Deathwish, Part 4: The Wailing Chamber

Part 1: Cinderfell
Part 2: Deal With a Vorpal
Part 3: Calmsquare Cantina

Oracle walked towards Alicia, who was teary eyed as she hugged a confused Dapper. “Dapper? Did you know this human?”

“I… suppose? I was able to remember her name, as it just so happens...”

Oracle looked at Alicia. “Oh, so you must have met him only a few days ago, then. Why didn’t you just say so?”

Alicia wiped her face with her sleeve as she turned to Oracle. “No! It was years ago! YEARS!”

Both Oracle and Dapper laughed, Oracle most of all. “Silly Alicia, that’s impossible! There is no way Dapper could have remembered something after such a long time! The longest memory for a Vorpal I’ve ever seen was a month, and that by itself is a legend I have trouble convincing others is real.”

Dapper scoffed. “A month? How preposterous...”

Oracle gestured towards Dapper disbelief. “See?”

Alicia sighed. She knew the truth, and that was enough. She didn’t need to convince anyone else, not even other humans. But now her plans were both less clear, more clear, and above all more exciting. “Dapper… now that I found you, can we explore the Inverse? Just like we did so long ago?”

Dapper smiled, doing a bow with an exaggerated flourish of his hat in hand. “Well, I don’t see why not. It’s such a strange sight to see a human in the Inverse NOT trying to murder everything and anything they find.”

As Alicia was about to ask why he thought so little of humans, she heard an explosion as the top part of the Cantina erupted into splinters, the building collapsing on whoever may have been inside. She almost swore it startled her so suddenly. “In the name of…! I thought the fighting was over!”

Dapper extended his legs as he got a better look around the area, then immediately pulled back down as Alicia glimpsed a large projectile go screeching through the air around where he had just been. “Yep, we got humans… Templars, by the looks of it.”

Oracle suddenly got very tense, rummaging through he pockets till she produced a pad of paper. “Ok, um… see anyone on this list? Redeye? Mindmelter? Contortionist?”

Dapper sighed. “I was up there for two seconds, Oracle. I just saw a group of humans, pulling some very menacing equipment. Some artillery, obviously, but something… else… ”

Oracle produced a folded piece of paper, handing it to Dapper. “Did it look like that?”

“Yes… a large vat, on wheels with all kinds of appendages. What is it?”

Oracle’s skin went white, an almost comical change in appearance if she didn’t look so terrified. “By the rift… they are coming for us.”

Alicia was confused. “What do you mean?”

“That vat… I’m a bit of a record keeper for us Vorpals, something you may or may not know. I keep track of existential threats as best I can. And I know we already lost someone to that machine, a Vorpal entirely vanished and never seen or heard from again.”

Alicia began to understand the gravity of the situation. “You mean… they permanently killed a Vorpal?”

“And now they are here. As dangerous as it seems, we must destroy it if we can. We can’t allow them to roam the Inverse and catch other Vorpals unaware. Alicia, please leave us, we can’t spend time protecting you.”

“No way! I’m going to help!”

Grector, who had been remaining silent and motionless the entire time, spoke suddenly. “That’s clearly a lie. Not only are you unable to help, why would you help? You would be a race traitor at that point. You clearly wish to sell us out.”

Alicia stomped her foot, turning to Grector with fury in her eyes. “Dapper said Templars. They are too far in the distance for me to make out, but that sounds a lot like the Enlightened. I don’t know much about them, but I know my country is at war with them. I want them defeated just like all of you do… what’s that saying? Enemy of my enemy is my friend? And I keep trying to tell you, I’m not an enemy of Vorpals to begin with. At least, I don’t want to be.”

Everyone was silent, Grector most strikingly as all as he stalked right up to Alicia. She shivered slightly under his imposing presence as he leaned down to speak to her closely, voice just above a whisper. “What exactly did you have in mind?”

Alicia smiled. “Just leave it to me.”

After running through her plan, she swallowed her fear and marched straight up to the procession of casters. They didn’t even see her at first, but thankfully the kinetic and gravity casters operating the casting-based artillery didn’t fire at her. The artillery itself was a trebuchet device, but shortened and reinforced with kinetics. In addition, it needed less windup as having gravity casters to manipulate the mass of the counterweight meant they could achieve much faster speeds. Alicia wish she didn’t know so much about weapons of war, but it was required learning in her school.

The men were definitely Enlightened. Gold stitches with a white base was not an easy color scheme to forget, and the ones wearing full armor had the roaring lion insignia as well. The man that must be the commander stepped forward, cape billowing as he stabbed an imposing broadsword in the ground while his hands rested on the pommel. “Young lady… what in the name of all that is decent are you doing here?”

Alicia measured her tone before responding. The Enlightened were known to be perfectly willing to kill anyone, even women and children, if they considered it as necessary to further their goals. “My name is Alicia. I hail from the Pyrox Kingdom, and I’m here to warn you not to go any further. The Vorpals beyond this point will not be defeated as easily as you think.”

The commander laughed, more genuinely amused rather than condescendingly. “Really? So, you believe we are here to simply fight Vorpals? Move aside, child. You are interrupting incredibly important tasks, assigned to us by Truth himself.”

Alicia tried to silence the voices in her head telling her to run, to do as the Enlightened said, anything besides what she was currently doing. The commander was growing more impatient with every passing second. He picked his sword back up, and walked over to Alicia, towering over her by several feet. “Girl… I said move. Or I will move you myself.”

Alicia stood firm, as the commander drew his sword back for a swing that would certainly be lethal. But it never completed it’s arc, instead being discarded along with a detached arm as Dapper sprung out of her backpack and sliced with inhuman agility.

The man staggered back in shock. Before he could even speak, Dapper had impaled him three more times, once using the commander’s own sword, and twice with Dapper’s arms sharpened into spikes and extended with sudden speed. The commander fell without another sound beyond choking blood, as dark mist began to fill the tranquil grass.

Oracle and Grector had already begun their assault from different directions, avoiding the heavy artillery as it couldn’t turn towards them in time. The panicked resistance of the Enlightened lasted for only a minute before Dapper, Oracle, and especially Grector had crushed, stabbed, or snapped the necks of every single Enlightened, leaving over a dozen Enlightened corpses scattered on the ground.

Dapper gave a hearty laugh. “That look on his face when I jumped out! Oh, such confidence replaced with such defeat… priceless!”

Alicia, though not exactly displeased with killing Enlightened, did not take the same joy in the extinguishing of human life as Dapper did. She watched the large amount of black mist on the ground, congregating around the dead Enlightened as their bodies vanished entirely. A somber reminder of what could very easily happen to her. “Yeah… I’m glad the plan worked. They did not expect a three pronged attack from Vorpals, that was obvious.”

Alicia walked over and observed the vat as Oracle and Grector joined her and Dapper after finishing off their final enemies. “Hmm… this thing is labeled Wailing Chamber. Does that mean anything to you three?”

Oracle immediately pulled out her diagram and wrote down the name. “That’s new… they must have properly named it. Alicia, do you know how this machine works? What does it actually do?”

Alicia shook her head, peering into the small viewing window and seeing only an empty inside. “No, it looks like some secret Enlightened project. But that has no more meaning than what you already know. You said they already got someone with this… thing?”

“Yes, I don’t know how long ago. But it was a Vorpal name Luminari. I do remember one thing about it… the screaming. The constant, intense screaming. Then silence.”

While her comments on the machine were disturbing to say the least, another thought occurred to Alicia. “How can you remember who it was, but not how long ago?”

Dapper stepped in, explaining with an air of slightly pompous authority on the matter. “Alicia, Alicia… you see, Vorpal memory is a complicated subject. Obviously, any sentient being requires memories to function and evolve, and that includes Vorpals. We can remember other Vorpals without any issue, and we can remember the entirety of the Inverse as if we were long time denizens of every single corner, whether or not we have been there recently. But passage of time is something we don’t require, so we don’t remember it all! Surely you humans don’t bother remembering things you don’t need, correct?”

“Human memory doesn’t work like that. We don’t choose what we remember, though we try many times to improve our memory of things we do wish to remember. Besides, how do you know all these things about memory? You need to remember those facts too, and as you said a sentient being needs to remember things like language and how to perform basic actions to survive properly. What are the determining factors for what a Vorpal can and can’t remember over an extended period of time?”

Dapper smiled and looked very confident as he began to respond, before stopping with finger in the air, suddenly not so sure of himself as he frowned. “Well… you see… um…”

He sat down, cross legged on the ground. “It’s really such that… well, considering the… huh. I don’t know. You really know how to pose the tough questions, don’t you, Alicia? Are you a scholar in human society? You’ve mentioned something about being several years old, so maybe it’s your extensive life experiences that inform your vast wisdom.”

Alicia sighed. She didn’t feel like having all of her past conversations with Dapper again, instead wanting to talk about something new. “No, not really… In fact, I don’t really fit in with, er, humans. And I’m not old by human standards, either. That’s part of the reason I wanted to see you again, Dapper. I don’t have a lot of friends back in the real- er, the Outverse.”

Dapper ran up and slung an arm around Alicia’s shoulder, shortening himself so he was the same height as her. “Hey! Don’t bring the mood down! We just had a great victory against… what did you call them again?”

“...The Enlightened.”

“Right! The Ignite End! Whatever, what they called themselves doesn’t matter! Grector… if you would?”

With a slam that startled Alicia, Grector jumped on top of the vat and crushed it as if it was a tin can. Dapper gave a greatly exaggerated laugh before lifting Alicia up and placing her on his shoulders. “Now… you said you wanted to explore? Let’s explore! There’s an entire Inverse to see!”

With that, Dapper tore off into the distance at a sprint with an eternally grumpy Grector and slightly amused Oracle right behind him.

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Thanks for reading! If you are enjoying the story, you might also enjoy my novel! It’s set in the same fictional universe, but follows different characters.

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