Chapter 10: Tales of the Underground
“Naomi,” Marshall called from outside the bathroom door. “I’m ready to go.”
“Do we really have to do this?” Naomi asked from within.
“Yeah, we do,” Marshall sighed. “The washing machine’s busted.”
“Can’t you go alone?” Naomi asked.
“No,” said Marshall. “What are the people at the Laundromat going to think when they see me with some girl’s clothes?”
“What if your mother finds out about this?” asked Naomi.
“She won’t,” Marshall replied. “She’s got a double shift today, and she won’t be home for a while.”
After a long pause, the bathroom doorknob slowly turned, and out stepped Naomi dressed in Marshall’s mother’s clothes. The top was sleeveless and the khaki pants were cut off mid-calf. Never in Naomi’s life had she felt so embarrassed about her appearance.
“People won’t stare at me, will they?” she asked nervously.
“I think you’re making too big a deal about this,” Marshall said, forcing a smile. “We’ve seen people dressed like that all over the city.”
“What about a town like this?” Naomi continued to ask.
“There’s no difference,” said Marshall, shaking his head. “Now, let’s go.”
Together they walked to the front hall. Naomi slipped on her shoes as Marshall picked up his laundry-filled backpack. Hoisting the backpack onto his back, Marshall opened the front door and took a step outside.
“What the—” Marshall said, retracting his step.
“What is it?” Naomi asked as she rushed to peer out the front door.
There, sitting on the front steps, was Dice.
“Hey,” Dice said with a grin as he turned around.
“What are you doing here?” asked Marshall, a little stunned.
“I just couldn’t bring myself to abandon you two,” said Dice as he stood up.
“How did you find us?” asked Naomi.
“Not sure,” said Dice. “In the middle of the night, I just felt that you were here, so I came.”
“No one saw you, did they?” Marshall asked, with his mother in mind.
“I don’t think so,” Dice shrugged. “Now, am I allowed in, or do I have to stay out again?”
“Come in,” Marshall sighed.
“You know,” said Dice as he stepped inside and looked around, “I think I want to live among humans.”
“You’d stick out like a sore thumb,” Marshall replied.
Not understanding the expression, Dice asked, “You could show me how to act like a human, right?”
“That would take time,” said Naomi, “but I can teach you.”
“What if they find you out?” Marshall added. “Even if you change your weird habits, your yellow eyes would give you away. Then what do you think would happen?”
Naomi shivered as terrible scenarios jumped to her mind.
“You could be captured or something,” Marshall continued in a serious tone. “They could treat you like a lab animal—a science experiment.”
“Who said I haven’t been through something like that already?” Dice shot back.
Marshall became silent.
“Look,” Dice sighed, “I guess I might as well tell you what happened.”
The first light he ever saw came from his parents as they floated before him. He regarded the two entities with curiosity. They didn’t look anything like him. While he had flesh and bone, they were vessel-less entities composed only of blood. Somehow, despite their drastically different appearances, he wasn’t afraid of them.
“You are our Instinct,” they would often tell him.
The three of them lived underground where there was little to see or do. As a small child, he often wondered whether there was more to the world than this series of tunnels and caverns. Day by day, he grew more adventurous until his curiosity got the better of him.
One day, he found a tunnel that was much smaller than the ones that he would usually explore. Crawling on his hands and knees he made his way through the tunnel until he saw a light. It burned his eyes, but at the same time, it was too intriguing not to look at it. As soon as his eyes began to adjust to the bright light, he felt himself being pulled away from it. He was dragged back out of the tunnel until he found himself facing his parents.
“Never go there again,” his father said sternly. “Humans live on the surface.”
“What are humans?” the child inquired.
“They look somewhat like you,” said his mother, “but they are dangerous. They were the ones that took our bodies.”
Naomi felt a bit sick hearing about floating orbs of blood that could somehow talk. Then, something dawned on her.
“Your parents used the same magic as Marshall and I do,” she said.
“So, they were the ones you talked about some days ago?” asked Marshall.
“Yeah,” said Dice. “I just don’t know how their abilities showed up in humans.”
Dangerous humans occupied his thoughts more and more frequently since the day he learned of their existence. He could only imagine what they would do to him if they found him. Just as he crawled up that tunnel, a human could as easily crawl down. He had to be prepared if that ever happened.
It was then that he decided to develop his own fighting style. Day in and day out, he would strengthen his muscles by pretending to fight the humans that he was sure to someday meet.
“So you really thought people were like monsters or something?” Marshall said, smirking at the irony.
“Yeah,” Dice said with a nod. “I didn’t know much about humans. I was training myself for the worst. Thinking back on it all, the worst was right in front of me.”
It seemed like a normal day that blended seamlessly with the previous years of the child’s life. He wandered aimlessly around the tunnels until he happened upon his parents in a large cavern. They cradled two new lives with light yellow eyes.
“You are our Logic,” they said to one. To the other, they said, “You are our Creativity.”
It was then that the child felt that his life would somehow change.
And change, it did. He was often ignored while his parents tended to his siblings. They would dote on the two little ones as never before. They would speak to them, teach them, encourage them. It was as though they had forgotten about their oldest child.
“There were times when I wondered why they’d ignore me,” Dice admitted. “If I didn’t mean anything to them, why did they make me? The only reason I could think of was that they made me just to see if they could.”
As the years passed, the child began to notice the differences between himself and his siblings. While he merely explored his surroundings, his siblings had a passion for transforming them. The two of them fashioned tools to build with. Eventually, they turned the dirt surrounding them into stone floors, walls, and ceilings. At times, the child asked if he could help them. His siblings would always turn him down.
Oddly enough, his siblings would never speak to each other. It was as though each one knew what the other was thinking at all times.
At one point, the child, now somewhat older, strode down a hall, past a room that his siblings claimed as their own. Peering in, he saw his brother and sister laughing with their arms wrapped around each other. It was then that he knew what he craved but could not obtain: love. In anger, he slammed his fist into a wall and broke it. Startled by the commotion, his siblings stared at him in wonder. He then attacked them in a jealous rage.
“You hurt them?” asked Naomi.
“Yeah,” Dice sighed. “You’d be angry too if you were in my situation.”
Sometime later, his siblings ambushed him, tied him to a rock, and for good measure, stabbed his wrists. As the pain rushed through him, he felt weak.
“What are you doing to me?” he asked fearfully.
“We are going to study anatomy,” said his brother.
“Using me?”
His siblings nodded in unison.
“Why?” he asked, more forcefully.
“Our parents gave us their blessing to do this,” his sister replied, “because you attacked us.”
It began simply by observing him. Then came the poking and prodding with instruments. After that, there was cutting and dissecting. They studied his human-like anatomy and ran tests on his blood. Once that was through, the experiments began.
“They did everything to me. Confinement. Isolation. Injecting me with anything they could get their hands on,” Dice recounted. “Every time, they thought of some new way to torture me.”
Naomi and Marshall stared at him speechlessly.
“They didn’t really want to kill me,” Dice continued, “but they came pretty close when they dismembered me and threw me into boiling water. My blood diffused in the water and I couldn’t piece myself back together. They pulled me out before I drowned, though.”
At that point, Dice closed his eyes a bit longer than a standard blink, as though he were trying to black out the memory. The description of the event made Naomi sick to her stomach.
After decades of torment, he felt like dying. He thought about what his parents had told him: he was their Instinct, the ability to find means to survive. He had lived through countless deaths, but for what? What he was living was no life at all.
As his siblings slept—something he could never do—a thought formed in the back of his mind.
Run.
His parents had told him that the world of humans was dangerous, but could it be any worse than this? Then he remembered that his parents told him that he resembled humans. He possibly could blend in with his surroundings. He had made up his mind. He would leave that instant.
He returned to the small tunnel that he had found all those years ago, praying that it hadn’t been sealed off. Fortunately for him, it was still as it was. Unfortunately, he was now full-grown and wouldn’t fit through as easily. The tunnel’s small size did not stop him from squirming and digging through.
As he exited the tunnel, a cool breeze caressed his skin, and he breathed in the nighttime air. Surrounding him was a world filled with trees and grass. Above him was a dark, endless sky. He had little time to admire his surroundings, though. He knew that if he stalled, his siblings would find him.
He ran through the forest with vigor, though it seemed that there was no end in sight. Then, off in the distance, he saw lights. They were small, but with every step he could see them more clearly. He wasn’t quite sure what those lights were, but he felt certain that there was life nearby.
It was then that he smelled the faint scent of blood mixed with another strong scent. As the scent became more powerful, a wet substance splashed across his legs and burned right through. A black liquid splattered on the ground as he fell from his severed legs.
He did not fall before he was stabbed in the chest with something cold and hard. Coughing blood, he hit the ground as he was stabbed a second time, then a third, then a fourth. Struggling to cling to consciousness, he turned his head and saw his siblings looking down at him.
“You’re coming back with us,” his sister said.
By now, he had undergone the painful process of his blood stitching his legs in place, though he could feel that his ankles had been tied together. Under normal circumstances, he would be able to break the binds, but now he was too weak to even move. He could feel the stakes being removed from his chest as he coughed more blood.
His sister tied his wrists and moved him onto his side, as his brother planted stakes in the ground around him. As his brother did so, the stakes began to warp into a cubic frame.
Before passing out, he heard some distant rustling and a voice calling out, “Who’s there?”
The last sound he heard was that of his siblings running away.
“Between then and the time you opened that box, I don’t remember a thing,” admitted Dice. “I’m actually kind of glad of that.”
Dice looked at his audience and saw Naomi quivering and blinking back tears.
“Naomi,” Dice sighed. “Don’t give me that look. Don’t be sad about something that happened so long ago. It’s over and done with. I want to move on. The last thing I want is pity.”
Naomi could no longer contain herself as she burst into tears.
“Um,” Marshall said, unsure of how to phrase what he was about to say. “There’s one thing I don’t understand. How could people take away your parents’ bodies?”
“They were burned,” said Dice. “Their blood couldn’t heal them fast enough.”
“But why would people burn them?” Marshall continued to ask.
“Humans fear what they don’t understand,” said Dice. “A group of them saw my parents use their abilities and ambushed them. I think those humans called themselves something. Something about children.”
“Ch-children?” Naomi stuttered as she wiped her eyes. “Not the Children of Terra, I hope.”
“That sounds familiar,” said Dice. “How did you know about that?”
Naomi turned away in shame.
“That’s my religion,” she said.
