Chapter 82: Do You Want To
"What is it? What did you find?" Madeline hurried after him.
"It’s a feeling, but I’m pretty sure what I can sense is exactly what we are looking for."
The footsteps layered up behind him down the corridor as more people followed behind him, and he didn’t even stop for a moment in front of the closed office door. He shoved it open, his eyes immediately falling towards one of the corners of the room.
And on the desk sat a potted plant, the roots of which had broken through its pot and grown out to weave and puncture through the desk. It should have been a modest-sized plant, but as they all gradually walked in with Dion to their front, the eyes of everyone that had come gradually widened, seeing how it had grown nearly to three quarters the size of a grown man.
"Mother..."
"Motherfucker that shit is huge."
Two of the men that had volunteered to help and walked in last let the words spill.
The vine had thickened into coils as heavy as rope, hanging over the edge of the wood and trailing down onto the floor, and its leaves had gone a dark green, wider across than his hand, with something crawling through the veins beneath the surface of them.
And hanging off the thickest coil of the plant’s thinner branches, there was a fruit.
It was round, about the size of his fist, and the skin of it was clear enough through its pulsing yellow colour that the literal flow of light inside showed through.
A pale green glow pulsed out of it, mingling with the yellow, and gathered itself back again over and over, and in Dion’s vision within those brief moments that it did so and swelled, the prana from within the room and from outside of the office was dragged in toward it that little bit harder.
Dion, standing watching it in those moments, found himself stuck in a bit of a daze. After all, being in such close proximity with the fruit, there was an extremely... strange sensation that filled him.
What truly made him stop, was that he didn’t feel the sensation linger in his body, he felt it burrow deeper, into his soul sea.
"...What is that?" Madeline whispered.
"That was here when we moved in," Basil said. "It... should have been dead. I know it was."
The moment right after he had spoken, Basil walked past the both of them before Dion could himself out of the odd feeling that the fruit gave him.
He crossed the room in three strides and closed his fist around the vine that was holding the fruit.
Dion immediately was stunned out of his reverie as he watched the glow flare up bright between Basil’s fingers, and the pulse of it quicken.
"Basil—" Madeline had hesitated to call, and was soon cut off.
"If this is what brought them," he said, and his voice, though rather even, with the sweat running down the side of his face his face’s colour had gone the shade of the concrete, "then we should throw it out before the next lot of them get here."
Every stream of prana in the room flowed towards the fruit and Basil, and the prana that Dion could feel wafting off of Basil himself felt like it was being agitated.
"Basil, let go of it!"
The fruit pulsed between his fingers, the green glow flaring brighter with each pulse, and his grip tightened as if he were about to tear it free.
Dion crossed the room swiftly and suddenly pulled Basil’s hand away from the thing, his hand over Basil’s. "Don’t touch it. The thing has a very strange energy."
Basil’s eyes came up to his. The sweat was running freely down his face and his jaw was clenched, bracing his headache, but his gaze was steady, at least until he heard what Dion then said.
"And we can’t throw the thing away."
Basil’s brows furrowed, and he muttered, "Give me one reason."
"I don’t have one yet."
Dion eased his grip on Basil’s hand, with the man easing himself away from the plant after what Dio had said about it.
At the same time, Dion then approached it and began to pull the pot free of the table. Surprisingly, he didn’t meet much resistance against his touch or pulling at all.
The roots that had driven into the wood pulled free with a sound like tearing cloth, and the fruit swayed as it pulsed on its vine, the glow pressing warm against his hands through the cracked clay.
’What in this forsaken world even is this?’ Dion thought, feeling how the prana interacting with the fruit seemed to happily settle with his touch, unlike when Basil held it.
And at the same time, holding it so directly, the sensation deep within his soul sea grew stronger.
"Dion, more of those things are coming. You said that yourself. And that thing is what’s drawing them here, yet you want to stand here holding it?"
’There is no way that something animals instinctively go after so vehemently is bad. The only problem is... what kind of effect does it have if it’s eaten?’
He immediately thought that Anastasia would know.
She would have taken one look at it and told him exactly what it was, and what it did.
His irritation with her flared briefly, and he immediately buried the thoughts of her.
His attention went back to Basil.
"We can’t destroy it," he said. "We’d be making a terrible mistake. We have to use it."
"Use it how?" Basil asked, his brows furrowing deeper.
"...You’re saying someone needs to eat it?" Madeline said from the doorway. Her eyes went from Dion to the fruit and back. "Dion, that vine is poisonous. You can’t just eat something that grew off a toxic plant and hope for the best."
Dion didn’t answer her immediately. His gaze drifted past her to the corridor, to the people who had followed them.
The man from the stairwell, the woman with the blanket, a few others pressed into the doorway to see what they had found.
Most of them shrank back when his eyes passed over them. One woman stepped behind the man beside her.
Then his eyes found the teenager.
The boy was leaning against the wall just inside the room, one hand braced flat against it and the other pressed to his stomach.
His breathing came in short, wet gasps and his face was grey and slick, and when Dion’s gaze settled on him he looked away for the slightest moment.
Then he looked back. His jaw tensed a few times, and his eyes went from Dion to the fruit.
"Do you want to take the risk?" Dion finally asked him.