Animosity : Chapter 2 : Lost & Found
Previous Chapter: Home is Where the Heartbreak Is
Lost Hope
It started as a small smoldering ember in a sea of black; a tiny dot of bright orange-red. The world was silent and cold. The ember’s warmth was enticing, but Neza approached apprehensively. As he got closer, the warmth grew stronger and the dot expanded. Slowly, he began to see shapes moving within the dot.
In the blink of an eye, the dot exploded and expanded so rapidly that it consumed him. He became surrounded by the hot blaze. His pupils narrowed rapidly as his eyes burned and vision blurred. He held up an arm in front of them to dull the smoke, heat, and brightness that struck them so callously.
When Neza was able to peek above his arm again, he saw his village aflame. He heard a little girl scream from the direction of his family’s house and quickly turned to look…
and woke up.
Consciousness disappointed him. Neza would have been content to never experience it again. His fur was soaked with sweat, despite the room’s frigid temperature. He shivered as he noticed his breath was briefly visible with each exhalation.
Neza sat up and wrapped his arms around his body to gather some warmth. His eyes darted about, taking in his surroundings. The walls and floor were smooth tiles that appeared to have once been white. Several meters above the floor he sat on, a cracked pale green ceiling connected to the tile walls. There was a basin in the corner, covered in dark streaks as if it had washed a thousand soot-covered hands. In the opposite corner, a large circular hole in the floor.
The air reeked of fumes and fecal matter. Neza was getting accustomed to alien stench, but the more intense ones often blocked his ability to smell anything else. Through a giant metal door he could hear muffled shrieks. The floor rumbled slightly and constantly with a low-pitch hum.
Neza growled as his head pounded. He was weary of waking up in increasingly dreary settings with no inkling of how he arrived. Each time he strained to recall his lost memories, sharp pains would ring through his skull. Morbid curiosity was his only drive to continue, but progress was slow.
He looked down at his hands to see a crude attempt at applying a splint and bandages to broken fingers on his left hand. They ached, but not too badly as long as they held still. The scrapes and cuts that covered him had scabbed over, but weren’t fully healed yet.
“So it’s been about a day or two” he quietly guessed to himself.
It surprised him how few injuries he sustained, considering how much blood he left clotting in the dirt on that mountain. As he continued his inspection, he saw that baggy dark tan pants covered his legs and his tasset was gone.
He braced his healthy right hand on the floor to stand up and felt cloth underneath him. He picked it up as he stood and found it was a relatively clean red shirt with symbols he couldn’t read on it. It fit well when he slipped it on, confirming that someone brought him here and took care of him.
Already suspicious of such a person, Neza had no intention of sticking around to meet them. The two motivations for taking care of Neza’s injuries both sickened him. He didn’t consider himself deserving of kindness or charity from anyone, and he was even less interested in being used by someone posing as a friend. Neza needed to escape, yet again, and work things out for himself until he could find meaning in all of this.
His new clothing covered most of his conspicuous features, but he wondered how obvious his large metal feet were. If he was going to get out of this place, he preferred to be silent and unseen. He had no idea what was behind that door, but he was fairly certain anyone who saw a Felni with metal legs wasn’t going to shrug it off. He would have to be careful not to draw attention to his feet.
As Neza walked toward the door he caught a glimpse of his reflection in the mirror above the sink. He stopped and pivoted his body toward it without blinking. Transfixed, he walked toward it as he saw his face for the first time since he was a cub. He recognized his eyes, but his face looked more like his mother’s than the one he remembered as himself. His heart fluttered for a moment at the thought of being held in her arms again. He was an adult, but he lacked a mane like his father’s; only a small patch of splotchy dark fur on his neck. He had a strange-looking metal ring piercing his left ear. He couldn’t tell how old he was exactly, but he now realized the gap between his childhood memories and recent ones was wider than he expected.
Neza clenched his jaw and stood up straight, trying to look like his father in the mirror His father was a proud, hard-working Felni that taught him to stand up for himself. His broken and defeated appearance was a perfectly clear window into his soul. Neza straightened his spine and puffed out his chest, determined to do his father justice. He turned the faucet on to wet his hands and tried to pull the thin dark hairs on the back of his neck up, but they were a pathetic excuse for a mane.
“Disgraceful…”
The metal door slammed open behind him, and Neza leapt across the room and twisted to face it in a panic. The largest Rhin he had ever seen ducked his head down so his horns wouldn’t hit the top of the door frame as he entered. His tiny ears twitched.
“If you’re done styling your fur, you should probably get out of here.”
The smirking Rhin was easily 2 meters taller than Neza and likely more than ten times his weight, but he still seemed to regard Neza as a threat. He kept his hands visible as he backed away from the door to let Neza pass.
Neza hesitated for a moment as he sized up the behemoth. The Rhin was wearing a red shirt and baggy tan-colored pants just like the ones Neza now wore. His thick, grey, wrinkled skin was clouded with black soot. Behind his immense horns, his small eyes were pink and weary. Neza silently wondered if this is who brought him here from the cliff side.
“Suit yourself” the Rhin said as he began untying his trousers and approached the hole in the floor.
Neza used that moment to slink past the Rhin and through the door. Just outside, he was briefly distracted by a sledgehammer taller than him resting heavily against the wall. A moment later, his metal hips clanged against a railing just outside the door, and his upper body took a moment to catch its balance again after nearly falling over it.
He twisted himself around to look beyond the railing and felt relieved to only see the 10 meter drop into a smelly bubbling liquid, as opposed to experiencing the drop firsthand. His eyes watered slightly as he accidentally inhaled the stench too broadly. Breathing through his mouth, he dwelled in his frustration at being unable to use one of his senses in these strange places he kept finding himself.
To his right, he observed a wide catwalk that encompassed most of the enormous room filled with loud machines and a dozen or so red-shirted Rhin. They continuously lifted barrels almost as big as themselves and dumped their contents into openings in the machines, over and over again. Their bodies looked worn out, but determined to continue their repetitive tasks.
Roughly 100 meters away, Neza spotted a staircase down to the ground level and near a large opening where natural light entered the room. He tried to walk casually toward it as he continued to take in his surroundings.
As he neared the staircase, Neza could see the opposite side of the line of machines as they extruded solid black cubes about a meter on each side. More Rhin outside the door seemed to strain lifting and loading them into vehicles.
Neza’s feet made metallic sounds against the staircase as he descended, but it seemed to blend in with the noise of the machinery. He accidentally made eye contact with one of the Rhin, and froze for a split second at the thought of being recognized as someone who didn’t belong there. Instead, the Rhin nodded and continued his work. The Rhin working down here weren’t quite as large as the one he saw earlier.
The foot of the stairs were only a few meters away from the open bay door. He paused for a moment to let a large wheeled vehicle drive by, before stepping out into the mid-day sunlight.
“Hey! Where are you going?” he heard someone shout behind him just as he passed through the door and turned the corner. Neza sped up his walking and pretended not to hear it. He turned a corner into an unoccupied alley between the building he just left and another that looked almost identical.
Neza panicked. He couldn’t be caught again. He needed to escape and get as far away from here as he possibly could. When he heard footsteps coming toward him around the corner, he quieted his breathing and stood very still.
When the Felni turned the corner, Neza lunged at her and the world went black.
Lost Control
After a short time, Neza had learned to surrender control of his balance to his new legs. They seemed to move with even less effort than his natural ones once did. They reacted to their environment faster than he could even recognize what was happening, like they had a mind of their own.
Now he wondered what else he had surrendered to.
An anonymous Felni lied dead inside the dumpster Neza sat leaned against. Her blood stained Neza’s teeth, nails, and fur. He could taste what he did, but his mind struggled to process it.
That Felni — one of his own — didn’t do anything except ask him a question, but Neza’s fangs found her throat without hesitation. At the time the world was nothing but blurs and echoes, but he could remember every millisecond of it now as it played in slow motion from his memory. The first person viewpoint did nothing to stop him from dissociating from the actions, as if he were merely a spectator.
He watched the sequence repeat in his mind. Each time, the Felni fell to the ground clutching her open throat and pouring her blood into the cracked dry dirt. Her eyes widened with terror as Neza’s foot rose above her and slammed down into her chest, flattening her and silencing her choking gasps. Neza disposed of her crushed body before collapsing into his current frozen position.
“Now I’m ruining other people’s lives too…”
Somewhere, a Felni family would be worried sick when she didn’t come home that night. What if she was the one that brought him in and bandaged his wounds? While he was still consciously aware of how reprehensible his actions were, the emotions were only ghosts in his mind. He didn’t feel anything.
This loss of control wasn’t mechanical, however. He killed that Felni like it was a calculated response to a situation he had previously prepared for.
After spending several minutes trying to gather the will, Neza finally pulled himself up and used the shadows of the alley to do some reconnaissance.
He realized he was in the center of the town he observed from the cliff. The black building he saw from afar was actually several large black buildings in close proximity. Two of them sandwiched the murder scene behind him. A tall fence stood between him and the smaller white buildings, so his best option seemed to be exiting the opposite direction, into what remained of his childhood village.
Using his shirt, he wiped as much blood from his hands and mouth as he could and walked through the shadows toward the slum. Uncertain of what he was looking for, he both dreaded and hoped to see familiar faces.
The sun was beginning to set when he arrived, but it appeared darker than usual to Neza. His eyes had become familiar with the bright artificial lighting of the black buildings and their surrounding areas. The elongated shadows were much less defined here. He could barely see the huts and shacks that he passed only a few meters earlier.
As he had come to expect, much was different from what he remembered. He only remembered seeing one Rhin in his life before today, but now he saw dozens of homes with high roofs and wide doorways to accommodate their stature. They roamed his childhood village now, most wearing the same red shirts as him.
As a kitten, Neza was taught that Rhin were known for their size, strength, and dedication to their crafts. They integrated well into hierarchical teams, seemed to have little ambition, took pride in their work, and never asked for more than what they needed. Their lives seemed very hard from the Felni point of view, but it seemed that the Rhin liked things that way.
When Neza was young, Rhin could only be found in areas where the jungle didn’t creep. Their homes were in wide open prairies without too steep of a grade. Rumors stated that even there, their numbers were dwindling. The only Rhin he had ever met before was a merchant that came to town selling custom tools and weapons built for Felni hunters. He was friendly, but didn’t reveal much information about himself. He left with a large cart of food and skins without saying goodbye.
Neza’s anxiety grew with each step he took through the village square. If he walked right past his own family’s house, he certainly didn’t recognize it. He began to wish he hadn’t come, and started for the tree line at the edge of town. He found an uninhabited area just inside the jungle’s reach and sat up against a thriving tree with deep green leaves.
As he sat, the small plants around him receded away from him. Even the trunk of the tree he leaned against felt like it winced at his touch. The solid bark yielded a few centimeters to him, and made his position more comfortable.
The sun retreated beyond the canopy. Unknown to him, his withdrawals were finally coming to an end. As long as he wasn’t straining his mind, the pain seemed to fade. Though he could still smell the stench of the black buildings nearby, he could make out a few hints of familiar smells that brought him comfort.
He found himself distraught. Not only about killing the Felni, but also because he caught himself forgetting he’d done it multiple times already. Neza always thought he’d feel some natural guilt if he ever killed someone, but that minimal drop of justice never came.
He allowed the thought to fade, fearing the headaches returning. Less than a minute later, he began the first peaceful sleep of his new life.
Found Purpose
“Hey Kutzi! Check this out!” a child’s voice called out in the distance.
Neza could see vague red-orange light through his eyelids for a moment. He held them shut until he felt small paws tug at his ear.
“Hey fel, why do you have human letters on your earring?” the Felni cub asked Neza.
Neza pulled his head away lazily, “What?” he asked vacantly, rubbing his eyes with his right thumb and index finger.
“You know, the weird marks on your earring. They look like Human.”
“What is human?” Neza asked without thinking about it.
The children laughed, “Did you hit your head or something, fel?”
“Yea. Something like that,” Neza muttered, just noticing one of the cubs was running her paws over his foot. The cubs were as curious as he was at their age. She didn’t seem to notice the dried blood splotches.
“My dad works at the human factory too.” the one called Kutzi said. “Do you know him?” he pointed at Neza’s shirt.
“Mine too!” the girl interrupted, apparently bored with Neza’s foot now. Before Neza could answer, she asked him “Why did you make the tree sad?”, staring over his shoulder and absently scratching her belly.
Neza sat up and turned his head to see the tree he was leaning on had curled backwards away from him and the leaves in the canopy faced up several meters away from where it was the night before. Neza couldn’t explain it. He just stared blankly at the misshapen tree the same way the cubs had when they first ran over to check it out. He began to mull over the word he had just heard.
“Human…”
Suddenly Neza’s eyes widened. Roused from his post-slumber haze, he could remember humans now. They were the things in the laboratory that he ran away from.
“Laboratory…”
The words stirred something inside him. Memories cascaded back too fast for Neza to take stock of them all.
One particular event was vivid, however. He saw himself running through the jungle with a small team of humans running after him. They weren’t pursuing him; they were keeping pace and watching their surroundings. Some of them carried small machines with them and others carried weapons like the ones they fired at him in the lab.
Neza stopped and sniffed the air. He knelt and placed the long spear-like weapon he was carrying on the ground. The vines and undergrowth retreated around him. He could feel his adrenaline rise as he caught the scent of his target.
The humans caught up to him and watched him carefully from a few meters away. Neza lifted his spear, rose back to his feet, and silently nodded in the direction of the scent.
His legs were metal in this memory, but they weren’t the same color as they were presently. They were dark gray and black with hard angular edges and exposed colored strings connecting the pieces. He couldn’t tell how long ago this was, but he could vaguely recognize the part of the jungle they were in.
Soon the group came upon the trunk of a pale white tree with thin, bright red veins running up its sides from the roots. The base of it was narrower than Neza’s bicep, so despite its unique coloring it didn’t stand out much in the dense and remote parts of the jungle where these plants grew. The humans would grind the roots into a paste and turn it into an intoxicating and delicious spice they called Ranico.
One of the humans was Commander Regan. He was short, even for a human, with brown-orange flesh and dark fur. For this mission he carried a large rifle, but he normally worked with smaller weapons like knives and handguns. Neza’s team was never supposed to go this deep into the jungle, but Regan planned this as a special secret mission.
Regan’s family back where he came from owned a large food company. He believed that Ranico was going to be his defining discovery; that it would elevate his legacy in his family business higher than any other Regan had in generations. While his current employer enlisted him only to test and train Native Operatives like Neza, he liked to design his mission objectives creatively and productively.
In this memory, Neza could feel himself as a completely different person. He moved as if his legs were always built that way. There were no pangs of intense pain vibrating through his skull. All he could remember feeling here was joy. He felt powerful when the jungle itself fled from him. He felt needed and useful to the humans. His confusion and desperation to escape were nowhere in this memory.
“Yet another successful hunt” Neza heard himself say to Regan with a smile.
Regan reached up and patted him on the shoulder, “Indeed. We’ll have to celebrate tonight.”
Neza’s mouth watered thinking of the special meals that Regan would get him for the nights after successful hunts. The man knew how to cook, and his division ate better than any other. Neza heard that other commanders never ate with their N.O., so he felt lucky to be assigned to this one.
“Ow!” he growled as one of the cubs yanked on the ring in his ear.
The cub giggled as she ran away behind a nearby tree stump. The other two seemed to lose interest in Neza when his mind wandered and were already heading back toward the town square. They called out to the little one, and she ran to catch up with the melodramatic anxiety of youth.
Neza fidgeted with his earring for a moment, wishing he’d tried to read it when he had a mirror. His thoughts returned to his new memories. “Did I volunteer for this?”
He glanced at the bandages on that hand, and realized it didn’t hurt anymore. Flexing the muscles in his fingers didn’t cause any pain, so he removed the coverings. He slowly tightened his fingers into a fist and they seemed to be flexible again. They hurt slightly if he stretched them back, but the splint no longer seemed necessary.
His thoughts returned to the banquet that occurred the night after that hunt. As warm as it made him feel, he couldn’t help but remember how atypical it was. Normally, his tests didn’t take place outside. They usually prodded and medicated him in the lab. He remembered them locking him in his tiny cell every night and shutting off all the lights on their way out. He remembered feeling cold as he licked his wounds and wept in loneliness.
In some of these memories he was a cub, not older than the ones that just walked away from him. The pictures were blurry from his earliest days there, but he could remember the feelings vividly.
Neza looked down at his feet for a moment and another set of images blinked into his mind for a moment. Humans were injecting something into his legs each day.
He felt fire flow through his veins. The needles left bruises wherever they punctured him, which was nearly everywhere. He heard his own voice crying out, but the words faltered with the quivering of his lips as he spoke.
He went through this every day, until his toes turned black. Over the next week, the black spread upwards over his feet, shins, and then his thighs. His fur fell out everywhere it reached, and the muscle withered away underneath. The humans panicked and tried multiple ways to stop it, but failed. Eventually, they amputated both of his legs and replace them.
In a different setting, he saw humans in black uniforms forcing him to lift heavy machinery over his head repeatedly. If he hesitated, they would electrocute him with long metal sticks that crackled loudly. Each lift was heavier than the last and they only stopped when he collapsed from exhaustion. When he wasn’t tortured, humans crammed him into a tiny cold cell with no light beyond the tiny slit in the door. They were purposely pushing every limit he had.
Neza roared so loudly that he surprised himself. When he looked into the village, his roar still echoing, no one even flinched. Neza roused from his daydream now, but his hands shook violently. He steadied them against his face. His body chilled, even under the heat of the noon sun. He trembled with the weight of a new-found purpose.
He wasn’t sure why the humans did those things to him, but he knew how he could find out. There was one human Neza knew would tell him, and he had an idea of where to find Commander Regan. It was time for Neza to get back to doing what he was best at.
Next Chapter: Cold, Alone, Alive