Where was he? He couldn't recall a thing at all except surprising that little red-headed whelp, and scaring him to piss, and in the process pissing something or other off.Just to keep the rust away...
"Hello, little boy...", he'd said in his high-pitched voice, sharp as razors through the purposely imprecise and inhuman settings of the voice actuator, behind his mask, within his head. Was head the right word for it? It probably was. Had to be, what I mean is, he was made to look very man-like, and successfully. But he very much wasn't one, totally couldn't be, what with all the metal and ceramic and carbon mixed into filaments and plates of composites that only he could truly exploit.
Or only him, supposedly. Supposed to. So it went, so it goes, but it never quite went so well as the best intentions of the Master intended, let alone his own, oh no, the best laid plans of mice and men...
But we are not a mouse.
No, he was not.
And we are not a man.
Debatable, but within himself he'd already denied the label.
He'd had the lad's undivided attention when he'd had him by his collar bone, drawing blood from a messy and mostly unintentional incision by which he held him, in a fashion much like inflicting an open fracture. But he was not, and he did not. As always, the point was to make others aware of the likely outcomes of possible recourse's to action.
The boy wasn't used to fear. Or at least he thought he'd been a boy. He/she/it, the child, it did a very good job of putting on an airs of indifference, whatever sex it had been. It acted like a boy, though fell quite well into that age and shape where it really could be either, and the little Mouse hadn't really bothered to adorn itself with the usual artificial signals and amplifiers of the usual human bifurcations.
"My mesmergraph specifies that you are somehow linked to the Crucible incident that occured twenty realities more normal of this one, by a factor of 2x45679271..."
Despite the obvious pain of ichor red staining an already red cloak black near his shoulder, however, the boy put out its words evenly enough. Even adult like. Better then adult like. The anti-automaton was impressed, most impressed indeed.
"I have no idea what you're talking about. Those terms are foreign to me."
The mix of stimuli produced a sentence that to the unaided ear and brain might have been processed as defiant, though a certain number of algorithims stored in the Emergent decoherence of his adiabatic brain, a thousand transistors bouncing around data, and assigning no blame. Blameless, positively blameless, they said.
He didn't believe them. Couldn't believe them. No one was innocent. Everyone was to blame.
"You Traveled here, boy...", drawing out the word quite specifically, to note the special meaning. "You aren't of this world any more then I, and I know this to be a fact of at least 90% certainty. So how did you do it? And what has it to do with the Crucible? Answer me..."
He dragged out his last word, too, while pressing his fingers (claws, talons....syringes?) deeper into the child's shoulder, registering a satisfactory whelp, and a wince.
"I was given a job." He didn't beg. "Attend a tournament, it would 'be an easy way of doing things'. I have no idea what those things are or why, just to obtain 'an object of sufficient density to create a traversible singularity."
The algorithims in Tres' brain once again confirmed a sort of 'truth-sense' with a similar level of certainty to before, but he didn't require that information. No ratty-little red-riding-hood from an obviously agrarian setting was going to make up that story. It had to be true. Too irrational to be untrue. The universe thrived on chaos, and irony.
Ah, universes (plural). Not to get anyone in a tizzy.
"Who hired you to attempt to perform these services?", he inquired further, more forceful and impatient then thus far, slowly withdrawing his fingers from the near-wound, the not-quite-a-wound, though it was still bleeding a stain of black into a rather new looking cloak of red.
The rodent-child tumbled to the ground. Tres hadn't realized he'd been holding it up, through exhaustion, brought on by pain, brought on by all measure to conceal all of these in a clever and foolish mask of ease and indifference. "He never told me his name."
It felt it's shoulder. It winced again. It looked around, rose again.
It's planning to run.
He should kill it. It might betray their little secret, their conversation, their-
Not like it mattered, though. Although breaking something that didn't respond to the process in mind and spirit, as much as in body, however, robbed the act of recreational violence of much allure.
Not violence...Ultraviolence.
Hm, another part of him whispered. It was the Master. No, it was his imprint. Whatever the case, he enjoyed a correction via fine literature, when it suited the thoughts, and their moments.
"Describe him to me...", he beckoned, gesturing as some sort of hunter/shepherd fiend, the mythic beast in him offering something to the prey for its trouble of stumbling into its attentions. He understood. No real names, no tender reunions, just a relationship of a certain kind of faith and trust, and then...
Just business.
The rodent that was a thief, and a boy, looked up at him. It was standing, oh most certainly, only slightly nursing its broken skin, it's bruised bone, its inflamed area. But Tres, though slightly hunched, as was his usual posture, was much taller. It understood. Ah yes, no one ever asked something for nothing.
"He's very tan. Very practical, and very crude and rude, though he still commands a certain type of respect. Old, but very physically fit. With a foreign accent that 'comes through like this', when speaking in private."
The child affected a US-Southerner drawl quite endearingly. The lights went off in Tres' head like bombs.
Oh. Ooooooh. Tres recalled. Oh yes. 'Hard Knocks'. Agent Knox. He'd been there. But he'd all died....hadn't he?
"Knox." he stated. A spark of understanding lit somewhere deep in the mirror black surfaces of the child's ageless eyes. It said, he had a label now. He had a name. He could identify this person he was being ordered about and commanded by.
And Tres knew who the Master was looking for, when the Master did not. And that person wanted at least two Traversible Singularities.
"He'd always been a direct sort....", Tres muttered to no one, "stupid and brutish." But with base cunning. Enough to keep him alive. Enough for him to keep up, at least for awhile...
He'd never liked him. But he had, in a particular way, as one acknowledges a kindred spirit. Even if you wouldn't spare him the honor of excising his liver, in a fit of mania and anger. Even if you wouldn't deign to share a room with him, a building, or a city.
Tres was a monster. But Tres had standards. And good ole Knox.....well he was just plain filthy.
In yet another moment in the past five normal years, Tres missed the sensation of lips pursed in a cruel, thin smile.
"I'm afraid that I have something for our dear friend 'Knox'....", Tres began, holding up a ghastly gunmetal hand, igniting each finger tip in a half-foot plasma stream, fed from the reactor, starting to life with a 'pop' that would have made weak, yet sensitive eardrums bleed. Bright crimson, the upset in the the reactor and its magnetic-mesh trickled a bit of red-shifted electricity sparking along the surface, Thanatos a stranger to the golden, wheat colored fields, under a harvest sunset, everything a golden brown, everything wonderful just-before-autumn.
"It's a message. Though I'm afraid I'll have to write it into a rather....peculiar tapestry. You will get to serve as the fabric...."
The boy-girl-child, what have you, messenger of Knox, representative of current and peculiar irony, had slipped its hand inside the fold of its hooded robes, to seemingly probe at the puncture beneath it, but as Tres began to approach, and the child assumed a measured, equivalent retreat, it jerked out a simply elegant silvery dagger. Steel, the sensors in the eye said, sampling refraction of the light of the setting sun off of its surfaces. It's pin-prick, in the only feature on the flat white mask, a brilliant crimson, expanded; the eye, viewing something it liked, or compensating for a shrinking amount of light. It jerked it's knife/dagger down to its side, and continued backpedaling, a slow, measured, deliberate pace of....
Of doing what exactly?
Tres stopped. The child gave him a puzzled frown. The pseudo-musculature visibly coiled, restoring some tension, multiplying basic tactile strength by a factor of two, at the expense of a similar extent of flexibility. Tres then began to move, false muscles screaming in their wiry clusters like nails on a chalkboard, a natural warcry born of the unnatural, adding to the horror, the suspense. He charged, muscles playing a discordant chord. His brain had placed it all in order for him. The child wouldn't react fast enough. Shouldn't be able to. A cunning muscle memory evident from recorded movement habits so far, but nothing that Tres couldn't deal with in due--
Mid-charge, the world began to stretch, as though his frame of vision seemed to have shot off into a starless, unlimited darkness of the universe blasted asunder. He was being Transported. Unintentionally. By a foreign device and technique, of unknown origin.
YOU ARE NOT AN AUTHORIZED COMBATANT
Tres chuckled. Or would have. There was a timeless time, which meant motionless air, which meant actions were singular and not repetitive, until he was done. He had no control; or nowhere near so much as he might have preferred to have. He could interfere though. He had some powers of relativity left to be exploited by the machine in his ey-
YOU WILL BE RETURNED FROM WHERE YOU CAME, AND-
I don't think so. He only thought it (couldn't speak it), but whatever it was stopped, between what it could perceive of his thought processes, and the single action he was setting in place.
YOU WILL--
But it couldn't stop him. Couldn't do much of anything, as he weakly struggled with its grip, but much as the Mouse could have done in his, he slipped through it. Still it's world, he could detect, as Quantum Steps recorded an instant dragged into eternity. Still the one he'd been tracking the child to, looking for signs of another survivor of the Master's hackjob at the Crucible. Great fun. Such a shame he'd missed it...
The world was becoming much more sane, now, as he found his perception normalizing, his person falling from an impossibly height in an icy chamber that brought recollections of old Hyborean temples. No time to perceive the runes, but the architecture was one thing-
He hit the floor, digging something of a crater. Mostly conscious. Oh yes, he was all there....
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