Interlude Sequence (II)

---

"Thanks for doing this," Lisa said. She stared at Bath intently, as though trying to convey the appreciation she felt. "I know you still don't believe in my idealism, but..."

Bath cocked his head. "What does this have to do with your misguided idealism?"

Lisa's mouth opened with a pop. "...Everything?"

Bath just chuckled. "Nothing. What's the natural enemy of self-determination?" He gazed at Lisa knowingly.

"Well, according to my phone..." Technology was still incredibly useful even after COTD's takeover. If anything, it had made various leaps and bounds as millions used their new mentally-oriented boons to create innovative technological baubles. "The definition online is, 'the state of being free from the control or power of another.' Antonyms: dependence, inability, stupidity...Wait, those are pretty lackluster antonyms."

Bath had to agree; the word he was looking for was absent from the list. "So? What's the natural enemy of self-determination?"

Lisa held her jaw in a hand, bent over in thought. She walked over to the railing on the Spire's balcony, then looked out over Basalith. 'What is the enemy of self-determination?' she wondered. 'Self-determination is being able to forge your own path. It's being able to make choices, within reason, without others stopping you.' She kicked her foot against the ground. 'Self-determination is freedom.'

The word fell out of her mouth, as though it held tangible weight. "Oppression."

---

Nevis thought it almost ironic that she was controlling so many birds. Birds ate wasps, didn't they? Not that she cared all that much. With the way the Creator made them, Nevis would be absolutely shocked if someone compared her quasi-sapient species to insects.

'Well, there are the antennae, and the carapace...' Nevis thought to herself, 'but everything else is different. Do insects have bombshell figures? I think not.'

"Nevis!" ol' Yellow Eyes barked from the front door of the Hive, his voice carrying through her speaker system. Nevis switched her monitor to the camera feed, then zoomed in.

"Mmm, you can almost see them..." she murmured, referring to Lepochim's abdominal muscles. "If only he wore muscle shirts instead of that brown monstrosity."

Nevis sighed. She could take a break for a second, right? She flicked back to the Bird Brain operations terminal, then groaned.

"Come up," she called out, knowing that her room's mic would pick up her elevated voice. "You should know the way by now."

Lepochim's expression remained as hard as ever. Nevis rolled her eyes. 'Hardass.' Her mouth cracked into a lopsided grin. "Literally," she breathed softly.

"The birds are attacking people," Lepochim complained, walking into the room with his 'I mean business' face on.

'Puh-lease,' Nevis thought. "That's what they're supposed to do," Nevis replied. "Courtesy of bilateral orders coming from both the Church and Dragon." She gave him a knowing look, crossing her arms and swiveling in her office chair. Her right leg, crossed over her left, pulsed up and down.

"The peacekeepers are having severe difficulties keeping up with the complaints," he grumbled. "These humans are too fragile, especially the ones further out from Basalith. One of these birds can kill people without sufficient constitution."

Nevis fluttered her eyes. "Kill? Oh, honey," she began. "What'd you think would happen when the Church and Dragon gave the Hive the directive to begin the war on oppression?"

"But killing people--" 'is oppressing people who might be powerful assets.' Or so Lepochim wanted to say before he was cut off.

Her grin was full of white plates designed to look like teeth. "War, Lepochim. I was under the impression you knew a thing or two about that sort of thing. Besides, anybody who gets killed had it coming." When she looked at him now, it was with seriousness matching his own.

"How do you know?" he balked, eyes narrowing diminutively.

"If the spearrows hate you enough to use lethal force," she said slowly, "then you get what's coming."

Lepochim mulled over her words. "I'm still not convinced the spearrows are reliable. They've been attacking an uncalled-for amount of people."

"Just because you have a stick up your ass doesn't mean everyone else does," Nevis retorted, completely aware of just how little fun Lepochim let himself have. "You don't see the things I see, Lepochim. Surveillance and information gathering is the foundation of a powerful organization. I don't know what god-awful tendencies deepthinks like yourself incline towards, but trust me when I say that many humans live lives steeped in depravity."

Lepochim's eyebrows rose slightly. He'd never seen a more vicious side to Nevis. He snorted, then said, "Fine. Just make sure you tell the birds to leave anyone truly powerful alive, then send them to Basalith to be reconditioned." Lepochim had never heard of kursi abilities before meeting Bern and Lauretta. Bern's ability in particular--memory manipulation--had great utility, despite its ridiculously stringent requirements. As long as the powerful humans were spared, to be subject to Bern's expert touch, Lepochim could care less.

"Fine." As Nevis began to get up from her chair, Lepochim took a step backward. Then, his face a stony mask, he backpedaled into the door, slamming his nose against the doorframe as he pivoted around. Despite this mishap, he smoothly exited the room and fast-walked out of the Hive.

Nevis cackled to herself, spinning wildly in her office chair. "Just standing up puts the fear of the devil into him," she cried gleefully. She moved her finger over the keyboard to press a macro-ed sequence: ctrl + fn + u. As she did so, one of her favorite songs blasted throughout her personal office.

She got out of her seat and began to dance, gyrating her hips to the beat. She sang along, though changed the words slightly:

"Under my thumb

The guy who once had me down

Under my thumb

The guy who once pushed me around

It's down to me

The difference in the clothes he wears

Down to me, the change has come,

He's under my thumb~"

Nevis hoped the line about deciding "the clothes he wears" would come to pass sooner rather than later. Muscle shirts...No shirts?

Then she turned back to the computer, letting the music fade into the backdrop. She returned to the Bird Brain operations terminal, where she checked on the deployed birds' positions and coordinated their future movements. Part of her wished she'd had the foresight to equip all the birds with personal cameras.

Though, having received several intelligence reports from her underlings on the activities of the spearrows, another part of her was glad she hadn't.

---

"Bar the motherfucking doors!" Big Tim grunt-screamed, his disproportionately high-pitched voice grating on Esther's ears even through the Grinder's soundproofed walls. "BAR THE DOORS!"

Tim and Jorge were the only ones guarding the Grinder. Esther thought that having two people guard one woman was overkill, but then again, women were valuable enough to warrant the overprotection.

Esther tried to stay as still as possible. Struggle against the chains, and they'd pull the grinding wheel under her feet. Then, she'd be forced to walk on its slippery surface. Fall, and she'd have to dangle from the chains, only making the wheel accelerate further. She'd then have to dangle from her wrists until the wheel naturally came to a stop and she could get her footing. And heaven forbid she slip again...

"Birds?" she murmured lifelessly. In the new COTD world, she was willing to believe anything. Who knew, maybe birds were attacking the sex trafficking ring. Hah.

'Dream on,' she thought self-deprecatingly. 'If only Alfred Hitchcock were in charge. I could go for some real-life The Birds action.'

Soon after the tweeting reached her ears, Esther heard agonized wails.

"AHHH! FUCK! FUCK!" She couldn't even tell who was Big Tim or Jorge; their tenor and baritone voices both jumped into womanly-octaves as they voiced their pained terror, squealing like tortured pigs.

She couldn't bring herself to feel excited. A bit of sadistic pleasure, perhaps, but Esther had long since crushed her own expectations. She couldn't bear to face disappointment.

And yet, the kernel of hope within her began to grow. "Help," she called out meekly, her throat and mouth dry. She bit her cheek to wet her tongue, then spoke again. "Help!"

Suddenly, a dent appeared in the grinder's wall, startling Esther half to death. This, unfortunately, caused her to fall off the wheel.

"HELP!" she screamed, grimacing at the pain in her wrists. The Grinder had been built fairly recently by one of the human trafficking syndicate's new land-shapers, refitting an old isolation room to include physical torment. It had been designed to cause pain even to people with a constitution boon.

Now, a hail of dents, as though someone was machine-gunning down the Grinder's rightmost wall, appeared. Then, the wall gave way under the pressure of new blows on the weakened metal.

A swarm of birds burst into the room. A few zoomed over to her wrists, then opened their toothy beaks and sawed her shackles off. The rest took to pulverizing the torture chamber with their arrow-like, reinforced beaks, turning the Grinder into swiss cheese.

Esther tentatively stepped forward, squeezing past the rip down the center of the Grinder's right wall. She nearly choked as she took in the sight of Big Tim and Jorge, feeling as though her lungs and heart were seizing up. She rapidly blinked her eyes, taking a step back. However, from behind, the flat of a beak nudged her forward, nearly causing her weak body to trip and tumble.

But she swallowed her nerves and walked forward. This was her chance.

Esther walked through the hallways, tears streaming steadily down her face. She couldn't pin down her emotion. 'Distraught, maybe,' she thought to herself, her mind feeling oddly disconnected from her body. A contingent of small, brown birds circled around her like protective guardians. One in front of her was clearly leading the way, peeping insistently as though telling Esther to get a move on.

From afar, they were almost indistinguishable from sparrows, though up close it became painfully obvious that they were something else entirely. For one, they had beady, ultra-sharp teeth. On top of that, their beaks were thick and ridged, coming to a needle-thin point at the end. When they had engaged Big Tim, Jorge, and the others that Esther was passing by...they had clearly taken to using their beak tips as their primary weapons.

As she walked, she checked the other rooms in search of other women. All of them were empty, though thankfully Esther didn't see signs of foul play outside the norm. She had been on the far side of the compound in the Grinder, leading to birds finding her after everyone else. She could only assume that other birds had already led everyone else out.

A painful hour of walking later, Esther arrived at the closest branch of COTD. She signed up for residence after standing in line with similarly-ragged looking groups of people. She found out by listening to others' conversations that almost everyone had been escorted by the same kind of tiny, ferocious birds.

If anything, Esther was just glad that everyone else looked--and smelled--as bad as she did. Before she even went to the Anima for any boons, Esther first went to the bath house. The steam from the ground was so thick as to provide cover to everyone present, much to Esther's appreciation. She let the warm water flow over her, as though it could wash away her past.

She left the bath house, donning one of the COTD-provided bath robes at the exit. As she walked through the bustling city, she felt as though she were in a dream. A beautiful, haunting dream, the kind that was far worse than nightmares. Nightmares were useful: they reminded her that her life wasn't the worst it could be. Everything certainly felt like a dream. It had only been a few hours since the birds came and rescued her from hell, viciously tearing apart her captors. Then, she'd been led by birds--as though she were Snow White or something--to the nearest dragonleaf city. Finally, she'd been admitted, no questions asked, and given a place to live all her own.

Esther couldn't remember the last time she had a dream so wonderful. As she approached her new apartment building, she laughed meekly to herself. "This isn't real," she murmured.

"That's what they all say," some guy muttered as he walked past, causing Esther to tense up. She exhaled deeply, then reached for the apartment door's handle. After climbing a few flights of stairs, she finally found her new residence.

She thought that it was the most perfect little place she'd ever seen. And it was hers. She knew in her heart that everything was real. There was some part of her that wanted to deny it, a sad, shriveled, broken part of her that rejected any good come her way as a lie or trap. She turned her head down, hair drooping over her shoulders, knuckles creased white at her sides.

"Mom," she murmured, tears once again beading in the corners of her eyes. "We finally made it out of that damned trailer park. I told you we'd make it out." Esther's hands shook as she drew them to her neckline, fingering at a necklace that was no longer there. Even so, her memory made a good enough substitute: she knew how the heart-shaped locket felt on her fingers, knew how it glinted gold in the light...

Esther hiccuped, then cut off her emotions, falling back on habit to avoid mental pain. She walked over to the bedroom, then ran her trembling hands over the bed's comforter. She wiggled herself onto its center, then spread her freshly-washed arms over its surface, as though she was preparing to make snow angels.

Instead, Esther fell asleep. For the first time in too long, her unconscious face shone full of peace.