Wow, so quick, fresh off the market shelves, this one!
Chapter 35
Splat
R + R rooms. Sounds innocent enough: that’s until you realise that this is a vykkers version of R + R. What do you think vykkers do for fun?
The passage was long and bendy, as well as having a lot more branches off than the Cute and Cuddly Labs. I wouldn’t say that’s a good thing.
But the place seemed equally deserted, nothing living in site except for mould that was growing on the walls and various objects left lying around that I wouldn’t like to mention!
After a rather uneventful hour I was able to strip off most of my bandages without leaving a bloodstain. I stuffed the webbing into my bag, not wanting to leave it lying around.
It was it was another half an hour later when I heard a mechanical whirring up ahead and the voices of a slig and a vykker. Swiftly, I opened a conveniently placed door that I conveniently happened to be standing next to (conveniently, it wasn’t locked) and slipped in, closing the door behind me and stood against it, listening for the sound of the couple passing me and praying they wouldn’t come into this room. Conveniently, they didn’t.
As soon as they passed I moved to open the door. But then I glanced back over my shoulder and gasped.
Rows and rows of shelves hid the walls of the room. They were covered with tightly-packed glass jars, all the same shape, which fitted perfectly into the shelves leaving just millimetres of clearance between jars and shelves. Each jar was filled with fizzing pale yellow liquid and had some sort of organ or body part in them. Rows of jars containing mudokon arms fused together, slig lungs, intern gallbladders, hundreds of different kinds of organs, many I didn’t recognise (strange for someone who spent 2 (Oddworld) years in a lab).
But that wasn’t the main thing that got my attention in the room. In the centre of the metal floor there were several enormous “surgical” machines surrounding a metal bed (And I would be lying if I said I didn’t mind being near surgical machinery). And lying on the metal table was what appeared to be a mudokon. I couldn’t see that clearly because the light in the room was dim but I didn’t need a closer look to tell me that this guy wasn’t your average mudokon. Despite every cell in my body urging me to get out of that room quick, I stepped forward for a closer look.
R+R rooms. The mudokon’s body and head and legs were all perfectly normal. But where his arms should have been there were no arms. Crafted onto the sides of his body were long bluey-green tentacles, strapped to the bed and trailing down to his knees. Every angle of the surgery showed that there was no point what so ever to what had been done to that guy. The skin had been quickly sowed together and not properly fused. The tentacles were obviously very heavy, there was no way this guy would be able to carry them properly.
No, this was the vykker’s form of R+R. The mudokon’s chest was heaving quickly and unevenly as if breathing was a difficulty for him, even when unconscious. I was turning to leave when he suddenly gave an extra-load rasp and his eyes fluttered open.
He looked at me. Or at least he tried: he seemed unable to focus and his eyes kept rolling up into his head. Then he spoke in a rasping voice that sounded as if it had been broken, glued roughly together and then broken up again: “Wh-who are you?”
I gazed down at his face, pain wreathed his face and it looked as if the effort of talking almost knocked him out. For a second I thought it had lost consciousness till he opened his mouth to speak again. I interrupted him and answered: “I’ve come to save some of the prisoners here.”
Slowly an elated smile spread over his face and he actually started to cry out of either joy or pain. He tried to speak but his shattered voice box didn’t seem to want to let him so instead he raised the end of a tentacle and gently stroked my hand with it. But suddenly, the effort seemed too much for him. His eyes rolled up to his forehead and his body sank down onto the table. As he was on the edge of passing out he opened his mouth once more and said barely above a whisper, “Mudokons are the cogs that make this place work… it’s on the door…” Then he added, so quietly that I could barely hear him, even with a scrab’s ears, “you were… one of the lucky ones…”
He passed out. “You were one of the lucky ones.” I remembered my own words: “0941 of the scrabaromitoken project.” 0941. That meant 940 mudokons either died, went insane or ended up like this guy. If I had been 939 I wouldn’t have been standing here. I might not have been standing at all! “One of the lucky ones”? Talk about the understatement of the millennia. This is what happened to the mudokons that were captured by the glukkons. This is what is still happening to the mudokons who are still being captured. This is what is happening to the mudokon species, my species. And this is what Abe is fighting against. As long as this goes on, mudokons will suffer like this and die. That is why they are fighting, a few mudokons and a gabbit verses 3 species bent on the destruction of the mudokon race.
I left the room with a sick feeling in my gut.
His scarred hand branded
On moons odd face
This hero may free
The mudokon race
With skin of blue
And Spirit guides too
Only He can save our bones from brew.
But if he falls
To glukkon yoke
Mudokon nation...
...Be doomed to croak...
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