Quote:
Follows this RP.
Faustite gasped and panted and clawed for air in the stagnant Negaverse halls. Smoke whistled out of his back, threatening to blow out the one device offering it an exit. Each corridor grew ever longer in their navigation. Each corridor lurched onward tauntingly, twisting in its whimsy, falling away in fits of sparks and stars with each uncertain step. He walked with a hand braced to the wall, with another at his spine over the pressurized pen. Footfalls echoed eternal. He wished for company long departed for more urgent business -- more familiar business. The stricken captain was left to solve his own problems. Consider it a new responsibility, they said.
Smoke poured out of his back.
Pieces of him changed with that promotion -- pieces he never knew would change. Black hiked up his fingers. Pressure swelled in his back. The promotion was meant to change him, to lend him more power, to provoke more efficiency. To commend his consistently exemplary energy draining. To condone his good behavior. To add another painstaking medal to Schörl's repertoire of ill-gotten achievements. But the promotion fed his physical dissonance, grew it across his hands and through his back. Chrysocolla told him that few knew anything, if at all, about partial youma. That these officers are doomed to a life of Negaverse servitude that few understood. There existed no cures, no means to control them. So the growth of his worse half -- was it unintended? Or a consequence that she somehow planned into the act?
His thoughts on the matter proved sluggish and exhausting. A weary hand reached for a tablet from subspace. Panting into the microphone, he called the only name to come to mind. He spat it with all the tired contempt he could muster. "Schörl." A long breath, rasped against this pressure. "I need your help. Can't breathe. No one knows why."
Needle fears warned her of her unorthodox method of approaching such issues. She may wound him yet, or worsen it, or youmafy him altogether. Confiscate his humanity. Reduce him to thoughtless drivel. Abandon him to suffocation. He told himself he didn't care; her preposterous punishments had no place in a predicament carved not of his own influence.
Where the identification of the caller could be useful for an organization as vast and internationally secretive with itself as the Negaverse, Faustite had been taken in as one of her own. Faustite’s voice was one committed to memory. In this case, though, despite its usual teenaged rancor in tone, there was growing cacophony in the timbre that wasn’t puberty. The new technology isn’t likely to distort on the line, either. ‘ No one’ indicates a possible stop at the infirmary to the med teams. One should hope. Not a normal medical issue, then. Magical?
Currently at a vantage in the city, the communicator pen was withdrawn from breast pocket and thumbed. Condensing questions in ‘crisis’ was a necessity. As was minimizing travel times. “Your location and can you walk?”
Calculation of her own distance from the Loft and supplies came concurrently. Mauvians had limitation on the amount of time to block auras, and a puzzled infirmary fobbing responsibility didn’t promise priority. Or was Faustite risking AMA in a pique?
No biting words. No singsong rhymes meant to humble him. he was serious. Faustite closed eyes to the encroachment of a thousand stars. "Citadel. First floor." Words darted away from one another while he scraped his lungs for breath. He kept on, and soon the rotten doors loomed with their blackened numbers clinging to their planks like desperate fruit. "By room one-three-six." He pulled a sharp breath out of the air.
Faustite dragged himself to the crumbling wall. A quick rest wouldn't cost him much; he turned, then leaned against the stonework until it hammered at the tip of the bic pen. His face collapsed into a twisted wince as he doubled over, then slid down entirely. The hissing sounded like it came from the other end of the corridor.
"Hurry," he panted into the mic.
I shall take that as a second answer ‘No’. Auxiliary sounds were picking up across the microphone, primarily those like shuffling cloth and stone. These were expected enough given the cited location. She knew the hallway by practiced precision. “Stay on the line. Count one to three-hundred. “
Five minutes. Something for him to focus on. Something to gauge his consciousness by.
She teleported to the Loft, feeling and awareness wrenching and leaving her fingers and toes tingling. Starseed tiepin sacrificed to consumption while she slipped in through the window entrance. To the workshop, gathering small medical box and a black, anvil shaped leather bag of Edwardian age scarcely newer than its companion. Several strides then to the raised and built off smoking den to rummage out a few cases and bottles with quizzical contents. Schörl’s brows spoke where her voice didn’t, ‘We may both want these once the path is known.’
The final stop was for clean linens and clean plastic drop cloths in the studio. She didn’t waste time announcing that she was on her way. Schörl appeared by door one-three-five to give room in case the captain was in an awkward puddle across a span of flooring. There was no need for extra energy or mess expending in having body parts in each other’s meat, or being unable to complete the spell. Experiments for the future.
“Well then. Let’s have a look at you.”
When she arrived, Faustite had slipped into a crumpled L-shape against the door. His shoulder sat flush against its black-stricken surface, rubbing out faint hints of the wood underneath with every movement. He found that if he stilled as much as possible, held fast to the pen, and breathed deeply, then he could stave off the encroaching stars.
Panic was so often a hindrance in situations like these that he wondered if it ever had a use. Still, the thought demanded too much oxygen.
Green toes and heel, tongue and vamp and calf all wrapped taut in a cream finish and etched with gold ivy. He knew those boots. He knew the side-stitched pants that tucked into them, and the cape that stayed ever at their back. Relief and foreboding formed a strange, nauseating mix -- very nearly making a greeting appropriate for the green general. In the minutes spent clutching for breath, he had nothing vocal to offer her. He only leaned, shirtless as he was, and gestured to the pen at his back.
Steam geysered out liberally, spraying the air with its mistaken memories. Every inspiration taken was a long, clawing draw that forced out a greater volume of smoke.
Examination spoke of hundreds of action movies and an overactive imagination that had combined Bic-pen cricothyroidotomy with the Mad Max solution for pneumothorax. Pleasantly, it was working enough to keep the boy alive. Taking stock of his hands, pulse, gums and lips, the skin around his eyes, the very temperature and feel of his chest spoke of differences and complications borne from the Youma-influence that had stolen the stars from Faustite’s eyes. It was all the difference symbolically and literally of the first knuckle to the third.
And some horse’s a** had enough creativity to get you this far and then what...set you loose? DIdn’t care to deal with you further? How many agents are crowing to study youma, and someone out there can’t be bothered to do something more helpful or permanent than a bic pen. A dead officer is less useful than one living, half youma, or converted to a youma, but they leave you with no more than a handful of oxygen. Or the AMA again? Blame is not useful, yet. The whole of it was grating with implications of waste. Further it was going to waste a third officer’s time, her own, in fixing what should have been seen to in the first go-around. “I’ll carry you, but it will be face down. “
“Barbary, the bags.” The Youma slunk down as the General folded down. One of the private rooms of the area used for infirmary near the barracks would do. Reverse-Bridal was one of the weirder necessities of this endeavor. “At least I won’t have to cut the uniform off of you. Have you eaten, yes or no, and what, if any, drugs have been administered?”
The inspection went with a loose awareness, Faustite playing more the part of the CPR dummy than the active patient. Glossy glaze trailed up to Schörl after some time, barely seeing, processing even less.
The mention of a carry went without comment; Faustite knew he could not manage the old, indifferent walls. Mostly to waste he was, with comments said running adrift between ears in a sea of nothing. He assented with as much of a nod as he could manage. Cold sweat reflected the gesture.
Questions asked were strung together, and Faustite took a minute to answer coherently. "No food," came the first answer, barely riding on a breath. He remembered as much. His stomach soured for it in the advent of promotion; trepidation often ate through his appetite. Drugs -- did he have any? The short gasps of time between promotion and now felt sparse, robbed him hoarse. What did Arsenopyrite use? What did he say? Memory slipped in a whisper.
Did he even leave the room? Did it matter? Back throbbed and breath strained under an unknowable pressure, and the bic at his back nearly whistled for the mixed scents that left it. "No drugs."
The rest fell to making himself useful as live weight. An embarrassing burden, if he paid mind to it.
Precious little breathing, precious little brainfood. The General left the subject, the ones responsible for the bic, or the patient currently suffering and slowed, vague. Patients had to have patience, it could be supposed, but there was only so long a brain would wait before damage was a langlasting problem. Idle chatter was avoided until Faustite was settled on the table.
Speed used some clothes and sprays to clean the room and tools. Step one was reducing some damage to be able to administer anything further. Schorl pulled a modified altitude mouthpiece, which hooked by an insert to a small, 5 litres canned oxygen from the kit. There was only one more can. It will have to be for the 30 minutes after ingestion. He’ll burn through the first getting stable to be worked on. Peak is at two hours. The whip then, to get him in state.
She counted, petting and flatting fingers along the side of the boy’s throat to feel when he breathed. Short bursts during inhales. There was enough in the the thing supposedly for more than 100 breaths. She could be patient in getting him stable, and counted through, little bursts, to forty. “Back with the living? Air becomes its own drug. Keep doing this, a quick press, when you inhale. I’m going to make tea on a hot plate. You’re must drink the whole cup. You have to. You have to keep it down. “
Faustite’s hand was guided onto the canister button. Giving the drowning man the life ring to float on. Grab on, little swimmer.
“Barbary help him hold it if he needs it.” She went back to the kit for the small, titanium attachment and it’s companion butane canister, a tempered pyrex flask and a 4 oz soda-lime cup with cork hand-band. The psilocybe cubensis took twenty minutes to steep. Schörl chanted, notes drawn in long registers that grew slower, droning the way people thought of the songs of monks lacking instruments in likewise stone chambers. Time could not be wasted- they both needed specific states. How did starseeds, or voices within them, or ghosts all figure together? It was a puzzle for less rushed times, where belief was so much less critical. Quantus tremor est futurus quando judex est venturus cuncta stricte discussurus…
First thought, then voice. Words, then sound. Until they weren’t separate and thought and sound were simultaneous, punctuated with puffs of air and the gradual growing burble of water into a boil.
A breath spent walking, a breath spent onto the table. The world careened, star-spangled and unfortunately patriotic. Another breath, another two, staggered and light, wonder and how, and his fingers wore numb like black.
A pretty paw held the canister where he could not. Fingers fumbled, words tumbled out of mind and absent syllable. Quick starts of breath while his lungs crushed themselves against his chest, a pressure screaming of why while his lungs stuttered not, not, not. Faustite disliked the lion's company, whatever it once was. Secretary to the world's worst agent, it spoke and moved in yes and never no, never a thought in its head.
Ever a thought in her head. When the room formed its pinprick hello, Faustite wanted to sit up and move and reach for fleeting answers. Wanted to.
He laid the way dying fish did, when their was became wasn't and their sides heaved with great gouts of not-water. He could think, however, so he thought away his twenty while fungus fermented in its hot water. He thought away the bone-drone coming from the other room, her voice a constant curse to his yes and his will.
The cup was filled, sloshed back and forth before rapidly blinking eyes. Pouring the air through the tea as much as the tea was cascaded from one vessel to the next until it was a manageable tepid. The General brought it over. Barbary and the canned air were pushed aside with an authoritative palm, “Drink. “
Hands of expected cavern chill, but her palms hot, she held the cup within his hand and guided it to his mouth without looking at him. “The trouble will not be difficult to reach. Typical thoracotomy surgery takes two to six hours. We will not take an hour. We will begin with incisions in the back, a posterolateral thoracotomy. It is like empyema, but you do not have an infection. You will not have any infections afterward. It is not cancer. There is growth in the tissues of your organs. It looks very interesting. They will need to breathe differently for you to breathe. Our assistant will bring us the contents of the grey workroom cabinet while we examine your lungs.“
Barbary chuffed, set down the canister, and vanished to go about this surprise new task.
“Your discomfort will be minimal. You have any questions for us?”
Pain pressed its hot fingers into lungs when he tried to breathe deeper. Soon he found tea in their place, rank with cave mushroom, and no room to decline. It tasted as it smelled -- like dirt -- and he drank what he could without sending the lot of it into his lungs. The burn simmered through tongue and throat; he coughed anyway.
With another sputtering cough swallowed, Faustite glazed through rapidfire methods. They rolled like water off her tongue, practiced and lilting for all the ways she never said them. The cadence was wrong. Her stature was wrong. The simple way she existed was wrong. But when Faustite looked up to her dumbly, when he saw the way the light caught and peered and stretched away from her sunfired hair, how it haloed about her head with javelins of lightspun gold, the thought of it fell away. He struggled against a tongue too sluggish and slow to answer, and finally he eked out the guttural sounds needed to convey his ignorance: "What."
His head tossed around looking for answers, and when there were none written in her face, he looked to Barbary. But the youma looked just as unaware -- perhaps unsurprising, since Barbary was never famed for his intelligence.
His quest for answers spanned seconds at most, and he soon rolled onto stomach on the too-cold, too-firm table. Breaths fogged and he watched them spread a placid lake across the surface. It crept and swelled and runneled up the walls, toward the ceiling. He watched it murmur and play while listening distantly for the sounds of Stroud's voice and her newer mannerisms. Incisions he caught. His back as well. But as it all wicked away under water, the lot of it felt like a dream.
“Yes, “ the words came rapid, but with the same impersonal intensity of a Christie’s auctioneer. “Yes, this is excellent access to the thoracic spine, intervertebral disks, spinal canal and nerve roots. The contralateral pendicle is not in this orientation, but you look good here. We will not need to see it. Your neural elements look good. We will be careful and avoid liver retraction. There are some tissue changes. You are feeling very hot? You are steaming. Too bad, you are so young. Well, you will have more than two weeks to live. “
“Your eyes are so interesting.” The General returned with stained hands to Faustite’s center of awareness, to his head, to his face. Crouching, picked up the respirator and attached something new, something different to it. Levity tried to creep against the distance, turning more ironic with the rapid fire than true joking, “You will need to cool off in space for a little bit, maybe you can collect some stars to color your eyes again. “
“You will breath this is like an inhaler. Ready- one, two, three-”
Schörl babbled a brook of nonsensical words. They washed about him, her hands lapping at his back then churning around his face. Where was this? Why was this? Breaths stutter,stopped, the boat motor ran dry. Marooned, he only fogged the ice beneath his face.
Thoracic. Intervertebral. Contralateral. Space. The words swirled into their own whirlpool of confusion. She gestured his mouth toward a mouth, he looked dully upon it, how the gauge curved like sharp eyes and sped its dial at him. She bade him breathe, the word volatile in his mind, shapeless, sensuous, visceral. It beckoned with a secret, a philosophy buried beneath its dripping, crystalline veneer. Like the dew below a morning sun. Like the glimmer of spring across the arctic span. He breathed, expectant to taste that revelation on his tongue.
Space, she said. Space, like an ocean of stars. And as he slipped beneath the surface of it, beneath that permeable ripple that guarded this world from the next, he saw each glittering star clutched in deep ocean grasp. Swathed in deep blues, even Barbary sailed through their midst. The creature sprouted its second head, third head, fourth head; it used those new appendages to propel itself among the deep. And ever near it swam Schörl's form, sharp-eyed and ethereal, ringed with a stolen halo, half-made of light's bitter edge and half the flesh of regret.
Faustite never recognized this world. He never recognized the sputtering shapes of notebooks endowed with suckered tentacles, propelling themselves through the air-water. Or the way thin steel legs bent and quavered toward an unspeakable surface. Schörl oscillated this strange place about herself with every word, every gesture. She spoke this world into existence. From her mouth flooded the aqua vitae that ensconced him, that drowned him slowly.
It was like a second baptism -- one performed on the underside of the ocean. Like he was dunked in the river of Lethe by words too sharp and blade-focused to comprehend.
The grey workroom cabinet contents came, provided: glittering, clanging, clattering hardware in gold-like tones. Too brassy? Bronze. Copper? Colored, alloyed, grade 5 titanium? Fasteners shone with uncorroded, diamond promise in Schörl’s hands, fitted and turned finger tight first. Coils, cylinders, pipes who sang muted notes met with muck, anchored, tightened, pushed, pulled, seared meat in and out and up with fusion and glue. He smelled a smoked sausage or salmon, but the blood was not so much, or so bad, with such temperatures and metal.
Glue was better than sutures for fast healing, chaos healing, and he spent all but three hours any day invested by the queen, anyway. Trails of unpleasant incense, then billows, and tapered down again, and there they were, proud as c**k’s crests from his bared back.
The General blinking-checked a pocketwatch in the kit bag, unconcerned of gore on fingers. “Yes, it will do. Right on time. We will not be late. “
“How are you feeling, Faustite? It is easier to breath?”
A wheeze-reply came distant, unused to breathing and still leaden with surprise. "... Yes," he decided in the moment. Lids twitched up, down, around while Faustite searched the undulating landscape. The creature-thing before him flickered its face at him and he reached out, slowly, tremblingly, to push on it. To banish it back to a static image. It felt warm.
Part of him shifted heavy like Barbary clung to his back again. But the 13-headed monstrosity ambled and grew and formed and ambled again more distantly in the space-lake. Wasn't that funny.
The flicker-thing before him started eating his hand, however, and Faustite wrenched his fingers back in a fit of ink. Of smoke. Was something burning? He felt starved. And he tasted, in moments, the smell on the air as it suffused into his body. As it nourished him. But he felt woozy nonetheless with this murky madness swirling into its own whirlpool. Draining through the floor and into the deep below that lined the Rift's floor. Or where?
"I need to lay down," he managed, as the world slid upright and his stomach slid downward. Outward. It parried his swallows until it reached his feet. And the world still whirled steadily down, down, down in its glittering ocean. He still wasn't sure what he saw, what he felt, but he knew it to be a momentous day.
