The Relentless Slaughter [Round 3: Tormentorland]

The Relentless Slaughter [Round 3: Tormentorland]
#97
Re: The Relentless Slaughter [Round 2: S'kkoi]
Originally posted on MSPA by Schazer.

The ferris wheel spun beneath her, staid enough in its movement to bring the thrill and panic of the chase down again to an absurd and calming crawl. Ke had only to take one extended step from the roof of one car to the next to stay atop the wheel, repeating as necessary every half a minute.

The monotony of it rendered the guards' chatter far below trivial, or maybe that was just the view. The world stretched out before Ke in a way that shouldn't, as if had grabbed the plane of the earth by its horizons and curled it up towards her, like a beast curling back its lips in a snarl. The intended effect was to accord an incredible, improbable view to whoever had reached the wheel's peak, all the better to stare vacantly out across the rails-linked theme parks. Ke could hear the parkgoers underfoot, car after ponderous car of people more excited by a spider on the roof than the improbable vista.

They'd squandered fifteen Rollobucks and ten minutes of themepark endorphins being sponged out by the mundanity of the "ride" just to sit on top of the world for half a minute, and wasted all that time ogling Ke. What did they want from her? Ke had nothing to give, least of all to the sort who'd shut themselves in little glass cages - she doubted they'd have any stories worth telling, either.

A gust slammed moodily into the wheel, rocking the perspex cradle and its mewling contents. She could leave right now, Ke mused. Leap, and fly away before the sky was full of storm and consternation and a howl like five feet of steel walls, shutting off escape.

She should leave right now. The Tormentor would find her, sooner rather than later, probably, but what could that monster do? Torture her? Kill her? Twist her form into some abyssal beast? It dawned on the spiderling that their Grandmaster lacked the subtlety to really strike fear into her. Those scuttling guards far below had terrified her even more!

Ke didn't know what to think any more, other than that she'd had enough of everything being difficult. She felt very childish and petulant and struggled to feel anything but justified in doing so. Security didn't help matters much, when they finished conferring and one of them shot something at her. It lodged in her exoskeleton, right above her first shoulder and eliciting a squeal of pain.

The bespectacled, betentacled couple in the car beneath had just enough time to wonder what was going on overhead, before a great white spider slipped from the roof and fluttered away. Its visage flickered like a hologram on a budget, settling eventually on a furiously flapping armadillo with a pair of comical wings. Ke felt nothing, chitin not contorting with subsequent pain the way stabbed or cut or impaled muscles did. To see her limbs vanish from sight from beneath her, like paint the exact colour of the ground far below trickled down her legs from where she'd been shot, that was disconcerting. An anxious flailing; a thrash of a head, now fronted by a snout, brought into collision with her own invisible legs; at least confirmed that Ke had, to all appearances if to nothing else, assumed the form of a dead contestant.

Not sure what to think of this development, Ke amused herself instead by looking down at the groundbound ants, watching a hundred or more nondescript dots to see if any chased her. They didn't, but the wind was already picking up, so the armadillo nee spider glided on down, down onto the bright and plastic firmament. The guards chased her, at a stroll, and she saw others of them standing in a deliberately dingy alley along the Durastep cobblestones on which she’d landed. Ke corrected herself.

They weren’t guards, for to call them that would imply something in this fake and pristine cage worth protecting. All artifice and emptiness and officious decrees about what she shouldn’t look like. If she wore the armadillo husk, the Security’d pay her no mind, and Ke would pay them the same discourtesy.

What did her outward appearance matter, after all? They could paint this fibreglass back alley in which Ke stood with all the shades of spooky and ominous and dark deals and Danger!, but they couldn’t paint the blue of a sunny, cheerful sky. They couldn’t paint raucous yells of empty-minded children who felt thrilled or surprised on command.

The clouds at the edge of the sunny, cheerful sky rumbled on cue, as if in reprobation. The Tormentor can, though. Subtle as a palace of solid gold, for sure, but the power is his. Ke reminded herself to not forget it.

Without much recourse, Ke skittered under the creaky, painted-to-look-peeling sign that proclaimed this single street as Old Town. A vendor or three hawked licensed merchandise from all the Halloween episodes, and the windows not frosted with dust and cobwebs were boarded over, boards tastefully dusted with artificial grime. At the street’s end loomed a haunted house - an honest-to-Nyame haunted house - on a hill, framed by the gnarled black trees and the still-cyan sky.

Parkgoers were staring at her, probably waiting for Rollo to dance or scare them or at least be a bit more thematically appropriate. One of the vendors leaned over, proffering a pointy witch’s hat.
Typical.

“Do, you, uh, want a hat, or, like, some other kind of prop-”

Ke did not want a hat. Ke did not want security’s disapproval, however, lurking in the “ominous” corners as they were, and waved a half-hearted limb in the crowd’s direction. One jig, a smattering of polite applause, and she excused herself into some sideshow entitled “Mister Mystery’s Curious Collection.”

All without a single word.


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Re: The Relentless Slaughter [Round 2: S'kkoi] - by Schazer - 11-21-2012, 08:00 PM