The video game, not Fate/Prototype.Chapters
Chapter 1 - What do lions think about? / Alex Fucking Mercer / Kaboom, Kaboom
Chapter 2 - Never say die / The men in black / Regretting your decision to go into Medicine
Chapter 3 - Stomach realm mandala / Team taijitu / Alone with the psycho (?)
Chapter 4 - The law of the wild
Chapter 5 - Puppeteer philosophy / Characteristic german efficiency
Chapter 6 - Breakfast of champions (part 1) / Hunting license
Chapter 7 - Breakfast of champions (part 2)
Chapter 8 - Chain of command / Down and out / Rapid response
Chapter 9 - Hunting party / Three wise men / Morning sortie / Abnormality
Chapter 10 - Narasimha
Chapter 11 - Game over / Hiranyagarbha / Gold lion warfare / Withdrawal orders / Somehow alive
Chapter 12 - Challenge and response / Spook country / One hour photo
Chapter 13 - Reevaluation / When the lions roar (part 1) / North by northwest
Chapter 14 - The run / When the lions roar (part 2)
Chapter 15 - The original ahnenerbe / Basement dweller / Burnin' down da house / Not saying it was aliens but it was aliens / The star of bethlehem
Chapter 16 - Riverside view / The old man and the PhD / Souvenirs / An offer you can't refuse
Chapter 17 - Birth of a great demon / Japanese neo-traditionalism / The truth, somewhat / Bollocks, and you can quote me on that / Consultation and incursion
Chapter 18 - Treadstone / It's that moment of dawning comprehension I live for / Sysadmin blues / Wheels within wheels / Bustin' out dead or alive
Chapter 19 - Predator versus super-predator / That awkward moment when / Peter pan syndrome / Inferiority simplex / The outcast / Discovery
Chapter 20 - To catch a predator / Boom, headshot / First contact / Rumination / Not so ninja after all
Chapter 21 - Thug life / Daddy's girl / Confidence trickster mentor / Hold the sex and rock'n'roll / Interdiction / Delays / Target acquired
Chapter 22 - Boom shakalaka in the new stylee
Chapter 23 - Der erlkonig / That left turn at albuquerque / God's in his heaven / October spy / Friends
Chapter 24 - Council of war / Responsible parenting / Vague communication / The lying king / Bribery and corruption
Chapter 25 - Edokko standoff / Bitter orange / Lie to me / Backroom dealer / The courage to lie to your friends / Bakenekogatari
Chapter 26 - Down the rabbit hole / Proust eats a cookie / Box of goblins / Seeing double / Drugs, the solution to everything / Father's day / Them's fighting' words
Chapter 27 - Murder speculation reloaded / Setting the trap / From the top / Hesitancy / Black ops / Call waiting / No death for the wicked
Chapter 28 - Girls will be girls / Scheming looks different / Real subtle / Original sin / Yakuza logic
Chapter 29 - Crossing the line / Relocation / Discourse / Spy game / The savage / Psychiatry
Chapter 30 - Snapshots from where you were born / Eye have you / Car to car / Oscar mike once more / And the dominoes / Theodicy
Chapter 31 - The man who mistook himself for a lion / Volatile headspace of yours / Paths crossed / Coincidentially
Chapter 32 - On exactitude in spying / Affably alice / Hounds to the hunters / State of denial
Chapter 33 - Antiderivative / Approach / Dull surprise / Spyin' in the rain / Once a sahib / How to describe the fuck out of a gazebo / Let mistakes be mistakes / Beef bourguignon / Inter rogat / Own up / Krait expectations / Alert phase / Tactical suicide / Strategic overkill
Chapter 34 - J'aiguise le couteau / Et méprise la douleur / Pour l'ensemble de ma vie / Je reste un étranger
Chapter 35 - Hiro protagonist / Don't even worry about it / The good, the bad and the telekinetic sociopath / I am thy chela / Adding eighth-grader syndrome to our laundry list of mental disorders, are we
Chapter 36 - Mountain of faith / Our man in havana / Bitten by a radioactive lion / Think but this and all is mended
Chapter 37 - Plans of the patriots / Project shrine maiden / They're taking the hobbits / Sneak attack, bitch / Uh-oh / Time to choose wisely
Chapter 38 - Veni vidi vincent
Chapter 39 - Approximately as planned / The captain's checkers game / International roaming / Flat snark wednesday
Chapter 40 - The samurai / Serpentine suspicions / Historical materialism / Not contagious / Dreamin' razor / Hypercube
Chapter 41 - Horobod / Break-in and entering / Suspicious suspecting / Surveillance society / The perfection of wisdom / Mostly 'armless
Chapter 42 - Peer review / It ain't me / I ain't no fortunate one / Don't break character / Call waiting
Chapter 43 - Reluctant replier / Conference call / Manifested mastermind / If your left arm causes you pain
Chapter 44 - The prospection of wisdom / But you yourself are nothing so divine / Daniel's saving face / Cross marks the spot
Chapter 45 - Icelandic fire / The game that we have been playing / The wolf among them / Thunderbirds are go
Chapter 46 - Demiurge blues / Aurora borealis / First tuesday demon club / Old dogs' dirty tricks / Deportation consultation
Chapter 47 - And we're back / Interview with a bad guy / Dial tone / Death threats unveiled / I recommend the spring rolls / Expatriate exegesis / Bringing home the bacon / You wouldn't have heard of it, it's pretty underground
Chapter 48 - The short version / Osukaa maiku / Ougon no kagakusha / Might as well be talking to a wall / Your own personal hangups
Chapter 49 - Meet the director / Marimiteinai / Get ready for some text you chumps / Offensive use of telecommunications / Successive use of telecommunications / Scream and leap / Cyclone warning / Two realms conspiracy
Omake
Omake - Origin: Mathematics / I Can Live With Only Three Walls
Omake - Shanked lion high
Omake - MIAL World Material: On the Origins of Mishaguji
*cue everyone leaving the thread in disappointment*
Wait, wait, come back! Hear me out at least!
A couple of weeks ago, I posted a snippet in the Crossover Ideas thread about Lio Shirazumi being given the Blacklight virus by Alex Mercer. "Consumption" and all that. That was kind of well-recieved, so I thought about it for a while and I think I've finally developed the idea enough to make a fic of it, so here goes.
-------------------------------------Before I Start
The main trouble with crossing over Kara no Kyoukai with Prototype is one of timing. The events of Prototype take place in 2008, while Kara no Kyoukai takes place between March of 1995 and March of 1999. In order to compensate for this, I'm moving the events of Kara no Kyoukai forward by a full decade. Under this revised timeline, Shiki's coma takes place between February of 2006 and June of 2008. The events of Remaining Sense of Pain (Part 3) take place in July of 2008. Overlooking View (Part 1) takes place in August/September 2008. Paradox Spiral (Part 5) takes place in November 2008. Using a high school entry date of 2005, Mikiya and Shiki were born in 1989, Azaka and Fujino in 1992, and Lio Shirazumi in 1988. To compare with the Prototype cast, Alex Mercer was born in 1979, Dana Mercer in 1988, Elizabeth Greene in 1951, Raymond McMullen in 1955, and Bradley Ragland in 1960.
It's also important to note that the KnK universe differs from the main Tsukihime/Fate continuity in that there are no True Ancestor (and hence, Dead Apostle) vampires. However, oddities such as ORT and Primate Murder still exist. Aside from that, however, all other characters and organisations as depicted in Type-MOON works still exist (or existed, in the event that they're dead.)
October, 2008
This is something I remembered from a long time ago. For a while, I'd thought I'd forgotten it. My memory isn't...well, it doesn't work like it should any more. It's fuzzy. Chaotic. I...lose things from it, every so often. A day or two out of the week, here and there. But it's fine. For now. It hasn't completely failed me just yet. It will, eventually. But that doesn't matter right now. What matters is the memory. I'm going to write it down, so I don't forget it. I must have been – what? Six, seven years old? I don't know. I didn't bring any photos from back then with me when I left home, and I don't remember what I looked like at that age anyway. Truth be told, every day it gets harder to look at myself in the mirror and tell myself I didn't always look like that. Never mind. Doesn't matter. It's the memory that's important, the memory, the memory – it's broken, disjointed, a series of snapshots in my mind, taken from some unknown viewpoint ten feet above and behind my head – damn it, where did it start again? Alright. Stop. Think. Think of it as a series of photographs. Photographs are simple, photographs I can understand. From the beginning:
FIRST: There's me, on a train. I'm looking at myself from behind, but I know it's me. In old photos, you always do. In old memories, doubly so. Next to me are two people. A man and a woman. Parents? More likely than not. I can't tell any more. It's been three years since I last saw them. They probably wouldn't even recognise me if they met me on the street.
SECOND: The same three people. Me and two others. We're at...where are we, anyway? It's daytime. Sunny. There's a light crowd around. There are...cages? Enclosures? A zoo? ...Ah, yes, I remember. A zoo. I went there – no, my parents took me there. I can't remember the reason.
That day, fourteen years ago...my parents and I went to the zoo.
“Which animals do you want to see first?”
A man's voice. My father's, then.
“Mm...”
That's right. There were so many to choose from. I couldn't decide.
“Oh, how about those?”
That was my mother. She was pointing at a nearby enclosure. Which? The photo doesn't show. It's off-camera.
THIRD: No people in this one. It's a close-up shot. A sign. “Giraffes”. Always seemed to be such a stupid-sounding word. Why are giraffes called giraffes, anyway? Who decided that? Did someone look at them one day and say to themselves, “Giraffe. That's a Giraffe.”, and everyone agreed with him? Seriously, what the fuck is up with that? Never mind. Need to concentrate. The memory.
“Mm-m.”
That's me. I'm shaking my head.
“Ah. I think I know what he'd like to see.”
My father again. We start walking.
FOURTH: A weird one. It's abstract. An arrangement of shapes and lines, with-oh, I see. It's a map. A map of the zoo. There's an arrow marked on it, traced along one of the pathways in black ink. I think it's where we went.
“So, how's your new school going for you?”
My mother. Making small talk, as she did. Did she? I can't remember. It just seemed to be a very mother-like thing to do, so I chose to believe that she did.
“It's fine.”
I would have been...six. Or seven. Primary school age. That's right, it was a new school. We'd moved recently. My father got promoted. Funny, I don't really remember anything about-
“Have you made any friends?”
-oh.
“...no.”
That. That's right. That's how it always was, wasn't it? Almost an entire educational career, from primary school through to the end of middle school, without making a single friend. It's the sort of thing the word “pathetic” was coined to describe, the kind of schadenfreude-inducing social failure that you can't help but laugh at when it happens to someone else.
It wasn't my fault.
FIFTH: Me and my parents again. We're standing in front of an enclosure, but I can't see a sign nor any animals inside.
“I don't see them.”
My father. When I try to picture his face, I can only think of his most distinctive features. Glasses. Square ones. He was short-sighted, I think. Not a very strong prescription, but I think he needed them to drive.
“Maybe they're asleep?”
My mother. I have even more trouble picturing her face. It's hazy, a blur to me. She had brown eyes. That's all I can think of. The rest is lost to me.
“There.”
I pointed into the enclosure. It was essentially a large pit, sunk into the ground, with rocks and grass and acacia trees – an idealised microcosm, the Serengeti in a bottle. Just like...what phrase did he use? A miniature world that concludes in a day. Heh. I can't deny the similarity there. Araya's puppet show is just another kind of zoo, when you think about it. Sure, it's a single-species exhibit, and it doesn't get visitors very often, and the enclosures are half-empty most of the time, so it's by no means a successful zoo, but it's a zoo nonetheless.
SIXTH: A lion.
The resident super-predator of the African savannah, now living in a pale imitation of its original habitat, to be gawked at by visitors. I seem to remember being slightly repulsed by the whole concept, even at that age.
Why should a creature like that have to live all its life in a cage of society's making?
It didn't choose to be born into captivity.
No-one asked it whether it would prefer to run wild and free, whether or not it was happier inside the cage. It was simply...decided. Society created a cage, and put the lion inside. They took the lion out of the savannah, and hoped that eventually that would take the savannah out of the lion. Maybe it did. Who can tell what lions think about?
But that, I thought, was something very sad.
The lion walked over to the edge of the wall, near where we were standing, and looked up at me.
For a second it looked...confused. I don't know if facial expressions work the same with cats as they do with humans. It gave the appearance of looking confused. Puzzled. Like it simply didn't know what to make of me. And then, it left.
“That's your namesake, you know.”
My mother. Again, just saying whatever she felt like to pass the time. I must have looked up at her quizzically, because she went on to say something else.
“Lio. One letter off from being a lion.”
Come to think of it, that's almost exactly what he said.
“How unfortunate. You lack one last step in being a lion.”
“Fuck.” I say out loud, to no-one in particular. I stop writing and put down my pencil. “What's the point?”
On my desk, aside from the diary I was writing in, the only other object is a small, rectangular piece of paper torn out from a lined exercise book, and written on that piece of paper is this:
6 months = 183 days = 4,392 hours = 263,523 minutes = 15,811,200 seconds
That is the Ceiling, the time allotted to me by the architect of my condition, the Magus Souren Araya. The absolute upper limit on the time I have left before the Impulse completely destroys what remains of “me”. And then, that'll be it for Lio Shirazumi. That day at the zoo with my parents I barely remember – that and a thousand other moments just like it will drown in the chaotic collective memory of my previous incarnations. From that day forward, the name of my Impulse, “Consumption”, will be both my autobiography and my obituary.
And I cannot accept that.
I absolutely, totally, cannot accept that.
It's not like this is an unsolvable problem. The solution exists. I know that. I've known it for years. I know exactly what it is, what I need to do, how it works. I understand it. But I can't reach it. Because yesterday Souren Araya made it quite clear to me that to go near Shiki Ryougi is to sign my own death warrant. Ryougi, you see, is the answer. I need Ryougi. I need her more than I need anything else in the world, more than I need air to breathe or water to drink. The films and photographs can only go so far. I know I don't have much time. That's why it's so important. But I can't get to her while Araya is alive. And Araya isn't going to die any time soon. If I step within a hundred metres of Ryougi, Araya's magecraft will crush the space inside my body, pulverising my internal organs starting from the brain downwards. The only thing more horrible to think about than that is the fact that he said I only had a 50-50 chance of actually dying from it.
“Fuck it.” I stand up, and walk into the adjoining room. There's no use thinking about this now. There's nothing I can do. I look at a small digital clock hidden among the Bunsen burners, test tube racks and assorted chemical glassware that occupies most of the kitchen bench. It's just past seven o'clock in the evening. Tuesday. Guess that means I'm heading out for tonight. It's been a good batch, this week. I tried a new method. It adds about two hours to the time needed to boil down the solution, but the end result gives me a higher output with fewer impurities, so I'd say it's worth it. I couldn't tell you how many notebooks I've filled with reaction diagrams and experimental data. The familiar process of writing on paper is acting as a substitute for my degenerating memory. It's this – reason, logic, the scientific method, shit like that – that lets me delineate myself from them – the ten thousand hungry beasts who live in the empty space my conscience left when it ditched me three years ago. Even if it is just making drugs. So it's important that I write these things down. Otherwise I might forget them. Anyway, time to go. The customers are waiting.
Ah...my time is short, the night is long, and I have so very much to do...
Gentek Laboratories, Gramercy, New York City
Ring, ring.
“McMullen.”
“We got him.”
“When?”
“The team led by Specialist Cross called it in just now from Battery Park. The DX-1118C sample was recovered intact. No breach of quarantine.”
“What about Mercer?”
“Dead.”
“Was that necessary?”
“Cross thought so. I trust his judgement.”
“With all due respect, Alex Mercer was one of this company's most valuable assets. I'd like to believe that there was a good reason for putting him on a slab.”
“Director, we're Blackwatch, not the goddamn Coast Guard. 'Non-lethal' isn't on the menu. If we're out in the field at all, we're out there to kill people. Taking out Mercer was an on-the-spot call, but SOP – our SOP – was followed to the letter. Am I clear?”
“Of course. But you do realise how far this is going to set back development on BLACKLIGHT?”
“I was given to understand Mercer had all but perfected it with the latest revision. Or am I wrong?”
“To say 'perfected' is oversimplifying. It's true that DX-1118C lacked the volatility that characterised 1118A and B, but as of right now it's only a third of the way through in vivo trials. It's still in the prototype phase.”
“Can Mercer's team complete the trials without him?”
“Yes, but if we have to reject DX-1118C due to some as-yet undetected design flaw, creating a new revision without Mercer's expertise will be difficult.”
“How difficult?”
“At a guess? We're looking at a setback of five to six months.”
“It's within parameters. Blackwatch is patient, Director. It's taken forty years to get to where we are today. Five to six months won't be a problem. Just as long as you get it done.”
“Of course.”
Chirp, chirp – EMAIL RECIEVED.
“Now, about Mercer's sister. She's a potential loose end. We've had her apartment under surveillance for some time, but it's still unclear how much she knows.”
“I would recommend-”
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Subject: Screw you.
First things first. McMullen, if you're reading this, it means that I'm dead. But I'm fairly sure that you would have known that already. So let me take a moment to tell you what I know. I know that BLACKLIGHT sure as hell isn't about curing cancer, or AIDS, or whatever bullshit story you and the board fed to the rest of the company. I know that there's only one way a biotech company gets funding in the tens of billions of dollars without being publicly listed, and that's through being in bed with one or several very highly-placed people at the DoD. And, most importantly, I know about her.
You know who I'm talking about, don't you, McMullen? That girl you keep in the P4 lab on the fifty-first floor. Elizabeth Greene. Codename MOTHER. It'd be nice to say that if you had just told the truth from the start, none of this would have happened, but I guess it's too late for that now. So, let me guess; once the Pentagon got their hands on whatever shiny new bioweapon you had me perfect BLACKLIGHT into, I would have been quietly taken out the back and shot? Makes sense, really. Don't want any loose ends on a project like this. Well, too bad. I have no intention of going quietly into that good night, “national security” be damned. Killing me is going to cost you dearly, McMullen. Let me tell you how:
Somewhere, in a certain country (I'll make it easier for you – it's one of the industrialised ones. The news media should start reporting the first cases in about a week, so if you haven't worked it out by then, check the front page of the International Herald Tribune), there is a vial of laboratory-pure DX-1118C. I hacked the P4 inventory database so that nobody noticed it was missing. Immediately adjacent to that vial is a small quantity of plastic explosive. That's connected to an electronic igniter which is in turn connected to a smart phone. I won't go into the precise details, suffice to say I've arranged it such that if I don't send an email to a certain address every 36 hours, those explosives go off, and the latest revision of BLACKLIGHT goes public on a massive scale. Obviously I can't send emails when I'm dead, so you have at most 36 hours to search the entire industrialised world for a single test tube. Impossible? Yeah, pretty much. If you want to narrow it down, you should probably assume that I've chosen the country such that, if this is ever traced back to the DoD, it'll cause as much of an international incident as humanly possible.
So, to sum up:
- BLACKLIGHT is going public, and there's not a damn thing you can do about it. I'm confident of at least a pentuple-digit death count before it gets brought under control.
- Once the international scientific establishment gets a look at DX-1118C, a simple cross-referencing of certain proprietary genome sequences will trace it back to Gentek.
- Have fun being hung out to dry by the DoD when they decide to pin this whole thing on Gentek! God knows the International Criminal Court has seen enough third-world dictators, it's time they had a scientist or two in there. If you handle this well, I think you and the board might get off with only four or five consecutive life sentences each.
- Rot in hell, McMullen.
Yours Sincerely,
Dr. Alexander J. Mercer
Chief Scientist, Project BLACKLIGHT
P.S.: This also constitutes my letter of resignation.
“-Director McMullen?”
“...son of a BITCH!”
“Is there a problem?”
“In a word? Yes. I'm forwarding you an email I received just now.”
“From who?”
“Mercer.”
“...”
“...”
“He's bluffing.”
“Mercer doesn't bluff.”
“He'd have needed an overseas accomplice. He couldn't have set all this up himself.”
“I wouldn't put it past him.”
“Jesus, McMullen, you sure know how to fucking pick 'em.”
“Assuming this is legitimate, what's our next move?”
“Get yourself and everyone left on the BLACKLIGHT team up to Fort Detrick ASAP. We'll have ELINT go over all of Mercer's overseas contacts with a fine-toothed comb. In the meantime, I'll have Cross bring in Mercer's kid sister. She might know something. If she does, we'll get it out of her. We don't know the exact time window we're dealing with here, but we might just have a shot at preventing this.”
“And if we can't?”
“Then Mercer's prediction comes true. Officially, we don't exist, and the DoD will make sure that the buck stops with you. Make no mistake, McMullen; in a situation like that, even you are expendable.”
“What about MOTHER?”
“That's up to you. If it were me, I'd have her liquidated immediately. She's a liability.”
“She's too valuable for that.”
“Do what you want, then. It's not my ass that'll be on the line here.”
Click.
“Alex fucking Mercer...son of a bitch.”
Tokyo
After a while, the glazed-over, empty-eyed expressions common to the junkies of Tokyo all start to blend into one another, which I guess would kind of screw over my ability to remember names, if this were the kind of business where establishing a rapport with your customers actually mattered. Truth be told, I don't sell drugs out of any sort of romantic notion of what drugs are and what they do to you. It's just “the subsuming of higher thought in a rush of primal impulse” - in other words, what's happening to me, but on a smaller scale. No, I sell drugs because of society. Society marginalises illegal drugs and those who use them. Pushes them under the carpet, into the cracks in the pavement. If I want to find someone like me – someone who can fill the void that Araya's existence prevents Ryougi from taking her rightful place in – I need to look on the edges of society. It's only logical. Those who truly want to escape the prison cell gravitate toward the walls, so that I might tunnel through from the other side to let them out. The illegal drug trade is a convenient way to do that. Plus, the money's not bad, either. I don't have to give any of my take to any kind of group or syndicate, so I guess I'm better off financially than most of the dealers around here. Not that I have much of what you'd call disposable income. Most of what I make gets spent on equipment – chemical supplies, stuff I need to maintain the hydroponics at the warehouse, and camera equipment – and food. Food is very important. My Impulse lends a special kind of lingering appeal to the taste of human flesh. In particular, it drives me towards...methods...of feeding which involve a great deal of post-mortem dismemberment. That leaves traces, and traces get found by the cops. Those traces happen to be the same traces that were left by my victims of two years ago, the ones that led Ryougi Shiki to become the person she is today, even though Araya did pronounce me a failure after the fact. If I...consume...in the same way today, Ryougi is sure to hear about it and make the connection, and what her reaction could be, I don't know, but it might potentially interfere with Araya's precious little experiment. So he's forbidden me from it. Under pain of a 50-50 chance of death. So I subsist on raw meats, both red and white, and try to shut out the roars and growls of ten thousand hungry beasts who insist that it's not really food until you've chased it down and torn it apart with your teeth, quenching your thirst with the blood and ripping the tendons and biting and chewing and crushing and-
Sorry. I've rather forgotten where I was going with this.
It's one AM, and I'm travelling rooftop-to-rooftop in Ikebukuro. I got cleaned out tonight. Not a single gram of product left. Maybe I should try Kobe beef, now that I can afford it. I caught sight of a pair of Araya's familiars a while ago. Crows. Possibly ravens. Some kind of bird, at any rate. Couldn't tell, at that distance. In this light. He usually has a couple of them follow me around. Paranoid old bastard really takes his experiments seriously. Honestly. If the linchpin of his entire plan (I'll admit he did explain it to me once, back when I was living in that apartment complex in Kayamihama. I wasn't really paying attention. Sue me.) was anyone but Ryougi, I wouldn't have to put up with this shit. Instead, I-
I stop.
I'm standing on the rooftop of...some, random, nondescript building in Ikebukuro, surrounded by air conditioners and TV antennas, the usual rooftop paraphernalia, you know...and I have no idea what I've been doing for the past two hours. The memory is just...gone. Just now. Just like that. And in the space it left-
Look. Find. Hunt. Chase. Kill. Tear. Snap. EAT.
Shut up.
Hunt. Trail. Follow. Scent. Blood. Sweat. Fear. Paw. Claw. Tooth. Teeth. Flesh. EAT.
Shut up.
Ice. Snow. Sand. Desert. Tundra. Jungle. Forest. Lake. Ocean. Live. Die. Live. EAT.
“Just SHUT UP!”
Crunch.
I look down, and see that I've just punched one of the air-conditioning units. Pretty hard too. My fist is embedded about nine inches into the fan assembly. Damn. The people on the street below...someone must have heard that, right? Must have. Damn it damn it damn it. Got to get it out, got to get away, they'll find me they'll find me they'll find me STOP.
Don't panic.
Just...calm down. Panic is bad. Fight-or-flight response. Animal instinct. Animals panic. Humans remain calm. That's the difference. The difference is necessary. Because I – Kill. Hunt. Fear. Teeth. Flesh. EAT. EAT. EAT. - shut up shut up I'm not listening to you I am a human and not an animal no matter what you say no matter what Araya says no matter what society says so just fuck off and let me think about this.
Why is this such a big deal?
It isn't. It's just an A/C unit. I should not be freaking out about this. Why am I freaking out about this? I've killed people. Why the fuck should an A/C unit matter to me?
Breathe deep.
That. That smell. I know that smell. Not from the chaotic pool of animal instinct. From before I knew them. From before I was like this. High school. Chemistry class.
Pentaerythritol. C 5 H 12 O 4. Method of preparation. Reagents. Formaldehyde. Acetaldehyde. Condensation reaction in the presence of a base. Tollens' Reaction.
No. There's something else. Sharp. Acidic.
Nitric acid. H N O 3. Concentrated.
Individually? Not uncommon. Relatively innocuous chemicals, found in laboratories all over the world.
Together, however...
White precipitate formed. Pentaerythritol tetranitrate. C 5 H 8 N 4 O 12.
High explosive. Primary component of Semtex.
I remember the strangest things, sometimes. Then again, I've always been good at chemistry. Maybe that kind of memory can't be eroded by the Impulse, because it's simply so removed from any kind of experience a predatory animal might have had. Damn. I should have asked Araya about that, when I had the chance.
Well, if I ever get tired of drug dealing, I could always find a job as one of those police dogs...you know the ones, they train them to sniff out explosives and drugs and stuff.
So what's this meant to be, anyway? I'm fairly certain this kind of feature wasn't included by the manufacturer. Air conditioners don't run on high explosives. That's ridiculous. So, what, there's some kind of bomb inside the fan assembly? Who the hell puts a bomb there? What kind of idiotic, terminally brain-damaged terrorist puts his bomb on a fucking rooftop? You probably wouldn't even kill anyone. It's not even summer, so losing an A/C unit couldn't even be called an inconvenience, really.
Is this real? Is this an actual thing that is happening to me? I'm seriously beginning to wonder if I'm hallucinating this. Ordinarily, because of my metabolism, my own product doesn't really have an effect on me, but maybe-
Beep, beep.
please tell me that that is not what i think it is
----------------------------------------------
Criticism, as ever, would be much appreciated. I'd like to think my interpretation of Lio's character is still in keeping with what we know about him from canon, but god knows I've probably taken one too many liberties somewhere. He will, after all, end up being the hero of this story. (In much the same way Alex Mercer was the hero of Prototype - by killing loads and loads of people.)
Don't ask me why Mercer's email is split between two quote tags. The post editor just did that for some reason.
