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"I didn't want him to forgive me I suppose." he said. "I don't know, I liked the sound of some sort of greater universal vindication, some forgiveness on a spiritual scale. I was willing to strive towards mending the balance between myself and the universe, something grand and I suppose a little pretentious. I felt like Rodney was someone who was uniquely equipped to help me towards that end. He seems to have an innate moral sense, an ability to choose good over evil, to do the right thing. I was hoping through him and through habit I could learn to do the right thing myself."

He gave Melvin a flat look.

"Do I think my life is doomed? If I don't manage to attain either redemption or godhood then yes. It is just a matter of time before things catch up to me, before Life division simply kills me off because I am too much trouble to them. I am on a short expiration date and the only alternative is transcending age and weakness or finding a means to be at some peace with both."

"He had a pedestal he earned with his rarity. There was something wise about him and about what he knew and knows. I don't think I'll ever learn anything with my freedom other than how to make myself better and more cunning."

Atlantis and transcendence sounded more doable.

"We'll see what we can find I think, to improve the future rather than reject the past."

His horse stepped into the shallow river crossing without any concern, Lawrence looking a lot more uncertain than his steed all of a sudden. He kept looking at the opposite side, telling himself the water wouldn't even reach up to his knees.

"Deus will keep everything from Atlantis despite you finding it. They'll take away and exploit your hard work and you won't get a penny from it. You are a full hunter and yet you immediately dismiss your right to have access to anything found. They are using you and all of us. We should get there first and then just...not tell them anything about it."

He hesitated at the question. "I can sit beside it now, I don't mind being next to water, it's just being in it that is the problem."

Lawrence seemed somewhat pleased by Melvin’s attitude, even if his basic desire to share was a little bit soft-hearted. What mattered was that he was selfish enough to be able to put their mutual good regarding discoveries before all else. “Good, that’s an attitude that will get us ahead in the world. When it comes down to it, it truly is both of us against the world. Deus won’t ever help us, to them we are nothing but cannon fodder, in my case even less than that. It is up to us to help ourselves.” He was rather resolute in this and dreamed of nothing more than a world where he could stab the organisation and Dr H in the back for all the indignities he had suffered. “They don’t respect you even a fraction as much as you deserve, you work hard, day in and day out, you craft no end of runics and have given them every bit of your loyalty since day one, do you get any respect for it? No, instead they spend all their time tripping over themselves to sing the praises of individuals like Mimsy. What has she ever achieved? Nothing. I was on a mission with her at one point and she displayed nothing but a callous disregard for safety protocols. They mistake a stilted manner of speech as intelligence.” He shook his head. “No doubt there are others like her. They don’t realise where their truly valuable individuals lie. You are brilliant, you just don’t flaunt it, you are excellent in a steady and dependable way. He talks about worth when he doesn’t understand it, he wants people who wear little badges declaring how excellent at science they are while ignoring the silent workhorses that power his division.” His horse picked up on his tension and irritation and walked a little more quickly along the path where it opened out a little more to the sunlight.

“Feet would be fine.” He said, eyeing the shallow water while they passed it. “It’s when I can’t see the bottom or see my own feet that I start to get a little off-kilter. There is probably somewhere along here that we could stop off, I’m sure I can hear a waterfall.”

Maybe he could show Melvin his artifact while they did so.

“It is exactly that kind of hypocrisy that makes me so irritated.” He said with a cold frown. “She has openly in the past done heinous things and expressed desire to harm creatures and humans alike without empathy or any apparent care. She still to this day clearly has no concept of empathy and is still capable of the same things if placed in a situation that permits it. None of this seems to matter in the eyes of the establishment. Her mother is hardly different, with a litany of misdeeds behind her a hundred miles long, yet all are excused in an instant as the actions of a darling who didn’t know better but who is considered somehow mended and better now. There are no end of double standards Melvin and both of us must be the whipping boys of an ungrateful division which will never respect us no matter what we do.”

He shook his head. “I could talk for a hundred years about the issues with H. Yet another example of do as I say not as I do, he is entirely capable of truly brutal acts and yet harshly penalises those who display curiosity, or - in the case of the minipets we destroyed – ignorance. I didn’t see him fining himself for what he did to us under the influence of that status either.” It was an event that he thought about often, and dreamed about almost as frequently. The strange half remembered nightmare of his own vivisection fascinated him, coiled like a nausea in his gut but fixated upon like an obsession. It was something that should have traumatised him deeply but simply drew him nearer all the time like a moth to a flame and made him curious what else the weapon bond made possible.

“I am not happy with my career; with the job we do, and I think it contributed in no small part to me abandoning my ultimate redemption.”

He sighed shallowly, both riders nearing a shallow waterfall that overhang a shallow calm pool of water. Leading to the water’s edge the ground gradated down to earth, gravel sized rocks and then shallow water and the water ran bright and clear. There was a secure area of grass and trees to harness the horses up to close by.

“I was working hard.” He said. “I was focused on doing the right thing and had been doing well, I spent long hours in the infirmary and hadn’t harmed a single person in months. I thought I had found a harmless way to benefit Life division by studying medicine and intending on applying that in ways that might benefit runic applications of the science. My intentions were good, my eyes set on a different sort of future. And then the next thing I know there is a mission where I am tricked into attacking one of our own people and then rendered a child and levelled a lingering and hefty fine for ignorant actions, taking a harsh set of comments on my worth and the perceived narrow tedium of my vision. The wage cut undermined my family life. And that was the end of that. No good deed goes unpunished, so why bother?”

Dismounting he moved to tether his horse up, making his way over to Melvin’s to take her rein so he could also get off her back. “I should have brought some towels with us, something to sit on and dry off with. Next time though.”

Lawrence nodded to Melvin, still not understanding why anyone would do anything not expecting reward but willing to accept that for reasons unknown some people did it anyway. Altruism was a mystery to him; one he’d never been able to solve. He’d tried equating it to the hope of some long-term spiritual reward but it seemed to be present even in individuals without faith, people who lived for their own reasons and had no fear of a hereafter. To him it always simply stood to reason that people existed to be taken advantage of, to be exploited for relentless gain.



He admired Melvin as he pulled off his shirt, finding himself calmed and soothed by the sight of him happy for the first time in what seemed like for ever. He hadn’t enjoyed seeing the other man upset, not least of which because it had made him look like a terrible person for doing it, but also because Melvin had been nothing but good and loyal to him and had been heinously repaid for his troubles. He let his irritation at Life division go at this, melting into the contact and dropping down to one knee – unafraid of the dirt thanks to the fact he was wearing denims.



“Give me your foot then.” He said.

“Oh you know me.” Lawrence said, dragging his fingertips along Melvin’s inner thigh. “Sometimes I enjoy playing at subservience.” When you were a truly divine being, it was sometimes enjoyable to walk amongst the mortals and play at their games. “Not many are worth it though, so you are fortunate in that.”

“And yes, that’s exactly it. It becomes tedious to constantly have to face negativity wherever I go. I might not care much about it on a personal level but it makes life difficult. I prefer a little calm, a little love and affection. I’m human after all.” He helped Melvin off with the boots, deftly using a combination of his good hand and the steadying weight of his bad arm to do so. “I enjoy getting away from everything, the animosity, the problems, all of it. I appreciate this trip a great deal.”

“Are you going to go swim?” he asked, curiously.