Re: The Grand Battle S2G1! [Round Two: Sk'va!]
09-27-2010, 03:38 AM
Originally posted on MSPA by Lord Paradise.
Jen had the feeling that Xadrez was using the royal “our” here, as the spirit promptly turned back away from Jen and began to work, scrawling what appeared to be a complex mixture of 6-dimensional calculus and freeform poetry into a wall that still appeared stable.
Things were bad in Cyk’Nl, now; everything was starting to buckle inward. Jen rose to her feet unsteadily and was immediately knocked back down by another tremor. “Alright, fuck this,” she groaned in synch with the rumbling of the atmosphere. As soon as the ground settled down enough to walk on, Jen thought green, sprang upwards and leapt towards Xadrez, snatching the knife out of his long-fingered hand and scurrying away apologetically.
Xadrez, focusing intently on the Ovoid problem, was angry in more of an academic than an emotional sense. Return that, he intoned, making no attempt to follow her.
“Patience, Rezzy-poo,” snapped Jen. “Metaphysics can wait, I need to take a minute to save my own skin.” With the ease of a skilled calligrapher, the girl began to carve an elaborate sigil into the ground, something resembling the Great Wave Off Kanagawa crashing over a beach made of tacky carpet. The tremor slowed, as though the laws of spacetime had to take a second out of its schedule to check out whatever was going on.
Jen began to speak. “Fireflies. Effervescence. White. Bubbles. Green. Anorexia. Six. Four-fifths. Rome. Green. Newton. Delta sharp. Green. Quicksilver. You know I’m good for it. Green green, maybe cyan. Kepler and the paradox of the resolution that precedes the conflict. Celestial. Later. Later! 48 hours. One third of a bell should do it. Green. Farsight. Hi, I’m Jennifer, have we met? No. No. No. Yes. Green” Green
Light
Light becomes unnecessary, photons take the day off, please, thank you, now: green we have Green confirm?
We have registered your complaint and are formulating a response. Pleasure doing business with you and we’ll see you soon, we hope. Flap flap. I’m sorry
The green flash ends giving way to a personal sunrise accepting a Jencentric frame of reference, thanks to Einstein and Minkowsky. The tremors continue; Jen does not. Welcome to Cyk’Nl enjoy your stay, bitch. Please move along to the next register to receive your bill
Normalcy returned to Xadrez for a moment, although he had difficulty not focusing on the details: the sigil fading in ugly blues and reds; sunlight doing a jig on his knife as it is placed back in his hand; Jen’s smile, seeming to rise. Layered words: ‘Sorry about the magic. I’ll get out of your hair now, okay? You work on what happens next.’
And then the tactician’s perspective blessed perspective came back to him in a rush, the reds and blues and blacks mixing back into the greens to form the beautiful gray mush that was his understanding of the universe. He was also alone. Alone with the theorem, the grand proof, the next bit. Wait, he corrected himself, Not alone.
He switched the knife back over to his threatening hand and inscribed the message “OBSERVE THIS” into a blank spot on the wall. Privately, he expanded the sentiment, appropriating an irksome colloquialism for his own self-aggrandizing purposes: You ain’t observed nothing yet
This was going to be easier than he had first surmised. The solution to the Ovoid problem was becoming clear, and on the other side an answer to Kracht might be found. That left Final Jeopardy after the break; the category is Jennifer fucking Tull…
* * * * *
While gravity was doing its thing to the cities, gravity was doing some things, or to be more lucid, some things were being done to gravity. Xadrez was not the only being to receive a flood of information: for the Ovoid, a four-dimensional landscape was like pen on paper, and it was slowly beginning to decipher the language. Certain patterns were beginning to emerge.
* * * * *
Arkal almost died.
The massive, ritzy apartment complexes on the Lower East Side of Sk’Va were built one story at a time, then placed on a large frame resembling the CD rack of the gods. The classless nouveau riche of Sk’Va could have their entire apartments removed by crane to be demolished and replaced or else transplanted somewhere more convenient. This struck everyone as an extremely convenient system because it never occurred to anyone that local gravity would one day be scrambled to the extent that every single apartment in the neighborhood would float out of its place and hover in the air, creating the rather apocalyptic image of hundreds of well-furnished flying saucers occasionally smashing into each other above a city not an hour away from cracking in two.
Arkal, correctly surmising that it was safer in the air than on the ground (these concepts being completely relative in a formerly-floating city, of course), had alongside Maxwell ascended to this flying maze of upper-middle-class residence and was working his way across to where they were pretty sure they could get down to the museum of history. Inevitably the obvious risks associated with this situation turned out to be perfectly valid, and he fell. Also inevitably, for narrative purposes at least, he was rescued.
The source of intervention from anticlimax may, however, come as a surprise to the reader, unless the reader predicted an aging Sk’Van with a jetpack and compound aviator goggles. Upon dropping Arkal off on another roof, the insect removed his helmet and pantingly introduced himself as Bakrjjrz Fl’jgowdon, inventor, extranaut and philanderer by trade. Then he pulled out a gun.
“You’re one of the outsiders to whom the recent have been attributed to, hmm? Stay where you are.” Arkal, who was not completely adverse to taking orders but for some reason found them infuriating coming out of the mouth of a bug, leapt to one side, not sure what he expected to accomplish.
Bakrjjrz hit a button somewhere and a jet of smoke planted him right in front of Arkal’s face, into which he planted a hairy and unlovable foot. “Answer the question, now, we’ve no time to waste.”
“Yes, yes,” grumbled Arkal, “I’m an outsider, you can see that, and I came with a group of six. But I have no idea what caused the fall, and I’m working to prevent it or to save myself at the very least. Where’s the boy?”
“I’ll ask the questions. You’re headed for the museum, right? What do you know about the UP program?”
“Nothing. I know that there’s a museum and that’s where I’m headed, and it would help me greatly if you told me what was there.”
“UP: Ultimate Pioneership. We—my contemporaries and I—and I suppose those of whom I am myself a contemporary—we’ve been warning them about the possibility of a scripturally non-canon city falling scenario for decades. The only solution was to remove gravity from the equation. Send the entire city into space.” Bakrjjrz pointed UPward dramatically.
“Among the stars? That’s madness. By my understanding of the makeup of forces you’d need to reach the moons and then multiply your velocity yet again by a factor of… of one and forty-one hundredths…” Arkal began sketching diagrams in the air fruitlessly, and then shook them away.
“We have the power, we have the engine, it’s in the museum, that’s not the issue. The issue is expanding the atmospheric correction systems to accommodate living in a vacuum, and integrating fully artificial gravity. Plus dealing with the things that are out there. The UP program was dropped and me and my contemporaries discredited… plus, I suppose, some reputational damage to some thinkers of repute of whom I myself may be considered a contemporary. While the engine could, with some modification, be used to—”
Mere minutes ago, when Arkal almost died, he was not terribly perturbed, for the average man may almost die a thousand times without actually dying or even being badly harmed. Arkal himself had nearly died several times in the past couple days. For Bakrjjrz Fl’jgowdon, however, this was not one of these days. The freakish appendage that passed through all of his vital organs was only almost killing him for about zero point zero six seconds before it had actually killed him.
The shoulder connected to the appendage shrugged meekly as its owner saw the look of rage on Arkal’s face. ”Sorry,” said Maxwell. ”Was he a friend of yours?”
* * * * *
Kracht studied the diagrams around the room and perused the giant engine inside the velvet rope. Though dormant, it looked more functional than anything else that might be holding up this city. The rare moment of unfamiliarity brought a smile to Kracht’s inorganic lips; he had never heard anything about Sk’Va’s space program, and here it was summarized in a handful of bullet points on a museum wall. He’d need to look into this later.
But first there was the issue of the room at the end of the hall upon which were inscribed in small letters the words “First Contact.”
It looked like Sk’Va had tried very hard to forget whatever was behind that door, but couldn’t bring themselves to dispose of it entirely. Kracht opened the door.
The room was small and cramped. In front of the dark pod that dominated the room was a large book full of photos. Dead insectoid bodies littering the streets. A bug with an inhuman fire in its eyes and a proboscis shaped liked a hawk’s talon. A city on fire.
On the inside back cover of the book was a button. Kracht pressed it, of course.
A light went on inside the pod. Inside, frozen and resting in a tank of formaldehyde but probably still far from dead, was a Bio Wyrm.
* * * * *
Sikarius had shut up for once; Maxwell was producing enough spite and pettiness for the two of them at the moment. It also didn’t help that Arkal had just punched him onto the roof of the floating apartment for no greater crime than squashing the bug with the gun and the jetpack.
“What the hell?” Maxwell screeched, sending an arm to snake around Arkal’s ankle and knock him to the ground as well.
”Reckless indiscriminate murder is what,” shouted Arkal over the ringing in his ears. ”You’re lucky I was specifically instructed not to kill you.”
”Yeah, well I was told not to kill you, too,” laughed Maxwell. “By a sixteen-year-old fucking girl!” Both he and Arkal rose and tackled each other. “Seriously, what the hell is with you people thinking you can just move me around like a piece on a chessboard? …Well okay, with Xadrez it makes sense. But not Jen and definitely not you! What are you from the—ow!--the past or something?”
A couple of silently traded blows later, Maxwell found himself looking over the side onto a ground below that shimmered like a 3-D movie when you’re not wearing the glasses. He warped himself painfully and did an elegant-looking flip into the inside of the apartment. Arkal made no immediate attempt to follow, and Maxwell plopped himself into a four-arm armchair, exhausted and reeling from a cocktail of mentally compromising emotions.
“I’m serious, Arkal!” he shouted towards the window. “I’ve been doing this on my own for a long time! I don’t… I can’t bring myself to give a shit about saving the town or escaping the battle or whatever the hell. I just want to move on.”
Arkal poked his head out over the roof and looked through the window. ”You know it’s not as simple as that, Maxwell.” With the grace of the gorilla he threw himself into the room and stood hulking against the low ceiling. ”For one thing, we’re all bonded together, by fate, the Observer, Xadrez’s plan, whatever it is that’s keeping us here, it’s working. For another, it doesn’t take a young man’s vision to know that your eyes are green, in more ways than one if you catch my drift, lad.”
Maxwell threw his hands up. “Oh, come on, I expect this from Kracht, not from you. Yes, I have a little crush on a little girl, okay? It happens. It’s happened before, and it’s a mental situation I know how to handle without following her to my fucking death, huh? Come on, you were a teenage boy once, you know how it is.
”I was a teenage man, lad. I fought for what I wanted, and I got it. You’re still just a whelp. Running from responsibilities. If I were more easily disgusted I’d have bashed your head in already on mere principle.”
”Well I’m sorry you’re—“
At that moment the apartment slammed pretty hard into another apartment and began to fall, creating a repeat of the events of the last couple hours in microcosm. Arkal shouted some indistinct curse and went back to the window, crawling back onto the roof. Maxwell chased after the smith but lost sight of him as a slightly slushy pool of water that might have been a reverse Jacuzzi fell onto his chest.
There was more pain, and darkness, and then what appeared to be the lighting of a very large match. The flame illuminated Arkal’s face, covered by large goggles and a helmet, hand outstretched. ”Hold on, lad. The rest of our journey is going to be a mite quicker.”
Maxwell grabbed the beefy hand, which pulled him up onto Arkal’s uncomfortably hairy chest. The jetpack flame intensified and launched them both out of the sinking apartment into the open sky.
* * * * *
From inside the greenshift, Jen ran on dust particles over the clouds of Cyk’Nl to a cathedral that was oddly similar to Sk’Va’s, except more pure, more primal. The stone and steel walls were framed by what appeared to be bone, and everything had a worn look about it. Also different from Sk’Va were the eight hooded reptiles joined in a prayer circle around an altar. Jen, who tended to be drawn to strong will in this state, found herself landing right atop the altar.
Reptile #1 looked up impatiently. “Do you represent the Inscriber?” Reptiles 2 through 7 made the symbol of the oval with long, dangerous-looking claws.
“I, uh… no. I represent me. I’m here to… I don’t know it’s hard for me to concentrate when I’m like this. I’m just taking a walk.”
“We are all taking a walk,” said Reptile #2.
“The will of the Inscriber has been made known,” added Reptile #3.
Reptile #4 added the Works Cited section: “’The noble vertebrates and the hated enemies alike shall be locked together in one final dance, boogying down toward heaven.’”
Jen shook her head slowly. “We can stop it still. I’m convinced? Everything’s tingling.”
Reptile #5 hissed. “There is no stopping that which has been written.”
“And we are well equipped to rejoin the city in Heaven,” pointed out Reptile #6 helpfully.
“Air. Gravity. All has been accounted for. The Inscriber will be pleased,” concluded Reptile #7.
“No no no no no” gasped Jen, watching her hand fade in and out of visibility with a curious mix of pain and pleasure. “We’re not going to heaven we’re going to the… to the ground. Earth. Place. No not the Place. An unplace.”
Reptile #1 (or maybe there were 9) pointed out something about transubstantiation that Jen didn’t hear but rather tasted. A moment of clarity ensued; the kind of clarity that supercedes consciousness.
The warm-blooded girl lowered herself down on the altar as though carried by the leathery wing of a Pterangel. The priests bowed in unison; the sacrifice had delivered herself to slaughter, as written. The Inscriber would be pleased.
Reptile #6 stepped forward and produced a small, golden axe. The curve of the blade was perfect, like the arc of the sun rising over the cloudline.
Jen had the feeling that Xadrez was using the royal “our” here, as the spirit promptly turned back away from Jen and began to work, scrawling what appeared to be a complex mixture of 6-dimensional calculus and freeform poetry into a wall that still appeared stable.
Things were bad in Cyk’Nl, now; everything was starting to buckle inward. Jen rose to her feet unsteadily and was immediately knocked back down by another tremor. “Alright, fuck this,” she groaned in synch with the rumbling of the atmosphere. As soon as the ground settled down enough to walk on, Jen thought green, sprang upwards and leapt towards Xadrez, snatching the knife out of his long-fingered hand and scurrying away apologetically.
Xadrez, focusing intently on the Ovoid problem, was angry in more of an academic than an emotional sense. Return that, he intoned, making no attempt to follow her.
“Patience, Rezzy-poo,” snapped Jen. “Metaphysics can wait, I need to take a minute to save my own skin.” With the ease of a skilled calligrapher, the girl began to carve an elaborate sigil into the ground, something resembling the Great Wave Off Kanagawa crashing over a beach made of tacky carpet. The tremor slowed, as though the laws of spacetime had to take a second out of its schedule to check out whatever was going on.
Jen began to speak. “Fireflies. Effervescence. White. Bubbles. Green. Anorexia. Six. Four-fifths. Rome. Green. Newton. Delta sharp. Green. Quicksilver. You know I’m good for it. Green green, maybe cyan. Kepler and the paradox of the resolution that precedes the conflict. Celestial. Later. Later! 48 hours. One third of a bell should do it. Green. Farsight. Hi, I’m Jennifer, have we met? No. No. No. Yes. Green” Green
Light
Light becomes unnecessary, photons take the day off, please, thank you, now: green we have Green confirm?
We have registered your complaint and are formulating a response. Pleasure doing business with you and we’ll see you soon, we hope. Flap flap. I’m sorry
The green flash ends giving way to a personal sunrise accepting a Jencentric frame of reference, thanks to Einstein and Minkowsky. The tremors continue; Jen does not. Welcome to Cyk’Nl enjoy your stay, bitch. Please move along to the next register to receive your bill
Normalcy returned to Xadrez for a moment, although he had difficulty not focusing on the details: the sigil fading in ugly blues and reds; sunlight doing a jig on his knife as it is placed back in his hand; Jen’s smile, seeming to rise. Layered words: ‘Sorry about the magic. I’ll get out of your hair now, okay? You work on what happens next.’
And then the tactician’s perspective blessed perspective came back to him in a rush, the reds and blues and blacks mixing back into the greens to form the beautiful gray mush that was his understanding of the universe. He was also alone. Alone with the theorem, the grand proof, the next bit. Wait, he corrected himself, Not alone.
He switched the knife back over to his threatening hand and inscribed the message “OBSERVE THIS” into a blank spot on the wall. Privately, he expanded the sentiment, appropriating an irksome colloquialism for his own self-aggrandizing purposes: You ain’t observed nothing yet
This was going to be easier than he had first surmised. The solution to the Ovoid problem was becoming clear, and on the other side an answer to Kracht might be found. That left Final Jeopardy after the break; the category is Jennifer fucking Tull…
* * * * *
While gravity was doing its thing to the cities, gravity was doing some things, or to be more lucid, some things were being done to gravity. Xadrez was not the only being to receive a flood of information: for the Ovoid, a four-dimensional landscape was like pen on paper, and it was slowly beginning to decipher the language. Certain patterns were beginning to emerge.
* * * * *
Arkal almost died.
The massive, ritzy apartment complexes on the Lower East Side of Sk’Va were built one story at a time, then placed on a large frame resembling the CD rack of the gods. The classless nouveau riche of Sk’Va could have their entire apartments removed by crane to be demolished and replaced or else transplanted somewhere more convenient. This struck everyone as an extremely convenient system because it never occurred to anyone that local gravity would one day be scrambled to the extent that every single apartment in the neighborhood would float out of its place and hover in the air, creating the rather apocalyptic image of hundreds of well-furnished flying saucers occasionally smashing into each other above a city not an hour away from cracking in two.
Arkal, correctly surmising that it was safer in the air than on the ground (these concepts being completely relative in a formerly-floating city, of course), had alongside Maxwell ascended to this flying maze of upper-middle-class residence and was working his way across to where they were pretty sure they could get down to the museum of history. Inevitably the obvious risks associated with this situation turned out to be perfectly valid, and he fell. Also inevitably, for narrative purposes at least, he was rescued.
The source of intervention from anticlimax may, however, come as a surprise to the reader, unless the reader predicted an aging Sk’Van with a jetpack and compound aviator goggles. Upon dropping Arkal off on another roof, the insect removed his helmet and pantingly introduced himself as Bakrjjrz Fl’jgowdon, inventor, extranaut and philanderer by trade. Then he pulled out a gun.
“You’re one of the outsiders to whom the recent have been attributed to, hmm? Stay where you are.” Arkal, who was not completely adverse to taking orders but for some reason found them infuriating coming out of the mouth of a bug, leapt to one side, not sure what he expected to accomplish.
Bakrjjrz hit a button somewhere and a jet of smoke planted him right in front of Arkal’s face, into which he planted a hairy and unlovable foot. “Answer the question, now, we’ve no time to waste.”
“Yes, yes,” grumbled Arkal, “I’m an outsider, you can see that, and I came with a group of six. But I have no idea what caused the fall, and I’m working to prevent it or to save myself at the very least. Where’s the boy?”
“I’ll ask the questions. You’re headed for the museum, right? What do you know about the UP program?”
“Nothing. I know that there’s a museum and that’s where I’m headed, and it would help me greatly if you told me what was there.”
“UP: Ultimate Pioneership. We—my contemporaries and I—and I suppose those of whom I am myself a contemporary—we’ve been warning them about the possibility of a scripturally non-canon city falling scenario for decades. The only solution was to remove gravity from the equation. Send the entire city into space.” Bakrjjrz pointed UPward dramatically.
“Among the stars? That’s madness. By my understanding of the makeup of forces you’d need to reach the moons and then multiply your velocity yet again by a factor of… of one and forty-one hundredths…” Arkal began sketching diagrams in the air fruitlessly, and then shook them away.
“We have the power, we have the engine, it’s in the museum, that’s not the issue. The issue is expanding the atmospheric correction systems to accommodate living in a vacuum, and integrating fully artificial gravity. Plus dealing with the things that are out there. The UP program was dropped and me and my contemporaries discredited… plus, I suppose, some reputational damage to some thinkers of repute of whom I myself may be considered a contemporary. While the engine could, with some modification, be used to—”
Mere minutes ago, when Arkal almost died, he was not terribly perturbed, for the average man may almost die a thousand times without actually dying or even being badly harmed. Arkal himself had nearly died several times in the past couple days. For Bakrjjrz Fl’jgowdon, however, this was not one of these days. The freakish appendage that passed through all of his vital organs was only almost killing him for about zero point zero six seconds before it had actually killed him.
The shoulder connected to the appendage shrugged meekly as its owner saw the look of rage on Arkal’s face. ”Sorry,” said Maxwell. ”Was he a friend of yours?”
* * * * *
Kracht studied the diagrams around the room and perused the giant engine inside the velvet rope. Though dormant, it looked more functional than anything else that might be holding up this city. The rare moment of unfamiliarity brought a smile to Kracht’s inorganic lips; he had never heard anything about Sk’Va’s space program, and here it was summarized in a handful of bullet points on a museum wall. He’d need to look into this later.
But first there was the issue of the room at the end of the hall upon which were inscribed in small letters the words “First Contact.”
It looked like Sk’Va had tried very hard to forget whatever was behind that door, but couldn’t bring themselves to dispose of it entirely. Kracht opened the door.
The room was small and cramped. In front of the dark pod that dominated the room was a large book full of photos. Dead insectoid bodies littering the streets. A bug with an inhuman fire in its eyes and a proboscis shaped liked a hawk’s talon. A city on fire.
On the inside back cover of the book was a button. Kracht pressed it, of course.
A light went on inside the pod. Inside, frozen and resting in a tank of formaldehyde but probably still far from dead, was a Bio Wyrm.
* * * * *
Sikarius had shut up for once; Maxwell was producing enough spite and pettiness for the two of them at the moment. It also didn’t help that Arkal had just punched him onto the roof of the floating apartment for no greater crime than squashing the bug with the gun and the jetpack.
“What the hell?” Maxwell screeched, sending an arm to snake around Arkal’s ankle and knock him to the ground as well.
”Reckless indiscriminate murder is what,” shouted Arkal over the ringing in his ears. ”You’re lucky I was specifically instructed not to kill you.”
”Yeah, well I was told not to kill you, too,” laughed Maxwell. “By a sixteen-year-old fucking girl!” Both he and Arkal rose and tackled each other. “Seriously, what the hell is with you people thinking you can just move me around like a piece on a chessboard? …Well okay, with Xadrez it makes sense. But not Jen and definitely not you! What are you from the—ow!--the past or something?”
A couple of silently traded blows later, Maxwell found himself looking over the side onto a ground below that shimmered like a 3-D movie when you’re not wearing the glasses. He warped himself painfully and did an elegant-looking flip into the inside of the apartment. Arkal made no immediate attempt to follow, and Maxwell plopped himself into a four-arm armchair, exhausted and reeling from a cocktail of mentally compromising emotions.
“I’m serious, Arkal!” he shouted towards the window. “I’ve been doing this on my own for a long time! I don’t… I can’t bring myself to give a shit about saving the town or escaping the battle or whatever the hell. I just want to move on.”
Arkal poked his head out over the roof and looked through the window. ”You know it’s not as simple as that, Maxwell.” With the grace of the gorilla he threw himself into the room and stood hulking against the low ceiling. ”For one thing, we’re all bonded together, by fate, the Observer, Xadrez’s plan, whatever it is that’s keeping us here, it’s working. For another, it doesn’t take a young man’s vision to know that your eyes are green, in more ways than one if you catch my drift, lad.”
Maxwell threw his hands up. “Oh, come on, I expect this from Kracht, not from you. Yes, I have a little crush on a little girl, okay? It happens. It’s happened before, and it’s a mental situation I know how to handle without following her to my fucking death, huh? Come on, you were a teenage boy once, you know how it is.
”I was a teenage man, lad. I fought for what I wanted, and I got it. You’re still just a whelp. Running from responsibilities. If I were more easily disgusted I’d have bashed your head in already on mere principle.”
”Well I’m sorry you’re—“
At that moment the apartment slammed pretty hard into another apartment and began to fall, creating a repeat of the events of the last couple hours in microcosm. Arkal shouted some indistinct curse and went back to the window, crawling back onto the roof. Maxwell chased after the smith but lost sight of him as a slightly slushy pool of water that might have been a reverse Jacuzzi fell onto his chest.
There was more pain, and darkness, and then what appeared to be the lighting of a very large match. The flame illuminated Arkal’s face, covered by large goggles and a helmet, hand outstretched. ”Hold on, lad. The rest of our journey is going to be a mite quicker.”
Maxwell grabbed the beefy hand, which pulled him up onto Arkal’s uncomfortably hairy chest. The jetpack flame intensified and launched them both out of the sinking apartment into the open sky.
* * * * *
From inside the greenshift, Jen ran on dust particles over the clouds of Cyk’Nl to a cathedral that was oddly similar to Sk’Va’s, except more pure, more primal. The stone and steel walls were framed by what appeared to be bone, and everything had a worn look about it. Also different from Sk’Va were the eight hooded reptiles joined in a prayer circle around an altar. Jen, who tended to be drawn to strong will in this state, found herself landing right atop the altar.
Reptile #1 looked up impatiently. “Do you represent the Inscriber?” Reptiles 2 through 7 made the symbol of the oval with long, dangerous-looking claws.
“I, uh… no. I represent me. I’m here to… I don’t know it’s hard for me to concentrate when I’m like this. I’m just taking a walk.”
“We are all taking a walk,” said Reptile #2.
“The will of the Inscriber has been made known,” added Reptile #3.
Reptile #4 added the Works Cited section: “’The noble vertebrates and the hated enemies alike shall be locked together in one final dance, boogying down toward heaven.’”
Jen shook her head slowly. “We can stop it still. I’m convinced? Everything’s tingling.”
Reptile #5 hissed. “There is no stopping that which has been written.”
“And we are well equipped to rejoin the city in Heaven,” pointed out Reptile #6 helpfully.
“Air. Gravity. All has been accounted for. The Inscriber will be pleased,” concluded Reptile #7.
“No no no no no” gasped Jen, watching her hand fade in and out of visibility with a curious mix of pain and pleasure. “We’re not going to heaven we’re going to the… to the ground. Earth. Place. No not the Place. An unplace.”
Reptile #1 (or maybe there were 9) pointed out something about transubstantiation that Jen didn’t hear but rather tasted. A moment of clarity ensued; the kind of clarity that supercedes consciousness.
The warm-blooded girl lowered herself down on the altar as though carried by the leathery wing of a Pterangel. The priests bowed in unison; the sacrifice had delivered herself to slaughter, as written. The Inscriber would be pleased.
Reptile #6 stepped forward and produced a small, golden axe. The curve of the blade was perfect, like the arc of the sun rising over the cloudline.