Re: The Vivacious Deadlock: S3G6: Round One: Genreshift
10-14-2011, 08:19 PM
Originally posted on MSPA by engineclock.
The Spectator sat in a chair of bone, perfectly still.
Her pose was oddly loose, as if some careless person had set her up like a doll and left her there. Slack ropes of her hair trailed on the floor like the train of an enormous gown, coiling around her in a limp tangle and gathering in pools around her feet. Curtains of it lay plastered to the sides of her face, framing a calm smile; her expression was blank. She might have been asleep if it wasn’t for the absolute placidity of that smile, so delicately written on her face that it seemed about to slide completely off.
The air flickered; there was a sound like a door being opened and Crowe appeared without warning in the center of the room, pen and notebook in hand. The expression on his face seemed to indicate that wherever he had just come from had been somewhere not entirely to his liking. Glancing disapprovingly over an open page, he straightened the cuffs of his immaculate suit and cleared his throat; whatever he was about to say died in his mouth as he caught sight of the Spectator on her chair, sitting quietly in a sea of red.
“He’s dead now,” she said softly into the silence. “He died some time ago.”
Slowly Crowe tucked the notebook back into his pocket, smoothing out the nonexistent creases. “Ah,” he said reluctantly. “Yes. That.”
“It was slow,” the Spectator continued. Her smile never faltered. “Tormy knew what he was doing when he killed him. His life ended inch by inch. I felt all of it. It was so beautiful I nearly wept. How does that happen, Crowe? How could he die? We were never alive, he and I. We were the same.”
Her assistant said nothing for a moment, the little of what could be seen of his face unchanging. “Kasaiyya,” he began, watching her twitch her head at the name, barely able to move under the weight of her limp hair. “He wasn’t-”
“He was the same as I.” The Spectator’s voice was suddenly cold. In the strange intangible that way that always accompanied it, Crowe felt her eyes turn their gaze on him. “I thought we would stay separate, that nothing would change, but there was something of me in him when he died and I felt it. I felt what should have been his soul leave his body in agony, second after precious second until there was nothing left.” She looked down at her hands, lying loosely on the arms of the chair. “He was never alive. How do you kill what isn’t alive? How do you kill what’s already dead?”
“Why are you asking this?”
“Is it that easy to die? Is it so simple? You should know. You’re mortal. You aren’t like us.”
Crowe narrowed his eyes. “I can’t see how that matters.”
“Can’t you?” She turned her head towards him, still smiling. “I saved you once. You were so close to becoming like me. You feared it more than anything. There was nothing you wouldn’t have done to stop it, nothing you didn’t promise me. Why was that, Crowe? I never thought to ask you and now it’s too late. What did you have to fear? Was it so bad knowing that you could die, that you would? I wish I knew. I can’t understand it. I wonder if he did, before it happened.” She turned away again, her voice growing thoughtful. “I wonder what he would say.”
“It doesn’t matter what happened to him,” Crowe said exasperatedly. “Whether he died or not isn’t important. You are still alive and he-”
There was the sound of a taut string snapping and suddenly Crowe was slammed against a wall, a thunder of beating wings assaulting his ears and the Spectator’s smiling face an inch from his. In his shock all he could see was the blankness of her expression, as rigid as if it had been carved on to her. The smooth stretch of skin where her eyes should have been stared blindly at him through the cover of his hands. “How dare you,” she breathed, “how dare you mock me like this. Alive? I was never alive. I was made from death and I have been death for as long as I have existed. He was the same, he was, I felt it, and he died a bloody death screaming for a mercy that didn’t exist. ‘Help me, help me, you can’t do this, I’m you, I’m you I’m you I’m you I’m you,’ he said. I let him die. Was that it, then? Was that the only aspect of life allowed to us? Some pitiful screaming end to whatever it is we are?”
“Listen to yourself,” Crowe hissed. He shoved her away, absurdly aware of the fact that the Spectator had forgotten to change her expression. She always did that when she was upset. “You both knew you were never going to save him. He wouldn’t have done it for you.”
“But that wasn’t it, was it?” she said, her hysterical tone at odds with her pleasant smile. “Was it? Do you know what he was planning, what he was going to do if he lived? Do you know what he was going to do to me?” She was losing control over her form, the dead weight of her hair dissolving into a single mass of boiling red. Her face had gone completely stiff; she had stopped bothering to try to speak through it.
“I know. It was what you always wanted, wasn’t it? He only had to ask and you would have gone along with it,” Crowe said coldly. He stepped to the side of her, his movements deliberate. She turned to face him; her features disintegrated into a fluid mass, her lower half flowing into a coil of muscle and scale that undulated like a whip. Around him he could feel the walls of the tower humming with a sound that shook itself inside into his bones. “Whatever happened between you and him ended when he died. His plans were over from the moment they began, absurd as they were. He was a fool to make them and you were a fool to believe him, Kasaiyya, even for a second. Tell me,” he said, raising his voice, “did you truly imagine that it would work? Are you that blind? Remember what you are.
Her response was a wordless scream delivered through jaws that were suddenly no longer anything human, serpentine and terrible with teeth that ran with blackish fluid from where they had burst out of her skull. Her shoulders rolled forward and melted back into a torrent of flesh that all at once seemed to suggest arms, legs, a torso, a massive beating heart. Pale skin liquefied, turned transparent; for the briefest instant Crowe could see the roiling mass of nothingness that comprised her before it solidified into a wall of armor. The last vestiges of her form were torn away in shreds as a monstrous coil of scale and bone swelled into existence where the Spectator had stood, loops of muscle winding through the air and slamming against the walls. Through it all a terrible scream arose, a thunderous howl that threatened to crush him under a hammer of a sound. Crowe didn’t flinch. As the shadow of the monstrosity fell over him and eclipsed his view of the ceiling he looked up and smiled thinly.
“Back to our senses, are we?” he said.
“I WILL END THIS NOW,” the red worm roared, jaws stretched impossibly wide. Its head swung wildly from side to side, spattering black fluid across the tower’s floor. “I WILL NOT BE DEATH. I WILL NOT SUCCUMB TO THIS FATE. NO ONE WILL DENY ME WHAT SHOULD HAVE BEEN MINE, WHAT SHOULD ALWAYS HAVE BEEN MINE! I WILL NOT STAY A SLAVE TO DEATH!”
All at once Crowe was aware that the eyes of the tower were open, pupils shrunken down to pinpricks as the Spectator drew upon them, red tendrils erupting from her sides and piercing the floor with a series of deafening cracks like a thousand bones breaking at once. Blood pooled up from the shattered surfaces, frothing in the worm’s convulsions. The eyes rolled from side to side desperately, frenzied in their pain, and with sudden clarity Crowe saw that their visions had vanished and been replaced by endless reflections of the Spectator’s myriad forms. The worm’s coils strained against the walls, threatening to buckle them; above it all rose a roar that climbed to an unbearable pitch before descending once more into barely recognizable words.
“BEAR WITNESS,” the worm screamed, “I AM GOING TO CREATE LIFE.”
In the center of the tower the red worm snapped its enormous jaws into the empty air and trembled, its coils frozen in the throes of rage. For the slightest instant, the time it took to draw a breath, there was a silence so absolute that Crowe found he could not hear his heart beating in his chest.
“You can’t,” he said.
She did.
__________________________
It started as a whine on the edge of the contestants’ hearing, a dull buzz that resonated in the backs of their skulls. It was nothing more than a whisper, the slightest suggestion that something was amiss; most of them didn’t notice it at all, and those who did dismissed it as a side effect of the constant genreshifting. Not a single one of them thought to give it any more thought than that.
As it grew, however, it became harder and harder to ignore. The more attentive among the contestants began to notice a strange tone to it, as if a broken record hidden somewhere nearby was stuck playing over a single note. The more they focused on it the more the sound seemed to elude them: it had no direction, no indication of origin other than the vague feeling that it was close, somewhere they should have been able to see. The more paranoid among them looked around for a source and, finding none, assumed that it was some weapon wielded by an unknown attacker and prepared accordingly. The rest simply wondered if they were going mad.
Then without warning the sound doubled in intensity, and even the skeptics found themselves clutching their heads. The sound was clearly distinguishable now, a high wavering singing like a finger trailed over the rim of a glass that infiltrated their minds the way no ordinary sound should have done, interrupting their thoughts and drowning out all the noises of the dying city. The sound continued to grow in uneven bursts, driving all semblance of thought from their heads and leaving only a brilliant pain that burned like fire within them, everywhere and nowhere at once. Still it rose, higher and higher, pushing them beyond what they thought they could endure until all they knew and all they were was a searing song of pain and fear.
One of them fell, no longer able to support themselves, and then another, clawing at the floor senselessly in their agony. Someone screamed, someone bit their tongue; all of them regardless of their location felt the same incredible pressure building inside their skulls and driving them out of their minds with its insistency. Every time they thought it could go no higher it spiked again, up and up until they could no longer tell it apart from their thoughts, could no longer remember if there had ever been a time when the sound did not exist and they weren’t a part of it, drowning in a seamless torrent of a woman’s voice, screaming and screaming and screaming.
Then, as quickly as it had begun, it stopped.
________________
A door slammed; Crowe stepped out onto a mountain.
His suit was soaked from the knees down in red and black stains that shone wetly in the light from the burning buildings. A massive burn zigzagged across his side and ran down his leg; he walked with a heavy limp on his right side as he made his way out onto the terrain. Corpses in varying states of dismemberment littered the ground, crisscrossing the patched-looking rock with streams of blood and other things that might once have been attached to a body. He walked through them as if they didn’t exist, holding his notebook in a white-knuckled grip. The parts of his face not smeared with blood were pale.
It was difficult to tell upon first sight that the bodies surrounding him were human. Some sported pieces of metal fused onto them at strategic locations; others were covered in fur and feathers that melted into each other with little regard for logic or taste. Most of them were in poses that suggested that their last few moments had been filled with interpretive dance. Delicately he picked his way between them, nudging the occasional piece of meaty shrapnel out of the way. He was searching for one in particular; he found it by the smell.
At the edge of a puddle of former contestant, Crowe began to write. A delicate script that seemed to curl back in on itself in ever more complicated patterns appeared on the page, forming strange shapes that quickly tangled together into an illegible mass of lines and dots. His hand barely seemed to touch the paper as a complex series of symbols appeared, encircled by a ring and connected to one another by a web of hair-thin lines. Crowe paused, looked over the page; in a single movement he ripped it out of the book and dropped it to the ground.
Instantly the contestants appeared before him in a neat circle, clustered around the sad remnants that had once been Merrifield. Most of them were caught in the awkward act of trying to remember where their brains were; a few didn’t even register the sudden change in location. Crowe looked them over in disapproval. He made a distracted attempt to straighten the tears in his jacket before clearing his throat pointedly at the gathered seven.
“Well,” he said, folding the book closed, “that’s it. Excellent job, everyone. I can’t even begin to say how proud we are.”
The contestants exchanged glances among themselves. Phere raised an eyebrow.
“However-”
“No,” Cedric said, a thunderous frown appearing on his face. Beneath him, Horsegark snorted. “This isn’t going to work.”
The four-armed man stared.
“We’re already in one of these, er,” the knight continued with a casual wave of his hand, oblivious to any change in atmosphere, “battle things. With the red angel woman with the great big tits.” He held his hands a considerable distance from his chest.
“The Spectator,” Crowe said.
“Yes,” Cedric agreed. “I mean, I can understand why you’d want us, especially myself. But we’re already been taken, see, you can’t just run off with us.”
“I am here in her interest. She is still the one managing you.”
“What’s got her so busy she can’t come get us herself?”
There was a long silence. “She’s indisposed at the moment,” Crowe said, “I’m afraid.” A drop of blood fell from his hair and landed in a puddle of the same.
“Did you kill her?” Phere cut in sharply.
“What?”
“How did you do it? Tell me.”
“She’s not dead!”
“What about you, can you be killed?”
Cedric gave an offended snort and rested a hand on Sigrar’s pommel. “Of course he can, look at him. He doesn’t even have a sword.” Horsegark nodded approvingly.
“The Spectator didn’t either, that doesn’t mean anything,” Phere shot back. “He brought us here. He’s probably the same sort of thing that she is. Or was.”
“Nah,” Cedric scoffed, “Why would he be working for her, then?”
“Why the hell are you arguing about this?” Crowe said angrily. “One of your number just died!”
The contestants were silent for a moment, their expressions ranging from regret to apathy. The puddle that had been Merrifield gave a desultory bubble.
“You could definitely kill him.”
“But how?”
“We are not discussing this!” Crowe cried. “This round is over! You’re done!”
“He doesn’t have wings either, I expect that’s probably part of it.”
“Will you shut up, you great fucking musclebound idiot,” the suited man snarled, turning on his good leg to face Cedric. He pointed furiously to the gash on his side with one of his arms. “What does this look like to you? What does it fucking look like? Do you think I popped down here to have a pleasant chat, is that it? Looking for some casual conversation with a glorified thug who’s clearly got compensation issues to work out? Because this is completely thrilling, let me tell you. I am dazzled by the sheer breadth of your intellect. She only tried to tear herself in half, that’s all, that’s all I had to deal with, it wasn’t like I-”
“Are you still trying to get us to join a battle?” said Cedric. He looked confused.
“No,” Crowe said, flipping to a new page and clicking his pen. “I am not.”
“Because it does kind of sound like-”
“Your next round,” Crowe said loudly, “will take place on the battlefield between the Thünderwölf clan and the city of Santa Nada. The siege has lasted generations; both of their cultures revolve around this conflict and the weaponization of specific forms of music used in such. You will be placed at random locations between the longship fleet and the city’s center. It is important to note that weapons such as you understand them do not exist in this world; any that you have on you will be altered accordingly upon arrival.”
“What if our weapons are broken?” Ivan asked hesitantly.
“I don’t care,” Crowe snapped. “Figure it out.” He flicked the pen across the notebook page in a swift X and rapidly circled the center; a hundred doors slammed simultaneously and the contestants were gone.
The silence in their absence was overwhelming. Crowe let himself sink onto the rocks and sat there in exhaustion as the remains of Merrifield bubbled quietly away.
________________
The Spectator sat in a chair of bone, perfectly still.
Her pose was oddly loose, as if some careless person had set her up like a doll and left her there. Slack ropes of her hair trailed on the floor like the train of an enormous gown, coiling around her in a limp tangle and gathering in pools around her feet. Curtains of it lay plastered to the sides of her face, framing a calm smile; her expression was blank. She might have been asleep if it wasn’t for the absolute placidity of that smile, so delicately written on her face that it seemed about to slide completely off.
The air flickered; there was a sound like a door being opened and Crowe appeared without warning in the center of the room, pen and notebook in hand. The expression on his face seemed to indicate that wherever he had just come from had been somewhere not entirely to his liking. Glancing disapprovingly over an open page, he straightened the cuffs of his immaculate suit and cleared his throat; whatever he was about to say died in his mouth as he caught sight of the Spectator on her chair, sitting quietly in a sea of red.
“He’s dead now,” she said softly into the silence. “He died some time ago.”
Slowly Crowe tucked the notebook back into his pocket, smoothing out the nonexistent creases. “Ah,” he said reluctantly. “Yes. That.”
“It was slow,” the Spectator continued. Her smile never faltered. “Tormy knew what he was doing when he killed him. His life ended inch by inch. I felt all of it. It was so beautiful I nearly wept. How does that happen, Crowe? How could he die? We were never alive, he and I. We were the same.”
Her assistant said nothing for a moment, the little of what could be seen of his face unchanging. “Kasaiyya,” he began, watching her twitch her head at the name, barely able to move under the weight of her limp hair. “He wasn’t-”
“He was the same as I.” The Spectator’s voice was suddenly cold. In the strange intangible that way that always accompanied it, Crowe felt her eyes turn their gaze on him. “I thought we would stay separate, that nothing would change, but there was something of me in him when he died and I felt it. I felt what should have been his soul leave his body in agony, second after precious second until there was nothing left.” She looked down at her hands, lying loosely on the arms of the chair. “He was never alive. How do you kill what isn’t alive? How do you kill what’s already dead?”
“Why are you asking this?”
“Is it that easy to die? Is it so simple? You should know. You’re mortal. You aren’t like us.”
Crowe narrowed his eyes. “I can’t see how that matters.”
“Can’t you?” She turned her head towards him, still smiling. “I saved you once. You were so close to becoming like me. You feared it more than anything. There was nothing you wouldn’t have done to stop it, nothing you didn’t promise me. Why was that, Crowe? I never thought to ask you and now it’s too late. What did you have to fear? Was it so bad knowing that you could die, that you would? I wish I knew. I can’t understand it. I wonder if he did, before it happened.” She turned away again, her voice growing thoughtful. “I wonder what he would say.”
“It doesn’t matter what happened to him,” Crowe said exasperatedly. “Whether he died or not isn’t important. You are still alive and he-”
There was the sound of a taut string snapping and suddenly Crowe was slammed against a wall, a thunder of beating wings assaulting his ears and the Spectator’s smiling face an inch from his. In his shock all he could see was the blankness of her expression, as rigid as if it had been carved on to her. The smooth stretch of skin where her eyes should have been stared blindly at him through the cover of his hands. “How dare you,” she breathed, “how dare you mock me like this. Alive? I was never alive. I was made from death and I have been death for as long as I have existed. He was the same, he was, I felt it, and he died a bloody death screaming for a mercy that didn’t exist. ‘Help me, help me, you can’t do this, I’m you, I’m you I’m you I’m you I’m you,’ he said. I let him die. Was that it, then? Was that the only aspect of life allowed to us? Some pitiful screaming end to whatever it is we are?”
“Listen to yourself,” Crowe hissed. He shoved her away, absurdly aware of the fact that the Spectator had forgotten to change her expression. She always did that when she was upset. “You both knew you were never going to save him. He wouldn’t have done it for you.”
“But that wasn’t it, was it?” she said, her hysterical tone at odds with her pleasant smile. “Was it? Do you know what he was planning, what he was going to do if he lived? Do you know what he was going to do to me?” She was losing control over her form, the dead weight of her hair dissolving into a single mass of boiling red. Her face had gone completely stiff; she had stopped bothering to try to speak through it.
“I know. It was what you always wanted, wasn’t it? He only had to ask and you would have gone along with it,” Crowe said coldly. He stepped to the side of her, his movements deliberate. She turned to face him; her features disintegrated into a fluid mass, her lower half flowing into a coil of muscle and scale that undulated like a whip. Around him he could feel the walls of the tower humming with a sound that shook itself inside into his bones. “Whatever happened between you and him ended when he died. His plans were over from the moment they began, absurd as they were. He was a fool to make them and you were a fool to believe him, Kasaiyya, even for a second. Tell me,” he said, raising his voice, “did you truly imagine that it would work? Are you that blind? Remember what you are.
Her response was a wordless scream delivered through jaws that were suddenly no longer anything human, serpentine and terrible with teeth that ran with blackish fluid from where they had burst out of her skull. Her shoulders rolled forward and melted back into a torrent of flesh that all at once seemed to suggest arms, legs, a torso, a massive beating heart. Pale skin liquefied, turned transparent; for the briefest instant Crowe could see the roiling mass of nothingness that comprised her before it solidified into a wall of armor. The last vestiges of her form were torn away in shreds as a monstrous coil of scale and bone swelled into existence where the Spectator had stood, loops of muscle winding through the air and slamming against the walls. Through it all a terrible scream arose, a thunderous howl that threatened to crush him under a hammer of a sound. Crowe didn’t flinch. As the shadow of the monstrosity fell over him and eclipsed his view of the ceiling he looked up and smiled thinly.
“Back to our senses, are we?” he said.
“I WILL END THIS NOW,” the red worm roared, jaws stretched impossibly wide. Its head swung wildly from side to side, spattering black fluid across the tower’s floor. “I WILL NOT BE DEATH. I WILL NOT SUCCUMB TO THIS FATE. NO ONE WILL DENY ME WHAT SHOULD HAVE BEEN MINE, WHAT SHOULD ALWAYS HAVE BEEN MINE! I WILL NOT STAY A SLAVE TO DEATH!”
All at once Crowe was aware that the eyes of the tower were open, pupils shrunken down to pinpricks as the Spectator drew upon them, red tendrils erupting from her sides and piercing the floor with a series of deafening cracks like a thousand bones breaking at once. Blood pooled up from the shattered surfaces, frothing in the worm’s convulsions. The eyes rolled from side to side desperately, frenzied in their pain, and with sudden clarity Crowe saw that their visions had vanished and been replaced by endless reflections of the Spectator’s myriad forms. The worm’s coils strained against the walls, threatening to buckle them; above it all rose a roar that climbed to an unbearable pitch before descending once more into barely recognizable words.
“BEAR WITNESS,” the worm screamed, “I AM GOING TO CREATE LIFE.”
In the center of the tower the red worm snapped its enormous jaws into the empty air and trembled, its coils frozen in the throes of rage. For the slightest instant, the time it took to draw a breath, there was a silence so absolute that Crowe found he could not hear his heart beating in his chest.
“You can’t,” he said.
She did.
__________________________
It started as a whine on the edge of the contestants’ hearing, a dull buzz that resonated in the backs of their skulls. It was nothing more than a whisper, the slightest suggestion that something was amiss; most of them didn’t notice it at all, and those who did dismissed it as a side effect of the constant genreshifting. Not a single one of them thought to give it any more thought than that.
As it grew, however, it became harder and harder to ignore. The more attentive among the contestants began to notice a strange tone to it, as if a broken record hidden somewhere nearby was stuck playing over a single note. The more they focused on it the more the sound seemed to elude them: it had no direction, no indication of origin other than the vague feeling that it was close, somewhere they should have been able to see. The more paranoid among them looked around for a source and, finding none, assumed that it was some weapon wielded by an unknown attacker and prepared accordingly. The rest simply wondered if they were going mad.
Then without warning the sound doubled in intensity, and even the skeptics found themselves clutching their heads. The sound was clearly distinguishable now, a high wavering singing like a finger trailed over the rim of a glass that infiltrated their minds the way no ordinary sound should have done, interrupting their thoughts and drowning out all the noises of the dying city. The sound continued to grow in uneven bursts, driving all semblance of thought from their heads and leaving only a brilliant pain that burned like fire within them, everywhere and nowhere at once. Still it rose, higher and higher, pushing them beyond what they thought they could endure until all they knew and all they were was a searing song of pain and fear.
One of them fell, no longer able to support themselves, and then another, clawing at the floor senselessly in their agony. Someone screamed, someone bit their tongue; all of them regardless of their location felt the same incredible pressure building inside their skulls and driving them out of their minds with its insistency. Every time they thought it could go no higher it spiked again, up and up until they could no longer tell it apart from their thoughts, could no longer remember if there had ever been a time when the sound did not exist and they weren’t a part of it, drowning in a seamless torrent of a woman’s voice, screaming and screaming and screaming.
Then, as quickly as it had begun, it stopped.
________________
A door slammed; Crowe stepped out onto a mountain.
His suit was soaked from the knees down in red and black stains that shone wetly in the light from the burning buildings. A massive burn zigzagged across his side and ran down his leg; he walked with a heavy limp on his right side as he made his way out onto the terrain. Corpses in varying states of dismemberment littered the ground, crisscrossing the patched-looking rock with streams of blood and other things that might once have been attached to a body. He walked through them as if they didn’t exist, holding his notebook in a white-knuckled grip. The parts of his face not smeared with blood were pale.
It was difficult to tell upon first sight that the bodies surrounding him were human. Some sported pieces of metal fused onto them at strategic locations; others were covered in fur and feathers that melted into each other with little regard for logic or taste. Most of them were in poses that suggested that their last few moments had been filled with interpretive dance. Delicately he picked his way between them, nudging the occasional piece of meaty shrapnel out of the way. He was searching for one in particular; he found it by the smell.
At the edge of a puddle of former contestant, Crowe began to write. A delicate script that seemed to curl back in on itself in ever more complicated patterns appeared on the page, forming strange shapes that quickly tangled together into an illegible mass of lines and dots. His hand barely seemed to touch the paper as a complex series of symbols appeared, encircled by a ring and connected to one another by a web of hair-thin lines. Crowe paused, looked over the page; in a single movement he ripped it out of the book and dropped it to the ground.
Instantly the contestants appeared before him in a neat circle, clustered around the sad remnants that had once been Merrifield. Most of them were caught in the awkward act of trying to remember where their brains were; a few didn’t even register the sudden change in location. Crowe looked them over in disapproval. He made a distracted attempt to straighten the tears in his jacket before clearing his throat pointedly at the gathered seven.
“Well,” he said, folding the book closed, “that’s it. Excellent job, everyone. I can’t even begin to say how proud we are.”
The contestants exchanged glances among themselves. Phere raised an eyebrow.
“However-”
“No,” Cedric said, a thunderous frown appearing on his face. Beneath him, Horsegark snorted. “This isn’t going to work.”
The four-armed man stared.
“We’re already in one of these, er,” the knight continued with a casual wave of his hand, oblivious to any change in atmosphere, “battle things. With the red angel woman with the great big tits.” He held his hands a considerable distance from his chest.
“The Spectator,” Crowe said.
“Yes,” Cedric agreed. “I mean, I can understand why you’d want us, especially myself. But we’re already been taken, see, you can’t just run off with us.”
“I am here in her interest. She is still the one managing you.”
“What’s got her so busy she can’t come get us herself?”
There was a long silence. “She’s indisposed at the moment,” Crowe said, “I’m afraid.” A drop of blood fell from his hair and landed in a puddle of the same.
“Did you kill her?” Phere cut in sharply.
“What?”
“How did you do it? Tell me.”
“She’s not dead!”
“What about you, can you be killed?”
Cedric gave an offended snort and rested a hand on Sigrar’s pommel. “Of course he can, look at him. He doesn’t even have a sword.” Horsegark nodded approvingly.
“The Spectator didn’t either, that doesn’t mean anything,” Phere shot back. “He brought us here. He’s probably the same sort of thing that she is. Or was.”
“Nah,” Cedric scoffed, “Why would he be working for her, then?”
“Why the hell are you arguing about this?” Crowe said angrily. “One of your number just died!”
The contestants were silent for a moment, their expressions ranging from regret to apathy. The puddle that had been Merrifield gave a desultory bubble.
“You could definitely kill him.”
“But how?”
“We are not discussing this!” Crowe cried. “This round is over! You’re done!”
“He doesn’t have wings either, I expect that’s probably part of it.”
“Will you shut up, you great fucking musclebound idiot,” the suited man snarled, turning on his good leg to face Cedric. He pointed furiously to the gash on his side with one of his arms. “What does this look like to you? What does it fucking look like? Do you think I popped down here to have a pleasant chat, is that it? Looking for some casual conversation with a glorified thug who’s clearly got compensation issues to work out? Because this is completely thrilling, let me tell you. I am dazzled by the sheer breadth of your intellect. She only tried to tear herself in half, that’s all, that’s all I had to deal with, it wasn’t like I-”
“Are you still trying to get us to join a battle?” said Cedric. He looked confused.
“No,” Crowe said, flipping to a new page and clicking his pen. “I am not.”
“Because it does kind of sound like-”
“Your next round,” Crowe said loudly, “will take place on the battlefield between the Thünderwölf clan and the city of Santa Nada. The siege has lasted generations; both of their cultures revolve around this conflict and the weaponization of specific forms of music used in such. You will be placed at random locations between the longship fleet and the city’s center. It is important to note that weapons such as you understand them do not exist in this world; any that you have on you will be altered accordingly upon arrival.”
“What if our weapons are broken?” Ivan asked hesitantly.
“I don’t care,” Crowe snapped. “Figure it out.” He flicked the pen across the notebook page in a swift X and rapidly circled the center; a hundred doors slammed simultaneously and the contestants were gone.
The silence in their absence was overwhelming. Crowe let himself sink onto the rocks and sat there in exhaustion as the remains of Merrifield bubbled quietly away.
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