Re: The Glorious Championship! [S3G5] [Round 4: GBN2
06-28-2012, 02:22 AM
Originally posted on MSPA by engineclock.
Somewhere in a highly unpalatable dimension, a shadowy figure sat on the snout of a worm the size of a continent.
“I’m just suggesting,” he said, a tone of voice that seemed to simultaneously indicate countless aeons of jaded sadism and a not-negligible amount of friendly concern, “That, you know, maybe you’re overreacting to all of this. Just a little bit.”
“Three worlds,” the worm whined in a voice that could have traveled solar systems. Unspeakable liquids of various thicknesses and descriptions pooled out from its teeth and washed over the floor in multicolored waves. “Three worlds of beings and I am still so empty, Tormy. Why am I so empty? Where is the rest of me? It hurts, Tormy, it hurts so much. Like holes in my hearts.” It ended with a miserable croon.
The Tormentor sighed and eyed the slowly congealing ocean on his living room floor. “We could have avoided all of this If you’d just bothered to look up the really fundamental basics of biology. Was it so difficult to pick up an encyclopedia? I know at least some of your eyes can read. You’ve got no excuse for this.”
“It wasn’t fair,” said the worm. It was a credit to its omnipotence that it could sound meek through a throat large enough to swallow small moons. “I just wanted a baby. Lots of people have babies. I…” It made a tremulous sound. “I thought it would be simple.”
“And look where it got you,” the Tormentor said. “How many of you are there now? Four? Five?”
The jaws of the Destroyer Worm trembled. It sniffled with the sound of an atmosphere imploding.
The expression of murderous joy on the Tormentor’s face faded to a gently dangerous resentment and he patted the ridge of the great hollow socket where the worm’s eye should have been. The surface of its scales rolled like an earthquake underneath him. “Oh, come on. It’s not entirely your fault. Everyone makes stupid mistakes when they’re young. It could have gone much worse, probably, somehow. It’s not the end of the world, after all! Well it was for the three you just ate, but they were boring little places anyway. They barely screamed at all.”
The coils of the worm shifted like tectonic plates, curling into a mountainous knot around the seated Grandmaster. The eldritch spires above them bent with the strain. “I wish Crowe were here,” the great beast said sadly. “He could help.”
The Tormentor frowned. “Kassie-”
A small blooping noise interrupted him. To his left, the air shimmered like a fine silk scarf and loudly split itself in two, briefly exposing a terrifying nothingness before a bluish djinni materialized respectively at the Tormentor’s elbow. Wordlessly it proffered a neatly typed memo and flinched when the Grandmaster carelessly disintegrated its arm as he snatched it away.
A few of the Grandmaster’s multifarious eyes flicked over the return address. “Can’t you tell the Hedonist that I’m busy?”
“Who is that, Tormy?” The worm said. It raised its head slightly, propelling them sixteen stories in under a second. The djinn considered vomiting but decided it would be rude under such circumstances. “Tell them to go away.”
“With all due respect, sir, the Hedonist-”
“What’s this about Gaurinn?” The Tormentor said, holding the letter upside-down.
“The… the centipede, sir, you attached him to a knight. Said knight is dead. ”
“Oh.” He sat back. “That was ages ago. Hasn’t that battle finished yet?”
The djinni blinked. “No, it’s only just reached the fourth-”
“Oh, do whatever you want, see if I care,” the Tormentor growled, shoving the spirit back through the portal with a small pop. The note flared into glittering black flames in his hand. “I’m bored with that anyway. A few parlor tricks, a little bodily trauma, and what did I get out of it? Some sob story in a trashy accent. Can’t get any entertainment out of anyone these days.”
“I thought you were pleased with that one…”
“Like an hour ago.” The Grandmaster examined the general area where his fingernails would have been if he had any. “I’ve got bigger plans now. Less dependent on worms and dead men. Er, sorry,” he said apologetically. “That was a bit tactless.”
The worm said nothing, only bowed its head to the ground and sighed.
___________________
Gaurinn had about two seconds of warning before it happened which, considered in the context of time/space distortion travel, is really a rather generous allowance. Subsequently the centipede had the privilege of anticipating very clearly what was going to happen, and it was not surprising in the slightest that he spent that time hating it with every fiber of his soon-to-be-recompromised being.
Even before his brain understood the situation the centipede’s legs were trying to flee, but the instant chitin met floor his body stiffened and he fell, heavily, onto the slick tiles, writhing mostly to make himself feel that he wasn’t completely helpless. Electricity exploded in his nerves, his spine, running down from the base of his head through his back and into the floor, and then something tugged at him insistently, and he felt himself slide unwillingly across the room, claws squealing madly as they dug into the tiles.
The studio flickered like a dying candle. The edge of Gaurinn’s vision frayed and split: a thousand threads unraveled from the seams of his being and the world around him, each a glittering infinity woven through a void that fell endlessly below him and arced aeons above his aching head. His body was a diamond, a burning point of light on the blackness of vacuity, and he found it uncomfortably familiar. It was not dissimilar to the effects of LSD or other ergolines, but since Gaurinn had never been under their influence his only connection was that it felt very much like the gestalt presence that was the Temporal Godhead, which up until this point he had mostly referred as Cailean You Fucked Up Big Time On This One Get This Fucker Out of My Head.
All things considered, he wasn’t entirely wrong.
_________________
When Gaurinn woke up he was struck with a powerful sense of déjà vu, mostly because he’d spent a significant amount of the Glorious Championship unconscious, but also because of the fact that he was no longer entirely sure that his lower half was there.
It took him a moment to realize, as well, that he was no longer in contact with the ground. His legs dangled limply a good three feet off the grubby tiles, the sight of which the centipede had come to loathe. That was fine. He’d gotten used to heights in the Kestalvian forest and in the military before that. Presumably he was trapped somewhere, and something had landed on him and was compressing him in between debris. There was a very clear reason that it felt like he was still attached to someone, there must be. He didn’t need to jump to conclusions. That would be silly.
From behind him there came a definitively female voice. It said, very clearly, “Oh, no.”
Gaurinn paused. His more than a little discomposed brain suggested that perhaps Cailean had turned into a woman again, shortly before he remembered that Cailean was several different kinds of dead. The voice had been louder, and- familiar, somehow- Where had he heard it before?
He turned around slowly and yelped as the beak of an enormous heron pecked him sharply on the eye.
“Fucking son of a goddamn bitch!” The heron screeched, narrowly missing Gaurinn with another jab of its head; he caught a watery glimpse of a furious yellow eye before the bird withdrew, hissing madly. “You will release me this instant,” it clacked, crest flaring out from its narrow skull. “You will, or you’ll lose those eyes, worm. I don’t know what possessed you to even begin to contemplate that this would be amusing, but I assure you that is far from the case.”
This last line was punctuated by another peck to the eye, prompting a short scream from Gaurinn and a burst of electricity the heron did not seem to notice. Desperately he scrambled for something to say, but all his addled mind could manage was a mumbled “Maowyn?”
The bird’s head withdrew, coiling on its serpentine neck. It eyed him coldly, flicking to the side to see him better. “Who else?” It said softly. Beady yellow eyes burrowed into his skeleton with divine scrutiny and Gaurinn felt his stomach-analogue curl up in sudden fear, a bitter taste forming in his mouth. The temperature in the room dropped and he felt his armor begin to crackle with static, but then he shook himself angrily and gave Maowyn an indignant glare.
“Alright, listen,” he said, pointing at the goddess with a claw, “Let’s get this straight. I got a real shitty feeling about where this is going and I’m pretty sure my intestines are currently your spine, but you’re not my fucking boss. Cail wasn’t, and I almost liked him. I get the feeling that you get off scaring peasants with air horns and glitter but I’ve been in the fucking military. I was supposed to die on a suicide mission. I fought a cyborg in the basement of a franchised pancake repository. I’ve traveled through the goddamn universe, I got hit on in a multidimensional bar and I spent at least two weeks strapped to a drunk-off-his-ass PTSD victim and I am not, not even in the slightest fraction of a degree, intimidated by some bitch with wings and a silly-ass accent.”
The fear retreated, and the heron glaredly at him once and looked away. Pushing back a growing sense of foreboding, Gaurinn gave the situation a once-over and resigned himself to the fact that most of his fears had been justified. Just below his middle row of limbs his chitin merged rather jarringly into the side of what appeared to be a snow-white woman, near to seven feet tall if his estimation was worth anything. Her body displayed both a fine, pale down and curves that would have driven a man to distraction if her head had not been that of a giant bird’s. Her beak glittered a bright silver and instead of another arm a massive wing sprouted from her shoulder and was folded neatly against her ribs. It was the closest thing to clothing she wore, Gaurinn realized, and then immediately veered away from that train of thought because it made him feel both voyeuristic and very slightly squeamish.
“If it makes you feel any better,” Taccha Maowyn said, “I thought the accent was a bit much.”
She turned back to Gaurinn, and where her eyes had been a furious yellow they were now only a sort of pissed-off beige. Her beak clacked once distastefully. “Let’s cut to the bone,” she said, “I understand somehow my little champion and you have gone your separate ways, and I can’t separate us any more than I could the two of you. We’re fused at the ether, if that means anything to you, which I highly doubt. No wonder you and the boy were so close-knit.”
“Cailean,” Gaurinn said defensively.
“Whatever.” Maowyn took an unsteady step forward, flapping her wing for balance. It stretched out twelve feet before she fluttered it back to her side. As she spoke, she looked at their surroundings in a way that suggested they’d made a sly dig at her during a Christmas party once and she’d written about it in her diary for days. “This is just what I need. I was busy. You mortals always think it’s so easy, being a god. Do you even know the paperwork I still have?” The feathers on her neck puffed up in anger. “That fool got himself killed by something minor, I expect. Probably syphilis.”
“His head was eaten! And then, uh, his organs kind of fell out. He was a zombie before that.”
“Of course he was, I was there, did you forget?” the heron snapped. “I am done with this gig, I swear, this is the last time I scrub around down here with dirtwalkers. Mortals. You’re all the same. Turn your back and you die like rats in traps. I handed him a knife and told him to kill people, most of whom who were already dying, by the way, and what’s he do, he fucks it up. Gets himself in a goddamn battle to the death and then sticks me with his blood debts.” She sniffed. “Typical.”
Gaurinn growled. A bolt of static crackled along his spine and he would very likely have decided to do something about it had a sudden and highly insistent knock not suddenly resounded at the door.
The goddess and the centipede jumped as one at the sound, deafening in the otherwise empty studio. An urgently familiar voice called, “Cailinn, Gaurean, whatever you two are calling yourself, you’re on in six. Set 16, shake a leg!”
She cleared the room in three strides, moving with the grace only those who aren’t actually bound by gravity can manage and flung the double doors open with a flick of her wing. Burningly white lights burst into the dark room, causing Gaurinn to flinch, but Maowyn’s head snaked upwards and undulated warily at the disturbance, pupils shrunken to dots. An overwhelmingly average man with a clipboard for a hand squinted up at her, biting his lip and frowning distractedly.
“Hey, no one told me there was a cast change. You guys can’t just go switching things up like this at the last second, you have to keep-”
Gaurinn didn’t see her move, only heard a dull thunk and felt the sudden spray against his face, blinding him. He felt Maowyn’s muscles relax, felt her shift forward, and he scrabbled blindly at his face with his claws. His vision was still blurry when he thought for a very strange millisecond that Maowyn and Gabe had kissed, her head bent touching his, but then Gabe’s skull slowly slid off her beak and he crumpled to the floor.
“What the hell?” Gaurinn said. “What the hell?”
The goddess gave him a cool look and scraped her beak against the door frame, flashing underneath the stage lights. Bits of hair and brain smeared against the paint. “I’m not going to play you mortals’ games, worm. Whatever you and that idiot boy had between yourselves died with him. I don’t have time for this. I will find a way to separate us. I do not particularly care what it takes.” She didn’t bother to look at what Gaurinn was only half-sure was Gabe’s corpse, and when she left she planted a single delicate foot on its chest before sweeping out onto the stage.
Somewhere in a highly unpalatable dimension, a shadowy figure sat on the snout of a worm the size of a continent.
“I’m just suggesting,” he said, a tone of voice that seemed to simultaneously indicate countless aeons of jaded sadism and a not-negligible amount of friendly concern, “That, you know, maybe you’re overreacting to all of this. Just a little bit.”
“Three worlds,” the worm whined in a voice that could have traveled solar systems. Unspeakable liquids of various thicknesses and descriptions pooled out from its teeth and washed over the floor in multicolored waves. “Three worlds of beings and I am still so empty, Tormy. Why am I so empty? Where is the rest of me? It hurts, Tormy, it hurts so much. Like holes in my hearts.” It ended with a miserable croon.
The Tormentor sighed and eyed the slowly congealing ocean on his living room floor. “We could have avoided all of this If you’d just bothered to look up the really fundamental basics of biology. Was it so difficult to pick up an encyclopedia? I know at least some of your eyes can read. You’ve got no excuse for this.”
“It wasn’t fair,” said the worm. It was a credit to its omnipotence that it could sound meek through a throat large enough to swallow small moons. “I just wanted a baby. Lots of people have babies. I…” It made a tremulous sound. “I thought it would be simple.”
“And look where it got you,” the Tormentor said. “How many of you are there now? Four? Five?”
The jaws of the Destroyer Worm trembled. It sniffled with the sound of an atmosphere imploding.
The expression of murderous joy on the Tormentor’s face faded to a gently dangerous resentment and he patted the ridge of the great hollow socket where the worm’s eye should have been. The surface of its scales rolled like an earthquake underneath him. “Oh, come on. It’s not entirely your fault. Everyone makes stupid mistakes when they’re young. It could have gone much worse, probably, somehow. It’s not the end of the world, after all! Well it was for the three you just ate, but they were boring little places anyway. They barely screamed at all.”
The coils of the worm shifted like tectonic plates, curling into a mountainous knot around the seated Grandmaster. The eldritch spires above them bent with the strain. “I wish Crowe were here,” the great beast said sadly. “He could help.”
The Tormentor frowned. “Kassie-”
A small blooping noise interrupted him. To his left, the air shimmered like a fine silk scarf and loudly split itself in two, briefly exposing a terrifying nothingness before a bluish djinni materialized respectively at the Tormentor’s elbow. Wordlessly it proffered a neatly typed memo and flinched when the Grandmaster carelessly disintegrated its arm as he snatched it away.
A few of the Grandmaster’s multifarious eyes flicked over the return address. “Can’t you tell the Hedonist that I’m busy?”
“Who is that, Tormy?” The worm said. It raised its head slightly, propelling them sixteen stories in under a second. The djinn considered vomiting but decided it would be rude under such circumstances. “Tell them to go away.”
“With all due respect, sir, the Hedonist-”
“What’s this about Gaurinn?” The Tormentor said, holding the letter upside-down.
“The… the centipede, sir, you attached him to a knight. Said knight is dead. ”
“Oh.” He sat back. “That was ages ago. Hasn’t that battle finished yet?”
The djinni blinked. “No, it’s only just reached the fourth-”
“Oh, do whatever you want, see if I care,” the Tormentor growled, shoving the spirit back through the portal with a small pop. The note flared into glittering black flames in his hand. “I’m bored with that anyway. A few parlor tricks, a little bodily trauma, and what did I get out of it? Some sob story in a trashy accent. Can’t get any entertainment out of anyone these days.”
“I thought you were pleased with that one…”
“Like an hour ago.” The Grandmaster examined the general area where his fingernails would have been if he had any. “I’ve got bigger plans now. Less dependent on worms and dead men. Er, sorry,” he said apologetically. “That was a bit tactless.”
The worm said nothing, only bowed its head to the ground and sighed.
___________________
Gaurinn had about two seconds of warning before it happened which, considered in the context of time/space distortion travel, is really a rather generous allowance. Subsequently the centipede had the privilege of anticipating very clearly what was going to happen, and it was not surprising in the slightest that he spent that time hating it with every fiber of his soon-to-be-recompromised being.
Even before his brain understood the situation the centipede’s legs were trying to flee, but the instant chitin met floor his body stiffened and he fell, heavily, onto the slick tiles, writhing mostly to make himself feel that he wasn’t completely helpless. Electricity exploded in his nerves, his spine, running down from the base of his head through his back and into the floor, and then something tugged at him insistently, and he felt himself slide unwillingly across the room, claws squealing madly as they dug into the tiles.
The studio flickered like a dying candle. The edge of Gaurinn’s vision frayed and split: a thousand threads unraveled from the seams of his being and the world around him, each a glittering infinity woven through a void that fell endlessly below him and arced aeons above his aching head. His body was a diamond, a burning point of light on the blackness of vacuity, and he found it uncomfortably familiar. It was not dissimilar to the effects of LSD or other ergolines, but since Gaurinn had never been under their influence his only connection was that it felt very much like the gestalt presence that was the Temporal Godhead, which up until this point he had mostly referred as Cailean You Fucked Up Big Time On This One Get This Fucker Out of My Head.
All things considered, he wasn’t entirely wrong.
_________________
When Gaurinn woke up he was struck with a powerful sense of déjà vu, mostly because he’d spent a significant amount of the Glorious Championship unconscious, but also because of the fact that he was no longer entirely sure that his lower half was there.
It took him a moment to realize, as well, that he was no longer in contact with the ground. His legs dangled limply a good three feet off the grubby tiles, the sight of which the centipede had come to loathe. That was fine. He’d gotten used to heights in the Kestalvian forest and in the military before that. Presumably he was trapped somewhere, and something had landed on him and was compressing him in between debris. There was a very clear reason that it felt like he was still attached to someone, there must be. He didn’t need to jump to conclusions. That would be silly.
From behind him there came a definitively female voice. It said, very clearly, “Oh, no.”
Gaurinn paused. His more than a little discomposed brain suggested that perhaps Cailean had turned into a woman again, shortly before he remembered that Cailean was several different kinds of dead. The voice had been louder, and- familiar, somehow- Where had he heard it before?
He turned around slowly and yelped as the beak of an enormous heron pecked him sharply on the eye.
“Fucking son of a goddamn bitch!” The heron screeched, narrowly missing Gaurinn with another jab of its head; he caught a watery glimpse of a furious yellow eye before the bird withdrew, hissing madly. “You will release me this instant,” it clacked, crest flaring out from its narrow skull. “You will, or you’ll lose those eyes, worm. I don’t know what possessed you to even begin to contemplate that this would be amusing, but I assure you that is far from the case.”
This last line was punctuated by another peck to the eye, prompting a short scream from Gaurinn and a burst of electricity the heron did not seem to notice. Desperately he scrambled for something to say, but all his addled mind could manage was a mumbled “Maowyn?”
The bird’s head withdrew, coiling on its serpentine neck. It eyed him coldly, flicking to the side to see him better. “Who else?” It said softly. Beady yellow eyes burrowed into his skeleton with divine scrutiny and Gaurinn felt his stomach-analogue curl up in sudden fear, a bitter taste forming in his mouth. The temperature in the room dropped and he felt his armor begin to crackle with static, but then he shook himself angrily and gave Maowyn an indignant glare.
“Alright, listen,” he said, pointing at the goddess with a claw, “Let’s get this straight. I got a real shitty feeling about where this is going and I’m pretty sure my intestines are currently your spine, but you’re not my fucking boss. Cail wasn’t, and I almost liked him. I get the feeling that you get off scaring peasants with air horns and glitter but I’ve been in the fucking military. I was supposed to die on a suicide mission. I fought a cyborg in the basement of a franchised pancake repository. I’ve traveled through the goddamn universe, I got hit on in a multidimensional bar and I spent at least two weeks strapped to a drunk-off-his-ass PTSD victim and I am not, not even in the slightest fraction of a degree, intimidated by some bitch with wings and a silly-ass accent.”
The fear retreated, and the heron glaredly at him once and looked away. Pushing back a growing sense of foreboding, Gaurinn gave the situation a once-over and resigned himself to the fact that most of his fears had been justified. Just below his middle row of limbs his chitin merged rather jarringly into the side of what appeared to be a snow-white woman, near to seven feet tall if his estimation was worth anything. Her body displayed both a fine, pale down and curves that would have driven a man to distraction if her head had not been that of a giant bird’s. Her beak glittered a bright silver and instead of another arm a massive wing sprouted from her shoulder and was folded neatly against her ribs. It was the closest thing to clothing she wore, Gaurinn realized, and then immediately veered away from that train of thought because it made him feel both voyeuristic and very slightly squeamish.
“If it makes you feel any better,” Taccha Maowyn said, “I thought the accent was a bit much.”
She turned back to Gaurinn, and where her eyes had been a furious yellow they were now only a sort of pissed-off beige. Her beak clacked once distastefully. “Let’s cut to the bone,” she said, “I understand somehow my little champion and you have gone your separate ways, and I can’t separate us any more than I could the two of you. We’re fused at the ether, if that means anything to you, which I highly doubt. No wonder you and the boy were so close-knit.”
“Cailean,” Gaurinn said defensively.
“Whatever.” Maowyn took an unsteady step forward, flapping her wing for balance. It stretched out twelve feet before she fluttered it back to her side. As she spoke, she looked at their surroundings in a way that suggested they’d made a sly dig at her during a Christmas party once and she’d written about it in her diary for days. “This is just what I need. I was busy. You mortals always think it’s so easy, being a god. Do you even know the paperwork I still have?” The feathers on her neck puffed up in anger. “That fool got himself killed by something minor, I expect. Probably syphilis.”
“His head was eaten! And then, uh, his organs kind of fell out. He was a zombie before that.”
“Of course he was, I was there, did you forget?” the heron snapped. “I am done with this gig, I swear, this is the last time I scrub around down here with dirtwalkers. Mortals. You’re all the same. Turn your back and you die like rats in traps. I handed him a knife and told him to kill people, most of whom who were already dying, by the way, and what’s he do, he fucks it up. Gets himself in a goddamn battle to the death and then sticks me with his blood debts.” She sniffed. “Typical.”
Gaurinn growled. A bolt of static crackled along his spine and he would very likely have decided to do something about it had a sudden and highly insistent knock not suddenly resounded at the door.
The goddess and the centipede jumped as one at the sound, deafening in the otherwise empty studio. An urgently familiar voice called, “Cailinn, Gaurean, whatever you two are calling yourself, you’re on in six. Set 16, shake a leg!”
She cleared the room in three strides, moving with the grace only those who aren’t actually bound by gravity can manage and flung the double doors open with a flick of her wing. Burningly white lights burst into the dark room, causing Gaurinn to flinch, but Maowyn’s head snaked upwards and undulated warily at the disturbance, pupils shrunken to dots. An overwhelmingly average man with a clipboard for a hand squinted up at her, biting his lip and frowning distractedly.
“Hey, no one told me there was a cast change. You guys can’t just go switching things up like this at the last second, you have to keep-”
Gaurinn didn’t see her move, only heard a dull thunk and felt the sudden spray against his face, blinding him. He felt Maowyn’s muscles relax, felt her shift forward, and he scrabbled blindly at his face with his claws. His vision was still blurry when he thought for a very strange millisecond that Maowyn and Gabe had kissed, her head bent touching his, but then Gabe’s skull slowly slid off her beak and he crumpled to the floor.
“What the hell?” Gaurinn said. “What the hell?”
The goddess gave him a cool look and scraped her beak against the door frame, flashing underneath the stage lights. Bits of hair and brain smeared against the paint. “I’m not going to play you mortals’ games, worm. Whatever you and that idiot boy had between yourselves died with him. I don’t have time for this. I will find a way to separate us. I do not particularly care what it takes.” She didn’t bother to look at what Gaurinn was only half-sure was Gabe’s corpse, and when she left she planted a single delicate foot on its chest before sweeping out onto the stage.