Re: The Spectacular Exhibition (S3G2) [Round 2: Space - Abridged]
05-12-2012, 12:32 AM
Originally posted on MSPA by SleepingOrange.
Several hours had passed like minutes. Like seconds, even, or moments. Perhaps they had passed for Crepitans in a way that had little to do with time; treefolk of all bents are notoriously awkward about their perceptions of chronology in any case. His departure from the beachy planet had been one bookend to a frenzied, atemporal story, certainly; what followed, though, had stood out less like a plot and more like a series of disconnected events.
A clan of tiny humans – were they tiny for humans, or just for him? – had fallen. He remembered fondly, or perhaps experienced in the moment or even was daydreaming about, their screams. As soon as he'd landed, he'd scooped one up, pulling it apart like an insect and flinging its still screaming corpse at what was probably its mate or offspring. It had certainly set an excellent tenor for the rest of the rampage, as the bloodied survivor had gibbered in abject horror as its home and family were crushed and splattered like the garbage they were. Crepitans had been sure to make sure that victim had been the last. Probably. The last of the first in any case. Cabins and cottages had fallen like blocks and splintered like toothpicks under his assault, followed by bridges and suburbs and radio towers. He supposed he'd moved between planets at some point, then, hadn't he?
Shrieks and shrikes and terror and laughter all blurred into one dreamlike recollection for him. How many lives had his blood-rimed hands claimed since the beaches? A dozen? A hundred, a thousand? That didn't seem right. There hadn't been time for that. Probably. Regardless, it had been many. Faces and species melted into one another and all died the same way, all chaff to be winnowed from the worlds they undeservedly inhabited. His boughs clacked and squelched with new trophies, his bird chirping contentedly in concert with his swaying.
Why wasn't he killing anything now, actually? Crepitans blinked and shook what could be called his head, trying to rouse himself from the then-and-now world of his memories or fantasies. He'd run out of victims, then, yes. As he had before. Long after he'd expected to come across another of his laughable competitors. Another planet – [i]had it been a city? A forest, perhaps? – had been drained of life, its peaceful inhabitants not prepared to deal with a behemoth of wood and blood and vrutality. So he'd, yes, he'd leapt again. As he had before. There was the creak of wood on stone, no, soil, and he'd left another impossible gravity field. Soared through the sky that wasn't a sky but was emptiness and landed again. Killed those who had lived there too, was killing them now, forced his spiked fingers through the bones of a bag of flesh. No. He blinked. That was then.
With an effort, he focused himself. He wasn't going to fall into the traps of doddering old grey-needled pines and lose a sense of when. Now, now, now. Now, he was floating in blackness, an ocean of black with spheres ahead and spheres behind and spheres around. Ahead and behind, one before and one after. The behind-spheres were past. He was moving ahead. Why wasn't he there already? Why had he stopped?
Well, he hadn't. He was still moving, or the worlds were moving around him. It was the same thing. His last leap simply hadn't had the force to get him to his destination, or perhaps he'd aimed poorly. It didn't matter. Probably.
He twitched, then thrashed. With nothing to gain purchase on, there was no way to steer, no way to gain speed. So he drifted, annoyed at this peaceful interlude of darkness. Of course, he hadn't actually slowed down since his leap; the breathable void didn't truly have any air resistance. He simply had longer to go before he reached anywhere than before. And so he thought.
Mostly, he thought the same thoughts he'd thought before. Thoughts about the Counsellor and Professor and the idiots he was supposed to be ending at their behest. Thoughts about how they had proven so inept, so foolishly incapable of organizing a deathmatch that he'd shed the blood of perhaps dozens of equivalents to his targets and seen none of them. Perhaps he was too competent, and they sought to hobble him and prevent the battle ending in minutes. But then why enter him against such obviously inferior targets to begin with? Incompetence, probably. Probably. It was all very, very vexing. He had things to be doing, better people to be killing in more exciting ways. Better plots to hatch than "Murder, then murder some more, then murder the one who asked for the murders."; it was all too straightforward, too beneath him. He could be ending empires, not swatting fleshy flies.
Perhaps he landed again, or perhaps he simply drifted back through his own personal bubble of time. Roots slammed into cobblestones, cracking them in a very satisfyingly ominous way. He followed the splitting rabble with a bloodthirsty roar, flinging seeds into the mass of little things that had come to see the ruckus. They were humans, maybe, or little plantlike beings with leafy skirts. A race of insects, a species of bird. Did it matter? They bled, or did something close enough, and they wept and they died. He wove spells as many among their number fled, causing their bones or plates or stems to twist and throb with agony, their muscles to turn on them and pull them apart. He laughed as some approached as though to fight. Did they throw fireballs, or was it some kind of mechanical device? Swords had probably played a pivotal role in being as unable to harm him as everything else. He let the ones who would fight live longer than the others, so they could watch each other die painfully, futilely. The broken soul of a brave warrior was a treasure to be savored before its skull followed suit.
This repeated itself, perhaps literally and only in his mind, perhaps figuratively and more tragically across a slew of planetoids. Spheres of all sizes and colors dripped with the shed ichors of their inhabitants, at the very least in the mind of the shaman. Certainly several had been exsanguinated and exterminated. Did it matter how many? No, it couldn't. Definitely. It was enough, it was many. But it wasn't as many as it could be, and it hadn't lead him to his real targets yet.
And yet, here he was, once again drifting aimlessly. Perhaps simply still drifting so. In the dark expanse of space that he'd never hitherto considered, it was harder than it ever had been on solid ground to follow the threads of when and where, realized and planned. No sun ticked and tocked across his canopy like an unwindable clock, no true interactions with other sentients set his pace, no complex or measured rituals filled his hours. It could have been hours, it could have been days. It could have been minutes, but it was hard for Crepitans to admit the possibility that his carefully-maintained linear awareness had so quickly crumbled as to fade in minutes of unnatural stillness and activity.
The only other being who could have cared about Crepitans's durations – and had survived to see befores and afters – wasn't in much of a position to evaluate them either. He'd been unconscious, or dead, and had just woken up. Maybe he was about to, instead. Either way, he couldn't know how long sweet comatose senselessness had dragged on for, even if he still had the faculties to evaluate it or the memories to make it relevant. Regardless of his consciousness or lack thereof, and regardless of what he might think about it, Norman Randall Pollet's little graveyard planet had just seen another one-sentient boom in population, and the man was soon going to have to deal with an angry and murderous and detatched saptwister.
Probably.
Several hours had passed like minutes. Like seconds, even, or moments. Perhaps they had passed for Crepitans in a way that had little to do with time; treefolk of all bents are notoriously awkward about their perceptions of chronology in any case. His departure from the beachy planet had been one bookend to a frenzied, atemporal story, certainly; what followed, though, had stood out less like a plot and more like a series of disconnected events.
A clan of tiny humans – were they tiny for humans, or just for him? – had fallen. He remembered fondly, or perhaps experienced in the moment or even was daydreaming about, their screams. As soon as he'd landed, he'd scooped one up, pulling it apart like an insect and flinging its still screaming corpse at what was probably its mate or offspring. It had certainly set an excellent tenor for the rest of the rampage, as the bloodied survivor had gibbered in abject horror as its home and family were crushed and splattered like the garbage they were. Crepitans had been sure to make sure that victim had been the last. Probably. The last of the first in any case. Cabins and cottages had fallen like blocks and splintered like toothpicks under his assault, followed by bridges and suburbs and radio towers. He supposed he'd moved between planets at some point, then, hadn't he?
Shrieks and shrikes and terror and laughter all blurred into one dreamlike recollection for him. How many lives had his blood-rimed hands claimed since the beaches? A dozen? A hundred, a thousand? That didn't seem right. There hadn't been time for that. Probably. Regardless, it had been many. Faces and species melted into one another and all died the same way, all chaff to be winnowed from the worlds they undeservedly inhabited. His boughs clacked and squelched with new trophies, his bird chirping contentedly in concert with his swaying.
Why wasn't he killing anything now, actually? Crepitans blinked and shook what could be called his head, trying to rouse himself from the then-and-now world of his memories or fantasies. He'd run out of victims, then, yes. As he had before. Long after he'd expected to come across another of his laughable competitors. Another planet – [i]had it been a city? A forest, perhaps? – had been drained of life, its peaceful inhabitants not prepared to deal with a behemoth of wood and blood and vrutality. So he'd, yes, he'd leapt again. As he had before. There was the creak of wood on stone, no, soil, and he'd left another impossible gravity field. Soared through the sky that wasn't a sky but was emptiness and landed again. Killed those who had lived there too, was killing them now, forced his spiked fingers through the bones of a bag of flesh. No. He blinked. That was then.
With an effort, he focused himself. He wasn't going to fall into the traps of doddering old grey-needled pines and lose a sense of when. Now, now, now. Now, he was floating in blackness, an ocean of black with spheres ahead and spheres behind and spheres around. Ahead and behind, one before and one after. The behind-spheres were past. He was moving ahead. Why wasn't he there already? Why had he stopped?
Well, he hadn't. He was still moving, or the worlds were moving around him. It was the same thing. His last leap simply hadn't had the force to get him to his destination, or perhaps he'd aimed poorly. It didn't matter. Probably.
He twitched, then thrashed. With nothing to gain purchase on, there was no way to steer, no way to gain speed. So he drifted, annoyed at this peaceful interlude of darkness. Of course, he hadn't actually slowed down since his leap; the breathable void didn't truly have any air resistance. He simply had longer to go before he reached anywhere than before. And so he thought.
Mostly, he thought the same thoughts he'd thought before. Thoughts about the Counsellor and Professor and the idiots he was supposed to be ending at their behest. Thoughts about how they had proven so inept, so foolishly incapable of organizing a deathmatch that he'd shed the blood of perhaps dozens of equivalents to his targets and seen none of them. Perhaps he was too competent, and they sought to hobble him and prevent the battle ending in minutes. But then why enter him against such obviously inferior targets to begin with? Incompetence, probably. Probably. It was all very, very vexing. He had things to be doing, better people to be killing in more exciting ways. Better plots to hatch than "Murder, then murder some more, then murder the one who asked for the murders."; it was all too straightforward, too beneath him. He could be ending empires, not swatting fleshy flies.
Perhaps he landed again, or perhaps he simply drifted back through his own personal bubble of time. Roots slammed into cobblestones, cracking them in a very satisfyingly ominous way. He followed the splitting rabble with a bloodthirsty roar, flinging seeds into the mass of little things that had come to see the ruckus. They were humans, maybe, or little plantlike beings with leafy skirts. A race of insects, a species of bird. Did it matter? They bled, or did something close enough, and they wept and they died. He wove spells as many among their number fled, causing their bones or plates or stems to twist and throb with agony, their muscles to turn on them and pull them apart. He laughed as some approached as though to fight. Did they throw fireballs, or was it some kind of mechanical device? Swords had probably played a pivotal role in being as unable to harm him as everything else. He let the ones who would fight live longer than the others, so they could watch each other die painfully, futilely. The broken soul of a brave warrior was a treasure to be savored before its skull followed suit.
This repeated itself, perhaps literally and only in his mind, perhaps figuratively and more tragically across a slew of planetoids. Spheres of all sizes and colors dripped with the shed ichors of their inhabitants, at the very least in the mind of the shaman. Certainly several had been exsanguinated and exterminated. Did it matter how many? No, it couldn't. Definitely. It was enough, it was many. But it wasn't as many as it could be, and it hadn't lead him to his real targets yet.
And yet, here he was, once again drifting aimlessly. Perhaps simply still drifting so. In the dark expanse of space that he'd never hitherto considered, it was harder than it ever had been on solid ground to follow the threads of when and where, realized and planned. No sun ticked and tocked across his canopy like an unwindable clock, no true interactions with other sentients set his pace, no complex or measured rituals filled his hours. It could have been hours, it could have been days. It could have been minutes, but it was hard for Crepitans to admit the possibility that his carefully-maintained linear awareness had so quickly crumbled as to fade in minutes of unnatural stillness and activity.
The only other being who could have cared about Crepitans's durations – and had survived to see befores and afters – wasn't in much of a position to evaluate them either. He'd been unconscious, or dead, and had just woken up. Maybe he was about to, instead. Either way, he couldn't know how long sweet comatose senselessness had dragged on for, even if he still had the faculties to evaluate it or the memories to make it relevant. Regardless of his consciousness or lack thereof, and regardless of what he might think about it, Norman Randall Pollet's little graveyard planet had just seen another one-sentient boom in population, and the man was soon going to have to deal with an angry and murderous and detatched saptwister.
Probably.