Re: The Gradual Massacre (GBS2G4) [Round 3: Las Orbitas]
05-03-2011, 10:00 AM
Originally posted on MSPA by whoosh!.
Blood Brothers' Roulette is a little known and rarely played variant on the classic Russian Roulette. Like Russian Roulette, the focus is on inserting a single bullet into a revolver, spinning the chambers and firing. However, Blood Roulette differs in that there are as many guns as there are players, and as many bullets. The outcome is also direly less impressive, as it is the hand of the opponent that is shot as opposed to your own head. It is also much more painful and harrowing to be a loser of Blood Brothers' Roulette.
It was this particular game that Aic found herself playing.
The room was gloomy, lit only by a single flickering bulb that cast a curiously harsh light on everything when it did deign to work. It was also cramped, almost every available piece of floor space barring the table at which she sat being dominated by white crates made of thick plastic (or perhaps some kind of metal?). On top of these towered even more of the boxes. Some had dates, numbers and names stencilled on the side, but these were few and largely grouped towards one side of the room. What was clear, however, was that all of them contained weapons.
The room was a veritable armoury.
Aic's opponent, a dark haired thirty-something with untidy stubble smiled at her and slid a revolver across the table with a hand that lacked two fingers. He smiled jaggedly. Next to him was a curiously archaic key, which he'd used to lock the door beforehand. He'd said something about “not wanting them to cause a fuss”.
“You're not nervous, are you? It's still not too late to back out.” If not for the snide edge to the comment it might almost have been construed as kindness.
“Nervous? No. I'm not counting on losing,” she replied, relaxing a little and giving him a grin of her own. Aic flexed her fingers, revelling in the cracking of bones and how unsettled Eight-Fingers was beginning to look.
“Don't intend to lose...? If you cheat, I'm taking your eyes.”
“Certainly. But I'm pretty lucky, Kalevi.”
Kalevi's eyes stared into hers, trying to discern the meaning behind those smug smiles and words. Whether he found it or not, his attention soon drifted to his own revolver. He schlucked it open, assured himself of the single bullet sitting in one of the six chambers, and clacked it close again.
“Whatever. Are you ready to go?”
“Hey, hang on. One question. What do you want if I lose?”
Kalevi grunted.
“You win, you get your weapons, no questions asked. You lose...” He gaze wandered to the rest of the room, his mind delving through all the possibilities.
“Nothing happens. You just leave,” he decided finally.
“What?”
He turned to look at Aic, her smile flushed out by uneasiness. The man shrugged.
“It's not that surprising. You're telling me you never get bored?”
Aic didn't reply to that one.
Instead, she snatched up the gun he'd given her.
“Great. Wonderful,” she snapped, sliding the revolver open to look at the single bullet inside. “Let's just do this.”
In that instant the whole atmosphere of the room changed. A kind of reverence overcame them both, an awe of the Gun. Wordlessly Aic did as she'd been told and angled the barrel of the ancient weapon at the man's splayed left hand. He followed suit, winking at Aic before lowering his sights to the game.
“Spin the chambers,” Kalevi intoned.
The rhythmic clicking of spinning bullets rose up in reply.
“Place your left hand back on the table.”
The reverential quiet still lingered, but the moment was closer now. Only a few seconds were left to drift away and then-
“On the count of three. One... two...”
Aic's heart rate accelerated into a silent frenzy, her eyes on the man's lips. Just a one more word, and then-
CLIK-CLIK.
No recoil ripped her wrist backwards, and no bones splintered like glass in her left hand. Hearing or no hearing, the gods of fate had smiled on them both. Perhaps. But then perhaps not, considering the expression on Kalevi's face.
“You fired twice!” The accusation was quick and bitter.
“I didn't fire once,” Aic replied pointedly.
He leaned inwards towards Aic, fury smouldering behind dark eyes.
“I said I'd take your eyes. And hey, you know what? That's actually starting to sound like a good idea.”
Aic threw back her head and laughed, letting loose a screeching squall of metallic movement. Kalevi slid back from her, but didn't stand. His expression had hardly changed. Even so, he could not succeed in being subtle about the revolver he now pointed at her head.
“What are you?” A deceptively simple question.
She said nothing at first, instead meeting his burning gaze with a coy smile. Then it flickered and she sighed, rubbing her neck.
“Relax. It's nothing,” she muttered.
“The hell it is. Tell me, or I swear I will hurt you,” he replied flatly.
“Put the handgun down.”
“Tell me.”
“This kind of ruins the spirit of the game, y'know?”
The poker face cracked and irritation flashed across Kalevi's face. “Now!”
“Look, you-” Aic faltered. She looked down at the table, her whole body suddenly tensed and small. “They had to reconstruct my throat. I- I had an accident. It was mechanical, but they made sure I could talk and breathe. That was the point. Laughter wasn't.”
“So. That's what the collar is for?”
“Yeah. I-”
Aic opened her mouth to try and explain it all, the poisonous air of the ruined earth, the boomers,
(the rain)
the Seventh Sanctum, but every single piece of that lost life flashed by like a torrent, a towering wall of that sheer amount of stuff in her head. She felt dizzy. Forgetting that she had a pistol aimed at her she tried to stand up, to convince herself that she was fine. But then she began to shake and her legs gave out; the floor slammed into her like a train, driving the breath out of her.
She was vaguely aware of Kalevi at her side suddenly. All of reality seemed to leap forward and blur in that moment. Aic tried to move, but every limb of hers felt a thousand times heavier. It was easier to be still.
He grabbed her head in his hands and wrenched it towards his own. His lips moved and slithered around various words, but it was too fast, too slippery for her to lip read. Her eyes rolled in their sockets. Everything. Hurt.
And then, among the streaking of senses a blinding moment of clarity slipped through, and a question fluttered to the forefront of her mind.
Am I Aic Or Acacia?
She lay there simply stunned by the devastating simplicity of the question. She struggled to produce the easy, simple, obvious answer that she knew. It was insane that she couldn't know, because the division had always been so achingly clear. Hate flared up for the other who wasn't her, but with no target for her rage it fizzled away in the confusion. And then, in a second flash of clarity, yet one more thought drifted into focus:
Quad.
Quad?
QuadquadquadquadQUADQUADQUADQUADQUAD-
Driven by that pulsing idea the terrible weight of her own body seemed possible to defeat, and soon she had achieved that herculean task of struggling into a sitting position. Kevali let go of her head slowly, as if scared she might simply collapse again without his support.
“Quad,” slipped free of her own mouth.
Trembling, stumbling hands brought out precious paper packets of white dust and a note of a strange currency that curled in her palm.
“I need...” Black spots clustered in her vision, dancing and vanishing and pressing against her sight as it began to drag her down into the darkness. Even so, it became pressingly important to say something, anything, to the man with eight fingers. It mattered more still that she should unfurl that crackling white paper and curl up that strange note, but this meant something. She had to prove to him, to anyone, to herself, whether that be friend or foe, that she wasn't a bad person for having to do this.
Quad was a mistake. But with more Quad, she could fix it.
She looked to Kalevi, silently pleading.
“Fucking hell,” was his emphatic response.
Then something big slammed against the door.
“What was that?” Kalevi slowly stood up, his gaze on the source of the noise. At present it remained shut, but still...
Aic jammed the Quad back into one of her pockets, and staggered to her feet. “I don't know... but it's not something good. No way in hell.”
He didn't reply, instead ambling towards to the door, pausing next to a nondescript crate to pull out a sleek assault rifle. “Pick something up.”
“What?”
Kalevi turned to fully look at her. “Get a weapon. Anything, I don't care. Everything in this room was designed with murder in mind.”
Despite the inherent uneasiness of the situation, Aic hovered uncertainly on the spot. “So... what? We try to blast each other's hands for a bit, then you're just giving your stuff away?”
He gave her a strained look. “Look, whatever's outside-”
BANG.
“Fuck!”
Kalevi instantly swung the rifle upwards towards the entrance, waiting. His whole attention was fixed on the door. Nothing else mattered.
BANG.
The metal dented a little. The hinges briefly strained, then crashedback into place.
Aic stumbled over to the nearest crate and tore the lid off, revolver still in hand. Inside were multiple boxes with words printed in a strange alphabet on them. She flipped one open, revealing only row upon row of grenade-like objects.
“Damn!”
She grabbed a couple and shoved them in a pocket of her white coat, but lunged for another crate.
BANG.
The hinges strained and stayed there. Slivers of light from the corridor were clearly visible.
Aic cast aside the lid of a crate sitting on top of a few others. Encouragingly, this one contained a few long, metal boxes with serial codes engraved into the metal. Her arms darted in and lifted one out, straining slightly against the sheer weight of the thing.
BANG.
Not much longer now. Risking a glance, Aic saw one wide, bloodshot and bleached eye briefly peer through the gaps before slipping away again.
The casing opened up smoothly, and there it was-
BANG!
Kalevi opened continuous fire on the shambolic mess of ruined human flying towards him, each of many rounds ripping little tatters of flesh and skin and blood away like a tree shedding leaves in a violent storm. But little tears were not going to stop a creature compelled by the power of Eldritch abyss. It collided with Kalevi at full force, smashing his head against a crate and sinking nails into the skin on his face. Immediately, the butt of the rifle was smashed into its skull. The head of the thing snapped back. Grasping the moment, Kalevi scrabbled backwards, away from it, but with several more hackle-raising cracks the neck of the creature realigned itself. Not well, but it's bloodshot eyes were unblinkingly focused on the man. It smiled, bleeding gums and cracked teeth lending yet more conviction to its appearance of a walking human error. He grinned back crookedly and pulled the rifle's trigger. A spray of bullets embedded themselves in the face of the brute.
Even then, it was not enough. The thing sprung at him again the second the gunfire abated, letting out a ghostly shriek as Kalevi's rifle began to click uselessly in his hand. Undaunted, he flung it aside and roared into the face of the beast.
Then, momentarily, he became vaguely aware of a faint buzzing began to rise above the madness.
And then, for a longer period of time, witnessed the gleaming, screaming glory of the thing's torso ripping apart from its lower body in an exploding torrent of blood and flesh and bone. With a wet thump, the creature landed on the ground. Slain.
Aic stood above the two of them, chainsaw in hand and face splattered with clotting blood. She mutely offered a hand to Kalevi. He grasped it and gasped to his feet, the rifle still held loosely. For a while, nothing was said. There was just a room covered in blood. And chunks of muscle and bone. And many other things besides.
“Right.”
“Hm.”
“Nice trick with the chainsaw.”
“Thanks. The manly roar was kind of cool too.”
“Not as effective.”
“Mm.”
A beat.
“D'you wanna kill some more?”
Blood Brothers' Roulette is a little known and rarely played variant on the classic Russian Roulette. Like Russian Roulette, the focus is on inserting a single bullet into a revolver, spinning the chambers and firing. However, Blood Roulette differs in that there are as many guns as there are players, and as many bullets. The outcome is also direly less impressive, as it is the hand of the opponent that is shot as opposed to your own head. It is also much more painful and harrowing to be a loser of Blood Brothers' Roulette.
It was this particular game that Aic found herself playing.
The room was gloomy, lit only by a single flickering bulb that cast a curiously harsh light on everything when it did deign to work. It was also cramped, almost every available piece of floor space barring the table at which she sat being dominated by white crates made of thick plastic (or perhaps some kind of metal?). On top of these towered even more of the boxes. Some had dates, numbers and names stencilled on the side, but these were few and largely grouped towards one side of the room. What was clear, however, was that all of them contained weapons.
The room was a veritable armoury.
Aic's opponent, a dark haired thirty-something with untidy stubble smiled at her and slid a revolver across the table with a hand that lacked two fingers. He smiled jaggedly. Next to him was a curiously archaic key, which he'd used to lock the door beforehand. He'd said something about “not wanting them to cause a fuss”.
“You're not nervous, are you? It's still not too late to back out.” If not for the snide edge to the comment it might almost have been construed as kindness.
“Nervous? No. I'm not counting on losing,” she replied, relaxing a little and giving him a grin of her own. Aic flexed her fingers, revelling in the cracking of bones and how unsettled Eight-Fingers was beginning to look.
“Don't intend to lose...? If you cheat, I'm taking your eyes.”
“Certainly. But I'm pretty lucky, Kalevi.”
Kalevi's eyes stared into hers, trying to discern the meaning behind those smug smiles and words. Whether he found it or not, his attention soon drifted to his own revolver. He schlucked it open, assured himself of the single bullet sitting in one of the six chambers, and clacked it close again.
“Whatever. Are you ready to go?”
“Hey, hang on. One question. What do you want if I lose?”
Kalevi grunted.
“You win, you get your weapons, no questions asked. You lose...” He gaze wandered to the rest of the room, his mind delving through all the possibilities.
“Nothing happens. You just leave,” he decided finally.
“What?”
He turned to look at Aic, her smile flushed out by uneasiness. The man shrugged.
“It's not that surprising. You're telling me you never get bored?”
Aic didn't reply to that one.
Instead, she snatched up the gun he'd given her.
“Great. Wonderful,” she snapped, sliding the revolver open to look at the single bullet inside. “Let's just do this.”
In that instant the whole atmosphere of the room changed. A kind of reverence overcame them both, an awe of the Gun. Wordlessly Aic did as she'd been told and angled the barrel of the ancient weapon at the man's splayed left hand. He followed suit, winking at Aic before lowering his sights to the game.
“Spin the chambers,” Kalevi intoned.
The rhythmic clicking of spinning bullets rose up in reply.
“Place your left hand back on the table.”
The reverential quiet still lingered, but the moment was closer now. Only a few seconds were left to drift away and then-
“On the count of three. One... two...”
Aic's heart rate accelerated into a silent frenzy, her eyes on the man's lips. Just a one more word, and then-
CLIK-CLIK.
No recoil ripped her wrist backwards, and no bones splintered like glass in her left hand. Hearing or no hearing, the gods of fate had smiled on them both. Perhaps. But then perhaps not, considering the expression on Kalevi's face.
“You fired twice!” The accusation was quick and bitter.
“I didn't fire once,” Aic replied pointedly.
He leaned inwards towards Aic, fury smouldering behind dark eyes.
“I said I'd take your eyes. And hey, you know what? That's actually starting to sound like a good idea.”
Aic threw back her head and laughed, letting loose a screeching squall of metallic movement. Kalevi slid back from her, but didn't stand. His expression had hardly changed. Even so, he could not succeed in being subtle about the revolver he now pointed at her head.
“What are you?” A deceptively simple question.
She said nothing at first, instead meeting his burning gaze with a coy smile. Then it flickered and she sighed, rubbing her neck.
“Relax. It's nothing,” she muttered.
“The hell it is. Tell me, or I swear I will hurt you,” he replied flatly.
“Put the handgun down.”
“Tell me.”
“This kind of ruins the spirit of the game, y'know?”
The poker face cracked and irritation flashed across Kalevi's face. “Now!”
“Look, you-” Aic faltered. She looked down at the table, her whole body suddenly tensed and small. “They had to reconstruct my throat. I- I had an accident. It was mechanical, but they made sure I could talk and breathe. That was the point. Laughter wasn't.”
“So. That's what the collar is for?”
“Yeah. I-”
Aic opened her mouth to try and explain it all, the poisonous air of the ruined earth, the boomers,
(the rain)
the Seventh Sanctum, but every single piece of that lost life flashed by like a torrent, a towering wall of that sheer amount of stuff in her head. She felt dizzy. Forgetting that she had a pistol aimed at her she tried to stand up, to convince herself that she was fine. But then she began to shake and her legs gave out; the floor slammed into her like a train, driving the breath out of her.
She was vaguely aware of Kalevi at her side suddenly. All of reality seemed to leap forward and blur in that moment. Aic tried to move, but every limb of hers felt a thousand times heavier. It was easier to be still.
He grabbed her head in his hands and wrenched it towards his own. His lips moved and slithered around various words, but it was too fast, too slippery for her to lip read. Her eyes rolled in their sockets. Everything. Hurt.
And then, among the streaking of senses a blinding moment of clarity slipped through, and a question fluttered to the forefront of her mind.
Am I Aic Or Acacia?
She lay there simply stunned by the devastating simplicity of the question. She struggled to produce the easy, simple, obvious answer that she knew. It was insane that she couldn't know, because the division had always been so achingly clear. Hate flared up for the other who wasn't her, but with no target for her rage it fizzled away in the confusion. And then, in a second flash of clarity, yet one more thought drifted into focus:
Quad.
Quad?
QuadquadquadquadQUADQUADQUADQUADQUAD-
Driven by that pulsing idea the terrible weight of her own body seemed possible to defeat, and soon she had achieved that herculean task of struggling into a sitting position. Kevali let go of her head slowly, as if scared she might simply collapse again without his support.
“Quad,” slipped free of her own mouth.
Trembling, stumbling hands brought out precious paper packets of white dust and a note of a strange currency that curled in her palm.
“I need...” Black spots clustered in her vision, dancing and vanishing and pressing against her sight as it began to drag her down into the darkness. Even so, it became pressingly important to say something, anything, to the man with eight fingers. It mattered more still that she should unfurl that crackling white paper and curl up that strange note, but this meant something. She had to prove to him, to anyone, to herself, whether that be friend or foe, that she wasn't a bad person for having to do this.
Quad was a mistake. But with more Quad, she could fix it.
She looked to Kalevi, silently pleading.
“Fucking hell,” was his emphatic response.
Then something big slammed against the door.
“What was that?” Kalevi slowly stood up, his gaze on the source of the noise. At present it remained shut, but still...
Aic jammed the Quad back into one of her pockets, and staggered to her feet. “I don't know... but it's not something good. No way in hell.”
He didn't reply, instead ambling towards to the door, pausing next to a nondescript crate to pull out a sleek assault rifle. “Pick something up.”
“What?”
Kalevi turned to fully look at her. “Get a weapon. Anything, I don't care. Everything in this room was designed with murder in mind.”
Despite the inherent uneasiness of the situation, Aic hovered uncertainly on the spot. “So... what? We try to blast each other's hands for a bit, then you're just giving your stuff away?”
He gave her a strained look. “Look, whatever's outside-”
BANG.
“Fuck!”
Kalevi instantly swung the rifle upwards towards the entrance, waiting. His whole attention was fixed on the door. Nothing else mattered.
BANG.
The metal dented a little. The hinges briefly strained, then crashedback into place.
Aic stumbled over to the nearest crate and tore the lid off, revolver still in hand. Inside were multiple boxes with words printed in a strange alphabet on them. She flipped one open, revealing only row upon row of grenade-like objects.
“Damn!”
She grabbed a couple and shoved them in a pocket of her white coat, but lunged for another crate.
BANG.
The hinges strained and stayed there. Slivers of light from the corridor were clearly visible.
Aic cast aside the lid of a crate sitting on top of a few others. Encouragingly, this one contained a few long, metal boxes with serial codes engraved into the metal. Her arms darted in and lifted one out, straining slightly against the sheer weight of the thing.
BANG.
Not much longer now. Risking a glance, Aic saw one wide, bloodshot and bleached eye briefly peer through the gaps before slipping away again.
The casing opened up smoothly, and there it was-
BANG!
Kalevi opened continuous fire on the shambolic mess of ruined human flying towards him, each of many rounds ripping little tatters of flesh and skin and blood away like a tree shedding leaves in a violent storm. But little tears were not going to stop a creature compelled by the power of Eldritch abyss. It collided with Kalevi at full force, smashing his head against a crate and sinking nails into the skin on his face. Immediately, the butt of the rifle was smashed into its skull. The head of the thing snapped back. Grasping the moment, Kalevi scrabbled backwards, away from it, but with several more hackle-raising cracks the neck of the creature realigned itself. Not well, but it's bloodshot eyes were unblinkingly focused on the man. It smiled, bleeding gums and cracked teeth lending yet more conviction to its appearance of a walking human error. He grinned back crookedly and pulled the rifle's trigger. A spray of bullets embedded themselves in the face of the brute.
Even then, it was not enough. The thing sprung at him again the second the gunfire abated, letting out a ghostly shriek as Kalevi's rifle began to click uselessly in his hand. Undaunted, he flung it aside and roared into the face of the beast.
Then, momentarily, he became vaguely aware of a faint buzzing began to rise above the madness.
And then, for a longer period of time, witnessed the gleaming, screaming glory of the thing's torso ripping apart from its lower body in an exploding torrent of blood and flesh and bone. With a wet thump, the creature landed on the ground. Slain.
Aic stood above the two of them, chainsaw in hand and face splattered with clotting blood. She mutely offered a hand to Kalevi. He grasped it and gasped to his feet, the rifle still held loosely. For a while, nothing was said. There was just a room covered in blood. And chunks of muscle and bone. And many other things besides.
“Right.”
“Hm.”
“Nice trick with the chainsaw.”
“Thanks. The manly roar was kind of cool too.”
“Not as effective.”
“Mm.”
A beat.
“D'you wanna kill some more?”