inheritance within reach

The figment of Jeremiah noted looked up from his research at the sound of buzzing equipment at the opposite side of the chamber.

"Mendelson. We have uninvited guests. Use the Deathwhisper...we don't want to alarm present company upstairs."

The assistant nodded, and loaded the sleek black weapon he pulled from one of the cabinets.

Marcus began screaming telepathically. [Mendelson! I trusted you! Why did you kill me! Why?]

I tried to console him as the servant climbed the stairs and slipped through the metal door that shut quietly behind him. [He can't hear you, Marcus. In fact, they're only memories.]

Jeremiah slipped into another corridor, retreating deeper into the labyrinth of his underground lair. As we started to master the dreamscape environment, we willed our bodies to develop faster. Marcus's memories hit me with a jolt. Our thoughts and memories were starting to permeate each other's minds.

[Darien...what are these parameters you have?]

[Parameters?]

[This instinct? Not to exert control over others, even if you are certain they would be better off under your control? To expect civilized behavior until proven otherwise, event at the cost of potential betrayal?]

As toddlers we were able to push open the lids of the gestation jars and draw breath.

[That...is what I call my conscience, Marcus. It is something our Father never had. At best he only mimicked the behavior in others, until he could catch them off guard. This meant he could never control Bloodwing. He tried to get around it by building clones of himself that could, that he would then control.]

We crawled out of the tubes, green fluid spilling from the jars and down Jeremiah's desk, spreading ink stains across notes of scientific diagrams and hermetic figures.

[He called me a demon?]

[Yes...apparently you are an attempt to clone Bloodwing himself. But he never exposed you to the Bloodwine to complete the change.]

We both hopped down the desk as we gained strength and coordination along with our height. I switched to the appearance of speech. "Perhaps he wanted a more Human version of the Founder. Just as Hades wanted a Demon child to present as his heir."

"What is happening to us now?" He pulled down a coat rack of white lab coats. After hesitating for a moment, he passed a coat to me as well.

"He created his own Bloodwing and Seventh Son to merge with in a laboratory setting. When you started the psychic combat, the process was set in motion."

As children we draped ourselves in the adult-sized coats, which from our perspective began to shrink.

"How do we stop it? Should we?" He asked as his voice croaked.

We stared at each other. My eyes turned to the coat rack as I resisted the urge to scratch my face while my mustache filled in. "You have a conscience now."

"I...yes."

"Do you like it?"

Before he could answer, the hidden door that Mendelson exited was ripped open by two pale arms with clenched fists. Without ripping the flesh on the shredded metal, the arms ripped the door from its hinges, tossing it down to the stone floor at our feet with an impact that made the mansion shudder. We looked up in alarm as a spectre of the Founder himself looked down on us, descending the stairs slowly.

Was this the Founder returned, or an embodiment of the memories of his reign of terror over me? Marcus and I acted as one on the first instinct was self-defense, and began to concentrate our now-shared power to will the apparition out of existence.