The Corsican Ogre: A Napoleonic Wizardry Quest
- Thread starter Omicron
- Start date
- Original
- Location
- St. Petersburg
[x] Slink away with Dumas the next time you're carrying supplies from a ship to the cellars.
I know we can make either method work, but I would balk at risking everything should we be seen. We were never big on subtlety. We can, however, act decisively when pressed for time.
I know we can make either method work, but I would balk at risking everything should we be seen. We were never big on subtlety. We can, however, act decisively when pressed for time.
[X] Sneak after Yuna and her 'doctors' when they whisk her off to experiment on her.
We'll be able to see at least some of what they are doing this way which could be interesting as well as accomplishing our main objective.
Also @Omicron I wanted to ask if we can use our power to create shadow in some way. For example by redirecting light in such a way that it does not reach the eyes of the guards, or is that to complicated without more specialisation, equipment and preparation for an artillery officer?
We'll be able to see at least some of what they are doing this way which could be interesting as well as accomplishing our main objective.
Also @Omicron I wanted to ask if we can use our power to create shadow in some way. For example by redirecting light in such a way that it does not reach the eyes of the guards, or is that to complicated without more specialisation, equipment and preparation for an artillery officer?
- Pronouns
- He/Him
[X] Sneak after Yuna and her 'doctors' when they whisk her off to experiment on her.
- Pronouns
- He/Him
[x] Sneak after Yuna and her 'doctors' when they whisk her off to experiment on her.
- Location
- Brittany, France
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Shadows aren't necessarily out of the Blood's wheelhouse, because you can conceivably link "radiance" to "the shadows it casts," and that's more or less what's happening with the shadow-lilies that are starting to manifest when Vivienne is using her power.
But the thing is, the Blood is antithetic to subtlety. It is a glorious power, a power that celebrates its own greatness. Stealth, misdirection, disguise are anathema to it. Notice that Vivienne can use the Blood to make herself harder to see and strike, but she is doing so by shining so brightly it's hard to look at her and see the person within the blazing light.
WinterLantern
Smoked bird
- Location
- North England
[X] Sneak after Yuna and her 'doctors' when they whisk her off to experiment on her.
Yeah that sounds about right from how the Blood has behaved so far.
I love the idea that the Blood could be used in a subtle way but its pseudo consciousness refuses on principle. I don't know if you watch the fate series, but it reminds me of how Rider could have used his flying chariot to launch a surprise attack on several distracted enemies. But instead used that opportunity to land right in the middle of them and announce who he was and why they should be impressed.
Still something to keep in mind for the future.
Cassiemouse
Market Atheist
[X] Sneak after Yuna and her 'doctors' when they whisk her off to experiment on her.
- Location
- Not the asylum anymore
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Unsure if I already voted, but if I haven't...
[X] Sneak after Yuna and her 'doctors' when they whisk her off to experiment on her.
[X] Sneak after Yuna and her 'doctors' when they whisk her off to experiment on her.
Chapter 11. The Aerie
- Location
- Brittany, France
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Chapter 11. The Aerie
Your opportunity comes a few days later. Two guards come out to the courtyard, batons in hand, and loudly call out Yuna's name. The Jacobin girl gives you a grin and gets up from your improvised game of checkers to go to them (you found a stick of charcoal to draw a grid, and use pebbles as tokens). She is led into the castle, and you wait a few moments after her departure before giving Dumas a nod, which your mentor returns.
Dumas approaches one of the bulkier inmates and starts a pre-arranged argument, loud and aggressive without quite coming to blows. It draws the attention of the guards, and one of the wardens starts walking up to them, his pace brisk but without running, to separate the two giants. This is your opportunity; you get up and walk up to the lone guard remaining at the large double-gate leading into the castle proper.
"I need to use a washroom," you tell him.
He gives you a vacant glance, which slides off your shoulder to check on the commotion Dumas is creating before coming back to you.
"You'll wait until you're back to your cell like everyone else, inmate," he says, his tone hollow. "Or I can take you back there early if you wish." There's something of a threat in that last sentence.
The wardens of Chateau d'If are not mindless automata, even if the fort has hold of their souls and stretches them thin. There is something of a man in there still, and you wonder how much of one.
You fix him with your gaze, forcing him to look at you, and tell him bluntly and without embarrassment:
"I'm bleeding."
The man eyes you up and down, and frowns.
"You're not injured."
"No," you say, raising an eyebrow, "I'm not."
His eyes rise to meet yours, his expression blank for a second, and then that typical expression, half-flinching, half-embarrassed, like he should be ashamed on your behalf, and he steps out of the way, muttering directions to a washroom that you have no intention of following. You thank him as you pass by him, rolling your eyes when he can't see you.
Men.
Once inside the Chateau's maze-like corridors, all you need to do is do your best to follow Yuna's directions, rushing up stairs and corridors until you hear footfalls ahead and fall back into a slow walk, as quiet as you can, following the group.
Dumas told you there was a laboratory 'under' the fort. Whether he misspoke or was wrongly informed, or this is a different laboratory altogether, you are not heading down.
You're heading up, into the Aerie.
The Aerie sits at the top of Chateau d'If's western tower, a chamber of air and light from which naught can be seen of the sea but the sound of its waves on the rocks and the smell of brine in the wind.
It is not under the open sky, not exactly; rather it is a vast vertical vault, a shaft almost, pierced with high narrow windows that stream sunlight onto suspended mirrors, creating a maze-like pattern of bouncing light that that illuminates the room in harsh, shadowless sun, not the gold star of a warm morning in Provence but the aseptic, clean white of the laboratory.
You dare not enter, not in a domain of such light. You press your body against the stone at the entrance, leaning ever so slightly so that you can see inside, there in the last shadow before the dizzying well of light ahead.
There are tables on the floor and they remind you of another laboratory you saw before, in another life, in Saint-Domingue. They have the same size and shape, designed for a body to lie upon, the same grooves meant to channel the unwholesome fluids into disposal buckets - or preserving vials. There are no corpses here though - or at least not on these tables.
There are bookshelves and blackboards full of unerased notes and equations, writing desks choked with paper, a haphazard series of benches like a half-hearted simulacrum of a university amphitheatre along one of the walls. Many surgical instruments and glass receptacles on tidy shelves. All of it is wood; all of it has been sunwashed to the dry white of bone.
Then there are the clusters. They make you think of fruit; some kind of grape, perhaps. Ropes hanging from the ceiling, and terminating in a bundle of curios hanging at various heights. Here, dozens of hermetically sealed glass jars, full of dark green fluid in which float eerie organic shapes. This one certainly is a hairless mouse, but could this one be a piglet, with its six legs and two heads? This one contains a hand which you at first think is human, but the long fingers and narrow palm speak to one of the exotic great apes - only, does its finger twitch from time to time? There, another grape, lower than the first, each fruity a geometric solid: spheres, cubes, pyramids and cylinders, of gold, lead, iron or precious platinum, each a different weight, a different shape. More jars and vials, these ones filled with dozens of swirling colors, mineral dusts, pastes that seem to slowly move on their own. And there, high above the floor and crumpled upon itself such that you can hardly tell what it is, a body swaying gently in the wind - a desiccated mummy, its gangly reptilian limbs clenched around its body, its bony narrow head clasped to its torso by wire. All of it cast in stark, uncompromising light, and yet incomprehensible to your eyes by its very nature, twisted and opaque even to itself.
The guards guide Yuna through the path made of a gap between the tables and shelves at the center of the room, towards an upraised table. Chains dangle from its top and bottom, and it is framed on the left by a blackboard still full of notes you can't decipher at this distance, and on the right by a tray of surgical implements. One of the men roughly grabs her by the shoulder to hold her in place; Yuna just stands there, wrists held slightly up, chains dangling, and waits. You're not sure for what.
A sound comes from above. Something like a cough, or a click of the tongue, or some kind of throat sound. It reminds you of a pigeon, or a goose perhaps. Another echoes it. Then, from the ground ahead, a low creaking like an arthritic leg stretching out after a long stillness, a clicking sound against the floor. It moves, step by step, creak, click, creak, click, and the low rustle of cloth or feather rubbing against itself… A louder *cluck* from above, more rustling there, and a nauseating sense of motion as if the walls themselves were sliding in and out of place…
You realize that they were never alone in the room.
They move down - you can't tell if they're climbing down or gliding through the air or sliding out of the wall - they're hard to make out, the same white as the walls themselves. Their white sleeves undulate like birds' wings, making them seem almost ethereal, but when they are on the ground (without transition, like they never 'landed,' like they were always there), their steps are sharp, stop-and-go, an awkward shuffle.
You've seen their long coats before, buttoned close to the chest, wide leather belt tight around the waist. Most of all the long, beaked masks with their glass lenses, making their faces inhuman and unreadable - old outfits of the plague doctors, burned in infamy in the public imagination when they joined the Royal Hunting Corps in their secret war. A thousand newspaper serials and cheap novels have been written about these 'birds of ill omen,' these 'ravens of unkindness.' Only you've never seen them colored such stark white, and the beaks are shorter, more blunt.
The arthritic click-clack emerges from behind the upraised table, a figure slowly circling Yuna and her guards. His beaked mask is longer, sharper, a sickly yellow; a wide-brimmed hat perches over his head, a demi-cape protects his shoulder from splatter. He's tall and slender, but his gait is awkward, his back slumped, his feet slow and unsteady, and all of a sudden you get it.
The plague doctors always reminded you of crows and ravens. But not these, no.
This silent crowd shuffling along the walls of the room, looming like ghosts at its tables and desks and near its blackboards, they're like seagulls, roosting in this sea-stranded fort, hungering for scraps from its prisoners. And the man who just appeared, well, he rather reminds you of an albatross.
"Will the prisoner please disrobe?" he asks in a voice that comes from the throat, that struggles to shape the proper syllables.
Yuna gives both her guards a raised-eyebrow look, and neither reacts. "Sure," she says, shrugging, and begins to undress without the slightest trace of modesty or embarrassment. You want to look away, but you can't help but stare.
The formless, always slightly too large clothes of the Chateau's prisoners hid much from the eye. Yuna is a woman marked, in more ways than one.
She is marked in her very flesh, for one. Her strength is obvious, but more than that, there is something to the corded, oak-gnarled shape of her muscles, the disharmony between the parts of her, in odd grooves lingering the flesh ate itself, that speaks to a body that has gone through hunger and thirst time and again, until it burned itself into her.
And she is marked by battle and punishment. The long trails of blade-bite, the star-shaped hole of a bullet tearing through flesh, which reminds you uncomfortably of your own bullet-scar; a gnarled mess of tissue around her ankle, like a wolf's bite or perhaps a bear-trap.
And she is marked, of course, in the most literal sense: her body is a blank page on which someone drew a treatise. But it's not the tattoos that draw your eyes first. No.
It's the rod.
It's a long, narrow band of silvery-white metal, shining, following the curve of her spine. Bolted, it seems, to each side of the vertebrae, and fused into the skin and the bone underneath. It runs all the way from her coccyx to the base of her neck, where it burrows into the skin and disappears from sight. It should be unbearable, keeping her spine from bending in any way, and yet it shifts like a fluid with each motion without ever seeming to stop being solid metal.
The tattoos unfold around that rod like flowers out of an earthen band. Circles and lines and spiraling patterns, diagrams that begin simple and then explode into such complexity that they must unspool over the whole of Yuna's back, her shoulders, and run down her limbs and torso. Equation written in black ink, in ornate looping calligrams. There is a cold, reverent beauty to the arrangement of this proof-in-skin, the symmetry and connections of its patterns coming together in one grand edifice, an architectural blueprint; it reminds you of the summoning and binding circles of British pact-workers and Church exorcists, of the complex visual equations of alchemists.
Yuna turns around, revealing the full extent of her nakedness; nothing more or less than you've seen in female officers' barracks a hundred times before, and yet the setting, the guards and chains and flock of seagull, give it all an obscene tinge that makes you sick to your stomach. One guard begins to unlock her wrists and ankles and puts them in the chains of the upraised table, one at a time.
"Why do you even bother with this?" Yuna sneers. "You know if I wanted to escape these chains they wouldn't even slow me down."
"The Chateau prevents your escape," the albatross says. "The chains are just to keep you from squirming too much during the demonstrations."
He turns around, walking up a desk and slowly opening a heavy tome, picking up a quill and ink, and begins to write, speaking as he does:
"Date and time… Name of the subject… Session number," and there he pauses for a moment, then writes down: "Eleven…"
A chuckle escapes Yuna's lips, and the man pauses in his work.
"Why do you even bother recording the numbers, man?" she says.
The albatros slowly turns around, staring at her with his expressionless glass eyes.
"I must keep a record," he says simply.
"Have you checked the 'session number' on your previous entries?"
No response.
"C'mon!" she says, laughing outright this time. "How long have we known each other, uh? Eleven sessions? One session a week?"
"Yes," the albatros says, weariness creeping into his voice. "Eleven weeks of study. This is the third month of our… acquaintance," the albatros says, a weariness in his voice. "It won't be long now."
"Doc," Yuna says with a grin, leaning into her chains, somehow seeming to dominate the strange tableau entirely, "we've been doing this for three years."
No response.
"When your students arrived, you told them this was a three-months study, a seminar so they could learn from the most dangerous subjects in all of France."
"They will be going home soon," the albatross says, not without sadness. "Their studies are almost done. They will bring much new knowledge to the Académie, and I will welcome in a new group for the next semester."
"They've been here since Christmas before last."
No response.
"Do their parents still send them letters?" Yuna muses, tugging against her chains experimentally, playfully almost. "Or has the mainland forgotten they ever existed, like it forgets all of us here?"
The flock of seagulls in their white robes stare at her, two, perhaps three dozen glass-lens eyes from all across the room, from above and below, from desks and benches and the walls themselves, inscrutable.
"When was the last time any of you took off their mask, uh?" Yuna shouts, sudden anger in her voice,
"Let's begin," the albatross says, his voice affecting tiredness, the tone of a man done with petty distractions. He turns from his heavy tome, pacing the room in front of the captive Yuna, the guards a few feet behind them, relaxed. "Who can tell me the average length of the human spine?"
"Seventy-one centimeter for the adult human male," comes a raspy voice from above, though you could not tell which of the masked students spoke up if your life depended on it. "Sixty-one centimeter for the adult human female."
"And after extensive and careful study using the finest devices and techniques available to us, how long have we measured the platinum rod fused to the subject's spine to be, when measured as an individual object?"
"Exactly one hundred centimetres," answered another student, who could only be told apart from the other in the slightly higher pitch of his voice. "The length of the platinum bars serving as prototype metres stored in the Académie."
"And what is the length of that platinum rod, when measured holistically as part of the subject's general physiognomy?"
"Sixty-one centimetres," a third student answered. "The exact length of the average adult human female's spine."
"Very good," the albatross said, turning to face Yuna, hands clasped behind his back. "And what conclusion have we drawn from these two incompatible facts?"
"The fact," two students spoke at the same time, their rhythm in perfect unison, "that the platinum rod is simultaneously one hundred centimetre long and sixty-one centimetres long, the length of the true metre and the length of a human spine, is the core which serves to power the subject's magic."
"Indeed."
The albatross produces a long, thin stick, pointing to various points of Yuna's body. She watched him with odd interest, as if she were gauging him, and the rest of the class, in his gestures and speech.
"The diagrammic spell-pattern inscribed in the subject's skin only serves to harness and channel the fundamental space-distorting paradox produced by the fusion of the rod and her spine. Unfortunately, we have yet been unable to fully transcribe, or decipher, this incredibly complex equation."
"You've only been at it three years," Yuna said with a mean smile, "keep at it. Maybe in a decade you'll figure it out."
"As you can see," the albatross says, pointing to thin scars across Yuna's arm - fresh scars, and yet scars which do not break up the complex equation spiraling around her biceps, "inflicting damage to the subject's skin temporarily disrupts her space-warping abilities, yet over time the spell-pattern reasserts itself fully. Short of killing the subject, it is unlikely the diagram can be permanently destroyed - thankfully for us."
Again, Yuna leans into her chains. You realize she's suspended slightly higher than ground level, and when she stares into his empty artificial eyes, she's above, looking down on him.
"Why don't you flay the skin off my body," she says in that kind of deliberate whisper one can hear across an entire room, "and take the rod out of my spine, and see if you can make it all work without the inconvenience of it being attached to a live woman. At least then I'll be free from this puppet show."
"I would do so without a second's hesitation," the albatross answers in a purely matter-of-fact tone, "if there wasn't an unacceptably high risk of your vital essence somehow being part of the diagram, leaving me with two useless trinkets that can no longer be combined to produce the spell."
A low, mirthless chuckle comes out of Yuna's lips as she sags into the chains, her expression so very tired.
"Three years," she mutters. "Going 'round and 'round and 'round… I'm as much of a prisoner as you are, ain't I?"
"What a truly odd remark," the albatross says, sifting through his surgeon's tools. "I am not the one in chains."
"These aren't the chains that matter here," Yuna mumbles, tugging on her shackles.
You watch with rapturous attention as the scene unfolds, your original purpose almost entirely forgotten. So that's the power Yuna hides behind her dismal appearance. A space-warping spell of such power that it requires the permanent fusion of metal and flesh and the inscription of its mechanisms using an entire human body as a canvas. The implications are… awesome and terrifying in equal measure.
In a way she's like you, isn't she? An immense power has been burnt into her body, and can never be taken out without killing her or diminishing her into something less than she ever was. Did she consent to such a ritual? Or did she 'consent' in the same way you did, all these years ago, a scared child who couldn't know better?
There is very little chance of Yuna, guttersnipe Yuna, of deep intelligence and quick wit but lacking any formal education, having designed this spell herself. Someone used her as a vessel for the terrible power they had calculated into existence.
You blink.
This is not why you're here. You need to focus.
But the room ahead is cast in merciless light, not a shadow in sight, not even under its tables and desk; mirrors wash it all with harsh sunlight, and you have no room for stealth. What will you do…?
As you wonder this, something catches your eye. Yuna is staring in your direction - no, she's staring straight at you.
She gives you a wink.
"Now, today, we will proceed to…" the albatross starts, and suddenly Yuna yanks her chains, pulling up to his face in a sudden move, snapping her teeth like a dog, eyes wide. The man flinches and steps back, freezing up for a second.
"You should show more fear and deference when dealing with a hound of the Jacobins, old man," Yuna hisses.
There's a moment of hesitation and dread. Then the man whips his stick, smacking her in the face, drawing a thin red line in the skin of her cheek. She squirms, leaning back in her chains.
"You are nothing to fear or defer to, prisoner," he spits. "You are not even a woman, not even a person. You're an object of study, and when your usefulness has ended, you will be disposed of."
Yuna's hands curl, a trembling in her fingers, a gesture easily passed for a reaction to the smarting blow she's suffered, and you're the only one to see it for what it is.
The room shifts.
Behind the rank of white-clad students and the watchful wardens, in the unoccupied rows between them and your hiding place, space warps. There the floor between two tables stretches, as if the solid white stone of the castle were but taffy; there the distance between a shelf and a desk compresses, the two pieces of furniture unchanged but closer together now. Above, one of the grape-like clusters of chemicals and vials is pulled down without ever moving, as if its rope had simply always been longer than it is.
Within moments, the stark sunlight bathing the entire room is broken up by new shadows, and a path opens before you, bringing points of interest closer together and the men in the room farther away, all behind them.
You never knew such power could exist. It's as if the very concept of 'distance' is Yuna's to manipulate.
You shake yourself. You need to move quickly and decisively; if one of the students or the two wardens were to simply turn around for a second, they would realize what's happening.
Dumas has given you a piece of thick cloth to use as an improvised knapsack, and a list of a few valuable items for your alchemical designs. But as you stare at the clusters hanging from the roof, you think you might have the chance to steal a particular prize from behind the doctors' backs…
Those Chasseurs who train in the ways of Fortitude learn to use their increased resilience and fine control over their physiology to take in body-altering substances which would be harmful or even lethal to others. Pick one.
[ ] A specimen jar and its twisted mutated beast. By consuming or injecting the bodily extracts of the very monsters they hunt, the Chasseurs learn to induce brief but hideous mutations in their own bodies, lasting only a few seconds.
[ ] A handful of the strange metal solids. By embedding certain metals in their body or using powdered metals for body paints, the Chasseurs learn to imbue their body with the occult properties associated with certain metals.
[ ] A sealed chemical vial and its bubbling colored fluids. By consuming or injecting certain chemicals which would ordinarily be highly toxic, the Chasseurs turn their bodies into alchemical crucible, granting their blood the properties of various toxins and drugs.
Your opportunity comes a few days later. Two guards come out to the courtyard, batons in hand, and loudly call out Yuna's name. The Jacobin girl gives you a grin and gets up from your improvised game of checkers to go to them (you found a stick of charcoal to draw a grid, and use pebbles as tokens). She is led into the castle, and you wait a few moments after her departure before giving Dumas a nod, which your mentor returns.
Dumas approaches one of the bulkier inmates and starts a pre-arranged argument, loud and aggressive without quite coming to blows. It draws the attention of the guards, and one of the wardens starts walking up to them, his pace brisk but without running, to separate the two giants. This is your opportunity; you get up and walk up to the lone guard remaining at the large double-gate leading into the castle proper.
"I need to use a washroom," you tell him.
He gives you a vacant glance, which slides off your shoulder to check on the commotion Dumas is creating before coming back to you.
"You'll wait until you're back to your cell like everyone else, inmate," he says, his tone hollow. "Or I can take you back there early if you wish." There's something of a threat in that last sentence.
The wardens of Chateau d'If are not mindless automata, even if the fort has hold of their souls and stretches them thin. There is something of a man in there still, and you wonder how much of one.
You fix him with your gaze, forcing him to look at you, and tell him bluntly and without embarrassment:
"I'm bleeding."
The man eyes you up and down, and frowns.
"You're not injured."
"No," you say, raising an eyebrow, "I'm not."
His eyes rise to meet yours, his expression blank for a second, and then that typical expression, half-flinching, half-embarrassed, like he should be ashamed on your behalf, and he steps out of the way, muttering directions to a washroom that you have no intention of following. You thank him as you pass by him, rolling your eyes when he can't see you.
Men.
Once inside the Chateau's maze-like corridors, all you need to do is do your best to follow Yuna's directions, rushing up stairs and corridors until you hear footfalls ahead and fall back into a slow walk, as quiet as you can, following the group.
Dumas told you there was a laboratory 'under' the fort. Whether he misspoke or was wrongly informed, or this is a different laboratory altogether, you are not heading down.
You're heading up, into the Aerie.
***
The Aerie sits at the top of Chateau d'If's western tower, a chamber of air and light from which naught can be seen of the sea but the sound of its waves on the rocks and the smell of brine in the wind.
It is not under the open sky, not exactly; rather it is a vast vertical vault, a shaft almost, pierced with high narrow windows that stream sunlight onto suspended mirrors, creating a maze-like pattern of bouncing light that that illuminates the room in harsh, shadowless sun, not the gold star of a warm morning in Provence but the aseptic, clean white of the laboratory.
You dare not enter, not in a domain of such light. You press your body against the stone at the entrance, leaning ever so slightly so that you can see inside, there in the last shadow before the dizzying well of light ahead.
There are tables on the floor and they remind you of another laboratory you saw before, in another life, in Saint-Domingue. They have the same size and shape, designed for a body to lie upon, the same grooves meant to channel the unwholesome fluids into disposal buckets - or preserving vials. There are no corpses here though - or at least not on these tables.
There are bookshelves and blackboards full of unerased notes and equations, writing desks choked with paper, a haphazard series of benches like a half-hearted simulacrum of a university amphitheatre along one of the walls. Many surgical instruments and glass receptacles on tidy shelves. All of it is wood; all of it has been sunwashed to the dry white of bone.
Then there are the clusters. They make you think of fruit; some kind of grape, perhaps. Ropes hanging from the ceiling, and terminating in a bundle of curios hanging at various heights. Here, dozens of hermetically sealed glass jars, full of dark green fluid in which float eerie organic shapes. This one certainly is a hairless mouse, but could this one be a piglet, with its six legs and two heads? This one contains a hand which you at first think is human, but the long fingers and narrow palm speak to one of the exotic great apes - only, does its finger twitch from time to time? There, another grape, lower than the first, each fruity a geometric solid: spheres, cubes, pyramids and cylinders, of gold, lead, iron or precious platinum, each a different weight, a different shape. More jars and vials, these ones filled with dozens of swirling colors, mineral dusts, pastes that seem to slowly move on their own. And there, high above the floor and crumpled upon itself such that you can hardly tell what it is, a body swaying gently in the wind - a desiccated mummy, its gangly reptilian limbs clenched around its body, its bony narrow head clasped to its torso by wire. All of it cast in stark, uncompromising light, and yet incomprehensible to your eyes by its very nature, twisted and opaque even to itself.
The guards guide Yuna through the path made of a gap between the tables and shelves at the center of the room, towards an upraised table. Chains dangle from its top and bottom, and it is framed on the left by a blackboard still full of notes you can't decipher at this distance, and on the right by a tray of surgical implements. One of the men roughly grabs her by the shoulder to hold her in place; Yuna just stands there, wrists held slightly up, chains dangling, and waits. You're not sure for what.
A sound comes from above. Something like a cough, or a click of the tongue, or some kind of throat sound. It reminds you of a pigeon, or a goose perhaps. Another echoes it. Then, from the ground ahead, a low creaking like an arthritic leg stretching out after a long stillness, a clicking sound against the floor. It moves, step by step, creak, click, creak, click, and the low rustle of cloth or feather rubbing against itself… A louder *cluck* from above, more rustling there, and a nauseating sense of motion as if the walls themselves were sliding in and out of place…
You realize that they were never alone in the room.
They move down - you can't tell if they're climbing down or gliding through the air or sliding out of the wall - they're hard to make out, the same white as the walls themselves. Their white sleeves undulate like birds' wings, making them seem almost ethereal, but when they are on the ground (without transition, like they never 'landed,' like they were always there), their steps are sharp, stop-and-go, an awkward shuffle.
You've seen their long coats before, buttoned close to the chest, wide leather belt tight around the waist. Most of all the long, beaked masks with their glass lenses, making their faces inhuman and unreadable - old outfits of the plague doctors, burned in infamy in the public imagination when they joined the Royal Hunting Corps in their secret war. A thousand newspaper serials and cheap novels have been written about these 'birds of ill omen,' these 'ravens of unkindness.' Only you've never seen them colored such stark white, and the beaks are shorter, more blunt.
The arthritic click-clack emerges from behind the upraised table, a figure slowly circling Yuna and her guards. His beaked mask is longer, sharper, a sickly yellow; a wide-brimmed hat perches over his head, a demi-cape protects his shoulder from splatter. He's tall and slender, but his gait is awkward, his back slumped, his feet slow and unsteady, and all of a sudden you get it.
The plague doctors always reminded you of crows and ravens. But not these, no.
This silent crowd shuffling along the walls of the room, looming like ghosts at its tables and desks and near its blackboards, they're like seagulls, roosting in this sea-stranded fort, hungering for scraps from its prisoners. And the man who just appeared, well, he rather reminds you of an albatross.
"Will the prisoner please disrobe?" he asks in a voice that comes from the throat, that struggles to shape the proper syllables.
Yuna gives both her guards a raised-eyebrow look, and neither reacts. "Sure," she says, shrugging, and begins to undress without the slightest trace of modesty or embarrassment. You want to look away, but you can't help but stare.
The formless, always slightly too large clothes of the Chateau's prisoners hid much from the eye. Yuna is a woman marked, in more ways than one.
She is marked in her very flesh, for one. Her strength is obvious, but more than that, there is something to the corded, oak-gnarled shape of her muscles, the disharmony between the parts of her, in odd grooves lingering the flesh ate itself, that speaks to a body that has gone through hunger and thirst time and again, until it burned itself into her.
And she is marked by battle and punishment. The long trails of blade-bite, the star-shaped hole of a bullet tearing through flesh, which reminds you uncomfortably of your own bullet-scar; a gnarled mess of tissue around her ankle, like a wolf's bite or perhaps a bear-trap.
And she is marked, of course, in the most literal sense: her body is a blank page on which someone drew a treatise. But it's not the tattoos that draw your eyes first. No.
It's the rod.
It's a long, narrow band of silvery-white metal, shining, following the curve of her spine. Bolted, it seems, to each side of the vertebrae, and fused into the skin and the bone underneath. It runs all the way from her coccyx to the base of her neck, where it burrows into the skin and disappears from sight. It should be unbearable, keeping her spine from bending in any way, and yet it shifts like a fluid with each motion without ever seeming to stop being solid metal.
The tattoos unfold around that rod like flowers out of an earthen band. Circles and lines and spiraling patterns, diagrams that begin simple and then explode into such complexity that they must unspool over the whole of Yuna's back, her shoulders, and run down her limbs and torso. Equation written in black ink, in ornate looping calligrams. There is a cold, reverent beauty to the arrangement of this proof-in-skin, the symmetry and connections of its patterns coming together in one grand edifice, an architectural blueprint; it reminds you of the summoning and binding circles of British pact-workers and Church exorcists, of the complex visual equations of alchemists.
Yuna turns around, revealing the full extent of her nakedness; nothing more or less than you've seen in female officers' barracks a hundred times before, and yet the setting, the guards and chains and flock of seagull, give it all an obscene tinge that makes you sick to your stomach. One guard begins to unlock her wrists and ankles and puts them in the chains of the upraised table, one at a time.
"Why do you even bother with this?" Yuna sneers. "You know if I wanted to escape these chains they wouldn't even slow me down."
"The Chateau prevents your escape," the albatross says. "The chains are just to keep you from squirming too much during the demonstrations."
He turns around, walking up a desk and slowly opening a heavy tome, picking up a quill and ink, and begins to write, speaking as he does:
"Date and time… Name of the subject… Session number," and there he pauses for a moment, then writes down: "Eleven…"
A chuckle escapes Yuna's lips, and the man pauses in his work.
"Why do you even bother recording the numbers, man?" she says.
The albatros slowly turns around, staring at her with his expressionless glass eyes.
"I must keep a record," he says simply.
"Have you checked the 'session number' on your previous entries?"
No response.
"C'mon!" she says, laughing outright this time. "How long have we known each other, uh? Eleven sessions? One session a week?"
"Yes," the albatros says, weariness creeping into his voice. "Eleven weeks of study. This is the third month of our… acquaintance," the albatros says, a weariness in his voice. "It won't be long now."
"Doc," Yuna says with a grin, leaning into her chains, somehow seeming to dominate the strange tableau entirely, "we've been doing this for three years."
No response.
"When your students arrived, you told them this was a three-months study, a seminar so they could learn from the most dangerous subjects in all of France."
"They will be going home soon," the albatross says, not without sadness. "Their studies are almost done. They will bring much new knowledge to the Académie, and I will welcome in a new group for the next semester."
"They've been here since Christmas before last."
No response.
"Do their parents still send them letters?" Yuna muses, tugging against her chains experimentally, playfully almost. "Or has the mainland forgotten they ever existed, like it forgets all of us here?"
The flock of seagulls in their white robes stare at her, two, perhaps three dozen glass-lens eyes from all across the room, from above and below, from desks and benches and the walls themselves, inscrutable.
"When was the last time any of you took off their mask, uh?" Yuna shouts, sudden anger in her voice,
"Let's begin," the albatross says, his voice affecting tiredness, the tone of a man done with petty distractions. He turns from his heavy tome, pacing the room in front of the captive Yuna, the guards a few feet behind them, relaxed. "Who can tell me the average length of the human spine?"
"Seventy-one centimeter for the adult human male," comes a raspy voice from above, though you could not tell which of the masked students spoke up if your life depended on it. "Sixty-one centimeter for the adult human female."
"And after extensive and careful study using the finest devices and techniques available to us, how long have we measured the platinum rod fused to the subject's spine to be, when measured as an individual object?"
"Exactly one hundred centimetres," answered another student, who could only be told apart from the other in the slightly higher pitch of his voice. "The length of the platinum bars serving as prototype metres stored in the Académie."
"And what is the length of that platinum rod, when measured holistically as part of the subject's general physiognomy?"
"Sixty-one centimetres," a third student answered. "The exact length of the average adult human female's spine."
"Very good," the albatross said, turning to face Yuna, hands clasped behind his back. "And what conclusion have we drawn from these two incompatible facts?"
"The fact," two students spoke at the same time, their rhythm in perfect unison, "that the platinum rod is simultaneously one hundred centimetre long and sixty-one centimetres long, the length of the true metre and the length of a human spine, is the core which serves to power the subject's magic."
"Indeed."
The albatross produces a long, thin stick, pointing to various points of Yuna's body. She watched him with odd interest, as if she were gauging him, and the rest of the class, in his gestures and speech.
"The diagrammic spell-pattern inscribed in the subject's skin only serves to harness and channel the fundamental space-distorting paradox produced by the fusion of the rod and her spine. Unfortunately, we have yet been unable to fully transcribe, or decipher, this incredibly complex equation."
"You've only been at it three years," Yuna said with a mean smile, "keep at it. Maybe in a decade you'll figure it out."
"As you can see," the albatross says, pointing to thin scars across Yuna's arm - fresh scars, and yet scars which do not break up the complex equation spiraling around her biceps, "inflicting damage to the subject's skin temporarily disrupts her space-warping abilities, yet over time the spell-pattern reasserts itself fully. Short of killing the subject, it is unlikely the diagram can be permanently destroyed - thankfully for us."
Again, Yuna leans into her chains. You realize she's suspended slightly higher than ground level, and when she stares into his empty artificial eyes, she's above, looking down on him.
"Why don't you flay the skin off my body," she says in that kind of deliberate whisper one can hear across an entire room, "and take the rod out of my spine, and see if you can make it all work without the inconvenience of it being attached to a live woman. At least then I'll be free from this puppet show."
"I would do so without a second's hesitation," the albatross answers in a purely matter-of-fact tone, "if there wasn't an unacceptably high risk of your vital essence somehow being part of the diagram, leaving me with two useless trinkets that can no longer be combined to produce the spell."
A low, mirthless chuckle comes out of Yuna's lips as she sags into the chains, her expression so very tired.
"Three years," she mutters. "Going 'round and 'round and 'round… I'm as much of a prisoner as you are, ain't I?"
"What a truly odd remark," the albatross says, sifting through his surgeon's tools. "I am not the one in chains."
"These aren't the chains that matter here," Yuna mumbles, tugging on her shackles.
You watch with rapturous attention as the scene unfolds, your original purpose almost entirely forgotten. So that's the power Yuna hides behind her dismal appearance. A space-warping spell of such power that it requires the permanent fusion of metal and flesh and the inscription of its mechanisms using an entire human body as a canvas. The implications are… awesome and terrifying in equal measure.
In a way she's like you, isn't she? An immense power has been burnt into her body, and can never be taken out without killing her or diminishing her into something less than she ever was. Did she consent to such a ritual? Or did she 'consent' in the same way you did, all these years ago, a scared child who couldn't know better?
There is very little chance of Yuna, guttersnipe Yuna, of deep intelligence and quick wit but lacking any formal education, having designed this spell herself. Someone used her as a vessel for the terrible power they had calculated into existence.
You blink.
This is not why you're here. You need to focus.
But the room ahead is cast in merciless light, not a shadow in sight, not even under its tables and desk; mirrors wash it all with harsh sunlight, and you have no room for stealth. What will you do…?
As you wonder this, something catches your eye. Yuna is staring in your direction - no, she's staring straight at you.
She gives you a wink.
"Now, today, we will proceed to…" the albatross starts, and suddenly Yuna yanks her chains, pulling up to his face in a sudden move, snapping her teeth like a dog, eyes wide. The man flinches and steps back, freezing up for a second.
"You should show more fear and deference when dealing with a hound of the Jacobins, old man," Yuna hisses.
There's a moment of hesitation and dread. Then the man whips his stick, smacking her in the face, drawing a thin red line in the skin of her cheek. She squirms, leaning back in her chains.
"You are nothing to fear or defer to, prisoner," he spits. "You are not even a woman, not even a person. You're an object of study, and when your usefulness has ended, you will be disposed of."
Yuna's hands curl, a trembling in her fingers, a gesture easily passed for a reaction to the smarting blow she's suffered, and you're the only one to see it for what it is.
The room shifts.
Behind the rank of white-clad students and the watchful wardens, in the unoccupied rows between them and your hiding place, space warps. There the floor between two tables stretches, as if the solid white stone of the castle were but taffy; there the distance between a shelf and a desk compresses, the two pieces of furniture unchanged but closer together now. Above, one of the grape-like clusters of chemicals and vials is pulled down without ever moving, as if its rope had simply always been longer than it is.
Within moments, the stark sunlight bathing the entire room is broken up by new shadows, and a path opens before you, bringing points of interest closer together and the men in the room farther away, all behind them.
You never knew such power could exist. It's as if the very concept of 'distance' is Yuna's to manipulate.
You shake yourself. You need to move quickly and decisively; if one of the students or the two wardens were to simply turn around for a second, they would realize what's happening.
Dumas has given you a piece of thick cloth to use as an improvised knapsack, and a list of a few valuable items for your alchemical designs. But as you stare at the clusters hanging from the roof, you think you might have the chance to steal a particular prize from behind the doctors' backs…
Those Chasseurs who train in the ways of Fortitude learn to use their increased resilience and fine control over their physiology to take in body-altering substances which would be harmful or even lethal to others. Pick one.
[ ] A specimen jar and its twisted mutated beast. By consuming or injecting the bodily extracts of the very monsters they hunt, the Chasseurs learn to induce brief but hideous mutations in their own bodies, lasting only a few seconds.
[ ] A handful of the strange metal solids. By embedding certain metals in their body or using powdered metals for body paints, the Chasseurs learn to imbue their body with the occult properties associated with certain metals.
[ ] A sealed chemical vial and its bubbling colored fluids. By consuming or injecting certain chemicals which would ordinarily be highly toxic, the Chasseurs turn their bodies into alchemical crucible, granting their blood the properties of various toxins and drugs.
- Location
- Somewhere!
- Pronouns
- She/Her
I really enjoy the implications that the students and teacher are being absorbed into the prison, like the rest of the staff. Masks that never come off and personalities that are being faded away, it's very chilling!
- Location
- London, England
[x] A handful of the strange metal solids. By embedding certain metals in their body or using powdered metals for body paints, the Chasseurs learn to imbue their body with the occult properties associated with certain metals.
Big fan of the "you are what you eat" sort of deal, oh yes. Also there are a lot of really cool and evocative occult properties of different metals to play with.
Big fan of the "you are what you eat" sort of deal, oh yes. Also there are a lot of really cool and evocative occult properties of different metals to play with.
Cecylene
Eternal Idea Engine
- Location
- Massachusetts
- Pronouns
- He/They
[x] A handful of the strange metal solids. By embedding certain metals in their body or using powdered metals for body paints, the Chasseurs learn to imbue their body with the occult properties associated with certain metals.
I am always a fan of Hemalurgy.
I am always a fan of Hemalurgy.
[x] A handful of the strange metal solids. By embedding certain metals in their body or using powdered metals for body paints, the Chasseurs learn to imbue their body with the occult properties associated with certain metals.
Wow, the fact that these mages never even realised says something terrifying about the power of the prison.
Wow, the fact that these mages never even realised says something terrifying about the power of the prison.
bookwyrm
Doom of Public Libraries
- Location
- Wichita, Kansas
Holy fuck, this place eats everyone, the prisoners, the guards, the odd support staff like this lost medical expedition, I bet even with the captains keeping strict orders to bunker down and never step foot on the cursed isle every once in a while the supply ships too find they have less crew then they started out with. Looking back the whole thing with release of the British POWs, that was so carefully timed and choreographed with but one single ship that would never return again, Vivienne wasn't just asking to be released into a trial on the mainland, she was asking for an active expenditure of state resources to fight the Chateau and pull on its leash long enough to let her go. This is no prison, this is a Napoleonic Sarlacc Pit.
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