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Friday, July 21, 2006
14:20 
Untitled Part Two
 Oh gods. That was a whammy.
At first she is only just aware of no longer being unconscious, and in that dreamy, narrow-minded state her thoughts drift along segues that appear perfectly logical in their progression. It has been a long time since Snake's poisons had enough of an effect on her for her team to bother using them, at least by themselves. These days it is Spider they turn to; or, on the bad days, Scorpion. Yet even Spider has to cook up some rather toxic venom to do what they want it do, and so now she gets two of them. The two spiders that sit on her shoulders when Matthew works on her alone may look the same but they are not the same.
She thinks of Araldite: one tube of resin, the other of hardener.
Slowly she becomes aware of being uncomfortable and also of being unable to move.
This is not good.
With some effort she jacks her eyelids open and is instantly disoriented. Her eyes feel upside down, but the blank expanse of institution grey that fills her field of view tells her nothing. Her arms will not move. Her body will not move.
She checks herself, checks her form. She receives an image of herself, and at first she is too disturbed by the image to worry about its source. There are metal pins inserted through her flesh into the bones of her arms, legs and spine. These pins are bolted onto the table on which she has been laid prone with the soft inner skin of her arms facing upwards. This is why she cannot move. Her head is not upside down.
Not yet.
She identifies the source of the image and feels dread.
"I wonder," says the man with liquid hazel eyes, one of whose names is Paul, "do you appreciate the irony?"
A Wyrmkind who monologues? Is this a Coyote trick?
No. No trick.
That means nothing. It needn't be a trick if Wyrm is involved. It could all be some horrible truth: all of it, all at the same time.
She feels a sudden jerk and then her arms are dragged straight down, the parts of the table to which they are bolted capable of independent movement. They stop just as the strain in her shoulders is becoming painful.
"Can't you tell?" she whispers as she fights to find some way of relieving the tension in her protesting joints.
"No talking. Matthew has taught you better than that."
Oh... No.
She had thought they would not use this on her. She had thought it was just a threat, something to keep her in line. The threat has always been enough. Anything that resulted in the threat of this she has not repeated.
He lets her see his intent but not what he is doing. She is blinded to everything except the grey expanse by his requirement that she be blind to everything but that. This means that he controls the images that have access to her mind.
Cold metal digs into the nerve bundle behind the point of her chin, penetrating, hard and unyielding and incessant like a man demanding conjugal rights. She feels the resulting explosive reaction in the network of systems that are connected — which is nearly all of them — like the toppling of dominoes in an incomprehensibly complex pattern, all spreading out from that one point.
Slowly but surely her head is tilted back over the edge of the table by the metal under her chin while the pins in her spine are pulled apart to stretch her along her length. Pain blossoms like an angry flower.
"The irony," Paul continues as if nothing has changed, "that the worst recidivists are produced by your Father. I would have thought that your kind would be the least likely to revert. Yet here we are again."
A small moan is squeezed from the woman's throat by the stresses her body is being put under. Inside her head she sees the two spiders run across the floor and jump onto her soft, exposed forearms. Even amidst the pain she can feel the delicate scratch of their feet as they climb to stand over the blue lines of veins inside her elbows.
He head is forced back further, her spine stretched. Her shoulders now feel like two balls of super-heated rock submerged in acid.
The Wyrmkind is standing over her. For a moment he withdraws the images from her mind, cutting her off, leaving her with the pain and the flat wall.
There is a sudden, shocking stab of pain just below the hollow of her throat. It is cold, burning cold. It draws a line down her chest, a scalpel made of frozen gas, opening her up from her neck to her pubis. She cannot see — he will not let her — but she can feel him peeling back skin and flesh and bone to expose her core.
There. His mind connects to hers again. She sees him standing over her, her body impossibly expanded. His face is lit from below by a soft, shifting glow that is coming from inside her chest. He gazes down inside her and the gently boiling light dances across the curves and hollows of his face, reflecting in his liquid hazel eyes.
Her arms are pulled down again, forced into an impossible position. The pain increases to the point where it is no longer pain but something else altogether. Something for which there is no word. Something like being impaled upon the spikes of the Gates of Heaven.
Paul reaches inside her but she can feel nothing except the pain. It drowns out everything. It blocks everything. It is the one and only over-riding signal that her mind is capable of understanding. Anything else does not even register as noise.
Abruptly something gives way. Her body's breaking point has been reached and passed and it concedes defeat like elastic stretched beyond its plastic limit. The pain explodes into heat that seems to melt flesh and bone, softening it, making it yielding and pliable. Tears stream from her eyes, drying almost instantly into salty trails on her searing skin, but she is not crying.
There. The spiders bite her once more. They are the same spiders but the venom is different this time. She can tell. She can taste it in the back of her throat and it tastes of parma violets.
She drifts in the strangely blissful, euphoric aftermath, floating on the heat that still suffuses her. The spider venom works its way through her system as the man with the liquid hazel eyes closes up the opening he made and takes just a little of the pressure off her tormented body. He waits, silently, smiling to himself. She cannot tell whether he is genuinely satisfied with what has happened or whether the euphoria is clouding her senses. She thinks it must be the latter because she cannot ascribe emotion to his kind.
As the spider venom reaches her hindbrain and her vision darkens towards unconsciousness she is just aware of Paul leaning over her and starting to release her from the table.
He smells, she realises, of roses.
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Wednesday, July 19, 2006
16:21
Untitled Part One
"Matthew, what's the new guys's name?"
The black man with the glasses is sitting on a battered orange plastic chair, bent over a clipboard, making notes. He has smooth skin the colour of mocha, skin that would be flawless if it were not for the fine network of complex lines formed by scar tissue over his face; the same scar tissue that means his close-cropped beard is somewhat uneven. The scarring lends interest, an instant attraction in otherwise blandly handsome features.
"Hmmm?" He does not look up.
The woman kicks her legs childishly under her elevated chair. Raised up like that her head is much higher than his — his eye level is approximately at her chest — and she is looking down on him. This does not give her any feeling of superiority. She is not capable of that in this company.
"The new guy. What's his name?"
She is unable to remember how or when she came to know the name of the black man. It was just there one day, and then it seemed as if she had always known it. Names have become very important to her for some reason. She wants to have a name for everything and everyone, even though only recently names were not important to her in the slightest. Like a child with a new fixation, it is almost upsetting when she can not discover what something or someone is called.
"Which new guy?" The black man is not really paying her full attention. His mouth moves and his throat makes sounds but his mind is elsewhere.
"The one who took over from... you know... the Russian." She whispers this last. Not because she is worried about being overheard; not because she is worried about the Russian: because by inference the new guy might know she is talking about him and she does not want that. Oh no.
Matthew finally looks up from his notes at the bright, birdlike, black eyes of the woman sitting in front of him, his attention wrested away from his work by her melodramatic whispering. She is still swinging her legs like a four-year old, hands gripping the edge of her seat as if she is worried she will slide off. Her hair is a mass of untidy spikes that look vaguely like wet, windswept feathers. She seems utterly oblivious to the shivering needles protruding from her flesh along her arms and around the bottom of her neck; nor does she seem concerned by the spiders, one sitting on each of her shoulders, each the size of her hand and with its front legs resting against the skin just below her ear.
He remembers her when she would never have dared speak to him. He remembers her when people were afraid to be alone with her.
Other people still are afraid to be alone with her. He isn't. Like Bob, who works with her even more closely, he no longer even feels the faint frisson of nerves resulting from not being entirely sure that she will not turn on him.
"I don't know," he says.
"Don't fib!" the woman retorts crossly. "You do know. You just won't say. If you won't say then say so."
"All right," Matthew sighs. "I don't know. I know what I call him but that's not the same thing."
"What do you call him?" Her legs stop kicking. She leans forward, rapt.
"Sir." There is no irony or trace of sarcasm in his tones. In truth Matthew does not call him by any name at all. There is no need. A name is a thing used for indicating the person who is the subject of a sentence or intent. The man they are discussing is one of Wyrm's. He needs no formal address, for he knows when he is being addressed without being told; and the squirming discomfort of thoughts made to turn in his direction are more than enough for any here to identify him as the subject.
"Oh." She is both disappointed and subdued by his response. Not by the term but by the absolute finality of it and lack of humour, and by the sudden awareness that even Matthew has to take orders from him.
"He'll be here any minute. Why don't you ask him?" Matthew suggests mildly, observing with interest that the spiders on her shoulders tense before he has uttered the first syllable.
"What?!" She is shocked. The black of her eyes is suddenly no longer bright and birdlike: it burns like boiling oil heated by volcanic fumaroles in the sockets. The needles stop their delicate shivering, her form's normal chaotic dance coming to a sudden, grinding halt in a form she imagines might be able to resist the attentions of Wyrmkind.
It is futile. She cannot even resist the attentions of the two spiders, which plunge fangs the size of her little finger into the sides of her neck. She flinches instinctively, but makes no attempt to brush them off.
As she slumps in the chair, Matthew sets his clipboard aside and begins to remove the once-more quivering needles from her flesh.
"Paul," she mumbles, eyelids drifting closed like a boat hull coming to rest on the seabed of a harbour as the tide retreats.
"What's that?" Matthew asks her gently. She has a tendency to utter randomly just before she goes down.
"His name's Paul."
For a moment Matthew just stands there, frozen, the needles he has already removed forgotten in his hand. This is the first time she has ever done anything that has truly surprised him, and suddenly he is beginning to see what has turned Bob from a frustrated technician resigned to an onerous job with little reward to a proud project manager whose work has suddenly become his baby and thus worthy of every frustration.
Matthew has always known that this was one seriously heavy calibre piece of artillery. It is his task to ensure that the safety catch is reliable, after all. But Family doesn't do 'Chosen Ones'. Everyone is expendable. No one is worthless. He has never been able to understand why this one was cocooned and lassoed out of Core and then given more people on the project team rather than fewer. It seems a lot of effort and fuss over just one gundog.
And yet she just fished the name of one of the AllFather's out of the planktonic æther. Bob might get excited about internal processes and biochemical idiosyncrasies: Matthew is far more impressed by capability, and the ability to retrieve information about Wyrm is an ability he had not expected.
"She's all yours," he says to the man with the orange-hazel eyes that match the colour of his glossy, shoulder-length hair. "Paul."
The man's effeminate mouth twitches in the echo of a ghost of a smile. Matthew knows that she was right. It is his name. One of them, at least.
She should not have been able to do that. Not at all.
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Tuesday, July 18, 2006
17:27
I need a holiday
 I've been thinking about the Weapon a lot.
I'm not sure why. Nights have been rough since getting back from the Dun Run. The first Monday night back was shocking, but possibly more on that later. It's another one of those 'just when you thought you'd got it figured' moments.
Maybe it's because I'm growing my hair. It's getting quite long now. It's not so much that I'm growing it as it is I'm not cutting it. Just haven't got around to going to a hairdressers — don't really like getting my hair cut professionally.
The Weapon, you see, was a sleek, sexy, formidable creature and didn't have much in the way of hair. Hair is an identifier. There's something significant about hair. Lacking it is, in some ways, just as significant as having it, but having enough of it to warrant styling is much more of a personal thing. There wasn't much that was personal about the Weapon. It was a thing, a tool, a piece of equipment. It didn't do personal.
Back then I was scared of it. It made me sick with dread. Now I admire it and part of me is sad and wistful that it got lost in assimilation, even though I am now closer to it and have more of the qualities I admired than I did before. The purity of it is gone.
Strange to say that I know this from one salient, personal, intimate detail: the Weapon would have had sex with Andy just to infiltrate itself into his emotions and exert power over him. It tried to seduce him once. I wouldn't do that. I wouldn't sleep with Andy for one simple reason: he's just not my type (sorry, bud, but you ain't).
But then, I suppose there's not much I wouldn't do if it came down to it, if I was told. For the Weapon the act of seduction was a tactical ploy, a means to an end. It was simply the most convenient, fastest and most efficient way to get what it wanted. That was enough.
It wouldn't be enough for me. It would take serious leverage to bring me to that, not least because it wouldn't be fair on anyone.
The Weapon didn't care about fair. I don't think it understood the concept.
I think I've also been thinking about the Weapon because I'm trying to work out what it is that I'm doing now. Where I'm supposed to be going. The Weapon seems in some ways to be key to that. What has got me here is a set of little deaths and the bunny training. What has got me here is assimilation with that part of what I was and using it as a template, a guide to help me get through the painful parts of the process. It was that aspect of my personality that had the strength of purpose to squeeze through that opening in the first place.
No regret, no fear, no doubt.
It was a heady thing to be, that creature.
There's a Family truism: if you want to know some juicy tidbit, even — especially — if you're not sure whether the answer will be what you want to hear, ask a Ravenbrat. The less sure you are of whether or not the information you seek will bring you relief or joy or happiness or a solution to your problem, the more likely you are to be able to get that from a Ravenbrat. We deal in the currency of change, and the denomination is surprisal. Ask a Ravenbrat and the answer may well not be to your liking, but it will bring change.
It's not deliberate. We don't set out to be the loose pebble that causes a landslide. It just happens that way.
"Have you seen my wife?"
"Oh... um... not this morning. Saw her down the Frig 'n' Frogate last Tuesday with that bloke from Tiso's, if that's any help."
"But she visits her sick mother on Tuesdays..."
Move onto the complex questions, the questions that most often plague a Gimp, such as "What am I for?" and the answers get exponentially more convoluted — and more straightforward.
That's the thing with Ravenbrats. Often the answers are fairly simple but take some explaining. Or they are very simple but the implications are horrendously involved. We exist as a substrate for a change in the dynamic equilibrium.
And here's another thing about Ravenbrats: they are downright useless at providing this service for themselves. Not only are they pretty useless at providing this service for themselves, because they are what they are, and are the catalysts of change, it seems rare that anyone else can help them when they need to change themselves.
A catalyst, you see, remains the same throughout a reaction.
Raven shifters exist in a chaotic equilibrium around a strange attractor that is the form that they would take if there were no external stimuli upon them at all. They are the butterfly effect. They flutter and flap, wheeling cartwheels through life, bouncing around in the breeze of existence in a permanent state of childlike wonder and exuberance.
This is not the same as Coyote at all. He causes change in the same way a landslide causes change, and the consequences always catch up with him.
Sometimes I feel like Serendipity, the muse (incidental - heh) in Dogma:
"That's the cosmic joke. I can give out a zillion and nine ideas a second, but I can't keep any for myself."
Every so often I get stuck, or something happens that I can't explain. It doesn't happen very often (at least I don't think it does) because mostly I'm so Gimped-up that it's generally patently obvious what I'm supposed to be doing. But sometimes it happens that I get bewildered and lost and don't know what to do next. Either I lose my stimulus or it becomes ethereal and changeable and so I'm like a pennant in a weak breeze, sort of limp and useless. Or sometimes it comes from way off field and I can't respond adequately. Sometimes it’s all of these at once.
There are two people I can turn to when this gets really serious, and sometimes — less often than this happens — they can help. Last time it was with my third tattoo, for which moment of relief I shall remain eternally grateful. Mostly, though, what helps most is just being able to talk about it. At the end of the day, if I'm stuck, it's generally because right then I'm supposed to be stuck.
Which is where I am right now. Stuck. Unsure. Sitting on that blasted plain able to hand out advice and direction to anyone in the same vague frequency band as me but unable to work out what I'm supposed to be doing myself.
Being older and wiser I'm hoping I'll have the patience to sit this one out, but I don't have any great expectations on that front. I know what I'm like.
The Weapon wouldn't have this problem. The Weapon would go one of two ways: it would either sit down on the ground and shut down everything but the bare minimum it needed for tickover, go into a sort of hibernation and wait until something significant registered on its radar; or it would find the last clear signal and follow that until told otherwise.
Either way it would not be plagued by doubt about the consequences because it understood that Raven evades consequences. He is a catalyst.
Catalysts don't change. The greatest shifter of them all and he doesn't really change. We can't abide stasis, we children of the Black Lord. The Blaggard produces hyperactive, fidgety, restless children who are only really calm when on the move. A Ravenbrat forced to be still will shiver with nervous energy, give the impression that he is about to explode. As soon as he is moving it will seem as if he is more still than when he was stationary.
This, for me, is almost as bad as the hell from which I've just escaped. Because, after all, it's made of the same thing: stasis. Can cope with just about anything other than stasis. Don't make me stay still Old Man, you know what it does to me. We've been through that. I've served my time in the box and this looks to me like the same thing in a different wrapper. You can buy the gift paper from a different shop, make it shiny and holographic and all the things that mean I'll treasure the wrapping more than the present inside, but that doesn't mean I'll ignore the contents.
And we need to have a one-on-one about those two guys on that job the other night. Because that was seriously freaked.
It's very quiet out here. The dirt has the texture of caster sugar and the stars taste of crystalline menthol. The sky is a colour that people call black but it's not really. Black doesn't taste like this. It's peaceful, but we don't do peaceful very well.
Don't play well with other children: don't like to be left on our own.
We always have to be so damned difficult.
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