THE CONTENTS OF THE CAPTION IS ONLY RELEVANT TO WHAT IS WRITTEN BELOW, AND BOTH ARE FROM THE VIEWPOINT OF THE NARRATOR. I DO NOT HATE TRANSFORMATIONAL ARTISTS AND I APPRECIATE THEIR WORK.
My knowledgeable correspondent called me and told me “to witness a justice served”. He is pretty much fixated on those abusing their transformative powers, as a part of his detective work investigating all those underground transformation ability-users and above-ground communities. I’m more familiar with transgender stuff, and when he told me the whole process will be much of my interest I immediately hopped onto my car, following him.
One of the safe houses his team has is large enough to hold a chamber for interrogating the captured. Well, this time, he told me, is a serial transformation abilities user who had a particularly notorious record of randomly zipping hapless victims far-away, with a wide range of the ways and end results he had used and done. So incredible, describing them will fill a whole volume.
His arms were tied to the back, blindfolded and gagged. His body was sedated and barely moving. “Move him off to that large glass tank,” he instructed me to help while untying the knot behind the chair. Even in a coma, we still felt the warmth and wobbling weight of the “convict”. The tank had no water but filled almost to the brim with a kind of sugar cube-like salt. The chamber was dim, but the salt still glittered and illuminated the place mildly, flashing like a rainbow, and with a slight gem-like translucence. I might had seen it somewhere before…
Stepping up to the right level, he then told me, “Leave him here”, eyeing the small platform tied to chains. We were careful not to touch the pool of crystal. He lowered the chains and sank the body below the unnatural prisms. The salt swallowed that body like quicksand, sucking and burying the body in, radiantly shining wherever the flesh was touched. “He’s done, get ourselves a drink”, he signaled.
A while later we were back in the chamber, slipping from small flasks of beer. “You’ll see what I mean by “a punishment worse than death sentence”. He raised the platform, much lighter than a medium-build man should be. The body’s hands were still tied, the blindfold and tape were still there, barely moving. But who was it, the one he captured certainly had no soiled safari hat, not the two bright feathers almost falling out? Not the clothing either, the dull red shirt and shorts he had. And I couldn’t even tell if that was a boy or a girl (not even the wimp I just saw), androgynous dark hair and a childish figure. They’d fit into the surrounding wilderness, maybe complete with a blank memory and eagerness to explore the woods. Black gloves and a backpack, make no mistake! The punished was gone, but not so much.
“Incredible! What were you thinking when you bought this tank of transformative crystals? And you are simply using this on him?”
“Ever seen Jurassic Park? Those nearly magical crystals are from a similar facility, partly open as a safari to tourists, off the coast of Japan out of business a few years ago. They used to have loads of wildlife there, trying to experiment with this substance. Something catastrophic happened and the facility was abandoned, nay, destroyed.”
“How does that substance end up here?”
“Some miners are willing to be paid lucrative wages to be on the archipelago, mining them at the threat of unknown mutated wildlife there.”
“Well…” That account wasn’t barely coherent. Maybe he had better contacts in the deep, being more of animate transformation man than myself, but a mineral that’s guaranteed to be more highly priced than diamond for the same woes my correspondent condemned? What was he, another of the transformational predators… on the top of the food chain?
“Well… I just can’t swallow what you have just done. Quite unethical to be blunt”. I told him.
“You haven’t seen the real power of this crystal. You will see what will be done next to compensate the animalized victims.” He signaled me again to remove the tank, the body resting on top of the pool. I couldn’t hesitate, his eyes already sternly focused on my torso.
“As you want.”
Out in the woods, he suddenly kicked over and threw half of the contents of the tank over the patch of grass, the body bumping out. “Oh hey! What are you really thinking?” “You haven’t seen the full potential of this starry sand. In a week some girls right out of the undergrowth will roam here, and I will do a service for the lost.”
I couldn’t even muster my courage to stare at this fiend. I quickly speeded away from the safe house, with only an excuse and farewell, and back into my driver’s seat.
What was the worst that has happened after I left?
A raccoon searched through the leaves and branches for something. It wandered around, almost aimlessly, until it saw a rough, glowing outline of a heap. It quickly sneaked towards the pile, where a cover-like and cloud-colored thing rolled off.
A treasure?
(If you look at the name of the image file or the tags I have already given the game away.)
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