Re: The Grand Battle S2G1! [Round Three: Water...place!]
03-07-2011, 04:05 PM
Originally posted on MSPA by Lord Paradise.
Caveside is a village that attracts a certain type of resident, and this is most often attributed to the smell. It’s a sickening, chemical smell, formaldehyde and pheromones with a hint of brimstone and diesel; depending on one’s mood it might keep one indoors, or draw one into the cave from which it wafts. People who will go to a town that smells like Caveside are suspiciously homogeneous: for one thing, they’re male humans, mostly; they’re either very tall, very short, very fat, or very thin, with a very small or a very big nose; religious in a fatalistic capacity, yet not averse to crime; prone to tell stories, when drunk, of their poor relationship with their mothers. There are also a number of whores of both genders, though they tend to dodge the census, not wanting to be thought of as residents of Caveside; these whores are to the one the richest people in Caveside, though all of them think of themselves as down on their luck, due to the poor odds of their retiring or leaving in the near future.
Caveside was always one of the ugliest places in the Place, and for this reason, as well as her culpability in its needing to exist, the Queen never failed to pop in once a year to admire the harvest.
The main crop of Caveside is abominations. These are sometimes grown as plants, sometimes raised as livestock, and end up looking much the same, in that they look nothing like anything. Everybody in Caveside eventually learns the trick of growing abominations, bombarding them with murky glowing magic and pruning off anything that seems to fit in with the rest. Once the abomination is complete, when the twin helixes of form and function (as the texts describe it) are unraveled and crumpled into chaos, it is brought to the cave, and there devoured by the Mother Dragon.
Jen watches, both separated by an ovoid veil and closer to everything than she ever has been, as the dragonslayers sneak into the cave. They wear facemasks to keep the smell at bay and earplugs so they can ignore the amelodic growl that comes from the Mother Dragon’s mouth, stirring into rumbling moans as she is hit by the occasional contraction of time and space. Then slayers have been instructed that if they cut her womb open, they will find no embryo or sac of eggs but a cyclone of possible embryos, the sight of which will lead to insanity and probably undying loyalty to the queen, so they should rather go for the neck.
Unaware that they are currently being watched with disgust by their rightful queen, the two dragonslayers are comfortably awash in an idea of nobility that supercedes the irony of their destroying the last chance of their future employment. Surely they need the vast influx of money that the upcoming birth will bring them: the centaur, let’s call him Jack, has several children to provide for and has lately taken to the ignoble profesion of smuggling letters and packages through routes unauthorized by the Post; the spider-vampire, let’s call her Jill, has been unable to maintain her expensive diet of silk and her body, once a favorite subject of first-year art students both due to the intrinsic beauty of her curves and the complexity of shadows cast by her four-each arms and legs, has withered away to something barely worth commenting on. Unfortunately, neither slayer entered their profession out of any notion of romantic heroism or even the promise of wealth, but by a piercing hatred of the dragon paradigm as a whole. They intend to bring it to obsolescence before its next iteration so much as begins; Jen is confident that they will fail, probably dying but certainly learning the folly of their ways. The former Queen remarks, without a great degree of hope, that she had intended to be there for the birth; then she turns the page on reality.
* * * * *
In the Place birds are shining, the sun is singing, little pebbles are falling down; a reverse tsunami creates an entire village. The three-piece suit is invented, completed with necktie; its tailor considers it for a moment then tosses it into the fire, cursing his mistake. A river flows from the ocean delta to a lake on a mountaintop, and the wind blows downwards, to the annoyance of some subterranean puffins. In a wedding ceremony between a four-year-old girl and the locket that tells her to cut off the hair of strangers, the best man breaks down in tears, then in laughter. About thirty miles west of everywhere, there is a great bargain on reanimated toad corpses, and folks come from all directions, arriving by the east road. An actor and a cow fall asleep simultaneously, each hitting the pillow so hard that they swap dreams. A lad of twelve makes an underhanded bargain with the gods, instructing them to incarnate as a very specific set of objects along a very specific path, and in exchange he offers to share with them the prize for the scavenger hunt. The word “flifsk” isn’t used by anybody for an entire day, so it retroactively pops out of existence. All of these things Jen saw, and for the most part understood.
* * * * *
On the Isle of Fuck This Isle, the Congress of Bastards reacted to the news of their queen’s death by getting wasted.
It was the third day since the word had reached them. Jethro of Man’s Man’s Quarry was very loudly telling a meandering and pointless story to Hr’drp the 64/13 and Most Clever Earl of Sky, who both seemed to find it uproariously funny. Father Grand watched on, bemoaning their sinful behavior, while Automatomboy moped and nursed a glass of water from the Ocean of Scotch. A chess game started between Half Moon Jack and She Whose Name is Forbidden by Three Separate Laws, devolved into backgammon, and came to an awkward halt when nobody agreed to be the Dungeon Master. There was a brief uninspired debate about Herman Melville before everybody came to the awkward realization that they were in a fantasy land and Herman Melville was not a thing.
It at last came to be that everyone agreed to sit down and have a chat about how best to flatter or else depose the new monarch who would probably come into power pretty soon, to the eventual effect of being pardoned or else shortening the term of the banishment imposed upon them by the previous monarch. The bickering accelerated until the Chad Vanderbilt announced that he had to “take a dump the size of your mom’s dick” and Jen decided she’d rather look somewhere else.
* * * * *
The Unlibrarian, who in a past life had gone by the Librarian, woke up at 5 and a third hours past high noon, to the sound of a mockingbird who had been enchanted to hear the voices at the bottom of the ocean. “Cxzneuioadafjkl,” it called.
The Unlibrarian groaned and rolled onto the left side of his bed, stumbling in the dark for some sort of breakfast. He grabbed his hat, so he ate it approximately, but not exactly not necessarily more or less than, half of it.
He dressed himself in a shirt of fire and grasshopper-leather pants with a month-old cookie in the pocket; missing his hat, he covered his head in flour. The clock struck fourteen-ninety-two, and he discovered a globe, which he shattered.
The shirt of fire began to dig away at the stitches through which the Middle-Gem was sewed to his chest, so he made that stop happening somehow and by the time it was done it was rapidly approaching both two and five o’ clock. The Unlibrarian cooked and ate last Thursday’s lunch and felt that if it never made him less hungry it would make him drowsy sometime in the spring, though he couldn’t be certain.
The Unlibrarian spent twenty-one minutes throwing dartboards at a dart, while blindfolded. He didn’t keep score, though he felt he had done worse than last time, which he supposed was good. He walked downstairs, then upstairs, then upstairs, then upstairs, then jumped off the roof, then jumped off the floor, then jumped off the wall. He found himself in his study; thus it was that the Unlibrarian decided to undergo cutting up his books and rearranging the words in aesthetically awkward combinations under his bed.
The Unlibrarian made an extensive list of words that didn’t rhyme and fed them to a reptilian thing he didn’t remember ever introducing to his butler, who was dead anyways. By noon he had deified a number of flowers that neither stood out nor overtly failed to stand out, in an effort to correct this error, and succeeded somehow. He wrote a poem about his blossoming sexuality, using only words he hadn’t used in his list of words that didn’t rhyme.
It was clear to all observing (which included Jen and her companions, among others) that the strain of his job was starting to get to the Unlbrarian. He was getting old faster than he should, and also getting young in a different direction than he ought. Eventually he was compelled to leave the chaos behind for a minute and walk, left-right-left-right like he used to, out to the balcony.
Outside of the Middle-House, from which the gods take their cues, all was serene. The Unlibrarian felt the Middle-Gem throb in his chest, observing nature and beginning to draw patterns, developing rhythms. The Unlibrarian felt a pang of fear and shame and ran back into the house.
Several impartial observers (except perhaps partial in that they had taken bets) wondered when the Unlibrarian would die, and when he did, what would happen. Would the chaos he had left in the Middle-House become self-sustaining, or would it dissolve into order, stagnancy, even society? The very nature of that-which-isn’t rested on this game of anarchy. The odds at the moment favored that a new queen would arise and kill or reassign the Unlibrarian herself, bringing constancy and order to the philosophy of magic once more. There would follow a time of science.
Jen stopped watching, partly because keeping up with time in the Unlibrarian’s Middle-House was a headache-inducing ordeal, partly out of guilt. She had had to make some hard decisions, back when she couldn’t pretend that it wasn’t all her responsibility.
* * * * *
Finally she brought herself to look inside the castle. Just outside the moat, the world was ashimmer with revolution; she couldn’t see any of the various dissenters , deserters, anarchists, republicans, legitimists, ill-wishers and hippies who surrounded the castle, their having invoked a mythical right to privacy, but she had been in these situations before and could identify many of them through the muffled sounds and smells alone. Jen sighed. Whatever were to happen next, it would not be without a battle.
Inside, everything went a bit blurry, but in a different, greener way, as though a tortoise with a monocle were everywhere at once; poor Moses always got like this when not directly observed. Jen tried clearing her throat in five dimensions, and this Moses seemed to hear, for he suddenly decided to exclusively exist right in front of where she was viewing.
Moses cocked his head, as excitedly as he could do anything. He looked very old and tired. ”Your once and future Majesty,” said Moses, in that somewhat less reserved tone he always used to substitute the entire emotional spectrum, ”Very well of you to drop by. May I ask what afterlife you are in? I perceive… beige. It doesn’t suit you.”
”Moses, I’m alive,” said Jen at a pitch just sort of shouting, but the meaning failed to penetrate the barrier between worlds. The Ovoid gave a slightly feminine rumble, as though judging her, or attempting to impart maternal wisdom. The window was beginning to close.
Kracht sighed. These sorts of elaborate rituals weren’t really his style, as far as his magical training went. He rose from the circle, causing the window to begin to crack and become convex.
Kracht, feeling vaguely that he was profaning something just short of divine but not really caring, shoved aside the faintly-glowing avatar of Jen, and simply punched through the window.
Were the mineral made of flesh or even something so pedestrian as steel, this would have been a problem. In the microscopic infinity separating Ovoid and Place were suns and galaxies and demons; his arm passed briefly through a space where the universe was constantly being created. Having survived Creation events many times before, Kracht had assumed this wouldn’t be a problem, but those hadn’t been quite so… focused. It stung him, kind of a lot.
Once his arm, blackened by microcosmic soot, had punched through to the place, he pulled at the other side of the window, revealing his face in front of Moses. “She’s alive,” he told the tortoise, sardonically. “But she has bigger things to worry about right now. Whatever comes next on your end, just stall it.”
Kracht pulled his arm back through to the Ovoid and the window collapsed. For a moment there was pitch blackness broken only by the respective faint glows off of Kracht and the Jen-avatar; then the Jen disappeared, her dress folding into a scarf, and the strange unnatural light of the Ovoid flickered back on. The world-tree stayed rooted in place, although now it was just a tree.
Jen woke up, sighing deeply. There was a sound not unlike water flowing. In one quick yet slightly disjointed motion she got up, snatched up the scarf, wrapped it around Fantha a couple of times, and then confronted Kracht.
“Bigger things to worry about? Jesus on a stick… two sticks, I guess… Jesus, Kracht, show a little tact.”
”My arm,” was all Kracht would say, polishing the hurt appendage.
”Your arm? My fucking shoulder! No offense,” she added, nodding in Fantha’s direction.
Both Jen and Kracht sighed, neither of them wanting to push the matter any further. They began to walk downstream, vaguely aware that the Ovoid was beginning to decelerate under their feet. Wherever they were headed, they would be arriving soon.
Caveside is a village that attracts a certain type of resident, and this is most often attributed to the smell. It’s a sickening, chemical smell, formaldehyde and pheromones with a hint of brimstone and diesel; depending on one’s mood it might keep one indoors, or draw one into the cave from which it wafts. People who will go to a town that smells like Caveside are suspiciously homogeneous: for one thing, they’re male humans, mostly; they’re either very tall, very short, very fat, or very thin, with a very small or a very big nose; religious in a fatalistic capacity, yet not averse to crime; prone to tell stories, when drunk, of their poor relationship with their mothers. There are also a number of whores of both genders, though they tend to dodge the census, not wanting to be thought of as residents of Caveside; these whores are to the one the richest people in Caveside, though all of them think of themselves as down on their luck, due to the poor odds of their retiring or leaving in the near future.
Caveside was always one of the ugliest places in the Place, and for this reason, as well as her culpability in its needing to exist, the Queen never failed to pop in once a year to admire the harvest.
The main crop of Caveside is abominations. These are sometimes grown as plants, sometimes raised as livestock, and end up looking much the same, in that they look nothing like anything. Everybody in Caveside eventually learns the trick of growing abominations, bombarding them with murky glowing magic and pruning off anything that seems to fit in with the rest. Once the abomination is complete, when the twin helixes of form and function (as the texts describe it) are unraveled and crumpled into chaos, it is brought to the cave, and there devoured by the Mother Dragon.
Jen watches, both separated by an ovoid veil and closer to everything than she ever has been, as the dragonslayers sneak into the cave. They wear facemasks to keep the smell at bay and earplugs so they can ignore the amelodic growl that comes from the Mother Dragon’s mouth, stirring into rumbling moans as she is hit by the occasional contraction of time and space. Then slayers have been instructed that if they cut her womb open, they will find no embryo or sac of eggs but a cyclone of possible embryos, the sight of which will lead to insanity and probably undying loyalty to the queen, so they should rather go for the neck.
Unaware that they are currently being watched with disgust by their rightful queen, the two dragonslayers are comfortably awash in an idea of nobility that supercedes the irony of their destroying the last chance of their future employment. Surely they need the vast influx of money that the upcoming birth will bring them: the centaur, let’s call him Jack, has several children to provide for and has lately taken to the ignoble profesion of smuggling letters and packages through routes unauthorized by the Post; the spider-vampire, let’s call her Jill, has been unable to maintain her expensive diet of silk and her body, once a favorite subject of first-year art students both due to the intrinsic beauty of her curves and the complexity of shadows cast by her four-each arms and legs, has withered away to something barely worth commenting on. Unfortunately, neither slayer entered their profession out of any notion of romantic heroism or even the promise of wealth, but by a piercing hatred of the dragon paradigm as a whole. They intend to bring it to obsolescence before its next iteration so much as begins; Jen is confident that they will fail, probably dying but certainly learning the folly of their ways. The former Queen remarks, without a great degree of hope, that she had intended to be there for the birth; then she turns the page on reality.
* * * * *
In the Place birds are shining, the sun is singing, little pebbles are falling down; a reverse tsunami creates an entire village. The three-piece suit is invented, completed with necktie; its tailor considers it for a moment then tosses it into the fire, cursing his mistake. A river flows from the ocean delta to a lake on a mountaintop, and the wind blows downwards, to the annoyance of some subterranean puffins. In a wedding ceremony between a four-year-old girl and the locket that tells her to cut off the hair of strangers, the best man breaks down in tears, then in laughter. About thirty miles west of everywhere, there is a great bargain on reanimated toad corpses, and folks come from all directions, arriving by the east road. An actor and a cow fall asleep simultaneously, each hitting the pillow so hard that they swap dreams. A lad of twelve makes an underhanded bargain with the gods, instructing them to incarnate as a very specific set of objects along a very specific path, and in exchange he offers to share with them the prize for the scavenger hunt. The word “flifsk” isn’t used by anybody for an entire day, so it retroactively pops out of existence. All of these things Jen saw, and for the most part understood.
* * * * *
On the Isle of Fuck This Isle, the Congress of Bastards reacted to the news of their queen’s death by getting wasted.
It was the third day since the word had reached them. Jethro of Man’s Man’s Quarry was very loudly telling a meandering and pointless story to Hr’drp the 64/13 and Most Clever Earl of Sky, who both seemed to find it uproariously funny. Father Grand watched on, bemoaning their sinful behavior, while Automatomboy moped and nursed a glass of water from the Ocean of Scotch. A chess game started between Half Moon Jack and She Whose Name is Forbidden by Three Separate Laws, devolved into backgammon, and came to an awkward halt when nobody agreed to be the Dungeon Master. There was a brief uninspired debate about Herman Melville before everybody came to the awkward realization that they were in a fantasy land and Herman Melville was not a thing.
It at last came to be that everyone agreed to sit down and have a chat about how best to flatter or else depose the new monarch who would probably come into power pretty soon, to the eventual effect of being pardoned or else shortening the term of the banishment imposed upon them by the previous monarch. The bickering accelerated until the Chad Vanderbilt announced that he had to “take a dump the size of your mom’s dick” and Jen decided she’d rather look somewhere else.
* * * * *
The Unlibrarian, who in a past life had gone by the Librarian, woke up at 5 and a third hours past high noon, to the sound of a mockingbird who had been enchanted to hear the voices at the bottom of the ocean. “Cxzneuioadafjkl,” it called.
The Unlibrarian groaned and rolled onto the left side of his bed, stumbling in the dark for some sort of breakfast. He grabbed his hat, so he ate it approximately, but not exactly not necessarily more or less than, half of it.
He dressed himself in a shirt of fire and grasshopper-leather pants with a month-old cookie in the pocket; missing his hat, he covered his head in flour. The clock struck fourteen-ninety-two, and he discovered a globe, which he shattered.
The shirt of fire began to dig away at the stitches through which the Middle-Gem was sewed to his chest, so he made that stop happening somehow and by the time it was done it was rapidly approaching both two and five o’ clock. The Unlibrarian cooked and ate last Thursday’s lunch and felt that if it never made him less hungry it would make him drowsy sometime in the spring, though he couldn’t be certain.
The Unlibrarian spent twenty-one minutes throwing dartboards at a dart, while blindfolded. He didn’t keep score, though he felt he had done worse than last time, which he supposed was good. He walked downstairs, then upstairs, then upstairs, then upstairs, then jumped off the roof, then jumped off the floor, then jumped off the wall. He found himself in his study; thus it was that the Unlibrarian decided to undergo cutting up his books and rearranging the words in aesthetically awkward combinations under his bed.
The Unlibrarian made an extensive list of words that didn’t rhyme and fed them to a reptilian thing he didn’t remember ever introducing to his butler, who was dead anyways. By noon he had deified a number of flowers that neither stood out nor overtly failed to stand out, in an effort to correct this error, and succeeded somehow. He wrote a poem about his blossoming sexuality, using only words he hadn’t used in his list of words that didn’t rhyme.
It was clear to all observing (which included Jen and her companions, among others) that the strain of his job was starting to get to the Unlbrarian. He was getting old faster than he should, and also getting young in a different direction than he ought. Eventually he was compelled to leave the chaos behind for a minute and walk, left-right-left-right like he used to, out to the balcony.
Outside of the Middle-House, from which the gods take their cues, all was serene. The Unlibrarian felt the Middle-Gem throb in his chest, observing nature and beginning to draw patterns, developing rhythms. The Unlibrarian felt a pang of fear and shame and ran back into the house.
Several impartial observers (except perhaps partial in that they had taken bets) wondered when the Unlibrarian would die, and when he did, what would happen. Would the chaos he had left in the Middle-House become self-sustaining, or would it dissolve into order, stagnancy, even society? The very nature of that-which-isn’t rested on this game of anarchy. The odds at the moment favored that a new queen would arise and kill or reassign the Unlibrarian herself, bringing constancy and order to the philosophy of magic once more. There would follow a time of science.
Jen stopped watching, partly because keeping up with time in the Unlibrarian’s Middle-House was a headache-inducing ordeal, partly out of guilt. She had had to make some hard decisions, back when she couldn’t pretend that it wasn’t all her responsibility.
* * * * *
Finally she brought herself to look inside the castle. Just outside the moat, the world was ashimmer with revolution; she couldn’t see any of the various dissenters , deserters, anarchists, republicans, legitimists, ill-wishers and hippies who surrounded the castle, their having invoked a mythical right to privacy, but she had been in these situations before and could identify many of them through the muffled sounds and smells alone. Jen sighed. Whatever were to happen next, it would not be without a battle.
Inside, everything went a bit blurry, but in a different, greener way, as though a tortoise with a monocle were everywhere at once; poor Moses always got like this when not directly observed. Jen tried clearing her throat in five dimensions, and this Moses seemed to hear, for he suddenly decided to exclusively exist right in front of where she was viewing.
Moses cocked his head, as excitedly as he could do anything. He looked very old and tired. ”Your once and future Majesty,” said Moses, in that somewhat less reserved tone he always used to substitute the entire emotional spectrum, ”Very well of you to drop by. May I ask what afterlife you are in? I perceive… beige. It doesn’t suit you.”
”Moses, I’m alive,” said Jen at a pitch just sort of shouting, but the meaning failed to penetrate the barrier between worlds. The Ovoid gave a slightly feminine rumble, as though judging her, or attempting to impart maternal wisdom. The window was beginning to close.
Kracht sighed. These sorts of elaborate rituals weren’t really his style, as far as his magical training went. He rose from the circle, causing the window to begin to crack and become convex.
Kracht, feeling vaguely that he was profaning something just short of divine but not really caring, shoved aside the faintly-glowing avatar of Jen, and simply punched through the window.
Were the mineral made of flesh or even something so pedestrian as steel, this would have been a problem. In the microscopic infinity separating Ovoid and Place were suns and galaxies and demons; his arm passed briefly through a space where the universe was constantly being created. Having survived Creation events many times before, Kracht had assumed this wouldn’t be a problem, but those hadn’t been quite so… focused. It stung him, kind of a lot.
Once his arm, blackened by microcosmic soot, had punched through to the place, he pulled at the other side of the window, revealing his face in front of Moses. “She’s alive,” he told the tortoise, sardonically. “But she has bigger things to worry about right now. Whatever comes next on your end, just stall it.”
Kracht pulled his arm back through to the Ovoid and the window collapsed. For a moment there was pitch blackness broken only by the respective faint glows off of Kracht and the Jen-avatar; then the Jen disappeared, her dress folding into a scarf, and the strange unnatural light of the Ovoid flickered back on. The world-tree stayed rooted in place, although now it was just a tree.
Jen woke up, sighing deeply. There was a sound not unlike water flowing. In one quick yet slightly disjointed motion she got up, snatched up the scarf, wrapped it around Fantha a couple of times, and then confronted Kracht.
“Bigger things to worry about? Jesus on a stick… two sticks, I guess… Jesus, Kracht, show a little tact.”
”My arm,” was all Kracht would say, polishing the hurt appendage.
”Your arm? My fucking shoulder! No offense,” she added, nodding in Fantha’s direction.
Both Jen and Kracht sighed, neither of them wanting to push the matter any further. They began to walk downstream, vaguely aware that the Ovoid was beginning to decelerate under their feet. Wherever they were headed, they would be arriving soon.