Intense Struggle! (Round 7 - The Database)

Originally posted on MSPA by Ixcalibur.

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Technically speaking Gimlak Foecrusher was not dead. The mysterious petrification that had consumed the three worlds did not exactly kill the inhabitants so much as put their bodies into a seemingly everlasting slumber. If something somehow reversed the petrification Gimlak would wake up. He’d be alive and aware just long enough to wonder why his face was in pieces upon the floor.

Though the trail of brutally beheaded statues that she left behind would argue otherwise, it was clear from the way that Aph moved through the mismatched streets that she was bored. Her body was slumped forwards, her arms dangled limp, and behind her her tentacles trailed along the floor as though she could not find the effort to keep them aloft.

This place was no fun. In a world where three worlds were squashed together one might have expected to have three times as many people to murder, but instead all Aph had were lifeless statues, a good number of which were of dumb fantasy stereotypes or improbable aliens. She’d smashed more than a few in an effort to sate the lust for death and destruction, but it just hadn’t been the same. She might as well to be tearing apart cardboard cut-outs for all the satisfaction it was giving her.

For a couple of minutes Aph had allayed the incredible dullness of this world by yelling out for Clara, recounting in graphic detail exactly what she would do to her as soon as she found the priestess. She’d done the same for Aegis, or as Aph had called him ‘gloves guy’, though it had been pretty much an afterthought borne from desperation. It wasn’t till a couple of minutes later that she’d realized Clara and ‘gloves guy’ might not be looking for a fight quite as eagerly as she was and yelling out would only drive them away.

So here she was, bored and miserable, a bit of a let down after the excitement and constant action of Cervaled Fall. She cursed the name of The Fool, and hoped to herself that the Monitor would be here any minute to deliver them to their rightful destination.

Almost without noticing Aph found herself standing in front of a stone tavern. The petrification had caused the sign to become unreadable, but somehow Aph just knew that it read The Poisoned Apple. Somehow in her minds eye she could see the tavern how it once was, before the stone, bustling with dwarves and gnomes and other worthless scum races. Sometimes she just wished they would crawl into a cave somewhere and die. That they would just leave us decent folk alone.

Thoughts that weren’t her own ran through her head. Recently she had got used to this sensation, her entire personality more or less submerged beneath an ocean of strangers’ thoughts, but this felt different. Where before the voices were part of her, by extension her voices, this was something affecting her from the outside. She didn’t like it, but as she floated to the door of the tavern and prised it open, there did not seem to be anything she could do about it.

Stepping into the tavern, she looked around. Everything was, more or less the same it ever was, though her eyes could not help but be drawn to an incongruous television which all the stools were gathered around. Aph scowled at the weird machine and turned towards the bar. Standing behind it was a statue of a female elf with long hair and a scowl upon her face. In her hands a glass being polished with an old rag, her eyes staring off into the distance.

Aph no longer in any real control of her body, recognised this statue as herself. She reached out and ran her fingers along the cold stone. For a moment she was morose, distraught at a bizarre fate she could barely comprehend. Slowly as she looked around the tavern she came to the conclusion that it was all the filthy dwarves’ fault; that excavation beneath the town. Those things were never supposed to be unearthed, but no the dwarves, they couldn’t help themselves. Offer them some shiny piece of machinery and they would bite your hand off. At one point Edgebarrow had been a decent place for decent people, back before those muckdwellers had shown up and ruined everything. They’d meddled with things they didn’t understand and they’d finally messed everything up for everyone.

Angrily Aph floated across the room and grasped the television, filthy dwarven engineering that it was, and threw it to the floor, where it smashed into rubble. She felt a little satisfaction, she’d always wanted to do that.