RP:Royal Homunculus

From HollowWiki

Part of the Larketian Fault Lines Arc


Summary: OOC NOTE: All of this is an ic secret. Do not mix ooc and ic knowledge. Muzo asks the Queen to see him urgently. She arrives, a mix of emotions, unsure what to expect and her guesses don't even come close. Due to a freak laboratory accident, her tissue samples have spontaneously combusted into life! The mythical homunculi, it is here, it looks like Josleen, and it's an abomination. The Queen weeps bitterly, terrified that she'll never have a real child, conceived of herself and the King. Muzo assures her hope is not lost, and asks what should be done with the homunculi. After some deliberation, Josleen decides it must be killed and leaves Muzo with the task. He agrees, but perhaps doesn't do it right away...

Secret Royal Laboratory

Muzo had been vague in his note. "Urgent that you see me," and signed simply "Muzo" on the card's reverse. Similarly, no special instructions have been left to the page girl, only that it be delivered to the queen immediately. Should she choose to heed the naga's summons, Josleen will find Muzo in the laboratory, holding a thin pipette of sanguine fluid to the lamplight and studying it through a jeweler's loupe. His setup is noticeably more busy than usual today, crowded with burbling alembics, spiraled condensers, and strange, humming accouterments of utterly arcane purpose. Apart from all this, a glass bell jar stands eerily under a circle of lamplight; it covers a small bowl filled with blood that sporadically stirs and ripples.


Josleen‘s greatest concern (and perhaps her sole concern as in truth being a Queen is quite boring day-to-day) is Muzo’s labor to fix her infertility. She left a meeting with a socialite as soon as she received the letter. Her guard can hardly keep up as she races to the garden, her pace only outdone by her mind which sprints on two tracks: the hopeful and the woeful. Has he made a breakthrough? Will she be able to conceive soon? Did he find an insurmountable obstacle? Will she never be a mother? She dumps the guard at the garden perimeter and takes all the precautions necessary before disappearing below ground into Muzo’s secret (and yet probably not-so-secret by now) laboratory. It’s hard to keep secrets in a fort riddles with eyes and ears. While it’s likely no one knows what Muzo is up to, his slitherings have been noted, as have his routes, and that of the queen’s. There’s talk. “Muzo,” she says as she races down the stairs, her health a 180 flip from where it was just weeks ago. “What is it? Oh please tell me it’s good news.” She shakes her head and corrects. “The truth, the truth will suffice.” Her eyes paw over every detail in the laboratory, her mind already trying to guess. The bell jar catches her attention but she cannot make sense of what she sees. Confusion is a common and natural state when in Muzo’s laboratory.


Muzo double takes when Josleen addresses him. "Your highness," the snake man mirthlessly greets her, and he plucks the loupe from his eye, setting his things down so he may wring his slickly scaled hands. "Wrote for you as soon as I knew," he begins, "which, of course, was already," the same hands split to gesture upward, palms toward the ceiling, eyes to the floor, "too late. Much too late. Impossible," Muzo nods and gesticulates wildly at the queen, "to proceed. Stalled. Ran tests. Naturally, wouldn't move forward, couldn't move anything forward. Impossible without," his face breaks into a pained grimace, and the naga nervously rubs at his snout, twirls a finger, trying to conjure into the conversation whatever he'd surely been leaving out. "Isolated the specimen. Believe it poses no threat. Safer this way." Muzo slithers over to the bell jar and peers in, looking down into the shallow bowl of blood. "The homunculus. Your homunculus." The blood's surface stirs again, and a small, pale hand breaches the surface, groping blindly with tiny human fingers, veins and bones visible beneath the grub-like skin. It couldn't belong to a creature much larger than a mouse.


Josleen‘s heart sinks when she takes in Muzo’s demeanor and opening words. What happened? She feels a pit open in her belly where a baby should be. The word which yanks her out of her pit of despair is ‘specimen’. What? She peers into the bell jar and, once that tiny translucent hand appears, gasps loudly and holds onto her mouth in equal parts terror and joy. “Is that…?” She has never heard the term homunculus before. “Is that my child? …How?” In truth she had hoped to carry the baby to term inside her like all mothers, but perhaps this is the only way for her. “Boy or girl? Can I see it?” The notion that this creation is only made of her tissue, that none of it includes Macon, has not yet occurred to her. “Oh gods, Muzo.” Her eyes begin to glisten and her heart races as she realizes that, as unorthodox as this may be, she may finally have a child of her own.

Muzo makes a very small, cut off sound at Josleen's question, and though he opens his mouth to speak several times, no words come out, not yet. She wishes to see it. To oblige her request, he takes the bell jar in both hands and lifts it away. "More complicated than that," Muzo finally manages. "Fails to meet your criteria. Specimen is not the king's child." Setting down the heavy glass dome, he carefully washes his hands, explaining as he does. "Only yours. Was prepping a sample with a timed exposure to radically generative..." His eyes scrunch shut, and he starts over, articulating more clearly and deliberately than he would ever ordinarily. "Something went wrong while I was working on your tissue. Flesh of your flesh and blood of your blood." After meticulously drying his fingers, Muzo turns and reaches into the bowl, tenderly, ever so gingerly feeling and grasping beneath the bloods opaque surface until, cupped in his interlaced fingers, Muzo lifts the homunculus slowly out. Rotund, translucent, gently throbbing, grasping blindly, roughly the size of an egg and blinking the blood out of its wide-set eyes and smacking long, thin froggish lips, as if gasping for breath.

Josleen‘s mind races with all the possibilities this child presents. Oh, to be a family! She’s weeping happily into her hand as Muzo lifts the bell jar. Finally, she gets to meet her child. She’s already telling Macon in her imagination, and he too, after adjusting for how strange this is, is overcome with joy and moved (maybe) to a single tear. That’s when Muzo confesses it is not Macon’s, but only hers. Her stomach bottoms out into that pit again. She feels the floor drop away. She suffers mild vertigo because her hopes had set her soaring so high and Muzo has now cut her wings. “…What?” She’s breathing irregularly as Muzo pulls the grotesque, frog-like, pale pink abomination out of the blood. She cries out in terror once and flinches away. She stumbles back onto Muzo’s desk, mouth still agape, staring in horror at this freak show. She mouths silent words and asks, “What is this?” Then before Muzo can answer, “Is this all that can be done?” Now Macon’s joy in her mind turns to horror and disgust, like her own. She gathers her wits and strength and approaches the creature in Muzo’s hand. Now she begins to see some of herself in it and her feelings grow complex. “Is this all there is for me?” Her voice pinches as she grapples with what may be her reality. A couple more tears fall.


Muzo would have to continued elaborating, but a cry of fright cuts him off. He holds his tongue, waiting, watching the tiny abomination turn, wriggle, and quiver in his grasp, blood continuing drip as it works its way out of the creature's nose and mouth. Letting the homunculus lay in one hand, Muzo carefully cups some blood up out of the bowl and pours it over the monster, tending it. "Not a child. A homunculus," the alchemist explains. "Commonly brought up in alchemical circles but seldom created, more seldom," his voice lowers in self-reproach and shame, "much more seldom created unintentionally. My fault for not guarding against the possibility. Risk didn't even occur to me." Keep on track, Muzo. Focus on explanations. "The homuculus, here," he lifts it an inch higher in indication, "is not being presented to you, now, as an end or even, for that matter, as progress. Foresee promising results to come," if you don't have him executed, ostracized, or defunded, "but are all unrelated to what you see, here." Muzo raises his eyes, leveling a stare with the queen. "But, since the homunculus is here, and it is yours," cupping another handfull of blood, Muzo dribbles it over the small, round, writhing lump.

Josleen | A homunculus is not a child. Josleen clings to this explanation, for she, an ardent supporter of life, would never condone killing a child, but this? What is this? It is not a child, as Muzo says, but a freak accident, and one that looks in many ways like her child, despite its freakish features. She shudders at its deformities and shuts her eyes. “That’s an abomination.” When she opens her eyes, she is looking away from Muzo and the homunculus. “Get rid of it, end it, and don’t tell the King. Don’t bother him with this stress.” She cups her face with her hand and weeps a little. The stress is all hers. Though her husband has made it clear he does want to shoulder this burden with her, she doesn’t permit him to. She feels that to be a worthy woman and wife, she must resolve it without him and only bring him the good news if and when it arrives. This Herculean task, self-imposed, consumes her. She begins to think about her difficulty conceiving and her future should she fail, and sobs into her hand right there in front of Muzo. For him this is a matter of science and duty, but for her it’s an integral part of her identity and happiness, and each passing day it is unresolved brings her grief.


Muzo begins to sense that Josleen has seen enough, and he carefully lowers the homunculus back into the bowl. Her decision reaches him just as he clutches the towel, wiping himself off, staining the white square red. "You are asking me to kill it." Muzo puts her instructions plainly, risking no ambiguity or confusion about her instructions in the matter. His tone is cautious, his eyes unswerving from the weeping queen, even as he drops the spent towel in a basket of unsanitary refuse. The ethics of the situation are hotly contested, even among experts, and Muzo knows this. He silently wonders how much Josleen knows, how much she even *could* know.


Josleen nods at Muzo’s request for clarification. “Yes…” she sobs. Slowly she comes out of her weeping posture, her face red and wet. All she wants is a baby, for Sven’s sake. What fault does she bear in her parent’s congress? She distracts herself in Muzo’s philosophical bent. “Though is ‘kill’ the right word? Is that even a life? How can it be when it was not conceived as all other living things are conceived?” She shakes her head, sniffles loudly, gasps outwardly. She’s still not alright, but trying to be. Discourse helps. “It’s a freak accident of science, and it’s an aberration in nature. Is it even responsible to let it exist? What if it escaped? Who knows what effects it would have on the environment.”


Muzo sets the bell jar back over the bowl. "It is alive," he straightforwardly confirms. Under any other circumstance, it would have been a perfect opportunity for a lecture. Engaging topic. Audience with a personal connection to the material. Much already understood, and much yet to be discovered. Any other day, he could have babbled for hours. And she's right, who knows? The little specimen was something of a taboo. Though he'd even studied homunculi at the academy, there were to be none of the usual practicals: no vivisection, no labs, not even so much as a preserved specimen. "Doubt anyone knows," he honestly confesses, nodding slowly. "As you wish, your highness. Will take care of it personally." The researcher confirms this with a low bow, posture silent, mind racing.


Josleen doesn’t want to hear that it is alive. She wants to hear that it is an abomination whose extinction is not only recommended, but noble. And thus she pretends to only hear the part she wants to hear, that he will kill it, and she nods stiffly. “Thank you. I… I’ve had a bit of moment there. I don’t suspect I can stay. I trust you’ll handle it without me?” She’s looking for permission to leave. “You say there is still a chance that Macon and I can conceive. I’ll cling to that hope.” He has nothing else to add, she takes her leave.


Muzo is bad at offering platitudes, and he is also bad at comforting the aggrieved. Before he's thought of the right thing to say, Josleen is already gone. The laboratory door shuts, echoing through the lab. Muzo looks to the bell jar. The blood within stirs.