Re: The Grand Battle S2G1! [Round Three: Water...place!]
01-02-2011, 05:23 PM
Originally posted on MSPA by Lord Paradise.
With the buildings sloughing off like LEGOS, the city of Cyk’Nl had a new kind of logic to it, something unlike a city altogether. The ivory roads and gutters became the seams of a shell, the levitation engines (of which there were five, arranged in a pentagon around the underside of the city) became orifices, and the polluted artificial atmosphere became a reeking sulphurous exhalation. Out of each of the engines came a very large reptilian head attached to a seemingly endless neck. Two of the heads were grey; one was green, with a lion’s mane of tentacles; a copper-colored head dotted with a long line of lichen above the eyes opened its mouth to roar and a dragon snuck out, launching off gracefully from its perch on a fang; the last head was blue, and salivated a steady waterfall of chlorine-smelling sludge from its drooping jowls.
The hydra’s heads convulsed, and from the twin main roads of Cyk’Nl emerged two comparatively scrawny and vestigial-looking wings, which flapped with a sound like a church bells. The city stopped falling and hovered, stationary, only a hundred meters above the Hydresther skyline. Fantha twitched like a thirteen-year-old boy catching a glimpse of a nipple on his TV screen.
“Can you do that a little lower?” asked Jen, out loud. “I have a knot.” She was beginning to calm down; seeing above her a physical, presumably killable representation of the insurmountability of her problem, she stopped feeling and started thinking.
”Imagine what its DNA must read like,” replied Fantha. ”It’d be… like Mein Kampf.”
”That’s an oddly human reference for you to be making, Fantha.”
”I’ve been picking this stuff up. A bit from you, but mostly from the Package.”
”Trippy. So Kath’s on there somewhere. Or in there.”
”She’ll have to kill it, won’t she? To proceed?”
”The going theory is that that’ll be her test, yeah.”
”What happens if we beat her to it?”
”I don’t know. To take that thing out, we’d need help. Hey Xad—” Xadrez was gone; in his place was a lingering smell of wet dirt. The chlorine waterfall hit a skyscraper in Hydresther, doing something to the edifice that looked more than anything like the Black Plague.
Jen looked back at the monster. Above it, the Hydresther bubble was beginning to burst, or rather leak. “Well anyway we’ll have to act fast. You know, I’ve been thinking about this whole situation the wrong way.”
”Is that so?”
”I’ve had this feeling ever since I died—or maybe before, since the Battle started—this feeling that something was coming to an end. It’s stupid. Obviously there’s something just beginning.” She turned her eyes back toward the hydra, which in its own way was now the city’s primary light source, and sighed. “Fantha dear, When you’ve been in this business for as long as I have, you get to appreciate a really good monster. It’s beautiful.”
”Mmm. What about me? Am I a good monster?”
”Bitch, you’re a worm.” Fantha drooped herself over Jen’s chest with just enough sarcasm for Jen to find it endearing.
A confused-looking dragon landed on the next rooftop over from Jen. She was a striking shade of purple with a green stomach.
“You,” Jen called to the dragon. “I shall call you Barney.”
Thirty seconds later they were in the air.
* * * * *
Kath wasn’t sure at exactly which point she realized she was traveling the insides of a living creature; the signs manifested themselves pretty gradually. And the hydra followed no sort of biological rules that she was aware of. Most living things under the sea, for one thing, kept all their tentacles on the outside, and used them to swim or manipulate objects, not just to stand up on either side of the pathway like weeds. Similarly, if the bloodstream of any conventional creature intersected with its windpipe by way of a stone bridge, that would be less of a convenience for travelers and more of a life-threatening problem.
Someone red, bloated and froglike passed her by; fearing it would burst all over her clothes if she stabbed it, Kath opted to hide behind a convenient rock. Apart from that, her journey (“quest” was the word the Green Man had used, though she still couldn’t fathom what that was all about) remained fairly uneventful until she came to the village.
“Organ” would probably be the word, she told herself. The tunnels opened up into a wide open space dotted with small tents made of a veiny membrane surrounding a large industrial-looking building. On the side of the main building a water wheel was dipped into the blood, supplying energy to something inside that was making a distinctly metallic chugging noise.
Kath was spotted right away and approached by two of the frog-things. “Organelle, identify self and function.”
“I’m Kath,” Kath said, deciding honesty was the best policy for once. “And I’m not an organelle. I came here from outside.”
One of the frogs nodded to the other, knowingly. They turned back to Kath. “It is as we thought. The Transcriber has come at last.”
They grabbed her by the shoulders and led her into the factory. Inside, dozens of organelles (some of whom were suitably outlandish in accordance with their functions) were working to maintain bizarre machines made of metal and protein. It smelled like coal.]
Kath was led to a door upon which the word “Nucleolus” was inscribed in crisp Helvetican calligraphy. Inside was an office, occupied by a very fat golden-skinned amphibian surrounded by a complex apparatus of optics. The nucleolus looked up from one microscope and lowered a pair of glasses from the ceiling to his eyes. “Ah!” he said, cheerily. “The outsider. Wonderful, wonderful. I’ll deal with you in a minute, young, er, lady. You two. What news?”
One of the frogs saluted and spoke up. “Well, we’ve got—“
The other frog saluted harder and spoke up more loudly. “The main issue at this point seems to be flooding. The wings, heads and necks are definitely in motion; brains have shut off all communication. It would seem that they’re angry at something.”
“Hmmm. Well, double production like we planned for. Obviously the insides are going to have to pull the slack for now. There’s no need to be alarmed.”
The quieter frog sternly pushed Kath forward. “But sir, if the Transcriber has truly arrived, might this not mean--”
“I’ll have none of your superstition,” barked the nucleolus. “The system has maintained for centuries. Every time we have a little excess movement, some strange radio chatter from the exo, or sexual organs are engaged with that Sk’Va tart, people like you are proclaiming that it’s the Death come at last.”
Kath was beginning to feel out of place.
“But sir, last time the wings began to flap—”
“I know my history. You know what percentage of organelles in the hydra were shut down during that incident? One point five. Catastrophe, yes. Apocalypse, no.” He turned very quickly towards Kath. “You. Exo-female.”
Kath sighed. “Is this going to involve a quest?”
The nucleolus seemed taken aback. “Well, no, dearie, I was simply going to ask if you’d planned out your—”
There was a rapping on the office door. “Dammit to the bowels,” muttered the nucleolus. “Open the door,” he commanded one of the organelle.
The frog opened the door and in stepped another, slightly nauseous-looking organelle, filled with something purple. He looked angry.
The nucleolus fell out of his chair. “Shut the door! He’s got ATP! He’s got AT—” he shouted, while at the same time the purple frog cried “Death to homeostasis quo!” and exploded.
For a few seconds Kath was only aware of dust.
Then rough, slimy hands pulled her upright. “Sorry about that,” said an organelle she hadn’t seen before. “We needed to get you out of there before the nucleolus assimilated you.” Kath, still a bit distracted by the ringing in her ears, allowed the frog to drag her over to the edge of the organ. There were four frogs crouching behind a cell and waiting to receive her. The rebels lacked the bloating of the regular organelles and were nearly translucent.
The leader, standing about seven feet tall with a long and twitchy flagellum protruding from his stomach, grabbed Kath by the shoulders. “Transcriber,” it told her, “Hero out of the Hydraether.”
“I’m not from the Hydraether,” said Kath, a bit indignant. “I hail from, er. Hydresther.”
The frog slapped her across the face. “Pull it together, exo-girl. We represent CORPSE. That’s an acronym. Cessation Of Respiration, PhotoSynthesis, Everything.” The frog flogged himself across the back and croaked. “We’re still working on the acronym. We’re working on a lot of things, especially now that we have—”
“Stop your talk a moment,” said Kath, a bit impatient. “You mean to kill the hydra.”
“We mean,” said the frog, “For it to stop living.”
“I’ve got it!” shouted one of the other frogs. “Cessation of Respiratory-Photosynthetic Slave Engine.”
“That’s perfect,” whispered the leader, “But keep your damn voice down. Exo-girl. We need your help. We have numbers but the wheels of Homeostasis Quo will continue to turn unless we take a number of extraordinary risks. And by ‘we’ I mean ‘you.’”
“Kill the hydra,” Kath repeated, twirling her sword. “Sounds about apt. Where do we start?”
* * * * *
The city-sized disturbance in the Hydresther bubble finally overwhelmed whatever power was holding it up, and it began to rise, splitting off into smaller bubbles and great walls of foam. Jen struggled to hang on to her rather ornery new mount and keep it in a position on the underside of the monster, free from the attention of its five heads. It didn’t work; one of the grey heads snapped at her with the kind of speed that you never expect from something that large. A quick, nauseating barrel roll brought Barney out of the range of the hydra’s fangs, which appeared oddly porous on this macroscopic scale.
Jen caught a whiff of something like fresh air, and took this as a signal to maneuver the dragon around the side of Cyk’Nl to the city’s surface, now in ruins. There was a splash of mist that was only ambiguously breathable and then a strong gust of wind brought around by a flapping of one of the hydra’s wings. Jen and Barney found themselves being skipped across the surface of the ocean like a pebble, the sun in their eyes, feeling the sort of high-speed disorientation and insignificance that the electron feels.
Barney recovered first, and flew off, leaving Jen weakly treading water until Fantha gave her gills, at which point she allowed herself to sink. Ignoring the thrashing of a hydra, now a landmass, Jen’s fading conscious stayed focused on another island, one that seemed to draw closer the more she
* * * * *
Jen appeared, not making the effort to show up out of any direction but merely materializing with a sound between a thud and a splash. Arkal startled. The girl was soaking wet and fast asleep upon the smooth tan surface of the island. Arkal touched her cheek gently; Jen was warm, breathing, and not a phantom (in any case, Arkal suspected that if he were seeing only an Ovoid-induced memory of the lass, she wouldn’t have that worm sticking out of her). At Arkal’s touch, Jen gave a sleepy whimper of complaint and rolled over. Arkal smirked. Feeling generous, he put a sword in her arms; Jen embraced the sword lovingly, curled up and began to snore lightly.
Arkal sat down a ways away and waited.
With the buildings sloughing off like LEGOS, the city of Cyk’Nl had a new kind of logic to it, something unlike a city altogether. The ivory roads and gutters became the seams of a shell, the levitation engines (of which there were five, arranged in a pentagon around the underside of the city) became orifices, and the polluted artificial atmosphere became a reeking sulphurous exhalation. Out of each of the engines came a very large reptilian head attached to a seemingly endless neck. Two of the heads were grey; one was green, with a lion’s mane of tentacles; a copper-colored head dotted with a long line of lichen above the eyes opened its mouth to roar and a dragon snuck out, launching off gracefully from its perch on a fang; the last head was blue, and salivated a steady waterfall of chlorine-smelling sludge from its drooping jowls.
The hydra’s heads convulsed, and from the twin main roads of Cyk’Nl emerged two comparatively scrawny and vestigial-looking wings, which flapped with a sound like a church bells. The city stopped falling and hovered, stationary, only a hundred meters above the Hydresther skyline. Fantha twitched like a thirteen-year-old boy catching a glimpse of a nipple on his TV screen.
“Can you do that a little lower?” asked Jen, out loud. “I have a knot.” She was beginning to calm down; seeing above her a physical, presumably killable representation of the insurmountability of her problem, she stopped feeling and started thinking.
”Imagine what its DNA must read like,” replied Fantha. ”It’d be… like Mein Kampf.”
”That’s an oddly human reference for you to be making, Fantha.”
”I’ve been picking this stuff up. A bit from you, but mostly from the Package.”
”Trippy. So Kath’s on there somewhere. Or in there.”
”She’ll have to kill it, won’t she? To proceed?”
”The going theory is that that’ll be her test, yeah.”
”What happens if we beat her to it?”
”I don’t know. To take that thing out, we’d need help. Hey Xad—” Xadrez was gone; in his place was a lingering smell of wet dirt. The chlorine waterfall hit a skyscraper in Hydresther, doing something to the edifice that looked more than anything like the Black Plague.
Jen looked back at the monster. Above it, the Hydresther bubble was beginning to burst, or rather leak. “Well anyway we’ll have to act fast. You know, I’ve been thinking about this whole situation the wrong way.”
”Is that so?”
”I’ve had this feeling ever since I died—or maybe before, since the Battle started—this feeling that something was coming to an end. It’s stupid. Obviously there’s something just beginning.” She turned her eyes back toward the hydra, which in its own way was now the city’s primary light source, and sighed. “Fantha dear, When you’ve been in this business for as long as I have, you get to appreciate a really good monster. It’s beautiful.”
”Mmm. What about me? Am I a good monster?”
”Bitch, you’re a worm.” Fantha drooped herself over Jen’s chest with just enough sarcasm for Jen to find it endearing.
A confused-looking dragon landed on the next rooftop over from Jen. She was a striking shade of purple with a green stomach.
“You,” Jen called to the dragon. “I shall call you Barney.”
Thirty seconds later they were in the air.
* * * * *
Kath wasn’t sure at exactly which point she realized she was traveling the insides of a living creature; the signs manifested themselves pretty gradually. And the hydra followed no sort of biological rules that she was aware of. Most living things under the sea, for one thing, kept all their tentacles on the outside, and used them to swim or manipulate objects, not just to stand up on either side of the pathway like weeds. Similarly, if the bloodstream of any conventional creature intersected with its windpipe by way of a stone bridge, that would be less of a convenience for travelers and more of a life-threatening problem.
Someone red, bloated and froglike passed her by; fearing it would burst all over her clothes if she stabbed it, Kath opted to hide behind a convenient rock. Apart from that, her journey (“quest” was the word the Green Man had used, though she still couldn’t fathom what that was all about) remained fairly uneventful until she came to the village.
“Organ” would probably be the word, she told herself. The tunnels opened up into a wide open space dotted with small tents made of a veiny membrane surrounding a large industrial-looking building. On the side of the main building a water wheel was dipped into the blood, supplying energy to something inside that was making a distinctly metallic chugging noise.
Kath was spotted right away and approached by two of the frog-things. “Organelle, identify self and function.”
“I’m Kath,” Kath said, deciding honesty was the best policy for once. “And I’m not an organelle. I came here from outside.”
One of the frogs nodded to the other, knowingly. They turned back to Kath. “It is as we thought. The Transcriber has come at last.”
They grabbed her by the shoulders and led her into the factory. Inside, dozens of organelles (some of whom were suitably outlandish in accordance with their functions) were working to maintain bizarre machines made of metal and protein. It smelled like coal.]
Kath was led to a door upon which the word “Nucleolus” was inscribed in crisp Helvetican calligraphy. Inside was an office, occupied by a very fat golden-skinned amphibian surrounded by a complex apparatus of optics. The nucleolus looked up from one microscope and lowered a pair of glasses from the ceiling to his eyes. “Ah!” he said, cheerily. “The outsider. Wonderful, wonderful. I’ll deal with you in a minute, young, er, lady. You two. What news?”
One of the frogs saluted and spoke up. “Well, we’ve got—“
The other frog saluted harder and spoke up more loudly. “The main issue at this point seems to be flooding. The wings, heads and necks are definitely in motion; brains have shut off all communication. It would seem that they’re angry at something.”
“Hmmm. Well, double production like we planned for. Obviously the insides are going to have to pull the slack for now. There’s no need to be alarmed.”
The quieter frog sternly pushed Kath forward. “But sir, if the Transcriber has truly arrived, might this not mean--”
“I’ll have none of your superstition,” barked the nucleolus. “The system has maintained for centuries. Every time we have a little excess movement, some strange radio chatter from the exo, or sexual organs are engaged with that Sk’Va tart, people like you are proclaiming that it’s the Death come at last.”
Kath was beginning to feel out of place.
“But sir, last time the wings began to flap—”
“I know my history. You know what percentage of organelles in the hydra were shut down during that incident? One point five. Catastrophe, yes. Apocalypse, no.” He turned very quickly towards Kath. “You. Exo-female.”
Kath sighed. “Is this going to involve a quest?”
The nucleolus seemed taken aback. “Well, no, dearie, I was simply going to ask if you’d planned out your—”
There was a rapping on the office door. “Dammit to the bowels,” muttered the nucleolus. “Open the door,” he commanded one of the organelle.
The frog opened the door and in stepped another, slightly nauseous-looking organelle, filled with something purple. He looked angry.
The nucleolus fell out of his chair. “Shut the door! He’s got ATP! He’s got AT—” he shouted, while at the same time the purple frog cried “Death to homeostasis quo!” and exploded.
For a few seconds Kath was only aware of dust.
Then rough, slimy hands pulled her upright. “Sorry about that,” said an organelle she hadn’t seen before. “We needed to get you out of there before the nucleolus assimilated you.” Kath, still a bit distracted by the ringing in her ears, allowed the frog to drag her over to the edge of the organ. There were four frogs crouching behind a cell and waiting to receive her. The rebels lacked the bloating of the regular organelles and were nearly translucent.
The leader, standing about seven feet tall with a long and twitchy flagellum protruding from his stomach, grabbed Kath by the shoulders. “Transcriber,” it told her, “Hero out of the Hydraether.”
“I’m not from the Hydraether,” said Kath, a bit indignant. “I hail from, er. Hydresther.”
The frog slapped her across the face. “Pull it together, exo-girl. We represent CORPSE. That’s an acronym. Cessation Of Respiration, PhotoSynthesis, Everything.” The frog flogged himself across the back and croaked. “We’re still working on the acronym. We’re working on a lot of things, especially now that we have—”
“Stop your talk a moment,” said Kath, a bit impatient. “You mean to kill the hydra.”
“We mean,” said the frog, “For it to stop living.”
“I’ve got it!” shouted one of the other frogs. “Cessation of Respiratory-Photosynthetic Slave Engine.”
“That’s perfect,” whispered the leader, “But keep your damn voice down. Exo-girl. We need your help. We have numbers but the wheels of Homeostasis Quo will continue to turn unless we take a number of extraordinary risks. And by ‘we’ I mean ‘you.’”
“Kill the hydra,” Kath repeated, twirling her sword. “Sounds about apt. Where do we start?”
* * * * *
The city-sized disturbance in the Hydresther bubble finally overwhelmed whatever power was holding it up, and it began to rise, splitting off into smaller bubbles and great walls of foam. Jen struggled to hang on to her rather ornery new mount and keep it in a position on the underside of the monster, free from the attention of its five heads. It didn’t work; one of the grey heads snapped at her with the kind of speed that you never expect from something that large. A quick, nauseating barrel roll brought Barney out of the range of the hydra’s fangs, which appeared oddly porous on this macroscopic scale.
Jen caught a whiff of something like fresh air, and took this as a signal to maneuver the dragon around the side of Cyk’Nl to the city’s surface, now in ruins. There was a splash of mist that was only ambiguously breathable and then a strong gust of wind brought around by a flapping of one of the hydra’s wings. Jen and Barney found themselves being skipped across the surface of the ocean like a pebble, the sun in their eyes, feeling the sort of high-speed disorientation and insignificance that the electron feels.
Barney recovered first, and flew off, leaving Jen weakly treading water until Fantha gave her gills, at which point she allowed herself to sink. Ignoring the thrashing of a hydra, now a landmass, Jen’s fading conscious stayed focused on another island, one that seemed to draw closer the more she
* * * * *
Jen appeared, not making the effort to show up out of any direction but merely materializing with a sound between a thud and a splash. Arkal startled. The girl was soaking wet and fast asleep upon the smooth tan surface of the island. Arkal touched her cheek gently; Jen was warm, breathing, and not a phantom (in any case, Arkal suspected that if he were seeing only an Ovoid-induced memory of the lass, she wouldn’t have that worm sticking out of her). At Arkal’s touch, Jen gave a sleepy whimper of complaint and rolled over. Arkal smirked. Feeling generous, he put a sword in her arms; Jen embraced the sword lovingly, curled up and began to snore lightly.
Arkal sat down a ways away and waited.