The retrieval of one of the current threats straight from the ice of Ishgard was a bittersweet victory for Sylvanius and her augmented kin. At the same time, a looming presence of doubt hung over all of them, confused about the layout of the events, and realizing much of it did not add up. 296, Terra, had reported that the elezen had been felled just over the frozen hillside of Coerthas. He tore up the land with his own will over the earth and her fires, carving wounds into the ice that will not fade for generations there, so long as the ice remained. In a lake of his own water, he said, you'll find the body. He was struck dead center with a spire of earth and dropped upon the snows. When his controlled water fell, it buried him in a newly formed lake, where it would freeze over solid and trap the subject known as 305. Terra did not stay in the scene at first, for there was a war waging between water and fire, and the kill shot was made blind. Upon returning, he found the body floating in the waters, noting his success in stopping the water mage. That is how the report read. Lillium poured over it while a still half frozen body lay over her observation table. She stood in her lab, suited up in white and gloved, reading over the notes again and again. It was a very easy report. What made her so perplexed were the additional reports from others who had seen 305 after the fact, and the theory that someone had rescued him out of the ice. Yet, despite reports of healer energy at the site, here lay the body fetched from the lake. She couldn't comprehend that he might have cloned himself at the last moment. Her emerald eyes looked over the body laying on its back, half stiffened by deeper frozen tissues, and the expression set in a pained shock. She had brought guards with her just in case this body sprung to life and threatened to drag her down the nearest drain. The soldiers looked on a body that was of a young elezen, dark skin tone and vibrant white hair that sharply contrasted. He was missing one eye, his left one, and the other that remained was a rich, slate gray. His flesh, except for the gaping wound in his stomach from Terra's strike, was devoid of scars. For the sake of the autopsy, Lillium had stripped away the unit's clothing and covered him with s sheet for modesty's sake. She had to see what was left of the body now that it was recovered and on her table, and see if it provided any clues as to how he could have possibly escaped. A shed skin is how Frost put it. An image of himself without the consciousness and will. Yet when she looked it over, all of the organs appeared in their place, so she wondered how one could shed his entire being to slip away. Her knife would provide some answers today. She set the paperwork on the lab desk and took up her tool kit. A body that had no blemish upon it would soon be carved wide open at its most vulnerable. She did half expect a torrent of water to burst out when she broke the skin, grab her and pull her away. Her first slice was delicate and wary. Dark skin broke under the razor edge, and no threat came. As her scalpel drew a line downward, the ashen color gave way to dull red. She attributed the skin to a thick, viscous liquid, and unlike true skin. It reminded her of a taffy, or cold molasses with how it behaved. When she broke it, it oozed slowly away from the wound. "Unusual", she whispered. The behavior of the flesh afterward was what startled her and the two soldiers that joined her. The flesh that had thawed closer to the surface slowly bulged out of that cut, and they all thought a rise of a watery tendril was soon upon them. However, nothing of the sort happened. Instead, it appeared as if a pressure had been released on the flesh below, causing its rapid expansion, and out the only space it had. The flesh was only that of the pectoral muscle just below, but it was thick and uneven. It was a slow chain reaction that would carry itself out as the body warmed and the ice retreated. She concluded she had to work a little quicker when the wound through the gut began to do similarly. Her first thought was to take a sample before it bloomed wide open, so she cut a wedge of the abdominal wall to store under an airtight seal. Next would be blood, even as it was congealed and slushy, was collected and placed into another container. The roegadyn turned back to her table to make another cut across the abdomen. She just needed to crack open the chest cavity to see if the organs were false. Cutting through the flesh was difficult as it grew thicker. The table that supported the body was standard steel, clean and strong, capable of supporting the ice block the body was brought in on and the corpse once it had been chipped free. The remains still weighed a great deal. When she had weighed them, the slight elezen body short of stature weighed near half a tonze. Had the body not been delivered directly to the table, no amount of men and women could have reasonably lifted it back up without requiring mechanical help. It baffled her, until she saw how the body behaved once damaged. The water he carried within him added to it, but now without it, she could soundly say, "There's a giant trapped in here, isn't there? Get me another table. Push it up against this one." Her prediction would be more than accurate. Once the ice had retreated enough, the flesh of the body could no longer hold it's compacted form of a slender youth. A chimera had been shoved into clothing and skin that appeared as 305 did, or perhaps, she wondered, this was no throw away body double. She remembered the state her other children were returned to her, deformed masses of tumors, sprouting horns and barely able to move comfortably under their thickened skins and chemically grown muscle. Seems 305 was no different, and his vanity hid him under a mask crafted in his own likeness. No. Perhaps not vanity, she wondered. In the span of only half a bell, the once slender body had exploded right there on her table. The skin at the surface had broken open and freed a chemically grown monstrosity below. It was human, by definition alone, but she and her guards considered it more closely relatable to haplets. Human-like only because they had thumbs and stood on two legs. It took both tables to barely support the spread of the corpse, which half hung off the edge just so she could keep the head of it on the one end. A longer extension of the spine draped over the edge, which she could assume was a tail made of a bundle of nerves that had escaped the spinal cord in the development of this mess. When she cut into it, it lacked complete vertebrae after the initial, blunt tailbone. It was solid muscle and nerves. Where the skin had not split open, it remained tightly bound to the flesh below, thick and solid as tanned leather. With the help of her bodyguards, she turned the hulking mass over so she could explore where the augmentations had gone suddenly missing. By now she had grown numb to what she was looking at, knowing if her emotions bled in she would be unable to go further. However, her help looked on the body with a degree of shock. Had it not arrived here an elezen, they would never have believed that what they were looking at was just that. When turned over, it could easily be mistaken for the boarder back of a roegadyn, but even that would be grossly underestimating. The wiring remaining from the shoulder's augmentations rippled through the flesh of the back, joining at the spine to thicken that, too, in patterns of set ribbing. "The connections are still here", she dictated while slicing through the skin to find the wires set in flesh. "The component must have detached here", she said while pulling at the flesh of the shoulder where a large hole existed. The turbines that guided the water with such precision were what rested here. They were gone now, along with the unit's prosthetic eye. Her hand set itself on the back of the skull, among the silken hair that retained its pristine, perfect sheen among the mass of mutated tissue. The purity of the white struck her silent. It made her see past the mass and to a memory of the shy unit she remembered, the one she listed as 201, one she brought to the Lettered by giving him the name of Aqua Blade. He did not have such deadly skill with water back then. He did not carry a sword or knife. She had named him for the nature of water, silent as it was, gentle as it could be, to have the potential to cut through mountains if it willed it. "My poor child", she finally lamented on a cracking voice. "I am so sorry I failed you." The body would never hear her words, and when the towering roegadyn bent over to weep, her tears would receive no assuring comfort from some aesthetic presence or spiritual remains. She wished only then that this was truly just a skin he had abandoned. She wished his will, his life was out there capable of being rescued. How he hated Theius right now. She hated how he had spited her work all these years, taking it then from her to contort it and steal away the peace she created. Of all people to lead his corrupted plan, it had to be one of her most gentle units, and one of her deepest regrets from the day of his rebirth. She was given 201 after his failed surgery, told that a healing unit had not been upgraded properly due to some error. He was young, a teenager, and scared. He was one of the willing conscripts. He wanted to serve. He wanted to help and demanded that he be crafted into one of the aspiring restoration units that were just coming to be. Even as a Basic unit, he had healing capacity. Then, the day of his upgrade, he was returned to her, frightened and confused, upon being told that he could never safely heal anyone else ever again. He could not project his aether outward into healing magics. Now he could only withdraw. She remembered how the youth had buried his face into her shoulder and sobbed. Sobbed for bells. She remembered taking him down to the disposal unit rooms and placing his number on the door. She remembered how he looked at her with widened eyes, pleading on how he didn't want to be with his brothers or sisters down here, the ones known as Reapers for their ability to bring swift death to the undying. She remembered telling him that while she regrets being unable to stop the error, this is where he had to be now. He insisted. He wouldn't act as a disposal unit. He didn't want to work like that. He wanted to be in the healing ward with his old friends, brothers and sisters who were fellow medic units, and their cultural leaders who were restoration units. She remembered assuring him that it would only be for sleep, that he could roam as he wished in the daylight hours. She remembered apologizing, hugging the confused teen tightly, and sending him to bed within that room. She had to. That was the protocol for subjects that were made in error. Her forehead was set now to the edge of the examination table. She did not fear letting the water of her tears drop onto the slab. "I am so sorry", she mouthed in a way that only her whisper carried the words off her lips.
