Eight Legs Too Many || ONC 2021 and 2022

Chapter 5: Shiori starts to wonder if this story has a plot

A/N: The full title was supposed to be: Chapter 5: Shiori starts to wonder if this story has a plot (because she's sure as hell not charging into the underworld and saving everybody) but Wattpad said it was too long for me to use it. :(

~*~

Death was still on the armchair when Shiori woke up the next morning. He was snoring louder than should have been possible for a paranormal entity that might not have vocal cords, head thrown back, a trickle of drool oozing down his face. Mr. Tibbles, their tabby, was eyeing him with the same level of disdain Shiori felt.

"You can claw him a bit," Shiori whispered. "Go on, stick your foot in his eye, you've got more lives to fall back on." But Mr. Tibbles just sat, watching Death's chest rise and fall with a sort of morbid fascination.

Useless kitty.

Shiori tiptoed over to the coffee brewer and stuck in a pod. The Keurig knockoff hummed to life with a loud sputter. Shiori shot a worried glance toward the door to the nearest bedroom—but there was no sign of life behind it, nothing to indicate Devland was anything other than fast asleep.

The coffee maker spluttered again. It was not good at its job, and it knew as much. Still, it was capable of converting a mysterious coffee pod into a substance disgusting enough to make Shiori's brain cells jolt awake screaming, which was really all she needed. Shiori watched liquid squirt out of the device in recalcitrant bursts as her mind replayed the conversation last night. Devland, she thought blearily. Devland had assured her that there was a way for her to go to the underworld and still get back to the land of the living.

A way that didn't involve her death.

She still didn't trust him.

The man was hiding things by the bucketload. Shiori could tell. There were things that didn't add up. Why did it have to be her who went into the land of the dead? And who had locked Death out of the underworld in the first place?

The worst part was that clearly Yoko expected her to go along with all this. She'd been far more affected by the pandemics than Shiori. And she was an optimist; the whole hero's journey save-the-world philosophy held a kind of appeal for her that Shiori couldn't fathom.

Shiori quite liked being alive. She liked her snakes, and she liked her lab. She was doing just fine for herself in life. Sure, the constant plagues and pandemics were annoying, but she had weathered them so far. The pandemics had even come with perks, like certain bars going out of business, and she wasn't going to risk throwing her whole life away to...

Save the world?

Yoko's never died, whispered a nagging voice in the back of her head. She's come pretty close though, hasn't she? She almost went to the ICU when she got COVID, and then there was the crocodile bite that nearly took off her arm...

Shiori snorted. Thank you, Conscience. What would I do without you? Next I suppose you're going to berate me for not donating all our money to charity! Or turning our apartment into a soup kitchen!

Her conscience made no reply.

Shiori let out an irritated huff and downed her coffee in three gulps. Then, taste buds still ringing from the assault, she did what she always did when confronted with uncomfortable dilemmas.

She pretended they didn't exist and headed to lab.

Lab was almost deserted, except for the red-headed Bertie, but Shiori wasn't sure he counted. Bertie had been there before she started, and he'd be there after she left—a perpetual grad student who'd seemingly relinquished all hope of ever finishing a paper, surviving solely off of a diet of pizza and Pepsi and the occasional hamburger. Shiori wasn't even sure he had an apartment of his own; she half-suspected he haunted the various buildings affiliated with the lab, sleeping in basements and using the lab showers whenever his level of grime grew intolerable. He had once had a main project, but in an attempt to procrastinate, he had accumulated a whole host of side projects, which he was now procrastinating on even further by building a maze for the snakes out of Legos, with little flags at the entrance and a spring-loaded confetti cannon at the end.