Chapter 42.4: Converging Schemes

While Wepp made his way down the steps and along the northern wall of the room, Minkus leapt to the main floor and took off at a jog through the center of the chamber, glancing only long enough at each green tube to determine whether Ventyr or Yissa were inside it. At least, he tried to only glance at them. 

Most of the large tubes held animals of different sorts—a stalker, a skelk, a moa, and others that Minkus couldn’t name. One or two of the subjects looked to be recent additions, too new to have suffered the brutal testing that had clearly been conducted on all the othes, but most of them ran a frightening gamut between ferally enraged and morbidly disfigured.

Things got worse as he went, but he had to keep looking if it meant finding his friends. His belly heaved at the sight of a coiled, dead krait with its eyes gouged out and laying tail-deep in its own blood. A raging charr male lunged at him, beating against his containment with raw, bleeding fingers void of their claws. There was even an asura in one of the units, balled on the floor and babbling so loudly that Minkus could hear him through the thick glass.

Wincing at each new discovery, Minkus paused again and again, wanting for anything to free them all, if such a thing were even possible anymore. But no, there was no time—was there? He had to press on. The effects of this mursaat magic was even worse than everyone had tried to convey, and he could only hope—pray even—that Ventyr and Yissa were as yet unscathed.

Minkus was still processing the thoughts when he slid to a stop, more on instinct than clear observation. There, in the next containment cylinder was the first of the people he was looking for. She sat slumped against the opposite wall of the chamber in nothing but her undergarments, and Minkus immediately feared the worst as he reached a hand toward the glass. He tapped cautiously.

At the sound, Yissa raised her head, and though her eyes opened sluggishly at first, they shot open the instant she realized who she was looking at. “Minkus!”

Yisssa snapped her head this way and that, spying the area around him before shimmying forward to put her own hand against the imprint of his. Tears welled in her eyes. “How are you— how is this possible? It’s incredibly unlikely that—”

“It’s alright, Scholar Yissa,” he said. He kept his hand against the glass and his eyes on hers—she was, he realized, in nothing but her undergarments. “We’re here to help. Where is Sergeant Ventyr?”

“We?” she asked. Her eyes remained misty, but her mind seemed to snap down a new course. “Who is—”

“Yissa,” Minkus repeated gently, “where is the sergeant?”

For a moment she stared at him, on the verge of saying more, but she held her tongue, nodded, and pointed to the cylinder in the far right corner of the room.

“I will be right back, alright?” Waiting for her to nod her understanding, Minkus smiled as warmly as he could before turning toward the sergeant’s cell and bounding across the open space at a sprint.

It was a short distance, but Minkus was thankful for Yissa’s direction. It wouldn’t have been hard for him to find the sergeant on his own, but knowing which way to go had saved him the pangs of inspecting more of those test subjects than he absolutely needed to.

The sylvari’s wide eyes were already on Minkus when he reached the unit.

“By the Tree,” Ventyr breathed. He stood up to the glass, and Minkus realized Ventyr too had had his outer clothes taken away. All over his body, Ventyr’s usually orange bark was grayed and dull, with no visible bioluminescence.

“Minkus, how in the Mother’s merciful name did you come to be here?”

The question snapped Minkus out of his reverie, and without a second thought, he began to recount the story almost entirely in reverse, starting with how he and Wepp had infiltrated the base and moving backwards to how he, Penny, and Crusader Yult had captured the guards. From there, he began into their journey across the moors, with each explanation seeming only to require some previous explanation of how they’d reached it. He wasn’t doing the story justice.

Ventyr cut him off. “I’m sorry, but we’ll have to save the full tale until later. Right now you need to release us.”

Minkus flushed and nodded, coming back to himself. “Oh yes. Yes, of course. I— I got carried away.” He shook his head clear of the clouded thoughts and glanced back across the room for Wepp, just spotting his round rear sticking out from behind the last test cylinder at the farthest end of the room. He must have found a terminal.

Minkus spun back to Ventyr. “I’m here with Wepp—I just mentioned Wepp—and we have a plan— a plan to get you and Yissa out, I mean. We’re going to step away— leave, I mean, out of this room. We’re going to leave, but we will be right back, with help.” Minkus could feel himself babbling.

Ventyr appeared unfazed, though, drawing his brow level and nodding. Whatever the sylvari had been through, he’d now slipped back into the mode of a soldier, quickly and silently expelling any weakness he’d shown even a moment before. Minkus could swear the air began to ripple inside the cylinder, and unconsciously he took half a step back.

He nearly started back to Wepp when the sudden sound of sliding steel doors locked him in place. He and Ventyr froze, their attention snapping to the southeastern corner of the room, where big metal doors drew slowly back into the walls on either side. The lab on the other side appeared to be lit similarly to the testing chamber, but what drew Minkus’ focus were the two silhouettes resolving between the spreading doors. One was definitely bigger than the other, and the sounds of their conversation filled the room, but Minkus couldn’t make out much more about them without getting himself caught standing there in the middle of the room. Sure, he was disguised as a guard, but anything he could to not have another Kikka experience seemed like a wise decision. Frantically, he jumped behind Ventyr’s cylinder and drew himself up, stock still and listening.

“What sort of anomaly are you referring to?” the first person said, pitchy with annoyance. “The creature has been experiencing an even level of agony symptoms for the last two days. Slathering, clawing, mild self-mutilation—that has been the totality of subject 327’s behavioral effects beyond the first 24 hours. Why would anything have changed now? Alchemy, this is not the time we need anomalies. Kikka will have our ears!”

“I can’t say why there would be a change.” The other voice was rich and composed, lower in volume but full of intent. “That is hardly my area of expertise, now is it?”

Minkus and Ventyr exchanged similar expressions of distress, and Minkus raised a finger. In a low voice, he assured the sylvari, “I— well, we’ll be back. I promise.” Ventyr nodded as Minkus turned to creep back toward Wepp.

Just as quickly, he stopped, recognizing a gaping hole in his plan. The two rows of cylinders running the length of the room were pressed toward opposite walls, with a big, open space making up the center of the room. If he was going to reach Wepp without drawing the attention of the newcomers, he’d have to slip silently between the test chambers and wall that spanned the end farthest from them, making his way silently around the exterior of the room. And if they caught him doing that, how would that be any less conspicuous?

Minkus grimaced and clutched nervously at his over-tight collar. It was the exact moment when he remembered what he was wearing.

Did guards work in this part of the facility; would he actually blend in? He had no idea, but it seemed like the kind of thing Jinkke or Penny would try, and he had no better plans.

On silent, padding feet, Minkus stepped out into the center of the room and toward Wepp, setting into a stride that he thought looked nonchalant. He really hoped it did, because nonchalant was not how he felt.

Minkus passed back by the horrifying cylinders he’d already seen, but he hardly looked at them. Keeping his attention locked on the corner of the room he thought Wepp was in, he glanced occasionally toward the eastern wall and the door that the two intruders should have come through. It was a little funny, he thought, that he should be calling someone else an intruder, but here he was.

Stranger still, he realized he’d lost sight of the two, though he still heard their voices, seeming to echo string the room from somewhere beside him.

“Just go look at your equipment,” the deeper voice said with an exasperated groan. “Bless the Unseen Ones, I have no more details to offer you.”

That was when Minkus glanced through one of the green-tinted cells, squinting to see past its horrifying contents and out the other side. It was hard to make out anything beyond those grim containers, but the two strangers were there; they were just walking the same direction he was, between the cylinders and the wall. It was the same plan he’d almost employed against them, only these two didn’t seem to be using it to hide, at least not from him. They seemed oblivious to anything but their own conversation.

Catching sight of that charr again, Minkus grimaced and returned his attention to his own course. The scenes inside each glass tube were even worse on second viewings: creatures, even people, wracked by some sort of internal trauma he could hardly begin to understand. Who could do that? He clutched the strap of his pack, only able to hope that the field-projector could indeed keep his friends safe.

Minkus passed by Yissa’s cell once more. Though his brow was still furrowed with the horrifying thoughts, he forced as warm a smile as he could.

Just a few cylinders away from where he’d seen Wepp, he realized that he’d lost track of the two voices on the other side. Maybe, he quietly hoped, they’d passed on in another direction.

He rounded the last one.

“I found them, Wepp,” Minkus whispered with a hint of excitement. “I found Ventyr and Yissa. But we should hurry. Someone else has…” Minkus froze, eyes widening as his words trailed off.

Wepp indeed stood at a rounded bay of terminals that faced away from Minkus. Wepp’s eyes darted to him, then down at the screens again, but only for a second. Behind him was another male asura, taller than some, with a face that came to a pointy wedge right at his nose. And with this asura was— a human man.

Humans weren’t anything unfamiliar to Minkus at this point, not in general. But in an asuran laboratory? That was strange. And this human— well, Minkus couldn’t quite come up with it, but something about his dirty, red leathers itched at the back of Minkus’ mind. And that scar down his face dredged up the same foggy sense of remembrance. Did Minkus somehow know this man? That didn’t seem likely.

“I told you to vacate the terminal,” the new asura chittered at Wepp. He stressed the words as though repeating himself. “Whatever your current activities may be, I assure you that mine take immediate and unarguable precedence.”

Wepp looked to Minkus uncomfortably but acquiesced to the newcomer’s command, making room for the narrower male to step up and begin whatever he was doing at the terminal. Minkus watched, resting a hand on his focus even as his other hand rose to play awkwardly with his ear. He didn’t know how to feign disinterest, and he was sure he was doing a poor job of it.

The human eyed him suspiciously, but it was passing. He set the bulk of his attention on the asura he’d accompanied into the room, who was now tapping navigational commands into one of the terminal screens and muttering complaints to himself.

Though he tried not to stare, Minkus couldn’t stop thinking that there was something about the human, about the calculating way he surveyed the room and everyone in it, and especially his own associate. It wasn’t the kind of calculation that most asura held in their eyes, that cool distance, attending to mysteries they’d not yet unlocked; this was— different. Heated? Malicious maybe? Minkus couldn’t pin a word to it, but he didn’t like it. The man rummaged in his pocket, then noticed something atop the console and appeared to change his mind about something.

“I see nothing indicative of a problem,” the asura said, looking at no one but addressing the man looming behind him. “Why would you conclude there was any sort of behavioral change in subject 327? I see nothing in the vitality records to evince that.”

The human watched the monitors intently over the asura’s shoulder, still flashing occasional glances at Wepp and Minkus. “If your dear technology doesn’t give you that information, Vadd,” he said, “perhaps we should investigate the creature with our own two eyes.”

The asura, this Vadd, turned away from the console to face the man. “My ears, bookah, are you wasting my time intentionally?” He didn’t sound like he actually believed that. “We are not expending one more second on what is clearly a lapse in your observational skills. We have real work to accomplish and a real, impending timeline to accomplish it in.”

The human sighed and ran his hand down the length of the scar that puckered his face. “You’re making this complicated, Vadd. You and your little lackeys here.” His calculating eyes passed across Minkus and Wepp, and Minkus could feel decisions being made, though he hadn’t a clue what they were. Something was wrong; something was about to be very wrong.

“Lackeys?” Vadd asked. “I don’t know these two from any other randomly selected pair of guards in this extensive—”

Before the asuran engineer could finish his complaint, the human lunged, one hand reaching for whatever he’d spotted on the console’s counter and the other flashing down at Vadd’s neck. The man grabbed and slammed the asura’s head into the steel and stone of the console: once, twice, and the asura collapsed out of view behind the bank of terminals.

It all happened so fast that Minkus only felt his eyes widen before the man had turned on Wepp, his hands already wrapped around the steel rod he’d pulled up from the counter. The rod sparked at its end—some kind of electrical prod,  Minkus would have guessed, if he’d had the time for guesses.

Minkus was now moving, hand firmly gripping the magical focus at his hip.

As the man swung the rod, its end flaring angrily to life, Minkus saw Wepp wobble. His eyes rolled back in his head, and he fell straight to the ground in a heap. Minkus has never been so thankful for any ailment.

The scarred man blinked, confused.

Minkus stopped short and shrugged. “He has a condition,” he said, hoping it would draw the human away from Wepp. “He— well, he isn’t a danger to you or— or to whatever it is you want.”

The man frowned, silently taking a closer inspection of Minkus’ face. It seemed the sense of déjà vu went both ways.

“What I want,” the man said, shaking away that nagging recognition, “is this.” He reached for the console, and Minkus heard a series of sharp clicks: one, two, three, four— more and more, until there had easily been a dozen switches flipped so rapidly that they must have been in close proximity to each other.

Minkus pursed his lips, now standing still and looking between Wepp’s crumpled body and the man working at the console. He had genuinely no idea what he and Wepp had walked into here, and he had no idea at all what this strangely familiar human male was—

There was a series of snaps from the huge, glass cylinder to Minkus’ right. Clasps along the base of the containment unit popped free, and with a hiss of air that had been trapped inside it, the cylinder began to rise off its base. The gnarled and bloody skale inside stirred.

Beyond it, the next containment cell popped open. Then the next, and then the next. And inside each one, some tortured creature groaned, howled, or cawed to life. All of the man’s toggle flips make sudden and perfect sense, and the bottom fell out of Minkus’ stomach.

A moment must have passed before a smart shiver jolted him back to his senses. He looked back at the man, who had ducked behind the console and was now rising with the unconscious Vadd over one shoulder. The weight slowed him a little but came nowhere near stopping him as he rounded the console and rushed Minkus, stabbing the electrified prod at him with unexpected precision.

Minkus took it right in the chest, instantly feeling the sizzle of electricity and the tense seizure of every muscle from his abdomen through his arms. He all but bounced off the rod, several feet back from the running man and his unconscious captive.

“Enjoy your precious subjects,” the human barked, only glancing over his shoulder before pressing on to the door that led out into the corridor outside. “I think they’ve been waiting for this.”