It's Something Called Obedience! ||

Chapter No.8: Lost Echoes of My Mind

I had to hold back tears in my eyes, I have an issue with Stockholm Syndrome, and it is a lie to say I never felt romantically attracted to her. Yet I had to kill her, and it hurt like hell, worse than hell. I know what hell is now, I'm dead and breathing Dread, but the place isn't as bad as it puts itself as. I'll miss her, but we have to go on, but Book-Let lets go of my hand. I look back at him confused, "Ink, these people need someone they can have push them in the right direction." He's staying, and I don't want to believe it but I am seeing him say it with my very eyes.
"Where would I go? How could I go? Book-Let don't go!" He shakes his head with a pitiful smile, "No Ink, go to the ocean north of here, we'll meet again soon." and just like that, he leaves me with a shut door. Who sends their friend to the ocean? I know damn well I wouldn't. Though I don't have a choice, I wouldn't force Book-Let to take me back into that creepy hospital. I patter my feet against the floor, making my way north of here. Just like he said, I started noticing the lilacs around the water. They're overly sized up and the water is nice and warm.
Some wacko barges out of the water gracefully, "I smelled prey- WHO IN DREAD'S GATES ARE YOU?" They are tan and merman-like, their tail is different shades of purple and their hair is black with pink highlights. Their eyes are dark brown and their face is chiseled yet overly soft. They are very sparkly, they are built like a siren. "My name is Ink Bringe, I'm a lesbian, enby Demonic and you?" I glare at them, they seem annoyed with my question.
"I am the beautiful and viscous non-binary, Crypt Pheonix, I'm a siren." That explains it, I heard sirens are extremely unpredictable. "Well Crypt, I'm not prey so you can go on your merry little way. " He glares daggers at me, and precedes to attempt lunging at me.
Well he failed because someone swoops down in the air and grabs him by the torso. "Crypt! What did I tell you about attacking our unwanted guests?" A short, green haired man with pink eyes and charcoal angel wings glares at the siren. "Sorry Adelic, I was hungry!" The angel-winged man who is supposedly named Adelic, furrows his brows, annoyed at Crypts insolence. "I'm still here, you know." I finally diverted the attention to me, I don't know whether that is a good thing or a bad thing. "Follow us, I'm Adelic by the way, transgender male, and a fallen angel." This dude's eyes pierce me like a knife.
Adelic takes my hand, gripping it tightly and uses it to throw me on his back. Crypt nods at Adelic and dives into the pool of ocean water. I latch myself onto Adelic, unsure of what to think of what happens next, he uses his wings to launch us both up into the air. "You know I can fly right?" I ask as he zooms past trees and hills. He sighs with a petty laugh and prepares for landing. "Not nearly as fast as me, FAs are known for their agility and flight." He shoots me chuckle as we go back down, finding ourselves landing in a cave.
We walked some ways before reaching a hidden exit that was barricading a tall, silver tiled house. A big, wooden staircase trails itself to the entrance, it was moderate and lovely. Adelic takes me to the stairs, leading me up into the entrance of the house where we find Crypt in a human-like form but extra glittery. "Glad you guys made it, you still were fast with the extra weight." He gives Adelic an approving nod. "You back-handed siren, I'm gonna make food, watch Ink." He walks off, leaving me alone with the arrogant siren.
"So, what kind of Demonic are you?" I look away from Crypt for a moment, being a demon derived from something always taken as inappropriate isn't something I'd try to express as something I'm proud of. "I'm a Lust Demon." I worry he'll think I'm all sexual and stuff, but I'm really not. "I'm sorry about that, being a siren feels taken away from the point of it too." I turn back to see him looking at me with a solemn look. "How would you think that? Don't you like it?" I ask, feeling irritated from his ignorance. "I'm asexual, I only do what I do to survive." I felt a pang in my heart, I totally misunderstood his sorrow, hopefully he isn't mad.
"I'm so sorry, I didn't mean to be misjudging, that was really hypocritical of me." She looks back up at me, "It's okay, I would've misjudged you too if your name wasn't obviously beyond the point of our job." They really are understanding, I hope she isn't just a people-pleaser. Adelic comes back with peppermint and jasmine tea, we take two cups, I add sugar to my tea while Crypt adds honey. There are tea cakes and biscuits on a tray with a kettle, Adelic sits next to me on the other side of Crypt and grabs a cup himself, he takes a sip without sugar or honey and then asls, "Can I have a sip from each of your teas? I want to see what I'd like better." We both nod, he takes a sip from Crypts first, then mine.
He decides they're both too sweet and grabs a tablespoon of brown sugar as his flavoring instead. He sips it, and deems it satisfactional, "You guys both enjoy flavoring too much, never mix my drinks or I'll break the cup." He lightheartedly jokes, though me and Crypt both get nerve-racked from it, more so me than him. He grabs a tea-cake and eats it, making sure there's no salt or seasoning. "Stop being so boring!" I whine, he just chuckles back at me, clearly he was amused with me. Being eccentric is fun though, it's fun to watch as well.
"He's always like this Ink, get used to it." The laidback siren bitch calls in response. Of course he's just perfect like this, of course he is. "Hey! I'm better than you!" Adelic rolls his eyes in response, clearly used to playing along with Crypts charades. They both start roaring in laughter, I don't think these two Gray-Area Species take fighting with a very small grain of salt. They also ate pretty fast because the dishes were practically clean in less than 20 minutes. I wonder how long these two have been living together for, "Oh we've been living here together for around 7-8 years, it's quite the ride so far." Did Crypt just read my, fucking, mind?! Oh my lordy lord, I have not gotten used to this world in the slightest.
"You realize us sirens have to read minds to get our victims to our bidding, it's kind of our thing." Ink, you are an idiot! Crypt is just making me sound stupid now. Of course though, sirens are rather spontaneous. "Crypt! Leave Ink's mind alone, they need their energy for later." And of course, it drains my energy to have my mind read like a book, where is the shock factor in this? Although, Adelic's wording was rather strange, am I gonna have to visit another Lemorah? As annoying as that'd be, they should just get all my information from my file, which is accessible at all times in my folder.
"Ink, in a few minutes I am going to have to fly us down to the laboratory, down there we will need to assess your body with our high-tech E.S.L.U.P also known as the Reversed Pulse." I still haven't recovered from Tion Pulse, so it feels rather scary to hear her last name again. It may be a common word but it's shakingly difficult to think about. "You alright Ink?" Crypt asks me with concern, "Yeah, uhm, who made that machine?" I try to maintain my voice as controlled and mediated. "Actually the head of Pulse Industries, Tion Pulse, she actually died recently." My breathing hitches, furthering Crypt's concern.
"Ink are you sure you're alright?" Adelic asks, clearly seeing through the facade that I'm trying to create. "I- I was the one who killed Tion, she captured me and did really abusive things." I start to tear up, my breath goes shaky as they both stare at me, stunned. Crypt offers me a hug, I accept and let her hug me, while Adelic stares at me with pity. "I'm sorry that happened." He finally says, wrapping a wing around me. We sat there for around an hour, letting me calm down and regain my composure.
"Let's go down there, we should do the stuff you need to add to my file." I finally wipe my eyes and stand up. Adelic and Crypt both follow shortly after. Adelic takes my hand as we follow Crypt to what seems is the middle of the house, there's four trap doors that lead to what only seems is water, "Ink my wings can lock out the water but the more you breath, the less oxygen there is the goal is that you'll breath little enough to keep oxygen for the trip back up as my wings take quite a while till there's more oxygen." Adelic explains, I wonder if he had to before.
I rest on Adelics back as a strange instinct, his wings flap upon and engulf me up into its darkness. Before that, Crypt turns back into his siren form, and dives through the trap doors and into the water. Now that I think about it, the underworld is actually pretty euclidian. Unlike it was made out to be while I was alive. We splash into the water, I do my best to not to exasperate my breath and take all the oxygen from Adelic's wings. I heard the water against Crypt's tail leave the background noise. The water pressure starts to leave in milliseconds.
We finally hit the floor, Adelic carefully sets me down from his wings. I notice a ladder behind me, and a computer in front of me with lots of other technology. Hooks on a scandoffing that presumably worked with the computer were presented behind the ladder.
Crypt makes his way to the hooks, plugging them into the computer and sitting me down in a chair. "Ink, lend me your arm for a moment, I need to place this hook in place of where you would place an IV or an intravenous line." Crypt gazes, I nod back at him, allowing him to clip my arm with the hook. "This won't take long, especially since you've already been through a Lemorah." Adelic explains, opening up the computer and typing in his password. The hook glows up golden, and starts showing up statistics on my file in Adelic's computer.
A loading screen shows up on the electronic, it finishes its process rather soon, all it added was some excess information, just my emotional traits and reactional pulses. Adelic clicks through different information, "Oh yeah Ink, I never explained the navigation system of this place did I?" He scrolls back in his chair toward me. He changes the tab, and switches to a map, scaling around the entire area. "This shows the entire cave network, and the tunneling of it and our building." It genuinely was an interesting mechanism, too complex for me to live with though.
"I think we should head back up soon, we shouldn't be down here for too long." I say, I feel unsafe in the underground pressure. Adelic checks the time, then looks over at Crypt and they both nod. "You should be able to breathe freely this time up, it's another 20 minute flight." Adelic says while Crypt, who was in his more humanoid form, decided to transform back into his original form as a siren. "Let's get going then." Crypt opens the trapdoors with his tail and climbs into the water. Adelic nods in response, opening up his raven-like wings so I can fit inside.
As soon as I get comfortable, Adelic engulfs me into the darkness and jolts to the water. It's relieving that I can comfortably breathe now, but I'm still too nervous to overdo it, so I'll do the same as the way down and only breathe when necessary. The pressure of flight brushes against my face, puncturing my face like butterfly knives. Crypt's movement slowly stops creating sound. It's like sitting in a tight bed, I can't understand how Adelic can move so swiftly without using his wings to propel him through the water.
We finally resurfaced to the house and re-enter the living room, it seems only a tad bigger than the small laboratory that rested under the house, but we didn't stop at the living room. We exited the room and climbed up a ladder that supposedly brings us to the second floor of the house. We collectively sat down in a comfortable bedroom, seemingly Adelic's and Crypt's. Crypt leaves the room this time, leaving me alone with Adelic. "I know it's been hard Ink, and I thank you for your patience, in my gratitude and filing check I have claimed to find your charming jewels pose no threat to us." He says nonchalantly, what does he mean, charming jewels?
I stare at him quizzically, offended that he calmly explained this in a manner like I understood this as much as he did, maybe he thought I did. But I'm rash, and I act on impulse, so biting my tongue doesn't work out for me like it should've. "What charming jewels?" I accuse him, his calmness dwindles down to shock. "Ink, didn't you know? Your horns have charming jewels to calm down prey and predators in Dread and Hue-Lake."
He continued, "They're always somewhere on higher ranked Demonics like Beast-Vixens and Lustic Demonicous', you are the second species I said if you were curious." He explained, at this point I was just sitting next to him, with a blank face. I never got a good look at the chapters Mania Manic wrote about my species. I pretty much fainted before that, and the rest is history I despise remembering already. It doesn't matter that I have these and it can cause me problems, what does matter is that if I had known, I possibly could have avoided these situations.
Of course it is no shock that death is still mighty unfair, it'd be terrifying if it wasn't, Crypt re-enters the room with a tray of cookies and hot chocolate, a vastly different taste than Adelic. Surprisingly though, Adelic takes a cookie immediately and scarfs it down, "Ink, you gotta try these!" He laughs with pure amazement.