Re: The Glorious Championship! [S3G5] [Round 4: GBN2
09-26-2012, 11:04 PM
Originally posted on MSPA by engineclock.
Crazy shirtless bird-woman woman-thing, god-person, he thought. Dumb motherfucker got yourself into this. Got yourself glued to an avian porn star. Great going. A+. You win a medal that says “WORST”.
“Quiet! Quiet on the set- Maowyn, no not another one! Damnit, woman. Someone get this girl a new PA. You! Go find- I don’t care what your union says! I said go!”
“Maowyn,” said Gaurinn, “You’re sitting on a pile of corpses.”
The goddess’s great heron’s head swiveled slowly to look at him, her yellow eyes flat and glossy. “Taccha Maowyn to you, worm,” she sniffed. The feathers on her face were freckled red and pink and she was cleaning her beak between two blade-like feathers with short, sharp strokes that occasionally sprayed Gaurinn with assorted viscera. “I’m a god,” she told him.
“Yes, I know.”
“I used to be a huge fucking deal,” she said, waving a blood-matted wing. “Three, four hundred years ago on that miserable heap of dirt. The White Age. My temple was staffed by hundreds at its peak. There were a few wars after that, some major tectonic movements, a couple genocides and a plague, all the major belief systems went into decline because, I mean, who wants to believe in a god that wants you to suffer?” She laughed a harsh tcchaa tccha. “Anyways, before that I was Laié Sicchat, Lord of the South Waters. My sacrifices were twenty virgins every spring drowned in a bog. Always the ugly ones. Gyse’s thing was pretty girls so they just assumed I didn’t want them. Typical mortal logic! Turned most of them into herons but they all still died of the plague regardless.”
A lost-looking PA wearing the same name tag as the last three sidled up nervously to Maowyn and Gaurinn’s chair, clutching a cup of coffee like a crucifix before a vampire. The heron goddess ignored her.
“Tell me, worm. What sort of gods do you have?”
“Don’t know any,” Gaurinn growled. He never thought he’d miss having a partner with a strictly utilitarian grasp on language. “Didn’t like any of the ones I met.”
Maowyn screeched. He’d given up trying to decipher her vocalizations sometime around when she decided roosting on the lights and nattering was an adequate explanation for what was wrong with her costume. The girl standing at her wing gave a cough that could have been mistaken for some dust motes settling and the heron’s head whipped around, fixing a great yellow eye on the girl’s face. “You. What is your name?”
“T-Taelia?” The P.A. seemed to be inventing a new way to completely avoid the fact that she was speaking to anyone.
“Taelia. That’s very pretty.”
“Oh, thank you. It was, um-”
“Taelia,” Maowyn intoned, her voice suddenly a sonorous echo thundering up from unholy depths, “I damn you to the fifth and final hell to wander endlessly in the Hollow Earth until your cursed bones crumble beneath your rotting skin, until your eyes turn white from age, until your broken feet no longer tread, and there to suffer for all time and eternity in the bowels of the world amongst the forgotten and the lost. Let this be done.”
Gaurinn watched disinterestedly as Taelia’s expression moved swiftly from confusion to fear and then to horror as huge cracks began to open up in the ground beneath her feet, the faint whistles of distant banshee screams accompanied by plumes of noxious black smoke vomiting up like storm clouds. She stumbled backward only to be grasped around the ankle by a searching talon, gnarled and pale and wickedly sharp; a cameraman gave the girl a disapproving look as it bit into her skin and dragged her down, pulling her beneath the linoleum with a distant terrible howl of laughter that cut off abruptly as she vanished from view. The tiles healed over with a whisper. Only a faint glow remained where she’d stood, dissipating gently into nothing.
“You could just tell them you don’t like hazelnut.”
“I should think the first four examples were enough, but they insist getting it wrong.” Maowyn’s beady eyes followed a small swarm of crab-like arthropods now swarming over the shattered remains of her coffee. “It seems to me they’re asking for it. That’s standard procedure, by the way, for botching a sacrifice like that. Do you think that boy could have managed it better? I don’t. Hrmf. I should have damned him when he still had a soul to damn.”
“Cailean,” Gaurinn reminded her absently. A thought struck him. “Why can you send people to hell?”
“It isn’t hell, it’s five hells.”
“Whatever, that’s not the point. You can send people out of here, right? Like I’m assuming your hell- oh hells, sorry, that’s very important- aren’t here. So why can’t you send us out of here like that?”
“Mm. Complicated.” She settled into the chair, shivering as her feathers fluffed up. Her silver beak dipped down and began to rummage for loose plumage. “Think of it as, ah… well, a map, I suppose. And you only have a few places marked, a few places you know fairly well and could probably get there on your own without getting lost. But if you try to go somewhere new, you can’t because… maybe you can’t read or something. And now that we’re here it’s like looking at the same map, only it’s three miles away because you lost it.” Maowyn found a kidney in her wing and gave it a critical look. “In this case, though, I’m only asking a distant friend for help. It’s difficult to find something out of your home universe.“
“You found Cail pretty easily.”
“I owned him. Stupid thing stank like a corpse anyway, could have found him anywhere.”
Gaurinn sighed. “So we’re still stuck?”
She tilted her head noncommittally, or possibly to stare at a stagehand skittering up in the rafters. “Could I make a map so small I could not read it? For now, at least, we’ll have to wait. But if I could find some kind of nexus maybe I could move us to somewhere I could navigate from. I mean this is all on human terms, it’s really much more technical than that. Are you almost human, dear? I’ve just been assuming that you are.”
“Maowyn. We have a show to film.”
“Who DARES,” Maowyn screamed, whipping her head around furiously and screeching at the petrified workers cowering behind drywall props. Nestled directly in her blind spot, an alien-looking rabbit rolled it eyes. She banished three more souls to the abyss in the time it took for the creature to float to the top of her corpse-pile and lay a condescending paw on her shoulder.
“Honey,” Vigil said with the air of someone whose life is spent dealing with planetary egos, “It’s been two hours already and all you’ve done is sit your pretty ass down on some stiffs and kill all my extras. I don’t know what your agent told you, but here in Tinseltown we’ve got deadlines, sweetie.”
“I am a god,” she hissed at him, pupils shrunken to tiny dots. ”You will address me as such.”
“You could be the queen of fucking France for all I care, kiddo, but that’s not going to get Magic Fighter Punchy Punch shot any quicker, now is it, sweet cheeks? I got three kids and a gimp in the basement to get home to here. Now get your tits on the stage and for chrissakes keep the blood off your damn costume, you amateur!”
Maowyn opened her beak and made a noise like a tow truck ramming into a radiator. “I WILL NOT BE SPOKEN TO AS- squawk!”
Gaurinn’s electricity rippled down the length of her back, neon sparks spitting out from her blood-matted feathers. “You wait, worm,” she whispered to him as she stalked down the length of the set, tearing her props from the quaking hands of the surviving costume department, “You wait until I tear us apart. You’re going to pray to me that I grant you the mercy to only face hell.”
Crazy shirtless bird-woman woman-thing, god-person, he thought. Dumb motherfucker got yourself into this. Got yourself glued to an avian porn star. Great going. A+. You win a medal that says “WORST”.
“Quiet! Quiet on the set- Maowyn, no not another one! Damnit, woman. Someone get this girl a new PA. You! Go find- I don’t care what your union says! I said go!”
“Maowyn,” said Gaurinn, “You’re sitting on a pile of corpses.”
The goddess’s great heron’s head swiveled slowly to look at him, her yellow eyes flat and glossy. “Taccha Maowyn to you, worm,” she sniffed. The feathers on her face were freckled red and pink and she was cleaning her beak between two blade-like feathers with short, sharp strokes that occasionally sprayed Gaurinn with assorted viscera. “I’m a god,” she told him.
“Yes, I know.”
“I used to be a huge fucking deal,” she said, waving a blood-matted wing. “Three, four hundred years ago on that miserable heap of dirt. The White Age. My temple was staffed by hundreds at its peak. There were a few wars after that, some major tectonic movements, a couple genocides and a plague, all the major belief systems went into decline because, I mean, who wants to believe in a god that wants you to suffer?” She laughed a harsh tcchaa tccha. “Anyways, before that I was Laié Sicchat, Lord of the South Waters. My sacrifices were twenty virgins every spring drowned in a bog. Always the ugly ones. Gyse’s thing was pretty girls so they just assumed I didn’t want them. Typical mortal logic! Turned most of them into herons but they all still died of the plague regardless.”
A lost-looking PA wearing the same name tag as the last three sidled up nervously to Maowyn and Gaurinn’s chair, clutching a cup of coffee like a crucifix before a vampire. The heron goddess ignored her.
“Tell me, worm. What sort of gods do you have?”
“Don’t know any,” Gaurinn growled. He never thought he’d miss having a partner with a strictly utilitarian grasp on language. “Didn’t like any of the ones I met.”
Maowyn screeched. He’d given up trying to decipher her vocalizations sometime around when she decided roosting on the lights and nattering was an adequate explanation for what was wrong with her costume. The girl standing at her wing gave a cough that could have been mistaken for some dust motes settling and the heron’s head whipped around, fixing a great yellow eye on the girl’s face. “You. What is your name?”
“T-Taelia?” The P.A. seemed to be inventing a new way to completely avoid the fact that she was speaking to anyone.
“Taelia. That’s very pretty.”
“Oh, thank you. It was, um-”
“Taelia,” Maowyn intoned, her voice suddenly a sonorous echo thundering up from unholy depths, “I damn you to the fifth and final hell to wander endlessly in the Hollow Earth until your cursed bones crumble beneath your rotting skin, until your eyes turn white from age, until your broken feet no longer tread, and there to suffer for all time and eternity in the bowels of the world amongst the forgotten and the lost. Let this be done.”
Gaurinn watched disinterestedly as Taelia’s expression moved swiftly from confusion to fear and then to horror as huge cracks began to open up in the ground beneath her feet, the faint whistles of distant banshee screams accompanied by plumes of noxious black smoke vomiting up like storm clouds. She stumbled backward only to be grasped around the ankle by a searching talon, gnarled and pale and wickedly sharp; a cameraman gave the girl a disapproving look as it bit into her skin and dragged her down, pulling her beneath the linoleum with a distant terrible howl of laughter that cut off abruptly as she vanished from view. The tiles healed over with a whisper. Only a faint glow remained where she’d stood, dissipating gently into nothing.
“You could just tell them you don’t like hazelnut.”
“I should think the first four examples were enough, but they insist getting it wrong.” Maowyn’s beady eyes followed a small swarm of crab-like arthropods now swarming over the shattered remains of her coffee. “It seems to me they’re asking for it. That’s standard procedure, by the way, for botching a sacrifice like that. Do you think that boy could have managed it better? I don’t. Hrmf. I should have damned him when he still had a soul to damn.”
“Cailean,” Gaurinn reminded her absently. A thought struck him. “Why can you send people to hell?”
“It isn’t hell, it’s five hells.”
“Whatever, that’s not the point. You can send people out of here, right? Like I’m assuming your hell- oh hells, sorry, that’s very important- aren’t here. So why can’t you send us out of here like that?”
“Mm. Complicated.” She settled into the chair, shivering as her feathers fluffed up. Her silver beak dipped down and began to rummage for loose plumage. “Think of it as, ah… well, a map, I suppose. And you only have a few places marked, a few places you know fairly well and could probably get there on your own without getting lost. But if you try to go somewhere new, you can’t because… maybe you can’t read or something. And now that we’re here it’s like looking at the same map, only it’s three miles away because you lost it.” Maowyn found a kidney in her wing and gave it a critical look. “In this case, though, I’m only asking a distant friend for help. It’s difficult to find something out of your home universe.“
“You found Cail pretty easily.”
“I owned him. Stupid thing stank like a corpse anyway, could have found him anywhere.”
Gaurinn sighed. “So we’re still stuck?”
She tilted her head noncommittally, or possibly to stare at a stagehand skittering up in the rafters. “Could I make a map so small I could not read it? For now, at least, we’ll have to wait. But if I could find some kind of nexus maybe I could move us to somewhere I could navigate from. I mean this is all on human terms, it’s really much more technical than that. Are you almost human, dear? I’ve just been assuming that you are.”
“Maowyn. We have a show to film.”
“Who DARES,” Maowyn screamed, whipping her head around furiously and screeching at the petrified workers cowering behind drywall props. Nestled directly in her blind spot, an alien-looking rabbit rolled it eyes. She banished three more souls to the abyss in the time it took for the creature to float to the top of her corpse-pile and lay a condescending paw on her shoulder.
“Honey,” Vigil said with the air of someone whose life is spent dealing with planetary egos, “It’s been two hours already and all you’ve done is sit your pretty ass down on some stiffs and kill all my extras. I don’t know what your agent told you, but here in Tinseltown we’ve got deadlines, sweetie.”
“I am a god,” she hissed at him, pupils shrunken to tiny dots. ”You will address me as such.”
“You could be the queen of fucking France for all I care, kiddo, but that’s not going to get Magic Fighter Punchy Punch shot any quicker, now is it, sweet cheeks? I got three kids and a gimp in the basement to get home to here. Now get your tits on the stage and for chrissakes keep the blood off your damn costume, you amateur!”
Maowyn opened her beak and made a noise like a tow truck ramming into a radiator. “I WILL NOT BE SPOKEN TO AS- squawk!”
Gaurinn’s electricity rippled down the length of her back, neon sparks spitting out from her blood-matted feathers. “You wait, worm,” she whispered to him as she stalked down the length of the set, tearing her props from the quaking hands of the surviving costume department, “You wait until I tear us apart. You’re going to pray to me that I grant you the mercy to only face hell.”