Chapter Text
The smell of neurological fluid had long since passed and it didn’t seem warm and didn’t have any sweating or chills. Looking into its eyes its pupils were both the right size and shape and moved together. It’s thoughts and speech were as clear as ever. It was hard to get it to follow instructions to move the rest of its neck and facial muscles. It would have to be asked several times to complete any given task, and had a tendency to question most things.
Explaining why they did this or that certainly wasn’t hard, but it also was something they weren’t used to having to do. Everything they did with this subject took about two to three times as long as any other, not that they minded. It broke up the monotony, and while they weren’t going to admit it, it wasn’t like there were any other illithids lining up to talk to them. Everyone else was either out building up the colony or on trips to the surface to obtain more food and labor. While necessary, their function was fairly solitary most of the time.
To feel the shape of its skull and whether or not it had any remaining pain they had to feel through its hair. Enforcing hygiene had been the least of anyone’s concerns regarding this subject and the hair had gotten quite long, at least a few inches all around. They noted with some amusement that it pushed back slightly into their hand, not in an aggressive way, but because it liked the feeling and was pushing towards it. This was not a behavior they typically associated with humanoids, but they supposed it was an overall very mammalian behavior. Also amusing was that it didn’t seem to realize it was doing so, its thoughts being stuck in past events of varying content.
Your hair is well overdue for a trim.
Its eyes snapped up to focus on their face,“no, it’s not.”
It doesn’t take long and won’t even hurt. It’s just to help you stay clean.
“You’re not cutting my hair. I’m serious. Don’t even try” it glared menacingly and folded its arms.
They pulled their hand away. Well, I’m not going to be bothered with keeping all of that clean.
“Then don’t.” It glared for a few more seconds, then stared off into space again, lost in its thoughts again. It dropped its arms and its tunic shifted revealing some of the scarring on its shoulder. Most of the edges were clean and straight, like they’d been cut with some kind of blade.
Their curiosity got the best of them and they gingerly reached a hand forward and slipped their first two fingers under the collar to lift it away from the skin. As they leaned over it to look, they curled the tentacles on their face as far back as they could, even pulling the long ones almost up over their shoulders. They got a glimpse of deeper, wider scars. These ones did not have clean edges. There were massive, irregular chunks of flesh missing between the shoulder blades.
The subject shifted under them and they immediately pulled back only to find it had grabbed fistfuls of their tunic.
I just wanted to look at the scarring on your back. I’m done.
The subject’s heart jolted in its chest and that image, the sun searing down through the black spiderweb, jumped back into its mind. Pain jolted through its entire torso, and its fists tightened. It was at this moment that they realized that not only had it grabbed them tightly and firmly, but its left hand had grabbed the front of its robes near their right shoulder, and its right was under their left armpit. It wouldn’t have surprised them if it encircled their heart purely on instinct, considering the one thing occupying its barely-present consciousness at that time was their own increasing heart rate.
They breathed as slowly, and as quietly as they could manage to try and slow their heart back down. They also kept their face tentacles pulled back, despite having a second one bitten off being the least of their worries at the moment.
They took a moment to consider those other possibilities. The obvious one was the subject killing them, in exactly the same manner it had killed two other illithid already. They also didn’t want to kill the subject after all this time and effort, and weren’t sure how they would accomplish that right now anyway.
They started to chastise themself for forgetting the danger again, but were finally forced to admit that they knew. They always knew, and it wasn’t even that they didn’t care. Regularly almost dying was one of the few things left that they actually enjoyed.
The subject still had a firm grip on them. Its entire body was rigid, in fact. The only difference was that it had dropped its head forward so that it’s forehead was pushed against their collarbone. It wasn’t thinking about much of anything but the pain was still present. Now that it had their full attention, they were able to notice the phantom sensation from both injuries separately. They could feel the memory of its sternum being cracked but also the memory of flesh being alternately sawed and crudely ripped out of its back. They remembered inflicting the first pain, but there had been a purpose and they had done it as efficiently as possible. The second sensation was clumsy and drawn-out, to the point that they almost wondered if it had been done blind.
It was still frozen stiff with remembered pain. It hadn’t occurred to it to kill them just yet. They knew from past experience that the moment the thought arose, it would act. The realization of their own indifference had clarified some things.
They sat, breathing intentionally slow and long for what felt like an eternity. Finally, they found the courage to speak their mind, Well. If you’re going to do it, do it.
Its eyes snapped upward with a surge of panic that was somehow both simultaneously restrained AND frenzied by its confusion.
We’re both sitting here panicking and suffering for it. If you’re going to kill me just DO IT.
It’s mind blanked into raw, SPINNING emptiness for what felt like another entire eternity.
…then it let go.
She read through the spines of the books in the study. It did, in fact, contain numerous books on the topic of dragons. There were also books on goblins, surface cultures, history, and even trade routes. She came across a book on gardening named “halfling horticulture.”
The creature came over and pulled it out of her hands. This one has been indispensable. It has excellent advice concerning humidity and substrate composition when growing fungi. I was able to advise the farming collective and they increased their crop yield by one-and-a-half, and in return they’ve been able to provide me with a fabulous staple crop of mushrooms. It carefully reshelved the book.
She pulled out one on insects,“please tell me you’re not feeding these to people.”
That book has mostly been helpful in the management of lice infestations. On that topic, it would still be best to shorten your hair.
She glared at it hatefully and shoved the book back into place.
The next shelf consisted of books in a language she did not recognize.
These are just records for the 500 hundred of us in this colony and our livestock and labor.
She thought for a second,“…so there’s another one of you somewhere taking care of the other half? I don’t know if I can handle there being two of you.”
No, 500 is the population of the colony.
“You told me it was one thousand”
You’re mistaken. I may have been telling you the number of thralls in total.
She didn’t see a need to continue arguing with it.
She wandered the rooms, looking in cells and behind doors at pitiful things locked away into tiny spaces. She wondered where the keys to their locks were, or how many copies even existed. Then she found her own, old room. She had spent so long in tiny spaces, in tiny TINY bubbles of air along thin strings of airflow. In that context, this space struck her. It was not huge on it’s own, but in another way, in a comparable way, it was MASSIVE. Why had they made space for this room? All of the other, little, rooms had one set of metal bars to restrain them. Why did this one have two? What were they keeping here?
Her curiosity got the better of her, and she opened a door. The smell was what hit her first. That was her second clue that she should have left well enough alone, after the pitch black of it. She pulled a torch from the hall outside and instantly regretted everything. There were two corpses. She should have been delighted to see them, considering how she knew them.
One was deep green and almost twice as tall as her. It wore long robes that splayed out over its corpse like still, empty water. It had four tentacles that fell from where its mouth should be and two that fell long and wide and wiggled away from its face along the floor lifelessly. It had squealed in her brain before but today it did nothing. The other one was there too, the one she was unsure of and had never been strong enough to fight off, although she wasn’t entirely sure considering it’s head was no longer intact. It didn’t matter anymore, but she still heard the questions, faint and distant, and they still gave her that deep, inner twisting sensation. “Where did you come from? Why are you here?” Those questions still rose, but now they rippled into the void. There they had their own, sometimes worse, sometimes better entropy. She had never been strong enough to fight it off, and now it did not matter.
Finally, she raised her head and the torch she stole from the hall to look around at the walls. They were covered in sloppy, frenzied writing in numerous languages, all in the same thick, black dripping substance that looked to have been finger painted onto the wall. The parts she could read said:
DRAONY EALY EATDS ONLY EATDRG ONASN TDRAONLY EATDRAGO OEATD OY EATDRAG OEATEAONS ONLY EATDRONLY ONS ONLY AGS ONLY EATDNNLRARAGNS NDRAOONATDRAGNGOATDRAONS O TAGOON EARANATDRAGONS ONATDRAGOSATDRAS OY TDGORAGOY EATDGONS Y EATDRNS OLY EATDRANS ONLY EAONS ONEAT