W Scion

The room looked like an aircraft hangar.  My bugs reached out, and I could only sense the three walls closest to me.  Vast.

The partner filled the space, beautiful in a way I struggled to put words to.  It was like a volcano mid-eruption, stone mingled with the orange-red magma, spray or smoke reaching incredible heights… it was breathtaking in the sheer elemental nature of it, fascinating, beautiful, and so incomprehensible I couldn’t have understood it with decades of study.

But where the volcano was driven by seismic movements, I was pretty sure, and the storm by wind, this was driven by something else.  Just as basic, on a level.

An idea, half-formed, captured in a moment.

It conjured up images an artist’s sketchpad, putting body parts on the page, trying variations.  There, in the sliver of the chamber I could make out, there was flesh, a soft gray, lit by the red emergency lighting.  It might have been menacing, but the lines had a softness to them, and every part was positioned in an almost gentle manner.  The individual parts were androgynous, as a rule, but they veered into the slightly masculine, the slightly feminine, even alien, territories.

Always, there was something to take the threat out of it.  One long-fingered hand, upturned, pinky and ring fingers curled slightly, as if reaching down to offer aid.  Another hand, more childish, the underside and palm white, before fading into the gray colors the other parts shared, vulnerable like a dog with its throat or belly exposed.  Another still, with water running down it, streams of the liquid running between and down fingers, more a piece of art than a limb intended for use.  There were countless more I couldn’t see, couldn’t spare the bugs to study them.

I could look at any one piece, and I could see the beauty in it.  Any number of these could have been blended together, mixed and matched to create a human being.  Not overtly male or female, but no doubt kind in appearance.

Then, at the same time, there was the bigger picture, only a glimpse of it in the far end of the staircase, through the part of the ceiling that had collapsed in that massive room… this jungle of flesh, like parts of a doll waiting to be assembled.  Artificial, everything in the wrong scale.  There was a pattern to it, like there was a pattern to the movement of the waves in the ocean storm, but I didn’t have access to the underlying logic.  I could only get a general sense of which direction the wind had been blowing.

Here and there, flesh connected to flesh.  In other places, the flesh broke down into core elements, expanses of skin, veins, muscle and bone, all with hints of the same art of experimentation the larger pieces had.  Where flesh didn’t connect to other pieces, it broke down further into other things, into fractals and patterns, then into things or spaces I couldn’t make out, like it had turned around a corner that didn’t exist.

> Venom 29.8