((Here's my second story....and unlike my last one, this one is actually FINISHED I hope you guys enjoy it! Anybody in the Council of Truth should enjoy it too ))
.....It's been awhile. Months, hasn't it? Months...of what I'd longed for - the chance to forget my troubles, the opportunity to put things behind me. To simply live, and have no regrets. But that isn't it, is it? I have regrets....There are things I still wish I hadn't done, things I lament. There's still the future laid out ahead of me...black and white fading to color fading to sepia as concept comes to fruition, fruition comes to age. The world moves past me, and all of the horrible events of the year before were nothing but a sepia-toned smear in my cortex.
Faded, distorted, fuzzy, but still none the less horrible....I've come out on the other end with scars; physical bits and pieces of the past still in full color, written on my face and etched into my eyes, which themselves were one such scar. I hadn't gotten away from that virus, that damned Biomare virus, without a reminder that at least some of me wasn't quite human anymore. I try not to tell anybody, but some of those nightmares still keep me up at night.
Just when I think everything is at its most peaceful...I can feel it again. The sensation of being outdoors, the warm notum breeze wafting about me, only I see it through different eyes. The same eyes of the creatures I'd killed so many times it has lost meaning. Distorted and warped flesh, milling about the plains with no life, no purpose, only hunger and longing for a life that was impossible to relive. And then someone came along to end it. But who cares when a mutant dies? To the rest of the world, it's good riddance...
Maybe to the mutants though it is relief. Maybe to them it's a hard slap in their warped faces that they just are no longer part of anything; simply biological refuse. That's how Omni-Tek thinks of them, isn't it? Biological refuse...nothing but living heaps of garbage.
But I'd avoided that fate....Regardless of what my dreams tell me, I am Opifex. I am still me....And should that virus ever reappear, I have the chemical equivalent of a viral holocaust safely snug inside a test tube beside my bed, right by the fragment of claw in that antiseptic jar that Dr. Duvall had returned to me. It was pulled out of MY leg, after all...Funny how much trouble a little claw can cause.
I suppose I'm lucky...I get into the worst of situations, in so much deeper than any living man ever had the right to be, and yet here I am...slumped over a desk, in an office of the Council of Truth Tower, looking out over the golden sandstone maze of Tir. Tir, even with a man like Silverstone at the nerve center of it all, is still a beautiful city...
Beautiful, but dead. Throughout the city, it feels as if there is a curfew, or a military occupation; which technically, there is. Silverstone is about as military as the Clans get, and his hold on this city is absolute. I wonder if he sees what damage his occupation is causing? Children run about the streets with little to no schooling. Litter is dragged along the sandstone streets with nobody, not even a cleanerbot to remove it. Homes and businesses are ramshackle and choked by the Sentinels, their ethic being that nothing matters as much as defense.
The Council has looked into these problems...And we want badly to help ease them. We want to give the children an education, we want to clean the streets, and turn Tir into the city that really should represent the Clans. But every time we go to do something that would benefit the people...the war rears its ugly head.
The damned war....I get the feeling I'm not the only one tired of it. I know that, at least at the moment it is mostly a cold war...A thawing cold war....But even so, men like Silverstone put it ahead of all else. Sometimes he is justified...Most of the time, he hinders the progress of what this planet needs the most; a lasting peace. But there's just too much hatred....this whole world seethes with it. Everybody hates something or someone....And nobody seems to fear dying. In the past, the one thing that had prevented war more than any other thing was the fear of death. But what do we have to fear here? Death hurts...it leaves you with a knot in your stomach and a knowledge that at the end of that tunnel of light there is another life, as if you had never been harmed. You feel sick, queasy, and faint...but you're alive. What's there to be afraid of? Without fear of death...let alone death itself....destiny looks something like an urobolos chain; a snake eating its own tail. Forever.