those bells are ringing | caustic

[Ivan]

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IVAN
slav. "god is gracious"
---
a son
a brother

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ALYOSHA, MY DEAR, MY ONLY SON, I'M AFRAID OF IVAN —

"It's just a guess. I thought ... maybe you wanted to go somewhere else too." Ivan shrugged in response, though his eyes flashed curiously.

If not space, then where? He failed to understand why Caustic thought his secrets were foolproof. To be sure, there was much Ivan had yet to know, but the blood of this trail had already been spilled, and Ivan wasn't ready to let go of an injured prey.

Ivan stepped forward, following Caustic down the stairs. His pace is characterized by a light-footed politeness. The young feline glanced up at the wolf. "It's strange to think," He thought. "That before, I was so vexed with him and his experiments." It had been a morbid fascination that twisted his heart, his poor beaten heart that tried to hard to find reason in an unreasonable world.

Ivan took in the cages, his features naturally hardening, but there seemed to be no sign of other animals here, from what he could tell so far. The lab was something that he supposed he expected of Caustic. Unlike the main room, this area had signs of living. Caustic lived by his work perhaps. Now Ivan could understand why the wolf appeared so distraught at the explosion. This meant something much more to him than a life in Tanglewood.

Ivan, having seat himself on the stool now, was silent up to the point when Caustic revealed his opus magnum — Ivan snickered at his own thought of this piece of machinery being compared to a work of literary genius. A small huff of breath left him, but he was largely unimpressed mainly due to how broken it was. It couldn't be helped, perhaps. After all, it had exploded.

"Well," Ivan blinked, glancing at Caustic as if trying to react based on the wolf's facial cues. "I have no idea what this is, but it looks very complex to what machinery I've seen. Are you something from the future? The history books here only go up to the 60's. I've never seen anything like it. One of my brothers, you know, he was named after a futuristic dystopian novel. I'm not, I come from a large Russian novel." He frowned and furrowed his brow as if just realizing something. Why where his siblings christened after British books while he was the only Russian? Well, save Atticus. He had never thought of it before.

"I think I've gotten off track." He had been trying to show off again. "Can you tell me what this was going to be used for?"

— I'M MORE AFRAID OF IVAN THAN THE OTHER ONE.