"I think Lester will be fine," he coos. You stare blankly. Richard smirks. "I- I'm Lester."
"Oh!" you say. "Fuck."
"There, the right response. They really sent the cream of their crop, huh?" The clean-cut douche Lester saunters closer to you, only his hand stays on the cord. His arm is distending grotesquely. He doesn't seem to notice. "Now, honey, who's 'they,' and was this sabotage or espionage? God forbid it was espionage."
"Don't come closer," you snap. "I'm armed."
"Whatever will I do. Here, honey, do you need a list? Probably can't remember all the branches, can you? Namway— please don't say that, that's us. Headspace. Querk. Ozertec… nothing?"
Headspace? You met with a rep the other day. You've never heard of the others. You pace backward as Lester continues to advance, his hand still on the cord four feet away from his shoulder.
Richard stands off to the side, smirking. "I, I think," you stammer (stop it!), "I think you should ask my associate."
"She's the brains, huh? Fair enough." Lester pivots. "Same question, honey."
"Nobody's ever called me that before," Richard says reflectively. "Fascinating."
Lester glances at you, forces a grin, and looks back. "I'm sure it is. Now, would you like to tell me which dickhead sent you two, and what they possibly hoped to accomplish?"
"Not really. Please excuse me." Richard beckons you over while Lester processes this response. "Okay, Maddie, pick an option. One, um, I bring this down around his ears, we leave. Two, we let him have fun, I bring this down around his ears when I get bored, we leave. Thoughts?"
"…Are there none that involve me?"
"Oh, no." Richard adjusts their sunglasses. "You're a useless sack of shit, Maddie, and you'd be trapped if I weren't here. Aren't we lucky Charlotte had her little oopsie? I would've been forced out if I didn't have a real body—"
You sigh.
>[1] Option 1: Who gives a shit. Get out of here, find the snake, and go home.
>[2] Option 2: Let Lester monologue for a while before you bust out. You'd like to hear more about Namway and… whatever they do. [Any specific topics?]
>[3] Option 3: Fuck the first two options! You're not going to let a *thing* tell you what to do. Take charge of this situation, somehow. [Well, what do you do?]
>[4] Write-in.
"Shouldn't we fish for info?" you say, and immediately kick yourself: why are you asking for goddamn Richard's input? "I mean—"
"If it brings joy to your little heart to wring useless factoids from this 'man,' I don't see why not." Richard leans in, sliding down the sunglasses a fraction so you can see the uncanny eyes. "Just don't make it dull, will you? Or I'll have to step in."
"Richard, why did you say 'man' like that—" Richard turns away. "Richard— god dammit." You rub your hand down your face.
Gameplan, Madrigal, gameplan: should you just let the guy talk it out? From your expertise in trafficking with various stripes of scumbags, you've sussed out one commonality: they all jack off to the sound of their own voice. All of them. It's because (this is your pet theory), see, nobody ever listens to them, not really— either they're freaky loners with no human contact, or they're surrounded by lackies and yes-men, or they're under a fake identity, or so on. So to have somebody (let's be reasonable: to have a woman) sit there and nod at the right times as they explain how the monarchy's controlled by cultists or why they really need ten pounds of black unguent— well, it's "special."
It kills you a little every time you sit there and nod. But it keeps people coming back— and god, you make so much fucking money.
Now, to be fair, this isn't your usual circumstances. But you see no reason why Lester wouldn't hold to this philosophy, which means all you have to do is…
Lester, for his part, hasn't been sitting idle: he's been making various sad attempts to engage and/or threaten you, which you've been ignoring. You get the feeling he's not quite cut out for this— either he's secretly too nice, or he's just generally shit, one of the two. Richard has been running interference while you plot.
Richard is crying, is what you mean by that. Big gobs of tears. You didn't catch why he decided to go that route, exactly, but it's actually really fucking convincing: it's because Charlotte's face takes well to looking sad, you think. Lester is, understandably, bewildered. "Ms. Francis," he's saying, "please, would you stop—"
"We- we- we—" Richard stammers. "We- we were just following o-orders… please don't— please don't kill us—"
And it's this point in the speech that Charlotte turns— that Richard turns slightly towards you, and their face doesn't change, but you can feel the wink behind the sunglasses. You decide about then that this is profoundly fucking awful, and it's you job to end it by any means necessary.
>[+1 Grit: 7/15]
"Lester," you say firmly.
He turns towards you, probably relieved to have a break. "Broke your vow of silence? What is it, hon?"
"We're not dipshits just because we were sent on a suicide mission, okay? It's not our fucking fault nobody tells us anything. We didn't even— Francis, tell him. We didn't even know what you made."
"It's true," Richard says. (His face is dry. You're not sure he understands how tears work.) "Still don't, not really."
"Okay, then, which dipshit sent you?" You don't say anything. "What, you have loyalty to that kind of employer? Makes me wonder why I treat my chucklefucks with any dignity! I should—"
"So we were wondering," you press on, "if we could know what— what we're going to die for, you know. At least that much. Not the secrets, just the, um, overview. What we should've already known."
"You want the spiel."
You nod.
Lester scans your face for a few seconds, then apparently accepts it as genuine. "…Sure. It's not too complicated, honey. Namway makes people."
You nod.
Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.
"Not biological people, of course, the market's too crowded. Heh heh. Uh, we manufacture goo dupes— 'gooplicates,' if you've got to. We get the blood and junk chit shipped in, an associate drills for the raw material, we forge the skeletons, put everything together, and ship them off to Management and paying customers. Yes?"
You nod.
"Is that good? Can we move onto you answering questions, now?"
You catch yourself before you nod. "…Who buys this?"
"Depends! Sometimes it's custom shit— someone wants to pull a fast one, cover up a crime, whatever. Sometimes it's bulk orders. Construction crew on-demand. Mercenaries on-demand. Slaves."
"And the snake," you say. Richard, rigid, glances at you. "That's the only thing we were told— the snake."
"Oh, well." Lester raises his arms. "I wash my hands of that. That's straight from Management, you know, not our fault. Dipshits wanted their own snake."
"What?" you say. You feel like this should be more portentous than it is. Is Management trying to wrangle a lot of animals? "Why?"
"Not my jurisdiction. Not my jurisdiction. This wouldn't be such a fucking issue, though, except they also want the original alive— so we had to do some experimental stuff. It didn't take. Or it did take, depending on your— it's locked in the basement."
"Oh," you say.
"I shouldn't've told you all that. Oh well." Lester brushes his hair back. "I'll just have to kill you, then. Sorry, honey. Don't feel bad, I was always going t—"
Lester pops, with a wet squelch, and scatters bits across the blank floor. Richard frowns slightly.
You gape for a second, then turn fiercely to Richard. "Did you explode him?!"
"N… I mean, yes, but… well, I planned to explode the whole thing, but only he took. Shame."
"Ah." You'd feel worse if the bits on the floor were viscera, but they're not: they're pinkish smears of… goop. "Ah."
"It appears this place is more escape-proof than expected. Not through any merit of the construction, obviously, it's shoddy. But the design is good."
"You exploded our jailer," you say. "…Wait, the—" (The lightbulb is gone.) "—nevermind."
"Exploded that too, I reckon." Richard examines his fingernails. "Shame."
"Okay, yeah, you exploded our fucking jailor and you left behind the jail." You rub your forehead. "Nice. Great work. Now what?"
"We consider our less-than-optimal options."
"Our bad options."
"Less-than-optimal. See, the issue with this place is that there's nothing here…"
[All of these will succeed. It's a matter of picking your consequences.]
>[1] And you can't do something to nothing: there has to be something there first. Or something. This equates, somehow, to cutting your arm open and letting a lot of your blood dribble onto the floor. ("Lester doesn't count.")
>[2] Leaving your spear behind would also work, apparently. "I mentioned this after the blood," Richard says, "because I think you'd prefer the blood." And you really fucking would. But… the option is there.
>[3] "I could toss out the violin altogether," Richard muses, and you force him to explain: he could, apparently, push Charlotte past her limits in order to brute force the place open. "It'd be unpleasant for her. Possibly painful."
>[4] Richard could attempt to pick at the "shoddy" weak points of the place— but it's liable to cause some nasty reactions in the rest of the facility. Fissures to nowhere. Doors peeling off the wall. Etcetera.
>[5] Write-in.
"…I don't get it."
"What is it you don't get, Maddie?"
You stare weakly out over the scene: nothing at all, save the spatter of fleshy goop across the floor. And Richard, ahead of you, polishing their sunglasses with the monogrammed hankie. You stuff your hands into your pockets. "Um, shit, everything. Why does it have to be my blood?"
"It's real. Well." Richard doesn't look up. "It's not, actually, but it's close enough."
"'Close enough.' And the entire guy you exploded doesn't work for you? It's not like he's gonna fuckin'— he's not gonna mind."
"I agree, it won't, but it's a prop, Maddie. It's a wooden standee of a bush. Wasn't real to start with, and now, well—" They slide the sunglasses back on. "—now it's exploded."
You raise your eyebrows. "'It.'"
"Oh, that wasn't the actual Lester. Doppelg?nger, you know— it probably didn't know, is the unfortunate thing. Delusion. I wager it's how it stayed together with no skeleton."
Shit. "That wasn't the actual…"
"If you owned a facility that manufactured doppelg?ngers of people, Madrigal, be honest— would you not make a bunch of yourself? There's probably 60 in a cold storage somewhere, with the real one off sipping martinis on the beach of a manse. Or dead, for all we know."
"I wish," you mutter, "I had a martini. Can we not just wait here?"
"For what?"
"Someone to come along? We're still in the closet, aren't we? It's just all fucked up— so should someone, like, open the door? I knock them out, we piss off, problem solved, no bloodletting required—"
Richard chuckles. "Maybe geographically."
"What?"
"Geographically, we're in the closet: we haven't moved. Physically, mentally, spiritually, we're nowhere at all. Understand?"
What part of "everything" did he not get? "No? Maybe if you weren't intentionally fucking vague—"
"Of course you wouldn't." (You scowl.) "It's simple, though. Everything unreal was shunted out, which is to say everything, Maddie, except you and him— and me, er, atypically. The rest of the closet is where it was, while we're… outside, in nothing."
"For fuck's sake, Richard, I know what a pocket dimension is." You hunch your shoulders. "Just say that."
Undeterred, Richard has begun to make expressive gestures. "It's not a pocket dimension— that's an outdated term, and for good reason— apart from being colloquial, it enforces the idea that these places are inside the original dimension, which isn't necessarily the case. The neologism is 'auxilliary space'—"
"I don't give a shit, Richard, I don't…" It's astonishing, in fact, how much of a shit you don't give. Son of a bitch, you know what it's like? It's exactly like Ellery's blithering, except with that you cared about the man, if not his favorite subjects. You don't have that mercy here. "It's a pocket dimension."
"Sure. If you must. It's a 'pocket dimension' with no egress and nothing in it. Sure. Close enough."
"Great." You rub your forehead. "So Lester's out. Waiting's out. I don't want to spill blood, you don't have any blood, I'm not leaving my spear— what else?"
"Jailbreaking Charlotte."
"Jailbreaking— I don't think that's what that word means, but whatever. I mean, I guess, but… it's kind of a dick move, right?" You shift on your heels. "I mean, I don't want her to come back and be all, like…" (You put on your best accent.) "…'Goodness me, Madrigal, why is it I have three arms?' Like, that'd fucking suck, right? For both of us."
"That's a good impression," Richard says. "I don't have that talent, I'm afraid."
"Um…" You shift on your heels. "Thanks, I'll take that as agreement, I guess. So… what was the last one? Something about picking at the stitches…"
"The weaknesses, yes. Effective, but it'll damage the integrity of the whole manse. Might start coming down around our ears, that sort of thing."
"Great," you say. "I don't give a shit about this place. Do that."
"Excellent." Richard pauses. "Yes, I'll go ahead and… do that."
An uncomfortable silence ensues as you wait for Richard to do anything at all. "Um," you say finally. "Are you?"
"No." They clench their jaw. "No, I'm just… give me a moment." As you watch bemusedly, Richard pulls in succession a packet of cigarettes, a cigarette holder, and a lighter from their pocket. They get a cigarette, put the packet away, put it in the holder, put the holder in their mouth, etc. etc.— but, you notice, the jaw doesn't unclench until the first inhale.
"Does Charlotte smoke?" you say conversationally.
"No. I'll pay for this." Richard rubs their lips. "But it's a trade, Maddie. One compulsion for the other."
"One…"
"Do you ever get the feeling you should do something, Maddie? But it's not you who wants to do it, it's—" Richard waves the cigarette holder about, sending trickles of black smoke arcing upwards. "—I don't know. Something foreign. A different person altogether."
"No," you say firmly. "Because I'm not a fucking lunatic."
>[+1 Grit: 8/15]
The cigarette holder goes back in the mouth. "Good, because that's never happened. We'll be out in five minutes."