RE: DEATHGAME 9000 [S!3] Round Two: Interplanetary Circus
11-03-2014, 01:20 PM
Weaver wasn't quite sure what he'd expected the inside of an “ambulance droid” to look like, but even entering with an open mind he decided it probably wasn't this.
The plane on which he was now standing featured neither walls nor a visible floor, the land and sky merging together as a shifting mess of purple colours so uniformly lit (as far as Weaver could tell, nothing within this space was casting a shadow) that it was impossible to judge any exact dimensions. The most present orientation point you could use to divine your position was a massive cube of gears and hard drives suspended in the air at a height that was probably several storeys above their position... but it wasn't easy to tell for sure having little else to compare it to. The people who built this place clearly did not suffer much from vertigo.
What little equipment there was (chiefly beds on wheels) seemed to be scattered in a fairly loose semicircle near where he'd appeared (alongside walls, what this space also lacked was any visible exit, oh dear) and was mostly, but not entirely, of a size that would make its human operation fairly impractical. That two of the beds were more of what he'd call a standard size implied some capability for manufacturing, which would be useful information to keep for later. Presumably one of them was made for him when ERIC had tried to ingest him earlier, but the other seemed to contain some kind of dense mist... and there was no sign of his promised arm.
“Looking for this?”
Only in this bizarre pseudospace could such a large creature have possibly sneaked up on him, whatever invisible material they were standing on evidently didn't make a sound. ERIC's other conscious passenger was leaner than the ambulance droid but fully half again as tall as Weaver, nearly three metres (making it taller than ERIC itself!), and from its body language was clearly trying to use it to intimidate.
Weaver had been generous in assuming many of ERIC's features to have been chosen with practicality in mind, but it appeared that the trunk-like legs, featureless mask face, and even the multitude of grasping limbs were all as much vanity features added to increase resemblance to its creators as they were there because they were useful... but there were differences too.
While neither had a visible mouth, this one was clearly speaking from a series of long pipes extending from the back of its neck (perhaps breathing too?) and while some areas of his body (chiefly the head and torso) were layered in thick red armour (it looked natural but he supposed it could be clothing) most of his skin seemed to be made of stretched, fleshy, pink ropes. Possible to wound then, but Weaver didn't fancy his chances in a one-on-one fight, there was a big weight advantage against him.
It was only lucky that it was this one that seemed aggressive rather than the two hanging motionless in the air behind him, they were both larger still.
“Have I been brought here under false pretences? You told me I would face only a brief examination, then I could leave, yet there does not appear to be an exit.” Weaver asked while backing away, he was foolish to have been so trusting.
“I may have... left out some details.” Gan easily kept pace with his longer stride, gesticulating with the boneless limb holding Weaver's severed arm whilst reaching round with several more as if to pre-empt his audience dodging to the side. “Truth is, I need you for something else, and you aren't going anywhere until I get it.”
“If you are intending to use my arm as a bargaining chip, I do not need it.” Weaver presented his slightly newer arm for inspection, “See?”
Gan performed a complicated shrug, and tossed the limb aside. “No matter, I don't think the machine is going to release you anyway even after it's checked you over. Nothing has left this place in years.”
“And... you will convince it to release me if I provide the services you require? I assure you, there is no need to make threats. I assented to coming in here because I need to find allies.”
“Oh no, I can't let you out. If it was that easy I'd have done it myself.”
Gan leaned his expressionless face down to inspect Weaver more closely.
“That's your job.”
It was tough work keeping watch on an obsessive robot while simultaneously staying out of its searching gaze, but Eris was pulling it off with purpose. Near as soon as ERIC had finished eating that other guy it had extended its head out on a pole again and resumed its search for her, and she still didn't really fancy finding out what it looked like on the inside... but she also wanted to be close by when its new occupant returned.
While she had the advantage of size (she was small enough to not even be visible over the rest of a crowd, ERIC was large enough that the crowd had to part to let him move), she was chafing terribly under the requirement for stealth. If she let her powers run loose as she had before she'd be giving her position away, but this was taking a lot longer than she'd expected it would. What was he doing in there?
That's why she was so pleased when all the lights suddenly went out. All along the concourse bulbs flickered and dimmed, stall signs slowly faded, and amusement machines suddenly lost power. The milling crowd stopped their milling around and quietened (though if you listened hard there were distant yells coming from the nearby big top), producing a single, still moment of silence.
Perfect!
An instant later there was a sound astonishingly like rapid gunfire, as the unpopped corn kernels in a couple of food carts began bursting into snacks of their own accord. As people yelled and scrambled to get away from what could be a crazed shooter, they found themselves tripping over a sudden stream of multicoloured rats which had emerged from under every available tarpaulin and seemed to be doing their best to run their tiny paws over bystanders feet.
Their screams were joined by shouts and curses as small objects began to float off into the air and people (fleeing from rats and loud noises but finding themselves more buoyant than expected) began to topple over and into each other. Eris wasn't even doing that last one herself but she appreciated the assistance of whoever was.
Punches were thrown, bags were stolen, all hell broke loose. This was a lot more like it.
After a little bit of effort, Keagan had managed to escape the big top. Unfortunately it... hadn't quite happened in the way he'd hoped it would. The tent fabric had provided an effective handhold initially but when he'd been startled by the sudden mid-air arrival of a river eel (it had been as surprised as him, and darted down and away into the crowd as soon as it met his gaze, he wished he had it so easy) he'd quickly learned that it wasn't quite as strong as it looked.
Now here he was, tumbling slowly up and away towards a distant glass ceiling, and no amount of swimming motions seemed to help change his course. Worse, from what he could see of the ground below (not as much as he would have liked, the lights going out didn't help his already strained vision), the lapse in proper operation of gravity seemed to be confined to a fairly small area of the station, so if he kept floating like this, eventually he was going to find himself in an area where things stayed on the ground as they were supposed to.
Keagan didn't know very much about artificial gravity generation, but he hoped the transition between areas was gradual rather than sudden. He could be fairly confident that a sudden fall wouldn't kill him, but it still wouldn't be pleasant.
And then on top of that, there was the fact that even without his glasses he'd have been able to tell that the area affected by the apparent blackout formed a circle, one roughly centred on... the tent which he had just left. Meaning that if he wanted to find out what was going on and put a stop to it, he was moving helplessly in the wrong direction. Fantastic.
His only other option being to continue to slowly rotate until he fell to the floor and bounced, Keagan started trying to swim again.
[color=#708090 ]ERIC was having similar mobility problems, the darkness combined with the sound of alarms and smell of flames had driven people into a frenzy, but they didn't seem to be able to make up their minds on a direction of escape. People were trying to push in every direction and getting nowhere, and none of them listened to any loud requests to get out of the way or stop fighting either. He'd set his eyes to project a full floodlight beam to help people navigate their way out but it didn't really seem to be helping, in fact a lot of people had apparently decided to float around in the air after they fell over and create even more of an obstacle of themselves, which was exceptionally inconvenient.
This was the second time he'd been paralysed by a riot today, but the mix of participants was diverse enough that he didn't think he could get away with any loopholes this time, and his patient seemed to engrossed with his new friend to be much help in any case.
At least he hadn't seen any injuries that were more than superficial, there was a real danger of someone getting trampled in the melee, especially someone small. Someone with the height of a ten year old for instance would not be safe here at all, so the sooner he could find where Eris had got to the better.
His decision to get an aerial view of the situation unfortunately came at about the time as the flagging gravity systems gave up the ghost entirely. While ERIC was built for hostile environments, that didn't extend to space, and he didn't really understand the concept of a variable gravity constant. It wasn't something his programmers had ever expected to be important. That would be bad if he were merely trying to walk, he was extremely heavy, but it was far worse when propelled by a jet engine perfectly capable of lifting that weight into the air even under completely normal gravity conditions. While what he intended was a very careful, gradual ascent, when he took off it was like firing a cannonball.
ERIC could clearly see that something hadn't quite gone right in the seconds it took for him to travel from the ground to the roof, but the only advice his navigational sensors could tell him was “gravity will slow you down, do nothing”, so that's what he did. When he hit the hardened glass with a reverberating clang audible even within the slowly burning big top, and bounced off, they told him “you're descending too fast, fire again to brake”, so he did that too. By the third time he smashed into the roof, he'd decided that the best strategy was just going to be to pin himself to it through constant thrust, and this... pretty much worked as a temporary measure, though any chance now of finding who he was looking for had pretty much disappeared.
The ceiling was designed to withstand high-velocity impacts but it was also a few years past its due inspection date and perhaps a little out of specification. It didn't break or even crack, but he had left a little pattern of stress fractures across the surface where he'd smacked into it. More alarms blared, further afield. If station security hadn't been on their way already, they would certainly be paying attention now.[/color]
Keagan, fortunately unaware of any impending danger, had been sent spinning by the air currents of the rapid ascent and hadn't been able to help himself yelling “Hey!” as ERIC blew past. The rapid rotation was making him really nauseous but he couldn't really think of a way to slow down. Flailing uselessly to try and reach some kind of equilibrium, it was quite difficult for him to tell what was going on (thank god his glasses hadn't fallen off) but... something had just flown past it right? Some security guards perhaps? There was a big riot below and a fire, and the gravity had turned off, so it would make sense for someone to have come here to investigate. Maybe they could get him back out of the air?
He called out again “Hey! Lend me a hand?” but as soon as he was fixed with a pair of high-intensity torch beams he got the sinking feeling that he'd just made a mistake.
“Request acknowledged!”
ERIC misjudged again, and they both crashed straight through the roof of the blazing tent on the way down.
“I can't believe this is so easy, your security protocols are terrible.”
“Aren't you supposed to be a master programmer? Of course this would be easy for you.”
“Only as much as this is a war machine... that I can interface with this at all is impressive.”
“Whatever, you're a robot and he's also a robot. I'm sure you can figure something out.”
Left with few other options, Weaver had been forced to take part in Gan's poorly established plan. ERIC had produced an access terminal without even questioning why when asked by the alien doctor (it dangled from the big machine cube on an impractically long cable, but seemed by some principle to stay at a fixed position rather than swing on its rope when he was using the keyboard) and he'd been amazed to discover that despite the port's unusual shape, it would respond to him inserting a reshaped finger in the same manner as a PC's USB slot back home.
Some other force was at work here similar to the one which was allowing him to understand anything his fellow captive was saying (he clearly wasn't speaking English, that hadn't taken Weaver long to establish given that he appeared to greatly appreciate the sound of his own voice), if he concentrated he could almost see the glyphs on the screen as something else before they shifted into a form he was capable of understanding and some of them clearly weren't translating properly... but while he was sure this wouldn't stretch far enough to teaching him how to reprogram another AI (something he was a little glad he wasn't going to have to do) there might be something else here that he could use to gain his freedom. He was looking at the user interface for a device capable of forming a dimensional rift! Some debug command or an emergency release function would be ideal, but he was also looking for any other controls he could use to manipulate this interior environment for his own means.
Gan had already given him a brief explanation of why ERIC needed a reality pocket in his job as an ambulance while he was talking about why they were stuck in here (he had gone back to talking about this now, not seeming to mind that nobody was listening), and possibilities for how to use it as a tool against The Grandmaster were already running through his head...
Could they simply freeze such a powerful being in time in the same manner as the two diseased occupants were kept technically alive? Tricking him into this place might not be easy but that still sounded substantially less difficult than the task he had imagined he was setting himself.
And the beds... had the human-sized beds been transferred from some external store or had they been created inside this place? That was worth investigation as well.
But all such plans hinged on being able to find the actual controls.
But now that he'd convinced Gan that he was trying to get them out, he had dropped the aggressive stance and Weaver didn't think he was in any immediate danger... so it wasn't like there was much need to escape immediately as soon as he had found out how. In fact, if he could get ERIC to freeze his would-be captor again (which apparently happened fairly often even without coercion) he could have all the time he wanted.
He could make something useful out of this mistake yet.
Both engrossed in watching the glowing screen, neither of them noticed the mist on the hospital bed slowly reform itself into a child. It wasn't quite the same child it had been when it came in, but it was a pretty good attempt.
Gomorrah wasn't quite sure where it was or what was happening here, it could feel itself in this one apparition and also the rest of itself which was larger... somewhere far off but also simultaneously very close. This might have given some beings cause for introspection, but Gomorrah wasn't particularly interested in such things and so didn't think on it any further. It was here and that was all that was important.
It didn't know or care that its puppet was meant to be caught in suspended animation either, so it bid she get up off the bed and she did. She walked out of sight behind the incongruous brick toilet block, really the only object present large enough to break a line of sight, and sat down again.
It wouldn't usually bother exerting direct influence over any of its spectres like this but it seemed to be having some trouble manifesting anything else. This wasn't really an ideal environment, with little for it to establish a grip onto, but this empty place was full of waiting potential. It felt like it could be if it could just find a way in, like it had in that last place where it had been able to build its own city. There could be room for that here, if it was allowed time to get itself comfortable. This was the thing closest to a building, so it would have to do for a start.
One of the toilets flushed (whatever it had been before, now it was a fairly elderly model with a pull-chain and a hanging cistern that was leaking moss) and a man named Clark walked out carrying a 12-gauge winchester shotgun. He wasn't... quite sure what he'd been doing before he had entered the public toilet block, but he was pretty sure he could recognise that glowing blue guy over there. Had he been threatening... Esther? His sweet little Esther... the darling girl who had been waiting for him outside and was now clinging to his leg. Yes, that was it! He'd tried to take her away from him, they said this wasn't a fit household! He said there had been ”allegations” (whatever that means) from her mum, the lying cow (wasn't she Esther? No, that's not right, Esther's the child), and that he wasn't allowed to see her any more! He couldn't be having that!
“Oi you!” he shouted, as he pointed at Weaver and raised the gun level with his eye.
The plane on which he was now standing featured neither walls nor a visible floor, the land and sky merging together as a shifting mess of purple colours so uniformly lit (as far as Weaver could tell, nothing within this space was casting a shadow) that it was impossible to judge any exact dimensions. The most present orientation point you could use to divine your position was a massive cube of gears and hard drives suspended in the air at a height that was probably several storeys above their position... but it wasn't easy to tell for sure having little else to compare it to. The people who built this place clearly did not suffer much from vertigo.
What little equipment there was (chiefly beds on wheels) seemed to be scattered in a fairly loose semicircle near where he'd appeared (alongside walls, what this space also lacked was any visible exit, oh dear) and was mostly, but not entirely, of a size that would make its human operation fairly impractical. That two of the beds were more of what he'd call a standard size implied some capability for manufacturing, which would be useful information to keep for later. Presumably one of them was made for him when ERIC had tried to ingest him earlier, but the other seemed to contain some kind of dense mist... and there was no sign of his promised arm.
“Looking for this?”
Only in this bizarre pseudospace could such a large creature have possibly sneaked up on him, whatever invisible material they were standing on evidently didn't make a sound. ERIC's other conscious passenger was leaner than the ambulance droid but fully half again as tall as Weaver, nearly three metres (making it taller than ERIC itself!), and from its body language was clearly trying to use it to intimidate.
Weaver had been generous in assuming many of ERIC's features to have been chosen with practicality in mind, but it appeared that the trunk-like legs, featureless mask face, and even the multitude of grasping limbs were all as much vanity features added to increase resemblance to its creators as they were there because they were useful... but there were differences too.
While neither had a visible mouth, this one was clearly speaking from a series of long pipes extending from the back of its neck (perhaps breathing too?) and while some areas of his body (chiefly the head and torso) were layered in thick red armour (it looked natural but he supposed it could be clothing) most of his skin seemed to be made of stretched, fleshy, pink ropes. Possible to wound then, but Weaver didn't fancy his chances in a one-on-one fight, there was a big weight advantage against him.
It was only lucky that it was this one that seemed aggressive rather than the two hanging motionless in the air behind him, they were both larger still.
“Have I been brought here under false pretences? You told me I would face only a brief examination, then I could leave, yet there does not appear to be an exit.” Weaver asked while backing away, he was foolish to have been so trusting.
“I may have... left out some details.” Gan easily kept pace with his longer stride, gesticulating with the boneless limb holding Weaver's severed arm whilst reaching round with several more as if to pre-empt his audience dodging to the side. “Truth is, I need you for something else, and you aren't going anywhere until I get it.”
“If you are intending to use my arm as a bargaining chip, I do not need it.” Weaver presented his slightly newer arm for inspection, “See?”
Gan performed a complicated shrug, and tossed the limb aside. “No matter, I don't think the machine is going to release you anyway even after it's checked you over. Nothing has left this place in years.”
“And... you will convince it to release me if I provide the services you require? I assure you, there is no need to make threats. I assented to coming in here because I need to find allies.”
“Oh no, I can't let you out. If it was that easy I'd have done it myself.”
Gan leaned his expressionless face down to inspect Weaver more closely.
“That's your job.”
It was tough work keeping watch on an obsessive robot while simultaneously staying out of its searching gaze, but Eris was pulling it off with purpose. Near as soon as ERIC had finished eating that other guy it had extended its head out on a pole again and resumed its search for her, and she still didn't really fancy finding out what it looked like on the inside... but she also wanted to be close by when its new occupant returned.
While she had the advantage of size (she was small enough to not even be visible over the rest of a crowd, ERIC was large enough that the crowd had to part to let him move), she was chafing terribly under the requirement for stealth. If she let her powers run loose as she had before she'd be giving her position away, but this was taking a lot longer than she'd expected it would. What was he doing in there?
That's why she was so pleased when all the lights suddenly went out. All along the concourse bulbs flickered and dimmed, stall signs slowly faded, and amusement machines suddenly lost power. The milling crowd stopped their milling around and quietened (though if you listened hard there were distant yells coming from the nearby big top), producing a single, still moment of silence.
Perfect!
An instant later there was a sound astonishingly like rapid gunfire, as the unpopped corn kernels in a couple of food carts began bursting into snacks of their own accord. As people yelled and scrambled to get away from what could be a crazed shooter, they found themselves tripping over a sudden stream of multicoloured rats which had emerged from under every available tarpaulin and seemed to be doing their best to run their tiny paws over bystanders feet.
Their screams were joined by shouts and curses as small objects began to float off into the air and people (fleeing from rats and loud noises but finding themselves more buoyant than expected) began to topple over and into each other. Eris wasn't even doing that last one herself but she appreciated the assistance of whoever was.
Punches were thrown, bags were stolen, all hell broke loose. This was a lot more like it.
After a little bit of effort, Keagan had managed to escape the big top. Unfortunately it... hadn't quite happened in the way he'd hoped it would. The tent fabric had provided an effective handhold initially but when he'd been startled by the sudden mid-air arrival of a river eel (it had been as surprised as him, and darted down and away into the crowd as soon as it met his gaze, he wished he had it so easy) he'd quickly learned that it wasn't quite as strong as it looked.
Now here he was, tumbling slowly up and away towards a distant glass ceiling, and no amount of swimming motions seemed to help change his course. Worse, from what he could see of the ground below (not as much as he would have liked, the lights going out didn't help his already strained vision), the lapse in proper operation of gravity seemed to be confined to a fairly small area of the station, so if he kept floating like this, eventually he was going to find himself in an area where things stayed on the ground as they were supposed to.
Keagan didn't know very much about artificial gravity generation, but he hoped the transition between areas was gradual rather than sudden. He could be fairly confident that a sudden fall wouldn't kill him, but it still wouldn't be pleasant.
And then on top of that, there was the fact that even without his glasses he'd have been able to tell that the area affected by the apparent blackout formed a circle, one roughly centred on... the tent which he had just left. Meaning that if he wanted to find out what was going on and put a stop to it, he was moving helplessly in the wrong direction. Fantastic.
His only other option being to continue to slowly rotate until he fell to the floor and bounced, Keagan started trying to swim again.
[color=#708090 ]ERIC was having similar mobility problems, the darkness combined with the sound of alarms and smell of flames had driven people into a frenzy, but they didn't seem to be able to make up their minds on a direction of escape. People were trying to push in every direction and getting nowhere, and none of them listened to any loud requests to get out of the way or stop fighting either. He'd set his eyes to project a full floodlight beam to help people navigate their way out but it didn't really seem to be helping, in fact a lot of people had apparently decided to float around in the air after they fell over and create even more of an obstacle of themselves, which was exceptionally inconvenient.
This was the second time he'd been paralysed by a riot today, but the mix of participants was diverse enough that he didn't think he could get away with any loopholes this time, and his patient seemed to engrossed with his new friend to be much help in any case.
At least he hadn't seen any injuries that were more than superficial, there was a real danger of someone getting trampled in the melee, especially someone small. Someone with the height of a ten year old for instance would not be safe here at all, so the sooner he could find where Eris had got to the better.
His decision to get an aerial view of the situation unfortunately came at about the time as the flagging gravity systems gave up the ghost entirely. While ERIC was built for hostile environments, that didn't extend to space, and he didn't really understand the concept of a variable gravity constant. It wasn't something his programmers had ever expected to be important. That would be bad if he were merely trying to walk, he was extremely heavy, but it was far worse when propelled by a jet engine perfectly capable of lifting that weight into the air even under completely normal gravity conditions. While what he intended was a very careful, gradual ascent, when he took off it was like firing a cannonball.
ERIC could clearly see that something hadn't quite gone right in the seconds it took for him to travel from the ground to the roof, but the only advice his navigational sensors could tell him was “gravity will slow you down, do nothing”, so that's what he did. When he hit the hardened glass with a reverberating clang audible even within the slowly burning big top, and bounced off, they told him “you're descending too fast, fire again to brake”, so he did that too. By the third time he smashed into the roof, he'd decided that the best strategy was just going to be to pin himself to it through constant thrust, and this... pretty much worked as a temporary measure, though any chance now of finding who he was looking for had pretty much disappeared.
The ceiling was designed to withstand high-velocity impacts but it was also a few years past its due inspection date and perhaps a little out of specification. It didn't break or even crack, but he had left a little pattern of stress fractures across the surface where he'd smacked into it. More alarms blared, further afield. If station security hadn't been on their way already, they would certainly be paying attention now.[/color]
Keagan, fortunately unaware of any impending danger, had been sent spinning by the air currents of the rapid ascent and hadn't been able to help himself yelling “Hey!” as ERIC blew past. The rapid rotation was making him really nauseous but he couldn't really think of a way to slow down. Flailing uselessly to try and reach some kind of equilibrium, it was quite difficult for him to tell what was going on (thank god his glasses hadn't fallen off) but... something had just flown past it right? Some security guards perhaps? There was a big riot below and a fire, and the gravity had turned off, so it would make sense for someone to have come here to investigate. Maybe they could get him back out of the air?
He called out again “Hey! Lend me a hand?” but as soon as he was fixed with a pair of high-intensity torch beams he got the sinking feeling that he'd just made a mistake.
“Request acknowledged!”
ERIC misjudged again, and they both crashed straight through the roof of the blazing tent on the way down.
“I can't believe this is so easy, your security protocols are terrible.”
“Aren't you supposed to be a master programmer? Of course this would be easy for you.”
“Only as much as this is a war machine... that I can interface with this at all is impressive.”
“Whatever, you're a robot and he's also a robot. I'm sure you can figure something out.”
Left with few other options, Weaver had been forced to take part in Gan's poorly established plan. ERIC had produced an access terminal without even questioning why when asked by the alien doctor (it dangled from the big machine cube on an impractically long cable, but seemed by some principle to stay at a fixed position rather than swing on its rope when he was using the keyboard) and he'd been amazed to discover that despite the port's unusual shape, it would respond to him inserting a reshaped finger in the same manner as a PC's USB slot back home.
Some other force was at work here similar to the one which was allowing him to understand anything his fellow captive was saying (he clearly wasn't speaking English, that hadn't taken Weaver long to establish given that he appeared to greatly appreciate the sound of his own voice), if he concentrated he could almost see the glyphs on the screen as something else before they shifted into a form he was capable of understanding and some of them clearly weren't translating properly... but while he was sure this wouldn't stretch far enough to teaching him how to reprogram another AI (something he was a little glad he wasn't going to have to do) there might be something else here that he could use to gain his freedom. He was looking at the user interface for a device capable of forming a dimensional rift! Some debug command or an emergency release function would be ideal, but he was also looking for any other controls he could use to manipulate this interior environment for his own means.
Gan had already given him a brief explanation of why ERIC needed a reality pocket in his job as an ambulance while he was talking about why they were stuck in here (he had gone back to talking about this now, not seeming to mind that nobody was listening), and possibilities for how to use it as a tool against The Grandmaster were already running through his head...
Could they simply freeze such a powerful being in time in the same manner as the two diseased occupants were kept technically alive? Tricking him into this place might not be easy but that still sounded substantially less difficult than the task he had imagined he was setting himself.
And the beds... had the human-sized beds been transferred from some external store or had they been created inside this place? That was worth investigation as well.
But all such plans hinged on being able to find the actual controls.
But now that he'd convinced Gan that he was trying to get them out, he had dropped the aggressive stance and Weaver didn't think he was in any immediate danger... so it wasn't like there was much need to escape immediately as soon as he had found out how. In fact, if he could get ERIC to freeze his would-be captor again (which apparently happened fairly often even without coercion) he could have all the time he wanted.
He could make something useful out of this mistake yet.
Both engrossed in watching the glowing screen, neither of them noticed the mist on the hospital bed slowly reform itself into a child. It wasn't quite the same child it had been when it came in, but it was a pretty good attempt.
Gomorrah wasn't quite sure where it was or what was happening here, it could feel itself in this one apparition and also the rest of itself which was larger... somewhere far off but also simultaneously very close. This might have given some beings cause for introspection, but Gomorrah wasn't particularly interested in such things and so didn't think on it any further. It was here and that was all that was important.
It didn't know or care that its puppet was meant to be caught in suspended animation either, so it bid she get up off the bed and she did. She walked out of sight behind the incongruous brick toilet block, really the only object present large enough to break a line of sight, and sat down again.
It wouldn't usually bother exerting direct influence over any of its spectres like this but it seemed to be having some trouble manifesting anything else. This wasn't really an ideal environment, with little for it to establish a grip onto, but this empty place was full of waiting potential. It felt like it could be if it could just find a way in, like it had in that last place where it had been able to build its own city. There could be room for that here, if it was allowed time to get itself comfortable. This was the thing closest to a building, so it would have to do for a start.
One of the toilets flushed (whatever it had been before, now it was a fairly elderly model with a pull-chain and a hanging cistern that was leaking moss) and a man named Clark walked out carrying a 12-gauge winchester shotgun. He wasn't... quite sure what he'd been doing before he had entered the public toilet block, but he was pretty sure he could recognise that glowing blue guy over there. Had he been threatening... Esther? His sweet little Esther... the darling girl who had been waiting for him outside and was now clinging to his leg. Yes, that was it! He'd tried to take her away from him, they said this wasn't a fit household! He said there had been ”allegations” (whatever that means) from her mum, the lying cow (wasn't she Esther? No, that's not right, Esther's the child), and that he wasn't allowed to see her any more! He couldn't be having that!
“Oi you!” he shouted, as he pointed at Weaver and raised the gun level with his eye.