“I’m not lying you god damned moron!” Timbrelle shouted as Plimt backed away. Despite her repeated insistence, he wouldn’t accept that his device had made a mistake. No matter what she yelled at him, nothing could shake him from his stupor.
“Gods above. Just what have I stumbled onto? Just what size is the central gem for it to read like this?” His voice was hushed, very nearly a prayer. The man smoothed both hands back and forth over his bald head and loosed a long breath. “I must inform Dimetrium. Yes… I’ll need to renegotiate terms.”
Plimt ignored her now frantic yelling until he could bear the noise no longer. “Good Gods! Shut up! Shut your whiny little mouth for a minute and allow me some peace for once today! You’re so pitiful it makes me sick. I’ve been coaxing you through your own torture with pleasantries so that your body wouldn’t give out too soon. I humored your inane questions about religion in hopes that you’ll stay coherent long enough to really feel the gems be pulled from between your muscles. I’m done babying you.” He pulled a leather mask off the wall and yanked Timbrelle into a seated position. Her hands, though freed from the shackles did little to push away the muzzle in her weakened state.
“This was specially made from the hide of an oblivioss and can’t be removed except by my command.“ He held the mask over her mouth and cinched the first belt tight around the base of her skull. “Any final confessions?”
She looked up at him cheeks sodden with tears. “Anything but the crusher...”
Plimt grimaced and pulled the second strap tight enough to cut into her face where it ran under her nose. “I won’t be back in time for the next session, so wait in the crusher like a good girl, ok?” His trademark gentleness was now sickeningly honey-coated—an affront to the kindness in which she’d once taken refuge.
The man folded her forward across her legs and began lowering the crusher into place. The opposing wooden surface didn’t stop when it met her back. Plimt kept laying more and more weight onto her until she slapped the tabletop in a frenzy.
He let out a howl of mirth. “I already forgot about the muzzle. Sit tight! I’ll be back right after making myself an obscene fortune.”
The feverish banging of her fists was not enough to keep the pep out of his step.
When he finally closed the door behind him, Timbrelle let out a sigh of relief and blinked away the tears she’d drummed up. Now that he was gone, she could finally relax and work through her plan. If what he said about missing their next session was true, there were at least thirty minutes to escape from the crusher and prepare for Plimt’s return.
Through a series of panicked glances and moderate begging, Timbrelle had convinced Plimt that she feared nothing more than the crusher. She deserved an Oscar. The gushing tears had been alarmingly easy to muster, speaking to a deeper instability she willfully chose to ignore.
It was time to put her alarming flexibility to the test.
The crusher, put simply, was the bread of a Timbrelle sandwich. The sides were wide open, expecting the victim to be immobilized by the tension in their body. Hunched over her knees as she was, the first step would be to reposition her body.
She crept her legs to either side, inching them down like the hands of a clock. When they’d parted far enough for her to wiggle her torso into the open space, she used her elbows to shove them further into the splits. With a bit more struggling she maneuvered her body into a “T”. Her feet poked out the sides of the machine, wiggling in the air as she worked. Now Timbrelle could use her elbows to drag herself out of the horrid contraption. At the edge, she slithered ungracefully onto the floor, nothing more than a dishevelment of limbs and half a blood-matted afro—the other half’s braids nearly undone. Her “skimpy” outfit had been intended to make her feel naked and shameful but Timbrelle reveled in the comfort of what equated to Earth athleisure. In a variation of short-shorts and a sports bra, she couldn’t have asked for a better outfit to do her work. More importantly: it was nigh impossible to find such immodest clothes on Kitos, even as undergarments. Adna’s bandeaus being the only apparent exception. Perhaps she should thank Plimt for her first pair of shorts.
A cheery note sliced through the barren silence of the stone chamber, heralding the arrival of a familiar interface window.
Ping!
Your variant of The Morobund Seal has reached 88% capacity.
-Soul Communion interferes with the gathering of spectral energy.
*It is advised that Soul Communion be halt-
The window blinked and cut away before she could finish reading.
Timbrelle scoffed into the mask. The windows weren’t worth the time they took to scan. She was long past the point of scouring them for clues to the interface. They were useless—a distraction from the real world around her.
Having finally caught her breath, she hobbled over to the brass wand with a dull, rosy aurora gem set into the tip. Its aura was weak in comparison to the size. Timbrelle tucked it into her waistband and checked the door. It was, predictably, locked.
She knocked her head back and stared into the shadowed ceiling. The laugh that bubbled up from her was eaten by the mask. It left nothing but the sound of air puffing from her nostrils.
Fine. If Kitos insisted on giving her no breaks… she would begin carving her own opportunities out of anything it deigned to offer. Miasma be damned, They could gather the desecrated remains of her fate because she meant to defy it by any means necessary.
Until now, she had been nothing more than a character at the mercy of a story set on rails. Never once had she been in charge of her fate. Hell, the medium even acknowledged it. It is your nature to be controlled—or some shit.
Well… that was going to change.
Ping!
A dazzling white textbox appeared at the center of her vision. The bright background swirled in opalescent eddies, unlike any notification she’d received. Similarly, the message it bore was singular—one she’d been quite literally dying to see.
Attune to divine item ‘Nerrus’s Right Eye’? Yes/No
*This aurora gem cannot be moved after attunement without breaking said attunement
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Timbrelle smiled behind her mask. Finally. At long last, she had caught a break.
The relief was short-lived.
***
The air, heavy with mold and humidity, was a commonality between dungeons. Its musk set off a wave of goosebumps and made Plimt’s heart skip a beat. Though the layout may have varied from place to place, he couldn’t help but revel in the dim light and omnipresent chill of a well-made dungeon. That familiar but elusive ecstasy he could only achieve during a harvest began tickling at his abdomen.
Plimt could feel it; His ascension was close at hand. The last three aurors had left him in a state of enlightenment for days following their harvests. This harvest promised to deify him or, at the very least, encumber him with riches.
Plimt couldn’t help flipping the door shut with his foot, a noticeable jaunt to his step.
“Good Lord. I must have been gone longer than I thought if all of the sconces have burnt out.” He set down the food and took a moment to reawaken the light. When turning back to the table, he hesitated.
There, beside the tray, sat a disembodied eye. Its surface was both bloodshot and bloodied, lacking both pupil and iris. It had no defining features other than the short tail of fleshy ligaments.
“Did someone come by while I was gone?” He asked the room, then rolled his eyes at his own stupidity. “Let’s get you out of that mask first. I hope you’ve learned something about how to behave in my care. All the niceness is getting a little tiring. Wouldn’t you agree?”
When Plimt attempted to turn the crank, he found that the chain had gotten stuck under the adjacent stretching rack, pulling it taught at shin-height and stalling the crusher.
“Which idiot came in here and messed with the equipment?” He fumed.
The pap-pap-pap-pap of bare feet on stone was the only forewarning when a white-hot pain erupted through Plimt’s head. He turned to face his attacker only to receive another blow, this time to the teeth.
A spray of enamel and blood exploded from his mouth in a pained bark. Tripping over the chain sent him plummeting to the grimy floor. He was left to watch, in a daze as the freed woman slipped behind the sarcophagus—a large iron sensory depravation capsule in the shape of a human.
The little bitch was right to hide from him. However she managed to escape the crusher didn’t matter, she wouldn’t get the key to the door from him. Size was on his side. Once he gathered himself, he would make her death as painful as possible. As it was, he needed just a moment to wretch up his incisors and realign his vision.
He did not hear the creak of the sarcophagus as its weight shifted, nor did he see it fall, but Plimt noticed its imbalance when it came crashing down on his legs.
A blood-curdling scream assailed his ears, grating on his raw nerves until he realized the sound was coming from him. The initial pain in his feet and lower legs was immediately dulled. Pressure was the only sensation that remained.
The girl stepped into the light. Blood from their earlier sessions flaked from her abdomen and thighs, but a bright red layer had since coated her face. The runes carved into the silencing mask were entirely illegible through the viscous glaze of blood. It seemed to originate from her right eye socket where a sizable gem had forcibly taken residency.
“Help! Help me! Anyone pleath!” He bellowed as loud as his condition would allow. Shards of his front teeth skittered across the floor at the impassioned plea. The attempt fizzled out when the girl, mute, looked him dead in the eyes and held up a hand to her ear. Dread flooded him as he recognized the gesture. When she’d first tried yelling for help, Plimt had raised a hand to his ear and said something like, “Oh. No. The clamor of people rushing to your aid.” He’d been the one to assure her that no one was coming to save her, that no one could hear her.
The girl shrugged when no one came bursting in to save him. A long, skinny finger pointed at the sodden mask, a question in her eyes.
“I won’t let you get away with dith.” Plimt leaned back against the leg of the crusher, blinking repeatedly to stave off the darkness nipping at the edges of his sight. There was much less time than what he was bargaining with. “Ok, ok. Jutht let me lib and I can remoob the mathk. Deal?”
The girl winked and pointed both first fingers at him, thumbs in the air.
He took a steadying breath and said, “I releathe you.”
The mask unlatched and dropped into her arms.
“That was the passphrase? How anticlimactic.” She turned an emotionless face on him. The bottom half was a clean mocha with a perfect bloody outline of the mask. Her eyes took him in, betraying an uncertainty. “But what should I do with you?”
He balked. “What? We had a deal! I releath the mathk, you let me lib. You agreed! I won’t lib ip you leabe me here!”
“Plimt. You seem to be misunderstanding something.” A maniacal grin seeped onto her face. “I don’t remember saying a gods damned thing. Do you? Go ahead and tell me, Plimt. What did I say when you offered that deal?”
The girl watched him with wide, deranged eyes.
They passed a long moment, him studying the rabid beast in the shape of a young woman. Finally he asked, “…What do you want?”
Her face dissolved into a look of feral vehemence. “What do I want? Me? I don’t even know what I am, Plimt! Hell! I’m pretty sure I’m stuck in purgatory or some shitty ARG! This—“ she gestured around them wildly. “None of it is real. You aren’t real. The Miasma isn’t real. It can’t be because none of it makes sense otherwise!”
She crouched in front of him, barefeet shuffling to avoid a stream of his blood headed to the drain. “Let me tell you what I learned today, mm-kay? The first time you finished a ‘session’ and wrung me of spectral energy I felt like I was coming apart at the seams. I tried to remember that corny thing my mom had always said about courage but six women came to mind. Each one was irrefutably my mother. The epiphanies continued on like that for some time. My parents, siblings, spouses, preferences, careers, children—there were a dozen realities that I had lived. Isn’t that nutty? Me? A prolific reincarnator? It seemed crazy to me too.” She seemed to find the idea humorous. That amusement instantly turned to a dead-eyed stare that pierced his heart with adrenaline. “And then we had another session… and another… and another… do you know what I realized then, Plimt?”
Plimt held onto the words through a tsunami of nausea, though could not answer them.
Her voice, no more than a whisper, cracked when she said, “I never lived those lives. Whatever I am, it’s is made from them—an amalgamation of eviscerated souls. To the ones I love… I would be nothing more than a patchwork of defiled parts. To them, I’m no more than a skinwalker.”
His eyes swam with tears that muddled his vision. The girl was experiencing some sort of dissociative event but Plimt was going to die to the sound of her crazed ramblings if he didn’t get to Dimetrium’s healer.
“The wand. The tourmaline wand. Jutht gib it to me on your way out. I can’t purthue you anyway.” He reasoned.
“This tourmaline?” She pulled a small pink gem from her bra and held it up between two fingers.
“You… you broke it.” He said lamely. The twinkling stone was of no use as a loose jewel without a device or crystalurgist to command it.
Plimt fought back the nausea blooming in his gut.
“What do you want?” He asked again.
Her face was slack when she said, “I should probably thank you. I think you’re the first person to ask me that question. This morning I’d have said that I wanted to go home and, barring that, live safely with Adna. But now? …there is no ‘home’ and there will be no ‘living safely’. I want justice for my families on Earth who had the very souls of their sons and daughters dismantled to create me. I want to find the sick son of a bitch who made me and take them apart piece by piece. I want to visit destruction upon them and everything they hold dear.”
Plimt gritted his teeth and rephrased. “What will you do with me?”
“Now that’s a good question. One I’ve been trying to answer since the moment I met you. So listen up: I had a mom named Claudia. She was a short, fiery woman from the Dominican Republic. Always liked to turn things into a lesson. There was one particular lesson in high school that I reflected on frequently after she passed. ‘When someone is at your mercy, it is an opportunity to decide what kind of person you will be. In that moment, Corazon, who will you become? Listen to your soul and let it choose the right path.’” She crossed her arms over her knees and rested her chin on them, watching Plimt.
“Tho… you’ll let me go?”
She cocked her head with a puzzled expression. “When did I say that? …No, Plimt. I’m tired of being obedient and jumping through hoops for Nerrus and the Rigels. This choice will be the first I have made for myself… and… to be completely honest—I think I’m going to murder you. That is who I want to be.”
Plimt’s vision swam with dark smudges but even still, he could see that nothing remained inside her but apathy and rage. Whether he’d intended to or not, Plimt had forced the girl to abandon her humanity. Almost like an…
Plimt recoiled back as far at his pinned legs would allow. Gods no… she couldn’t be.
“Did you figure it out? Why no one can save you? Why no one will avenge you.” Her eyes sparkled, one with refracted shards of firelight, the other with amusement. She stood slowly, looking down at him from above. “I’m Unmade, bitch.”