Cycle 003: Voyage of the Mare Crisium (Finale) WHO: Bryant and Kessie (Open to All Cycle 3 Puppets (Provided they are haven't been distilled, processed, or stuck in the incubation chamber.) WHEN: Several days after the last separation. WHERE: The Hive (Starts in Breeding Cells and goes through the Distillery to the Hub) WHAT: The very last plot post for cycle 003! Scenes started in this specific thread will count against you as incompletes if they get dropped, and any final on-screen deaths will earn points towards the score tally. Post as little or as much as you like to resolve your character’s stories! If anyone wishes to follow/interfere with Bryant and Kessie, he or she may still do so, but must exit through Bryant and Kessie's cell, as well. WARNING: This is the last thread of the cycle, so just about anything goes in here (within reason; keep it IC and feasible within this thematic setting). That means anything that you want to do that hasn't yet been done can be summed up or played out here. The next plot post will be for Cycle 4.
The Hive
Horror Story - 3rd Cycle Close
It seemed like an eternity had passed before the walls dissolved a second time, but dissolve they did. Once again, it happened shortly after the lemur group was redistributed into pairs. Another attempt at integration, socialization amongst the humans, now that the aggressive alpha male and the overly curious had been removed from the population. Another batch of holes in the system, though there were fewer this time. Only one wall to the incubation chamber was compromised, but two that were adjacent to the distillery vanished along with the dividers in the human enclosure.
The distillery was lower priority, admittedly, than the incubation room. Animals weren’t generally attracted to it, whereas the pregnant females had a tendency to draw others of their kind close for some reason. Possibly smell. There had been issues in the past with creatures compromising the incubating females -- pulling out the tubes, damaging the process -- and so harsh security measures had been established to keep that from happening. Thus far, nothing so dramatic had been needed for the distillery. The animals feared it, and didn’t attempt trespassing.
Or hadn’t attempted it in the past, at least. Certain medical examiners and energetic conspiracy theorists were somewhat unprecedented within the structure.
---
When the walls came down again, it was almost a relief, an unanticipated distraction from the way Kesiah had been feeling the past few days. After seeing Dr. Handsel eating the strange paste, she had decided it was safe to consume for herself; only after eating her fill had she realized “safe” was an arbitrary perception. It was toxic, but not in a way that would kill you, no. This was almost worse.
When her body had begun to grow hot, and she’d found herself staring at Bryant, it had taken all of Kessie’s will not to proposition the grieving man she was in a cell with. It would be completely inappropriate, she reasoned. He was grieving for Marcus, mourning his lover, and they couldn’t. It would be wrong.
She did stop eating the food, though. Water was good enough for her, after she’d filled her belly with the strange glop.
The walls came down, and Kessie looked up from where she’d been studying the strange “material” they were to use as bedding. Last time, the wall to the incubation chamber had come down. She’d seen what had happened with Jon, then, the spike that had come down and pierced through him, lifted him into the ceiling and pulled him away. This time, there seemed to be no barrier at all between them and the strange, terrifying chambers that held some of their own, and a multitude of others.
“Bryant…” Kessie pointed, biting her lip. They would expect everyone to go into the middle again, cling to each other, count who was left. But this way...this way might not be watched.
Grabbing the strange, organic-feeling blanket, Kessie flung it at the chamber. If her hunch was right, then the spiky ceiling traps had been activated by motion, or pressure. If either of those was true, they’d spear the blanket, still warm from her body, and she’d know it wasn’t safe.
If the blanket survived, well...it didn’t mean there wasn’t a trap. It just meant the trap was different.
The pink matter that comprised the blanket fell to the floor with a rather meaty sound, since it had more weight to it than fabric. Other than that, nothing happened whatsoever. No tentacles. No spikes. No giant aliens coming to collect wayward souls. Just stillness. So far as the blanket could tell, there wasn’t an apparent trap to spring.
---
Bryant had been mostly oblivious to many of Kessie’s heated stares… largely because he was busy trying to hide the effect the drugged food had on him. He was still grieving Marcus, would always grieve, but as time went on Bryant was sitting curled into a ball facing the tree less because he wanted to hide tears but more because he wanted to hide unwanted erections. He’d eaten partially because she’d eaten, partially because he knew now it was expected of him. He was likely supposed to be of some use, given that he was a broken toy that had been repaired.
Two or three small meals later and it was a little easier to put his memories of sex with Marcus into a box in his mind labeled ‘once in a lifetime’ and to assess the possibility of copulation with Kessie. His conscious, intelligent mind didn’t want to. Not because he found her unattractive, of course, but because it was bloody wrong and it wasn’t him, it was the drugs coursing through him that made him want so badly. It wouldn’t do to frighten her so whenever Bryant felt he’d have a hard time controlling himself, he’d retreated to the tree.
He was there when Kesiah called his name, pointed at the vanished wall. There was no real reason why he’d wish to gather in the centre to join the others, after all: though he cared about how they were faring, he’d already lost the worst thing he could lose. He didn’t want to have to explain his new leg to anyone else, had already seen the shock on faces in nearby pods. Bryant hadn’t made eye-contact much. Didn’t want to see what else besides shock he’d be able to read. It was bad enough that he knew what happened, that he and Kessie had talked it through. Doing it again would rip a very new bandage off a still-bleeding wound. He could control how he felt but not in front of a crowd.
So he nodded agreement, watched as she flung the blanket at the chamber, watch it’s progress with interest. The slap it made as it hit the ground was oddly reminiscent of something -- a butcher preparing a cut of meat. He’d pulled himself to stand once he was sure there were no spikes or flames or aliens coming to see what moved. ‘Come on, old boy; best get a move on. Put one foot in front of the other.’ But instead of thinking: ‘left, right, left, right,’ he caught himself thinking: ‘Marcus, Bryant, Marcus, Bryant,’ and it caused him to stand still for just a moment. It looked more like he was warily approaching the bedding… but he’d had to shake Marcus out of his mind a little. It was amazing how well he could walk, how that ridge of extra flesh had ceased to hurt as much as it had when he first woke up. Because he was who he was, an oddball medical examiner who took joy in his work, it was impossible not to think these thoughts. He just had to guard against any more thinking of Marcus’ ‘I got this, mijo’ grin and things of that nature.
Bryant did approach the flung bedding material, crouched a little to examine it. He looked at Kessie over his shoulder, confirmation that there wasn’t anything immediately around to prohibit them from going forward.
Then he straightened. After a beat of hesitation, he held his hand out for Kessie to take.
---
Kessie was wary, nearly reaching out to Bryant; even if the bedding didn’t get speared or gassed or have something untoward happen to it, she knew that was just the beginning. There were always traps. They couldn’t possibly have just dropped this wall for no reason; something had to be going on.
But Bryant didn’t get pulled into the ceiling or speared or gassed either, and he was much heavier than the strange, creepy meat-blanket she’d used as a test. When he crouched down so easily, she worried at her lip; she’d been worried about him, really, dealing with a limb that wasn’t his. He’d adjusted well, but it was Marcus’s leg. And there was just something so horrifically macabre about it, something so inherently wrong, to see the sweet doctor walking around with a leg that was a different color, covered in tattoos from a different person’s life.
Still. She wasn’t exactly qualified to give him counseling, being as she was a few screws short herself. Or at least that’s what she’d been told.
When Kessie took his hand, she couldn’t ignore the crackling itch of heat that seemed to pulse through her. Damn the aliens and their drugs; even the most basic of comforting gestures, signs of solidarity, made her want to abandon the idea of exploring the...the...pod-people. But she couldn’t. They couldn’t.
Marcus was in there. At least they were pretty sure they’d seen him. Not that they’d looked overly hard, but what was he going to do without a leg? He’d been causing trouble--Kessie had filled Bryant in on the way Marcus had attacked the stranger, the person she hadn’t seen on the ship. She didn’t know why he’d done it, or what had happened. But she’d seen the explorers get speared. She was fairly sure They didn’t take too kindly to rebels.
“So.” Her voice was shaky, but she offered Bryant up a wan smile. “Once more into the breach, dear friends? That sort of thing? See what we can see before they drug us or spike us or...or something else? I’m glad I’m with you. Really. I know it sounds stupid but I’m so grateful I’m with...with someone I can trust.”
---
Bryant’s fingers curled around Kessie’s hand, caused a stab of warmth to go through him that was a fair bit farther south than his heart, anatomically speaking. But he pushed aside arousal and focused on their unspoken intention -- to find Marcus -- and their now-spoken mission -- to see what they could see.
Her words helped. Because it was nice to know she trusted him as he trusted her, nice to hear it confirmed. “It d-doesn’t sound s-st-stupid,” Bryant mumbled, a little shyly.
But it also helped that she’d led off with something that was a quote and a question rolled into one. He’d only ever developed any sort of social life for Marcus; before that, he’d made futile attempts at getting the people around him to be as comfortable with him as they seemingly were with each other, feeling himself to be the odd man out wherever he went. Lonely, and not knowing how to change it, he’d turned to books as a logical source of solace and companionship.
Hearing the Shakespeare, Bryant looked at Kessie beside him and smiled in a way that could only be described as a grin, nodded. If he focused on words, he wouldn’t dwell on fear. Or grief. Or… desire.
“‘Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more,’” Bryant quoted, very softly, drawing from his memory what he knew of the famous Cry ‘God for Harry, England, and St. George’ speech from William Shakespeare’s Henry V. He perhaps rushed the next bit because it struck a little too close to home. “‘Or close up the wall with our English dead.’” They were heading into an area that was comprised of their dead. Worse, their should-be-dead. What they’d been able to see through the wall had looked… bad.
Bryant started walking forward, hoping Kessie would stick close. He could hear the voices of others congregating far behind them; it was now or never to go exploring. “‘In peace, there’s nothing so becomes a man as modest stillness and humility,’” he continued, in an almost conversational tone now. In his British accent, the speech he’d never seen performed, only on the printed page, came alive. Somehow, it mattered to say the next part. Then Bryant would stop, because he was a bit hazy about the middle bits anyway. He knew Hamlet better.
“‘But when the blast of war blows in our ears, then imitate the action of the tiger; stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood…’ Oh.” There was more after that, more encouraging words, but Bryant trailed off and never picked the thread back up again. His original pause was because they were into the thing now, this awful theatre of displayed agony, and it was far larger than they could’ve guessed from their small cell. Rows upon rows of creatures -- not just humans, no, there was any number of beasts and birds and things -- in clear cylindrical drums. There were tubes in every conceivable orifice.
And they writhed.
“Oh.” Bryant repeated again. His steps had slowed, halted, but his eyes darted about from cylinder to cylinder, to the overwhelming largeness of this place. It seemed endless from where he stood. It was easier to say he stopped talking because he was overwhelmed than because he remembered a few lines towards the end of the speech he’d been quoting: ‘And you, good yeoman, whose limbs were made in England, show us here the mettle of your pasture; let us swear that you are worth your breeding.’
Not all of Bryant’s limbs were made in England. Not anymore.
He and Kessie were here in part to look for the donor of his left leg. They thought they’d seen Marcus -- they hadn’t been sure, but they’d thought so. Now Bryant was trembling slightly. If the tubes right in front of him were any indication, Bryant didn’t know how he was going to handle seeing Marcus so tortured, so close.
---
Kessie gripped Bryant’s hand a little tighter when they stepped into the distillery. She hadn’t been expecting it to be so vast, with so many pods. And she hadn’t expected the things in the pods to actually be moving.
“This is horrible.” The words were a whisper, shocked and appalled, as Kesiah’s eyes locked on one tube, then another. Pulling away from Bryant, she stepped closer, pressing her fingers against the glass; the body inside--no one she recognized--twitched and spasmed as though it realized someone was there. There were tubes everywhere. In her eyes, even, and suddenly Kessie felt as though she was going to vomit.
“How…?” The word was shaky; Kessie stepped back, into Bryant, not caring that they were both naked. She didn’t appreciate weakness, or vulnerability; for a moment, all she wanted was to bury her face in the Briton’s broad chest and hide.
“How could anyone do this? Anything? Bryant...Bryant, I think those people are still alive in there.” Oh, that thought was too much, and Kessie turned her face away, retching. Nothing came up--she managed to control herself--but it was...horrible.
“I don’t...are you sure you want to see if the one we saw was Marcus?” She didn’t even hardly know the man, and she didn’t want to see him like this. Nerves exposed for them, bottled in some horrific torturous nightmare. What must it be like? She couldn’t even begin to imagine. They had to do something!
But what could they possibly do? Two naked prisoners, surrounded by technology they couldn’t even fathom? Kesiah shook her head, unable to take her eyes off the tubes. It didn’t matter. They had to do something. They had to.
---
When Kesiah backed into him, Bryant nearly wrapped an arm around her as they stood, back to chest. Pure horror was doing a good job of keeping the drugged arousal at bay. The idea that they were naked or the fact that he hadn’t been able to stop thinking about pushing her into a wall and having his way with her: these were things that had been buried under a fairly thick coating of fear and revulsion. He thought to reach out to her when she retched but couldn’t do anything to make this any more palatable to witness.
Morbid fascination kept his eyes on the… the tubed torso that Kessie had sought contact with. He was still looking at it when she asked her questions and he answered them in order, even the one that could have been rhetorical. “I-I-I don’t know how they could d-do this.” Bryant thought of the aquatic apes he’d watched so closely with such wonder those first days. “They… maybe they’re trying to… to…” But he hadn’t a clue how to finish that sentence adequately, even though he had a few ideas.
“And no,” he said firmly to Kessie. “No, I do not want to see Marcus, not… not like this. But I owe him that much, don’t you think?” An odd blend of shame and disgust tinged his words as he looked down at his -- Marcus’ -- left leg.
Tears welled unbidden and Bryant dashed them away with an angry gesture. None of that anger was present as he held his hand out to Kessie again, as he mumbled, “I… I t-think we saw him… ah, maybe he’s over this way?” He tore his stare away from the tube they stood in front of and he guided their steps a few rows over.
---
Given his preference, Marcus Caravahlo would have liked to have gone down fighting. He’d tried, in his own way, by beating the rapist in the cell next to his unrecognizable. Had he refrained from that act of violence, it might have taken longer for the humans to have been gassed and put under closer inspection. His fight had been lost at that point, however, without ever even seeing the face of his true opponent. Proven to be violent, volatile, and testing infertile (which was deemed to be likely the source of his violence), Marcus was extraneous. Useless save for two things: the distillery, and the processing lab. He hadn’t been conscious when they’d removed his limbs, but the coring process was hard to stay unconscious through. It was a hollowing, a widening of channels already present in the human body, but ones not accustomed to invasion. That had woken him up, at intervals. If his vocal chords hadn’t already been deemed extraneous and removed, along with all four of his limbs, the screams would have been quite amazing.
Hard to struggle, without arms and legs, let alone the ability to see, or scream. There was no way for him to tear the things out of him, no way to pull away from them, no anesthetic. He felt every agonizing moment, up to and including the moment the thick, gelatinous fluid filled his lungs and kept him suspended in the drum. There was no numbing agent in the fluid, and Marcus had surely been driven insane, by that point. Hypersensitive to every sensation, with nothing to focus on except the steady, agonizingly slow drip of liquids going through him, pooling within him, collecting, maturing, and draining out through the system. Left with little more than the awareness of the constant seeping, he couldn’t be expected to cling to sanity as well.
And still, Marcus fought. The rise and fall of his chest was strong and steady. Muscles would flex despite the missing parts, in spite of the tubes snaking through him, and he’d twist, jerk violently within the fluid, still trying to pull away. Pull it all out. Get free. His face was twisted in silent, enraged screams, and he cried, as well. He cried, but the tears were just collected, intermingled with the other liquids being pushed through his body. It was a wonder he could cry at all, really, with the majority of his eyes lost to the coring process. A wonder and a pity, that such an untold amount of trauma didn’t result in death, or at least unconsciousness. Hard to struggle, though, without arms and legs… and very, very hard to sleep without his fucking eyes.
---
It was Bryant’s turn to back up, to bump gently against Kessie, as they beheld the cylinder that held what was left of Marcus. The doctor’s breath came in quick little rips, and tremors racked his frame, as if his body was trying to take in some of Marcus’ suffering into himself. It wasn’t hard to see that Marcus was still Marcus, struggling and fighting it all the way; Bryant thought he’d spit curses and gnash his teeth in snarls if those things were allowed him. His left leg -- Marcus’ leg -- ached in sympathy.
But sympathy was hardly the strongest feeling Bryant had coursing through him right now. Revulsion was racing neck and neck against terror for first place, though there was a dark horse in the running that was coming up fast to bypass the others: rage.
He approached the quivering, straining thing that was the shell of his lover, the man who’d held his heart before aliens came along and squashed it flat and then poured fluids into it to get every single ounce of joy and love from Bryant via Marcus. He closed his eyes -- if Marcus couldn’t see, it didn’t seem fair that he could -- and touched the torso tube. On instinct, just in case the consciousness within could sense more than agony, Bryant pressed a kiss to the glass.
When he turned to face Kessie, the doctor was graver than she’d ever seen him, something hard and cold in his blue eyes. “You’re right,” Bryant agreed slowly. “We do need to do something.” His eyes flicked upward, searched around. “T-they have to be controlling all of… all of this from bloody somewhere. If we can find it, maybe w-we can attempt to disable it… if we can’t, well…” The mild-mannered medical examiner looked murderous and sounded not a little like Marcus as he capped his line: “Then we burn this fucker down.”
---
When they found Marcus, saw him writhing and struggling in the tube, Kessie’s hands flew to cover her mouth. And when Bryant backed up, bumped into her, she instinctively braced her hands on his arms, held him. This was madness. Insanity. This was not the work of a rational creature, or even a pseudo-rational one. This was the work of something wicked. Evil.
They were not the creatures she’d thought. These were not like the ones that had come to her in the forest. These were something else.
Bryant’s anger, the coldness in his eyes; this was a change from the man she’d gotten to know. It was frightening, but...her eyes met his, understanding in them. They had to do something. The creatures hadn’t come after them, not yet. And they...they could change this.
“I’m with you.” The words were quiet, but determined, and Kessie extended her hand, clasped Bryant’s arm. “Wherever this goes. Wherever it takes us. I’m with you till the end. And if the end is burning it to the ground…?”
Her gaze hardened, and she nodded, once.
“So be it.”
---
So be it. Bryant and Kessie regarded each other a few seconds longer and then Bryant nodded. Though the congenial man she’d come to know these last days wasn’t looking out from the good doctor’s eyes anymore, he hadn’t vanished completely: gently, Bryant placed his free hand over Kesiah’s on his arm. Thank you the gesture said, just as surely as if he’d said it aloud.
Then he took her hand again and, without looking back, led her away from Marcus and down a row of those damnable containers, away from the direction they’d come. “I haven’t… haven’t seen any of… of t-them in here, have you? What if… ah, what if they’re busy watching wh-what everyone is doing back there, with the walls down? A-after last time, perhaps they wish to keep a closer watch on everyone?” Yes. Well, of course. Wouldn’t want to lose more pets, have to fill more of these cylinders with armless, legless, eyeless, hopeless shells when you could have the real living creature intact…
It was a reasonable assumption, that the integration process would be distracting to the keepers. Bolstered by the fact that no tall, multi-limbed sentinels appeared to detain them, and no alarms were set off, the two walked hand-in-hand through the vast distillery. Passing vat after vat of animals. Dolphins, sea otters, primates, lemurs, monkeys... a single dog that was vaguely familiar from the lifeboat. From being clung to by a blind woman on the beach. All of them amputated, all of them horribly alive... inexplicably kept contained in their suffering. All of the animals passed were mammals, as well, but that hardly seemed worth noting in the wake of everything.
It did end, miraculously. At the far end of the rows of vats there were even exits. Strange, but recognizable for what they were. Several passage ways that went down, and one large, central tube that seemed to incline up, instead.
Had Bryant and Kessie chosen to go down, they would have found other hive sub-levels. Other distilleries. They would have seen the birds and the reptiles. Perhaps they could have found the amphibians, the fish, and the insects. So many cells, so many animals thought to be extinct, kept just on the brink of extinction. Over-bred and insane. So much suffering being harvested from the vats. But the two didn't choose to go down, exploring the magnificent bowels of the hive. They went up, instead. Through a large, twisting conduit that went up to a central hub. A soft hum guided them, something that sounded so much like a power source. Something important. Something that could possibly be destroyed.
The hub was oddly dim, operated by nearly a hundred misshapen creatures, each one possessing a dozen unblinking eyes and at least a dozen long, spindly limbs. Each of those limbs barely the width of a human finger, but several feet long; fused into the wall of the hub, itself. These were not the tall, walking sentinels that Kesiah had seen abduct Bryant. Nor were they sharp-limbed surgeons that Bryant could remember from his procedure. No, these pale, ugly things were quite new. They were smaller than their brethren, only about twenty inches in diameter. They were also less invasive than their brethren, as they didn't seem inclined to remove Bryant and Kessie from the room, if they were capable of moving at all; the bloated forms of their bodies didn't seem designed for activity. They paid no attention to the two humans whatsoever; all of their eyes were fixed upon myriad images of the cells, flashing in front of them, projected from tiny light sources. Each of the mouthless watchers was emitting a soft, low hum from within itself, as if they were communicating as they observed the captives in the hive. It was possible that they hadn't yet noticed the two humans at all.
But something would. Something had to be on its way. They were little more than escaped pets, crickets that had hopped away from their enclosure. That didn't mean they'd be allowed to remain free. The male was disposable. There were others that could replace it. The female, on the other hand, needed to be returned to her cell.