“Disgusting..."

  Jenny, the giant snake that sits in the caves under the continent, constantly thinks of that moment. As she quickly slithers away from her assailant, she remembers that moment again.

  “Disgusting...”

  She’s absolutely horrified at it. Every time she thinks of it, it’s as if her mind starts to melt. She just doesn’t comprehend that moment.

  She’s finally shaken off her pursuer, and coils into a large circle in a large open section of the caves. It’s a very large section. It’s nearly as large as an entire district. All of this space, and she’s the only one who uses it.

  Of course, right now, she’s carrying Sherman Chex, who’s sleeping. She carefully lays him down, at least as carefully as she can, being a giant snake, and stares at him.

  He’s quite strange. Just the sight of him makes her remember a very lousy memory. He looks quite a bit like someone else. It’s a shame. She continues the memory from a bit after she left off.

  A long while prior, after their first meeting at the library, Jenny Watcher sits in a cafe waiting for a strange man to arrive. She recalls how he picked her up and ran through an invisible boundary to free her from an infinite staircase. She recalls how he jumped over one of the large bookshelves at the library. She recalls how he adores snakes.

  Just these facts alone remind her heavily of a man she met earlier in her life. Not to mention their identical appearances. Though, it’s quite odd, the man appears to be the same age as he was all those years ago. There’s probably a reasonable explanation for this.

  He gets in after around seven minutes. Looking at the clock, he’s in the seat right when the hour hand moves to the next hour. He’s perfectly on time. His long orange hair, parts of which extend down to near his elbows, shines in the light. The red line which continues to stay in place, even as his hair moves from the wind blowing through the open windows.

  While he may look nice, he is most certainly not. Polite greetings are not on his menu. His face is one of boredom. Once he sits down, he immediately asks his first question.

  “What do snakes like to eat?”

  As Jenny answers the question, she notices his eyes seem like they are strangely bright. It’s like they’re trying to shine a light through her body. Notably, they aren’t emitting light, and just seem like it.

  He’s incredibly strange. Sometimes he moves as if he’s manually activating each limb in his body. Other times, it’s like he moves perfectly. He asks another question.

  “What type of environment do snakes like to live in? Can it be recreated in a house?”

  She takes a moment before answering his question. He frowns a bit, since he isn’t the biggest fan of the answer. When he frowns, the space behind him appears to contort into a frown as well. It’s incredibly strange. The lousy man has a few more questions.

  “What if, say, the snake was pretty large, like the size of an entire person?”

  Jenny is incredibly shocked at the question. Does he know she’s a giant snake? Is there another large snake? What is this man doing? Obviously, these questions aren’t about her. She would never fit into a house as a snake, as even at this point in time, the distance from her head to the tip of her tail would stretch across nearly one and a half districts.

  She takes an incredibly long time to think. The waiter even arrives with their drinks in the time it takes for her to think of an answer. She never ends up answering the question, as the orange haired man asks a follow-up question.

  “Where do I know you from?”

  She’s incredibly shocked.

  “The library!”

  The man tilts his head.

  “No, I most certainly know you from somewhere else.”

  “Oh, maybe you know my TV show?”

  “I’ve only ever seen ‘Murder Island Dummies’.”

  Hearing that confirmed all of her suspicions.

  Back when Jenny Watcher was only a small snake in a cage, she was cared for by all of the children in the town. Just remembering them makes her shudder, as their memory is inseparable from that of them burning. Back on track, she recalls a specific memory of one of the children.

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  His name was Ricky Revels.

  He was around seven years in age, and his family would move around a lot. She only ever saw him for around a month before his family moved to another town. At that time, she remembers that while he was caring for her, he placed her cage onto the couch and turned on the television.

  The television screen was incredibly bright. It wasn’t her first time watching television, but she certainly didn’t do it often. She was a snake, after all. The boy changed the channel several times, searching for the one he was looking for.

  There was a show about pirates, and their adventures flying in the sky.

  There was a show about pirates, and their tragic deaths at the hands of a skeleton captain, named the “Angel of Death”.

  There was a show about pirates, set in a tavern. There were several characters who would all sit at the bar and drink. They shared their stories, and would interact with other people at the bar.

  All the shows were about pirates. Everyone loved pirates.

  Finally, there was a show about pirates, and their life on an island. Every so often, there would be a new ship that would crash onto the island. Sometimes, the new stranded people would be friends, such as ‘Rollo’ and ‘Alan’. Other times, they’d fight. Every few episodes, someone would turn out dead. It doubled as a murder mystery. They’d have to find the killer to reveal one more clue to get them off the island.

  That was ‘Murder Island Dummies’.

  At the end of the final season, after most of the cast was killed in a crazy wildfire as they slept, it was revealed that the mastermind behind the entire island fiasco was one of the three people left alive.

  A man who had first appeared in the second season, ‘Amarin’. A lady who had been in the show since the first episode, ‘Selly’. And finally, a person in armor who had only appeared at the start of the final episode. He hadn’t arrived via ship, it just seemed that he had appeared between episodes. His name was never revealed, and in fact, it was never really revealed who had set it all up. The show just ends on the cliffhanger. Well, at least from Jenny’s perspective.

  The Revels family was the only family in the town with powerful enough antennae to receive the channel that aired the show, and as such, when they left, taking their setup with them, the show was over for her.

  It was a good thing for the Revels, at least Jenny thinks so, as the town was attacked by an opposing army only two weeks later, leading to the death of everyone except for her, a snake.

  Just a few weeks prior to the meeting at the library, which took place many, many years after this event, she’d gone to a media conservation center to see if any tapes of the show had survived. Of course, they hadn’t. The only record that the show had even existed was a sign on the wall labelled ‘Lost Media’. It was a shame.

  So how, just how could this man recall the show like she had? He simply had to have been there to watch it!

  It was a simple connection to make, the men looked exactly the same, the men had similar knowledge, and similar tendencies. They were simply the same people.

  The man she had met at the library was the man that had destroyed her town and let only her survive. The man who had let her go because she was a snake.

  So, she asks a question of her own.

  “How do you know about ‘Murder Island Dummies’?”

  The man squints.

  “It’s more odd that you know about it, at least from my perspective. How do you know about ‘Murder Island Dummies’?”

  Jenny is taken mildly aback. Should she answer truthfully, or should she make up some answer? She decides on the latter.

  “Oh, I found some tapes of it somewhere!”

  “Really? I made sure they were all burnt.”

  Jenny starts to shiver. She has no idea why, she knows this man would never hurt her if she told the truth, he saved her all those years ago, right? But, for some reason, she can’t stop herself from lying.

  “Oh? I just... Found them in a cave!”

  “A cave?”

  “Yeah, next to an iceberg!”

  He sits back down. He was never standing, but it seems like he’s sat back down.

  “Oh, that damn iceberg. The one near the pole?”

  “Yes, that one.”

  “I was frozen in that one since the conflict. Got out at the start of the year. Some moron with a large boat rammed into it.” He chuckles a bit.

  “Oh, okay!”

  He stands up and smiles.

  “Well, goodbye now! I’m sure the snake will be happy.”

  He waves as he starts to walk away. She waves back.

  “Goodbye! I hope I see you again!”

  He never really said it, that’s the main problem she’s facing. He never really said the word. She just knew what he was thinking. He wasn’t thinking any happy thoughts, he thought she was a liar. He knew she was lying.

  She knows the entire time what he was thinking. It was one simple word. One simple word that she really doesn’t want to think about. The word which was never said was the one that hurt her the most.

  “Disgusting liar”

  She can handle being a liar, that wasn’t the problem. It was the truth. It was the other part. She had never thought about things that way. How could the same man who had spared her all those years ago think of her this way? She simply could not get it out of her mind.

  “Disgusting...”

  Sherman Chex wakes up and finds himself laying on a stone floor. It’s quite different from where he was earlier.

  He finds himself in front of the giant snake he thought was cool.

  She’s crying.