Vigor Mortis

Chapter 108: Site 4

Pounding footsteps. Voices. Ragged breaths. Heartbeats. The instant I return to consciousness I am assaulted by the all-too-familiar cacophony of nonsense garbage forcing its way into my ears and to the forefront of my attention. I keep my eyes firmly shut, my breathing quiet and even, as I set about the process of consciously sorting through the overwhelming intake of information. I slowly let it pass over me, returning my panicked brain to a semblance of working order. It doesn’t have to be all at once. Filter, filter, filter…

Important sounds: my heartbeat, multiple synchronized heartbeats from some kind of nonhuman creature, the mutterings of what sounds like medical jargon, the general shape and layout of the room I’m in and the cot I’m laying on.

Next comes smell. My nose wrinkles and I wish I could just plug it, but that only kicks the problem down the road. Still, the scents here are particularly unpalatable, both sterile and sick. Blood, alcohol, sweat, that gross nutrient slurry biomancers like to shove in people. Filter, filter, filter…

I’m in a hospital. Which I suppose makes sense. I didn’t expect to wake up at all after getting bitten in half, but if I’m going to wake up anywhere it’s certainly going to be a hospital. Blessedly, I feel next to nothing from my sense of touch, so I’m probably doped up on painkillers. That’s nice. I like painkillers.

Finally, I open my eyes, and while I spend a brief moment being overwhelmed by sight one of the first things that catches my attention immediately straightens my thoughts in order. Looking back down at me, with a pleasant smile on her lips, is First Lady Penelope Vesuvius.

“Oh good,” she says, “you’re awake. Name please?”

“Templar Jelisaveta,” I grunt in answer.

She nods, glancing down at a pile of notes that she’s carrying.

“Birthday?” she asks.

“Um, Giant’s Thumb, twenty-seven years,” I say automatically.

“And how many fingers am I holding up?” she asks, holding three fingers up in front of me and two behind her back.

“Three,” I tell her.

She smirks, her misshapen golden eyes almost glittering. This is, of course, why I could immediately identify Vesuvius the Inhuman despite having never met her: no one else has that color iris, or those jagged, lizardlike pupils. And of course I doubt there are many people running around with like a dozen extra tiny hearts either, but I resolve to not go gossiping about that particular feature. Lady Vesuvius’ long blonde hair is in a single, complex braid that reaches down below her waist. Fashion-wise, she seems to be wearing a custom-made gambeson, flared and accented to highlight her frankly unfair figure in ways that might not be perfectly efficient but don’t severely compromise the integrity of the armor. And damn, it has to be expensive fucking armor. The dye job on it is masterful work, each individual fiber coated completely, the color sinking deep into the interwoven threads rather than slapped on to save costs. The end result is a woman that looks equally ready to attend a formal dinner as she is to single-handedly kill an entire army, because that’s apparently a thing she can do.

Half the Church considers her an honorary High Templar, and almost everyone considers her a national hero. Which of course immediately makes me wonder what the fuck she’s doing personally treating someone like me.

“Well, congratulations on surviving,” First Lady Vesuvius tells me, grinning like a Watcher-damned vampire bat with those crazy canines of hers. “I’m happy to report you are no longer in any immediate danger of losing your life, and I expect a full recovery within three days.”

Three days!? I very literally lost an arm and a leg. I don’t have any feeling in my body, but I attempt to flex my missing bits and underneath the covers of my cot I see them move. Ugh, wool blankets. I am extra happy my whole body is numb right now.

“How long have I been out?” I ask.

“Twelve days,” the True Lady answers, “although eleven of those were merely your squad transporting you from the forest to this facility. Your team managed to stop the bleeding, and I volunteered to take your case from there.”

I can’t help it, I’m a bit incredulous.

“Are you seriously saying that you regenerated my limbs in a day?”

“Of course not,” she answers, smugness creeping into her tone. “The basic structure is there, but I still need to perfect the detail work. I wouldn’t recommend walking on your new foot quite yet. And make sure you hold and drink this with your old hand.”

Yeah, like that isn’t still stupidly fast for a multiple limb regeneration. I knew a guy that was out of action for a month with something like this. She hands me a large cup-with-straw of—ugh—nutrient slurry. I have no idea how biomancers make this awful shit, but I start sucking it down without complaint. I am, as to be expected after intense biomancy work, brutally hungry. It actually tastes a lot better than I’m used to, sweet and with some attention to flavoring, but hardly anything tastes good to my overly sensitive tongue anyway.

After I slurp down enough of the disgusting slop that I judge I’ll just make myself uncomfortable drinking more, I decide to bluntly come out and ask. They say Vesuvius is pretty even-tempered for someone with enough screws loose to give themselves lizard eyes, and I’m not really one to beat around the bush.

“With respect, First Lady, why are you treating me?”

“I often do work for the Templars,” she answers smoothly. “You are, after all, the most effective force we possess against the vrothizo threat. I consider it no less than my national duty to assist.”

What a very politically-minded answer. It’s also obviously bullshit.

“Okay, but why have you decided to treat me?” I ask.

She laughs at that, and I think it’s actually genuine. The muscles in her shoulders just unclench the tiniest bit, the deliberacy of her actions lightening for that single moment.

“The talent in your file,” she says, tapping the papers she has in front of her. I try not to twitch as her fingernail makes a permanent mark, imperceptible to everyone but me. “It’s listed as natural biomancy, and described as ‘enhanced senses.'”

“That’s accurate, ma’am,” I say. “I couldn’t rightly tell you if the classification of biomancy is accurate or just a random guess, though. I have no control over it, from my perspective I just started to randomly see and hear things differently when I was fourteen.”

And isn’t that an understatement. I nearly went certifiably insane after my talent manifested.

“Well, I would like your permission to investigate these sensory enhancements you possess, which of course will involve a lot of medical work outside the scope of your recovery, but I believe I can get it done without delaying said recovery.”

“Permission granted,” I answer immediately.

Like I’m gonna say no to Penelope fucking Vesuvius. This woman could absolutely ruin my career on a whim. It might be nice to know a little bit more about my talent as well, but at this point in my life I have more or less made my peace with it.

The next few days are mostly uneventful for me, except for the part where she grabs one of my eyeballs and starts yanking it around. I’m going to have nightmares about that for a good long while. Other than that though, I’ve just been sitting around being bored in bed while getting a bunch of spells cast on me. At the end of the third day Lady Vesuvius just warns me that due to my enhanced senses I will probably smell something a little weird about my body as it breaks down the excess compounds from the nutrient slurry, but that it’s perfectly normal. If she discovers any actually useful information about my talent, though, she doesn’t share it with me.

Then, shortly before I’m discharged, command comes and asks how I feel about being transferred to the Inquisition.

The news stuns me speechless, but in retrospect I should’ve anticipated it. I made a wretched showing in the forest. I was supposed to scout, and I did a good job of that I think, but when it came time to fight the vrothizo I was just a liability. I’m not the best fighter, I know that. Unlike many of the Templars, my talent has no offensive applications, and physically I am well-trained but generally unimpressive by our standards. That by itself would have been fine, but then I just had to have an episode during the fight.

Most of the time, I can manage myself. My senses are stupidly precise, but with experience I know how to ignore the sight of every disgusting bump and pore in a person’s face, every wet slap of saliva as their tongue moves around in their mouth, every hint of body odor or agony of perfume (Watcher’s eyes I fucking hate perfume). Sometimes, though, usually just after waking up, the filter in my head just turns off and I’m assaulted with information.

When this happens, I usually pretend that it isn’t happening. I’m pretty unresponsive during an episode, but they tend to only last five, maybe ten seconds. They used to occur all the time, but I’ve put my damn work in and I’m much better at re-centering myself than I used to be. Still, I’ve never talked to anyone about it, because of course if I do I might lose my job. A Templar that randomly loses the capacity to distinguish between things she’s seeing is not exactly combat ready, but the episodes are so rare it was never a problem. You know, until it was.

For my pathetic failure, a failure that endangered my entire squad, I deserve the dishonor of the Inquisition. Ostensibly, the reason for my transfer is the lack of Inquisitor candidates, but I of course don’t miss the mention that the Inquisition is ‘more likely to benefit from my particular set of talents.’ Which I can’t even deny, considering that Inquisitors fight things less and look at things more, and it’s no secret which one I’m better at. It’s just… a little frightening to be asked to submit myself to sin like that. But I say yes, of course. When command makes a request, you say yes.

A month later I have learned spells that allow me to see souls and protect my own, and now I’m being shipped off to Watcher knows where. They stick me in a wagon with two other Templars and tell me to shut up, which of course immediately results in the whole wagon offending my delicate nose. My body still stinks like fucking nutrient goop, but thankfully I’m the only one that seems to notice.

For most of the journey, they actually blindfold me, which has comically little effect. Not only is wrapping cloth around my eyes itself totally useless—I can both partially see through it and navigate without sight—but either way I’m not going to remember the path we took to our destination. I’m shit for directions. All I know is that it’s miles from Skyhope, or any other city for that matter. The entire time, my escort of Templars refuses to speak a word to me, only occasionally glancing my way with thinly-veiled disgust. I’m brought to a large, empty clearing somewhere within the forest, and led down the stairs to an underground facility that I had no idea even existed.

I’m not gonna lie, for a solid thirty minutes I was terrified that I was being brought here to be executed. I’m not, obviously, but holy shit with the death glares and the blindfolds and the secret underground facility nobody has ever told me about, I feel like I have justifiable reasons to freak out a little. The whole place smells what a normal person would describe as ‘musty,’ which means I’m individually identifying at least eight separate kinds of mold (and I’m pretty sure three of them are mildly poisonous). I’m ushered into a small room before my blindfold is finally taken off, and sitting in front of me at a large desk is a man wearing Inquisitor Captain armor, minus the helmet. He looks to be no older than his mid-forties, though his full-face beard and thinning hair are almost entirely gray regardless. A nameplate on his desk reads ‘Warden Manus.’

“Welcome to Site 4,” the man tells me gruffly. As an Inquisitor Captain, he is my direct and likely only immediate superior on a deployment this far from Skyhope. “From now on, Inquisitor, you will eat here, you will sleep here, you will shit here, and maybe a couple times a month you will get to see the sky. Any unauthorized communication to any entity outside these walls under any circumstances is treason against the Church. Is that understood?”

Holy shit. What the fuck did I sign up for?

“Conceptually, sir, I understand you perfectly,” I say calmly, despite that internal panic. “If I may say so, however, I find myself a bit off-kilter. I was not briefed on this beforehand.”

Warden Manus and I are alone in his office, which is by my count ten floors underground in whatever the fuck Site 4 is. He’s sitting down behind his desk, and from his body language and tone I’m guessing that he’s not exclusively the ‘yes sir, no sir’ type. I can get away with fishing for information.

“That is by design, Inquisitor Jelisaveta,” my boss grunts. “But you did indicate in our initial investigations that you were positively disposed to a long-term deployment.”

He grins without a single trace of amusement.

“That was a mistake on your part. Now you’re one of ours.”

Ugh, he has like twelve flakes of some kind of food in his teeth. And his desk. The lacquer is so uneven! All the little pockmarks and indents, each a tiny deposit of dust and grease… I suppress an urge to shudder. Focus, Jelisaveta. I don’t think he’s mocking me. I legitimately got myself wrapped up in something with so much operational security they couldn’t even tell me it was happening until I got here. I don’t like that, but I’ll follow orders. What else am I going to do?

“What does being one of yours entail, Captain?” I ask simply.

He snorts, but gives me a slight nod of approval.

“Site 4 is a maximum-security correctional facility,” he explains. “A prison, essentially, where we keep people that cannot be contained anywhere else. As our shiny new replacement Inquisitor, you will be watching, handling, and attending to the needs of our more dangerous inmates.”

I take a deep breath to steady myself.

“Replacement Inquisitor, sir?”

“We had an incident,” the Warden says simply. “You will be fully briefed by another member of the staff. But suffice to say, Inquisitor, this is a high-stress position. Your previous Captain noted exemplary interpersonal and conflict resolution skills, along with a consistently even temperament in your file. That kind of levelheadedness is what we need here, not a warrior’s bravado.”

I nod, slowly. It’s true, I’ve always preferred doing city work to forest excursions.

“Understood, sir. In the interest of keeping a level head, would you mind just popping the bubble and telling me the most shocking thing about this facility that I currently have the clearance to know? It’s been quite the day and I feel as though it’s best to get it over with.”

Once again, he flashes that humorless grin. There’s a hint of sadism to it this time, so I immediately resolve to keep my face as straight as possible.

“Twenty floors down sits the cell where we keep former High Inquisitor Ars Rainier.”

Fuck. Yeah, I don’t keep a straight face at that one.

It certainly explains why no one is allowed to know about this place, at least. Holy shit, they have Ars here. Ars is alive! I was only a little girl during the Ars crisis, but it was still one of the most terrifying parts of my life. I’m shown to my room and given large stacks of instructional material that I’m expected to memorize within the next two days. There’s no mention of why the fuck he’s alive, except for the fact that his prisoner classification is Epsilon-Zero, which as far as I can tell is as nasty as it gets. Epsilon security protocols are intensive to the point of absurdity, including a clause about how I’m expected to lay down my life to prevent them from escaping… or from dying. Under no circumstances is an Epsilon-class prisoner allowed to die, and as such a huge slew of precautions in their security protocol is about preventing those prisoners from gaining the opportunity to kill themselves. I only have a few ideas as to why that would be considered so important, and all of them are terrifying.

The ‘Zero’ designation of Epsilon-Zero means that the risks of attempting to reform the prisoner into a functional member of society are considered categorically and unacceptably greater than the risks to personnel. A Zero-designation prisoner would normally be executed, but due to that weird clause of Epsilon-level security, Ars is kept alive.

I am, thank the Watcher, not expected (and in fact explicitly forbidden) to involve myself with the team assigned to Ars, except in the event of an emergency. Two days later, I find myself shadowing another Inquisitor as she makes the rounds in what will be our shared prisoner assignment. She has, apparently, had to do this job by herself for the month between my arrival and the loss of her prior partner, so she seems understandably exhausted and short-tempered… but still trying her best. Her name is Inquisitor Victoria, but she asks me to call her Vicki so I do the polite thing and ask her to call me Jelisa.

“Okay, so here’s my second to last. I’ll probably want to keep this one. Gamma-Four, but was Gamma-Two when we got her. She’s a splice named Altrix.”

Technically, both of us will be considered responsible for every single prisoner within our purview, but Vicki suggested that we each focus on taking half of them rather than alternating or doubling up. Which, uh, kinda seems like a security risk to me, but she insists it enables the establishment of a better rapport with the prisoners. As my senior and the only one between the two of us who has any real idea what we’re doing, I’m inclined to defer to her. So far today, we’ve mostly been making the rounds so I can see the sort of things Vicki does every day and she can introduce me to the prisoners.

Generally speaking, the facility isn’t what I expected from a prison. Most of the cells are clean and comfortable rooms, complete with furniture and reading material and mostly-private attached bathrooms. Higher-number prisoners tend to get nicer accommodations, because higher-number prisoners are the ones that can be trusted with things like tools, privacy, and so forth. Ostensibly, the ultimate goal of the prison is to rehabilitate and reintroduce its prisoners back into Valka, and the higher number you are the further you are along that track. Of course the numbering system also therefore works as an incentive to get the prisoners to play nice regardless of whether or not they are genuinely interested in helping the community, but that’s a big part of why establishing a personal relationship with them is part of our job. Class Four is pretty good, because I’m pretty sure Class Six is the point where we figure out how to get them out of prison on a permanent basis, the method of which tends to depend on the other half of their classification, which marks how dangerous they are.

My talent would make me Alpha class, assuming I got imprisoned here for whatever reason, because my talent sucks and isn’t really a danger to anybody. Gamma-class prisoners and above are where shit gets a little terrifying, so all of them are required to wear a metal collar enchanted to detect if the wearer channels any mana and immediately knock them unconscious if it does. This prevents the use of active spells or talents and is completely essential to our capacity to keep some of these prisoners locked up at all.

According to her file, Altrix has a chaos-tinged biomancy talent that allows extremely rapid tissue regeneration. Which sounds incredibly helpful, until you read the bit where if she uses her talent on a healthy target their cells multiply out of control until they end up as a massive flesh blob that starves to death minutes later. And yeah, her talent packs enough power to bypass the magic resistance of about ninety-eight percent of the population, and works on a line-of-sight basis. Ars really fucked some people up.

I triple check my soul sight and soul shield spells before we open her cell, because while Altrix doesn’t have any confirmed animancy abilities it just feels like a good idea to stay in the habit. It feels so strange to cast animancy. Instinctively I feel as though it should be some kind of wretchedly dark magic, with arcane mana structures and twisted somatic incantations… but no, it’s just kind of exactly like every other school of magic. I’m not really a great mage, but I know the essential eight like any Templar and dabbled for a while in seeing if I could use kynamancy to dull my senses, which didn’t really work out. The point is, my job now requires me to commit blasphemy as part of my daily routine, and I really expected that to seem more serious than it does.

“Okay, take off your helmet,” Vicki instructs. “I know that’s normally against protocol but we have a special dispensation for Altrix. She won’t remember your voice, she needs to see your face.”

I do so, and then Vicki knocks on the door and then opens the cell, the inside of which really looks more like a pretty decent apartment. A woman I assume must be Altrix sits on the bed with a book in hand, her head twitching every couple seconds as she stares wide-eyed in our direction. Intellectually, I’m aware that she is most likely the ugliest woman I have ever met, at least by normal standards. Every revealed part of her skin is a bumpy mass of tumor-like growths, bulging pustules of colors ranging from ashy gray to inflamed red. Personally, though, I couldn’t really care less; everyone looks hideous to me as a result of my talent, as the fine microscopic details of the human body are not at all the kind of thing that humans find pleasant to look at. Far more interesting is the woman’s soul, which unlike most splices I’ve seen today seems to be a mashup of three different people who ended up murdered and tortured into the form of someone new. Each of the souls appears to have a similar texture, like a mix of gravel and dirt, but the three nearly equal-sized parts are all different colors. If not for that change in color, however, I might not have noticed the seam between them, which implies that this particular splice is a relatively recent victim of Ars.

“Good afternoon!” Vicki says, waving cheerfully. “How are you doing today?”

“H-hello, V-Vicki,” the prisoner stammers. “W-who is t-that?”

“This is my new partner, Jelisa!” Vicki answers, injecting what seems to be genuine warmth into her exhausted features.

“W-we are p-pleased to meet you,” Altrix says. “W-would you l-like to guess, V-Vicki?”

“You know it! Let’s see… you’re Nix right now, aren’t you?”

The twitching woman grins, revealing a twisted set of teeth—literally twisted, like strips of bark twirled between someone’s fingers. So that’s a thing, but I’m way too busy appreciating how relatively clean her room smells to care. It’s not difficult to just smile right back.

“That’s r-right!” Altrix (or Nix, I guess?) answers happily.

“Yeah! I told you I’d figure it out, Nix. I’m getting pretty good at it, huh?”

“Y-yes,” the splice nods. “We a-appreciate it. Um, but y-your partner looks c-confused.”

“Well, I figured I should ask if you wanted to tell her or not.”

Nix frowns.

“N-not much to t-tell,” she says hesitantly. “W-we are three. Sometimes, one l-leads. Sometimes, we are t-together. You m-may call all of us A-altrix. But we have our own n-names, too.”

I nod. I think I get it? The soul kinda gives the basic idea away. There’s no way I’m going to be able to tell them apart like Vicki does unless I interact with her a lot, though. So in that case…

“Would you prefer I ask who you are, or simply call you Altrix?” I ask.

The smile returns, this time even wider.

“Ask, p-please,” she answers, and I resolve to do so. Of course, I have no idea how much I will be seeing the woman if Vicki splits our duties the way she proposed, but it’s an easy enough concession to remember.

Introductions established, we set onto the main purpose of our duties. First, of course, we ask if she’s feeling okay, if there’s anything she needs, if there are any problems with her room and so on. I feel like a landlord, going door-to-door and asking all her tenants if the roof is leaking, except in our case the tenants are all dangerous enough to pose a threat to society. But, you know, for a lot of them it’s entirely not their fault. They were just born this way, or in the case of Nix/Altrix, made this way. I can relate to that, kind of. Even if my talent isn’t dangerous it’s certainly not one I asked for. Altrix apparently still struggles with hers from time to time, and it’s a gamble on whether or not she immediately passes out when someone enters her room as a result of the collar detecting her trying to cast on someone.

Which would, you know, kill them, but I try not to hold it against her.

In fact, during my visit, she was really kind of fun. Nix pulled out a board game and we spent about half an hour playing it (I got my ass kicked) before Vicki declared that we have to move on to the next prisoner on our list. Not that she called them prisoners in front of Nix.

“Isn’t she just an absolute sweetheart?” Vicki asks me after we lock Nix back up. “I like to use her as a nice palate cleanser before I have to end the day with our last stop.”

“Our last stop being?” I prompt.

“One that you don’t really need to worry about. It’s only fair I take care of her, but you should meet her at least. Just don’t do a single fucking thing unless I tell you to. She’s Epsilon-One.”

I blink in surprise. Epsilon? Like the same security we keep Ars under?

“Am I even qualified for that?” I ask.

“No, but technically yes,” she sighs. “Look, just… I’m serious. Don’t say or do anything. Here’s the file.”

She hands me a worryingly thick folder which I start to thumb through immediately. The folder is covered in her gross fingerprints and the ink is uncomfortably thick, but I just ignore it, a task that becomes easy once I start to become captivated by the contents. Class Epsilon-One. Imprisoned for one year, nine months, twenty-two days. Necromancer, kynamancer, metamancer, biomancer, possible cognimancer, possible kineticist. I’m normally a pretty flat-faced person but my eyes bulge as I keep reading the list. Known abilities include empathic life detection (unknown range), undead control (vocal), physical enhancement (extreme) …Wait, instant death aura? Wight creation!? What the actual fuck? I keep reading, and the list keeps getting crazier.

“It says here she’s holding over three hundred human souls hostage?” I ask my partner. “As in like, present tense?”

“Yep,” Vicki grunts. “They’re inside her body somehow, she’s fucking psychotic. We tried everything to save them. Plea deals, bribes…”

“Torture and threats?” I finish for her, scowling at the files. “There are notes in here about how she’s immune to pain, too.”

Vicki shrugs, seemingly unrepentant. The woman’s face is hard, boiling with a hidden fury.

“We should’ve just killed her months ago, but command says no. Apparently they’re afraid it’ll make things worse.”

My eyes flash over the files as we descend down many, many flights of stairs, the cramped stone walls echoing every footstep like a drum in my ear. What startles me most is the extreme difference between the way Vicki treated the other prisoners and the way she seems inclined to treat this one. Keeping three hundred souls away from the Mistwatcher is fucked up but I feel like something more happened here, maybe something personal. I find it near the end of the files, a simple note. “Demoted from Epsilon-Three to Epsilon-One after lethal altercation with staff.” The date for the entry is about a month ago.

Well. I guess it’s time to meet the prisoner who killed my predecessor.