Justice of Hearts
- Pronouns
- He/Him
[X] [Card] Hearts
[X] [Boon] Justice
The squeal of the train's brakes roused me to consciousness. How long had it been since the incident? Six months? Eight? Longer? My internal narrative was still confused, the doctors saying that my brain had suffered extensive scarring from the radiation, excision surgeries, and stem cell patch jobs. I actually had a lot of scarring from various complications making the 'scar free' treatments not quite live up to their name. While on some level it made me stand out, there were enough people with extensive scars and injuries if you knew where to go that I could just blend into the crowd of maimed humanity. While these places were often considered dangerous by polite company, the extent of my scarring actually gave me something of a ward against casual interest. While I moved slow from all the damage to my muscles and bones, there was a certain air of danger to my appearance, and more than that my capacity to feel intimidated had been thoroughly burned out by the incident. Also, the few times I appeared for PR events I was always in heavy makeup to make me look more 'heroic' for the public.
Of course, I didn't need to go anywhere dangerous. I was a double duty guinea pig and PR prop, so the state paid for my living expenses and healthcare so long as I did what they wanted. It was a gilded cage, but I didn't care. I didn't care about a lot of things, hence why I was commuting from my quiet, crummy apartment in one of the safer apartment blocks to an industrial slum. My living expenses were basically paid for as long as I regularly showed up for examination and interviews, but I was bored and angry and unable to actually work in my chosen field of study, so I had found a place where I could get work without needing to present identification. Shortages of critical resources had made it more economical to use human labour rather than automation in many places, and there were hundreds of millions of refugees worldwide willing to work for almost nothing. Modern day slavery, whee. I anonymously shoved most of my pay into various donation boxes out of guilt that my boredom was still denying someone what little money they might have made.
Also, I liked to volunteer for the work most likely to cause cancer, because I was still receiving biweekly monitoring and treatment, and the doctors seemed somewhat pleased that I was abusing my body. Apparently they had a lot of patients who refused to let tumours caused by their vices stop them from continuing to indulge in said vices. If I was going to get the expensive treatments just because I figured I would get my money's worth and spare some poor soul with no access to healthcare from exposure to toxins. Since I had some morality left, my choice of work place was a water remediation plant. The rising tides had swept over vast swaths of industrial coastland, stirring up materials thought safe to bury, and turning the new shorelines into lifeless mudflats full of poison and corrosives. Remediation plants sucked up tremendous quantities of seawater and processed them into purified water for use in the vertical farms, while also recovering various elements for return to the economy. It was not a particularly energy efficient process, and emissions wise it was only worth it if you ran it off a nuke plant of some sort, but the plants were heavily subsidized in order to 'do something'.
I worked in the sludge pits, the second stage of processing after first pass distillation had separated out volatile compounds from the heavier materials. Further treatment of this stream would separate out the various elements from each other, but at this phase people in poorly maintained survival gear would use rakes and poles to keep the concentrated sludge moving along the line. The stuff was of course immensely caustic and toxic, there were all sorts of mechanical agitators and grinders that could easily rip off limbs if you weren't careful, and the material came out of the distillation chamber boiling hot and frequently on fire from flammable chemicals in the mix. It was the definition of a job fit for machines and not humans, but the company had gone cheap and minimized their use of computers. Humans were the only ones with the pattern recognition to keep the lines flowing properly in the absence of electronic control systems.
I wasn't particularly fast or strong, but I also didn't notice the hellish conditions so much, and after a certain point I started sleep walking through the work. Boredom and insomnia had driven me from my apartment in frustration, but they had also sapped my energy. A fleshy replacement for a machine, my brain soon turned into a machine. Despite the danger, I think I actually started to sleep while working, hence how much time I had lost track of. If I was awake then my thoughts were reduced to dreamlike memories of sleepless wanderings in the night. Belches of fire and toxic gas from the boiling muck all around me brought back memories of wanderings through fog thick with particulates and piping blowing out hot sewer gases. Harsh fluorescent lighting turned into flickering neon lights from the shanty towns my restlessness took me through during the night. My coworkers, dressed in form concealing suits, became the anonymous people of the night selling their flesh and poisons.
I was stirred from my dreaming diligence by the shift change. Trudging away from the platform I had been working on, I joined the others in filing into the grey water shower that hosed off our survival gear and equipment enough that we would not contaminate the change room. Shuffling into the chipped white tile of the change room, we all began to mechanically strip down, numb and indifferent to matters of gender between us. We all checked each other for scalds and burns from where our equipment had been inadequate, applying various creams in the limited amounts supplied to us. We then wiped down our gear and tossed it into the pile to be used by the third shift. Most of the rashes we had came from the sharing of inadequately cleaned suits that we spent hours sweating in, but every once in a while it turned out to be cancerous or a flesh eating disease. It was considered impolite to not put extra effort into cleaning up the discharge from sores that had opened up during your shift, but people missed things and the wash cycle was inexact, so you just had to deal with finding surprises at the start of the shift.
"Hey Dante, we have to talk," Jorge, the shift lead asked of me out of the blue. My name wasn't Dante, but everyone had given me the nickname because I was always in the worst parts of the inferno. No one really liked Jorge, but it wasn't really his fault. He was just the personal face of the company, and everyone wanted the less taxing work and better pay his position offered. Except for me, because I was a mess and didn't care.
"Yeah boss?" I asked, even as a nasty little thought whispered in the back of my mind that if I wanted I could find a way to get into the plasma decomposition section and get paid ten times more, even if I was still taking a hit for doing it under the table.
"Come with me a second," Jorge said, gesturing that we go to a quieter place behind the lockers.
"Yeah boss," I intoned flatly as I followed him away from the sweaty crowd of fellow workers. Going into an unoccupied isle where second shift had their lockers, Jorge then turned to me and gave me an uncomfortable, almost desperate look, while I just raised an eyebrow and asked, "What's up?"
Chewing on his lower lip for a moment, Jorge said quietly, "You know how I've offered to get you transferred to shift lead in nitrates? It's Miss Beacon."
Well that explained things, so I replied with a flat, "Oh." Amelia Beacon was the department manager, a relative of someone higher up in the company, and she was the sort of woman who looked at the abuses of men in power and was jealous. She was a predator, pure and simple, and she took sadistic glee in flaunting the body her surgeons and personal trainers had given her. Sexual abuse was rampant, but since pretty much everyone working in the sludge pit didn't have proper work permits, she could take their source of income away with the snap of her fingers. Everyone knew that Jorge was among the latest of her toys, and they hated and pitied him in equal measure for it.
"Yeah man. Yeah. She's uh... she's not happy with me over the fact that you keep turning me down. Look, I know that you're some kinda crazy tourist down here and the money doesn't mean anything to you, and she doesn't hold any power over you, but she holds power over me," Jorge explained, a look of desperation coming over his face. "The more you think you're immune to her, the more she wants to break you for it. I have to go home to my wife knowing that I have been unfaithful to her, and her numb resignation to it hurts the most. Fang was gay and she still forced him to go down on her. He didn't hang himself because of the sarcoma diagnosis, that was just the excuse to make the pain from the shame stop. Please Dante, don't just fucking walk away from this and leave me holding the bag. Take the promotion, bury your face in her crotch until she gets bored, and then get on with your life so the rest of us can get one with ours."
I took a deep breath in as a rage I had not felt in over a decade welled up within me. From the way Jorge recoiled, I knew that my emotions had to have flashed across my eyes even though I kept my face still. Nostrils flaring, I ground out between clenched teeth, "Okay... but I'm taking a walk first."
Showing the sort of emotion no one around me was accustomed to, I stomped back to my locker and finished dressing before I stormed out of the plant as quickly as my ravaged and rebuilt body could take me. I glanced at the train station that would take me towards the high grounds where my apartment was situated, but knew that I would not sleep tonight. My body was exhausted, but my mind was fresh off its daily rest, and it whirled with various thoughts as I stalked into the shanty town crowded around the flood plains of the river the plant was situated on. Emergency tents had been reinforced with scrap to become a sprawling, unregulated slum. Worn out solar panels, crude windmills, water wheels and illegal patching into the power grid all provided energy for the activity of humanity. Impromptu markets sold goods of dubious origin, chem labs brewed up every sort of pharmaceutical distraction one could imagine, and the red glow of neon lights told of the men and women who only had their bodies left to sell.
I was mad. I knew injustice, had experienced it personally so many times, but this instance found a way through my armour of resigned indifference. It wasn't the indignity that was to be foisted upon me so much as it was the reminder that those who wished to hurt me had learned to attack the people around me instead. I was also furious at the abuses of Miss Beacon being shoved in my face even as I tried to dutifully ignore them like the good little drone I was. I remembered my early university days, of reading about the brave men and women who had fought so hard and sacrificed so much for equality and freedom from harassment, only for the ruling classes to decide that they could live with equal opportunity but refused to give up their license to harass. Murderous thoughts flashed through my mind, but I shoved them away, knowing that they were pointless. For a terribly long time I started to look at the prostitutes around me, hoping to find one that looked enough like Miss Beacon so I could hate fuck her, before the impulse passed and I felt incredible shame for my own thoughts crash over me.
I pressed some cash into the hand of one woman I had been staring at uncomfortably before I stalked off with a mumbled, "Sorry." She didn't have it in her to ask for an explanation, just accepting the extra cash without having to work her profession for it.
An evening rain started up, the water rich and heavy with pollutants from the slum, making everything wet and uncomfortable. My mind spun with anger and shame and bitter regret and my wandering became more erratic. At some point I wandered away from the glow of humanity, into the concrete mazes of rotten, abandoned buildings that had been gutted by floods and storms and that the inhabitants of the camps had yet to find a use for. Exposed heat exchange pipes from the plant steamed in the rain, the fog ill coloured from both light pollution and chemical pollution. My wanderings brought me into one such cloud, where I found the sounds of the outside world dampened away. I closed my eyes, and wondered if this was all real, or just the spasms of a mind firing its last spasms in the ruin of a fusion test facility that experienced an inexplicable disaster. The fog was so thick and smothering that even up and down became confused.
I exhaled and my breath came out as steam in the arctic chill. Opening my eyes, I found myself in icy blue fog at the base of a tremendous wall of ice that dominated the entire horizon. More stars than I had ever imagined could exist filled the sky, and ethereal sheets of blue and green light flickered in the distant sky just above the ice sheet. A wind blew off the ice, parting the fog to reveal a frigid steppe of the sort that I expected to be filled with woolly mammoths. Clad in leather and fur and lacquered scale, I followed the revealed path down, away from the glacier into this long extinct realm. Meltwater fed into streams that cut the ground into a marshy mess, and upon one of the islands the tremendous bulk of an elephant sized leech rested, a humanoid figure stalking it. Drawing closer, I discovered that the leech had the face of one Amelia Beacon, and the humanoid was an all too familiar naked woman. Older now and no longer pregnant, her familiarity was also enhanced by the fact that I could now see that her face was that of my mother, even if the rest of her body was distinctly not.
She turned to me as I approached, a joyously feral smile upon her face, and she said, "You need to feed dear."
She was holding a knife made of flint that was no doubt razor sharp and doubtlessly could effortlessly part the parchment translucent flesh of the Beacon-leech, spilling out the accumulated stolen essence. Old blood, rich with power would cascade from her throat, and the two of us would feast and dance under the Arctic night.
Feast?
[] Yes
[] No
[] Join the kill
[X] [Boon] Justice
The squeal of the train's brakes roused me to consciousness. How long had it been since the incident? Six months? Eight? Longer? My internal narrative was still confused, the doctors saying that my brain had suffered extensive scarring from the radiation, excision surgeries, and stem cell patch jobs. I actually had a lot of scarring from various complications making the 'scar free' treatments not quite live up to their name. While on some level it made me stand out, there were enough people with extensive scars and injuries if you knew where to go that I could just blend into the crowd of maimed humanity. While these places were often considered dangerous by polite company, the extent of my scarring actually gave me something of a ward against casual interest. While I moved slow from all the damage to my muscles and bones, there was a certain air of danger to my appearance, and more than that my capacity to feel intimidated had been thoroughly burned out by the incident. Also, the few times I appeared for PR events I was always in heavy makeup to make me look more 'heroic' for the public.
Of course, I didn't need to go anywhere dangerous. I was a double duty guinea pig and PR prop, so the state paid for my living expenses and healthcare so long as I did what they wanted. It was a gilded cage, but I didn't care. I didn't care about a lot of things, hence why I was commuting from my quiet, crummy apartment in one of the safer apartment blocks to an industrial slum. My living expenses were basically paid for as long as I regularly showed up for examination and interviews, but I was bored and angry and unable to actually work in my chosen field of study, so I had found a place where I could get work without needing to present identification. Shortages of critical resources had made it more economical to use human labour rather than automation in many places, and there were hundreds of millions of refugees worldwide willing to work for almost nothing. Modern day slavery, whee. I anonymously shoved most of my pay into various donation boxes out of guilt that my boredom was still denying someone what little money they might have made.
Also, I liked to volunteer for the work most likely to cause cancer, because I was still receiving biweekly monitoring and treatment, and the doctors seemed somewhat pleased that I was abusing my body. Apparently they had a lot of patients who refused to let tumours caused by their vices stop them from continuing to indulge in said vices. If I was going to get the expensive treatments just because I figured I would get my money's worth and spare some poor soul with no access to healthcare from exposure to toxins. Since I had some morality left, my choice of work place was a water remediation plant. The rising tides had swept over vast swaths of industrial coastland, stirring up materials thought safe to bury, and turning the new shorelines into lifeless mudflats full of poison and corrosives. Remediation plants sucked up tremendous quantities of seawater and processed them into purified water for use in the vertical farms, while also recovering various elements for return to the economy. It was not a particularly energy efficient process, and emissions wise it was only worth it if you ran it off a nuke plant of some sort, but the plants were heavily subsidized in order to 'do something'.
I worked in the sludge pits, the second stage of processing after first pass distillation had separated out volatile compounds from the heavier materials. Further treatment of this stream would separate out the various elements from each other, but at this phase people in poorly maintained survival gear would use rakes and poles to keep the concentrated sludge moving along the line. The stuff was of course immensely caustic and toxic, there were all sorts of mechanical agitators and grinders that could easily rip off limbs if you weren't careful, and the material came out of the distillation chamber boiling hot and frequently on fire from flammable chemicals in the mix. It was the definition of a job fit for machines and not humans, but the company had gone cheap and minimized their use of computers. Humans were the only ones with the pattern recognition to keep the lines flowing properly in the absence of electronic control systems.
I wasn't particularly fast or strong, but I also didn't notice the hellish conditions so much, and after a certain point I started sleep walking through the work. Boredom and insomnia had driven me from my apartment in frustration, but they had also sapped my energy. A fleshy replacement for a machine, my brain soon turned into a machine. Despite the danger, I think I actually started to sleep while working, hence how much time I had lost track of. If I was awake then my thoughts were reduced to dreamlike memories of sleepless wanderings in the night. Belches of fire and toxic gas from the boiling muck all around me brought back memories of wanderings through fog thick with particulates and piping blowing out hot sewer gases. Harsh fluorescent lighting turned into flickering neon lights from the shanty towns my restlessness took me through during the night. My coworkers, dressed in form concealing suits, became the anonymous people of the night selling their flesh and poisons.
I was stirred from my dreaming diligence by the shift change. Trudging away from the platform I had been working on, I joined the others in filing into the grey water shower that hosed off our survival gear and equipment enough that we would not contaminate the change room. Shuffling into the chipped white tile of the change room, we all began to mechanically strip down, numb and indifferent to matters of gender between us. We all checked each other for scalds and burns from where our equipment had been inadequate, applying various creams in the limited amounts supplied to us. We then wiped down our gear and tossed it into the pile to be used by the third shift. Most of the rashes we had came from the sharing of inadequately cleaned suits that we spent hours sweating in, but every once in a while it turned out to be cancerous or a flesh eating disease. It was considered impolite to not put extra effort into cleaning up the discharge from sores that had opened up during your shift, but people missed things and the wash cycle was inexact, so you just had to deal with finding surprises at the start of the shift.
"Hey Dante, we have to talk," Jorge, the shift lead asked of me out of the blue. My name wasn't Dante, but everyone had given me the nickname because I was always in the worst parts of the inferno. No one really liked Jorge, but it wasn't really his fault. He was just the personal face of the company, and everyone wanted the less taxing work and better pay his position offered. Except for me, because I was a mess and didn't care.
"Yeah boss?" I asked, even as a nasty little thought whispered in the back of my mind that if I wanted I could find a way to get into the plasma decomposition section and get paid ten times more, even if I was still taking a hit for doing it under the table.
"Come with me a second," Jorge said, gesturing that we go to a quieter place behind the lockers.
"Yeah boss," I intoned flatly as I followed him away from the sweaty crowd of fellow workers. Going into an unoccupied isle where second shift had their lockers, Jorge then turned to me and gave me an uncomfortable, almost desperate look, while I just raised an eyebrow and asked, "What's up?"
Chewing on his lower lip for a moment, Jorge said quietly, "You know how I've offered to get you transferred to shift lead in nitrates? It's Miss Beacon."
Well that explained things, so I replied with a flat, "Oh." Amelia Beacon was the department manager, a relative of someone higher up in the company, and she was the sort of woman who looked at the abuses of men in power and was jealous. She was a predator, pure and simple, and she took sadistic glee in flaunting the body her surgeons and personal trainers had given her. Sexual abuse was rampant, but since pretty much everyone working in the sludge pit didn't have proper work permits, she could take their source of income away with the snap of her fingers. Everyone knew that Jorge was among the latest of her toys, and they hated and pitied him in equal measure for it.
"Yeah man. Yeah. She's uh... she's not happy with me over the fact that you keep turning me down. Look, I know that you're some kinda crazy tourist down here and the money doesn't mean anything to you, and she doesn't hold any power over you, but she holds power over me," Jorge explained, a look of desperation coming over his face. "The more you think you're immune to her, the more she wants to break you for it. I have to go home to my wife knowing that I have been unfaithful to her, and her numb resignation to it hurts the most. Fang was gay and she still forced him to go down on her. He didn't hang himself because of the sarcoma diagnosis, that was just the excuse to make the pain from the shame stop. Please Dante, don't just fucking walk away from this and leave me holding the bag. Take the promotion, bury your face in her crotch until she gets bored, and then get on with your life so the rest of us can get one with ours."
I took a deep breath in as a rage I had not felt in over a decade welled up within me. From the way Jorge recoiled, I knew that my emotions had to have flashed across my eyes even though I kept my face still. Nostrils flaring, I ground out between clenched teeth, "Okay... but I'm taking a walk first."
Showing the sort of emotion no one around me was accustomed to, I stomped back to my locker and finished dressing before I stormed out of the plant as quickly as my ravaged and rebuilt body could take me. I glanced at the train station that would take me towards the high grounds where my apartment was situated, but knew that I would not sleep tonight. My body was exhausted, but my mind was fresh off its daily rest, and it whirled with various thoughts as I stalked into the shanty town crowded around the flood plains of the river the plant was situated on. Emergency tents had been reinforced with scrap to become a sprawling, unregulated slum. Worn out solar panels, crude windmills, water wheels and illegal patching into the power grid all provided energy for the activity of humanity. Impromptu markets sold goods of dubious origin, chem labs brewed up every sort of pharmaceutical distraction one could imagine, and the red glow of neon lights told of the men and women who only had their bodies left to sell.
I was mad. I knew injustice, had experienced it personally so many times, but this instance found a way through my armour of resigned indifference. It wasn't the indignity that was to be foisted upon me so much as it was the reminder that those who wished to hurt me had learned to attack the people around me instead. I was also furious at the abuses of Miss Beacon being shoved in my face even as I tried to dutifully ignore them like the good little drone I was. I remembered my early university days, of reading about the brave men and women who had fought so hard and sacrificed so much for equality and freedom from harassment, only for the ruling classes to decide that they could live with equal opportunity but refused to give up their license to harass. Murderous thoughts flashed through my mind, but I shoved them away, knowing that they were pointless. For a terribly long time I started to look at the prostitutes around me, hoping to find one that looked enough like Miss Beacon so I could hate fuck her, before the impulse passed and I felt incredible shame for my own thoughts crash over me.
I pressed some cash into the hand of one woman I had been staring at uncomfortably before I stalked off with a mumbled, "Sorry." She didn't have it in her to ask for an explanation, just accepting the extra cash without having to work her profession for it.
An evening rain started up, the water rich and heavy with pollutants from the slum, making everything wet and uncomfortable. My mind spun with anger and shame and bitter regret and my wandering became more erratic. At some point I wandered away from the glow of humanity, into the concrete mazes of rotten, abandoned buildings that had been gutted by floods and storms and that the inhabitants of the camps had yet to find a use for. Exposed heat exchange pipes from the plant steamed in the rain, the fog ill coloured from both light pollution and chemical pollution. My wanderings brought me into one such cloud, where I found the sounds of the outside world dampened away. I closed my eyes, and wondered if this was all real, or just the spasms of a mind firing its last spasms in the ruin of a fusion test facility that experienced an inexplicable disaster. The fog was so thick and smothering that even up and down became confused.
I exhaled and my breath came out as steam in the arctic chill. Opening my eyes, I found myself in icy blue fog at the base of a tremendous wall of ice that dominated the entire horizon. More stars than I had ever imagined could exist filled the sky, and ethereal sheets of blue and green light flickered in the distant sky just above the ice sheet. A wind blew off the ice, parting the fog to reveal a frigid steppe of the sort that I expected to be filled with woolly mammoths. Clad in leather and fur and lacquered scale, I followed the revealed path down, away from the glacier into this long extinct realm. Meltwater fed into streams that cut the ground into a marshy mess, and upon one of the islands the tremendous bulk of an elephant sized leech rested, a humanoid figure stalking it. Drawing closer, I discovered that the leech had the face of one Amelia Beacon, and the humanoid was an all too familiar naked woman. Older now and no longer pregnant, her familiarity was also enhanced by the fact that I could now see that her face was that of my mother, even if the rest of her body was distinctly not.
She turned to me as I approached, a joyously feral smile upon her face, and she said, "You need to feed dear."
She was holding a knife made of flint that was no doubt razor sharp and doubtlessly could effortlessly part the parchment translucent flesh of the Beacon-leech, spilling out the accumulated stolen essence. Old blood, rich with power would cascade from her throat, and the two of us would feast and dance under the Arctic night.
Feast?
[] Yes
[] No
[] Join the kill
