Hey Chio Crew! I’m taking a break from posting updates this week to give my hands a bit of a rest so I can work more slowly. For today’s (and next week’s) update, we’ve put together a piece of short fiction by Delade. You can read it here or the full text is down below. Regular story updates will be back in a couple of weeks!

In the meantime: if you’d like to help us keep making comics, you can join the Chio Club, subscribe to the comic on Tapas, or follow us on Youtube or TikTok! Sharing the comic with your friends is also a huge help to us – the best way of spreading webcomics around is usually word of mouth, and we’d very much appreciate it!

Story text begins below:

Radon and Gil: Part One

By Delade

Radon checked the door again, giving it a good tug with his hand.

Nothing happened.

“I told you,” Gil said from across the room, “it won’t open until it clicks.”

“How do we make it click, then?” Radon asked. “How are we going to get out of here?! We’re trapped!”

“We’re not trapped, we’re just…” Gil thought for a moment, lounging back on one of the room’s two beds. “‘Temporarily detained,’” he said after a moment. “The lights need to come back on first anyway. Give it time, Radon. Everything’s going to be alright.”

Radon forced himself to slow down and think. This wasn’t the first time Gil had predicted something needed to happen first before something else could happen. “Cause and effect,” the other chio had described it, which was something Radon himself didn’t really understand either.

Twenty minutes ago, there was a series of loud bangs and explosions. Then the lights went out. The door, which was always locked, remained the only way out of the room.

Gil was the smarter one between the two of them—scary smart. Unlike Radon’s soft and sandy-colored fur, Gil had a dark and matted coat with brown splotches along the neck and green eyes that blended in with the clothes the White Coats had given him to wear. He was talkative and sociable to the point Radon thought he was obnoxious, but that was before he saw how smart Gil was.

Now though…

Now he was just annoying.

“How do you know this?!” Radon asked, his voice tense and anxious.

“Know what?”

“This!” Radon muttered. “This! All of this! How do you know…anything?! You’re always going on and on and on about this and that, and you never say how you know! How do you know all this?!”

“It’s a gift,” Gil said cheerily after another obnoxious dramatic pause. “The hardest part is reading what the White Coats left on the walls next to their switches. They’re so short and succinct you have to really think about what they’re trying to parse out! I mean, ‘on’ and ‘off’ are descriptive, sure but what exactly is it turning ‘on’ and ‘off’? Is it a light? A fan? A noisemaker?”

“You don’t even know what any of those things are!”

“I know enough,” Gil said. “I know that right now the lights need to come back on first for the door to unlock. I know it has something to do with power—which has something to do with the lights themselves—but beyond that I’m a little unsure…I know I know what I know, though.”

Rather than engage and argue with him further, Radon turned his attention back to the door and tugged again, harder this time. In a fit of sudden inspiration he suddenly tried pushing on the door instead.

This time the door shifted, and made an unexpected clanking noise in the process.

“It clicked!” Radon said quietly. “It…Gil, it clicked.”

“No it didn’t.”

“But I heard it!” Radon said, louder this time. He turned back to a relaxed Gil, still laid back on the bed. “It clicked.”

“No,” Gil said confidently, “it shifted.”

“…what’s the difference?!”

“One is the sound of the door clicking, which sounds like this,” he said, making an audible click with his mouth, “and the other sound—the door shifting—sounds like this.” He heaved his body sharply to the right, causing the bed he was laying on to shift against the floor, where it made a dull grinding sound…similar to what the door had just produced.

Radon felt stupid again.

“…oh,” he said, sinking to the floor and propping his back up against the door. He flayed his long tail out to the left, then wrapped the tip of it around the other bed frame’s leg in the small room absently, not really paying attention to it.

Gil saw this and sat up a bit. “Oh, don’t be like that,” he said. “It’s an easy mistake to make.”

“Easy for you to say,” Radon muttered. “You know everything there is to know and I just don’t know anything, apparently.”

“Thats a load of buddlefudge,” Gil exclaimed, springing up out of bed with an insufferably nonchalant leap. “You know plenty of stuff, Radon! Don’t be so hard on yourself.”

“What do I know then?” he asked. “Why don’t you just tell me.”

“You know I’m not like you,” the dark colored chio said casually. “You know I’m not mean and that I’m not going to hurt you. You know I listen and try to help you out when you’re feeling low. You know enough. Don’t worry.”

“I…I can’t help it, Gil,” Radon said. “I just…I’m scared. I heard and felt those loud booms and heard those loud pops and screams earlier and I’m just…I don’t know what to do.”

“Believe it or not,” Gil said carefully, “I am too.”

“Buddlefudge,” Radon muttered.

“It’s true!” Gil quipped. “I’m quite scared. In addition to all the bangs and pops we felt out there—”

A distinct click sounded from the door, filling the room with an echo that seemed to fill every single solitary space.

“What was that?!” Radon barked, scurrying himself into the corner near the bed and away from the door.

“…that was the door,” Gil said, moving to stand up from the bed. “The door…clicked…but the lights aren’t…on…”

“What…what does that mean?” Radon asked. “What does that mean, Gil?”

“I don’t…know what it means,” Gil said, “but I know it means we can get out of here.”

Leave.

They could leave.

Radon tentatively stood up, then moved closer to the door. He reached for it with his hand, gave it a gentle pull on the handle, and the door opened. He looked back at Gil, who was now studying the lights in the ceiling and scratching his head in thought.

“The lights should have come back on,” he said. “I don’t understand.”

“Think about it later,” Radon said. “Let’s just get out of here.”