“Not a good idea, Beast,” Sky said. Carol wiggled loose and threw herself at Beast, her favorite daggers in her hands.
Beast just shrugged and batted Carol against a wall. In the process, he sent her daggers flying, well out of reach. He raised up her limp form and crushed her to the ground. Sky’s jaw dropped at the swiftness of Carol’s defeat, and he readied an attack, to disable Beast. Lori grabbed his arms, and pulled him back. “No,” she said. “Don’t interfere.”
Carol lay on the cold rock, dishrag limp. Beast put one of his hind feet on Carol. She tried to wiggle free, and Beast pressed down until Carol stopped moving. “Boss. Beast is boss,” he signed to Sky and Lori. “No need fight you. Beast is boss.”
The juice moved. Not a tag, but something else, something initiated by Beast. Just like in the old days. Just as impossible to stop.
Beast was boss. What little fight remained in Sky vanished, a candle flame blown out by a hurricane wind.
“I guess we’re going to stay here for a while,” Lori said. She shivered as she clung to Sky. “I can’t fight him. He got me first, and I don’t even know how…”
Sky did.
Beast was boss.
This was Beast. He could do nearly anything. The aurora behind him, which Sky sensed using his metasense, told the tale.
Beast was boss.
Bad bad bad. Sky’s old captivity nightmares awakened again, the ones he never allowed himself to remember. He had hoped that his years of training would allow him to fight off Beast’s hold.
He was wrong.
The only reason the Lost Tribe of Transforms were able to go back to civilization was that everyone save Focus had died or been dragged into withdrawal. Without that, they never would have been able to beat Beast’s hold.
Carol Hancock (1/23/73 – 1/25/73)
I lay in my infinite bed, leaning up against a giant dildo. The Dreaming. I couldn’t move. Bedbugs rubbed up against me, like juice overloaded woman Transforms rubbing up against their Focus. A vague memory of something like a fight that hadn’t gone well chased through my mind.
No. Not a fight. Beast subdued me.
Okay, I could move my hands and arms. Nothing else. No one to sign to, though. I found that disturbing. I had to be close to Lori, didn’t I?
She wasn’t anywhere near.
Armenigar had warned me. Don’t fight Beast in an enclosed area. Don’t try and out-muscle him or out-quick him. Use your speed, rush in and rush out. He is quick, but not overly fleet of foot, so you’re faster. The back is more vulnerable than the front, and he can’t grab you if you get him from the back. She sparred with me and showed me all of Beast’s tricks.
The knowledge didn’t help a bit. He initiated the fight while I stood in front of him. I did better when I fought Keaton in her kitchen the first day of my apprenticeship. He didn’t even use any of the tricks Armenigar showed me.
I found the Madonna standing in front of me. For a moment, I just basked in her heavenly motherly glow. Then I started to sign.
“I blew it. Beast took me, beat me, subdued me. He did something with the juice and made me his.”
The Madonna smiled at me, reached down and plucked a butterfly from my head and held it gently in her arms. I hadn’t known my version of the Dreaming grew such things.
“Think nothing of it,” the Madonna signed back, after a few moments. “The fight was inevitable, and necessary. Your internal beast is gone, now.”
True. Peace surrounded me, the sick peace of defeat. “It was as if I had no face, no command presence at all.”
“How many Nobles did you have tagged? Real tags.”
I sighed, for what it was worth in the Dreaming, which wasn’t much. “Not a one. Guess in his eyes, I was nothing.”
The Madonna sat down beside me, her eyes tired and caring. “You’re an Arm, a fellow predator. Your simple presence triggered his need to humble you, and he did. The hold, what he did with the juice, is like an Arm tag, but something else. The Nobles need to learn how to do this juice maneuver if they are ever going to hold their own. You’re a part of his pack. The hold is strong. Consider me, though.”
Enigmatic. I didn’t understand her point. It made me wish I hadn’t learned to sign. The Madonna picked up one of the bedbugs rubbing up against me, examined it, then for some reason tossed it far away. “Why did he say he wanted peace? Not to fight?” I signed. “He’s supposed to be our Chimera leader. Chimera love to fight, don’t they?”
“That doesn’t sound like Beast to me. In the old days, he wanted to fight all the time. On the other hand, he’s much older now, and his age and maturity must make a difference,” the Madonna signed. “However, with your internal beast humbled, the danger we faced from you is over. Return or not, the problem you presented us is gone. From now on, your choices are your own, and you shall prosper by your own skills and talents. Good luck, as always. Don’t despair, as the contest against Beast will be Lori and Sky’s fight. Oh, you should know that only Rumor and I possess the strength to penetrate Beast’s Dreaming defenses. You’re isolated, awake and asleep.”
Then she disappeared, before I could ask any of the other fifty questions. The butterfly she left, and it flew back to me and landed on my big toe.
I opened my eyes, to pain. Based on the Dreaming, I assumed paralysis from the waist down again. Nope. Not with pain like that. Just a few broken bones.
My head lay in Sky’s lap. Again. I ran through the Madonna’s conversation and decided I was about as screwed as it was possible to be. If this was to be Lori and Sky’s fight, then things were going to end up being all twisty and convoluted and make my brain hurt. “How bad off am I?” I asked Sky.
“Well,” Sky said. “I would love to have Hank here to examine you. I think the worst of it was a concussion, but the concussion symptoms went away hours ago.”
I didn’t want to know. I tried to sit up, and couldn’t. Overwhelming pain. “Broken bones?”
“Arms, ribs, left leg, perhaps a broken pelvis, and a broken left collarbone. Now that the bruises are healed, you’re back to your normally beautiful self.”
Sky was full of it, as usual. He traced lines on my face, and forehead, praising my beauty. I would have rather thrown up on him, but right now, I would take all the support I could get. Beast’s subdual flattened my ego.
“Where’s Lori?”
“Beast dragged her away. He’s besotted with her. Lori’s not cooperating.”
Some things never change. “Good for her. Can’t he force her?”
Sky shrugged. “Guess not, at least so far. Did he force you with some juice trick, or…”
“Voluntary on my part,” I said. “I thought it would help win him over to our side. Besides, being that high on juice overcame my normal disgust about Chimera sex and he’s about as alluring as anyone I’ve ever encountered.
“Uh huh.” Beast was impressively handsome.
“At least Lori didn’t kill him for what he did to me.” I winced at my memories.
“She said he got her with some juice thing. He got me too, when I started to think about defending you. Sorry.”
We jabbered for another half hour, going over the same useless facts. For an entire half hour. Sky didn’t irritate me even once. I couldn’t get angry at Sky, I couldn’t even get angry at Beast. I hoped the lack of anger wasn’t permanent. I would end up doing the ‘yes ma’am’ routine to three-year-old bottom quartile Focuses.
Beast had gray hairs, unnatural for us Major Transforms. Gray hair meant high stature on any primate, humans included. How long before I got gray hairs? At a minimum, even with Zielinski’s predictions of shorter lifespans for Arms and Chimeras that he didn’t think I knew about, we would be into the Transform Apocalypse before I started to turn gray. Way too late to balance Beast’s stature with my own gray head.
A roar of anger from the next room over interrupted my useless jabbering with Sky. Sad anger, I decided, thinking about that roar for a few seconds.
A minute later, Lori came back, hollow eyed and woebegone. I feared the worst. She either killed Beast, or he had forced her. Considering she still moved, and her belly was still big as a house, the latter didn’t seem likely.
“Dearest?” Sky asked. Lori turned to him and glowered.
“Carol back?”
Sky nodded.
“Barely,” I said. My voice sounded bitter to my ears – even my control was off. “I’m not up for any fighting or moving, though.”
“Well, I’m not sure, but I think things may be looking up,” Lori said. She sat, across the chamber from us. “Or not, as the case may be. Beast and I came to a little agreement. He’s going to stop trying to force me.”
Her tone was chilling. “What’s the cost?” I asked.
“I’m not allowed to touch either of you. Literally. No touching.”
Oh, Lori, what’s that going to do to you, after you worked so hard to learn to let people touch you? She would turn into the ice maiden again, the frigid female professor.
“How does this solve anything?” Sky said, smelling oh so faintly of helpless male anger.
“You heard the howl? That was Beast coming to terms with the fact that we need to return him to his humanity. To get a piece of me, he’s going to need to reshape himself into a human form.”
“We?” Sky said. “Lori, dearest, I’m not much of a Crow Shaman. We thought it would take Occum and Shadow working together to bring Beast back.” Sky then went off into something French and profane, amid a ton of bells, whistles and bleeps from dross illusions.
“We,” Lori said, firmly. “Until we can talk to him, human to human, there’s no way Beast will be able to understand our needs, either as a group or as a civilization of Transforms. Until then, I’m no longer yours.”
I blinked. “Save for the tags. Unless you’re getting rid of those.”
Lori pasted a false smile on her face and raised her hands. “Don’t mention them,” she signed at us. “Beast can’t see them. Yet. If, or when, he figures out they exist, I’m sure he’ll want us to get rid of them.” Out loud, she said, “Anything for the Cause, you know.” I winced at her tone of voice. She literally prostituted herself for the Cause. From Inferno’s Focus to Beast’s Pack Mistress. A hell of a fall, but only one of her many sacrifices.
Me, I didn’t know of any sacrifice I could make to buy us success. Beast had already taken everything I had to give. The Madonna was right. I would be the comic relief, the grand joke, entertaining the audience as Lori and Sky did the real work.
“That still leaves the question of how we’re going to be guiding Beast to his human form,” Sky said.
“With all our skills,” Lori said. “Because if we mess this up, Beast is going to kill us and eat us. He promised.”
“I can’t do this!” Sky said. “Beast isn’t supposed to be acting this way. He’s…he’s…” Sky’s voice tailed off, and he balled his hands into fists. “I’m not a Crow Shaman! There’s no way I can bring him back. This’s hopeless.”
“You’re a Crow Elf, Sky,” Lori signed. “Elf. Not a Wizard or a Shaman, but an Elf. Good enough to be a Guru Elf. Together, we solved the household tuning problems no one else could solve. We can solve this one, too.”
“Impossible. Crazy. I’m not that good!” I steadied Sky’s emotions through the tag and gave him a dose of Arm aggression I currently couldn’t use. This was no time for him to surrender to depression and despair.
“We don’t have the time for a research project, Lori,” I said. In my mind, I saw Chicago fall to the Hunters. Cathy Elspeth tortured and her mind broken. The Focuses would devolve into a dozen pathetic catty factions. The Arms would vanish into the shadows under Sokolnik’s leadership, the way the Crows once did, living in culverts and eating from trashcans.
“I know. We don’t have a choice, though, Carol. We do the impossible, or…” Lori, still with that false grin on her face, made a throat cutting motion.
She was right. Whatever Beast did to me, I couldn’t conceive of fighting it. Or him. This was what the Patriarch Loess did to me in Kansas City when Keaton and I rescued Bass as a baby Arm…only done right. None of us would be going anywhere, and we existed entirely on Beast’s sufferance, at least for the moment.
About the only thing Sky, Lori and myself had going for us was the fact we had all been in this trap before, from the first Focuses and Keaton, and we had found our way out of the maze. Nothing like a little desperation to sharpen our minds.
Beast howled again, and I winced, feeling his pain. No, this wouldn’t be easy.
---
“Here is the truth,” Beast signed, after he put me down. I couldn’t walk, and I didn’t understand what in the hell he wanted from me, short or long term. We hadn’t gone far, perhaps five miles, into an area where the mountains turned into a high plateau four thousand feet above our heads. I remembered this from our maps, the Ram Plateau, a former centerpiece of a long abandoned Canadian National Park, back from before the days of the Monsters. Beast stopped us in front of the opening to a cave, one barely wide enough for him to squeeze through. The decidedly warmer air flowing from the cave meant the place housed one of the area’s hot springs. “Family, I guard this place.” Beast had already regained his grammar.
“You want us to go in there?” Sky said. He radiated young Crow terror all of a sudden.
“As I signed, here you will understand the truth.”
None of us could resist Beast’s demand, least of all me, as I remained broken-leg baggage. Beast picked me up, gently, and on three legs walked us into the cave. Sky and Lori followed, Sky complaining all the way, Lori quiet and concentrating on her metasense.
I didn’t understand Lori’s concentration until I entered the cave, or what was likely the entry-room of a large cave complex. To my eyes, the place remained dark. To my metasense, it glittered. The entry room was warmer and damper, but I smelled the warmer and damper sections beyond and below. They didn’t possess the metasense glow, though.
Only here.
A dozen old columns, once living cave formations but no longer, divided the large room, perhaps two hundred feet wide, six hundred feet long, and forty feet high, into sections. Every surface in the front room glowed in my metasense, intricate, complex and ever-changing patterns both mesmerizing and daunting.
Just the sort of fucked up place you should expect to find if some bastard drags you out on a goddamned quest. I hated mystical mumbo-jumbo even worse than I hated quests, and this appeared to be mystical mumbo-jumbo central.
“Wow,” Sky said.
Lori stayed quiet.
“This is the home of the aurora,” Beast signed. As he did, the aurora sprang up around us, emanating from the walls. Not a real aurora, but a dross illusion of one. This was like being inside something like my Monster amulet, or the Eskimo Spear. But this place was fucking huge! I took out my Monster amulet and it, too, echoed the aurora of the room. “This is where we all come from.” He led us to the side of the room, a collection of cut surfaces and carvings a mere sixty feet to the left of the entryway. One drew my attention, a roughly rectangular slab that some ancient Crow had incised with the same sort of gold, silver and copper ‘wires’ decorating the Eskimo Spear.
On the yard wide slab were about two dozen offerings. Spear points, arrowheads, scrapers, the marks of the warrior and hunter. The last one froze my aching body, as it was a Lee-Enfield rifle.
“Tell me this isn’t what I think it is,” I said, turning my head so I could see Lori, or at least the part of her not blocked by Beast’s shoulder.
“I can’t,” Lori said. “If what Patient Zero told me is at all correct, this is where he contracted Transform Sickness and became whatever he is. This is it, Carol. The heart of the Predecessors.”
The Lee-Enfield had been standard British issue from 1895 to 1957. At some point in that time interval, or later, our Patient Zero placed this rifle here. I couldn’t tell anything more than that, save that th
e rifle appeared to be undisturbed and new. As did the primitive weapons and tools, and I was sure they had been here for centuries.
“The Holy Man once left a worn pistol here,” Beast signed. “He replaced it while I guarded this place.”
“You met him?” Lori said. “Why didn’t you kill him?”
“He was Holy. Beyond my reach. He told me to stay here. Guard this holy place. So I have, and so I shall remain.” Beast paused. “And now, so shall you. You are a gift to me from the auroras.”
Bullshit. I took off my Monster amulet and tossed it on the slab, next to a spear point. I could practically see Beast’s wants and desires in the auroral illusions flowing across the walls. We were the Progenitors’ promised family reborn, Lori and I replacing the Madonna and Arm. “I am no gift,” I said. “I am…”
Beast did something to me to quiet my words. “No words. You are my wife. You all are my harem. My family. You will learn.”
With his free hand he grabbed the Monster amulet and gently placed it over my neck. I couldn’t stop him. “Wife, you will learn to please me.”
Well, fuck.
This time, I was going to change my fucking name to DeepDeepShit.
Chronicle VI
The Magic Corkboard
The Sixteen Varieties of Transforms
Transform ability affinities are best defined by four variables termed Juice Use, Juice Target, Mental Gestalt and Social Gestalt. Each of the four variables splits into two affinities, which appear to be an inverse bell curve function, with most Transforms lying at either end, and only a few in the middle. Understand that these are affinities, not absolutes, and cross-training is in most cases possible. However, training is easier in one’s affinity, and at times abilities in the affinity areas will occur instinctively (the latter appears to be at the root of the ability affinity process, but this remains unproven). Note: in this scheme, ‘juice’ encompasses what Focuses term juice, what Arms term juice (which is slightly different), what Crows term dross and what Chimeras term élan (which is closer to dross than the touchy Crows and Chimeras want to admit).
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