Re: The Grand Battle II! [Round 6:Doomish Temple!]
10-08-2010, 06:59 PM
Originally posted on MSPA by Sruixan.
“I now rather wish that you hadn’t said that.”
Maxwell too was having difficulty comprehending quite how and quite why the visage of Konka’s wayward vacuum cleaner had found its way onto the temple wall; whereas he was sure the lich was probably doing some analytical tomfoolery to settle his uneasy mind, he wasn’t too hung up on the absurdity of the device’s portrayal. Of course it was confounding, but in comparison to having been plucked out of a generally rather sane and unremarkable universe and being plonked down into a fight to the death against seven other hardly rational beings, the highlights of which had so far included a mind-boggling trans-planar trip, a landscape that couldn’t be assed to obey the laws of physics, an actual zombie infestation and an underground temple with an anomaly hidden in every quality it possessed… embarrassingly, having gotten to the end of a list of all the impossible things that he’d experienced today, he’d long since forgotten the original purpose of rattling through such a selection.
He was also reasonably certain he’d been thinking it aloud. Konka Rar didn’t seem to have noticed, preferring to focus on the incongruous carving before him than on the crazed ramblings of an eccentric individual. Fair enough.
“Are you actually listening? I shall admit that it’s been a little dry up to this point but I’m sure it doesn’t take someone like you a whole two minutes to appreciate a wall.”
“What?”
“You have been catapulted across time and space to engage in combat against an assortment of incredible beings at the whim of near-omnipotent entities, shuffled between locales, universes and even battles, sampling a smorgasbord of exotic locations and yet the appearance of a picture of your vacuum cleaner is something of a surprise?”
As gobsmacked as he might have been about discovering Eximo’s visage, Maxwell’s impertinence did little to help the necromancer’s state of mind, partially because, for the second time so far, he was making worrying sense. Not that he’d admit to that, though.
“I can tell you with absolute certainty that this rock is incredibly ancient and, I would wager, these carvings as well. They have been here for longer than Eximo has; they must have been chiselled out before I even came to be – and yet, here it is.”
“Does it have a second name?”
It took a second play-through in his mind for Konka to realise the meaning behind this apparent non sequitur.
“Um. Yes, actually. It’s full name is Eximo Pulvis.”
“Could you spell that out for me?”
”Why must you continue with this persistent questioning? I can’t think of any reason whatsoever to explain why you want my to spell the name of my vacuum cleaner…”
“If you really must know, I’d like to figure out quite how this script works, so as to make some sort of step towards deciphering the content of these walls. There is a hazy notion forming in the back of this poor mind of mine that there may well be information to be gleamed from them…”
The lich was pretty sure Maxwell had used such an unnecessarily long term to spite him, but having dwelled on that for a moment, it suddenly struck him just what the genius was trying to do.
“You don’t really need to worry yourself with that too much. I assure you that I have some processing power which could be put to such a use and I’m sure you’ll concede that cybernetics are far better at pattern recognition that you are.”
“Pffft. Spoilsport.”
Once again, Maxwell was starting to grate on Konka’s nerves. Such a dismissal was surely completely illogical; if the man was as determined to understand the carvings as he implied…
“Let’s be sensible here. If you want to be able to read these messages before you expire, I suggest you let me take over the decryption process.”
“Lift your left leg up for me, please.”
The lich had by now become begrudgingly acceptant of such irrelevant replies and this one seemed innocent enough. There was obviously some immensely important reason why he should raise his limb that was naturally far too trivial to actually articulate. Obviously.
“Ah, excellent. Right then, now for the tricky bit. Well, the trickier bit, technically, but whatever! Tell me, what do you see?”
After a pause, eventually broken by the scraping sound indicative of grating one’s teeth, Konka Rar replied; “My leg.”
The resultant snigger lasted for a fair few seconds longer than was probably wise, but Maxwell couldn’t quite contain himself. “You’re not trying at all hard enough. Had I desired such an answer then I would sadly be forced to presume worrying facts about the current state of my insanity.”
(The lich couldn’t help but note that any normal person would have preferred to use “sanity”, with its far more positive connotations, but then he wasn’t exactly speaking with the epitome of commonplace…)
“The curious thing I’d quite like you to have seen is, well, I would have liked to have thought it obvious, but then it’s something that’s so omnipresent it doesn’t even get taken for granted; it just is.”
“If this is another one of those underhand cracks concerning my skeletal nature then-“
“Shadows.”
“…”
“See, for an underground temple, this place sure is well lit. Such an observation leads pleasingly swiftly to the acknowledgement of there being no areas of shade, an occurrence rendered explicable only if you consider the somewhat bizarre idea of every surface being a light source, thus leading in turn to the weird dilemma of quite how this particular section of otherwise amazingly average strata has somehow been imbued with the power of creating and radiating light. As annoyingly inadequate an explanation as it is, the best I have so far come up with is “by magic”. The one advantage of that particular suggestion is that it does also account for the existence of the golems (and I am quite certain that they are plural, thanks), although the mechanics concerning “how” are very much beyond my grasp.”
There was a momentary lapse in the rambling as Maxwell stopped for breath; the decidedly startled necromancer could force out only the unintelligible beginnings of an interjection before the wall of words resumed.
“You, I can only assume, have already come to the conclusion that there is some “magic” involved in this arena, simply because you are by your very nature a being of magic. You are also, I would believe, not the sort of person who would loiter around staring at featureless walls for no apparent reason, especially with that rather fetching eye of yours. I, on the other hand, have had to think myself down the (comparatively) hard route, an endeavour that, I’m sure you’ll agree, did prove not just possible but eventually rather fruitful indeed.”
This intermission lasted a tad longer than the first, allowing Konka to get out the whole of the word “well” before he made the awful mistake of hesitating over the comma that succeeded it, plunging the “conversation” back into the decidedly inhospitable depths of consciousness at work.
“See, that is what I do, really. I notice, I think, I resolve. Sometimes, just for a change, I get all audacious and mix up the order a bit, but the net result always serves to highlight that about the only bit of me that’s useful for anything at all is the gooey ruddy-pink blob that’s crammed into my skull. If anyone ever figures out how to keep brains in vats, allowing them to survive into the future, mine would probably top the shortlist. The trouble there is that such an endowment alone is not, in my opinion, grounds on which to enter me into a bleedin’ battle to the death. I don’t do “battling”. The best I can do is to vaguely poke someone with a rapier-like stick and ask them (politely, of course) to make a sort of “oh-no-I’m-dying” noise.”
Pausing tactfully to allow the lich to chuckle, Maxwell had a go at composing himself.
“All I’m saying is that I am going to die. I am reasonably resigned to this and I can’t honestly see any way it is not going to be so. I do not, however, see any point in being so submissive to my inevitable demise that I forgo the span between now and then. I am still here, after all. The only problem with that is the unfortunate niggle that I am only human and therefore hard-wired to be just a little bit angsty about the whole imminent-death business. The space in between, therefore, is woefully doomed to be nothing more than a mental breakdown of unfavourable proportions, unless I can keep my mind glued together with something (heck, anything) that happens to be available. I just need something to do, something to concentrate on for a bit, and I guarantee you I’ll be fine.”
A monologue like that, in an ideal world, with every word a window into the troubled soul of the speaker, would resonate so as to merit a heartfelt response from its intended recipient, through which an understanding would somehow be forged, one that would last the rest of the story or movie or book or whatever perfect medium one might happen to be enthralled in.
“Pfft. Anything to stop you from collapsing down to the forsaken level of “quivering wreck” again. You’re ramshackle enough as it is.”
In an ideal albeit fictional world, of course. As heartfelt as Konka’s reply truly was, it had a bitter air about it that no script would dare include, not unless suffering such hostility was later reimbursed, a situation that, considering the parties involved, was decidedly unlikely.
So Maxwell just sighed and dwelled upon other, relatively less irksome things, like sprawling subterranean structures that, for all intents and purposes, suddenly materialised in strata too deep to be reached without near-impossible effort. He could probably just dismiss the matter as a triviality, since he wasn’t exactly going to be able to do anything about it, but it seemed a little silly to build a temple seemingly related to the battles that were being fought across the multiverse (five seconds were spent musing over possibly pluralizing that word) miles underground where it took omnipotence to reach…
…somewhere in the corner of his mind’s eye, he was sure he’d just seen a light bulb flicker into action…
“…oh man that is so, so worryingly awesomely perturbingly terrifyingly mind-bogglingly goodness gracious me…”
“Would you stoop so low as to tell me what it is that’s just struck you?” tutted Konka.
“No. I’ll show you it though; now, if you’d care to follow me.”
Coy as usual, Maxwell spun a revolution or two, and then sort of stumbled towards the debris pile that had formed across the corridor. As he began to scale it, there came from behind him the sound of someone without a throat trying their best at clearing it.
“Dare I be as bold as to point a little something out here?”
Picking his way over a relatively tricky stretch of rubble, Maxwell was somewhat glad that, being in front, the rolling of his eyes was an action kept gratefully private.
“You are, to put it succinctly, fleeing from where all the interaction is taking place to disappear on the basis of some spurious whim, something which, if I am not mistaken, you’ve done before? I can hardly construe this as anything else but another display of cowardice…”
(as much as he didn’t like the fact, Maxwell had to admit there was more than a slight hint of truth in those words. The problem as he saw it was that, if he was to progress further into the temple, he would eventually and inevitably come face to face with Vyrm’n and, really, he just didn’t think he would be up to suffering that. His worries about what she’d become in his absence had been stewing at the back of his head for an uncomfortable while now, curdling into a myriad of dreadful possibilities that he hardly dared to acknowledge in his current, oh-so-weary state…)
“If I didn’t know you better, I’d be forcing you to show a bit more fight right now, but I’ll be amazed if there honestly is any in you at all…”
(…but then, most vexing of all, sadly, was that he couldn’t help but consider that that seemingly inhuman black mass was similarly worried about what he’d turned into since that deplorable slip of the tongue back in the theatre...)
“Just for that, I’m going to change tack. In fact, I expect this shall be much more fun… for me, anyway…”
“I now rather wish that you hadn’t said that.”
Maxwell too was having difficulty comprehending quite how and quite why the visage of Konka’s wayward vacuum cleaner had found its way onto the temple wall; whereas he was sure the lich was probably doing some analytical tomfoolery to settle his uneasy mind, he wasn’t too hung up on the absurdity of the device’s portrayal. Of course it was confounding, but in comparison to having been plucked out of a generally rather sane and unremarkable universe and being plonked down into a fight to the death against seven other hardly rational beings, the highlights of which had so far included a mind-boggling trans-planar trip, a landscape that couldn’t be assed to obey the laws of physics, an actual zombie infestation and an underground temple with an anomaly hidden in every quality it possessed… embarrassingly, having gotten to the end of a list of all the impossible things that he’d experienced today, he’d long since forgotten the original purpose of rattling through such a selection.
He was also reasonably certain he’d been thinking it aloud. Konka Rar didn’t seem to have noticed, preferring to focus on the incongruous carving before him than on the crazed ramblings of an eccentric individual. Fair enough.
“Are you actually listening? I shall admit that it’s been a little dry up to this point but I’m sure it doesn’t take someone like you a whole two minutes to appreciate a wall.”
“What?”
“You have been catapulted across time and space to engage in combat against an assortment of incredible beings at the whim of near-omnipotent entities, shuffled between locales, universes and even battles, sampling a smorgasbord of exotic locations and yet the appearance of a picture of your vacuum cleaner is something of a surprise?”
As gobsmacked as he might have been about discovering Eximo’s visage, Maxwell’s impertinence did little to help the necromancer’s state of mind, partially because, for the second time so far, he was making worrying sense. Not that he’d admit to that, though.
“I can tell you with absolute certainty that this rock is incredibly ancient and, I would wager, these carvings as well. They have been here for longer than Eximo has; they must have been chiselled out before I even came to be – and yet, here it is.”
“Does it have a second name?”
It took a second play-through in his mind for Konka to realise the meaning behind this apparent non sequitur.
“Um. Yes, actually. It’s full name is Eximo Pulvis.”
“Could you spell that out for me?”
”Why must you continue with this persistent questioning? I can’t think of any reason whatsoever to explain why you want my to spell the name of my vacuum cleaner…”
“If you really must know, I’d like to figure out quite how this script works, so as to make some sort of step towards deciphering the content of these walls. There is a hazy notion forming in the back of this poor mind of mine that there may well be information to be gleamed from them…”
The lich was pretty sure Maxwell had used such an unnecessarily long term to spite him, but having dwelled on that for a moment, it suddenly struck him just what the genius was trying to do.
“You don’t really need to worry yourself with that too much. I assure you that I have some processing power which could be put to such a use and I’m sure you’ll concede that cybernetics are far better at pattern recognition that you are.”
“Pffft. Spoilsport.”
Once again, Maxwell was starting to grate on Konka’s nerves. Such a dismissal was surely completely illogical; if the man was as determined to understand the carvings as he implied…
“Let’s be sensible here. If you want to be able to read these messages before you expire, I suggest you let me take over the decryption process.”
“Lift your left leg up for me, please.”
The lich had by now become begrudgingly acceptant of such irrelevant replies and this one seemed innocent enough. There was obviously some immensely important reason why he should raise his limb that was naturally far too trivial to actually articulate. Obviously.
“Ah, excellent. Right then, now for the tricky bit. Well, the trickier bit, technically, but whatever! Tell me, what do you see?”
After a pause, eventually broken by the scraping sound indicative of grating one’s teeth, Konka Rar replied; “My leg.”
The resultant snigger lasted for a fair few seconds longer than was probably wise, but Maxwell couldn’t quite contain himself. “You’re not trying at all hard enough. Had I desired such an answer then I would sadly be forced to presume worrying facts about the current state of my insanity.”
(The lich couldn’t help but note that any normal person would have preferred to use “sanity”, with its far more positive connotations, but then he wasn’t exactly speaking with the epitome of commonplace…)
“The curious thing I’d quite like you to have seen is, well, I would have liked to have thought it obvious, but then it’s something that’s so omnipresent it doesn’t even get taken for granted; it just is.”
“If this is another one of those underhand cracks concerning my skeletal nature then-“
“Shadows.”
“…”
“See, for an underground temple, this place sure is well lit. Such an observation leads pleasingly swiftly to the acknowledgement of there being no areas of shade, an occurrence rendered explicable only if you consider the somewhat bizarre idea of every surface being a light source, thus leading in turn to the weird dilemma of quite how this particular section of otherwise amazingly average strata has somehow been imbued with the power of creating and radiating light. As annoyingly inadequate an explanation as it is, the best I have so far come up with is “by magic”. The one advantage of that particular suggestion is that it does also account for the existence of the golems (and I am quite certain that they are plural, thanks), although the mechanics concerning “how” are very much beyond my grasp.”
There was a momentary lapse in the rambling as Maxwell stopped for breath; the decidedly startled necromancer could force out only the unintelligible beginnings of an interjection before the wall of words resumed.
“You, I can only assume, have already come to the conclusion that there is some “magic” involved in this arena, simply because you are by your very nature a being of magic. You are also, I would believe, not the sort of person who would loiter around staring at featureless walls for no apparent reason, especially with that rather fetching eye of yours. I, on the other hand, have had to think myself down the (comparatively) hard route, an endeavour that, I’m sure you’ll agree, did prove not just possible but eventually rather fruitful indeed.”
This intermission lasted a tad longer than the first, allowing Konka to get out the whole of the word “well” before he made the awful mistake of hesitating over the comma that succeeded it, plunging the “conversation” back into the decidedly inhospitable depths of consciousness at work.
“See, that is what I do, really. I notice, I think, I resolve. Sometimes, just for a change, I get all audacious and mix up the order a bit, but the net result always serves to highlight that about the only bit of me that’s useful for anything at all is the gooey ruddy-pink blob that’s crammed into my skull. If anyone ever figures out how to keep brains in vats, allowing them to survive into the future, mine would probably top the shortlist. The trouble there is that such an endowment alone is not, in my opinion, grounds on which to enter me into a bleedin’ battle to the death. I don’t do “battling”. The best I can do is to vaguely poke someone with a rapier-like stick and ask them (politely, of course) to make a sort of “oh-no-I’m-dying” noise.”
Pausing tactfully to allow the lich to chuckle, Maxwell had a go at composing himself.
“All I’m saying is that I am going to die. I am reasonably resigned to this and I can’t honestly see any way it is not going to be so. I do not, however, see any point in being so submissive to my inevitable demise that I forgo the span between now and then. I am still here, after all. The only problem with that is the unfortunate niggle that I am only human and therefore hard-wired to be just a little bit angsty about the whole imminent-death business. The space in between, therefore, is woefully doomed to be nothing more than a mental breakdown of unfavourable proportions, unless I can keep my mind glued together with something (heck, anything) that happens to be available. I just need something to do, something to concentrate on for a bit, and I guarantee you I’ll be fine.”
A monologue like that, in an ideal world, with every word a window into the troubled soul of the speaker, would resonate so as to merit a heartfelt response from its intended recipient, through which an understanding would somehow be forged, one that would last the rest of the story or movie or book or whatever perfect medium one might happen to be enthralled in.
“Pfft. Anything to stop you from collapsing down to the forsaken level of “quivering wreck” again. You’re ramshackle enough as it is.”
In an ideal albeit fictional world, of course. As heartfelt as Konka’s reply truly was, it had a bitter air about it that no script would dare include, not unless suffering such hostility was later reimbursed, a situation that, considering the parties involved, was decidedly unlikely.
So Maxwell just sighed and dwelled upon other, relatively less irksome things, like sprawling subterranean structures that, for all intents and purposes, suddenly materialised in strata too deep to be reached without near-impossible effort. He could probably just dismiss the matter as a triviality, since he wasn’t exactly going to be able to do anything about it, but it seemed a little silly to build a temple seemingly related to the battles that were being fought across the multiverse (five seconds were spent musing over possibly pluralizing that word) miles underground where it took omnipotence to reach…
…somewhere in the corner of his mind’s eye, he was sure he’d just seen a light bulb flicker into action…
“…oh man that is so, so worryingly awesomely perturbingly terrifyingly mind-bogglingly goodness gracious me…”
“Would you stoop so low as to tell me what it is that’s just struck you?” tutted Konka.
“No. I’ll show you it though; now, if you’d care to follow me.”
Coy as usual, Maxwell spun a revolution or two, and then sort of stumbled towards the debris pile that had formed across the corridor. As he began to scale it, there came from behind him the sound of someone without a throat trying their best at clearing it.
“Dare I be as bold as to point a little something out here?”
Picking his way over a relatively tricky stretch of rubble, Maxwell was somewhat glad that, being in front, the rolling of his eyes was an action kept gratefully private.
“You are, to put it succinctly, fleeing from where all the interaction is taking place to disappear on the basis of some spurious whim, something which, if I am not mistaken, you’ve done before? I can hardly construe this as anything else but another display of cowardice…”
(as much as he didn’t like the fact, Maxwell had to admit there was more than a slight hint of truth in those words. The problem as he saw it was that, if he was to progress further into the temple, he would eventually and inevitably come face to face with Vyrm’n and, really, he just didn’t think he would be up to suffering that. His worries about what she’d become in his absence had been stewing at the back of his head for an uncomfortable while now, curdling into a myriad of dreadful possibilities that he hardly dared to acknowledge in his current, oh-so-weary state…)
“If I didn’t know you better, I’d be forcing you to show a bit more fight right now, but I’ll be amazed if there honestly is any in you at all…”
(…but then, most vexing of all, sadly, was that he couldn’t help but consider that that seemingly inhuman black mass was similarly worried about what he’d turned into since that deplorable slip of the tongue back in the theatre...)
“Just for that, I’m going to change tack. In fact, I expect this shall be much more fun… for me, anyway…”