Epilogue 2: Secrets
“So, d’ya have any idea why he ended up smaller than we were expecting?”
The question was addressed at a woman that could in many ways be described as the embodiment of non-descript. Everything about her seemed to be bland or average. She was in her mid-thirties or early forties. Her hair was a shade of mousy brown that could be found anywhere in the world. Her height was just as standard, average to an almost mathematically perfect degree. Her figure was unremarkable, and so were her features. She was just like any woman that one might pass by on the streets without noticing, a woman who could have been a teacher, an accountant, a shop manager, or a cashier. Only two things about her would make her stand out in the minds of those who saw her at work.
The first was that she was wearing a lab coat over the simple skirt and blouse she wore. Said lab coat wasn’t a clean one. In fact, it had a number of dark brown stains splashed across it that suggested dried blood. The pockets of the coat also had a variety of tools and instruments poking out of them. From simple things, such as a measuring ruler and a ballpoint pen, to more esoteric items, like a gleaming scalpel or a test tube full of a gently glowing liquid, all of them were ready to be grabbed and used.
The other thing were her eyes, framed by unremarkable wireframed glasses. In colour, they were every bit as bland as the rest of her, a forgettable brown that slipped from the mind. But the look behind them, their intensity, their focus, that shone through like floodlights burning through mist. These were eyes that stared out at a world that they assessed and judged, seeing everything and then evaluating it. And there was a sense that not much met with her standards.
Her eyes flicked over to the woman who had just spoken, finding the clash of her brilliantly emerald hair and the orange overalls to be just as irritating as ever. In fact, there wasn’t much about the green-haired young woman that didn’t irritate the woman in the lab coat. Her frivolous attitude, her lack of professionalism, and her irreverence to her superiors, all of it ground on the nerves of the older woman to the point where she did her best to avoid interacting with the demigoddess.
Unfortunately, or fortunately depending on how you looked at it, for all her flaws the overall-wearing woman was an excellent field agent, one with a reputation for being able to get things done. True, she wasn’t the most powerful demigod in the world, but her powers were flexible, and she had proven herself to be skilled and crafty in their use. It was enough to allow her to hit above her metaphorical weight class, and it made her a valued asset to the organization they were both a part of.
The pair of them stood in a large room surrounded by computers and advanced medical equipment. The centre was taken up by a massive glass water tank, one large enough to have comfortably held a killer whale if it had to. However, rather than water, it held a thick, vaguely orange liquid, and rather than an orca it contained the latest of the demigoddess’s acquisitions. The lamia-like demigod looked almost comically small in the huge tank, almost lost in it. But then again, the tank itself was almost comically small for the chamber it was placed in. Originally the tank in this room had been large enough to have held a fully-grown blue whale, but that had been replaced with this smaller one, once they realized their new subject was much smaller than anticipated.
There was no reply to the question though, causing the green-haired woman to frown.
“So . . . d’ya have any idea why he ended up smaller than we were expecting?” She repeated, her voice slightly louder this time.
“Not as of yet,” The older woman replied, turning back to a computer screen displaying data being fed to it by the other devices in the lab. “We have only the initial samples to work with. I imagine it shall be days or weeks before we have any concrete answers.”
Her voice was every bit as forgettable as the rest of her, the tone flat and all but emotionless.
“Well, lemme know when ya find out, okay? I was looking forward to a good fight when I found him, something big y’know? He was a bit tough to put down, but it was kinda boring, even when he fought back. I was hoping to take on something new, something I hadn’t already beaten.”
Both of them were speaking in English, though there was a strong accent to the demigoddess’s words. Both their voices reverbed about the chamber, and their words weren’t alone in doing so. Every click, beep, and whir coming from the machinery echoed about the huge room, the final effect being slightly unsettling. The older woman didn’t seem to mind, but the green-haired girl seemed eager to try to fill the echoing quiet.
“Is he going to be any use like that? I mean I was expecting him t’be huge, y’know? Like, lots of heads, maybe an extra set a’ legs, lots o’ teeth, that sorta thing. Instead, I just find a guy that looks like a weird lamia, that’s disappointing. Now that he’s just people size, is he going to be any good to ya?”
Internally the older woman dearly wished that she could stuff the demigoddess into one of the other tanks that lined the edge of the room. Those had been too small to fit the latest of her subjects, but a more normal-sized victim would have gone in just fine. Once the emerald-haired woman was in there and surrounded by the suppression fluid even her powers wouldn’t have been able to help her get out. That thought, of the demigoddess being trapped in there and unable to talk, brought a small smile to her face as she continued to work.
“Hey, yer smiling! Did ya find somethin’ good? Y’hardly ever smile, y’know that? Does that mean ya found something y’can use?”
As the younger woman continued to chatter the nondescript woman did her best not to let her increasing frustration show on her face. Had the demigoddess been some sort of unintelligent ditz then it might have been bearable, like ignoring the buzzing of a fly. What truly irritated the older woman was that she knew full well that the emerald-haired girl had a good and intelligent head on her shoulders, she’d simply never used it, or cultivated any sort of discipline or self-control. If she’d just apply herself then she could have been . . . more! More than the babbling annoyance that she had to put up with.
A ding from one of the computers off to the side drew her attention away from her dark thoughts and back to the matter at hand. Striding over she sat in the swivel chair before the screen and started to review the data that was now being displayed.
The equipment in this room, indeed in most of the complex, was something the rest of the world currently considered to be nigh impossible, a cooperative mixture of science and magic. In the world beyond the complex they lived in, mortal minds were being pushed to nervous breakdowns as they tried to reconcile the wild laws of magic with the rigid framework of science that had been built over the millennia. Here, that had been solved by an alliance of the divine and the mortal, and results were already being reaped.
The computer was showing her the results of the bloodwork and DNA analysis of the demigod floating in the tank. Rather than the familiar computer display of numbers and words that would normally show up on such a device this one was showing lines of runes and diagrams of magic circles. To most others, it would have been incomprehensible, but the older woman could read it as easily as she could her own name. After all, she had helped invent the system.
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Her eyes flicked from line to line, taking in the data, assessing it, digesting it. She’d done it dozens of times before, so it was a task she was accustomed to. The values displayed were good ones, indicative that her new subject was a powerful Legacy, uncommonly so. Her eyes ran across the scrolling runes, noting such qualities as were interesting to her.
High levels of flesh-aligned mana indicated a strong probability of both enhanced physical abilities and instincts, those were always useful. Strong internal organs that she was unfamiliar with suggested the demigod might well be adaptive to a wide variety of environments, a rare power. His personal mana was also surprisingly robust, it was taking the device longer than expected to complete the decoding of its internal makeup. Still, with the power-enhancing capabilities of the machine, the breakthrough came quickly. She was soon immersing herself in the revealed data, enough so that she could ignore the incessant chattering of the younger woman.
It was an interesting mixture. The powers of flesh and blood were prominent, but so too were enhancement and growth. Poison was in there, though it was a comparatively minor amount. There were also ties to nature magic, though they seemed to be even more tenuous than poison. It was an interesting mixture, and she was absently making mental notes when she noticed something that didn’t belong, a discordant note in the visual harmony.
It was only a couple of lines of runes amidst the flood of information, but the instant she saw them her hand darted out, fast as a striking snake, pressing the keys needed to stop the flow of data. Her eyes narrowed as she scrolled back, trying to find the lines that had so startled her. They were there! It had been no mistake, no trick of the mind, the lines stared back at her, unchanging and utterly out of place.
“Didja find somethin’?” The demigoddess spoke practically into her ear, almost making her jump in surprise. “Ya look like ya found somethin’! Is it any good? Is it interestin’?”
Internally the lab coat-wearing woman railed at her. If she had to speak why couldn’t she speak in French which she spoke flawlessly? At least then she wasn’t mangling the language to the point of near incomprehension with both her accent and her grammar!
“Yes, there appears to be an anomaly in the bloodline. Please go to the Seeker’s Chamber and inform the Seeker that he should cast another auger in regard to this demigod’s progenitor, it may be possible that he is an inheritor of two Legacies.”
“Awww, do I have ta?” The question came out as a whine. “Ya know that I’ll be stuck waitin’ for ages if I try ta see him. It takes foreva for him to get ready.”
“Then you had best leave now,” The older woman replied. “The sooner you get there the sooner you shall be finished.”
The demigoddess pouted in response, but she did turn and walk out the door, leaving blessed quiet in her wake. The woman allowed herself a momentary smile before turning back to her computer and beginning to type furiously.
The task she had sent the demigoddess on would keep her out of the way for the better part of an hour, though sending an agent to disturb the Seeker would cost her later. She would have to burn through some favours owed her after she told them that it had been an error on her part, but it was a price she was willing to pay to ensure that none saw what she was about to do.
On the screen, the lines of runes detached from the rest of the readings and occupied the screen by themselves. A few more clicks and the woman brought up a file from her personal data collection, and another set of lines joined the first ones. It was just as she had thought, the lines were identical.
With her eyes narrowed in thought and concentration, she stood, striding over to another device, this one centred around a needle. Without hesitation, she held her hand under it, and didn’t even flinch as the needle stabbed down and extracted a sample of her blood. With cold eyes, she watched as the red liquid was pumped through a transparent line and into another machine, one lined with more runes which glowed into life as the sample reached the spell-covered core of the machine.
The device worked fast, and in a handful of minutes, more data flowed onto the screen she had been working from. Sitting down it was but the work of a moment to find what she’d been looking for, then a third line of runes joined the first two. Once again, all three were the same, confirming what she’d suspected.
Power was tied to blood, this was one of the oldest rules of the divine. It was why blood was such a powerful reagent. It was why blood-drinking creatures such as vampires were present in virtually every mythology around the world. Blood was a potent medium for power, and power could be read in it as easily as the print in a book could be if one had the skills. Mana signatures were unique to every being, a sort of magical fingerprint, and such signatures could linger in blood samples for as long as the blood remained relatively fresh.
The woman in the stained lab coat possessed no divine power of her own, even though she was of a bloodline with divinity in it. The Legacies, the mantles of power passed down through the generations, had passed her by. Still, such an inheritance did not pass unmarked, meaning that even if she had no power of her own, mana had still left its mark upon her very DNA.
And while all mana signatures were unique, that didn’t mean that there could not be similarities.
She stared at the three lines of runes, two of which she knew were representations of the mana signature in her own blood. The third one had been found in the analysis of the captured demigod’s blood, but the data indicated that the mana that signature had been found didn’t actually belong to the demigod’s. This a foreign mana that had been inserted into him. In time it would have faded away. The fact that it was still potent enough to be noticed in the analysis indicated that it had been introduced recently, maybe as recently as a day or two ago.
A frown creased her face as she reviewed the data, trying to learn what the foreign mana had been doing. It was a difficult task since she was only working with the earliest data. A more in-depth analysis would come over the next few days as the magic-enhanced computers performed more intensive analysis and sorted through the masses of data that would be accumulated. What she had, was just the tip of the iceberg, but it should be enough.
There were traces of . . . something in the blood. Some sort of recent shift. She wasn’t sure what it was, all she could see were the leftover signs. Still, they were enough to form an outline, a rough estimation. When combined with the early reports on the rampancy that this demigod had supposedly displayed, but which was no longer there . . .
She leaned back in her chair, her eyes fixed on the trio of matching rune lines, but her mind was miles away and two decades in the past. She remembered herself, as young, reckless, unfocused, unmotivated. She remembered a party, drugs, drink, someone kind, someone cruel, then waking up the next day without any memory of what had happened. She remembered an unwanted pregnancy, the disgrace, the humiliation of not even knowing who the father was. She remembered her family casting her out, leaving her to rely on fickle friends and what benefits she could squeeze out of an uncaring social security system. She remembered a difficult pregnancy, followed by the panic of realizing that she had to take care of this tiny new life. She remembered being terrified by her own fierce feelings for the squalling red thing that had come out of her body, the bewilderment it invoked in her, the utter mess it left her in.
And most of all, she remembered leaving him, wrapped in blankets, warm and asleep, on the steps of an old couple she’d known growing up. She’d rung the bell of their house, waited until she could hear them moving, then run as though all the hounds of hell had been at her heels. She’d prayed that the small bundle of wailing and sleeping that she couldn’t even bear to name would have a good life, and then she’d run and kept running until she had no more energy left in her.
Life had changed much since then, but even all these years later she could still remember the sight of that tiny sleeping face as she laid him down. Her child. Her blood.
She looked at the three lines, the meaning of them all too clear to her now. She paused for a moment, then tapped a few keys, erasing her search and her recent actions from the memory of the computer. A few more quick instructions and all traces of the deleted memories were themselves expunged, no traces remaining.
The screen reverted to showing the original data, the display updating as more and more new information was added as the analysis of the samples continued. Now that she knew what to look for it was much clearer to the her. She could see the hints of how the captured demigod had been quite a different creature only a short time before, she could see something of how he had changed. The rampancy seemed to have been quite acute, and yet the foreign mana had been able to bring it down, forcing the demigod’s warped divinity into a more contained and ordered state.
From a chaotic monster to a powerful demigod . . . the change was a testament to both power and skill, if she was any judge, and it brought a smile to her lips. She was uncertain as to exactly what her feelings were on this matter, but on one thing she was quite certain.
“Well now,” She murmured, feeling the need to speak it out loud, even if she would be the only one to hear it. “It looks like my son does good work.”
Adam, his friends, allies, and enemies will return in Blood Divine: Stolen Blood!