Mini-Grand 5101 [Round 3: Xilyon Odyssey]

Originally posted on MSPA by Ixcalibur.

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Bartleby’s lifeless body floated in the cold water. For a minute or so nothing happened, and then it began to mutate quite violently. The process all but shredded his clothing, leaving his jeans hanging limp around his legs, only held up by his belt. His knife was forced out of his heart and slowly sank into the depths. His shirt was relatively undamaged. After a couple of minutes of heavy mutation Bartleby awoke, regenerated. His four arms were now tentacles, covered in suckers, his legs had mutated together to become a tail. He reached out and touched his face with his tentacles; it was relatively humanoid, although he noted the presence of gills; useful. It had long been discussed amongst his people whether the regeneration attempted to compensate for environment or whether sometimes people just got lucky and regenerated into a form apt for their environment. Bartleby had never been particularly interested; he just went with whatever he had at the time.

He suddenly realized that this ship was still moving, and that he should try to get onboard while he was still thankfully adjacent to it. He swam up and hooked onto the side of the vessel using the suckers on his tentacles, and slowly he attempted to scale the sheer wall that is the side of the Titanic. Even if this were not an incredibly difficult thing to do on its own, this was made more difficult by the fact that this form was very difficult to control requiring him to concentrate on using each individual sucker. If he hadn’t had to focus quite so hard on the task at hand he might have wondered how the hell octopuses cope with such impractical limbs.

It was not easy but eventually he made it, dragging himself up over the railing and onto the deck. He lay there gasping for air, too exhausted to move, not that he would have found it easy without legs anyway. Suddenly there was screaming coming from somewhere close by, he turned his head to see a woman in a fancy, though old fashioned, dress in hysterics. He tried to speak, to ask her to calm down. Bartleby was in fact having a hard time grasping that he was the cause of her distress, since he came from a culture where this kind of thing would have been perfectly normal. Suddenly there were more people around her, one of them, dressed in a fancy uniform saw the creature that had somehow made it on deck and drew a pistol. The others that had shown up, took the hysterical woman away. The master of arms waited until she had been taken back, and then pulled the trigger; he probably reckoned he was doing ‘the creature’ a favour by putting it out of its misery. Bartleby yelped in pain as the bullets ploughed into him. As he slipped back into death his last thoughts were that this was going to be one of those days.