Intense Struggle! (Round 7 - The Database)

Originally posted on MSPA by Ixcalibur.

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Aph’s mind was chaotic, it was a wild ocean of personalities and voices in the grip of a raging storm and Aph was upon a lifeboat being thrown this way and that way holding on for dear life. But, to be more accurate, she was the storm as well, she was the ocean and everything in it was her. There were some scraps, some vestiges of what was originally her, before this, before D’Neya, and they might still have been fighting to hold on, to attempt to exist rather than to be subsumed by the maddened waters. They would not brute force their way to control of her body, it was too hard and she was too weak; she was too far gone now. Aph could barely claim to bear that name any more, she was no more Aph than she was D’Neya, or any of the numerous other personalities vying for control in the raging waters of her mind. Even Aph, and this time we talk about Aph as the vestiges of herself again, could barely be said to be herself any more. Magic leaks, magic runs and flows and blends and mixes with other magics. Like a splash of ink in a puddle of water and she might have been something else entirely. She didn’t, couldn’t, know. She was too busy fighting for her continued existence.

Aph was not a person any more; a person has consistent thoughts and a rationale that informs their actions. Aph was a consensus, a democracy of psychopaths who could only agree upon hate and death, frustration and anger and at some points sadistic glee. She was inconsistent because she was a constant battle for mental supremacy; a turbulent sea that was growing even more troubled with each second that she remained deadlocked with her latest opponent; a slight man with straw coloured hair and long misshapen arms. His attacks were not posing her much of a problem; on the one hand his plumes of flame were easily deflected by a twilight tentacle, on the other the torrents of icy water were harder to dodge but much less perilous. If it wasn’t for the fact that she was limited in movement, and as such was finding it much harder to aim her magic, this fight might have been very different indeed.

She conjured a glob of necrotic energy and loosed it in Dragonarms’ direction. He dodged, grabbed hold of a streetlamp now made from glass and paper and sand and bone and he swung himself out of the way. The toxic energy landed almost nearly at the spot where Crazyman had just been standing; it bubbled and hissed as it ate away at the sidewalk. As Crazyman Dragonarms spun around, putting his gauntlets together to deliver a devastating molten tsunami, he found Aph to be hurriedly floating down an alleyway. She needed a moment to be able to think (as much as she could think), find a way to free herself and then return to fight on her own terms without impediment and then they would see what was what.

“Hey, you!” Crazyman shouted after the retreating nymph. “Get back here.” Promptly the bulky form of XMO was at his side.

“Come on Crazyman Dragonarms, we’ve got bigger issues to deal with.” XMO’s gaze was fixated up the street where Iota and the Paxes were holding off a group of mostly-wooden basilisks that had taken it upon themselves to attack the group.

“You’re just going to let a criminal go free?” Crazyman Dragonarms asked incredulously.

“We don’t know she’s a criminal.” XMO pointed out.

“But she attacked me!” Crazyman Dragonarms thumped one of his misshapen gauntlets against his chest pridefully. “Are we not Non-Infingers? Do we not not back down when justice must be done no matter how inconvenient it might be for us?” The impact of the speech was lost in the akwardness of the double-negatives, but XMO took the point. His speakers emitted a grating sound that someone had once thought sounded something in the vicinity of a sigh, and he opened his mouth. Aph hadn’t gotten far. The alley she’d opted to flee down had ended in the rubble of where two buildings had intersected and she’d been forced to backtrack upon herself.

XMO sucked, hard. XMO sucked so hard that Aph felt as though something had hooked onto her. Air rushed past her and into the enormous mouth of the vacuum-robot. Anyone else might have just lost their footing, fallen to the floor and maybe been dragged along the pavement for a little while. Aph however, well she started leaking. Dour clouds of muddied mana were pulled loose. They spilled down the street, a veritable dark rainbow of magics streamed out behind her eventually disappearing into the robot’s iron lung.

“Wait!” Crazyman Dragonarms exclaimed. “Hold on! Something weird is happening!”

When XMO ceased suction and clamped his mouth shut, the mana that remained in the street sought the nearest body of mana to return to, which was Aph. She had collapsed face first to the street as her mana had been siphoned away, and there she lay, unconscious again. She looked different, slightly brighter perhaps, and there was a visible loss of the twilight magic that made up her tentacles (not that either of the Non-Infringers who gazed across the scene noticed these details, or would have found them particularly interesting or relevant if they had).

Crazyman Dragonarms scratched at his chin thoughtfully. “What was that?!”

XMO shrugged.

“If you’re bringing her then go on, I’m not hauling her behind us.” XMO said.

“Okay fine.” Crazyman Dragonarms hauled the nymph over his shoulder and turned to follow XMO. “Where are we going anyway? Did you work out what is going on?”

“Yeah.” XMO said. “Reality is about to collapse. We’re headed to the epicentre in the hope that reality is thin enough there to allow us to connect our transponders with home base and get out of here before this entire reality destroys itself.”

There was a pause.

“We should hurry.” Crazyman Dragonarms replied enthusiastically.

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Aph’s mind was ordered, well, to an extent. No mind could be perfectly ordered and still be a mind. It was an apartment she lived in. It was a little messy and there were some things hidden away in the back cupboards that she didn’t particuarly want anyone to see, but it was hers. Hers and hers alone… well more or less, there were some stragglers, but they were minor things with as much power over her as she had had over herself some minutes ago. She was a person again, a person in control of her own mind and her own body, though of course she wasn’t exactly the same person who she had been. The decoration of her apartment was one that almost certainly wouldn’t have appealed to her before this all began, if I could extend a metaphor to its very breaking point. She didn’t know who she was now, not yet, but she did know she wasn’t who she had been and when she woke up, she was going to be very grateful about that.