Waiting for Izzy at the chariot was no bother at all, not with his new addition secured. Arkash watched with fascination as the digits curled at his command, and as the individual rings slipped and turned the lengths of his metallic phalanges, he stared in admiration.
Time ran while he was captivated by the construct, and Izzy returned soon enough. As quickly as they'd arrived, they were both on the Chariot and out of Rustbucket, on their way back to the Derelict with the thudding roar of the engine to herald their mad rush home.
The Chariot fit inside the elevator with Arkash and Izzy, and so it descended with them.
"How does it feel?" Asked the human.
With his steel arm, Arkash gave a thumbs-up. "Just like the real thing; a little heavier but not much." He rolled his shoulder at that as if to relieve some of the tension. "You got a mirror, right?" She nodded her head at that. "Good," he sighed in relief, then reached a hand over the side of his face where the scales had melted his eye shut. "This has bothered the shit out of me."
Izzy nodded a little. "I know how you feel," she said.
Arkash paused then, then looked to her one-eyed gaze and settled on her eyepatch. "I can fix it for you, you know."
"No need," she answered quickly and bowed her head. "Thank you though, I'm sure you're an amazing Necromancer."
Arkash nodded a little, lips pulled into a considerate frown. "Well if you change your mind..."
"I won't," she assured.
He looked away and directed his gaze to the walls as they rose around their descending platform. Soon enough, the lift made it to the bottom of the derelict, and Arkash exhaled. "Thanks for driving me. I'm going to be busy fixing myself for a while... I'd offer you to stick around but I know your stomach..."
She laughed a bit and crossed her arms as if to shield herself while she thought. "I'll go fetch some scran while you fix your eye, and I'll hang outside for the rest."
"Sounds like a plan; I'm starving."
She laughed a bit. "I know."
With that, Arkash stepped off the platform and Izzy pulled the lever. The platform whirred to life and began its slow ascent. Once again, Arkash was alone in the Derelict, left to his devices. In such a case, he had a lot of work to do.
So, without pause, he was off on his way down the hall toward the main chamber. Along the way, he collected as many cobwebs as he could to liven the place up a bit, and left them in a tattered bundle in the corner of the main chamber when he arrived. Straight to the table, he collected his tools, stashed them in their appropriate compartments within his bag, then was on his way once more. He left the main chamber and returned to one of the many chambers that lined that long main hall.
His mechanical arm made short work of the silken barrier woven over the door, and he stepped in with ease. Dust covered one of the tables, nearly a quarter inch thick, which he wiped away with his claws before he set his bag down. From it, he produced the mirror Izzy had gotten him, and set it up against the wall to see himself unassisted.
He was a wreck, a shade of his former self in all his ugly disfiguration. Arkash didn't pause to take it all in. It wasn't him, not for long.
Out of his robes and bandages, he stood bare. The full extent of the damage to his body was made clear, with severely melted scales and osteoderm covering most of his body. The basalt shade of his carapace was pale and pink where it had melted, the beige hide of his belly and neck and suffered similar injuries and presented that same sickly pink as the patches in his basalt scales.
It was easy enough to look past the injuries to his body; the skin could be repaired fairly easily with necromancy. The disfiguration of his face was difficult for the Rathor to look at. So, he didn't linger. He opened the clasp of his doctor's bag and fetched his scalpel, Sinew gun, carving sickles, mortar and pestle, and grafting needle, and laid them out in an orderly fashion before the mirror.
Gently, he felt along the melted scales in the area. Most of it was hard, as his skull supported the warped flesh, but he did soon find his eye in its socket and felt the pressure of his fingers pressing the eyeball within against his retina. A deep breath preceded a deep exhale as he collected his scalpel with his metallic hand and leaned in toward the mirror. Two fingers with their prints flat to the eye acted as a stencil for his blade; he knew where not to cut.
Carefully, he lifted the blade to his face. His hand didn't shake, not so much as a quiver. Steadily, he tested the fine motor skills of the artificed appendage.
When he was satisfied, he let out a lungful of air and eased the blade into his traumatized skin. It pierced with ease and continued to split with just as much ease. Despite the intended depth of the cut, the ruined skin bled very shallowly. The thick red substance barely met the edge of his finger by the time Arkash had circled around to the lower hemisphere of his socket. He had to move his fingers to complete the circle, but soon enough, he'd cut out an island of his eyelid.
His breathing was a little shaky as he set the scalpel down, and he tilted his head to get a look at the weeping outline. From there, he very carefully slipped the tips of his claws into the wound and hissed as he wormed them under his destroyed scales. His right eye stared, as wide as it would open as he oh-so-carefully pinched, and began to pull away from his socket. His claws began to shake when he made some distance between the skin and his body, and he let go to sprawl his fingers on the table. His heart had picked up, his breathing was ragged, and his face was bloody trailed down one side.
The Rath took just a moment to compose himself before he came at the dead skin again with his mechanical arm, which didn't shake at all. Gently, he pulled away. The motion went much smoother without any sudden twitches or jerks to peak his anxiety, but he couldn't see as well with his arm in the way. All the comfort of his jitterless arm sank, however, when the skin he was removing tugged on his eye. "Fuck.." He cursed. "No no no no no..." as he tried to pull a little harder, but found that it tugged on his eye just as hard.
His fears were realized when he found that the skin had melted onto the eye.
Self-preservation kicked in, and Arkash used both hands. His claws were poised to hold his eye in place while the other peeled the skin from the surface of his eye. It was remarkably dry, he found It felt nothing like most other eyes against his fingertips.
The sensation of peeling something away from his eye made his stomach churn; the skin audibly tore from where it was fused.
And when the skin came away, he eagerly peeled away the surface skin from the tissue beneath and threw it to the table to discard it before he removed his fingers from the site and beheld the partially deflated, blackened orb in his face.
His heart sank; he was going to have to replace it. Finally, Arkash drank his warped visage from the mirror. Everything from his missing scales to the gnarled flesh of his stump and his disfigured face. Finally, he beheld what had become of him.
Quiet, his heart raced in his chest, thudding against the bars of his ribs. There, in his own reflection, he found horror.
Venom pooled in his mouth and dripped freely from his lips as rationality left him, and he let out a shaky breath from his nose as tears welled in his left eye.
As a clump of his venom fell from his jaws and splat on the table, he breathed a sharp inhale.
Hand in tremors, he scanned the table for his grafting needle and prepared to build a new eye. He didn't dare look himself in the mirror again, not until he at least had his eyes back.
With his nose pointed down, Arkash reached toward his eye with his claws, and skewered the blackened mass in a pinch, then gently, at first, tugged on it repeatedly. As he felt the muscles that held it in place tear he began to yank more aggressively until it came out. He let out a brief, half-second cry of abject horror, and guided the optic nerve from his skull in a sensation most alien.
The gap he's made felt unnaturally cold as the cool air of the derelict took up the space his eye had once been, but he didn't dare linger.
In a swipe of his claw, he severed the nerve.
Image source.
