Re: The Spectacular Exhibition (S3G2) [Round 1: Parallels/Perpendicularities]
07-03-2011, 09:28 PM
Originally posted on MSPA by Schazer.
Tria wasn't all that keen to stick around Geppeto and his puppets, partly because their jocular bickering and carefree yells as they discovered the caverns' secrets left her feeling awkward and lonely. (Also, the fact it was a troupe of undeniably creepy marionettes doing the bickering and yelling, but that almost went without saying by now. Almost.) The fact of the matter still remained, though, that Mo's twin-lamp eyes were the only decent illumination in the crypt. Tria hovered behind them, struggling to find a balance between staying out of their way and making keeping up easy.
The ladder had taken them what felt like the height of the pyramid again into the earth, until they found the missing elevator. Tria had to rip the emergency hatch off the top, before wriggling into the car itself and prising the doors open. (Otto leapt into the car behind her while she was working, fairly startling the girl - in spite of the echoing, ever-nearing clatter of wooden feet on rungs.)
The woman lingered for a while at a crossroads. She could hear Otto's faint yells down the left corridor - something about a huge pillar? Whatever it was, Tria caught Geppeto's reply a moment later down the right, but was distracted by the clack-clack-clack-clack as Otto ran to rejoin his brother.
"Oh. It's you."
Tria did her best to not slam Otto into a wall by his mechanised arms, but the shink of his manipulator's blades extending reminded the woman just how deep underground they were. From the surface. Where Brooklyn was off roaming somewhere and why the hell had Tria sent her away leaving her all alone to be slaughtered by a wooden maniac who she'd just sent flying back down the corridor.
Tria didn't wait for any noise after the crack of splitting wood. She just ran.
---
Brooklyn was sulking, inasmuch as a hovering chainsaw can. The sedate pace of the stupefied lizards, accompanied by their every pathetic flinch at the burst of her jets, restrained the ghost to the kind of vague, poltergeist-powered drift she imagined her new spin-doctor companion might regale in his rubbish sermons as "stately". Brooklyn distracted herself from the merciless sun and poor company by figuring out how best to phrase a metaphor that'd popped into her head.
It's like... like reading your ticket after you've checked your luggage in with Reincarnation Airlines, and it says your next stop's a dragon, but then it's one of those placid looking weedy creatures I saw on that snorkelling trip, once? That's how I think I feel right now. A weedy sea dragon hankering to go and terrorise some peasants, or make it rain. Or something. Hmm, maybe just slash the sub-imagery we're using for reincarnation, I never did like a metaphor that dragged on...
Brooklyn snapped out of her reverie at the fearful screeches of what passed for reptiloid language. She barely noticed the desert shaking; the chainsaw was far more occupied with the mechanical motions in and beneath the pyramid. It wasn't until Norman shouted, and Brooklyn consented to do as she was told and look up at the sky, that she realised something was very, very wrong.
The sky was white - not the slouching, unsociable gloom of snow-choked clouds; but an entire icy landscape stretched out against the cloudless blue. It didn't simply appear with some suitably cataclysmic noise - instead the image of it was warping and buckling and flickering in and out like a poorly-tuned television before a less-dead Brooklyn would've accosted it with duct tape and a spanner. If it hadn't been reminiscent of that rather mundane facet of her life, Brooklyn would've been far more awestruck.
As it was, of greater interest to the ghost was the arctic landscape itself. Mirroring the desert around her, a partially demolished pyramid hung sandstone-gold incongruous from the white; behind her were a spine of mountains, sheer flanks stripped black and devoid of snow. Brooklyn ratcheted her chain a few irritable notches at the lizardmen's wails, wondering if an equally moronic parallel native traversed the tundra. One peak stretched above the rest of the mountain range, as though it had inched its gargantuan way out and above, reaching for a similar spire - one in Brooklyn's desert, its summit tipped with an unearthly light so piercing that she marvelled at how she'd never noticed it until now -
---
The Sentinel did not stir. It instead thrashed furiously against the rubble which entombed it, reducing great bricks of stone into so much dust, and didn't stop until its hideous, scaly head broke from the ruins. It stared sightlessly up into the desert, before its gaze spun to the needle-like spire that pierced the mountain range. The world seemed to ripple as for the briefest, electric moment, sand and snow phased in and met at the two peaks, sending shockwaves across the landscapes.
The Sentinel felt all this, stared up at the desert pyramid, stared through it, then flickered like a sea of sky-bound sand before it vanished.
---
It occurred to Tria, somewhat too late, that she'd run deeper into the complex - further from a way out, further from Brooklyn. Otto's yells that she'd tried to murder him, and Jo's thunderous footsteps closing in, made her regret it. She sorely wished the lights on her arm would dim - so she could at least hide in what she was growing more and more convinced was a dead end - but had to settle for it responding to her anxiety and adopting a warmer colour scheme.
Great.
The punctuation of Jo's handful of shotgun blasts didn't help any, either - Tria cowered behind the enormous stone statue which occupied the best part of the room, keeping it between her and the murderous puppet.
A chill ran down everyone's backs - an accompaniment to the overhead lights flickering, and stone being crushed beneath Sentinel feet as the beast materialised by the doorway. Jo paused, trying to figure if this was that Tria woman's doing or not, turning back to the intersection where Geppeto worked desperately to fix Otto's arm from twisting at the awful angle it was in.
Desecrators. I will end you.
The voice was enough to make Tria shudder, but didn't compare to the anguished scream of a boy that followed a brief burst of gunfire. A steel ball, a chunk of wooden limb still attached by a chain, was tossed with terrifying ease past Tria's field of vision, cratering the wall. She heard more running, more terror-stricken threats fading back in the direction of the elevator, before the malevolent presence that had appeared mere moments before seemed to fade.
The statue's eyes lit up. Each was a glaring white half-circle - large as a car tunnel – fairly blinding Tria.
You will die here.
The entire statue - the massive head of some kind of dog - began to glow, and rise toward the ponderously opening roof. Everything was shaking again as sand streamed in. Tria ran for it, stumbling over log-like limbs despite the additional light as she escaped the Sentinel's chamber, and saw more sand rushing from the side chambers Geppeto and Otto had explored. The elevator shaft was making buckling sounds Tria could detect even above the rumbling and groaning, and if the puppets were there she had no wish to engage them. She instead ran for one of the side chambers, scrambling up ever-growing piles of sand, and found the pillar Otto had been talking about. It was shifting slowly in the dim glow of her apparatus, the carvings rising from the sand even as it drowned in it.
Tria kept clambering up the pile of sand until it had risen above the doorway, until she finally hauled herself onto a ledge on the pillar. She gazed upward, clinging as hard as she could with shaking arms. It seemed to rise into the black forever.
---
Brooklyn howled with surprise as the sand on one side of the pyramid shivered. The pyramid itself began to lurch to one side, a pillar pulling itself from the desert at each corner. From the turmoil rose a jackal's head, big enough to hover at the pyramid's now-midair base; twisting the structure’s visage in her mind’s eye into some grotesque stone turtle. It screamed, craned its head around in a failed attempt to line the arctic pyramid in its sights, and shot a beam of light from its jaws.
Norman just stared while his acolytes screeched their pathetic heads off, but after a moment of slack-jawed amazement a loathing twitch of recognition appeared on his features. Brooklyn had to wonder what that was about (the manifestation of all that mysterious machinery launching her into one of her "discovering" moods) and followed his gaze.
A ghost was prancing on the jackal's forehead, a spectral speck whooping like a maniac and waving to his brother.
Tria wasn't all that keen to stick around Geppeto and his puppets, partly because their jocular bickering and carefree yells as they discovered the caverns' secrets left her feeling awkward and lonely. (Also, the fact it was a troupe of undeniably creepy marionettes doing the bickering and yelling, but that almost went without saying by now. Almost.) The fact of the matter still remained, though, that Mo's twin-lamp eyes were the only decent illumination in the crypt. Tria hovered behind them, struggling to find a balance between staying out of their way and making keeping up easy.
The ladder had taken them what felt like the height of the pyramid again into the earth, until they found the missing elevator. Tria had to rip the emergency hatch off the top, before wriggling into the car itself and prising the doors open. (Otto leapt into the car behind her while she was working, fairly startling the girl - in spite of the echoing, ever-nearing clatter of wooden feet on rungs.)
The woman lingered for a while at a crossroads. She could hear Otto's faint yells down the left corridor - something about a huge pillar? Whatever it was, Tria caught Geppeto's reply a moment later down the right, but was distracted by the clack-clack-clack-clack as Otto ran to rejoin his brother.
"Oh. It's you."
Tria did her best to not slam Otto into a wall by his mechanised arms, but the shink of his manipulator's blades extending reminded the woman just how deep underground they were. From the surface. Where Brooklyn was off roaming somewhere and why the hell had Tria sent her away leaving her all alone to be slaughtered by a wooden maniac who she'd just sent flying back down the corridor.
Tria didn't wait for any noise after the crack of splitting wood. She just ran.
---
Brooklyn was sulking, inasmuch as a hovering chainsaw can. The sedate pace of the stupefied lizards, accompanied by their every pathetic flinch at the burst of her jets, restrained the ghost to the kind of vague, poltergeist-powered drift she imagined her new spin-doctor companion might regale in his rubbish sermons as "stately". Brooklyn distracted herself from the merciless sun and poor company by figuring out how best to phrase a metaphor that'd popped into her head.
It's like... like reading your ticket after you've checked your luggage in with Reincarnation Airlines, and it says your next stop's a dragon, but then it's one of those placid looking weedy creatures I saw on that snorkelling trip, once? That's how I think I feel right now. A weedy sea dragon hankering to go and terrorise some peasants, or make it rain. Or something. Hmm, maybe just slash the sub-imagery we're using for reincarnation, I never did like a metaphor that dragged on...
Brooklyn snapped out of her reverie at the fearful screeches of what passed for reptiloid language. She barely noticed the desert shaking; the chainsaw was far more occupied with the mechanical motions in and beneath the pyramid. It wasn't until Norman shouted, and Brooklyn consented to do as she was told and look up at the sky, that she realised something was very, very wrong.
The sky was white - not the slouching, unsociable gloom of snow-choked clouds; but an entire icy landscape stretched out against the cloudless blue. It didn't simply appear with some suitably cataclysmic noise - instead the image of it was warping and buckling and flickering in and out like a poorly-tuned television before a less-dead Brooklyn would've accosted it with duct tape and a spanner. If it hadn't been reminiscent of that rather mundane facet of her life, Brooklyn would've been far more awestruck.
As it was, of greater interest to the ghost was the arctic landscape itself. Mirroring the desert around her, a partially demolished pyramid hung sandstone-gold incongruous from the white; behind her were a spine of mountains, sheer flanks stripped black and devoid of snow. Brooklyn ratcheted her chain a few irritable notches at the lizardmen's wails, wondering if an equally moronic parallel native traversed the tundra. One peak stretched above the rest of the mountain range, as though it had inched its gargantuan way out and above, reaching for a similar spire - one in Brooklyn's desert, its summit tipped with an unearthly light so piercing that she marvelled at how she'd never noticed it until now -
---
The Sentinel did not stir. It instead thrashed furiously against the rubble which entombed it, reducing great bricks of stone into so much dust, and didn't stop until its hideous, scaly head broke from the ruins. It stared sightlessly up into the desert, before its gaze spun to the needle-like spire that pierced the mountain range. The world seemed to ripple as for the briefest, electric moment, sand and snow phased in and met at the two peaks, sending shockwaves across the landscapes.
The Sentinel felt all this, stared up at the desert pyramid, stared through it, then flickered like a sea of sky-bound sand before it vanished.
---
It occurred to Tria, somewhat too late, that she'd run deeper into the complex - further from a way out, further from Brooklyn. Otto's yells that she'd tried to murder him, and Jo's thunderous footsteps closing in, made her regret it. She sorely wished the lights on her arm would dim - so she could at least hide in what she was growing more and more convinced was a dead end - but had to settle for it responding to her anxiety and adopting a warmer colour scheme.
Great.
The punctuation of Jo's handful of shotgun blasts didn't help any, either - Tria cowered behind the enormous stone statue which occupied the best part of the room, keeping it between her and the murderous puppet.
A chill ran down everyone's backs - an accompaniment to the overhead lights flickering, and stone being crushed beneath Sentinel feet as the beast materialised by the doorway. Jo paused, trying to figure if this was that Tria woman's doing or not, turning back to the intersection where Geppeto worked desperately to fix Otto's arm from twisting at the awful angle it was in.
Desecrators. I will end you.
The voice was enough to make Tria shudder, but didn't compare to the anguished scream of a boy that followed a brief burst of gunfire. A steel ball, a chunk of wooden limb still attached by a chain, was tossed with terrifying ease past Tria's field of vision, cratering the wall. She heard more running, more terror-stricken threats fading back in the direction of the elevator, before the malevolent presence that had appeared mere moments before seemed to fade.
The statue's eyes lit up. Each was a glaring white half-circle - large as a car tunnel – fairly blinding Tria.
You will die here.
The entire statue - the massive head of some kind of dog - began to glow, and rise toward the ponderously opening roof. Everything was shaking again as sand streamed in. Tria ran for it, stumbling over log-like limbs despite the additional light as she escaped the Sentinel's chamber, and saw more sand rushing from the side chambers Geppeto and Otto had explored. The elevator shaft was making buckling sounds Tria could detect even above the rumbling and groaning, and if the puppets were there she had no wish to engage them. She instead ran for one of the side chambers, scrambling up ever-growing piles of sand, and found the pillar Otto had been talking about. It was shifting slowly in the dim glow of her apparatus, the carvings rising from the sand even as it drowned in it.
Tria kept clambering up the pile of sand until it had risen above the doorway, until she finally hauled herself onto a ledge on the pillar. She gazed upward, clinging as hard as she could with shaking arms. It seemed to rise into the black forever.
---
Brooklyn howled with surprise as the sand on one side of the pyramid shivered. The pyramid itself began to lurch to one side, a pillar pulling itself from the desert at each corner. From the turmoil rose a jackal's head, big enough to hover at the pyramid's now-midair base; twisting the structure’s visage in her mind’s eye into some grotesque stone turtle. It screamed, craned its head around in a failed attempt to line the arctic pyramid in its sights, and shot a beam of light from its jaws.
Norman just stared while his acolytes screeched their pathetic heads off, but after a moment of slack-jawed amazement a loathing twitch of recognition appeared on his features. Brooklyn had to wonder what that was about (the manifestation of all that mysterious machinery launching her into one of her "discovering" moods) and followed his gaze.
A ghost was prancing on the jackal's forehead, a spectral speck whooping like a maniac and waving to his brother.
peace to the unsung peace to the martyrs | i'm johnny rotten appleseed
clouds is shaky love | broke as hell but i got a bunch of ringtones
eyes blood red bruise aubergine | Sue took something now Sue doesn't sleep | saint average, day in the life of
woke up in the noon smelling doom and death | out the house, great outdoors
staying warm in arctic blizzard | that's my battle 'til I get inanimate | still up in the same clothes living like a gameshow
clouds is shaky love | broke as hell but i got a bunch of ringtones
eyes blood red bruise aubergine | Sue took something now Sue doesn't sleep | saint average, day in the life of
woke up in the noon smelling doom and death | out the house, great outdoors
staying warm in arctic blizzard | that's my battle 'til I get inanimate | still up in the same clothes living like a gameshow