The Arcane: Alistair Mann

CHAPTER 7 DEAD LESSONS

Alistair Mann takes one of the child's brain in hand and runs his fingers over it. He marvels at its beauty. The reason behind how a mass of various tissues fastened together by connective tissues dipped in a deep lather of blood and how that can perform cognitive functions eludes him. There are more unexplored ocean depths than unexplored space, but that pales to the unknown regarding the human brain. Alistair Mann sets down the mass of tissues on his desk and separates the right and left lobes carefully. Perfectly, he severs through the corpus callosum, and the two lobes fall apart.

Alistair Mann does not understand human emotion. Why people feel, how people feel, why some people feel one way in a situation and in that same situation someone else feels totally different? When Alistair Mann kills his victims, he is thankful. To him they should be gracious for sacrificing themselves to further his research. So, why should their relatives grieve them when they die? If the families are religious and most are, death is not permanent, they are in a better place.

What makes emotion even more perplexing to Alistair Mann is the human emotion in himself. What one does not understand, one should not be a part of. Alistair Mann has spent his entire life searching for answers but to no avail, and he has spent his entire life trying to suppress emotions. You cannot bottle up emotions if you do not allow them to exist. And so, as he built his multi-billion dollar empire he did so in hopes that it would help him give him the platformn to get answers to these questions. With unlimited resources one might assume you would be able to yield unlimited answers, but that was is so.

Carefully, Alistair Mann separates the frontal lobe from the deep limbic lobe. He sets the frontal lobe to the side and continues. Working carefully, he separates the superficial central sulcus, postcentral gyrus, and parietal lobe from the limbic lobe as well. The limbic system is responsible for emotional behavior, memory, homeostatic responses, and sexual behavior in a human's brain. This has been one of Alistair Mann's main focuses on his quest for knowledge.

Scooping the corpus callosum away from the limbic lobe, Alistair Mann drops the it and holds the limbic lobe in his hands. The limbic lobe is nothing grand, just a simple ring-shaped convolution that surrounds the medial border of the cerebral hemisphere.

Alistair Mann says aloud, "How can such a simple mass of tissues that lie deep within the human brain yield such conflicting and serpentine emotions in humans?"