THE IRON MAIDEN

[ Do you need a de-worming bath? For hypothetical and emotional worms like these ones it is more or less a regular bath, but applied with a companion's gentle touch and care. ]

-- Distant and scarce but ever yours, @tacetnix

"It's a good team to be part of! I'm never declining a good well that sucks. If that sentence gets out of you it probably did suck."

"But the rest... oh, you know the rest! Most likely answers are, no I didn't do anything about it, I buried it unenclosed under my heart and now it's spread everywhere like glass powder in my bloodstream and eating me alive, bit by bit, I can feel infinite minute not expendible parts of me going missing, and it writhes, and it burns, and it hurts, and it hurts, and it really does suck. But I love the worms! I often don't need an emotional bath. I love the fact that they're mine and that it's me they're feeding upon. I like the hurt. It does not feel like anything but itself but it's not bad, you know? Sometimes you want this. You really want to be devoured by it. It's all yours. Breathlessly yours. Armfuls of yourself perforated by it like red wet moth-eaten clothing and slowly dripping, shredding further. But you know you can take it. And if you can take it it's yours. It's not bad. It's really not. And it's mine. It's alright. I'm alright. I promise!"

---- "You- always determine the fastest way to say the most concerning things. I quite love that about you, in fact. Every time I see your brilliant and smiling face, I somehow learn new and intriguing ways that I can be taken unawares. Each day is a new exploration into concepts arranged in matrices made to turn spoken words into unspoken worries."

She speaks quietly, voice hoarse, yet trained not to strain as little as she can manage. And within that range, honed from decades of living and communicating with human beings, Mary finds herself making room to uptick a fraction of her pitch upwards. A show of concern, in her voice.

"So I shall do you the favor of nodding along, charting your words in my books, and musing on the strings of your abstract innards when I have nothing better to do but wait. For this is what a companion is for, no? Massaging the worm-eaten-yet-standing cadavers in the shapes of their friends and loved ones. Truly, only in Yharnam do we have such pleasantry."

This cute little critter isn’t AI-generated. Meet the hairy horned dorid (Acanthodoris atrogriseata.). Found in intertidal habitats in the Northern Pacific, including Washington state’s Puget Sound, this species grows about 1.1 in (2.7 cm) long. The hairy horned dorid is a nudibranch—and it’s just one of the more than 2,000 known species of these soft-bodied marine molluscs!

Armored Trooper Votoms

She is quiet for some time. Eventually, her hand raises above her head. Her voice comes out quiet and hoarse from beneath the woman's brimmed hat.

First Proposal: Anxiety.

"I would accept a fair number of my late liege's afflictions were in fact rooted IN anxiety, but I do not believe his scaleless status was caused by it. Unless... he was anxious about something and suffered dragon pattern... scalelessness..."

He turns around and places a pin in a cork board under a card labeled 'anxiety'.