Evolution

Maksim Iosky didn’t put much faith in the Guilds or the Gateless. He had no mind for politics, positions, or other things that were above his head. Indeed, he was a man wholly focused on what was in front of him, his business as a tinker, the sweetheart he was courting, the street before him that he walked. Anything else was above Maksim’s head, and he ignored it utterly.

Above his head was the prattling of the more superstitious or revolutionary lots. There were more down to earth explanations for a disappearance or two than clandestine abductions. Above his head were the warnings of those same lot, to avoid guid-heavy streets at night, because day or night the paths Maksim took were the swiftest from one place to another, at least that required no acrobatics.

Above his head was a great, pulsing mass of flesh and gas, floating silently behind him. Maksim Iosky kept his head down and his eyes forward, and he did not even notice it. For a whole block, the thing stalked him, making not a sound in the darkness. Closer it came, until it was above Maksim, and if he lifted his face to the heavens he would have seen it waving its tentacles furtively. But Maksim did not pay any heed to matters that were above his head.

At least, not until this one reached down and seized him. Strong, muscular tendrils wrapped around Maksim’s arms and torso, and before he even recognized his plight beyond the simple shock of being grasped by someone or something, it was too late to struggle, and he was forced through some manner of orifice into an air-filled sack within the creature.

Maksim pawed frantically at the glassy walls of his confinement, which were slick and smooth. Through one, he could see the outside world through a haze of green, see that he and the creature were ascending into the smog-filled sky. Something in the bulk quivered nastily, and the air took on a sweet and sickly fragrance.

Maksim coughed, and made an uncoordinated lurch against the outer wall. He slid towards the bottom of the cyst and -

Discontinuity.

“… Cytoplast research, and apply it to Krasis techniques.”

Maksim awoke in water. No, not water – something thick and syrupy, if clear as water. Buoyant. Floating. He felt the pressure of the fluid, and something clammy wrapped around his mouth and nose. He inhaled air with a faint musk of sweet and rot.

He could see a hallway dimly through the water and the surface of the tank that held him. In it were two tall, lanky creatures speaking, one with four arms. Their heads and limbs were elongated, and their eyes seemed to Maksim to be soulless. Vedalken, he knew, but such vedalken! These… these had to be Simic.

“Careful,” said the four armed one, “You don’t want to sound like a Vigean.”

“I don’t hold to the old ways,” said the other, “But I think we can get some benefit by adapting the old science. The first splice was successful, at least partially.”

“Well, what works, works.” The four-armed Vedalken turned to Maksim.

“The subject is awake.” It said. And then it raised his hands, and a cyan glow suffused them and flowed into the tank. The sweet stink rose again, and Maksim once more lost consciousness.

***

Maksim awoke again, held by constricting vines to a pulsating surface. A vedalken stood over him

“Good.” It said, “It took you some time to shake the effects of the gas. But the last one was conscious, so it might be a necessary part of the process to preserve your intellect.”

“What- what process?” Maksim asked, “What’s happening to me?! Where am I?!”

“One question at a time,” said the Vedalken, “to answer the first, I am about to merge your life essence with that of several creatures at once.”

Maksim began thrashing wildly against his bonds. He knew about the Krasis, and he wanted no part in becoming part of some twisted monster!

The vedalken sighed. “You’re welcome.” It said frustratedly. “Really, humans these days have no manners whatsoever, so if you’d stop with the wild motion we can get on with the procedure.”

Maksim did not cease fighting.

“Or you could be obstinante like your predecessor and force me to continue anyway. I hope you’re happy with yourself for disrupting the forward march of Ravnican progress.”

The room flashed teal, and Maksim’s thrashing became involuntary. His body spasmed and contorted, and he would have screamed in agony if his breath had not been forced in and out of his lungs in sharp bursts accompanied by inhuman sounds.

Maksim’s throes of agony seemed to last for hours, but all the while the slithery bonds held him fast while allowing him what movement he needed. He could feel his limbs bulge sometimes, and contract others, but the tendrils were ready for a hostage of seemingly any size or shape. At last, after the anguish and maddening sensations seemed poised to tear Maksim’s mind away to peaceful oblivion, it stopped.

Maksim breathed quick, ragged breaths. His sight was milky, indistinct, for he saw the world through literally new eyes. His bonds loosened and he reached up towards the nearest light, the one above him, but the hand that reached out was no human hand at all. He tried to speak, but at first all that came from his mouth was a rasping croak. At length, he managed three words.

“What am I?” he asked, but he did not recognize his own voice, for it was alien in tone, wet, full of gurgles.

And at that, the Vedalken, who had stared impassively, a blue-grey shadow in Maksim’s sight, replied. Its voice was strange, the pitches magnified by Maksim’s new hearing and utterly distinct.

“My triumph.” It said. And then the surface upon which Maksim lay tilted downward, and he slid through a moistened passage into a dimly lit pool of scum-filled water, in which he landed with a unique plop and a symphony of ripples and droplets.

When Maksim lifted his head again above the water, his vision had cleared. He gazed around the pool, and saw easily that there were too entrances: one above, through which he had fallen, and one in the far wall, which seemed sealed. In the pool were growths of fungus that smelled edible from ten feet away, and… there was another creature.

It was hunched over itself, scaly, ridged back towards him and paddled tail stirring the water. Slowly, Maksim began to move, his twisted limbs letting him circle around through the pond. He circled around until he could see something of the other creature’s front. It was trim, emaciated even, and covered with a mixture of slimy skin and patches of grey fur. The face… the face! The jaw was wide and frog like, but above that, the face was human, the eyes, the torn and grimy blond hair.

Was this to be his reflection?

“Hello?” he croaked

The other creature looked up, and spoke. Its voice was slimy, hissing, but something in Maksim’s new ears translated it as a female voice.

“They… they took you too, didn’t they?”

Maksim nodded as well as he could.

“I am Petra.” she said.

“Maksim” he muttered.

“Do you know what they will do with us?” Petra asked.

Maksim shook his head.

“I fear them more than death.” Petra said, “I... I haven’t eaten since they took me. I think I can hold out. Long enough.”

Maksim tried to look down at himself, his thick, leathery hide. He was a monster, as she must have known that she was, but he didn’t know that he could do the same. So, he simply nodded and sank down to the water, and waited for what doom would next befall him.

***

Maksim heard voices, faint, in the hallway outside.

“The female is dying.” One said, “You can put a mushroom feast in front of a talking Krasis, but you can’t make it eat. At least the male has been maintaining his strength.”

“I still don’t approve of it.” The other Vedalken declared, “We should just get another female sample.”

“This one has already survived the fusion! We can get two as well as we can get one, so if this botches the whole thing, we start over. It’s a simple as that.”

“Then let’s get it over with.”

The Vedalken entered the pit, and Petra looked up at them, too weak to do much else. Maksim did not stir. This was not for him, he told himself. Someday, he would have a chance – at what? He did not know that, it was above his head, but he told himself that he would bide his time and wait.

But as the Vedalken led Petra out, practically dragging her mutated form, one gestured at Maksim, and the ooze cysts beneath his skin responded, compelling him to come to heel like a tame hound and follow the procession.

“You see,” said the first vedalken, “The male is the better result as well. A few augmentations won’t hurt.

At that, Maksim’s mind snapped from malaise to awareness. They meant to change him again, to hurt him again. He began to balk, but it was as though he was on a tight leash.

“Blast it…” muttered the Vedalken, “You have to remember they can talk! They have human intellect!”

The other Vedalken groaned. “Yes, yes, that’s the point. Just get it under control. It should be thanking us for this, really. It makes everything much easier.”

“If it works.”

Maksim stopped fighting, but still did not feel like trying to talk to his captors, his torturers. He had said words only when prompted, and nothing here required his reply. Part of him hoped that easier meant for him. The rest knew it could not.

They were led to the room where Maksim had first been changed, and he was bound to one slab, and nothing but the roof of the room and its bright yellow light in his view. The pain began quickly, and the spasms, but he did not suffer as the first time, was not twisting as the first time…

And then it hit him, and Maksim’s mind was shattered. A torrent of memory washed over him. He washed over a torrent of memory. They were the same. They were the same. A little boy grew up playing with metal bits. A little girl grew looking for flowers amidst the weeds of the cobbled lanes. Maksim worked tin. Petra sold flowers. Taken. Tortured. Mutilated. Petra screamed. Maksim Screamed. Petra was defiant. Maksim was determined. Colors played across the mind’s eye, a fantastical arrangement, nameless and out of the spectra of sight or description, far-reds and impossible spaces, medial shades beneath violet and gold not on any spectrum.

Madness engulfed the mind.

Time passed.

MaksimPetra opened its eyes onto the world again.

“Well,” said the skeptical vedalken, “It survived.”

“Of course it survived.” Said the first, “and it will prove a functional hermaphrodite, you’ll see. The strain will be stable after this.

MaksimPetra strained for understanding. One question burned in its mind.

“What am I?” it asked

“Good,” said the Vedalken, “You still speak. You are our masterpiece creation, father and mother of a new breed of Krasis. Do you understand.”

“Yes.” MaksimPetra said, but MaksimPetra had inherited more than speech from its parents-by-fusion. It had patience. And it had a hatred for itself eclipsed only by its hatred of the Simic. MaksimPetra nodded and said “Yes” again, and tried to sound pleased. MaksimPetra would not let it come to pass. MaksimPetra would be free, or it would die, but it would not let the Simic have another victory.

And at that, MaksimPetra was swept back down into the breeding pool, to await any further tests of its abilities.

***

The moment was ready, thought MaksimPetra. The time could not fail to be at hand. It had laid eggs despite itself, and its body yearned to release seed over them in the manner of fishes and thus beget a race of MaksimPetra monsters. But MaksimPetra had other ideas. It had the trust of the Simic, its caretakers. It had its augmentations. It would be free, and it would die, and that would be the end of the abomination that was MaksimPetra.

MaksimPetra did not exactly have a plan. Though it had gained the trust of its torturers, it did not know the seething hallways of the Simic lab, and it still could not truly resist the gestures of their hands when laced with magic, for in its bones and its blood flowed the cytoplast they manipulated, their madness had integrated into the Krasis MaksimPetra.

Still, MaksimPetra could wait no longer. Soon, it would be noted as defiant, and soon they would be on their guard again. It had to strike now, or it would never be free, and countless abominations like MaksimPetra but unaware of the horror of their state might be born.

Thus, when the door opened, MaksimPetra surged forward. The four-armed Vedalken was there, and MaksimPetra knocked it to the ground, jaws snapping wildly and tearing free one of the tormentor’s right arms. MaksimPetra ran, the limb dangling from its mouth, hot blood running over its chin, until it spat the vile thing at a turn.

Onward through the labyrinth raced MaksimPetra. It sought the outside, but some means of self-destruction would suffice if no escape was possible, for surely suicide should be preferred to existing as a monster.

MaksimPetra could smell the air wafting through the complex, could feel the subtle eddies of its currents and guess the path that might lead to the smoggy streets of Ravnica beyond rather than into other breeding pools or laboratories. The scent came closer, with the musk of the capture zeppelids that had first claimed Petra and Maksim. Their dock was open to the air. That would be MaksimPetra’s escape, whether the height of the fall was negligible or from the highest tower in Ravnica. MaksimPetra would be free of its captors, free of its curse.

A sharp shock wracked MaksimPetra’s bones, slowing down its mad dash. It turned towards the source of the force, the two-armed vedalken, the chief torturer. Its hands glowed bright, and the cytoplast inside MaksimPetra responded.

MaksimPetra did not. It thrashed like a raging beast and strained its muscles to move farther away from the Vedalken, like a rabid hound straining at the end of its leash. And then, when the strain was too much, MaksimPetra leapt the way the Cytoplast wished to go, towards the Vedalken in a savage pounce.

And MaksimPetra would have slain its tormentor if not for the arrival of another Krasis. How focused had MaksimPetra been on sensing the outdoors that it had blinded itself to the enemies about it! MaksimPetra’s brain was made to think like a human, not sense like an animal.

The other thing, with elements of frog and crocodile and wolf, fought savagely to protect its master-creator. MaksimPetra howled and raged and pawed at the thing with amphibian fins, and snapped with its toad-wide and toothy maw. But the other Krasis, the Wolf-Crocanura, was stronger and more savage, and cut at MaksimPetra with sharp claws, and bit MaksimPetra with sharp teeth.

And once again blood flowed across MaksimPetra’s slimy skin, but it was MaksimPetra’s own blood, cool and viscous, and luminous with the active cytoplast.

This, MaksimPetra thought, was a good end. It was not the end MaksimPetra had hoped for, but it was an end. Oblivion, or Agyrem, would be better.

MaksimPetra lost consciousness.

***

Pain was the first thing to occur to MaksimPetra, before any other awareness. It did not know any other thing about itself, but it was in pain, some wounds or contortions giving it agony fro, every quarter. Sound was next. Even as the voices of Vedalken, speaking nearby were heard, MaksimPetra was cognizant that it was hearing them in a very different way than ever before, as though all its skin was an ear. It could not see, utterly blind, and MaksimPetra wondered in what it was entrapped now that its enterprise had failed.

“I still think you shouldn’t have salvaged anything.” Said the Vedalken who once had four arms.

“Nonsense,” replied the other, “We may have lost our intelligent Krasis, but the biota, the Cytoplast control system… they will still fund our further research.”

MaksimPetra came to a greater awareness of itself. It was blind not because it was in darkness, or because it was hurt, but because it had no eyes. Indeed, the pain that had first awakened MaksimPetra gave it an idea of its form. Eyeless, limbless, its trunk was vast, and every inch of its skin vibrated as a membrane, giving MaksimPetra its hearing.

“Need I remind you what happened to my arm? And nearly to your head?”

“First, we are growing you a new arm for graft, so you’ll be better than new soon enough.”

MaksimPetra willed itself to move, but it could not. Was it paralyzed? Was it restrained? The pain was too much, MaksimPetra could not understand much in the way of other sensations, just pain and sound.

“Second,” continued the Vedalken, “It’s not as though we can have a repeat incident.”

“Yes, yes,” the first sighed, “There you’re right. At least you made your survivor sample into a sessile creature, even if it is dangerously Vigean.”

Sessile? Sessile?! What was MaksimPetra? It strained again, but then realized that there was no straining, no muscle. Its trunk was not a person’s trunk, but more like the trunk of a tree, or of a gigantic mushroom, wet and slimy and largely rigid. MaksimPetra could not move. MaksimPetra could never move!

“What of the brain?” the one Vedalken asked the other.

“Oh, the brain?” came the reply, “Well, it was incorporated into the tissue culture, but really I don’t think anything survived. And even if it did, awareness would be an outside possibility, not to mention futile.”

“I’m not fond of those contractions, that’s all.”

“Trust me,” said the Vedalken, “They’re just natural.”

MaksimPetra screamed. In its mind, the scream was long and ragged, the wail of a creature, any living thing, lost to utter agony and utterly without hope. But on MaksimPetra’s body, vents opened slightly, and faint breaths of wind passed through breathing tubes, then closed again, nothing more than a respiration not enough deeper than average to even stir the notice of the Vedalken.

And the one Vedalken turned to the other. “Come. We have cultures to attend to, an arm to graft… there are better things to worry about than one cell-culture Hydropon.”

MaksimPetra never stopped screaming.




Yuuuup, It's another Tevishian Ravnica story. At this point, I have a rough outline of rounding out the remaining six guilds to the cycle, and really solid ideas for five of those.

As to this story, I knew dealing with the Simic I wanted to approach Rapid Hybridization's subject and attitude, and shortly settled on the motifs of Alien Abduction stories. Things actually progressed faster and stranger than I was anticipating, with Maksim being turned into a Krasis in Experiment #1 and the eventual fusion of MaksimPetra being something that came up during writing. I think it probably worked. I was always intending Maksim to end up as a Vigean Hydropon (or post-Dissension variant thereupon), alive but without agency and no other living thing the wiser.

EDIT: Yuri changed to Maksim as I looked up Debt and remembered I already had a ravnican Yuri, even if not one confusable with the lead here.

Jesus, Tevish, I know I write dark stuff, too, but these grimdark Ravnica stories are starting to bum me out a little. I don't know if I want to read the Rakdos one you come up with...



Thanks for posting!

It's kind of interesting... While my Rakdos story as outlined is in the same spectrum (It's Dimir that isn't, with smaller shake-ups from Gruul, Golgari, and Selesnya and I don't know yet what I'm doing with Azorius.), I had really considered going a totally different way with the Cult since... well, we don't need the M:EM to see their dark side; it's pretty much right on the cards. The others are there, they have dark sides shown, but the Rakdos are relentlessly, unforgivably evil in printed sets land. So why not go into the "mad artist" spectrum, or even a Ravnican Halloween? But... I had a good idea for a very Rakdos arc, that hits the dark tone but should also get some interesting notes, hopefully more intellectually engaging than this particular story. And Cult of Rakdos ft. Jack Skellington would have stood out like a sore thumb in a "cycle". I might still write that story, going over and above rather than keeping to a cycle of 10, but there's also going to be a different one.

That's amazing! Way to teach us Magical things!

There was a few spelling errors, but nothing worth fiddle sticking this tablet over.

Yea

*shudders*

Why do I suddenly feel like I need to take a shower? And like there isn't enough Dial in the world?

*shudders again*

So, I can state unequivocally that this piece creeps the bejeezus out of me. Which -- given that I'm pretty much sure that creeping the bejeezus out of people is the intended effect -- means that you scored a direct hit. So, well done, sir!

I guess I'm a little bit in Raven's camp, in that I have a hard time engaging at a deep level with our doomed protagonist, just because I don't feel like I can relate to this kind of misery and hopelessness. Which is, in a really, really awful way, almost sort of affirming? I mean, my day at the office sucked out loud, but at least no one transformed me into an vibrating membrane?

I really think you showed a deft touch with the way you handled the splicing scenes. I like that, most of what we learn, we learn from eavesdropping on the Vedelken. It sort of drives home Maksim's helpless state -- he learns about the horrible things which are happening to him mainly by listening to the small-talk between his torturers, the same way that I learn about things at work by listening to people talking next to the coffee machine. And I really like how you handled the merging of the two minds and memories. I thought that was very skillfully done.

Now, for that shower...

Thanks for sharing, Tevish!