Seth and the Prometheus Guild

The Director

The day he was supposed to meet the Director started with a big event for Seth; his foot manacle was taken off.

Suspiciously he watched the Guard named Gregory kneel at his feet, fastening a little key to the iron shackle. The position exposed his neck and Seth itched to bite it and break it with a decisive shake of his head.

Actually, in this form it might be more prudent to use his hands to break the human's neck? He'd have to ask someone how humans preferred to kill without weapons. Not Francesca though ... and probably not Gregory either.

Gregory always got Seth's hackles rising, and not just because he had shot him with that small sleeping dart on his first day here. His coloring and build strongly resembled one of the Guards of his old place – short-cropped light hair, a beard a few shades darker, a lot of freckles and broad shoulders. While Seth could distinguish humans easily by their smell or corner-spots of their appearance – hair color and skin tone – he failed to register their finer features, such as the distinct shape of their eyes, nose or lips. To him they were just fleshy blobs that made up their faces.

So every time he spotted Gregor it was like a specter of his past appeared, taunting him.

The temptation to do away with this specter would probably have been bigger if Francesca hadn't been standing next to him, waving a pair of bright red human shoes in his face. She'd tried to get him to wear shoes since a few days ago, insisting that it was a necessary part of proper human attire.

Seth cared nothing for proper human attire though. The clothes he could accept – his soft skin apparently needed a layer of protection as even insect bites – insect bites! - were enough to make him bleed now. And while this body regulated its temperature to some degree, it was still quite vulnerable to the cold.

So the clothes he tolerated, although it took some time to get used to the unusual sensation of the light linen trousers and blank cotton shirt. But shoes were a different matter.

He didn't see what protection his soles needed, at least not while staying indoors where the floors were unnaturally smooth. And on top of that, while wearing them he'd be unable to feel the vibrations in the ground through the soles of his feet. He'd have no grip while running or scaling something.

With a little clink, the manacle feel from his foot, redirecting Seth's attention back from Francesca to Gregory. The human male grunted and straightened, as usual not uttering any words.

Francesca, on the other hand, was vocal: "Finally you're rid of that dreadful thing. It's wrong to chain children to the wall, making me feel like we are part of some dark-ages torture facility."

Seth didn't know what she was talking about, but it sounded interesting.

"Now, just slip into these fancy sneakers and we can be off to see the director."

In the end, Seth didn't wear the shoes. Instead he took his first trip through the human dwelling with bare feet.

He actually stumbled upon those same first steps, already so used to the weight of the shackle around his left foot that the sudden absence of it caused a miscalculation and resulting imbalance. It even unnerved him that the metallic rattling that usually accompanied his movements, courtesy of the long chain and its clinking links, was suddenly missing.

But he soon forgot about those things as he stepped out of the room and took in the massive human dwelling. It was like nothing he'd ever seen before, a long echoing hallway made of brown stone, doorways and windows that were not square but arched and unreasonably large, stone columns and balconies, winding stairs, decorations etched into the stone on the walls and ceilings.