Re: The Grand Battle S2G1! [Round Five: Round Six!]
08-28-2012, 04:28 AM
Originally posted on MSPA by Lord Paradise.
Five smokestacks of polished aluminum burst through the bedrock like a hand coming out of a grave. They swallowed up the sandy lower layers of the soil and engulfed the looser topsoil, devouring the grass and the purple-tinted dew that rested on the grass. The Silver City burst into the sunlight of the Place, and made no attempt to be gentle.
A blast of heat from nowhere fused the soil into a rocky foundation. Unneeded materials—plant matter, nutrients, insects, woodland creatures, traces of the Place’s inherent magic—were discarded, fed to the smokestacks, and ejected as a wispy, silver fume. An overcurious bird got a lungful of the smoke and took a dive; by the time she hit the ground, there was a rooftop in the way.
It began to rain. The clouds put their best effort into beating back the smoke, to little avail; when that failed, they threw their largest hailstones against the building rising up against them, resulting in nothing but a bit of ambient noise and a minor inconvenience for the three figures dueling on the rooftops. The building sprouted gutters, transporting the hailstones link an unholy Plinko machine to a gleaming new storm drain.
Dejected, the clouds allowed the wind to shuffle them along to safer regions, and the sun shone through the windows of the burgeoning factory. With a faintly purple tint it illuminated the complicated and mysterious machines assembling themselves on the factory floor. The industrial process sprang to life with a grand hum. Strange energies unseen in the history of the Place began to broadcast: wireless Internet, radio waves, Gamma decay. The latent magic clinging to the air attempted to incorporate these new phenomena and was instead itself replaced by something else.
Some unholy energy source began turning the pistons on the great machines. Silvery steam hissed out of vents as loosely-defined blocks of superheated metal were carried by conveyer belt from one apparatus to another. A giant gear, appearing more decorative than utilitarian, began to spin counterclockwise, then, as though changing its mind, stopped and spun clockwise for a bit.
Within the bowels of the building his-n-hers bathrooms were hastily assembled, linking up to a spidery sewer network that dug its way through the earth like a giant worm; non-organic paper substitutes fluttered around a burgeoning office before arranging themselves on a metal desk; a calendar, adorned with images of indistinct beige feminine figures in silver lingerie, flicked over to the current date. Outside on the curb, a sign burst forth from the Earth, proudly declaring INFINITY days since our last workplace injury.
The conveyer belts looped around in an endless circle, warping the molten metal into different configurations, producing nothing. The factory itself, and its flagrant mockery of what had minutes before been a tranquil meadow, was output enough.
Something rotated into being, something flesh-toned and loosely ovoid. An arm burst out of it, wiggling its fingers experimentally, then a leg. It grew a thin brown mustache, then almost everything about it that wasn’t a human melted away. The fragment coughed up about a tablespoon of something pink, then pulled a jumpsuit out of four-space and stepped into it carefully. On the breast pocket of the jumpsuit was the label “4-Man.”
The 4-Man manually pulled one of its heavy, goopy eyelids back up into its forehead and revealed a malformed eye, which without an iris could only properly focus on things about two meters away. “Demet,” it mumbled. It peered through the window as though to make sure that the sun wasn’t shining, and squeezed its eyeball with its fingers in a rough approximation of squinting.
Something clicked in the 4-Man’s developing brain telling it to run, but didn’t quite make it to its legs. When the giant shimmering rainbow-colored snake first smashed its head against the window, it looked for a moment like the glass was going to hold. The reinforced pane rippled against the impact out to the edges, and then abruptly shattered. A shard of glass perforated the 4-Man’s neck, and it noticed to its surprise that it was full of blood before being crushed out of existence by several hundred pounds of snake skull.
Outside, the numbers on the sign fluttered. “It has been ZERO days since our last workplace injury, it corrected.
Jen, perched on the poor unconscious monster’s neck, caught her breath. She threw her head forward and hurriedly combed through her hair with her fingers, dislodging a few bits of broken glass, a scale or two, and a terrified moth. Her sword clattered to the floor. She recalled having been better at this at some point.
Outside, she could hear the battle between Sir Cedric and King Hector raging outside. Hector, she judged, would be able to hold him off for a bit with his weird pulling-animals-out-of-the-air magic-but-not-magic-magic powers. Cedric was strong, though. The kind of strong you can’t count on to tire out or make a mistake. She would need to get proactive.
As though mocking her plans, the Silver City gave the ex-monarch something to react to. Some half-dozen shambling Amalgam-fragments began to shimmer into existence around the factory floor, briefly contorting in unearthly many-limbed forms before settling on standard-issue three-dimensional bipedalism. They hung together as though their creators had designed their skin to be one-size-fits-all. They adorned themselves in work boots, baggy pants and wifebeaters, welding masks, goggles and industrial-strength gloves. Then they turned to Jen.
“4-Man gone,” lamented one worker.
“Oonion employss only,” another barked at Jen.
“Nun-regallation equippent!” shrieked another, indicating the snake. “Safety hazzid!”
A fragment pushed through the crowd and brandished a hot poker at Jen. “Oonion ordinnits nummur two states: kill! Dustroy!”
“You know,” sneered Jen, retrieving the Ovoid-sword, “Last time I killed all you people you were a lot more articulate.”
Her sword went through the worker’s neck but didn’t come out the other side. Through it, Jen could feel a strange pulse, like the opposite of an absence, the stuff of the Amalgam itself. Even compared to the Ovoid she had known, there was something wrong about this entity. She pulled the sword out. The fragments were closing in all around her.
During her reign, Jen had gotten herself in a lot of fights with what she might tactlessly describe as “minions.” These fights fell into two camps. There were fights against minions who genuinely believed they could kill her and reap some sort of benefits from this victory, and then there were fights like this.
* * * * *
A swarm of anti-fireflies flew out of a vent, absorbing the light in the alleyway and giving Hector some time to escape. This was not going well. Where had Jen the First gone? His Progenitor powers weren’t doing him much good without a decent swordfighter to back him up, especially in the Silver City, where he was having a tough time triggering plant growth. He had a strain of crabgrass doing its level best to disrupt the pavement, his strongest ivy was working on bringing down some of the less stable buildings and a cloud of pollen was valiantly attempting to disrupt communications within the City, but he was barely even slowing its growth, let alone creating conditions that would give him the advantage. This place had become stifling for all life except humanity, and Hector didn’t make humans. It was a rule of his—he could make humans, but couldn’t fathom a situation in which the world would be improved by the addition of another human.
Taking to the street, Hector climbed onto the back of a charging hippopotamus, then grabbed on to the tail of a sky-manta and took to the air. The sky-manta dropped the monarch off on a low rooftop and perched chirping on a ledge, keeping watch. Hector closed his eyes and tried to think. “Huginn, Muninn,” he muttered, speaking the names aloud to give them power. Obediently the two symbolically-charged ravens appeared on his shoulder and began to whisper to him.
”This is not a fight you can win alone, my King,” counseled Huginn.
”Look to the former Queen,” agreed Muninn. ”If necessary, look to the other.”
“Find her,” commanded Hector to Muninn. The raven of memory cawed affectionately and flew high above the city.
Hector opened his eyes. “What happened?” he asked Huginn.
”Ill tidings, King,” warned the other crow. ”Memory will return to you as soon as it is able with the Queen you asked for.”
“I’m getting married?” asked Hector.
”You must think, my liege. Sir Cedric will seek the Middle-Gem to initiate a paradigm-shift. Place a call in to your Librarian.”
There was a conch shell in Hector’s hand. Still a bit dazed, but knowing to trust his raven of thought, he spoke into the shell.
“Librarian,” he said.
The intended recipient of that call, of course, was dead already. The powers that operated the soundboard on these intraPlacial lines of communication, however, quickly conferred and agreed that his murderer was the natural inheritor of the title, and directed the spirit to take notice of the sound of the ocean emanating from a small object sitting upon an end table.
* * * * *
Jen stuck the beige blade through the interior of the single whirling gear. Despite the fact that the cog remained completely disconnected from the remainder of the factory’s process, all progress ground to a halt. Jen wiped the sweat off her brow and various beige-tinged bodily fluids off of her hospital gown. Killing the fragments had been a welcome but unproductive distraction. Now she needed to—
“Caw,” interrupted a raven, entering through the broken factory window. ”I am to lead you to the king,” it explained curtly, landing on her shoulder.
“His Majesty requests me on the front lines?” asked Jen.
”His liege has opted for a tactical retreat,” chided the raven. ”A tactic with which you are well familiar.”
”Can it.” Jen walked out of the factory into the shadows of the Silver City, which now spread out in all directions. The raven pointed with one wing, and Jen began to walk.
”You remember what this Place used to look like,” said Muninn. It wasn’t a question.
”Will look like,” corrected Jen. “This is just... a complicated past. This isn’t my home.”
”The past is everybody’s home,” countered the raven. ”It’s what we all secretly wish to go back to after a busy day at work.”
”Like I said, it’s not my past. Everything that happens here, I have a friend who I know is going to take care of it, because he already has. That’s the theory, anyway.”
An Amalgam fragment peered at Jen out of a storefront. “EVERYTHING MUST GO,” read a sign, completely honestly. They did not appear to be selling anything. ”We all owe responsibilities to the past,” nagged the raven. ”You have spent years neglecting yours.”
“Yeah, well, I’m sure if I were a mythological incarnation of memory that just fell out of a king’s ass—remember that?—I’d feel differently, but as it stands—“
”Do you even remember why you left?”
”I got bored. The queen business just turned into another sort of real life.”
”A fine narrative, my once-queen,” mocked Muninn. ”A note-perfect ironic twist on the narrative of rousing adventure that is your life. (You’ll want to turn left into this alley lest Sir Cedric come this way.) It is a lie that has suited you fine thus far, but now the time for lies is past.”
Jen shrugged her shoulder very suddenly, throwing the bird off-balance. She ducked into the indicated alley and traced the patterns of the fire escapes above her, saying nothing for a good while. “You’re just a stupid bird,” she finally said, petulantly.
”You cannot lie to your memory, your formal majesty,” warned Muninn. ”I can lie to you, if I wish, but never you me.”
The alley swallowed girl and bird. Somewhere not far away, a fire raged.
Five smokestacks of polished aluminum burst through the bedrock like a hand coming out of a grave. They swallowed up the sandy lower layers of the soil and engulfed the looser topsoil, devouring the grass and the purple-tinted dew that rested on the grass. The Silver City burst into the sunlight of the Place, and made no attempt to be gentle.
A blast of heat from nowhere fused the soil into a rocky foundation. Unneeded materials—plant matter, nutrients, insects, woodland creatures, traces of the Place’s inherent magic—were discarded, fed to the smokestacks, and ejected as a wispy, silver fume. An overcurious bird got a lungful of the smoke and took a dive; by the time she hit the ground, there was a rooftop in the way.
It began to rain. The clouds put their best effort into beating back the smoke, to little avail; when that failed, they threw their largest hailstones against the building rising up against them, resulting in nothing but a bit of ambient noise and a minor inconvenience for the three figures dueling on the rooftops. The building sprouted gutters, transporting the hailstones link an unholy Plinko machine to a gleaming new storm drain.
Dejected, the clouds allowed the wind to shuffle them along to safer regions, and the sun shone through the windows of the burgeoning factory. With a faintly purple tint it illuminated the complicated and mysterious machines assembling themselves on the factory floor. The industrial process sprang to life with a grand hum. Strange energies unseen in the history of the Place began to broadcast: wireless Internet, radio waves, Gamma decay. The latent magic clinging to the air attempted to incorporate these new phenomena and was instead itself replaced by something else.
Some unholy energy source began turning the pistons on the great machines. Silvery steam hissed out of vents as loosely-defined blocks of superheated metal were carried by conveyer belt from one apparatus to another. A giant gear, appearing more decorative than utilitarian, began to spin counterclockwise, then, as though changing its mind, stopped and spun clockwise for a bit.
Within the bowels of the building his-n-hers bathrooms were hastily assembled, linking up to a spidery sewer network that dug its way through the earth like a giant worm; non-organic paper substitutes fluttered around a burgeoning office before arranging themselves on a metal desk; a calendar, adorned with images of indistinct beige feminine figures in silver lingerie, flicked over to the current date. Outside on the curb, a sign burst forth from the Earth, proudly declaring INFINITY days since our last workplace injury.
The conveyer belts looped around in an endless circle, warping the molten metal into different configurations, producing nothing. The factory itself, and its flagrant mockery of what had minutes before been a tranquil meadow, was output enough.
Something rotated into being, something flesh-toned and loosely ovoid. An arm burst out of it, wiggling its fingers experimentally, then a leg. It grew a thin brown mustache, then almost everything about it that wasn’t a human melted away. The fragment coughed up about a tablespoon of something pink, then pulled a jumpsuit out of four-space and stepped into it carefully. On the breast pocket of the jumpsuit was the label “4-Man.”
The 4-Man manually pulled one of its heavy, goopy eyelids back up into its forehead and revealed a malformed eye, which without an iris could only properly focus on things about two meters away. “Demet,” it mumbled. It peered through the window as though to make sure that the sun wasn’t shining, and squeezed its eyeball with its fingers in a rough approximation of squinting.
Something clicked in the 4-Man’s developing brain telling it to run, but didn’t quite make it to its legs. When the giant shimmering rainbow-colored snake first smashed its head against the window, it looked for a moment like the glass was going to hold. The reinforced pane rippled against the impact out to the edges, and then abruptly shattered. A shard of glass perforated the 4-Man’s neck, and it noticed to its surprise that it was full of blood before being crushed out of existence by several hundred pounds of snake skull.
Outside, the numbers on the sign fluttered. “It has been ZERO days since our last workplace injury, it corrected.
Jen, perched on the poor unconscious monster’s neck, caught her breath. She threw her head forward and hurriedly combed through her hair with her fingers, dislodging a few bits of broken glass, a scale or two, and a terrified moth. Her sword clattered to the floor. She recalled having been better at this at some point.
Outside, she could hear the battle between Sir Cedric and King Hector raging outside. Hector, she judged, would be able to hold him off for a bit with his weird pulling-animals-out-of-the-air magic-but-not-magic-magic powers. Cedric was strong, though. The kind of strong you can’t count on to tire out or make a mistake. She would need to get proactive.
As though mocking her plans, the Silver City gave the ex-monarch something to react to. Some half-dozen shambling Amalgam-fragments began to shimmer into existence around the factory floor, briefly contorting in unearthly many-limbed forms before settling on standard-issue three-dimensional bipedalism. They hung together as though their creators had designed their skin to be one-size-fits-all. They adorned themselves in work boots, baggy pants and wifebeaters, welding masks, goggles and industrial-strength gloves. Then they turned to Jen.
“4-Man gone,” lamented one worker.
“Oonion employss only,” another barked at Jen.
“Nun-regallation equippent!” shrieked another, indicating the snake. “Safety hazzid!”
A fragment pushed through the crowd and brandished a hot poker at Jen. “Oonion ordinnits nummur two states: kill! Dustroy!”
“You know,” sneered Jen, retrieving the Ovoid-sword, “Last time I killed all you people you were a lot more articulate.”
Her sword went through the worker’s neck but didn’t come out the other side. Through it, Jen could feel a strange pulse, like the opposite of an absence, the stuff of the Amalgam itself. Even compared to the Ovoid she had known, there was something wrong about this entity. She pulled the sword out. The fragments were closing in all around her.
During her reign, Jen had gotten herself in a lot of fights with what she might tactlessly describe as “minions.” These fights fell into two camps. There were fights against minions who genuinely believed they could kill her and reap some sort of benefits from this victory, and then there were fights like this.
* * * * *
A swarm of anti-fireflies flew out of a vent, absorbing the light in the alleyway and giving Hector some time to escape. This was not going well. Where had Jen the First gone? His Progenitor powers weren’t doing him much good without a decent swordfighter to back him up, especially in the Silver City, where he was having a tough time triggering plant growth. He had a strain of crabgrass doing its level best to disrupt the pavement, his strongest ivy was working on bringing down some of the less stable buildings and a cloud of pollen was valiantly attempting to disrupt communications within the City, but he was barely even slowing its growth, let alone creating conditions that would give him the advantage. This place had become stifling for all life except humanity, and Hector didn’t make humans. It was a rule of his—he could make humans, but couldn’t fathom a situation in which the world would be improved by the addition of another human.
Taking to the street, Hector climbed onto the back of a charging hippopotamus, then grabbed on to the tail of a sky-manta and took to the air. The sky-manta dropped the monarch off on a low rooftop and perched chirping on a ledge, keeping watch. Hector closed his eyes and tried to think. “Huginn, Muninn,” he muttered, speaking the names aloud to give them power. Obediently the two symbolically-charged ravens appeared on his shoulder and began to whisper to him.
”This is not a fight you can win alone, my King,” counseled Huginn.
”Look to the former Queen,” agreed Muninn. ”If necessary, look to the other.”
“Find her,” commanded Hector to Muninn. The raven of memory cawed affectionately and flew high above the city.
Hector opened his eyes. “What happened?” he asked Huginn.
”Ill tidings, King,” warned the other crow. ”Memory will return to you as soon as it is able with the Queen you asked for.”
“I’m getting married?” asked Hector.
”You must think, my liege. Sir Cedric will seek the Middle-Gem to initiate a paradigm-shift. Place a call in to your Librarian.”
There was a conch shell in Hector’s hand. Still a bit dazed, but knowing to trust his raven of thought, he spoke into the shell.
“Librarian,” he said.
The intended recipient of that call, of course, was dead already. The powers that operated the soundboard on these intraPlacial lines of communication, however, quickly conferred and agreed that his murderer was the natural inheritor of the title, and directed the spirit to take notice of the sound of the ocean emanating from a small object sitting upon an end table.
* * * * *
Jen stuck the beige blade through the interior of the single whirling gear. Despite the fact that the cog remained completely disconnected from the remainder of the factory’s process, all progress ground to a halt. Jen wiped the sweat off her brow and various beige-tinged bodily fluids off of her hospital gown. Killing the fragments had been a welcome but unproductive distraction. Now she needed to—
“Caw,” interrupted a raven, entering through the broken factory window. ”I am to lead you to the king,” it explained curtly, landing on her shoulder.
“His Majesty requests me on the front lines?” asked Jen.
”His liege has opted for a tactical retreat,” chided the raven. ”A tactic with which you are well familiar.”
”Can it.” Jen walked out of the factory into the shadows of the Silver City, which now spread out in all directions. The raven pointed with one wing, and Jen began to walk.
”You remember what this Place used to look like,” said Muninn. It wasn’t a question.
”Will look like,” corrected Jen. “This is just... a complicated past. This isn’t my home.”
”The past is everybody’s home,” countered the raven. ”It’s what we all secretly wish to go back to after a busy day at work.”
”Like I said, it’s not my past. Everything that happens here, I have a friend who I know is going to take care of it, because he already has. That’s the theory, anyway.”
An Amalgam fragment peered at Jen out of a storefront. “EVERYTHING MUST GO,” read a sign, completely honestly. They did not appear to be selling anything. ”We all owe responsibilities to the past,” nagged the raven. ”You have spent years neglecting yours.”
“Yeah, well, I’m sure if I were a mythological incarnation of memory that just fell out of a king’s ass—remember that?—I’d feel differently, but as it stands—“
”Do you even remember why you left?”
”I got bored. The queen business just turned into another sort of real life.”
”A fine narrative, my once-queen,” mocked Muninn. ”A note-perfect ironic twist on the narrative of rousing adventure that is your life. (You’ll want to turn left into this alley lest Sir Cedric come this way.) It is a lie that has suited you fine thus far, but now the time for lies is past.”
Jen shrugged her shoulder very suddenly, throwing the bird off-balance. She ducked into the indicated alley and traced the patterns of the fire escapes above her, saying nothing for a good while. “You’re just a stupid bird,” she finally said, petulantly.
”You cannot lie to your memory, your formal majesty,” warned Muninn. ”I can lie to you, if I wish, but never you me.”
The alley swallowed girl and bird. Somewhere not far away, a fire raged.