Re: The Grand Battle S2G1! [Round Five: Round Six!]
05-23-2012, 05:58 PM
(This post was last modified: 05-11-2013, 08:49 PM by Elpie.)
Originally posted on MSPA by Lord Paradise.
Jen was wearing all black. She’d been watching… some Tim Burton movie, who could remember, they were all the same. It had inspired her on a pure aesthetic level: being eleven years old and not much of a film critic, she’d failed to recognize the ultimate emotional emptiness, the lack of answers behind the Gothic trappings. Wearing black was an answer in itself. The color was everything: it meant being cool, and if you were cool enough you could survive on your own without food or water or income or parents. Getting the world to revolve around you meant that things would fall into your lap, was her loose and deeply mistaken conception of physics.
She had packed a diary and a selection of gel pens, to chronicle her adventure; a knife, stolen out of the kitchen, because there was no sense in wearing all black if you didn’t have anything to conceal; a waterbottle, and her scooter, and all the money she had in the world (a sizable one hundred and fifty dollars), and that would have to do.
“You’re sure you don’t want me to tell you where I’m going?” she asked Fanthalion.
The pretty redheaded girl who had never existed shook her head. “It’s better if I don’t know,” she answered, lying back on the bed.
“Well then, what good are you?” snapped Jen, banishing the figment from her memory. The circumstances of her egress from home warped around her, reflecting an important truth—she’d been truly, utterly alone, else why would she have run away? For that matter, why was she imagining her old bedroom as being covered in World Tree roots?
And why couldn’t she stop remembering things?
It was another memory that supplied the answer. ”Basically what I’m saying is this is going to hurt. Physically, emotionally… it’ll bring out the things that were buried.” Ah, yes. The elf bitch. Jen struggled to focus on the present as a form of rebellion. Where was she? Had she killed the entire human race? And if so, why was it an… Observer… thing… now? Had Fantha been left behind? Had Kath? Also, “the place” what? That wasn’t a very helpful descript—
Oh. Right.
Jen climbed to the top of a hill. She had already been doing so, instinctively. The climb wasn’t steep but she had to be careful to avoid stepping on the tiny ant-castles that dotted the hillside, lest she get a reputation as a murderous giant.
At the top of the hill an old man sat in an armchair. His skin was withered away, turned to fabric, and stained with grape soda. “Hello, little girl,” he said. “I am the Chairman. Give me a penny or equivalent token of insignificant value, and I’ll tell you what kind of chair your soul is.”
“I have nothing,” Jen assured the Chairman. “But how much to stand on your back? I need a vantage point.”
“Oh, you can have that for free. Myself, I haven’t stood in near a millennium. Not much point in standing when you’re the Chairman.”
Jen clambered onto one of the Chairman’s arms—chair arms, that is—being careful to avoid his arms—his human arms, that is. Her heart was racing. Way back at the beginning of the battle, she'd briefly considered the notion that the Place could be a round, but had long since decided that the Observer was too cruel to give her even a glimpse of home. The other one, though… “a first-hand demonstration of everything at stake”… maybe just. She balanced atop the back of the armchair and allowed herself to look around.
It wasn’t.
That said, it was.
For one thing, it wasn’t green anymore. Well, it was green, mostly, being largely comprised of forest and meadow, but that was jus a coincidence. The sky had a light purple tinge around the horizon, the sun appeared to be shining in negative, and there were violets growing wherever they saw the opportunity. For another thing, it looked absolutely nothing like her Place. Instead of a standard-issue palace, there appeared to be a giant whale floating centrally in the sky. The stars were different. The seas weren’t in the same places. Still, it shared a quality with her Place where you could see the whole thing just by standing on a hill. And aside from that, it shared a certain—aesthetic. A sense of whimsy. She found it difficult to believe that there was a second place like this, and therefore concluded that it must be the same place, only at a different time. The past, or the future, or something beyond that.
Jen giggled. She was back. “You’re not even a bit curious?” begged the Chairman. “Is your soul a recliner? Is it an office chair? Can you fold it up and store it in a closet? What color is it? What’s it made out of? Are the dogs allowed up on it? Could it even be—a throne? All of these things I can see, and all for a penny!”
Jen had been walking for what felt like hours. Of course, she hadn’t been patient enough back then to acknowledge a difference between “minutes” and “hours” beyond that they were both rather longer than seconds and she wanted to go home.
There was something terribly unfair about a hedge maze that didn’t hold a definite shape in three-dimensional space. She hadn’t quite suspended disbelief enough to be able to articulate this concern, but something was definitely up. A few minutes back she had tried circling back towards the entrance to find that the labyrinth simply kept going. Besides which, only a fraction of it was actually made of hedges anymore; there were steel gates and marble walls and stone tunnels, and sometimes the sky disappeared and when it came back the stars were different. Sometimes she heard growling, or laughter, or music, or something whispering her name. She understood, having seen that movie, that she was supposed to draw arrows where she’d been already, but gel pen wouldn’t work on most of these surfaces. It was all very disheartening. Getting lost and starving to death in a hedge maze was a silly way for a runaway preteen to die; if anything, she expected to be enslaved by a disreputable circus and shot for trying to escape, or run over by an eighteen-wheeler on the streets of New York, causing an accident that killed six people. You know, a fun, adventure-y death. It was that sense of childlike excitement, and an angry Rottweiler, that had driven her into the garden maze in the first place.
After some time wandering with no sense that the directional choices she was making were having any actual effect on her relative location, Jen just began to let her feet guide her—or maybe it was her heart, or a minty sweet smell carried on the air, or maybe she was just following a bumblebee. In any case, she was became certain that she was heading in the right direction—not only that she was heading towards the center of the maze, but that that was where she wanted to be. The corridors began to narrow out, the statuary became more ornate, the air was charged with a sense of importance. The moon hung low and heavy over her like a water balloon about to burst.
And when the fairies started to show up, flitting around telling dirty jokes and throwing acorns back and forth, it wasn’t exactly shock that Jen felt. It wasn’t anything that manifested outwards at all. The doors leading her from a sane, rational existence to a fantastical, logically unsound one opened automatically at her approach, like the entrance to a department store. A great number of things broke inside Jen’s head that day, but none of them turned out to be necessary, at least not for a great while afterwards. It was probably the greatest day of her life, and certainly the most important.
“Does it have a lever that moves the seat up and down? Are there any prominent stains on it? Is there a man sitting on it who is trying to swindle you out of a penny? Is it an heirloom? Is it more of a stool, really? If you and a friend were to—”
There came a voice from out of the forest. It roared like the sound of tears evaporating in a fire, filtered through a cheap garage-band sound system. ”ATTENTION, DENIZENS OF… OF ‘THE PLACE!’” it began. ”IN THE NAME OF THE SILVER AND THE BEIGE, I, SIR CEDRIC, ULTIMATE ALL-STAR AND GRAND CHAMPION, CLAIM THIS LAST BASTION OF BIODIVERSITY IN THE NAME OF HUMANKIND!”
”Hmm,” whispered the Chairman to Jen. “That man who is speaking: do you think he has a penny? I could tell him terrible things about his soul—yea, chairible things!”
“Shut up,” replied Jen, drawing her Ovoid-sword. “I’m listening.”
”I DO NOT ASK YOU TO SURRENDER!” the voice continued. ”FOR THERE WILL BE NO MERCY FOR YOU! THIS PLACE WILL BURN TO MAKE WAY FOR THE ARRIVAL OF THE SILVER CITY. MAKE YOUR PEACE WITH THE INEVITABLE. AS FOR MY COMPETITORS IN THIS ENGAGEMENT: EMMA, YOU’RE SAFER THAN ME THAN YOU ARE WITH THE ROCK. I’LL BE COMING TO KILL HIM AFTER THE RAZING OF THIS PLACE, WHICH YOU CAN DO NOTHING TO PREVENT. I’LL SEE YOU THEN, AT THE LATEST. BE CAREFUL.”
Jen leapt down off of the Chairman’s chair. “Always refreshing to know whose ass to kick,” she told him.
“Ah, yes,” agreed the Chairman. “Kick it hard enough, and he’ll be quite unwilling to sit down for quite a while. Meaning you’ll be doing the chairs a favor. Gods’ speed, little girl.”
Jen ran down the hill, being heedful of the ants. Smoke was beginning to rise.
The whale could smell the smoke. Creator-King Hector, the First of His Name at Least as Far Back as He’d Bothered to Read in the Histories, experienced everything the whale experienced when he sat on his throne. That was the way he’d set it up. The throne sat upon the smaller of the whale’s two telepathic brains. The smaller one could communicate with individuals, while the larger one could communicate with the Place as a whole, and with the sun and the moon and the stars and the oceans and other bodies beyond the reach of normal minds. If Hector’d been any good at real magic, he wouldn’t need to use the whale as an intermediary to communicate with his kingdom, but alas, the bulk of his supernatural skill was in his status as a Progenitor, which predated his reign as monarch. Owing to this, Hector often felt like a fraud, an outsider, a conqueror, a human.
Sure, the previous monarchs had largely been humans—his immediate predecessor had been a mermaid, and one of the worst tyrants in the Place’s history—but all had undergone the sort of harrowing trials that allowed them to transcend that status and become something more. Hector had sort of strolled in while the kingdom was recovering from Queen Kath’s rule and fending off the armies of the Hand of Silver, used his superpowers to patch things up, and then spent most of the past year sitting on a whale’s brain, fending off humans at the borders and awaiting trouble.
Trouble was here. Hector didn’t need the whale’s ears to hear the voice of a pissed-off human supremacist forecasting the imminent death of all of his subjects. He rose, grabbed a conch shell off an end table and spoke into it, calling up Moses in the Grove of Knowledge.
Moses had been slow to react to the news. “Yes, your grace?” the tortoise asked, as though he hadn’t just heard the same thing his king had.
“Moses,” shouted Hector, looking through the whale’s sight at a spreading forest fire. “Look up every word of what that guy just said. I want to know who ‘Emma’ and ‘the rock’ are. I want to know what Silver City exactly he’s referring to and how it intends to arrive. I want to know when the hell Hoss started appointing ‘Ultimate All-Stars and Grand Champions.’ I’m riding out. If anyone asks, yes, they should be helping any way they can.”
“…Yes, your grace.”
Hector put down the shell and snapped his fingers, causing a purple-striped winged zebra to spring nervously into existence behind him. He telepathically commanded the whale open its mouth and mounted the beast before nearly trampling two of his mothmen carrying a prisoner.
“Human snooping around the Fountain of Sweet Lies, your grace,” said one nervously. “Attempted to steal no less than an entire bench.”
The human looked up at Hector, grim but apologetic. The Creator-King found little sympathy in his heart for the man. “How the fuck,” he growled, “Did you people get in here?”
Jen was wearing all black. She’d been watching… some Tim Burton movie, who could remember, they were all the same. It had inspired her on a pure aesthetic level: being eleven years old and not much of a film critic, she’d failed to recognize the ultimate emotional emptiness, the lack of answers behind the Gothic trappings. Wearing black was an answer in itself. The color was everything: it meant being cool, and if you were cool enough you could survive on your own without food or water or income or parents. Getting the world to revolve around you meant that things would fall into your lap, was her loose and deeply mistaken conception of physics.
She had packed a diary and a selection of gel pens, to chronicle her adventure; a knife, stolen out of the kitchen, because there was no sense in wearing all black if you didn’t have anything to conceal; a waterbottle, and her scooter, and all the money she had in the world (a sizable one hundred and fifty dollars), and that would have to do.
“You’re sure you don’t want me to tell you where I’m going?” she asked Fanthalion.
The pretty redheaded girl who had never existed shook her head. “It’s better if I don’t know,” she answered, lying back on the bed.
“Well then, what good are you?” snapped Jen, banishing the figment from her memory. The circumstances of her egress from home warped around her, reflecting an important truth—she’d been truly, utterly alone, else why would she have run away? For that matter, why was she imagining her old bedroom as being covered in World Tree roots?
And why couldn’t she stop remembering things?
It was another memory that supplied the answer. ”Basically what I’m saying is this is going to hurt. Physically, emotionally… it’ll bring out the things that were buried.” Ah, yes. The elf bitch. Jen struggled to focus on the present as a form of rebellion. Where was she? Had she killed the entire human race? And if so, why was it an… Observer… thing… now? Had Fantha been left behind? Had Kath? Also, “the place” what? That wasn’t a very helpful descript—
Oh. Right.
Jen climbed to the top of a hill. She had already been doing so, instinctively. The climb wasn’t steep but she had to be careful to avoid stepping on the tiny ant-castles that dotted the hillside, lest she get a reputation as a murderous giant.
At the top of the hill an old man sat in an armchair. His skin was withered away, turned to fabric, and stained with grape soda. “Hello, little girl,” he said. “I am the Chairman. Give me a penny or equivalent token of insignificant value, and I’ll tell you what kind of chair your soul is.”
“I have nothing,” Jen assured the Chairman. “But how much to stand on your back? I need a vantage point.”
“Oh, you can have that for free. Myself, I haven’t stood in near a millennium. Not much point in standing when you’re the Chairman.”
Jen clambered onto one of the Chairman’s arms—chair arms, that is—being careful to avoid his arms—his human arms, that is. Her heart was racing. Way back at the beginning of the battle, she'd briefly considered the notion that the Place could be a round, but had long since decided that the Observer was too cruel to give her even a glimpse of home. The other one, though… “a first-hand demonstration of everything at stake”… maybe just. She balanced atop the back of the armchair and allowed herself to look around.
It wasn’t.
That said, it was.
For one thing, it wasn’t green anymore. Well, it was green, mostly, being largely comprised of forest and meadow, but that was jus a coincidence. The sky had a light purple tinge around the horizon, the sun appeared to be shining in negative, and there were violets growing wherever they saw the opportunity. For another thing, it looked absolutely nothing like her Place. Instead of a standard-issue palace, there appeared to be a giant whale floating centrally in the sky. The stars were different. The seas weren’t in the same places. Still, it shared a quality with her Place where you could see the whole thing just by standing on a hill. And aside from that, it shared a certain—aesthetic. A sense of whimsy. She found it difficult to believe that there was a second place like this, and therefore concluded that it must be the same place, only at a different time. The past, or the future, or something beyond that.
Jen giggled. She was back. “You’re not even a bit curious?” begged the Chairman. “Is your soul a recliner? Is it an office chair? Can you fold it up and store it in a closet? What color is it? What’s it made out of? Are the dogs allowed up on it? Could it even be—a throne? All of these things I can see, and all for a penny!”
Jen had been walking for what felt like hours. Of course, she hadn’t been patient enough back then to acknowledge a difference between “minutes” and “hours” beyond that they were both rather longer than seconds and she wanted to go home.
There was something terribly unfair about a hedge maze that didn’t hold a definite shape in three-dimensional space. She hadn’t quite suspended disbelief enough to be able to articulate this concern, but something was definitely up. A few minutes back she had tried circling back towards the entrance to find that the labyrinth simply kept going. Besides which, only a fraction of it was actually made of hedges anymore; there were steel gates and marble walls and stone tunnels, and sometimes the sky disappeared and when it came back the stars were different. Sometimes she heard growling, or laughter, or music, or something whispering her name. She understood, having seen that movie, that she was supposed to draw arrows where she’d been already, but gel pen wouldn’t work on most of these surfaces. It was all very disheartening. Getting lost and starving to death in a hedge maze was a silly way for a runaway preteen to die; if anything, she expected to be enslaved by a disreputable circus and shot for trying to escape, or run over by an eighteen-wheeler on the streets of New York, causing an accident that killed six people. You know, a fun, adventure-y death. It was that sense of childlike excitement, and an angry Rottweiler, that had driven her into the garden maze in the first place.
After some time wandering with no sense that the directional choices she was making were having any actual effect on her relative location, Jen just began to let her feet guide her—or maybe it was her heart, or a minty sweet smell carried on the air, or maybe she was just following a bumblebee. In any case, she was became certain that she was heading in the right direction—not only that she was heading towards the center of the maze, but that that was where she wanted to be. The corridors began to narrow out, the statuary became more ornate, the air was charged with a sense of importance. The moon hung low and heavy over her like a water balloon about to burst.
And when the fairies started to show up, flitting around telling dirty jokes and throwing acorns back and forth, it wasn’t exactly shock that Jen felt. It wasn’t anything that manifested outwards at all. The doors leading her from a sane, rational existence to a fantastical, logically unsound one opened automatically at her approach, like the entrance to a department store. A great number of things broke inside Jen’s head that day, but none of them turned out to be necessary, at least not for a great while afterwards. It was probably the greatest day of her life, and certainly the most important.
“Does it have a lever that moves the seat up and down? Are there any prominent stains on it? Is there a man sitting on it who is trying to swindle you out of a penny? Is it an heirloom? Is it more of a stool, really? If you and a friend were to—”
There came a voice from out of the forest. It roared like the sound of tears evaporating in a fire, filtered through a cheap garage-band sound system. ”ATTENTION, DENIZENS OF… OF ‘THE PLACE!’” it began. ”IN THE NAME OF THE SILVER AND THE BEIGE, I, SIR CEDRIC, ULTIMATE ALL-STAR AND GRAND CHAMPION, CLAIM THIS LAST BASTION OF BIODIVERSITY IN THE NAME OF HUMANKIND!”
”Hmm,” whispered the Chairman to Jen. “That man who is speaking: do you think he has a penny? I could tell him terrible things about his soul—yea, chairible things!”
“Shut up,” replied Jen, drawing her Ovoid-sword. “I’m listening.”
”I DO NOT ASK YOU TO SURRENDER!” the voice continued. ”FOR THERE WILL BE NO MERCY FOR YOU! THIS PLACE WILL BURN TO MAKE WAY FOR THE ARRIVAL OF THE SILVER CITY. MAKE YOUR PEACE WITH THE INEVITABLE. AS FOR MY COMPETITORS IN THIS ENGAGEMENT: EMMA, YOU’RE SAFER THAN ME THAN YOU ARE WITH THE ROCK. I’LL BE COMING TO KILL HIM AFTER THE RAZING OF THIS PLACE, WHICH YOU CAN DO NOTHING TO PREVENT. I’LL SEE YOU THEN, AT THE LATEST. BE CAREFUL.”
Jen leapt down off of the Chairman’s chair. “Always refreshing to know whose ass to kick,” she told him.
“Ah, yes,” agreed the Chairman. “Kick it hard enough, and he’ll be quite unwilling to sit down for quite a while. Meaning you’ll be doing the chairs a favor. Gods’ speed, little girl.”
Jen ran down the hill, being heedful of the ants. Smoke was beginning to rise.
The whale could smell the smoke. Creator-King Hector, the First of His Name at Least as Far Back as He’d Bothered to Read in the Histories, experienced everything the whale experienced when he sat on his throne. That was the way he’d set it up. The throne sat upon the smaller of the whale’s two telepathic brains. The smaller one could communicate with individuals, while the larger one could communicate with the Place as a whole, and with the sun and the moon and the stars and the oceans and other bodies beyond the reach of normal minds. If Hector’d been any good at real magic, he wouldn’t need to use the whale as an intermediary to communicate with his kingdom, but alas, the bulk of his supernatural skill was in his status as a Progenitor, which predated his reign as monarch. Owing to this, Hector often felt like a fraud, an outsider, a conqueror, a human.
Sure, the previous monarchs had largely been humans—his immediate predecessor had been a mermaid, and one of the worst tyrants in the Place’s history—but all had undergone the sort of harrowing trials that allowed them to transcend that status and become something more. Hector had sort of strolled in while the kingdom was recovering from Queen Kath’s rule and fending off the armies of the Hand of Silver, used his superpowers to patch things up, and then spent most of the past year sitting on a whale’s brain, fending off humans at the borders and awaiting trouble.
Trouble was here. Hector didn’t need the whale’s ears to hear the voice of a pissed-off human supremacist forecasting the imminent death of all of his subjects. He rose, grabbed a conch shell off an end table and spoke into it, calling up Moses in the Grove of Knowledge.
Moses had been slow to react to the news. “Yes, your grace?” the tortoise asked, as though he hadn’t just heard the same thing his king had.
“Moses,” shouted Hector, looking through the whale’s sight at a spreading forest fire. “Look up every word of what that guy just said. I want to know who ‘Emma’ and ‘the rock’ are. I want to know what Silver City exactly he’s referring to and how it intends to arrive. I want to know when the hell Hoss started appointing ‘Ultimate All-Stars and Grand Champions.’ I’m riding out. If anyone asks, yes, they should be helping any way they can.”
“…Yes, your grace.”
Hector put down the shell and snapped his fingers, causing a purple-striped winged zebra to spring nervously into existence behind him. He telepathically commanded the whale open its mouth and mounted the beast before nearly trampling two of his mothmen carrying a prisoner.
“Human snooping around the Fountain of Sweet Lies, your grace,” said one nervously. “Attempted to steal no less than an entire bench.”
The human looked up at Hector, grim but apologetic. The Creator-King found little sympathy in his heart for the man. “How the fuck,” he growled, “Did you people get in here?”