Chương 278: Book 4 Chapter 38.2: Into the Minds of Madness

The scene inside the shared mindscape shifted again, this time to an idyllic suburban kitchen. Vell could feel the warmth of a stove and smell cinnamon in the air. A young woman was working at the stovetop, making a batch of french toast and bacon. Yuna examined the spotless kitchen and nodded approvingly.

"See, this is why you can't sympathize, Vell," Yuna said.

"Not everyone was raised in as nice of an environment as this."

"Interesting theory," Vell said.

"Just one problem." Vell pointed at the black-haired woman.

"That is not my mom," Vell said. He pointed up at the roof above.

"And this is not my house."

"Alistair! Time for breakfast!" Answering his mother's call, a young man bolted down the stairs. Kraid smiled brightly as the memory of his younger self bounced down the stairs with a smile on his face and hopped into a seat at the kitchen table. Yuna looked utterly baffled as the smiling child happily took his first few bites of french toast. He cut through the thick bread with a knife and ate every bite with a smile on his face.

"Thanks, mom," Kid Kraid said, as he put aside his fork and knife.

"Why are we having french toast today? Is it because I got a good grade?"

"You always get good grades, my little scientist," Kraid's mother said, giving her son's hair an affectionate tussle.

"I made french toast because you like french toast."

"Oh. Because you love me?"

"That's right!" Young Kraid pondered the statement for a moment.

"Mom," he began, looking up at his mother with questioning eyes.

"Are you always going to love me? No matter what?" Kraid's mother abandoned her dishes to walk over to Kid Kraid. Shee put one hand flat on the table, and used the other to stroke her son's hair, then kissed him on the forehead.

"Of course I am, dear."

"Okay." Kid Kraid picked up his breakfast knife, still dripping with thick syrup, and jammed it right through his mother's hand. Yuna gasped with shock alongside the memory of Kraid's mother as the kitchen knife pinned her hand to the table. Kid Kraid didn't even blink at his own act of brutality, and looked up at his mother with the same sparkling inquisitiveness in his eyes.

"What about now?" Kid Kraid said.

"Do you still love me?" Kraid's mother looked down at the knife in her hand, and her whole body started to tremble. In spite of the pain, she managed a strained chuckle.

"Of course, baby," she whimpered.

"Of course." The grown up Kraid strolled around the kitchen and smiled with fond nostalgia at the horrific memory.

"Ah, mom, you were a saint," Kraid said. He turned back to his contemporaries in the memory.

"I had to stab her four more times before she tried to have me institutionalized, you know. Dad was out after incident number two, of course. Quite a bit less patient, that guy." Yuna manged to pry her horrified gaze away from the younger Kraid to look at the older one.

"W-why did you do that?"

"Because I'm a scientist," Kraid said.

"She made a claim, and I tested it. Turns out she wouldn't love me 'no matter what' after all."

"Are you getting it now?" Vell asked.

"There's no underlying reason here. He just wants to hurt people because he can."

"Hey, it's not just 'because I can'," Kraid said.

"It's because I want to see what happens."

"Not an improvement," Vell said.

"Come on, Yuna, the deeper into his head you get, the worse things are going to be. Call this off before we get into something really terrible."

"This just speaks to an experimentation or information based pathology," Yuna said.

"We'll have to look into trauma related to his schooling, maybe."

"Ugh, fine," Vell said.

"My turn." The memory of Kraid's maimed mother faded out, and the image of a small, cramped living room replaced it. A young Vell laid back on the couch, playing with a tiny toy airplane. The air was cold, and smelled stale, and from the silence in the apartment, Vell was the only person in it. The scene played out for a minute or so before the door of the apartment started to jiggle, and a bored Vell sat up straight.

"Mom?" Vell's mother finally got the jammed door to unlock and stepped through. She stopped to give her son a quick kiss on the head as she walked by, but that was the only similarity with the loving routine put on by Kraid's mother. She had a handful of mail she stopped to read while Vell continued to play on the couch, and when it came time for dinner, she had to unpack frozen chicken.

"This is... not exactly what I was imagining," Yuna said.

"Well, we weren't doing great financially until we got a massive settlement payout vis a vis me getting sliced in half," Vell said.

"Mom and dad worked a lot, usually couldn't afford a babysitter."

"Oh don't whine about it," Kraid said.

"I'm not whining, that's the point," Vell said.

"I had a slightly inconvenient life, and I turned out fine. I don't have some pathological need to never be alone just because my mom and dad weren't home very often. I had a problem and I got over it, and I definitely didn't turn into a skeleton-armed supermurderer about it."

"Oh! That's an excellent point!"

"Yes," Vell said.

"Finally-""Kraid, please focus on the incident where you lost your arm," Yuna said.

"That kind of physical harm has got to leave a lasting psychological scar." Vell groaned loudly and slapped his own face as the memory scene shifted once again. This time it coalesced into a dark cave, though that cave was soon illuminated by a gout of fire. The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

"Almost got me that time, you son of a bitch," a young Kraid said. He looked to be about Vell's age in this memory, and, crucially, he still had both of his arms. Young Kraid dodged another fireball from a raging adult dragon and retaliated with magic of his own.

"Oh, now this is something," Yuna said.

"Dragon attacks are known to cause long lasting trauma."

"What do you mean 'dragon attack'?" Vell said.

"This is a Kraid attack!" Vell wandered through the midst of the mental dragon battle, gesturing to the cave walls, the piles of gold, and the nest at the back of the cave.

"This is the dragon's lair," Vell explained.

"It lives here! Kraid is the one who broke into his lair to kill it and steal all its stuff!"

"You don't know that, Vell," Yuna said.

"Kraid's an academic, he could very well have-" Another fireball raced across the room, and the younger Kraid dodged it while his older self looked on.

"Hey," Young Kraid shouted.

"How about you save us both some time and let me kill you so I can take your stuff!"

"I really don't know what else I have to do to make this point," Vell said.

"Look at this! Look at this nest!" He tried to dig his hands through a pile of cracked eggshells, but could not interact with anything in the memory projection.

"These eggs were fertilized," Vell said.

"There's goopy little baby dragons in here, it's disgusting. He killed babies!"

"Technically those were only fetuses," Kraid said.

"That's not very pro-choice of you, Harlan."

"You should have been aborted," Vell snapped.

"Vell, that hostility isn't helping things," Yuna said.

"We're in the middle of a very troubling memory for Kraid."

"Yeah, this is the part where I lose my arm," Kraid said.

"I was very upset by it." The memory of the battle played out a little while longer, as Kraid traded blows with the vengeful dragon. After narrowly dodging a burst of fire, the Young Kraid produced a blade of black flame and started dashing towards his foe.

"And this is where I got cocky," Kraid said. He shook his head at his younger self.

"Never go melee when your opponent has teeth that big." Young Kraid went for the throat, and though he cut a pretty significant gouge in the dragon's neck, it wasn't enough to kill. While he was still near the dragon's mouth, it bent down to snatch him out of the air, catching Young Kraid's arm in its jaws. As they occupied his memory, both Vell and Yuna could feel the sudden sensation of panic -and the stabbing pain when the dragon bit down. Yuna gasped with shock, but Vell didn't flinch.

He'd lost arms to worse things than dragon bites. The dragon threw his head from side to side, and what was left of Kraid's attachment to his arm was torn away. Young Kraid got thrown to the ground as the dragon tossed its head up, let out a swift gout of fire to roast the arm, and then swallowed it whole. Young Kraid clutched his bloody stump and crawled backwards on the floor. The dragon looked down at him with malice in its eyes, and then did nothing but let out a low, threatening growl.

Young Kraid glared back, and cast a spell to teleport out of the lair while he had the chance.

"Oh, and look at that, the dragon spared his life," Vell said.

"Pretty noble considering Kraid just murdered its children."

"Oh don't pretend it was noble," Kraid said.

"Probably just didn't like how I tasted. Anyway, let's not end on the note of me getting bit." With a slight mental tug, Kraid pulled the memory a little further along. They saw the same lair and the same dragon, this time pinned to the ground by chains of black fire. The dragon thrashed against the restraints and tried to roar, but could do nothing as a one-armed Kraid walked across its scaly chest.

"Congratulations on making me bleed," Young Kraid said.

"You're the first person to do that in a long time." Kraid held out his one remaining arm over the dragon's gut.

"And you're probably going to be the last." The dragon let out a guttural groan of pain as its stomach bulged and the broke open from within. A few shards of black, acid-pocked bones tore through its flesh from within and then hovered through the air towards the empty space where Kraid's arm had been. The bones reassembled themselves into a usable arm, and Young Kraid examined them carefully as he stepped off the dragon's chest.

"Hope you enjoyed the snack," he said.

"I'll be back soon to see what finishes you off first, the hole in your gut or starvation." Young Kraid took his rebuilt arm and vanished, leaving the dragon to a presumably gruesome fate. Thanks to the memory projectors shared connection, Yuna and Vell could both feel his profound satisfaction at the dragon's suffering.

"Okay, so now we have Kraid leaving an intelligent creature to suffer a horrific death for the crime of defending itself from his aggressive behavior," Vell said.

"Dragon's are inherently dangerous creatures, Vell," Yuna said.

"And regardless of his personal intent, physical trauma always leaves lasting mental scars."

"You can justify anything, huh?" Vell said.

"Fine, you want to deal with physical trauma, let's get some physical trauma." Vell took the reins of the memory projection, taking them from the expansive cave of the dragon to a small, cramped train car. The maglev train let out a low hum as it raced down the tracks, and a young Vell hummed along with it as he sat next to his mother.

"I've always sort of wondered how this happened," Kraid said.

"Oh. Oh dear," Yuna said.

"I assume this is when you…" Vell extended a thumb and slashed it in a quick line across his waist. Yuna started to look a little nervous.

"Is that entirely necessary?"

"You want to explore trauma, this is trauma," Vell said. He apparently couldn't reason with Yuna, so it was time to try a little shock and awe. Hopefully having to relive Vell's death right alongside him would scare Yuna into ditching the memory exploration.

"I'd get ready if I were you. It hurt. A lot." Kraid folded his hands behind his back and awaited the oncoming crash with an eager expression on his face, while Vell crossed his arms and waited for the memory to play out. Yuna tried to match their stoic demeanor and failed spectacularly. Every time there was even the slightest rattle in the train, Yuna closed her eyes and braced herself for a crash that ended up not happening. Until it did.

The bullet train moved so fast that there was no warning when it finally derailed. One moment Vell was talking with his mother about their plans to see his grandparents, and the next moment they were both tumbling through a maelstrom of steel and noise. Through the shared memory, Kraid and Yuna both got to experience the shock, confusion, and fear, and then finally the pain. The memory snapped to pure blackness as Yuna fell to her knees and clutched at her waist.

Even Kraid flinched at the sudden and violent impact.

"Hmm. Worse than I expected."

"I died," Vell said.

"Were you expecting it to feel pleasant?"

"I wasn't expecting it to be that bad," Yuna said.

"It gets worse," Vell said.

"There's a part two."

"A part two of getting cut in half?"

"Yeah," Vell said.

"Getting put back together." The void of nothingness gave way to a void of somethingness as Vell's memory snapped back into being. Yuna spent a few seconds wondering if her machine was broken until the memory of panic started to overwhelm her. It was dark because Vell was in a body bag.

"Okay, that's enough of that," Vell said. He switched up his memory and pulled them back to the dentist's waiting room. As much as he wanted to scare Yuna into canceling the experiment, he didn't want to traumatize her.

"Aww, come on, send us back," Kraid said.

"I've always wanted to know what it feels like for the people I bury alive."

"You've buried people alive?"

"Several times, in fact," Kraid said. Yuna was horrified, and Vell was not surprised.

"I wasn't buried alive, I was in a morgue," Vell said.

"Took about fifteen minutes for someone to get me out." Yuna looked more horrified than before.

"And I'm fine," Vell said.

"I'm not even claustrophobic! Because I worked on my emotions in a healthy way instead of burying people alive!"

"Well you had a very strong emotional support network," Yuna said.

"Kraid didn't have that."

"He 'didn't have that' because he stabbed his mother, Yuna," Vell said.

"Repeatedly."

"Five times, to be exact," Kraid said.

"Five times," Vell said.

"Which is five more times than any reasonable human would excuse, so why are you looking for excuses?"

"I'm not looking for excuses, I'm looking for reasons," Yuna said.

"Everybody has a reason they behave the way they do, we have to be able to identify, diagnose and treat the cause-""The 'cause' is that he is a bastard," Vell said.

"Yuna, ninety-nine percent of the time I'm right there with you, but this is Kraid! How many different ways does he have to demonstrate he's an immoral lunatic?"

"Hopefully less than seventy-two million, eight-hundred and thirty-four thousand, three-hundred and twelve times," Kraid said.

"That's how many evil things I've done. And yes, I do keep count."

"As unpleasant as it is, we have to put in the effort," Yuna said. Vell made several strained grunts of frustration and then gave up.

"Okay, what kind of memory to review next?"

"I have some wonderful memories of cooking I'd love to show you," Kraid said.

"No," Vell snapped. Considering the blowtorch comments last loop, that could only end in disaster. Thankfully, Kraid had also provided an alternative.

"Love. Let's look at memories of love."