8. Bird Cage

“I’ve been watching you, you know,” the speaker continued, never breaking ‘eye contact’. “You seem to know your way around a fight, sweetcheeks, but you also have glaring weaknesses that’ll get you in trouble sooner rather than later. If you have any hope of making it to the surface in one piece, you’re going to need an ally, and lucky for you, I’m—hrrgh!”

The sac in which the speaker was trapped suddenly swung wildly from side to side. This was accompanied by a wet retching sound that issued from the approximate location of the one eye, which now shut tightly in consternation.

Serac turned her gaze upward, partly to avoid getting drawn into secondhand nausea, but mainly to look for the source of the disturbance. Higher up the room, Jailers and Penitents continued to jostle for supremacy, oblivious to the changes to their environment. Yet the winds inside the Aviary had clearly picked up in speed and intensity, as if the prison itself had decided to take matters into its own hands.

“Oh my gods,” the one-eyed speaker cried out in between throaty spits and ragged breaths (yuck!). Gone instantly was his casual arrogance, leaving only the meek submission that was part and parcel of the Damnatorium experience. “I beg of you, get me out already! I don’t know how much more of this I can take!”

Serac’s hand moved before her mind did, first reaching tentatively for the swinging alveolar sac before deciding she needed to think twice about how exactly she would go about the task. It wouldn’t do to put herself in danger just to save this—

“Surely, you can’t be serious!” Trippy interjected then, with his snark back in full force. “Are you just going to stop for every Dick and Jane that come calling? Have you even met this man before today? What possible reason do you have to lend him an ear, let alone a hand?”

“Funny you should say that,” Serac replied with a shrug, “considering I just met you for the first time today. Besides, I’m doing this for my own benefit as much as his. If I have to listen to all this retching any longer, I’m going to throw up on myself and probably you too.”

“Be that as it may, I should have a say in this! This is meant to be a partnership, and I haven’t agreed to bring in a third party with nothing in the way of a vetting process.”

“Who said anything about bringing him in? I’m just going to let him out of his cell. That’s it. We can think about the other stuff later.”

“Who… who are you talking to?”

Serac ignored the stranger’s wretched moaning and instead focused on the task at hand. She’d already intuited that making direct contact with the jail cell wasn’t a viable option—not worth the risk. That left, once again, REVOLVER as the only ranged tool at her disposal, but she also wasn’t keen to expend more resources than was reasonable.

One bullet. That was all she would allow herself. One bullet to try and rescue this haughty catcaller of a stranger, then she would move on with her life regardless of the outcome. So… I’d better make this one count. As such, she needed something to aim for. Something that could let her reliably disrupt the jail cell’s integrity while leaving the goods inside unharmed.

“Can you go any lower?” She called out as an idea came to her.

“Excuse me?”

“Duck. Or, I dunno, slide lower. Just make yourself smaller, okay? I don’t know your situation inside that thing, but I need a clear line of sight to aim at your, uh, peephole.”

“My peep—? What are you insinuating? And what do you intend to do exactly?”

“Isn’t it obvious? I’m going to make the hole bigger.”

The stranger swung in silence for a while, with his one eye blinking rather nervously through his peephole. Then, as Serac watched, the eyeball slid down to reveal a patch of clammy skin, then some mucus-slick hair, and finally the hollow darkness inside an alveolar sac. This too was accompanied by more retching, no doubt as the stranger became intimately acquainted with a reservoir of his own upchuck.

“Perfect,” Serac murmured weakly, even as she fought down a throaty heave of her own. She readied REVOLVER at the same time.

A wildly swinging sac. A tiny target. And a bout of intense nausea to boot. This was to be by far the most difficult shot of her brief gunslinging career, but Serac felt oddly composed as she committed to it.

Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

She was once again visited by a sense of dissonance, one that quickly settled into confidence as her soul somehow found a reference point to draw from. She’d done this before. If not the exact same scenario (which, let’s be real, was highly doubtful), then at least something a lot like it…

Aim, lock, fire. Whether by instinct or experience or perhaps both, Serac chose the moment where the alveolar sac swung toward her in a straight line, making the tiny perforation upon its wall just a little bigger for her to aim for. The bullet connected, not straight through the peephole, but rather grazing its edge, just as the gunslinger had intended.

[144!]

By now, Serac had developed several of her own theories about how Wayfaring and Pathsight worked in conjunction. As such, she wasn’t all that surprised to see a damage number attributed to this inanimate object. Moreover, she was pleased to see that her one shot had produced its intended effect: that of slightly widening the peephole and, more importantly, softening up the surrounding tissue.

“You’re on your own now, Mr Eyeball!” she called out merrily, even as she reloaded REVOLVER to bring her Cartridge total to [6|9]. “See if you can’t claw out of that thing on your own. And if you don’t even have the strength to do that, then I frankly can’t see how you were ever going to be a worthy ‘ally’.”

More retching and heaving. Followed by a finger that poked itself out of the ruined peephole and began to dig its way around the edges.

Seeing this did catch Serac by surprise. For the finger didn’t look exactly how she’d imagined it.

She’d met other Rakshasas that had more of a copper complexion compared to her own cinnabar, but this one… appeared a little sallower than what she was comfortable with. The finger also lacked the onyx-black claws that, along with horns, were among the very few things a Rakshasa could claim as their pride and joy.

The sight of the somewhat ‘deformed’ finger immediately made her think of the Frenzied Penitents. Even those poor souls with their lurching gait and hollowed-out eyes had at least looked quite a bit healthier than Mr Finger here. But Serac liked to think of herself as an it’s-what’s-inside-that-counts kind of girl, and she decided to reserve judgment until the stranger revealed himself in full.

And reveal himself he did. Step by arduous step. First, the lone finger pulled apart enough of the wall for a whole hand to squeeze its way into the open. Then that hand heaved and ho’d until it was joined by its counterpart, upon which two sallow-looking (and very much clawless) hands ripped through the sac lengthwise.

This coincided with a gust of wind that pushed the whole chain of cells closer to the staircase. Mr Hands didn’t miss his chance, choosing this moment to leap out of his cell and onto solid ground…

… Upon which he immediately doubled over to cough, spit, and dry-heave some more. Serac watched it all happen, and her eyes widened in earnest amazement as she was forced to readjust in real time her perception of who—or what—this stranger was. Eyeball to Finger to Hands to Body.

The figure, even in his folded state, was clearly taller than any Rakshasa Serac had known. His Penitent’s rags were in far worse shape than his rescuer’s, torn and eroded in parts that revealed a surprisingly muscular frame underneath. If it weren’t for his miserable disposition, sickly complexion, and yes, complete lack of claws or horns, Serac might’ve even concluded that Mr Muscles was the healthiest inmate she’d ever met.

“Gods,” the man’s muffled voice broke through in between his dry heaves, though he still kept his head buried between his arms. “I knew I could count on you! Thank you, sweetcheeks. Truly, I mean it.”

“Yeah…” Serac murmured uncertainly, her bewilderment temporarily overriding her disdain for the stranger’s casual misogyny. “Say, are you okay, mister? Like, what happened to your—?”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake! I should’ve known!”

“What?” Serac, having forgotten all about Trippy, was startled into voicing her honest reaction. “What should you have known?”

“That does it. I’m now thoroughly and adamantly against bringing this soul along as our ally. You can’t trust him, Serac Edin! Climbing Mount Meru is ultimately a zero-sum game, and we mustn’t share our pursuit of it with a competitor—with your own kind.”

“My own kind? But… that’s exactly what I’m trying to figure out right now! What even is this guy?”

“Seriously, I’m going to ask you again. Who do you keep talking to?”

With that (admittedly quite reasonable) question, the newly freed stranger raised his head. The full view of his face only confirmed what Serac had already suspected: that the man was decidedly not Rakshasa. Albeit… his alien features somehow managed to feel familiar, in that ‘dissonant’ way Serac was starting to grow accustomed to.

A haggard angular face that now framed a pair of inquisitive eyeballs. Mucus-slick and charcoal-black hair that grew not only on his head but also all the way around his square jaw and prominent chin—a beard! That certainly was a rare sight inside a prison full of smooth-faced Rakshasas and their Hellspawn Jailers.

And yet, even more striking—and more alarming—than the stranger’s face was the text that now sprang up all around it. A message from Pathsight, dutifully filling in the blanks in a novice Wayfarer’s knowledge with proprietary data.

[Designation: ZACARIAS BORGES-JUVENTUS]

[Wayfarer Race: MANUSYA]

[Karmic Level: 16]

[Liminal Karma (Deficit): -15,950 क]

[ERUDITE Instrument: VISAGE]