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Critters
Baby Muffin wants Cookie to play
If I beat art block I may shade or texture. Maybe
Baby Muffin's name is not meant to copy Cookie he was named via discord suggestions and voting. I cant argue with democracy.
Cookie belongs to @emmatheward
Journal Entry #1
I turned eighteen two weeks ago.
Not exactly the exciting start to adulthood I'd imagined.
Mom and Dad flew overseas for the summer the day after my birthday, leaving me with the house and a list of chores that was probably longer than it needed to be. They promised they'd be back before autumn.
Right now, that feels like a lifetime away.
I wasn't planning on keeping a journal.
I just...
Need somewhere to put my thoughts.
Things have been strange lately.
Not my life.
The island.
The news has been full of weird stories for the past few days.
Engines refusing to leave their sheds.
Engines becoming unusually aggressive.
Others apparently too weak to pull trains they'd handled for years.
Everyone seems to have a different explanation.
Faulty coal for the steam engines and faulty petrol for the dieses.
A sickness.
Bad maintenance.
Someone even joked online that the engines had caught the flu.
It's probably nothing.
At least...
That's what I have kept telling myself.
Four days ago, I decided to go walking.
I ended up farther east than I'd ever been before, following an old railine that looked oddly untouched.
No litter.
No rust.
No weeds growing between the sleepers.
Just silence.
Eventually, I noticed a single rose growing beside the tracks.
It looked completely ordinary.
Deep red petals.
Green stem.
Nothing unusual...
Until I looked closer.
Scattered across the petals were tiny metallic-looking grains.
Not yellow pollen.
Not glitter.
Little reddish-gold flecks.
Like someone had ground up rust...
Except it shimmered.
That shouldn't be possible.
Rust isn't supposed to sparkle.
I remember crouching beside it.
It smelled incredible.
Sweet.
Fresh.
Almost... nostalgic, in a way.
Without really thinking, I leaned in and took a deep breath.
The tiny metallic grains lifted from the petals as I inhaled.
Some disappeared into the air.
Some...
Went into my lungs.
I coughed for a few seconds.
Laughed at myself.
Picked the flower anyway.
I figured I'd press it between the pages of a book when I got home.
The next morning the rumors about the engines got worse.
Several services were delayed because some of them apparently refused to move.
Others were making noises nobody had heard before.
One newspaper even described them as looking "unwell."
I remember thinking how ridiculous that sounded.
How does an engine get sick?
Now...
I'm not laughing anymore.
The rose is changing.
The reddish-gold particles have spread farther through the petals.
They're eating away at them without actually destroying them.
The flower isn't wilting.
It's...
Rusting.
I know how insane that sounds.
Flowers don't rust.
Neither does gold.
Yet somehow whatever's covering those petals looks exactly like rust, and every day there's a little more of it.
I've thought about throwing the rose away.
I even picked it up yesterday.
Then I couldn't.
I don't know why.
It just...
Didn't feel right.
Maybe I'm just getting attached to the weirdest souvenir imaginable.
Or maybe it's something else.
I've started noticing little things.
Nothing obvious.
Nothing anyone else would notice.
Sometimes I hear distant whistles before anyone else reacts.
The sound of steel wheels on rails has become... comforting.
Almost familiar beyond simple life experience.
Yesterday I caught myself staring out the window whenever I heard an engine passing by.
Not because I was curious.
Because something inside me wanted to follow them.
That's ridiculous.
I know it is.
It was like I was a little kid.
Still...
I keep finding black dust on my pillow every morning.
Not much.
Just enough to notice.
I'm probably imagining connections where there aren't any.
The engines getting sick.
Then the strange flower.
The rising gold dust.
Me.
They're probably unrelated.
...
I pray to God that they are.
(Let me know what you think in the comments below! 👇)
Baby Muffin says be gay do crimes and taste the rainbow
Bug do big stretch
Wonder if monster engine diesels gotta warm up before work. Thus lots of stretching
Journal Entry #2
I didn’t sleep properly last night.
I don’t mean I stayed up late or woke up a few times like I usually did.
I mean I don’t think I actually slept at all, not in any meaningful way I can remember.
There was even more black dust.
When I got up this morning, my body felt wrong.
Not injured. Not sick. Just… off. Like I’d been carrying something heavy for hours without noticing until I finally set it down and realized how much it hurt.
My shoulders fucking ache.
My legs feel stiff even though I didn’t exercise yesterday.
My hands kept trembling slightly when I poured water. I told myself it was stress. That word is starting to feel like a placeholder for everything I don’t understand.
The first thing I checked, like I always do now without meaning to, was the rose.
It’s still on the kitchen counter.
It looks bigger again.
That shouldn’t make sense.
It’s a cut flower.
I brought it home with the intention of pressing it in a book, and I remember that clearly. I remember holding it between my fingers and thinking it was small enough to forget about if I left it alone long enough.
But it isn’t small anymore.
The stem looks thicker than it did yesterday, like it’s trying to support weight it shouldn’t be able to gain. The petals are deeper in color, but not in a healthy way. It’s not blooming. It’s… building itself.
Layering.
Like rust forming structure instead of decay.
What if it's reviving itself?
With that, the metallic flecks are denser now. Less scattered. More deliberate. Almost like they’re arranging themselves along the veins of the petals.
I stood there for a while just looking at it, trying to remember if I’d moved it closer to the edge of the counter facing my room yesterday.
I’m almost certain I didn’t.
And yet it feels closer every time I enter the kitchen.
That thought made me laugh a little, because it sounds ridiculous when written down. A flower moving across a counter. I even checked the floor beneath it like that would explain anything.
Nothing had fallen.
Nothing had shifted.
Still… I keep getting this feeling that it’s aware of where I am in the house.
That’s not a sentence I should be writing at all.
I left the kitchen after that because I didn’t like how long I was standing there staring at it without blinking.
I went back to my room, but even there I couldn’t settle. My body soreness got worse as the morning went on, like it was responding to movement delay instead of activity.
I kept stretching my arms and neck without realizing I was doing it.
Like something inside me was trying to “loosen” parts of me that weren’t meant to tighten in the first place.
I tried to distract myself with my phone as I did with way too many of my problems, even before all of this shit, but everything felt slightly delayed.
Messages took longer to process. Videos felt like they were arriving half a second late. I checked my internet twice. It was fine.
It’s probably just fatigue...
I keep telling myself that, but the words don’t even pretend to land properly anymore.
Around midday, I made a decision I still can’t fully explain.
I went back.
Back to the tracks.
Back to where I found the rose in the first place.
I don’t know why I did it. I told myself it was to “check the area,” like I was proving to myself that nothing else was unusual was there.
That it was just a strange coincidence the rose was there and I could put it to rest by revisiting the place.
But that doesn’t feel like the real reason anymore.
The walk there felt longer than I remembered. The air was heavier, somehow, like humidity without moisture. Every so often I thought I heard a faint metallic rhythm in the distance, but when I stopped to listen, it disappeared.
The railway line still looked wrong in the same way it did before.
Too clean. Too untouched.
Like time didn’t apply properly along it.
No litter. No rust. No weeds.
Just sleepers stretching into silence.
I followed it to the exact spot I remember.
The ground didn’t look like recently empty soil.
It looked disturbed.
Not recently dug. Not carefully excavated either. More like something had been pressed down into it repeatedly until the earth gave up trying to resist.
I stood there for a long time before I knelt.
My hands were shaking again.
I told myself I was just tired.
That I was just curious. That I was only confirming what I already knew.
The soil came apart far easier than it should have.
It wasn’t soft, but it wasn’t stable either. Like it had forgotten how to hold its own shape.
At first I thought I saw wood. Old sleepers maybe, broken or shifted.
Then metal.
Not rails. Something curved.
I dug further.
I don’t remember deciding to. I just remember my hands continuing.
The earth gave way in uneven chunks, revealing something underneath that didn’t belong there at all.
Fabric. Black. Heavy, coated material like an old coat, soaked through with dirt and time.
Then the outline of a shoulder. Then a face turned slightly to the side, partially obscured, as if it had been resting there rather than buried.
There were goggles. Black, thick lenses, cracked slightly at the edges, still strapped across the head. And a body that looked wrong in ways I can’t fully explain without feeling like I’m misremembering what I saw.
Too old to make sense in proportion to the rest. Too warped, like the shape had been folded inward and never corrected.
Like a man who had spent too long being bent around something larger than himself.
A motorcycle helmet was half-visible near him, or maybe it wasn’t a helmet at all. I don’t know why I thought that. It just felt like something that belonged there, even though nothing about it made sense.
He was lying directly beneath where the rose had been.
Centered perfectly.
Like it had grown from him.
Then I noticed the tumor-like growth from his heart, ending in a stump.
Then I noticed the strange symbol etched into his chest:
"̶C̶h̶e̶b̶ ̶e̶h̶ ̶r̶i̶s̶h̶ ̶c̶r̶o̶n̶n̶a̶g̶h̶y̶n̶ ̶n̶e̶u̶-̶e̶n̶n̶o̶i̶l̶ ̶d̶y̶ ̶c̶h̶e̶a̶g̶h̶l̶e̶y̶ ̶c̶u̶m̶m̶e̶y̶;̶ ̶n̶i̶s̶h̶ ̶t̶'̶e̶h̶ ̶f̶u̶l̶a̶i̶n̶g̶t̶ ̶c̶r̶o̶n̶n̶e̶y̶ ̶s̶m̶e̶s̶s̶e̶y̶ ̶n̶a̶'̶n̶ ̶D̶e̶i̶g̶h̶a̶n̶ ̶h̶e̶n̶e̶.̶ T̶a̶ ̶f̶y̶s̶ ̶a̶y̶m̶ ̶n̶i̶s̶h̶ ̶d̶y̶ ̶v̶e̶ ̶s̶h̶o̶h̶ ̶f̶e̶e̶r̶.̶"̶
...
...
...
...
...
I don’t remember stepping back.
But I wasn’t kneeling anymore when I realized what I was looking at.
And the strangest part is—
I can’t tell if I’ve seen him before.
Not in real life.
But somewhere.
Like a dream that doesn’t belong to me, sitting just out of reach, trying to surface and failing every time I think about it too hard.
I left the tracks after that.
I think I ran part of the way.
I don’t remember deciding to come home.
I just remember being here again.
Sitting at my desk.
Writing this right now.
My hands still smell like earth and something metallic that doesn’t come off properly.
The growing and reviving rose is still on my kitchen counter.
I haven’t gone to look at it again.
I don’t want to.
But I keep hearing something very faint when I stop moving for too long.
Like distant wheels.
Or something trying to remember how to move along rails.
I think I need more sleep.
I’m not sure I trust that I’ll get it properly anymore.
Doodle of @mwolf0epsilon 's oc. I liked how it turned out
New oc
Nicknamed Fluffy
Monster engine version
So if engines can have eyebrows I got to thinking why not other hair. Ive seen ocs with beards and Mighty Mac has hair thus I came to the conclusion maybe there's a random mutation that causes some engines to have more facial hair.
Thus Fluffy is fluffy
Potential Fluffy lore yapping below
@crowwbones drew Baby Muffin
Gaze upon him
He searches for snacks
