The smell of decaying flesh filled what was left of his nostrils. The pungent odor of ones own decay, the sign of an end. He lay perfectly still in the center of his room, his one and only room. The walls were bare and cold. If he lay still, completely still, the voices lay still as well.

He twitched.

EEEEEEEEEAAAAATTTTTT IIIIIIITTTTTTT!!!! Follow your heart follow your feet follow your stomach follow your beat The End, The End, We Have Subsisted For Too Long The End, The End Arrives EEEEEEEEAAAATTTT!!!

He screamed and tried to lash out, but all he felt was an empty bubble of nothing. Without it he was nothing. There was so much more that he should see and feel, but it wasn't there. It just wasn't there. It was ... silent. The voices screamed in his head and he fought to be heard above them. His legs kicked the concrete, re-opening a barely healed wound on his heel. It was infected. It wouldn't heal.

With great effort he fought to still his involuntarily convulsing body. It was hard to control some things when you could no longer tell if they were still there or not. His left leg wouldn't stop twitching, so he screamed at it. His throat rasped out a painful wheeze. That seemed to help. The voices faded as his body stilled, and once again he was left alone with his stench.





Trevvor Vent stepped gingerly over the corpses and rubble. There were things laying about of whose origins he had no desire to be educated upon.

"Emperor's bones, what happened here?" he half-murmured to himself. The dim light filtered through dust and smoke exposing what was left of the Mytus IV prison. What appeared to have been an enormous hand had simply punched its way through people, guards, cells, even walls.

Down a what was supposed to be a hallway and into a cell and into another hallway, this one a hallway not exactly on the schematics. Vent reached out and touched the ragged, crumbling walls. "Hallway appears to have been... bored out of the solid rock? He continued on. There was another body; this one was not that of a prisoner. He knelt to look closer. This one was almost intact, save for its head which was unusually flat and bloody. It was dressed in some sort of black stealth suit, and was decked out with all sorts of electronic equipment. Trevvor made a note as such on his datapad. This fellow was going straight to Kaneda.

He looked up across the body to the elevator. The doors had been torn off; the lift was skewed into six new directions. Two of the elevator's eight corners had been warped out and shoved into the walls of the shaft, holding the elevator steady. There was another body here, in a fashion. By the entrails Trevvor assumed human.

Not about to step into the elevator, Trevvor looked about. Two hallways branched off of here besides the one that was, well, non-original. Just follow the blood he thought, and did so.

Eating certainly was a trick. When he felt up to it he would drag his way over to the food plates that were hydro-lifted into his room. The food was decent, quite good in fact. He was mostly interested in the liquids, though. Without it there he felt parched. Like a man lost in a desert he thirsted. Slaking his desire with tangible liquids did nothing for his thirst. He needed more than just water. But it wasn't there.

The food came up today, but he didn't look. He was focused on remaining still. When still, the voices ceased.

"Hey, we could, you know, go out and..."

"Shhhhhhh...." he whispered gently. "Shhhhhh". What was left of his upper lip barbled around with the action, flapping like a paper in the breeze. His right eye caught sight of the motion and fixated itself. He blew air again, and watched the chunk of skin twitch. Just barely out of sight, at most he could make out a darkish outline.

His left eye rolled loose in its socket, disorienting his attempts. The optic nerve still worked he knew, he could still see, but the muscles controlling the eye had deteriorated several weeks ago. There wasn't much that wasn't deteriorating. He pissed like a female now, not for lack of musculature control, but rather appendage. A finger or two were gone. The skin was beginning to slough on his chest.

"Not supposed to be like this, al'har. Not supposed to go like this."

He paused in his thoughts on body rot. It had been quite some time since an intelligible thought had come out of the void.

"How is it supposed to be?" he gargled.

Flash of light, glow of blue, giving back to the father. Not the rot. Not the rot. Never the rot.

"The rot. Now I have a name for it. The rot." He giggled slightly. Then coughed, spasming as he did so.

"KILLDESTOY BUU URN AND KILLDE STORY AND BURNNN within the factory that is our mind wemus eat them and file them away and snap their puny little ne The Rot! The Rot! The Rankorbait you hazmadat, shoulda kept on running, shoulda kept running Should Not Have Given In To Opening.







There was another body here. Trevvor wasn't used to this much death. He had been around death a lot before his move to Vinda-Corp, but those bodies were usually not brutally eviscerated all over the wall.

Despite the gore and his churning stomach, the seeming randomness of the slaugher and destruction, Trevvor was looking for a pattern. There was death and destruction everywhere, but there was a relation between the two. He just wasn't seeing it all.

"Body number 29 is humanoid, male, five foot seven, weight ... one-twenty. Musculature is very drawn. Position is quite elongated; that coupled with the blood stains indicate he was dragged after his legs were crushed." Trevvor clicked his dictaphone off. Recording his thoughts weren't necessary, they were even probably against policy. It helped him focus, however, and that's what was required here.

He looked up and around. He didn't know much about demolitions, he wasn't even attempting to analyze the destruction all about him. But if he had to make a guess, it wasn't explosives. Far too ... far too organic for explosives. The movement, the changes in direction, the general feel spoke sentient control. His guess was someone in one hell of an armor suit. That could explain the massive amounts of crushing deaths, but not the re-arrangement of some of the bodies. Backup troops for the armored mech perhaps? He furrowed his brow, and continued on.

There was something here, but he couldn't lay his finger on it. He had to keep moving. By now the authorities would have begun their investigation, and they would most certainly know he was down here. Mytus' security was the epitome of prison security. Rough, tough and brutal. "Onwards and downwards," muttered Trevvor.

"The Rot". He sat there, contemplating the phrase. Now he was sitting up. It had taken some time and considerable effort to accomplish the feat, given that his abdominal musculature was quite emaciated. The voices continued to hammer at him, screaming their babble of incoherency, driving iron stakes into his nasal cavity in an attempt to be heard.

He dismissed them with a wave of a hand, or half of a hand if you so prefer. More fingers were missing than not.

"The Rot," he barbled. "The Rot."

There was a familiarity with the phrase. He had heard it. Another part of him new what it was? Another part... he giggled a bit at the thought. There were parts of him scattered all over the room. A finger there, his reproductive there, a toe over yonder, soon he guessed his jaw would go. It had been feeling a bit loose lately.

But who cared? The voices certainly didn't, and the plate of food had long since stopped speaking with him. Pffft, who needed friends anyway? Not when you had The Rot. The Rot was always there, always working, always comforting. Always constant.

He rolled a loose finger around in his left hand, the hand that still maintained its original condition. He contemplated. The Rot contemplated with him, and The Voices screamed. Somewhere, in the confusion, was an answer.





Trevvor could hear them behind him. Mytus' security teams were working quickly. There was nothing here to suppress, that aided in their speed quite a bit. No prisoners to beat down, no riots to quell -- just bodies to count. Trevvor doubted if they even did that. They were probably most interested in those that moved. Vent hadn't seen anyone moving but himself.

He was standing beneath what could have been called a skylight of sorts. A beam of light shot down from a smooth, almost glass-like hole in the ceiling. Trevvor reached up to touch the hole with wonder. The interior was smooth, as if it had been melted. Outside the hole a spiderweb of hairline fractures etched their way out. The hole was the eye of the storm, sitting exactly center. Vent was sure that his depth couldn't be less than two miles, yet this perfectly straight hole conveyed light as if someone was firing a blaster down it. Either the sun was at its zenith and by some coincidence was lined up perfectly with both the top and bottom of this hole, or ... Trevvor stopped pondering. Things were getting stranger and stranger. He wasn't even sure why he was down here. He was a junior executive at Vinda-Corp, not a crime scene investigator. Hell, his only qualifications were the two years he had put in at the university preparing to be a mortician. Trevvor shook his head and continued on. He shouldn't be here. He should have never taken the call. He had been minutes away from going home to his wife and kids.

The 'tunnel', it truly was a tunnel now, petered out a dozen meters past the strange hole. Once again Trevvor was in a prison block, and once again there were bodies everywhere. But these bodies were different. There was a lot more blood, and far less destruction. He paused to look at a few. The crushing deaths had been bad, very bad, but these were almost inhumane in their precision and efficiency. And brutality. Then he looked again, and almost vomited.

The neat slices, razor-thin cuts, severed limbs and eviscerated bowels were the calling card of only one kind of weapon, and Trevvor was damn sure that a vibroblade couldn't gut a man through duractrete walls.

He contemplated the enormity of his situation. Time had long ago ceased to mean anything to him. There was only sleep, and The Rot. When he ate, chewing his own teeth and some times his own flesh along with his rations, there was The Rot. When he had attempted an excuse for exercise, there had been The Rot. Given that The Rot never slept, never stopped and never left, it could even be said that there was only The Rot. But during his sleep he was pleasantly unaware of The Rot. Sleep was his only reprieve. In his sleep he dreamed, and The Rot was far, far away.

He contemplated. There had been a dream, but he could not remember... could not remember clearly. Perhaps The Rot was making its way into his brain? It would not have surprised him. Perhaps the voices in his head had destroyed his brain? That would not surprise him either -- those damn voices would do anything to make him listen.

The dream confused him. There had been sunshine, lots of sunshine. Grass, a meadow, some blood and a lot of pain. And beautiful sunshine.

He had tried to sleep again, tried to re-dream the dream, but his body refused to enter its natural hibernation state. He had desperately tried to draw upon it, but the void that surrounded him prevented that attempt. There was nothing left but to tolerate The Rot until his body could no longer stay awake.

He rolled his index finger in contemplation. It was mostly bone, and was so smooth and polished. His left hand hardly even missed it. He touched the knuckle, and examined the bone close with his one good eye while his left eye studiously examined the ceiling of its socket. The bone was so dense, so perfectly -- damn it! He swore and lunged into a standing position. The voices screamed at a deafening tone, his movement rousting them from their hiding place deep in his damaged brain. He grunted and stepped forward, tredding upon his spongy feet. His left eye conveniently rolled forward and down, allowing him to both examine the blood trail he was making as well as where he was headed.

Exercise. Exercise. SLEEP! A toe failed to do its thing, and he collapsed. The voices mocked him, and he whimpered. Not all of his nerve connections were dead. Through the voices pain cut like a knife. And through the pain cut a voice.





Trevvor spewed again. A few more heaves and his stomach stilled. Sith! His mind raced. The puzzle lay out now, so very easily. A sith attempt to assassinate the leadership of Vinda-Corp. It fit the evidence like a glove. The destruction, the macabre mutilation of the bodies and now this -- the trademark wounds of the lightsabre. He was going no further. From here on out the Mytus security crews could deal with the problem.

A quick call on his com and he took off again, this time backtracking.

Frell, Sith!