Awesome picture Dripik! Not quite as I imagined it but it's interesting to see a fan's interpretation. I hope you draw more!
Sorry this chapter's so overdue. It's been a very hard chapter to write; I can't confess to knowing much about child-care and Dionysia's a very complex child! She's badly raised, certainly, but the vykkers went to the trouble of badly raising her
the hard way!
But it's here at last! I'm fairly happy with the outcome but of course I always want to hear your opinion. That's right, YOU!
Best of all I managed to find an excuse to use a truly awesome word in the last sentence!
Chapter 21
Under the guidance of their psychologist, a vykker named Edwin Mehler, the eight vykkers raised Dionysia much the same way Cartel sligs were raised, except with a heavier emphasis on education and a more inflated perspective of her own importance. Certainly she did not meet many sligs in her early life, but she met a few mudokons with the obvious message: ‘they are one species; you are another. You are better than them’.
Her superiority over others was indeed a key point in her upbringing, admittedly more so than was intended.
Krik was not popular with certain members of the team, and when Dionysia was a young child it became increasingly apparent to the other vykkers that he wanted to play a bigger influence on her than they were prepared to accept without a fight. One particularly unpleasant vykker (in Krik’s opinion, at least) named Dachau, the same vykker to had threatened to turn Krik in when he told them of his samples from Skillya’s DNA, seemed to take it as his personal mission to prevent Dionysia from growing attached to Krik, and of course the successful scientist had one thing to aid him that Krik had next to nothing of.
It was tragically true, even for vykkers, that if you didn’t have money on Mudos, then you had nothing. Money was a sign of status. It was assumed that the only reason a vykker would have little money after his fortieth birthday was because he was a poor scientist, which was mainly the reason Krik had struggled to get a half-decent job since his troubles with Skillya. If you did not have money, you could not easily earn money.
And so when Dachau had started presenting the young Dionysia with expensive gifts and treats, Krik saw her slip out of his hands like sand. On one incident Dachau had presented her with a sugar mudokon pop – a sweet treat (totally meat free, but in the shape of a mudokon) usually reserved for the children of the higher species (that is, glukkons and vykkers) – and she had carried it around for hours as she ate it, savouring every bite. One of the vykkers had laughed and announced, “A regular little Skillya isn’t she!”
Krik had had more than one reason not to laugh along with everyone else at this joke. For one, he had seen Skillya’s eating habits first hand and found nothing funny about them. Secondly, Dionysia had barely looked his way since Dachau had started doting on her all these presents and sweets.
It was a subject of much discussion how much of her persona Dionysia had inherited from Skillya. Was her arrogance, her expectation that everyone would treat her with respect, a result of her genealogy, or of how they had raised her? There were other surprises awaiting them coiled within her genes. Her first few weeks of life had been shaky, and worrying for the vykkers, as she had struggled to develop and hold on to life. For a few days it had all seemed lost, but she had fought back and with the help of a few chemical supplements, several suggested by Krik himself, she had won her battle over death and lived through her short infancy. There had been much work done between the vykkers to try and uncover just what had gone so badly wrong inside of her to cause such dangerous early months.
Her life expectancy, they had decided, was probably between 20 and 30 years assuming something didn’t go drastically wrong with her biology and cut that time short. Her infanthood had been short, no longer than what you would expect of a slig.
The greatest shock to all of the vykkers except Krik was a fault they found very early: there were certain chemicals vital to survival that her body wasn’t producing enough of, and without regular top-ups administered by injection every two weeks she wouldn’t live for very long, certainly not an Oddworld month. The chemicals in question were easy and cheap to procure for the industrial vykkers, however, so it was not a great tragedy as long as they kept her close.
“Still,” One of them had said slowly, “These things are easy enough for us to collect but would be almost impossible for natives to find.”
“Is that a problem?” Someone had replied in a reedy voice, “Just another reason for her not to run away, not that I expect she would,” He added.
Was that a suspicious glance in Krik’s direction? He himself lowered his gaze and said nothing. He would not let them know how he had added that little defect himself, how Dionysia was, among everything else, a test subject for one of his own ideas with which he intended to turn his life around,
as long as it worked! And it was partly that that fuelled his wish to be closer to her than the others, so he could monitor the condition closely without arousing their suspicion.
The number of needles that all this meant they were having to poke into Dionysia may have been a problem, since in most creatures it would foretell some rather extensive scarring, but Decrough had rather cunningly suggested to Krik in the early stages of genetic assembly a certain genome that made the skin develop a resistance to scarring, so that it healed more quickly and indeed more totally than was regular. Apart from a few minute lumps on her underarm, where they regularly injected her chemical supplements, her skin was almost unblemished from their work.
Her skin had grown slightly darker during her first year of life, and rings of deep purple had grown in her feather, beside its original colour of red, though this was not that unusual: most mudokons had two or more colours in their feather. She was muscular, but her skin was smoother, less sinuous, than a normal mudokon’s, which may have been related to her slig DNA.
It had been a shock to them all when they found out that Dionysia knew of her odd relationship with Skillya. She never said how she found out, and it indeed it seemed as likely as anything else that she didn’t remember herself, as one doesn’t know how they learnt to speak. None of them had ever told her, or at least never owned up to telling her, and so it was generally assumed that she had overheard them speaking about it. Certainly it was not unlikely, for she practically worshipped the vykkers (which, it must be said, none of them ever complained about) and when she wasn’t in lessons she was often wandering among the labs, following them, watching them, though never getting in the way. She was not at all squeamish about blood or surgery, as long as it wasn’t herself under the knife, which probably was simply because she’d been brought up with it, so it was not unlikely that she overheard a few private conversations here and there. This did not worry the vykkers as much as might be expected as they were, after all, raising her to spy on other mudokons, but finding out that she knew about Skillya none-the-less terrified them. They held a meeting in which it was announced that they must never mention the slig queen unless it was undeniably necessary. On different occasions they each spent a long time lecturing Dionysia about how she must never repeat what she knew about herself and Skillya to anyone, ever, not even to one of them. They told her so many times that she grew angry, not uncommon in itself, but it was unusual for her anger to be directed so strongly at one of the vykkers, but still they told her, over and over again, until every one of them was totally satisfied that she understood.
They all knew what could happen to them if the truth about Skillya’s DNA in Dionysia became known to an outsider. Female worker-class females were rare. Female sligs, other than the queen, were totally unheard of, either because they simply didn’t occur due to sligs’ genetics, or because Skillya, fearing competition, killed any female sligs she laid. No one knew for sure and even Krik had no idea either way.
Dionysia was infertile. Krik had made totally sure that she could not possibly be fertile when he had made her, and even then the vykkers had operated on her at an early stage to make it certain, and then again when Dionysia had revealed that she knew their secret. However, this would never appease the wrath of Skillya, who had grown if anything
more irritable and destructive with age, were she to find out. They would all be killed; Dionysia and all of the scientists, and Krik had no interest in finding himself before Skillya for a second time. This too they explained to Dionysia no end of times; if the word got out that she was related to Skillya then they would all die slow, horrible deaths.
Though the full force of Dionysia’s temper (or at least what they took to be its full force) was rarely directed at the vykkers, her anger was not something rarely seen. Especially during the early half of her childhood she had become angry almost whenever she hadn’t got her own way, and it had taken hard work to make her realise that they wouldn’t obey her every whim. They had, for a short while, regretted doting on her so much when she was a child. She got angry when she was hurt, if she was disturbed when she did not wish to be, and her moods were very changeable: she could be laughing along one minute and furious the next. She had a cruel streak too, which reminded Krik very much of Queen Skillya. It infuriated him to see Dachau and her talking quietly together and then have her look up at him and laugh maliciously. He wandered what she was being told, and it made him more determined to win her over from the other vykker.
The problem he faced was of course
how to win her over. He couldn’t match the gifts Dachau presented her with, and he knew less about children than he did about animal welfare. He tried, on more than one occasion, to talk to her, to have a conversation with her, but she always appeared uninterested from the start, and then made a huge display of boredom until he got so angry with her that he was glad when she wandered off. He felt sure that she didn’t treat the other vykkers that way and was certain that Dachau had set her against him in their private conversations. He would have murdered the other vykker if he thought he could have gotten away with it.
On a more positive note, a mudokon called Abe had escaped from a factory and caused a huge terrorist scare on the other side of Mudos just a few weeks after Dionysia’s birth, and their boss, Decrough, had spoken to the glukkon funding this project and, as the glukkon and most of the rest of the industrial world was so frightened by events they had all received hefty pay-rises. Krik was being paid significantly less than the rest of the team but still an impressive amount, certainly enough to boost his reputation when he was finished with the Denial of Nature Study.
Things changed at last for Krik when Dionysia was about a year and a half old, about 9 or 10 in the equivalent mental age of a vykker, and a new problem began to arise: her voice. That girl could
shout! She began laughing loudly, talking loudly, shouting, yelling and making more noise than a bull scrab in mating season. It is amazing just how difficult writing up a report on developmental biochemistry in a prototypical model can become when said model is shouting at the top of her bloody prototypical lungs in the next room. Krik was sure Dachau was putting her up to it until he spotted the other vykker ranting to Decrough about the problem one afternoon when Dionysia was safely away in lessons with Mehler.
“It’s like trying to work down a mine-shaft! I cannot concentrate; I swear if you don’t shut her up some how I’m leaving.”
Decrough, who was busy with some chemical experiment at the time, hadn’t even bothered to look up when he answered. “You’re the one whose hand she eats out of night and day. If you can’t make her lower her voice, Dachau, then I don’t see what the rest of us can do.” As the head of the team, Decrough office was decidedly more soundproof than any of the others, so he retained the right to be less concerned with her noisiness than the rest of them.
“Odd, seal her mouth with duct tape or something!” Dachau raved.
“We could always just stitch her lips,” Suggested one of the other vykkers who had heard Dachau’s shouting and had decided to join in the conversation. “Progressive mudokon stitches of course.”
Progressing mudokon stitching was a special type of lip stitching intended for any mudokons who were intended to keep speaking, just not so loudly. Unlike tight, permanent intern stitches, PM stitches were slightly elastic so they stretched a small amount, just loose enough for the mudokon to talk at a low level and eat without too much hindrance (at least once they became used to it), but they would not be able to raise their voice. It was painful for the mudokon, certainly, but they were expected to get used to it. Then over time the elastic would weaken, the stitches would loosen and the mudokon would be able to speak more freely, though still not nearly as freely as they would be able to without the stitches at all. Raising their voices would, by the end, be possible, if somewhat painful, but hopefully by that time the mudokon would have learnt to keep quiet.
The decision to stitch Dionysia’s lips was agreed on unanimously, with the exception of Decrough who announced that he would take no part in the affair, and a few days later they coerced Dionysia onto an operating table and gassed her into a semi-comatose state to keep her quiet and still while they conducted the procedure.
They had expected her to be angry when she woke up, after all it was an incapacitating operation and it would hurt a bit until she got used to it.
They had not expected her to wail upon waking and run to her room where she lay on her bed shrieking and sobbing through barely open lips. Dachau had gone to ‘talk some sense into her’ and after much screaming had ensued from within her room, he returned muttering viciously about how she was overreacting, “Attention seeking brat, blowing totally out of proportion…”
Krik was not sure if she was faking her reaction or not, but he decided to go and speak to her, so after Dachau shut himself up in his office to fume angrily in his expensive swivel chair for an hour or two, he too headed to her room.
The shrieking had stopped by this point, but she was still crying, heaving in deep breaths and letting them out jerkily, making her chest swell and deflate oddly. She was lying on her front, her head turned away from him when he entered quietly. He let the door close with a bump and, hearing the noise, she turned to see who had come in. Tears stained her face and blood was running from the wounds in her lips. She saw him, mumbled a few choice profanities and turned away.
“Dionysia,” He began, but was instantly cut off by another loud curse.
“We’re here to help you,” He informed her grouchily. She made an odd noise, somewhere between a cynical snort and a sob. Realising his tone of voice wasn’t helping, he tried to sound more concerned. “Look, I don’t know why this is hurting you so much-”
“You think I’m faking it. I don’t want another lecture,” She informed him, her voice oddly muffled as she tried to speak without opening her lips more than half a centimetre.
“I really don’t know if you’re genuinely in pain or if you’re only pretending. I wish to find out so that if you are hurting I can try and help. The others informed me that nothing went wrong in the operation,” He said, implying (untruthfully) that he had not taken part in the procedure, “So if there’s something wrong it’s in you and we need to know about it so we can fix it.” He moved closer and bent down over her bed, “Let me look at your lips.”
Very reluctantly she rolled over, exposing her face to him. He bent down lower to examine her more closely, took a small torch out of the black doctor’s bag he carried with him and shone it over her mouth. Her lips were clamped as closely together as possible and blood was oozing from the holes in her lips where the stitches ran. “Open your mouth,” He instructed. Her lips parted a tiny amount. “As wide as you can, please,” He said tartly.
She hissed with anger and turned away.
“Look, we can’t remove the stitches,” He informed her, beginning to loose patience.
“Why not?”
“Because we put them there in the first place for a very important reason; one which you will come to understand in time,” He replied tactfully, while quietly hoping she would
never come to understand why they had done it. It would simply be more trouble than it was worth. “Believe me, it would be more painful taking them out now than leaving them in.” He paused, letting his voice soften again, “I promise you you’ll get used to them in a couple of days. Your lips will toughen up and the stitches will stretch gradually until you can open your mouth more widely. Before long you won’t even notice them.”
He could here her sniffling back tears gently so he reached into his bag again. “I have some painkillers here that will help for a little while. I’ll just get you some water to wash them down.”
He poured a glass of water from the sink in her room and handed her a couple of pills from his bag. When she lifted the glass to drink a fair amount of the water dribbled down her chin. Her face screwed up in frustration and she raised the glass in anger. He reacted quickly and pressed a delicate hand against it before she could fling it across the room. “Don’t worry,” He said, quickly, but as gently as he knew how, “It’s another thing you’ll have to get used to, that’s all.”
She hissed miserably again and moaned, parting her lips as little as possible, “I can barely drink from a glass! How am I supposed to eat anything when I can’t even open my mouth properly?”
“Well for the next few days you’ll have to eat soup, broth, porridge. Then as you get used to it you’ll be able to eat, just with smaller bites than what you’re used to,” He made what passed for a vykker as a friendly smile. Fortunately she was able to recognise the expression, “Before long you’ll be eating just as you were before.”
Her lips twitched, fighting off a frown, which would no doubt be painful if she lost the battle, and after swallowing the painkillers she lay down on her side on the bed. He sat over her, patting her shoulder gently. “I think perhaps you feel pain more than most people do. When you get used to the stitches we’ll do a test to find out.”
As he stood up she whispered so he could barely hear her, “Thank you.”
He gave her a friendly nod and headed for the door, but as he stepped out of the room his warm smile warped into a malignant look.
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I wanted to get the image of drifting through Krik's memory at the start there. I wanted him to be looking back on events, in no particular order, adding thoughts as they come to the front of his mind. I think the flow from memory to narrative (the bit about Dionysia getting her lips stitched to all you non-creative writing students) wasn't as smooth as it could have been. Something to work on I guess.
Anyway, let me know what you think. I'll probably be without internet access until Sunday now and I want a nice long list of replies when I get back!
My gosh I'm sleepy. If there are any spelling/grammatical mistakes in the latter third of that chapter it's because I was struggling to keep my eyes open as I typed.