RP:My Snakey Breaky Heart

Part of the The End's Not Near Arc

Part of the Larketian Fault Lines Arc

Summary: Sneks fight. Sneks cry. Snakey Breaky Snek Hearts.

Secret Royal Laboratory

Muzo wastes as little time as he can coordinating the guards, letting Thermond handle them, a competent lieutenant and the assigned chief of lab security ever since the (ahem) unfortunate incident. A great portion of the materials and equipment have been covered with white sheets, and a substantial portion more has been packed into crates stenciled "ARMORY" or "ACADEMY" or "BURN" or otherwise. Muzo, the snake himself, labors in one of the functional corners, tools in hand, sparks and flashes leaping from his high workbench. The researcher has his back to much of the action as Thermond seems to have it under control. In stern-eyed teams, the guards haul the crates up the stairs, out the door, and one by one out of the garden to their assigned places. The civilians of the fort seem to know better than to investigate this particular operation; they give the guards a wary berth.

Reginae sneaks in the Royal gardens, slipping past the heightened security in Larket with ease. Shifting came in handy, in almost every situation and where shifting didn’t work illusions did. The naga that enters through the lush foyer is not smiling per usual. Her lips are pinched in a scowl as she aims her attention on the locked door, invisible to all the guards moving crates. Pilar’s description of the scene had been grim. The wretched smell of decay inside the lab. A woman with her insides exposed, pumped full of some potions that kept her alive. Who knew if she was spared the agony of air or pain sensations? It’s likely if left to endure the traumatic pain, she would have perished long ago. Regi hadn’t seen the woman. Didn’t know who she was, but she knew Pilar’s account had disturbed her. She’d refuted the charges. Muzo has standards and ethics, she’d declared to the Queen of Frostmaw. Her ally. Their ally. White locks danced in the shadows as she shook her head and scuffed quietly with disgust, azurite eyes scanning for Muzo as she slipped past the guards that hover inside the door. How did she talk to him? She waits with silent breathes until the last squad of guards load up their particular parcel and depart. If the chamber is empty, save for herself and Muzo, Regi will slam and lock the lab door before pulling back her invisibility illusion to reveal herself. Her hand is pressed firmly against the back of the door and her eyes are dark with assumptions.

Muzo sighs with gratitude as the door slams overhead. All the busy guards have been a necessary evil, and in many ways, they have served to further diminish Muzo sense of control. The sanitary, lingering smell of lye is still sharp on the air, there are several spots on the barren stone walls that are visibly dark with moisture, yet to dry from their recent washing. The laboratory seems much, much larger than it had this morning. Muzo sets down his tools and turns, and he discovers Reginae. He does not jump. "You can come down." Though the tidy, sterile stone interior does not match Pilar's description, one thing certainly does. Half of Muzo's face is missing, an unnaturally tidy display of clean bones, exposed muscles and ligaments that all end neatly, scales resuming abruptly at the injury's edges. The eye socket, empty, is affixed with several metal studs and brads that are evidently fastened to the bone itself. "Caught me by surprise."

The smooth opalescent scales of her tail glide down the stone steps silently. Her face is still pinched in the anger she clung to. Let it be a lie, her eyes pleaded as darkness gave way to the scientist and his injuries. Her first instinct is to let the anger fall out of her clenched palms like a wet soap. It’s so easy to let it fall and forget it had ever existed. It would be so easy to greet him as usual, to look into his inky eyes - urm, eye and tell him they’d find a way to repair the damages. Science was costly, she knew. She couldn’t have known it would cost this much. “I could say the same…” She replied dryly, waiting in the silence for him to refuse the knowledge brought to her. “What was in the jar…?” She added cooly, lids lowered to only show half her eyes. It’s clear she’s keeping as much distance between them as possible, for fear his nearness would change her mind about her anger and make her doubt herself.

Muzo makes a face, but it's difficult to tell his intention--without all his parts, the subtle expression is indecipherable. "Be advised," he raises a finger a points, cautiously, at the door above, "you can't be found here, or it will be terrible trouble for us both." The jar? Reginae's question earns a lopsided scrunch that she can probably interpret: confusion. Tail undulating behind him, Muzo begins slithering toward her, carefully laying a single finger over the tip of his snout. Once he is a little closer (presuming he can get closer), Muzo continues in a lower tone. "Homunculus is safe, if that's what you're worried about. Care is arranged. Jar will not be discovered."

“I’m aware of the danger.” She replies diplomatically, shifting her gaze to meet his. Reginae swallows the lump in her throat as he advances, unprepared. The Homunculus...She scuffs. That wasn’t what she meant. Azurite scans his face. Is there regret? Is there justification in what he’s done? Does he not feel shame for torturing people? For stealing the bodies of those wrongly killed and denying their innocent families peace? Does he not deny it? Could he really at this point? The questions that rattle around in her mind are endless. They don’t have time to answer them all. “I’m worried about you...and what happens next.” She whispers, squinting her eyes in the dim light. "So tell me what happens now."

Muzo angles his head, favoring his remaining eye to study her and partially obscuring his unsightly disfiguration. Her questions prompt a thoughtful flick of his tongue as great ponderous gears roll withing his mind. "How much do you know?" It's a whisper, rather as though he had mused it aloud without even addressing her. Reaching up, he lightly, indicatively touches the studs and brads in his eye socket, turning this time so she can see them more clearly. "Nearly complete. A lot of work, paying off already." Turning, he glides away, swimming easily across the cellar floor to return to his workbench. Muzo holds something up, but the lab is long,and it isn't entirely obvious. "Just applying finishing touches. Believe it will suffice. Could have had it ready sooner if I'd known you were coming." He turns it, and a ruby-hued glimmer shows from within. It is a faceplate complete with prosthetic eye, an elaborate prosthesis of many interlocking, overlaying parts with a featureless red eye to match, not in hue but at least in superficial dimensions, his remaining natural counterpart. Turning his back to Reginae, he picks up his tools. "Only a moment, truly." The sparks and flashes resume.

Reginae shakes her head with disbelief, her voice devolving into a jagged hiss as she turns away from him incredulously to shake her head. She can’t look at his face, see the proof painted so blindly in his injuries and tone. Her lithe fingers flex into tight fists, fingernails biting into her palms while she tries to dig deep into her well of patience. She huffs, disgusted at herself for defending him to Hildegarde. For being blinded by her emotions to ignore all the warning signs. The homunculus in the bell jar of blood, the secrets he couldn’t share with her. Damn him. “Muzo!” She hisses as she spins back around, advancing to pull him away from what he’s doing with the face plate and sparks. “I don’t give a damn about that.” But she did. Oh how she did. “Is what PIlar told me true or not? Tell me.”

Muzo resist Reginae's tugging, arms stretching as he leans with her urging, adamant on finishing his present sparkstroke before relinquishing his precious scribe-shaped instruments. The fall to the bench with a clatter, and he rounds on her impatiently, cold anger evident in what's left of his face. "Pressing me for answers when I don't know they question. Asking me for recounting of state secrets I'm not at liberty to give. Desperately trying to salvage what remains of the operation, including confidentiality, and you ask for vague answers?" His arms spread wide, and he floats backward on his tail. "My laboratory, welcome. Still recovering from a saboteur's attack. Trust you'll forgive the present state. Will have to restructure operations, naturally. Suffered setbacks."

Reginae paused, squinting and taken aback by his rough reply. What happened to the docile curious man she’d known him to be? Something was -wrong- but she can’t reign her frustration in enough to put her finger on it. Instead she draws back her arms to her side, crossing her chest and standing with an obstinate posture atop her tail. “Did you torture witches under Larketian orders? Did you torture witches? Did you have some witch hooked up to a machine that kept her alive while her body was open to the air? Did you attack Pilar? Did you hoard dead bodies of people for experimentation? What is wrong with you?” The questions seem endless, she’s spouting them off at infinitum, her lips curled against her teeth in quiet agony. “Why didn’t you tell me? Why did you put yourself in danger? I could have done something. I could have protected you. I could have done -something-.”

Muzo inhales a breath, readying himself to answer, but every time his lips part, they continue tumbling at him. Frustration curls his scaly lips, revealing his fangs. "Reginae. Reginae. Enough. Enough!" With this last, his face contorts in a spirited snarl, prompting him to hiss and shudder in pain, his body recoiling as his hands reach for his face. Quickly, he pulls his touch away, blood on his fingers, and he slithers over a sheet, whipping the fabric off to reveal a cabinet beneath which he throws open and hastily rifles through. "Hsst. Hsst!" In a moment, he's got some gauze and balm, and he applies this to the freshly opened tear in the exposed tissue of his cheek. "Have performed autopsies on several specimens and a vivisection on one specimen," Muzo pants through his words, tilting his head back as he talks. "Was set to release the live specimen a couple days prior. Procedure was very invasive, underestimated recovery time. Had complications, setbacks, needed to keep her alive, yes." Shaking his head, he gestures vaguely, fingers splayed. "Pilar and the... other one broke in, took her. Can only hope she's survived."

Reginae is silent while Muzo explains, hissing at her to cease her endless questions. This isn’t Muzo. She gritted her teeth and groaned, bending at the waist with her arms laced against her stomach. The heavy silence that creeps in is split as she groans, her humanoid face bursting like a mask around the seam of her jawline so a opalescent scaled snout appeared where her lips and teeth had been. Slowly the skin beneath her eyes bubbles up to reveal scaled cheeks and eyes of pure azurite, no pupils to spoil their undiluted luminosity. Her hands lift to shield her face from view,ashamed, she whimpers. No one had ever seen her like this. How fitting that he can take one last secret with him when he goes. He did this. “You betrayed me!” She bellows, letting the rest of the humanoid skin around her false jaw line, neck, torso and arms fall away in the horrifying display of shifting until she’s pure scales and beady blue eyes, snout to tail. Her serpentine brow is furrowed as she continues to accuse him at a heart wrenchingly low volume. “After all the work I’ve done to convince people that we are worth trusting. All the work -we’ve- done to fight against Jaize, the Time Leech...” Her eyes are burning into him mercilessly. “And you turn usssss back into MONSTERSSSS! And for what, Muzo!?!” The length of her endless tail sweeps to the side, not aimed for him but aimed at the clean laboratory floor, to thud it’s muscular weight into the stone below. The ground shutters, the fringes of her eyes begin to fill in with an inky black. The stone and dirt beneath where they stand clefts, bowing to her force in a spider web of cracks below the point of impact. “We were sssssssupposed to be partnerssss and you LIED TO ME!” Her voice is thick, throat coated by misery and cynicism. Her ghostly hair fans out, like a cobra’s hood and she hisses at him in poisoned annoyance while her fangs protrude through her lips. There’s a modicum of pain hidden underneath her abundant anger.

Muzo pulls the gauze briefly away to check the bleeding and, in that moment, catches a glimpse of Reginae as he'd never seen her before. He double takes, but she's covering her face, and he feels the dribble of blood running down his jaw to stain his lips, quickly prompting the gauze to return. Betrayal? How? Turning where he "stands", Muzo's eye finds Reginae just in time to bear the brunt of her diatribe. "Shh!" He warns her at the tail's first thundering crack, but it's too late. Stones shatter, the ground shakes. "When did I lie?" Muzo rebuts. "You haven't a clue what goes on here," he leans in, forgetting his blood as he drops the gauze, rearing nose-to-nose with Reginae, her misery and indignation serving only to exacerbate his own. "I've gotten closer to the crown than any biped in this whole city, and you accuse me of dishonoring our race? Ksst! No trust in my judgement, no faith in my loyalty?" High above, atop the stairs, the lock clicks.

Reginae hears the lock click, in the back of her mind knows what it means but something else has taken the lead on her actions and thoughts. Something more primal and destructive. “And whose side do you take when forced to choose? Because by keeping me in the dark, you are putting me at risk with my allies in Frostmaw and putting all naga at risk as word of this spreads! If you had trusted me with this instead of hiding it from me, I could have done something to help you. Now it’s too late.” She repeats, the black fading back from her eyes as her hair lies flat against her back. Their snouts bump together and she recoils. “Don’t be so damned selfish!!” she hisses, brow furrowed with desolation as foot falls find the stone stairs above. By the time anyone shows up in the stairwell, Reginae will appear to have vanished and Muzo will be the only one left in the room.

Muzo is showing some fang of his own, tinged red, and his tail writhes anxiously. Her next words make his swallow, and he opens his mouth to interrupt her, only to discover that no words come. Somewhere, she's struck a certain nerve at last, something other than mere frustration. "I should have told you." It's all he has time to say. The guards are peering in, and Muzo is alone, bloodied and tearful. "Leave me!" He lashes at them, his tail whipping around to crack a violent warning against the floor. "Leave me!" Guards exchange a look and, with little hesitation, afford the aggrieved snake his dignity.