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Hellfish · 08-24-2012, 05:22 PM

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“Lethe, my dear. You’re looking so trim.”

The speaker is a sparrow, perched on a golden bough. It is of normal size and proportion, no unusual markings, no disfigurations or scars. Its eyes are bright with malice though it speaks with a gentle voice.

An identical creature is perched to its right. Its name is Lethe. Lethe bobs its head.

The first sparrow, whose name is Kyokotos, settles its wings. Its feathers are dull and in need of preening. “It’s been a long time, hasn’t it? Have you forgotten me?”

Lethe tilts its head at Kyokotos. It cheeps.

“Lethe,” the first says tenderly. “You break my heart.”

“Your heart, Kyokotos?” says Lethe. “You have no heart. Your heart is mine.”

The sparrow hisses like a snake and flutters madly in a sudden fit. The wind buffets the other bird and stirs the silver leaves on the golden branch with a dry tinkling. “I try to be kind to you,” says the sparrow, “I follow you to the end of the earth, and you repay me with venom. Treachery from my own nest. We were brothers, Lethe.”

The other bird gives it a blank look. It spies something on its perch and pecks it absently.

Kyokotos sidles closer. “What about this?” it says. “What about a game?”

Lethe chatters to no one in particular. It hops to a higher branch and examines its toes.

“I could find a few chesspieces. A couple of die. We’d make up the rules.”

Old grey down falls from Lethe’s beak as it rummages through its feathers.

“It’d keep our mind off things.”

Lethe hurns at this, gives Kyokotos a long look that doesn’t say anything. It whistles the last few bars of an old drinking song and bobs it head.

“I’ve found some old cards already. They’re battered but they’ll do.”

Faint shadows appear at the base of the sparrows’ tree, an old cherry with gnarled branches and withered fruits like wrinkled old men. Its bark is cracked and weathered gold and gleams softly in the morning sun. Hard clay-like blossoms are stuck to the underside of its boughs and fill the air with a choking sweetness that hints at musk and rot. The silver leaves are shriveled with drought.

Lethe spreads its wings as if to dry them from some nonexistent rain and hops down again. Its tail flips back and forth with the landing. Kyokotos follows, calling after its twin.

“There are eight. Four for me and four for you. We can move them however we want. The board is empty.”

The shadows coalesce into dim shapes. Blurry things like faces turn towards the chatter.

“We’ll move them elsewhere. The orchard is no place for them.”

The shadows are gone and the ground has buckled with their footprints.

Lethe’s eyes are bright and cold as it stares calmly at its twin, and then down towards the base of the ancient tree. For miles and miles in all directions there spreads hundreds of bent and broken shapes, each a mirror of the same cherry, every insignificant twig the same. Where the orchard meets the sky there is only the faintest suggestion of a pomegranate sunrise.

“I hate this game,” says Lethe. “I always end up winning.”

CAST

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PREMISE
I will make things up and that is about it?
mostly this is just here because I don't feel like backing it up anywhere else.

I pick which character to write for based on a random number generated from 1-8. I don't know how eliminations will work yet. I don't know anything else really.

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Round One: The Trans-Awareness Museum of Modern and Relevant Art

A sprawling collection of recent sculpture, paintings, prints, performances, etc, from somewhere very far away. The Museum itself is a Minimalist behemoth of glass and concrete with a suspiciously complex level design. There do not seem to be many patrons present. Some of the exhibits are dangerous, and some are merely dangerously expensive. The gift shop is reasonably priced. It is impossible to leave.

“A Murder In Red”
(Artist Unknown) (Date Unknown)
Mixed Media

The plaque was affixed to a small brass door half-obscured behind two towering behemoths, sculpted angels with the heads of snakes. Their wings stretched the lengths of the corridor, brushing the mosaicked ceiling with their pinions. Small, tasteful sconces had been situated behind them and bathed their backs in a milky radiance that glowed through to the pale floor. TOS suspected they were made of a type of china. In a few moments he realized he was correct.

The corridor was very still. The walls and floor were marble tiles of some variety he had never seen, a blue so pale it was nearly grey with silvery veins ribboning through its surface. Gently the empty suit folded under nothing and knelt at a statue’s feet, a papery glove extending briskly from the wrist and over the glistening stone. The words Arbadea and Gnichhio came to him and meant nothing, and TOS smiled and dismissed them. It was a beautiful world, this place. Such sprawling legacy.

The serpent-faced angel wore a robe in the Roman style, shielding the androgynous angles of its elongated form. The suit’s collar barely reached the angel’s knee, shrouding the mask tilting up to behold its face. Scaly lips were drawn in a gentle sneer at some distant foe and the angel’s eyes were gilded slits, twin points of light among the starry incandescence of the mosaic. TOS thought that it was beautiful, and for just an instant he could see a flicker of melting clay and receding fire unmaking the angel and peeling away its robes. It was a shame to lose such a thing of beauty, he thought.

TOS stepped through a puddle of imaginary slurry and opened the brass door with a single touch.

Hellfish · 08-24-2012, 05:28 PM

It was the lack of heat that told Mokaiyat he had left the Temple of the Enduring Flame, long before the iron worm accepted that the walls were a matte white instead of scorched bricks and that the air smelled of chemicals instead of burning meat. Metal limbs clanked and shook on a slick tiled floor. Two glowing eyes swept the scene: white on white on white, little square things hanging from the walls and a fat fern beneath a small sign reading Coat Check. Impossible.

The familiar scent of woodsmoke and ash rose through the worm’s iron body and for just an instant he could believe that this was a vision, a divine madness, before he saw the thick wad of papers beginning to burn under his claw. An iron hand plucked the thing from the floor, trailing crumbles of glowing ash. Welcome to the TAMMRA, it said, the letters curling and smoking in his claws. Please follow the numbered signs to our featured exhibit, A Susurration of Silent-

It ignited all at once in a huff, a ball of smoke and flame dissipating into the air with a disappointed sigh. Mokaiyat trembled. Somewhere in his fiery innards a groan of scraping iron escaped, almost a whimper from the burning behemoth that rose half again as tall as any man from the blasphemously bare floor. Where were the braziers, the flame attendants? The temple girls? The sprites, the afrits? Where was he?

He looked again at the small pile of ashes trailing through his fingers. TAMMRA, he thought. TAMMRA. Who would build a temple and leave it bare?

His eyes had dimmed to barely more than a smolder, a gentle glow like dying coals. His mandibles scraped together, their fearsome appaerance somewhat lessened by this display of hesitation. Slowly the worm began to creep forward, afraid that at any moment the white walls would change to some other, more terrible hue or the high priest would appear and declare him unworthy of this challenge, tell him that he had failed Shadaiak in his cowardice and declare him an enemy of the flame…

The worm shook the terrible thought from his mind. “I am fire,” he said aloud, his voice the roar of a furnace igniting, The air wavered around his mouth. “I am the holy flame that burns and burns and never dies. I am the ember of Shadaiak. And I will burn this place to the lowest ground in His service if it takes me all my life.”

Tits.

It had been such a pleasant dream. A furnished parlor in the 20th century style, all brushed steel and polished oak and weird splotches on the carpet. Someone had installed odd red chairs in it that looked like fat tomatoes and felt like sitting on concrete. He’d been reading a book, some maudlin thing about his childhood when he’d caught a frog from the pond in his backyard and set it loose in the kitchen, and how he cried for days when he saw its little green legs kicking from the mouth of his father’s dog. The illustrations had been rather poignant. And now he was here, dreaming something else, and he thought peevishly that if this was the best he could imagine he might as well go back to waking up.

He was in yet another unfurnished room (he liked to call these blank canvases, it made him feel intelligent), lit from above by a scathingly ugly chandelier, walls bare except for what appeared to be a large painting of a dragonfly-like animal drowning in a bowl of cherries. It was wearing a small hat that Four thought was unflattering. A card next to it read Sex Machine and a Half, Serreo Yultin, 156, Oil on Skin.

Four had never liked oils. They were pretentious.

As he began to settle into this new dream he saw that the room was much larger than he had initially imagined. The ceiling was easily three times his height, extended though it was by the consciousness gel, and stretched out for many meters. Odd that they would only put one painting in such a large room, he thought. Such a waste of space. He noticed as well that he was not, as he was in so many of his reveries, entirely alone: there was a figure standing next to him, heinously tall, wearing what looked like an old plague doctor’s mask and a forest of weedy-looking pelts. Its skin was an unhealthy shade of sapphire and a wickedly curved sword hung from a clump of fur about its waist. He considered introducing himself, but decided that would be unseemly.

The figure gave a sob, startling Four more because he had not noticed that the room had been silent than because of its volume, and he was surprised to hear that its voice had a definite feminine tilt to it. The figure- she- continued to weep unashamedly for a few more breaths, delicately gasping for air. Four turned to look at her. The beak of her mask was dripping tears onto the immaculate floor, hissing where they fell. Her eyes were hidden behind some type of gauze, but Four felt her gaze pierce him accusingly.

“Are you a devil?” she said. Her voice was thick with weeping, but there was a current of steel underneath it. “Have you brought me here to punish me?”

Four heard his voice reply, echoing through the gel. “I should ask you the same, beautiful.”

The woman gave a short bark-like cry of Tormentor! The mask swung from side to side, blank eyes gaping at the ceiling. “Is this then my long-awaited penance?”

“I don’t see why you wouldn’t share.”

There was a brief pause. The glittering beak nodded solemnly as the woman took in the towering column of dark blue plasma surrounding the limp body beside her, little more than a man-shaped shadow shrouded in an azure gelatin mold. Dimly he saw her peer in to examine his face. “You are like no devil I have ever seen.”

“I’d hate be a devil, I think… it seems like such a lot of work, hmmm. I doubt the horns would flatter me.”

This was a strange dream, he thought. Bird women and bad art. He watched his new companion stare haltingly around the room, beak wobbling unhappily. He often knew what the dream figures wanted, but this one was different. It was refreshing, somehow. Maybe this dream was more complicated than he’d thought. “Who are you?” he asked her, figuring the worst she could do was lie, or stay silent. “Why are you here?”

The mask’s hollow eyes turned back to him briefly. “I am Svalinn, fallen shield of the Silver Kings. I am here to pay for what I have done.”

She lost interest in him after that, examining the dragonfly painting with a conspicuous level of scrutiny. Her hands, spidery and impossibly long, probed the surface in a way that made the plasma-bound Four feel vaguely voyeuristic. She moved like a cat if cats were insects. “Not very friendly, are you?” Four said to her fur-covered back. She did not respond. He’d never been ignored in a dream before, he realized. That struck him as funny, and he chuckled. The bird woman twitched and reeled about, laying a delicate hand on her sword.

“Do you find this amusing?” she said quietly. “Do you find my sins a joke?”

Four shrugged. The gel around him wobbled. “Maybe,” he said. “I had thought I had a better sense of humor.”

The bird-woman stared at him for a moment, motionless, then turned sharply and prowled out of the room. Four followed at a safe distance, figuring that if his subconscious was going to dress up for a carnival then that was its own private business but maybe he had best keep on eye on its proceedings.

**btp** · 08-24-2012, 08:01 PM

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Hellfish · 08-28-2012, 02:15 PM

Paint-dirt-plant-paint-paint-meat sniff, dirt burn smoke paint red red red red paint. Sniff, red.

Shwvir warbled, an alien sound in contrast to the bland singsong being pumped out of the lobby speakers. She was clinging to the ceiling of a weird white place and she didn’t like it. Nothing tasted right. It smelled like bad chemicals and sick. Her edge-wings had begun to shrink away from the dead air and she flapped them irritably, dislodging a shower of paint flakes that tasted like rat poison. The shivak spat, eyeing her long grey tongue. Little white flakes clung to it like chemical snow. Sick.

She dislodged in a freefall, snapping open her wings only a few meters from the floor. It was a big place but not big enough for her to fly too far, her being about a horse-size plus wings and this place being for a man-size, no wings. A few flaps were all she could manage before she was forced to land atop a sort of a box-table with paper and writey-things and a flat smaller box inside it. Her claws left big tears in the paper and on the fake stone. Why make fake stone? She puzzled over this for a moment, kneading the paper into unrecognizable wads. Was there a shortage of stone? No one had told her.

A short flutter brought her to the floor, dislodging whatever was left on the box-table and clearing away the paint smell, if just for a second. Her own musky-nest-warm scent was overlaid with the terrible stink of the walls. Shwvir sneezed. It echoed sharply around the room and she barked in surprise before realizing it was only a sound, and proceeded to run her tongue over her claws.

A couple of die.

Her ears folded back. She’d hated that voice.

The bad taste wouldn’t leave her mouth after she’d cleaned it from her wings so she gave up, shaking her head and spitting. It was such an awful taste. Once she’s eaten the death of a sick old pigeon and it hasn’t tasted as bad as this. Only the burning in the air made her feel better. Like a funeral pyre. She purred, a low sound like gravel caught in a rotor. She hadn’t realized that she was hungry. It seemed more important than wondering what the little bird had meant.

In two flaps she was airborne again, skirting through the hallway. She was starting to remember a place like this, a big building with colorful windows and a lot of crying people and a wooden box with a woman inside. That death had been weak, tasteless, even though she’d fought a bigger male for it. This place was like that place but happier.

She smelled the burning again, rising to the ceiling. Not as good as she thought. Not as much meat, more wood. Tree-deaths were boring. It was getting stronger, but where was the smoke? Her eyes focused: the floor came into sudden sharp perspective, each tiny crack like a canyon to her. Only tile and clay and stone, and little bits of paper, and dirt, and ash…?

More tiny cracks made little circles where something big had stepped on the ground. Too big for human-size. Maybe a horse or a big engine-box. But smoke? The floor was scorched. Swvir gave an irritated rattle. It didn’t make any sense. It made no sense, unless-

She banked around a corner and backwinged frantically at the giant black worm standing on a burning pile of clothes. It didn’t so much as flinch in the wind, though its glowing eyes got brighter for a second and its bug-looking mouth made man-noises at her. “What are you,” it said, “How did you get here?” Shwvir squawked at it angrily. It was too big and it smelled like burning and it wasn’t going to die. She flared her wings and hissed.

The worm thing stared at her. Was it getting hotter? She felt heat on her skin. Like the sun. Like a fire. The worm’s eyes were getting brighter, and brighter-

Then it made a sound like a big cat growling, and from its mouth came a wave of flames.