Vendetta [S!2 Round 2 ~ Soñaire]

Originally posted on MSPA by Ixcalibur.

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Altara swept through the doorway, down a short corridor through another biolocked doorway and into a large steel warehouse. Her pace was confident, self assured. Though she did not rush, neither did she hesitate; not even to check that her new ally was keeping pace. Zenith had to jog to keep up after pausing to nervously watch the heavy doors automatically close and lock behind them. Sterile halogen lights flickered on as the pair stepped into the warehouse. Shelves full of huge metal boxes towered above them, stretching out in both directions. The sounds of the Presidentialgon were muffled down here, the only noise the low whirr of the fans slowly turning at the far end of the room. Before the druid and the alien there was a device, a metal pillar with a built in keyboard and monitor. Altara did not even break her stride as she walked up to the computer. Only then did she hesitate. Cautiously she prodded at the keyboard with her index finger, clearly unfamiliar with the technology, though her pace quickly picked up and within a minute her fingers were dancing along the keyboard while she stared resolutely at the screen.

Zenith had no such sense of purpose. For a minute he hung by the doorway and looked around the room he found himself in. Like much of what he had seen of the Presidentialgon so far it was reminiscent of his home. If he hadn’t known better he might have sworn he was in a disused and slightly outmoded cargo bay. However he did know better and he could not have hoped to forget the circumstances which he was here under. Thankfully the security measures they had passed through seemed robust enough to keep out their competitors, except of course the one that was already in here with him. His attention was drawn to the druid and he suddenly felt slightly wary.

There was something unsettling about Altara, at first he had been unable to place it but now he saw it was her intensity; her focus on the task at hand and the fact that he was not certain exactly what that task might be. On the other hand, he reassured himself, she had been the one to offer a truce and she had sounded genuine enough at the time. Perhaps he should do something to make himself useful? Zenith quickly decided to make sure this warehouse was as secure as it seemed. He figured that in a situation like this it was important to be aware of your surroundings, so that if the worst came to the worst he could make a hasty retreat.

“I’ll just go and check this place is secure.” He told her, but Altara was not listening.

As he moved down the narrow corridors Zenith could not help but find his attention drawn to the containers that surrounded him. In front of each there was a handheld identification screen with an item number and description of the item. Altara had told him that this was where weaponry was developed, but this didn’t seem to fit with the items that he saw; ‘SPU-00107: 1x camera rig w/ hypnotic filters, instantaneous subliminal layering capability. USAGE: Non-invasive mass perception alteration; causes subject to appear charismatic. CLASSIFICATION: obsolete’. A small crate, no larger than the size of a shoebox was labelled: ‘SPU-00189: 1x housing complex (89 km²) USAGE: Affordable compact housing, to be used in conjunction with SPU-00188 (discontinued) CLASSIFICATION: discontinued. IMPORTANT: please do not shake item’, while on an opposite shelf there was a series of crates that seemed to occupy the entire shelving unit: ‘SPU-00023-j: 1kg classified chemical powder. USAGE: causes targeted irreversible memory loss; use in conjunction with SPU-00023-a. CLASSIFICATION: active’.

Once again that tiny nagging worry surfaced in his mind. It was obvious from the way Altara strutted around this place that she knew more than she was letting on. The prospect made him a little nervous, but he was already doing all that he could. Maybe finding a back door to this place wouldn’t be such a bad thing after all.

As was obvious by this point, this warehouse was not exactly as Altara had described it to Zenith. This was the Special Projects Unit, and though there were likely some weapons in here somewhere that was far from the point of the unit. The shelves were filled with high tech gadgets and gizmos developed for the express purpose of solving problematic political issues. The deception had been necessary, in Altara’s experience humans were primitive creatures; barbarians who cared only for warfare. To try and lure one to come with her under the pretence of actually doing some good for the world was folly. And while yes, she could tell there was a certain amount of differences between humans as she had experienced them and Zenith, it was not a distinction that she cared about.

It took her longer than she had anticipated; the human brain was inefficient and unreliable when it came to remembering strings of figures, but eventually she found what she was looking for. She was given a shelf number, to which she went, collected the crate and took it to a desk area at the far end of the room where Doctor Zenith Grey cautiously approached her.

“I am going to need your assistance.” Altara said plainly.

“To do what?” Zenith cut straight to the point. “If this is some kind of weapon, something to kill the others with I won’t help you. I cannot condone any action that leads to someone’s death.”

“I do not care about this contest.” Altara replied calmly. “I am a manifestation of the world we stand upon. I am ancient. I am the earth and the air and the waters of this world. I bend to no man, no matter what I am promised or how easy it would be to claim victory. I am pitted against insects, should I swat them all at the behest of a rat that thinks itself above me? You ants are of no consequence to me. I will do as I see fit and you will aid me in reclaiming this space that ought to belong to me.”

Zenith was silent for a moment. It was not a perfect response, it did not set his mind at ease exactly but at least she was not actively hostile. He wondered just how much of her speech was accurate, whether she was as powerful as she said or whether she was just deluded. He thought she probably skewed towards the latter but he was happy enough not knowing for certain. “What do you need me for?”

“This container requires two distinct fingerprints before it will open.” Altara replied, her eyes fixed upon the seamless metal box that rested upon the desk in front of her. It was one of the safeguards put in place to keep the highly sensitive nature of this place and the things to be found within it under wraps. She knew all this because this body had known all this. It was one of a select few to have access to this place.

“What’s in it for me?” Zenith asked, somewhat boldly.

Altara sighed; this kind of individualistic behaviour was so typical amongst humans. “This place is suffering, stilted, crying out for help and you choose to ignore it. If appealing to your self-interest is the only way to make you do some good, then I will do so.” Altara’s voice was harsh and yet serene at the same time. “Assist me and I will assist you. The wind will not bend to your whims but it could be persuaded to blow in your direction for a while.”

It was partly her assurance of some assistance and partly curiosity to see what was inside that box that made Zenith agree to help. He stepped forwards, peeled off his left glove and then pressed a single grey finger against the lid of the container. Altara likewise pressed a tan finger against the smooth silver device and at once there was a click and it slid open. The container was filled with small plastic wallets each of which contained a small handful of seeds. To Zenith it seemed distinctly underwhelming.

“What is this?” He asked.

“They call it a reforestation kit;” Altara sneered at the idea, “developed when for a fleeting moment a number of humans decided to care about the state of the environment. Discontinued because those humans were fickle in their sentiment and a political sex scandal distracted them long enough to move on.”

“So…?”

“So we reclaim this place.” Altara said. “This world does not belong to humans. This world belongs to itself, to me. Humans will be shown to respect that.” Altara tore open a packet of seeds and within seconds it was possible to see them starting to grow; a process kick-started by the moisture in the air. Suddenly from behind the two a strong gust of wind blew the seeds from Altara’s palm, through the grates above them and into the ventilation system. Altara’s eyes shone green and red and her lips moved silently as she tore open packet after packet after packet, the wilding wind sending the seeds disappearing throughout the complex. Zenith gripped desperately onto the desk as the winds grew stronger and stronger. Altara stood impassive as her tattered dress was whipped up around her.

Throughout the Presidentialgon wherever the reforestation seeds came to lie they began to grow faster than any plant anyone had ever seen. Their roots cut through the metal or marble floors; their branches shattered windows and smashed into the floors above. Thick bushes and shrubs were to follow and soon, within mere minutes of Altara’s weavings casting the seeds throughout the complex, it came to more resemble a forest than a nexus of political power.

When eventually the seeds had all been dispersed, the wind died away and all the noise that remained was the creaking and cracking of the building above them. Altara turned and focused her steely gaze upon Zenith for what was probably the first time since they had entered the room.

“This place belongs to me again. What would you have me do?”

SpoilerShow

Yako if there are any problems with Zenith in this post just let me know I will do my best to amend them.

Originally posted on MSPA by XX.

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“Do you mean to tell me there is nothing- nothing, not one single fleck of a concept, not so much as a precious blueprint or a muddled scribbling on a bathroom wall- nothing here that would give even the slightest indication that you Neanderthals have developed anything at all even marginally more powerful in this anthill of a political center than some quibbling excuse for a nuclear warhead?”

The stag glared coldly at the members of the Erstwhile Cabinet, ears pressed irritably against his skull, and willed the mood in the room down. It was a simple process, so mindlessly simple that there was no need for him to guide it; it was the most basic influence the Laurels could produce. A slight inflection of the commanding voice downwards was enough to stun an ordinary participant- he liked to call them that, it amused him to imagine them having an option- into willful submission. Here, with Rayeln’s lurking bulk and the judging stares of the mob as amplifiers, the effect was lobotomizing. He could almost feel the poor idiots’ hearts break as they glanced away from him like scolded children, the weakest among them visibly holding back tears.

“Our… deepest apologies, Administrator Exida,” the War Minister said. It was either a very mannish woman or a very womanish man; Exida hadn’t decided. “We, ah, well it’s just that this is uh, this is a very… delicate time in- with- I personally was led to believe that the developmental departments had several projects that they were assigned,” the Minister said desperately, stabbing a blank notepad with a badly-chewed pen. “I- I think in particular there was a sort of accelerated arboreal device and a prototype version of a virus that, er, did something rather strange to the, er, subjects’ eyes and a sort of… large tank-like thing that might quite possibly fly under the proper circumstances…”

Exida didn’t hear the rest of the whining thing’s speech and didn’t particularly care to. He’d enjoyed this once, he thought, the sheer ease of the Laurels’ power. It was cleaner than machines, simpler than psionics, and significantly less dangerous to the soul than any worthwhile form of arcana. Its effect was universal and nearly impossible to negate; given a sufficient amount of time Exida suspected even the Seven would have succumbed. He’d paid for as much.

“Wasn’t there something about some kind of heat beam?” another subject said, glancing hopefully at the deer brooding at the head of the table. Her face fell at Exida’s bored glare. “I- I did hear there were significant hopes for that…”

The stag sighed, blowing smoke across the table. His cigarette was down to a stub. Stress did that to a man.

“Perhaps a biological weapon of some kind?”

It had seemed to him when he’d entered the chamber that the greatest minds of this sad world might be something more than limp-spined sniveling sycophants, that maybe something might be in place to prevent widespread mental rewiring from a glorified parlor trick, but he’d been disappointed. This was only another puffed-up troupe of monkeys playing at world domination. From the corner of his eye Exida saw Rayeln glance at him, sliding his sword from its resting place deep in the antique molding. He could have the barbarian kill everyone in this room, the deer thought. His mouth twitched. A few words and he could just walk away.

At the same time as Exida was thinking this, a rather large piece of nothing appeared directly to his left.

No, he corrected himself after a stunned moment, not nothing. Very distinctly something, very clearly someone standing beside him, except for the fact that they weren’t. There was the impression of a person, certainly; a sort of human-ish thing, not any particular color or texture or size or shape, but very clearly standing to attention at the corner of the conference table. The air around it seemed to waver slightly; the harder he looked the more his eyes slid past the thing, as if deliberately trying to hide it from him. He wanted very badly to turn around and ignore it. Every part of him whispered that nothing was there, that he had something, anything else to attend to…

“Psychic disruption field,” Exida said quietly. He fixed his eyes exactly two feet above the nothingness’ head. “Where did you get this?”

The something-nothing chuckled. The Ministers hadn’t noticed its presence; they babbled senselessly at each other, scribbling down ideas for superweapons on rumpled bits of cocktail napkins. In the far corner a pair of them held hands and began a rather wobbly rendition of Kumbaya. “Very good, Mr. Exis,” a gentle voice purred. His ears picked up the subtle hiss of a sonic disguise, the unnatural smoothness of its tone. The deer shivered as a hand lay itself across his shoulders: it was cold as steel. “I think the good people of this Cabinet have garnered your point.”

“Have they?” Exida said. He stared hard above the nothingness’ head. At the edge of his vision a slim figure swam into view, rigidly posed by the table and clothed in something that seemed almost certainly grey. The field was too strong to distinguish much else. Best to keep it talking. “Tell me, do you greet all your new governmental figures this way or is my initiation a special affair?”

“No, Mr. Exis,” the voice said, and he felt the faintest warning prick of a needle against the nape of his neck. “For an initiation there must be a welcoming and you, Mr. Exis, are not welcome here. Not in the slightest. You’re a very long way from home. Excuse yourself from the table, we have business elsewhere.”

The deer growled, a difficult feat but not an unusual one for a man of his character. The noise caught the attention of the Ministers, who squirmed nervously in their seats. “I’m afraid I must leave you,” Exida said, painfully aware of the needle pressing against his fur and the blurry presence holding it. A small round of moaning began around the table; he narrowed his eyes and it immediately ceased. “I will return shortly. See that you don’t disappoint me.”

“I suppose that will have to do,” the voice said. It almost sounded amused. “Follow me. Do not stop for any reason. Do not speak to anyone.”

Seething, Exida watched the vague blur drift casually towards the doors. He felt its hidden eyes on him, silently awaiting his cooperation. They thought him an amateur, he thought as he followed it. He was slightly stunned. Rayeln called something to him as he left; he didn’t bother to respond. The brute would have to manage without him. Nothing annoyed Exida more than a minion who couldn’t improvise.

The hallway outside was conspicuously empty, echoing with the distant sounds of sirens and gunfire from some far-off wing of the seemingly endless complex. Whatever remnants of the mob that had decided to stay with Rayeln and him had dissipated during the Cabinet meeting. Exida vaguely mourned their loss; god only knew what they’d gotten into feeble little heads after the initial stranglehold of the Laurels had worn off. If he was very lucky they’d started a riot somewhere and all gotten themselves shot.

Underneath an oversized portrait of Space President Roosevelt a patch of empty air wavered temptingly. Exida sighed. “This is terribly exciting,” he said, averting his eyes, “but I’m rather busy right now, as you most likely noticed. There are people trying to end my life and I would really rather like to stop them. It’s a strange habit of mine. Who are you and what do you want from me?”

The nothingness shimmered; there was a soft click and the portrait slid into the floor, exposing a narrow corridor illuminated in neon yellow track lighting. “I want you to walk with me, Mr. Exida,” the voice said, and very suddenly coalesced into a strict-looking woman with gleaming metal skin. “We have a task for you.”

_________________________

Rayeln was growing angry.

The squealing whore-pigs at the table were gibbering like frightened chickens in a slaughterhouse, too distressed by the deer-leader’s exit to do anything other than babble mindlessly. He felt his lips curl back in disgust at their antics. These limp aristocrats and their sniveling ways would come to an end soon, he swore on his father’s father’s grave. Their days of oppressing the weak and the hungry were over! Long over! He would be the one to mount their heads on stakes, just as soon as his cervine friend returned from whatever urgent business had called him away. This Exida was surely the sort of man who would be honored to supervise the mass executions. No doubt he would allow Rayeln the pleasure of removing their weeping heads himself! The revolutionary’s chest swelled with anticipatory pride. It was a good, good day for an uprising.

A Minister broke suddenly into tears, startling Rayeln out of his fugue. His fellow working men and women barked with anger, glaring suspiciously out from their huddled heaps against the walls. When Exida returned he would ask the deer to give them another speech, Rayeln decided. Their morale was fading. This would not stand, not in this terrible hour of need! Furtively he glanced from side to side, assessing the dire situation. The room was still in chaos; the Ministers swarming over the table, the few traitor guards stiff at attention but long-since unresponsive. If the deer did not return soon Rayeln feared they would soon lose progress. He could not allow that to happen, he realized with a grave sort of manly terror. The aristocracy must fall at all costs!

In a burst of energy he leapt up from the floor, carving a neat swath out of the wall with a great sweep of his blade. The time to strike was now! Exida was a man of the people; of course he would understand the need to keep the revolution in motion. He wasn’t entirely sure why the deer had kept him silent for all this time, assuming he had his reasons, but even a fool could see that now was the time to mobilize! Exida would thank him when the time came. Thank him with the dismembered corpses of their mutual enemies!

“BROTHERS AND SISTERS,” Rayeln howled. If the mob’s answering roars sounded a little less convinced than usual the revolutionary didn’t notice. He struck his sword upwards towards the beatifically smiling cherubs painted on the ceiling, challenging the heavens themselves to stop him. “WE MUST MOVE FROM THIS PLACE! WE MUST CARRY ON! THE BLOOD OF OUR FOES AWAITS, MY COMRADES! ONWARD! ONWARD TO VICTOOOORRRYYYY!”

As the last of the riffraff headed out, the Ministers shrugged at each other and calmly went back to panicking.

______________________

The room was cold: bright fluorescent lights on bare polished steel, immaculately bare except for a low metal table and a pair of highly uncomfortable chairs isolated in the center of the floor. The lights were bright enough to force him to squint but not so bright as to blind, only barely enough to obscure the figure that sat at the opposite side of the table. It couldn’t have screamed “interrogation room” harder if the phrase had been painted on the walls in six-foot letters.

“Mr. Exis,” a calming voice said, “Please have a seat.”

“Thanks, but I’m a deer,” Exida replied sharply. “I’ll stand if it’s all the same to you. We really could have a much more civil discussion if you didn’t insist on these primitive surroundings. You seem to know something of my background and you know damn well we’re both beyond amateur hour. A spotlight? Really? You do know bright lights are only intimidating to genuine animals.”

The voice on the other side of the table sighed. He suspected this one was male. The metal woman had left shortly before ushering him into this waste of a perfectly good cliché, not that he’d had any time to grow fond of her. He would have preferred her to this sap, given a choice; at the very least she had displayed hints of a sense of humor. “I will be perfectly honest with you, Mr. Exis,” the new voice said, “We actually know very little about you. You arrived in this location three hours seventeen minutes and forty-five, sorry, forty-six- seconds ago, and in that time you’ve managed to gather a mob, incite several riots, overwhelm an in-session Senate, be the cause of three direct and fourteen indirect deaths, cause several hundred thousand dollars in property damage, and despite all this be unanimously and completely illegally voted into a major governmental position. You exhibit characteristics of an experienced insurgent leader and appear familiar with technology not yet publically widespread in this area, and you somehow convince nearly all encountered persons to assist you with little more than a series of verbal commands. You are also a deer. A talking deer. Make no mistake, Mr. Exis, what we know about you is highly insufficient for the kind of work our organization performs.”

“Shadow government?”

“Something like that.”

Exida snorted. “And I assume torture will be my suggested incentive to cooperate.”

The figure behind the light shrugged apologetically. “If you insist on continuing to cut to the bare bones, yes, physical coercion would be the simplest method for us, if somewhat less efficient than our… other methods.”

He shouldn’t bite, he didn’t want to bite, but even without the additional empathy of the Laurels Exida knew a spike in heart rate when he saw it. Just enough to suggest something interesting, though given the standards of what he’d seen his hopes weren’t high. “Go on,” he said, “impress me.”

Abruptly a hand appeared on the shade of the spotlight and pushed it to the side. Once the stars were out of his eyes Exida could finally see the mysterious speaker: a worried-looking young man in a completely unremarkable suit, the only distinctive feature about him the mass of wiring protruding from behind his ears and the faint metallic sheen to his dusky skin. “I am sorry about that,” the man said, offering Exida his hand. The deer ignored it. “It’s standard protocol. I never liked it to begin with, it’s all a little too obtuse for me.”

“It’s charming, I assure you.” Exida stared at the man. “Does it bother you that this kind of containment is highly uncivil? Is this the sort of treatment you believe your fellow humans deserve, startled like animals and locked in a giant cage? What sort of monster do you have to be to-”

“Sorry, Mr. Exis,” the man said, and tapped his cranial wiring knowingly. “Immune.”

“It was worth a try.” The deer shifted his weight to a more comfortable position. “Is psychic shielding the only enhancement available to you or is it simply distressingly common here?”

The man scribbled something down into a notebook Exida hadn’t noticed and nodded. Briefly he pressed a hand to the back of his ear, bit his lip, and crossed whatever he’d written out. “It’s standard issue for our agents. I’m 5106, by the way. So your ability is psychic-based, then?”

“Not really. There are gods and a number of moral loopholes involved, it’s all very technical and tedious and took my best lawyer four days to muddle through the fine print. You know the type. If you were so concerned about my progress, why was I not apprehended sooner? Are you aware that there are at least seven other beings in this complex who pose- almost pose as great a threat as I do to your agency?”

“We are indeed aware of them, Mr. Exida,” 5106 said, and passed a small slip of paper across the table to the deer. On it were eight names, each annotated in miniscule writing with fragments of unreadable shorthand. “These entities arrived at the exact same time as you in various locations across the complex. Nearly all of them are, as you say, a threat, particularly-” he tapped a line reading J. Raptor, “this one. Our observations on the pair of you are curiously similar.”

Exida chuckled humorlessly. He hadn’t bothered to pay attention during the farce of a banquet those pseudo-Italians had orchestrated. The name meant nothing to him. “Is he a deer as well?”

“No,” 5106 said, “that appears to be only you. However, he does display physical and mental distortion on par with your abilities, though his approach is decidedly more haphazard. It was much harder for us to predict his actions. His reaction to your little announcement indicates a minimal at best comprehension of his surrounding; our analysts claim his talents are all that separates him from a total madman.”

“Fascinating,” Exida said. “If you have him here as well I’d like a chance to speak with the man. I’m sure the things he’ll say will prove boundlessly interesting to us both.”

5106 glanced up at him. The deer was surprised to note that his expression had not once changed since the interrogation began, nor did the man seem to need to blink. Or breathe, for that matter. “No. We concluded it was easier to observe him in action, as it is. He is rather more capable of keeping himself entertained than you.” The agent cleared his throat loudly; for a fraction of an instant, Exida swore he could hear a clipped voice emanating from the man’s wires. “And we are on a tight schedule here, Mr. Exis. Let’s get to the point. We need your help.”

The deer snorted in surprise. He hadn’t expected to go down this particular route. “For?”

The agent stared him down, dark eyes reflecting the golden glint of the Laurels. There was nothing in those eyes, Exida realized. Nothing at all. Not a single hint of fear or hope or anger. Just simple calculation. For the first time in years he felt a tiny shiver work its way up his spine. “Despite what you may think of us, Mr. Exis, we are still in charge of protecting this nation from significant internal strife and we will stop at nothing to ensure its safety. Nothing, Mr. Exis, do you understand me? As of this very instant in time you are worth something to us now as a curiosity. We feel that we have more to gain by keeping you alive for now than we do by killing you, and that is the only reason you have survived our attention for more than the five seconds it would take to eliminate you. You may wish to pray to your god of preference that we do not change our minds. I can’t imagine how it would help.”

Exida paused for half a second too long. “And what, exactly, do you expect me to provide assistance with?”

“Well, for starters,” 5106 said lightly, “one of our containment units appears to be a forest.”

Originally posted on MSPA by Protoman.

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Rayeln grins from ear to ear. The local S.W.A.T. team lines up on the other side of the empty plaza. Their guns are drawn, and their men are dripping with nervous sweat.

"Sir, we order you to drop your weapon and disperse your crowd. This is the only warning we will issue you. We have been authorized to fire."

Rayeln ignores the man. His voice shakes. No way to intimidate an enemy! Furthermore his stance does not convey to his troops any sort of power, any sort of force. Men respond to strength! A good leader must appear strong.

Rayeln sets his feet at shoulder width, raises his sword, and cries out in his loud, booming voice, "COMRADES! THE TIME IS NOW! LET US SLAUGHTER THE ARMY OF THESE CAPITALIST PIG WHORE DOG ARISTOCRATS! THE AGE OF RAYELNISM APPROACHES!"

He takes a slightly more dignified stance, slowly walking up and down his line.

"You who fight and die with me today will be marked in the annals of history as those who brought a great leader to power! Your names will be known by every schoolchild in this nation! Except probably only the first names, ink is very expensive. But no matter, your names!"

He proudly raises his sword into the air. "Let us not forget what we have fought for till today! Let us not forget the men we have lost! Let us not forget all that there is to ga----"

"Fire!"

A volley of gunfire rings out, automatic weapons blaring out as a good chunk of the crowd falls.

"CHARGE!"

The horde rushes forward. Most men are armed only with sticks, rocks, and random bits of debris found around the offices they rampaged through. The officers, on the other hand, are armed with automatic weapons.

Rayeln grins. This is the Rultzvenian way of war! Get as many men as you can and throw them all at the enemy, regardless of how poorly trained or badly equipped they are!

As the rush continues, the crowd grows thin. Morale wavers. Some fall on the ground, offering surrender. Others run away, hoping to evade the next volley of gunfire. Few remain by Rayeln's side in his charge towards the S.W.A.T. team.

Rayeln himself takes a bullet to the shoulder, the knees, the gut, and the neck. "No matter!" he says to himself. It's not like he uses those parts anyway!

The charge finally meets the line of S.W.A.T. Rayeln is like a rabid badger, swinging his axe left and right. Upon meeting his enemies, he kills 3 with one swipe of his laser cutlass. Indeed, their armor is no match for such a fine weapon.

A redness fills Rayeln's eyes. Suddenly these men are not officers of the law of these new foreign aristocrats. No! They are the noble pig scum who bore his father away from his fief, his land, his title! The blood of his drunk, noble father fills Rayeln's veins as he goes into a crazed berserker's frenzy, shouting, "FOR PAPAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!"

Rayeln blacks out, his mind incapable of comprehending the liters of blood squirting out from all around him. His body carries forward, slashing and cutting at every soft thing he sees.

When he awakens from this bloody slumber, he finds nothing but death surrounds him.

The plaza is filled with the carcasses of the slaughtered. Corpses hang from monuments, leaving one to wonder how they got up there in the first place. There are no survivors, aside from him.

Rayeln's army is dead. All of them. So is the swat team. The last of those who stood against the mighty Scourge is hunched over his blade still. Rayeln almost feels like keeping the corpse as a memento of the occasion. Instead he just lets it slump off and begin the decaying process.

Rayeln hunches over. Maybe it's the blood loss but he feels... doubt. His army was made up of men, women, and children. He's sent them all to their deaths for a cause that benefits him and him alone. Perhaps he was no better than the thousands of aristocrats who've died at his blade. Perhaps he's no populist, but simply another greedy bastard attempting to exploit the lower class and gain power.

Perhaps in trying to destroy the aristocracy... he's become one.

Rayeln shrugs and decides it's DEFINITELY the blood loss. He saunters off with a spring in his step to attempt to find medical aid post-haste.

---

He comes upon a small children's clinic situated in between what Rayeln's named the Temple of the Great Bearded Man and the House of Aristocratic Dead People in Funeral Suits. He stumbles in. The receptionist is clearly shocked by the appearance of this large, bloodied, bearded cossack wielding a laser sword.

Rayeln gives her his best smile, exposing his somewhat-rotten teeth as he asks in his most jovial, folksy tone:

"HELLO COMRADE RECEPTIONIST I AM IN NEED OF DOCTOR. YOU SEE I AM RATHER COVERED IN HOLES FROM PRIMITIVE LEAD BULLETS YOUR PEOPLE USE AND I BELIEVE I NEED THEM COVERED BEFORE MY BODY LOSES ALL BLOOD AND I DIE. CAN YOU LEND ASSISTANCE, MISTER COMRADE RECEPTIONIST?"

The receptionist sighs. This is only the third craziest thing he's seen. He points to the right.

A few hours pass. Rayeln exits the hospital covered in gauze. He also requested a band-aid adorned with the face of a Great Red-Bearded Monster. The doctor told him this monster's name is "Elmo." Truly, the image of such a fiery beast will strike fear into the hearts of his enemies.

Rayeln thinks of the deer. He will not be pleased with this development. But no matter! An enemy army has been slain, and Rayeln lives! It is a victory, no doubt, a cause for celebration! Rayeln takes a gulp from the flask he keeps at his hip.

Rayeln walks forth, prepared to kill all who stand in his path to power.

Originally posted on MSPA by Flummox.

---

“Well, there are my people—“

Zenith stopped as Altara abruptly turned away from him and walked back to the rear of the room, pulling something off of the same shelf she’d gotten the other container off of.

“What’s this?” he asked, taking a few steps toward her but then stopping.

She pulled something out of the box – a cylinder of some sort, wider on either end. She pressed a button and the top slid open, revealing a sharp blue light. She slid a small glass tube into the top and pressed another button. Whirring sounds started and a butterfly appeared.

“What are you doing?” He half expected her to be angry at his persistent inquiry, but she wasn’t.

“An ecosystem is diverse,” the butterfly landed on her finger, “Plants and trees are just plants and trees. But a forest – a forest is a system.”

More butterflies seemingly poured out of thin air. They were joined by ants, crawling down her sleeve and to the ground, where they marched in dutiful lines to the forest above.

“It seems the humans, with all of their foolishness, knew this.” A toad leaped off her palm. “But, ah, it seems I have disregarded your request. What do you wish?”

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

“Zounds! Slow down, there’s a forest here!” Johnny Raptor nearly slid into a tree. A cloud of dead leaves flew up as the four tried to stop.

Ariq whinnied and reared as a distinctly hoof-shaped dent was put into a trunk. Splintered bark crumbled to the floor.

“This is going to take some reconsideration,” said Artemis, “The forest is going to slow us down quite a bit.”

“Slow us down?” the Khagan grinned, “It’s not like we have anything else to be doing.” He spurred his horse and took off down the row of vegetation, trying to avoid them but failing. Trees were left scraped and broken in his wake.

Artemis sighed and slumped against the wall. Johnny sat beside him and his brain began to formulate theories of Exida’s involvement in the creation of this forest.

A butterfly landed on Artemis’ outstretched finger. “They really don’t fool around when they want to make a forest.”

“A butterfly?” Johnny Raptor looked up. “Say, what’s that sound?”

“I don’t—“

It came slowly at first – a few black particles, distant and humming. Then the rest of the cloud came, and its nature became apparent. It was a swarm of insects, their names and types unidentifiable but bearing that undeniably insectile nature.

The three began to run, but their progress was of course hampered by the trees that stood in their way. The swarm was gaining, and quickly, not being held back by the forest.

“We can’t run forever!” said Artemis, and he was acutely aware of this fact as his legs began to burn with exhaustion.

Johnny Raptor didn’t seem to hear him, and of course Felgurd was unresponsive – but it wouldn’t have mattered much anyway, seeing as there wasn’t really anywhere else to go. Suddenly he tripped over a root, and fell. He held his breath and shut his eyes tightly as the swarm flowed over him, expecting severe pain…but receiving none. No, there was only a faint tickling as the swarm flowed over him. Eventually he stood up and brushed ants off of his clothes fervently.

Johnny Raptor was standing there with Felgurd, livid, though unharmed. A small bird was perched on his hat.

“That wasn’t really a proper locust swarm. So why—“

Johnny’s half-baked ideas sprang forth in a sudden burst of anger. “I’ll bet that deer is behind this! A woodland conspiracy! A collective wilderness plot! Why, I’ll wager he’s allied with the Viper, that conniving traitor! Come on, we have a turncoat to catch!” He took off running, punching any shrubs that got in his way. The bird seemed to have one of its claws caught in the fabric of his hat and was struggling desperately to get free.

A clash of two Personalities, Artemis. This is going to be amazing, said Grendel.

“Shut up! This is crazy enough as it is without your demon mumbo jumbo!”

He and Felgurd followed as best they could, though they were beset by the shrubs that sprang up after Johnny had beaten them down.

After what seemed like ages of running, the three came into a large, open room. It was chaotic, or rather what happens after extreme chaos – namely, a mess. People who looked important were huddled into corners weeping. Johnny Raptor knew immediately that something was very wrong – very probably the work of that deer. He grabbed the nearest minister by the lapels.

“You!” he said, shaking the man, “Did a deer come through here?”

“A deer? A deer – oh, please say you’ve brought him back. Please…” he burst into tears again. Johnny dropped him.

“The only thing I’m going to be bringing to you is his dead body!” And under his breath, “That scheming cur!”

The room was struck by silence. Everyone stopped what they were doing. Then the ministers mobbed Johnny Raptor, pulling on his clothes, wailing and screaming.

“Please, no, please…don’t—“

He tore their hands off of him and slapped one across the face. “Stop your sniveling!”

What’s gotten into these people? I always thought humans were pathetic, but this, well.

“Come on,” said Artemis, “Let’s get out of here.”

They made their egress followed by more piteous wails. But what lay outside was a scene that left them dumbstruck.

“What happened here?” said Artemis, nudging a ragged corpse with his shoe.

“Probably the work of that deer!”

Artemis sighed – surely not all of this was the work of one person? What motive would anyone have to murder all of these people? Johnny Raptor was bent on revenge, and no rational thought would bring him out of it.

They rushed into the nearest building, a four-story monument to Abraham Lincoln. A statue of him crowned the top, holding high the Sword of Freedom and wearing the Top Hat of Equality.

Johnny Raptor burst into the first room. “Have any of you seen a deer around here?” There was no reply – it was empty. The second floor was empty as well, but the third was packed with security guards and policemen, giving a stern telling-off to a teenager who’d been spray-painting the wall, their sentences punctuated with nightsticks.

“Have any of you seen a deer around here?” The authorities gave him a stern look and went back to beating the kid.

“I said,” Johnny Raptor began, but was interrupted by Felgurd, who grabbed the nearest policeman and crushed him against the wall, leaving a bloodied smear. [color=#99z8rz]For he had recognized these people. He’d first encountered them in the Aleutian islands, years ago, these were the humans who’d attacked him, these were they who had murdered Tolgurd.

“Stand down!” the policemen were screaming, the delinquent forgotten in lieu of their teammate. Felgurd charged them, blind rage replacing previous thought. Bullets lodged in his body but had no visible effect on him. The security guards, wearing white, were ignored, but he killed two policemen before the remaining one made a decision he should have made far earlier – he ran. Johnny Raptor attempted to hold Felgurd back, shouting something about allies and same sides, but he was cast aside.

The cop ran up the stairs. He had a sizable lead, which Johnny had contributed to, but he was quickly being gained on. His screams were shrill and pointless, as he opened the grate to the roof and began climbing up the metal rungs embedded into the statue’s back for maintenance purposes.

Felgurd was suited to climbing, however, and soon he was lunging for the policeman’s shoe. He missed and fell short, but the psychological effect was not lost. The officer scrambled faster, nearly missing a rung. Soon he was holding onto the brim of Abe’s hat, as Felgurd reached up, and, with ease, took hold of the man’s pant leg.

But with the weight of a man and an otherworldly abomination, the thin stone that comprised Lincoln’s hat snapped, and the two came tumbling off of the statue. Felgurd’s feet-hands were torn out of their grip and he went sailing down off the immensely tall building…[/color]

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Felgurd was falling, down, ever down, the blackness utter and complete, broken but for the stars – the stars, whirling. He turned to look at something—

Then the memory rewound, skipped backwards, and he was in his home. He was being born.

Felgurd blinked, slowly. Not a blink with an eyelid, but a blink with the mind, shutting off vision and turning it back on.

There had been another there, another like him. Its eye swiveled and clicked and protruded a bit from the mask – Felgurd recognized the gesture. It was a smile.

“Hello, Felgurd,” said a gentle voice, the voice of another being, an invisible Father.

“Hello, little brother,” said Tolgurd.

The Father had turned its head to look at the End. The Nothing.

“There is no time,” it said, “Go.”

The Nothing had advanced, quickly. The Father pushed them both down a hole, a threshold – and they were spinning, spinning—

Felgurd turned to look at the Father, he had almost seen its face – but the Nothing was all-devouring, and the Father was gone. The doorway was sealed.

Tolgurd’s eye whirled rapidly and receded deeply into his mask. Felgurd was familiar with this one too. It was a tear.

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[color=#99z8rz]
Felgurd awoke, curled into a fetal position. Broken and dead hands lay about him, next to the tattered corpse of a policeman. His eye was spinning quickly, deep in his mask, an expression of an emotion, something he hadn’t done since Tolgurd had died. He made no attempt to stop his version of crying. For the first time, he felt cold, and alone.

[/color]

Originally posted on MSPA by SteelKomodo.

---

“FELGURD!”

JESUS DICK!

[color=#99z8rz]Felgurd might have heard them, but even if he did, he showed no sign of it. He was a pitiful sight, lying amongst the mess of severed hands next to the broken corpse of the policeman and weeping behind his mask.[/color] Even though he barely knew the multi-limbed monstrosity, Artemis felt his stomach churn at the sight, even as security guards ran up to the body, dragging their fallen comrade away. It reminded him too much of those people who, parkouring around Portsheath, got too confident about that leap or that ledge. The last experience they had on this side of existence was similar to what the poor Felgurd had gone through.
It was never pretty.

We gotta do something! he mentally screamed at Grendel.

Are you fucking insane?! was the response. He’s a broken wreck surrounded by security guards! There’s not a fucking thing we can do for him!

Would you rather we left him for dead?! To be killed by those guards, under the control of that deer?! We can't just leave him there!

"Back, you fiends! Back!"

Thankfully, whatever dilemma had existed was quashed when Johnny Raptor suddenly burst out of the front window like a charging bull. The security guards immediately trained their guns on him, but it would have been like aiming a lance at a speeding train for all the good it did. Artemis watched in surprise as the muscled hero promptly turned into a whirlwind of testosterone, then ducked as an unconcious security guard came whistling over his head.

Bet you're glad we found him now, sneered Grendel.

Shut up.

When it was all over, the general area outside the memorial building was littered with dazed security guards. Johnny dusted himself down, then reached down and picked up Felgurd's battered form from the floor. [color=#99z8rz]The mask betrayed no emotion on Felgurd's part, hiding his continued weeping from the superhero as pain continued to rack his form. He probably didn't even hear the encouraging words coming down from above, although considering they consisted mostly of[/color] "SPEAK TO ME ARE YOU ALRIGHT" [color=#99z8rz]repeated in several varations, this was probably a good thing.[/color]

"Okay," muttered Artemis after what seemed like the fiftieth attempt, "I don't think that's going to work anytime soon."

[background=#FFFF00]"There HAS to be medical supplies in that building!" rumbled Johnny. "We can't leave this poor chap to die here!"

There was a hand on his shoulder.

Yes we can, sneered Grendel's voice. The dumb bastard was clumsy enough to cripple himself, so why should we help him? He's no fucking good to us now!

The glare that Johnny gave the demon could strip paint off a tank. "The first rule of the Secret Service," he growled, "is to help the helpless. And that includes poor old Felgurd here. We need all the firepower we can get if we're going to take on that deer. Now, either you go get a medkit from within that building so we can help this fellow out, or I'm reaching in there and pulling you out of that boy's head. And believe me, I will do it"

...fine. Come on, kid, we got a multi-limbed monstrosity to save.

Isn't that, like, par for the course for you? asked Artemis as he turned and headed back into the building. I mean, what with being a demon and all...

Well, Midas can be a bit of a clumsy bugger...

"Be careful in there! There might still be security guards!"

As the others headed back into the building, Johnny looked down at the weeping Felgurd. His mind - or, what was left of it - was tugging at some familiar memory deep inside, of seeing someone in this exact position a long time ago. And it hurt, and it was Viper's fault, and this whole mess was going to pot faster than you could say Two Tickets To Timbuktu.

"Hang in there, kid," he whispered.

And then an alligator walked out of the alley and, quite rudely, went for him.

In the ensuing wrestling match, Johnny did not see a hulking shadow slip into the building behind him.

-----

It took half the damn building.

And Johnny had been right - with Felgurd's rampage came heightened security, and now there were guards at almost every nook and cranny of the place. It was a situation the vagrant boy was quite familiar with - Grendel's mad schemes often included stealing priceless artifacts from museums, or a fancy gemstone necklace from some rich woman's mansion. And no idiotic heist was complete without the ubiquitous army of security guards. Artemis had learned many, many tricks from dealing with such situations, such as keeping eyes out for closets to hide in, or areas the security cameras didn't cover. But the one major thing he'd learned was that, usually, it was a good idea to not try and rob the things in the first place.

Grendel had insisted on turning into a short knife. He'd insisted that it was "just in case", but Artemis firmly believed that killing should be a last resort. No, the real skill was in slipping in, getting the job done and slipping out again without anyone realizing it. Partly because the boy wanted to stay alive, but mostly because he loved the mental image of the guards stomping on their own hats in impotent fury.

Eventually, after god knows how many floors of ducking, dodging and weaving past god knows how many security guards, they found it.

"I still don't get," muttered Artemis as he prised the wall-mounted case open with the knife, "why they don't have more of these things."

Obviously, put in Grendel, because they don't expect their security guards to be hurt. Whoever these guys are must be some hardcore motherfuckers.

"What did I say about swearing?"

Oh, shut up. Now grab that thing and get back down before...

"Before what?" asked Artemis, after a three-second pause had elapsed. He blinked. When did it turn so dark all of a sudden?

Clutching the medkit on one hand, he turned.

"Privet, comrade," growled Raylen the Scourge, raising his weapon.

----

"Now, that was just plain rude."

The alligator looked sheepishly up at Johnny Raptor like a scolded child.

"You do not," the man went on, shaking an admonishing figure, "jump a man when he is administering important medical aid. Why, I ought to-"

A buzzing sound made him snap his head upwards. A familiar gunship was hovering above the building, and lowering a rope ladder towards the roof of the building. As Johnny watched, a very familiar band of helmeted men, all of them toting rifles, swung down from the rope onto the topmost floor.

"VIPER!" roared Johnny, shaking one fist. "You'll not get away with this! You! Stay here and look after Felgurd!"

The alligator didn't seem to want to complain. And when the burly man leapt to his feet and rushed into the building with a cry of "JOHNNYYYYYYYYY RAPTOOOOOR!" it didn't really feel like it had any other option.

[color=#99z8rz]Even in his pain, Felgurd wondered why the big man had to be so dramatic.[/color]

Originally posted on MSPA by Flummox.

---

[color=#99z8rz]Felgurd stood up, fingernails scrabbling for purchase on the flagstone. A leaf fluttered down and landed gently on his shoulder. He looked up to find himself under the green umbrella of a large tree. An alligator was curled around its trunk. The forest was spreading. Where did everyone go? He kicked bloodied hands out of his path and took a step forwards.

Click

He whirled. A man was standing there, rifle raised. There was a soft thud and Felgurd felt something penetrate his shoulder. He lunged. Power was poured into the ordinarily weak finger muscles and his legs bunched and sprang. He felt a tendon tear from the strain. All in one fraction of a second, he knocked the man’s gun away with one hand and before even Felgurd knew what was happening he was holding the man up by the neck. The man was too surprised to struggle and hung limply with a wide-eyed expression.

He began to feel acutely aware of the wound in his shoulder and a cold numbness spread in the hand that was hit. It started to loosen its hold on the chain of hands. Then it suddenly went limp and his arm detached, dropping the man ungracefully on the flagstone.

Tranquilizer darts.

Felgurd ran, half-tripping over tree roots and his bloody, empty sleeve flapping ludicrously in the wind. As he lurched into the nearest building, he heard shouting and footsteps and spun around, looking for its perpetrator. As soon as he located the running security guard he heard the sharp report of a pistol behind him and a bullet lodged in his back. He whirled, his remaining arm held straight out, catching his assailant in the chin and spinning him onto his back. In an instant Felgurd was on him and scratching at his face with a hand that possessed impressively long and manicured nails. He was clawing harder and harder and the blood began to spurt and someone was screaming – it was the man – but then Felgurd was screaming too and he felt bullets tearing into his body.

There was more shouting and gunfire and the world was a blur as Felgurd was lashing out with all of his remaining limbs and running and slipping on the puddles of blood and muzzle flashes were blinding him and there was so much, so much of everything and he ran into a wall—

—not a wall, the ground—

and there was silence.

And Felgurd felt his body being dragged away, lifted, and then the world was blackness and he could feel the soft vibration of a moving vehicle.
[/color]

Originally posted on MSPA by Ixcalibur.

---

SpoilerShow

Sorry this took so long. I am essentially the worst person.

When Altara had pledged herself to aid Zenith, she had expected him to already have some goal in mind and likely a way that she could be used to aid him in whatever that goal might be. This wasn’t really all that representative of Zenith’s actions or behaviour based on her time spent with him (if truth be told Altara had been so focused upon her own objective that she had paid next to no attention to the alien, save when necessary). This was a notion that she harboured about humans (as far as she was concerned Zenith was close enough to be classified as a human); that they were all uniformly treacherous and manipulative. She believed that the inclination to scheme and plot on how to turn any given situation to their own ends was an innate aspect of humanity.

Zenith didn’t really have much of an idea what his long term goal was at this point. The most obvious and pressing concern, one that didn’t seem to bother the druid, was this battle to the death. However, he was sworn to help people, not to hurt them and definitely not to kill them. The idea of asking her to end the life of one of his competition did cross his mind, but it was unconscionable. Maybe if he had more time to think, and a less distracting environment to thin in, he might have opted to ask Altara to protect him, in the hope of forming a more concrete alliance between them. But before he might have reached this conclusion Altara was using a machine to produce fully grown insects within seconds and he made his mind up then and there.

Dr. Zenith Grey pressed a couple of buttons on the robotic gauntlet he wore, and in response the gauntlet projected a holographic display showing his catalogue of species. It was a work in progress, a complete anatomical record of every species of creature he had encountered and hopefully one day a complete record of every species that existed. Of course, even before the battle and the implications therein, Zenith had known that completing such a catalogue was the work of more than one lifetime and perhaps not even possible given multiple generations of work. This didn’t deter him from recording new species when he could, and now before him fluttered creatures he had never seen before, which no member of his species had seen before.

He requested that Altara generate samples of as many different species as she could. She was happy to do so, if not a little suspicious.

--------

Colin Andrews was someone that everyone knew. They would pass him in the corridors, he always seemed to be in the more important meetings and from time to time he would speak at press conferences about the issues of the day. However the thing about Colin Andrews was that nobody seemed to know what it was that he did. Nobody ever really asked any questions because they assumed that someone else knew what he did and even if they were to be suspicious for a moment that suspicion would be quickly slain by the fact that it was Colin Andrews. Good old Colin Andrews, above suspicion more or less because he was so familiar, so completely unthreatening.

The Special Projects Unit was Colin’s brainchild, as was the fact that the SPU was to be kept secret from the highest ranking governmental officials, even from the President himself (especially from the President himself). Without wishing to wander too far from the point he did not believe that the government could be trusted with the power that lay within the items the SPU hoarded, though they might from time to time benefit (unknowingly) from them. At this point you might be wondering what made him so qualified to hold these items of great power and wield them as he sees fit, but come on, this is Colin Andrews we’re talking about here. He’s not a bad guy, right?

As pockets of chaos had erupted throughout the Presidentialgon Colin hadn’t been worried. A talking deer had been appointed to head up a newly created and extremely alarmist governmental position, whilst throughout the public areas of the Presidentialgon there were riots and dangerous individuals ran free. While others panicked and desperately tried to bring the situation under control (no less than seven bills to ‘burn down all the forests’ had been presented to the House of Congress in the last hour) Colin remained calm and resolute. He’d been through one office in the Department of Agriculture where the Secretary had been drinking himself to death whilst everyone else was alternately packing all their things and smashing up the place. Colin knew that at some point he was going to need to step back, assess the political (and physical) damage that had been done and work out how to fix it, but for now he was finding it kind of amusing.

Or he had been.

Then he had received an automatic notification on his handheld computer telling him that unauthorised SPU tech had been opened by unknown fingerprints. This was a disaster. Forget all the damage being caused throughout the facility and people being whipped up into unruly mobs about things that probably didn’t even exist, if they were catastrophes then this was the end of the world as he knew it, and before he could even process that it had gotten worse as a forest started to grow at unnatural speeds throughout the facility. This was SPU tech laid bare to the world. Before this he might have been able to send a covert team down there and silence those responsible and keep a lid on this entire thing but now… he couldn’t even find the words to express his devastation.

The only advantage he had was the chaos that currently reigned in the Presidentialgon and the fact that government was never quick to respond to a crisis. It would not be today that they would look into how this happened (an investigation that would as things stand expose him and ruin everything he had ever worked for), it might not even be tomorrow. He had some time and he needed to act, to destroy everything that could link him to the unauthorised and morally questionable operation that had been going on for years, right here in the Presidentialgon, right under everyone’s noses. And he would have to kill everyone who knew about it, it was just a matter of fact. If he wanted to survive then his entire staff (and the intruders of course) would have to be dealt with.

Colin wasted no time. He made his way to the Department of Supplies where he filled out the appropriate forms and was supplied with a number of deadly weapons. The clerk had looked a little concerned, but everything was in order; Colin had the appropriate authorisation (he always did) and so the items were handed over. Shortly afterwards the clerk got a bullet in his head for his troubles. Can’t leave any witnesses, Colin mused amiably as he tore to shreds the requisition documents. He would have to remember to make sure the network of cameras had all had a mysterious malfunction when he was done with his current task.

The vault was located in a section of the Presidentialgon which was mostly given over to maintenance and automated systems. Colin only saw one or two people on the way down and they were too engrossed in their own personal disasters (most likely the extra work they were having to do to deal with the current calamity) to pay him any attention, even with flecks of blood on his shirt and a gun jammed into his belt. Really the building should have been evacuated long ago but President Kipling just kept making speeches about how wonderfully brave and steadfast the people of NeoTransAmerica were being in this troubled time; Colin was particularly proud of his hand in his appointment.

Colin would have admitted to feeling a certain amount of trepidation as he stood at the door to the vault. Whoever was inside was of an unknown quantity and was surrounded by crates filled with highly advanced technology; 95% of which could be weaponised at a moment’s notice. After a moment’s hesitation (and no more) he entered the combination, made his way down the short security corridor and opened the inner door up with his palmprint. Though he would have been hard pressed to say what he had been expecting he was pretty sure he wasn’t expecting what looked like the world’s most dangerous petting zoo.

There were snakes, enormous spiders as big as his fists, monkeys climbing amongst the crates, a golden maned lion sauntering nonchalantly between the aisles and an emerald green basilisk half-hidden in the shade beneath the shelves. The scene was eerie in its remarkable placidity; the animals here ought have been killing one another, or if not that then surely they shouldn’t have been this well behaved. The only sign that something was amiss was a bickering coming from the back of the room. Colin had his gun out in a second and was wishing he had opted for a silenced model so he could dispose of these creatures without alerting the intruders. As he stalked through the worringly tame wild animals the atmosphere seemed to change. The bickering turned to full on arguing as the voices were raised and the creatures seemed to regain their predatory edge.

As he reached the end of the row he saw a woman, who seemed to bear a passing resemblance to Celia Rensfield (an agent who worked for him) but younger and inexplicably garbed in a length of torn white curtains. Standing opposite her was an alien ripped straight from a bad B-Movie; holding a scalpel in one hand and some kind of cute furry creature that didn’t look exactly natural in the other. Around them animals were tensed up, baring their teeth and growling as the argument became more and more intense. A bear reared up onto its hind legs and really Colin should have shot them there and then.

The alien went to lower his scalpel and before it even left his hand, the woman’s attention was elsewhere. She’d noticed Colin and suddenly all hell was breaking loose. Colin opened fire on the pair, though the bullets were slowed or sent off course by the same kind of air manipulation Altara had used to scatter the seeds. In a moment the animals turned from merely threatening to violent. Those nearest the SPU administrator tensed and leapt, and whilst this was going on Zenith took this opportunity to turn and flee the vault.

In what seemed like just a moment it was all done.

Zenith was gone and Colin was dying on the floor, his throat torn out by an enormous wolf. Around him were the corpses of creatures; their bodies torn apart by the bullets that ripped through them. Altara didn’t move. Beneath her calm exterior roared an ocean of rage. She pledged herself to help Zenith and he repaid her by wishing to perform ‘science’ upon her creatures; he requested her aid in cutting them open and documenting how they fit together, what made them tick. That this man, the memories of the woman whose body she inhabited identified him as Colin Andrews, tried to kill her and did kill some of her dear creatures was almost irrelevant; just another horror inflicted upon her by the beasts known as men. She decided there and then that this wouldn’t stand one second longer. She’d reclaim this place more properly, she would force out or kill every last human. It was no more than they deserved.

Originally posted on MSPA by XX.

---

A black folder landed on the desk.

“It’s a serious threat, Mr. President.”

The letters V-I-P-E-R were embossed into it just enough to glitter under the light of the single desk lamp. Something caustic had recently been spilled on it; cartoonishly green smoke wafted from a ragged hole in its upper right corner, exposing a few leafs of charred paper. He already knew what they said.

“But…”

Weary hands dragged the folder closer and lovelessly flipped it open. He could feel a migraine coming on like a targeted missile between his eyes as he scanned the first few pages. Childlike doodles of oversized guns and men with bulging muscles nested side by side with tactical analyses of sleek-looking machines like helicopters on steroids, dwarfing scale drawings of tiny men fleeing in panic. A huge red V marked the top of every page like a letterhead, overseeing neatly scripted notes detailing casualty rates and personnel losses in addition to “how completely awesome it was”. The latter included a graph.

“In the right hands, it could be an opportunity.”

He didn’t look up from the folder, mindlessly flipping back and forth between two identical images of a man being eaten by a snake.

“This feels very familiar,” he said.

“Granted, there are some risks, some… well, uncertainties, certain factors out of our control. But we feel that our studies so far have been sufficient to warrant these measures and that, given the situation, it may currently be our best and only hope. Our tests in the field have proven overwhelmingly successful.”

“I don’t like it.” The next four pages were all scribbled drawings of a man in black armor with a red V on his helmeted face. He was frowning very emphatically.

“Sir, levels one through five are already irretrievably lost to us. If we do not act quickly…”

He looked up at the young man standing at the other end of his desk, smiling apologetically with one hand on the silver wire leading into his ear. He made a point of not looking at the identical gunmen standing to either side of him, their weapons trained on the President’s heart.

“Please,” 5106 said, “We’re just trying to help.”

______________________

Shit.

The sword came down like a guillotine an inch from Artemis’ face.

“Uh, Rayeln, was it?” the boy stammered, swallowing. The hand not holding the medkit searched the air behind him desperately. “Rayeln the, uh, the… the Something, Something Bad? Is that you? Rayeln-”

“Rayeln the SCOURGE!” Rayeln roared. His bulk occupied the hallway like a furious bulwark of flesh and beard, the smell of dried blood and rubbing alcohol thick on his breath. His laser sword hissed forebodingly against the conditioned air. “Scourge of the aristocracy! Scourge of the monarchy! And you, little noblesse whelp, YOU are an ENEMY of the PEOPLE!”

The big man took a lumbering step forward, holding his weapon before him with both hands. He grinned like a tiger at a deer.

Son of a bitch. Why does everyone in this disaster have to be such a blowhard?

With a harsh shhtanng the sword came slicing down again; Artemis dodged, almost without thinking, twisting away from the angry glare of the blade with a long-practiced efficiency. Belatedly he felt the medkit slip from his fingers and he scrabbled for it, his grip failing as the sword flashed downward and cleaved the kit neatly in two.

The contents instantly exploded outward, bandages and creams of various descriptions spattering across the walls in puffs of burning plastic and chemicals. “VICTORYYYY,” Rayeln screamed, stomping an enormous boot down on an already flaming pile of gauze. “Take your punishment, traitorous objects! Feel the wrath of the peoples’ justice! No longer will you aid the enemies of freedom! No longer will you perform your mysterious tasks in the dark of your tiny box! RAYELN THE SCOURGE has brought you to the harsh light of TRUTH!”

Rayeln’s boot came down again and again, the astrocossack swearing mightily in a language Artemis suspected didn’t technically exist. His booming voice shook the walls as the boy took a step backward, then another. And another.

“Uh, Grendel…?”

“Don’t ask me, kid. Guess we’re not that interesting after all.”

A bear-like snarl exploded forth from the giant’s throat. “What is… ? It is MEDICINE??” He squinted at the smoking remains of the kit’s lid. Its red cross was little more than a molten blob. He gave it a few more hacks with his sword, smearing the plastic across the carpet. “Hah! Foolish aristocrats! Have your puny bodies failed you so poorly that you require childrens’ band-aids?”

“We needed those,” was all Artemis could think to say, shortly before his mouth contorted into a grimace of anger and Grendel shouted, “HEY, ASSHOLE!”

Rayeln’s head whipped in their direction, eyes narrowed to slits. He seemed vaguely surprised to see that the boy was still standing there. “Wait your turn, wretch,” he growled, grinding a heel into the sad remains of a tin of burn cream. “Your death will come shortly. Patience is a virtue only the pure can afford!”

“Fuck’s sake,” Grendel grumbled. The knife flashed; in its place there was suddenly a black and twisted sword, its razor point smoking faintly. An insistent tug brought up Artemis’ arm and Rayeln eyed the boy with sudden suspicion, spitting angrily onto the floor. “Do you know how long we searched for those, you bastard? Who the hell destroys a box of medical supplies?”

“Sabotage! Ha!” Rayeln bellowed proudly, giving his sword a few more experimental sweeps through the charred mess. His chest swelled with pride and he swung his blade at Artemis, missing the boy’s head by several meters. “Comrade Exida asks many tasks of me, and this could very well be one of them! I serve only the people!”

“That doesn’t- Exida? The deer?”

“THE MOST MAJESTIC OF CREATURES!”

“Sure, yeah.” The sword rattled angrily in Artemis’ hand. The boy’s eyes flicked around the hallway, searching for an exit, but Rayeln stood squarely in the way of escape and Artemis doubted he could dodge the man without losing any of his favorite limbs. Play it safe, he pleaded silently to Grendel, but the demon ignored him. “And uh, where’s he now? Exida? Still got a head as big as fucking Jupiter?”

“Speak ill of him all you please,” Rayeln snorted, ramming his blade home in the carpet and posing heroically with one massive fight clenched at the heavens. “Comrade Exida has a plan to crush all you puny aristocratic ants like the insects you are beneath his MIGHTY PROLETARIAT HOOVES!”

“Does this plan consist entirely of yelling?” Grendel said dryly.

“Yes,” Rayeln admitted, “For the first part. But luckily the second is more exciting.”

Later Artemis would remember that it was at this point that the barbarian ripped his sword from the carpet and pointed it at his head, and that some time between then and the blackness that followed that the big man moved much, much faster than someone of that size and bulk should have been capable straight for him in a screaming red blur. Grendel was batted aside like a stick in the hands of a child, hellfire burning against the laser in a shower of blinding sparks; then there was an explosion of pain on the side of Artemis’ head, and a thick and terrible blackness, and a demon swearing prolifically as the floor came up to meet him.

_________________

“Slept well, did we?”

[color=#99z8rz]Darkness. [/color]

“Come, now, we don’t have all day, wake up. There are bigger issues than your silly head trauma at hand.”

[color=#99z8rz]A soft and melting darkness. [/color]

“Do you even have a head underneath that thing? Eurgh.” The voice faded, mumbled “shock” and “time for this”. It returned dripping with disgust, “…Do everything around here. What are you waiting for? Do it, you idiot!”

[color=#99z8rz]Electrocution hit him like a bolt of freezing lightning and suddenly he was screaming, his countless fingernails punching through his suit in a thousand frantic seizures. He smelled burning hair and burning skin and heard the seams popping on clothes as his hands arched and spasmed, every tendon in them a wire of agony flashing through his body- something held him down, prevented him from fleeing, from fighting, and there was burning, burning, burning and fire, and light, and his thoughts were an electric Braille blinding him with lightning pulses of pain-[/color]

“He doesn’t have a heart, you complete waste of oxygen, he’s made out of hands. Who the hell gave you your degree? No, don’t cry, you incompetent ass. Get off the floor and get the sedatives ready. Christ.”

[color=#99z8rz]Just when he thought he could take no more and the darkness was coming up to swallow him again the agony ceased and Felgurd’s hands collapsed. He felt his body begin to dissipate, slipping weakly against his bonds. [/color]

“I won’t lie to you. I don’t remember your name and it certainly doesn’t matter at this point.”

[color=#99z8rz]The world was gently returning to him. Strange, beautiful lights were glittering distantly through a quiet fog and he found himself thinking of snow, decades ago in a coastal town. Lights, and a white sun staring down at him from somewhere in the pale sky. It was cold out, he thought. Cold as winter. No, no, that was wrong, he was cold, he was freezing. He was on something hard and metal, and metal was touching his hands and crushing them. He couldn’t move. His eye whirled sluggishly, aching with an agony he hadn’t felt in years. Broken bones ground against one another as he feebly tried to turn, to see who was speaking at his side (though he knew, and he knew), but a cage of steel held his head in place. [/color]

“No matter. You’re awake now, aren’t you? They tell me you fell off a damn building.”

[color=#99z8rz]The branches of a white tree (and how the ornaments shone…) passed into his vision, smooth and weather-worn, but they weren’t trees at all. They were antlers, and they went down and down and down into a pair of beautiful, beautiful black eyes. [/color]

“What kind of things can make a monster cry?” Exida whispered to him. His breath tasted of cancer. “It must have hurt. It must have broken your empty heart.”

[color=#99z8rz]Felgurd tried to respond, but all that came out was a wheeze.

The deer turned away, hooves clacking on the unseen floor. The animal was a cloud of snow with a golden collar around his neck, and something else- a red smear on his fur. Blood? Did deer bleed, he found himself wondering. Did deer bleed? Did he bleed? Did Tolgurd? He couldn’t remember.

He just wanted to lay there and weep. [/color]

“He’ll be ready in a few minutes. Not too long. I want them to see how pathetic he truly is.”

[color=#99z8rz]Other voices were breaking through his mental winter fog now, sounding meek and worried. The deer was talking over them as if they didn’t exist, using words like “deadline” and “fatality” and “viper” (Johnny?), and other things Felgurd didn’t understand. Tolgurd’s memory was an iron weight in his chest. It was all so light and so heavy, such a tremendous howling pressure in his head. His mask tilted forward, its single eye spinning; was this what his brother had felt, when he died…? Would he meet him again? Felgurd wished he knew. He wished his hands would stop twitching, wished his suit wasn’t torn, and he wished with all the heaviness in his nonexistent heart that he had been the one to die instead. [/color]

In the corner of the room, Exida reviewed his script.

“ ‘Prepare for your annihilation’? ‘ Resistance is hopeless’? Does anyone actually know what this ‘Viper’ horseshit is? This is a disgrace,” he grumbled. “Bush-leaguers. Bush-leaguers with a megaphone, God save us all. I drowned a man in gasoline at sixteen.”

“No one doubts your credentials.”

“Last week I gored a doorman for staring. Not doing anything in particular, just looking a little longer than I liked. A little extra slackness of the jaw. Makes a man feel self-conscious, being looked at like that. Might’ve had his wife done as well, don’t remember. I’d like to think of myself a professional in this business. I quite literally wrote a book on it and had everyone who read it blinded. This is undignified.”

“Obviously.”

The deer turned, squinted. Cigarette smoke wafted through his muzzle. “You’re a funny one. I hope that when this is all finished I’ll get to kill you.”

“Unlikely at this point.”

“Mm.” Medical personnel scurried around the lab, some audibly sniffling. One woman was crouched against a wall, holding her head and chanting a string of numbers in Javanese, but she was an anomaly. The room was a hive of productivity surrounding the masked hands-monster, pinned to a metal slab in a complicated wire cage. It had been dug up from some obscure supply closet in the facilities’ basements. No one had bothered to explain why they had already possessed restraints for a giant man made out of hands.

A loud bang startled several people into hysterical screaming as a malfunctioning screen exploded. Exida gave a quiet cough; the room went silent but for the gentle moaning of the thing on the slab. Every stricken face in the room was turned toward his. An intern began to wail into a balled-up jacket.

The deer snorted, rolling his cigarette between his teeth. “Keep going.”

Work resumed as if nothing had ever interrupted it, though pieces of the lab were now marginally on fire and one or two of the medics were suffering from second degree burns. One politely excused himself from the lab, shielding the shard of plastic now extruding from his eye.

“I suppose I’m obligated to say that I appreciate your help,” Exida mused, “If you’d call it that. No man writes his own bit in the end, I suppose. ”

“I would assume not, Mr. Exis,” said 5106, needlessly checking his watch. “And as much as I have enjoyed our discussion, I believe that if we are going to act the time is now.” He gestured to someone on the other side of the room. “If you would, please.”

The deer looked down at his chest. Specifically at the gleaming crimson V now fixed to his breastbone, and the rust-colored powder it was leaving on him. The smell of cheap spray paint clung to his nostrils. He allowed himself a chuckle.

He strode to the center of the room with casual grace, his golden hooves treading over broken clipboards and the occasional squealing staff member alike. Most of the medics were now struggling with a set of cameras that had formerly been used as coffee tables but were now being hauled upright and centered squarely on the semi-conscious Felgurd, a team of experts adjusting their six-figure lenses. Makeup artists poured from hidden doors and began to flit through the crowd like hummingbirds, drying tears and applying foundation and mascara to men and women alike as needed. One buzzed around Exida as he walked. The deer resisted the temptation to bite her.

Two spotlights erupted into life with tremendous crashes as the last layer of blush was applied on a giggling anesthesiologist and the artists vanished in a cloud of dry ice. In the confusion the sound crew had already finished their setup; the subtle hiss of feedback filled the room like distant condescending applause. Felgurd groaned but the noise was quickly drowned out by an ominous chorus of cellos from the string quartet in the back of the room. They continued to trill quietly as the deer steeped forward, punctuating his hoofbeats with trembling notes and the occasional anticipatory moan.

As the chief director motioned for the cameras to begin rolling Exida found himself thinking of what the agent had told him while the broken form of the monstrosity was being strapped down. Why? he had asked the quiet man. Why do it? Why play along?

5106 had only given his most patient smile. Why, Mr. Exis, he had said, Haven’t you ever simply been curious?

___________________


Gunships boomed in the sky like thunderheads.

The Presidentialgon huddled in their shadow amidst the howls of tornado sirens and foghorns like a frightened child hiding from monsters underneath its sheets. High above the ground at the building’s apex a tattered flag snapped and fluttered listlessly in the backdrafts, its sixty-three stars and twelve hundred stripes crudely masked with the emblem of a rearing red serpent. The once white walls were smeared with smoke and viscera. A prominent façade bore the words “RAPTOR DEAD TONIGHT 7 P.M.” scrawled in twelve-foot-high crimson letters, freshly painted in blood. Both of the periods were heads nailed to the plaster. One of them was sneezing.

Johnny Raptor sniffed. He could smell the evil.

The constant TCH-TCH-TCH-TCH-TCH-TCH of the gunships’ heliblades masked all noise but he had no doubt that deep inside that noble institution of law and orderlihood, red-blooded damsels were squealing in erotic terror and burly men in distress were squaring their jaws against the insidious serpentine threat that had come down on them like a tsunami of pure malevolence. Johnny hadn’t personally been there to see the coup- he’d been too busy helpfully punching Viper squadmens’ heads into educational murals- but it was always the same. The same uniforms, the same chants, the same squalling propaganda wagons trundling into villages and cities and underground nuclear shelters everywhere. The same chaos, the same tyranny. The same mysterious man in a mysterious suit and his endless hordes of mysterious minions.

It was enough to make a fellow suspicious, but that fellow did not happen to be Johnny Raptor.

With the roar of a tidal wave hitting a glacier the belly of the nearest gunship beamed light from its fissures and yawned, displacing bristling AA missiles and swinging bullet belts as black ziplines shot down and shattered the central dome of the Presidentialgon with a titanic crash. Viper squadrons poured down them like ants- filthy villainous ants!!- swarming over the monument with vile-looking instruments and mockingly hacking away at stuccoed eagles and angels with sudden fervor. That their tools were various household implements wrapped in tinfoil and that most of the soldiers were all wearing intern-level clearance badges did not strike Johnny; all he saw was a paragon of democracy being fouled by the grubby hands of unwashed evil. He surveyed the scene with indignant fury, his chest swelling into a mighty bellow of “JOOOHHNNYYYYY-”

“-RAPTOR. JOHNNY RAPTOR. IT’S BEEN A LONG, LOOOONG TIME.”

The musclebound hero stopped midbreath, looked up, and let his remaining air out in a dumbfounded whuh.

A single, massive gunship was descending down from the noxious swirls of an oncoming thunderstorm like the grasping hand of a furious god, sending the rest of the fleet spinning away on gusts of wind as though they were nothing more than leaves on the swells of a raging river. It loomed like a second sky over the sudden plunging darkness of the Presidential lawns; next to it the fleet’s largest ship was barely a speck of insignificance. The noise it made was the sound of an atom bomb perpetually trapped in the exact moment of explosion, only less pleasant. It was huge and imperious and black and evil and in the dead center of its belly there lay a seven-stories-high red V.

“VIPEEEEERRRRRRRRR,” Johnny screamed, mostly out of habit. He shook his fist at the hovering leviathan to let it know he meant business.

Like the burning eye of God opening to reveal His wrathful gaze the V on the ship’s belly whited out, casting a colossal spotlight on the heart of the nation’s capital. Decorative ponds and fountains for miles in all directions evaporated instantly and for a moment Johnny was blinded; but the screen flickered, blinked down a few numbers on a spinning countdown wheel, and then the cataclysmic thundering of a sound system the size of the average skyscraper tore its way through the troposphere.

“PEOPLE OF NEOTRANSAMERICA,” the voice of an apocalypse came howling down, “PREPARE FOR YOUR ANNIHILATION AT THE VICTORIOUS HANDS OF THE ALL-POWERFUL AND TRIUMPHANT VIPER! YOUR PITIFUL STRUGGLES HAVE BEEN IN VAIN! WE HAVE DESTROYED YOUR TEMPLE OF SIN AND FUTILITY! WE HAVE BROUGHT YOUR SO-CALLED LEADERS TO THEIR KNEES AND REQUESTED THEM TO PERFORM OBSCENE ACTS UPON US! WE HAVE CONQUERED YOUR EMPIRE! WE HAVE CRUSHED YOUR HEROES! YOU ARE HOPELESS! YOU ARE EMPTY! RESISTANCE IS USELESS, LOWLY SCUM! BOW BEFORE THE MIGHTY POWER OF ALL THAT IS VIPER!”

“Not on my watch,” Johnny growled, and then, as if on cue, a colossal white deer appeared on the titanoship’s screen. It smiled, and then didn’t.

“THE MAN CALLED JOHNNY RAPTOR,” it said, “THIS NEXT PART IS FOR YOU.”

The view flickered; now he was looking at the back of what seemed to be a long metal table standing alone in a gleaming silver laboratory. Noxious flasks of boiling liquids and posters reading “SUBMIT” in various languages covered the walls. Strange racks of instruments that were clearly never intended for anything but to bring incredible amounts of pain to their victims hung in tantalizing distance from the ceiling, dangling above- what was it? A man? A pile of clothes? A heap of squirming rats?

The camera panned around the room ponderously, showing a brief glimpse of white-coated men huddling in the shadows with clipboards clutched in their hands like life preservers. One of them waved as the image centered directly on the table, a crystal-clear pinnacle of cinematographic glory that managed to disgust and awe with equal confidence and lack of regard for aesthetic stamina.

A ragged suit writhed sluggishly underneath a network of steel bars freckled with dark stains and suspicious smears. Its motion indicated a mass of worms or insects, yet somehow it managed to exude an air of completely piteous defeat that begged for assistance and promised countless hours of adoring favors. The only part of it fully exposed to view was a strange mask, blood and other exciting fluids trailing from the single eye sunken into its surface. As the camera zoomed in on its face it turned toward the screen with a creaking of tendons and the unmistakable grinding of fractured bones.

[color=#99z8rz] “Jjjjjohnnyyy,” Felgurd wheezed. His voice resounded off the landscape like the last sigh of a dying god. The camera crept forward until the screen was filled with nothing but his mask, blown up to the size of a small city. His eye revolved like a miserable sun. “Jjj-jjjjhhhh….”[/color]

“YOU SEE,” the booming voice of Exida interrupted, “YOU SEE HOW HELPESS YOU ARE AGAINST US?”

The screen returned to the deer, wielding a cigarette and a sneer with equal nonchalance. This time Johnny saw all the animal’s subtleties, rendered seven stories tall in insultingly high definition: the faint sheen of dirt and oil clinging to his pearly fur, the deadly sharpness of his antlers, the virulent crimson of his staring eyes. Had he been inclined to Johnny would have also noticed the thick lines of false lenses around the deer’s irises, but red eyes on a villain was as natural to him as punching a critically endangered species so he accepted it and moved on. He had to admit, for an animal that wasn’t some kind of tiger the cervine was an impressive specimen. He swaggered in a way that deer simply shouldn’t, and he was wearing the V of Viper on his chest. Johnny hated him instantly.

“Exida Exis!” Johnny shouted. It all made sense now- of course this whole tournament was a setup by Viper! It couldn’t have been anything else, not with this level of organization and diabolical masterminding. Viper was notorious for its gladiatorial-style combat rings. Probably. He’d certainly read that somewhere on the back of a b-

book- somewhere-

Johnny shook his head. Not that he-

The deer’s gigantic face glowed like an unholy moon through the smog and filth choking the sky. His red eyes searched the ground with open scorn, and impossibly they found Johnny with a flash of red lightning that illuminated the Presidentialgon in hellfire. The colossal stag smiled thinly. “AS YOU CAN SEE, MR. RAPTOR, IF I MAY BE INFORMAL-” A brief noise offscreen; the deer gave it an irritable glance- “WE’VE CAPTURED YOUR LITTLE FRIEND. IN OUR TRULY INFINITE MERCY WE ARE WILLING- ONCE WE’RE FINISHED WITH HIM, OF COURSE- TO EXCHANGE HIS WORTHLESS LIFE FOR YOUR EQUALLY POINTLESS EXISTENCE. A FAIR TRADE, DON’T YOU THINK?”

Someone outside the camera’s view did something that made Felgurd scream.

“YOU HAVE NO CHOICE BUT TO ACCEPT. OBVIOUSLY.”

From across the distant barren plains that must surely exist in a land so irrevocably tainted by evil there came a wind that sliced across the ground like a reaper’s scythe, slashing across Johnny’s legs. It stirred the foul air, thick with burning plaster and the fog of a slow and rising evil that sank into his skin, staining it with the rank deadness of a doomed world. It was bitter. It whistled through his clothes and out over the smoking ruins of the capitol in a taunting dance of swirling ash. It pushed the brim of the great man’s hat down low, casting a shadow over his face that obscured all but the faintest red spark in his clear blue eyes.

“YOU WILL MEET US IN ONE HOUR, BY OUR COUNT, AT THE FOOT OF THE SPIRE OF GRATITUDE. YOU WILL COME ALONE. YOU WILL COME UNARMED. AND TONIGHT, JOHNNY RAPTOR…”

He paid the wind no mind.

He had a deer to kill.

“…YOU, WITHOUT ANY SHADOW OF A DOUBT, WILL DIE.”

From the highest window of the Presidentialgon, a man holding the unconscious body of a possessed teenager grinned with feral satisfaction.

_______________________

Kid. Kid, wake up.

“Can’t.”

Yes you can. Up and at ‘em.

“Head exploded. Pr’sure.”

It did not, pansy. Rise and shine!

Artemis groaned. It felt like someone was suspending him off a balcony by an ankle.

A few moments later he realized that this was, in fact, the case.

“….Grendel?”

Seriously, kid. I really think you’re going to want to see this.

“Hah! Puny aristocratic dog-child, speaking to itself. It is the hemophilia from your weakened bloodlines that makes you ramble so, tiny man! When the deer-god conquers this miserable planet all this feeble blood will be purged as if by swarms of righteous leeches! Or other such heroic hematophagic creatures, suckling from the veins of the aristocracy like babies at their mothers’ evil breasts! It shall be glorious beyond words!”

You know what, on second thought try to pass out again. I’m already sick of listening.

Blearily Artemis opened his eyes, the light of the setting sun assaulting him like a rude bar patron who’d had too much to drink and desperately wanted to have a discussion about it. For the most part what he could see was an orange blur with a large dark line on the top, which logic insisted was the horizon. Logic hadn’t been much use so far, though, so Artemis ignored it.

Jeez, your head is killing me.

Rayeln’s garbage disposal baritone rumbled like far-off thunder as the boy reluctantly forced himself to take in his surroundings. He was somewhere between fifty and sixty feet off the ground, by rough estimate, dangling aimlessly above a deserted courtyard in Rayeln’s iron grip. A few corpses were piled far below him, huddled against the walls. One was staring up at him with a betrayed expression and a gun clenched in her hand.

“What… ?”

“It is the Revolution, tiny not-comrade! The Revolution long-awaited by the suffering masses! Picture the children clinging to their mothers’ bullet belts, crying out in despair for the blood of our mutual enemies; the young lovers tenderly whispering the many ways the noble scourge will water the rose gardens of the free people with their filthy capital-ridden blood! Picture them vindicated! Surely in the halls of Communist Valhalla my father weeps iron tears of joy at this, the most victorious of days!”

Artemis nodded, closing his eyes. The corpse’s gaze was a little too confrontational. “Okay. Will you let me down?”

“Pffha. In my day we hang children off towers for their benefit.”

Nevertheless the barbarian hauled the boy over with a casual shrug of his colossal shoulders. Artemis collapsed into a rumpled heap against a column and slid to the floor, his head flopping aside like a ragdoll’s. Distantly he heard Grendel snicker.

“Yes, a great day,” Rayeln repeated, a slight tremble entering his voice. Artemis looked up at him blearily: the big man was staring triumphantly at something in the distance, shielding his face with a shovel-like hand. A single inexplicably red tear trailed from his eye. “Never did the small peasant boy that I once was imagine that he would one day be able to experience the full throes of such a glorious upheaval.”

He’s not kidding, you know. We’re in for a grade-A cockfight.

“What are you talking about?”

“Tiny rich ant-child! Why do you question yourself aloud? Truly, you know nothing,” Rayeln snorted, and snatched up Artemis by the scruff of his collar to hold him up over the barbarian’s head.

The boy’s jaw dropped open almost as an afterthought.

Heh. You know, I wasn’t kidding about Personalities.

If you were to give a child a pencil and a piece of paper and tell them to draw the most incredible battle scene they could think of, with every type of weapon they could imagine and the most vicious and terrible carnage they could conceive and specified that you wanted the bodies to number in the thousands, the ground to be soaked with blood, and the sky to be a deep shade of apocalyptic crimson, and after all that fed the child an overdose of PCP there might be a very small chance that they would produce an approximation of what Artemis saw, with some license given for artistic integrity.

Even if they didn’t, it would certainly be more tasteful.
____________________________

At this moment, the Khagan and his noble steed were finding themselves in the center of a sizable conflict, which despite the unimaginable casualty rate was mostly turning out to be emotional in nature.

The last, panicked thoughts of the soldiers who died between Ariq’s gnashing teeth or under the Khagan’s raging fists tended to fall into the general template of “what is that”, or more expressed more accurately “why specifically is it happening to me”. They had accepted for the most part their new reptilian physiology (it wasn’t so bad) and they had had no trouble in receiving the deer as their glorious leader (he was very convincing). They didn’t even particularly mind that they were all about to die, for they knew in their hearts that they were bad people and that was simply what bad people did. But something about the hell-horse and its monstrous rider struck the Viper squadrons as being horribly, horribly wrong. Had they been able to express their feelings beyond the sprays of blood blossoming from their lips, they would have realized that the man mowing them down like paper cutouts simply wasn’t the right kind of hero.

Originally posted on MSPA by XX.

---

From his the belly of his gunship, Exida gave the battle a three out of ten.

“What the hell is going on?” he barked, pressing his snout to the smoked glass that formed the cabin’s walls and leaving a wet noseprint that would later be enshrined in a reliquary on the outskirts of the Capitol. “Is that a goddamn horse down there? Thing looks like an impacted rhinoceros. I thought we had perimeters up by now! Damn you, I want men down there in containment five- ten minutes ago! Send people with names!”

“You’re a natural, Mr. Exis,” said 5106. He hadn’t left the deer’s side in over an hour. The agent’s soft voice was a subtle underline through the chaos and screams of the rabid crew. “One wonders why you hadn’t come to our attention before.”

“You know damn well why,” Exida growled. His furious red eyes glowed with a light that had been steadily building up since his last transmission, casting a baleful glare over his sunken cheeks and razor fangs. The V on his chest glittered with the cold finality of steel. “I had an empire. I had ten thousand soldiers following my every word, I had money. I had influence. I had so many politicians in my pocket that I jingled when I walked. The most beautiful woman on our unworthy earth called herself mine and I had power, dammit. No one stands against Exida Exis and lives! You want to see what a real villain can do in this amateur hour? I’ll crush this world beneath my hooves! I- ah, hell, you’ve got me doing it again.”

The agent’s eyebrows arced above his sunglasses. “Why, Mr. Exis, no one is making-”

“Yes, I heard you, ‘acclimation’,” the deer snapped. “Scaffolding, if you ask me. When did we start pandering to these people?”

“Not until just now, actually. It’s proven most interesting. I believe that horseman has begun eating one of your ships.”

“Son of a stag!” Exida motioned behind him with his antlers. The view on the cabin window rocketed in on the Khagan and expanded his image to near life-size. The deer watched the giant man punch clean through the chests of six consecutive snakemen and snorted. “What do you think? Deuteragonist?”

“Doesn’t have the charm.”

“No, look at those sweat stains. Disgraceful. Though his body count is more than enough… Minions! How far are we to zero hour?”

A small cabal of hissing snake-headed men growled a series of unintelligible numbers that Exida merely nodded along to. “Close, then,” he said, pawing at the floor with his hoof. Instantly the window sprang into a display of glowing green screens, most bearing orthographic drawings of Johnny Raptor strangling a varying number of serpents.

“Ready my ship,” Exida called, staring at Raptor’s beatific face with unabashed hatred. His cigarette sparked and fizzled, scorching the screen with showers of white-hot sparks. “We go terrestrial in ten. Bring the abomination. By God, Raptor, I hope you’re fully prepared to see exactly what kind of man you decided to fuck with.”

____________

He was.

Or, at least, that’s what he thought.

Johnny Raptor sped toward his date with destiny atop what was very likely a stolen motorcycle. In truth, he wasn’t actually sure where it had come from or how he had ended up riding it, but he definitely knew why. Motorcycles were cool. He was cool. It was a case of pretty self-consistent logic.

Although, he mused, ramping over the heads of a furious mob of Viper ninja-cops, it might have been more impressive if his teammates hadn’t deserted him for various reasons. Felgurd had been taken by the ever-groping hands of the Viper war machine, Artemis was most likely off canoodling with some girl by now and Sweet Uncle Sam only knew where the Khagan had run off to. It was a hard and lonely life, being the hero, but Johnny Raptor was used to it. He didn’t have a choice.

The motorcyle’s wheels shredded over Presidential lawns and Viper footmen alike as he sped towards the Spire of Gratitude, looming on the horizon like a dark needle piercing the heart of NeoTransAmerica. Viper gunships circled above like great dark birds, lazily pumping the occasional round of flak missiles into the action. A faint red halo had formed above the Spire’s apex that cast the entire structure into ruddy shadow. Funny, Raptor thought, he’d never heard of any Spire before- it must be new. Probably a monument to his countless victories against the ongoing threat of Viper, ha ha, yes! How ironic the deer probably thought he was being, staging a showdown in the very shadow of one of Johnny’s greatest accolades! Well the joke was on him! Johnny Raptor NEVER lost a fight!

(But you have, something whispered. You have and you have.)

He would emerge from this conflict bloodied, yes, battered certainly, but victorious, and he would mount that hellish deer’s head above the marble fireplace he was sure to receive from the grateful public. Perhaps if he were feeling merciful he might even let it become his faithful steed!

(And when have things ever gone that well for you?)

Johnny Raptor grinned triumphantly to himself as the Spire’s colossal form came nearer and nearer. He would always win. He was a hero. He was invincible.
___________________

“COWARDS,” the Khagan roared, scattering bodies before him like confetti from the hands of a child, “FILTHY COWARDS! COME! SHOW ME YOUR LEADER! SHOW ME YOUR WEEPING MOTHERS! JE SUIS TA MORT! LET ME SEE YOUR FACES!”

The deafening clamor of the battlefield was like a symphony to him. The percussive chatter of the popping shells and the clattering of marching boots, the subtle lyricism of each enemy’s dying breath (each lung an wheezing woodwind, each bubbling tongue a tremble of strings), his own roars a maestro’s conduction over the orchestra’s bloody swell... He stopped to wipe away a tear that burned a hole through the cheek of the snake-man it fell on, who died screaming underneath Ariq’s hooves. More followed. Toghun did not keep track.

He rode through the hordes in a surge of crushing fury, overpowering man and machine alike. Tanks were crushed like dollhouses beneath him and men died by the frothing dozens. Occasionally their bullets hit him but he noticed no more than if they were moths nibbling at his vest. It was as though he was at the head of his own armies again, riding down his foes to the admiring cries of his men- ah, yes, but that was wishful thinking. Very wishful. If he wanted to return to them he must first destroy these squalling excuses for warriors. Hardly a challenge for the Khan of Khans!

The Khagan stopped Ariq short and kicked him into a rear, surveying the field as his horse screamed with rage and raked the air with his monstrous hooves. The fighting was grouped into tight clusters scattered around the base of the Spire, the largest now keeping a respectful distance from Ariq’s hooves and only reluctantly throwing themselves into Toghun’s line of fire. The rest- he frowned- were… standing? A quick spur of his heels sent Ariq rocketing forward into a cluster of screaming snakemen whose gurgling cries the Khagan thoughtlessly tuned out as he peered over the masses. Standing, yes. And- talking? Did that one have a crossword out?

He shook his magnificent head. Where were the opponents? Where were the coursing armies, the enemy ships?

Where was the war?

“JOOOOHHNNNNYYYYYYYY RAPPPTOOOOOOOOOOOOOORRRRRRRRRRR!”

The motorcycle shot over a rampart in a haloed blaze of igniting gunpowder and stage makeup, flames and empty bullet shells raining down from its rims into the hissing swarms. It flew into the sky like a steel and rubber Icarus, pausing in its ascent long enough to blot out the sun and cast an eagle-shaped shadow over the battlefield. When it landed a shockwave of atomized Viper chattel flew out for miles.

Johnny dismounted and flipped open the kickstand in a single, imperceptible motion. He would have discarded his helmet had he been wearing one, but he was not. Helmets were for babies.

“WHO HERE,” he yelled through teeth so white they could have been seen from space, “IS IN CHARGE?”

There was no response. Thousands of glittering yellow eyes stared back at him, most vaguely surprised and a little incredulous. It must be the motorcycle, Johnny decided. The flames might have been bigger.

“I AM LOOKING,” he said, “FOR THE ONE CALLED EXIDA EXIS. HE IS A DEER. I HAVE NOT SEEN HIM IN PERSON BUT HE IS ABOUT-” he gestured in the vague area of his own head, “-THIS HIGH AND LOOKS LIKE A DEER.”

“I HAVE BUSINESS WITH HIM,” he added helpfully.

One of the foremost snakemen scratched his head and shrugged. He pointed upwards in a way that suggested press X to continue.

“DO you, though, Mr. Raptor? Or do I… have business with YOU?”

And for the second time in as many hours, Johnny found himself staring up at the sky at the belly of a descending Viper gunship, except that this time the deer sneering down from it was real.

Open blast doors folded out like angel wings from either side of a slick black machine that was to a helicopter what an ICBM is to a throwing dart. Its engines whirred and roared frenetically, drowning out all sounds of struggle in the field below; haloes of dust and shrapnel encircled the machine and filtered the sunlight into murky obscurity. At its center was the head of a pure white deer. Watching. Smirking.

Black-clad soldiers bristled in behind him, their reptilian silhouettes distorted by the addition of machinery and high-powered rifles strung from their spiny shoulders. Their heads poked over the beast’s shoulders and hissed at Johnny jeeringly, but the man took no notice. Any interest they might have held for him was overtaken entirely by the spectacle of Exida himself. An unbiased observer might have identified the creature’s species as a cross between a deer and a professional wrestler; a biased one would have called him a marketing masterstroke waiting to happen. But Jonny was not truly either of these things, and what he saw as the gunship came to rest in a cloud of blood-sodden dust was this:

An imperious white stag with antlers like two ivory trees bursting from its skull, their tips crimson with blood and corruption. Virulent red streaks ran down them into the beast’s eyes: two beautiful rubies glittering with a cold malevolence that made Johnny grit his teeth in anticipation. Despite its reek of evil the deer shone through the clouds of dust and smoke with a pearly radiance that washed all color from its surroundings. It was a beacon. It was a god. And Johnny knew, with every manful fiber of his incredibly fibrous being, that it existed for him and him specifically.

“Johnny Raptor,” Exida said softly, stepping from the ship on golden hooves. His voice was as tender as a lover’s. “I’ve been waiting for this for a long, long time.”

His henchmen opened fire in a roaring hail of bullets that Johnny dodged like a psychic dancer, flinging himself back behind his motorcycle as 51mm shells tore through the air. The bike’s frame shook and shuddered but miraculously held long enough for Johnny to dig (he had to have one he always had one) for the knife in his boot, tossing it expertly without looking over the motorcycle’s seat in the direction of the deer. There was a loud shunk and the sound of a few hundred pounds of meat falling to the ground; over the gunfire Exida’s voice screamed, “Stop, you idiots! Damn your incompetence, what part of ‘leave him to me’ was unclear to you? What part exactly?”

The bullets stopped. A few shells clattered to the ground distantly. Cautiously Johnny rose, winding a strip of fabric around his arm with surgical precision. He wasn’t injured, but he thought the situation called for it anyway. “Exida Exis,” he said. He looked away from the deer, watching the endless horde of Viper squadmen creep closer and closer, forming a loose ring around him like a slithering, reptilian ocean. Familiar territory. “I admit I didn’t expect you to show up in person!”

The deer tossed his antlers silently. His entourage fanned out from behind him, still cringing from their reproach and nimbly stepping over the body of the snakeman with Johnny’s knife extruding from his neck. The scopes of their rifles formed a ring of shiny black eyes around Johnny that waved in the foul breeze. “I can nearly say the same for you, Raptor,” the deer said coolly. “Or I could if I didn’t know exactly the kind of man you are. You’re all so painfully predictable, you heroes. So hungry for the cameras. So desperate for a little applause! I’m almost disappointed.”

Johnny guffawed (predictable predictable) and pushed the desiccated remains of his motorcycle to the ground. Exida’s henchmen twitched and hissed at the crash, though the deer remained stoic, only narrowing his crimson eyes. Johnny swaggered forward and spread his hands wide. “Are you going to have them shoot me, you curmudgeonly cervine?” he said, nodding at Exida’s henchmen with a square-jawed grin. They flinched. “Or are we going to do this like men?”

The deer inclined his head. “I shudder to think that you’d consider me impolite, Mr. Raptor. Back up,” he called to his men, kicking the curled body of the downed guard out of his path. “Fifteen meter perimeter, all of you. If I see so much as a foot out of line you’ll lose it.”

“I don’t have a weapon,” Johnny said, fingering the hidden knife in his sleeve.

The deer’s eyebrows arced elegantly. A puff of cigarette smoke floated from his nostrils. “Neither do I. Like men, as you said.”

“Fine with me.” Johnny shrugged off his jacket (he was wearing he had to be that’s the way it worked) and let it to fall to the ground. The dust it stirred swirled around his boots. “Now,” he said, raising his fists before him, “Let’s-”

“COMRADE EXIDA!”

Johnny wheeled around, clenching his knife as the deer swore viciously enough to make his guards blush-

An explosion of red and brown ripped through the gathered crowd like an atomic crowdsurfer, tossing a wave of bodies in its wake as a brilliant red sword slashed through wayward limbs and heads alike. A wide, beaming face appeared smeared with blood of various descriptions and bared its wolflike teeth at Exida, proudly displaying something that wriggled faintly over one giant shoulder. The soldiers nearest him had their weapons trained on him, if only mostly out of confusion; they appeared to be irritated that missing at this range would be difficult even for them. A few looked in Exida’s direction and coughed pointedly.

“Let him through,” the deer said. His ears quivered just slightly.

Slowly at first, then more willingly the crowd began to part around Rayeln the Scourge as he strode manfully forward, bearded face grinning childishly as he pushed aside the less nimble soldiers by the heads. When he was about ten feet away he gave his mighty shoulders a shrug; the body that had been draped over him was thrown into the air and crash-landed directly between Exida and Johnny, carving a large swath through the dust.

“Hi, Johnny,” Artemis said sheepishly.

“Kid,” Johnny sighed, shaking his head, “We’ve really got to talk about where your sidekicking career is going.”

“Comrade, I am here!” Rayeln’s voiced boomed over the otherwise silent crowds as he trotted up to Exida’s side. He peered down at the deer with an excitement that bordered on fanaticism, ignoring that the latter’s teeth had nearly bitten through the cigarette clamped in his jaws. “Comrade, I have located one of the aristocracy’s spies! I have been steadily sabotaging their efforts to hinder the peoples’ liberation ever since you so wisely-”

“Shut up.”

Rayeln’s smile flickered. He tilted his head at the deer. “Comrade…?”

“You idiot. You great fucking idiot! Someone please tell me how someone- anyone- fucks up this extravagantly. Please! Tell me! Anyone? No?” Exida’s antlers butted into Rayeln’s chest, who twitched, stunned. “How long do you think I’ve been waiting for this moment, Rayeln,” Exida asked, his voice high. “Take a guess. Please. Now.”

“C-Com-”

“Take a guess.”

Rayeln looked helplessly to either side of him. His smile began to slip. “I… am not…sure-”

“Four hours, Rayeln. Four hours I was sitting in that dank cabinet of a ship breathing the smoke of my own cigarette. Four hours with that sycophantic son of a bitch whining in my ear about his rules and his manifestos, and these hordes of faceless idiots breaking into a mating cluster at the slightest hint of any form of excitement . Four hours waiting for yet another hero in what seems like a never-ending parade of mockery and cheap camp imitation just to have all my planning, all my masterminding ruined by a single incredible blow of incompetency and poor self-control, ruined by you, you pathetic sack of testosterone-soaked flesh. Can you imagine, you wretched imbecile? Can you possibly summon the last dying cells of your steroid-addled cortex and think for even the briefest fraction of a second of the setback you’ve caused me?”

Rayeln took a tiny step back. The laser sword’s tip fell to the ground. “E… Exida…”

“Don’t say my name,” the deer said coldly, red eyes clear with fury. The Laurels around his neck shimmered. “Do us all a favor and slit your worthless throat.”

The barbarian’s stricken face looked down at his sword, back to Exida, then back to the ground. His mouth twitched and he began to say something before he closed his mouth, squaring his quivering jaw. He lifted his arm gently, the sword’s pommel loose in his grip as the blade began to drift to his neck-

Johnny shouted “No!” at the same time that a hellish horse’s scream cut through the artificial hush of the battlefield. Something erupted behind him with the sound of a miniature landslide; he turned to be greeted by a faceful of fresh blood spouting from the half of a Viper soldier held in the hand of a triumphant Toghun. The Khagan was seated atop a snarling Ariq amongst a puddle of liquefied reptilians, one fist raised triumphantly high to the scorching sun. He held the recently emancipated skull in his hands, which he tossed casually to land in a wet, bouncing roll at Exida’s hooves.

“Exida Exis,” he said smugly, wiping the palm of his hand off on his armor. “For the glory of the Pankhaganate, I challenge you for the supremacy of this contest. Face me!”

The deer’s head moved from Rayeln to the Khagan with ponderous gravity. “Rayeln,” he said, slowly, tasting the words, “I’m going to have to ask you to wait for a moment. Something else has come up. My apologies.” A single golden hoof lifted, paused; it landed in a soft, inaudible puff of dust.

The two Viper guards flanking him sank to the ground and drew their weapons from their holsters in the same motion, shouldering the rifles as though the machinery had been born from their bodies. They paused for no more than the time it took to aim between breaths and pulled their triggers simultaneously.

Both of Ariq’s front knees exploded inwards like two huge, fiery blossoms, smoking blood sprouting over the horse’s legs and chest as it sank to the ground screaming in clouds of billowing steam. Red sparks spat out onto the ground, burning tiny craters into the dust around the kneeling beast, rivers spreading beneath it as it roared and roared, thrashing its enormous head from side to side. Toghun swore and tore at the reins but Ariq’s convulsions had nearly unseated the Khagan. He clung to his horse’s mane, shaking a bloody fist at Exida and opening his mouth for a battle cry-

“Again,” Exida said. “Hit the rider this time.”

Two more flowers bloomed on Ariq’s chest and the horse bellowed again, more machine than animal in the furious cacophony of its screams, but its voice paled in comparison to the roar the Khagan gave as the bullets pierced his abdomen a few centimeters shy of his ribs. His hands flew to his armor, shock overtaking his face at the thick blackish blood flecking his fingers. He raised them before his face, half in defense and half in fury, suddenly aware of how he shone in the sunlight. His lips moved wordlessly as he locked eyes with Exida. Rubies. Beautiful red rubies on a white, white plain.

“Rayeln. I’ve found a use for you after all.”

The giant approached like a drunk, staggering from side to side and slipping on the steaming blood pooling away from the twitching Ariq, holding his sword like a child’s toy. He smiled at Toghun. “Sorry, Comrade,” he said, raising the humming blade above his head. He closed one eye to focus. “I only did it for the people.”

Johnny’s vision went black.

When he opened his eyes Exida was smirking at him, Rayeln swaying at his side with a cautious smile on his face and his hands coverd ins cove co- in- in

“Johnny,” Exida said gently, “Johnny, I’m going to give you a little test. My good friend Rayeln here has to pay for his mistakes. But I consider myself to be a fair man, so I’m giving you the option of saving him from his own stupidity. If you can convince him- just for a moment, not any longer than that, I think that’s reasonable- to spare his own life, he can keep it. And so can you. Do you understand?”

The air was filled with dust and the sun was hotter than he remembered. The back of his neck felt numb from the heat. “I understand,” he heard himself say. Each breath was becoming an effort. The heat was crushing him.

“Good,” the deer smiled, smiling, turned his handsome face to the man with the sword and told him to do it.

Johnny didn’t even get a word out from between his lips before the blade made a noise like hot metal hitting water and the man-of-the-people fell, and fell, and fell.

And fell.

A silence spread out over the battlefield.

“Does it surprise you, Raptor?”

And fell.

The deer spoke to him like a god to a disciple. He heard his voice like a memory, surfacing. Like an unwanted face.

Like a pretty girl by a river.

“Did it feel like a game to you, before now? I’ve seen your type so often, boy. Just another page in an endless, boring book of stupid men pretending to be heroes. Hah. I was almost, almost, like you once, nineteen years ago. I hope you know what it feels like, now. I hate to see a hopeful man die.”

“I’m a hero,” Johnny tried to tell him. His mouth didn’t cooperate. He tilted to the side, the ground rebelling underneath his feet. “I’m Johnny Raptor.”

“Are you, though? Who are you, really?” A hoof hit him in the chest like a gunshot, shattering the silence and maybe his ribs too, and a couple of other things he’d forgotten about. He flew back through space and memory and the girl’s long lovely tangles of hair and the things she said and did to him and landed in the dust and blood of a battlefield, blood on his hands and on his tongue and a deer standing over him with eyes like red burning fire and a smirk that promised immolation. He turned his head. He couldn’t stand the heat.

The crowds of serpents started to shake, started to shed their skins, and he saw them burn up under the sun, turning into shadows and less than shadows. Cheap pulp paper and wet runny ink burst from their veins and fell to the ground in speech bubbles that all seemed to say the same thing, but he couldn’t read them, he couldn’t, she’d know and she
She
she

“Who are you?”

The man called Johnny Raptor turned his eyes to the deer, to heaven, to the black-and-yellow Ben-Day dots in the sky that filled the sun and the moon and smiled a weak, shivering, shimmering smile. There was nothing else to do; he had to play his part. He didn’t have a choice. He opened his hand and this time he felt it appear, forged from the script running endlessly behind his eyes. He shaped it from ink and letters and fiction and something from before when his name was different and what he made fell into his palm with the weight of a universe.

“Who-”

“My name,” he whispered, “is Johnny Raptor,” and he pulled the trigger.

He didn’t hear the explosion. He didn’t see the armies of creeping reptile-men hybrids dissipate, didn’t see the ships crashing from the sky like flaming deicidal arrows, didn’t see the Spire devour itself in ravenous billowing clouds and didn’t feel the kickback, though it knocked the gun from his hands.

All he really felt, as the deer stumbled once and sank to its knees before him, red flowers blooming from its mouth and chest and the crimson V dissolving from its neck around the pretty black hole in its shining fur, was like a hero.

SpoilerShow

I
I am sorry

Originally posted on MSPA by Solaris.

---

As the showdown between the man and the deer escalated, Don Itallio reviewed the activities that he had been recording since the start of his event. He wasn't sure just what he was searching for, but he felt something was a bit off...

His thought was interrupted by the sudden appearance of a seven manila folders. The one on top had a tab that read "LAST. THING. STANDING" and it had a beautifully written note attached to the top.

There seems to be something brewing among a number of other people who developed an idea similar to ours. This is the information we have collected on these other seven 'events.'

The Don smirked as he fingered through the first folder, taking out the file on The Broadcaster.

"Excuse me?"

Don Itallio put his files down and turned to his new, unwelcomed guest, a mousey creature that he hardly considered sentient. "Yes? How may I help you?" The words were coated with a somewhat annoyed tone; no criminal enjoyed visits from any lapdog of a man of law, least of all one under The Arbiter.

"If I am not mistaken, you have a STATIC in your er, battle, Vendetta was it?"

"And if I do?"

"Well, to put it simply, they're called." The messenger paused for a bit, half expecting a vaporization.

Don Itallio raised one brow, but opted to listen as getting rid of him wouldn't solve anything, for now.

"You see, someone else has already summoned up iterations of them further in the future than yours which has caused a bit of a temporal instability. It is very complex and I'm sure you don't want to hear it all, so if you could just allow me to request that their time here be erased, and that they return home, it would be very appreciated."

Normally, he wouldn't even entertain the thought of releasing anyone already chosen, least of all to someone like the snivley, aimless creature before him. He had other things to deal with, his very legacy was at stake, surely that was more important than the dealings of whoever else wanted to use them for their "battle". However, as he stared down onto the files, he realized that there was something he needed that this messenger could get him. And in the end, it wouldn't be too difficult for his hitmen to find another prospect or two (although he'd have to make sure that they don't make such a mistake again).

"Hmm... I will agree to these terms without a single protest if you just do one thing. Tell me where The Broadcaster is."

===

The remaining contestants saw as the walls of the underground facility changed to a slightly familiar decor. Once more they sat at a lavish table, though this time where wasn't any food, and surprisingly, rather than a single missing seat an astounding four seats were empty.

"Hello there, I'll make this short. I'm afraid that STATIC will no longer be joining you. Worry not, for we'll still be playing with a full deck, well, full minus our charred cards." Two of the seats, formerly belonging to the druid and the alien now seat two new women, one crying black tears and the other looking attractive, but somehow off. "This is D-003865 and this is Miss Rivia Peters."

"As I would like to get on with things, I will give them the abridged version of events. Ladies, I an Don Itallio, I apologize for the unannounced retrieval and late introduction. The two of you are going to join these four in a little contest to see who should be my successor to this, The Mafia. I will send you to fantastic locales and if you survive through them all you will become the head of an organization that spans the entire multiverse."

As with the first introduction, the Don takes out reading glasses and chart and starts pointing at the remaining original contestants.

"While I would like to give a bit more details, we are strapped for time, so just the names will have to do. Let us move on."

Blackness and a familiar saxophone sound consumes the six contestants and Don Itallio as they leave the dining room for somewhere else...

SpoilerShow

Say hello to Pharmacy and Palamedes, who are replacing Protoman, Anartic Wolf, Yako, and Digital Hellhound!

Here are their characters.

Username: Pharmacy

Name: D-003865

Gender: Ladytype

Race: AHAHAHHAHAHAHHAHHAHAHHAHHAHuman

Colour: "...I go through life with an impassive expression, from time to time permitting myself a gentle smile, and I often wonder whether I have ever laughed..."

Biography:

Born between the union of controversial science and a single oocyte of some unlucky intern, D-003865 ("Dee-Oh" for the scientifically impatient) always felt she had lived a life of nothing, but that was okay. Nothing was exciting when your existence is under the thumbs of a corporation that dithers between semi-legal charity and an absolute disregard for basic ethics.

But something always comes out of nothing and pretty soon, D-0 found herself running away from screaming personnel and just as equally loud alarms. Admittedly, her grand escape was pretty dang easy; the amount of security they had was as just as much as the amount of empathy that kept employees from being accused as robots. The bigger question was why did she escaped. She kept on asking herself that question to herself.

Too bad she never found an answer.

Description:

Bowed stature. Baleful blue eyes. Black hair. Black blood. Equally black tears constantly streaming from her eyes - could be mistaken for eyeliner, but those are real real tears. Also cries constantly no matter how good or bad she feels - it's a side effect of being the experiment she is. Super pale. Fairly androgynous but not enough. Basically looks about what you expect from a young-ish woman genetically engineered to ensure maximum depression. It's a sucky life, I know.

Incredibly nervous gal - kind of swings back and forth between hermetic avoidance and half-hearted attempts towards friendliness. It's like she wants to be social (being locked up nigh-constantly usually makes you desperate of some human interaction) but she does not want to get hurt - especially from anything. All in all, fairly harmless - and maybe places a little too much trust in others. She kind of stutters and slurs occasionally. The stuttering is from her socially-deprived shyness. The slurring is from her drugs.

She is full of drugs - that's why her insides are black, why she cries - and probably explain the forlorn and vacant look on her face. The (un)needed drugs are fed into her veins from the contraption she wears. It looks like a vaguely high-tech straightjacket and like all vaguely high-tech straightjackets, it tightly binds her arms and prevents them from breaking free - at least by her lonesome, of course.

The purpose of these drugs was to stabilize her body and to render her catatonic at the slightest chemical imbalance. Unfortunately, for her supervisors, she built a resistance to them. And never told them.

Which was why she managed to escape.

Items/Abilities:

Pitykinesis. With enough straining and grunting, she has the psychic ability to internally generate a negative sort of emotion and place them into objects. She can control where the pity goes. Who is the focus and what not. Usually, she uses it as a shitty form of telekinesis because she essentially makes the object feels so sorry that they move for her but usually they become too depressed and just stop half-way in the middle.

Yes, the objects include people. It's not exactly mind control. It's more she shoves pity into the person's psyche and waits. She has no control over how people reacts to the foreign feels that blossomed in their depraved hearts. No word on those with lack of empathy.

She never used this power effectively on a sentient being before. Probably because there is a small staple in her spine that discourages her almost nigh-constantly. No wonder she's so twitchy.

======

Username: Palamedes
Name: Miss Rivia Peters
Gender: Female
Race: Human
Color: Blueeee (#0000FF)

Weapons/Abilities: Rivia relies on the old tools of her trade: whatever she can find around her capable of hurting others. She prefers guns and other long-range weapons, due to how far they keep the enemy away from her, but currently she doesn’t have one at her disposal.

She also carries on her, at all times, a large stash of various addictive drugs (or ‘medicine’, as she calls it), and isn’t particularly capable of functioning when off them. Rivia’s primary ability comes to her thanks to one of these drugs, Argus. Argus gives its partakers, as a side effect, the ability to psychically project things to the human eye - a crude but effective form of illusion. This drug is only available to extremely shady billionaires and crime lords, as well as their minions, hence Rivia’s ability to get her hands on some.

Unfortunately, Rivia’s various other addictions have significant effects on her Argus-given ability. For some reason she is unable to make people envision things that aren’t real, instead preventing them from seeing things that actually are. So it’s really more of a sort of invisibility power, though she’ll never admit it.

Description: Rivia is an attractive girl at a quick glance, tall, thin, with short cut blonde hair. While makeup and minor cosmetic surgeries have managed to cover up the worst of the physical imperfections caused by her drug dependency, on a closer observation she carries many of the signs of someone who is on about four too many kinds of illegal chemicals. The great amounts of money her bosses can afford for one of their higher up enforcers helps to pay to cover up more severe deformities as well, but one can only get so many nose jobs, anti-aging formulas, or stain removal treatments before you start to look funny.

Personality wise she’s no particular treat either – while friendly, she’s not exactly anyone’s friend unless they remind her of herself in some way, and even then she’s liable to betray them should the reasons be good enough (and her skewed sense of priorities mean that far too many reasons could be ‘good’ reasons). Past that she’s snarky, aggressive, and whatever else you want her to be if she needs something from you.

Biography: Rivia is from your stereotypical dystopia – gangs rule whatever parts of the world the oppressive governments and corporations don’t, everyone is terrible in some way, and it’s in the future, though not so much that it’d be unrecognizable to people in the present. Rivia herself was born to an unpleasant family in an even less pleasant neighbourhood. Her parents were both addicts, and when they died due to issues with the local mafia she ‘inherited’ their stash… and their debt.

She started off pretty small in both cases, with cigarettes, alcohol, and prostitution for the gang’s lackeys, and eventually moved up in her world to heroin, acid, and prostitution for the gang’s higher ups. Eventually she had paid off her debt and gotten into the worst kinds of chemicals, and decided that the life of whoring and crime she had grown up around was the best way to obtain the ‘medicine’ she now needed.

It was through this work that she was eventually introduced to Argus – an important guest from a more prominent organization convinced her to take the new, experimental drug instead of a regular payment. It changed her life, gave her powers and abilities she couldn’t ever dream of before and couldn’t live without now, and when she was promised more in exchange for backstabbing her gang she took the opportunity without a second thought.

Turns out that gangs like to employ treacherous but drug dependant goons, especially when they suffer from certain side effects of the only drug on the market they can’t aquire on their own.

Now, working for the most powerful criminal syndicate in the continent she finally found her niche. She worked mostly as an illusionary enforcer now, supporting the more combat oriented members to confuse and destroy any enemies to their organization. In exchange, she got all the free Argus she could want, and enough money to fund the rest of her habits. She was happy, well, as happy as anyone in the shithole of a planet could be, and ready to just live out the rest of her life in the luxury afforded by walking all over the backs of the oppressed.

Too bad something else had different plans for her.

======

I also edited them into this post.

Stay tuned for round two's introduction!

Originally posted on MSPA by Solaris.

---

When the music and blackness subsided, the six contestants, old and new, were greeted by gravel, wood, and stone.

"Welcome to the small town of Soñaire. It has all of the essentials, a bank, a general store, houses, law, just like any other town. Or at least, it did. As you can see, it is a bit on the barren side, no?"

The town's streets and buildings were all empty, without a soul in sight. The moss grew on the walls, weeds covered the sidewalk, nothing alive in the entire town except plant life and the six contestants.

"Where did everyone go you may ask? Well you see, something came and killed them all. Very sad and such a shame, because, you see, the people who lived here had a secret... nothing to concern yourselves with though, just your boring run-of-the-mill supernatural power, I'm sure you would all be much more interested in whatever killed them."

Don Itallio snapped his fingers and all of the contestants fell into a deep sleep, unknowingly entering the true Soñaire, and soon about to discover a world they could only dream of. "Well, you'll know soon enough."

"Buonanotte."

SpoilerShow

The town of Soñaire exists on two planes, there is the physical realm that has been rundown by a period without upkeep, and then there is the town of Soñaire that lives on in the world of dreams. The people who lived here did so in the second Soñaire, using their special ability to control and share their dreams to make life virtually perfect. Then, something came in to the town and killed them all, leaving behind only the remnants of their peaceful dreams, and maybe something else. As for this creature, it could have left after killing them all, fell into a deeper sleep, or still be lurking around, who knows?

Now, as for the setting, the contestants should initially be unaware that they are dreaming, seeing Soñaire as a small, abandoned, and slightly odd town at first, before slowly seeing that there is more to it, seeing whatever remains of the original residents of the town and the something. Maybe with time their dreams will affect the town as well, they'll figure out what's going on, want to take advantage of it, ~possibilities~. Have fun!

EDIT: Also, you all start off wherever you want, not where your characters were tossed asleep~

p.s. The spoiler under this one has very little to do with most of you.

SpoilerShow

Visitors? The Broadcaster had made a few calls here and there, some less allowed than others, but visitors to him, both unannounced and more than one, was a bit new. As the two entered his cell, one a woman wearing a stunning dress and red hat and the other a shark(?) in a robot suit, he felt a chill.

"To whom do I owe the pleasure?" He was a bit nervous, as anyone would be, but he did his best to hide it.

"My name is Femme Itallio, this is Esquire. We are with an organization and have come here to strike a deal."

"A Deal? What sort of deal? I will remind you that I'm a bit tied up at the moment." The Broadcast made a weak chuckle and raised his hands before it faded and he sighed.

"Well, if all goes well, you won't be."

The Broadcaster looked up at the scarlet woman with a curious skepticism. He could not find any words.

"I'm sure that you are tired of being here and being snubbed, so I'll make this fast." She reaches behind her back and pulls out a group of folders and tosses it to his side of the table. "I'm sure you are familiar with a few of these."

The Broadcaster looked at the covers of each of the folders, noting that the first is labeled "LAST. THING. STANDING." and reached for it. As he opened the folder and read the files on himself and his contestants, he absentmindedly asks, "How did you get these?"

Esquire replies, his voice is quick, to the point, and factual, "That is unimportant. What is important is that these other battles have people our organization is interested in, and that you have made sure to keep tabs on them." He comes closer to The Broadcaster and whispers, "Yes, we know of your plans in regards to distribution after you are freed, although I wonder what would happen if they knew about it?"

[background=black][COLOR=white]Femme grabed back the folders before The Broadcaster saw any others, "Here is how it will go. You will give us information and access to the other battles, and in return we will give you the same to ours, adding it to your... season. Then, Esquire shall use his talents in the realm of law to have you freed and as a show of gratitude, you will grant us a favor, something to be discussed at another point in time."

"Er..." The Broadcaster looks at the two people before him, then down at his table, at his shackles, and at this situation. This is not what he wanted, not what he planned! He had been incarcerated, he had been humiliated, and for what? Was it worth it?

He thought for a moment, not of the troubles, but of the excitement, of what he stood to gain. Was it worth it?

Femme's eyes moved to Esquire's as his did to hers. Though they were silent, the message had gotten across, The Broadcaster was contemplating, thinking this through, but he would choose correctly. All it would take is a push in the right direction.

Esquire cleared his throat, "Mr. The Broadcaster, we are very busy people," he stared into the imprisoned man's eyes, almost as if to send a message, "Do you agree to our terms?"

A silence followed.

And then...

"Yes."

Originally posted on MSPA by Palamedes.

---

Rivia stood up, stretched out the kinks in her body that come from sleeping on something as hard and unforgiving (to your back at least) as gravel, and stifled a yawn. Unnecessary questions such as why she was lying down on gravel or when she had falled asleep in the first place remained unasked, instead replaced by a general sense of furious confusion.

"What the fuck?"

She looked around at the nearby buildings.

"Where the fuck am I?"

Not that she, or any narcotics abuser for that matter, was a stranger to waking up in a place she didn't recognize. Hell, it was almost a daily occurrence for her. What bothered her was that today was supposed to be one of those rare exceptions to her regular abuse pattern, she was supposed to meet up with few of the boys and take out some fat piece of shit who pissed off some other rich shit, and she knew from experience just what sort of hell she was going to get in if she was late. Furthermore, the more she looked around the more things started to get more and more fucked up.

Firstly, where the hell was she? This place looked like the middle of fucking nowhere, definitely not part of or even near the city she was supposed to be in this second. There weren't even any fucking people around, the place looked deserted. Hell, it didn't even look like the same goddamn country. Banco? Wasn't that Mexican or something? Son of a bitch she was in Mexico wasn't she? Last night definitely set a new record for worst trip ever, and as that usually also means best trip ever, Rivia wished she could remember it. After a few seconds of thinking how wrecked she must have been, the ramifications of her being in fucking Mexico hit her like a sack of bricks.

Oh god oh god oh fuck I'm in so much shit they're going to take it they're going to take it and waste me and make me deal

Of course she knew her bosses weren't going to kill her, they had sunk enough into her addictions and the abilities they gave her to just throw it out to make a point. No, what they would do was infinitely worse - they would take all of her substances and let her deal with the withdrawal for a while. Rivia just knew it - they would take her goddamn medicine and make her go fucking cold turkey. She had fucked up once before and they had done it, and those four days were the worst she could remember ever having. She had fucked up and got four days back then, and that was just for a minor offense, being fucking late for a hit she didn't even have to take part in. She dreaded whatever plans her bosses would have for her when they found out just how bad she fucked up this time; would they take it all away for a whole week, maybe even two? Rivia shuddered just thinking about it.

She took a few deep breaths. Maybe things weren't as bad as she thought? Maybe someone had changed the meeting place to Mexico for some fucking reason, maybe the day of the hit was tomorrow and she had fucked up the dates, maybe the whole bullshit assignment had been called off altogether. At this point she was ready to hope for anything. She checked her phone for any messages… and no reception, how fucking typical. She was about to throw the piece of shit at the ground when something caught her eye. Specifically, it was the time and date indicator, which stated as bluntly as machines always do that she was supposed to meet for the hit a full two weeks ago - and Rivia knew that no trip, no matter how kickass, would result in losing out on two weeks, much less that she could have survived the wrath of her bosses so easily for being shitfaced on the job. Especially when the job involved being paid an almost impossible sum just to kill some fuck name Itallio

It was then that Rivia was hit with a larger, heavier, more metaphorically sack of bricks (probably while on fire, metaphorically of course). It was still hazy, but she remembered heading out, sober as can be (for her at least), to take on the job. She remembered it was supposed to be easy, a piece of fucking cake. After all, he was just a regular, run of the mill mafia boss, and she had helped kill plenty of those. An ambush would suggest differently, as would a non-drug induced blackout while the rest of her team got slaughtered.

~~~

She then remembered waking up strapped to a chair, with armed guards, some sort of doctor (though not the healing kind of doctor, you can easily tell these things if you've been in the business long enough), and some fucker in a fedora. The fucker introduced himself as Itallio and in doing so helped Rivia realize just how fucked she was more then the bonds holding her in place or doctoral equipment being polished just within her field of vision.

He punched her and asked her where she was from. She knew better then to say right away.

He punched her and asked her which idiot hired her. She said she didn't know, they were never told.

He punched her and said he didn't believe her at all. She insisted.

He punched her one last time and told the doctor to begin, just in case. Call him back when she was ready to talk. It was then that he vanished, either into thin fucking air or through the door opposite Rivia. Her memory was even hazier here, probably from getting her ass kicked, or from the beating, or the torture. After a while the mob boss came back, though she was too out of it at the time to fully recognize what was going on. Said a few strange things to the doctor, starting with 'release her'. A few stranger things followed, some directed at her and some at others asking him what he was thinking, Rivia was too out of it at the time to really think.

Said something about 'hitmen finding only one suitable replacement'. Rivia wondered if they had gotten one of his guys back during the fight. He then said something about how 'she's handled herself decently enough so far' and walked towards her. Wait, was he talking about her? She'd stab that son of a bitch in the eye if he was going to try shit, passing out on his shitty floor or no. He stopped a fair distance from her and glared before continuing. 'Probably didn't know what she was getting into', 'seem like a reasonable type', 'give you a shot', 'need an extra guy', 'might draw out that son of a bitch' all came out of his mouth before he started with some weirder shit. 'Have to compete with', 'deer guy', 'hand guy', 'demon guy', 'could use another x chromosome' - Rivia remembered at that point getting together enough to ask him who the fuck did he thought she was with that chromosome bullshit, 'some sort of fucking scientist?' or something. He laughed and offered her a choice, compete or death.

~~~

Rivia rubbed her head, back in reality now that she kind of knew what the hell had happened.

"Yeah, big fucking decision tough guy. Oh, I think I'll choose death! Asshole."

~~~

After her impromptu recruitment, she was put in some sort of lounge room. Somehow. Mabye she blacked out again, it seemed like the only reasonable explanation. Regardless, she was still a bit too woozy to really pay attention to the don’s shit but he was explaining that the doctor and some altar of win or something weren't around anymore? Then he said her name and some sort of code or something? She didn't know, it was boring and there were five other people at the table who she couldn't remember and he teleported them or some kind of shit and knocked her out again. For better or for worse, Rivia was in this thing, whatever it was, and at least she kind of knew the events leading up to it.

~~~

“Now to find what the fuck I'm supposed to be competing in...”

She tried to think. What did she know so far? Besides the fact that the fat bastard was forcing her and presumably a bunch of other people to do shit for his sick enjoyment, of course. Other people including a deer guy, hand guy, and demon guy. She figured the first was probably some kind of hunter? She didn’t know much about deer besides the fact that they still existed solely for the rich to hunt them, so he was probably some sort of rich snob. Depending on his type, he could be an easy mark to trick into giving her some way out of this shithole or he could be a piece of fucking work who’s better off shot. Hand guy was probably some sort of pervert. Or had really big hands. Rivia briefly tried to remember if people said anything about guys with large hands, but decided it was probably no threat at all. As for demon guy, Rivia concluded she’d need to know what the fuck a demon was before she could figure him out. Some booky of her bosses talked about them once, so they were probably from books or something. Too bad books were for pussies.

There was also the slight chance that Itallio could have just meant there was literally a guy who looked like a deer, a guy with extra hands, and some sort of probably fucked up thing. In that case he was putting together a sick freak show, but Rivia dismissed the thought. After all, he could have found much worse then her right? If it was, well, she’d just have to strangle the fuck out of that judgemental shit bridge when she came to it.

Rivia knocked over a nearby trash can out of boredom, all of this thinking was annoying as fuck. Before she could however, she heard some kind of muttering from a nearby alley, followed by footsteps. Before she could react, more murmuring joined in from other alleyways and streets, slowly getting closer. Fuck the competition, whatever it was sounded like bad news and Rivia had to get the fuck out of there. She saw an opportunity, the nearby Banco (which, she thought, was probably Mexican for Bank) which initially tipped her off to her location was only seconds away, and to top it off, its window looked easily smashable. Unlike literally every assumption she had made thus far, this time she was correct, the glass losing a short battle with her shoulder as she jumped through the window and took cover against the wall. Almost as soon as she did, the voices sounded significantly closer, as in right over the fucking wall closer. Rivia thought about looking over to see what they were, but decided against it and just closed her eyes instead. Ten seconds in, the voices stopped. Rivia decided it was safe enough now for a look.

There was jack shit there. No footprints, no damage to anything, nothing. What’s more, the window she had just busted through was as good as fucking new.

"What the fuck?"

Originally posted on MSPA by Pharmacy.

---

"Strange."

Rivia ran a hand over the glass twice. One to test her hypothesis. Another just to make sure. Grime and dust of bygone days flaked under her cat-claw manicure. Her unnaturally tight face wrinkled at the mess that collected under her nails. Judging from the marks she left, the windowpane was in a sore need of a washing, but it was also complete. A few cracks here and there. Maybe a spiderweb at the corner, but complete. Very complete.

"Fucking strange."

But the broken glass was still there. She bowed down and slowly extended a shaky hand to each filthy piece. Anointing each grimy shard with a single tap of the finger. She wrapped her fingers around the largest and most jagged piece she could find. Improvisition came to her like an old friend. She smiled.

She picked one up.

Pleased to have some sort of weaponized weight in her hands, Rivia swung around the wall. She swung around but nothing met her. Only the presence of empty stands, fragile papers, broken pens, and dust. There was a lot of dust. Rivia stared a errant flyer on the ground. “Soñaire Banco: River-to-River Banking Services” it said. She frowned and spitted at it.

And then the voices started again. It seemed quite near.

“ALRIGHT I HAVE ENOUGH OF YOU DISEMBODIED VOICES,” Rivia shouted at no one in particular. Spit-flecks escaping from her lipstick-caked mouth and making dark flecks on the white-dusty floor. “WHO THE FUCK ARE YOU AND WHY DO YOU FUCKING EXIST.”

---

“U-Uh, De-Dee. Double zero three eight six five…”

A couple of chairs away, a voice so small and quiet that Rivia could register barely above a slight murmuring of voices. The voice marveled at how she managed to pronounce the words without skipping on a single syllable, how quick she managed to complete the serial number that was her namesake. She marveled at how clear her mind was. She was marveling because it was better than feeling sad all the time.

“O-or. D-Oh. E-everyone calls me that.”

D-0 shuffled her position on the ground of Banco. She was behind one of the old stands filled with the stench of wood-rot and mothballs. Dustbunnies surrounded her like flowers at a funeral. Their colors darkened by a significant pool of tears. Sniffling, D-0 marveled at that too. Everything was marvelous, especially if you were on some dirty floor of a long-abandoned bank.

“A-and I don’t know why I am h-here.”

D-0 was not quite sure if the nearby woman heard her or not but the former property of Entente Posthuman Training Corps was too tired to care. The old surroundings were completely new to her, overloading her sterile naivety with foreign experiences and sensations, namely how choking the dust was and how weird wallpaper looked from a vertical position. It was not the most comfortable position but it was a lot better than her former location. She could just close her eyes and…

<font color="#0000FF">A chalk-white hand picked her up.

At first, D-0 realized how unpleasant it was to have her cords pulled. It was sort of a dull pain at the base like someone tugged at a handful of hair, but it was a pain she could ignore. On the other hand, the face hovering in the haze of apathy was not something she could shrug off. It was pretty. But also not pretty. It was rather disturbing.

“Oh so, it’s Ladydude,” the woman said as she sneered, showing every single one of her teeth like a demented genderbent manticore.

D-0 shrinked at that moniker and said nothing. It was a nickname coincidentally similar to one given by researchers back in her former living place and he had a tendency to skimp on the anesthetics while doing especially heavy modifications. On a Top Fifty of Most Unpleasant Doctors, he would be a 36th on her list.

“Pathetic,” she tetched as she released her grip, letting D-0 realize how much gravity hurts. D-0 scurried to her knees as fast as her bounds would let her. She looked up and saw the criminal-looking woman as much larger than she expected. It made D-0 feel very small, especially so considering how vicious that glass shard looked.

“So you are one of them competitors, eh.” The lady said. Her face a smudge of white in D-0’s vision.

“W-what,” D-0 was not quite sure what she just said. Competition? It sounded vaguely related to a meeting she went to before. The Lab Rat frowned a bit at that statement. It seemed absolutely silly to have a contest out of the blue especially with no rules, no prizes, nothing in a place of nothing. What is a name to call a competition, she pondered, when there is nothing to win or lose.

“It’s a simple question, dear.” Rivia said but of course, D-0 did not knew her name.

Well, when you have nothing, D-0 thought. You only have your life.

“It’s either a yes…”

Oh my god. Suddenly, it hit D-0 what situation she was in.

“…or a no.”

Oh my god.

Realizing the fate she was in, D-0 froze for a bit. A feeling of a heavy rainstorm played upon the face and like some maudlin love-interest in some sub-par movie, D-0 cried. She cried pretty hard. She did not exactly meant to cry but it was built into her. Crying was part of her and the realization fed into her selfish self-pity and thus she cried even more. </font>

Originally posted on MSPA by Flummox.

---

[color=#99z8rz]The vision emerged from the blackness, split and coalesced, surfacing from the pain which had suddenly, quickly, and completely vanished. The earth was cracked, dry. He found himself staring down a crevice in which a thousand ants swarmed. The wind blew dust over his body and flapped his tattered clothes.

He pushed himself up. No, he didn’t. He tried again, pulling his arms under his body. No, he didn’t do that either. He had no arms. That was a problem. He rolled over. The sun seared into his eyes, bright, bright. Soon he made out the endless, cloudless blue sky. A dark shape, a vulture, tore at something near his arm. No, not near his arm. He didn’t have arms. Near his shoulder, then. He smelled rotting and burnt flesh.

It took him a while to remember that he could reform his body any way he wished. He grew arms and pushed himself up to a standing position. Tentatively, he reached out and petted the vulture on the top of its head. It bit him between his thumb and forefinger. Ouch. He crushed its skull. Oops. He inspected himself. There was dirt under every fingernail and caked in every wrinkle. He tried to wash himself with vulture blood. That didn’t go over well and he ended up with two bloody arms and a bloodstained, ragged shirt.

There was a town far on the horizon. Towns meant people. Humans. Was that good or bad? Couldn’t decide. Humans had killed Tolgurd. They had tried to kill him too. But there was Johnny, and Artemis, and they had been kind to him… no. They had not. They had betrayed him, he remembered now. Left him in his hour of need. Abandoned him to be tortured.

He picked up a rock. Tossed it from hand to hand. Then he clenched it in his fist. It would give his punches clout, weight, sturdiness. He picked up another rock, placed it solidly in the center of his chest. Put another in his other hand. He set off towards the town, one thought swimming through his head.

Revenge.

He walked determinedly. Reduced to a fraction of his former height by loss of mass, loss of hands, barely three feet tall. The remains of his suit dragged along the ground, ridiculously long compared to his now stumpy legs. But he trudged along, eye fixed on the town in the distance.

A great wooden sign marked the entrance to the town. Welcome to Soñaire. He threw a rock through it, leaving a jagged, splintered hole. He knew he was not welcome here. He wasn’t welcome anywhere. The storefronts stared at him, a stranger. He threw a rock through the one window that wasn’t already broken and picked up two more rocks.

“Johnnyyyy!” He cocked his arm back, ready to throw a rock at the first sign of that traitor’s head peeking around a door. There was nothing. He waited. Nothing. It seemed Johnny Raptor was wise to his plans. Or maybe he just didn’t hear. He shrugged, a human gesture that he had learned recently and had taken quite a liking to. Perhaps he should feign trust, friendship, forgiveness for a little while. Stab that turncoat in the back. A reciprocal betrayal. He quite liked that idea; he had no concept of irony, but that seemed somehow fitting.

He stumped towards one building, a general store by the look of it – he couldn’t read the sign over the door; it was a word he didn’t know – and kicked the door. It fell off its hinges with no further persuasion. It had probably been waiting to do that for years. He looked around. Dust was falling from the ceiling. It was dark in here, the only light coming from the holes in the roof, but he could see well enough to know that he was alone in the building.

He walked forward and tripped over a sack of flour. The rock fell out of his hand and clattered away, rolling under a stack of potato sacks with undoubtedly rotten potatoes. There was no way he was getting that back. He pulled a hammer off the wall. It seemed like a good enough weapon, and he hefted it. The head fell off. He started to put it back but stopped when he found that there was already another hammer there. Shrugging, he let the shaft drop to the floor.

He was about to walk out but noticed that the door was back the way he had found it. The door he had kicked down was still there. He shrugged again and kicked it down again, this time to the outside. The sun caught him by surprise again, after his eyes had begun to get adjusted to the darkness. He walked outside and brushed some dust and wood splinters off his coat.

The window he had thrown a rock through was whole again. So was the signpost, though still battered, weather-beaten, and faded. Both were missing his signature rock-shaped holes. It was beginning to get on his nerves (though he had none, in a physical sense). Could he destroy nothing in this miserable place?

He heard voices coming from the building opposite and shied away. He wished not to encounter anyone at this moment. Stumping down the street, pressed against the side of the road opposite the voices, he began to throw rocks periodically, through windows and at walls, trying to see if he could break something. Always they regenerated, mysteriously, when he wasn’t looking.

There was laughter surprisingly close behind him and he jumped, running to the other side of the street. Bubbles flowed out of an open window. The buildings began to look less run-down and more like people had been living in them not too long ago. A line of laundry billowed in the wind. The air became cooler and the sun less intense. An old man in a rocking chair on someone’s porch winked and nodded in his direction, making a smoke ring in his pipe. Did he wink? It was hard to tell, he was squinting that hard. Felgurd wished fervently for his hat back, so he could pull it over his face and people wouldn’t be able to see him. It was odd that the old man didn’t scream or anything, though that was probably because he was going senile. Once an actual person of sound mind saw him, he’d have to make his exit.

A cool breeze whipped up Felgurd’s coat. It smelled like the sea. He shook his head, perplexed. It was impossible to imagine that there would be any large body of water out here. It’d been so long since he’d seen the ocean, though, and he almost wished it were true.

A group of laughing children ran past him. It seemed as though they had materialized out of thin air. Felgurd spun around quickly, hoping to hide his face and body behind the remnants of his jacket. Perhaps he could look like some kind of demented dwarf instead of the monster that he was. But the children seemed not to notice. They said nothing and kept running. What was this place?

Up ahead, there was a Latin American square adobe house, smoke curling out of a hole in its roof. Climbing infinitely into the sky was a spiral tower, shimmering and glassy.

Felgurd had an odd thought, a human expression that was used to describe things like this. This is the stuff of dreams. He had no idea how right he was.
[/color]

Originally posted on MSPA by XX.

---

Un ciervo se está muriendo.

A woman sits by his side and she is as beautiful as the sun.

She strokes his head, and her hands are cool, and they are wet with the blood of her child.

“Do you remember it all, my love?” says the deer. There is red on his black lips, and a burning hole where there should be his heart. His neck is ringed by golden lights. He glows like a god in her afterimage. “Slaughter. Slaughter. When they took you from me I thought I would die.”

She smiles.

“Those bastards will pay,” he says with a better man’s conviction, the same words he’s said for twenty years and will say until he joins her in her beautiful hell. They are a lullably, a litany, a holy hymn. They are as familiar to him as her name, and sometimes he thinks they are. “They’ll pay with everything they have and everything they’ve ever owned, and their hearts and their bones and all the agony I can bring them. I swear to you, I swear I will wrench apart the world. I will find them, for you. I will take it back.”

He does not weep, nor would he, but she is sick of misery, Misère. Lately it is all she knows. Her hands are narrow and cold, like her smile, like the knife that was buried in her. She cradles him. Her long, dark hair settles like a perfumed veil across his face.

He cannot see her now, for she is a shadow of a ghost he loved, but her face is tattooed on the surface of his mind. A flawless raging goddess who rises above a thousand men and a thousand ships, her perfect face cold with daunting misery as her hands pour rosewater and gunmetal. Absolution. Her cat’s grin, her blue eyes. Her perfume. In twenty years he has not forgotten that she has always smelled like honeysuckle.

“I believe you.”

The song of her voice fades through him. He nuzzles her, dabbing blood onto the dress she was buried in. Black was a sweet color for her. They had buried her child in white and her beside it, a goddess interred in an unworthy earth. He looks at her and sees the picture from his desk: a smiling beauty, her head turned this way, holding a lily in her slim hand. She’d hated that picture. She’d always said she looked too young.

“Misère,” he says. It is his favorite word.

She looks up at the sky, at the hot Southern sun as though she has forgotten it can blind. For an instant he lets himself believe that he is home, with her by his side on the field behind their house. It is summer, and the garden is blooming with honeysuckle and wildflowers and the gun they’d buried when they were 16, giggling over their shared secret. It will be there forever, he realizes. He never told Martin about that field. In a thousand years it will rust away, and there will be an empty space behind the ruins of a house and under a thousand years of honeysuckle they will still have kept their secret.

“You are not finished yet, chéri,” she says. He feels her move and he wants to scream at her through his bleeding lips, to tell her to tell their son about the field, to dig up all the metal and the flowers and to lay it on his grave, but he knows it is useless. The way she lays him down on the earth tells him she knows it as well. “You will walk again, and I will sleep in peace. We were made to bleed this world, chéri. No one can deny us that.”

He knows he is going to die. He knows she already has. And all he thinks of as she walks away is that somewhere, one million miles away in a long-dead town he would have never thought to visit, there is a deer that is dying in the sand.