Re: The Grand Battle S2G1! [Round Three: Water...place!]
01-14-2011, 07:07 PM
Originally posted on MSPA by Lord Paradise.
In her youth, whenever Jen had to do something monotonous—say, shucking corn—she helped pass the time by imagining what the simple task looked like from a microscopic level. She pictured the individual fibers of the plant snapping like palm trees in a hurricane, little germs fleeing in all directions, and for a rare moment Jen stopped being the submissive daughter, the shy and unlikable middle schooler, shucked her personality of the B+ student to reveal something golden and nutritional underneath. She was the destroyer of worlds. She was powerful.
Jen allowed herself to imagine, briefly, how the Ovoid felt.
To just sink would be a bit too pedestrian for the anomaly; showy as ever, the Ovoid had to distort and stretch and speed up and slow down and generally act like a broken film reel of a lava lamp. Arkal, in a moment, was a hundred yards away from her, and then on top of a hill above her, and then gone; for a moment Jen could see right in front of her face a crew of low-budget pirate cosplayers struggling to board their vessel; when she finally bumped into Kracht, it was like very suddenly getting a boyfriend. She felt secure with the one thing in this world that was guaranteed permanent grabbing her a bit roughly by the shoulder.
“Hey there,” she said to Kracht, gratefully. She felt a little guilty, all of a sudden, for her prolonged association with the knife-wielding maniac who had devoted most of the past two rounds to killing this perfectly friendly chunk of rock. “I assume you’ve been through this before.”
”It usually doesn’t get this… excitable… this fast,” Kracht responded glibly. There was a note of sadness in Kracht’s voice harmonizing with the note of sadness that had always been there; something had changed this round. As if confirming her suspicion, Kracht asked half a question. ”I, um. Are you…”
”Spit it out, Kracht.com. Pretend it’s a list. ‘Top 5 Things I Have to Say to Jen (And Why I’m A Bitch About It)’. You can do it.”
”Are you going to kill me?” Kracht blurted out, a bit pathetically.
Jen giggled sleepily. “Kill you? Come on Kracht, you’re like a Hostess snack cake with a cream filling of pure diamond. Which leads us to, A) how am I supposed to kill something with no expiration date, and B) why would I want to kill something so delicious? Answer me this, Mr. Time DJ.”
Kracht sulked. ”Listen, Jen, when you’re as accustomed to it as I am, familiarity can be a kind of drug.” The Ovoid seemed to have settled a bit, leaving Jen and Kracht islanded in a place that was both underwater and dry, pitch-black and sunlit. ”Things are different now. All this water. Alexei. You dying, and…” Kracht looked uneasily at Fanthalion, who hissed at him coyly. ”I’m sorry, I’ve gotten out of the habit of asking names.”
”Its name’s—sorry, her name is Fantha.”
”Yes, well, ‘Fantha,’ you’re a part of it too. …I don’t know, sometimes I get these… solipsist notions. Like the whole world is just a recurring dream that incarnates all the little fragments of myself, except in this one suddenly I’m drowning. And now I’m starting to think, if I just, no, when I finally get shattered, and all these little fragments, you and Xadrez and Arkal and the whole world are just falling to the floor without a me to reflect anymore, maybe that’s when all this starts to matter. No more do-overs, no more continuity. The universe begins when I die. This sounds stupid, I’m rambling, sorry.”
Jen took a seat on the surprisingly soft Ovoid surface. “Kracht,” she said. “Moses—you know Moses, right? You know of Moses.” Kracht nodded, sitting down across from Jen. “Moses told me once when my friend Nostal Joe died, some years back. Great guy, Joe, you remind me of him, I guess. I was in a pretty bad way, and I, you know I did some spells and I was sort of out of it and I went down to this little seaside village where I met the guy, which was also where I buried him. And where I used to have friends in this place and run around with a wooden sword with ten-year-old kids and it was one of the only places in the whole Place where there was never anything unexpected going on and I could just relax, but now, now coming back there with this guy’s death just sort of treating my gut like a bouncy castle… it all seemed so small. Small, and backwards, and poor, and it smelled like fish and I… I just couldn’t look at it. I ordered it razed. I was in talks with the royal arsonists, talking about it like it wasn’t any sort of significant thing, just a day on the job, talking about, you know, how to create this aesthetically pleasing conflagration with zero casualties and relocate everyone to that city with the upside-down wall, I forget what it was called, and feed the ashes to the Indus Tree. And I was starting to relax, like it would make everything better if this place just weren’t here anymore, and I could make a new village after a while that would supposedly be better, and in comes Moses, and for the life of me I couldn’t understand why he was mad. And he just pulls me aside and he tells me that it’s ‘rather common’ for people who’ve faced death to ‘attempt to recontextualize their predicament in terms of rebirth.’ Winter, for example he says, gives birth to spring. But, Moses says this and I believe him, cause the guy’s been around a long time, and not just coasting for a few infinities like you have but he really lived a long life, you know? Moses says that’s a lie. Winter gives way to spring but the spring isn’t any better than it was last year, it’s the same old shit. And that spring is guaranteed every time to turn into another winter, in turn. So who am I, he asks me,’ to seek catharsis in autumn?’ And he was right. I just wanted to watch the leaves turn red and fall off so the world would be in the same place I was.”
Kracht gave a dry smile. ”I’ve watched a lot of movies in my day, Jen. I’ve heard about all the anti-suicide speeches man is capable of writing. You don’t have to worry about me, I don’t want to die. I’m just… confused as to why I haven’t.”
”Yes, well, that’s what Xadrez is working on figuring out this very moment, as a side project from his grand plan of saving the universe from whatever-the-fuck or whatever the fuck—”
”We should talk about th—“
”No we shouldn’t,” interrupted Jen. “I have my own problems. At this point—and the degree of calm I’m displaying by suggesting this from my very, very high-stress position should be considered pretty commendable—at this point I don’t see any reason why anyone else should die at all.”
Kracht’s smile faded. ”As much as things change, your majesty, death is not an enemy that can be fought. Especially not in the Grand Battle.”
”Don’t call me that.”
”’Your majesty’? Things have changed, if you’ve decided to be modest.”
”I haven’t ‘decided’ anything,” snapped Jen. “I lost the Green when I died. The Place is a—” she spat the word “democracy for a bit, and then it’s going to be taken over by a sexy mermaid who I think is also a serial killer. So that’s… that’s how my day’s been going.”
”Oh. Yeah, well that’s different.” Kracht shuddered. ”As much as it unsettled me falling into your domain, being Green and all, belonging to someone else—someone I have never met… is worse.”
”It’s bad feelings all around. And I mean, I’ve gotten used to the idea of not really thinking of myself as a queen anymore. I was just walking around the ‘real’ world or whatever and meeting people and not paying taxes and I was pretty happy. But now this idea that I might not see it again, on account of some stupid loophole. It sucks.”
Kracht clapped his hands together with a rather piercing and uncomfortable sound. ”I can fix that,” he said. ”Of course you can see the Place again. You figured it out a long time ago. The Ovoid.”
”The Ovoid can take me there? I didn’t think we were on really good terms.”
”No, no.” Kracht stood up abruptly. ”But being here makes things a bit more pliant. You can extend a sort of scrying spell to reach the Place. Sometimes even send messages.”
Jen nodded excitedly. “Shit. Yes, of course I can. I just need to—what do I need to do?”
”Improvise. You’ve only ever figured it out in the past.”
Jen smiled. “Alright. Sit with me. Fantha, stretch around to the side a bit, it’s going to need to be the three of us in a circle. No, scratch that, in an oval. Ow. There’s a girl. Join hands.” Jen reached out and touched Fantha with her left hand, and came to the odd realization that she could feel what Fantha felt, though with a slight time lapse. Her other hand was encompassed in Kracht’s rather larger and colder hand. Kracht touched Fantha lightly on the wyrm’s chin, and the oval was complete.
There was a minute of silence, as Jen’s breathing and Fantha’s slight up-and-down motions slowed down and came into synch with the faint pulses of radiation off of Kracht’s unmoving body. Then, while remaining seated, Jen arose and stood in the center of the oval. She seemed somewhat older, though it may have just been the lack of stripes in her hair and the substitution of her bizarre tie-dye outfit for a simple green dress the strap to which constantly threatened to fall off of one shoulder (the same shoulder that would have ordinarily had Fantha sticking out of it). Jen smiled and looked down at her seated self, whose eyes were closed and who appeared very small. Then she looked further down and tapped the ground with her bare foot. “You’re in on this too,” Jen told the Ovoid, “whether you want to be or not.” The ground gave no reply. “Alright,” concluded Jen, looking up at the sky, which was itself underwater, “Let’s do this shit.”
Jen gave a gesture and appeared to be working an invisible interface, shuffling through a series of menus that only she could see. She turned a knob and there was a piercing feedback noise that managed to be beautiful and harmonic despite itself. Jen turned off the sound. “Celestereo’s up in running,” she told herself/Fantha/Kracht/the Ovoid. “What are we feeling for working music? Gangster? Green Classical? Proto-pop?” She looked around expectantly. “Alright, alright,” she said. “A bit more contemporary. Be warned that being filtered through planes and shit tends to distort the lyrics to reflect the truth, but I’ve never been in the habit of listening too hard to lyrics. So, you know.” She turned another knob and a male voice began to sing.
“When I get older
I will be stronger
They’ll call me freedom
Just like a waving flag”
“Guilty pleasure of mine, I know,” said Jen, perhaps too softly to be easily heard over the music. “So what do you think, we visit the world tree?”
“…and never go back
And never go back
And never go back,” answered the music.
“Cool beans,” replied Jen. A small stalk was growing out of the ground. Jen stepped out of the way, singing along. “Born to a throne, stronger than Rome, um, something own.” She stopped, fearing that her rather poor singing voice would slow the growth of the world tree.
She needn’t have worried. It grew to several feet above her height, sprouted a rainbow of branches, leaves and fruits that cast a glaringly bright shade over Jen’s head, further isolating those involved in the ritual. “Thanks, Norse mythology!” said Jen, patting the tree. At her touch, nine rings began to circle the tree.
“…where I was grown
Cosmos we’d roam
Out of the green I
Made myself seen I
Became the queen…”
Gold letters hanging in the air identified one of the rings as “Groennheim;” this struck Jen as completely unnecessary as it was the only ring that was bright green, and gave off an imperceptibly soft sound of children laughing. She touched the ring and everything went green. Kracht, the seated Jen, Fantha, and a sound that might have been the voice of the Ovoid began to sing along very loudly as Jen, feeling the presence of something much more powerful than her, struggled to hold onto the ring.
“When you were older
Your arm was longer
You had a kingdom
You were its verdant flag
But now you’re a rag
But now you’re a rag
But now you’re a—”
Celestereo cut out with a twang and a crash. The world tree was gone and all was red and green and beige. For a moment she thought she had failed, and then for another moment she thought she was dead, and then she opened her eyes.
The circle was now nowhere, and was also properly circular, having opened up a bit to accommodate an ovoid manifestation of the Ovoid. Fantha retreated to a comfortable length, and Kracht stood, pointing upwards. There was a sound of flags rustling.
Jen looked up and it felt more like looking inwards. Bulging slightly as though refracted through a glass ball, there was an image of a green castle.
Jen’s lips quivered but she didn’t cry. Fantha coiled around her neck in the wyrm’s closest approximation of a hug. All Jen could say was “home.”
* * * * * *
Kath felt her world becoming increasingly abstract. The veins and assorted other passageways of the hydra’s body gave way at points to stone walls, rooms of coral, and pools of clean salt water. She led her froglike companions through a digestive organ through which a river of acid run, and helped evade a couple of those dragons that seemed to litter the place for no apparent reason, but also past a virus that spoke in math and wouldn’t let her cross until she solved its riddles (when it began to cheat, she killed it). When they got lost, they encountered a tapeworm that would only tell them the way to the heart if they bought into its pyramid scheme, and failing that, if they brought him a fruit that only grows in the hydra’s adrenal gland (the fruit tried several times to escape from them, and when restrained would not shut up about its exploits in online videogaming). Kath met a brain that seemed completely unaware that it was inside a hydra at all, and Kath began to suspect that the brain was right, that she had long ago left the insides of the creature, or had never been there at all. The twisting passages of the labyrinth gave off an overwhelming impression that there was nothing outside, that she was simply nowhere, that even the politically-motivated frogs accompanying her were just paper dolls propped up to serve as foils, or perhaps tools, as a part of her test.
After what might have been weeks or hours (though she inwardly suspected, quite correctly, that it had been more like minutes), Kath and the frogs (they had no names) found themselves in a particularly clean-looking blood vessel, with walls that might have been copper except for the faint way they pulsed. Up ahead they could faintly make out the sound of rushing fluid, a massive torrent of it that caused the ground to quake beneath us.
“The aorta,” said one of the frogs in hushed tones.
“I didn’t think it would be this easy,” said the leader of CORPSE. “Transcriber, we cannot go with you much further.”
Kath suppressed a smile. A little solitude would do her some good. “Why not?” she asked.
The frogs looked embarrassed. One of them sternly looked at the leader, who scratched his head. “We… cannot swim,” he said.
Kath rolled her eyes. “Idiots. I’ve been traipsing around this place with a bunch of—”
Then there was a light.
When the light (partly) subsided, Kath found herself facing a sphere of pure white light. It was beautiful yet radiated malevolence, which caused Kath to feel a sort of kinship with it. The frogs recoiled in fear.
“B Cell!” shouted one of the frogs. “Run for your lives!” They ran and found themselves facing a second B Cell behind Kath. “Oh shit oh shit oh shit oh shit oh sh—”
The blubbering organelle found it within him to shut up when out of the white cell came six silhouettes; one feminine one in a mesmerizing shade of dark blue tinted with red, and five froglike ones the color of various “before” pictures in a commercial for cleaning products.
The female one approached Kath, staring intensely with pitch-black eyes. Kath realized she was looking at her own reflection, albeit inverted. The dark Kath spoke.
”I am Anti-Body,” it said with a voice like death. ”I am the other side of Alone. I am Abyss made Self. I am all that you will never learn to fear, or love.” The Anti-Body outstretched its hand. ”Join me, maid, and you will see such things growing on the underside of the Sculptor’s marble.”
Kath, for once, wasn’t sure if she was being led to the next part of her quest, or its end. She tentatively lifted up her hand, but was blindsided by the shockwave from the explosion that threw her to the ground (the Anti-Body remained still).
She looked around, there were only four frogs remaining, each pursued by or fighting against four Anti-Frogs. Another of the Anti-Frogs caught up with its original and the two were simply gone, causing another burst of energy.
Kath rose to her legs and faced the Anti-Kath, drawing her sword. The Anti-Body smiled and drew her own weapon, holding it by the blade and brandishing the hilt towards Kath.
The swords clashed. The Anti-Sword seemed heavier than her own, and with each motion of the duel Kath found her arm forced downwards painfully. The Anti-Body was toying with her, which didn’t seem right, according to Kath’s vague knowledge of microphilosophy. Shouldn’t they be equal?
Kath became aware that the Anti-Body was reading her thoughts around the time it said, ”We will never be equals except in annihilation. I come as an agent of the White; you are ‘dis-ease;’ you number among the ills of the world. The Hydra commumes with the White and the Anti-White to ensure Homeostasis Quo. You are neither side of the coin; you are nothing. You are merely Kath.” Kath, not knowing for sure quite why, found herself falling to her knees. She realized just how long she had been walking, how long she’d been wearing these ugly ineffectual legs. She saw her Anti-Body standing over her, not making a finishing move. Instead it leaned over and whispered in her ear.
”Don’t worry, Kath. The Ultra-Darkness doesn’t want you come to harm. We care for you. You’re the rough in the diamond. The bloodstain on the green dress. Watch.”
The Anti-Body nonchalantly raised her sword up to her mouth and touched the tip to her tongue, drawing a drop of green blood. Then she slit her own throat. Torrents of beautiful, sparkling green spilled out over her torso. ”Not exactly the standard template for an affectionate gesture,” said the Anti-Body, the melodrama draining out of its voice along with the blood, ”But we hope you get the sentiment, Kath. Don’t disappoint us.”
The Anti-Body burst into a black smoke that smelled of sex and harsh perfume. Kath tried not to breathe it in, but had always had difficulty holding her breath in air. She inhaled a brief gulp of the black stuff, but exhaled only air.
Then she was alone, with the sole surviving frog to keep her company. “Come on,” she told it, not bothering to try and figure out what just happened.
Two minutes later, they were at the shores of the hydra’s aorta. “This is where we part, I take,” Kath told the frog, without emotion.
“Yes indeed,” replied the frog, with a great wealth of emotion. “I pray that you may return to a free body, and aid in the process of decomposing the old to build a better world in the rotting carcass of liberty.”
Kath chuckled. “Of course,” she intoned, sagelike. “Because I’m doing this for you.”
The frog smiled hopefully. As his head fell off his body the smile folded into a sort of tilde. The rest of the organelle’s skin crumpled like a suit that nobody was bothering to wear anymore. Kath, despite her usual aversion to clothes, was struck by a sudden urge to wear the frog over herself. As she tied in her sword, she sighed, imagining that she felt a slight rattling in her respiratories—not pneumonic exactly, but like somebody trying to escape.
Kath looked over the edge, wished away her legs and allowed herself to fall into the river of blood.
In her youth, whenever Jen had to do something monotonous—say, shucking corn—she helped pass the time by imagining what the simple task looked like from a microscopic level. She pictured the individual fibers of the plant snapping like palm trees in a hurricane, little germs fleeing in all directions, and for a rare moment Jen stopped being the submissive daughter, the shy and unlikable middle schooler, shucked her personality of the B+ student to reveal something golden and nutritional underneath. She was the destroyer of worlds. She was powerful.
Jen allowed herself to imagine, briefly, how the Ovoid felt.
To just sink would be a bit too pedestrian for the anomaly; showy as ever, the Ovoid had to distort and stretch and speed up and slow down and generally act like a broken film reel of a lava lamp. Arkal, in a moment, was a hundred yards away from her, and then on top of a hill above her, and then gone; for a moment Jen could see right in front of her face a crew of low-budget pirate cosplayers struggling to board their vessel; when she finally bumped into Kracht, it was like very suddenly getting a boyfriend. She felt secure with the one thing in this world that was guaranteed permanent grabbing her a bit roughly by the shoulder.
“Hey there,” she said to Kracht, gratefully. She felt a little guilty, all of a sudden, for her prolonged association with the knife-wielding maniac who had devoted most of the past two rounds to killing this perfectly friendly chunk of rock. “I assume you’ve been through this before.”
”It usually doesn’t get this… excitable… this fast,” Kracht responded glibly. There was a note of sadness in Kracht’s voice harmonizing with the note of sadness that had always been there; something had changed this round. As if confirming her suspicion, Kracht asked half a question. ”I, um. Are you…”
”Spit it out, Kracht.com. Pretend it’s a list. ‘Top 5 Things I Have to Say to Jen (And Why I’m A Bitch About It)’. You can do it.”
”Are you going to kill me?” Kracht blurted out, a bit pathetically.
Jen giggled sleepily. “Kill you? Come on Kracht, you’re like a Hostess snack cake with a cream filling of pure diamond. Which leads us to, A) how am I supposed to kill something with no expiration date, and B) why would I want to kill something so delicious? Answer me this, Mr. Time DJ.”
Kracht sulked. ”Listen, Jen, when you’re as accustomed to it as I am, familiarity can be a kind of drug.” The Ovoid seemed to have settled a bit, leaving Jen and Kracht islanded in a place that was both underwater and dry, pitch-black and sunlit. ”Things are different now. All this water. Alexei. You dying, and…” Kracht looked uneasily at Fanthalion, who hissed at him coyly. ”I’m sorry, I’ve gotten out of the habit of asking names.”
”Its name’s—sorry, her name is Fantha.”
”Yes, well, ‘Fantha,’ you’re a part of it too. …I don’t know, sometimes I get these… solipsist notions. Like the whole world is just a recurring dream that incarnates all the little fragments of myself, except in this one suddenly I’m drowning. And now I’m starting to think, if I just, no, when I finally get shattered, and all these little fragments, you and Xadrez and Arkal and the whole world are just falling to the floor without a me to reflect anymore, maybe that’s when all this starts to matter. No more do-overs, no more continuity. The universe begins when I die. This sounds stupid, I’m rambling, sorry.”
Jen took a seat on the surprisingly soft Ovoid surface. “Kracht,” she said. “Moses—you know Moses, right? You know of Moses.” Kracht nodded, sitting down across from Jen. “Moses told me once when my friend Nostal Joe died, some years back. Great guy, Joe, you remind me of him, I guess. I was in a pretty bad way, and I, you know I did some spells and I was sort of out of it and I went down to this little seaside village where I met the guy, which was also where I buried him. And where I used to have friends in this place and run around with a wooden sword with ten-year-old kids and it was one of the only places in the whole Place where there was never anything unexpected going on and I could just relax, but now, now coming back there with this guy’s death just sort of treating my gut like a bouncy castle… it all seemed so small. Small, and backwards, and poor, and it smelled like fish and I… I just couldn’t look at it. I ordered it razed. I was in talks with the royal arsonists, talking about it like it wasn’t any sort of significant thing, just a day on the job, talking about, you know, how to create this aesthetically pleasing conflagration with zero casualties and relocate everyone to that city with the upside-down wall, I forget what it was called, and feed the ashes to the Indus Tree. And I was starting to relax, like it would make everything better if this place just weren’t here anymore, and I could make a new village after a while that would supposedly be better, and in comes Moses, and for the life of me I couldn’t understand why he was mad. And he just pulls me aside and he tells me that it’s ‘rather common’ for people who’ve faced death to ‘attempt to recontextualize their predicament in terms of rebirth.’ Winter, for example he says, gives birth to spring. But, Moses says this and I believe him, cause the guy’s been around a long time, and not just coasting for a few infinities like you have but he really lived a long life, you know? Moses says that’s a lie. Winter gives way to spring but the spring isn’t any better than it was last year, it’s the same old shit. And that spring is guaranteed every time to turn into another winter, in turn. So who am I, he asks me,’ to seek catharsis in autumn?’ And he was right. I just wanted to watch the leaves turn red and fall off so the world would be in the same place I was.”
Kracht gave a dry smile. ”I’ve watched a lot of movies in my day, Jen. I’ve heard about all the anti-suicide speeches man is capable of writing. You don’t have to worry about me, I don’t want to die. I’m just… confused as to why I haven’t.”
”Yes, well, that’s what Xadrez is working on figuring out this very moment, as a side project from his grand plan of saving the universe from whatever-the-fuck or whatever the fuck—”
”We should talk about th—“
”No we shouldn’t,” interrupted Jen. “I have my own problems. At this point—and the degree of calm I’m displaying by suggesting this from my very, very high-stress position should be considered pretty commendable—at this point I don’t see any reason why anyone else should die at all.”
Kracht’s smile faded. ”As much as things change, your majesty, death is not an enemy that can be fought. Especially not in the Grand Battle.”
”Don’t call me that.”
”’Your majesty’? Things have changed, if you’ve decided to be modest.”
”I haven’t ‘decided’ anything,” snapped Jen. “I lost the Green when I died. The Place is a—” she spat the word “democracy for a bit, and then it’s going to be taken over by a sexy mermaid who I think is also a serial killer. So that’s… that’s how my day’s been going.”
”Oh. Yeah, well that’s different.” Kracht shuddered. ”As much as it unsettled me falling into your domain, being Green and all, belonging to someone else—someone I have never met… is worse.”
”It’s bad feelings all around. And I mean, I’ve gotten used to the idea of not really thinking of myself as a queen anymore. I was just walking around the ‘real’ world or whatever and meeting people and not paying taxes and I was pretty happy. But now this idea that I might not see it again, on account of some stupid loophole. It sucks.”
Kracht clapped his hands together with a rather piercing and uncomfortable sound. ”I can fix that,” he said. ”Of course you can see the Place again. You figured it out a long time ago. The Ovoid.”
”The Ovoid can take me there? I didn’t think we were on really good terms.”
”No, no.” Kracht stood up abruptly. ”But being here makes things a bit more pliant. You can extend a sort of scrying spell to reach the Place. Sometimes even send messages.”
Jen nodded excitedly. “Shit. Yes, of course I can. I just need to—what do I need to do?”
”Improvise. You’ve only ever figured it out in the past.”
Jen smiled. “Alright. Sit with me. Fantha, stretch around to the side a bit, it’s going to need to be the three of us in a circle. No, scratch that, in an oval. Ow. There’s a girl. Join hands.” Jen reached out and touched Fantha with her left hand, and came to the odd realization that she could feel what Fantha felt, though with a slight time lapse. Her other hand was encompassed in Kracht’s rather larger and colder hand. Kracht touched Fantha lightly on the wyrm’s chin, and the oval was complete.
There was a minute of silence, as Jen’s breathing and Fantha’s slight up-and-down motions slowed down and came into synch with the faint pulses of radiation off of Kracht’s unmoving body. Then, while remaining seated, Jen arose and stood in the center of the oval. She seemed somewhat older, though it may have just been the lack of stripes in her hair and the substitution of her bizarre tie-dye outfit for a simple green dress the strap to which constantly threatened to fall off of one shoulder (the same shoulder that would have ordinarily had Fantha sticking out of it). Jen smiled and looked down at her seated self, whose eyes were closed and who appeared very small. Then she looked further down and tapped the ground with her bare foot. “You’re in on this too,” Jen told the Ovoid, “whether you want to be or not.” The ground gave no reply. “Alright,” concluded Jen, looking up at the sky, which was itself underwater, “Let’s do this shit.”
Jen gave a gesture and appeared to be working an invisible interface, shuffling through a series of menus that only she could see. She turned a knob and there was a piercing feedback noise that managed to be beautiful and harmonic despite itself. Jen turned off the sound. “Celestereo’s up in running,” she told herself/Fantha/Kracht/the Ovoid. “What are we feeling for working music? Gangster? Green Classical? Proto-pop?” She looked around expectantly. “Alright, alright,” she said. “A bit more contemporary. Be warned that being filtered through planes and shit tends to distort the lyrics to reflect the truth, but I’ve never been in the habit of listening too hard to lyrics. So, you know.” She turned another knob and a male voice began to sing.
“When I get older
I will be stronger
They’ll call me freedom
Just like a waving flag”
“Guilty pleasure of mine, I know,” said Jen, perhaps too softly to be easily heard over the music. “So what do you think, we visit the world tree?”
“…and never go back
And never go back
And never go back,” answered the music.
“Cool beans,” replied Jen. A small stalk was growing out of the ground. Jen stepped out of the way, singing along. “Born to a throne, stronger than Rome, um, something own.” She stopped, fearing that her rather poor singing voice would slow the growth of the world tree.
She needn’t have worried. It grew to several feet above her height, sprouted a rainbow of branches, leaves and fruits that cast a glaringly bright shade over Jen’s head, further isolating those involved in the ritual. “Thanks, Norse mythology!” said Jen, patting the tree. At her touch, nine rings began to circle the tree.
“…where I was grown
Cosmos we’d roam
Out of the green I
Made myself seen I
Became the queen…”
Gold letters hanging in the air identified one of the rings as “Groennheim;” this struck Jen as completely unnecessary as it was the only ring that was bright green, and gave off an imperceptibly soft sound of children laughing. She touched the ring and everything went green. Kracht, the seated Jen, Fantha, and a sound that might have been the voice of the Ovoid began to sing along very loudly as Jen, feeling the presence of something much more powerful than her, struggled to hold onto the ring.
“When you were older
Your arm was longer
You had a kingdom
You were its verdant flag
But now you’re a rag
But now you’re a rag
But now you’re a—”
Celestereo cut out with a twang and a crash. The world tree was gone and all was red and green and beige. For a moment she thought she had failed, and then for another moment she thought she was dead, and then she opened her eyes.
The circle was now nowhere, and was also properly circular, having opened up a bit to accommodate an ovoid manifestation of the Ovoid. Fantha retreated to a comfortable length, and Kracht stood, pointing upwards. There was a sound of flags rustling.
Jen looked up and it felt more like looking inwards. Bulging slightly as though refracted through a glass ball, there was an image of a green castle.
Jen’s lips quivered but she didn’t cry. Fantha coiled around her neck in the wyrm’s closest approximation of a hug. All Jen could say was “home.”
* * * * * *
Kath felt her world becoming increasingly abstract. The veins and assorted other passageways of the hydra’s body gave way at points to stone walls, rooms of coral, and pools of clean salt water. She led her froglike companions through a digestive organ through which a river of acid run, and helped evade a couple of those dragons that seemed to litter the place for no apparent reason, but also past a virus that spoke in math and wouldn’t let her cross until she solved its riddles (when it began to cheat, she killed it). When they got lost, they encountered a tapeworm that would only tell them the way to the heart if they bought into its pyramid scheme, and failing that, if they brought him a fruit that only grows in the hydra’s adrenal gland (the fruit tried several times to escape from them, and when restrained would not shut up about its exploits in online videogaming). Kath met a brain that seemed completely unaware that it was inside a hydra at all, and Kath began to suspect that the brain was right, that she had long ago left the insides of the creature, or had never been there at all. The twisting passages of the labyrinth gave off an overwhelming impression that there was nothing outside, that she was simply nowhere, that even the politically-motivated frogs accompanying her were just paper dolls propped up to serve as foils, or perhaps tools, as a part of her test.
After what might have been weeks or hours (though she inwardly suspected, quite correctly, that it had been more like minutes), Kath and the frogs (they had no names) found themselves in a particularly clean-looking blood vessel, with walls that might have been copper except for the faint way they pulsed. Up ahead they could faintly make out the sound of rushing fluid, a massive torrent of it that caused the ground to quake beneath us.
“The aorta,” said one of the frogs in hushed tones.
“I didn’t think it would be this easy,” said the leader of CORPSE. “Transcriber, we cannot go with you much further.”
Kath suppressed a smile. A little solitude would do her some good. “Why not?” she asked.
The frogs looked embarrassed. One of them sternly looked at the leader, who scratched his head. “We… cannot swim,” he said.
Kath rolled her eyes. “Idiots. I’ve been traipsing around this place with a bunch of—”
Then there was a light.
When the light (partly) subsided, Kath found herself facing a sphere of pure white light. It was beautiful yet radiated malevolence, which caused Kath to feel a sort of kinship with it. The frogs recoiled in fear.
“B Cell!” shouted one of the frogs. “Run for your lives!” They ran and found themselves facing a second B Cell behind Kath. “Oh shit oh shit oh shit oh shit oh sh—”
The blubbering organelle found it within him to shut up when out of the white cell came six silhouettes; one feminine one in a mesmerizing shade of dark blue tinted with red, and five froglike ones the color of various “before” pictures in a commercial for cleaning products.
The female one approached Kath, staring intensely with pitch-black eyes. Kath realized she was looking at her own reflection, albeit inverted. The dark Kath spoke.
”I am Anti-Body,” it said with a voice like death. ”I am the other side of Alone. I am Abyss made Self. I am all that you will never learn to fear, or love.” The Anti-Body outstretched its hand. ”Join me, maid, and you will see such things growing on the underside of the Sculptor’s marble.”
Kath, for once, wasn’t sure if she was being led to the next part of her quest, or its end. She tentatively lifted up her hand, but was blindsided by the shockwave from the explosion that threw her to the ground (the Anti-Body remained still).
She looked around, there were only four frogs remaining, each pursued by or fighting against four Anti-Frogs. Another of the Anti-Frogs caught up with its original and the two were simply gone, causing another burst of energy.
Kath rose to her legs and faced the Anti-Kath, drawing her sword. The Anti-Body smiled and drew her own weapon, holding it by the blade and brandishing the hilt towards Kath.
The swords clashed. The Anti-Sword seemed heavier than her own, and with each motion of the duel Kath found her arm forced downwards painfully. The Anti-Body was toying with her, which didn’t seem right, according to Kath’s vague knowledge of microphilosophy. Shouldn’t they be equal?
Kath became aware that the Anti-Body was reading her thoughts around the time it said, ”We will never be equals except in annihilation. I come as an agent of the White; you are ‘dis-ease;’ you number among the ills of the world. The Hydra commumes with the White and the Anti-White to ensure Homeostasis Quo. You are neither side of the coin; you are nothing. You are merely Kath.” Kath, not knowing for sure quite why, found herself falling to her knees. She realized just how long she had been walking, how long she’d been wearing these ugly ineffectual legs. She saw her Anti-Body standing over her, not making a finishing move. Instead it leaned over and whispered in her ear.
”Don’t worry, Kath. The Ultra-Darkness doesn’t want you come to harm. We care for you. You’re the rough in the diamond. The bloodstain on the green dress. Watch.”
The Anti-Body nonchalantly raised her sword up to her mouth and touched the tip to her tongue, drawing a drop of green blood. Then she slit her own throat. Torrents of beautiful, sparkling green spilled out over her torso. ”Not exactly the standard template for an affectionate gesture,” said the Anti-Body, the melodrama draining out of its voice along with the blood, ”But we hope you get the sentiment, Kath. Don’t disappoint us.”
The Anti-Body burst into a black smoke that smelled of sex and harsh perfume. Kath tried not to breathe it in, but had always had difficulty holding her breath in air. She inhaled a brief gulp of the black stuff, but exhaled only air.
Then she was alone, with the sole surviving frog to keep her company. “Come on,” she told it, not bothering to try and figure out what just happened.
Two minutes later, they were at the shores of the hydra’s aorta. “This is where we part, I take,” Kath told the frog, without emotion.
“Yes indeed,” replied the frog, with a great wealth of emotion. “I pray that you may return to a free body, and aid in the process of decomposing the old to build a better world in the rotting carcass of liberty.”
Kath chuckled. “Of course,” she intoned, sagelike. “Because I’m doing this for you.”
The frog smiled hopefully. As his head fell off his body the smile folded into a sort of tilde. The rest of the organelle’s skin crumpled like a suit that nobody was bothering to wear anymore. Kath, despite her usual aversion to clothes, was struck by a sudden urge to wear the frog over herself. As she tied in her sword, she sighed, imagining that she felt a slight rattling in her respiratories—not pneumonic exactly, but like somebody trying to escape.
Kath looked over the edge, wished away her legs and allowed herself to fall into the river of blood.