Re: The Glorious Championship! [S3G5] [Round Three: The Epigen Center]
01-16-2012, 08:15 PM
Originally posted on MSPA by engineclock.
The door read Celestial Affairs, Lesser Deities and featured a handle very much designed with actual hands in mind, at which the heron glared resentfully. It was perfectly acceptable to cater to the majority of deities with humanoid forms but after a certain point things just became insulting. It took her a few more minutes of scrabbling with her beak to realize that the door was in fact locked and that a tiny hand-lettered sign was taped to the front: Will return soon. She pecked it irritably. No one had any courtesy these days.
From somewhere beyond her, a cold breeze whistled through the branches of long-dead trees. The tiniest whisper of a voice echoed from out of the air. “You’re early, Mawyg. I thought we agreed on ten.”
“It’s only nine thirty,” the heron snapped. Her head twisted around like a snake, glaring at the empty hallway. “Some people like to be on time.”
The air around the heron’s feet sluggishly began to stir. A chorus of ghostly women rose into a wail as the wind picked up and swirled into a towering column of air, howling and tearing at the carpets. Unearthly violins joined in as the billowing winds flashed a silvery white and an impossibly graceful figure slipped out from the whirlwind, bathed in blinding radiance.
The light wavered once, then abruptly extinguished as Maowyn stretched her wings and yawned. Her pinions clutched a chipped and battered coffee mug that she brought to her swordlike beak and clacked at tiredly, settling the feathers on her serpentine neck. She looked down at the irate heron and sighed. “I really did have things to do today. You’re lucky I’m between meetings.”
The bird puffed herself up, reaching her full height of somewhere around the goddess’s knee. “What kinds of things? Important things? Important enough for you to ignore an entire pantheon while some bumbling higher-up runs off with your latest devotee? Those kinds of things, or some other trivial nonsense you can’t be bothered to deal with right now?”
“Keep your voice down, Mawyg,” Maowyn said, eyeing the empty hall. “It’s not that easy, alright? It was rude but there’s not much I can-”
“He stole him! From you!” The heron shrieked, flapping her wings madly. Stray feathers puffed out and settled on the floor like fat snowflakes. “And all you’ll do about it is turn your head and look the other way! Where is your pride?”
The goddess sighed again and opened the door to her office, ushering Mawyg through with a sweep of her wing. Abandoning the mug on her desk, she turned to a worn-down filing cabinet and began to sift through it as the heron chattered indignantly about divine right and tax breaks. She pulled out a slim green-brown file from under a stack of bills and slapped it gently down in front of the bird.
“Open it,” she said in response to Mawyg’s curious glance.
The file was full of photographs of the same ambiguously young man, all taken from an overhead perspective and all just ever so slightly out of focus. In most of them he was simply staring at a variety of objects in polite confusion, but here and there was a graphic image of the same man in patchy armor wading through meaty pulps that could have been other humans once, a shimmering white knife in his hand. In every picture his face was blank.
“I didn’t even particularly want this one,” Maowyn said, shuffling through the pile. She pointed to one of the same man lying in water, cut nearly in half from throat to hip. “It was sort of a last-minute thing, I was on my way somewhere else and he just stumbles practically into my living room, oozing all over everything and making this awful crying sound and flailing around because he doesn’t know how to swim. I figured if I set him up the way I usually do it’d count as my good karma for the day and I could get some publicity out of it, but…” She shook her head. “That planet is so strange. Ten thousand years in a Medieval stasis. I think it does something to their brains, Mawyg.”
She leaned back and rummaged under her desk for a tumbler of scotch. “I never really wanted that gig. It sounded good on paper, mercy goddess and all that, but you get there and half of them are trying to kill the other half and all of them are lousy with disease, rarely get one that lives past forty or so, and you have to do that ridiculous accent…” She poured herself a glass and offered one to the heron, who sniffed in response. “I know you’re stuck there for the next few centuries, but it’s different when you’re away. My other worlds are infinitely more pleasant.”
“But it’s the principle of the thing,” Mawyg insisted, tapping her claws on the desk for emphasis. “The Tormentor stole him from you.”
The mercy goddess shrugged and swilled her scotch. “If it was another one of the pantheon I could do something about it certainly. Chtagga owes me a favor and Orune can’t resist anything remotely female, but we aren’t talking small-time anymore. Even if I wanted to I couldn’t challenge one of his kind. I wouldn’t even know where to start.”
“You can’t just ignore it, though,” the heron squawked.
“He can keep the boy. To be frank, it’s easier for me than to take him back.” She took a sip and looked away, ignoring the heron’s furious glare. “Besides,” the goddess said, “I expect he’s better off.”
____________________________
It’s odd the way some things still seem generic when your pattern recognition skills are shot.
Cailean sat quietly between two huge hulking machines of indeterminate purpose, having been shoved there by a crew of irritable-looking lab assistants who had quickly ascertained that his grasp of English was minimal at best. The drone of their hidden engines was comforting; a steady blur of sound that drowned out the noises in his head. Beside him, Gaurinn was trying to flag down the swarm of technicians that crawled over the machinery like ants. They really were like ants, Cailean thought. Little white ants in coats.
> You know what happens when you break a Super Promise, don’t you?
No, he thought. Gaurinn hissed. Had he said that out loud?
“If you’re not going to move your worthless ass and help then could you do me the simple favor of not drooling on us? You’re not helping our case,” the centipede growled. Spotting a techie who’d strayed too far from the others, he launched into a tirade that was met with a frosty glare and promptly ignored.
“None of this would be happening if you hadn’t tried to eat one of them! We were this close to getting somewhere, Cail! Are you even thinking at all somewhere in that stupid skull of yours?” Gaurinn did a quick once-over. “Half-skull, anyway?”
The formerly living former soldier surprised himself by remembering how to shrug, and was the only one to notice when Gaurinn turned away in disgust and a small piece of paper fell into his bony lap.
Rauhoitu lapsi, loppu on yllämme, it read. Nukutaan.
Oh, he thought. Okay.
He looked up at the towering machinery and saw a narrow slot he hadn’t noticed before wedged in between two gently glowing pipes. It didn’t seem to belong with the other parts of the mechanism. It had a tacked-on look to it, and as he pondered (or more accurately completely failed to notice) this fact, a little equally out of place light lit up and a piece of paper slid out and fell to the floor.
Do you want to get out?, this one read.
Yes.
Stupid boy.
An explosion tore through the lab with a deafening roar just as a siren went off, randomly screaming the words SECTOR and C and PANIC and DON’T in a variety of constantly changing orders. Several people went down, knocked unconscious by the sheer sound, as the others surged over their bodies to the banks of computers lining the walls. Frantic fistfights broke out and more than one marriage was dissolved as Cailean stumbled out into the fray, deflecting panicked labworkers left and right with undead stoicism.
Gaurinn swore prolifically but over the din Cailean couldn’t tell if he was telling him to keep going or turn back. Either way he ignored the insect. Things had very suddenly changed.
Swells of adrenaline were hitting his brain like a fist shattering a glass wall. The scent of a hundred frightened humans was triggering something far back in his skull, something that didn’t need words to tell him what to do- only blood rushing to his head, and the sudden agonizing clarity of each and every open throat darting in reach of his teeth. All thoughts of misery and escape and insects were evaporating; it was all he could do to push Gaurinn out of the way before he tore his way through the frightened herd. Dreamlike he heard the insect scream his name as he lunged for a white-coated shoulder, biting clean through to the bone and shaking his head like a rabid dog through the haze of blood. Far too easily he pushed the wailing creature to the ground and slashed at its neck with bony fingers. It was all so easy. It was all so easy!
The sad thing’s arms twitched and flapped uselessly at his head, tapping something hard into his skull. He snarled at it and snapped at a finger, severing it, and the creature dropped on object onto its chest. It was red, and round, or the squalling meat was red and its red was getting everywhere. Wasn’t it loud? He’d better finish it now-
Cailean stood, wobbling on a half-finished leg. A small red sphere was in his hand, but he didn’t care about that. There was flesh everywhere.
He started to laugh. Everywhere.
The door read Celestial Affairs, Lesser Deities and featured a handle very much designed with actual hands in mind, at which the heron glared resentfully. It was perfectly acceptable to cater to the majority of deities with humanoid forms but after a certain point things just became insulting. It took her a few more minutes of scrabbling with her beak to realize that the door was in fact locked and that a tiny hand-lettered sign was taped to the front: Will return soon. She pecked it irritably. No one had any courtesy these days.
From somewhere beyond her, a cold breeze whistled through the branches of long-dead trees. The tiniest whisper of a voice echoed from out of the air. “You’re early, Mawyg. I thought we agreed on ten.”
“It’s only nine thirty,” the heron snapped. Her head twisted around like a snake, glaring at the empty hallway. “Some people like to be on time.”
The air around the heron’s feet sluggishly began to stir. A chorus of ghostly women rose into a wail as the wind picked up and swirled into a towering column of air, howling and tearing at the carpets. Unearthly violins joined in as the billowing winds flashed a silvery white and an impossibly graceful figure slipped out from the whirlwind, bathed in blinding radiance.
The light wavered once, then abruptly extinguished as Maowyn stretched her wings and yawned. Her pinions clutched a chipped and battered coffee mug that she brought to her swordlike beak and clacked at tiredly, settling the feathers on her serpentine neck. She looked down at the irate heron and sighed. “I really did have things to do today. You’re lucky I’m between meetings.”
The bird puffed herself up, reaching her full height of somewhere around the goddess’s knee. “What kinds of things? Important things? Important enough for you to ignore an entire pantheon while some bumbling higher-up runs off with your latest devotee? Those kinds of things, or some other trivial nonsense you can’t be bothered to deal with right now?”
“Keep your voice down, Mawyg,” Maowyn said, eyeing the empty hall. “It’s not that easy, alright? It was rude but there’s not much I can-”
“He stole him! From you!” The heron shrieked, flapping her wings madly. Stray feathers puffed out and settled on the floor like fat snowflakes. “And all you’ll do about it is turn your head and look the other way! Where is your pride?”
The goddess sighed again and opened the door to her office, ushering Mawyg through with a sweep of her wing. Abandoning the mug on her desk, she turned to a worn-down filing cabinet and began to sift through it as the heron chattered indignantly about divine right and tax breaks. She pulled out a slim green-brown file from under a stack of bills and slapped it gently down in front of the bird.
“Open it,” she said in response to Mawyg’s curious glance.
The file was full of photographs of the same ambiguously young man, all taken from an overhead perspective and all just ever so slightly out of focus. In most of them he was simply staring at a variety of objects in polite confusion, but here and there was a graphic image of the same man in patchy armor wading through meaty pulps that could have been other humans once, a shimmering white knife in his hand. In every picture his face was blank.
“I didn’t even particularly want this one,” Maowyn said, shuffling through the pile. She pointed to one of the same man lying in water, cut nearly in half from throat to hip. “It was sort of a last-minute thing, I was on my way somewhere else and he just stumbles practically into my living room, oozing all over everything and making this awful crying sound and flailing around because he doesn’t know how to swim. I figured if I set him up the way I usually do it’d count as my good karma for the day and I could get some publicity out of it, but…” She shook her head. “That planet is so strange. Ten thousand years in a Medieval stasis. I think it does something to their brains, Mawyg.”
She leaned back and rummaged under her desk for a tumbler of scotch. “I never really wanted that gig. It sounded good on paper, mercy goddess and all that, but you get there and half of them are trying to kill the other half and all of them are lousy with disease, rarely get one that lives past forty or so, and you have to do that ridiculous accent…” She poured herself a glass and offered one to the heron, who sniffed in response. “I know you’re stuck there for the next few centuries, but it’s different when you’re away. My other worlds are infinitely more pleasant.”
“But it’s the principle of the thing,” Mawyg insisted, tapping her claws on the desk for emphasis. “The Tormentor stole him from you.”
The mercy goddess shrugged and swilled her scotch. “If it was another one of the pantheon I could do something about it certainly. Chtagga owes me a favor and Orune can’t resist anything remotely female, but we aren’t talking small-time anymore. Even if I wanted to I couldn’t challenge one of his kind. I wouldn’t even know where to start.”
“You can’t just ignore it, though,” the heron squawked.
“He can keep the boy. To be frank, it’s easier for me than to take him back.” She took a sip and looked away, ignoring the heron’s furious glare. “Besides,” the goddess said, “I expect he’s better off.”
____________________________
It’s odd the way some things still seem generic when your pattern recognition skills are shot.
Cailean sat quietly between two huge hulking machines of indeterminate purpose, having been shoved there by a crew of irritable-looking lab assistants who had quickly ascertained that his grasp of English was minimal at best. The drone of their hidden engines was comforting; a steady blur of sound that drowned out the noises in his head. Beside him, Gaurinn was trying to flag down the swarm of technicians that crawled over the machinery like ants. They really were like ants, Cailean thought. Little white ants in coats.
> You know what happens when you break a Super Promise, don’t you?
No, he thought. Gaurinn hissed. Had he said that out loud?
“If you’re not going to move your worthless ass and help then could you do me the simple favor of not drooling on us? You’re not helping our case,” the centipede growled. Spotting a techie who’d strayed too far from the others, he launched into a tirade that was met with a frosty glare and promptly ignored.
“None of this would be happening if you hadn’t tried to eat one of them! We were this close to getting somewhere, Cail! Are you even thinking at all somewhere in that stupid skull of yours?” Gaurinn did a quick once-over. “Half-skull, anyway?”
The formerly living former soldier surprised himself by remembering how to shrug, and was the only one to notice when Gaurinn turned away in disgust and a small piece of paper fell into his bony lap.
Rauhoitu lapsi, loppu on yllämme, it read. Nukutaan.
Oh, he thought. Okay.
He looked up at the towering machinery and saw a narrow slot he hadn’t noticed before wedged in between two gently glowing pipes. It didn’t seem to belong with the other parts of the mechanism. It had a tacked-on look to it, and as he pondered (or more accurately completely failed to notice) this fact, a little equally out of place light lit up and a piece of paper slid out and fell to the floor.
Do you want to get out?, this one read.
Yes.
Stupid boy.
An explosion tore through the lab with a deafening roar just as a siren went off, randomly screaming the words SECTOR and C and PANIC and DON’T in a variety of constantly changing orders. Several people went down, knocked unconscious by the sheer sound, as the others surged over their bodies to the banks of computers lining the walls. Frantic fistfights broke out and more than one marriage was dissolved as Cailean stumbled out into the fray, deflecting panicked labworkers left and right with undead stoicism.
Gaurinn swore prolifically but over the din Cailean couldn’t tell if he was telling him to keep going or turn back. Either way he ignored the insect. Things had very suddenly changed.
Swells of adrenaline were hitting his brain like a fist shattering a glass wall. The scent of a hundred frightened humans was triggering something far back in his skull, something that didn’t need words to tell him what to do- only blood rushing to his head, and the sudden agonizing clarity of each and every open throat darting in reach of his teeth. All thoughts of misery and escape and insects were evaporating; it was all he could do to push Gaurinn out of the way before he tore his way through the frightened herd. Dreamlike he heard the insect scream his name as he lunged for a white-coated shoulder, biting clean through to the bone and shaking his head like a rabid dog through the haze of blood. Far too easily he pushed the wailing creature to the ground and slashed at its neck with bony fingers. It was all so easy. It was all so easy!
The sad thing’s arms twitched and flapped uselessly at his head, tapping something hard into his skull. He snarled at it and snapped at a finger, severing it, and the creature dropped on object onto its chest. It was red, and round, or the squalling meat was red and its red was getting everywhere. Wasn’t it loud? He’d better finish it now-
Cailean stood, wobbling on a half-finished leg. A small red sphere was in his hand, but he didn’t care about that. There was flesh everywhere.
He started to laugh. Everywhere.