The Traveler in Red: Warlords of the Withered Land

Part Fifteen

        His original plan was in shambles.  It had completely fallen apart.  He thought he'd be dead by now.  And, frankly, the more he thought about it, he was more and more certain he should already have been dead.

    The fact that he wasn't meant there were elements of which he was unaware in-play... and that was a bad thing.  Someone needed him alive.   That meant someone was willing to risk much in order to get a great deal more.  Someone thought he was valuable alive.

   But he felt odd, fuzzy, not quite disoriented, but disengaged.  He had tried moving several times, but he felt less physically restricted than, again, disengaged.  He thought it was likely they had done something to his neural system.  His limbs would not respond.  Perhaps they had given him some kind of chemical paralytic.  He gave up theorizing.  It wasn’t productive.  Still, he felt a small measure of concern that he didn’t feel more frustrated at his situation, whatever that situation was.  He was having problems focusing on any one thought for any length of time.  He felt like he had been drugged.  He couldn't shake the impression there was something ominous about his current mental state.

       Mystikyll debated whether or not the fact he was still conscious was a good or a bad thing.

     He still had his vision, he could see, but he could not turn his head very well.  He was wearing some kind of a collar that prevented full, free movement of his head from side to side.  Apparently he was suspended off the floor of a tall, cylindrical chamber.  He noticed that, in the shadows cast by the orange light filtering through a ceiling to floor vent next to the elliptical raised dais across from the door to the small room, a thin, gnomish-looking man lingered, dispassionately observing him.  The man was garbed in spiky gray armor administering to a standing console where a series of switches and toggles sat within a rectangular chassis.  A few meters away, closer to Mystikyll’s position, almost under him actually, a pale, slender woman in a floor-length gray smock was monitoring a waist-high wheeled cart that carried a collection of tubes and capsule-shaped tanks.  Several accordion-style conduits snaked away from beneath the cart and led to a place he could not see, beyond the limits of his peripheral vision.

     He could also see that, on the floor below, there was what appeared to be a patterned image, circular, a schematic inlayed into the floor in copper-colored metal.  The design reminded him of that of a sundial or a timepiece.

     What kind of a room was this?  And why was it the objects he tried looking at on the edges of his vision appear to be visually warped and curved?

            The man in the spiky armor looked up from the console and glanced over towards Mystikyll and Mystikyll could see his own reflection on the silvered-mirror visor covering the top half of the man's face.

            The image he saw was that of himself floating some four and a half meters over the chamber’s floor in a what looked to be a pearlescent, semi-translucent bubble ---

      --- and, unbelievably, both his legs and both his arms were gone.  Removed.  Amputated.  A trio of small diameter, transparent, flexible conduits containing tubes were anchored to the stumps from which his limbs had once emanated and a blue-green fluid moved through those tubes, pumped up from the console at which the lab-smocked woman below stood.

   “Good, the replacement navigation unit appears to be online,” the woman said to the armored man.  “Fluid-suspended gyrostabilization, motion-based alignment and inertial hemispherical resonator gyros are operating within nominal parameters.  Psychometric sensory alignment is almost complete.  Bio-cybernetic interface engaging at Stage Three…”

     ‘replacement navigation system’?  What?

      A cold electric charge ran up his spine and exploded at the base of his neck as realization set in.