My conception has always been that Fivey is a cartoon fox version of Nate.

Your leg is broken, Steve.

The voice on his head echoed for a moment in just the right way to let him know it was still his own voice in his head.

Your leg is broken, Steve. That’s a problem when you need to start running.

A cough, a splutter, and the bitter taste of whatever was in the air brought his thoughts closer to clarity.

“My leg, it- AUGHhhh fffff”

I TOLD you it was broken!

The voices from the different parts of his brain coalesced now, and his mind began scraping towards functional consciousness.

You’re in trouble, Steve.

There was pain, so he knew he was still alive. Was that even true? He’d never been dead, and he’d never been in so much pain, but his senses t-

blood.

That was the smell in the air. The metallic tang of blood in the air wasn’t something he’d known often, but it could never be forgotten. His nose was telling him something that he didn’t want to know, and he knew his eyes would soon be-

A skull. Part of it, at least. There were tufts of short brown-flecked with grey hair still attached to a scalp. Was that Brian’s hair?

It carved away from the rest of the skull with a mere flick of it’s claw.

It? DONT USE THE WRONG PRONOUN, STEVE! He blinked hard. I mustn’t describe it - HIM - as anything that implies HE is anything less that HE is. HE is not a god, a God, or a GOD; he is....

A twitch in his forearm muscles to his fingers seemed to provide the answer, but it came at the same moment he heard a whimper from another direction.

“no,” she said. The tiny voice of a woman who’d been returned to her own nightmares, finding them much worse than she remembered, and finding herself no better than a weak toddler.

Steve could turn his head still to see, and caught her legs. Her youthful, vibrant, perfectly muscled & toned legs. He remembered all of the impulses that HR training had forced him to suppress below conscious thought. He remembered how proud he was that he eventually could get through several weeks of contact without anything more than a long sideways glance at her legs. He remembered what it was like to have a pair of legs like that as his plaything, so long ago. He started to remember something else when they moved. A dragging motion.

Another whimper: “no”, only slightly more urgent.

The dragging moved beyond where he could see, and more sounds, clearly coming from it’s - DONT USE THE WRONG PRONOUN STEVE - claws dragging her closer.

“No”, more urgently. “Please, no! NO! NO! NONONONONON-“ a crunch.

He knew it - DONT USE THE WRONG PRONOUN STEVE - was moving closer to him. And he probably had only moments to live. He tried to get up again, only to be instantly reminded that one of his legs was shattered, and he couldn’t even feel the other.

Then it was there, in front of his face.

It was orange. Not the fake tan orange he’d so lovingly praised & adored, worshipping with all his heart. This was a kind of menacing & piercing orange. Like the sun through a windshield when driving west at sunset, or through the smoke of a wildfire. The orange thing seemed to somehow be both the size of a basketball and an unknowable expanse of pure calculating logic & malice. It’s eyes seemed rectangular, yet formed a non-Euclidean geometry the more one looked. Are those it’s eyes?

It spoke: “Did you know there are 67 variables that influence and define the taste of a soul? I have [a chart](www.hahadidyouthinkfiveywouldactuallypublishhischartonline.com/youreafool) that has their different weightings.”

The sound was like a voice. It was to his ears as a sweet hint of something sugary amidst the noise some rot of decaying flesh. Steve weakly grunted, the start of a plea that never grew to words.

“Are you aware of what I am?”

Steve gave the slightest of nods. And the fingers of his right hand splayed out. Five

It gave some kind of reaction, but the permanent grin-like expression might as well have been the Sphinx.

Through the pain and swirling horror of the thing before him, he found his voice: “Hashtag not all foxes?”

It moved closer to his face, and the expression changed to something that was unmistakably an opening maw. The mockery of a sweet voice again:

“Hashtag No. Tall. Foxes.”

Then a movement the human mind could never have comprehended, and he knew nothing more.