Post-Modern Prometheus

Remember your Frankenstein. Don't freak out and leave it here to kill your family in the Italian Alps, I thought. I dared turn around. Fainting and falling down in a depressive spiral as I failed out of my Swiss university seemed appropriate.

The despicable creature that had spawned from the bulbous protuberance on the floor was a flayed man. Shit, I bet that there was a lot more to it. I bet it even had a species and a genus and a fucking fantasy race to it. But when I see a creature standing up with two legs, looking at me with two balls of eye barely held in with biology-textbook straps of muscle being the only thing keeping them in their sockets, with, yeah, no skin anywhere on its body, leaking fluid and blood from between the fibers of its muscle, I am going to call it a flayed man. Maybe a flayed person, if I sat there and thought about it.

"I… am… whole?" the room—the flayed man—said.

And then there was that part. The creature didn't seem to be attached to the floor, but as it moved its limbs around meekly, portions of the room twitched and some of the bright red tendrils contracted and pulsated.

"Are… you… father?" it said. "Why do you think I am your father?" I said.

It felt dangerous. I didn't want to say I wasn't its father, just in case it would attack me on sight without this weird, fucked-up imprinting thing that was going on, but I didn't want to say I was, just in case the Tower would put some sort of responsibility for it on me.

And, well, look. I really don't want to judge. I truly believe that anyone capable of independent thought has the capacity for kindness, cooperation, and fair conduct. Those were things you could rational yourself to, with the right guidance. And I did not believe that aesthetics had anything to do with morality. But the gaunt, awkwardly limbed creature in front of me was just about the most monstrous thing I had ever seen.

"Father… I need… help father," it said. "How can I help you?" I said. "Not help me… need to help… father," it said. "Why do you need to help your father?" I said. "Need to… from my… walking upon my insides," it said. "Are you the room or the creature?" I said. "I am… I… alive," it said.

Ah, fuck it. They said.

"Well, I just thought I would try to help you. Would it be fine if I was not your father?" I said. "Don't know… don't know what father… would want," they said. "Do you have a name?" I said. "Do… not… you… brought my voice… out of the organ… will you… give?" they said.

It wasn't really a choice.

"Can I call you Adam then?" I said. "I am… Adam… What name… Adam's father?" Adam said. "I don't know. I do not know your father. Can we be friends? I am Alex," I said. "Alex… friends… Adam," Adam said.

Then Adam's voice split, and there were two voices talking opposite one another. The creature in front of me said: "Good… Friend… Alex." The walls said: "No… friends… only… father."

And the walls began to move.

First, a sphincter of muscle closed the door behind me. Then fluids began to ooze out from the pores and slits among the muscles and skin of the walls. Through the pseudoportal I saw Artemis running toward me and leaping head-first into it. Of course, the portal was impassable, and so she flew through the space of the portal and landed on the other side of it back in the same room where she had been, flying through it as if it was not there.

Then the spurting and pneumatic popping sounds began.

I dodged in a random direction, assuming that wherever I went was better than presenting an immobile target, but when I landed on the fleshy floor, I heard Adam crying out in pain and saw that there was a bone spike jutting out of his (oh, what the hell, so it's his now, is it?) midsection, and acid was eating away at his face.

I rushed toward him, wiped off the acid as best I could with my sleeve, and began casting the barrier spell even as more projectiles came in his direction. To protect us from all sides, I had to get really close in. In fact, as the purple outlines of the potential planes of the spell materialized in front of my eyes, I realized that I would have to hug the poor creature to cover us, even with far-too-large gaps between the panes.

It still took me two or three seconds to cast the second-rank spell, and while I was doing so, some bone shrapnel hit me from behind. I felt the blunt impact but didn't feel tearing, and only then considered how in many games magical items cannot be damaged by non-magical means. Or maybe the faerie silk that my "robes" were made out of was simply sleek and dense enough that none of the shards went through. I was unwilling to check, though I did note that my sleeves weren't melting in the acid that I'd wiped away.

"Why… father… hurt… Adam?" Adam said. "Adam, don't look," I said. But of course, the creature had no eyelids, so he buried his face in my shoulder instead, leaving it slick with intermuscular fluids and blood.

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I cast my fire protection spell and began burning. The room retched, trembled, and screamed. Adam also wailed in pain. But was it sympathetic, or was he metaphysically linked to the room in some way still?

"What's wrong?" I said. "Father. Will. Be. Mad," Adam said. "I do not think your father is a very good person," I said. "He hurt you when you said you wanted to be my friend. That is not very nice." "No. Not. Nice," Adam said. "Does it hurt you when I burn the room?" I said. "Hurts nose. Smoke. Poison," Adam said.

I couldn't smell anything, but I didn't have all of my nasal nerves exposed to air without skin or hair to get in the way. I also wasn't newly born. So, perhaps there was something to avoid. Different forms of damage, then.

I cast the icicle spell, and it really didn't seem to do anything at all. I cast a few more, but all of them broke upon the thick skin and the dense muscle of the walls. Then, with a gastric sound, green-tinted gas began filling up the room from the bottom up.

I was not going to die suffocating on Tower farts. Adam was wailing in my arms as I looked around the room, searching for anything I could hit in order to damage the creature that was surrounding us.

Right, Alex, you dumbass. It's like I'd never played a video game before. Maybe try hitting the pulsating, red, glowing weakpoint-looking tendrils that permeated the room and gave us light?

I quickly let loose several more icicles to slash the glowing tendrils apart with the sharp edges of conjured ice.

The room shivered in pain. It screamed. It now seemed disconnected from Adam, as he didn't react in ways beyond the quiet sobbing onto my shoulder that he was doing already. Even so, as the icicles struck the supposed weak points around the room, nothing seemed to change. The sphincter still sealed the door, the flesh surrounding the room remained healthy and taut, and the creature in my arms stayed pathetic and miserable.

Sealed tightly with this creature that now seemed to demand my protection like a child, I was running swiftly out of options. Ice caused the room pain but not enough to destroy it. Fire hurt it more, but also released gases that would likely poison us both. Whatever physical attacks I might attempt were woefully insufficient.

Then again, the assault on the room's weak points had caused it pain, and there was some intelligence guiding it.

"I can fire these shards of ice into your soft spots for hours before I get tired," I shouted to the room. There was no response, so I fired off several more barrages of icicles into the tendrils. The room shook and screeched. I watched the pulsing tendrils closely.

Where once they had gathered at the eggsac that birthed Adam, their current terminus was less clear. But I resolved to follow the flow of light and fired again. I prodded the tendrils with more icicles, and their red light pulsed in response.

In return, the room filled with caustic gas. It moved slowly from the bottom up, giving me a moment to take a deep breath before it reached my face. I would have to exhale to cast my spells, but I already knew what I was going to cast and where. Ice, ice, goddamned baby. I spoke the words of magic into the gas-filled air of the classroom. As the icicles struck the tendrils, more screeching followed, more gas was expelled—and then the red light moved, pulsing upward toward an opening in the ceiling that I could only see as the light revealed it.

I was quickly running out of breath, which was, sort of, the plan. Holding the wet, pathetic man in my arms as he sobbed, I shouted into the air:

"This is your last chance. Leave us be!"

The room shook and shivered with pain and anger. But it responded. And this time I saw its mouth. The slitted opening in the ceiling where all the red tendrils converged opened up and spoke. It said:

"Die, die, die."

And fortunately for me, it kept going, repeating the word again and again. I was already light-headed when I began chanting the spell. First, the mouth choked on conjured grease. I timed it then, for an inhale. And I cast the full spell the Monarch of Goblins had given me, and the room exploded.

It first exploded in screams. I grabbed Adam and threw us both to the ground. As it exhaled, it sprayed burning oil and gas, which ignited the caustic vapors filling the room—and there was an explosion.

That nearly killed me. The force of the blast battered my back, broke ribs, crushed lungs, and slammed my head against the floor. Ironically, only the soft flesh coating the classroom prevented me from being knocked out. If I had, I would have died. Instead, as the gas burned off, the heat and smoke rose toward the retching mouth. It choked on the poisoned air, opened up again for breath, reigniting the fire from the oil and my magic.

Its dying screams were almost worse than the myriad pains smashing through my body. When it was over, I couldn't move. Blood and other fluids evacuated through every orifice. I had just enough breath to beg Adam to hide me, and he dragged me to a wardrobe, peeled off burned tendons and flesh, and pushed me inside.

Of my top ten horribly torturous five-minute waits for healing, I would rank this toward the bottom. I was too stunned and semi-conscious for it to count as true torture. My lungs burned, but I didn't notice until ten minutes into the healing, when it was already improving. I crawled out of the wardrobe into a room now more ash than flesh.

Adam still sat near the remnants of the eggsac that birthed him.

"Alex. You are alive," Adam said.

"Just about. How are you?" I said.

"Severed," Adam said.

"You're not going to kill me, or anything?" I said.

"Alex, friend," he said, his words an exhausted, fading trickle.

"I'm sorry if I made things hard for you," I said, and I was.

"I do not want to go back. I do not want to go forward. I do not understand what it is to be," Adam said.

"I don't know if it's my place, but I think that is what being human is," I said.

"I am not. Human. At all," Adam said.

"Sorry. Two days ago the only kind of creature I could talk to was human. I mean that nobody understands what they're supposed to be. Especially a few minutes after being born," I said.

"Father told me. It was purpose," Adam said.

"People told me what my purpose was too. Trying to follow that never really worked out," I said.

"I understand what you are saying. I think. To be human, to find purpose, to not burden Alex. I must go," Adam said.

"Where would you go if you did?" I said.

Adam dug through the viscera left over from the eggsac he came from. Remarkably, he withdrew a goo-covered, steaming journal from within.

"This book. It speaks. Answers within. I will seek. I will follow. Friend Alex," he said.

And he studied his journal while I gathered my things to continue toward the monster that had started this.

As I looked back, I half expected Adam to follow. But instead, I saw him disappear among the dying meat, into the darkness inside the walls.

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