User:Dragonclaws/Monsters5

Squid, Raven, Gorilla, and Rats
“Don’t you worry nothin’, Johnson,” Reynolds called over his shoulder to him as he himself was led into a chemical bath by workers in rainbow-colored hazmat suits that made them look like a bunch of bugs.

Johnson was surrounded by the workers, who waved scanners around like antennae. For their protection, he was bound with buckmesh cords, but he suspected he could break through it with little effort. What truly protected them was his will, strong enough to subvert that of the beast inside him.

Randy stood silently off to the side as an unspoken threat. With his hulking Spartan armor and general aggressive demeanor, he came off as nothing less than a big gorilla, more animal than man. It was with Randy’s presence he kept the infestation in check, reminding it that to attack would be unwise.

One of the bugs stepped forward. “Hello, Sergeant Major,” a Reach-accented feminine voice said through a crackling speaker. “Can you hear me?”

He gave her an incredulous look. He was part-monster, not deaf. He grunted an affirmative.

“Very good,” she said. “I am Dr. Ellie Lindqvist, but you may call me by my reflective spirit name, which is Raven.”

He blinked. He had heard of this fringe religion but was only partly familiar with it. It had something to do with a giant mirror that only existed in a spiritual dimension, through which one could see their true animist nature. It sounded like bunch of crap to him, but he’d play nice. “Dr. Raven,” he acknowledged.

“That will do,” she said. He assumed she referred to him, but then the other workers stepped aside. “Please follow me to our quarters, Sergeant Major.”

Fearlessly, she turned her back to him and started walking through plastasteel-lined hallways. He told the infection to hush its murderous demands by glancing at Randy, taking up the rear, and he followed her. They emerged in a makeshift medical facility retrofitted from what he recognized to be a cargo bay of a Mandala-class spaceship. What was notable was the large viewing station mounted overhead, where rebel heads could oversee the area.

“This will be our new home for the next several weeks,” Dr. Raven told him. “I will work and live right beside you, as will Morlock.”

“Excuse me?” he asked. “As will what?”

He knew the reference, but was confused by it. Morlocks were fictional creatures created by H.G. Wells in his book The Time Machine. They were supposedly what lower class humans would evolve into in the far future: ghostly apes manning machines underground. They were best known for eating the Eloi, which were the creatures upper class humans would evolve into, and the Morlocks were definitely the villains.

“Morlock,” repeated Randy from behind them. “It’s my name. My true name.”

He turned to see Randy removing his helmet. A deathly pale face with a thick bleached beard looked back at him, and he was reminded of Tartarus. Randy was just about one Mohawk away from the dead Jiralhanae. He certainly didn’t look normal.

“And just what the hell are you?” he questioned.

Randy laughed harshly. “A Spartan. Or that’s what I was, once, until that right was cast from me. I am now reborn as a rebel, the underprivileged Morlock, ready to take power back from the bourgeoisie oppressors.”

Dr. Raven nodded sagely. “Morlock is our avatar, our savior.”

A real Spartan? Johnson looked back and forth between them and smiled contemptuously. “A rebel Spartan, huh? Wow, and here I thought the Spartans were the most few and proud of all of us. Well, you’ll be hanged for sure, traitor.”

“They’ll have to catch me first,” Randy retorted calmly. “And you say ‘traitor’ like it’s a bad thing.” He continued to remove his armor, revealing a bizarrely pale yet muscular body.

“What, you’re not worried about Flood infection?” He wiggled his tentacle, inwardly grimacing as he was once again made aware of how awful his body appeared.

“Morlock is a posthuman like you,” Dr. Raven said. “ONI has given him gorilla-nature, and he has found his reflection, but I have only just begun my spirit quest.”

“What? Posthuman? Gorilla-nature?” he repeated.

Randy gave a silverback-like roar, beat his chest, and fell forward onto his knuckles.

Johnson stared. “This is a dream,” he muttered. “It has to be a dream. I can’t be a Flood; I can’t be in a URF spaceship; and I certainly can’t have met a rebel Spartan that thinks he’s a monkey…”

“Gorilla,” Randy and Dr. Raven corrected simultaneously.

“Gorillas and monkeys are completely different,” Randy insisted. “Though, there is a man with a monkey reflection on the bridge crew, so not to be disrespecting monkeys.”

Johnson was at a loss for words. He didn’t know whether to laugh or… He didn’t know what to do.

“As I was saying,” Dr. Raven continued, “Morlock will teach you to accept your posthuman form and start your spirit quest. When you find your reflection, you will become one with your body. Meanwhile, I will perform an examination of your body to ensure that no one else take Flood-nature without consent as has happened to you.”

“Without consent?” he repeated.

“Indeed,” she said. “No one should have to go through what you have. What a violation of your soul to take on a nature you didn’t choose!”

“So, people could consent?” he asked, eyes narrowing. “People could choose to take Flood-nature?”

“If that’s where their spirit quest should take them,” Dr. Raven replied happily.

“Uh-huh.” The reason for this examination became clear. He imagined rebel Flood soldiers charging down corridors, wiping out all resistance.

Yet, he was certain ONI would do the same thing to make counter-Insurrectionist troops. No, worse; they would rip him to pieces to learn all they could. Reynolds was right; at least the Rainbows would put him on a spirit quest to learn his inner animal or whatever. Hippies with guns were better than Mengele.

He looked at the lanky white gorilla-man. He was quick to view Randy with disdain for being a traitor, and yet what was he now? The label of ‘traitor’ was a burden that weighed heavily on his shoulders.

He couldn’t do this. Time to go, he told his infestation and felt an answering buzz against his mind.

Taking a deep breath, he summoned strength to his muscles and pulled against his bonds. The super-strong buckmesh tore and he freed his tentacle. Dr. Raven had the sense to drop to the floor as he whipped it around with fantastic speed.

Randy roared and charged him. He fought, not like a Spartan, but like a berserking Jiralhanae. It was an act staged to unnerve, to make the opponent feel like they were fighting a monster.

Johnson saw past it. He was a monster. All Randy was, was a man pretending to be a great ape. He looked past the inhuman appearance and noted only the way Randy’s limbs lashed out. He then simply dodged accordingly.

Two rounds into their dance, Randy saw his act wasn’t working and switched to basic hand-to-tentacle combat. He would throw out a couple punches and dance away to dodge Johnson’s tentacle.

Johnson couldn’t believe he was fighting a Spartan. It had to be a lie, right? Could a Spartan really betray Earth and her colonies?

ONI said Spartans never died. He knew that wasn’t true. Spartans died; they were just listed as MIA to preserve the illusion of immortality. He’d known for a while that the list of MIA Spartans was really a list of KIA Spartans, but maybe that wasn’t true for all of them.

Maybe Randy was an MIA Spartan who was brainwashed by the Rainbows. Or maybe he was loyal to the URF before he became a Spartan. Reynolds was proof that the URF had a network of spies among the UNSC.

Johnson surprised Randy with a side-sweeping kick, but he found his balance as easily as a cat if not a gorilla.

“Sergeant Major,” Dr. Raven called from the sidelines. “I have to insist that you stand down at once!”

“Sorry, doc,” he said without taking his eyes from Randy, “I’ll have to decline.”

Then the wasp stung him. He looked down to see a jumbo-sized tranq dart sticking from his chest. The infestation squealed as its strength left it.

The room spun, and Johnson struggled to stand. He was on his own. The infestation wasn’t helping anymore. “It’s dying,” he realized and began to cry with delight. “The monster’s dying!”

He was so happy that he barely minded collapsing on the floor. He was free. He was…

7-7-7-7

Another day, another credit. That was a Human saying. Rabar would have preferred something a little less mindlessly focused on gaining power, but that was the nature of powerful people for you.

In any case, Rabar accumulated his credits, and this unit decided to make a transaction. He didn’t like to spend his credits outside the struggling Unggoy economy and did so very sparingly, but he now spent a sizable chunk of credits on downloading Jitjist sermons, specifically those conducted by Master Dedet. The cleric was really quite friendly to him, and he considered this a good show of kindness.

At random, he played samples of the cleric’s sermons. He paused on a section involving the Flood.

''“…Which the prophet described as a Great Source of all life, and yet he indicated the Flood were there before their hosts. Many of the Human religious artifacts indicate that before God created Humans and other sapient beings, He first created sapient life called Angels to be his most devoted servants. This and other references have led me—and others—to believe that the beings currently known as the Flood were originally holy Angels…”''

Rabar turned it off. He hated when people tried to play down the evils of the Flood. They were a menace to all civilizations, like a plague that consumed all goodness and replaced it with filth. Though he hadn’t heard Jitjists comment on it, he liked a few overheard Christian opinions comparing the Gravemind to the figure of Satan. Unfortunately, they were expressed by those Humans.

The Rights Advocacy Teaching Society, or the Rats as Unggoy had taken to calling them, were a group of Humans who seemed to think Unggoy were as Satanic as Rabar considered the Flood. They claimed giving Unggoy rights delegitimized their own rights. They claimed Unggoy to be lower life forms, and that treating them as people made all animals worthy of being given rights as people, and if that were to happen, Human rights would be less valuable, so Humans would be sold as pets and Unggoy would take control of the Human government. They made wicked signs and protested outside the Unggoy district. Whenever there was a law suggested that would benefit Unggoy living in Luna, the Rats fought hard against it, insisting that their rights as Humans were in jeopardy. Though Rabar knew general xenophobia was to blame, many Unggoy considered the Rats the main reason they continued to be mistreated by Human society.

As the Rats were the ones who to the Luna Unggoy presented the idea of Flood being associated with Satan, the Jitjists naturally favored the opposite idea. Jitji did make a few comments about how the Forerunners transformed the Flood to the killers they now were, and that was enough for some Jitjists to portray them as the great victims of the ancient world. According to the Flood-apologists, they were good in basic nature but simply cursed to hunger.

Rabar shook his head. If he were made hungry for the flesh of his fellows, he would bind himself and die of starvation. There had to be some basic evil in the Flood, hunger or no.

That made him worry about Lazarus down on Earth. That smart AI had the same basic nature of the Gravemind, simply without its animal instincts. Though he supposed the hunger made the Gravemind dangerous in an immediate way, the calmer sort of evil represented by Lazarus was certainly not safe. As an AI, that being was imbued with different characteristics, many he supposed to be harboring deadly potential in this networked world.

Why did no one else see what was to him obvious truth? He looked at his wrist computer with the holographic form of Master Dedet frozen midsentence. There were preachers preaching the opposite. He recalled the cleric advising him to become a preacher himself. Maybe that was a good idea. He could become an Unggoy of the cloth and preach needed ideas to the Unggoy people. In the guise of religion, he could encourage skepticism of Lazarus’ goodwill.

Making up his mind to pay the Jitjist Council a visit, he left his quarters and slipped into a lift. He spoke to Luna’s dumb AI named Mycroft—currently flashing an advertisement on the holographic panel for a commercial medical dispensary—and he told it his destination: Section Four. The lift moved automatically, its motors humming.

He soon arrived at the First Church of Jitji, retrofitted from some storage compartments. It was impressively decorated for what it was, with embroidered cloth wall-coverings depicting Jitji and his disciples. Many Unggoy listened to religious teachers, while others quietly said their prayers to the One God in the stances of submission. In the next room, he heard snippets of a sermon being performed to a holographic recorder to be broadcasted all over Luna and even parts of Earth to ensure all Unggoy in the Solar system heard the truth.

“Ah, Rabar!” It was Master Dedet, one of the teachers present. “So wonderful to see you here!”

He greeted the cleric and expressed his interest in joining his ranks after all.