Arxur Exchange Program - Chapter 10-1: Museum
Eventually, the truth always finds its way out. Darkened hearts and darkened histories make themselves known as the world changes. Three men entwined by the threads of fate must now face… Everything. And it all starts with a visit, a visit to a place most innocuous- And a place that binds them all together, a simple… Museum.
Memory Transcription Subject: Ktarr, Arxur Exchange Participant
Date[standardized human time]: December 30, 2165
Built of the same commonplace grey cement as any old building, blocky and dreary. You could almost call it a relic from the Dominion era, but no… It was new. And they chose its aesthetic for a very specific reason…
“It looks… Depressing” I comment, eyeing the sign at the entrance. Arkwai Memorial Museum is written on it.
“It… looks like…” Dad mutters and I look down. He’d made a point of being his chair today.
“Just like them. The fringe ones, the worst of them.” Lithenn is looking up at the sign as well as we enter the dreary lobby. It was terrifyingly barren, there was just a simple desk on the far side and somehow the low light only felt oppressive instead of comforting. “Didn’t think you’d pick this style, given the name. Maybe the grandiose display pieces of a senator’s private holding…”
“We have nothing to hide.” It was a new voice that came to greet us. Standing behind the single desk was a woman with scales like granite, though she seemed younger than I expected out of someone working in a museum. That might be explained by the man with her, his scales had lost a good deal of their color to time and there was a certain tautness to his skin “This is a place to properly remember what was done in the past, the truth of it. Maybe some places were gentler than others, but there is a reason our kind was… Still is… Hated. And the goal of this museum is to show what actions, what horrors, made it so. And to let you judge for yourself.”
We collectively turn to look at her and she flinches for just a moment when she notices Lithenn’s presence. Still she tilts her head respectfully “Welcome to the Arkwai Memorial Museum, built in memory of all of those who lost their lives at the farms. This, in particular, was constructed based on one farm in particular. Though the original has long since been undone.” As she takes a steadying breath I can feel the nervousness drip slightly into her voice despite how well she hides it “I must warn you” this seems directly aimed at Lithenn “The displays can be rather… Graphical in nature. Though we do not aim to glorify anything, it would be a disservice to those who suffered sanitize their pain”
I tried to start saying something, but Lithenn waves me off, and just tilts his head to the side as if he were putting his neck on display. We’re all speechless for a moment, except for the older man who puts a heavy paw on her shoulder “Do not worry about him, Shara” he then turns to stare at my thafki friend- The gaze he has sends a shiver down my spine, I’d seen others before like that… I wonder, does he consider his work here some form of atonement? “He will be less bothered than you are” he walks around the desk “Do you wish a guided tour, or to see it on your own?”
“The guided tour, please” Lithenn asks for all of us.
The older arxur dips his head slightly “Very well. I am Arkath and will be assisting, this is Shara who will be your guide”
She turns to him questioningly, and though he does attempt to whisper I can hear he is not used to doing so “You will understand soon enough. I must be present.” His voice has an almost unnatural evenness, an evenness that is familiar, one I’d seen far too often in older people.
Shara seems uneasy for a second before she unclips a large tablet from her belt and holds it in her left arm “Well, then, if you would follow me” she says. I push Dad’s chair forward as Lithenn walks beside me.
We’re taken in through a very understated small door that leads to another oppressively dark zone, but this time there are a few more lights in the ceiling giving it more of a nighttime illumination than an enclosed space lighting. The new room itself seems to be an entrance area, though I imagine it is a recreation of one.
At the end closest to the door we came in through is the tail end of some form of large ship, the entire room being overtaken by the replica loading ramp. The walls are decorated with the images of what would most likely be the scenery around the old Arkwai farm, it paints a desolate picture with a large expanse of cleared terrain being depicted. At the opposite direction of the ramp is the recreation of a building’s entrance, though it has a very simplistic design it seems to be made of wood rather than more modern materials.
“This area has been modelled after the delivery platform of the old ‘cattle’ farm” Shara begins explaining, she presses something on her tablet as she speaks “The Ishekal Cattle Transport, the most commonly utilized prisoner transport vessel at the end of the Dominion” holographic images suddenly pop to life, and though their visages are somewhat ghostly that only makes it more distressing.
A line of people whose shapes and forms I am unfamiliar with are walking out of the transport, the majority of them small brown-furred quadrupeds, they are all so obviously terrified with pinned ears and shaking bodies. It takes a moment until the holographic image of an arxur fades into view, this one walks down the loading ramp- There is… Something starkly wrong with her that I can’t properly identify at first, not before I witness one of the small quadrupeds fail to keep walking. She proceeds to simply kick the little one all the way to the entrance, sending them tumbling into the legs of another arxur. He picks them up with a claw, raising them to eye level before slowly opening their mouth…
There’s something nagging me about this. “This scene comes from the security cameras of the Arkwai farm” Shara explains plainly. Something is strange about those two arxur… The man who picked up the alien he… The look in his face. It is terrifying, his entire expression- That is a man that is not attempting to hide malice, anger, hate- Whatever it is that’s behind those eyes, it’s dark. But the woman, what is that that is so wrong?
I look closer for a moment, then take a step back. The proportions of her limbs are wrong, she isn’t short but compacted, and I can see the shape of her ribs through her scales. I turn to the entrance again, though the scene had paused completely… I look at the alien in that man’s grasp and… I already know they don’t survive this encounter. But this man isn’t as… As… Malnourished, malformed, as the woman.
“I see you are perceptive” Arkath’s voice is somehow cold, he focuses on the images as he speaks “Raiders were kept in a constant state of starvation, with those who worked directly with the cattle having easier access to meals. Corruption was common and rampant, even encouraged to a level, so it was not uncommon for those at the farms to be healthier in general.” Then he turns to face me directly “And you do not know how to deal with it. That you have found sympathy for one responsible for… This” he points to the frozen image of the man holding the alien.
I take a deep breath, but before I can ask something he waves us deeper in. We follow along as he and Shara lead us through the recreated entrance, walking right by the phantom of a crime long past…
Inside it was no longer a recreation as it was before, we’d moved on to a stone flooring and a long corridor. The lighting was a little brighter as well, letting me see from here a long line of displays. “Are those the real ones?” I hear Lithenn’s voice, turning to the side to look at what he was pointing at. “Didn’t know you could preserve metal in that state like this.” It was a… Strange kind of contraption. There was a square pad at the bottom, metal chains were tied to a long petal pole at the back and the chains ended in… Cuffs? There were green stains on the cuffs.
“This is a replica, the original is in storage as the original’s stains and signs of wear were decided to be preserved, which would have made the equipment erode quickly. So the original is kept in a special storage facility” Shara’s voice is controlled, but not cold like Arkath’s was “This was the first step of the captures, the triage. This in particular is a weighing scale with binds to keep the prisoner in place for measurements”
“Those that were too wounded” I look down at Dad “Wouldn’t even get here… And then… The ones that were too small, too light…” he pats my arm, a signal to let him guide himself. He directs his chair carefully around the object, Shara watches with a surprised look, Lithenn has an almost smug look to his face while Arkath just shakes his head slightly. Me and Shara follow him as he stops just beside the scale. He brings a claw up to some faint, almost unnoticeable set of indents “You really did recreate every detail, even the simplified weight chart…”
For a second, the whine of Dad’s chair is the only noise as he pulls back “Arkwai… Did not receive much intake. It was rare, actually, but if it was it’d usually be zurulians” he takes a deep breath before looking further ahead.
“I see… That’s what you’re doing…” Lithenn has crossed his arms, also looking ahead “I suppose this would be what’s more important to show, but… Hrm… Well, let’s see what else is there, shall we?”
I almost say something- But no. They have things of their own to think about, their own thoughts about this place. I could ask later, when they’re done processing, but not yet. Shara takes us further in, showing us a few more artifacts on the way- They’re medical items, but something about them is simply… Dreadful. They’re all examination tools, not crude but deeply uncaring ones. Tools to measure and triage the shape and value of… Another person.
And in all of them I saw those… Tally marks? Not tally marks, no, but little scratches, words and numbers. Shorthands- “They didn’t even… Bother paying attention to their work, did they?” I mutter, mostly to myself, but I am heard nonetheless.
“They did not” Arkath is who talks first “There was never a reason to care.”
Past the instrumentation, we reach a new area. This one has more than just artifacts, or should I say that the artifacts on display are images. The entire area is structured like a long corridor with small rooms at the sides, but instead of a room proper there were images, the first sets of images depicted what those rooms originally were like, though empty-
The floor was a filthy grating, visible under it a slightly sloped cement surface. The walls were pure cement as well except for the bars in the door, at the far end of the room there is a pile of rotting leaves… There is nothing else, and the emptiness gives me a sense of dread. I look at our guides, Arkath unfazed as always and Shara spends a little longer looking at the rooms. “Those images in each room were taken by the dismantling crews, and have been arranged to display how each room looked at the time,” she explains “The entire process was thoroughly documented. Right- Arkwai was not a wrissan facility, but resided in territory that now belongs to Colia. The original facility was thoroughly decommissioned, and the planet itself was returned to its original owners, the zurulians”
“I imagine being in the area of the most defenseless Federation power at the time is why it was chosen for what it was” we all turn to look at Lithenn as he peeks through another door “All these ones you see here? They didn’t stay on Arkwai.”
I walk over to look at what this room is. It’s another cage, another prison, but as I look at it I reflexively take a step back and put a paw over my nose to protect against a smell that never comes. The room, like all the others, is small. Far too small, I cannot count the number of bodies in the pictures, but they are stacked on top of each other, there not being enough space for all of them to stand. The small quadrupeds, zurulians, are tightly packed in the room but what made me recoil was not the mass of bodies but the… The waste. There was no cleanliness in this place, through the vivid images I could see that whatever was generated would drain through the grates. There was no space to sleep, though one image had shown them swarming over a water bucket.
“I was always curious about what it was like on the other side” it’s Lithenn’s words this time “Hrm… If there were less… Like half as much… Wouldn’t be much different from the production breed’s barn out in the field”
“These cells…” Dad’s eyes are distant as he speaks “They’re rated for a third of that capacity. But no, the raiders want to get done with it and go back out, can’t do the processing right. And of course the head is happy with it, because they need to be ‘cruel’ and ‘show them’.” There’s something to his voice, a quiver to it. I’ve seen him cry, so I know he’s holding it in but also his voice is… Slow, detached, like when he spoke of his annoying coworkers “And then whose fault is it when all they can taste is pus and filth? Ours, of course, for giving them ‘low quality’ meat. Whose fault is it when half of them die before processing is done? Ours, clearly, for ‘stealing’... Nobody cares. Nobody ever cared. One way or another…”
“That’s the problem isn’t it, Vthel?” Lithenn hits on the wheelchair with enough force even I feel it rock “Wanna know something funny about those?”
“Yeah?”
“These cells are the same size as the barracks rooms in a cattle ship” Lithenn chuckles “Though it’s only four per in each” I look at the room again, taking in the size… There was barely enough space for three people side to side.
“H-how do you know that?” I’m afraid of asking this… What did Lithenn do to know such a thing? Why would he be in one?
“Turns out the cattle trade- Sorry, sapient trafficking- is still alive and well. They were using an old repurposed cattle ship as transport. How dumb can you be?” he laughs for a moment, before turning to Dad “Rakath. He was in that crew.”
“Rakath, cattle doctor…” Dad mutters in response “He’s…”
“We did tell them to stand down. Progressive use of force, bitch actually had a grenade launcher.” Lithenn speaks like telling a tale to a friend in the park, ending it with a little laugh even, like it was a joke.
“He was never smart.” There’s a… Wistful? Chuff to Dad’s voice.
Someone Dad knew. I already expected Lithenn to have stories like this but… This was personal, wasn’t it? It was no coincidence, how far did this go?. Shara’s looking about as distressed as I felt, meanwhile, Arkath just stared at the two of them with a look of amusement in his face… “Let us continue,” he says.
There are more displays that we pass by, weapons. Not so much killer weapons but weapons for subduing, shock batons and the like, which were used to herd the prisoners around. There were only a few more of those display rooms, each one worse than the last. The very last one was particularly horrifying, and remembering that those were actual photos of their state at the time, the pile of sick bodies… Though what stuck to me the most was… Everyone else.
Shara seemed uneasy, but in control. She probably gave this tour often, and the feelings about it never left her- But she was used to them. Arkath seemed… Bored. Not affected in the least, and though he kept a professional face it was… Just everyday for him. I could understand it, it probably was, he probably gave this tour a thousand times too. Lithenn was simply… Unaffected. Non-chalant in a way I couldn’t quite understand. Had his job taken him to such terrible places as to get used to this? Meanwhile Dad was… There was a lot I could see in him, it was hard to tell what he was even feeling right now.
But eventually we pass through all of this part into another room. The next set of objects on display are… Are… I stop at the door to the next section to take in slow, deep breaths before walking further in. The displays contain a variety of knives and blades, both the straight and curved varieties, tools I am very familiar with from my own kitchen in their form, but they are larger and heavier. I see powdering hammers used to make bone dust for seasoning and calcium enrichment, I can even see a draining basin for blood collection, though something about its size feels… Wrong.
But perhaps the thing that terrifies me the most is a simple table on display. A simple type of table I’ve seen in restaurants before, one wherein the benches are a part of the table itself. But it is full of scratches, despite the metal it is made of there are gouges of different sizes and shapes across it, and most terribly are… Chains. Four chains, one attached to each corner, each ending in a manacle.
“Those were the tools they utilized in food preparation” Shara begins with practiced calmness, though I can still feel something else in her voice “You might notice that those implements are familiar, that is because the Dominion retained the usage of instruments from before it’s formation and never strictly developed butchery tools unique to it, uncomfortable that the thought may be. Though they were designed both heavier and larger as it was expected that their victims would attempt to fight back, so they had to be used as weapons at times.”
“At times” Lithenn says “Though quite a few of those didn’t even bother fighting, did they?” the casual way he talks is actually terrifying, and leaves us in silence for a moment.
I take another deep breath, before walking closer to the table. It’s, like every artifact, cordoned off so we don’t cause any damage to it. “It was basically by mandate that the prisoners be consumed alive whenever possible” Shara’s voice comes from behind me “Therefore the tables were designed to hold their victims in place during meals. Though live meals were kept only for higher ranking members or for special occasions, the usual workers and soldiers instead relied only on preserved rations.”
“I admit I miss the screaming a little bit” everyone turns to look at Arkath “But that was also quite wasteful. Without butchering properly you wind up with a good twenty percent of it just wasted, of course that’s not counting the usual infighting for warm flesh among the workers. Add in the struggles and you’d get a good third of the flesh just wasted. Terrible, I say, but that was the goal at the time wasn’t it? Honestly the Federation’s view of us as filthy had some merit to it, meal halls were the most unsanitary places with all the blood and viscera nobody wanted to clean.”
Shara is looking at him with some deep emotion in her face that I can’t quite discern- It almost feels like… Betrayal? “What… How can you…” she mutters.
“Hey Vthel,” Lithenn walks up to me and Dad, as if he hadn’t heard a terrible admission “Can you give me a bit of a boost with that chair of yours? I wanna check a thing” he asks.
“Sure” Dad says as Lithenn jumps on the armrest. I can’t fathom what he is going to do, but Dad takes him over to where the draining basin is.
Once they’re close, in his usual display of athletics Lithenn flips upside-down in a handstand, keeping his body perfectly straight, tail stretched as if… As if… “Well, I’ll be damned, it really is. This is definitely from our side of the farm” he says with a far too light tone in his voice. Positioned as he was, I could see it- The size of the basin was perfect, his tail reaching up to the position of the hook, his head all the way down to the collection area. I take a step back and look down, taking that out of my sight.
“What… What do you mean…” I hear Shara’s voice, already shaken from her partner’s earlier words, now even more so.
“You know this isn’t what this farm was about, right?” is his response “Sure this is all ugly as hell but, y’know, this wasn’t the focus of this one.”
“A lot of this… Is from the transfer area.” I look up at the father’s voice, in time to see Lithenn flip and land on the ground with almost no noise “Raiders would bring their captures to Arkwai for processing before going off again, from there the captures would go to other specialized farms based on the species they caught. If they ever get there, of course… Things had a habit of… Disappearing mid-transit. But that was just… A small part of Arkwai, not the meat of it… Not what I did there…”
“Hah, yeah” Lithenn looks up at the basin he had just… Just made a point of showing was made for one thing in particular “We helped with those sometimes” he points to a tool that was specifically made for thafki “The real portion of the Arkwai farm was us.”
“I…” Shara’s voice is trembling “Yes… Arkwai was primarily a thafki farm… How do you know?”
Lithenn chuffs lightly, humorously, before turning to look at Dad “It’s no coincidence you live nearby, is it?”
“No” he admits, to my curiosity “When… When I was trying to get away from that dominionist province, the curators of the museum approached me. They were looking for the people who worked on Arkwai for… For our stories, for… Things we might have kept from there…” he sighs, looking up with closed eyes “They helped me get out of there, Ktarr was still just an egg… They helped me find a little plot of land here, even paid most of it, all in exchange for telling them all I knew about the old farm”
Lithenn turns back to Shara “Me, well… ES-44576” he waits for a moment, waiting for recognition, but I can’t guess what he’s- Shara’s sudden surprise is great enough for her to drop her pad, and Lithenn just tilts his head slightly “I was born there.”
Yyyyeah this one got so big I had to split in two. Have fun~
Posted Apr 12, 2025, 9:00 PM UTC