone. A throwaway, podunk sort of nanoreality that not only represented something as disposable as a biovessel, but a biovessel already in the process of being disposed, no less. Had he eyes (or at least eyes he ever bothered to wear), he would have rolled them hard at Staph's suggestion to simply wait things out, or even take some backup along, and harder still as she repeated that this was only a mission to evaluate the situation and report back in one piece.

  He knew that, obviously. But he knew that, obviously, in the way of a teenager who knows, obviously, to come home exactly when their worried parents pleaded with them to come home. There wasn't really willful, conscious disregard for the worst case scenario, but just a sort of unspoken cosmic certainty that nothing ever happens to anyone that ever really validates the concerns of an uncool authority figure. Not that Paulie was equivalent to a teenager, per se, but he was definitely the kind of guy where you'd never know the difference, which wasn't unusual to entities who coasted along lazily siphoning the conceptual potential of other beings under a cloak of situational invisibility. Savages, the lot of them; imagine having to represent some kind of meat to live off something else representing some other kind of meat, when you could have evolved the sophisticated kleptoconceptual metapathology of something like, say, a Narration and bathe in the ripe juices of what it fundamentally means for anything to happen to anything.

   And so, with a heavy sigh, the manifestation of the idea of a bacterial colony officially hired the manifestation of the idea of a rectal malignancy for a quick reconnaissance mission, with the help of the manifestation of the idea of a painful urinary problem who had apparently long ago latched onto the polyp as a sort of surrogate brother.

  The journey, at least at first, proved neither long nor difficult. The two terrible medical issues were more than a match for the various worms of the subzone's putrescent wilderness, and it was in fact either Paulie, Amber, or the both of them who initiated every single violent confrontation in their path. Even if they weren't viable long-term hosts, worms were still soft, vulnerable noodles of life-concept in a wasteland of bizarre quasi-life concept, and obliterating weaker things to snack on their dissipating potential was as fun for the young malignancies as it was invigorating. The two "livled up" rapidly as they ambushed every appetizing vermomorphic biovessel in what was an increasingly circuitous path.





  The potential ramifications of Paulie's epiphany would ultimately go on to prove quite interesting for your species, but that wasn't important right now so never mind all that. What was important was that our vile little friends here were increasingly certain they could take on whatever these quaint zonal boonies might throw at them, and decreasingly interested in the intended parameters of their quest. Why should they run back to that stuffy old staphylococcus and wait around for her decision, when they could probably mop up whatever it is on their own and squeeze out of this rinky-dink stinkzone through the same crack? Even if the worms were a halfway decent buffet, almost any other zone would beat this humdrum dead-end.

Besides...the slaughter of such tube-based life was proving effortless enough that it had already grown a bit boring.

...At least, until, they noticed a rather sudden drop-off in noticeable wormsign.

The landscape of red rot, once so lively with the sounds of writhing and wriggling, had grown hauntingly silent.

...And when at last they encountered the first worm in a few dozen nanolayers, something about it seemed...off. Off in a way the two had sensed once before, countless macrolayers ago in the Hospital.

...Before Paulie could complete that thought, the worm erupted. It erupted, just so you know, exactly the way a balloon animal would if it had already been inflated to near bursting with nothing but entirely too much clam chowder, but the fool of a clown who produced the thing was dead certain that this balloon animal was still only at half its capacity, and tried to prove this point with an additional injection of entirely too much tomato paste.

From that birthday-ruining heap of lumpy wetness, there rose a shape that we all know and love.

...And it wasn't alone. Where worms once slithered the phosphorescent jungle came a heinous assortment of finned and flippered shapes that flopped, slithered, floated, or toddled around on their tails. At least one of them rolled around in a hoop shape, and for some reason, at least one of them drove a tiny little car.

Paulie made a break for it, shouting something equivalent to "LET'S CHEESE IT," except it was very old saying in the dialect of colorectal polyps that is far too obscene to repeat here. It means the same thing. It doesn't matter.

But as the polyp dashed between snapping bottlenoses and darted between smacking flukes, it occurred to it that it could not detect the itchy little vibrations of a prickly kidney stone scuttling behind it, and turned its perspectosphere only just in "time" to see Amber disappearing down the hungry maw of that first terrible dolphin.

...Was what the polyp so dearly wanted to believe. And yet, for some reason, the obnoxious wad of misformed mucous membrane found its floppy, boneless little feet carrying it in a roughly circular path back in the direction of its unfortunate companion. Images flashed through whatever constituted its brain. The countless layers spent kicking back in Fern's inventory. The many brilliant jokes Paulie always came up with as they binge-watched the drama just outside the secure borders of the bag. The way Amber snickered at Paulie's rude impersonations of the various entities the grey zoner encountered. The way they both erupted into giggling fits at her many, MANY hilarious misfortunes.

Barely thinking, barely bothering to rationalize itself, the Polyp could only utter a continuous chain of grotesque expletives as it barreled and bounced through the horrid delphinoid pod, kicking its way off bulbous dolphin melons and rolling down tails as it pursued the one with the hapless little kidney stone somewhere within its foul digestive system.

  Realizing what was pursuing it, and why, the cackling dolphin broke away from the crowd and fled, entirely just to be more annoying than for any other reason, and wove a path of destruction through the fungus-forest. It was going nowhere in particular, but eventually, "nowhere in particular" turned out to be a strange natural clearing in the fungi, where countless massive mycelial "roots" converged and fused into a large, circular depression that would have made the perfect location for a battle sequence, but we're not doing that right now, so use your imagination.

  The polyp fought valiantly, considering how deeply unvaliant of a lifeform it was, repeatedly hurling itself against a dolphin that was, unfortunately, quite a bit tougher than the worms Paulie and Amber had come to so effortlessly decimate. Paulie couldn't even do what it would normally do to an adversary with any kind of bowel or bowel-adjacent structure, since the Dolphin's mouth was not the only place it had rows and rows of horrible teeth. You might think that's awfully convenient for the one dolphin under attack by an animate colorectal polyp, but you might only think that if you still don't know a whole lot about dolphins. It wasn't surprising at all, actually. Unharmed and unimpressed, the dolphin allowed the onslaught to continue for as long as it found the futility of it amusing enough, until at last it raised its tail and hit back, gently at first, just experimentally, which was still enough to launch Paulie with considerable force.

  The polyp staggered to its little feet, wobbling as it stepped out of the furrow its body had carved in the fungus. It probably said something like "now you've done it," or intended to, but all that really came out was a gurgling, muttering sound as it flung itself forward again, only to collide with an ever-so-slightly firmer swing of the dolphin's monstrous tail. This kind of thing went on for longer than was really comfortable to even the dolphin, which felt only disappointment at having such a spongy and breakable nemesis, and made the decision to move on with its life after another quick snack.

  It stretched its jaws wide. Wide enough to tear itself an even wider set of jaws than it originally had, which was another thing you shouldn't be surprised a Dolphin might be capable of. But, as it prepared to put an end to the Ramblin' Evil Colorectal Polyp once and for all, its previous quick snack finally went as well as you might have guessed it would.

  Paulie may have struggled with dolphin physiology, but Paulie was soft and squishy. Amber was not. The dolphin's convoluted innards only meant it had that many more places for Amber's ragged shards to entangle themselves, and like all dolphins, at least 50% of its weight at any given time consisted of a fluid that was chemically identical to rancid, unhealthy urine mixed with actual rancid, unhealthy urine, so thick with contaminants and so meager in its actual water content that its consistency ranged from something like maple syrup to something like gelatinous oatmeal.

  It lurched to a stop, its teeth inches from Paulie's battered form, and froze there for a moment. It shuddered a little, unsure how it felt about the sensation radiating throughout its interior. Imagine for a moment if your body were a garbage bag stuffed full of wet sausage casings and a single small, dense bundle of razors that had been rusted together into a solid clump from soaking in all that moisture, and now suddenly someone has decided to try and drag the razors back out of the bag with the slightly hooked end of a welding torch, which is of course not quite hooked enough to make this process an easy one, and they're so caught up in the frustration of this nearly useless act that they don't even notice when they've turned the torch on.

  The exact moment that this dolphin decided it loved this sensation was also the exact moment before its rapidly swelling, oozing biomass ceased to have a capacity for thought.

Significantly spongier than usual, Paulie barely registered either the wet, crunchy rending sound or the copious soggy plopping sound coming from the space where there had previously been a dolphin, which was too bad, since they would have both been high on the polyp's list of favorite sounds to have registered.

But then there came the sound of sharp, scratchy, rugged needles clicking and scraping against one another. The sound of a very much alive and healthy kidney stone. This was a sound the polyp not only registered even through the fog of multiple lacerations, but found itself enjoying, quite shockingly, even more than the sound of any living thing rendered into slurry from the inside out...and this particular sound was stronger than it had ever been before.

  The two friends took a moment to recuperate, knowing the other dolphins would zero in on the gory mess soon enough. They debated whether to turn tail and just head back, but a curious vibration kept tugging at their minds; not the encroaching dolphins, but something else that didn't belong to the zone. Something under them.

  It was the faint, pulsing edge of a perceptosphere that wasn't worm, dolphin or malady, but very dimly reminiscent of one they had felt, at some point, while stowed away in the Fern being's tote bag. Remembering their mission, Paulie took a few wobbly steps back as Amber twirled her wicked new form like a top, effortlessly carving semicircle through the fungal mesh beneath their feet and peeling it back like a giant, mushy lid.

  ...It hadn't been the floor of the forest at all, but an overgrown canopy. The true floor was far below, and that dimly familiar vibration emanated from within a tiny, forgotten old shack.

  They had found the "intrusion," or at least, the one that wasn't a bunch of dolphins.

The road back to Staph and Maya's control center would be tricky, but they were sure they could handle it. What they weren't so sure of anymore was whether they really needed to go home. There were still plenty of tasty worms, after all. Maybe these corpse-folks could use a hand (or jagged, rocky blade) dealing with this dolphin infestation.

And maybe...it didn't really matter where they were, as long as they still had each other.

NEW: OFF-TOPIC CHAT PAGE

AUTHOR'S NOTE: Hey everybody, thank you for enjoying Awful Hospital thus far, and for your enormous amount of patience over the last few years in particular. This update took me over eight weeks while I worked my new Bug Zoo job and finished up (even more unforseen labor) on Mortasheen. However, this single page resolves an entire step in Fern's unfinished quests that would have likely taken longer than that if we did it any other way, and serves as an example of what the Narration character can do for her (and for you, as readers). From now on, when I still don't have time for smaller and more frequent updates, the updates you do get will cover a little more ground. Not to this extreme, since I realize not everyone wants to read a micronovel every time, but enough to make things flow a lot easier for all of us. The next update bounces straight back to Fern again!