I cannot justify the four-month wait between this chapter and the last. All I can say is that this section has been one of the most emotional, and one of the hardest to write, coupled with me now having an actual (if voluntary) job and much less free time than I once did.
It is the last of this section, however, and will just about wrap things up for Stivik and Dionysia for the time being. Hopefully things will be easier after this, though I'm probabylg going to have to spend a lot of time reading old 'W@RF' threads from now on.
Tally-ho!
Chapter 29
The crushing feeling in Dionysia’s stomach gave an agonizing twinge when she saw Mehler walking towards her a few days later and she had to struggle to stop herself from frowning.
Something must have shown on her face, however, because the first thing Mehler said was, “You were hoping it would be Krik who came to see you?”
Yes she had, but she shrugged and looked away.
Mehler paused for a few seconds before saying, “Come on. We’ll go to the lab now and get this week’s tests out of the way first. How have you been feeling recently?”
“Fine.” That was one good thing at least; tests with Mehler were never as painful as with Krik. Even so, she wished that he had come this week. She wanted to be fawned over. She felt utterly miserable.
Mehler led the way to the lab, Dionysia lagging behind slightly. When they arrived he had her sit down and got to work with pills and injections.
“Is something upsetting you, Dionysia?” He asked as he got to work.
“No.”
He glanced at her and turned back to his work.
“Dionysia, what is the standard radio transmission wavelength for reporting terrorist activity?”
She swore quietly; he was going to make her go through her stupid lessons? For about 15 minutes he quizzed her as she dully rolled off answers, listening to his corrections and comments only just enough to absorb the information into the back of her mind.
As he gave her the last injection he’d laid out, he asked her, “What signs can you look for to spot a liar?”
“Body movements and eye movements, eye contact, pupil dilation, the length of time taken to answer a question, voice tone, aggression…” She trailed off.
Mehler nodded, “Is something upsetting you, Dionysia?”
“I said, no!”
A few seconds passed before she swore under her breath.
Mehler sank himself into a chair opposite hers, “What is it?”
She stared at the far wall as she answered quietly, “
Brzstrk sligs.”
“Dionysia-” He began.
“What?” She snapped.
He glared at her, “Remember who you’re talking to.”
She glared back, and then asked in a voice so sugary it was poisonous, “Yes?”
He paused a moment to rein in his temper, “You were created to cooperate with sligs. How can you expect to achieve your purpose if you don’t work with the currently existing security?”
“What use are they supposed to be to me? They’re all idiots.”
“They’re here for the same reason as you, Dion.”
She answered him icily, “None of them are
anything like me!”
Then she realised that what she had just said wasn’t correct.
* * *
She caught Stivik when he was just starting his night shift a few days later. She wanted him alone, and when he was starting work instead of finishing it.
“Stivik.”
He was at the far end of a corridor. He turned quickly when he heard her, and then growled, “What do you want?”
“I want to know why you hate muds. The other sligs just hit them for fun, because they think it makes them special. You hit them like they owe you something, like they’ve done you some great wrong. What is it?”
He glared at her appearance, anger flaring instantly, “Why should I tell you anything?”
She took a deep breath, “Because we’re the same.”
He half raised his gun, shaking in anger, “You bitch! I’m-”
“There’s no one else like us, Stivik, in this factory, or anywhere. We’re both alone. Neither of us has anyone.”
He was silent.
Worlds collided while they stood there, facing off with each other.
Eventually he spoke bitterly, “All you muds as the same.”
“I’m not a mud,” She answered automatically.
He smirked, “In you’re head, maybe.”
She shook her head. “The vykkers made me different. I’m not like them.”
He stared at her and then he turned away and gave a derisive snort, at vykkers or at her?
“Muds are savage murderers. They deserve what they get.”
She waited. After nearly a minute he went on, his back to her. “Five to one. Does that make you special, that you can fight someone who wasn’t going anywhere close to you, wasn’t expecting or looking for trouble, when you outnumber them that much? Cowardly bastards sneaking up on us. Tilic was a good leader, made sure
we got away – two of us, only a year of experience each – and he stayed behind to save the others, Burn and Stack. He knew Stack could take care of himself but Burn was useless when things got bad. He was never trained properly as a scout.”
“He got killed - Burn?” Dionysia asked quietly.
Stivik paused. “No. Stack protected him as long as he could, but they shot Stack down and smashed him with their clubs till there was nothing left of him but blood-stained dirt…” With a note of vicious triumph he added, “Tilic saved Burn from out of their hands.”
“Stivik-”
He turned to her and snarled, “They’re all the same inside. Terrorists too; they all go on about freedom and fairness and
grhzz like they’re somehow better than us, but how many sligs have been murdered by terrorists, by Abe? How many have had their bodies taken over and have been screaming in their heads as he
tears them apart?! What makes them righteous? What makes them so holy when they’re as quick as us to commit murders worse than ours, to turn brother against brother?”
She stared at him, hurting inside and trembling and wanting to tell him that sligs were no better, that they murdered for fun and gave no thought for others. It would be like talking to a scrab; it would not understand and would only try and attack her.
There was nothing she could say to him. She could see the scars of healed spooce wounds on his skin. Had those wounds come in the battle that had killed Stack?
He sneered at her, “Reality hurts, doesn’t it?”
She ran away from him.
* * *
It was a few days later, and for once, he tracked
her down.
She was in the closed sector where he had taken her the time that seemed ages ago, that he had saved her from the lab. She was alone, brooding, sat on a crate with her back against a wall. She looked around sharply when he entered but when she recognised him she lowered her gaze.
He sauntered over, leant against a wall beside her and lit a cigarette. “So what makes you so different? What makes you not like them?”
She ignored him.
He snorted. “You
are like them, aren’t you? You’re as arrogant as any terrorist.”
“Huh. No mud is as arrogant as any slig.”
He paused, “That’s what it is isn’t it? Those
gtrz vykkers made you from bits of slig, didn’t they?”
“Oh please, do you think they butchered a bunch of sligs and sowed them onto me? They’re a little more advanced than that.”
“So I’m right; they mixed up slig and mud DNA and cooked up the result? Ugh!”
“I CAN’T HELP WHAT I AM!” She yelled, her temper rising.
He hesitated. “
Grhzz.”
She stood up to walk away.
She was nearly at the door when he called after her, “Dionysia.”
She stopped.
“Why? Why would they make something like-”
She turned with a smirk. “Something like me?” He waited. She tossed her head derisively, “Because they’re expecting the arrogant terrorists to make the same mistake as you, Stivik. They think they’ll be so blind that they can’t tell the difference between a mud and,” She put on an innocent voice, “Lovely little me.” She cackled, suddenly.
He shook his head slowly, “What are you?”
“I’m the same as you, Stivik. A freak in the system.”
“No slig is like you!”
She sniggered and walked to the door.
“Oh, my Odd,” He murmured suddenly, just loud enough for her to hear, and something in his voice stopped her in her tracks.
“What?”
“You are though, aren’t you?”
“WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?”
“That vykker you worship; he was arrested when he was working for Skillya! ‘Cause he took something from her, didn’t he? He took her blood. He made you.”
She was frozen on the spot, breathing hard, her heart thumping so heavily her body seemed to shake with every beat.
“That’s right isn’t it? They made you from Skillya’s blood!”
“No!” She replied shakily, a lie about as convincing as a Rumor Kontrol conspiracy.
“
Grhzz!”
She didn’t turn around; she just ran.
* * *
Stivik sat alone in the dimly lit sector for hours.
The world seemed to be crashing around his head.
He had taken his recording box off of his pants and was playing with it, moving it from one hand to the other, flicking the panel on the back open and closed, running his fingers over the record button that in his mind seemed to represent the fate of his whole future. Was he enslaved to that button? Was he a prisoner to the power behind this box as much as any mud was a prisoner to the corporation that owned it?
He put the recorder beside him on the crate he was using as a seat and put his head in his hands.
What was he supposed to do? Betray Dionysia like he’d betrayed Tilic? Hand her over to destruction because she was an abomination, a creation so illegal the Cartel probably hadn’t even thought of writing laws to dictate such a felony?
That final discussion with Tilic kept running through his head like a recorded message on an infinite loop. “They don’t want their hero getting killed… You were destined for higher things… I thought you’d be pleased…”
What was he supposed to be, some sort of champion? Some great hero for turning in a guy who had saved his life countless times? Why was it always him who had to be the traitor? Why was he the one who always had to choose between the law and his friends, between what was right and what was… good?
Was it good that Tilic had sought to betray the glukkons? Was it right that the vykkers create a freak from blood so important it was practically sacred?
He guessed, somewhere deep inside, that Tilic had thought his actions ‘good’, but one fool’s opinion didn’t make it true. Why did vykkers destroy everything he held dear, why was he always trapped between them and glukkons?
He looked down at his metal legs. Were they worth it? Was some mobility, some enhanced vision, worth anything if it meant this much pain, this much confusion?
He reached up to remove his mask (for the first time in Odd knew how many years) but stopped himself just in time. He hadn’t sunk that low yet.
He looked at the box beside him on the crate. A sensor, he had told people it was, but a sensor for what? For liars, for thieves, for terrorists, for people who didn’t deserve to exist? Was that what Dionysia was?
Her face swam before him and he saw those big, watery yellow eyes, the stitched lips, the three-fingered hands, and his stomach lurched cruelly. Odd,
brzstrk muds!
He picked up the box, held it in his hands, felt its weight, its shape. His finger toyed with the button, pressing it in as far as he could without switching it on, letting the spring inside push it back again.
He sat their for maybe ten minutes, till everything around him seemed to sink away and he saw himself under the stars, watching a moon swathed in clouds as grief and pain swamped him and threatened to crush him, a tiny number in an enormous world, as insignificant as a star a million miles away.
A small sound at the far end of the room brought him back to reality and he pressed the button.
“67322,” He said dryly. “I’ve been talking to the mudokon experiment, 0942-DNS7-V.4. I managed to gain her trust and she told me that…” He paused. The world around him seemed silent and still, “The vykkers who made her used DNA from Queen Skillya to make her. I think the vykker I asked for information on, Dr Krik, stole it years ago. We know he was arrested for running drug tests on her so I guess he will have taken blood from her, too. I…” He stopped again, and took a second to regain himself, “I’m really certain of this. I mean, she definitely believes it and it’s not the sort of thing you’d tell your creation if it wasn’t true. I suggest that this be followed up immediately; in my mind it poses more of an imminent threat than any results I might find from my investigation of Director Bescher, who still seems perfectly clean. There’s nothing more I can achieve here.”
He pressed the button and sat for several seconds, staring down at it.
Then he looked up. She was standing in the doorway, staring at him, trembling.
“This is what you are?” She asked, and he was impressed by how level she kept her voice.
He looked down at the box again, and then up at her. “I could still smash it. They would never know. I could say it was an accident and the message would never reach them.”
“No you couldn’t, could you? You’re their prisoner. You’re no freer of them than I am of this place, of the drugs they use to keep me alive,” She said with an odd, pleading note in her voice which seemed to say, ‘Let me be wrong’.
He shook his head. “You’re right. This is what they made me. I told you they wouldn’t let me go back. I have to do what’s right, for the Cartel.”
“But since when did the Magog Cartel dictate what’s right?”
“They always have, for people like us.”
“So it’s right that I have to die, just because of what I am?”
Her question sent daggers of pain through his heart. With great difficulty, he answered, “If they say so. What’s right isn’t the same as what’s good.”
She stared at him. In the dark, at this distance, he had to imagine the tears on her cheeks.
“I hate you,” She whispered.
He knew it was a lie, but he let himself believe it was true, because it would hurt so much more if he didn’t, and he already hurt so much he couldn’t understand how he was still alive.
He stood up and walked away from her, flicking open the back of the recorder as he went, and pressing a tiny button labelled ‘send’.
* * *
Someone always has to take the blame. That is one of the rules. In this case, as high-ranking sligs barged through their large, rented lab, the vykkers blamed Mehler, because he was the one who had encouraged them to keep her alive. He was the one who had visited her last before she gave away that single, vital piece of information, who
must have told her whatever it was that made her give them away.
He never saw Dionysia again. Penniless and jobless, he vanished into obscurity, another nameless cog in the great, man-eating, industrialist machine.
The Magog Cartel covered up the whole affair brilliantly. Queen Skillya never found out about the abomination that was created from her blood, stolen from her so many years ago. The Cartel made the proposition to the small group of vykkers quite clear; they worked for the Cartel, and if they messed up, or if anything happened to Dionysia that the Cartel didn’t approve of, then Skillya would very quickly find out about their treachery.
Dionysia herself became a play-thing of the Cartel. Whatever freedom she had once felt was taken from her as the Cartel began sending her wherever and whenever they liked, as the vykkers turned their backs on her, furious that she had brought this tragedy upon them.
Still though, she sought solace in the kindness of Dr Krik, who, though colder and harsher than ever, still welcomed her to him, still protected her and let her close, and watched her with an eye that dared not lose sight of such a precious creation.
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I am on my knees, begging you to reply (even if it's only to say 'I read your story and liked/disliked it', though if you can stick a 'because' at the end of that you'll get bonus points).
Next section leads us into events of the RPG!
This is fantastic 
I absolutely love your characters and the way they evolve.
.
your story is cool, fanfic like yours are rare, there should be more of them. 
)
When Part 5 is done I'll need to take a break anyway to sort out the sections in W@RF, take notes of the events in the RPG, work out what's significant enough to include, add some Oddworld Realism to the more Mary-Suey parts of the RPG, balance characters, iron out the many, many plot holes and so on.
that's great!
(That includes you Dripik! 