RE: The Gradual Massacre (GBS2G4) [Round 6: Tidal Cove]
07-04-2013, 05:42 AM
The cockroaches screamed tiny lobster screams as they sank into the pot, and one by one, as they went silent, the brew around them started to seep in. It filled in the cracks and crevices in the insects' shells, and as it did, a dark brownish colour started to enter into the mixture. One more ingredient was in, only three more remained.
Delphine checked the recipe. The last instruction simply read, "Simmer uncovered." Rolling her eyes, she set the paper, worn and smoke-stained, down on the table. For the moment, all she could do was wait.
Idly, she straightened grimy jars and sacks of herbs, trying in vain to impose some semblance of order on her home. (How things got so disorganized she'd never know.) She grabbed a rag from someplace and started wiping mold from a window, stopping when she found the rag doing more harm than good.
Her home, a tiny little one-room shack, bobbed gently on the waves, but Delphine had lived there as long as she could remember. A little backing and forthing was nothing new, but as she dunked the rag under the water and wrung out a cloud of muck, something in the rocking did disturb her. The cove, her home, was at low tide. It was meant to be there, that's where it stayed. It was at low tide in the cove. But something didn't feel right.
With her freshly-soaked rag, Delphine, dripping saltwater all over her rotten floorboards, rushed over to the window and gave it a good wiping-down. Once she could see more than just vague shapes through it, she moved on to the hooks. There were six empty, now, and once each of them shone with moisture, it was over to the remaining ingredients. The twigs and leaves sucked up as much water as possible, and when the brewer moved on, they didn't so much glisten as... steam. Tiny curls of water vapor drifted away, leaving crystals of salt clinging behind them. The music box tinked out one of its rusty plunks of a note as Delphine did her gallant best to shine its front, the tiny porcelain figure making another jerky, halting twitch in its rotation. The baited hook just got a quick swab, as it wouldn't do to drown the worm that, despite having been knotted around the hook days ago (or weeks? months?), was still thoroughly alive.
---
As it happened, Elmo "Firestorm" LeMarche was also still alive. (At least, as best he could tell. He was breathing and pulse-ing and apparently thinking, was that enough? He wasn't sure, he wasn't a biologist.)
The room he was in reminded him of nothing more than a dentist's office. No, wait. Making a few backspace motions with his ring finger, he changed his mind. It reminded him of nothing more than his dentist's office, Dr. Satelle's. It was the same place, he was sure of it, down to the disarmingly mismatched furniture (designed to cultivate a feeling of hominess and calm) and the boring brochures about things and places he had no interest in.
"Tidal Cove," one read. It described a dreary-looking cove surrounded by rather thick forest, the author discovered, one with only a floating shack and a worn-down lighthouse to distinguish it from every other tree-crowded cove in the world. "Abandoned decades ago, the Martvelle Ridge Lighthouse is lovely to admire from a distance. (Tourists are advised not to visit it due to the structure's instability, evidenced by the complete lack of a top third on the lighthouse proper.)"
One diagram equated the cove to a clock, leaving eleven to two as a gap out into the ocean, making a "clever" comment about two-thirty being a lovely beach time (if you didn't mind a little seaweed), and marking ten o'clock sharp as the time to see the lighthouse (the hours leading up to it apparently being rather steep, so bring some fresh water).
LeMarche was just getting to the bit about not wandering too far from the cove when the flippy-number display by the office door switched over from " " to " " and someone who probably hadn't been standing there before slipped a ticket reading " " into his hand.
Elmo looked up. The person who was suddenly standing right near him (and looking massively disinterested as they did so) was about average height, probably near average weight, and if you'd put a gun to the author's head and told him to describe them, you'd probably have to shoot him, because even though he described things for a living, even he'd be hard-pressed to pin down any useful descriptors.
"Mmmalright," the person said, looking more or less at LeMarche, "let's get this over with. Name?"
"...Elmo 'Firestorm' LeMarche."
The person gave him a look of some sort. "Elmo... 'Firestorm'... LeMarche." They also noted down "includes own nickname" and didn't quite manage to not say that part out loud. "Gender?"
"Male," Elmo supplied, quickly followed by "Where am I?"
The person blatantly started writing "male where am I", crossed the second bit out, then replied, "Waiting room. Race?"
"Hu- What? What kind of question is that?"
The person gave him another of the same sort of look. "Can we just get through this?"
"No!" Elmo would've stood up indignantly if there wasn't someone standing so close in front of him. "I'm not answering any more questions until you actually explain what's going on!"
Another look. "Look. For some reason or another, the system flagged you as interesting, anomalous, or potentially useful. The boss is out for the moment, so you're just going to be stored until he gets back and decides what to do with you. Race?"
---
Delphine was wiping down a shelf with a dry rag by the time the pot started to smoke. Immediately, Delphine forgot the rag and rushed over to the recipe. "Simmer uncovered," it read, "then filter out and set aside what rises to the top. Continue simmering."
She didn't have a strainer or a slotted spoon or anything, so she just resorted at peering through the smoke until she spotted something bobbing in the liquid. After a couple of tries, she managed to grab it by a bit of tattered fabric, pull it out, and hang it back on the hook it had come from.
The doll looked like it'd been torn apart and sewn back together, torn apart and re-sewn again, over and over until it was more stitching and patchwork than original material. It still kept its original shape, more or less, but one would hardly call it the same doll it had originally been. Being in the brew had changed it, stained it, leaving it entirely without any of its original appeal, just a stained and dripping reminder of what it used to be.
---
In the dark recesses of the abandoned lighthouse, something took a breath. It was a rattling and soggy one, most certainly, but it was unmistakably a breath. After a second, the form took a second, then a third, and while it was plainly going to take a bit of work to get back into regular practice at it, the source of the breaths, chained and hanging from a wall though it may have been, plainly had every intention of keeping it up.
---
Three other forms, also soggy, arrived on the island around the same time. (These ones, however, were just sodden with ocean water, not whatever goes into some sort of potion.) Spaced far enough apart that they'd need to move closer to talk but not so far as to be out of sight of one another, they'd all washed up along the beach that constituted the border between half of the cove and the ocean. (The other half of the cove had gradually-steepening cliffs, which weren't nearly as good at having things wash up on them.) They were about to start waking up, it seemed, and at about that time, Delphine's suspicion that something wasn't right solidified into a much more solid feeling.
In the distance, she heard the first tree give way. It was a long way off, and it could easily have been drowned out by the quiet lapping of waves on her hut, but she heard it nonetheless.
The tide was coming in, and the fog, the emptiness, was coming with it.
Delphine checked the recipe. The last instruction simply read, "Simmer uncovered." Rolling her eyes, she set the paper, worn and smoke-stained, down on the table. For the moment, all she could do was wait.
Idly, she straightened grimy jars and sacks of herbs, trying in vain to impose some semblance of order on her home. (How things got so disorganized she'd never know.) She grabbed a rag from someplace and started wiping mold from a window, stopping when she found the rag doing more harm than good.
Her home, a tiny little one-room shack, bobbed gently on the waves, but Delphine had lived there as long as she could remember. A little backing and forthing was nothing new, but as she dunked the rag under the water and wrung out a cloud of muck, something in the rocking did disturb her. The cove, her home, was at low tide. It was meant to be there, that's where it stayed. It was at low tide in the cove. But something didn't feel right.
With her freshly-soaked rag, Delphine, dripping saltwater all over her rotten floorboards, rushed over to the window and gave it a good wiping-down. Once she could see more than just vague shapes through it, she moved on to the hooks. There were six empty, now, and once each of them shone with moisture, it was over to the remaining ingredients. The twigs and leaves sucked up as much water as possible, and when the brewer moved on, they didn't so much glisten as... steam. Tiny curls of water vapor drifted away, leaving crystals of salt clinging behind them. The music box tinked out one of its rusty plunks of a note as Delphine did her gallant best to shine its front, the tiny porcelain figure making another jerky, halting twitch in its rotation. The baited hook just got a quick swab, as it wouldn't do to drown the worm that, despite having been knotted around the hook days ago (or weeks? months?), was still thoroughly alive.
---
As it happened, Elmo "Firestorm" LeMarche was also still alive. (At least, as best he could tell. He was breathing and pulse-ing and apparently thinking, was that enough? He wasn't sure, he wasn't a biologist.)
The room he was in reminded him of nothing more than a dentist's office. No, wait. Making a few backspace motions with his ring finger, he changed his mind. It reminded him of nothing more than his dentist's office, Dr. Satelle's. It was the same place, he was sure of it, down to the disarmingly mismatched furniture (designed to cultivate a feeling of hominess and calm) and the boring brochures about things and places he had no interest in.
"Tidal Cove," one read. It described a dreary-looking cove surrounded by rather thick forest, the author discovered, one with only a floating shack and a worn-down lighthouse to distinguish it from every other tree-crowded cove in the world. "Abandoned decades ago, the Martvelle Ridge Lighthouse is lovely to admire from a distance. (Tourists are advised not to visit it due to the structure's instability, evidenced by the complete lack of a top third on the lighthouse proper.)"
One diagram equated the cove to a clock, leaving eleven to two as a gap out into the ocean, making a "clever" comment about two-thirty being a lovely beach time (if you didn't mind a little seaweed), and marking ten o'clock sharp as the time to see the lighthouse (the hours leading up to it apparently being rather steep, so bring some fresh water).
LeMarche was just getting to the bit about not wandering too far from the cove when the flippy-number display by the office door switched over from " " to " " and someone who probably hadn't been standing there before slipped a ticket reading " " into his hand.
Elmo looked up. The person who was suddenly standing right near him (and looking massively disinterested as they did so) was about average height, probably near average weight, and if you'd put a gun to the author's head and told him to describe them, you'd probably have to shoot him, because even though he described things for a living, even he'd be hard-pressed to pin down any useful descriptors.
"Mmmalright," the person said, looking more or less at LeMarche, "let's get this over with. Name?"
"...Elmo 'Firestorm' LeMarche."
The person gave him a look of some sort. "Elmo... 'Firestorm'... LeMarche." They also noted down "includes own nickname" and didn't quite manage to not say that part out loud. "Gender?"
"Male," Elmo supplied, quickly followed by "Where am I?"
The person blatantly started writing "male where am I", crossed the second bit out, then replied, "Waiting room. Race?"
"Hu- What? What kind of question is that?"
The person gave him another of the same sort of look. "Can we just get through this?"
"No!" Elmo would've stood up indignantly if there wasn't someone standing so close in front of him. "I'm not answering any more questions until you actually explain what's going on!"
Another look. "Look. For some reason or another, the system flagged you as interesting, anomalous, or potentially useful. The boss is out for the moment, so you're just going to be stored until he gets back and decides what to do with you. Race?"
---
Delphine was wiping down a shelf with a dry rag by the time the pot started to smoke. Immediately, Delphine forgot the rag and rushed over to the recipe. "Simmer uncovered," it read, "then filter out and set aside what rises to the top. Continue simmering."
She didn't have a strainer or a slotted spoon or anything, so she just resorted at peering through the smoke until she spotted something bobbing in the liquid. After a couple of tries, she managed to grab it by a bit of tattered fabric, pull it out, and hang it back on the hook it had come from.
The doll looked like it'd been torn apart and sewn back together, torn apart and re-sewn again, over and over until it was more stitching and patchwork than original material. It still kept its original shape, more or less, but one would hardly call it the same doll it had originally been. Being in the brew had changed it, stained it, leaving it entirely without any of its original appeal, just a stained and dripping reminder of what it used to be.
---
In the dark recesses of the abandoned lighthouse, something took a breath. It was a rattling and soggy one, most certainly, but it was unmistakably a breath. After a second, the form took a second, then a third, and while it was plainly going to take a bit of work to get back into regular practice at it, the source of the breaths, chained and hanging from a wall though it may have been, plainly had every intention of keeping it up.
---
Three other forms, also soggy, arrived on the island around the same time. (These ones, however, were just sodden with ocean water, not whatever goes into some sort of potion.) Spaced far enough apart that they'd need to move closer to talk but not so far as to be out of sight of one another, they'd all washed up along the beach that constituted the border between half of the cove and the ocean. (The other half of the cove had gradually-steepening cliffs, which weren't nearly as good at having things wash up on them.) They were about to start waking up, it seemed, and at about that time, Delphine's suspicion that something wasn't right solidified into a much more solid feeling.
In the distance, she heard the first tree give way. It was a long way off, and it could easily have been drowned out by the quiet lapping of waves on her hut, but she heard it nonetheless.
The tide was coming in, and the fog, the emptiness, was coming with it.