Re: Vendetta [S!2 Round 1 ~ Presidentialgon]
01-27-2012, 07:15 AM
Originally posted on MSPA by Flummox.
[color=99z8rz]There was no escape. Footsteps pounded outside the only door. The only exit was the room he had come from, through the hole he had made. Looking back through the momentous cavity, he could see the door buckling from the weight of people slamming against it.
Felgurd could not escape. But he had to. He had to avenge Tolgurd. He had to find his purpose.
The only way out was through the walls again. He looked over the room. Tacked up wallpaper in a garish floral design. A wooden table, but it looked frail. No, the object best suited for his needs was the bookcase in one corner of the room.
He heaved it up onto his shoulders, or what would have been his shoulders if he had a skeletal structure. Books rained down upon his head, flattening his hat and carpeting the floor in a flood of paper and ink. One of the screws must have been loose, because one of the shelves slid out and clacked upon the floor. Silence was no longer a priority. They knew where he was already.
He produced another arm from underneath his jacket and knocked on the far wall to see if it was hollow. A dull, muffled sound just barely passed the lining; it was solid.
The left wall was more promising – a deep, clear note rang throughout the room, but it was thicker than the last one he broke. Felgurd backed up from the wall, then took a running start and shoved the bookcase through, relying on his momentum to shatter the plaster. White chips of paint and plastic flew across the room in a great cloud, obscuring his view.
When it finally cleared, he could see that he had not completely succeeded. The bookcase had gone through the first three layers of the wall, but the plaster on the other side remained. The bookcase itself lay a ruined and crumpled mess on the ground, splinters pointing every which way.
It would have to do. He reached inside of the dent and scraped at the wall. In the sudden silence, he could hear the cracking of both the door in this room and the one previous, almost giving way under the efforts of the men. It would not be long now until they broke through.
He scraped harder and more furiously, bringing his feet to bear on the wall and sprouting more limbs, diverting his entire concentration to widening the small hole that he had made.
With each scratch at the wall, more plaster fell apart and drifted down onto whatever lay on the other side. Eventually it was large enough for a few hands to fit through, and he pushed an arm through the hole, taking grasp on the other side and cracking off a large sheet of the opposite wall.
As soon as he had ducked through the hole, the two doors gave in, and splinters buried themselves deep into the remnants of the cracked wall. Gunshots reverberated behind him, echoing off the cramped space of the previous room.
But this room was much larger. No, it was humongous. A ceiling at least ten times taller than his full height. A width five times the height and a length five times the width. All of it painted a dull red, with a golden trim. Statues coated with gold, seated in magnificently large thrones, the tops of their heads almost grazing the ceiling. A red carpet flung down the middle, marvelously straight in its journey down the hallway, between the statues, and leading up to the front, where the largest statue of all sat, presiding over the entire room.
It was full of people. People, in ordinary clothes, their bodies straining against the velvet boundaries that prevented them from touching the statues. Men, in black suits so perfectly creased that their edges seemed like they could prick the finger of any who touched them; with shoes so painstakingly shined that they seemed to hold the face of the sun itself, laced onto their toes and heels; wearing black headsets, a startling contrast to their pale faces; men, policing the tourists who filled the hall so completely.
Surprisingly, the sound of him breaking the wall had been masked by the buzz of the crowd. As far as he could tell, no one even noticed. Odd.
Felgurd could hear voices behind him of the men who were following him. Voices shouting to each other. Voices shouting into their headsets. Voices shouting for his condemnation. They will not capture him. Not today.
“I repeat! It’s gotten into the President’s Hall! It’s dangerous, we need it captured and apprehended immediately! Code Yellow! Code Yellow!”
But Felgurd knew he was safe, for the moment at least. They wouldn’t dare use their guns in such a crowded area. Nor when they stood any chance of hitting these massive effigies of their leaders. They looked valuable, and he knew how humans responded to money.
He ducked behind the nearest figure. If he passed through them quickly enough, they stood less of a chance of catching him. He could have gone into the crowd, but he would not be able to blend in well enough, not in this light.
In the short span of time that he was passing from behind one statue to the next, he performed a quick visual scan of the room. The uniformed and official-looking men had noticed him, apparently, because they were running towards his general position with their pistols drawn. The crowd had also taken notice, because there was general havoc amongst them. People ran, tripped, fought. Knives were pulled. A gunshot rang out from the mob. People were screaming now, running, grasping each other in the race to escape the building. A trampled, bloody body was left behind, the remains of a teenage boy. His heart was still pumping, its efforts futile. He took what was to be his last gasp of breath as his body heaved and convulsed, his straying arm landing on the body of an aged lady who lay there, crushed under the weight of the multitude.
But Felgurd felt no sympathy. All humans died eventually anyway. He ducked and weaved between the sculptures, hoping that the men would not ever catch him in a clear line of sight. But there were a finite amount of statues, and he was nearing the end of the room. Eventually he reached the last statue in the row. It was impossible to tell how far behind the men were.
He crouched down behind it and prepared for his pursuers to catch up with him. By now they would have been joined by the men following him from the two previous rooms. He started to pull the hands from his left arm and join them onto his right arm, slowly so as not to alert his hunters to his hiding place. Soon enough he had no left arm and his right arm was roughly twice the length it was before. He began to pull hands from other parts of his body too, becoming shorter and smaller while his arm grew longer and thicker.
He waited. Waited for the right moment…
The footsteps registered in his mind, a dim flicker of recognition in his eye as they came closer, closer…
He stepped out from behind the statue and, flinging his arm out wide, whipped it back around to close around the man’s throat. Felgurd dodged at just the right moment, the bullet from the surprised man’s gun tearing a clean hole in his suit tail.
The man began to choke and dropped his pistol. Hunter became hunted. The sheer force from Felgurd’s grip began to bruise the man’s neck as his blood vessels popped one by one. The bruises spread up his jaw and down his collar as slowly, gradually, his jugular was crushed inwards, almost collapsing on itself. Felgurd, sensing another man gaining on his position, quickly pulled back his right arm, snapping his victim’s neck. He gathered his hands from his elongated arm back into the rest of his body as he fled.
He was on the run again.
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[color=99z8rz]There was no escape. Footsteps pounded outside the only door. The only exit was the room he had come from, through the hole he had made. Looking back through the momentous cavity, he could see the door buckling from the weight of people slamming against it.
Felgurd could not escape. But he had to. He had to avenge Tolgurd. He had to find his purpose.
The only way out was through the walls again. He looked over the room. Tacked up wallpaper in a garish floral design. A wooden table, but it looked frail. No, the object best suited for his needs was the bookcase in one corner of the room.
He heaved it up onto his shoulders, or what would have been his shoulders if he had a skeletal structure. Books rained down upon his head, flattening his hat and carpeting the floor in a flood of paper and ink. One of the screws must have been loose, because one of the shelves slid out and clacked upon the floor. Silence was no longer a priority. They knew where he was already.
He produced another arm from underneath his jacket and knocked on the far wall to see if it was hollow. A dull, muffled sound just barely passed the lining; it was solid.
The left wall was more promising – a deep, clear note rang throughout the room, but it was thicker than the last one he broke. Felgurd backed up from the wall, then took a running start and shoved the bookcase through, relying on his momentum to shatter the plaster. White chips of paint and plastic flew across the room in a great cloud, obscuring his view.
When it finally cleared, he could see that he had not completely succeeded. The bookcase had gone through the first three layers of the wall, but the plaster on the other side remained. The bookcase itself lay a ruined and crumpled mess on the ground, splinters pointing every which way.
It would have to do. He reached inside of the dent and scraped at the wall. In the sudden silence, he could hear the cracking of both the door in this room and the one previous, almost giving way under the efforts of the men. It would not be long now until they broke through.
He scraped harder and more furiously, bringing his feet to bear on the wall and sprouting more limbs, diverting his entire concentration to widening the small hole that he had made.
With each scratch at the wall, more plaster fell apart and drifted down onto whatever lay on the other side. Eventually it was large enough for a few hands to fit through, and he pushed an arm through the hole, taking grasp on the other side and cracking off a large sheet of the opposite wall.
As soon as he had ducked through the hole, the two doors gave in, and splinters buried themselves deep into the remnants of the cracked wall. Gunshots reverberated behind him, echoing off the cramped space of the previous room.
But this room was much larger. No, it was humongous. A ceiling at least ten times taller than his full height. A width five times the height and a length five times the width. All of it painted a dull red, with a golden trim. Statues coated with gold, seated in magnificently large thrones, the tops of their heads almost grazing the ceiling. A red carpet flung down the middle, marvelously straight in its journey down the hallway, between the statues, and leading up to the front, where the largest statue of all sat, presiding over the entire room.
It was full of people. People, in ordinary clothes, their bodies straining against the velvet boundaries that prevented them from touching the statues. Men, in black suits so perfectly creased that their edges seemed like they could prick the finger of any who touched them; with shoes so painstakingly shined that they seemed to hold the face of the sun itself, laced onto their toes and heels; wearing black headsets, a startling contrast to their pale faces; men, policing the tourists who filled the hall so completely.
Surprisingly, the sound of him breaking the wall had been masked by the buzz of the crowd. As far as he could tell, no one even noticed. Odd.
Felgurd could hear voices behind him of the men who were following him. Voices shouting to each other. Voices shouting into their headsets. Voices shouting for his condemnation. They will not capture him. Not today.
“I repeat! It’s gotten into the President’s Hall! It’s dangerous, we need it captured and apprehended immediately! Code Yellow! Code Yellow!”
But Felgurd knew he was safe, for the moment at least. They wouldn’t dare use their guns in such a crowded area. Nor when they stood any chance of hitting these massive effigies of their leaders. They looked valuable, and he knew how humans responded to money.
He ducked behind the nearest figure. If he passed through them quickly enough, they stood less of a chance of catching him. He could have gone into the crowd, but he would not be able to blend in well enough, not in this light.
In the short span of time that he was passing from behind one statue to the next, he performed a quick visual scan of the room. The uniformed and official-looking men had noticed him, apparently, because they were running towards his general position with their pistols drawn. The crowd had also taken notice, because there was general havoc amongst them. People ran, tripped, fought. Knives were pulled. A gunshot rang out from the mob. People were screaming now, running, grasping each other in the race to escape the building. A trampled, bloody body was left behind, the remains of a teenage boy. His heart was still pumping, its efforts futile. He took what was to be his last gasp of breath as his body heaved and convulsed, his straying arm landing on the body of an aged lady who lay there, crushed under the weight of the multitude.
But Felgurd felt no sympathy. All humans died eventually anyway. He ducked and weaved between the sculptures, hoping that the men would not ever catch him in a clear line of sight. But there were a finite amount of statues, and he was nearing the end of the room. Eventually he reached the last statue in the row. It was impossible to tell how far behind the men were.
He crouched down behind it and prepared for his pursuers to catch up with him. By now they would have been joined by the men following him from the two previous rooms. He started to pull the hands from his left arm and join them onto his right arm, slowly so as not to alert his hunters to his hiding place. Soon enough he had no left arm and his right arm was roughly twice the length it was before. He began to pull hands from other parts of his body too, becoming shorter and smaller while his arm grew longer and thicker.
He waited. Waited for the right moment…
The footsteps registered in his mind, a dim flicker of recognition in his eye as they came closer, closer…
He stepped out from behind the statue and, flinging his arm out wide, whipped it back around to close around the man’s throat. Felgurd dodged at just the right moment, the bullet from the surprised man’s gun tearing a clean hole in his suit tail.
The man began to choke and dropped his pistol. Hunter became hunted. The sheer force from Felgurd’s grip began to bruise the man’s neck as his blood vessels popped one by one. The bruises spread up his jaw and down his collar as slowly, gradually, his jugular was crushed inwards, almost collapsing on itself. Felgurd, sensing another man gaining on his position, quickly pulled back his right arm, snapping his victim’s neck. He gathered his hands from his elongated arm back into the rest of his body as he fled.
He was on the run again.
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