30 - Tempus Furcifer
GraftingBuddha
Retired Pooh-Bah
30 - Tempus Furcifer
Time passed, as it was wont to do. As Taylor had observed, the clocks didn't stop just because an immortal centipede-woman had died - or came as close to dying as one of her kind could get. The battered TV, of a make none of them could really discern, played low-definition news reports, detailing the fight against Lung. Protectorate heroes had acquitted themselves well, saved a number of civilians who'd been in the area. Lung had been wounded, but had managed to escape. The status quo of the Bay lived on, the gangs continued to struggle for territory, the PRT struggled to maintain a vague order, and the only substantial difference was that a number of bored mothers and teens started going to a new mindfulness studio - this one perfectly mundane, a little place run downtown by a Thai family that pretended to be Chinese for marketing purposes. The burned ruins of the Luminous Qigong Centre crumbled into ash, piece by piece. No parent company swooped in to take care of the damage, and so it became another entry on the city's endless list of 'things which we should probably clean up one of these days'. For months afterwards, people in the bay complained of ash in their food, and in the immediate vicinity of the old centre, people simply got into the habit of dusting more frequently and washing their plates before every meal as well as after. A store that sold vacuum bags and the machine necessary to seal them underwent a substantial boom in this time, making enough money that the owner was able to finally afford a diamond ring for his wife, as opposed to the plain gold band they'd been settling with for so very long. And so, a Thai family became richer, a local businessman had a superb shag, and a number of teenagers complained at how often they were asked to dust.
Of all of this, Taylor saw only a little. Then again, she saw little these days - her eyes were unfocused, lazy, drifting from item to item before settling on a single thing for hours on end. She woke, she shuffled to the clean but old kitchen in the farm, and ate breakfast. Turned out Sanagi was quite the cook - though she was labouring under some very odd impressions which were the topic of some debate with her and Danny. She would insist that you should never rinse rice, because it leaches the flavour. Danny insisted that you should rinse rice if you want the rice to be fluffy and not a pile of rice-flavoured gum. She questioned his manhood. He questioned her ability to cook. And at the end of it all, Taylor would still eat breakfast one way or the other. And then, she'd sag into her seat in front of the television, and watch.
The protein farm, when they had arrived, seemed… cold. Very cold. Now, though, it was inching its way towards homeliness. Small rugs were dug out of cupboards, where they'd been left the last time someone had actually lived here. That alone helped, covering the cold stone floors and making the morning walk to the kitchen marginally more bearable. The old fireplace, a hole in the wall with a cast-iron box inside, was in near-continuous activity. After a few days, with cabin fever (and alcohol deficiency) slowly driving her mad, Ahab decided to get to work in the protein sheds. The hazmat suits were attached to the inside - the materials inside were far too dangerous to ever be given the chance to escape, so even a hazmat suit had to remain inside at all times. The suit had a plate at the back which connected to the exterior airlock, allowing one to simply climb from the back of the suit directly into the airlock, where decontamination could occur. An elegant system - one that Ahab described at length to Taylor one evening. Every day she'd walk out, climb into the suit, and start tending to the grubs. Ensuring their toxic beds were the right kind of toxic, making sure no deformities or mutations were developing, cleaning out old beds and introducing new grub populations to areas where they'd died out… in time, she would come back with a basket of the things, freshly killed. None of them actually tried to eat them, but eventually Ahab commandeered a bathtub for the fermentation of bathtub protein grub moonshine, which apparently was only technically legal in the nuclear exclusion zones out in Eastern Europe.
Taylor only tried one sip, and promptly fell asleep, waking only to see Danny and Ahab dancing a merry jig while singing a song with lyrics that made her blush. Made sense that her father would know them, though - he did work with the dockworkers. Back in the day her mother would shriek in indignation whenever he returned from one of their bar nights, singing something about a particular gentleman from Nantucket who had the unique privilege of being well-endowed. Or was it something about a ship called Venus? Possibly both. He hadn't sung those songs in a long time - Ahab's patented bathtub protein grub moonshine was a miraculous thing, apparently.
It took a few days for the internet to come back, and promptly Sanagi, Danny and Ahab fought over the single laptop in the entire house. It took hours, but eventually Sanagi had reported that she was sick and had been knocked cold for a few days, Danny had reassured his coworkers that he was alright, and Ahab ordered a case of Stoli vodka delivered to her house. All equally essential activities. Taylor gradually came back to herself, starting to observe the activities of the others with more care, and even beginning to participate. One day, she woke, went to the kitchen, and made breakfast for herself - for the first time in nearly a week. She only realised this when the second bite of scrambled eggs was making its way down. A rare smile crossed her face briefly.
The next day, she woke, went to the bathroom, and began to go through her morning routine - slowly, but carefully, relishing every stage. She plucked her eyebrows, moisturised her face, used a hot cloth cleanser, and ended with delicately brushed teeth, swift but vigorous flossing, and a swirl of mouthwash. She then moved back to her customary chair, and started inspecting her nails. Vanity, surprisingly, was the last thing on her mind. Her appearance barely mattered to her at the moment, but the ritual of caring for her face, the feeling of getting to know her own skin intimately and completely, felt… cleansing. It was something Taylor Hebert could do, and no-one else. Not Brent DeNeuve, and not the person she feared she was turning into.
Turk came by after a while, sending the now-quiet house into an uproar. He looked like hell - his arm was up in a sling, he had heavy bags under his eyes, and he'd lost some weight. Nonetheless, he looked relieved to be alive, and happy to see the only people he could really talk about things with. He laid things out plainly - the cult was either dead or gone, if there was a meaningful difference between the two. No-one poked around the centre, no-one asked him questions, no-one followed him. Sanagi chose this moment to interject - she'd looked at the list of casualties and tried to match them up with police files, and indeed, most of them had been reported missing some time ago, or who had no real connections beyond the centre - full cult members, probably completely overtaken by whatever Master-esque effect Chorei had over them. Taylor tried not to think about that. She tried not to think about what it may have been like when Chorei had perished - had they perished in turn? Had they snapped awake, only to see Lung about to crush them to death? Had they been aware the whole time?
Taylor didn't sleep well that night. Turk decided to stay with them for a few days, and then to head back to Brockton. The others agreed, eager to escape the farm and finally go home. The next day, Sanagi monopolised the laptop, to the great irritation of her colleagues. She didn't care. Sanagi was irritable. She reviewed the documents over and over, trying her best to extract some new meaning from them. The reports were… jumbled, the witness statements completely different to what she had expected. She'd anticipated questioning, real probing into what had been going on at the centre. The facts were undeniable - the bodies with centipedes growing in them, the woman who'd briefly battled Lung to a standstill… the PRT should be all over that. If anything they should have picked up on the fact that the woman had vanished off the face of the earth. On Monday she reviewed one of the reports, and noted that they referenced an 'unknown parahuman' - the case was going to be handed to the PRT. General practice was that if the BBPD needed access to PRT records, closed cases were available on request, and still-open cases were entirely under PRT jurisdiction. They controlled what information got in and out. Given the chaos, given the undeniable number of followers, she assumed the BBPD would press strongly for access to PRT records here, if only to keep track of the fallout. To her surprise, the PRT handed the case right back over, noting that the parahuman elements were no longer relevant. She gained access to the rest of the reports on Tuesday. She blinked.
The records had changed. Instead of an unknown parahuman fleeing the scene, the report now named a parahuman called 'Mukade' - Sanagi checked, the name was a real one, apparently a centipede-themed villain who used to live out in San Francisco and later vanished from the face of the earth. Her 'gang' - all mentions of 'cult' were gone - was involved in… organ harvesting, using the Qigong Centre as a front? What? She battled Lung in a territorial dispute, then shifted her focus to the Protectorate, who succeeded in wounding her. Unfortunately, she was later found dead with multiple knife wounds, the implication being that Oni Lee had attacked her while she was vulnerable.
Sanagi knew that was bullshit. She'd punched Oni Lee in the face repeatedly, Taylor had sent a wave of venom into his eyelids, the bastard couldn't even blink let alone fight. And there was no way he could have fought Chorei. The case was being labelled 'closed' - a new villain crushed by established powers, her rudimentary gang scattered to the winds, another win by the locals. And then there were just pages and pages of cleanup efforts, rehabilitation… she reviewed one of the those pages, one of the organ harvesting operation survivors. An unfamiliar face stared out at her, with a detailed witness statement describing horrific treatment at the hands of a fiendish parahuman.
Sanagi couldn't believe what she was reading. Someone had gone into the BBPD - and possibly the PRT - records and had changed every detail, making an unusual fight which ended ambiguously a straightforward parahuman brawl. There was even going to be a press conference that evening with members of the Protectorate congratulating each other on a job well done. She trawled through every single page she could get her hands on, each one a delicate mosaic of truthful events melded with complete falsehoods. The organ harvesting survivors - she looked them up, nothing. Witness protection. Case was anticipated to go on for years, against a company which apparently had rented the building out - bullshit. She'd looked into the building during her own investigations, the place was entirely owned by the cult which occupied it, under the name 'LQC' - Luminous Qigong Company. But now the company which rented the place out was… still LQC, but now that stood for Ling Quality Consortium.
This was a coverup, plain and simple. A coverup executed so dizzyingly quickly that she couldn't possibly imagine the resources necessary to make it happen. Photos, backstories, witness statements, false trials… everything was arranged to go off in perfect order, she'd had maybe a day, a day, to review the real reports before they shifted around. Sanagi scowled. She dug deeper - nothing. Flawless reports. Unquestionable statements. Nothing she could actually hold onto. The only proof that Chorei had been something beyond a parahuman, and had been destroyed by something completely beyond her conceptions of what was possible, existed in her head and the heads of the people in this farm. One man with a gun could effectively eradicate all traces of Chorei's real nature if he had a mind to do it. And then… she saw it. An acronym she didn't recognise. Some government agency had been brought in to assist, consult on the operation. Specialists in organ harvesting operations, apparently, provided expertise on how to handle the victims and trace the buyers. Three letters, no explanation for what they meant.
S.E.T.
Later, Taylor accessed the laptop. It was late, and she could barely hear the moaning of the industrial junk that loomed in the distance. Her eyes were more active, her face more expressive. She was slowly, but surely, coming back to herself. She still didn't enjoy sleeping, though. Nightmares didn't make her surge upright with a scream in her throat - nightmares generally didn't do that, she'd found. Instead, she'd just… wake. At three in the morning, sun still down, with tears slowly sliding down her face. She'd stay there for hours, unmoving, sobbing until her face was soaked. And then she'd stand, wash herself off, do her morning routine, and she'd be presentable again. She was starting to exercise again, too. Exercise made it hard to think about what had happened. She checked her emails, idly flicking through the small things which had slipped through her spam filter. Nothing really - her emails were usually quite barren, she didn't exactly have many people she corresponded with. And then, something - a few days ago, buried under unremarkable things, an email from an actual person.
She opened it up.
Dear Ms. Hebert,
Professor Buyandelger at Barnabas recommended I get in touch - I understand that you had some interest in his work on the vermin cult? My name is Arch, and I've been working in a similar area for some time now, primarily looking at cross-cultural manifestations of various cult activities, particularly one involving immolation.
I'd be happy to send you some articles on the topic - though most are terribly vague, I'm afraid - but I was curious about one thing: Buyandelger mentioned that you'd mentioned Japan, a country which he had very little knowledge of, in the context of vermin cults. May I ask if you've found any data on that topic? Buyandelger would ask, but he forgot to email you and now feels rather too awkward.
Please, let me know if there's anything you'd like to ask me about relating to these articles. I look forward to discussing them.
Best,
Arch
She checked the first article attached to the email - J. B. Slate 2005 - Archaeological Analyses of the Human Remains found in the Tuscany Mithraea. She opened it, and the first thing she saw was an image - a ring of bodies, burned to the point of looking like carbonised wood, with whorls that resembled enormous fingerprints engraved on every exposed scrap of flesh. And on every face, a beatific smile.
Her reply to Arch was near-instantaneous.
In the depths of another city, a man narrowed his eyes. He was surrounded by fire - a nest of centipedes eradicated. Transparent plastic sacs loomed all around, brimming with amniotic fluid, containing bodies that writhed with centipedes. Rows and rows of the sacs stretched into the distance, and one by one the fire was destroying them. Sometimes the bodies barely reacted as the fire melted their cocoons, sending them sprawling boneless to the ground with sighs of relief. Other times they struggled, splitting their own sacs, collapsing with bodies too weak to stand on their own, pale centipedes twitching in pain as the heat slowly cooked them. As juveniles, an ordinary flame would already have been a danger, and this fire was something quite beyond the norm.
Beyond the sacs, in a clear patch of ground, a monk was burning to death. He laughed, and wept enormous yellow tears, his eyes shrunk to tiny wrinkled grapes. His mind was long-empty, replaced with boiling fire. All his memories had long been bled away after days of being consumed, until he became nothing more than the source of the inferno now obliterating his life's work. At this point, he didn't care. He was finally whole. The man who had started this, who stood surrounded by flame yet showed not a hint of fear or pain, remained perfectly still. He sniffed, deeply, smoke entering his nostrils and leaving his mouth. Slowly, deliberately, he moved towards the exit, the heels of his shoes crushing down on skin and scales that had never seen the sun, and now were exposed to something a thousand time more brilliant. He sniffed again, tasting the carnage around him, and something else, a quality of the world that existed beyond natural senses.
He smiled curiously.
"Something just broke."
Time passed, as it was wont to do. As Taylor had observed, the clocks didn't stop just because an immortal centipede-woman had died - or came as close to dying as one of her kind could get. The battered TV, of a make none of them could really discern, played low-definition news reports, detailing the fight against Lung. Protectorate heroes had acquitted themselves well, saved a number of civilians who'd been in the area. Lung had been wounded, but had managed to escape. The status quo of the Bay lived on, the gangs continued to struggle for territory, the PRT struggled to maintain a vague order, and the only substantial difference was that a number of bored mothers and teens started going to a new mindfulness studio - this one perfectly mundane, a little place run downtown by a Thai family that pretended to be Chinese for marketing purposes. The burned ruins of the Luminous Qigong Centre crumbled into ash, piece by piece. No parent company swooped in to take care of the damage, and so it became another entry on the city's endless list of 'things which we should probably clean up one of these days'. For months afterwards, people in the bay complained of ash in their food, and in the immediate vicinity of the old centre, people simply got into the habit of dusting more frequently and washing their plates before every meal as well as after. A store that sold vacuum bags and the machine necessary to seal them underwent a substantial boom in this time, making enough money that the owner was able to finally afford a diamond ring for his wife, as opposed to the plain gold band they'd been settling with for so very long. And so, a Thai family became richer, a local businessman had a superb shag, and a number of teenagers complained at how often they were asked to dust.
Of all of this, Taylor saw only a little. Then again, she saw little these days - her eyes were unfocused, lazy, drifting from item to item before settling on a single thing for hours on end. She woke, she shuffled to the clean but old kitchen in the farm, and ate breakfast. Turned out Sanagi was quite the cook - though she was labouring under some very odd impressions which were the topic of some debate with her and Danny. She would insist that you should never rinse rice, because it leaches the flavour. Danny insisted that you should rinse rice if you want the rice to be fluffy and not a pile of rice-flavoured gum. She questioned his manhood. He questioned her ability to cook. And at the end of it all, Taylor would still eat breakfast one way or the other. And then, she'd sag into her seat in front of the television, and watch.
The protein farm, when they had arrived, seemed… cold. Very cold. Now, though, it was inching its way towards homeliness. Small rugs were dug out of cupboards, where they'd been left the last time someone had actually lived here. That alone helped, covering the cold stone floors and making the morning walk to the kitchen marginally more bearable. The old fireplace, a hole in the wall with a cast-iron box inside, was in near-continuous activity. After a few days, with cabin fever (and alcohol deficiency) slowly driving her mad, Ahab decided to get to work in the protein sheds. The hazmat suits were attached to the inside - the materials inside were far too dangerous to ever be given the chance to escape, so even a hazmat suit had to remain inside at all times. The suit had a plate at the back which connected to the exterior airlock, allowing one to simply climb from the back of the suit directly into the airlock, where decontamination could occur. An elegant system - one that Ahab described at length to Taylor one evening. Every day she'd walk out, climb into the suit, and start tending to the grubs. Ensuring their toxic beds were the right kind of toxic, making sure no deformities or mutations were developing, cleaning out old beds and introducing new grub populations to areas where they'd died out… in time, she would come back with a basket of the things, freshly killed. None of them actually tried to eat them, but eventually Ahab commandeered a bathtub for the fermentation of bathtub protein grub moonshine, which apparently was only technically legal in the nuclear exclusion zones out in Eastern Europe.
Taylor only tried one sip, and promptly fell asleep, waking only to see Danny and Ahab dancing a merry jig while singing a song with lyrics that made her blush. Made sense that her father would know them, though - he did work with the dockworkers. Back in the day her mother would shriek in indignation whenever he returned from one of their bar nights, singing something about a particular gentleman from Nantucket who had the unique privilege of being well-endowed. Or was it something about a ship called Venus? Possibly both. He hadn't sung those songs in a long time - Ahab's patented bathtub protein grub moonshine was a miraculous thing, apparently.
It took a few days for the internet to come back, and promptly Sanagi, Danny and Ahab fought over the single laptop in the entire house. It took hours, but eventually Sanagi had reported that she was sick and had been knocked cold for a few days, Danny had reassured his coworkers that he was alright, and Ahab ordered a case of Stoli vodka delivered to her house. All equally essential activities. Taylor gradually came back to herself, starting to observe the activities of the others with more care, and even beginning to participate. One day, she woke, went to the kitchen, and made breakfast for herself - for the first time in nearly a week. She only realised this when the second bite of scrambled eggs was making its way down. A rare smile crossed her face briefly.
The next day, she woke, went to the bathroom, and began to go through her morning routine - slowly, but carefully, relishing every stage. She plucked her eyebrows, moisturised her face, used a hot cloth cleanser, and ended with delicately brushed teeth, swift but vigorous flossing, and a swirl of mouthwash. She then moved back to her customary chair, and started inspecting her nails. Vanity, surprisingly, was the last thing on her mind. Her appearance barely mattered to her at the moment, but the ritual of caring for her face, the feeling of getting to know her own skin intimately and completely, felt… cleansing. It was something Taylor Hebert could do, and no-one else. Not Brent DeNeuve, and not the person she feared she was turning into.
Turk came by after a while, sending the now-quiet house into an uproar. He looked like hell - his arm was up in a sling, he had heavy bags under his eyes, and he'd lost some weight. Nonetheless, he looked relieved to be alive, and happy to see the only people he could really talk about things with. He laid things out plainly - the cult was either dead or gone, if there was a meaningful difference between the two. No-one poked around the centre, no-one asked him questions, no-one followed him. Sanagi chose this moment to interject - she'd looked at the list of casualties and tried to match them up with police files, and indeed, most of them had been reported missing some time ago, or who had no real connections beyond the centre - full cult members, probably completely overtaken by whatever Master-esque effect Chorei had over them. Taylor tried not to think about that. She tried not to think about what it may have been like when Chorei had perished - had they perished in turn? Had they snapped awake, only to see Lung about to crush them to death? Had they been aware the whole time?
Taylor didn't sleep well that night. Turk decided to stay with them for a few days, and then to head back to Brockton. The others agreed, eager to escape the farm and finally go home. The next day, Sanagi monopolised the laptop, to the great irritation of her colleagues. She didn't care. Sanagi was irritable. She reviewed the documents over and over, trying her best to extract some new meaning from them. The reports were… jumbled, the witness statements completely different to what she had expected. She'd anticipated questioning, real probing into what had been going on at the centre. The facts were undeniable - the bodies with centipedes growing in them, the woman who'd briefly battled Lung to a standstill… the PRT should be all over that. If anything they should have picked up on the fact that the woman had vanished off the face of the earth. On Monday she reviewed one of the reports, and noted that they referenced an 'unknown parahuman' - the case was going to be handed to the PRT. General practice was that if the BBPD needed access to PRT records, closed cases were available on request, and still-open cases were entirely under PRT jurisdiction. They controlled what information got in and out. Given the chaos, given the undeniable number of followers, she assumed the BBPD would press strongly for access to PRT records here, if only to keep track of the fallout. To her surprise, the PRT handed the case right back over, noting that the parahuman elements were no longer relevant. She gained access to the rest of the reports on Tuesday. She blinked.
The records had changed. Instead of an unknown parahuman fleeing the scene, the report now named a parahuman called 'Mukade' - Sanagi checked, the name was a real one, apparently a centipede-themed villain who used to live out in San Francisco and later vanished from the face of the earth. Her 'gang' - all mentions of 'cult' were gone - was involved in… organ harvesting, using the Qigong Centre as a front? What? She battled Lung in a territorial dispute, then shifted her focus to the Protectorate, who succeeded in wounding her. Unfortunately, she was later found dead with multiple knife wounds, the implication being that Oni Lee had attacked her while she was vulnerable.
Sanagi knew that was bullshit. She'd punched Oni Lee in the face repeatedly, Taylor had sent a wave of venom into his eyelids, the bastard couldn't even blink let alone fight. And there was no way he could have fought Chorei. The case was being labelled 'closed' - a new villain crushed by established powers, her rudimentary gang scattered to the winds, another win by the locals. And then there were just pages and pages of cleanup efforts, rehabilitation… she reviewed one of the those pages, one of the organ harvesting operation survivors. An unfamiliar face stared out at her, with a detailed witness statement describing horrific treatment at the hands of a fiendish parahuman.
Sanagi couldn't believe what she was reading. Someone had gone into the BBPD - and possibly the PRT - records and had changed every detail, making an unusual fight which ended ambiguously a straightforward parahuman brawl. There was even going to be a press conference that evening with members of the Protectorate congratulating each other on a job well done. She trawled through every single page she could get her hands on, each one a delicate mosaic of truthful events melded with complete falsehoods. The organ harvesting survivors - she looked them up, nothing. Witness protection. Case was anticipated to go on for years, against a company which apparently had rented the building out - bullshit. She'd looked into the building during her own investigations, the place was entirely owned by the cult which occupied it, under the name 'LQC' - Luminous Qigong Company. But now the company which rented the place out was… still LQC, but now that stood for Ling Quality Consortium.
This was a coverup, plain and simple. A coverup executed so dizzyingly quickly that she couldn't possibly imagine the resources necessary to make it happen. Photos, backstories, witness statements, false trials… everything was arranged to go off in perfect order, she'd had maybe a day, a day, to review the real reports before they shifted around. Sanagi scowled. She dug deeper - nothing. Flawless reports. Unquestionable statements. Nothing she could actually hold onto. The only proof that Chorei had been something beyond a parahuman, and had been destroyed by something completely beyond her conceptions of what was possible, existed in her head and the heads of the people in this farm. One man with a gun could effectively eradicate all traces of Chorei's real nature if he had a mind to do it. And then… she saw it. An acronym she didn't recognise. Some government agency had been brought in to assist, consult on the operation. Specialists in organ harvesting operations, apparently, provided expertise on how to handle the victims and trace the buyers. Three letters, no explanation for what they meant.
S.E.T.
Later, Taylor accessed the laptop. It was late, and she could barely hear the moaning of the industrial junk that loomed in the distance. Her eyes were more active, her face more expressive. She was slowly, but surely, coming back to herself. She still didn't enjoy sleeping, though. Nightmares didn't make her surge upright with a scream in her throat - nightmares generally didn't do that, she'd found. Instead, she'd just… wake. At three in the morning, sun still down, with tears slowly sliding down her face. She'd stay there for hours, unmoving, sobbing until her face was soaked. And then she'd stand, wash herself off, do her morning routine, and she'd be presentable again. She was starting to exercise again, too. Exercise made it hard to think about what had happened. She checked her emails, idly flicking through the small things which had slipped through her spam filter. Nothing really - her emails were usually quite barren, she didn't exactly have many people she corresponded with. And then, something - a few days ago, buried under unremarkable things, an email from an actual person.
She opened it up.
Dear Ms. Hebert,
Professor Buyandelger at Barnabas recommended I get in touch - I understand that you had some interest in his work on the vermin cult? My name is Arch, and I've been working in a similar area for some time now, primarily looking at cross-cultural manifestations of various cult activities, particularly one involving immolation.
I'd be happy to send you some articles on the topic - though most are terribly vague, I'm afraid - but I was curious about one thing: Buyandelger mentioned that you'd mentioned Japan, a country which he had very little knowledge of, in the context of vermin cults. May I ask if you've found any data on that topic? Buyandelger would ask, but he forgot to email you and now feels rather too awkward.
Please, let me know if there's anything you'd like to ask me about relating to these articles. I look forward to discussing them.
Best,
Arch
She checked the first article attached to the email - J. B. Slate 2005 - Archaeological Analyses of the Human Remains found in the Tuscany Mithraea. She opened it, and the first thing she saw was an image - a ring of bodies, burned to the point of looking like carbonised wood, with whorls that resembled enormous fingerprints engraved on every exposed scrap of flesh. And on every face, a beatific smile.
Her reply to Arch was near-instantaneous.
* * *
In the depths of another city, a man narrowed his eyes. He was surrounded by fire - a nest of centipedes eradicated. Transparent plastic sacs loomed all around, brimming with amniotic fluid, containing bodies that writhed with centipedes. Rows and rows of the sacs stretched into the distance, and one by one the fire was destroying them. Sometimes the bodies barely reacted as the fire melted their cocoons, sending them sprawling boneless to the ground with sighs of relief. Other times they struggled, splitting their own sacs, collapsing with bodies too weak to stand on their own, pale centipedes twitching in pain as the heat slowly cooked them. As juveniles, an ordinary flame would already have been a danger, and this fire was something quite beyond the norm.
Beyond the sacs, in a clear patch of ground, a monk was burning to death. He laughed, and wept enormous yellow tears, his eyes shrunk to tiny wrinkled grapes. His mind was long-empty, replaced with boiling fire. All his memories had long been bled away after days of being consumed, until he became nothing more than the source of the inferno now obliterating his life's work. At this point, he didn't care. He was finally whole. The man who had started this, who stood surrounded by flame yet showed not a hint of fear or pain, remained perfectly still. He sniffed, deeply, smoke entering his nostrils and leaving his mouth. Slowly, deliberately, he moved towards the exit, the heels of his shoes crushing down on skin and scales that had never seen the sun, and now were exposed to something a thousand time more brilliant. He sniffed again, tasting the carnage around him, and something else, a quality of the world that existed beyond natural senses.
He smiled curiously.
"Something just broke."
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