NationStates Jolt Archive

"They shall be crushed by the weight of their own impurity!"

(Thirty Years Ago)
"Mommy! Why do you have to go to the hospital?"

An innocent question, one with no honest answer available that would serve to preserve said innocence.

"Sweety, you know how sick Mommy has been, she has some bad stuff inside her and the hospital people will take it out. Remember when you had that seed in your teeth and I helped you get it out? It's like that, only deep inside me so I can't use a toothpick." The mother's face, half-covered by metal, was the same face the child had always known. Her one natural eye twinkled as she smiled down at him, her other eye glowed in the same shade of blue as her natural eye, bright and only a little harsh, he was quite used to it by now. His own face had a similar look to it, save for his eye was a duller shade of blue than hers.

The mother's three-fingered metal hand clutched the hand of flesh of her child as they walked towards the medical center. Trucks and cars zoomed along a few feet away, belching noxious gases, causing the woman to cough and her son to grow more worried still. They arrive, and the woman is rushed into surgery, she had an appointment after all. Her son was taken to the daycare center, it was a good hospital that understood the needs of the single parent family.

Hours pass. The clock on the wall counts away the seconds, its silent digital face serving as the only element of hospital sterility in the messy and disorderly room. One by one, the other children leave, taken by smiling parents away from the room. Eventually, only one child remains with the nurse on duty. He remains when they change shifts, yawning but refusing to fall asleep in case his mother were to return. The new nurse looks at the schedule, growing worried herself, trying not to let her emotions show on her mostly artificial face. She stopped her frown, her only means of controlling her facial expression since both her eyes had been replaced by lenses of glowing green light, and smiled down at the child who had taken to following her about the room, curling up at her feet when she stopped.

A doctor arrived and called the nurse over, his face revealing nothing of the news he brought, mostly because of the metal that covered it. The two whispered to eachother, each pausing to look at the child more than once during the course of the conversation. The doctor walked over, kneeling next to the child and putting his had upon the boys shoulder. It weighed heavily there, not least because it was a complicated construct of steel. His eyes were a dull brown, glowing softly and pulsing in time with his speech, artificially generated words with a dull buzzing quality to them. "There's no easy way to tell you this... but your Mother won't be coming to get you. We tried to put new parts in her, but her body couldn't handle them, and she died... I'm sorry." "No!" the child cried, "You're lying! She wanted the parts! Take me to see her now! You're lying!" His tears streamed down his face, causing sparks to fly from his cheaply made implants. "I'll take you to see her, just calm down, ok?" The doctor wiped away the tears with a towel as the child fought to contain himself so that the doctor would take him to see his mother.

They walked down the hall, the doctor's artificial hand feeling quite cold and uncomfortably tight to the boy. They reached a room at the end of the hall, and the doctor opened the door into the darkened space. The boy rushed into the room, lit only by the soft glow of medical screens, and tore away the veil around his mother's bed. There she lay, motionless and pale, lifeless save for the glowing blue of her right eye. "No! No, no, no!" he cried, leaping onto the bed beside his mother. He clung to her tightly, demanding she wake, looking into her mechanical eye and asking how she could be so cruel as to leave him. The doctor moved towards him, placing his cold hand on the boy's shoulder once again, "There was nothing we could do..." The distraught boy turned and looked into the glowing eyes of the doctor, sparks flying from the uncontrollable flow of tears, his face contorted in rage, "I'll get you!" He lept upon the doctor, swinging his fists at the glowing lenses of the doctor's eyes. "You did this to her! All of you! That's why it still works! I'll get you all!"

He continued to scream as orderlies came to hold him until state childcare workers could arrive.

Tick, tock, tick, tock. The clock ticked away the seconds, giving rythum to the motions of the man hunched over below it. The nearly silent sputter and sizzle of the soldering iron could barely be heard over the soft but pervasive sounds of the clock. Not a normal circular wall clock, or one of those awful ones that look like a cat, but a large and ornate construction made entirely out of wood. Everything from the hands to the gears had been hand crafted by the individual sitting below it. He looked up at the clock, face hidden by a thick hood, the bright light of the workbench only serving to deepen the shadows within it. "Five minutes..." he said to himself, busying himself once again with the details of his work.

The mentioned length of time passed, and swiveled around on his stool, facing the rest of the small room shared by his workbench, his bed, and his television which rested on top of an old crate. He reached forward and turned on the television, smiling as he did so.

A woman's face appeared on the screen, quite pretty by Ascensian standards, her mechnical implants were smooth and supple, seeming to be one with her flesh. The holographic projection of a human eye in her artificial socket made her look like she was slowly becoming trapped inside the machine. The man watching savored this irony, and turned up the volume. "Terror rocked the city of Abbadoth today, as the wave of mysterious bombings continued. Today's target was a medical research center. Twenty-seven staff and thirty patients died in the explosion and subsequent partial collapse of the building, with countless others injured." The screen pulled back from the woman's face, to show a smoking ruin in the background, rescue workers still swarming over it. "No parties have claimed responsibility for this heinous act, and even the extreme biogenicist group "Flesh First" has denounced these bombings as awful acts of terror which only serve to kill the innocent, and bring about hate. Now, back to the studio."

The man flipped off the television as the woman's face was replaced by a man's, he had no interest in any other news. He leaned back against his workbench, relaxing for a moment and smiling at a job well done. He then turned and resumed his work with the soldering iron.

Breaking News from Ascensia

A newsroom scene, a pretty woman in a black pants suit sits behind a desk, and turns to the camera as it focuses on her. As she does this, one notices her glowing red mechanical eyes.

"The nation of Ascensia and perhaps the international community was shocked today as a chain of explosive devices rocked the Central Hospital in the city of Abbadoth. Reporting live from the scene is Jennifer Perpecast."

The scene moves outdoors, smoke fills the air and people are rushing everywhere, being ushered by men and women in uniform or merely scampering. The camera focuses in on another comely woman dressed in a shiny leather jumpsuit that is plainly meant to ward off something. Her eyes two are glowing mechnical replacements, blue instead of red.

"I'm standing just one block away from all that is left of the Central Hospital. This building cared for over half of Abbadoth's injured and sick, being the largest not only in the city but in the nation. From what police have told us, explosive devices were somehow smuggled into the building and placed strategically at sites just a few feet from several key support beams. There was no time to evacuate. Four thousand people are assumed dead, fourteen hundred patients and one thousand staff. Officials have not mentioned any suspects at this time."

The scene once again changes, back to the newsroom.

"Rumors have been circulating that the Ascensian Inquisition will be taking over the investigation regarding these..." She puts her hand to her ear. "Wait a moment, i'm receiving word that this station has just received a tape from an individual claiming to be the bomber. Our experts have analyzed the tape and have determined it to be genuine. We'll aire that tape now."

An image fills the screen of the lower half of a man wearing sweatpants. His upper body is covered in shadow. A sinister chuckle precedes the emergence of a deep voice. "I suppose you wonder why. To tell you would deny you a reason to exercise your intellects, so I will not. I will only say that you are far more deranged than I, for you trap yourselves within shells of death. Only when this nation can give up worshipping death will I cease to give them opportunities to commune with their God." The man begins to laugh, softly at first, then cackling loudly. The tape cuts to static, and the image is replaced once again by the pretty anchorwoman.

"Shocking... we will bring you details as they emerge on Perpecast."

OOC: Wow this is really good... keep writing.. :-)

*tag*

The sounds of morning mass soothed him whenever he had a chance to hear them. He had insisted that his hearing not be enhanced for this specific reason. He savored every sound, every breath taken in by those chanting. He never wanted the way he heard this to change. Listening to the monks, all chanting in unison, their deep intonations reverberating throughout the Imperial Church's walls, always made him smile. His smile was mental, since his mouth had long ago been replaced by a mechanical voice synthesizer and food processing unit, but it was the thought that counted. As the monks slowly came to a stopping point, he pushed away from the railing on the high balcony, turning and begining to walk away just as the last note of their song faded from the air. Every second counted in his line of work.

He made his way through the passages of the Imperial Palace to his small office, nodding to his aide as he passed her by on the way through his own door. Though her face was completely concealed behind a robe, showing only her glowing green eyes, he knew she had smiled up at him. She always did. He sat down heavily in his chair, an antique, leftover from the days when Ascensia still had forests to speak of, when timber was a resource and not a political platform. It creaked only slightly, he had taken good care of it the past tenty years. His desk was the modern metal simplicity that had become so popular in the years following the civil war. People seemed to associate asthetic appeal these days with rebelious tendencies. He sighed just a bit at this, but it couldn't he helped. He picked up the folder on top of his inbox, opened it, and began to read. Another report on the medical terrorist... they really had to think up a better name for him until the nut gave himself one. Nuts always thought up something catchy to be called by the media. this wasn't the first one he had ever dealt with, his was a long and successful career after all. But, he was the most destructive, that much was indisputable. He pulled a map out of his desk, marked with every target hit, and used his pen to place an X over the location of the Central Hospital. After doing this he leaned back in his chair to think...

He had hit nothing but medical facilities, which was the strategy of one existing terrorist group within Ascensia, "Flesh First", but he had hit bio-engineering facilities as well as cybernetics labs, so it couldn't be them. The tape he sent to the news network left them with only more questions. Could this man be so psychotic that he thought of all medicine as evil? Such dark age thought might not have been out of place in somewhere like Iesus Christi, but here it was an alien notion indeed. That gave him the thought that it might be a foreigner, but he had already checked, and every foreigner within the nation was accounted for, none of them had given in under torture to being the bomber. He rocked slowly back and forth in his chair, sighing again. Leaning forward, he pressed the button on the intercom, "Sister," his mechanical voice buzzed slightly, only slightly imperfectly mimicing his natural one, "send in those forensics reports from the police, as well as the ones from our teams." He didn't need to hold the button down to wait for her to reply, she always did everything quickly and efficiently. Moments later his door opened and she came in with a stack of papers in her hands. The desire to smile came upon him again.

Alpha Class Inquisitior Cyril Ascensia hadn't failed to make an arrest on a case in twenty years, and this wouldn't be the case to break that record.