Today's commentary continues a series of excerpts from I Am Empowered, the short-lived but useful Year-One-ish prose experiment I worked on about a decade ago to flesh out and explore the earliest months of Emp's superheroic career, along with concepts and details not necessarily addressed in the Empowered proper. Note that the project was originally composed in old-style Twitter 140-character segments, as the narrative was theoretically Emp's (unpublished) social media account of her Year One adventures; for some reason, I have no interest in writing prose fiction, but don't mind doing so in tweet format. Note also that the entirety of this incomplete project is serialized under the I Am Empowered hashtag on my Patreon.
And now, we rejoin Year One Emp's first-person narration as she meets Scanning Analytophore Ginny for the first time. (I'll use a different font and size to differentiate the excerpt from my regular commentary.)
I whimper miserably, completely helpless and immobilized by the lingual bed’s web of stubby, wet pseudopods clenching me tightly from head to toe.
“A single analytophore scan replaces a dozen different conventional-tech scans,” singsongs the nurse. “Quite the medical breakthough, really.”
She taps the extrusion again. The scanning bed slides back into Ginnie’s maw, my shuddering body now firmly papillae-bolted to its surface.
Feeling not unlike a terrified sacrificial virgin—without the virgin part, admittedly—I’m inexorably drawn into a biomechanical Moloch’s gullet.
The nurse’s voice quickly recedes and dwindles as I’m swallowed. “Don’t worry, this will all be over quickly.” Pause. “Well, quickly-ish.”
The light from the room outside likewise recedes and dwindles, as I’m drawn onward and inward into wet, humid, softly rustling darkness.
After ten feet of wobbly backwards travel—or has it been 50 feet?—I’m submerged in total, utterly featureless blackness deep inside Ginnie.
Soundtrack: My bicycle-pump-rapid breathing, obscenely loud. Faint, skin-crawling skittering and gluey squelches from the gullet around me.
I blink, the imaging lenses of my supersuit’s mask spring to life, and a horrific, night-vision-green nightmare assaults my reeling senses.
Glistening, misshapen slabs of striated muscle. Skeins of interwoven veins or tendons or cables. Twisted, wet, indecipherable alien organs.
All of it visibly moving, pulsing, throbbing in hideously clear detail, only a few inches away from my face. Cue another horrified sheep bleat.
Frantically, I blink repeatedly until my suit’s lenses finally go black once again, plunging me back into comparatively welcome darkness.
I’m trapped inside Ginnie’s scanning chamber—or throat, or belly, who knows—for what could be ten minutes, or ten hours, or ten weeks.
Hard to maintain a remotely objective sense of time when your poor, beleaguered brain devolves to an animal state of pure, unending terror.
My trembly lips are pressed together so tightly, so bloodlessly that I’m beginning to worry that I might lose all circulation in them.
Hogtied or shackled, duct-taped or spiderwebbed by the scariest of bad guys, I’ve never felt as powerless and petrified as I do right now.
Siren-loud, my fear-stupefied mind is blaring, DON’T SCREAM. DON’T SCREAM. DON’T SCREAM. DON’T SCREAM. DO NOT START SCREAMING.
Stand by for another Ginny-related I Am Empowered excerpt tomorrow, folks!
Today’s Patreon update: Originally done as a means of scratching out more worktime to complete the long-gestating Empowered vol. 12, I've switched over to a Monday/ Wednesday/ Friday Patreon posting schedule that won't feature the fixed content format I previously used. However, my vast archive of years of Patreon posts—extensive Empowered previews, vintage con sketches, work stages on covers, "damsel in distress" commissions, life drawings & much, much more—remains available for Patrons' perusal.
-Adam Warren
