Gaius Antonius & Abel Angelus - Deal With The Devil
Abel looks around his office. It was in far worse shape than in his last meeting with Gaius. The fight during the blood rain had really messed the place up and Abel still hadn't repaired all the damage.
Abel winces as the door falls down when Gaius knocks on it.
"Welcome, sorry about the mess, have a seat."
Striding carefully around the damage, Gaius approached the central desk. He raised one foot up high to step right into the guest chair, rather than pull it back and risk a cracked leg falling off entirely.
Neither man spoke for a few moments. Gaius took a few deep breaths, biting the inside of his cheek as he pondered how to approach things. He certainly looked different; more than just rejuvenated, the man carried a physical confidence and almost otherworldly grace which he'd never before demonstrated. Rather than the typical coat and hat, he had come dressed in a drab brown robe with a hood that hid his whole body, having not wanted to be noticed.
"I imagine this meeting carries a… more complicated feeling than I first intended." Gaius eventually said quietly.
"Well you were at least right in that you would come back a king." Abel gestures to the damaged room. "I am just lucky that I am apparently a horrible fighter as a blood hungry bezarker. Just had a slap fight with a junior until it was over."
"I am, at least, glad you came out of it alright. I haven't got a clue how it happened - nobody really knows what happened at all. I…" Gaius sighed, seemingly not up for digging into the things he had seen. "I encountered many things. Things I'll never speak of. Things I want to speak of but can't right now. Things I couldn't describe even if I wanted to. But yes, I did make it."
With that, Gaius pulled back his hood, revealing a strange new feature: a third eye, set into the middle of his forehead and housed in a horizontal socket. "Couldn't tell you where this came from, and it's not even the biggest change my body's gone through."
Abel gets a somewhat creepy gleam in his eye "How deeply have you looked at the changes. Like have you examined exactly how your new eye connects to your brain? Do you have a whole new optic nerve? A whole new section of your brain to decode the input?"
"From what I've been told, an entirely new nerve. My… I think they called it the 'occipital lobe'. That's gotten bigger, to accommodate more information, I suppose." Gaius shrugged. "I can see depth as long as any two of them are open, so I'm trying to train myself to blink one eye at a time in sequence, for an edge in a fight. No success yet though."
"Interesting. So your change came with a whole new section of brain to accommodate it yet it still doesn't include the instincts to fully take advantage of it. Did you know much about brain biology before your change?" Abel is lending forward now.
"Mm, more than most, I suppose?" Gaius leaned his head back a little, trying to remember. "I've certainly learned more recently, but I've always gotten headaches. So I picked up a few words here and there from physicians. I'd say I know a lot more about muscles and bones than I do about brains, though."
Abel's face falls at the word headaches. "I am guessing that you didn't get a full brain scan before the changes so it's possible that this isn't actually new but just a bloodline perk activating. You might have had the extra 'occipital lobe' all along and advancement just let you grow the eye."
Abel points at his head "Do you still get headaches?"
"Now that I think about it, not since I advanced. Well. Not unprompted ones; still hurts plenty when I get hit in the head." Gaius smirked. "You might be onto something. There was this one time I was in a fight, and got a skull fracture, right here." Gaius pointed to where his new eye sat. "It was painful, but there was something else, a feeling I don't know how to describe. They say blind men still feel phantom sensations around their eyes, perhaps it was like that."
"Have you ever been blinded by an injury? Sometimes cultivation allows people to develop based on perceived need." Abel was enjoying this puzzle.
"Blinded? No, not that I recall. Although, my senses have been unusual for a long time." Gaius explained with a nostalgic look on his face. "Dao influence, in a sense. Alteration of my own perception."
Abel smirks "Well I am guessing you would have mentioned it if your new eye allowed you to see though earth."
"I'm afraid not." Gaius chuckled. "Would be great if it could, but so far I'm not sure what's different about it, other than, you know…" he sighed, falling silent again. "I'll quit stalling, if you'd like. I thought my life would be less complicated after I pulled this off, but it's all more insane than ever."
"I have never heard of a cultivator whose life became simpler with advancing cultivation. It's the price for being able to matter in this world"
"Five hundred years."
Gaius said those three words, then stopped, leaning forward and resting a forearm on the desk. "The thirteenth chamber held my mind captive for five hundred years, Abel. I nearly died of despair. I dreamt up countless things to keep myself alive, and some of those dreams never ended." Three eyes affixed Abel with a longing, vulnerable look.
"I'm afraid, friend. Afraid that I'll lose all
logos entirely. Occasionally, I mistake a waking dream for the real thing, or the other way around. Sometimes I go days without sleeping, because I'm afraid I'll wake up back in that prison."
Abel frowns. Well that puts a new perspective on things. "I am not a therapist or a psychologist, but are there any distinct things that allow you to tell the difference between dreams and the real world?"
"Generally. The things my mind throws at me are never right, there's always at least one sense the dreams lack, usually more. And they don't show up in my new eye, probably because, like you said, my instincts haven't adapted to it." Gaius looked down and furrowed his brow. "Maybe that's why it appeared, to shepherd me through madness."
"Might I recommend that you ditch that idea of learning to blink your eyes one at a time? It seems like it would be better for your mental health to keep the two sets of vision distinct from each other."
"Mm, that's probably the way to go. Maybe I'll blink the bottom two, then the top one." Gaius scratched his head, trying to find the words to follow up. "But the point, Abel, is that now, more than ever, I desire your partnership."
Gaius pointed right at Abel, and looked at him with eyes of steel. "An advisor, a man with both feet planted firmly on the ground, to anchor me down to the earth. A King's thoughts are wild, deficient in
logos, mine more than the others'. I need your partnership, and I am prepared to pay handsomely."
Abel hesitated; he currently had quite a sweet gig in the Bei Spirit mine. But it was clear Gauis did need help. Also pay handsomely. Abel deflected, "I might be able to point you towards some mental cultivation arts that should help. I heavily practice a math based cultivation art although I am helped by Cal" Abel holds up the calculating caterpillar. "Then again a spirit beast might also be helpful." Alway better to help people solve their own problems when possible.
"Scylla does help me, when she realizes it's happening. Still, no matter how well I control myself, I won't ever be the person I was before. I want people who aren't afraid to disagree with me, to tell me when they believe I'm wrong."
"Well I have always been unusually good at that. It would be nice to practice that skill professionally rather than as a hobby" Abel smiles trying to lighten the mood.
Gaius chuckled, fleshing a nervous smile. "You're a fun man to talk to, as usual. Anyway, with regards to my offer…" He then reached into his robe and retrieved a sizeable roll of parchment, some three feet long and wide, covered in various legal jargon, and handed it across the desk to Abel. "I had the bookies whip this up. A contract to my new legion, up for renewal once per year. Before ascension, you would lead the Engineer Corps, at least until an Array-Smith Centurion joined, after which you would be their second in command. After ascension, you would be my right hand in addition to leading the Engineer Corp. You would have the right to veto any order but mine, unless counter-vetoed by a two-thirds majority of Centurions. Call it a special in-between rank."
Abel's eyes fly over the contract with all the skill of a professional bureaucrat. "You seem very confident in my eventual ascension. The terms here are amazingly generous for qi condensation."
"You will." Gaius said, leaning in closer until his mouth hovered just over Abel's ear, and he switched to a clandestine whisper. He even hid his mouth behind his hand, as if worried of eavesdroppers. "This is beyond Top Secret, but… I can
personally guarantee your success. Speak of this to no one." With that, he leaned back again, stepping his hands. "I have confidence in you." He smiled.
Abel spots something in the contract: "This legion doesn't actually exist currently."
"That's correct, it doesn't." Gaius nodded. "I wanted to snap you up now in case you ascended in the intervening time. It's a legal grey area, no rules specifically against doing it."
Abel considered how he lost control during the blood rain. He had thought his tattoo array would be sufficient, but it turned out not to be. The 12th heaven stage was supposed to help with resisting such influences. Abel made a split second decision and signed his name to the bottom of the document.
"Now that that is settled. I have loads more questions. You say that the vision of your third eye is district. Can you use it to look through a telescope well, keeping both other eyes open and process the visual stream at the same time?"
"Haven't tried it. I imagine I could, though both images would be a little weird. It's… not exactly like I see in two ways at once. More like one and a half fields of vision?" Gaius squinted, struggling to describe a sensation entirely alien to a human's. "A split tongue can move in two directions at once, but it's still one tongue. Press both halves to one thing and they taste the same thing. Imagine if you pressed them to two different things. You'd taste them both, but… muddled. Am I making sense?"
Abel cups a hand around one eye "Yes, but the reason I ask is that I have made all sorts of vision enhancing eye pieces over the years, but they always have the problem of distracting from normal vision too much to be practical. I Wonder if you might be able to make any use of them."
"I'll gladly festoon myself in whatever you'd like, now that you've signed on." Gaius smiled, patting Abel on the shoulder. "Well, technically my legion doesn't exist yet, but that comes into effect once it does. Right now you legally lead an Engineer Corps of one. Perhaps you can make use of that."
Abel rummages in his cracked desk and brings out a red piece of glass broken down the middle. "This eyepiece allows-" Abel notices the break. "-This eyepiece
used to allow the user to see heat."
"Heat? That's quite something." Gaius picked up the lens, holding up to his eye experimentally. "…not sure what I was expecting; you said it was broken. Still, I can see some of the colors outside the human range, but I can't see heat. This would be fun to play around with."
"I expect we will both have lots of fun playing around. By the way, I hear that you are resistant to fire?"
