She loosened the drawstring and looked inside.
The machine was white, and box-shaped, about the size of a toaster. There was an ON/OFF switch, a button labeled ANALYZE, a button labeled START, and an old-school digital readout like you’d see on an old electric clock. There was a small circular slot on top of the thing with the words, Insert genetic package here, written under it.
A flexible plastic pipe emerged from the back of the machine, leading to what a appeared to be a very fancy looking gas mask, made of metal rather than plastic, with glass lenses.
The whole getup reminded Myra of the little machines asthmatics used to give themselves breathing treatments.
But there were some very odd things about it, too. All around the edges of the device were odd symbols, perhaps magical runes.
And there was a wire running from the box to a small wrist-cuff made of flexible metal. She’d seen numerous arcane devices with cuffs like that before. It was the sort of technology the Travelers from Ulfarra were known for. Machines like this didn’t use electricity. They ran on pure magic.
This thing, in comparison with most other Traveler machines she’d run up on, was pretty modern—certainly no more than 20 or 30 years old.
She looked at the words under the circular slot again.
Insert genetic package here
“Now this is neat,” she muttered.
She took the device out of the bag to get a better look at it, and uncovered a little box full of transparent plastic cylinders, filled to the rims with colorful liquid. They had labels on them, written in magic marker: Daily Dose, Stealth Package, Recipe 3, Experimental…
She tried inserting one of the cylinders into the little opening on top. It fit perfectly, and snapped in place when she pushed it all the way down.
Very simple.
She started to put the box of cylinders back into the bag, but stopped when she noticed a booklet in there, lying at the bottom, with a white leather cover that reminded her of one of those pocket-sized bibles some people carry around.
She picked it up to get a better look at it, and saw that there was gold lettering on the cover, with the title:
The Morphagenic Mask of Doctor Morgan L. Mitzinger PHD - User’s Guide
Hah! she thought. The thing even comes with an instruction manual!
- - -
Myra went back to her office in the church, and placed the bag on the desk. Then she took everything out, laid it down in a neat row, and looked it over.
A thrill of pure elation ran through her.
This was just the thing to make Mother forgive her. The old Queen was a very practical woman at heart, always looking for an advantage. If this device did what Myra thought, it could be huge.
And not only did she have the nifty little machine, she also had a man who’d used it successfully. If the instruction manual didn’t have all the facts, he could teach her the rest.
After Mother sees this, she thought. There’s no way she’ll kill me.
Her mother loved her, after all. She really did, deep down. She was incredibly dangerous when angry, of course, but she had a softer side sometimes, and she could be warm when she wanted.
This will get me right back on her good side.
Myra felt like running in there and kissing the prisoner on the cheek for putting this thing into her hands.
In fact, she was feeling so generous, she decided on the spot that if he would just cooperate with her, she’d go out of her way to make things easy for him. She saw no particular reason why he should have to die, or even suffer. Maybe not ever.
She sensed something solid in him, something unyielding. The fact that he’d had the courage to face her even after she’d bested him suggested a real strength of character.
I might actually have a crush, she thought. Most of her crushes ended up dead, eventually, but it might be fun for a while. It really might.
Something to consider…
She thought about going straight to the cell-block and just asking him about the machine directly, but decided to give it a quick test run on her own first.
She put the wrist-cuff on. Right away, she felt tingling in her arm, and warmth on the skin of her wrist as the device reached inside her body and tapped into her connection to the Eternal Power Source. Her own natural psychic channel was much wider than average. She wasn’t nearly as strong as her mother in the power, but she had inherited quite a bit of strength, more than enough to energize most Traveler devices she’d encountered over the years, including some that were only intended for very powerful sorcerers and wizards.
At first she thought this one was going to be too much for her. It took a whole minute for anything to happen, and the band around her wrist became uncomfortably warm for a few seconds. But finally the box started buzzing and then the words, ERROR: ACCESS VIOLATION, appeared on the digital display, and started blinking.
Hmmm.
Some kind of built in security scheme? Maybe it was attuned only to the young prisoner’s energy signature. If so, that would be annoying, but there were Traveler technicians in The Lands who could probably get in there and readjust it, or hack it to bypass the scheme altogether. Even if this wasn’t actually Traveler tech, it was certainly so similar that it had to be based on the same basic principals, and Traveler technicians were amazingly resourceful.
Maybe there’s something about this access stuff in the instruction manual…
She picked the book up and immediately felt a soft hum begin along the surface of the leather cover, followed a moment later by a tingling in the skin of her fingers.
The book was active, like the machine.
Fascinated, she opened it to a random spot near the middle, and started to read, but...
What?
For just a moment she thought she saw blurry dark lines on the pages, like smears of ink trying to become text, but then suddenly there was nothing except for the page numbers at the bottom. No text at all. She flipped through several more pages, and the same thing happened every time.
She sighed. The book was also protected.
Bristling with annoyance, Myra started putting everything back in the bag. It was time to talk things over with the prisoner.
7 - Negotiation
Kevin heard the door open and looked up as Myra entered
She walked over to his cell, and he noticed she was holding the bag from his car with The Mask in it.
“Tell me about this thing,” she said. “I already know it gives you the power to transform. I need to know how to use it.”
He shrugged, “Well, tough crap. I’m not telling.”
“Really? Just that simple?”
“You’re a killer.”
“I’m a lot of things.”
“I’m sure.”
“There’s an instruction book,” she said.
“And you can’t read it.”
“You can?”
He shrugged.
“You could read it to me then.”
“Doesn’t matter anyway. It won’t work for you.”
“Why?”
“The mask won’t even come on for you. It’ll give an access error.”
“What if I made you put it on? It would power up, and then I can inhale the vapors.”
He hadn’t thought of that.
Crap.
“That probably won’t work either,” he said. “And even if it would, doesn’t matter, because I won’t do it.”
She looked at him for a long time, half smiling. Then she said, “Do you think you can just reject me? Do you think this is that kind of relationship?”
“You probably think you can torture me,” he said. “Right?”
She shrugged. "I was hoping we could avoid that, but I'll admit it occurred to me."
He nodded. "Let me show you something."
He closed his eyes for a couple of seconds, reached inside himself, and disabled the nerves that sent pain signals from his left hand to his brain. Then looked up
at her with a flat expression, holding both hands in front of his face.
Without hesitating, he suddenly gripped his left ring finger in his right hand and bent it all the way backwards. There was a loud pop as it came loose from the joint. He felt nothing.
She stared back with a look of…
Excitement?
Not the reaction he'd been expecting at all...
Need to throw in a little more shock value…
With the broken finger hanging limp and grotesque against the back of his hand, he swung it left and right, causing the digit to flop around wildly.
Her face broke into a broad grin.
"I love it," she said. "Can you break another one for me?"
He went quiet, not sure how to respond.
She's nuts, he thought. She had a knack for making herself seem sort of sane when she wanted to, but deep down, she was totally bonkers.
"How do you do it?" she asked.
Kevin took a deep breath. "I have a lot of control over my body. If I don't want to feel pain, I don't feel it. If I don't want to be scared, I fool with my own brain chemistry, give myself a dose of something that calms me down. So basically, you can't do a lot to me if I don't agree first."
Her face took on an amused expression. "I bet I can make you do whatever I want."
"I don't think so."
"I'm sure you're wrong. You're the sort who prides himself on being a good person. Good people are easy to manipulate. Do you know how?"
He suddenly had an inkling of where she was going, but didn't want to say anything.
Myra turned abruptly and walked over to the cell where April and Andy where watching the proceedings in horrified silence. Then she shot her hand in through the bars, grabbing April roughly by the throat. She lifted the young woman up a full foot off the ground, and just held her there.
April struggled uselessly, kicking at the bars and trying to pry Myra's fingers loose.
Myra addressed Kevin, her voice calm, "Tell me how to use the machine, or I'll crush her throat, here and now while you watch. And then," she shot a menacing look over towards Andy, "I'll go in there and kill the brat, and I'll do him slow. I'll make it hurt for him as much as I can, and I'll make you listen to him scream."
Kevin raised both hands up in surrender. "Jesus! Okay! Whatever you want!"
Myra continued choking April—who was already turning blue—for a couple more seconds, as if to make sure her point was crystal clear, and then she dropped her unceremoniously.
April's legs were too weak to hold her up when she hit the ground, and she collapsed in a heap, gasping and wheezing as Andy ran over and fell on her, hugged her, sobbing uncontrollably.
"Okay," said Myra, as she turned and walked back towards Kevin's cell. "Start talking, and leave nothing out. I'm dying to try this thing."
8 - Born
Myra surprised him then, by sitting down in the floor with the bag in her lap, cross-legged, and leaning forward eagerly, like they were best buds and she was just hanging out here, being neighborly.
He stepped back from the bars and sat down on the bench at the rear of the cell.
“Start talking,” she said.
“Seems like you got the basic idea,” he said. “You must be listening to what we say in here.”
“Yes, naturally. Why wouldn’t I be?”
“Well then you know how it works. I put the DNA packages in, breathe in the vapor that comes out inside the gas mask… That’s it.”
“And then how do you make yourself transform?”
“Well, that’s hard to explain. I go down into my body, and trigger it.”
“Down into your body?”
“Well, you saw what I did to this finger.” He brought it up now, and forced it back into the socket. “I’ve always been different when it comes to my body. I can feel things, sense things, control things that other people can’t control.”
“And after you use the mask, you sense something inside yourself; something that’s different?”
“Yeah… It’s like. I don’t know. You’d just have to feel it to understand.”
And I’m not going into any detail anyway. Because you don’t need to know.
It suddenly occurred to him that maybe she would be able to use it, at least a little bit. She could change shape, so she might have at least some of the same physical abilities he did.
“I’m going to pass the instructional manual to you,” she said. “And then you’re going to read it to me, word by word, and if I sense for a moment that you’re lying, or if you stumble on your words in a way that makes me think your trying to hide something, I’m going to do something to injure young Andy over there. Maybe we can see how he reacts to having a finger pulled out of joint.”
April’s mouth fell open, and Andy started to sob.
“Don’t hurt them,” said Kevin. “I’ll read the book to you.”
She smiled, “Yes you will. Because your heart is good and true and full of kindness. You’re like a knight in a fairy tale or something.”
She reached into the bag, and was feeling around for the book when one of the guards abruptly barged into the cell-block.
Myra turned to the guard, eyes blazing with fury. “How DARE you interrupt me?”
“Very very sorry. Tobias sent me. An urgent message just arrived for you from someone called the Queen Mother.”
Myra’s expression immediately softened. “Oh. Just now?”
“That’s what he said.”
“Fine. Tell him I’ll be right out.”
The guard left, and she said to Kevin. “I’ll be back shortly, and we’ll continue this conversation then.”
“Sure,” he said. “You’re the boss.”
She rose and hurried away.
- - -
Myra carried the envelop to her office, and took a seat at her desk.
Her mother’s message, as always, had come in the form of a film cartridge. The old lady hadn't learned to read or write until she was much too old to ever become comfortable with either skill, so she preferred to send her communications in other ways. In the old days, she'd relied on couriers. These days, she had the guards film her with a portable, point-and-shoot cartridge camera, loaded with Insta-Movie film reels which didn't have to be developed.
Myra set up her projector, stuck the film in and watched. Then she rewound it, and watched again.
Overall, Myra didn't care for the message at all. On the one hand, it didn’t sound like she was in danger of imminent death, which was good to hear. But there were a lot of surprises in the message. Things that she never would’ve anticipated.
And also her Mother had looked sharp, on top of her game.
She’d seemed cunning.
In some ways it made Myra proud, because deep down she wanted to respect her mother, but it was also awfully inconvenient. Myra had become quite comfortable with the idea of her mother as a doddering, fading old relic; still dangerous of course, but easily manipulated. This version of Mother seemed renewed, as if she were finding another source of strength in the face of being imminently replaced. She seemed like a real threat. She seemed like the big boss lady of old.
And also, the old woman knew way too damned much about everything. Had The Great Father really told her already about Kevin Tanaka? Or had she found it out herself in some other way?
Does she have spies watching me? Or is the serpent really telling her all this…
The idea that Apep was keeping an eye on her didn’t set well with Myra. It didn’t fit with her view of the world, or her way of life.
But what could she do?
I should probably just count my lucky stars that Mother doesn't want to kill me. That’s what I should do.
Myra turned off the projector, and started packing a suitcase. Mother wanted a meeting and she wanted it now. It wouldn’t be a good idea to drag her feet.
- - -
A short time after Myra left the room, April started crying again. She looked
really upset.
Getting choked probably didn’t do a lot for her mood, Kevin thought.
“Hey April,” he said “I know you probably hate me now, but I just wanted to let you know, I’m sorry for getting you hurt. I should’ve just caved in, did what she wanted.”
“Forget about it.”
“I won’t forget about it, and in the future, I won’t screw up like that again.”
“Just shut-up about that,” she said. “It’s not important. I gotta tell you about something.”
“About what?”
“About the reason why I’m the one who should be sorry. Not you.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I tried to trick you. When I was asking you questions about the shapeshifting stuff. Myra told me to ask you. She wanted me to fish for information. It was all just a big act.”
He shrugged. “No big deal. I sort of figured it out.”
“I wasn’t lying about anything else though,” she said. “It’s all true about my Dad, and the cult.”
“I believe you.”
“I just had to lie, because I’m so scared for myself, and my little brother.
“I don’t blame you. If I had a kid depending on me, trying to live under these circumstances... You do what you have to do.”
“Yeah. But it was still rotten, and I’m still sorry I did it.”
“It’s okay,” he said. “Don’t beat yourself up. You did the right thing.”
After that April stopped crying, and the room was quiet. Kevin let himself doze, because there wasn’t much else to do, and he was in no mood to talk about anything. He lay there trying to anticipate what might be coming next.
- - -
About 30 minutes later, one of the guards came in, and said, “You’ll all be leaving here in about an hour.” He looked over at April and Andy, “You two need to pack a few things. You could be gone a while.” He turned to Kevin, “Doesn’t look like you have anything to pack, so you’re probably good to go as is.”
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