02 – Preferential Treatment

Erika winced and grimaced every time she heard the bone saw whir. Holding a meeting over an operating table was… an experience to be sure, one that Erika didn’t feel like she ever needed. Leah had wanted her to be a doctor once upon a time, and Erika actually considered it before getting her GED, but watching The Doctor hack into Anna killed any lingering interest in the idea.

It took effort to hold back her nausea.

Erika forced her focus on The Director. “I trust I have you to thank for putting us back together?”

“I would save your thanks for The Doctor,” The Director said, elbows on his knees as he leaned forward and watched the event that Erika was doing her best to ignore. “He is a man whose ultimate goal is to cure the disease of death, and has made great strides to that end, but constantly requires new bodies to work on to advance his learning. When three severely injured people showed up in our laps, it was he who requested the opportunity to restore you all.”

Erika looked over the boy, frowning a little at the idea that this kid was in charge of one of the main factions of the city, and that the others would come to him with requests like that. He just looked too much like some kid doing his best to emulate his dad, or something like that. Appearances had to be deceiving in this situation—he could be some thirty thousand-year-old monster for all she knew. Since it was a distraction, she decided to ask outright.

“What are you?”

“Pardon me?”

“Sorry if this is rude, I just wasn’t sure if you were a mage or undead or…” Or a regular twelve-year-old, Erika did not voice her thought out loud, figuring it would offend him, no matter if he was a little boy trying to dress up like an adult or an old man who just looked like a kid.

Judging by the narrowed eyes, she offended him anyway. “I am a Genius-class being, if you must know, not that such classifications are worth the air it takes to speak them.”

The Fixer had mentioned Geniuses before, mostly in the context of the classification system having been created by a genius in the first place. At the time, Erika hadn’t been fully certain that he had been referring to some species of genius, rather than just a brilliant individual. It felt a bit strange that Geniuses were considered things on par with undead, monster spiders, and people who summoned giant rock monsters.

“You are not impressed. That is fine,” he said, sitting back to observe the continuing surgery. “I may not be able to emit laser beams from my eyes, but I possessed the knowledge, expertise, and resources to track the man who assailed you fast enough to arrive in time for The Doctor to perform his miracles.”

“I didn’t say I wasn’t grateful…”

“It matters little. I am quite used to being talked down to,” he said with a wave of his hand. “You’ll see one day…”

“One day we’ll all see? We’ll rue the day?”

“You jest,” he said with a half-smile, “but I am the sort of person who does not mind plotting for years before seeing my enemies fall. Verily, I am quite fond of designing situations such that my foes dismantle one another with me lifting nary but a finger to push the events into motion.”

“I… see.” Erika didn’t know what else to say. Or, rather, she had a lot she wanted to say, but quipping about his loquacious speech seemed like a bad idea. Without knowing what would offend him, remaining silent unless spoken to sounded like the best way to keep off his shitlist.

Turning back to the operation, Erika had another wave of nausea; The Doctor had Anna’s whole thigh peeled apart where he was affixing something directly to her bone. The Orderly had rejoined the operation, moving to assist The Doctor in attaching clamps, prying muscle apart, and handing him tools before he asked for them. The other member of their surgery team was moving about, removing a bag of blood from the pumping machine before reattaching a fresh one.

“The life-saving portions of the operations are complete—and they have been for some time,” The Director said, as if he heard Erika ask what they were doing down there. “But equally important to The Doctor as life is quality of life. It is quite simple to salvage a mind and shove it into an amorphous blob of flesh, attach feeding tubes and waste collection, and call it a life saved, but that isn’t enough for The Doctor. His subjects must be independently mobile and capable of acting upon the world, not just a preserved consciousness.”

Erika swallowed, her gaze flicking between The Director and the surgical tableau. The Doctor’s hands moved with a precision that was clearly inhuman, his focus absolute. “So… you’re saying she’ll walk again?”

The Director nodded. “Certainly.”

“With a prosthetic?”

“A graft. The Gadget has been regrowing hyper-cloned body parts. Combined with The Doctor’s attentions, she’ll likely move better than she walked before. There may be a period of adjustment required, but The Doctor’s subjects often take quickly to their replaced limbs. You are already up and walking after a mere three days, and you had several broken bones.”

Erika started, gripping her armrests. “Three days?” She grabbed at her phone, only to remember that it was gone. She didn’t even know where it was, so she couldn’t retrieve it as she had with her clothes.

She made a mental note to add some cheap cell phones to her armory.

“You and the cursed-sword wielder were injured, verily,” The Director continued, ignoring her, “but neither of you had an engine block rip off your legs or a door crunch your arm into pulp, to say nothing of the amount of glass embedded into her chest. It was by a mere nine millimeters that one shard of glass missed her jugular. I imagine she will not wake for several days hence.”

Erika swallowed, not realizing just how injured Anna had been. She saw a blurred daze when she tried to remember the details, at least until she managed to break the window of the van to escape. From there, the monk had attacked immediately. There hadn’t been a chance to check on any of the others.

“You said you were tracking the monk?” Erika asked.

“Is that his title? The Monk? We were never able to discover it.”

“I don’t know,” she admitted. “Never saw him before yester—er… whenever it was. He just looked like one, so that’s what I’ve been thinking of him as.”

“Fitting, I suppose. Yes, we first became aware of him in mid-October. The Prescient has been attempting to locate him since, though your little escapade caused quite a few ripples that made finding him much easier than expected.”

“Ripples…” Erika scoffed. “I asked because these people have been tracking me. Now that I’m awake, they’re certainly going to be here sooner rather than later.”

“You need not fear the monk. He is, at this moment, contained and under watch by The Mind,” The Director said with a small shake of his head. “This place is not wholly within Chicago; accessing the Asylum is nearly impossible.”

“Are we outside?” Erika asked, eyes widening. “Like outside outside?”

“Outside reality? As in Outsider-class beings?” The Director laughed, actually laughed, disturbing both The Orderly and the one Erika presumed was The Gadget as both glanced up—The Doctor maintained laser-focus on his surgery. “Let’s not be silly. If I had the power to access the fundamental, primordial, chaotic matter of existence, suffice it to say that we would not be conversing.”

“I’ve heard it described like a machine,” Erika said with a disappointed huff.

“Regardless, we are in a simple pocket dimension, one fully within the boundaries of reality.” He paused, then gave her a sidelong glance. “You told The Orderly that the monk and his associates have access to teleportation in some manner?”

“I’m no genius,” Erika shrugged, “so don’t ask me to explain what they did. All I saw was a portal opening to some weirdo place with a bottomless pit and a pile of maggots.”

The Director hummed, lightly rubbing his chin. “I will inform The Mind to keep an eye on possible incursions, but I estimate a low likelihood of success… at least so long as they do not get their hands on one of ours, they might figure a way for members of The Castle to act as a key.”

If all she needed was a key, Erika wondered if she could break her way in. Thinking about that possibility made her look down at her bare wrist. It had barely been a month since her birthday, and she already felt alone without her watch. “Do you know where my things are?”

“Things?” The Director followed her gaze down to her wrist, making a small note of understanding in the process. “Your clothes were deemed damaged beyond reasonable ability to repair and were incinerated. The Gadget took possession of your phone, your watch, and several baseball bats we found at the scene, intending to repair them.”

“I hope they didn’t… I mean, not to sound ungrateful, but the watch wasn’t just any old watch.”

“Yes, it had a… glitch on it.” The Director nodded down to the center of the operating theater, making Erika involuntarily glance down. “After the surgery concludes, I will have The Gadget take you to his room.”

“How long…” Erika trailed off as The Gadget pranced away from the operation, passed through a set of double-doors, and returned in short order, wheeling along a cart holding a human leg.

The bloody stump, kept alive via a series of blood-filled tubes connected to a smaller version of the pumping machine, extended just past the knee. Having seen Anna’s leg in the past, she knew it was covered with all sorts of tattoos; the new leg had all of her ink in the right place as far as she could see, but the skin looked too clean to have been caught in an accident.

“That’s the cloned leg?” Erika asked.

“It is indeed.”

“And you all went out of your way to tattoo it.”

“It was not something I ordered, I assure you,” The Director said with a fond smile. “The Gadget is quite an artist, I imagine he took it upon himself to recreate her original designs as much as possible.”

“That’s very kind of him,” Erika said as The Gadget and The Orderly hefted the leg into place. Once The Doctor started jamming the extension attached to Anna’s bone into the new leg, she turned away again in a hurry. “So… mind if I ask why you were tracking the monk?”

“We had an unusual encounter with him, culminating in The Prescient receiving a vision of sorts—portends of a dire future in which some manner of monstrosity destroys the city. It would be inconvenient to pack up and move elsewhere, thus we are, naturally, opposed to such a future.”

Erika shuddered, remembering that thing in the darkness beneath The Fixer’s chains. “Did the monstrosity have a big red tongue lashing out?”

“Interesting. I presumed you would be aware of the threat, given a few other details of The Prescient’s vision, but I wasn’t expecting you to have seen the being.” The Director turned fully away from the operation, giving Erika his full attention. “What can you tell me about it?”

“Not much,” Erika said with a small sigh. “It is some kind of monster chained up in a parallel dimension, it has a whole bunch of cultists and worshipers that have persisted through centuries, and has some kind of connection to a being called the Mother of Maggots—which had been sealed up, but… uh… broke loose at some point. No idea how.”

“I see,” he said, maintaining eye contact so intensely that Erika had to glance away. “Mother of Maggots is not a title familiar to me, but it might explain some recent events—I shall assign a few of my crew to look into it. Let us focus on the parallel dimension for now. Where did you access it? How? And how did you learn of this being in the first place?”

“In order: the museum in the Lower West Side, one of the cultists prayed to a statue to open the portal, and I learned of the being through my work with The Fixer. I don’t know if you know of them, but they’ve been trying to track down this Mummy for a few hundred years now, mostly unsuccessfully.”

“The Historical Gallery and Cultural Museum of Chicago?” Recognition lit up The Director’s eyes. “Ah. The first incident of The Eclipse’s gas leaks. I sent The Prescient and The Maid to investigate shortly after, but they found naught of use.”

“I… might have destroyed the statue the cultist used, mostly in the hopes of keeping the monster and the maggots contained. It closed that portal, but clearly didn’t work long term.”

“Conjecture: The Eclipse likely secured the remnants of the statue following its destruction.”

Erika nodded, guessing that was accurate enough. “Pretty sure it was The Eclipse who stopped the gas leaks—er, maggots. I was trying to figure out a way to stop it, but they must have beaten me to it.”

“Conjecture: The Eclipse used the statue’s remnants to close the portals, perhaps identifying a magical signature to either hone in on impending incursions and deal with them before they can begin, or prevent them altogether.” As he spoke, The Director reached into his suit pocket and pulled out a small paper tablet. He started marking little check marks all down its lines, as if ticking boxes in a list, except without the actual list. Two pages and several dozen checkmarks later, The Director blinked. “The Eclipse has no mages in their roster. Who could have… The Hierophant,” nodding to himself, he started checking boxes once again. “And The Hermit.

“Well, Agent?” The Director said, looking back at her. “If that is the name you prefer…”

Erika shrugged. “Been working for me so far.”

“I believe I have good news, bad news, and worse news.”

“Bad, good, worse, if I get to pick the order.”

“The bad news is that The Eclipse’s method of suppressing these incidents is not sustainable. I’d give them… the remainder of the month before we start seeing these incursions once more.”

“That’s… alright, I guess.” Despite her words, Erika was kicking herself internally. After the gas leak incidents died off, she had stopped focusing on a way to stop them permanently—she felt she hadn’t been making progress, and with them gone, she focused on other things that she could help with, like Rick’s sword. If The Director was right, she had two weeks to pick up that research again before whatever The Eclipse’s solution was failed. “Good to have forewarning, I suppose.”

“For the good news, once they are aware of the scope of the threat, I imagine The Eclipse will be more than happy to work with us both.”

“We’re already kind of working with The Eclipse,” Erika said, gesturing from herself to Anna down on the table below. “Kind of,” she repeated. “I told them we were neutral as far as politics in Chicago goes. They seemed willing to allow that. I don’t think they know that I’m involved with this whole maggot business.”

“It may behoove you to keep that card close to your chest. My interactions with The Emperor have given me an impression of a woman who loathes chaos, and who views anyone who causes chaos as a weed to be plucked and burned.”

“If I’m working with them on this problem, they’ll probably find out sooner rather than later.”

The Director swept his arms wide in his seat, motioning to the operating theater at large. “So long as you establish yourself first, they may deem removing you to be far too troublesome, and instead merely attempt to fence your corner of the garden off, if you’ll allow me to continue the metaphor.”

That had been her plan, more or less. Or, at least, she had hoped that a bunch of ghost hunters would be considered beneath their efforts to truly deal with.

“As for the worst news: that would be the scope of the problem at hand. I am not even speaking of the monstrosity that The Prescient foresaw. Excluding the first night at the museum, each incursion incident escalated from the last, growing more and more severe. Now, I do not know the exact method with which The Eclipse is preventing additional incursions, but based on the limited information I do have, their method will not have stalled that escalation.

“When their method fails,” The Director said, turning his bright blue eyes on Erika, “it will fail spectacularly.”

Erika slumped in her chair, once again feeling like this was her fault. She couldn’t have known, but she had nonetheless been the one to smash those chains and free the Mother of Maggots. “We should let them know as soon as possible, right?”

“Would that it be that simple,” The Director said with a small chuckle. “The Emperor is not keen on The Castle’s existence. She is likely to dismiss warnings as plots of sabotage, at least so long as they come from us directly. A third party might be more believable. You were out on a mission to cleanse a spirit when you were attacked, correct?”

“How did you know that?”

“Conjecture and discourse with your swordmaster.”

“Ah.” Right. Rick would likely not have had any reason to hide information, especially with The Castle doing their best to put all of them back on their feet. “So, you want me to use that to… get a meeting with The Emperor and claim I discovered something about all this?”

“I would advise making haste in securing this meeting. My estimates are often accurate, but they are less so if I possess less information. At this juncture, I am operating almost purely on conjecture.”

“Meaning this whole thing could blow up in our faces tomorrow,” Erika grumbled. With one last glance at Anna—there probably wasn’t going to be time to get her back on her feet—she took a breath and stood up. “Better get moving now then. You said Ri… The Swordmaster is somewhere in this place?”

“I will call for The Butler to show you the way. The Gadget will stop by later to either return your effects or take you to them.”

“Sounds great,” Erika said, not feeling great at all. Standing up hurt; she still had some brace around her leg and her chest, and now she was expected to get someone with the ostentatious name of The Emperor to listen to her? “Just great.”