Re: DEATHGAME 9000 [S!3] Round Two: Interplanetary Circus
12-06-2012, 03:45 AM
Originally posted on MSPA by Jacquerel.
“When were you planning on telling me this?”
ER/IC's recording of The Incompetent's opening speech played itself back to an incredulous audience for the third time but didn't seem to have made itself any less ridiculous. Back at home the presence of alternate universes had already been all-but confirmed even if they were yet unreachable and theories about what forms interdimensional travel and the people they might meet during it might take were hardly uncommon in works of speculative fiction but... that didn't really make any of it more easily believable to Gan.
Or less frustrating.
By all rights he should probably have been upset at the loss of the last link to his homeland, as far as he was concerned it had only been a couple of subjective weeks since everyone had become sick all at once, but all he could bring himself to feel was anger.
Not only was he stuck inside a walking box that refused to do anything he asked it to do unless he worded it in increasingly roundabout ways (did it not realise there weren't going to be any hospitals around that could serve his patients?) and not only was it hiding important information from him when it knew he was making plans (literally none of what he had just accomplished had been to any good, he was never even going to see any of those people again!) but the only reason they weren't where they should be in the first place was because they were supposed to fight for some cosmic child's amusement? Well, fuck that!
“You didn't ask”, was all Eric bothered to give by way of reply, and as far as he was concerned that was reason enough. What did any of that have to do with what he was supposed to be doing? He was starting to think that his self-appointed onboard paramedic didn't really know what he was talking about, medical license or not.
None of his detours or suggestions had ended in any kind of positive progress and had taken up a fairly substantial level of valuable patient space, though worryingly he couldn't quite tell where everything he had ingested had got to now. There was a faint feeling of... something, but not what it should have been. Perhaps it had been jumbled around a bit when he was shuffled between worlds.
It would probably sort itself out.
But yes, things had been delayed long enough that he had been transported somewhere else entirely and thus lost all of the scant information he had managed to gather about the previous city, especially as his new GPS system had vanished in a very tiny explosion mere seconds after arrival, effectively placing him back at square one. First priority was therefore going to be fixing this.
Perhaps worse though was that the transition clearly meant that one of the strange people he'd watched earlier had been killed, which was a fairly large failing on his part and another mark against following anyone else's plans. Much of what The Incompetent had said, Eric had simply ignored, but that part had seemed fairly relevant to what he regarded as his place in life and though he was not really capable of any strong form of resentment, he did not appreciate the fact that Gan had kept him wandering around for so long that he'd only sighted one of them, and completely failed to do anything about how he knew there was likely to be danger. That was far from efficient.
As it did not seem like his one conscious passenger was likely to stop plotting out loud to himself any time soon, Eric put him on slow for a while in order to devote more processing power to the important act of looking around, startling a couple of a couple of people who had mistaken his previously motionless form for one of a long line of colourful vending machines.
What they thought he might have supplied, heaven only knows.
Still muttering darkly (and unaware that he no longer had an audience), ERIC's unwilling passenger stomped his way over to the casually scattered pile of captured kappas and aimed a fearsome kick at the nearest one's shell for the purpose of stress relief. They were chronolocked after all, it wasn't as if they were going to feel it or suffer any ill effect whatsoever.
He'd fully expected to bounce off an impervious surface and possibly even bruise himself a little (it was a similar careless action that had got him incarcerated in the first place), so he was fairly surprised when he actually met no resistance at all. So surprised that his momentum carried him forwards and downwards, tumbling through several more intangible reptiles and slamming into the ground. Dislodged pixels scattered in all directions, bursting into algebra as they impacted against any real surface until Gan was once again almost alone in the nebulously defined space of ERIC's interior (save for the other two silently frozen members of his race, a robot arm and a boy).
Stunned to silence he heaved himself off the ground and took stock, fortunately nothing wounded but his confidence and peace of mind. What the hell caused that? Was there something wrong with ERIC's interior?
The two other Khral mercifully did not explode when cautiously prodded with one pseudopod, however the juvenile human seemed to have turned into a fine purplish mist while Gan's back was turned. This was mildly disconcerting as time should not have been moving in its relative area but did at least provide useful grounds for conjecture. The other two members of his kind had been here the whole time, but everything brought from another world seemed to have destroyed itself since they had left. Was this just a normal effect of interdimensional travel? Presumably ERIC and the other “contestants” would be protected in some way...
Why it left more corporeal evidence of its previous life than the kappas had was another mystery.
This left Weaver's severed limb, which also still seemed to be entirely tangible (and fairly obviously artificial, why were they carting this thing around again?). He recognised this from their Host's introductory speech though, and it was not from the same world as him or from the one they had just left.
Wasn't its owner meant to be some kind of genius? If he couldn't find a method to create a cure (something he'd never been particularly confident about) he could at least perhaps get someone with the right skills to “persuade” Eric to let him out. Could they use its arm as a bargaining chip perhaps?
Maybe he should have been thinking along those lines from the beginning, he'd spent too long already pandering to the artificial “feelings” of a machine.
The vending machines had been arranged in some sort of market area, many small booths scattered in front and around the sides of a single, much larger tent. The crowd was fairly thick (Eric noted with mounting optimism a fairly wide variation in species, not quite to the extent of the selection presented by the Gamexus but the more species of person a place was able to treat the more likely they'd have someone who knew something about Xenobiology and could finally take his burden off his metaphorical hands) but fortunately proved far more willing to get out of his way than the previous one he had encountered. When not coerced by the angry ghost of a city most people had a sensible aversion to self-propelled balls of metal and Gomorrah's influence had yet to extend much further than the walls of the tent it currently occupied.
That said, Eric did still have to exercise some care and as a result was moving forward a little slower than he would have liked. It would have been dangerous and impractical to take off here (especially considering he didn't have any form of map) but the delay was not something he appreciated in the slightest. As an emergency response unit designed for natural (or artificial) disasters he was not used to having to wait in traffic, as it were.
It had not yet occurred to him that he could simply ask for directions to the nearest medical tent (though he was likely to be disappointed at the facilities provided once he did) so he alleviated this irritation by craning his neck high above the heads of the circus-goers to try and spy out some kind of helpful sign. It meant that he could only really clearly see the surrounding people's heads but as they were generally moving out his way anyway this didn't seem like it was going to be an issue.
The theory would have worked too, if everyone had been looking where they were going and nobody had been short enough to pass under everyone else's heads. Alas, ERIC wasn't the only member of the crowd relying on most people's ingrained reflex to move out of someone else's way, or the only one who wasn't really paying the utmost amount of attention to what was in front of him. Or her, as it were.
The candyfloss vendor had actually stopped chasing her fairly quickly, he knew he couldn't keep up and couldn't afford to let his other incompetent employee man the whole store on his own for any length of time, but she hadn't found it particularly hard to pick up additional pursuers as she went. It would practically be a crime to run through a crowd without unleashing a torrent of underfoot marbles or setting the individual notes in a man's wallet flapping into the sky like butterflies.
Both at once caused a particularly spectacular effect as people were too busy greedily watching the sky to watch their own feet, so they often didn't even notice the growing pile of other people who'd been sent tumbling head-over-heels to the floor until they were suddenly counted among their number, flailing their arms in a fairly ineffective imitation of what they'd been coveting seconds earlier.
Eris certainly noticed it though, and as you've probably picked up by now she noticed it so much that she ran headlong into ERIC, bouncing off his plated exterior with an audible clang. Her child's body didn't give her an incredible amount of resilience but she was at least naturally bouncy and not completely unaccustomed to falling to the ground, the impact only leaving her a little dazed with a couple of bruises.
It actually took ERIC a couple of seconds to notice that anything had happened at all, though fortunately it registered before he managed to step on her.
As she shook herself off and ERIC repositioned his head to a more sensible location they realised pretty much both at the same time that the other was one of the people from The Incompetent's lineup of unfortunate participants. To Eris this detail wasn't really one of particularly great importance, but to ERIC this was enough evidence to create an individual exception in his previously-established rules against bothering humans (or at least, things that looks like humans). This in turn provoked what was probably a fairly predictable response, his spherical chest hinging open to expose the purple brilliance of his Event Horizon and his various arms uncoiling to their full and vaguely threatening lengths, veering in at slightly uncomfortable angles.
“Greetings and apologies Queen Eris of the Vetolian Flow , Do you require medical assistance?”
Hopefully he wasn't going to end up greeting every participant in this way.
“When were you planning on telling me this?”
ER/IC's recording of The Incompetent's opening speech played itself back to an incredulous audience for the third time but didn't seem to have made itself any less ridiculous. Back at home the presence of alternate universes had already been all-but confirmed even if they were yet unreachable and theories about what forms interdimensional travel and the people they might meet during it might take were hardly uncommon in works of speculative fiction but... that didn't really make any of it more easily believable to Gan.
Or less frustrating.
By all rights he should probably have been upset at the loss of the last link to his homeland, as far as he was concerned it had only been a couple of subjective weeks since everyone had become sick all at once, but all he could bring himself to feel was anger.
Not only was he stuck inside a walking box that refused to do anything he asked it to do unless he worded it in increasingly roundabout ways (did it not realise there weren't going to be any hospitals around that could serve his patients?) and not only was it hiding important information from him when it knew he was making plans (literally none of what he had just accomplished had been to any good, he was never even going to see any of those people again!) but the only reason they weren't where they should be in the first place was because they were supposed to fight for some cosmic child's amusement? Well, fuck that!
“You didn't ask”, was all Eric bothered to give by way of reply, and as far as he was concerned that was reason enough. What did any of that have to do with what he was supposed to be doing? He was starting to think that his self-appointed onboard paramedic didn't really know what he was talking about, medical license or not.
None of his detours or suggestions had ended in any kind of positive progress and had taken up a fairly substantial level of valuable patient space, though worryingly he couldn't quite tell where everything he had ingested had got to now. There was a faint feeling of... something, but not what it should have been. Perhaps it had been jumbled around a bit when he was shuffled between worlds.
It would probably sort itself out.
But yes, things had been delayed long enough that he had been transported somewhere else entirely and thus lost all of the scant information he had managed to gather about the previous city, especially as his new GPS system had vanished in a very tiny explosion mere seconds after arrival, effectively placing him back at square one. First priority was therefore going to be fixing this.
Perhaps worse though was that the transition clearly meant that one of the strange people he'd watched earlier had been killed, which was a fairly large failing on his part and another mark against following anyone else's plans. Much of what The Incompetent had said, Eric had simply ignored, but that part had seemed fairly relevant to what he regarded as his place in life and though he was not really capable of any strong form of resentment, he did not appreciate the fact that Gan had kept him wandering around for so long that he'd only sighted one of them, and completely failed to do anything about how he knew there was likely to be danger. That was far from efficient.
As it did not seem like his one conscious passenger was likely to stop plotting out loud to himself any time soon, Eric put him on slow for a while in order to devote more processing power to the important act of looking around, startling a couple of a couple of people who had mistaken his previously motionless form for one of a long line of colourful vending machines.
What they thought he might have supplied, heaven only knows.
Still muttering darkly (and unaware that he no longer had an audience), ERIC's unwilling passenger stomped his way over to the casually scattered pile of captured kappas and aimed a fearsome kick at the nearest one's shell for the purpose of stress relief. They were chronolocked after all, it wasn't as if they were going to feel it or suffer any ill effect whatsoever.
He'd fully expected to bounce off an impervious surface and possibly even bruise himself a little (it was a similar careless action that had got him incarcerated in the first place), so he was fairly surprised when he actually met no resistance at all. So surprised that his momentum carried him forwards and downwards, tumbling through several more intangible reptiles and slamming into the ground. Dislodged pixels scattered in all directions, bursting into algebra as they impacted against any real surface until Gan was once again almost alone in the nebulously defined space of ERIC's interior (save for the other two silently frozen members of his race, a robot arm and a boy).
Stunned to silence he heaved himself off the ground and took stock, fortunately nothing wounded but his confidence and peace of mind. What the hell caused that? Was there something wrong with ERIC's interior?
The two other Khral mercifully did not explode when cautiously prodded with one pseudopod, however the juvenile human seemed to have turned into a fine purplish mist while Gan's back was turned. This was mildly disconcerting as time should not have been moving in its relative area but did at least provide useful grounds for conjecture. The other two members of his kind had been here the whole time, but everything brought from another world seemed to have destroyed itself since they had left. Was this just a normal effect of interdimensional travel? Presumably ERIC and the other “contestants” would be protected in some way...
Why it left more corporeal evidence of its previous life than the kappas had was another mystery.
This left Weaver's severed limb, which also still seemed to be entirely tangible (and fairly obviously artificial, why were they carting this thing around again?). He recognised this from their Host's introductory speech though, and it was not from the same world as him or from the one they had just left.
Wasn't its owner meant to be some kind of genius? If he couldn't find a method to create a cure (something he'd never been particularly confident about) he could at least perhaps get someone with the right skills to “persuade” Eric to let him out. Could they use its arm as a bargaining chip perhaps?
Maybe he should have been thinking along those lines from the beginning, he'd spent too long already pandering to the artificial “feelings” of a machine.
The vending machines had been arranged in some sort of market area, many small booths scattered in front and around the sides of a single, much larger tent. The crowd was fairly thick (Eric noted with mounting optimism a fairly wide variation in species, not quite to the extent of the selection presented by the Gamexus but the more species of person a place was able to treat the more likely they'd have someone who knew something about Xenobiology and could finally take his burden off his metaphorical hands) but fortunately proved far more willing to get out of his way than the previous one he had encountered. When not coerced by the angry ghost of a city most people had a sensible aversion to self-propelled balls of metal and Gomorrah's influence had yet to extend much further than the walls of the tent it currently occupied.
That said, Eric did still have to exercise some care and as a result was moving forward a little slower than he would have liked. It would have been dangerous and impractical to take off here (especially considering he didn't have any form of map) but the delay was not something he appreciated in the slightest. As an emergency response unit designed for natural (or artificial) disasters he was not used to having to wait in traffic, as it were.
It had not yet occurred to him that he could simply ask for directions to the nearest medical tent (though he was likely to be disappointed at the facilities provided once he did) so he alleviated this irritation by craning his neck high above the heads of the circus-goers to try and spy out some kind of helpful sign. It meant that he could only really clearly see the surrounding people's heads but as they were generally moving out his way anyway this didn't seem like it was going to be an issue.
The theory would have worked too, if everyone had been looking where they were going and nobody had been short enough to pass under everyone else's heads. Alas, ERIC wasn't the only member of the crowd relying on most people's ingrained reflex to move out of someone else's way, or the only one who wasn't really paying the utmost amount of attention to what was in front of him. Or her, as it were.
The candyfloss vendor had actually stopped chasing her fairly quickly, he knew he couldn't keep up and couldn't afford to let his other incompetent employee man the whole store on his own for any length of time, but she hadn't found it particularly hard to pick up additional pursuers as she went. It would practically be a crime to run through a crowd without unleashing a torrent of underfoot marbles or setting the individual notes in a man's wallet flapping into the sky like butterflies.
Both at once caused a particularly spectacular effect as people were too busy greedily watching the sky to watch their own feet, so they often didn't even notice the growing pile of other people who'd been sent tumbling head-over-heels to the floor until they were suddenly counted among their number, flailing their arms in a fairly ineffective imitation of what they'd been coveting seconds earlier.
Eris certainly noticed it though, and as you've probably picked up by now she noticed it so much that she ran headlong into ERIC, bouncing off his plated exterior with an audible clang. Her child's body didn't give her an incredible amount of resilience but she was at least naturally bouncy and not completely unaccustomed to falling to the ground, the impact only leaving her a little dazed with a couple of bruises.
It actually took ERIC a couple of seconds to notice that anything had happened at all, though fortunately it registered before he managed to step on her.
As she shook herself off and ERIC repositioned his head to a more sensible location they realised pretty much both at the same time that the other was one of the people from The Incompetent's lineup of unfortunate participants. To Eris this detail wasn't really one of particularly great importance, but to ERIC this was enough evidence to create an individual exception in his previously-established rules against bothering humans (or at least, things that looks like humans). This in turn provoked what was probably a fairly predictable response, his spherical chest hinging open to expose the purple brilliance of his Event Horizon and his various arms uncoiling to their full and vaguely threatening lengths, veering in at slightly uncomfortable angles.
“Greetings and apologies Queen Eris of the Vetolian Flow , Do you require medical assistance?”
Hopefully he wasn't going to end up greeting every participant in this way.