The Mantis Corruption - Book Three - 4. Chapter 4 - Olona, Part One

Within the township of Tuilii la Ru, one block of warehouses served as the training facilities for the organic mechanics. Olona was an apprentice, but she was acutely aware that she had already surpassed her teachers. She felt like her masters were holding her back, though she would never voice those thoughts, at least not until the arduous process of training was eventually completed.

Olona wanted to be a healer. She considered the Demifae practices to be quackery, and that mystics dabbled in things that ought not to be dabbled.

Meanwhile, here I am, she thought, hacking apart a corpse on the orders of a master who’s barely scratched the surface of the subtleties of physiological manipulation.

Tuilii la Ru was the northernmost suburb of the grand metropolis that made up the capital city of Ruburge. In the heart of the city, life was exuberant and boisterous, but the northern region felt too old-fashioned to Olona. There were very few activities for youths outside the city limits, but the only organic mechanic apprenticeship facility was in Tuilii la Ru.

The technologies and practices of the organic mechanics were originally created by biological architects of the Oselian Empire. They developed skills in manufacturing replacement body parts and prosthetics that were unlike anything developed in all of the history of humanity’s advanced achievements.

Early in Olona’s childhood, she learned about the techno-healers, and a healthy obsession with their practices began to grow in her. Long before she was old enough to submit herself for evaluation as an apprentice candidate in the program, she was already practicing the old art. Any injured or dead creature that young Olona came across in the city streets, or found floating in the shallows along the banks of the mighty river were subjects of her early experimentations, and Olona was talented.

Her first major success was a dog that had lost one of its eyes. Olona was 7 years old at the time. The beast was just a mutt who lived on the street, and its injury was from long before Olona began to interact with it. After several months of feeding the dog, she managed to train it to eat out of her hands. During that time, she also collected all the required parts and fashioned the crude optical replacement. She built it at her parents’ kitchen table.

When it was finished, she found the dog and sat on the curb to feed it a meal. Olona patted its head several times while it was eating, then she slipped the replacement eyeball into her hand and brushed it over the dog’s eyebrow. Little Olona stood up and stepped back, in case the dog reacted with aggression, but her design on the old Oselian technology was flawless. Even though the device was rudimentary, it entered the dog’s orbital socket, and the animal did not flinch or yelp in pain. It simply stopped chewing, blinked both its eyes, and looked around in surprise. Olona approached it with a handful of food, and the mutt happily continued to eat.

Over the next several years, she managed to repair many damaged animals. A frog’s broken leg was mended. Two cats that had clawed each other to pieces were also healed with her technological creations. She even fixed a fellow child’s broken finger without requiring a splint.

At 14, Olona was accepted as an apprentice. Her parents were never thrilled by her fascination with organic mechanics, but they allowed their child to leave home and stay with the other apprentices to follow her dream.

However, the years of training dragged for Olona in frustrating monotony. By 17, she was already more skilled than her masters. Olona was adept at repairing or replacing almost any guild-approved part of the human body. She was also involved in an advanced research project that focused on the blood corruption disease.

There was a growing number of organic mechanics in the Tuilii la Ru region, but she was one of the very few women among them, and Olona often felt awkward around the men. Wasting her time on any of them held no interest for her; she would have liked friendship, but she hated the way the men treated her as inferior for being a woman.

One of Olona’s daily responsibilities included practice on cadavers, but those experiments felt like a waste of time to her. She did not understand why the apprentices needed to keep practicing techniques on corpses when they were already performing the same techniques on living patients.

Olona knew that she could not take the additional three years of training that was required for acceptance into the guild, and she was already preparing to abandon her apprenticeship. She knew that she would need to, eventually. Olona did not have a formulated plan, but she had begun to make preparations to leave. Her skills were already to the level that she could have gone out into the world and developed new healing technologies for people.

But that’s just not how we OMs do things, she thought in frustration.

There were no organic mechanic centers anywhere else in the city. Their practices were not accepted by the masses, not like those of the Demifae.

Why people trust the esoteric arts over tried and true technology, I just do not know.

There was a major Demifae neighborhood in Ruville that was called the Cauldron, and they dealt with a majority of the injured and infirmed.

They can keep their spells, she thought.

Many of her days were spent in similar frustrations.

A few weeks before her 18th birthday, Olona was already fulfilling most of the orders that her direct superiors received. She spent her evenings building intricate replacement body parts for the few injured folks of the river lands who preferred metal to magic.

Olona’s final day in the apprenticeship program arrived when she was not expecting it. She awoke that morning as if it was any other morning, and after she donned her robes and apron, she headed outside and down toward the warehouse workshop.

A trio of masters met her in the street.

“It has come to our attention,” one of them stated before Olona could even greet them, “that you have performed sacred corruption upon yourself.”

“You are guilty,” the second declared, “and your punishment will be severe.”

“Come with us now,” commanded the third, “and face our wrath with the dignity of…” before he could finish, Olona’s quick mind considered several variables, and she interrupted him.

“Fuck that!” she replied in a squeakier voice than she intended, and she launched herself away from the three masters.

They were shocked.

In an instant, Olona was down the street and around the corner from them. She heard their screams of “traitor” and “villain” and “freak” fading behind her.

Before the end of her second year, Olona began to regularly break one of the cardinal rules of her training, in secret. She enhanced parts of herself that did not need healing. There were a few organic mechanics whose past injuries had been healed with their own living machines that now dwelt inside of them, but the practice of self-enhancement was strictly forbidden. They called it sacred corruption. Olona did not do it as a form of rebellion, and she knew it would get her expelled from the order, but she thought it was a peculiar prohibition and one that she could not abide.

Her first act of sacred corruption, although she did not think of her enhancements in those terms, happened late one night after fixing an older man’s injured leg. When she was complete with the repair, she tested his limb and realized that it was much stronger than before her treatment. Once alone, Olona repeated the process on both of her own legs. It gained her the ability to run as fast as a horse.

During the nights, she tested the mechanics that she gave herself. She was always cautious, but she was also aware that what she was doing would likely lead to serious consequences. Olona managed to give herself more enhancements than she expected before being caught, and several of them provided her with significant advantages over those who now pursued her.

Olona knew that it was only a matter of time before someone found out what she was doing. She was also aware that she was already outperforming her teachers and ready to leave them behind. Olona was not arrogant, but her success bolstered her confidence.

While in her apprenticeship, everything she needed for her practice was right at her fingertips. Each component that was required for creating the machines used to heal people was stored in a well-stocked organic mechanic warehouse. Over her few years in the city, Olona built connections with a few shady people who she hoped would be able to provide her with the gear that she would now need to acquire elsewhere.

“Fuck those old reptiles,” she said between breaths, as she raced into her home to grab the escape bag she kept hidden in the front hall closet. The strap was slung on her shoulder and she was out the door again in a matter of seconds.

Olona was sick of her apprenticeship, sick of her talents going unrecognized, sick of her small-minded masters, sick of barely making a difference when people everywhere were suffering, and most of all Olona was sick of being inhibited by those who were in control.

Her parents still lived in their home to the south of the greater Ruburge area, in the river village of Mellini. Olona suspected that her boredom in that quiet little backwater may have contributed to her creativity, and she did not intend on returning to Mellini anytime soon.

The urban sprawl of Ruburge stretched out from its center and merged with the three suburbs that surrounded it. Olona ran with unnatural speed down quiet streets through one neighborhood after another, until she was at the edge of the Ruburge city limits. She did not want to draw attention to herself and slowed her pace when she reached an area where more people were present.

There was a hostel that she regularly passed on her numerous trips into the city for the masters, and although the sign read NO VACANCIES, Olona stopped there first.

“I know you’re full up,” she said to the man behind the counter, “so can you recommend another cheap spot, maybe in the Ruville region?”

“Corner of 58th and Mantol streets, a place called Riverbends,” the man replied without looking up at Olona.

Outside on the street again, she checked the signs. They indicated that she was at the intersection of Tankarl and 17th avenues. The roads that were labeled with the designation of street rather than avenue were clear across the city, and that was just where Olona wanted to go.

The most direct route to Ruville from where she was would take her straight through the heart of the city. Her main alternate path would be to follow the curve of the river all the way. Olona considered zigzagging through the neighborhoods, but she worried that she might get lost or turned around.

She could have arrived in the region of Riverbends in a matter of minutes if she was using her internal machines, but she walked at the same pace as the other pedestrians. It took Olona almost an hour to reach Ruville, and before she located the hostel that the man recommended, she decided to stop at a pub for a drink and a smoke and maybe even some food.

“The Goat’s Maw?” she read from the sign in a curious voice. The entrance’s handle was a ram’s horn nailed to the door. Olona pulled it open.

Above the bar straight ahead of her was a taxidermy goat head with its mouth wide open. The tavern was crowded, with many folks enjoying a late breakfast or an early lunch.

Olona approached an empty stool, planted herself in it, and she lit a joint.

She took a puff as a barmaid asked, “Whot’ll it be, luv? Ooh, don’t that just smell lovely!” she added.

Olona smiled and nodded. “I’d be very pleased with a half-pint of bitters, and that crispy bacon over there,” she added, pointing at another customer’s plate, “looks mighty good. I’d take a hardboiled egg and a few strips of that.”

Outside the Goat’s Maw, a shrill bell started to ring✪