Godclads

Chapter 6-9 A Civil Conversation

"Thank you! Thanks for eating my daddy!"

-"Aedon" Chambers aged 10, cheering on the ghouls fleeing from his block during the Uprising

6-9

A Civil Conversation

Chambers sputtered. "Last time? Last time? The last time you--you--Oh, okay. Yeah. I guess you did let me have enough sleep. Thank you for your service, Captain Regular, ma'am. This is exactly why I looked out for ya on that cold and miserable night after the Crucible. Because I really wanted to get my limbs twisted to shit and brain damage so bad those flesh-loving Sang-fucks decided the best way to fix it was POURING FUCKING BUGS IN MY HEAD TO 'eat away the injuries.'"

The outburst toned the enforcer's face in a flush of red. His eyes, likewise, bulged with exaggerated incredulity. Yet, the flow of his thoughtstuff was far less charged than it seemed. Avo frowned at that. It appeared that Chambers was playing up his outrage to prod at an angle of sympathy. Foolish, but fascinating.

"An' look at you now," Draus continued, ignorant as to the true state of Chamber's mind. Not that she likely cared. "Did a fine job fixin' you up, didn't they?"

"I can still feel them just... chittering around inside my head," Chambers said. He shuddered.

Draus nodded in mock sympathy. "Well, you best get yourself together there, consang, because I assure you: that nightmare is over."

"--But I can make it happen again if you don't stop wasting my time and start talking."

The enforcer sighed. "This... this how you talk to everyone? Fucking... pretend niceties followed by threats? Come now?" He turned to Avo as if imploring him for help. "I mean, come on. Why not offer me a deal? Something nice? A glass of fucking water even. Ain't no need for being this mean. You already got me all bound up in this fucked up meat cage. It feels like I'm in a tongue, by the way. Like... like a big one."

"Could just crack his wards," Avo said, addressing Draus. "Dive into his mind."

"Give it minute. You can do that once I'm good and done with the 'niceties' anyway."

Chambers shot a look of sadness at Avo. "Avo. Consang. You remember when you got the key to that old Galeslither so you wouldn't be bothered by any of the half-strands after you fucked up Rantula?"

And there it was again. Chambers was fishing for sympathy. From a ghoul. It was like the man didn't know what he was, or at least seemed to suffer a very warped idea of how a ghoul exactly functioned. "Remember you getting me into bad run. No preparation. Lied to me about details. Left me to die."

"Hey. That ain't my fault. How in all the fucks was ol' Chambers supposed to know those Scalper shits were going to be involved? Do I look like a data broker from the Deep Bazaar? No, consang. I'm like you: Just a squire tryin' make it in the biggest of the big that's New Vultun."

At this point, Draus cracked a disbelieving smile. "Ain't gonna lie, he's real precious in a rat-bastard kind of way."

Chambers grinned at her, his smile one of boyish glee manifesting at the lowest of compliments. "I always thought I had it in me to make it in the soaps." Beneath Draus and Avo's blank-faced stares, he sagged and sighed. "Alright. Remind me where we left off. I'd just start talkin' myself but... I'm afraid I might upset our dear Regular again and earn myself another session of bug surgery."

"Talk 'bout your boss," Draus said. "Jhred Greatling. Mirrorhead. Give us everything you know. Leave nothing out."

He let out a long and overwhelmed breath, bottom lip flipped over to accentuate the severity of the topic. "Suppose I better get to it, yeah?"

"Yeah, that sounds wise," Draus said.

"Will know if you're lying," Avo added. "Don't lie. Will make me sloppy when digging through your mind later. Bad for sanity."

Chambers frowned. "And back to the threats again--"

"Keep talkin'," Draus said, interrupting his diatribe.

"Alright, alright," Chambers said, rolling his flesh-encased shoulders as best he could. "So, couple years back... I'm gonna say two because I had a bad turbo habit at the time. I'm real bad." He laughed. "Me and my brother, Osjet, we would get like a dozen or so needles and flick 'em at each other's eyes."

A blink of motion flicked across the periphery of Avo's vision. A crack followed. Avo blinked. Chambers' blinked. A small red welt began to form across his cheek.

"You just slap him?" Avo asked Draus.

"He's worse than Kae. 'Cept he don't have any good excuses. Stick. To. The. Story. Mirrorhead. Not your brother. Not anything else. Mirrorhead."

"Fine, fine," Chambers said, "Jaus. Don't need to hit me. You're like my dad."

"Clearly didn't do a good job," Draus said.

The enforcer shrugged as best he could. "Nope. Which was why it wasn't a big loss when the ghouls ate him." He launched a reflexive smirk at Avo. A speckle of fondness slipped out from him into the local Nether. "Anyway, I... I remember tellin' you about Mirrorhead just showing up, right? A year back... he jabbed us... yadda yadda ya?"

Chambers leaned out as far as he could. "Well, this was just about a month after he jabbed me. Conflux was already getting real expensive shit flown in. Expanding operations. Recruiting even more people. But something always felt off about the boss."

"Something?" Draus asked.

"Like he was always ducking someone, right? But he's a Godclad. And 'Clads don't need to do no duck is what I thought at the time." Chamber chuckled. "Was ol' Chambers wrong about that. Anyway. I just finished grabbing some chow after a day of doin' fuck-all, basically, and decided to sneak over into the sealed section where the mem-con shit is still running so I can hit up on some nova without nobody really noticing. Didn't really wanna share, you know?"

"Mem-con didn't affect you?" Avo asked. That was doubtful. The mind plagues were outdated and from a bygone war, but they should've still affected Chambers all the same. Especially considering the nonexistent quality of his wards.

Chambers smacked his lips. "I wouldn't say 'didn't affect.' It's more like I already got exposed to it. It was one of them Low Master 'watch your loved one die in front of you nightmare shit' ghost-brain-fuckings. Already got hit by it back when I was a kid, and my old man was a real half-strand, so... You know. Not a big loss."

Right. Different minds required different traumas to break. There were fissures in the thoughts of any being, but some required specially shaped tools to lever against the cracks.

Regardless, Chambers just unknowingly increased the value of his continued survival. Not that Avo would ever reveal such a thing.

"Anyway, I get inside, and what do I see? A Stormtree Blockrunner drone just lodged through the wall. Microfusion cell and everything's still intact. Just left lying around there. Turns out, the boss didn't even have the area cleared for potentially usable goods before sealing them off with plascrete. Real sloppy."

"Or he's just not a Necro," Avo suggested. It was still just a guess, but it was growing increasingly obvious, despite all the resources the Syndicate boss had at his disposal, he wasn't very good at Necrotheurgy.

"Yeah, he ain't no strategist either," Draus said. "Guess he takes after his ma that way. No Reg would leave a bunch of unchecked territories sealed off. Not for longer than a week. Ignorance is fatal."

"Yep, ignorance is a hell of a thing," Chambers said, snickering with glee. "You guys are gonna love what happened next. So... so, I spend a while fiddling with the haptic controls and somehow, I get it working. Fantastic. Awesome. Chambers got a vec that can silently slice through the insides of a block's walls and clamp onto elevator chutes. What do I do with it then? Well, its intelligence-gathering systems were also still functional, so I guess I started... collecting some details on my so-called friends. You know. So I can trade for favors."

"Blackmail," Avo said.

Chambers winced. "Now, that's an ugly way of putting it, Avo. I didn't just threaten people with what I learned. I tried helping them too. For a price. I was like a... an augury. A prophet from the old days. Really got ol' Chambers a lot of cred and imps. Good times."

His smile then sizzled out slowly. "Then, after a few months, I ended up climbing high. Too high. Found myself cutting out where I really shouldn't and ended up behind a sheet of glass."

The enforcer stopped talking then. It took Avo a full second to get that the man was holding his words for dramatic effect. "After the boss didn't appear out of nowhere and mangle me, I went back down. Cause... you know, I was still spooked to fucking shit. But I couldn't stay away, so, I went back up again. Made sure I didn't have anything reflective on me either. No glass. Painted over the Blockrunner a bit. And started... listening. And boy did he give away a lot of interesting shit."

"And this is why you gotta surveil the entire structure," Draus said. "Otherwise you get shit like this." She shook her head and chuckled. "Fucking Highflame Guilder gettin' spied on by a two-bit gutter kid. This alone might be enough to sink what's left of his family name."

"Yeah, about that," Chambers said. "I don't think Jhred here's on the up and up with his own family. See, the conversation I managed to get from him? It sounded like he was talking to a sibling. Maybe a sister. Afrel or something. It also sounds like our little Godclad might be on the verge of getting kicked from the family line for whatever reason, and was on the out-and-out with his old man."

Draus shot Avo a look and turned back to Chambers. "You sure about this?"

"Sure? Fuck no, I got his side of the conversation using the vec's scanner. He was speaking to whoever over the Nether. Had to guess from his words. Still, he sounded the desperate kind of pissed, like he was asking someone else to ask someone even higher up for more time. So he wouldn't have to beg." Chambers spat. He managed to get some on himself. "Prideful half-strand'll probably die from that."

"Alright," Draus said, nodding as she took in the information. "You know, if you were this forthcoming 'bout more of these details last time, I wouldn't have had to make art outta your limbs."

"Why, thanks for telling me that, Captain, I very much appreciate you twisting the fucking knife. Makes me wonder how you ended up dishonorably discharged."

Draus smirked. "You're welcome."

"Anyway," Chamber said, "I kept listening for a while more and he started talkin' numbers. Couldn't fully get them. Sounded like death statistics or something. How many lives were being fed to the Sovereignty by the daily and all the Heavens Yuulden-Yang was running. Besides that, he said something about how losing faith in him now was going to be a mistake and how he'll wipe away the shame or something. Dipped out of sensor range after that. Didn't manage to capture anything like it since."

Quietly, Draus digested the information. "The Blockcrawler. It's still there?"

"Yeah," Chambers said. "Haven't used it in a while. Mirrorhead got even more micro-heavy after that. Made us start wearing his patented stupid fishbowl helmets so he could... channel himself out of us easier or whatever you call that weird Heaven shit. Something got his ass real spooked, and if you ask me? I think whatever time he managed to get ran out, but he's still out here, trying to get something done. Whatever that is, anyway."

"He talked about the Sovereignty," Draus said. "He say anythin' 'bout your surrounding districts?"

"He tried to get us into business with Dead Lotus," Chamber said.

"Tried?" Draus asked.

Chambers winced. "Well, when you offer someone else a twenty-eighty cut over businesses and territories and state that it's your best and only deal and that they would be hopelessly stupid not to accept it, the words sound a bit more insulting than diplomatic. You see, your new consang Chambers might-gotta a tongue sweeter than natural honey itself, but Mirrorhead--Jaus--now there's someone with the sophistry of a gh--"

Avo glared at him. "Finish sentence."

"--git. Ghoul doesn't really fit, because... I mean, let's be honest, ghouls are such deeply honest beings that really aren't afraid in letting you know how they feel and who they are. Meanwhile, Mirrorhead's like a wall. A... a pile of bricks. He's an insult to ghouls. Especially one as sharp and... and as clever as you, Avo, my good consang."

Avo continued glaring. "Still made me hurt people."

"Holy shit are you still stuck on that? Fuck me, I'm sorry. I didn't know a little mistake was going to lodge itself all the way up your ass and die there. Look. I'll make it up to you. Next time, I'll do my research."

"No next time," Avo snarled. "Never make that mistake again." He leaned in close to meet Chambers' eye-to-eye. "Soon. Will have special run for you. Special favor for me. That's how you make it up."

Chambers blinked. "Sure. Yeah. If you don't eat me, I'm game for anything." He laughed. "In a way, you did free me from Mirrorhead so... you know, I guess I can see that I... I owe you, actually."

The mental gymnastics of the enforcer was truly awe-inspiring.

"Anyway," Chamber said. "You got more questions? I can tell you all kinds of stuff about Conflux. Weak spots. Who hides all the good drugs. Who's in charge of doing the auxiliary Necro shit for Mirrorhead. What business looks like. When the next Crucible was supposed to be scheduled."

"How many of you are there?" Draus asked.

"Hm?"

"How many of you did Jhred hire?"

Chambers shrugged. "Probably a few thousand. Ten or so is my guess. I know we have other branches. He dives between places in the mirrors and all that. I think they're periphery places though. He's trying to cast a wide net and push in. He keeps up separated into silos. We're the Junction guys. The backbone, from what I can tell."

"But he has other places to go and rebuild?" Draus asked.

"Yeah," Chamber said. "If he really wanted to. Yeah. We were always more of a quantity over quality operation anyway."

"Can attest to that," Avo said. "Done with conversation? Can copy other details from memories directly. Implant him with phantasmic first. You talk to others."

Draus stared at Chambers for a beat. "You can keep his mind intact?

"Yes," Avo said. "Unless its structure is compromised."

At this statement, Chambers' eyes widened.

"Hey, hey, hey, listen," Chamber said, clearing his throat. "If you're gonna be doin' anything to my mind... I might wanna walk you through it."

"Not amateur Necro. Know what to do."

"I'm not talking about that," Chamber said. "I'm talking about certain... things I downloaded."

"Things."

"You know. Entertainment options. Vicitarities. Uh. Stress relieving materials."

Avo started at Draus. Draus shrugged. "Don't look at me none. I got no idea what he's talkin' about."

Chamber sighed. "You'll... you'll see when you go in. Just let me give you a heads-up. Some of my mind space might be... messy."

"How messy."

"Ah. I might have a virus or two messy."

Avo could handle a virus or two.