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 Posted: Sat Apr 30, 2022 10:30 am
Faustite strode into the room by the light of his own stomach. His fire unveiled a cramped space, soon illuminated – a small, wooden desk shoved up against the wall to maximize space, a solitary filing cabinet, and a pile of cages stacked next to the cabinet. On the walls hung two cork boards each smothered in different papers. And on the floor, nearest the desk, was the lone occupied cage. As he walked inside, fine dust stirred around his feet.
"Surprised you're still here." In two strides, he covered the room's free space. Faustite knelt on the stone floor next to the cage. He beckoned to nothing, and from nowhere came Headache. "Know you can leave for the Rift at any time. Assume someone ordered you to stay."
The creature in question was an oversized pillbug, with large, spherical eyes, and two needled mandibles framing its vertical mouth. Its antennae were jointed near their midpoint, and where they bent down, a glob of fluorescence hung at the tip. These, Faustite saw, would drop occasionally, and formed a small tributary at the bottom of its cage.
The youma turned to face him as myriad legs shifted its bulky body. Faustite heard the membrane slide over its eyes as it blinked. Click, click, click, went its mandibles.
Flame eyes darted to the cloud that was Headache, but the fireflies continued meandering about themselves.
Faustite suspected that this one lacked the mental faculties to infer requests. Seating himself with legs crossed, he asked, "Did someone order you to stay here?"
The creature emitted a series of clicks and grinds. As he glanced to Headache, the fireflies formed a green traffic signal.
"Was it the Captain who mans the desk?"
The isopod stared. Its antennae meandered near and far from it, occasionally bumping into the cage bars.
Faustite waved away the question. "Tell me what Rockatanskite did to you."
A silence followed. Faustite wondered if the question was, perhaps, not literal enough, but the isopod creature began its clicking and grinding. The burning General looked to his youma once again. Headache's many fireflies busied to form an arrow sign that veered to the right, a ROAD CLOSED sign, and that of a building.
Faustite's brows furrowed. "... He stopped you from going somewhere. Destiny City?"
Headache flashed him a red light.
Faustite stood, then started to pace. "The Rift?"
Yellow light. The General's countenance grew pensive.
"Describe your wounds."
While it clicked away, Headache buzzed nearer to the cage. Faustite couldn't guess how one bug youma communicated with the other, but they collaborated with each other somehow. As they worked it out, he wondered if he had the correct youma. Perhaps he was asking the wrong questions, or Rockatanskite sabotaged its memory somehow. He couldn't rule out his informants lying to him, but they were the ones to tip him off about the Scar; why would they lie about this?
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Posted: Wed May 04, 2022 11:48 am
"The ********." Faustite thought he knew youma better than most; while they varied as much as people did, youma could still feel pain and physical loss. They didn't want to be dusted. They didn't want to lose parts of themselves, to battle or to the whims of their masters. And in all his years spent in the Rift, all his years spent with Squiddy, and all his years spent as part youma, he had never once seen a youma value returning to a place above being intact.
He'd known territorial youma. Known a few that were habitual about where they dwelt in the Rift, or were particular about their space. Some fought to the death for their territory. But they were never this benign about it.
Perhaps this one was just broken. Head scrambled for all these broken parts.
"Headache," Faustite hailed as he halted his pace. "Chat with it. See what you can learn about this place it's obsessed with." He watched them for a moment more before he turned his attention to the room.
Tawdry, blank space that it was, the General expected that Rockatanskite harbored few secrets from that Captain in terms of his experiments. Doubted he would need to hide anything; the Captain seemed completely uninformed and uninterested in them. Being an older fellow, Faustite figured Rockatanskite would have a preference for paper. Perhaps he harbored a distrust for technology, too.
Approaching one of the twin boards, Faustite peered at what he could easily see. Pinned to the cork was a motley selection of papers – brown napkins, yellow steno pad pages, torn computer paper, pieces of graph paper – all adorned with the same messy handwriting. Written in tablet pen ink, too. Half-formed ideas and misbegotten hypotheses, all, and Faustite's frown deepened as he read each of them.
All youma can be controlled, one read. Faustite scoffed.
Youma regenerate into the same form each time. That one, Faustite thought, was a foregone conclusion to all Captains and Generals with youma.
Youma can regenerate their parts. This one he unpinned, let it flutter toward his youma.
It was only in glancing back, an order half-formed on his tongue, that he caught the writing on the back: regrow Faustite's organs. His mouth twitched. "Hold onto that one."
The rest of Rockatanskite's idea pinboard held little of value to him – a couple pins regarding youma grafting, and how much he suspected could be successfully grafted. Another pertained to reversing youmafication. He found more interesting comments by upturning the hypotheses with his fingernails, for more than half were money motivated.
It was sensible, he supposed. Find someone who became part-youma and market them a cure. Track down the family of a youma and extort them for a chance to have their loved one back. They were bold tricks, sure to earn him notoriety among the ranks. Perhaps, then, the organ angle was a safer one.
Put him under, do whatever it took to regrow his organs, ice them, sell them to the underground medical market. An easier angle, he supposed; who would discover his money-making ventures if Faustite showed up hurt again, and woke up mended eventually?
And if Rockatanskite could manage that, then how far was he from discovering a method to reverse partial youmafication?
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Posted: Fri May 13, 2022 7:50 am
"Hold onto that, Headache. Got more questions for this one." Faustite turned from the decorated board and knelt down before the cage.
The youma, however small and mutilated, chewed dents into the bars. He thought it curious – as if the youma followed its orders, while it tried to reconcile its impetus to return to that other place. Unfortunately, it hadn't regrown any parts of itself yet; perhaps Rockatanskite's experiment wasn't far enough along for that.
When he spoke again, he lowered his voice. "Why do you need to go to that place?"
The answer: three short clicks.
"Headache?"
The youma pictogrammed what it could for Faustite's comprehension. For this, Faustite's brow furrowed again; the explanation grew stranger. He wondered if Rockatanskite sabotaged its decision-making ability, or if the creature was always this way. Faustite never met it previously; he wouldn't know if it was broken by this treatment. Even Revenant thought it strange enough to tip him off, however.
"Your only job is to serve the Negaverse. You do so by draining energy, fighting senshi, consuming their starseeds. What, of those, do you stand to accomplish in the Rift?"
Two clicks, and twice as much confusion.
"How does that –" Faustite cut himself off, clicked his tongue, breathed a sizzling sigh. Between this strange, possibly broken creature, and Headache's halfway facetious translations, Faustite expected he would get farther in these pursuits by a different route. "Wait for me at the Citadel entrance. You'll take me to this place as thanks for your freedom.
"You've permission to leave." He stood, then, and waited until the isopod vanished.
"Look presentable," he urged his youma. "Best we check on the others."
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