Re: The Phenomenal Fracas (GBS2G6) [Round Five: The Ambitus Phenomenon]
10-04-2012, 02:34 AM
Originally posted on MSPA by Anomaly.
Syvex sat wondering what the hell he was doing in the forest anyway. He had a lot more pressing things to do than listen to an argument about exploiting trees and the planet and seriously who cares?
"Alright, I get it!" Syvex interrupted. The three plant... people... whatever they were calling themselves stopped squabbling to glance at their captive audience.
"I'm... very sorry," Olivia said sheepishly. "We're being very rude to our guest."
"Like he'd actually understand anyway," Dove mumbled. "Probably just wants to get ou-"
"Quiet," Olivia hissed.
Syvex sighed. "I don't have any questions, no. Sorry, but I've got things to do. You three can argue all you want about some stupid plants, but I-"
"What was that?" Olivia asked, shocked.
"I think you've got bigger things to worry about tonight than some trees."
"Such as?" Dove asked impatiently.
"You know, a revol... Erm..." Syvex realized his error too late. "I mean, nothing."
"A revolution?" Crepitans asked in a tone somewhere between disgruntled and intrigued.
A silence permeated the woods as the three stared at Syvex. Yup, he'd screwed up. Rather than try to talk his way out of the situation (talking wasn't really a strong suit of his), he did the only reasonable thing and threw a portal on the ground beneath him. He didn't really use much care in placing the other end other than putting it as far away as possible, and ended up draped over a few tree branches.
Sadly, Syvex wasn't out of earshot of the increasingly-agitated hippie grove. He really hadn't done much to help - their less-than-civil conversation swung wildly between driving away their guest and spies and revolutionaries and lies and a whole lot of other things that Syvex neither cared about nor wanted to hear. At least he had escaped. There was definitely no way the 60-foot tree person could find him hiding in a tree or anything.
Actually, staying nearby was probably a very bad idea. He made a few more jumps in rapid succession, ending up hanging from a branch somewhere near the edge of the forest - beyond the thicket of trees he could barely make out the shape of a building. A few of his portals were worryingly offset, though not to the extreme of the first one.
No sense worrying about that though. He was probably just nervous. Nervous that Eureka was probably turning into something like him. Nervous that she was supposed to die in the past. Nervous that he was in a forest, a dark forest wait no that couldn't have been why. It was just a bunch of stupid trees.
He decided it was best not to worry about it. He couldn't return to the opera hall if he couldn't calm down - a task made a bit more difficult by the hideous laughter arising from nearby.
i know not how she survived
the young princess was as defenseless as the rest
perhaps more so, were it not for the amulet she bore
but that should not have saved her
perhaps it was the other item she carried with her
a spiderlike pincushion, which she was so sure that no one could see
which she obsessed over from the moment she discovered just hours before her family died
i do not know what happened to this item
young princess lillian, though a recluse after the revolution, had a single daughter
perhaps it has been passed down
Wonderful. So the pincushion-god-thing was... taking the long way back? As far as she knew it hadn't even done much of anything since the battle started. Maybe she just hadn't been paying attention. though. Didn't look like it had done much even now, except keep someone alive. Was that a big deal? Maybe.
She kept looking through the journal. It was a pretty comprehensive account - if she found herself in the past again, she could know ahead of time what was going to happen. More importantly, maybe she could find something about herself. Didn't Syvex say that she was going to die? Already died? Would die in the future, in the past? One of those. Maybe he was wrong, though. It was just a name on a fountain. Maybe there was a mistake at some point. Surely someone could have screwed something up over 100 years.
Eureka's fleeting optimism was crushed as she flipped to yet another page.
the night of the revolution took many innocent lives with it
some that did not seem to belong at all
one of these stands out in my mind, if only for the circumstances
her name was eureka finch
i know this only because of her companion, the eyeless snake who was earlier arrested
whether she was the same woman he was with earlier is unclear
she was not nearly as human at this point if she was the same
in fact, she resembled him to a degree, with more arms and spines than the woman i had seen before
but nonetheless, she was killed in the royal ballroom as i looked on
killed by the guard captain before he himself was slain by the snake
they called him a hero for his act, but he refused the title
he requested only remembrance of her
he took up the body of his fallen comrade and was never again seen
An increasingly unnerved Eureka looked up to find that the cobblestone path was gone, and that the trees ahead were much, much denser than before. Eureka stopped, only half-cognizant of her surroundings. She could have probably returned to the opera house again, if she wanted to. She just had to clear her mind, to not worry about the journal. To not worry about her impending death and/or Syvexization. How long did she have? Hours?
She wasn't doing a very good job of not worrying about it. She gazed to the side. Where there had once been (or would later be) a small memorial garden stood instead a field of weeds and a ramshackle shed, decaying with age. There wasn't really any reason to focus on it, and yet she felt there was something odd about it. Maybe it was just the fact that it had (from her perspective) appeared from nowhere. Maybe it was just the fact that it was so out of place on the edge of the forest.
Or maybe it was the pounding coming from inside, accompanied by insane cackling. The rusted lock on the door rattled weakly, then broke mere seconds after. Out poured a disheveled wreck of a man, wrapped in what might have been a torn-up potato sack. He raised himself off the ground, grinning madly and alternatingly staring at Eureka and the mass of bone-splinters where his right arm should have been.
"Ahahaha! Now no prison can hold me!" He held the bone-arm in front of his face, staring wildly with his one remaining eye. "Thank you for the help, door-guy! Hahahaha!"
He stared blankly at Eureka for a few more seconds, then immediately charged at her, swinging the bone-arm at her face. The shards of bone sliced straight through the frail fabric she'd cut from the coats at the opera, and left quite a few gashes on the arm she used to defend herself.
"What the hell is wrong with you?!" she shouted at him, as if it would actually make a difference.
"I've escaped, don't you see? They thought they could hold me! Haha! Hold me! I'm celebrating. Celebrating by killing you! Ahahahaha!"
Eureka jumped back as the cackling madman tossed a couple of bone splinters at the ground, which immediately grew into a pair of giant skeletal spiders. Eureka stowed the journal inside of her sweatshirt/suit and gathered up what scraps of fabric she had left.
She was pretty sure she'd seen worse.
"What the hell is wrong with you?!" A familiar voice echoed past Syvex before the trees behind choked it into nothingness. Syvex stopped to consider for just a moment that maybe Eureka wasn't in as much danger as he always assumed she was in. She could regenerate now, right? Yeah, sure, into something like him. Plus, she wasn't really anywhere in the neighborhood of "immortal".
A couple of portal-hops later, Syvex found her, aggravatedly scratching some rough purple-gray patches of skin on her arm while standing over a broken pile of bones and what looked like an unconscious zombie. She looked a little surprised to see him, but just a little (he tended to drop in from nowhere a lot).
"Didn't think you'd be back so soon. ...Who is this guy, anyway?" he asked.
"Some kind of psycho, I don't know. They had him locked in a shed for some reason." She hastily pulled up her sleeve. "I guess you got away from the giant tree thing?" she asked, slightly calmer but still fairly agitated.
"Not before his friends tried to get me to... support forest protection? I'm not really sure what happened, but I think I told them about the revolution."
"You... what?" Eureka pulled a large, leather-bound tome from her sweatshirt and quickly flipped through it.
"What's that?" Syvex questioned.
"It's something I borrowed from a library in the future. It's this floating box thing's journal about the revolution."
"So... It says what's going to happen tonight?"
"Yeah..." Eureka stopped flipping through the book. "So apparently... a giant tree and a couple others warned the guard captain about an impending revolution..."
"Oh. I guess I changed history."
"Didn't change much. The captain tried to detain them for questioning, but then fighting broke out. They all died in the struggle afterwards."
"Died?" Syvex paused for a moment. He'd sent them to their deaths. It wasn't just them, either. Hundreds of people (for a loose definition of "people") were going to die soon in a bloody revolution. He'd been there. He'd seen masses of lives ended over a pointless conflict. He didn't want to see it happen again.
"Can't we stop the revolution? You know what's going to happen. You've got the book."
"Yeah, but what happens once we change things? What if we, I don't know, cause some kind of time paradox?"
"A what?"
"If we changed the past so that the book stops existing, then we would never have the book in the first place, and couldn't have changed the past."
"...Maybe we're protected against those? I noticed the fountain appearing and disappearing in the future. Besides, we have to take the chance."
Eureka raised an eyebrow. "You've spent this whole time trying to keep me - us safe, and now you're going to risk your life to stop a war? Are you feeling alright?"
"Just... Nevermind. Maybe you can use that thing to find out what the others are up to."
Eureka had suddenly stopped paying attention in favor of staring at the tiny, dilapidated shed, whose door now opened into some sort of stately living room. The necromancer was nowhere to be found.
Syvex sat wondering what the hell he was doing in the forest anyway. He had a lot more pressing things to do than listen to an argument about exploiting trees and the planet and seriously who cares?
"Alright, I get it!" Syvex interrupted. The three plant... people... whatever they were calling themselves stopped squabbling to glance at their captive audience.
"I'm... very sorry," Olivia said sheepishly. "We're being very rude to our guest."
"Like he'd actually understand anyway," Dove mumbled. "Probably just wants to get ou-"
"Quiet," Olivia hissed.
Syvex sighed. "I don't have any questions, no. Sorry, but I've got things to do. You three can argue all you want about some stupid plants, but I-"
"What was that?" Olivia asked, shocked.
"I think you've got bigger things to worry about tonight than some trees."
"Such as?" Dove asked impatiently.
"You know, a revol... Erm..." Syvex realized his error too late. "I mean, nothing."
"A revolution?" Crepitans asked in a tone somewhere between disgruntled and intrigued.
A silence permeated the woods as the three stared at Syvex. Yup, he'd screwed up. Rather than try to talk his way out of the situation (talking wasn't really a strong suit of his), he did the only reasonable thing and threw a portal on the ground beneath him. He didn't really use much care in placing the other end other than putting it as far away as possible, and ended up draped over a few tree branches.
Sadly, Syvex wasn't out of earshot of the increasingly-agitated hippie grove. He really hadn't done much to help - their less-than-civil conversation swung wildly between driving away their guest and spies and revolutionaries and lies and a whole lot of other things that Syvex neither cared about nor wanted to hear. At least he had escaped. There was definitely no way the 60-foot tree person could find him hiding in a tree or anything.
Actually, staying nearby was probably a very bad idea. He made a few more jumps in rapid succession, ending up hanging from a branch somewhere near the edge of the forest - beyond the thicket of trees he could barely make out the shape of a building. A few of his portals were worryingly offset, though not to the extreme of the first one.
No sense worrying about that though. He was probably just nervous. Nervous that Eureka was probably turning into something like him. Nervous that she was supposed to die in the past. Nervous that he was in a forest, a dark forest wait no that couldn't have been why. It was just a bunch of stupid trees.
He decided it was best not to worry about it. He couldn't return to the opera hall if he couldn't calm down - a task made a bit more difficult by the hideous laughter arising from nearby.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Eureka hastily thumbed through the age-worn journal as she strolled back toward the park. It gave a very detailed account of the night of the revolution - traitors and death and injustice and the usual fare. A number of sections gave her pause, though.i know not how she survived
the young princess was as defenseless as the rest
perhaps more so, were it not for the amulet she bore
but that should not have saved her
perhaps it was the other item she carried with her
a spiderlike pincushion, which she was so sure that no one could see
which she obsessed over from the moment she discovered just hours before her family died
i do not know what happened to this item
young princess lillian, though a recluse after the revolution, had a single daughter
perhaps it has been passed down
Wonderful. So the pincushion-god-thing was... taking the long way back? As far as she knew it hadn't even done much of anything since the battle started. Maybe she just hadn't been paying attention. though. Didn't look like it had done much even now, except keep someone alive. Was that a big deal? Maybe.
She kept looking through the journal. It was a pretty comprehensive account - if she found herself in the past again, she could know ahead of time what was going to happen. More importantly, maybe she could find something about herself. Didn't Syvex say that she was going to die? Already died? Would die in the future, in the past? One of those. Maybe he was wrong, though. It was just a name on a fountain. Maybe there was a mistake at some point. Surely someone could have screwed something up over 100 years.
Eureka's fleeting optimism was crushed as she flipped to yet another page.
the night of the revolution took many innocent lives with it
some that did not seem to belong at all
one of these stands out in my mind, if only for the circumstances
her name was eureka finch
i know this only because of her companion, the eyeless snake who was earlier arrested
whether she was the same woman he was with earlier is unclear
she was not nearly as human at this point if she was the same
in fact, she resembled him to a degree, with more arms and spines than the woman i had seen before
but nonetheless, she was killed in the royal ballroom as i looked on
killed by the guard captain before he himself was slain by the snake
they called him a hero for his act, but he refused the title
he requested only remembrance of her
he took up the body of his fallen comrade and was never again seen
An increasingly unnerved Eureka looked up to find that the cobblestone path was gone, and that the trees ahead were much, much denser than before. Eureka stopped, only half-cognizant of her surroundings. She could have probably returned to the opera house again, if she wanted to. She just had to clear her mind, to not worry about the journal. To not worry about her impending death and/or Syvexization. How long did she have? Hours?
She wasn't doing a very good job of not worrying about it. She gazed to the side. Where there had once been (or would later be) a small memorial garden stood instead a field of weeds and a ramshackle shed, decaying with age. There wasn't really any reason to focus on it, and yet she felt there was something odd about it. Maybe it was just the fact that it had (from her perspective) appeared from nowhere. Maybe it was just the fact that it was so out of place on the edge of the forest.
Or maybe it was the pounding coming from inside, accompanied by insane cackling. The rusted lock on the door rattled weakly, then broke mere seconds after. Out poured a disheveled wreck of a man, wrapped in what might have been a torn-up potato sack. He raised himself off the ground, grinning madly and alternatingly staring at Eureka and the mass of bone-splinters where his right arm should have been.
"Ahahaha! Now no prison can hold me!" He held the bone-arm in front of his face, staring wildly with his one remaining eye. "Thank you for the help, door-guy! Hahahaha!"
He stared blankly at Eureka for a few more seconds, then immediately charged at her, swinging the bone-arm at her face. The shards of bone sliced straight through the frail fabric she'd cut from the coats at the opera, and left quite a few gashes on the arm she used to defend herself.
"What the hell is wrong with you?!" she shouted at him, as if it would actually make a difference.
"I've escaped, don't you see? They thought they could hold me! Haha! Hold me! I'm celebrating. Celebrating by killing you! Ahahahaha!"
Eureka jumped back as the cackling madman tossed a couple of bone splinters at the ground, which immediately grew into a pair of giant skeletal spiders. Eureka stowed the journal inside of her sweatshirt/suit and gathered up what scraps of fabric she had left.
She was pretty sure she'd seen worse.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Even enveloped in darkness as he was, Syvex could scarcely make out the laughter's source. Someone was shouting at someone else, something about a door, maybe? Odd."What the hell is wrong with you?!" A familiar voice echoed past Syvex before the trees behind choked it into nothingness. Syvex stopped to consider for just a moment that maybe Eureka wasn't in as much danger as he always assumed she was in. She could regenerate now, right? Yeah, sure, into something like him. Plus, she wasn't really anywhere in the neighborhood of "immortal".
A couple of portal-hops later, Syvex found her, aggravatedly scratching some rough purple-gray patches of skin on her arm while standing over a broken pile of bones and what looked like an unconscious zombie. She looked a little surprised to see him, but just a little (he tended to drop in from nowhere a lot).
"Didn't think you'd be back so soon. ...Who is this guy, anyway?" he asked.
"Some kind of psycho, I don't know. They had him locked in a shed for some reason." She hastily pulled up her sleeve. "I guess you got away from the giant tree thing?" she asked, slightly calmer but still fairly agitated.
"Not before his friends tried to get me to... support forest protection? I'm not really sure what happened, but I think I told them about the revolution."
"You... what?" Eureka pulled a large, leather-bound tome from her sweatshirt and quickly flipped through it.
"What's that?" Syvex questioned.
"It's something I borrowed from a library in the future. It's this floating box thing's journal about the revolution."
"So... It says what's going to happen tonight?"
"Yeah..." Eureka stopped flipping through the book. "So apparently... a giant tree and a couple others warned the guard captain about an impending revolution..."
"Oh. I guess I changed history."
"Didn't change much. The captain tried to detain them for questioning, but then fighting broke out. They all died in the struggle afterwards."
"Died?" Syvex paused for a moment. He'd sent them to their deaths. It wasn't just them, either. Hundreds of people (for a loose definition of "people") were going to die soon in a bloody revolution. He'd been there. He'd seen masses of lives ended over a pointless conflict. He didn't want to see it happen again.
"Can't we stop the revolution? You know what's going to happen. You've got the book."
"Yeah, but what happens once we change things? What if we, I don't know, cause some kind of time paradox?"
"A what?"
"If we changed the past so that the book stops existing, then we would never have the book in the first place, and couldn't have changed the past."
"...Maybe we're protected against those? I noticed the fountain appearing and disappearing in the future. Besides, we have to take the chance."
Eureka raised an eyebrow. "You've spent this whole time trying to keep me - us safe, and now you're going to risk your life to stop a war? Are you feeling alright?"
"Just... Nevermind. Maybe you can use that thing to find out what the others are up to."
Eureka had suddenly stopped paying attention in favor of staring at the tiny, dilapidated shed, whose door now opened into some sort of stately living room. The necromancer was nowhere to be found.