Re: The Wretched Rite - Round Two - Inferno Alpha
02-28-2012, 12:58 AM
Originally posted on MSPA by Jacquerel.
Staring out at the vast weirdness that was The Unborn instilled in Alluvion a peculiar sense of responsibility. Barabbas had already informed them of their role in its development of course but there is a big difference between hearing something and understanding it, and besides that when he'd heard the speech the first time he was still getting over the fact that he suddenly wasn't a whole river.
He didn't know what actions had stirred the gestating god before him to take on its current form, or in fact what most of his fellow “sacrifices” had actually spent the last round doing, and suddenly realised that he'd been both wasting his time and shirking in his responsibilities. Whether this was true or not, he saw himself as being in a unique position of insight with regards to the godling's development, was it not the same way he'd been formed?
Well, he was made of the dreams of fish rather than the deeds of a group of strangers, but there were some similarities there anyway. Or, he'd like to think that there were.
The problem then was figuring out what kind of actions would ring loud enough to speak to The Unborn's budding consciousness, and then which of those would actually be desirable. While he was generally well-meaning he also wasn't really familiar with the company of anyone who didn't have gills, but he had already caught on to the fact that what fish would be happy with probably wouldn't be quite enough to satisfy everyone else.
Perhaps, considering that he knew about as much about the civilisation of other sapient species as the Unborn did, he wasn't actually in any kind of privileged, enlightened position at all! Unfortunately this did not occur to him, and before he could stop and think long enough to realise it he had been yanked away again and deposited somewhere within the bowels of the Inferno Alpha complex. What better place than hell to give him a good moral compass?
Alluvion's reception to the hell-world turned out to be a fair bit warmer than the one Poran received, though this wasn't really immediately apparent. The first thing he noticed was that it was dark, darker even than it had been in the empty place where the Unborn lived, and also fairly cramped. It wasn't dissimilar to the short period of time he'd spent in a bucket, in fact, except this time the space was slightly more generous and the walls (what with being made of stone) were a lot more resistant to shoving. Another difference between this place and the bucket was that there wasn't a convenient exit hole in the top, a fact that he found not only notable but actually very worryingly important considering that none of the walls were responding to his frantic attempts to push them away. Lastly, he noticed the warmth, although really “warm” very quickly became an understatement. It felt like he was being boiled, which... meant that he probably was. Fortunately, help was close at hand.
“Oi lads! There's another new arrival over here!
Not really sure how we could have missed this one to be honest... oh well, better crack her open then.
Hope this isn't another whiner, we're on a schedule.”
The lid of the sarcophagus had barely been shifted far enough to admit air before Alluvion burst through the tiny hole. Evaporated steam had built up a lot of pressure to help him on his way, but it wasn't like he really needed all that much encouragement to get out of there.
“What the hell? Is one of you playing some kind of practical joke? Because I ain't laughing.”
“Wasn't me, boss.”
Now that he was outside, Alluvion could see his former prison (a stone coffin lying in a hole filled with burning tar, not that he knew what a coffin was), the surrounding landscape (fairly uninteresting, a barren plain interspersed with identical tombs and ringed by a tall, barbed iron fence) and of course his rescuers and the source of the muffled voices he'd been able to hear during his mercifully short confinement, a loose assortment of odd-looking machines.
The bulk of the admittedly fairly small group was a gaggle of steel imps; sharp-faced, pointy-nosed children hovering in the air and carrying little tridents. The fact that some of them weren't even bothering to flap their impractically tiny wings implied that this wasn't their actual method of propulsion, though one of them wasn't flying quite steady and had to keep adjusting himself to prevent an aimless list to the left. It looked like they could once have been coated in some form of artificial skin, it was still visible in places, but most of it had worn away by now leaving their mechanical skeletons in full view.
One of them was smoking a cigar (which was probably a fairly pointless endeavour as it didn't have any lungs and the air was filled with smoke anyway, but he felt like it gave him an air of sophistication), and all of them were staring at the river spirit, or a space just underneath him.
“Well”, said the cigar-smoker, sardonically, “that was certainly interesting.Not every day I see a living fountain in hell I have to say.
Would you mind getting off my subordinate? That is assuming you even understand what I am telling you, they certainly shouldn't be shunting mindless animals down here but with the current administration I wouldn't put it past them.”
Alluvion looked down and, sure enough, another imp was lying under his translucent coils, completely motionless with its yellow eye-lights dead. Evidently it had been caught in his torrential escape from the burning tomb and subsequently bathed in water as he reconstituted himself on top of it. He sheepishly washed himself out of the way.
“I am most sorry! Your friend, is he alright?”
Usually he wouldn't even have to ask but to his god senses they weren't even there, which was somewhat disconcerting. Things that moved and spoke but weren't alive in the strictest sense of the word were still an entirely new experience to him.
“Eh, probably”, the imp replied, “Not very well insulated you see, you may not have guessed this but water isn't really a regular hazard down on this ring.
Most likely someone'll just drain him out replace a couple of fuses and he'll be up and about again, though I suppose if he's lucky there's always a chance he's melted something vital and he's gone for good.
Either way it'll be more maintenance than any of us have gotten in months. Aamon! You carry him, it's not like I could even if I wanted to.”
This shout stirred the final and only non-imp member of the group from where he'd been standing on the other side of the tomb, being the only one with the upper body strength necessary to shift the coffin's heavy lid. His six-eyed, horned face would have been familiar to Poran although this specimen was considerably more run-down than the ones that had chased the poor bard, several floors down. It clanked over to Alluvion and picked up the fallen imp by one leg, not even showing the any interest in the river elemental or even acknowledging his presence past that required to keep from getting wet himself. Alluvion was still trying to sort out what that last exchange had meant.
“I am sorry, lucky? Why would this be a desirable event? Nobody wants to die, and I am not even going to eat him.”
“Nobody wants to... ha! You do know where you are don't you? Aren't they still giving their introductory talk? Though I suppose unfamiliarity with the material is probably what got you down on this ring in the first place. We get all the oddballs down here, I mean who signs up for a voluntary hell that they don't believe actually exists? Though at least we're busier than level one. Heard they've just started using that one as a staff room.
...sorry I shouldn't really be sharing this with the clients should I? Even in the sorry state I'm in now. That bastard's changes must be getting to me.”
Alluvion had understood about one word in five of that last outburst but the strange creature seemed to enjoy talking about itself and he needed time to get himself acclimatised. It was far cooler here than it had been mere seconds ago when he was trapped in an enclosed space but still warmer than made him feel comfortable, he'd even shrunk a couple of inches as the inward flow of water from his base struggled to keep up with the heat's gradual theft of his body mass (though the evaporated particles simply winked out of existence a few feet away from his body).
“I must make more apologies, I have only recently arrived here and I'm not entirely sure what is going on.
Please, who is “Bastard”? Who are you? What is a “hell”? And what is the purpose of all these boxes?”
The demon just stared at him for a couple of seconds in disbelief and then shook his head.
“While this makes my job a whole lot easier, I am honestly shocked at how far standards have fallen. Wouldn't be like this if I was still on the job you know, people always knew where they stood when this was my gig.
I'm a demon, right? You know what that is? No, evidently not. Robots? You know what they are?” As Alluvion shook his head again, the imp sighed and scratched at his faceplate,
“Right this is clearly going to take a long time and we really don't have all that much left, should be a fury patrol in a few minutes. It is technically still my job to make sure you sit there in that stone box for the rest of time however since some lunatic rewired my brain for me, I am going to have to do the best I can to see that the opposite happens.
Would you enjoy being back in that little stone tomb?”
”Of course not!”, this was finally a question Alluvion understood.
“Right then.
Good, I suppose.
Did you know you're the first person who's answered yes to that? Follow me and we'll get you backstage before some flying cat lady tries to shove you back in, maybe my new master will have time to answer your numerous obvious questions before sending me off on another utterly pointless errand. You can be clueless buddies together, won't that be lovely?”
One of the other imps was already holding open a rectangular trapdoor that had previously been a seamless part of the floor. The metal-walled tunnel it led into seemed dark and unwelcoming but it was still probably better than being boiled alive, and there was the possibility of information at the end of it. He hadn't quite figured out that the imp was insulting him yet, his command of the language still wasn't absolute, but there was still something about his attitude that the river spirit felt that he couldn't trust. Perhaps it was just the fact that he couldn't read the robot's mood like a book.
That said, with the lack of any other real options and despite the fact that he still didn't have much of an idea what was going on, Alluvion followed the grumpy imp and the rest of his posse into the darkness.
Staring out at the vast weirdness that was The Unborn instilled in Alluvion a peculiar sense of responsibility. Barabbas had already informed them of their role in its development of course but there is a big difference between hearing something and understanding it, and besides that when he'd heard the speech the first time he was still getting over the fact that he suddenly wasn't a whole river.
He didn't know what actions had stirred the gestating god before him to take on its current form, or in fact what most of his fellow “sacrifices” had actually spent the last round doing, and suddenly realised that he'd been both wasting his time and shirking in his responsibilities. Whether this was true or not, he saw himself as being in a unique position of insight with regards to the godling's development, was it not the same way he'd been formed?
Well, he was made of the dreams of fish rather than the deeds of a group of strangers, but there were some similarities there anyway. Or, he'd like to think that there were.
The problem then was figuring out what kind of actions would ring loud enough to speak to The Unborn's budding consciousness, and then which of those would actually be desirable. While he was generally well-meaning he also wasn't really familiar with the company of anyone who didn't have gills, but he had already caught on to the fact that what fish would be happy with probably wouldn't be quite enough to satisfy everyone else.
Perhaps, considering that he knew about as much about the civilisation of other sapient species as the Unborn did, he wasn't actually in any kind of privileged, enlightened position at all! Unfortunately this did not occur to him, and before he could stop and think long enough to realise it he had been yanked away again and deposited somewhere within the bowels of the Inferno Alpha complex. What better place than hell to give him a good moral compass?
Alluvion's reception to the hell-world turned out to be a fair bit warmer than the one Poran received, though this wasn't really immediately apparent. The first thing he noticed was that it was dark, darker even than it had been in the empty place where the Unborn lived, and also fairly cramped. It wasn't dissimilar to the short period of time he'd spent in a bucket, in fact, except this time the space was slightly more generous and the walls (what with being made of stone) were a lot more resistant to shoving. Another difference between this place and the bucket was that there wasn't a convenient exit hole in the top, a fact that he found not only notable but actually very worryingly important considering that none of the walls were responding to his frantic attempts to push them away. Lastly, he noticed the warmth, although really “warm” very quickly became an understatement. It felt like he was being boiled, which... meant that he probably was. Fortunately, help was close at hand.
“Oi lads! There's another new arrival over here!
Not really sure how we could have missed this one to be honest... oh well, better crack her open then.
Hope this isn't another whiner, we're on a schedule.”
The lid of the sarcophagus had barely been shifted far enough to admit air before Alluvion burst through the tiny hole. Evaporated steam had built up a lot of pressure to help him on his way, but it wasn't like he really needed all that much encouragement to get out of there.
“What the hell? Is one of you playing some kind of practical joke? Because I ain't laughing.”
“Wasn't me, boss.”
Now that he was outside, Alluvion could see his former prison (a stone coffin lying in a hole filled with burning tar, not that he knew what a coffin was), the surrounding landscape (fairly uninteresting, a barren plain interspersed with identical tombs and ringed by a tall, barbed iron fence) and of course his rescuers and the source of the muffled voices he'd been able to hear during his mercifully short confinement, a loose assortment of odd-looking machines.
The bulk of the admittedly fairly small group was a gaggle of steel imps; sharp-faced, pointy-nosed children hovering in the air and carrying little tridents. The fact that some of them weren't even bothering to flap their impractically tiny wings implied that this wasn't their actual method of propulsion, though one of them wasn't flying quite steady and had to keep adjusting himself to prevent an aimless list to the left. It looked like they could once have been coated in some form of artificial skin, it was still visible in places, but most of it had worn away by now leaving their mechanical skeletons in full view.
One of them was smoking a cigar (which was probably a fairly pointless endeavour as it didn't have any lungs and the air was filled with smoke anyway, but he felt like it gave him an air of sophistication), and all of them were staring at the river spirit, or a space just underneath him.
“Well”, said the cigar-smoker, sardonically, “that was certainly interesting.Not every day I see a living fountain in hell I have to say.
Would you mind getting off my subordinate? That is assuming you even understand what I am telling you, they certainly shouldn't be shunting mindless animals down here but with the current administration I wouldn't put it past them.”
Alluvion looked down and, sure enough, another imp was lying under his translucent coils, completely motionless with its yellow eye-lights dead. Evidently it had been caught in his torrential escape from the burning tomb and subsequently bathed in water as he reconstituted himself on top of it. He sheepishly washed himself out of the way.
“I am most sorry! Your friend, is he alright?”
Usually he wouldn't even have to ask but to his god senses they weren't even there, which was somewhat disconcerting. Things that moved and spoke but weren't alive in the strictest sense of the word were still an entirely new experience to him.
“Eh, probably”, the imp replied, “Not very well insulated you see, you may not have guessed this but water isn't really a regular hazard down on this ring.
Most likely someone'll just drain him out replace a couple of fuses and he'll be up and about again, though I suppose if he's lucky there's always a chance he's melted something vital and he's gone for good.
Either way it'll be more maintenance than any of us have gotten in months. Aamon! You carry him, it's not like I could even if I wanted to.”
This shout stirred the final and only non-imp member of the group from where he'd been standing on the other side of the tomb, being the only one with the upper body strength necessary to shift the coffin's heavy lid. His six-eyed, horned face would have been familiar to Poran although this specimen was considerably more run-down than the ones that had chased the poor bard, several floors down. It clanked over to Alluvion and picked up the fallen imp by one leg, not even showing the any interest in the river elemental or even acknowledging his presence past that required to keep from getting wet himself. Alluvion was still trying to sort out what that last exchange had meant.
“I am sorry, lucky? Why would this be a desirable event? Nobody wants to die, and I am not even going to eat him.”
“Nobody wants to... ha! You do know where you are don't you? Aren't they still giving their introductory talk? Though I suppose unfamiliarity with the material is probably what got you down on this ring in the first place. We get all the oddballs down here, I mean who signs up for a voluntary hell that they don't believe actually exists? Though at least we're busier than level one. Heard they've just started using that one as a staff room.
...sorry I shouldn't really be sharing this with the clients should I? Even in the sorry state I'm in now. That bastard's changes must be getting to me.”
Alluvion had understood about one word in five of that last outburst but the strange creature seemed to enjoy talking about itself and he needed time to get himself acclimatised. It was far cooler here than it had been mere seconds ago when he was trapped in an enclosed space but still warmer than made him feel comfortable, he'd even shrunk a couple of inches as the inward flow of water from his base struggled to keep up with the heat's gradual theft of his body mass (though the evaporated particles simply winked out of existence a few feet away from his body).
“I must make more apologies, I have only recently arrived here and I'm not entirely sure what is going on.
Please, who is “Bastard”? Who are you? What is a “hell”? And what is the purpose of all these boxes?”
The demon just stared at him for a couple of seconds in disbelief and then shook his head.
“While this makes my job a whole lot easier, I am honestly shocked at how far standards have fallen. Wouldn't be like this if I was still on the job you know, people always knew where they stood when this was my gig.
I'm a demon, right? You know what that is? No, evidently not. Robots? You know what they are?” As Alluvion shook his head again, the imp sighed and scratched at his faceplate,
“Right this is clearly going to take a long time and we really don't have all that much left, should be a fury patrol in a few minutes. It is technically still my job to make sure you sit there in that stone box for the rest of time however since some lunatic rewired my brain for me, I am going to have to do the best I can to see that the opposite happens.
Would you enjoy being back in that little stone tomb?”
”Of course not!”, this was finally a question Alluvion understood.
“Right then.
Good, I suppose.
Did you know you're the first person who's answered yes to that? Follow me and we'll get you backstage before some flying cat lady tries to shove you back in, maybe my new master will have time to answer your numerous obvious questions before sending me off on another utterly pointless errand. You can be clueless buddies together, won't that be lovely?”
One of the other imps was already holding open a rectangular trapdoor that had previously been a seamless part of the floor. The metal-walled tunnel it led into seemed dark and unwelcoming but it was still probably better than being boiled alive, and there was the possibility of information at the end of it. He hadn't quite figured out that the imp was insulting him yet, his command of the language still wasn't absolute, but there was still something about his attitude that the river spirit felt that he couldn't trust. Perhaps it was just the fact that he couldn't read the robot's mood like a book.
That said, with the lack of any other real options and despite the fact that he still didn't have much of an idea what was going on, Alluvion followed the grumpy imp and the rest of his posse into the darkness.