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The standard containment sites account for humanoid proportions. They are made of a combination of metal, reinforced concrete, bakelite, and glass, for easier surveillance, and are made to be fireproof, as well as safe against uses of excessive, sudden force, such as would happen in an explosion. More recently, they’ve been implementing the use of material that can resist acid attacks. Celia is still on sick leave after the number done on her by that one - well. He shouldn’t speak ill of the dead. Most subjects are kept in four by four by four chambers, because that allows them some room to move, if it is safe, while still keeping most of the anomalous behaviours easily controlled.
DOC is not of standard humanoid proportions.
They keep him in a cave. Ah, ‘keep’ is a way to put it, sure. That they cannot actually remove him from it and that all they’ve been able to do so far is set up a perimeter and install a lighting system in the caverns themselves. The guards are present at every hour of the day since the last incident, which had led to the discovery of the subject, but they are rotated constantly due to the effects DOC has on the mind. Zedaph recognises none of them as he heads towards the mouth of the first cave, the spiral stones protruding from the mountainside throwing heavy shadows that cut across the bright sunlight bathing the meadow. Zedaph allows himself a single glance at the impressive shapes, and he notes that they look like horns.
Just before he enters the mountain, a large woman with a facemask on stretches out a hand to stop him and her gloved hand hits his chest. Zedaph holds a wince back.
“Busy day today, then? Many visitors?”, Zedaph asks, but the quip doesn’t land. His smile remains perfectly in place as he gets out his ID card and the woman looks at it for a few long seconds.
“The innermost chamber is flooded. You will keep to the circling caves. You have one hour.”
She nods after a long, scrutinising look is fixed onto Zedaph and steps back, her touch finally gone. The same verification process has been repeated at the entrance to the safehouse in the nearby village, then at the first fork in the forest path, which was too narrow for cars, forcing Zedaph to wade through the mud that a week full of storms has created, and then at the entry point to the perimeter, and Zedaph wants to say the security is excessive, but he knows it’s barely enough.
“ One hour”, she calls after him, and if DOC has managed to get the Foundation’s guards so worried, then perhaps this is as serious as his superior had made it seem.
There is another set of guards, armoured to the teeth and looking almost statuesque as they stand there. There’s a cold wind coming from within the darkness of the cave, because the light only reaches so far, illuminating his way a few steps at a time, but these ones don’t stop Zedaph as he waltzes on the iron platforms that connect the caves. All the guns and the protective gear in the world wouldn't protect them, not from DOC, but he understands the human need for a physical sort of shield between them and this . But Zedaph knows better, so he goes in armed with nothing more than a voice recorder that he’s modified himself to withstand the magnetic fields prevalent around more volatile subjects.
One can’t really fight DOC, any form of offence is done in the mind, which is why they’ve sent Zedaph in the first place. That, and he’s expendable.
His pace is brisk as he manoeuvred through the veritable labyrinth of caves and tunnels, the temperature dropping further and further. His fingers are starting to feel numb and Zedaph wraps himself a little better in his labcoat. The silence is only punctuated by his own breathing and silent steps, at least until the lights start dimming. Then, a rumbling within the stone itself begins. Soft as a whisper, it sounds like rocks sliding against the walls, but the distance of the sound isn’t constant. Sometimes the noises feel as though they are happening right beside his ear. Act like you do not sense anything out of the ordinary .
The fluorescent lights, orange, so as to be visible within the fog of vapour and stone dust, start flickering by the time he reaches the second inner camber, which is simply of mostly cylindrical shape, ending in a chasm at the bottom, but Zedaph only has flashes of illuminated stone to build up the idea of the chamber in his mind, and it’s big enough as to be hard to comprehend. The magnitude is only amplified by the flickering that makes an odd pain start building behind his eyes. He could put in a complaint about the lights being faulty, but Zedaph also knows that they could change the lights every hour, around the clock, and they would still malfunction around DOC. It’s just odd that he’s decided to move from within the main chamber and towards the inner circle of rooms surrounding it. Hm.
Focus , Zedaph thinks, tilting his head to the side when all of the lights go out to his left, then to his right, leaving only a single little pinprick of neon fire in front of him. Zedaph stops where he is, not approaching the indicated place, and for a moment, the cave stops whispering, holding its breath as it waits for him to obey, forcing on a complete silence. The click of his recorder feels monumental, then.
And at last, with a soft hush of intensifying wind, the distant light goes out too, leaving Zedaph waiting in the abyss.
The voice, when it comes, is low and strange, as if it isn’t used to speaking in a way humans understand.
“ Aren’t you a brave one? ”
Zedaph thinks about everything they know about DOC. Thinks about the love of games, of gruesome endings to said games, about the sheer amount of knowledge he has, even after being dormant for who knows how long. One of the things they haven’t been able to deduce yet is how many thousands of years ago DOC was made, but the theory that DOC did not need to be conscious in order to absorb knowledge of what was happening in the world around him during his slumber is one Zedaph believes fully. He coined it himself, after some insistence . A shiver runs down his spine.
“I wasn’t aware standing in place was considered bravery. Good to know!”, he calls back, fully rejecting his instinct to whisper his answer, so as to not disturb the playfield DOC has started laying out for their conversation.
DOC laughs with the sound of a building crumbling in on itself and Zedaph blinks once, twice, carefully stomping on the urge to draw back even just a single step.
“ Fiery, too! ”, DOC says, amused, “ Your name. ”
“You already know it”, Zedaph adds, looking ahead into the nothingness, until the nothingness blinks, revealing a gigantic red eye that bathes Zedaph in crimson light. It’s as big as Zedaph is tall, and Zedaph would almost describe it as mechanical looking, but not quite. Raw metal given life, perhaps.
“ Say it. ”
Zedaph looks straight into that large eye and the cold dread building up his spine, making his skin tingle is only barely soothed by a distant presence in his mind, in a memory. He recalls eyes, too many of them, watching him in the darkness as his eyes remained fixated onto the mirror on his dresser door, even if he couldn’t see them. He hears the echo of words that had been whispered in his ear.
“I have not been sent here for polite conversation, I’m afraid”, Zedaph drawls, simulating coldness in his voice to cover anything else.
Doc doesn’t reply, but the large eye blinks closed, and when it opens again, it is much further away and the outline it leaves Zedaph staring at is… Zedaph starts speaking, even before he realises his mouth is moving.
“Face of a man, partially, one half covered in what looks like metal”, he begins, then, speeding up, “Lower jaw is artificial and fanged, the eye on the metal half emits a light of around two thousand lumens, wavelength of seven hundred nanometres, fur or moss covering the skin, spots of a darker subs-”
A trembling avalanche of sounds interrupts, and Zedaph cannot help a gasp as DOC moves, the whole metal bridge he is standing on trembling and sending Zedaph to clutch for the railing. Now yelling as a gigantic hand appears in the light, Zedaph continues:
“Clawed hands, in proportion and metal. Expected physical strength for size-”, he has to duck as stone rubble falls from the ceiling Zedaph cannot see. He wishes he could run, just as he wishes that his heart would stop slamming painfully against his ribs, but he has to stand. If he runs…
“ You are embarrassing yourself, more have come before you and seen the same ”, the voice is underlined by laughter, and something presses at Zedaph’s mind. He would have thought it a headache, but he knows better, thankfully, and he resists, grimacing.
“And more will come after me, but I intend to get the job done”, Zedaph says at a normal volume that should go unheard in the chaos that is only now starting to ebb. The glowing red eye narrows and DOC’s face shifts, as though something under his skin shifts. The glow dims all at once and he stops wreaking havoc on the cavern, but it takes a while for the shaking of the metal platform to seize as well.
“ What…? ”
Zedaph wonders if DOC is surprised, if he is capable of such an emotion, or if Zedaph is building him up as more person than entity of immense power in his brain, as instinct dictates. The pressure in his head grows and Zedaph’s hands clench into fists, nails digging into flesh.
“The Foundation knows that you break minds as surely as you break reality”, Zedaph breathes out, the presence at the back of his thoughts starting to rouse with the prodding that abruptly stops, “They have some tricks for these cases, dear friend.”
DOC is not a friend, but Zedaph doesn’t have enough focus to spare to curve speech habits right now.
“ You? A trick? ”, the giant lowers himself and takes a few steps until he is behind Zedaph, “ No. But you have something helping you. What is it? ”
“Information for information”, Zedaph offers instead of giving into the demand, straightening himself out and brushing the dust off of the front of his labcoat. DOC tries a last attack on Zedaph’s mind, but he barely feels this one. His little trial earlier already startled the eyes watching them into attention. A deep growl resonates around him. It’s as much of an agreement as he’ll ever get, Zedaph knows.
“Subject DOC, what are you?”, Zedaph asks, bringing the forgotten recorder back to his lips. Clear audio would be best, after he’s gotten this far.
“ The blurred edges ”, DOC says and Zedaph snorts. So cryptic, these titans of godly power. It would be funny if the threat on his life wasn’t very much part of said “blurred edges”.
“We know you can affect reality, both in the individual perspective and at large. Is that what-”
“ No, little human. You said, information for information? ”, Zedaph nods slowly and DOC grins, his smile filled with thousands of knife-sharp teeth, “ Who else followed you? ”
“I am alone here”, Zedaph shrugs. Two can play at this game.
The air rearranges itself, the push of it lessening. The barbed smile sharpens. Zedaph is practised in putting on shows that override sense and logic.
“ Ah. I see . ”
Zedaph will give DOC that, for all of his grandiosity, he is not stupid, not at all. Fuck, this really might be his last day alive, huh? Zedaph just wishes he’d prepared a suit for the funeral.
“Yes. Of course. Well, I suppose you already answered the first question. Since you made the effort to come all the way out here-”, a tingling of foreign recognition that isn’t DOC makes Zedaph pause briefly, and the red eye narrows further, while the, presumably, organic one stays firmly shut, “Who made you? Why?”
“ You will answer first. Name. ”
Zedaph bites the inside of his cheek. The odd sensation grows. Is there something he’d missed?
Yes .
Should he…?
“Zed.”
“ You play a dangerous game. ”
“I am known as Zed. Doctor, if you prefer formality.”
There’s a grumble that sounds almost annoyed, and somewhere in the darkness that doesn’t glow blood red, a stone wall cracks.
“ They didn’t try to make me, but anyway I was. They played too, with powers beyond them. Looked too close. ”
Zedaph lifts an eyebrow when DOC closes his eye, plunging the cave back into shadow and leaving it that way. Despite knowing his size, enormous as he is, Zedaph cannot help but think that DOC feels even larger like this, all-encompassing.
“Not a cult, then, summoning their god with sacrifices, but doing something wrong along the way?”, Zedaph prods. The darkness doesn’t answer for a long time. If he listens closely, Zedaph can almost make out the sound of the recording device working, as silent as everything is. When DOC speaks, it sounds like the sort of sound one hears as someone calling their name, only to realise no one was there, too quiet, too real to be real.
“ Sacrifices… Do humans think their lives and the lives of their livestock and the weeds of their habitat are worth so much? That with that alone, they could create this? ”
They sound like the words said before a display of power, to show exactly what those puny sacrifices of blood and bone are worth to such an entity, but nothing happens. Nothing needs to happen. Zedaph has already seen enough, heard enough.
“Then what made you?”
A distant ambience filters through. The rain must have started again, growing heavy enough as to be heard underground. It incites a hiss of sliding stones, and the eyes Zedaph cannot see blink in inane delight.
“ Seeking and not finding. Exploration. Questions asked to the night. Why did you accept to come here, little human? ”
Zedaph wishes he had a mirror. As it stands, he just has to think really hard. Curiosity and darkness. How much does he have left of his hour?
“I…”, Zedaph isn’t sure what to say. That they knew Zedaph was the only one able to deal with these kinds of entities and bring something of value out of it? Something that isn’t Zedaph recoils at the thought. That they were already looking for ways to get rid of him?
“I can do this, better than anyone they have on hand”, Zedaph settles on. DOC sounds disbelieving when he speaks next, but, technically, Zedaph hasn’t lied.
“ I know the Foundation. They want knowledge, but they refuse to see , don’t they? Why are you with them, why did they let you in? ”
Is he mocking him? No, wait. Not Zedaph. He is mocking.
One hour .
The headache is back.
Ok, he gets it, he’s got limited time, he has to think harder about what he’s asking if he’s to gather trivia and get back alive, he gets it , but-
Thunder drums in the distance. Zedaph sighs.
“I was a good candidate for them. Stupid enough to not read their clauses, that’s all”, he says with a half-hearted smile, his usual humour lacking heavily.
“ And stupid enough to come here. Not stupid enough to leave yet. ”
“You’d kill me”, Zedaph says simply. It’s the truth.
One.
Hour.
Thunder.
And.
Rain.
Do you hear them?
Zedaph closes his eyes. The back of his eyelids looks the same as DOC’s darkness. He thinks it’d hurt less if he was hurled skull-first against one of the cave walls.
Do you hear them?
“ They would come looking for you. What an annoyance. No, I would not. It would not be fun. ”
“So is that it? All your power, and you’re looking for fun?”, Zedaph asks, trying to understand why DOC is. He’s asked questions about his existence, but if he doesn’t understand, if he doesn’t see , he’s doomed already.
Do you hear them?
“ You should know better. What fun is there in something as clean as death, for you? ”
Something odd about the way he says that-
Do you hear them?
Specifics. For him? Who else?
“Death…?”
Do you hear them?
The rain gets even louder, but then the walls start shaking again. Zedaph’s starting to feel nauseous, and like that first time they met, he finally sees them again. Eyes. Too many to count. Watching.
“ He is talking to you! I knew, I knew…! ”
D o y o u h e a r t h e m ?
Rain. Blurred.
“The innermost chamber is flooded”, Zedaph recalls, starring into one of the thousands of eye pairs whilst DOC seems intent on bringing the whole mountain down, “You can move, the people at the Foundation have recorded movement within the caves, but you always meet their men there… Water…?”
Zedaph smiles, and suddenly he has lost all control over his body and mind.
I hear them , he thinks, And I see you .
When Zedaph wakes up, he finds himself staring at the pristine white ceiling of one of the hospital rooms, back at the Foundation's base. He’s fully soaked, but there’s stone dust all over him as well. He feels very much like a fish about to be cooked in flour and oils.
A nurse sits beside him, looking at him with critical eyes. If he expects Zedaph to say something, they’ll probably be here for a while. His voice is still not his own.
Had he…?
No.
What did you do? , Zedaph would like to ask, but the answering glee and mischief that fill his chest come from someplace else. He probably hadn’t killed DOC, the Foundation would have his head and all the eyes that have taken residence up there if that were the case, but Zedaph can never be sure.
Water, seriously. That was it? The weak spot of a god is getting a bit wet?
Apparently, receiving an answer to that stray question is much more interesting than not, because Zedaph can almost see the image of earth cracking in a drought, the sound resembling broken bones more than anything.
Zedaph smiles and raises an arm to cover his eyes. The nurse says nothing, just keeps watching him.
Whatever. It’ll just mean easier containment; that should take the Foundation Council off his back for a bit. It’s still kind of funny though, that he’d actually believed he was going to die.
Eyes that no one else can see watch him and Zedaph laughs silently at their intent gaze.
But you know all along, didn’t you, Grian?
Startling at the name, the pressure on his throat eases, and Zedaph says, as quickly as possible:
“Seal him underwater, tell the Council to seal him underwater.”
The nurse rushes out and Zedaph promptly vomits over the side of the hospital bed he’s been strapped into at the ankles.
“ Names have power, Zedaph. You don’t play with power ”, the eyes around him blink, then Grian is back to being dormant at the back of his head while Zedaph continues emptying his stomach of meals he’s pretty sure he hasn’t eaten. Maybe he really should see a doctor while he’s here. Hah, doctor for doctors. Fun.