the circulatory system\n\nBorn gone. Instead you have the Small Ones marching through your body in at the steady and pleasantly quiet rhythm of a washing machine. The Small Ones are helpful and small and hard workers, not unlike yourself. Your body is a hive to them and they will strip the flesh or nearest equivalent from whatever you feel like and do their best to deliver it back to you in a form you can give to your friends who might be currently lacking in it.\n\n[[Back|Removed]]

[[“You can’t.”|highway]]

Your heart doesn't beat, so you aren't very warm and there's no insistent thundering under your skin, but your blood marches along to pleasant gentle rythm, and you're soft and you still have lungs so you sigh softly and without a stomach you don't make embarrassing gurgles. The Ghoul runs her fingers through your hair as if she will never get tired of it.\n\n[[You fall asleep and she stays with you even though she can’t sleep.|Impossible Mountains]]

Nonhuman life still exists in the Dusk Jungle, but it wants nothing to do with people. It’s not so bad if you cover the Kid with a breathing apparatus and a suit to protect her skin, even if she looks kinda funny while her big sisters blow the deadly spores like dandelions and curl up in the mushrooms, enjoying the privileges of being machine undead. It’d be perfect for everyone but the little one if all the species there were smart enough to not try eating them\n\n[[Crash]]

Trash Ghoul\n\nGrown in the trash wastes from a positronic seed, the ghoul grew from absorbing ambient discarded garbage and memories into a generally human sort of thing. They have a general humanity instead of specific memory, which leads to vague identity and ideological intensity, and are born ready to die for everyone.\n\nA quick-burning firework of magic and greedy flesh.\n\nTheir brains form before their bodies and their flesh more or less perfectly conforms to their consciousness so they’re super fucking hot and it’s really easy to hate them for it.\n\n[[Back|Removed]]

You're [[Removed]],\n\nwhich can be sweet.

In The Impossible Mountains, the world bends beneath the moon. The peaks twist and curl in upon themselves in agony as the moon coaxes them to betray the earth. The moon teaches the people here a strange gravity, a mad gravity, and it frees their bodies to pursue other shapes, longing and reaching and stretched and spiraling.\n\n[[Crash.|fight2]]

There is so much to your body that now you want to know and the ghoul is teaching you all about it, all about the things you never knew it before, and now you know them, she is showing you so clearly, how every bit of your body feels something so precious, how actively your body lives, that it really belongs to you, and you can be pulled apart like a blossom as she lists the details of your beauty.\n\n[[She holds your hand while you spend the rest of the night regenerating.|Impossible Mountains]]

Dusk Treader A attacks by R. Smoke\n\n40 damage to Removed.\n\nRemoved is poisoned.\n\n40 damage to Ghoul.\n\nGhoul resisted the poison.\n\n0 damage to revenant.\nRevenant is immune.\n\n80 damage to Kid.\n\nKid is poisoned.\n\nRemoved used Cleaner.\n\nRemoved was cured of poison.\n\nKid was cured of poison.\n\n120 damage to Dusk Treader A.\n\nGhoul used Marm. Fires.\n\n97 damage to Dusk Treader A.\n\nDusk Treader A is stuck!\n\n98 damage to Dusk Treader A.\n\nDusk Treader A fell.\n\n[[Victory.|Dusk Treader A fell.]]\n

Removed

Humanity is liability and what a relief it is to not have it, enough to assuage the guilt of shirking your duty to be one. It's impossible to not feel a little pang in the accusatory stares of strangers who don't know the first thing about you, but your removed organs will serve others much better than they ever did your body, and what's left of you is a more complete existence than it ever was fully assembled.\n\nYou're missing the [[heart]], the [[digestive system]], and the [[organs of generation]].\n\nYou and your [[older sister]] and your [[younger sister]] have a restless [[Kid]] who must be kept safe until she dies. This place isn’t safe. You’ll take her to the ocean where we ride boats between the skyscraper groves and watch the jellyfish dance and glow in the night.\n\n[[And it's time to go.]]

Heirloom Revenant\n\nAn AI knight handed down from generation to generation, her ghost persists long after her machine body has rusted to the red scrap that clings like dust and cobweb to her shimmering soul. Spending a few thousand years caring for living children has worn all the softness off her patience and her body.\n\nA super-psychic with no flesh to harm.\n\nShe is hilarious and exhaustingly mean.\n\n[[Back|Removed]]

The highway has no end and there is no reason to be kind to anyone else on it. There are some things in this world you just can’t fight, and they are better and stronger and less broken than you. Such things are hungry and want you to care about it. It’s best to ignore them if you can, spite them if you can’t, because if you try to fight them you’ll never win.\n\n[[Crash.|fight3]]\n

Kid \n\nShe’s not grown up, so she’s as human as a question mark, a tamagotchi, a chao egg, with three busy sisters glittering in the corner of her eyes suggesting answers. She’s a good girl, which has you worried, but maybe she is just waiting. Thankfully, she is ten billion times smarter than all of you.\n\n[[Back|Removed]]

the stomach and intestines\n\nUnacceptable corruption (literal). When you were little it was okay but you can hardly remember what it felt like when it wasn’t torturing you, and what a relief it is to not have to eat anymore, a small need to be free of. You inject nutrients or use the Small Ones, the tiny machines who march dutifully through your body. And bonus, there’s not much left inside you so it’s not even very inconvenient if you get stabbed or whatever.\n\n[[Back|Removed]]

“How can you be sure?”\n\n“About?”\n\n“Anything.”\n\n“I’m not.”\n\n“But you don’t act like it.”\n\n“Are you sure I’m not still doubting?”\n\n“If you are I can’t hear it.”\n\n“I’m keeping it safe then.”\n\n“The doubt?”\n\n“And myself.”\n\n“And yourself?”\n\n“And you.”\n\n“And me?”\n\n“And Ghoul?”\n\n“Not her.”\n\n“Why not?”\n\n[[“Okay her too but I’m not gonna let you get us stuck in a rut.”|highway]]

Words by [[Aevee Bee|http://patreon.com/mammonmachine]]\n\nCSS and UI design by [[Lulu Blue|http://thosewhowearblue.com]]

Lycanthrope A unfolds the true form and attacks with Uzumaki Fingers.\n56 damage to Ghoul!\nResisted Mad.\nGhoul counters with Rend.\n50 damage to Lycanthrope A.\n\nRemoved attacks by Spinal Siphon.\n\n330 M damage to Lycanthrope A\n334 M damage to Lycanthrope B\n383 M damage to Moon Masher A\n\nMoon Masher A uses Dance…but it failed!\n\nNot enough MP.\n\nRevenant attacks by Dk. Dream.\n\nLycanthrope A fell.\n\nLycanthrope B fell.\n\nMoon Masher A fell.\n\n[[Victory.]]

Thirst-tortured Ghoul attacks by Dehydrate.\n\n323 damage to Ghoul.\nThirst-tortured Ghoul recovered!\n\nGhoul attempted to run.\nCouldn’t get away!\n\nRampant Revenant attacks by Brain Splicer\n\n167 M damage to all.\n\n167 damage to all.\n\nRevenant attempted to run.\nCouldn’t get away!\n\nRemover used Thief.\nRemoved resisted the attack.\n\nRemoved attempted to run.\nCouldn’t get away!\n\nAdult attacks by H. Arts.\nKid repelled the attack.\n\nKid used Gate.\n\n[[Got away safely!]]

Hopefully you’ll be there tomorrow. The Ghoul and the Revenant are watching while you help the Kid get ready for sleep. You want to dive in the sea, pick polished stones from the shore, snuggle in the quiet shallows and watch the jellyfish glow. But it doesn’t feel like you’ve done enough. You hesitate as you brush her hair. She will be okay, of course she will be. You have been as good an immortal machine undead teacher can be to your student. You’ve taught her about life and machine life, death and machine death, the human and the inhuman, the thinkers and the animals, the born and the never born. You teach the lessons of the body and she learned from your discoveries how it is possible to force a body to function like a soul, and now that she knows it is up to her to do something about it. But there's still so much more. \n\n[[“Flesh and synthetic organs alike are defined by their execution of a function, which the root name refers to. A stomach is defined not by its make or model or year but because of the function it executes. Living or dead, life or machine, understand that the names you have given are not to be taken away. Using the default equipment and its definition is a choice you can always rescind. Your body will betray you first, remain loyal only to the functions you desire from it.”|end]]\n\n[[“We’re on your side, always. I know you won’t believe this coming from me, but I’m going to say it anyway. Everything about you is valuable and powerful and that can’t be taken from you. It will always be there, when we’re gone and even if the world tries to bury it. I know you know that. But I really mean it. It's the most important thing in the world that you remember this.”|end]]\n\n[[“We love you.”|end]]

Nobody gets to sleep in the Impossible Mountains but everyone still needs to recover the HP and MP so you all wait in a circle and there’s nothing to do except talk. So you talk. The ghoul and the kid tell each other stories and they’re very sweet, but it’s awkward between you and the revenant, it’s always like she’s making fun of you, like no matter how old you get she’ll always be one thousand years ahead of you, and of course she will but also aren’t you the second oldest, so why are you so far away from her? It hurts to not get it and she won’t explain it. But no matter how mad you are at her you still trust her, except you just want her to answer\n\n[[How can you be sure?]]\n[[How can I be sure?]]\n[[...]]

“I am surer of my self than I am of them and how could I be honest and fair to myself if I was not standing up for my truth? There’s a moment where something you are as sure as you can be of can be taken away, and are you able to risk them taking it? Are you truly sure? Are you the sort of person who has only kept anything because no one has tried to take it away? It’s not okay for them to take it just because it is a broken thing. All we have to hold on to are broken things. There is a flaw to every thing and if you let anyone who finds it to take it from you will only live at the whim of the clever. [["Give yourself enough credit to live."|highway]]

“Is this okay?”\n\n"ahhhh...it's a little..."\n\n“How about—is this okay?”\n\n“Ahh!”\n\n“More or?”\n\n“More like….this.”\n\n“Here?”\n\n“Let me show you—”\n\n“Here?”\n\n“———————!!!!!"\n\n"Oh wow."\n\n"Keep on...there...it's so...sweet."\n\n[[You’re too sleepy to keep having sex but too restless to stop and spend the right of the night getting as close as you can to one or the other.|Impossible Mountains]]

“Thanks, Mom,” she says, and she laughs, not because it’s a joke, but because it’s not.\n\n\n[[End.|true end]]

the junk\n\nUnacceptable corruption (metaphorical). Not being able to give birth feels complicated, even though it shouldn’t. This is something you should be over. You’re Removed, not Bestowed. You’re grown up and won’t long for impossible gifts like a child. You will be happy enough with just the wholeness that comes from discarding what is unberable.\n\nYou can still have sex, and it can be very nice even if you have to be patient and explain how it all works.\n\n[[Back|Removed]]

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Camped in the shed skin of an insect you watch the pollen slowly fall like snow outside. The Revenant is guarding the nest they have burrowed for the Kid underground and you and the Ghoul can enjoy your translucent apartment to yourselves. There’s no day or night in the phosphorescent jungle: just dusk forever. You’re leaning on the Ghoul, because you’re warm and you want to be warmer and she has leaned into you too like she is warm and she wants to be warmer, and after squirming for a little she catches your eye.\n\n[[Hold me.]]\n[[Have sex with me.]]\n[[Rip through me.]]

Aevee Bee