Chapter 223 : Patchees' progress

Jeremy had... Very mixed feelings, at the moment. On an elevator to the depths of the Sunken City, a place he never thought he'd set foot in

Jeremy had... Very mixed feelings, at the moment.

On an elevator to the depths of the Sunken City, a place he never thought he'd set foot in, at the side of a boss who looked a little closer to a Villain than most people would feel comfortable with, on the way to see a group of people twisted into abominable forms by a now dead madman... Well, Jeremy's day wasn't going quite according to plan. To be fair, he had willingly decided to join Silhouette's group, well aware the shadow man was... Not morally dubious, that would be unfair to a man who had been quite friendly and had proven to be one of the best bosses around, according to Maggie. But there was no ignoring the fact that Silhouette had a flair to him that would be typically seen on Villains.

Regular people didn't have a completely black office, so dark that the human eye couldn't see anything but the void, even with an open window.

Though Jeremy had to say, as one of the people with the right set of powers to let his senses perceive the truth of the scene, the office in question looked quite nice. A little detached, more like a set than a truly personalized space. Aside from the color and affinity for the darkness, everything in the room was rather plain and soulless - in the corporate way, not the eldritch or demonic way. The closest thing to an insight into Silhouette's personality had been the paintings, with the one featuring a group of salmon climbing up a waterfall seemingly being the one he liked the most, since it was the one directly facing his desk. Well, there was also the one with a bird pecking at a tree, but it was too close to the door - and thus at risk of being accidentally hit or damaged - for Jeremy to think Silhouette truly cared about it.

Though deep down, Jeremy knew he was only thinking about that meaningless office to distract his thoughts from their objective in coming down here. His sister.

He.... He didn't want to get his hopes up. He knew that factually, even if Maria was still alive and miraculously one of the Patchees had successfully rescued in his bizarre monster pound, chances were high, nay, most certainly guaranteed, that she wouldn't be the same person he knew. She had been taken years ago. Knowing the Patcher's work, she likely was more of a dog made of human flesh than a person by now. A beast that had almost certainly taken her pound of flesh, perhaps even kidnapped others to experience a similar fate.

He didn't care. She could be a dragon of carrion and hate, with the blood of thousands on her hands, and he would still love her. Still would try to save her.

But also knew that Patchees didn't have the best chances of survival. Whether it was because they were failed experiments getting recycled or simply because the monsters were taken down by those they tried to kill, it was very rare to get multiple sightings of the same Patchee beyond a year after its first apparition. Not impossible, some of the creatures had survived and become famous, but those were mostly the ones that gangs had bought and were taking good care of. Their creator saw no value in their continued existence, besides the freshness of the materials they provided.

Jeremy was so lost in his thoughts that he barely noticed their surroundings as they made their way to a large black wooden building surrounded by a dark metal fence. He still took in the experience of being in the Sunken City, a place most people living in the good parts of Zalcien on the surface thought didn't exist, and tragic as it was, he could still appreciate the melancholic atmosphere of the ruined urban environment left to decay. That, and despite walking alongside Silhouette, he knew better than to let his guard down in this sort of environment.

Still, were his thoughts not constantly drifting back to memories and worries about his sister, he likely would have taken advantage of the scene to start planning poems. Poems he would only ever share under his nom de plume, to make sure to avoid the usual remarks that came with writing poems in the modern age, but poems he enjoyed nonetheless.

Mercifully, Jeremy was finally pulled out of his cycle of dark thoughts interrupted by vain attempts at distracting himself by focusing on the most mundane of things. How? When the pair arrived at their destination. The gate blocking them from the building, which he could now see was labelled as "Shadow Den", opened on its own when Silhouette led the way inside - no, scratch that. The gate hadn't opened on its own. They had been let in by... By... Was that a ghost nun? And it wasn't the only one, Jeremy quickly noticed, catching sight of more ethereal figures through the windows of the building.

"They are perfectly safe. So long as you don't pose a threat to their charges, they will happily welcome you."

"Who are they, sir?"

"The former tenants. If you notice roots, don't mind them, that would be their leader and former orphanage director."

"Orphanage?"

"Mother Greenheld's orphanage. A quaint little place back in its prime, from what our undead friends shared. It is one of my holdings now. I can't help but find it charming that, in a way, it still serves its purpose at welcoming and hosting lost souls until they are ready for the world."

"I mean no offense, sir, but... These undead look... Not feral but..."

"Yes, yes. They're not as aware as a living person would be. But trust me, they're still very human beneath it all. The soul is still there, and more importantly, the heart. The metaphorical heart, of course. The only undead who kept her literal heart would be Mother Greenheld herself, I suppose, and even then, it is not a heart in the cardiovascular sense but rather in the core way. But, as I said, they're perfectly fine. For better or worse, they are more stable and human than most of the Patchees we rescued so far."

Jeremy nodded along, simply following the living shadow as he led them to the back of the building rather than its inside. He had mixed feelings on the strange black grass he stepped on as they left the little path that would have brought them to the front door, the plants feeling a little crunchy for things that were still alive, but those were quickly ignored and thrown out the window as soon as he saw his first Patchee.

The vaguely centaur-like monster of charred human flesh and hair with far too many ribs for its size and a diagonal face was currently struggling to hold a pen in one of its smaller, more functional hands, writing something down on a magic slate under the supervision of one of the nuns. When the creature finished, it proudly turned the slate around to show it to the ghost, who nodded with a kind smile in her eyes. As soon as the two inhuman entities noticed the approaching Silhouette and his charge, they both tried to stand a little straighter - a complex maneuver for a legless spirit and a jumbled mess of bones covered in burned skin with too many limbs.

"At ease, at ease. Hello there, you two. Joe, good to see you made progress. I'm sure you'll be able to go back to pen on paper in no time."

The creature's messed-up face smiled as it nodded - or, well, presumably he with a name like Joe - before walking aside to let Silhouette and his human follower pass. Jeremy did his best to ignore all the wrong ways those legs moved, as well as to ignore the way the disproportionate eyes followed him as they walked away.

"This was Joe. Joe is... He still struggles with speech, but he is one of our best writers. He has shaky hands, but his prose is quite advanced. In a few days, we plan to give him a text-to-speech device to carry around, if he manages to use a keyboard successfully. If he does, he'll be one of our poster children for the initiative."

"There was more than one person used in making that, right?"

"Yes, we counted the bones. But as far as we know, there is only one functional mind. It's unclear if only one brain was used, if there's too little nervous system sampled from other people to carry their consciousness, or if Joe is the only spirit who didn't unravel after the creation of this body. Whatever the case, Joe is one of the easiest to handle. A little clumsy, but a clear singular persona with high intellect and the means to communicate, all in a very willing and eager package. We just need to be careful to avoid having fire around him, since he has pyrophobia."

"That's one of the best case scenarios?"

"A few are holding on better, but most aren't quite this... Collected or communicative. But a lot of that is due to his progress since arriving."

Silhouette raised a tentacle to point at a wretched creature with long arms, with far too many joints and enormous hands at the ends, alongside a head on an equally off-puttingly extended neck.

"This is Philibert. He was... The closest thing to a second-in-command the Patcher had, I suppose. More of a slave in an assistant role, but, for the sake of the Patchees, he's their unofficial leader. He can speak, simple words at first, but since he arrived, he's been getting closer to managing full sentences, so long as they don't have too many syllables. More importantly, whatever the Patcher did to him lets him understand most of the others, even if they're non-verbal. So, he is their de facto representative and ambassador. I think by now, Joe is in a better place than Philibert, but he isn't interested in the leadership position."

"So... That means..."

"Yes, I will let you have a little talk with Philibert, to check if he knows any Patchee with the name of your sibling. And if he doesn't, then we'll have a little tour of all our refugees, in case the sight of you might awaken suppressed or lost memories."

"They... They don't remember who they were?"

"Not all of them. Joe does. He was a former member of the Blood Angels. Philibert doesn't know who he used to be, and he's far too gone in his current life to feel okay trying to dig into the past. He's... He's content now, without the Patcher hanging over him. He doesn't want to ruin his happiness by remembering a life he feels he'll never get back. Others remember who they were but don't want to share, some want to remember but just can't, and a few... Well, a handful are composed of far too many different people to truly accept any one of their identities."

And with that, the pair reached the pale, bald creature they had come to talk to.

"Philibert? If you have a moment, I brought someone from the surface. This is Jeremy Jones. He is here to try and reconnect with his sister, should she be one of those we've gathered."

"Savior? Wants information?"

Jeremy looked at the transformed man and took a deep breath.

"No, I... I'm the one who needs to know. Do you know a Maria? Maria Jones? She... She used to be tall, lean, with big, round glasses? She had freckles and a white bang in her otherwise long black hair."

The creature hummed in thought, bending his leg-like neck to look at the ceiling as he searched his brain for any relevant memory.

"Met many Marias... Many lose their minds in the first week... Maria or not Maria... Names go and die... Only fear left... Fear and what the master called..."

"Philibert, if you could just tell us if any of the ones here used to be called Maria, that would already be a big help."

"There is... One... She sleeps at the tree..."

"Thank you, Philibert."

Jeremy was almost in a trance as Silhouette led him into the building, ignoring the armed people, additional ghosts, and strange contraptions he could see on the walls. No, he was far too lost in his thoughts to notice anything else this time. And as Silhouette led him even further into an inner court, separate from the outside garden and featuring a single dead tree with vaguely humanoid features in its trunk in the center, all his mind could see was the creature wallowing in despair at its exposed roots.

It was ugly. An abomination. A serpent of human flesh with far too many arms attached, with a head composed of an elongated skull, as though someone had pulled on a human face like it was dough, and sharp teeth and molars sharing spots in the mouth where they shouldn't. A mane of hair of various colors ran down the spine from the base of the head to the tip of the tail, an appendage which ended in a bone claw not unlike an earwig's pincer. It was frightening, off-putting, something straight out of a nightmare. And yet, he couldn't look away from those sad, hopeless eyes.

He could never mistake these blue and green eyes, with the odd spot in the right one. 

"Maria?"

The serpent raised her head to look at the intruder, only to freeze. Her maws tried to articulate something, but all that came out were chilling growls and groans. She rose from her rest, her tube-like body flexing all of its mighty muscles running her entire bus-like length, before she quickly crawled her way to the black-and-white man with her many limbs, a crazed glint in her eyes, before she pounced.

Jeremy Jones found himself hugged by far too many foreign arms for his own comfort, but it didn't matter. What was important was the soul he hugged back and their shared tears as her beastly head nuzzled against his human face.

Neither noticed the shadowy tendrils that had been ready to intervene should the situation grow dangerous, the dark things quickly retreating to leave the two sobbing siblings alone under the watchful yet discreet attention of Mother Greenheld herself, a piece of her bark where her eyes had once been moving in an attempt at a wink to reassure this forgotten helper. 

James wished he could be in their place, one day.