Die. Respawn. Repeat.

Chapter 91: Book 2: Laboratory

I'm pretty sure Whisper is planning to kill us.

Mostly because she's leading us directly to Guard in that secret laboratory of hers. As far as I can tell, his body hasn't moved. I think she tried to move him, judging by the traces of unusual. Interface-tainted Firmament around him. I also think she failed.

Which is concerning in its own right, but I'm really more worried about the fact that she's bringing us to her secret laboratory. Am I supposed to believe she's going to let us leave after this?

Her steps are stilted and awkward, hurried. She's itching to use a skill I can sense the Firmament within her churning in response to both her emotional state and to her aborted attempts at activating a skill. Hueshift detects traces of red and yellow within her Firmament, some combination of anger and fear and adrenaline, and once again I'm left to wonder exactly what He-Who-Guards means to her.

There's a set of stairs hidden behind her throne, built with an angled frame so that it's impossible to see without walking right up to the throne and looking around it. There's nothing keeping it secure otherwise no barriers, no hidden traps. Not as far as I can tell, anyway. The Firmament here is still and silent.

In fact, not even the threads of the Whisper skill are present here. I frown slightly, looking at She-Who-Whispers and at the absence of Firmament around her. Does this mean she deafens herself every time she comes in here? That means she has periods of time when she can't listen in on everyone. I could use that, if I could figure out a schedule for when she usually visits this lab.

The stairs lead up to a crystalline door embedded into the walls of her castle. I watch as she reaches out, bringing a complicated knot of Firmament to a fingertip and tracing it along the edges of the door. From what I can tell, it's a really complicated Firmament lock of some kind her Firmament unravels and interlocks with an imbuement on the edges of the door, allowing her to just... peel it back. Like she's unzipping a piece of the wall from itself.

I'm not going to lie, it's fascinating to watch.

Ahkelios leans forward like he's paying special attention to the zipper-lock, and I focus my gaze past Whisper and into the laboratory Guard is being kept in. Where my Firmament sense wasn't able to capture much detail while I was downstairs, I'm now able to simply see for myself. This room is a laboratory, but it also looks like the inside of a hospital. Half of this equipment is medical equipment.

I frown. There's no sign of anyone that needs medical attention here. Guard's body is pure machinery and none of it is hooked up to him.

"This is the problem I described," Whisper says, her voice terse. She gestures to Guard, who is lying face-up on a crystalline table; I notice with some alarm that pieces of the table appear to have grown into him. Or maybe he's growing into the table. It's hard to tell. Metal joins with crystal in a seamless transition that doesn't even look like it should be physically possible.

I'm pretty sure Whisper didn't describe anything like this, but I'm not about to say that out loud.

"There's nothing wrong with him physically," Miktik says. I glance at her in disbelief, and she quickly clarifies. "The... corruption that you're seeing is surface-level. It doesn't meld with any of his critical systems."

"Do not concern yourselves with the way he melds with the crystal." Whisper's tone is terse. "I want to know why he isn't able to move or speak. Can you help or not?"

"I might be able to," I say cautiously. I step forward. Whisper doesn't stop me, although she does narrow her eyes at me as I pass her by. The resolution of my Firmament sense isn't very good from all the way downstairs, but now that I'm right next to him...

Geez. His Firmament is a mess. How did it get this way? Tarin and I didn't get nearly this messed up, and Miktik's completely fine. What's different about Guard?

"His Firmament unstable," Tarin says, folding his wings across his chest. I glance at him he's echoing the words he said to me when we first met. "That why he not wake up. Firmament problem."

"So I surmised," Whisper says. Her voice is cold. "And the solution?"

"It not easy to fix unstable Firmament." Tarin flicks a wing at me as if to tell me to hurry up and examine Guard, and I do so, sweeping my Firmament sense across his body. Up close, it's easy to tell what's wrong. There's a whole chunk of layer ripped loose from his Firmament, leaving the deeper layers raw and exposed.

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I remember what I noticed back when we first met the purple Firmament that swirled in his core, and the glimpses of multicolored light flickering through every so often. Now the latter is all that's left. The only traces of purple are lingering fragments and broken threads.

The strength of his Firmament is also noticeably weaker. It pulses and fades in and out, almost like...

"Is he dying?" I say out loud. More to myself than anything but I flinch as Whisper's Firmament suddenly flares, strong enough to visibly manifest as a red-tinged warp in the air hovering above her skin.

"No." Her voice is hard as steel. For a moment, I worry that she's going to reach out and try to strangle me, but she holds herself back. She stares at me, her gaze sharp. "Explain why you think he is."

Her tone leaves no room for argument, though I notice she doesn't use her Whisper on me. "His Firmament is weak," I say. "It keeps flickering. Fading. I know Tarin said it was unstable, but it's more than just unstable, it's..."

It's hard to describe exactly what happens with Whisper as I say this. Silverwisps don't show their emotions visibly. The silver-gray smoke they're made of doesn't do much to help them convey what they're feeling; it's the reason they wear those little collars with displays on them. It allows them to convey emotional context.

Whisper doesn't use the standard-issue collar. She uses a pendant decorated like a pearl necklace, with a tiny, teardrop-shaped display hanging from the bottom. The display doesn't change.

And yet I feel the raw intensity of her emotional response to this. From the way both Tarin and Miktik flinch, I'm guessing they feel it too. Grief, rage and fear strangle each other all at once, an outpouring of emotion so strong Miktik's legs fail her. Tarin sways on his feet, and for the first time, I feel the Iron Mind skill I bought kick in, shielding me from the strength of it.

I sway on my feet anyway, mimicking Tarin's reaction. No need for Whisper to know the tricks I have up my sleeve.

Then just like that it's over. The intense wave of emotional Firmament fades into nothing, and on the surface, Whisper is once more the picture of perfect calm. "I see," is all she says. She seems to consider saying something more, but then she stops.

Premonition activates, screaming danger. A split second later, I feel a surge of Firmament, the hairs on my skin standing up in response to the sheer energy. More by instinct than anything else, I release Compounded Mind, letting the Firmament I've packed into the skill accelerate my perception tenfold. I haven't had a lot of time to charge it, but fortunately Whisper doesn't seem to be going for speed. Just overwhelming power.

A pulse of deadly Firmament radiates out from her. She's already turning to Guard as she does this. I can see her glancing toward her notes, and I put the pieces together.

She's realized what's happening to Guard, and she's decided she doesn't need us anymore.

Interesting.

He-Who-Guards was dying.

That was the only thing She-Who-Whispers understood from what the strange creature told her. She had never seen his like before, and if she was in a better state of mind, she might have been more suspicious of him. But none of that mattered to her he had confirmed her worst fears.

Somehow, the izkran was back, or at the very least her fix had somehow failed. He-Who-Guards was now in the state he had been in years ago, when the disease had ravaged his Firmament base and stripped it down to almost nothing. If it hadn't been for the Trials, she wouldn't have been able to save him at all. Even with all the power she gained from it, the best she could do was give him a half-life.

She glanced at her notes. At everything she'd done to try to save him.

Miktik's AI core helped. The inventor didn't realize what she'd made. It wasn't just an AI core; it functioned as a kind of cognitive prosthetic, propping up everything that He-Who-Guards had lost.

(A small part of her whispers that even with all that, He-Who-Guards is not himself. That the Firmament she used to patch him up is controlling him so that he cannot protest. A small part of her knows he would disapprove. But she's long since learned to silence those parts of herself.)

She had the information she needed now. If all that was happening was that her stabilizing FIrmament had been ripped off of him, then all she had to do was reapply it. But she couldn't have anyone that had seen Guard like this just roaming around in the streets.

Her options were to kill them or to use Whisper in the Winds to force them into silence.

Miktik she knew she could intimidate into silence but these two others, Miktik's so-called 'helpers'... there was something up with them. The crow was too confident, and the other creature clearly had an uncanny talent for detecting Firmament. This wasn't something she'd heard that the 'humans' as the Integrators called them could do, but...

Hm.

The idea of using her credits on intuition alone stung, but she'd already used some to check and hadn't caught any messages left by her presumed past self. If she was right, and this creature was the Trialgoer, this was her chance to find out from the very beginning of one of the Trial's loops.

[ To updt: Miktik helper tg?]

The message had to be short. The longer the message, the more credits it would cost her. The idea was simple; she would kill this creature. If time continued normally, then it was not the Trialgoer, and she would update her log with a 'no'. If she didn't update the log at all, then she would know that the 'Miktik helper' was the Trialgoer. Not the most descriptive message, but it would have to do.

And as for how she would kill them... a Focused Blast would do. Simple and effective. The creature didn't have a chance of resisting her level of Firmament if it did, it wouldn't have been so affected by her temporary loss of control.

She charged up her skill and fired.