RE: Inexorable Altercation [Round V - Saint Arthelais' Hospital]
09-18-2014, 07:04 PM
(This post was last modified: 09-18-2014, 07:13 PM by Elpie.)
The death of everything.
Or thereabouts. Or for a certain definition of “everything” – there was probably more everything to be had, though beyond a certain frontier even Azgard wasn’t sure.
Less the death of everything, perhaps, than the survival of Nothing. But, ah. Chester was getting ahead of himself. Literally. There is, it turns out, an upper limit on data storage across space whereby eventually the only solution is to make the circuitry 4D. Half of these signals were from the Future – A future, as delineated and contained by a certain Book. Deviate from the Book, alter the future, corrupt the data, doom everything.
But Chester was getting beside himself. There was too much. He was getting lost in the data. Pull back. The data was not meant for mortals.
The data cannot be managed. But the story can. Start with the story.
In the beginning there was the Wordsmith. But before the beginning was the end – or, rather, the sort of linearity that would place the Wordsmith at the beginning, but not the end, isn’t suitable for this story. It rarely is with these Battle things.
“Has he even begun?” asked the old man. Barabbas Poe, according to the data – sorry, Barabbas Poe (disambiguation), whatever that means.
“Shush,” said the girl. Atelia Oneiros. “He dove right in. Now he needs to swim to surface.”
“If you can hear me,” said Poe (Chester could), “You have to find the story. Break it down into its component parts.”
“There are no components,” snapped Atelia. “The whole is contained in every facet. Let your brain do the work. Flip around, skim to the good parts.”
“We don’t have ‘til morning,” barked Poe. “Structure the thing out. Filter by parameters. Inciting incident, rising action, climax. Round one, round two, round three. Subject, verb, object. Name, race, gender, favorite color, description, utility, biography. ‘Which Game of Thrones House Are You?’ We have put these systems in place to reduce the infinite. Pithy is good. Once—”
--Upon a time. Yes. It was all coming together. Eight contestants, seven rounds, one to remain. A ‘Grand Battle’ as these things go. Though it would need a name, ‘Grand Battle’ being taken. And speaking of namelessness, who was thinking this? What omnipotent entity had set this particular bout of carnage into motion? Not ‘the Observer,’ that was taken. Nor ‘the Grandmaster,’ which was a descriptor, but not a name. And not ‘Chester’ or ‘Azgard or ‘Wordsmith’ – these were all just other observers (“observer” as descriptor, not name).
Ach. This was always the way. The problem with effecting actions – with inciting incidents – was existing in a concrete sense. This was an entity (ish) with a fondness for grand abstractions. Things like dreams. Rules. Contingencies. Restriction. Balance. Life. Nothing. And the Door. These things didn’t quite exist either. Which apparently made them ineligible as Grand Battle contestants. Hmmph.
Avatars would have to be fine. Here was Restriction epitomized in an insterstellar prison – a nice sentient being, with even a home universe and a minor social circle to interact with. Ah, but now there’s a problem of scale. Apparently Azgard is more of a round than a contestant. Bah. The Hedonist got to play with a whole planet and a culture, and that turned out –
-- They did what? Okay, fair enough. Set “Race” to “Human” across the board, then. Humans are always crowd-pleasers, and they’re easily portable.
Plebeians.
Chester doubled over to throw up to find that Atelia had already placed a bucket in the trajectory of his last two meals. He chuckled through bubbles of spitty bile. “Thanks… for the bucket,” he choked.
Atelia gave him a glare that was supposed to be either bemused or patronizing but just looked distant. “I didn’t put it there,” she just said. “Sometimes things are just there. When you think about them. Other times something else appears that you didn’t think of at all, which is where you came from. Does throwing up indicate progress?”
“Inciting incident… is go,” said Chester, carefully pulling himself to an upright position. “Another ‘Grand Battle’ with all humans but none of them are humans. And that’s you.” A handkerchief was in his hand. It smelled like Chester’s mother. He dabbed at those parts of his lips and tongue that were burning slightly with his own stomach acids.
“That was a long time ago,” said Atelia.
“You were a dream.”
“I think maybe. Things slip. But yes.” Atelia pressed a finger to her forehead and momentarily shimmered out of existence. “Yes, that was the operant idea at one point.”
“No time to talk,” said Poe (disambiguation). “Azgard must be repaired this round. Our every action is critical.”
“I’ll have the job done,” wheezed Chester. “On time. But I can set my own pace.” He looked down at the unconscious Azgard on the floor. Man and machine flickered in his vision like the same word repeated in two languages. “I’ll get it done.”
* * * *
Of course “there's something out there” was the safer bet, but Will hadn’t met to alarm Annaliese. Still, this? This he had no expected.
The tall tripedal cyborg-thing with the name like a chainsaw revving up repeated its demand that Will bow to his god. That didn’t sit well with Will. I mean, look where gods had gotten him thus far.
Annaliese was screaming. Parset was… hiding? Gone. As much as Will was beginning to like the little guy, he didn’t think he could count on Parset for a last-minute rescue. It was down to man vs. the unknown once again.
Fortunately, the previous day’s scrambling around Hezekiah had left him prepared for just such a situation. Will drew a terrifyingly advanced shotgunny-looking implement from over his shoulder and aimed at the thing’s head.
Will Haven, whose defining moment in his life involved forgetting that the earth moves, was a more quick than a thorough thinker. In this instance he was acting on a set of assumptions that he determined, through a highly unscientific roughing out of probabilistic outcomes, would maximize his chances of survival.
1: That a shotgun-looking thing he stole off a Hezekiah inmate, with a trigger and two barrels, would function roughly as a shotgun. I.e. if he pointed the barrel at his enemy and pulled the trigger, some destructive force would be leveled against his enemy.
2: That the sort of disc-shaped bit at the top part of his foe contained some sort of control center—ideally a straight-up brain—and its desctruction by untested shotgun-y object would stop the enemy’s functioning.
3: That Will was always the quickest draw in the room, and big scary things tended to be slow per square-cube law or whatever.
These were all pretty good bets. Probabilistically. So after Will discharged the weapon and was filled with a white-hot, floaty sense of successful conflict resolution, he took a split-second to evaluate the outcomes before deciding on his next action.
1: He could tell that the Vroomvroomvroom thing, or whatever, was dead, because the sword it was holding was covered in blood.
2) He knew that Annaliese was safe because the sound of her screaming had been replaced by a gentle, pulsating, ringing sound in his ears.
3) He knew that his arm was supposed to be all the way over there on the floor because it uh
Because it was
Oh God
* * * * *
The back of Peth’s head was starting to itch. He knew he wasn’t supposed to scratch at it. It could bleed or um. Something very bad could happen.
“Careful on the steps there, little guy,” said his new friend Hoss. Hoss was the coolest and bravest and smartest guy he could think of and had all the best powers.
BONG
The bells were getting awful loud now. Hoss was all the way at the top of the stairs. “It seems safe!” he called over the ringing. Peth scrambled up the few remaining stairs.
“What’s doing it?” he asked.
“According to my readings,” said Hoss, doing some readings on his super-cool cybernetic arm, “some sort of gravitational anomaly.” BONG BONG “I think the frequency of the chimes indicate some sort of code.”
Peth yawned.
“Got it. It’s been repeating this message: ‘T H I S I S V O I T R A C H P L E A S E A C K N O W L E D G E.’ This is ‘Voitrach,’ please acknowledge. Those last two chimes were acknowledging my acknowledgment, I assume. Child’s play for a mind such as myself to decode.”
“The bell is alive?”
“Not quite, little tyke. But something alive is making it move. Voitrach, please continue your message as quickly as possible. Peth, you’d better cover your ears.”
Over the next five minutes, the bells chimed at what seemed to be a furious pace while Hoss decoded. Then they stopped. “Huh.” Peth’s new friend’s synthetic arm began to whir. “Peth, the next message reads: ‘S Y N T H E S I Z E B L A C K M A T T E R.’ That’s not a form of strange matter I’ve encountered before, but it’s in my database. Should just about exhaust me but apparently I can make… it says “0.00 fg” here. So, I have no idea how much, cause it doesn’t have mass. We’ll see.”
Hoss pressed his hand against the walls of the bell tower. A small portion of the wall turned black. The cyborg-friend extracted a cube of black material about six inches to the side.
“There,” said the cube in a British accent. It reshaped itself into the silhouette of a man about a foot tall. “Not half the man I was, but it will do. Peth, my name is Felix. Do you remember me?”
Peth nodded. “I didn’t—”
“No. Someone else did. Someone who’s on this way, and if they find you, they’ll try to kill and replace you. I’m here to help.”
Felix looked weird, like a shadow puppet against the wall. But it was definitely him; Peth remembered that voice. The back of his head itched.
“Okay,” he said. “What can we do?”
“Greyve is trying to get the other contestants over here to help but they have their own problems. Hoss, we’ll need you to house OTTO’s consciousness for a while once we find a way to upload him. Is that alright?”
“Anything for my best pal Peth,” said Hoss nonchalantly.
“Good,” replied Loran. “Voitrach has some power in his current form, but not much. That leaves one more member of the team we need if we want to beat Daddy Ham. We need you for that, Peth. Do you have enough control?”
Peth nodded. “I can invite anyone I want but sometimes it makes other people slip out. They could be far away. There are some in the hospital already.”
“We’ll deal with that when we come to it. Right now we just need this one friend.” Felix whispered a name in Peth’s ear. “You remember who that is?”
Peth nodded. “Yeah.” He blinked. “I did it. I think.”
Hoss started at the sound of footsteps on the stairs. “Felix? Are those the killers you warned me about?”
BONG
“I don’t think so,” said Felix. “Stand down.”
A young woman ascended the stairs to the tower, fists crackling with lightning. “Where am I?” she demanded.
“Hey,” said Felix, raising his tiny black hands. “Power down, Apathy. It’s Felix. We’re still in the battle. You died but we brought you back. The rest of us are trying to figure out a way we can all get out of this alive.”
Apathy grimaced. The electricity on her arms died down, save for the errant spark. “Okay. Thanks for the save. I’m in, but if you think about crossing me you’re fried. What do you want from me?”
“We need you to lay in ambush.” Felix turned to Hoss. “We’re gonna get Peth out of here. Voitrach, wait until we’re two minutes away, then start ringing again. Apathy, Loran Twight is coming after us. He needs to be stopped but we need him alive. Can you do that?”
Apathy cracked her knuckles. Lightning struck the tower, followed by a peal of thunder that made Peth cry out. She smirked. “I guess we’ll find out,” she said.
* * * * *
Will was dead.
Okay Will wasn’t dead because everyone was still there but that thing had chopped off his arm so for all intents and purposes he was dead and oh God. Oh God.
We should find Loran, said the queen, in a way that seemed oddly detached from the manner at hand.
“Please stop talking!” Annaliese shrieked out loud. Find Loran. What a ridiculous thing to be thinking about at a time like—
The monster turned on Annaliese, marching toward her with its blood-soaked blade outstretched. Maybe the constant screaming and talking to the voices in her head hadn’t been the best move. Okay. Maybe Parset would save her? Maybe Will would die soon enough that she could get tossed away to some other world of horrors? Maybe Loran was her best bet?
The monster raised its sword—
--And its… middle part? …exploded. Guts and shrapnel coated the room and thankfully missed Annaliese’s person.
Through the cavity in the monster’s now-inert corpse she could see Will, looking about as confused as she was, contemplating the barrel of his gun-arm. Gun-arm.
Yes. Okay. To recap, Will now had two arms. That is, three arms counting the one on the floor. And one of them had what Will called a “laser gun” on the end instead of a hand. “Will?” asked Annaliese.
Will took a second to catch his breath. “Yeah?”
“Do you have arm-regrowing magic you haven’t told us about? Like a lizard?”
“I don’t… no, I don’t.” Will, still crouching on the floor, looked to his gun arm as though asking it to confirm that statement. “I was dying and I felt something like… ah. Okay.”
”Okay?” Find Loran “What okay? What could possibly be okay?”
”I know who did this but I don’t know how I did it.”
Annaliese sighed. “Sorry, you know who did this but you don’t know how you—”
”Yeah. I did this. But I didn’t do it. Look. This is my arm, see? But not my my arm.”
”You’re not—” Will rose and walked over to her, showing her the new arm. It didn’t look any different from his old one. Very, um. Sort of tight and muscle-y. A little more tanned, maybe. Gun for a hand.
But! She looked where he was pointing. Will’s gun-arm had a tattoo that hadn’t been on his hand-arm before, as far as she knew.
It read: YOU ARE THE PRIME WILL. WE WILL HELP YOU BUT YOU HAVE TO LIVE FOR ALL OF US
“Will,” said Annaliese. “This is not helping me understand.”
”Sorry,” said Will. “I can explain I think but first we have to get—” His arm abruptly pointed across the room, practically pulling itself out of its socket. “Ow,” said Will. “I didn’t do that.”
The arm was pointing to Parset, who had just emerged from under a bed and was prompting the dead monster with a drumstick. “Parset get out of the way,” said Will. “I don’t know if I’m going to shoot you or just…” the arm pointed down for a bit, and then up. Okay. I don’t think I’m going to shoot you. I think I’m trying to show me something.”
Parset stood stock-still and cast a questioning glance at Annaliese. Annaliese shrugged.
Will walked towards Parset as his arm refined its angle. In a few paces the gun’s barrel was pointing directly at the gnome’s collarbone.
Annaliese had a silly thought. “Parset, where’s that key you used to wear around your neck?”
Parset brought his palm up to his forehead.
Or thereabouts. Or for a certain definition of “everything” – there was probably more everything to be had, though beyond a certain frontier even Azgard wasn’t sure.
Less the death of everything, perhaps, than the survival of Nothing. But, ah. Chester was getting ahead of himself. Literally. There is, it turns out, an upper limit on data storage across space whereby eventually the only solution is to make the circuitry 4D. Half of these signals were from the Future – A future, as delineated and contained by a certain Book. Deviate from the Book, alter the future, corrupt the data, doom everything.
But Chester was getting beside himself. There was too much. He was getting lost in the data. Pull back. The data was not meant for mortals.
The data cannot be managed. But the story can. Start with the story.
In the beginning there was the Wordsmith. But before the beginning was the end – or, rather, the sort of linearity that would place the Wordsmith at the beginning, but not the end, isn’t suitable for this story. It rarely is with these Battle things.
“Has he even begun?” asked the old man. Barabbas Poe, according to the data – sorry, Barabbas Poe (disambiguation), whatever that means.
“Shush,” said the girl. Atelia Oneiros. “He dove right in. Now he needs to swim to surface.”
“If you can hear me,” said Poe (Chester could), “You have to find the story. Break it down into its component parts.”
“There are no components,” snapped Atelia. “The whole is contained in every facet. Let your brain do the work. Flip around, skim to the good parts.”
“We don’t have ‘til morning,” barked Poe. “Structure the thing out. Filter by parameters. Inciting incident, rising action, climax. Round one, round two, round three. Subject, verb, object. Name, race, gender, favorite color, description, utility, biography. ‘Which Game of Thrones House Are You?’ We have put these systems in place to reduce the infinite. Pithy is good. Once—”
--Upon a time. Yes. It was all coming together. Eight contestants, seven rounds, one to remain. A ‘Grand Battle’ as these things go. Though it would need a name, ‘Grand Battle’ being taken. And speaking of namelessness, who was thinking this? What omnipotent entity had set this particular bout of carnage into motion? Not ‘the Observer,’ that was taken. Nor ‘the Grandmaster,’ which was a descriptor, but not a name. And not ‘Chester’ or ‘Azgard or ‘Wordsmith’ – these were all just other observers (“observer” as descriptor, not name).
Ach. This was always the way. The problem with effecting actions – with inciting incidents – was existing in a concrete sense. This was an entity (ish) with a fondness for grand abstractions. Things like dreams. Rules. Contingencies. Restriction. Balance. Life. Nothing. And the Door. These things didn’t quite exist either. Which apparently made them ineligible as Grand Battle contestants. Hmmph.
Avatars would have to be fine. Here was Restriction epitomized in an insterstellar prison – a nice sentient being, with even a home universe and a minor social circle to interact with. Ah, but now there’s a problem of scale. Apparently Azgard is more of a round than a contestant. Bah. The Hedonist got to play with a whole planet and a culture, and that turned out –
-- They did what? Okay, fair enough. Set “Race” to “Human” across the board, then. Humans are always crowd-pleasers, and they’re easily portable.
Plebeians.
Chester doubled over to throw up to find that Atelia had already placed a bucket in the trajectory of his last two meals. He chuckled through bubbles of spitty bile. “Thanks… for the bucket,” he choked.
Atelia gave him a glare that was supposed to be either bemused or patronizing but just looked distant. “I didn’t put it there,” she just said. “Sometimes things are just there. When you think about them. Other times something else appears that you didn’t think of at all, which is where you came from. Does throwing up indicate progress?”
“Inciting incident… is go,” said Chester, carefully pulling himself to an upright position. “Another ‘Grand Battle’ with all humans but none of them are humans. And that’s you.” A handkerchief was in his hand. It smelled like Chester’s mother. He dabbed at those parts of his lips and tongue that were burning slightly with his own stomach acids.
“That was a long time ago,” said Atelia.
“You were a dream.”
“I think maybe. Things slip. But yes.” Atelia pressed a finger to her forehead and momentarily shimmered out of existence. “Yes, that was the operant idea at one point.”
“No time to talk,” said Poe (disambiguation). “Azgard must be repaired this round. Our every action is critical.”
“I’ll have the job done,” wheezed Chester. “On time. But I can set my own pace.” He looked down at the unconscious Azgard on the floor. Man and machine flickered in his vision like the same word repeated in two languages. “I’ll get it done.”
* * * *
Of course “there's something out there” was the safer bet, but Will hadn’t met to alarm Annaliese. Still, this? This he had no expected.
The tall tripedal cyborg-thing with the name like a chainsaw revving up repeated its demand that Will bow to his god. That didn’t sit well with Will. I mean, look where gods had gotten him thus far.
Annaliese was screaming. Parset was… hiding? Gone. As much as Will was beginning to like the little guy, he didn’t think he could count on Parset for a last-minute rescue. It was down to man vs. the unknown once again.
Fortunately, the previous day’s scrambling around Hezekiah had left him prepared for just such a situation. Will drew a terrifyingly advanced shotgunny-looking implement from over his shoulder and aimed at the thing’s head.
Will Haven, whose defining moment in his life involved forgetting that the earth moves, was a more quick than a thorough thinker. In this instance he was acting on a set of assumptions that he determined, through a highly unscientific roughing out of probabilistic outcomes, would maximize his chances of survival.
1: That a shotgun-looking thing he stole off a Hezekiah inmate, with a trigger and two barrels, would function roughly as a shotgun. I.e. if he pointed the barrel at his enemy and pulled the trigger, some destructive force would be leveled against his enemy.
2: That the sort of disc-shaped bit at the top part of his foe contained some sort of control center—ideally a straight-up brain—and its desctruction by untested shotgun-y object would stop the enemy’s functioning.
3: That Will was always the quickest draw in the room, and big scary things tended to be slow per square-cube law or whatever.
These were all pretty good bets. Probabilistically. So after Will discharged the weapon and was filled with a white-hot, floaty sense of successful conflict resolution, he took a split-second to evaluate the outcomes before deciding on his next action.
1: He could tell that the Vroomvroomvroom thing, or whatever, was dead, because the sword it was holding was covered in blood.
2) He knew that Annaliese was safe because the sound of her screaming had been replaced by a gentle, pulsating, ringing sound in his ears.
3) He knew that his arm was supposed to be all the way over there on the floor because it uh
Because it was
Oh God
* * * * *
The back of Peth’s head was starting to itch. He knew he wasn’t supposed to scratch at it. It could bleed or um. Something very bad could happen.
“Careful on the steps there, little guy,” said his new friend Hoss. Hoss was the coolest and bravest and smartest guy he could think of and had all the best powers.
BONG
The bells were getting awful loud now. Hoss was all the way at the top of the stairs. “It seems safe!” he called over the ringing. Peth scrambled up the few remaining stairs.
“What’s doing it?” he asked.
“According to my readings,” said Hoss, doing some readings on his super-cool cybernetic arm, “some sort of gravitational anomaly.” BONG BONG “I think the frequency of the chimes indicate some sort of code.”
Peth yawned.
“Got it. It’s been repeating this message: ‘T H I S I S V O I T R A C H P L E A S E A C K N O W L E D G E.’ This is ‘Voitrach,’ please acknowledge. Those last two chimes were acknowledging my acknowledgment, I assume. Child’s play for a mind such as myself to decode.”
“The bell is alive?”
“Not quite, little tyke. But something alive is making it move. Voitrach, please continue your message as quickly as possible. Peth, you’d better cover your ears.”
Over the next five minutes, the bells chimed at what seemed to be a furious pace while Hoss decoded. Then they stopped. “Huh.” Peth’s new friend’s synthetic arm began to whir. “Peth, the next message reads: ‘S Y N T H E S I Z E B L A C K M A T T E R.’ That’s not a form of strange matter I’ve encountered before, but it’s in my database. Should just about exhaust me but apparently I can make… it says “0.00 fg” here. So, I have no idea how much, cause it doesn’t have mass. We’ll see.”
Hoss pressed his hand against the walls of the bell tower. A small portion of the wall turned black. The cyborg-friend extracted a cube of black material about six inches to the side.
“There,” said the cube in a British accent. It reshaped itself into the silhouette of a man about a foot tall. “Not half the man I was, but it will do. Peth, my name is Felix. Do you remember me?”
Peth nodded. “I didn’t—”
“No. Someone else did. Someone who’s on this way, and if they find you, they’ll try to kill and replace you. I’m here to help.”
Felix looked weird, like a shadow puppet against the wall. But it was definitely him; Peth remembered that voice. The back of his head itched.
“Okay,” he said. “What can we do?”
“Greyve is trying to get the other contestants over here to help but they have their own problems. Hoss, we’ll need you to house OTTO’s consciousness for a while once we find a way to upload him. Is that alright?”
“Anything for my best pal Peth,” said Hoss nonchalantly.
“Good,” replied Loran. “Voitrach has some power in his current form, but not much. That leaves one more member of the team we need if we want to beat Daddy Ham. We need you for that, Peth. Do you have enough control?”
Peth nodded. “I can invite anyone I want but sometimes it makes other people slip out. They could be far away. There are some in the hospital already.”
“We’ll deal with that when we come to it. Right now we just need this one friend.” Felix whispered a name in Peth’s ear. “You remember who that is?”
Peth nodded. “Yeah.” He blinked. “I did it. I think.”
Hoss started at the sound of footsteps on the stairs. “Felix? Are those the killers you warned me about?”
BONG
“I don’t think so,” said Felix. “Stand down.”
A young woman ascended the stairs to the tower, fists crackling with lightning. “Where am I?” she demanded.
“Hey,” said Felix, raising his tiny black hands. “Power down, Apathy. It’s Felix. We’re still in the battle. You died but we brought you back. The rest of us are trying to figure out a way we can all get out of this alive.”
Apathy grimaced. The electricity on her arms died down, save for the errant spark. “Okay. Thanks for the save. I’m in, but if you think about crossing me you’re fried. What do you want from me?”
“We need you to lay in ambush.” Felix turned to Hoss. “We’re gonna get Peth out of here. Voitrach, wait until we’re two minutes away, then start ringing again. Apathy, Loran Twight is coming after us. He needs to be stopped but we need him alive. Can you do that?”
Apathy cracked her knuckles. Lightning struck the tower, followed by a peal of thunder that made Peth cry out. She smirked. “I guess we’ll find out,” she said.
* * * * *
Will was dead.
Okay Will wasn’t dead because everyone was still there but that thing had chopped off his arm so for all intents and purposes he was dead and oh God. Oh God.
We should find Loran, said the queen, in a way that seemed oddly detached from the manner at hand.
“Please stop talking!” Annaliese shrieked out loud. Find Loran. What a ridiculous thing to be thinking about at a time like—
The monster turned on Annaliese, marching toward her with its blood-soaked blade outstretched. Maybe the constant screaming and talking to the voices in her head hadn’t been the best move. Okay. Maybe Parset would save her? Maybe Will would die soon enough that she could get tossed away to some other world of horrors? Maybe Loran was her best bet?
The monster raised its sword—
--And its… middle part? …exploded. Guts and shrapnel coated the room and thankfully missed Annaliese’s person.
Through the cavity in the monster’s now-inert corpse she could see Will, looking about as confused as she was, contemplating the barrel of his gun-arm. Gun-arm.
Yes. Okay. To recap, Will now had two arms. That is, three arms counting the one on the floor. And one of them had what Will called a “laser gun” on the end instead of a hand. “Will?” asked Annaliese.
Will took a second to catch his breath. “Yeah?”
“Do you have arm-regrowing magic you haven’t told us about? Like a lizard?”
“I don’t… no, I don’t.” Will, still crouching on the floor, looked to his gun arm as though asking it to confirm that statement. “I was dying and I felt something like… ah. Okay.”
”Okay?” Find Loran “What okay? What could possibly be okay?”
”I know who did this but I don’t know how I did it.”
Annaliese sighed. “Sorry, you know who did this but you don’t know how you—”
”Yeah. I did this. But I didn’t do it. Look. This is my arm, see? But not my my arm.”
”You’re not—” Will rose and walked over to her, showing her the new arm. It didn’t look any different from his old one. Very, um. Sort of tight and muscle-y. A little more tanned, maybe. Gun for a hand.
But! She looked where he was pointing. Will’s gun-arm had a tattoo that hadn’t been on his hand-arm before, as far as she knew.
It read: YOU ARE THE PRIME WILL. WE WILL HELP YOU BUT YOU HAVE TO LIVE FOR ALL OF US
“Will,” said Annaliese. “This is not helping me understand.”
”Sorry,” said Will. “I can explain I think but first we have to get—” His arm abruptly pointed across the room, practically pulling itself out of its socket. “Ow,” said Will. “I didn’t do that.”
The arm was pointing to Parset, who had just emerged from under a bed and was prompting the dead monster with a drumstick. “Parset get out of the way,” said Will. “I don’t know if I’m going to shoot you or just…” the arm pointed down for a bit, and then up. Okay. I don’t think I’m going to shoot you. I think I’m trying to show me something.”
Parset stood stock-still and cast a questioning glance at Annaliese. Annaliese shrugged.
Will walked towards Parset as his arm refined its angle. In a few paces the gun’s barrel was pointing directly at the gnome’s collarbone.
Annaliese had a silly thought. “Parset, where’s that key you used to wear around your neck?”
Parset brought his palm up to his forehead.