Flawed Reasoning
| Flawed Reasoning | |
|---|---|
| Date of Cutscene: | 14 December 2012 |
| Location: | Unknown |
| Synopsis: | A brief look into the life of a madman. (Connected with Hobo With A Shotgun TP) |
| Cast of Characters: | Ansem |
| Tinyplot: | Hobo With A Shotgun |
Sometimes recreating the universe could be very tedious.
Smooth and sterile surfaces surrounded this small, private sanctuary. Glass and metal marched away in neat and precise lines. It was a place of contemplation. A place of thought more carefully balanced and designed than a Zen garden. The household did not attend this place where every object, every crevice, every angle had its purpose and its place. He cleaned every surface himself, attended to the working of every machine. It was a place for pushing the boundaries of his research. A place on which was focused his undivided attention.
Ansem leaned away from the table over which he had been leaning. A sigh of discontent hissed from his lips as the humanoid figure there writhed. The motions did them little good for they were securely bound at arm and head and ankle but still they twisted, black patches swiftly breaking out across their body even as he watched.
He tapped the side of his cheek twice before retrieving a small micro recorder from the white coat over his shoulders, flicking the device engaged as another rippling shriek erupted from the bound subject. “Formula 19 has proven itself to be sadly inadequate. While initial trials showed promising returns on early stages of corruption, it has proved disappointing in allaying the symptoms of later stages. The flaw persists, again, against my earnest efforts and the heart is approaching final collapse. Tomorrow I will return to my earlier studies and trace my way forwards to the next approach.”
Ansem thumbs the recorder off, stifling a wave of dark fury and frustration as the figure writhed on the table. They were one of his many followers, members of the old race whom he had thought worthy of uplifting. This one was a foolish young man who had dug too deeply into the gifts he bestowed against his sternly worded restrictions. When the flaw had manifested itself soon thereafter, he had been brought here instead of the main facility. He felt a moment of paternal frustration and disappointment that the boy had not turned out to be stronger, but he and the boy had not truly met before this evening.
That task of recruitment he put into the hands of others. Nine? –Perhaps Fourteen? – He was not immediately sure. He would have to check his assignment notes this evening. Ansem walked over to the head of the table, watching as they twitched and thrashed, yellow eyes locked and unseeing on the pristine black ceiling. At least he could still be of some minor use.
The hand he placed on their shoulder was as calming as a strong jolt of sedative. The thrashing calmed and the heart at last gave in to the inevitable. In a manner of moments the boy was transformed into a slinking shadow, the heartless twitching and pawing at its head as if to claw the last shreds of fading identity from its mind. “Report to four and the main facility, please.” The heartless popped out of existence and Ansem surveyed the empty chamber. After a few moments, he began to meditatively clean and straighten his sanctuary. He was quite rudely interrupted from his reflections by the voice of a servant.
“Master?”
Ansem continued to bring order to this corner of the universe for several minutes, refusing himself the release of careless rage and spite. When he was completely certain he could speak in a calm, reasonable tone of voice he gently inquired. “Lucas, do you recall that I asked not to be disturbed here?” and the servant, a bangaa and one of the most stable of his creations does a credit to his programming by not responding.
He despised people talking back to him. It was a crude and offensive habit of the uncivilized. He would regret having to have Lucas replaced again so soon. This variation was showing such promise, but until he found the crucial flaw in the design it was a sad inevitably of his creations to gradually degrade.
Ansem cleaned his hands and straightened, wiping them off on a towel as he approached Lucas. The bangaa was still in the doorway, eyes averted in reverence. They took the towel that Ansem offered them, following as the master left the sanctuary for a small study only a handful of strides away. The doorway to the sanctuary faded from existence, showing nothing but a smooth blank wall as Ansem went to a small radio nestled amongst the literature of a dozen worlds or more. The soft sounds of something vaguely French sung by a woman bled into the silent study while dark flames crackled in the small hearth. (Theme: Non je ne regrette rien—Edith Piaf) “Speak.”
“Five has stopped reporting in, master.” The bangaa looks uncomfortable and tries to explain his egregious error in disturbing him. “You asked me to tell you if he did it a third time. He.. he has. Nobody is able to contact him either.”
Ansem gave an abstract look to the books, walking over to a small end table where several comfortable chairs lurk near a tasteful reading lamp. On the table is an exquisite bottle of Rabanastre Spice wine, of which he pours a small glass for himself and a second.
“That will be all, Lucas. Let him in please and then you are excused.” “l..let who in, Master?”
The utterance, in a moment of confusion turns out to be a mistake. Ansem very slowly raises his eyes from the spice wine to regard Lucas with a calculating, almost pitying look. Lucas, very wisely, bows low to that smiling pity and quickly retreats from the room without saying anything else. He is barely past the richly stained and varnished double doors when they explode inwards.
“What is the meaning of this outrage? I am in the middle of very delicate experiments. What idle fancy provoked you into summoning me THIS time?!”
Ansem looked into a mirror of himself while five glared at him from the doorway. He raised an eyebrow at the sheer fire and audacity of his creations words. They had no names, for names were chiefly an identifying construct for which, in this case, numbers were more efficient. There was only one appellation for Master, and as they were all masters in their own ways and designs he was the only one named as such. The rest were designated by numbers, and five was still staring at him enraged while he took a sip of the spice wine. It was an excellent vintage. Light and sweet but with a twisting spiral of those desert spices enlivening the senses. He would have to have more requisitioned when he thought of it.
Ansem let the dawning horror grow on five’s face as they realized just whom it was they were speaking to in such a manner. They all may be masters in their own ways—but they were not in THIS way, and not in this house, certainly.
“Come have a drink with me, five. Tell me what you have been up to.”
The song ended and the beginning notes of Aria Di Mezzo Carattere began to fill the study as the duplicate took the offered glass gingerly and sat down in an opposite facing chair as requested. Ansem did not sit. He cradled the drink in one hand while he wandered the study, one hand playing over the titles.
When five has told him what is obviously a carefully edited account of his actions, Ansem has to chuckle to himself mentally. His fingers were on a religious text of Faram, and he pondered briefly his next words before speaking them. “Five. I created you with much of my wisdom and experience, but I also left gaps so that you would be encouraged to learn other interpretations that may be useful. Have you done any religious study on your own?”
Ansem listens to the imperfect imitation of his own voice echo with paranoia and suspicion as five answers. “Yes. I have done some of that. Why?” “I was just wondering—in any faith, of any world, do they teach their followers that they can somehow deceive their god?” He feels a moment of sad confirmation when the duplicate pauses too long in response, eyes flicking towards the double doors as they finally realize the implications. “No. I wouldn’t think so.” Ansem answers for them. “Drink your wine.” Five looks down at the drink as if it had suddenly turned into a oozing gel full of leeches, then straightens his back and glares imperiously at Ansem.
Ah, youth.
“Unraveling the magic of the fae, especially a containment spell this complex is crucial for our ongoing plans. I’ve almost pieced together enough from the shards of Avalon and its outer shell of Manhattan to make something useful of the stinking hole.”
Ansem lingers near the wooden bookshelves for a minute or so while five continues to rant. They have become more and more obsessed with the magic of the fae and the reasons why Manhattan, of all of Earth, survived where the rest did not. They had suffered a crucial failure of patience, a sad symptom of flawed reasoning.
It was enough obsession and impatience that they would forget the original objective.
Enough even.. to perform the capital crime of science.
All this but the last, Ansem could forgive. It was his curse, to compassionately overlook the minor slights and failures of his subordinates. He would cuff them lightly like rowdy children and then send them out again to do better.
Ansem walked over to stand behind five’s high backed chair, one hand on the green surface as he leaned over it slightly. “Five. Tell me again. You overshadowed the boy?” Five finally drank from the glass to ward off having to answer the question for a few more seconds. The strains of the opera swelled as the silence strained against the dimensions of the room.
“I needed a better look of the containment mechanism. How the system reacts to a breach. Perhaps it is not as complicated as I first thought. With a little more study, I believe I can replicate some of the basic functions.”
“And, you’ll have that time as the—“ Ansem can’t help but let a little derision seep into his voice. “Charmingly antiquated spell and the boy are tucked out of the way somewhere?” Five nods cautiously, taking another drink as Ansem does. “Yes. Nobody will fetch them until I—until you want them too, of course.”
Ah, five. Alas, this is he believed a case of ‘too little, too late’
“Very well. You have my permission to leave now.”
Five stood from the chair, bowing his head slightly but face straining to conceal a sneer of contempt that played only across his eyes as he turned away to leave. He made a choking, gasping sound and the drink glass smashed against the floor as the opera came to a grand crescendo. A hand of solid darkness slowly lifted five off the floor, a hulking abomination stretching out from behind the calm faced Ansem as he put his own glass down on the side table.
“Five. I told you to watch the boy, not overshadow him. “The giant squeezes tighter, the darkness within the duplicate throbbing and convulsing like that boy on the operations table. “Sloppy reasoning, five. Sloppy, flawed reasoning brought you to this degraded and pathetic state.” The giant slams five down into the floor, grinding him into the perfectly fitted wooden panels slick with a gleam of wax. This repeats several times as Ansem expends all of his former frustrations on the errant shade. He pulls himself back from a thrashing maniacal frenzy at the last second, dark tendrils of shadow leaking from five as they hang semi-lifeless in the grip of the dark guardian. Ansem walks around to inspect five while the guardian stays in the same place. He leans in to explain in a soft voice. “You slanted the data, five. You told me—what you thought I wanted to hear. I told you to watch the boy, to chart his internal darkness and his control of it, and—if necessary, to /gently/ attend to its growth. Those who willingly take in darkness often succumb to it fastest, and yet the boy remained stable until you began meddling. You maligned the experiment by directly involving yourself. You destroyed years of planning for the sake of Oberon and his /Misfits/” his voice has grown into an imperious boom far outstripping the weak denials and explanations still tumbling from the mouth of five.
He /hated/ being talked back to.
Ansem thrust a hand through five, retaking his essence like any god who bestows a gift taking it back again from the unworthy. The entire experience, the years of knowledge and thought and memory return to the original in a rush of darkness. The guardian dissolves as it is no longer needed. The last strains of the opera fade away into the hush of expectant silence in-between songs.
“I see.”
The aberrant ‘thing’ he would no longer deign to think of as anything but another failed experiment had barely even bothered to give the sentient spell matrix a useful designation or catalogued the one they used for themselves. Even that bit of basic civility was lost on them. He indulges in the simple act of paying attention and skims the needed information from the boy’s memories. Perhaps there was time to correct these impositions. He would greatly regret having to simply scrap the entire design. It was an outside chance that the boy was anything but passively resistant, but with the failure of Formula 19 he was willing to reset the experiment—even if he had to attend to such things personally.
Ansem walked through the opulent mansion with a sense of purpose, putting one coat away and grabbing another as he paused near the kitchen for a moment. “Margaret.” He says to the woman in the preparations area. A human servant stood with a clawed hand almost elbow deep in the chest of a humanoid female, halfway through extracting the light inside while the female was restrained on the counter, their mouth stuffed with rags to muffle their annoying and often distracting screams. “Margaret, keep dinner in reserve if you would. I’ve got some errands to run.” The servant nodded, passing a hand over the female’s eyes as they gingerly extracted their hand. They went limp across the table, instantly unconscious as Ansem turned away towards the door. He exited the mansion onto the grounds proper.
He took a few idle minutes to enjoy the stretch of carefully maintained garden around the outside of the friendly and cheerful Victorian establishment behind him. In particular, he checked a stand of black roses that had been struggling until the current year for signs of wilt and the decay that signaled the flaw had worked itself into this simple and elegant creation. Finally he reached the end of the garden pathway, gesturing for a portal to appear and take him where he wished to go. He had not left the grounds or the main facility for quite some time. He did not have any pressing concerns until the next day.
--Perhaps it was time to remedy the matter, and go out for a walk.
