Chapter 2

“You still have no idea what it is?” Mary asked as she hovered over the plant on the dinner table, inspecting it. She picked up one of its six vines with her fingers. “This feels ... heavy.”

“I thought so too,” said Darci, “and no, I still don’t have a clue what kind of plant it is. I want to ask an actual botanist, but I’m a little scared.”

Mary looked up at her, “Scared? Why would you be scared?”

“That would be very difficult to explain without you thinking I’m going nuts.”

“If you were trying to put my mind at ease, you failed spectacularly,” Mary deadpanned.

“I was going to take a clipping of one of the vines since the first one it lost grew back in a few weeks. When I picked up the vine to snip it ... it...”

“It what, Darci?”

“It got scared.”

Mary raised a skeptical eyebrow, “You’ve been spending too much time around plants and not enough around people.”

“See, I told you you’d think I’m going nuts. Besides, I spend plenty of time around you.”

“Maybe that’s part of the problem. I thought you’d be dating again by now, or at least scoping out the field.”

Darci shook her head, “I’m good with what I have for now. I don’t feel ready to start ‘dating’ dating yet, and I’m not very keen on picking up some guy at a bar for a quick fuck. Also, you haven’t said I’m not going nuts.”

“You’re not going nuts, Dar. If anyone in this world can talk to plants, it’s probably you. But are you sure you weren’t just projecting?” She wiggled the little vine in her fingers, “Please, Darci, don’t cut my arms off and send them to a lab!” she said in a squeaky voice with her lips pursed. “If you keep cutting my arms off, I won’t get big and strong and—” Mary froze in place for a moment before her face took on a lusty expression. A second later, she dropped the vine and shook her head as if trying to clear her thoughts. “Whoah, I need to lay off the hentai. That was honestly a pretty hot idea,” she said, looking at Darci and licking her lips. “Too bad stuff like that doesn’t happen in real life. I’d be up for it.”

“I was scared you’d think I was nuts a few minutes ago. Now, I’m starting to worry about you.” Glancing over at the plant, she said in a stage whisper, “Irwin, what the hell did you put in her head?”

“Irwin? You named it?”

“A lot of my plants have names, Mary. You’re just never out in the greenhouse to hear them.”

“Speaking of which, when is this guy going out there?”

“Never, probably. I’m thinking about making him a houseplant.”

“Him?”

“Yes, ‘him.’ Certain plants feel male or female, and he gives off a male vibe.”

“I’m telling you, Dar. You need some dick that isn’t silicone.”

“An-y-way,” Darci growled, “if he can feel scared, he can feel lonely too.”

“But out there, he’ll be among others of his own kind. Among friends! He might even find a girlfriend out there to shack up with. A non-human girlfriend, I mean.” She said before breaking into fits of laughter at the look Darci gave her.

“You’re an ass.”

“But I’m an ass who adores your ass, so that makes up for it,” said Mary, still grinning.

Darci looked the blonde over with a look that matched Mary’s earlier. “While we are talking about adoring asses, did you have any special plans for tonight?”

“In fact, I do,” she replied, putting an arm around her lover’s waist and pulling her close. “First, I’m going to get you out of that dress. Then, I’m going to make love to you until you’re on the verge of cumming. After that, you’re getting into your riding duds, and I’m taking you to dinner at a nice little restaurant out of town. Finally, if you’re up for it, one of my occasional hookups living in said town texted and said they were looking for some company.”

“Male or female?”

Mary got a dopey grin on her face and shook her hips a little, “Very male. He only hits me up when he’s single, and with a dick like his, he usually doesn’t stay single long. I honestly wanted to surprise both of you, but if you are interested, there’s something he likes to do that I can’t and is normally frowned upon when it’s a surprise.”

“Butt stuff?”

“Yup. He likes the booty, and you know I can’t do that.”

“So you’re offering up mine as a sacrifice?”

“Sweetheart, I’ve watched you cum just from fucking your ass a few times already. I don’t think I’d call it a sacrifice. However, the other reason I’m not making this a surprise is that he’s pretty thick. I’d recommend a plug to stretch you out.”

“I’m going to say yes to undressing me, yes to getting me worked up, yes to the buttplug, yes to the motorcycle ride and dinner, but no to your friend. A while back, you put the idea in my head of James doing my ass while you ate me out. I want that, and not just with some nameless guy.”

“Horning in on my fuck buddy, are you?”

“It was your idea.”

“That’s fair, and I won’t say he isn’t itching for the same because I’d be lying.”

“How much longer do we have to wait?”

“Three months, assuming we don’t end up doing it with Irwin here first.” Mary stopped and blinked a few times. “Did I just say that out loud?”

“Irwin, just what did you stick in her head?” she asked the plant.

“If you must know, it was him, but huge,” said Mary, raising a hand and standing on her tiptoes to show how tall his stalk was, “and he was holding us both up in the air with his vines like some tentacle hentai movie. One of them was in your ass as he carried me over and stuck my face between your legs. The most interesting part was that he had vines in my pussy and ass, and my ass didn’t hurt. Too bad it was just a little daydream.”

Darci wrapped her arms around Mary and pulled her head down to rest on her cleavage. “My poor baby. Women are getting pissed off at their husbands and boyfriends for wanting to stick their dick in their butts, and here you are moping because you literally can’t have sex that way.”

“Now look who’s being the ass,” Mary grumbled while returning the hug and nuzzling Darci’s breasts. “It doesn’t help that you can actually get off from it.”

“Only if I’m in the right mood. Shall we make our way to the bedroom?”

Mary sighed and relaxed against Darci, “‘S comfy, I don’t wanna now.”

“You can use my boobs as pillows later. You promised me a motorcycle ride and dinner.”

“Fiiine,” she said, standing up. “but I get to put the butt plug in.”

Darci sauntered around Mary while pulling her sundress over her head, “But of course you are. “ she said while walking toward the bedroom with sultry sway of her hips. Somehow, the fact she wore only her workboots only turned Mary on more.

Darci disappeared down the hall to the bedrooms, and Mary took a moment to bend over and look at her friend’s plant. The resemblance was uncanny. Everything in her vision matched except for the size.

“I don’t know whether I should tell you to stay the fuck out of my head or tell you to grow up in a hurry. But I will tell you that if you hurt Darci, I have a juicer at home you will fit into, even if I have to chop you into little bits. I know those thoughts didn’t come from me.”

Mary stood up and shook her head, “I can’t believe I just threatened a fucking plant. Maybe I am the one going nuts.”

“Maryyy, I’m naked, on the bed, and alone!” Darci shouted down the hall.

“Coming!” she yelled and headed toward the bedroom after glaring at Irwin one last time. “Hey, Dar,” she called out, “Mind if I borrow a pair of panties for the night? Mine are soaked.”

“Only if I get to lick you dry first,” Darci answered as Mary stopped in front of the bedroom’s open doorway. Brunette hair cascaded down the bed’s side as Darci lay across it on her back with her feet pointed toward the far wall. Tilting her head back, she smiled at Mary upside down and beckoned her forward with a finger.

“Fucking Hell, I love you,” she said breathlessly, reaching for her jumpsuit’s zipper as she walked into the room.

Irwin didn’t know what a ‘juicer’ was but knew that the ‘juices’ Darci kept in her refrigerator were all liquid and didn’t like the implication of Mary’s words.

He was still feeling out this name she had given him. His ancestral memories never had the quadrupeds assigning his kind names but instead referred to them by the designation on their pots or soil beds.

This was especially true in The Archive, where the collective knowledge of his kind and the quadrupeds were kept within a massive, multi-storied greenhouse and seed bank. Most information could be retrieved from his people in the greenhouse, but more obscure tidbits were kept in seeds. If the quadrupeds needed such knowledge, they planted the seed and had to wait until it grew and absorbed the information within to pass on the desired data. It then went to the greenhouse until it matured and produced its own seed. After that, they lived a long healthy life until they finally grew old and passed away. At least, that’s what his kind was led to believe.

The alien plant was also getting used to the idea of the gender she believed him to be. His species was hermaphroditic, able to both produce and fertilize seeds. However, he paid close attention to the media on Darci’s tablet as she perused it at the kitchen table, usually with her morning cup of coffee, and felt more drawn to the male side of the spectrum.

The device was similar to the holoscreens the quadrupeds used, and he believed he had watched the human enough to manipulate it if he ever had the chance. Unfortunately, she always took it into her room to ‘charge’ before going to work.

Late one night, when the human ‘Mary’ did not arrive, Darci propped the tablet up on the table and began viewing videos of humans mating. Some were recordings, while others were artistic renderings of humans put in motion. The human came across one of the artistic videos where bumpy purple vines wrapped around a female’s arms and legs before lifting the woman into the air so more of the vines could mate with her. Darci quickly became dissatisfied with the video and switched to an archive of similar scenes that did not move. After a few minutes of scrolling, she pulled another of the chairs over and placed her leg upon it. The woman’s face changed color, turning pink as she continued perusing the pictures. Darci leaned back and moaned quietly, allowing Irwin to see one of her hands had dropped below the table’s edge.

Breathing heavily, her arm made rhythmic motions that sped up and slowed down as she looked at her tablet and continued flipping through the pictures. She stopped on one and moaned again before tapping the image to make it larger.

The top of the picture started simply with a pink-haired human female watering some plants in a sundress like those Darci often wore. She is interrupted by a vine, similar to his own, wrapping around her. At first, she seems startled, then acts pleased as the vines restrain and partially strip her, exposing the fleshy mounds on the female’s chest and removing her undergarments. At the bottom of the image, the vine has inserted itself into the female’s mating orifice, and the vine’s restraints seem more superficial than restrictive, more like the humans’ embrace in greeting or affection. Unlike the woman in the earlier video, the pink-haired female appears greatly pleased by this.

Irwin then realized that in all of the recent pictures, the women were being attended by appendages similar to his vines and appeared happy, excited, or had expressions comparable to when Darci and Mary performed pleasurable acts upon one another.

Darci closed her eyes and moaned again. Her breathing increased in depth and frequency as her arm’s movements sped up.

Unable to restrain his curiosity, Irwin stretched a vine out and ran it along the table’s edge to keep it hidden. The vine’s tip touched Darci’s elbow, and Irwin was unprepared for the torrent of pleasure that washed over him. He was doubly unprepared for the image of himself near his fully mature size, holding Darci up like the woman in the purple vine video. In her fantasy, Darci wore a yellow sundress like the pink-haired woman on her tablet, while two of the fantasy Irwin’s vines slid in and out of both lower orifices. A few seconds later, his doppelganger carried Mary over, her arms and legs similarly bound. The vine in Darci’s top mating orifice retracted as the fantasy-Irwin brought Mary’s face into contact.

“Yess, lick my pussy,” Darci moaned. As the fantasy-Mary’s tongue darted out and began caressing Darci, the vine sliding in and out of her lower orifice sped up, as did the two vines penetrating Mary from behind. Darci’s pleasure built and built to a fever pitch. The hand beneath her legs blurred as it vibrated the top of her mating orifice, causing her pleasure far beyond what any of Irwin’s ancestors had experienced or could even comprehend. He thought any greater stimulation beyond this must be impossible.

In the human’s mind, Irwin’s other self thrust into her top mating orifice again as Mary’s tongue moved to the little foci of pleasure just above it.

“Yes, fuck my pussy and my ass,” Darci panted, her voice a high-pitched whine. “Harder, baby. Give it to me. Fuck me. Yes. Yes. YESSS!” The vines in her fantasy buried themselves in both orifices and erupted milky goo, filling the Darci in the fantasy until her belly grew to make room. A fraction of a moment later, Darci’s mind exploded in pure, blinding pleasure so powerful it caused the human’s muscles to spasm uncontrollably.

Darci’s shrieks echoed around the kitchen, but Irwin couldn’t hear them. The assault of pure bliss, a little bit of pain, and exquisite pleasure coursing through Darci’s body and mind so overwhelmed him he couldn’t form a coherent thought.

Moments later, the world returned, and his thoughts came crashing back to reality. He prepared to pull his vine back lest the human discover him, but Darci was still in her fantasy world. The vines around her arms and legs unwound only to create a mesh beneath the recovering human. His vines brought Mary over and laid her next to Darci on the mesh as he laid the other women n the mesh next to her. The women pressed their mouths together and ran their hands over each other’s bodies as fantasy-Irwin continued sliding in and out of their pussy and ass at a slow, languid pace. Mary’s hand glided over the small bump on Darci’s belly where the other Irwin filled her. A vine brushed a bit of sweat-soaked hair from the woman’s forehead and trailed down the side of her face, where she caught it with a hand and held it there affectionately.

Mary moved forward and pressed her mouth against Darci’s again when the real Irwin finally broke contact and retracted the vine before Darci opened her eyes.

He needn’t have worried since her breathing changed to that of the human’s resting state a few seconds later. Irwin had seen her do this a few times on the couch in the living room and knew it could last from a few minutes to several hours. Irwin stretched out a vine again, taking a more direct route to the woman. It only touched her for a moment, sending a strong thought toward her before withdrawing.

Darci awoke with a start after only a few minutes. Groggy, she looked around the kitchen for a moment before leaning forward in her chair. “Damn, what a mess,” she grumbled, looking a the puddle on the floor. The human stood and yawned, thrusting her arms upward and spreading her fingers as she tightened all the muscles in her body. “I think it’s time for a shower and a nap after that,” she said, smiling at Irwin. Glancing at the wet spot where her sex dripped all over the floor, she chuckled and said, “I’ll leave the clean-up to you,” then grabbed her tablet and saved the picture before walking back to her bedroom. Irwin waited until he heard the sound of the shower before picking up his pot and walking over to the side of the table.

Not long after she brought him home with her, Darci put him in a new pot with fresh soil, but the new pot was a reddish-brown stone much heavier than the plastic cube. He no longer had the option of dropping to the floor safely, even if he could figure out how to get back up. Thankfully, Irwin had grown since the foray to the floor on his first day. One vine reached back and hooked the edge of the table behind him as the other five dropped over the front of the table, growing thinner as they stretched. The vines wiggled forward when they reached the floor, eventually squirming into the clear puddle and laying there as they absorbed the human’s fluids.

Once the liquid dried up, he cleaned what he could from the front of the chair and returned to his place on the table. Irwin thought about the human’s fantasy and how the feeling of being pumped full of fluid coming from the end of his vines pushed her into a state of frighteningly pure bliss. Raising one of his vines, he focused on it for a moment before a drop of milky fluid appeared on the tip that roughly matched her fantasy.

Irwin arranged his vines roughly how they had been before Darci came into the kitchen and settled into stillness as he went over his contact with the human while she masturbated. Now he had a name for what she was doing and why. He also learned that the two lower orifices were her pussy and ass and that ‘pussy’ had many other names. Irwin discovered Darci’s ass wasn’t even meant for mating, or ‘fucking,’ or ‘making love’ depending on the situation, but she found pleasure being penetrated there regardless. The tiny nub at the top of her pussy was called a ‘clit’ and brought extreme pleasure, even crossing over into pain if overstimulated.

But there were other things besides the sexual aspects of her thoughts, like Darci’s feelings for Mary, which she assigned the word ‘love.’ Both women professed the word to one another often. Now, he had an inkling of what it meant but at the same time felt the sentiment ran much deeper than the surface thoughts he gleaned from Darci’s fantasy.

The plant had so much to learn from everything that just happened, but it would take time.

As he began replaying this latest interaction with the human, he also decided that Darci had been correct in referring to him as male. Irwin didn’t want to watch a larger version of himself fuck, or make love to, Darci.

He wanted to do it himself, and for that, he would need to get a lot bigger.

“Look at you,” said Mary, running a finger along the side of the bulb on Irwin’s main stalk. “Graduating to a new pot out here in the living room.”

“And already started getting into it with Shadow,” Darci chuckled, coming out of the kitchen with a glass of white wine in each hand.

“How so?”

“I’m not sure, actually,” she replied, handing one of the glasses to Mary and sitting down on the couch closest to Irwin’s container. Setting her glass on the end table in front of the plant, she picked through his vines before holding one up. The tip appeared misshapen. “But after I repotted him and put him out here, it looks like someone tried to gnaw on him. I was in the bedroom when I heard Shadow yowl, then tear through the house and out the cat door. I come out to find this,” she held up the vine, “and Beans in the middle of the floor with his tail bottle brushed. Not sure if it’s some kind of chemical defense, but whatever it was, Shadow won’t go near him. He won’t even crawl into my lap if I’m on this side of the couch.”

“So did you kiss your boyfriend’s boo-boo and make it all better? Maybe get a little tongue action in there?” said Mary, opening her mouth and moving the tip of her tongue in tight circles before giggling.

Darci rolled her eyes. “Get your mind out of the gutter.”

“Sweetheart, it’s Friday night, I’m at your place, you are in a sundress without a bra and probably without panties, and you don’t have to work in the morning. My mind has been in the gutter for hours now, and you just made it worse by giving me alcohol,” she replied, swirling her wine.

Letting go of Irwin’s damaged vine, Darci sat back on the couch and crossed her legs. “Before I let you act on that. I wanted to ask you more about the image Irwin gave you a while back in the kitchen.”

Mary raised a questioning eyebrow, her eyes flicking momentarily to the plant. “What of it?”

“Tell me what you remember of it, in as much as you can.”

“I dunno, Dar. That was a couple weeks ago,” she said, her reluctance evident in her tone

“Try, please?”

“Fine, let me think for a second.” Mary stared off into the distance while swirling the wine in her glass for a few moments. “Okay, here’s what I can tell you...”

Mary spent the next few minutes recalling everything she could of the brief, but memorable moment with the plant, getting more and more aroused as she focused on the details.

“Wait, stop there,” said Darci. Smirking, she put her arms up and out to her sides while moving her legs apart.

Darci slowly moved into what seemed to be a very specific pose on the couch as Mary watched in confusion. The brunette pulled her legs up and out to the side, then pushed the hem of her sundress up, exposing her naked sex.

Mary gasped as her eyes widened in surprise. “What the fuck?” she breathed. It was the same pose as the Darci in her vision. Her eyes shifted between Darci and Irwin. “But ... how?”

Darci relaxed and pulled her dress back down. “A few days, maybe a week, before he showed you that, I was in the kitchen having a little alone time. Since somebody,” she glared up at Mary while taking a sip of wine, “got the idea of a viney, tentacled boyfriend in my head, I went looking to see if this was a thing on the internet, and it sure as hell is. Long story short, I ended up playing with myself out in the kitchen, and what you described came directly from the fantasy I was enjoying at the time.”

“But ... my ass. He had one in my ass, and it felt good.”

“Hon, he doesn’t know about your injury or that you can’t take anything bigger than a finger back there. I’m guessing he took the feelings from my experience in the fantasy and projected them onto you.”

“So you’re suggesting Irwin is a sentient, psychic plant. Why are we not running and telling the cops or the government? And what does he want?”

“I don’t know about sentient and psychic—”

“He took a fantasy from your head, rearranged it so I felt what you did, and projected it into my head. I think that counts as sentient and psychic.”

“Fair point. But I can tell you I got a sense of appreciation when I repotted him. He trusted me to take care of him and didn’t lash out like he did at Shadow.”

“You probably weren’t treating his vines like a snack either.”

Darci smiled, “True. But I think he trusts me, and I don’t want to betray that.” She looked up at Mary with a sheepish grin. “I’ve loved and taken care of plants for so long that it’s nice to know what I do is appreciated.”

“I can see where you are coming from there, and you are the only person I know where that actually makes sense and isn’t creepy as fuck. But I have so many questions. Like, where did he come from? Some genetics lab? Outer space? Did he fall through a rift in spacetime? Has his kind always been here, and you were just the first to discover them? But most importantly, is he safe, and what does he want? I’m not going show up one day to find your dress laying in front of him, and you’ve disappeared, am I?”

Darci set her wine down and looked over at the plant. “What do you think, Irwin? Can you answer some of Mary’s questions?” she asked, lifting up one of his vines with her finger. “You too, Mary,” she said, waving her down.

“Damn thing is probably going to poison us to keep its existence secret, and we’re fucking holding hands with it,” she grumbled while reaching down and lifting a vine like Darci.

Seconds passed, and nothing happened.

“Well, now I feel foolish,” said Mary, withdrawing her hand.

“Wait, wait, wait,” said Darci grasping Mary’s wrist and pulling it back toward Irwin. “Think about it. If he’s a sentient, psychic plant, he’s taking a huge risk revealing himself to us.”

“Hasn’t he already done that, though?” she asked, lifting the vine again.

“It’s one thing to guess. It’s another thing to know.”

“True.”

A minute passed, then two. Mary sighed and pulled her hand away again. “I think we’re out of luck. Maybe it was all some weird, shared hallucination,” she said. She brought the wineglass to her lips but stopped before taking a sip. “Dar?”

The brunette’s face lit up like she had won a prize at the county fair. Her eyes widened, and her mouth fell open in amazement as she stared off into the distance.

“Darci? Are you alright?” Mary asked.

Darci’s expression shifted from happy excitement to appalled. When she finally looked up at Mary, there was anger in the woman’s eyes Mary had only seen a few times before.

“You threatened to JUICE him!”

The color drained from Mary’s face. “Awww, shit,” she mumbled before downing the rest of her wine.

“I. cannot. fucking. Believe you right now! You ... you ... you don’t even own a juicer!”

“No, but you do. Wrong thing to say. Listen, Dar, that day was really fucking weird, and you have been known for being a little too trusting. I was just trying to look out for you, and ... well ... what I said was mean, but it was also true, and not just for Irwin. After Derrik served you the divorce papers, I would have done the same thing to him if it were legal. I love you, Dar, and anyone who hurts you needs to know there will be hell to pay, as your ex-husband found out.”

“You’re making it very hard to stay mad at you,” Darci growled.

“Just making sure your house doesn’t turn into the next Little Shop of Horrors.”

“Carla already made that joke. Scared the hell out of me doing it too—” Darci blinked a few times. “Uhh ... Mary, I don’t think that will be a worry.” She looked at Irwin, “You should probably be the one to tell her that.”

Mary sighed and looked at the plant. “I promise I won’t throw you in the juicer, and I can’t believe I’m talking to a plant again.”

“So, he’s not just a shared hallucination?”

Mary looked at her wineglass. “Unless you spiked the wine with LSD. No. You were in the bedroom getting undressed when I said that. There’s no way you could have heard me.” The vine lifted as she reached down to hold it again. Mary froze for a moment, then placed her finger beneath it.

What would it be like to touch the mind of another being? To communicate telepathically? Mary had a lot of ideas in her head from movies and books. Would it be an echoing, hollow voice? Would it even know English? Actually, that was a silly question. Irwin clearly understood what they were saying.

What actually happened made it very difficult not to laugh.

Instead of words, a picture formed in her mind, but more than a picture, it was like a single-page comic on parchment. The first image was of a soft, cartoony version of Darci looking behind her at a piece of glass sticking out of her leg. That was followed by Carla helping Darci walk away. Out of a gap between what Mary thought were two boxes, but Darci later explained were stacks of the plastic flats her plants arrived in at work, a green vine poked out and touched the pool of blood left behind. Next, the puddle had disappeared, and a cartoon version of Irwin in a black square pot looked brown and sickly.

At the very bottom of the page was a representation of Audrey II from Little Shop of Horrors with the cartoon Darci beside it. In the next frame, it picks Darci up and tosses her into its mouth, and is followed by a significantly bigger Audrey II.

Below it, the first two scenes repeat but with Irwin instead. In the last ‘drawing,’ a shriveled, brown Irwin lay in the ground, his pot tipped over, dirt spilling out, and two X’s on his bulb.

“Blood is poisonous to you?” Mary asked.

A red circle appeared around the image of him dead.

“How do you know about Little Shop of Horrors?” asked Darci

The page went blank for a moment before a bust of cartoon Darci appeared. From it, a thought bubble extended from her head with a storefront, Audrey II, and a man in glasses representing Seymore. The drawing of Irwin appeared with a vine on Darci’s shoulder, two big goofy-looking eyes, and a faint yellow cone beginning at his eyes and stretching toward the thought bubble.

“So, you can see our thoughts?”

The scene changed to a side view of a shoreline with Irwin on it. He continued to stare at the thought bubble from a moment ago bobbing on the surface of a body of water. Another image appeared below. The thought bubble was submerged, and Irwin’s big-eyed depiction looked around for it with a question mark over his head.

“But why should we trust you won’t hurt us, and what do you want from us?” asked Mary.

The page went blank again before two Irwins with sharp red triangles for eyes appeared, one below the other. In front of the top one, Mary’s cartoon joined Darci’s. Both looked bruised and battered as Evil Irwin beat them with his vines. The second scene proved even more disturbing since both women were laying on the floor with Xs over their eyes. Red arrows pointed from each scenario to the next in the sequence, a police car beside Irwin with his vines up in the air. Pictures of Irwin behind bars, then in a clear acrylic box with air holes in it followed. At the page’s bottom, a dead Irwin lay on a metal table as an evil-looking man in a labcoat sliced him open with a scalpel.