Re: The Glorious Championship! [S3G5] [Round Three: The Epigen Center]
05-20-2012, 10:00 PM
Originally posted on MSPA by Lord Paradise.
You can learn a lot about a body from the way they perceive the experience of three-dimensional space becoming five-or-six-dimensional for four seconds. An artist, perhaps a musician, perhaps someone with extensive experience taking hallucinogens, would likely be highly unperturbed. She would react quickly and efficiently, seeing and seizing upon an opportunity to bypass the alien menace standing between her and a bite to eat, and step out into the lobby, feeling the breeze wafting in from a cool summer’s day outside.
A complex computer system with developing schizophrenia would obviously completely freeze up and not move anywhere at all. The paranoid typewriter accompanying it would blame an invisible force that it believed to be manipulating everybody around it, and briefly attempt to formulate an escape plan despite its lack of independent mobility.
A very frayed, if determined former construction worker would duck in fear that God’s judgment was upon him, inadvertently passing through several buildings of corporate structure in the process, and then find the time to steady himself and take advantage of his situation to propel himself straight to his target, a zombie with a centipede for an arm. Said zombie would experience a surge of endorphins and attempt to eat the entire facility at once, chipping his wall on a glass ceiling in the process. Said centipede arm would briefly brace himself for another madcap, disorienting time-travel ordeal before realizing that this was something different entirely and not something with which he wished to involve himself.
Within the corporate structure of Epigen, it is easy to imagine that people would tend to view the anomaly as something analogous to their jobs. Those in control of the corporation—the bosses, as it were—would react primarily to the fact of being able to view the entire entity at one time. Some would weep for joy at the beautiful symmetry of the thing that they had built up through their diligence and ingenuity, while others would weep in sorrow at its ultimate hollowness, the pain it had caused, and the aliens battling HazMat workers across the folds of space within its walls. The scientists whose hard work and ingenuity had actually built up the corporation would turn their ingenuity upon the phenomenon they were experiencing, and make the ultimate mistake of attempting to understand it. They would fail. None of these people would take the opportunity to move. People with simpler careers, however, accustomed to a life of specific and repetitive tasks, however, might have more success. A switchboard operator would come to see space as a switchboard, an aggregate of connections between individuals. As she had been doing for years, she would reach out to them—specifically to those with which she saw a kinship, with the ones on the bottom, those who had been pushed into menial minimum-wage tasks by dint of their gender or their race or their education or their economic circumstances. She would call to them and patch them through to the one who seemed to have a plan, someone who could lead them, someone who perhaps owing to the nature of his work for the company would in that moment view the entirety of Epigen as an elevator.
A narrator, forced to cope with the literary device of space itself opening up before him like a flower, would, apparently, choose to perceive it as an opening flower. He would then expound upon it at length in the conditional tense, perhaps to add a certain remove to an explication of something ultimately inexplicable. Even the fourth wall would fray and buckle under the stress of representation before normality, predictably, asserted itself.
Brom had had an interesting experience. His immediate thought when he perceived an ability to elevate all the people he cared for as far in either direction as he wished was to take them all the way up. For a moment they were all together on the roof, watching the sun set. Brom felt proud because, like Moses on Mt. Sinai, he had led them there, and now they were waiting for him to tell them what was next.
Unfortunately, they had not been the only ones to instinctively seek the high ground on the sinking ship that was Epigen. The secretaries, janitors, plumbers, electricians, receptionists and what-have-you that collectively, yes, may or may not have made up the current incarnation of the entity known as the Convolution were surrounded by the thousands of cockroaches, rats, pigeons, spiders, koi, and weaponized bees who had experienced the bend. Flying through the air, crawling on their arms, flopping about on the floor. Brom saw that this was not the promised land he had hoped for and slammed the metaphorical down switch, taking his people all the way back down to the lobby.
Elimine Fraze was on the way out the door when her immediate surroundings suddenly got a lot more crowded.
* * * * *
Cailean really was not looking well. Gaurinn was only doing a bit better. ”Hi, Gabe,” said the worm. ”Any idea what that was about?”
Gabe ignored both the worm’s pleasantries and the piles of dead aliens and rubber-suited men all around. “I need the orb,” he demanded.
”That red ball?”
”Uh... yes.” Gabe was confused by Gaurinn’s cooperation and Cailean’s slack-jawed—or maybe “no-jawed” would be the better descriptor—complacence. He had been certain he had come here for some sort of battle to the death.
”I have no idea what the thing does. Here. It’s yours.” Gaurinn reached into Cailean’s pocket to grab the object in question, but the zombie pressed his other hand into the worm’s face, moaning negatively.
Cail grabbed the orb and looked at it, sniffing it experimentally. “Miiiiiiiine,” he decided.
“No, it’s not!” yelled Gabe, brandishing his mop threateningly. “It’s mine! I need it so I can take a break!”
Cailean snarled. ”Miiiine!” he barked, popping the orb into his mouth.
Gabe reacted with the swiftness and decisiveness present only in the minds of the completely deranged. He jabbed Cail with the mop, forcing the zombie to spit out the orb, which rolled into a position just about halfway between the two of them. There was an awkward moment of silence, following which Cailean growled and charged.
* * * * *
So the good news, as Admiral Itzel understood, was that the black hole was gone, as ordered. The bad news was that a virtual army of Epigen employees with Convolution readings off the chart had just appeared in the lobby. And also that Gabe was mentally imbalanced and fighting Cailean. And, furthermore, scientists were attempting to make an educated guess as to what that red orb did, and none of them were good.
If Lucky couldn’t put a stop to this fight and get ahold of that orb, Operation Stall the Round was likely to come to a swift end.
* * * * *
Elli had no idea where all those people had come from.
Well, that wasn’t true. She had a pretty good idea that they’d walked to the lobby the same way she had, not that she really had any idea what that was. What was truly mystifying was how they had managed to all do so at the same time. And why they were all looking at her like that.
A grizzled old black man who Elli recognized as Brom, the elevator operator, walked up to Elli and gave her a hug. ”I’m sorry, he said, as though he understood why he was saying it.
”We’re all sorry,” piped up another. ”For everything.”
Elli released from the hug, a bit awkwardly. “It’s, um...” she started. “I forgive you? I just... I need to go, okay?”
Brom broke out into a sob. ”I know,” he said. ”I know you do. But could you just do one quick thing for us before you do? I know we’ve already taken so much from you, but... one last favor.”
Well, Elli was far too much of a bleeding heart to turn down that offer. “Okay. What is it?”
Brom turned to the crowd, then back to Elli, and took a deep breath. ”Fire us.”
* * * * *
Gaurinn really didn’t want the undead corpse of the guy whose arm he was to kill one of his fellow contestants—especially not Gabe, who was vaguely likeable. He wasn’t really sure what he could do about it, though. He could try yelling, he supposed. “Cail, stop!” he shouted, in his most paternal voice.
Cail stopped. Gaurinn felt mighty pleased with himself, until he realized that Cailean hadn’t stopped to listen to him at all. He had stopped to examine a point of red light that had appeared on the floor.
Some feet away, Gabe stood grinning, his hand morphed into the shape of a laser pointer.
Gaurinn clung to Cail’s side and said, “Oh, sh—“ before Cail dove into the point of light headfirst.
“Miiiiiiiiiiiine!” shouted the zombie, bashing his head into the floor over and over again. Gabe flicked his hand, and the light shown on the wall. “Waaaaaaant iiiiiiiiit” begged Cail, charging his neck through some plaster.
Gaurinn held on for dear life. This was the most frightening moment of his life. “Gabe, stop!” he cried. “Please?”
The red light returned to the floor. “Gauauaauriiiiiiin looooooooook” moaned Cail, collapsing to his knees to grab at the laser again. ‘Spreeeeeettyyyyyyyyy”
After thirty more seconds of this, the zombie was starting to seriously hurt himself, and Gabe saw no signs of attempting to grab the orb and run, so Gaurinn’s irritation at Cail was starting to turn into sympathy and his sympathy for Gabe was starting to feel a lot like irritation. “Gabe, cut it out!” he yelled weakly.
”What, take a break?” cackled Gabe cryptically. ”All in time, worm.” He pointed the laser pointer directly at Gaurinn’s head.
Cail raised one arm. “Hoooooooold shtiiiiiiiiiill—“
“Gabe, stop!” Gaurinn shot a bolt of lightning—meant only to stun--at Gabe’s arm. Gabe quickly turned his hand into a battery charger and absorbed the electricity, then turned it into a taser and launched it gleefully at Cail’s face.
The zombie didn’t seem overly perturbed by the electricity, and attempted to eat the barbs of the taser with limitless success. Grimacing, Gabe turned back to the red orb. He pointed his hand at it and turned the appendage into an electromagnet. This was a mistake. The orb, as it turned out, was not made of metal, while Gaurinn currently was.
Gaurinn’s forehead slammed into the magnet painfully, throwing spots in front of his vision. Cail trailed behind, still looking for the laser. “Gabe, you idiot—“
”I am not an idiot!” insisted Gabe, turning his hand into something that Gaurinn did not immediately recognize to be a set of Jaws of Life. The worm was only conscious of something very tight and uncomfortable clamping around his neck. ”I just excel in different areas than other people! I did very well in shop class, Gaurinn!”
”Ack.”
“Whuuuuuhdiduh liiiiiiite goooooooo”
Gabe released Gaurinn and disabled Cailean one last time with a welding torch to the face for good measure. By the time the worm recovered his senses both he and the orb were already gone. “Okay, I don’t know what’s wrong with that guy,” Gaurinn told Cail, “But I’m pretty sure it isn’t just the Convolution.” Cail, still frantically searching the walls for a red light, did not deign to respond.
You can learn a lot about a body from the way they perceive the experience of three-dimensional space becoming five-or-six-dimensional for four seconds. An artist, perhaps a musician, perhaps someone with extensive experience taking hallucinogens, would likely be highly unperturbed. She would react quickly and efficiently, seeing and seizing upon an opportunity to bypass the alien menace standing between her and a bite to eat, and step out into the lobby, feeling the breeze wafting in from a cool summer’s day outside.
A complex computer system with developing schizophrenia would obviously completely freeze up and not move anywhere at all. The paranoid typewriter accompanying it would blame an invisible force that it believed to be manipulating everybody around it, and briefly attempt to formulate an escape plan despite its lack of independent mobility.
A very frayed, if determined former construction worker would duck in fear that God’s judgment was upon him, inadvertently passing through several buildings of corporate structure in the process, and then find the time to steady himself and take advantage of his situation to propel himself straight to his target, a zombie with a centipede for an arm. Said zombie would experience a surge of endorphins and attempt to eat the entire facility at once, chipping his wall on a glass ceiling in the process. Said centipede arm would briefly brace himself for another madcap, disorienting time-travel ordeal before realizing that this was something different entirely and not something with which he wished to involve himself.
Within the corporate structure of Epigen, it is easy to imagine that people would tend to view the anomaly as something analogous to their jobs. Those in control of the corporation—the bosses, as it were—would react primarily to the fact of being able to view the entire entity at one time. Some would weep for joy at the beautiful symmetry of the thing that they had built up through their diligence and ingenuity, while others would weep in sorrow at its ultimate hollowness, the pain it had caused, and the aliens battling HazMat workers across the folds of space within its walls. The scientists whose hard work and ingenuity had actually built up the corporation would turn their ingenuity upon the phenomenon they were experiencing, and make the ultimate mistake of attempting to understand it. They would fail. None of these people would take the opportunity to move. People with simpler careers, however, accustomed to a life of specific and repetitive tasks, however, might have more success. A switchboard operator would come to see space as a switchboard, an aggregate of connections between individuals. As she had been doing for years, she would reach out to them—specifically to those with which she saw a kinship, with the ones on the bottom, those who had been pushed into menial minimum-wage tasks by dint of their gender or their race or their education or their economic circumstances. She would call to them and patch them through to the one who seemed to have a plan, someone who could lead them, someone who perhaps owing to the nature of his work for the company would in that moment view the entirety of Epigen as an elevator.
A narrator, forced to cope with the literary device of space itself opening up before him like a flower, would, apparently, choose to perceive it as an opening flower. He would then expound upon it at length in the conditional tense, perhaps to add a certain remove to an explication of something ultimately inexplicable. Even the fourth wall would fray and buckle under the stress of representation before normality, predictably, asserted itself.
Brom had had an interesting experience. His immediate thought when he perceived an ability to elevate all the people he cared for as far in either direction as he wished was to take them all the way up. For a moment they were all together on the roof, watching the sun set. Brom felt proud because, like Moses on Mt. Sinai, he had led them there, and now they were waiting for him to tell them what was next.
Unfortunately, they had not been the only ones to instinctively seek the high ground on the sinking ship that was Epigen. The secretaries, janitors, plumbers, electricians, receptionists and what-have-you that collectively, yes, may or may not have made up the current incarnation of the entity known as the Convolution were surrounded by the thousands of cockroaches, rats, pigeons, spiders, koi, and weaponized bees who had experienced the bend. Flying through the air, crawling on their arms, flopping about on the floor. Brom saw that this was not the promised land he had hoped for and slammed the metaphorical down switch, taking his people all the way back down to the lobby.
Elimine Fraze was on the way out the door when her immediate surroundings suddenly got a lot more crowded.
* * * * *
Cailean really was not looking well. Gaurinn was only doing a bit better. ”Hi, Gabe,” said the worm. ”Any idea what that was about?”
Gabe ignored both the worm’s pleasantries and the piles of dead aliens and rubber-suited men all around. “I need the orb,” he demanded.
”That red ball?”
”Uh... yes.” Gabe was confused by Gaurinn’s cooperation and Cailean’s slack-jawed—or maybe “no-jawed” would be the better descriptor—complacence. He had been certain he had come here for some sort of battle to the death.
”I have no idea what the thing does. Here. It’s yours.” Gaurinn reached into Cailean’s pocket to grab the object in question, but the zombie pressed his other hand into the worm’s face, moaning negatively.
Cail grabbed the orb and looked at it, sniffing it experimentally. “Miiiiiiiine,” he decided.
“No, it’s not!” yelled Gabe, brandishing his mop threateningly. “It’s mine! I need it so I can take a break!”
Cailean snarled. ”Miiiine!” he barked, popping the orb into his mouth.
Gabe reacted with the swiftness and decisiveness present only in the minds of the completely deranged. He jabbed Cail with the mop, forcing the zombie to spit out the orb, which rolled into a position just about halfway between the two of them. There was an awkward moment of silence, following which Cailean growled and charged.
* * * * *
So the good news, as Admiral Itzel understood, was that the black hole was gone, as ordered. The bad news was that a virtual army of Epigen employees with Convolution readings off the chart had just appeared in the lobby. And also that Gabe was mentally imbalanced and fighting Cailean. And, furthermore, scientists were attempting to make an educated guess as to what that red orb did, and none of them were good.
If Lucky couldn’t put a stop to this fight and get ahold of that orb, Operation Stall the Round was likely to come to a swift end.
* * * * *
Elli had no idea where all those people had come from.
Well, that wasn’t true. She had a pretty good idea that they’d walked to the lobby the same way she had, not that she really had any idea what that was. What was truly mystifying was how they had managed to all do so at the same time. And why they were all looking at her like that.
A grizzled old black man who Elli recognized as Brom, the elevator operator, walked up to Elli and gave her a hug. ”I’m sorry, he said, as though he understood why he was saying it.
”We’re all sorry,” piped up another. ”For everything.”
Elli released from the hug, a bit awkwardly. “It’s, um...” she started. “I forgive you? I just... I need to go, okay?”
Brom broke out into a sob. ”I know,” he said. ”I know you do. But could you just do one quick thing for us before you do? I know we’ve already taken so much from you, but... one last favor.”
Well, Elli was far too much of a bleeding heart to turn down that offer. “Okay. What is it?”
Brom turned to the crowd, then back to Elli, and took a deep breath. ”Fire us.”
* * * * *
Gaurinn really didn’t want the undead corpse of the guy whose arm he was to kill one of his fellow contestants—especially not Gabe, who was vaguely likeable. He wasn’t really sure what he could do about it, though. He could try yelling, he supposed. “Cail, stop!” he shouted, in his most paternal voice.
Cail stopped. Gaurinn felt mighty pleased with himself, until he realized that Cailean hadn’t stopped to listen to him at all. He had stopped to examine a point of red light that had appeared on the floor.
Some feet away, Gabe stood grinning, his hand morphed into the shape of a laser pointer.
Gaurinn clung to Cail’s side and said, “Oh, sh—“ before Cail dove into the point of light headfirst.
“Miiiiiiiiiiiine!” shouted the zombie, bashing his head into the floor over and over again. Gabe flicked his hand, and the light shown on the wall. “Waaaaaaant iiiiiiiiit” begged Cail, charging his neck through some plaster.
Gaurinn held on for dear life. This was the most frightening moment of his life. “Gabe, stop!” he cried. “Please?”
The red light returned to the floor. “Gauauaauriiiiiiin looooooooook” moaned Cail, collapsing to his knees to grab at the laser again. ‘Spreeeeeettyyyyyyyyy”
After thirty more seconds of this, the zombie was starting to seriously hurt himself, and Gabe saw no signs of attempting to grab the orb and run, so Gaurinn’s irritation at Cail was starting to turn into sympathy and his sympathy for Gabe was starting to feel a lot like irritation. “Gabe, cut it out!” he yelled weakly.
”What, take a break?” cackled Gabe cryptically. ”All in time, worm.” He pointed the laser pointer directly at Gaurinn’s head.
Cail raised one arm. “Hoooooooold shtiiiiiiiiiill—“
“Gabe, stop!” Gaurinn shot a bolt of lightning—meant only to stun--at Gabe’s arm. Gabe quickly turned his hand into a battery charger and absorbed the electricity, then turned it into a taser and launched it gleefully at Cail’s face.
The zombie didn’t seem overly perturbed by the electricity, and attempted to eat the barbs of the taser with limitless success. Grimacing, Gabe turned back to the red orb. He pointed his hand at it and turned the appendage into an electromagnet. This was a mistake. The orb, as it turned out, was not made of metal, while Gaurinn currently was.
Gaurinn’s forehead slammed into the magnet painfully, throwing spots in front of his vision. Cail trailed behind, still looking for the laser. “Gabe, you idiot—“
”I am not an idiot!” insisted Gabe, turning his hand into something that Gaurinn did not immediately recognize to be a set of Jaws of Life. The worm was only conscious of something very tight and uncomfortable clamping around his neck. ”I just excel in different areas than other people! I did very well in shop class, Gaurinn!”
”Ack.”
“Whuuuuuhdiduh liiiiiiite goooooooo”
Gabe released Gaurinn and disabled Cailean one last time with a welding torch to the face for good measure. By the time the worm recovered his senses both he and the orb were already gone. “Okay, I don’t know what’s wrong with that guy,” Gaurinn told Cail, “But I’m pretty sure it isn’t just the Convolution.” Cail, still frantically searching the walls for a red light, did not deign to respond.