Plutocracy

Stage 3- In the Eyes of a Madman, Part 1

A figure huddled in a corner in a white room. A white t-shirt and white jeans adorn his body, and white socks with no shoes cover his feet. His skin is dazzlingly radiant; colored purple, yellow, blue, and even shades of green and red in some spots. His eyes are wide open, but they are not eyes. They are glowing seas of blue with mandelbrot sets swimming in the middle, like an island.

This is Fract.

He is scared. He does not know where he is; he never does. They put him in a new room every time. He cannot think straight; if one were to listen to his thoughts, they might catch his madness and suffer from it in the way he does. He reaches out one shivering hand and extends a finger to touch the thin air before him, his eyes focusing on something that isn't there. He quickly recoils his arm and wraps it around his leg, placing his head on his knees and tightening the ball of himself.

If we were to risk the madness and tap into his thoughts, this is what we would see:

A man falling into a pit, towards the alien maw of a massive creature. The teeth on the creature are wicked and jagged, and it's eyes are slits of orange. They are narrowed menacingly, as if the creature knows what it is doing. The man falling towards the pit looks very much like Fract, but his skin is pale and his eyes are a dark brown. A brief piece of Narrative from Fract is delivered to us from the lips of the falling man:

I am the pit.

Truly the thoughts of a man who is utterly insane.

A knock comes at the 'door' in Fract's white room, and Fract makes no move to let the person on the other side enter or even say 'Come in.' The door opens, and a man in a white suit comes in. He has the blonde hair and blue eyes of one of Arksiane's medical staff, the main purpose of which was to tend to Demigods. Everyone else could be killed and reborn with some of their DNA at a much lower cost than maintaining a constant medical staff.

"Hey. Do you want to come out? They've got something for you to-" The man abruptly stopped as his eyes rolled into the back of his head, and his head slid off his body. The man's corpse fell to the ground, arms at its side, and the man's head rolled to Fract's feet, where he slowly craned his head down to look at it. He stared into the dead man's eyes, and saw himself reflected in them. Screaming, he kicked the head away from himself, and it rolled into a corner in the opposite side of the room. He huddled into an even tighter ball and began shivering madly, like a man who has seen his own cruel fate but has no power to change it.

"Damnit, not again," Jeff said, staring at the monitors in his office with an exasperated look on his face. Turning towards a different monitor, he pressed a button on the control panel before him and Mentor appeared

What is it?

"Fract killed another one."

How many does that make?

"Twenty-one, I believe."

That boy has issues. I don't know why you support him with such vigor.

Before Jeff could retort about Fract's immense power in combat or the potency of his abilities, Mentor's monitor was off and Jeff was left staring into a black screen.

"Asshole."

Jeff reclined his chair and put his legs on his desk, staring up at the little black bug on his ceiling.

Even he wasn't above surveillance.

The man and his head were quickly removed from Fract's room by another man in the same uniform, who had an expression of absolute terror on his face as he gathered the parts and ran. Fract ignored him; he was too busy hallucinating. He saw the patterns of the fractals that adorned him, and before him was an image of the Mandelbrot set several billion iterations deep. The twisting shaped agonized and terrified him; part of the reason he only wore simple white clothing. He had a fear of complexity and depth; simplicity calmed him. Unfortunately, his eyes saw patterns and depth everywhere, which sent him into a terrified rage in which he removed the heads of everyone near him in a very similar way to the medic who was previously in his room.

A few hours later, a knock came at Fract's door. He recognized the specific pattern and the volume of the knock as Jeff's.

"Come in," Fract said quietly, not diverting his gaze from the floor in front of him.

"Hi," Jeff said, stepping in slowly and looking around. There was still a stain of blood on the floor; stupid Medic. He would have the man reset. "Do you want to come out?"

Fract seemed to think about it before slowly replying in a voice that seemed forced.

"I . . . would like that . . . very much," Fract said, his voice muffled as his face was buried in his knees.

The two men walked out of the room, Fract's hand twitching madly, almost resembling a keyboard player.

A few minutes later, they were across from each other, a small table with a chess board between them. The game had only started, with Jeff's knight in front of his pawns and one of Fract's pawns moved forward two spaces.

Fract never really liked chess. He understood it's purpose for keeping him about his wits (were there any to keep about in the first place) but he had never found the game a challenge. Despite the fact that Jeff was an excellent chess player and beat everyone in the corporation, he didn't stand a chance to Fract. The man was a machine at Chess. Very patternistic, never missing an opportunity when it presented itself to him, always hopping onto the correct piece and coming out on top. Jeff wondered why Fract couldn't be like that all the time, instead of just in chess and when he was pumped full of antipsychotics, which was fairly often.

Within fifteen minutes, Jeff was down to his king, and Fract still had his queen and a knight on the field, along with his king.

"Looks like Checkmate to me," said Jeff, sighing and leaning back. "Every time, Fract. You're killing me."

That managed to make Fract smile, as he methodically rearranged the board with all the pieces on his and Jeff's sides of the board into the standard format.

They played a few more matches, and Jeff never came close to winning. Fract even found it in him to laugh at one point, which made Jeff extremely happy. Fract had been getting saner, as he'd noticed. This was a good thing. Maybe they wouldn't have to use quite as many antipsychotics when he went out in public in the future.

That of course didn't mean none, as the last time they'd tried that about fifty Facdefs lost their heads and thirty more had to be hunted down and reset so they wouldn't talk.

Eventually Fract decided he wanted to go back to his room, and Jeff brought him down to a new room without a bloodstain on the floor where the two bade each other goodbye with an awkward wave, and then the door closed and Fract was alone again. He sat down in the corner opposite the bed they gave him but he never felt comfortable using and curled himself into the fetal position, shivering quietly.

The cycle began anew.