TBI Pt3 Hollow

Growing Things

It was finally over.

It took a home invasion, a localized zombie apocalypse, and the death of Jimmy, but the Bullgang had finally made the wise choice to forget traveling and lock themselves down. Someone or something was clearly out to get them, and when push came to shove the homies weren't afraid of getting serious. Bull had built a safehouse for a situation just like this, and the group had settled in for a period of waiting while Bull, Chaos, Bliss, and Donut agreed to work together and get to the bottom of the situation. They couldn't risk the safety of the younger kids any further, that was clear. The four of them decided that the safest thing to do was lay low for a while, but despite Chaos' attempts to insist otherwise, Donut told the others he would go back to the now-empty mansion and lay the foundations of an investigation. It was the smart thing to do. It was also a lie.

Donut ducked under the police tape that had been left behind, slipping his key into the front door of the mansion and slowly opening it. He examined the dark entryway for a moment, then slipped inside and went right to work. His obsession had not been mindless. His plans had been thwarted, but it had hardly been for lack of his own genius. Bad luck? Certainly. But more than that, it had been his own restraint. His lingering regrets and his tendency to second guess himself. After weeks of introspection, he had settled on the solution. He had to purge the weaknesses. He could regret once his plans had succeeded, but for them to work in the first place he had to be ruthless. Unfortunately, it was not in his nature. So instead, he had to use his raw intellect to create something without those weaknesses.

Click

His fingers found the false panel, pulling a plank away from the wall to reveal the access tunnel he had placed into the walls of the Bull mansion ever so long ago. He ran his fingers over the smooth metal, then pressed his thumb to the scanner. It beeped in response, and the door slid open. He blinked away the flash of fluorescent light and breathed in the sterile air of his laboratory, then ran his hand over the padded surgical table. Twice now, Chaos had avoided being strapped here. She had avoided his touch. She had avoided being fixed, and she didn't even know it. The thought was both amusing and infuriating, and he turned away before one emotion could assert itself. For this plan to work, he might need both. He needed to create a facsimile of himself. A false doppelganger. A hollow pit to be filled with his malice and his desire and nothing else. A crime against nature.

A masterpiece.

He went to work. Fueled by dark desire, he pondered his collection of occult writings and wandered to the edges of scientific theory. The concept of capturing a human soul in an inanimate object was not new, but it was also heavily taboo. However, he did not need to capture his soul for this plan to work. Rather, he would need to trap the essence of his malicious intent, the seed of wrongness that grew thick inside him. He needn't give it a will of its own or even a real personality. Just emotions trapped in a vessel.

He created the body out of masonry clay. Strong enough to overpower Chaos with ease, but not so strong that he couldn't destroy it if it got out of hand. He had used pottery clay first, but even striking it with a fist could shatter pieces off. He packed the interior with straw to give it shape and cushioning, and nestled inside of it a steel heart engraved with the magic of animation. At this point, he had created a rudimentary golem. Beginner magic by any standard, lumped and ugly, but a working prototype. The next step, infusing his own will into it, was much harder. If his mind wandered for even a moment, the resulting creature was muddled and confused, its mind like that of a child's and its behavior unnatural. The number of discarded prototypes reached over a dozen before he managed to entirely focus on his desire for Chaos during the entirety of the ritual. The flame of creation went out, the smoke cleared, and across from him in the circle sat...a motionless figure. For a moment, Donut felt rage and frustration boil within him. He stood up in a flash, grabbed a metal rod off of a nearby desk, and raised it to strike down yet another failed creation. However, as he did so he caught a gleaming reflection from the creature's eyes, which had opened while he wasn't looking. Donut stared into them for a moment, and as he did so he knew he had succeeded. This prototype, its form carefully crafted into a human shape, sat cross-legged on the floor, its black eyes gleaming with reflected light. As Donut froze and held his swing back, its clay mouth spread into a malicious, impossible grin. Donut was unnerved for a moment, but remembered its fragility and pushed the feeling aside.