a neurodivergent fantasy psychological horror dystopia
Chapter I
In Which Twerp Makes A Mistake
Twerp was back in the chair again. “Fuck the chair,” thought Twerp. “The chair sucks ass.” She reflected for a moment on what had put her there.
If only Gorebash hadn’t provoked her, she wouldn’t be in this situation. She wouldn’t be back in the chair. It was Gorebash’s fault! He knew better than to call her short. Not everything is about how you look. Twerp was short and ugly and weak and everybody knew it, and even though it was the most obvious thing ever, these fucking morons couldn’t help but point it out whenever they could.
As far as Twerp was concerned, this was basically an invitation for her to start breaking things and biting people. This time, Twerp took an eye. She felt pleasure when it popped between her teeth and she tasted the bloody juices tinged with iron.
She had better not repeat that part aloud.
She couldn’t help but brood on it. She always brooded when she was in the chair. Everyone had to keep up their front, man. That’s all it was. As soon as she did something right – as soon as she nailed a game of Daggers with a perfect throw or dropped the perfect putdown on somebody bigger and stronger than she was – out came the “shrimp”s and the “fatty”s and the suggestions she have her face rearranged. All anyone cared about was their pride.
She bit her lip and spent a few moments resenting everyone and everything. Pride. It makes the fucking universe spin. Wasn’t that why the Illustrious had created the Prism anyway? So he could have a legion of slavish worshipers? Wasn’t that why Omnirath had rebelled against the Illustrious and tried to take the Prism for himself? Fuck Pride. Pride is for morons.
The fact that pride was also the primary reason she did anything at all did not occur to her.
Suddenly the guilt came, in an overwhelming wave. She realized that Gorebash would never see distance again. Gorebash was a blundering, ignorant Ogre only useful for his ability to throw rocks at things. He would be almost useless on the front lines now, so he would probably be put down, or sent to the mines. The mines sucked even more than the chair. She had never been there, but she knew this without actually knowing it.
Just then Plinius the Younger stepped in and interrupted her brooding. “Again,” he said, slamming down his ornately-bound Documentum Dysfunctio on his huge oak desk. “Again you sit here before me, Twerp. I thought the latest Pact had you a bit more evened out than this?”
Twerp shrugged. “I’m sorry, Master Plinius.” It was an automatic reaction, expected of Goblinkind like her whenever they got caught in a slip-up. “I’ll try to do better.” She didn’t mean a word of it.
“You won’t try, Twerp. You will do better.” Plinius the Younger sighed and practically collapsed into his bison leather chair. “You have to.” He stroked his bushy, carefully-groomed mustache. He had all the mannerisms of a Sage a hundred years older than he was, but he wasn’t a decrepit old man like most of them. You could tell that just by the name. He was New Blood. He was willing to give Twerp a chance. Not like the greybeards at the very top, right next to the Illustrious. If it were up to them, she’d have had her head separated from her shoulders a long time ago.
Dogs that learn to bite must be put down, was the Old Way of thinking. No good for anything anymore. But the New Blood maintained they could be useful in limited ways, and they had reams of research and experiments to prove it.
She felt herself overcome with gratitude. The thankfulness, deep and abiding, radiated warmth from her belly like a comforting sun. Adoration. She felt adoration for the Sage. She was so incredibly thankful the New Blood could find some use for a Twerp like her. She was only dimly aware this wasn’t who she was; it was the Pact at work. “Good thing I don’t have tear ducts or he would think me as weak as Gorebash does,” she thought, scratching her eyelid. “Did,” she corrected herself. She remained as expressionless as she could manage, but her mouth worked furiously.
“What are we to do about this then, Twerp?” Plinius the Younger steepled his fingers. “What indeed?”
Twerp said nothing, fidgeting a bit with the hem of her plain beige garment.
“You know,” Plinius said, looking over his glasses at her. “I’ve already been reprimanded twice for being so lenient with you.” Then he adjusted his glasses upward, so they perfectly framed his piercing ice blue eyes.
Twerp couldn’t resist a smirk. That wasn’t true. Nobody could run the Processor as well as she could. That wasn’t true.
If Plinius noticed her defiance he didn’t mention it. He stood up, shuffled over to the window, his long elaborate robes dragging the wooden floor behind him. He looked out over the Manufacture and crossed his arms.
Twerp knew without knowing that it was better to say nothing at all.
A long moment passed. Twerp’s mind was pregnant with fear of discipline.
“We’ll have to negotiate another Pact,” Plinius said flatly.
Twerp twitched a bit in her chair. “Well, that will be unpleasant,” she thought.
“Do you really think that’s –” she started to say, just before Plinius spun around his heels, jabbing a finger at her.
“Ah, ah, ah, ah!” He said, scolding. Once again the urge to take an eye came over her, but she knew she would instantly explode into a thousand thousand pieces the moment she tried. She had seen it happen. So she simply gripped her chair until her knuckles turned a paler shade of emerald. “’Do I really think that’s necessary!’” Plinius mocked, as though he could read her thoughts.
“Hell, he probably can,” the thought flashed, but Twerp said nothing.
“Well what do you think Twerp? It’s been five months since the last Pact, and the renewal expiration is six. Maybe in the interest of caution, considering your overabundant disturbances to the Line, we need to re-negotiate a bit early, yes?”
It didn’t sound like a rhetorical question, Twerp thought, but it totally was. Twerp kept quiet. The lust for blood had passed as quickly as it went, squelched beneath a flat, passive affect of subservience. This was also the Pact.
Without another word Plinius the Younger returned to his desk and settled slowly and maybe a bit too regally in his cushioned chair, resting his elbows on the desk for a moment. Then he opened his ponderous Documentum Dysfunctio and began to copy a bunch of formulas from the margins of a page onto a parchment.
Once again, the silence.
Twerp cleared her throat. Plinius the Younger waved vaguely in her direction with a hand. “We’ll set up your new Pact in a week’s time,” he said, handing her the document he had scribbled out. “Take this to the Agent and tell them to set it up.”
Twerp held the parchment in her hand, looking at the swirl of non-Euclidean formulae, glinting softly with arcane energies, swirling and reshaping into nebulous configurations. She wished she could read what was “written” there. Then the Pact told her what to say.
“Yes, Master Plinius,” she said.
“Then out of my sight,” Plinius said, pointing to the door. “And if you wind up in here again before the Pact can be re-negotiated, it’s the end for you! The End, Twerp!” He pointed at her now. “I mean it!”
She made no gesture and quickly strode to the door, opening it.
As she closed it behind her, she left a crack, and took one final peek at Master Plinius, even as her stomach sank and then tied in knots.
He had his head in his hands. He was weeping.
Feeling more than a little defeated, but also glad to be out of the interrogation, Twerp ambled down the stairs to the foyer where the Agents waited.
She approached one of the Agents behind a counter, which was wreathed in a crackling field of coalescing protective energies, and halfway passed through the parchment. Only Arcane Instruments could pass through such a field.
The Agent snapped it up from Twerp’s hand and glanced. “I can’t read this of course,” she sighed, and emphatically brought down a glowing red stamp on it, authorizing it. An orange light infused the document, and the formulae cemented themselves into it, taking their final shape and transmuting into plain black ink.
It was Official now. Another Pact.
Twerp scratched her head. “Pact in a week,” she said to the Agent.
“Yeah, that’s what I figured,” the Agent grumbled, rolling up the parchment into a glass tube and sliding it into a nearby tin cylinder that stretched from the Agent’s desk all the way to the Head Office. “That’s what it always is when you come in here.” Then she began scribbling into a book.
“Off with you now,” she said, without looking up.
Twerp tried to peek over the counter to see what she was writing, but she wasn’t tall enough.
So she just walked out.
