Spiral of Light

Chapter 8: You Can't Shave Me Bald!

Moloch stared down at the miserable creature. Hybrids were once all Aneoki like himself, with two arms, two legs and a normal hair covered head. It all started from either boredom, undiagnosed mental disorders, or general ingratitude for being given a healthy body by the light. These disenfranchised citizens voluntarily injected themselves with radical gene resequencing therapies, taken from one or more of the many sentient and dangerous creatures to be found on their Jungle Planet.

Then after a painful period spent in a gestation globule, they would emerge reborn, their physical forms being completely altered.

As the hybrid's process became more refined and more sophisticated the leaders of their dens brazenly declared themselves and their followers an emerging master race, superior to all normal Anoekians, and began to recruit followers. Many of the poor who had limited prospects in pillar life, or employee inhabitants of a level like Drydellia, who were not disgusted to have their physical form twisted and deviated by homebrewed mutagenics, eagerly flocked to the Hybrid dens as a way out of the difficult predicaments of their lives.

The Den masters were usually skilled enough in sequencing the mutagenic concoctions to prevent deaths from dosing, and saw that their packs grew in strength, striking deals with shady members of the pillar underworld for ducats and mineralis-vita. They oversaw the injection mixes of their members and helped craft and administer progressively more mutagenic compounds.

But it was a fine line between developing the maximum benefits of mutation and evolving too much and losing most of the higher brain functions attributed to sentient beings. If a mixer became completely insane and reverted to a primitive mode of function, it would be called a Drainer.

If a drainer was not dealt with in time, it would escape the den and feed on citizens as their appetite for spinal fluid would become insatiable. Should that happen, it was the Den Master's obligation to put down any Drainers they created, as ravenous beasts that preyed without restraint on a local population was a surefire way to attract undue attention to the hybrid den from the local constabulary and the legion.

Many of those who gambled on changing themselves won big. They used the mutagenic genes to increase their strength, vitality, speed, and lifespan. But for those who lost, Moloch only had to look at the vile spectacle of Screwtongue, who kept nervously scratching at his puckered flesh, as his mind flitted from idle thought to thought. His chin quivered and leg restlessly trembled as he stood hunched beside the Centurions.

Moloch could not remember any occasion where citizens began mixing as means to rebel against an oppressive level's socio-political regime. Most Republic citizens resented Hybrids, or Mixers as they colloquially called them, and their general disdain drove the hybrid dens into the robust underground scene of the pillar, where they acted as hired muscle, mercenaries, and slavers.

A Hybrid Den had the reputation that no job was too detestable, if the ducats were good, and the mineralis-vita was pure. Generally, their dens could be found in the forgotten quarters of the lower levels, like this one but there had been rumors that they started a colony out in the deep jungle. However, Moloch knew that out in the Jungle there were real predators whose talent for killing wasn't pharmaceutically induced through gruesome therapies but honed by mother nature herself through eons of merciless evolution.

To survive in the jungle was another thing altogether.

Ubiquitous to all hybrids was the desire for mineralis-vita, a powder derived from massive crystal formations that grew in the sea of burning sands to the west. Historically it had been consumed as an all-purpose vitamin and spice; for it greatly enhanced the flavor of food, while imparting all of one's daily mineral requirements. However, those that hybridized themselves, soon figured out that it greatly enhanced their genetic reconfigurations and was a powerful euphoric intoxicant and they sought it out in the purest forms they could get. Tracking where the supply of mineralis-vita went in the pillar was a very effective way to catch hybrids.