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Sid remained close by, watching Billy until he realized how rude it most be. He couldn't help that it was surreal to watch him crawl. Once he looked away he settled for just at the water.

Sid said nothing for a while, the more he stared at the river, the more he worried about the future. He could only ignore it for so long and... No, he was about to face facts yet. It was bad enough he'd had to acknowledge the perils of getting older earlier without plunging ahead into the scaly, fang-filled things in store for him.

Worst of all, he wasn't anywhere near something that could take his mind of things the easy way. He felt horrible, physically and emotionally, and he was too absorbed in it all to try and keep from showing it. Funny to think how hard back in the beginning. Now he just didn't care.

"A viperfish." Sid sounded distant. "They apparently live, like, really ******** deep in the ocean. Miles below, or something. Couldn't find out all that much."

His halfassed attempt at research hadn't turned up much more than a short blurb and an unnerving drawing. It bothered him even more that all the habits listed for it were preceded by 'it is thought that'. Nobody knew exactly what the damn things did, which would have been funny if he wasn't in a position to find out for himself.

"I guess that's a plus." Sid scratched his chin nervously. "There was this one chick... said she hoped I'd be something fuzzy. Wonder what she'd think..." He had an idea, and he laughed mirthlessly over it.

"I have no ********' clue, man..." Sid's memory of the conversation with the cheetah girl was hazy. He probably shouldn't have drank all that whiskey immediately afterwards.

"Wouldn't surprise me," Sid said tersely, adding another unpleasant topic to the list of things that were going to gnaw at him for a while. He finally moved closer to the river and found a rock to sit on. He couldn't help but sigh with relief once he had the weight off his feet.

"You just have to get by... somehow..." He was no longer all that certain how he'd manage.

Sid pulled his cane across his lap. He was close enough to the water that he could have dipped his feet in it if he wanted, but he kept them back. "I was a lot of things before... had a lot of dead end jobs, anyway. I used to have pretenses of being a writer, but one book doesn't count for much, does it?"

Some people would have been happy with just one, but Sid's worst failure was never producing more than the odd short story afterwards. One book... He was going to be added to the long list of authors who had one work and just vanished.

"I ******** everything in my life up so badly..." he said. He didn't mean to say that out loud, but it got him off the subject of writing. Sort of.

"I don't know what you'd call it... Just gets lumped into Fiction, anyway." Sid glanced up at the sky once more. All the stars looked exactly the same as the ones before. "I wrote it when I was young and full of acid. Lots of drugged-up, existential bullshit in it, if you ask me, but I guess it fooled people."