Chapter Text
There is a researcher, a guard, and a General who wears medals he earned, not from honor or from heroic acts but from blood, this is The Ant Farm, where all sorts of creatures and beings are sent to. Either for experimentation, exploitation, or termination, perhaps a mix of all three, perhaps a mix of just two, perhaps they put someone in a cell to kill his humanity and any hopes for it.
They go through hallways, the black-haired, brown-eyed researcher that is Dr. Margaret Yu fixes her glasses, she recently got a new assignment, she does not know what, she is scared to find out. She has heard rumors of what is in the cell, from a son of Typhon to Cthulhu, but like a good researcher does, she continues. Each door leads deeper into more sterile rooms, more blank rooms, each room with more security, more locks, and cameras.
Finally, she sees a pure white sterilization room and in the middle is a smaller room about the same size of a small walk-in closet, it is completely made of glass and in the corner with what looks to be a person or something resembling a person, green and red hair comes from it and covers the body and the floor, the bloodied fungal crown rest on its head having been burned with what looks like some sort of anti-bacterial gas but over time not just at once. There is cobweb like wisps of the creature around it in various forms of fight and flight, but what Yu sees first is the black arrow that seems to come somewhere within the thing and protrudes out, the arrow seems unreal in a way, like it should not exist in this plane of existence.
She looks at how the creature shakes and shivers, how it stays hunched in the corner trying to keep its space. She sees how much pain the poor thing is in. General Honey speaks “Well darlin’ this is your new work, research em’, document em’ and hey, if he gets too rowdy just sterilize the bastard yeah? Shouldn’t be too much of an issue for a woman, hell he’s been here since 2009, after the first year of fixin’ he has been as docile as a doll.”
Then the creature slams his full body weight against the glass, the boom vibrates throughout the room. The guard points his gun at it and General Honey quickly presses a button then all at once Ethylene Oxide gas pours in from the floor of the glass room. As it fills up the small room, she can hear an inhuman scream and once the gas leaves she sees another cobweb husk where he once was, he is now on the other side of the room trying to make himself smaller as his crown is even more in ruin, drops of blood comes from it staining it’s hair.
General Honey knocks on the box and the creature flinches “See? Told ya. He is harmless.” He lets out a laugh. “Also don’t worry about the gas, it’ll disperse ever so often on its own, but you know, sometimes they need just a bit of extra helping to stay in line.”
Dr. Yu nods looking down trying to disguise her disgust “What is his name, I um just want to know what I am working with?” The General gets too close to her for her own liking, but she does not dare to mention it, “He is 527 and apparently the guy is one of The Horsemen, I think they said Pestilence or something’ like that. So hey, hope you paid attention in bible school HA!”
He turns to walk out of the room and then looks back at her.
“Whelp I will leave ya to it sweet cheeks, remember, research, see if the thing is more useful to us than it is leading on, and if it can be weaponized in our war against strangeness!”
The General leaves, taking the guard with him and she is left alone with the creature? Horseman? She is not fully sure what to think. The doors shut and she is truly left alone with him, the cameras are on and she knows this, but she also knows that unless they have detected a reason to, they will not capture audio. She knows this because she has worked here her entire professional career and knows the tech well enough.
She tries to see the horseman’s face, but she cannot see his eyes through all the hair but does manage to see one white dot among the darkness that follows her slight movements, after 5 minutes of it tracking every movement, it just stops and they are at a standstill. She looks at the web-like husk and how they still show features of a body, a thin, hungry body, it is almost like tragic pieces of artwork in its own way...
After 30 minutes of not doing anything, she decides to break the silence. and in her most friendly voice speaks, “Hello, my name is Dr. Margaret Yu, I will be studying you until well, they move me to a new unit.” Which is hopefully not anytime soon she hopes, she is tired of them moving her from unit to unit having to see those poor creatures getting hurt in new ways.
There is a beat of silence and then a voice comes from the creature, young and tired, his voice is torn up, it does not sound like something that belongs to such a being that is the powerhouse that is Pestilence, “John, … It is John Ryder.” The voice cracks and breaks at the end as though it is manually having to speak each word in a way that she can hear. She is simply happy to hear him speak though and to have a name too! That is amazing! That is...exciting
Dr. Yu smiles, “I thought it was Pestilence.” She can’t help but give a slight smile.
“……both.”