WnW 6.b – Perspective

The shuddering impacts on the reinforced steel door were enough to send ripples through the glass of brandy in Sullivan’s hand. He stared down past the amber surface to what lay on the side table beneath it. 

The continuous attempts to breach his safe room would have shaken a lesser man, but since a young age, Sullivan had been playing the tables in the illegal gambling dens of his hometown, in rooms full of men eager to pull one over on such an easy target. He had been conditioned in those rowdy environments to be able to ignore any and all distractions in order to calculate the best odds of survival. That hadn’t always meant winning the money. He hadn’t had the resources he had now. But he would collect all dues eventually.

Sullivan realized that one of those resources, manpower, was now the reason he was trapped in a room full of nothing but ledgers, receipts, some small comforts, and a phone attached to the wall.

Don’t take your medications with alcohol. Sullivan scoffed and angrily set the glass down without taking a sip. He had never obeyed this instruction before, yet now he was finding his resolve shaken.

“Come on out, Sullivan!” a voice sang out.

“There’s nowhere to run! And we just wanna give our boss a big ol’ hug!”

That got some strained laughter from the mob.

“Yeah! A huge kudos to our favorite boss. Things only got better once you took over!”

Another slam rattled the repurposed safe door.

The voices quieted to an angry rumble of conversation that Sullivan couldn’t parse.

Then a fresh wave of hatred washed over Sullivan and he curled his fingers around the armrest of his chair.

Fists hammering on the door restarted with a renewed fury.

“Fuck you! You’re the reason I can never go out in public again!”

“Fix this, Sullivan! Fix this!”

“You promised us that we would come out on top! Now half my friends are dead, the other half are monsters and it’s YOUR FAULT!”

“Push me again and I’ll use your skull to bash this door down,” one of the mob snarled, making it clear that the only reason they hadn’t broken in yet was the fact that they were at each other’s throats almost as much as Sullivan’s.

“Just you wait, Sullivan. The moment the others bring back the power tools and we crack this open, we’re gonna have so much fun.”

Sullivan tuned out the threats as his gaze roamed the room for the hundredth time. The ledgers, usually stacked neatly on shelves, lay open to random pages on the floor around him. Sullivan had discovered early on in his career that imbalances were oftentimes better left untouched. The threat of collection allowed Sullivan to extract a special kind of interest: favours and influence that money alone could not buy. These written records would appear boring and dry to any reader, but Sullivan knew how much power they held.

Sullivan curled his lip. How much power they should have held. Yet now every due, meticulously scrawled in exact terms, was about as valuable as the paper they were written on. Infuriating.

Another wave struck and the mob howled, their collective fury bubbling out of their throats.

Nothing could be done. The phone didn’t work. There were no other exits from this safehouse. The mob wouldn’t listen. How could it be called power if it evaporated into thin air? What had once felt solid and real now had Sullivan questioning why he had been so foolish as to build the foundations of his work on it, to stake his life on it.

He had no more connections. Helen had left, seemingly pleased with the results. After convincing his men to throw aside their humanity in order to claim Sillwood as theirs alone, the Gambler’s Ring had taken heavy losses, unprepared for the horrors that stemmed from Dice.

Whether based in truth or just the influence of these cursed pulses of emotion, they blamed him.

Sullivan angrily knocked the drink to the floor with a backhand that cracked his rings across the glass. The papers strewn about greedily drank up his last remaining comfort, blotting out the useless records of his wealth.

His fingers shook as they touched the case that remained on the side table. Finding the clasp, he popped the case open to reveal the three vials of clear liquid that rested comfortably on a velvet insert.

Slowly, methodically, he picked up and examined each one in turn, looking for differences in how the liquid caught the light, looking for hidden messages in the serial codes stamped onto each vial.

Was this the one that would tear my body apart, reshaping it into an insensate horror?

Or maybe this one?

Perhaps it is all three, a ploy by Organ to make sure I never make it out alive.

Each vial returned to the case so that he could view them side by side, hoping that something would leap out at him, a tell that would reveal the path forward. Perhaps some Shape that would allow him to quietly exit through the walls like a ghost, so that he could find a new home where he could put this nightmare behind him and never think of it again.

Sullivan felt his heartbeat through his fingertips as they hovered over the vials, unable to take the plunge without some assurance that he was making the right choice.

Finally, a laugh burst forth from his gut, making him double over in hearty chuckles. The laugh bounced around the room like a pachinko ball, stirring up the mob even more as they sought to break the door down with their bare hands.

He sat his head back against the chair’s headrest and wiped away a tear. This rush of adrenaline, this feeling of inescapable dread, it had been some time since he’d felt it. It took him back to when he was a kid, gambling for the first time with the one and only dollar to his name. What a thrill.

Sullivan blindly felt for the vials and grabbed the first one he touched. We all find ourselves back at the beginning, no matter how much we run from it.

The cold needle pricked his neck as the fluid rushed forth to forever alter his body.

Come on. Big money…

The last coherent thought Sullivan would ever have bounced around his brain as the Dice took hold. Emotions he had never felt before raced through his nervous system, burning through the tracts like a wildfire, igniting cells with new purpose.

Further and deeper. Greater happiness, greater fear, greater sadness, and greater anger. Each tested the bounds of Sullivan’s mind, pushing deeper and deeper until finally he reached the breaking point.

A single moment of time, an invisible threshold passed, and Sullivan was no more.

Yet his body remained and moved on without him.

New, alien methods took over. Tendons curled and snapped out, bones splitting to adorn new limbs. Leathery scales erupted like hives out from its skin. The face abandoned its form that had served it well during its human existence, uncaring of the memory it was defiling as it elongated and splintered, a toothy smile becoming permanently affixed. Flesh filled in a mold that had never been used before.

The center of processing, the brain, kept changing too. Pieces grew larger like cancerous growths while others atrophied. Shaping had never been reluctant to stretch and ablate the human mind; that was a restriction placed by the mind itself.

Like evolution’s billions of years occurring in the span of a minute, a new creature was created. It perceived the world through newly formed eyes and other sense organs that no human could comprehend.

The Aberrant could feel the heat of the things on the other side of the wall. It could taste the aggression chemicals unknowingly released by the mob.

A final change settled over the creation, quite different from everything that had come before.

Something given. A purpose.

The Aberrant smiled with a mouth like a crocodile that stretched across its entire body. Violence would be enacted. Suffering exacted. Dues to be paid in broken bones and flayed minds.

—

A man and a woman stood in front of the Aberrant, its spilled blood adorning the man’s face. He pushed a hand through his blond hair, dyeing it with muddy streaks as he grinned at the beast.

Its lungs trembled with heavy breaths from the battle it had just fought. Many humans had fallen to its terrible toothed jaws.

Yet now, try as it might to drag itself forward, it had been injured to the point of immobility. So it could only stare at the humans with undying hate.

Then the man spoke to the woman, even as he stared into the Aberrant’s eyes, “Have you given my proposition some thought?”

The Aberrant could not understand what those words meant, of course.

“Perhaps,” the woman replied. “There are a lot of moving parts right now. I won’t cut off any potential path before I’m positive I am on the correct one.”

The man smiled wider. “You say that, but just the fact that you sought me out means you’re interested.”

The woman adjusted her glasses. “Ortum-3 is our best candidate.”

“Is that the reason you’re considering it or are you just salty that she managed to pair with Nick and ruin your plans?”

“You won’t agitate me. Try as you might.”

“I know I can’t sell you on the melodrama of it all. As delicious as it sounds to me. I can only prick your curiosity and nurture that inquisitive spirit of yours.”

The woman crossed her arms. “I wouldn’t want to squander her potential. I need hatred. You need to make sure of it.”

The man laughed. “Now it sounds like you’re fully on board! All right, I’ll make sure of it. It’s been far too long since we’ve spoken anyway. I’ll meet them both, make it count.”

The woman walked away without another word.

The man crouched down, just out of reach of the jaws that longed to snap his frail form.

But when the man reached out to place his hand on the Aberrant’s snout, something clamped down on the Aberrant, stopping it from acting.

The man looked deep into the Aberrant’s eyes, like he’d been reunited with a long lost lover. “You hear that?” he asked as he stroked the scaly hide. “Sounds like you’re going to get what you wanted.”

Hatred raged, invisibly bound.

“I get the feeling that you’re listening in. You get me, don’t you? We can’t just be boring about it. So just you wait. I’ll cook up something with an aroma potent enough to wake the dead.”