The temple of the Oracle was filled with cloyingly sweet smelling smoke, which filtered in through Adam's mask and washed over his face in one unpleasant waft, but the wolf mask he wore was deceptively decorative, and the dark, crystalline eyepieces served to disguise utility.
Inside the mask, fealty, connected to both the mask and the SE system, purred to life from a background idle. Little dials and levels appeared on Adam's HUD bathing his face in a gentle blue light unseen from outside observers. As the sweet smell of cloying smoke permeated the air inside his helmet, a warning appeared at the center of his display morphing the gentle blue light into an angry red.
WARNING TOXINS DETECTED.
It took only a moment of surprise for Adam to react, quickly engaging the respirator function of the mask, which suctioned itself tightly to his skin to create a closed bubble of air. Bad air was vented from his mask, and, with the help of the fealty system, Adam navigated to his Vital's system, and used the console to artificially vent his mechanical lung,
It was an odd sensation, to feel one of his own body parts deflate without him asking it to. In fact it was so disconcerting, that he forced himself to breathe out with it, just so things would feel more natural. His Mask continued to vent air before everything inside was clean. He turned to look at Maverick, and she nodded to him subtly.
Overhead the smoke grew in thickness, filling the room with a heavy fog.
In all their fancy garb, jeweled masks and sequined clothing, the crowd seemed like nothing more than wafting dream or a slow spiral of ghosts trapped in ian endless dance.
Overhead the ceiling of the temple was lost in fog, but he could still see the flickering sconces on the walls, and the smooth, marble floor beneath their feet. The room was very hot and muggy, some steam mixing with the smoke. Hot water bubbled in pools at the sides of the room, while strange alien blossoms sat floating atop the water, their petals in many vibrant shades of orange and purple.
Adam barely recognized the palace, despite having been inside once before.
Then again that had been a very long time ago.
At the far end of the room, just over the heads of the other party goers, Adam could just make out the altar and pedestal on which the oracle might have sat, and it was here were his familiarity with this place fled back out the double doors, and h was left looking upon a scene the likes of which he had not seen before.
He recognized the oracle, a beautiful woman sitting languidly on her pedestal, dark olive skin shining in the flickering candlelight. She lay on her side one hand resting on the gentle curve of her hip as the smoke rose around her emanating from behind the altar itself. Once upon a time, this temple had been dedicated to the Greek god Apollo, master of prophecy. Adam remembered the towering golden statue which had loomed behind her on their first meeting: an olympic fit young man, covered by nothing but a fallen sheet of fabric draped artfully around his hips, with gentle curls rendered in marble, and carrying a lyre.
That effigy was gone, and its corpse lay in rubble at the back of the room, and from that rubble there rose.... A familiar twisting structure of stark white human bone, which branched upward like the limbs of a tree, spreading up the wall and onto the ceiling in a pattern that radiated from behind the Oracle's head. Despite being the relative consistency and appearance of bone, the limbs pulsed and shivered. The fog around them took on a reddish hue. Had this been a videogame Adam almost expected to hear boss music.
At his side, Maverick shifted uneasily.
He heard her engage her comms channel, as they were pushed forward by an eager crowd until they were packed back to front in a crushing herd.
"You seeing this?"
"Wish I wasn't" He responded, "What do you make of it?" WIth their masks sealed, their voices would be imperceptible to the people around them, whose bodies had only just begun to sway with the influence of whatever drug had been fed into the atmosphere of the room.
"Well it's definitely void." She said, "Even if it didn't have that void thing crawling up the wall, I can feel it..."
Adam knew what she meant, yeah perhaps the scene was giving her a creepy feeling, just like it was giving him, but he was well aware of the thing that lurked inside her body. It wasn't a subject they had broached much. How does a person start that conversation, 'Hey maverick, how are you doing today, how is the pet void demon that you keep inside and can burst out at any moment.... Good?, that's great to hear! Give him my best.'
Not to mention that it wasn't something Maverick liked to talk about
They knew, from pieces slowly gleaned over the last few years that Maverick had once been involved with the void, before they were sent to Earth by the Makers, a fact about which she was deeply ashamed. The creature that live dinside her was the same creature with which she had made a deal.
Their relationship now was...
Complicated.
He never doubted maverick's loyalty, but he didn't trust the thing that called her insides a home.
Whose side was it on?
He would have wagered to say it was with the void, but it had helped them fight off void creatures on a few occasions. At one point it had clearly worked for the vocid, because it had made a deal with maverick to work against the makers, but it had also made her life on Earth a living hell.
It was messy.
But still the creature was useful. It could detect void creatures from a mile away.
Looking up at the strange growth that had taken up the temple, Adam had no trouble saying that he didn't need a void demon to tell him what this was.
"Brothers and sisters!"
The voice startled him, and he nearly dropped his still-full champagne glass as the oracle sat up from her lounging position, beautiful face wide in a catlike smile. The crowd quieted, their subtle swaying having grown into an agitated stur. The man in front of Adam was listing so heavily to one side and the other that Adam though he might fall over, but by some miracle, he kept his feet.
The oracle raised her hands, "My brothers and sisters, rejoice! Today is the day the end begins and the beginning ends, and all things start and all things begin to end." The crowd hummed in unison, still swaying back and forth, and as the oracle spoke, the swaying slowly began to synchronize, the crowd moving like a captured wave inside a glass enclosure.
Adam and maverick exchanged glances from the periphery of their masks, but together they began to sway as well, tilting gently from one foot to the other in time with the rest of the crowd, doing their best to blend in.
"My brothers and sisters, you all have partaken, from the sweet nectar which was provided to you. You have drank sweet and deep and filled your stomach's with truth!" Her voice rose, and behind her the wall of bone seemed to shiver with sensual pleasure, "You have chosen the bath of enlightenment, understanding the truth of what was. Our world is a lie!'
"A lie." A few voices chanted from the crowd.
"This place around us is a beautiful fiction. Before this was a universe of blackness, perfect darkness and stillness, perfect nothingness, until the makers came and ruined the natural order of things. WIth them they brought light and pain and suffering, and loneliness." She waved her hand around the crowd, "You have all felt it, have you not, the pain inside your anima tells the true story, that pain of loneliness and desire..... It is simply the desire of the body to return to the natural state of things, before the universe was plucked apart and forced into pieces to serve a cruel master. Had the Architect" She sneered at the word ,"Not intervened, your souls would have been left in perfect peace for millions of years, but here you are, each one of ou, outcasted, misunderstood, hurting for a truth that is being denied to you."
Adam's blood ran cold with ice.
"The Cult vibes are strong with this one." Maverick whispered.
And that was true enough.
What a lot of people didn't understand, and what had been explained to Adam during his military training so many years ago is that cults, terrorist organizations, and pyramid schemes tend to recruit in an almost identical way. Their first step is to create an organization, one with a specific goal, with that organization, a structure is implemented, usually rigid and hierarchical, but with the opportunity for upwards movement. The group is designed to make even the smallest individual feel like an integral part of the group.... To feel belonging. From there they pick their targets carefully, generally vulnerable people in bad situations, people who are lonely, cast aside, people who are angry and feel victimized by the world. Perhaps you are a moral fundamentalist that believes the world is a wicked place seeking to destroy your morality, perhaps you are a lonely man who can't find a date who believes he has been cast aside by women, perhaps you are a lonely housewife looking for an independant way to make money. They ply you with promises and flattery, make you feel special, strip ou of your identity and turn you into part of a roiling mass... just like the rest. And once that is done they feed the two mentalities, you are both a victim, and you are special. Yo uare one of god's chosen cast off by the world, you are a holy warrior for god fighting against corruption, you are your own boss in a world that would force you to work for 'the man'.
And here it was.
You are those that understand pain, have suffered honorably, in a world that has disrupted the fundamental order and created your suffering.
He glanced around him feeling sick.
She continued to speak degrading the makers, and the architect, singing the praises of sweet, sweet void.
"We could destroy it." Maverick said softly
Adam tilted his head in her direction, but did not fully look at her, "What do you mean."
"The void growth, we could destroy it, disrupt this whole thing.:"
Adam paused a sort of discomfort rising in his stomach, "We can't."
He could hear the frown in maverick's voice, 'Why not."
"Because they haven't done anything wrong."
"Are you kidding me?" Maverick said, and he could sense her eyes trailing around the room, at the creepy swaying and the frenzied speaker as the void creature pulsed on the wall behind her.
He shook his head, "They haven't hurt anyone. Besides, I think this might fall under freedom of religion...."
Maverick gave him a look of incredulity.
"They are infecting people against their will, poisoning crops. They went after the chairwoman...." her voice trailed away, not for lack of more things to say but because she simply couldn't accept that he wasn't seeing what she was seeing. He understood
"We need proof of those things before we act, or we are no better than they are."
"I think this letter tucked into orange vials of void joice is proof enough." She shot back, and she did have a point
He opened his mouth to speak, but his voice was cut off a moment later as the smoky air was filled with a holoprojection from above.
Adam's eyes widened in shock
The oracle raised her hand, "They perpetuate abomination, they bring lies!. Look upon the face of their leader."
Adam looked up staring at his own face hoovering in the smoke, "Look at their acolytes." Sunny, Maverick, Ramirez, Conn, Krill and on and on.
"And look at their spawn, the antivoid." She spat.
Adam's shock turned to terror as Kay's picture was projected onto the smoke.
And then his horror became rage as the oracle spat out her next words.
"They MUST be DESTROYED!"