Re: The Vivacious Deadlock: S3G6: Round Three: The Sable Masque
03-14-2013, 01:54 AM
(This post was last modified: 05-06-2013, 01:40 PM by Akumu.)
Originally posted on MSPA by Akumu.
In a public hallway of the Resplendent Palace, Melissa Harmon pushed her way through a throng of masked guests trying to head in the opposite direction. She tried to keep in mind that they were not, in fact, melting together into a river of flesh that threatened to drown her. She had been drugged. Had drugged herself. Whatever. Still, that knowledge made the experience no less horrifying, and it was starting to eat away at her belief in objectivity. What if perception was reality, after all?
Of course, if that was the case, she’d just will herself to stop being drugged and get on with things. Wait, shit. That’s exactly what the birdman had told her to do. She screwed up her eyes and put all her concentration into a little mantra. Isomers, isomers, isomers. I’m sober, I’m sober, I’m sober. When she opened her eyes back up, the bad news was that everything was still melting. The good news was that reality continued to behave as if it were real. Harmon considered this as a net gain and soldiered on.
As the crowd began to thin, their place was taken up with a thickening smoke. Harmon stepped out past the last stragglers onto the mezzanine above the Sapphire ballroom and took in the scene on the floor below. It seemed like everything was on fire. The diaphanous hanging streamers and wood paneling, yes, but also the marble floors and columns. Paper-cut-out men fell like autumn leaves from the ceiling, trying to smother the flames, but only succeeded in giving them more fuel. Amidst the inferno, a man yelled and swung his sword, lashing new lines of fire to life across the ballroom.
It wasn’t Cedric.
Ivan Norst was having the opposite problem: he couldn’t get away from Cedric. Well, he probably could, if it came down to it. But there were so many people here and the knight was the only known quantity. Still, he thought, twirling his quill nervously, this was simply mortifying.
“Tell me, man, what do you think of the beard?” Cedric boisterously asked the ball-goer he had an arm wrapped around. “It’s indispensable out on the arctic wastes of Norland, hunting icegarks, but it doesn’t seem to be the style here, does it?”
“Not this season, no,” the man said, nervously eyeing Sigrar, “but it’s very fine, yes, very oh my god what’s that?”
Cedric turned to look and felt an emptiness in his very friendly grip. His confidant was suddenly ten yards away and sidling quickly into the crowd.
“Rude,” Cedric muttered, frowning.
Ivan wished he could have the same cavalier attitude. He guessed it came with being ludicrously strong. They were all dying off one by one, as promised, but it was hard to imagine anything killing Cedric. If he played the page, he could perhaps stay protected, but what if it came down to just the two of them?
He glanced at the champagne flutes. A few quick scratches with his quill could convince the champaign to be poison instead. Would even that kill the knight? Anyway, it would be best to postpone such considerations until the more psychotic of them were out of the picture. It would be best of all to get out of the whole sick game, but for that he needed more information. Unfortunately, the best source of information was probably the most psychotic of all.
Ivan was musing this over when the hood came down over his head.
“Crap! Cedric! Help!”
Cold hands grabbed him and lifted him from the floor, but before his feet lost contact with the marble he could feel the crowd backing away. No one was coming towards him, and he didn’t sense the heavy footfalls of the knight at all.
Cedric was gone.
In the forgotten room at the center of the Resplendent Palace, a corpulent form sagged back into its throne. Its flesh drooped and tore, rivulets of cloudy fluid rolling across pallid skin.
“It is done,” the King said between ragged, wheezing breaths. “I must rest.”
The King closed its eyes and its breathing began to stabilize, its wounds to knit back together.
“Hematite,” another King spoke, drawing the man’s attention from the appalling sight of his lord’s weakness, “What is the status of the other Outsiders?”
“Harmon and Norst have been taken by the Tireless Men, sires. They await your dispensation. Phere has been ejected from the Palace; we are watching for her porting signature should she attempt re-entry. And Cascala...”
“Yes, Hematite?”
“What of the ’most dangerous’ one, Hematite?”
“She has evaded capture. A team is in pursuit.”
“Unacceptable.”
“We expect success when we delegate, Hematite.”
“You know what it means to fail us, Hematite.”
“We will speak with those you have brought to us. Use this time to capture Cascala, or to prepare the Malachite for a promotion.”
“Yes, sires.”
The last King rousted, his eyes fluttering back open.
“The Coronation must proceed.”
Hematite bowed deeply and backed out of the throne room, cold sweat dripping off his brow. As the rough wooden door shut in front of him, he straightened and spun to face the waiting Tireless Men.
“You two, the Kings seek an audience with Harmon. Bring her inside. You two stay with Norst, their majesties will request him presently. The rest of you, join the search for Cascala.”
As the Men started into motion, Hematite sprinted back towards the war room.
They began to move again.
It was dark inside the hood. Dark and quiet. Apart from the iron grips on her arms, she was cut off from the world. She tried to focus on those grips. The sensory deprivation was not helping the hallucinations one iota.
The hood had come down shortly after she had failed to find Cedric amongst the flames, and the grips came right after. She had struggled to get away at first, but her captors were impossibly strong, and solid. Maybe they were the robots she had been looking for, but phase two was no use if it came before phase one. So for now, she bided her time and followed along where she was pulled, waiting for her chance.
She felt the air on her skin go colder, clammier.
The hood came off and the smell hit her like a punch to the stomach. She fell against the restraining grips of her captors, trying to double over, retching.
“Child, you insult us.”
“We will speak with you.”
“Look upon us.”
Rasping voices came from nearby. Harmon focused on breathing through her mouth and took in her surroundings. Her captors, if they were robots, were android. Black robes, gloves, and masks obscured them. The floor was stone, rough and filmed over. Threadbare tapestries. And against the far wall, in the dimness, bloated mockeries of humans, seated in high-backed wooden chairs too small to properly contain them. She could almost see the smell radiating off of them in greasy waves. It smelled of death. From them came the rasping voices again.
“We have many questions.”
“Release her. We would have her speak freely.”
“Come closer, child.”
Harmon steeled herself, and as her arms were released, she turned and drove the heel of her palm up into the eye of the masked android beside her. She heard the sharp crack of breaking glass and its head rocked back, but it barely staggered. As its partner reached out to snare her again, she spun around the half-blinded one and darted for the door.
Bands of force wrapped around her and she was stopped dead in her tracks. The air itself seemed to solidify into a straitjacket holding her in place, and she was turned and dragged back before the triumvirate.
“Melissa Harmon, we are the Spinel Kings.”
“This is our realm, and we will not be denied.”
“What you will not give, we will take.”
She was pulled closer.
Their mouths did not move, but the Kings’ voice rang clearly in her head. Was it one of them? All of them? She couldn’t be sure. Harmon felt a pressure behind her eyes as the Kings’ influence pushed its way into her mind. Memories flitted past her awareness as they were flipped through like the pages of a book, the reader looking out for the highlighted passages to zero in on. The memories slowed and settled and she was sitting on her father’s lap, watching as he manipulated the holo-display, twists of his fingers rotating the cloud of data around his prototype, modifying and drawing connections. The lights were so pretty. She burbled happily and clapped together her pudgy hands. Her father looked down at her, smiling, and opened his mouth—
The Kings’ presence withdrew and Harmon dropped back into the now, gagging anew at the putrescence of the throne room. The Kings muttered amongst themselves and then turned back to the transfixed scientist, delving once again into her mind.
She sat at her own workbench, just turning off the hot air gun and watching through a loupe as the solder solidified around the last chip’s pins. All the connections looked good. She took this fourth revision of the card and slotted it into place in the exploded tangle of the harmonometer. With a flip of a switch, the cyclotron hummed to life, increasing in pitch as the beam came up to speed. The attached ammeter dial swung up to full current and stabilized. Harmon turned her attention to the radioactive sample between the arms of the probe. No arcing this time. On the oscilloscope, an integrated signal began to grow. Everything was working, and she was actually seeing the counterfactual decays!
“Hell yes!” she leapt up from her stool, pumping a fist in the air, “Dr. Ambrose! Emma! Get in here, you need to see—”
The words died on her lips as she saw the room around her. Instead of the walls of the laboratory, corruscating colors filled space out to the limits of her sight. They twisted and pulsed and sound filled everything, coming from everywhere.
Her workbench and apparatus blew apart into shards of color, joining the mass that surrounded her. It swaddled her, constricting her even as the pressure behind her eyes redoubled.
She sat with her back against the headboard, sheets over her legs and sweat drying on her bare skin. She studied the crack running along the ceiling in a moment that stretched on for a hair too long, and sighed.
“Adam,” she started, gingerly, turning to look into his expectant eyes, “it’s just not a good time. When I start in this new position, the tenure clock starts too. I need to be able to focus on that.”
Adam frowned, and when he opened his mouth Melissa saw that he was a shell, filled with the colors that tried to squeeze her to nothing.
“I know what I said. That was true, and this is true. I can’t be another drip from the pipeline, Adam, I just can’t. This is too important to let anything slow me down.”
Over her words came the Kings’, pushing out through her as the color pushed through Adam.
Melissa rocked back as if slapped, tears springing to her eyes.
“Of course not, I’ve never... we’re partners and, but I need... God dammit, I love you, and I want to be with you, isn’t that enough?”
She turned, curling her legs under herself and grabbed Adam’s hand where it lay on the bed. She looked imploringly into his eyes, and he stared back, his eyes wet as well but his mouth set in a razor-thin line. After a long moment, he averted his eyes.
“I should go,” Melissa whispered, and slid off the bed to collect her clothes.
“Mel, wait.”
She turned, trying to keep her face a mask. Adam held bunches of the sheets in a white-knuckled grip, looking down. She knew what he was going to say next. She didn’t want to hear it, but this was how it had happened. He looked up, started to speak, and burst apart into streamers of color that shot towards her.
In the throne room of the Spinel Kings, Melissa Harmon convulsed in the air, as did the King who held her there. Its face was a rictus of pain and concentration, its arms straining against the chains that held it in its seat of power, the manacles digging into the doughy flesh of its wrists. Its neighbour leaned over, detaching from the wooden back of its throne with a wet sound and an intensifying of the stench of decay. It chopped its hand through the air between Harmon and the afflicted King, and both collapsed and were still.
“Do we have a problem?” the third King asked.
“No,” said the second, after a moment, “he has not been infected.”
“The Cog did not tell us of this. It has betrayed us.”
“Perhaps it only did not know. What we found of the host agreed with its report.”
“Incomplete information is as dangerous as no information, regardless.”
“We know enough now to contain the host. After the Coronation, she should be examined more fully.”
“Agreed. Tireless Men, take her to the cells and put up the full complement of psychic wards.”
“And have the boy brought in next.”
Harmon awoke, head throbbing, on a wooden bench in a windowless stone room. She began to rub at her eyes with the heels of her palms, before wincing and pulling her hands away. There was a spectacular bruise forming where she had hit the android, not that it had even done her any good. What the hell had happened in there? What the hell was inside of her head? Her train of thought was derailed when she heard a muffled voice from the wall. Somebody was singing on the other side.
“O, I’ve got no end of sorrows, my tears they could near drown a whale, but I could put all that behind me, if you’d buy me a tankard of ale, oooooh, hi-diddy ho-diddy hi-ho-hi-he—”
“Cedric?!”
The singing cut off in response. She couldn’t believe her luck. It had been the longest, shittiest route to get here but things were all falling into place.
“Princess Harmony?” came a returning shout.
Well, you couldn’t ask for everything.
“Yes! We need to get out of here, are you in a cell too?”
“I am in the hospitality of the local lords, aye. Just trying to be sociable and then I was in gaol. I suppose I’ll have to serve my time honorably for whatever offense I caused.”
“Cedric, I’ve been badly mistreated, and I am in very unladylike conditions at the moment.”
There was a long pause.
“Well, I’d say a lady’s honor comes before obedience to someone else’s lords any day! Stand back from the wall!”
In a public hallway of the Resplendent Palace, Melissa Harmon pushed her way through a throng of masked guests trying to head in the opposite direction. She tried to keep in mind that they were not, in fact, melting together into a river of flesh that threatened to drown her. She had been drugged. Had drugged herself. Whatever. Still, that knowledge made the experience no less horrifying, and it was starting to eat away at her belief in objectivity. What if perception was reality, after all?
Of course, if that was the case, she’d just will herself to stop being drugged and get on with things. Wait, shit. That’s exactly what the birdman had told her to do. She screwed up her eyes and put all her concentration into a little mantra. Isomers, isomers, isomers. I’m sober, I’m sober, I’m sober. When she opened her eyes back up, the bad news was that everything was still melting. The good news was that reality continued to behave as if it were real. Harmon considered this as a net gain and soldiered on.
As the crowd began to thin, their place was taken up with a thickening smoke. Harmon stepped out past the last stragglers onto the mezzanine above the Sapphire ballroom and took in the scene on the floor below. It seemed like everything was on fire. The diaphanous hanging streamers and wood paneling, yes, but also the marble floors and columns. Paper-cut-out men fell like autumn leaves from the ceiling, trying to smother the flames, but only succeeded in giving them more fuel. Amidst the inferno, a man yelled and swung his sword, lashing new lines of fire to life across the ballroom.
It wasn’t Cedric.
- - -
Ivan Norst was having the opposite problem: he couldn’t get away from Cedric. Well, he probably could, if it came down to it. But there were so many people here and the knight was the only known quantity. Still, he thought, twirling his quill nervously, this was simply mortifying.
“Tell me, man, what do you think of the beard?” Cedric boisterously asked the ball-goer he had an arm wrapped around. “It’s indispensable out on the arctic wastes of Norland, hunting icegarks, but it doesn’t seem to be the style here, does it?”
“Not this season, no,” the man said, nervously eyeing Sigrar, “but it’s very fine, yes, very oh my god what’s that?”
Cedric turned to look and felt an emptiness in his very friendly grip. His confidant was suddenly ten yards away and sidling quickly into the crowd.
“Rude,” Cedric muttered, frowning.
Ivan wished he could have the same cavalier attitude. He guessed it came with being ludicrously strong. They were all dying off one by one, as promised, but it was hard to imagine anything killing Cedric. If he played the page, he could perhaps stay protected, but what if it came down to just the two of them?
He glanced at the champagne flutes. A few quick scratches with his quill could convince the champaign to be poison instead. Would even that kill the knight? Anyway, it would be best to postpone such considerations until the more psychotic of them were out of the picture. It would be best of all to get out of the whole sick game, but for that he needed more information. Unfortunately, the best source of information was probably the most psychotic of all.
Ivan was musing this over when the hood came down over his head.
“Crap! Cedric! Help!”
Cold hands grabbed him and lifted him from the floor, but before his feet lost contact with the marble he could feel the crowd backing away. No one was coming towards him, and he didn’t sense the heavy footfalls of the knight at all.
Cedric was gone.
- - -
In the forgotten room at the center of the Resplendent Palace, a corpulent form sagged back into its throne. Its flesh drooped and tore, rivulets of cloudy fluid rolling across pallid skin.
“It is done,” the King said between ragged, wheezing breaths. “I must rest.”
The King closed its eyes and its breathing began to stabilize, its wounds to knit back together.
“Hematite,” another King spoke, drawing the man’s attention from the appalling sight of his lord’s weakness, “What is the status of the other Outsiders?”
“Harmon and Norst have been taken by the Tireless Men, sires. They await your dispensation. Phere has been ejected from the Palace; we are watching for her porting signature should she attempt re-entry. And Cascala...”
“Yes, Hematite?”
“What of the ’most dangerous’ one, Hematite?”
“She has evaded capture. A team is in pursuit.”
“Unacceptable.”
“We expect success when we delegate, Hematite.”
“You know what it means to fail us, Hematite.”
“We will speak with those you have brought to us. Use this time to capture Cascala, or to prepare the Malachite for a promotion.”
“Yes, sires.”
The last King rousted, his eyes fluttering back open.
“The Coronation must proceed.”
Hematite bowed deeply and backed out of the throne room, cold sweat dripping off his brow. As the rough wooden door shut in front of him, he straightened and spun to face the waiting Tireless Men.
“You two, the Kings seek an audience with Harmon. Bring her inside. You two stay with Norst, their majesties will request him presently. The rest of you, join the search for Cascala.”
As the Men started into motion, Hematite sprinted back towards the war room.
- - -
They began to move again.
It was dark inside the hood. Dark and quiet. Apart from the iron grips on her arms, she was cut off from the world. She tried to focus on those grips. The sensory deprivation was not helping the hallucinations one iota.
The hood had come down shortly after she had failed to find Cedric amongst the flames, and the grips came right after. She had struggled to get away at first, but her captors were impossibly strong, and solid. Maybe they were the robots she had been looking for, but phase two was no use if it came before phase one. So for now, she bided her time and followed along where she was pulled, waiting for her chance.
She felt the air on her skin go colder, clammier.
The hood came off and the smell hit her like a punch to the stomach. She fell against the restraining grips of her captors, trying to double over, retching.
“Child, you insult us.”
“We will speak with you.”
“Look upon us.”
Rasping voices came from nearby. Harmon focused on breathing through her mouth and took in her surroundings. Her captors, if they were robots, were android. Black robes, gloves, and masks obscured them. The floor was stone, rough and filmed over. Threadbare tapestries. And against the far wall, in the dimness, bloated mockeries of humans, seated in high-backed wooden chairs too small to properly contain them. She could almost see the smell radiating off of them in greasy waves. It smelled of death. From them came the rasping voices again.
“We have many questions.”
“Release her. We would have her speak freely.”
“Come closer, child.”
Harmon steeled herself, and as her arms were released, she turned and drove the heel of her palm up into the eye of the masked android beside her. She heard the sharp crack of breaking glass and its head rocked back, but it barely staggered. As its partner reached out to snare her again, she spun around the half-blinded one and darted for the door.
Bands of force wrapped around her and she was stopped dead in her tracks. The air itself seemed to solidify into a straitjacket holding her in place, and she was turned and dragged back before the triumvirate.
“Melissa Harmon, we are the Spinel Kings.”
“This is our realm, and we will not be denied.”
“What you will not give, we will take.”
She was pulled closer.
Who has sent you here?
Their mouths did not move, but the Kings’ voice rang clearly in her head. Was it one of them? All of them? She couldn’t be sure. Harmon felt a pressure behind her eyes as the Kings’ influence pushed its way into her mind. Memories flitted past her awareness as they were flipped through like the pages of a book, the reader looking out for the highlighted passages to zero in on. The memories slowed and settled and she was sitting on her father’s lap, watching as he manipulated the holo-display, twists of his fingers rotating the cloud of data around his prototype, modifying and drawing connections. The lights were so pretty. She burbled happily and clapped together her pudgy hands. Her father looked down at her, smiling, and opened his mouth—
Here is becoming and we are us who will become.
The Kings’ presence withdrew and Harmon dropped back into the now, gagging anew at the putrescence of the throne room. The Kings muttered amongst themselves and then turned back to the transfixed scientist, delving once again into her mind.
What is your purpose?
She sat at her own workbench, just turning off the hot air gun and watching through a loupe as the solder solidified around the last chip’s pins. All the connections looked good. She took this fourth revision of the card and slotted it into place in the exploded tangle of the harmonometer. With a flip of a switch, the cyclotron hummed to life, increasing in pitch as the beam came up to speed. The attached ammeter dial swung up to full current and stabilized. Harmon turned her attention to the radioactive sample between the arms of the probe. No arcing this time. On the oscilloscope, an integrated signal began to grow. Everything was working, and she was actually seeing the counterfactual decays!
“Hell yes!” she leapt up from her stool, pumping a fist in the air, “Dr. Ambrose! Emma! Get in here, you need to see—”
The words died on her lips as she saw the room around her. Instead of the walls of the laboratory, corruscating colors filled space out to the limits of her sight. They twisted and pulsed and sound filled everything, coming from everywhere.
We are what is, we found what is not but soon it shall be.
Her workbench and apparatus blew apart into shards of color, joining the mass that surrounded her. It swaddled her, constricting her even as the pressure behind her eyes redoubled.
What is your weakness? How can you be stopped?
She sat with her back against the headboard, sheets over her legs and sweat drying on her bare skin. She studied the crack running along the ceiling in a moment that stretched on for a hair too long, and sighed.
“Adam,” she started, gingerly, turning to look into his expectant eyes, “it’s just not a good time. When I start in this new position, the tenure clock starts too. I need to be able to focus on that.”
Adam frowned, and when he opened his mouth Melissa saw that he was a shell, filled with the colors that tried to squeeze her to nothing.
We are forever, we end when time is not and when time is we are.
“I know what I said. That was true, and this is true. I can’t be another drip from the pipeline, Adam, I just can’t. This is too important to let anything slow me down.”
Over her words came the Kings’, pushing out through her as the color pushed through Adam.
You mistake your importance. We are as well, but we are not you. You are bounded, and those bounds can be pushed back.
You are not. “You” is not. We are. You will be.
Melissa rocked back as if slapped, tears springing to her eyes.
“Of course not, I’ve never... we’re partners and, but I need... God dammit, I love you, and I want to be with you, isn’t that enough?”
She turned, curling her legs under herself and grabbed Adam’s hand where it lay on the bed. She looked imploringly into his eyes, and he stared back, his eyes wet as well but his mouth set in a razor-thin line. After a long moment, he averted his eyes.
“I should go,” Melissa whispered, and slid off the bed to collect her clothes.
“Mel, wait.”
She turned, trying to keep her face a mask. Adam held bunches of the sheets in a white-knuckled grip, looking down. She knew what he was going to say next. She didn’t want to hear it, but this was how it had happened. He looked up, started to speak, and burst apart into streamers of color that shot towards her.
In the throne room of the Spinel Kings, Melissa Harmon convulsed in the air, as did the King who held her there. Its face was a rictus of pain and concentration, its arms straining against the chains that held it in its seat of power, the manacles digging into the doughy flesh of its wrists. Its neighbour leaned over, detaching from the wooden back of its throne with a wet sound and an intensifying of the stench of decay. It chopped its hand through the air between Harmon and the afflicted King, and both collapsed and were still.
“Do we have a problem?” the third King asked.
“No,” said the second, after a moment, “he has not been infected.”
“The Cog did not tell us of this. It has betrayed us.”
“Perhaps it only did not know. What we found of the host agreed with its report.”
“Incomplete information is as dangerous as no information, regardless.”
“We know enough now to contain the host. After the Coronation, she should be examined more fully.”
“Agreed. Tireless Men, take her to the cells and put up the full complement of psychic wards.”
“And have the boy brought in next.”
- - -
Harmon awoke, head throbbing, on a wooden bench in a windowless stone room. She began to rub at her eyes with the heels of her palms, before wincing and pulling her hands away. There was a spectacular bruise forming where she had hit the android, not that it had even done her any good. What the hell had happened in there? What the hell was inside of her head? Her train of thought was derailed when she heard a muffled voice from the wall. Somebody was singing on the other side.
“O, I’ve got no end of sorrows, my tears they could near drown a whale, but I could put all that behind me, if you’d buy me a tankard of ale, oooooh, hi-diddy ho-diddy hi-ho-hi-he—”
“Cedric?!”
The singing cut off in response. She couldn’t believe her luck. It had been the longest, shittiest route to get here but things were all falling into place.
“Princess Harmony?” came a returning shout.
Well, you couldn’t ask for everything.
“Yes! We need to get out of here, are you in a cell too?”
“I am in the hospitality of the local lords, aye. Just trying to be sociable and then I was in gaol. I suppose I’ll have to serve my time honorably for whatever offense I caused.”
“Cedric, I’ve been badly mistreated, and I am in very unladylike conditions at the moment.”
There was a long pause.
“Well, I’d say a lady’s honor comes before obedience to someone else’s lords any day! Stand back from the wall!”