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magicworker

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Part 4: The recast

Lex did not play well with others, but he got shit done. He stood in his large basement amid the multi-colored glow of various pieces of equipment and the indirect light of task lighting at several workstations lit like fluorescent islands in a wine dark sea.

"So this is it?" he asked rhetorically to the two people seated nearby half in an island of light and half in the shadows.

"It's the best we could do," one of them replied.

Lex had given them a specific task, and contributed much of the fundamental tools and processes towards their goal. He also gave them much-needed motivation, for which they failed to be grateful. If this succeeded as he hoped, they and the few others that had worked on his project would likely be as happy as he to have it be over.

Lex's motivation was revenge, or jealousy, or anger, or maybe just a whim. He didn't think about his own motivation much at all. But he now anticipated the feeling of accomplishment and power and control at hurting those who would steal his toys. Well, she wasn't a toy, she was more than that, or she could have been, would have been. He ignored the returning anger to refocus on the happier thoughts.

He also ignored the fact that he only had a vague recollection of her. Jane? Judy? or with an 'i' at the end? or was it Jill? The important thing was that she was a beautiful ... blonde? who could see past his rough exterior and blunt realism and smiled kindly at him in sweet understanding with a love that so few people were able to deliver.

The next day, he was in his well-appointed office in front of a large screen divided into four displays: one showing a worker from the lab yesterday in a boring monologue, another slowly flashed through different notifications about finances, news, appointments, etc., another was a video modeling various chemical and biological changes, but most of his attention was a man in a cage whom Lex barely remembered was named Barry.

About an hour earlier, Barry was led to an unfamiliar cell by guards he didn't recognize and told to drink a milkshake. He was almost too confused to be scared or angry, but he behaved in a way to let the guards and later Lex know that he was angry and hesitant to do as they asked. Suddenly, there was a knife in Barry's foot and Lex smiled imagining the sound of Barry's scream and smiled again imagining it was a particular someone other than Barry. Lex was glad he didn't have to wait long for Barry to drink the contents of the metal cup given to him.

Lex waited in anticipation as Barry waited in dread as the monologue in the other display continued and likely already revealed the outcome of the experiment, which Lex had assumed as a given anyway, based on the fact that he was sent this package and not a plea for more time. It took a while, and Lex was impressed that this guy had the nerve to make him wait so long for an answer he already knew. Finally, Lex recognized that Barry knew something was happening, but Barry then smiled. Smiled? Wouldn't it be painful? Then it was noticeable that Barry's body was changing. He was inflating under his uniform with powerful, bulging muscle. Barry roared in triumph as he felt his body develop in ways he never dreamed of. 

Lex just smiled and noticed the moment that Barry's joy turned to pain and again Barry screamed, silently on Lex's display, as Barry's muscles ripped the uniform apart and grew to comic-book size, ripping through Barry's own skin as well, leaking rivulets of blood. Soon his limbs snapped into odd angles as he dropped to the floor in a writhing, seizurous mass that appeared less and less human as the muscles rearranged his body parts and tore themselves apart and popped out fragments of bone and organs across the barred cell.

Again, Lex imagined Barry's fate happening to another person and knew it would happen soon. Lex watched through to the last minute of the video when Barry's muscles seemed to deflate and settle and reveal more of Barry's skeleton as blood spread out to cover the cell's floor. Lex changed the screen to show a lush mountain waterfall and looked over at his desk at a generic screw-top white plastic jar that had a piece of masking tape on it as an unremarkable young man scurried into the room.

"Make sure he finds it," was all Lex needed to say.

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I LOVE the writing in this story!

The foreshadowing (Titles "Hook" "Line" and "Sinker") 

-More foreshadowing, with a bit of ominous passing thoughts---

This guy was huge. I don't remember ever seeing him at the gym, and he would have stood out, as he did now.

 

Terrific muscle growth description -- 

I felt the pump, but not like I had in the past, just enjoying the bloated size. It was like I could feel it from the inside, feel the muscle yearning to grow into that bloat.

 

BUT THEN, the story takes a turn with "The recast"  -

Lex did not play well with others, but he got shit done. He stood in his large basement amid the multi-colored glow of various pieces of equipment and the indirect light of task lighting at several workstations lit like fluorescent islands in a wine dark sea.

"Wine dark sea" is a reference to:

Homer's Odyssey;  in Greek the phrase wine-dark sea made a perfect flourish at the end of the hexameter line used by Homer.  https://www.nytimes.com/1983/12/20/science/homer-s-sea-wine-dark.html 

The Wine-Dark Sea is the sixteenth historical novel in the Aubrey-Maturin series by British author Patrick O'Brian, first published in 1993. The story is set during the Napoleonic Wars and the War of 1812.

Lex just smiled and noticed the moment that Barry's joy turned to pain and again Barry screamed....

Who is Lex?  Who is Barry? Why is he being punished? What does this mean for our narrator/protagonist?  

 

The plot thickens, along with our hero ....

Someone's going fishing......

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Thanks, Mdlftr, for the great feedback. What started as a fun, quirky story is maturing quickly and there's going to be another flashback before we return  to the 1st person.

Re: wine-dark, I was thinking of Homer (you might enjoy my Ikaros story) primarily and also Paul McCartney's Winedark Open Sea.

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