“Alright, alright, I’m goin’,” he conceded, this time going upstairs in earnest.

Zel wanted to follow in his stead, but… That writing desk kept calling to her. She just couldn’t help taking a look, hoping that Makhus had left some of his translated writings there. He had, and so she read them. Each and every single page. She picked through the disorganized pile of detached notes and arranged them into a single stack as she read through them, mentally putting together the pieces based on listed dates and page numbers.

So many accounts of travel, of menial toil, even pages upon pages that were just the writer venting about the pitfalls of his work.

How tired he was of being left in the dark about when new supplies would come, about the state of the war, of never knowing whether the work of him and his comrades even had a point. There was a page talking about how it was a blessing in disguise, how their greatest breakthroughs had arisen from being forced to work with what they had.

How afraid he was.

How he hoped the “True Homunculus” would be sufficient to tip the scales of war.

Months of journal entries about “The Work”, about the struggle of operating the Bunker’s systems, growing homunculi, testing them, storing them, and inevitably recycling them.

Three months in the journal’s eyes later, hope for victory had changed to spite. To a desire to create something, anything, that would exact retribution upon who he perceived to be the destructors of his home. There were lines such as:

Why don’t we just dedicate a floor or two to growing Titan-types? We could just put them under geas before any sapience forms and use them as meat machines. If the soul never grows beyond that of an animal, it wouldn’t be inappropriate to treat them as animals.

The author later went back on such sentiments, writing:

Werner’s right about the Titan-types. The sheer quantity of viriditas required to grow them en-masse would be insurmountable even with the capital’s supply at our disposal, and it would be little better than tossing away the soul-fragment samples. We can’t afford to lose so much as one sample as it is, seeing as new ones haven’t come in since the Bloodletters got wiped out.

It felt… Strange, reading this. Zelsys felt the accounts detailed in the journal to be strangely relatable, despite the fact she had absolutely nothing in common with a state alchemist, or whoever this person happened to have been.

It cut off at the mention of marshalling all of the Bunker’s resources to the growth of even just a single entity made with every single sample available. To her growth.

So, she looked for anything like an original manuscript, and found it… Only to be unable to read a word of it. A few papers were inserted amidst the pages, some detailing decoding notes from Makhus to himself, while others had fragmentary translations. A few had full-page translations of where they were inserted all over the journal, and one of these she found near the end.

It’s not taking. All those base layers, all those samples, all the Bunker’s resources…

The translation ended. The ink looked relatively fresh. There was a note in Makhus’s handwriting.

Sudden addition of word substitution cipher.

Homunculus doesn’t respond when questioned.

Perhaps it has degenerated too far.

Mnemonic Extraction Ritual?

She looked for a decoding key, and found one copy of many amongst the strewn-about papers. The code itself wasn’t all that complex, and so she took to it with a pencil she pulled from one of the drawers. A short while of labor later, and she had an equally short decoded text that didn’t make sense. The sentence structure was there, but words were substituted for other ones to the point of nonsensicality. And yet, from the recesses of her memory came forth the knowledge of which words meant what.

She had to re-read every sentence twice or thrice to make sense of the archaic, bizarre wording and grammar that was present even behind the word-substitution, but she could read it. She even felt the need to, somehow.

Subject Zeta still isn’t growing. I stayed behind thinking I would just wait until it reached spiritual critical mass, but it just isn’t getting there. Each time one fragment begins to grow dominant, the others suppress it. There is no dominant core for the others to form around. A few months ago, we would’ve been able to just select a fragment at random and pump it with some extra juice, but now that’s a pipe dream. The Bunker is barely afloat as it is, and trying to fuel such a ritual on my own would be suicide. To think that the exacting precision of the second-generation Albedo-samplers would turn out to be the project’s downfall…

I know what must be done.

I will use our backup first-gen sampler on myself.

Hopefully it’ll leave me with enough to drag myself out of the Zone.

No real writing for a few pages. One page was scrawled with toddler-like scribblings, half-covered in black droplets of ink and what looked to be blood. Then, a page that started with more scribbling that rapidly grew to be legible writing. She decoded it over the course of another half-hour, if the clock down here was to go by.

It took half my fuckin’ liver, and most of my childhood, I think. I don’t think I remember what my mother’s face looks like anymore. I know what an attribute reader is, even the fact that the one He gave me was a white stone tablet… And still it took me a few looks to re-learn what the Sage-damned thing really looked like, let alone how to operate the interface.

There was a thin line of blood droplets across the page that trailed off to the side, as if the source had pulled away right as the bleeding began.

Oh great, now the veins in one of my eyes ruptured. Can’t see shit with it.

I know who I was, but the memories just aren’t there. It’s like I have the outline of a story, but half the pages are missing… And re-reading the earlier parts doesn’t help one bit. Everything written in this journal, I remember. What a cruel joke.