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scarletta-ec · 4 years

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Original Sin Story: Re_Crime

CHAPTER FIVE: THE ESCAPE OF THE WITCH SALMHOFER

Scene 1

Meta dreams of running away from orange flames, and an endlessly black, warped figure standing among them, shining, dead eyes. She has to keep running— for she is a fugitive.

Scene 2

Meta is in a bad mood that morning— not just because of the dream, but because she’s being woken early by a pounding at her door and angry shouting. It’s Raisa Netsuma. She ends up busting in the door before Meta can get up.

Raisa has burn scars all over her body including her face, from Eve’s lightning strike earlier. She and her people are refugees from Jakoku, and she leads the White Army in the southwest of Levianta. She is also one of Apocalypse’s top brass. Meta worries deeply about her— she thinks she’s too passionate and too wild in battle for her own good. In person, Raisa spoke little, but in a fight she had earned the title of a fiend. It was Pale’s idea she join, hearing of her prowess, and Meta originally agreed because it added the entire White Army and the Second Regiment to their forces, coming to know her better as they lived together in Merrigod.

Meta is distracted from Raisa's upset ranting by staring at her mouth scars, which are not covered with a mask like they usually are.

Raisa is visibly in pain since a lot of her facial muscles are stiff, and her skin sensitive, but is too upset to stop yelling. She hadn't even waited for Meta to get out of bed, having climbed onto it. Meta thinks her hair looks even whiter against her reddened skin.

Raisa says that their base in the north has fallen.

The security forces have become the Royal Capital Army, and are cracking down on Apocalypse— an organization which seeks to disrupt as much of the world’s order as it can, just because they think that’s how things should be, thinking things like laws and such are foolish. Meta is one such person.

She has tried hard to forget her past. She was an orphan, grew up alone, and hated everything in the world. Her life only gained meaning in her eyes after she turned twenty.

She wandered the streets of Levianta, living off of what she stole from vendors and unlocked homes. Whenever she was caught, she would always manage to charm them and be let off with a warning. She didn’t know it at the time, thinking it was because she was a pitiful child, but this had been a result of her Gilles Inheritor powers, which she had no idea how to use, manifesting without her direct control.

She was sometimes allowed into homes and invited to stay as long as she liked, though she never did stay long. Watching the family dynamic around her somehow only made her even lonelier. So when people came to her with their arms open, she always chose to run.

One day, Meta found herself in the midst of chaos, with lots of bodies and fire and destruction around, but she did not run. Not even when she was surrounded by armed men, and one of them (Pale) approaches her with a knife in one hand and a person by the hair in the other. Recognizing her as a Ghoul Child and fellow HER, he offers her the knife, which she accepts.

With his encouragement, she kills the hostage with the knife.

This was her first murder. And she finally felt at home.

She and Pale have committed a great many crimes together at this point. Gammon is the new head of the senate, and is the reason why the royal capital army is pursuing them so fiercely. They’re having trouble fighting them off— in addition to their skill, neither Meta nor Raisa’s powers or magic can breach their bulky armor. They have to come up with a battle plan for here on out.

Meta zones back in and embraces Raisa in bed. When Raisa stops speaking, she lets go and orders Raisa to go retake the northern base, or at least stymie the soldiers there. She’ll send the rest of the former White Army and half of her Red Devotees to give her aid. Raisa, still teary, points out this’ll leave them short-handed to the west, but Meta says they should leave that to the “baron”, Yegor.

Raisa awkwardly runs off the bed. Meta gets dressed, and then thinks she’ll head over to see Pale, her “darling”.

Scene 3

Meta changes into her favorite clothes, and then goes to Pale’s room. She can hear him talking with a woman in there, and then sees a scantily clad Milky laying on the bedsheets, next to Pale who is under them, when she opens the door. Milky greets her politely, and then leaves to go to her own room. Meta goes inside to see Pale is smoking in bed.

He asks if she’s okay, and she shakes her head at the notion that she has anything against "that girl". No matter who Pale sleeps with or loves, she’ll love him still. And she believes he will always come back to her— her powers don’t work on him, so she is certain that they really do love each other.

She wryly asks if he's okay with Raisa, to which he says it's not his business.

Pale has a unique physiology. He has to absorb magical power from another person periodically, or else he’ll lose his youthfulness. His preferred way of doing this is by sleeping with them, with women, specifically. Meta’s magic is not enough alone to sustain him, great though it is. The other person’s magic replenishes once he's done, though the initial drain exhausts the person being fed on.

Meta notices a black box on the nightstand. It is a music box with a winding key that Pale is taking apart. Apparently he’s not very good at reassembling it, though he's disassembling it for the practice.

Meta tells Pale about their base falling, the two speculating that they might have a traitor in their ranks.

Meta worries about Raisa— she's been rampaging worse than ever before. Meta thinks she may be taking out her anger on everyone, including the Royal Army, as the woman who might have been queen that she was trying to get revenge on (Eve) for her injuries is missing.

Pale asks if Meta is implying Raisa is the traitor, or a liability. Meta flusteredly jumps to her defense, insisting it must be someone else.

Pale decides to head north. His “older brother” told him to lay low, but Seth hasn’t contacted him in a long time— thus, they think he might be dead, in which case, there's no need to hide anymore. He tells Meta to go west, to enlist Yegor’s aid in suppressing the forest of Held.

Meta would like to go with him, but knows he wouldn’t like her to go against his wishes. They kiss and part ways.

Scene 4

Yegor is the baron, as suspected. He is cruel and brutal despite having once been the head of a religious temple, having already crushed the villages living in the forest’s eastern half by the time Meta arrives there. Though curiously enough, despite the buildings being in ruins, she can’t see any corpses around. She figures he must have cleaned up the corpses, wondering why for a moment. The place has a fog rolling over it.

Yegor is the “Black Baron”, his army is called “The Black Army”.

One of Meta’s devotees tells her they found some survivors. He takes her to an area before a trauben field to the west of the village. It’s a green haired woman, covered in blood and crouched down, cradling a half-conscious man with blue hair, surrounded by devotees. She’s crying about her missing children— Cecil and Vell.

Meta thinks she’s stupid, figuring that the woman should be grateful she’s alive, and that she can just make more children, that is, if Meta allows her to live. She’s about to order her men to kill the woman when she realizes her men have collapsed, foaming at the mouth. She realizes that the fog is actually poison.

Meta is almost as bewildered to find both she and the woman seem unaffected, noting she can't tell with the man in her arms as he was already out of it.

Meta hears Raisa's hoarse shrieking as the fog grows too thick to see anything. The couple seems to have vanished.

Meta is confused because Raisa shouldn't be here, meanwhile Raisa can only scream about "treason".

Raisa's words are slurring, indicating she may not be immune, protected from complete incapacitation only by her mask to cover her scars.

By the light of the moon, Meta sees figures approaching her from the fog, all wearing masks. They clasp one of her wrists in chains.

The meaningless shrieking crescendos as a sudden impact around her waist brings Meta to ground as a bright red flash explodes, and everything turns black.

Scene 5

Meta is in a dark, inhumane, cold jail cell. She tells the girl in front of the window that she wants a jacket or hot food or something, but no dice. It’s not mealtime yet and they have nothing else for her to put on. There are no men in this jail, so she can’t use her powers to escape.

Upon being asked, the girl introduces herself as Elluka Chirclatia (Zellana’s younger sister). She is a young looking teen. Meta threatens her, expecting her to cry, but Elluka calmly states that she’s more powerful than Meta is, and, in fact, now that her sister is gone, Elluka is the strongest person there.

She reveals Meta is not in an actual prison— she is in Lighwatch temple. Elluka is a virgin priestess there. This is a very special jail cell in the temple designed for someone of Meta’s magical talents. The walls and the ceiling are covered in anti-magic runes— meant to weaken and negate magical power or spells.

They hear footsteps, and Elluka declares it must be the head of the temple— in other words, Yegor Asayev, who has long black hair and thin, black facial hair. Meta accuses him of being the traitor— he claims that Apocalypse merely disappointed him. He abandoned his post believing them to be patriotic warriors, but defected when he realized they were just thugs. Meta accuses him of merely wanting to satisfy his cruel urges. Yegor doesn’t deny or confirm this— merely saying that unlike them, he wants to live a long life.

He tells her (and Yegor really does give the impression that he might enjoy making people suffer) that Pale has been captured, and is in Welvya prison. Raisa wasn't captured— but she was killed immediately after her attempt to protect Meta. That means that Apocalypse has essentially been beheaded.

Yegor isn't sure how Raisa managed to catch wind of his betrayal soon enough to arrive there at that time, and wonders if he may have a traitor of his own.

Yegor mocks Meta and Raisa a little more and tells her to wait for her execution like an adult. He claims to have been divinely pardoned for his crimes— Meta thinks it’s a mix of his family connections and his reward for selling out Apocalypse. He leaves.

Meta is nearly in tears, of both grief and rage. She's shaking in her seat, which rattles the chains.

Meanwhile poor Elluka has been watching this whole thing from the sidelines. She notes that while Meta is a bad person, so too is Yegor. Meta advises Elluka to leave this place as soon as she is able to. Elluka says she’ll think on it, and then leaves the room.

Scene 6

Meta is moved to a new room, similar to the old one except that there is a smooth white chair in the middle. The legs are affixed to the floor, and it has several leather straps on it. Meta figures this is the execution chair.

The executioner (who has his face covered) tells her to sit down, and she does. She tries to think of a way out of this, but the executioner tells her that her Gilles power won’t work on him— she quickly recognizes his voice as sounding like Pale. And when he takes off the cloth covering his face, she quickly realizes that it’s Seth (he was thinking of messing with her by pretending to be Pale, but decided not to at the last second).

Seth remarks that they haven’t seen each other since she tried to kill him at Merrigod (which he thinks Pale ordered her to do, though she denies it). Not that he holds any ill will for that. Pale has apparently been growing more and more rebellious towards Seth. He insists that he is not their enemy, even if he isn’t really on their side.

He says that he came here to help her. His plan is to have her “killed” to get her out of the capital— Gammon decided that all criminal corpses are to be taken to an installation outside of the city. Meta jokes that he’ll revive her as a zombie, to which Seth nods— seemingly to freak her out, as when she objects he goes into his real plan.

It skips their discussion of that. Seth reminds her that the condition for him saving her is that she participate in his experiments at his research facility, and hands her a glass bottle. There is a map to the facility rolled inside.

He starts affixing the straps to her arms, legs, stomach, and head. She asks if this’ll hurt— Seth says he wouldn’t know, as he’s never been executed before.

He throws the switch. She’s electrocuted, and then falls unconscious.

Scene 7

After the execution, Meta’s body is taken inside a casket to the installation as planned. Right after it leaves the temple, Yegor and the priestesses all say a prayer for her. A tearful Elluka is the only one who notices Yegor smiling a little as he makes his prayer.

Meta awakes in the coffin in the installation. She gets the lid open and climbs out, amazed that she’s alive. Seth regulated the electricity so that it would only temporarily disrupt her heart. She takes out the map, though of course has no intention of keeping her promise. She’s about to tear up the map when she sees a message in there from Seth.

He has Pale. And if she doesn’t show up, he’ll kill him. She runs across the cold stone to the institute.

Scene 8

Ever since Gammon’s coup, the twelve capitals have been in an uneasy governmental state. The 12 senators are supposed to be the heads of each family that governs the 12 cities— but Gammon has shuffled them all out, including his father. Fearing too much backlash, Gammon selected sons of the same families instead of getting new family lines altogether. Making the new senate SIGNIFICANTLY younger, in their twenties.

Gammon also made public the matter of Gavriil brainwashing the queen, promising to bring the senate back to something that serves the queen rather than using her. The prophecy of destruction also becomes common knowledge, and to help ease the unrest, Gammon appoints Seth in charge of a new Project Ma.

Seth is explaining this to Meta in the royal research institute. He has since hired on a great deal more researchers, though they are actually political informants, there to make sure she doesn’t run away. This is several months in— she’s already pregnant, and showing.

Meta asks if she’ll be made queen, but Seth says not this time (though she will get a higher status and various rewards). Apparently he had to do it this way because otherwise the Senate wouldn’t have given him permission to have her birth the Twins of God. They talk a bit about the politics of this a little. As a note, Seth marks the time of destruction as being “ten-odd” years away, so probably no more than a year has passed since Adam and Eve disappeared.

Seth says that Gammon isn’t like the other politicians, though— he faced the queen and came into contact with the “truth” though Seth doesn’t know what that was exactly, and as such he is legitimately desperate to avert the country’s destruction. This is part of why he accepted a criminal as the potential mother.

Since becoming pregnant Meta has been living hidden away in the institute. They don’t want the public to know that she’s the mother. She considers her situation a little, like that they might just kill her when they don’t need her anymore. She can reasonably assess that the government isn’t a monolith— Seth, whether ordered by Gammon or acting on his own, wouldn’t have had to go to such measures to break her out of jail if Yegor was in on the plan. So while Seth may promise to keep her safe, there’s no guarantee the others will. She also just doesn’t trust him.

She asks (as she has many times without being told yes) if she can see Pale. Today, Seth agrees. He explains that Pale had not been able to sustain himself without taking magic from people, and as such he wasn’t likely to live much longer— so he had him swap into a more sustainable body. He calls someone into the room, a boy. This is Pale.

Meta is really confused, so Pale explains. He is a Ghoul Child— an artificially created being, comparing it to Meta’s children, saying that they are different only in that his mother was a glass vessel instead of a human being. Meta has to agree with that, she was not impregnated by sex but by a procedure, after all. Ghoul Children were the fruits of Seth’s research on the Next Queen Project as Horus.

Pale notes that he started having the issue with needing magic once he became an adult, though he’s better off than the other Ghoul Child made alongside him, who was little more than an empty shell. They ended up transferring his soul from his degrading body into the empty shell to save him. However, it took some time, which is why Seth couldn’t have them meet until now.

Pale knew this from the beginning, and it is why he ordered Meta to try to kill Seth— he wanted to become the “true” one by killing the original. Meta is moved by sympathy for Pale and goes to hug him. Pale asks Seth if they can be alone for a little bit, and Seth agrees because he’s not a monster, come on.

After hugging a little while, Pale tells her they should escape together— he can live as he is now, so there’s no need for Seth to keep him alive. They can’t flee while Meta is pregnant, so he figures he’ll do something after the babies are born. He wants to restart Apocalypse with her, and Milky if they can afford to find her.

He’s living at Seth’s house right now, under the guise of being his nephew. Figuring the conversation is over, Seth enters to fetch Pale, taking him away. Meta sees Pale as nothing more than arms and legs connected to Seth’s fingers by thin strings.

Scene 9

Several months pass, and the babies are born. They are immediately put into a life support system. The “baby room” is in the institute, with the twins inside two large glass tubes, that run from halfway up the tower to the ground floor, full of fluid. Gammon is looking at them with Seth.

Like normal premature babies, Meta's babies weren’t able to breath well after being born, but they’ve recovered now, the tubes are a precaution. Gammon wants to have them taken to Alicegrad soon, so they can be made into the receptacles for Levia and Behemo’s souls.

Gammon explains that Alice herself will do this using the “Swap Technique”. He claims she is the only person in Levianta who knows how to do it, and that supposedly all of the queens through Levianta’s history have had this power. Their ability to receive revelations is, according to him, a result of temporarily allowing the gods’ spirits into their bodies.

Seth doesn’t let on that he already knows all about it, because he can do something similar.

Gammon has been wearing his hair differently, setting his ponytail low instead of high. He's been smiling more often, too.

Seth also thinks that this is all quite unlike Gammon, being much more knowledgeable than he would have thought. He thinks maybe someone has swapped their soul into his body. Whether Gammon is still in there or not is something Seth can't tell.

The day after next, Hansel and Gretel’s birth is told to the public, and the new Evillious calendar is made to mark their birth date.

Scene 10

Four days later, at night, Meta is looking at the babies and thinking to herself how cute they are, despite the fact that she never had an interest in kids before now. She’s not happy though that they aren’t her and Pale’s kids, she can’t even hold them, and that they’re going to be taken away to be used as vessels for gods tomorrow.

Looking upon them, it triggers memories of her past. Gretel’s eyes are open, and she is reaching for her mother inside the glass. Meta puts her hand over hers on the glass, and then has a flashback.

Scene 11

It’s her dream from the beginning of the chapter, running from orange flames with a figure in the middle. She has to keep running. When she glances back, she sees Seth Twiright.

Scene 12

Meta's reminiscing is interrupted. She can hear screaming, shouting, and gunshots. Realizing it’s Pale at work, she dives inside the tanks, taking the babies with her as she shatters the tubes. The remnants of Apocalypse are wreaking havoc. Pale calls to her from a window in the hallway, bidding her to leave the building through it.

He objects to her taking the children along, saying they’ll only get in the way, but she refuses to leave them behind. She realizes his current body is too small to run with babies in his arms, so she carries them both herself.

She thinks about her birth, her early childhood, that time she hated so much. Seth declared her a failure, and, fearing being put in refrigeration like her “brother”, escaped from him during the same attack Adam disappeared in. She knows it’s selfish, but she doesn’t want the babies to suffer as she has. She doesn’t want them to be the toys of gods.

Scene 13

Meta and Pale are running through a foggy new moon night. They think that they’re safe— but Pale suddenly trips and falls, starting to lose consciousness. Meta remembers what happened in the forest, and realizes the fog is the same poison as before.

Seth approaches (wearing a full-face mask), wondering why it’s not affecting her babies. He says the fog was a sort of byproduct of producing Venom— it won’t kill anyone, but they’ll be put to sleep for a few days. Seth already knew the fog likely wouldn't affect Meta, but he's certain the babies wouldn't be inheritors like her. He wonders if a god could be interfering.

Pale urges Meta to leave him behind and run south to escape the country— he knows Seth won’t kill him; Seth confirms, saying basically he’s too good at being evil to kill. Meta says she’ll wait for Pale in the forest, and runs off. Seth tries to follow her, but Pale grabs his leg and she gets away.

Seth kicks him to get him to let go. He won’t kill Pale, but he does plan to “reset” him.

Scene 14

Meta is running away, referencing the last part of the song.

Meta’s part ends in her declaring that she’s a fugitive.

#infoedit #ec #evillious chronicles #meta salmhofer #original sin story #story #fanfic #seth twiright #Pale Noel #Raisa Netsuma #yegor asayev #elluka chirclatia

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