The part of the interrogations that weighed heaviest on my heart was when I left the Stranger alone with the tree.
It was the 40-year Gently Plum that I had often taken shade under as a child. The committee had transplanted it within the walls of the fortress for the final test in the battery for the Strangers.
They usually performed well for the earlier stages of the interrogation - they would eat the food we gave them if they were hungry enough, though their manners were atrocious. The speaking test was less conclusive: they could not understand us but when they were entered into the chambers in pairs they directed their gibbering sounds more to each other than to the administrators. I believe that they use those sounds to communicate. Fertility tests were muddled until we found one with a peculiar amber meal lodged inside of it: one that seemed to have congealed in the rough shape of the Stranger’s body. Briefly, there was excitement among the committee for redemption, that maybe what we had thought was an amber meal was the true form of the creatures and that the callous, rakeless exterior was only sort of shell or cocoon, but the only amber meal we found was inert and insensible. We concluded that it was instead an internally-situated soft joey that might mature into a full Stranger.
The procedure for the final test was to simply leave the Stranger alone with the Gently Plum for a full day. We would observe their behaviour from the elevated platform above the walls. The tree was pre-marked on its north-facing aspect with intriguing but not over-old marks, in a pattern simple enough for an infant to understand.
But however many Strangers the scouts had brought over from the mainland, none of them added to the marks on the Gently Plum. No elaborations on the cross, no deepenings, sometimes not so much as a curious touch.
Often they climbed the tree. Strangers are very good climbers, and of course we oiled the walls before each interrogation, so the tree might have looked like an escape route to them. In the most heartbreaking cases they would tear branches off of the tree, or use their horrid weight to bring down a bough, to use as a profane kind of weapon against me or the others. In these unhappy events, my colleagues on the wall were forced to blow a thimble of paralytic spores towards the offender. There was something utterly tragic about their extreme reaction to the powder - they tensed so hard that their internal skeletons cracked and their mouth-claws crumbled, their throats brought to their fullest volume of complaint before their breath ran out.
Witnessing this makes it hard for me to retain the neutral attitude my role requires of me. Nobody would be more pleased than I to see the Strangers demonstrate a base level of humanity but I am beginning to feel it might be a lost cause. I petitioned the committee for an extraction, for I could not endure the insults heaped upon the Gently Plum. I asked for her to be transplanted back to the North Shore where she belonged, and after that the interrogations were much simpler.
ticklish-art
The part of the interrogations that weighed heaviest on my heart was when I left the Stranger alone with the tree.
It was the 40-year Gently Plum that I had often taken shade under as a child. The committee had transplanted it within the walls of the fortress for the final test in the battery for the Strangers.
They usually performed well for the earlier stages of the interrogation - they would eat the food we gave them if they were hungry enough, though their manners were atrocious. The speaking test was less conclusive: they could not understand us but when they were entered into the chambers in pairs they directed their gibbering sounds more to each other than to the administrators. I believe that they use those sounds to communicate. Fertility tests were muddled until we found one with a peculiar amber meal lodged inside of it: one that seemed to have congealed in the rough shape of the Stranger’s body. Briefly, there was excitement among the committee for redemption, that maybe what we had thought was an amber meal was the true form of the creatures and that the callous, rakeless exterior was only sort of shell or cocoon, but the only amber meal we found was inert and insensible. We concluded that it was instead an internally-situated soft joey that might mature into a full Stranger.
The procedure for the final test was to simply leave the Stranger alone with the Gently Plum for a full day. We would observe their behaviour from the elevated platform above the walls. The tree was pre-marked on its north-facing aspect with intriguing but not over-old marks, in a pattern simple enough for an infant to understand.
But however many Strangers the scouts had brought over from the mainland, none of them added to the marks on the Gently Plum. No elaborations on the cross, no deepenings, sometimes not so much as a curious touch.
Often they climbed the tree. Strangers are very good climbers, and of course we oiled the walls before each interrogation, so the tree might have looked like an escape route to them. In the most heartbreaking cases they would tear branches off of the tree, or use their horrid weight to bring down a bough, to use as a profane kind of weapon against me or the others. In these unhappy events, my colleagues on the wall were forced to blow a thimble of paralytic spores towards the offender. There was something utterly tragic about their extreme reaction to the powder - they tensed so hard that their internal skeletons cracked and their mouth-claws crumbled, their throats brought to their fullest volume of complaint before their breath ran out.
Witnessing this makes it hard for me to retain the neutral attitude my role requires of me. Nobody would be more pleased than I to see the Strangers demonstrate a base level of humanity but I am beginning to feel it might be a lost cause. I petitioned the committee for an extraction, for I could not endure the insults heaped upon the Gently Plum. I asked for her to be transplanted back to the North Shore where she belonged, and after that the interrogations were much simpler.