Sick Nib #1
Story Time: A (mostly) weekly update of our exquisite corpse story. Each section is written in turn so please forgive any major or minor blunders, we’re just having silly fun after all and hope you do too!
One would think there would be more to life than dreaming about sausages. But in order for one to think that one must have been born before The Great Upset. Unfortunately for our hero, Sick Nib, he was born right in the middle of it. His mother, the virgin butcher of Lottatrees Wood, hadn't meant for it to happen and, if she was feeling really honest, wasn’t sure exactly how it did happen. One minute she was smoothing minced porcupine into a pig’s intestine and the next she was stuffing raw link sausages into the screaming, bloodied face of a half-orc baby. It was in this shocked state that she resolved to raise her son in secret. Not least to protect him from the destruction happening around her but also because it was generally bad business for virgins to have children.
Sick Nib—incidentally, as soon as he understood his name, he invented explanations in answer to the questions he imagined his friends would ask, when he imagined them—Sick Nib thus led a solitary childhood, yet not a lonely one, for his dreams accompanied him. Of sausages, of course, yet just occasionally, when the insistent hunger of his nature was quelled he would be allowed to venture further. To a room, luxuriously wooden, lined with shelves, topped not with spices but books–fancy that! Metres and metres of them, which twirled like the staircase he ascended. What did it contain, he wondered, this particular book which he sought? A recipe, no doubt, for endless sausage, that would be nice, nice enough to run, which he did, to outpace the growling pursuit. Yet the tome was up ahead, delectable and dripping, as always. And as always, Sick Nib jolted awake and padded to the kitchen.
“Sir?” Sick Nib said as he approached his mother. A greeting enforced since his youngest years in case an errant customer was within earshot - which rarely happened as there were rarely any customers.
“Dreaming again?” She doesn’t turn but swings a dull cleaver.
Thump.
Sick Nib sighed as he hopped on a stool with a soft smile. “Yeah, I almost touched it this time. It's so, so beautiful.”
Thump.
“Humph. Ain't no such thing. Beauty is a subjective interpretation often promoting an indoctrinated bias that serves the capitalist powa structuras in order to continually exploit the advancement of the majority working classes. I didn't raise you to succumb to the propaganda of the ruling elite!”
Thump.
Sick Nib’s eyes rolled back and continued around two full turns before he groaned.
“The Great Upset ended years ago! There's no enforced anything because there are no folk around to think or do anything!”
Thump! Thump! Thump! Thump!
“Fine! I’ll go check the traps...” Sick Nib slips off the stool and drags himself to the back door.
