54 - Grafter [Cherno] [+Internet Outage Update]

A/N: I still don't have a proper internet connection.

I was supposed to have a new router installed by now, but no, ISP has to be a piece of shit and just conveniently "forget" about my order.

The outage may go on for a week or even two. The mongrels at my ISP have been dragging their feet in getting my new internet connection handled, claiming to have "an issue in our system" etc etc. They even said they would get back to me to resolve the issue around 1pm. It is 6pm as of me writing this vent-note.

On the upside, I've managed to tether my phone to my computer, so now I'll be posting through a borderline dial-up level mobile data connection. Posting schedule irregularities are still possible until I have proper internet back.

I will attempt to catch up to 20 advance chapters in the next day or two, as posting even one is like pulling teeth with this crippled connection.

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Behind the shrine, down a short hallway which also contained doors to a few other rooms, Casus headed to the door at the very end.The banisher simply opened the door and entered. Entering the dimly-lit room, Krahe was met by a nostalgic sight, one quite unlike Razem’s prim and proper sanctum. It was a small room lit by an overhead light, with an articulated medical chair in the middle, one made of hardwood wrapped strange scaly leather and padded with who-knew-what. Many tubes and cables hung from its underside, leading to an array of gruesome tools on a separate rack. Artificial arms, legs, and strange parts of many different makes dangled from the ceiling, while bundles of living flesh and even whole organs floated in large jars. These jars, connected to tubes that led through the wall to another room, were filled by differing shades of glowing fluid and plastered in varieties of curious religious seals. Some were wrapped, like her arm, while others were covered by stick-on rectangular seals akin to taoist talismans for good fortune which were so popular in parts of the undercity.

A miasma of smoke hung over everything. At first, she thought it to be the incense burning in one of the corners, but then she noticed the half-filled ashtray sitting right next to medical tools on a counter. The smoke languidly flowed across the ceiling towards a vent with a fan in one of the corners.

While the grafter worked away at his arm, he asked who Krahe was, to be permitted into a grafter’s shrine-workshop to observe holy work being done. The Banisher openly mentioned that Krahe was a “foreigner” from a far land with corrupt religious organizations. It was obviously codespeak for “she’s an otherworlder”, at least as far as Krahe was concerned. Sne also caught that the grafter’s name was Firminus.

“Don’t take it personally. As I see it, there is not the slightest chance under the sun that a continent-spanning church isn’t corrupt in some way. Even on the infinitesimally tiny chance that the organization at large isn’t rotten, there must be locally corrupt branches and corrupt officials in the highest ranks… And that’s if I really push myself and assume that the nature of the faith somehow curtails corruption. It is nothing against your church in particular, what little interaction I’ve had with its members has only been positive. Call me a cynic, if you wish. That outlook has served me well thus far.”

To her surprise and relief in equal measure, the only feeling she sensed in the grafter was a sense of bemusement as he spoke: “That is you being optimistic? Truly, what a hellish world you must have come from. If there is one unfaltering beacon of righteousness in this world, it is the Twin Churches. Just as the Banishment Wheel, so too have the Twin Churches stood as sacrosanct guardians over all mankind for millennia.”

“I told her as much,” Casus chimed in, only to get shushed. The grafter pulled a ruptured muscle-bundle out from betwixt the tangle.

“Even if they would destroy buildings and districts just to recover your corpse? And there’s a hemorrhaged muscle bundle where the tricep would be, looks like it’s tangled with a… Tendon? Why’s a tendon there?”

“Oh, good eye. You may have some talent for grafting,” the grafter noticed, moving to that area. “Oy… Casus, how long has it been since your last checkup? Looks like the secondary blackvein got tangled somehow, this is why you run them coaxial with the skeletal scaffold.”

“But this way I get-” Casus started.

“-more blood where it needs to go with less tubing.” Krahe guessed aloud.

“Yes, very much so,” the grafter nodded towards Krahe. “Not those exact terms, but close enough.”

The Grafter looked to Casus.

“Have you brought her hoping that I take her on as an apprentice or some such? To get that arm replaced?”

He didn’t seem entirely opposed to the idea.

“I’m not looking to apply to any such thing, for all it matters,” Krahe chimed in again.

“...And I did not expect you to know anything of fleshgrafting,” the Pilgrim Banisher narrowed his eyes in confusion.

Continuing his work, the Grafter returned to the topic of Krahe’s implicit distrust of the church at large: “I will admit, the Grafting Church’s methods are heavy-handed at times, but that does not mean it is corrupt. Besides, anyone who suffers property damage or bodily injury is compensated above and beyond what is necessary.”

Krahe leaned forward in her seat, crossing her legs. She rested her left elbow on her knee, and in turn, rested her chin on the back of her hand. Not even trying to hide it, she conjured a cigarette into her hand, forming a thin tendril of tar to usher it into the corner of her mouth and light it with an ember at the tendril’s point. A frivolous exercise of minute control, more for show than anything else.

“That’s nice,” she uttered in an utterly dead, distinctly not-nice tone of voice. “A shiny new house and a new dog won’t bring back a wrecked home and a dead brother, though. Best to not catch innocents in the crossfire to begin with than to pay for someone’s new legs because he stepped on one of your mines, or worse, pay for someone’s funeral because one of your graft-saints sterilized the building he was in with superheated steam.”

“Are you the same Blackhand that slaughtered all but one living soul in the Old Street Butchershop?” Casus questioned, genuinely taken aback rather than trying to call her out on the hypocrisy of which she was keenly aware.

“I didn’t touch the civvies on the second floor, and only broke the butcher’s leg in case he was one of Hashem’s men so he wouldn’t call for reinforcements…” she listed, turning her gaze up from Casus’ arm to meet his gaze. “But I will readily admit that I do not live up to my own ideals.”