Existentially Bound: Part 8
This Way Comes...
The angular walls and vaulted ceilings flickered with an ambient red illumination. For once, Tressa's bio-luminescence in the red-lined leaf pattern that made up her skin was not the source. Among the seams of the walls and between the hexagonal-tiled floor, there was a red energy flowing into the place, forcing its red ambiance deep into the foreboding hall. Various panels and holographic interfaces blinked and buzzed, filling the corridor with an ominous humming, alerting all that entered that this was the opposite of a dormant facility.
"I'd say so! (So much for little activity!)" Kimura added, chambering a round in her rifle. A quick glance to Harid ensured the man was doing very much the same to his own recovered waterlogged rifle.
"Maybe there is shielding preventing internal detection? Let's not be so quick to blame her. We've gotten this far…" Paige said attempting to keep everyone on track.
"Just how far is this though? How far in do we have to go for Six?" Emily asked peering down the massive corridor. "So do we destroy it or sneak by?" came Valandra's voice. Ember took back her voice, "Ember it?" she said, looking at Paige.
Lady Dejarin nodded. "Ember it."
A crackling electric sound came from the woman's wrists and hands as the air around them began to storm. A frosty smile formed from the corner of her mouth as she walked slowly toward the tanks and bots. Arcs of lightning formed as she moved forward, sparking, exploding and electrifying everything in her path. Over the thunderclaps, a slight laugh could be heard. Everyone paused a moment, looking at each other, then back to the spectacular shocking display. One of the tanks burst into flames while the other one powered down, as did Ember's electricity. She turned to see the wide eyes of her allies and gave a slight shrug. "That was holding back, actually," Emily said only half-joking.
In truth, the limits of her newfound 'Djinniness,' as she endearingly called it, was unknown to the woman - to both women, in fact. While overriding all but only a small fraction of her fire abilities, Valandra had brought with her a host of newfound power: both in the form of her ice power, as well as her acquired wind and lightning abilities. And, while overloading her powers was intoxicatingly tempting, both secretly feared what it meant: the two women may, in fact, lose their individual personalities. This thought terrified them both, caused them both to individually highly guard their feelings from the other. Amongst both women, there was a place in each of their minds - a special place that neither ventured, and while both knew of its existence, neither wanted the walls to come down completely (although both had entertained the idea).
Paige walked past a trance-like Ember, stared into the intact tank and covered her mouth at the sight. The mutated creature was still alive (if one could call the miserable existence life). Glassy hazel eyes glanced back to Harid and the others, and to Ember who seemed to be having an internal conversation, then back to the tank. She placed her palm upon the cylinder and spoke a soft incantation, which would drain what remained of the creature's lifeforce. Her hand glowed a vibrant green as a necrotic symbol briefly sparked upon the back of her hand. The mutation's movements stopped as the last of its essence left it.
"I… Paige, have you?" Harid said as pale as a ghost.
The young woman cleared her throat, stood upright. "Father… now is not the time. Remember: focus on the mission?"
The older man frowned at his daughter's point. He knew he had to reconcile his disapproval with the forbidden magics she'd clearly been using, but knew such things didn't belong on missions or excursions. Mostly, however, the man felt defeated. All her life, Harid had kept watch over his daughter, doing what he could to keep her mother's talents from the dark arts at length. Now, he feared, not only did she defiantly embrace it, but did she resent him for keeping her from the path?
Tressa looked at Kimura. "What is it with humans transfixed on inner monologue during battles?"
The pink haired woman shrugged, then pointed forward. "This place goes on forever. We need to figure out where to go."
Tahlia approached, using her talents to stare further than normal eyes could see. "We go to where that unavoidable dread lies."
Tressa raised a thorny eyebrow. "Where would that be?"
The Whisperer brought her hand to her wrapped head, trying to make sense of the broken voices she could hear. "We will know when we are there."
"We think like an asura," Harid said fingering the patters on the floor. "Asura tend to think in patterns and shapes. If we figure out what this one is… this giant complex… we find Six in this nexus."
"Perhaps, but I do have a certain set of skills…" Tressa said, already a few steps ahead of them, kneeling down to inspect the flooring. The path clearly came to a junction with tiles hovering above a watery tank, both hexagonal paths branching until they met adjacent hallways. "There's traffic patterns though: small bits of dirt, light footprints…" She knelt down further, placing her head upon the path, regarding both lanes.
Kimura inadvertently made a face as her boot ran across the dirt and grime on the floor.
The sylvari sat up, pointed forward. "There."
The group collectively ventured forward down the chosen hallway, looking very much the same as the first, with a set of tanks and a few monitors upon its walls. Upon approach, one of the screens flickered on. A large asuran timestamp showed with a date of ten years ago. It faded to a recording of a group of small children, each being walked by a mechanical golem slowly down a hallway. The children looked tired, beaten down… broken. Each had their head shaved; each with a sequential numbered tattoo upon their necks. One child, near the middle of the line, turned her head, stared angrily at the camera. The escorting golem quickly prodded the girl with a shock of its mechanical arm. "Move along, Six Alpha." The defiant girl clenched her fists, then gave into the golem's ushering as the monitor fizzled out and the image disappeared.
Harid was a statue. "That's... That's them: the Numbers... And Six as a child..."
Paige swallowed the lump in her throat. "That is sick… That monster did this to children! He…" She paused, unsure how to continue the statement; such hatred for Lennk filling her mind.
The taller man stood beside his daughter, placed his good hand upon her shoulder. "Then we find her; we stop him from doing any more harm to us."
"I… I still don't understand what more he wants from us, or Kievaa for that matter… I feel so helpless, father," Paige said, her eyes watering.
Emily cleared her throat, almost forcing her way through the couple. "You brought us all together; you are not helpless. And…" Ember's voice rang clearly, "Neither are we!" A few steps forward, the woman manifested lightning which quickly electrocuted the two tanks ahead. Within the tubes, where slightly more humanoid creatures, wailing and screaming from pain as they died. "It's best not to think about it; we're doing them a mercy," the woman's cold voice said as the sparks settled.
Paige's eyes were wide at the screams. "Emily… are you sure there was nothing we could have done… I… I don't want to just kill innocent-"
"Their souls cry out. I am unsure they even understand why," Tahlia offered.
"She's right… These things were created to be weapons. The bastard took the humanity out of them." Harid rubbed his temples. "By the Gods, so help me if he's done that to our Six."
Paige shivered at the thought. "She'll… be alright," she said, the reaffirmation clearly for her own benefit.
Another set of doors slid opened upon the party's approach, this hall looking as though it were an exact replica for what came before it.
"Are we… going just in circles?" Kimura said, glancing further ahead, where another identical set of doors sat. "I've never… 'taken' from Inquest before. Now I know why!"
Tressa shot a beaming smile to her partner, but shook her head. "I'm tracking our movement. We're good."
While no golems or automatons were present in this corridor, the tanks and small systems display was. Upon their approach, the monitor fizzled on, showing that of Kievaa bending over an operating table. She narrated as she went about her work over the corpse. "Systems intact… Well, for the most part. Organs seemed to hold until that fire bookah cooked them… Initial indication shows the Resuscitation Suit should have worked, had the impact not completely snapped its neck!" She rolled over to another table, setting down a diabolical instrument covered in an ink-like substance, went searching for another. In her absence, lay the corpse of Shiera, split down the middle and pulled open for the autopsy, her inner organs black, charred and smoking. A giggle could be heard from off-screen. "Oh well… Plenty more numbers to go!"
Paige suddenly grew ill; felt as though she would vomit. The shocked, unnerved and disgusted expression was shared by the group.
"She… She's a monster!" Tahlia suddenly and uncharacteristically broke the silence.
"That's why we're going to freeze her and watch her die slowly!" Emily hissed.
Even though it had fizzled out, Paige practically had to be turned away from the monitor. Harid used the opportunity of the empty tanks ahead to divert her attention. "They're empty. That's good. The deeper we seem to go… the more human they seem to get," he said.
"Aye. But look here," Kimura said, wiping some soot from the engraving at the bottom of one of the dormant tubes. "That's asuran for Fourteen, aye?"
The cylinder on the adjacent pod was broken, cracked, and appeared as though there had been something slammed into it. Tressa looked over the device for a moment, then concluded as she saw the engraving of its designation. "This is the tube from the other lab. It says Fifteen. Brought here from there, no doubt."
"So that…" Paige gestured to the black screen. "That was Fifteen? The one that Ember-"
"Yeah. I killed her; I get it." Emily spat.
Below her eye head wrap, Tahlia frowned, considering. "Then to whom did we rescue? To whom do I have in my charge?"
A frosty sigh was exhaled as Emily rubbed her head for a moment. "You know, there was a lot going on. I thought I heard that asura say Sixteen, but…"
"She talks to a chicken!" Valandra added. "There was little reason to think the number she read was correct!"
Harid cleared his throat. "Look, regardless, we gotta keep going. I… I don't even want to think about what they've done to-" the words simply left the man's mouth at the horrible thought which never stopped repeating in his head. Nevertheless, he pushed through, being the pillar on which the group could harness strength from. They continued forward silently, all ready for what monstrosities lie ahead.
Except they weren't…
At another crossroad of hexagonal patterns suspended above a pool, the group came to a standstill. On one of the paths before them was a latticework of red light beams of lasers, blocking their path, the other leading to a sealed door within an archway, foreboding malevolence.
"I say we go through the lights," Emily said walking brazenly up to them. "They obviously don't want us to go in here, so…" She reached her hand in between where the beams intersected and grinned when nothing happened. "Okay, so a wall of ice to block the beams and then we'll make a hole through it!" Ember said to Valandra as they began to channel their magic to manifest the wall.
Without warning, the ice magic blasted her back, reflected threefold from the wall of lights. She slammed into the ground, hard on her hip, yelping in pain from the blow-back and landing. She slid a moment, stopping just before Tressa's feet. The sylvari flashed her ambers at the woman and gave a slight giggle after seeing the human's wide-eyed surprised expression.
"Impetuousness may not be valid here; luck would have it, however," Tressa said as she helped the woman up, "we have a master locksmith: a… Pink Thorn, as it were…" She nodded to Kimura then to the small panel beside the lattice.
The thief simply blinked at Tressa, still not used to the moniker, but after a fashion, she picked up on the suggestion. "I'm on it!" she said, happily moving to the panel. The entire time, the pink-haired woman had been imagining being anywhere but on this mission, but the importance to Tressa had kept her willing to assist. Yet, her skills, she felt, hadn't been put to their full usefulness, thus was delighted to simply 'pick a lock'. A smile inadvertently came to her face and when she glanced back, the sylvari mirrored it, delighted in her partner's happiness.
"Well?"
Kimura cleared her throat and in her own time, gave her findings. "Well, it's a double mechanism: one for the grid and one for the door; I did a bank job that had a console something like this… The trick is figuring out which to unlock first, so that no alarms are triggered."Harid huffed. "Glad I didn't hear that back in my Lionguard days."
"Where you were the left arm of the law?" Tressa immediately interjected.
"Now's not the time, Rose!" the man said, annoyed with the slight. "Just… Do what you can, Pink. We'll be on the lookout for any-"
"Yes!" Kimura exclaimed. "Got it!"
Tressa leaned over to Harid. "And, that's my girl," she said with a smirk.
The doors beyond the lattice split down the center, slowly rolled open, to reveal a darkened tunnel where the red ambiance died. At the conclusion of their performance, a loud groove clicked, followed by the sound of power humming and waking up the room beyond. Another loud clank echoed in the darkness, which signaled the powering-up and red-illumination of a bio-tube, similar to their encounters before. Within the cylinder was a bubbling liquid, and a pale, suspended, floating shape of a woman. Systematically, another chamber on the opposite side of the wall lit up, with the same internal occupant. Followed by another further down; then another, and another… Until the entire hallway was brightened, revealing numerous bio-tubes lining both sides.
The party was aghast and horrified at the sight. Through the latticework of lasers and the archway of the door, into the closest tube, and through the liquid inside, it was clear: the woman floating within… was Shiera! As was the other tube's occupants.
Tressa's amber glowing eyes barely blinked. "Thorns and brambles… What are those?"
Emily stood close enough to the lattice to see through a crosshatch. "They're her. All of them. Copies of her," the words tasted sour in the woman's mouth. "That damned asura…"
Harid grumbled. "Exactly why I don't like asura. With the exception of Jinx…"
Paige wanted to interject her father's statement, but couldn't stop staring at the tanks. Below each was an asuran number, starting with the nearest tube, twenty-five, and decreasing the further they went. The woman was already working the puzzle in her head, but the results made her stomach turn. "She… She was supposed to die, and go up the line, wasn't she?"
Taliha stepped forward, held her hand aloft to sense the souls of those within their receptacles. The whispers that returned were different than anything the woman had ever encountered. "They are all… wrong," she said, trying to make sense of it. "It is as though… They are in pain and reaching out for anything… No. For a… soul to cling onto; These are husks with fragments of her… They are… bodies awaiting Shiera's soul…"
Paige held her stomach. "Oh Kormir's veil! They are sick!"
Tressa looked at the woman. "They? The asura which haunts you?"
Harid took in a breath. "Lennk or Kievaa's doing; on their orders if not by their hand, I'm sure."
"We must do something," the Whisperer said, looking a bit peaked herself. "We must not let the monsters use her in this manner."
"Agreed. Pink, see if you can get us in there. Maybe Six is beyond-"
An agonizing scream suddenly pierced the air from the other hallway, unmistakably, the voice of their comrade, Six Alpha.
Paige spun around, almost immediately advancing. "Six? Is that you? We're coming for you!" She took a step further, then glanced back at the group, and the tanks beyond, then to her worried father. "I can do this. We all can! Emily, come with me; I'll probably need your firepower. Father, take care of this and-"
Emily was already ahead of Paige by a few steps. "Let's go get our friend. Harid, we can do this; I'll protect her."
"Hells you are! We're coming with; who knows what that monster-"
At his advance, another light grid illuminated as the one in front of the hallway flickered off. Kimura raised an eyebrow. "That… um… that wasn't my doing."
The grid sparked to life, blocking Paige and Ember from Harid and his group. The man's heart sunk. "Paige… I…" he said reaching out through the grid with his mechanical hand.
His daughter gave it a squeeze. "It's okay. You deal with those things. Pink can get this barrier down and you all can come to meet us. Just promise me you'll be careful, father."
Harid almost chuckled, despite the tears in his eyes. "Thought that was my line."
Father and daughter stared at each other a few more minutes, the unsaid words by both, speaking volumes. Paige gave his hand one last squeeze before wiggling free of his grasp. She knew if there were time, the man would have made up a fake story about the mechanical hand not answering to his command, but the woman knew it to be his own worried fear and desire not to let her go. It was a metaphor for their entire relationship now: Paige was leaving the man's old ways and venturing further down a path of her own. And as scared of the change as she was, Paige knew the path was powerful and through necromancy she had tasted such power. The confidence from it only solidified her resolve: she would take such power and unleash it upon Lennk and Kievaa, avenging those which their atrocities have claimed.
[To Be Continued...]
