Re: The Grand Battle S2G1! [Round Three: Water...place!]
10-10-2010, 04:50 AM
Originally posted on MSPA by Lord Paradise.
Call it a few seconds earlier:
The ocean seemed a rather poignant image: infinite and gray, muddled hues in darkness. Meanwhile, in the interior once referred to as Jen, colors bled like markers in the rain.
It was the classic love story. Wyrm meets girl, wyvern kills girl, wyrm gets thrown by rock at girl’s corpse, wyrm meets girl’s brain and within the space of a montage they’re an old married couple. Not a traditional marriage—frankly, Fanthalion would have preferred a male host, finding the masculine brain pattern to be a bit more sublime in the Kant sense—but nonetheless, snug as two peas in a psionic pod that happened to wield magical powers and royal lineage.
So it went for about half a minute, when Fanthalion experienced something much, much more significant. A fellow wyrm—holy shit, the odds!—in the throes of death, carrying with him a data package nearly as old as the trinary stars of the carrier planet, decides to pass on his birthright to the only suitable host in the room. And, presto, just like that, Fanthalion was a prophet. Being the most important Wyrm in all of existence, with stratospheric religious truths and divine genetic strands swirling around in her conscious parts, frightened the young wyrm to no end. It also completely ruined the insinuation process.
Sikarius, from what Fanthalion could glean from the data package (and the old fogey’s consciousness was in there, somewhere, she could feel it) was several generations removed from the carrier planet, a pioneer from a bygone age. He likely knew next to nothing about the art of psychoparasitic insinuation, instead resorting to threats and, God forbid, reason to exert his will over the poor Maxwell boy. With this backwards attitude (and Fanthalion admitted, perhaps with a limited pool of options given his situation at the time, although that version of events doesn’t allow her the smugness of youth) Sik decided to interrupt the process at its most crucial phase. Imagine you’re at the most important moment of your life, about to be told what your job will be until your corpse finally hits enough half-lives to disintegrate, and suddenly both you and your boss are struck with the equivalent of eighty thousand hallucinogenic college courses filtered through the (possibly still active) consciousnesses of a chronically-enraged wyrm and his angst-ridden eronemos primate. That’s what Jen may or may not have experienced, the uncertainty stemming from the fact that the rulebook might as well still be a fucking tree for all the good it’s doing amidst this Biblical shit.
By the time Fanthalion got the voices to stop (which of course means that the girl is hearing voices within voices, now that’s a thought) the pair was being attacked by a shark and the whole deal was already in danger of dying a disappointing death in a tepid solution of salt, blood and unfulfilled destiny in water. Luckily the wyrm was very, very good at this. She rewound the system a bit, found an obsolete version of the Jen code that would likely serve, pumped the half-reformed body full of psychic stimulants, got her on her feet manually and turned on the switched locales faster than Jen could say “Who died?” The stench of dragon’s breath and dust suddenly give way to the scent of shark’s breath and seawater. It occurred to Jen that it was probably odd that she’d never actually fought a shark before, but there’s a first time for everything. Crap, she asked herself, who died and why do I feel like someone lit my metabolism on fire?
Jen felt some psychic push as though some entity somewhere was considering answering her internal question and only narrowly refrained. She had no time to worry about this because of the fucking shark and also Kracht being an asshole fuck aaaargh
Something blue flashed ghostly in front of Jen’s eyes that looked like an equation in pen and ink all overlaid on Kracht’s smug prick face and then his hand covered it up by shoving itself into her breathing tubes. This was a Problem and Jen was in no mood for Problems so she tried punching Kracht with her left and that didn’t work so she tried her right arm but that was the one Kracht was holding so she tried to scream. Something bad was happening to her depth perception, fuck fuck fuck
Some of those other bastards started doing stuff and there was a conversation that all sounded the same to Jen like nag nag nag nag nag and then her mouth was free so she spewed out some very hurtful words, not even thinking just trying to drown out the sound like all her frustration at God-knows-what and all the energy running up her insides just decided to fly out like eight birds in a one-bird cage and there wasn’t any time to be poetic about it
Then she fell silent not because she was out of words but because her throat went dry and still and she felt all crumbly inside. There was some sort of tension like Jen was the only one who could feel anything shaking so she tried again to move her arm but it just made her felt sick and weird like something probing at her.
Eventually giving into the feeling like her brain was going backwards through time Jen squeezed out the word “hello” as though trying to establish any communication at all with anyone, get into a fight she could win or lose, anything.
Something answered. Take a breath and look inside it said.
Jen did so unthinkingly and the first thing she realized about herself was that she still only had one eye and one arm. It was the perfect moment to scream. As the scream broke out of her, shattering her painfully lucid psychic high, something rather more physical broke out of her, shattering a couple bones in her shoulder and that made her scream all the more. Now fully healthy, the wyrm shined in the light of dusk over the ocean and pulsed with sickening otherness over Jen’s shoulder like it had no intention of ever looking like it belonged there. Kracht let go of Jen’s arm and Jen thought it was the feeling of her dying as she fell willingly to the floor of the raft but instead it was just a rare moment of surprise as Kracht instinctively recoiled from the shark’s second charge. In just enough time for everyone to see what was happening, a sizable chunk of the raft was gone under the sea in the beast’s mouth, and Jen with it.
Call it a few seconds earlier:
The ocean seemed a rather poignant image: infinite and gray, muddled hues in darkness. Meanwhile, in the interior once referred to as Jen, colors bled like markers in the rain.
It was the classic love story. Wyrm meets girl, wyvern kills girl, wyrm gets thrown by rock at girl’s corpse, wyrm meets girl’s brain and within the space of a montage they’re an old married couple. Not a traditional marriage—frankly, Fanthalion would have preferred a male host, finding the masculine brain pattern to be a bit more sublime in the Kant sense—but nonetheless, snug as two peas in a psionic pod that happened to wield magical powers and royal lineage.
So it went for about half a minute, when Fanthalion experienced something much, much more significant. A fellow wyrm—holy shit, the odds!—in the throes of death, carrying with him a data package nearly as old as the trinary stars of the carrier planet, decides to pass on his birthright to the only suitable host in the room. And, presto, just like that, Fanthalion was a prophet. Being the most important Wyrm in all of existence, with stratospheric religious truths and divine genetic strands swirling around in her conscious parts, frightened the young wyrm to no end. It also completely ruined the insinuation process.
Sikarius, from what Fanthalion could glean from the data package (and the old fogey’s consciousness was in there, somewhere, she could feel it) was several generations removed from the carrier planet, a pioneer from a bygone age. He likely knew next to nothing about the art of psychoparasitic insinuation, instead resorting to threats and, God forbid, reason to exert his will over the poor Maxwell boy. With this backwards attitude (and Fanthalion admitted, perhaps with a limited pool of options given his situation at the time, although that version of events doesn’t allow her the smugness of youth) Sik decided to interrupt the process at its most crucial phase. Imagine you’re at the most important moment of your life, about to be told what your job will be until your corpse finally hits enough half-lives to disintegrate, and suddenly both you and your boss are struck with the equivalent of eighty thousand hallucinogenic college courses filtered through the (possibly still active) consciousnesses of a chronically-enraged wyrm and his angst-ridden eronemos primate. That’s what Jen may or may not have experienced, the uncertainty stemming from the fact that the rulebook might as well still be a fucking tree for all the good it’s doing amidst this Biblical shit.
By the time Fanthalion got the voices to stop (which of course means that the girl is hearing voices within voices, now that’s a thought) the pair was being attacked by a shark and the whole deal was already in danger of dying a disappointing death in a tepid solution of salt, blood and unfulfilled destiny in water. Luckily the wyrm was very, very good at this. She rewound the system a bit, found an obsolete version of the Jen code that would likely serve, pumped the half-reformed body full of psychic stimulants, got her on her feet manually and turned on the switched locales faster than Jen could say “Who died?” The stench of dragon’s breath and dust suddenly give way to the scent of shark’s breath and seawater. It occurred to Jen that it was probably odd that she’d never actually fought a shark before, but there’s a first time for everything. Crap, she asked herself, who died and why do I feel like someone lit my metabolism on fire?
Jen felt some psychic push as though some entity somewhere was considering answering her internal question and only narrowly refrained. She had no time to worry about this because of the fucking shark and also Kracht being an asshole fuck aaaargh
Something blue flashed ghostly in front of Jen’s eyes that looked like an equation in pen and ink all overlaid on Kracht’s smug prick face and then his hand covered it up by shoving itself into her breathing tubes. This was a Problem and Jen was in no mood for Problems so she tried punching Kracht with her left and that didn’t work so she tried her right arm but that was the one Kracht was holding so she tried to scream. Something bad was happening to her depth perception, fuck fuck fuck
Some of those other bastards started doing stuff and there was a conversation that all sounded the same to Jen like nag nag nag nag nag and then her mouth was free so she spewed out some very hurtful words, not even thinking just trying to drown out the sound like all her frustration at God-knows-what and all the energy running up her insides just decided to fly out like eight birds in a one-bird cage and there wasn’t any time to be poetic about it
Then she fell silent not because she was out of words but because her throat went dry and still and she felt all crumbly inside. There was some sort of tension like Jen was the only one who could feel anything shaking so she tried again to move her arm but it just made her felt sick and weird like something probing at her.
Eventually giving into the feeling like her brain was going backwards through time Jen squeezed out the word “hello” as though trying to establish any communication at all with anyone, get into a fight she could win or lose, anything.
Something answered. Take a breath and look inside it said.
Jen did so unthinkingly and the first thing she realized about herself was that she still only had one eye and one arm. It was the perfect moment to scream. As the scream broke out of her, shattering her painfully lucid psychic high, something rather more physical broke out of her, shattering a couple bones in her shoulder and that made her scream all the more. Now fully healthy, the wyrm shined in the light of dusk over the ocean and pulsed with sickening otherness over Jen’s shoulder like it had no intention of ever looking like it belonged there. Kracht let go of Jen’s arm and Jen thought it was the feeling of her dying as she fell willingly to the floor of the raft but instead it was just a rare moment of surprise as Kracht instinctively recoiled from the shark’s second charge. In just enough time for everyone to see what was happening, a sizable chunk of the raft was gone under the sea in the beast’s mouth, and Jen with it.