Not Alone

Hide and Seek (Part Three)

Deep in the underworld, two lost souls faced each other.

"I heard about a Cameraman they used for a police mutant. And I heard about another who was experimented on and became a Glitch. So, you were the more unfortunate of the two... I can't imagine any worse fate. Poor little brown mouse..."

Brown couldn't stand the pity radiating down from Blade Strider's eyes. But since his body was not his own anymore, he couldn't lower his head. All he could do was look back with the unblinking lens of a Cameraman.

"That thing can't hear you," Jellybean chided the Strider. "It's not sentient. When a Parasite is using an Agent, it's body is just a mindless tool. You may as well talk to an anvil or something."

"Oh, but I do talk to my tools," Blade Strider tilted his head as though he was trying to look through the Parasite to Brown. "Can't you at least take your tongue out for a minute so I can apologize to him?"

Jellybean giggled, the shrill sound stabbing into Brown's earpiece like a rusty needle.

"Of course not, you stupid thing."

The Parasite flipped the Strider off with both Brown's hands.

Was it ever going to stop finding that funny?

"Stupid thing?" Blade Strider lowered his head into his bowl, putting his narrowed eyes at level with Brown's lens. "Listen, you tonsil stone the Scientist hacked up, I am making treated lenses so our soldiers don't get massacred by—"

"That's a job a human could do, you said so yourself! You're only the guy who got clapped by—"

"DON'T!"

The shout was so thunderously loud from right in front the Strider's cavernous mouth that the Parasite, whose little ears were surely more sensitive than Brown's mechanical hearing, jumped backwards off the toilet seat and perched on the rim of the vat.

"Don't. Mention. That. Name."

"What name?" Jellybean needled, giggling uncontrollably. "Titan Cameraman? TITAN CAMERAMAN? THE ROBOT WHO CLAPPED YOU?"

The Strider lifted his head back up and frowned, narrowing his tired eyes.

"Do you want to see something interesting?"

The Parasite made Brown shrug.

"Do you know that glass becomes molten at three hundred degrees Celsius? Just look at all that boiling liquid down there, waiting to be poured out into molds. I think it must have reached at least five hundred degrees, judging by the way it's bubbling."

Jellybean tilted Brown's head down to give the contents of the vat a cursory look.

The liquid below looked more like lava than what Brown imagined liquid glass, glowing a painfully bright orange with shimmering highlights of purple and green, presumably the chemicals the protective lenses were made of.

It was a mesmerizing sight.

Jellybean wasn't impressed.

Why does this idiot want me to look at—

The Parasite's thought was interrupted by the flat of a sword hitting Brown without warning between the shoulders, pinning his body to the edge of the vat by the waist, leaving his arms and camera wobbling far too close to the molten glass below.

The Parasite fought to move with all the power it had stolen from Brown, but there was nothing to use as leverage, and his body could only flail like a trapped butterfly.