Creations Beautiful and Wondrous: Falling

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In Kyrgyzstan, Nathan and Angelo go looking for an explanation behind some of the unusual events in the town where the Elpis group is staying. Not unexpectedly, they run into trouble - but of what sort?


"I swear to God I ought to have locked you in the chaikhana," Nathan grumbled, not at all pleased to have Angelo tailing him down the street. He'd been lying in wait outside the door of the guest house, and hadn't taken no for an answer. As if it was actually that coincidental that he 'happened' to be outside for a smoke just as I was leaving. "Dom didn't make herself a pain in the ass when I told her I was going out."

"I don't believe you", Angelo said calmly, matching him pace for pace. "Dom, let you go off quietly if she thought somethin' fun was goin' to happen?"

"Yes!" Nathan said, a little too loudly. A couple of the locals digging in the abandoned dump directly across the road looked up at the sound, their expression mildly curious at best before they went back to their hunt for scrap metal. Their minds were dulled, numb in a way that put Nathan on edge. There weren't people dying in the streets here in Mailuu-Suu, but the damage this town was doing to its inhabitants was just slower, and less visible. "She knows how to do as she's told," he muttered. "I can tell her 'stay', and she'll stay. You ought to take notes."

"You'd make me stay if you really wanted to", was the cheerful response.

"Oh, was that an invitation to throw you over my shoulder and go dump you back with the girls?" Nathan asked, looking as if he was already plotting out just how he would do that. "Maybe I can promise Monet a raise if she sits on you."

"No, it was pointin' out if you wanted to, you'd have done it already." He glanced back at the house. "I'll pay for her next pair of shoes if you try it."

Nathan shot him a quizzical look. "Is that supposed to be a threat?" he asked, more irritably than anything else. It wasn't that he actively didn't want Angelo along, he'd just... hoped for some quiet time by himself. To wander the streets and see if he didn't stumble across something that might help explain what was going on.

It wasn't unusual to see popular religions developing in depressed areas. Nor was it unusual to see a range of unusual symptoms in reaction to long-term radiation damage when these people were living in the midst of multiple uranium dumps. But these cult members were demonstrably much more unhealthy than the rest of the town, and while he wasn't a doctor, being married to one had let him listen to that woman from Doctors Without Borders and recognize that she was right and there was something odd happening. It was just a pity that she hadn't managed to convince any of the Kyrgyz authorities of the same. Although I suppose if they cared about what happened to this town, things in general wouldn't be as bad as they are.

"Nah, just a counter-bribe that beats yours." He was looking a little uncertain, suddenly. "But if you really didn't want me along..."

Nathan just made a face at him, and thinned out his shields. Which were already too thin.

Angelo still didn't look altogether happy, but he was still trailing along. "So you're out t'figure out this cult a bit better?" he ventured after a while in silence.

"I don't know that I really have much hope that I can, or whether it's anything that we could do anything about if I do... but if I get any more information at all, it might at least be helpful to Doctor Keats." Nathan grimaced. "Might as well try and do something of general use. Rather than pretending our narrow little constituency is the only one who needs help here."

"Yeah, there aren't that many mutants around here", Angelo said quietly, gazing around at the few people in eyeshot. "Shame we can't justify settin' somethin' up ourselves to help them all."

"I try to tell myself that various organizations have their roles and specialties," Nathan said, "and that we'd all be overstretched and running out of funding if we tried to do everything. But it doesn't really help." He gestured at the river as it came into view. "When even their water is poison..."

"I don't s'pose fundin' them to move away would do much good", was the tentative suggestion. "Nowhere any better for them to go."

"Any capable government would be considering exactly that response," Nathan said. "But, well... this is the former USSR. Goes without saying that they do not have their house in order." He shrugged unhappily. "We'll do what we can to help the mutants who are stuck here, try and resettle the younger ones out. Every little bit helps."

"Think we can justify helpin' more people to the board if it's the mutants' families?" Angelo asked. "Got to be worth a try."

"Well, we're hardly going to split up families," Nathan said. "Not that many of our potential candidates have much in the way of family." He sighed. "People die early around here."

"Then we get them to lie. Claim anyone they want to take along as family." It was for a good cause, and it would hardly be the first time it'd been done.

"I'm very fond of you for your idealism, but forging travel documents doesn't help if we don't have the resources to resettle a sizeable number of people," Nathan said. It was a sign of how far he'd come that he was able to concede that. Elpis had deep pockets, but not that deep.

"We could work with the other organizations around here?" Angelo suggested, more hopefully than confidently. "Pool our resources, if we don't have enough on our own."

"We have a charter, Angelo. If we don't stick to it, we become less effective."

That got a faintly mutinous look and a muttered, "Don't see us bein' very effective here."

"I suppose this is where I think wistfully about being twenty-one and idealistic again. Except, you know, my twenty-one was very different than your twenty-one." There was no real edge in Nathan's voice; he couldn't be annoyed at Angelo for chafing at the restrictions under which they worked, even if he was being stubbornly persistent about it.

"I'm takin' my idealism late", Angelo informed him with something like defiance.

--

"Something very odd's going on in there," Nathan muttered. There had been nothing remarkable in the town itself, but he'd caught a telepathic whiff of something outside the boundaries of Mailuu-Suu proper that had drawn his attention. Following the trace had led him and Angelo to what looked like an abandoned mine building, maybe five minutes outside town. It was very dark and very quiet out here.

Angelo looked at the building dubiously but not really questioning Nathan's word. "I can't hear anythin' in there. Where?"

"Inside." But it was very quiet. Like there were minds in there, distinct patterns, but not... quite. He'd never encountered anything quite like it. "There are-" Nathan stiffened slightly as two dark forms came around the side of the building. His eyes narrowed as he reached out with his mind, projecting a suggestion that they didn't need to check the west side of the building, that no one would think of approaching from that direction.

Angelo glanced sharply sideways as he caught the figures in his peripheral vision, tensing automatically for a fight... then relaxing as the men just turned and walked back the way they'd come. "Guards?" he asked quietly.

"Apparently," Nathan murmured, then moved out into the open, heading for the building. There was a door there, locked securely but not resistant to his TK. It led into what looked like some sort of storage room, lined with shelves of... all kinds of things, Nathan thought bemusedly. "This is someone's hoard," he said.

Angelo had followed him, and now started walking carefully and quietly along one of the shelves, studying its contents. "I know what this is", he said slowly. "I've seen places like it before, full of stuff just like this. I'd bet you anythin' all this is stolen."

Nathan sighed, running a hand over neatly stacked piles of currency, of several different varieties. Even American, he noticed. "So we spend hours walking around and wind up finding a gang of thieves. Although they seem to be having some sort of a meeting out there," he said, keeping his voice low as he thinned out his shields and reached out to scan the minds he was sensing in the rest of the building. Clearer, up close like this, although the patterns were strange. "It's just very-"

Odd, he meant to say. But before he could, his eyes glazed over and his knees buckled. He hit the floor like a sack of potatoes, if perhaps not quite so loudly.

Angelo jumped as Nathan collapsed, then the next moment he was kneeling to check the older man's pulse. Finding it steady and apparently quite healthy, he looked up in the direction of 'out there'. There didn't seem to be much he could do for Nathan in this room, but maybe he could find out and stop what was going on elsewhere in the building.

Unfortunately, this was not to be. When he stepped out of the storeroom into the main part of the warehouse, he had just enough time to take in the crowd of unconscious bodies - and the one conscious occupant - before his eyes rolled up and he joined them on the floor.