After we escaped Viola, I saw rain for the first time. It was two weeks after the break-out. Fiona and I were crouching in a doorway when the first drops began to fall. As the rain hit the sidewalk, first lightly, then in a torrential downpour, I remember feeling both awestruck and frightened. There was so much water that I thought the clouds were going to fall down and crush me and Fiona and everyone around us. It scared me how the sky had been big and dark after our escape, always grey and unchanging. But for me, the rain changed everything. I was squinting as it hurtled down in sheets, trying to tell myself I could see things in the raindrops, trying to convince myself we had done the right thing. I would say that I was sure I could see the others – happy – that I could see Eve and Ariel, both alive and smiling. I would search for my mother in the downpour, trying to piece together her face from what I had imagined she would look like.
The first time I saw the rain, I was crying.
I still remember seeing all the people milling by, throwing sideways glances at the two sodden teenagers with oddly coloured hair and eyes. That was another thing that struck me after we escaped. There were so many people; sometimes so many that they spilled into the sidewalk – like a river that had burst its banks. I didn’t know there were this many people in the outside world, the most I’d ever seen was when all twelve of us were in the recreation room. It was a little bit overwhelming; everybody pushing past you in the street, no-one stopping to check if you had been hurt or injured; in the way the doctors liked to do. And then there was the traffic and all the vehicles that came with it – the cars, the tucks, the trains, the trams. We must have been nearly run over at least ten times that week, never without Fiona swearing loudly at the car, only to wander into the path of another one moments later. The sound of them was horrible. The first time I heard an engine, I thought there was an earthquake – like Terra used to do; only five times the size. I think I screamed the first time I heard the screech of a horn. All these things made us feel even more lost in this huge world we had fallen into. It was miles away from the claustrophobic corridors of basement five, and that’s what scared me. I had been the weak one back at Viola, the one who made herself smaller to hide from the bigger things. And if I was weak there, what chance did I have in this strange new world?
Until this point, I had been so enthralled by the rain that I had forgotten Fiona was there. She must not have seen me, and I buried my face in my knees as soon as I heard her swear under her breath. Both of us still had on our clothes from the recreation room, and we were shivering and dripping with water. I heard Fiona stand up, her boots squelching as she paced in circles on the sidewalk.
Neither of us knew where we were, where we were going or even what we were going to do. There were a few more minutes of pacing before Fiona yanked me to my feet. For the next few seconds, I felt increasingly aware and embarrassed that the two of us, of all people, should be escaping together. My eyes were still swollen and red, and I couldn’t stand to look Fiona in the eye. We couldn’t be more different, but I guess neither of us wanted to be alone – though I don’t think Fiona would admit it. It didn’t matter that we were on the run, that we were Destrillians – all I wanted to do was stare at the rain and forget everything that had happened. It took me a few minutes to pluck up the courage to look at Fiona. No sooner had I caught her eye did I look to the ground. The rain had only served to make Fiona more furious than before. Her eyes burned with anger, and her hair limply stuck to her forehead. I remember it wasn’t as bright as usual, and I remember that it was the first time that I noticed she was only about an inch or two taller than me. I had always thought Fiona as this hugely intimidating figure, always looming over me. But in the rain she seemed a little softer, if only by appearance. She wasn’t Ariel, but Fiona and I were still linked by the same wish to be free.
Freedom- that’s what all of us wanted. I suppose it was stupid of me to think everything would fall into place - that we would live happy, picture perfect lives like the ones we dreamed of. But now we were more lost than ever. I think it was because we both knew that our freedom marked a new chapter for us- for me- something I wanted more than anything in the world. Fiona and I both knew what it held in store for us – something harder and darker than we had ever experienced at Viola. I just think don’t think Fiona ever wanted to turn the page.
It’s when I’m alone that I really start to think. Did we do the right thing? Then I ask myself if it’s just me being like this, and I feel even more out of place than before. Ever since Lucy Adams was created, I’ve felt like I’m drowning; like all those I killed at Viola. I struggle and struggle to keep Thetis Alcesteos alive, only to feel like I’m killing her every time I step out of the door. I want to be her again, I want to be prototype #006; but I can’t. This is the darker reality of our freedom – to hide who we are. We might have escaped our Violan prison, but we’re still trapped in these stifling human identities. I’m trying to come to terms with that. Fiona isn’t. Okay, she got us the TV, she pays some of the rent with money from her escapades, and she deals with Ms. Petrowski when I’m in one of my slumps. That’s it. It’s as if my job, my efforts have all been to support her, and the life she wanted; like I’m the person to the side of the stage, giving silent encouragement as the show rattles on without me. When I hear the door slam, or see her storming out, it makes me see a shadow of who we used to be; who I could have been. Honestly? I think I’m jealous of it. It frustrates me that she can do what she wants without thinking of the consequences. But sometimes it makes me sad, and even angry. I thought the point of escaping together was to help each other build our lives in this brave new world. Just sometimes, I wish she would be here when I came back from work; just to see another Destrillian. I need that at times, the comfort of knowing that you’re not totally alone. It’s these small things that really get to me, that make me question whether I can prove Dr. Perkins wrong, prove that I’m more than a ‘fragile’ little girl.
It’s Fiona’s attitude as well – not that I could have expected it to change. Sometimes, when she speaks to me, I see that same look of disgust she used to wear when she saw me in the recreation room, and then it’s gone. I think she sees me as a human now, and that hurts me more than any biting words or bad memories. I tried to learn from her, tried to become stronger and hold my own against the weight of responsibility. I’m reaching to be this fearless, brave girl, only to fall when I grasp it in my finger tips. Fiona caught me crying once, after she called me ‘Lucy’ in an argument. She didn’t say anything, and I think that was the worst part. If she had shouted, or hit me, I would have known how to react. But the silence was horrible. It felt like I was being crushed by my own short-comings, my inadequacies. No matter how strong the facade, the girl from four years ago still lives on. I can be cold and callous as I like, but the girl inside still feels everything. And that makes everything worse. I think Fiona knows that, maybe that’s why she’s never around. That’s why, when I hear the rain, I remember that time when everything was new and overwhelming. It said on TV that rain washes everything away.
Satsu, BRIAN BLESSED, MIGHTY AND WISE Junpei Iori: Ace Detective, Maccaffrickstonson von Lichtenstafford Frabenschnaben, Polite Krogan, Robert Baratheon
He looks at me, eyes wide open, grinning like it’s his lucky day. The fucker doesn’t have a clue. Hell’s raining around us like the devil’s on Lysyrgic – but wait a minute, that’s why we’re here. Hah.
“This is just a taste of our product.” Rick emphasizes the word “taste” with an emphasis on the last ‘te’ and waves his hand around at the general hell’s bells orgasming around us. He thinks that by using complicated hand gestures and talking in a fake accent he sounds sophisticated, but really it just sounds like I want to break his nose in both directions.
I play it cool, though, because there’s plenty of that for later. There’s no point messing up three years worth of undercover busts to take out my annoyance on someone I’ll be taking it out on later anyway.
“So, whaddaya think? I think you ain’t gonna go back after you’ve seen all this.”
I sip on the brandy he’s brought downstairs for tonight. It’s not poisoned, which I suppose means he still hasn’t gotten suspicious yet. It sure as hell doesn’t taste cheap. This is, after all, supposed to be his crowning achievement, the cream and the icing and the candles and the lighter on the cake. Rich for life, all the hookers and bent cops he wants to keep him and all his future hooker-born kids away from jail until the last one of the McCauleys dies.
Dunno about him, but this’ll be my crowning achievement, that’s for sure.
“I think you’ve outdone yourself this time, my friend. This stuff’ll get everyone hooked. Your best so far.”
When I say this, he looks pleased with himself, the way a toad looks pleased with itself when it’s had a particularly juicy grub.
Or the way Dog’s pleased with himself when he’s pissed on the neighbour’s letterbox two houses down and screwed her prize hound.
Rick’s pupils are ridiculously dilated. He’s probably hooked on it himself. The surgery to put the tracheal filter in my throat was worth it, but the things I’m still getting from this crap in the air is enough to make me cough. If it’s like this at a fraction of its strength, this shit is probably enough to kill people several times over. Which begs the question how the guy on the opposite side of my briefcase is still alive. I ask him about that.
“Nah, when it gets into the air like this, it’s not as strong as ya think. The longer you’re in it, though, the better it gets. The lab-coats that gave me this stuff had a lot ta say about it and I didn’t really get half of the shit they were goin’ on about, but basically, ya got different strengths and ya combine it with different stuff to target whatever you like. You wanna get high, you use this much along with this other thing, you wanna get a caffeine slap in the face, you use this much with this other thing, you wanna jizz in yer pants, you take this much and do it a few times at once, blah blah blah.”
“Lab-coats? You hired some guys?”
“Nah, couple’a scientist blokes were just getting into the market, and they needed to get some product off their hands. Told me that it was high class stuff and everything. They cut a deal with me, said they’d let me have the product if I showed them the ropes to the market. They’d give me the recipe if I gave ‘em some contacts to cut some more deals with.” His grin widens, as if it could get any wider – he proves me wrong.
“So you got both the product and the recipe?”
“Haha, now that would be tellin’. I will say this, though -” I’ve just about had it with his motherfucking stupid hand gestures in his motherfucking speech patterns – “Best business I’ve done with anyone ever.”
One of the people writhing on the floor lets out a whimper, which startles me because it means that the drugs are starting to really take their effect on my head. I wonder how much more evidence the rest of the police need to kick down the doors. Madison and the rest of her crew are probably already at the doors, ready to bust some heads. Knowing her, this is probably her best 30th birthday party yet. The sort of woman who’d say “fuck that” to a mid-life crisis with a shield in one hand and a baton in the other.
Rick gestures for an assistant to bring out the goods, the drugs I’m supposed to be buying. Apparently this is police money we’re using, which I guess isn’t so great because there’s some fucker up in the Artolian government making us get less and less every year. On the upside, any of the cash we use up in this raid goes back to us anyway – Sharkey’s gang will be as good as dead after this and when it comes to all of the raids this week, it’s finders keepers for us cops, including drug money, laundered firearms and equipment. I must have let it show because he seems to notice the eagerness in my eyes and reciprocates by wasting no time at all in opening the case.
“I know, man, this is big stuff. Everyone’s a fuckin’ winner here, ya know.”
The insides of the carry case have that glittery foam, the stuff that sparkles in the light and has that new car smell. In there is a ten-by-twenty set of glass vials with a couple of pistol-grip syringes and a manual hundreds of pages thick, with the company logo and name all scrubbed off, of course.
The vials contain an opaque liquid that seems to change colors and shimmer like fog, which brings me to two conclusions – the vials are strongly pressurized and the drug is used as an aerosol. Rick tells me that it can also be directly injected into the blood, but he hasn’t figured out how yet.
I take out one vial. It’s pencil thin and thick-walled, but judging from its potency it’s probably enough to last a few doses. I hold it up to the light and check the glasswork. It seems to confirm Rick’s story enough – all this is the work of professionals and is definitely not some backyard job of a junkie. At least, this batch is – if they have the recipe who knows how many fuck-ups they could cause with it.
I flick through the manual as I push my briefcase of money towards him, and the manual confirms pretty much everything I’d already considered, and then some. Seems like this was experimental crap, aiming to make the lives of shrinks easier by hooking patients up to machines and feeding them drugs that turned their subconscious inside out and revealed it for the machine to see. Highly versatile, but like everything to do with psychologists it only worked so well. Also no-one found a market for it until they found out how versatile it could get.
This would blow Lysyrgic right out of the water and push a few lords off the black market.
“Yeah, they gave me a couple’a fancy electronic shrink chairs, but they said they were just to ‘enhance the experience further’ or someshit. I mean how much more enhancing do ya need, huh? Haha!”
“So why haven’t you taken over the Orange Zone yet?”
He leans closer to snatch the briefcase of cash I’ve laid out for him, and blows a single continuous stream of cigar smoke as he talks. “See, here’s the thing. This stuff, yeah, we can get all the ingredients easy. It doesn’t cost too much to make the magic work. But hell, man, it can take days, weeks even to come up with a couple’a doses. This shit’s a premium product no matter how popular it is. I’m talkin’ about all the other lords in this Zone bankrupting themselves for a couple of tubes. Just not enough to go around, ya see? And the tech to do it faster, it sits in the company my lab-coats came from. That ain’t gonna come out soon, they got way more applications for that stuff and they aren’t letting those go.”
I nod as I finish the rest of my whiskey. The drugs that come out in the Orange Zone are all low-cost, high-yield products that come from low-quality crops, but the flip side is that they’re high-yield. You could sell to as many clients as you wanted, when you wanted, however much you wanted. A drug like the one in front of me would have everyone wanting more where there wasn’t any more. People would go batshit insane. Balances unbalanced.
Letterboxes pissed on and prize hounds screwed.
“But for now, I have enough. I reckon I’ll sell it slow, give out a few doses for some of the clubs out there, just business-exclusive, yeah? You’re a special mate though, Arkansas -” That’s my fake name – “so I got some specially for you.
“Too kind. All the best.” I try and outgrin him, and fail, shaking his hand from across the table as we get up to leave. My head’s actually twisted itself into a clusterfuck by now, and I’m having difficulties walking. As one of Rick’s bodyguards gets to the door, I figure it’s time to set off the codewords before they notice five squads out in the hallway and above the windows.
“By the way, Rick…”
“Yeah?” “Arkansas is done here.”
No sooner than I’ve said it, the bodyguard gets a faceful of door as it gets kicked down into him. I drop to the floor, hands on my heads, and Rick has enough brains to dive under a table while the rest of his bodyguards draw their guns. It doesn’t matter, though, because in three seconds they’re all on the ground spasming from taser leads or keeled over from rubber shot.
***
I’m sitting in one of those interrogation rooms now, they’re going through the motions. I appreciate the gesture, but by now I just want to go home. My real home, that is, not some cheap motel apartment I used during my undercover stint.
A brown-haired beauty with skin like black ash walks in, all heels and unbuttoned shirt with class and style. If it was ten years ago and I was still young and stupid and wasn’t married yet – and she wasn’t my boss, I sure as hell wouldn’t have minded having a fling with her on an office table somewhere. As it stands, she just likes teasing me and I return the favour.
“So, looks like NALEIN’s favourite crim is back in custody.” She pouts and leans forward just enough for me to take a peek down her shirt, sliding a manila folder of photos and files I’ve seen several times before, crossing her legs with a mock intensity in her eyes. I fidget and swallow down the non-existent lump in my throat before coughing.
“And it’s good to see you back at the top of the ladder, babydoll.”
She laughs, a good stout belly-laugh, and we get up and hug like we’ve been best pals for years, which I suppose is okay because it’s true. I haven’t been with cops proper since I started the investigation aside from getting ‘arrested’, and I’ve had very little time to spend with family proper either.
“Man, you look like shit, Arctos.”
“All the better to smear you with, Winona.” She grins at my retort, and while we sit down she gets out from nowhere two glasses of ice and a bottle of Oaklaw’s Damascus Cream – my admiration for her going up a few notches already. We both lick our lips as she pours it into the glasses and we clink them together like we’d always imagine we would at the end of the investigation. It tastes so cold and ice-creamy and as the whisky settles in I sigh and note that she’s made my day again.
“God I miss quality like this. You know, in a couple of years with the payroll I’ll be getting, I won’t be able to afford jack shit. You heard about what they’re doing to us, right?”
“Well, might as well get married asap while you can still afford it, right? How’s he doing?”
“Oh, he’s great. Teaching at the University isn’t quite the life he expected, but as far as pay and work goes, he likes it. We’ve planned to hold the wedding at the end of the year.”
“Good for you then.” I manage a frown despite the second sip of Oaklaw’s. “I don’t like the way the funding’s going though. I mean, we’re almost done on this operation, but we haven’t cleaned up Osea even halfway yet.”
“No-one likes it, Arctos.” Winona fidgets with her lapels with one hand, and then puts the glass down as she does up another button of her shirt, noting how cold it’s getting. “Even as Director, I’m not getting very much feedback at all. We used to have this thing going on with the government but they cut that off ages ago and now if the forecast is right, we’ll be dead in the water in a few years.”
Bad news. Not to say we didn’t see it coming.
“But anyway, for now, you’ve got a break ahead for you, Arctos. Your wife’s been worried, of course. And it’s about time you went home to see Lana too.”
God. The mention of them threatens to put tears in my eyes, but even though Winona wouldn’t really mind, I fight them back and manage to let off nothing more than a sniffle. It really has been too long. And when she says ‘wife’, she’s not referring to the hooker I’ve been with for the past months to a year in that motel. She was a nice woman- hell, I even slept with her once - but it was once and now it’s just another of my little regrets. And then she turned out to be a cop as well under a different team, and then, well, it got a little less awkward.
Lynn took it so well, it was ridiculous how she took it – I hate clichés but I feel literally like the luckiest man alive whenever she lets me off the hook like that.
The hooker is like a goddamn family friend now, that’s how forgiving Lynn is. Well, at least that’s what she told me – the whole tea-and-biscuits treatment.
And Lana, well, it’s true, they grow up so fast. Only a couple years and she sprouts like a goddamn tree. In a few years she’ll be rebelling against the state and skipping classes and getting told off by me and having dumb teenage arguments.
My thoughts drift back as a little bit of quiet overtakes our conversation and Winona pours another round for us.
“You can get to writing that report when you come back from your leave. We got a bit more work to do, and we’re not entirely useless yet. The stuff we’ve gotten these past few weeks might potentially open an entirely new shitstorm.”
Another newer and well-creased folder slides towards me with a post-it marking the front, simply labeled “Blackstone”. I let off a raised eyebrow and flick through the first few pages at the top of the pile inside. “What sort of shitstorm?”
“Well, the sort of shitstorm that’s more well-funded, market-oriented, and, we think, on the surface, legit.” Reading through it, I begin to understand how big a shitstorm it could be. There are a multitude of names here – Whitestone, Aesyr, Viola, Broadcare, Shenlong, the list goes on and on. And the thing that registers in my head –
“These are all research corporations.”
“Yeah, and more importantly, they all have some sort of hand in the pharmaceuticals industry. We’ve been trying to get info on where Rick McCauley got the so-called ‘psychologist tech’ but we haven’t found it yet, aside from the drug samples we have now. Read through all that when you have time, maybe just before you come back. Whoever’s peddling industry-grade shit to the black market right now is going to cause a lot of trouble. Trouble we don’t need.”
I nod, and we finish the rest of the Oaklaw’s in relative peace. I make a note to myself to make a start on the first three. I’ll get Madison to do a little probing. As Winona gives me a peck on the lips when we leave the interrogation room, there’s already euphoria in my head that’s making me giddy despite Whitestone, Aesyr and Viola information going through my mind.
Our pairing couldn’t have been more fucked up. Thetis and I, just the two of us, stuck with one another after the less-than-shitty escape from Viola. When we got the hell out of that dungeon with the rest of the Destrillians, a last-resort squad of combat drones (that came out of nowhere!) drove us to split up one more time.
Yeah, fucking fantastic. The two most unlikely to get along on the inside, let alone in the WHOLE WIDE WORLD, were chained at the goddamn ankles. Why chained? There was no one else like us out there, that’s why. I certainly wasn’t going to just expose myself to find the other dipshits that ran off in every other direction nor just go off on my own in a place I had no fucking clue about. That would have been worse than putting up with the crybaby.
It was hell. For weeks Thetis and I ran around trying to figure this outside world out. Creepy old men would stare and make the most retarded sounds at us while cars would try and get in our way all as we made our way to wherever the fuck we were going. Of course, I threatened every bastard and machine that tried to really get in our way. As much as I wanted to make sure no stray Viola ass-slaves would try and come after us so soon, I also made it clear that no one wanted to fuck with me. This, obviously, meant that I was mostly dragging the crybaby everywhere. She would bitch and moan constantly about how she was afraid and tired and this and that. SHIT, if I wanted a whiny little cunt to follow me everywhere, I wouldn’t have kicked all those fucking yippy dogs out of my way. They could have joined in right with her!
After three months or so of hiding, stealing and scrounging we had learned that we wandered into the capital of Artolia, Osea. Not that I could find that on a map, but fuck it, it was progress. Shittier still, we were in the safest part of town: the Orange Zone. Soon after that, I had come into some money from a very generous douchebag that was just throwing his money at me. It may have been because I let me temper get the best of me, but I think the guy was just being nice. But, with that cash, I managed to get a shitty little refuge in the area. Some decrepit bitch was running the place, but her temper would never match mine, ever. It was that mess of a face that made me wonder if some leftover experiment from Viola was going to pop out of her chest. Of course, the cunt didn’t like us one bit, that was expected. If she wasn’t so desperate to get some new tenants into that hellhole at the time, she would have probably kicked us out the moment she saw us. That wouldn’t have happened even if it was case. I refused to be a fucking squatter longer than I already was and I grew so DAMN TIRED of the constant whining Thetis spat out. Plus, no one says no to me. Especially a stupid human.
Have I mentioned the crybaby and her whining? Can’t fucking stand that bullshit. When we had finally gotten a roof over our heads, she REALLY started to piss me off. I learned to not be overly enraged everytime she began to complain about not knowing what we were doing on the streets or quietly contemplating what our next move would be once we got a place other than a sheltered corner or an alley way. I could cope with all of that now by just having one long and intense session of fighting and ability practice in one of the abandoned buildings nearby—away from anything that would scream if it were to catch fire. Now, Thetis began to bitch about getting one of those things the silly humans have: a job. What the fuck? We are two products of superiority and she wants to “try and act like them” with a job? Not only that, but the dumbass wanted to make up an alias. Are you fucking joking? It was bad enough she put some made up name on the piece of paper we had to scribble on when we got the apartment. I almost wanted to beat the shit out of her, but I controlled myself…for once. It was infuriating dealing with her from then on, especially when she told me that some fruity fuckface nearby actually hired her for regular hours. As a matter of fact, I felt ashamed. Is this what was going on with the other Destrillians? What would Ariel have done if she were out here with us? She was dead now, so it didn’t matter…Back to Thetis.
More fighting, tension and time went by and I slowly found myself out in the Orange Zone more than at our place. “Lucy” would live out most of her days at that homo’s pizza place and bring back scraps to last us a while. I tended to get back from wherever the hell I was at some hour of the night that I found her sleeping in the single mattress I begrudgingly shared with her. More times than not I would end up sleeping on the piece of shit couch we scooped up from a street corner one time. If that wasn’t the case, I would find myself watching all sorts of silly shows on the television (that some other douchebag so nicely gave me) to learn more about these pesky humans and their habits.
Even more time passed and we sort of fell into a groove. Thetis and I would both be gone all day, but I might or might not have caught her still awake when I got back from my “day trips”. If she was awake, we tended to get into a shouting match which was usually all mental. At first they were vocal, but the creepy bitch snapped and threatened that she’d call the authorities on us. I wouldn’t have given a flying fuck, but if they got their grubby hands on us, we might have been forced back into some hole like at Viola. Hell no.
That’s how it went between the crybaby and I until one night when I came in to find her asleep in the bedroom. It was like something had changed without my knowing it. Instead of me throwing a quick glance into the open door of the room, I walked up to the door and leaned against the frame. I studied Thetis laying there. She was laying there with a pained look across her face as she held tight to the one blanket that covered her body. Four years of living like this, in a shit hole and a lie. I didn’t know what to do. Ugh—why the fuck should I? It’s all her goddamn fault that she’s “Lucy Adams” and can’t just be Thetis, the real her. I turned right on my heel back into the living room to my usual sleeping spot. I sat there staring at the wall, a mix of frustration, anger and something else. I couldn’t tell you what was running through my mind just then, but I decided that I wouldn’t sleep on the couch that night.
I hate bad dreams, and after waking up with a start that morning, I hated them more than ever. It was always the same old same old, thoughts of Ariel, Eve’s death, Dr. Perkins’ tests, our escape; it never changed. However, there was something very different. I looked at the clock. It still wasn’t working. The walls were still the same colour, covered in the same peeling striped paper. I only noticed one little thing that was off. It was really warm. I mean, REALLY warm. Despite the door being open, despite me wearing just a vest and some underwear, the room was stiflingly hot. I nearly leapt out of my skin when I heard something shuffle beside me.
When I saw Fiona lying next to me, I still can’t tell you exactly what was going through my head. I kept as still as possible, watching her chest rise and fall gently as she slept. I even felt a little bit nervous, and I should probably explain why before we go into this whole thing. Fiona NEVER slept in the same room as me. In fact, she would do her best to avoid even showing her face while I was around. And then when we did see each other, we got into arguments. They would be about anything and everything; the rent, money, leaving the TV on, and even buying milk. The thing was, Fiona ALWAYS had the last word, that is, if I hadn't run out of the room in tears before she could. It always made me feel horrible when she did that, like I’d let her down or something. It was as if she wouldn’t let me stand up for myself. But even though it upset me, I was kind of used to it by then. That’s why I was so confused to find her right there, in the same room as me, sleeping right next to me.
Have you ever felt so lost for what to do that it makes you feel awkward? You think you can’t do anything that could be weirder than what’s happening, but then, the situation isn’t really that strange at all. It’s hard to explain, but this was just one of those times when I had no idea what to do or think. To start with, I was worried. Had she hurt herself when she was out fighting? It wasn’t the first time I’d thought about that, but then I would hear her rebuke in my head. “I don’t get hurt,” always said in that cocky arrogant tone that was kind of reassuring, but made me feel angry and stupid all the same. My second thought was that it was probably some kind of prank, and that she would probably jump up and shout at me for stealing the blanket or something. I wouldn’t put it past her, Fiona would always find something to blame me for, and I suppose she was usually right. But still, she looked so peaceful, just lying there. I suppose she never had anything to be afraid of; there probably isn’t anything in the world that could scare her. Fiona is Fiona, after all. It’s just that I’d never seen her so calm, not in the 13 years I’d known her. She’d always be the one to break a silence, start a fight, insult someone, and then provoke a stranger just to punch them in the face. For me, Fiona and calm are not two words that go together. If I had ever imagined that Fiona existed before Viola, she would have been like this.
I don’t know why, but I reached over and touched her arm, just to see if she would wake up. Looking back, it was crazy of me, but at the time, I didn’t really think about it. If I hadn’t realised the reason for the room’s soaring temperature, I figured it out as soon as I brushed my hand against her shoulder. Heat was practically radiating from her skin. I guess it was natural for her, of all people, to have a high body temperature. The room was always freezing anyway, so it was kind of comforting in a weird way. My heart was pounding against my chest, not just because I was terrified she’d wake up... but what if she did? She’d be so angry at me... There were so many thoughts bouncing around my head that I felt dizzy. As strange and new as this whole bed sharing thing was, I was sort of pleased with it. It felt like we were finally past Viola, past all of the apprehensions about the real world.
It was almost as if she had finally accepted me.
I’m not sure how long I lay there for, but if it hadn’t been for that incident, maybe I would have found it harder to come to terms with the changes that happened over the coming few months.
I think it would have been wrong to say that things were drastically different. The sleeping thing started to happen more and more often though, and honestly, I didn’t mind that at all. I got what I wanted- I didn’t have to be alone anymore. It wasn’t that Fiona had changed much; she was still never in the house, always getting into fights and all kinds of trouble; things like that stayed the same. I mean, when we argued over the rent the next week, I was kind of relieved. But that was just it; it had taken us a week to start arguing again. Both of us were fighting less and less, and we were starting to talk more and more. Sure, it was only about little things, the usual stuff, like ‘How was your day?’, ‘What’s on TV?’ and so on. But it was a start.
There were other things too, little gestures and moments when Fiona made me that weird feeling in my stomach again. They were never grandiose things or anything, but they made me happy nonetheless. I got the impression she might have finally begun to understand that I’m not as strong as her, as much as I want to be. One of Fiona’s moments that stood out the most for me was when she bought me this shirt. It just happened out of the blue, but it’s not like I didn’t appreciate it or anything-, totally the opposite, in fact. My job barely covers rent, let alone clothes; so I’d gotten used to stealing stuff from washing lines and laundrettes and the like. And as you might expect, when you’ve been wearing the same rotation of 5 shirts for three years, they were getting sort of ratty and threadbare. It was so difficult to find clothes that were my size, and a lot of the stuff I stole either drowned me, or looked ridiculous. I stole a summer dress once, and I still get embarrassed about how stupid I looked in it. Fiona didn’t stop laughing for about an hour; it made me feel so self-conscious.
But when she got me this shirt, she burst through the door at about 3am, slamming it behind her the way she always does (though I think she does that just to piss off Ms. Petrowski). As usual, I was sat watching a movie marathon on IBC. I turned around to smile at her and say hi, but she was just kind of silent. That was another one of those times I was worried about her. She called me over to the door, stumbling over her words as she spoke– I thought she must have been drunk or something. I climbed over the sofa, and barely took two steps towards her as she threw a brown paper bag at me. I tried not to look at her as I reached inside and felt crisp folds of material against my fingers. I looked at her blankly, my mouth open half in shock, half in absolute bemusement. There were a few seconds of silence, then Fiona said; "I was tired of seeing you wearing the same damn clothes all the time,"
I didn’t quite know what to say. I’d thought about it before, well, more like wished that Fiona would show an ounce of kindness. But despite all that, I’d never really believed it would happen. And now it had. I felt a melting pot of feelings bubbling up inside me; that weird feeling in my stomach that I seemed to be experiencing more and more. It was a strange mix of elation, bemusement, warmth and most of all, happiness. Then I remembered something I’d seen on IBC earlier that night, which would turn out to save me from that awkward silence. It was during this movie, I think it was called ‘While You Were Gone’ or something like that, that there were the two main characters. One of them was upset about something menial, and then the main character gave her some candy. So it was sort of like what happened with Fiona, except I think I would prefer new clothes to candy. Things like chocolate are easy to steal.
The most important part was the bit AFTER the girl got the gift. She was smiling from ear to ear in exactly the same way that I was, and then she skipped over to the other human, and kind of... well, it’s hard to explain. It looked really strange, but she pressed her mouth against his lips. Lips touching lips. Then the male friend looked really pleased and smiled back at her. I’d never seen Fiona smile like that before. They both seemed happy together. It was very odd, and I thought it was sort of an impractical way to thank someone for a gift, but then it came on another movie that night, for exactly the same reason. Humans always do dumb things, but in the movie, it didn’t seem dumb at all. In fact, I remember thinking about how the male human was a bit like Fiona. He seemed to get into a lot of fights, especially with other humans. The female on the other hand, was stupid. She was always desperate for his attention, following him around all the time and complaining when he was trying to help her.
No-one had ever bought me a gift before, let alone something I actually wanted and needed. And here, Fiona of all people had actually made me smile more than I had in my entire life. So, I tried to remember exactly what happened in the movie when I bounded over to Fiona, threw my arms around her and pressed my lips against hers. I swear I felt Fiona’s temperature rise as I counted to three and stepped backwards, like the girl did in the movie. Maybe that was some bizarre side effect that they didn’t explain in the film, because I felt my cheeks go hot too. But then Fiona went really quiet, and I got scared. I remember thinking about what she would have said if she recognised it as a human thing, and what I would do if she had snatched the shirt back, and it was all just another cruel joke. Despite all my paranoia, I still couldn’t stop smiling, which wasn’t helped when Fiona mumbled something under her breath like, "Yeah, whatever", before turning to face the wall. As soon as she turned away, I pulled on the shirt.
I instantly snapped out of my daze at Hannah's words. I couldn't even remember what she was saying or why I'd suddenly tuned out. It didn't seem to matter, she caught on quickly.
"Would you like me to tell you the details again or should I just strike a pose?". Hannah giggled as she finished her sentence. Even while we were talking business she never could keep a serious demeanor. I quite liked it to be honest. For once it felt good just to have a reason to smile.
"If you do both then I might be able to pay attention to what your saying". It was a cheeky comment and it was nice to be assured she took it in good light. She smiled at me. If the smile had lasted for a second less then I'd have ignored it, but it wasn't like that. She looked genuinely happy and although it was part of her bubbly personality, it had always seemed like a simple facade to keep spirits up. This was different, this was real happiness. No, its late. We're both tired and I'm probably just hallucinating anyway.
"You should get some sleep Hannah, we've got a long day ahead of us tomorow". She nodded and hugged me before walking towards her room. Before she walked through the door she turned around and looked deep into my eyes.
"Lokka....I always loved your eyes".
My expression disappeared and was replaced by confusion and almost panic. I watched as Hannah took the steps into her room and shut the door.
Why did she say that? I can't believe she just said that. I paced the room for a while and then sat down at my desk. Reaching into my desk draw I found the file that I had read every night for the past three months.
Hannah didn't know her powers as a Destrillian but the files found within the Viola facility detail specifically that experimentation on her was at least part successful. She didn't let it bother her though, like many of us she was glad to be away from that place.
There was a knock at the door. I got up and opened it to the familiar face of Deyn Aybel, the other Destrillian in our group. Deyn had always been more rough mannered than anyone else I'd met. He slapped me on the shoulder and walked past me.
"Busy day tomorow?" Deyn said without making eye-contact.
"Yeah"
Whilst I handled the information gathering and data collection, Deyn would be out on the field 'bashing skulls'. He was built heavy and tall, seeming very intimidating even without his powers. He had the power to fire solar blasts of energy from his arms. As far as Viola was concerned he was a major disappointment. They intended for him to be a manipulator of energy. His body was pushed to the limit but biological issues forced them to stop before killing him. His Prototype number was 000-000-015 and his codename was Nova Shock.
"I'm going to bed"
"Yeah ok, I've got a bit more to do. See you tomorow"
I returned to my desk as he walked into his room and closed the door. I brought up the file for tomorows mission. The details had been sent to me by a member of what was known as 'The Prism Network' which was a small group of people that had provided me with important information countless times in the past. Most of their identity's were unknown to me, as mine was to them. Their network credentials were secure however and they were trusted simply from the experience of investigating their information.
The file included the wherabouts of a man known as Detryn, Somebody that Lokka and the others were tasked with killing by a client in return for important information. Details listed that he would be accompanied by roughly 5 gang members. That was easy enough for 3 Destrillians to take down.
I turned off my computer and shut my eyes, falling slowly into a soft slumber. Images of Viola haunted my dreams that night. The experiments. The chamber.
God I hated it there.
Nights where you could sometimes hear screaming all through the night.
And Him. I wanted to kill him. I still want to kill him. I will kill him.
Then theres Her. I dont know what I'd do without her.
More screaming
Silence. 　 　 "Lokka if you dont get up now then I'm pouncing on you"
As I realised I was dreaming again, I woke up with a smile. Hannah's voice always had that effect on him
"Maybe I'll just keep my eyes closed then"
"Yeah, and then I'll get Deyn to come in here and thump you"
"I'm up!"
I yawned as I stretched my arms out in a wide arc. I was blessed with the image of Hannah holding a plate of eggs and toast. I smiled as I reached for a slice of toast and stood up from the chair I'd fallen asleep in again. Pacing around the room I allowed my body to wake up a bit more. My neck was aching from the way I'd slept, ofcourse that didn't come as much of a surprise. I turned back to see a giggling Hannah staring at me.
"What is it?"
It seemed as though I'd left a nice big print in the chair I slept in, shaped like my very own buttcheeks. This for some reason led her to believe she could stare at my butt. She realised I was watching her and looked the other way, even though I managed to catch a glimpse of her blushing. Things between us two had been changing over the last few weeks. I didn't know why but I could tell it was a good thing.
She started gathering her things in the apartment and started putting them in her bag.
"Deyn is still in bed but I'm going out the grab some of the neccesities, do you need anything?"
I looked around my desk and then in my drawers. I noticed I was running low on magazines for my pistol so grabbed a few credits out of my top drawer and gave them to her.
"A couple of 20.cal magazines will be nice"
She took the credits, winked, and walked out of the door. I returned to my desk and started getting some work done.
Lokka Kayne
The next few hours kind of flew by. Deyn woke up and hung around a bit. Hannah got back and we started preparing for what lay in front of us. It would be another simple task, but that didn't mean it didn't need preparation. It got to around eight o' clock and it was time to head out.
We strode down the paths of the Orange Zone. As always Deyn was moving quite a bit infront. He was definitly eager but he also had a good eye for trouble and was therefore safer for us to follow. Hannah broke off my concentrated pace.
"So is this one any more important than the last ones we took out?"
"Not really. But the information we are getting is another step toward our goal. With this we can track down one of the leading scientists"
"Another Viola goon? I thought we'd tracked down enough of them. We've had no leads on the other Destrillians and they aren't making themselves very visible. How the hell are we going to find them?"
"We need to persevere. We keep at it then we'll find them. We'll get Kram and the others to join up with us. With people like him and Salem at our side we'll surely be strengthened greatly"
"What about Tao? Will we find her too?" 　 "We are going to find everyone, even those from the other facility. We'll join together and carve out our own future. If people were to look at us for what we truely were, we'd be thrown aside or destroyed by society. It wont go down like that. When the tables turn, Humanity will have to answer to us" There was a pause in the conversation. It was a noticable pause.
"And what about OUR future?"
I stopped walking then and Hannah approached me.
"You have a habit of making things harder than they need to be Lokka"
I froze up. In honesty this was not a circumstance I'd ever encountered and yet it was warm and inviting. She put her arms around my neck and kissed me. She definitly hadn't done that before. Perhaps this was a future I could look forward to. I kissed back and held her for a few moments before gazing into her eyes as she did mine.
"This is something I want. It is. But we need to focus right now."
I dropped my arms from her and she did hers. She looked at me a while before smiling and resuming her walk forward.
"We'll wait untill we're home, Huh Lokka?"
"Yes. I'd like that."
Our footsteps echoed as we walked under a shallow bridge. Deyn slowed which meant that we were almost here. Hannah and I moved forward and joined up with him.
"Over there" Deyn pointed at a large building in the middle of a plaza. It wasn't a subtle or quiet place and there were plenty of bystanders around. It may get out of hand but it was important that the three did nothing out of the ordinary. Killing a gang member and his guards may be a frightening act for most, but two men throwing energy blasts and conjuring forcefields would be a lot more of an issue.
"Deyn, No solar blasts. Guns only"
"Yeah"
As the three of us lurked in the shadows a little more, we loaded our weapons. I was carrying my pistol whilst Hannah used her VI submachine gun. Deyn had an assortment of weaponry he used but today he'd gone with the Assualt rifle. Nodding in agreement with each other we crept forward and entered the building.
If details were correct, and details were always correct, The man we were after was meeting with an arms dealer upstairs to secure a contract. Roughly 5 armed guards were to be expected upstairs so heavy force would not be needed. We proceeded upstairs, Deyn taking the front and myself taking the rear. We were moving quickly and I was very aware that were making enough noice running up the stairs to alert any of the few men. It wouldn't matter, we would be fast enough to retain the element of surprise.
We came to the door at the top of the stairs. The meeting was being held in this room. Holding nothing back Deyn brought his leg up and back, and thrusting forward he broke the lock on the door and pushed it open, aiming his gun in front of him.
The room was completely empty. Not a single person was now in this room apart from the three of us. Just a mere desk and chair in a room with a few windows. I couldn't understand it. Nobody had left the building in the last few minutes and we were on time.
This is when the chaos began.
Before any of us had time to react a single bullet flew through the window infront of us, followed by several more. One pierced through my shoulder and I noticed another go straight through Deyn's leg. I grunted as the bullet hit me. It wasn't as painful at first but as Deyn roared in pain the reality set in.
"GET OUT" Deyn yelled as he ducked down. We quickly filed out of the room but were met by more gunshots. We had been followed up the stairs by a group of 15 men all armed with rifles. They opened fire on us, completely defenseless in the hall.
"BARE YOUR TEETH DEYN" I yelled as I dropped my gun and forced shields around the group. The bullets hit the shield and disappeared, the gun-wielding goons looked completely astounded and frightened at the same time. They had no time to panic as they were blasted down the stairs by one of Deyn's shocks. The men fell to the floor almost all of them knocked unconcious by the great fall.
"I can hear more of them downstairs, we have-" Me sentence was cut short by horror, nothing less.
Blood. It poured out of her chest like a fountain.
"Ha....Ha-Hannah?" I looked her in the eye as she lay there, almost motionless. Deyn had realised too and he was kneeling down too trying to bandage the blood.
"HANNAH!" I grabbed her shoulders as if to wake her up. I stared at her. She just wasn't moving. Wasn't...breathing.
No it couldn' be true.
This couldn't have happened.
Why did this happen!?
"I'M GONNA SLAUGHTER THEM!" Deyn jumped up, blinded by rage. He raced down the stairs. I couldn't even speak. I could hardly move myself. I wished death upon myself then. I didn't know why but I did. A tear fell from my face as I kneeled over her. I felt like if I could get her out of here, she'd be ok. She'd be fine, she just needed rest.
My rational side kicked in. She didn't have a pulse, She wasn't moving. She was dead. I couldn't change that. I couldn't even take her body home. We were ambushed. There were more downstairs and outside. Then I remembered Deyn downstairs. I looked at her eyes a last time as tears dropped from my own. I loved you. I really did.
Goodbye.
I almost fell down the stairs in my panic. I ran over the crippled bodys at the foot of the stairs and headed out of the building. On the way there were more bodys, more blood. There were atleast 20 of them counted now. What the hell?
I followed the trail out of the building and saw him, laying there about 100ft infront of me, far way. Around him were roughly 30 more bodys. Deyn had killed them all, but he'd dropped his gun upstairs. He had completely exhausted himself to a point of collapsing.
I saw more men approaching him. Running as fast as I could I tried to get in range of him. Things became more of a blurry haze around then. More men ran at me from different directions. I blasted them away with my powers, utilizing more strength than I ever had before now. I kept blasting as they ran at me. They blocked my vision and I couldn't see in front of me anymore.
Anger boiled as I released a kind of shockwave that sent the men hurtling in all directions. I looked back at Deyn. NO!
The man standing over my friend laughed at his colleague as he fired a round into Deyn's head. My eyes flashed green. I couldn't see anything.
I felt it coarse through my veins. Raw power. Almost flying at him I ripped the man in half with pure force, and did the same with the gathering men.
More came at me from the right and gunners on rooftops focused on me. I had to get out of here. I'd need to leave them.
How could I leave them?
No. I had to leave them.
I ran through the streets, My eyes glaring a bright green that almost illuminated the path in front of me, the only thing I could see. I could hear them rushing behind me, trying to keep pace. Adrenaline rushed through me as I got away from them and navigated through the streets.
It had all ended tonight. Our ambition was over. My friends were dead. The world was stopping us now before we fought back. We would not rise.
No. We have to. There are others. They can help. They can help bring about what we started. But not now. We need to lie low. All of us.
Wherever you are.
I found a deserted rooftop and stopped. My body would not go any further, this was the end of the line. Falling to my knees I began to crawl to a nearby air vent. I could fit inside it.
I crawled in and stopped. I could feel my body shutting down. I thought back to my friends. I thought of Hannah and what had happened. I thought of the way she spoke to me, the way she kissed me just an hour before. The way we hoped to build our own life. I thought of Deyn and his bravery in a time of desperation. I fell asleep then.
Darkness.
Nothing but pure darkness.
Blood.
It gushed out of her wounds as she just layed there.
It dripped across the floor that night, the deaths of many in one brutal flurry.
Lifeless and barren, the city had become a wasteland of white ash and the burnt out blackened corpses of buildings. What was once the capital city of the country of Vaul had become a monument to the death and destruction that mankind was capable of doing upon each other. The whole continent had become a testament to what would happen to those unfortunate or foolish enough to take up arms against the might of the Artolian military.
The uprising by Vaul had been settled with the single greatest act of man-made destruction in the history of mankind. Five years prior, seven nuclear bombs had been dropped on key population centres and military installations of the country. What was left of the government surrendered within the hour, what was left of the armed forces attempted to keep order. Within days the remaining population had fled underground or abroad, those who remained on the surface were left in a daily cycle of chaos. Even several miles away from the initial impact crater of the nuclear bomb that had been dropped on Araketh, the threat of radiation made it a fight for survival every single day for those who had survived the blast. That was not even taking into consideration the struggle to find food, and the constant threat of other savage survivors.
The stranger that walked through the dusty ruin of what had once been a suburban street was learning all of this the hard way. His throat was parched and his stomach was starving, he could not even remember when he had eaten his last meal. Every step forward dug more and more into the bare soles of his feet and threw up more dust from the ground that caught in his throat and seared like fire. Never before had he felt so sapped of energy and near death.
The stranger was no older than twelve or thirteen, though his actual age would have been impossible to determine for he was tall and well built.He was thin and emaciated by his wandering through this dead world with lips cracked, exposed skin and unkempt chestnut brown hair covered in white ash and dust.
He cast a glance upwards towards the sky, the sun was high in the sky and the shadows were minimal, making him swearing bitterly under his breath as he passed the burnt out wreck of a flipped up car, lamenting the lack of any shade to hide from the relentless sun that was pursuing him across the sky.
He couldn’t even remember how long he had been walking for. It had to have been at least a week, he remembered he had taken six rests when the moon came up and he was free to curl up in the most comfort he could muster and sleep a long and dreamless sleep on ground that had been bleached by the unrelenting summer sun and nuclear fallout.
Possibly the worst part about traversing such a desolate environment was the loneliness, the overwhelming solitude of walking through an environment where all forms of life had been reduced to nothing more than fire and atoms by the crushing hammer of Artolia. The boy did not seem to be outwardly affected by it though, maintaining a grimace brought about by focusing his mind on his empty stomach and parched mouth, trying his hardest to forget that the ashes he had found himself walking through were probably what had once remained of the populace of the city of Araketh.
It took his ears a couple of seconds longer than he would normally for his mind to catch up with his ears and recognise the cracking sound of a gunshot that rang out. Even his head moved slowly to react to the sound of the footsteps moving towards him. Everything was in slow motion now, shrouded in a foggy haze concentrated around the periphery of his field of vision.
“You look like you’ve been out in the sun too long boy!” a hoarse voice shouted back at him. Its owner was just now emerging from an alleyway. Clad in similar dirty rags and carrying an old military rifle, a pair of binoculars hanging around his neck. “You didn’ even notice me followin’ your ass for the past 2 miles!” the man shouted, bearing a yellow toothed grin.
The boy didn’t have the energy to shout back at him, the certainty of his outcome from this confrontation was absolute. He felt the words catch in his throat, and proceeded to cough, not daring to take his wide, frightened eyes away from the bandit who began to cock his rifle.
“In another life it would have been against my principles to kill a child.” The man said, the boy noticed that his wide grin didn’t falter though. “But it has been a damn long time since I’ve had a fine meal.”
Involuntarily the boy felt the vomit rise up in his throat and he bent over to throw up the only residue left in his stomach. Staring death in the face like this, after everything he had been through was making him physically sick. He felt faint.
“It probably is best if you pass out son.” The man snarled hungrily.
The boy couldn’t help it; his knees were beginning to crumple underneath him. This was it. Would he even feel his death? For these precious moments he wondered briefly whether or not these feelings and images stranded in a barren ashen wasteland devoid of life the very last images to see in his life. Dying at the hands of this speck of human garbage. Everything was going white as he watched the shadowy figure advance towards his collapsing form with outstretched hands.
Two shadowy figures? His eyes could barely stay open as he sank to his knees in exhaustion, but another figure, much smaller had appeared on the scene. He was vaguely aware of shouting between the two of them, but his brain was too addled to make much sense of any of it. The smaller figures features were blurry and indistinct; the two looked like scribbles of black ink fighting on the stark white sheet of paper on which they had been drawn.
As soon as the conflict had begun it seemed to be over. Or maybe the boy with brown hair had just lost all sense of time, at this stage of starvation and dehydration it was very difficult to tell exactly. The smaller shadowy figure, the one that had come to his aid seemed to have wrangled the rifle away from the taller man and swung the butt of it upwards towards the man’s head. The wet, chunky thud at the hardened wooden stock struck the man’s temple and the brilliant flash of scarlet blood that sprayed against the brilliant white sky immediately caught his attention as his eyelids began to droop and the loss of consciousness became more unavoidable.
The last thing he saw before his body gave in to the rigours of sleep was the smaller figure carefully slinking towards him, carefully keeping it’s distance, approaching this new arrival into its territory with the same caution that any predator would take when something strange or alien entered into its environment.
The boy’s eyes closed and his body fell forward, exhausted, unconscious, beaten, but alive.
.oOo.
Jade green eyes fluttered open. The first thing he noticed was that he was lying down on something that was almost unquestionably a mattress. He hadn’t felt the soft comfort of a mattress on what had felt like an eternity. The second thing he noticed was that he was in a room, a room with three walls (one having toppled over at some point) and with the ceiling partially caved in, but it was more civilization than he had seen in months. A single flickering light-bulb illuminated the small room in a sickly yellow light, showing that it had definitely been somebody’s bedroom at one point or another, though the traditionally wooden bedside table and wardrobe were now just smashed remnants of their former selves.
Whoever had brought the boy here was nowhere to be found, though by the sight of another well worn mattress on the other side of the room the person was not far off. They must have brought him here after he had passed out on the street. By the sight of the dark effigies against the deep midnight blue night sky he could tell that he was still in the city. Though, truth be told he had no idea whereabouts. This city was as entirely new and alien to him as everything else he had encountered in this wasteland. He could barely even remember what home looked like.
“Awake then?” a slightly nasal voice sounded from the doorframe. The boy twisted his head to look at it and winced momentarily as he felt the shots of pain fly up his neck. It hit him now that his entire body was wracked with pain. Walking non-stop for 3 weeks had messed his body up good.
The look of surprise on his face at the appearance of his rescuer couldn’t be avoided though, in spite of the pain that stretching the muscles in his face had caused.
It was a boy, maybe one or two years younger than he was and dressed in equally tattered and dirty clothing. He was smaller and thinner than the boy with brown hair, and his hair was cut shorter too, being choppy and jet black. It looked as though he had been cutting it himself. His clothes resembled a pair of old buttoned up grey pyjamas that had long since been cut at the knees and at the sleeves.
“You do understand me yeah? You aren’t some foreigner right?” the black haired boy asked, giving the new arrival a frown “You been out in the sun so long that your brain has turned into mush?”
The boy with brown hair still didn’t say anything, sensation had come back into his throat and it felt as though it had very recently been sandpapered.
“Whatever, here you go” the boy in grey held out a bowl of some foul smelling soup. “You’ll be dead soon if you don’t eat. Trust me, I know. I’ve seen it happen.” The boy said ominously, holding out the bowl to the first boy, who took it with weak and trembling hands.
“Water?” he asked warily. His voice was high and broken, his parched throat made the words difficult to get out. The boy with black hair nodded understandingly and held out the water bottle that he had tied to his belt with a few strands of rope.
“How long were you out there for?” he asked, watching as the boy he had rescued took great gulps of the water, nearly finishing the entire bottle.
“A few weeks, maybe more” the brown haired boy responded. His voice regaining some strength thanks to the soothing cold water’s influence on his throat.
“What were you doing out there?” the saviour responded. His voice harder and more accusatory than it had been before. The first boy seemed to respond with some amusement at this, in between shovelling spoonfuls of the stew into his mouth. “Something I said funny?” he wasn’t even hiding the sharp, hostile tone to his nasal voice now.
“I’m half dead and can barely get out of bed, you really think I’m a threat to you?”
The second boy didn’t say anything and just shrugged in response, seemingly more on edge now that his apparent quick temper had been brought to the surface so quickly.
“I’m out here because I’m on the run.” The first boy said calmly, brushing his long brown hair out of his eyes as he rose to sit up on the bed, setting the quickly finished bowl down beside him.
“ ‘On the run?’ “ came the response in a mocking imitation. “The hell does that even mean?”
“I escaped from one of those camps.” The brown haired boy explained patiently, not phased at all by his saviour’s quick irritation. “You know, those camps full of prisoners that the government had set up after the bombing?” he explained further, seeing the incomprehensible look on the look of the other child. “Well, I got out of there. Been walking ever since, just trying to get away.”
“Pretty damn stupid of you, don’t you think? How the hell did you expect to survive out here.” Came the condescending response, though it was no longer audibly hostile or threatened. The boy was now leaning against the doorway, his head cocked in interest at the stranger’s story.
“I didn’t.” The first boy replied solemnly, “I just wanted to be out of there.” He let the sentence trail off, and to his surprise there was no biting inquisitive remark demanding an explanation. “Were you the one that killed the man that came after me?” he asked, the memory of what had happened had just suddenly come to the surface, a startling moment of clarity amongst the blur of the past few weeks.
His question was met with a savage grin in response, “Did what I had to do didn’t I?”
“You look even younger than I do though”
His saviour just shrugged, “If it makes you feel better, I’d never killed a man before. Seen it done lots of times though.” Much like what his new companion had done moments before, he declined to ask any further questions on the matter, even though his mind was nearly brimming over the top with them. He settled on one that wouldn’t be too intrusive to this survivor or his history, there would be no use alienating him so soon.
“So what’s your name?” he asked slowly, in a slightly pained voice as his stomach struggled to take in the first food he had been given in what seemed like ages.
“The name is Oberon” the boy said proudly, “You got a name?”
“Jason” the brown haired boy said in response. “Jason Spencer. Thanks for saving my life.”
He paused momentarily. “Why did you save my life?” it seemed inexplicable to him, everything about this city seemed to suggest that it ran itself by a ‘kill or be killed’ set of rules. It didn’t make sense for a survivor of the catastrophic destruction wrought on this land to take in a survivor like this, unless he intended to kill him later. In response, Oberon just looked at the floor and shuffled his feet, completely unreadable other than that the subject made him feel awkward. “Or are you just going to kill me later?”
“Yeah, may do” Oberon said carelessly, flashing another cocky grin.
Jason smiled back, another action that hurt the muscles on his face. He could feel the sting of the intense sunburn he had sustained now in full force.
“You should go to bed now. Make the most of it whilst it’s dark outside, it’s impossible to sleep during the day.” Oberon said, noting the severity of the fatigue that was beleaguering his houseguest. Without so much as a goodnight, the savage boy had disappeared back through the doorway he had came from.
Jason didn’t even have time to consider everything that had just happened to him today, this salvation that he had stumbled upon quite by accident. His saviour had been a kid just like himself, albeit a kid much more accustom to the rugged life in this wreck of a city than he was. He briefly had time to speculate just how much time this boy had spent on his own before his tired body succumbed to the best night’s sleep that it had experienced in what felt like a lifetime.
.oOo.
When Jason woke up it was sunny again outside, shining through the cracks and holes in the walls to illuminate the interior of the room. The bulb from the night before had now been switched off; Oberon had clearly been back after Jason had gone to sleep. His body was still aching all over and his stomach had felt as though it had twisted itself into a knot as it tried to digest the food that it had just been fed with last night.
Slowly and shakily, Jason Spencer managed to force his tired body out of bed and onto his feet. He gritted his teeth at the pain that flooded his senses from the soles of his feet. So much trekking over harsh terrain had left the soles of his feet covered in numerous bloody gashes. Groaning in frustration he collapsed back down on the bed, walking was going to be near impossible for the near future.
Lying back down again he let his mind wander as to where the boy who had rescue him, Oberon, had gone off to. Surely he couldn’t have wandered off too far and left him on his own whilst he was so weak. Would he? A fleeting moment of panic gripped the boy as he realised that he really didn’t know anything about his rescuer other than the fact he had saved his life the other night. He was just another stranger in a land of strangers and savages. He was young, that much was obviously apparent, but he had killed a fully grown man with his bare hands and hadn’t shown himself to be the least bit bothered by the act. Could he really be trusted?
“You’ve been sleeping for three days you know?”
Jason leapt back on his mattress in surprise as Oberon’s head dropped upside down through the hole in the roof. The young boy was smiling a wide, inverted grin at seeing the shock on his houseguest’s face.
“Three days? Really?” that would certainly explain why the hunger had come back.
“Yeah ‘fraid so? Hungry?” Oberon asked merrily. Swinging down in one singular fluid move as he fell through the hole in the roof head first, one hand hanging on to the lip of the hole as his body flipped over in mid air before casually letting go and falling to his feet with all the agility of a monkey.
“Starving yeah” Jason replied, “I haven’t had a proper meal in like a week.”
Oberon shrugged as if to tell Jason that he shouldn’t expect a proper meal in a good long time. Instead he reached into the pocket of the satchel he had slung over one shoulder and produced what appeared to be a slightly over cooked chicken leg which he threw so that it landed on Jason’s lap.
“Enjoy” he said drily, “Should be hot enough, I just pulled it out of the fire”, Jason observed this to be the case judging by the heavily blackened exterior of the chicken leg.
“So where am I anyway?” he asked as he took an enormous bite of the stringy meat.
“My home” Oberon answered, as if stating the obvious. He had moved over to the mattress on the other side of the room and collapsed down on it, shaking the matted black fringe out of his eyes and tucking into his own chicken leg.
“How long have you lived here?” it seemed like the most logical question to come next for Jason, trying to gauge whether or not Oberon held any of the prejudices of either Artolians left behind and imprisoned after the war or Vaulians who had suffered so much at their hands.
“I don’t know. Six years or so maybe? Parents gave me up to this place a while back. It used to be an orphanage.” He added when he saw Jason’s look of incomprehension.
“Used to be? What do you mean?” Jason asked quietly as he finished the meagre meal that Oberon had provided for him.
“Nothing’s left of anything in this city anymore is it?” Oberon snapped impatiently, Jason kept quiet in the slightly awkward wake of the nerve he must have touched. “What about you, you got a story?” Oberon asked weakly, Jason couldn’t tell if he was genuinely interested or just trying to change the subject but he decided to indulge him anyway.
“Everyone has a story” Jason said slowly, “I’m sure mine’s just as sorry as yours is.”
“Want to bet!?” Oberon nearly shouted. Standing to his feet and glaring at his new arrival.
“Yeah, I do.” Jason said in response and in spite of the weakness of his voice there was a cold resiliency in it that visibly unnerved Oberon. “Maybe one day I’ll even tell you about it.”
“Don’t get too comfortable, I haven’t even decided if I’m going to throw you out on your ass or not”
“If you were going to do that then you would have done it already” Jason smirked back at his temperamental saviour.
“Whatever.”
.oOo.
It took the better part of two weeks before Jason’s feet had healed well enough for him to get out of bed and walk around fully again, and in spite of his volatile attitude and often just plain antisocial nature, Oberon returned several times a day to bring him food and water and to just talk to him. Though since their first altercation neither one had decided to bring up the subject of what brought them to be staying in the ruin of the orphanage.
Jason quickly learned that Oberon’s room, where he had been staying, was one of the best preserved rooms. A lot of the interior had been gutted, walls had been reduced to masses of destroyed masonry and dust and everywhere was peppered with bullet holes. Oberon had explained that this orphanage and the area around it were involved with extremely heavy fighting during the fight for Araketh at the very heart of the war. He had told Jason stories about how the Orphanage’s Matron had made them all hide in the cellar as men died above their heads and bombs levelled the building they had once called home.
The inquisitive side to Jason Spencer had long since wanted to ask Oberon where his Matron and all the other kids in the orphanage were now. Though the answer was painfully obvious, noticeable just by the solemn and detached way that the usually so animated Oberon became when he talked about them.
On the day that marked the start of his fourth week staying in the Orphanage, Oberon finally showed Jason the cupboard in which had kept the weapons he had stolen from various other survivors and salvaged from the various wrecked army depots.
“You have to be careful though, some areas of the city are still too full of poison to let you go in.” Oberon explained as he took out a large, dirty knife from the cupboard and slid it into his rope belt.
“That would probably be the radiation from the bomb” Jason had explained.
“Radiation? That some fancy name for the poison?”
It had quickly become apparent to Jason that Oberon’s education was severely lacking in some areas. Though that was hardly surprising, given that in between urban warfare, nuclear bombs and having to fend for himself in a world that was so determined to kill him. In fact, on their first trip out hunting together into the wasteland Oberon had admitted that he was barely able to read. Whilst Jason himself proven himself to be laughably bad at hunting any of the non-mutated animals that had made their home in the burnt out city centre, so the two had quickly made offers to teach the other.
“How come you’re readin’ is so good then?” Oberon asked him that night. The two boys were sitting opposite one each other in the central room of the old orphanage building. Jason had spent the past evening digging the fire pit whilst Oberon had gone out to catch dinner (more chicken).
“I was taught well” Jason said with a smile as he waiting for the chicken breast that he had skewered and held over the fireplace to blacken and cook properly.
“What the hell does that even mean?” came the now expected aggressive question. Jason smiled at how well he had come to know his new friend in such a short space of time.
“My parents were Artolian diplomats. I got a good education whilst I lived there.”
Oberon gave a short barking laugh “I knew you were some kind of rich city boy. Sure don’t look like it though.” He nodded towards Jason’s overgrown brown hair and ragged clothes. “If you’re Artolian, and in this country, this mean that you were in one of those prisoner camps that our government set up?”
“Yes.”
Oberon paused to take a bite of out of the chicken on his skewer. “And your parents. They were in one of those camps too?”
“Yes.”
“Don’t suppose that was what you were running away from when I found you?” Oberon asked, his tone of voice was much more careful and considered than it was usually. As if he was uncertain about whether or not to press his new friend for more information.
“It’s okay; I never even liked my parents anyway.” Jason said quietly. Though he wasn’t looking towards Oberon or the fireplace when he said it, instead looking off to the side where his face would be hidden in the night time shadows.
“Neither did I. Like my parents I mean” Oberon said quickly.
“You’re an orphan Oberon. How much of your parents do you even remember?”
“Not much, I suppose” Oberon conceded. “But what the hell sort of a family just gives up and abandons their child, you know? It's unforgiveable”
Kris; Mantichorus; Sam Vimes; Neku Sakuraba; Koki Kariya; Hazama; CuChulainn; Yu Narukami; Mewtwo; Rival Silver; Suicune; Kanata; Professor Oak; The Brigadier; VIII; The Engineer
I lightly closed the door to the café behind me, making sure not to trap my heavy case in the doorway. I smiled tightly at the woman behind the counter before taking a seat by the window.
The sea view outside the window would have been impossible to get any later in the day, I’m sure. The Artolia Dockland was a popular courting destination from what I’d heard, and I could believe it. The salt air was fresh and excited the hunger just enough, and the view across the thin body of water that separated Damascus from its neighbour was certainly mood-setting.
Of course, many visitors to Chulainn Hub never found the Artolia Dockland, mostly because only the locals call it that. Technically, this was just the quayside, the docklands were a few yards along the bay. However, since all that separates the public quay from the commercial docks is a thin wire fence, most people think of it all as one.
Supposedly, it got its nickname because on a clear day, if you have a telescope or similar, you could see the coast of Artolia. I wondered about that, as it sounded like many an urban myth. Still, it was a clear day today, I might find out later.
“Hi, can I take your order?” a waitress said, sauntering up beside me. I glanced up at her slightly tanned face.
“Coffee, black. No sugar. Thanks,” I said. She nodded absently at me, jotting it down on her pad.
“It’ll be a while longer than usual, I’m afraid. They’re just replacing the filter in the percolator.”
“No problem. I’m in no hurry.”
She nodded again, and wandered off with a barely repressed sigh. I had to smile to myself, half in irony and half in sympathy. No-one imagines themselves working a dead-end shift in a small café as a waitress.
I picked up the newspaper left by the last patron who’d sat at this table, and flipped it to the front page. I chuckled quietly when I saw it was the provincial propaganda rag. What this paper reported and what would have actually happened would rarely match up. Especially any reports about Carabas spies. I’d had enough dealings with Carabas spies to know that their actions would never be reported. In truth, all the provinces knew this, but if anything happened they couldn’t explain, they put it down to Carabas spies.
Still, it was perfect. I wouldn’t be able to read this piece of dog crap anyway, not with a straight face, but it provided perfect cover. After all I wouldn’t be able to focus properly on any articles because of the ear piece currently nestling up to the busted bionic in my left ear.
The noises coming through it were far from conductive to a peaceful reading environment.
>Feth, look at the bastard go!<
>Wallace, how many rutting times?! Stop jamming the comm. frequencies.<
>Sorry, sarge.<
>Jurczak, this is Dela. My squad has dealt with the dissident cell on twelfth. How goes ninth?<
>Dela, Jurczak. Building cleared, but one runner. He’s headed quayside.<
>Sergeant Jurczak, this is Captain Avon. Do you have a description?<
>Yes sir. Male, early twenties I’d guess. Maybe five ten, lanky. Red tee, jeans. Sir, I understood we had backup from a specialist?<
“Here you go,” the waitress said, putting my coffee on the table. “Sorry for the wait.” If she could have made that sound sincere, I doubt she’d have been working here.
“No worries,” I said, just as deadpan. I took a sip from the coffee and turned my attention back to the comm. chatter. Apparently they were talking about me.
Dela said, >So, he’s gone AWOL?<
A sigh from Avon. >We’re a city garrison, he’s forwarded from counter-intelligence. He doesn’t have to report to me.<
>Frak that.< I was beginning to like Sgt. Dela, whoever she was.
Jurczak responded. >Sir, we have a name for this operative?< She sounded slightly out of breath. The faint scudding of boots told me her squad were in pursuit.
I downed my coffee in one gulp, wincing slightly at the strength of the dregs. As the waitress began to approach my table again, she froze as I put up a little placeholder proclaiming me to be an operative of the Chulainn government. The few scattered patrons also turned and gawped as she gasped.
I rubbed the sub-dermal transmitter implanted in my throat, activating it, as I started to fiddle with the case.
“It’s Early,” I said. A thought occurred to me, and I opened the window next to me. “I’m already at quayside.”
I heard the captain sigh in audible relief. >Well, welcome aboard, Mr. Early. I’m glad you’re in the right place.< It was hard not to miss the faint sarcasm in his voice, too.
“I just went where I was told,” I said. I started pulling out the ceramic plated pieces out of the case.
>Multiple ops, no doubt,< Avon said. I didn’t doubt it. It sounded right for counter-intelligence work: set up multiple contacts at different points, so one will be in the right place at the right time. Only tell the ones who didn’t do anything that there were others after the fact.
“How are we doing this?” I asked. I attached the scope.
There was a pause before either sergeant replied. >No survivors my end,< Dela said.
>Only the runner mine,< Jurczak admitted.
>Tranq dart, then,< Avon said. The same thought had occurred to me. It was rare for any Damascan province to not want a prisoner to interrogate.
“Agreed,” I said as I finished slotting the sniper rifle together, to the astonished gasps of the staff and the other patrons. Looking at the ammo packs, I picked out the tranquilisers, leaving the traditional bullets and the experimental anti-tank rounds in the case. I fitted it carefully to the arming chamber just as a young man in a red tee pelted into view, arms flailing madly as he ran.
“Your runner, Sergeant Jurczak? Blond, was he?” I asked, pointing the barrel out of the window. Wouldn’t do to shoot the wrong flailing idiot.
There was a harsh curse of uncertainty from Jurczak down the comm. net. The young man got closer to a passenger ship that was letting people onboard.
>Sarge, he was, sarge!< I recognised the voice as Wallace. She sounded pretty het up. >I saw it! Fething peroxide, it was!< There was a slight echo there: it had been on Jurczak’s last transmission, too. They must have entered the range of my bionic implants.
>She’s jumpier than a rutting hare, but I trust her eyes!< Jurczak shouted. She must have been close enough to be heard without the comm., as a few of the patrons frowned at the language. >Take the shot!<
My father once said it takes a certain type of man to shoot someone in the back. He made his views on that sort of man pretty clear. So, out of respect for the dead, I tilted my aim downwards at the last second as I pulled the trigger.
Jurczak and her squad cleared the corner in time to see the runner shriek and leap into the air, as the tranq dart hit him in the seat of his trousers. As he landed, his legs buckled as the tranquiliser took affect and he was flat on his face as the guards surrounded him.
I started to bring the rifle in from the window, when something struck me. I raised it again.
“Huh, whaddaya know,” I muttered, forgetting my implant.
>Early?< Jurczak said. She looked around, quickly spotting the sniper rifle sticking out of the café window. I heard her conceal a snort of laughter.
“It seems you can see Artolia from here,” I said.
There was a laugh from Avon. >I’m sure we don’t need you to shoot anyone there,< he said, clearly amused.
I smiled slightly too, if you can call a quick quirk of a cheek muscle a smile. “Quite. Early out.” With that, I rubbed the throat implant again to deactivate it for the time being.
I dismantled the rifle back into its constituent parts, and put them away back into the case. I closed the case and stood. The patrons and staff were all frozen in place. I picked up the placeholder and it disappeared back into the folds of my coat. In its place, I left the money for the coffee, as well as a small tip.
“And this is for the disturbance,” I said, putting down an extra five damasks. “Be seeing you.”
==
Jurczak was younger - not to mention shorter - than I expected her to be. The only other woman in the squad was taller than her, not to mention the male members of the squad. But she conducted herself well, directing four squaddies to perform crowd control and set up a perimeter. One joined her guarding the unconscious prisoner, while the remaining three were directed to kick back.
It might seem like an odd order to give a soldier, but as she didn’t know when the cops might turn up to haul the prisoner away for questioning, or if there might be any disturbances in the meantime, it was quite an astute order.
I was about to disappear in the crowd, before I got a call on the comm. net. Encrypted channel, too. I couldn’t exactly ignore it
>Early? Congratulations on that shot.<
I glanced at an obvious camera emplacement, and nodded at it slightly. I would recognise the voice of Edwin Creed, the left-hand of the governor, anywhere. I wasn’t going to reactive my throat implant for such a waste of breath. He wouldn’t be interested in anything I said right now.
Creed chuckled as I nodded to the camera. >Yes, I was watching from here. We want you to stick around until the civil authorities show. This is an official op, there’s no need to hide, so you might as well join the troops. I trust you have your ID to hand?<
I cussed Creed’s name under my breath, before allowing myself to blend into the crowd. I can’t explain it, as it isn’t a skill that can be taught. You either learn to do it while stalking people through the urban jungle, or you’re out of a job, possibly due to an acute case of dead. People still know you’re there, it’s just that you become so much background detail, they edit you out of their memories.
I thumbed the throat implant active again.
“Yeah, I have my ID,” I said under my breath. “But what if I get snapped?”
>Right hand pocket of your coat, that’s where you put it,< Creed said. I frowned, and then remembered the gadget he’d given me when I was assigned the op. >Put it to the V setting and all visual recording media will be scrambled. Except ours, of course.<
I shrugged, gave an affirmative and deactivated the implant. The gadget in question looked like any of the electronic organisers so many Chulainn citizens carried around. I’ll be honest, I don’t understand how it’s supposed to scramble any nearby cameras, but my Damascan employers are the ones I came closest to trusting. Think of it as mutual paranoia: neither of us will attempt screwing the other over in case it fails.
I fished out the gadget and my ID, attaching the ID to the shirt under my coat as I activated Creed’s wonder toy. I slipped the gadget back into my pocket as I walked up to the cordon.
“I’m sorry, sir,” one of the squaddies said, walking up to me hand out-stretched.
“Good technique,” I said, flashing my ID to him. He shook his head ruefully and stepped aside.
“Sarge! Early’s here,” he called over as I walked past him. Jurczak’s head popped up, and she looked to mutter something. The squaddie by my side grinned and muttered something himself.
“Tight ship you run here, sergeant,” I said as I came up beside her. “Chewing him out for not using the comm. net?”
Being shot a look from someone almost a foot shorter than you isn’t as amusing as you’d think.
“We’re still on op, Early,” she said. “It’s not quite time to hail each other by name and rank across the cafeteria yet.” Her voice semi-echoed in my ear due to the active comm. net.
“I’ve been told by Creed to stay on site until the cops come to collect him,” I told her. She looked borderline insulted by the unspoken slight to her and her squad, but nodded at me nonetheless.
“Very well. Go and sit with the others, I’ll holler if you’re needed,” she said. “If you’d still had it on, I’d ask you to deactivate the sub-dermal mic you must have. I don’t want the comm. net jammed by chit-chat.”
I nodded to her and wandered over to where the other troops were sat. Two of them were playing cards, while a youngish looking guy was reading a book. I briefly wondered where Wallace was, until the young guy glanced up and opened her mouth.
“So, you’re Early, huh?” Wallace grinned. Usually I’m good at telling guys from Polly Olivers, but in this case I messed up. Something must have shown on my face, because she smiled wider.
“Ah, thought I was a guy, huh?” She snickered slightly. “Don’t worry about it, it happens a lot. Thankfully it keeps a lot of the actual guys away.”
“You’re Wallace, then? Good job catching the runner was blond,” I said, sitting beside her.
“Ha, no worries,” she said. She pulled a canteen out and took a sip. After a momentary pause, she handed it over to me. I knew something was up from the way her eyes grinned. A quick sip confirmed my suspicions.
“Nice,” I said, handing it back. “But what if the sarge catches you with illicit hooch?”
She looked at me with careful innocence. “Illicit hooch? No, this is for, ah, medicinal purposes.”
I ran the taste over my tongue. Oh, I should’ve known. Makes sense with Jurczak’s comment about how jumpy she was.
“Tranquillity,” I said, to her slight nod. It’s brewed from a root supposedly good for tightening one’s focus. For that reason, the root’s taken by revising students and ADHD sufferers. However, it can also be distilled into a very tasty but low-alcohol alcoholic drink. For as long as I can recall, there’ve been arguments and counter-arguments that the booze form is as good as the root itself. It’s currently held that the booze isn’t as good as the root, but no-one would try calling bullshit on anyone claiming it did help them.
There was a honking from behind the crowd. I stood and craned my neck.
“They were quick,” I said, seeing the police van.
“We’ve had this op planned for almost a week,” Wallace said, looking up at me. “Plenty of time to get the necessary lines of communication up.” In some provinces, it would have been a month to get the cops and soldiers to play nicely enough together. But the insignia on the squad members marked them as part of the Hub’s garrison, so I doubt they’d had much first hand experience with people from outside the province.
The crowd parted fairly easily compared to some, but then again, armed soldiers always make people think twice about making a fuss. The squad began to gather around their sergeant without missing a beat, Wallace’s book and canteen, and the deck of cards disappearing like a magic trick.
The corporal (one of the two who’d been playing cards, I noticed) took the still unconscious prisoner over to the cops, while Jurczak turned and took a few steps towards me.
“Well,” she said. “Thanks for the assist, Early.”
“De nada,” I shrugged. “We both only go where we’re told, sergeant.”
“The café was part of you orders?” she asked, with a hint of mischievous malice.
“Maybe not only where I’m told,” I chuckled.
==
Edwin Creed shot me a long-suffering glance as Grayson Blake, the governor of Chulainn, looked over the after-action report. He sat back and sighed.
“The café, Mr. Early?” Blake asked, a slight smile playing on his face.
I shrugged. “I had no idea when I’d be needed. Plus, I was fairly certain that Mr. Creed would have had others covering other routes, so I wasn’t even sure if I would be needed, sir.”
Creed nodded reluctantly as Blake looked to him for confirmation.
“Early was only one of the operatives on the ground for this operation, sir,” Creed said. “However, considering our suspicions of the dissidents’ sympathies, I felt it was necessary.”
Blake nodded, apparently satisfied with this. “I may as well tell you, Donovan, what we suspect,” he said. (And let me just say, no-one calls me Donovan these days, only this guy. Still, he pays my wage.) “We have reason to believe that the dissidents were planning on contacting Artolia, requesting their ‘protection’ for several towns and villages along the border.”
He nodded at my sharp intake of breath. To put it simply, they were going to ask Artolia to invade Chulainn. Whether the country’s government would agree to such a idiotic idea is another thing, but regardless, word would eventually come back to the other provinces. Niska at least would be quick to make a move at such an obvious sign of weakness.
“That would be messy,” I said. Whenever I’m in such talks, I’ve always found understatement to be the way to go. Either they think you’re somewhat simple and leave you to your own devices, or they think you’re an outrageous wit. Unfortunately, Blake seemed to be as fond of understatement as I was, so I never got any advantage from him.
“Ever so slightly,” he agreed. “Now, your work yesterday was much appreciated. And, I’m glad to say, you can have a break now. Just remember, you’re on our retainer.”
“I…” I bit my tongue. “I understand our arrangement, Mr. Blake. I won’t go taking any other jobs behind your back in the meantime.”
“Glad to hear it,” he smiled. “Edwin, if you could please show Donovan out?”
Creed and I nodded, stood, and began to walk towards the door. We both recognised the dismissal.
Creed shook his head at me as he shut the door behind us. “You were lucky there. Using the café like that could have easily backfired. As it is, the proprietor used to be part of the garrison himself, so he found it all ‘ripping good fun’.”
I nodded absently. “So, when’s the next job likely to be?”
Creed smirked. “Early… You really weren’t required for this last one. I just gave it to you as a favour. They say Saitan makes work for idle hands, and in your case it seems to be true.” Creed clapped me on the back. “Just try to behave, eh?”
I grinned and shook my head. Then, “Why wasn’t there any press coverage of the bust?”
“You haven’t heard?” Creed asked. “There was another murder last night.”
“Another one? Damn.” That made at least a dozen in the ten months I’d been working for Damascus, and I know the first one was reported before that. So far, the police and the military hadn’t got anywhere in their investigations.
Creed chuckled. Something must have shown on my face. “Well,” he said. “You’ve got some time off. Why don’t you see if you can figure it out?”
I think he was joking, but it seemed as good a way to waste the time as any.
They always used to tell me I could take whatever somebody threw at me. That’s what they told all the Destrillians, I guess, but I think I got it more than anybody else because I was always the one to ask why we were doing anything in the first place. “Why do we fight so much?” “Because you can take it.” “Why are we locked underground?” “Because you can take it.”
“Why do you never ask before sticking a needle in me?”
I remember how that particular question threw them a little. You would’ve figured that the answer would’ve been “Because you would object,” but no—of course they answered with “Because you can take it, number nine.” I can take pain. And surprise. And shock. And I can throw it back, too, like any half-decent Destrillian can. But back then – back when the fighting was scary and the subterranean hallways felt claustrophobic and the needles never bothered to knock before entering – back then I wasn’t quite so good at it. Because way back when? That girl who was still tiptoeing around her powers, trying to balance on that knife edge between normal and abnormal? That girl who was playing pretend at being human so hard your heart would break at the sight of it? That little girl who couldn’t quite take it yet?
That was me.
***
And she tried so hard at it, too.
“And again!”
“Mmph!” came the muffled cry as her opponent, no more than a soldier hired to help hone her in her early days of monsterdom, pinned her roughly to the ground. Five seconds into another round and her face, already streaked with sweat and frustrated tears, was being smushed into the floor. “Come on, number nine, work those powers already!” the soldier above her egged. “You’ve got your face right up against a whole crapload of metal—use it!” “Nngh,” was the reply, as a twelve-year-old Idris Savage gritted her teeth and struggled against the powerful grip holding her down. In much more time than the onlooking scientists would have liked, she managed to twist in such a way that she was able to shoot her hands out and smack them flat against the soldier’s ribcage, pushing him over and winding him in the process. She scrambled away and rose, weary and wary, to her feet on the other side of the training room.
“For the record,” she said, “that floor’s plastic! There isn’t any metal inhere!”
“Not true, number nine,” said one of the onlookers on the other side of the glass, through a staticy PA system. “There’s metal all around you.”
“No, there isn’t,” the pale girl replied earnestly. “I can feel it; there’s nothing in here, you’ve given me nothing to work with!” She pushed her paling hair out of her eyes and tried to ignore how it was dull and lifeless blonde now, instead of the brown it should’ve been—instead, she concentrated on glaring indignantly at the scientists on the other side of the room, who were putting her through these stupid tests. It was getting completely ridiculous – these people had had her going at it for hours now, with no indication of letting her stop or rest any time soon. Especially considering how her power was still manifesting, still settling down into its new little container, she was wearing down. Not even. She was exhausted. But being the proud creature she was, she refused to show it. The scientists consulted each other for a moment, until one pressed the PA button again. “Correct. The floor, walls and ceiling of this room are made of plastic. Of course, there is metal behind the walls, but obviously you aren’t advanced enough yet to sense that. This was merely a test of your perceptive ability. It’s progressed, but you’re lacking, number nine.” “For goodness sakes, it’s Idris.” “You should be adapting quicker. Put more effort into your newfound abilities.” “Well what if I don’t want to!” the poor confused girl snapped, keeping her chin up even though inside she could feel her chest ache with the shame of disappointing someone—even someone as unknown to her as these sterile white-clad people, with their needles and serums and chilling experiments. “You’re just going to have to try harder.” “But why?” she called, to anybody who would answer. There was a pause – nobody quite knew how to answer the young Destrillian, simple as her question was. Maybe the wording was too broad. Maybe it was the way she said it, with her voice full to the brim of I’ve had ENOUGH for today. Or maybe they didn’t have an answer for her.
And then a voice spoke. “Because you can take the strain, Gunmetal Glint.”
Cedric Rosenfeld was leaning in the doorway. Wordlessly, Idris watched as the tall man strode into the room as if it were his own living room and not a cold and merciless training ground. He turned to the soldier, seemingly completely at ease that a potential threat was at his exposed back. “You’re relieved of your duty for the day, soldier. Thank you for your time.”Idris’ chief scientist then turned towards his charge and scrutinized her stubborn, tired face. “…well then number nine, you’ve clearly had enough for the day. You will be escorted back to your room immediately.”
And Idris, who had always been particularly good at reading people, caught something that looked like a smile on his face as he turned and whisked out of the room to attend his business.
***
“Number nine, will you cease?” came the exasperated call from the room the girl had just stormed out of.
Idris Savage was not happy. Her body, which they had promised would begin to settle into its changed self soon enough, was just not complying. Luckily, her blood had stabilized itself to the point where she no longer required saline infusions, and the fact that she could walk down a hall without an IV was a nice change. But that small happiness shrunk into nothing when set beside all the hell she’d been forced through lately. And the hell she was being forced through right at this very minute.
“It’s only temporary! When you’re finally acclimatized—” began whichever caretaker who had followed her from the Recreation Room. Idris Savage forced all her outrage into one venomous glare and fixed it somewhere relatively harmless: the floor. She was too indignant and too furious to see how the metal warped in a tiny little trail behind her, almost as if it were cowering in on itself from her gaze.
Oh SURE, say it like it’s easy, she raged internally. The poor girl had been told to weather through all the rough changes she’d gone through, because she could take it. And there had been many. For starters, her body had been—and she had never believed it possible before now—growing thinner, even more eviscerated, as her metabolism sped ever faster and used up more of her fat. She had been told not to worry, that the muscle she was developing would replace it and that some day, her limbs would be smooth and firm and strong as the steel she could supposedly control. But for now it was skin and bones and unhealthily so. Not to mention, her own skin scared her. It had looked thin enough to slice through with one stroke of her own brittle fingernail, and it had felt so, too, but in some places, like her hands and feet, the skin had hardened. It’d been completely invisible to the eye – her skin had still looked fragile enough. But slowly, the impenetrable skin had travelled up her arms and legs. Idris had been told that this, like all things, was another change that she would come to accept and be grateful for. They had said that when the skin was finally settled, her entire body would be sheathed in something tough enough to withstand even a strike from a blade. But to pale little Idris, it had just felt like the walls of her own body were slowly closing her in until they trapped her. So far, she had survived all these discomforts, and borne them with not much more than a disgruntled sigh and the occasional scowl at the people who were forcing her through this. It’s not like she’d had a choice in the matter, anyway. But this. This was bordering on obscene. She could take a weak body and tough, chalk-white skin—even though she’d always loved to run and jump, and she’d almost cried when her freckles disappeared. She could take the fact that slowly, her hearing and eyesight were getting sharper and sharper, until it almost became painful, the amount of clarity with which she heard and saw things.
But what Idris Savage could not take? Was having all her hair fall out.
The now-bald girl had been subjected to an onslaught of psychic ridicule in the Recreation Room. Even though some of the Destrillians didn’t mean to be mean, everybody was surprised, and Idris wasn’t in a forgiving mood. When one of them had tried to make light of the situation by joking, she had only just saved herself from starting a fight – which she would have lost – by getting up and stalking out of that room as fast, and with as much menace, as she could. Her plan had been to let out as much pent-up frustration as she could simply by forcing it all into her walk and her stare, but by now she was figuring that that wasn’t going to be enough.
“Fancy seeing you here, Gunmetal.” Her scientist, and chief overseer, Cedric Rosenfeld, stepped out of nowhere and smoothly began to walk in line with her. The fact that he was quite easily keeping stride with her angry pace made Idris even more irritated. “What on this good green earth do you want, Rosenfeld.” “Nothing too much – just saw you coming down the hall and decided to have a chat.” “I’m not in the mood for a chat”the girl spat, and meant it. They had almost reached her room now and she could not wait to get in it so she could rage all she wanted and then relax in that strange blue-filled pod of hers. “Fine, then,” came the man’s breezy reply, and together they turned a corner and arrived at her door. Almost condescendingly, in Idris’ eyes, Dr. Rosenfeld punched in the key for her door and swiped his card. The door was heavy and plastic-lined, to keep her from escaping, and so it took a good six seconds to open; as Idris stepped in, the scientist behind her made one last remark. “By the way, I thought you’d like to know that you’re still quite pretty without your hair. I don’t see what the big fuss is all about.” There was a moment of silence, in which Idris stopped dead and considered what he had just said. And then she turned, stomped her foot, and the heavy, pneumatic, metal and plastic door slammed shut on Cedric Rosenfeld’s face. He sighed. At least her powers were progressing.
***
“What foolish rebellion is this?” “I’m not going to,” repeated Idris Savage for the umpteenth time, full of an indignation that she couldn’t quite pin a reason to.
This had been going on for a while now.
Idris’ present caretaker heaved a sigh and raked a hand through his unkempt hair. The Gunmetal Glint had been persisting at this notion of not going to training today for at least an hour now. The girl herself had woken up that morning and had, on sheer instinct, decided that she was going to do nothing for anybody that day. It felt childish even to her, to get into such a mood with no discernable backing to it, but for some reason Idris couldn’t care less at the moment. “Number nine, you’re going to go through the exercises that you go through every day. There is no arguing this point. Now for gods’ sake,”said her caretaker, taking her hand, “will you just”—he tugged at her arm—“come”—she didn’t budge—“ON.”
She allowed the man to try and pull her from her room. Strong though he was (all of her caretakers needed to be strong nowadays,) he couldn’t do much. He forced her to take one step, and then she twisted her feet against the ground to prevent herself from moving anymore. The man sighed. He had no idea why she was being so difficult, either. “Is there a reason to all of this?”he asked, exasperated. “No.” The answer surprised him. It wasn’t necessarily the answer itself, but the tone with which the young Destrillian said it. There was no hint of snideness in her answer; she was simply telling the truth. “Then there is no logic to your action. If there’s no reason why you shouldn’t go, then you’re going.” “No.” That answer didn’t surprise him so much.
“And there is a reason, now that I think of it,” she continued. “I just don’t know what.” This really threw the poor man, who had already had a rough day as it were. The Blazing Fury had been disobeying this morning, too, but the fire Destrillian’s means of displaying her rebellion were much different—and much more difficult to deal with—than the Gunmetal Glint’s. Needless to say, having two troublemakers in one day was a lot to handle. In the seconds that the man took to think this, Idris has smoothly pulled her hand from his and had walked back to the middle of her room, bony arms folded. She just seemed to look so terribly entitled to whatever she was going on about, that as hard as the scientist tried to maintain his anger with the girl, he couldn’t. She was baffling.
“Number nine,” the man tried, and then, “Idris,” to really try and hit home; “I don’t know what you’ve got going on in that sharp little head of yours, but whatever it is, it makes no sense. We’ve agreed that there’s nothing preventing you from going about your daily routine, so can you please” he said, really trying to lay it on thick, “please, just go to the training room and perform your exercises?” Idris stood there and thought about it. And she thought a little more. She smiled, a bit apologetically almost, and the man knew her answer before she could give it. She saw, and didn’t bother to give it at all.
“Fine, then. You can stay, but I’m putting you in your cryo pod so that you can’t cause any trouble.”He paused, thoughtful. “Any more trouble.” Having got her way, the small, pale girl said nothing, but turned to go to her pod with no fuss. The scientist watched her go for a moment, almost forgetting that she had begun her life somewhere outside of Viola in the first place. She seemed so natural here. Almost too natural. He turned and filled a syringe with Distrum, and then approached the girl settling into her glass pod. Without hesitation, he took her arm and injected the substance into the strong white skin and the bloodstream beneath it. “Why do you never ask before sticking a needle in me?” the Destrillian asked, quite calmly. The oddity of the question struck her caretaker for the second time. The weirdest things this girl asks. If she weren’t so good natured, I would worry about how difficult she would be in a few years from now. “Because you can take it, number nine,” he replied as the pod shut itself and blue cryogenic gel began to fill it up. Idris just had time to give him what might be thought of as a reproachful look before she closed her eyes and was still.
I deserve to get a break today, she thought as she began to slip into sleep. I don’t know why but I do. I’ve worked and worked and something tells me that it’s practically my right to do what I want for now. I’ll make it up tomorrow, or something.
Hours later, her caretaker returned to her room with none other than Dr. Cedric Rosenfeld, who was curious to see why Idris hadn’t been at her training. “It’s virtually inexplicable, sir,”the lesser man was carrying on, as they entered the room with the girl slumbering peacefully in the pod. “The Destrillian said it herself. She has no idea why she’s being so stubborn, she just is. She didn’t cause any real trouble, she’s just being… uncooperative.” “And no wonder,” mused the chief scientist. The comment prompted a reaction from the caretaker, who turned a look of disbelief upon Dr. Rosenfeld. “Might you have some idea about her disobedience today?”he probed, trying very, very hard to keep his tone respectful (he’d had to deal with all this trouble, after all, and learning afterwards that it had a perfectly logical reason behind it was not on his high list.) “I can guess,” Cedric Rosenfeld replied, gazing with an unreadable expression at the softly glowing pod. After a moment of silence, he turned to face the caretaker, and with a quirk of a smile he said, “after all, it isher birthday.” The caretaker’s jaw dropped. Nobody bothered Idris Savage again that day.
But sometime in the late hours of the night, just before one day turned into the next, something caused Idris to awaken in her pod. The girl had no idea what it was, or why she had heeded its call, but she slit her eyes against the blue cryogenic gel to try and see outside her pod, to find out. Nobody was there. But what was there, glowing on the monitor that usually displayed her output and life signs, scrawled across the screen in the same bright orange script, was a message.
“HAPPY 13th BIRTHDAY IDRIS”
***
“LOOK OUT—” CRASH “…sorry,” said the Gunmetal Glint, wincing apologetically at the small group of scientists who had just barely managed to skirt death by freezing at the last moment. Where they would have been, was a giant plate of metal smushed up in folds against the wall. They all shot her looks and then hurried down another hallway, and Idris exhaled sharply through her nose. It wasn’t her fault, after all. She’d been minding her own business, la-di-daing down a hallway to a training room, and as another Violan employee had crossed her path, rolling a tray of something or other, it had just barely caught on her dancing foot. Now Idris was a graceful creature by nature, and so she didn’t fall entirely. Using her sharp sight and quick reflexes, the girl simply turned the fall into a roll and sprung back up onto her feet again. The problem arose when she went and gave a little hop, to get rid of the extra momentum. It had been distracting and she hadn’t been concentrating, and… Well. Needless to say, Idris got to the training room with as little delay as possible.
It’s getting awfully ridiculous, she thought to herself as she nodded absentmindedly along with whatever instruction her scientists were giving her at the time. I can barely BREATHE without making something crumple or warp or gods forbid crush into something else. What am I going to DO with myself? It was true. In the past month or two, the metal Destrillian’s powers had suddenly begun to grow exponentially: “About time,” the scientists had said. Their glee was cut short when they saw precisely how fast Idris’ abilities were manifesting. The girl could blink and without thinking she could crush a doorway. She was becoming dangerous. Of course the irony was lost on nobody – Idris Savage had taken the longest time out of almost all the Destrillians to embrace her powers. The fact that they were finally manifesting at full force, all at once, was probably Fate’s way of saying “You wanted improvement, so here it is!” Worse yet, they discovered that no amount of Distrum quelled the onslaught of raw power. If anything, that made it more dangerous. The only way to control it, unfortunately, was to have poor Idris concentrate with every fibre of her being, every moment of the day, on keeping herself under control. If she got out of line for even a moment, then things like the near-disaster in the hallway earlier were bound to become commonplace. Luckily for Viola, the Gunmetal Glint was exceptional at concentration, and she didn’t get bored easily, either. But even Idris had her limits.
“In you go.” The Destrillian nodded at the command and took her place inside the training room. Her opponent, she realized, was a woman. This was relatively new to her, as usually Viola only sent in male soldiers. Maybe it had had something to do with the instructions she’d paid no attention to. “Fight!” came the command, and Idris slung herself lower to the ground in a predatory stance. She bit her lip, took a deep breath, and then tried to let out a little bit of her power—just a little. No such luck. At the wave of her hand, the first two inches of metal came off of the wall to her left (and mind, this was the same room she had trained in years ago, with the metal buried behind plastic) and came hurtling towards the woman. This soldier had amazing reflexes. She dropped to the ground like a stone and kicked one of her legs out, so that she hit the bottom of the giant sheet of metal and it turned to such an angle that the woman was just— —barely— —able to slide beneath it. She sprang back to her feet just as the projectile crashed into the opposite wall. Idris quickly nudged it with an elbow to fuse it to the wall, lest it fall down and crush them both.
“…apologies for that, miss,” she said, with a bit of a smile. “It’s been going on for a while now.” “Oh don’t worry about me,” replied the woman, with surprising confidence. The metal Destrillian felt a prick of condescension with the woman. After all, no matter how swift she was, she was still human. And Idris was a Destrillian, now almost fully manifested and dangerously so. What was there NOT to worry about? “This is an exercise in… restraint, number nine,”came the voice over the crackly PA system. “You are required to fight as always, but you now also have the problem of your strengthened abilities. Your priorities are to win, and not to kill anybody. Understood?” “Perfectly.” Through grit teeth. This was going to be a little difficult.
And difficult it was. Not only because people were counting on her not to kill the woman, but because Idris herself didn’t want to kill the woman. This was a soldier that Idris was fighting against, don’t forget, and she was every bit as agile and quick-witted as she had made clear beforehand. But despite this, Idris maintained an extra sense of delicacy around her, trying her darned hardest not to hurt her, only to stun. There were a few close shaves both ways. Idris almost lost when the soldier whipped out a gun, but the Destrillian’s newfound powers reacted on their own and threw a magnetic field up at the last moment, catching the bullets and swinging them back around in the woman’s general direction. That was the first time Idris had ever done something like that and she only had a moment to revel in it before she shoved her powers back down under concentration and kept on fighting. Conversely, she almost decapitated the woman. Twice. “Sorry!” she kept on yelling, without quite knowing why. After a while, the two began to almost joke with it. It was a grim sort of humour, but the woman and the Destrillian found common ground in what they thought was funny, and Idris was just beginning to really enjoy herself when the PA system crackled at them to stop. “You’re not trying, number nine,”they told her. She replied that no, she was actually trying very hard thank you, and that maybe they ought to try fighting somebody without killing them when the force of a small atomic explosion was being suppressed within you by willpower alone. Some of the scientists chuckled. They were used to Idris’ joshing by now. The training session cut short before they could push the Destrillian too far, and the two women walked out. It was then that Idris began to realize why she had been trying so hard in the first place.
It sounded ridiculous from Idris, of all people. But it was because the woman was… well, a woman. And something about being a woman forced upon Idris a sense of delicate handling. Even though the soldier was made of really, really tough stuff, she still looked fragile. Maybe it was her figure. Or her effeminate face. Or something. Either way, Idris realized, it was the perfect natural barrier against harm.
Looking down at herself surreptitiously, Idris noticed none of the feminine curves that the female soldier had. Quirking an eyebrow, she thought about the other female Destrillians. Immediately, the joyously freckled face of Emma Johnson, the nature Destrillian, swam into her mind’s eye. The girl was sweet and kind, and had grown a formidable set of hips and breasts. And nobody really wanted to hurt Emma. Next would’ve been Ariel. Though not quite as buxom, she still had definitive curves. Everybody loved Ariel—even Fiona, and the fire Destrillian hated everybody. The evidence was starting to pile up here.
Now Idris had never been much of a complainer about anything. Any whining she’d done over the past years at Viola had been, for the most part, light-hearted and joking; nothing much bothered her, after all. Idris, as a Destrillian and as a person, was content to sit back and watch things unfold until the time where she was needed, and so she’d gained a healthy perspective on how her world worked. Complaining would get you nowhere. The only way to fix things would be to do it yourself. But you can’t force yourself to grow hips and a chest, can you? She frowned. Nope. Definitely impossible. Part of her, ever-joking, thought that if there was a Destrillian of feminism, they could clear this problem right up. She chuckled at the thought and then realized that she’d called it a “problem.” Was it really? Of course not, she scoffed. If anything it helps me. No extra weight. And it’s easier to slip in through doors and the like. Still though, she thought, leaning against the wall, it’s all fine and dandy to say that but it’s another thing entirely if I’m going to be flat as this wall for the rest of my life. Turns out that that comparison wasn’t quite the right one to use at the time, as Idris had lost concentration again while thinking, and as a result she had sunk herself right into the wall. She hurriedly jumped back out of it, leaving an Idris-shaped mould a half-foot deep in the metal. She sucked her teeth in frustration, and then turned to one of the caretakers who were watching her with a worried expression on their faces. This one was a woman, too, and Idris figured that if she was going to ask this question, she may as well ask somebody who would get it.
“So,” she began, appearing at the side of the female nurse quicker than she could blink. The woman stifled a squeak of surprise and looked at the adolescent Destrillian with suspicious curiosity. “We all know that my powers are rocketing upwards and they’re not going to stop going that way for whoever knows how long, right? “Well that’s splendid,” she continued, unfaltering, as the nurse nodded, “but it seems to me that my abilities are the only things growing around here.” The girl gestured to herself for further emphasis. “I might be able to throw steel around like it’s a plaything, but as far as my body goes it looks like I should still be playing with playthings in the first place. It’s grand that I’ve finally got this development going on, but there is no development going on here.” She pointed right at her chest. Idris was never the type to skirt around subjects. “Love, I’m what, sixteen now? And I’ve got the female presence of a stick. Emma’s obviously grown up, and Ariel and Fiona and all of them—what about me?” she said, a natural joking tone slipping into her voice. “When’s my turn?”
Cynthia Schmidt had never needed to answer a question like this before. She didn’t even have the previous experience of having had this conversation with her own children before, as she had none. The nurse tucked a lock of strawberry blonde hair back into its bun and thought frantically for some sort of answer. “Well, um,” she started, and then faltered, and then began again. “I think it’s just that your body won’t grow until later. Everybody’s different, and everybody develops at different ages,” the nurse said, feeling uncomfortable with talking about this in plain air. The Destrillian in front of her nodded like it was perfectly natural, though, so she pressed on hurriedly. “I think if you just wait, then in time you will, um… grow.”
“Hmmm.” Cynthia Schmidt winced a bit at that. Had the answer not been satisfactory? “Something tells me that waiting is the right decision, yes – what else can I do, after all? But at the same time,” Idris said, her eyes calmly sizing up Dr. Schmidt’s own chest, which she found extremely uncomfortable, “did you start growing at sixteen?” “I…” “No never mind, that’s a stupid question,” the metal Destrillian said, waving away her earlier words. “You’re a human and I’m a Destrillian. Different rules. And besides, I never asked what to do about it. I just wanted to know why.” To this, Cynthia Schmidt had no answer. Her watery blue eyes met Idris’ clear, sharp grey ones, and there was a pause.
Somebody appeared at their side. “It’s because—” “If you say it’s because I can take it, I swear I’ll crush you into the floor,” Idris interrupted with a lopsided smile. “And we’ll see if you can take THAT, doctor of mine.” Dr. Cedric Rosenfeld laughed heartily, and the girl joined in with a tinkling laugh of her own. Today seemed to be a good day for half-humour. “But really then,” the Destrillian resumed, tilting her head at Dr. Rosenfeld, “if you’ve a real answer, I’d love to hear it.”
“The real answer, Gunmetal, is that your form of puberty has manifested in your powers, not in your body itself,”the man said, waving a hand in Idris’ general direction. “While some of the others will go through a… natural, puberty, yours seems to have become ability-centric. I’ll tell you right now that I don’t expect you to grow another inch anywhere, and neither should you.” The girl pouted for a moment, but continued listening. “If it’s any consolation, though… by the end of it you’ll have incredible amounts of power at your disposal. Incredible. And metal itself is one of the most stubborn elements to control. Should this go the way I’m estimating, you’ll very well become one of the most powerful Destrillians Viola has ever had the…” he glanced over at the wall where her dent was. “The distinct pleasure of working with.” “Distinct indeed,” said the metal Destrillian, with pride in her voice. “Well fine, I guess I’ll just have to live my life as a two-by-four.” “You won’t have to, Idris,” said Rosenfeld. “You’re living life as a Destrillian.”
She considered that for a long time afterwards. And it still makes sense today.
***
She’s dead.
She’s dead she’s dead she’s dead.
She’s dead and there is nothing in the world that you can do about it and they killed her he killed her oh god oh god oh god why weren’t you there you could have done something and she’s dead and you’ll never see her again and she didn’t deserve it at all never deserved it ever why oh why oh why did they do it Ariel is DEAD and it’s all. Their. Fault.
---
The room was quiet. Still. Nothing was out of place here; the monitors were all working and the door was locked from the inside and they had finally managed to fix the air conditioning so that it didn’t make so much noise. All there was, was the gentle hum that it still generated, and a tall, bespectacled man sitting in a chair, and a girl afloat in a glowing, gel-filled pod.
Dr. Cedric Rosenfeld sighed. Today, Ariel Regan, Destrillian Prototype 000-000-012, had been killed more or less in cold blood. The moment she had died, just about every Destrillian in the facility had thrown a fit. It was like they could feel the death of their comrade, and it drove them all crazy with hate. In his personal opinion, Viola had bitten off more than they could chew when the big wigs decided to kill the girl in the same building as the other Destrillians—and on the same floor, to boot. The proximity must have been agonizing for everybody. Including Idris. The scientist closed his eyes and pictured that day’s events over again in his mind. Idris had been in the worst possible place for her to be at the time – the training rooms. Rosenfeld still remembered the look on her face. That absolute mask of horror, shifting like sand into one of dead certainty, and then indescribable grief. All of the metal she had been controlling during her round with the soldiers dropped to the floor, as lifeless as he knew Ariel then lay. There had been a moment of silence. Nobody else but a few of the doctors knew what had just happened, and the possible connection it had to what was going on in the training room with Idris at that moment. She just… stood there. But then she lifted her head up, and they saw that another look had replaced the previous. Even Dr. Rosenfeld, ever-calm, had to open his eyes and focus on the girl in her pod right now, so as not to be sucked too far into that memory. Because the look that had been on the Gunmetal Glint’s face would give them all nightmares until they were very, very old. It was a look of complete, omnipotent pain. And one of rage.
And just like that, the small, pale girl had twisted her arms about her, clutching at her own white arms as she sunk to her knees. She made not a sound, and that made it all the scarier when the walls, floor, ceiling… when the whole training room warped hideously to her silent command, malleable as putty, surging into the middle where all the soldiers were and enveloping them in their own personal, airtight shells. And then still more metal sprang from the ruined walls and impaled them while they suffocated, again and again, and then as if this was still not enough punishment those metal casings squeezed downwards, slowly crushing its victims from the tops of their heads to the soles of their feet. If it hadn’t been for the screams of the metal protesting as it did its work, they would have been able to hear the cracking of the soldiers’ bones and the disgusting squelching sounds of the rest of them slowly being compressed downward. And small, skinny Idris just sat there on her knees and hugged herself so hard that bruises erupted beneath her fingertips, and by all that was good in the world, Cedric swore he’d seen her crying—just before the windows looking into the training room were obscured as more metal dragged over them, turning the entire place into a rock-climber’s dream and a Violan scientist’s nightmare.
It had taken forever to navigate the twisted wreckage to go and get the Destrillian out. Not to mention, the metal would still jerk and pull away from itself once in a while, to shoot out at random points that were entirely fatal. Another scientist lost her life stepping over a huge bubble of metal, only to have it suddenly spring upwards and rend a hole straight through her throat. But they’d gotten her out, eventually, and as they restrained her with needle after needle of Distrum, she had just sat there and taken it. Just sat there and looked at them all, and it was at that moment there. That one brief instant, out of all the days before and after. That was the moment where Idris had had the face of a real Destrillian.
And here he was now, taking the responsibility for his charge. Dr. Rosenfeld had to admit, it was a much better job than that of all the other scientists, who had to go and find a way to reconstruct the training room. It was pretty much beyond repair, let alone any sort of use for the next month. Not that any of the Destrillians would be using training rooms for a while; they were all worked up like Idris was.
…dead.
The tall man blinked. He looked up, flicking chestnut hair out of his eyes.
…gone…she’s gone…
Idris’ voice rang out in his head, sad and empty and unspeakably hurt. Dr. Rosenfeld’ fingers had already typed out half of the code needed to administer another colossal dose of Distrum, when something stopped him. Quietly, he laid a finger on the backspace key, looking up at the girl in her pod. She was still out for the count, as far as consciousness went. It was just her mind that was slowly coming out of its coma, that was all.
Idris couldn’t feel anything. She couldn’t feel enough to know she couldn’t feel anything. But slowly, very very slowly, her senses began to return to her. And as they did, so too came the physical manifestation of the pain she was feeling internally. A dull, radiating ACHE in her chest, spreading absolute agony straight down to her fingertips. It hurt more than anything had ever hurt anybody in the entire history of the world, and Idris had a feeling that it had nothing to do with how she couldn’t remember how she’d got into her pod. It had nothing to do with the real, physical pain that was intertwined with the emotional—the physical pain could only come from a complete and total overusage of her power, but Idris couldn’t remember what she had done to cause that. No, this had to do with Ariel. And with how Ariel was dead, and how she’d been killed and how nothing could ever be happy again because why in the world would anybody anybody anybody want to kill Ariel and now she was dead and—
“Stop it.”
The voice, muffled through the pod though it was, jolted Idris out of her spiralling thoughts. And the girl found that, really, all she was now, was incredibly, incredibly tired. And she just wanted to tell that to somebody who might care one whit about it. And by some subconscious instinct, she found and called out to the one living being that might want to hear her out.
Why is she gone, doctor of mine.
It was barely a question, so devoid of any life it was. Dr. Rosenfeld smiled an odd, hollow sort of smile as he considered the answer he would give her. “She’s gone, Idris, because she was of no further use to Viola,” he began, choosing his words carefully. The man knew that he only had one chance to engrain this deep enough into his Destrillian that she would never make the same mistake. “Ariel was killed because she was too free-spirited, too rebellious. Her ambitions became corrupted and she started to turn on the very people who’d given her all that she has. We, all of us here at Viola,” he continued, putting every drop of feeling, sincere or not, into his voice, “we’re the ones that raised you, the ones that gave you such gifts. And you have these gifts to carry out a specific mission, when the time comes. You are soldiers, all of you,” he said, and then he paused, for he wasn’t quite sure how next to phrase what he wanted to say. Even for a man as smooth as Cedric Rosenfeld, the next few moments were going to be awkward.
“Idris Savage, Destrillian Prototype number 000-000-009. The Gunmetal Glint. That’s who you are, Idris, whether you like it sometimes or not, and it’s who you’ll be forever. There’s no changing that. And that means that you belong to us; I don’t know whether I believe in any sort of divinity,” the tall man said, raising his eyes to the asbestos-lined ceiling, “but I can say that I’m thankful that it was her and not you. Because Idris, after Ariel, a lot of people here at Viola—and this includes myself—would pin you down as the one to try and rebel. You’ve got the same sort of independence that she had, and you care for people like she did… and you ask the same pesky questions.”The joke in his voice just barely made the words tolerable. “So for goodness sakes, do what Viola wants from now own. Do what we tell you—do what I tell you, and this never has to happen again.”
Silence. He could feel the girl’s presence, quiet but awake, considering everything he’d said (and he had said a lot, considering what he usually said) and weighing its sincerity. Finally, the presence slipped coolly from his mind, leaving nothing but a sleepy and resigned final word.
Okay.
***
And she hardly even tried at it, too.
“And again!”
“Mmph!”came the muffled cry as her opponent, one of the half a dozen top-notch soldiers in the room, was pinned roughly to the ground. Five seconds into another round, and the Gunmetal Glint’s opponents were already having their faces smushed into the floor.
“My god man, work with me here!” the Destrillian above the soldier egged. “You’ve got five men right here and they seem perfectly happy to twiddle their thumbs in the back—use ‘em!” “Nngh,” was the reply, as the soldier tried to swat the girl off of him. She let the struggle continue for a bit before leaping smoothly off him and landing back in the middle, allowing him to get up. Her lopsided smile said it all – she was going to win and she knew it. The men looked at each other and simultaneously decided that now, now was a good time to pull out the weaponry. And so six fully-grown men pulled out guns of varying severity, aimed, and fired straight at the Destrillian. But Idris Savage was untouchable. Cool as a cucumber, she raised a magnetic field around her and caught all of the bullets – and there were many. She waited until the men had all but spent their rounds, and then, with little more than a disappointed tut, reversed the field and sent the bullets rocketing back in the direction of the soldiers’ feet. Most of them got out of the way in time. Most of them. A few would be off-duty for a few weeks thereafter, with bullet wounds in their feet. Idris watched their struggles with a sort of polite amusement; the metal Destrillian was perfectly happy to stand there and wait until somebody tried to hit her. And when finally, somebody did try and hit her – a good attempt at a sneak attack from the back, while the girl was distracted with the kerfuffle in front of her – Idris ducked the swing of the gun butt and retaliated with a roguish grin and a sharp kick to the side. She twisted back up to standing and sprang like a bat out of hell towards one of the two remaining soldiers, landing with a thud against the well-built man, hands smacked flat against his chest. Using the force behind her, she toppled him and used his fallen body as a springboard for her hands, pushing off and away, executing a perfect flip and landing crouched, ready for the last of the pack.
This soldier was one of the men who routinely trained with Idris. He was pretty much permanently assigned to her, as opposed to a good number of the others, who were rotated through the Destrillians to give them a fresh challenge. But being assigned to Destrillian Prototype 009, and having fought her so many times before, the man had a good idea of what he was about to be subjected to. He sighed at what was probably going to happen next. And then, almost as quick and agile as the weapon he was fighting, he fired one bullet at the girl to distract her, diverolled on the ground and sprang back up running full-tilt towards her.
Idris, it had to be said, hadn’t seen the bullet coming. It was new and that made her smile. So instead of perhaps giving the man what was coming to him, she simply swatted the bullet away like it was a bothersome insect, and then— —just as the soldier was about to make contact with her— —she stepped to the side and held an arm out, effectively clotheslining him.
Idris Savage stepped over his groaning body and surveyed the scientists behind the window with ever-present patience, as they chattered to each other about what had just happened. Eventually, a voice – staticy as ever, as they’d never bothered to fix that PA – came through. “Well done, Idris.” She knew from the moment she heard her name that Dr. Rosenfeld was in the room. Seeing quite easily through the tinted glass (her eyes, with their enlarged irises and pupils, could do that sort of thing,) she spotted him leaning casually against a control panel. “’s my pleasure, love.” “In fact, the only question I have for you is, precisely how hard was all of that?”
Idris thought. She cut the men some well-deserved slack by pretending like she was considering their combat skills. But after a few moments of enjoying the tense silence that obviously meant every scientist in that room – and the soldiers who were awake, too – wanted to know the answer, she felt obliged to tell the truth. “Well not to offend the good soldiers here, but you may want to tie my hand to my foot next time and tell me to do it that way.” She shrugged and smiled at everybody’s groan. “Might make it more challenging, I don’t know.” “You’re supposed to tell us when you aren’t trying hard enough, Idris,”came Dr. Rosenfeld’s voice, and she was pleased to hear the light tone in his voice. He, at least, thought the joke was funny. “Nowadays, you’re supposed to be pushing yourself to the absolute limit. There shouldn’t be any slacking off in training.” “Oh but why not?” the girl insisted playfully. “It’s much easier on the soldiers, after all, when I don’t try too hard. Why should we make this more difficult for them, when they try so terribly hard as it is?” Her cheeky smile dropped into an incredulous yet still light-hearted pout at her doctor’s next words. “Because you can take the strain, Gunmetal Glint.”
She was about to sling back a dramatic retort when something stopped her. Her face became more serious all of a sudden; the small Destrillian woman bit her lip in apparent thought, mulling over whatever idea had just slithered into her head. Finally, she looked back up through the glass and – everybody could tell by her tone – addressed Dr. Rosenfeld personally.
“Remember that time, years and years ago, when I was fighting in here against some guard and I kept on losing?” At the hesitance that followed, she added, “You know, when my face kept getting mashed into the ground.” At this, the tall man smiled in remembrance. “Oh don’t look so smug about it, you horrible man,” she said, letting loose a chuckle. “All those years ago, when I was beaten and tired, and just wanted to go and rest, you killed the training for the day. You did it on purpose, didn’t you? Because you took pity,” she said, contemplating his expression through the tinted glass window, her head tilted delicately to one side. “I still remember.”
Everybody waited for the answer. Cedric Rosenfeld took his time before giving it.
“…I might have.”
And Idris Savage, who had remained, through all these years, particularly good at reading people, caught something that looked like a smile on his face as he inclined his head in farewell to the other scientists, and whisked out of the observation room to attend to other business.
***
They always used to tell me I could take whatever somebody threw at me. That I could take pain, and surprise, and shock. And I could – and I can – throw it back, because I’m more than a half-decent Destrillian. And everything they told me proved to be true, because Viola really did get it all thrown back in their faces when we stormed the facility and made a break for it. But nowadays I wonder. Can they take it? Destrillians as a whole were created to withstand all sorts of hell and high water, but what about the scientists who started the project in the first place? Can they go up against ten, twenty, one hundred heavily-armed soldiers and come out without a scratch? Are they capable of watching as their friends and family die, practically right in front of them, at the hands of their own kind? Can they take the strain of what they’ve created?
It’s not my place to say for anybody else, but I know one man who could.
Because that girl who was tiptoeing around her powers, trying to balance on that knife edge between normal and abnormal? That girl who was playing pretend at being human so hard your heart would break at the sight of it? That little girl who couldn’t quite take it yet?
She learned to. She grew up. And she got stronger. She fought through all sorts of misfortune – for no real reason, looking back on it – and she managed to come out the other side alive. And over the years, she stopped worrying so much about whether she’d be able to handle whatever came her way, and started to just handle it. That, is the true mark of a Destrillian.
She was not sick, she’d tell herself. She was just a little sad. Sometimes she had nightmares about The Owner killing her, and she tried not to wake up screaming, since that would only get her into more harm. But she was not sick, she told herself, she just wasn’t happy. That was why that frail girl had suddenly beaten her owner to death: she was just so sad that she felt like breaking.
She was not sick, she’d tell herself. She was just a little scared. The needles that they had frightened her, her hair fading to white, her eyes turning red, her powers terrified her. Certainly, she had friends, she had people she loved, who took the fear away and made her feel, for the tiniest sliver of time, safe. They helped to teach to how to control the powers she didn’t want, which almost made her feel happy. That was why The Scientists decided to try and make her better.
She was not sick, she’d tell herself. She was just a little unsure. The scientists had tried to make her faster, better, more powerful. But somehow, something must have went wrong within their calculations, within their prototypes, because she wasn’t just enhanced. Time became too slow, her heart kept beating faster, everything else slowed to a near standstill. That was the day she apparently stopped existing to the world.
She was not sick, she’d tell herself. She was just a little too fast. The world did not see her, though she could see it, she could drink the water and breathe the air. But this world of no one was painful, and so very alone, she had no idea what to do. She wandered to the capitol, living in the clock tower, a ghost that no one saw, a spirit that didn’t exist. That was the day that He appeared and brought her back, if only for a moment.
She was not sick, she’d tell herself. She was just a little tired. Her hands felt heavy, and her head felt like a block of lead. It was horrible of her to think it, but she felt that at least she wouldn’t have to be alone any more. She could feel the blood pumping through every vein, her heart beating itself into arrhythmia. Certainly, she was going to die now, after all of the times she managed to survive. That was why she was brought back to life, for the third time.
She was not sick, she’d tell herself. She was just a little angry. She was tired of standing back as things happened to her, standing down when she knew she needed to stand up. There was something that she needed to do, something that was absolutely necessary to standing up for herself, instead of letting Him take care of it for her. That’s why she went with her friend back to her homeland, to destroy the man that had so deliberately destroyed herself, the Princess of Xi Qin, Tao Hong.
“Daddy, tell me a story?” Cedric Rosenfeld blinked. His six-year-old daughter peered up at him, her eyes the only thing visible above the bedcovers. It was one of those rare nights where the man would actually be home from work at Viola to see his family, and as such, his wife, Nessa, had asked him to tuck their little girl in. Now, Felicia Rosenfeld was a girl used to routine, and so when her dad had pulled the covers up to her ears and kissed her on the forehead goodnight, she had expected a bedtime story. She was surprised that he didn’t know he was supposed to do this. Cedric sat back down on the edge of little Felicia’s bed. He paused a moment, and patiently the daughter waited for the father to start. “…sweetie, I’m not a very good storyteller,”he told her after a while. He didn’t want to disappoint the girl, but his knowledge of commonplace fairytales was a little on the lacking side. “Then make something up,”she countered, stubborn as her mother. Cedric placed a hand on her head while he wracked his brain for something to tell his daughter. Really, the only stories he’d heard in a long, long time were the tales the other scientists back at Viola told about their Destrillians— “…hmm.” It could work.
“Well, Flick,” he began, as the girl giggled at the use of the nickname that only her father called her by, “once upon a time there was a really big war. All of the countries in the land started fighting, and they didn’t stop for a very long time. During the war, one country decided to try and make people to… protect, themselves.” “You mean they made heroes?” “Something like that, honey. It took a long time, and the people who were involved made a few mistakes along the way – they were human, after all – but eventually, they were finished. All the fighting had ended while these… heroes, were being made, but the people who had made them continued to train them in case it started again. “Now, each of these special people looked just like a human being,” Cedric continued to his wide-eyed daughter,“but they were super strong and fast. They could jump the space between the buildings in the city, like they were flying”—Felicia gasped in delight—“and they could lift your mom’s car up without even thinking about it. But the really special thing about them, was that each one knew how to control an element. Water, fire, wind—that sort of thing.” “Like fairies!” the little girl exclaimed, making her father chuckle. “Some powerful fairies, Flick. The scientists who had made these super people called them…”at this moment, he paused. Neither his wife nor his daughter knew about what really went on at Viola, and he was disinclined to give them any hints. Still, he couldn’t think of any name that better suited the Destrillians than what they were. “Called them what?” Cedric looked down at his bright-eyed daughter, and decided to tell her a half-truth.
“They called them Dessies, Felicia.” “That’s a fun name.” “Isn’t it?” The man smiled, and then continued. “There was Terra, who was the earth Dessie; she could take the ground and make fantastic shapes with it. Thetis was the water Dessie, and she was a shy one but she could do all sorts of things with her powers when she wanted to.” “Could she make it rain on a really hot day?” “You bet she could! Fiona controlled fire—she was a little more dangerous. People had to be careful with Fiona, because fire is unpredictable, and Fiona had a bit of a bad temper. Emma Johnson could take that little flower over there,”Cedric said, gesturing to the little flower pot on the windowsill, “and turn it into a big and beautiful garden, all on its own.” Felicia, by this point, had noticed something. “Were they all girls, Daddy?”
Cedric laughed. “Not at all. There were boys too, like Kerr—he could control gravity, so if you asked very nicely, Flick, he might have made you able to float in the air like a cloud.”Felicia smiled very widely at that. Her smile turned into a pout when her father added, “You would need to ask very, very nicely though. Kerr didn’t like many people – he was a bit of a loner.” “Oh, he just needs a hug and some soup,” said the little girl, doing an impressive impression of how her mother could act sometimes. All fussy and practical—that was their Nessa. Still, with another chuckle, Cedric resolved to give Dr. Abaddon the advice once he returned to Viola. “Maybe he does. Erthys, on the other hand, was more social – he could control lightning.” Little Felicia gasped at that. How could one person control such huge, loud lights in the sky? “Ariel was the most friendly of them all, though. She was the Dessie of sound, so…” He tried to come up with one of Ariel’s powers that wouldn’t be out of place in this light-hearted story. “So she could sing better than you and your mother put together.” His daughter made a “hmph!” sound at that, but listened on, enraptured. “Eve could control snow and ice; she could take a nice day like today was, and make it a snow day for you in ten seconds flat. “And then, there was Idris.”
He paused. How to explain her, he wondered. Idris had always defied conventional explanation. Little brown-haired Felicia looked up at her father, ready to hear about the next Dessie and their awesome power. She noticed that he took a while to think. “Idris…that’s a weird name,” she commented, to fill the silence. Cedric poked her on the nose. “So was Thetis, but you didn’t say anything then. Idris… well, she could control metal. You could give her a piece of it, and in a minute or two she could hand you back a pretty bracelet or a necklace.” The little girl’s eyes lit up as he continued. “Idris could climb up a metal wall just like a spider, if she tried.” “Ew!” went the little girl, at the mention of spiders. Cedric shushed her, and continued to say “She wasn’t creepy like a spider, though—she was actually very pretty.” “What did she look like?” “Well, she was very, very small. In a few years, you would be taller than her, Flick; she had short blonde hair, and these big, clear grey eyes. She smiled a lot, which made her look very approachable, but not many of the other Dessies spoke with her.” “Why’s that?” asked Felicia, instantly offended. “Nobody knew—especially not Idris, and she wanted to know the most. All the scientists just assumed that she preferred to be alone, and they were right most of the time, but there was one who knew she was a little lonely because of it.”Cedric’s daughter nodded along as he talked, envisioning a pretty blonde girl sitting alone in a corner, like she used to before she made friends in her first grade class.
“She must have been sad,” Felicia remarked. Cedric nodded, patting his daughter on the head. “I’m sure she was. But although nobody really talked to her all that much, most of the Dessies liked her, so she was okay. “Now even though the scientists had made the Dessies to protect everybody from getting hurt in the war, there was no more war going on, and so the Dessies started to get upset. They were kept underground for their training, you see—” “All that time?!” “Yes, honey. Otherwise, people might get scared of them.” “Well I wouldn’t,” she huffed. Cedric smiled at her. “Maybe, if you ever meet one, you should tell them that. So the Dessies were unhappy with how they were living. They had to train very hard, and it was very tiring work; there was no sunlight where they were kept. Slowly they became sadder and angrier about how the scientists were keeping them there.” He stopped. He readjusted his glasses, thinking of what came next. The thing was, nothing came next. The Destrillians were kept safe under the many levels of Viola, where they were whipped into top shape for the day that another war came about. That was how it was. There was no end to the story.
“Daddy?” Felicia said, looking at him. “How does the story end?” But Cedric Rosenfeld was a quick-thinking man, and his answer was a good one. “Why don’t you tell me? How does the Dessies’ story end, Flick?” “Hmmm!” the little girl sat up a bit in her bed to think. It didn’t take her long to come up with an ending that pleased her. “All the Dessies should escape from the scientists!” Cedric blinked again. “Oh?” “Yeah! They should all sneak out and go somewhere where there’s lots of sunlight, and no scientists to make them train. They can live in a big house together, like a family.” The brown-haired girl warmed to her theme, grinning up at her dad. “Kerr can get his hug and his soup. Emma can make them a big garden. Idris... Idris can have friends. Lots of them. And maybe she could make a bracelet or something for… Fiona, right? The one with the bad temper? Because mom always says that if somebody’s angry then a present from a friend will always cheer them up!” “Do you think they would be happy then, Felicia?” “Mmhmm!” said the girl, and then proceeded to punctuate her point with a wide yawn. Cedric smiled something of a half-smile, and tucked her back in. “Then that’s what happened. And they all lived happily ever after. Now it’s time for you to go to bed – goodnight, Felicia. I love you.” “I love you too, Daddy.”
Cedric got up and switched the light off in her room. He left the door open so that the gentle light from the hall flooded onto her floor—Felicia was still at the age where she didn’t want a nightlight, but didn’t like total darkness, either. Then, he turned and walked down the hallway to the staircase.
The problem with happily ever afters, is that somebody always winds up unhappy.If the Destrillians ever escaped, we would face massive consequences; expensive equipment would get crushed, billions of dollars lost, and people would get hurt. People would definitely get hurt. Your father might not come back from that escape alive, Felicia.
He flicked his hair out of his eyes as he descended the stairs, to join Nessa in the sitting room.
But oh well. It’s just a child’s fantasy, anyway.
I knew it. He's definitely staring at me. I'm trying to tell him about something pretty damn important and as usual he's just gawking at me. Things had been like this quite a lot recently; if we weren't filling out a contract, then Deyn was usually off somewhere in the city. Lokka and I had spent a lot of time to ourselves and I didn’t know whether he felt the same or not, but it felt unnatural when we were apart.
"Lokka, are you staring at me?"
It definitely caught him off guard. He wasn't even aware of what he was doing but he tried to compose himself.
"Would you like me to tell you the details again or should I just strike a pose?"
Lokka smiled, something that he'd been doing a lot recently. He didn't like to show feelings like this, something to do with vulnerability. I used to joke like this with Lokka to break awkward silences. He never used to talk so much, especially back at Viola. He kinda stood there and analyzed everything. The staff, the Destrillians, the equipment, everything! I spoke to him a few times back then. He was alone most of the time, even during social hours. Deyn would have conversations with him sometimes and many of the other Destrillians looked up to him.
"If you do both then I might be able to pay attention to what you’re saying."
He was being cheeky. Strange, but it did suit him in a way. I smiled at him and looked into his warming eyes.
"You should get some sleep Hannah, we've got a long day ahead of us tomorrow."
I agreed. It seemed like I hadn't slept at all this last week; we’d gotten some new information about the how the other Viola facility had been run, and it got me thinking about times back then. The thoughts kept me up at night and the memories still dwelled on my mind. I gave Lokka a hug before I went to my room. I knew he'd still stay up late tonight and keep working, reading and checking all of his new files. I looked back at him as he watched me walk off and couldn't help but share a little portion of my heart.
"Lokka....I always loved your eyes."
It had been bold of me, but my embarrassment still got the better of me and I had to take the few strides to my room extra quickly to avoid any uncomfortable silences. Shutting the door I smiled to myself, knowing that the words would go over and over in his head.
My attention focused to the cluttered room I called my own. It was the larger of the three in the apartment and yet it was by far the messiest. Deyn didn't use his room enough for it to become untidy, and Lokka had a very precise filing system for all of his documents. I began picking up some of the more important items that littered the carpet, my gun being the first. When the situation called for it, I carried a Senna VI submachine gun. I'd just gotten used to it over the years, I guess, and I wasn't quite as well trained as Deyn and Lokka in the way of firearms. There were clothes scattered about my room, some having been there for a little over a fortnight now. There was no time for cleaning and tidying in this line of work and even if there was, I doubt I would be motivated enough to tidy something that I knew would be messy again in a matter of days.
Regardless, there were more important things to think about, I thought to myself as I pictured Lokka still sitting outside. We'd been going through the same routine recently and although we were Destrillians, and busy Destrillians at that, it was time to take a positive step forward with our lives. It was clear we both wanted it.
But not now. It was late. As I undressed ready for bed I heard Deyn being let in to the apartment by Lokka. He'd been out on an interrogation mission tonight and it had clearly gone on longer than it should have. In most circumstances the human being questioned wouldn't live, not that it bothered me. That was the reason the three of us stuck together from the beginning. We shared a racial ideal that most of the other Destrillians did not. Many of them hoped to fit in with humanity and others just didn't care much. We were different. We wanted more for our people. More than just a life of hidden identities and looking over our shoulder. We shouldn't have to pay for the decisions made by humans before us. We were better than them. We were stronger, faster and more useful, and there was no way we'd sit back and be used as tools. Especially after everything they put us through. Everything they put me through. Training exercises, harsh procedures, being pitted against our own kind, and for what?
I had powers, I knew that much. Lokka had uncovered plenty of files from Viola that made it seem as though I was progressing with my abilities. But I didn't know what it was I was progressing with! I wasn't ever allowed to see what I had been focusing on. I tried repeating the process multiple times since leaving Viola, concentrating on various items from fruit to bricks. I had even attempted to make an incapacitated human's head explode, but to no avail. My powers were a secret to me—they may as well have no longer existed. They may have served a purpose to the scientists at Viola but that was redundant now. I'd stopped trying to prove my powers years ago.
As my head dropped against the warmth of the pillow, I let my mind wander through a sea of thoughts. Viola, Lokka, The future. They were all things I dreamt about regularly now. That was another speculation I had regarding my powers, I constantly dreamt about the future. The themes and events were reoccurring and realistic; I couldn't help but think whether they were visions. I had shrugged it off though. There was no scientific explanation for realizing the future and it certainly had nothing to do with my training at Viola. I sighed and drifted back into a soft sleep.
________________________________________________________________
'Hannah-zhang...Why is your hair so similar to some of the plants I see before entering the training room? I mean... I mean.. ummm.. I think it's pretty ... your red hair... it's beautiful... ahahahahahahaha!'
Tao blushed and laughed at the same time. She had got very comfortable with me but her shy persona still shone brightly through everything else.
'I like your hair too, Tao, it’s shinier than mine!'
Tao and I were sitting against the wall of the training room while Lokka and Salem fought each other. It was supposed to be a sparring session, but it seemed like they were both fighting seriously, or at the very least Salem was.
Lokka stumbled back against the wall after being blown off his feet by an explosion. I caught a glimpse of Salem smirking as the dust cleared. His usual cocky persona, although still visible, was largely overshadowed in battle by his pure determination to win. Lokka pushed himself off the wall and launched towards Salem for a frontal attack. An explosion triggered in the gap between the two men, but as the dust cleared it was clear Lokka had shielded himself. Utilizing the few seconds between the attack, Lokka thrust the now visible shield wall at Salem, causing him to quickly step left and straight into Lokka's palm. As Salem was forced back he executed smaller explosions all around Lokka, causing him to duck down and shield himself further. The fight played out similarly for a few more minutes until both the boys started feeling fatigued and called an end to it.
I noticed Tao's attention hadn't been on the fight. She had been staring across the room at Kram the whole time. Theirs was a complicated relationship, which seemed like it frustrated the young boy to his very core. Lokka nodded at me in greeting as he dusted himself off from the fight. Salem returned to the corner where Kram had been sitting.
Suddenly the walls started shifting, shadows dancing off them as the very material broke down and fell to pieces. The floor disappeared from beneath me and I began to fall through the air.
_______________________________________________________________
The imaginary fall caused my body to let out a sudden jolt, as I felt the springy comfort of my mattress beneath me. It wasn't just a dream, it had been a real event. It’s relevance, however, was a mystery. I didn't dwell on it too much. These dreams had been frequenting my mind mostly every night for a few months now—just stress, I assumed. I took a glance at the alarm clock next to my pillow and realized that it was reaching now into the afternoon. I let out a loud yawn before stretching my arms and pulling myself out of bed. After a quick trip to the bathroom I began getting dressed, getting ready for the day.
Hannah Fey - My Storm
As I finished putting on my clothes, adjusting the maroon tie around my collar, I grabbed the handle of the door and opened it loudly. Lokka was right where I had left him, but atleast he was asleep. Of course I wouldn't let that continue for much longer. I began by lightly nudging his shoulder, but I grew tired of it quickly and started poking and prodding at his chest. Man, he was a deep sleeper.
I let him be for the time being and checked on Deyn. He was still asleep in his own room but would be awake in more than enough time to get ready. He was very prompt. At that point I was glad that both the boys were asleep because my stomach let out a loud, embarrassing grumble. I hadn't eaten at all last night because I had been so busy with all the research. I took a few steps over to the kitchen, where I opened the fridge. Of all the things we had to worry about here, food was never something any of us remembered. Peering into the almost empty refrigerator, I found only four eggs. It would have to do, I figured. Reaching into the adjacent cupboard, I grabbed a full loaf of bread. I began preparing the food and thinking about the day ahead of me.
We wouldn't have to go out on the job till later on, and there wasn't all that much to do until then. Lokka would likely be working through most of it. I decided it might be a good idea to go grab some food for the fridge, and maybe some ammunition. I munched down on what I just made and started preparing some more for Lokka. Sneaking a glance at him asleep on his chair, I decided that I'd wake him up for his food. Sticking the food onto a plate, I picked it up and walked over to him.
After nudging him a few more times, I hit him on the shoulder.
"Lokka, if you don’t get up now, then I'm pouncing on you,"
He woke up gracefully and replied. We had a bit more of a flirt then, as we had had the night before. It was an odd way of letting ourselves go, considering the business that we'd have to attend to later on. You wouldn't expect behaviour of this kind from your average mercenaries. But then, we weren't your average mercenaries. After a short discussion, I announced that I would be heading out for supplies. Lokka wanted me to grab him some ammunition, so with a sly wink, I headed out the door.
Over the course of a couple of hours, I managed to pick up enough food for a fortnight, as well as spare ammunition for most of our weaponry. When I got back, it looked like Lokka hadn't moved from his chair. He was a workaholic, but you couldn't blame him. He'd managed to gather so much information, using only the very few files we managed to steal from Viola before our departure. He had most of the files from our own facility, as well as almost all of the prototype portfolios from Viola's first facility. He wanted to find them. We wanted to find them. And we would.
The clock struck 8 o' clock. If we wanted to be prompt, we'd have to leave now. Grabbing our stuff we left the apartment, bolting it behind us. The three of us strode down the Orange Zone.
It was a nasty place to say the least; I personally preferred it higher up in the hierarchy. We'd had the privilege of working undercover in a big business up there before. The dramatic shift in lifestyles was a lot to take in. Humanity always had a way of pushing their most valued individuals and groups up on a pedestal. It made it all the more satisfying to bring them back down to ground level. Deyn took long strides to assert his position at the front. He kept close enough for us to feel him telepathically, but far enough away for him to seem unconnected to us. This was the perfect time to have a serious conversation with Lokka. I struggled to find an opener for the conversation, so I just took the situation at hand.
"So, is this one any more important than the last ones we took out?" "Not really. But the information we are getting is another step toward our goal. With this we can track down one of the leading scientists."
They were all connected, our targets. It was what made our web of influence and knowledge so ever-expanding. Still, they all stayed very connected to our primary concern.
"Another Viola goon? I thought we'd tracked down enough of them. We've had no leads on the other Destrillians and they aren't making themselves very visible. How the hell are we going to find them?"
"We need to persevere. We keep at it then we'll find them. We'll get Kram and the others to join up with us—with people like him and Salem at our side, we'll surely be strengthened greatly."
Salem and Kram certainly were strong Destrillians. How they'd react to our cause however, was a different matter entirely. I let my mind wander to the other people I'd known at Viola. Some seemed more important than others.
"What about Tao? Will we find her too?"
"We are going to find everyone, even those from the other facility. We'll join together and carve out our own future. If people were to look at us for what we truly were, we'd be thrown aside or destroyed by society. It won’t go down like that. When the tables turn, Humanity will have to answer to us."
He was passionate about his beliefs, that was for sure. Lokka had adopted these ideals long before our departure from Viola. Back then would have been a perfect time to gather up the Destrillians, when we were all in one place. But it couldn’t have happened that way. If we had asked them to give up their chances of complete freedom way back then, we would never have grown to be strong together. We would need time to grow individually before this could happen. As passionate as Lokka was about this, I knew he was hiding another passion from me, from himself. "And what about OUR future?"
He stopped, hesitant about the conversation's new direction. I stepped closer to him.
"You have a habit of making things harder than they need to be, Lokka."
He looked like he'd completely frozen. It was now or never Hannah, you wouldn’t get this chance again. Without hesitating I threw my arms around his neck and kissed him. I couldn't have been doing it wrong, because before long he kissed me back. We stopped and he gazed into my eyes. He didn't look regretful at all. This was a good sign.
"This is something I want. It is. But we need to focus right now."
That was all I needed to hear. In fact, it was a lot more than I expected to hear. I dropped my arms and continued walking along the path.
"We'll wait until we're home, Huh Lokka?"
"Yes. I'd like that."
It wasn't long after our emotional encounter that Deyn's pace slowed. It meant that we'd arrived.
"Over there"
Lokka continued to instruct Deyn not to use his powers, as the attention it may attract would be a lot to deal with on top of what we already had to deal with. At times it felt like not knowing my powers was a good thing. My identity as a Destrillian was much better hidden, and I had no chance of accidently revealing myself.
I took my Senna SMG out of its holster and continued towards the building that was our objectives, crouched down alongside Deyn and Lokka. All of us were equipped with weaponry, even though we weren't expecting a lot of opposition. Data had stated that we were against five men at most, as well as our target. Data was always correct when Lokka had collected it via his alias, 'Prism'.
We entered the building; it looked empty enough as we crept inside. The event we were crashing was going on upstairs. Locating the staircase we were to use, Deyn rushed in front, followed by myself, then Lokka.
We sped up the stairs. We didn't need stealth at this point; we were already close enough to the room to take them by surprise anyway. We had barely approached it completely before Deyn lifted his leg and smashed straight through the lock on the door. It swung open, revealing....nothing. There was nobody here. We were dumbfounded. The data we received was always accurate, and it wasn't like we--
___________________________________________________________________________
It was a strange sensation.
I hadn't felt any pain at all.
Subsequent gunshots and shouts were nothing but a muffled blur now.
My eyes were open...but...
What was this?
I couldn’t move my body at all.
What was this?!
I could see him. I could see them both.
They were looking at me.
They were trying to help me.
They couldn't.
He looked at me; he looked deep into my eyes. LOKKA!
Lokka, can you hear me?!
Please.
Please answer me.
He couldn't.
I was dead.
Dead.
I can't be dead.
I can see him.
Could I be dreaming?
No.
The dead do not dream.
This was real.
But surely, surely he knew I wasn't dead.
Was he...was he...crying?
No, don’t go!
Please, please don’t go!
I felt it!
His tear, I felt it on my cheek.
How could I feel it?
I could feel nothing more than this.
Why was he leaving?!
Don’t go, please; I'm here, I'm alive.
Or...was I?
It didn't…make any sense.
I couldn't move, I couldn't do anything but lie here.
...
...
...
My eyes were still open – I could see everything.
Is this what people saw when they died?
No life flashing before your eyes, just the vision of a world without you?
It couldn't be; it didn't make any sense.
The mere fact that these thoughts occupied my mind was enough to tell I hadn't passed on yet.
Her eyes opened and the familiar sight met them. She was more used to it than her own reflection by now.
In every direction the dull grey haze spread out more vast and infinite than the universe itself. It all appeared to be composed of smoke, stretching around her in every direction, but whenever she reached out to touch it the smoke always seemed to be just out of her reach. She didn’t even bother this time, resorting to folding her arms and frowning. Her wearied expression long having gotten used to the vast crushing expanse of this dimension.
She didn’t have to wait long this time before objects began to materialise out of the gloom. The sketchy outline of a room. The shadows of its occupants. Hollow voices. Echoes.
“You’re hurt and you need help!”“I’m sorry have we met?”“What kind of shitty joke is this?”“I think it’s time you stopped playing games” “It’s a surprise to see you here.”
It took some time to discern the individual voices amongst the sea of noise and colour, but finally they could be made out, just barely. Many faces swam in and out of focus. There were so many different people, so many different sets of eyes, so many different types of emotion being conveyed. It was suffocating. Maddening.
Every one of them looked kind of funny though, they had that much in common. Whether they looked aloof, concerned or worried, each one shared the expression of just being lost. Like they shouldn’t have been there to begin with. Yet there they all were.
As the details of the room emerged from the foggy, indiscernible world it became apparent that they had all just woken up out of the pods that were neatly lined up like toy soldiers. It was definitely a place that they didn’t want to be, that was for sure. It was dangerous.
The scene faded away, and all of the lost, confused people seemed to melt away back into smoke. The room itself seemed to dissolve into the background and there was short, intense rushing feeling. The feeling of being pulled along a roller coaster by the shoulders, the kind of rushing that made you screw your eyes up tight for fear of the wind pounding them into jelly.
Wide chestnut coloured eyes opened to find her long lilac fringe had fallen haphazardly over her face as she had been dragged through this void. Frowning slightly in annoyance she pushed it out of her eyes. Eyes that had no pupil, but dark markings against the light brown that seemed to spiral towards the centre.
That part of these dreams was never a pleasant experience. A new room was beginning to materialise, pulling itself together out of the unknown even faster than the previous one. The room was tiny and small, two seats, a wheel. She found herself sitting in the passenger seat of a car, flying through the forest at night. The driver was tall, grizzled and scarred. She let out a small gasp as his face appeared from the shadows, more haggard but just as stern as she had remembered. Jason Spencer, clad in dirty, bloody prison fatigues.
So he was going to escape? Well, that had always been inevitable. He wouldn’t have allowed himself to get caught if he hadn’t known he wouldn’t
The scene left as quickly as it had came and she found herself in a different scenario entirely. The change was much quicker this time, the acrid fog descended and lifted almost within the blink of an eye. She was in a different room now, nowhere she had ever been herself, but a room she was still intimately familiar with. Everytime this occurred to her, this secluded room always bathed in pitch black darkness always flashed before her eyes. Sometimes for a split second, sometimes for what seemed like hours. Always the scene was the same, always. The constant sense of patience was almost as tangible as the darkness that had engulfed the room, or the man who sat there.
His features were mostly hidden in the shadows of the room, only partially illuminated by the light of the dozen television monitors that he peered unblinkingly into. She had never been able to see what he was staring at on those monitors, not once. The screens were always cloudy, or smudged, their content always hidden from her. The man looked the same as ever, what little of him she could make out in the dark room, his face still old, weathered and framed by his pale hair, frozen in a perpetual look of concentration as he studied the unknown displays on his monitors.
The scene was the same but different. She could sense the tension that was in the air, something had happened, or rather was going to happen that had made the usually static atmosphere in this room charged.
The darkness of the room began to eclipse the light from the screens, slowly consuming them, dimming them until nothing but impenetrable blackness stretched out in a yawning chasm all around her. She closed her eyes, the blackness rather than the smoke meant only one thing.
Her eyes opened once again, but slower, wearier than before.
Wincing at the brightness of the bleary world that greeted her waking eyes.
The real world was always much brighter than her dreams.
Finn Eliot raised her hand and rubbed the sleep from her eyes with the overlarge cuff of her pyjama sleeve. Pausing to give a small smile at the fact that even though they were so ill-fitting, she still had a wardrobe full of clothes this size because Spencer had known that she had preferred the snug warmth of the bigger, baggier sized clothes to clothes more her actual size.
He could be so thoughtful sometimes.
Pushing the wild, unkempt fringe of lilac hair out of her eyes, Finn rolled over in the enormous double bed and crawled over to the glass bedside table. It only contained one item, a large black digital clock that not only showed hours and minutes, but also the day, month and year. It had become necessary habit for her to check the clock every time she woke up, to see how long she’d been asleep this time. Obviously it hadn’t been so long this time, those times were always the worst. The times when she’d woken up to find the cold unwelcome plastic feeding tube down her throat because the visions had kept her unconscious for weeks at a time.
“Only two hours?” Finn moaned, seeing the meagre amount of time that passed since she’d nodded off to sleep made her pale, round face crease up in a frown. “That’s a poor excuse for a nap Mr. Clock” she grumbled to herself, knowing that this meant another night of no sleep.
Persephone had asked her the other day, why she had such trouble getting to sleep when using her abilities the way she did, to see visions, was so draining. Finn remembered just scowling at her. Persephone was probably just being bitchy because Salem had put itching powder in her shampoo or something. Not that Persephone ever needed any excuse to be bitchy.
Finn sprung out of bed, her pyjamas bunched up under her feet to keep her small feet warm. Somebody had left the windows open whilst she had been sleeping and now the whole room was feeling the effects of the cold night. Not that it was really night of course, these windows were just there for effect, to cast the illusion of normalcy over this house. But nothing was real here, even the night-time sky out the window was just a holographic projection created by computers and generators somewhere deep beneath this room synchronised to the day/night cycle of the outside world.
Finn had known for a long time that it wasn’t real. Even when it simulated the sunshine outside and the windows and rooms in this building became realistically warm. There was a magic about the real sun, the one that Finn had so rarely seen, that this mechanical construction just could not capture. It was so cold, so artificial. She hated it.
Not bothering to change out of her sunshine yellow pyjamas she walked back across the large room, which in spite of the large comfortable bed had all of the appeal of a hospital ward. There weren’t many happy memories to be found in this room, always plagued by visions, always confusing and sometimes scary. Everything was white too, from the bed sheets to the wallpaper. Finn didn’t like it, much like the artificial night, it was so devoid of life, feeling and personality. Much like the visions, it was so impersonal.
Finn caught her own reflection in the large mirror positioned on the wall of her room, next to the expansive chest of drawers and let out a long sigh. Appearances might not have exactly mattered to her, but even she had to concede that she looked a bigger mess than usual today. Her collar length lilac hair was more messy than usual, despite her best efforts it continued to fall down over her sleep-deprived eyes and stick up in awkward tangles down the back. Her normally ghostly pale skin was even more pallid and unhealthy now than it usually looked. Nearly two weeks of very few hours sleep a night was giving her a distinctly worn out look. Nonetheless she forced an awkward smile onto her face, it didn’t do much but at least it made her look better than the frown that had adorned her face before.
As she stepped out of her room into the expansive corridor outside of it, and felt the soft, expensive ultramarine carpet under her feet she took a minute to examine who cold and dark this place was at night. The elaborate chandeliers that hung down from the ceiling like a canopy of trees were switched off now, leaving the high arches of the marble ceiling in darkness. The facade of the normalcy of a day and night cycle was even extended to the fact that the lights were switched off at night time. Finn mentally grumbled for what seemed like the hundredth time about the ridiculousness of trying to maintain normalcy when you were living in one of the most expansive mansions in the world, constructed below the surface of the Earth.
Making her way down maze of corridors she tried her best not to look at the eyes of the various statues that stood steadfast in alcoves along the wall. Each one of them was anything from ten to a thousand years old, acquired from all over the world, and some worth more than the entire net worth of some of the world’s poorest nations. The cold, unfeeling stone eyes of the gargoyles, warriors, dancers and world leaders always gave Finn the creeps. Though at least the statues lining the corridors were less scary than visiting the portrait gallery at night, something she just refused to do on principle.
It was just unnerving in general. The size and scale of this mansion, and almost always it seemed to be empty. That wasn’t to say that were never any people here. On the contrary, even without the presence of Jason Spencer filling the mansion, there was still a small of army of armed security guards that patrolled the grounds and the mansion itself, and a never ending rotation of scientists and technicians seemed to routinely appear and disappear into the bowels of this underground estate. Finn always found it most peculiar, she had always counted herself as having mapped out every corridor, nook and cranny of her home here. Having tasked herself with exploring the labyrinthine web of corridors, halls and staircases over the years since her transfer from the confines of Facility #2 she had never found any indication of where the mansion had hidden all these people in lab-coats and overalls.
She rounded the corner and approached the Grand Stairway, the entranceway to the main entrance hall of the mansion; which had never failed to quietly awe her in the vastness in its size, and to the ordinary human, overwhelming in the scale, beauty and intricacy of its design. Enormous frescoes stretched from the floor to the shadows of the ceiling, each one depicting humans wearing ornate and ceramic armour and wielding weapons of shimmering gold, descending into cracks in the skin of a scorched and blackened planet to do battle with some nameless monster. Each one of its draconic heads was wreathed in fire and its many clawed arms grasped and groped their way towards the sunlight depicted at the top of the fresco, that was currently hidden in the night time gloom.
In stark contrast to the elaborate and unimaginably expensive decor of the rest of the mansion, the main double doors stood out the same way that a vagrant would stand out on Osea’s Acropolis. They were a simple set of stainless steel doors that connected the mansion to the outside world via an elevator shaft. Come night time, the simple control panel set up next to the door was completely locked down to all but the senior personnel and the security staff. Two of which stood on either side of the door, clad in the traditional black tactical uniform of Viola’s security but were unarmed save for the pistols holstered at their waist. The two men seemed to be swapping stories about their latest night on the town out down in the Audoulan border village and barely seemed to acknowledge the presence of Finn as she made her way down the stairs and rounded the six foot tall lion statue that made up the end of the stone banister on the staircase and pushed open the doors that led into the mansion’s west wing.
She’d always preferred the west wing to the east. There were three different dining rooms here, and in the day time at least, two of them were filled with sunlight from the wall of glass-panelled windows. The third was a much smaller dining room that housed a great black piano, she’d once been told by Salem that the piano was over two hundred years old. But Salem has also once told Finn that if she tried getting out of bed in the middle of the night then Spencer’s pet dragon would climb out from under her bed and eat her. As far as Finn was concerned, the jury was still out on whether or not Salem could actually be counted as a credible source.
It didn’t take her long to pass through to the kitchen, nodding her acknowledgment at a trio of security officers sitting around in one of the dining rooms playing a game of poker. Feeling the ever watchful stares focus on her spine as she let the doors shut behind her. Security guards had always made her uncomfortable. The scars from her time in Facility 2 took more than just a few years to heal.
The automated lights of the kitchen clicked on automatically, illuminating the sea of linoleum and stainless steel that made up the estate’s kitchen. Normally teeming with half a dozen of the finest cooks that Viola’s extensive bank account could hire, it was eerily empty and silent at night. Finn smiled at this and pushed her fringe out of her eyes again, the cooks could be such jerks. More than once they had shouted at the mess that the frail Destrillian inevitably ended up making in the kitchen (or the one time she had set it on fire), but it’s not like it could be helped. The one time she did try to tidy up after herself ended badly enough when she passed out into a vision induced coma midway through the proceedings. By the time she had come too it was almost time for dinner, and her slapdash attempts to hide everything had not gone unnoticed by the more stern of the chefs.
However, Finn Eliot was far too tired and the hour was far too late for her to be concerned with what the chefs would shout at her with tomorrow. If worst came to worst she could always hide. Hiding was easy in this place if you knew all of the rooms and the passageways. She’d had a lot of time to get to know these rooms intimately since Spencer had been imprisoned. She felt a lot more comfortable roaming the cavernous hallways and spider’s web of twisting corridors without knowing that his presence was not looming around the house like some monstrous ghost.
That was not to say that Spencer was unpleasant to her, or was in any way intimidating. Finn found herself reflecting as she pulled open one of the many fridges located in the kitchen and let her eyes be drawn to the enormous plate that lay on the top most shelf of the fridge. It was a plate, at least a good foot and a half in diameter, piled high with some enormously elaborate strawberry jelly. The perfect midnight snack, Finn decided for herself. It was just sitting there waiting to be eaten after all.
The thing about Spencer was that for all of his charm and fatherly care and knowledge, Finn knew inherently that there was something much darker lurking below the surface. Something turbulent and angry, waiting in the dark like some monstrous beast, bathed in shadow and wearing the costume of a sophisticated business man from day to day. She saw it in him. The way he paced around the house like a caged lion, the way he stayed until the early morning light, meticulously planning with either Abaddon or by himself. Then there were the dreams.
Finn nearly dropped the stool she was carrying as she remembered the dreams. Or, more accurately, the visions. The curse of being the Destrillian of Time. Spencer appeared often in them, possible futures for him, clips from his past as the CEO of Viola, his time fighting in the war, and even of his childhood. She had come to the conclusion that Spencer kept Finn in such close proximity because it influenced how often her visions would be about him. Finn had a theory that she was here, in this mansion, and treated so well because Spencer was using her power as a way to plot out the different possible outcomes of every decision he made. It wouldn’t surprise her if this was the case, it would explain a lot.
She slammed the stool down, making a loud crack on the polished linoleum floor that took her by surprise enough to make her jump with fright.
It was so quiet here at night sometimes.
She scowled at the stool with an accusatory glare, almost hoping as though the stool would shrug sheepishly and mumble an apology. The stool remained stubbornly silent and Finn sighed, pulling herself up onto the stool and reaching up to hoist the enormous plate of jelly from the shelf. It had to have been over a day since her last good meal, even though Spencer was usually very good at making sure some food was always delivered to her for when she woke up. Service gone downhill in his absence, and had only gotten worse from there. Which had inevitably led to more late night raids on the kitchen than one would consider reasonable.
She wasn’t even the worst offender either. Just this past monday she had come down to the kitchen to grab a few sandwiches and found that Dr. Malcolm Abaddon (who had seeming taken up permanent residence here since Spencer had left to go to prison), with the dubious help (or hindrance) of Salem was trying to blunder his way through cooking a full roast meal at four in the morning. When she had asked why, he only muttered something about having been working for the past three days none stop.
She didn’t like Abaddon. At least Spencer put on a show of being nice when she was around. He didn’t, his constant attention to every single detail and dedication to work so secret not even Salem knew about meant that he was either constantly stressed or unpleasant. The few times he did seem to be in a good mood obviously coincided with the times that whatever experiments he was working on seemed to be going well.
Finn put that out of mind for now as she dragged the stool over the counter top, producing the most comically oversized spoon (it matched the jelly) she could find from a nearby drawer and began to shovel big heaps of the strawberry flavoured desert into her mouth.
Tonight she didn’t have to think about any of that. Instead her mind was just filled with the memories of the faces she had seen in that vision, of those other Destrillians.
At whatever point they ended up coming together again in the future after being separated for so long could only spell the start of something big. In between enormous mouthfuls of jelly she could only ponder what date in the future the scene she had witnessed in her vision could come to pass.
It was so peaceful here, Jason thought to himself. He wished that he could stay here forever. The sense of contentment was filling every limb and ounce of his being as he just lay here, facing upwards towards a cloudless, azure sky. Relishing the feeling of the soft blades of grass that pressed against his bare back and that spread on endlessly around him. He was lost, blissfully lost, in this ocean of supreme comfort. There were no hard jagged edges here, nowhere rough to scrape your skin on or hard surfaces that hurt to lie down on. Everything here was tailor made to make him comfortable. He closed his eyes and let a smile stretch out over his features for the first time in such a long time.
“Jason!”
He turned over and cracked open an eyelid. Standing a little way up the hill from where he lay he spotted his parents. Not the way he had last saw them, waif-thin, pale skinned and with eyes sunken and hopeless. No, they were healthy, and smiling down at him. His mother, her long brown hair tied back in a neat plait was fussing over a picnic basket, trying to keep the blanket down against the gentle wind whilst his father stood, powerful and tall, smiling down at him, his own dark brown hair slicked back and out of his face.
“Jason!!” the voice shouted louder. His father held out his hand and signalled for Jason to come join him at the top of the hill. The picnic must be ready.
Slowly and reluctantly, the young teenager picked himself up from his grassy resting place and reached behind him to grab the dark blue shirt he had been using to rest his head. He pulled it on and walked slowly up to his parents, it did not even cross his mind that is was peculiar that in spite of how warm it was in these fields that there was no sun to be found in the sky, yet they were still bathed in sunlight.
He grinned at his father, who smiled widely back at him. Even at sixteen, he was getting pretty tall, nearly up to his father’s shoulder. He had always said that Jason would grow up to be big and strong.
“JASON, WAKE THE FUCK UP!”
Like a curtain being snapped open, so the dream was ripped away from Jason Spencer, revealing only the stark harshness of his reality.
“Get up damn it!” He felt the sharp kick to his stomach drive him completely out of the lingering remnants of sleep and his eyes snapped open to reveal the urgent, angry face of Oberon leaning over him, half hidden amongst his long black hair. The familiar darkness of the room disturbed by an eerie orange light.
He still felt warm.
“Whuz goin’ on?” Jason slurred, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes.
“The building’s on fucking fire!” Oberon shouted at him, pointing to the far wall. Indeed the flimsy wood and drywall had become engulfed by thick, wiry vines of fire. Jason leapt to his feet as thick wads of fire spat onto his mattress.
“Come on! Pack your shit, let’s go!” Oberon yelled over the crackling sounds of the flames. He didn’t wait for Jason, immediately bolting out of the door, his own backpack already fastened to his back.
Jason wasted little time in following suit, his quick senses almost instantaneously alerting him to the danger situation at hand. He fetched the one-strap bag from the floor, judging from its weight that all of his personal possessions were already all inside the bag he sped off after his friend into the corridors of the orphanage.
It was much worse out here. Flames had almost consumed one half of the building, tearing through the thin walls and leaving corridor, floor and ceiling awash with fire. The smoke was thick and choking. Jason threw up an arm over his mouth and nose to stop the acrid smell of burning in his throat and nostrils.
He felt a strong hand clap him on the shoulder and he was spun around to face Oberon.
“This way!” he shouted, his voice hoarse from the smoke inhalation. Jason nodded, noting that his friend wasn’t bothering to cover his mouth and nose from the fumes. This was typical Oberon, he thought to himself, completely reckless. Brave, obviously brave, but completely reckless. He charged forward, down the smokiest corridor away from the flames. Jason followed suit, arms and legs pumping, fuelled entirely on adrenalin as the home he had known for the past four years was burning down around him.
Oberon burst through the door at the end of the corridor, not even bothering to open it instead just bounding through the closed door, shattering the flimsy wooden structure straight off its hinges and completely destroying the rotten wood frame, landing heavily on his chest. Jason watched as the shockwave reverberated up the flaming building, causing the burning floorboards to fall from the ceiling, narrowly missing him as he followed Oberon through the door, grabbing his friend by the collar of his shirt and pulling him up onto his feet.
Oberon quickly shrugged of his friend’s helping hand and jogged side by side down the corridor together, grimly noting the blackening wallpaper on the walls, indicating that the fire has spread to within the walls themselves, surrounding them.
“Only one option!” Oberon shouted coarsely. Jason nodded in agreement, eyes fixated on the window at the end of the corridor, long since devoid of any glass.
The two teens leapt from the ground floor window and landed roughly on the dirty asphalt of what had once been the car park of the orphanage. Jason landing in a painful crouching type position and Oberon collapsing into a hasty roll, the pair quickly got to their feet again, ignoring their injuries from the fire and the jump and continued to jog into the ruined city. Occasionally casting a look back at the skyline behind them, the pitch black sky smudged orange at the horizon, occasionally dotted with pillars of rising black smoke.
.oOo.
The arid climate, perpetual dryness and frequent storms meant that the former capital city of Vaul was now a literal hotspot for spontaneous wildfires started by rogue lightning strikes. Several times a month wildfires whipped their way through the city, each time burning it out time and time again, reducing more and more to ash and blackening more and more of the destroyed city, propelled through it by howling winds. Though windy days carried a far more lethal threat than that of a forest fire. The very real and very deadly threat of lethal dosages of radiation being blown across the city from one of the nuclear bomb sites to the north or the south that. Completely undetectable, the nuclear fallout could not be seen or smelt, so the few survivors had to pay close attention to the behaviour of the scavenging animals that made their home in the city. Birds and rats seemed to have an uncanny ability to detect when deadly gusts of radiation were blown through the city, so keeping track of their movements was absolutely essential for those who sought to eke out a meagre existence in the ruined city.
It was for this reason that Jason Spencer, and Oberon, spent eight hours the following day trying to catch a rat.
“You reckon our old one burned to death?” Oberon asked out loud, his dark clothing and messy, collar length jet black hair covered in dust from the day’s work.
“Probably” Spencer replied drily. Much like his friend he had cut his long hair in the time since he had arrived in the city. Though to a much greater degree, his own brown hair had been cut very short and was only now starting to grow into a messy thatch.
“You could at least help me out over here” Oberon grunted as he probed yet another large crack in the wall of the corridor they were currently occupying.
“You’re doing fine on your own” He said patiently, not looking up from the dirty, worn-in book he was reading from.
“You wouldn’t be much help anyway.” Oberon muttered under his breath. Reaching a lanky arm into one of the cracks in the wall and groping around, a look of concentration etched into his features. Truthfully he did show much more aptitude for the physical aspects of survival than Jason, who seemed much more concerned with planning ahead, rationing their food, or (much to Oberon’s chagrin) teaching his friend to read and write.
“Probably not” Jason remarked, plainly not interested in Oberon’s snide remarks.
Not wanting to ask about what he was reading (in case he decided to force him to read it for himself) Oberon turned his full attention back to the wall in front of him. Gently running his fingers over the surface of the space in between the outer and inner walls of the corridor and the room beyond it, his expression turning grim and exasperated. The floor was smooth, not rough claw marks and dusty lumps of rodent droppings. Nothing had ever lived in this wall.
“Shit. We’re moving on.” He retracted his hand, picked himself up and marched off down the corridor. With a sigh, Jason lazily did the same and followed him, shoving his book back into his bag and folding his arms.
“What were you reading anyway?” After seeing that Jason had put away the book, Oberon had decided that it was now safe to enquire as to its subject matter without fear of a lesson or lecture.
Jason smirked at the back of his friend’s head. Oberon made a determined effort not to turn around. Indulging him at this point would only have made the next few hours unbearable.
“Why, Oberon? Interested?”
Oberon cringed, Jason was so smug sometimes that the act of not turning around to punch the older boy in the face caused him genuine physical pain.
“No, jus’ asking.” His response was punctured by a momentary silence as the two boys reached the gaping hole in the outside wall of the building, and carefully navigated their way down the rubble to street level.
“You should really make more of an effort to read, Oberon. There’s nothing more valuable than an education.” Jason quipped, the faintest touches of pride in his voice betraying the expensive schooling he had had before the war had brought him to this corpse of a city.
“Did they teach you that in school?” he asked sarcastically, still determinedly walking a few paces in front of his companion. There was something refreshing about having Jason speak his pretentious quotes to the back of his head.
“Actually it was something my parents taught me.” His voice faltered, as it always did whenever the subject of his parents came up. Four years wasn’t that much time after all.
“Sounds like bullshit to me” Oberon called back to him with all of the grace and consideration of a steamroller. “A good education might make you smart, but there’s nothing more valuable than power.”
“You think?” Jason asked back, masking the tone of his voice so that it was just questioning. Oberon frowned, he hated it when his friend did this, it made absolutely impossible to read.
“Yeah.” He continued as the two got to their campfire, which was still merrily cackling away in the largest ruined shell hole of an abandoned car park, flanked on three out of its four sides by barbed wire tangled along the top of the low-lying brick wall that surrounded it. The two had barely noticed that the sun was setting. The duo sat down around it, grateful for the relief on their legs after a day’s worth of hard exploration. “It’s all very well being smart and wordy, but when a fight breaks out it all comes down to kicking the other bastard faster and harder than he can kick you back. It always comes down to that.”
“Did they teach you that in orphanage?”
Oberon didn’t say anything, his head turned to watch as the sun hid itself behind the skeletal remains of the high-rise buildings in the city. After four years in each others’ company they still had yet to run out of things they disagreed on.
“If you’re smart enough, maybe you could stop the fight from breaking out in the first place” Jason ventured, though he instantly regretted saying those words. Knowing he had trodden on his companions toes. He watched as Oberon spat angrily on the ground to his side, stoking the fire with a stick vigorously.
“Don’t be an idiot.” He snarled back at Jason quietly, “People a damn sight smarter than you couldn’t stop this” he gestured with both arms to the cityscape around them, “From happening. They couldn’t keep millions of people from dying, including our families. So don’t tell me that being smart can stop wars. When it couldn’t stop jack shit from happening to this entire country.” His voice was raw and angry, as Jason had expected it to be. He closed his eyes patiently and waited for Oberon’s voice and breathing to calm down.
“I’m well aware that this war killed our families, thank you very much.” He said quietly, once he was sure that Oberon was listening again. “And I don’t think that you’re wrong. Not entirely wrong, at least.”
“You don’t think I’m right though, do you?” Oberon snapped back testily. His volatile temper still ticking over Jason’s callous disregard of the losses they had both endured, and silently fuming at the cold, uncaring stoic composure of his friend.
Jason declined to answer that question.
The sun dipped below the houses. The flames of the campfire rose higher and burned brighter against the encroaching darkness.
“It’s not just about being strong Oberon. It’s about being smart enough to know when to be strong, where to apply the pressure, and when to back off and let things take their course without your interference. You’d be shocked at how fast things will collapse in on themselves when you just leave them to their own devices.”
Oberon snorted derisively, he knew a lecture had been incoming.
He wasn’t about to admit that what his friend was saying did make some sense.
“Mock all you want man. Doesn’t change the fact that it’s true.” Jason lay down on his back in the dirt of their crater. “It’s not enough to be strong, or intelligent. In this world you need to be the best of both if you want to make a difference.”
“Is that what you wanna do Jason? Make a difference?” the tone of Oberon’s voice was heavy with sarcasm, drawing attention to their status as nothing more than a pair of teenage street urchins.
Jason just shrugged, as though he was undecided on the issue.
“Where did you learn all this anyway?” the dark haired youth asked.
“I know you don’t want me to say ‘in a book’, but...” he could feel Oberon sigh wearily from across the campfire. “You should read it, I’ll even help you.” he reached into his rucksack and threw the book he had been reading earlier today over the tips of the flames to land firmly in Oberon’s lap.
“What’s it about?” Oberon said grudgingly, not entirely wanting to admit to his friend that he had caught his interest.
“Memoirs, Oberon. Of the greatest general who ever lived; we learnt about him in school. He lived 2000 years ago and dabbled in a bit of philosophy, a bit of science, then conquered most of the known world...”
“And his name was Viola?” Oberon scoffed, reading the name from the cover. “What a stupid name.”
Satsu, BRIAN BLESSED, MIGHTY AND WISE Junpei Iori: Ace Detective, Maccaffrickstonson von Lichtenstafford Frabenschnaben, Polite Krogan, Robert Baratheon
The midnight swell of the sea was illuminated by pale moonlight, as a boat floundered barely above the waterline like a drowning dog. Even with the size that the luxury yacht had, the ocean in this part of the waters was feral, swallowing up and pulling down even the flotsam that floated. Sea foam collapsed on top of the boat in waves as it continued to struggle to surface its head from the pounding that the wind-storm was inciting. The boat itself seemed to shimmer in a haze as the roaring of the sea was briefly overcome with a scream and gunshots.
A young child flew out from a cabin door, tangling herself onto the railings as the whole yacht dipped back into the black-blue maw of the waves. Her mouth was open, but no more sound came out except for the choked gurgle that followed the seawater expelled from her stomach and the blood in her airways.
A second figure appeared from the cabin doorway, the gun in his hand casually resting by his side as he grabbed onto something beside the door to brace against the returning swells. He lifted his gun, and fired.
He fired as much of his bullets at the child as he could, who replied with a rasping, gurgling whimper lost in the howling gale. He moved away from the safety of the door onto the deck to put a final shot between the girl's eyes to put her down for good.
The luxury yacht hurled itself forward as a wall of water struck from behind, and the man with the gun was thrown along the deck by the force. Even as his body struck the ground, his trigger finger had registered his intent, and went off once more.
The child finally found the effort to scream again, her animal howl cut short as a wave crested almost completely over half of the boat. It untangled her from the railings, into the sea.
She could not see: blood, her blood was in her eyes, washed away by sea water which forced them shut again as the waves swallowed her under. She fumbled for a hold on the yacht, grasping at nothing as the water had already thrown her several feet away from the hull of the boat and several feet under sea level. A searing hot pain enveloped the top of her head and her entry wounds, meeting the crawling icy numbness over the rest of her body.
Nearby, the waves intensified once again into a gargantuan wall of water, managing to catch the yacht on the side like a charging beast. The boat groaned as it was turned on its side and collapsed into the depths, corpse-like.
The resulting ripple swept the girl up to the surface, with the gales blowing stinging sea foam into her blood-spattered face. Kicking to stay afloat, she managed to grab onto something by reflex as it collided into her chest, a sharp corner digging into her collarbone like a blunt knife. As she floated on the surface, the pain chewed away at her consciousness until she felt nothing.
***
The dim of the morning sun broke through the early fog and chased it away, leaving the shimmer of a calm north ocean. The man at the helm of the mid-size trawler, bloodshot eyes and rope-burns instead of skin on his hands, chewed on a well-worn toothpick that had weathered last night’s storm not nearly as well as he had. The hustle and bustle from last night was still lingering, men down on the deck still moving about with a sense of urgency.
But without the sense of dread and the fear of a watery grave present a few hours back, the atmosphere was considerably less tense. Morning meant sunlight, and sunlight meant visibility, warmth, and perhaps hope. The skipper even heard a laugh or two as the chatter continued. Laughter was good. His good-for-nothing youngest brother doctor had once said, “laughter was food for the soul”. He had no idea what it meant, but as the man threw his toothpick over the edge of the ship and replaced it with a fresh one from the box in his back pocket, he felt he was getting closer to understanding his academic-turned-alcoholic sibling’s ramblings.
He turned back to the bridge to adjust the wheel he set on an automated course, but his elder brother had already taken the wheel, giving him a knowing smile and a thumbs up. The skipper had had misgivings, but apparently the hour he had let his brother sleep below deck was now an hour well invested.
It was good to know there was still family in the family business.
Still, last night’s storm came completely out of the blue. If the news had said anything about the front moving north out from Artolia, he wouldn’t have bothered sending the ship out in the first place. According to his younger brother back home, the air was moving southward, at first. Then it suddenly turned its tail and brought full-force gales past every town near the mountains, knocking down communications for most of the night.
Luckily, the skipper had directed the trawler in roughly the same direction; they weren’t too far from course and they could perhaps come home before the end of tonight, perhaps with a catch large enough to pay back the cost of the repairs the boat needed now.
He snorted. He certainly wouldn’t be finding anything at this point in time. Even the most adventurous and stupid fish wouldn’t be moving out from the bottom of the ocean this soon after this sort of weather. But later, in the afternoon, there might be something worthwhile.
His brother’s keener, more alert eyes picked up on a body in the water.
They cut the engines to calm the water around them, and gradually they were close enough to fish the body out of the water. It was the body of a very young girl, holding onto a piece of what appeared to be a ship’s mast.
“Get the loops around her waist and under her shoulders! Easy now!”
“That’s a helluva split head!” A yell of surprise as they eased her onto the deck of the trawler. "Think the debris did that to her?"
“Wound is too exact. Looks like a blade sliced the top of her head. Or a bullet.”
“Bit early to be jumping to conclusions about being shot an’ all-”
“She’s taken a few.” The skipper picked at the fabric of the girl’s clothes, tracing his fingers briefly over the punctures in her thin shirt. “Only one thing to do now. Let’s turn this ship around. Rick might be able to save her, if she isn’t dead by the time we get there.”
“She’s not dead already?”
“Her lips are moving, but…” The skipper pulled the girl’s eyelids up a fraction, revealing only whites. “I don’t think she knows it.”
“Yeah, right. Rick’ll be able to save her. Right after he stops pissing his booze dry.”
“You shut the fuck up now, kid. I’ll make him clean up.” As right as the crew hand was, the skipper wasn’t one to let people jab at his family. “Let’s wrap that head wound up first, and get this boat going again.”
***
Rick Castor, M.D, ex-M.S, threw his cat off his stomach as he sat up on the bed to reach for the brandy on the table. The cat, apparently used to this already, landed with an indignant stare, but quietly padded off to some other corner of the room. Rick stumbled off to another corner of the room to shut the window blinds letting in the irritatingly cheerful afternoon sunlight, but tolerated enough light to illuminate the room for him to see what he was drinking.
Svarog Plains, B.A – budget age. The bottle he had last night. Apparently he hadn’t finished it this time. He supposed it was an improvement, even if a somewhat dubious one. Although his progression was nothing compared to the condition of the girl on the table. The priest up on the far side of the hill balked at giving, or even selling him anything stronger than the wine they had, which was tantamount to grape-flavored water. But, at the very least, there was lots of it. And there was no denying taste.
The number of gunshot wounds that girl had sustained when the rest of the crew had brought her in led him to believe they were already carting in a corpse. But he found a fluttering, weak, pulse – she was very much alive, even if very much in a coma.
The entry wounds were extensive, especially for gunshots to the back, but the wounds were cauterized, and the flesh sterilized and washed by sea water. Her skin seemed hardened, and the muscles wrapping around her back seemed permanently drawn taut. Even Rick’s sharpest scalpel and needle had difficulties cutting through to the wound.
And then there was what he found under the skin. He found himself cutting into strange implants, warped around her vital organs. It was here where he found most of the bullets, embedded less than an inch into them. He dared not remove the implants for fear of causing any more harm than good, but he presumed their effect: the bullets were of a monstrous caliber. The closest in size he had ever seen were the shells in his brothers’ hunting rifles – this was beyond big game hunting.
Had these implants not been in place to absorb the vast amounts of shock from these bullets, the shots fired would have most likely torn her apart.
He moved his attention to the head wound as soon as he could, resolving to focus himself away from the alcohol. The Svarog Plains brandy lay out of reach for a long time.
The blood loss from the head wound was likely one of the reasons why the girl was so near death; the longer he spent trying to clean the wound, the more afraid he was that the girl would suddenly die from whatever bruising and bleeding he had found under the skull. For that matter, the skull was absurdly difficult to drill through: He presumed there might have been some sort of ceramic plates laid into the skull, but after several resharpenings of the saws, he finally had enough space to minimise the damage that the bruising to the mid-brain region had caused, finally suturing the gash along her scalp after what seemed like an eternity. Miraculously, the girl had survived.
By the end of the entire ordeal, Rick collapsed back on the bed with the bottle of brandy as his re-established anchor, but a sense of satisfaction spread in his smile. He was a drunkard, but not a useless drunkard. And his new patient could even wake up in the next few days.
The first signs of awakening, unsurprisingly, were unintelligible groans. Rick fought through his stupor of morning sleep, gently pushing his cat off his stomach as he slowly sat up. Startling movements were the last thing he needed for the patient.
“Who… where am..?”
Rick made his way to the girl, still immobile on the table. “I’m a doctor. You’re lucky to be alive, dear. How are you feeling?”
The girl now fought to retain some of her energy in the response, although she could only present the listlessness in her eyes. “… it h- hur…”
“The pain will pass. It was probably unbearable before, so at least it won’t kill you now.” He gently laid a hand on her shoulder. “My name’s Rick Castor. What’s yours?”
“Na- name…” Her eyes widened, perhaps in fright, as she turned her head to the window, the sunlight so clear and golden from the windows. “I… they- jett-ah… jettison…”
***
“You’ll remember everything over time. It may take days, weeks, months, even years. But it will come back.”
“I – want to… leave me alone.”
“Don’t you want to find out what you need to know? Who you are, how you got here?”
“Do you know?”
“If you listen, it might help. You speak multiple languages, especially during your sleep. You also have a mastery of many regional accents, a whole lot of accents that I don’t know of. I know only those in Artolia and a few off neighboring countries. The slight brogue you’re speaking with now isn’t from your natural tongue. You’re using it only because everyone else here does.”
“What’s my – natural tongue then?”
“Honestly? I don’t know. You’re obviously the most proficient in Basic. Also, I can’t place your age. Normal physiology would place you at roughly 6 years of age, but your physiology, and intellect, is far beyond anyone 6 years old.”
“Wha… what are you trying to tell me?”
Rick sighed at the girl’s closed expression. “I’m saying that someone has done terrible things to you. To your insides. I don’t know what they’re for, but I could hazard a guess. I am a doctor, after all.”
‘Jettison’ scoffed at the sight of him turning the bottle of brandy to his lips, the most outward display of emotion so far. “A doctor.”
“Yes. A doctor who saved your life. Don’t forget it.”
“Sorry.” Her eyes turned curious, questioning, at Rick. “Why aren’t you doing, you know, doctor stuff at a hospital or something?”
Rick’s lips curled into a smile of distaste. “I used to. I poured my heart and soul into the job, and eventually I broke under the stress. Now I’m back home, sitting behind the family business.” He pointedly said the last few words with an air of finality, punctuating it with a last, emptying swig of the brandy. He had already spent enough time in the past pondering his downfall.
“Sorry.”
“You apologise a hell of a lot. I’m undecided on whether or not that matches your profile.”
“P-profile?”
“You’re full of contradictions. You lack a sense of duty or moral fibre, but unlike a child you always follow given orders without question. You’re inquisitive when you need to be, but not because you’re interested, emotionally invested in the topic. You have – had, it seems – a strong tolerance but also aversion to pain. Some of this, I might add, could be linked to child abuse. But from our talks, nothing mentioned about parents seems to elicit any emotional response that would likely appear under an influence of family abuse, which even for an amnesiac might trigger something.”
“What… what does it mean to you? I don’t understand.”
“It has implications beyond imagination, but there’s one thing that might stand out.” Rick took out from under his chair a small burlap sack, and untied it, emptying its contents out on the table between Jettison and he. A pile of junk metal parts lay in front of her. “Pick the pieces out and put them together. Start with this.” Rick picked out a nondescript steel rod, and handed it to her. Jettison eyed it warily.
“But… I don’t know what – what is this?”
“It’s a puzzle. Pick the pieces out, put them together. Try.”
She hesitated, looking at the rest of the pile. After a moment, her face relaxed, her expression blanked, fingers smoothly moving around the pile and picking out various parts of metal that stood out in her head.
She thumbed a conical-cylindrical lump into the hollow of a jagged block, slid it into the convenient space below where she was holding the rest of the puzzle, the top half sliding cleanly forward with a click –
And she aimed the semi-automatic handgun square between Rick Castor’s eyes, a single bullet chambered.
Her vision slid out and into focus as her mouth opened and closed in gasps, confusion clouding her mind as Rick gently prised the gun from her hands. “I’ve never… I didn’t know what…”
“I know.” Rick swept all of the bits and pieces off the table, back into the bag. It didn’t help that he had given her one and a half guns (the half of which was a different make) to assemble amongst the rest of the junk, and she had picked out the exact parts with which to assemble the whole one. “That was under twenty seconds. A very throrough knowledge of firearms, and all the surgery done to you – the profiling indicates you as some sort of child soldier, but it still doesn’t explain everything.”
“How can I remember how to make guns out of parts, but not remember why?”
“Part of it is the physical damage. Another part seems to be psychological blocks placed in, perhaps purposely. Perhaps caused by the head wound.”
“And it’ll come back after a while, you said.”
“Yes. Instinctive actions come back first: attention to detail and learning, mannerisms and speech. Drilled-in training like the ability to field-strip and reassemble firearms. Actual knowledge and memory of things, places, actions – not quite so easily.” Rick got up from his chair, and pulled down a few medical textbooks and another bottle of brandy from a nearby bookshelf.
“With time, comes experience, and with experience, triggers may come which will help you remember your past -”
“I don’t.”
“What?”
“I don’t want to remember.” Jettison, despite her fatigue and post-operative strength, wrung her hands on the table like talons. Racking her mind over the handgun still in the burlap sack under the table. “Whatever it is, I don’t want to care. No more pain.” She looked up at Rick, face impassive, but her eyes pleaded volumes.
“We don’t need you anymore, so these people are taking you away. Be glad that someone else is bothering to put up with you.”
Slam.
“This one is expendable. See what happens to her with the most volatile test yet to be successful. We need more results with it.”
Stab.
“Doctor, she survived! Vital signs are unstable, though.”
“Well gentlemen, it seems that we may have just found our monster.”
“Monster.”
Monster.
Burn.
~~~
Skin peeling. Blood boiling. Body aching. Heart racing. Perpetual pain pulsed throughout her body with no hope of being purged from her.
“Good morning Number Four.”
It had been one whole year since the initial transformational treatment, and the uncontrollable fire that now flowed through Fiona Myrwind burned away her former life and memories. The biggest indicator was her physical form morphing violently: eyes turning from a dark green to a piercing orange, a shaved head of fine hair that was almost a white colour and a gaunt physical appearance overall. These changes made it crucial that she be fed water and food for most, if not all day and night through IVs. Even in this poor state that her body displayed, it yielded no sympathy from those that studied and manipulated her.
Her primary overseer, Dr. Finley Fringe now stood before her, glasses resting on his sword-tipped nose with icy eyes. Those sinister orbs studied her still body in the orange cryo gel, the wheels in his head turning, thinking about all the sorts of fun he was about to have with his personal experiment.
“It’s time that we begin your training today, my dear. It has been confirmed that you have had ample time to acclimatize to your abilities and essentially new body, so we will not stall the rest of your progression any longer. Since I am such a courteous gentleman I will also ensure that we start you out with the most basic agility skills of your regimen. Now, let’s get you out of her pod.”
Without any refusal, Fiona quietly made her way to a small training room full of weight equipment. She was hooked up to more machines than the ones meant to keep her healthy in her cryo pod. They all beeped and flashed tediously, a choir of murmurs supplying an irritating melody. Beep. Hum. Pierce. Sting. Pop. Murmur. Beep. Hum. Pierce. Pinch. Sting. Pop. Murmur. Snicker. The caretakers and scientists observing this first exercise for the fire destrillian left her there, entering an adjacent room with a glass pane overlooking her area. A loudspeaker sounded off.
“Step on the treadmill, Number Four.”
Beep. Tap. Sting. Tap. Sting. Tap. Sting. Hum. Whisper. Fiona stepped up onto the machine, a tensed look about her. It had become somewhat bearable to tolerate the constant agony of her body when she was being fed nourishment through her IVs, but being stripped of all of that to stand alone after a year was excruciating. Heat. Heat. Heat.
“Begin Destrillian Prototype #000-000-004 Test Number One Point Zero, Primary Speed Examination. Number Four, start jogging.”
On cue, she began to jog in place, the treadmill coming to life beneath her feet. A pained look crept up as minutes went by, keeping pace.
“Faster.”
Fiona ran faster.
“Faster.”
She gritted her teeth.
“Faster.”
Getting hot.
“Faster.”
Chafing.
“Faster.”
Skin breaking. Too hot. No air. No water. What were they doing? Were they keeping her alive just to see how long it would take her to die on this dreadful contraption? What did they want from her?
“Stop.”
Fiona barely kept her footing as she stumbled and fell to her hands and knees, gasping for air. Her throat was beyond the point of being dry and her eyes were nearly completely red. Caretakers rushed in and replaced the monitoring devices with heavy doses of water; an IV, and four two-liter bottles for her to guzzle down. They wrapped bandages around the patches of her skin that had split open and applied several frozen cloths to her head. They stayed with her until Dr. Fringe came back into the room, writing down last minute scribbles onto his clipboard.
“Enough of that nonsense, now! We can’t spoil her; Number Four needs to build up her physical tolerance if she’s to be one of Viola’s finest.” He examined her as she swayed slightly back and forth, trying to stand up. The lead scientist held an indifferent look, waiting until Fiona was fully upright. He turned on his heels and headed for the door.
“Come along, little Destrillian. Keep up.”
~~~
Yelling. Fighting. Hurting. Killing. Aching. The codename Blazing Fury was about to have far more meaning than intended.
Over the next two years, Fiona slowly came into her abilities as Viola had hoped for. Her body could stand to go without special care for weeks, even months, at a time and filled out with muscle and healthy weight. Her hair had grown into short, spiky, mild variety of yellows and oranges, as well. She was only 11, but the science team that was focused on this prototype saw great potential in her for the future. Finley Fringe left many Destrillian briefings with his head held high, running off statistics and rates of improvement of his precious “creation”—her obedience and growing proficiency with her element of fire. Little did they realize that a variable of sorts had been brewing within Fiona since she grew to become comfortable with her new form.
Examination and Assessment: Striker Lambda TPL Seven Point Nine, commencing.
It was another offensive exercise, the most difficult to date—or so Dr. Fringe briefly mentioned over the loudspeaker of the training room. The scientists monitoring her trial today didn’t expect a full victory from the Destrillian of fire, so they all watched in anticipation of just how far she would go before defeat overwhelmed her.
3..
2..
1..
A deafening buzzer went off and Fiona was surrounded by five military personnel. They all carried miscellaneous weapons ranging from stun rods to a medium-ranged semi-automatic taser gun.
Finley Fringe's voice came over the loudspeaker once again. "Fight until you are told to do otherwise."
Prototype #004 stood crouched, eyeing her adversaries carefully. She didn't bother to acknowledge her scientist's order, nor had she for quite some time. Fiona just awaited whatever trial she was faced with, no longer surprised by any of the "plans" set forth for her progress as a Destrillian.
The training exercise started like any other: Blazing Fury applied all of the combatant techniques she had been taught, coupled with her steadily growing capacity to wield her element.
What seemed like a small team of easily dispensed soldiers turned into an extremely draining session of perpetual fighting. Once the first five men were taken down, another few expendable soldiers stormed into the room. For a brief moment just seconds before, Fiona thought today was going to be an easy day. Then again, that was never the case for her.
Punch. Dodge. Burn.
"Keep fighting."
Kick. Shock. Melt.
"You cannot stop now!"
More punching. More dodging. More burning, kicking and pain.
"Number Four, do not sto--"
"Will you SHUT THE FUCK UP?!"
"I will do no such thing, Num--"
"NOW!" Fiona chucked a rather large fireball right at the observation room's window. It left a black circle on the surface, the pane being reinforced for such an occassion.
"I'm tired of being your little slave. I've had enough of this torture. Everytime I've wanted to just sleep or lie down you pull me away to show off to your other white-coat friends, or you throw me into one of these places and make me do everything you say! No more stupid rules, no more tests, and no more pain! I'll give you all a taste of just what hell I've been through!"
Her eyes. They had always been an orange colour, ever since she has been turned in a Destrillian--but never like this. Fiercely did they glow from under her bangs as she stared down the reflective window, almost convincing the group on the other side that she could see them when she spoke. Almost as if there was nothing between them. It wasn't safe. The men stuck in the training room already appeared to have become frantic from this shift in the fire Destrillian's behavior. They were soldiers, what was stopping them from outright attacking and restraining her?
"Dr. Fringe, it seems that the temprature in the arena is rising at an alarming rate!"
"What?!"
Fiona could here the disturbed chatter and her smirk emerged. "They're roasting in here. Might want to let them out."
The grunts had fallen to their knees. The room itself had a heat shimmer about now and their faces were going pure red. The fire starter walked right up to one, grabbing him by the collar and launching him at the same singular observation window. When the roasting soldier's body met the glass, blood splattered all over and he fell to floor still. "You humans are so tender, I swear!" She let out a maniacal laugh. "Better bring some mops while you're at it, Fringe."
The scientist was watching in disbelief. What had happened? Prototype #004 had been such an obedient creation. Where had he gone wrong? He'd conditioned his specimen to the letter. This was impossible.
"Sir! What are we going to do? This prototype is out of control!"
"C-call the special team in to restrain her and-and clean up after those...frying corpses."
Fiona went back to laughing and tormenting the rest of the poor souls stuck in the training room with her. Blood sprayed here and there, onto the white, pristine walls. "I'm not going to take any more shit from you assholes. Burn until you're ash! HAHAHA!"
"NUMBER FOUR!"
"FUCK YOU, SHORTY!" The fire Destrillian snapped her head back towards the window. "In fact..." Her glowing orange orbs focused right to where she knew the vertically challenged doctor was standing and she charged straight for the spot. "Let's have some quality time together!" She clenched her fist as flames surrounded it and punched the pane as hard as she could. A crack. That was a start. Fiona punched a few more times. The crack grew larger. "Come on out and have fun with your favourite Destrillian!"
"Or not."
#004 would not give up on breaking the glass between them, that is, until a fine needle made its way into her neck. It took a moment, but the fire prototype fell limp into the hands of a fully armoured officer. She was put in a specially-made straight jacket and bound to a gurney. The heat in the room had quickly dissipated, stabilising to a normal temperature once again. Finley Fringe came in minutes later, dabbing his now perspiring forehead.
"Th-thank you fine gentlemen for your assistance here. Please take Number Four to an appropriate restraining room until we can properly evaluate the situation." He looked at his specimen for a moment, trying to hide the shiver that ran down his spine. "It seems that we may have to keep this one on an extremely tight leash for the remainder of her stay."
~~~
Not long after her first session of violent outbursts came more, and more. More temper tantrums than any of the Blazing Fury observation team could keep track of. Finley Fringe became infuriated and overly stressed over this sudden rebellious behavior considering how valuable his subject was to the overall mission of Viola. There were a series of meetings held regarding the fire prototype’s status with the company. The final conclusion? Destrillian Prototype #000-000-004 was to remain under heavy surveillance and guard, under no circumstance being threatened with a death penalty. She was one of their top specimens: she was becoming more and more proficient with the flame element, and there were no tangible replacements. As difficult as Fiona was, she was far more of an asset in the long run…
”You little monster! You WILL obey!”
WHIP
”We are your masters and you will never leave this place until WE say so!”
SHOCK
”Enough, Dr. Fringe. Leave Number Four here to let the pain and words sink in.”
The thick steel door shut with a resounding slam, Fiona not bothering to react to what sounded like a mild smack to her. She stood strapped to an upright five-pointed crucifix in the middle an ice-cold room, now beaten, battered and bruised. Blood trickled down and froze onto her scantily clothed body. Her head hung there, all strength sapped from her. Silence for what seemed like ages. And then a melodic tune.
Hope is behind…
The world ahead…
And there are many paths to tread…
Through shadow…
To the edge of night..!
Until the stars are all alight…
The lyrics weaved through her the back of her mind like a soft lullaby, but she couldn’t tell where it was coming from. It sounded as if it came from every direction. Maybe insanity had finally been pounded into her. The song was sung again and again. A chill went down her spine that wasn’t caused by the room temperature.
A hand came from seemingly nowhere and gently cradled Fiona’s face. For a split moment, she thought it was another Viola goon, but the touch was too tender for one of those creeps. Feeling ran through the fire Destrillian and she knew that this person in front of her was like her. #004’s eyes slowly opened and orange met compelling violet.
She had black and white hair—piano keys came to mind.
"You looked like you needed to see a friendly face," Destrillian 000-000-012, Ariel Regan said softly. Her voice barely above that of a gentle whisper, as though anything louder might cause Fiona genuine physical harm.
#004 blinked and then her eyes rolled to the back of her head in disbelief. "They must have really hit me hard this time. You can't be real."
Ariel smirked and raised a hand to Fiona's forehead, moving slowly to let Fiona's wondering eyes follow her movements. Then, without warning, she coiled back one finger and flicked Fiona hard in the centre of her forehead. Not hard enough to hurt her, that would have been the last thing the fire Destrillian needed right now, but hard enough to give her a shock at least.
"That felt real, right?"
The fiery redhead shook her head back and forth and looked at Ariel with a half-hearted snarl. "Yeah."
Ariel grinned back at her. "See? Real. Real as real could be."
"You're the first person like me I've seen. Where did you come from?"
"About four rooms down the hall?" Ariel guessed, crossing her arms and tilting her head upwards. "It's kind of hard to tell. You aren't the first person like me that I've seen."
"Damn bastards never let me out of their sight anymore. They must be hiding me like some kind of rabid dog." Fiona was speaking more to herself as she pulled her gaze away from Ariel's intriguing eyes.
"They rarely let me out of their sight too, but I know we aren't alone. Sometimes I hear other kids. Like us. But I figured out a way to put the guards outside my room to sleep, its how I got out." The uncertain tone of voice swiftly hardened into one of pride at this last declaration. "Do you want me to get you down?" The concern was almost tangible in her words.
A silent nod was all she replied with and with strange ease the older Destrillian eased the firestarter out of her retraints. Weak from the frozen room, Ariel helped her down and out of there. As they stepped into the main corridor, Fiona looked at the two armed guards waiting there in surprise. They looked to be off in their worlds. #004 looked to her new friend. "What did you do to these assholes?"
"I think they're paralysed," she said nonchalantly, watching with a slightly bemused grin at the statue-still looks of surprise that hung unmoving on their faces. "I can do that, too."
"My name is Ariel, by the way. The scientists here call me #012, but my name is Ariel."
"Fiona. The douchebags here call me #004."
"Nice to meet you," Ariel said cheerfully. Compared to the vicious comments of the scientists or the authoritative barking of the guards, her genuine voice was like a breath of fresh air in the sterile Violan corridors.
There was an awkward pause before the fire Destrillian spoke up. "Yeah." Even though it certainly wasn't the most pleasant of responses, the older prototype knew she meant well.
Beyond their first brief meeting, soon cut off by a stray third guard patrolling the hallways not too far away, the two Destrillians kept in touch from time-to-time. This usually ended up meaning Fiona got into trouble and Ariel would once again slip into the frozen holding cell. Eventually, all of the prototypes of the facility were placed in a recreational area of sorts and interracted. Fiona was finally exposed to the rest of her kind, but still only spoke to #012. Even then it was mostly in private via their newly developed form of telepathic communication. If she were forced to speak to any of the others, it was usually met with a threat or some other form of rude behavior--verbal or otherwise.
Ariel Regan was the Blazing Fury's only outlet during her time in Viola.
~~~
Finley Fringe stormed into the fire Destrillian’s room, barely waiting for the door to slide open. He threw his tattered clipboard to the floor and pounded on the pod’s reinforced glass.
“Get up!” He shouted. The doctor couldn’t tolerate anything right now. “He wants me to partner up with Rosenfeld! Why would I ever do that?! The man can’t tie his own shoelaces let alone properly handle a Destrillian! I’ve seen how he treats his precious Gunmetal Glint. It’s sickening; you’re our creations, not pets or children! This isn’t a casual project, this is the biggest investment of Artolia’s federal income! Well, I won’t let him have any say in your actions. You were assigned to me and as such you will only take orders from me!” Fringe was speaking to himself at this point, but he couldn’t help let out his frustration that Spencer was impeding on his personal specimen and work. He slammed his fist down on the calling monitor to Fiona’s caretakers. “I’d better see you people down here in five minutes with two large doses of tranquilisers and restraints!”
As was the routine now, Fiona was drugged and had her wrists and ankles "delicately" placed in shackles. She was guided to the large training room where another Destrillian was patiently waiting. Fiona’s caretakers took off the restraints and bolted for the exit, leaving the two prototypes to themselves. The drugs were wearing off fast, so Fiona was able to compose herself and get a good look at the other person stuck in here with her.
“And look at what we have here. Good afternoon, Fiona.”
“Ah, shit. Why am I stuck in here with Baldy?” She barely flicked Idris a glance and focused right on the small mirrored pane that looked over the room.
“Fiona...” began Dr. Rosenfeld, Idris' primary overseer—only to be interrupted by a low growl that seeped through the loudspeaker. Fringe refused to refer to the fire prototype as anything but “Number Four” and he certainly wouldn’t let someone like Rosenfeld get away with it. “...I mean, Number Four. Today's training is focusing on teamwork. As soldiers, you need to learn how to cooperate, and how to make use of one another's strengths. You've been paired up with Idris, as it were, to perform something of a tag team. To win this battle, you won't be able to just have at them on your own. The two of you are going to have to work together, to combine your talents and—”
It sounded as if a small scuffle broke out in the observation room for a brief moment before Dr. Fringe took over the microphone. “Number Four and Number Nine: simply put, this is another exercise where you are to keep fighting until we say otherwise. No breaks, no help, no nothing. Fight with everything until you can no longer handle it.” The microphone made a thud and choice words like “unprofessional” and “novice” barely made it through the loudspeaker.
A straight line of fire split the room right down the middle, Idris and Fiona on either side. The fire Destrillian stared over the wall of flame at her training partner. “You stay on that side and I stay over here. You take the peons that go over there and I get the idiots that march my way, understood?”
“Whatever you say, Sparky.” The metal Destrillian flashed her fire counterpart a knowing grin.
As if on cue, a terse, boisterous alarm sound went off in the room and ten men equipped with electro rods stormed into the large arena. A few nearly tripped over the melted space of floor, where the flames had just gone out.
“Too easy.” Fiona swept through the several victims foolish enough to veer toward her. She dealt a spinning backhand to the first man, square in the nose as she grabbed the pole of another circling her. The fire Destrillian used it against him by guiding it (while still in his hands) fiercely into his own stomach, overloading his nervous system with 10,000 volts of lethal electricity. Needless to say, he fell to the ground violently convulsing with a heavy scorch mark where the rod struck him. The other fellow had already fallen to the ground, gripping his face in a agony as blood gushed out onto the pristine, white flooring. The second pair of brave souls rushed her not a moment later, side-by-side. Poor things never saw it coming. Fiona landed gracefully behind the two attackers as brain matter and ooze escaped their cracked, lifeless skulls.
Idris was taking out the other six with similar ease. She barely seemed to move at all; instead, she turned her head away from the trashed bodies and towards the door for the next wave. She sighed an amused sigh. Cakewalk.
A few more waves came and went—thirty or so men waving around blasters and shotguns, tossing grenades—all too easy. Idris reflected this notion in sending a look that said ‘Is that all you’ve got?’ to her team up on the observation deck. Rosenfeld and the caretakers of hers that were spectating smiled and chuckled under their breath, only to be interrupted by a furious Fringe. “Just what sort of nonsense are you trying to pull, Number Nine?! You’re lucky that I don’t have you apprehended and disciplined for this unruly behavior!”
"With all due respect, doctor," Dr. Rosenfeld began, quiet but stern, as the sixth wave came upon the two Destrillians, "the Gunmetal Glint is my project, and you have no right to be telling her what she can and cannot do."
"Well, Rosenfeld, you have no authority in calling my specimen by name. Nor should you have been granted to work with such an advanced prototype like #004. You. Should. Feel. HONOURED!"
"Oh trust me--I do." He smiled. It was infuriating.
"Then perhaps you should keep a leash on that tongue as well as that poor excuse of a Destrillian down there."
Dr. Rosenfeld said nothing to retort, contenting himself with turning back and watching the battle unfold.
Finley Fringe kept his eyes on the younger doctor, studying his satisfied expression. The other company in the room took notice of shorter scientist's fists starting to clench, his whole being beginning to shiver. Before anyone could check on him, Dr. Fringe burst into a dramatic fit of rage
GIR! BRING ME MY DEATHRAY!!!
"Morons! I work with absolute morons! They'll let anyone walk in with a slip of paper attached to their forehead that has any semblance of an authentic degree! Monkeys dressed as men in this facility! Someone else can deal with this unlearned buffoon!"The furious Fringe stabbed an accusatory finger towards Dr. Rosenfeld, then turned on his heel and marched straight out of the observation deck. The room remained silent, with the taller doctor retaining his amused countenance.
A few more waves came at the two Destrillians with more complex tactics and weaponry, including some jetpack-equipped soldiers. Each was taken out with added amounts of effort, but nothing too overwhelming. #004 was growing bored.
"Enough with this jetpack bullshit! Give me something new and actually WORTH MY TIME!"
Dr. Rosenfeld aimed a sidelong glance at the clipboard, and what was planned for wave ten. "As you wish," he said, and then, with a hint of a smile, "Fiona."
The entire wall started to disappear, and with it, a large tank came into view. It was a behemoth of a thing, with powerful metal arms and two high-calibre cannons.
"What is it?" Idris asked, loud enough to not be talking to herself.
"A hunter-destroyer machine," replied Rosenfeld calmly, safe behind the observation window. "You wanted something worth your time, Destrillians. Here it is."
"Aww, come on, Baldy! Don't piss your pants now, the fun's just getting started." Fiona cracked her knuckles and neck, moving towards the intimidating vehicle.
Idris seemed to think on something. After a pause, she just shrugged, took a delicate step back, and smiled widely at the firestarter. "Okay," she said. "You deal with it."
Without looking back, #004 replied, "I will."
The alarm sounded to cue the start of the wave and instantly bullets shot from either side of the machine. Not a difficult task to dodge bullets, so Fiona made easy work moving in.
Before the firestarter could get within range of dismantling a mini-turret, a large grappling claw was fired from the tank. It managed to take hold of her and trap her against the far wall. She met the barrier with a distinct "umph" and immediately went to work on removing herself from it. "Goddamn it!"
Idris, who was still standing exactly where she'd been before the fight had started, smiled--if possible--even wider and more sweetly than before. "Having trouble, hun?"
Fiona managed to remove two of the four hooks out of the wall in time to dodge another spray of nasty gunfire. "I never have trouble, you walking lightning rod."
The fiery redhead made another run straight for the gargantuan vehicle. "Bet you can't launch another shitty claw at me you bast--FUCK YOU!" the fire Destrillian ate her words as a long, metal arm shot out from a concealed opening on the tank and took firm hold of her. Once again, she had run in blindly, overconfidence being the downfall. Idris looked on with a tinge of a smile on her lips. Fiona writhed around in the harsh grip of the mechanical arm, but to escaped to no avail. Instead, she was fed some volts of electricity. #004 shouted out in pain and was tossed against a side wall like a cheap rag doll.
The firestarter pulled herself up, suppressing a twitch from the aftershock of the jolt. A demonic look that could scare a grown man adorned the fire starter's face as she glared over to Idris, still with that infuriatingly amused expression.
"So." Idris beamed, entirely unphased by Fiona's livid stare. "A lightning rod I am."
"Come a little closer and we'll find out!"
The blonde girl just raised her hands in mock defeat, watching with obvious amusement as a leftover shock ran through the flame-haired girl.
Fiona produced a growl in frustration at both her unwanted company and the stubborn machine in front of her. Her body became tense and the temperature of the room went up. #004's eyes glowed when she looked back at Idris. "Enough of your pussyfooting! Get your ass into gear!"
"But surely you aren't having trouble with anything, are you Fiona?" Idris cried in disbelief. "You're just so powerful. I'm sure you can do it on your own. Right?"
"I. Said. MOVE IT!" She charged right at #009, the observation deck becoming a little worried at the fire prototype's behavior.
Idris slid swiftly to one side, avoiding Fiona's wrath by a few inches. Finally her smile dropped from its overdramatic grin to a much more natural, predatory thing. "Alright, alright," she said, eyeing the weapon she was supposed to be fighting with the fire prototype. "Let me see what I can do."
Quickly, she darted around the machine, landing little experimental kicks and jabs here and there to test it's weaknesses. The mechanical, scope-like eye of the tank wasn't fast enough to follow the lightfooted Destrillian. After a few more taps here and there, Idris landed calmly beside Fiona.
"I think I've pretty much figured it out," she said airily, tossing a look back at the irate face of her partner. "If you heat the thing up, I'll dart in and bend it into knots. Deal?"
"Fine. Just don't let that grappling piece of shit touch me." With that, Fiona took off for the large, armoured vehicle. Her countenance switched into a focused variety of anger as she dodged another spray of bullets. The fire starter flicked a an open hand in the direction of the minigun turret and quickly formed a fist, causing a small explosion in the same spot. Idris came at it from the other side, driving her palm flat against the metal casing beneath the turret, denting it irreparably inwards. Deftly, the girl plunged her hand straight through and yanked out some of the wiry innards. Sparks flew.
Another gun sprang from the side of the metallic behemoth and focused on Fiona, much to her dismay. She leapt towards it and brought down a firm and flaming heel to it, resulting in an internal explosion.
An idea came to her just then as the fiery redhead heard the small succession of booms from her damage. She jumped off and away from the tank, shouting out to her unwanted ally. "Better step back, Baldy! Things might get a little too messy for you."
Idris simply looked at her curiously, analytically, before deciding that it would most likely be best--and least painful--to let the fire Destrillian do what she wanted. She jumped back off the tank and landed carefully a little ways away, looking on the scene in front of her.
Vehicles ran on fuel. That fuel is highly flammable. A smirk graced her lips as she licked them with malicious anticipation. "Eat this, douchebags!" She swung her arms up and brought them down in front of her, quickly clenching her hands into fists and releasing her power on the combustible materials within the tank.
Idris had to admit, the sight of a giant mechanical monster like that being exploded in all directions was pretty impressive. She cleanly sidestepped a piece of shrapnel as big as she was. The fight was over. "Good job," she said cheerily to Fiona, grinding a bit of the tank good and far into the ground with her foot just to make it difficult for the clean-up crew to get it out. "We should do this again sometime."
"I think I've had enough of you for the rest of my miserable life."
"Have it your way, then." Idris stepped over the remains of their final fight towards the observation window, and the exit. "Maybe someday, when your life is less miserable, you'll think back on that and reconsider."
"Doubtful."
The Gunmetal Glint looked back over her shoulder at the fire prototype. "Which part?" she asked, and before she could get an answer, stepped through the now-open door and back to her scientist.
Fiona's sights had been trained on the large embers still gracing the training room when she was forced to snap her attention towards her metal counterpart. Her eyes studied Idris in thought as #009 left the room. Which...what..?
The fire Destrillian shook her head and sneered. "Ah, fuck that."
~~~
"What if I told you that we could get out of this pit?"
"We can escape if we stick together, just wait!"
Are you with me, Fiona?
A charged pain slithered into the back of the fire Destrillian's head as she was being carted back to her room from a routine physical. She was secured by multiple straps to a gurney, bound up tight in a power-suppressant straight jacket with an IV pumping anesthesia into her veins. The straightjacket was new--usually the drugs were enough, but not for today. Today was a special day. And Viola did not want their fire Destrillian throwing one of her fits on it. But even the heightened security measures wouldn't stop Fiona's reaction to what she was just about to realise.
It came out of nowhere. One moment, she was being wheeled along, unable to do or say anything, unable to feel anything but vague irritation at all the procedures--and then it was like Fiona heard the lethal gunshot right next to her ear. Heartbeats slowing until complete failure. The death of Ariel Regan.
#004's body started to twitch. The caretakers overseeing her passage back to the containment room took no notice. She did that sometimes, when the anesthetic wasn't quite strong enough to keep her down entirely, or when she just felt like being more difficult than usual. What did they care if she was trying to make life harder on them? She wasn't going to succeed. But she was.
Convulsions. Her eyes snapped open.
"NOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!"
"What the--"
"Attention: Destrillian Prototype #012 has been disposed! Please sure ensure that all other prototypes are secured immediately! Lethal reprocussions may occur if this warning is not heeded! I repea--"
"SHE'S DEAD!!"
"Oh my God! Someone get Dr. Fringe and a special team down here at once!"
Fiona had gone straight off the edge. The team knew it with a single glance: the Blazing Fury's chief scientist would not be able to stop her, let alone be reached in time. In that instant, every one of them knew they were going to die. And there was nothing they could do to stop it. Some of them were brave and stood their ground, but others turned and tried to run, to self-preserve--only to fall to the ground screaming as their bodies overheated until all their vital fluids had evaporated, leaving nothing but dried, shrivelled husks left.
As if it were papier mache, Fiona ripped and burned through her specially-fabricated restraining articles. Under normal circumstances, the precautions taken to secure #004 would have been successful without a doubt. These were certainly not normal circumstances.
Freeing herself from the bondage, Fiona ripped out the long IV needle out of her arm, not even flinching at the way it dragged and tugged at her skin, nor the sickly, wet sucking sound it made as it popped out. With a cry of utmost rage, she turned and stabbed it right into the forehead of the closest Viola staff member.
"You are all to blame!" she screamed. The girl had gone demonic--not a thing on earth could get in her way. Grabbing a second victim, the fire Destrillian's fingers clenched until they were white with pressue. The man cried out in anguish as the skin was melted right off his body. With a violent motion, Fiona threw the caretaker against the metal wall, leaving him to writhe and bleed on the floor.
Not a single one of the caretakers in that small space of corridor escaped Fiona's wrath. The agony of losing the only friend in all of Viola that she had was unmatched. Even the special security squad meant to subdue the extremely enraged Blazing Fury wasn't able to put her down. Twisted, burning, broken corpses strewn across the floor at odd angles decorated the hallway. Even the walls themselves fell victim to #004's ferocity. The sheer waves of heat that radiated from her being melted and warped the metal and plastic, until it literally dripped down the walls. All of her anguish poured out in the form of violent resistance to anything that so much as came within ten metres. More personnel came out. And more. And still more, and it seemed she was never going to stop.
Until eventually, she did. In hindsight, the surviving staff realized that it had simply been too much stress to maintain such high power levels for such a long time. She herself had finally burnt out. She swayed and coughed, and the heat seemed to all be sucked back into the source--and then she fell down dead, or as good as. She was out cold.
The flaming wreck of one of the finest teams in Viola was all that was left to show for it.
Dr. Fringe had been nowhere to be found until Fiona was finally placed back into her cryotube, comatose.
"You're lucky they didn't terminate you on the spot for that horrifically embarrassing show you put on for the entire facility! Ignorant child, I ought to have you placed back into solitary confinement for another month! Prototype #012 was useless to our cause anyway. More flawed than what comes out of that Vargas' armoury."
The words from the cruel scientist were like dull, annoying thuds in the back of Fiona's mind. Nevertheless, a reply came in the form of the liquid-gel around her starting to churn and bubble from a spike in internal temperature.
"Two months in solitary confinement? Excellent suggestion, #004."
~~~
"Waste of life!"
Scorch.
"Piece of shit!"
Slice.
"Stupid human!"
Boil.
"Eat your rotten heart out, Fringe!"
Melt.
For all of her life, Fiona Myrwind had a reason to lash out at the world around her. A time came when she was finally able to do so with a rage that had grown with the fire Destrillian and would go unmatched. This rage has never been quelled, nor did anyone ever think it would be. Only time would tell just what was in store for the prototype, Blazing Fury.
The landscape had gone cold in the Artolian part of the world. There was a thick blanket of snow as far as they eye could see, and on colder nights the wind cut to the bone. But nobody minded, because to combat the rising chill, the warm, crackling feeling of Yule was in the air. All over the country—all over the world—people were putting up decorations, and organizing parties, and baking traditional goods to give to friends and families when the three-day long celebration arrived. Although different people celebrated it different ways, the winter solstice was a universal concept, and so everybody was in on it somehow. Everybody was in a festive mood.
And in the second Violan facility, that meant the doctors were in the mood for a bit of a friendly spar. Not nearly as “to the death” as usual – after all, this was the season of giving. And even if the Destrillians were nothing but tools of war, their overseers felt obliged to break their subjects’ boring daily routine of tests and solo training, and to pit them against one another; to let them in on the holiday fun, in a manner of speaking.
Kram had no idea what Yule was, of course. Neither did the rest of his kind. But they all obediently obliged when their doctors told them they were going to spend the day fighting one another in relatively friendly one-on-one matches. (Except for number twenty eight, who, as per usual, had refused to fight and had been locked up in his room again. Shame.)
“You will only continue to fight until somebody tells you to stop. That could be us… or perhaps one of your comrades. Who knows?”said the disembodied voice of a scientist over the PA system in the room all the Destrillians were sitting against the wall of. “Number twenty two, number twenty four, begin the match.”
Kram watched as the chosen two stepped into the middle of the room, both dropping into their respective stances. He calmly observed the both of them, the only betrayal of emotion a quirk of his eyebrow at the choice the scientists had made. Salem was going to flatten Hannah – the girl didn’t even know what her powers were, and his friend was one of the more brutal Destrillians in the facility. A tiny smirk curved his lips. He wondered how long it would take for the girl to tap out.
Not very long, as it were. Hannah tried her best despite having no known power, relying on her nimble body and her prowess with hand to hand combat, but quick and light as she was, she was no match for Salem. The green-haired boy didn’t even look like he was enjoying himself, it was so easy. He stood in place, a bored expression on his face, and after he had dodged Hannah’s kicks and punches a few times and gotten tired of them, he whipped his arm out like a viper striking and shoved the girl, a cry of pain being forced from her as she skid right back to the far wall. Before she could even take a step forward an explosion had erupted right in front of her, causing her to dive desperately underneath it and to roll back up to her feet a little while away, breathing heavily. She knew what was going to happen next, as it always did—and she was in no mood to be made a fool of by Salem.
“I’m out,” she said, aiming a glare at the smugly triumphant grin of her opponent and then walking back to her place beside Tao, where she slumped down the wall and wiped the sweat from her brow.
Lokka was up against Salem next. He made a much more impressive show than Hannah, Kram thought idly; the quiet boy with his toxic green eyes would give you no sign he was going to make a move until it was too late. The two Destrillians were more or less evenly matched, on good days, and the battle was very long and drawn out. A singed hand here; a bruised knee there; a few fiery blasts and an invisible wall or two and before the darkness Destrillian knew it, ten minutes had passed and the two were still fighting.
“You sure you wanna keep at it, Lokka? You’re starting to look a little pale,” Salem mocked, a grin twisting his face as he leapt to the side of one of Lokka’s attacks and brought an elbow down on the smaller boy’s spine. “Oh wait.”
Lokka ignored the verbal jab completely, but took the blow like an expert and snapped around to place a well-aimed kick in the back of Salem’s injured knee, causing the gas Destrillian to stumble and fall.
“That’s enough, you two. Go sit down.” Lokka only just barely spared a disparaging look for Salem before going back to his solitary place, leaning against a corner and discreetly wiping blood off onto his pale hand. Salem got up, thoroughly satisfied at having had such a good run, and took his own place next to Kram.
“Bet you’re on,” he said to the red-eyed Destrillian, who only nodded in response. “What, you’re not excited?”
“It’s a fight. There’s nothing to be excited about,” came his reply, matter-of-fact and devoid of the enthusiasm Salem had been expecting.
“Tch. Buzzkill.”
“At your service.”
“Numbers twenty-one and twenty three, step up please.” The scientists, behind their bulletproof glass observation window, were immensely enjoying the sight of their creations going at each other without needing to closely observe and analyze and chart and measure their progress. For once, it was just for sport—gladiatorial, almost. And most of the Violan staff found that there was something exciting in watching two Destrillians fight when they didn’t have to use all manner of machinery to pick the performance apart.
Kram sighed as his number was called. Ignoring Salem’s I-told-you-so punch on the arm, he rose and walked to the middle of the room to face his opponent. She stood there, taller than he was, her long silver hair tied back to keep it out of her way in battle. Tao Hong, the Destrillian of speed.
The only thing that could have lessened his enthusiasm.
“Begin.” Tao, for her part, looked ready for a match. She was a proud girl, they all knew, and she would not allow herself to back down from a fight she would probably much rather avoid. Kram wasn’t looking anywhere near forward to this, himself, but orders were orders and besides, he wouldn’t hurt Tao too badly. Just a little nick and scrape here and there – she could take that. Then she’d call for him to stop just like the crybaby he knew she was, and that would be that. No harm done.
They began.
-----
In the short while between the beginning of Kram and Tao’s fight, and the end of the scientists’ Yule festivities, things had gone very wrong.
Kram watched forlornly as Tao was wheeled out of the combat room, unconscious and bleeding profusely from her side. He could feel the stares of the other Destrillians on his back; could reach out and sense which belonged to who. Hannah, obviously, was the one filled with reproach. How dare he do that to her best friend? How dare he lose control in what was clearly stated as a not-so-to-the-death fight, and rip Tao open with his powers like a serrated knife shattering through a porcelain doll? Elvan and Lokka both were giving him plain stares. Simple. Blank. The only words you could put to it were “hmm.” They were both sitting there, politely taken aback at the display of brutality but not caring enough to really feel for the silver-haired girl. Salem, he could practically see nodding in approval. Stupid bitch had it coming, the yellow eyes would say. And Castiel? Kram could feel the boy’s eyes appraising him, looking upon him with a sense of respect, of awe—
And suddenly he hated himself for it.
There was nothing to be amazed at, losing control of yourself, giving into your powers and watching as you destroyed things you never wanted to destroy. A bitter scowl settled onto his face. It’s nothing to be proud of. All it means is that I’m too weak to control myself.For all their fighting, the Destrillians had never gone so far as to mortally wound one another, but here they were and Tao’s scientists were even now trying to find a way to stem the blood flow. She’s dying, right now, and it’s your fault, Kram. Great job.
Winning had never felt so much like losing before. Sullenly, he slunk back to his room and spent the rest of the day brooding in the thick, tense silence that pressed around him there.
-----
There was never a way to tell whether it was day or night inside Viola, but Kram’s abilities had always been a telltale sign. They always grew stronger when the sun had gone down outside. When it finally had, then, he opened his eyes – something he had great difficulty with, having been pretending to sleep and fighting off the effect of the Distrum for hours now – and focused on the tiny coil of darkness behind one of the monitors. His room was especially well-lit to prevent giving him too much to work with, in case he’d ever wanted to do something like this. But Kram had never cared enough to try and escape his room, so over the few short years he’d been there, the Violan staff had relaxed their security.
That had been a mistake. The darkness behind the monitor wobbled, then took solid shape and shot towards the only guard in the room, ricocheting off the back of his skull and effectively rendering him unconscious. He would be up in a minute or two, so Kram had to act quickly. With all the strength he could muster, he forced all the tiny shadows in the workings of the stasis pod door to work like a lockpick and in moments, the door hissed open, allowing him to tumble out.
He got to his feet with no time to spare, and grabbed the needle of Distrum from the security guard’s pocket—and then jabbed it in the man’s arm and squeezed, watching with cold satisfaction as the liquid entered the man’s bloodstream. Either he would be out for a very, very long time, or he would die. It didn’t matter to Kram. He only cared about one thing then and there.
The heart-stopping trip to the experimental level of the building took an excruciatingly long time. Luckily, the flickeringly half-lit hallways were perfect for Kram, and ever since earlier that day he had been savagely taking advantage of his power—almost as if to show it precisely who was in charge of it. There were no casualties; there were no sightings. He was invisible.
After what seemed like forever, he finally set cautious foot in the room where Tao lay, side bandaged thickly, bound to her cot. She was wide awake – the pain had quickly wasted the Distrum her caretakers had administrated, but it wasn’t like the girl was strong or stupid enough to try anything in her current situation.
The darkness Destrillian approached her silently. Her pink eyes widened in surprise when she saw him, but there was no trace of fear in the look, and that made Kram feel worse, for some reason. It was like she knew he hadn’t meant to hurt her that badly. It was like she’d forgiven him already.
But he knew that some dark, Destrillian part of him had wanted to hurt her that badly, and more badly still. She shouldn’t have forgiven him. He hadn’t even apologized yet—but that was going to be fixed.
“Tao, I—”
“Don’t.” She tried for a smile but only wound up grimacing as a wave of pain overtook her body. A hand reached compulsively for her wounded side, only to be restrained by her bonds. It was pathetic. “I know.”
“How…” Kram swallowed, feeling uncomfortable at the sudden emotion he was feeling. What business did he have, caring about this, anyway? Disobeying his doctors, breaking out of his room, all to see if Tao was alright? He thought she was nice, but he didn’t care that much about the stupid girl.
Did he?
She didn’t say anything, only looked at him, expecting him to finish his sentence. Kram, though, had no idea how to finish it. The silence dragged on, the two of them staring at one another, until Kram realized that he was wasting valuable time standing there like an idiot. “How’s your wound?” It was quite obviously not the end to the first ‘how’ sentence, but the girl took it in stride.
“The doctors said I will be here for a few days, at the very least,” Tao explained, in that funny, half-formal speech pattern of hers. “It…is very deep. I don’t know how close I was to dying, but…” She cringed, hissing out a gasp of pain. Kram started at the sound; it was so grating to his ears. All his fault.
“How can you just lie there and talk to me?” he finally asked, hardly believing how much he meant what he was saying. “You should hate me.”
“I couldn’t hate you, Kram.” She strained to smile again, and this time she succeeded. “Especially not now.”
“What do you mean?”
“I heard Hannah’s doctor…told her about something called Yule,” the girl began to explain, ringing a bell in Kram’s head. Hadn’t he heard mention of something like that at least once in the hallways today? “A time of celebration. I just—I don’t think it would be right to hold a grudge during such a peaceful time.”
Kram frowned. Her words had just made the ugly feeling in him even worse. He was dismal. “You’re too good to be a Destrillian.”
Tao only shrugged in response—before promptly remembering that moving hurt. A lot. She made a small noise of pain and that only made Kram feel worse. It was all just going downhill. “You shouldn’t be here, you stupid crybaby,” he said, and it relieved a little bit of the pressing, crushing weight, to talk. So he began to just say whatever was on his mind, hoping it would make the discomfort go away. “You don’t fight to kill and people are going to hurt you here because of it – I used to think you were just too weak for it but after today I know now it’s harder to not fight, and… I just… You’re not even angry. You just lie there with this goddamn gash in your side and you talk to me like it’s not my fault and that makes it feel like you’re stronger than I am and I’m hating it.”He paused for breath, looking anywhere but Tao to keep from becoming any more titanically embarrassed than he was now.
But she just laughed, a fragile little giggle, and replied as if it were normal to hear number twenty three speak with any feeling. “It’s okay. It is hard to stay controlled, but we can all do it – we do it all the time. You do it all the time, Kram, you just slip once in a while is all. That’s all right.”
“No, it isn’t.”
“I forgive you.”
“No, it—what?”
“I said, I forgive you,”she repeated, looking up at him with a sincerity that shone through even the pain she was feeling. Her voice was warm and strong and it made him feel something, which was scary. But welcome. “None of us is perfect, and that’s why we have training in the first place. We may be Destrillians, but I believe we all have the right to be human once in a while. We are allowed to mess up and to learn from our mistakes, right?”
“You should be allowed to hurt me back,”Kram replied vehemently, stubbornly upholding the sense of honour he’d only just realized he had. It had always been there, but he had always been able to shove it out of sight in the name of orders. But there were no orders to follow now, no rules or regulations or things to keep his self-righteous side from peering out. “I almost killed you. You should be able to get even.”
“Oh, Kram,” was all she said. Tao’s eyes had their usual motherly concern in them, and the pity killed him.
“Hurt me back, Tao, goddamn it!”
“…all right. Come closer.” Kram stepped right beside Tao’s cot and undid the bonds that held her torso and her arms, fully prepared and expecting her to sit up and hit him or something. He closed his eyes, ready to take it on the chin and then feel better. But instead of a fist, it was a kiss that met his cheek.
He leapt back like it had been fire. Tao saw the look on his face and smiled a sad smile, lying back down gingerly. “There. Now it hurts.”
She was right.
“Night, Tao,” Kram said, unable to handle being around her any longer. All the guilt and bitterness and self-loathing (and that little speck of something else) had risen up in his chest and he could barely breathe for it all. He was not used to feeling things.
“Goodnight, Kram. Happy Yule?” she said back, trying out the last two words on her tongue. They felt right enough.
“Happy Yule.” And he ran back to his room as fast as he possibly could, ignoring how a pair of guards saw him and began to give chase. He was running from much more important things. He made it back to his room, checked the guard on the floor (he was dead, it seemed,) and then climbed back into his pod, wanting to forget it had all happened.
But it was still there when he woke. And the day after that and the day after that. And from then on, things were different between Kram and Tao; there were sidelong glances as they passed in the hallways and their fighting turned into dancing, and slowly, something they could call a friendship began to grow.
She had the uncanny ability to make him feel, and he hated it and loved it at the same time.
Satsu, BRIAN BLESSED, MIGHTY AND WISE Junpei Iori: Ace Detective, Maccaffrickstonson von Lichtenstafford Frabenschnaben, Polite Krogan, Robert Baratheon
Rocco threw down the folder on his desk, prompting Arctos to pick it up. "Perfect scores in the Aptitude exam, ninety-pluses in all Physical and Combat assessments. What do you think?”
Arctos’ already worn brow creased further as he dug his penknife further into the cast binding his forearm, leaning on the side of Rocco’s desk for support. “What do I think?” He laughed, a hollow, bitter laugh with the weight of months’ worth of paperwork apparent in his mood. “I think she should be a fucking astronaut, that’s what I think. She should be in the Self-Defense bullshit, pulling off ‘special aid’.” He gritted his teeth as the dull ache from his fracture cut through the numbing of his medications, slicing down the middle of the plaster by another inch. “Fucking thing won’t cut.”
“You’re not worried she’s just a Shokakan looking for a fight?”
“Rocco, I’m worried about a lot of things at the moment. I’m worried about the government talking away our own goddamn money. I’m worried about the breadsticks and peashooters they’re replacing our fucking batons and guns with. I’m worried about the poison-huffing dipshits expanding their turf downtown. What I’m not worried about, Rocco, is some immigrant who has a death wish for the Orange Zone. And if the report is right, which you say it is, then she can handle herself fine in any other squad. I don’t need another.”
A heavy sigh escaped before Rocco could stop himself. It was one thing for Arctos to speak his mind, it was another thing entirely to continue his bitter tirade. “The reason why we’re here is because you do need another, Archie.”
“Don’t fucking call me that.”
“I know that Detective McGraw was a big part of the team, but -”
“There were only four people who can call me that.”
“- But Wolfe’s Pack has always been a five-man team.”
“And now there’s only three.”
“And you know we’ve been tightening our belts on this, Arctos.” Rocco stubbed out the remains of his cigar on the ceramic ashtray next to his in-out tray. “These days detectives aren’t the only ones doing the problem-solving, and the riot squads aren’t the only ones putting down the flash mobs. And for god’s sake, the doctor said the cast comes off by the end of the fortnight, stop picking at it.”
“Don’t have time for that shit.” The last few inches of plaster gave way to the penknife, and Arctos flung the cast into the wastebin by Rocco’s desk. He took the period of silence as an opportunity to snatch the file off his desk.
He flexed his fingers in pain, as he browsed through the rookie’s dossier with his good hand. He clenched painfully, curling his lips in disgust. “Oh come on, Rocco. I don’t give a damn if this kid is world justice herself, she’s barely had four months on the job. She’s still a fucking cadet.”
It was Rocco’s turn to express his own sort of displeasure. “When was the last time we had talent like this graduate, Arctos? Or for that matter, when was the last time we had talent like this even enlist? This is as good as it gets, Wolfe. This isn’t even a take-it-or-leave-it situation. You just take it, no questions asked. You take it, because in a year’s time there won’t be anything for us to take.”
Arctos threw the folder back onto Rocco’s desk. “This kid better be a fucking prodigy.”
“Why don’t you see for yourself?”
***
The rain pounded and rattled the windows of the station like an endless cascade of pebbles off the rooftops of Osea. A woman stood at attention, at one end of the empty conference room, chairs and tables stacked and moved to the side. Rocco and Arctos sat at the other end. It was a full five minutes before Arctos bothered beginning the interview.
There was a pause. “That is your name, right?”
“Yes, sir.” Her voice was loud, clear, bold, confident. Arctos leaned back on his chair and templed his fingers.
“You graduated from the Academy with flying colors. The officer who signed your papers called you, ‘a shining example of the potential talent in young law enforcers today’. Do you recall this?”
Arisa lifted her chin up a fraction as she replied. “Yes, sir. The statement also included a recommendation -”
“Lemme tell you something, Officer Amuro, and I use the word officer in a very loose sense of the term.” Arctos sniffed in disgust at the headstrong reply of the policewoman. “The officer who signed your papers was a fucking snitch for a gang called the Wildcats down in the Orange Zone district. He managed to peddle five hundred k’s worth of lysyrgic in the week before I weeded him out. So I’m sorry to say that his words don’t mean a rat’s ass to me now that’s he’s rotting in a penitentiary somewhere. Are you aware of that?”
“I am aware of that, sir.” She barely skipped a beat. “Graduation Supervising Officer Knolls displayed erratic behavior and signs of paranoia during the training course and supervision of the Aptitude Exam. He frequently went for bathroom breaks and communicated on his private mobile phone during his work hours.”
“Hmm.” Arctos continued to probe through Arisa’s profile. “Says here you hold – or held, should I say – dual citizenship between Artolia and Shokaku. Is that correct?”
“That is correct, sir. My father also held dual citizenship, and although my mother was a Shokakan citizen, I was born here.”
“Was he the one who taught you your kenpo?”
“I beg your pardon, sir?”
“Your kenpo, gendai bujutsu. Your hand-to-hand aptitude. You put Sergeant Gregson on his ass in fifteen seconds flat during your Physical Assessment. The arm locking is a staple move, the throw a typical use of counterbalancing using the opposing leg. Unless you were an actual soldier of Shokaku’s military, which is obviously out of the question, you would have someone most accessible to you teach you the art. Since your mother would have stayed to the conformist role that your culture demanded of her, as the home guardian. And your father also taught you the firearms skills that got him killed in provoking a gang firefight… and got you into this role as a cadet pretending to be an officer.”
At that last flourish, Arisa faltered slightly. “I… yes, sir, my father was a -”
“Why the fuck are you here, Amuro?” Arctos narrowed his eyes to slits as he sat forward. “I mean, this. All… this.” Arisa’s gaze unwavered as hers met his. “You could just go to the ASDF and go career all the way to the top. Make yourself a killing and live like a queen. Shit, if you really want to waste your talents, go for a modeling career. You’re practically a thirty-two-twenty-four-thirty-two, kid. Why the fuck would you want to put a blueshirt over that?”
“I -”
“- What in the hell do you see in the Artolian Enforcement Detachment that looks so inviting to you?”
“I believe.”
“You what.” Arctos’ voice was flat, incredulous.
“I believe in the law, sir. It might not be the only thing between this country and anarchy, but it’s the best thing we have. And it might not look like much to you any more, Inspector, but I still believe in it. And I still believe in the people that work for it.” Arisa almost glared at him as she finished speaking, a silent challenge that Arctos couldn’t be bothered rising up to.
“No-one needs to believe in jack shit, Amuro. No-one rewards a hero these days.”
“I’m sorry you think that, Senior Inspector.”
“We’re done here. Get out of my sight.” Arctos looked down at the sheaves of paper strewn amongst the table in front of him. Arisa left without a word. Rocco turned to him with a bemused smile. “And before you say it, it doesn’t make a difference who her father is.”
“He’s rubbed off on her, hasn’t he?”
“He’d rub off on a trash can if he thought it would turn into a law abiding citizen.” He put Arisa’s file back together again, slowly, deliberately, going over every fine detail again. “It’s almost a pity he went batshit insane for real.” “She’s a keeper. You know that.”
“The Chief Inspector was damn near the best in the force, and it fucking broke him to see us reduced to this.” The rain outside reduced to a trickle, fat droplets of water running off the rooftops and tapping on lower ones as they fell. Arctos sniffled as the chill began to set in. “I don’t expect his kid to be half as inspired as he was.”
Middlegate was an old town, and the girl had known it since they moved there. Paint flaked off the clapboard houses, the cobbled streets had worn down to rubble, and nearly every white picket fence had more than a few panels missing. In the fall, the air was filled with the smell of swollen wood, and in the spring, the fragrance of fresh blossoms was nearly overwhelming. Whenever she asked why they had moved there all those years ago, the girl always got the same answer. Her father would say that he liked the quiet, whereas her mother would tell her how much she loved the flowers here. Not that the girl had anything to complain about; her house was freshly painted, the garden filled with fruit trees that were perfect for climbing-- not to mention the trickle of a stream that she liked to dip her toes in to. The only problem was that in Middlegate, everybody knew everybody.
In this town, the family was a curiosity. With bright blue eyes, light blonde hair and olive skin, the little girl they saw so often running through the maize fields simply couldn’t have been Artolian. Maybe not even Alvyssian, they muttered amongst themselves during their community coffee meetings. They would gossip about how the father was a doctor, and how the mother was often in hospital, and how they had once caught the little girl picking flowers from their gardens. Of course, the community had never thought to ask the family any of these burning questions, and thus they remained unanswered.
So that was how things were; the family stayed out of the way of townspeople, and the townspeople stayed out of the way of the family. Mostly, anyway—the little girl would often come home crying about how some of the other children had made fun of her name. But the mother had always been able to make her feel better, whether it be with a hot chocolate during winter or a Popsicle during summer. Most of all, the girl liked it when the mother told her stories. A lot of the time, the mother would tell stories of great heroes who fought off magical monsters and beasts that were so huge they could squash her with a single finger. Sometimes the stories were scary, so the girl would hide under her bedcovers while her mother sat beside her, her voice soft with the maternal reassurance only she could give.
One thing the little girl didn’t like about the stories, however, was the way that her mother would speak in a language so unlike her own. The girl asked her parents over and over to teach her, so she could learn all the secrets to the myths and legends that she had been told. Once again, she was given the same reply. Perhaps when you’re older, they would say. So the little girl would puff her cheeks out in a pout and run off to climb any of the numerous trees their garden had to offer. The girl was used to being on her own. The girl’s mother had home-schooled her, and the other children were mean, so she didn’t talk to them much. If she was ever seen outside the lush perimeter of her house, it would be in the tall grass and dainty flowers of Middlegate meadows. For hours, the girl would sit there, pick petals and produce shrill whistles from the coarse blades of grass. Sometimes her mother would have to come and find her, though the girl didn’t mind.
Then one day, her father came home from work early. It was raining outside, and the girl stared out of the window. She watched as the water swallowed their flowerbeds, each one turning into a nightmarish swamp as once bright petals disappeared in the churning mud. The father laid a hand on the girl’s shoulder. Your mother is sick, he said, but the girl didn’t understand. She was scared and confused, like her father was speaking in that strange language of the stories. They needed to go and visit her, the girl was told, so she held onto her battered old teddy-bear with one hand and her father’s sleeve with the other as they made their way out of the house.
In spite of the pounding of rain on the aluminium roof of their car, the girl could still hear her father shout at the small congregation of townspeople who had gathered by their fence. They huddled together and whispered amongst themselves, preying on the latest gossip like a pack of hungry wolves under a collection of garishly coloured umbrellas. There was shouting, so the girl in the car curled into herself and thought about the monsters and magic of her mother’s stories. One of the group outside caught her eye, and she scowled. The girl didn’t like the townspeople very much. She was almost always on the end of a disapproving look. It took what seemed like hours for the father to disperse the crowd outside their home. Then, without a word, he climbed into the car and they were on their way.
The rear-view mirror framed her father’s gaze in a way that made the girl feel a little uncomfortable. With short intervals to focus on the road, his eyes were almost constantly locked on his daughter. She had never known how to meet his stare; it wasn’t like her mother’s. It always felt hard and serious. The girl hugged her knees as close as the seat-belt would let her. Her shins knocked together as the chill of the rain crept through a small gap in the window. Several minutes passed before it stopped. Then her father broke the silence. We’re going to the big city, he told her, to see your mother. He caught a glimpse of her pink tongue through the gap in her teeth as she smiled. He smiled back.
Rolling hills and thickets of trees sped past the car, and the little girl watched with her nose squashed against the window. Her mother had been away for days, so the girl was more than excited to see her. Bright blue eyes stared at the fence that drew a line across the horizon. She pressed her teddy-bear against the glass. He didn’t seem to appreciate the view as much as she did. It seemed like they had been driving forever when they finally stopped. The girl wrinkled her nose as she the stench of the gas station caught in her nostrils. Her father opened the side-door and told her she should sit quietly while he filled up the car and that he would lock the doors and only be a couple of minutes and that she shouldn’t worry because he’d be back soon and then they could see her mother again. The door slammed shut. A few minutes later, it was wrenched open again.
When the girl woke up, she was glad to be alone. Silence sat in the room like a second person, save for the drip-drop of rain through the broken roof shingles. One of the curtains was draped across a chair, casting a harsh bar of orange light across the mattress. Thetis Alcesteos didn’t bother to close it. The darkness scared her a little bit; the deprivation of light when she was in Viola had always sent her thoughts into a frenzy. Like a snake, they would coil and wind themselves around her head, suffocating her, poisoning her. She rolled onto Fiona’s side of the bed and groaned into the pillow. But Thetis couldn’t go back to sleep, not now. The tiredness was still there, yes, but it was unreliable, fleeting.
The tiled floor of the bathroom was cold underfoot. With a pull of the cord, a single bulb shed its dull light across the room and the girl dragged herself to the dirty glass mirror. Any form of distraction would do. For several minutes, she stared. Thetis searched in herself for the image of the little girl in the dream. The skip with which she walked. The gap-toothed smile. The slight button of a nose. The rosy cheeks. The olive skin.
There was no trace of her.
She stared at the girl in the mirror and saw the same thing she always had; high, hollow cheekbones, arms punctured with needle scars, slouched shoulders, skin pale with sickly pallor, eyes that had seen too much. Thetis shrugged the mess of blue hair back over her shoulder. It was some sort of self-conscious reminder, when every strand spilt over her skin, ratty and untied. Things hadn’t changed much at all, not since Viola, anyway. She pulled a spare hair-tie from her wrist and began to braid her hair. For Thetis, the very act was therapeutic. Calming. Routine. Then something caught her eye. As she threaded one lock of hair into another, her arm pulled up the material of her tank. And there it was, plain as day.
Thirty slim black bars of varying widths branded into her skin of her hip-bone, underlined by nine digits that would be forever burned into her memory. The mark of a Destrillian. She couldn’t remember how she got it, only that she woke up one day and it was there.
It hadn’t faded.
****************************************
What are we waiting for?
Dr. Abaddon had once described Dr. Perkins as a soulless automaton. On the contrary, Alison Perkins thought her silence to be a form of dignified professionalism. There was no need for a stream of obscenities as the risks increased, no murmured threats towards incompetent colleagues and no off-hand attempts at humour to relieve the tension. No, to Alison Perkins, silence was her greatest guardian against escalating frustrations.
Are we waiting for someone?
“What have I taught you, Number Six?” The Doctor didn’t look up from the clipboard she was studying.
“…T-that I should talk verbally when I’m with you or the other doctors, Dr. Perkins.” There was a small sigh of satisfaction as the prototype in the Plexiglas chair finally spoke. It had only taken three hours, twenty six minutes and seven seconds. But that wasn’t what they were both here for. Yellow eyes darted to Dr. Perkins as she fingered a speck of dirt on her lapel. There was nothing else to focus on.
“Have you felt anything unusual in the last four weeks, Number Six?” Whether it was a trick of the light, the prototype didn’t know, but she swore she could see her reflection in the Doctor’s glasses. There was something sinister about her that made a shiver run up Number Six’s spine.
“Well,” the prototype mumbled, winding her fingers through strands of blue hair “I-I keep feeling sick when the other doctors stick needles in me—“
“Answer my question, Six.” But prototype Six didn’t want to answer. She didn’t like it when she heard that horrible, scolding voice, but she hated it even more when the doctor was disappointed with her. Before the prototype said another word, her eyes darted from one corner of the room to the other. There was no one else there, except, of course, the men behind the two way mirror. But Number Six didn’t need to know that. The blue-haired girl gripped her knees until her knuckles turned white, and, as if she was telling a secret, the prototype leaned closer to her doctor.
“S-sometimes…” she didn’t dare the meet the doctor’s steely gaze. “I-I mean, all the time, kind of. I-It feels like there’s always something else in the room with me.” Alison Perkins stopped scribbling notes. “A-and it’s not just this room, it’s e-everywhere I go.” Number Six’s teeth sunk into her bottom lip. “T-the worst part is, I know I could t-touch it if I wanted.” Fingers began tapping nervously on the arm of the clear plastic chair. “I-I just think it would swallow me up if I t-tried.”
With a small smile, Dr. Perkins carefully rested her clipboard on the desk. What could be more reassuring than the reminder of success? Perhaps human ingenuity was not so flawed after all. The doctor steepled her fingers and reclined into her chair. “I would like it very much if you would concentrate on that feeling for a couple of minutes,” she paused for a second. “Could you do that for me, Number Six?” Her voice was steeped with a kindness the prototype had never felt before. She longed for it, to hear it again and again. A rare smile crept onto Number Six’s face, and her hands trembled with excitement.
“Will I get into trouble?”
“Of course not,” the reply came, smothered by the same false sweetness. Dr. Perkins leaned forward, and her voice lowered to a whisper. “It’ll be our little secret.” An excited nod sealed the contract of confidentiality between doctor and patient. No longer shackled by the fear of a harsh reprimand, the blue-haired girl shuffled to the edge of her chair and closed her eyes.
It all seemed to happen in slow motion. Fingers flexed and muscles tensed as Number Six reached out to touch the phantom that had bothered her for so long. At first the prototype thought she was bending the air, but it was much heavier than that. It was suffocating, the way the very molecules surrounding her seemed to shake and spasm. Blue eyebrows knitted together; it was almost tangible now, licking at the tips of her fingers, taunting her. There was no-one now, only Number Six and the ever growing pressure that threatened to squish her into the ground if she stopped concentrating for even a second. The room stretched and swelled and nearly burst. Clenching her fist, the prototype’s mouth twitched open. She snatched at the air, and, with all the strength she could muster, forced it back.
Yellow eyes snapped open as an explosion of pressure slammed into her body and sent her flying backwards. Chest heaving, Number Six stared as water trickled down newly formed rivulets in the wall. Then she remembered she wasn’t alone. It was only when the prototype watched Perkins’ mouth opening and closing without a sound that she heard the ringing. Ringing that was agonising, shrill and relentless. Scrambling away from the guards that tried to pull her to her feet, Number Six swung her arm almost instinctively.
The prototype’s mouth hung open at what she saw next; a pair of fully grown men hurled across the room by a wall of water. Number Six knew it had been her; she didn’t feel so overwhelmed in her basement world anymore. In fact, she felt strangely powerful. And watching those guards as they slammed against the wall? She didn’t understand why, but it made her feel… good. The ringing subsided, and a nervous, yet ecstatic smile painted Number Six’s face as Dr. Perkins walked over, clipboard in hand.
“I-I did it! I did just like you said I should do it, Dr. Perkins!” For the first time since she had woken up, Number Six was laughing. Elation overshadowed all fear of consequence, and her happiness soared like a kite in the clear blue sky. She had never felt so free.
And for once, Dr. Perkins was lost for words. How she marvelled in her own creation, her own ingenuity. Water. How extraordinary. All the failures, all the mishaps, all had been overcome. No, they didn’t matter anymore.
Alison Perkins had created a fully functional Destrillian.
A tug on her sleeve tore the doctor from her reverie.
“Y-you aren’t angry at me?” The doctor’s eyes roamed over the two unconscious guards before resting on the prototype. In the moment’s silence that followed, there was something in the way Dr. Perkins lips had curved in to a smile, something about the way in which she held the prototype in her gaze that made Number Six draw away.
“Some things come with their own punishments, Number Six.”
********************
A year had passed since Number Six manifested her powers, and finally, finally, she had been allowed to access the Recreation Room. The prototype was excited, of course, but fear churned inside her. Anxieties floated through her thoughts like storm clouds. Only, there didn’t seem to be a silver lining. Number Six had been warned that many prototypes had turned out to be…unpredictable, but as long as she remained obedient, she would be safe. Number Six loved that word, safe. It reminded her of how she felt when she was sleeping in her pod. There was something safe in the glass of her tube. It was familiar, and she couldn’t deny the enveloping security of being tenderly imprisoned within. No training, no tests, no interruptions. When she was first told of the Recreation Room Number Six felt distinctly Un-Safe. She didn’t like it one bit.
Dr. Perkins told her how important it was that she tried to integrate with the others. Other Destrillians, she called them. Number Six had been referred to as such for nearly a year now.
Destrillian.
She didn’t understand what it meant.
When the recreation room door was opened to her, it hardly became any clearer. In fact, Number Six thought to herself as she ambled over the threshold, the only thing everyone seemed to have in common was how strange they all looked. Only two steps in, Number Six caught a glimpse of a blonde-haired girl in a corner. Pale and wiry, dark rings of exhaustion hung around her storm-grey eyes. Number Six thought she looked a little sad, sat there with an IV in her arm. But she didn’t approach her. She didn’t want to be scared away.
Without a second glance, Number Six tip-toed over to the nearest chair. Before taking a seat, the prototype eyed it suspiciously, as if it was a prop to someone’s cruel prank. She decided against it, and instead slid down the white-washed wall to sit on the floor. After what felt like an age, Number Six finally mustered the courage to take a look around.
That was when she saw her. The girl with piano key hair. She had none of Number Six’s wide-eyed vulnerability, no, there was something about her; something wild, untamed; something of an education that made her seem distinctly out of place in the confines of the four walls that boxed her in. In a way, Number Six felt relieved when she saw her, but also wary. She was a protest against the rules and authority that hung in the air like smoke. It was only when the doctors moved the girl on that Six felt her illusions shatter.
How could she be allowed to think otherwise? This girl, this Destrillian was a seduction, a false hope to dream beyond her cryo-tube. Dr. Perkins had warned her about the others, and now she understood. The lure of temptation hurt more than she could imagine. So, like a drowning human breaking the surface of the ocean only to be dragged back under, Six shrank back into her corner.
Disapproval mewled in the background as the girl strolled around the room, talking to some, waving at others. Prototype Six shuffled uncomfortably. If Dr. Perkins saw her doing that, she didn’t even want to think about what would happen. Number Six looked away and put her hands on her knees. She could not quite feel them anymore. A faint sound from across the room made the water prototype aware that she was being watched. Number Six glanced at the girl who was making her way over and turned herself further into the wall.
“Haven’t seen you here before.”
Leaning over to study Six, the girl hooked her thumbs in the waistband of her sweatpants. Long, fine strands of black hair hung down by her ears, while her deep violet eyes were framed by high ridges of cheek-bone and a fringe swept with white. Number Six noticed the soft line of her mouth and how she had to almost pout to hide her smile. Yellow eyes followed the delicate curve of her neck, the slope of her shoulders, the toned contours of her arms, drinking in every detail of the girl’s unblemished porcelain skin as she went. After a thorough examination, the purple-eyed girl righted herself. With a twitch of the fingers in greeting, she finally introduced herself. “I’m Ariel. What’s your name?”
“T-today is my f-first day,” The water Destrillian stammered and stared fixedly into the floor. She felt suffocated by the attention. Every object in the room began to bulge; and Six felt herself shrink as the room seemed to strain with things and people far bigger than she. Ariel was unusual; that much was clear. The way she held herself; how she walked; the musicality with which she spoke; it was the strength and detachment of someone who lived in another world.
“I can tell,” Ariel teased, and Six flinched at the laughter in her voice. She pulled her knees a little closer. “So what’s your name, then?”
“My name is N-Number Six,” she said almost in a whisper. Ariel cocked her head to one side.
“The doctors here call me Number Twelve, but that doesn’t make it my name you know,” Ariel sat down next to the water Destrillian and held her in a firm gaze. “Don’t you have a real name?”
The blue-haired girl lifted her eyes from the floor and caught Ariel’s stare. It was only a few seconds before she looked away again. "D-Dr. Perkins said I-I'm called Number Six. That is my name.”
“She's never called you anything else?” Ariel raised an eye-brow. Around her, the air was sad somehow. Behind that smile in her eyes lay two dark pits of disappointment. Number Six didn’t answer and her brows furrowed in confusion. All these questions were beginning to make her feel uncomfortable. Dr. Perkins always made her answer questions.
“W-well, sometimes she just calls me S-Six." Ariel’s gaze intensified and Six’s heart tightened in her chest. After a moment’s silence, the water prototype glanced nervously across the room. Dr. Perkins was conspicuously absent. The blue-haired girl pulled her legs closer and smiled shyly at the older girl "You c-can call me that if y-you like?"
Ariel twisted her face into a scowl, her dislike for the doctors' labelling of the other Destrillian was obvious.
"Do you like that then? Being called Six?"
Six's gaze dropped as Ariel's sharp tone cut through her confidence. There was complete silence for a moment or two, and Six hoped someone would come to take her back to her tube. The water prototype screwed her eyes shut as she fumbled for the right words.
"W-well I g-guess I do," the blue-haired girl didn't meet Ariel's stare. Her lip trembled everso slightly as she spoke. "I l-like it."
The Destrillian of Sound relaxed her gaze a bit, noticing how timid and nervous the blue-haired Destrillian was, she made sure that her next words were spoken with less intensity.
"I used to like being called Number Twelve too, I suppose. Back when they first started letting me out of my pod. Then, one day, I overheard one of the guards calling me Ariel. I liked it, so I kept it," she said with a smile. "Turns out that was the name I had before I woke up."
Six looked up, eyebrows knitted in confusion. "B-before you woke up?"
Ariel turned to meet Number Six's large yellow eyes and shrugged, "You know? That first time you woke up? If you can remember it. Not all of us can all that well." Six's bangs fell across her face as she shook her head. "Why don't you ask your doctor what your real name is?"
"I-I don't understand," Six stammered. Dr. Perkins didn't like it when the water prototype asked questions. She didn't like it one bit. Yellow eyes widened as the doctor's savage tone resonated in her. White fingers twisted in each other. Six was frightened. "I don't understand."
"I'm sorry, I didn't mean to upset you," Ariel said gently, recognising how her persistance was making Number Six tremble and stammer, and instantly recognising the source of that insecurity. Her doctor must be a total bitch.
"I can find out for you, if you want? I can find you a better name than the one that they've given you."
The curious gleam in her eyes faded almost as quickly as it had appeared. "B-but I like this one," Six mumbled. The quiet order and cleanliness of the recreation room seemed to be unravelling around her. She desperately wanted to be back in her pod. Dr. Perkins hadn't told her the others would be so unkind. As if to make sense of it all, Number Six took a deep breath and spoke slowly. "It is mine."
"No, it's not, it's their's." came the sympathetic reply.
The thought made her nauseous. Something unsettling had swum up in the blackness. The water Destrillian shivered, as if to physically shake it off. The feeling remained. Ariel was still wearing that hard gaze, and Six would have cried if her eyes were not so dry from staring.
“Number Six?” There was an odd whimper in the attendant’s voice as he spoke. “It’s time to go.” He seemed to brace himself, as if preparing for an emergency. The prototype nodded obediently and rose to her feet. She looked at Ariel, who remained cross-legged on the floor.
“I-It was nice to meet you,” Six said quietly, just as Dr. Perkins had told her to. The water Destrillian allowed the man to lay his hand on her shoulder and lead the way. In the second she looked back, Six caught a glimpse of Ariel glaring venomously at the guards.
If Jason Spencer had noticed that the rusted hands of the clock had stopped ticking then he had declined to do anything about it. Not that there would have been much to do about it anyway, garbage could only be stripped down for so much and it was doubtful this rusted and broken relic would have fetched a price worthy of him lifting himself up off his mattress.
Clocks were a pretty arbitrary commodity in the Undercity anyway. Neither daylight nor darkness filled its cramped corridors of this grimy makeshift metropolis. It was permanently lit by the sickly green floodlights that hung from the ceiling of the massive underground hollow. It was powered by hundreds of thousands of thick rubber pipes that supplied the ramshackle settlement with power from massive turbines buried deep beneath the Undercity itself.
When the first survivors of the war with Artolia fled the radiation drenched wasteland of the surface in favour of the underground, it had seemed like a natural plan to construct their settlement above one of the nation’s geothermal power stations. The power station itself was one of the few pieces of infrastructure that had survived the nuclear bombardment because of its geographical location so many miles beneath the planet’s surface.
However, power had only been the first step towards survival, and the collection of survivors would have quickly abandoned their newfound haven had they not turned their attention towards attaining fresh water and growing food in the few areas of non-polluted farmland on the surface. Neither task proved to be easy; many months went by before the settlers were able to find and create a reliable fresh water well that was not poisoned by the radiation soaked topsoil. Moreover, the above-ground farms needed to be kept under watch every hour of the day by grim-faced men and women who had to monitor the direction of the wind and the amount of radiation that would be blown in.
So the Undercity had prospered, attracting the vagrants and the survivors, those who had been forced to eke out an existence in a world that had been scorched barren by conflict. Nobody was turned away and over time rudimentary society had begun to develop once more. Arguably for the very first time since Artolia had dropped its nuclear bombs during the war, some semblance of normal life was being cultivated in the deep pits of the world beneath Vaul’s charred surface.
Life was not perfect here, as Jason Spencer and Oberon had quickly discovered shortly after their arrival at the undercity nine months ago. Like any power vacuum, there were those quick to fill the gap and take advantage of the fledgling society.
It wasn’t so much that crime was rife in the city. In that regard it compared quite well against the metropolises of other countries. Laws here were strict and strictly regulated by police primarily made up of former soldiers in the Vaul armed forces. After a few minor skirmishes, the pair of teenagers had learnt not to get on the wrong side of the city’s security guards. The problems facing the Undercity mainly lay with the factionalism that had been allowed to develop in the absence of any definite system of government. Decisions and plans were often developed by prominent figures within the community or those who had been around the longest . Seniority, coupled with the charisma required to make oneself noticed, was heard and respected.
And Oberon was late.
Oberon was frequently late these days and it never failed to tick him off. They were going to miss their appointment at this rate. In all fairness, it could more accurately be called a job interview; not that the Undercity had anything quite as simple or as divisive as actual employers or currency. Such things had been abolished when the lofty goal of survival had been made the goal of this society, rather than the cultivation of any class or economic based hierarchy. As such, everyone was expected to work in order to receive regular rations of food and clean water. Whilst it was true that the city would not turn away the unemployed, they were treated as worse than dirt by the populace.
Since they had arrived, the pair had quickly been given jobs helping to clean out the old ventilation system leading to the geothermal power station below. It was dangerous work because of the ramshackle state of the shafts and the difficulty posed in navigating their narrow pathways. Often the shafts themselves fell vertically, with nothing in the way of handholds for gripping onto; not that there was ever much need for that. In certain parts, the dank vents became so narrow that even the smallest, most lithe of individuals could get themselves wedged in there for days until rescue came.
It was nightmarish, claustrophobic work that was often handed out to the children and teenagers because they could most easily navigate the narrow labyrinthine network of tunnels and pipes beneath the Undercity. Thankfully, both Jason and Oberon had now reached the end of their adolescence and were considered by their superiors to be much too large for work in the tight confines of the ventilation system.
Whilst both boys had developed a wiry, lean physique, it had been Oberon who had gained the most from the growth spurt, albeit only just. Jason, however, had found that his broad shoulders and regular exercise had married themselves nicely to the regular food he was now receiving from the Undercity’s kitchen into giving him the taut physique that was a far cry from the scrawny, underfed adolescent he had been years ago.
And Oberon was still late. Frustration growled in the pit of Jason's stomach.
He swung his legs down from the top bunk and sighed. This was a nasty habit that his friend had been picking up.
As if on cue, the door to the single bedroom that made up their accommodation swung open and Oberon’s form swaggered through, his sharp, chiselled features hidden beneath an unruly mop of dark hair.
“You’re late again,”
The accusation was instantaneous, but Oberon merely smirked incredulously and raised his eyebrows up so that they disappeared well beyond his shaggy fringe.
“What’s the big deal?”
“You’ll know the big deal if we miss our appointment with Rossiter and we’re stuck cleaning poison out of the ventilation shafts for another six months because you don’t know how to arrive anywhere on time.”
Rather than respond to the retort, Oberon simply pulled a sour face as Jason clambered down off the top bunk and glowered across at his friend. Much to his irritation he could see that despite his younger age, the barest traces of stubble were starting to form across Oberon’s chin. He doubted he would ever hear the end of that.
“Let’s go then.”
The pair swiftly left the chamber, taking the time to seal the several locks on the door before setting off down the hectic metallic corridor towards one of the several dozen elevators that the Undercity used to transport its denizens to the many floors of the abandoned power plant and its many workers to the outskirts. This was where new sections of the city were continually being cut out of the sheer rock in order to continue expanding the necessary living quarters for the refugees who sought shelter beneath ruined wastes of the world.
Predictably, the corridors of the shelter were filled to bursting with the usual busy workmen clad in their overalls, urchins running playing and merchants wearing wide shaggy cloaks to hide their contraband. None of these posed an obstacle for the two teens as they expertly wove their way through the crowds towards the elevator on this level. To this day it never failed to amaze Jason how vast this complex was. Despite the various sections that had fallen into disrepair, it had been protected from the nuclear bombardment because of its natural protection deep beneath the planet’s crust.
As always, the queue for the elevators was a long one. It was the hub of everything. Of the spider’s web of activity that was woven throughout the entire facility. Once the pair had finally gotten on, they set their sights on foreman’s office three floors above them. Most of the main offices for the power plant had been here originally, however many of those non-essential ones had already been converted into administrative offices from which the entire Undercity was run.
As the pair left the elevator it was obvious that unlike the residential floors below them, this level of the city was not used for housing refugees. It was far cleaner and its walls were not dirtied by the constant hustle and bustle of moving crowds. Instead the uninspiring slate grey paint was largely covered up by cork boards, to which an incalculable amount of lists had been pinned. From requisition orders to work rotas, everything was on display here, formulated by a small army’s worth of secretaries and analysts, drawn from any member of the city who showed themselves to have a particular aptitude for organization.
It was in one of these offices that Foreman Cameron Rossiter was based. Rossiter had been a former Major in the Vaul armed forces’ engineering corps and was easily the most physically imposing man in the entire city- at least, according to everybody that had ever had an appointment with him. He was the one responsible for assigning every citizen in the Undercity to their respective job assignments. Usually, the line outside his door stretched all the way down the long corridor but today it was curiously empty. The office door was tightly shut and muffled shouting was distinctly audible through the closed door.
“Wonder what the poor shit in there did to piss him off,” growled Oberon in a low voice, just in case Rossiter’s keen ears picked up on the muttering.
“Knowing Rossiter? Hell, I don’t know. Brought him the wrong cup of coffee?” Jason suggested wryly. Rossiter’s explosive temper was almost as well known as his commanding skill in organizing the ramshackle workforce of the Undercity. Something twisted unpleasantly in the pit of Jason’s stomach. The thought of upsetting Rossiter and being forced to work topside on the windmills that measure that amount and direction of the radiation sweeping the country. Those poor bastards definitely did not have a long shelf life.
Oberon gave a grin at the joke. Unlike Jason, he didn’t seem nervous at all. As always in times of great stress, he remained totally unflappable.
“How do you do that?”
“Do what?” Oberon replied, genuine confusion in his voice.
“You don’t seem worried at all. What’s your secret?”
“What’s there to be worried about?” came the response, Oberon’s voice was strange and curiously flat. “Whatever this guy can do to us in here, is nothing compared to what we’ve already been through out there.”
He didn’t need to elaborate. Both of the boys knew exactly what he was referring to and exactly how much they had lost before they had run into each other six years ago. Was that why he never seemed scared?
The door to the office swung open, nearly being pulled off its hinges in the process as a simply terrified young man was almost thrown from the room.
“You two. In here, now.” A deep voice growled from the inside. It was deep and rumbling, like the feeling of an earthquake or a volcano.
Silently, the pair entered the sparsely decorated office. Besides the man in the centre of the room, its most prominent feature was the row of filing cabinets that lines two of the four walls.The desk and chair seemed to be nothing more than a token commodity as both were piled so deeply beneath papers and clipboards that it was a wonder that anything could be found there at all.
All these things paled in comparison to the room’s true centrepiece. Truthfully, no matter how big the office might have been, it became almost comically dwarfed by the presence of Cameron Rossiter. Simply put, the man was enormous, easily over seven foot tall, colossal arm muscles bulged out from beneath the sleeveless coveralls that were stretched tight across broad shoulders. He seemed to have more in common with a rhinoceros than any human being the pair had ever seen before. His black hair was closely cropped and a distinct comparison to the thick beard of black bristles that dominated his face.
As soon as the pair entered his line of sight, Jason had the distinct impression that his dark eyes were scanning the pair of them. Staring right through them from their home in his craggy, tanned face and picking them apart, piece by piece.
“Jason Spencer and Oberon?” he grunted, flicking his eyes down to one of the clipboards that he snatched up off the desk with one gloved paw. “Oberon, your last name is missing,”
“I don’t have a last name.” The dark-haired boy replied back. Jason did all he could to avoid sighing, this was a tired conversation that he had heard all too many times before.
“Don’t have a last name?” Rossiter repeated, snapping his eyes back up to meet Oberon’s. There was no doubting it now, he was definitely sizing the two up. Though his voice had become quiet, not sceptical or judgmental, but definitely curious.
“I was an orphan. Parents only left me with the one name.” Apparently this was all the answer that Rossiter needed as he simply grunted and returned to staring down at his clipboard.
“You two have any particular area you would like to work in?” Rossiter asked. His voice had once again dropped to low, utterly unreadable levels.
“Not really,” Jason answered this time, drawing the coal black eyes in his direction.
“Good, I’m not in the habit of indulging peoples favourites or fancies,” Jason could have sworn he had seen the corners of Rossiter’s mouth flicker upwards into a smile beneath the bushy beard. “You’ll be working where we need you to work most. You understand?”
“Yes sir,” both of the young men nodded.
Rossiter nodded in approval. “The mining division could use a couple of strong lads like you. It's more work than the engineering down in the power plant. Maybe when you’re older,” Jason nodded, Oberon smiled. Mining was definitely good work compared to some of the other terrible jobs that needed doing just to ensure that the Undercity could continue to function. Mining and expansion were much better than swabbing out the all too easily clogged sewage pipes, afterall.
“Orphan you say?” Rossiter rumbled again, apparently losing his train of thought. “If you hadn’t told me otherwise, I could have sworn that you two were brothers.”
.oOo.
“Can you believe he said that?”
“Yeah, absolutely,”
Jason and Oberon both looked incredulously across the dirty little table that was now liberally covered in empty glasses of particularly cheap vodka.
“What? You guys do look alike!” the justification was said with a particularly grotesque grin. Not that, that was his fault.
“Ever the joker, Coffin,” Jason replied drily, “Do us all a favour and shut up.”
Their partner, Coffin just spread his horrific grin even wider. Coffin wasn’t his real name, but it was one that he had taken to calling himself because according to him ‘he’d be in one sooner rather than later’. It was a remarkably optimistic attitude to have considering that he was speaking the absolute truth. Coffin was one of the many, many people who had suffered directly at the hands of Artolia’s nuclear bombs. In addition to losing his family and friends to the fire, he had been hit directly with the heat and radiation. As a result, seventy five percent of his body had been covered in twisted, searing burns that might have healed with time, though his appearance would forever be a living portrait to the atrocities committed.
He was completely hairless, and his nose had almost completely disintegrated, leaving an a gaping dark hole in the centre of his face, which was an almost unrecognisable mass of blistered scar tissue and sickly transparent skin.
“Whatever you say man, I’m just here for the booze,” came the jovial reply as the hairless man picked up his glass and downed it in one. The two boys grinned and did likewise. Coffin had been one of the first people to help the two settle into the Undercity when they had first arrived from the wastelands, and he was a hard man to dislike. A couple of years older than the pair of teenagers, Coffin was always ready with a quick joke and almost unstoppable optimism despite his horrific injuries. This staple of his personality was only compounded by the ludicrously bright orange vest that he wore adorned with a blank grinning face.
“You ever work the mines, Coff?” Oberon asked casually, signalling over to the man working behind the bar to get another round of their cheap, nasty vodka ready.
“ ’Fraid not, Oberon, don’t got the energy for it, you know?” he replied back. Jason nodded in understanding; mining was tough, physical work and Coffin, despite his boundless optimism, was not cut out for that level of physical endurance. “I doubt Rossiter would take it too kindly if my arms fell off whilst on the job.”
“He’d probably just tell you to keep going with your teeth or something. I’d hate to see what would happen to the poor sod who fell behind on production,” laughed Oberon.
“We have incinerators for a reason.” Smirked Jason, prompting another round of laughter from the three friends, not to mention another round of drinks.
“You guys not think about trying to volunteer for the security forces?”
“Definitely not, I’ve seen enough of what the military can do,” replied Oberon almost instantly. His voice was unwavering and decisive. Jason shifted uneasily in his seat. It was not an action that went unnoticed, as though Oberon had fully expected Jason to back him up immediately. He turned to his long time friend and raised his eyebrows expectantly.
Jason merely shrugged.
“Something you want to bring to this party?” asked Oberon, the tone of his voice had a definite steel to it.
“The military isn’t going to start fighting back against Artolia, so what’s the point?” Jason stared at the vodka in his chipped glass as he swirled it around with his wrist. “We’d only be fighting against the same scum we always fight,”
If Jason had expected the reply to just blow over the conversation as though it was no big deal, he was being desperately hopeful.
“You what!?” Oberon shouted so loudly that the bar manager and several of his customers turned to stare in disgust at the racket. “Are you fucking serious? You’d consider joining the army only to get one over on Artolia?”
“Wouldn’t you?” Jason asked icily, keeping his cool despite his friend’s explosive outburst.
“Correct me if I’m wrong but didn’t you once tell me that you are an Artolian, Jason?” asked Coffin. His rasping voice remained surprisingly neutral.
“It was Artolia who imprisoned me in a camp, Coffin. It was Artolia who gunned down my parents right in front of my eyes regardless of their nationality. I have every right to hate them just as much as the two of you do,”
Oberon continued to look appalled. “And you want revenge, right? Is that it?”
“You don’t?” the response was quiet and utterly deadpan.
“I don’t see the point of more fucking war when we could be focusing on helping people, protecting them from each other,” Oberon snapped back. “I read those books you know. The ones that you thought I didn’t? The ones about history? War accomplishes jack shit, Spencer, you of all people should know that.”
“Helping people?” Jason scoffed back almost immediately, “You can’t really expect me to stay here forever, Oberon. Hiding in this dark, seedy corner of the world. Not after all that’s happened. Not after everything I’ve lost to Artolia. You of all people should know that.”
If anything, this was what staggered Oberon the most. Never had he considered the prospect that Jason might have had plans that lay beyond the walls of the Undercity. Beyond the borders of Vaul.
“So what? You’re going to burn Artolia to the ground just because you lost Mommy and Daddy? The world doesn’t revolve around y-“ The punch took that connected with his jaw had come so quickly that Oberon didn’t even have time to comprehend it before he was laid out on the floor. The glass-burdened table was suddenly upended as Jason lunged at him, eyes wide and rabid. A combination of shock and alcohol had slowed his response time so that when he staggered to his feet, a crowd was already forming to try and separate the two. Coffin leaping between the two and literally forcing the two apart.
“I’ll make it revolve around me!” roared Spencer, his face a livid mask contorted with rage. Something had snapped between them in mere seconds. Jason Spencer had always been so quiet and so reserved, to see all this rage and hate spilling out of him was a sobering sight. Oberon, no longer was leaning on the jostling crowd for support, just stared in disbelief. Spencer was almost unrecognisable.
“You’re an idiot,” Oberon spat back, watching with savage enjoyment as Jason continued to thrash against those who crowded back to restrain him. He had seen everyone in his entire orphanage die at the hands of Artolia in the war, but there was no hatred there. Nothing like this. People couldn’t be trusted to settle conflicts on their own. It would only ever breed more revenge born out of hate.
“You’re both idiots.” Coffin grunted unhelpfully as he continued to hold the pair apart at arm’s length.
“Get off me!” Jason howled, breaking free of the many pairs of hands that gripped him. He cast one glare of pure loathing at Oberon and then turned, vanishing into the tight throng of people.
“Jason! Jason!” he called after him, but Jason Spencer was gone. His oldest friend was nowhere to be seen amidst the oncoming press of people demanding to know what had started the confrontation.
.oOo.
It had taken roughly an hour for Oberon and Coffin to finish explaining what had happened to pair of extremely unimpressed looking security guards. Their disinterested glares had given the two lads every impression that this incident would be filed under ‘drunken argument’ when the report came to be filed.
But it hadn’t been a simple drunken argument. Something felt torn inside Oberon as he and Coffin sat in silence in the empty room that used to belong to himself and Spencer. Coffin had been right, earlier in the night, when he had made a passing remark about the two looking like brothers. They felt like brothers. They had spent practically every day of the past seven years at each others’ sides, literally fighting the world itself for their right to survive. Now Jason was gone.
The room had been completely untouched, he clearly hadn’t checked back in here on his way out from the bar.
“You reckon he’s left the city?” Coffin asked for what felt like the hundredth time.
“The hell should I know.” Oberon snarled back, for what felt like the two hundredth time. The whole experience had been so explosively out of character that he wasn’t sure what Jason would do next.
Coffin shrugged. He hadn’t known Jason for nearly as long as Oberon had, but he still felt compelled to stay and help his friend in his time of grief.
“I’m sorry I brought it up, man,” he said lamely.
Oberon looked up from the wooden chair, his expression one of genuine puzzlement.
“I’m sorry I brought up the whole security thing. I didn’t expect him to fly off the handle like that, I should have just stuck to the booze,” Coffin continued earnestly, even after Oberon waved away the apology with a gesture of his hand, hoping that Coffin did not notice the tears prickling at the corners of his eyes.
“No, shut up. You have nothing to apologise for,” he sighed. “The bastard’s gone,”
Captain Aiden Hubble knew as much. No expedition sailed this long through waters this dangerous and with no pay in sight without the crew murmuring and hissing mutiny behind his back. In was in the nature of sailors to complain, especially with privateers. Men who had renounced the rigid discipline of the navy in order to live the life of piracy and freedom; these were men who most frequently resorted to complaining. If they were malcontent under the authority in the Artolian Navy, then they weren’t going to be any happier under the command of a shady privateer.
Such was the way of things. The Captain couldn’t afford to be picky about his crew. Not when he had asked so much of them already.
The Captain was not an unreasonable man. His stocky, grizzled appearance belied a keen, savvy mind that had made him as able a businessman as he was a seaman. At least to this end, his appearance was fitting. His thick silver hair and beard had and tied into thick knots and braids for the most part, for convenience sake, and his features were hardened and red from nearly three decades of working his craft across every ocean under the endless sky.
Or so he had thought. There was no two ways to look at it, Captain Hubble had concluded; they were lost.
So the men had been talking.
And the Captain had been fretting. He had lost track of the amount of sleepless hours he had spent pouring over the vast yellowing maps he had spread over every flat surface in the small captain’s cabin, each one criss-crossed with a spider’s web of cartographer’s lines and navigation routes through the thousands and thousands of islands that peppered the storm-tossed Shattered Sea. Unfortunately, every one of these maps was useless. The labyrinth of identical barren, mountainous islands and unchanging charcoal grey tumultuous water that spread out in every direction around them made this particular vast stretch of water probably the most deadly in the entire world. Countless ships throughout history had been lost in this lifeless geographical maze; enough for Hubble’s every instinct to warn him against making this voyage. But the promised pay had been too good and his wallet had been light for too long. There wasn’t much call for privateers in a world that had already been eaten up by armies and corporations.
The Captain sighed fruitlessly; the latest weather chart he had been training his watery eyes on had proved just as useless as the last three he had seen today. He grasped the thick rubber mug he had been using to steady the charts against the pitching and the rolling of the ship against the perpetually turbulent seas, lifted it to his lips and took a generous swig of rum, its fiery taste doing nothing to cure the knot of anxiety coiling in his stomach.
The ship rolled with the latest wave and the charts spilled from the table. He did not bother collect them. Instead, with mug clasped firmly in hand, the Captain marched forth from his Cabin and out onto the deck of the forecastle. Unsurprisingly, the rain was lashing down. It was nearly always raining in the Shattered Sea, but that was only when storms of ball lightning weren’t blistering down the corridors of water between the tall cliff faces of the surrounding islands.
This truly was a hellish place.
“Captain,” came the grim acknowledgement of the helmsman, a small, wiry lad with a thatch of messy straw blonde hair. “Storm’s coming in.”
“You sure, Chase?” Hubble queried, taking another sip of the rum from his mug.
The young man nodded resolutely, not even turning to face his Captain, his eyes instead focused on the horizon of chaotic open ocean and the occasional bleak, towering cliff face. Hubble didn’t doubt him. Thirty years at sea and he had yet to find a man with eyes and instincts quite as good as Chase, a street urchin from a pirate port that he had ended up rescuing from the gallows, where the boy had been scheduled to hang on several dozen charges of theft. As good as his eyes were, he had never been very good at pushing his luck.
“Aye, I’m sure.” Chase added for emphasis, noting the inky black distant clouds and the low rumbling of thunder.
“Anything else I should know, Chase?” The savvy Captain drained the last of his mug and leant his elbows up on the worn railing, looking down at the scurrying of activity amongst the sailors on the maindeck; a rag-tag combination of Alvyssian mercenaries, Xi Qin pirates and dark ex-slaves from the Southlands who had abandoned their masters and run north into poverty and desperation.
Chase seemed to bite his lip, temporarily holding his tongue.
“The crew is getting restless, Cap’n.” He spoke carefully, torn between betraying his crewmates and loyalty to his old captain. He decided that restless was a much better word than mutinous.
Hubble scowled, discerning Chase’s true meaning despite his diplomatic choice of word.
“Too much work for not enough pay?” he asked rhetorically. Given the substantial amount that he and the crew were being paid to charter the islands around the Shattering, he found this a questionable claim on the part of his crew.
“Not my place to say, beggin’ your pardon, Cap’n.” Chase commented stoically, but Hubble discerned that as another yes.
It had been a peculiar job, Hubble reminisced. He and his crew having been recruited out of some backwater free town on one of the Thalassan Islands. A shanty town, away from the natives and from the navy, and a refuge for pirates and privateers, it had no name and it would probably disappear sometime in the next year. Relocate to another cove, or another island, or just vanish entirely, its occupants boarding their respective ships and setting sail for beyond the horizon.
He had arranged to meet the employer in one of the many saloons set up in such a free town; one steeped in the whores, filth and alcohol that came with a town free from the law or influence of any nation or corporation. The interior of the large ramshackle establishment was lit by grimy green lanterns, and felt reminiscent of the insides of a large (and particularly cheap and filthy) ship.
Hubble had barely touched the large pint of cider before him, wanting to keep a clear head as he negotiated business with the enterprising noble who had hired him to navigate through the islands of the Shattering and map out a safe course to the islands near its core. The gentleman himself seemed both completely out of place in this place and simultaneously completely at ease with his surroundings. His cynical eyes and easy smile had led to a relatively smooth negotiation of Captain Hubble and his crew’s fees, judging from his spotless and clearly expensive manner of dress, the old, wry Captain was not afraid to start negotiations high.
The noble had smiled back and assured him that money would not be a problem.
Almost as an afterthought, the Captain had asked how his new employer was going to expect to walk safely through the streets of the free town. Someone of his dress and obvious wealth was bound to attract the attention of every cut-throat and thief in the area. The gentleman motioned to the trio who stood by the bar, huge men, with at least half dozen or so weapons strapped to their person and watching their exchange like hawks. He explained how much faith he had in his bodyguards. Hubble hadn’t pressed the matter.
The change in direction of the strong winds through this narrow channel brought Hubble back to the present. He swore under his breath, counting on the wind going against his sails in order to buy him more time to prepare his vessel for the oncoming storm. Now the sails billowed out as the small gale filled them and the ship noticeably took off like a rocket, cresting high waves and risking crashing into the high cliff walls that flanked them on either side.
“Take down the sails!” the Captain roared, piping up and gaining the attention of all those present on the deck. “We need to slow our speed!”
The crew were only too happy to start lowering the sails and taking down many of the auxiliary sails entirely, taking any course of action that would slow the propulsion of their vessel into the dark clouds rushing to meet them from the horizon. Veering off course was also not going to be an option, even as one of the cliff walls gradually tapered off beneath the ocean waters. It would have been insanity to tear off in that direction, with jagged undersea reefs like rows of knives that needed to be navigated with the utmost attention to detail.
It had taken a further hour for the worst of the storm to hit. Slate grey waves crashed against the fat hull of the ship that caused it to pitch and roll sickeningly with each thunderous strike. The jagged cliff faces that surrounded the ship looked jet black enough the obsidian sky. Not even the light of the setting sun could pierce the ominous skyline that stretched out around them in every direction. The only illumination came from the forked lightning that crashed down all around them.
Any thought of mutiny that the crew might have had had long since been put out of mind, replaced by the pure determination to survive. In all his years at sea, Hubble had never known a crew work this efficiently. The prospect of certain death did bring out the best in people.
“I suppose it would be too late to turn back, sir?” Chase yelled over the howling wind as he clung on with white knuckles to the ship’s wheel.
“Aye!” Hubble shouting back at him, even standing just feet away from Chase, he had remarkable difficulty hearing the young man. The sound of the wind roaring in his ears felt deafening and the constant feeling of the rain pelting his exposed skin had left it feeling tender and raw. Every one of his many layers of clothing felt utterly soaked through, as though he had been dunked in the water.
“We’re really going to force our way through it?”
Hubble stayed quiet, eyes transfixed on the sight in front of him. High cliffs jutted out from the water like a pair of dark fangs, driving the water between a steep bottleneck. His watery, old eyes widening in horror. No amount of experience was capable of preparing a sailor for the sight of what was developing between the rocks.
Even in calm waters, threading the ship between the two unforgiving slabs of rock and the twisted mess of sharp rocks would have been a challenge. In this storm, it seemed so much more likely that the ship would smash itself apart as it slammed into one of the cliff’s sides. Even that now seemed like a distant possibility now as he watched the scene unfold in front of him like a gripping tragedy that he could not bear to take his eyes away from.
Out from between the gap in the rocks, a tremendous surge of water had spilt out all at once. Before he knew it, he was feeling the ship sucked towards the massive wave that surged forward down the narrow rocky channel directly for the prow of the ship. Vast and grey, to his horror the wave showed no sign of slowing its terrifying ascent. It continued to grow and to gorge itself in the water around it, drawing more in until the lip of the wave towered almost as high again as the topmost mast of the ship.
Time seemed to slow down as the crew who scurried across the ships’ deck stopped their work to look at the gigantic wave. Even the wind appeared to have momentarily died down as though in respect to the colossal power of the sea as the wave rushed forwards to crush the ship under its heel.
.oOo.
17 Years Ago
The Hubble Residance
Kurban
“And they survived?” asked a sceptical voice.
“Some of them did, yes, Mr. Spencer,”
Jason Spencer raised his eyebrows in surprise as he looked up from the leathery pages of the manuscript. The face of the man whose living room he was now sitting in broke into an earnest smile.
“Forgive me, but I don’t think you would have come all this way to read my great-grandfather’s manuscript if you knew that it was a fake.”
The man was smarter than he looked, Spencer had to admit to himself. Finding any account of what lay at the heart of the Shattering was rare enough, especially given how difficult it was to actually gain a permit to study the core of the ruined continent. Many expeditions had tried, all had failed. Without exception, almost every single person who had been to the inner workings of the Shattering for the past three hundred years, since the birth of what would be considered modern science had never returned, or had been driven so insane as to be utterly unintelligible. Thus there had been a mutual decision by the governments of the world, a decision to make it a taboo subject to want to further investigate the bizarre geographical formation of the island. It would forever remain a mysterious anomaly. Studied from afar but never up close, too many times, too many precautions had just been swept aside by whatever it was that lay in the dark heart of the world.
Solomon Hubble smiled pityingly at what he saw as a foolish young businessman. A handsome man with a mane of sweeping black hair and a full dark beard that was only just beginning to show the emergence of his first grey hairs. He was not the first adventurer who had shown up asking about his ancestor’s voyage to the Shattering almost four hundred years ago and he doubted that he would be the last. He extended his arm and gestured back to the enormous book that had been laid open on the table in front of Spencer.
“Would you like to continue reading, Mr. Spencer?”
With a curt nod of acknowledgement, Spencer’s bottle green eyes shot back down to the dirty, ancient pages of the book and he continued to read.
.oOo.
Before he could see anything, Captain Aiden Hubble had become aware that the rain had stopped. The feeling of the harsh droplets slashing against his skin like bullets had been so enduring that the relief it brought to his skin was immediately noticeable. It was only then that Captain Aiden Hubble became aware that he was alive again.
His eyes cracked open slowly, gradually widening in disbelief. He had survived.
Lying on his back, the Captain was staring up into the pure blue of the sky. The only traces that a storm had ever graced such a serene looking sky were the faintest whisps of silver clouds that strung themselves across the horizon.
He was alive. For a moment, that mattered more than any of the hows or whys or wheres. He opened his mouth a sucked in a great lungful of air through his chapped lips. The fresh, cool air scorched the inside of his throat, which felt dry and scarred from the salt water.
He had very few memories of the crash. Though the raw pain he felt in his chest as he sat up was testament to how powerful the force of the wave was. He remembered the ship disintegrating as it made contact with the rush of water, he remembered watching the top deck crumple apart like paper. Then the full force of the wave hit him and he knew know more. But now he had woken up and everything seemed to hurt. Every fibre of his being seemed bruised or damaged by the storm.
Slowly. Almost painfully slowly. Hubble began to move around and survey his surroundings. He was sitting on a rock lying low in the water so that it was worn smooth by the waves that must have been lapping at it for thousands of years. Very little wreckage of the ship had washed up alongside him. A piece of wood no more than a foot across, a thin stretch of rigging, nothing more than scant debris; it would have been impossible to tell what it had come from.
He twisted his head around to take a look behind him, realising with some discomfort that there was a sharp pain in his neck whenever he tried to turn it; necessitating that he move his entire body around in order to survey the landmass behind him.
In all his years at sea and journeying to the many different corners of the world he had never once seen any island quite like this. There were no discernable features on it at all. No hills or valleys, beaches or fields. It simply rose in a slow slope off into the distance, though not even to an extent that it would be called a hill. It was merely a gentle incline, smooth and featureless. Though, what made it so unusual was that unlike the rocky ring of islands that dominated the horizon in every direction, the island itself didn’t look to be made of rock at all.
Glass.
The island appeared to be made of glass. Smooth and not even cracked despite the fact that this place was obviously ancient and stretched deep down to the sea floor, where it was anchored, not simply floating. Dimly blue, reflecting the colour of the pure azure sky above them, for a moment, Hubble was robbed of breath. Nothing else he had ever seen had come close to the majestic beauty of this pristine glass wasteland.
Ever so slowly, step by step, the bedraggled captain made his way up the slope. It was so gentle that he didn’t even have to worry about slipping on the glass in his wet boots. Turning his body one way and the other on either side of him he saw that there was nobody else from his crew here. Nobody else seemed to be making the same ascent as him, and the island was certainly flat enough that if anybody else had been climbing up the slope along with him he would have seen them no matter how far away they would be. Unless they were on the other side, past the summit.
He continued to trudge forwards, every step was agonizing. His old body was crying out for rest. But still, he felt compelled to keep going. It was as though something was calling to him from beyond the summit of the island, something just out of his reach. It felt like an almost audible beckoning, as though voices were carrying on the wind.
But there was no wind. The air around this glassy dome that inexplicably rose out of the ocean was still the point of being non-existent. Not even the knots tied into his grey beard stirred.
So the Captain kept on climbing, only dimly aware of the sun as it beat down upon the exposed top of his head and back of his neck. It was only now that he noticed that the wide tricorne hat that he had been wearing before the ship had been destroyed was lost to the Shattered Sea. It wasn’t much further now.
He pressed on, eventually coming to the summit of the island’s rise and for a second time his breath was taken away. The sight was more incredible than the island of glass itself.
Hubble stood and gazed across at the most unusual crater he had ever seen. It was roughly a mile across and completely circular, presumably the glass incline that the Captain had just walked up was mirrored on all sides of the crater, all leading up to the steep drop over they reached the summit leaning over the precipice.
It wasn’t just the size of the crater that amazed Aiden Hubble though, he had seen plenty of canyons and valleys in his time. But none quite like this. It was as though a vast raging maelstrom had bored itself down through the centre of the glass island. Every wild line and contour was frozen perfectly and preserved in glass, unmarked and unscathed by the passage of time, and it stretched down so deep into the island that the gnarled, twisted bottom of the crater was shrouded in pitch darkness, even in broad sunlight. After the initial steep drop, the crater continued to twist and narrow itself downwards, the blue sheen of the glass gradually fading through to royal blue and then to indigo before it disappeared into blackness as the pit continued to twist inwards to become narrower and narrower.
He felt sick looking down into it, like the yawning mouth of some gigantic corpse. This was a bad place. Something unspeakable had happened here. This crater was a monument to it. An everlasting scar on the face of the planet and a warning to stay away, this was not a place that life was meant to return to following the disaster.
Biting his lip, Hubble felt it now in earnest and it made him make one tentative step backwards. There was something buzzing in his ears, something indescribable. When he shook his head the noise seemed to disappear completely, as though it was something that he might have just imagined. Was it coming from the bottom of that crater?
It was as though someone or something had taken control of his body, as though he had been relegated to a mere spectator’s position as he watched himself take a slow first step back towards the lip of the crater, and jumped.
.oOo.
“It’s incredible that your great-grandfather made it back at all,” Spencer commented quietly as he looked up from the book. In the four hundred years since these words had been penned this was by far the most vivid collection of notes describing the physical experience of being on the island at the heart of the Shattering. Not once in the four hundred years since then had any of the handful of survivors who had walked on that island produce quite such a vivid recollection of the experience.
“The log stops here, I don’t suppose any note was ever made of what it was that Captain Hubble found in the crater?” he asked the question gently, well aware of the publicity surrounding the Hubble family and how well rehearsed the potential answer would probably be.
“Nothing he ever spoke of,” Solomon Hubble’s answer was so well-rehearsed that Spencer’s had already thought two steps ahead of it.
“Mr. Hubble, please, the full story,” he motioned to the jacket pocket of his smart double-breasted suit. “I am prepared to pay you handsomely for it.”
To his satisfaction he saw the greedy eyes of Solomon Hubble light up as they darted momentarily between Spencer’s green eyes and the subtle indication towards his cheque book. They might have been in a country far from Artolia, but they were by no means cut off from world politics. The fame and wealth of Jason Spencer was not news to him.
He opened his mouth to speak but then stopped, as though he had thought better of it. “My family have never told anybody this,” he spoke quietly, in a dangerous whisper. “We thought that it was best that nobody went back there to look. The last thing we want is more blood on our hands.”
Spencer said nothing in response to this, but he leaned forward. His face was kept stoic and expressionless but his green eyes widened in ravenous interest.
“For four hundred years my family has told people that he never spoke about what he found down in that crater,” Hubble closed his eyes and took a deep inhale of breath “But that isn’t to say that Captain Aiden Hubble didn’t find something down there. He just didn’t speak of what it was. Maybe he couldn’t bring himself to describe what he had seen. But he never wavered in his diary entries, ones that we never released to the public,”
“He was adamant that there was something down there.”
Six Months Ago
Spencer Mansion Underground Complex
“Well, do you?”
“Do I what?” Ariel asked from across the mansion’s vast dinner table as she plucked a fresh can of beer from the six pack.
“Can’t you read? Ever feel like you’re just filler?” Salem asked again, finishing his own can and throwing it carelessly onto the mansion floor.
“I’m sorry, you’re going to have to elaborate, Shockwave.” The Destrillian of Sound pulled the can open, sending a fresh spray of foam onto the tablecloth, watching with satisfaction as Salem’s face wrinkled at the use of his codename.
“Like, shit, I don’t know,” Salem waved him arms in the air as he struggled to find the appropriate words to give his internal musings. “Like what we’re doing now, just sitting around and having a beer. Like this kind of thing doesn’t matter. Like all we’re doing is taking up space until the next big thing happens.”
Ariel raised her eyebrows and took another sip of her beer. Conversations like this were pretty much par for the course with Salem. In fact, compared to some of the things he could come up with, this was positively normal.
“Isn’t that just what life is, though? Just filler in between the big moments that actually matter?”
“Comforting to know, isn’t it?” Salem grinned as he cracked open another beer. “Sometimes we can have those days that last forever and ever and then whole months and years can pass in the blink of an eye.”
Just like that, the conversation had changed. Ariel took another gulp of the frothy beer and listened patiently; she knew better than to interrupt when Salem was beginning to get started on one of his quasi-philosophical ramblings.
“See now, I can’t remember a damn thing about last week, or where Elvan and Lorelei have gone. I mean, they are supposed to be here, right? But boom, just like that, it’s all been glossed over like it was nothing. But this here, this conversation about absolutely nothing has been 331 words so far,”
How he knew this, Ariel didn’t bother to ask. Sometimes she was convinced that Salem just made half of this stuff up on the fly.
“Elvan and Lorelei are on assignment in Xi Qin,” she corrected him, “and you would know that if you actually paid attention to those briefing reports that we get sent.”
“Yeah, I can’t read,” Salem said casually. Again, she had absolutely no idea if this was true or not. She was absolutely sure she had seen him reading a book before. Unless he was just pretending to read in order to get out of actually having to hold a conversation. That could happen, too.
“And I remember everything that happened last week, thank you,” she continued, taking a large swig of beer. “Have you thought that maybe it’s just your memory? It’s been pretty shitty ever since you broke into Spencer’s wine cellar.”
“One of Spencer’s wine cellars,” Salem interrupted, holding up a hand to correct her. “I’m convinced that he has more hidden around here somewhere.”
“Hidden for good reason,” Ariel commented wryly - not that Salem was paying her any attention anymore. His gaze seemed vacant and his mismatched eyes glazed over slightly. Not wanting to rush him back into another utterly perplexing odyssey away from the safe waters of logic, Ariel didn’t comment and just happily sipped her beer.
“Do you reckon snails have teeth?” he finally asked.
“What?”
“I’m going to my room. See you around,” and with that, the Destrillian of Gas kicked away the chair from under himself and stalked off to his bedroom (but not before remembering to pick up the rest of the warm cans of beer and tucking them under his arm). Ignoring Ariel’s agitated stare, he rounded the corner from the dining room and hurried up the white marble spiral staircase that joined the hallway that led to the Entrance Hall.
It didn’t honestly matter to Salem whether or not snails had teeth. Ariel had been beginning to get boring and stringing together the first sentence that came to mind and watching how she reacted was that much more interesting than just saying goodbye.
It was so easy to get bored here at the mansion. In between the communiqués from the Sponsors or from the Boss in prison, the Destrillian found himself with vast chasms of time to kill. It made him feel trapped. Caged, like an animal. He finished his beer and kicked open the door adjacent to the second art gallery and threw the empty can through the doorway. Truthfully, he had no idea what lay beyond there. The mansion seemed to go on forever.
“Hey! I think you dropped something!”
Salem turned and looked behind him with exaggeratedly raised eyebrows as Finn Eliot marched out of the room he had hurled his rubbish into, her hands planted firmly on the hips of her navy blue pyjamas adorned with dozens of sleepy little crescent moons.
“Stop complaining, Short Stuff, that’s Ariel’s department. Or Lorelei’s, if you catch her in the right mood,”
“This house isn’t your dumping ground you know,” Finn cut across him with a scowl. “You can’t just do whatever you like.”
“But I do, anyway,” Salem reminded her with a casual grin. Fiddling for a second with the stash of beer under his arms, he struggled to wrest one free from his elbow’s grip without dropping the collection all over the floor. “If you want a beer you’re going to have to come and get one yourself. I don’t have enough hands for this.”
Finn didn’t even bother to dignify this with a response. “So what are you doing anyway?”
“What are you doing?” Salem shot back instantly. Finn’s rigid, disapproving pose seemed to relax a little and Salem grinned. In spite of their occasional bickering, Salem enjoyed the company of the little Destrillian, though he couldn’t help but feel her preparing some sort of chastising remark after every few of his sentences.
“I was just heading off to the kitchen; I fancied some ice cream. Care to join me?” she spoke quietly, as though afraid of being overheard and told off. Salem laughed at the young girl’s cautiousness. There was no authority over Destrillians here. Especially here.
“Nah, you’re on your own tonight, Shorty.” He wasn’t sure why he was shunning her company tonight. He wasn’t feeling the crippling pangs of boredom that he had been downstairs, but something else was pulling him away.
“You’re planning something aren’t you?” she asked him; the corners of her mouth were apparently having some degree of difficulty deciding whether or not to become a grin or a frown.
“Yeah, I think its character development, and it sucks.”
Leaving behind the Destrillian of Time to her mid-evening ice cream crusade, Salem continued to navigate his way through the winding corridors of the mansion. He noted for the first time just how far away his own quarters were from the main rooms downstairs. The mind really did go to funny places when it had nothing to occupy it.
At long last he came to his own quarters, located at the end of a corridor with deep burgundy carpeting. It was the only doorway in the entire corridor. He had this section of the mansion all of himself.
The door itself could barely be seen beneath the gigantic full length poster of a blonde woman in a snakeskin bikini. Salem barely gave the scantily clad picture the admiring glance he usually paid it as he kicked the door open and flopped face down on the black bed-sheets of his emperor sized bed.
Unlike the many dozens of other bedrooms in the mansion, the ones that had been occupied by the Destrillians for the years that they had been under the personal care of Jason Spencer were a stark contrast to the lavishly decorated, but impersonal, other rooms. In the three years that the Destrillians had lived in the mansion, they had taken every measure possible to adorn their quarters in whatever manner best reflected the personality that had emerged in the relative freedom outside the confines of their relative facilities.
Nowhere was this more true that the bedroom of Salem Locke.
To begin with, the walls on the left and right hand side of the bed had been roughly blown apart, extending the already considerable living space into the two adjacent rooms. One of these had been turned into a lounge for a formidably sized television set; the other housed a small minibar and dumbwaiter system that went straight down to the kitchen. At one point, Spencer might have intended for this room to be a cocktail lounge for important guests.
Next, Salem had turned his attention to the forest green wallpaper that had originally plastered the walls. Now, there was no trace of that wallpaper left on the walls. All of it had been hidden behind all manner of posters. Everything from scantily clad women (there were quite a few of these), motorcycles, and cars, to a tattered black skull and crossbones flag that was so large it was draped over an entire wall of his lounge.
When did life get so dull? Even the last mission that Persephone had delivered to him had only sent him as far as Villnore. Helping Maruca Avidez test weapons systems for his new thing at the place. Yawn. Whatever. None of it actually mattered.
At least when Spencer was here it felt like they were working towards something. Even if they weren’t. Even if Spencer’s entire plan just amounted to being some massive power trip that the old man had cooked up just to get one over on everyone else, it felt like the work he had been having Salem and the others do felt important. Now there was just nothing. Nothing conversations and nothing missions and always the same old faces.
Salem rolled over in his colossal bed and stared up at the poster he had pinned up above his pillows in bed. Eight naked lesbians riding the same motorbike had never looked so boring.
Maybe I should blow up the ceiling.
“Salem Locke! You’d better not!” Ariel’s voice carried from the end of the corridor. Evidently, she had been on her way up to see him when she’d heard his thoughts. This whole psychic thing could be such a hassle sometimes, if you don’t actually think about the ins and outs of it.
“Get out of my head!” Salem shouted back at her, as her loud footsteps began advancing on this door. “Seriously we should have like a code, or something.”
Like, a code where I can blow things up and you don’t wear any clothes.
“I- What?”
I’m joking.
When Ariel kicked the door open her face held none of the playful disapproval that Finn’s had. She looked angry and her brow was furrowed behind her fringe of choppy black and white hair.
“What the hell is going on with you? You’ve been acting weird all night, and now I could hear you thinking about blowing up more of this place from all the way downstairs.”
“I never was very good with that whole psychic thing,” Salem interjected, but he bit his tongue as Ariel’s nostrils flared.
“What is going on inside your head, Salem?!” It was a demand. Probably not even an unreasonable one, considering how rarely what was going on inside his head actually got communicated to other people. Not since he had been back in the facility had he ever been pressed into one of these talks - by someone who went on to betray him, no less. So that had all worked out lovely.
“Salem, I can hear your thoughts. Please, tell me what’s going on?” She had asked this time; her voice had become much softer. Ariel was always doing funny things with her voice.
“Do you ever feel tired of all this?” he began slowly, none of the usual eccentricity was present in his voice. He sounded exhausted.
“Tired of what, Salem?”
“Living here, in this cage. Doing the same boring shit month after month. Taking orders. Sometimes I reckon that we made a mistake by not escaping when we should have.” Ariel looked sideways at him, her expression deadpan. “Well you know what I mean.” He was familiar with Ariel’s failed attempt to escape from facility one. But he’d never asked her why she’d gone from wanting to escape Viola to being at the beck and call of its President. She was here now, that was what mattered.
“We work for Spencer, right? Not the Sponsors? We aren’t just their errand boys for those damn Lyverius bastards, right?” There was a faint air of desperation in his voice that didn’t escape Ariel’s notice as she looked at him with a look that might have been slightly too understanding.
“That’s right.”
"Good, because I'm bored of them."
"You're just bored?" Ariel's voice was tinged with disbelief at her fellow Destrillian's childish complaint. Salem just shrugged as she narrowed her stern gaze.
"What's the point of having this life if we're going to waste it away being bored? Life shouldn't be boring."
Ariel didn’t say anything, but her earlier frustration with the Destrillian was beginning to evaporate. Without Spencer’s physical presence in the mansion things had become so much slower-paced. Moreover, working for the Lyverius’ acquaintances of their boss felt nothing like their previous work for Spencer.
It no longer felt like they were accomplishing anything. With Spencer every mission had felt critical and important to the progress of his plan. But under the Lyverius’ command they felt less like accomplices in helping their boss achieve his goals and more like disposable tools, forwarding agendas and schemes that they knew nothing about and cared nothing for.
“It’s not as though Spencer is going to stay locked up forever you know,” she said calmly, watching as the tattooed Destrillian propped himself up on the edge of the bed. “He is going to get out eventually,”
“Yeah, it’s all part of the plan, I know,” he cut himself off before he bitterly added that it was all that had been drilled into him by the Boss when he had been at the mansion; though the look on Ariel’s face seemed to suggest that she knew what he was going to say anyway. At no point in hearing the man talk endlessly about his damned plan had it ever been made clear that their lives and abilities would be condemned to rotting away in such mundane and uninteresting circumstances.
“So just suck it up for now, things will get back to normal eventually,” she turned to leave, but not before stooping down to pick up one of the cans of beer that Salem had dropped on the floor.
“Just try not to blow up the ceiling, it’s all I ask.”
In truth, it had not been a good week, as far as Magnus Nordstrom was concerned.
The Vice-Chancellor of Artolia could only grimace as he watched the rain fall in streams down the windows of the luxurious private sedan. The jet lag from his overnight flight back to Artolia from Canctra had left him feeling strung out and irritable. Some men might have mistaken these as being signs that the man was getting in over his head at the highest level of global politics. But to suggest such a thing of Magnus Nordstrom would have been an insult to the forty years he had devoted to the Artolian political system, more than twenty of those years to the position of Vice-Chancellor itself, the second highest seat of power in the entire country.
During his tenure, Magnus had overseen four different Chancellors of Artolia come and go like the tides. Yet he had remained resolutely anchored to his office, and despite multiple attempts by his political enemies to remove him, here he still was, leading a government attaché to Canctra to settle an agricultural trade dispute.
Twenty years worth of influence at the highest level had seen him make enough contacts and spin himself a web of security so tight that it had largely become accepted into unwritten law within the apocrypha of Artolian politics that the only way Magnus Nordstrom would retire was when he decided he wanted to. Such was the scale and scope of his political entrenchment.
No, it was not lack of experience that caused Magnus’ weary sighs as he cast his gaze upward towards the stormy steel coloured sky. It was just age. Returning his gaze to the lengthy folder on Western Alvyssia’s reparation payment schedule, his mind couldn’t help but return to the real debate he had been engaged in throughout the week. That maybe the time to retire was drawing sooner rather than later. He had watched as the past forty years of politics had etched line after line and wrinkle after wrinkle onto his skeletal face, and seen his once proud, blonde hair become a mane of silver under the stresses and strains of a lifetime of late nights and hard decisions.
The sound of distant thunder broke his thought process and brought his attention back to the dull report and scowling disapprovingly whenever he came across a line that indicated that they were beginning to slacken on their reparations policy towards the Western countries. Chancellor Gerald could be such a liberal-minded fool sometimes, and a far-cry from the tougher policies that had been advocating in the years before this latest Chancellor’s appointment.
“Will you be heading home then, Vice-Chancellor?”
“No. Take me to the Office.” Magnus spoke only in blunt commands, not even bothering to look up from his folder.
“Right you are, Vice-Chancellor.”
Magnus barely even heard the driver; it was as though the man existed on some lower plane of existence that was so far beneath his own that nothing he had to say was relevant.
The roads of the Osean Citadel, the seat of the entire country’s political and judicial power, were so jammed with the cars of commuters reporting to the dozens and dozens of different government branches that progress to the office of the Vice Chancellor was irritatingly slow. Magnus was not yet so lost in his report that he was unaware of the passage of time. Still, the storm above continued to moan and grumble. Without meaning to, his mind automatically began envisioning the potential damage the rainstorm would be doing to the Orange Zone’s notoriously poor sewer system. Within two days' time a report detailing the damage estimate would be passed under his nose. It was nothing more than clockwork.
It took a further twenty minutes for the car to pull up outside the entrance to the Office of the Vice-Chancellor. It was the formal name given to the small circular building that was attached to the gargantuan Artolian Capital building that housed many of the more senior offices of the government. The Vice-Chancellor’s office seemed to be a small, albeit grandiose addition to the building. With its high domed roof and outer walls wreathed in columns, it was very elaborately decorated for what was essentially a single office, reception area and small record library.
The rain had stopped by the time Magnus had left the car in the parking lot at the bottom of the hill beneath the Capital building. With his briefcase tucked in one hand he moved swiftly up the white marble double staircase that led to seat of government.
At first glance, he did not appear to cut the most impressive figure: barely six feet tall and rapier thin. Though the wide berth many of the junior politicians gave him as he cut into the building was equally done out of respect for the senior official and out of apprehension. One lowly minister was in such a hurry to get out of his way that he spilled his coffee over Magnus’ five thousand credit, black leather shoes and the plush indigo carpet of the high-ceilinged hallway.
With a withering glance, the minister practically leapt out of sight through the nearest doorway.
A nearby thunderclap heralded the start of yet more rain.
No, Magnus Nordstrom was not having a good day.
So when he entered his central circular office building to find his personal assistant lying on the floor, dead and continuing to bleed from the short-bladed knife buried to the hilt in the centre of his back all over the decades-old carpeting of the room, all he could do was sigh in exasperation. His tired senses took longer than he thought possible to register alarm at the scene. They took longer still for the logical part of his brain to register the fact that the attacker must still be in the room.
“Nordstrom?” The voice that came from behind him was cold and inquisitive.
“You have the right office,” Magnus responded, slightly bemused that his unseen assailant felt the need to seek some reassurance that he was indeed the Vice-Chancellor. All things considered, he did reckon himself to be a rather recognisable figure.
“Are you going to kill me?”
No response. He could practically feel the knife or the gun of the killer trained on his back and a very real sense of fear began to well up inside his stomach. Swallowing, he did his best to control it. He had found his slate coloured eyes drawn to the body on the floor and it had given his usually commanding voice an unnatural tremor.
“May I turn around?”
“Yes.”
He had been expecting a professional mercenary. Some tough military-type who was skilled enough to have infiltrated this deep into the Artolian government without being detected. The killer was a young man, deathly pale and wearing dark street clothes. He could have been a college student but for the unusual eyes. At first his sockets looked empty and devoid of life. It took a moment for him to see that there where eyes there beneath the long tangle of badly dyed hair, but they were jet black. Something restless stirred in his memory.
“Who sent you?” It seemed a far more logical question than ‘who are you?’ rarely were individual mercenaries or thugs ever as important as the figures or interests they represented.
The stranger cocked his head at the question, allowing the Vice-Chancellor to get a better look at the sharp, angular features of the face beneath the hair. His features were utterly unreadable.
Something inside him clicked.
“No one sent me. I came on my own.” The eyes like coal were staring and unblinking straight into his own.
“I see. I was under the impression that the project eliminated memories of your previous life, Kerr.” His thin lips spread into a small smirk as he saw the Destrillian momentarily caught off-guard by the accusation. It couldn’t have lasted more than a second, and nothing in his face betrayed it, but Magnus was sure that he saw his son’s body momentarily tense up at the sound of his own name.
“It did,” Kerr spoke slowly, giving no indication about whether or not his shock had come from the admission that people in the government knew about the Destrillian Project or whether it had been his father who had said it.
“It clearly didn’t stick,” Magnus replied wearily. “So are you here for information, then? Or for revenge?"
“Neither.” The response was so blunt that this time it was Magnus’ turn to be caught off-guard. Ever since he had heard of his son’s and the other Destrillians’ escape from Viola he had known that it was only a matter of time before he would be tracked down and attacked by one of them. Either for information on the company, which members of the government had condoned the plan or just outright killed for his involvement in the whole messy affair, especially if it was Kerr who had found him.
“Then why did you come here?”
“I wanted confirmation.” Kerr moved around the room towards the corpse and knelt beside it to tug the knife free. “That you were my father.” He pulled hard on the knife and it jerked free from the body, causing it to momentarily spasm in a way that forced the Vice-Chancellor to close his eyes.
“I was beginning to think that you weren’t going to comment on it at all,” said Magnus contemptuously. Kerr shrugged as he got to his feet again.
“So what do you want then? To know why you were selected for the Project?” For the longest time, Magnus had known that potentially he would have had to explain this to his son, if they ever saw each other again. Not justify, simply explain. Pleading for Kerr’s understanding or even forgiveness was never something that had crossed his mind. Even now.
“Are you expecting an apology?” the Vice-Chancellor sneered at him.
“That’s irrelevant. I’m a Destrillian now.” His son sheathed the short knife into a leather holster in the lining of his jacket pocket. “I’m here because the Artolian Vice-Chancellor has my last name.” The pitch black eyes flicked back up to meet Magnus’ own and Magnus understood. This hadn’t been a mission born out of hatred or vengeance, but curiosity. Did his son really hold no feelings of revenge whatsoever for the father who had so willingly given him up for the Project?
“At least on that, we can agree. You were irrelevant,” the reply was bitter and succeeded in sending a shadow of fury rippling across the Kerr’s face.
“I was human,” the Destrillian corrected him. It was obvious that uttering those words disgusted him. As he shook his head his eyes caught an image captured in a picture frame on Magnus’ wide-semicircular desk. A small elderly woman with a kind face and greying hair pulled up into a tight bun was beaming at him with her arm around a much younger man in a military uniform. The man was much larger than the old lady, with broad shoulders, strong arms and a lantern jaw. His blonde hair was cut short and matched the healthy moustache that adorned his grinning face. Kerr scowled.
“They would be your family,” Magnus prompted. “Your mother, Eris and your older brother, Reissner.,” The words were lost on Kerr; whatever memories he had of growing up with these two people in the photograph where nothing more than ghosts and shadows.
“I don’t care.” Kerr turned on him again, though his voice sounded angry now, rather than disinterested. It was as though the visual reminder that he had once been related to human beings only incensed him. Magnus’ eyes were drawn to the spot inside Kerr’s jacket pocket where he knew his son was concealing the knife. The politician couldn’t help but assume that his son might care more if he had actually remembered more of his childhood.
“I see. So your memory really hasn’t returned then.” Far from sounding relieved or upset that his son couldn’t remember what his life had been like up until Magnus had put him forward as a candidate for the Destrillian Project, instead, Magnus sounded somewhat interested. “And you don’t care about your past at all?”
“It hasn’t,” Kerr replied, frowning at the fact that Magnus’ own features were as impenetrable and hard to read as his own.
“It doesn’t matter what I was before.” Kerr shook his head again to free his vision from the long brown hair that kept obscuring his vision, and for the first time Magnus was momentarily taken off-guard by how strongly his son resembled him from forty years previously. “We’re done here.”
Magnus couldn’t help but feel as though he had escaped rather slightly as his eyes caught the sight of the darkening blood on the carpet as they followed Kerr storming towards the main door.
“How do you intend to get out of here?” Magnus asked one last question, this time it was he who was taken under the thrall of curiosity. The Capital building was arguably the most highly defended building in all of Osea. Maybe even all of Artolia.
“The same way I got in.” Kerr’s reply was short and curt. Without turning around to catch one last glimpse of his father, the Destrillian had disappeared between the pair of double doors and left Magnus Nordstrom standing, frowning at the corpse he had left behind.
Satsu, BRIAN BLESSED, MIGHTY AND WISE Junpei Iori: Ace Detective, Maccaffrickstonson von Lichtenstafford Frabenschnaben, Polite Krogan, Robert Baratheon
Smoke gently rose from her body in light grey curls as she sagged to the floor in a crumpled, spasming heap. Somewhere else inside the house, the burglar security system was stuttering. Spasmodic wailing could not drown out the howls of fury and despair as the young man looked across the room from where the noise was coming from. A small flame began to ignite from the circuit board where the lamp had been attached, but the boy’s father was too panicked, too livid, too everything other than rational to notice anything other than the body he cradled in his arms.
The son looked down at his own arms. He had been toying with cables, as usual. A frayed one connecting power to the television had caught his fancy. The thought of running his finger over the exposed wire, feeling the pulse of electricity underneath, had come as naturally as instinct. One thing had led to another, and the mother went to investigate a badly flickering lamp, cursing the quality of the light fixtures that her employers had rather readily purchased for her.
The power that coursed through the boy’s fingertips and into his body, forced itself out again. The surge went back into the grid and struck his mother like a full-fledged lightning strike. Natural curiosity gave the boy his last glimpse of his mother’s eyes; deep blue pools for irises, framed in mild surprise. To him, that became the defining face of death – mere mild surprise, too slow against the speed of light to register any agony or pain.
Other men came and went as hours became days and days became weeks. Men in emergency uniforms, then men in military ones. Men in expensive suits, and finally men in lab coats.
In the middle of it all, a family became whittled down to a father and a son. Neither had said much at all. Now, the father retreated into a shell of alcohol and voiced his pain with his fists. The adolescent boy took his beatings quietly but not passively, just as he took everything else. They were once training lessons; they were once mixed martial arts conditioning sessions, trained to make the son as much of a prize fighter as the father once was. Now they were simply beatings from a grieving father, an outlet of indiscriminate rage in the rawest possible form.
It was the day that the boy nearly died, that the men in lab coats returned. The uniformed guards accompanying them separated him from the father and beat the whiskey-stained man until he stopped struggling. The father hardly made a sound as he unclenched his fists and went limp. The adolescent boy himself was nearly unrecognizable. His face had been pummeled purple, the cuts from swollen eyeslids, lips and broken nose bleeding profusely. The rasping whisper emanating from the syringe valve inserted below his larynx was a poor excuse for breathing. His jaw looked deformed, as if it had been smashed from the left-hand side; a bloody gash trailing all the way down to his collarbone where his face had made rough contact with a long, blunt edge.
But, against all logic, he was still alive.
Even with the vestigial breathing mask fastened to his face, the doctor walking beside the stretcher could tell it would take months of rehabilitation until any research could ever be made. She tentatively laid her hand on his right shoulder, the least bruised part of his body, although she could not bring herself to smile reassuringly as she had been instructed.
“Hello, Connors. I’m Doctor Rosin Franklin. You can call me Rosie. I’ll be taking care of you from now on. You’ll be safe.”
Connors’ deep blue gaze, framed in mild surprise, never left the Viola scientist until he was given a double dose of the sedative. He did not wake for another month.
***
“Do you remember now, Erthys?”
“I don’t remember so much as I do experience, I confess.”
“It is a memory you are experiencing. A personal experience.”
Erthys floated in a blank, white void of light. It had been some time since he could recall how long he had been in here. A lesser being may have already gone insane from the solitude, but lesser beings would not have stayed here long. And Erthys was not exactly alone.
He rolled a shoulder muscle, relishing the feeling even though he could not see his shoulder. “It is really a shame. It doesn’t feel like a memory to me. And if it doesn’t feel like a memory, am I really remembering it?”
There was a moment’s pensive silence.
“You have to find them, and take them back.”
“Finding them would be a more practical task if I knew who they were. Who would be ‘them’?”
“Me.”
Erthys looked in the direction of the new voice, not quite sure of what was up or down, in front or behind. But he saw. The young man was ragged, pale, but muscle and sinew strained taut under his skin like cable steel. The blue irises had faded, like an item of clothing passed through the wash too many times, but it was a gaze as piercing as ever. As naked as a newborn child, he could see the myriad of scars, needle tracks and bruises, least of all the long, white scratch of skin tracing the edge of the hollow of his throat, to the corner of his lips, almost inviting the stilted smile that Erthys recognized.
“You?”
“There are more of us, but only one of you will leave. You will make that choice, and return in chaos before the end of everything. You will leave this empty space behind, but you will come back when you have no more need for your body.”
“The ‘end of everything’ isn’t quite an inviting event to return to, although I suppose if I can pay a visit to the family one last time, I can put up with it.”
“You have all the time in this world of yours, but there is very little where you are needed. Make destiny. I will be there for you when it happens, Erthys.”
They both moved, Erthys running a hand over his face, feeling the rough scars wrapping his blind white eyes from under his eyelids, the long cascade of hair, and felt the rest of his body return to him. He found it in himself to smile, mildly surprised.
The young boy with the uncertain, innocent face had grown into one of Viola's finest Destrillians as the years went by. Fond memories of training with Salem had made Kram alert and focused in attaining the end goals of his overseer, Dr. Ying Li: to be one of Viola's best ever superhuman weapons. Having grown in Viola after the supposed abandonment of his mother and father, Kramskov Niet was already destined to follow the dark fate that awaited all children who were converted into Destrillians.
However, one incident two months ago had changed him forever. The arrival of Destrillian number twenty-one, Tao Hong, had unintentionally strayed the young man far from his goals, replacing them with his own individual desire: freedom. The young man struggled with conveying these feelings to his friend and partner Destrillian number twenty-two, Salem Locke. These were the days depicting their fall from friendship to animosity; how Kram had defied Viola in exchange for freeing she most important to him, and how Salem had tried to dissuade Kram from betraying the ideal that he had been following for so long over something so little as love.
Kram was escorted by Dr. Li and two units of guards. The boy's sudden shift from reluctance to overconfidence over the years had garnered praise from Dr. Li, but she had yet to thank the one arguably responsible for the boy's change: Salem Locke. However, today there was something different in the air. Not unlike last time, where it was carefree between the doctor and her subject. Dr. Li had something in mind and wished to see it for her own eyes.
"Alright Dr. Li, who are we up against today?" Kram asked Dr. Li while walking with cool confidence towards the training room. The very same one where Salem and he combated a squadron of Viola's training droids and emerged victorious so many years ago. Dr. Li gave the young man a pat, ever so proud of her successful subject's growth. But this only masked the intentions of today's training - such is the deceptive touch of Dr. Ying Li.
"Today we are pitting you against Mr. Locke. Do you remember that time where he and yourself fought against a horde of machines to test your team compatability?" she asked him as they strode back to the memorable training room.
"Yeah? Why do you suddenly want to shift my usual training against Tao to Salem? I've been doing well haven't I?" Kram asked, slightly anxious.
"That is correct. But because I have noticed a decreased interest to further develop your abilities, I have decided to change the roster. Need I remind you that you still have a long way to go before you are finally given the norms and privileges of Viola?" she asked.
"Y-yes..." Kram said in a quiet and somber tone.
"Your performace with Bradley's pet has disappointed me, little grasshopper. I believe it is time to reinvigorate that spark I saw years ago after being dulled by Ms. Hong," she said sharply. Kram could tell that Dr. Li was beginning to notice his feelings towards Tao. How long before he was forced to say, he wasn't so sure. He even was a little nervous about the rest of the Destrillians finding out about the burried secret that happened during Yule with him and Tao. Never the less, it was just another training with Salem to improve his fighting abilities and he gave her a nod of absent-minded agreement as they marched towards the training room. Upon arrival at the familiar room, they could see a group of men along with Dr. Bench and Salem standing, awaiting their arrival.
"Good day, Prodigy. Mr. Locke," Dr. Li adressed the younger doctor and nodded towards Salem.
"Hello, Pretty. Hello, Salem," Kram said with casual politeness towards both of them.
Dr. Evelyn Bench scowled at Li's nickname for her and pretended not to notice, "Doctor, Subject 23, good morning," she said stiffly, with a curt nod. It was unfortunate that Kram worked so well with her subject; it meant that they were forced to see each other a lot. Somethng that Dr. Bench found deeply uncomfortable given Kram's apparent schoolyard infatuation and her own awkward relationship with the overbearing Dr. Li.
"You need to learn to lighten up, you know that, Eve?" Salem piped up, folding his arms and nodding a welcome at Kram. "Have a nice lie in, princess? You're late,"
"He makes a good point, Ying, it would have been more practical to get these two here at the same time so we could brief them together. It would have prevented any...misunderstandings," Bench stuffed her hands into the pockets of her slightly oversized labcoat and narrowed her eyes suspiciously at Dr. Li and Kram. She wouldn't put it past the Xi Qinese doctor to have given her Destrillian a different set of instructions in order to improve his performance against Salem.
"Forgive our tardiness. I have been trying to locate the boy. Not that I have lost control of him in any form, but he has been rather...lost in his thoughts, shall we say," she turned her analytic eyes towards Kram. He dodged her stare and tried to be as dismissive as possible, hoping that she would not see through his heart so easily. It was true that he had been visiting Tao alot in secret, but his near experience at being caught in the act almost overturned his relations with him and Dr. Li.
"I only wanted to come back here. That's all...I just lost my way and went back to my pod," Kram lied quietly. Dr. Li was not convinced by the Destrillian's shallow lie, her glasses flashing menacingly against him.
"My dear, the training room is not the direction of Number 21's holding cell," Dr. Li said coldly. She knew that something was going on between Kram and Dr. Bradley's subject and it really bothered her. Distorted tapes leading towards Ms. Hong's cell confirmed her suspicions that Kramskov and Tao had been up to something, nothing immature but something to do with seeds of dissent. Had the Destrillian of speed corrupted her prized subject's goals? Was this Dr. Bradley's gambit in sabotaging her life's work? She has yet to see if it indeed was happening right now.
"Whatever. Let's just get this over with," Kram hissed in annoyance as he brushed past her and the guards to meet Salem. Kram gave his friend a more welcoming look despite suspicions arising between him and his own overseer.
"Yeah, can we? Please? All this exposition is making me queasy," Salem snorted derisively.
Bench rolled her eyes. She had done her best not to get herself or Salem involved in whatever drama that Subjects 21, 23 and Dr. Li had whipped up for themselves. It was a further reason why she dreaded these joint training sessions.
"I agree with Salem." In response, the Destrillian threw her a gigantic wink, which she proceeded to ignore, "Lets just get on with today's exercises,"
"Whats on the agenda today then, Docs?" Salem asked, cracking his knuckles enthusiastically.
"The task is simple. As usual, you both will be pitted against each other. First one to draw blood without death shall be deemed victorious and relieved for an hour before being sent back to the pods. Use of weaponry is authorised," Dr. Li said.
"Well bugger me blind. You have blown me away with all this startling innovation," Salem drawled sarcastically.
"'Tis what I do best, my dear," Dr. Li quipped back with a smirk. Kram immediately broke away from the group and positioned himself on the opposite side of the arena, his hands kept to his pockets. There was a noticable change in Kram compared to the meek little boy years ago, he was rather distant towards them as of late, bordering on apathy. It was now made apparent by his desire to end this match and potentially win the hour Dr. Li proposed. He wanted this short freedom for himself...he needed it. She was waiting for him to return.
"Ready whenever you are, Salem," Kram called out as he clenched his fists burried under his pockets. This was no team related fight this time; he was going to butt heads with one of the deadliest and most experienced Destrillians of them all. 'The monster of monsters', as Tao described him. How far had Salem grown after fighting alongside him for a while, Kram had yet to see.
Not bothering to even uncross his arms, the Destrillian moved into position opposite his dark haired counterpart, whilst the pair of doctors and their guards proceeded to move to the room's periphery and out of harm's way.
"Try and make this interesting, okay dude?"
With an approving nod as a promise to do so, Kram darted towards Salem. With a slap of his right hand, he sent a wave of darkness against Salem. Unlike the smaller arcs he used to convey, this was more potent and darker than its previous forms. Kram's development had grown compared to the time he was last seen here. Using his left hand, he sent another wave against his friend before breaking off from the straight path and running left to catch him from that side. He readied his right hand with another slash of darkness in case Salem resorted to using explosives. He was rather cautious after experiencing the blast from various fights and the most notable one where he'd literally witnessed Salem tear through the largest robot he had ever seen. These accounts and experiences armed him with enough knowledge to find ways to counter his deadly gas moves.
The first arc of darkness was large and easy to dodge, Salem told himself with a smirk as he casually ducked beneath the searing wave of pitch black energy that tore across the room. He had seen Kram make this move hundreds of times before. Starting off with a large attack and then following up with a smaller one to catch you off guard. To his wide-eyed surprise, the fact that Kram had charged at him head on, following in the wake of his darkness attack took him off-guard. Another slash of darkness ripped through the air in front of him, prompting the Destrillian to roll his shoulders backwards to avoid the energy's high reach. Enough time for Kram to close the gap between the two.
Kram leapt forward and delivered a surprise round house kick laced with darkness up across Salem's face. All he had to do was knock him out instead of draw blood from his friend. Such attacks were his methods as of late compared to his violent tendencies of drawing blood from each battle. To add a fail safe should this attack fall through, he charged another burst of darkness from both his hands to at least grab Salem with them. He wasn't so sure if touching a Destrillian with a concentrated dose of darkness was enough to weaken them, but it was worth the risk. With a confident smile, he was about to land a connecting kick and with a couple with darkness laced hands as failsafes, he was confident that this fight was his to own.
It was a tactical decision, Salem had decided, to let the roundhouse kick connect with the side of his face. It had hurt, sure. But it was the easier option to take, giving him the time he needed to grab Kram's outstretched hands by the wrists. Twisting his face into a grimace, the larger Destrillian lashed out with one of his legs, colliding harshly with Kram's knee.
Kram felt the brunt of Salem's kick as it sent a shockwave of pain across his knee. Biting his lip to forcefully relieve himself of pain, Kram raised his free leg to send another kick laced with darkness across Salem's face. The dose wasn't fatal but enough to push him away from his friend's powerful counterattack.
Still gripping Kram's wrists with both hands, Salem had anticipated the second roundhouse kick. With a snarling grin, the Destrillian of gas waited for Kram to raise one of his legs off the ground for his next assault. As his cruel smirk spread wider, Salem leapt backwards, harshly tugging his hands backwards, yanking the Destrillian of Darkness off balance on his one foot.
Kram's face, apparent as ever, twisted into rage as he unleashed a deadly amount of darkness around his arms to loosen Salem's grip of his hands. At this rate, he would lose the match and fail to acquire the reward Dr. Li had promised. He had to hide the desperation behind his eyes; if Salem knew what he was after, this could turn into a bloodbath between him and Salem. He wasn't going to let the more experienced Destrillian have his way this time. It was winning that was all in Kram's mind.
Darkness began bleeding into his body as it began shrouding him in it, although he had to exert control or else the migranes would come faster before this battle was over.
I can't let you win...I've allowed you to win a thousand times. But not now, not when I can get the chance to be with her Kram said telepathically at Salem.
Oh will you give it a rest with the inner monologuing, Kram! Salem fired back almost immediately, quickly frustrated as he was forced to leap away from the other Destrillian and release his advantageous grip from around Kram's wrists, which were now wreathed in fierce, smouldering ripples of darkness. Reluctantly, Salem was forced to concede that this ability of Kram's to channel his power through his various body parts was ... annoying, at best. He closed his eyes for a moment and hoped Kram would take a step forward to close the gap.
The rapid burst of air pressure between the two Destrillians was generated so quickly that Salem barely had time to leap backwards to escape the expanding fireball. It was a bit ostentatious, the Destrillian of Gas thought to himself. He doubted whether or not Evey and the other doctors were aware that he was capable of producing such large explosions so quickly. The idea made his smile grow wider as the roaring orange explosion collapsed in on itself, leaving a smoking, charred crater on the dirt of the training centre floor.
The explosion took Kram by surprise. He lept back in horror as the flash of the explosion wiped off the shroud of darkness covering him like weak flames against a strong wind. Fortunately, he had stored a decent percentage of the shroud before it went to waste, seeking another alternative to put Salem at a disadvantage, he darted for the armory to retrieve any melee weapory to extend his reach towards the Destrillian of gas. Picking up two wooden swords laid out at the make shift armoury, he armed himself and darted for one of the foam plateus, hoping to strike Salem from above. He had to align his shadow with Salem in order to strike at the precise moment. With a leap of faith, he jumped as high as his injured legs could carry him, hoping the leap would carry him directly above Salem.
The timing was perfect, the training dome's lights magnified his shadow atop of Salem. Closing his eyes to focus, he tried to conjure the deathly effects of his powers right at Salem's feet, hoping he would fail to notice the ominous growing darkness. Readying his sword for a feint attack, he dove as the darkness of his shadow began to intensify at Salem's feet. With a daring smile, he readied his second sword for his real attack.
The attack caught the Destrillian of gas off guard. He had not been expecting Kram to follow up so strongly or so quickly. Beginning to utter a curse word so vile that it was practically untypable, Kram connected with his attack.
Kram landed a blow at Salem's head and followed with another strike to his chest. Kicking the taller Destrillian's knee down, Kram positioned both wooden swords around Salem's neck, as if threatening to behead him. The glare that Kram gave Salem was intense and filled with rage by his friend's refusal to stand down.
"You lost, Salem. Stand down already!" Kram hissed. The desperation to see Tao became so evident, he knew Salem could see it. He didn't have to hide his desire anymore. He had to win even if it meant knocking Salem out.
No snappy comeback, sarcastic remark or wry self-aware monologue sprang from the tightened lips of the Destrillian. His mismatched eyes contemptuously studied the determination etched into the face of his younger sparring partner. There was only one reason why Kram was fighting so ferociously and it had absolutely nothing to do with him.
He swung his head backwards, squashing his body low and beneath Kram's raised swords. There was no more grinning. His mind was made up.
An explosion in the air just behind Kram threw the Destrillian's concentration, just for a moment. Salem was up and on him faster than Kram anticipated. His face stoic and expressionless, cold and frightening. The first punch was a left hook aimed straight for Kram's face, easily telegraphed by Kram as he brought his hands up to block the punch. His hands were raised, away from guarding his body. In a better mood, Salem would have smirked. This was a novice's mistake.
The next punch was low and dropped like a sledge-hammer on Kram's side, connecting with his kidney and causing Kram to physically grunt with pain. His hands were moving down now, away from his face and back into a more regular stance for guarding shots to the body. Far too late. A second punch, much harder than the first got underneath Kram's guard and smashed into Kram's liver with the force of a freight train.The paralysing effect was instantaneous as Kram's body proceeded to lock up and refuse obeying his commands as his liver screamed out in anguish.
Kram wasn't in this fight as his friend. He wasn't even in this fight for himself.
The crimson eyes were glassy and unfocused. Barely even registering the enormous overhand right that connected so hard with the side of Kram's head that he felt the force it whip his face to the side and send burning hot shrieks of pain down his neck. The next thing his body knew it was on the ground, his open mouth faintly tasting the salty dirt of the training room floor.
"N-Not yet..." Kram hissed. Battered, in pain and filled with determination after all that punishment, he refocused his attention towards Salem. So this was what he was capable of if driven off the edge. Kram knew he had gone too far in provoking the far more experienced Destrillian. Tao was really the ire of the Destrillian of gas.
"I'm sorry I..." he gagged. " I disappointed you," he told Salem weakly as he tried to get himself back up. He knew that Salem was doing this because of Tao, he knew that Kram had lost all the focus and desire to fight alongside Salem. He showed his emotions and cards too early before he thought he could truly overpower him. It was a mistake, one he had to rectify. He forced his legs to move and his body to stand up straight, there was but one way to bring this match to a draw.
"I love her, Salem." Kram said, wary of Salem's rage. "I'm s-sorry, but I'm not the same kid who f-fought with you anymore." He knew that this was true, he knew that Salem had to accept this softer side of Kram one way or another.
"She makes-" Salem strode forward towards Kram, snatching out with one free hand to grab Kram by his long, scruffy hair.
"you-" he cocked his right hand back again.
"so-" his fist connected squarely with Kram's face. The punch was not aimed, or coordinated. It was messy and wild, aimed directly for whatever part of the earnest, emotional mug in front of it that it could reach.
"WEAK!" the last word exploded out of him. Primal and raw, like the bellow of a wild animal. He snapped his head forward again and was rewarded with the dull thump of pain in his own forehead as Kram was once again thrown onto the floor.
"WHY WON'T YOU FIGHT BACK!" Salem screamed down at the other Destrillian. Every enjoyable memory he had shared with his friend here in Viola, all of the pranks they had pulled on the doctors and all of the times he had dragged Kram into sharing the blame and the delight of causing mayhem, all of those memories hurt. Burning white hot with anger so much that it almost physically hurt him. Whatever this girl had done to Kram, it was obvious that this was no longer his best friend that lay panting and hurt before him.
"Because."
Kram suddenly grabbed Salem's leg with a sudden rush of strength that he had kept all this time. He forcefully pierced Salem's leg with his fingers and flooded the wounds with darkness. He rose up and landed his strongest punch against his stomach as he pierced Salem's left abdomen with his index finger, filling it with darkness.
"She-" he dragged Salem down to his knees, his wounded face and bruised eyes bringing his far more superior counterpart to his face. releasing his index finger from his friend's abdomen, he charged a darkness laced fist and slammed it against his chest, to further spread it around his insides.
"would- " he punched Salem's face with a fist full of darkness.
"never-" he headbutted Salem against his forehead.
"allow me-" he landed another strike.
"TO HURT YOU THIS BAD!" he roared at him as he charged another fist and was about to land another punch at Salem's face. He held Salem's head with the strands of green hair as he gazed at his wounded friend's eyes. The next strike would have been fatal, he knew it. The rage was culminating into this one deadly blow that would forever separate them.
You can't! Stop it! You've won! THAT'S ENOUGH!!
The darkness vanished from his hand as he forgot all his rage and threw himself unto Salem in complete embrace. He couldn't finish it.
The grin slowly found its way back onto Salem's bruised face. The pain felt real, though numbed by the chilling effect of the darkness. It was a strange sensation, as though he was moving his sore muscles through a dense ice pack.
"That's more like it," he choked out, coughing up his words through a throat that had obviously been on the receiving end of one of Kram's punches.
"See what I mean, dude? That bitch never lets you have any fun anymore." His laugh was wheezing. The darkness that was flowing through his insides made him feel as though his innards were simultaneously on fire and freezing at the same time.
"Both of you are equally important to me. You'd do well to never forget that," he told Salem. Releasing his grip on the Destrillian as he slumped forward, blood beginning to flow from his mouth. With tired eyes, he stared up at Salem's own wounded face.
"I'm... tired of all this 'fun'. Viola will never let us truly be free," he wearily told Salem. He knew that after seeing Tao wounded that night in Yule, ready to be healed for another round of experiments coupled with his and Salem's own experiences with the other doctors, was a clear indication that they were all fated to be chained to Viola's ruthless servitude forever. The promised sky and breeze that he had heard from Tao, the beautiful lands spread across the world to which they were separated from, would never be within his grasp. Not like this.
"Ugh, when did you get to be so full of crap," Salem groaned, rolling onto his back as the pain from the injuries finally sank in. "You little bitch." His voice sounded tired and far away, modestly interrupted with groans of pain.
Doctors Ying Li and Evelyn Bench made their way into the cluttered mess of the training room to see both Destrillians lay there, intensely wounded and utterly defeated by their powers. As predicted, Kram had become an utter mess to escalate this fight.
"Humblest apologies for the mess, prodigy," Dr. Li coldly said as she eyed Kram's conscious body, still under pain from Salem's deadly assault. The data gathered from this fight indicated that Kram was no longer fit to be partnered with Salem for the mean time. She feared that it would be a fight to the death next time they faced each other like this or even in team-based trials.
Dr. Bench was forced to bite her tongue. As the fight had gone on she had been getting increasingly frantic in trying to get Dr. Li to stop the fight. The senior doctor, however, had merely waved away her concerns. Eager to get more data as she had watched her Destrillian be beaten half to death and then proceed to beat her Destrillian half to death. Exasperated, she had sent the armed guards away to go prepare a medical team to be despatched here. It was unlikely that either Kram or Salem would be walking away from here on their own two legs.
"What has happened to you, grasshopper?" she grimaced at Kram.
"He's got a shit load of that human emotion you call love," Salem grumbled from his prostrate position on the ground nearby. He had curled into the fetal position to nurse his stomach, which was in the act of deciding whether or not the damage done to it by Kram was worth a hearty vomit.
Satisfied by the Destrillian of Gas' answer, she made her way to Salem and forced him into lying down completely. The position he was in would've potentially hastened his wounds to a greater degree.
"Let it flow out. You are merely allowing grasshopper's powers to rupture your system if you lay in such a manner," she said patiently. With palm point techniques of Xi Qinese origin, she pressed his abdomen to allow bits of darkness to escape the puncture wound of Salem's abdomen. The darkness hissed and vanished everytime it escaped the wound. She stretched the leg which Kram wounded to allow the same effect to disperse faster.
"Duly noted," Salem mumbled to himself as his doctor went over to him to examine the extent of the damage. Placing her hands on her hips in frustration as she watched Li's aptitude in mending the damage done by Kram.
"Truly. Be still, child. Fortunate for your Destrillian background, any normal human would be rotting inside by now," she tenderly said. This went without saying that Kram's powers had the ability to cause a frostbite-like feeling due to the absolute zero temperature of Darkness.
"Kram, I think that its time that we talked about your relationship with Number 21," Bench snapped. The fact that Li would rather tend to her own Destrillian than discuss the elephant in the room was beyond irritating.
"I ain't saying shit, Pretty," Kram hissed back at Dr. Evelyn. He would only discuss it with Salem and no one else; it was their problem to resolve without the involvement of these doctors.
Dr. Bench cocked her head slightly and adjusted her glasses. It was a curious thing, she had expected this kind of language and attitude from Salem. But not from the traditionally more meek and mild-mannered Kram.
"This isn't up for discussion, Kram. These psychological factors could have a serious impact on your battlefield performance." Bench was forced to raise her voice at the end to drown out the sound of Salem moaning out a resounding 'No shit.'
"I love her. Salem's still my best friend. That's all there is you need to know," Kram stubbornly said. He was very reluctant to even say much to Dr. Bench due to the fact that she might be as controlling as Dr. Li.
He didn't want to give that advantage to them at all.
Dr. Li encircled the metallic stressballs around her hand while struggling to further understand why had Kram suddenly developed these useless emotions after being exposed to Number 21. The impossible odds of such events were starting to take a toll on her understanding of Kram's psyche and how he would be so desperate to see her. She had to eliminate the problem: Number 21. She had to find a way to forcefully make Kram remember his purpose and why he had been chosen by the project or else her career and life's work would come to an abrupt end. It was either adapt to Kram's desires or completely crush his insubordinate ways.
The sharp knocking on the door of her office prompted Li to raise her head. Dr. Evelyn Bench stood in the doorway, hands pushed into the pockets of her large labcoat and eyes looking unnaturally large behind the thick lenses of her glasses.
"We need to talk about Kram."
"I am well aware, prodigy..." Dr. Li said. One way or another, she was at a loss for Kram's strange display and rather hostile attitude in recent months.
"Abaddon would want to wipe his memories, or put him in isolation. There's no way that we are going to be able to keep this on him either. Once the latest psych reports comes in..." Bench let her voice taper off. Either way it was inevitable. There was no way such a strong development in one Destrillian's psyche could be kept a secret for long.
Dr. Li slammed the metallic objects at the table and shot Dr. Bench a deadly glare.
"Do you think, tampering with grasshopper's memories AGAIN will make him any better?! THINK, WOMAN! Mr. Abaddon would merely erase years of hard work put into Kramskov!" she yelled at Dr. Bench. This was the first time that Dr. Li had displayed any form of anger towards her staff other than arrogant gloating or resentful comments. Fixing her glasses, she took three seconds to recollect her composure as she began shuffling the stressballs.
"No...he must not know of grasshopper's fractured psyche at this moment. Instead, we must focus on eliminating the source of this mess," she told Dr. Bench.
"Believe it or not, Ying, I agree," Dr. Bench responded, her voice kept clipped and patient. She didn't appreciate being shouted at, though it was sadly far from the first time that the senior staff had vented their frustrations on her. "Salem is in enough of a mess without his closest comrade being turned into a brain-dead drone,"
"And I as well. It is not grasshopper's fault that this has caused him to lose faith in us. It's that wreched Number 21 as well as her ignorant doctor," Li hissed at the screen reflecting Dr. Bradley's face.
"We must persuade Mr. Abaddon to aggressively test Ms. Hong to her limits," she said sheepishly. She knew for a fact that Tao was incapable of progress after those canyons of scars etched across her back as well as her stomach scars prevented her from developing physically. But the fact such a frail female could incite such a change in her subject was the worst sabotage ever crafted by Dr. Bradley.
"What do you suggest?" Bench suggested. It was not impossible to think that Dr. Li was privy to more of Viola's higher level experiments than herself.
"There was a dangerous experiment created in theorem by Dr. Bradley's father before Ms. Hong was chosen to be the Destrillian of speed. The experiment was never completed as none of the destined candidates before Ms. Hong were ever successful in achieving their full potential. The Experiment was called Time Distillation Speed...forcing the subject to expend extrenuous amounts of energy to remain out of the sound barrier in order to allow their bodies to become near astral-like figures, or even experience frozen time in their point of view when in such a form. Fortunately for me, Ms. Hong has yet to be subjected to this..." Dr. Li smirked as she fixed her glasses menacingly.
"She has gone too far this time. She must pay for sabotaging my life work," she hissed.
"Does this facility's management know about this experiment? Does Spencer?" Bench's voice sounded shrill and slightly outraged. The Destrillians Project was one thing, but it was being done in the name of defending the nation. This experiment just sounded dangerous for the sake of being dangerous. That was a far weightier burden on her conscience.
"Only Mr. Spencer, Abaddon and Bradley's team are aware of this...officially, of course. It has yet to be approved once again due to its nature on vaporizing the subject before they could ever be truly achieve the capabilities of The Destrillian of Speed. Ms. Hong is still a poor wounded sparrow in this facility...and what happens when one approves to place a frail beauty like her under the raging typhoon of such an experiment?" she asked Evelyn.
"I suppose it might help stimulate her progress," Evelyn conceded, turning her green eyes towards the floor. Whilst it was true that this experiment could help Tao's development, there was no way that it would come risk free. Even for a Destrillian.
With a confident smile armed with a devious agenda, Dr. Li rose from her desk.
"Begin preparations. With your aid, we must discard that psyche report, forge it if you must and give me a year to convince Mr. Abaddon to initiate the Time Distilation Speed Experiment. We WILL force Kram and Ms. Hong to bend to our will!" she said triumphantly. She had to put Bradley in a dilemma, just as she had unwittingly placed her in one in the eyes of Spencer and Abaddon. They would have to move quickly before they discovered the forgery of the psyche reports and eliminated the years of Kram's development.
"Number 20 and Number 23, your training is to commence in 30 minutes. Savour your moments alone to avoid any ill feelings," Dr. Li's voice called out through the speakers of the partially destroyed training dome. Kram was already idly picking weapons with Number 20, Lokka Kayne. It had been a while since the two had spoken, but at least no animosty had spawned between the two Destrillians--unlike the outcome with him and Salem.
"Hey Lokka?" Kram began as he fumbled through the various wooden weaponry made available to them.
"Yeah?" the other replied in a dulled tone. His interest in this particular type of training was miniscule at most.
"I know you and I haven't gotten close or have that much of a friendship. But I gotta ask you something...personal," Kram said hesitantly as he picked the wooden swords or batons to be used in the following exercise.
Lokka was assembling his weapon, not bothering to make eye contact with Kram. The boy wasn't intentionally avoiding it, though his mind was mostly elsewhere. "What is it?"
"Do you uhh...know this sort of feeling towards another girl? Something that you can't shake off when you see her? I don't know...love? Or dedication?" The younger Destrillian was lost in his own question towards his senior counterpart. The feelings he had towards Tao were bordering on love or something even greater than human comprehension. Maybe he placed too much thought into it, but either love or dedication seemed like the word for it at the time.
The older Destrillian paused for a few moments. "I don't think you picked the right person to ask about this," he said quietly as he returned to the weaponry in front of him. "But if you want an answer, then no, no I do not know this feeling."
Kram sighed in frustration. He thought he had pinned down the right word at that moment. However, he did have something else to ask instead.
"What do you think or feel about being here all your life? And you're trapped here with that girl you...uhh...love so much and you'll know something bad is going to happen?" He picked those words carefully, to avoid any other verbal confrontation with Lokka. "I uh, don't know about you but... Don't you have that sort of feeling towards someone here?" he asked him.
"You're my allies. Nothing more; nothing less," Lokka stated, allowing for a brief pause so as not to patronise Kramskov. "In regards to staying here all my life, well, that simply isn't true. We're weapons, Number 23. We were built to fight. You think we can do that here?" He twirled a large fighting staff around with his right hand, feeling and assessing the weight of it, forcing his body to accept it as an extension of itself. "And-- if you think something bad is going to happen, Kram, then why don't you do something about it?"
Kram bluntly placed a sword down in frustration before turning to him to show that it wasn't a simple thing to do. There was no holding it any longer with him and Lokka.
"If the ones who raised you, and put you through hell just to become a weapon without reward or praise, took everything from you as reward for your loyalty and servitude...what would you do?" he pressed on before deciding to come out with the hard question.
"I'd kill them," Lokka replied calmly. He took his stick and started walking to the further side of the room, having selected his weapon the moment he stepped into the room. Stopping when he reached the middle, he allowed Kram to soak up any honest answer he could.
"Nobody takes anything away from me."
Kram gave Lokka a confident smile before reaching for the wooden sword he had slammed moments earlier and made his way to the center a few yards away from Lokka, readying his weapon.
"Not even Viola?" he asked.
"Nobody."
Kram, for the first time ever, gave a wide smile that he would be known for in his later days. This moment changed him, served as a ripple that would break his bond with Viola for the days to come.
"You're a good friend, senior," Kram said. He knew what to do and what had to be done. The path was clear and this was all it had taken.
Lokka shook his head. "No." He turned to face Kram now with his chosen weapon at his side. "We're allies. Don't forget that."
Kram readied his much more flexible stance, to avoid resorting to powers this session. "A friend to me no matter how you define it."
"Training time started," Dr. Li called out through the speakers. "Begin."
Kram rushed at Lokka with a more enthusiastic and positive outlook. He had to tell her about this and eventually...Salem. He would have to accept his choice no matter what path they both might take in the long run. Times were changing for Kram, and he knew he had to act soon, be it a week or a year from now.
The recreation room was probably a misnomer. There was very little in the way of recreation to be had here. A handful of tables and chairs, a pool table that had half the balls missing and a table tennis set that lacked a net, balls and bats. Viola's intention had been to use these as off-duty techniques to measure the Destrillians proficiency for hand-eye coordination, though the idea had been quickly scrapped. The objects were simply part of the furniture now.
Or, in Salem's case, the pool table was a comfortable place to have a lie down. It had been over a week since his fight with Kram and still he was sore and walking with a limp. It was frustrating. Kram hadn't learned a damned thing. The pair hadn't even spoken since that day.
"Did you know that you breathe incredibly loudly?" The voice of Destrillian number twenty-seven, Lorelei, was tinged with annoyance. "Even in here, there's no peace and quiet," she sighed.
"Well, I'm fucking sorry, noise police. Next time I stop by the armoury I'll be sure to eat a silencer." He spoke the words to the ceiling, choosing to ignore Lorelei's scrutinising presence. The last thing he wanted was for her to start psychoanalysing the drama of the past week.
"Cheers," she replied brightly, deciding to leave her chair to engage the other in conversation. "So what brings you here today, Salem? Did the doctors get tired of you flirting with them?" Despite her opening reproach, Lorelei had decided some time ago that she rather liked Salem - or, at least, that he didn't bother her quite as much as most people did.
A handful of jokes immediately leapt to Salem's mind, though for once none of them escaped his lips straight away. He held his tongue and shrugged against the worn felt of the table.
"I needed some time away, I guess," he grumbled. Regretting the words almost as soon as they had left his mouth. There was no way that Lorelei wouldn't read something into that. Next time, he reminded himself, he would just make a tastelessly inappropriate joke about her being blind.
For her part, the indigo-haired young woman did not disappoint. "Something on your mind, then, I see." Coming to a stop beside the pool table, she decided that this was as good a way to pass the time as any. "Mind if I have a seat?" she asked, her tone somewhat more gentle now. It was rare for Salem to have anything other than sex, violence and mayhem on his mind - who knew when the next time that happened would be?
"Whatever," the response was dismissive and uncaring. She hopped up on the pool table beside him and settled in.
"Is there something I can do for you and your charming accent today, Lorelei?" There were over five hundred different tiles that made up the ceiling in here. Had he miscounted? He could have sworn that there were over six hundred yesterday.
He thinks it's charming? she wondered, fighting a smile. "Certainly," she replied. "You can tell me what's up. I've been here at least two minutes and you've only made two jokes, neither of which were at my expense, and you haven't tried to get in my pants."
"Very perceptive. You've seen right through me," he sighed, swivelling his mismatched eyes down to look at the Destrillian perched on the corner of the pool table. She could probably see much more with those brilliant blue, sightless eyes of hers anyway. Not that he had made much of an effort in hiding the fact that something had been very definitely been on his mind lately. "You've heard about Kram and Tao, right?" he wasn't sure what had prompted this admission of the very thing that had been on his mind. Maybe it was something about Lorelei's unnerving stare, or her cute ass, or the fact that she was the only other Destrillian in the room at the moment. He wasn't sure.
"Yeah," she replied, rolling her eyes. "What about it?"
"It doesn't piss you off at all? Doesn't make you want to slap him upside his big, stupid dopey head and then throw that HUGE BITCH on top of a pile of live grenades?" He didn't try and hide the anger edging into his voice. There was no point, really. Everybody in the facility had heard about Kram and Salem nearly killing each other in the training room last week.
"Not especially; I mean, she is a huge bitch, and I don't like either one of them, but someone apparently finds them useful. As long as that's the case, what do I care?" She glanced over at the green-haired Destrillian. "But obviously it matters to you."
"No it doesn't, I don't care," he immediately snarled back. "I just think it's annoying as all hell." He pulled himself up into a sitting position so that he no longer had to look up at the judgmental stare of the other Destrillian.
"Why?" she asked. "You're friends, aren't you?"
"He's an overly sentimental, dorky, good for nothing streak of piss," Salem shrugged. He and Kram had been friends, but there was no doubt that something had changed between the two over the past few years. Or maybe it had just been Kram that had changed and then subsequently everything else had changed around him. Either way, it was all Tao's fault.
"But?"
"He used to be my friend." Lorelei is so annoying. Lorelei is so annoying. Lorelei is so annoying. Lorelei is so annoying. The endless playback loop continued through his head. Had the doctors here neglected to inform him of her mysterious power to make him talk about goofy, personal bullshit?
"'Used to'? So you blame Tao, then."
"Of course I blame her. Fuck, better clear out some room in your pod for the platinum No Shit award I'm going to get to work on fashioning for you."
"How thoughtful of you," she said with a smile. A considering expression crossed her face. "Why not just kill her, then?"
"I dunno. I guess I've thought about it a lot." Salem shrugged and turned his eyes back towards the five hundred and forty four tiles on the ceiling, "The guards don't exactly give me a lot of free reign anymore, you know?"
Lorelei snorted. "So the two of you are training. Accidents happen," she said with a shrug.
Salem let out a mirthless laugh. "You think they'd let me train with her? I'm far too badass for her to handle."
"Ooh, I love a confident man," she chuckled. "Although..." Her expression suddenly became serious. "She seems to have him wrapped around her finger, doesn't she?"
"A damn sight more than his joke of a doctor does, that's for sure." Salem's eyes were drawn back to those of his indigo haired companion. "Why?"
"Exactly what you just said." She turned her unseeing gaze upon Salem. "Perhaps they've become...confused as to just where their loyalties lie."
The tone of what she was suggesting was not lost on Salem, who broke out into a wide smile. "Perhaps you're right." He slouched back down onto the table with his hands folded behind his head, the dawn of an idea beginning to break into his mind. Perhaps there was a way to get rid of Tao after all that didn't involve alienating Kram for good.
Two guards lay unconscious at Kram's feet. He was inside the ever so familiar pod room, where each and every one of them was contained - however this was not his. He sat at the base where the pod would normally be positioned, as if its guardian. Beneath the pod, slept the one he cared for, his newfound source of life. Kram idly threw one of Li's metallic stressballs around the room, resonating around them that they did not wish to be bothered or that he was there and had to beware. After several attempts and precautions, the guards had given up all attempts to prevent him from meeting Tao within the pod room. Tao's sleeping visage was well aware that Kram was in the room, watching over her and hoping to speak to her. Having caught his presence long before he sat at the base of her pod, she made her first move.
Hello there, Kram. What brings you here? she said through telepathy, still eyes closed.
Kram suddenly stopped throwing the ball around with one catch. Having caught her telepathic message, he placed it down to give her a still sense of peace.
Salem and I aren't talking anymore, Kram responded.
Tao remained still within the confines of her pod.
I am well aware, Kram.
Kram bit his lip, picking up Li's metal ball once more and throwing it around to think of what to say.
He's still your friend is he not? Kram...You should not have done that. Why did you let go of your feelings as easily as that?
Kram caught the ball.
He's not. If he can't accept you, or sees my feelings as weakness, then he's not. But he's still...
He's still important to you. No matter what. Keep in mind you and I have been around for but a year. But Salem and you, you both share a lifetime of friendships even I am envious of. Do not throw it all away, Kram.
Kram grimaced as he held the ball tightly.
We have to get out of here...
Kram, please. I've already resigned to my fate here... We're Destrillians. Nothing more. Even if we are free, where do we go?
Kram threw the metal ball against the Viola symbol etched on the left side of the door with all his might, denting it and leaving it stuck.
No. There is always a way. I'm going to save you and all of them, even if I have to save Salem from his own bloodlust.
Tao remained silent as her magenta eyes slowly opened and stretched her hand against the pod's glass. Kram placed it in as well, a red blush running through his cheeks as he stared at her beautiful glowing eyes.
Alright. But promise me that you would meet Salem again. Promise?
Kram reluctantly dodged her hopeful eyes until he conceded by nodding.
I'll...uhh, meet him again to see how he's doing. Eventually.
Please do, Kram. Take care of yourself, okay?
Without another word, Kram waved an affectionate good bye to Tao as he descended back to his secret route into the darkness of the facility. He had to act fast. There was something in Tao's words that made him quite nervous, there had to be something wrong with her or what they were doing to her. Time was running out. He had to think of a way to free the others and conduct his own escape with her. He knew he could only turn his pleas to the one person capable of helping either of them, but he did not know when to strike.
Dr. Li's metallic hand clawed at the sides of the strange outlandish armour that sealed Kram within. Her annoyed face, coupled with her artificial wheezing, did not make the situation they were in.
"What in Aya's name is this abomination?" she exclaimed as she scratched the armour.
"Sorry I didn't have time to rip him out of this damn tin can myself, doc," Salem grunted from the corner of the room. He was leaning aside from the group of a half a dozen doctors that were examining the Rider suit that encased the Destrillian of darkness.
Dr. Li turned and gave him a welcoming smile. Their relationship throughout the years have become quite...complex to say the least compared to the times in the early days.
"You have done a splendid job, Salem. You need not be so critical of your efforts," she responded through her electronic voice. "You bringing the grasshopper home is most appreciated."
"Yeah, well, the little bastard never did know what was best for him."
"Let's hope he has forwent his petty emotions this time," Dr. Li said as the doctors began to call in several mechanics to torch open the armoured abomination and bring back what was once theirs.
There had been no contact with the team in over twelve hours. It had been the longest Jason Spencer had been without contact with the men on the ground since the excavation had commenced over thirty days ago. It was obvious by the timid glances of the yacht's staff, and the reluctance of the dozen or so soldiers that served as his private security guard, that he was worried, and therefore irritable. They gave the tall, bearded man a wide berth as he sat brooding in the exquisite black leather chair of the sweeping main cabin of Viola Inc's Presidential yacht.
Reverse engineered from military grade technology developed by the company itself, the yacht sat like a gleaming black dagger of naked carbon fibre. The ultimate marriage of comfort, elegance and high technology. But not even the advanced radio equipment that was equipped to it could maintain any sort of consistent signal with the excavation team that were working beyond the turbulent wall of storm clouds on the glassy surface of the Shattering. A deadzone in every right, each little blip of electricity was disrupted going in, and coming out. It took about a dozen outer-atmosphere satellites just to amplify the signal enough to come, thin, weak and constantly laden with white noise, through the speakers inlaid in the sleek table of black glass designed for this very purpose.
It was hard not to feel frustrated, having to sit back on the sidelines whilst the team laboured away at their task. It was not a feeling that Spencer was accustomed to at all. Even as an officer serving in the Artolian military, he could rarely be found far from the combat of the front lines. But in the real world, things were much less simple. A universal agreement between nations forbade any excavation of the Shattering because of the global risks unique to this geographical location. News that Jason Spencer and his family had travelled there was frankly more trouble than it was worth - and not just with the foreign governments and corporations that would see these actions as a breach of international law. There were entities far more dangerous than those that disapproved of trespassing in these waters.
Sleepless green eyes hovered over the barely touched glass of scotch that rested in his hand. He had once been told that it was a danger sign when you were too worried to even finish fine liquor. The edges of his mouth flickered slightly beneath his full beard of jet black hair and the old soldier downed the glass in one.
Outside, Jason Spencer's wife stood tall on the deck of the sleek yacht, her sharp eyes scanning the expanse of choppy water and the glimmering edge of land that lay, just in sight, on the horizon. Eleanor Grey, for her part, was impatient as well. She was a woman who got things done, no fuss and no delay, and even despite the scale of the venture she and her husband were undertaking, a month was longer than she would have liked to spend waiting uselessly for something to happen. Some called Mrs. Grey a control freak; others just called her organized. Whichever one a person sided with, they couldn't deny that when her name was on the bill for a project, it would be seen done swiftly and well.
To Eleanor, a month was neither swift nor well. The fact that she had spent said month on the yacht had done little to soften her - if anything, the inability to do much anything of use contributed to her ire. She blasted a short sigh of annoyance through her well-defined nose, the only outward sign of a loss of composure that she gave.
Her children had not helped matters, either. Although the yacht had made a few stops to refuel and for the gift of proper land under the family's legs again, so much time in so little a space had made the boy and girl stir-crazy, each in their own way. Neither one had reared their heads today, perhaps sensing the air of tension that seemed to have swallowed the yacht like a dense fog.
Her children were good for that, she mused. She had to give them that much. Both Zachary and Persephone had a way of tuning into the radio signals their parents gave off, and responding appropriately. Perhaps it was genetic, or perhaps it was the gift of a whole life spent in close proximity with Eleanor and Jason. Maybe it was both. Regardless, Eleanor knew her son and daughter understood a lot of the things between her and her husband that no outsider could. She could trust them, at least, with that.
She threw a glance behind her, to the slanted, tinted windows of the cabin. She knew she would be unable to see in but she could not stop herself from chancing a look over her shoulder now and again, waiting. As if she would be able to tell, darkened glass or not, when something happened from some shift inside.
No amount of random glances would yield any crop to her. The glass remained as dark and impassive as ever. She left the prow without hesitation, without a single backward glance, descending to the entrance of the cabin at a brisk, professional pace. Eleanor Grey was always like that: no time for the things that didn't matter.
"Enjoy the fresh air?" Jason asked from the long cabin. It served as the main lounge area for the yacht and was primarily used for entertaining large numbers of guests at corporate parties and fundraisers. It seemed haunting and forlorn without such numbers, housing only Jason pouring himself another glass of scotch from a lean, thin bottle on the well-stocked liquor cabinet.
"No." That was all she said for a moment, crisp and clipped. Only the one lifted corner of her lips gave away that she wasn't actually as unhappy as she sounded. She joined her husband on a chair opposite him. "The salt in the air isn't refreshing after this long - it's just briny. It gets in your nose and doesn't leave."
Jason nodded, but didn't respond immediately. It was conversation for conversation's sake. Neither one of them was willing, after all, to discuss the more pressing matter at hand, or their inability to do anything about it.
"Do you want me to get you a drink?"
"Please."
Nodding again, Spencer stood up to return to the liquor cabinet and moved for a bottle of gin. Scotch had never been his wife's drink. It was the little things like this which truly defined their relationship - hugs and kisses and tender caresses were rare, but if you asked one the other's favourite drink, preferred number of pillows, meat-to-vegetable portions, they wouldn't blink an eye.
He handed her the glass of gin (two cubes of ice, as always) and walked to the cabin's window. There was not much to the scenery here. Choppy grey waves crashed against the steep, jagged cliff faces of one of the Shattered Sea's innumerable islands. Everything about this place was hostile.
"Have you seen much of the kids today?"
"Not a whisper." Eleanor drank from her glass, following her husband with her eyes. "They've gone and holed themselves up downstairs. Nothing unusual for them," she added, and then with a hint of amusement so slight that anybody else would have mistaken it for simple exasperation, "I'm sure the peace is appreciated by all."
The beard hid the smile. It was no secret that their two teenage children could be more than a handful if they put their minds to it.
"Maybe we should have dinner with them later? We did promise them a holiday after all."
"What's a holiday to them? Those two look at every day as a holiday, or else every holiday as work." It was also well-known to the couple that their children could not swallow the words "quality family time" without at least a bit of a grimace, as all children their age did. Regardless: "we'll call them to the table at seven."
Jason nodded in approval. Tiring of the scenery, he returned to the comfort of the cabin's quality executive seating and took a sip of the thick amber coloured liquid that dwelt in his glass.
Eleanor took a moment to relax into the back of the chair, allowing her rigid posture to slack just a little. She took another sip of her own glass, mirroring her husband, and as she did she let time slow down around her. She did this on occasion - it was how she dealt with the near-constant overload of responsibility she had. Listen for the ticking of a clock, or the beating of a heart; lengthen the space between them, open it up and step inside and deposit her thoughts in each one like an envelope, and then step back out and let the next one follow. Second by second. Heartbeat by heartbeat.
In this state of contemplation, she took the rare opportunity to properly admire her husband. Being six feet tall herself, Eleanor thought she had been fortunate to find somebody who could make her feel small, when she wanted. Jason Spencer was a giant, and the understated but unmistakable command he held over every person in a room seemed to match that. The only other person she knew who could step into a space and instantly become its centrepiece was herself.
She noticed the tired lines under his eyes, too. "Maybe you ought to join me outside a little more often," she suggested, allowing her voice to lose the clear, business-like tone she used on anybody but her family.
Jason laughed softly at his wife's invitation. It was rare that the two of them were able to commit to spending time together that did not relate to work in some capacity. Even here, far beyond the veil of civilization. It was even more rare to hear such a request coming from his wife, the only person he knew whose fiercely unrelenting professionalism could match his own.
"Maybe when we get to somewhere with a more romantic view, Ellie." There was none of the usual gruffness to his voice when he called her Ellie, a name that Jason privately suspected none of the doting nannies or obnoxious school teachers from her past had ever dared use.
"Understandable. The view is boring after an hour or two," Eleanor replied bluntly. Sometimes her comments were too simple, too to-the-point for people. Even some of her closest associates could be coerced, after a few hours at a bar on a weekend, to say they occasionally thought of her as rude. In reality, though, Jason's wife felt she simply did not have breath to waste on words meant only to flesh out what she was really meaning to say. When said correctly, a point does not need to be prepared for, or softened, or trimmed with pretty, useless speech. It was a quality that Jason found quite refreshing when so much of their world involved dealing with great volumes of people content to bury the meaning of their words beneath heaps of unnecessary jargon and bureaucracy.
"I'm sure the view at ground zero must be quite different." Jason threw her a significant glance. Ground zero was the common terminology for the epicentre of the great inverted spiral that made up the Shattering crater. For all the myth and peril it was steeped in, it was still widely regarded as being one of the planet's great natural wonders.
"I imagine so." She returned his gaze and held it, green on green. "Perhaps one day we might even see it." It was an odd mix, the sentence: half joke, half expression of impatience.
"I'd hope so. I'd take that glassy wasteland over the next two dozen board room meetings and gala events that we'll be dragged along to." There was something innately appealing about exploring the unknown that spoke to the old adventurer in Viola's Vice-President. He finished off the second glass of scotch in a great gulp in his own expression of impatience. Neither one of them had taken well to sitting back and waiting for a situation to unfold that was beyond their control.
This time, Jason managed to eke out a real smile from his wife. Small, but real. And then, once more: "Understandable."
.oOo.
"So why aren't we allowed to go to this Shattering place, again?" the high, youthful voice of the young girl sitting at the end of the table piped up, neatly cutting through the tense silence that hung like a thick, heavy miasma around the dinner table. The young girl didn't address either of her parents, instead choosing to swirl the grapefruit juice in her crystal wineglass with an air of thorough disinterest.
Eleanor looked down her nose at her daughter. Thin, pale, and showing signs of one day being as tall as her mother, Persephone was nothing if a piece of work. She did look quite a lot like her mother, with the same general face shape and the same green eyes as both Eleanor and Jason.
The only part of her that seemed to come from her father was her black hair--which at the moment was less a natural, dark-brown sort of black and more of a glossy bottle-black. Persephone had a habit of doing strange, impulsive things, and her latest escapade had been to try and dye her hair the same colour as her mother's, a rich, deep auburn. It had happened with one or two days to spare before the trip to the Shattering, and it had not gone well. The girl had received a scolding that only the likes of Eleanor could give: never aggressive, but completely terrifying all the same.
Her hair had been re-dyed back to black-- and her face, lifted in some strange, eager sort of hopefullness in that one moment before her punishment had come crashing down, had been re-formed into its usual snooty, disdainful pout.
Sometimes Eleanor wondered, from the way Persephone acted, and from the strange, sometimes even disturbing things she did, whether her father hadn't given her something else.
Nobody was answering the girl's question, though, and this made her impatient. Not because she cared much about the answer, but because she was being ignored. "Well?"
"Have you ever heard the stories about what the Shattering is, Persephone?" Eleanor asked after swallowing a decadent little morsel of her Cornish hen. "About what it does?"
Her daughter shrugged, giving no definitive answer either way. Both her parents sighed inwardly. It was a typical response and one which they had entirely expected.
"I've heard a little bit, but not much. It's not an area of study that they encourage at school," a voice piped up from opposite Persephone. Zachary Spencer's voice was the opposite of his sister's melodramatic whine; it was thoughtful, soft, and quietly interested in gathering more knowledge.
If Persephone took after her mother's looks, then there was no doubt that Zack comprised of the best attributes of both parents. From his father, the sixteen year old was tall for his age and with an unruly mop of feathery dark hair that fell over a carelessly good looking face with the thin nose and high cheekbones of his mother. However, it was not in these features that Zack was most like his parents. The studious, diligent and thoroughly secretive atmosphere that seemed to surround him was something so instinctive of his family that there was no doubt as to the identities of his parents.
Even now he kept his inquisitive face thoroughly unreadable. It was not beyond assumption that he already knew a good deal about the Shattering and was merely asking to try and glean whatever secretive knowledge his parents might be privy to. Nevertheless, Eleanor thought with a private smirk, it would be worthwhile to indulge him.
"Recent geological research," she began, "has approximated that the Shattering has been part of Shaledost for seven thousand years. Satellite images, if you've seen them, Zack?" She paused a moment, but he showed no indication of recognition, "Show a large island in the middle of where, geographically, Sobek and Pharos used to be connected. The interesting thing about this island is that, towards the center..." and here she allowed herself a small sip of wine before finishing her sentence, taking enough time to let the suspense grow, but not so much as to seem expectant of a reaction: "it's made entirely of glass."
"Glass?" Persephone's voice perked up slightly as she raised her sharp green eyes to meet her mother's. The first sign of definite interest from the typically difficult twelve year old.
Eleanor nodded slightly, making no outward sign of the satisfaction she felt at finally having begun to captivate even her constantly-aloof daughter's attention. "Now think. What, logically, could have caused that to happen?"
Persephone said nothing, her young mind still reeling from the thought of an entire island made of sparkling glass. Zack however, narrowed his eyes in thought. His eyes were a curiosity, as grey as smoke save for a few flecks of palest green lingering in his left eye.
"A volcano maybe? Or a meteorite impact?" he ventured. "Some kind of large explosion?"
Jason Spencer smirked as he watched the subtle way in which Eleanor's tale had captivated their two children, playing on Zack's instinctive inquisitive nature, and Persephone's child-like wonder at fantastic sights and stories that could have come straight from a fairy tale.
The mother's lips twitched in the inkling of a smile, her approval the reward for her child's efforts. "That's correct. Millennium ago, something went off with enough force to turn an entire continent into glass-- and into the broken bits we're anchored in right now.
"Another curious thing," she added after a small pause, catching the eye of her husband, "is the grain of the glass. Not only did something fuse the desert together, but it had the correct force and velocity to scour a whirlpool into the center." She took another bite of her meal, savouring it like she savoured the moment, and the astonishment she could feel brewing in the air. "A mile-wide whirlpool made of glass. That is what the Shattering is."
"Something," Zack repeated casually. There was no doubting the significance of that word. It was extremely rare that either of his parents were ever completely in the dark about anything. He shrugged, as if to show that he let the comment pass without a second thought. "And that's what your company is doing here? Excav-"
"What do you think did it!?" Zack was cut off by the shrill, excitable outburst from his sister. Who was now staring wide-eyed at her mother's story and leaning so far forward that a lock of her long ebony hair was perilously close to an encounter with the dinner left on her plate.
Eleanor gave her daughter a long look, considering. "I'm sure your father has an idea or two," she said finally, turning her head a little to face Jason.
Jason took a long, measured drink from his glass of red wine. His craggy features taut and thoughtful as he considered what to tell his eager audience.
"If you believe the myths and legends," he began slowly, choosing every word carefully. "There used to be a city built there. A city unlike anything that we have seen since, made of gold and diamonds, marble and ivory. So large that it stretched across the gut of an entire continent." Jason paused for a moment, to drain his wine glass.
"It was a city built by and built for the gods themselves. Their capital city, from which the Kings of the gods would rule over all the humans on the planet.
"Historians and experts in this kind of thing say that the city was destroyed in a great explosion. It was so large that all the surviving documents, carvings and artwork from that era show it as though a second sun is bursting to life right on our planet's surface." He shrugged, letting the suspense hang in the air for a moment.
"Who knows how much of that is really true? We certainly don't expect to find any gods down there. But we know there was a city here, and we know there was an explosion." He spoke directly to Zack, answering the question that his teenage son had been unable to properly ask him earlier.
Both of the children sat in silence, though Persephone's dreamy expression showed that her mind was still fixated on the gaudy splendor and extravagance that it was reported that this city of the gods had once possessed. Zack said nothing, though looked every bit as alert and interested in his own more subtle way.
"We know one more thing, too." Eleanor kept her eyes on her plate, carefully selecting a perfect bite-sized forkful of hen and promptly spearing it before looking up, with a casualness to match her son's, around the table. She had a dreadfully good gauge of how people would react to the way she said something, her children in particular. The tall woman placed the fragrant bite of food into her mouth and chewed it slowly, giving them just enough time, once more, to give her words an exponential impact: "It makes people insane."
"It makes people insane?" Zack repeated slowly, ignoring his sister's feigned expression of confusion in favour of outright asking for more information outright.
Eleanor nodded once, simply. "No scientific record or research has explained why. There is a reason why nobody has excavated the place before now." Her tone was laced with just enough blankness to perhaps worry her children a little that she was disappointed they hadn't thought of this before. "Getting too close to the centre can make people depressed, aggressive, manic-- even suicidal."
Jason was thankful that his wife was being cautious with her explanation as he shovelled another helping of the roast lamb into his mouth. The Shattering had previously recorded an almost 100% fatality rate amongst explorers and would-be excavators, almost all of whom had descended into the most fatal depths of insanity long before their bodies were recovered. If they could be recovered at all. Nevertheless, he remained silent to let Eleanor finish her story.
"Almost every single person ever to go near the Shattering has suffered major psychological and medical complication immediately or soon thereafter." The fact settled at the table like another person; the Spencer family's gaunt guest, pressing and real. "Your father and I have done all we can to ensure the necessary precautions have been taken to deal with this issue, but even so, it's been... an uphill battle." She didn't feel the need to mention that they had lost a handful of people, or the details surrounding their slow degradation. This was intended to educate, and to thrill-- not to outright scare. Still: "That," she finished, looking back at Persephone, "is why we cannot go there."
It was also a wise move, thought Jason, not to ruin the excitement of the evening's tale with the potential political fallout if they were spotted trespassing on the island.
"Can we at least see it?" Persephone insisted, with a characteristic pout.
"I might be able to have a word with the skipper and see if he can take us close by the island tomorrow," Jason compromised with his young daughter. A response that earned him a prompt look of shrewd disapproval from his wife. She was not too keen on having a yacht so filled with advanced electronics, ploughing straight into the planet's most infamous electromagnetic dead zone.
"Thanks daddy!" Persephone chirped up with a broad grin. One large enough to hold off Eleanor's chastising retort till the children had at least left the table.
It took a moment too long for Jason's keen ears to pick up the sound of a radio crackling to life from the open doors to the room just behind the main cabin. Most of the radio equipment was hardwired to go through to the vessel's bridge, but this most sensitive and private of broadcast channels was designed to come through the audio-visual equipment that had been set up in the couple's private study.
Exchanging a significant look with his wife, Jason quickly stood up and excused himself to his two curious children and strode with a barely contained anticipation as to what the radio transmission from the Shattering team would yield. Excitement and dread had whipped themselves into a frenzy in the pit of his stomach, as he sincerely hoped that the team were not about to bring him news of yet more fatalities.
Wasting no time surveying the small, tidy study, the tall Vice-President leant over the video monitor that had been built into one of the far desks and flicked on the switch beneath the red blinking light that signified an incoming message. Plucking the receiver from its cradle on the desk, he raised it to his mouth and watched as the grainy black and white video stream crackled into life.
"Mr. Spencer?" came the voice of one of the team, sounding half-exhilarated, half-frightened, but not insane or suicidal. It was a good sign.
"Speaking, lad. Where are you? Are all of your team still alive?" He spoke urgently; there was no telling when the signal could be interrupted by the notoriously volatile atmosphere that lingered over the Shattering.
"Everyone is safe for the moment, sir," the man on the other end replied, and then, sounding as if the sentence had to blast past a lump of nervous excitement in his throat, "we've-- reached the epicentre of ground zero."
The hooded young man stepped out of view on the monitor, revealing the almost black interior of the Shattering's deep epicentre. Nearly twelve hundred feet below sea level, the glass reflected the bleak, dark lack of sunlight that penetrated this far into the ocean. Jason vaguely became aware that Eleanor had entered the study behind him.
A wave of relief washed over Jason with the news that the team had reached ground zero safely. It was a reassuring thought, that the modifications that Viola had made to the Polar Exploration gear currently worn by the group had been effective in halting whatever dementia had infected their prior excavation efforts.
"Deliver your report," he ordered, but with none of the authoritative harshness typically associated with the command.
"There's--" The signal crackled and spat white noise at the husband and wife, and for a moment or two the screen went dead entirely. Just as they began to worry it might not return, it flickered to life again: "--here. Hello?"
Eleanor snatched the receiver from Jason's hand and held it close to her mouth. "We're here. Hurry up - the connection is going to go any moment."
"Ma'am." There was slightly more of an apprehensive edge to the excavator's voice now that the person on the other end of the line had switched. It hastened his words, though, which was all Mrs. Grey cared about at the moment. "It's this-- sort of... well to be honest we have no idea what it--"
"What does it look like?" Quick, clipped, to the point.
"It's big, from what we can see. Rounded. Smooth. Sort of... silvery. We haven't had time to run proper tests yet but a preliminary scan is showing us nothing."
Whichever member of the crew was tasked with holding the camera twisted it from its current position and directed its vision elsewhere. There was a momentary explosion of static, and the picture lost any sort of focus or quality. When it cleared up, the camera was pointing directly at the strange construct jutting, smooth and distinct from the black glassy wall.
It certainly was large. Without a clearer picture it was impossible to tell how large, but by squinting the pair could make out it could be room-sized. The surface of the object gave off a strange glint in the darkness; it was perfectly smooth, even glossy, without a single visible warp in the shape to show for thousands of years buried under thousands of tonnes of ground.
"Aim more light at it," Eleanor said to the receiver. Despite a brief flare of crackling, the line held and workers rushed to try and direct the light sources they had more effectively towards the object. "Stop. There."
It could have been stone, or glass, or metal-- or some strange combination of the three. Nothing about the colour, texture or opacity gave any indication. It was a shimmering dark grey, shot through with spider veins of a more milky silver. Like striking gold in a plot of land. On closer inspection, the lines seemed much too exact to be a work of nature. They ran about the surface in a seemingly random fashion, but after getting used to the strangety of the entire object, one could see that they followed very specific patterns. The lines seemed to have some sort of depth to them, some sort of luminosity, but the details were indecipherable and would probably remain that way until someone pressed their nose right up against the thing. Eleanor was tempted to ask just that.
Perhaps not quite that, though. Focused though she was on gleaning every bit of information possible about their new discovery, there was no telling how dangerous the object was. Her team, though deserving a reprimand for their slow progress, were risking enough right now as it was. "Get the camera as close as you can."
Dutifully, the cameraman moved towards the mysterious object. The picture quality predictably disintegrated into a sea of blurs and angry lines of static. When it came back into focus the lens was only inches from the smooth surface of the enigmatic artefact. One of the other-worldly faintly glowing lines that criss-crossed it was present in the edge of the frame. The lights shining on the surface of the thing showed just how glossy it actually was: the surface seemed almost liquid, it was so smooth and unperturbed. Almost not truly there-- because no real object could attain that level of perfection.
Jason said nothing, the realisation that this expedition had yielded more than he could have ever imagined was beginning to dawn on him and it was becoming increasingly hard work to temper his own excitement at the discovery.
"What do you make of it?" he breathed to Eleanor, who could scarcely take her own eyes from the remarkable images displayed on the monitor.
"Thank you," she said into the receiver and to the team on the other end before covering it slowly with one hand. Just as slowly, almost as if she didn't quite want to, she removed her gaze from the screen and looked at her husband.
"I think the stories you told me are turning out to be more true than I thought."
