Welcome back to our weekly episode of Fire in the Snow! I'm excited for this chapter because we're finally getting out of the snow and infiltrating some fun, dark, musty places to dig up some spooky secrets! I wanted to thank you for your continued reviews and support because I appreciate it so much!
Welcome Shal96, Allybile, x-Chappy-x and AimTrekRaider7 (have I already welcomed you? If I have welcome again!) to the follow and favorite families! Thank you guys so much!
XxDNSxx: Thank you so much for your continued reviews! I wanted to let you know, I have NO intention of dropping this fic! It's my baby, and I love it! Thank you love!
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Chapter rated M for graphic depictions of blood/violence/gore, graphic depictions of medical procedures, obvious allusions to mental disorders/PTSD, brief heavy language, perilous situations, and general adult content.
They were losing the night, feeling it bite at the fluttering fuzz of the Schloripps' thick coat and scratching at her ankles as she buzzed and flitted about aimlessly for purchase against the heavy, continuous gust of the jetstream. Red held tight, fisting her fur and squinting as he shivered through the blowback of vicious ice crystals slamming into his raw, wind-whipped cheeks and almost blinding him completely to the rapidly encroaching dome of Bornau, attempting to take a breath and finding his lungs dangerously compressed in the thin air. He reached up and unhooked his Elite respirator from his chest, popping the casing and tugging free his glittering, metallic mask before passing it back and shooting Purple a look, urging him to sling it on for his own safety when he noticed him loll dangerously with airsickness. Thankfully, he didn't put up much of a fight, graciously accepting the pressure-controlled device and incredibly appreciative that the woozy, overpowering buzz in the back of his skull finally subsided to leave him with the much needed clarity he'd been searching for to pump himself up for the inevitable unpredictability of the city he'd never seen. Red narrowed his eyes in exhilarating anticipation when he heard his friend whistle sharply behind his mask, grinning as the Schloripps instantly responded to his call and dove into a steep drop, rocketing Zim back against his chest and drawing a terrified screech from his lips that was lost to the whoosh and dance of the snow pounding down around them and freezing them all to the bone. The sanctity of the rush, the feeling of freedom without threat of being shot down, the tingle of weightlessness ripping through his spooch was beyond exciting; Red felt like he was at the very pinnacle of the universe, a proverbial prince of everything he could see and more as he tried to keep his eyes open and drink in the heavenly, gorgeous fireburst of vivid daylight yawning over the horizon and painting streaks of brilliant greens and slathering mauves across the cloudy atmosphere. If the Callnowians didn't live here and wreck utter chaos over their collective lives, he would have ventured to say that the sight was one of the most beautiful he'd seen in a long while. But, as the sound of six sharp claws grazed the insulated titanium of the Bornau Dome below them, all he could think about was the grisly, gruesome horrors of Lire's sooty, crusted organs spilling in mangled heaps to the crystal clear quartz beneath his feet as his blood turned to literal dust and fluttered away in the breeze like starlight. He had screamed violently at Red and pathetically begged him to end his life, to take him out of the appalling suffering he obviously couldn't feel but could see nonetheless.
Something was so wrong…so very wrong.
He just didn't know what.
Red was no scientist. He had dropped out of the Academy for his lack of academic achievement to enroll directly in the accelerated Elite program on Devastis, forgoing a stable job to throw himself on the front lines as one of millions of expendable bodies with a death wish before he was whisked away from his position as a pilot in training to undergo two long cycles of Callnowian cultural training and marry the now deceased Sen. He shuddered when the Schloripps began her final, careful descent, feeling Purple's comforting grip tighten around his chest and Zim dig his jagged claws hard into his thighs to keep from slipping off as he wailed in guttural terror about how he would never do anything as risky as ride the Callnowian wildlife again for as long as he lived. Sen…Lire had mentioned her when Red had remained fervently adamant about her skull-shattering death. Purple had blasted half of her once perfect, plastic laden face with the searing boom of a plasma shot, obliterating her delicate marrow and spraying her glittering black blood over the interior of her opulent, overly lavish ship as her royal guard panicked and scrambled to hoist up her lifeless body from where she had collapsed ruthlessly against her seat. She was dead. She was completely, wholly, brazenly deceased. Still, Lire had looked up from below in disgusted uncertainty, beady jade eyes piercing every layer of his thick skin as he let loose something horrendously confusing;
Sen is deceased? That's impossible, she can't die.
Can't die.
Was it just shock? Was it a statement of perplexity or was it something deeper than the shallow surface? Red felt the what little air he could draw in force its way from his lungs when their jiggly-legged friend landed hard on her appendages, kicking up snow as her knees absorbed the shock and wavered as waves of pressure cascaded over her body and vibrated up Red's spine. Zim yelped and lost his balance, sliding free from his perch and falling the meager twelve feet from her back to the pillowy embankment where he was promptly swallowed by the snow and disappeared momentarily from sight. No, no, this wasn't making any sense. Was Red just thinking too hard about the whole mess and seeing things between the bewildering lines of context in his exhaustion that didn't actually exist? Yeah, that was probably it. All he knew for certain was that Lire, in the low warming light of the cavern, wasn't Irken. He was something different and he and Del were involved in something erroneous that went against the very forces of nature herself. His blood had somehow been wrongfully modified and stunk of foreign chemical reeking, terrifyingly sedating substances none of them recognized when it hit the air and almost gagged them out of the game. Whatever it was, and whatever Del had agreed to as Purple had claimed to overhear in the past, Red was sure it had to do with the estimated five thousand missing citizens none of them could seem to locate. They were displaced, if they were even alive at this point, and hidden away for bizarre, alien scientific advancement that made his blood pressure spike and his head spin with far more unsolved problems than disturbing answers. He wasn't even sure he wanted to know at this point for fear of what he may unearth from the snarling, gooey shadows taunting him from afar in a vacillating, formless tango of horror and nightmarish visions plaguing him every time he closed his eyes. He was still shaken up by the image of Lire's depleted, popped spooch shuddering in his chest and deflating…how was he able to stand? How had his PAK remained calm with such a dire wound festering and oozing from the deep, vital stab Red had thrust under his ribcage?
"Red, come on! We'll get caught!"
Red almost hadn't registered the sound of Purple's feet hitting the crispy ice encrusted snow below, shaking his own mind-numbing anxieties free and tucking them behind his resolve to find his people as he glanced down to where his friend had hissed in irritation at his catatonic fugue state. He reached forward and took his chilly hand, gripping at his fingers as he helped him stumble gracelessly down and land haphazardly on his heels as Zim poked up from where he'd been all but swallowed by nature to brush the frigid substance from his now completely frozen, stiff antennae. The Schloripps stood and shook her quivering flank as it twitched, pounding through the snow and turning to sprint as she played before flopping down onto her side and rooting through the embankment. Purple tried to get her attention, throwing his hands on his hips as he whistled only to stomp lightly in frustration, peeling his mask away and passing it back to his colleague when he tried again.
"Flicky, quit screwing around and get back over here!" He halfheartedly demanded, tightening his grip on his thin undershirt and narrowing his eyes when the Schloripps refused to acknowledge the rise in his tone in favor of continuing her trilling, chittering rolling, kicking her six long limbs high into the air. "Flicky, stop! You're gonna get us caught!"
"Flicky? What the hell, you actually named it?" Red sneered in distain, fumbling to clip his respirator back in place over his breastplate before turning and stepping over where Zim continued to collect himself. He placed a hard palm against the side of the dome and blinked, letting his ocular implants hum to life and scan through deserted, dark streets of the city. "Don't get too attached to it, Pur. You know we have to release it back into the wild after it burrows us into Ipi's mansion." He reminded, squinting and moving to the left to glance around what looked like a general store as he strained to remember the layout of the gridwork eluding him.
"She's not an it, Red, and yeah, I named her Flicky because she's always flicking her proboscis around like she owns the place. She's a big old diva and she deserves a name!" Purple retorted hotly, clapping his hands together and grinning when Flicky finally noticed, her five stalks of eyes craning forward from their protective covering as she all but froze to listen. "That's better! Thank you. Now, I need you to listen very carefully and-"
"Irk, quit talking to her like she understands what you're saying, idiot." Red grumbled in annoyance, trying to drown out the maddening baby speak resounding from his back and breaking his intense focus. "She's a Schloripps, Purple and all she understands is how to eat and fly."
Purple shot his antennae forward and jutted out his bottom lip, turning away from his grumpy companion to run a hand over the prickly, sensitive hairs dotting the length of Flicky's legs when she finally returned covered with fur matted with half melted snow. "Don't listen to him, Flicky, he's just angry that he didn't get any sleep and that I like you better." He bit with a sly grin when Red glanced over his shoulder and shook his head in disappointment before returning his gaze to pierce the metal, pressing his chest into the titanium as he scanned for the telltale spires of Ipi's marble estate.
"No, I'm pissed that your pet stabbed me and that we have to raid one of the most heavily guarded places on this damn planet without any weapons or a getaway ship." Red explained realistically, trying to keep his voice tame. "There's three of us and thousands of guards running the halls of this place, and now that we killed the daughter of the most important politician in this half of the quadrant, they'll all be looking for us."
Zim stood and popped his spine, plodding through the dense embankment to Red's side as he worked. "Zim doesn't remember any guards in the catacombs." He began slowly, watching his commanding officer stare blankly into the paneling of the dome as he mapped out a plan of attack and mumbled street names over and over to himself to drill them into his flighty memory. "It was completely abandoned and looked like it hadn't been used in cycles."
"Do you remember a way to get into the main hall from below?" Red asked shortly, finally locking on to the gargantuan, multi-leveled building that housed his deliciously important target. "The map you drew out died with the ship and…our friends. I didn't look it over well enough to memorize it so I need you to think very carefully and tell me what end of the building we need to make it to in order to snake up the back and take Ipi by surprise. We're going to kill her, but I need to get her off to the side and interrogate her without anyone noticing she's gone. We can't let anyone die without finding out where they've taken our people, first."
Zim chuckled pridefully, puffing out his chest as he thought. "I never forget, my Taller. It's…eh…the south side. No, the north side." He brought a finger to his lips as he thought long and hard about the layout of the site from below, scanning through rooms and chambers in his head. "Wait! It's the east side for sure!"
Purple led Flicky over, gingerly rubbing a palm along her cool, gelatinous foreleg and rolling his eyes. "Ugh, you really don't know do you?" He turned to Red and threw a hot finger down at his volatile liability of a friend. "Your stupid demolitions 'expert' is going to lead us right into the city square and get us all killed!"
"I know, I know. He was in an explosion as a smeet that fried some of his internal hardware so he's a bit…off." Red reminded, talking over Zim's attempts to interject his own opinion into the conversation. "Zim, if you don't get your act together, I'm going to be forced to relieve you from Lavender Fire and Purple and I will do this ourselves."
Zim glared back at Purple, eating him with his eyes as a dark, appallingly hateful expression flashed behind his magenta eyes. "As I was saying," he spat sadistically, "there's a service entrance along the east corner of the catacombs that I'm sure stops on every level of the building."
Red blinked as he ran his calloused stare over the four gargantuan pillars of the mansion he used to reluctantly call home. There were eighteen guards stationed at the front and two patrolling the white hot electronic gate, swallowing at the thought of millions of volts of blistering plasma melting him to nothing more than a smoldering pile of ash if they played this wrong. He moved a bit more to the left, struggling to see past an immaculately clean cosmetics factory and catching sight of another…three? Yeah, three guards stationed along the east side of the structure and chatting leisurely in the all-encompassing darkness the dome rained down upon them all. They would be cutting it close.
"You're sure?" He muttered under his breath, internally regulating his lenses to sputter off with a tiny click. "You're absolutely positive the east side is where we need to be?"
Zim didn't skip a beat, nodding in unwavering loyalty and grinning in powerful satisfaction when Red turned back to where Purple waited stewing in his thin patience. He trailed the length of Flicky's powerful diggers of claws and chewed nervously on his lip when deep, profound doubts began to creep into his spooch. This was a devastatingly flawed plan with a crushingly pathetic lack of detail. If Flicky caught wind of something deliciously sugary in the city and decided to take them off of their blind path to hunt for her next meal, she could potentially get all four of them slaughtered and strung up in the square as examples of what the Callnowian government rained down upon noncompliance. He couldn't stomach the thought of tiny Zim fluttering in the breeze as his goopy entrails dangled freely from his abdomen, or the mind-shattering image of Purple's beautiful, soft face shot execution style before his head was planted on a spike at the gate of the city. Red had a self-proclaimed duty to keep them both safe, sheltering them in his broken visage of metaphorical wings under his breath and growing twitchy at the thought of putting someone so delicate and someone so short in perilous danger at the hands of an instinct driven Schloripps.
There was no other way, was there?
They couldn't walk through the city and knock on Ipi's door in their tattered uniforms caked with dusty, unnatural blood and scarred to utter hell. They would be apprehended before they made it to the main thoroughfare, and the prospect of sneaking up through the catacombs, no matter how traumatic and horrifying it would be to return to something that dank and miserable, was enough to push Red back over the edge.
"Alright, um…Flicky." He thrust a commanding, authoritative finger up, feeling ridiculous when the cheesy, childish name grazed his tongue. "I don't know if you understand what I'm saying or not, but we need you to dig us exactly," he turned back and squinted back through his electronic enhancement, gauging the distance, "nine hundred and fifty-seven feet to the hard east so we end up directly under the belly of the capitol. Then you'll need to burrow us up into the vaults of the Manson. Got it?"
Purple erupted in a fit of laughter when Flicky chirped and unfurled her long mouthparts, sniffing and licking around Red's uniform as he yelped and tried to get away from her intrusive, perceptive sniffer. "You total jerk, Red. You had more chocolate and you didn't tell any of us?" He teased, only half mad at the idea of being douped out of a scrumptious, small meal as his stomach rumbled. "She understands you completely so don't talk to her like she's stupid. Schloripps have language recognition built into the thalamus of their brain, almost like a natural translator. Lire taught me that, so I guess he was good for something." He paused and moved forward, maintain sly eye contact as he reached down and grazed Red's pocket with his fingertips, dipping them slowly inside and tugging free the secret, half eaten chocolate bar he'd kept hidden from the rest of the team. "You better pay up if you want her to take us there."
Red shivered at the surprisingly friendly whisper, feeling it shudder down his spine and warm him to his toes as his forgotten, nearly melted candy was taken and unwrapped by delicate, spidery fingers and tossed high into the air. He ricocheted out of his fog and shouted when Flicky impulsively skittered forward and regurgitated nauseatingly into the snow, forcing Red to turn away in sickened disgust when she began slurping and sucking on the goopy, acidic mixture.
"That's the nastiest-" He was cut off when the behemoth finished and wailed, bounding forward on ecstatic, curious legs and going to town at the base of the dome.
Flicky was unexpectedly quick, flattening her sturdy, glassy wings to her fuzzy body and throwing huge clumps of earth and roots this way and that as she raked and razed her way into the ground, disappearing from sight into a wide, gaping cavern and sniffing out her way as she went. Purple grabbed Red firmly by the arm and charged forward, pushing him into the dark, grimy hole before snatching Zim around the waist and forcibly chucking him along after his friend. He chuckled at their collective disgusted gripes and hopped down, willing his PAK to glow as Flicky made quick work of the tunnel, excreting a strange, sticky fluid from her knees to keep the soil in place so it wouldn't collapse in on itself.
"This is incredible!" Purple exclaimed as he skipped through the mud, taking mental notes and recording everything he saw deep in his mechanical hardware as he followed closely behind in fascination. "Do you know how useful she would be back on Irk?! She could help dig out trenches for the infrastructure in less than thirty minutes!"
Red and Zim weren't nearly as ecstatic, pulling their once decent boots free from goopy mud mixing in with Flicky's natural secretions and trying not to shudder in absolute revulsion to the feeling of dripping soil smearing down their already blood caked cheeks and groaning as Purple elatedly kept on, singing praise back to the dutiful Schloripps as she paused and sniffed at a tiny insect crawling along and unnerved by the radiating glow of lavender seeping off of Purple's PAK.
"This is disgusting!" Zim exclaimed heatedly, frantically wiping his soiled gloves down his front and whining out loud when he realized he couldn't find a way out of the claustrophobic, germy space closing in around him. "There's so much filthy filth and hideous root things I can't take it!"
"Calm down, we're almost there anyway." Red stuck out his tongue in repelled abhorrence when a glob of slimy muck landed on his shoulder and stained his uniform beyond belief. He tried to focus on the distance in his ocular lenses, guiding Flicky on as she paved the way to their risky assassination attempt and scanning the streets above. "You need to go to the left a bit, Schloripps. At this rate, you'll put us right outside the eastern wall."
Flicky warbled and complied, her clawing gaining zealous traction as she chucked clumps back into Zim's face and earned another aghast shriek of revolting hatred. "It's so sticky and hideous down here and filled with all kinds of germs! This isn't how the life of an Irken invader is supposed to go!"
"You delusional idiot, just keep going." Red snapped, feeling his frayed nerves wear dangerously thin as Purple collected soil samples and stored them in his PAK for later. "And you, what the hell are you doing?"
"I'm collecting samples so when I get to the nebula and get my own place, I can study this stuff and see what kind of tiny organisms live inside all these rocky, clumpy folds!" He giggled maddeningly, clearing his throat when he realized how ridiculous he must sound and continuing on with the last stretch of their trek. "Ah, anyway, how close are we?"
"Twenty feet. We need to burrow up." Red instructed, happy that Flicky got the point and directed her attention upwards, fanning her wings for balance as she rapidly scaled the wall to her makeshift ceiling. "Damn, I'll give it to her; she's really helpful. This would have taken days for us to dig out ourselves and she did it in what, three minutes?"
Purple nodded, grabbing for Zim once again and tossing him high into the air, happy when he got the point and threw out his PAK legs to stabilize himself against the tunnel and hoist himself up into an echoy, mysterious freakshow of a room he hadn't previously seen. Purple watched from below, shooting Red a look of perplexed bewilderment when Zim called back out in terror and nearly tripped forward into the hole as he went pale and attempted to wave the others up, stuttering on a repeated, terrified loop at what he'd seen before dropping to his knees and covering his mouth to stare blankly back at whatever was squeezing the words from his senses. Red pushed past and went first, feeling his spooch turn and flip before knotting as he quickly scaled the loose walls and grunted, hoisting himself up and reaching out for Zim to grab him when he nearly slipped. He grumbled in irritation when his friend ignored him completely, instead grasping at the chipped tile of the floor from where Flicky had scratched her way through and acid ate the concrete and steel support bars, tugging himself up and rolling up onto the surprisingly pristine floor. He coughed, reaching down and latching onto Purple's wrist when he extended up for his touch, using all of his strength to pull him to his side through the jagged opening where they laid for a few seconds to catch their breath.
Red blinked when his surroundings came into the forefront and alerted him to the scent of sterile gauze and medical tape tinged with something horrendously metallic he hoped wasn't what he thought it was. The light was dim and Flicky had squeezed herself into the tiny box of a room, pressing up against the metal of the sanitized ceiling before making her way towards the hole to brush her hairy legs over the side of Purple's exhausted cheek.
"I hope I see you again, big girl." He grinned, nodding her on as she scrambled out, her scratching and chittering fading away into the darkness and leaving them with only the faint reoccurring beep of a delicate pulse monitor and the hum of atmospheric tanks pumping hydrogen into alien lungs breaking the silence. "Red? Is this…what is this?"
Red pushed up on unsteady arms and glanced to Zim, immediately feeling the color drain from his cheeks as he followed his fixed, terrified gaze to the left across the hole to where a massive sheet of murky sanitary plastic had been hung up for privacy, fluttering and wavering disturbingly where the end of a dark table pressed up against the plastic and darkened it to a shadowy gloom that set Red's skin to crawl. He reached out and grabbed for Purple by the shoulder, pulling him to his feet and keeping his grip along his scapula as they both stared on in utter horror when a faint grumble and something barely seen shifted through the blinding light of the overhead lamp, sucking them all in to the dubious, bloody unknown and freezing them in their muddied boots. Purple flew up and gripped at Red's hand, digging his once perfectly manicured claws into his white knuckles and stifling a panic stricken yell when the nightmare vision groaned long and low and moved again, slinging up off the metal platform and rustling about gracelessly before speaking in a voice so disgustingly sweet and familiar none of them believed it was true. No…it couldn't be. Lire…Lire was right?
Lire was right.
"I knew…you would come home…I can smell it."
Red took a step back when his jaw dropped in utter terror, the cloudiness splitting as six waiflike fingers pinched and teased at the misty plastic, giving him a tiny glimpse into the deep skintone he'd come to recognize so well. Lire was right. He was right but how?! How was this possible?! Glittering black blood dripped to the floor and oozed past the titanium leg of the table, stopping short in its lazy tracks to crust nauseatingly and turn to nothing more than a pile of ashen crumbles and violet tinged dust. Zim cried out at the sight and scrambled back in a heap of gawky limbs when his PAK beeped out his rising pulse and sent norepinephrine to his mind to attempt and calm the tidal wave of horror radiating off of him in sweeps to engulf his two commanding officers where they panicked. They needed to leave. They needed to leave now.
"I can smell your…beautiful cologne, Styx."
No.
There was no way this would ever be possible. There was no way she…she was here.
Purple flicked his antennae back in mind-numbing, agonizing fear when three gory pads gripped sveltely around the edge of the sanitary shield, tugging lightly against the suspension and popping a few of the hooks free and letting them clank vibrantly to the pale floor before giggling. The voice. That voice. She was teasing them. She was toying with them like a carnivorous Hogulus running for timid prey as she sat back down and bent to slip on two patent leather, Plookesian heels at her leisure, poking each of her two claw pointed toes through the slit and standing with a huff and a flippant sigh of relief when her long, wiry spine audibly cracked back into place. The sounds of lingering rigor mortis sounded, stiff joints and jawlines snapping free as blood began to flow once more and horrendous wounds lay gaping like the mouth of gory, tendon stinking caverns.
"And you, my sweet Purple, I'm so disappointed in you. But, I guess I can forgive you and let you have a second chance to prove your loyalty to me. I understand how difficult it is to leave your home and be given to someone you don't know."
Half mangled flesh, teeth barely clinging to sockets and held together by a mash of black, sentient hair undulating in the shadows. Three eyes intact, two obliterated and popped like candy as bone jutted at awkward, quickly mending angles to fight off the threat of gangly infection and festering puss oozing down her plasma burned, melted skin. She smiled, swallowing a clotted wad of blood as Purple and Red stared on in glassy, shattered terror, their minds going on autopilot as the plastic was brushed to the side and the lavish click of her expensive, powerful heels rebounded and deafened them both. Zim looked away, averting his gaze from the terror of everything he had imagined and becoming shell shocked when his nightmares came true and manifested as a singed, zombie-like mirage throwing her hand on her hip before them.
They had to leave.
They had to leave.
They had to leave.
It was a mistake to come here…to see this abomination of a patchworked freakshow stitched together with the finest of silks and shrouded in tantalizing suede as her free tongue lolled from the blown open, annihilated cheekbone flooding away like liquid as it slipped and slid down her neck.
Sen.
Sen was...alive?
EW Sen sounds gross! But…Lire was RIGHT? What?! How is that possible?! I guess we'll find out later on! Like I've said in my review, I will be posting on Wednesdays because I ended up getting a full time art job! Yay! I will not be abandoning this, and I hope you guys have fun!
Next Update: Wednesday, February 19, 2020 at 10:00 pm CDT (UTC-5)! See you then!
