+What the fuck do you mean you gave it the memories of Noloth? The creature–+
+Is our enemy. But also no ally to the Guilds. It can yet be turned to purpose, and from what I perceived of its new design, the touch of subtlety is lost to it. We will have time to study it. Learn from it. Perhaps even become it–+
+Become… like that thing? To have no self? To burn and hear the fires crackle in the voices of our victims? The cruelty is too much, Emotion–too much!+
-The Low Masters
13-20
Become (I)
RESURRECTION - 100%
Strands of thaumic flame tore Chambers upward into the real as he shuddered into existence where he last died. He spent most of the time complaining to the burning-seed-chicken that was his Heaven, but it didn’t talk like Avo’s inner gods. Yet.
Fucking rotlick keeps all the good shit for himself. Kept killing Chambers for no reason too. Or maybe it was the Reg who shot him.Things get pretty hard to tell when all your memories get evaporated, and you end up only being able to observe yourself from narrow pinpricks of consciousness.
As his senses crumbled back into place like an avalanche, he found Draus still jabbing her projectile launcher at Avo, Denton and the bug-cluster-bioform trying to talk her out of it, and Cas standing next to the stairway with an arm folded, face scrunched in confusion.
Yeah, he looked like how Chambers felt inside.
Shaking his head, Chambers walked over next to the Agnos who rubbed at her own arms. She was very deliberately looking away from Avo–away from the ever-growing inferno that was his phantasmal halo.
Now, Chambers didn’t consider himself the smartest nu-dog in the vat, but he could tell when someone was hurting something bad. He was the same way around glowing gun barrels after his father decided to “brand” him that one time. Ugly shit, but time scabbed your hurt plenty.
Time the poor girl didn’t have.
Off to the side, Essus was sitting up, leaning against the wall. The dancing ghosts that burned and wouldn’t stop burning cast pools of darkness around his expressionless face. His eyes darted over to stare at Chambers, and the ex-enforcer awkwardly mimed his finger guns at him in response.
The refugee just shook his head and laughed. “It is pointless even to rest with you all. I am truly beyond damnation.” A few more demented chuckles escaped from him. He went back to staring at Avo–staring at the ghoul’s burning mind.
…Yeah, that consang was north of fuckeduptia by Chambers’ estimations too.
“”So,” Chambers said, announcing his presence to the rest of the room, “one of you definitely killed me again. We’re really making a habit of going after poor old Chambers, huh?” He positioned himself close beside Kae so as to block Avo from her line of sight.
He wasn’t that crazy old hundred-arms lady they kept talking about–he couldn’t fuck with time. But he could distract people from stuff. Block what they don’t want to see.
The mind’s pretty good at not noticing stuff you don’t want it to.
Draus didn’t bother turning to regard him, which was kinda expected. The Reg likely knew he was back before he even did. She could probably hear his heartbeat or something, and the way those little specks of glass orbited her person like a glittery asteroid belt was also some weird shit.
“See,” she said, punctuating her words with a snort. “Seems like gettin’ shot cures the burnin’ after all.”
Well, that pretty much confirmed who shot him. Wasn’t that unexpected–Draus was always kind of a rough bastard with how she treated him. But what could he do? He might’ve been a ‘Clad too now, but she was just too strong, too vicious. He could set things on fire and grow flesh from the burning or some shit, but she got Mirrorhead’s kit.
He felt so helpless. At her mercy–
[ACTIVATING LUSTAWAY]
Ah, fuck, he needed to stay focused.
“Did he leave anythin’ inside you?” Draus asked. She cocked her head at Denton who had both her hands held up in a placating gesture, forcing Draus to point her gun offline so as to not shoot through her. “The Glaive here thinks that Avo was tryin’ to reach through you. Remember anything?”
Chambers closed his eyes and delved deep into his own thoughts. Darkness greeted him. Darkness, and thoughts of Draus overpowering him and crucifying him to the wall using her glass while everyone watched. He would say no, and she would proceed to amplify her interrogative efforts–
[ACTIVATING LUSTAWAY]
“Fuck,” he clutched his head, “focus Chambers, you half-strand. Focus. Think about that shit later. Alone.”
“What’s that?” Draus asked.
“Nothing. If–if our rotlick was still inside me, I’m not feeling him, alright? Either he’s being really subtle about it, or he’s got some… size problems with his ghosts, but ol’ Chambers here isn’t getting his brain-bits tickled. Just me right now. Just me. Just… me…” A twang of annoyance strummed a cascade of mocking notes inside him. “Great. Now you got me doubting myself.”
Denton added her own question as well. “Are you’re certain he left nothing within your memories?”
“No! Well, if you’re talking about the mind-eating fire thing, it sure as shit doesn’t feel like it did before. That took time to chew through me. This felt like… I was evaporating! And getting dissolved into someone else. And there were like these… other voices. I had a memory that my dick was missing but I was waxing myself for some strange reason, and made me feel weird as fuck. I mean, it was kinda hot, but still–pretty fucking weird.”
Everyone stared at him.
“I’m trying to be honest.”
“Yeah? Be honest in a summary.” Draus shook her head. “We don’t need no illustrative detail about what tickles you.”
There was no fucking winning with these people.
“Well, he’s not burning like Avo is. If the Eaters were active inside of him, they would express themselves as they had earlier." Denton turned back and studied Avo. The ghoul was holding himself in place with his Echoheads. Intermittently, his fangs would click together and he would make these strange expressions his facial structure just didn’t seem to support.
“Now that shit just looks uncanny,” Chambers muttered.
“Yeah,” Draus said in a rare moment of agreement between them. “Should just kill him and let him explain it to us.”
“If we shoot him, we won’t be able to understand what’s happening,” Denton interrupted. “When Agnos Kusanade was burning, her exocortex backed up her missing memories and fed the Eaters a constant supply of fuel to burn. Avo… I don’t think he’s using his memories up. I think he’s growing. The fire is constant, and his mind isn’t destabilizing. He has been this way for far too long, and the brightness and depth only seems to be growing.”
“There is no hint of the Conflagration inside him,” Denton said. “Whatever Avo did, it is not affecting him anymore. Not right now, anyway.”
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Draus scoffed. “That still don’t explain why Avo’s mind is burnin’.” Her last words were directed more toward Denton. “You absolutely sure he’s still there? Because with Kae–”
“With Agnos Kusanade, her mind should have burned away without the exocortex.” The glaive turned to regard the ghoul’s Metamind halo. The ghosts that once wisped out from it now spewed expulsions of flame that wove into a blazing hurricane as it spiraled. “He’s still there. I can see that his mind isn’t burning away but… growing. And becoming brighter.”
“So, what’s that mean, Denton?” Draus asked, waving a hand in Avo’s direction. “Kae? You got any ideas? You know, since you…”
An unfitting scowl deepened across the Agnos’ face. She looked… jealous. “I learned that I actually know very little today, Jelene. Even about my own life. Maybe his half-strand of a father hid another miracle inside him. Maybe he ruined someone else’s life to do it.”
Chambers awkwardly patted her on the shoulder. She just looked down and offered him an apologetic smile.
Something about her made him feel sad too. Like she was the wrong class of person to be this miserable.
Him and Essus? Well, they were born to be coal.
The Agnos should’ve been protected. It wasn’t right. It wasn’t sensical, but it was just how things went for the longest time.
Cas let out a breath as well. “Yeah, Val, I don’t know. You’re right about most things, but this…” He looked up at Sunrise, who had its drones spread wide over Avo’s unmoving form.
“Unsure,” Sunrise said, its tone holding an inquisitive wistfulness. “I… do not know. And there is nothing in the databanks that I can draw upon. This is… unprecedented.”
“Yeah,” Cas carried. “Maybe it might be best to kill him and clean the slate. See what he remembers.”
“Give this a few more minutes,” Denton said. “With how he is right now, I don’t think anyone can interface with him. I want to see if there are any other changes. And I don’t want to interrupt anything.”
“Interrupt?” Chambers asked.
“The fires are spinning,” Denton replied. “That means he’s might still be doing his own thinking. And if he’s in the middle of a dive, I don’t want to stop that before he finishes doing what he must. You understand, right Captain Draus?”
Well, that last part was just sliding a shiv between the rib-plates.
Draus sneered. “We consangs, ‘Glaive.’ Play that ‘we’re a team’ shit with someone else.” A beat passed. “Five minutes. If nothin’ changes with him, I’m settin’ him free. Five minutes.”
Denton met her stare without difficulty and nodded. “I suppose that’s how long he’ll have for now.”
As the conversation settled, their eyes all wandered back to Avo's halo, wondering just what was hidden between the clefts of his flamed-veiled memories.
***
Pouring himself through his Auto-Seance into the remnants of Abrel Greatling’s mind paid immediate dividends. Though there wasn’t enough of the other Godclad left to form a full template, he still subsumed multiple useful structures into himself.
Flashes of bygone memories sprouted amidst his labyrinthine cognition. He felt as if a sea within a sea, the center of himself a countless intersection of paths and thoughts boiled away from his recent victims or borne from the fruits of his own skill.
As he condensed himself within Abrel’s mindspace, he waited to sample a few traumas patterns from the Exorcists guarding her before they jacked out.
He tasted other deviations in the mem-data as well. Intercepted echoes left by thoughts calling for the activation of certain contingencies to cut Abrel from the Unwhere so, “it wouldn’t spread.”
There was a sublime satisfaction in being feared.
Avo loved it. Talon-1 found it highly unprofessional. The Woundshaper delighted in the present. The Galeslither whistled notes of morose horror at what he inflicted upon those he burned away.
[Exorcist Geunne had an interesting construct. High regret build. Very effective on parents. Has much to do with disappointing her children. Hurting them when younger. Pain has specific edge. Has heighted effectiveness against mental templates Talon-8 and Talon-17. Abandonment issues. Menders didn’t fully fix. Internalizing weakness comprehension.]
[Should consider eating one of the Exorcists. Might make for interesting addition to our collection.]
[No. Hunger talking. Want to feel them hurt and die. Be honest. They are poor Necros. Soft meat. Bad for our teeth.]
[No fun. You sound like Draus.]
[Simulating 44% Draus template from existing sequences: “Godsdammit, rotlick. Stop talkin’ about this twisted shit and get on with the run. Ain’t got time to burn.]
[Might be more words than she would use. Would be more helpful if we had her as template.]
[Not burning her. Can still feel her session in our Auto-Seance. Chambers too. They trust us still. Trust. Quality thing for this city. Template isn’t worth that.]
[Isn’t? Sounding human.]
[You sound like Zein with drugs.]
And for the first time, he felt his ghosts grind against each other, the tension within him actually manifesting as phantasmal struggle.
+Enough,+ he ordered his subminds to cease. He had the will, but they seemed to vocalize much of his flowing desires. Perhaps he could build more balance into himself. He fused over some of Talon-1’s mental form and felt the slavering cruelty in him lessen immediately.
It wasn’t like using a Morality Injector–it was like rewriting himself outright. Some of the human aspects of his new meta-neurology didn’t conjoin well with his base-mind, however. Trauma rattled like lighting pulsing within the sheen of a stormcloud.
He had much to relearn of his new form.
Stretching his presence wide through Abrel’s hollowed mindscape, he stitched himself into her senses, her perception, her vessel, and like water filling the same cup, he wore her battered flesh and found himself staring out into the void.
Darkness cradled him in its embrace. Long stretches of nothing built upon nothing lined with striations vibrating with unnatural distortions. Sunderwilds, he thought. Flickers of moving light passed in the distance. Flashes of threading beams. Those could be voidships in motion or distant sections of the Unwhere golems shunting another prisoner across its conduits.
Right now, however, they had surrendered Abrel Greatling to the void.
They had surrendered her to him.
And in the weightless silence, he wielded her flesh while he waited to see if she would resurrect naturally. He had drawn the final remnants of her ego into him, after all. Forcing her to wriggle in as the coldness clutched her prison capsule, she answered him like a puppet most wondrous.
But there lingered an absence yet; a spot of nothingness existed where her Frame should have pressed against his if they were in actual proximity with each other. He couldn’t access her Heavens either, though he remembered specks of what she could do with her all-cutting wings of light.
Just how did the tissues of the mind and will interconnect? And where the latter subside for the interest of one who wished to devour it from afar.
Perhaps the vessel needed to die as well? Perhaps its continued state of “living” counted as part of a platonic formula for the existence of an entire being. Merely removing one aspect of the equation was not enough, it seemed.
It was time to ensure the destruction of both.
Making Abrel die took a moment of finesse. If he had only his base-mind to rely upon, he would have considered accelerating another object into her using the Unwhere network itself. From memories offered by Talon-6, however, a neater option prevailed.
Overclocking her biometric implants took little more than a thought but as he was the sole arbiter of these systems in absence of that which he subsumed, he overclocked them–along with all other active implants in her body–and especially her brain.
The results were biologically cataclysmic.
Abrel Greatling’s body was a morphology of expense and transhuman artistry. From skin to sinew, her make was quality and efficiency, with even the oxygen burning at nearly a thousand times the efficiency of a flat.
Even if she weres stripped of her Frame, she would have walked a god among the baselines. She could have sprinted for a week without tiring–strained against tons and only failed against the limitations of physics instead of her own tendons.
But supporting this was a body-architecture equally complex, and when that was compromised…
Her innards were the first thing to distend. Something about how hyper-excited her organs were paired with a blood-based crystallizing cushion matrix ensured her final end. The protections–once meant to harden against concussive impacts–resulted in prolapse instead.
As bulging buds of flesh distended from her orifices, he felt the world around his senses slowly going dark as her senses began to fade, and the body began to fail…
***
RESURRECTION - 1%
Abrel Grealting was again.
She remembered drowning in chaos and hate for what felt like eons. She remembered an unseen presence violating her mind.
And she remembered…
She remembered a fire, stripping what remained of her.
A fire that thought. A fire that dreamed.
Why was the fire the last thing she recalled?
And why didn’t she want to finish this resurrection?
RESURRECTION - 4%