Utterly Mad

"What?"

The grey fog pressed in, and the voice of memory spoke out. "I'm sorry Catnip!" Someone was shouting, "It's for your own good!" Her name was L, and she was force feeding her something white and powdery after she'd been dusted with...

"It's a strange misling." whispered the voice, "Richie would never send their kind. Richie says he doesn't like them. Shush you, shush." The grey fog grew so thick that Catnip now only had the dim impression of the glint she'd caught before, and of something thin and emaciated stalking just beyond her sight.

"Who-"

"Shush you, shush, and listen." It told Catnip, not that she could have resisted. Something like incorporeal fingers was working it's way into her head, pushing her buttons and telling her what to do. Making her do what she didn't want to do. "Pricetown burns little misling, Pricetown burns and I wait. Wait for my love, wait for my Richie. He said he loved me, he told me to wait here, he told me..."

---

"We need money." Is what he told her. Rita Ortiz has been told by her lover, that he has a plan to escape Pricetown together but that they will need money for travel. Rita is a naive girl, and spoiled to a fault, but her father is outstandingly rich. Was outstandingly rich. He has fallen to the mycus, leaving the water barons fortune unguarded. Rita is infected already, but her love has a plan for that as well. "We can get medicine." He told her, but she must get the money first. She must get it and then wait for him in a certain laboratory in the lab beneath Pricetown. She will be safe there. The singing of the little tower in the room is unpleasant, but she can't really bring herself to approach it. It is a model of the howling tower outside town. The large one above hasn't run since the cataclysm, not since the power source was stolen. Rita doesn't know why they don't just replace it, if it can keep Pricetown safe from the mycus.

She is still waiting, late into the night, when she falls asleep. For a time, Rita dozes and walks in simple dreams in which she sits at the banquet table of her fathers stately house, and all she can smell is mold and blood and smoke while the food tastes of not but rot and decay. It is a dream she does not wake from until the mycus has consumed everything of her. The fungal growth has found it's way through her, dusting every inch of her in spores and mycelia, and bursting rudely from the wound between her breasts. It was not the mycus that did this. She is awake, but not alive. Her fortune is gone. What blade was it that did her to her grave? Rita knows not, but she will wait. She has no choice anyway. The model tower is too abhorrent to approach, and it is between her and her egress. If she does leave, the searing spear will find her and burn her, and she cannot have that until she and her love have escaped. There is medicine, there are ways. She is awake, if not alive, and she will see him again. So, she waits. The years roll by, and she waits. Then...

---

"Then you came." The voice of Rita speaks into Catnips mind. Catnip can feel the grip on her will weakening, something about the story is drawing the creatures attention away from her, or maybe it's intentional. In a moment, Catnip will be free and she will run. She will gird her will against further intrusion and she will run for all she's worth. She's pretty sure she knows the way back. "But ah, I am starving." Rita says suddenly, and Catnip gets the impression of that hunger. The monster approaches close, materializing fully out of the fog and showing not just an emaciated body, but something that looks as though it has lain out under the sun for an age, it's gender lost to time and mummification. Skin stretched over bone, fungal growth blooming across it's skin and filling it out in some places. Despite it's appearance, there was something powerful about it. It hurt her eyes to look at. If Catnip was going to escape, it had to be now.

One hand fell on Catnips shoulder and with a shriek of primal fear, she tore herself away and fled. In her head, the fingers leapt forward. Rita's will tried to assert itself over her, and failed. Catnip locked down, stopped thinking, allowed her mind to blank. She imagined the mass of pinkish grey in her skull suddenly petrifying, becoming solid and impenetrable. It was on this, that Rita lost her hold entirely.