Interlude: Allena
Interlude: Allena
Allena sat in the gathering darkness of her personal office, reflecting on how far she had come from her roots as a respected medical scientist on the eastern continent. She’d been the darling of the University, showered with accolades and grants. All for childish work that now seemed so lacking in true understanding. It amused her to look back on her younger self, so full of passion yet so utterly limited by her own narrow horizons. Strange that her work now, despite being so much more meaningful to the future of mankind, forced her to work under a shroud of secrecy, supported not by grants and eager acolytes but by stolen gold and petty criminals.
She could hear them now working in the labs a few floors down, a gentle murmuring coming up through the wooden floor beneath her. She would prefer to do this work herself – it was hard to trust others to grasp the importance of what she had begun to learn – but it would take her a lifetime to make the necessary progress without assistance. It was difficult to find those who had both skill and disposition, who could see past the trivial details of the work to the larger picture beyond. Just yesterday she had been forced to deal with a small mutiny in lab 6, its team no longer willing to do what was needed. She ground her teeth at the time she had lost, but consoled herself with the fact that they had still managed to serve some small purpose as they departed.
Yes, it would be so much easier to work on her own, but no matter how clearly she saw the way forward, the distance to be covered remained vast. Even with a dozen labs operating across the Wastes, progress was frustratingly slow. They were charting a whole new kind of matter, with its own laws and properties, and they had only the crudest tools with which to do their work. The substance of Life and Thought itself, a sparkling haze of energies swirling just beyond the senses. Thus far it had defeated her at every turn, which cause her no end of frustration. So responsive to the state of the flesh, and yet utterly unaffected by anything else she brought to bear. She could see the moment of its departure from the subjects in front of her; one moment the sample was full of both life and intelligence and the next moment the was nothing left but dripping meat.
It was maddening. She had no tools! She could not trap it, nor trace the path it took to the Outside. At times she could almost see it, a shimmer at the edges of a fresh wound. One team reported that it seemed more present when acted upon by one with a powerful emotional bond, something in the intensity of thought made it more tangible. She had some ideas on how to exploit that fact, but at the moment she enjoyed the current state of affairs enough to look for other avenues of inquiry. She pursed her lips, considering, then shook her head. He’d still be there later if it came to that.
She shuffled through the papers on her desk idly, mostly orders for her “new prosthetics”. Many of her acquired scientists had come from the ranks of the Brotherhood of the Stone, and they brought with them a wealth of knowledge and experience in binding steel to flesh. The value of their work to her ultimate goal was limited; their dreams of transcendence amounted to little more than a glorified sort of full-body prosthesis. Even so, peddling prosthetic arms and legs to the public provided living bodies and an acceptable excuse for surgical operations. There was a limit to what could be gleaned from such limited experimentation, but it had its place.
Besides, she was in constant need of funds, and her newfound reputation for miraculous prosthesis provided quite a stream of income. Taking her team’s notes and applying her own unique insights, she had managed to concoct a solution that forced the rapid growth of the body’s nervous tissue, allowing her to forcefully pull the nerves from the remnants of the limb, working them down into the machinery of new replacement part. The results were undeniably superior to other methods, despite the agonies inflicted upon the subject. Working more slowly over several sessions would reduce the discomfort, but she was reluctant to take time away from her real work, and no one else seemed to have the necessary knack. Eventually lab 6 had developed an effective anesthetic for her to use, but Allena quickly decided against its use as she found that the active feedback from the patient made it easier for her to place the nerves correctly. Still, what she really needed were tools that could grant her access to the finer, immaterial aspects of her patients. Until then, her work was limited to what was essentially a type of finely-developed butchery.
Frustrated, she leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes, willing the encroaching headache away.. She should really get to bed, but her body refused to rest. Her mind was filled with buzzing edges, patterns twisting around concepts just outside her understanding. She needed new insights, a new lead. Perhaps it was time to look through the Abbot’s notes again. She had only scratched the surface of what was in there, and she longed to delve in more deeply. Still, she hesitated; reading in the book was both exhausting and costly. Every reading stretched her mind in new ways, twisting thoughts in on themselves in ways alien to her limited, mortal mind. In time, she believed she could take it in in its entirety, but the change was an inherently destructive process. The human body could tolerate traveling at great speeds, but if the velocity changed too abruptly the results would be messy. The mind was much the same. It payed to be cautious.
But it had been some time since her last reading, and she was up against a wall she couldn’t seem to break through. Her resolve hardened, and she withdrew the little book from its pouch around her neck. As always, some tattered remnant within her seemed to quail and pull away from the book, but the effect was so weak now as to be almost imperceptible, and Allena knew better now than to listen to it. She cracked the cover, and ran her eyes across the haphazard notes and diagrams. Her awareness expanded, and the pages dissolved into a level of knowledge far beyond language.
She felt something massive moving beneath the substance of the world somewhere far from her, yet so vast as to fill her soul with a writhing, twisting horror just beneath the surface of her awareness, the disembodied sensation of strange creatures rippling up beneath her skin to form strange signs and symbols. She knew she was falling, losing sight of the way back. She started to turn, struggling against the black currents sweeping her towards the terrible hole moving before her, but at the last second she caught a glimpse of something across the distance. Just flicker, but it was enough. In that frozen instant she saw a man, shining with the dark understandings like her own. He was standing near a strange forge, surrounded with the same pulsing symbols even now being written across the straining surface of her mind. From a woman in front of him he extracted a sliver of something ephemeral. It twisted, sparked, and hardened. A piece of the soul, resting in his hand. It waited there, ready to be fashioned into whatever tool was needed.
She struggled back towards the safety of her own mind, thoughts slipping and scrabbling desperately across the pages before her until her eyes managed to escape, staring up into the unmoving darkness of her office. In time, her ragged breathing slowed enough to allow her to calm her trembling body. Her eyes danced with fire, still filled with the fleeting images she had seen. Who was that man? He had what she needed. She knew this intrinsically. With his methods she could finally build the tools she needed. Surgical knives for the soul. Stitches and staples for the mind. Such things she would create.
He was coming to her. Soon. He would need tools, money, and room to work. And, of course, he would need the raw materials of his craft. She would have to prepare. Tucking away the precious book, she reached to her desk. There had been an order here, a man looking to replace his daughter’s leg. Yes, there it was. The man had recently come into a good deal of money and was famous for his work in a field where such replacements were distressingly common. He’d pay well and bring in vast quantities of work for her simply by word of mouth. She smiled, it was a perfect place to start.
She began drafting her response.
Dear Mr. Montagne,
I’m happy to inform you that it’s your daughter’s lucky day…
