Prompto Argentum (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
hashtag_chocobro) wrote2022-06-23 12:04 pm
hashtag_chocobro) wrote2022-06-23 12:04 pm
First Magitek Production Facility; Niflheim, Eos; ?????, ??/?? ET [06/23 FT].
Prompto stood before the door that would lead him into the chamber where Verstael awaited. Even with the thick door closed, he could hear the machine working inside, pumping miasma into the tubes, and he tried not to think about how that could have been his fate. He tried, instead, to think of what had been his fate….and to remind himself that the only thing separating himself from the man to blame for the fact that all of that was now gone...was this one single door.
He breathed out. He could practically feel the sweat from his hands through his gloves on his grip on his gun. He held out his wrist toward the console. It lit up. Beeped. And opened the door.
And Prompto, trying to ignore the way his whole body shook as he tried to hold his gun before him steadily, slowly crept inside.
Immediately, he was greeted with the strange sounds coming from Verstael, the man's back still turned to him, but his shoulders shifting and heaving with his labored breathing. It almost sounded like he was laughing, really, but just didn't have the lung capacity for it, coming out as a desperate, almost manic wheeze.
"What the matter?" he asked, between those odd, strangled breath. "Have you never seen a man turn before?"
And turn was exactly what Verstael did in that moment, finally moving to face Prompto, who had been preparing himself to look into a face like his, as he had with the clones inside the tubes outside this chamber, only older, but what he saw, at least on half his face, was much, much different. A deep grimace cut across Verstael's mouth as a deep, ashen black seemed to be crawling up the entire right side of his face. That same strange black marring that had been on some of the clones, the one reminiscent of the miasma that filled the tubes, and Prompto, lowering his gun slightly from the pure shock of it, realized that he was now witnessing a man being taken over by daemonification right now, right there, before his very eyes.
Another harsh wheeze dragged out of Verstael as the cold, dead, vacant eye on the right side of his face pieced into Prompto, the skin around it beginning to fester and peel away. "If those Lucians hadn't intervened," he gasped out, lifting his left hand to clutch at the right side of his chest, "you could have turned, too! You were cloned from this genius' genes!" His laughing now came out in pained but almost ecstatic hisses through his clenched teeth and his head rolled back. "Born of my own flesh and blood!
"You," he continued, spreading both his hands out wide as if to indicate the whole facility, as dark purple lines shot through the infected side of his face; that lifeless eyes skewed wildly in its socket, while his other eye, that same bright, bright blue of Prompto's own, stared firmly at him, "are but one of millions created to serve our great Empire in the magitek infantry! And now...now you've finally come home to Niflheim."
Verstael lowered his arms, but then lifted one again, shaking and shuddering under the daemon miasma coursing through him, and he reached out for Prompto.
"My son."
Prompto tried to fire right then and there, but found that he couldn't, not while aiming at Verstael, and, in desperation for something, he fired off a shot into the ceiling. "Shut up!" he shouted. Breath shaking, he lowered his head, lowered his gun, trying to shake off the words crawling through his as effectively as if Verstael had in fact infected him with the miasma. He had to fight through it, fight through all the doubt and pain writhing through him. "You're…you're wrong! I'm a Lucian!"
He gulped in some air, lifting his eyes with gasp of it, the tears streaming down his face. Once that first one raced down his cheek, there were more to follow, falling unbidden and unrelenting. "I am not," he declared desperately, "one of your experiments!"
"Not anymore," Verstael growled in agreement, grimacing with each stop he took forward toward Prompto, words coming about between gasping wheezes. "Now, you're nothing but a failure. I ought to return you whence you came."
The cracks along the side of Verstael's face began to split and ooze with a black liquid. Prompto didn't even need to look at the man to know it; he could hear it, even over the sound of the pumping machines. "Perhaps then you might serve some useful purpose."
The oozing split of Verstael's face was even more gruesome that Prompto imagined as he threw his eyes up and found the man lunging for him. "Never!" he vowed, lifting his gun between them.
But his hands were shaking. His entire arm was shaking. His finger seemed frozen in place, unable to pull the trigger as Verstael leaned back with a mighty laugh, the cracks on his face, the black daemon miasma starting to glow and burn brightly with the infection. He jerked back again, his body shifting unnaturally with the cracking of bones, the splintering of muscles, and when he spoke, the shining, glowing black sludge pooled from his mouth.
"With your help," Verstael said, his voice gaining an odd quality to it, supernaturally doubling in on itself, a resonate echo of multitudes, "my ascension to divinity is now all but complete!"
Terrified at the transformation taking place before his eyes and by his own ability to act, Prompto took only a step backwards before he felt completely pulled into Verstael's thrawl. "Soon," he continued, "neither the Kings of Lucis nor the gods themselves," his hand clasped onto Prompto's shoulder, exuding black smoke, and sending an immediate surge of heat through even their thick clothing, "will be able to challenge my reign."
With Prompto now in his grasp, Verstael reached his other hand for his cheek, a gesture that, under any other circumstances, might be construed as a gentle embrace. But the miasma was quickly racing along Verstael's arm, down those reaching fingertips, and Prompto knew, he just knew, that if this man touched his flesh with that infected hand, he and Verstael would have more in common than their genes.
With a strangled, gasping, desperate scream, Prompto forced his body to act. He lifted his gun in between the small distance between him and the man who created him, and he pulled the trigger.
Smoke, miasma, that viscous black ooze, all splattered and shattered on the impact as Verstael, still somehow managing to gasp for breath, staggered back. He hit the ground with one last rattling sigh, and then Prompto, still trembling, still holding the gun as if he couldn't believe he'd just shot a man…not just any man…his father, his creator...point blank, right in the face, took a staggering step forward toward the smoking wreckage of the corpse that was Verstael Besithia.
The man who gave him life and would have just as easily taken it, as well. And had almost succeeded, after all these years.
The gun dropped from Prompto's hand.
His knees were soon to follow, as he curled into himself while the sobs began to pour out of him. But there wasn't many of them. After all of that, there wasn't much left inside of him at all. He felt as if he'd been entirely drained of everything, and felt only cold emptiness left.
And then there was a voice from the intercom.
"Oh!" Even the distance couldn't diminish the theatrical mocking shock dancing in Ardyn's voice. "Look what you've done! You've gone homicidal!
"No," he corrected, with a particularly cruel delight. "Patricidal! You lose all your friends and murder your family! And now you've no one left!"
Ardyn's rich, deep laughter started to fill the chamber, and Prompto, who thought that there was finally nothing left inside of him, was wrong. There was something there. Desperate rage.
"Shut up," he said, and slowly, it started to build, and build and build until he was shouting it to cover up the laughter, as he threw himself forward, pounding his fists into the floor. "Shut up! Shut up! SHUT UP!"
But his energy was drained, and the he slumped over from the effort, while the laugher died away and the emptiness returned just as quickly as it had departed.
Because he was right. Ardyn was right. There was no one left, and all he could do was curl up and sob.
"Vital functions," the pleasantly mechanical voice over the intercom sang out, "decreasing. Plasmodium activity index increasing."
Prompto lifted his head as the machine before him began to start and whirl with increasing power. The smoke that had been fading from Verstael's body began to billow out more powerfully. He gaped as the voice continued.
"Daemonification complete. Initiating transfer to Unit XDA-1002: Immortalis."
"W-what?" Prompto gasped, staring up at the DNA-like coil of machinery as it turned slowly, slowly, and the lights of the room began to dim, illuminated now by a faint red glow. A soft siren started as the tubes in front of him filled with red, and something….something organic, not mechanical, seemed to be creeping into motion. The sirens began to wail, reaching a fever pitch, as the entire chamber began to shake.
Something suddenly burst through the ceiling, something large and monstrous, resembling the sketches Prompto had seen on a few of the papers scattered throughout the facility. But the creature, the monster, the daemon, after hitting the ground, did not get up, and Prompto realized that someone had crashed it through the ceiling as if with a mighty blow. An act that was all but confirmed as the figure on top of the creature slowly stood up and yanked out her lance.
For a brief moment, Prompto stared up at Aranea Highwind, and Aranea Highwind stared back.
She then jumped down from the monster. "You always play hard to get like this?" she asked.
"Ar…Aranea," Prompto started, and he tried to push himself up, couldn't find the energy, but she cut him off, anyway.
"Save it, Blondie," she said. "On your feet!"
She wasted no time in striding over to a desk, where papers and plans and blueprints were spread. "So this is that new model they're working on," she muttered as she leaned over them and then spared a glance over to Prompto, still there on the floor, paralyzed by his disbelief, his shock, just….everything.
"I don't know what's got you so shook," she said, her attention now diverted his way, "but you can deal with it later. Let's move."
When he still couldn't respond, she reached down to grab him by the lapel of his jacket, dragging him up so that she could get right in his face. "I'm only gonna say this once," she said, leaning in until there was barely an inch between them. The dramatic pause she put in there was longer than that space, and then she yanked him until he had no choice but to follow her to his feet.
"Lose your will to live," Aranea informed him, "and you lose all hope of me helping your sorry ass. Got it?"
She narrowed her eyes fiercely at him, and Prompto could only look back in bewilderment, in confusion. Why would she bother in the first place? Didn't she know…how pointless it was? How useless? But when she let him go, she did so gently, and, now that he was on his feet, he almost couldn't help feeling like he really didn't have anything else to lose at this point, anyway, did he? He staggered forward with her support now gone and, numbly, began to follow her out the door.
But the alerts had been sounded, and not only did they have magitek troopers to worry about, but the daemons had been released as well. Still, they made their way quickly to the hangar of the facility. They didn't have much of a choice; with their presence and intention to escape now well known throughout the base, the gates were beginning to close. They didn't have much time, but between the two of them, they were able to fight their way down to the hangar, where a series of snowmobiles awaited, easy enough to be rigged up and swept out.
As they approached, though, Aranea reached for Prompto's shoulder, turning him roughly toward her and shoving a map into his chest.
"Head there," she directed. "I'll catch up later."
With a shaking, confused, indecisive breath, Prompto watched as she turned to stride back into the fray, and then, frantic, he called out, "But what about you?"
Aranea didn't turn back, though, pulling out her lance and already crouching for an attack. "I said I'll catch up!"
"But what if you--" Prompto began to protest.
"Just go!"
Prompto stared back at her, then stared down at the map in his hand. Tried to remember how to breath and then, with a few backwards steps and a new resolve, turned toward the snowmobile to hop aboard. A few seconds later, the engine was revved and he was ready to gun it, back out into the unknown frozen wilderness of Niflheim.
[[ Part 3 of 4, there's still one more to go after this! NFB, NFI, OOC always appreciated, today is a very big day, and also, Aranea is GOAT. True facts. ]
He breathed out. He could practically feel the sweat from his hands through his gloves on his grip on his gun. He held out his wrist toward the console. It lit up. Beeped. And opened the door.
And Prompto, trying to ignore the way his whole body shook as he tried to hold his gun before him steadily, slowly crept inside.
Immediately, he was greeted with the strange sounds coming from Verstael, the man's back still turned to him, but his shoulders shifting and heaving with his labored breathing. It almost sounded like he was laughing, really, but just didn't have the lung capacity for it, coming out as a desperate, almost manic wheeze.
"What the matter?" he asked, between those odd, strangled breath. "Have you never seen a man turn before?"
And turn was exactly what Verstael did in that moment, finally moving to face Prompto, who had been preparing himself to look into a face like his, as he had with the clones inside the tubes outside this chamber, only older, but what he saw, at least on half his face, was much, much different. A deep grimace cut across Verstael's mouth as a deep, ashen black seemed to be crawling up the entire right side of his face. That same strange black marring that had been on some of the clones, the one reminiscent of the miasma that filled the tubes, and Prompto, lowering his gun slightly from the pure shock of it, realized that he was now witnessing a man being taken over by daemonification right now, right there, before his very eyes.
Another harsh wheeze dragged out of Verstael as the cold, dead, vacant eye on the right side of his face pieced into Prompto, the skin around it beginning to fester and peel away. "If those Lucians hadn't intervened," he gasped out, lifting his left hand to clutch at the right side of his chest, "you could have turned, too! You were cloned from this genius' genes!" His laughing now came out in pained but almost ecstatic hisses through his clenched teeth and his head rolled back. "Born of my own flesh and blood!
"You," he continued, spreading both his hands out wide as if to indicate the whole facility, as dark purple lines shot through the infected side of his face; that lifeless eyes skewed wildly in its socket, while his other eye, that same bright, bright blue of Prompto's own, stared firmly at him, "are but one of millions created to serve our great Empire in the magitek infantry! And now...now you've finally come home to Niflheim."
Verstael lowered his arms, but then lifted one again, shaking and shuddering under the daemon miasma coursing through him, and he reached out for Prompto.
"My son."
Prompto tried to fire right then and there, but found that he couldn't, not while aiming at Verstael, and, in desperation for something, he fired off a shot into the ceiling. "Shut up!" he shouted. Breath shaking, he lowered his head, lowered his gun, trying to shake off the words crawling through his as effectively as if Verstael had in fact infected him with the miasma. He had to fight through it, fight through all the doubt and pain writhing through him. "You're…you're wrong! I'm a Lucian!"
He gulped in some air, lifting his eyes with gasp of it, the tears streaming down his face. Once that first one raced down his cheek, there were more to follow, falling unbidden and unrelenting. "I am not," he declared desperately, "one of your experiments!"
"Not anymore," Verstael growled in agreement, grimacing with each stop he took forward toward Prompto, words coming about between gasping wheezes. "Now, you're nothing but a failure. I ought to return you whence you came."
The cracks along the side of Verstael's face began to split and ooze with a black liquid. Prompto didn't even need to look at the man to know it; he could hear it, even over the sound of the pumping machines. "Perhaps then you might serve some useful purpose."
The oozing split of Verstael's face was even more gruesome that Prompto imagined as he threw his eyes up and found the man lunging for him. "Never!" he vowed, lifting his gun between them.
But his hands were shaking. His entire arm was shaking. His finger seemed frozen in place, unable to pull the trigger as Verstael leaned back with a mighty laugh, the cracks on his face, the black daemon miasma starting to glow and burn brightly with the infection. He jerked back again, his body shifting unnaturally with the cracking of bones, the splintering of muscles, and when he spoke, the shining, glowing black sludge pooled from his mouth.
"With your help," Verstael said, his voice gaining an odd quality to it, supernaturally doubling in on itself, a resonate echo of multitudes, "my ascension to divinity is now all but complete!"
Terrified at the transformation taking place before his eyes and by his own ability to act, Prompto took only a step backwards before he felt completely pulled into Verstael's thrawl. "Soon," he continued, "neither the Kings of Lucis nor the gods themselves," his hand clasped onto Prompto's shoulder, exuding black smoke, and sending an immediate surge of heat through even their thick clothing, "will be able to challenge my reign."
With Prompto now in his grasp, Verstael reached his other hand for his cheek, a gesture that, under any other circumstances, might be construed as a gentle embrace. But the miasma was quickly racing along Verstael's arm, down those reaching fingertips, and Prompto knew, he just knew, that if this man touched his flesh with that infected hand, he and Verstael would have more in common than their genes.
With a strangled, gasping, desperate scream, Prompto forced his body to act. He lifted his gun in between the small distance between him and the man who created him, and he pulled the trigger.
Smoke, miasma, that viscous black ooze, all splattered and shattered on the impact as Verstael, still somehow managing to gasp for breath, staggered back. He hit the ground with one last rattling sigh, and then Prompto, still trembling, still holding the gun as if he couldn't believe he'd just shot a man…not just any man…his father, his creator...point blank, right in the face, took a staggering step forward toward the smoking wreckage of the corpse that was Verstael Besithia.
The man who gave him life and would have just as easily taken it, as well. And had almost succeeded, after all these years.
The gun dropped from Prompto's hand.
His knees were soon to follow, as he curled into himself while the sobs began to pour out of him. But there wasn't many of them. After all of that, there wasn't much left inside of him at all. He felt as if he'd been entirely drained of everything, and felt only cold emptiness left.
And then there was a voice from the intercom.
"Oh!" Even the distance couldn't diminish the theatrical mocking shock dancing in Ardyn's voice. "Look what you've done! You've gone homicidal!
"No," he corrected, with a particularly cruel delight. "Patricidal! You lose all your friends and murder your family! And now you've no one left!"
Ardyn's rich, deep laughter started to fill the chamber, and Prompto, who thought that there was finally nothing left inside of him, was wrong. There was something there. Desperate rage.
"Shut up," he said, and slowly, it started to build, and build and build until he was shouting it to cover up the laughter, as he threw himself forward, pounding his fists into the floor. "Shut up! Shut up! SHUT UP!"
But his energy was drained, and the he slumped over from the effort, while the laugher died away and the emptiness returned just as quickly as it had departed.
Because he was right. Ardyn was right. There was no one left, and all he could do was curl up and sob.
"Vital functions," the pleasantly mechanical voice over the intercom sang out, "decreasing. Plasmodium activity index increasing."
Prompto lifted his head as the machine before him began to start and whirl with increasing power. The smoke that had been fading from Verstael's body began to billow out more powerfully. He gaped as the voice continued.
"Daemonification complete. Initiating transfer to Unit XDA-1002: Immortalis."
"W-what?" Prompto gasped, staring up at the DNA-like coil of machinery as it turned slowly, slowly, and the lights of the room began to dim, illuminated now by a faint red glow. A soft siren started as the tubes in front of him filled with red, and something….something organic, not mechanical, seemed to be creeping into motion. The sirens began to wail, reaching a fever pitch, as the entire chamber began to shake.
Something suddenly burst through the ceiling, something large and monstrous, resembling the sketches Prompto had seen on a few of the papers scattered throughout the facility. But the creature, the monster, the daemon, after hitting the ground, did not get up, and Prompto realized that someone had crashed it through the ceiling as if with a mighty blow. An act that was all but confirmed as the figure on top of the creature slowly stood up and yanked out her lance.
For a brief moment, Prompto stared up at Aranea Highwind, and Aranea Highwind stared back.
She then jumped down from the monster. "You always play hard to get like this?" she asked.
"Ar…Aranea," Prompto started, and he tried to push himself up, couldn't find the energy, but she cut him off, anyway.
"Save it, Blondie," she said. "On your feet!"
She wasted no time in striding over to a desk, where papers and plans and blueprints were spread. "So this is that new model they're working on," she muttered as she leaned over them and then spared a glance over to Prompto, still there on the floor, paralyzed by his disbelief, his shock, just….everything.
"I don't know what's got you so shook," she said, her attention now diverted his way, "but you can deal with it later. Let's move."
When he still couldn't respond, she reached down to grab him by the lapel of his jacket, dragging him up so that she could get right in his face. "I'm only gonna say this once," she said, leaning in until there was barely an inch between them. The dramatic pause she put in there was longer than that space, and then she yanked him until he had no choice but to follow her to his feet.
"Lose your will to live," Aranea informed him, "and you lose all hope of me helping your sorry ass. Got it?"
She narrowed her eyes fiercely at him, and Prompto could only look back in bewilderment, in confusion. Why would she bother in the first place? Didn't she know…how pointless it was? How useless? But when she let him go, she did so gently, and, now that he was on his feet, he almost couldn't help feeling like he really didn't have anything else to lose at this point, anyway, did he? He staggered forward with her support now gone and, numbly, began to follow her out the door.
But the alerts had been sounded, and not only did they have magitek troopers to worry about, but the daemons had been released as well. Still, they made their way quickly to the hangar of the facility. They didn't have much of a choice; with their presence and intention to escape now well known throughout the base, the gates were beginning to close. They didn't have much time, but between the two of them, they were able to fight their way down to the hangar, where a series of snowmobiles awaited, easy enough to be rigged up and swept out.
As they approached, though, Aranea reached for Prompto's shoulder, turning him roughly toward her and shoving a map into his chest.
"Head there," she directed. "I'll catch up later."
With a shaking, confused, indecisive breath, Prompto watched as she turned to stride back into the fray, and then, frantic, he called out, "But what about you?"
Aranea didn't turn back, though, pulling out her lance and already crouching for an attack. "I said I'll catch up!"
"But what if you--" Prompto began to protest.
"Just go!"
Prompto stared back at her, then stared down at the map in his hand. Tried to remember how to breath and then, with a few backwards steps and a new resolve, turned toward the snowmobile to hop aboard. A few seconds later, the engine was revved and he was ready to gun it, back out into the unknown frozen wilderness of Niflheim.
[[ Part 3 of 4, there's still one more to go after this! NFB, NFI, OOC always appreciated, today is a very big day, and also, Aranea is GOAT. True facts. ]