Doctor Dmitriy's Datachron

He could not remember who had grabbed the other first out of raw, cold fear for their mortality, clutching at a warm body in lieu of scooping up the last few grains of sand in their hourglass. He’d marveled at the surprising tactile warm from such a waspish frame; such a quick beating heart strangled by adrenaline, excitement and dread.

Likewise, he couldn’t recall who had crushed lip to unfeeling metal jaw-frame or if he’d moved first, forgetting artificial prosthesis wreathed in black memories for the first time since such clouds had formed. Hands had moved of their own accord, groping hard in darkness. If he was going to die, torn apart by ravenous ally or starved for serum until he snapped and ripped apart his comrade’s face, the only primal scream they could emit into the face of doom without attracting death was to each other – a petulant, violent statement that they were alive until the end.

Indeed, in the end the Black Hoods rescue attempt found them before the ravenous or strain-infected could. They’d arrived just in time, too; some months after the fact the head of the rescue squad admitting to Dim that another fifteen minutes without forcibly separating, tying them down and slamming an emergency vitalus booster into their reservoirs and they never would have brought both Dmitriy and Doctor Payne back from the verge of growling, carnal beasts. He’d laughed at the worlds of his friend, proudly remarking that even now in all honesty nothing much had changed.

All jokes aside though, it had been awkward. Very awkward. You don’t just end-of-the-world fuck with a respected colleague in a moment of crisis and then pretend like everything is completely normal the next day. He’d tried to ignore it, tried to push aside the bloodlust-tinted ravenous recollections in that coffin-like rectangular space, for the sake of professionalism, for the sake of decency, but from the very beginning there were cracks in his façade – and Artyom’s too.

He daydreamed against his will. He became absentminded, often forgetting a carefully worded instruction or a request for assistance in the middle of an operation, back home safely now in the middle of Thayd. He’d caught himself glancing more and more at the red-haired, demon surgeon behind cloth face masks; always when he wasn’t looking. In turn, Doctor Payne didn’t yell or roar or attempt to sting him with carefully worded barbs of poison either, merely repeating his instruction more firmly and curtly until Dmitriy snapped back to reality again.

They hadn’t really spoken at length about what had happened to them, even now. All Doctor Konstantinov knew was that some weeks later, when the whole fiasco was just beginning to fade from his mind and swapping scrubs for his more comfortable civvies, Doctor Payne had come upon him without remorse, cornering him in the changing room.

It hadn’t been to roast him alive, or to make up for the past few weeks of vitriol. The towering, feared surgeon of atomic anger that had scared his predecessor off in a matter of days instead hesitantly, almost shyly had asked him for a date. A date. In both bewilderment and relief he had accepted right away.

The rest, as they were so wont to say, was history.

For the first time in many, many decades Dmitriy had been happy. They did fight at times, held wildly different opinions on a great many things and often were as night and day, but something seemed to just click between them. Eventually he had realized that the desperate flutter in his chest every time Artyom came skulking in with that scowl on his face was the resurgence of love.

Love. Who could have guessed, in such a rotten world?

So, was it wrong to want to remove an unfeeling metal jaw-frame to kiss him for real, for the first time? Was it hubris to watch the object of his affections suffer in painful prosthesis and yearn to change all that? Regen could have been his ticket to greatness, true, but that was merely a by-product of his true intentions.

But he had messed it up.

He had messed it up so bad, so bad.

This was not something the fancy of fortune would be able to fix.

xxx

He’d cried out before in pain and surprise, but this time Doctor Konstantinov let out a shriek of abject terror.  He felt that, felt his hand touching the lump… and felt the lump in turn touching his hand.

So paralyzed by the discovery was he that his ruined and regenerating body gave a violent, uncontrollable buck to distance himself from the growing horrors attached to his flesh that his socked feet slipped forward on the metal flooring of his lab and his knees crumpled once more, dropping him fast enough to crack the back of his head against the edge of the table and douse his vision in a shower of sparkling stars.

Fortunately, the cables framing his face and skull were made of a sturdier stuff than he’d hoped and the only thing he received was a visible dent that hadn’t even broken through the durable polymers. Almost panting, (and later on he’d realize, quite ineffectively for air), Dim probed a hand around to feel for the damage. He tried to rise again, grasping at the furniture for purchase, but his fingers were too mangled and his legs too numb to rise. Only pins and needles danced up and down the panicked nerves where he’d fallen. Even with vigorous, clawed rubbing he could barely feel anything at all.

Dmitriy’s laughter was high-pitched and wheezing, almost whistling through clenched teeth as tears of hurt and fear streamed freely down his cheeks. He didn’t know what was happening – he hadn’t a clue! Nothing, not a single outlier in any of his wildest scientific dreams could have accounted for this! What in the name of Kemos was happening to him?

The mordesh measured the growths around his waist one more time, battling to bring his composure back under control. He stretched out his fingers and thumb and found that the nubs were already longer by a good third and could hardly be called a nubbin anymore, stretching out and out with every twisting, wrenching pulse of his bruised body. Little clusters of virgin suckers were forming across the underside, exuding a thin protective lubricant to insulate himself from the harsh, open air.

He chuckled through his pained tears. Surely he must have raised the shutters and opened the window directly into true insanity. All he need do now is stick his head inside.

“Ahhh… Bambi. My Bambi. I’ve really done it this time…”

He fumbled for his damaged datachron one last time. It was the only object that could root him to normalcy in the midst of madness, as difficult as it was to manipulate with uncooperative digits. As alien limbs sought to slither across his already atrophying legs he hit the redial for the second time that day, pleading, almost praying in weak whispers to “please pick up. Come on now, please… please pick up.”

It rang for a few moments, hesitated in turn, and then switched immediately back over to the familiar and clipped intonation of Doctor Payne’s voicemail. As Artyom had earlier, a city away, Dmitriy felt the impulse to throw his datachron against the wall in frustration, but what would that have accomplished, really? He truly would have been cut off from the rest of the world.

The pressure in his core tightened as fresh pain erupted from the base of his skull. He dialled again, listlessly, his only movements the heaving of his chest and the slight twitch of a thumb against the screen.

Whirr. Humm.

“Speak now. Swi-”

Click.

Dmitriy slumped back further against the table. Admittedly, it did not feel quite as bad as his jaw trying to rip through his face and displace his prosthesis while still attached to his body, but he was… quickening. Becoming. Parts of him were quietly dislocating and dissolving. Muscles bulged larger than they had ever been in life. He flicked his thumb again.

Whirr. Humm.

“Speak-”

Click.

New nerves arched to life, petitioning a permanent connection to his brain. All of a sudden he could feel; really feel, more than he had ever felt before. He felt wrong, dry; unpleasant – remembering the dark, dripping depths of his dreams.

Whirr. Humm.

“Spe-”

Crackle.

The good doctor let out a growl that sounded right at him in the deep wilderrun jungle. It took all the willpower from the kind, gentle half of him slowly drowning in endless waters to not completely crush the contraption in powerful, too-large hands; merely cracking the casing instead. Artyom was not going to suddenly spring to action and rescue him. It already seemed too late to rely on the aid of an esteemed, great surgeon and scientist to fix his mistakes and make him all better again.

But perhaps there was someone else.

Drifting away from familiar territory, the degenerating doctor dialled another number not nearly used as often as his lover’s. There was an aqueous quality to his breathing now, so soon freed from the artificial tinge of false vocal chords, slipping past teeth hooked and horrible as they clumsily spun out the words. It took scarcely more than three rings for the receiver to pick up this time, thank the gods.

“Mmmaaaaaalllll…” Dmitriy groaned before the other could even speak.

He heard a marked hesitation on the line, sounds of slight static, and the unmistakeable crunch of boots on dry leaves coming to a snappy stop. A soft, deep voice intoned; “… Doctor?”

The abomination coiled against (and somewhat around) the lab table exhaled a wet sigh of relief. “Furrr… mmmmallll-deeeeh…. Hhhhk… Mmmal. I nnnneeed yuuuuhhh…” He tried to say, but it was difficult. He had quickly remastered speaking with flesh and bone again after so long, but it felt like the air to breathe wasn’t exactly taking the right channels to come out as words. Something felt like it was sticking like a dam in his lungs and his sides hurt at every ragged attempt.

As for the agent on the other end, his voice was harder this time. Firmer. Hundreds of miles away a shadowed, lithe form waved towards some seemingly empty trees to give the signal to hold the snipers for now, and then he touched his ear delicately to focus on the call. “Dim. This is dire. Are you about to become ravenous? Is this why you are calling me?” He asked.

He’d asked himself that not long ago. Now, it was much harder to waive such a concept away. Dmitriy shook his head slowly before realising his friend had his datachron configured to audio only. “Mmmalll, I mmay have mmmade… mmyself a mmonsterrr… Ssssend help…” He pleaded, trying to gain enough leverage to rise from his tangle on the floor.

Agent Formaldehyde absorbed this data, such as it was. He was already mentally preparing the paperwork to justify the order to retreat, for on the borders of disputed territory most of his men were mordesh and many would have agreed; a potential patient zero catalysing an outbreak carried more weight than the war of attrition against the Dominion so far.

His short nod was barely discernable in the darkness as he opened up a secondary channel. “Acknowledged. Markus. Miles. Mikhail, abort. Fall back while I contact the nearest harrower.” There was only a rustling of the trees and mere moments later faint footsteps echoed into the night. The black hood turned back to his datachron call, sallow features creasing into a frown. “Dmitriy, are you still there?”

He received no words for an answer but he could hear the other man panting. Wet, gluey, raspy panting.

“This had better not be one of your jokes, Dim. The Widow does not have much of a sense of humour.” Formaldehyde warned, but he already highly doubted such a possibility. Something felt quite wrong according to the raised metaphorical hackles at the back of his neck.

By this point Dmitriy needed both hands free to heave himself back up to an average standing height against the lab bench. To manage this a clumsy, uncoordinated appendage at first gripped around the datachron for him before dumping it with a clash and a clatter upon the clean surface. He peered at it unsteadily like a mermaid propping himself up against jutting rocks. How had he even, he didn’t know just-

– AHHH! –

- but a roiling, ripping feeling was beginning to coalesce between his pelvic bone and navel, one that also seemed to be pulling outward too, but with fire; white hot rolling fire!

Formaldehyde visibly cringed and pulled his earpiece out with slender fingers as an almost surprised, sharp howling scream pierced through the ear bud receiver. It had barely sounded human, or in their case mordesh. Erstwhile, in the wake of something horrific and vital ripping open within him Dmitriy slid like a cage-less squirg low to the ground once again.

A massive pair of jaws unhinged. Black keratin, hard as iron. One great big hook lunged down and sliced through cloth, skin, rotting flesh and weak dissolving bone. The doctor all at once experienced an agony-tipped sensation that none other on nexus had felt – the simultaneous half-numb pain of being eaten alive and the strange, sickly-sweet taste of his own flesh and soft marrow.

“Dim! Are you there? Dim! Answer me!”

He could not respond now. His call to Formaldehyde, more often called Mal to friends, may as well have been in the Halon Ring for all the good it did him now. But still, the call continued unabated and recorded every pained moan, every audible thrash and every crack, crunch and hungry gulp.

Agent Formaldehyde spat out a word in his native mordescu that he wasn’t allowed to say at home. If looks could kill the stalker’s glowing grey-eyed glower could have… made a colleague pretty uncomfortable at the time. “Very well, stay right there. Operatives will be sent to your location.” It was a bold statement considering he had no real control over that, but he was confident. His expression softened somewhat. “Dmitriy. Do not die.”

All this fell upon distracted ears. The doctor was far too preoccupied with the hurt in his guts and the savage, almost feathered-membranous slits slicing open beneath his ribs to hear the reassurances of a friend. Abandoning the damaged device, Dim crawled across the floor painfully like a snake on his belly, clawed fingers seeking purchase on the uneven metal panelling to pull his large and too-long body along, foot by foot.

Artyom. He wanted Artyom to find him instead. He wanted his tall, clever firebrand to stride in through the door right this very minute, fold his arms and glare at him in that unmistakeably doctor Payne way that always set his heart at ease. He’d say something incisive that Dim would not be able to deny or refute, and then he would forgive him and help him into his lab and… and… and fix things. Artyom would think of something – he always did – and come this time next week he’d be kissing him for real; for the very first time and it would all be so… so worth it.

Dmitriy wept new tears this time, not of pain but simple weary despair. That was merely a delirious dream and not about to happen, and it was all his fault.

His urgency increased as the cuts in his sides strained and gasped for… not air, he determined, but something else. It was becoming more and more difficult to breathe with his lungs and his skin was so dry it hurt. He could not remain like this any longer.

The taste of blood and bone faded from his senses as his massive muscled arms hoisted the humanoid part of his body up against the windowsill letting in the gloaming twilight into his lab. He’d kept it locked most of the time and he didn’t have the key on hand right then, but if his memory served him correct two storeys down and a little ways further into the jungle a strong river flowed through wilderrun and beyond. It had made for good fishing once upon a time, or refreshing to dip ones toes in, but now all Dim could think about was the water.

Water.

Water.

Every fibre of his distorted being needed it more than air and earth combined.

The creature shrugged off his stained lab coat and the tattered remains of his shirt, wrapping a fist in the fabric before slamming it as hard as he could into the pane. The glass shattered readily into ragged shards and he took the extra time to pick out the pieces still attached tenaciously to the frame.

Levering himself to barely fit inside the window, just like the little scamp he had once been to sneak out of history class alone, Dmitriy took one last look over his shoulder at the cradle of his hubris. The datachron was still running and the place was an utter mess. Well, he’d clean it up later, he thought.

He crawled outside the window and leaned. Alien limbs gripped, adhering to every crack and crumble. For a moment he felt the fresh touch of wind on his unmarked, healed face.

It stung. It stung so badly but it wasn’t the raw agony it had been some time earlier. Dmitriy coughed one more time, rubbing the wetness from his face by the sleeve of his coat as a single drip fell from the tip of his nose. Everything beneath that and above his neck brace was almost too much pain to handle right now, but he felt it fading. Slowly, fading.

“Y-Yaro… mhr…” He croaked, picking the squirg up carefully by the mantle. His voice sounded like gravel mixed with a watery whisper, barely audible enough to be considered speech. Dmitriy turned his head and hacked up a giant glob of clotted blood, thumping himself hard on the chest.

The mordesh drew into himself while he waited for the remnants of the pain to fade, holding onto the squirg like a child with a toy. “Not dead…” He murmured to himself, a little clearer now. Regen may have been a mistake. The twisting and restructuring of his primal pattern had felt like the world had been trying to turn him inside out… such burning and wrenching… he was not smart enough for this.

He wasn’t Victor Lazarin. He wasn’t Artyom Payne. He was just Doctor Konstantinov, mender of bones. Purveyor of placebos.

“C-come, Yaromhr… lehht me feed you…” Dmitriy gasped. Despite his arms and legs feeling like jelly and his nerves acting like an arching livewire he soon stood, knees trembling a touch as he found his feet. He had no idea how long he had been out but it was dark now, the windows holding no light and the rest of his laboratory swathed in shadow. He lurched forward, shuffling step by weakened step.

He did not get far before he trod on something underfoot. The doctor hesitated, pulling his boot away and looking down to discern the cause. Dmitriy merely stared in dull puzzlement when he recognized the scrap metal on the floor.

It was him. Well, his metal jaw; what had replaced the lower half of his face when he… ah, but he didn’t like to think about that. Pain seemed to erupt within him anew when he saw the loosened screws tipped at the ends with his blood, then tarnished steel that had lain nestled against necrotic flesh for years, and the nasal piping that felt, he sniffed, yes; gone. It was on the floor now, leaking drips of stray vitalus.

But how was-

The fog in his mind began to clear. Tentatively, he ran a tongue across the virgin flesh of his lips.

Tiny pink tentacles had ensnared themselves around his wrist so he did not drop Yaromir at the shock, but the memory came seeping back into his skull, scratching at his face and pulling, wrenching the artificial prosthesis free. A flutter loosed itself in his gut and he bolted at once for the washroom, finding his strength while he could as he dove for the only thing in the world important right now – the mirror.

He shoved the door open, groped blindly for the lights and steeled himself to face the gruesome visage he had long ago become accustomed to, though his festering form was a far fling from the fanciful youth he had once been in the light of the living day.

Wide, glowing blue eyes stared back at him in shock. Wrinkles and rot-marks, scars and crow’s feet; slight discoloration where the old flesh met the new, yet the smoother, less weathered surface still held hints of olive-toned skin that was already fading and mixing in with the contagion-green. For a brief time the cells had been somewhat alive.

The jawbone ached but filled in the ragged hole that had been left behind by the loss of its metal replacement. Dmitriy could almost swear that he still felt the marrow seeping in to the empty cavities like a sponge and his lips, they were perfect and reminiscent of his old ones. Perhaps. It had been some time ago.

He had gums that ached in the same manner of the infant who cries over a rusk or the newly contagion-enhanced mordesh suffering all their teeth falling out, only to be replaced with the bladed points of the predator as they grew in to take their place. Dmitriy had felt that pain twice in his life already, and now it was time for the third. He counted each one, holding his jaw open and running his fingers lightly along the sharp topography. Each tooth was present and accounted for.

By the time he finished tears were already welling-up without consent. He stepped away from his reflection as if in a dream; trying to break the illusion. This was, of course, what he had hoped for. It just had never entirely crossed his mind that his time tinkering with the threads that tied creatures together would actually bear fruit.

Dmitriy rubbed his eyes with the back of his coat sleeve and tore himself away from the mirror to reenter the lab, prodded by the pink coils of his pet to provide food. He did it mostly on autopilot, his mind not entirely as settled as he would have wanted it – mixed about by shock, pain and drugs.

“… I… cannot conceive of it…” He told Yaromir, clipping off the end of the tube of paste and setting the squirg down on the table before him. Yaromir curled around it immediately, destroying the confection once again as though it were a tube of shaved ice enjoyed by a young human on the beach.

As his friend fed, Dmitriy retrieved his datachron; sighing and tutting as his fingers traced the crack-lines on the screen. He would have to get it repaired or even replaced, but for now he hoped the utilities under the casing still functioned well enough for use.

It was with almost trembling digits did Dmitriy buff the surface of his datachron and hit the redial, pacing back and forth as he listened to the brief static, scratching at an itch in his ribs near the surface of his vitalus tank. He was almost sweating, tingling at the fingertips over the magnitude for what he had accomplished – the reality of what he had done.

He had to tell someone, anyone, but there still remained only one person on his mind.

Dmitriy was already nervously chewing his lower lip and falling back into bad habits when the datachron finally established a connection; but his jubilation was short-lived.

There was a click. “Speak now. Swiftly.”

The doctor jumped at the chance. “Artyom!” He exclaimed, then struggled with a raspy cough as payment for extending his voice too far and too soon. His next words were a softer, pleading whisper. “There is much I must say. It is a miracle! A marvel of-”

“-should your words hold anything of import I will attend to it later. Talk at the tone.” The datachron added, curtly.

This caught Dmitriy somewhat by surprise, but he quickly recovered his composure. As doctors they were quite often indisposed, or perhaps his partner was so angry at him Artyom had simply sent him directly to voicemail. Either option was just as likely, yet perhaps he deserved both by now.

After the beep his cleared his throat again and continued, although a small measure of the wind had already been let out of his sails. “My dearest, since we last spoke much has changed. I must see you right away. I have dredged the depths of depravity and have discovered a cure, not of the contagion, but for a calamity considerably less critical, but by no means middling. I suppose progress should start somewhere.”

He laughed a laugh that was meant to be fit and hearty, as reassuring as could be, but seemed more frenetic and feverish instead. “I will taxi to Thayd as soon as I can. Please accept my apologies for earlier. Soon you shall see why.”

Dmitriy grinned at that, a small, sharp smile and set the datachron down. As soon as he did so he pressed a hand to his vitalus tank to tamp down a loud growl from his stomach, pleading him to remember his fast. Indeed, he had not taken in sustenance for almost twenty four hours and it occurred to him, as he strode to the refrigerator and pulled it open, that he was no longer beholden to the thin soups and nutrient-rich broths that had become his lot in life since the accident.

Regen had healed him of all that. Why should he drink of another drop when he had teeth again, teeth that could tear and gnaw at solids and meat in famished delight? The sight of the familiar flasks of broth for the first time filled him with an intense rush of revulsion and nausea. Why should he? Why? Why?

Wait.

The doctor hesitated.

This… this was normal, right? Was he ravening? He still felt somewhat lucid; his thoughts were his own while vitalus flowed fresh in his veins. Perhaps it was just the profound power of his hunger setting off red flags in his mind.

The mordesh hunched over as he rifled through the contents of the fridge, hoping for a small snack before he departed. His fingertips touched upon chemicals, toxic substances and small tissue samples, yet apart from these and his flasks there had been no reason to stock anything else for many years. Well, discounting Yaromir and his tubes of protein.

Dmitriy snuck a glance back over to the table where his friend was feeding. He had more paste in stock, and while chilled it held the consistency of pâté, but it was not the blue-rare steak that suddenly flitted through his mind with almost painful longing. It was only, as he knew, just scrambled brains and protein. It couldn’t be harmful for consumption, perhaps a bit tasteless, but…

To hells with it! He pulled out an extra tube, ripped off the top and bit down.

It was better than he thought. Perhaps it needed a little more salt and some hindbrain impulse protested the thought of eating another creature’s grey matter, but both his gut and his heart sung out in joy at being able to eat again. Yes, normally. Like a whole person.

Not a steak, not real meat, but a compromise. Within minutes he was already tearing into a second one, and then a third. Soon enough his mind had already blanked on how many he was eating or how noisily, meat juices dripping down his chin, only this felt good and right to him somehow and managed to scratch at an itch lying dormant for countless years.

For now he had forgotten about Regen. He forgot about Artyom. He even forgot all about the odd threadlike strands of skin and muscle that floated in his vitalus tanks like wayward algae. He forgot about it all until, through his sixth and final sampling of Yaromir’s feed, did a bolt of visceral pain rip through his ribs and abdomen, seizing up the muscles. Dim let out a brief choke, startling back into reality.

He dropped the half-eaten packet and found meat on his hands, his woefully unwashed labcoat and his face, but he could not be ravenous. How could he? He was thinking just fine.

Dmitriy emitted a growl of pain that sounded like it was more from a predator than a scientist and then corrected himself right away, moaning weakly instead. “Oh, that cannot be good…” He rasped and wiped at his chin with the back of one hand before reaching down to unbutton his shirt. It felt like an intense cramp but slightly different, as though it were a muscle spasm that was pulling him outwards rather than tightening up.

His fingers scrabbled ineffectually over the buttons, lacking their full coordination. Dmitriy all at once realized that they were aching too, all the way to the bone, and when he pulled his hands away to hold one up to the light for his inspection he paused, staring wide-eyed in chilling fascination.

This was not his hand. The nails has darkened from their usual thick and blunted form and had lengthened considerably, just as the contagion had turned their teeth to fangs so too did this… something… pull out his fingers, twisting them into harrowing points. Even as he studied them they grew longer, pain shooting from fingertip to knuckle joint in both hands.

The doctor let out a small scream and staggered away from the fridge, bumping back up against another surgical table and gripping at that with whatever remained of his fingers to steady himself, but the very moment he did so another gut-wrenching shift of agony twisted up his insides, pulling, pulling, pulling outwards again.

“Good gods, no… I had thought the agony already over…” He gasped, breaking out in prickly perspiration for a second time. Abruptly he laughed, ringing out rich and true and untainted by the modulations of his old, broken prosthesis.

“Perhaps it was something I ate?”

Dmitriy grabbed at his shirt just below the collar with his claws and shredded downwards, laying bare his flesh and bypassing the buttons entirely. Much simpler that way. Even so he poorly judged his own movements and scraped thin trails down his chest at the same time, but once he got a gander at the goings-on beneath his shirt a little blood was the least of his worries.

His midriff was metal and flexible polymer tanks, this part at least was normal, however beneath the tank worn down somewhat by age no organs floated about in a bath of pale blue vitalus. He couldn’t see his intestines or liver or stomach, likely bulging outwards a little by all the delicious paste he had devoured. All he could see was skin beneath the polymer, dying skin turning green and stretched across abdominal muscles, growing from sternum to pelvis and lacking a bellybutton, but he supposed that made sense. It wasn’t like a bellybutton would grow back naturally.

Where was his vitalus? He needed it! Gone!

He breathed deeper, almost hyperventilating. He was overhealing. Flesh and bone voluntarily sacrificed to make room for his sanity preserving fluids had filled back in, those thin wisps and fibers of flesh knitted together against his will, perhaps spurred on by the primal life suffusing his organs. Admittedly, he hadn’t thought about this at all in his projections, though this may explain his hunger. His need.

Barely thinking with anything but his hind-brain Dmitriy turned towards the table he was leaning against. He thought to take his weight off of it but his legs were weakening; turning to water. He swallowed hard, clinging with a claw and fumbling for tools, anything he could find and anything within his reach – anything that could be useful. Pliers. Screwdriver. Laser cutting device.

Dmitriy chuckled in manic, pained fervor as sweat slicked his palms and his skin. The sweat felt cold and… thicker, perhaps, clinging his shirt and trousers to his skin. In his mind he tried to come up with an introduction for the paper describing his work, about the miracles of Regen (oh he would have to fit a pun in there somewhere!) as he unscrewed more bolts and cut and pried.

He had already removed part of his face. What harm was a little more?

Polymers warped and bolts were stripped as he peeled the empty tank away from his skin, as though peeling the cast from a broken limb. His body was bruised and creased where the metals used to be, nearly too painful to touch and his body was damp from what he was increasingly certain was not sweat, but some other kind of fluid. Leaking vitalus, perhaps? No, not nearly viscous enough.

His midsection was solid around his organs, full of muscles and fat and his arms were no better – flesh under the glass, wrapping around the bone. The doctor goggled at that, at the absurdity of regenerating inside the test tube encasing his whole body. Palms flat, minding the claws; he stroked a hand down against the smooth flatness of his belly and marveled at the serum’s work.

Beneath his waistline, some inches below where his navel should have been he found some strange protuberances ringing his hips like a fleshy belt. He delicately (and with some newfound difficulty) unbuckled his own leather belt for a better look, but he could not lean against the table for much longer, partially dissected as he was. His legs were not even water anymore – they were nothing. He could feel them trembling; giving out.

This was the source of that weird sensation turning his guts inside out. Strange nodules – unchecked flesh growth, perhaps – around half the length of his fingers were cramping. Pulling. Like himself, they were damp with strange slick sweat.

However, it was only when one curled around his finger of its own accord did the mordesh have any inkling as to what they really were.

What if he had found another mordesh more suited to his sensibilities, like a good Grismaran soul not as gnarled and grotesque as his own contemptible form. Another scientist or doctor who still had all their limbs neatly intact and did not need a wheelchair when their prosthetics became too painful to endure.

Simply thinking about his handicap caused his legs to ache in their caps, connected as they were to a pair of mechanical limbs replacing his knees and lower extremities. He, too, knew that his thoughts were irrational and that his anger was causing him to jump to crazy conclusions, but it was not something he could help until he composed himself a little.

After all, it wasn’t like he was going to someday become beautiful and grow back his legs.

The little scanbot had been about to ask him if he needed some time to calm down before Artyom let out a deep hissing breath through his clenched teeth, like a great war machine venting pent-up steam. Hunched over as he was he straightened himself right away and performed a complete heel-turn, walking out of what passed for a medical lounge with almost a snap in his step.

“So be it! Progress marches on! There are always other able assistants available anyway! Let him work on his puerile projects! Zoe, step lightly! There is much to do!”

<“Coming, Sir!”> The scanbot chirped and followed him out into the hallway. Doctor Payne strode through the complex with purpose, heading towards his first appointment. He passed the alchemist-run outpatient pharmacy where many mordesh stopped to pick up their vitalus and flagged down a tall, broad-shouldered mordesh scientist wearing a lab-coat and carefully rolling up a brown paper bag.

“You. Doctor?”

The mordesh glanced at his glowing yellow eyes and fixed snarl upon his face like a jabbit caught before a laser beam. “U-um… yes. I’m Professor Dubrovskiy-”

“Good enough. Come with me.” He ordered, pointing a ragged nail at him. When he didn’t budge Artyom grabbed him by the collar and dragged him along instead.

“B-but! I’m a botan- … I-I just needed medi-”

Doctor Payne ignored him. “You’ll do fine. Here.” He growled out and tossed a pair of surgeon’s gloves to the other man. He needed an assistant like Dmitriy and this mordesh would do. If he squinted maybe he could even pretend they were the same.

In any case there was a triple bypass surgery that desperately required his attention, and hearts would not wait.

REGEN.

The exponential cell-repairing properties of the squirg applied to his people.

Regeneration. It would not cure the contagion but repair the necrotizing effects of rot and the passage of time. Lips and teeth and jawbone gradually restored, piece by piece.

Dmitriy gently touched the cool metal of his face. For a moment he closed his eyes.

Bones and joints. Flesh grown back. Ligaments reconnected. Ten healed toes.

A second chance for the one he loved.

He lay on the large steel table in the center of his laboratory, spread out like a patient awaiting treatment, or an injured man in a hospital bed just waiting to be seen. One arm lay limp at his side while the other was folded calmly over his stomach, his pair of boots tucked away out of sight, leaving him in his lab uniform and socks. He did not know what was about to happen to him but he was sure he needed to be in a safe, quiet place just like this.

Everything felt sort of swimmy and not-all-there, but Dmitriy knew this was more from the sedative and painkillers he had added to the serum to account for any sudden surprises or pain. It almost felt like he could float off his table and up into space, through the atmosphere to touch the rings of Halon and move onwards, past the stars. For a moment it felt like he was back in – what was it – maybe college, skimming a few chemicals here and there from the supply room to mix up compounds for a party; girls giggling and tossing their luminescent hair while the sashay of a young man’s hips had, for a brief time, stolen his heart.

Doctor Konstantinov laughed softly. He was supposed to be operating right now, not lying there buzzed from preemptive pain medication. He felt like Yaromir, pressed against the chopping block, and would his arms and legs hurt when a giant kindly doctor sliced them off for fun?

Dmitriy slipped lower and lower into a daze even as his heart-rate began to race, pulsing in his chest as his limbs became leaden and tingled to their very fingertips. If he could, he would have brushed his hand across his mouth yet again, checking again and again to make sure the barbaric metal jaw was still there. He had loosened the screws holding it together a little before he had succumbed to the bench, daring to hope. At least, he thought he might have. It was hard to remember now.

Mere minutes later he had sunken behind the shroud of sleep and then, not long after, he dreamed.

They were dreams unlike the usual dark flights of fancy or remembrances of many ages past, not the fear and gut-sick feeling of the Fall with the stench of death and blood all around him, or the cold wrenching despair of the gun in his hands, his face on fire, ravenous stalking the hallways shrieking his name…

Instead he dreamed about the deep watery places of the world, where sound was merely the bubbly echoes of water and he could not speak or indeed see, but space was filled with slimy things with scales and one too many eyes… a dream of a Nexus where the world had turned on its side, pouring the oceans like a tipped ewer over the land until the planet had drowned.

He wanted to awaken, gasping for air, but breath did not come. Was he drowning for real?

Sinking, deeper…

Deeper…

Into a midnight place where tentacled limbs yearned for his grasp.

Dmitriy awoke gasping for air, sucking the oxygen in through a mask of pain, a hand clawing pleadingly at his chest. It were as though the oceans from his brief dreams had spilled forth from his mind and were crushing his chest, filling his lungs; a heavy weight unseen.

He sat up slightly, battling against gravity and as a doctor expecting the unknown he took inventory of his pain.

Chest… hurts… cold sweat shivers…numb… tingles… face hurts… Aaaagh! Hurts…

Make note of this, he told himself as he trembled. This was also a part of his experiment and his triumph. Gasping for air through his screw-loosened artificial jaw the physician groped nearby for his datachron, switching on the recording device after a few uncertain presses of the screen.

“I think I may be having a heart attack…” He joked, his chuckle uncertain and raspy between his heavy breaths. “REGEN is not painless, I was aware of this, but I…”

He squashed a sudden moan as a needle of pain threaded through all his nerves, a pain so intense he hadn’t realized how numbed his senses had become as a carrier of the contagion until it came to life again, arching through his system like a live wire. His entire body jumped in shock.

“I- I… did it work? I…” He felt a softer ache in his forearms unaccounted for in his predictions and he rolled back a sleeve on his left arm, checking the quality of his fresh vitalus. For a moment he feared that it may have soured right away, that the amazing regenerative powers of his miracle serum might have sapped all the primal life directly out of his tanks, or even worse – may have emptied them completely, but nothing he could have planned for prepared the pained physician for what came next.

Dmitriy dropped his datachron. It fell from his grip onto the ground beside the lab table, but by some miracle it continued to record his voice, albeit softer as though from a great distance and muffled with pain though it was.

The vitalus was muted and cloudy, filled with flesh-like strands of ligaments suffused in the glowing blue liquid. Some tried to cling tenaciously to the stark white bone of his forearm, fledgling muscles searching for a connection. Further spider-strands clung to the polymer surface of his tanks and knitted themselves together like gathering hoarfrost, growing around the edges; becoming tangible. It seemed like skin.

Doctor Konstantinov emitted a startled cry, though through the filter of his datachron it wasn’t certain if it was in horror or merely surprise. He sat up and tried to swing his legs around the edge of the bench to stand, but the mordesh soon found his muscles had greatly exaggerated their strength in the throes of his serum and he buckled at the knees. His legs were water-

-water-

His legs weren’t there. Well, they were, but he couldn’t feel them anymore. Such a doctor he was! All his plans, his precautions, and he still ended up belly-down on the floor as painful tingles flowed up and down his nervous system in waves.

“It works. I think. It works…” He announced, but this time his laugh was extended by a gurgle of pain. Abruptly he tasted blood.

Tasted.

Blood.

His eyes went wide. He couldn’t- he hadn’t tasted anything for real since… since…

The true pain hit him then. The real pain. Everything before the taste of blood with hints of metal had been mere minor bruises compared to the utter torrent of agony that wracked his broad and shaking frame. The datachron recorded his howls as the voice box connected to his prosthesis extended itself beyond its programmed limits but it could not capture the way he shook and bucked in agony, how as the machine struggled to translate his sounds, it could not record his convulsions or the way his fingers contorted, legs locked up – the tears that flowed and mixed with the blood, the vitalus; the spittle.

His elbow connected with the datachron and cut the program at the same time it cracked the screen. Dmitriy’s fingers gouged at his face and clawed at the screws, lacerating his cheeks. How did the hinges work again? It had seemed so easy to remember a million years ago before the waters, the oceans… before blood had stained his nails slippery and turned the molehill into a mountain.

Something that had resisted finally gave. He pulled, felt the tubes slide from his nose and metal come away, coughing over the removal of something deep and vital in his throat.

“Hold still, lapochka.” Doctor Konstantinov chuckled as he attempted to hold the squirming pink squirg against the cutting board, slipping a large needle deep into the rubbery flesh of its under-mantle. Its large eyes bulged out at him in either confusion or discomfort. Mostly confusion, he reckoned, injecting the mixed concoction he had cooked up into one of the tentacles before it could wriggle free. Within mere moments the limb that had flailed along with its brethren went limp and placid.

“That wasn’t so bad, was it Yaromir?” He added, tapping at the tentacle with a fountain pen lifted from his pocket. It was merely a cocktail of anesthetic and water, mixed with a trace amount of aurin herbal sleeping agent for his cephalopodic companion. Yaromir blinked at him unsteadily in response, one eye after the other.

“This is merely confirmation research, I must ascertain whether field reports are valid before I continue.” Dmitriy explained to the creature, laying down the syringe and picking up another tool instead. “Should this work, there will be nothing to fear. If not… er… well, you will receive a decidedly more delicious dinner of grey matter in compensation, but my hopes are high. Hold still.”

He waited a moment more for the deadening shot to circulate a little more through his fishy friend and once he felt satisfied enough time had elapsed he took the surgical mordesh cleaver and sliced the numb tentacle clean away from the body of its host. It came apart quite easily for the knife was sharp and the doctor was quite good at cutting, yet the young squirg squishling hardly reacted at all. Good.

Dmitriy took the tentacle and plopped it into a formaldehyde-filled jar before he continued. Perhaps it would fascinate a fledgling medic some time along the line, but that was not his focus for the day. “Apologies, my arguably less able assistant.” He cooed through his synthetic voice box, past jaws made of metal and tough polymer hinges as he picked up the creature and carried it back to its tank.

Yaromir attempted to cling to his arm with its remaining tentacles before he pried it free and released it back into familiar waters again. Soon he would bring it a meal of scrambled roan brains and protein paste. Shortly afterwards, he hoped, the results would present themselves and he could continue developing his project.

Until then, Doctor Konstantinov worked a little more on perfecting his own version of miracle serum.

Eighty years had elapsed since his race had fallen to ruin, yet he could remember the Fall well. It lay crystallized within his mind, razor-tipped and sharper than any memory of a birthday, a celebration, or untimely death. Sometimes he could still feel his throat hoarse and raw from shouting and the sickly sticky sensation of clotted blood on his knuckles, the torch in his hand…

The roughness of the rope as he had tightened it about Doctor Lazarin’s neck.

And then their bodies had begun to fall apart. The contagion kept them that way, wore away at them until he fancied one day they’d all be skeletons wandering about suffused in neon liquids. Doctor Konstantinov wasn’t entirely sure he could purge the contagion from an entire race in one fell swoop. He was not that patron saint of hubris. He was not a genius.

He merely had an idea.

When he returned to check on Yaromir some two hours later with a soft tube of dinner for him (laughably more palatable than his own liquid-based diet, he thought wryly) he chuckled in delight. “A prionic package for my pinkish protégé!” He announced, then tilted and twisted the hungry creature within the tank with a thin baton as it attacked its prey.

He could not find the stump he had made some time earlier. Each squirgling tentacle was accounted for, even the new, slightly translucent one a shade lighter than its companions. To grow back an entire limb within two hours was phenomenal, but to have it fully functional and joyously squeezing the paste out with just as much fervor as its brethren was no doubt more encouraging. Dmitriy had heard tales of hostile squirg suffering massive damage to live and breed again, a creature most difficult to expunge, and maybe… maybe…

Maybe there was something to that after all, buried deep down within a twisted Eldan’s fetishistic dreams of grandeur.

Dmitriy told no one of his research. Not his colleagues, not his fellow mordesh. Not even his lover. He kept to his outpost deep within Wilderrun and for some weeks he would often fail to return to his home in Whitevale with only datachron apologies and promises to make up for his absence. His sleep became irregular, his vitalus changing sometimes walking a razor-thin wire. Only his dedication to doctoring remained the same and for a while the only time he could be reliably reached was when his hands were bloodied and inside the chest cavity of an unconscious fellow exile.

He knew that he could not keep up this schedule forever, but he was getting close. He was getting so, so close.

It was around this time the Torine began to discover familiar, yet somewhat off creatures while on their hunts. Pumera with multiple tails and missing fur. Girrok with wounds that surely should have been fatal getting up and shambling away, unconcerned. Reports of a large dawngrazer stag laming a leg and then walking about just fine barely a day later. Was it the blessing of Vitara? They could not be sure.

And then, at long last, his research culminated with a final datachron call.

Doctor Dmitriy rubbed tiredly at an eye, momentarily forgetting that he was indeed in a video call. His usual green pallor had become pale, almost ashen in places. “I cannot come in today. You must manage without me.” He explained, pulling on a cleaner lab coat. It was cleaner only by virtue of having been worn a few times less than the other. Laundry had begun to escape him somewhat as well.

“This is unprecedented.” The other, artificially tinged voice on the other end of the call stated with a gaze most piercing and suspicious. Doctor Konstantinov’s strange habits had not gone unnoticed, least of all by him. “Have you a reason why?”

“I must be sick.” Dmitriy lied with all readiness, busying himself with tasks as he spoke, or anything that would give him a reason to remain out of the range of his datachron’s screen. He could lie convincingly through his voice and his words, but with his face, his eyes, the way he furrowed his brow a little when he told a fib? Never.

“So it seems. When was the last time you managed a restful repose? I can’t be certain, I haven’t seen you lately. Or at all.” The datachron replied, watching the doctor pace back and forth through the limited range of the screen. His jacket had vague blue stains on the sleeve. Vitalus, perhaps? Or something else.

“I am sorry, my sweetness. I just need more time. I would not dodge my duties unless I bordered upon a breathtaking breakthrough. You know this. I… I will make it up to you, I swear.” Dmitriy sighed, but he was singing a tune all too familiar to the other by now and the scowl on the other mordesh’s face proved it.

“No, don’t stop your enigmatic experiments on the exiles account. I’m sure I will be able to pick up where you so succinctly left your patients in limbo.”

“Artyom-”

Doctor Artyom Payne cut him off, his thick red eyebrows coming together like a gathering storm. “There is nothing left for you to say!” He barked. “You may vanish for days on end, you may leave your half of the bed as cold as you desire, and you are more than welcome to run your research separate and divorced from my own, but I will not condone the desertion of your duties!”

For a mordesh, no less than death would make it acceptable. Even Dr. Lazarin put in his work hours while fixated on the contagion’s cure. Perhaps Dmitriy was hoping for too much after coming so far. His own ‘miracle cure’ was chilling in a refrigerator just waiting to be used, but his senior and superior had a point. Those he had left resting in a clinic bed covered in tubes or waiting for their surgeries did not care for progress. They cared only for their own lives.

As should he.

Dmitriy cleared his throat behind the cold blockade of metal and pipes worming their way down his destroyed neck and windpipe. He sat down at his desk, ran a hand through the long vitalus cables that passed for his hair and looked down at his datachron propped up against a wide container of girrok bile. Glowing angry eyes pierced his, lip curled back over somewhat crooked yellowed teeth.

He smiled. He loved that scowl.

“You’re right. It would be monstrously irresponsible of me and unfair to you. I don’t know what I was thinking.”

The other mordesh eyed him suspiciously; silently. In truth, he hadn’t known what Dmitriy had been thinking ever since this ‘idea’ of his had surfaced.

Doctor Konstantinov reached over and hovered a finger over the call button. He shrugged slightly. “My Bambi. Forgive me. You can rage all you like later. Should I vanish inadvertently… well… you know where to find me.”

“OH YOU DMIT-”

He killed the call before the shout could become a roar of anger, half fancying that maybe he’d still be able to hear it from all the way in Whitevale to the jungles of Wilderrun. The doctor chuckled at that despite the pressure in his chest.

If he did not hit upon success in this next cumulative experiment then there was nothing for him to show in order to justify his activities. Test subjects now roamed Wilderrun that should rightly have succumbed to their injuries and only bore a few… niggling oddities in return. Upping the potency of the serum had increased those oddities, but Dmitriy was confident he had filtered out that randomness from the carefully-woven structure of squirg primal pattern and complementary elements.

Yaromir’s blood was going to change Nexus. He was sure of it.

The doctor rose from his desk and stole away to the chilled laboratory to fetch his cure. Ideally, after extensive animal experimentation the only logical step forward was to document the results in humanoids, but Dmitriy could not ask another mordesh to risk their festering flesh based on his own eureka moment. His… idea.

If Artyom would have known about it, perhaps he would have interfered. He may even have volunteered himself as patient one of the project. For that reason alone the other mordesh had kept quiet.

No interferences, no other subjects. Only himself.

He would pass through the glass ceiling no matter the odds.

Dmitriy removed from a biohazard container a single syringe filled to the brim with a viscous, light blue liquid. He’d mixed it with his own brand of vitalus and wound the searching strands of squirg patterning alongside a sample of his own. They’d fit together deceptively well, all things considered. Better than pumera or girrok or dawngrazer, that was.

He had fasted and recently refilled his vitalus. Dmitriy rolled up his sleeve and fastened a tourniquet to his left arm, clamping the end between the hinges of his artificial jaw to hold it tight. Good god Kemos, perhaps he would not need it soon anymore. Perhaps, for him, the world would change.

The writing on the needle spelt REGEN. No reason why just yet, Dmitriy had just thought the acronym sounded apt enough. He would figure out the wording behind it later.

He sucked in a deep breath and let it fill his lungs as he felt out a familiar vein, injecting himself with the experimental substance before he could change his mind. He felt the coldness of the additional vitalus carrying his weeks of endless, sleepless work through his system before the chill dissipated, and he knew now that he would not be able to take it back.

Dmitriy sat down, waiting for a surprise that did not come. At least not yet. Several very long moments passed before he opened his jaws a little and allowed the tourniquet to pop free.

It would take time. Of course, all good things took time. It was just… relieving to know he had not immediately expired.