RE: Grand Battle S3G1! (Round Four: City of the Dead)
06-28-2017, 09:02 PM
(This post was last modified: 06-28-2017, 09:02 PM by Mamylon.)
eeeeeeee
Siobhan thought for a moment that the sound was the metal detector going off—like it had been repurposed as an anxiety detector—but it was just her.
eeeeeeeeeeee
A guard walked over, hovering his knucklebones an inch away from her shoulder. “Is everything okay, miss?”
eeeeeeeeeeeeEEEEEEEEEEEEmmffnn. Siobhan pressed a hand over her mouth and then, when that wouldn’t stop the keening, bit down on her own hand. The cool CapriSun taste of ectoplasm on her tongue calmed her down a bit, but made her self-conscious. Hair frazzled, eyes watering, nails chewed to shit. She imagined what all this must look like to the guard—and then remembered that she was here on perfectly legitimate business, she didn’t have to lie, and it didn’t matter how she looked, because she wasn’t a fucking TV reporter. “Migraine,” she choked out through the flesh of her hand. That one had been a lie, but so what? “I’m here for saeeeeeeeeeeefe deposit box one oh threeeeeeee.”
“Of course. Do you have the key?”
Siobhan fished the key out of her pocket and held it up, reminding herself that she hadn’t stolen it. It had just arrived in the mail under mysterious circumstances, was all. “The key,” she said, to prove that she could.
“Alright. I’ll take you down to the vault. You should know we have video surveillance down there, but, uh. No audio.”
Siobhan choked down the “fuck you” rising up in her throat—among other noises—and followed the guard down into the depths of the bank. She wasn’t committing a crime, and no one was after her. There was nothing to be afraid of. She was a respected journalist, and somebody in connection with one of a hundred interviews she’d conducted over the past week had mailed her this key, which was a perfectly sensible way to drop an anonymous tip and only a little sketcheeeeeee
The guard closed the vault behind her. Safe deposit boxes in their little rows, all different sizes. 103 was one of the big ones, at the bottom.
No one was listening. Siobhan gave herself five seconds.
eeeeeee
eeeeeeeee
eeeeeeeeeee
eeeeeeeeeee
EEEEEEEEEEEEEEnough.
Siobhan wiped away a tear and opened the box, and screamed. Just a normal scream, for normal reasons. Inside the box was a woman’s severed head.
“Hi,” said the head.
Siobhan cleared her throat. “Hi.”
“Some pipes you’ve got.”
“Sorry. I’ve had a stressful week.” Siobhan cradled the head and lifted her out of the box, assuming that she wouldn’t want to be lifted by the hair. “Did you mail me that key?”
“I thought this would be a good place to talk. Detective Sleepy Holloway.”
“Pleasure to meeeeet you. Ahem. What can I do for you, Detective Holloway?”
“You came by the station the other day,” said Holloway’s head. “You were asking about the life scare last week, and you hinted something about the liches knowing something, but it sounded like you didn’t know for sure.”
“I don’t know anything for sure,” admitted Siobhan.
“Well, now you do. I did a bad thing, Siobhan. I took some money. But I was sworn to silence.”
“I don’t believe in silence,” said Siobhan. “I’m a, uh. A journalist.”
eeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
Here at least
We shall be free; the Almighty hath not built
Here for his envy, will not drive us hence:
Here we may reign secure, and in my choice
To reign is worth ambition though in Hell:
Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heaven.
Scofflaw carefully underlined each word, defaced the page with a perfect 45-degree earmark, stuffed the book into the envelope, and dropped it in the mailbox. It would be waiting at the door to Huebert’s new pad by the time he arrived. Huebert wouldn’t get a word of it, never mind the layers of irony (see, he’s a Frankenstein, and in the original Frankenstein—), but he’d show it one of the others, and they’d get the gist.
Truce.
Sure, there was a bit of a niggle about the whole entropic-universe thing. He’d been wrestling with his newly-accentuated mortality, in between all the science and magic and rough sex that had consumed his life for the past week. But he’d decided firmly against the accelerationist “win the battle” response. Himself, Jetsam, Tor, Nyoka, and Huebert, with the squid in his back pocket—clearly this was as stable a configuration as he could hope for. A fire guy and a water lady; a dependable lunk and a mercurial hunk; three goods and a neutral to his triple-stuffed evil. No square pegs trying to tongue-whip themselves into round holes; no indignant Meipi trying to murder him. Balance. Stasis. Sort of.
The question now, Scofflaw reflected on the way back to the ol’ tomb, was who would upset the apple cart first? The Fool or the NSC? If the Fool were authorized, by whatever weird rules he comported himself, to intervene, he probably would have done so by now. Whereas the multiverse nerds had probably already—from their own frame of reference—flung themselves spatiotemporally hither, and maybe wound up a week or two late due to a rounding error. If it was the NSC, the outcomes looked pretty good. Best case scenario, they give him the resources to make a go of it in a new universe. Worst case scenario, they stick him in a jar somewhere and he’d scheme his way out. Middle case scenario, they drop him off back at home and, notwithstanding a couple unsettling revelations about the nature of reality, things go back to normal.
Unless the NSC had already been to his Earth and—hmm.
Scofflaw knocked on the door to the apartment, dabbing off his zombie makeup with a moist towelette. Until hope or ruination arrived, he had enough chaotic-neutral schemes to keep his hands busy.
Rebekshep answered the door, fully wrapped. “Morning,” she said. “You missed a spot.”
“I always do.” Scofflaw smudged his jowl where his girlfriend indicated. “All part of the mystique, Beks. Blind spots. Overlooked details. Two-meter-wide exhaust ports.”
“Uh-huh. Come on in, doofus.” She rubbed his hair, and he grinned, stepping into the living room. Beks’ apartment was cramped, but not so gloomy as it had been a week ago. Soft-white lightbulbs, an aggressive sweeping, generous Febreze, and an overall change in aura, a hint of life in the air. He’d bought some art and changed the wallpaper without asking her. “It’s time for my diagnostic,” she said.
“I know.” Rebekshep led him to the bedroom and sat down, expectantly, on the bed. “Wrist.” Scofflaw unwrapped her hand, which was down to what she called “the base layer,” essentially just clothes. As a man who prided himself on having some weird-as-shit paraphilias he could pull out as the moment needed, Scofflaw knew a good wrist when he saw one. Thin but strong. And damned if there wasn’t a trio of little blue lines, poking out for an inch or two before sinking into the palm. He put his fingers there.
And counted.
“Fifty-three,” he said. “Neck.”
“Mm-hmm.” Rebekshep would quickly learn how to do this to herself, but the whole “pulse” idea was new to her. She unwrapped from the collarbone up, and Scofflaw pressed two fingers to the vein.
He counted. “Seventy-two. Chest.”
Rebekshep unwrapped several stripes of her torso piece, careful not to dislodge her pacemaker, which, although she hadn’t needed it for days, could always be reactivated in an emergency. Scofflaw pulled a stethoscope out of a drawer, pinched the bell between two fingers above his palm, and cupped her breast. “One hundred two,” he said.
“My excitement response is getting faster,” said Rebekshep, taking a deep breath.
“That’s a good sign.” He took a few more seconds to listen to her heart, which, assisted by the best magic and science money could buy, had been so eager to get back to its job after he’d pulled it out of its jar. “Good that you’re not getting bored of me already, at least.”
“It’s been a week.” Rebekshep shifted her weight against him, nestling into the crook of his arm. “How fast do you usually get bored with your partners, Saint?”
“It depends. I have an easier time staying focused on a sex partner if they’re also a science project—or vice versa.”
“God, you’re the worst.” She giggled and laced her fingers into his and cut short his further experiments into her excitement response. “Finish the diagnostic. How’s my smell?”
Where ten was a mass grave and one was a post-sex shower on a seventy-degree day: “Call it a four.”
“Hair growth?”
He ran a finger along the surface of her scalp. It squeaked. “Nothing yet. How was work?”
“Tiring.”
“Emotionally tiring or physically tiring?”
“I don’t know.” She stood up from the bed and, while considering the question, finished undressing; she unwrapped her sleeves, and then the rest of her torso piece, and then, either out of tiredness or because she knew it would provoke him, shimmied out of her bottom wrappings like a pair of skinny jeans, pulling her asscheeks into view inch by agonizing inch. “I guess just emotionally. ‘Cause I’m not tired now.”
“If you are tired now,” said Scofflaw, playing against type, “that’s okay. We can take it easy. Maybe watch something.”
He was so impressed with her. Physically, sure, but once he’d gotten her out of that hospital and indulged her most taboo desires, her personality had lit up, the way she must have lit up the temples or marketplaces or whatever-the-fuck in the presumably-Egyptish civilization where they’d apparently been impressed enough to turn her into a collectible. He prided himself in his ability to bring these things out in people, sometimes.
Only after he’d made sure that she was not a Boring Person had he decided to tell her what he really was, and what he was hiding in the scroll that was now hidden underneath her sock drawer, and that, with enough stolen resources, he would be able to give her what she most desired. Now, alive enough to fool most morticians, she crawled into bed next to him—her body language indicating that she was taking him up on his half-bluffed offer, and they would be cuddling.
“I stole another look at Huebert on my shift last night,” she said.
“Mmm. How’d he look? Was he itching to get out of there?”
“He’s hard to get a read on. His face. He looked sad, maybe. Or confused.”
“Sad and confused is good. At the very least it means the very first thing he does when he gets out won’t be to track me down and do me like Lennie did the bunny.”
“If you wanted to,” said Rebekshep, resting her head on his chest, “do you think you could bring him back?”
“Hmm. Well, that’s what a Frankenstein is already, isn’t it?” And, doing Gene Wilder doing Colin Clive: “‘It’s aliiiiiiiiive!’” He considered the question a little more seriously. “I’d need to get a look at him. Maybe I could improve on the design, but I couldn’t get him up to your level. You came to me near-mint. All I had to do was unbox you and replace the batteries.”
“So you’d need other mummies.”
He barely realized what she was asking, because a part of him had been thinking along these lines all week: “Not necessarily. Ghosts, now there’s another story. There’s no body to restore; you just need to empower them to make a new body for themselves. And your better class of ghoul—” He tapped her chin and angled her face up to enable eye contact. She was smiling. “What are you thinking?”
“Well, I know some people. People from the scene, people we can trust. Some of them have a lot of money. And since I’m almost done—”
“You’re a long way from done, Beks,” warned Scofflaw. “We haven’t even gotten you eating yet.”
“But in terms of labor needed on your end, I’m almost done. We could expand. I could be the face and you could be the brains.”
“Hmm.” Scofflaw was silent. What had been the terms of the truce he’d laid out? “Reign in hell.” He should really stop communicating in allusions that he himself didn’t totally get.
Rebekshep sat up in the bed. She saw herself in the mirror in front of the vanity, pulled a wig—jet black—out of a drawer, brushed it straight, and put it on top of her head. She looked at herself naked, leaning forward and back, pouting her lips, sticking out her tongue, pulling her eyelid down to look at the blood vessels at the corner of her eye. She was safe for a full hour, now, before she had to rewrap. “I mean, come on, Saint,” she said. “I’m going to start aging soon, and as soon as one of your friends gets himself killed, you’ll be gone to some other planet where you’ll find some other ‘science experiment.’ Why not think big, while we’re here?”
“Because,” said Scofflaw. “Beks, you need to understand… when I think big, I think big.” He made a brain-explodey gesture and a little whoosh with his hands, which made her snort. “It makes me different. You might not like me as much, like that.”
She dismissed the warning with a flick of the finger. “I’m not scared of you, Mr. Supervillain. i’m going to talk to some people. In the meantime,” she said, turning back towards him, “I want to meet some of the other battlers.”
eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
Siobhan thought for a moment that the sound was the metal detector going off—like it had been repurposed as an anxiety detector—but it was just her.
eeeeeeeeeeee
A guard walked over, hovering his knucklebones an inch away from her shoulder. “Is everything okay, miss?”
eeeeeeeeeeeeEEEEEEEEEEEEmmffnn. Siobhan pressed a hand over her mouth and then, when that wouldn’t stop the keening, bit down on her own hand. The cool CapriSun taste of ectoplasm on her tongue calmed her down a bit, but made her self-conscious. Hair frazzled, eyes watering, nails chewed to shit. She imagined what all this must look like to the guard—and then remembered that she was here on perfectly legitimate business, she didn’t have to lie, and it didn’t matter how she looked, because she wasn’t a fucking TV reporter. “Migraine,” she choked out through the flesh of her hand. That one had been a lie, but so what? “I’m here for saeeeeeeeeeeefe deposit box one oh threeeeeeee.”
“Of course. Do you have the key?”
Siobhan fished the key out of her pocket and held it up, reminding herself that she hadn’t stolen it. It had just arrived in the mail under mysterious circumstances, was all. “The key,” she said, to prove that she could.
“Alright. I’ll take you down to the vault. You should know we have video surveillance down there, but, uh. No audio.”
Siobhan choked down the “fuck you” rising up in her throat—among other noises—and followed the guard down into the depths of the bank. She wasn’t committing a crime, and no one was after her. There was nothing to be afraid of. She was a respected journalist, and somebody in connection with one of a hundred interviews she’d conducted over the past week had mailed her this key, which was a perfectly sensible way to drop an anonymous tip and only a little sketcheeeeeee
The guard closed the vault behind her. Safe deposit boxes in their little rows, all different sizes. 103 was one of the big ones, at the bottom.
No one was listening. Siobhan gave herself five seconds.
eeeeeee
eeeeeeeee
eeeeeeeeeee
eeeeeeeeeee
EEEEEEEEEEEEEEnough.
Siobhan wiped away a tear and opened the box, and screamed. Just a normal scream, for normal reasons. Inside the box was a woman’s severed head.
“Hi,” said the head.
Siobhan cleared her throat. “Hi.”
“Some pipes you’ve got.”
“Sorry. I’ve had a stressful week.” Siobhan cradled the head and lifted her out of the box, assuming that she wouldn’t want to be lifted by the hair. “Did you mail me that key?”
“I thought this would be a good place to talk. Detective Sleepy Holloway.”
“Pleasure to meeeeet you. Ahem. What can I do for you, Detective Holloway?”
“You came by the station the other day,” said Holloway’s head. “You were asking about the life scare last week, and you hinted something about the liches knowing something, but it sounded like you didn’t know for sure.”
“I don’t know anything for sure,” admitted Siobhan.
“Well, now you do. I did a bad thing, Siobhan. I took some money. But I was sworn to silence.”
“I don’t believe in silence,” said Siobhan. “I’m a, uh. A journalist.”
eeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
Here at least
We shall be free; the Almighty hath not built
Here for his envy, will not drive us hence:
Here we may reign secure, and in my choice
To reign is worth ambition though in Hell:
Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heaven.
Scofflaw carefully underlined each word, defaced the page with a perfect 45-degree earmark, stuffed the book into the envelope, and dropped it in the mailbox. It would be waiting at the door to Huebert’s new pad by the time he arrived. Huebert wouldn’t get a word of it, never mind the layers of irony (see, he’s a Frankenstein, and in the original Frankenstein—), but he’d show it one of the others, and they’d get the gist.
Truce.
Sure, there was a bit of a niggle about the whole entropic-universe thing. He’d been wrestling with his newly-accentuated mortality, in between all the science and magic and rough sex that had consumed his life for the past week. But he’d decided firmly against the accelerationist “win the battle” response. Himself, Jetsam, Tor, Nyoka, and Huebert, with the squid in his back pocket—clearly this was as stable a configuration as he could hope for. A fire guy and a water lady; a dependable lunk and a mercurial hunk; three goods and a neutral to his triple-stuffed evil. No square pegs trying to tongue-whip themselves into round holes; no indignant Meipi trying to murder him. Balance. Stasis. Sort of.
The question now, Scofflaw reflected on the way back to the ol’ tomb, was who would upset the apple cart first? The Fool or the NSC? If the Fool were authorized, by whatever weird rules he comported himself, to intervene, he probably would have done so by now. Whereas the multiverse nerds had probably already—from their own frame of reference—flung themselves spatiotemporally hither, and maybe wound up a week or two late due to a rounding error. If it was the NSC, the outcomes looked pretty good. Best case scenario, they give him the resources to make a go of it in a new universe. Worst case scenario, they stick him in a jar somewhere and he’d scheme his way out. Middle case scenario, they drop him off back at home and, notwithstanding a couple unsettling revelations about the nature of reality, things go back to normal.
Unless the NSC had already been to his Earth and—hmm.
Scofflaw knocked on the door to the apartment, dabbing off his zombie makeup with a moist towelette. Until hope or ruination arrived, he had enough chaotic-neutral schemes to keep his hands busy.
Rebekshep answered the door, fully wrapped. “Morning,” she said. “You missed a spot.”
“I always do.” Scofflaw smudged his jowl where his girlfriend indicated. “All part of the mystique, Beks. Blind spots. Overlooked details. Two-meter-wide exhaust ports.”
“Uh-huh. Come on in, doofus.” She rubbed his hair, and he grinned, stepping into the living room. Beks’ apartment was cramped, but not so gloomy as it had been a week ago. Soft-white lightbulbs, an aggressive sweeping, generous Febreze, and an overall change in aura, a hint of life in the air. He’d bought some art and changed the wallpaper without asking her. “It’s time for my diagnostic,” she said.
“I know.” Rebekshep led him to the bedroom and sat down, expectantly, on the bed. “Wrist.” Scofflaw unwrapped her hand, which was down to what she called “the base layer,” essentially just clothes. As a man who prided himself on having some weird-as-shit paraphilias he could pull out as the moment needed, Scofflaw knew a good wrist when he saw one. Thin but strong. And damned if there wasn’t a trio of little blue lines, poking out for an inch or two before sinking into the palm. He put his fingers there.
And counted.
“Fifty-three,” he said. “Neck.”
“Mm-hmm.” Rebekshep would quickly learn how to do this to herself, but the whole “pulse” idea was new to her. She unwrapped from the collarbone up, and Scofflaw pressed two fingers to the vein.
He counted. “Seventy-two. Chest.”
Rebekshep unwrapped several stripes of her torso piece, careful not to dislodge her pacemaker, which, although she hadn’t needed it for days, could always be reactivated in an emergency. Scofflaw pulled a stethoscope out of a drawer, pinched the bell between two fingers above his palm, and cupped her breast. “One hundred two,” he said.
“My excitement response is getting faster,” said Rebekshep, taking a deep breath.
“That’s a good sign.” He took a few more seconds to listen to her heart, which, assisted by the best magic and science money could buy, had been so eager to get back to its job after he’d pulled it out of its jar. “Good that you’re not getting bored of me already, at least.”
“It’s been a week.” Rebekshep shifted her weight against him, nestling into the crook of his arm. “How fast do you usually get bored with your partners, Saint?”
“It depends. I have an easier time staying focused on a sex partner if they’re also a science project—or vice versa.”
“God, you’re the worst.” She giggled and laced her fingers into his and cut short his further experiments into her excitement response. “Finish the diagnostic. How’s my smell?”
Where ten was a mass grave and one was a post-sex shower on a seventy-degree day: “Call it a four.”
“Hair growth?”
He ran a finger along the surface of her scalp. It squeaked. “Nothing yet. How was work?”
“Tiring.”
“Emotionally tiring or physically tiring?”
“I don’t know.” She stood up from the bed and, while considering the question, finished undressing; she unwrapped her sleeves, and then the rest of her torso piece, and then, either out of tiredness or because she knew it would provoke him, shimmied out of her bottom wrappings like a pair of skinny jeans, pulling her asscheeks into view inch by agonizing inch. “I guess just emotionally. ‘Cause I’m not tired now.”
“If you are tired now,” said Scofflaw, playing against type, “that’s okay. We can take it easy. Maybe watch something.”
He was so impressed with her. Physically, sure, but once he’d gotten her out of that hospital and indulged her most taboo desires, her personality had lit up, the way she must have lit up the temples or marketplaces or whatever-the-fuck in the presumably-Egyptish civilization where they’d apparently been impressed enough to turn her into a collectible. He prided himself in his ability to bring these things out in people, sometimes.
Only after he’d made sure that she was not a Boring Person had he decided to tell her what he really was, and what he was hiding in the scroll that was now hidden underneath her sock drawer, and that, with enough stolen resources, he would be able to give her what she most desired. Now, alive enough to fool most morticians, she crawled into bed next to him—her body language indicating that she was taking him up on his half-bluffed offer, and they would be cuddling.
“I stole another look at Huebert on my shift last night,” she said.
“Mmm. How’d he look? Was he itching to get out of there?”
“He’s hard to get a read on. His face. He looked sad, maybe. Or confused.”
“Sad and confused is good. At the very least it means the very first thing he does when he gets out won’t be to track me down and do me like Lennie did the bunny.”
“If you wanted to,” said Rebekshep, resting her head on his chest, “do you think you could bring him back?”
“Hmm. Well, that’s what a Frankenstein is already, isn’t it?” And, doing Gene Wilder doing Colin Clive: “‘It’s aliiiiiiiiive!’” He considered the question a little more seriously. “I’d need to get a look at him. Maybe I could improve on the design, but I couldn’t get him up to your level. You came to me near-mint. All I had to do was unbox you and replace the batteries.”
“So you’d need other mummies.”
He barely realized what she was asking, because a part of him had been thinking along these lines all week: “Not necessarily. Ghosts, now there’s another story. There’s no body to restore; you just need to empower them to make a new body for themselves. And your better class of ghoul—” He tapped her chin and angled her face up to enable eye contact. She was smiling. “What are you thinking?”
“Well, I know some people. People from the scene, people we can trust. Some of them have a lot of money. And since I’m almost done—”
“You’re a long way from done, Beks,” warned Scofflaw. “We haven’t even gotten you eating yet.”
“But in terms of labor needed on your end, I’m almost done. We could expand. I could be the face and you could be the brains.”
“Hmm.” Scofflaw was silent. What had been the terms of the truce he’d laid out? “Reign in hell.” He should really stop communicating in allusions that he himself didn’t totally get.
Rebekshep sat up in the bed. She saw herself in the mirror in front of the vanity, pulled a wig—jet black—out of a drawer, brushed it straight, and put it on top of her head. She looked at herself naked, leaning forward and back, pouting her lips, sticking out her tongue, pulling her eyelid down to look at the blood vessels at the corner of her eye. She was safe for a full hour, now, before she had to rewrap. “I mean, come on, Saint,” she said. “I’m going to start aging soon, and as soon as one of your friends gets himself killed, you’ll be gone to some other planet where you’ll find some other ‘science experiment.’ Why not think big, while we’re here?”
“Because,” said Scofflaw. “Beks, you need to understand… when I think big, I think big.” He made a brain-explodey gesture and a little whoosh with his hands, which made her snort. “It makes me different. You might not like me as much, like that.”
She dismissed the warning with a flick of the finger. “I’m not scared of you, Mr. Supervillain. i’m going to talk to some people. In the meantime,” she said, turning back towards him, “I want to meet some of the other battlers.”
eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee