ASAIMC/7/12
He'd called it Purchasable Emotional Liberation. The man was a moron, who sold his gimmick to the vulnerable without even sensing his own exploitation. Emerse wasn't sure the man had ever sat down to think on action.
Emerse was his name. Not Lenglen Oxx, like Muaven had said. She had named him that, on the authority of his ill mind, and stolen from him his prize. Now, alone and trapped within this near infantile form, his sat atop the Chushigenshai, the spine of the Maza Ichana, in a coat he'd stolen from someone taller, shorts not very short, and wearing a cap to hide what Seig had done to his hair. Seig.
Sieg.
He hated three names. Lenglen Oxx, and then Mauven Elslip.
Mauven more.
But there was a new entry, which he somehow managed to almost resent more.
Seig had employed him because Emerse had asked, without qualification or justification, and he had said yes, because he was incomprehensibly stupid and a rambling, loathsome fraud who had started his business with no plan of action. He had once said, with his feet up and a smirk on his imbecilic face, that he was merely pursuing a new age of emotional support and helping those in need, when they had nobody else to turn to. Emerse knew this wasn't true, because he wasn't sure Seig was capable of experiencing anything close to a human emotion, and definitely nothing as complex as loneliness.
Emerse pulled loose his hat and ran a hand through the ruin Seig had constructed, matted and thick with imperfect cuts, and stood, taking his feet from the edge of the scraper and standing over the city, the high winds getting colder. Evening here was beautiful, with the lights firing up and following the fishing villages and vast cities down the Stria. He supposed he could have been abandoned on an uglier world. Yet, he decided, not with an uglier man.
He retraced his steps down back through the building, passing people preparing for evening business as they busied themselves with carrying equipment or food up and down the poorly lit construct, abandoning the main stairwell to pass through an adjoining corridor, to enter a new building, one much smaller and even worse illuminated, making for the entrance to his employers office and pausing at the door, to once more seriously and genuinely consider murdering him.
He exhaled a breath fit for the dying and entered into a dim space, bright only by a large screen which portrayed some animals dying, before which sat a conglomerate of silhouettes, weeping quietly, led by the false preacher who stood alongside the video, crying with them.
Seig looked up to the sound of the door, the only one facing that way, and offered a wink and thumbs up which Emerse ignored, already taking the tissues on the small stand and holding them ready.
He could crush him.
It wasn't the same routine all the time. A selection of three videos, often different, but animals always died in each of them. Not explicitly, but they still perished in heart breaking ways. That was the point, Emerse presumed. You sit there and cry with Seig, who walks over and consoles you in turn. Wipes your tears. Tells you it'll all be fine. Emerse would supply the tissues, thank everyone for coming at the end. Alongside everything else that needs to happen for a business to succeed.
They were all women; Emerse had never seen a man there, and while the guy didn't act weirdly, the fact that he was making money off of this disgusted even Emerse. He had expected the job to be a tolerance of mockery, but few had come with the intention of exploiting the exploiter, to instead take their seats a ball in lost anguish, compelled by reasons the boy didn't need to know, to pay for sadness.
Elslip had left him with consciousness but not freedom, liberating the mind from its cage but keeping it still within the prison, still wired with a complex anatomy of cabling which threaded itself over his eyes and up to his skull. He could remember now, though. Recount everything to this day. It had swelled within his skull as she'd unplugged and disconnected the dimming machine and left him there, alone on the pad, staring with wide eyes as she flew with her proud crew toward their deaths, and abandoned the helpless child she so hated on a foreign world. The look she'd given him as she'd turned, and the silence in her steps.
If only he'd been quicker. Ignored the euphoria of liberation and leapt on her. Still, he may not have won.
Like so many others, he too had desired Kamakara, and fulfil a true purpose few would dare dream of. Unlike them though, he wanted more than a mere title; a thing to lean on and boast of among a hall of deities.
Unlike them, but like that evil woman, he wished to claim Chikumi Kamakara for himself, and seek the eye of the grand Anubis to soar above the fellow competition, and claim his true title among those with whom he would find blood. Stand with them either as equals or a superior, with a power to give and take what they held so deer.
And atop a broken world he faced her, a beast upon a vast and sprawling plane, caught under the hue of an unpigmented sun, bright against the dark sky, the pale light rolling over the chalky stone to cast shade on their footprints which traced over colourless mountains and sparse yet vivid bloom the shade of currents, and lead to the valley in which they dualled, barren and free. A white desert, punctuated by rising stalagmites on which the occasional, garnet blossom hung. A good place to fight.
A good place to die.
He would become Kamakara or die, and yet she managed to find another option. One too terrible to consider. A third destiny. One he despised.
He may hate three names, but there was one that would always tower over the rest. He could say it and think it and curse it, but if Emerse ever saw her again, he'd make Seig the new number one. He did not consider it a goal, or a plan. It was now objective in the principles of his thought.
Someone hiccupped and he was back in the room, watching as the moron crouched next to an older lady and wiped her cheek of torment with the cuff of his shirt, and offered a weak, wounded smile of sympathy which he spent hours practicing, every day, before either a mirror, an audience of weeping women or Emerse. Standing there in the shadows, expressionless with a perpetual squint of accusation, illuminated by the lights of the video which portrayed something cute falling from something high, he sniffed and blinked, his body in this office but his mind among the stars, back on that fabled day when Mauven faced him, both in their primes, both glorious as a leader of pronounced reverence, hailed by whole civilisations as the mother of a new age of evolution, who turned to a devil challenging her for her mantle. A single figure she'd been tracing for weeks. Stalking over the wastelands, in search for her prey, only to sense a presence and turn, under the brilliant white lights which moved over a shaded ether, dark against light, bright and brilliant, to face the demon who she called neither Lenglen nor Emerse. But her prize. Her reward. Yet another trophy to add to her mantle, and another name to flaunt to her horde.
Seig ambled over and shattered his facade with a grin, standing alongside the boy who didn't bother to turn, holding the tissues with both hands and staring straight ahead, blank and expressionless. The video meant that the whole back wall was illuminated but nobody was looking that way, all sights instead directed toward the show, which blasted in low quality tape onto a scarred and poorly plastered wall. Emerse couldn't see the appeal in this activity, which was partially why he'd sought Seig out, but he didn't much mind the people, who were respectful and mostly hailed from the upper levels of the city. Citizens who spent their days away in an office, struggling to keep up with the logistics of an always expanding city, with a constant flow of information just under their feet. He could appreciate the cause. But the solution-
"Busy turnout." Seig said, whispering too loud and attracting a twitch from the nearest participant. He fell quiet for a moment, before leaning in toward Emerse, who did not react. "Could be because of Yibirukushi, but we've had more people in ever since. Makes them feel lonelier, I guess." The boy grunted, and the man shrugged.
The presentation advanced and portrayed a sweet bird fated, Emerse knew, to some end horrifying, so he turned away and looked to the glass casement which overlooked the Stria, late and left with but the whispers of day, the marsh slipping down past the horizon, the boundless nothingness dappled with the remnants of forgotten computer systems and telecoms spires, rusted and slipping below the shallow pools. He wasn't sure what else occupied the planet; whether it was a complete habitat or speckled with an array of regions and landscapes, but the immense amounts of moisture here implied a dryer, warmer opposition. A vegetation desert, draining what little liquids were left below a harsh, overhead sun. The home of a peripatetic people, divided from the modernised civilisation they shared. He only thought this because he hadn't really seen a sun save for the light it spent trying to break through the clouds. Maybe there was on around the other side. Maybe there wasn't.
"A lot of people are leaving, too, you know." Seig continued, arms crossed. Emerse raised a brow. "Because of this whole war." Emerse turned a margin, but hid it well with a flick of his head.
"You mean the Fools? They're nowhere near here." He spoke in hushed tones, barley shifting toward the man who shook his head, rubbing an eye of falsified sorrow.
"Forget them, kid. Old news. We've got Museishingen support here anyway; no way they're getting close. No, I'm talking about the new war." Childish admiration spluttered from his mouth, and Emerse had to hold himself as the man continued. "People are just up and leaving, either to flee or fight. It's crazy, actually. Like, it shows our nature, right? A factionless, classless, motiveless war. Either uncontrollable fear, as you run from something you don't even know or understand, or inconsolable passion, as you abandon your life for a piece of the action. Me myself, I don't see what's got people so interested, but then I've never been a man of particular violence-."
Emerse reached up and formed his hand into a straight edge, spinning and carving his manus through Seig's head, dividing it from the back of the skull through to the upper lip.
The boy watched in silence as the body fell back against the near wall and slumped, the noise drowned by the film as the bird was crushed, what was red turned grey by distorted film-light to trace the halved head in a trail, down the leaning surface.
Emerse placed his tissues on the small table and bowed to the oblivious audience, who's backs faced the murder, heedless as they observed and wept and seemed to care little that their host didn't appear, leaving the boy to clean his paw against the hem of his coat and disappear without attention, slipping from the room and sliding the exit closed without sound. He found he didn't really get cold, in this foreign form he had been forced to occupy, and the effort he had to put behind one cut would be embarrassing if anyone other than he knew of it. Still, it was nimble, and could take a beating, he presumed, as he retraced his steps back to the stairwell and started down, pocketing his still stained hands in the frontal pouch of his overcoat after pulling his cap lower, striding between the loose columns of passing figures who slipped in and out of the harsh, early night lights, too busy to pay a second to the child who weaved between them, flowing between the stones with a stooped frame to evade attention.
He stepped out into a beaming street, an offshoot of the main line which was draped with the many colours of countless bars and restaurants, each warring to gain a post from which they could suspend their radiant symbols and words, a crowd amassing before each stand and stall to allow a shorted adventurer to pass undetected and untroubled under the neon daylight of a Strian evening. Characters of so many unspoken fables passed him, drifting without intent and racing with a following stare, marks and shades and modifications and clothes all differing from each individual as they moved alongside a shadow who avoided the conversational and kept to the quiet, who advanced with purpose, following the strongest until he broke from the flock and came upon the central ribbon of road which traced the mighty automaton, watching its city as the unending, dead king, insensible of the outcast thing that walked, without a true destination or goal from the twelfth murder he'd performed in his stay here, with the only thing he truly envisioned being each and every victim replaced by a girl a little shorter than him, with thick blonde curls and a constant, confidently wide grin plastered across her features.
To be plastered as Seig's brain was.