The Vivacious Deadlock: S3G6: Round Three: The Sable Masque
05-20-2011, 09:59 PM
Originally posted on MSPA by engineclock.
Somewhere in a tower nervously clinging to the underbelly of a newly-formed dimension, something wearing the shape of a woman sighed.
Her hair, or what was trying to be hair, billowed around her in red clouds, obscuring the top half of her face. It moved constantly, twisting and winding around her, its tips wrapping her arms and hands. Gravity wasn’t a factor to it; strands broke off in mid-air and wrapped themselves in floating knots, tightened and dissolved into nothing. The woman made no move to stop it, even as curtains of it fell to cocoon around her, hiding her from view.
She sighed again. She was bored.
Everything had been so dull lately…
The woman stood, her hair twisting back in on itself and flaring into wings, huge red feathered things that shook themselves open sleepily. She half-swayed, half-strode over to the closest wall, as if unsteady on new feet, and leaned against it, running her hands over the pale surface. Next to her, an enormous eye growing directly out of the wall slowly swiveled and focused on her face. Its pupil contracted, then slowly relaxed, growing larger and larger until the woman could see an entire world revolving in its reflection. The eye blinked and a thousand images flashed over it in an instant, scenes of death and life and war and peace and famine and plenty… All beautiful. All of it.
Maybe it was getting old.
A hand rested on the eye’s lid for a moment, then slid it shut. It twitched, still searching, but the woman ignored it. Instead she slowly turned to face the rest of the eyes on the walls, now that they were all awake. They covered every inch of the room, ranging in size from ones taken from the smallest of insects to huge, glaring behemoths that rolled in their sockets languidly. Each was now focused on her, thousands of glittering eyes pointed at her face, flickering occasionally with flashes of faces, bodies, things crawling and lunging and seething with life. Primordial worlds and dying suns burned within them; countless lives began and countless more were extinguished side by side.
One eye in particular caught her attention. Completely black from pupil to sclera, it shone more dully than the others, visibly struggling to keep its lid open. As she approached it, it turned towards her weakly, blurred with exhaustion. She hadn’t used it in some time, but this one had always had to bear more strain than the rest. Much more. She supposed it wasn’t fair. The black eye trembled as she reached for it and bolted open in fear at her touch, its darkness deepening instantly. Slowly, painfully, a dark and twisted landscape came into focus and swirled away as the eye found its target.
A shadowy form, dark enough to seep light from its surroundings, emerged slowly from the darkness. Its outlines were vague, either by its own doing or the eye’s unwillingness to focus as its vision skipped from side to side. The figure tensed. An ever-changing number of arms twitched as it turned to show its face, speckled with dully glowing red eyes that blinked randomly. Their expression changed when the figure saw the caller, and an impossibly large grin bared its teeth in the dim light.
“Well, look who it is. Haven’t heard from you in a while.” The voice rang with a tone that made the eye narrow in pain. “How are your delightful little chimeras coming?”
“Oh, I can’t even tell anymore!” The woman wailed, drawing her wings up around her shoulders. “I don’t understand them any longer. These endless cycles of change and perfection. I don’t understand them! I don’t. They’re all the same now, all of them. All of them. What’s happening to me? What am I to do?”
The eye shuddered as the dark figure blinked in surprise. “Er, well-”
“There’s screaming behind you, Tormy,” the woman said suddenly, smiling behind her feathers. “More than usual? More than usual.” She giggled. “What are you up to these dark days? It’s been some time.”
The Tormentor’s face twitched briefly at the nickname but he laughed, making the eye shudder. A slender black arm gestured vaguely behind him and the eye’s vision followed obediently, changing swiftly to an overhead view of a field of chaos. Tiny figures collected in groups and scattered in the wake of larger ones as the Tormentor narrated. “The Relentless Slaughter. My latest game and the greatest of the Grand Battles yet, if my judgment is correct. Which it is. You know how it these things go, don’t you? Eight contestants, seven rounds, seven ways to die. I think you’ll find, though, that this particular battle is a little more interesting than that.” He snickered. Something on the field screamed.
A high, shivering laugh floated up from the woman’s throat and escaped between her teeth. “Such brilliance! Such elegance, such sheer ingenuity, such devastation. Magnificent. What vivacity there is in a lone life fighting to survive. What perseverance…” Her wings writhed behind her and became a long row of red bone spines trailing down her back. They flexed in a wave, stretching like fingers. “What a genius you are, Tormy. I’d never thought of such potential, never. What an idea. A captive war. What inspiration this is…” She paused for the briefest of moments. “I want one.”
The eye’s response to the Tormentor’s responding laugh was to roll in its socket in agony. Its lid dipped and threatened to shut entirely before it reoriented, bringing the shadowy figure back into reluctant view. “Oh, naturally. You would be the one to say that, wouldn’t you.” He smirked. “Sadly, I’m not in control of these things. You’ll have to speak to the Fool about it. Limits and rules and all that.”
“Technicalities, all of it. How dull. How stagnant. I’ll see to it eventually. These are meaningless things in the face of what must be done. Mere details.” She grinned, pressing a hand against the faltering eye. “What I will create will be beautiful. I am going to perform a sacrifice to life itself. Eight doves, eight altars. Beautiful. All of it, flawless. My work will echo for aeons.”
“I’m sure it will, K-”
The Tormentor’s voice was cut off abruptly as the eye finally gave out and closed, quivering under its lid. The woman stroked it comfortingly. None of her eyes had the strength to stare into that space for long, not even this one. She’d been so careful to take it from one of the things that grew in that darkness… The Tormentor would understand. It didn’t matter. They would see each other again.
She turned away from the wall of eyes and laughed. There were things she needed to do. Her fingers snapped, deafeningly loud in the otherwise empty room; instantly a neat-looking man of no real distinction appeared in its center, wearing a dull gray formal suit. Four arms sprouted from his shoulders, the uppermost pair of which was occupied with shielding his face from view. He sighed dully. He was used to this kind of thing.
“Crowe, go inform the Fool that I am claiming one of these Grand Battles for myself. I am going to make something beautiful. I am going to destroy everything to find the essence of life and what I am about to do will echo for ages in the eyes of the universe. There are no words for the majesty of what I will create.”
The man in the suit wearily pulled a well-worn notebook and pen from his suit pocket and began to scribble down every fourth word or so. “Pardoning my impertinence, this does rather seem like something you should inform him of yourself, if you’re being entirely serious at the moment.” He looked up briefly, apparently not troubled by the hands over his eyes. “Do you even know what you’d call this… affair of yours?”
“Names are meaningless, Crowe,” she said, laughing. “Call it anything you want. The Riotous Standstill, the Brilliant Ruin, the Vivacious Deadlock for all it matters.”
“Noted.”
She turned to the eyes, which shifted their focus from Crowe back to her in one sweeping wave. “All of the thousands of worlds my eyes can see, all of the billions of lives..” She drifted towards one of the largest, a terrifyingly blue monstrosity with a horizontal slash for a pupil that rolled ponderously from side to side. Leaning in towards it, her spines dissolved and became hair again, billowing and seething in a frantic tangle.
“I will search them all and when I have exhausted every possibility, seen every thriving world I will take from them my eight perfect sacrifices. My battle will begin and end in destruction that will shake the fibers of the universe itself, and I…”
“I will be its Spectator.”
______________________________________
Everything In Its Right Place: What’s this all about?
All I Need: Entry form. This is slightly necessary.
NAMES TO WATCH OUT FOR:
1. Godbot: Sir Cedric- #FF0000
2. Pharmacy: Merrifield- #9D0020- MELTED
3. Akumu: Dr. Harmon- SeaGreen
4. PickYerPoison: Klendel- #0000FF
5. Fluxus: Ivan Norst- DarkOliveGreen
6. Anomaly: Nalzaki- #999999 on #191919- STYX'D
7. SleepingOrange: Cascala- #336699
8. Ixcalibur: Empress Phere- 4B0082
_________________
PLOTTING AND PLANNING
Somewhere in a tower nervously clinging to the underbelly of a newly-formed dimension, something wearing the shape of a woman sighed.
Her hair, or what was trying to be hair, billowed around her in red clouds, obscuring the top half of her face. It moved constantly, twisting and winding around her, its tips wrapping her arms and hands. Gravity wasn’t a factor to it; strands broke off in mid-air and wrapped themselves in floating knots, tightened and dissolved into nothing. The woman made no move to stop it, even as curtains of it fell to cocoon around her, hiding her from view.
She sighed again. She was bored.
Everything had been so dull lately…
The woman stood, her hair twisting back in on itself and flaring into wings, huge red feathered things that shook themselves open sleepily. She half-swayed, half-strode over to the closest wall, as if unsteady on new feet, and leaned against it, running her hands over the pale surface. Next to her, an enormous eye growing directly out of the wall slowly swiveled and focused on her face. Its pupil contracted, then slowly relaxed, growing larger and larger until the woman could see an entire world revolving in its reflection. The eye blinked and a thousand images flashed over it in an instant, scenes of death and life and war and peace and famine and plenty… All beautiful. All of it.
Maybe it was getting old.
A hand rested on the eye’s lid for a moment, then slid it shut. It twitched, still searching, but the woman ignored it. Instead she slowly turned to face the rest of the eyes on the walls, now that they were all awake. They covered every inch of the room, ranging in size from ones taken from the smallest of insects to huge, glaring behemoths that rolled in their sockets languidly. Each was now focused on her, thousands of glittering eyes pointed at her face, flickering occasionally with flashes of faces, bodies, things crawling and lunging and seething with life. Primordial worlds and dying suns burned within them; countless lives began and countless more were extinguished side by side.
One eye in particular caught her attention. Completely black from pupil to sclera, it shone more dully than the others, visibly struggling to keep its lid open. As she approached it, it turned towards her weakly, blurred with exhaustion. She hadn’t used it in some time, but this one had always had to bear more strain than the rest. Much more. She supposed it wasn’t fair. The black eye trembled as she reached for it and bolted open in fear at her touch, its darkness deepening instantly. Slowly, painfully, a dark and twisted landscape came into focus and swirled away as the eye found its target.
A shadowy form, dark enough to seep light from its surroundings, emerged slowly from the darkness. Its outlines were vague, either by its own doing or the eye’s unwillingness to focus as its vision skipped from side to side. The figure tensed. An ever-changing number of arms twitched as it turned to show its face, speckled with dully glowing red eyes that blinked randomly. Their expression changed when the figure saw the caller, and an impossibly large grin bared its teeth in the dim light.
“Well, look who it is. Haven’t heard from you in a while.” The voice rang with a tone that made the eye narrow in pain. “How are your delightful little chimeras coming?”
“Oh, I can’t even tell anymore!” The woman wailed, drawing her wings up around her shoulders. “I don’t understand them any longer. These endless cycles of change and perfection. I don’t understand them! I don’t. They’re all the same now, all of them. All of them. What’s happening to me? What am I to do?”
The eye shuddered as the dark figure blinked in surprise. “Er, well-”
“There’s screaming behind you, Tormy,” the woman said suddenly, smiling behind her feathers. “More than usual? More than usual.” She giggled. “What are you up to these dark days? It’s been some time.”
The Tormentor’s face twitched briefly at the nickname but he laughed, making the eye shudder. A slender black arm gestured vaguely behind him and the eye’s vision followed obediently, changing swiftly to an overhead view of a field of chaos. Tiny figures collected in groups and scattered in the wake of larger ones as the Tormentor narrated. “The Relentless Slaughter. My latest game and the greatest of the Grand Battles yet, if my judgment is correct. Which it is. You know how it these things go, don’t you? Eight contestants, seven rounds, seven ways to die. I think you’ll find, though, that this particular battle is a little more interesting than that.” He snickered. Something on the field screamed.
A high, shivering laugh floated up from the woman’s throat and escaped between her teeth. “Such brilliance! Such elegance, such sheer ingenuity, such devastation. Magnificent. What vivacity there is in a lone life fighting to survive. What perseverance…” Her wings writhed behind her and became a long row of red bone spines trailing down her back. They flexed in a wave, stretching like fingers. “What a genius you are, Tormy. I’d never thought of such potential, never. What an idea. A captive war. What inspiration this is…” She paused for the briefest of moments. “I want one.”
The eye’s response to the Tormentor’s responding laugh was to roll in its socket in agony. Its lid dipped and threatened to shut entirely before it reoriented, bringing the shadowy figure back into reluctant view. “Oh, naturally. You would be the one to say that, wouldn’t you.” He smirked. “Sadly, I’m not in control of these things. You’ll have to speak to the Fool about it. Limits and rules and all that.”
“Technicalities, all of it. How dull. How stagnant. I’ll see to it eventually. These are meaningless things in the face of what must be done. Mere details.” She grinned, pressing a hand against the faltering eye. “What I will create will be beautiful. I am going to perform a sacrifice to life itself. Eight doves, eight altars. Beautiful. All of it, flawless. My work will echo for aeons.”
“I’m sure it will, K-”
The Tormentor’s voice was cut off abruptly as the eye finally gave out and closed, quivering under its lid. The woman stroked it comfortingly. None of her eyes had the strength to stare into that space for long, not even this one. She’d been so careful to take it from one of the things that grew in that darkness… The Tormentor would understand. It didn’t matter. They would see each other again.
She turned away from the wall of eyes and laughed. There were things she needed to do. Her fingers snapped, deafeningly loud in the otherwise empty room; instantly a neat-looking man of no real distinction appeared in its center, wearing a dull gray formal suit. Four arms sprouted from his shoulders, the uppermost pair of which was occupied with shielding his face from view. He sighed dully. He was used to this kind of thing.
“Crowe, go inform the Fool that I am claiming one of these Grand Battles for myself. I am going to make something beautiful. I am going to destroy everything to find the essence of life and what I am about to do will echo for ages in the eyes of the universe. There are no words for the majesty of what I will create.”
The man in the suit wearily pulled a well-worn notebook and pen from his suit pocket and began to scribble down every fourth word or so. “Pardoning my impertinence, this does rather seem like something you should inform him of yourself, if you’re being entirely serious at the moment.” He looked up briefly, apparently not troubled by the hands over his eyes. “Do you even know what you’d call this… affair of yours?”
“Names are meaningless, Crowe,” she said, laughing. “Call it anything you want. The Riotous Standstill, the Brilliant Ruin, the Vivacious Deadlock for all it matters.”
“Noted.”
She turned to the eyes, which shifted their focus from Crowe back to her in one sweeping wave. “All of the thousands of worlds my eyes can see, all of the billions of lives..” She drifted towards one of the largest, a terrifyingly blue monstrosity with a horizontal slash for a pupil that rolled ponderously from side to side. Leaning in towards it, her spines dissolved and became hair again, billowing and seething in a frantic tangle.
“I will search them all and when I have exhausted every possibility, seen every thriving world I will take from them my eight perfect sacrifices. My battle will begin and end in destruction that will shake the fibers of the universe itself, and I…”
“I will be its Spectator.”
______________________________________
Everything In Its Right Place: What’s this all about?
![[Image: vdintro.png]](https://img21.imageshack.us/img21/2395/vdintro.png)
All I Need: Entry form. This is slightly necessary.
NAMES TO WATCH OUT FOR:
1. Godbot: Sir Cedric- #FF0000
2. Pharmacy: Merrifield- #9D0020- MELTED
3. Akumu: Dr. Harmon- SeaGreen
4. PickYerPoison: Klendel- #0000FF
5. Fluxus: Ivan Norst- DarkOliveGreen
6. Anomaly: Nalzaki- #999999 on #191919- STYX'D
7. SleepingOrange: Cascala- #336699
8. Ixcalibur: Empress Phere- 4B0082
_________________
PLOTTING AND PLANNING