2.4 These Prayers Ain't Working Anymore
Site-189 Interrogation Room
Dr. Melina Anagnostis is roughly shoved into a medium-sized, square room with a mirror on one end, a table in the center with four chairs and a recording device. Under any other circumstances, she’d immediately register it as an interrogation room. But she can barely think through the thick buzz of reality pressing against her skull, much less manage her senses.
I am trapped. Cut off. Alone.
The room reeks of bleach and cleaning products, irritating her sinus cavities and adding to the deluge of unpleasant erosion gnawing at her. Dread worms and crawls in her belly, the static fear of isolation, of being helpless and alone creeping up her spine.
She has worked her whole life to stop from ever feeling this way again. After her mother, after her ex Husband stripped her autonomy, agency. Cloaked herself in power, in armor, in the trappings of knowledge and infinite contingencies.
But this is the one she never imagined. The one that would render all her magic null, useless. Is this what her ancestors felt like? Is this what drove them into the addictions that brought them down? Oppression breeding oppression.
What do they want? Why wield this torture against us? No, that's naive, you know why.
The oppressive crush of intensified reality grinds against her skin, scrambling her abstract threads even worse than when she had the cuffs on. She feels nothing. Silence, the void.
She’s human again. Mortal. Weak and powerless.
Her greatest fears realized in a chain of dominos so intense that the rugpull threatens to completely unwind any sense of self into gibbering madness.
That's probably the point.
Warmth trickles out of her nostrils as the room attempts to spin horizontally. Vertigo threatens to discharge the contents of her stomach.
Or, well, would if she had had anything material to eat in the last 24 hours.
Is this where my entire life has been leading? Where all the struggles have left us? To die in the middle of the ocean, with not a soul knowing who we were? I should have laid down in the fires, let the river take me where it would. That would have been a better fate than this.
Two guards stand at the door, eyes boring into the back of her nightshirt.
Do they see my marks? Does the reality field expose them?
How long has she been standing there? She realizes she doesn't know.
Why not just kill us? Get it over with.
“Sit,” one of them commands her. Her limbs move automatically, as if she’s on autopilot, lucidity feeling like a dream drifting so very far away.
The chair’s metal is cold, hard and unforgiving against her olive and fragile skin. All her defenses, contingencies and options stripped away, leaving her this. Skin and bone and meat. She looks at her hand, trembling.
No robe to shield her. No implement to call on. No blood to wield.
Exhausted from panic, lack of sleep, hunger and the constant ontokinetic erosion of the Site’s defenses, she fights to not slump over onto the table and pass out.
She's hanging on by her nails.
I’m broken, and they know it. They figured it out, what I am. They're going to tear me to pieces.
Something deep inside of her snaps, something that’s had enough.
Stop that. Stop this despair. This is not you. This is what he tried to make you. What they are trying to make you, so they can pick you apart. Pull yourself together! Will you be the sniveling maiden on the shore and in the forest weeping over a lost life? Over all your failures. Or will you stride forward like the Queen you are, forging your own path?
Her body shudders, mind a whirlwind as her eyes settle on a black, rounded half orb in the corner of the room. Her façade pieces back together slowly, burning warmth of hope rising in her chest as she draws up in the seat, before crumpling forward, cheek pressing into the cool metal of the table. Drool dripping onto the surface as her body gives out and fails. Fever burns in her flesh, dysfunctional streams of thought falling into each other.
Delirium sets in.
A camera. A camera. They’ll come for us. When they realize what’s happened, they’ll come. With fire and steel. With what little bodily control she has left, she steadies her breathing, slow and deep. The twins, our trails, fire in the sky, the wheels of eternity burning a fire in our weeping flesh. We just have to hold on. We just have to hold on…
She passes out.
Then she's awake.
Then she's out.
Then she's awake.
In microbursts of alternating consciousness and floating she swims, fighting against the black. His laughs echo in the distance. Scarlet hues echoing in the water she can't see. He's pulling her now, away, deeper.
It's all pointless. She can't fight the current.
So she stops trying, and surrenders. Surely, Oblivion can't be this bad. Surely he can't take her if she's dead.
Her thoughts bubble and arc in lilac text across a conceptual void in which she floats, half immersed in something cool and wet and yet not wet and warm at the same time. Sticky.
It must be blood. The blood her whole foundation stands upon.
But what if they don’t know? What if they can’t find us? What then? What do these people want of us? What if he swallows me now that I am without defense against him?
“Is she dead?”
Something prods her shoulder through the black and crimson static of the reality field. Her muscles twitch.
“Nah, just unconscious.”
“Almost feel bad for her.”
“Don’t. You start feeling empathy, and then five months later we find you as bloody sludge on a cell wall.”
Creaking metal, the sound of a heavy door opening as she floats on the surface of an endless void-filled sea, staring up at a starless sky. She looks down at herself in the nothing. Looks down and laughs in pain. Pajama bottoms, stained with mud and the blood of a man who lost his ear.
She laughs. His blood, what a fool she was. She could have used his blood, pulled it out of him and turned it against them. But they would have hit her with a tranquilizer.
She's laughing. She's inside, and laughing. Outside and laughing. Watching herself laugh. Watching dozens laugh, walls of her and she and I laughing endlessly in a panacea of fluttering skin and eyes. Blood blossoms through the they and them, blooming like the flowers in her mother's orchards.
The sound of a chair scraping on the floor, eyes opening in the writhing darkness, all around. Staring, blinking, piercing through her. Scarlet eyes. No, not scarlet. Emerald?
They swallow the other hers, while she is being swallowed by him.
I. See. You.
“Begin Special Agent Asset Interview-8711-01.” A new voice echoes in the distance.
“Dr. Anagnostis?”
Melina closes her eyes in the nothing, and again and again, onwards into infinity, a never ending sequence of nothing and sprouting eyes growing ever closer, cascading, spinning and swirling. Eyes becoming mouths full of ever sharpening jade teeth, lunging faster and faster forwards across the shrinking gaps.
“How quaint and informative. Julian, please turn the SRA’s in the room off.”
“Ma’am? Are you sure?”
“Oh, yes. Quite yes. If we need to reduce her to a drooling bag of flesh again, I’ll let you know.”
There’s a click somewhere in front of her, and then Melina shoots up, a primal howl of pain tearing from her lungs as reality sinks its teeth into her flesh. Her skin writhes, red welts spreading across the surface as she begins to fray at the conceptual seams.
“Oooooops.” A voice cuts cleanly through the blistering white agony.
As quickly as the teeth set into her flesh, they draw out again. Acheing with pain, bleeding from several lacerations in places she can’t even see; she shudders, vision clearing as she returns to lucidity.
Her heart hammers in her chest.
Reality’s cruel tide pulls back, just like when the cuffs were removed, enough to feel as if she’s wading instead of drowning.
A woman, mid 50’s with a thick folder neatly arranged before her, sits at the table across from Melina. Black hair, with a streak or two of grey woven in. But what catches Melina’s eye the most is the prickle of light in her green eyes, the disgust briefly crinkling her lips before she comports herself. The look sends shivers down her spine.
She knows that look.
It's a look her mother often wielded. It's one that slipped across her own face many times when she was very young.
Everything is neatly arranged. The guards positioned symmetrically, a watch neatly laid on the table. Folder placed perfectly before her.
The sudden relative clarity swims in Melina’s head as if she’s a bat using its echolocation for the first time. She wipes the drool off her face with a shirt sleeve, and sits up, pressing her hands underneath the table to hide their trembling.
Focus.
“The Foundation appreciates you and your partner’s cooperation, Dr. Anagnostis.”
Breathe steady. Show no fear. Terror is the mind killer.
“I’m Eulades Eurylochus, Site-189’s director.” She offers a polite, but wildly insincere smile. Again Melina's skin crawls, and every hair on her body stands on end.
Melina’s brain snaps into analysis, ignoring the predatory look of ‘I’ve got you right where I want you’ in the other woman’s sneering eyes. Every instinct is screaming to run, but she has nowhere to run to. So she has to find a way to fight.
Site Director, that means she authorized this. Answers. You can get answers. You can force her on camera to say what she did, your name is already raising flags in the file databases as soon as this is stored on the web servers. But will that be enough—? Her thoughts are cut off as Eulades clears her throat.
“Dr. Anagnostis, do I need to turn the SRAs back on?”
Melina's chest squeezes tight, flames of anger starting to stoke beneath her diaphragm. But she’s three steps ahead and knows how to render me docile. There’s no guarantee that stalling will get us anywhere and I—I don’t want to be drooling on the table again. A frozen knife of humiliation stabs into her chest, worming and spreading into terror in her veins like an invasive vine.
“No,” Melina says, her throat too dry; unable to stop the gravelly exhaustion from leaking into her voice.
“Very good. I understand you’ve had quite the rough night and landing, I do hope you understand how careful we have to be with anomalies of your caliber and reputation.” There's something there in her voice. A thinly veiled layer of superiority that's just barely poking through.
It makes her heart beat fast, familiar nausea simmer in her stomach.
It's just like Mom. What's her motive?
She picks up the glass of water on the table, and takes a long, and somewhat dramatic sip of it.
“Aaaaaah, the beauties of onboard desalination.” She smiles, the cruelty swirling behind her eyes. “Would you like a glass of water? You must be so thirsty.”
Instinctually Melina licks her dry, cracked lips.
Smiling with feigned empathy, Eulades snaps a finger, and one of the guards steps out. He returns after a moment with a glass, and hands it to Eulades.
Here come the manipulation tactics, if she's following Foundation interrogation rulebooks.
Eulades extends the glass towards her, Melina reaches for it, hand trembling, only for Eulades to snap it back at the last second.
Predictable. Just like mother.
“Oh, but before you do, I need to know you understand the perils of your situation.” She says with a tut tut. “As long as you cooperate, we won’t, oh how would you put it, pull you apart at the conceptual seams.”
Melina bites back the sneer, and through gritted teeth says, “I understand.”
Of course they treat reality benders differently. She knew that. But this is—
“Excellent. Now, I bet you’re a prideful little thing, so, try not to take this personally. I promise you, it’s not on our end,” Eulades lies through her teeth, eyes seething with sparks of hate.
“As long as we have that understanding, and we’re civil, I’m sure we can do great things together.”
For a moment, reality twists, and she doesn't hear this woman's voice. She hears the regal intonations of her mother's cruel and twisted tones.
W-w-hy does she sound—
A cold chill runs up her spine, goosebumps along her skin.
No, get it together. That's not her. Focus. Ok. First step, test the boundaries.
She hands Melina the glass. She holds it up to her nose, sniffs, dips a pinky in and then sticks it into her dry mouth. Her eyes water, the taste of fresh and purified water a monumental relief.
Then she dumps it on the metal floor, watching the moisture soak through the grates into the drains.
Melina sneers, quiet fury raging inside.
“Poison. A test or an amateurish attempt to further weaken me.” The insult sparks crimson in the corners of her eyes as she bites deep into her own lip, tasting iron. A crimson she cannot afford to wield. “And you sit before me and preach about civility and cooperation.”
Eulades smirks. “I had a feeling you were the brains of the two. Magesbane, terrible little concoction for things like you.”
I can not sit back and play with this one. This will be a game of chess with an underhanded opponent unafraid to cheat. More perilous than I could have accounted for because she's a bigot too. We need to get out, I can't stay here, I can't do this. Not again.
Melina considers leaping across the table, smashing the glass into the woman’s throat. Draw blood. Her normal magic will do nothing, but she is among the most powerful blood thaumaturges to ever live. A reality field will not be enough to stop her dance. But without the robe to filter the power through, the high might be too much. She could lose control. She doesn't have the protection it offers, and Cardea isn't here to break her out of a spiral.
Her eyes dart left and right.
Melina could use Eulades as a shield while she stretches what little regular magic she could call in this moment. But those are only tricks and spells for children. Only good enough to distract the guards long enough for her to close the distance.
I get close and then what? Hope I can disable the SRA? Hope I can overpower them in this state without resorting to blood.
Eyes bounce to the pen the woman set down after scribbling some notes on the clipboard. Faster, easier guarantee of punching through the artery.
She'd die in seconds, the guards too, and I wouldn't need to use much. Avoid the high, avoid the spiral. It could work but…
But the same endpoint. The people in the room wouldn’t be the problem. It’s the people outside it.
“Oh, I wouldn’t,” Eurylochus says with a click of her tongue, tracking Melina’s eyes to the pen. “You’d kill me, but then the guards would kill you.”
She pulls a little remote out. The far wall turns into a video projector. Melina’s heart stops for a tenth of a second, the video projector clinking on with a video feed of Cardea pacing in a padded cell. The whole world tilts sideways.
“If that’s not enough incentive then I’m sure this will be. The floors of our cells are lined with a high voltage shock system. This one is tied to a dead man’s trigger. My heart stops beating and,” Eurylochus makes a buzzing noise with her tongue. The joy behind her eyes is nauseating.
She has me. She has both of us. Is this how she operates all the time? Do the O5’s know? Gods above this is hopeless.
She glances at the camera and wants to sag into the chair and admit defeat. There’s no conceivable way out without— no she won't do it. She won't risk that.
Melina stares at the screen, numbness spreading through her fingers, up her spine. “What do you want?”
Even if █████ sees these tapes, how long will it take them to reach us. Hours? Days? A week? We will already be dead. Why are they doing this?
“I want you and her.” She points to Cardea. Chills arc up her spine. The words echo, as they did when her own mother said them about the man who would tear her world apart. “But it’s not about what I want. It’s about what you need.” She grins, malicious intent spreading behind her eyes.
“What do you mean?” Melina shifts carefully, circling a finger around the edge of the glass, trying desperately to stim, to not break down. Is this woman her mother? No, she's surely dead. The glass fills with water as a tiny child’s spell ripples through lilac light to fill it.
Keep it together. Focus. A little purification spell…
Eulades watches the display with a wrinkling of her nose and pursing of her lips. “You are aware, oh yes of course you are, that you broke into a database and gained unauthorized access to SCP-8711, right?”
Melina stops, hand freezing in the air just as she’s about to pick up the glass. Confusion ripple through her mind.
8711 is perfectly within our clearance to access? What is she talking about?
It must have spread onto her face.
“I see you’re a little confused, maybe you need a little refresher. Let’s review your classification clearance together, shall we?” She opens the folder and slides it across the table to Melina.
The grin across her lips bristles with the same joyous intensity of a predator having perfectly trapped its prey. The similarities between this woman and her mother grow by the moment, and she has to fight to stop her teeth chattering.
Melina looks, blinking, ice and electricity spreading through her abdomen.
Impossible, I read this contract dozens of times, memorized all of it before we ever signed. How can thi— Her stomach drops like a rock, the dark clasp of dread and icey fingers of terror squeezing around her heart.
Someone must have changed it. We’ve been set up.
She's frozen, utterly paralyzed. Realization rocks her like an earthquake, crumbling any confidence or hope of rescue.
No it doesn't matter this is a setup. It doesn't matter that they are coming. We're anomalies to them. They'll throw us in a cell, tear our agency from our fingers, give us afileandcontainmentprocedures and She can't breathe. She can't think straight. The wall are crashing in. We’re going to die because someone changed the fucking rules. We're going to die because someone found the exact conditions needed to neuter us. We're going to die because the whole world stops and she understands.
She understands exactly what all those people must have felt so long ago. Even knowing what Cardea went through, even meeting many others, never has she felt targeted like this before. She has never felt this level of crushing, systemic force pressing against her.
We're going to die, because they think they are above us.
Her hands rattle beneath the table, tremors working through her fingers. Why? No the why doesn't even matter? A bigot has our reigns, she has the means to completely undo us. The system is going to crush us. I'm going to die a slave. I'm going to die in the dark. She wants to cry, scream, burst into tears, rage, do anything.
But she just sits there, paralyzed. Powerless, like she was when he bound her heart and mind in chains all those eons ago.
What a miserable fucking fate. To fight with your privilege against the oppression of your own blood, of the tyranny and cruelty of the world, and finally be crushed beneath its heel like an ant.
“Fortunately for you, despite your anomalous nature I actually need your skills, so I’m willing to overlook the indiscretion in exchange for your full cooperation. Barring some preliminary evaluations of course.” This monster, no puppeteer across from her clasps her hands together on the table, like its a business deal.
Is this Karma catching up to me? For all the suffering my blood has caused? For all the lives stolen by my failure? Fate? Manipulation from a greater enemy we cannot yet see?
Melina squeezes her eyes shut. No, stop. Stop, stop, stop. Terror is the mind killer; terror is the mind killer.
Her mother would think she was pathetic for sitting here, wallowing. She'd demand Melina stop sniveling, and show these fools what their bloodline means.
Kill them all in fire and blood iron.
But she's better than that.
I will not give in.
She grits her teeth. “So, let me—so that I understand. Your men, lackeys, loyal miscreants stormed our dorm, shot Cardea five times, put us in cuffs and chains,” her voice raises in volume, the hot flames of a dying star’s rage twirling up her spine with the icey terror snaring across her nervous system.
It's stupid, foolish, suicidal even. She's terrified, but she's not going to die like a sniveling coward.
“Dragged us across the world to an isolated ocean base where you torture me with ontokinetic suppression, try to poison me, and you expect me to agree to help you?” Her eyes open again, bracing for retaliation, torture, SRA spikes for doing anything but sniveling and begging on her hands and knees. It's what her mother would do.
But she's wrong about that. It's not what her mother would do.
“I think that’s assigning quite a bit of malice that wasn’t intentional,” Eulades lies through her teeth again, a bit of joy sparkling in her eyes. “But yes, I think that’s about the gist of it.”
The temperature of the flames rise in Melina’s chest. Her mother would insult her, like this woman is doing now. She'd bait Melina with the carrot, and then hit her with the stick.
“And now you are blackmailing us too.”
And lie to her fucking face about it.
Next she's going to say, it's a problem I can make go away.
“I think blackmail is a little harsh. Think of it as an, opportunity to make a potential problem go away. If you can get past your predatory instincts to destroy, of course.”
Melina's stomach twists.
Air hisses between Melina’s teeth. The fucking nerve. She knows very well what this means for us. She’s baiting you. Just like Mom would a diplomat that's less than her. Hoping you will snap so she can fry us like bugs. And it’s working.
“What do you really want?” Melina sags into the chair, grasping the glass of purified water and downing it like its hard liquor. She wins. This woman is her mother. In actuality, or reincarnation. The fact is, she's exhausted, triggered, starving and alone.
Is this all projection?
Is her mind warping the memories?
She's not sure.
All of this is for show, she has you in the palm of her hand. She has you both in the palm of her hand. She’s parading it out for her own twisted amusement, making you dance like a puppet.
“I already told you, I want you, her, and your combined skills. Whatever they may be given the redactions.”
She doesn't even know what we can do. But that doesn't matter. We're tools, animals to be tamed and wielded against her enemies, whatever they may be. We’re going to die like dogs in the mud.
Defeat seeps into her voice. “Why? You have your own personal army.”
Eulades’s eyes gleam, and she rubs salt in the evergrowing wound. “Oh, they’re great, aren’t they? But they’re useless as a bag of rocks by themselves for my grand prize.”
Melina tilts her head, a bubble of curiosity breaking through the rage and despair. “And that is?”
“Neutralizing the influence of SCP-8711. With you and your demon of a partner, we’ll be able to find the source, and turn off the spigot with minimal influence from the ontokinetic effects—” she keeps rambling, her voice trickling into the distance.
Melina drops the glass; it pings on the floor. Instant fear twisting her guts like a knife. Oh no. That’s worse.
“If you’re cooperative, and good, maybe we’ll even let you go at the end. Maybe we’ll offer to help you with your existential problem.” Eulades chatters on, voice nothing more than the chirp of a cricket in her mind. "It must be so upsetting, unable to slot neatly into place with the rest of reality. Distressing, disorienting. The pure terror of it. What's it like?"
The world tilts around Melina. Walls closing in. She’s insane. She's worse than mother. This woman doesn’t have the slightest clue about her. Her throat feels tight, she pulls on the collar of her nightshirt.
“Nevermind, I'm sure even you can't describe it. Being how much of a stain on normalcy you are, maybe you can't even comprehend what's wrong. Maybe that's your normal baseline? A fascinating thought. Sick animals beying for relief without even realizing it. Here I am, to be your shepherd through the dark. This will be such a demonstration, proof to the council that we can take on these massive anomalies and win. Help you stop being monsters beasts. Of course they’ll forgive any trans—”
She’ll kill us. Kill me on site. I was told never to come back. She's worse than this woman, pretending to be my mother. Images flick through her mind in endless, rapid succession.
“Of course we’ll be able to assert normalcy, if you’re very lucky and very cooperative, we might even consider making you a person again.”
Melina stares at her, through her stunned, frozen in place. In simultaneity she wants to curl up into a ball, cease to exist, undo all the life decisions that led her to this point. At the same time, she wants to rip this woman’s mind from her body, flay it to the point of gibbering insanity, and then rebuild it and subject it to the process repeatedly till the end of time. It's what her mother deserved. It's what this woman deserves. It's probably what she deserved had she continued on that path.
Only a monster could think like this. Right? She knows what this was like. How deluded and all consuming this fantasy of superiority, of being above, blessed by the universe feels in the twisted mind. Then, she was shaken out of it, her chains unbound. To be here, in the spot opposite of what she once was… For a moment, she wonders how she got to this point.
There's only one way to break this mindset. That is through force of exposure.
She's not enough to break this. If she tries, she'll get a round of reality torture.
I thought we destroyed this, that these normalcy monsters all died with the GOC when we ripped out its spine. I am going to die. We never should have left the Hand. We never should have left the library. We never should have become involved with the Hand, with Moose, with any of this. We didn’t root all the rot out, it’s grown and festered here, in this nightmare. Worse, we’re going to step foot on her island, and she’s going to obliterate me and Cardea or they’re going to crush us conceptually and use our remains to polish their pristine tiles.
It takes only a moment to realize a chuckle is bursting from her lips. Terribly pained, manic and deranged it grows into a full laugh, slamming through her chest like a derailing freight train.
“Is something funny about this?”
The laughs come harder, louder, rocking her whole body, pain flaring in her lungs. What a joke. What a horrible, morbid joke. Gods above how did we even fucking get here? How did I get here. Is this punishment for not being enough?
Melina curls forward as Eulades attempts to say something, her voice drowned out by the maniacal and agonizing laughs pouring out of Melina. Tears start to leak from her eyes, dripping onto the floor in a small river.
She wheezes in pain, chest cinching like a vice as despair roils across her skin in luminescent purple waves.
No one is coming to save us from this madness. No one is coming to save me. I'm going to die screaming in the dark.
"This is wildly unprofessional, Dr. Anagnostis."
Her head rolls to one side holding the screen in her eyes, Cardea pacing the cell impatiently.
No she can't give in. She can't let her mother be right. She can't let them win.
No, get it together. You can't fall apart now. She's still depending on you. Its your turn to protect her. Do this, not for yourself, for her. Between the laughs she manages to force her body slowly up into a sitting position.
“Are you quite done?” Eulades's voice trickles back into the foreground of her mind, annoyance peaking in the tone.
It’s been a long time, but I have never known her to walk back on her word. But there's a chance. Even a slim chance of recognizing what's happening here.
“How,” she says clutching her chest tightly, feeling the hammer of her heart as her hand shakes against her skin, “can I take this insanity seriously. How can I not laugh in the face of my own impending demise, at how untethered you are, what you have done to us to ride carelessly forward on a horse named death, dragging us along through the quagmire behind you.”
She carved her own path, just like you. All you need to do, is help her understand.
Her words strike a nerve, Eulades eyes bugging out of her skull suddenly wild and bloodshot as she screeches. “I am not insane! I am a visionary scientist who will save thousands of lives from things like you. You think it’s funny that this anomaly stole my family from me, as they steal from millions of other people every year?”
Melina glances towards the camera, catching Julian’s hand hovering at the control panel. “What I think is, that you are a monster. No I don't think it. I know what you are. A coward who does not understand the forces she is meddling with. You stand on the precipice of a doom whose temple holds the horizon, and you cannot comprehend its depth. No not cannot, you refuse to, your viewpoint is too narrow, perspective too limited. Reality doesn't perfectly mold itself to your narrow boxes, it's complicated, nuanced, and vast beyond all of us." Melina laughs sucking in breath. "I am going to die, you will die, Cardea will die, everyone here is going to die because of your obsessive hate. Your need to feel superior. That is what I’m laughing at, that I am going to die screaming because of an idiot.” She slams her hands on the table, startling the guards. “And the truth is I am terrified.”
Melina stops, time slowing to a trickling crawl as the brilliance of inspiration crackles straight up her spine slamming into her brain.
The muses, in whatever twisted form AWCY has them in, take her. Epiphany at the moment of despair. Hope in the dark.
Her eyes dart left and right rapidly, staring at the table. To get there, they will have to leave this place behind. This is a fortress with no hope of escape. But out there, there’s a chance. There’s a chance to reach her in her own domain. A chance we can slip their chains.
She wants to cry with the relief the realization brings.
Cry because it requires bending the knee and kissing a stupid ring.
It's the option she hates the most, and the only one with any viability.
It’s not hopeless. I just have to kill my pride, and wait for the opportunity.
Eurylochus quakes with rage, standing over her, turned away to face towards Julian. "Julian, up the—"
But I can not tell this monster. If she knew, what's really there, she wouldn’t believe us. It wouldn’t increase our odds of survival. No, if she knew, she might abandon the attempt and kill us here and now. We have to set the trap, and hope she takes the bait. Ice ripples through her fingers as they quake. This option is terrible, but there’s nothing else. If I refuse, she’ll fry me and Cardea. Or worse, action the blackmail. There's no walking back from those things. There’s no other out, █████ will never reach us in time.
Melina speaks, sharply cutting Eulades off. “I’ll do it.”
The other woman looks back at her and blinks, rage slipping from her face, replaced by confusion. “What?”
“I’ll do it.” If I can get back to Cardea, we can forge—
“Just like that?” Eulades face twists between incredulous disbelief and surprise. As if its really so hard to believe that they would agree. Her eyes narrow. "Whats your game."
Melina doesn’t respond. This is plan C and it is all we have.
A heavy, awkward silence sits between them for a minute or so.
Eulades sighs. “Would you at least elaborate on what has you so terrified?”
Hope blinks brightly in the dark. Perhaps now is a good time for measured retaliation.
“No. It is something that has to be experienced,” Melina says darkly. “I’ve given you my answer, I have nothing else to say.”
Eurylochus’s face reddens, for a moment it seems she's going to have another outburst, but then she checks her watch and she sighs. "Fine. Perhaps your partner will provide more enlightenment."
“She will not, but you are most welcome to try. Cardea has less tolerance for fools than I.” She suppresses the tremble in her voice, and the shaking of her hands to force a smirk to curl across her own lips, satisfied with her own jab, but bracing for the consequences.
Nothing comes, and Eulades stands, irritation draped across the narrowing of her eyes. “There’s one more thing, and we're on a tight schedule, unless you have any more to add?”
“I do have one request,” Melina says, dragging the memory from the depths of her brain.
There's no way they brought it. But it's worth considering.
“Oh?”
“Would someone please get me and my partner some fucking clothes?!”
﹏𓊝﹏
﹏𓊝﹏
2.5 It's Killing Me to See You this Way
Site-189 Firing Range
A collar snaps snugly around Melina's neck as she seethes. A small flashing christmas light, one of two, emerges from the circuit box powering the collar, and blinks green every few seconds.
Now she really has been marked as a slave.
Rage. A lightning storm of sparks and flame in her chest mingling with the numbness of terror flaying up her spine like thundersnow during a bad winter storm. Collared like an animal. Like a slave.
The room she's been marched into is long, exceptionally so given the dimensions of the site. Are they using some pocket space technology? Magic even? Seems hypocritical.
Cubicle like divots open out onto a firing ranges that stretches for hundreds of meters. The room and the hallway just before it reek of gunpower and metal polish as she stands in the doorway. She can just barely feel the threshold beyond into a clean space with none of the crushing flood of reality that permeates the rest of the cursed site. Tiny threads of abstract string break through the tiny, crushing gap and worm their way outwards, unfettered and quickly unwinding only to wither with the field crushes the base of the strand. It's a torture all its own to be so close to relief.
Why is this here? Why would you build a room like this, shielded from the SRAs? Are they testing something? Thaumic weaponry?
Her tongue moves over cracked, dry lips, instincts screaming to take a step forward, bite into the dry flesh and spark blood, spring it into tiny needles and secure freedom. But the gun pressed against the back of her skull, and Eulades in front of her with the remote at the ready stop her from giving in to instinct.
"Now, I’m sure I don’t need to tell you what this fun little thing does," Eulades coos in her ear with delight, tilting a remote back and forth with far too much glee.
Melina's robes are a comfort in this moment. She's not entirely sure how they had them, but suspects that they were probably stolen from her room by one of the soldiers, as a perverse trophy.
She's glad, and sickened in many ways. At the perversion of her robes as a trophy. At the fact that had they bothered to look too close, bothered even to suspect, then they would have known.
She knows how the Foundation talks about her people. How the world talks about them. Its why she buries her heritage. Slathers it in the myth of who she was in history. Not what she was from.
They're monsters in the anomalous world's eyes. Rightfully so. It's strange, how no one ever blinks twice when they learn who she is. Question, wait, isn't that where they ruled? She wonders if Moose knew. If Moose knows. Surely, she must.
The magic in the robes threads' buzzes, defiant of the SRAs. It would be extremely easy to break the façade, reach deep for the blood she just refreshed, bring to bear all that stored power.
Hell she might even be fast enough to block the bullet to her skull. Fast enough maybe to cut off Eulades's arm, stop her pressing the button. But then, the whole Foundation will find out what she is.
"But try any—"
"You will fry us like bugs. I understood the point the first dozen times you made it." The bravado doesn’t hide the shaking of her hands inside the folds of her robes. She still doesn't have her implement. She could get by without it, but its security leaves her feeling half naked.
"Good, glad we understand each other. Now, since your files are heavily redacted, I need a little demonstration of just what you can do." Eulades pats the side of Melina’s face, the skin seeps with a taint that will take weeks to wash out. "Now, go on. I don’t have all day."
Melina suppresses a sneer, entering the elongated room. Relief floods every fiber of her being, all the distortion and shearing of her conceptual threads falling away. She'll user regular magic. Avoid reality bending. None of the blood.
Better. Sweet relief. She almost starts to cry. Without a watch she can't tell how long they've been here, but the hours have felt like days.
Her ontokinetic senses fail to penetrate through the walls, threads curling along the surface like snakes. Lead?
She breathes in and out, finding her center, eyes opening, the rim of lilac sliding like curtains over her irises. Beneath the robe and ontokinetic skin, she can feel the marks worming in her skin, burning to life. Muscles relax, the pins and needles in her skull abating.
Reality unfolds before her gaze, conceptual spiderwebs arcing across the room in infinitesimal fractal folds, jutting into the walls, the floors, the ceiling, the targets far in the distance. The strings are all within her grasp, and she is the puppetmaster. All she needs to do now, is pull, and make reality dance to her will. The robes congeal tighly to her skin, begging to be used. She strokes them softly, assuring them there will be another day.
She focuses on the targets in the distance, tracing all possible paths to them, even the ones that aren't yet formed.
She grins, lips pulled back baring white teeth. It's not joy, its a threat display.
They want a demonstration. Through the side of her skull and the periphery, tiny electronic interchanges whisper through space between collar and remote. If I give them too little, they could execute me on the spot. The same is true if I show them the depths I can reach, I become a threat to large to control. Moderation is the key to survival. I hope.
"We haven't got all day, get on with it!" Jacobs shouts at her from just outside the doorway in the observation box, growing impatient with the audible tapping of his foot.
She considers the strings. They have just enough reach to turn the glass pane into a shower of death. She could target the cameras in the corners, obliterate them, and then the blood would be free to use. No, too slow, can't decapitate all of them. She fidgets with her fingers, mentally sliding open lists of glyphs and spells. Or, I could try to disintegrate them. She looks up at the roof.
Maybe try to bring the roof down atop their heads, aim to collapse and shatter the spine before they get the collar’s signal off but— She swallows, hands shaking. No, not without knowing where Cardea is. Not with the deadmans switch. She’d be dead in seconds. I—hecate's sacred fires— I have to dance to their beat.
A deep breath.
I'll dance to show them what true life is.
She extends her hands in the air in a slow arc, eyes falling closed. The whole room pulses with purple light, a deep full body thrum leaking through even to the observation box. Radial astral discharge throbs in the atmosphere, snaking through each and every conceptual string. It thrums beneath her skin, echoing of the marks that lie hidden. The whole room burns, abstract webs bend, thrash, entagle with rich curls of lilac ripping from her body and striking outwards like vipers, anchoring reality as a puppet to her strings.
Raw power courses through her skin, a manic smile forcing its way onto her lips. Wisps congeal along fingertips, threads entangle, thickening and wrapping into branching fibers.
Blood magic is not the only kind that brings her pleasure.
Her terror, rage, despair, all of it melts in the security of pure power.
Lets give them a show.
Sharp glee rips from her throat in a chirping laugh as she launches into a dance. Light bursts in waves tumbling outwards, ripping into spirals from her boots. Threads of purple spin and twirl along the ground into geometric shapes. Three steps forward, two steps back, the growing geometry smearing outwards and following her steps. Her hair rises, luminescence pouring through the twine of her robes. Snaking arcane symbols burn into the fabric, synergizing without the use of blood.
Currents of air ripple around her as if she were a thunderstorm, ripping past and into the observation box where they buffet her audience. Thunder rolls on an unseen horizon, violet electricity crackling in her ears.
This is my domain.
She claps once, and then the dance truly begins.
This!
Her feet carry her through a spinning twirl. The air stirs as the boots slide on the floor. Lines of ever-growing purple radiance ripple outwards; one hand snaps forwards, lavender twirls of geoemetric lightbursts spinning into glyphs along the tips of her fingers. Flick of the wrist. Thunderclap, lighting bursts forth in a roar as a ruinous bolt slams down range and smashes a target.
Is
Violence arcs through the atmosphere with her arm as is snakes in, and then pushes back out. Thick columns of light burn from SUV sized pools of royal-purple glyphs, screeching down the range and smashing into the charred human outlines. The whole room shakes with tremendous force.
My
Folding in somatic motions with the blood dance was the best decision I ever made.
POWER.
She barely notices the laughs thundering from her lungs.
The next string of motion snares together in her mind, and her body follows. She leaps like a ballerina. Light pours down her extending leg, a glyph spinning off the sole of her boot. The columns of water ripple and freeze in a sharp wave of blistering chill. Both columns tremble, and then burst outwards, hundreds of fiercesome spikes arcing in all directions.
Only a gymnast could hit the ground and roll better than she does now. She pops back up on her knees in a slide and abruptly brings it to a halt by slamming her palms into the floor like a sledgehammer. Cascading circles of lilac blossom on the floor, the walls, the ceiling, and rip down the length of the chamber in a wave of displacing earth. They shatter the ice into razor sharp shards as sharpened spikes of rock smash through the targets and into the far wall.
A figureskater after a perfect landing, she rises, spinning on one heel back to full height. Thirteen claps echo, pounding her hands against each other as she roars "Sybyll I beseech thine power!"
The glyphic circle at her feet roils and whips inwards, surging up her boots. It flows upwards, consuming her skin with brilliant purple light. For a fraction of a second, the glyphs and sigils beneath her second skin burn through. Wings and a tail of geometric swirling patterns burst from her back, robe congealing into arcs and runs of glimmering scales as horns curl up from her skin.
Too much Melina. You’re getting close to showing too much. Don't reach into the blood.
For the briefest of moments her eyes narrow into draconic slits. Infernos howl in her chest. Thumb and forefinger press to lips.
She screams.
She screams with power.
She screams to humiliate her mother.
Screams to tell the whole world she is more than what she was.
Violet, blue, and green flame tears from her throat in a mass of snarling doom. Trapped by the room's confines, the column of flame howls and roars in a tight spiral along the walls, arcing down range and slamming into whatever might be left of the targets at the far end.
Her hair and robes whip behind her, heat from the burning atmosphere pouring back to flush against her face.
Through sheer willpower, she snaps the fingers closed. Flames burn against her closed fingers before she jams her jaw shut like she's just eaten a bad meal, and swallows the furious power forcefully. Palms smash together in a thunderous clap, a hurricane of wind tearing through the flames.
The power building in her chest and fingers rings in her ears, eyes narrowing as she roars with furious exertion. It takes all her breath control and focus, the entirety of her conceptual mass to not cave to the instinct to fully bear the might of reality on her shoulders. Blood pounds in her ears, whispers rising as the material plane glitches around her. Flashes of distortion threaten to peel the ontokinetic second skin away and reveal her truth to their captors.
Her hands part. They shake copiously, crackles of purple static jumping finger to finger.
Reality rips apart before her, conceptual fingers pulling and snapping webs further and further apart. The far wall drags briskly away. It's as if it's attached to a jet room, the whole space lengthening impossibly fast.
Cyclones of abstract ideas thunder into reality, space-time flickering through jungle, desert, abyssal ocean, grassy plains caught in the throes of a calamitous thunderstorm, the howling gust of a typhoon tossing naval vessels about like toy ducks on vicious waves. She looks through time, through space, and she knows reality like she rarely ever does.
TOO FAR. YOU HAVE TO STOP. She's in the blood now. She's not sure when she slipped, but its feeding the condensing mass between her fingers.
Gravity folds inwards between her hands, matter compressing and condensing with such rapidity and brilliance that the blossoming star that bursts into existence nearly blinds her.
In the next moments it dies a horrible death, plunging into a never-ending dark spheroid of orange-haloed gravitational compression. Time seems to slow to a crawl as she watches storms of static-electric-discharge rip between skin and singularity.
Is this what the twins feel like at the peek of their power? Is this what Mother felt like when she gave into the blood?
Then she screams like a banshee, feeling it start to pull at her own conceptual threads. She backhands it. It resists for a millisecond, feasting on the blood might of the robe, like it doesn't want to let go. Then, the light bursts in a blinding purple flash, force rocketing her back into the wall as displaced air ripples the loose skin of her cheeks. The singularity blinks and surges forward like a particle beam, faster than the eye can track, leaving a gash of ruined floor in its wake.
Time slows to an acheing crawl as her web brushes against something at the other end. Familiarity, a name slinging back down the strings.
Her eyes widen, heart freezing as she leaps to her feet. Pure terror iceing every inch of skin. Legs and arms work on autopilot as she peels herself off the wall, breaking into a dead sprint in defiance of the typhoon force winds.
But she's too late. Too late to correct the mistake. Too late for the blood drawn shielding glyph to be of any use.
She's done what she promised to never do.
no.
Reality snaps back like a rubberband, slamming the target wall against the gravitational warp. Wind rips back down the range buffeting her and her audience, black consuming the entire end of the room for seven-tenths of a second before it’s over.
No.
Her ears ring, reality tilting as she grapples with what she’s just done. Telescopic magic concentrates in her irises, pooling beneath the gathering tears. She barely feels the impact of her knees hitting the ground.
No!
At the other end of the decimated range, secured to the back wall, missed in the heat of her focus, is the source of her terror. Great spouts of pooled blood streak in arcs along the wall, and on the floor. A mop of maroon hair hangs from the head of a body. Massive gashes oozr blood from every limb and surface, only just now starting to heal.
No gods no! What have I done!? What did they make me do!?
She used blood magic against her greatest love.
Melina howls. She howls like she hasn’t in a lifetime, rounding with all that residual power on her audience, reaching deep into the robes to grasp for her brother's blood. Cataclysmic fury and anguish burns through her whole being.
There's a port in the observation room glass, already opened. She raises her hand, electricity crackling off her fingers.
She receives 3 tranq. darts to the chest. The door to the range pops open, and she turns her face, only to receive a rifle butt to the face. Then comes the cruel agony of the collar’s activation.
She doesn’t feel the tile smashing into her skull. She doesn’t feel anything but grief.
Trashing on the floor, the dark sets in, the void swallowing her in its eternally greedy maw.