I think I'm getting the hang of this job.
Gerald walks into the Information Team break room and heads for the machine, because he wants a coffee and because he has been awake for a very long time and the two facts are related.
A yellow-haired agent crosses the room behind him, trips over nothing at all, and puts a full cup of boiling coffee across his shoulder and down the side of the navy plate.
"AGHHHH— FUCK—"
Archer straightens up with an expression of enormous innocence.
"Oops. Silly me. I should watch where I'm going."
Gerald hits him.
It's not a decision. His arm goes and Archer goes with it, backward over a table, and lands in a spread of somebody else's lunch.
"Fucking prick."
Correct him.
I already did.
Cooper is up and across the room fast for a man who had been sitting down.
"What the hell is going on here?"
Archer gets himself upright, grits his teeth, and wipes the blood off his nose with the back of his wrist.
"Nothing. I just tripped."
He mutters something on his way out that doesn't carry.
Cooper sighs and starts picking up what came off the table.
Gerald feels the guilt arrive about four seconds late and crouches to help.
"Sorry about that."
"Nah. He was asking for it." Cooper stacks a tray. "I just wish you could've gone a bit easier on him. He's an agent too, y'know."
Gerald nods and finishes wiping the coffee off the floor and doesn't say what he's thinking
He looks at the murky brown soaking into the joints of the plate.
Right. Back to Control. This needs cleaning.
Energy quota's nearly done anyway.
"Captain of the Control Team. Care to explain why you are making a mess in my department?"
Ah, shit.
Here we go again.
"Information Team Sephirah Yesod." Gerald straightens. "It's funny how you only ever turn up after an issue occurs."
The single purple eye does not move.
"I don't see how that is relevant to what I've just said."
I can feel my blood pressure going.
Punish him.
Rectify his ignorance.
Shut up.
You aren't in control. I am.
"It's relevant because one of your agents started an altercation with me. Am I expected not to retaliate?"
"No. You are expected to file a report with the Sephirah of the agent's department." Yesod's banding shifts as he folds his arms. "Not every provocation permits a confrontational response."
This guy.
"Got it. Can I go now?"
Yesod stares at him for a long moment.
"I do not want to hear about something like this again. We do very delicate work here."
"Maybe you wouldn't," Gerald says, "if your agents were under control."
"...What was that?"
Gerald clears his throat and walks away at a leisurely pace.
"Now, if you'll excuse me."
— — —
(Pov: Yesod)
Troublemakers.
Everywhere I go. They crawl out of the walls.
Ugh. What a headache.
"Cooper. Clean this up, and deny entry to anyone outside Information Team for the remainder of the shift."
Everything is messy because of these inept, underdeveloped homunculi. And I am the one who has to tidy it.
"I also want reports on every Abnormality currently held in this department. Including individual enkephalin production, day over day."
Cooper nods and goes to relay it to Hunter.
Good. That should straighten things out for the moment.
Now. The rest of the policy revisions need resubmitting to the manager.
I cannot believe they were operating under these conditions. It's barbaric.
Yesod writes four lines of notes to himself with calculated precision, and moves off toward the central Information room at a slightly increased pace.
— — —
(Pov: Manager)
"Let me ask you a question, Manager."
The manager doesn't look up from the report. "Go ahead."
"What would you do," Angela says, "if one of your subordinates who is harvesting energy from an Abnormality, in order to meet the quota, shall face certain death doing so?"
He does look up then.
"...That's an odd thing to ask."
"It is a very basic question. I am certain you know the right answer."
He thinks about a work log with two repression entries on it.
"I'd save the employee."
"..."
Angela lets the silence run.
"Sigh. It's so simple. I cannot believe I have to remind you." She squares the folder against her forearm. "The manager's role is to oversee energy production. And that only. You are not here to take care of the employees."
"Not that I have known you for a long time. But I never took you for such a humanitarian."
"Right."
"The truest answer would be to harvest enough energy before such a situation could arise." A pause. "Lobotomy Corporation is an industry giant, and its mission to produce energy is our top priority."
"Noted."
"It was such a simple question for me. Mayhaps not for you." Another pause, longer. "If I were human, I would have said: how disappointing."
"Please do not worry. I will not make such a statement."
"I'm an AI, after all."
The manager writes nothing down for a while.
Then, because it's the eighth day and the numbers are good and there is nothing at all on any of the screens that looks like a problem, he goes back to the report.
— — —
(Pov: Gerald)
Back on the Control floor he submits the plate for cleaning, which leaves him in the base black with the red armband and no work order and, unusually, absolutely nothing to do.
Maybe I'll go see Punishing Bird.
...
No. Maybe not.
He goes to the vending machine instead and finds the row where the NüTrition Chocolate Chip Almond Nut granola bars live standing empty.
"What the fuck?"
He presses the button four more times and then kicks the machine.
"Fuuuck."
He looks at the alternatives, which are a war crime, and reluctantly buys the plain original chips.
Better than nothing, I guess.
He eats them walking, and that's how he ends up outside O-02-56 anyway, and finds somebody already there.
A brown-haired agent in the Beak set, white pistol on the hip, the light armor, fumbling with the document in its bracket.
"Hey. Haven't seen you around here before. What's your name?"
The agent jumps and the document comes apart in his hands, pages going everywhere.
"O-oh, crap—"
He gets down and starts gathering them, glancing up at Gerald and back down.
"H-hello, sir. I'm Thomas. The rookie. I only got hired today."
Neat. I can spare some time to show him the ropes.
"Nice to meet you. I'm Gerald. Captain of the Control Team."
Thomas stands and squares the pages and puts the document back in the bracket, badly.
Gerald notices, and files, and does not act on, the fact that he squares it with his thumbs the way somebody does when they have handled a lot of paper.
"Did you read everything on there?"
"Y-yeah. Pretty sure I've got it all memorized."
Good.
Then you'll know what's actually in that room now.
Because I read that document three days ago and it said small avian, non-hostile, produces a small necklace under favorable conditions, and yesterday it said something else entirely, and nobody has told me who edits them.
"Great. Then I'll walk you through the procedure inside. Get you used to the work."
Thomas tilts his head.
"I remember reading in the employee handbook. Only one person is permitted in an Abnormality's containment unit at a time."
Gerald waves it off and reaches for an excuse.
"Don't worry about that. I'm— uh. Captain. I don't have to worry about things like that."
Something flickers behind Thomas's eyes, and a smile arrives on his face.
"Is that really true?"
"Yeah, yeah." Gerald gives him a couple of rough pats on the shoulder and changes the subject. "Let's not waste any more time. First lesson."
He drags the rookie in through the door.
— — —
The thing on the floor of the containment unit turns its head.
It is standing, because there is nothing in the room it can perch on anymore. Grey and white, wings folded and enormous, talons spread on the concrete. Behind the head, very faintly, a ring.
In the center of the chest, five red lobes.
Thomas makes a small sound.
"Yeah," Gerald says. "Take a second."
He crosses his arms and nudges him forward.
"Go on. I'll watch and give you pointers."
Thomas approaches, and his shoulders are up around his ears.
"H-hey, little birdie. I— I—"
He turns around, trembling.
"C-can you do the first part? Please?"
What the hell. This is the easiest part.
"All you have to do is sweep the floor. What's hard about that?"
Thomas holds out the broom in both hands.
"I just want to watch you do it first. I'll get more confidence watching you. Please."
Sigh.
He's hopeless.
"Alright. But after this I'm not helping you with anything else."
Gerald takes the broom and sweeps the loose feathers into the pan, they're the length of his forearm now, and reaches up, out of pure habit, to put a hand on the side of the enormous head.
It permits it.
Then it comes forward and tugs at his cheek with a beak that could take his jaw off, carefully, the exact same way it used to.
"Alright, alright. Stop. I've got you a snack—"
It doesn't stop. It keeps pulling at his face with something like insistence, hard enough to hurt, dragging his head around toward the door.
"I get it, I'm sorry, this time I could only get chi—"
Something goes into the back of his head.
Hot liquid runs down inside his collar.
"Whhgrrghh tgghe FFFuugcht—"
He turns, sluggish, everything at half speed.
"...Thomas?"
Thomas is standing four feet away with the white pistol level in both hands, and his face has nothing nervous on it at all. It is cold, and it is doing arithmetic.
He fires twice more.
Gerald gets his forearms up on instinct and both rounds go into them and both arms stop working.
"Tch. How are you not dead yet?"
Gerald coughs blood down his own chest and gets Penitence off his hip with fingers he can barely feel.
"Why?"
Thomas rubs his temple and shakes his head, almost sympathetic.
"What's the use in telling a dead man?"
Gerald pushes everything he has into his legs.
The world slows the way it does now, he sees the rounds leave the barrel, sees the line each one is going to take, starts moving out of the wa—
Splat.
He was fast enough. His body wasn't.
The fourth round goes into the side of his neck and everything below his jaw stops taking orders, and he goes down.
On the way down he swings.
The blade takes both of Thomas's legs off at once, cleanly, at the knee.
Thomas's eyes go enormous.
"AHHHHH — YOU PIECE OF SHIT—"
He drags himself forward on his hands, gets a fistful of Gerald's hair, grinds his face into the floor and puts the barrel against the back of his skull and empties the magazine into it.
Four rounds. Then two more on an empty chamber, clicking.
Gerald had stopped some time before the third.
Everything is red.
— — —
(Pov: ???)
I really screwed up.
I had my guard down. And I paid the price in full.
...
The nothing does not respond to this.
Gerald's consciousness drifts in it and does not surface.
Why haven't I woken up in my room yet.
He starts, gently, to panic.
What if I don't get another chance?
What if I'm just... stuck. Dead, and stuck, and I can't warn any of them, and the day just keeps going without me—
The silence does no hand whatsoever in helping.
DAMN IT—
Whirrr...
That sound again.
The same one. The one from the couch, the one he hasn't been able to explain to himself since day five.
Gerald tries to project his voice, and gets very little of it out.
"Wh-o... AA-re you...?"
And a silhouette emerges from the murk in front of him.
It is standing on a level that this space does not have. Its outline is entirely black and entirely certain, and every part of Gerald that still functions wants to look somewhere else.
"Are my words reaching you," it says, "or is this iteration, like the rest, destined for disregard?"
The voice is warped and it is enormous and it is mature in a way Gerald is not.
And it sounds, unmistakably, like him.
He forces it out.
"Y-ye...s."
The silhouette steps closer, and appraises him from the boots up, and the pressure of the attention alone makes him drop his eyes.
"You might be the convergence I require. In return, you are allotted two questions. Utilize precision."
Seeing no other option available to a man with a hole in the back of his head, Gerald asks the first.
"W-wh—"
His voice shrills out and stops entirely.
"Is this it? The extent of your capabilities lies in the few words you dare utter before me?"
With palpable annoyance, the figure snaps. The pressure comes off Gerald's chest.
"What— what did you do to me?"
"Is this the first of few impudent questions?"
"N-no. Ahem."
He collects himself.
"Who are you?"
"Redundant. Deemed unnecessary." A pause. "One question remains."
...
Gerald gawks at it.
How shameless can somebody actually get.
First he doesn't answer, and now he's counting it—
"That's not fair of you."
"Deal with it."
This little piece of shit.
"Fine." Gerald breathes, which he is not doing. "Why can I remember the loops in this facility."
"Partially through the Abnormality known as #^$#@!%&#&."
The name does not arrive. Something goes through the middle of it and comes out the other side as noise.
"It was unintended at first. I was not ready to reactivate the protocol." The silhouette's tone flattens further. "This is its mess. Not mine."
Gerald's head spins. He has more questions than he started with.
"Hold on. Which Abnormality? I couldn't make out what you said."
"Why should I repeat myself. Your queries have been satiated."
"I just want concrete information. I literally could not hear you."
"...Maybe this will suffice."
"They are the very first one you met in this cycle of remembrance."
Gerald churns through it, which is difficult, because his thoughts are moving like something being dragged.
One Sin?
...One Sin did this?
His hand goes up, and the crown of thorns is on his head. Here. In this place, where he has no body.
I guess it attached to my... soul. Mind. Whatever this is.
Either way. I guess I'm a bit thankful.
"Great," he says. "So what's next?"
"Nothing."
"What?"
"I hold no domain over when your astral projection will re-enter that disgusting shell you call a body." The silhouette has already turned away. "Leave me to my devices."
The silence comes back. The whirring continues underneath it.
"...Are you not going to leave?"
"Leave to where. You are occupying my space."
A small amount of malice comes off it.
"Coincidentally, you also interfere with my work by the mere notion of your voice entering my mind for even the fraction of a zeptosecond."
...
Wait.
Does this mean I can annoy him until he gives me more answers?
"Don't you dare even dream about it."
— — —
(Pov: Manager)
"Motherfucker."
The manager slams both palms flat.
"Why do the cameras turn off when Gerald is in a room with an Abnormality?"
The screen for O-02-56 is a flat grey rectangle with a padlock in the corner.
"Angela!"
She steps in with documents against her forearm.
"Yes, Manager?"
"Did you look into the camera problem I told you about?"
Angela sets the documents down.
"Energy reports have been declining for some time. Random surges appear to be taking appliances out of commission. This would include the cameras."
She straightens.
"Manager. Have you updated the security system on your terminal recently?"
"Ha. So you think this is a virus."
Angela frowns.
"No. I think it was a targeted attack." She picks the documents back up. "Consider my words, if you will."
And she leaves, heels going down the corridor.
The manager opens a joint channel.
— [CONNECTION ESTABLISHED] —
(X)Malkuth. What the hell is going on in your department? I can't see into Punishing Bird's room.
(M)Oopsies! My apologies, Manager! I've been sorting out the less compliant employees, just as you asked of me!
(X)When did I ever ask you to do that.
(Y)Apologies for interrupting, Manager. Why have you contacted me as well?
(X)Because I want to check whether Punishing Bird has any special effects I haven't seen yet.
(Y)No, Manager. Everything in the managerial document on that Abnormality is everything you need to know.
(X)The managerial document changed twice this week.
(Y)...Then everything in the managerial document is, currently, everything you need to know.
(M)Yeah! What he said! What's got you so worked up anyway? Gerald is a competent employee and he gets the job done in a timely manner!
(X)I suppose you're right. I just have a bad feeling about this whole turn of events.
(Y)Manager. If I may. For decisions of this importance, trust only your rational thought.
(X)...Right. Well. Malkuth, I'd like you to check on the current state of affairs in Punishing Bird's room.
(M)You got it, Manager!
— [CONNECTION TERMINATED] —
Sigh.
Once again. I really hope I'm being paranoid.
— — —
(Pov: Thomas)
Shit.
This should hold for now.
Thomas gets his belt off and works it around the top of one stump and then uses the sleeve of his jacket on the other, and lays the two amputated pieces of himself roughly where legs would go.
I'll play it as a freak accident. Bird went off, killed the captain, took my legs.
That works. That works fine.
That stupid fucker just had to ruin everything.
How's a cripple supposed to make captain of the Control Team.
Never mind stay here at all, instead of being shipped back to the City—
He shudders involuntarily, and hates himself for it.
I have to make the right moves from here.
The bird has not stopped.
It has been standing over the body since Gerald went down, and it has not moved toward Thomas and it has not moved away, and it is looking at him with an expression he refuses to interpret.
Then it starts pecking at his shoulder. Hard. Then harder.
Then it takes a strip out of his arm.
"Get off— get off—"
This stupid fucking bird.
Thomas has had enough. He raises the pistol, puts the sight on the five red lobes in the center of its chest, and fires.
The bird hits the floor.
And then it stops being a bird.
The wings come off the back of it in a way wings do not, and the grey goes out and something the color of a wound comes up through it, and the frame goes on getting bigger past the point where it should have hit the ceiling.
Thomas watches it happen with his mouth open.
The door comes off its runner.
Lisa is through first with the Horn already charged, Yuri behind her, Mao last and fastest, Mao gets in front of the first strike and takes it on Penitence, which he has picked up off the floor beside a corpse, and the talon closes on his forearm and throws him across the room into the far wall.
Lisa brings the pincers of the Horn together on the right wing and the room fills with a sound like a building coming down.
----..-....-.-.-----...-...----..-
-.-.-.-....-.....-------..-.
What...?
Thomas's head is spinning. There is blood coming out of both his ears and running down his neck.
What the hell is happening—
His eyes go to Gerald's, which are open and glazed and pointed at nothing, and something cold gets into his chest and stays there.
I have to get out of here.
He crawls for the door, and every inch of it drags at what is left of his thighs.
Yuri sees him going, breaks off, grabs his arm and hauls him out into the corridor.
She props him against the wall and pulls a kit off her back and pops it open and starts working on the punctures in his face and shoulder.
"Thomas. Good lord, what happened in there?"
She bites her lip and wipes blood off his cheekbone with her thumb.
"And why the hell is Gerald dead?"
Thomas runs through every excuse he has and none of them survive contact.
His heart is going hard enough to hurt.
"F-fuck. That bird turned on us out of nowhere—"
"Thomas—"
"Gerald was teaching me the ropes and it fucking killed him, I swear—"
He can barely hold it in. His whole body will not stop shaking.
Yuri narrows her eyes.
Then she sighs, and pulls the bandage tight enough to make him whimper, and stands.
"We'll talk more about this later."
And she goes back in.
Thomas waits until she's through the door.
Then he starts crawling the other way, toward the armory, with his eyes very wide.
If I can just get in there—
I can save myself—
— — —
(Pov: Yuri)
Thomas wasn't telling the whole truth. I could tell.
(?)Correct. I had already verified that.
(*)He was lookin' pretty guilty, wasn't he. Real guilty.
(?)Correct. His facial microexpression pattern indicates partial responsibility for the incident.
I see.
...
She has stopped being surprised by them, is the thing. She stopped somewhere around day four. She does not remember exactly when they started and she has decided, firmly and repeatedly, not to look directly at that.
Well. Can't do much about it now except back up Lisa and Mao.
Yuri comes through the door and the room is worse.
Mao's weapon is mangled past recognition and he has abandoned it and is engaging a thing four times his size with his hands. Lisa is bleeding from the shoulder and from a wrecked hand and is still holding the Horn E.G.O weapon up in both of them.
"Fuck, Mao, get back!"
Her perception drops into the slow place. She brings Today's Expression up, the grinning skin-mask of a pistol, the teeth of it stretching as the charge builds, and puts three rounds into the central mass.
They cling and expand outward, growing lumps of new flesh over the joints, and the thing goes down under its own weight.
It thrashes on the floor with rage.
And its stomach opens.
(?)Analyzing. Chance of successfully suppressing the Abnormality is below two percent.
(*)Shit. That's not a very high number, is it.
(?)No. It is astronomically low.
(*)So what the hell are we supposed to do here?
(?)A wise decision would be to run.
Fuck that. I'm getting Lisa and Mao out first.
(?)That is a very poor decision.
And I make very poor choices.
Yuri brings the pistol up and starts a charge, and the face on it begins to turn angry.
The bird isn't interested in her.
All of its stomachs converge on the body lying in the middle of the floor. They wrap it and lift it, the head hangs back, the pale face twitching, and the tendrils go red.
Gerald's skin begins to burn from the inside. The color comes up under it like something being poured in. His eyes lose the grey entirely.
A guttural roar comes out of a throat with four holes in it.
(?)...
(*)That thing—
(?)...Yes. It appears to have defiled Gerald's corpse further.
Yuri's face twists into something that is a cousin of the thing hanging in the tendrils, except that hers has a person behind it.
"DIE, YOU PIECE OF SHIT—"
She fires.
The round visibly warps the air around it, black tendrils crackling off the edges as it crosses the room, and where it lands it eats straight through flesh to bone and pins the bird to the wall in its own superheated remains.
Yuri's eyes start to bleed. She does not care very much.
(?)Your chance of success has risen to five percent.
(*)The hell do you mean, only five—
(?)The undead Gerald will begin attacking at any moment.
And on cue, he is standing in front of her, and a roundhouse kick lands in the center of her chest.
— — —
(Pov: Mao)
Yuri goes into the far wall and stops in a shape people don't stop in.
Mao gets one hand on the wall and drags himself up off it using every single thing he has left.
"Oi. You ugly piece of shit."
The head snaps toward the noise.
The body turns after it, slowly, arms coming out from the sides. The mouth opens on teeth that have gotten longer since the last time Mao looked, and saliva comes off them onto the floor.
Kid.
Whatever's in there. I'm real sorry.
It lunges and hits the wall where Mao was standing.
Mao's kick caves in the side of its knee and it goes down hard.
He chops the back of its neck to put it out, a habit from a place he doesn't talk about, and realizes halfway through the motion that it isn't conscious to begin with.
Stupid. Stupid habit.
It's hand comes up and takes the E.G.O suit off him like the skin off a fruit, and he goes up into the air.
Halfway down, the arm winds back to put a hole through his chest.
Whoosh.
And it stops.
Two inches out. Absolutely still.
Mao drops the rest of the way and hits the ground.
"Uugh..."
He can't move. He doesn't feel anything below the collarbone and he has been in enough places to know what that means.
Blood comes up into his mouth slowly.
He gets his head turned far enough to see Lisa face down on the tile, taken off her feet before she'd have seen anything coming.
...
Aw, hell.
Kid. You better remember this one.
The dark comes up on him.
And he lets it do as it pleases.
.
.
.
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