#regeration

“David Troughton is The Doctor” 

The corpse of a patchwork thing sits lifelessly in the graveyard, another victim slumps nearby. It spasms suddenly, twitching madly as a faint glow creeps across its left arm. The corpse falls into the mud with a squelch, the glow burning with increasing intensity. Ancient, deliberately crude stitches burn away in an instant separating the hand from its host.  It rolls to the side, revealing a distinctive ouroboros tattooed across the wrist.

The pattern begins to move, the snake consuming its own tail endlessly. The creature begins to move, pattern doubling in response. From one angle it resembles a figure of eight, from another, infinity. The snake is still trapped in its loop, however, the trail it follows becomes increasingly complex, shrinking and spreading across the surface of the hand as the fire burns around it.

The atrophied stump bursts, thin, watery blood soaking into the ground as fresh veins emerge from within, methodically snaking their way across the ground. Muscles, fat and bone emerge soon after, warping their way through nets of veins. Slowly but surely, the creature takes shape; Rudimentary organs emerging in response to higher, unseen processes. A brain forms, seconds later it is flooded with memories, the creature cannot place them.

It stands, translucent skin tearing with the effort. It regards the patchwork corpse with unblinking eyes and takes another laborious step forward. Its left-hand remains unchanged, looking as alien as it did on the patchwork creature. It is the only part of the creature that suggests any sort of life, any sort of history. Its task done, the ouroboros has reverted to its original form.

The creature stumbles forward, emerging into the graveyards exterior as one of its lungs collapse. It is surrounded by the hollowed out remains of the place’s other victims. It shrieks, mouth tearing open to reveal toothless gums. Another step forward sees its organs begin to fail, one more and its twin hearts rupture. It smashes forward landing in a shallow pool of water. The short, painful life of the ninth Corsair comes to an end.

For a while, the body is still, gently floating in the brown water with a peace it never knew in life. Soon it begins to glow, the previous form sacrificing itself to ensure there was enough for the process to begin naturally. It judders and shifts, the flames burning with an array of colours as it reshapes itself. The hand burns away, replaced by a younger alternative that no longer possesses the ouroboros, the skin is dark and healthy.

The man remains floating for a few seconds, the confusion caused by the process eclipsing any awareness that he is drowning. Things click into place and he forces himself upright, standing ankle-deep in the pool. He remembers the pain he was in only seconds ago, but the sensation itself is little more than a distant afterthought. He takes a deep breath, smiles broadly and lets out a bellowing laugh. He can hardly believe it worked. A quick glance confirms the tattoo has vanished and he begins to search his body for it. He finds it settled across a smooth, featureless stomach, a new hue of red tinting the snake’s scales. He spares a brief thought for whatever poor fool donated the energy to kick-start the process and emerges from the pool.

The place feels empty now, absent of the hostile intelligence that had once claimed his life. The Corsair wonders if it was ever aware of the trick he had hidden under his sleeve, but ultimately decides he doesn’t care. The hurdle that was his untimely death now cleared, he begins to process his next steps.

The situation is bleak -marooned in a lifeless bubble universe with no immediate means of escape- but hardly unsalvageable. His mind is already abuzz with potential escape plans; Learning the formulas for doors, praying for help from the higher forces who occasionally made use of his skills, assembling a life raft from the dead timeships, or perhaps even using them to build a crude labyrinth to breach the underside of the universe proper.

In comparison to the void’s more notable fauna, intercreational parasites are near infinitesimal to the point that they might as well be ignored, indeed, the few that have -through unknown means- entered the spiral politic at large have been remarkably benign as parasitic species go. That is not to say the behaviour of the parasites is un-alarming, certainly the ease with which they integrate themselves into the lives of hosts can be unsettling, engaging in unparalleled memory alteration that cements the parasite as an integral part of an individual/group’s social make-up. However, as Father Castigate of Faction Paradox remarked during his ill-fated attempt at harnessing the parasites, the worst thing the parasite could do was “giving gaggles of sad, lonely fuckers another sad, lonely fucker to mooch around with.”

Tellingly, the parasites are not body-snatchers. They do not outright replace individuals as part of some insidious invasion plan, instead they insert themselves into their lives, exponentially spreading through the initial host’s social circle into wider society until it is present within the culture on near memic level. For the parasite, this is a simple biological function, observation gives it form and energy, and what few studies exist suggest no real negative impact on host bodies. Some suggesting that the parasite is heavily dependent on host’s sense of self.  Indeed, it has been theorized that were a parasite to infect a Homeworlder -a group with a unique relationship with the self- it could insert itself into the link of distinct personalities that make up any given House member, creating a near-endless source of nourishment simply because the Homeworlder believes that the parasite is previous form. 

It should however be noted that, given the numerous precautions taken by the Great Houses, the chances of such an infection happening are minuscule. 

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