Re: The Relentless Slaughter [Round 3: Tormentorland]
05-27-2012, 07:18 PM
Originally posted on MSPA by Lord Paradise.
Are you giving up your faith, Lieutenant Zimmer?”
Ha. Yes, he should certainly think so.
Because Rolloland had failed, either out of genuine unoriginality or simply willful stubbornness, to come up with a name for a rollercoaster other than “the Rollocoaster,” there were a number of Rollocoasters in the park, each marked by a different color. Higher energy colors represented lower energy coasters—Rollocoaster Purple was a ride for children, and Rollocoaster Red was The Big One, the one the teenagers all had to dare each other to give a try.
Zimmer had a great admiration for the engineering that had gone into the coaster. It displayed a great reverence towards the classical rollercoaster form. Had Zimmer had access to the sort of gravity-manipulating materials that had clearly gone into its design, he might be tempted to build the most efficient coaster possible: a straight line, or a simple loop, that merely simulated the ups and downs of a standard coaster by warping local gravity. He is certain, at least, that most of his fellow Orashaldi scientists would have done so. But Rollocoaster Red was not merely a centrifuge; it had a humanistic purpose beyond the stimulus of the human body to release certain endorphins; it was an experience. The swirling loops, the track that hung in the air and teleported the car from place to place, the animatronic armadillos that leered at the passengers, the dark tunnels and the matrices of neon tubes that darted about the track like a school of fish, all of these aesthetic details contributed to the whole.
The Lieutenant did not need to take it on faith that once he reached the front of the line he would be rewarded with the thrill-ride experience of a lifetime. The evidence was there, all around him. It was a hypothesis he could prove with repeatable observations.
After replacing his shredded clothes, prudently purchasing a bright yellow Rollo-themed umbrella, and of course investing in a Rollo-On-The-Go Line-Bypass-Pass because he was a man of limited patience, Zimmer was nearly out of Rollobucks. That was all well and good. He had enough to grab something to eat, but for obvious reasons wouldn’t want to be filling up his stomach until after he had worn himself out on the coasters. He wasn’t the nauseous type, but there was no reason to tempt fate.
Shortly before the boarding station—was that what one called it?—the boarding station for the coaster, there was a set of lockers where one could deposit any valuables or small objects that might fly out of pockets at high velocity. Zimmer felt around in his pockets for the assortment of dangerous, important, or sentimentally significant chemicals hanging there. He smiled, laid his umbrella down next to one of the lockers and hurried past.
The cars seated two. Zimmer walked past a heated argument between a human mother, a father and a young boy as to who should be the odd one out, and seated himself comfortably in the car in the very front. After a few seconds, the mother joined him, sweating and exasperated.
“Hello,” greeted Zimmer cheerfully.
“Hi,” said the mother, lowering the safety bar. She was a heavyset woman, and with the bar as tight as it could squeeze against her stomach, Zimmer still had quite a bit of room to move about.
This did not faze him. As the coaster jerked into motion and began to ascend (nearly vertically!) the alchemist leaned back in his seat as far as he could. The blood began to rush to his head. “Are you excited?” he asked of his companion.
“I don’t even like these things,” sneered the other. “On the way down—depending on your definition of down, I guess, you know what I mean—on the fast bits I might try to hold your hand. It’s a reflex.”
The coaster continued to drag the car upward with a soft ching-ching-ching-ching-ching-ching-ching sound.
“I’d rather you didn’t,” replied Zimmer, losing none of his easygoing affability. “I’m going to be working with dangerous chemicals.” As he spoke, the alchemist began to assemble a small laboratory space on his lap, with a small burner, an apparatus to hold a number of vials, and a number of miniature measuring devices. They wobbled uncertainty at a sixty degree angle to the ground.
The mother blanched and folded her hands on her lap.
<font size="1">Ching-ching-ching-ching-ching-ching-ching-ching
The mother didn’t look down. She wanted only to see her family in the car behind her. Of course Geoffrey had wanted to be with his father. At his age he was too fearless to need mothering at times like these, and he would want to show his dad how tough he was. Of course no one had considered her needs. She was an after thought. She looked over to the man beside her, who had lit the burner and was waving a vial of something blue and crackling over it. The silence became unbearable. If she didn’t say something to him she would need to look down just to relieve the tension.
“Um, excuse me,” she said. “What exactly are you doing?”
“Ah! And to think I thought you’d find this boring. It’s nerdy stuff, you understand,” grinned Zimmer. “See, there’s a disease inside of me. It’s dormant, now, I think. I had, at one point, believed that the disease was an agent of the Light of God—a microscopic crusade, of sorts. However, I recently saw an afflicted man forget the name of his love—forget his own name—and I began to worry. God, after all, is the Source of all ingenuity—I know from experience—and He would not act through something that spread ignorance and forgetfulness.” Zimmer’s hands were a blur. He seemed to know what he was doing. The mother sat politely, having learned long ago to be tolerant of all faiths.
She thought she heard Geoffrey cry, “Mom, look!” It may have just been wishful thinking on her part, or someone else’s son’s voice carried on the wind, but still she looked.
She looked out, and as there was nothing to see but sky, she looked down.
Barring the fact that it kept getting farther away, the view of Rolloland from above was quite beautiful. It looked exactly like the map (there was the haunted house, there the ferris wheel, there the big top) but more dynamic. There was a murmuring laughter rising up like smoke from every corner. Lights of all colors shone in every context. Running along the border of the park on one side was Rollo River, and on the other side were the various subsidiary parks she would be visiting over the course of the week—Wiz’s Wacky Water World, Armadillo Zoo, and the bizarre “Rollo Strip” nightclub junction. A network of levirails snaked between all the parks and out to an assortment of hotels. For a moment she saw Rolloland as an ecosystem, as an economy, as something fascinating in its intricacy and complexity, as anything other than a money-sucking tourist trap that would give her son ADHD and her husband gonorrhea.
And then she grimaced to see the storm-cloud building on the horizon. And then she shuddered to see the fire under it.
As a point of fact, her first thought (absurd both from a rational and humanistic standpoint) was this is good news for us; what are the odds that there will be two accidents in one day and then the panic set in. The mother grabbed at Zimmer’s hand, but, rapt in his strange science, he slapped it away. “Synthesizing something to purge an unwanted virus from my system should be simple. From a theoretical standpoint it’s a simple modification of the eternal youth extract, which already defends against the body’s own cells turning cancerous. Unfortunately, none of my instruments can provide enough kinetic energy to catalyze the reaction I need. Which is where this first drop comes in. You should hold on tight right about now, by the way.”
Ching-ching-ching-ching-ching-ching ching ching ching, ching; ching. Ching. Ch. . Ching. Ching chign ching-ching-ching-ching chingchingchingchingchingchingchingching
A graduated cylinder flew out of Zimmer’s hand, and he giggled. He was almost positive that the vial in his hand was probably a universal antivirus of some sort, and if not, it was something else that was also interesting. He imagined the trembling of the rollercoaster and the inexorable pull of artificial gravity shaking the contents in all directions he could name and some he couldn’t, causing strange and divine reactions. It was not too much of a stretch to imagine, for a similar process was going on in his brain.
Lieutenant Matthew Zimmer’s brain was an aggregate of beliefs. Even the most rational, secular part of him—the scientist, the mathematician—founded all of its knowledge on a series of postulates established thousands of years before. All that he knew about the fundamental properties of the universe he had derived from miniscule, barely significant perturbations in data, expanded into truth by the application of these postulates.
For a few seconds, gravity reigned; Zimmer became weightless due to the simple mechanical properties of acceleration, and then remained weightless due to a conspicuous negation of gravity. His burner blew out.
Zimmer’s belief in the Orashaldi God was not altogether different from his belief in science. Millennia ago, a framework of belief had been handed down by some theological philosophers, complete with a definition of knowledge and a set of criteria for proving and refining that knowledge—a spiritual analogue for the scientific method. Everything in Zimmer’s life had lined up perfectly consistently with these beliefs; he had been rewarded for faith, he had experienced miracles, he had achieved immortality and wealth in the service of his religion. As a matter of fact, his first direct confrontation with an omnipotent and capricious being was the first incident in his existence that contradicted the scripture, so his conflation of his own God with the Tormentor might be seen as more of a coping mechanism than a reasonable logical leap.
The coaster began to teleport the alchemist and the screaming, crying woman next to him at random between planes of existence in a way that Zimmer found familiar but not unpleasant.
The same could be said for Zimmer’s encounters with Dorin, replete with a personal Dial-A-God network in her brain. There was nothing about her that was not heretical, but a combination of his decaying psyche, the miracles he’d seen her perform, her aura of divine authority and his borderline-pedophilic attraction to her compelled him to find a place to accommodate her in his personal theology. The tenets of his original faith, and of the basic principles of scientific reason, had begun to fray around the edges. And then came the Oracle, which in its early stages began the process of plastering over his internal disputes and substituting a warm, comfortable certainty.
Zimmer giggled and slapped his thigh (allowing a thermometer and a scale to go soaring off into the distance) as the coaster went round in a dozen loops and whorls. The face of a cartoon armadillo, the symbol who had been brought to life that he might die for his God (and are not the scriptures full of such beings?), laughed at him from all angles, sharing in his joy. He had lost any notion of where the ground was and he didn’t care.
The Oracle, though it was perhaps less dormant than Zimmer suspected, hadn’t gotten the opportunity to finish its surgery on the lieutenant’s mind. It was left open, a gaping bloody hole in his head, perhaps with a scalpel and a sponge lying inside. The Oracle had been shoved aside by another God, one far more murderous and terrible and fast-working. That particular possession had gnawed on his sanity for a time and then been cut off (mostly) by an instantaneous change in scenery, and now Zimmer was on a rollercoaster.
A rollocoaster, sorry. The car disappeared into a tunnel, or maybe visible light had just been turned off on a local level. In any case, the Orashald was moving very fast and could hear nothing but rumbling and screams all around him. He became momentarily certain that he was going to die, and hoped that his erection would die down before the woman whose name he hadn't gotten noticed it.
A chemical reaction was occurring. Disparate, uncontrollable elements were being fused into something that could not properly be predicted, but at best hypothesized.
Rollocoaster Red slowed to a halt. Zimmer was grinning like an idiot. The woman next to him took a proper inhalation for the first time in about forty-five seconds. The safety handle released.
Zimmer clapped the woman on the back. “You did great!” he laughed. He fumbled around in his jacket. “Here,” he said, handing her a small vial. “A little gift for putting up with me. It’s the secret to eternal youth. I know your husband will appreciate it.” He winked and strolled off.
The woman was left holding the vial of clear liquid in her trembling hands. “Mom, Mom!” Geoffrey cried, hugging her waist from behind. “Mom,” said Geoffrey. “Wasn’t that the coolest?”
As Zimmer passed by the lockers to grab his umbrella (that rain would be heading his way pretty soon), he came across a photo booth. On the screen on the back were a series of photos, reaction shots of the passengers on the first drop. He examined one in particular, showing two cars. In the back car, a boy and his father held hands and raised their arms, screaming in joyous glee, sharing a perfect moment of familial bond. In the car in front, the boy’s mother sobbed openly and gasped for air. Next to her was Zimmer, holding a beaker over his burner, his mouth turned up at the edges and his hair standing on edge above him.
It was a beautiful memory, but it would cost almost all of his Rollobucks to get a framed copy, not leaving him enough for dinner. Ah, well. Maybe after he killed one of the Tormentor’s other chosen, he could take their money and—wait, that wasn’t right. Once he killed one of them, he’d be shoved off somewhere that didn’t take Rollobucks. Zimmer chuckled. The internal currency exchanged was a great trick to keep you coming back. So, he’d need to convince one of the other battlers to buy him a meal—maybe Dorin—and then kill them. Poisoning their food would be the obvious method.
Zimmer walked up to buy the photo.</font>
Are you giving up your faith, Lieutenant Zimmer?”
Ha. Yes, he should certainly think so.
Because Rolloland had failed, either out of genuine unoriginality or simply willful stubbornness, to come up with a name for a rollercoaster other than “the Rollocoaster,” there were a number of Rollocoasters in the park, each marked by a different color. Higher energy colors represented lower energy coasters—Rollocoaster Purple was a ride for children, and Rollocoaster Red was The Big One, the one the teenagers all had to dare each other to give a try.
Zimmer had a great admiration for the engineering that had gone into the coaster. It displayed a great reverence towards the classical rollercoaster form. Had Zimmer had access to the sort of gravity-manipulating materials that had clearly gone into its design, he might be tempted to build the most efficient coaster possible: a straight line, or a simple loop, that merely simulated the ups and downs of a standard coaster by warping local gravity. He is certain, at least, that most of his fellow Orashaldi scientists would have done so. But Rollocoaster Red was not merely a centrifuge; it had a humanistic purpose beyond the stimulus of the human body to release certain endorphins; it was an experience. The swirling loops, the track that hung in the air and teleported the car from place to place, the animatronic armadillos that leered at the passengers, the dark tunnels and the matrices of neon tubes that darted about the track like a school of fish, all of these aesthetic details contributed to the whole.
The Lieutenant did not need to take it on faith that once he reached the front of the line he would be rewarded with the thrill-ride experience of a lifetime. The evidence was there, all around him. It was a hypothesis he could prove with repeatable observations.
After replacing his shredded clothes, prudently purchasing a bright yellow Rollo-themed umbrella, and of course investing in a Rollo-On-The-Go Line-Bypass-Pass because he was a man of limited patience, Zimmer was nearly out of Rollobucks. That was all well and good. He had enough to grab something to eat, but for obvious reasons wouldn’t want to be filling up his stomach until after he had worn himself out on the coasters. He wasn’t the nauseous type, but there was no reason to tempt fate.
Shortly before the boarding station—was that what one called it?—the boarding station for the coaster, there was a set of lockers where one could deposit any valuables or small objects that might fly out of pockets at high velocity. Zimmer felt around in his pockets for the assortment of dangerous, important, or sentimentally significant chemicals hanging there. He smiled, laid his umbrella down next to one of the lockers and hurried past.
The cars seated two. Zimmer walked past a heated argument between a human mother, a father and a young boy as to who should be the odd one out, and seated himself comfortably in the car in the very front. After a few seconds, the mother joined him, sweating and exasperated.
“Hello,” greeted Zimmer cheerfully.
“Hi,” said the mother, lowering the safety bar. She was a heavyset woman, and with the bar as tight as it could squeeze against her stomach, Zimmer still had quite a bit of room to move about.
This did not faze him. As the coaster jerked into motion and began to ascend (nearly vertically!) the alchemist leaned back in his seat as far as he could. The blood began to rush to his head. “Are you excited?” he asked of his companion.
“I don’t even like these things,” sneered the other. “On the way down—depending on your definition of down, I guess, you know what I mean—on the fast bits I might try to hold your hand. It’s a reflex.”
The coaster continued to drag the car upward with a soft ching-ching-ching-ching-ching-ching-ching sound.
“I’d rather you didn’t,” replied Zimmer, losing none of his easygoing affability. “I’m going to be working with dangerous chemicals.” As he spoke, the alchemist began to assemble a small laboratory space on his lap, with a small burner, an apparatus to hold a number of vials, and a number of miniature measuring devices. They wobbled uncertainty at a sixty degree angle to the ground.
The mother blanched and folded her hands on her lap.
<font size="1">Ching-ching-ching-ching-ching-ching-ching-ching
The mother didn’t look down. She wanted only to see her family in the car behind her. Of course Geoffrey had wanted to be with his father. At his age he was too fearless to need mothering at times like these, and he would want to show his dad how tough he was. Of course no one had considered her needs. She was an after thought. She looked over to the man beside her, who had lit the burner and was waving a vial of something blue and crackling over it. The silence became unbearable. If she didn’t say something to him she would need to look down just to relieve the tension.
“Um, excuse me,” she said. “What exactly are you doing?”
“Ah! And to think I thought you’d find this boring. It’s nerdy stuff, you understand,” grinned Zimmer. “See, there’s a disease inside of me. It’s dormant, now, I think. I had, at one point, believed that the disease was an agent of the Light of God—a microscopic crusade, of sorts. However, I recently saw an afflicted man forget the name of his love—forget his own name—and I began to worry. God, after all, is the Source of all ingenuity—I know from experience—and He would not act through something that spread ignorance and forgetfulness.” Zimmer’s hands were a blur. He seemed to know what he was doing. The mother sat politely, having learned long ago to be tolerant of all faiths.
She thought she heard Geoffrey cry, “Mom, look!” It may have just been wishful thinking on her part, or someone else’s son’s voice carried on the wind, but still she looked.
She looked out, and as there was nothing to see but sky, she looked down.
Barring the fact that it kept getting farther away, the view of Rolloland from above was quite beautiful. It looked exactly like the map (there was the haunted house, there the ferris wheel, there the big top) but more dynamic. There was a murmuring laughter rising up like smoke from every corner. Lights of all colors shone in every context. Running along the border of the park on one side was Rollo River, and on the other side were the various subsidiary parks she would be visiting over the course of the week—Wiz’s Wacky Water World, Armadillo Zoo, and the bizarre “Rollo Strip” nightclub junction. A network of levirails snaked between all the parks and out to an assortment of hotels. For a moment she saw Rolloland as an ecosystem, as an economy, as something fascinating in its intricacy and complexity, as anything other than a money-sucking tourist trap that would give her son ADHD and her husband gonorrhea.
And then she grimaced to see the storm-cloud building on the horizon. And then she shuddered to see the fire under it.
As a point of fact, her first thought (absurd both from a rational and humanistic standpoint) was this is good news for us; what are the odds that there will be two accidents in one day and then the panic set in. The mother grabbed at Zimmer’s hand, but, rapt in his strange science, he slapped it away. “Synthesizing something to purge an unwanted virus from my system should be simple. From a theoretical standpoint it’s a simple modification of the eternal youth extract, which already defends against the body’s own cells turning cancerous. Unfortunately, none of my instruments can provide enough kinetic energy to catalyze the reaction I need. Which is where this first drop comes in. You should hold on tight right about now, by the way.”
Ching-ching-ching-ching-ching-ching ching ching ching, ching; ching. Ching. Ch. . Ching. Ching chign ching-ching-ching-ching chingchingchingchingchingchingchingching
A graduated cylinder flew out of Zimmer’s hand, and he giggled. He was almost positive that the vial in his hand was probably a universal antivirus of some sort, and if not, it was something else that was also interesting. He imagined the trembling of the rollercoaster and the inexorable pull of artificial gravity shaking the contents in all directions he could name and some he couldn’t, causing strange and divine reactions. It was not too much of a stretch to imagine, for a similar process was going on in his brain.
Lieutenant Matthew Zimmer’s brain was an aggregate of beliefs. Even the most rational, secular part of him—the scientist, the mathematician—founded all of its knowledge on a series of postulates established thousands of years before. All that he knew about the fundamental properties of the universe he had derived from miniscule, barely significant perturbations in data, expanded into truth by the application of these postulates.
For a few seconds, gravity reigned; Zimmer became weightless due to the simple mechanical properties of acceleration, and then remained weightless due to a conspicuous negation of gravity. His burner blew out.
Zimmer’s belief in the Orashaldi God was not altogether different from his belief in science. Millennia ago, a framework of belief had been handed down by some theological philosophers, complete with a definition of knowledge and a set of criteria for proving and refining that knowledge—a spiritual analogue for the scientific method. Everything in Zimmer’s life had lined up perfectly consistently with these beliefs; he had been rewarded for faith, he had experienced miracles, he had achieved immortality and wealth in the service of his religion. As a matter of fact, his first direct confrontation with an omnipotent and capricious being was the first incident in his existence that contradicted the scripture, so his conflation of his own God with the Tormentor might be seen as more of a coping mechanism than a reasonable logical leap.
The coaster began to teleport the alchemist and the screaming, crying woman next to him at random between planes of existence in a way that Zimmer found familiar but not unpleasant.
The same could be said for Zimmer’s encounters with Dorin, replete with a personal Dial-A-God network in her brain. There was nothing about her that was not heretical, but a combination of his decaying psyche, the miracles he’d seen her perform, her aura of divine authority and his borderline-pedophilic attraction to her compelled him to find a place to accommodate her in his personal theology. The tenets of his original faith, and of the basic principles of scientific reason, had begun to fray around the edges. And then came the Oracle, which in its early stages began the process of plastering over his internal disputes and substituting a warm, comfortable certainty.
Zimmer giggled and slapped his thigh (allowing a thermometer and a scale to go soaring off into the distance) as the coaster went round in a dozen loops and whorls. The face of a cartoon armadillo, the symbol who had been brought to life that he might die for his God (and are not the scriptures full of such beings?), laughed at him from all angles, sharing in his joy. He had lost any notion of where the ground was and he didn’t care.
The Oracle, though it was perhaps less dormant than Zimmer suspected, hadn’t gotten the opportunity to finish its surgery on the lieutenant’s mind. It was left open, a gaping bloody hole in his head, perhaps with a scalpel and a sponge lying inside. The Oracle had been shoved aside by another God, one far more murderous and terrible and fast-working. That particular possession had gnawed on his sanity for a time and then been cut off (mostly) by an instantaneous change in scenery, and now Zimmer was on a rollercoaster.
A rollocoaster, sorry. The car disappeared into a tunnel, or maybe visible light had just been turned off on a local level. In any case, the Orashald was moving very fast and could hear nothing but rumbling and screams all around him. He became momentarily certain that he was going to die, and hoped that his erection would die down before the woman whose name he hadn't gotten noticed it.
A chemical reaction was occurring. Disparate, uncontrollable elements were being fused into something that could not properly be predicted, but at best hypothesized.
Rollocoaster Red slowed to a halt. Zimmer was grinning like an idiot. The woman next to him took a proper inhalation for the first time in about forty-five seconds. The safety handle released.
Zimmer clapped the woman on the back. “You did great!” he laughed. He fumbled around in his jacket. “Here,” he said, handing her a small vial. “A little gift for putting up with me. It’s the secret to eternal youth. I know your husband will appreciate it.” He winked and strolled off.
The woman was left holding the vial of clear liquid in her trembling hands. “Mom, Mom!” Geoffrey cried, hugging her waist from behind. “Mom,” said Geoffrey. “Wasn’t that the coolest?”
As Zimmer passed by the lockers to grab his umbrella (that rain would be heading his way pretty soon), he came across a photo booth. On the screen on the back were a series of photos, reaction shots of the passengers on the first drop. He examined one in particular, showing two cars. In the back car, a boy and his father held hands and raised their arms, screaming in joyous glee, sharing a perfect moment of familial bond. In the car in front, the boy’s mother sobbed openly and gasped for air. Next to her was Zimmer, holding a beaker over his burner, his mouth turned up at the edges and his hair standing on edge above him.
It was a beautiful memory, but it would cost almost all of his Rollobucks to get a framed copy, not leaving him enough for dinner. Ah, well. Maybe after he killed one of the Tormentor’s other chosen, he could take their money and—wait, that wasn’t right. Once he killed one of them, he’d be shoved off somewhere that didn’t take Rollobucks. Zimmer chuckled. The internal currency exchanged was a great trick to keep you coming back. So, he’d need to convince one of the other battlers to buy him a meal—maybe Dorin—and then kill them. Poisoning their food would be the obvious method.
Zimmer walked up to buy the photo.</font>