Ex Lacrima Remnant

Track #20 – Velvet Underground

Robin’s eyes kept staring at the ceiling, at the multitude of fixtures scattered up there, in a neat, regular grid. Yellowish lights, warmer than she expected them to be in a place like that. The walls were completely sullied by graffiti, somehow leaking on the plastic-looking floor too. More than a safety shelter, that place looked like a living, breathing commune. Children sitting around the rooms, some adults keeping an eye on them, some other stockpiling food and first aid supplies. All while lively chatter echoed inside that vast underground structure, shielded from the artificial sky of Aralu by several meters of concrete. A city under the underground city under the city. Something Robin couldn’t fathom, a challenge to her firmly held beliefs. She adjusted her gas mask, making sure the lock was fastened tight. Showing her face to ‘aunt Caro’ had been a mistake, making one more person aware of her existence. One person that already met ‘Robin’, no less, just under different circumstances. So, safety it was. Keep it on, till Kryzalid shows up again. Then, question her. Ask about the plant. That. Nightmarish. Excuse. Of a plant. That came out of that woman Natasha’s mouth. More questions. No answers. Yet, the ‘truth’ was closer than before. That much she could appreciate. She walked closer to one of the walls, stared at the graffiti. The drawings were rough, amateurish, but they felt warm. Lively. She took out a small notebook from under her red robe, opened it on a still empty page, unsheathed a pen from its spine. Her fingers moved slowly, methodically, reproducing the drawing on the sheet, line by line, turn by turn. Then, letters. Words. Sentences. A full, detailed analysis, condensed and streamlined to fit the small margins without leaking on the following page. She closed the booklet again, put it back where she took it. Long time since she found a reason to take it out and add something new to it. Still, she felt like she had to take note of that place beyond reason, before the inevitable happened, before the train crashed against the wall at full speed.

“Hey, heeeey!”

A voice from behind her, a small hand pulling her red cape. Robin turned around to face her guest – a child, maybe ten, twelve years old. Talking to her.

“You’re a friend of Lady Kryzalid, right? You came back with her, just before lunch!”

Robin didn’t answer immediately, weighed her words. No, they weren’t friends. At most, reluctant allies. For all the wrong reasons. Telling that to a child with no more than three days to live, though, felt unnecessarily cruel. Her distorted voice escaped her gas mask, sounding more menacing than she intended to.

“Yes. I am acquainted with her. What of it?”

“Can you give her this flower for me?”

“Can’t you do that yourself?”

“N… no! L… Lady Kryzalid is scary. But I want to say ‘thank you’ for stopping the Keepers! so, please! Please! Pleeeease!”

Robin groaned, grabbed the flower from his small hand. A pink tulip. Made of plastic, of a very bad quality too. But she didn’t have the heart to say no. So, she nodded to the child, even if she didn’t think much of it.

“Sure. I’ll do that.”

“Yes! Thank you, Mister… Mister…”

The young boy was clicking his tongue, almost as if trying to remember something he couldn’t possibly know. Robin remained silent for a second longer, pondering on what to do. Then, in the most solemn tone she could muster, she started to talk again, waving her hand wildly in the process.

“Alas! My name is a well-guarded secret. Lady Kryzalid’s allies must stay concealed, lest the Peacekeepers seize us all. Understood?”

“Y… yes, Mister!”

“Now, go. I’ll give her your present.”

That said, she turned her attention back to the wall, not even checking if the child left her alone as she wished. That last performance flustered her a little. She was past the time for playful shenanigans like that. That was a part of her that was dead and buried, one that she couldn’t allow to resurface. Her fingers grazed the painted wall, followed the profile of the graffiti, the curvature of each shape. It wasn’t that different from back then. The details were not the same, the style was way less refined, the shapes stronger, but that art… she clenched her fist. Three days. That was how much time she still had left. Three days and she was wasting her waking hours in a underground shelter, far from getting even a smidge closer to her goal. Leaving was not an option, now. After their show, the Peacekeepers would storm Aralu, look for them everywhere. Kryzalid and her two accomplices. A rhizome with one eye and an individual with a gas mask. True, she had the benefit of not having been seen clearly. She could have shed her disguise, walked out like nothing happened. Except her face was known. It was in the archives. Connected to agitations, protests, riots. Moving the masses, making her voice louder. When she was still naive enough not to wear a mask.

“Yo, Robbie! Had dinner yet?”

That voice. That annoying voice. She turned around one more time, in the direction of those words. Seeing nothing less than a woman with a face mask, an eyepatch and a cap compressing a wild, braided mass of red hair. She was wearing baggy pants, sneakers and a t-shirt with PIC written in block letters, a smaller ‘Peacekeeping Is Cocksucking’ superimposed on it. Yup, that was Kryzalid, in incognito mode. No doubts about it. Her outfit was very similar to the first she donned when driving that car. That had to be her way to avoid being pestered by the people around them. Behind her stood that mononeural, cyclopean idiot of Dobrio, covering his abs properly for the first time since they met and pointing at her with his wurst-sized finger. Of course, of course it was he who guided his blind pal to her. And, a little bit on the side, Lacrima, sporting new, elegant black garments that covered her plant parts completely, almost making her look like a real human – emphasis on almost. Robin eyed them from behind her lenses, knowing full well they couldn’t see her in turn.

“I’m not hungry.”

“C’mon, you have to eat something. There’s some good roasted potatoes in the oven, and…”

“I want the truth. Not potatoes. The truth. You’ve clowned around enough and I’m getting insane. What the heck was that plant? What is your… what is your deal?”

Kryzalid shrugged, heaved a sigh, her visible eye fixated on the floor.

“Straight to business, huh. Well, come with us, please. We gotta get to a quiet place to chat.”

Robin stared at the wall one more time, before leaving it behind, walking towards the strange trio hesitantly. Her attention turned to Lacrima, to her flower. It was bigger than before their fight with the two rhizomes, but at least it wasn’t leaking lymph anymore. Whatever Kryzalid did to her, it had to have stopped the overflow, although she didn’t really understand what Lacrima meant with ‘drain me dry’, before. It sounded like a weird formulation, maybe one caused by her delirious state. Kryzalid understood that and asked Robin not to interfere, to just let her handle it and wait outside, far from the room she brought the rhizome to. That secrecy killed her, made her dead curious. But curiosity killed the cat and she was tired to be a cat. A part of her gave that procedure a connotation more sensual than it had the right to be. After seeing how Kryzalid drunk Lacrima’s lymph from her wounds, back in her flat, she couldn’t shake the feeling that the ‘emergency draining procedure’ entailed more than simple lymph-sucking. Still, inquiring about it would have led her nowhere. Or led her to places she didn’t want to go to. There was the truth and there was that. But the truth about the plants? That was something she had to know. She glanced at her hand, at the flower she was given. Without waiting a second longer, she grabbed Kryzalid’s arm, shoved the flower in her palm.

“One of your fans told me to give you this.”

Kryzalid closed her fingers around the corolla, moved them around the stem, the leaves, caressed the engravings. She smiled under the mask, right as her fingertips explored the sepals one more time, before moving back to the petals.

“That little squirt’s so nice. His rhymes are always funny. Shame he’s so scared of… the other me.”

“…wait, how do you…”

“Braille. He carves short poems on plastic items he finds around Aralu, so that I can read them. His momma told me that he learned Braille for me. Don’t know if to feel honored ‘bout it. But, anyway…”

Dobrio closed a door behind them. A small room, enough space only for five, six people at most. Two cots. One table. Kryzalid’s hand searched for the right place to seat at, let herself slump on it. Dobrio followed her soon after. Lacrima sat on the other cot, without saying a word. Robin took place close to her. Two on one side. Two on the other. Just like when they met. Kryzalid cleared her throat, took her cap off, freed her eye from the patch, pulled down her mask. Mimi’s face emerged from under the disguise – yet, Kryzalid was unmistakably at the helm.

“The ‘truth’, you said. So, before I tell you the full story… what do you think you’ve got?”

Robin unlocked her gas mask, pulled it down too, freed her hair from the red hood, took off her gloves. Face to face. No more games. She heaved a long sigh, then she glared at the creature wearing Mimi LeFou’s angelic face.

“There’s something wrong with both the rhizomes and the Peacekeepers. Something that is connected to those… to that plant you… forced to crawl out of that woman’s body. It answered your call, almost like a trained snake. It answered your music. But not… not the notes everyone heard. Something else you hid into it! So, what… are you? Are you even really a human being?”

“…who…”

Mimi ground her teeth, almost sank her nails into her legs, her cheeks turned red.

“…who are you taking me for? Of course I’m still human! Even… even if this world is stripping my humanity away, day by day, surgery after surgery, grafting after grafting. I’m… I’m still human. I want to be. I want to remain human. I need to remain human. Being human… is the only certainty that I’ve left. The… only one.”

Her voice cold, measured, monotone. Her eyes wet with unborn tears.

“Ask me something like that ever again and you won’t leave this room alive.”

Then, she closed her eyes, opened them again, wiped them with her hand. She tilted her head on the side, licked her lips, snapped her fingers. Back to her Kryzalid persona. Back to her confidence.

“With that out of the way, let’s begin with the masterclass. So, ever wondered how I make heads go boom? Guess!”

Robin gauged her reaction, that sudden shift in mood. Her question broke Kryzalid’s armor, reached her inside Mimi. She took a mental note of it, of what triggered that switch. Then, she shelved it away. That was not important, right now. The answer to her question was. So, she guessed, blurting out the idea that festered in her mind for so long.

“Frequencies. You hit the resonance frequency of a human brain, till it bursts open.”

“Close, but no. I can do that, mind me, but it’s hard. It requires a very long fine tuning process to isolate the fundamental and play it back. Not worth the hassle, those mofos would shoot me dead before I played the first note, if I went for it. And what if each person had a slightly different resonance?”

“So, how…?”

“Guess again. Which people did I kill by popping their heads like meat balloons?”

“You murdered civilians and Keepers alike, without distinction.”

“No, no, no. All of ‘my’ victims were Peacekeepers… even those who weren’t.”

Robin glared at Kryzalid, at those opaque eyes that only pretended to see.

“What… does it mean?”

“The thirty seven civilians that died that day were all former Corps officers. They got discharged after their mandatory serving time. They all… started at the same time as me. They were all… my buddies, if you get me. And paid for my eye surgeon visit, you know? They were dead sure that weirdo with an office in a mall could spin out a couple replacement eyes for me. It was a party of sorts, a… gift from all of them to me. Thinking they all died that day…”

Kryzalid grinned, almost to the point of ripping her lips.

“…makes my blood boil. That bastard got me good. Got them good. All of them. Faces I knew. Faces I could still see in my mind, even if I was already blind. Taken away from me. In the time of a song.”

A long breath, mixed with a sigh. She started shaking her legs, kicking the air several times in a row.

“That’s how Mimi died, by the way. Somehow, she survived the carnage, only to be shot by the real murderer and thrown in a body bag down to Aralu. Where a massive one-eyed idiot found her.”

Dobrio raised his hand.

“That would be me.”

Kryzalid lifted her hand, patted his head.

“Pfft. Your first words after I woke up were priceless, you dumb fuck!”

Then she puffed her chest, acting out in a poor Dobrio impression.

“‘Holy moly! Who threw away a perfectly serviceable inflatable doll? And why there’s a hole in her chest?! Weren’t the others enough?’”

Dobrio rolled his eye, patted her hair back.

“In my defense, I was dead stoned after getting a fix of sugar cane. But, hey, good thing you were still alive.”

“That’s because of the lymph.”

Kryzalid quit her theatrics, crossed her hands, kicked the air again.

“Whoever killed them and shot me, also… forced me to drink lymph. Shoved it down my throat, and I couldn’t do anything to stop them. A… lot of it. So much lymph. Enough to make me a junkie in one go. Enough that I was hit by withdrawal as soon as I woke up.”

“Oh, yeah. You bit my hand too. And cried. A lot. It was…”

“Pathetic. It was pathetic.”

Kryzalid stopped moving her legs, drew a deep breath.

“I’ve never felt so violated in my life. That bastard… raped my brain. That feeling, the feeling of not being in control, of… of being used. The lymph that goes down, goes down, goes down. My body that becomes numb. And wants more. More. Against my will. Wants. More.”

Her fingers delved into the mattress of the short bed, almost ripping the filling off. One breath. A second breath. A third. A fourth. Calm. Calm down.

“In one day, I lost my friends, became a terrorist, was declared dead, was thrown into the depths of Aralu in a body bag and turned into a lymph junkie. All because of… someone that I recognized, but that I can’t remember. All I have are scattered memories. And that music. That sound that filled my ears, made them ring like mad. The sound that killed all of them, coming from the speakers, mixed with that horrible mall muzak. That sound made their heads, their stomachs explode in front of me, right as I came out of the eye surgeon’s office. Right after he told me that my eyes were actually fine, but my optic nerves were severely damaged. That’s the last thing I remember. The next snapshot is red. Just red. And then… and then…”

Kryzalid felt a pressure on both of her shoulders. Huge hands, hugging her. Arms the size of tree trunks.

“It’s fine, it’s fine. You ain’t alone anymore, Mimi.”

She reciprocated the hug, leaning into the huge man’s chest.

“…you’re right. Thanks, Dobbie.”

“Don’t call me Dobbie ever again. I’ll let it slide just once ‘cause you’re drained.”

Robin stared at the ceiling, deep in thought. That sequence of events, the ‘truth’ behind Kryzalid’s birth… didn’t explain anything. Didn’t connect any dots. A sob story with no practical value. So, what was even the point of being there? Of having endured the company of those lowlifes? No, there had to be something more to it. It couldn’t just be that. Yet, she had to ask, she felt the burning need to press further.

“So, do you want revenge?”

Yet, Mimi didn’t seem ready to leave Dobrio’s arms. She grabbed him tighter, her eyes turned wet again. Then, a breath, a long breath, her tears wiped out one more time.

“Revenge is just a delicious side dish. As a main course, all it does is leaving you empty and craving for more. You can’t have revenge as your goal, if you want to remain sane. That’s why, for me, revenge is just a little extra, a plus. What I really want… is to stop whoever did this to me, so that… so that there won’t be any more Kryzalids. I don’t want anyone else to… to go through what I went through. And the fact that the culprit is still out there, living their best life…”

She crunched her fist, gritted her teeth.

“…makes my skin crawl. I swear, I’ll fucking kill them, no matter what.”

Kryzalid sat on the cot, her hand still closed.

“Now, the plants. You still don’t get it, right, Robbie?”

Robin nodded, fidgeting with her fingers.

“Yes. I… fail to see the connection between them and the Peacekeepers.”

“Ever ever heard of a kill switch?”

“A kill…”

Robin gasped, her eyes wide open.

“Are you saying… that Peacekeepers have a bomb planted in their heads? But that’s…”

“Closer. It’s not a bomb. It’s a parasite.”

Kryzalid pushed her index on her forehead, tapped on it twice.

“Yes, a tiny, tiny parasite plant – placed in the depths of their nasal cavity, almost between their eyes, clinging to their brain with short, stubby tendrils. A parasite plant that can instantly bloom or detonate in a localized explosion…”

Her hands mimicked a violin, the act of playing the bow on imaginary strings.

“…when given the right push.”