RE: The Great Belligerency [Round 4: Static]
05-14-2013, 12:03 AM
(This post was last modified: 05-14-2013, 12:07 AM by SleepingOrange.)
As soon as the note rang out, Amala felt herself vanishing into the ether. It should have taken a specific melody and the approval of Anansi for the horn to give its blessing, but it should also have been being blown by a mortal. Fractured and confused as she was, she was still a goddess; her implicit and innate understanding and manipulation of divine energy was more than enough to overcome the ritual's barriers. She simply fueled it herself.
Of course, for all that, she didn't really know what she had expected to happen. She'd seen the webby threads of divinity hanging around the object and known it wasn't for hands – or claws – like the the arrogant scientist's, but that was about it. The confidence – or haughtiness – borne of her station had been enough to make her act, but not enough to give her any idea of what was to come. Even if it had, her prediction wouldn't have been that she'd reappear in a small, tidily-cluttered office, or that the only other being there would have been the man in a suit idly drumming his fingers on a keyboard. It was far from the grandeur or power she would have expected from a divine artifact if she'd bothered to expect anything at all, but as implicitly as she'd seen the horn's nature, she saw the man's too. Plain and dark and seeming nothing much, but without question, a god. He swiveled to face her as she arrived, smile betrayign nothing.
"Ah!" Anansi effused. "This is a surprise."
---
Cole watched for he-didn't-know-how-long as the old one stalked back and forth, muttering furiously to herself. Once upon a time, he'd been referred to a psychologist when his temper had gotten the better of him once too often and too publicly, and she'd worked with him on an number of relaxation therapies and techniques. Most of them were nonsense and foolishness, and one in particular had stood out as exactly the sort of witch-doctory that proved that counselling was for idiots: he'd been made to lie on his back and close his eyes while she spoke soothingly to him, trying to tell him what to see and feel. Tell him what his body was doing, tell him he was tired and relaxed. "You feel your limbs relaxing, becoming heavy," she'd said. "Heavy as lead. Heavy as lead." There had been a lot of repetition, a lot of circular speech and stories. "Heavy as lead." It was foolish, and it just made him more tense. "Soft and relaxed. Heavy as lead." He spent so much time concentrating on how he didn't feel what she was saying that it had completely defeated the purpose of the exercise. "You feel your arms wanting to sink into the sand. They're as heavy as lead." He'd left in a huff every time, and she would shake her head and tell him he wasn't going to make progress if he wouldn't cooperate. As though it was his fault she couldn't do her job.
All in all, he'd forgotten about the whole experience a week after he'd no longer been required to go. He probably never would have thought about it again, ridiculous nonsense that it was, if it weren't for the fact that he finally felt what the therapist had been trying to do to him all those years ago. His arms and legs and chest really were heavy as lead. He could feel himself wanting to sink into the ground. He could feel the loss of control, the loss of responsibility.
He hated it.
He was snapped out of his reverie – which he'd only indulged in to begin with because it was somewhat less infuriating than focusing on his complete helplessness and how much he loathed the old crone – by the sudden, jolting return of sensation to his extremities, followed by his unbidden rise to his feet. Confused, he turned to his tormentor, who was already speaking.
"You know, you and I want something similar."
He snorted as well as he was physiology capable of, briefly amazed that he'd been allowed the capacity to do so. "So this is the part where I get a 'we're not so different' speech, and you try to convince me to work with you? Thanks, but I've had enough being ordered around by supernatural women who think they know what's best."
He pivoted and made as though to stride away, not really expecting to make it far. He didn't.
"Be silent."
He was. He was still, too.
"The fact that you have retained any notion of your own autonomy or will or power is as amusing as it is disgusting. You've seen that you can do nothing I do not choose for you, that I can control you as easily as you breathe. This is not a request for your cooperation. I have that already. This is merely for your own benefit, because an ignorant tool soon becomes a broken one."
He rankled at being called a tool, but couldn't even sneer in indignation.
"I can see your desires and thoughts written on your soul. When I say that our goals are similar, I am beyond contradiction. I will winnow the self-satisfied divinities you have been dragged along with and by out of this nonsensical contest, and many more will follow them. There will be a great spilling of divine blood by the edge of that blade, which I believe you can appreciate."
Cole found his mandibles loosened, although he honestly didn't see what benefit she thought she stood to gain by telling him this or allowing him to speak.
"And you expect me to believe that I'm going to survive your purge? That as soon as I help you get the sword, you're going to let me free?"
She laughed, or did something roughly analoguous to laughter. "Of course not. You will almost certainly die, soon, as part of its retrieval. But you will serve your purpose in your death. Be satisfied knowing that I will be accomplishing what you never could, knowing your played a small part in it." Her perpetual snarl twisted briefly into something like a smirk. "Perhaps whatever god takes mercy on your proud soul will let you watch. By their grace, of course."
He tried to respond furiously, to spit profanity or acid in defiance, but his maxillae were as heavy as lead. Heavy as lead.
She shoved him roughly in the small of the back.
"Move. There are things to accomplish while we wait for for her return."
---
"And, I suppose, an honor. It's not often I see an honest-to-Nyambe progenitress in my humble little corner of creation."
He peered closer, still smiling.
"Or something like one, anyway."
He extended an elegantly-long hand. "In any case, do pardon my manners. I'm Anansi. I do stories and knowledge, mostly as well as a few other... Odds and ends. When I have the time."
Amala was nonplussed, which was frankly a new experience. She took his hand awkwardly, eyes darting around the little office.
"I'm uh... Ama..." Somehow that didn't seem right. "I created... I create... I'm not a progenitor, just a..." Her eyes alighted on his, and suddenly she regained her bearing and certainty. "I am Amala, Who Tends the Garden, mother to plants and health."
"Of course. And what brings you here today?"
"I found this in the hands of someone clearly unworthy of its possession and sought to return it where it belonged." She held up the horn, which glinted dully in the harsh light.
Anansi made a good show of not having known as much already. "Haha, so you did. The poor boy can't win for losing can he?"
"I'm... sorry?"
"Oh, yes, I knew our buggy little friend had the horn. I even put it there for him to find, although I'm sure he thought he got hold of it by his own merits. You know how mortals can be. This one especially, right?"
She felt her hand drifting to the hilt of the sword. She knew how they could be.
"I hope you can do me a favor and make sure he gets it back. I'd rather like to meet him after all these years, see how he's getting on. You have to be a bit explicit with lessons for these ones, don't you? May I have the horn for a moment?"
She wordlessly handed it over; he returned to his desk, scribbled something on a sheet of paper, and tucked it in the instrument before returning to his guest and hanging it around her neck, carefully brushing a strand of her hair back behind what remained of the mask as he did.
"Sorry to see you come all this way for nothing, though. Is there anything I can do for you while you're here?"
She blinked, ignoring the question. "You're the god he has so much rage for? You don't really seem like the divine punishment type. Or even one with the cachet to pull it off." She gestured at the crowded space, almost knocking a small wooden totem off a filing cabinet it the process.
He rolled his eyes, and suddenly she fond herself in a seemingly-infinite darkened cavern, facing a towering monster of a man made of flexing biceps and legs going in every direction. "You'd prefer I manifest like this all the time? Waste my energy when there's no-one to impress? Act like I'm still in the age of sail? We've all got to move with the times." He chortled, which in his current form was a booming wave of malevolent sound. "Besides, you ought to know better than most how deceptive appearances can be."
And in another instant, she was in a cozy little wooden room, with only a heavyset woman in a mobcap and tattered apron for company. "Now why doncha tell ole Aunt Nancy what she can do for ya?"
"I don't believe there's anything I need from you."
"No? Well then watcha gonna do, child?I know ya have all these plans, all these things you want to fix. I see it in your eyes. But do you know where to start?"
Amala looked away. "I'll find my way."
"I'm sure you will, I'm sure you will. But sometimes it's nice to have someone who understands to talk to, ain't it?"
Amala didn't respond.
---
Deep in a fortified bunker in an undisclosed location, an alarm went off. It was only one of several dozen alarms currently going off, and it was ignored like the rest of them; the only person who could have done anything about them had lost the capacity to hear them when he'd finished decomposing, and lost the capacity to act on them around the time he'd died. It was just one alarm among many, unheeded and unhelpful. The only special thing about this one was that this was the first time it had ever gone off, and that newness quickly faded as it joined the cyclical routing of on, wail, off with all its siblings.
After several such cycles, a prompt appeared on a terminal. It politely asked if it should proceed with its automated response to the situation, or if anyone wanted to abort it. The skeletal hand on the keyboard did little to dissuade it, and so as the countdown hit zero, a nearby machine whirred to life and the alarm stopped, exotic particles and strange physics twisting together and reaching into the void.
---
"Maybe... I don't–"
Amala flickered briefly and clutched her stomach.
"Something's pulling me!"
"Go with it then, child." She tenderly patted Amala's hand, nodding at the horn around her neck. "If that's where you're meant to be, that's where you're meant to be. And if you ever need me, or just want to talk, well... You know where to find me."
Without another word, the goddess vanished, dragged back through the multiverse to the world she'd only just left. Anansi, once again all suits and ties and shining teeth, smiled broader than ever. Trailing from his fingertips and disappearing in midair were a pair of ephemeral cobwebs, invisibly anchored to Amala's face and hand.
---
Within the void, the Executor was working frantically. He'd already had to abort his planned launch of the next universe-program, and his contestants were nowhere to be found. One moment he'd been pulling them out of the chaos of the Plateau, and the next... Well, it was as if they'd never existed at all. Something had hijacked his transfer. He was furious about it.
And worse, he simply didn't know what to do.
He'd been combing for any scrap of data that might have revealed what happened, but whatever had pulled them from his carefully-scripted grasp had basically used the program against itself. There was almost no sign of outside interference, and what little there was had lead him to dead ends. He'd resorted to monitoring all sorts of interuniversal activity and heightening what surveillance he had of other battles, not sure if any of it would lead him anywhere.
And then, suddenly, it did.
A rapid departure and near-immediate retreat from one little dimension, yes. Similar signature to what little he'd found, yes, yes. And... There, absolutely, it was the goddess. Sort of. But he tracked her back, and there were the rest of them. Perfect. He'd found them, and nobody but him and them would be any the wiser, and if he spun it right, even they wouldn't be.
But the possibility of this happening again was unacceptable.
He set to work increasing his safeguards and fine-tuning his protocols and programs. He hadn't expected any real interference to begin with; the service he provided to anyone he expected would be powerful enough to meddle with him was valuable enough that he doubted any of them would risk it. He'd been careless because it had seemed like a waste of time to be careful, but no more. Distractedly, he turned off most of his feeds; this was going to need all his concentration. And what were the odds of something relevant or important happening in the battles at large during the brief window this would occupy him for?
Of course, for all that, she didn't really know what she had expected to happen. She'd seen the webby threads of divinity hanging around the object and known it wasn't for hands – or claws – like the the arrogant scientist's, but that was about it. The confidence – or haughtiness – borne of her station had been enough to make her act, but not enough to give her any idea of what was to come. Even if it had, her prediction wouldn't have been that she'd reappear in a small, tidily-cluttered office, or that the only other being there would have been the man in a suit idly drumming his fingers on a keyboard. It was far from the grandeur or power she would have expected from a divine artifact if she'd bothered to expect anything at all, but as implicitly as she'd seen the horn's nature, she saw the man's too. Plain and dark and seeming nothing much, but without question, a god. He swiveled to face her as she arrived, smile betrayign nothing.
"Ah!" Anansi effused. "This is a surprise."
---
Cole watched for he-didn't-know-how-long as the old one stalked back and forth, muttering furiously to herself. Once upon a time, he'd been referred to a psychologist when his temper had gotten the better of him once too often and too publicly, and she'd worked with him on an number of relaxation therapies and techniques. Most of them were nonsense and foolishness, and one in particular had stood out as exactly the sort of witch-doctory that proved that counselling was for idiots: he'd been made to lie on his back and close his eyes while she spoke soothingly to him, trying to tell him what to see and feel. Tell him what his body was doing, tell him he was tired and relaxed. "You feel your limbs relaxing, becoming heavy," she'd said. "Heavy as lead. Heavy as lead." There had been a lot of repetition, a lot of circular speech and stories. "Heavy as lead." It was foolish, and it just made him more tense. "Soft and relaxed. Heavy as lead." He spent so much time concentrating on how he didn't feel what she was saying that it had completely defeated the purpose of the exercise. "You feel your arms wanting to sink into the sand. They're as heavy as lead." He'd left in a huff every time, and she would shake her head and tell him he wasn't going to make progress if he wouldn't cooperate. As though it was his fault she couldn't do her job.
All in all, he'd forgotten about the whole experience a week after he'd no longer been required to go. He probably never would have thought about it again, ridiculous nonsense that it was, if it weren't for the fact that he finally felt what the therapist had been trying to do to him all those years ago. His arms and legs and chest really were heavy as lead. He could feel himself wanting to sink into the ground. He could feel the loss of control, the loss of responsibility.
He hated it.
He was snapped out of his reverie – which he'd only indulged in to begin with because it was somewhat less infuriating than focusing on his complete helplessness and how much he loathed the old crone – by the sudden, jolting return of sensation to his extremities, followed by his unbidden rise to his feet. Confused, he turned to his tormentor, who was already speaking.
"You know, you and I want something similar."
He snorted as well as he was physiology capable of, briefly amazed that he'd been allowed the capacity to do so. "So this is the part where I get a 'we're not so different' speech, and you try to convince me to work with you? Thanks, but I've had enough being ordered around by supernatural women who think they know what's best."
He pivoted and made as though to stride away, not really expecting to make it far. He didn't.
"Be silent."
He was. He was still, too.
"The fact that you have retained any notion of your own autonomy or will or power is as amusing as it is disgusting. You've seen that you can do nothing I do not choose for you, that I can control you as easily as you breathe. This is not a request for your cooperation. I have that already. This is merely for your own benefit, because an ignorant tool soon becomes a broken one."
He rankled at being called a tool, but couldn't even sneer in indignation.
"I can see your desires and thoughts written on your soul. When I say that our goals are similar, I am beyond contradiction. I will winnow the self-satisfied divinities you have been dragged along with and by out of this nonsensical contest, and many more will follow them. There will be a great spilling of divine blood by the edge of that blade, which I believe you can appreciate."
Cole found his mandibles loosened, although he honestly didn't see what benefit she thought she stood to gain by telling him this or allowing him to speak.
"And you expect me to believe that I'm going to survive your purge? That as soon as I help you get the sword, you're going to let me free?"
She laughed, or did something roughly analoguous to laughter. "Of course not. You will almost certainly die, soon, as part of its retrieval. But you will serve your purpose in your death. Be satisfied knowing that I will be accomplishing what you never could, knowing your played a small part in it." Her perpetual snarl twisted briefly into something like a smirk. "Perhaps whatever god takes mercy on your proud soul will let you watch. By their grace, of course."
He tried to respond furiously, to spit profanity or acid in defiance, but his maxillae were as heavy as lead. Heavy as lead.
She shoved him roughly in the small of the back.
"Move. There are things to accomplish while we wait for for her return."
---
"And, I suppose, an honor. It's not often I see an honest-to-Nyambe progenitress in my humble little corner of creation."
He peered closer, still smiling.
"Or something like one, anyway."
He extended an elegantly-long hand. "In any case, do pardon my manners. I'm Anansi. I do stories and knowledge, mostly as well as a few other... Odds and ends. When I have the time."
Amala was nonplussed, which was frankly a new experience. She took his hand awkwardly, eyes darting around the little office.
"I'm uh... Ama..." Somehow that didn't seem right. "I created... I create... I'm not a progenitor, just a..." Her eyes alighted on his, and suddenly she regained her bearing and certainty. "I am Amala, Who Tends the Garden, mother to plants and health."
"Of course. And what brings you here today?"
"I found this in the hands of someone clearly unworthy of its possession and sought to return it where it belonged." She held up the horn, which glinted dully in the harsh light.
Anansi made a good show of not having known as much already. "Haha, so you did. The poor boy can't win for losing can he?"
"I'm... sorry?"
"Oh, yes, I knew our buggy little friend had the horn. I even put it there for him to find, although I'm sure he thought he got hold of it by his own merits. You know how mortals can be. This one especially, right?"
She felt her hand drifting to the hilt of the sword. She knew how they could be.
"I hope you can do me a favor and make sure he gets it back. I'd rather like to meet him after all these years, see how he's getting on. You have to be a bit explicit with lessons for these ones, don't you? May I have the horn for a moment?"
She wordlessly handed it over; he returned to his desk, scribbled something on a sheet of paper, and tucked it in the instrument before returning to his guest and hanging it around her neck, carefully brushing a strand of her hair back behind what remained of the mask as he did.
"Sorry to see you come all this way for nothing, though. Is there anything I can do for you while you're here?"
She blinked, ignoring the question. "You're the god he has so much rage for? You don't really seem like the divine punishment type. Or even one with the cachet to pull it off." She gestured at the crowded space, almost knocking a small wooden totem off a filing cabinet it the process.
He rolled his eyes, and suddenly she fond herself in a seemingly-infinite darkened cavern, facing a towering monster of a man made of flexing biceps and legs going in every direction. "You'd prefer I manifest like this all the time? Waste my energy when there's no-one to impress? Act like I'm still in the age of sail? We've all got to move with the times." He chortled, which in his current form was a booming wave of malevolent sound. "Besides, you ought to know better than most how deceptive appearances can be."
And in another instant, she was in a cozy little wooden room, with only a heavyset woman in a mobcap and tattered apron for company. "Now why doncha tell ole Aunt Nancy what she can do for ya?"
"I don't believe there's anything I need from you."
"No? Well then watcha gonna do, child?I know ya have all these plans, all these things you want to fix. I see it in your eyes. But do you know where to start?"
Amala looked away. "I'll find my way."
"I'm sure you will, I'm sure you will. But sometimes it's nice to have someone who understands to talk to, ain't it?"
Amala didn't respond.
---
Deep in a fortified bunker in an undisclosed location, an alarm went off. It was only one of several dozen alarms currently going off, and it was ignored like the rest of them; the only person who could have done anything about them had lost the capacity to hear them when he'd finished decomposing, and lost the capacity to act on them around the time he'd died. It was just one alarm among many, unheeded and unhelpful. The only special thing about this one was that this was the first time it had ever gone off, and that newness quickly faded as it joined the cyclical routing of on, wail, off with all its siblings.
After several such cycles, a prompt appeared on a terminal. It politely asked if it should proceed with its automated response to the situation, or if anyone wanted to abort it. The skeletal hand on the keyboard did little to dissuade it, and so as the countdown hit zero, a nearby machine whirred to life and the alarm stopped, exotic particles and strange physics twisting together and reaching into the void.
---
"Maybe... I don't–"
Amala flickered briefly and clutched her stomach.
"Something's pulling me!"
"Go with it then, child." She tenderly patted Amala's hand, nodding at the horn around her neck. "If that's where you're meant to be, that's where you're meant to be. And if you ever need me, or just want to talk, well... You know where to find me."
Without another word, the goddess vanished, dragged back through the multiverse to the world she'd only just left. Anansi, once again all suits and ties and shining teeth, smiled broader than ever. Trailing from his fingertips and disappearing in midair were a pair of ephemeral cobwebs, invisibly anchored to Amala's face and hand.
---
Within the void, the Executor was working frantically. He'd already had to abort his planned launch of the next universe-program, and his contestants were nowhere to be found. One moment he'd been pulling them out of the chaos of the Plateau, and the next... Well, it was as if they'd never existed at all. Something had hijacked his transfer. He was furious about it.
And worse, he simply didn't know what to do.
He'd been combing for any scrap of data that might have revealed what happened, but whatever had pulled them from his carefully-scripted grasp had basically used the program against itself. There was almost no sign of outside interference, and what little there was had lead him to dead ends. He'd resorted to monitoring all sorts of interuniversal activity and heightening what surveillance he had of other battles, not sure if any of it would lead him anywhere.
And then, suddenly, it did.
A rapid departure and near-immediate retreat from one little dimension, yes. Similar signature to what little he'd found, yes, yes. And... There, absolutely, it was the goddess. Sort of. But he tracked her back, and there were the rest of them. Perfect. He'd found them, and nobody but him and them would be any the wiser, and if he spun it right, even they wouldn't be.
But the possibility of this happening again was unacceptable.
He set to work increasing his safeguards and fine-tuning his protocols and programs. He hadn't expected any real interference to begin with; the service he provided to anyone he expected would be powerful enough to meddle with him was valuable enough that he doubted any of them would risk it. He'd been careless because it had seemed like a waste of time to be careful, but no more. Distractedly, he turned off most of his feeds; this was going to need all his concentration. And what were the odds of something relevant or important happening in the battles at large during the brief window this would occupy him for?