Chapter Text
==>
A young troll looks out from the mouth of the caverns on purple grassed plains below them, stars spinning about at millions of miles per hours, moons spiraling just as fast. It is cold, and the breeze rustles their skirts as it collides with the warm air that bellows within Alternia. There are no winds within the caverns, only stale and stagnation, and the great shuttering breaths of the mother grub one could mistake for breeze if one got too close. This troll is not close. They are looking at the surface world, longing, missing like they have been since they were forced away.
Though it was ten sweeps ago this troll was given life, only today will they be given a title.
> Enter title.
Enter title: SST Laboratories Automaton E54.
> Don’t fuck with me now.
Enter title: Bastion.
> That’s better. Let’s move on then, shall we?
Your name is BASTION. As previously mentioned, you have been drafted and reassigned to the GLORIOUS COLLECTIVE AUXILIATRICES, the primary role for your thinly populated bloodcaste. Here, you and your fellow jades hold the FUTURE OF THE EMPIRE in your hands, where it is your duty to care for the creature that facilitates the mixing of genetic DNA from less than willing volunteers in order to produce new trolls for THE EVER MARCH FORWARD IN TIME. It falls to you to cull weak or abnormal grubs before they reach the age that they can add to the slurry themselves, and thus, this is not a job for the faint hearted.
Not that the faint hearted aren’t dragged here anyway. Jades do not belong on the surface. They are raised in the caverns, or torn away from the lusii that have selected them as soon as they can walk.
You’re different from the others. You were out there too long before the drones caught you, where you still spends nights at the mouth of the cave staring longingly out at the plains brimming with danger. The others whisper at among themselves that you’ve gone sun mad, that you’ll never make it to adulthood.
But yet here you are. Despite the odds you have ASCENDED, and from this night forward you shall have greater duties, maybe even young jades of your own to be responsible for. Yet, you still yearn. You think to yourself, one last time. One last time to go see her, let her know you’re alright, that you’ve made it to ascension day and you’ll be safer from now on. No one ever told her that you survived. You don’t think she even knew what was going on when the drones took you.
So, just for one night. You still know where your hive is. You put one foot forward into the swaying grass.
> Be the other one.
What? You can only ever be yourself.
> Fine, be you in the future.
You are yourself in the future, distant temporally, close physically as you stand once again at the exit to the caverns, escape feet away. This time the full weight of your disobedience weighs down upon you, for now you are not just some delinquent newly ascended whose greatest crime is a little truancy. The terror of what you are about to do has your strutpod locked, your chug column swallowing over and over again as your mouth remains frustratingly dry.
The grub tucked in your arm squirms. You freeze.
You pray, you pray to the Minstrels, to the Demoness, to anyone who might be out there listening that she doesn’t cry out. If she cries then you are both dead because you are harboring a disease, a newly declared blight, the words painted candy red across every screen.
The Summoner has caused more fear, cracked more foundations than none but the Sufferer before him. A sweep dead and still his shadow hangs over the empire, spurs the Empress into violence, to impulsivity. No one would say it aloud, few would dare to think it even in their own heads, but many see She is afraid. The propaganda spins it into a crushing defeat over a heretical degenerate, but anyone who hasn’t replaced their memories of the revolution with empire schoolfeeds realizes how close the Summoner came. Some say one of his beasts left a scar across her chest.
So the purging of the bronzes feels sloppy, hasty, like it might be rolled back any day. The highbloods have gone paranoid; what they once thought was a little parlor trick, a version of psionics for traipsing about the wilds and playing with barkbeasts, has turned into something far more threatening than the could have ever imagined. The Cavalreapers were all but decimated, the proximity of the troll population to so many lusii called into question. All around you, whispers of reforms threaten what it means to be a troll.
It could be over speculation on their part, it matters not to you. Nor toward the waves and waves of bronzes culled in the caverns below you, the number only growing as fear of empathetic psionics increases.
You were shaking. That’s all you can remember now, the shaking. You’d culled before, of course you had it was—is, was—your job yet there was so many and the floor was stained and the copper color was all over you. There is—was, is—a tiny window. The smallest gap between when the mandate goes from an unofficial decree to an official decree, when every bronze on the planet will be killed, where the line might be wiped out all together. And it shouldn’t have made a difference. One more little wiggler body to add to the pile. But the drones weren’t looking and your superiors were arguing and there was this tiny little grub, just on the floor, helpless as she mewled for something to eat.
You grabbed her and ran.
It doesn’t make a difference, you’ve only made it so you’ll both be culled. It does nothing when all you grabbed was this one, this one, singular little body when her hatchmates are painting the walls. You could have grabbed others, but you could only really carry the one, and it makes no difference now anyway. They’re long dead.
So it’s just you, and her, snuggled in the crook of your frond rotator. You are a fugitive, and you’ll have to take your first steps out there, into the world that hurt you so badly the last time you ventured out. On the run from the empire, something you couldn’t escape from before, and you doubt you can now, but you have nothing to do but attempt.
You have no prospects, but you do have a plan. There are people you can take her to, your little grubling. Can you say that? Is she yours? No, she is no ones. Neither of you belong to anyone. You are simply her vessel, her ship that might take her to a place where she can have hope.
You put one foot forward into the swaying grass.
> Be you in the past.
You cannot open your eyes. They are too…sticky.
You are hurt, hurt, hurt everywhere and oh so very stiff. You can barely tell what is a part of you and what is not, if the horizontal you are lying is soft or hard or somewhere in between.
There is light, you are sure of that, but only after minutes—hours?—of agonized searching. Color should be next you tell yourself, and think you’re probably right. Then shapes. Please let there be shapes.
There is sound too. The shapes, they’re a troll, horns poking through a blue hood, distinct when all the world around you is white and grey.
“Now, that can’t be right.” The voice speaks. The voice should belong to the troll, and you think it does. She comes closer to you. “You need to stay down, child. You won’t heal like this.”
You think you already are down. You role on your side to tell her so, only to have her face so close to yours that you can see all the shapes you were looking for and more.
Her right ganderbulb is warped. She has four pupils, three elongated, stretched to form a triangle, and one in the center. As soon as you look at them, you can feel them digging straight through your mucus membranes and into your soul.
“Sleep.”
> Sleep.
To think, you had spent nearly your whole life on the planet’s surface, fighting for your life, small and rare blooded with a lusus not strong enough to protect you. You’d learned how to steal, and more importantly to hide, but the greatest lesson of all was that much could be avoided if you were simply unnoticeable. Yet, despite all that, of maybe because of, you had grown confident in your assessment of the outside world. Memories had faded from learning experiences to facts, safely tucked away in the back of your mind where you would never have to take them out and reexamine them again.
Maybe because you were now too large or too confident or some combination, but you could not slip by unnoticed as you once could.
A group of adults found a lone jade so so far from their caverns, and thought it was the funniest thing they’d ever seen. It must have been funny, with how much they’d laughed, and kept laughing, and maybe your eyes had filled in and your second molt had come upon you but you’d never see adults as anything but an other. Far more powerful. Inescapable.
When they’d had their fun with you, you were gone and did not sleep, for not every dark pass into unconsciousness is sleep. When you awoke (for one can still awake even when not asleep) everything was crusted and sticky, broken, bruised. You tried to look, to see if it was still night, but to your rising panic you could see nothing, no light, no dark, no moons. They’d blinded you, they’d blinded you and you squirmed about on the ground like a newly hatched grub, desperately trying to see.
You wanted to go home. You wanted to go home now, and tears couldn’t come but you tried to haul yourself forward, panic burning your blood pusher cavity and you began to crawl. There was no way to know if it was the right direction. You could not see. You only knew that home was not here.
Looking back, you are not sure if you were even trying to get to the caverns, or your hive.
The third time you awaken, there is no cerulean here to great you. Instead, there is a different troll, rusted, short, humming to himself nearby as you try to blink yourself to consciousness. You can see, you were not blinded after all, but something is still not right. Your vision is…distorted. Wrong. Like things have been all been narrowed to look down a long tunnel. Reaching up, you feel where your right eye should be, and your point stumps only come across lumpy flesh, a scarred over sore.
“Hey,” the rustblood barks, and you jump so hard you knock something around inside you and the pain blooms fresh. “Don’t mess with that!”
You tell him you’re sorry. It’s over several gasps of pain as you try to right yourself, but your balance is gone too, and suddenly a horrid memory of that night surfaces. They ripped at you as you screamed. One had torn your arm off, blood dripping from her jaws, jade mixing with her facepaint as she’d taken a bite out of it and chewed.
You don’t want to look. You don’t want to look but you do, and see that your right arm is gone, some sort of splint in its place, white metal fused in your skin. There’s just synthetics, poking out of your flesh, and your bloodpusher is beating too fast for you to breathe. You scrape at it, like you might be able to dig it out, your digits making gashes in your flesh.
“Minstrels,” the rust swears. “Ana, get in here! Your patient is having a meltdown.”
“Your patient,” and suddenly the cerulean is here, the one with the psionics, sweeping in with her cloak trailing behind her. She takes on look at you and says, “oh now lets not do that, child. Why don’t you sleep for a bit?”
No! No you don’t want to sleep. You want to be OK. You want to back, you want to go back!
You start crying. It hurts more than it used to, as tears bubble in your left eye until they’re forced to fall, stinging as they race down your cheeks. You stop clawing at your arm and put your head in your hand, weeping like a wiggler, emerald tears leaking out of you.
Out of the corner of your eye you see Ana and the other troll exchange a hesitant look. She comes close, putting an arm around your shoulder and saying, “it is alright, habibti. You’re going to heal up nice, and you’re going to be alright. Okay?”
You sniffle. Despite not wanting to sleep, you do feel tired already. You want to lie down.
“That’s fine,” she says. “Go right ahead.”
There are pillows on the back of the lounge plank that let you lie sort of horizontal while still looking at the trolls around you, the burgundy now fussing with some tool bench. No wonder you feel so sick, who knows how long you’ve been lying here without sopor?
Even as you think it, you see a tube tied tight into your missing arm feeding a stream of green slime into your body. Oh, okay, that’s not so bad. You’re okay, you’re not going to die. Maybe these people are just fixing you up because they’re going to eat you too, but that doesn’t seem as likely as it did before with all the trouble they’re going through.
What happened? How did you get here?
“Well, Torbjörn found you a little ways outside of Gutterclaw,” Ana says as she indicates the troll behind her, still pretending to look busy. “He thought you wouldn’t make it, so he brought you back here to fix you with some spare parts. Though it’s a good thing I was visiting, otherwise he probably couldn’t have gotten them to take. Might have just killed you by infection.”
“I’m an engineer,” Torbjörn grumbles. “Not some docterror, or whatever it is you’re sunlighting as these days.”
Spare parts?
Ana nods. “Your new arm there.”
When you look down at the splint jammed in your stump and just stare at, Torbjörn sighs and comes over. “It’s a prosthesis, repurposed drone parts. I would’ve given you something more dexterous, but I design military grade, so that’s what I got. Didn’t want to slap you with one of the big guns, that’s a culling offense for anyone lower than cerulean.”
With more care than you would have guessed from his brusque attitude, he gently takes your—new—arm in his hands. And…you can feel him as he does it. No, feel isn’t quite the right words, it isn’t what you would sense if he was doing the same thing on your skin. This is more that you can detect, detect his fingers and where they are in relation to this stick of metal. It’s downright terrifying.
“Try extending it,” he offers.
You don’t know how to do that. You can sense from it sure, but it doesn’t feel like you, not in the normal sense. But both your rescuers are looking at you now, so you know you have to at least try. In the end, you think, I want to flex my elbow.
To your surprise, it’s as easy as that. The arm extends, dangerously thin now that it’s not folded up. Before, it went about to where your elbow used to be, and it’s proportioned that when at full length it ends at the approximation of a hand. The drone arm appears to be some sort of medical needle, or perhaps a prong for fine electronic work.
“It should be a few more days before all the nerve endings are set, but it’s the better of the adjustments,” Torbjorn admits. “We could only save the one eye.”
You swallow. Right, the eye. You wonder if you could have a mirror.
Ana brings you one and you spend the next twenty minutes staring at your reflection, seeing the new face looking back at you. Your right ganderbulb is completely gone, shredded to bits, skin healed over what Ana says is a prop to keep the socket from collapsing. The left, however, isn’t even recognizable as a troll’s—it’s verticle, a long yellow pupil surrounded by white and grey metal, stitched into your face like a patchwork doll. You touch it lightly.
“So, that’s how you got here,” Ana says when you set down the mirror. “Now that you know a bit about us, mind telling us your name?”
> Share title.
“I see. You’re a long way from the caverns, child. Ah,” she says suddenly. “That reminds me. I think someone has been trying to see you.”
With that, she goes to the window and opens it. A tiny white lusus flies through, and your bloodpusher flips right over itself as she hurls herself at your head.
You start crying again, tear ducts patched over smooth metal wetting it once again as Ganymede flies circles all the while, tweeting wildly, darting away as you try to catch her. Finally, she lets you nab her in both hands and pull her close to your face.
“She showed up a few days ago, absolutely twittering mad,” Ana says fondly. “I figured that being right after we got ourselves a stray was too much of a coincidence.”
It’s been a very rough night. You sob as you pat her little head with a finger, trying to communicate how much you’ve missed her in as few words.
You thank your hosts. You hope its enough, when you don’t have caegars for repayment.
Torbjörn scoffs. “You can repay us by staying out of trouble in the near future.”
“Torbjörn, that’s no way to talk to them after they were nearly culled,” Ana scolds.
“I’ll talk to them however please,” he shoots back. “My hive, my rules, and that goes for you too Anaana.”
“I remember things a bit different when you were practically begging for help last week.”
“I did not beg-”
Please, please don’t argue on your account. You promise you’ll stay out of trouble.
Ana smiles at you, a sweet but condescending smile as she smirks at your sick bed. “Oh child, that’s adorable for you to try, but really, it’s not like that at all.”
You blush suddenly. No, no that’s what you were doing. You weren’t trying to mediate, honest. Sorry if it came out like…sorry.
Ana laughs, and you flush harder. After a moment, your curiosity overcomes your embarrassment, and you ask that if they’re not together, what is going on between the two of them?
“I’m her matesprit’s kismesis, whatever that makes me,” Torbjörn huffs.
“What it makes you is a pest,” Ana declares. “Now, go play with your robots somewhere else. Our guest needs a breather.”
> Rest up.
The next wipe is cotton balls in your acid tract and stitching ribs. You spend your nights horizontal, cuddling Ganymede and thinking about what will happen when you go back to the caverns. You will be reprimanded most assuredly, but they will not cull you. They will take one look at your half-stitched body and realize someone has done the work for them.
You quietly entertain the idea of staying. Just staying here. The time you are brave enough to say it aloud, the stony silence you get is all the answer you need. They have their own duties to keep after all, Torbjörn makes weapons for the empire’s war machine, and his matesprit takes credit since an indigo’s creations will always attract more eyes than a burgundy’s. You don’t blame her though. She’s nice, she brings you glasses of water and puts the back of her hand against your nugbone while asking how you are. It’s always the same, how are you tonight, how are you tonight, but the pattern becomes almost soothing, a routine to fall into. She also makes you grubcakes. You have no idea how long it’s been since you’ve last had grubcakes.
Ana…well you don’t know what Ana does. You think she is some sort of elite operative within the nanonbiters. Ana’s matesprit doesn’t come by at all, even though he has more reason to visit Torbjörn then Ana does. You don’t ask. It’s probably some sort of wrap-around passive-aggressive pitch battle they have going on, the hormonal jades get into those sorts of things sometimes.
So you stroke Ganymede on the top of her head and explain to her that you won’t be coming back this time. You bones knit and they stick you with mediculizers, and finally you limp back to the caverns. Halfway there, it strikes you that you didn’t look back. That you were there and then you left and you didn’t realize how profound it was that you had felt safe for the first time in your life until you’re standing waist deep in the plains. And it stabs you so hard you cry, alone and pathetic in the middle of the wastes.
> Be you in the future again.
You are now a fugitive once more, another three sweeps older, which you will remain for the rest of our story. The bronze has awakened now, mewling for food, ravenous in the hours since her last meal. You set her down and dig around in the dirt for grubs.
Insect grubs that is. You’d have to dig a lot deeper to find more grubs like her.
You claw manages to bring up a few fat ones over the course of a half hour. The wiggler slurps them up and bawls for more.
You drape yourself on a nearby rocks, exhausted and disappointed. You’d been hoping that you could scrounge a few bugs for yourself when she was full, but you’ve already wasted so much time it can’t be worth the effort. Your think pan buzzes with an Auxiliatrice’s training, running over how long a grub can survivor without food, how many days until their first molt. It’s all so much to carry around in your head when fatigue also weights down your slowing limbs.
It’s difficult with only one arm. Most times you spend with her nestled securely in it, your needle there for simple tasks but not much else beside electronic manipulation. There had been a close call with a drone a day back, and your delirious thinkpan had entertained the idea of trying to hack it with your needle it in some daring escapade. Stupid. You don’t know the first thing about hacking, or drone work, no matter your cyborgization. Instead, you’d tucked you and your charge into a narrow burrow and waited for the danger to pass, just like you’d manage every previous time.
More than anything you require water. You find your thinkpan hurts on more minutes than it doesn’t, dizzy spells and mind plunges. More than once, you’ve shaken it out to realize you’ve been going the wrong direction for hours, losing more than half a day’s progress all counted.
You need to find somewhere to lay low for a while. You have day cloaks for both you and the wriggler, but they prevent shriveling under the sun, not protection from the heat itself. Your insistence to push on through Alternia’s radioactive day cycles leaves you staggering, sweltering under the coat of leather. Your grub needs food, and you need some sopor slime—you haven’t slept since leaving the underground and it’s only a matter of time until your foggy state leads you to a fatal slipup. There must be somewhere you can hide from the drones, at least for a night.
On your journey you’ve seen remote hives dotting the land, but you’ve always taken care to avoid them. Even with your cloak to hide your replete eyes, the strange bundle at your side would jog anyone’s suspicion. Or appetite.
But you’re running out of options. Water, slime, shelter, food. Just to recharge. To restock.
So the next time you come to a towering building out on the savannah, alone, not even a road to lead anyone here, you approach rather than shy away. Your hopes are high: there is no skuttlebuggy in the drive, and the windows are dark.
The door is locked, but thankfully there is at least one thing your prosthetic arm is good for. After more jamming than picking, it pops open, and you make your way inside.
The relief is immediate. The most important part of a hive is shelter from the day, and cool air caresses you as if the sun had already set. Quietly, you shrug off your cloak and set the grub on the meal plane. She gurgles in complaint to be out of the comfort of your arm, but you shoosh her as you make your way to the thermal hull. Tubs of churned dairy product, vermillion spheres…there. Milk. Actually, an unreasonable amount of milk, but you’re not going to look a hoofbeast in the aural receptors.
You pour some milk into a bowl and place it on the meal plane. The grub scuttles over immediately, and you wait a minute to make sure she won’t fall in and drown herself before going to find something for your own person. You settle on a can of fart nibblets, and sit down to eat.
If the air’s relief was welcome, this is a blessing. But having a full digestion bladder only reminds you how exhausted you are, and a few times you almost nod off in your chair and land face first in your nibblets.
Should you risk sleeping here? The denizen could be home any minute, technically, and you’d be at a great disadvantage if they caught you unawares.
But, as you nearly fall asleep for the fourth time, you realize you won’t be able to put up much of a fight anyway. You promised yourself you’d get some sopor, and damn well you’re going to get it.
> Ignore your better judgment and explore the dark creepy hive.
The halls are gloomy and narrow. There are scuff marks in the carpet, one that’s green and thin, like it’s been worn down to its barest fibers over many sweeps. As you withdraw from the out walls, the hive only grows blacker and blacker, and unease coils deep in your gastric evacuation gland.
You’re alone in your disquiet. Full and happy, the grub has dozed off. You are trying keep her rocking gently when you hear something behind you, scraping on the threadbare floor. You whip around.
It’s a lusus. You freeze in fear, clutching your grub close to your chest as the creature takes another step toward you. It’s a centaur, its white coat glistening even in the half-light, and the spheres in the fridge jump to your mind. Of course there’s no scuttlebuggy: this place belongs to a child.
A child and their custodian.
The centaur snorts, scraping its hoof on the carpet at is takes in you both, tilting its head and deciding whether to charge. There is no escape except backwards, and you know you cannot outrun this sort of lusus. They are famously strong, and no doubt just as fast. Your only hope is to stay here, and hope you don’t look threatening.
The lusus looks at you. You look at it. The two of you stay locked in visual combat while the grub sleeps on.
“Adawe? Where did you go to?”
An exhausted looking troll child appears at the centaur’s side. It immediately loses interest in you, and snorts in her general direction.
Somehow, this does not relax you. When the troll—an olive, only discernable by the rectangular sign on her headpiece—notices you, she says, “oh, did Adawe let you in?”
Cautiously, you consider options. Then, very slowly, you say yes, yes she did.
“Okay, that’s alright then.” The girl tilts her head, her vaguely sleepy eyes blinking at you. “I’m sorry, I can’t have guests right now. I have a big experiment I’m almost finished with, but I can talk later.”
Is she really not threatened by you? Perhaps she is very sheltered, living so far away from any civilization, but even then she should be at least a little put off. When you were her age, you’d been terrified of adults, and the idea of finding one in your hive would have sent you running to the nearest green trash receptacle for shelter. Then again, maybe if you had a lusus like that, you wouldn’t have been nearly so intimidated.
It’s quite alright. You can just…sit for a little while.
The olive nods. “Okay. Adawe can get anything for you, if you like. I’ll be in the subterranean block.” And with that she was gone, and you had tactfully refrained from saying you had already raided her storage cubes.
At first, you were still nervous about the strange troll and her lusus. What if this was some sort trick to lull you into a false sense of security? Sure you thought you were playing along with the whole “guest” thing, but if this olive was some sort of serial murderer who kidnapped anyone who wandered to this corner of the plains?
Well alright, that probably wouldn’t have been very lucrative. Sill, you were on edge, and you had to remind yourself that the best opportunity the centaur had to run you down would have been in that hallway.
You cautiously ask Adawe if there is a spare recuperacoon around, and she leads you to a room on the second floor with a melting window. When you’re sure she’s gone, you scoop out a bit of sopor slime for the grub and put it in a little bowl, also provided by Adawe. Still, it takes your last bits of courage to disrobe and submerse yourself in the liquid. When you do, you’re out before your toes touch the bottom.
> Figure out what to do with yourself.
Once again, you’ve found yourself a guest. Perhaps that is not such an unusual thing to be, but jades aren’t usual trolls, and you are not experienced with being in places that don’t belong to you. When you wake you find yourself not dead and your grub not eaten and your cloths where you left them. By the setting sun, it’s been almost a full twenty-four hours.
You set off exploring. At first, you keep your route looping back to the grub every few minutes, making sure she’s eating her elongated water vegetable, exploring only a room at a time. But eventually you grow bolder, and find yourself lost in not an unpleasant way. You think it’s the walls with their windy nature and not quite level floors, awakening some distant memory of the caverns like a comforting hand on the back of your neck.
Slowly, you regain your strength in the strange house on the plains. You hadn’t realized how weak you’d become, too busy trying not to die to notice that you would have expired of exposure no more than a day past this place. The sun madness will do that to you.
But now you’re much better, and after half a wipe, you still haven’t seen the olive girl again. She spends all her time subterranean block, where at all hours you hear strange noises emanating from. Perhaps she has a touch of the madness as well. It would certainly explain her lack of concern for you.
At first, it is only haunting. Strange bangs and clangs of machinery are the orchestra that sounds during dinner, are what sends you to sleep at daybreak. But, as time goes on, apprehension turns into wonder, and then to the dangerous emotion of curiosity.
When does she sleep? What is she doing? Does she subsist only on the meals her custodian brings to her and nothing more?
It is only a few days more to reach Torbjörn and Ingrid’s hive. You could have reached it in an afternoon, bought an omniscuttlebus ticket and wandered barefoot to the station as you had when you were younger, but all main thoroughfares are inaccessible with cullbait tucked in your arm. Now it’s a long journey by foot, and it scares you how close you came to failure without realizing it. The scare has put the doubt back in your bones, and now you’re loathed to leave this place of safety and set out alone again.
Your decision is made for you when you walk your respiteblock one morning to find a small cocoon has been stitched into the ceiling, slathered with hardened mucus and pulsating with a faint orange light. You sigh. The delays have now cost your charge’s grubhood, easily the most manageable stage of a troll’s life cycle. When she emerges from her molt she’ll have fangs and claws and legs with bones, and be that much harder to manage. Additionally, you are now stuck here until she’s out—you did not sit through the Abbess’s thousand speeches to move a grub while it’s cocooning.
You drop into the swaychair across from the cocoon. For long minutes, you stare, and stare, trying to summon some feeling within you that isn’t overwhelming defeat.
And, all the while, the banging from belowincline gets louder. You do not know if you are going crazy or if the last of your nerves has finally eroded, but over the past day the cacophony has only seemed to grow more an more frantic. You stare at the glowing glob of spit. It beats in time to your blood pusher, filling your aural receptors, your very hate glands, combining with the awful racket below. You stand you send the swaychair flopping. You’re going to go find out what the hell is going on down there whether your host wants you to or not.
Adawe is nowhere to be seen. When you push open the door you see why: she’s standing by the olive, who’s bow bend deep in some sort of massive machine that’s crouching in the center of the block. The lusus looks up, briefly snorts, and then goes back to watching her charge wield a blowtorch inside the monstrosity.
As your feet creak down the wooden zigzag, the eyesore comes into focus. You don’t even care if your host notices you anymore, so in awe of this thing. It looks positively alien, with its odd blend of insectoid based technology and more primitive electronics that seem to be at its center. Upon closer inspection, you realize that the more familiar grubnology that you’ve grown up with is actually some sort of addition to its natural state, one that the girl is using as scaffolding to dig into the massive lotus closed at its center.
She finally notices you as you stand in front of the nyctinasty in awe. “Hello,” she says cheerily, all of the exhaustion from her voice wiped away, though the bags under her eyes are not. Minstrels, she really could only be five or six sweeps old, far to young to be looking like that. “I forgot you were still here. You have good timing! I’m almost finished.”
It certainly sounds like it. Down here, what was once drowned out no became a dull roar, the horrid buzz of something groaning to life.
What…is it?
“I don’t know!” she says with delight. “I’ve been trying to figure that out for ages now. But I know it’s very old, likely pre-ascendancy.”
It takes you a moment to realize she is not referring to personal ascendancy, but special ascendancy. That would be…you can’t even wrap your mind around how long ago that would have to be. Trolls have been a spacefaring civilization for eons.
She hops down off the lotus’s organic frame. The flower’s base is made of carved stone, painted with must have been green thousands of years ago, but now only survives in cracked smears. She equips a crowbar from her specibus, and begins pulling at a panel of stone until it pops, landing with two of its edges still hanging from the machine.
“Hmm,” she says to you or maybe to no one. Then she’s gone again, scuttling up the framework around the machine to pick up her blowtorch again. “Almost there…”
The honkbeastflesh on your arms can’t stop you from wandering closer. Nothing can stop this strange thing’s pull, even as dread wells inside you. You look at the corner of “stone” the olive has pulled apart. There’s a screen underneath.
The girl keeps firing. You try to tell her about the numbers on the screen but she waves you away with a, “I’ve almost got it!”
You read the numbers again. They’re changing. With your blood pusher dunked into icewater, you realize that it’s a countdown. You raise your voice again.
“Aha! Look!”
There are seconds left. She brings her crowbar down on the tip of the blossom and the resounding clang drowns you out.
The countdown hits zero. The lotus cracks open.
With the loss of the structure supporting it, the whole outer carapace of the machine goes crumbling, the olive girl falling with a shriek. You do not see where she lands, too busy throwing yourself backwards in order to avoid the splash of falling bug juice, scrambling toward the corner furthest from the bloom.
By the time you right yourself, the lotus has fully opened. Each petal lays delicately on the base, as though they’re as dainty as a true flower and not larger enough to crush a troll flat.
In the center, where each successive sepal had once been wrapped around it, floats a glowing ball, bright white, hanging like an ornament from a kringlefrond. But its exposition is still not over. There are shapes within the orb of white, tessellating, and the movements only grow faster. Wide, curved arrays blur right before your ganderbulb, and suddenly it grows nearly twice its original size, forming into an abnormal shape.
At this point, it becomes too bright to look. When the flares of white have faded from the subterranean block’s walls, you turn and gaze back upon a troll standing in the middle of the flower.
There is a clattering. Adawe has finally pulled her charge from the remains of construction, but the troll girl doesn’t seem to care. She wriggles free from Adawe’s grasp, and runs right up to the troll that did not exist a moment before but now does. “Hello! I am Efiola!”
The adult—for she is an adult, tall as she is, muscles as thick around as your waist, horns jutting forward menacing like a rhinoceros beetle—turns to Efiola. “Greetings! I am OR15A, and it is very nice to meet you!”
You scramble further backwards, trying to make yourself as unnoticeable as possible.
OR15A takes a knee, and the whole ground shutters. She asks Efiola, “are you the one who awakened me?”
“I am, I am!” Efiola is practically bouncing. “I knew something amazing was inside, didn’t I say? Look, look didn’t I say?”
The last she addresses to you, and to your horror the apparition turns her attention in your direction. You try to shrink away even though there is no more space left because the troll before you is very, very wrong. What you thought at first were olive eyes don’t quite catch the light right, nearly iridescent, yet they are not gold either. Your brain snaps between trying to put them in either category but fails every time, and slowly you are forced into a conclusion you desperately do not want.
This person is a mutant. She is a mutant and you are an Auxiliatricer and she must know what that means about you and her.
She waves. “Hello! And who might you be?”
> Share title.
You keep your lips pressed tight and shake your rattlenogin.
She squints sadly, her brow going furrowed around her strange mutant eyes. So she goes back to Efiola, “I cannot share my appreciation enough for activating my capsule. Now that you have, I must surely have a prerogative here to uphold. Please tell me: when am I?”
Efiola tells her as she rocks on her heels.
“Forward then!” OR15A says, pleased. “Delightful! Thank you again for opening it on such a fine date.”
But…but there was a countdown.
Efiola and the mutant both look over to where you’ve apparently found your voice, a feat that you regret immediately. But every thing is just so topsy turvy that you have to say something, like how the pod was going to open anyway with or without all the hammering.
OR15A chuckles. “Of course it was! But that timer was only set because the pod would be opened, and thus it was set to the time it would be. We didn’t know one before the other, and thus we had to know them both simultaneously.”
You have no idea what that is supposed to mean. Who’s we? Other mutants?
“Mutants?” She tilts her head. “What an odd thing to say.”
“Not to be rude,” Efiola says, dashing around ever inch of OR15A and examining her dimensions, “but your eyes are very abnormally deviated from natural hues.”
As she says that, the mutants eyes go sad again. “…I see. So they truly have done as they promised. I feared as much when I said goodbye, but I had always hoped…are there truly no limebloods left in the genosphere?”
When both of you give her looks of confusion, she sighs, and casts her ganderbulbs to the water stained ceiling.
This is making your thinkpan hurt with all this talk of expected causality and gene slurries. You’ve found a little strength to wobble to your feet, still unsure whether this “limeblood” might yet become a threat. But you’re also curious again, that damned instigator once more, and it’s slowly tamping down your urge to flee.
“Hm? What is a limeblood?” she says in response to your question. “I suppose then none would know anymore, not even a revered brooder. Of the twelve castes, our psionics were the strongest, greater than even the gilt. For this, we were deemed a threat, and a purge began of our caste began not long after I hatched. When I left, there were few left who were still known to us, but I still thought…” She trails off into silence.
The words send a sickening wave of déjà vu down your gullet. She had said twelve castes, not the holy and honored eleven. The very structure you have been taught to venerate where every troll has a duty and a status has not always been.
If she is to be believed, her entire hemocaste was cleansed, expunged entirely from history. And now it is happening again.
She shakes herself from her melancholy daze. “Well, that is then and this is now. For since I am here, there must be some duty I am meant to perform. Tell me, is there any great task you are intending to accomplish?”
“You could let me study you!” Efiola piped up immediately. She ran back into her collapsed piles of junk and withdrew a husktop, sitting cross-legged on a broken beam. “This is probably the greatest find of the millennia. Everyone on the museum forums is going to be so excited!”
OR15A chuckles. “It would be my pleasure to help you, dear awakener. And how about you, my friend?” she suddenly directs to your coward corner. “I do feel bad for startling you earlier.”
You flush darkly. Maybe it’s her antiquated speech, but ‘feel bad for startling you’ is only one word away from ‘feel bad for you’, an expression so blatantly saccharine you can’t help the warmth at the back of her neck. You assure them both not to pay you any mind, you were just going to leaving. In fact, if you just go grab your grub, you can go right now.
“A grub?” the lime blinks. “Is such a thing now routine that a jade must transport grubs from one location to another?”
Not exactly. Lets just say none of you should be found by the drones right now, so it will be better if you split up.
“Drones?” As soon as she asks it, Efiola leans up and whispers in her sound dish. “Ah, I see. That is most terrible, but I believe your assessment is incorrect. It would be better if I went with you, we could better protect each other that way.”
Expertly, you lie and say its cool and you’ve been doing just fine on your own.
She must know it, for she smiles warmly. “It is alright, my friend. For if Efiola has no need of me to go anywhere, then this must be the protocol I was sent to fulfill.”
“If you’re going, I’m coming with!” Efiola declares. “There’s no way I’m letting this slip through my fingers, it’s been my life’s work!”
You’d like to point out that a life’s work for someone of her age is a paltry sum, but aren’t feeling that callous. You feel the advent of social pressure mounting upon you, just like all the times when the other Auxiliatrices cliqued together to whisper words behind hands and you’d find yourself outvoted.
OR15A grins at you. “Go, grab your grub. We will be with you to travel on the morning.”
> Go grab your grub, simp.
Somehow, the air is even hotter than it was when you first made your break for the surface. You’re now travelling with a small group instead of (effectively) on your own, and the feeling of a dozen mechanical eyes that may or may not be watching you from a distance makes you itch.
The newly molted wriggler is fussy, for one thing. Her legs are far too short to keep pace, so you still have to carry her, but now she kicks and spends most of her time either trying to climb your horns, or escape your embrace all together.
Efiola rides Adawe near the bark of the party, laden with supplies and constantly asking OR15A—who Efiola has simplified to ‘Orisa’—endless questions about the world she came from. Orisa take them all in stride, willing to talk for the hours it takes to get from one night to the other. She’s come from a time with no ships, no ascension, no drones and no husks. You ask how her people were able to build such an elaborate time machine while still pre-technological, and she had laughed. You’d misunderstood, apparently. The lotus was not created, but gifted, and on that she would say no more.
Her world seems untamed, barbaric, but just as dangerous. You and Efiola listen as she tells of the lime’s ventures into hiding as the Empress turned them into worse than gutterbloods, where there death was not just prescribed, but demanded. The Empress of her tales may not even be the one who rules today, one who Orisa calls The Imponderable Superciless. It all sounds of fairy stories your lusus would read with you on morning’s light.
Despite the tales and the provisions, the journey wears on you. You keep walking and walking as grasslands turn into straight up desert, and you hope you are approaching Gutterclaw by now. In the middle of the day when the sun cloaks seem to do nothing, Orisa points out a great structure shimmering in the distance and suggests you stop there for some shade. You disagree, but once again with Efiola’s endorsement, you are out voted.
Below the great ruin of metal, you let the wriggler to the ground and watch her toddle about on the sand. Immediately, she begins to dig, and within seconds has found a snake and bitten it clean through the neck.
“A strange tower,” Orisa remarks as she approaches you.
You try to hide your discomfort. Despite the fugitive and traitor that you are, her mutantness still triggers a deep-seated unease in you. Instead of focusing on that, you look at the statue that blocks out the worst of the sun. It is of a troll woman holding a torch aloft, and her once beautiful exterior has been turned teal by the desert’s rays. Despite its craftsmanship, there is still something undeniably shitty about it.
“Do you wish me to hold the troll-ling for the next part of our journey?” she asks. “It seems as though it is difficult for you.”
You look at your feet and try to summon some indignation to muscle out your embarrassment. It’s really fine. She doesn’t have to do that.
“This is my directive,” she insists.
She keeps saying that, but you don’t see how helping two cullbait morsels complete their doomed mission can be any sort of great purpose.
“Ah, I cannot say for certain, I am actually quite new at this. But I can guess.” She takes a seat in the sand. “Some time in the far future, as distant to you as you are to me, there will be a game played for the fate of all trollkind. It is important that each shade plays a role in this game, including this one’s.” She reaches out and brushes sand from the wiggler’s hair as she begins to devour her captured prey.
That seems all sort of farfetched. And dumb.
“Oh it is very dumb,” Orisa agrees. “Dumb, but true. Even one of my own line will reach this game, though not as directly as this one here. So, that is why I think she must live. Live and reach these trolls you believe will keep her safe.”
You drop into the sand next to her and draw your strutnubs to your chest. Even that you are not so sure of anymore. Torbjörn wouldn’t even take in you when you’d asked, what makes you think he’d put his crew’s life on the line for an illicit wiggler you’ve dumped on his doorstep? You’ve been a terrible revolutionary and an even worse custodian. You should have just tried to pawn her off on the nearest lusus as soon as you got free of the caverns.
To your surprise, as you sink your head further on to your knees, you feel a large hand on your back. You blink in surprise as you look up into Orisa’s smiling face. “You have been a good custodian. You have risked your life for this wiggler time and time again, and as long as she still draws breath, there is hope for us and our future.”
You take a breath, then another, just as the Matrideas taught you to do when the air inside the tight tunnels became too much. You breathe, and watch the young troll spit out squeaky clean bones into the grit.
“But please,” Orisa adds. “Let me carry her for a while.”
Your own vertebra snake has been aching for the past many kilometers. You cautiously agree.
> Get where you’re going, for the love of Pete.
You are more comfortable walking near Orisa now, and you arrive shoulder to shoulder (well, elbow to shoulder) over the ridge that leads into the Lindholm valley. You’d only seen it once from the outside, but you’d never forgotten the site.
Nearly tripping on the way down, you scramble over the hill and slide filthy in front of the little red door. You knock hurriedly, and hear nothing at first. Of course you don’t, it’s the middle of the day. You knock again.
Finally, movement from inside. The door comes open, and in the frame is Torbjörn, shielding his lookstalks from the sun. He takes one look at your forlorn face, then at Orisa, Adawe, and Efiola just coming up behind you. Finally, his gaze falls on the bronze in your arm, grub scars still reflecting with metallic light.
He takes one, large, regretful sigh and says, “alright, alright, come in.”
You’re so relieved to have finally made it, you fall asleep as soon as your cheek touches the loungeplank cushion. When you awake, it everyone else seems to have sorted themselves into other corners of the hive, Ganymede has made a nest in your hair, and Torbjörn is across from you, reading from his husktop.
You ask him where is everyone. And then you notice that most of his and Ingrid’s things are stashed into boxes, some half packed and some not, but everyone in far more of a state of disarray than when you left it. Then you only want to know what is going on.
He shakes his head. “Did you not hear about the decree?”
The bronze genocide? That’s why you’d some here.
He shakes it again. “Not that. That never became official. What is official is that starting next sweep, all Ascended will be required to be extraplanetary. Permanently.”
You can tell just by the way he says it, gruffly, with just a bit of anger that he’s saying what he means. Every adult? Off world?
“Yeah. This time next solar rotation, Alternia will belong to the children.” He looks through the kitchen door, where you can just see the edges of Ingrid talking with your travelling companions, and bouncing your grub on her knee. Or, you suppose, now her grub. It burns a sad cigarette hole in the fabric of your heart, but burns warm all the same.
She notices you watching her. With a smile, she lifts the grub into her (two) arms and carries her into the rumpus room.
You ask her if she and he are just going to get up and leave.
“Stars no,” he scoffs. “We’re heading for the most remote part of the planet we can.”
Ingrid smiles. “You’re welcome to come, if you like.”
You look at them all gathered there. Efiola seems to have lost all interest in Orisa, now enthralled with Torbjörn’s machines. Unconcerned with the fickleness of the whims of the young, Orisa pleasantly says, “I, for one, will not be. I will have another directive to complete, and I must get to my next pod to find where it will send me.”
“Aww,” Efiola says. “I was hoping you’d come with us to South Sea.”
Oh, so she is going too. Things certainly were discussed while you were out. Things need to get discussed and they went out and discussed them. Great.
You think about South Sea, about being free again. Hunted, yes, but you’ve always been hunted, it will be nothing new. You could live out your natural life discretely while your companions died one by one until there was only Ingrid to outlive with you. It could be nice.
Yet, despite all odds, you have ASCENDED. Somehow, that must be worth something, broken little sun mad renegade that you are. You once had run you whole life, but in a cage you, had still accomplished something.
One last time, you look around the room, but when your gaze finally falls, you ask Orisa if it might be possible to go with her.
“Are you sure, Bastion?” she asks, obviously surprised. “There is no telling where we ill end up. Very likely you will not see your friend again.”
That’s not so new. You tell her you’re sure.
She smiles softly. “The capsules can transport much greater volume than their dimensions. It is very possible. And, I think, I will enjoy the company.”
You grin stretches all the way to your ears, and Ganymede titters. You assure her that of course she can come along.
Torbjörn scoffs, though you’ve known him well enough that’s he’s not truly irritated. “Well. You don’t get to come by, drop a smuggled kid on our entryway incline and not help us pack. Get your ass off that plank.”
Obediently you do, and go to help your friends, as content as you think you’ll ever be. You put scarves into bags and robots into parcels and think about the future honestly for the first time in a very long while.