Vigor Mortis

"…So then she claimed she killed Inquisitor Elliot because he discovered a working method to extract the souls from her body, and heavily implied she did so via spellcasting, despite the collar."

I finish my verbal report to Warden Manus, a full four days after I penned and submitted a written report on exactly the same subject. His stern and withering glare is completely ineffective with my attention captured by the tapping and skittering at the back of his office cupboard. An oily, disturbingly sweet scent wafts around the room, filling me with the urge to vomit.

"And you're confident in this information?" he presses.

"As confident as I reasonably can be, sir," I confirm.

"Hmm... which is quite good in your case," he mutters, and I'm a bit taken back by the unexpected compliment. "If this is true it's more information than we've gotten from the Epsilon since she got here. That said, while Inquisitor Elliot spent a lot of time trying to free those captured souls, he never once reported to me about a reliable method. Just theories, most of which failed and the rest of which were denied for violating Epsilon protocols."

Which means they would have endangered Vita's life. Elliot sounds like such a charming fellow. …I shouldn't think ill of the dead, though, and certainly not of someone I've never met. I will the thought away.

"There's also the question of how she could possibly cast with the collar on," I point out.

"Hmm... yes," he agrees. "The collar enchantments are powerful in their simplicity. They detect mana entering a soul and give a warning zap for trace amounts, knocking the target unconscious for anything more than that. No mana in the soul, no casting."

"Could she be immune to the knockout effect?" I wonder. "Her file listed a lot of resistances to physical trauma."

"No, we tested that. She recovers faster than most, but she's not immune. Your manual collar activation should function just fine."

I nod. There's an emergency rune on my armor which, when used, sends out a pulse of mana that activates every prisoner collar in a wide range, knocking them all unconscious. It works regardless of whether or not mana is being channeled by the prisoner, and is pretty much indiscriminate.

"If I were to hazard a hypothesis, perhaps something about the odd shape of her soul tricks the enchantment," Manus grunts. "I don't know exactly how, but it's possible. I will get our metamancy team to look into it."

I nod, not really having anything to add and admittedly still distracted by the wretched pattering sound of claws on wood, hard joints scraping and clicking with movement.

"In any case, excellent work, Inquisitor Jelisaveta. More guards will be stationed on the Epsilon floor until we get to the bottom of this. Brush up on your nonlethal takedowns and double down on magic resistance training. Dismissed."

"Understood sir, I—"

That awful, patter-scratch noise breaks my focus again, and I sigh.

"Sorry, sir, can I actually see behind your cabinet for a second?"

My boss' confusion is obvious, but he nods in assent and lets me start dragging pieces of his office furniture away from the wall. Behind them skitters the quickly-growing colony of cockroaches that I've been failing to ignore since I got here. A thought comes to mind before I start to kill them, an insidious thought that I think I'll regret but can't ignore.

"Actually, do you have like, a bucket or something, sir? With a lid?"

Surprisingly, he does, so I collect every last one of the damn roaches, pulling them in with a simple kineticism spell whenever they skitter out of my reach.

"Fuck, how long have those been there?" Manus curses.

"Just a few days, sir," I answer. "Must have tagged along with something you brought in from the shipment."

"Disgusting," he grunts.

Well, so are humans, and also so is basically everything else, but I don't disagree. Cockroaches breed fast and like to group together, which means their smell gets particularly awful if you leave them alone. There's always going to be the sound and stench of bugs, though. It's wretched, but inescapable.

...Except in Vita's cell, now that I think about it. Hmm.

"What the fuck are you doing with those?" Manus grunts.

"Taking them somewhere they won't stink up the place when they die," I tell him. "Frankly, sir, I'd like to request official permission to smack anybody that squishes a roach somewhere public. These things are wretched."

He chuckles, and so with live insects squirming around in a bucket I excuse myself from my superior's office and make my way to the Beta security floor. Technically, I'm not even lying; the disposal method I'm thinking of won't smell at all.

I'm heading to a Beta-3 prisoner named Melissa, a young girl that could arguably place pretty high in a competition to decide the saddest and unluckiest history of our many unfortunate inmates. Melissa was the daughter of a successful potter who got paid a handsome sum by a noble that fancied his work to move to Skyhope. At the ripe age of eleven, her whole family hitched a ride with a Hunter-guarded trade caravan. Pretty standard stuff, really. It's about the safest way to travel unless you're lucky enough to have a contingent of Templars going the same direction you are.

Without warning, a surge of predators smashed into the caravan and a group of scavengers cleaned up the rest. With the exception of Melissa, they all got slaughtered, and against all odds she managed to drag herself all the way down the rest of the road and make it to Skyhope.

Of course, the first time I heard that story I thought to myself 'well why the fuck is she in prison then, the poor thing?' There are better places to go if you just need to learn how to control the kind of dangerous talent she must have had to survive that. She's obviously a victim, not a criminal!

"Melissa? It's Jelisaveta. Is it alright if I come in?" I ask, knocking on the door.

"Ah! C-come in!" she warbles.

I let myself inside, the door shutting, locking, and watertight-sealing behind me. My boots snap against the sticky ground, the sparse, humid room devoid of a bed or chairs at the prisoner's request. Instead it has a few dolls and other children's toys, carefully crafted from clay rather than wood or chitin. At the edge of the room a gelatinous glob of sky-colored liquid quickly reshapes itself into a humanoid form, trying and failing to put on wool-woven clothing without it sinking inside her form and dissolving into nothing. The corner of the room has piles of similar half-destroyed shirts and skirts, and Melissa whimpers as she inadvertently adds another to their ranks.

"Sorry! S-sorry, I'm trying, I promise I'm trying, b-but I just—"

"Hey! Hey, it's okay!" I reassure her, stopping and holding up my hands in a placating gesture. "You don't have to dress up just for little 'ol me!"

"I should be able to!" she whines. "I know I can, it's just so hard!"

The golden ooze quivers with distress, finishing up the formation of fingers and the contours of a human girl's face. The trick behind her story is that it leaves out the part where the entirely-talentless Melissa did not, arguably, survive the attack at all. By most definitions Melissa died, but was 'brought back to life' when an animavorous ozoid failed to completely digest her soul. Depending on who you ask, Melissa either became an ozoid... or the ozoid just believes itself to be Melissa.

My position is that it doesn't fucking matter, because she's a person named Melissa either way.

"Hey, I'm serious, don't worry about it!" I insist. "I'm not here to get you to practice anything. I got you a treat!"

"A treat?" she chirps, forgetting to maintain her legs and flowing quickly towards me. "What kind of treat?"

"A weird kind," I answer, grinning behind my helmet as she curiously blinks liquid facsimiles of eyelids over sightless, false eyes.

Melissa tends to put people off with her not-quite-human shape, but I absolutely love it. She has no skin, no blood, no organs… her body is just a memory of a shape imprinted on the soul of a child eaten by a monster. And I think she is fucking adorable, ecstatically so. Her form is nothing but homogenous liquid, not even containing the disgusting zoo of microorganisms that I have to suffer through every time I take a drink of water! It feels almost like looking at someone from before I got my talent, and that just… holy shit. No disgusting pores vomiting minuscule beads of sweat, no spiderweb of capillaries pulsing under the skin, no fucking face bugs— she's a genuine joy to look at, unlike almost everything else in my life.

"That's suspicious," she accuses. "You're being suspicious, Paris."

My smile drops.

"...I'm Jelisaveta," I remind her.

"Oh," she says, her form starting to lose shape for a second before snapping back. "Oh, right."

And there's the cloud blocking the rainbow. Melissa was eaten when she was only eleven, according to her. She got moved to Site 4 as soon as she was discovered, and since then she's been here for thirteen years. She's nearly my age, but she's shown almost no mental development over that time. Her memory has more holes than a net. She's played with the same toys, lived in the same room, and struggled with the exact same problems for thirteen fucking years and has hardly even realized it. Every year we apparently throw her a birthday party, and every year she still believes she's eleven.

She's perpetually stuck at security level three despite how desperately and willingly she wants to help, because she can't learn. Even though her body seems capable of becoming impermeable she can't hold herself that way long enough to not be a contact hazard to nearly every organic substance.

And worst of all, sometimes she's just barely lucid enough to know it.

"S-so, anyway, the surprise!" I rally, reaching into the bucket and pulling out a squirming little cockroach. "Ta-da!"

"W-what!?" Melissa shrieks, slipping backwards. "Jelisaveta! That's not funny! I can't believe you got me bugs!"

I grimace.

"You, um... you mentioned once that you kind of miss eating those forest bugs, didn't you?" I remind her hesitantly.

"No! I mean, kind of? I just ate them because I had to..."

"It's okay to like eating weird things, you know," I tell her.

"No it's not," she mumbles, turning her head away from me. "I'm not supposed to touch that kind of stuff."

I take a deep breath, letting it out slowly to psych myself up. Yeah, I know she's not.

"Try it, please?" I press, holding it out to her.

Hesitantly but obediently, she reaches out and plucks the wiggling cockroach from my fingers, being careful not to touch my armor. I hate myself a little for it, knowing in advance that she genuinely doesn't want to but is so used to following orders from Inquisitor-uniformed Templars that she'll do it anyway. But I have to know.

Sure enough, the cockroach slips inside her gelatinous body and immediately starts to disintegrate. I keep my eyes carefully locked on its tiny soul, as well as the only marginally larger cracked black orb that is Melissa's own soul. It's a damaged, battered thing, like an ancient stone tablet breaking and fraying away. I watch as the bug’s soul is pulled in towards her, dissolving into motes of dust which flow inside, ever so slightly working to repair that damage.

"Oh, Watcher, this is so good!" Melissa announces. "Th-this is really good!"

I have to quickly set the bucket on the floor as suddenly Melissa flows half her body into it, absorbing all the rest of the captured insects at once. It all absorbs into her, and as I feared her soul looks undeniably… healthier.

Fuck.

"O-oh, that...! Do you have any m-more?" Melissa begs. "Please tell me you have more!"

I genuinely have no idea if this counts as a sin. Does the Mistwatcher care about cockroach souls…? I mean, it would be a pretty weird heaven if all the monsters the Mistwatcher has made to challenge us just show up and try to kill us all over again in the afterlife, so I believe only thinking creatures go there. I'd need to chat with a Preacher to be sure. Either way, this is definitely against Melissa's containment policy.

"Of course, Melissa," I tell her anyway. "I don't have any right now, but I can come back later with more if you keep this a secret, okay?"

She shrinks down a little, squishing in on herself.

"That's easy," she mumbles. "Can't tell anyone something I don't remember, right?"

Fuck, what awful words. Damnit. Well, at least it helps me feel less guilty about adding to my sin tally. I may not know if the Mistwatcher cares about cockroaches, but he has to care about Melissa. If this is the only way...

"Well, someday you will remember," I say, as much of a prayer as a promise, "so when you do, keep it between us, okay?"

"Okay, Paris."

It hurts, but I don't have the heart to correct her again. Instead I quickly clean all of the leftover bits of her out of the bucket, unlock the cell, and exit. I take the long way to the cafeteria, my mind churning as I wolf down some breakfast and grab seconds to take to Vita, as is my routine. Victoria—and most of the people here, really—seem to really enjoy the food, the Church having at least been kind enough to supply a skilled chef to a facility where the cafeteria is literally the only place to eat. ...Unless you eat cockroaches, I guess. Anyway, this translates to me absolutely despising the food, because what everyone else considers a delicious pinch of salt, I consider criminal assault. To my tongue, everything is almost painfully over-seasoned. But like with most things, I'm used to it. That's pretty much the mantra of my life.

When I open Vita's cell, I'm surprised to find her not only awake but doing push-ups. Her little stuffed crow is sitting on her back like an adorable training buddy. Shit, that's funny. I'm glad I could see this today.

"Hey, Jelisa," Vita grunts, a thin sheen of sweat coating her body.

"Hey, Vita," I greet back. "Bread and stew day."

"Yup," she grins, collecting her stuffed animal with her elbow-tentacle before hopping to her feet. "Smells nostalgic."

"Oh?" I ask, handing her the bowl and spoon. "How so?"

She takes a deep breath, seeming to relish in the simple ability to feed herself even after having been doing it for half a tenday.

"They pretty much always served stew at the hunter's guild," she explains, rapidly wolfing down multiple bites without spilling a single drop or dropping a single crumb. The third eye in her face and the eye of her soul point my way as her two 'normal' eyes focus on the meal.

"Oh yeah, you used to be a hunter," I comment.

She snorts.

"Yeah, kinda hard to remember, isn't it? Since I've been a prisoner for so much longer. It's funny. When I first realized I could fucking rip souls out of things I figured the best way I could use it was against monsters. Get stuck with a bad talent, use it to protect people anyway, you know? Lotta fucking good that did me. Getting to eat monster souls was nice, at least."

"And eating other souls made your soul stronger, right?" I ask without really thinking about it.

Vita stops eating for a moment to flash me a horrible, all-too-knowing grin.

"That it does. I have to say, as a former orphan, it really does the body and mind a lot of good to stop starving all the time. Nothing is shittier than having to live entirely off of the kindness of strangers, Jelisa."

"...Strangers can be very kind," I protest.

"They can be cruel, too," she counters. "Not everyone is lucky enough to run into someone that will actually help. How long was she starving before you showed up?"

Of course she saw all that somehow. Of course!

"How much do you know about Melissa?" I ask her.

"Is that the kid's name?" Vita grunts, using the bread to clean the inside of the stew bowl before eating it. "Bits and pieces. She's kind of like me, but mostly not really. Her problem, I think, is that she doesn't have a brain. Mistwatcher soul shards are designed to work with brains; they hook right up to and intertwine with part of the noggin after being put in a body. The soul requires the brain to grow, and the soul has to grow in order for her to grow. Unless the soul grows, the soul can't contain more stuff, and if the soul can't contain more stuff it can't hold... well, anything. Memories, skills, you name it. Take a soul out of the environment it's supposed to work in and it just doesn't work as well. In fact, it usually degrades over time. Go figure. So she needs some other way to get a bigger soul."

I blink in surprise. I think that might be the most words I've ever heard Vita say in one sitting before.

"...You're saying it will work," I summarize.

"I guarantee it," Vita confirms damningly. "Honestly, I could fix that girl in a heartbeat. And not in like, a creepy way or whatever, but actually fix her. I've done it before on a vrothizo victim."

"Huh?" I ask.

"Oh, didn't you know?" Vita asks, smirking again. "Vrothizo eat souls too. It's kind of weird how the Mistwatcher teaches that souls are sacred and yet lets so many animavores run around, don't you think?"

Shit. Is she goading me? She doesn't feel like she's lying.

"Can you imagine how many Templars must have died with damaged souls?" Vita continues. "Or hell, I bet there are a bunch of vrothizo big enough to swallow someone whole. Not a single bit of soul undigested. No afterlife for them, I guess."

There absolutely are vrothizo big enough to swallow people whole. I knew people that were swallowed whole. They… no.

"Surely that just means lost or damaged souls can still reach the afterlife…?" I hedge.

"Then what the fuck is your problem with necromancy!?" Vita snaps.

I stiffen a bit, startled at the outburst. Still… hmm. Is that a contradiction? Either soul damage affects a soul in the afterlife and the Mistwatcher allows that, or it doesn't and that should extend to 'damage' dealt by cognimancy and necromancy. Right? Or is that a false dichotomy? Is there some fundamental difference between removing part of the soul and altering it with a spell?

"Well, I guess it's nice that you actually feel conflicted about this," Vita grunts.

"It's a good point," I tell her. "The problem is that I hardly know anything about animancy. I'll have to talk to some people. Preachers, better Inquisitors… and maybe some other animancers, I suppose."

Setting the now-clean bowl aside, she moves her stuffed animal from tentacle to lap, her face blank but inner eye twitching with thought.

"...I should probably get going," I manage after a while. "Other people to check up on. See you at lunch?"

I gather her bowl and silverware, turning to leave, but Vita speaks up unexpectedly.

"No," she protests quickly. "Sorry. Could you… stay for a bit?"

Surprised, I give her a slow nod, staying put. She seems a bit on edge, but after another moment of silence she speaks up.

"Do you think I deserve to be here, Jelisa?"

The question takes me by surprise. In all honesty, I don't know if I ever thought about it before. I probably should have, I guess, but...

"…It's not really my place to make those judgments," I answer lamely.

She scoffs.

"No, you don't know enough to understand the question, do you?" she grumbles. "You've read about it, but you've never seen what this place is, not really."

Subtle hints learned over many years quickly put me on edge. Her muscles tense, her body prepares sweat in anticipation of action. I feel, all of a sudden, like I am in grave danger. It's as if I'm in the forest again, surrounded by greater predators.

"Right now, as we speak, four of your coworkers are torturing Capita," Vita growls.

My brain halts at that, unable to form a coherent response.

"What...?" I ask dumbly.

"You heard me," she says. "She hasn't broken yet, but at this rate she will. In more ways than one."

"But… why?"

"Because she caused the Skyhope perception event," Vita answers frankly. "They want her to spill accomplices, hideout locations. They haven't caught everyone involved. So she's screaming up there, with a biomancer on standby to fix her broken fucking fingers."

I... holy shit. How does she know any of this? But I mean, if there are still people involved in the perception event at large I guess we do need to—

"You know what?" she snaps, cutting off my thoughts. "Sure! Fine. I'll grant you that's maybe not the worst reason. But I got fucking tortured too, and they did it to me because they wanted to kill. My. Family."

"That's not—"

"It is!" she roars, jumping to her feet. "This right here is—LOOK AT ME!"

I jolt in terror, peeling my gaze off her face and down to where she's pointing, the core of her soul. In one tendril is a black, anemic soul, not unlike Melissa's.

"This is Angelien," Vita hisses. "She is my sister. And I will never. Ever. Let you fucks take her. It doesn't matter how much you starve me or waterboard me or tear off my fingernails or break my bones. And they have done all those things and more! Fucking look at me and tell me I'm lying!"

She's not. She's really, actually not.

"All I wanted, all I fucking wanted was to feed my goddamn family, and this whole wretched island has been fighting me every single step of the way! All because of mindless cattle like you that worship the fucking farmer! You're not content just letting us starve, no, you have to choke us as soon as we find a bite to eat. Well, I'm done. I'm fucking done! It's over! I've waited two years for this chance, and you finally fucked up! You sent them right to me, and gave them the perfect excuse to bring the big guns!"

Oh. Oh, no. The horrible smile of this five-foot-tall girl somehow makes me feel so small. This is more than just a tantrum. My hand hovers over my collar-activation rune, heart pounding as my senses sharpen in the face of death, pushing me to the brink.

"Do it, Jelly," Vita sneers. "I'll show you what I showed him."

Shit, shit, shit, shit.

"...I thought you said I get to live?" I stall, desperately trying to think of a way to de-escalate.

"Oh, you do," Vita says with haunting sweetness. "But only you."

A vibration rocks through the facility, shaking from the first floor all the way down here to the bottom. An explosion? Doesn't matter. I don't hesitate, pouring mana into the collar activation rune. I feel a pulse, a chill, a loud cracking noise... then nothing. Vita takes a long, deep breath, drinking joyfully in my impotence.

"Release me," she orders.

I don't do that—because why the fuck would I do that—but impossibly, it doesn't matter. Her bindings move under their own power, lattices of soul energy snaking through them. Clasps undo themselves, bindings loosen, locks twist from the inside without a key. I try to activate the rune again but Vita's collar pops straight off, its enchantment broken. Everything we foolishly thought kept this girl locked up clatters to the ground. I rush forward, praying that by some miracle I can grab her and choke her out before dying, but I only run face-first into her outstretched hand. An iron grip splinters the front of my helmet as a tendril growing from the elbow of the same arm wraps itself around my neck. I try to peel away her fingers, strike at the inside of her arm, twist her joints, do anything, but her tiny, twig-like limb may as well be the Watcher's own for all I can affect it.

"Jelly, I like you, I really do," she quips, still holding a fucking stuffed animal under one arm. "But we are not at the stage where I will let you hug me."

I scream as her grip tightens, jagged chunks of chitin stabbing into me as my faceplate shatters.

"There we go. I put all that work into remembering faces and you hardly ever show yours. Open."

Dragging me to the door, I watch as Vita rips out a sliver of her own soul and shoves it in the locking mechanism, which then clicks ajar as commanded, pulled from the inside by a veritable skeleton key. Another locked door is immediately in front of her, and beyond it are four Templars waiting to attack and subdue her. They have no chance of winning.

"D-don't kill them!" I shout at her, blood dripping into my mouth. "Their names are Sarah, Hau, Kennith, and John! Kennith supports his ex-wife and daughter back in Skyhope, Hau—"

"—Watched and did nothing," Vita hisses, four tentacles piercing through the wall and returning with four familiar souls. No, no no no no no. This can't be happening.

"Use your fucking eyes, Jelisa!" Vita presses, tossing me away as she shoves a soul fragment in the next door. "Open! You are the only one, the only one who raised a hand to stop a beating here. What does that say about your organization!?"

Another explosion rocks the upper floors as Vita's soul-holding tendrils reach up towards her wide-open mouth. Oh, Watcher, no! She's about to eat them!

"Stop!" I beg. "Please, Vita. You… you're better than this. Aren't you?"

She narrows three of her eyes at me, stepping over to where I kneel helplessly on the ground and squatting in front of me.

"Only you," she promises again. "As far as I'm concerned, if it's a good enough death for a cockroach, it's good enough for a Templar."

She drops the souls down her throat and I watch in horror as the people I knew dissolve away into nothing.