Re: The BATTLE of the CENTURY! [S!7] - Round 1: The New Frontier
01-21-2013, 04:55 AM
Originally posted on MSPA by Lord Paradise.
Fisher laid his bedroll down and sat in it fetal-position, reflecting upon the absurdity of his situation.
He was surrounded by a muddy brown canvas, utterly devoid of windows. The door—the flap, he should say, though that term never failed to conjure up images of diseased sex organs in his mind--was a slit that had been cut into one of the walls, apparently with scissors and by a mentally retarded toddler. Shunted into one of the corners, Fisher was beset by a profound disturbance in the harmony that he believed to dictate not only his magic but his homeostasis, the workings of his body. The tent made him feel older.
And then in the other corner, the other bedroll sat, mocking him. “One of the pretty ones,” the officer had promised. Some vapid, fifteen-year-old camp follower, no doubt, sure to unendingly complain about the food and suffer from foul-smelling hysterical pregnancies every other weekend. Deities-damned pre-toothbrush refugee society had a truly fouled-up way of treating their functionally-literate betters.
His roommate failed to show up until well after dark. Plying her trade, no doubt. Maybe if he was lucky she would work her way up to her own tent hocking her unique brand of Founder’s Day Oral and then everyone would forget about Fisher and he could at least be alone in his shitty tent and maybe put the two bedrolls together and have space to roll over in the night without cuddling a raccoon.
When she did finally show her face—and the body to match it—he was almost, but not quite, struck speechless.
“Hi,” she said coyly, stooping over a bit to step through the flap. “I’m Aubrine.”
And she was Aubrine, he felt, as Aubrine as one could manage. Comfortably half-his-age-plus-or-minus-seven, blonde, her refugee-regulation tunic and peasant skirt modified in a way that said “one of the pretty ones” but didn’t quite say “open for business.” The makeshift scarf was a nice touch. Aubrine was clearly set apart from the rest of the refugees not only in her fashion sense and inherent physical qualities but in that she was the only person in this floating sauna that looked cold. Cold like a beer straight out of the fridge, like pressing your hand against the window on a December night. Stresses of the “Battle of the Century” forgotten, he had a queer urge to be lonely and shivering with her in a corner somewhere.
“Harry Fisher,” he replied gruffly. “That’s your bed. Where’ve you been?”
“Taking in the sunlight,” she said with a smile that failed to reach escape velocity before crashing back down into a grim frown. “Taking in the sights.”
“The new home, yes,” said Fisher, staring resolutely at the canvas. “It has its charms, I suppose. I’ve been in here.”
“Here has its charms as well,” said Aubrine. “If my asking doesn’t bother you, why’d they not house the women with the women? Seems more decent that way.”
It didn’t once occur to Fisher to be dishonest. “I convinced the brass I might be some use to them,” he said. “You were meant to be a perk, I think.”
“Oh.” Aubrine scratched her head. “I’d rather you wouldn’t.”
“I wasn’t planning on it.” Fisher looked around. “Tomorrow we’ll, er... establish some manner of divider. For privacy’s sake.” Fisher shuddered upon realizing that sprucing up this shithole was going to require leaving it.
“Well, don’t be too much a stranger,” offered Aubrine. “Times like this, friends are hard to come by.”
Friends. The wizard recognized the ridiculous of that statement, thinking upon whatever seven madmen had been sent to kill him.
“I’m going to try and sleep,” he declared after about thirty seconds’ silence.
“Good!” said Aubrine, sitting on her hands, a flash of color around her lips. “I mean, you know. That’s all well.”
“We’ll see if it is, in any case,” responded Fisher, yawning. He pulled the thick blanket over him like a paperweight and lay curled up on the bed, trying not to touch anything. His eyes refused to close, and he lay for a while in the imperfect darkness, studying the square inch of mattress in front of him and thinking about immune systems and the ecologies of floating islands and death and the number eight.
A wind whipped up around the tent. Clouds licked at the sky-island’s shores and were recontextualized as fog. The night stretched thin. Rest cascaded over the refugees—first the children, then the drunks, and eventually the children’s parents and the drunks’ wives, too, looking over their resting loved ones and contemplating the future. Fisher, whose worries were less orthodox but no more profound, found that he was not an exception. He slept.
Aubrine waited a while after his breathing settled. To make sure.
There was a hole in the wizard’s dreams the size of a city, a hole you could drive a god through. The unconscious mind of a magician, you see, tends to latch on less to the Freudian and more to the cosmic, which might explain why that ilk tend to have only the shallowest understanding of themselves. A dank and labyrinthine cerebral subway had, in its proper place, been home to a great multitude of ghosts and deities and metaphors and sentient errant spells that sat around holding up cardboard signs and standing watchfully over shopping carts full of mind-trash.
Fisher never remembered his dreams, but he had always been sure to throw them a little change when he was passing by, and thus they were able to scrape a bit of dignity out of their existence. The multiversal transplant had disrupted this ecosystem, added them to the count of refugees, leaving them to fend for themselves somewhere far outside the purview of this story.
Fisher’s dream was too vast and empty and lonely to be anything but lucid, his neurological excretions echoing in the absence of rationale or familiarity. He was in a place where he didn’t know if there was a God. He didn’t know if there was magic here. He scrambled in his dream for so much of a frame of reference to define “here” by, something he could latch onto, like “north,” or even “away.” Nothing could define how definitively not-where-he-should-be he was except for this huge nothingness at the bottom of his brain; abandoned tunnels and the lingering smell of terrible wine.
The emptiness was only the moment before the flood, but time works differently in dreams.
The flood was biblical in nature. The flood of juice down Eve’s cheek as she took that first bite of apple. Then, the flood of knowledge. And then the hand of judgment crashing down with that weight that you imagine lightning must have to make it fall so fast. That was first contact. Fisher was sitting on all fours behind the yellow line as the train approached but his teeth had scattered all over the tracks when it had hit him. The doors slid open automatically and unleashed a mountain full of dirt.
And the island said hello.
Fisher’s mind bloated the way a carcass distends when it rots, creating an environment supportive for new life.
And in Fisher’s dream he and the island were one, and the island was a billion, which made him one billion and one, which made him one in a billion, which made him nothing, which made it all nothing, and the train of thought dashed him against the concrete alongside last year’s graffiti.
He saw little bugs with thoughts all arranged in platonic solids and marching like an army without any of the tragedy.
And he saw lithe and predatory things jump down from the trees to give a gift of death to things beautiful and innocent, like a lover’s quarrel without any of the sadness.
And standing alongside the island he met his new people, small and cold and afraid and in need of a home and a father and they called to him “New Frontier” and he answered “Yes.” He could hear the click and the low hum of history turning on.
And he could taste magic in the dirt. Fisher dreamt the things that islands dream, things beyond supposition.
And through the island he reached out to his fellow outsiders: to the butterfly resting blissfully and weighless upon the lightest twig on the tree of causality; to the many-man and the red-eye flight; and last of all he turned his dream-gaze on a cold dead thing that was once a man and he recoiled in disgust.
The reaction reverberated all the way back into his body.
Fisher sat up in bed so hard he slammed his forehead into Aubrine’s chin, eliciting something between a hiss and an eek from the would-be first-time vampire. “Fuck!” cried Fisher, rubbing his head. Then he noticed the woman standing over him, lantern in hand, the firelight reflecting off of her glistening canines.
He thought, Stop that bitch! She stole my teeth off the subway track! And then reality resumed with a compressive pop and he realized his tentmate was trying to imbibe him.
They flailed ineptly enough that the vampire’s superior strength failed to make much of a difference, Fisher’s blanket flapping about in the space between them. “Fuck!” Fisher repeated. It was like a mother trying to give an ornery child a bath. Like all children, in spite of his thrashing, Fisher understood that at one point he was going to have to grin and bear it.
Fate, in this instance, intervened. Aubrine could see well enough in the dark now that it was only force of habit that had compelled her to bring the lantern around. The thought was little comfort to her as the lamp slipped from her fingers and crashed to the ground, spraying a line of burning oil across the blanket. She bit her lip and shrieked, taking two steps back.
Fisher, not at all cognizant of the strategic benefits of the ploy, threw the blanket over her head.
The flame spread faster than it would have, in a completely rational universe. The mostly-authentic vampire spent about two seconds draped as an imitation ghost before resolving herself into a fireball. The sound of her burning was awful beyond describing, and the smell made Fisher slightly hungry.
Charred and blackened, Aubrine ripped off the sheet. She experienced a moment of clarity, or at least was overcome momentarily by a superior will, and felt properly a thing of the night, evil and cold and dead and sexy. “I am the first of many!” she pronounced excitedly through the half of her lip that hadn’t yet melted off. “This place will be consumed by death, and you will die with them!”
The curse and the smoke waved around Fisher’s nose as the flaming corpse went silent.
The wizard rubbed his chest, shivering, as the tent went dark once more. Was this a nightmare? Was he still dreaming? What had he been dreaming before? For that matter, what was he dreaming now?
Was there ever chance he was going to get back home before he died a horrible and soul-destroying death? If he died here, would his soul make it back home?
Did this mean he had the tent to himself now?
Fisher laid his bedroll down and sat in it fetal-position, reflecting upon the absurdity of his situation.
He was surrounded by a muddy brown canvas, utterly devoid of windows. The door—the flap, he should say, though that term never failed to conjure up images of diseased sex organs in his mind--was a slit that had been cut into one of the walls, apparently with scissors and by a mentally retarded toddler. Shunted into one of the corners, Fisher was beset by a profound disturbance in the harmony that he believed to dictate not only his magic but his homeostasis, the workings of his body. The tent made him feel older.
And then in the other corner, the other bedroll sat, mocking him. “One of the pretty ones,” the officer had promised. Some vapid, fifteen-year-old camp follower, no doubt, sure to unendingly complain about the food and suffer from foul-smelling hysterical pregnancies every other weekend. Deities-damned pre-toothbrush refugee society had a truly fouled-up way of treating their functionally-literate betters.
His roommate failed to show up until well after dark. Plying her trade, no doubt. Maybe if he was lucky she would work her way up to her own tent hocking her unique brand of Founder’s Day Oral and then everyone would forget about Fisher and he could at least be alone in his shitty tent and maybe put the two bedrolls together and have space to roll over in the night without cuddling a raccoon.
When she did finally show her face—and the body to match it—he was almost, but not quite, struck speechless.
“Hi,” she said coyly, stooping over a bit to step through the flap. “I’m Aubrine.”
And she was Aubrine, he felt, as Aubrine as one could manage. Comfortably half-his-age-plus-or-minus-seven, blonde, her refugee-regulation tunic and peasant skirt modified in a way that said “one of the pretty ones” but didn’t quite say “open for business.” The makeshift scarf was a nice touch. Aubrine was clearly set apart from the rest of the refugees not only in her fashion sense and inherent physical qualities but in that she was the only person in this floating sauna that looked cold. Cold like a beer straight out of the fridge, like pressing your hand against the window on a December night. Stresses of the “Battle of the Century” forgotten, he had a queer urge to be lonely and shivering with her in a corner somewhere.
“Harry Fisher,” he replied gruffly. “That’s your bed. Where’ve you been?”
“Taking in the sunlight,” she said with a smile that failed to reach escape velocity before crashing back down into a grim frown. “Taking in the sights.”
“The new home, yes,” said Fisher, staring resolutely at the canvas. “It has its charms, I suppose. I’ve been in here.”
“Here has its charms as well,” said Aubrine. “If my asking doesn’t bother you, why’d they not house the women with the women? Seems more decent that way.”
It didn’t once occur to Fisher to be dishonest. “I convinced the brass I might be some use to them,” he said. “You were meant to be a perk, I think.”
“Oh.” Aubrine scratched her head. “I’d rather you wouldn’t.”
“I wasn’t planning on it.” Fisher looked around. “Tomorrow we’ll, er... establish some manner of divider. For privacy’s sake.” Fisher shuddered upon realizing that sprucing up this shithole was going to require leaving it.
“Well, don’t be too much a stranger,” offered Aubrine. “Times like this, friends are hard to come by.”
Friends. The wizard recognized the ridiculous of that statement, thinking upon whatever seven madmen had been sent to kill him.
“I’m going to try and sleep,” he declared after about thirty seconds’ silence.
“Good!” said Aubrine, sitting on her hands, a flash of color around her lips. “I mean, you know. That’s all well.”
“We’ll see if it is, in any case,” responded Fisher, yawning. He pulled the thick blanket over him like a paperweight and lay curled up on the bed, trying not to touch anything. His eyes refused to close, and he lay for a while in the imperfect darkness, studying the square inch of mattress in front of him and thinking about immune systems and the ecologies of floating islands and death and the number eight.
A wind whipped up around the tent. Clouds licked at the sky-island’s shores and were recontextualized as fog. The night stretched thin. Rest cascaded over the refugees—first the children, then the drunks, and eventually the children’s parents and the drunks’ wives, too, looking over their resting loved ones and contemplating the future. Fisher, whose worries were less orthodox but no more profound, found that he was not an exception. He slept.
Aubrine waited a while after his breathing settled. To make sure.
There was a hole in the wizard’s dreams the size of a city, a hole you could drive a god through. The unconscious mind of a magician, you see, tends to latch on less to the Freudian and more to the cosmic, which might explain why that ilk tend to have only the shallowest understanding of themselves. A dank and labyrinthine cerebral subway had, in its proper place, been home to a great multitude of ghosts and deities and metaphors and sentient errant spells that sat around holding up cardboard signs and standing watchfully over shopping carts full of mind-trash.
Fisher never remembered his dreams, but he had always been sure to throw them a little change when he was passing by, and thus they were able to scrape a bit of dignity out of their existence. The multiversal transplant had disrupted this ecosystem, added them to the count of refugees, leaving them to fend for themselves somewhere far outside the purview of this story.
Fisher’s dream was too vast and empty and lonely to be anything but lucid, his neurological excretions echoing in the absence of rationale or familiarity. He was in a place where he didn’t know if there was a God. He didn’t know if there was magic here. He scrambled in his dream for so much of a frame of reference to define “here” by, something he could latch onto, like “north,” or even “away.” Nothing could define how definitively not-where-he-should-be he was except for this huge nothingness at the bottom of his brain; abandoned tunnels and the lingering smell of terrible wine.
The emptiness was only the moment before the flood, but time works differently in dreams.
The flood was biblical in nature. The flood of juice down Eve’s cheek as she took that first bite of apple. Then, the flood of knowledge. And then the hand of judgment crashing down with that weight that you imagine lightning must have to make it fall so fast. That was first contact. Fisher was sitting on all fours behind the yellow line as the train approached but his teeth had scattered all over the tracks when it had hit him. The doors slid open automatically and unleashed a mountain full of dirt.
And the island said hello.
Fisher’s mind bloated the way a carcass distends when it rots, creating an environment supportive for new life.
And in Fisher’s dream he and the island were one, and the island was a billion, which made him one billion and one, which made him one in a billion, which made him nothing, which made it all nothing, and the train of thought dashed him against the concrete alongside last year’s graffiti.
He saw little bugs with thoughts all arranged in platonic solids and marching like an army without any of the tragedy.
And he saw lithe and predatory things jump down from the trees to give a gift of death to things beautiful and innocent, like a lover’s quarrel without any of the sadness.
And standing alongside the island he met his new people, small and cold and afraid and in need of a home and a father and they called to him “New Frontier” and he answered “Yes.” He could hear the click and the low hum of history turning on.
And he could taste magic in the dirt. Fisher dreamt the things that islands dream, things beyond supposition.
And through the island he reached out to his fellow outsiders: to the butterfly resting blissfully and weighless upon the lightest twig on the tree of causality; to the many-man and the red-eye flight; and last of all he turned his dream-gaze on a cold dead thing that was once a man and he recoiled in disgust.
The reaction reverberated all the way back into his body.
Fisher sat up in bed so hard he slammed his forehead into Aubrine’s chin, eliciting something between a hiss and an eek from the would-be first-time vampire. “Fuck!” cried Fisher, rubbing his head. Then he noticed the woman standing over him, lantern in hand, the firelight reflecting off of her glistening canines.
He thought, Stop that bitch! She stole my teeth off the subway track! And then reality resumed with a compressive pop and he realized his tentmate was trying to imbibe him.
They flailed ineptly enough that the vampire’s superior strength failed to make much of a difference, Fisher’s blanket flapping about in the space between them. “Fuck!” Fisher repeated. It was like a mother trying to give an ornery child a bath. Like all children, in spite of his thrashing, Fisher understood that at one point he was going to have to grin and bear it.
Fate, in this instance, intervened. Aubrine could see well enough in the dark now that it was only force of habit that had compelled her to bring the lantern around. The thought was little comfort to her as the lamp slipped from her fingers and crashed to the ground, spraying a line of burning oil across the blanket. She bit her lip and shrieked, taking two steps back.
Fisher, not at all cognizant of the strategic benefits of the ploy, threw the blanket over her head.
The flame spread faster than it would have, in a completely rational universe. The mostly-authentic vampire spent about two seconds draped as an imitation ghost before resolving herself into a fireball. The sound of her burning was awful beyond describing, and the smell made Fisher slightly hungry.
Charred and blackened, Aubrine ripped off the sheet. She experienced a moment of clarity, or at least was overcome momentarily by a superior will, and felt properly a thing of the night, evil and cold and dead and sexy. “I am the first of many!” she pronounced excitedly through the half of her lip that hadn’t yet melted off. “This place will be consumed by death, and you will die with them!”
The curse and the smoke waved around Fisher’s nose as the flaming corpse went silent.
The wizard rubbed his chest, shivering, as the tent went dark once more. Was this a nightmare? Was he still dreaming? What had he been dreaming before? For that matter, what was he dreaming now?
Was there ever chance he was going to get back home before he died a horrible and soul-destroying death? If he died here, would his soul make it back home?
Did this mean he had the tent to himself now?