The Spectacular Exhibition (S3G2) [Round 2: Space - Abridged]

Originally posted on MSPA by Schazer.

---

Chainsaw screams and rocket roars resounded through Space, fleeing from Brooklyn as often as they arced about the constricted endlessness and chased her in turn. Her omnipresent wails merely fuelled her hysteria, a beach and a forest and knot of cogs and a crystal ball of a moon and a castle and cemetry and a carpark and an ocean over a city all hurtling past her again and again into something homogenous and awful and incredible. It must have taken someone lifetimes, to build it or move it or achieve something close to divinity to exist it into place.

Add one ghost, one messily-curtailed echo of one lifetime. Cities burnt, shores crumbled, and a dozen soldiers carved to pieces. They couldn't have hurt her.

ArooooOOOOOOOoooo, howled Hoofstad's sirens, as Brooklyn sailed past them a fourth time. She cut the thrust, and aerodynamics be damned the chainsaw sailed onward. The silence served to calm her down, blanking out external noise as simple as not concentrating.

Not looking was simple as well, for the most part. The mundanity of just knowing where and what things surrounded you, so integral to living that there weren't pithy words for the whole experience, you lost that when you died. Or died, but stuck around jammed in a testament to your most spectacular mistakes. Brooklyn didn't know the difference, but a joyride of crippling guilt and merely-symbolic fleeing from phenomenal balls-ups was giving her time to think.

Moons. Water. Rubble. More moons. The little knot of cogs, a smear of sand in three dimensions. Another moon. A haunted house, and its token ghost.

A ghost!

Brooklyn slammed the metaphorical brakes, then realised that didn't do squat and sliced circles out of the void for a bit before the chain's revs pointed her mansion-ward. Her charge was a bit too enthusiastic, and carved straight through the roofspace of the North Tower. Oops.

Trenton, to his credit, just waved.

"Are you that ghost from the desert?" she demanded, loose bolts rattling irritably as her chassis twitched this way and that. Ghost sight, as it turned out, took a while to warm up again.

"Oooh, you saw me? Couldn't be sure how I'd look to you, if you could see me at all. Norm's never any help when I ask him."

The ghost's cheerfulness was disarming. "Norm?"

"My brother. The preacher creature you're supposed to be sticking your pointy end in, according to the... Councillor?"

"... Counsellor, I think."

Trenton just looked confused. "Isn't that what I said?"

"With an 'e'."

"With a what now?"

Brooklyn snorted with frustration; the Pollet's uncomprehending gawk in the face of danger just annoyed her further.

"Ugh, you're as hopeless as your brother, aren't you? Can you even read?"

"Woah!" cried the striking but indistinct smudge that comprised the best part of Brooklyn's sight. She could've sworn its aura flared up once, like a particularly petulant and indignant sun. "Of course I can read. I can write, too!"

"Really," Brooklyn retorted, vaguely aware (and even more vaguely, comfortable) she was falling headfirst into an argument with a veteran idiot. "Says you and what publisher?"

"My brother's assorted nebulously extant deities," swore Trenton. He hadn't actually stopped his incessant swinging in circles while grasping the tail of Skullclops Manor's rusty weathervane, but Brooklyn couldn't see that. "You are rude!"

"And you," snarled the chainsaw, "have no right-" creak creak, round round round, went Trenton on the weather vane- "no right at all-" creak creak squeak- "to claim a scrap of superiority over your idiot of a brother!" Creak, creak. "What's he doing in a fight to the death, anyway?"

Creak cr-

"I was just wondering about that."

"Wait, really?" Thank god (only as a turn of phrase, granted), a sane thought in his head.

"Pffft, nah."

Brooklyn clanked, choked, fell about a foot in the air, then seemed to finally compose herself.

"This is a waste of time."

"This is a waste of time," parroted Trenton, leaping atop the weathervane and deftly balancing upon it. "Look at me! I'm a dragon in a box! A metal monster, busy as can be! I haven't the time or the nose to smell the flowers, only to turn it up at silly little ghosts as I fly by to my busy ghostly business!"

"If you think you're being funny-"

"All the time in the mortal coil, and I've shuffled out it in a magical flying suit of armour! There's not a second to waste!"

"Shut up," snapped Brooklyn. The poltergeist refused, or maybe he didn't hear her over the shriek of her chainsaw.

"But I'm trying to help!" Trenton chided. "Look, for discourse's sake I'll even worship your timeless shrine, give up my slothful ways, and cut to the chase. Why did you come looking for me?"

And despite her obvious answer - her harried, impatient self, Brooklyn found herself unable to answer. Not without feeling like she had to blurt the obvious and sound dumber for saying it.

"You a ghost. Like me. I just- I just needed someone to talk to. About, uh. Ghost things."


There was an awkward science.


"Iiin my defence," grumbled Brooklyn, seething in her chassis, "talking to you seemed a damn better idea before I actually talked to you."

"That is such a sweeping generalisation if I ever heard one! I mean, just because we're both ghosts, we're automatically going to have so much in common? It's not like being a ghost has to define you, it's not like we only hang out with ghost-friends and ghost-allies, only talking about ghost-things-"

"Yeah, I get it."

"It's not like there's one single way to ghost-dom either! Poisoning, soldiering, drowning, dysentry, childbirth, lynching, simply nodding off to sleep at a ripe old rage and a lifetime's regrets-" Trenton stoped at this point, not for lack of observations on ghost-dom, but because his conversation partner had her blade in his head. It was a tad more disconcerting than when Norman and his staff actually got the jump on Trenton and cut an ineffectual swathe out of him, but not by much. He stopped more out of courtesy.

"I," growled Brooklyn, "am not in a good mood."

Trenton sniffed. It smelt of post-storm forest; fresh air mixed with churned mud and snapped branches. "I didn't need to be a published author to figure that one out."

"Good."

---

Norman Randall Pollet's book was interrupted by splintering roof, though he didn't recognise it as such. A dusting of crumbled cobwebs and decreptiude turned solid dislodged from the ceiling, sprinkling itself gently across the page.

Norman glanced up, his solitude registering in that single moment. The noise was upsetting. He wanted to be alone, and knew as soon as he'd decided that that whoever was out there would not indulge him.

"... Damnit," growled the clergyman, uneasily uncertain of Who was supposed to be damning things for him. He rose from his seat (a pile of musty albums and other books he'd already read), shuffled out the door and to the cupboard under the stairs where he'd stashed his cane. The sight of it alone wasn't anything special, nestled as it was in shadows and spiderwebs, but Norman just knew. He'd grab that staff, march to the front door, and someone would tell him something he should've already known and had no wish to know; like where he'd gotten it from and who he'd done despicable things to just to have gotten it.

Norman sighed. Some hellish cockerel yodel-screeched above, wishing him good morning, you self-serving scum.

How could you do that to that poor boy?

Do you know him!?

Norman did not. The staff in his hands felt like it was chewed up and spat out a sawmill, any connection to its tree shrivelled and dried and snapped off with disuse. Oddly comforting, really. He made his unhurried way to the front door, not entirely certain where it was after his perceived months of hermitage.

Grin-nh-nh-nhn-nh-nh-nhn-nh-nh-nhn, went the cockerel on the roof.