#chix

You can't remember the last time anybody genuinely cared for you.

The lard has piled on so thick that the memories of your past life have melted away, at least the individual moments. The cycles run fresh in your mind, however:

You'd want to do a concert. Half to pay rent that seemed to pile on every deadline, half for some desperate need to have your own individuality in a world bent on making you a cog. Some greedy middle-to-highblood would catch onto this, and sell you a spot at a venue at a increase meant to benefit them. You needed the money and hoped you'd at least break even, so you took it, put in the work, and walked out with barely more than you came in. The managers, having filled their own pockets more than yours, left you in the dust, not much better than how you started off. You'd pile at this for months and months until the respect obtained from your notoriety allowed you to make a decent living off this.

And then extra opportunities for money came. It was supposed to be easy money doing jingles for chains, but the people there were no different than the ones you met when you started your career. But you were so desperate for security that you took it. And then it took from you. The respect you'd worked so hard to earn faded away until this was another cycle you were dragged into. And then, at your weakest, they pulled the rug out from under you and made you theirs.

While you got what you wanted for a while, it wasn't the way you wanted it. Your needs were met, but there wasn't any emotional fulfillment. Nobody cared for what you did, but you had to do it because the alternative was still much worse. But then the time it took to get you out of there was too long, and...

You ended up here. The people who put you into this situation, in a stroke of cruel luck, managed to increase their earnings by putting you into a warehouse and outsourcing your food waste-disposing "talents" to every eatery willing to drive halfway across the country only to deposit their scraps into your trap.

You begged them not to do this. You scrounged for whatever neurons you had left dedicated to speech to plead for them to just cull you where you stood, for it was considered a far more preferable option then what came next.

They didn't care. They chose cruel mercy, for equipment has no say in anything. You would live another day and then some.

And now you're here. Stuck in another cycle. The only company you have is the rumbles, in all the forms they take. Your stomach, having consumed your trollish shape (amongst every other part of your body also having some responsibility) long ago, now complains, insatiable even when full. It's almost as if your very body exists to chastise you for thinking that things would be that easy. Meanwhile, if you put your whole effort into focusing, you can hear the rumbles of trucks outside, all disposing their crusts, crumbs, and whatever else the populace was too greedy but uncaring to finish into a container. You couldn't quite understand what it did, but judging from the slurry of food pumped into your mouth through a tube, it was all blended into an unrecognizable mush. (Much like you, you guess..) The mumbles that rise from your being aren't even harmonic, a sign of how far you've gone down the drain. It's a sad day when your titanic gut has more talent than you.

Beyond a shadow of a doubt, you've lost everything. You've lost your shape to what appears to be a dollop of butter with a face barely sticking out of the mass that consumes you. You've lost yourself, barely able to cling onto vestiges of the past as the memory of what your svelte but defined hand looked like when it held a microphone. You've lost your talent, barely able to muster anything resembling a tone, or a tune, or anything specific. And the worst part?

Nobody seems to care. After your stunts make you lose the respect you carefully earned, not a single person would even care to look in your direction with anything but contempt. But before you sealed your fate, this was a boon you squandered. Now you see nobody. Nobody bothered to break in attempting to save you, sympathize with your sorry fate, or even laugh at you. The cruelty of this world and the highbloods who run it have cultivated a society bred of necessitated selfishness. Tortures thought unforgiveable happen every day, and the best a passerby can do is turn a blind eye and count their lucky stars that it didn't happen to them.

A tube descends from the ceiling, as it has done before many times in the past to stuff the latest cache of slop down your gullet. You barely manage a sigh of numb resignation as your consciousness fades into the depths once more. Your waking moments are plagued with fractured regret and your unconsciousness is marred with inexplainable sorrow.

Like it or not, life went on without you. Despite fighting tooth and nail, Alternia still forged a cog out of your suffering.