Well, here we are again (it's always such a pleasure).
We're covering old ground again here, picking up with the start of Part 7; it's right after Anni and Stivik's fight; she's dying on the lab floor.
We're recovering mostly the same events but all the text is different, and I'm much happier with it than I ever was before.
Let's get on with it, shall we?
RUPTURE FARMS PRESENTS
NEW AND IMPROVED
PARAMITE PIES!
NOW 112% NATURAL!
______________________
Part 7
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Tormentor's Brink
Chapter 46
Dionysia was hiding, which is to say she was somewhere she might be looked for but where she didn’t want to be found. She was lying on the floor-level beds in one of the old recovery rooms, hoping Krik would give up searching before discovering her here. She didn’t want to suffer his irritation or coldness, and she didn’t want to suffer the confident, unassailable arrogance of the Cartel glukkon who Krik was supposed to be talking to, with her present only to be the target of sneers and snide remarks.
She missed to her core the days when she was out of this horrible little laboratory, away from her vykkers, when she could say what she wanted to glukkons in the knowledge that they feared her value and her influence over her creators. Now... well, now that was long gone. And nothing she said could dissuade the vykkers of her part in causing it.
“Didn’t you want me to get close to sligs?” Had been her first retort, shouted over and over again around about the end of the first quarter of every minor skirmish over their betrayal to the Cartel. And the comments that shortly followed, that she hadn’t told, that he’d worked it out, were met with so much scorn and cruelty that she soon gave up using it, and for the first time in her life she found herself backing away from a challenge, giving up the fight.
Had it been a year since those fights had raged backwards and forwards throughout these horrible labs where she and the vykkers were practically held as prisoners? No, more than that. Of course, the vykkers were allowed out at times. Watched constantly, restricted in their movements, yes, but at least they weren’t stuck in this tiny, mind-numbing facility
all the time! She rolled over onto her front, pressed her face into the thin mattress and growled angry curses at the injustice, the cruelty, the misery.
This proved her undoing: she made more noise than she intended, and Krik happened to be passing close to her hiding place at the time.
The door burst open and he came in shouting, “What do you think you’re doing, idiot girl? We’ve been looking for you for nearly an hour and the Cartel bastard’s been waiting for forty minutes!”
His tirade continued as she pushed herself to her feet slowly, sullenly, and mumbled moodily, “Didn’t know it was today.”
“Are you trying to get us all killed?! Do you think you can still play games with glukkons after you gave all our secrets away to that bloody spy? Are you somehow...”
She winced at the unjust accusation and let the rest of the rant wash over her as he forced her from the room and through the centre, jabbing her viciously in the back with four of his claw-tipped fingers. At least he hadn’t used
his name, though knowing Krik he probably didn’t even remember it. Decrough named the slig who’d betrayed her, betrayed them all, all the time, just to upset her for fun, and every time he said it, spat it, hissed it, it was like taking a bullet to the gut. She told herself she hated the slig, and never even let herself think of him.
Finally they arrived outside of Decrough’s office and Krik stopped shouting; Dionysia took some satisfaction in knowing that Decrough, leader of the project that birthed her, had been kicked out of his office for the visitors’ use. Her pleasure was short lived as a moment later she was stood in the corner of the room like a display to be gawked at while Krik greasily sucked up to the glukkon, who responded with open insults and mocking civility. A wiry slig, the glukkon’s bodyguard, sneered at her behind his boss’s back and mimed being hung. She glared murderously at him, and he laughed at her silently.
“Dionysia!”
She looked around sharply as Krik snarled her name; he and the glukkon were both glaring at her. There was a pregnant pause.
“Some spy,” The glukkon sneered, “If she can’t pay attention to her surroundings I don’t see what use you expect to get from her.” Then he turned back to Krik, “Anyway, the mud is getting too expensive to keep here.”
Dionysia suppressed a furious screech at being called mud and stayed silent, unaware of what she had missed, and frightened by the glukkon’s words.
Krik, too, waited silently, and she could see his claws trembling ever so slightly; this was not reassuring.
The glukkon leered, enjoying their uncertainty. “We’re not keeping it here anymore,” He said cheerfully, after the joke of their concealed fear had passed, “We’re sending it elsewhere.”
Her eyes widened and she looked up at the glukkon’s face, barely daring to believe.
“Where?” Snapped Krik.
The glukkon grinned, “We thought of a way it could be useful at last,” He replied portentously. She noticed then that he kept referring to her as ‘it’, but she would let it pass if she could just get out of this place!
“Doing what?” Krik sounded uneasy.
“We’re sending it to a factory environment; isn’t that what you wanted, to test it out? So we’ve picked a suitable place for a mud designed for anti-terrorist security: one where it might manage to run into some actual terrorists!” He was grinning at the joke only he knew the punch line to.
Dionysia was completely perplexed. “Where-” She began, and then Krik jabbed her hard and sharp in the ribs with his claws, twisting them in her flesh, and she shrieked in shock and pain, swinging a hand at him as he withdrew; she felt hot blood on her skin where he’d dug into her. She heard the whir of the slig’s pants as he doubled up in muffled laughter. Hurt disguised itself in her as anger but as she opened her mouth to shout Krik snarled at her.
“Shut up!”
His expression as furious as her own, he turned to the glukkon, “Can you skip the teasing and get to the point?” He snapped.
The glukkon, also grinning at her expense, obliged, “There’s a glukkon who owns a factory down south, and we have reason to question his loyalty to the Cartel. Your mud is being shipped there as an excuse for us to have someone keep a very close eye on him.”
“One of us?” Krik fed.
“Oh, not just any one of you!”
Krik’s expression turned mirthless, “Ah, another fine duty I’m volunteered for by the eminent Doctor Decrough.”
“Well guessed; apparently he thinks this whole messy entanglement is your fault, Dr Krik-who-was-previously-punished-for-experimenting-on-Skillya. Maybe we should ask her what she thinks?”
There they went again, threatening to tell Skillya about how she, Dionysia, was made. If they did, well, death would be the best they could hope for. And as long as the Magog Cartel could dangle that threat in front of them, they could lead them all around like meeps to a carrot.
“You’ll be expected to visit the factory once a fortnight, to check up on the mud, do whatever you need to do to it, and to make a report on the glukkon. I hope for your sake you do a good job. Oh, and if anything happens to the mud when you’re there, you might find yourself accused of destroying evidence vital to a criminal investigation, and then who knows what secrets might come out?”
“You’ve made your point,” Growled the vykker.
The glukkon grinned, “For your sake, we can only hope so.” He looked back over his shoulder at the slig and gestured him forward with a jerk of his head, “Move.”
The glukkon was just leaving the office when Krik called out, “Wait. You didn’t say what this place you’re sending us is called.”
The glukkon leered, “Didn’t I? It’s a little place down south, called Rupture Farms.”
* * *
Stivik was sat at a table in the security office. His gun was in pieces before him, half-way through a thorough clean, but Stivik had been distracted with picking splinters of glass out of his hand with a pair of slightly greasy tweezers.
It was his own stupid fault really, punching the girl with the syringe in his hand, but he’d been so lost in adrenaline that he’d not thought of it, not even noticed the pain until he was back here and already had his gun taken to bits. It was a stupid mistake, even stupider not to realise, and he’d never have done something so foolish when he was back with the pack; he could imagine Braz’s scornful laugh at the error. It would serve him right if he got poisoned by whatever the syringe had contained.
He thought of Anni, alone and helpless on the lab floor, and grinned. Even if the vykker woke up it’d take him an age to find the key where Stivik had chucked it, or force the door open. Maybe by then the girl would be beyond help. He chuckled to himself as he wiped the blood off of the tweezers onto a stretch of bandage from the roll he’d filched from the lab.
By the time he was satisfied with the state of his hand it was well after wake-up. He bandaged it up quickly, reassembled his gun and hustled out of the office.
Razor was lounging beside the door inside the cafeteria and leering at a group of mudokons huddled outside the kitchen when Stivik arrived downstairs. Razor glanced at him, nodded to the group and asked, “Those the girl’s friends?”
Stivik shrugged, “Odd knows; all muds look the same to me.”
Razor chuckled and then looked at him again. “You look like you’ve been killed and warmed up,” He said casually. “What did I miss last night?” There was accusation in his voice, as Stivik had sent him to the bunks telling him the excitement was over.
Stivik smirked at him, “The brat attacked me,” He said casually and waved his bandaged hand. “I managed to fight her off, though she was being pretty rude to the vykker when I left.” It wouldn’t hurt to start casually shifting the blame towards Dek. He doubted he’d get the vykker into much trouble but his only real concern was to keep himself out of it.
“He won’t do anything to her, will he? You said he’d wait until the boss allowed it.”
“Huh, that was before I heard what she was calling him; vykkers are touchy
brzstrks.” He huffed a laugh, “I bet they’ll hear the screams all over when Dek’s allowed to get his claws-”
“Stivik?”
Both sligs looked around in surprise, and then Razor grinned maliciously. The mud chef, Dean, had come over to them and was trying to look brave as he faced the two guards; this one wasn’t normally nervous around the sligs and Stivik grinned at how the confusion was upsetting the slaves. “What do you want?” He asked brusquely.
Dean steadied himself and said, “We haven’t seen Anni since yesterday. Boogie said she was in the lab and-”
“Then I suggest you go and ask Dek and stop bothering us,” Stivik suggested nastily and Razor guffawed. Dean nodded and hurried back to his friends.
“Muds,” Stivik muttered disgustedly and left it at that. “C’mon, I’ll grab a scrab cake from the office before we start work.”
* * *
Anni wasn’t sure if she was falling or floating, until she felt stone beneath her feet and cold wind on her face, and her eyes cleared and the vision before her took her breath away. Forests and hills and valleys were laid out before her like looking down on a living model world, a vista of Oddworld’s beauty set out before her eyes like a feast before a starving man. She drank in with her eyes all she had dreamed of for so long, but even as she did she knew she could never have it; all of this was out of her reach. She was lying on the floor of the lab; distantly she could feel the pain of her breaking body and knew... “This is a dream,” She said aloud.
“Yes,” Said a voice, and she froze. The voice was mudokon and female and she didn’t dare turn, hedged between fear and longing of who it might be.
Silence hung between them, caught in Anni’s fear. Could it be? ...Did she want it to be?
“This is a dream,” Said the voice, “But that doesn’t mean what you’re seeing isn’t real.”
She couldn’t bear it; she turned quickly on the spot. Another war of emotion tore at her; the mudokon girl was a stanger. Her skin was whiter than anything Anni had seen before, and her feather short and black as midnight. She wore a simple grey dress of native make. Anni stared at her for a moment before her gaze was stolen by the sight of the mountains rising up behind her, stretching up like pillars holding up the sky. Water cascaded in steps down the craggy face some distance away and Anni suddenly became aware of the roar of it. Up where it first appeared something massive was carved into the cliff-face, but the distance and the mist thrown up by the tumbling water stopped her identifying it. “Where am I?” She asked.
The mudokon looked at her with sparkling, sad eyes, “Dying, in an iron prison.”
The words seemed to bind Anni to the place and she felt the ache of pain in her chest and limbs, and the world around her grew darker. “I don’t want that!” She said desperately.
“And you can escape it!” The girl insisted, “But not this way! Not the way you’re going. Don’t listen to her; find another path!” The girl’s arms shot out and she grabbed Anni’s hands, and for a moment Anni felt her skin, and then she opened her eyes and looked up at the ceiling of the lab in Rupture Farms, pain heavy in her head and chest and the cold floor chilling her bones. Her heart was thudding agony through her veins instead of blood and she knew she wasn’t dead.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
(Almost forgot to edit in the italics.) A (comparatively) short one this time round, and one or two differences from the previous version, some of which have some significance.
Hope you enjoyed. Please reply, and there'll be another next week.