“Milk teeth. Hot pink. Thrill seeking. Kosckelezern. Methamphetamine. Un-god supplication. Salt of Solomon. Lily-in-the-Deepest-Dark. Partial asphyxiation. Betel nuts. Gambling. Snow. Eating. Opium. There is a long, long ladder of interesting substances or activities to which susceptible persons of weak will or unfortunate neurobiology might slave themselves. These have, almost universally, some combination of two things at the bottom rung of their lucid engagement: self-deception and apathy toward the external.”
-A Dissertation on Addiction and the Psychology of Dependence, the Relationship of the Same to Various Extrafacetarily Exposed Cultures, and Metanalyses of the Same
The feeling that Eihks had at the base of his skull was entirely fictional. That is to say, the sensation was legitimate; the tactile suggestion of it was completely ersatz. His seething brain refused to let him rest until he turned around, stared it right in its cerebrum, and admitted that he was aware THAT WAS A SIDE EFFECT OF THE PROBLEM.
His problem, incidentally, was that he was a Tufcich class of undead. The problem compounded itself in that he was additionally guilty of hiding that truth for the last…
Well. That was a lot of years stretching back into the past.
The karkshesh (Gegaunli karkshes, the networks were calling them - as though to rub salt in Eihks’s psychological wound) had made things inconvenient for him, to be certain. It wouldn’t have been impossible to fend off denouement if Ms. Ktsn had gone and sliced open his leg or torso or even his head without showcasing his arcane cap. Enough people had midrange immortalities or other special capabilities that it wouldn’t be enormously unusual if he survived a massive wound without any outward reaction besides annoyed discomfort.
On the other hand, he’d been stuck with deceptions for a long time, and maybe this was a sign saying that he needed to come clean - damn the immediate consequences to reputation.
Perhaps best to not dwell on it overmuch.
At least they wouldn’t fire him from his philanthropic assignment - not that they wouldn’t have done if they’d had more people in their volunteer pool, and he hadn’t demonstrated perfect reason, and the arcane cap on his femoral triangle didn’t (very explicitly) show with its sigils why it had reanimated him but didn’t make him over into a virulent animal.
Yes, he and that pohostinlat lady had struck it off right away. “Reasonable concern of risk” indeed.
His medical facilities hadn’t quite fully repaired his leg from the earlier stresses visited upon it, but he could walk adequately during the short period the convalescing process would yet take. They tromped together through the mid-height grass away from the village, Ktsn flipped over to let her legs take lower, faster, broader-angled steps. “Fastlegs,” the locals called the stance, according to the linguistics data Eihks had received. She was low enough to have the underside of her torso-ish region brush the stems almost constantly.
“That little section of metal on my leg is problematic for a number of reasons,” he huffed. The first shall be last, and the last person he’d met would be the first to get explanations for his shame.
“Really.”
“When you have one of these, you’re a special kind of…”
Local language lacking, improvise necessary terminology.
“... not-alive creature. I’m not officially in trouble, as such, but after showing that little section of metal to the world, it’s clear to everyone around me that I can cause trouble quite easily.”
“That is - what?”
The eye on the closer side of Ktsn’s face suddenly angled up, and her eyelid squinted at him.
“I am afraid I do not understand.”
How to explain.
“I was killed a long time ago, and have been walking around ever since with the fear that people would realize that fact.”
“Excuse me,” said the woman as she kept the pace. “I do not think you understand the meaning of the word ‘killed.’”
“I absolutely do, thank you very much. Just because I’m technically cheating at fluency in your tongue doesn’t mean I don’t understand it.”
“Cheating?”
Eihks tapped his cerv-mesh, and the karkshesh’s eye followed his finger.
“The thing on my neck puts knowledge in my head, and lets me say and do things that would be hard or impossible otherwise.”
Her set of rounded inner teeth showed as her lips retracted a bit.
“I’ll explain that later,” he said.
Ktsn said nothing.
“When my people were… studying yours, we learned a fair amount about your diseases. You have that thing called moltrot.”
He waved a hand up at his face.
“You see somebody who’s partly balding, and the hair around the patch begins turning a very light blond. That tells you they’re sick and you should stay away, right?”
“Yes.”
The woman was at least listening, rather than silently resenting with an ear unstuffed.
“The same thing for me. If you see this,” he added, with a point at the metal under his clothes, “it’s like a very large bald patch, with a very deep white rash around the edges where the hair’s turning color. Imagine that rash, except covering my whole body.”
The farmer didn’t slow, exactly; however, she did swerve just a bit farther away from her companion, over a short mound of dirty clover-stuff.
“I’m not actually…” he started, a wry grin slitting his lips apart. It crumpled suddenly; no existing word for contagious in the language. Approximations aplenty, but all possessing very different connotations.
“You’d have to secure my cooperation to get this sickness, and my cooperation isn’t forthcoming.”
When she looked at him with even more skepticism, he ran a hand through his bangs. The action almost caused him to trip over a thing that was either a rock or a biologically bizarre plant, hiding in the taller grass.
“First,” he said, mimicking her prim-and-proper manner of speech, “I would have to actually bite or sink my fingernails into you, and hold on for some time, to pass along my condition. Second-”
And there she went. Look at her go.
Eihks stopped, cocked his head, and observed the woman sprinting. Sure, it was only for a short time, but those legs could go bleeding-fast in bursts. She wasn’t getting away from his tracking utility; let her depart for a few minutes. He’d catch up.
He’d been interested in how the karkshesh had reacted to his appearance. Fear had, unless he was badly mistaken, been right there at the surface. He’d learned what tells to anticipate, and what sorts of things evidently lowered the implicit threat level of a creature like himself, from the basic data of his state-sponsored information-dump. It was nice that she waited as long as she had before lashing out. Not great, since the lashing out still happened, but time would tell which direction that pair of behavioral plot-points curved. It was very neat, though; a species whose instincts led them to preserve the group at the cost of the individual during times of fear. Not when the fear-source was a known and known-to-be-insurmountable quantity, true; interesting, regardless. The manner in which anger drove the experiencing party away from its object also discouraged internecine confrontations. Curious but arguably sensible adaptations for a lineage whose birth rate was relatively low and who had relatively long lifespans. Very worth studying, all of it.
Now, even more interesting was the fact that she’d identified his kind. Eihks most certainly didn’t see anything in the material handed out which mentioned describing the species who’d be assisting in this venture. That was a mystery he intended to dig up as soon as he could. At the same time as he investigated what had happened back there in the village, possibly.
Whatever had damaged his tibia, and thrown him off balance just long enough to let the woman get her little pickax into play, and expose his dirty little secret to the world, it wasn’t just stepping on a branch or having a rock roll underfoot.
That had been, unless he was badly mistaken, magic.
It’s times like this that make you wish you’d invested in a bit of College of Prophecy advisement.
The man watched her dart into the trees, arboreal puffball leaves wicking the breeze. He sat down, counted to a hundred, very distinctly didn’t think about his professional career likely coming down in burning wreckage, and then counted to a hundred again. In the meantime, he drew shapes in the air like he was carving with a knife. It was a beautiful day out in the abducted world’s field, with the faintly purple clouds overhead and the occasional sounds of critters foraging for whatever they might find.
It would have been far more beautiful if he could still taste or smell or touch. It would have been placid and happy if not for the silent tessellated faces across the sky below those clouds.
The greater worry of his integrity as an objective source of truth tried to surface, and he made an effort to avoid thinking about something he couldn’t change just yet.
A few more counts to a hundred, and Eihks stood up, detecting the fact that his charge had stopped her headlong flight. She was far ahead, and her wandering patterns had a curt biological-random character. He suspected she was following paths or such, indicating commonly walked areas with well-laid-out and often-followed routes. A house of some description, if he wasn’t mistaken.
He wasn’t going to cheat and use his dæmon cluster for surveillance, not in this case.
When he decided to go for broke, the human began working his gyrokinetic talents, placed a thaumaturgical fulcrum in the air, flung himself skyward, and soared.
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