Mune'stahr and Pylott: HELLMARROW, a tale of the Ventriculum

Part 8,"On That Day, Murder Will Be the Optimism of Insanity..."

There was a strange man with asymmetric, hybridized morphology on the floor below. He was tending to a large, waist-high, crescent-shaped computer console festooned with an array of elliptical viewscreens. She could feel an air of malevolent authority emanating from him.

When she spoke aloud, her voice sounded like a dry rasp. That croaking tonality made her briefly wonder how long she had been in her captor's possession.

"Who are you? How did we get here? Where is this place?"

"Don't act dim. You'll bore me and that will not produce good results. I have no doubt you have a good idea who I am and you probably have some semblance of an idea where you likely are," the man answered irritably.

"The last that I remember we had been surrounded and overrun by an attacking force of Manifold Predators..."

"So? I know all that. The Manifold Predators serve my will. Why are you wasting my time?" the man who was obviously the creature named Fellmanghul responded.

Pylott held her temper. "I suppose it goes without saying that I shouldn't bother to ask you about Queen Infernyya Rebekkon then..., no doubt you'll find that question offensive, too."

Fellmanghul shifted his gaze away from the viewing monitors and raised his eyes to lock with Pylott's.

"Considering the circumstances, it is a perfectly reasonable query. Queen Rebekkon is secured in the chamber adjacent to us where, like you, she is my prisoner. She is important. You, on the other hand, are a distraction. Additionally, she is royalty and, as such, is due some measure of respect. Though she is shackled and rendered powerless, I saw no need to add insult to injury by forcibly exposing her to evolutionarily diseased, alter-human trash like you – and certainly not to an anthropoid-mockery like this metal-implanted Argossyan simulacrum you have as an ally."

Fellmanghul's unexpected distaste and breed-specific bigotry struck Neuronia Syngulareus with the force of a physical blow.

"Well, I guess that would be an attitude one could expect from a psychotic, bottom-feeding, hermaphroditic bio-aberration like you."

Fellmanghul smiled frostily. "Ah, so you expect me to be repulsed by you. I commend you for your foresight, being, after all, no more than a steel puppet with delusions of personhood."

Cursing in her native tongue, Lt. Cmdr. Syngulareus violently strainedagainst her bonds... to no avail. Pylott made eye contact with her and, shaking her head as Syngulareus raged, frowned, clearly indicating the Naval officer should regain her professional detachment and calm. Reluctantly, the sentient cyborg-anthrobot acquiesced.

"Where are all the people, the inhabitants of Lobarth Ceryndum?" Pylott asked. "What did you do with them?"

"Oh, yes, that. I sometimes forget that outsiders would find their absence to be disconcerting. The people... They're sequestered, impounded within a series of corrals I constructed. Not actual physical cages, but mental corrals, telepathic enclosures. Inside those pens, frozen in mid-thought and paralyzed in physical space, they are dreaming."

Pylott flinched at Fellmanghul's use of the euphemism "dreaming". As a member of the Star Legion, she had been trained in defenses against telepathic incursion by antagonistic sentient creatures and she knew that there was far more ferocity and violence involved in forcibly overpowering and hijacking another person's mind than most people could imagine. And it took icy control, a lot of it. Any being who could do such a thing would possess very little in the way of moral decency. Ripping away another person's sense of self, re-directing their thought processes and usurping their perception of Reality was an act that left lasting mental trauma on the victim or victims, often leaving them with dissociative amnesia or locked permanently into a paranoid schizophrenic state. A Cyonik Vamfyrr would be a tremendously formidable enemy to have to defend against. "So you're saying you telepathically puppeteered their minds, all of them, and induced a psychic fugue state, placing them in torpor?"