Re: The Phenomenal Fracas! (GBS2G6): [Round Three: HMS Thunderhead]
02-18-2011, 07:12 PM
Originally posted on MSPA by MalkyTop.
You know, after having life forced upon her, after having to put up with the stupidity and cupidity and paranoia-ity and other –ities throughout time, after being interrupted from dealing with life in general, Eureka felt entitled to know just what the hell was going on.
I mean, it’s not asking for much.
Was this even supposed to be scary? Sheesh. The whole thing was changing too quickly for her to even get a good look at what she was supposed to be scared of, not to mention the idea of being scared of such a mess.
Okay, maybe she was feeling slightly frightened. But it was mostly out of confusion.
Someone was actually saying something. Was someone trying to…reason with the damn thing? Who knows. She couldn’t hear. But it broke her out of her shocked trance and she started struggling, though it honestly didn’t do much. Whatever strength she had, it wasn’t particularly good against telekinetic grips.
Muriegro was the first to escape yet again. Probably had something to do with his magic voodoo thingies. In any case, the…she already forgot what it was supposed to be, but it screeched rather loudly. As soon as the priest landed, the rest were let go. Eureka found herself landing pretty ungracefully. Glancing around quickly, she was slightly happy to see that Riko had fared worse than she. As the more battle-ready leapt into frantic action, she struggled to get back up onto her feet.
As an afterthought, she hopped on the spot. Huh. Normal.
The big bad evil demonic thing, it was pretty horrifying to look at. She was almost glad that this place was ridiculously dark and that it was sometimes hard to see. Almost. Maybe Syvex could see in the dark and in fact was more powerful in the dark. Maybe priest guy had priesty powers so that he could sense where to attack. Whatever. She only had cloth. That was pretty damn useless.
She squinted in the dark and tried backing away a little before realizing that if she backed up any further, she would fall into some sort of mysterious abyss. Okay. So big red boil-tumor and tentacles and eyes everywhere and magic dark evil blast shadow things. If she stared hard and ignored the other contestants running about and trying to kill the damn thing, she could sort of make out possible outlines of people. Previous victims, probably. This sort of looked like a final boss of a video game. Unfortunately, it didn’t look like it had a big glaring weak point. Not even anything vulnerable to a well-aimed scarf attack.
And then there were suddenly a lot of ships and white-coated men. Eureka really wished the universe would explain some of this stuff to her.
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Perhaps the squads of GRIMACE weren’t quite expecting a hulking monstrosity in the middle of an incredibly dark, underground area, so dark that it would shame it to be called merely dark. If so, they recovered quite quickly and went to work. They had to pick up one of their scientists. Then they had to pick up one of their extremely important project that mysteriously disappeared. Killing the thing that hung from the ceiling(?) would be a bonus, though not ultimately necessary. Which was lucky, because nobody really wanted to fight the thing.
Riko felt incredibly relieved as he saw the familiar ships touch down. He waved and shouted, two things that a stranded survivor generally does when confronted with his salvation. Armed men marched out and he rushed towards them. A few hacked away at stray tentacles and one guy who was supposedly in charge shouted at Riko something he couldn’t quite understand and so he had to repeat it.
“Where’s the core!” he shouted again. Maybe he meant to say Core. Whatever.
“Wha—you mean the pirate’s backpack thing?”
“Which one’s the pirate!” It wouldn’t kill him to be more polite. One of the soldiers got stabbed through the heart by one of the writhing tentacle things and fell over. His body was dragged slowly over to the central body of the beast. His position was quickly taken over by another.
<font color="#804060">“Um,” Riko replied, turning around and pointing vaguely at the lump of apparent flesh. “The, the one with the jetpack, um.”
By this time, Eureka had started over to the various ships that were possibly her ticket out of here. She almost tripped over another lump of squishy something. Considering what the enemy looked like, she was tempted to squeal like a little girl and kick it away, but the tiny, weak “Ow” gave her pause. That rather annoying voice sounded familiar.
Ah, so that’s what the trashcan looked like without the, er, trashcan. She didn’t particularly know why, but she picked it up. In some places, it was disgustingly sticky. In other places, it was worryingly hard and dry. She ran over to the waiting ships just as a few soldiers attempted to try to get closer to the big nasty tumor thing.
She backed away a little when several guns were raised to her chest, but Riko quickly shouted, “No, wait, she’s okay.”
Yeah, this from a guy who tried electrocuting her to death.
The guns lowered. That was nice. She wasn’t quite let into the small circle of soldiers, though.
“Hey! Rick! Or, uh, Rika!” A brief expression of annoyance passed over the scientist’s face, but he moved closer to Eureka. “We need to leave. Like, now. This place is insane and I think the trashcan thing is dying and I really don’t think those insane guys can beat up that thing and I can’t help but think if I stay here any longer something bad’s gonna happen to me.”
Riko glanced around shiftily. “Yeah, I know. Just hang on. We’re waiting for some other guys to come and escort us in. They, uh, they want to get that Core for, um, some reason, so, uh—“
Riko’s eyes bugged out. It was almost cartoonish and Eureka would have laughed if she could. Instead, she dropped Miq, who landed with a dull ‘clunk,’ and fell over backwards, a sharp tentacle going right through her abdomen. Riko bit his lip as he watched her body get slowly dragged away and then suddenly realized that he wasn’t in an entirely different location.
She was still alive.
“We…we have to get her!” he shouted loudly as her body was dragged out of sight, behind even more waving tentacles. “She’s still alive—“
“Look,” the superior officer said gruffly, grabbing Riko’s shoulder. “You’re important. The Core’s important. And while my men’re over there, they could prob’ly pick up those other guys if you really want to. But I’m not sending troops in a field of killer tentacles after some broad—when the hell are those others coming!”
They both turned back to the ships. All of them were being slowly mummified by horrendous tentacles. “Oh hell no,” the lieutenant (general? Commander?) growled before barking out more frantic orders.
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At the actual fight, where all the real action was taking place, Syvex was feeling completely fine.
Total darkness. Real, complete darkness. Delicious.
Somehow, everybody seemed to move under a silent agreement of a temporary team-up against this throbbing monstrosity. Which was alright by him. His dark, shadowy blasts didn’t seem to be making much of a dent on their own.
The whole fight was just a big confusing whirl of tentacles and dodging and blasting. Once in a while, he’d bound near one of the others. He saw sandman at one point, twisting and weaving and bringing up tiny sand shields. Blackmask flew by him several times. The large priest was…around, somewhere, he assumed. He might have seen him, briefly, maybe? Whatever.
Syvex leaped over one swinging tentacle and ducked under another before firing another blast.
You know, it was actually so terrifying being near this thing that it was almost physically painful. Seeing meaty faces pass over the surface before sinking in somewhere deep and dark, looking at veiny flesh pulsing, watching impossible shadows of scientists and syringes pass over his vision while tentacles attempted to blind-side him everywhere…it was probably a good thing he had good reflexes. And a good thing he knew when to just let said reflexes take over.
Wait who was that.
Syvex turned and he couldn’t help but wonder where the hell all these armed men came from. Some of them had jetpacks too, sorta like Blackmask. Those guys were chasing the pirate right now, in fact.
Though the men were apparently trying to help them bring down the nightmarish monster, he didn’t think that he should really let them chase his (at least temporary) ally around. He tried aiming at their jetpacks, but apparently one of the grounded armed men noticed and smacked his arm away. Syvex almost turned on him when a tentacle grabbed the soldier and quickly whisked him away, out of sight.
Hey. Look at that. There’s another body being dragged away. Poor thing. Looks almost like…
“Oh goddammit, Finch,” Syvex sighed loudly before going after the unconscious woman. It almost seemed like her only purpose in life was to get into trouble.
More tentacles were trying to stop him, but he easily dodged them. They surrounded him as he reached Eureka and he tried to sling her over his shoulder. The tentacle wouldn’t let go. Was it barbed? Man, that would be painful. He tugged on her gingerly before trying to blast the tentacle in two. Noooope. “Dammit Finch wake up wake up wake up.”
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Eureka found herself on the roof of a train.
The train, in fact. The one she had been on only moments before. Although, of course, that train was fake. She was pretty sure this train was too. For one thing, it was moving, clearly moving ridiculously fast, but she definitely didn’t feel much movement. No wind. Nothing pressuring her to sit the hell down so that she wouldn’t be blown completely off. Another thing that tipped her off was the fact that it actually felt like she was being dragged on a floor of some sort. Though that feeling passed. Now she vaguely felt like she was being shaken roughly.
Eureka jumped on the spot. There was no need to repeat the endeavor. If she had closed her eyes, she would have been convinced that both feet stayed firmly on the roof.
Okay, so now she was back in hallucination land again. Looked pretty deserted. Also, the roof seemd to be bleeding. That was a little strange.
Suddenly, sand blades seemed to sprout from the roof. Like how events had left off back when it ended. Sorry, icky tentacle boil thing, can’t fool me.
It was only a matter for Eureka to walk to the edge of the car as sand blades sprouted like daisies around her. They seemed to be struggling to keep up with her movements. At the edge, she sat down and slipped off, unpocketing a roll of bandages and using them to cling on to the edge and lower her down slowly.
Whoops, that didn’t happen. Instead the useless bandages did nothing and she fell ungracefully onto the tiny metal platform between the cars. She didn’t really feel the pain. More like felt the expectation of pain. Or something like that.
She certainly was falling down a lot lately, wasn’t she.
Okay, so no cloth powers. That’s fine. The place seemed empty besides her. There shouldn’t be any trouble and if there was, she knew how to take care of herself.
What was she supposed to do here? It didn’t seem like she was dead. Yet. (If the afterlife was a bleeding train, that would be a stupid afterlife.) Was there even anything she could do? Okay, so what happened…she got attacked by the, the, the thing. So…now she was connected to the thing, probably. And if she was connected, then maybe she could take out the thing from the inside.
Wow, what a stupidly clichéd line.
In any case, Eureka opened the door to the next car.
Oh my god why are the walls bleeding what are those writhing things are those bodies oh my god oh my god aaaaah they’re moving aaaaaaah oh my god gonna throw up aaaaaaah it’s driiiippping on meeeeeeee aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah
The train car was not abnormal at all. It was a little inconvenient that she had to tread through thick blood-like stuff to get through, though. There didn’t seem to be anything in here that could take out the thing from the inside, though.
The sensation of being shaken was slowly fading. In fact, everything felt a little dull right now. Her brain was feeling sorta dull and woozy. But somehow she was still able to walk straight. That was nice.
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It was hard to think up insults on the fly, especially when dodging death tentacles of doom constantly and trying to ignore the ‘FLEEFLEEFLEEFLEE’ signals his brain was trying to send him. But Blackmask at least managed to spit back, “Damn curs!” That was better than nothing, right? Right.
One guy was trying to overtake and flank him. He drew out his pistol and fired. Dammit, he had more important things to do…holy water…get the holy water on it. Not that he was sure he could get close enough without getting hit by one of those tentacles. Or going insane. But somehow, he had to get the holy water there.
More flanking, more firing, but the guy on the other side of him grabbed his arm and drew in close, hands scrabbling for an off switch on the pirate’s jetpack. He swung his gun around, but there was another behind him who grabbed his arm and twisted it behind his back. His jetpack was shut off and, struggling, he was led downwards and away from the fight.
Goddamn no-good…hey, where did they even come from, anyways?
As they continued to drag him away, they grabbed at the Core, attempting to wrench it off, but unfortunately for them, one of the attributes Blackmask prided himself in was being as loud and as uncooperative as was possible when confronted with authority figures. One guy got kicked in the jaw. Although Blackmask would be the first to say that he was quite limber, he was a bit certain he wasn’t that limber. He briefly wondered how he managed that.
All thoughts of mysteriously obtained flexibility left him when he finally noticed that he was being led to that scientist fella. Being the only man he recognized, Blackmask gave Riko the dubious honor of being the one he would shout at. “Hey! Wha’s goin’ on ‘ere! Wha’ d’ya think you’re doin’, you scum-suckin’ lubber!”
As the pirate shouted more pirate-y things, Riko tried to explain that no he wasn’t quite sure what was going on and no he couldn’t do much of anything because yes it was out of his control mostly. Then they actually managed to slip the Core off, but more wild struggling caused it to get knocked away and onto the floor. A few seconds later, and as soldiers tried to disarm the pirate, he fumbled with the flask of holy water and accidentally dropped it. It shattered somewhere on the ground.
“Be careful!” one smarmy landlubber shouted. Nobody really noticed a dark, blobby thing lunge desperately into the slot of the Core.
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The further she went through the train, the more un-train-like it was getting. To be specific, it was less ‘train’ and more ‘squishy flesh thing covered in jam and yes we’re calling it jam for now because calling it the other thing will just make the experience slightly worse.’ A lot more bodies too, though some of them appeared to be sinking away and out of sight. She wasn’t quite sure what to think about that, though it did tell her that it was not wise to stand still for too long.
When she reached the next door, she found that she couldn’t open it. It wasn’t locked, really, it was just the handle…it was sort of…gross. Squishy. Sorta came away in…clumps. Ugh. Well, the gunk didn’t seem all that strong. Was she supposed to…walk through it? The thought made her shudder slightly, but she figured if she closed her eyes, maybe it wouldn’t be too bad.
“Ugh…dammit.” Eureka turned at the sound of another voice. And there, looking slightly distressed, was Syvex. He glanced distastefully around at the surroundings and seemed to brighten up when he saw Eureka. “Hey, great, you’re okay!” His sharky smile dropped momentarily. “Or I’m dead.”
“I’m not dead,” Eureka snapped, though to be honest, she wasn’t quite sure herself. Especially now that she suddenly noticed that she seemed to have gotten yet another wound. Blood was dripping out her stomach. Didn’t hurt, though. “Quick, do you happen to still have your shadow blasty powers?”
“Hm? Why wouldn’t I…?”
“Look, just try blasting that door open, would you?”
Both brushed aside questions about why Syvex was here in order to press on. Gotta stop this fleshy-train somehow, after all. With a loud boom, the door exploded. Jam spewed out into the next car. Eureka hopped through the now-open door and Syvex followed soon after. A squelchy sound indicated that the door grew back.
“Right. Let’s get this over with,” Eureka sighed.
“Wait, what are we even doing?”
Eureka shrugged. “I, uh, hm. Not…entirely sure.”
Syvex blinked at her. The silence urged Eureka to continue. “Look, I’m just sorta looking for something in here I can mess up. I dunno, an off switch, maybe. Something obvious to destroy.”
She paused. Wasn’t there something odd that just happened? Something that shouldn’t be able to happen? Didn’t something feel a little…off?
…Nah.
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Miq wasn’t surprised that everybody seemed to forget about her. Right now, she was rather hard to see. But it would have been nice if some people at least noticed that she was dying. At least then maybe someone could save her.
So when a container dropped near her, she was incredibly grateful and quickly dragged herself into the thin opening. As she did so, she felt something drop on top of her. It made her a little damp, but it didn’t seem to do anything harmful.
But the new container definitely hurt, yes it did.
Pain pain pain pain pain pain pain power
She was dissolving, but at the same time, she felt stronger than ever. The now-toothy slot grinned widely. When someone tried to pick her up, she extended a glowing pseudopod and knocked the hands away before running off quickly on more glowy pseudopods. Wow, why was she so glowy? Oh man so much power there must be something she could do with it. Hey, look, there was an icky thing trying to attack her with icky tentacles. Maybe she could do something about that.
Behind her, several people gaped as they saw the Core, the life’s work of many scientists, get up and walk away. It was rather adept at mowing down tentacles with whip-like pseudopods.
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The last door was blown away and Eureka quickly jumped through. The room was definitely larger than it should be. And it was the meatiest and jammiest yet. Her every step sank rather distressingly into the ground with a sad squelch. But it looked like this was the room she was looking for. On a train, it would be the control room. Here, it was…sort of a control room. Just a bit meatier. And instead of levers, there was a big, throbbing spherical thing. Sorta like a heart. Maybe a heart and brain combined. Wow, that’s a disgusting image.
“Right,” Eureka said, trying to sound more sure of herself than she really was. “Help me get this thing—“
Once again, she found herself getting stabbed through her abdomen. This time, it hurt a lot. Behind her, Syvex chuckled, voice dripping red.
“Ah, so trusting. You were so foolish. You even knew this would happen…”
Eureka couldn’t respond very well because she was too busy bleeding. But she did manage to say a few words.
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Dammit Finch dammit dammit dammit wake up.
Things were pretty much going crazy. Syvex had finally lost grasp on what was exactly going on here. It was suddenly growing brighter, for one thing. Also the Core thing was suddenly walking around on stilts. Or some other weird leg things. And it was killing tentacles like nobody’s business and actually managed to stab right through the actual big lump of fleshy thing. Though the wounds were healing up quickly enough so such stabbings weren’t really effective yet.
Eureka was still being dragged along. He just wasn’t quite strong enough to pull her away and he was rather uncomfortable with playing tug-of-war with her as the rope, especially with that thing going through her chest. Not to mention tentacles were still trying to sneak-attack him and everything was very distracting. Eureka’s feet were getting worryingly close to the fleshy monstrosity.
Wake up wake up wake up.
“S-syvex…”
“What? Finch!” The shadow snake blasted away a few more lingering tentacles. “Finch, I’m here! Hang on, I’ll, I’ll get you out of here…”
“Sssssyvex you…you…basssstaarrrrd.”
This threw Syvex off a little. But another tentacle ambush reminded him he had no time to be thrown off.
The sudden appearance of a walking, glowing Core caused both Tamerlane and Muriegro to decide to cheese it and watch from afar. It was probably a good idea for him to follow. But he still had a grumpy, paranoid woman to save.
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So much pain. So much pooowwwerrr but despite it, it didn’t seem like she could do anything! How disappointing! And she was really starting to feel very, very, um, not there. She had to be able to do something. If she was going to get this much power, she wanted to do something. She should do something.
Maybe if she continued stabbing at this icky thing, something will happen.
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She was so close. It was right there. She had to do something. Just within reach. But no, her legs were giving out and she couldn’t will them to stand and Syvex was still busy stabbing her through the chest and laughing and laughing. It hurt. It shouldn’t hurt. Why shouldn’t it? Because this wasn’t happening.
Was this denial?
No. It really wasn’t happening. Literally, you fool.
There’s no reason not to have cloth powers.
Her arm suddenly snapped upwards. A bandage wrapped itself around the throbbing heart-brain thing, dying red as it did so. It pulled and snapped away. The bandages constricted and it popped like a water balloon. Syvex was screeching. No, the train was screeching. No, it wasn’t a train. No, there was no train here at all. Was everything melting away? Was it ever there in the first place?
No, there was just nothing.
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The throbbing of the fleshy orb suddenly ceased and the whole thing seemed to…sag. The color was fading away and if such a thing could exude an emotion, then it was a cold resignation.
She was burning up. She was almost burnt up. But she had to do this, before she was gone, she had never felt so sure of it. She couldn’t let this be a total waste.
Miq thrust a crumbling pseudopod</font> Malevolence-ward. Yes, she could do it, she could make it…
There was nothing more fueling the Core, and thus, nothing more to support it in the air. It started to fall.
You know, after having life forced upon her, after having to put up with the stupidity and cupidity and paranoia-ity and other –ities throughout time, after being interrupted from dealing with life in general, Eureka felt entitled to know just what the hell was going on.
I mean, it’s not asking for much.
Was this even supposed to be scary? Sheesh. The whole thing was changing too quickly for her to even get a good look at what she was supposed to be scared of, not to mention the idea of being scared of such a mess.
Okay, maybe she was feeling slightly frightened. But it was mostly out of confusion.
Someone was actually saying something. Was someone trying to…reason with the damn thing? Who knows. She couldn’t hear. But it broke her out of her shocked trance and she started struggling, though it honestly didn’t do much. Whatever strength she had, it wasn’t particularly good against telekinetic grips.
Muriegro was the first to escape yet again. Probably had something to do with his magic voodoo thingies. In any case, the…she already forgot what it was supposed to be, but it screeched rather loudly. As soon as the priest landed, the rest were let go. Eureka found herself landing pretty ungracefully. Glancing around quickly, she was slightly happy to see that Riko had fared worse than she. As the more battle-ready leapt into frantic action, she struggled to get back up onto her feet.
As an afterthought, she hopped on the spot. Huh. Normal.
The big bad evil demonic thing, it was pretty horrifying to look at. She was almost glad that this place was ridiculously dark and that it was sometimes hard to see. Almost. Maybe Syvex could see in the dark and in fact was more powerful in the dark. Maybe priest guy had priesty powers so that he could sense where to attack. Whatever. She only had cloth. That was pretty damn useless.
She squinted in the dark and tried backing away a little before realizing that if she backed up any further, she would fall into some sort of mysterious abyss. Okay. So big red boil-tumor and tentacles and eyes everywhere and magic dark evil blast shadow things. If she stared hard and ignored the other contestants running about and trying to kill the damn thing, she could sort of make out possible outlines of people. Previous victims, probably. This sort of looked like a final boss of a video game. Unfortunately, it didn’t look like it had a big glaring weak point. Not even anything vulnerable to a well-aimed scarf attack.
And then there were suddenly a lot of ships and white-coated men. Eureka really wished the universe would explain some of this stuff to her.
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Perhaps the squads of GRIMACE weren’t quite expecting a hulking monstrosity in the middle of an incredibly dark, underground area, so dark that it would shame it to be called merely dark. If so, they recovered quite quickly and went to work. They had to pick up one of their scientists. Then they had to pick up one of their extremely important project that mysteriously disappeared. Killing the thing that hung from the ceiling(?) would be a bonus, though not ultimately necessary. Which was lucky, because nobody really wanted to fight the thing.
Riko felt incredibly relieved as he saw the familiar ships touch down. He waved and shouted, two things that a stranded survivor generally does when confronted with his salvation. Armed men marched out and he rushed towards them. A few hacked away at stray tentacles and one guy who was supposedly in charge shouted at Riko something he couldn’t quite understand and so he had to repeat it.
“Where’s the core!” he shouted again. Maybe he meant to say Core. Whatever.
“Wha—you mean the pirate’s backpack thing?”
“Which one’s the pirate!” It wouldn’t kill him to be more polite. One of the soldiers got stabbed through the heart by one of the writhing tentacle things and fell over. His body was dragged slowly over to the central body of the beast. His position was quickly taken over by another.
<font color="#804060">“Um,” Riko replied, turning around and pointing vaguely at the lump of apparent flesh. “The, the one with the jetpack, um.”
By this time, Eureka had started over to the various ships that were possibly her ticket out of here. She almost tripped over another lump of squishy something. Considering what the enemy looked like, she was tempted to squeal like a little girl and kick it away, but the tiny, weak “Ow” gave her pause. That rather annoying voice sounded familiar.
Ah, so that’s what the trashcan looked like without the, er, trashcan. She didn’t particularly know why, but she picked it up. In some places, it was disgustingly sticky. In other places, it was worryingly hard and dry. She ran over to the waiting ships just as a few soldiers attempted to try to get closer to the big nasty tumor thing.
She backed away a little when several guns were raised to her chest, but Riko quickly shouted, “No, wait, she’s okay.”
Yeah, this from a guy who tried electrocuting her to death.
The guns lowered. That was nice. She wasn’t quite let into the small circle of soldiers, though.
“Hey! Rick! Or, uh, Rika!” A brief expression of annoyance passed over the scientist’s face, but he moved closer to Eureka. “We need to leave. Like, now. This place is insane and I think the trashcan thing is dying and I really don’t think those insane guys can beat up that thing and I can’t help but think if I stay here any longer something bad’s gonna happen to me.”
Riko glanced around shiftily. “Yeah, I know. Just hang on. We’re waiting for some other guys to come and escort us in. They, uh, they want to get that Core for, um, some reason, so, uh—“
Riko’s eyes bugged out. It was almost cartoonish and Eureka would have laughed if she could. Instead, she dropped Miq, who landed with a dull ‘clunk,’ and fell over backwards, a sharp tentacle going right through her abdomen. Riko bit his lip as he watched her body get slowly dragged away and then suddenly realized that he wasn’t in an entirely different location.
She was still alive.
“We…we have to get her!” he shouted loudly as her body was dragged out of sight, behind even more waving tentacles. “She’s still alive—“
“Look,” the superior officer said gruffly, grabbing Riko’s shoulder. “You’re important. The Core’s important. And while my men’re over there, they could prob’ly pick up those other guys if you really want to. But I’m not sending troops in a field of killer tentacles after some broad—when the hell are those others coming!”
They both turned back to the ships. All of them were being slowly mummified by horrendous tentacles. “Oh hell no,” the lieutenant (general? Commander?) growled before barking out more frantic orders.
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At the actual fight, where all the real action was taking place, Syvex was feeling completely fine.
Total darkness. Real, complete darkness. Delicious.
Somehow, everybody seemed to move under a silent agreement of a temporary team-up against this throbbing monstrosity. Which was alright by him. His dark, shadowy blasts didn’t seem to be making much of a dent on their own.
The whole fight was just a big confusing whirl of tentacles and dodging and blasting. Once in a while, he’d bound near one of the others. He saw sandman at one point, twisting and weaving and bringing up tiny sand shields. Blackmask flew by him several times. The large priest was…around, somewhere, he assumed. He might have seen him, briefly, maybe? Whatever.
Syvex leaped over one swinging tentacle and ducked under another before firing another blast.
You know, it was actually so terrifying being near this thing that it was almost physically painful. Seeing meaty faces pass over the surface before sinking in somewhere deep and dark, looking at veiny flesh pulsing, watching impossible shadows of scientists and syringes pass over his vision while tentacles attempted to blind-side him everywhere…it was probably a good thing he had good reflexes. And a good thing he knew when to just let said reflexes take over.
Wait who was that.
Syvex turned and he couldn’t help but wonder where the hell all these armed men came from. Some of them had jetpacks too, sorta like Blackmask. Those guys were chasing the pirate right now, in fact.
Though the men were apparently trying to help them bring down the nightmarish monster, he didn’t think that he should really let them chase his (at least temporary) ally around. He tried aiming at their jetpacks, but apparently one of the grounded armed men noticed and smacked his arm away. Syvex almost turned on him when a tentacle grabbed the soldier and quickly whisked him away, out of sight.
Hey. Look at that. There’s another body being dragged away. Poor thing. Looks almost like…
“Oh goddammit, Finch,” Syvex sighed loudly before going after the unconscious woman. It almost seemed like her only purpose in life was to get into trouble.
More tentacles were trying to stop him, but he easily dodged them. They surrounded him as he reached Eureka and he tried to sling her over his shoulder. The tentacle wouldn’t let go. Was it barbed? Man, that would be painful. He tugged on her gingerly before trying to blast the tentacle in two. Noooope. “Dammit Finch wake up wake up wake up.”
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Eureka found herself on the roof of a train.
The train, in fact. The one she had been on only moments before. Although, of course, that train was fake. She was pretty sure this train was too. For one thing, it was moving, clearly moving ridiculously fast, but she definitely didn’t feel much movement. No wind. Nothing pressuring her to sit the hell down so that she wouldn’t be blown completely off. Another thing that tipped her off was the fact that it actually felt like she was being dragged on a floor of some sort. Though that feeling passed. Now she vaguely felt like she was being shaken roughly.
Eureka jumped on the spot. There was no need to repeat the endeavor. If she had closed her eyes, she would have been convinced that both feet stayed firmly on the roof.
Okay, so now she was back in hallucination land again. Looked pretty deserted. Also, the roof seemd to be bleeding. That was a little strange.
Suddenly, sand blades seemed to sprout from the roof. Like how events had left off back when it ended. Sorry, icky tentacle boil thing, can’t fool me.
It was only a matter for Eureka to walk to the edge of the car as sand blades sprouted like daisies around her. They seemed to be struggling to keep up with her movements. At the edge, she sat down and slipped off, unpocketing a roll of bandages and using them to cling on to the edge and lower her down slowly.
Whoops, that didn’t happen. Instead the useless bandages did nothing and she fell ungracefully onto the tiny metal platform between the cars. She didn’t really feel the pain. More like felt the expectation of pain. Or something like that.
She certainly was falling down a lot lately, wasn’t she.
Okay, so no cloth powers. That’s fine. The place seemed empty besides her. There shouldn’t be any trouble and if there was, she knew how to take care of herself.
What was she supposed to do here? It didn’t seem like she was dead. Yet. (If the afterlife was a bleeding train, that would be a stupid afterlife.) Was there even anything she could do? Okay, so what happened…she got attacked by the, the, the thing. So…now she was connected to the thing, probably. And if she was connected, then maybe she could take out the thing from the inside.
Wow, what a stupidly clichéd line.
In any case, Eureka opened the door to the next car.
Oh my god why are the walls bleeding what are those writhing things are those bodies oh my god oh my god aaaaah they’re moving aaaaaaah oh my god gonna throw up aaaaaaah it’s driiiippping on meeeeeeee aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah
The train car was not abnormal at all. It was a little inconvenient that she had to tread through thick blood-like stuff to get through, though. There didn’t seem to be anything in here that could take out the thing from the inside, though.
The sensation of being shaken was slowly fading. In fact, everything felt a little dull right now. Her brain was feeling sorta dull and woozy. But somehow she was still able to walk straight. That was nice.
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It was hard to think up insults on the fly, especially when dodging death tentacles of doom constantly and trying to ignore the ‘FLEEFLEEFLEEFLEE’ signals his brain was trying to send him. But Blackmask at least managed to spit back, “Damn curs!” That was better than nothing, right? Right.
One guy was trying to overtake and flank him. He drew out his pistol and fired. Dammit, he had more important things to do…holy water…get the holy water on it. Not that he was sure he could get close enough without getting hit by one of those tentacles. Or going insane. But somehow, he had to get the holy water there.
More flanking, more firing, but the guy on the other side of him grabbed his arm and drew in close, hands scrabbling for an off switch on the pirate’s jetpack. He swung his gun around, but there was another behind him who grabbed his arm and twisted it behind his back. His jetpack was shut off and, struggling, he was led downwards and away from the fight.
Goddamn no-good…hey, where did they even come from, anyways?
As they continued to drag him away, they grabbed at the Core, attempting to wrench it off, but unfortunately for them, one of the attributes Blackmask prided himself in was being as loud and as uncooperative as was possible when confronted with authority figures. One guy got kicked in the jaw. Although Blackmask would be the first to say that he was quite limber, he was a bit certain he wasn’t that limber. He briefly wondered how he managed that.
All thoughts of mysteriously obtained flexibility left him when he finally noticed that he was being led to that scientist fella. Being the only man he recognized, Blackmask gave Riko the dubious honor of being the one he would shout at. “Hey! Wha’s goin’ on ‘ere! Wha’ d’ya think you’re doin’, you scum-suckin’ lubber!”
As the pirate shouted more pirate-y things, Riko tried to explain that no he wasn’t quite sure what was going on and no he couldn’t do much of anything because yes it was out of his control mostly. Then they actually managed to slip the Core off, but more wild struggling caused it to get knocked away and onto the floor. A few seconds later, and as soldiers tried to disarm the pirate, he fumbled with the flask of holy water and accidentally dropped it. It shattered somewhere on the ground.
“Be careful!” one smarmy landlubber shouted. Nobody really noticed a dark, blobby thing lunge desperately into the slot of the Core.
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The further she went through the train, the more un-train-like it was getting. To be specific, it was less ‘train’ and more ‘squishy flesh thing covered in jam and yes we’re calling it jam for now because calling it the other thing will just make the experience slightly worse.’ A lot more bodies too, though some of them appeared to be sinking away and out of sight. She wasn’t quite sure what to think about that, though it did tell her that it was not wise to stand still for too long.
When she reached the next door, she found that she couldn’t open it. It wasn’t locked, really, it was just the handle…it was sort of…gross. Squishy. Sorta came away in…clumps. Ugh. Well, the gunk didn’t seem all that strong. Was she supposed to…walk through it? The thought made her shudder slightly, but she figured if she closed her eyes, maybe it wouldn’t be too bad.
“Ugh…dammit.” Eureka turned at the sound of another voice. And there, looking slightly distressed, was Syvex. He glanced distastefully around at the surroundings and seemed to brighten up when he saw Eureka. “Hey, great, you’re okay!” His sharky smile dropped momentarily. “Or I’m dead.”
“I’m not dead,” Eureka snapped, though to be honest, she wasn’t quite sure herself. Especially now that she suddenly noticed that she seemed to have gotten yet another wound. Blood was dripping out her stomach. Didn’t hurt, though. “Quick, do you happen to still have your shadow blasty powers?”
“Hm? Why wouldn’t I…?”
“Look, just try blasting that door open, would you?”
Both brushed aside questions about why Syvex was here in order to press on. Gotta stop this fleshy-train somehow, after all. With a loud boom, the door exploded. Jam spewed out into the next car. Eureka hopped through the now-open door and Syvex followed soon after. A squelchy sound indicated that the door grew back.
“Right. Let’s get this over with,” Eureka sighed.
“Wait, what are we even doing?”
Eureka shrugged. “I, uh, hm. Not…entirely sure.”
Syvex blinked at her. The silence urged Eureka to continue. “Look, I’m just sorta looking for something in here I can mess up. I dunno, an off switch, maybe. Something obvious to destroy.”
She paused. Wasn’t there something odd that just happened? Something that shouldn’t be able to happen? Didn’t something feel a little…off?
…Nah.
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Miq wasn’t surprised that everybody seemed to forget about her. Right now, she was rather hard to see. But it would have been nice if some people at least noticed that she was dying. At least then maybe someone could save her.
So when a container dropped near her, she was incredibly grateful and quickly dragged herself into the thin opening. As she did so, she felt something drop on top of her. It made her a little damp, but it didn’t seem to do anything harmful.
But the new container definitely hurt, yes it did.
Pain pain pain pain pain pain pain power
She was dissolving, but at the same time, she felt stronger than ever. The now-toothy slot grinned widely. When someone tried to pick her up, she extended a glowing pseudopod and knocked the hands away before running off quickly on more glowy pseudopods. Wow, why was she so glowy? Oh man so much power there must be something she could do with it. Hey, look, there was an icky thing trying to attack her with icky tentacles. Maybe she could do something about that.
Behind her, several people gaped as they saw the Core, the life’s work of many scientists, get up and walk away. It was rather adept at mowing down tentacles with whip-like pseudopods.
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The last door was blown away and Eureka quickly jumped through. The room was definitely larger than it should be. And it was the meatiest and jammiest yet. Her every step sank rather distressingly into the ground with a sad squelch. But it looked like this was the room she was looking for. On a train, it would be the control room. Here, it was…sort of a control room. Just a bit meatier. And instead of levers, there was a big, throbbing spherical thing. Sorta like a heart. Maybe a heart and brain combined. Wow, that’s a disgusting image.
“Right,” Eureka said, trying to sound more sure of herself than she really was. “Help me get this thing—“
Once again, she found herself getting stabbed through her abdomen. This time, it hurt a lot. Behind her, Syvex chuckled, voice dripping red.
“Ah, so trusting. You were so foolish. You even knew this would happen…”
Eureka couldn’t respond very well because she was too busy bleeding. But she did manage to say a few words.
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Dammit Finch dammit dammit dammit wake up.
Things were pretty much going crazy. Syvex had finally lost grasp on what was exactly going on here. It was suddenly growing brighter, for one thing. Also the Core thing was suddenly walking around on stilts. Or some other weird leg things. And it was killing tentacles like nobody’s business and actually managed to stab right through the actual big lump of fleshy thing. Though the wounds were healing up quickly enough so such stabbings weren’t really effective yet.
Eureka was still being dragged along. He just wasn’t quite strong enough to pull her away and he was rather uncomfortable with playing tug-of-war with her as the rope, especially with that thing going through her chest. Not to mention tentacles were still trying to sneak-attack him and everything was very distracting. Eureka’s feet were getting worryingly close to the fleshy monstrosity.
Wake up wake up wake up.
“S-syvex…”
“What? Finch!” The shadow snake blasted away a few more lingering tentacles. “Finch, I’m here! Hang on, I’ll, I’ll get you out of here…”
“Sssssyvex you…you…basssstaarrrrd.”
This threw Syvex off a little. But another tentacle ambush reminded him he had no time to be thrown off.
The sudden appearance of a walking, glowing Core caused both Tamerlane and Muriegro to decide to cheese it and watch from afar. It was probably a good idea for him to follow. But he still had a grumpy, paranoid woman to save.
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So much pain. So much pooowwwerrr but despite it, it didn’t seem like she could do anything! How disappointing! And she was really starting to feel very, very, um, not there. She had to be able to do something. If she was going to get this much power, she wanted to do something. She should do something.
Maybe if she continued stabbing at this icky thing, something will happen.
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She was so close. It was right there. She had to do something. Just within reach. But no, her legs were giving out and she couldn’t will them to stand and Syvex was still busy stabbing her through the chest and laughing and laughing. It hurt. It shouldn’t hurt. Why shouldn’t it? Because this wasn’t happening.
Was this denial?
No. It really wasn’t happening. Literally, you fool.
There’s no reason not to have cloth powers.
Her arm suddenly snapped upwards. A bandage wrapped itself around the throbbing heart-brain thing, dying red as it did so. It pulled and snapped away. The bandages constricted and it popped like a water balloon. Syvex was screeching. No, the train was screeching. No, it wasn’t a train. No, there was no train here at all. Was everything melting away? Was it ever there in the first place?
No, there was just nothing.
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The throbbing of the fleshy orb suddenly ceased and the whole thing seemed to…sag. The color was fading away and if such a thing could exude an emotion, then it was a cold resignation.
She was burning up. She was almost burnt up. But she had to do this, before she was gone, she had never felt so sure of it. She couldn’t let this be a total waste.
Miq thrust a crumbling pseudopod</font> Malevolence-ward. Yes, she could do it, she could make it…
There was nothing more fueling the Core, and thus, nothing more to support it in the air. It started to fall.