Re: The Gradual Massacre (GBS2G4) [Round 3: Las Orbitas]
12-10-2010, 08:09 PM
Originally posted on MSPA by MrGuy.
Holly staggered to her feet, leaning against a wall. The crackling field around her had died down, long since replaced by an utter placidity. It might well have stayed that way if she hadn't become vaguely aware of a screech and a ticking followed by a couple of engineers desperately limping-- or in some cases crawling-- past her. She stared at one, currently clawing at a wound in a desperate effort to remove some foreign object from it.
The spark of fear was reignited, and it proved to be more than enough to light another flame of rage. The crackling began again, louder this time, and pluviathaums sprayed around her, releasing massive amounts of the magical energy known as mana into the surrounding environment. A few bystanders were lucky enough for instant death. Holly once again began striding through the halls, desperate to avoid the incessant ticking and-- if she was particularly lucky-- to ensure her revenge.
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Ouroborous' newfound taste for the organic wiring had, it should be noted, not weakened its taste for human flesh in the slightest. In fact, the swarm Countess was tracking at the moment showed an interesting tendency to devour electrical infrastructure "between courses", so to speak, temporarily abandoning it for a brief meal of engineer before re-entering the walls as soon as that was finished. Countess had found by this point that the task was made not only far simpler, but slightly less tedious by yanking engineers out into the swarm's path, then lining up a shot that would electrocute a good 80% of them at once; unfortunately, the supply was beginning to dwindle, making even this small consolation unsustainable. What was worse, due to their irritatingly high reproductive rate, every time it seemed like she had almost finished off at least a significant chunk of the first strain, they merely retreated into the walls for a few minutes before springing forth once again in abundance. It was becoming quite clear that unless they were gathered in one place and killed faster than they could spawn, the attempt would be unsuccessful.
A smile played across her face as she began to notice a pattern. Whenever the Ouroborites entered a wall, about twice as many would go to one side as to the other, and their seemingly haphazard path was, on closer inspection, an attempt to travel diagonally to a single point near the center of the station. A few had even made their way through some sort of transport tube in order to more efficiently reach said area; Countess took this as her cue to commandeer a nearby elevator and press the large "HUB" button within. As it slowly began moving along, she uttered a muffled praise to whoever had made sure that the main methods of transport had their wiring particularly well-protected by an especially thick wall.
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An indeterminate amount of time passed, as for the elf it was all beginning to run together, crumpling into nothing more than some vaguely constant progression of events. It didn't help that the arrangement of Las Orbitas was rather baffling to her; between all the various hallways, cargo holds, restaurants and occasional shops or laboratories, all looking more or less like the same old rusted door from the outside, it was all too easy to get lost, and the fury burning in the front of her mind combined with the panic nibbling at the back was making it hard to stay focused. How long had she been running? How long had she been fighting? Where was she in the city? She distinctly remembered wandering through a labyrinth of crisscrossing paths, and killing or severely injuring the rare engineer unlucky enough to cross her path, but no specific points of interest popped out. What would previously have brought her sadistic glee was now simply hazy inertia.
Her location, anyway, was fairly easily discerned once she put her mind to it. Looking back out the door she had passed through was another hall, which as far as she could tell was more or less identical to the others; she had long since either lost her map or burned it to a crisp, though she couldn't remember which. A few elevators, and several more rooms, were to one direction; a couple of corpses and the entrance to yet another cargo hold the opposite way. Several thick documents were laid out on a table, most of them labelled along the lines of "Bio-Engineering Project 6-A: Infiltration (Data Recovery)", and more than a few computers were also present. Holly proceeded into a sort of "side-room" branching off, not connected to the main hallway.
She looked around and found several transparent artificial habitats, each filled with several specimens of some bizarre creature or another, as well as a steady supply of food. Holly looked curiously at what appeared to be some variety of armor-plated lizard, then cracked a small grin and raised her gauntlet to the window. A slight squeaking noise emanated as she slowly traced a large hole in the plexiglass before finally punching it to the ground. The lizard turned its head and quickly began crawling towards the new opening. As it got closer, its pronounced claws and fangs became clearer, and with a crackle, a jolt of mana caused a pair of malformed wings to sprout from its back. Its desperate attempts to fly into the air were, to Holly at least, simultaneously horrifying and hilarious. She proceeded to do much the same with every window on the floor, unleashing all varieties of burrowing crustaceans, camoflauged parasites, and venomous arachnids, already warped by genetic engineering into architects of death and further twisted by the unstable magical energy flowing into them.
There was, for a brief moment, a very disconcerting lack of a crackle. During this brief window, the elf heard a loud ticking she hadn't noticed before. "No! No, I'm not ready yet! I'm not done with this place!" She furiously lashed out at the nearby wall, repeatedly whipping the deliberately old-timey clock adorning it until it fell to the ground, then stomping it and punching it and throwing it until its inner workings were scattered all across the ground. A scorpion with an exponentially increasing number of eyes came a bit too close for comfort before she could kick it away, and the elf finally decided to make her way out of the room, hurrying to an elevator, frantically mashing buttons until it opened, entering, and frantically mashing some more buttons until she was whisked to a different part of the station.
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Countess gave her new surroundings the once-over. They'd do fine-- there seemed to be plenty of wiring and a fair amount of refrigerated meat available to her; the Ouroborites that had already arrived had scattered and began tearing individually at anything they could find, so she might have to hurry. She grabbed a nearby dumpster, which was thankfully empty, and began filling it with all the goo and other edibles she could find. If there was a display screen, she would remove it and extract the bounty concealed directly behind it; if there was a freezer, she would give it a quick zap to thaw its contents before tossing them in as well. She also made sure to shut the container whenever she wasn't throwing things into it; she couldn't risk any Ouroborites attacking the stockpile prematurely.
Soon the container was filled to the brim and ready to perform its duty as bait; the only thing remaining would be to find a place where it would be particularly unfeasible for Ouroborous to escape or hide before she could get to the rest of them. Still, some help would make the endeavor quite a lot less dreary, and there it was, that despicable elf skittering around like a decapitated chicken. At the moment, Countess felt the feud could wait; as it stood, the elf couldn't possibly be stupid enough to fight her when the mindless swarm was milling about. As for a place the bugs might be easier to keep track of, she seemed to be heading towards a rather large building cut off from the rest of the city, and it was as good a guess as any, so the clockwork creature trailed after her, making sure to stay out of sight until just the right time.
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Once again, the elf's progress through Las Orbitas began flowing together, but for a completely different reason. Once strolling, Holly was now sprinting through what equated to downtown-- a large, open space with proper edifices, near the center of the station, which she had reached shortly after exiting the elevator-- cutting through an artificial park or ducking into a narrow, out-of-the-way corridor, ticking and tocking assailing her ears from every angle. Can't let her catch up no wait she's this way I was wrong she's that way wait it's quieter over there she can't be in that building because the door's closed. Holly had approached a large coliseum which stood out among the rest of the area. The steel of its construction still gleamed, and its windows were all still intact; even the massive sign adorning it had not a speck of graffiti or peeling paint. The tremendous double doors, as she had noted, were still tightly shut, and the ticking in her head seemed to abate when she turned towards it. It was, therefore, not particularly long before she had channeled her fear and rage into melting and crushing the door into nothing.
The elf ducked into the stadium and perked up her ears. The ticking, if it had ever truly been there, was certainly not audible any longer. She let out a sigh and began walking the vast hallways of the sporting establishment; it quickly became apparent that the inside reflected the stadium's state far more than the outside. Crates of all sorts of merchandise, snowglobes and foam fingers and sticks and facemasks and skates and books and jerseys and bobbleheads, lay haphazardly piled in a gift shop with the slatted gate permanently closed, laying beneath the flickering light, waiting for a journey to the next station that would never come, nothing but wasted plastic and paper. The stench of rotten food wafted from a concession stand that had been hastily abandoned, not even having bothered to take its wares off display; they now provided food for the occasional cockroach or rat.
After quite a bit of wandering in this manner, she eventually reached a recessed door with a clearly broken keypad. After an experimental kick, it ground open with a horrifying screeching sound that resonated in Holly's ears for several seconds after it ended. She took a second to recover before making her way through into an ancient locker room. A single trophy and several pennants were lovingly enshrined, along with several jerseys and hockey sticks; she grabbed a facemask lying on a bench and considered putting it on, nearly discarded it as far too battered, then decided to keep it just in case. She proceeded much in this fashion, wandering around the room until coming back to the display case, which opened easily, the lock long since rusted away. Holly wiped the dust off of an old picture frame. Inside was the 2284 Wyverns lineup, clutching their championship trophy and grinning at the camera. So happy, she thought to herself. How disgusting. She burnt the picture and frame to ash, the last record Las Orbitas had of its only Intragalactic Cup victory, and cast it to the ground.
The elf once again began wandering, the crackling surrounding her serving as her only reminder that she still had to exact revenge. She headed through a large doorway into the center of the stadium, where she quickly hopped down to the rink itself, which peculiarly contained an open dumpster. The floor of the arena, once coated in ice, was now merely damp; the gigantic screens which had once shown instant replays and promotional tie-ins were cracked and gave no output beyond the occasional crackle or spark; and the seats, once impeccably cleaned by a massive custodial staff, were now caked with dirt and cobwebs, the rare vermin being the only creature that ever deigned to use them. None of these reminders of a bygone era mattered one bit to Holly, however, after she realized that all she could hear was a combination of shrieking and ticking, each steadily rising in both volume and pitch. She gaped in a combination of awe and despair as a flood of Ouroborites poured in from above, quickly followed by the Countess arriving calmly from the side; this only increased when the latter's greeting was a highly-disconcerting "Oh, you. Help me out here, would you, dear? Enemy of my enemy and so forth." As the elf desperately fought back the encroaching bugs with terribly-aimed bursts of flame, she became convinced that the situation could not possibly become any worse.
A few seconds after that, the lights went out.
Holly staggered to her feet, leaning against a wall. The crackling field around her had died down, long since replaced by an utter placidity. It might well have stayed that way if she hadn't become vaguely aware of a screech and a ticking followed by a couple of engineers desperately limping-- or in some cases crawling-- past her. She stared at one, currently clawing at a wound in a desperate effort to remove some foreign object from it.
The spark of fear was reignited, and it proved to be more than enough to light another flame of rage. The crackling began again, louder this time, and pluviathaums sprayed around her, releasing massive amounts of the magical energy known as mana into the surrounding environment. A few bystanders were lucky enough for instant death. Holly once again began striding through the halls, desperate to avoid the incessant ticking and-- if she was particularly lucky-- to ensure her revenge.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ouroborous' newfound taste for the organic wiring had, it should be noted, not weakened its taste for human flesh in the slightest. In fact, the swarm Countess was tracking at the moment showed an interesting tendency to devour electrical infrastructure "between courses", so to speak, temporarily abandoning it for a brief meal of engineer before re-entering the walls as soon as that was finished. Countess had found by this point that the task was made not only far simpler, but slightly less tedious by yanking engineers out into the swarm's path, then lining up a shot that would electrocute a good 80% of them at once; unfortunately, the supply was beginning to dwindle, making even this small consolation unsustainable. What was worse, due to their irritatingly high reproductive rate, every time it seemed like she had almost finished off at least a significant chunk of the first strain, they merely retreated into the walls for a few minutes before springing forth once again in abundance. It was becoming quite clear that unless they were gathered in one place and killed faster than they could spawn, the attempt would be unsuccessful.
A smile played across her face as she began to notice a pattern. Whenever the Ouroborites entered a wall, about twice as many would go to one side as to the other, and their seemingly haphazard path was, on closer inspection, an attempt to travel diagonally to a single point near the center of the station. A few had even made their way through some sort of transport tube in order to more efficiently reach said area; Countess took this as her cue to commandeer a nearby elevator and press the large "HUB" button within. As it slowly began moving along, she uttered a muffled praise to whoever had made sure that the main methods of transport had their wiring particularly well-protected by an especially thick wall.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
An indeterminate amount of time passed, as for the elf it was all beginning to run together, crumpling into nothing more than some vaguely constant progression of events. It didn't help that the arrangement of Las Orbitas was rather baffling to her; between all the various hallways, cargo holds, restaurants and occasional shops or laboratories, all looking more or less like the same old rusted door from the outside, it was all too easy to get lost, and the fury burning in the front of her mind combined with the panic nibbling at the back was making it hard to stay focused. How long had she been running? How long had she been fighting? Where was she in the city? She distinctly remembered wandering through a labyrinth of crisscrossing paths, and killing or severely injuring the rare engineer unlucky enough to cross her path, but no specific points of interest popped out. What would previously have brought her sadistic glee was now simply hazy inertia.
Her location, anyway, was fairly easily discerned once she put her mind to it. Looking back out the door she had passed through was another hall, which as far as she could tell was more or less identical to the others; she had long since either lost her map or burned it to a crisp, though she couldn't remember which. A few elevators, and several more rooms, were to one direction; a couple of corpses and the entrance to yet another cargo hold the opposite way. Several thick documents were laid out on a table, most of them labelled along the lines of "Bio-Engineering Project 6-A: Infiltration (Data Recovery)", and more than a few computers were also present. Holly proceeded into a sort of "side-room" branching off, not connected to the main hallway.
She looked around and found several transparent artificial habitats, each filled with several specimens of some bizarre creature or another, as well as a steady supply of food. Holly looked curiously at what appeared to be some variety of armor-plated lizard, then cracked a small grin and raised her gauntlet to the window. A slight squeaking noise emanated as she slowly traced a large hole in the plexiglass before finally punching it to the ground. The lizard turned its head and quickly began crawling towards the new opening. As it got closer, its pronounced claws and fangs became clearer, and with a crackle, a jolt of mana caused a pair of malformed wings to sprout from its back. Its desperate attempts to fly into the air were, to Holly at least, simultaneously horrifying and hilarious. She proceeded to do much the same with every window on the floor, unleashing all varieties of burrowing crustaceans, camoflauged parasites, and venomous arachnids, already warped by genetic engineering into architects of death and further twisted by the unstable magical energy flowing into them.
There was, for a brief moment, a very disconcerting lack of a crackle. During this brief window, the elf heard a loud ticking she hadn't noticed before. "No! No, I'm not ready yet! I'm not done with this place!" She furiously lashed out at the nearby wall, repeatedly whipping the deliberately old-timey clock adorning it until it fell to the ground, then stomping it and punching it and throwing it until its inner workings were scattered all across the ground. A scorpion with an exponentially increasing number of eyes came a bit too close for comfort before she could kick it away, and the elf finally decided to make her way out of the room, hurrying to an elevator, frantically mashing buttons until it opened, entering, and frantically mashing some more buttons until she was whisked to a different part of the station.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Countess gave her new surroundings the once-over. They'd do fine-- there seemed to be plenty of wiring and a fair amount of refrigerated meat available to her; the Ouroborites that had already arrived had scattered and began tearing individually at anything they could find, so she might have to hurry. She grabbed a nearby dumpster, which was thankfully empty, and began filling it with all the goo and other edibles she could find. If there was a display screen, she would remove it and extract the bounty concealed directly behind it; if there was a freezer, she would give it a quick zap to thaw its contents before tossing them in as well. She also made sure to shut the container whenever she wasn't throwing things into it; she couldn't risk any Ouroborites attacking the stockpile prematurely.
Soon the container was filled to the brim and ready to perform its duty as bait; the only thing remaining would be to find a place where it would be particularly unfeasible for Ouroborous to escape or hide before she could get to the rest of them. Still, some help would make the endeavor quite a lot less dreary, and there it was, that despicable elf skittering around like a decapitated chicken. At the moment, Countess felt the feud could wait; as it stood, the elf couldn't possibly be stupid enough to fight her when the mindless swarm was milling about. As for a place the bugs might be easier to keep track of, she seemed to be heading towards a rather large building cut off from the rest of the city, and it was as good a guess as any, so the clockwork creature trailed after her, making sure to stay out of sight until just the right time.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Once again, the elf's progress through Las Orbitas began flowing together, but for a completely different reason. Once strolling, Holly was now sprinting through what equated to downtown-- a large, open space with proper edifices, near the center of the station, which she had reached shortly after exiting the elevator-- cutting through an artificial park or ducking into a narrow, out-of-the-way corridor, ticking and tocking assailing her ears from every angle. Can't let her catch up no wait she's this way I was wrong she's that way wait it's quieter over there she can't be in that building because the door's closed. Holly had approached a large coliseum which stood out among the rest of the area. The steel of its construction still gleamed, and its windows were all still intact; even the massive sign adorning it had not a speck of graffiti or peeling paint. The tremendous double doors, as she had noted, were still tightly shut, and the ticking in her head seemed to abate when she turned towards it. It was, therefore, not particularly long before she had channeled her fear and rage into melting and crushing the door into nothing.
The elf ducked into the stadium and perked up her ears. The ticking, if it had ever truly been there, was certainly not audible any longer. She let out a sigh and began walking the vast hallways of the sporting establishment; it quickly became apparent that the inside reflected the stadium's state far more than the outside. Crates of all sorts of merchandise, snowglobes and foam fingers and sticks and facemasks and skates and books and jerseys and bobbleheads, lay haphazardly piled in a gift shop with the slatted gate permanently closed, laying beneath the flickering light, waiting for a journey to the next station that would never come, nothing but wasted plastic and paper. The stench of rotten food wafted from a concession stand that had been hastily abandoned, not even having bothered to take its wares off display; they now provided food for the occasional cockroach or rat.
After quite a bit of wandering in this manner, she eventually reached a recessed door with a clearly broken keypad. After an experimental kick, it ground open with a horrifying screeching sound that resonated in Holly's ears for several seconds after it ended. She took a second to recover before making her way through into an ancient locker room. A single trophy and several pennants were lovingly enshrined, along with several jerseys and hockey sticks; she grabbed a facemask lying on a bench and considered putting it on, nearly discarded it as far too battered, then decided to keep it just in case. She proceeded much in this fashion, wandering around the room until coming back to the display case, which opened easily, the lock long since rusted away. Holly wiped the dust off of an old picture frame. Inside was the 2284 Wyverns lineup, clutching their championship trophy and grinning at the camera. So happy, she thought to herself. How disgusting. She burnt the picture and frame to ash, the last record Las Orbitas had of its only Intragalactic Cup victory, and cast it to the ground.
The elf once again began wandering, the crackling surrounding her serving as her only reminder that she still had to exact revenge. She headed through a large doorway into the center of the stadium, where she quickly hopped down to the rink itself, which peculiarly contained an open dumpster. The floor of the arena, once coated in ice, was now merely damp; the gigantic screens which had once shown instant replays and promotional tie-ins were cracked and gave no output beyond the occasional crackle or spark; and the seats, once impeccably cleaned by a massive custodial staff, were now caked with dirt and cobwebs, the rare vermin being the only creature that ever deigned to use them. None of these reminders of a bygone era mattered one bit to Holly, however, after she realized that all she could hear was a combination of shrieking and ticking, each steadily rising in both volume and pitch. She gaped in a combination of awe and despair as a flood of Ouroborites poured in from above, quickly followed by the Countess arriving calmly from the side; this only increased when the latter's greeting was a highly-disconcerting "Oh, you. Help me out here, would you, dear? Enemy of my enemy and so forth." As the elf desperately fought back the encroaching bugs with terribly-aimed bursts of flame, she became convinced that the situation could not possibly become any worse.
A few seconds after that, the lights went out.