Re: QUIETUS [S!5] [Round 1: Godsworn Valley]
04-20-2012, 10:48 PM
Originally posted on MSPA by Jacquerel.
The sudden, unexpected jump from your home to that of a mad god and then further onto a live battlefield was something few could realistically be expected to enjoy, though some react better than others. For Chaete, The Outsider's cataclysmic intrusion into her life was not only an introduction to the other contestants in his little competition but also a primer on the concept that sometimes bad things happen to you and that there's really not a great deal that you can do about it. The abomination's haltingly imperfect speech was no adequate replacement for the near-constant humming and murmuring of the conversations of her siblings and parents and the aberrant touch of its mind in this new silence left a persistent feeling of dread that would have led her to shudder, had its intervention not left her incapable, and what it was saying really wasn't much help either.
Having expected a lifespan in years that would have left that of most of the other contestants insignificant in comparison (though the Sun embedded in the torso of Rachel Wylite might have also expected to enjoy a similarly impressive number) thoughts of her own mortality were almost as alien as the entity that had brought her here to begin with and no less distressing. Worms have no natural predators and the leading cause of death in adults is hunger caused by having eaten everything within a traversable distance, an imminent and violent demise had never previously been on the cards, and on top of the existential dread there was always the fact that The Outsider (whose attempt at appearing humanoid to appease the competitors had the opposite effect on someone who'd been schooled to avoid humans whenever possible, though possibly the effect of something trying but failing to be a man meant that it similarly repulsed everyone else and it was likely to still be less terrifying than his true form) had frozen her in place and thus subjected her to her first ever experience of true helplessness. The sudden inability to move was basically the first time anyone had demonstrated to her that she wasn't utterly in control of every aspect of her own life, ever.
This manifested itself as a sort of panic feedback loop where she became scared and miserable because strange things were happening to her and then even more upset because her instinct to do something about it was thwarted by the fact that she was completely immobile and forced to keep watching. By the time she was whisked out of The Outsider's freezing abode she had got worked herself into such a state that as soon as her body unlocked she dove head first into the ground, her head eclipsed by a blur of spinning molars... only to emerge no more than a couple of feet away, coughing and spluttering and now incredibly filthy. The ground here was buried under a damp sea of churned, reddish mud and it tasted awful. She spat out what she could but as she was essentially built to be a one-way system this didn't have a great deal of effect. Her stomach growled at her in protest. Tantrum temporarily postponed, she allowed herself to start calming down and examined her surroundings between deep gasps for breath.
From her perspective, this new environment was utterly bizarre. Obviously none of the other contestants had been here before and only a few of them would have been familiar with battlefields but it would probably be quite safe to wager than Chaete had been the least prepared of all. She didn't even recognise the sky and the oppressive grey ceiling of clouds weighed down on her as she stared upwards and she was tempted to hide back in the soil again (though a sudden stomach cramp persuaded her otherwise), it felt like she'd been suddenly trapped inside a giant box.
What even was that thing blocking the stars from sight? Was it some kind of barrier? Was she now trapped, as The Outsider had seemed to have promised? The prospect of a new world, while lonely, could eventually have turned out to at least have a few silver linings but how would she find out if she consumed this foul-tasting planet (the prospect of which did not enthuse her) and grew up but was then trapped within a giant sphere? She'd already almost forgotten about the other contestants, the prospect of feeding and then running out of food seeming like a much more dangerous potential outcome than the short term danger of getting killed. The ball of rock on which she had grown up would have been a miner's wet dream had a prospector ever chanced upon it (though none did, and as such it had no name), but it wasn't capable of sustaining any of the most common forms of biological life and lacked any form of atmosphere. The stars had been visible at all times, there had been no air and definitely no water. She even felt heavier than she had done at home, and the involuntary act of breathing (something that perhaps could have at least aided in steadying someone else's move) was just another addition to the swiftly growing list of "new, disconcerting things" (her muscles continued doing it automatically anyway, no sense in wasting free air).
This preoccupation with the sky was perhaps a poor choice of priorities though. She had disregarded the softly shaking ground as just another absurd property of the strange dimension in which she had been unwillingly placed, one that she would have to deal with like the sudden nearness of the horizon and the fact that it was so much harder to lift her head out of the ground, but unlike the sky this vibration wasn't an intrinsic property of the planet but actually the rumbling of distant engines coming ever closer. She was blasted out of her unpleasant reverie by the sounding of a foghorn and the sudden shouting of men.
““Hoist anchor lads! There's something ahead!”
As a pleasant change of pace that Chaete could not possibly have appreciated, this sight would probably have actually been more astounding to someone who wasn't an alien worm (swiftly making up for a life of blissful boredom by racking up new and baffling experiences right and left) who merely saw several oddly shaped heaps of moving metal. Most anyone else would have recognised it as a fleet of whaling boats, haphazardly fitted with treads and forward guns, emerging over a distant hillside and barrelling down the slippery slope towards her.
“That's not one of ours, man the harpoons! For the sea god!”
Even if she hadn't been told by her parents that humans are angry, vengeful creatures that would tie up her in a hold and use her as a space engine she would probably have been able to guess their intent, and at this point she needed very little provocation in order to activate her panic flight mechanisms. With an untranslatable mental squeal of terror, she dug her head into a tiny space between the physical planes and emerged beside a stone cliff face one and a half miles away, leaving a pulsing mid-air wormhole in her wake. When the men in their boats arrived five minutes later, the drivers got out and stared. What kind of crazy weapon did this?
And where could they get their own?
The sudden, unexpected jump from your home to that of a mad god and then further onto a live battlefield was something few could realistically be expected to enjoy, though some react better than others. For Chaete, The Outsider's cataclysmic intrusion into her life was not only an introduction to the other contestants in his little competition but also a primer on the concept that sometimes bad things happen to you and that there's really not a great deal that you can do about it. The abomination's haltingly imperfect speech was no adequate replacement for the near-constant humming and murmuring of the conversations of her siblings and parents and the aberrant touch of its mind in this new silence left a persistent feeling of dread that would have led her to shudder, had its intervention not left her incapable, and what it was saying really wasn't much help either.
Having expected a lifespan in years that would have left that of most of the other contestants insignificant in comparison (though the Sun embedded in the torso of Rachel Wylite might have also expected to enjoy a similarly impressive number) thoughts of her own mortality were almost as alien as the entity that had brought her here to begin with and no less distressing. Worms have no natural predators and the leading cause of death in adults is hunger caused by having eaten everything within a traversable distance, an imminent and violent demise had never previously been on the cards, and on top of the existential dread there was always the fact that The Outsider (whose attempt at appearing humanoid to appease the competitors had the opposite effect on someone who'd been schooled to avoid humans whenever possible, though possibly the effect of something trying but failing to be a man meant that it similarly repulsed everyone else and it was likely to still be less terrifying than his true form) had frozen her in place and thus subjected her to her first ever experience of true helplessness. The sudden inability to move was basically the first time anyone had demonstrated to her that she wasn't utterly in control of every aspect of her own life, ever.
This manifested itself as a sort of panic feedback loop where she became scared and miserable because strange things were happening to her and then even more upset because her instinct to do something about it was thwarted by the fact that she was completely immobile and forced to keep watching. By the time she was whisked out of The Outsider's freezing abode she had got worked herself into such a state that as soon as her body unlocked she dove head first into the ground, her head eclipsed by a blur of spinning molars... only to emerge no more than a couple of feet away, coughing and spluttering and now incredibly filthy. The ground here was buried under a damp sea of churned, reddish mud and it tasted awful. She spat out what she could but as she was essentially built to be a one-way system this didn't have a great deal of effect. Her stomach growled at her in protest. Tantrum temporarily postponed, she allowed herself to start calming down and examined her surroundings between deep gasps for breath.
From her perspective, this new environment was utterly bizarre. Obviously none of the other contestants had been here before and only a few of them would have been familiar with battlefields but it would probably be quite safe to wager than Chaete had been the least prepared of all. She didn't even recognise the sky and the oppressive grey ceiling of clouds weighed down on her as she stared upwards and she was tempted to hide back in the soil again (though a sudden stomach cramp persuaded her otherwise), it felt like she'd been suddenly trapped inside a giant box.
What even was that thing blocking the stars from sight? Was it some kind of barrier? Was she now trapped, as The Outsider had seemed to have promised? The prospect of a new world, while lonely, could eventually have turned out to at least have a few silver linings but how would she find out if she consumed this foul-tasting planet (the prospect of which did not enthuse her) and grew up but was then trapped within a giant sphere? She'd already almost forgotten about the other contestants, the prospect of feeding and then running out of food seeming like a much more dangerous potential outcome than the short term danger of getting killed. The ball of rock on which she had grown up would have been a miner's wet dream had a prospector ever chanced upon it (though none did, and as such it had no name), but it wasn't capable of sustaining any of the most common forms of biological life and lacked any form of atmosphere. The stars had been visible at all times, there had been no air and definitely no water. She even felt heavier than she had done at home, and the involuntary act of breathing (something that perhaps could have at least aided in steadying someone else's move) was just another addition to the swiftly growing list of "new, disconcerting things" (her muscles continued doing it automatically anyway, no sense in wasting free air).
This preoccupation with the sky was perhaps a poor choice of priorities though. She had disregarded the softly shaking ground as just another absurd property of the strange dimension in which she had been unwillingly placed, one that she would have to deal with like the sudden nearness of the horizon and the fact that it was so much harder to lift her head out of the ground, but unlike the sky this vibration wasn't an intrinsic property of the planet but actually the rumbling of distant engines coming ever closer. She was blasted out of her unpleasant reverie by the sounding of a foghorn and the sudden shouting of men.
““Hoist anchor lads! There's something ahead!”
As a pleasant change of pace that Chaete could not possibly have appreciated, this sight would probably have actually been more astounding to someone who wasn't an alien worm (swiftly making up for a life of blissful boredom by racking up new and baffling experiences right and left) who merely saw several oddly shaped heaps of moving metal. Most anyone else would have recognised it as a fleet of whaling boats, haphazardly fitted with treads and forward guns, emerging over a distant hillside and barrelling down the slippery slope towards her.
“That's not one of ours, man the harpoons! For the sea god!”
Even if she hadn't been told by her parents that humans are angry, vengeful creatures that would tie up her in a hold and use her as a space engine she would probably have been able to guess their intent, and at this point she needed very little provocation in order to activate her panic flight mechanisms. With an untranslatable mental squeal of terror, she dug her head into a tiny space between the physical planes and emerged beside a stone cliff face one and a half miles away, leaving a pulsing mid-air wormhole in her wake. When the men in their boats arrived five minutes later, the drivers got out and stared. What kind of crazy weapon did this?
And where could they get their own?