Aberrant: 200X - Songs of Despair [FIN]

[Christian H. Blues]

Late April, 2011. Approximately 8 days after the VCCE. Minneapolis.

Someone was playing a tenor sax. A student, from the looks of him, busking on a lazy Spring evening on the edge of Kenwood Park. From where he was, C.H watched the young man play to the passers-by, skilled fingers eliciting warm golden tones from the instrument and making some college girls smile and flirt with their eyes as they passed by, and C.H. felt... nothing. No nostalgia. No yearning to have his old horn back so he could go down there and play alongside the student, riffing back and forth so skillfully that they would draw a crowd and make magic there in the park. No, he felt nothing solid, nothing tangible as the music throbbed and sang on the evening breeze. Instead he was aware of a phantom pang of something, the feeling an amputee has for a limb that is there no longer.

The nova mused that perhaps he should feel badly about it. But he didn't, and that was that. He had made a choice to survive, down there in the darkness, and he didn't regret it. Of course, he doubted real regret was possible anymore, either. There was now only abstract, intellectual acknowledgement of errors made, of dissatisfaction with himself. The music was beautiful still, the notes spilling over one another in perfect asymmetry as the young player improvised skillfully. But it didn't stir him anymore. He didn't feel the need to play again.

Another desire drove him now.

He pondered that, as he clung to the side of a building three stories up, his pigmentation altered to blend in perfectly with the brickwork, listening to the sounds of copulation inside with no more emotion than he would listen to crickets chirruping in the park. The house on Lake of the Isles Parkway was expensive, as befit the Executive Director of Research for the Triton Foundation's sizable Minneapolis facility. That man, Robert J. Stephens, and his wife were the ones currently engaged in the bedroom whose window C.H. waited beyond, musing coldly over his new drives and direction in life.

He had become a monster, he knew that. His eruption had made him, for whatever twisted random reason, an inhuman predator by nature, someone who consumed living creatures and absorbed them utterly into himself. He'd read theories that eruptions were shaped by the subconscious or conscious desires of the nova, but he was proof that theory was flawed somehow. The C.H. who had-been was no predator. He was a music-maker, a lover, a friend, and a warm human being. Not a devourer or freakish skin-stealer.

Triton and Proteus hadn't turned him into a monster - his eruption had done that. They'd tried to turn him into their monster, perhaps. Attempting to force compliance, trying to break down his will. But C.H.'s mind was every bit as resilient and adaptive as his body - nothing they had done had taken for long. Even Mox, tailored for nova physiology, had ended up simply building his immunity to it. He was a living example of "That which does not destroy me will only make me stronger". And finally they had locked him away in the darkness, unable to risk letting him out of his cell, barely able to risk feeding him, and thus forcing him to adapt once more, becoming able to suspend his vital functions for months at a time,

And it was in this state Sluice had found him, and told him of Teras. In the lucid dream-state of his thoughts, the two novas had talked and shared experiences, and the Terat telepath had mentored C.H. on the first unsteady steps of the Path. And the circle had become complete: His eruption had made him a monster, Triton/Proteus had prevented his human nature from asserting itself during his formative stages, and now Christian Hellion Blues had seen clearly, considered himself in relation to the world around him, and decided yes, he would become the Monster. Why deny what he was? What purpose would it serve to try and be 'human' when he was so clearly not one, whether in body or mind.

I'm not really C.H. anymore. he realised as he clung to the bare wall and watched the two humans inside fucking. Mrs Stephens was 15 or so years younger than her husband, a devoted mother and a loving wife. He felt the phantom pangs of conscience as he considered what would befall her today, but ruthlessly quashed them. Her husband had been the Triton doctor who'd authorised C.H's transfer to Bahrain all those years ago, and was in all likelihood a Proteus operative. Harris's memories had been quite emphatic on that - It was Robert Stephens who'd inducted him, almost Masonic-fashion, into the cabal within Utopia and it's subsidiaries responsible for 'shepherding' the nova flock. C.H. thought the term appropriate - shepherds led their charges to the slaughterhouse too. Not C.H. Then who am I? No wonder most Terats took new names, titles as much as anything.

They had finished, the man rolling off his wife and cuddling for a few minutes before she kissed him and rose, walking to the bathroom. The man also rose, sweat from his exertions dampening his hair, and crossed to the window. C.H. slowly ducked below the line of sight, hearing the catch being thrown and the window being opened to let the cool evening air into the hot room that smelled of perfume, cologne and sex. All was just as it had been a few nights previously, whilst their children were out at the movies or with friends. C.H. could hear the shower running, heard the man walk to the bathroom door and announce that he was going to the kitchen, and did she want anything.

He narrowed and elongated his form, slipping through the half-opened window noiselessly before snapping back into his more humanoid shape. Ahead of him the two baselines bantered, the woman laughing as she told his target to close the door. Stephens did so, grinning as he turned - and ran straight into the figure waiting behind him.

C.H. extended one hand into a pseudopod, wrapping it around the man's neck and mouth and lifting him from the ground. A black spur with a wicked, serrated edge tipped the tentacle, waving in front of the horrified bulging eyes as an extra loop of the fleshy coils ran under his arms, keeping him from being inadvertently hanged. C.H's black eyes studied Stephens as he turned him this way and that, as though a lepidopterist examining a specimen caught in a net. He raised a finger of his other hand to his lips, admonishing silence as, in the bathroom, a tap squeaked and the shower turned off. Both men fixed their eyes on the door, but then Stephens watched in stifled horror as the previously upraised finger became a slick black stinger, the tip hypodermic-sharp, and the slender figure of the man- the creature thought long buried in the past stepped towards the door just as it opened and his wife came out, towelling her hair.

There was a nova-swift flicker of the upraised needle-finger as it jabbed into an exposed armpit, and the woman's cry was stifled into a drawn out moan as whatever chemical the monster had secreted was pumped into her body, causing her to stumble forwards and sprawl on the floor. With another moan, she turned over clumsily, her eyes drifting in and out of focus as they tried to fix on the sight of the man with a tendril for a hand holding her naked husband aloft.

"Hello, Mrs Stephens." C.H. said urbanely. "Allow me to introduce myself. I was called Christian, and your husband did things to me, as well as ordering things to be done to me. One of those things is what I have just done to you, namely injected you with a large dose of Datura, a rather dangerous psychoactive." He crouched down, absently holding the imprisoned man captive, and nodded in satisfaction as he saw the woman's pupils dilate wildly, expanding to cover near the entire iris. She broke out in a sweat then, moaning a little under her breath as she started to rub her legs against the carpet. He straightened, turning to look at the man in his grasp, who's eyes were alive with fear and concern as he looked at his wife. "It's not a nova-strength dose, of course. That would be immediately fatal and the object is not so much to kill as to punish. Punish you, in point of fact. But she probably will die, if she is not hospitalised. That would be kind - I've given her a triple strength dose and in all likelihood that, combined with what she will see here, will unhinge her entirely. She won't remember much at all, but she will probably spend her days with permanent and cripplingly severe neurological damage." C.H.'s eyes bored into Stephens'. "I'm going to call an ambulance, Doctor Stephens, just as soon as you and I settle accounts. Because I'm not kind."

He crossed to the window and closed it, then returned to stand in full view of the tripping woman sprawling naked on the floor. Then he concentrated and began to absorb Stephens much as he had Harris. He uncovered the man's mouth, letting him scream in agony, grief and fear as he was drawn inexorably into the nova's body. From the doctor's first scream, the woman began to shriek too, the horrific sight and sounds of her husband meeting his monstrous fate rending at the weakened walls of her sanity. As before, C.H. let it be drawn out, kneeling before the shrieking, moaning woman and grabbing her head between his hands, forcing her to watch as her husband's screaming face was swallowed up by the rippling flesh of the Terat's body. She screamed and tried to reach in to grab him, her hand encountering a solid chest instead of the taffy-like substance she expected. C.H. released her and stepped back.

"Robert..." she sobbed in a slurring voice, reaching out towards him, her mind teetering, barraged by the psychoactive and the horror she had just witnessed as she started to scream wordlessly once more. Her mind found no surcease in unconsciousness - the drug would not allow that. Nor would she be able to properly describe what she had seen - whatever the amnesiac effect of the drug left behind would be blurred by her inability to distinguish what was real from what was not. Assuming she was ever again lucid enough to describe anything, of course. Or for that matter wipe her own ass.

Inside himself, C.H. heard Robert Stephens crying and raging, and permitted himself a thin smile. He briefly considered wearing the man's shape and brutalising the woman as her husband, but to be honest felt little more than abstract contempt mixed with pity for her. She had served her purpose now, the deed was done, and Robert Stephens would spend the rest of his existence screaming and regretting what his actions had brought not only to him, but to his family.

His flesh rippled before the still-screaming woman's eyes, taking on the form of her husband wearing a plain grey jogging suit.

"Goodbye, Helen." C.H. told the woman in her husband's voice as he left, shutting the door on the shrieking woman.

He called an ambulance from a payphone in the park.

[The Mariner]

Mary had just stepped out of the shower, from cleaning up after a long training session and gotten dressed in her duty uniform at the 5th precinct headquarters when her night-shift supervisor runs up with a look of concern on her face.

"Lieutenant Cartwright... looks like something big just happened."

"You're telling me. We got a situation. A strange one. A Nova one."

"Looks like it's stirred something up. Who's going there."

"The CSI techs from Downtown. They have reason to suspect that if a Nova is responsible they'll need a Nova asset just incase they need it."

"Anything I should know then before I head there?"

"It's in the Kenwood neighborhood, the Stephens estate. Seems Robert J. Stephens is missing, and his wife is one flew over the cookoo's nest. She's en route to Hennepin County Medical Center while the team is heading here to pick you up. You'll need to get into your clean suit while you're on scene, don't want to contaminate any evidence. Not that the medtechs there on site haven't screwed things up already."

Mary sighs. She hated getting into that semi-transparent number they got from some second-rate firm. She has to wear it over her full-body duty uniform and the lack of breathability of the cleansuit is annoying. Like wearing a trash bag over thermal underwear.

"Alright. What's the weather out there?"

"Rainy, mid 60's."

"Good to know." Mary says as she grabs her cleansuit out of it's storage bin. At least the suit makes a really effective rainsuit. "So I'm on a observational role at this point?"

"Right. We still need to get you through the leg-work portion of your training. The evidence collection, interrogation techniques, the whole nine yards."

"Looks like I got my major in the wrong field."

"It's perfectly alright. You're coming along pretty good. Your search and rescue scores need work."

"I know... I freaked on the water rescue portion of the test, I'm sorry."

"No need to freak out about that, we got time. Now, the team's arrived. Speak to Detective Anthony at the front desk and they'll give you the lay of the land."

Mary walks up, fully suited, to Detective Anthony who has a couple of his field techs with him. The man is in his early fifties, and prematurely gray from what he's seen, but he still has a warmth in his eyes. A dedication that is readable in every wrinkle.

"Ah! Ensign Minneapolis, I take it?"

"Yep. So... you got me for on-the-job training tonight."

"Indeed I do. Now, I recommend you do not touch anything on the scene of the crime. I and the other techs will handle that. I just want you making sure there's no surprises for us while we're there."

Mary hops in, and sees the other three techs are already in clean suits of their own, and one of them is pulling out a field lab kit and getting it set up.

"Now, time is of the essence. Let's get there and get to work."

The traffic is light for a Friday night in early summer in the Uptown area. The CSI van makes a turn and heads down Franklin Avenue for the final leg of the trip. When they arrive, there's police blocking the street, yellow tape everywhere, and the children sitting in a police incident van speaking to a social worker from central.

Mary steps out first, and the commander of the 5th precinct waves her over. Some of the low-rank officers grumble at having a Nova looking over their shoulders and would rather have her find a quiet corner to daydream in. "I'm here, Captain. What's the situation."

Captain Anne Williams... 5th precinct. Spent 15 years on the force. Earned medals for her valor during the 35W bridge collapse. Missing an eye in the process. She's still a dangerous shot, but her person skills are what earned her the rank and duty. "Not good. The wife is in a complete psychotic collapse. Her kids are scared half to death and the man of the house is no where to be seen. Some of the neighbors said they saw him in a grey jogging outfit, but we can't substantiate it yet. He called from a pay phone at a nearby gas station. Can't trace him since."

Mary looks about and sees Detective Anthony walk over.

"Captain... we got little to nothing. We have genetic samples from the bedroom, but it looks coital in origin. No blood, plenty of hairs, but I'm doubting it's from anyone other than who's supposed to be in there. If there was a kidnapping... he's a pro. A Nova pro which makes this worse."

Mary scratches her head as best she can wearing her suit. "Mind if I have a look?"

"I doubt you'd have much use on the scene itself. Those kids over there though might need some encouragement if they saw something."

Mary nods. "Easily done."

[Christian H. Blues]

He'd fought the temptation to stick around and watch. Really, that would be nothing more than simple vanity, and he was trying to move beyond such things. So he sat in a sports bar and watched the evening news instead, studying the faces captured at the scene by the cameras. The new civic defender, Ensign Minneapolis, was there according to the reporter, seen talking to a one-eyed police captain with a businesslike demeanour. C.H doubted anything would come of that. Even if she were a metasensory, the nature of Stephens' disappearance would baffle the local law and order for a while yet.

Unless, of course, Utopia and Triton shared data with them. They had to suspect what was afoot now. They'd have discovered his absence from Bahrain, discovered that Harris and Stephens were both linked to C.H. Blues. They would know some of what he was capable of, though hopefully not all.

But why would they tell the world? Inside him, he felt Stephens mind being slowly digested along with the rest of him, and knew from that intimate, monstrous contact that Triton, and indeed Proteus, would never divulge all they knew. The entire concept behind Proteus was one of control: control of novas, control of the media, control of the flow of data. To willingly throw away their anonymity and come forward would be to surrender that control, without which there would be no Proteus.

So no, they wouldn't play ball with the cops and thus invite further scrutiny. But that didn't mean they wouldn't have their own resources looking for him. Stephens' second in command at Triton would already have set wheels in motion, C.H. knew. He'd have also changed passwords, deactivated keycards, and done his best to sequester the organisation from whatever his boss could reveal. His best wouldn't be good enough, though. Information acheived through torture was incomplete. Even regular telepathic scans could miss things that the telepath didn't know to look for. C.H's absorption of his victims' neurons included everything. The guard's names. The secretary's favorite snack. The second in command's home address.

One thing at a time. Another day or two, and all Stephens memories would be his, and Stephens would be just a memory, literally. By then, the Proteus operatives would be in town looking for him. And then he could move on his next victim.

For now, he focused on examining the mind within him, slowly sucking every last drop of synaptic activity and metaphorically rolling it over his palate, extracting everything he could about Triton and it's less-savory activities.

[The Mariner]

Mary walks over to the children. They're sitting in the van, blankets over their shoulders. Mary knows it'd be cold with the rain hitting her face. She walks over and greets herself. "Hi there..." She says, taking a knee. "I'm Ensign Minneapolis. I'm helping the officers figure out what's going on. Maybe... you can tell me what's going on?" She says, pulling out an LED light designed to light an area and turning it on to light the darkness around them. They see the sailor collared jumpsuit Mary's wearing under her cleansuit. Definately not the usual uniform for the MPD.

She's not gotten her actual "Duty Costume" from the project directors, it's still under construction, but the spare suit they whipped up Mary wasn't minding.

"Umm... Is Mom alright?"

"I would hope so. Tell me what happened." She says with concern. She has a feeling how scared she'd be after what happened. The Son spoke first.

"Mom snapped. Dad dissapeared and Mom wen't crazy. When we got home... she... wasn't like our mom. She was like a... animal."

All the daughter could do is cry.

"This is important... did you see anything unusual? Anything not like what should be at your house?"

"No... nothing. Just that Dad's gone."

Mary looks down. "I see. What about her?" She says, pointing to the Daughter.

"I didn't see anything. We didn't do nothing."

"What? I didn't..."

"JUST SHUT UP AND DO YOUR JOB! FIND OUR DAD! YOU DAMN NOVAS CAN DO ANYTHING YOU WANT AND YOU LET US "BASELINES" SUFFER!"

She leans foreward. "Get your Aberrant carcass out of my face."

Mary stumbles back, as if her words slugged her in the chest. The son holds her back. "Dammit, she's trying to help us!"

"All she's doing is padding her ego. She's nothing more than some Nova wrestler with some guilty concience somewhere that makes her want to be some superhero or something!"

The Captain walks over and puts a hand on Mary's shoulder. "Come on... did you find out anything?"

Mary's stunned at the children's outburst. She at one impulse wanted to snap right back and read the daughter the riot act.

"I'm sorry... It's in the police's hands now." She says, turning around. "Nothing that we already know, Sir. Should I head over to the Hospital and see what I can find out?"

The Captain sighs. "Hopefully you can. You did your best here."

Mary looks up the road and hears the thunder. "It's too dangerous to fly. I don't think I can channel the lightning if I'm hit... yet."

"I can have a squad take you."

"I'd appreciate it."

[Christian H. Blues]

[Two months later, 17th August 2011]

"Nothing."

The young lieutenant set the case file on the desk in front of the captain, a depressingly familiar file. She'd asked to be kept in the loop on this one, though. Eight disappearances in June, all Utopia or Triton personnel, four of them high-ups, followed by two months of nada. Zip. Nothing. That was actually the unoffical name for the case "The Nothing Case". Seven men and one woman vanished, tentatively linked to another two mysterious disappearances at the Victoria Crush event and, so some rumors said, a disappearance in D.C. All related to Project Utopia. And then? Nothing.

"Nothing at all?" she asked, opening it up and gazing at the crime scene reports.

"An unsubstantiated report of a nova-related disturbance downtown, apparently some hooker saw a 'young man with dark hair' getting shot at by 'guys with silenced guns'. She didn't even tell us this until a month after the event - we picked her up and she tried to bargain. Apparently the dude got shot up, but kept on moving and changed his face to 'some old guy' before disappearing. It's thin, and the witness isn't reliable. She also claims she saw Slider two years ago, supposedly after her murder."

"Shit." the Captain closed the file and rubbed the bridge of her nose. "Meanwhile, we've still got a crazy woman in the hospital and an unsolved case involving a nova. I know it was a damn nova, Bridges. There's no way in hell a mundane perp could have pulled this off. And I know it was the same guy in D.C... My gut is screaming at me."

"Well, he's not doing it here anymore." the Lieutenant offered, as though that would mollify his boss.

It didn't.