Re: Mini-Grand 5108 [Final Round: The Asylum]
03-06-2012, 11:15 PM
Originally posted on MSPA by Ixcalibur.
In The Asylum it was pretty much inevitable that you would succumb to insanity. No matter how sane you are when you arrive, soon you will be reduced to a quivering shadow of your former self whether through the sheer soul-crushing hopelessness of the situation or through the dastardly machinations of the doctors and their invasive treatments. When the doors had opened most patients first steps out of their cells had been tentative, fearful of what they would find out there. But the guttural roar of the half-oni Greyve echoed down the corridors and marshalled those fragile fragmented minds, primed them for battle. The patients that swarmed around the door to Reuben’s cell were almost animalistic in their fervour to get at the doctor inside. The bars of the cell shook under their weight; chips of plaster fell from the doorframe, dislodged by the ferocity of the assault. Doctor Heinrich Skalpell fretted as he stared at the feral patients; this siege was not one that could last. The bars would come toppling down and he would be left at the mercy of those who he had honestly only ever wanted to help.
Only a couple of patients heeded Arckal’s theatrical approach. The salvo of shotgun blasts and bloody squelch of bodies hitting the floor seemed to draw their attention much more effectively. Within moments their attention shifted, and they advanced down the narrow corridor on the stuntman and his retinue.
“I’ll hold them off!” Arckal bellowed in between shotgun blasts. “You get in there and help Rueben.” Ywie nodded her blank face and stumbled from the motorcycle. Though she was now free of the confinement of the straightjacket she had been forced to wear for so long she still looked unsteady upon her feet.
“Jetsman, help her.” Arckal said, opening fire upon an advancing dinosaur. Blood splattered across the walls and feathers hung in the air for a second. Jetsam was only too keen to get out of Arckal’s immediate proximity, and so heedless of the mangling of his name, he darted to Ywie’s side.
Arckal’s shotgun clicked empty and it was quickly discarded. He revved up the motorcycle and stared down the advancing crowd of crazies for just long enough to look awesome, and then, cool pose accomplished he screeched off down the corridor. One hand held tightly to the crossbar, the other held the sword and was brought around in a wide arc through the horde of infuriated patients. For a moment it seemed he was abandoning the pair, then on the far side of the crowd, and of Reuben’s cell, he skidded to a stop and the enraged mob started back down the corridor after him. In a couple of moments a path to Reuben’s cell was opened. The door opened and Doctor Heinrich Skalpell fled down the corridor, past Ywie and Jetsam. It was the fastest he had ever moved and it was debatable whether he even noticed the pair as he passed them.
“Come on Jetsman.” Jetsam felt his mouth moving again as Ywie’s words came out. With a sigh he put his arm around the girls’ shoulder and started towards Reuben’s cell. “Could you, you know… not do that?” He asked. This question went unanswered as they stumbled into the cell. Probably the only thing that stopped them involuntarily screaming at the sight of the nurse was that Ywie had no mouth with which to scream, and Jetsam quickly reasoned that nurse hadn’t noticed them yet and if they didn’t make a noise there was a chance she wouldn’t notice them at all.
Heedless of the commotion, Nurse Bertha had continued hooking Reuben up to the machine. Seemingly hundreds of cables extended into the blob in a manner that would have been more grotesque and disconcerting had it been happening to something approximating a human. The equally inhuman nurse was standing behind the machine, and her hands were working the dials and levers. Before Ywie and Jetsam had a chance to do anything, she had activated the machine, and suddenly everything was drowned out. The distant sound of the braying mob, the sound of Arckal slashing and cutting his way through them, the unpleasant slithering squelching of the nurse; all of it drowned out by the drone of the sadistic machine and the agony of Reuben’s screams, interspersed with sobs.
Ywie panicked. In a sudden snap decision she shoved Jetsam at the nurse. He collided with her (it?) and they fell to the floor, sprawled on top of one another. Jetsam hurriedly tried to disentangle himself from Bertha while his skin tried to crawl from his body. Ywie dashed over to Reuben and started ripping the cables from his body. The screams abated slightly, they were no longer seemed to engulf the entire world, but not enough to stop the overwhelming sense of panic. Here was someone she could help and every second the treatment went on, that potential for help slipped further and further away. She laid her hands on the blob and strained as though focusing would force the healing energies contained within her body to act faster. Jetsam was on his feet and messing with the machinery, desperately trying to end the cacophonous wailing. After a minute or so of random button mashing he managed to find the off switch. The screams stopped and there was a moment of ringing silence. He breathed a sigh of relief, until very suddenly he remembered the nurse. There she was, rising from the ground. She looked different, as though she were taller, more inexplicably horrible, and with a look of intense hatred in what passed for a face. Jetsam stumbled back to the doorway and slammed it shut.
Ywie’s panicking mind calmed somewhat when Reuben’s anguish ceased. It allowed her to regain her composure and actually think about what she was doing. Ever since the ritual Ywie was little more than a shell; a container for astonishing amounts of healing energy in a very literal sense. She grabbed a scalpel and with a moment’s hesitation, she plunged it into her chest. Traces of sparkling blue energy spilled out of the gap, like gas dissipating into the air. She widened the cut and more and more energy leaked out, focusing itself and flowing into the blob. This continued for a minute or so, and Ywie started feeling a little weak. She had healed people before, but none of them had ever taken as much energy out of her as this was doing. She collapsed to he knees and wondered whether she had made a mistake. She tried to stem the wound with her dress, but her healing energy was flowing thick and fast and soon she didn’t feel strong enough to even fight against it.
Helplessly she knelt and watched as someone emerged from the goo. He had shining silver eyes, shoulder length black hair and an immaculately trimmed beard. He looked very confused.
“For a second there I thought that damn blob had actually beaten me.” Azazel Deathbringer announced. He looked around, at the cell he found himself in, at the faceless woman with blue energy flowing out of her, at the monstrous thing over there in a nurse’s dress, at the fact that his armour hadn’t been reconstituted with the rest of him. “What the hell is going on here?” He demanded. The nurse turned from where it had been trying to break down the door and focused its disquieting attention on the naked bearded swordsman. Azazel did feel a certain nervousness in the pit of his stomach under the abomination’s glare, but he was not the kind of man who would let that deter him. “You there, tell me what happened to the Extravagant? Is this another battle?” The nurse pounced, digging her long syringe like claws into his vulnerable flesh. Azazel retaliated breathing a volley of swords in her direction.
When Sir Franklin Crow emerged from the blob Azazel and the nurse had come to a sort of stalemate. Any injury she inflicted upon the bearded swordsman was healed instantaneously, but conversely he didn’t seem to be able to do any damage to the nurse. The floor was littered with swords and the barred doorway had finally collapsed out into the corridor.
“Hey guys.” Sir Crow said. “I think it would be really cool if you were to join my party and we all teamed up to find a way out of this mess.” Neither Azazel nor the nurse paid him the slightest bit of attention and in the end, Sir Crow dodged past them into the corridor beyond to look for some bagels to eat.
--------
If anyone who had prior knowledge of the Reuben’s exploits had been watching the procession of people being reconstituted from the rapidly diminishing blob, they might have at this point assumed that people were being reconstructed in reverse chronological order. They would have been incorrect. As the consciousness that had gained most of a foothold in the blob Reuben was the very last to emerge from it. The second to last was Simon Vex; a scientist from Neuge Research Station, the person responsible for the manufacture of the blob. The scene that greeted him upon his resurrection was a cramped cell, containing one dead polar bear and an unknown quantity of eclectically dressed people. Scratch that, an unknown quantity of eclectically dressed co-workers; people he worked with every day at Neuge, but in bizarre mismatching clothes that they’d never be seen dead in at the lab.
Standing directly in front of him a pair of people he didn’t recognise were whispering to one another and glancing down at the corpse of a faceless girl. No, wait, Simon noticed her body moving slightly; her head rising as if to affix him with a blank stare. She was still alive, just about. One of the two men, the one surrounded by a slight golden glow, regarded him critically and shook his head. Simon thought he was about to return to his conversation when he reached into a cape and pulled from it a t-shirt and jeans. He passed them to Simon, who gratefully slipped them on.
“What is going on?” He asked.
“We’re waiting on someone.” Arckal said, as though that answered all his questions. There were too many Neuge scientists to be contained within the small cell; they had spilled out into the corridor beyond. Here they stood around talking to one another about what it was like to be eaten alive by a blob and then reconstituted and how this technology could potentially be repurposed as a means of saving space on long distance travel. Azazel Deathbringer in a turtleneck and sweatpants was guarding the door to the maintenance cupboard where he had finally managed to contain the nurse. The door shook and buckled angrily behind him. Sir Franklin Crow was standing around in an anorak and shorts, eating bagels and not being very useful to anyone.
Finally Reuben emerged from the blob. There was at this point very little of it left; just about enough to fill an ice cream tub.
“Reuben!” Arckal exclaimed, despite the intervening madness, he easily recognised the kid.
“Sunglow.” Reuben said sadly. There was an emptiness in his eyes and it was probably only moments before he broke down crying. “Everything is wrong. I just want to go back to Oceania.”
“It’s okay Reuben.” Arckal said. “Jetsman here knows a way out of this place. We’ll be out of here in no time.” He looked around at the gathered Neuge Scientists, who had stopped in their idle chatter. He raised his voice: “All of us. We’re all getting out of here.”
--------
Elsewhere in the facility Asteira had hid in one of the empty cells rather than risk it in the corridors outside. Her heart, well not technically her heart but the heart of the body she was occupying at the moment, was pounding. She was stuck. No matter what she tried she couldn’t seem to extricate herself from this body. It was becoming a problem. She had never been claustrophobic, but this confinement, this inability to abandon a body as soon as it has served its usefulness; she imagined that this was how it must have felt.
It had taken Asteira a while to come to this conclusion, and even longer to marshal the nerve to follow through with the idea. She had to get out of this body and she didn’t care about the consequences. If she was to die, correction, if this body was to die then she would be free to make her escape. She hoped so anyway. She’d never done this before. She raised the scalpel, and ever theatrically she plunged it into her chest. She collapsed to the floor of the cell, her crimson blood spilling out staining the white tiles red. It took longer than she’d expected. She probably should have slit her throat Asteira mused.
A figure strolled into the room and looked down at the bloody corpse that lay there. “What a god-damned senseless waste o’ life.” He said; his voice an inelegant drawl. The man flicked the butt of a cigarette into the corner of the room, did what he had to do and was about to move on when he seemed to notice something intangible. “Well what do we have here?” Mister Saturday mused to himself.
In The Asylum it was pretty much inevitable that you would succumb to insanity. No matter how sane you are when you arrive, soon you will be reduced to a quivering shadow of your former self whether through the sheer soul-crushing hopelessness of the situation or through the dastardly machinations of the doctors and their invasive treatments. When the doors had opened most patients first steps out of their cells had been tentative, fearful of what they would find out there. But the guttural roar of the half-oni Greyve echoed down the corridors and marshalled those fragile fragmented minds, primed them for battle. The patients that swarmed around the door to Reuben’s cell were almost animalistic in their fervour to get at the doctor inside. The bars of the cell shook under their weight; chips of plaster fell from the doorframe, dislodged by the ferocity of the assault. Doctor Heinrich Skalpell fretted as he stared at the feral patients; this siege was not one that could last. The bars would come toppling down and he would be left at the mercy of those who he had honestly only ever wanted to help.
Only a couple of patients heeded Arckal’s theatrical approach. The salvo of shotgun blasts and bloody squelch of bodies hitting the floor seemed to draw their attention much more effectively. Within moments their attention shifted, and they advanced down the narrow corridor on the stuntman and his retinue.
“I’ll hold them off!” Arckal bellowed in between shotgun blasts. “You get in there and help Rueben.” Ywie nodded her blank face and stumbled from the motorcycle. Though she was now free of the confinement of the straightjacket she had been forced to wear for so long she still looked unsteady upon her feet.
“Jetsman, help her.” Arckal said, opening fire upon an advancing dinosaur. Blood splattered across the walls and feathers hung in the air for a second. Jetsam was only too keen to get out of Arckal’s immediate proximity, and so heedless of the mangling of his name, he darted to Ywie’s side.
Arckal’s shotgun clicked empty and it was quickly discarded. He revved up the motorcycle and stared down the advancing crowd of crazies for just long enough to look awesome, and then, cool pose accomplished he screeched off down the corridor. One hand held tightly to the crossbar, the other held the sword and was brought around in a wide arc through the horde of infuriated patients. For a moment it seemed he was abandoning the pair, then on the far side of the crowd, and of Reuben’s cell, he skidded to a stop and the enraged mob started back down the corridor after him. In a couple of moments a path to Reuben’s cell was opened. The door opened and Doctor Heinrich Skalpell fled down the corridor, past Ywie and Jetsam. It was the fastest he had ever moved and it was debatable whether he even noticed the pair as he passed them.
“Come on Jetsman.” Jetsam felt his mouth moving again as Ywie’s words came out. With a sigh he put his arm around the girls’ shoulder and started towards Reuben’s cell. “Could you, you know… not do that?” He asked. This question went unanswered as they stumbled into the cell. Probably the only thing that stopped them involuntarily screaming at the sight of the nurse was that Ywie had no mouth with which to scream, and Jetsam quickly reasoned that nurse hadn’t noticed them yet and if they didn’t make a noise there was a chance she wouldn’t notice them at all.
Heedless of the commotion, Nurse Bertha had continued hooking Reuben up to the machine. Seemingly hundreds of cables extended into the blob in a manner that would have been more grotesque and disconcerting had it been happening to something approximating a human. The equally inhuman nurse was standing behind the machine, and her hands were working the dials and levers. Before Ywie and Jetsam had a chance to do anything, she had activated the machine, and suddenly everything was drowned out. The distant sound of the braying mob, the sound of Arckal slashing and cutting his way through them, the unpleasant slithering squelching of the nurse; all of it drowned out by the drone of the sadistic machine and the agony of Reuben’s screams, interspersed with sobs.
Ywie panicked. In a sudden snap decision she shoved Jetsam at the nurse. He collided with her (it?) and they fell to the floor, sprawled on top of one another. Jetsam hurriedly tried to disentangle himself from Bertha while his skin tried to crawl from his body. Ywie dashed over to Reuben and started ripping the cables from his body. The screams abated slightly, they were no longer seemed to engulf the entire world, but not enough to stop the overwhelming sense of panic. Here was someone she could help and every second the treatment went on, that potential for help slipped further and further away. She laid her hands on the blob and strained as though focusing would force the healing energies contained within her body to act faster. Jetsam was on his feet and messing with the machinery, desperately trying to end the cacophonous wailing. After a minute or so of random button mashing he managed to find the off switch. The screams stopped and there was a moment of ringing silence. He breathed a sigh of relief, until very suddenly he remembered the nurse. There she was, rising from the ground. She looked different, as though she were taller, more inexplicably horrible, and with a look of intense hatred in what passed for a face. Jetsam stumbled back to the doorway and slammed it shut.
Ywie’s panicking mind calmed somewhat when Reuben’s anguish ceased. It allowed her to regain her composure and actually think about what she was doing. Ever since the ritual Ywie was little more than a shell; a container for astonishing amounts of healing energy in a very literal sense. She grabbed a scalpel and with a moment’s hesitation, she plunged it into her chest. Traces of sparkling blue energy spilled out of the gap, like gas dissipating into the air. She widened the cut and more and more energy leaked out, focusing itself and flowing into the blob. This continued for a minute or so, and Ywie started feeling a little weak. She had healed people before, but none of them had ever taken as much energy out of her as this was doing. She collapsed to he knees and wondered whether she had made a mistake. She tried to stem the wound with her dress, but her healing energy was flowing thick and fast and soon she didn’t feel strong enough to even fight against it.
Helplessly she knelt and watched as someone emerged from the goo. He had shining silver eyes, shoulder length black hair and an immaculately trimmed beard. He looked very confused.
“For a second there I thought that damn blob had actually beaten me.” Azazel Deathbringer announced. He looked around, at the cell he found himself in, at the faceless woman with blue energy flowing out of her, at the monstrous thing over there in a nurse’s dress, at the fact that his armour hadn’t been reconstituted with the rest of him. “What the hell is going on here?” He demanded. The nurse turned from where it had been trying to break down the door and focused its disquieting attention on the naked bearded swordsman. Azazel did feel a certain nervousness in the pit of his stomach under the abomination’s glare, but he was not the kind of man who would let that deter him. “You there, tell me what happened to the Extravagant? Is this another battle?” The nurse pounced, digging her long syringe like claws into his vulnerable flesh. Azazel retaliated breathing a volley of swords in her direction.
When Sir Franklin Crow emerged from the blob Azazel and the nurse had come to a sort of stalemate. Any injury she inflicted upon the bearded swordsman was healed instantaneously, but conversely he didn’t seem to be able to do any damage to the nurse. The floor was littered with swords and the barred doorway had finally collapsed out into the corridor.
“Hey guys.” Sir Crow said. “I think it would be really cool if you were to join my party and we all teamed up to find a way out of this mess.” Neither Azazel nor the nurse paid him the slightest bit of attention and in the end, Sir Crow dodged past them into the corridor beyond to look for some bagels to eat.
--------
If anyone who had prior knowledge of the Reuben’s exploits had been watching the procession of people being reconstituted from the rapidly diminishing blob, they might have at this point assumed that people were being reconstructed in reverse chronological order. They would have been incorrect. As the consciousness that had gained most of a foothold in the blob Reuben was the very last to emerge from it. The second to last was Simon Vex; a scientist from Neuge Research Station, the person responsible for the manufacture of the blob. The scene that greeted him upon his resurrection was a cramped cell, containing one dead polar bear and an unknown quantity of eclectically dressed people. Scratch that, an unknown quantity of eclectically dressed co-workers; people he worked with every day at Neuge, but in bizarre mismatching clothes that they’d never be seen dead in at the lab.
Standing directly in front of him a pair of people he didn’t recognise were whispering to one another and glancing down at the corpse of a faceless girl. No, wait, Simon noticed her body moving slightly; her head rising as if to affix him with a blank stare. She was still alive, just about. One of the two men, the one surrounded by a slight golden glow, regarded him critically and shook his head. Simon thought he was about to return to his conversation when he reached into a cape and pulled from it a t-shirt and jeans. He passed them to Simon, who gratefully slipped them on.
“What is going on?” He asked.
“We’re waiting on someone.” Arckal said, as though that answered all his questions. There were too many Neuge scientists to be contained within the small cell; they had spilled out into the corridor beyond. Here they stood around talking to one another about what it was like to be eaten alive by a blob and then reconstituted and how this technology could potentially be repurposed as a means of saving space on long distance travel. Azazel Deathbringer in a turtleneck and sweatpants was guarding the door to the maintenance cupboard where he had finally managed to contain the nurse. The door shook and buckled angrily behind him. Sir Franklin Crow was standing around in an anorak and shorts, eating bagels and not being very useful to anyone.
Finally Reuben emerged from the blob. There was at this point very little of it left; just about enough to fill an ice cream tub.
“Reuben!” Arckal exclaimed, despite the intervening madness, he easily recognised the kid.
“Sunglow.” Reuben said sadly. There was an emptiness in his eyes and it was probably only moments before he broke down crying. “Everything is wrong. I just want to go back to Oceania.”
“It’s okay Reuben.” Arckal said. “Jetsman here knows a way out of this place. We’ll be out of here in no time.” He looked around at the gathered Neuge Scientists, who had stopped in their idle chatter. He raised his voice: “All of us. We’re all getting out of here.”
--------
Elsewhere in the facility Asteira had hid in one of the empty cells rather than risk it in the corridors outside. Her heart, well not technically her heart but the heart of the body she was occupying at the moment, was pounding. She was stuck. No matter what she tried she couldn’t seem to extricate herself from this body. It was becoming a problem. She had never been claustrophobic, but this confinement, this inability to abandon a body as soon as it has served its usefulness; she imagined that this was how it must have felt.
It had taken Asteira a while to come to this conclusion, and even longer to marshal the nerve to follow through with the idea. She had to get out of this body and she didn’t care about the consequences. If she was to die, correction, if this body was to die then she would be free to make her escape. She hoped so anyway. She’d never done this before. She raised the scalpel, and ever theatrically she plunged it into her chest. She collapsed to the floor of the cell, her crimson blood spilling out staining the white tiles red. It took longer than she’d expected. She probably should have slit her throat Asteira mused.
A figure strolled into the room and looked down at the bloody corpse that lay there. “What a god-damned senseless waste o’ life.” He said; his voice an inelegant drawl. The man flicked the butt of a cigarette into the corner of the room, did what he had to do and was about to move on when he seemed to notice something intangible. “Well what do we have here?” Mister Saturday mused to himself.
Heaven Help Us | Make Room!!!! | I'm Not Okay (I Promise)
Hang 'Em High | The Only Hope For Me Is You | Zero Percent | Early Sunsets Over Monroeville | DESTROYA | Demolition Lovers | To The End
Surrender The Night | Disenchanted | The Ghost Of You | Party Poison | Vampires Will Never Hurt You | The Jetset Life Is Gonna Kill You
Hang 'Em High | The Only Hope For Me Is You | Zero Percent | Early Sunsets Over Monroeville | DESTROYA | Demolition Lovers | To The End
Surrender The Night | Disenchanted | The Ghost Of You | Party Poison | Vampires Will Never Hurt You | The Jetset Life Is Gonna Kill You