“Ok…” Grant said, “Resurrection. Sure, let's do it.”
He made a conscious effort to enter a more centered, practical headspace. It was a trick he had learned in rehab. The first step was to acknowledge your situation.
“I have magic powers. The world is going to shit. I’m going to help someone come back from the dead. I don’t really want to help, but I have to because it would be kinda shitty of me not to.” Grant said in his best calm mantra voice.
Grant thought over that last part. Was it bad to bring someone back from the dead? In a lot of fiction the undead came back, not the same. Thoughts of Pet Cemetery ran through his mind. Should the dead be left dead?
Doctors brought people back from the dead though. That was a good thing. Of course they did it within minutes. Not within hours. If he did this, would he be bringing back a person, a ghoul, or a vegetable?
“It’s only been a few minutes though…” Grant said.
He jumped to his feet, realizing there was a ticking clock. It was true he would be using magic powers, but he had to imagine that the longer Jacob was dead, the worse it would be.
That time constraint made the situation urgent. It drove him away from his spiraling thoughts and into direct action.
If he waited he might fail just based on not acting quickly enough. He could moralize and plan all he wanted but the decisions and opportunities he had right this moment might be gone by the time he was done.
He wasted a moment looking at the locked door and remembering that he couldn’t go out. He cursed under his breath, then he rushed back into the main part of the hotel room where the camera could see him.
“Olivia! I think I can bring him back.” He shouted at the tv.
It was still on, but no one was visible. They had vacated their stations, but he wasn’t sure how far they had gone.
He waited as the moments ticked by. He began to think no one was going to answer. His mind raced as he tried to think of how else he could get out of here.
“I guess I could bite the door open…” He said looking that way.
Someone rushed over in front of the camera. They were wearing a mask. Grant watched as they fumbled with the mouse trying to unmute themselves.
“Mr. Walsh, please don’t force your way out. Dr.Shaan and Dr.Lee are busy right now. Is there something I can help you with?” The young man said.
“The cultist- er, Jacob! I can bring him back.” Grant said.
The quest window was still open in his mind’s eye.
That Which is Broken
Quest - Special Quest
Objective: Servant of the Harbinger, Jacob, has seen directly into the beyond shattering its mind. Repair its mind.
Added objective: Servant of the harbinger, Jacob, has died. Secure sufficient raw materials and revive it.
* Collect (9) Flesh of the Beyond 9/9
* Collect (1) Regeneration Essence 0/1
* Perform Ritual of Undeath. 0/1
* Repair mind 0/1
Reward -
* (6) Legendary Essences
* (12) Flesh of the Beyond
Looking at it again he realized he was missing something. He needed to find a regeneration essence. He got some essences from the fernlings: writhing, consuming, floating, and propagation. Not all of them had had propagation but they had all had the other three.
“I need some parts and pieces but I can bring him back to life. Do you have any other anomalies?” Grant asked.
The man looked up from the camera for a moment before answering. “I… don’t think I’m supposed to answer that.”
“Ok, that’s a yes, you do have them.” Grant said.
Grant thought about the other anomalies he knew about. If the fernlings, had writhing, floating, consuming, and sometimes propagation what would have regeneration?
“Do you have any of those little slimes?” Grant said.
The man looked away from the camera leaning forward. He was trying to see someone who could help, Grant assumed. The man sighed deeply.
“Can you hold on while I go check and see if Dr.Lee is back from the lab?” He said.
Grant rolled his eyes then nodded. “Go - quick quick!”
The man got up and walked out of frame.
Grant sat down on the edge of the bed. The slimes, as everyone called them, were pretty harmless as long as you didn’t touch them. They were hard to kill though. People had cut them in half only to have two slimes on their hands; they each grew to the approximate size of the first in short order.
The slimes caused cell damage if they made contact with you. That damage was not readily apparent but it put people at great risk of developing skin cancer within a little as two weeks.
AROG scientists had warned people about this specific risk as soon as it became aware. That was on top of the general warnings that the world's governments had put out about interacting with anomalies and anomalous entities.
‘Slime Videos’ had gone viral on multiple social media platforms within days of these warnings. It depicted people playing with the slimes, or ‘pranking’ their friends with them. While most people didn’t participate directly, they were still pretty popular internet content. People could be pretty stupid.
Was Grant going to be stupid though? He didn’t think cancer was a risk for him anymore. At least, not a risk in the sense that he was already ‘all-in’. He was either immune, because of his Elder Flesh ability, or he was already going to be so cancered up from previous exposure that it didn’t even matter anymore.
He decided he was going to do it. If he got skin cancer he could just cut all the skin off and it would grow back. For him it should be an eminently treatable condition.
He took a deep breath and then reached out with Harbinger of the Beyond. He had gained a sense from all the pathways he had closed about how to open one. He just needed to make sure it wasn’t too big.
He didn’t relish the thought of fighting something as big as a fernling again. The effort required to close off the link to the fernlings had been a pretty hard limit for him. It felt like lifting as much as he could right over his head.
Reaching out with his new appendage he felt what seemed like a small notch in reality. He pushed into it, stretching it. It seemed to vibrate. He kept the force he was applying as small, smooth, and even as he could.
The notch grew until he felt himself pass through into somewhere else, like a drill passing through a board. A small bit of light shone out from a finger sized hole in the air in front of him. He pushed a little harder. It grew until it could comfortably fit his fist through.
“Here goes nothing.” He said.
He jammed his hand in and felt around. Burning, searing pain shot through his hand. He yanked it back. The burning stopped as soon as he got his hand out.
A slime, roughly the size of a grapefruit, was glommed onto his hand. It spilled down over his wrist and undulated in its slug-like way of moving.
The cool slime actually felt nice on his arm, where he could feel it. His hand was charred black even from just that one moment of being in there. He looked at his hand with his mouth hanging open.
He had not expected it to go quite that badly. Thankfully, it didn’t hurt on the blackened burned part. It only hurt at his wrist where it wasn’t completely blackened. There it was sickly yellow blisters rising out of reddened skin.
He had been badly burned as a child. It hadn’t been quite this bad, but it had been a third degree burn. It had destroyed all his nerves at the site of the burn, destroying his ability to feel. The same must have happened here.
He caught a whiff of his hand. It smelled like when BBQ sauce burned on the grill. Mouth closed he screamed inwardly, trying to keep a handle on the pain. His arm shook and shuddered as the stripe of pain wracked his nerves. He gripped his forearm with his free hand.
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“Mr.Walsh, Dr.Lee is still busy in the lab, you’re going to have to- Holy Shit!” The man had come back to the video chat.
He had started to speak before really seeing what was going on. When he did, his voice had gone up an octave or two.
“Oh hey.” Grant said in a strained voice. “I found a slime.”
He held up his hand. He watched as it started to heal. The coloration started to go back to normal starting at his wrist then spreading upwards towards his finger tips. The man leaned in towards the screen to get a better view.
Your reserves are depleted. (3) Flesh of the Beyond have been automatically consumed to aid in the restoration of your body.
You have lost ectodermal organs; Fingernails, Right hand.
(2) Flesh of the Beyond will be consumed to create replacement. Would you like to add any essences?
[Yes] [No]
He selected no. It probably deserved some thought. However, after what he had seen Jacob go through he couldn’t even bring himself to think about it. He felt an itching burning sensation begin at the ends of his nearly healed fingers.
“Wait there, please don’t…” The man just trailed off and ran away.
—
Olivia walked back across the ‘lab’. In the month since AROG had set up shop at this hotel, the banquet hall had been converted into a large lab. While they had better facilities and equipment back at Berkeley, they didn’t have a facility with ample accommodations for guests.
Later she would take her samples back to Berkeley Lawrence for a more detailed analysis. She didn’t need the million dollar equipment for what she was doing right now though.
She had reached her destination. Cages containing little white mice with red eyes were stacked ten high against the wall here. She opened up the small port on one of them. Inside six mice huddled around the water dispenser. They did not react to their imminent doom as it approached.
She lined the sample jar up with the open port. It clicked into place. The thing inside had been moving languidly. The eye at the end of the stalk writhing weakly peering all around. Now it moved more rapidly.
She hesitated to say aggressively. That would not be a scientific conclusion. Not yet.
She slid out the partition that sealed the sample jar. The eyeball at the end of the stalk inched forward, towards the waiting mice. Once it got within range, it lashed the end of its stalk forward like a scorpion’s stinger.
The stalk buried into the mouse. It squeaked in pain. The others darted away from it and scrabbled at the edge of the cage.
Olivia grimaced. She hated working with live subjects. She much preferred working with cell cultures. She had hoped to avoid live subjects going forward with her career. The endemic had robbed her of that possibility though.
Soon the eye had burrowed into the mouse, fitting itself snugly against the animal’s fur. It began replicating itself. One eye became two, then three, then four, then five, until it stopped. The mouse walked around stiffly and unsteadily, like its legs had become stilts.
It had stopped squeaking. Its own original eyes were vacant. They did not focus on any one thing. In stark contrast the new parasitic eyes were gazing around with what looked an awful lot like wild curiosity. Olivia would hesitate to attribute intelligence to those eyes, but it certainly had that appearance.
The rest of the mice, even those inside the other cages were terrified and scrambled to get away from the infected subject. Olivia added that observation to her notes, choosing more neutral, less emotionally loaded language.
The eyes did not spread beyond the first mouse. Despite the rapid replication of the parasite within the host, it did not spread to others. At least not at the same incredible speed. That speed at which it spread, was something Olivia would have called impossible before the Andemic.
She let out a sigh of relief. Many others would be relieved to hear of this too. AROG shared all findings on a minute by minute basis with the entire network. Everyone had been keeping a close eye on their work since the oddities of the afternoon had become noticed.
To say they were concerned about this new threat was an understatement. Countermeasures involving incendiary carpet bombings were already in the planning stages.
This was not entirely an overreaction. If the parasite could take over a host in twenty seconds, it could spread to millions in a single day. Olivia had done that math, even though she was not the epidemiologist. It was simple enough.
Even a conservative version was alarming. Assume one parasitized host can spread this infection to two other people in ten minutes, and that that process can repeat indefinitely, as it could in any dense urban environment. Even accounting for a dropoff in reproduction as time went on and new victims became harder to find, the population of San Francisco could be subsumed in less than 6 hours.
Models of how it would spread beyond its initial environment were not her purview. She had seen some of the chat in the AROG channels though, and some very grim estimates had been made.
She waved over private Gross. They had a fine working relationship, but she could tell he didn’t like being her lab assistant. He was not squeamish, like she was, but he simply felt the work he did was beneath him.
He was an elite soldier, so it was certainly not an optimal use of his skills. It was something she could have done herself as well, which was frustrating for both of them. Safety regulations demanded that all anomalous subjects be eliminated by qualified personnel though.
“Please kill the subject Private.” She asked.
She pointed at the subject mouse with the eyes in it, as if he wouldn’t know which one she was talking about.
“Yes Doctor.” He said.
Despite her attempts to get on a first name basis with him, he insisted on using ranks.
He replaced the cover on the port, removed the sample jar, and locked his coupling torch into place. They had devised a system by which they could reach into a sealed cage and destroy a subject.
He jammed the torch inwards, the large neck-like gasket flexing inwards with it. The tip hovered in front of the subject mouse. All of its eyes stared up at the torch with keen interest. He depressed the trigger and a lick of white flame shot out.
The mouse's head was gone in a single moment. The eyes quickly abandoned the dead mouse, just as they had abandoned the human she had collected them from. This had been the expected outcome, what came next was the experiment.
The eyes began inching over towards another mouse. All five to a single mouse. They lashed out with their stalks and burrowed in. No further replication took place. The scientific community would breathe another collective sigh of relief.
If those eyes had gone on to seek out separate victims, that would have been nearly as bad as the first scenario they were worried about.
When he died There had been dozens of eyes burrowed into him. They had all gone towards Meera, but no one else had been standing within six feet of him.
If, in more confined spaces, they had all sought out new hosts this would be a contagion like the world had never seen. As it was, the death toll could only expand linearly, which was much more manageable.
That was a worse case scenario too. All of the eyes were contained, as were the remains of their first victim. Soon, after more experiments, they would all be destroyed in a fire hotter than the sun.
Olivia had been uncomfortable with experimenting on them at all. She wanted to destroy them all immediately. Meera had pointed out that similar eyes might exist elsewhere and they needed to know everything they could. Olivia had reluctantly agreed, or rather, she had accepted her orders.
She was still growing used to being part of a paramilitary operation. Most people were still adjusting.
“Doctor.” Private Gross said, trying to get her attention.
She turned around to look at him. With a backwards nod, he directed her attention to the entrance to the lab. Victor, her actual lab assistant, was standing there, talking to one of the other soldiers animatedly.
Victor was trying to convince the soldiers to let him in the lab. He was not allowed in the lab without explicit clearance from Meera. The Hazmat suits that she, Meera, and the soldiers wore were a limited resource, and took time to get into and out of properly.
Victor didn’t rate that level of resources under normal circumstances. Only when they really needed an extra set of hands was he allowed in. For now he was wearing a standard, civilian AN95 mask.
Victor was supposed to be monitoring the quarantined subjects. If something happened to them while he was doing whatever this was, she was going to wring his little neck.
Eric and Grant were both compromised. She knew this and it worried her on a very personal level. However, neither Eric or Grant showed any signs of exposure at all. She had subjected their blood and tissue to a full battery of tests; all results were clean.
However, Grant had very clearly been exposed and changed in a major way. This was worrying to her, and to the AROG network at large. Clearly, their tests were not working.
Another layer of concern was the nature of changes that Grant was going through. As baffled as they had been by the seemingly incomprehensible effects of anomalous particles on the human body, this had kicked things up to a new level.
All that to say, the condition of Grant was of extreme importance to a great many people. That Victor had chosen to leave his post and come here annoyed her for that reason alone. Add on top of that his constant wheedling to get ‘lab time’ and Olivia was ready to severely chew him out.
For her, that was a big deal. Meera usually did that sort of thing. Olivia mentally prepared herself to step out of her comfort zone and dress Victor down as she approached him.
“Doctor Lee!” he said. “Please come quickly, Grant has a slime!”
“What, how?” She yelled.
She didn’t wait for an answer though. She pushed past victor and took off down the corridor at a run.
—
Grant looked at the slime. They were notoriously hard to kill. Of course Grant had a weapon capable of destroying matter. It was just… did he really want to bite the slime?
Something about a ticking clock drove Grant to get pretty competitive. His mother had gotten him to do many chores with a stopwatch and a challenge to beat his record.
He forced himself to take a breath though. It wasn’t good to get exposed to anomalies, even the small ones. The slime shone with the faintest of lights. He had already been exposed to a huge one today though, so what was one more.
His fingernails grew back in while he waited. He stared at the slime psyching himself up.
“Fuck you Jacob, you prick.” He said.
He gingerly lifted the slime up to his mouth. He opened wide and tried his best to just scrape it with his teeth. He figured if he could just annihilate it a bit at a time it would die and none of it would get in his mouth.
A little bit did get in his mouth though. Thankfully it didn’t taste like anything. It did writhe around in his mouth though. He aborted his plan and went to plan B. He started chewing and working his tongue around as fast as he could. He imagined he probably looked like a dog eating peanut butter.
Olvia opened the door and walked into the room. He saw her eyes go wide as he was finishing his last few bites.
“Hey Olivia.” He said, his mouth still a bit full of the remnants.
He chewed a little more while she stared at him mouth agape. The little bits inside his mouth began to dissolve into a gaseous state. He felt it rush down his throat.
Slime has died.
You have received:
* (1) Writhing Essence
* (1) Propagation Essence
Dammit. It hadn’t worked.
“Grant what the fuck are you doing!” She yelled.
“Oh, ok, so… I know this must look crazy,” Grant said, holding up his hands, “but I’m trying to save Jacob’s life.”