It's Turbin' Time (Library of Ruina Modded/Arknights)

2.18 - Face the Fear

You look at X's face.

Your gaze pierces through the censors, and pierces through the modifications. For a second- for a fleeting, infinitely small moment- you see his true face. His façade cracks, and for that brief instant, you see a man who is simply tired. A man who is alone.

So alone, in fact, that he sought companionship from something that most men would turn in revulsion against. Because he empathized with it.

To be forgotten, erased, removed from history… to live in a world where you simply never existed… and everyone moves on as if your presence never mattered at all. Everything functions perfectly without you.

What a terrifying possibility.

So… you'll take this offer. You'll let him come with you, and you'll promise to accept his help. You turn your eyes away from his, and look at the door. You will face that thing.

You walk towards the door, step by step. An expectant look takes form in X's face, and his [CENSORED]-hand clenches.

You reach the door, you place your hand in the doorknob, and turn it.

[CENSORED] is on the other side of the room. It's in horse form, and its spawn are all sitting in its back. It's walking around in circles, and its children are making those awful noises while it runs from one wall to the other in a loop.

"Well, thanks for letting me follow." says X, smiling brightly. "Would you like to wake up, now?"

"Yeah, I would." you answer. "It's nice to meet you, X, and I'm sure we'll get along well. But I want to have some actual sleep, now. Rest my head from… all of this."

He nods, and your vision becomes blurry. [CENSORED] turns its "head" towards you, and the sound of cracking glass can be heard. The architecture of L-Corp begins to crumble, and the entire building shakes.

You fall to your knees as dust from the ceiling covers your hat. The door falls over in the other side, and the doorframe collapses on itself. The walls, the floor, and the roof soon follow, breaking and shattering entirely.

"See you, Sieg." he says, before you fall.

Everything goes dark.

You sleep without dreams.

---

…you wake up.

Ugh.

Your head hurts like hell. The memory of the thing behind those bars is not clear anymore, but you think your "mental corruption" levels are still high.

L-Corp used to just shoot employees with some kind of Enkephalin derivative bullet to deal with that sort of mental assault, or just load the compound into the air of the main rooms. It worked fine according to Abel, but you do not trust Enkephalin in any manner. You've seen far too many lives be ruined by that stuff.

It's not much of a concern when you don't give a shit about your employees- they'll just come back when the loop resets, obviously- but you'd rather not have your kidneys melt into unrecognizable goop from a drug overdose.

Well, not much you can do about it.

"What… what thing behind those bars?" says Abel.

Oh. Right. He wasn't there.

Well, you just had a dream right now. Much like his dream. You met [CENSORED]. Safe to say, that thing is bloody awful.

"[CENSORED]? If you saw it… you saw X, as well, didn't you?"

Eyup.

Boy's kind of unhinged.

"He was… unorthodox, yes. I did not realize he would appear so soon, but with Abram's early appearance… I should have predicted it as well. What did he do?"

Got really cozy with that… thing. He said he empathizes with it- and you kind of understand. They were both forgotten, after all.

"Did he possess parts from [CENSORED]? And, most importantly- did you see it?"

Yeah to both. Really creepy thing.

"You saw… it's true form?"

Eyup.

"...did that idiot forget to filter its presence? If he is utilizing full E.G.O synchronization with that particular ALEPH, he could be immune to it- but he could have killed you. It is surprising that you faced it, unblocked by Deterrence, and survived with such a mild level of mental corruption." notes the former manager. "Nevertheless, I have a more pressing question: what did he do?"

He's in Kazimierz.

"...he's already materializing in this world? Did you allow him to?"

He didn't give you any options on that specific matter. He said he wanted to help- and that he was going to materialize anyway, whether you wanted to or not.

He then offered you a choice.

You could have let X come with you. He'd materialize in Kazimierz, and you and him would join forces against Carmen..

Or you could tell him to fuck off, he'd go fight her in his own in some corner of the world- but he assured you that you'd never see him again.

You disliked the idea of him and [CENSORED] just going off to do their own thing with no supervision whatsoever, so you took the first one. Better to keep him in a place where you can see.

"...that was the correct choice. [CENSORED] is far too dangerous and hostile to be left alone.'

Yeah, that. But you have a question for Abel.

"Hm?"

How many managers died in that place?

When you entered X's dream, it was littered with corpses. He said they were the corpses of every single nameless "X" that could not reach the threshold. Every single corpse had killed themselves in some brutal and painful manner.

How many of these nameless existed after Abel?

Why did only four iterations of "X" accomplish enough to earn a name?

"The name is not a matter of accomplishment."

…what?

"The name is a matter of stagnancy. To attain that name was to give up and choose to become an obstacle. To oppose and test the Seed of Light, in a way." he says. "All of us forsook the path and chose to stay in that room you saw. Waiting."

He sounds sorrowful.

"My mistake… My first mistake was to be far too hasty. One of my many mistakes, in truth. I moved through the days without thinking. I believed simply reaching the end would be enough. It was not. It was not until I reached that unsurpassable door that it occurred to me that I might have to complete Malkuth's missions."

…Malkuth?

"One of my Sephirah. I did not understand how much my associates mattered. Self-realization, ironically, is unattainable if you seek it all by yourself. In the end, I was too stubborn, too set in my ways to reach redemption. I rejected them as worthless machinery, and that was my greatest failure. All I could do was sit in the front of that locked door, and wait for my future successors to come. And they did come. Far too many to count. But only one of them reached the end, and only two of them fell like I had."

"Abram… perhaps we will gain greater understanding if we read his book. But he gave up. He sank into grief and ceased to believe in our mission. He simply gave up after he managed to pass through my challenge."

"Adam was always a mystery to me. He did not speak a word to me as I presented him with his trial. But I am not sure. He did not even believe me to be worth his time."

Ignoring the Malkuth thing- you need to talk about that later- you will have to mention that Adam has WhiteNight, according to X.

"Indeed he does. He might be a danger later… now that I think of it. WhiteNight is an incredibly dangerous Abnormality, but Adam only ever spoke to X. Even when we met in the Library, in the night where our plan came into motion… he never said a single word to me."

Worrying.

But speaking of Abram.

Where is his book? And the book of the Current? It's not in your jacket- scratch that. You're not wearing your jacket at all. Where the hell are you right now?

You take a look above you- only to see an unfamiliar roof above your head. You've awoken, yet again, below a hospital ceiling. Your vision is still blurry at first, but when you manage to turn my head, you see the door before you.

You twitch. Everything is fine, or so it seems.

You are dressed in a white hospital gown. Again. They took your things from you. Again. And you'd rather have those things. You absolutely do not want the book of the Current in the hands of someone who doesn't know what they are doing with it.

Fuck, could whoever found the book end up letting the damn thing out?

"We better hope they cannot."

You sigh and try to sit in the bed. Once again, someone hooked an IV to your left arm. Your hat is still in its rightful place, thankfully.

You hear footsteps.

Someone comes through the door.

It's a woman with brown hair. Given by those things in her head that remind you of a bird, she's likely a Liberi. She has a coat, with a brown armband carrying the symbol of infinity, plus a set of "plus/minus" inside of it. She's looking at a clipboard, and in her chest there is a rectangular badge with the same infinity symbol.

"Oh, you woke up." she says. "Good morning."

"...how long has it been?" you ask her. "Is this… Rhodes Island?"

That place Emperor told you might be able to fix your current circumstances. You still have his letter- did Capone present it to them? You shouldn't have slept this hard.

She looks up from her clipboard.

"Roughly eight hours since you arrived. You fell asleep during the journey, and your friends carried you here while you were unconscious. I was called thanks to your… nonstandard situation."

You take a look around the room. It's a hospital room, but it's considerably different from the one you saw in Lungmen. There are several instruments in a side of the room- whose construction seems similar to the medical scanners you've seen K-Corp employ- and the smell of antiseptic infests the entire place.

"Are you feeling well?" the woman asks. "I am Silence, a medical specialist. You are currently in Rhodes Island, yes."

She looks very tired- not only in the conventional "hadn't had enough sleep" manner. Just a sort of perpetual aura of exhaustion- the one you've seen in Memento. She also reminds you of an owl. Oh, so that's what the head crest is from.

What's that thing behind her, flying? It's some kind of drone.

"I presume Kal'tsit informed you about what I asked her for, no? What exactly did you do since I arrived here?"

She nods.

"First, you were in need of basic medical care. While broken bones, lacerations and a concussion were reported by your friend- Capone, most of the harm had already been regenerated by the time you got here. The real danger was the foreign materials inserted into your body by Arts, who were damaging it."

She looks at something- something that seems like some sort of diagram.

"I first presumed it to be a shard of activated Originium, something I have experience with, but I have been proved wrong. Your friends were not very helpful in uncovering what exactly it is. That information will be vital in actually removing them." she tells you. "We would have attempted a surgery, but after your status was fully stabilized, it seemingly entered an inert state."

She looks back at you.

"Do you have any information on it?"

You sigh. You wanted to keep most information on the City hidden, but this one will need to be disclosed. It's not like you know much about F-Corp's Singularity.

"It's called Fairy. According to what I know, at least, it can "open" anything. The combat applications are obvious; it was launched like a projectile by the Ar- Caster."

The word "Arbiter" dies in your tongue. It's not relevant right now, and she'd have no idea of what it even means.

"While it is extremely energy-intensive, it can also be used as a "skeleton key:" it can open any lock, and targeted use can "open" the mind of targets. It was used by the Caster and associates utilizing the same technology for torture purposes, and she successfully extracted critical information from targeted personnel without the usual problems that torture has, in timeframes where a conventional interrogation was impossible and there was no evidence of them being traitors."

That part is not correct- not even technically correct. Obviously the Arbiter never did this to you. But you have seen F-Corp employees walk into rooms with targets, and leave with information they could not have possibly interrogated from these very same targets in that timeframe.

The Arbiter no doubt had the capacity to do that, with her enormous stock of Fairy. That thing consumes an absurd amount of energy. Not even F-Corp Agents use it as frivolously as the Arbiter did. Throwing Fairy keys around as projectiles… yeah, that's a surefire way to go bankrupt.

"In addition to this-" you continue "The material became lodged into the flesh of the target. Whenever they took any sort of evasive, defensive or offensive motion- anything that could exert them, really- the Fairy would cause continuous damage by violently "opening" their insides."

She is annotating your words in her clipboard, nodding.

"Do you know the name of your attacker? It will probably not be of much use, but we can search for our records for any similar cases reported before. You mentioned it was a technology? Not the personal Arts of the Caster?"

"Fairy is a technology. Unique Arts would be possible, but its effects have been used by multiple people before, all belonging to the same corporation, which is colloquially referred to as "F-Corp."" you say. "I have no further information on that corporation. I don't know much about them or who they are."

That last part is, obviously, a lie. What was the name of the Arbiter? You think some of their subordinates called around for her. Yes, yes, the name was… yes, you remember it now.

"Binah," you say. "and she was also referred to as "The Arbiter," or "An Arbiter.""

She nods.

"How long has it been since you had this material inserted into your body?"

"Roughly one week and a day. Maybe two days."

She grimaces.

"If this is a material created by Originium technology, it is very likely that you will have contracted Oripathy in that timeframe. But the Originium-Crystal density was abysmally low…" she says, muttering something to herself.

"I will provide you with an Infection monitor. Please place this-" she hands you a bracelet. "In your arm."

You place the Infection monitor in your arm with a click. Silence takes something from her pocket- it kind of looks like a phone?

"It will serve as a general-purpose tracker for your health while you are transiting through Rhodes Island. Excuse me for a second, while I properly adjust it for your… abnormal vital signs."

Ah.

Yeah, someone was bound to notice it, eventually.

Your Locust Workshop appendage linkers, your lung enhancements to allow greater ease of breathing, the fact that they replaced your entire heart, your entire circulatory system, several chunks of your nervous system, your bones, your eyes, your auditory system, your tongue… the fact that your appendix is now a hidden stem cell bag, the list goes on. It was probably also noticed by the hospital, come to think of it.

Fuck, they might have some sort of scan there.

You look back at Silence. She finished fiddling with her device. The perpetual sense of exhaustion doesn't budge. She really does remind you of Memento- probably has a fucked up sleep cycle, or just doesn't sleep right.

"Memento?" she says.

"Oh, did I say that out loud?" you tell her, a little embarrassed. It's probably the fault of the headache. "Memento is an old friend of the same organization I am part of. Turbulence Office. Sorry for the comment."

"No, no, it was nothing. My Oripathy really did mess with my sleep cycle."

You notice something. When you said the name "Memento," her eyebrows rose for a second, but then they went back down again. When you said the word Turbulence Office, she grit her teeth. She probably recognizes the name… both of them.

You'll need to ask her about that later.

"Well, can I leave now?" you ask her. "Or will we remove the fragments of Fairy in… well, shortly after this."

She shakes her head.

"Not yet. We still need to take a few tests. Warn us if you feel anything different. And you have guests waiting for you."

Uh, Wympe, Capone and Arabella are probably worried for you. You're feeling an awful sense of déjà vu- didn't this exact situation happen in Lungmen before?

"Well, you can let them come."

After the woman leaves, her drone trailing behind her.

A few minutes after that, you hear someone running at full speed through the hallways of this place. Rhodes Island, right?

You turn your head towards the noise. It's probably Wympe- no.

It's absolutely not Wympe, you think, seeing the black coat and the masked face of an entirely different Turbulence Office Fixer. Oh, and Nicole is there, too. She's smiling at you.

"WHERE THE FUCK WERE YOU, YOU FUCKING-" screams Sleepy in a tone of voice that could awake the dead.

Ah, this is just like home.

End of Arc 2 - Bloody Tides

(You have reached Rhodes Island.)

(Arabella has gained The Nameless's Neural Cluster. If given a body, this bundle of neural tissue will become something else.)

(Your friends have found you.)

(Now.)

(Make your choice.)

[ ] Interlude: Enkephalin Rush

[ ] Interlude: The Library III

[ ] Interlude: Records II

[ ] Interlude: Mansfield Break

[ ] Interlude: Pinus Sylvestris

[ ] Interlude: Accelerated Mending

[ ] Interlude: Ride The Lightning