#timps

it’s tim boyyyy

today i am learning how many tim simps there are

bonus crack for the tim simps:

It was a good night to ride. This far away from the main streets didn’t get much traffic this late, and the wind whipping past was just loud enough to drown out whatever you were trying to avoid.

He picked up a knife from the table and start cutting off his shirt. About half of it came off. The rest stuck to him, embedded in the countless knife wounds like some grotesque latch-hook wall hanging. He gently probed around a couple of the wounds. “Huh, I’m surprised there was enough blood left to clot. You were clearly working out some repressed anger there, I think that release might be healthy for you. But I’m going to need more nimble fingers to fix anything here.”

He turned, positioning himself between the mirrors so he could look at his shoulders. There was some unhealthy colors around the one that still had an arm on it. The other side actually looked a little better, if you ignored the fact that the arm was gone. He moved over to the camera to let it get a good shot of each. His right shoulder got the first closeup. “I don’t know how well you’ll be able to make this out, but it looks like I managed to get this one off without too much collateral damage.” He turned, showing the left. There was a lot of bruising and then from the armpit down was covered in nasty, deep cuts. “And then, well, you’d know better than I would what your goal was over here.” He backed up, and gingerly moved his arm around, feeling how much resistance it gave as he tried to move it through the full range of motion. “Definitely going to need a look at eventually, but I can mostly make it work.”

He walked back over to the table. He had a large bowl and a crockpot-sized device plugged in. He turned a knob on the device and started to fumble with the cap on a jug. “The first thing I’m going to need to do is get my fingers in a better situation to work with. I’d normally just find someone who could give me a hand, but I’ve already had to do that once.” He managed to get the cap off and poured the jug into the bowl. “Rubbing alcohol, to loosen the duct tape.” He set the jug down and stuck his hand into the bowl, gently swirling it around. “The important part here is that I just want to loosen it right now, not completely remove it. Not yet.”

After a few more moments he took his hand gently out of the alcohol and very carefully placed his hand into a latex kitchen glove. It was hard to make out in the camera what he was doing with his hand, the way he was pushing his thumb against the fingers and the hand against the table. “Gotta make sure I’m getting each finger into its own slot, otherwise it’ll drive me crazy for ages.” Satisfied, he took the now fingerless hand back out. He alternated between dunking it in the alcohol and wiping it against his pants, trying to scrape away the last of the duct tape. He put his hand back in the glove, pushing as far in as he can to begin with and then carefully balancing the hand up to his mouth to pull the glove tighter with his teeth. Then he placed his hand inside the device he’d turned on before starting.

“I can’t get you a good camera angle but this is a wax melter. There was a brick of wax in here and now I’m letting it run into the glove to help keep things together. I think it is supposed to be for something to do with exfoliation or something normally.” He paused to squish the wax around, helping it get deeper inside the glove. “In all likelihood this is actually going to make it take longer to get this hand back to full use in the long run, but it has the tradeoff of being a very quick improvement up front.”

Rick lifted his hand out and focuses on it. He gets a little wiggle out of the fingers for his efforts. Satisfied, he takes advantage of a strategically placed strip of duct tape partially stuck to the edge of the table and some awkward rubbing against his side to take the glove on. “While that cools a little more to firm up lets prep the transplant!” It was starting to sound more like he thought he was running a cooking show than playing doctor.

He picked up a very familiar looking arm. “You weren’t wearing a watch or I’d know for sure, but I’d say it has been about 5 hours since you last saw this.” Rick wiggled it a little. “I’ve worked with older before, so that shouldn’t be too much of a problem. He gently placed the arm in a microwave, closed the door, and hit some buttons to start it. “We do this not because there’s any actual benefit to doing it, but because I figure as an almost-chef this is the most offensive thing I can do in this situation.” The arm wasn’t in long before he had it back out. Next to what seemed to be a blender with the cup broken off. “This step is both offensive and actually helpful. When I did the cut removing this it was mostly a straight down saw through, but the hole I’m putting it into is a bit more tapered. So I need to rough it up a little bit.

The blender going on would have blocked out any further comments if he’d tried to make any, even before he picked up the arm. As he angled the cut end against the spinning blades the sound would change, from a sharp high screech with a chudder as the bone skipped off the blades to a wet splattered punctuation as tiny gobbets of flesh were sent flying, blood-red ‘sparks’ flying off the machine. As he turned the blender off, he adds “I bet that’d smell delightful.” He sniffs. “But I’m not even going to worry about finding out how intact my nose is until after I’m properly armed. Gotta keep the priorities straight.”

Rick grabbed the knife he’d used to remove his shirt and set it next to a chair before fetching the arm and sitting down. After a few moments of examining the cut end of the arm, he set it down and grabbed a large needle and a spool of thread. Settling back in, he picked up the arm. He tested the heft of it in his hand, took a deep breath out of habit, and then rammed the arm against his shoulder. He winced, more out of annoyance than pain. “Almost.” He kept pushing, wiggling the arm in the socket back and forth and around, trying to find the right spot. The click of the bone getting into the socket was just barely audible on the recording. He turns in the chair, carefully holding the arm in place, so he can look into the mirrors. Even if he had gotten the bone itself in about the right spot, you can tell that the muscle itself wasn’t nearly the right shape to make a clean join. Some places had too much meat pushing against meat while there were areas that were left completely exposed.

Rick was undeterred, setting the donor hand in his lap while he grabbed the needle and thread. He worked quickly. The thread he was using was thick and he was making big stitches, dramatically whipping the arm to his shoulder. Occasionally he’d pause to pull it tight, or to trim some excess flesh off to make the fit a little better. After he’d gone around the join once, he pulled it tight, knotted it off, and then started again, going through the same process but a little tighter, a little neater. He shifted in the seat, feeling the connection, before deciding to give it a third pass. After that was done and knotted, he gently pushed the hand out of his lap. The arm stayed in, the hand dangling limp.

“Okay good, the hard part is over. Sorry I couldn’t keep the commentary going, but it takes a lot to force fine motion when I’m this wrecked. Now for the fun part.” He scooched the chair closer, positioning himself so that the camera’s view would mostly frame his part of the arms deal.

He sat in the chair, limp. Rick knew that this was the part that Katters was most interested in seeing. He honestly didn’t really know why or how it worked himself. He’d try to give as much information as he’d worked out. “As near as I can tell, the only reason anything ever works is willpower.” The snark had left his voice and he was speaking slower as he focused his attention inwards.

“If things are running smoothly then momentum will keep the plates spinning for the most part. But in order to actually get it spinning in the first place, it is all me. This is my body. Anything that I’ve done to it, any change or modification or loss, doesn’t change the fact that it is still my body. If a human kills, cooks, and eats a cow, the human doesn’t become part cow, the cow gets absorbed by the human and becomes part of the human.” There could have been a twitch in the arm. “If a person gets a minor cut, the body mostly knows how to heal it.” There definitely was a twitch this time, and some of the stab wounds on his torso were starting to leak a little. “It is a matter of reaching in, grabbing your body by the throat and telling it FIX THIS.”

The fingers splayed out on the stolen hand, stretching to their limits as Rick felt them out. How far each finger could move, the range of motion on the wrist. Occasionally there would be a jerk as a signal hit the wrong destination. He wasn’t going to take any lip from an arm. He made a fist, relaxed it. Wiggled the fingers. He seemed to have gotten things working okay.

He coughed, startled. “Urp. It’s like I can taste you in my entire body. Like I’ve been swimming in spicy carbonated  beer-battered Orajel.” He muttered a couple hard to make out swears as he got up and picked up the bowl the rubbing alcohol was in and dumping it on the stitched-up graft. He stood there, braced against the table for support for a few moments. “Okay, I’m getting used to it now. I think it just had a lot of pent up bitterness.”

“Right, now that I’ve got my second amendment done, time to take care of the smaller wounds. Give this thing a test drive.” He started cleaning out and patching up the various stab wounds. It was a messy process, since the ‘jumpstart’ had gotten his blood pumping again, but they were also less complicated to fix. One by one, a bandage, wrap of gauze, or in the worst case a towel covered with shrinkwrap and duct-tape replaced the cuts.

He stood up, looked himself over in the mirrors to see if he’d forgotten anything. He pinched his nose with the new hand, feeling it out. Satisfied that it wasn’t in need of any repairs he turned back to the camera. “I think that about does it for now, I’ll have to keep these clean and not push myself for a while but at this point it is just a matter of time. I’m kinda curious to see if you’re able to work out anything from watching this. It was a fun visit, I’ll have to drop by again sometime.” He turned the camera off.

The trip had taken a few days, and he’d gotten a little scruffy. The path from his last meeting to the modest motel he’d been staying in brought him by a Tonsorial Parlour. The sign clearly said they did shaves, so he figured the name was meant to be a touristy draw. Maybe this was a historically old part of town. Anyway, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to get himself looking sharp before returning the next day.