Re: The Glorious Championship! [S3G5] [Round Two: The Kestalvian Rainforest]
10-19-2011, 02:36 AM
Originally posted on MSPA by Lord Paradise.
Sunlight insinuated itself, snapping seven eyes shut against the glare. The coat of a million possibilities had a thread loose, and when the monster picked at it, it stung her. Ill omen. Can’t go back to sleep. Work to do. Tick tock.
(Why didn’t the clock like her new clothes? Cause they were secondhand.) Focus. Work.
Home was falling down around her, revealing an outside swirling with paradox. Something was shrieking distantly. Sunlight and bioluminescence exposed her collections to the brightness. Bits of her collection woke up and started walking away, and other items remembered that they had never existed at all. Nearly everything was lost. She would have to start over.
There was a storm coming overhead—the monster could feel the winds through four-dimensional Eustachian tubes. It was a hurricane with seven eyes, her equal and opposite. Tick tick tock. She unfocused her eyes and then focused them again, keying one eye in to each eye of the time-storm.
Her first two eyes drew her to an odd primate woman (the word human chimed through the monster’s head like a cuckoo, tock tick) carrying a sentient-looking communicative contraption. Two eyes. Trouble. Tick two trouble tock type.
There was a new patch in her coat. Vague half-memories of ticking egg timers and a masculine mirror, minute handjobs and no morning after. More time tampering, but in this instance, maybe for the best.
Tock tickticktickticktick ding two more eyes settled on a couple of more anomalies nearby. The first was just another human, who didn’t seem to amount to much. The second made the monster pop a blood vessel in her eye for the duality of the thing. Man and centipede, tockity talk tick. Power about this one. A fellow traveler? Something about that centipede made her uneasy. The monster rang a bell in her head and made a pirate attack them. She could do stuff like that whenwhenwhenever she wanted. Or maybe the storm had done it. Either way her head hurt now, though that might just be the sunlight.
Her fifth and sixth eyes didn’t have to look as far. Two metal amalgams, like manifestations of order and chaos. Other humans with them, too, but unimportant. Time hurt, here. The storm raged and the trees bent temporally against the wind, growing and shrinking and flowering and wilting, tocktickticktocktockticktictkicoktkciotkcitokcclang. The forest didn’t know what season it was anymore. Rusty gears grinding. Focus. So much clockwork to do and so little time. Seven eyes.
The monster’s seventh eye tried to look at too much at once and exploded. Ignoring the pain, she dabbed at the blood with her (second)hand. Squeak grind tock tock. Sunday Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Empty Eye Socket Saturday. Hmm. She would need stitches, in time. This called for direct intervention.
TOCK
And a hand emerged, short but authoritative, the symbolic hour hand. Send not to know for whom the bell tolls; the clock’s ticking, I just count the hours / I didn’t mince words, I said to her myself,
HURRY UP PLEASE IT’S TIME
* * * * *
”Stand back, Gabe!” shouted Cailean, suddenly regaining confidence and sobriety. Pirates were pirates in any time or place, and they tended to make themselves recognizable. And he did not want to have to mercy-kill Gabe.
The pirate laughed, holstering his musket. “Quite the anomaly ye lot are, eh, son? Let’s not make this more painful than it has to be; I’ll just take yer arm and be done.”
Absurdly, Cailean found himself asking, “Which arm?”
Gaurinn kept a better head. Slightly. “What do you want me for?”
“The biomass I can do with or without,” responded Captain Mandragan. “Ye’ve got a time machine hidden in there somewhere, and I doubt I’ll be able to remove it while yer still attached to t’other one. My cutlass will make a short undoing of whatever circumstance put ye together, and compared to what I could do with my Chronovolver otherwise, it’ll be downright pleasant. Now, stand down, or the logic of keepin’ ye alive will escape me.”
“Like hell,” said Gaurinn, firing a bolt of lightning at the pirate.
The electricity was absorbed harmlessly into the barrel of the Chronovolver. Mandragon laughed mirthlessly. “I’ll give ye that one fer free,” he said. “This isn’t a fight ye’re going to w—ack!” That last sound was owing to the nail that had lodged itself in the captain’s thigh. Gabe stood smugly behind Cailean, a nail gun attached to the end of his wrist. “Argh, ‘swhat I get for showin’ mercy. Die!” Mandragan ran a hand across the cylinder of the Chronovolver, setting it spinning with an ominous ticktockticktockticktockticktock sound, and Gaurinn panicked. While Cailean hurled their body out of the way, the centipede did something he had been afraid to try since Quantos’ death--he charged up some electricity and ran it through himself.
There was a sound like an operating system loading up.
Cailean was, owing to the absurdity of recent events, none too shocked to land some feet away from where he’d initially meant to roll. It would seem this was because the universe didn’t want him to occupy the same space as the five other Caileans and Gaurinns that now had the pirate flanked. He and the other Caileans all decided it would be a good idea to raise their knives threateningly.
“Give”
“Up,”
“Pirate,” said three Gaurinns.
“You’re”
“Outnumbered.”
The sixth Gaurinn, not having been allotted a word in that sentence, merely growled and crackled a little.
The pirate was unperturbed. “Har! Sonny, I’ve been hit broadside by wave functions taller’n the boughs of yonder tree! The Chronovolver’ll collapse ye all! Observe!”
Mandragan pulled the trigger and his arm became momentarily very hard to look at, because it was aiming in six different trajectories at once. TicktockticktockticktockticktockticktockBANG and six bullets shot out right at the eyes of six different Caileans.
When the smoke cleared there was only one Cailean lying on the forest floor. Or rather, about ninety percent of one.
Sunlight insinuated itself, snapping seven eyes shut against the glare. The coat of a million possibilities had a thread loose, and when the monster picked at it, it stung her. Ill omen. Can’t go back to sleep. Work to do. Tick tock.
(Why didn’t the clock like her new clothes? Cause they were secondhand.) Focus. Work.
Home was falling down around her, revealing an outside swirling with paradox. Something was shrieking distantly. Sunlight and bioluminescence exposed her collections to the brightness. Bits of her collection woke up and started walking away, and other items remembered that they had never existed at all. Nearly everything was lost. She would have to start over.
There was a storm coming overhead—the monster could feel the winds through four-dimensional Eustachian tubes. It was a hurricane with seven eyes, her equal and opposite. Tick tick tock. She unfocused her eyes and then focused them again, keying one eye in to each eye of the time-storm.
Her first two eyes drew her to an odd primate woman (the word human chimed through the monster’s head like a cuckoo, tock tick) carrying a sentient-looking communicative contraption. Two eyes. Trouble. Tick two trouble tock type.
There was a new patch in her coat. Vague half-memories of ticking egg timers and a masculine mirror, minute handjobs and no morning after. More time tampering, but in this instance, maybe for the best.
Tock tickticktickticktick ding two more eyes settled on a couple of more anomalies nearby. The first was just another human, who didn’t seem to amount to much. The second made the monster pop a blood vessel in her eye for the duality of the thing. Man and centipede, tockity talk tick. Power about this one. A fellow traveler? Something about that centipede made her uneasy. The monster rang a bell in her head and made a pirate attack them. She could do stuff like that whenwhenwhenever she wanted. Or maybe the storm had done it. Either way her head hurt now, though that might just be the sunlight.
Her fifth and sixth eyes didn’t have to look as far. Two metal amalgams, like manifestations of order and chaos. Other humans with them, too, but unimportant. Time hurt, here. The storm raged and the trees bent temporally against the wind, growing and shrinking and flowering and wilting, tocktickticktocktockticktictkicoktkciotkcitokcclang. The forest didn’t know what season it was anymore. Rusty gears grinding. Focus. So much clockwork to do and so little time. Seven eyes.
The monster’s seventh eye tried to look at too much at once and exploded. Ignoring the pain, she dabbed at the blood with her (second)hand. Squeak grind tock tock. Sunday Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Empty Eye Socket Saturday. Hmm. She would need stitches, in time. This called for direct intervention.
TOCK
And a hand emerged, short but authoritative, the symbolic hour hand. Send not to know for whom the bell tolls; the clock’s ticking, I just count the hours / I didn’t mince words, I said to her myself,
HURRY UP PLEASE IT’S TIME
* * * * *
”Stand back, Gabe!” shouted Cailean, suddenly regaining confidence and sobriety. Pirates were pirates in any time or place, and they tended to make themselves recognizable. And he did not want to have to mercy-kill Gabe.
The pirate laughed, holstering his musket. “Quite the anomaly ye lot are, eh, son? Let’s not make this more painful than it has to be; I’ll just take yer arm and be done.”
Absurdly, Cailean found himself asking, “Which arm?”
Gaurinn kept a better head. Slightly. “What do you want me for?”
“The biomass I can do with or without,” responded Captain Mandragan. “Ye’ve got a time machine hidden in there somewhere, and I doubt I’ll be able to remove it while yer still attached to t’other one. My cutlass will make a short undoing of whatever circumstance put ye together, and compared to what I could do with my Chronovolver otherwise, it’ll be downright pleasant. Now, stand down, or the logic of keepin’ ye alive will escape me.”
“Like hell,” said Gaurinn, firing a bolt of lightning at the pirate.
The electricity was absorbed harmlessly into the barrel of the Chronovolver. Mandragon laughed mirthlessly. “I’ll give ye that one fer free,” he said. “This isn’t a fight ye’re going to w—ack!” That last sound was owing to the nail that had lodged itself in the captain’s thigh. Gabe stood smugly behind Cailean, a nail gun attached to the end of his wrist. “Argh, ‘swhat I get for showin’ mercy. Die!” Mandragan ran a hand across the cylinder of the Chronovolver, setting it spinning with an ominous ticktockticktockticktockticktock sound, and Gaurinn panicked. While Cailean hurled their body out of the way, the centipede did something he had been afraid to try since Quantos’ death--he charged up some electricity and ran it through himself.
There was a sound like an operating system loading up.
Cailean was, owing to the absurdity of recent events, none too shocked to land some feet away from where he’d initially meant to roll. It would seem this was because the universe didn’t want him to occupy the same space as the five other Caileans and Gaurinns that now had the pirate flanked. He and the other Caileans all decided it would be a good idea to raise their knives threateningly.
“Give”
“Up,”
“Pirate,” said three Gaurinns.
“You’re”
“Outnumbered.”
The sixth Gaurinn, not having been allotted a word in that sentence, merely growled and crackled a little.
The pirate was unperturbed. “Har! Sonny, I’ve been hit broadside by wave functions taller’n the boughs of yonder tree! The Chronovolver’ll collapse ye all! Observe!”
Mandragan pulled the trigger and his arm became momentarily very hard to look at, because it was aiming in six different trajectories at once. TicktockticktockticktockticktockticktockBANG and six bullets shot out right at the eyes of six different Caileans.
When the smoke cleared there was only one Cailean lying on the forest floor. Or rather, about ninety percent of one.
Spoiler