Re: The Gradual Massacre (GBS2G4) [Round 4: Misty Swamp]
08-12-2011, 12:57 AM
Originally posted on MSPA by MalkyTop.
Holly would have said something along the lines of “You’re kidding me” with perhaps an extra word slapped in the middle that started with the letter ‘f’ and ended in ‘ing,’ but that was Holly and Cherry was trying extra hard to not be Holly, which was getting harder and harder with each passing second, especially with the added stress of giant mutant bugs trying to fly down her throat and eat her from the inside out.
Cherry stifled all cynical comments and said, “I think I might know where we can find a catapult-y thing.”
“Great!” said Algernon. “Right, I could probably handle the big gob of bug guts thing. So, where do we go?”
“Into the fire,” Cherry said with all the enthusiasm of a movie critic reviewing an animated summer flick. “And speaking of which, stay close to me. And do you have any ideas how to constantly annoy me while we’re moving?”
“Uh. Well.”
For some reason, Algernon flashed back to his childhood, when he mostly worried about things like schoolwork and video games and not falling off a swing set. There were quite a few annoyances he dealt with, but one stuck out in his mind. It was a horrible, horrible, horrible idea, but he blurted it out anyways.
And so it was that Algernon found himself being piggy-backed around what was driving steadily towards a post-apocalyptic setting by an elf who knew him more than he knew her and had grown a tendency to spew fire since the last time he met her. Every once in a while, he would ask her to go faster in a way that was supposed to be arrogant and self-entitled but just came off as incredibly awkward (like there was anything Algernon could come off as besides awkward). Still, there were many times when he clung onto the sides of her face, screaming at the top of his lungs “AAGH THEY’RE GETTING CLOSER, OVER THERE, NO NOT THERE, THERE, SHOOT IT SHOOT IT SHOOT IT AAAAAGH” that really, he didn’t even need to try and Cherry had to suppress every urge to shake him off and get on with things without a pansy riding her back.
It was lucky that Cherry had enough stamina to carry a (supposedly) full-grown man. It was lucky that Algernon was wimpy enough to have none of that heavy muscle stuff weighing him down. It was lucky that their destination was relatively close. Fate had even sent a further annoyance in the form of other townspeople flocking towards her like she was the messiah. Considering how she was blazing a trail through the swarm of monsters currently trying to devour their everything, it was pretty understandable. But she hoped she wasn’t expected to save every single one.
Dr. Grellend (was he a doctor?) had worked hard to barricade his residence. It was almost heartbreaking to put that effort to waste by blasting through a wall.
Algernon dismounted.
“Grellend!” Cherry shouted out, though it wasn’t quite that necessary.
“Are you trying to kill me?!” the dwarf shouted back. His outburst probably had something to do with them breaking down the walls that were keeping the monster bugs out.
“Sir, do you happen to have something that we could use to fire something really large really far away?” Algernon asked meekly. Other townspeople who had survived the trip were crowded inside, as far away as possible from the new hole.
“I would have happily provided sanctuary!” Grellend continued, still stuck on the breaking-into-his-house thing.
It took a while to get back on track.
It turned out that Grellend did have a nice, big catapult for reasons he didn’t want to talk about and it was strong enough to fling objects quite far, but they would probably need a nice, good hill or something in order to fire a big glob of bug guts because otherwise it would probably just collide with a wall.
“There wouldn’t happen to be a hill around, would there?” Algernon said in a way that was hopefully certain that there wasn’t.
The townspeople shuffled about and made general murmurings sounds that eventually came to something along the lines of ‘No, not really.’
“Well, what’s the big plan now?” Cherry called back, still holding off the horde of Ouroborites mostly on her own.
“Uh,” Algernon said. “What about a rooftop?”
“Do you really think you could roll this thing straight up a wall?” Grellend snapped.
“Maybe if we had a large pulley system—“
“I am not waiting for you to build a freaking pulley system,” Cherry snarled.
“Well…who can climb walls?” Algernon asked.
A few hands went up.
“Who can climb walls while dragging a catapult?”
Quite a few hands, that is to say, all of them, went down.
“Okay. Uh.”
“We’d also need people to carry up defenders so that nobody gets eaten on the way up,” Grellend observed sardonically.
“…Right.” Briefly scanning those who happened to have wall-climbing skills, Algernon pointed out the strongest-looking ones. “Maybe if we have a team pulling it up? And then you can carry up Cherry and…do you happen to have some sort of stairway up to the roof?”
“No, not really.”
Algernon rubbed his forehead in annoyance, or would have if there hadn’t been sharp worm teeth in the way. “Right, right…I’ll just…get up there myself. You…do have rope, right? I just realized I never asked and since this whole thing depends on the assumption that you have something rope-like, I hope that you wouldn’t do something like not tell me while you’re listening to this…”
“No, I have rope. Chains, too, if you really want.”
“Right. Good. And something nice and big for a projectile, right?”
“Yup. Though that’ll have to be carried up too.”
“We’ll just deal with that as it comes.”
They ended up going for tying rope harnesses around those designated to carry the catapult up, but then tied those to chains attached to the catapult. To save a trip, they tried then tying a large, smooth metal ball to the back with an especially large chain that was certain to have enough slack so that they could simply pull it up when the catapult was all settled at the top. Cherry was tied to the back of her designated carrier and Algernon reluctantly decided to make gecko-grip shoes and walked up besides Cherry, possibly hovering there in case she wanted to be annoyed again.
The plan went surprisingly well, even though the climbers struggled with their load for what felt like an hour or so, and it probably took another hour to haul the ammo up. It took yet more time to load the catapult, but at least it took less than a second for Algernon to make the large ball covered in bug juices so that it looked like an especially disgusting jawbreaker. Almost instantly, the flying insects swarmed to the large, purplish mass and the crawling ones…crawled up to it, hugging the thing like a clingy lover. Everybody stepped back, but the swarm had eyes only for the catapult and its load. It was then that Algernon realized that someone would actually have to get close and launch the thing. Without asking, he was certain that nobody wanted to put their hands anywhere near the swarm, even if they were paying no attention to them. He supposed that, since it was his plan, he would have the honor of pulling the trigger.
It was then that he realized that he had never launched a catapult in his life, and with the weapon now looking like a big mass of bugs, he wasn’t sure how to launch a catapult. There was probably a lever somewhere, covered up by the swarm.
With great trepidation, Algernon approached the catapult, using the skeletal arm he had with him (seriously, why did he have that?) to brush off a suspiciously lever-looking part that proved to indeed be a lever. Making sure that he was standing at a relatively safe place, he attempted to hook the arm onto the handle and pull it. Dear god, he hoped he had to pull and not push.
The lever went down, the catapult made catapult-y noises, and then it did catapult-y things, and the ball covered in bugs and their guts flew off into the far distance, almost ponderously so. The flying insects zipped after it while the crawling ones valiantly tried to follow but many of those who lagged behind were burned up by Cherry.
And thus, the swarm was excised from the town without a hitch at all and everybody made a sort of weary celebration whoop and tried to figure out how to clean up the mess and go on with their lives while Algernon busied himself with washing bug gunk off of his surprisingly useful skeletal arm and making sure the coating of bug gunk stopped being a drain on his memories.
They didn’t really think about where the giant ball was going, nor did they think about which direction they haphazardly aimed the catapult towards. They were alive and things weren’t killing them and that was enough for them.
The townspeople of Kerosene probably would have some objections if they had known what was going on, but really, nobody could expect that a ball of the monster bugs they were trying to eradicate would come falling from the sky.
Holly would have said something along the lines of “You’re kidding me” with perhaps an extra word slapped in the middle that started with the letter ‘f’ and ended in ‘ing,’ but that was Holly and Cherry was trying extra hard to not be Holly, which was getting harder and harder with each passing second, especially with the added stress of giant mutant bugs trying to fly down her throat and eat her from the inside out.
Cherry stifled all cynical comments and said, “I think I might know where we can find a catapult-y thing.”
“Great!” said Algernon. “Right, I could probably handle the big gob of bug guts thing. So, where do we go?”
“Into the fire,” Cherry said with all the enthusiasm of a movie critic reviewing an animated summer flick. “And speaking of which, stay close to me. And do you have any ideas how to constantly annoy me while we’re moving?”
“Uh. Well.”
For some reason, Algernon flashed back to his childhood, when he mostly worried about things like schoolwork and video games and not falling off a swing set. There were quite a few annoyances he dealt with, but one stuck out in his mind. It was a horrible, horrible, horrible idea, but he blurted it out anyways.
And so it was that Algernon found himself being piggy-backed around what was driving steadily towards a post-apocalyptic setting by an elf who knew him more than he knew her and had grown a tendency to spew fire since the last time he met her. Every once in a while, he would ask her to go faster in a way that was supposed to be arrogant and self-entitled but just came off as incredibly awkward (like there was anything Algernon could come off as besides awkward). Still, there were many times when he clung onto the sides of her face, screaming at the top of his lungs “AAGH THEY’RE GETTING CLOSER, OVER THERE, NO NOT THERE, THERE, SHOOT IT SHOOT IT SHOOT IT AAAAAGH” that really, he didn’t even need to try and Cherry had to suppress every urge to shake him off and get on with things without a pansy riding her back.
It was lucky that Cherry had enough stamina to carry a (supposedly) full-grown man. It was lucky that Algernon was wimpy enough to have none of that heavy muscle stuff weighing him down. It was lucky that their destination was relatively close. Fate had even sent a further annoyance in the form of other townspeople flocking towards her like she was the messiah. Considering how she was blazing a trail through the swarm of monsters currently trying to devour their everything, it was pretty understandable. But she hoped she wasn’t expected to save every single one.
Dr. Grellend (was he a doctor?) had worked hard to barricade his residence. It was almost heartbreaking to put that effort to waste by blasting through a wall.
Algernon dismounted.
“Grellend!” Cherry shouted out, though it wasn’t quite that necessary.
“Are you trying to kill me?!” the dwarf shouted back. His outburst probably had something to do with them breaking down the walls that were keeping the monster bugs out.
“Sir, do you happen to have something that we could use to fire something really large really far away?” Algernon asked meekly. Other townspeople who had survived the trip were crowded inside, as far away as possible from the new hole.
“I would have happily provided sanctuary!” Grellend continued, still stuck on the breaking-into-his-house thing.
It took a while to get back on track.
It turned out that Grellend did have a nice, big catapult for reasons he didn’t want to talk about and it was strong enough to fling objects quite far, but they would probably need a nice, good hill or something in order to fire a big glob of bug guts because otherwise it would probably just collide with a wall.
“There wouldn’t happen to be a hill around, would there?” Algernon said in a way that was hopefully certain that there wasn’t.
The townspeople shuffled about and made general murmurings sounds that eventually came to something along the lines of ‘No, not really.’
“Well, what’s the big plan now?” Cherry called back, still holding off the horde of Ouroborites mostly on her own.
“Uh,” Algernon said. “What about a rooftop?”
“Do you really think you could roll this thing straight up a wall?” Grellend snapped.
“Maybe if we had a large pulley system—“
“I am not waiting for you to build a freaking pulley system,” Cherry snarled.
“Well…who can climb walls?” Algernon asked.
A few hands went up.
“Who can climb walls while dragging a catapult?”
Quite a few hands, that is to say, all of them, went down.
“Okay. Uh.”
“We’d also need people to carry up defenders so that nobody gets eaten on the way up,” Grellend observed sardonically.
“…Right.” Briefly scanning those who happened to have wall-climbing skills, Algernon pointed out the strongest-looking ones. “Maybe if we have a team pulling it up? And then you can carry up Cherry and…do you happen to have some sort of stairway up to the roof?”
“No, not really.”
Algernon rubbed his forehead in annoyance, or would have if there hadn’t been sharp worm teeth in the way. “Right, right…I’ll just…get up there myself. You…do have rope, right? I just realized I never asked and since this whole thing depends on the assumption that you have something rope-like, I hope that you wouldn’t do something like not tell me while you’re listening to this…”
“No, I have rope. Chains, too, if you really want.”
“Right. Good. And something nice and big for a projectile, right?”
“Yup. Though that’ll have to be carried up too.”
“We’ll just deal with that as it comes.”
They ended up going for tying rope harnesses around those designated to carry the catapult up, but then tied those to chains attached to the catapult. To save a trip, they tried then tying a large, smooth metal ball to the back with an especially large chain that was certain to have enough slack so that they could simply pull it up when the catapult was all settled at the top. Cherry was tied to the back of her designated carrier and Algernon reluctantly decided to make gecko-grip shoes and walked up besides Cherry, possibly hovering there in case she wanted to be annoyed again.
The plan went surprisingly well, even though the climbers struggled with their load for what felt like an hour or so, and it probably took another hour to haul the ammo up. It took yet more time to load the catapult, but at least it took less than a second for Algernon to make the large ball covered in bug juices so that it looked like an especially disgusting jawbreaker. Almost instantly, the flying insects swarmed to the large, purplish mass and the crawling ones…crawled up to it, hugging the thing like a clingy lover. Everybody stepped back, but the swarm had eyes only for the catapult and its load. It was then that Algernon realized that someone would actually have to get close and launch the thing. Without asking, he was certain that nobody wanted to put their hands anywhere near the swarm, even if they were paying no attention to them. He supposed that, since it was his plan, he would have the honor of pulling the trigger.
It was then that he realized that he had never launched a catapult in his life, and with the weapon now looking like a big mass of bugs, he wasn’t sure how to launch a catapult. There was probably a lever somewhere, covered up by the swarm.
With great trepidation, Algernon approached the catapult, using the skeletal arm he had with him (seriously, why did he have that?) to brush off a suspiciously lever-looking part that proved to indeed be a lever. Making sure that he was standing at a relatively safe place, he attempted to hook the arm onto the handle and pull it. Dear god, he hoped he had to pull and not push.
The lever went down, the catapult made catapult-y noises, and then it did catapult-y things, and the ball covered in bugs and their guts flew off into the far distance, almost ponderously so. The flying insects zipped after it while the crawling ones valiantly tried to follow but many of those who lagged behind were burned up by Cherry.
And thus, the swarm was excised from the town without a hitch at all and everybody made a sort of weary celebration whoop and tried to figure out how to clean up the mess and go on with their lives while Algernon busied himself with washing bug gunk off of his surprisingly useful skeletal arm and making sure the coating of bug gunk stopped being a drain on his memories.
They didn’t really think about where the giant ball was going, nor did they think about which direction they haphazardly aimed the catapult towards. They were alive and things weren’t killing them and that was enough for them.
The townspeople of Kerosene probably would have some objections if they had known what was going on, but really, nobody could expect that a ball of the monster bugs they were trying to eradicate would come falling from the sky.