Posts Tagged ‘ancient Egypt’

OBSERVATION RESUMES

This time when he woke up in the lab, Richard was prepared for the sense of dislocation. What he wasn’t prepared for was the look in Faloneth’s eyes as she considered him, the d’ha’taan cradled in the palm of her hand. She looked – Richard searched for the right word – hungry.

After a time that seemed like eternity but was surely only a few seconds, she stood up, walked to a counter that ran the length of the wall, turned and leaned against it. She rolled the d’ha’taan in her hand again, as if considering, before she spoke. “Very informative, Richard.”

At his blank stare, she continued. “Oh, not what I learned. Quite the opposite, in fact.” She held up the blue, teardrop-shaped crystal. “Do you know what this is, Richard? How it works?”

“It looks like one of the stones my wife’s masseuse uses. Trying to help me get in touch with my feminine side, are you?” Richard quipped.

Faloneth’s smile in no way indicated that she appreciated his humor. “We shall see how much longer your impudence persists. The d’ha’taan is an amplifier. Its crystalline structure enhances my ability to walk through your mind; though, as I told you, it has never been necessary to use it on a human before. Do you know what happened when I used it, in its least intrusive configuration, on your mind, Richard?”

“We started singing old campfire songs together?”

“Nothing happened. Less than nothing. It was like gliding over a frozen lake, with all of the things I am looking for hidden in the depths below. Not even the tedious minutiae that most humans are perennially preoccupied with came clear. Why do you suppose that is, Richard?”

Richard looked at the crystal with genuine interest. It really did look like the things that those New Age spas used, claiming to be able to tune clients’ auras and such. He’d always dismissed it all as so much bunk. Perhaps, as the saying went, there was a kernel of truth even in the most outlandish ideas. He looked at Faloneth. “Nadine has accused me of being empty-headed occasionally. Maybe she was right?”

The intensity of the anger that crossed Faloneth’s face bordered on insanity and left no doubt that Richard had struck a chord with his taunting banter. The question was whether or not it would prompt her to do what they wanted. And if it did, would Richard survive?

She looked at the d’ha’taan, which glowed softly for a moment. “It is reconfigured,” she said, looking at Richard again. “In a moment, I will know who created you. I will know how it was done. It is regrettable that you will not survive the process. There are certain things that I would have enjoyed exploring further.” She stepped toward Richard, reached out to place the d’ha’taan on his forehead. In spite of himself, Richard flinched, closing his eyes.

“Look at the damn restraints, Richard!” yelled Alea Chantal. “We’ve got to get the hell out of here.”

Richard opened his eyes, trying to crane his head to look in all directions at the same time. He saw Carlos lying on the other side of the room. He was glassy-eyed, obviously dead. The look on his face suggested it hadn’t been a pleasant way to go.

“The restraints, Richard. We don’t have much time.” The urgency in Alea Chantal’s voice helped Richard pull himself together. He looked at the clasp over his left wrist, which immediately began to open. As soon as he could get that hand free he shifted his focus to the right, then each anklet, as Alea Chantal and Sarsoneth worked through him to manipulate a power he still found it hard to believe he possessed.

As soon as the process was complete Richard leapt out of the chair. Faloneth lay to his right, crumpled on the floor but still breathing. The blue crystal, dark now and dead-looking, lay beside her.

“Richard, go out the door in front of you and turn right,” Sarsoneth said. “I was able to extract the layout of this complex from Carlos’ mind before he died. I can guide you to the exit.”

Richard didn’t have to be told twice. He was through the door and running down the corridor in an instant.

“Right again at the next juncture, Richard. You should be prepared for a number of disturbing sights beyond the next door.”

Sarsoneth didn’t elaborate and Richard wondered what a disembodied emotionless voice would consider “disturbing.” He turned right, came to the door and opened it. The sight that greeted him only confirmed his initial belief that Sarsoneth had a talent for understatement. If he hadn’t been so terrified and desperate to get out of there, he might have taken time to throw up. A row of ten small cells lined each side of the corridor, after which a second door closed off the passageway. There was a dead body in each cell. From the anguished expressions on their faces, they had died the same way that Carlos had.

The fact that he had almost certainly been instrumental in their deaths, however, wasn’t what made Richard feel sick. It was their physical condition. With one or two exceptions, they were horribly deformed. It was as if someone had taken them apart and put them back together again without much consideration of what went where.

“Faloneth’s genetic experiments, Richard. You did them a favor.” Alea Chantal’s voice was gentle in his head.

“What… what was she trying to do? What did she want?” Richard choked out as he covered the distance to the second door, trying not to look at the wrecks in the cells as he passed.

“You.”

Richard opened the second door, stepped through and quickly closed it behind him. He leaned against it for a moment. “Okay, not going to think about that right now. Where next?”

“Turn left at the end of this corridor, Richard.” Sarsoneth directed. “There will be a stairway. Two flights up there will be a door with a DNA scanner. It may take a moment, but we will convince it that you are Carlos. It should allow us to exit. I am not certain how much longer Faloneth will remain incapacitated so it would be wise to continue to move quickly.”

Richard had already reached the stairs and was pounding up them. “I’m not exactly dawdling here, you know. I saw the look in her eyes.” A thought occurred to him. “If you took me past that corridor of horrors to convince me she’s crazy, it wasn’t necessary.” He skidded to a stop at the second landing.

“That was not my intention, Richard. It was simply the most direct route to this exit. Please look toward the scanner above the door.”

Richard looked up, saw another crystal. It wasn’t shaped anything like the one Faloneth had used on him.

“Different purpose,” Sarsoneth responded to Richard’s unasked question. The crystal glowed more brightly for a moment. “I believe we can leave now. Please try the door, Richard.”

As Richard pushed the door open cautiously, he was amazed to hear familiar sounds. Stepping through, he found himself on the sidewalk of a busy city street. Pedestrians hurried by, dressed in a wide variety of business and casual attire. There was a chill in the air and most people wore light jackets of one kind or another. No one paid any attention to him.

Richard gaped at the historic landmark rising a few blocks away. “We’re in London.”

OBSERVATION PAUSED BY REQUEST

Enquiry Response: The Member is correct; the Yannoneth use of crystals, while not unique, is one of the most extensive documented. My thanks to the Member for that reference from the Universal Repository.

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OBSERVATION RESUMES

Richard was back in the grove overlooking the lake. He leapt up from his seated position by the tree. “Alea Chantal! Sarsoneth! Where the hell are you?”

“Right here Richard.” Alea Chantal stepped into view from a shadowy spot beside a cluster of birch trees a few feet away.

“That bitch is crazier than I thought I was. She’s got a thing on my head that’s gonna suck my brain out or something. We’ve got to do something.”

Alea Chantal’s smile was barely a flicker across her face. “No more denial eh, Richard? Meeting a Disaffected will do that to you. As to ‘doing something’, we’re trying Richard. It isn’t easy. If you were in full control of the g’ru’tnok you’d at least be on an equal footing in regards to abilities. You can do everything she can do. Unfortunately, she still has a few millennia on you in terms of practice.”

“Did you say ‘millennia’?” Richard asked.

“Yeah, millennia; and for a Disaffected Yannoneth, every second of that time is filled with delusions of grandeur and plotting to take over the world.” Alea Chantal rolled her eyes. “Did you get that bit about being ‘the most powerful Yannoneth’? Every single one of them makes that claim.” She made a rude noise. “I bet even Sarsoneth could have beat her, back in the day.”

“Your confidence in me is touching, my dear,” came Sarsoneth’s voice, although his tone, as flat as ever, didn’t seem touched. “However, I must remind you, again, that we have limited time. I am finding it difficult to deflect the probe that Faloneth is using on Richard. We must continue to act with dispatch.”

“I agree,” Richard said. “I want to get as far away from that nutjob as possible. So how do I get control of this g’ru’tnok, whatever it is? Is it in the lab? What’s it look like? Is it like that d’na’whatever that Jaimie found in the temple? I didn’t see anything like that.”

“You didn’t spend much time looking either,” Alea Chantal noted, drolly. “Once you got a look at Faloneth, your eyes were pretty much glued there.”

She didn’t bother waiting for Richard to reply. “G’ru’tnok isn’t an object. It’s the energy that permeates the entire planet. It’s in and around everything.”

Richard’s scepticism kicked in. “New Age gobbledegook,” he snorted.

Alea Chantal shrugged. “Have it your way. This is all just a dream.” She began to fade out.

“Wait. Point taken. I’m trying, okay? So how does this g’ru’tnok help us? What am I supposed to do with it?”

Alea Chantal regained solidity. “You can do anything with it. With enough practice. That’s the problem. You should have had years to learn to how to manipulate it. Decades. Time to hone your skill before you ever faced a Yannoneth one on one.”

Richard pressed. “Okay, so that was Plan A and it’s out the window. What’s Plan B? You and Sarsoneth did pretty good back in the jungle, with my arm and the jeep and Carlos and all that. Why can’t we do the same thing now? I’ll empty my mind, let you drive, or possess me, or whatever the right term is. Let’s just get that thing off my head while I’ve still got a brain in my skull.”

“Faloneth is not sucking out your brain Richard,” Alea Chantal replied. “As to what we did in the jungle, that was a cakewalk compared to this. We only had Carlos to deal with. You saw how easily Faloneth kept him immobilized in the lab while she was dealing with you. He wasn’t even an afterthought.

“Whatever we do will have to be swift and it’ll have to be brutal. We won’t get a second chance. You can’t just ‘let us drive’. The d’na’tnek doesn’t work that way. Even with the unique engineering the Twelve gave you, what we’ve already done was almost impossible.”

“‘Engineering’?” Richard asked suspiciously. “Hang on. Faloneth wanted to know who ‘created’ me. Who are the Twelve? What the hell does that mean, ‘engineering’?”

Alea Chantal was uncharacteristically contrite. “I’m sorry, Richard. As Sarsoneth is fond of reminding, I sometimes have trouble focusing on the task at hand. Once we get out of this, we’ll explain it all. Just as we’ve promised. For now, just think of the Twelve as the good guys and the Yannoneth as the bad guys. Given what Faloneth is trying to do that shouldn’t be too hard, should it?”

Richard couldn’t argue with that. For now. “So we’re back to the original question. How do I escape?”

Sarsoneth spoke up. “I believe I may have the answer to that. If a feedback loop can be created in the crystalline structure of the d’ha’taan, it should overload. If we act at the exact moment that Faloneth is placing it on Richard’s forehead, while she is still in physical contact with it, we should be able to direct the overload through Faloneth’s nervous system, rendering her unconscious.”

Alea Chantal was enthusiastic. “She won’t know what hit her. Can you make it look as though it overloaded naturally? Or at least as a result of some mental trap set up by the Yannoneth that she thinks created Richard?”

“The latter would be more appropriate. This is, in fact, a technique that was used by the Disaffected themselves during the Shelter War. Faloneth will find it quite plausible that a rival would set such a trap in Richard’s mind. When she recovers.”

“Not enough energy to kill her, I suppose?”

“Unfortunately, that is correct.”

Richard was thinking about something else. “What happens if you don’t time it right?”

“Should Faloneth remove her hand before the overload is initiated, you would most likely be killed,” Sarsoneth replied matter-of-factly.

“Don’t be a woos, Richard,” Alea Chantal chimed in. “A quick-fried brain is better than the slow dissection Faloneth has planned for you any day.”

Richard didn’t have any reply to that so he ignored it. “So once she’s knocked out what do I do? Ask my good pal Carlos to unlock my cuffs and show me the door?”

Alea Chantal laughed. “Glad to see you’re getting your sense of humor back, Richard. No, silly, once Faloneth is out of the picture, that’s when we do what we did in the jungle. You focus on each of the restraints and we get busy.”

“And Carlos? The guards?”

“The discharge from the d’ha’taan will affect all minds for some distance, Richard.” Sarsoneth said. “It is only because Faloneth is Yannoneth that she must be in contact with it. In fact, the discharge may permanently damage anyone else in the room.”

“The hell with them. They killed at least one of the members of my team, maybe all of them. If they’re following this psycho bitch, they take their chances.”

“Indeed,” replied Sarsoneth. “Faloneth is removing the d’ha’taan, Richard. She must use it again for our plan to succeed.”

Everything faded again.

OBSERVATION PAUSED BY REQUEST

Enquiry Response: To the Member’s point: both human and Danaerean terminology is being used due to the unusual intermingling of the two cultures.

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OBSERVATION RESUMES

As Richard regained his senses, he realized that he was seated in a chair of some kind. When he tried to raise his hand to his head, he discovered that his wrists were locked to the chair’s arms. A tentative movement of his legs confirmed that his ankles were similarly restrained.

Acting on Alea Chantal and Sarsoneth’s directions, he began to visually survey the room. He hadn’t gotten much past identifying it as a laboratory of some kind, however, before he was distracted by a voice. The woman he’d seen on the trail in Central America stepped into view. “Well, Richard, you led us a bit of a chase.” She looked to Richard’s left and added, “More of a chase than I had anticipated.”

Richard turned his head to follow her gaze, saw Carlos standing in the corner of the room. He seemed unnaturally rigid, and his expression made it clear he was in considerable pain. Richard wasn’t particularly sympathetic. “Hey buddy,” he said fliply. “I’d offer to shake hands but, well, I’m kinda tied up.” He looked back at the woman, decided to play dumb. Which still wasn’t all that far from the truth anyway. “Listen lady, your stooge over there got what you wanted. I don’t like people who vandalize ruins, but what’s done is done. I hope you make a bundle on the black market for that trinket. If you’ll just let me go, I promise I’ll be on my way and we’ll forget the whole thing, okay?”

The woman laughed. “Even were I a mere human fool like Carlos, I would not be taken in by such a patently false statement. Would you not seek justice for your murdered friends? Redress for the … trinket as you call it that you have lost? Besides Richard, although the d’na’nish is indeed a great prize, and I thank you for leading me to it, it does indeed pale almost to a ‘trinket’ beside you. No Richard, we shall not be parting company any time soon. So you need not continue your pretence at innocence. It is pointless.”

“Damn it lady,” Richard yelled. “Like I told that asshole in the corner, this is no pretence. Who the hell do you think I am? I’m no prize. I’m an archaeologist, trying to dig up some old ruins in the middle of the jungle. I’m not rich. No one is going to pay a ransom for me.”

She ignored his outburst, other than to say, “Ransom. An amusing idea.” She looked at him clinically, put a hand to his jaw, turning his head from side to side. “Not Malineth’s work. He doesn’t have the skill to blend the physical aspects so well. He always ended up with deformed limbs or some similar shortcoming.” She smiled at Richard. “I assume that you were not born with scaled arms, nor grew horns and a tail when you reached puberty?” At Richard’s blank stare she laughed. “No, I did not think so. Definitely not Malineth then; although he did create some interesting hybrids. You have no doubt seen representations of Anubis. Although I preferred Horus myself. I am partial to birds.” She seemed to be considering.

“Hashipaleth perhaps? She was always quite clever at unlocking the psychic elements. No doubt, one of hers would have been able to misdirect a weak mind like Carlos’.” She let of Richard, stepped back. “Well, enough speculation.” Her gaze fixed on Richard’s eyes. They seemed hypnotic. “Who created you Richard? Who is your Lord or Lady? Who do you obey?”

For a moment, Richard felt like he was getting lost in those eyes. Then he seemed to break free of whatever she was trying to do, and answered defiantly. “Created me? Mr. and Mrs. Redmond created me. After a rather rambunctious New Year’s Eve party as I recall the story. The only lady I listen to is my wife; and I wish the hell I’d ‘obeyed’ her and not come on this damn dig.”

The woman ignored his defiance, continued to lock gazes with him a few moments longer. Then she turned away scowling. “Amazing. Your will is strong Richard. It is almost Yannoneth in magnitude. I have never encountered a human, engineered or otherwise, who could resist me for even a moment. Perhaps I was a trifle harsh with Carlos after all.” She flicked a glance at the corner where her flunky still stood motionless. He immediately gasped and sank to the ground, as if released from some sort of paralysis.

When she turned back to Richard, he could see that she was holding something in her hand that be a crystal of some sort. “This device will make you more …amenable … to my requests Richard. You should be flattered; never before has there been need to use it on a human. It can, however, have unpleasant side effects. Permanent ones. I would prefer to have my answers without damaging you. So I ask you one more time – who do you serve?”

Richard shook his head, struggled against his restraints. “I told you damn it, I don’t serve anyone. I’m an archaeologist. I dig in the dirt. That’s all.”

The woman shook her head. “I am sorry Richard. We both know that is not the truth. You are much too powerful. I need to know how that power was created, and by whom. I need to make it mine.”

“Make it yours? Why? Who the hell are you?”

“I am Faloneth, the most powerful of the Yannoneth. I must have the secret of your genesis because it will aid me in achieving my destiny.”

“What destiny would that be?” Richard asked.

She looked at him contemptuously. “Why to rule of course. To be worshipped. To hold the life, and death, of everyone and everything in my hand.” And with that she reached out and placed the crystal on Richard’s forehead.

This was getting tedious he thought, as he felt consciousness slipping away again.

OBSERVATION PAUSED BY REQUEST

Enquiry Response: The Member is correct; sentience capable of utilizing Energy should not be capable of the megalomania evident in Faloneth’s statement. This aberration is a result of the Setback.

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