Re: The Gradual Massacre (GBS2G4) [Round 4: Misty Swamp]
05-09-2011, 01:32 AM
Originally posted on MSPA by Pinary.
Deep in the bowels of the station, the old, decrepit dimension-flux core still laboured, barely putting out enough energy to power the flickering "maintenance required" indicators across its panel, let alone any of the ship's systems- those had long ago been moved to temporary auxiliary mothods. Though it had once harnessed the forces of the multiverse itself, drawing on the interplay between shifting dimensions, the core was now the last of its kind. They were dangerous, people soon realized, for more reasons than one. First and foremost was their inability to deactivate peacefully; any attempts to shut them down would invariably result in catastrophic explosions, causal violations, or even extrauniversal leakage, requiring decades of careful work to seal. The engineers had intended to take the core with them when they left, as a detonation so close to the Earth would be a loss to archaeology and tourism alike, to say the least, but unfortunately, the team who had been assigned to that hadn't exactly made it through the storm of wanton killings that had accompanied the contestants' arrival.
For the first time in years, though, something was changing about the core. As the impossible generator activated in a distant section of the station, a few new indicators came to life. The centralized power grid, focused on the antiquated core, was doing its best to balance the output of Algernon's invention, but its age (coupled with having much of its organic circuitry eaten) was rendering it unable to do much at all. The best it could manage was to feed some of the excess back into the the dimension-flux core, which, under normal conditions, would then be shunted back out to the city.
Needless to say, these were not normal conditions. Shunting that power back into the city was impossible, so it built up in the core instead.
An indicator flickered halfheartedly to life- an overload warning.
-
As the door to the laboratory slid open, Thane sprung into action. With his instinctual knowledge of the station's functions, he'd formulated a plan, and he only needed a few more sacrifices to make it work.
It was a grand plan, he had to admit, smiling inwardly as he grasped one rather surprised engineer's neck and snapped it as he threw the man into the room. There were systems available to track life signs, and while they were capable of narrowing the parameters down to such precision that one person could be tracked based on their breathing patterns, the abomination had no interest in that. Instead, he had opened them wide, as wide as possible, even taking a few values past what would strictly be called "alive." He'd coded exactly one exception in, and that was himself. He would take that data and feed it into the ritual he'd prepared- in his mind, the technologies and ancient rites merged and flowed together seamlessly.
Moments later, he had everything he needed. There were only five engineers remaining alive, each with all four limbs broken. Two wept, two screamed, and one simply stared at Thane as he moved. He dragged the five into positions spaced equally around the circle of blood he'd prepared, and, satisfied that he was ready, began the ritual. Soon, every scrap of life on the station would bend to his will.
In left hand, he grasped a raw power cable, from which he would draw the electrical energy he would need. In his right, the data cord, bringing the locations of every single piece of life on the station flowing into him. Terrible forces began to swirl, barely contained inside the circle he'd drawn on the floor. He began to chant, intoning words that, had the men surrounding him been able to hear past the forming gale, would have driven them all mad within moments. The ritual began to take shape, and Thane readied to unleash the forces he'd wrought.
-
In a distant chamber deep in the city, another tiny indicator flickered to life.
Overload.
Not a warning, not a precursor, not an instruction to get out now. A statement of present fact.
-
Thane's eyes flashed open. The cable in his left hand felt wrong now- it was drawing in, pulling from him instead of gushing forth. It dragged abominable, mashed-together energy with it, taking Thane's intents and plans and methods and pulling them into itself.
They travelled down the cable, into the central power system, and were pulled into the dimension-flux core, along with most of the power in the station. Inside it, they whirled, and they merged with the impending multiversal tear to form something different.
Thane's clean, ritualistic plans to take every living thing and make them his servants came together with the core's intention of ripping a hole in reality itself. The two concepts mingled, and from them was born a compromise.
Everything in the station that could by any stretch of the definition be called alive was grabbed, as it would have been, and held in the grasp of unholy energies. They were not, however, converted into eldritch slaves, bent to Thane's will. Instead, the dimension-flux core seized them, held them for just a moment, and then flung them bodily into another universe entirely.
Just one being remained, his ritual a failure. The city began to rattle around him. Thane knew what was happening.
Las Orbitas broke up around him, and he burned.
-
In the next universe over, a single man appeared. He fell to the wet, spongy ground with a splurtchy noise, and after a moment, he stood. Looking around, he found himself in a hilly, swamplike area, a dense fog covering most of the lowlands. In the distance, he saw what looked like small, squat structures, and near him, a boardwalk had been constructed, formed of what looked like driftwood and... were those bones?
As he picked some moss from his bushy beard, he heard steps echoing out behind him. They sounded like boots, two pairs, walking casually along the boardwalk. Drawing his blade, the man faced them.
Two people came into view, a man and a woman. The woman, old, wasn't particularly tall, but something in the way she held herself made the newcomer suspect that she was used to being taken seriously. The man, though nearly a foot taller and quite heavily built, walked a few steps behind her, lugging a large quantity of wood in his arms.
The pair stopped when they saw the newcomer, but only briefly. They approached him, stepping off of the boardwalk and onto the hill he'd found himself on.
"Oh, bless, another poor soul's here," she said, her tone soft and motherly. "Did you come from another of the battles as well, boy?"
He lowered his sword to his side. "I, uh... I came from a battle. Sort of." He cleared his throat. "There's this, uh... This demon, he calls himself the Controller. He-"
Faster than he could process, the woman had torn a reed out of the ground near her and brought it whipping sharply against the man's shoulder. "Don't you speak that name!", she warned, all softness gone instantly from her tone. (Though the term motherly would still likely be accurate.) "We know all about him, believe you me. You were forced to fight by that abominable beast, and you somehow managed to escape. I've heard that story a thousand times over, told by every poor soul who's ever made their way here. How did you manage it, hm?"
The newcomer was taken aback. "There was a, uh, a mage in our competition, who could use mirrors as gateways. As she died, she poured her life into one final act, and I fell through the opening she created." He passed his gaze around the swampland, searching. "Are you saying it worked, that I'm actually free?"
The woman chuckled. Gesturing to the two men, she started back on her way along the boardwalk. "You could call it freedom, if you like. He can't find us here, but none of us have a means of going home. You're not being forced to fight, but you're still trapped."
"So, wait. Who are you? Where am I?"
"Stars, child, you're slower than my grandson." The man lugging wood grinned a bit at being mentioned. "Most of us here were in a battle of our own, once upon a time. One way or another, we came to escape, and for some reason, we ended up here. When it became evident that we were no longer in our ex-captor's clutches, we began to build." She stopped walking and turned to face him.
"I am Encel, one of the first of the Escaped. I was in one of his battles when I was a girl. I've lived here for something like fifty years. This is my grandson, Fenn." He tried to wave, but nearly dropped the stack of wood he was carrying. Encel sighed. "My daughter and he were both born here, along with a number of others. Mostly, though, people just show up, escaping battles one way or another. Sometimes we get just one person, like yourself. Other times, it's everyone in a battle. By now, there are thousands of us, scattered around.
"There are a handful of larger villages, a good many smaller ones, and some people prefer to just strike out on their own. Of course, they rarely get far."
"Why's that?"
She shot him a look. "Think for a moment, boy. Most people here came from a battle to the death, hand-picked to be there. Some are content to settle down, build huts and boardwalks, and make a life here, but more than a few just run off into the fog, and anyone just wandering around runs the risk of getting attacked.
"Do stay out of the fog, by the way. When I arrived, it drove whoever would breathe it into an incredible rage, and we lost a number of people to fights and the like. In the years since then, though, it's... fermented, maybe. It's subtler, now, driving you to paranoia and insanity rather than just rage. It wears off soon after you leave it, and it takes longer to build than it used to, but still, you should steer clear of it.
"Not to mention that it's where most of the runaways live..."
As the trio moved down the boardwalk, flashes burst out across the horizon, and a moment later, every living thing that had once been on Las Orbitas (save one) suddenly found itself hanging above a swamp.
-
"Chair recognizes Nikolai Lutetian, Ennel Mining."
"Thank you. We are all reeling from the deaths of the engineering crew aboard Las Orbitas, and I'm sure I'm not alone in apprehension as to the impact the disaster could have on Humanity's Cradle. In this time of tragedy, we must take action to prevent these events from repeating themselves. I urge the Council to approve funding into autonomous androids, which would be capable of performing this task more safely and more efficiently than any human team could manage."
Deep in the bowels of the station, the old, decrepit dimension-flux core still laboured, barely putting out enough energy to power the flickering "maintenance required" indicators across its panel, let alone any of the ship's systems- those had long ago been moved to temporary auxiliary mothods. Though it had once harnessed the forces of the multiverse itself, drawing on the interplay between shifting dimensions, the core was now the last of its kind. They were dangerous, people soon realized, for more reasons than one. First and foremost was their inability to deactivate peacefully; any attempts to shut them down would invariably result in catastrophic explosions, causal violations, or even extrauniversal leakage, requiring decades of careful work to seal. The engineers had intended to take the core with them when they left, as a detonation so close to the Earth would be a loss to archaeology and tourism alike, to say the least, but unfortunately, the team who had been assigned to that hadn't exactly made it through the storm of wanton killings that had accompanied the contestants' arrival.
For the first time in years, though, something was changing about the core. As the impossible generator activated in a distant section of the station, a few new indicators came to life. The centralized power grid, focused on the antiquated core, was doing its best to balance the output of Algernon's invention, but its age (coupled with having much of its organic circuitry eaten) was rendering it unable to do much at all. The best it could manage was to feed some of the excess back into the the dimension-flux core, which, under normal conditions, would then be shunted back out to the city.
Needless to say, these were not normal conditions. Shunting that power back into the city was impossible, so it built up in the core instead.
An indicator flickered halfheartedly to life- an overload warning.
-
As the door to the laboratory slid open, Thane sprung into action. With his instinctual knowledge of the station's functions, he'd formulated a plan, and he only needed a few more sacrifices to make it work.
It was a grand plan, he had to admit, smiling inwardly as he grasped one rather surprised engineer's neck and snapped it as he threw the man into the room. There were systems available to track life signs, and while they were capable of narrowing the parameters down to such precision that one person could be tracked based on their breathing patterns, the abomination had no interest in that. Instead, he had opened them wide, as wide as possible, even taking a few values past what would strictly be called "alive." He'd coded exactly one exception in, and that was himself. He would take that data and feed it into the ritual he'd prepared- in his mind, the technologies and ancient rites merged and flowed together seamlessly.
Moments later, he had everything he needed. There were only five engineers remaining alive, each with all four limbs broken. Two wept, two screamed, and one simply stared at Thane as he moved. He dragged the five into positions spaced equally around the circle of blood he'd prepared, and, satisfied that he was ready, began the ritual. Soon, every scrap of life on the station would bend to his will.
In left hand, he grasped a raw power cable, from which he would draw the electrical energy he would need. In his right, the data cord, bringing the locations of every single piece of life on the station flowing into him. Terrible forces began to swirl, barely contained inside the circle he'd drawn on the floor. He began to chant, intoning words that, had the men surrounding him been able to hear past the forming gale, would have driven them all mad within moments. The ritual began to take shape, and Thane readied to unleash the forces he'd wrought.
-
In a distant chamber deep in the city, another tiny indicator flickered to life.
Overload.
Not a warning, not a precursor, not an instruction to get out now. A statement of present fact.
-
Thane's eyes flashed open. The cable in his left hand felt wrong now- it was drawing in, pulling from him instead of gushing forth. It dragged abominable, mashed-together energy with it, taking Thane's intents and plans and methods and pulling them into itself.
They travelled down the cable, into the central power system, and were pulled into the dimension-flux core, along with most of the power in the station. Inside it, they whirled, and they merged with the impending multiversal tear to form something different.
Thane's clean, ritualistic plans to take every living thing and make them his servants came together with the core's intention of ripping a hole in reality itself. The two concepts mingled, and from them was born a compromise.
Everything in the station that could by any stretch of the definition be called alive was grabbed, as it would have been, and held in the grasp of unholy energies. They were not, however, converted into eldritch slaves, bent to Thane's will. Instead, the dimension-flux core seized them, held them for just a moment, and then flung them bodily into another universe entirely.
Just one being remained, his ritual a failure. The city began to rattle around him. Thane knew what was happening.
Las Orbitas broke up around him, and he burned.
-
In the next universe over, a single man appeared. He fell to the wet, spongy ground with a splurtchy noise, and after a moment, he stood. Looking around, he found himself in a hilly, swamplike area, a dense fog covering most of the lowlands. In the distance, he saw what looked like small, squat structures, and near him, a boardwalk had been constructed, formed of what looked like driftwood and... were those bones?
As he picked some moss from his bushy beard, he heard steps echoing out behind him. They sounded like boots, two pairs, walking casually along the boardwalk. Drawing his blade, the man faced them.
Two people came into view, a man and a woman. The woman, old, wasn't particularly tall, but something in the way she held herself made the newcomer suspect that she was used to being taken seriously. The man, though nearly a foot taller and quite heavily built, walked a few steps behind her, lugging a large quantity of wood in his arms.
The pair stopped when they saw the newcomer, but only briefly. They approached him, stepping off of the boardwalk and onto the hill he'd found himself on.
"Oh, bless, another poor soul's here," she said, her tone soft and motherly. "Did you come from another of the battles as well, boy?"
He lowered his sword to his side. "I, uh... I came from a battle. Sort of." He cleared his throat. "There's this, uh... This demon, he calls himself the Controller. He-"
Faster than he could process, the woman had torn a reed out of the ground near her and brought it whipping sharply against the man's shoulder. "Don't you speak that name!", she warned, all softness gone instantly from her tone. (Though the term motherly would still likely be accurate.) "We know all about him, believe you me. You were forced to fight by that abominable beast, and you somehow managed to escape. I've heard that story a thousand times over, told by every poor soul who's ever made their way here. How did you manage it, hm?"
The newcomer was taken aback. "There was a, uh, a mage in our competition, who could use mirrors as gateways. As she died, she poured her life into one final act, and I fell through the opening she created." He passed his gaze around the swampland, searching. "Are you saying it worked, that I'm actually free?"
The woman chuckled. Gesturing to the two men, she started back on her way along the boardwalk. "You could call it freedom, if you like. He can't find us here, but none of us have a means of going home. You're not being forced to fight, but you're still trapped."
"So, wait. Who are you? Where am I?"
"Stars, child, you're slower than my grandson." The man lugging wood grinned a bit at being mentioned. "Most of us here were in a battle of our own, once upon a time. One way or another, we came to escape, and for some reason, we ended up here. When it became evident that we were no longer in our ex-captor's clutches, we began to build." She stopped walking and turned to face him.
"I am Encel, one of the first of the Escaped. I was in one of his battles when I was a girl. I've lived here for something like fifty years. This is my grandson, Fenn." He tried to wave, but nearly dropped the stack of wood he was carrying. Encel sighed. "My daughter and he were both born here, along with a number of others. Mostly, though, people just show up, escaping battles one way or another. Sometimes we get just one person, like yourself. Other times, it's everyone in a battle. By now, there are thousands of us, scattered around.
"There are a handful of larger villages, a good many smaller ones, and some people prefer to just strike out on their own. Of course, they rarely get far."
"Why's that?"
She shot him a look. "Think for a moment, boy. Most people here came from a battle to the death, hand-picked to be there. Some are content to settle down, build huts and boardwalks, and make a life here, but more than a few just run off into the fog, and anyone just wandering around runs the risk of getting attacked.
"Do stay out of the fog, by the way. When I arrived, it drove whoever would breathe it into an incredible rage, and we lost a number of people to fights and the like. In the years since then, though, it's... fermented, maybe. It's subtler, now, driving you to paranoia and insanity rather than just rage. It wears off soon after you leave it, and it takes longer to build than it used to, but still, you should steer clear of it.
"Not to mention that it's where most of the runaways live..."
As the trio moved down the boardwalk, flashes burst out across the horizon, and a moment later, every living thing that had once been on Las Orbitas (save one) suddenly found itself hanging above a swamp.
-
"Chair recognizes Nikolai Lutetian, Ennel Mining."
"Thank you. We are all reeling from the deaths of the engineering crew aboard Las Orbitas, and I'm sure I'm not alone in apprehension as to the impact the disaster could have on Humanity's Cradle. In this time of tragedy, we must take action to prevent these events from repeating themselves. I urge the Council to approve funding into autonomous androids, which would be capable of performing this task more safely and more efficiently than any human team could manage."