Demonic Devourer: First, I Eat the Babies

“Welcome to Tsubera!” Sierra says, gesturing grandly at the metropolis around us. “The capital city of Novarath, to be precise.”

“You can drop the cheeriness,” Adrian grumbles. “This place is a shitheap.”

Getting around the city is harder than I first thought. Then again, I didn’t put much effort into that first thought, so…

Anyway, the point is that there’s bridges everywhere. The buildings at the height we’re at have to be built on something , and for the most part, that means they’re really tall. There’s not exactly ground to walk on, so instead a complex latticework of bridges connects every building in some way or another.

Not all of them are on the same floor, which makes things even more complicated. Right now, we’re walking on a bridge on what Sierra terms “Level 411.” The building we’re going towards doesn’t have any other bridges on this level. Instead, its connections to other towers are either higher or lower.

Our current position is near the top of the entire city. I wonder how we’re going to manage getting all the way down. The space below stretches so far down that I can’t see the bottom. There are enough bridges down there to block sight of pretty much everything, and of course there’s a lot of buildings that don’t tower nearly as high as the ones that we’re around.

I think I wouldn’t hit the bottom if I fell.

“Watch your step, Adrian,” Sierra chuckles.

“It was one time,” the Warrior-Hydrokinetic replies, crossing his arms grumpily. “Aw, come on, this place again? Seriously?”

“You would do well to remember who’s responsible for saving you,” Sierra replies, suddenly serious. “I dislike them too, but we cannot deny that they have assisted us greatly.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Adrian says. “Whatever. Let’s just get this over with.”

I remain quiet, soaking in the information and the sights of the city around us. When I asked who we were meeting before, Sierra refused to divulge anything other than the fact that Marie is, in fact, involved with this.

That likely means Sapphire is too. I don’t know how to feel about that.

The bridges aren’t the only way to get around, I notice. There are some people freely flying around under their own power, while others use vehicles of some sort that seem to not care about gravity. They hustle to and fro, each of them with a destination clearly in mind. People enter buildings and exit with purpose, as if slowing down for a single second will be the end of them.

I wonder what it’s like to be them, to know what they’re going to do next. To have expectations for what comes next, rather than a vague idea and a drive to improve.

“Here we go,” Sierra says, indicating the glass door in front of her.

Up here, everything is glass and steel, sharp corners and rounded edges and very clean. It’s almost sterile in a way that reminds me of the lab. Artificial.

I hope the rest of the city is different.

The glass in front of us is frosted, though I assume whoever’s in there can see us. Still, I dip my head, hiding my face behind shadow, and I apply the final touches to my Disguise Self.

There’s a nonzero chance that there’s someone here that is looking for someone by my description. My figure is fairly recognizable—especially my eyes—and I’ve made my fair share of enemies in the Crowned Islands. I don’t want my disguise to be something that doesn’t match with my actual body, though, since I know from experience now that disguises that don’t fit my body shape work perfectly fine up until I interact with anything physical.

As such, my usage of the skill is simple. Red eyes become an unremarkable brown, tied-back black hair gains a tinge of green at the tips, but my proportions remain largely the same. My face is what I change most, and even that’s mostly minor changes to make myself slightly less recognizable. Subtle changes, all of them, but in combination with a heavy amount of Acting, it adds up to create a new personality.

Unfortunately, there’s nothing I can do about the name. I don’t know how I reassigned the name “Evelyn” to my system in the first place, and thus I can’t replicate it. I also don’t know how to cloak my status from Appraise like Adrian and Sierra can, so if someone Appraises me and knows of me, there’s nothing I can do.

The doors swing open silently. A woman wearing a face-obscuring helmet and a black suit greets us.

“The Jade child,” she states impassively. “This way, please.”

She gestures inwards, and Sierra moves to follow, curtsying politely as she does. Adrian doesn’t make any respectful movements, so I don’t either.

The inside of the building isn’t anything terribly special. I notice a lot of little aspects of it, but they’re mostly boring. Succintly put, it has the same cold style as the lab, if the lab were instead focused on doing business and receiving esteemed guests rather than dissecting living beings and putting them back together.

I digress.

Our destination is an unmarked brown door in a hallway full of unmarked brown doors, lit at an ever so slightly uncomfortable intensity. I can’t tell if it’s intentional.

A man and a woman are waiting for us in the room, which is larger than I would think from the outside. It’s also remarkably furnished—it looks more like a spacious conference room at a nice inn than anything from the lab like I would’ve expected.

The man is all business, a nondescript black mask with a bright purple marking over the left eye covering most of his face. His posture screams professional to me, far more than any of the guards at the site where I was created did.

The woman, on the other hand, is anything but. Her clothing choices are eclectic, to say the least, though the rainbow of fabric she wears does appear to be high quality enough to technically qualify for whatever standards they might have. Where her partner stands with his hands clasped behind his back, she lounges on a comfortable-looking chair, both her feet up on a desk.

When I try to Appraise them, the skill fails.

Ah. They are powerful, then.

“My name is Simon,” the man introduces himself.

“I’m Florence,” the woman says, making a face. “I don’t like that name. Call me Rin.”

First names. Is that a custom here? The knowledge that my amalgam grants me doesn’t give me much for cultural norms, so I’m a bit lost here.

Thankfully, I have Sierra and Acting to take the lead for me.

“Tourmaline, seven, green,” Sierra intones.

“Bronze, three, purple!” Rin replies, kicking her legs off from the table. “Right. You’re the Jade kid?”

“That would be me, yes,” Sierra replies serenely. “I trust Marie has explained the situation?”

I’m tempted to take a look to see how she’s schooling her expression, but I’m sure she’s drawing on some skill like Acting to take her through this.

She doesn’t seem to be the biggest fan of her family, after all.

“You’re on loan to us to assist in clearing out an infestation on the sixty-second level,” Simon says. “I believe the instructions included that there was no need to guarantee your safety?”

“That is correct,” Sierra says.

“So if you die, it’s not our fault?” Rin asks brightly. “Great! Let’s get going!”

“Now?” Adrian asks.

“Now!”

Rin’s statement is addressed to Adrian, but her eyes land on me. For the first time this conversation, she actually looks at us, and her gaze is far more serious than her demeanor. Twin eyes glowing with purple magic stare straight at me, and the fear that she can see through my disguise pierces through me.

The first step to not being discovered is to hide.

The second is to distract.

“Excuse me,” I say, “Are you able to provide details?”

“I was going to ask,” Simon says, cutting in and pointing at me, “Who is this? Lady Jade’s statement involved two people, not three.”

“She’s an independent contractor,” Sierra says dismissively. “We paid good money for her to join us.”

“Why?”

“Can’t hurt to have someone else to take the fall for us if it comes down to it,” Adrian says before looking askance at me. “Uh, sorry. But you know your job.”

He’s surprisingly good at faking this. I have to wonder if I’m the only one with an Acting skill here.

“They say jump, I ask how high,” I say with a shrug. “If you’re ordering them around, you’re ordering me around. I’d just like to know the orders I’ll be following.”

“Of course,” Simon says, nodding. “The teleportation circle to our destination is located nearby. I can explain on our way.”

I raise an eyebrow at that and whistle. A contractor would know the price of one of those. “A teleportation circle? You don’t skimp on costs here, do you?”

“We’re just borrowing the place,” Simon says, flashing me a smile that doesn’t reach his eyes.

“This place is rich as hells,” Rin cackles, getting up to throw an arm around my shoulder. “You aren’t wrong about that!”

Her eyes belie the playfulness of her statement, the glow growing slightly more intense as she stares at me.

Danger, my instincts scream, but she hasn’t done anything yet and Sierra’s made it clear that she and Adrian need to follow through with this.

“Let’s get moving,” Rin says, humming lightly as she lets go of me and starts walking.

Simon sighs. “Follow her.”

As we walk, traversing a positively labyrinthine mess of hallways that all look the exact same, Simon narrates the task we’ll be executing.

“The sixty-second level is host to laboratories by a number of organizations that would prefer to remain unnamed. Nine days ago, one of those laboratories broke wide open, exposing the residents of the floor to a degenerative magical virus that spreads through sound. Containment efforts have locked the level off, but the virus has persisted within, hampering valuable research.

“Any who fall victim to it begin to experience symptoms thirty to forty mintues after infection. All hosts to the virus will invariably begin speaking through a system of screeches that have not yet been deciphered.

“Exposure is caused by listening to their makeshift language or by physical contact with the infected. The infected can and will attack anything that makes a sound that is not in their language. We do not yet know if infection is fatal.

“You are to exterminate the infected to the last being. Do not speak. Do not listen. Kill anything that moves. That is all.”

“Woooow, well done,” Rin says, clapping slowly. “Great breakdown. We’ve got some custom-made sound-eliminating plugs for you!”

This actually does seem somewhat interesting. I’ll need to rely on Bloodpath and Misty Mirage if contact spreads it. Actually, I don’t know if the former skill even works—would a magical (presumably anomalous) virus spread to infect me if I’m in my blood-form?

The teleportation circle is located in a nondescript room with off-white walls, ceiling, and floor. It’s barely large enough for the five of us to walk around in, but there is in fact a very complex teleportation circle below.

“Before we go,” Simon says, “Equipment.”

He reaches out into thin air and retrieves a full-body bodysuit, then another, then another. I grow a little more impressed with each piece he retrieves.

Simon has the same kind of extradimensional storage space that Sierra does, then. Something similar, at least.

I take the bodysuit he offers me and the pair of soft earplugs, too. I’m still wary of Rin, but Simon just seems to want to get the job done.

Putting the suit on doesn’t take long. It covers my entire body from head to toe, though the fabric is thin enough that I can see through it.

The plugs are a perfect fit for my ears. They’re magical, of course they are, but even then it still surprises me how natural it feels. All sound disappears, and it catches me off guard how many little noises disappear. The air whistling through the building, the background hum of the machinery keeping this place running, all conversation… all of it, gone.

Simon and Rin direct us to where we should stand, pointing each of us towards a separate part of the circle. Their mouths move, but I can’t hear a thing.

Rin holds her hand out in a thumbs-up, cocking her head questioningly. Sierra nods, then Adrian follows suit.

I do the same, then blink.

In the fraction of a second where my eyes were closed, the world around me has changed.

I stand in a ruined laboratory, eerily similar to the one where I was created. Broken glass dots the floor, and I look around to see a room full of shattered test tubes and suspicious liquid creeping over the floor. Here and there, I see bodies, none of them less than a week dead.

Is this another UCC establishment? Given the nature of the virus they described and the general construction of this place, I think it very well might be.

I can worry about that later. Right now, I have a more pressing issue.

I’m alone.

Was that an intentional part of the teleportation ritual? I wouldn’t be terribly surprised if it is, because there’s no receiving circle on this level to guide the spell. The walls around me are fucked up enough that that might have interfered too.

Unlike the lab I was born in, this one isn’t buried in the earth. The building I’m in stretches out pretty far, but here and there, there’s holes in the wall where I can see out, out towards the rest of the city of Novarath. The sixty-second level of it, apparently.

Sunlight doesn’t reach us here. Twenty feet above and below, a layer of solid steel walls off the level from the ones around us. Artificial light shines from fixtures here and there, but it’s not bright at all.

I don’t see any monsters. No “infected.”

Strangely enough, I haven’t received an objective for this task. One would think that something as basic as “kill the monsters” would have an associated objective, especially if it’s as hard as Rin and Simon made it sound, but my system hasn’t offered anything yet. There won’t be any rewards beyond what I can Devour, and even that’s made harder by the bodysuit.

With nothing better to do, I begin wandering the area, searching for an ally to communicate with or an enemy to fight. I keep my head on a swivel, the utter lack of sound preventing me from hearing where enemies might be.

As it turns out, I don’t have to wait long. Less than a minute after I start walking, Rin and Simon land right in front of me.

Where have you been, I ask, but I can’t even hear the sound of my own voice. All I can feel is some rumbling where my vocal chords are.

Simon’s mouth moves.

Rin’s mouth moves, and I see her laugh.

The revelation hits me like a train.

They didn’t put in the plugs.

They’re either not affected by the virus… or it doesn’t exist.

Acting keeps me from showing any signs of surprise.

A system notification blares up into my face before I can make a resolution on what to do.

Objective: Find Sapphire

Sapphire is coming to find you.

Distance: 49 miles

Oh, fuck.

I brush the notification away. That’s a fire I’ll need to put out at some point, but for now, I turn towards Simon and Rin.

No, I turn towards Simon. Where is Rin?

I whip my head around just in time to feel the blade slide into my back.