Displaced

Chapter 123

Asoft hum broke the relative silence of the cavern, letting Bazzalth know thatone of the recombination tests had completed. For now, he ignored it; the result would remain stable for a few daysand he wasn't yet finished with his current task. The idle musing that this wasn't his usual modus operandi crossed his mind, but he ignored it. Still, as the day went on, he found that the thought refused to leave him, perhaps because, upon further consideration, it was quite correct.

Bazzalth had always preferred to focus on a single avenue of inquiry, a single experiment, a single set of tasks. He liked to devote his entire intellect towards wringing every last drop of Knowledge from whatever his subject at the time happened to be. If, for some reason, the course of the experiment called for a period of idling, he would fill those gaps with a small project that didn't have a time limit, such as redesigning his tools for better efficiency or improved accuracy.

Looking back now at the last days, however, he realized that something had changed. He currently had three concurrent experiments running, each completely unrelated to the others. It had gotten to the point, he realized, that they were actively interfering with each other's progress as he was forced to juggle the time and resource demands of each. The whole process was highly inefficient and not something he'd done before. So... why had he suddenly gone down this path?

A moment of introspection gave him an answer, one that he didn't much like but had trouble refuting. This irregular behavior of his had begun after Blake had departed, and after he'd met with Pari after more than a year of separation. Thinking back, he concluded that he'd started the second experiment to fill a moment of downtime during the first, then added a third when the second had proved unable to fill all of his idle moments. He was keeping himself busy, he realized—so busy that he had no time to let his thoughts wander, so busy that there was no opportunity for the emptiness to sink in.

Bazzalth was lonely.

Being alone was nothing new for him, of course. He had spent the vast majority of his life in isolation, away from all the others who only looked down on him, mocked him, and treated him like he were little more than a tool and a toy. But there was something different to this solitude than all the centuries before. Something was missing now, something that perhaps had always been missing but had gone unrecognized until he'd finally had a taste: companionship.

Though their time together had been all too brief, those few days with the sarcastic crawler had been some of the most enjoyable and memorable of his long life. And as for Pari, the brief re-convergence of their paths had reminded him of the way things had been when the small creature had called his dwelling home.

One time, she'd released some sort of smoke that blanketed the test chamber's walls with a pink residue that had seemingly done nothing other than provide the lair with some additional color—that is, until they'd woken to find the chamber covered in a thick layer of mold-like fungus. While the unforeseen interruption had hampered his planned studies, he could not deny that he'd accrued much Knowledge of a different sort in his twelve-day war against the shockingly persistent invaders. Truly, fungal spores were the only form of life that could challenge dragons when it came to hardiness.

In the seasons after Pari's first reluctant departure, his sister Tavreth had consumed his every waking moment with demand after demand, to the point that he hadn't had a moment to process the void Pari had left behind. By the time his days had slowed down again, he'd gotten used to the state of affairs again. This time, he was afforded no such luxury.

What did it say about him that the two beings in his long life with whom he'd found the most companionship were a crippled crawler and a half-person hybrid creation of a past experiment? He preferred not to think about it. Instead, Bazzalth emerged from his lair into the evening air and took flight. It was time to do his rounds.