by Katie Vack
Not entirely sure why the two were here of all places, in a room which seemed so seldom used, he continued past and took the left door to find himself in a much smaller and plainer hallway. A few doors led off to either side, but on a whim he decided just to ignore them and passed out through the other side of the corridor.
This room seemed empty save a table in the centre and the few chairs surrounding it, which again appeared not to have been used in years. He moved on again, finding himself next at the foot of a grand staircase, which he ascended. He went left, right, left, right, and after a short while was hopelessly lost.
One room he passed through appeared to be an armoury, one a kitchen, and one was full of cages containing the remains of long deceased animals. He found himself walking through dining rooms, bathrooms, wine cellars, and a mysterious room which contained all kinds of potions, but not once did he ever actually come into contact with anyone.
Eventually, tired of wandering around aimlessly, he decided that he should probably try and get to somewhere useful. It sounded, after he had stopped walking and tried listening for a while, like there was something going on in a room somewhere off to his right. He made his way towards it in a fairly roundabout manner, and after not long arrived at his destination.
This room was different from the others; mainly because it appeared to actually see some use. The cast iron doorknob had no dust on it, which made a change, and the hinges didn't show even a speck of rust. By the looks of things, he was definitely getting closer to the place where he could probably find the others. A scuffling, scratching, noise could be heard from the other side of the door and so, without bothering to knock, he turned the handle and stepped inside.
He stopped, stunned, at what he saw. The room was, in a similar way to his hospital room, plastered floor to ceiling with all manner of eldritch scribbles and equations. Against one wall was a shelf bowing heavily under the weight of an armada of glass bottles and jars, containing liquids every colour of the rainbow- some still, some bubbling, some fizzing, and some even seeming to be fighting against the power of gravity.
In the middle of the room was set up a dizzying array of scientific instruments, sprawled across a mismatched array of tables- fires were roaring from numerous burners, short-circuiting batteries were sparking everywhere, and the room was clouded and filled with a choking range of different smokes, which seized their opportunity to escape and rushed past him through the open door.
Grayson fell to his knees, choking and gasping, lungs assaulted by the searing haze, until all of a sudden it was over. The smoke fled further down the corridor he had just passed, smashing through a window and flying off into the distance almost as a sentient being. Grayson raised his head, taking another look into the room, and suddenly found himself staring into the faces of three rather unusual creatures.
Four pairs of eyes blinked slowly as one, and Grayson found himself doing the same, all the while wondering how he could have missed them the first time. The three of them stood, or whatever they did, in a line abreast a couple of metres away from him, gazing intently as though attempting to figure out who or what he was.
On the left was something that looked like a cross between a snake, a lion, and a bird. It was certainly snakelike, with a scaled and limbless green body that flowed smoothly into its tail, but it also had a blazing orange lion's mane around its neck and a pair of brown and black speckled wings. It certainly didn't look like anything he'd even known existed.
In the middle was something which looked just like a B type hellion, except that it stood barely over a foot tall. Humanoid, it was clearly some kind of highly evolved insect. It was skinless and hairless, covered instead in a thick layered carapace of dark red. It's legs were reverse jointed, ending in powerful hooves, and it had six arms which all ended in razor-sharp talons. Its elongated skull had two rows of three eyes, all of which boasted the hellion's transparent secondary eyelids.
At the far right sat... well, he wasn't really sure. It seemed to be nothing more than a cubic foot of some form of jelly, a translucent blue which faded into a green, then a yellow, even as he watched. It had no face, no limbs, and apparently no organs, and he would have passed it off as a mere object were it not for the way it seemed to be quivering with life.
The whole room was silent, with the exception of the apparatus that continued to operate in its own. None of the four moved. Grayson decided, eventually, that he should find some way to break the tense silence.
"Well..." he felt like an idiot the moment the words left his mouth, "hello there."
The snake hissed. The hellion clicked. The jelly seemed to wobble a little more vigorously. Grayson stopped, dumbfounded. It sounded crazy but had they... understood him?
"I'm... Grayson. It's... nice to meet you?"
The snake nodded once, hissing again. The hellion cocked it's head and clicked its mandibles. The jelly definitely quivered enthusiastically.
Grayson paused again. Even if they didn't understand him, they were definitely responding. He really had no idea how to proceed from here.
He was spared the decision by a door to the room slamming open. The madman he'd had the misfortune to meet the day before rushed in, a stained white lab coat flapping around his ankles. He took one look at the chaos of the room and broke in a scowl, striding over to the jelly and plucking it up off the floor to hold before his face.
"What have you done this time, Oliver?"
The jelly turned a sheepish shade of lilac, wriggling to free itself.
"Oh, really? You expect me to believe it was those two?" The snake and the hellion quailed beneath his penetrating glare. "Then what did happen?" There was a silence of a few seconds, in which he appeared to be listening to a silent voice. "What, can you remember, is the one thing that I have told you not to touch without my supervision?" The jelly made a sudden bid for freedom, rippling into a long, thin, length and sliding out of his grasping hands, a defiant orange as it reformed upon contact with the ground and attempted to slither away.
The man didn't give it the chance, scooping it straight up again. "Don't bother, Oliver, you'll only make things worse for yourself. No, I don't care whether you managed to make a sentient cloud. What I care about is that you disobeyed my orders, yet again, and broke half of your equipment, yet again. You will clean this up- now." He turned to the other two. "You, as well. Just because it wasn't your idea, that doesn't exempt you from responsibility. Sid, help Oliver to clean this mess up. Harrison, get on the net and order some replacement gear. You might as well order my kit at the same time."
The jelly and the snake began to guiltily dismantle the sprawling network of apparatus, and the miniature hellion bounded rapidly out the door the man had entered through. Grayson rose to his feet, bemused. "Can you really speak to them?"
The man turned to him, pulling out a couple of cigarettes. Grayson expected he was about to be offered one, but the man simply put both in his mouth and lit the pair. He inhaled deeply, and then blew out an immaculate smoke ring. "Of course I can. Why shouldn't I be able to?"
"You don't look like a silvan."
"I'm not. I'm one hundred-percent human, and proud of it. What does that have to do with my communication with my children?"
Grayson raised a mental eyebrow at the interesting phrasing. "Well, I thought only silvans could talk to animals."
"Animals?" The man scowled again. "Animals? You're greatly mistaken, half-blood. They've had human consciousness transplanted into them: they're no more animals than you or I."
Grayson froze, alarm bells suddenly tolling within his mind. "Half-blood? What do you mean, half-blood?"
"Half-blood." The man grinned tellingly. "A being that contains DNA from two different species in roughly equal proportions. In your case half lumin, half caster. You're an anomaly, and an unusual one at that. Most of your kind don't survive a single day."
Grayson began to back away, suddenly weak, grabbing hold of the doorframe for support. "You
're mistaken. I'm just a lumin."
The man laughed. "No you aren't, silly. You're a freak of nature, somebody who by rights shouldn't exist- an anomaly."
Grayson stumbled backwards, tripping into the wall behind him. The world suddenly seemed to be closing in on him, everything shrinking and darkening before his eyes. "I don't know what you're talking about."
"Yes," the man began to walk towards him, "you do. You used your powers to leech the electricity from your mech when you fought him, and then you used them again when you fought the leech last week. One purple, one yellow- even your eyes are proof of your identity. ?"
Grayson raised himself up to his full height, which was still significantly shorter than the other man. He brought his good hand up into a fist, shadows rippling around it as it began to burn with pain. His eyes narrowed. There was no way anybody should know this much about him. "Who are you?"
"Me?" The man laughed. "You can call me Doctor Stein. Short for Frankenstein. Do put those silly shadows away though, your neurones haven't yet recovered from last time."
Grayson ignored the command. Frankenstein was a name he recognised. He wasn't sure where from, but if this man was big time he might be in some real trouble. "How do you know about me?"
"Simple. Your team watched you fight- flames of the damned, no less. It seems that you lied to them. Told them you were a lumin with no powers. Not sure why you'd do that, but they certainly aren't happy about it."
Grayson sank slowly down the wall, shadows extinguished, head in his hand. "They know?"
"Of course. You weren't exactly discreet."
How did they know? He thought he'd hidden his powers very well- he'd used them twice, once on Lyka and once on Crayton, but he'd taken pains to hide his shadows on both occasions. But then, he was speculating. He really didn't know what had happened back at the convoy ambush. "What do you want with me?" His voice was laden with a resigned despair.
"What do I want? Why, to fix you of course. I am, among other things, a doctor, and that is why the three of you were brought to me. The half-dead silvan with the mortal wounds, the mutant who gave such interesting readings, and the anomaly. Of course I'd like to run some tests, but right now my task is to bring you back up to full health."
Thief was alive, then. He'd hoped as much, but he hadn't really been sure. "You want to heal me?"
"Yes."
"Not to kill me, or imprison me, or chop me up and use me for some kind of sick research?"
"My dear boy, research excluded, why would I want to do anything like that?"
"You said it, didn't you? A freak of nature. That's what I am."
"Well yes, but... surely you didn't interpret that as an insult?"
"How am I meant to interpret something like that? Why wouldn't you hate me? Everyone else seems to."
The doctor frowned. "I don't like self-pity, Grayson. I don't hate you, I'm not going to hurt you, and I couldn't care less what species you are- you're a patient that I need to mend, nothing more and nothing less. Now are you going to spend all day whining, or are you going to go and find your friends so that you can get this matter settled?"
"They aren't my friends."
"Your teammates, then. I've no idea why you're so ashamed of what you are, but you now have to face the consequences of lying to them about it. From what I hear, if you'd been honest with them from the beginning there might not be three of you bound to hospital beds right now."
"I had no idea that would happen."
"No, but intentionally or not you may have been partially to blame for the disaster you've wrought upon yourselves. Are you going to keep avoiding the problem, or just go and get it sorted?" Grayson said nothing. The doctor watched him for a few seconds, then turned and left. "They're in the next room, Grayson. Talk to them."
* * *
Grayson hadn't been in a hurry to meet his teammates for the first time since the battle, so of course he'd made every excuse possible in order to put it off. He'd found his old clothes and gotten dressed, he'd spent a little more time wandering around the hospital and, running out of ideas, he'd even spent the time to wash off the worst of the blood. But he found that, no matter what he did, he kept coming up against the exact same obstacle.
He had to talk to them. It was that or quit this job entirely, and he had no intention of doing so. The fear of speaking to the others was its own kind of weakness; and he hated weakness, despised it. He crushed weakness like the insect it was, and he was going to have to do the same here. Add to that the fact that, by avoiding them, he was essentially running away, and that settled the matter. He'd sworn long ago never to run again, and he didn't break his oaths.
Steeling his nerves, he made his way towards the closed door through which the voices were emanating. Without pause or announcement, he shoved it open and strode through in, finding himself in some kind of living room. Arranged around the centre, lounging in some of a dozen assorted and mismatched armchairs and chaise-lounges, were the other five members of his team.
The reaction upon his entrance was pretty much as he had expected. The casual conversation died off almost instantaneously, and he found himself staring into five varyingly judgemental pairs of eyes. The room hung in stillness for a few seconds, and then Karolus rose purposefully to his feet.
The aetherial strode towards him, dominating him through a height difference of nearly two feet, clad in the pristine white and gold robes that his kind seemed to wear as casual dress. "Well," he stated after a pause, "look who decided to turn up."
Grayson didn't waver. "I'm sorry, I was a little busy being severely wounded. Did I miss my allotted time of arrival?"
"No. You missed the time when we told each other who we are and what we do. You know; that time when you told us that you're a lumin with no powers or abilities. Funny how that corrupted blood of yours slipped your mind."
There was a hiss of disbelief from somewhere across the room, but Grayson barely noticed it. His already furious mind was bent solely upon the angel in front of him. "I saw no reason for it to be important. I see no reason why you should know everything about me."
"You saw no reason? You saw no reason!?" Karolus' face purpled with outrage. "How about the fact that half of my team is now seriously wounded and I can't progress further at anything below full strength? How does it feel, traitor? Did you enjoy sabotaging this operation? Did you think you could have them killed, just like that?"
Grayson stepped incandescently towards the bigger man, shadows screaming within his mind. "What did you just call me?"
"You heard me. You're the traitor. You lied to us about yourself, freak, and tried-"
That was it. The shadows coiled around Grayson's left fist and he struck out ferociously with it, landing a blow straight upon the angel's jaw. Karolus reeled backwards, face half paralysed, and Grayson stumbled away clutching his wounded shoulder.
The aetherial recovered first, sending an inescapable wall of air towards him. He tried to absorb it with his shadows but he was too weak and it struck him head-on at full force, sending him flying backwards into a wall. He shrieked in agony at the pain of his broken ribs, landing in a crumpled heap at the bottom. Karolus didn't stop, gathering a scythe of shimmering force and hurling it his way, but suddenly there was someone in between them.
The concentrated air slashed into Seth's unprotected body, his legs braced and arms spread wide to shield his downed comrade. He grunted heavily and a splash of green blood sprayed around the room from the deep, diagonal laceration across his heaving chest. The hellion straightened, letting his arms fall and seemingly oblivious to the blow he had just been dealt. Grayson's eyes widened as the lizard turned to look at him- even with the hellion's thick hide, the cut was two feet long and easily an inch deep. If that had hit him, he'd be lying on the floor in two pieces.
Seth reached down with one arm and lifted him back onto his feet, acting as though the blow was nothing more than a scratch. Grayson couldn't tell what expression he was w
earing, but it was probably more disapproval than pain. "No fight. Bad."
Karolus stumbled backwards, panicked. "Gods, no! I didn't mean- didn't mean to- it was an-"
"Shut it, Karolus." Sora straightened and rose to her feet with the rest of the room. "Is that what you do? Attack your injured teammates when they can't fight back?"
"But..." Karolus frowned, "it was him that started it!"
Sora's eyes narrowed, looking more cold-blooded and reptilian that Seth's ever did. "Déjà-vu , angel- I don't think this is the first time you've made that excuse. If you really want, I could finish this for you and save us all the hassle. Do you want me to?"
"No."
"Then shut up and back the hell off."
Karolus wisely chose not to reply. Grayson, however, still hadn't quite had enough time to cool down. "Thanks for that-"