Re: The Glorious Championship! [S3G5] [Round Two: The Kestalvian Rainforest]
10-21-2011, 09:55 PM
Originally posted on MSPA by engineclock.
It was a tragic fact that Cailean Lachlan was not familiar with the principles of quantum mechanics.
The number of things he wasn’t familiar with in general was astounding, relative to the overall knowledge of the current population of the Kelstavian forest. Basic math and reading were well beyond his limited grasp of the world, likewise heliocentric theories of revolution and any philosophy past “being dead is probably bad”. The few things he had any sort of expertise in were tended to revolve around knowing which end of a weapon was the one you put into people. He’s just a poor boy from a poor family, someone might have said. You can’t expect too much.
The things he might have thought about as he lay dying were simple. “I don’t like this” was a probable one; “finally” was another. He wasn’t a complicated man, our Cailean. Death was not a concept that held any particular significance for him except that it seemed like something to be avoided. If he were to think about it any deeper than that he would likely start to question that assumption, so it was just as well that he didn’t. The gunshot that killed him did it instantly. He didn’t think about anything at all.
Over the next few hours scavengers came to feed on his body, as tends to happen in a healthy ecosystem. His remaining eye was one of the first things to go, followed shortly by his major internal organs. The rest was torn apart and scattered throughout the nearby undergrowth. That time itself was collapsing while all of this was happening was largely irrelevant: the sounds of gears grinding backwards until they broke down from the strain was ignored by the animals that scurried through the brush, their skins peeling off and on and off again as skeletons peeped out from underneath. Trees grew tall and died in milliseconds, over and over in the same spot until they were choked with the clutter of their own corpses. Half the forest conferred with itself and decided that “Don’tdown was the new up and everything should be underground forever. That’s what I heard, anyway. A monster’s coat had a tear in it; all the thread she had was pinkFeed an open ring though four closed rings, then close it. Pink is the wrong color for everything.
The existence of multiple Times is not something that should happen/ should be explained. “Someone mistookIf you were to take a book and switch its pages all around every st
ory is wrong every verse is back that way on another page you’r
going the wron
ay
Turn to PAGE 52follow thedirections
above
metalwasn’t fully melted and didn’t get in the moldchased a newspaper at the bookstall.Then, Invert the head and repe a t the last step
he must stay his hand.”
RETURN TO PAGE 17
RETURN TO PAGE 17
RETURN TO PAGE 17
RETURN
Back up.
Some people aren’t lucky enough to die.
___
It was true that Cailean’s death came instantly, but it’s also true that there is a line between “alive” and “dead because half of your brain is no longer inside your skull”. When those two lines cross is anyone’s guess. Not mine, definitely. But things change when you’re a goddess, huh? Here she comes now.
He didn’t need to be told that she’d stopped time (cap.? –ed) because that’s just the kind of thing you know when you’re in that awkward twilight between life and death. He was thinking with the brain he didn’t have that this wasn’t really something he wanted to happen right now. He didn’t like her very much. She was kind of a bitch. He’d be happier if she left and found somewhere else entirely to put her awful feathery tits.
She didn’t think very highly of him either, he could tell that much. It’s a little bit weird when deities swear (to who? God?) but looking at his shattered skull she was cursing every inch of him for being such a complete failure. He gathered that he was pretty good at failing things from the way she was talking, but he also had a feeling that all his memories were in the other part of his brain and didn’t know how to check. When he tried to remember, all that came up was a picture of a horse.
The featherbitch was gearing up for something else now. He could tell by the way all the Time in the area was starting to warp around her like a big green net caught on some terrible bird-shaped rocks. How long had he been able to see Time? Probably forever. That kind of made sense. Didn’t this seem awfully familiar? Hadn’t he done this all before? He couldn’t remember. Now is such a good time to start over. Make a new life for yourself. Burn your bridges if you have any. Don’t you agree?, he asked her. Doesn’t that make so much sense?
She didn’t hear him, and Cailean figured it was because he mostly didn’t have a jaw. (If none of the pages in your book match, why try to read the story? You’ll only get confused.)
He knew with the certainty that dead men have about these kinds of things that this was going to end badly.
Turn to PAGE 17. You are DEAD.
___
What Gaurinn experienced during this ordeal was something like his lower half falling asleep, except that instead of his body it was a man’s spine and that man was dead. The centipede died just as quickly, of course. The only difference was that when Time came screeching to a halt he still had a brain to think with.
He saw a ten foot tall bird-woman appear out of nowhere and berate Cailean for a number of things in an accent that didn’t seem entirely genuine, and he felt the feeling shoot back into his extremities as she tried to reverse of flow of life from their body. Or bodies, if they were still trying to pretend they were different people. Gaurinn wasn’t really sure he saw the point. It felt like dying in reverse, and there’s really not many other ways to put that.
If she’d bothered to ask he could have told her that the time energies that surrounded them were too tangled to interfere with. Trying to heal Cailean triggered the collapse of every possible outcome of the situation at once: simplified, success and failure. He was dead, he should have been dead, but he was and he wasn’t and in the best of all possible worlds he was simultaneously both. One man died, another one lived, but you didn’t know which until you opened the box.
Cailean didn’t understand quantum mechanics. He didn’t understand much of anything anymore except that if you took the time to look at things the right way, there wasn’t a man alive who wasn’t dying.
___
It wasn’t the first time Theophilus Mandragan the Twelfth had seen a man get back up after being shot, but it was the first time he saw someone do it missing most of their head.
He would have been hard-pressed to describe the exact nature of the thing that had taken the place of the man he thought he’d killed. It had the shape of man, roughly, but bits of it were flickering in and out like a mistuned television and a corpse was steadily taking their place. It was nauseating to watch but something about the way its skeletal hands were trying to pat the flesh back onto each other kept him from turning away. A recognizable face only seemed to exist half the time; in the other half it was occupied by a smashed skull trying to reconstruct itself from nothing in particular. A single green eye turned sadly on the teeth falling out of its rotting jaw before it vanished, leaving a dark socket that melted into a thin stream of bone. The neck twitched; turned towards him, he saw the jaws open wide-
The next bullet caught it straight between where its eyes should have been. Mandragan breathed a sigh of relief as it staggered and fell to one knee, a long pale bone flashing where a living man would have had a leg. It shook once; a high whistling sound came from its gaping throat and then it was up again, mismatched hands held outstretched to the pirate like a beggar’s, pleading and pleading.
Mandragan stumbled backwards over the forest floor as it broke into a run, its single eye glittering above of a face full of broken teeth. He heard its bones creaking and snapping as they shattered and realigned over and over again, ignoring the bullets that smashed into its chest; he saw its hand reaching almost tenderly for his face and its teeth coming down towards his neck, felt the rush of air against his skin from a ruptured windpipe and then, quite shortly after, he failed to feel much of anything at all.
Like a slap to the face, that’s what it was, and you should never hit a lady.
The mountain hand ticked ticked ticked on, if time was a book with the pages all switched then this was the index marking the chapters as they turned. The numbers in the sky were there if you looked for them, 1 7 6 2 9 10 13 13 13 13 13 13 but the hand was creeping on and there wasn’t time, there wasn’t time for that at all. Twenty minutes to midnight but moving in reverse. Where do you go at three in the morning when the hour of the wolf is here? It was always wolves with her. There they go now.
Twenty minutes to midnight. Set your watches, gentlemen.
There really aren’t any social conventions for how to deal with your other half being debatably undead.
Gaurinn found himself pondering this as he watched Cailean’s teeth having an argument with Mandragan’s throat. Some of the patches on him looked like they were settling down, which was nice. At least some of his ribs weren’t showing anymore, and one side of his face was more or less back to normal. Gaurinn decided not to address the other side just yet. His stomach wasn’t as settled as he’d have preferred.
“Cail,” he said, “Are…”
The noise he got back in response was the sort of sound you might hear from a small mammal going through a meat grinder.
“Right,” Gaurinn said.
__
The crew of the Timefucker was hardly unused to the sight of violence, but they drew the line at having a dead man get up and start eating their captain. It just wasn’t natural and it was very distressing to their communal peace of mind. They couldn’t be blamed for wanting to evacuate as fast as their temporal displacement fields could move them, and they could be blamed even less for not knowing that due to the already unstable nature of Time that a certain guardian entity would be extremely irritated at this interruption and tear their personal timelines completely out of the continuum. None of them had ever existed, but due to the high concentration of various paradox flora in the area everyone was convinced they had. The anomaly went largely unnoticed, because by this point there wasn’t really anyone left who cared.
__
Back on the ground and in the present, an entity who was for all intents and purposes a quantum-challenged zombie remembered how to use his vocal cords.
“Ggggggg,” he started, and pushed the broken half of his jaw back in place. A small piece of pirate fell from the hole in his throat. “Gghhhh. Ghhauuriinnnnuh?”
The centipede arm patted the nearest non-bleeding part of Cailean he could reach. “You’re, uh, you’re talking now. That’s a step up for you.”
“I’mmmm. Iiiiiiiiihhhhmmmm…”
“Spit it out already. Oh jesus god no, not that, put that back right now.”
Cailean shrugged. His shoulder joint explored its current options for location. “Mnngghh. Hhhh. Hhhhhh? Hhhhhhii. Iiiiimmmmm. Iiiii’mmmssssss.”
“Maybe you should try talking again when you have a tongue.”
The dead man turned to him and smiled with the bleeding half of his face, the empty socket staring blankly. He did, in fact, have a tongue. It had just happened to be down his throat prior to that time. “I’mmsoooo happpyyy, Ghhhggaurrrriin.” He held up a skeletal hand. A single brown eye rolled around on it aimlessly. “Iiii’mm sooooo haaaappppyyyyyyyy.”
He ate it. He was so excited that Gaurinn didn’t have the heart to stop him.
It was a tragic fact that Cailean Lachlan was not familiar with the principles of quantum mechanics.
The number of things he wasn’t familiar with in general was astounding, relative to the overall knowledge of the current population of the Kelstavian forest. Basic math and reading were well beyond his limited grasp of the world, likewise heliocentric theories of revolution and any philosophy past “being dead is probably bad”. The few things he had any sort of expertise in were tended to revolve around knowing which end of a weapon was the one you put into people. He’s just a poor boy from a poor family, someone might have said. You can’t expect too much.
The things he might have thought about as he lay dying were simple. “I don’t like this” was a probable one; “finally” was another. He wasn’t a complicated man, our Cailean. Death was not a concept that held any particular significance for him except that it seemed like something to be avoided. If he were to think about it any deeper than that he would likely start to question that assumption, so it was just as well that he didn’t. The gunshot that killed him did it instantly. He didn’t think about anything at all.
Over the next few hours scavengers came to feed on his body, as tends to happen in a healthy ecosystem. His remaining eye was one of the first things to go, followed shortly by his major internal organs. The rest was torn apart and scattered throughout the nearby undergrowth. That time itself was collapsing while all of this was happening was largely irrelevant: the sounds of gears grinding backwards until they broke down from the strain was ignored by the animals that scurried through the brush, their skins peeling off and on and off again as skeletons peeped out from underneath. Trees grew tall and died in milliseconds, over and over in the same spot until they were choked with the clutter of their own corpses. Half the forest conferred with itself and decided that “Don’tdown was the new up and everything should be underground forever. That’s what I heard, anyway. A monster’s coat had a tear in it; all the thread she had was pinkFeed an open ring though four closed rings, then close it. Pink is the wrong color for everything.
The existence of multiple Times is not something that should happen/ should be explained. “Someone mistookIf you were to take a book and switch its pages all around every st
ory is wrong every verse is back that way on another page you’r
going the wron
ay
Turn to PAGE 52follow thedirections
above
metalwasn’t fully melted and didn’t get in the moldchased a newspaper at the bookstall.Then, Invert the head and repe a t the last step
he must stay his hand.”
RETURN TO PAGE 17
RETURN TO PAGE 17
RETURN TO PAGE 17
RETURN
Back up.
Some people aren’t lucky enough to die.
___
It was true that Cailean’s death came instantly, but it’s also true that there is a line between “alive” and “dead because half of your brain is no longer inside your skull”. When those two lines cross is anyone’s guess. Not mine, definitely. But things change when you’re a goddess, huh? Here she comes now.
He didn’t need to be told that she’d stopped time (cap.? –ed) because that’s just the kind of thing you know when you’re in that awkward twilight between life and death. He was thinking with the brain he didn’t have that this wasn’t really something he wanted to happen right now. He didn’t like her very much. She was kind of a bitch. He’d be happier if she left and found somewhere else entirely to put her awful feathery tits.
She didn’t think very highly of him either, he could tell that much. It’s a little bit weird when deities swear (to who? God?) but looking at his shattered skull she was cursing every inch of him for being such a complete failure. He gathered that he was pretty good at failing things from the way she was talking, but he also had a feeling that all his memories were in the other part of his brain and didn’t know how to check. When he tried to remember, all that came up was a picture of a horse.
The featherbitch was gearing up for something else now. He could tell by the way all the Time in the area was starting to warp around her like a big green net caught on some terrible bird-shaped rocks. How long had he been able to see Time? Probably forever. That kind of made sense. Didn’t this seem awfully familiar? Hadn’t he done this all before? He couldn’t remember. Now is such a good time to start over. Make a new life for yourself. Burn your bridges if you have any. Don’t you agree?, he asked her. Doesn’t that make so much sense?
She didn’t hear him, and Cailean figured it was because he mostly didn’t have a jaw. (If none of the pages in your book match, why try to read the story? You’ll only get confused.)
He knew with the certainty that dead men have about these kinds of things that this was going to end badly.
Turn to PAGE 17. You are DEAD.
___
What Gaurinn experienced during this ordeal was something like his lower half falling asleep, except that instead of his body it was a man’s spine and that man was dead. The centipede died just as quickly, of course. The only difference was that when Time came screeching to a halt he still had a brain to think with.
He saw a ten foot tall bird-woman appear out of nowhere and berate Cailean for a number of things in an accent that didn’t seem entirely genuine, and he felt the feeling shoot back into his extremities as she tried to reverse of flow of life from their body. Or bodies, if they were still trying to pretend they were different people. Gaurinn wasn’t really sure he saw the point. It felt like dying in reverse, and there’s really not many other ways to put that.
If she’d bothered to ask he could have told her that the time energies that surrounded them were too tangled to interfere with. Trying to heal Cailean triggered the collapse of every possible outcome of the situation at once: simplified, success and failure. He was dead, he should have been dead, but he was and he wasn’t and in the best of all possible worlds he was simultaneously both. One man died, another one lived, but you didn’t know which until you opened the box.
Cailean didn’t understand quantum mechanics. He didn’t understand much of anything anymore except that if you took the time to look at things the right way, there wasn’t a man alive who wasn’t dying.
___
It wasn’t the first time Theophilus Mandragan the Twelfth had seen a man get back up after being shot, but it was the first time he saw someone do it missing most of their head.
He would have been hard-pressed to describe the exact nature of the thing that had taken the place of the man he thought he’d killed. It had the shape of man, roughly, but bits of it were flickering in and out like a mistuned television and a corpse was steadily taking their place. It was nauseating to watch but something about the way its skeletal hands were trying to pat the flesh back onto each other kept him from turning away. A recognizable face only seemed to exist half the time; in the other half it was occupied by a smashed skull trying to reconstruct itself from nothing in particular. A single green eye turned sadly on the teeth falling out of its rotting jaw before it vanished, leaving a dark socket that melted into a thin stream of bone. The neck twitched; turned towards him, he saw the jaws open wide-
The next bullet caught it straight between where its eyes should have been. Mandragan breathed a sigh of relief as it staggered and fell to one knee, a long pale bone flashing where a living man would have had a leg. It shook once; a high whistling sound came from its gaping throat and then it was up again, mismatched hands held outstretched to the pirate like a beggar’s, pleading and pleading.
Mandragan stumbled backwards over the forest floor as it broke into a run, its single eye glittering above of a face full of broken teeth. He heard its bones creaking and snapping as they shattered and realigned over and over again, ignoring the bullets that smashed into its chest; he saw its hand reaching almost tenderly for his face and its teeth coming down towards his neck, felt the rush of air against his skin from a ruptured windpipe and then, quite shortly after, he failed to feel much of anything at all.
Like a slap to the face, that’s what it was, and you should never hit a lady.
The mountain hand ticked ticked ticked on, if time was a book with the pages all switched then this was the index marking the chapters as they turned. The numbers in the sky were there if you looked for them, 1 7 6 2 9 10 13 13 13 13 13 13 but the hand was creeping on and there wasn’t time, there wasn’t time for that at all. Twenty minutes to midnight but moving in reverse. Where do you go at three in the morning when the hour of the wolf is here? It was always wolves with her. There they go now.
Twenty minutes to midnight. Set your watches, gentlemen.
There really aren’t any social conventions for how to deal with your other half being debatably undead.
Gaurinn found himself pondering this as he watched Cailean’s teeth having an argument with Mandragan’s throat. Some of the patches on him looked like they were settling down, which was nice. At least some of his ribs weren’t showing anymore, and one side of his face was more or less back to normal. Gaurinn decided not to address the other side just yet. His stomach wasn’t as settled as he’d have preferred.
“Cail,” he said, “Are…”
The noise he got back in response was the sort of sound you might hear from a small mammal going through a meat grinder.
“Right,” Gaurinn said.
__
The crew of the Timefucker was hardly unused to the sight of violence, but they drew the line at having a dead man get up and start eating their captain. It just wasn’t natural and it was very distressing to their communal peace of mind. They couldn’t be blamed for wanting to evacuate as fast as their temporal displacement fields could move them, and they could be blamed even less for not knowing that due to the already unstable nature of Time that a certain guardian entity would be extremely irritated at this interruption and tear their personal timelines completely out of the continuum. None of them had ever existed, but due to the high concentration of various paradox flora in the area everyone was convinced they had. The anomaly went largely unnoticed, because by this point there wasn’t really anyone left who cared.
__
Back on the ground and in the present, an entity who was for all intents and purposes a quantum-challenged zombie remembered how to use his vocal cords.
“Ggggggg,” he started, and pushed the broken half of his jaw back in place. A small piece of pirate fell from the hole in his throat. “Gghhhh. Ghhauuriinnnnuh?”
The centipede arm patted the nearest non-bleeding part of Cailean he could reach. “You’re, uh, you’re talking now. That’s a step up for you.”
“I’mmmm. Iiiiiiiiihhhhmmmm…”
“Spit it out already. Oh jesus god no, not that, put that back right now.”
Cailean shrugged. His shoulder joint explored its current options for location. “Mnngghh. Hhhh. Hhhhhh? Hhhhhhii. Iiiiimmmmm. Iiiii’mmmssssss.”
“Maybe you should try talking again when you have a tongue.”
The dead man turned to him and smiled with the bleeding half of his face, the empty socket staring blankly. He did, in fact, have a tongue. It had just happened to be down his throat prior to that time. “I’mmsoooo happpyyy, Ghhhggaurrrriin.” He held up a skeletal hand. A single brown eye rolled around on it aimlessly. “Iiii’mm sooooo haaaappppyyyyyyyy.”
He ate it. He was so excited that Gaurinn didn’t have the heart to stop him.