thejusticelounge | lucena position (2)

Goriam does not enjoy the crying of females. Thokos makes the same complaint when the old Karnan wails for her dead child, but his hatred is based off fanciful ideas of strength and power.

Goriam does not enjoy the crying of females because she remembers the sound of her own cries in the dark.

The egg sac that contained Goriam, as well as her sister Gorius, along with six other females, four males, and 2 asexed, incubated for exactly 39.521 day-units. It was kept at precisely the right temperature for optimum male production, and, like all other Psion egg sacs, was kept cozy in a secure heat-room.

Goriam’s brothers saw the outside world moments after their hatching, when they were whisked away to the shelters of science and learning that would train them to be the scientists so revered, so feared, by the universe. It was a suitable fate for beings born without empathy.

The ones with empathy, however, the females and their siblings, would find themselves trapped in the same reproduction factories for the rest of their lives.

Goriam did not see her direct hatchkin for the rest of her life. She heard rumors that Ioanam had been choked to death and that Koriux was flayed for her insolence, and Goriam had cried long and hard over these rumors in the dark. But it was not the first time she cried, nor the last.

Her egg-batch was tainted, Goriam decided, when she heard the final rumor—that her sister had received a Green Lantern ring and had left the facility—and her people—for good. Goriam was not displeased by this assessment. Better to be tainted than what the males of her kind were. So she began sabotaging her reproductive cycles, ruining her couplings. She listened to the things the guards would say in passing, and she memorized the way they opened, closed, repaired the doors.

And one day, when the men were sleeping, she crept from her cage, the keypad hacked by her own small claws and cut their heads off in their sleep.

It was ruled a medical mystery by the Psions, who captured her and ordered her to be dissected for further study. They speculated she had help, or that the guards had simply not locked her cell correctly. They could not account for the sleeping drugs in all the dead Psions’ systems. Nor the skillful way she had managed to send out a message proclaiming herself a Psion for hire.

But when a black market vessel passing by heard the message—Goriam still remembered the way she had proclaimed herself smarter than the menfolk, smart enough to outwit any of their systems—, they wanted her for themselves.

Goriam did not approve of the way they conducted their business, particularly the way in which she left one sort of slavery and found herself in another, but she did enjoy watching them blast holes through the surgical committee right as they were about to drill her skull open.

It did not matter, in the end, who she was working for, or how she was paid (which, incidentally, was never). All that mattered to Gloriam was that she was out. Men could be killed; cells could be hacked. These threats meant nothing to her anymore.

She was small, and that meant she could take down the largest of fighters. All warriors had weak spots that a long-enough blade could reach, and so Goriam carried many knives. She became very good at killing, and so she was even more valuable a good to the black market traders.

But yet here she was, sold by her last owner to a motley group of Vegans fighting whoever Queen Komand’r demanded. Goriam had no problem with this, but the look in the eyes of their foes became darker and darker, and the ones who expelled black liquid from all their orifices and screamed about truth and secrets were the first she killed. Madness was contagious, after all.

The little one was more disturbed by it. She had tried to reason with one Karnan, holding his head as he expelled a dark gunk all over her legs, but his words were gibberish and his gestures erratic. When he went for the little one’s throat, Goriam stabbed him in his double-heart. The little one had cried over that, and over her own confusion about everything around them, but Goriam didn’t mind. She was young yet, and her tears would soon dry.

«Hello? Can you guys hear me?» Goriam heard the little one say into the communicator the second night, before she was to be again condemned to the sleepless light.

«There’s something going here and I can’t figure it out. It’s like…it’s like the more we fight, the sicker the armies are. The ones that aren’t just….just dead in the eyes are screaming and puking up this awful stuff. We’ve been burning them, we don’t know what else to do, but it’s—»

Goriam waited for the little one to cry again. But she did not.