Re: The Wretched Rite - Round Two - Inferno Alpha
07-20-2012, 03:04 AM
Originally posted on MSPA by Jacquerel.
Speaking is a tricky business and it's frankly startling how good people get at it so quickly, even from a young age children can be pretty good at picking up inflection to detect things like sarcasm or secondary meanings (though removing a lot of the visual clues reduces people to taking jokes at face value again). The human brain devotes a fair bit of effort to picking this up as early as possible and refines it over many years with plenty of other people around to help it out.
Most river animals on the other hand (or at least the ones involved in our little god's formative years) don't really go in for the whole social interaction thing past “if I shake my gills just like that and turn orange, I'll get all the honeys” (fish slang is also terribly out of date as there's nobody around to tell them any better) and “what's that nerd doing strutting around my patch? I'll intimidate him with my impractically enormous right pincer”.
Alluvion was a blindingly fast learner but even so he was still struggling with the concept of people not making their intentions totally clear from the offset. The angel pretty obviously wouldn't have been able to eat him even if it wanted to (it didn't appear to have a mouth), and what's the purpose of deception if not for mating or eating?
Another thing Alluvion lacked was the theological background to understand what a “Final Reckoning” could actually mean, and thus he could only react with a surprising amount of surprise to see his new friend sprint and run away at the robot's words.
Had it not said that they were lucky? That meant good things, did it not? Why did people keep running away from him? Was he doing something wrong?
The angelbot itself, if you will subscribe to robots actually having feelings at all, could have been said to be fairly frustrated. Could they not at least have both run? Then it would have been able to give chase and forget for a while that it was in this disgusting warren of delinquents instead of now having to babysit an odd-looking sinner that had already started talking to itself.
Were it able to even consider that its superiors might be capable of error or misjudgement it would have cursed the machines that assigned it to searching the management tunnels for reprogrammed demons instead of the job of pacifying the rioters outside (and hence bringing righteous fury down upon the unclean, for clearly all here were sinners and thus deserving of a good smiting anyway) but alas it was not and had to make do with glaring at its new ward with a blank, benevolent face that couldn't actually display any form of feeling.
And every second it spent grinding its gears together with ire was a second that the escapee got even further away so it was going to have to do something about that too. It wasn't like anyone was going to be able to outrun an angel though.
Had the angelbot asked its captive's opinion it would have found Alluvion all too willing to pursue Olivia, while he was still sure that the angel had their best interests at heart (not only due to its words, but also some odd feeling that it just looked generally trustworthy) it did not know about The Unborn and Alluvion felt that it was still his deepest responsibility to meet up with the other Chosen Ones and make some kind of plan about this because as far as he could tell from the scant few times he had seen them, they weren't being particularly proactive about the whole situation.
Not that he was sure what that would entail himself, what is the protocol for teaching a God?
He had actually just started the question, “I am terribly sorry but would you mind if we-” when the angel interrupted him.
”We need to fetch your little friend first, and we'll go a lot faster if you don't walk. Grab on tight.”
The angel ignored Alluvion's protests and stretched out a hand, manacles unfolding out of its wrist. It wasn't expecting what was basically an enormous slug to put on a great turn of speed and besides that it looked fairly landbound. Decorative though the angel's wings might be, it's not like robots have ever needed wings to fly. It only hoped that Alluvion was actually capable of holding on, it honestly looked like his fingers would slip through its iron skin if he tried to attach himself.
As Alluvion shied away it rolled its eyes (actually it didn't because it couldn't, but it imagined that it did) and forcibly grabbed his wrist. Its panels were fully watertight, there was really nothing to worry about and it didn't care what contact had done to a pair of rusting demon bots, it was cutting edge.
Which is why it was suddenly and unpleasantly surprised when it found itself collapsed in a twitching, sparking heap on the ground as soon as its fingers pierced the surface.
Everyone knows that electronics break if you drop them in water right? That's just common knowledge. It's not true of course, but unluckily for some there are places where the belief that something is true is more important than the fact that it isn't. The angel had just stuck its hand into one of those places. At least it didn't suffer for very long.
Alluvion hadn't done it on purpose and he was very sorry about it, but he was about as helpless before the fact that his very touch destroyed anything electrical as the angel had been to disobey its creators. Administering a few experimental shakes (that he swiftly abandoned as he realised he might be making it worse) and a liberal dose of apologies, he quickly exhausted the sum total of his technomedical knowledge.
The angel would be ok though, right? That guy earlier said it just needed to be dragged to a repair shop and it would be good as new and (if his word was to be believed, which Alluvion had no reason to doubt) probably actually better than it had been before, so on the whole there probably wasn't a lot of harm done. He reluctantly turned to pursue Olivia all by himself.
The trail was cold and the angel had guessed correctly when it had thought Alluvion's shape unfit for traversing corridors at speed. He wasn't slow but he was also nowhere near a match for a panicked, sprinting biped in a race especially with such a long head start. It wasn't long at all before he was terribly lost and none of the demons or sinners he encountered seemed to have any interest at all in helping him out. How he managed to get from there to behind the scenes of the seventh ring was a bit of a mystery and certainly didn't involve travelling in a straight line or (perhaps more importantly) the right direction.
If he hadn't realised anything strange was happening earlier, this was where he first started to wonder what was going on. As he had descended most of the people who passed him had been heading in the opposite direction and not usually slowly. By the time he reached Floor Seven proper there was almost nobody around, just rows and rows of empty demonic offices and a few similarly unoccupied torture engines. An angry crunching, couching noise was coming from the grates on the walls.
And there was a body.
She wasn't dead of course, nobody died on Inferno Alpha, but she wasn't moving very much apart from the occasional twitch. As Alluvion moved closer he noticed that her lower jaw was completely missing, and the red-tinted drool that ran down her chin and onto her ruined outfit was giving off smoke and had left some fairly unpleasant burns in its path.
A half-eaten apple was clutched in the ruins of one hand, the other still firmly gripped a pair of gardening shears.
Even Alluvion's god-senses couldn't determine whether the poor woman was paralysed by extreme agony or... pleasure? If it was the former then he could hardly just leave her here but he also didn't want to contaminate himself with whatever that stuff was. He gingerly reached out to reinforce the bond and make certain but sprang back as she suddenly slumped over, her arm buckling and falling with an almost inaudible hiss into a pool of gore and acid.
His ministrations really hadn't ended well for any of their recipients today and the task set to him by Barabbas was certainly important but he was beginning to think he might have taken a wrong turning, and he just couldn't leave someone lying there in pain, especially if he might have made it worse. He turned and made to go and search the abandoned offices to see if they had left one of their pointy forks behind, or really anything sharp that he could use to put her out of her misery.
He needn't have bothered. A couple of minutes after he turned there was a faint “Plop!” as a second overripe apple fell from the leafy canopy choking the air vents and carpeting the ceiling, bursting over her face and finishing the job for him.
Speaking is a tricky business and it's frankly startling how good people get at it so quickly, even from a young age children can be pretty good at picking up inflection to detect things like sarcasm or secondary meanings (though removing a lot of the visual clues reduces people to taking jokes at face value again). The human brain devotes a fair bit of effort to picking this up as early as possible and refines it over many years with plenty of other people around to help it out.
Most river animals on the other hand (or at least the ones involved in our little god's formative years) don't really go in for the whole social interaction thing past “if I shake my gills just like that and turn orange, I'll get all the honeys” (fish slang is also terribly out of date as there's nobody around to tell them any better) and “what's that nerd doing strutting around my patch? I'll intimidate him with my impractically enormous right pincer”.
Alluvion was a blindingly fast learner but even so he was still struggling with the concept of people not making their intentions totally clear from the offset. The angel pretty obviously wouldn't have been able to eat him even if it wanted to (it didn't appear to have a mouth), and what's the purpose of deception if not for mating or eating?
Another thing Alluvion lacked was the theological background to understand what a “Final Reckoning” could actually mean, and thus he could only react with a surprising amount of surprise to see his new friend sprint and run away at the robot's words.
Had it not said that they were lucky? That meant good things, did it not? Why did people keep running away from him? Was he doing something wrong?
The angelbot itself, if you will subscribe to robots actually having feelings at all, could have been said to be fairly frustrated. Could they not at least have both run? Then it would have been able to give chase and forget for a while that it was in this disgusting warren of delinquents instead of now having to babysit an odd-looking sinner that had already started talking to itself.
Were it able to even consider that its superiors might be capable of error or misjudgement it would have cursed the machines that assigned it to searching the management tunnels for reprogrammed demons instead of the job of pacifying the rioters outside (and hence bringing righteous fury down upon the unclean, for clearly all here were sinners and thus deserving of a good smiting anyway) but alas it was not and had to make do with glaring at its new ward with a blank, benevolent face that couldn't actually display any form of feeling.
And every second it spent grinding its gears together with ire was a second that the escapee got even further away so it was going to have to do something about that too. It wasn't like anyone was going to be able to outrun an angel though.
Had the angelbot asked its captive's opinion it would have found Alluvion all too willing to pursue Olivia, while he was still sure that the angel had their best interests at heart (not only due to its words, but also some odd feeling that it just looked generally trustworthy) it did not know about The Unborn and Alluvion felt that it was still his deepest responsibility to meet up with the other Chosen Ones and make some kind of plan about this because as far as he could tell from the scant few times he had seen them, they weren't being particularly proactive about the whole situation.
Not that he was sure what that would entail himself, what is the protocol for teaching a God?
He had actually just started the question, “I am terribly sorry but would you mind if we-” when the angel interrupted him.
”We need to fetch your little friend first, and we'll go a lot faster if you don't walk. Grab on tight.”
The angel ignored Alluvion's protests and stretched out a hand, manacles unfolding out of its wrist. It wasn't expecting what was basically an enormous slug to put on a great turn of speed and besides that it looked fairly landbound. Decorative though the angel's wings might be, it's not like robots have ever needed wings to fly. It only hoped that Alluvion was actually capable of holding on, it honestly looked like his fingers would slip through its iron skin if he tried to attach himself.
As Alluvion shied away it rolled its eyes (actually it didn't because it couldn't, but it imagined that it did) and forcibly grabbed his wrist. Its panels were fully watertight, there was really nothing to worry about and it didn't care what contact had done to a pair of rusting demon bots, it was cutting edge.
Which is why it was suddenly and unpleasantly surprised when it found itself collapsed in a twitching, sparking heap on the ground as soon as its fingers pierced the surface.
Everyone knows that electronics break if you drop them in water right? That's just common knowledge. It's not true of course, but unluckily for some there are places where the belief that something is true is more important than the fact that it isn't. The angel had just stuck its hand into one of those places. At least it didn't suffer for very long.
Alluvion hadn't done it on purpose and he was very sorry about it, but he was about as helpless before the fact that his very touch destroyed anything electrical as the angel had been to disobey its creators. Administering a few experimental shakes (that he swiftly abandoned as he realised he might be making it worse) and a liberal dose of apologies, he quickly exhausted the sum total of his technomedical knowledge.
The angel would be ok though, right? That guy earlier said it just needed to be dragged to a repair shop and it would be good as new and (if his word was to be believed, which Alluvion had no reason to doubt) probably actually better than it had been before, so on the whole there probably wasn't a lot of harm done. He reluctantly turned to pursue Olivia all by himself.
The trail was cold and the angel had guessed correctly when it had thought Alluvion's shape unfit for traversing corridors at speed. He wasn't slow but he was also nowhere near a match for a panicked, sprinting biped in a race especially with such a long head start. It wasn't long at all before he was terribly lost and none of the demons or sinners he encountered seemed to have any interest at all in helping him out. How he managed to get from there to behind the scenes of the seventh ring was a bit of a mystery and certainly didn't involve travelling in a straight line or (perhaps more importantly) the right direction.
If he hadn't realised anything strange was happening earlier, this was where he first started to wonder what was going on. As he had descended most of the people who passed him had been heading in the opposite direction and not usually slowly. By the time he reached Floor Seven proper there was almost nobody around, just rows and rows of empty demonic offices and a few similarly unoccupied torture engines. An angry crunching, couching noise was coming from the grates on the walls.
And there was a body.
She wasn't dead of course, nobody died on Inferno Alpha, but she wasn't moving very much apart from the occasional twitch. As Alluvion moved closer he noticed that her lower jaw was completely missing, and the red-tinted drool that ran down her chin and onto her ruined outfit was giving off smoke and had left some fairly unpleasant burns in its path.
A half-eaten apple was clutched in the ruins of one hand, the other still firmly gripped a pair of gardening shears.
Even Alluvion's god-senses couldn't determine whether the poor woman was paralysed by extreme agony or... pleasure? If it was the former then he could hardly just leave her here but he also didn't want to contaminate himself with whatever that stuff was. He gingerly reached out to reinforce the bond and make certain but sprang back as she suddenly slumped over, her arm buckling and falling with an almost inaudible hiss into a pool of gore and acid.
His ministrations really hadn't ended well for any of their recipients today and the task set to him by Barabbas was certainly important but he was beginning to think he might have taken a wrong turning, and he just couldn't leave someone lying there in pain, especially if he might have made it worse. He turned and made to go and search the abandoned offices to see if they had left one of their pointy forks behind, or really anything sharp that he could use to put her out of her misery.
He needn't have bothered. A couple of minutes after he turned there was a faint “Plop!” as a second overripe apple fell from the leafy canopy choking the air vents and carpeting the ceiling, bursting over her face and finishing the job for him.