RE: Sublime Showdown (Round 1: Faerie)
06-30-2013, 03:20 AM
You are utterly expendable, Trang told her. You are the most miraculously renewable of resources on this beautiful blue planet. Any two goddamn bums I find off the street can squeeze me out a human being, no training needed. They just gotta do what comes natural. Now that equipment you are slinging is engineering genius, top of the line. Goddamn motherfucking rocket scientists with fucking degrees spent their entire lives designing and perfecting it. They took humanity and they pulled down their sciency lab pants and peed in the face of God. What did your parents do? Break a condom? Pardon me, while I hold my applause. Your bionic pinky's existence is ten times more marvelous and incredible than yours, and is worth inestimably more to us than you are.
So if you want to leave, you can leave, but if you leave, we're going to want everything we gave you back.
Strap's fingers wilted out of the double-Giridian-salute as her desperately firing synapses regained control over her body. She hit the ground with a heavy clank and immediately started rolling. Her skates whirred cheerfully as she helplessly skidded down the narrow archway of stone she had been deposited on.
With an unladylike squawk she crouched down and dragged her synthetic hand across the rock to keep from falling on her face. The arch dipped sharply to a near-vertical halt in the grass below. The drop looked near fourty feet.
Strap fumbled with the catch on her back and dropped the full weight of her Ventcore reassuringly onto one shoulder. She mashed the primary transformer and the barrel dutifully clacked a foot back and into Exhaust mode.
Right as Dahlia went over the drop.
“SONOVABITCH,” she asserted, spinning the Core around as she skidded toward the ground. Her finger, nail half-painted, closed around its trigger.
The ventcore frogblasted, boosting her bodily up into the air inches before she hit the ground. She did a clumsy forward somersault and ended up like she usually did when she tried a vertical blast: in the grass on her ass waiting for the pain to pass.
That was shitty, was her first thought.
This is not Chi-town, was her second.
Her hand immediately snapped to the bomb on her neck. More than fifty miles outside city limits was the tether, and Trang said if you broke the tether they give you a little off the top.
It wasn't tingling. No vibrations. No beeping noise.
She experimentally splayed her fingers out on the grass. Her bionics were all set, operating at full. No shutoffs.
Her green-gloss lips pulled up into a smile. Holy shit. Was she free?
Strap sprang to her feet and retrieved the Ventcore from the grass. Her elation wasn't tempered when she realized that she had just skated off a giant ribcage, sunk into the ground. The skeleton stretched its petrified way across a near mile, lying pale and dessicated on the mountainside she found herself on.
Rolling out before her was Faerie.
From up here, Strap couldn't see the bloatbeetles crawling along the ground, the Brownies in the alien trees, the Kraken in the impossibly blue lake, the Adar Rhiannon bobbing through the grasslands with their charmed corpses and sleepwalkers in tow, or the flashing blades of the Wild Hunt thundering through the forests. She couldn't see Berchtold, its white-cloaked leader, or Surma, the Violent Death personified, or the roiling Gap of Goblin. What she could see was freedom, and it looked awesome.
This was a friggin' fairy tale, and she was the prettiest princess at the ball.
There was a town down in the valley, all blue spikes and flashy lights. If she was gonna find all the other contestants in this freakshow, that was the place to look.
See, she'd already figured out how you game this system. No one moved on till one of them died. If they all just got along and no one killed anyone, they could just stay in cool fairy world forever. Okay, so maybe she wouldn't visit the cheese planet or whatever any time soon, but this was as good a place as any for a new start. She had an inactive bomb on her spine, some frictionless skates on her feet, and 20 pounds of blasting, vaporizing freedom on her shoulder.
Maybe on her way down the mountain she'd doublespin clutch off the big dead guy's skull. Just because I can, she thought for the first time in years. She lowered her goggles, angled the Ventcore, braced her knees, and squeezed that beautiful little trigger.
Things were finally looking up.
So if you want to leave, you can leave, but if you leave, we're going to want everything we gave you back.
Strap's fingers wilted out of the double-Giridian-salute as her desperately firing synapses regained control over her body. She hit the ground with a heavy clank and immediately started rolling. Her skates whirred cheerfully as she helplessly skidded down the narrow archway of stone she had been deposited on.
With an unladylike squawk she crouched down and dragged her synthetic hand across the rock to keep from falling on her face. The arch dipped sharply to a near-vertical halt in the grass below. The drop looked near fourty feet.
Strap fumbled with the catch on her back and dropped the full weight of her Ventcore reassuringly onto one shoulder. She mashed the primary transformer and the barrel dutifully clacked a foot back and into Exhaust mode.
Right as Dahlia went over the drop.
“SONOVABITCH,” she asserted, spinning the Core around as she skidded toward the ground. Her finger, nail half-painted, closed around its trigger.
The ventcore frogblasted, boosting her bodily up into the air inches before she hit the ground. She did a clumsy forward somersault and ended up like she usually did when she tried a vertical blast: in the grass on her ass waiting for the pain to pass.
That was shitty, was her first thought.
This is not Chi-town, was her second.
Her hand immediately snapped to the bomb on her neck. More than fifty miles outside city limits was the tether, and Trang said if you broke the tether they give you a little off the top.
It wasn't tingling. No vibrations. No beeping noise.
She experimentally splayed her fingers out on the grass. Her bionics were all set, operating at full. No shutoffs.
Her green-gloss lips pulled up into a smile. Holy shit. Was she free?
Strap sprang to her feet and retrieved the Ventcore from the grass. Her elation wasn't tempered when she realized that she had just skated off a giant ribcage, sunk into the ground. The skeleton stretched its petrified way across a near mile, lying pale and dessicated on the mountainside she found herself on.
Rolling out before her was Faerie.
From up here, Strap couldn't see the bloatbeetles crawling along the ground, the Brownies in the alien trees, the Kraken in the impossibly blue lake, the Adar Rhiannon bobbing through the grasslands with their charmed corpses and sleepwalkers in tow, or the flashing blades of the Wild Hunt thundering through the forests. She couldn't see Berchtold, its white-cloaked leader, or Surma, the Violent Death personified, or the roiling Gap of Goblin. What she could see was freedom, and it looked awesome.
This was a friggin' fairy tale, and she was the prettiest princess at the ball.
There was a town down in the valley, all blue spikes and flashy lights. If she was gonna find all the other contestants in this freakshow, that was the place to look.
See, she'd already figured out how you game this system. No one moved on till one of them died. If they all just got along and no one killed anyone, they could just stay in cool fairy world forever. Okay, so maybe she wouldn't visit the cheese planet or whatever any time soon, but this was as good a place as any for a new start. She had an inactive bomb on her spine, some frictionless skates on her feet, and 20 pounds of blasting, vaporizing freedom on her shoulder.
Maybe on her way down the mountain she'd doublespin clutch off the big dead guy's skull. Just because I can, she thought for the first time in years. She lowered her goggles, angled the Ventcore, braced her knees, and squeezed that beautiful little trigger.
Things were finally looking up.
let's post righteously & having good times /// check out The Book of the Courtier /// ensure proper vegetable consumption /// also check out The Blade and the Cycle /// post it up!!