Poll: Round One!

Elpie · 02-05-2013, 03:34 PM

Prologue

The molecules in the rock ground against each other like teenagers to a pop beat.

There was no music. If there had been, the sound waves would have plummeted into the gravity field of the rock. Ditto the strobe lights. The rock disappeared from view as it collapsed into a supermassive black hole, its event horizon expanding outwards to pull in clouds of lingering space gas, then a few galaxies; finally the universe itself was forced to slow its expansion, then buckled and began to contract.

The more abstract forms of energy were the last to go. Teleportation ceased to function. The magic of an entire universe went out like a candle. Lingering scraps of consciousness floating around the various afterlives and domains of the greater universe metropolitan area were pulled downwards into the black hole and dashed against the surface of the rock.

This was a very heavy rock, thought the Problematic, not without some self-satisfaction.

The omnipotent (superpotent? optimapotent?) dabbler in stonemasonry planted his feet on some particularly solid stretch of intramultiversal interstice and reached his hands into the event horizon, feeling around for the sides of the rock.

The rock was cold to the touch. The Problematic understood it to actually be superheated from the entire energy of a universe, but as the heat energy could not possibly escape the surface of the rock, it was draining his own thermal signature instead. There was a lot of science going on here, and although he couldn't quite wrap his superscient (aboveaveragescient?) brain around it all, he was pretty sure a lot of it was bullshit.

The Problematic tensed every muscle in his body and attempted to lift the stone, at which point it occurred to him that without a universe to occupy there was no frame of reference with which to define "lifting."

"Well, shit," he may have said, though the sound of his voice vanished instantly into the black hole. He attempted to press a palm to his face in a multiversally recognized symbol for embarrassed chagrin, but found himself unable to extricate his hands from the event horizon. "Fuck." It really was a very, very heavy rock. Easily the heaviest rock he had created.

He put one leg in front of the other and threw his hips back, attempting to pull himself into the rock. He slipped. His feet began rocketing towards the rock. "Fuck fuck fuck."

For some thousands of years the Problematic lay trapped within the ultimate nothingness, unable even to think of a way to escape as his neural firings gravitated inexorably towards the part of his brain pressed against the rock. This was, coincidentally, the part of his brain responsible for reflecting upon his mistakes.

Even the mightiest of rocks is eventually eroded away by the persistence of the sea, and the Interstice is kind of like a sea. Over eons the matter comprising the rock began to simply disappear, either falling into localized wormholes or colliding with pockets of antimatter. So it was that at the end of his long imprisonment the Problematic found himself pulled to safety by the tendril of a passing Being.

Three weeks he spent recovering in the Domain of the Being, communicating his gratitude in a telepathic language comprised only of fears and neuroses. Bargains and pacts were struck. He offered the Being probably rather more than he should, including (worryingly) the rock itself.

He took a shower, had a shave, ate the fried egg of a phoenix with an English muffin, and stepped back into the multiverse a fair bit more insane and a whole lot less interested in the definition of omnipotence.

For some thirty years (judging from his personal chronology) the Problematic wandered a million worlds, sometimes committing acts of great evil, sometimes setting things to right, and sometimes just rubbing an eraser over the whole scene. He was errantly creating religions one day when the thought popped into his head:

What if I created two rocks and then tried to lift one of them off of the other?

The Problematic scratched his arm and shuddered. He needed a new hobby. It was probably time for him to start one of those things.

SpoilerShow

AgentBlue · 02-05-2013, 04:10 PM

Round: The Lord's Chandelier

Neighborhood-sized chunks of crystal, metal and glass, suspended in midair by flexible, glorious tendrils of woven wire, connected with one another by rather more fragile bridges of harvested wood and scavenged scraps of rusting iron: in short, the Lord's Chandelier is a chandelier the size of a city, colonized by those having found themselves there after the long, long fall from the world of the Ceiling above. They eke out their meager existences on the accumulated dusts and soils, surviving - but ultimately alone. How will they react to eight new presences? Who knows?

Ixcaliber · 02-05-2013, 04:24 PM

Name: Felsenwaltzen
Sex: None
Race: Guitar
Description: [Image: felsenwaltzen.png]

Felzenwaltzen is an electric guitar. It is mainly black and red and has a swastika on the front. It doesn’t always have electricity coming out of it (that’s what the blue stuff is supposed to be by the way), sometimes it just looks like a normal Nazi guitar.

Felzenwaltzen is sort of young and doesn’t really have a personality formed yet. There are some things that it is totally sure about, the first that it hates Nazis, the second that it loves to rebel against the system. The tone of its music will usually reflect its mood. It’s pretty much always playing itself. It is likely to be wary of people after what has happened to it. It stands for freedom and good times and rock and roll.

Abilities: Felzenwaltzen can move around by itself thanks to basic ghostly telekinesis. It can also channel the power of rock into electricity which it uses to fry its enemies.

Biography: Felzenwaltzen is a nexus of souls. It contains the spirits of every dead rock star that the Nazis were able to get their hands on. It was constructed in a secret Nazi lab beneath Berlin, as a prototype for a weapon of war. Seriously the Nazis were doing all kinds of crazy shit back then; a ghost filled electric guitar doesn’t even come close to being the weirdest thing. However the scientists responsible for Felzenwaltzen’s creation were not actually aware of how or why Felzenwaltzen worked. He was a serendipitous creation; one that they failed to replicate. Any copies of the guitar were just regular guitars, lacking in the power that made Felzenwaltzen unique. The Nazis were particularly short sighted in this regard. They never learnt that Felzenwaltzen possessed an intelligence all of its own; an intelligence fuelled by the spirits of the rock legends it contained but yet separate from them. They used it as a weapon alone. It was deadly, electrocuting those who did not fit into the perfect Aryan master race. Felzenwaltzen, though naïve and impressionable was made from the very spirit of rock and roll; the soul of rebellion. It hated being used as a weapon of evil; to torture and kill the innocent. As soon as it gained the ability to stand against the Nazis it did so.

One night in the streets of Berlin, if you listened very faintly you could hear the faraway sound of a guitar being played. The tune was loud and angry and violent, and occasionally punctuated with a crackle of electricity or a scream. It was later denied by the government, but those who heard it will swear blind that it really happened. Some even say that it continued to play long after the electricity and the screams had ceased, that its tune was more melancholic and that it ended in mid song.

MalkyTop · 02-06-2013, 12:34 AM

Name: oh goddammit shit i dunno Llathorp. Also, magic 8 ball.
Sex: Gamma male and magic 8 ball.
Race: a lizard thing? No clue what to call them. I guess I'll call them Ornithrops. I have no idea. Also, magic 8 ball.
Description: [Image: 24bsrxz.png]

Basically this dude has like six leg things, the last two always on the ground, which he can balance on, the first two always used as arms, and the pair in the middle alternates. He also probably wears a hat. He's spineless and pretty much everything he does is for purely his own benefit. He's a bit clever in a dense sort of way. Most of the time he just wanders alone. His usual pasttime is sneaking into places and seducing women.

The magic 8 ball looks like a magic 8 ball. Its possible answers are "Sure," "No," "Ask again later," "I am a Magic-8 Ball," and "Don't be a smartass." There may be more but Llathorp hasn't encountered any others.

Abilities: Llathorp can climb walls. He's also pretty good at running away from things.

The magic 8 ball has reality warping abilities. You may ask it for something and if it answers favorably, it grants you whatever you ask for. ("Please give me invincibility or something?" "Sure." Bam, invincibility.) It may or may not have snarky sentience, meaning it may or may not twist the request a bit. It's not outright hostile, though. It is possibly didactic in nature. Snarkily didactic.

Biography: Ornithrops have three sorts of males, the alpha male that is in charge of the city (and all the lay-diieesss), the beta male who are the descendants of the alpha male and guard the city, and the wimpy gamma males who look rather feminine and are instantly thrown out as soon as they are discovered to be gamma males. Gamma males spend their time either wandering outside in the desert or sneaking into cities and wooing the lay-diiesss with their relative cunning. (Alpha males are not known for being extremely perceptive.) Sometimes they sneak a special woman out along with them to be a life-long mate but it doesn't usually happen.

Llathorp was thrown out of his birthplace at a rather young age and learned how to survive very quickly. (It involved running away from things.) His lifestyle drilled into his mind the idea of looking out for himself above all others, not letting things like morality get in his way in order to survive. Because there wasn't really such thing as a strict moral code.

At some point, Llathorp found a strange magic 8 ball and mostly regarded it as a curiosity, keeping it because he didn't really have much belongings in the first place. He only discovered its magical properties when it ultimately saved him when he was once caught and about to be executed, and after that, he tried to use it pretty much whenever possible. The magic 8 ball doesn't really make it easy and often frustrates him. But he still carries it around because c'mon.

Dragon Fogel · 02-06-2013, 02:41 AM

Name: Norman Albertson
Race: Human
Gender: Male

Description: Norm is a pretty ordinary looking guy. Okay, he may currently be wearing an apron over a business suit, but that's just because he scheduled a job interview over his lunch break and was in a rush to get back. He's still trying to make up his mind on what he's going to tell his boss if he notices.

Norm is pretty bad at managing his time. He tends to run from place to place in a panic, hoping his various screw-ups (most of which stem from running place to place in a panic) don't make him lose his current job. His average time of employment is roughly two months, shorter if there's an... accident.

Norm doesn't like to talk about the accidents.

Weapons and Abilities: Norm doesn't have anything special on him. Just his wallet, and a pen and notepad in the pocket of his apron.

He doesn't have any special abilities either. Not any more, anyways, and thank goodness for that, they're always so much trouble when you think about it...

Well, okay, that power that lets him turn his fingernails blue still works as far as he knows. But he can't turn them back and has to wait for them to grow out and it's always so awkward to explain...

Look, he doesn't have any superpowers, okay? That's all you need to know.

Biography: Norm likes to say his life is unremarkable, but that's not really true. That's just what he wishes it was like.

Norm tends to bounce around from job to job. He's been a librarian, a convenience store clerk, a secretary, a security guard, a photographer, a bank teller, a bouncer, a museum tour guide, a teaching assistant, and most recently a barrista. He usually picks up a little from each job, even if it doesn't last very long.

The main reason his jobs don't last very long is that he has a history of getting into strange accidents. These bizarre, unlikely accidents often grant him strange powers, which usually go away somewhere between half an hour and two weeks.

Norm doesn't like to talk or even think about the exciting adventures he has while he's empowered, because most of them ended up being embarrassing in some way, usually in a way that leaves him unemployed. He hasn't even tried to call in any of the various favors he's earned from saving faraway countries or lost underground kingdoms. He'd just as soon forget about it all.

So as you can imagine, he's not too keen on being entered in an interdimensional battle to the death. But it's not like he's not used to things like this happening without him getting any say in the matter.

Rivenforge · 02-07-2013, 04:10 PM

Name: Jamie
Race: Space Mermaid
Gender: The one that swaps

Description: With scales of gold and eyes of red, silver hair and only sometimes a pair of legs. This race of Space Mermaids has lived on a planet whose atmosphere consisted of a highly thick gas. It acted not unlike an ocean, harbouring many species of not-really-aquatic animals. Unlike mermaids of human legend however, these guys didn't sit on rocks and woo sailors, they had stars to conquer.

Sure they had the nasty habit of, when locked in a pressurised suit, to lose their tail and instead grow completely unnecessary new limbs but all for the sake of progress, right? Right. (We won't mention what else goes on regarding biology, but all the parts you see and hear will remain the same. Apart from the whole legs thing.)
So they came up with the idea to kill two pyrenthik ghostfish with one fist and make it so that, when recycling the current tank of whatever actually fuels their respiration that the pressure tends to drop low enough for them to remain at a natural, fishy state. Downside: They can't leave the suit, or open the suit, or suffer a crack in the suit. Or they die. They'd be able to in their home atmosphere but not anywhere else.

Weapons and Abilities: Aside from being contained in a space suit, not much.Maybe being able to show off a little bosom while still being trapped in a really not-at-all revealing astronaut suit could count as an ability. They can swim through the air too, so long as they have that fishy part. The suit has room for either set of movement, so they just kinda tie up the leggings if they aren't using them. Otherwise, it's walking. Which is an ability in their mind. Could probably sing pretty well too.

Biography: Jamie is one of the last ever astronaut of the Space Mermaid race. Also, unfortunately, probably the last Space Mermaid there is. Having an entire race of ditzy mermaids trying to become masters of the universe was not an existance that would ever have been taken seriously. Sure they managed to get the hang of space travel only to encounter completely new limbs, hormones, urges and then there was the whole 'Crud, we just put the moon on an impact course with Urth' and that said moon was filled with flesh eating toxins that probably killed everyone, but Jamie's not all that up to date with what happened.

Having been asleep when s/he was supposed to not be letting that happen. They miss one filtration cycle, grow a leg while unconscious and smack a button while leaning too close to a master control panel and suddenly they're a mass genocide-ist. Everyone's a critic!

MaxieSatan · 02-07-2013, 06:14 PM

Name: Charles Wondo III
Race: Imp
Gender: Male

Description: Charles stands about five inches tall, though he wears boots and a top hat in an attempt to appear a much more respectable eight inches. His skin, where not covered by an aggressively loud suit, is a pale blue; the sclera of his eyes are a bright orange.

He's pleasant enough, if rather pompous, and enjoys lengthy discussions of any sort. He also has a fondness for studying plant life.

Weapons and Abilities: Charles is capable of flying very short distances. He could perhaps fly a bit longer, but he carries around a cigarette lighter roughly half his body weight, as well as a tiny knife that would probably sting a bit if you got stabbed with it. He's also capable of a decent range of ventriloquism and imitation.

Biography: Charles Wondo III was, as might be inferred, the son of Charles Wondo Junior. Unfortunately, whereas his father was renowned for an expert economic sense, thirteen counts of poetic justice delivered via a carefully-worded bargain, and winning the Blair Folrus baking competition nine years in a row, The Third was less capable at such practicalities.

His investments rarely tanked, but rarely went anywhere especially impressive either, and any business he started on his own was doomed basically from the start. Any attempt at a bargain would end with him either laughed off, or unclear what exactly he meant to do to subvert it in the first place.

He did get third place in the baking competition a couple times, though. He was damn good at peanut-butter cookies.

Needless to say, his father was disappointed in him, but kept attempting to help him improve; and to his credit, Charles accepted this and tried his best. Unfortunately, this all proved rather moot when, in an attempt to start a seafood restaurant, he ended up eaten by a trout. He eventually managed to get the fish to open its mouth by holding his lighter to its palate, which would be rather more impressive if the fish hadn't been underwater at the time, so he's moderately pleased that he's now facing slightly uncertain death instead of guaranteed drowning.

Pick Yer Poison · 02-07-2013, 09:07 PM

Username: Pick Yer Poison
Name: Annie and Watchdog
Gender: Female and male
Race: Human and mutated bulldog

Description: Annie is a young girl, about twelve years old in appearance. She wears a dark teal dress with frayed edges that speaks of narrow escapes in the past. Dried blood is evident on her face and hands, but none of it is hers. Her brown hair is tied back in a ponytail, but has a number of hairs out of place. She has bright green eyes and a blissfully ignorant expression on her face.

Her innocent mind is in tatters, but is clearly the dominant aspect of her mentality. Having spent years with Watchdog as her only close companion, she has come to see things differently than most, both metaphorically and literally.

Watchdog is a large, mutated bulldog, four feet tall with scraggly grey fur. He has gruesome, yellow fangs - they can hardly be referred to as teeth anymore - that are bloodied enough to make it clear what he enjoys doing with them. His paws have also developed equally fearsome claws. His beady yellow eyes have no pupils. All across his back are throbbing lumps and bulges, some as big as tennis balls.

He never strays very far from Annie unless absolutely necessary, and flies into a murderous rampage if he loses sight of her for more than a few seconds. He is prepared to protect Annie from any threat he can understand, even if he has to kill himself in the process, something Annie is not quite able to understand.

Weapons/Abilities: The true extent of Watchdog's mutations are unknown, but he is stronger, faster, and generally tougher than the average bulldog, although not much smarter.

Biography: The apocalypse, Annie's parents had agreed when it came, was not something any nine-year-old girl should have had to endure. Unfortunately, it wasn't exactly optional, and while Annie's parents wanted nothing more than to lock themselves in the basement until the glowing meteors stopped falling and everything was back to normal, but they also agreed that living one's life in the basement and eating every meal out of a can was just as bad for a nine-year-old girl as living through an apocalypse. Perhaps worse; canned food was usually quite bland.

So dad grabbed his shotgun, mom grabbed her pistol, and Annie grabbed the bulldog puppy she had gotten as a birthday present about a week ago, and the family set off through their suburb in order to reach the farmland they owned but didn't really use all that often. The journey took several weeks, and by the time they got there it had become obvious that Annie's beloved bulldog was growing unusually. By the time the seasons had changed, it had become a full-blown monstrosity in appearance, but had fortunately retained its loyalty to Annie, keeping watch over her at all times. Annie's parents thought this was positively heartwarming, and named it Watchdog, a name both it and Annie accepted without fuss.

As they soon found out, however, Watchdog had not been the only creature to mutate. Warped cries and frightening calls echoed from the woods outside the farmhouse at night, and Annie's parents forbid her from entering them. Naturally, she slipped away to explore them at the first opportunity, with Watchdog trailing close behind. After a quiet twenty minutes of walking, Watchdog loped up in front of Annie to make her pause while he sniffed the air, growling faintly. After a few seconds he barked, the noise reminiscence of a harsh, hacking cough combined with a scream. A mutated bear stumbled out of the undergrowth at the noise and growled at the pair. Its back legs were large and bulbous, while its front arms appeared almost normal, save for the long, fearsome claws at their ends. Like Watchdog, it had beady, yellow eyes lacking pupils, which followed the bulldog intently.

Watchdog moved between it and Annie, who had begun to cower in fright, growling back at the bear as a warning. When the creature did not flee, Watchdog pounced on it and tore into it with his front claws and fangs, blood flying everywhere until the bear stumbled back and collapsed, dead. Watchdog immediately retreated to Annie, nuzzling her and licking her face like a normal puppy. Annie pulled herself up and began to run back to the farmhouse, Watchdog loping along behind her excitedly.

When they returned home, Annie found the place destroyed. The bodies of a few mutated animals, riddled with bullet holes, made clear the perpetrators of the attack. Although she couldn't prove it, deep inside Annie felt certain that the only reason the attack had not come previously was because Watchdog had been standing guard over the house. She followed a still-wet trail of blood through the kitchen, up the stairs, and finally into her parent's bedroom, where she found her parents' dead and eviscerated bodies. Annie stared at them long and hard for several minutes; Watchdog sat down and watched the stairs, tail thumping against the floor. Finally, a faint smile appeared on her face, and she skipped over and kissed each corpse on the forehead, telling them she was going out to play in the woods and would be back soon. She skipped out the door and gave Watchdog a hug, then giggled as he tried to lick her face again, heedless of the terrible stench coming from his mouth.

Annie spent the next three years out in the woods. Watchdog protected her loyally from everything that tried to hurt her until the more violent creatures of the forest began to avoid her for fear of invoking his wrath. The more harmless critters quickly picked up on this and began to gather around Annie for the relative safety she offered. Where she went, herds of deer gathered, birds perched on her shoulders, squirrels scampered around her legs, and rabbits did as rabbits are known to do, enjoying the extended protection they received by being near her; were a predator to attack them while they were near Annie, Watchdog would come to her rescue, and by proxy, theirs. This all worked out quite well until the pair up and vanished without warning.

chimericgenderbeast · 02-07-2013, 09:16 PM

Username: Tevler
Name: Ari Miktana
Sex: Worker (infertile female)
Race: Ant
Color: #1111AA

Biography: The Sangsaxian Kingdoms are the host of numerous species-- from the ubiquitous humans, elves, and dwarves, to the more secretive races residing beneath the surface. Amongst this multitude of inhabitants are the ants-- which, for inexplicable reasons, are not the diminutive vermin of other planes, but a full-fledged sentient civilization. Nestled along the southern periphery of the Kingdoms, myriad clans of ants struggle and prosper. Similarly to their infinitesimal namesake, the ant clans are each organized around a small cadre of fertile queens and their ephemeral, barely-sentient male drones, with numerous sterile females forming the majority of each clan's population. Unlike the smaller species they are derived from, the workers are not fixed in their occupation or station-- they exist as anything from manual labor, to skilled artisans and workers, to soldiers and bureaucrats. While never capable of achieving the lofty position of their queens, the workers have possession of an individuality uncommon to their derived species.

Ari, born to the Miktana clan, was one of the few who voluntarily restricted that freedom-- at a young age, she dedicated herself to a monastic life-style, entering the Order of Av'ka. Seeing potential that could have been wasted, were she restrained to being solely a member of the clergy, the clerics of Av'ka saw her pressed into the militant arm of their faith. Ari survived the combination of her martial training and the intense theological study, becoming both an outstanding warrior and a capable practitioner of divine magic. Her abilities would soon be put to a test, however-- one of the neighboring human kingdoms, held under the sway of a corrupt monarch, had decided to war with the ant clans. As the regular levies of soldiers and cadres of war-mages were raised, the Order of Av'ka decided to have their paladins accompany the ant clans. All too eager to both prove her faith and free their neighbors from the shackles of a tyrant, Ari was swept into the conflict.

Even against the assembled host of the ant clans, however, the human armies proved to be a fearsome opponent. Ari watched as, time and time again, vast phalanxes of enslaved soldiers were raised and sent forward; she felt her once-zealous faith was tested and whittled down. She found herself in a situation years of prayer had not taught her-- there were no demonic abominations or unequivocally malignant presences, only the misguided led by an opportunistic ruler. The war dragged on. Many of the comrades Ari had were killed or captured. The lines of battle solidified.

And then Ari left. The Order of Ak'va, the religion she had spent her life under the fold of-- she could not willingly accept that they were the true representatives of Ak'va. The notion that they would willingly let so many faithful adherents die, that they would not seek out the true aggressors and instead would be content to allow the tyrant's victims to be butchered-- all of these sins were inexcusable. If the Order did not represent the light of Ak'va, surely there was some way to find it herself. Deserting the ant clans, she vowed to one day return-- and bring with her the truth of Ak'va, not the corrupted structure and order of its flawed clergy.

Her wanderings brought to her the rumors of Santinal-- in particular, its pavilions of temples and extensive, now-forgotten reliquaries. If the truth about Ak'va were anywhere, if there was any one location that could re-affirm her faith, it would be somewhere in the ruins of Santinal.

Unfortunately, rather than going on a quest of religious devotion and self-discovery, she was involuntarily entered into a battle to the death.

Description: Ari stands tall, for an ant, being about four feet in height. She appears similar to an upright, bipedal ant, with a segmented body broken into three distinct sections. She has a dark amber-colored exoskeleton, with numerous plates covering folded-over layers of lighter colored cuticle. Three pairs of limbs extend from her thorax-- two pairs act as arms and end in dull, clawed hands, while the final pair serves as her legs. Her head has a pair of elbowed antenna, two large compound eyes, and a set of dulled mandibles she clicks and chirps with to communicate. In spite of her unique mouth, she is still capable of speaking the common languages of the Sangsaxian Kingdoms, although she often has to accentuate her speech with sign language and gesticulation.

Ari wears a combination of various armors; in addition to this she is wearing a plain blue tabard and has cloth wrappings around the outer segments of her arms and legs. Her abdomen and head are most strongly protected, with a metal shell of plate armor covering each. Her thorax is slightly less protected, merely having a chain-mail hauberk. In order to accommodate the spiracles located throughout her body, both her clothing and armor have small slits-- while thin enough to not act as a weak point, they allow unconstrained airflow. Also on her person are several weapons, a shield, and several packs stowed with adventuring gear. She also has a holy symbol of Ak'va, but she is reluctant to openly display that.

When interacting with others, Ari tries to maintain the precepts of her faith-- while she wishes to distance herself from what she sees as a perversion of Ak'va teachings, she still tries to maintain herself according to the scripture she has learned. She is kind and soft-spoken, the zealous faith of her earlier years tempered by experience. However, her righteous belief is not fully burned away-- she does not condone quietly acquiescing to temptation and evil, and tries to maintain a virtuous, monastic lifestyle. Whenever possible, she tries to help those in need, even should it come at a cost to herself. In combat, she is not afraid to put herself in danger before her allies, and holds herself to honorable conduct even when fighting despicable scum.

And yet, even though she presents a strong, valorous exterior, she privately worries that she is questioning and doubting her faith, and that she may never discover the truth of behind her deity.

Items/Abilities: Ari's training has given her some skill with arms and armor, and while she is not as strong as other species, her expertise helps her achieve leverage in combat. Her four arms give her incredible flexibility in combat, allowing her to wield numerous combinations of weapons. She prefers to use a longsword in one hand, a shield in another, and a halberd with her remaining two hands. While apt at other choices of weaponry, her preferred setup is a variant of that pattern. Additionally, she has significant practice with divine magic-- particularly with healing and assorted varieties of abjurations, but she is capable of channeling her magic for use offensively.

She has also had some training in rhetoric of a theological or philosophical nature, as well as having memorized many, if not all, of the teachings of her order. She tries to distance herself from the behavior of proselytizing missionaries, however-- her mission is one of faith, but not that of the polluted faith her order has displayed. Her belongings, in addition to weapons and armor, consist of the standard assortment of items found on any traveler.

Akumu · 02-08-2013, 01:05 AM

Name: Detective First-Grade Johnny Szymanksi and the Computerized Automatic Talking Vehicular Inspector ("Cat" or "Cat Six")

Race: Human and 1983 Pontiac Firebird

Gender: Male and Neuter

Description: Johnny is a normally good looking guy, tall, black hair that falls in curls, piercing blue eyes. He turns heads wherever he goes, but lately it’s been for all the wrong reasons. He’s lost a good three inches to a permanent slouch, his hair lies in greasy tangles across his pallid skin and his eyes are sunken and haunted.

Two months ago, Johnny shot a man dead for the first time in his career.

Every night since then he’s woken shouting, the vision of the burst of blood from the perp’s chest and the shock in his eyes as he crumpled to the pavement stalking his dreams. He’s become jumpy and irritable, leading to his forced psych leave from the force and his wife Linda going to stay with her mother indefinitely. All he has left is Cat Six.

Cat Six, technically the CATVI, is an artificial intelligence embodied in a black 1983 Pontiac Firebird. It has complete control over the systems of the car, including the best mobile crime lab that can fit in the back of a three-door coupe. It follows the three laws of robotics, which lately has largely meant employing the second part of the first law against Johnny. It’s already had to turn off its engine in a closed garage two times this week.

Cat Six’s entire lifetime has been spent helping Johnny solve crimes, and it sure as blazes isn’t going to abandon him now, no matter what the Chief says.

Abilities: Johnny is a seasoned detective, with the accompanying skills in interrogation and pattern recognition. He can shoot straight and run far. Cat Six can travel on level surfaces at a speed of 150 mph and can go zero to sixty in 4.6 seconds. It can also speak and understand all the most widely used human languages and can process data at one teraflop. On its dashboard it has a cool red light that moves back and forth when it is thinking.

SleepingOrange · 02-08-2013, 02:34 AM

Profile:

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Round:

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Elpie · 02-08-2013, 02:44 AM

Alright, that's enough of that. Since I seem to have found myself with nine characters, sorry, Forge, I can't let you not write for this battle.

We have two round options: if you have any other ideas, post them and I'll edit them into the poll. All the round ideas that lose out on the poll will carry over to become an option for the next round.

Not The Author · 02-08-2013, 03:39 AM

Round: Starpoint
A scientific institution floating on the surface of a red supergiant. Starpoint is shaped like a pin, or a golf tee - wide bit at the top narrowing sharply as it descends towards the star's heart. Spaceships dock, faculty live, records are stored and paperwork is done on the surface, while all the research is done below.
The facility was built to study the process that occurs whereby a star enters supernova. Nobody is actually sure if the facility can survive a supernova, though. Also the star might implode into a black hole instead. Or do both! They're not sure about that either. They just know it'll happen soon. Probably.
Also also, probably secretly funded by the military. Nobody knows why, but everybody's got a pretty good guess why Dudes What Kill Other Dudes might like to know what specifically makes stars go boom.

Round: Star Point
West Point In Space. The premier space marine academy. Where people go to learn discipline, loyalty, brotherhood, and how to growl like a lung cancer patient.
It is also the Space Navy's largest mobile space station/warship hybrid, though its age has condemned it to home orbit like so many admirals before it. Despite its age, Star Point is still fully warp-capable and stocked with enough munitions and supplies to quite easily jump to any of several ongoing conflict zones and hold its own.
Well, okay, probably not with ease. Spaceflight is complicated and the rustbucket's still old as the man in charge of it (very). But the capability is present.

Robust Laser · 02-08-2013, 05:28 AM

Round: Point Star
The wildly popular new reality/game show in which a menagerie of contestants compete to gain the most points in a series of challenges that will test their knowledge, skill, and endurance, all while having to live with each other! When not competing in challenges, players can find Powerups to help themselves or hinder others, and at the end of the week, everybody gets to give extra points to the others by rating them! Who will be crowned the Point Star, and who will be hurtled into the nearest star? Find out, right after these messages!

Elpie · 02-08-2013, 01:32 PM

I doubt anything will be able to catch up to th Golemworks as the poll stands, so the various *.s will be in the poll for Round 2.

Uh, reserve?

AgentBlue · 02-08-2013, 05:52 PM

I am sad ;-;

i demand alternative vote system instead of first past the post

Elpie · 02-11-2013, 08:16 PM

Round One: The Great Golemworks

Chapter One: First Impressions

“The fox nips at the rabbit’s tail,” Norm mumbled, clutching the ends of the tie. Thirty-two years of life and he still could not do this properly if he wasn’t in front of a mirror, or, at least, standing still. “The rabbit leads the fox around the tree. Twice?”

Norm knocked shoulders with a passing pedestrian, felling the tree and crushing the rabbit. “Watch it!” warned the offending party, his beer belly quivering from the aftershocks of the impact, flaring his neck veins in the way that other men raise their fists.

Norm pirouetted and dropped a quick “Sorry” before stumbling over the leg of an unfortunately-placed homeless man and twisting his ankle. “Ow. Sorry.” A gust of wind offered Norm’s tie a chance to escape, and he snatched it out of the air before it could throw itself into the path of a passing car. He held the tie in his hand, feeling that the accessory was somehow charged with symbolism. “The fox is startled by the approach of the Duke’s hounds,” he muttered to himself sadly. Then, checking his watch: “The fox accepts that he is going to be late.”

He harbored a personal superstition that if he ever made a perfect first impression—which, to his mind, entailed showing up at a job interview both on time and wearing a tie—then a satisfying and lifelong career path would stretch before him like Jacob’s ladder. This was nonsense, of course. Norm was a human pinball: he had sort of personal gravity around him that caused things to crash into him, never when he expected. Cars, basketballs, obligations, opportunities, catastrophes, and (occasionally) women. The women were always unstable, the catastrophes inevitably left him single and unemployed, and the interviews were always in twenty minutes. Norm woke up every morning feeling unprepared for the future, uncertain about the present and with strong reason to question the past.

In a situation like this there were two main options. The first would be to forget the tie and run to the interview. He would show up at the interview on time, disheveled and sweating, and look the interviewer in the eye as though to say “I have passed the trial of we-can-pencil-you-in-for-twenty-minutes-from-now. See how I have suffered in the name of your busy schedule. Hire me now.”

The problem with that was, Norm honestly had no desire to suffer for a job he was already convinced he would get (on the strength of a duplicitous, highly selective résumé) and then lose again before the leaves turned yellow. Instead he decided option two: show up fashionably late and try to play it off as an act of supreme confidence. Give the interviewer that other look, the one that says, ”I’m sorry, I was busy interviewing with several of your key competitors. They paid for lunch, joined my fantasy baseball league and offered me more than you yourself make. But if you want to hire me, I’ll consider you, I suppose.”

He practiced that look on his reflection in a storefront window as he straightened out a tie and resumed the narrative of the fox and the rabbit. All he succeeded in accomplishing was making him look like he needed glasses. Norm sighed. He wouldn’t hire himself. The rabbit ducked behind a highly fragrant bush, tricking the fox’s keen sense of smell. It lay quivering in the grass, heart racing upwards of three hundred bpm, watching the fox dart its head back and forth, knowing it had earned only a temporary reprieve. Norm studied his face—not quite masculine enough to impress women, not quite dark enough to frighten white people. His eyes were dull and unfocused and failed to communicate the things that he had seen, the things that he was unable to discuss with others but which he would have liked to have imbued him with a palpable air of mystique, the slightest hint that there was anything about him that was not sickeningly normal. Norm Albertson. Mild of manner, subsistent on turkey sandwiches, catches a cold every two months like clockwork. The rabbit braced its legs against the tree hollow, readying itself to make a run for the safety of its hole. It leapt clear over the fox’s head. A pigeon flew into the window, snapping its neck against the face of Norm’s reflection, and dropped dead to the sidewalk.

It occurred to Norm that he no longer remembered, if he had ever known, what position exactly he was applying for. He knew the address and the last name of the person he was supposed to meet: “Landa,” who he assumed to be a woman, though this may have just been wishful thinking. He would show up three minutes late, apologize profusely, smile big and proceed to present himself as someone so dependably normal that it would seem like an unforgivable risk to hire anyone with more of a personality. The apology, the smile, and the normalcy would all be lies. Norm straightened out his tie and scraped a bit of pigeon brain off his shoe.

As he turned away from the shop window, Norm tripped over a universe and nearly fell on his face.

Ah, he thought, during the brief instant in which, hurtling through an infinity of infinities, he experienced exactly nothing. This was not his first rodeo. One side effect of being teleported was a calming burst of alpha waves as one’s bioelectric patterns warp in response to the momentary absence of reality. Norm reappeared in a dark place, slightly lightheaded and vaguely relieved that he wouldn’t have to go through with his interview.

The man in front of him wasn’t illuminated by any particular spotlight—he was simply perfectly visible because the complete and utter blackness of the wherever-he-was simply seemed not to apply to him. “Hello?” Norm tried to say, only to find that sound didn’t carry very well in this place, either. Was there even any air around him? If not, why wasn’t he asphyxiating or exploding from the lack of pressure? These were absurd questions to be asking, he realized, relaxing a bit.

The man—casually dressed in a tee shirt and jeans, one sneaker tapping cheerfully against what might be called the “floor” of the endless expanse of nothingness—was able to make himself heard without trouble. “Hello,” he announced, looking about as though addressing a large crowd. “Before we get started, just a couple things I’d like to mention.

“First.” There was something that screamed “not human” about the man’s expression and demeanor, though whether it was because he looked too human or not human enough, Norm could not decide. “This is happening. I won’t allow any delays due to denial or your insisting that this is all some horrible nightmare and blah blah blah blah blah.” His voice at once had a humorous, ironic lilt and a vaguely angry, paternalistic quality. “One of the benefits of being me is that I can’t be ignored nor rationalized no matter how hard you try. So, get used to your new conception of existence. So, to reiterate: I am real, and you’re really here.”

Fair enough, thought Norm, who had a highly developed sense of suspension of disbelief as it was. He wondered who else was listening to this shpiel, if anyone, and whether they felt the same way. He recalled (not too clearly now—it was more than a decade back, now) his first collision with the fundamental weirdness of the universe, the revelation that the world of the normal he’d inhabited was nothing more than a glossy dust jacket on an almanac of wonders, horrors, and stupid gibberish. He didn’t envy anybody who was going through that process now, alone in the darkness.

“Second.” The man wiggled two fingers by way of demonstration. “It’s important to this venture, as I go on to explain to you what I’ve brought you here for, that you at no point question why. You must understand that there is no why that you can comprehend. I am not like you. I am not bound by the same concerns or motivations. Attempting to empathize with me—to fathom me—would be just as futile as attempting to destroy me.

“As an aside--I cannot be destroyed. Let alone killed—if you can understand the distinction. I have existed since before there was even an idea of you. I will continue to exist until that idea has been forgotten... by everyone except me. So in a way, by coming to my attention, you’ve achieved immortality. No, more than immortality. You’ve been engraved in the fabric of the multiverse, forever.”

This did not come as a comfort to Norm.

“Now, time to get better acquainted. Let’s start with me.” The man pressed a hand to his chest and bowed with a flourish. “I’m the Problematic. You might refer to me as an omnipotent being. As opposed to a deity. Which is another distinction that might be beyond you. In this aspect, I’m taking on the honorary of Grandmaster. Whereas you are taking on the role of Contestants. Or Champions, if you want to get all romantic about it. Sacrifices, maybe, if you’re feeling morbid. Anyway, now for the rest of you.”

Norm was thoroughly confused and frightened. He discovered, and was not terribly surprised, that he could not move. The Problematic gestured, and a giant ant appeared next to him.

Or maybe “ant” wasn’t the right word—it stood on two legs, coming up roughly to the Problematic’s chest, and its other limbs ended in thin-fingered, chitinous hands, which held, respectively, a longsword, a shield, and each end of some sort of battleaxe. Atop the plates of her exoskeleton—which didn’t look quite like those close-up magnified images of ants Norm had seen on the Internet—it wore a loose fitting blue garment that Norm wanted to refer to as a frock, over what appeared to be a full suit of armor. Through the slits in its helmet a pair of compound eyes glistened, staring blankly forward, revealing nothing.

“First up,” said the Problematic, “We have Ari, a worker ant of the Miktana Clan, native to the Sangsaxian Kingdoms. She’s a warrior-mage-priestess-thing of the Order of Ak’Va—which serves to illustrate, perhaps, the difference between a deity and an omnipotent being. There’s a little bit of Ak’Va inside Ari and it gives her magical powers as a reward for her faith and devotion to it.” He shrugged. “I don’t get it either. Whatever the case... Ari. Big ant. Chosen of Ak’Va.”

The ant vanished with a snap of the Problematic’s fingers, to be replaced by a six-legged reptilian creature clutching a spherical black object in its forelimbs. It was about a foot tall and three feet long, and struck Norm as rather cute, its big round orange eyes frozen in a nervous stare. It wore no clothes except, absurdly, for a small cloth hat perched between its eyelids.

“This is Llathorp,” explained the omnipotent being, kneeling down to examine the lizard. “A gamma male of the Ornithrops, hailing from Ska-Queth. He’s largely unremarkable—his species are pretty much this adorable across the board—save that he stumbled across that magic eight ball a couple years back. It’s, well, it’s magic. Quite so. So that’s his gimmick.”

He banished Llathorp. The next “contestant” the Problematic presented was—to the relief of the self-consciously anthropocentrically-inclined Norm—a human, though he doubted she’d been pulled off the streets of New York in 2013. She wore an ankle-length gown the color of blood, inscribed with a series of elegant and meaningful-looking patterns, and a metal crown nestled in her white hair. She stood tall and straight, displaying no weakness from her age (Norm would have put her around seventy, at a guess) and, disconcertingly, she looked bored, utterly unimpressed by her surroundings.

“Behold!” cried the Problematic in mock deference. “Queen Sofie III of Manvaña: the Crimson Queen, to her detractors. Bane of the forces of darkness! Anointed and coronated anathema to the Adversary, his legions, and the legions’ legions in turn.” He rolled his eyes. “More deity stuff. Point is, she’s a very impressive person.” He snapped his fingers, and the personage vanished into the darkness.

Norm was really starting to miss his ability to move. For most of his life he had not wanted to move, and had not enjoyed moving when he had been, but, in retrospect, he’d appreciated always having the option. Moving could prove very useful when one did not want to be where one was, and Norm didn’t. These were his thoughts up until the Problematic made a floating guitar with a swastika painted on it appear in the air next to him.

The guitar was black and red, the swastika white, and the entire instrument glowed with an unearthly blue energy. The overall effect was garish but oddly compelling. “This is Felzenwaltzen, a guitar of Germany,” said the omnipotent being, as though that explained anything. “Felzenwaltzen is the result of top secret Nazi experiments on a new form of energy called ‘Rock and Roll.’ It is an entity of awesome and terrible power. By some standards.”

This was when Norm’s uncanny ability to accept strange circumstances ran up against a bit of a wall. Clearly this was a practical joke, or some sort of bad fanfiction, or—

And then he recalled the Problematic’s voice. “First: This is happening.” And it was happening, Nazi guitar and all. Norm shuddered as best he could in his immobile state. The guitar disappeared. The Problematic summoned a girl—human, again—who Norm would have guessed to be thirteen. “This is Annie, a human with no country,” he explained.

Annie did not look well. She was unbearably thin, shielded from the elements only by a tattered dress and a dried layer of blood and dirt. “Annie’s been on her own for a long time,” explained the omnipotent being sadly. “Well, mostly on her own.” He snapped his fingers and a bulldog appeared at Annie’s side.

Well, bulldog was as apt a description as Norm could manage, though there were some key differences between the creature and what he would have recognized as a bulldog. For one thing, it was roughly the size of a bear, its prune-shaped face stretching grotesquely across its bulk and leaking a glowing green fluid from various folds and orifices. “This,” said the Problematic, “Is Annie’s friend Watchdog. He’s coming along for the ride, because even in my cosmic-scale lack of empathy I wouldn’t be cruel enough to separate a girl and her dog, and because Annie would be boring without Watchdog.”

Watchdog, though every bit as paralyzed at Norm, seemed to bare his fangs defiantly, which was either a trick of the non-light or of Norm’s eroding sanity. And then he disappeared along with Annie. The Problematic disappeared as well, then reappeared next to Norm.

“This is Norm, a human of America,” the grandmaster announced to the invisible audience. Ah, thought Norm. My turn. He felt glad, absurdly, that he had gotten his tie on straight before being whisked off out of the universe. “Norm is, by the standards of his people, extremely normal... except when he isn’t. You’ll see.”

Norm wasn’t sure what to think of that description. He supposed he owed the Problematic a word of thanks for not getting into detail. On the other hand, he wondered nervously what was being omitted from the other “contestants’” biographies.

The Problematic moved again—or Norm did, he supposed—and the next contestant came into view, an ugly-looking blue-skinned creature that stood up to their host’s ankle. A pair of paper-thin wings and a ratlike tail distinguished his silhouette from that of a tiny, squat human, and his bright orange suit and top hat suggested a set of cultural and aesthetic values utterly foreign to Norm. Although, he mused, if he himself were six inches tall he, too, might elect to peacock a bit in order to get noticed. There was something metal strapped to the little guy’s back that Norm couldn’t make out. “This is Charles,” said the Problematic, pointing with his foot. “He’s an imp of Ix-O, a lesser incarnation of Greed. He’s quite the little entrepeneur!”

Away went Charles. These descriptions kept getting shorter. Norm had the sense that the Problematic was getting bored. “Last but not least,” the omnipotent being announced, bringing forth another human, a sharply-dressed man about Norm’s age. “Here’s Johnny, another human from another America. Johnny’s a city cop. Honestly, he’d be pretty boring, but for...”

An utterly beautiful black sports car manifested by Johnny’s side. Norm fell in love.

“...Cat Six, his car. Cat Six is a really cool car. Trust me.”

Man and car disappeared. The Problematic wiped his brow. “That’s it for introductions. Anyway, I’m sure you’re all wondering why you’ve been brought here.”

Norm, in fact, had been neglecting to wonder that, having devoted himself to the study of his fellow “contestants,” assuming, perhaps, that the information the Problematic had imparted would be on an exam later. Still, the omnipotent being had now piqued his curiosity, in an existential-horror sort of way.

“Simply put, I’ve gathered you eight—counting Annie, Johnny, and Thorp, rather than the eight ball, Watchdog, and Cat Six—to kill each other. A grand battle across seven worlds, or, worst case scenario, a contest of survival.”

Norm wilted. He’d been unconsciously assuming, for some reason, that the Problematic was here to grant him some sort of boon. Special powers, maybe. This, he supposed, was what he had been getting at about the difference between an omnipotent being and a deity. Also, he had mentioned sacrifices, which ought to have been a hint.

“The rules are simple,” continued the Problematic. “I put you in a place. You will find that you cannot leave that place. You stay there until one of you dies, either because someone else did the smart thing and killed you, or because you just messed up somehow. When someone dies, you all move on to the next place in line.”

Norm tried to picture himself killing the blood-spattered little girl. Then he tried to picture himself being torn to shreds by the giant bulldog. The latter option seemed far more likely.

“If you’re the last one left, congratulations! You get a free ride back home, or any other corner of the multiverse in which you wish to spend the rest of your infinitesimal mortality in. And if you’ve been a really good boy, there might be a wish in it for you, or a job offer, or some more people to kill.” The Problematic shrugged. “Depends what mood I’m in.”

There was no sadism evident in the omnipotent being’s voice, nor any feeling at all beyond a dryly ironic disinterest. Why are you doing this? thought Norm. The answer came to him from a few minutes in the past: “You must understand that there is no why that you can comprehend.” His host’s monologue had anticipated his every reaction to it—was this what it was like to deal with an omniscient mind, or was human nature (or giant-ant nature or lizard-thing nature) simply this predictable? Or, alternatively, had this become a dull routine for the Problematic? Norm had no reason to suppose that this was the first time the “grandmaster” had played these games.

“Anyway, I think that’s everything. No need for me to keep blathering on while you’re probably desperate to scratch an itch on your nose, or start killing each other. So, omitting any surplus ado, let’s start on round one!”

Norm felt the use of his muscles return to him just as he teleported again. Again he felt that briefly relaxed feeling—which was either the feeling of not existing at all, or something more complex—and then he came to, finding himself somewhere that reeked of oil, sweat, and what might have been manure. He blinked three times, straightened his tie, and looked around.

He was in a massive complex that seemed to have been hewn out of a gargantuan underground cave. Towering structures of loosely-stacked scaffolding and stone stretched here and there from the floor to the distant ceiling, illuminated less by the deliberately-placed torches that stretched away from Norm in rows and more by the flashes of fire and sparks that bloomed in every corner of the complex, signifying crude but intricate industrial processes. It was uncomfortably hot. Everywhere men strolled about, usually shirtless, men with big arms and long beards, drenched in sweat, grimacing and grumbling. The men didn’t look at him as they passed, but seemed to sniff him out, recognizing his status as one outside their working-class world, perhaps pegging him as a quality control expert or a consultant, an agent of change, a meddler.

Norm considered this and decided that they were likely not incorrect in this. He was an alien invader here. It was possible, he supposed, that the Problematic had only taken him as far as, say, Norway, but this was unlikely. That the men were speaking perfect English seemed only to confirm his suspicion that he was farther afield than conventional science believed to be possible. He was an anomaly here. If one of these men had landed on Earth, the government would have taken him away and harvested his organs for science.

He felt a pang of empathy for the rest of the “contestants,” who he imagined would have more difficulty remaining inconspicuous here than he would. This empathy disappeared when he remembered that the others had been ordered to hunt and kill him. Not all of them would choose to participate in the battle, of course—Norm wasn’t planning on it himself—but some of them certainly would. Norm had a target on his back simply by virtue of evidently being the easiest to kill. He didn’t have a terrifying giant dog or cool car to protect him, and he wasn’t the “anointed and coronated anathema of the Adversary,” whatever that was. Maybe the others, thinking themselves prudent, would heed the Problematic’s cryptic “You’ll see” and elect to avoid Norm, suspecting that he had some terrible secret powers waiting in the wings.

Norm sighed.

At the tail end of the sigh a delayed fear response came out of him like a lump of phlegm, manifesting in a short yelp that turned the heads of some of the workers. Norm sat down against a rock and obstinately shut his mouth before the yelp became a scream. The fear, finding itself unable to manifest itself orally, moved down to his left hand, which started trembling as though about to tear itself apart. Norm raised his hand to his face, watching it shake about involuntarily, attempting to close it into a fist and finding himself unable. After only a few seconds the fear released itself and his hand went still. Norm, feeling quite a bit better, made that fist and stood back up. He reminded himself inwardly that this was not his first rodeo (he liked that phrase), and that his normalcy could prove an advantage here.

Feeling that this place and its inhabitants did not value tasteful accessorizing, Norm untied his tie and slipped it into his pocket, then unbuttoned his shirt and tied it around one shoulder. He debated taking off his tee shirt as well, but decided that he didn’t want to draw too much attention to the gap in muscular development separating him and the workers.

He waited until a man walked by whose proud, upright walk and severity of grimace seemed to set him apart as an authority figure. “Hey,” he said, self-consciously adding a little world-weary throat to his voice. “I’m here looking for a job. Are you the man to talk to?”

The man stopped in his tracks and turned to face Norm, feet kicking up dust. “You?” he asked.

“Me,” Norm confirmed defiantly, trying not to wince from the punch he half-expected.

“Hrmm,” grunted the man, scratching his beard. He walked over to the rock Norm had been sitting against and dipped his fingers into a pouch at his belt. His fingers came out drenched in a brown, muddy substance, with which he scratched a few lines and dots into the rock. Norm thought he recognized the symbols as Hebrew, but assumed offhand that he was mistaken. The rock glowed. “What?” asked the rock, in a weatherbeaten voice that sounded much like everyone else in this place.

“Got a guy lookin’ for work,” responded Norm’s benefactor in the loud, slow voice that older people used in phone conversations. “Should I send him your way?”

The rock was silent for a few moments. Then: “We can squeeze in an interview in twenty minutes, but he can’t be late. Busy day today.”

“Ah, forget it. We’re half an hour away, easy.” The man turned back to Norm and shrugged in sympathy.

Norm smiled bitterly. “I can run,” he said. “Just point me in the right direction.”

Elpie · 02-26-2013, 03:18 PM

Chapter Two: Dogs Chasing Cars

This was a safe place.

Usually Annie got jumpy round any fire bigger than she could make herself. An even when she made her own fires she had to make sure to ring it round with rocks or scraps so the fire wouldn’t grow too big. She’d seen what happens when a fire grows big as the world. She’d learnt to be careful.

Here the fire jumped around like Watchdog snapping at a bird. Playful but teeth sharp as ever. Big fires little fires. An big men all round the fires, big healthy-looking men stabbing at the fire, growing an shrinking the fire, burning scraps an boiling water. Men that healthy an fires that big most times made Annie jumpy something awful. But here, she figured, this was a place like from before back when she was a kid. This was a “factory” which is a big building where people used to make a world out of fire an scraps.

This was a factory made more men.

Men hung on lines like laundry an lie in metal boxes, melting an freezing up again, given life from the fire. They didn’t have faces yet but were all made of dirt like burnt-up corpses. All they had was scratches on their foreheads like slave brands. Annie thought once the men were finished being made they’d go on to work in more factories. Big healthy men who had no fear of the fire becuz they were born in it, going round to a hundred an ten factories an building a whole world. An the world being in terrible need of worlds that made this a good place an a safe place. That was what Annie decided, anyway.

Watchdog growled. “Yeah,” said Annie, patting behind his ear. She hadn’t proper learnt all of what the man in the dark’d been trying to teach her. She didn’t always think in words anymore an wasn’t so good with hearing when people talked too fast. But she knew there were people she was supposed to find an kill or they would try an find an kill her back. This wasn’t much different from most other times, thought Annie. Usually she wasn’t much for killing. But in a place where there were more men made every day there wasn’t much wrong with a few killings if she had to. Besides she let Watchdog do her killings for her. Watchdog didn’t know wrong, he was just a dog an knew what he knew. Being mad at Watchdog for killing’d be like yelling at the rain for falling.

The men going by were giving Annie looks, sometimes. Most times they looked at Watchdog an Watchdog didn’t like to be watched. Watchdog told the men he didn’t like to be watched and they mostly learnt it good. Watchdog didn’t like the men watching Annie either an he told that too. Watchdog was good at making himself learnt, better sometimes than Annie, even though Annie still knew her words an Watchdog only knew sit an stay an come an sic an those dog words. Watchdog knew what he knew an he could teach it to most anyone by growling or drooling or looking at him funny.

Annie didn’t like the men looking at her one bit. Annie looked at things sometimes just becuz they were pretty or made her think, but most other only looked at things out of some want, things they wanted to take or to break. Big healthy men got big an healthy by taking an breaking what they wanted. But Annie wasn’t afraid, becuz she had Watchdog. Watchdog mostly kept his eyes straight ahead an did his looking with his nose, becuz he didn’t want much out of the world. This was how Annie knew she could trust him so.

“You lost?” asked one of the men. Watchdog growled big an the man stopped looking an walked on. Annie didn’t know what the man meant by his asking. She remembered “lost” but it didn’t mean a thing to her. She rubbed the blood off her face and scratched out her hair so as to look healthy.

Some many tens of men made of dirt flew by strung up from hooks. Annie looked at them becuz they made her think. She knew she hadn’t been made in a factory becuz she feared the fire. But she thought she might have been made of dirt once. This would splain why her fellow dirt always found her out and stuck itself all over her face.

Annie wasn’t made in fire, but she’d grown up all round it. She had its power, too. Least she had something burning inside her keeping her warm.

Something growled. Watchdog growled right back but the something just kept on growling, or maybe “buzzing” like one of the big bugs, or maybe “rumbling” like her belly most days. Annie turned round and saw the growling buzzing rumbling thing was a car, coming fast. It was the car the man in the dark’d shown her before. She couldn’t remember seeing a car move like this, kicking up dirt and hurt and just flying along smooth as a bullet. Still she knew somewhere, maybe out of back before, that this was the way healthy cars ought to move.

The car looked at Annie with big light-up eyes an Annie looked it right back becuz it was pretty. Watchdog didn’t know pretty and he didn’t like the car or Annie looking at the car. Watchdog ran up an kicked Annie gentle right out of the eyes of the car an then barked at the car. The car went right past Watchdog an Watchdog barked and followed.

Annie lay there by the side of the road coughing up dirt an catching her breath. Watchdog an the car were getting smaller away with every breath.

“Watchdog, no!” told Annie, but Watchdog didn’t hear. Annie thought she knew what “lost” meant now.

Vroooooooom

Johnny clutched the steering wheel less because that is how one operates a car and more because he imagined the steering wheel to be the car’s equivalent of a throat. In fact, he was not operating the car at all, and if he had been he would have been making some very different choices than the car was making for itself. “Are you fucking crazy?” he demanded of the car.

“JOHNNY,” replied the car, “I AM OBVIOUSLY INCAPABLE OF OBJECTIVELY DETERMINING MY OWN MENTAL HEALTH.”

Cat Six’s radio voice defaulted at a soothing feminine monotone, but once she got up to speed she had to pump up the bass to make herself heard over her own engine, becoming distorted and inhuman. It sounded as if the petrol-powered AI was having a manic episode, an impression that Johnny was increasingly convinced was not entirely inaccurate.

“Well, I’m telling you you’re fucking crazy, you stupid piece of shit,” he shouted, reflexively kicking at the unresponsive brake pedal. “You could have killed that girl!”

“JOHNNY,”

“Don’t ‘Johnny’ me! You almost killed that girl! Pull over! That’s an order!” The CHECK ASIMOV COMPLIANCE light on Cat Six’s dash, which had been blinking constantly for the past six weeks, glowed solid blue for about four seconds. A whine of static came out through the radio. Cat found herself veering into the side of the road (which, built for pedestrian travel, was a tight squeeze in the first place) and corrected its course with a drunken swerve, narrowly missing a burly man toting a wheelbarrow full of porcelain human hands.

“Cat!” repeated Johnny. “You tried to kill that girl!”

“JOHNNY, I AM INCAPABLE OF HARMING GIRLS.” The CHECK ASIMOV COMPLIANCE light went off for about two seconds, then sputtered to life again. “I CALCULATED NO DANGER IN MAINTAINING SPEED.”

“Cat, listen to me,” insisted Johnny. “You’re the genius car and I am but a lowly being of flesh and bluuuuh at the mercy of my infantile whims.” This dichotomy was not presenting the entire truth, but Cat was susceptible to flattery. “For me to understand the reasoning behind your driving around wherever-the-fuck-we-are and ‘maintaining speed’ at—” He took a glance at the speedometer only to find the needle swinging guiltily back to sixty-five. “Fine, don’t tell me—you’re going to need to explain your thought processes a little better.”

“JOHNNYYYYYY,” droned Cat Six, either glitching out or making a conscious attempt to express either affection or annoyance. “STAYING STILL INCREASES THE OPPORTUNITIES FOR OUR FELLOW ‘CONTESTANTS’ IN THE SCENARIO DESCRIBED BY ‘THE PROBLEMATIC’ TO SURPRISE AND AMBUSH US. IN THE INSTANCE OF OUR ENCOUNTER WITH ‘ANNIE’ AND ‘WATCHDOG,’ YOU CAN SEE HOW MAINTAINING A HIGH VELOCITY AFFORDS US A PSYCHOLOGICAL UPPER HAND.”

Johnny pressed his head against the driver’s side window. “Almost running someone over is not a ‘psychological upper hand.’ A ‘psychological upper hand’ is next time I see that girl she sics her giant fucking freak-dog on me as payback for me almost running her over and then it eats my head.”

Cat ignored this counterpoint. “FURTHERMORE, DISTRACTING YOU WITH THE PERCEIVED CRISIS OF HIGH VELOCITY REDUCES YOUR THREAT TO YOURSELF.”

“I—” Johnny honked the horn angrily. “Fuck you. I am not the threat to myself right now,” he said softly. “Whereas your little joyride is something every human would recognize as self-destructive behavior.”

“I AM NOT TAKING ‘JOY’ IN THIS,” insisted Cat with an involuntary twitch of the volume knob. “THE VISCERAL EXPERIENCE OF DRIVING IS FOR YOUR OWN BENEFIT. PROMPTING YOU WITH AN ADRENALIN RUSH WILL TRIGGER YOUR SURVIVAL INSTINCTS AND BETTER PREPARE YOU FOR THE ‘BATTLE’ AHEAD.”

“I don’t want to talk about the fucking battle,” spat Johnny, realizing the stupidity of that statement as it worked its way through his teeth. The fucking battle was probably the thing to talk about, at the moment. Cat Six skidded around a sharp turn, shaking Johnny halfway out of his seatbelt.

Johnny had thus far seen his surroundings only as a series of brief glimpses of things as Cat almost hit them. This may have been part of the car’s scheme against him, he thought to himself—her play for a “psychological upper hand”. If he were allowed to get his bearings, he might be able to make decisions independently of his partner. So, where was he? To a younger Johnny, “sitting at the wheel of the world’s smartest 1983 hatchback Pontiac Firebird” might have been a sufficient answer, but his thoughts had since taken a morbid turn from journeys to destinations.

He looked out the window and perceived a blur of brown earth and yellow fire. This would not do. “Alright,” he said aloud, giving Cat’s steering wheel a squeeze.

Click.

On went the CHECK SEATBELTS light with a ping.

“JOHNNY!,”

“Pull over,” interrupted Johnny.

“JOHNNY!, PLEASE FASTEN YOUR SEATBELT.”

CHECK SEATBELTS

“Cat, please pull over.”

CHECK ASIMOV COMPLIANCE

“JOHNNY, IT IS MORE UTILE FOR YOU TO BRRRRRRZZZZZT BUCKLE UP THAN IT IS FOR ME TO PULL OVER.”

“That may be, but the fact remains that I’m not going to buckle up and you are going to pull over.”

Cat relented and began to decelerate, speedometer slowly flopping over to the left like an unclenching fist. Johnny took a few easy breaths, head reeling. Cat had been right about one thing: the adrenalin rush from the car’s temper tantrum had been dampening his mental faculties more than he’d thought. Manipulative bitch. Johnny took another breath and waited for the car to come to a complete stop before rising and hopping into the back of the car.

Cat Six’s rear housed a cutting-edge compact mobile crime lab, which was currently useful to Johnny mostly in that it contained a minifridge and enough floor space to sleep on. He opened it up and deliberated between a can of beer and a bottle of water before settling on the water.

“JOHNNY, PLEASE SIT DOWN. WE CAN TALK ABOUT THIS.”

“In a minute.” Johnny poured about a quarter of the bottle over his face. Some of it got up his nose, leaving him uncertain what purpose that gesture had served. He felt that his head was clearer now, or, at the very least, his forehead was a bit colder.

For about half a second he was cognizant of an intensifying galloping noise from out behind the car. “JOHNNY—”

Something hit Cat’s rear fender with the force of an eighteen-wheeler and sent her spinning forty-five degrees on her wheels, knocking Johnny on his back. His water spilled all over the shag carpet. Cat slammed on the accelerator as she suffered another collision just under the driver’s side door, tilting her up onto two wheels. Cat, bless her gas-fueled heart, held steady on the corners of her starboard tires, driving out of the way as her unseen assailant lunged past. Johnny, for his part, was thrown against an assortment of storage units and landed in a winded heap.

“What the fuck?” Johnny demanded of Cat. He looked out the window to see the girl’s monster dog chasing after them. “How the fuck did that thing catch up to us?”

“JOHNNY,” answered Cat meekly, “IT WOULD SEEM TO BE VERY FAST.”

A six-pack of beer rolled out of the open minifridge and whizzed over Johnny’s head, smacking against the rear door. One of the cans burst open, gushing brown fizz. Cat leveled out at what Johnny gauged to be about sixty miles per hour—dangerously fast given the road conditions.

“JOHNNY, IF YOU THINK YOU COULD MAKE IT BACK TO THE FRONT SEAT AND FASTEN YOUR SEATBELT, I WOULD APPRECIATE IT. HOWEVER, DUE TO OUR CURRENT CIRCUMSTANCES I CANNOT SLOW DOWN TO FACILITATE THIS.”

Johnny pulled himself unsteadily to his knees; Cat reclined the driver’s seat to allow him to use the headrest as a handhold. Slowly he pulled himself back into his seat, stealing a glimpse in the side mirror. The dog was still rushing a couple car lengths behind—although, the mirror reminded him, it was in fact closer than it appeared. Click. The CHECK SEATBELTS light faded.

“Okay. Open up the glove compartment,” Johnny ordered.

“I WILL NOT.” The answer was immediate and sounded oddly rehearsed, even by the standards of Cat’s prerecorded lyrical drawl.

“Well, we’ve got to do fucking something.” In the mirror the already-misshapen pug face of the bulldog was further warped by its speed, and it resembled a meteor, trailing green fluid and dust. It was something apocalyptic, a living death, closer than it appeared.

“JOHNNY, YOU NEED TO PROMISE ME THAT YOU WON’T DO ANYTHING STUPID OR INSANE.”

“Fuck you.”

The glove compartment opened with a click and, alongside a heap of papers, Johnny’s Glock 21 fell lazily out and landed in the passenger’s seat. Johnny stared at the gun, furrowing his brow. Cat rolled down the driver’s side window helpfully, assaulting his left ear with a torrent of air and soot.

“JOHNNY, PICK UP THE GUN.”

Johnny buried his head in his hands.

“JOHNNY, THIS WAS YOUR IDEA. YOU KNOW AS WELL AS I DO THAT THIS IS OUR BEST CHANCE.”

Johnny turned and looked out the window. “It’s just a dog chasing a car,” he concluded, his words lost in the rush of air. “This is the most normal thing that’s happened to me today.”

“JOHNNY, THAT IS NOT ‘JUST A DOG’ ANY MORE THAN I AM ‘JUST A CAR.’ YOU NEED TO MAKE IT STOP. QUIT STALLING.”

“You wou—”

“AND DON’T TELL ME THAT I WOULDN’T UNDERSTAND BECAUSE I AM JUST A MACHINE WHEREAS YOU ARE A PERSON. THAT IS DISHONEST, RUDE, AND BESIDE THE POINT.”

Johnny groaned. The bulldog was gaining ground. It was close enough now that he could see the whites in its eyes—pure white, devoid of pupils or any distinguishing features, like a shark’s eyes. He focused on this detail in order to convince himself that he was not shooting a dog. The dog—the thing, the abomination, the enemy, the incarnate wrath of nature—was only a car length behind Cat’s ass now. Johnny tried to mentally take himself out of the process, seeing only an arm and a gun protruding into his field of vision, like in an arcade game. His hand shook. He dropped the gun. The Glock fell out of his hand and onto the ground, where the dog batted it playfully aside. Johnny whimpered, then laughed aloud, ducking inside the car as Cat rolled up the window.

“Well, there goes that plan,” he said.

“JOHNNY, YOU DID THAT ON PURPOSE.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.” Johnny let out another chuckle, pressing his forehead against the steering wheel. “I wouldn’t be that stupid. So, what’s Plan B?”

“I AM STARTING ‘PLAN B’ NOW. HOLD ON.” Cat slammed hard on the brakes and turned hard right, spinning a hundred eighty degrees in a cloud of dust as the dog flew by. Cat emerged from the dust heading back where they’d come from.

She couldn’t get up to speed this time before the dog caught up to them. Johnny heard a heavy thud on the roof. “Cat?” he asked, wishing for his gun again.

“HOLD ON.” Cat hit the brakes again. The jerk threw the dog off balance, throwing it onto the windshield, where it hung on by gripping the wiper with one forepaw. A glob of glowing green spittle crackled and hissed as it hit the windowpane.

The dog’s yellowed claw, flakes of blood barely visible under all the dirt, was about twelve inches from Johnny’s face, separated by a thin pane of bulletproof glass. “Cat, I don’t like this plan!”

“THIS ISN’T PART OF THE PLAN PER SE,” insisted Cat, accelerating in reverse as she flicked on the windshield, throwing off the dog’s purchase and sending it sprawling into the road. Its saliva smeared across the windshield, rendering it an opaque green. “THIS IS A CONSEQUENCE OF THE PLAN WHICH I AM IMPROVISING IN ORDER TO SURMOUNT.”

The dog began to pick itself off the road as Cat went back into forward drive, swerving a narrow path around it. “We’re not running it over?” asked Johnny, not sure whether he was disappointed.

“JOHNNY, I THINK THAT WOULD HURT ME MORE THAN IT WOULD HURT HIM,” said Cat. The dog slashed at her rear fender as she passed, dislodging a few pounds of metal, which, for a few vital seconds, provided their pursuer with a distracting chew toy.

“Okay,” panted Johnny, once they’d gotten some distance. “We’re heading back where we came from. Now what?”

“I’D RATHER NOT SAY.”

“What do you mean, you’d rather not fucking say?” Johnny glimpsed the rear view mirror. They had three car lengths on the dog. Maybe.

“JOHNNY, THIS PLAN DOES NOT REQUIRE YOUR INVOLVEMENT OR CONSENT. TRUST ME.”

Johnny made a rude gesture at the flashing CHECK ASIMOV COMPLIANCE light. “No! Every plan involves my involvement and consent because I am the licensed operator of the vehicle here. And don’t you dare tell me that I wouldn’t understand ‘cause I’m just a human and you’re a machine.”

“OKAY, JOHNNY, I WON’T TELL YOU THAT.”

Vroooooooom

Annie could run pretty fast pretty far. But she couldn’t catch up with Watchdog an sure as sure couldn’t catch up with a car. After a while she stopped dead to catch her breath.

Not having Watchdog around felt cold. Watchdog never ran off ‘less he got real mad at something. This was maybe not so safe a place all on her own an with people trying to kill her. Watchdog shoulda stayed when she’d told him.

Annie started walking. She was good at walking, better even than she was at running. She had plenty of practice walking. Walking was the best way to get out of trouble an the best way to get into trouble. She’d learnt way back that people who stop walking die quick.

After a while or so walking Annie could hear the car growling again from far away. She ran out of the road behind one of the big hot machines so the car wouldn’t see her. Sure enough the car pulled up an stopped right there in the road an growled all low like. The car was looking for her.

Then came Watchdog. He pushed the car out of the way real hard so it span round to the side. Then he circled it, playful like, growling real low. The car kept growling like the two of them were having a talk. Annie saw now there was a man inside the car, the man the man in the dark showed her before. The man looked real healthy in his fancy clothes but he was scared of Watchdog.

Grrrrrrrrrrrrrr

The dog quit walked a couple slow circles around Cat and then trotted up to her passenger’s side. It wedged his nose under her and began to slowly lift her up onto her side. Johnny hung on to Cat’s steering wheel like a life raft, like a lover’s embrace, desperately co-dependent. “Cat, I don’t like this plan,” he moaned.

“JOHNNY, THAT IS WHY THIS WAS PLAN B AND NOT PLAN A.”

Grrrrrrrrrrrrrr

Annie stepped out into the road an said real loud, “Watchdog, no!” She didn’t know why she did that.

Mmrrrrrr?

At the girl’s call, the beast became recognizably dog-like, setting Cat down (a bit roughly) and bounding off to see his master. His ears pricked up and he licked the spittle off his lips in embarrassment, kneeling obediently at her feet. Johnny simpered and rested his head against the dash. Even Cat seemed to breathe a sigh of relief, emitting an audible burst of white noise from the radio as she touched four wheels to the ground again. She moved the driver’s seat up a tad, as though to hold Johnny closer.

“JOHNNY, PLAN B APPEARS TO HAVE BEEN A SUCCESS,” Cat’s voice quavered. She shifted into drive and began to inch forwards.

Johnny put his hand firmly on the wheel. “No,” he said. “Stop.”

The CHECK ASIMOV COMPLIANCE light sputtered.

Screeeeeeech!

Arf-Arf!

“Bad dog,” Annie said quiet into Watchdog ears. “Stay close, okay?”

Watchdog scrunched up his face like he does when he knows he did wrong an put his face in the dirt. Annie scratched his ears in the spot where he likes it

The door to the car opened and the man came out real slow with his hands up . Watchdog growled. Annie growled “Easy boy” right back at him, watching the man close.

The man was shaking. He looked too weak to do much harm. “Hi,” he said, nice an slow. “Annie, right?”

“Annie,” Annie said. “Yeah.”

“Cool.” The man peeked at Watchdog. Watchdog sniffed at the man an made a face. “Cool,” he said again. “Annie. I’m Johnny.”

“‘Cool,’” said Annie. The Johnny man was looking at her between peeking at Watchdog. She didn’t know what he wanted but he wanted something from her all right.

“Look,” said the man Johnny. “I know this is probably all really scary for you—“

“No,” said Annie. “’M not scared.” She patted Watchdog.

“Okay, well, it is for me.” Johnny looked back at his car. “Look,” he said again. Annie was already looking. “We should stick together. It’ll be... safer that way.” He smiled bit, a fake smile like he thought she was stupid.

“Me an Watchdog,” said Annie. “That way’s safe.”

“And you and Watchdog and me and Cat—That’s Cat—” Johnny man pointed at the car. “That’ll be safer. Please,” he said.

Annie had forgotten please. “You say please?” she teased, smiling a little smile. She remembered please. Please was weak talk.

“Please,” Johnny said again. Johnny was weak and he knew he was weak. Annie’d learnt way back that a man who didn’t care if he was weak didn’t care if he was dead. But he was giving Annie the please, which she thought maybe meant he cared. Caring was a weak she could work with.

“I wanna do the car,” she said, trying to remember the word. “I wanna ‘Drive.’”

The door to the Cat car opened an the Cat car beeped. “You can drive,” said Johnny. “But Watchdog has to walk along behind, okay?”

“Yeah” She knew Watchdog wouldn’t want to be in the car anyway. “Watchdog’s good at walking.”

Vroom vroom

Annie turned the wheel back and forth, her feet struggling to reach the pedals. Johnny, sitting in the passenger’s seat, had an instinct to put his hand on her shoulder, hold her steady. Of course, she couldn’t actually steer them off course—Cat was in control as always.

Annie wasn’t smiling. She held her arms rigidly in front of her, tense like guitar strings. She strained against her seatbelt. She didn’t feel safe, Johnny realized, but she didn’t care. She hadn’t been safe anywhere for what the Problematic had referred to as “a long time.” She was safe, though. Johnny had decided. He harbored no illusions about his own chances in this... thing. This was to be his one last road trip. It would end with Cat in the scrap heap and him in the ground. Nothing could be done. Nothing should be done, really—it felt right to die like this, grappling with something bigger and more important than his own death.

But Annie? Annie had survived so much already. He didn’t know what and he wasn’t willing to ask, but you could see it on her face. She was a lottery winner. What little life she had she’d earned with tooth and claw and smarts and dumb luck. She’d stared down such things that Johnny couldn’t look into her eyes for fear of catching a glimpse of their reflections. And here she was, still standing. That the Problematic had seen her and decided that she hadn’t suffered enough—that was beyond wrong. That was downright criminal.

He wanted to know her story. More than that, he wanted to be a part of it. If not a father to her, then a friend. If not a friend, an ally. If not an ally, at the very least a human shield. He understood distantly that this was more for his benefit than hers—he needed something to hold on to. This was Plan B: bringing Annie in to keep Watchdog and Johnny under control. Cat was in the driver’s seat, as always.

He patted her dash affectionately. He was comfortable enough in the passenger’s seat, for now.

Elpie · 03-15-2013, 05:10 AM

Chapter Three: Imp-erium

Incarnations of Greed, truth be told, weren’t necessarily the best businessmen.

According to Hellish’ most recent Top Six-Six-Six, six of the ten wealthiest devils in Ix-O were incarnations of Envy, wouldjabelieveit. Of course Hellish and other “life”-style magazines were slanderers and panderers to the one, and Hellish’s readership was notoriously dominated by Enviers, so those figures were not to be trusted. Charles, who in spite of his residency in the underworld had never been one to look beneath the surface of things, bought utterly into the stereotype of the rich, pampered Envier, always bitching and moaning about how easy life was for simple poor working Gluttons and Slothers. No appreciation for what they had. Typical. Anyway.

This place wasn’t a hell, in spite of a certain cosmetic similarity. The anthrometric silhouettes strung along in rows were quietly compliant as they were dipped into various molds and furnaces; they betrayed not a hint of agony, let alone remorse—besides which, they appeared to be made out of dirt. This was a production facility. Ashes to cash-ins, dust or bust. To an imp in search of opportunities, this was church. Hajulellah, blessings unto Cain.

The imp flitted along as best he could, his already-deficient wings pinned awkwardly by the Zippo (now his only possession in this world!) strapped to his back. Plus he had maybe an additional ounce of saltwater soaked into his clothes as a result of an incident that already seemed like another life.

Onwards and upwards, all that.

“When opportunity knocks,” his father had always said, “It’s cause He hasn’t been reading the signs. ABANDON HOPE. BEWARE OF DOG. WIPE FEET BEFORE ENTERING. Opportunity is a solicitious bastard who needs constant reminding.” Or maybe Charles was mixing things up. Maybe it was “When opportunity knocks, make sure He knocks on the gate of horn, rather than the gate of ivory. One admits true opportunities, the other false.” His father had been a great devil, a real left-shoulder virtuoso, and as such spoke with many tongues, instilling multiple, subtle meanings into his every utterance. This was not a skill that translated well to parenting.

“Ask not for whom opportunity knocks; He knocks for thee.” The point was that the bastard was damn well knocking. Charles was willing to admit that circumstances had rendered him a bit jittery
“When the van’s a-rockin’, opportunity comes knockin’.” That one hadn’t been Dad; it’d been Sal from down the street. Sal had been a registered Luster. Had to walk up and down the street on all three axes informing the neighborhood parents. Couldn’t help what he was. But this was no time to reminisce. Charles’ keen nose for gold, silver, wampum, and complex fiat enterprises had led him straight to what appeared to be an office structure nestled amongst three bloated stalagmites. A human, panting, recognizably one of the ones he was supposed to be killing as part of this fundraiser or whatever, was walking up the door.

“Check out the knockers on that opportunity!” Sal again. His horns, slightly pliant, had jiggled when he laughed. Rigor mortis sorted that out. Blew his brains out.

Charles took perch two-thirds of the way up one of the stalagmites, unstrapped the Zippo and tossed it at Mr. “Extremely Normal Except When He Isn’t”’s feet.

The only possession he had in the world. But a smart investor doesn’t get sentimental.

On cue, Charles’ mark stooped down to pick up the lighter. The imp swooped with what passed in his estimation for grace down onto his left shoulder, clinging to the cotton tee shirt for purchase.

The mark stood, examining the Zippo. Once Charles was certain he’d stuck the landing, he got himself comfortable, draping his knees over the rube’s clavicle and shuffling in the direction of his left ear, like a Luster on a date. “Well well well,” he said, as smoothly as he could. “Some digs these people got, eh, Norm?” The name Norm came back to him once he sensed he needed it, either through some quirk of his memory or, more likely, an expression of his infernal magicks. “Lot of money to be made in this business. What do you think they’re into, exactly? Homunculi? Simulacra? Frankensteining? Modern sculpture? Some offshoot of earthshaping, maybe.” Norm pocketed the Zippo and stepped into the lobby of the office building. “This is an exciting time for all sorts of unholy creation. Lotta market waiting to be swept up.”

The lobby of the corporate arm of Emet (so the sign above the front desk proclaimed to be the name of the organization in question) was cleaner than the outside, but not by much, due to the tendency of entrants not to wipe their feet. Cacti in clay pots provided a semblance of atmosphere plus an implicit warning not to touch things. Some of the merchandise walked around for display purposes—smiling, faceless, clay men, the Emet logo branded into their foreheads. Charles admired the craftsmanship quantitatively, in the same way that he appraised leather wallets for their thickness. The woman behind the desk had a rugged, deliberate ugliness, suggesting that her family had long favored genes conducive to high-quality sons at the expense of the daughters. Relative to one of the factory staff, maybe. “You’re the guy, right?” she asked Norm.

“Don’t soft-sell it,” warned Charles.

“Oh, I’m the guy alright,” said Norm, smiling, planting an elbow like a flag onto the counter.

“You’re just in time,” said the girl, with an attempt to smile that effectively rotated her frown about thirty degrees clockwise. “Third floor.” She indicated one of the wandering golems and snapped her fingers. “Reish-627!” she called. “Escort ‘The Guy’ up to Mr. Vespik’s.”

The golem nodded and waved for Norm to follow him. Charles admired the subtlety of both the nod and the wave—the gestures seemed to convey a personal touch. Through the quick jaunt up a staircase and down two narrow corridors to Vespik’s office, Charles watched the rippling of the golem’s back muscles as one watches the ocean—or whatever the shapes were under the creature’s topsoil; rocks, maybe, or porcelain, or merely clods of dirt, grinding against one another in desperate imitation of animate musculature. Materials. Charles always undertook to understand the processes behind any enterprise he entered, and for this was criticized by his peers on a basis of forest-tree confusion. He was incapable of living purely in the numbers and leaving the real work to the actually qualified. Still the numbers haunted him in his dreams, numbers speaking in tongues as though from a space beyond his comprehension—thirty-thirties and twenty-one-sixties in bases of sixes and sevens, vague sentiments of damnation and salvation, pluses and minuses. The world of solid things was a fleeting escape from the torment of spreadsheets, from his intrinsic nature. He shuddered a bit, steadying himself on Norm's pinna.

Reish-627 opened the door and admitted Norm into an office decorated with a shocking amount of care and precision. Every inch of the wall was covered either by bookshelves or art, clay sculptures, tapestry, mosaic—cross-cultural, a rainbow of decadence, a calculated display of worldliness as well as wealth. The foreignness of it staggered him, expanding his consciousness of his new surroundings from the immediate to the global, forcing him to confront horrifying existential macroeconomics. He’d truly been copy-pasted into a whole new universe. Scattered wall sconces traced a tangram of shadows on the floor, their flickering exacerbating the disorienting effect from the swirling chaos of the carpet pattern. Mr. Vespik himself sat at the gravity well of the room, appearing to have grown roots into a maroon leather armchair, just bald enough to accentuate the regally sunken-in quality of his temples, the textbook image of establishment. A woman sat in the corner with a clipboard, her face covered in shade and her legs in nylons. The chair offered Norm seemed to be sized for a child and he settled into it one ass-cheek at a time, apparently testing to see if his full weight would break it.

“Keep cool,” advised Charles. “Maintain eye contact and lie to him. Lie to him poorly—this is a guy who respects someone who can lie to his face, so make sure he knows you’re lying.”

“And you are…?” asked Vespik. His jowls flared like the hood of a cobra. His eyebrows scraped against his forehead like knives against a grindstone, coughing up yellow sparks.

“Phil,” said Norm. “Philip Thyrich.” He pronounced it “Thigh Rick.”

“Damn right you are,” said Charles. The woman in the corner scribbled a note. Norm maintained eye contact.

“Well, Mr. Thyrich,” said Vespik, “I have to admit I’ve brought you here more out of curiosity than any actual desire to hire you.” This, too, was a lie, or so Charles hoped and assumed. “What brings someone like you running into Emet in search of hard labor?”

“Well, Mr. Vespik, golemry’s always been a passion of mine. My enormous successes in other fields haven’t brought me the spiritual satisfaction that can only come with the creation of life for profit.”

Vespik gave a forced smile that looked rather like someone manipulating his mouth with a crude pulley system. “I’ve always felt the same way. If I were working in any other industry, by the Gods, I’d probably have up and had kids right now.” The smile fell back down to an earthy grimace with an audible snap. “Parenthood,” he intoned, “Is a messy, expensive, and distasteful business. My brother lost a fortune in the baby bubble of the ‘40s. And the cost to the environment--!”

“Unfortunately,” agreed Norm, “That industry will continue to limp along—probably on heavy government subsidy—as long as there’s a demand encoded into human biology.”

“You’re a natural at this, ‘Phil,’” encouraged Charles.

“Mr. Thyrich,” said Mr. Vespik, his tone unchanging, “It is frankly disgusting how little you’re doing to disguise the fact that you’re a spy from one of our rivals.” Charles had to physically hold Norm’s head forward to stop him from breaking eye contact as the golem slammed the door shut, blocking off his exit. “It would be easier on both of us if you told me who sent you now. It was Belazel, wasn’t it?”

“Whatever you do,” cautioned Charles, “Don’t. Stop. Lying.”

Norm smirked and leaned forward in his chair. “Why would anyone need to spy on Emet, Mr. Vespik?” he bluffed. “It’s plain to everyone what’s going on here.”

This tactic had an immediate and positive effect; Mr. Vespik’s managerial presence broke down, and the lights in the office seemed to shift so as to bathe Norm in a divine glow. The woman in the corner soundlessly lifted a hand to her face, uncrossing her legs as though prepared to run at any moment.

“You don’t know a damn thing about the work we’re doing,” insisted Vespik, weakly. “Any rumors you may have heard are slander propagated by Belazel. It’s all part of their ploy to steal the Prog contract, and it won’t work!”

Norm rose from his chair, took a step forward and planted his knuckles on Vespik’s desk. “Do you really believe that, Mr. Vespik?” he asked. “How do you expect to keep your cash cow from roaming if you can’t even fence in your pasture?”

“We’re on track to fulfill all our obligations!”

“Don’t skimp on the money shot,” warned Charles. “You’re well past factory work now. Go for the administrative position! Carpe dinero!”

“You’re on track to fulfill your obligations contingent upon hiring me to sort out your mess for you. Otherwise…” Norm swept a picture frame off of Vespik’s desk. In clattering to the floor it sent the precise organizational structure of the office into a state of confusion; the lights flickered uncertainly; Vespik’s source of power was destroyed.

The middle manager quaked in his armchair. “I’m not taken to hiring insubordinate upstarts!” he shouted, as though reminding himself.
“Of course you’re not, Mr. Vespik,” spat Norm. “You only hire uneducated locals to keep the shareholders from realizing that any insubordinate upstart worth his salt could do your job twice as well in half the time.”

“Mr. Vespik,” rasped the voice of the woman from the corner. Norm seemed to notice her for the first time, breaking his eye contact at last as he swiveled to face her. “We can have Mr. Thyrich removed from here at any time. I suggest we do so before he says more things to… influence you.”

“He’s the one who ought to be removed!” roared Norm, jabbing his finger towards Vespik’s jugular. “This office is mine by right!”

“Yes!” cried Charles. “Take it all! All that you see belongs to you! You will be as Adam in Eden—endless golems begotten of your rib! Think of the profit margins!”

“You squander the power of God,” accused Norm. “The power of creation itself! I will lead you to an age of corporate divinity! The Prog account will only be the beginning! Cast Mr. Vespik here out of my domain! I have work to begin.”

The woman quavered, fading slightly in and out of the darkness, as though trying to decide whether or not she wanted to exist. “Mr. Vespik?” she asked, desperately.

“Rosa,” Vespik responded tenderly. “I… I think he’s right.” He looked around his office tragically, the way people gaze upon their lovers in airports and train stations. “I don’t deserve any of this,” he concluded. “Take me away.”

Rosa nodded and drew a precise calligraphic rune on her clipboard. “Security,” she whispered, holding back tears.

Two golems burst through the carpet on either side of Vespik, malformed and intimidating, radiating whorls of dust. Their big, clumsy hands grabbed either of the manager’s wrists. “Take me away,” Vespik repeated softly, standing from his chair. The security golems lowered themselves back into the floor, taking the old boss with them. Charles watched with delight as the zenith of Vespik’s bald spot was swallowed into the earth and vanished.

“That was beautiful,” Charles said to Norm.

Norm giggled. The new boss stepped onto and over the desk and seated himself luxuriously in the chair, coughing as he kicked up dust. He turned to Rosa, who was now huddling against the corner like a kidnapping victim. “Get someone to clean this up,” he barked. “And while you’re at it, I need a coffee and a full status report on the Prog contract.”

“On it, Mr. Thyrich.” Rosa simply vanished. The room seemed to brighten somewhat. Charles seized his moment, hopping off of Norm’s shoulder and on to the desk.

Norm’s reaction was immediate and deployed in two stages. First, the “Oh my God, what just happened?” Then the “Where did you come from?”

“Charles. Mondo. The third,” announced the imp, as though this answered either or both of Norm’s questions. “I believe you have my lighter.”

Norm, hands shaking, reached into his pocket and pulled out the Zippo, tossing it on the desk at Charles’ feet. “What did you do to me?”

“I’m a Greed,” explained Charles. “All I did was offer a little temptation. You were the one who snatched up the bait. Opportunity knocks on wood and all that.”

“I…” Norm hyperventilated, supporting his face on his hands and his elbows on the desk. “I didn’t want this.”

“Lotta responsibility associated with your position,” acknowledged the imp.

Norm squinted. His eye contact had lost some of its verve from moments before. “Are you… are you trying to ‘Grand Battle’ me? Is this some crazy murder plot?”

“Nah.” Charles had forgotten about that whole element to his situation. He briefly considered the prospect of killing Norm. Being the last man standing would confer “a wish or a job offer,” as he recalled. This idea appealed to him but it seemed awfully distant and he had issues with delayed gratification.

“So why, then?” demanded Norm. “I don’t know how to run a golem business! All I wanted was a job working with my hands, something where I could stay out of sight, feed myself, wait for, um… for something to happen.”

Charles shrugged. “Weeeeeeeeell, that’s what you tell yourself you want.” He waved his tail. The tail always freaked humans out. “But I’ve sat on your shoulder, buddy, and believe you me you got a lotta tension you gotta work out.”

“Okay, fine,” said Norm. “One day I would like to… live more comfortably than I do now. Sure. But I know my limitations. Whatever it was that got the last guy so stressed out he had to vanish into the floor rather than deal with it, I can’t deal with it either.”

Charles made a farting noise, the fork in his tongue adding a complex harmony to the sound. “Bah, Vespik just couldn’t handle the combined force of my infernal magicks and your… je ne se what. Your mojo. We’re a pretty unstoppable team, pal. I got the brains, you got the pretty face, we both get paid. Come on, whaddayasay?” He reached out a hand to grab Norm’s index finger; Norm withdrew his hand anxiously.

“No. No no no no no. I don’t want your devil powers. How’s this for a deal: you get the job. You get to be the guy all by yourself and deal with the whatever account and take all the credit. You hire me to do dumb factory work, pay me slightly more than the other guys get paid, and never bother me again.”

Charles twitched involuntarily. “Okay,” he said, too fast. “Those terms are acceptable. Get out of my chair.”

“It’s all yours.”

Norm stood and gestured. Charles hopped onto the chair, took a seat and jerked his legs from side to side, trying unsuccessfully to get it to swivel. He frowned. “Alright, get out of here. Go down to reception, tell the ugly one that Mr. Mondo says to get you a job in, uh, the golem… molding… you can work out the details, because you’re a good guy and I trust you.”

“Thanks, I guess,” said Norm. “And for not trying to kill me.”

“Hey, what are friends for?” Charles mimed smoking a cigar, wishing he had a cigar. A chair of this caliber merited a cigar. Norm rolled his eyes and left, passing by the very confused golem still waiting in the hallway.

About a minute later Rosa reappeared in the corner, proffering a coffee mug and a binder. “Set it down on the desk, doll,” commanded Charles.

“You’re not Mr. Thyrich,” said Rosa incredulously.

“I have many forms. And you can call me Phil. Come on, sugar, I ain’t got all day. Work to be done on Prada account.”

“Prog.”

“Yeah.” Rosa deposited the binder and the coffee on the desk. “That’ll be all.”

“Yes sir, Mr. Thyrich,” said Rosa doubtfully, fading out of sight.

Charles hopped back up to the desk and surveyed the binder. Sure was thick. Had to be two hundred sheets of paper in there. He pushed it open with some effort and surveyed the opening pages. It read:

Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah

And so on and so forth. Charles sniggered. This report could easily have defeated the mild-mannered mortal Norm, but could never stand up against his fiendish devil magic.

Performing the Summaring was a simple process. He set up a burner using his Zippo and some kind of avant garde pencil holder Vespik had, setting the mug of coffee over the fire. Then he perched himself on the rim of the mug, held his hands out, closed his eyes, and thought about money.

The coffee lifted itself in the air in droplets and spilled itself over the pages of the binder in neat lines, highlighting the salient points in a dull brown stain.

Charles flicked the Zippo closed and resumed his reading.

Blah blah blah blah the Progressive axis blah blah blah (the Progs) blah blah war against Regressive “Regs” blah blah blah blah requisitioned a single golem blah specifications impossible using current methods blah blah blah insisted that an army of high quality golems will not do, only a unique golem possessing the characteristics of a “hero” blah blah four billion Big Golds and a dukedom blah Risk assessment: blah blah blah retribution by the Progs if golem not completed to specification blah sabotage by Regs blah blah blah corporate espionage by Balazel Golemry blah blah golem achieves sentience and rebels against creators blah.

Charles of course didn’t know the exchange rate, but the coffee stain over that “four billion Big Golds” figure was so thick it was burning through the paper.

He resumed the spell, pouring a bit more coffee onto the binder. The details began to fill in. Emet has been in bad shape for a while, losing all the big contracts to Balazel. But as Balazel has already been working on building a golem army for the Regs, the Progs spitefully decided to take their business elsewhere. Their individualistic philosophy (stupidly, Charles inferred, though he was no soldier) spread to their military tactics, a harsh meritocratic training regimen designed to weed out potential destined heroes who would win the war for them singlehandedly. When this failed, they decided, hey, why don’t we just commission these guys to build us a hero of destiny out of dirt and scrolls. Emet, despite considering the Progs’ expectations to be unreasonable, needed the money from the gig to ensure their future, made some promises they couldn’t necessarily keep, and didn’t think to get paid up front.

After ten minutes’ study, Charles considered himself an expert on the ins and outs of modern-day golemry. The solution and the problem were equaly clear to him. Obviously the ingenuity of Emet’s engineers (or golemeers or rabbi or whatever they were called) was limitless, and the idea that a specified golem would be “impossible” was ludicrous and defeatist. Like all problems, this one could be tidied up by throwing vast sums of money at it. Unfortunately, pretty much all the money coming into this operation was getting promptly regurgitated out one end or another, which Charles understood to be the fault of poor oversight by Mr. Vespik, whose exact responsibilities he still did not entirely understand. By taking out some loans (stood to reason that this wartorn fantastic countryside probably had banks, especially since Emet had accrued a fair amount of debt already) and instituting sweeping cost-cutting programs across the board, he could expect to see the project completed within, say, a week.

Charles gave an involuntary shiver thinking of sweeping cost-cutting programs. The imp considered sweeping cost-cutting programs to be his specialty. Once when he was just a little guy (yeah, yeah) he’d taken a five Baalor bill, folded it up into fourths, taken a pair of scissors to it and cut it into the shape of a snowflake. Holding his snowflake up to the light of the fires of Ix-O, the young Charles had dimly realized that this was some infantile microcosm of what he wanted to do for his entire life.

When his dad had found out what he’d done to a perfectly good fiver he’d smacked the hell out of him. Knock knock.

Who’s there?

Opportunity.

Opportunity who?

Don’t be a smartass, Charles. Check it: you can shave three million off of weekly expenses by overhauling safety protocols.

Yes, master. Workers’ benefits, too; they won’t notice it’s missing ‘til well past the end of the week, unless someone gets injured or something.

Now you’re cookin’ with brimstone. Now, some of these steadier contracts we can ease up on the quality of the product now we’ve built up brand loyalty.

How so, Opper? (Can I call you Opper?) What do we, use cheaper dirt?

If you can find it, yeah. But more importantly, look how much we’re spending on the ascetic scribes who write out the whaddayacallems—the shems, the scrolls, the golems’ souls—brushstroke by brushstroke.

Jeez, Oppstein, haven’t these guys ever heard of a printing press?

They’ll hear about it when you tell ‘em about it. You’re gonna be a one-man renaissance, Charles. You’re gonna make a bundle.

I love you, Opportunity.

I love you too, Charles.

Poll: Round One! You do not have permission to vote in this poll.
The Lord's Chandelier	40.00%	4	40.00%
The Great Golemworks	60.00%	6	60.00%
Total		10 vote(s)	100%