One of the Old Clans
25 Mar 2016Terra Sheer
They take me someplace that reeks of machine oil and old bourbon, bind me up in a sleep sack and velcro me to the wall. It's from that vantage that I begin to acquaint myself with my new surroundings -- albeit with a glacial slowness. It takes forever for any sensation to seep through the thick fog in my mind. The ones that do ... I don't much like.There are three slavers, I think. I don't recall their names from the snippets of conversation I pick up ... but then I'm terrible with names, anyhow. A name never suits a face half as well as the face suits the man. So, for now, I call them as I see them.
There's Meatbrick. Must be part gorilla, and clearly the unfortunate victim of a growth hormone disorder. He doesn't fit pretty much anywhere he tries to be, so he moves around a lot, to the detriment of everything around him. Clumsy, but oblivious. Or maybe just oblivious. It's hard to care about plowing through things, I guess, when most things don't stand even half a chance of slowing you down. Meat talks a lot, but doesn't say much. Sometimes he doesn't even bother to say words. He just burbles noises like they mean something.
Maybe they do, and I'm just missing it as I slip in and out of useful consciousness. But, somehow, I'm pretty sure they only mean something to him.
Orbiting Meat is a whip of a guy I'll call Lizard, on account of his tendency to randomly wink and poke his tongue out the left side of his mouth ... like if it were only a little bit longer, he could maybe lick his eye. Lizard doesn't say much, but when he does, he thinks it's clever. He'd probably prefer to stay put, his skinny limbs all folded up around him, but Meat doesn't pay him any more mind than anything else, so he's constantly scrambling to stay out of the way.
Last comes Scar. He comes in and out of the room every hour or so. Always hooks himself into a worktable when he does, puts a big knife down next to him and stares at the wall for a while. The others get quiet when he's around. I think he's their captain. But something about him doesn't make sense to me. He isn't Kumo. Not like the other two, anyway -- not stereotypically. Maybe he's an import. But you've gotta be one mean son-of-a-bitch to burn your way up the ranks of that organization without some good old fashioned clan nepotism behind you.
"Will she live?" he asks once, on one of his fleeting appearances.
"Do I look like a goddamn doctor?" Lizard snits.
Scar is missing his right eye. He probably lost it to whatever put that lurid purple line down that side of his face. But he doesn't wear a patch like your archetypal pirate. He just lets the void stare the world down for him. Scar points that empty socket at Lizard like he can see out of it. Then he just sits there, dead still, letting the emptiness speak for him. Lizard twitches, licks, and scrambles over to me to check my pulse. With him comes the stifling breath of old bourbon.
"Uh ... she's comin' out of it, I think. Not quite froze through."
"She's got privateer blood," Scar muses. "One of the old clans." He gets up to leave again, slipping his knife back in his belt with a practiced flip. "She's worth a pretty price, intact," he says as he goes by, "so you two keep her that way."
Oddly enough ... that doesn't give me much comfort.
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