Esther shrugged. “It’s not impossible. If people will turn to thinking of demons as their saviour from everything that’s wrong with the world,” here, her expression twisted into disgust, “why not homunculi?” She looked at #74 “You’re a reasonably new form of consciousness that runs on a form of energy that most people don’t understand terribly well, and you more-or-less came about because of the opening between the demons’ world and ours. And your entire purpose -at least, according to your creators- is to make life safer for humans. It makes a kind of sense.”
#74 decides she’s going to tactfully ignore the part about “according to your creators.”
“That’s exactly right. The Company’s worried that the Heresy’s going to distract homunculi from their loyalty to the Company, and by extension, humanity as a whole, but apart from a few scattered seperaitists the Heretics I’ve heard of tend to talk about serving humanity. After all, angels are the enemies of demons, are they not?”
But aren’t demons merely fallen angels? That thought gets clamped down and thrown into the mental box marked “Things that are troublesome and I am never going to thing of again.”
“Wait. The company thinks that the Lazarus Heresy is going to distract humanity’s loyalty from it?”
“Sorry, I wasn’t quite clear. The Company believes that the homunculi will be distracted from their duties by the Lazarus Heresy. Charismatic personalities do tend to cause trouble, I suppose. It would be nice if, after 15 years of serving humanity, people had a bit more faith in us than that.”
Dahlia stands there watching as two friends bicker
Her head was pounding, she was tired, and she felt ill. A cold sweat came over her and silently she slipped away from her two friends and returned to the Infirmary, collapsing in to her chair and putting her head in her hands
Going ‘cold turkey’ as they called it was harder than it seemed. She managed to do it for morphine but this drug was something else. She knew she shouldn’t take more, what use was there, her wounds had healed. But she just wanted more, no, needed it. Feeling like a child again, she curled in to a little ball on her chair hoped her father would come soon.
Zek sat quietly in the tearooms, listening to the voices drift in from the taverna. The Lazarus Heresy again. That was a crisis waiting to happen. He closed his eyes for a moment and let his thoughts drift. He let the incantation he was working on slowly orbit in his head, pondering words about water and fire and fog and hell and darkness and sleep…
Sleep.
How long had it been? Two… three days? Maybe an hour’s rest at the pools, and half an hour the day before on the cart back from Portree when he wasn’t being attacked by a goat? Three days since a decent sleep? No, more, maybe four. He opened his eyes. As much as he felt like sleeping was the important thing to do, it wasn’t happening.
“…after 15 years of serving humanity…”
Oh, boy. Here came the firestorm.
Dahlia walked past him, almost tripping over her own feet every step of the way. She didn’t notice him sitting there, and he hesitated to get up. A few minutes more, he thought.
There was, Esther had learned, very little she could say to #74 without it turning out to be the wrong thing to say. Her immediate response (“Well some people have faith in your kind, just not the ones you’re determined to remain in servitude to, there’s your problem”) would only result in #74’s icy stare and being called ‘Ms. North’ in that tone of hers. Still, #74 didn’t seem to approve of this Lazarus Heresy business any more than she did, so she settled on; “It seems irresponsible to me. Telling people that there are angels about. Have you any ideas about who might have done this?”
#74 sighed.
“Sorry if I’ve been sharp, M-…” she waved her hands around, "This has made me a little tense. The Company is cracking down on the heretics at the moment, and I’m hoping the young ones - if they have fallen victim- can be talked around to sense. "And I’d be the one handing the punishments, she thought. “The woman we have to thank for this is Catherine De Winter, who made the first homunculi. Out of her still living husband. I don’t need to elaborate on why this is not a good idea. You were talking about delusions of grandeur, earlier. It’s pretty impressively self aggrandizing to believe one has single handedly brought forth angels into the mortal realm.”
She allows herself an eyeroll, then notices that Dr. Swanhilde (younger) has moved away. In fact she was already stumbling down the corridor.
“Dr. Swanhilde may need some assistance.”
Jane fell out into the mortal realm and blinked into the sunlight. Her Device for Temporal Anomaly Realignment and Prevention (TARP) hummed slightly as it linked into the ICT and adjusted it’s display to show her what the time and date was was and informing the Royal Mail she had returned. She stared at it with incomprehension for a few minutes before stumbling towards the Royal Mail safe house. Barely a day had passed, barely a day. The Union of the Gear was getting good at this. Jane suddenly had a vision of meeting herself returning from a mission she had left on. She froze for a moment, shuddering.
it would be fine she told herself better than the alternative . She wondered how many of the missing inferno-naughts would return in 100 years time, confused because they had only been gone a day…
She made it to the safe house without meeting anyone, herself or otherwise, and began the self-created rituals dedicated to keeping herself sane.
Esther wondered if falling victim to the belief that you were an angel incarnate was better or worse than falling victim to the belief that your purpose was to remain enslaved to a company that, as far as she could tell, was infested with cultists. She didn’t think that #74 would appreciate her musings so instead she said, “Yes. She’s in a bad way right now. Withdrawal is hitting her hard.” It’s my doing. “I’ll check on her. And thank you. Let me know if any more of this comes up? I’m curious to see where this develops. If it does. Hopefully this is the end of it.”
“Come on,” she said to Harriet, carrying her down the corridor between the Taverna and the infirmary. “Let’s go check on your Aunt Dahlia. Maybe you can help cheer her up.”
Zek was in the tea room, engrossed in one of his projects- Which one, Esther couldn’t say; he had too many to keep track of. She gave him a tired nod. “How’s work going?”
Curled in to her ball, Dahlia knew she was shaking and very pale. With morphine she could control the withdrawal symptoms, but these were more intense than anything she had ever experienced. It was bad enough that for a brief moment she considered taking morphine to take some of the edge off as her arm was flaring up in pain. “Gøre det stoppe…gøre det stoppe” she repeated quietly, praying that the Gods would hear it.
[quote=“siximpossiblethings”]
Zek was in the tea room, engrossed in one of his projects- Which one, Esther couldn’t say; he had too many to keep track of. She gave him a tired nod. “How’s work going?”[/quote]
Zek slowly opened his eyes. He seemed to take a while to return to where he was, as though he was still caught up in thoughts of thunderstorms and airships. He idly chewed on one of his fingernails as he flipped to the page with a hastily-scribbled alphabet on it. Esther could see that the cuticles were red - whether from stress or slaughter, she couldn’t tell.
‘Can’t sleep,’ he traced out. He looked towards the infirmary. ‘Dahlia?’ He tapped on the question mark a few times, speculatively.
When Esther made a move towards the infirmary, Zek held out his hand. ‘Let me,’ he tapped, then indicated Harriet. ‘No sense in that’, and he gestured to the infirmary.
Jane walked in though the back door and dropped her report into the ICT. Done, until they summoned her for another pysc check-up “Have you been seeing things that aren’t here? Have you been seeing things other people cannot see? Don’t worry, I see them too. The others are in cahoots with them aren’t they…?” Trying to trick her into admitting she was mad. The problem was that once it became clear she wasn’t seeing things, nor was she dangerously paranoid or homicidal; they would reassign her to the next available mission.
She’d tried implying that she was going insane (in a safe and non-threatening way) and she should have a break… but she wasn’t subtle enough for it and they either hadn’t picked it up or worked out what she was doing. All thatshe had convinced them of was that she was mildly paranoid about Skye, but apparently since it was such a safe area “she would get over it”. SO all that had won her was the occasional free weekend… on Skye
Jane asked for coach-guard backup every time she thought she was going to have to spend more than a day here. It was usually dismissed.
Still it meant to could talk to #74 and help Lewy with his work. Jane wandered into the hallway and brightened up as she saw Zek, whom she hadn’t seen in age… no, from Zek’s point of view it was probably only a couple of days. Jane carefully toned her enthusiasm at seeing real people down a few notches.
Esther hesitated.
Motioning for his paper and retrieving a pen from her bag, she tapped back.
"I’m responsible for the state Dahlia’s in, and Harriet can sleep through anything. I’ll take her away at the first sign of trouble."
And it’s hardly the worst thing you’ve ever brought Harriet into, is it? Her conscience snipped.
“Hello” Jane said to Esther and Zek, with what she hoped was a normal tone. “How are you? Have either of you seen Lewy?”
Lewy looked down, watching the camp grow larger as he brought his new invention in for the smoothest landing possible on an air-strip made of ill-kept dirt roads. There was a distinct -thunk- as one of the wings clipped a tree. He idly considered moving back to the auto-rotating model; it was slower and less manoevrable than the new fixed-wing model, but required far less space for take-offs and landings. Still, he was pleased with how it had handled. There was a raw exhilaration in defying gravity at high speeds, and a certain amount of peace. In the sky, you’re alone. No demons, no other engineers constantly trying to ‘improve’ your designs. Nothing but freedom.
But you have to come back to the ground eventually, he reminded himself. There are just some things you can’t run from.
Lewy checked the fuel for the third time since landing. After ‘forgetting’ to do it twice, and crashing both times, he’d engraved “FUEL LEVELS!” into the instrument dash, right by the final ignition switch. Satisfied that there was enough in case he had to make an emergency flight, he shouldered his bag and made his way to the Taverna.
“Oh! There he is. Have a good day!” Jane continues down the hall towards the entrance.
“Right,” Esther said. “I’m going to go check on Dahlia. Are you going to come with me, or do you want to see Lewy straight away?”
Cailin lay in the infirmary, the images and memories trying to sort themselves out in her troubled mind. She felt hurt and numb, no longer from the pain of her injuries those had long since healed; Doctor Daniel as she called him had done a wonderful job at healing her body. But her mind needed a healing that she could not find in this place. She needed to get away from the Isle of Skye away from the people that had caused her pain and grief if she was ever going to be able to function again.
“Margret”
Her eyes were still a little vacant as though they were wary of things and surrounds, like a bird about to take flight after a fright. But the voice was calm and she had stopped taking the relaxants they tried to give her, relaxants wern’t what she needed, she needed answers and a way to find out more about Sofi and her research and someone to go with her.
Margaret looked up at the sound of her name, and stood up, abandoning her tea at the table nearby. She walked over to Cailin’s bed and knelt down, taking the woman’s hand. “I’m here, what do you need?” Her expression was earnest and helpful, as it always was.