Esme leaves for a time and you're left sitting in silence with Bruce and Mary. Bruce returns to his work, scratching and cutting and carefully laying on layers of thin plastic and holographic film. Mary slips away into the kitchen and seems to be busying herself with making food. You sit on the bed for a bit before getting up and picking up the undead rat. It sits in your hand like a firm beanbag, occasionally squirming but mostly just looking at you as best it can with the flopping head. You try to connect to it like you do to the others and it isn't the same. The thing is its own creature, your mind only pervades it slightly. You're a choke chain on it, able to drag it around by force but not command it precisely. You set it back down and practice commanding it, sending it running back and forth. It follows obediently but not quite perfectly. Its almost like ordering a well behaved dog.
Esme returns after a bit, carrying a chicken. She's got its legs held with one hand, its body resting on her forearm and its head sort of stuffed into her elbow or armpit. It seems an odd way to hold it but the chicken isn't struggling so you suppose she knows what she is doing. She closes the door behind her and walks into the room, stopping in front of you and looking at the rat marching back and forth for a moment.
"So, how do we wanna do this?" She asks.
You explain your desire to show it something first to see if you can get that specific memory from it. You look around a bit for something specific and decide on some sort of stamp making device Bruce has on his desk. You pick it up and set it down on the ground before grabbing the bird from Esme and essentially forcing it to look at the stamp maker. You hold it there for about 5 minutes before shifting your grip to the bird's neck and jerking it in a way that you somehow know will break it. The action feels familiar somehow; as though you have done it before. Mary in the kitchen seems to be conspicuously and intentionally ignoring whats going on while Esme is watching you a lot more than the bird.
You can see the memories leaking from the thing in a very odd way. It looks almost like fragments of light flowing up on the steam billowing out of the spout of a teapot. Its a miniature geyser of that flows slowly upwards and disperses into the air. You put your hand over that stream and bring it down to the source, the creature's head. You feel them coming into you like pinpricks across your palm and shooting electric sensations that run up your arm and tingle across your scalp. The memories are not what you imagined. You imagined a video or series of images or maybe abstract knowledge but this is far more. All your senses are filled with the memories; you see, hear, smell, feel and even taste everything this creature did. You feel its inhuman body, at once natural but also twisted and hunched and stretched, coated in feathers, face constrained behind a beak. You are it and you are you at the same time and the overlap is disorienting to say the least. Even its thoughts, its feelings, its understanding of the world bleeds into you and you feel the bizarre non-thoughts of an animal. Not conscious like you, not considering, not thinking but aware and focused, a ticking mechanism of a mind.
You see it though, that stamp maker, impressed upon the creature's mind. You almost don't find it among the untold thousands of hours of eating, sleeping, and just standing. Such a crushing tide of memory that almost blurs everything into uselessness.
You pull your hand back. You don't feel as tired as before.
Author
Topic: The Left-Hand Path (Read 118943 times)