Chapter Text
Where is my pain? Dave wondered. He felt his chest to see if any of the bullets had lodged there, but there were none. He ran his hands through his hair wondering where his headache, fatigue, and Jade’s bullets had gone. He pinched and prodded, slapped and smacked, hit and bit himself, but felt nothing. Where is my pain?
After he finished his self-examination, he observed his surroundings and noticed that he was in a room he didn’t recognize. There were strange cards, red and yellow bear things, and posters with foreign writing plastered across the room. Is that Arabic?
When he looked out the window, he only saw sand. Piles and piles of sand. Wow, fuck, do I have to spend eternity here? Seeing as there was nothing else to do, Dave promptly sat down and started drawing a comic mocking his current situation.
“What is that?” a raspy, quiet voice said. Dave whipped his head around, scanning the room for the source of the voice, but to his avail, he saw nothing. “Uh, it’s not very nice to call my host plushes “shitty.” They’re actually pretty cool!” Dave fervently searched for the person talking, but they, once again, eluded him.
The voice continued, “Uh, not to critique your comic or anything, but Pupa Pan isn’t for children. It’s actually a movie for all ages.” It trailed off at the end, but still effectively sent chills down Dave’s spine.
“Hey man, I realize that you’re having fun creeping me out and shit, but it’s time for the game to stop and you to come out.” His voice quivered at the end, and he hoped that whatever demon spawn was talking to him wouldn’t notice.
It didn’t. “Oh, you can’t see me? Uh, sorry about that. Just give me a second.” Dave heard rustling around the room and a few miscellaneous items being picked up and tossed around.
“Shit man, you should’ve told me that you were hanging bare pickle out here. I can feel myself getting the vapors just by the thought of being in a room with a naked man. I’m a delicate flower, you know.” He rambled on and on, waiting for the person to materialize—is it even a person?I
Although in reality he had only waited a few minutes, those few minutes felt like hours to him. He wasn’t sure if it was because he was losing track of time for once in his life, or because all time seemed to stand still.
The nervousness of the voice in the distance reminded him of someone who occasionally tried to pick a fight with, although doing so very unsuccessfully—when he was younger, Dave had talked to a troll. Or rather, he trolled a troll attempting to troll him. To Dave, the reverse-trolling had occurred long ago, but it as still fresh in the troll’s mind.
Wait wait wait… am I actually going to meet a fucking troll? He had long wondered what had looked like, and he prayed to God that they weren’t too monstrous—he wouldn’t want to spend eternity or something with something he can’t bear to look at.
The voice materialized, and he found himself looking at what seemed like a grey boy with cartoonish horns—in both length and color. At first glance, it seemed like the boy was wearing metallic pants, but closer inspection proved him to have metal legs. In fact, closer inspection showed that they were not very alike except for their shape. The boy’s skin was a strange mixture of scaly and not, his fingers had talons on them rather than nails, and his teeth seemed too big and too sharp for his mouth—as if every time he used his jaw, he shredded his mouth.
Dave avoided looking at the troll’s eyes. When he first materialized, Dave caught a glimpse of the blank eyes, and—quite honestly—they scared the shit out of him. All signs of life gone from the eyes—all the little idiosyncrasies that he could notice in Jade’s eyes, all of the ones he hid behind his own shades just gone. Kaput.
“So, uh, I guess you some questions?” the troll rubbed his arm slightly, tilting his head as if he himself were the one asking the questions. “Like, um, why you don’t fee any pain?”
“Yes, as a matter of fact, I was just wondering that. What the fuck happened to my pain? One moment, I’m being pelleted by goddamn bullets and now even when I try to fucking pinch myself, nothing. Am I fucking dreaming right now?” His words tumble out of his mouth like water to a waterfall.
“Kind of. You’re dead, actually.”
Dave stares at the troll incredulously, looks for a mirror, and lowers his glasses. Those blank, lifeless eyes stared back at him. He waved a hand in front of his face. He could see the hand, but there were no pupils that followed it. He snickered a little, reminded of Roses’ “magic” cue ball which she claimed held the secrets of their universe and the next. Except his eyes had no secrets in them. The little details in his eyes that he had tried to hide were not there.
He dropped his shades. No use for them anyway.