"Master Folken?"
No response. Only the gurgling of boiling chemicals answered the young man's query.
"Master Folken?" he asked again, pushing his way carefully into the laboratory. Another young man sat at the desk in front of him, carefully writing something left-handed while using a gloved right hand to peer at a beaker.
"Master Folken, I apologize for interrupting you, but I was told to introduce myself immediately. I am Dineer, your new assistant."
The sky haired man turned slightly, frowning. "Really now? Only you?"
Dineer blinked. What a low voice for such a young person! "Yes, well..."
"Nobody else volunteered."
Dineer grimaced.
Folken peered at the young man, cloakless, wearing the standard Madoushi uniform, whose handsome face was only creased by the stretch of his smile. His spectacles had been pushed onto his head, holding back the top of an unruly mop of hair that was braided and hung over one shoulder. "I see," Folken said at last.
"I-I had heard of your genius, Master Folken!" he stammered. "It really does not matter to me what the others say, though there are a few that think as I do. To think that you perfected the Crima Claw on the Alseides model all on your own! Not to mention discovering the premises of redirecting Fate particles, creating the periscope system for both Guymelef and tank usage--"
The other man's frown deepened, and he began to turn back around. "I don't need an assistant."
"I'm really sorry you think so sir, but Strategos Kyr gave me this." He held out a scroll, neatly sealed.
Folken unraveled it and peered at Kyr's flourishing and sickeningly precise handwriting. When he was done, he rerolled the scroll and handed it back. "We are to begin working with the Senior Sorcerers on the Fate Experimentation project, beginning tomorrow morning. Specifically, it says, we are to begin the manipulation of Fate particles on organic beings."
"Wonderful!" Dineer cried, taking an eager hold of the other boy's right hand. "It will be wonderful to work... to work..."
The cold metal in his grasp twitched slightly. Pointed fingertips scraped lightly against the back of his hand. Dineer slowly gazed upwards, taking in the twisting wires and cords, gaping at the bolts, screws, and molded plates that were fused together to create a hideous, metallic mockery of the muscles and sinews on a skinless human arm.
That glove had been his hand!
"Yes," Folken replied coldly, a small smile on his lips, "I suppose
it will."
Dineer winced and ran his fingers through his hair. He took a long pull at his glass before continuing. "I apologize. Folken kept that thing well hidden from the other students. A lot of the other boys thought that he was deformed in some way, but that was entirely unexpected."
Van's face pinched in nearly the same way. The hairs on his neck rose, remembering the sting of that fingertip needle. His introduction to his brother's alteration had been, if anything, more startling than Dineer's. The others had heard, but never seen firsthand, the replacement arm, and were impatient but respectful in the short lull. Zhi merely looked bored.
The Strategos cleared his throat. "Well… Folken and I worked together for some time before we got any sort of success. It was frustrating work. The Sorcerers had previously attempted experiments on live beings before, all failures, and we were privy to their calculations, but never to details. We found those on our own later, much to our horror.
"In the meantime, I tried to whittle away at his personal defenses."
He smiled wistfully, staring at the droplets of red wine that remained
at the bottom of his glass. "He'd been so used to being shunned by his
fellow classmates and intellectuals that to find someone that actually
was trying to like him was strange. I think I must have talked quite a
bit, telling him about myself, trying to get something more than scientific
information out of him. It took several weeks before I succeeded…"
The boy was an incessant chatterbox.
Against his will, Folken had already learned that Dineer was the son of a struggling metal artisan whose soldier husband had died on some government sanctioned expedition. She was left to fend with a teenage son whose misbehavior eventually sent him to the gallows, and Dineer. Her penny-pinching had eventually saved enough to him to school where it was discovered that the young child was something of a prodigy. The word was spread to the Sorcerer's Academy, and when he was old enough, Dineer made a tearful goodbye to his loving mother to begin boarding at the most elite of Zaibach educational centers. Since then, he'd made a name for himself as one of many respectful, hard-working students. It was then not kindly looked upon that he'd singly volunteered to be the assistant of the cold, friendless foreign boy. Dineer mentioned this last only once, and then so quietly that Folken hadn't been sure he'd heard it.
So far Folken had escaped answering any of the boy's questions regarding his lineage by pretending he hadn't heard them. Much to his own surprise, however, he found himself acting somewhat polite, encouraging the one-sided conversation by asking questions (though they didn't really go farther than, "Is that so?" and "Really?") and nodding attentively.
Damn it all, he found himself enjoying the boy's company. He'd been trying so hard to keep himself from becoming attached to this place and this place's people; after all, one of these days he would take Celena away to somewhere they would be safe. She'd been mysteriously absent since the discovery of her drawing. Folken made cryptic attempts to locate and discover the whereabouts of his tiny friend to no avail. He'd seen Jajuka often enough now that he was a permanent addition to the Emperor's Fate laboratories; the beastman was apparently the keeper for many of the animals stored for experimentation. Even he had no answers to Celena's disappearance, and Folken's anxiety grew.
"Christ!"
Dineer pounded his fist into the laboratory table, frustrated at another failure. The rat had died. Again. Calm as usual, Folken wrote down the incident as required by the Sorcerer's Committee. Green, 7th Moon: Experiment on Subject 278-A closed due to subject's termination. "Is it as bad as last time?"
"No," responded Dineer. "At least most of his body held together. Can't say too much about his insides." He prodded the dome-shaped, hairy lump with a hypodermic needle. The skin split under the pressure, releasing a smelly, bloody, gooey mass that had once been the animal's organs and bones.
"At least we've finally isolated the proper Fate particles." He peered at the laboratory's chalkboard, seething at having to report another week's worth of dead ends. They were advancing in inches to successfully completing their work, and he abhorred the possibility that this one thing could take a lifetime to achieve.
Dineer sighed and settled despondently onto his stool. "Mother used to tell me that the angels would get me through times like these." He ran his fingers through his hair, which hung loose around his shoulders.
Folken's eyebrows quirked. "Angels?"
"Never heard of an angel?"
"No."
"You're serious?"
"Yes."
"I knew it!" Dineer was delighted. He straightened up, a grin broadening on his face. "You really aren't from the capitol! Maybe from the outskirts?"
"The angels?" he asked, hiding his panic under exasperation.
"Messengers of God." He cleared his throat. "For he will command his angels concerning you to guard you in all your ways; they will lift you up in their hands, so that you will not strike your foot against a stone."
"What?"
"It's from a Psalm. Always was my favorite." The boy beamed. "Got me through those damn entrance exams. They're supposed to look like human beings with white bird's wings. Mother had a statue she kept near the door. She really took to that religious stuff after father died."
"Winged humans," dully repeated Folken. "You worship Atlanteans."
"Not really, although that first round of mythology classes really hit me. They're more than just humans, I suppose. According to the local priest they're just spirits and beings that exist in Heaven with God, no real link to the cursed Atlanteans."
"Which god?"
"The God." He took on a false, haughty air. "The one and only God; He who vanquishes the false gods and makes them appear as the hollow idols that they are." He rolled his eyes. "There were some fanatics back home that wanted to go out to Freid and Fanelia and make sure that they knew what the true religion was. I hear Fanelia still worships the dragons and the like. Bet they would have gotten a great reception, seeing as how the King supposedly married a Draconian and all. I say, are you feeling all right?"
"Yes," he croaked, swallowing a nervous lump.
Dineer regarded him for a moment or two. "It's strange that you've never heard of any of this."
This was the first time Dineer had vocalized any sort of speculation regarding his lineage. Folken hoped silence would deter his curiousity. It had the opposite effect.
"You know, they're saying that the heir to the Fanelian throne disappeared a few years back. Some say he died on that bloody ritual of theirs, but a body was never found."
"I -"
"- Don't know what I'm talking about. Look Folken," Dineer smiled warmly at him, "I told you that I respected you, so much that wherever you're from and whatever you've done would really not matter to me. I'm thinking that we could make this project a lot easier for ourselves if we supported each other as friends. What do you say?"
The sky haired boy was stunned speechless. To reveal his past would mean once again facing his failure, and the possibility that he'd left behind a shattered family and country. He'd planned so long just to begin life anew with Celena, Naria, and Eriya, and to one day leave Zaibach's cold, scientific ways behind him. Dineer's question presented another possibility; that perhaps Zaibach's embrace would welcome him; that this was where Fate had meant for him to be.
"I used to wet my bed," Dineer said finally.
"What?"
"I used to wet my bed," he repeated. "I figured I could give you a dirty secret and then you could tell me yours."
Folken stared at the grinning Zaibachian for a moment, astonished.
"My mother used to hang the sheets out to dry right out the front window. She thought that might encourage me to stop."
One side of his mouth drew upwards. This was embarrassing to the both of them!
"I think it followed me all the way through school," Dineer commented wistfully. "Someone remembered I'd been the one with the strange yellow flag that hung in front of my house. I think it hampered my dating life, no pun intended."
Folken involuntarily chuckled.
His assistant was "I never knew you could do that."
"Do what?"
"Laugh."
The mirth left his face. And, for reasons he couldn't fathom, Folken told him everything. He told him of Fanelia and of his father and brother, skirting the truth regarding his mother. He told him of the botched dragonslaying ritual, and how he'd hesitated, fatally, upon seeing the intelligence and emotion in the land dragon's eyes. He told of waking upon the operating table, horrified beyond comprehension upon discovering the inhuman appendage that had replaced his severed arm. He even told of being lonely and disheartened, and of the emotional relief that came from a single, happy little girl. He told of finding Naria and Eriya, and how he began to dream of a new life, with a new purpose. He stopped finally after his initial meeting with Jajuka, including the terrifying illustration that had been left behind, realizing that the light that streamed in through the windows had dimmed considerably.
"I say," Dineer whispered, awestruck, "that was the last thing I ever expected."
"I need to find her," Folken murmured fervently. "There's something wrong here that I can't find. The beastman said that doors would be open to me now that I've been appointed here."
Dineer stood and paced. "The archives, maybe. We can start there. But before they start letting us in, we need to start producing some results." He waved his hand at the botched experiment.
At last, inspiration! Folken's eyes lit up. "Tomorrow, then."
Dineer nodded, smiling. "To future success!" he toasted, lifting a beaker to his newly established friend.
"To success," Folken responded.
Their beakers dinged together. The sound rebounded ominously off of
the room's metal walls, and the two boys felt inexplicably chilled.
On the way back to his room, Dineer passed a familiar figure that he couldn't be more delighted to see.
"Jajuka! How are those Daedalian rock lizards doing?"
The beastman bowed respectfully. "Well, my lord. They've taken better now that we've been able to give them a proper amount of lighting."
"Your bandages need replacing," Dineer said, concerned over the blood-soak wraps around the beastman's head. "Whatever happened?"
Jajuka touched the wrap, his expression saddening as did so. His voice quivered as he spoke, "An… An accident, my lord."
"I see." Dineer frowned.
The beastman looked around. Then, with tears unabashedly dampening the fur under his eyes, he gazed upon the slightly smaller human teenager. "Tell him that he needs to find her," he said quietly, "before it's too late."
"What has happened?" Dineer whispered.
"They've taken her for the final trials. One way or another, she may be lost to all of us forever."
"Who has?"
Jajuka put a furred hand on the boy's uniformed chest. "Your peers, my lord.
"The Sorcerers have Selected her."