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Chapter 10: Saying goodbyes.

Ratcatcher jumped out of her bed at the first sounds of the alarm clock. Feeling her heart race in anticipation, the explorator started her morning routine. One thousand push-ups, first on the left paw, then on the right hand. Next, pick up two weights, each weighing sixty kilos, and use her tail to lift her body up and down. Crossing her legs, Ratcatcher closed her eyes, remembering her mediation lessons, and kept on training, pushing her long tail to its limit. Feeling sweat coming from her brow, Ratcatcher put aside the weights and practiced stretching, turning all the excess calories into new and improved muscles.

Back in the academy, Ratcatcher got a bit of flack for not upgrading her body. She only laughed at all the offers. Unlike Iternian abnormals, Ratcatcher already had all the needed organs to endure minor poisoning and to survive in oxygen-deprived areas. This gift came with the evolution that helped her people survive in the Scrapyard, nature graciously helped them. Some students suggested Ratcatcher go to a flesh sculptor to have her left side remade into something more elegant. Some even offered to pay for the treatment, viewing her appearance as something deserving of pity. The young woman never gave them much of a thought, always challenging the students to a friendly competition instead of getting angry. Mismatched her body may look, the harsh back and forth travels in the suffocating tunnels of her home left Ratcatcher with enough agility to fit in with the group.

She darted into a bathroom to clean herself up, giving careful attention to her tail before brushing her fur coat, turning her gray fur into pristine condition. Who knows how long they will end up being in the Desolation? This may well be her chance to have a proper shower.

Ratcatcher put on a blue tracksuit with a single slice at the back for her tail and dialed Mom’s number, opening the armory. She pressed a finger to her lips, lost in thought at seeing her stuff. Carefully arrayed pistols, shotguns, daggers, knives, gear for climbing mountains, rebreathers, and several custom-made crossbows with poison darts… Even her old power armor was here—the one gifted to her by the Explorators Agency for the first few training missions. Ratcatcher lovely dusted off the pauldrons of this oversized beast, remembering the happy times of her internship. Boy, she really messed up a lot back then! Even Augustus actually pushed out a laugh, helping her get out of that swamp…

To business! The explorator picked up her mancatcher, putting in paralytic poison she bought from one of the exotic shops and a power-suppressing drug into the very tip of the weapon, right in the place from where two half-moon blades go up. Once the blades locked a victim in place, she could easily pump in the needed solution with a single press of a button. Naturally, she would never use a paralytic on any escaping patients. This was both gross and way too unprofessional. The people here came to be healed, not bullied by someone eager to show up.

Next came the med kit, a small portable bag capable of maintaining the necessary temperature to preserve medications from spoiling. Ratcatcher took everything she could, from bandages to pills to raise immunity and antivenom. The medical tools in her armory were small, no bigger than a coin, but at a moment’s notice, the nanomachines within them could grow them to their normal size. This miracle of technology had allowed the explorator to perform surgeries in the field should the need arise. Ratcatcher’s paw stopped over a scalpel. Like all students, she had passed a full, two-year medical course back in the academy and even performed a three-month long practicum in the hospital. Will this be enough?

Probably not, so let’s keep our allies safe! She felt anxiety again. It’s true that she desperately wanted to return to the field, where she could explore the marvels of the underground labs and cities and learn the long-lost secrets of the past. Concurrently, she dreaded letting her teammates down. Before, she was the weakest link in such expeditions and had to pull her weight. Not this time, not according to the brief information that she got from Artificer.

Her belt came to life, encasing the woman in armor all the way to the neck. Humming a tune, Ratcatcher allowed needles to come from her fingers. Each needle pierced the top of one of the small capsules, preparing both deadly and power-blocking poisons. The explorator pondered for a moment about taking firearms and finally decided upon armor-piercing darts, stored in the launchers on her wrists.

Summoning an armored plate, Ratcatcher tried on the weapons. A steel plate rose from the side of her armory room. With a twist of her wrist, she sent forth a dart that soundlessly flew through the air, far faster than any crossbow bolt. A ringing sound announced the appearance of a torn hole in the plate. The explorator picked up the dart, looking it over for any damages. Nothing, good as new. Reusable. Perfect.

Putting the weapon back into the launcher, Ratcatcher caught herself at the thought that she’ll have to kill again. Of course, maybe a miracle happens, and they never meet anyone on the mission… But this was wishful thinking. In truth, she hated killing people. Seeing light disappear from the eyes of a living being, witnessing a puddle of blood increasing beneath a just living body, sensing how once warm, thinking, breathing, being turned to cold…

Enough with this. For Iterna, we march! Ratcatcher snapped out of the gloom just in time for her terminal to come online, showing Dad’s smiling face.

Unlike his wife, Johatan Vong almost looked like a normal human in shorts, his fur coat aside. His sunken eyes were white, giving the false impression of blindness, he lacked whiskers and a tail, and his nose looked exactly like a human nose. Greeting Ratcatcher, Dad kept on working with a knife, chopping vegetables and meat before himself.

Ratcatcher and her tribe once lived in the Scrapyard, where gigantic piles of waste left from the Old World. The place is located to the west of Iterna’s borders. They were never many of them, just a few dozen abnormals banded together because people in the nearby town viewed them as monsters. With each generation, every newborn kid in the Scrapyard was losing some of their animalistic appearance, looking more and more normal. By the time they joined Iterna, some of them even looked like fully normal humans.

Their reunification with Iterna happened almost by accident. Ratcatcher, back then just an eight-year-old stupid and arrogant girl, found a lost kid. This girl was just a normal human, and Ratcatcher assumed that the people from the city must have thrown her out. She took the screaming ball of flesh with her, and Dad and Mom helped fix the broken leg and showed how to tend wounds… A day later, Eugenia Mylli arrived in all her glory, thinking that people from the Scrapyard stole the kid. Turns out Iterna had led a long negotiation process, convincing the city dwellers to join them. When one of them walked to the Scrapyard for a daily job of finding metal, he lost her daughter when she fell into a crevice. Hearing about ‘voracious spawns of evil who eat people’, Eugenia jumped to the rescue.

After all the confusion was cleared, the people from the city and the tribe of fifty people from the Scrapyard both joined Iterna. Iterna provided standard apartments for all its citizens. At first, the abnormals were a bit worried. Most of them were barely educated, and only a few even knew what Iterna even was. Their fears were unfounded, and government officials helped everyone fit in.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

You could not go broke or be homeless in Iterna. Centuries of careful policy implementation had ensured that no citizen would ever be left homeless. An apartment, a TV, a refrigerator, clothes, and at least one terminal to contact the Net were the standard issued items from the government, along with free healthcare and food to live normally. Ratcatcher’s father had quickly found himself a job at a nearby milk processing plant, rising all the way from a driver to a manager, convincing his wife to leave her own job and concentrate on living happily and raising the kids.

Soon enough, Dad had saved enough credits to buy a nice-looking house on the city’s outskirts. The sun was shining softly through the windows behind him, lighting up the kitchen and all the handmade furniture inside. Dad always loved wood carving and kept on working to perfect his hobby in recent years. He even sold some of his homemade furniture on the Net, blatantly lying that they were ‘products of the Scrapyard’s cultural heritage’ to boost the price. Yeah, sure. As if they had wardrobes or proper beds back then.

“Hello Dad! Is Mom busy? How are you doing?” Ratcatcher crashed on the floor cross-legged, waving her paw in greeting.

“She had a poor sleep,” Johatan replied warmly, finishing making sandwiches and turning to prepare coffee. “We are kind of freaking out about your mission.”

“They never tell us anything! You never tell us anything! But before, you could at least call us, and now we are put before the fact that you won’t contact us for a week at least, or even more!” Joanna Vong came into view, rubbing her beady eyes. Upon first arriving in Iterna, mom caused quite a commotion. Her long tail ended with a small talon, both of her ankles were inverted, she had the same looking clawed paws on her legs and arms. Her brown fur coat did little to hide her impressive fangs when she spoke or her crimson eyes. “Tell me the truth, Ratcatcher, how dangerous is it?”

“Not any more dangerous than the Scrapyard!” The explorator laughed along with Dad, feeling thankful for his support. She remembered Mom’s gentle paws that cradled her during her childhood, her sheer ferocity, and dealing with any insectoids that tried to lay a stinger on the young Ratcatcher. Truth be told, Joanna, or Bloodsworn, could be rather scary in her fury. She also worried far too much, in Ratcatcher’s opinion. “Augustus is coming with me. How safer can I be?!”

“Oh, thank the Planet.” The woman on the screen quickly made a religious gesture, drawing a round circle around her upper body with her thumb, thanking Planet for the mercy. “Augustus is a nice boy. At least someone will keep you out of trouble.”

“Hey! I take offense to that!”

“Don’t care, we saw the videos from your trainings,” Dad grinned, passing the food and coffee to Mom. “Where are you venturing off to anyway?”

“These were just trainings, will you let it go alrea…” She jumped to her feet, fuming from embarrassment that he got her on such a cheap bait. “Sorry, can’t say, the country’s secret. Listen, I am on a tight schedule. Is Liam awake? I wanna say hi.”

“He better be, the school bus will be here in under twenty minutes,” Mom snapped, reaching to the terminal. “We love you, sweetie. Stay safe, okay?”

“Will do! See you soon!”

The screen flickered for a moment before showing Liam’s messy room. Her brother still hasn’t made his bed. Two weights were thrown carelessly on a pile of clothes in the room’s corner. The walls were covered with posters, fantasy maps, several popular music groups, a few sport posters, and, of course, horror movie posters. Liam hunched over the table, carefully putting trading sport cards into a box.

“You do know that Mom is so going to kick your ass once she sees the room, right?” Ratcatcher teased him, and, in a flash, Liam turned with a graceful movement of muscle and fur.

“Tsk, the bus will not arrive for the next twelve minutes. I only need two to fix this mess,” the boy responded arrogantly, ignoring books on the floor and stepping to hide hamburger leftovers on the table. His haughty impression broke into a smile. “Great to see you, sis!”

“It didn’t feel right to run away without saying hi. How is school? No one is picking on you?”

Liam Vong took after their mother. His tail lacked the claw at the end, but his eyes were just as beady as their mother’s. His head hunched forward slightly, the boy’s thick and elongated snout contained truly mighty chompers within, along with gleaming, elegant white claws in his paws. When he walked across the streets, Liam resembled more of a bear than a human.

This caused some problems. In Iterna’s abnormals were rare. You could walk from one end of the city to another and not face a single mutation, not meet even a single tentacle, markets aside. Ratcatcher remembered how happy Liam looked at the idea of going to an actual school. Out of them all, he was the first to discard his tribe’s name, demanding everyone call him by his ‘human’ name. The boy became obsessed with Iterna’s culture, spending hours behind the terminal, forcing Dad to cut some of his access to the Net after the young boy picked up a few words that he really should not know at his age.

It ended up being even more painful for him after the first school day. Ratcatcher had it easy, the explorators’ Academy had courses and teachers to bring her up to speed, and all the people there were adults who knew when to keep their mouths shut. Kids had no such restraint. Mom brought the distraught Liam back after he asked the teacher to call her. The boy dismissively declared that he didn’t care one bit about all of the teasing, but Ratcatcher saw tears in his eyes. Ratty, animal, scavenger—that’s what the kids called him.

Surprisingly, the next day the teacher himself came for Liam, convincing the boy to give the school another chance. No matter how many times his sister kept pestering him, Liam outright refused to tell her about what happened, but for four years now he has come back home mostly happy and full of energy, to the point that he would often take apart TVs and terminals, just to see how they were working, and to try and assemble them back, much to Mom’s annoyance. For while Liam picked up new stuff fast, his tinkering usually left a few broken things in its wake, leaving Mom without her favorite period dramas.

“Of course not! Yesterday, I carried our team during the rugby match,” An excitement flashed in Liam’s milky-white eyes, his paws clenched from barely held back emotions, and the tail smashed aside a book off the table. “Elisa, you should have seen it! Four boys, all trying to drag me down, and I carried that ball to the end! Again and again! The trainer said that any university will scout me at this rate, just for the sake of winning the nationals! Can you imagine? Me! And everyone chanted my name. I felt my blood pumping and my heart felt like it was going to jump out, and we all went to have a pizza and…”

“Congrats!” Ratcatcher clapped in his honor, making sure to look serious, before breaking into laughter. “No, really, Liam, this is grand! Keep going, I believe in you! Just make sure your grades don’t degrade.”

“Ha! As if they could! I am destined to surpass you, sis, in everything and anything! Just you wait! One day you’ll come back to the mayor Liam Vong! Or… or maybe, maybe… the president Liam Vong! Yeah, I’ll show you!”

“Now that would be a day.” She felt a tingle of sadness at not being able to grab this loveable buffoon and take him for a spin like before.

“You are going to come back… Right, sis?” Liam suddenly became serious, and Ratcatcher cursed to herself, guessing that he overheard some of Mom’s worries.

“Sure I will!” She lifted her paw, showing up the power armor, and pointed a finger at the ceiling, commanding the nanomachines to cover her head and activate the light from her visor. Striking a heroic pose, she grabbed the mancatcher with the tail before throwing it into her arms and making a dramatic spin with her weapon. “No evildoer will be left standing in my wake! Just you wait, in a week or two, we’re gonna meet once more, and I am going to look exactly the same…” The clock rang up again, cutting her speech. “Dammit, time’s up. Listen to Mom and Dad, clean up your room, or I’ll kick your ass!”

“This will be violence against a minor!” Liam laughed.

“And I don’t give a damn! Love you, Liam, stay cool!”

Grabbing her belongings, Ratcatcher rushed out of her room, reaching one of the helipads. Just at the appointed time, not a second too early or late, a round blue form came from the skies, looking far smaller than any iternian flying vehicle she knew. The metal orb, only slightly bigger than her, opened a door, inviting the curious explorator in. Green lights came from within the machine, scanning Ratcatcher from head to toe before carrying her into the sky and darting toward Artificer’s base.