Revisiting The Root Cause

[Lye]

He watched Madison's tender touch and sweetened lies as she tried to comfort the hulking brute. Lye shook his head. Her hands cupped the prisoner's face and a puff of blue sprayed against his dampened face. The promised reprieve did not come without its own cost as the brute toppled over and gasped for air. His fingers clawed at his face until the appendages themselves snapped backward and dangled like sausages.

"A knife to the skull would have been quicker," Lye commented as he caught the keys she tossed to him. "But who am I to lecture?"

As predicted, the brute finally came to rest. Its lifeless corpse fell under Lye's disinterested gaze. He shook his head in disappointment before following the crazed scientist back to her lab. When they arrived, the assassin flopped into one of the open chairs Madison had around her facility. His fingers tended to the bridge of his nose as he tried to calm the prickled nerves of her grasp over him.

"So," he began. "What'd you gather from looking at them? To me, it looks like a little of you and a little of me in one potentially contagious package."

Lye gently shook his head as his hand fell from his face. The prospect of something being created of the two churned his stomach on a foul level. Even uttering the idea of their combined creation seemed an abomination in itself.

"And where would you like me to start helping?" he gestured to her expansive lab.

Madison already had motioned to a nearby few. While the question held genuine intention, Lye didn't expect the briarheart to take the offer. In fact, the odds of him being the center of one of her "experiments" lingered at the back of his mind. He loathed the idea, but compared to her joint efforts with Aurelianus, it would be a regular preventative checkup by comparison.

"Or will you be cutting me open instead?"

[BlackAndBlueEyes]

Actually, that's not a bad idea.

How about you just cut yourself open instead? Just take the rustiest blade you can find in the Seventh Sanctum, jam it right into your sternum, and saw yourself open with as much disregard for your personal health as you can muster. The incision will be easy; I left a few visual cues on where to make the cuts on your chest when I installed the briars around your heart.

The operation will not be an easy one; not because of the potential loss of blood, but because you will have to shut your fucking trap for a couple hours and I'm not sure you can actually sustain life without verbalizing your passive-aggression towards me, which I'm convinced is more vital to your continued survival than oxygen.

Once you've separated the halves of your rib cage, you can just reach right in and pull your goddamn heart out and plop it on the table over there. Then, I will grab the most comically oversized magnifying glass I can find, get riiiight up in the pulsating flesh of your ticker, go "hmmm" and "ah, I see" a lot, and scribble down nonsense in my notebook in the indecipherable handwriting of most doctors.

From there, we'll just shove your blackened heart back into your body, glue your shit back together, and slap a series of bandages featuring smiling cartoon kittens on your chest.

I'll even give you a lollipop afterwards, and tell you what a good boy you've been.

And then, I'll work my super-secret Briarheart wizardry and have all the fucking answers for you in time for tea.

But instead, let's just go with a more practical scenario. "Along the far wall over there," I said with a gesture to a series of benches lined with expensive implements, "there should be a few microscopes. Can you get me the one with marked with a '400 max'? There should also be a box with clean glass slides in it. The little lacquered wood one, about the size of a cigar box. Can you get that too, please?"

I moved to another end of the laboratory, grabbing a few small blades and syringes. There was a sort of thump at the door. I turned just in time to watch the corpse of Lichensith's mutilated prisoner crawl in and fall down the six stone steps before coming to an unceremonious stop on the smooth floor of the chamber.

"Do be more careful," I said to the dead thing. "I need you in one piece."

"T-t-t-ribly sorry," it stuttered, the cordyceps infecting its brain working hard to emulate human speech.

"That's okay, sweetie. Can you lift yourself up onto the examination bench closest to you?"

What was left of the man grunted in acknowledgment and tried his hardest to do what he was asked. I swiftly wove around the labyrinth of equipment and tables in the lab with an armful of stuff I'd need for the procedures I was about to undertake.

For all the sudden revelations that were foisted upon me and the complete change of plans that came with them--not to mention the dire implications that they had as well--I was getting a little excited. My head always began to feel light and I couldn't help but to put a giddy spring in my step whenever I was about to do some fucking science.

I threw the tools onto the tray near the reanimated prisoner as he pulled himself up onto a bench. "Lye," I asked as I began preparations to extract a few blood and tissue samples. "What I need from you is a few vials of blood. Can you handle that yourself, or would you rather me do it?"

[Lye]

Madison's delay elicited a low brow and thinned eyes from the assassin. While he lacked the talents of a mind reader, he just as easily assumed her mind churned away at some ill devised comment that she deliberated whether or not to blurt out loud. Instead, and like a train skipping back onto the rails, Madison pointed to the far wall of her lab. The thoughts that temporarily entertained her flattened under her scientific inquiry and all semblance of ire fell wayside to her mechanical movements.

Eyes still narrow, Lye felt a small iota of gratitude toward the briarheart. Even though her tongue consisted of vines and thorns, the assassin knew it to be guilded with silver and venom. Still apprehensive, he turned his attentions toward her collection of tools, machines, and contraptions that lined the far wall. Shelves stacked upon shelves in a rough library of organized chaos. The assassin never dabbled in her science, so looking for the microscopes proved difficult.

"Not that one," Lye heard her mutter and his hands stopped short. He ground his teeth and stepped sideways where several other devices were jammed together.

"Not those either," he heard. Both amusement and frustration came across Madison's tone and Lye took a deep breath through clenched teeth. He shot a sideways glance toward Madison, but her attentions focused exclusively to the shambling mess of a man that struggled to put himself on a table. With another sigh, Lye returned to his seemingly simple task.

"I would have preferred being cut open to being an errand boy," he mumbled under his breath.

"What's that?" Madison rang out.

"This one?" Lye replied with a stagger. He pulled one of the microscopes off the shelf, noticing the number scrawled across the viewing glass.

"Yes, that one."

The box was infinitely easier to locate and he brought both to Madison's table. The expression on his face reflected both his frustration and his humility. He found himself further disgruntled by the briarheart's subtle snicker as she asked for a few vials of blood. He took a deep breath, felt a sharp pain around his heart, and exhaled before setting to find something resembling a needle or syringe.

Madison was loving this.

"I got it," he grumbled. Thankfully, the assassin knew what to look for and where. Prior to the events of Eiskalt, Madison inoculated everyone with a serum to fight off her engineered plague. From one of the tables in the middle of the room, Lye pulled several glass vials topped with thin rubber stoppers. In a small draw beneath, he found several needles pointed on both ends with a cork grip in their middle.

He returned to the reanimated prisoner and set the materials beside him as Madison prepared for more hands-on work. Lye grabbed a needle, unceremoniously jabbed it in the neck where he knew the jugular would be, and stuck one of the vials on the opposing end before making a bloody mess all over the floor. Three vials were eventually filled but not without missing the timing of a few spurts to the floor.

"There." Lye set the last of the vials onto the table and pulled the needle from the corpse's neck. He extended his hand will all three samples clinking against one another and sloshing a deep ichor within.

[BlackAndBlueEyes]

I consciously waited until he was finished and presented the vials of corpse blood to me before I spoke up.

"I meant from you," I mused, a sly smirk of sharpened teeth stretching across my face.

The assassin's posture stiffened and his spidery fingers tightened around the glass vials. I could see the fire in his eyes as he tried to stifle a fit of childish anger.

"You asked for blood. I am giving you blood."

"I said, what I need from you is a few vials of blood. Your blood." I approached the lithe man and took the corpse's fluids from him. "That's why I asked if you wanted to handle it yourself."

I lightly threw the things onto a nearby table and produced a fresh syringe and a couple empty vials, different in shape than the other three.

"Your arm, please," I told him.

Lye only scrunched his face up a bit as if he was in dire need of a trip to the toilet.

I cocked my head to the side, my amber eyes flashing in annoyance. "Give me your arm or I'm going to stick this thing in your eye."

Reluctantly, the Master Hand slid an arm out of his black duster and presented me with the pale flesh of his elbow. With deft hands, I removed the cork that protected the end of the needle, cautiously stuck it into the vein located in the crook of his arm, and withdrew enough blood to fill the two vials.

I withdrew the needle from his arm, and moved back towards the table where I tossed my equipment. I produced a small bandage and tossed it Lye's way before sticking the tip of the needle into the vials, filling them with his tainted blood.

Without spilling a single drop, mind you, because I am a fucking professional.

After I finished up, I turned back towards him. He had already put his coat back on. The bandage I offered was lying on the table next to him, unused. The ungrateful prick.

"So here's the deal," I said, breaking the bitter silence that always seems to fill the air whenever the two of us were in the same room together. "It's going to take me a few weeks to come up with any real results, but I'm going to examine and run a few tests on these samples here." I motioned towards the tray with the five glass vials of blood and the twisted scrap of bone he originally showed to me.

"I'm not sure what I'll find just yet, so don't bother asking." The last thing I wanted to confirm was that the briars I planted around his heart somehow seeped some of their magicks into his bloodstream, mutating his own innate abilities to control bone matter into something far more dangerous. If that were the case, then... Well... We'll cross that bridge and light it on fire when we get there.

"But when I do discover something, I will let you know. Okay?"