Re: The Vivacious Deadlock: S3G6: Round One: Genreshift
06-14-2011, 01:05 PM
Originally posted on MSPA by fluxus.
Storm clouds were forming overhead, a dark and ominous mass brooding above the nameless city toward which they were headed. Sitting, jostled, in the back seat of a rather grisly looking three-wheeled vehicle, Ivan Norst stared bleakly up at an inky sky, the stars now completely swallowed by purple clouds. Narrow windows stretched like gills along the length of the vehicle and through them Ivan could see two of the men that rode, on horseback, before them. The stench of oil and burning plastic permeated the air.
It couldn’t have taken more than an hour to reach the city walls after Ivan, under the guise of the young son of one Dr Matic, had met his current escort, seven men of varying ages who made up a sadly dressed motley crew. Two of the mustachioed men wore cowboy hats while another was decked from head to foot in medieval armor. None of them proved to be of particularly striking intelligence. The first two not-soldiers (as he’d taken to calling them) he’d had the pleasure of meeting sat in the front seats of the vehicle in which he currently rode. Looking as though they’d been freshly released from the set of a science fiction B movie, they bickered amongst themselves with a familiar ease. They weren’t actually soldiers, as Ivan had been quick to pick up on, but more of multi-genre themed gang that seemed to have dealings with this strange doctor. And if Ivan was honest, they seemed to be entirely comprised of outcasts. They’d elected to escort him to Matic on the odd chance that he was, in fact, the doctor’s ward and thought it too great a risk to leave him in the midst of a battlefield. Ivan was still surprised at how easily they’d accepted his lie.
They were deep within the city’s western quarter now, their space age means of transport strikingly out of place amongst buildings that looked to belong in the old west. Ivan half expected Clint Eastwood to jump out from behind one of the shops, pistol in hand and poncho ‘round his shoulders, but the streets were all but deserted. Thunder rolled in the sky and a lone tumble weed blew pitifully across the dirt road as the rain began to fall. It was nearly a half an hour later that they saw it.
What remained of an old saloon lay smoking in a heap before them, its roof caved in while small licks of flame still thrived amongst its ruin despite the rain. One of the horses reared in fright as the company of not-soldiers came to a halt.
“What the-” one of the men in the front seat began, but his exclamation was drowned out as the doors of the vehicle opened with a clamor of mechanical whirring. He turned around after exchanging a few quiet words with his partner and addressed Ivan directly.
“You,” the man began awkwardly, gesturing wildly with his hands. “You should…. Well. You should stay put. Here. We won’t be long. No need to worry.” He finished with a nod and made to follow his partner toward the smoking ruins. Ivan raised an eyebrow at his retreating form and mused that the supposed gang members appeared to be a good deal more frightened than he was. It didn’t take more than a moment before he was following them to the scene.
The doorframe to the saloon had, amazingly, been left standing and it was almost comical how the not-soldiers made to walk through it, despite the fact that much of the wall had either burned or crumbled away. Ivan followed them inside, raindrops smattering his shirt and blurring the lenses of his glasses. The water’s cold turned his skin to gooseflesh.
“-to be the work of some of the science fiction folk, I’d deem,” said the not-soldier dressed like a medieval knight in a flamboyant drawl. One of the cowboys held his hat over his heart, his eyes downcast. Six men had clustered in a semi circle within the saloon. Dust clouded up from the rubble on which they stood and hovered about their feet while bits of the wall continued to crumble to the floor.
“Now wait just a minute,” exclaimed the man who’d given Ivan orders to stay in the vehicle, clearly outraged by the knight’s proclamation. Ivan inched around them as they began to argue, taking care to step gingerly through the debris with his bare feet. There were many dead here, maybe fourteen, their corpses littered throughout the saloon haphazardly. Three still lived, he could feel their heartbeats through the floor, faint but steady. And he could feel the weight of the dead man around which the not-soldiers were crowded before he could see him. Or smell him.
The corpse over which his escort was arguing had been brutally mutilated. Gutted and torn, the body lay strewn against one of the collapsing walls, above it scrawled in a dark crust of blood, “SIR CEDRIC THE VALIANT SENDS HIS REGARDS”. One of them had been here, Ivan could feel it. Another contestant. And judging by the state of the corpse, they were still close.
The sight was grisly but grotesquely fascinating, and Ivan found himself unable to look away out of a combination of horror and utter shock. The man’s entrails spilled out over his belt where an old fashioned pistol was slung. Ivan’s fingers twitched and, after eyeing each of the present not-soldiers to make sure they were deep in the argument, he snatched it from the man’s holster. The smell that assaulted Ivan then was almost more than he could bear, and he covered his nose and mouth with his shirt in a vain attempt to keep himself from dry-heaving. He tucked the pistol into the waistband of his jeans not a moment too soon.
“Gentlemen!“ shouted the seventh and final not-soldier as he stepped into the saloon. He was dressed like a detective from the 1940s and had painted his exposed skin grey so that it appeared he’d stepped straight out of an old black and white movie. The bits of pink flesh that had been uncovered by the rainwater were all that gave him away. “Useless argument does nothing for us. You know what we‘ve been hired to do so I suggest you act the professionals Matic took you for. Unless you‘d rather I remind you.” He swept aside his coat to reveal the gun that hung at his belt, it’s barrel long and ugly. This man was clearly the group’s commander and Ivan was slightly impressed at the way he dominated their attention. Their bickering had ceased immediately when he’d spoken up.
“Qyp, Asus,” he said, “continue to escort young Mr Matic here to his father’s workshop.” He nodded to Ivan, apparently the only person to have noticed him. The man called Asus’ eyes widened to find Ivan standing behind him while Qyp nodded and murmured a quick “Yessir!”
“And the rest of you lot are staying with me,” the detective began. “We scour the place, you know the drill.” And with that his posse set to work.
Asus grabbed Ivan by the shoulder and muttered, “Back to the car with ye” but Ivan held his ground. “There are three survivors,” he said, addressing the detective. His voice sounded hoarse.
“C’mon, you,” Asus said but the detective held Ivan‘s eyes.
“There’s one beneath the beam there,” Ivan gestured to the far right corner of the building. “And two along the remains of the… of the bar.”
The detective nodded. “Survivors, eh?” he said, and ugly grin twisting across his face. “You heard the man!” he shouted to his crew, “Matic pays extra for the living so get on it!”
Ivan felt as though his blood had run cold.
---
The ride to Matic’s abode was a short one. Ivan watched the two men where they sat in front of him, Qyp at what he could barely compare to the wheel while Asus sat beside him and badmouthed Bartemus the knight. Only when he was certain that they were deeply engaged did he dare to remove the pistol from his jeans and the pen from the collar of his shirt. Gingerly, but with more precision than he knew any human should be capable of, he scrawled a series of symbols onto the barrel of the gun that carved themselves into the metal after they were written.
“How’d you know where those survivors were anyway?” Asus asked suddenly, turning his eyes to Ivan who quickly slipped the pistol beneath his leg. But before he had time to answer Qyp piped in as he parked the vehicle.
“We’re here. And like I said to you earlier, I says. You need to quit with the questions.”
The castle in which Matic had chosen to make his workshop reeked of a Mad Scientist; its white stone walls were unwashed and overgrown with lichen while wires hung from the roof and pored out of windows and cracks in the stonework alike. The two not-soldiers led Ivan to a parlor that at one point must have been grand. Its ceiling was high and vaulted and intricately gilded paper peeled away from the walls. Great machines buzzed and hummed throughout the room and sent off waves of current that set the hairs on the back of Ivan’s neck on end. Considering the size of the place, a fairly limited amount of people were at work within the castle’s many halls. Ivan counted twenty-seven stationed in the nearest rooms, seventeen patrolling the halls, a frenzy of motion in two separate rooms, and one feather light set of footfalls that was slinking its way from room to room, pausing here and there whenever a guard got too close. Ivan’s heart began to race as he watched her. This person, female, whoever she was, did not belong here.
One of the scientists, dressed appropriately in white lab coat and green rubber gloves, had come down to greet them after Qyp had pulled a long brocaded rope and rung a bell echoing deep within the bowels of the castle. The man had listened uninterestedly to Asus as he presented Ivan, while Ivan had held his breath, silently planning.
“Doctor Matic doesn’t have a son,” the scientist began, exasperated, after Asus concluded his tale. “Nor does he want one. Now be gone; we’ve no time for the trivialities of-” But his sentence was cut short as a gunshot rang through the hall; his body collapsed to the floor with a resounding thud, a deep gash at his temple.
‘Please don’t be dead, please don’t be dead, please don’t be dead,’ Ivan pleaded frantically, silently, as he watched the man fall. The program he’d coded into the pistol should have, if everything had configured correctly, slowed the firing mechanism and transfigured the weapon into something of a stun-gun. As soon as he felt the scientist’s heartbeat through the floor, Ivan turned the gun to Asus and Qyp. Asus he swiftly shot at the base of his neck but Qyp was quick and had already turned to face him, a strange sort of laser clutched in his hand.
“They’re not dead, I promise you,” Ivan said, his voice low as they stood facing each other, weapons raised. “Remember what you said? About not asking questions?” There was a desperate edge to his words.
Qyp shook his head and opened his mouth to say something but Ivan fired, not waiting to here what he had to say. He was out of the room before Qyp hit the floor. No one had stirred in the castle at the sound of gunfire but it was only a matter of time before the scene was discovered.
Even with his ever-extending mental map of the Castle Matic, Ivan spent a nerve-wracking forty minutes prowling the halls and avoiding detection before he found what he’d been looking for. But finally, finally she was there. At the end of a deserted and sterile white hallway, utterly invisible to the naked eye, she was there.
Ivan held his gun aloft, pointed directly at her chest. “You’re looking for something.” He hoped he sounded bolder than he felt as he schooled his features into a cold mask. Her movements stilled and he could feel her eyes on him.
“You’re looking for something,” he repeated as she crept closer. They began to circle each other. “And I have every mind to alert the rest of Matic’s people to your whereabouts.” He could hear a guard in the next hallway over. “But it just so happens that I’m looking for something too.” She inched even closer, dangerously close, but he held up a finger. “My body is wired to this place, all of ours are. You touch me and they’ll know. You touch me and the guard in the next hallway over will be on you before you have time to wipe your hands clean.” She stopped descending on him and he felt himself breathe again. “But,” his voice was barely above a whisper. “If you help me, we both win.” He smiled.
“The choice is yours.”
Storm clouds were forming overhead, a dark and ominous mass brooding above the nameless city toward which they were headed. Sitting, jostled, in the back seat of a rather grisly looking three-wheeled vehicle, Ivan Norst stared bleakly up at an inky sky, the stars now completely swallowed by purple clouds. Narrow windows stretched like gills along the length of the vehicle and through them Ivan could see two of the men that rode, on horseback, before them. The stench of oil and burning plastic permeated the air.
It couldn’t have taken more than an hour to reach the city walls after Ivan, under the guise of the young son of one Dr Matic, had met his current escort, seven men of varying ages who made up a sadly dressed motley crew. Two of the mustachioed men wore cowboy hats while another was decked from head to foot in medieval armor. None of them proved to be of particularly striking intelligence. The first two not-soldiers (as he’d taken to calling them) he’d had the pleasure of meeting sat in the front seats of the vehicle in which he currently rode. Looking as though they’d been freshly released from the set of a science fiction B movie, they bickered amongst themselves with a familiar ease. They weren’t actually soldiers, as Ivan had been quick to pick up on, but more of multi-genre themed gang that seemed to have dealings with this strange doctor. And if Ivan was honest, they seemed to be entirely comprised of outcasts. They’d elected to escort him to Matic on the odd chance that he was, in fact, the doctor’s ward and thought it too great a risk to leave him in the midst of a battlefield. Ivan was still surprised at how easily they’d accepted his lie.
They were deep within the city’s western quarter now, their space age means of transport strikingly out of place amongst buildings that looked to belong in the old west. Ivan half expected Clint Eastwood to jump out from behind one of the shops, pistol in hand and poncho ‘round his shoulders, but the streets were all but deserted. Thunder rolled in the sky and a lone tumble weed blew pitifully across the dirt road as the rain began to fall. It was nearly a half an hour later that they saw it.
What remained of an old saloon lay smoking in a heap before them, its roof caved in while small licks of flame still thrived amongst its ruin despite the rain. One of the horses reared in fright as the company of not-soldiers came to a halt.
“What the-” one of the men in the front seat began, but his exclamation was drowned out as the doors of the vehicle opened with a clamor of mechanical whirring. He turned around after exchanging a few quiet words with his partner and addressed Ivan directly.
“You,” the man began awkwardly, gesturing wildly with his hands. “You should…. Well. You should stay put. Here. We won’t be long. No need to worry.” He finished with a nod and made to follow his partner toward the smoking ruins. Ivan raised an eyebrow at his retreating form and mused that the supposed gang members appeared to be a good deal more frightened than he was. It didn’t take more than a moment before he was following them to the scene.
The doorframe to the saloon had, amazingly, been left standing and it was almost comical how the not-soldiers made to walk through it, despite the fact that much of the wall had either burned or crumbled away. Ivan followed them inside, raindrops smattering his shirt and blurring the lenses of his glasses. The water’s cold turned his skin to gooseflesh.
“-to be the work of some of the science fiction folk, I’d deem,” said the not-soldier dressed like a medieval knight in a flamboyant drawl. One of the cowboys held his hat over his heart, his eyes downcast. Six men had clustered in a semi circle within the saloon. Dust clouded up from the rubble on which they stood and hovered about their feet while bits of the wall continued to crumble to the floor.
“Now wait just a minute,” exclaimed the man who’d given Ivan orders to stay in the vehicle, clearly outraged by the knight’s proclamation. Ivan inched around them as they began to argue, taking care to step gingerly through the debris with his bare feet. There were many dead here, maybe fourteen, their corpses littered throughout the saloon haphazardly. Three still lived, he could feel their heartbeats through the floor, faint but steady. And he could feel the weight of the dead man around which the not-soldiers were crowded before he could see him. Or smell him.
The corpse over which his escort was arguing had been brutally mutilated. Gutted and torn, the body lay strewn against one of the collapsing walls, above it scrawled in a dark crust of blood, “SIR CEDRIC THE VALIANT SENDS HIS REGARDS”. One of them had been here, Ivan could feel it. Another contestant. And judging by the state of the corpse, they were still close.
The sight was grisly but grotesquely fascinating, and Ivan found himself unable to look away out of a combination of horror and utter shock. The man’s entrails spilled out over his belt where an old fashioned pistol was slung. Ivan’s fingers twitched and, after eyeing each of the present not-soldiers to make sure they were deep in the argument, he snatched it from the man’s holster. The smell that assaulted Ivan then was almost more than he could bear, and he covered his nose and mouth with his shirt in a vain attempt to keep himself from dry-heaving. He tucked the pistol into the waistband of his jeans not a moment too soon.
“Gentlemen!“ shouted the seventh and final not-soldier as he stepped into the saloon. He was dressed like a detective from the 1940s and had painted his exposed skin grey so that it appeared he’d stepped straight out of an old black and white movie. The bits of pink flesh that had been uncovered by the rainwater were all that gave him away. “Useless argument does nothing for us. You know what we‘ve been hired to do so I suggest you act the professionals Matic took you for. Unless you‘d rather I remind you.” He swept aside his coat to reveal the gun that hung at his belt, it’s barrel long and ugly. This man was clearly the group’s commander and Ivan was slightly impressed at the way he dominated their attention. Their bickering had ceased immediately when he’d spoken up.
“Qyp, Asus,” he said, “continue to escort young Mr Matic here to his father’s workshop.” He nodded to Ivan, apparently the only person to have noticed him. The man called Asus’ eyes widened to find Ivan standing behind him while Qyp nodded and murmured a quick “Yessir!”
“And the rest of you lot are staying with me,” the detective began. “We scour the place, you know the drill.” And with that his posse set to work.
Asus grabbed Ivan by the shoulder and muttered, “Back to the car with ye” but Ivan held his ground. “There are three survivors,” he said, addressing the detective. His voice sounded hoarse.
“C’mon, you,” Asus said but the detective held Ivan‘s eyes.
“There’s one beneath the beam there,” Ivan gestured to the far right corner of the building. “And two along the remains of the… of the bar.”
The detective nodded. “Survivors, eh?” he said, and ugly grin twisting across his face. “You heard the man!” he shouted to his crew, “Matic pays extra for the living so get on it!”
Ivan felt as though his blood had run cold.
---
The ride to Matic’s abode was a short one. Ivan watched the two men where they sat in front of him, Qyp at what he could barely compare to the wheel while Asus sat beside him and badmouthed Bartemus the knight. Only when he was certain that they were deeply engaged did he dare to remove the pistol from his jeans and the pen from the collar of his shirt. Gingerly, but with more precision than he knew any human should be capable of, he scrawled a series of symbols onto the barrel of the gun that carved themselves into the metal after they were written.
“How’d you know where those survivors were anyway?” Asus asked suddenly, turning his eyes to Ivan who quickly slipped the pistol beneath his leg. But before he had time to answer Qyp piped in as he parked the vehicle.
“We’re here. And like I said to you earlier, I says. You need to quit with the questions.”
The castle in which Matic had chosen to make his workshop reeked of a Mad Scientist; its white stone walls were unwashed and overgrown with lichen while wires hung from the roof and pored out of windows and cracks in the stonework alike. The two not-soldiers led Ivan to a parlor that at one point must have been grand. Its ceiling was high and vaulted and intricately gilded paper peeled away from the walls. Great machines buzzed and hummed throughout the room and sent off waves of current that set the hairs on the back of Ivan’s neck on end. Considering the size of the place, a fairly limited amount of people were at work within the castle’s many halls. Ivan counted twenty-seven stationed in the nearest rooms, seventeen patrolling the halls, a frenzy of motion in two separate rooms, and one feather light set of footfalls that was slinking its way from room to room, pausing here and there whenever a guard got too close. Ivan’s heart began to race as he watched her. This person, female, whoever she was, did not belong here.
One of the scientists, dressed appropriately in white lab coat and green rubber gloves, had come down to greet them after Qyp had pulled a long brocaded rope and rung a bell echoing deep within the bowels of the castle. The man had listened uninterestedly to Asus as he presented Ivan, while Ivan had held his breath, silently planning.
“Doctor Matic doesn’t have a son,” the scientist began, exasperated, after Asus concluded his tale. “Nor does he want one. Now be gone; we’ve no time for the trivialities of-” But his sentence was cut short as a gunshot rang through the hall; his body collapsed to the floor with a resounding thud, a deep gash at his temple.
‘Please don’t be dead, please don’t be dead, please don’t be dead,’ Ivan pleaded frantically, silently, as he watched the man fall. The program he’d coded into the pistol should have, if everything had configured correctly, slowed the firing mechanism and transfigured the weapon into something of a stun-gun. As soon as he felt the scientist’s heartbeat through the floor, Ivan turned the gun to Asus and Qyp. Asus he swiftly shot at the base of his neck but Qyp was quick and had already turned to face him, a strange sort of laser clutched in his hand.
“They’re not dead, I promise you,” Ivan said, his voice low as they stood facing each other, weapons raised. “Remember what you said? About not asking questions?” There was a desperate edge to his words.
Qyp shook his head and opened his mouth to say something but Ivan fired, not waiting to here what he had to say. He was out of the room before Qyp hit the floor. No one had stirred in the castle at the sound of gunfire but it was only a matter of time before the scene was discovered.
Even with his ever-extending mental map of the Castle Matic, Ivan spent a nerve-wracking forty minutes prowling the halls and avoiding detection before he found what he’d been looking for. But finally, finally she was there. At the end of a deserted and sterile white hallway, utterly invisible to the naked eye, she was there.
Ivan held his gun aloft, pointed directly at her chest. “You’re looking for something.” He hoped he sounded bolder than he felt as he schooled his features into a cold mask. Her movements stilled and he could feel her eyes on him.
“You’re looking for something,” he repeated as she crept closer. They began to circle each other. “And I have every mind to alert the rest of Matic’s people to your whereabouts.” He could hear a guard in the next hallway over. “But it just so happens that I’m looking for something too.” She inched even closer, dangerously close, but he held up a finger. “My body is wired to this place, all of ours are. You touch me and they’ll know. You touch me and the guard in the next hallway over will be on you before you have time to wipe your hands clean.” She stopped descending on him and he felt himself breathe again. “But,” his voice was barely above a whisper. “If you help me, we both win.” He smiled.
“The choice is yours.”