Getting into POLLY WANT, honestly: some stories are hard to expand, but this one really needed to be properly fleshed out. I feel a lot better about this project than the other one, honestly. I should have expanded it a while back.
The odd thing about horror, Blid Srohtop discovered, was how quickly you adjust to living with it all the time.
The first few weeks were the roughest; Blid knew he would have to hustle for more customers now that the contract with the Terran Consulate had gone down the sewers, but he had trouble focusing at odd moments during the day. It was always the same thing, too. He would be doing this or that, and suddenly a memory of that horrible [bird]’s head would leap right out of the primitive parts of his brain and terrify him.
It was odd, though. It should have been that terrible beak that unnerved him most, but it wasn’t. It was the eyes, and the way how the [bird] had kept turning its demonic head to watch him from one side, and then the other, with a frustration and suppressed rage that was clear to perceive, even with species and xenological barriers in the way. And the oddest part of all about that? Unlike everything else, that frustration did not seem particularly aimed at him.