Industrial Strength Magic

Chapter 189: Karth the Experiment

Karth was hungry.

Karth was always hungry, but this particular day found him wandering further afield of his village in search of Meat. Despite its purpose of making Karth temporarily not hungry, Meat had the most infuriating tendency to flit away at high speeds.

Today had been no different, except the sun looked a little different along with the dirt, plants, animals, and sky, but that was of no concern.

Currently he was tracking a pale, two-legged Meat, that had done him the favor of pissing itself before running, making it extremely easy to follow the Meat’s scent.

Sniff, sniff, sniff. Karth wafted carefully along, tested the air with his nose. He closed his eyes to focus on the smell, when a tree branch hit him in the face.

In a blind rage, Karth uprooted the tree with a roar, snapped it over his knee and spent the next five minutes turning the remaining wood into splinters.

When he caught his breath, Karth spat out a hunk of wood, dimly realizing that wood made a poor substitute for Meat. That was the kind of thing Meat ate.

Probably. In his dim moments of lucidity between his normal rage or hunger fueled meltdowns, Karth was quite a curious fellow. It wasn’t Meat all the way down, was it? Surely some Meat ate something else.

He’d seen some Meat chewing on the branches of saplings before he’d jumped on them, torn their heads off and shoved their twitching Meat down his gullet.

Oh, there’s the scent.

Karth felt his rage climb as the irritation of tracking the Meat began to mount. Why doesn’t it just get in my mouth and stop making me waste my time? Doesn’t it have any consideration for others? Rude.

Bristling with white hot anger, Karth followed the scent of two-legged urine to a massive cave.

Had he not been so livid, he may have noticed the two-legged urine scent that he’d been chasing was strong to indicate multiple gallons had been used liberally along the path.

Had he not been so livid, he may have noticed the fact that he was no longer on Manita.

Had he not been so livid, he may have noticed the unnatural way the cave jutted out of the ground, its walls perfectly smooth.

Had he not been so livid, he may have noticed the shiny thing on the forest floor beside the entrance.

However, Karth was furious at Meat for wasting his time, and before he ate it, he was going to smash it firmly against the walls of the cave until he got bored as a potent reminder to not give him so much trouble next time.

Karth barreled down the suspiciously smooth stone ramp into the underground cave, his breathing erratic as he searched for Meat.

Suddenly the floor of the cave gave way from beneath him, dropping him into a lightless stone coffin.

Karth immediately began to rage, bellowing and pounding his fists against his confinement, but strangely it didn’t work. Karth had never run across a problem he couldn’t solve by sinking into a blood rage and tearing it apart…Not that he was consciously thinking about this at this point.

Unseen loops of some soft yet indescribably strong material looped themselves around his arms and legs in the dark, pulling him to the ground.

Karth got even angrier, thrashing wildly against the restraints, but accomplishing little.

Suddenly the floor, flipped on its head and turning upside down, so that all the blood began to rush to Karth’s head. The sudden influx of blood made Karth woozy and quelled his rage.

***

“Wait-“ Paradox said, interrupting Karth’s story. “You can calm trolls down by turning them upside down?”

“Well, yes, how do you think troll mothers get their children to behave?” Karth asked.

“I had no idea.” The tiny human said with a shrug before he touched his chin, musing. “It must be a reflex similar to scruffing cats. Certainly not a terrifically viable solution for most people…”

The Dangerous Meat glanced back up at Karth and motioned for him to continue. “My apologies, keep going.”

“Where was I?” Karth asked. “Ah, yes, the experiment pits.”

Paradox’s eyebrows rose, a gesture of surprise.

***

Karth was restrained to a stone slab, suspended from a strange beam of shiny metal that seemed to be able to move his slab around at the leisure of his captors. He was only able to see by the light of the far doors opening to take his fellow prisoners away.

These moments of light were brief, and Karth took in everything that he could, desperately searching for something he could latch onto.

He’d been starving for some time now, and it’d rendered him more lucid than he was comfortable with.

As time went by and his stomach began to eat itself, facts and ideas began to…linger, taking root in his mind like plants, growing roots that blended together into a seamless whole. Unimportant facts combine with other unimportant fact to inference more important facts.

The fact that the pit was bottomless, and that there were thousands of other prisoners:

Both unimportant facts.

Implied that what was holding them was an organization, and not an individual. No individual would have the time to individually feed and care for them…and experiment on them to this extent.

Hundreds of other creatures came and went daily. Some came back, others did not.

That didn’t bother Karth too badly. The things these strange two-legged creatures did to him were relatively tame. Things like cutting off his arms and leg to see how long they took to regrow, sticking metal things into his brain, only to excitedly chatter their strange, foreign language at each other when his brain eventually shoved the blinking chips back out.

Boring stuff, really.

After a couple years of time to think and ponder his situation, all his long, healthy, branching thoughts coalesced into a determination to try something different than falling into a blood rage and trying to eat the two-legged creatures as soon as he saw them.

“Hey. Meat,” he’d said, bone tired, his emaciated body hanging on the verge of death. “Can you get into my belly already? I haven’t had a good meal in ages. Or better yet, let me go, so I can stuff you in my mouth myself.”

While he spoke, he looked around and spotted a tiny tow-legged cutting tool.

The two legged meat had gotten real excited and chattered to themselves at length.

In their excitement, one of them bumped one of the rolling tables full of sharp implements, and Karth had been able to hide the tiny object between his fingers.

That night as Karth had been sawing away at his restraints, the tiny green light above his head had gone red, and they’d brought him back in, confiscating the tool before he could even finish his first restraint.

There was even more excitement, and many tools pressed against his forehead.

Karth was too starved to care.

“Just kill me if you’re gonna kill me,” he said with a sigh.

More excitement.

One of the two-legged creatures with the tools pressed against his head held a hand to it’s ear, seemingly listening to orders before it reluctantly backed away.

The next day they fed him well for the first time in years. Karth’s limbs swelled with new muscle in a matter of minutes, and the beautiful interconnecting weave of thoughts built on top of thoughts was shredded by the white hot rage as soon as he saw another two legged creature.

Karth almost got him, too.

They starved him for a couple months after that, seemingly disappointed every time they brought him in, only for him to try and break free of his restraints and eat them all.

Then trolls began to disappear.

As some of the most durable of the Manitian creatures held captive, Karth had become familiar with the hundred or so giants he was locked together with.

That number began to dwindle, and the tree of interconnecting branches of thoughts mixed with facts regrew, blooming into the knowledge that they were beginning to find ways to kill them. either they’d outlived their usefulness or the experiments had…grown in scale.

The knowledge built on facts and assumptions made Karth vaguely uncomfortable. He wasn’t used to thinking this far in advance but he’d never been held on the brink of death for so long.

In order to avoid death and feed himself, he needed something he had no word for:

A plan.

The next time they brought Karth in, they gave him a strange test. Behind a glass door was a cartload of raw meat. Enough to fill his stomach to bursting.

At the center of the glass pane was a strange contraption with a round indent.

On the floor was a round piece of metal.

No two-legged Meat in sight.

Karth scowled, and a moment later, the restraints loosened on his stone slab for the first time in months.

Karth stumbled away from the wall comprised of his stone slab. He was deathly weak, but still able to walk.

He glanced down at the round thing on the floor, then at the meat on the other side of the clear glass door.

Then a beautiful idea bloomed, the result of his two long years of starvation, and (mostly) uninterrupted thoughts.

This…is a test of my mind. They expect me to put the round thing in the round hole to open the door, then eat the meat.

But if I eat that meat, I’ll lose everything I’ve gained again, and I won’t be able to escape. I’ll lose my beautiful woven tree of thoughts, and be right back where I started.

Naturally I have to convince them I am less than I am, Karth thought, growling and slamming against the glass door, pretending to be desperate to reach the meat.

He was desperate, but hopefully he could control his hunger when he made it to the other side…

The glass was strong, and his fists didn’t make anything more than a smudge and a bit of blood against the clear surface.

That should be long enough.

Karth pretended to lose interest in the meat, then wandered around the cell for a moment before he shuffled across the metal round thing.

He picked it up and studied it carefully before standing up and using it to bash the glass.

The glass rebuffed his attempts, easily.

But If I don’t finish the test, they won’t administer another…I must do both…

Another beautiful blossoming idea grew, and Karth pretended to fumble for a moment before applying the round circle to the round hole in the door.

The glass retreated into the floor with a hiss, and the sudden smell of bloody, raw meat nearly made him lose control.

Nearly.

Karth leapt on the cart full of meat, smashing it open and feasting as messily and violently as he could, scattering bloody chunks of meat and pieces of the steel and glass cart everywhere…to disguise the fact that he was burying shards of metal rods in his wrists.

A month later, his thought-tree had recovered, and he was taken to another room. This time with a slightly more complex puzzle.

Karth almost rolled his eyes at the sight of two circles of metal along with a track in the door that required them to be placed and then slid to open it.

Karth solved it…slowly.

Once the glass wall opened up, Karth ate even more violently than last time, scattering the cart and it’s contents around the room, only eating a few morsels of food as he deliberately slammed the cart up against the glass with every ounce of strength his emaciated body could muster.

Finally the glass shattered and Karth gleefully embedded his skin with large chunks of it before his restraints began to emerge from the wall and restrain him again.

The next test, he deliberately got his hand arm caught in the door, severing his arm at the wrist.

As he had so many times before, he reattached it, but prevented himself from fully healing the wound.

Only the skin.

It was a strange sensation, stopping his body from healing. It was like tightening a muscle he’d never used before, and the strain was nearly too much.

But he persisted.

Because, his thought-weave was telling him, Freedom is better than Meat.

That night, he tore his mostly-detached hand off, and the light above his head stayed green. Karth swallowed the deer-sized bite of meat he’d been holding under his tongue and regrew his hand.

Once his hand was back, he tore the shards of glass out of the skin of his other arm and used them to saw off the other hand. once free, he tugged his old hands out and ate them.

On the last foot, he held onto the top of his restraints and kicked off with his newly formed foot, tearing away from his last restraint and flying through the air until he landed on a platform he’d seen the two-legged Meat walking along, sometimes shining lights on their captives.

BOOM!

Karth landed on the metal walkway, bending it down several feet with his sheer weight.

A loud noise began to blare from everywhere as red lights began spinning on the ceiling.

Karth scrambled on his hands and knees through the tiny hallways, looking for the way back outside. To the place he’d been before.

A few screaming two-legged Meats wearing long white drapery crossed his path in the confusion.

He probably shouldn’t have grabbed them in confusion and reflexively stuffed the shrieking Meat into his mouth to shut them up, because as soon as he did, the sheer indignity of his long capture lit a blazing fire in his stomach and Karth went into a blood-rage.

Long story short: They caught him again.

He was staring at the ceiling, restrained from head to toe, regretting his lapse in control, when a voice spoke to him. Manitian, for the first time in years.

“You’re a clever one, aren’t you? Too clever by far.”

The voice seemed to come from the pitch-black corner of Karth’s cavernous new prison.

He warranted a cell now, instead of a slab of stone, apparently.

“I’m not sure how you expect me to respond to that,” Karth said, returning his gaze to the ceiling.

“Once we discovered troll’s tendency for increased brain activity on the brink of death, we were testing the trolls to determine who our primary test-subject should be for the Operation. I think we have a winner, don’t you? You were this close to being cut from the running, you know? With how badly you were failing those tests…and the mess.

Peggy had faith in you though. ‘He’s an outlier’ she said. ‘His behavior is incongruent with the others, so we should find out what’s causing it. He could be pretending to be dumb,’ she said. She went to bat for you, and is the only reason you’re still alive.”

“Well, thank Peggy for my continued torturous existence as a test subject for me, I guess.” Karth said, rolling his eyes.

“Unfortunately you ate her last night.”

“Excellent.”

“Now that we’ve found our prototype, I’m going to make you an offer. A really, really good one.”

“Does it involve leaving this place?” Karth asked. And finding you, and tearing you limb from limb, and eating you?

“As a matter of fact, it does. Begin the ritual.”

“The what?” Karth asked, noticing motion in the corner of the massive room. Dozens of naked two-legged meat marched in single file, lead by a single human with a rather odd-looking blade.

They surrounded him and began to chant, the one with the blade perched above his forehead. Light began to bloom from beneath Karth. He couldn’t turn his head to look at the source, but he could see it out of the corner of his eye, and the dark room became ever so slightly lighter.

He glanced to the side again and saw that the glow coming from the ritual circle beneath him wasn’t strong enough to reveal his captor.

Only their eyes.

The orbs were set half an arm’s length apart, and slitted green gold, watching the process with mild amusement.

In his weakened state, Karth’s powerful rage was little more than a flutter in his chest, but it was enough.

Ah, why not?

Karth chewed the piece of glass he’d hidden in his cheek out, then spat it into the neck of the balding scientist hovering above him with the blade, with enough force to bury it deep into the tiny creature’s throat. It staggered backwards, quickly replaced by another aging Meat.

“Too clever by far.”The voice almost sounded…proud.

Karth’s laughter echoed through the cave as they began to carve into his forehead.

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