The Gradual Massacre (GBS2G4) [Round 6: Tidal Cove]

Originally posted on MSPA by MalkyTop.

---

She would be safe as long as she stayed in here and it stayed out there.

But there were other ways of destroying her, subtly, from the inside.

Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock.

It felt like her mind was eroding.

It was coming closer wasn’t it? It was going to come inside. And then she would die, like she knew she always would, because she was a stupid, worthless, horrible excuse of a living being…but she didn’t want to die. No.

She faced the tick tock tick tock, faced it as emotions sparked around her and disappeared and set fire to things and didn’t, again and again, and she could definitely see somebody out there and it wasn’t just her imagination because that somebody was moving toward her, but it wasn’t the somebody she was expecting. But it was still somebody she recognized.

Poof, there goes another fire, but no, he just shook it off. Poof, fear. Poof, paranoia. Poof, poof, poof.

Thane, or the very image of Thane, approached. He approached deliberately. He approached and Holly could not retreat or attack or anything, and she had to just face facts that she was going to die. Her mind was starting to fill with hallucinations. She was already dead. She was not yet dead. She was in a state of undeath. There was nobody there and she had imagined it all along. She was experiencing pain. She was experiencing calm. She was experiencing insanity, an insanity where she was outside looking in, unable to move or to act, a spectator of her own life…

Everything stopped.

When Holly looked up, she saw the Thane-thing, standing very still, as the gaseous being enveloped him. It didn’t appear to be doing anything, but the Thane-thing was also not doing anything as a result of whatever it was the ball of gas was not doing. It felt as though a battle was happening in front of her eyes. It felt as though the ball of gas was losing.

The Thane-thing twitched.

She took this chance to run out. The shelter wasn’t safe anymore. She needed another place to hide. Where the hell did snively Algernon go? He probably already found a shelter. He probably told them about her. He probably told them to kill her. That was what Algernon would do. She had to find him. She didn’t have quite a clear idea about what she was going to do when she did, but she had to find him…and then she would do…something.

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Acacia got up and went outside, but only for show. Closing the door behind her, she simply leaned against the wall and stared up at the ceiling, counting the seconds up to a minute.

Before she could head back inside, though, a woman bounded up to her, disheveled and familiar. Acacia opened her mouth to…to…say something? To shriek in surprise? To attack reflexively? But the woman cut her off. “I heard that they were taking care of – of someone here,” she said hastily. “May I look at him? It won’t take long.” And she darted into the room before even waiting for an answer.

Acacia closed her mouth. And then she entered as well and managed to get out a “Wait a minute,” but she paused when she heard Algernon say, “Cherry?”

The woman she knew wasn’t named Cherry. Perhaps she was mistaken.

Acacia went back to waiting outside. Whatever their conversation was going to be about, they probably didn’t want some deaf woman lurking around them.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

“…Hey, Algernon.”

“I’m really sorry, I’m really, really sorry, I shouldn’t have just left you behind, I was just, it’s, I just couldn’t – “

“It’s okay,” she said, and he calmed down.

It was strange. He had seen Cherry cheerful. He had seen Cherry angry. He had never seen Cherry solemn before. There was a heavy feeling to the atmosphere. Something serious. But he couldn’t focus on it. All he could focus on was that he was an absolute, miserable dingus. As usual.

“I mean…I don’t know. I’m sorry. I—I guess I wanted to…escape. Or something. From…from things that…I don’t even remember them. It’s stupid! I’m stupid.” He couldn’t stop babbling. It had already been hard enough for him to stay awake the past few minutes, but now he couldn’t stop babbling and he wasn’t sure what he was saying or if any of it made sense.

“It’s okay, really,” she said. “I forgive you. I’ve forgiven you already. For a long time now.” She smiled. It was different, he thought, but it didn’t matter because he was forgiven.

“…So…you’re okay?”

“Yes. I’m glad to see that you’re okay too…” She stood straight, but her hands were fidgeting badly. “…You can lie down again, if you want.”

That wouldn’t be conductive to continuing the conversation because he was already on the verge of passing out. Lying down would just compound the problem. But he did so anyways and tried to keep his eyes open. He was failing very splendidly.

“…I’m so happy to be talking to you again,” she said. “I…we haven’t really been, well, really talking much. Not after what happened that time. You don’t remember, do you?”

“…Mmmngh. I…don’t really…remember things…”

“I realize that,” she chuckled. “It’s one of the more memorable things about you.”

“…Nnn,” he said, trying to sound affronted. She bit her lip.

“I…I always meant to talk to you earlier,” she said. “I really did. But…things always got in the way. Or maybe that’s an excuse. I always saw you with…with that woman. You were living with her, even, and I didn’t want to bother you. And you were having a lot of problems of your own. I kept hearing everybody talk about you. It…wasn’t good. At all. And, well, I didn’t know what to talk about. Maybe…it would get back to that incident. And I didn’t want to talk about that at all…and now, you’ve forgotten. I don’t know if that’s a bad thing or not.”

Algernon didn’t respond at all that time. She sighed.

“I…just think that all of this, somehow, could have turned out differently. We could’ve gotten closer, perhaps. Friends. Or…something. Maybe you could’ve finally settled down. Maybe the incident would have never occurred and everybody would be happy…instead of all this insanity happening.

“I…I feel like something’s going to happen. You’re going to leave. Or maybe I am. I’ve grown fond of you, Algernon. I’m sorry I can’t even tell you that when you’re awake. I’m…pretty cowardly. I’m pretty selfish too. I don’t want you to forget me. But you will, won’t you? You’ll forget me one day. I don’t understand why, but…it’s just something you do.”

Her hands slipped into a pocket and drew out a ring. It was unhesitantly slipped on his finger.

She finally stood up and walked towards the door. “…Goodbye, Algernon. Try not to forget me.”

Acacia watched as the woman walked away, quickly accompanied by a gun-totting snake.

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“Christ, there’s another one.”

Several of Hearth’s guards surrounded what appeared to be a babbling elf. Her eyes were unfocused, her mouth constantly whispering. It was unclear whether she could see them or not. It was something that seemed to be happening non-stop now, really. Fugitives all coming from some unknown place, wandering around for some foolhardy reason…

“Careful, I think we should knock this one out,” said one.

“I think…she’s…sparking?”

There was a sound. She shrieked and launched herself forward, pushing past the line of guards. A few chased after her. The rest stared back into the depths of the swamp.

“What was that soun – “

Originally posted on MSPA by Schazer.

---

Message curled up somewhere on Countess' person, surveying the damage.

Dear Countess-

"I know you're as immodest as you are insufferably pretentious, Message. You needn't bother repeating yourself, as much I know you wish to."

Message held back its retort, likely as it was the amalgam would mistake its silence for a white flag. A tendril of ink instead drip-slid out from the joints in Countess' fingers, lapping up the muddy mix of ash and blood and marshwater.

He may have been of some actual use to you, but that point is quite moot. Kerosene has fallen-

"-That's disgusting," interrupted Countess, trying (with little success) to yank Message off the charred remains at the island's shores.

-and you are a hypocrite. The situation in neighbouring Fernwood will no doubt worsen by the time you haul your unaerodynamic self out there. Perhaps it would have already fallen, which does not suit my needs at all. Regardless, this "disgusting" meal you left me - a gesture so courteous for the likes of you I can only assume the side effect of satisfying my needs was entirely unintentional - will improve my stamina. Enough that I may lead you back to civilisation far less circuitously, at any rate.

Some urgency would not be remiss, though. The Swamp has, all too quickly, become a far deadlier place.

Regards,
The Message

The last of the inky trail slithered out, and snaked across the Swamp's surface like a shadow. Countess took a few dainty, whirring steps, arms folding away in an almost-pensive motion.

"I wonder."

Message flowed in a lazy circle, making no response until its companion slid back under the water. Her voice sang out, a little tinny from submersion, but chirpy-depraved as ever.

"Do you think the Ouroborous could make a meal of that mindworm?"


---


Dear Countess,

As much as I abhor penning a cliche, I simply cannot leave you alone for five minutes, can I?

With exasperation,

The Message

"More like five days, by my estimation." Countess flexed a mantis-like forelimb, reviewing the way it slotted flush into a groove down her chassis. She didn't like it all that much, but figured it was better than having an actual five days to renovate. Clockwork, the agent had to concede, was pretty and precise and oh-so elegant, but really wasn't much use in a swamp. She hated having to resort to this sleek, futuruistic form her constituent nanites seemed to prefer, but the location left her no choice. Not to mention a new face would give her the element of surprise, to run one of those imbeciles through and put an end to this unpleasant detour.

PS. If I had abandoned you for five days on my reconnoisance - which I certainly did not - then you could have easily walked to Fernwood by now. I can see where you're trying to go with this, but did it not occur to you that the boardwalks are the quickest route between two towns?

It hadn't, but Countess wasn't going to admit it. She opted for one last beartrap grin, unchanged save for the whole arrangement locking together a little more seamlessly, before slipping into the water.

Under the moulded-steel shell, the still-clockwork innards kept whirring and churning, occasionally managing to drag another clag of muck out through its myriad teeth and spit it out. Her arms clamped to her chest in a straitjacket embrace while her still-insectoid forelegs dragged her unhurriedly through the murk.

Dear Countess, began Message, registering as an occasional oily black streak across Countess' field of mired vision:

do you even understand how aquatic organisms function?

She ignored it.

What were you even expecting to find? Next to nothing of an agreeable disposition lives off the boardwalks. Are you doing this purely for the sake of being contrary? I find that rather immature.

...

If you insist on being disagreeable to the point of uselessness, then don't bother heeding my suggestion and swimming the way I'm indicating in the corner of your eye. At the very worst, the two of you might talk some sense into each other.

In disgust,
The Message

Countess waited until Message had well and truly departed elsewhere, then dragged her steely self to face port(ish) and forged on.

An hour's crocodilian marsh-draggling, with only the distant screech of Ouroborites to distract her, and the agent's feet scraped solid ground. A sleek head - whose shape seemed to borrow from all the worst carnivores - craned from the water on a slightly telescoping neck, gracing a sharp-plated body on four mantid legs. A pair of arms unfolded, the needle-like fingers (she just couldn't give those up) picking mud off the oversized forelegs. Countess furrowed the ground with a hindleg, which had been folded away during her trek. Ouroborous had passed through here, that much was clear.

The damp little island might've been a hill, once upon a time. A mouldering stone watchtower was busy taking forever to collapse, taking up most of the available land. The stone blocks at the foot of the tower (you could see where they'd fallen off the crenellations up top) were slick with purple, and a chitinous leg still poked out from underneath one. The remnants of a shrub and what looked to be extremely crude attempts at agriculture, sulked on the one patch of land not overshadowed by the building.

Countess looked up to to the battlements, and took a brick to the flank - but only because she'd almost-purposefully flailed the initially-targeted head out of the way. She scrambled away from the great overdue accident of an edifice, finding some innard of head-region that could still ratchet angrily and growling her mechanical growl.

The dead man walking, to his credit, managed to sate his curiosity until just after Countess began to think it might've been an accident.

"... Paige?" It was less a question, and more tenuously-witheld belief.

Well, that made things interesting.


---


Reilen refused to climb down his own rope ladder (paranoid idiot), and Countess was certainly in no form to climb up it. He also kept telling her (loudly) to keep her voice down in case those sentrali bugs showed their ugly faces again, which just ground her gears even worse.

"It's Countess, now," implored the amalgam. "Considering I haven't gone by that name since I started work with Viscount-"

"-who?"

"Hethwell," chirped Countess, testily. Her colleague made a non-commital noise which (in Countess' opinion) needed serious curtailing with a knife to the face. "Let's pretend I'm here to help you, and you'll be grateful enough at the prospect of a friendly face" -ok, she did have to concede Reilen got to laugh at that- "to tell me what brings you to this fetid backwater. Good?"

Reilen just cackled some more, waving what looked to be a chunk of inexpertly-grilled Ouroborite. Disgraceful, but Countess supposed you couldn't pick a worse hell for a Telpori-Hal than a swamp. No wonder he'd lost it.

"You've changed in a lot of ways, 'Countess'."

"Hal still black as ever, I hope?"

"Nah," growled Reilen, in a catastrophically poor display of tact. He grinned. "Well, I mean you're still as sadistic a bitch as always, sure, but something's eating you."

Countess said nothing, doing some kind of metal equivalent with her face of smiling sweetly. The Telpori-Hal continued to glare at her from his perch, as though trying to pick out some small feature on her nonexistent clothing.

"Still got to wonder how you ended up here, Paige. He tossed you in a battle, and you didn't rip them all limb from limb before one of them got a chance to escape?"

"Countess, Reilen. It was supposed to be a test. It is a test. I'm merely under the guise of a contestant, to sow discord-"

"-and stop something like this from happening? That is rich."

"I suppose you fared far better," chirped the amalgam. Reilen just laughed. Again. It was starting to annoy her.

"Nah, not going to kid myself. Boss got plain bored of me, can't dress something like that up. Wait! I've got it!" The Telpori-Hal leaned over the parapet, jabbing an excitable finger Countess-ward.

"You've got the hots for the Boss, haven't you?"

That prompted a very, very long silence.

Eventually, she managed:

"Follow your own advice, Reilen, come down here, and try asking me that a little more quietly. I think that meddling brainworm Hitchcock" -oh hey- "in Holm might not have heard you."

Reilen responded by shrieking at the top of his badly-starved voice. He found it hilarious, although a small part of him realised he'd just given himself the options to starve to death, or jump down there and melt Countess' poor smitten sadist face off. He solved this dilemma by not watching his footing, and pitching headfirst over the parapet.

Countess didn't bother toying with Reilen, even while most of his bones were shattered, which was a good enough indication she was furious and he should regenerate. He realised what a monumentally stupid idea that was, when she slid a leg underneath him and tossed him into the swamp.

She settled, spidercatlike upon brushed-steel haunches, and groomed herself clean of mud while doing some mental arithmetic. This whole detour might've taken two days, maybe three if Message opted to be useless. For what? Reminiscing with an old colleague about how much better things were, way back then? Was this what normal people did?

What an utter waste of time, she thought to herself.

Originally posted on MSPA by Pinary.

---

"What was that soun-"

The green tendril that shot out of the mist and into one of the remaining guards' throats came quickly, cutting that guard off mid-sentence. It didn't stop there, and without much pretence, it whipped around, grabbed another guard's neck, and pulled, wrenching that guard to the ground and leaving him motionless. Then, and soon as it was done, it pulled away, retreating back into the mists of the swamp and leaving the remaining two guards to brace themselves for its return.

It did return, but, counter to the guards' expectations, it didn't come alone, and certainly not at the same speed it had before.

It came, instead, as part of what seemed to be an amalgamation of a zombie, a swamp monster, and an eldritch abomination. The thing shambled slowly forward, a wide, toothy grin splitting its face farther than grins really should.

The guards just stared at the swamp-thing, and when it flicked its wrist in a quick motion, they flinched back. They didn't end up with new holes through their bodies, however; on closer inspection, it seemed that what had once been Thane had procured a pair of shiny handcuffs from somewhere and was now wearing them across its somewhat-rotten wrists.

-

"Captain! Captain, wake up!"

Captain Scumbeard, asleep in the closest he'd approximation to his old bunk he'd managed to make, was reluctant to do what his earnest first mate was urging him to do.

"Captain, we have to go! They're everywhere, we don't have long!"

Okay, it did sound important.

"What, what is it?", he asked, still rather groggy from the night before. "Who're everywhere?"

He got his answer soon enough.

-

"No, sir, not a word. He's just sitting there."

The people of Hearth were taking no chances when it came to the not-Thane monstrosity. It was in a specially-outfitted hotel room, thick iron bars keeping it contained in one corner and a quartet of guards standing watch at all times. One door to the room was atop one of the highest branches of the tree, leading anyone who passed through to a probably-fatal drop down to the ground outside, and the other was set in the floor of a specially-dug pit that had an additional pair of guards armed with high-powered rifles standing by the top.

The radio in the guard's hand crackled to life. "Well, if he does say anything, let me know immediately. Over and out." (The head of the guard, a sentient police dispatch console that preferred to be called either 911 or "sir," always used proper radio protocol.)

"Right, will do."

The Thane-thing wasn't much disturbed by being in a cell. It knew just what was happening outside. It could still hear them coming. All was well.

-

Looks like it was true. The whole town, destroyed.

there is movement down there

At the ship's words, Sarin drew back a bit. She didn't want to see the sorts of things that might lurk in Fernwood's remains. If she looked over the edge, she worried she might see the things that had destroyed the town, or maybe some sort of beast eating the remains of the population.

What she didn't think to worry about was a grappling hook wrapping around one of Richter's bones, followed by another, then another, then more. The thought hadn't even occurred to her.

-

The joint populations of Kerosene and Fernwood arrived in Hearth not long after the un-Thane itself, and their reception was about as warm as they'd expected. I mean, a horde of zombies approaches your fortress, what are you going to do, invite them in for tea?

Automatic weapons fire, magical fire-weapons, and assorted other warfare ammo blazed from the lower branches of the tree. When one of 911's scouts had reported back that there was a "horde of something coming in, over," the call of "battle stations!" had gone out. Everyone who could handle a weapon was sent to positions on the tree's lower branches, from which they could shoot from cover but still have an excellent chance of actually hitting anything.

It was a solid plan. The combined fire of Hearth's defence kept the swamp-zombies at bay.

Well, most of them.

-

"Land ho!", came the cry.

Captain Scumbeard, the ex-living ex-ex-pirate, stroked his still-scummy beard and smiled a still-toothy smile. "Prepare to disembark," he said, putting the old piratical emphasis back into his arrs.

With a few quick throws, there were grappling hooks binding their vessel to the tree. From there, the crew began their mission.

-

Something thumped on one of the doors to Thane's makeshift cell.

Immediately, one of the guards grabbed for his radio. "Sir," he began, "we've got-"

He didn't get to finish his message, due to a cutthroat pirate doing the sort of thing one would expect someone described as "cutthroat" to do. None of the other guards even reached their radios.

The thing that wasn't Thane stood, and once Scumbeard's crew had found the keys to the cell, walked forward. As the crew scrambled to get the cuffs off of their leader, they looked to it for guidance. What was their next step? What did they do next?

It told them.

-

The plags were coming.

Acacia, being in possession of two hands and having seen a machine gun before, had been sent out to a branch where she could guard, and she'd even gotten a perch not far from Kalevi.

It wasn't much comfort. They were coming for her.

There were so many of them below, and the mist partially obscuring them didn't do anything to make them any less real.

She'd always known they would come for her. She'd done things, and they'd seen, and now they were here, coming to get her.

She didn't notice when her gun ran out of bullets, because by then, she'd stopped even aiming. She was just pointing it down at the crowd and clutching the trigger for dear life.

Kelavi, on the other hand, did notice. "Aic," he shouted, "you need to reload!"

Kel was there. They were coming and Kel was there. She needed him, she needed to get to him, he could help, he could make them leave, she'd be safe with him, where was he, she needed him, Kel where are you.

"Aic, come on, stay with me! You need to reload!"

There he was, just over there, she needed to go to him, she had to get there, she was coming, almost there.

The fear of the plags might've kept her on the branch if she'd had a bit more time. Left to her own devices, she might not have fallen from her perch and met her end. Kelavi might not have seen her go and might not have dived after her in an insane bid to protect her.

Unfortunately, a skeleton airship slamming into the tree wasn't exactly conducive to people keeping their footing.

If Kalevi hadn't bought her what time he had, though, they would've eaten her so fast that two humanoids, an amalgam-creature, and a selection of insects wouldn't've gotten to see what happened when the hole caused by Richter's forced flight into Hearth's trunk was able to leak any substantial amount of fog into the town. The four remaining contestants might not have had an opportunity to witness that Hearth, like Kerosene and Fernwood, was inevitably bound to be zombie food.

> Contestant dead. Loading mswampexit004... Done. Executing...

Still, though, the moment Acacia had officially ceased to be alive, reality ground to a halt around the four. Almost immediately, sections of the world began to vanish, and any sounds that had existed dissolved into static.

As things vanished faster and faster, though, the static resolved itself into a sound the contestants all recognized. (Well, the ones capable of recognizing it.)

The Controller was laughing at them, getting a good, hearty chuckle out of his actions. The sound reverberated in from all sides, the echo distinct enough that it almost sounded like their captor had brought company.

After a few moments, the laughter died away, and the Controller spoke. His voice echoed just as his laughs had, but his tone was quieter, almost contemplative. "Beautiful," he said, "just beautiful. There's always something to be said for building up hope, only to dash it away once it's ripened."

He sighed, lapsing into silence for a second or two before continuing. None of the contestants could see where he was, but he sounded like he must've been nearby. "I thought you could use some time to yourselves, time to just think about the last few weeks, so I booked you all rooms at Tropic Skies, a lovely hotel in a tropical climate. Feel free to look around the resort; there's a bit of an event going on, so I'm sure you'll have plenty to do.

"Enjoy!"

As the Controller's last word echoed into the distance, the black nothingness around the contestants began to resolve itself into a room. After a few seconds, each contestant found themself alone in a nice little hotel room, the walls covered in a tropical palm-tree wallpaper and a hidden speaker somewhere quietly piping out the calming tones of steel drums. The music didn't quite mask the sound of voices out in the hotel proper.

-

Nearly an hour prior, Tropic Skies' main ballroom was immersed in something very nearly resembling total darkness. In the shadowed room, a massive crowd of beings was packed together, the murmur of quiet voices easily recognizable as restrained excitement. Something big was about to happen.

"Should be any second," one of the multitude was whispering to another.

"I wonder if something- ooh! Shh, shh!" The reply, as with most every thread of conversation in the packed room, dissolved into attempts to shush everyone else in the room when, contrasting starkly with the darkness, a bright-white line appeared, light stabbing out at the mass congregated there.

After everyone's eyes had a moment to adjust, they could see a lone figure standing in the shaft of light, all black-on-black, just a shadow in the brightness.

"Greetings," the figure said, voice amplified through massive speakers all around the room. "You can call me the Coordinator, and this..." (He paused for a few moments' dramatic effect)

"This... is the Grand Convention!" Flinging his arms wide, all the lights in the room went up at once, practically blinding everyone once again. Nonetheless, the crowd cheered, adding temporary deafness to their temporary blindness.

The Coordinator was a regular guy, except he was dressed in an all-black suit and was wielding what seemed to be a microphone cane. "Welcome, one and all, to the fourteenth-annual Grand Convention, the world's foremost celebration of the Grand Battle series and its related media! I'm absolutely thrilled to be here at Tropic Skies, whose facilities are nearly twice those we had access to last year!" At this, the crowd cheered again. They did seem to enjoy cheering. "We've got unilateral access to their facilities, including three ballrooms like this one and nearly a dozen smaller rooms as well, but even with all that space, we've managed to pack our schedule so full of events that you're going to have some tough choices ahead of you. Would you rather attend a session on module design in the GBRP system or get a lesson in drawing from Kent Browning, illustrator of the Battle Majestic and Epic Clash comics? That's the kind of choice you've got ahead of yourself, so better start thinking now!

"Of course, you don't have too long to decide; both of those sessions start just ten minutes from now, at eleven o'clock, along with five others. There's also the vendors' hall over in Ballroom Two, a scavenger hunt that'll be taking place across all three days of GrandCon, and numerous other activities besides. Keep your schedule handy, access the site from your phone, or check any of the numerous signs scattered around the building; however you decide, just do it quick, because GrandCon starts now!"

With that, the ballroom's doors swung wide, and a tide of fans was released out into the convention. Most of them had attempted to costume up to some extent or another, and the quality varied from just wearing a logo t-shirt to astonishingly life-like makeup and prosthetics. There was exactly one thing that brought all of them to that convention: their love of the Grand Battle series.

Soon enough, they were dispersed around the convention centre. Conversations abounded; people everywhere could be heard discussing their favourite battles, which characters could beat which in a fight, and the finer points of canon.

"Eximo was an upright Hoover, didn't you read the manga?"

"Whaat, no. The novels- that's his first appearance- make it plainly clear he was like a Shop-Vac!"

"Plainly clear? I don't know which novels you were reading, but the originals were ambiguous about him at best!"

GrandCon XIV was shaping up to be the best Grand Convention yet; unfortunately, before the first session could even end, the only unoccupied rooms- four of them, booked months prior under the name Ken Parusi- had their intended occupants transported in.

This year's GrandCon was going to be interesting.

-

"Senator Lutetian, the evidence of your crimes being overwhelming in both quantity and quality, and you yourself having plead guilty to your crimes, you are hereby sentenced to life imprisonment in Prisoner Rehabilitation Colony Three-Eighty-Four without the opportunity for appeal."

Show Content

SpoilerWelcome to round five, the cameo round, taking place at the lovely Tropic Skies hotel and convention centre. The hotel is basically alone on a small, tropical island, and that small island is normally located somewhere on a planet nearly identical to our modern Earth. The Controller, however, has moved it a bit for this round. Not only did he pick the island up and pop it into an pocket dimension, but he also converted the crisp, clear ocean water into crisp, clear acid. To top it off, the dimension loops horizontally- getting in a hypothetical acid-proof boat and rowing away will just bring you back to the island.

Now, the main difference between the Earth we all know and love and the one Tropic Skies and its occupants came from is that of popular culture- in addition to Star Trek, Pokemon, and the rest of our numerous franchises, the Grand Battles are a big fictional series, spanning multiple mediums and spinning off into numerous others. To celebrate their shared enthusiasm, fans come together once a year to the Grand Convention. Just like conventions we have for other things, they've got guest speakers, costume contests, panels, and all sorts of other conventionly things.

In particular, the costumes are a major point of GrandCon- barely anyone comes without making some semblance of effort, and the costume contest is one of the most celebrated parts of the weekend. The most rabid and capable fans come up with extremely life-like costumes of their characters, and many of them even role-play the part. (It's official convention policy that no weapons should be functional, but the sorts of people who make costumes accurate to the levels some of these people do aren't exactly concerned with strict adherence to the rules. In fact, compared with most fandoms, Grand Battle fans tend to have a bit less sanity and restraint per capita. After all, they do spend lots of time reading/watching/sleeping-in-bedsheets-of a series about forced combat and murder.) Given the number of people at the convention, I'd estimate at least a few dozen breathtakingly accurate costumes and at least four times that many devoted role-players. It's tradition for most other people to at least try to play their part some of the time, but you can never root out every last cynical jerk.

A few final notes:

• I'd rather you didn't cameo authors. If you need an in-universe creator for things, I'd prefer you just make someone up.
• For convenience, you can probably assume that the fictional Grand Battle novels/comics/etc are released in parallel, much like the real battles, and that the various states of the seasons and series roughly reflects where we're at about now.

If you've any questions, I'm on IRC. If I'm not on IRC, call an ambulance and give them my address, because I should be.

Originally posted on MSPA by Godbot.

---

“Kelavi!” cried Acacia. “Kalevi!” she corrected herself.

“Aic!” called a boy across the aisle from her. They couldn’t find anyone who’d actually bothered to dress as Kalevi, so the first available Pluck had just taken his mask off. “Aic, you need to reload!”

“Kalevi!” she wailed, swiveling back and forth and firing her plastic tommy gun at the group below her. It whirred and rattled loudly. There he was, just over there, she needed to go to him, she had to get there, she was coming, almost there.

Left to her own devices, she might have kept firing, or remembered to stop and pretend to reload.

Unfortunately, a group of boys rushed shoulder-first into the vendor’s table she was standing on, nudging it just enough that she pretended to lose her balance. She squealed and fell off into the waiting arms of a group of laughing zombies, who ripped and tore at her while awkwardly keeping about a foot away. She shrieked and tried to push their hands away from her silver-painted neck brace. ‘Kelavi’ jumped from his table and ran over to try to pull zombies away, but no one was paying attention to him anymore.

“STAND ASIDE,” barked Sgt. Cedric, grizzled veteran of the Strathmire Marine Corps, as he hefted his prop chainsaw. Dr. Harmon, the Only Reasonable Scientist, just laughed and hurled herself at the crowd of zombies, only about half of which were actually dressed as some variety of walking corpse, and smacked someone with her Zombie Sensor as a dead serious Sgt. Cedric sawed through swathes of slathering undead.A zombie Scott Williams grabbed him from behind, pinning his arms, and Dr. Harmon took Sigrar from Cedric’s hands and beheaded him. Scott slumped to the floor and made socially appropriate gurgling sounds, and a second Scott Williams ran onto the scene, grabbing the cosplayer on the floor by the shirt.

“No, I can’t! No! No!” he repeated, up until Dr. Harmon chainsawed his head off in exactly the same way. Everyone laughed and applauded, and Sgt. Cedric resumed shotgunning zombies and looking good doing it. One managed to get ahold of the barrel, force it down, and manage the zombie equivalent of a roar in Cedric’s face, but two suction-tipped darts hit in in the side, and it looked around, dumbfounded.

From across the aisle, Michelle Davis grinned and cocked her repainted Nerf Longshot.

As the sniped zombie reluctantly fell to the floor, Cedric took aim at the last one, who had picked up Acacia’s (still allegedly empty) tommy gun and had it pointed at her. It pulled a miraculously still-breathing Acacia in front of itself as a shield, which gave Michelle a clear shot. The first round missed, but everyone waited patiently for her to reload, and the second dart hit the zombie square in the back. It lurched to the floor while wildly spraying bullets everywhere. Cedric stepped over the piles of bodies and bent over to pick up Acacia. She protested as she let him get an arm under her, and he lifted her into a heroic bridal carry. Everyone cheered and applauded this time, except for Dr. Harmon, who just stood next to him with her hands on her hips in mock jealousy. As the crowd dispersed and the Scotts helped each other up, a rather impressed enforcer decked out in The Sunset’s armor came to talk to Michelle Davis about live ammo.

---

Put simply, a founder effect is a kind of bottleneck event where a handful of members of a breeding population are suddenly separated from the others. Though it has no effect on any of the individuals, the founder effect has an interesting consequence on the entire group: In the new, smaller population consisting of a random selection of organisms, a rare mutation that occurs once in a hundred thousand specimens might suddenly be present in one in fifty of them.

Like a working pair of wings.

The door to room 3150 rattled and thumped for a moment before the bottom half was torn free and smashed to pieces. Dozens of large, healthy, starving ouroborites skittered and fluttered into the hall, maddened by the stench of blood and meat all around them. A latecoming guest stopped to admire what he was becoming increasingly unsure was actually a costume, and as he drew closer to see if there was a person underneath, the nearest ouroborite – one that was covered in warped strips of smooth black carapace – scrabbled dozens of twitching legs against itself, delivering enough shriek to singlehandedly make him collapse on the ground, shuddering in blind agony.

He almost didn’t feel it when Ouroborous fell upon him and tore his limbs apart before ripping open the rest of him.

Fed but not sated, the insects twitched and slithered after their leader – a slow, weak ouroborite bloated with pheromone sacs, spraying sickly-sweet fumes into the air that told them to follow and seek darkness.

Originally posted on MSPA by MrGuy.

---

Holly was greeted, on arrival, by three voices. The first was easy enough to ignore, since it had been in her head for a while now and was showing no intention of going away. The other two, however, were a bit more fascinating. Pressing her ear to the door of the hotel room, she could hear two individuals with rather obviously fake accents discussing some nonsense or other.

"I'm telling you," enunciated one in an old-timey British tone as he chewed something, "supplemental materials aren't canon. They never met."

He was met by an attempt at German that sounded, if it could be said to sound like anything, like a dying French-Scot. "If you had bothered to read the foreword to Battle Royal Movement 2: D.S. Al Coda: Vol. 1, you would have noticed that 'Haze' Martin explicitly considers all cut plans and prequel novels canon." This statement was punctuated by a very loud crunch.

"First of all, 'Whirlwind' is far superior to 'Haze,' and he disapproved of the idea. Second, we're not talking about novels, we're talking about the comics version."

"Which is, according to Wikipulvis and AMP'S Database Dot Net, going to have the relevant issues compiled, expanded, and released as a novel this June."

"Shit, really?"

The voices faded, but Holly's interest was piqued. The hotel room seemed dull at best-- even the modern affinities such as television and phones didn't particularly interest Holly at this point, as not only had she spent some time on a space station, but she was currently more concerned with the amalgamation of tiny robots that she still had to deal with because she was too incompetent to kill her and would that voice shut up already, god-- and while it might be somewhat isolated if she locked it, she didn't expect that to stop Countess or Algernon getting in. She grabbed a pillow and stuffed it into her bag, then (after making a token effort to wipe the swamp sludge off her dress with a blanket) headed out and chased after the voices. "Hey! You!"

Almost immediately, they turned to face her, and two things struck Holly. First, the concept of nerds being eternal and her vague sense of emotional signature giving her an idea of what they were like, she was immediately put off a bit; she then reminded herself that Cherry would be fine dealing with pimple-faced book-reading losers but you're not Cherry but she might as goddamn well be, so she was going to talk to them anyway. The more notable thing is that, while she didn't recognize the one on the left as anything more than some badly-groomed idiot in a stupid coat, the one on the right-- covered in gray body paint and fake scars, wearing horns and oversized arms made out of cardboard-- was somehow memorable, if only due to the precise pattern of scratches.

Said gray man took a large bite of his rock candy, smiled, and continued in his ridiculous voice. "Ah, but here is the lady herself! Tell me, Miss Tallbirch, do you believe that you met me before, or was that merely a fabrication?" The man in the coat turned to view the elf as well, albeit roughly seven inches below eye level, murmuring something about an excellent resemblance.

Holly stared blankly at him. She had just about no idea how he recognized her or what he was talking about. Seeming to sense this, he continued. "Steinwaffe? Or, Constable Stonearm, as you'd call me, but I'm out of uniform at the moment."

At this, the resemblance clicked in Holly's mind, and she began panicking. "Look, I don't want any trouble, okay? I'm in a really bad situation, and... and I'm reformed, honest..."

It was now the cosplayers' turn to stare in confusion, before chuckling (the one dressed as Parsley accidentally spitting out several crumbs of baguette). Then the pseudo-gargoyle cleared his throat, and continued, "I'm not here to arrest you, Miss Tallbirch. I am merely here to confirm that we have, in fact, met."

"Um. Yeah, we have."

The man dressed as Steinwaffe then punched his companion gently in the shoulder, blurted out a distinctly not-in-character "told ya so", and grinned. His friend, in turn, scowled, before the two of them began to walk off. Once again, Holly started to panic. "Wait!"

The cosplayers turned, Parsley giving her a blatantly-attempting-to-be-disinterested-and-relaxed "yeah?" in response.

The elf responded by looking at her feet and doing her best to look shy and nervous. "Well, I've never been..." Realizing she still had no idea where she was from a practical standpoint, she proceeded into a series of incomprehensible mumbles before leading into "before, and I could use help from someone who knows what they're doing..."

Steinwaffe glanced at Parsley for a moment, both of them sweating quite a bit. Eventually, the faux-statue mumbled a "sure" and the two began leading Holly through the hotel. As they got into an elevator, Parsley piped up with "So, milady. I see that you're quite a fan of the Gradual Massacre."

Holly blinked. Okay. So these guys knew about the battle, but apparently didn't know she was in it... somehow? She decided to take a shot in the dark. "Uh, yeah! But, um, this is just because... I'm interested in... Holly in particular? It's not my... favorite, uh, thing..."

Steinwaffe chuckled. "More of a Fearsome Encounter woman, then?"

"A what?"

Raising an eyebrow, he continued in a tone of voice combining sarcasm and confusion. "Well, it may be the most recent battle to begin development, but certainly someone with such an excellent costume as yourself is entirely up to date on Grand Battle canon, if only from the fan sites?"

Most recent battle? "There's, uh... more of these?"

Steinwaffe stared at her like she was the stupidest person he'd ever met; Parsley continued his pattern of staring a bit lower and a lot more worshipfully. The former piped up, "Yes, fool, there's more than just the Gradual Massacre. I should think someone attending this convention would know better." Parsley responded by elbowing his compatriot in the gut and, as the elevator doors opened, grabbing Holly by the arm and escorting her out (forcing her to do her best acting job to avoid scowling, since it wasn't particularly convenient to rummage in her bag for something associated with joy or patience).

"What my oh-so-rude and monstrous ally in the fine art of hunting evil creatures means, milady, is that he is quite impressed by the amount of effort you are putting into not breaking character. Would that I could do the same, but alas, if breaking the fourth wall shall spare a lady his idiocy, than break the fourth wall I must. I shall try to avoid it."

"Um, yeah. Listen, thanks, but I've got to go now." Holly gave the man a quick kiss on the cheek, immobilizing him with astonishment long enough for her to stride off. Staying in character? Breaking the fourth wall? Were she and everyone she knew nothing but a goddamn story to him or something? How adorable. You were already pathetic and weak, and now you discover you're not even real. But she was real. She could think and feel and stuff. And if she could be here, that just proved that it was more than a story.

Or did it? As she passed by a giant typewriter with legs and eye holes shouting at a woman with a green scarf about how she was supposed to be Gabriella, not Jennifer-- said woman responding that they had agreed that she was coming as Jen and he was coming as Max and Deux It 2 It was way better than Gloryhole's Fuckmanship in any place, leading him to shout even louder about her utter lack of taste and why did they ever start going out in the first place-- Holly began thinking.

She was crazy, she knew that; that idiotic little voice wouldn't shut up about it. Maybe she wasn't Holly Tallbirch at all, but just some stupid loser who thought she was Holly. Maybe her whole life was a lie she'd made up to distract herself!

But there was an easy enough way to disprove this, she realized. Holding out her hand, she focused, and soon enough a pile of defective compasses, some 14-inch rulers labeled as standard 12-inch ones, and a single gun with no rounds in it materialized. Okay, so she could actually do magic, which probably meant she was actually who she thought she was Oh yeah because nobody's ever hallucinated before, especially not you and that was a stupid thing to say because you're a hallucination anyway, asshole.

Holly looked around. There were quite a few people around, and in the distance, she could see some booths selling clothing, books, and what appeared to be statuettes; she decided that she might as well take this lead and head out.

Originally posted on MSPA by MalkyTop.

---

”What.”

At some point, Algernon found himself sitting down on the bed. It was rather nice. He hadn’t seen such a nice, clean bed in such a long time.

“Whaaaaaaaat.”

The room was similarly nice and clean. Although the combination of an abrupt awakening, a change in environment, and the beginnings of an existential exploration of the self-doubt of his immediate past made him queasy to the pits of his stomach, he managed to not blemish a perfectly clean room with any of his icky stomach things.

He carefully lay down and reached for a pillow. The complimentary mint that had been set lovingly on top of it flew across the room and bounced off the TV, having gone completely unnoticed as Algernon pulled the pillow tight over his face. It smelled rather nice.

“Whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat,” he said. It was the only thing he could think of.

After a bit of rolling around on the bed and pondering the deep philosophical question of how one could tell whether he was in a dream or not and maybe a bit of sobbing, Algernon sat up and watched some TV. Then he reasoned that it seemed rather obvious that he wasn’t paying for the room at all, and raided the mini-fridge. He was feeling cheered up, almost unreasonably so, but then again, he was finally fulfilling the deepest wishes he had ever since he was a kid.

And then he found the wine.

The last time he had ever been offered any sort of alcoholic drink, he was nine. He was holed up in an abandoned bar with his dad and they were sitting behind the counter as outside, madness went on. It was before he ever had a stupid worm stuck to his head, and so, they were both helpless to fight against whoever was out there. His dad picked up a full bottle and handed it over to him, and Algernon had said, “But I’m underaged.”

His dad had laughed so hard he started choking. At the time, Algernon didn’t really understand. All he knew was that he was scared and completely unprepared for the end of the world. And then when he woke up in the morning, he learned that he was scared, completely unprepared, and also alone. He didn’t understand that either, though he did often wondered if his dad had taken the gun for that purpose only.

It was a bit interesting how intact this memory had stayed. But now it reminded Algernon that, with all the shit that had gone on in his life, he had never once had a drink.

And then a few seconds later, he realized why he never drank.

Seriously, the stuff tasted horrible, and smelled even worse.

He drank half a bottle.

It was then, sitting on the floor, sniffing at a half-empty wine bottle all alone, did he notice the mess he made. Unintentionally, though, but it was impossible for a man who came from a post-apocalyptic setting to not leave a mess, and it certainly didn’t help that he had just come from a swamp. He scratched self-consciously at his face and then he set his eyes on the bathroom door.

And in turn, he set eyes on the shower and it was love at first sight.

He would have collapsed then and there on the tiled floor and raised his arms high and cried tearfully towards heaven for this blessing granted to him, but instead, he took a very, very long shower.

Life would be absolutely perfect if he could stay in this room forever.

Originally posted on MSPA by Schazer.

---

Controller, do you read me?

I should say he does.

Countess froze, her transmitter snapped off like a child hiding something stolen.

"How did you-"

I say he reads you exceptionally well.

Like a book, in fact. A formerly well-paged and tiresomely familiar book.

The amalgam trembled, a very urgent need to rip something apart tempered by nobody else in the room. Unable to retort, she settled for a scream which badly startled a goggled, jetpack-toting blonde passing by in the corridor.

Oh, come now - don't shoot the messenger, Countess. I empathise with you, in more ways than you'd think.

"You're not supposed to be here," she snarled, kicking and stabbing furniture indiscriminately as she paced the tiny room. "You're wrong, something must've happened, you wouldn't be here if he knew-"

If you will not listen to me, Countess, at least listen to yourself. You declare all the facts, yet ignore the obvious conclusions. He is watching, and he does know. He tolerates it, believing I am no bigger threat to his battle's integrity than his agent's realisation of betrayal.

There was a tentative knocking.

"Go away. Leave me alone."

I will not. My terms are written in black and white, so to speak - I cannot choose another host without killing my last. I will not pretend my transferring to you was a premediated action, but I am nothing if not an opportunist. This relationship has the potential to be a fruitful opportunity for the both of us, if you would be inclined to co-operate.

"Um, are you sure? Maybe there's something I can do-"

"I don't care. Go away."

Please, Countess. Be reasonable. Do you honestly want to sign your death warrant for the sake of some solitude?

Countess almost answered "yes", but instead stared at the floor, limbs occasionally twitching as though trigger-ready for a fight.

"Just be quiet, then," she eventually muttered. Countess went for the door, and was as honestly surprised as the lady standing on the other side of it.

"Oh, wow," was the door-knocker's eventual awed response. "That's fucking amazing. 'scuse my language," she swiftly corrected, a gloved hand unconsciously covering her mouth. "I hope it's not too ignorant a question, but... who are you supposed to be?"

Originally posted on MSPA by MrGuy.

---

The woman at the booth sighed, one hand propping up her chin and another twirling the end of her scarf around. This was her first time at GrandCon, and she had been convinced that her stuff would sell like hotcakes, but so far, all she'd managed to sell was a single bracelet. She tried to remind herself that things were just getting started, that she still had three whole days to make some money, but that stupid self-doubt kept plaguing her, telling her she was going to fail.

"Um, hello?"

The tailor looked up to see the best costume she'd seen in her life. Dear god, it's accurate down to the mud stains, she thought. Holly, in turn, simply shuffled in place and coughed, waiting for a response. Eventually, she got one. "Hey! Great costume. Welcome to the store, uh, anything catch your eye?"

Holly looked over the booth. Scarves, hats, gloves, and jewelry lined the booth; all clearly cheap, but at the same time, it looked quite nice - the shopkeeper had clearly put a lot of effort into making them. The elf frowned at the desperation she caught from the woman as if she actually cared about other people which she did for fuck's sake and even if she did, she shouldn't, because there's more important things right--

Eureka chewed on her lower lip. "Are you alright? You look a little, um..."

Holly shook her head. "No, it's fine. I'm just, you know... browsing." If she had some clothes, she could use them as materials, or maybe she could even disguise herself the next round... But she didn't have any money. You're a goddamn emotion wizard, just get her to give it to you for free. But that would be wrong, and you need to give up this ethics bullshit and accept the fact that you can only survive by fucking other people over. Besides, she'll be happy.

There was a long pause, which the shopkeeper punctuated with a cough. Finally, Holly smiled, saying "just one moment." Putting her bag on the ground, she rifled through it before finding a letter from one of the clients she'd had back in Fernwood. Thanking her for helping him come to grips with his depression from losing an arm, and finding him a place to work. She gently folded it in her left hand, and extended her right to Eureka. "My name's Ch--" fuck, she couldn't use that, people would remember she'd used it before-- "Uh, Chelsea... Volta."

The woman grasped her hand and shook, only able to get out "My name is" before she was overcome with a feeling of bliss and relaxation. She laughed a little, and Holly winced. Was she really doing this, all over again? It's necessary. The elf let go and smiled. "So, um, can I... maybe have some things for free?"

The shopkeeper simply laughed again and nodded. "Sure, whatever you want." Holly smiled and took several items of clothing, shoving them into her bag and smiling. As she walked away, several people stared at her in confusion. Some wrote off the glow they'd seen coming from her hands as their imagination, and others as an impressive special effect that came with the costume; but a few thought that neither of these seemed quite possible, and began wondering how on earth she'd managed it.

The elf backed away as they approached her. "Uh, what do you guys want, exactly?" One of them, a young boy with a fake beard, poked her with a gray cardboard tube. "Are you really the elf lady?" Another, a young woman dressed in an oversized hat and robes and wearing too many pendants to count, stared in awe. "You're the real Holly, aren't you? It's great to meet you."

The elf stared at the small group, confused. "Look, you have the wrong idea. I'm just... I'm just, you know, a fan of... these things, coming to this place because..."

The third member of the group, a thin man with dirt-covered hair and vines wrapped around his torso and backpack, smiled slightly. "You don't have to hide it from us. I mean, Part Four of Gradmass is released just in time for the convention, and then someone in a perfect Holly costume shows up? Anyone could see we've got a cameo round on our hands."

Holly stared blankly for a moment, then grinned. "Alright, you three, but don't tell anyone, okay? I have very important questions for you that could determine the outcome of the entire battle." Almost all of them immediately perked up. "Just follow me to my room, okay? There we can talk in private."
---------
Holly strolled through the halls, adjusting the brim of her hat. On the one hand, it wouldn't be too difficult to stay inconspicuous as herself; on the other hand, this would probably be safer should she run into Countess, and the person who'd previously owned the costume had given her enough information on Miss Nibbs that the elf figured she could fake her way out if anyone called her on it.

She realized that the voice in her head had finally quieted down, and she sighed. Was this really what it would take? Going back to this bullshit? Just deal with the fact that you weren't meant to be a good person. It'll be easier that way.

It was easier, Holly supposed, as she flipped through the schedule for the day. One panel in particular caught her eye-- Robots, Golems and Zombie Vacuums: Artificial Beings in Grand Battles. Slowly, a sinister grin came to her face, and she headed directly to the courtyard, temporarily repurposed as the Eximo Plaza.
------
Inside a dark closet, Cedric and Olivia finally managed to wake up Annaliese. "Huh? What is it?.. where the hell is my costume?"

Olivia sighed. "Seems we were played for fools. Last thing I remember, Miss Tallbirch took out a pillow. Then I woke up here. Door's locked, by the way. I don't expect to be getting out any time soon."

Cedric turned his head. "Hey, guys? Do you hear a sorta screeching?"

Originally posted on MSPA by MalkyTop.

---

The cleaning lady rapped sharply on the door and waited, leaning on her cart. Keeping close proximity to it made her smell somewhat like sickly clean chemicals, something that she had tried to meticulously scrub off when she had first taken the job, but she had stopped caring long ago and had simply allowed layers of smell to just caress her into a permanent relationship.

When there was no answer, she carefully set an ear against the door. The unmistakable sound of a hissing shower greeted her.

Before she could pull away and move on to another room, muttering to herself darkly all the while about how it wasn’t hard or anything to put up the ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign, a muffled yelp sounded out.

“Um! Sorry! Hang on, hang on! I’m just – “

There was a thud, then another, then a worrying crack. The water shut off and soon after, the door was opened and the room's inhabitant stood there, half-naked, sheepishly wringing out his shirt. The cleaning lady watched the water sink into the carpet.

“We have laundry service,” she said.

“Oh well,” said the man, pulling the damp shirt over his head. She noticed that he had some sort of hat shaped like a worm on. It was also rather damp. Did he really take a shower with his costume on? “You see, this is kind of…my only set of clothes. So obviously, the, uh, laundry thing, wouldn’t be very feasible or anything. Because then I’d be kind of, um, naked.”

The cleaning lady stared impassively, recalling the list of reasons why she hated this time of year. The man’s eyes lingered on the cart beside her and visibly brightened. “Oh, wonderful, do you have towels there? ‘Cause I could use some. And some extra soap. I would absolutely love soap, and shampoo, as much as possible. Do you mind if I just, um, took some?”

Without waiting for an answer, the man stepped out of the room and dove into the various little boxes, stuffing anything he deemed important in his pockets. When he ran out of room, he just filled up his arms. At one point, he tried stuffing a bottle of shampoo into his mouth. Finally satisfied, or at least realizing he couldn’t possibly hold anything more, he turned around and stared blankly at his closed hotel room door.

“Um,” he said, the shampoo bottle dropping out of his mouth. “I, uh, forgot my card. Also, I don’t think I would’ve been able to take it out in the first place, um, because my hands…”

The cleaning lady opened the door and he loped in happily, looking around for his backpack. She took the chance to follow and do her job.

She stopped and wondered how exactly the sheets got so dirty while the man opened up the fridge and stuffed more things into his backpack. After a minute of contemplation, he shoved in a bottle of champagne and tried to push in a second one before realizing that he would have to carry it under his arm.

“Hang on, could I have a second towel maybe? Yes, thanks, thanks a lot, really appreciate it…”

She kicked him out.

Blinking at the closed door, Algernon tentatively knocked, with increasing frequency. “I – I don’t, I still don’t have my, um, room key – “

“Wow, dude, lame. Algernon didn’t take showers.”

He turned around at the sound of his name and was rather confused to find a woman dressed in a distressingly dead way. That is, she appeared to have a large amount of knives stabbed in her back and front and all over, as well as a noose around her neck and her feet embedded in what looked like cement but was actually grey Styrofoam.

“I – uh, who’re…what…”

She raised an eyebrow. “Too obscure for you? C’mon, I’m Bartleby. See? Get it? The guy who always dies? I’m dying in multiple ways?” She tried to gesture at all of herself and accidentally knocked off a plastic knife. “Ah, shit,” she muttered, trying to figure out a way to pick it back up without dislodging all the knives somehow attached to her back.

There were very many words she had said that Algernon completely didn’t understand, even though he knew the actual definitions of the words. He tried to wrap his mind around whatever possible context this lady was speaking in and gave up. For a moment, he only stood there stammering. Then he finally said, “But Bartleby’s a boy’s name.”

Bartleby-who-is-not-a-boy rolled her eyes. “Gender doesn’t matter. What does matter is that Algernon doesn’t take showers. ‘Cause how does a guy in a post-apocalyptic world and then in a multiversal battle have time to bathe?”

‘I don’t appreciate someone gabbing off about me as though she knows exactly what I should do,’ Algernon was about to say, but instead he said, his voice trembling on the edge of squeaky, “How—how’d you, that, uh, I’m not…I mean I wasn’t, um, that…I mean, last time I checked, it wasn’t a crime to want to take a shower or anything,” he said sadly.

“…Did you wash your clothes in the sink or something?” Bartleby suddenly said. “Why’re you holding a towel and a bottle of champagne?”

“That’s, uh, none of your business, and I don’t think I want to talk to you anymore so, um, uh, bye.”

He marched worriedly down the hall, hoping that the woman wouldn’t trail behind.

She did.

“Hey! Wait, actually, hang on, you’re not that bad. You’re playing him in-character as though he actually were in a hotel, right?”

Algernon slowed down and stared at her, wide-eyed.

“Yeah, I get that, like Algernon’d totally jump at the opportunity to finally take a shower if he could. Also, the worm coming out of your head is really great. How’d you make it anyways?”

This lady was absolutely crazy. “I knitted it,” he stammered, resuming his fast-walking.

The Bartleby-woman caught up easily. “I hope that wasn’t supposed to be a joke. I’m really asking here, and if you really don’t want to tell me your secrets, then just say so, okay? ‘Cause otherwise you’re just being rude. Why are you going down the stairs?”

He didn’t stop this time. “Because I want to go down floors and also not be up here, uh, with you.”

“You could take the elevators,” she shouted down as he rounded the corner.

“Elevators don’t work!” he yelled back.

Bartleby started to follow again, running to catch up, trailing fake knives along the way. She began to regret the decision to put Styrofoam around her feet. “Hey, dude, your attention to detail’s cool and all, and you’re really good at acting, but this is like the twelfth floor or something!”

“Tenth now,” he shot back, speeding up.

“I’m just saying that getting all sweaty and tired for the sake of verisimilitude isn’t gonna do well for convention-going, right?”

“If you’re tired, you can stay up there then!”

“Are you trying to imply that I’m not fit?” She ran faster. He attempted to adjust his own speed accordingly and almost tripped over himself.

“Elevators are – are just not, y’know, safe or anything, this big box in this big shaft held up by some rope or something – “

“You do realize that those ‘ropes’ are built to carry heavy loads, right?”

“W-well, you know, I’m just saying, and also, you know, if it like, shuts down while you’re in the middle of, uh, riding it, then you’re stuck inside, so – oof,” he grunted, accidentally running his shoulder into a wall.

“I’m beginning to think,” said Bartleby, trying to grab for his arm and failing, “that you are really legitimately a paranoid moron.”

He was full-on sprinting now, practically jumping all the way down to the foot of the stairs. “Oh yeah? Well d’ya know what this paranoid moron’s gonna do when you get trapped in an elevator and – and die of elevator stuff because you’re so – do you smell something?”

Bartleby crashed right into Algernon’s back and fell over, spraying fake knives everywhere. “Hey! Jerk! You know how long it’s gonna take to get all this – oh.”

Both pairs of eyes stared at the splash of blood they could spot from around the corner of the hall. Almost mesmerized, Algernon staggered towards it, steadily revealing more and more of the gore to himself until it was all there, right in front of him. Bartleby, not about to be shown up, followed.

There wasn’t much left of the body besides all the blood. There were definitely bones. And miraculously, it seemed that a bit of entrails had survived the whatever-the-hell-happened-here. But mostly, there was just blood, painting the walls, the carpets, even flecking the ceiling here and there.

Algernon wasn’t sure whether it would have been more horrifying to actually see a, a face or something, like an actual substantial body where he could see mangled skin or whatever. But then he started thinking about how thorough the whatever-the-hell-happened was with removing everything about the person, actually stripping the person to the bone and he turned around, feeling dizzy.

Bartleby, meanwhile, came to the quick conclusion that this probably wasn’t some sort of promotional thing for a new book or movie or whatever and promptly turned her mind to the various exciting mystery novels and noir films she had absorbed throughout her whole life. This seemed like a perfect chance to pretend to be a detective for a while.

“Oh god oh god oh god oh god oh god.”

She slapped the broken record of a man and he blinked before adding, “We need to tell somebody.”

“No,” she said emphatically, grabbing his arm to stop him from running off again. He blinked. “If you do that, they’ll shut down the convention!”

Algernon tried to think of a suitable answer to that and found that he couldn’t. So he settled for the gut reaction. “You’re insane.”

“We have to clean this up before someone finds out,” she said. “Gimme that towel.”

“Um, no.”

“If you don’t help me, I’m totally going to beat you up.”

Algernon twitched uncomfortably as she started squeezing his wrist. He certainly liked to avoid beatings whenever he could…

Originally posted on MSPA by MrGuy.

---

"...so at least in my mind, Six's psychoses stem from his language recognition software inevitably forcing him to become human, a sort of "words have power" thing similar to Orwell's Newspeak." The brown-haired woman in a T-Shirt and slacks laid the microphone down and placed her arms on the table, which the assistant in the aisles took as his cue to determine the next person to answer. For some reason, though, as soon as he glanced at the woman dressed as Annaliese, he was convinced she should answer the question - maybe it was the way her tentatively-raised hand and ill-fitting clothes suited the character, maybe it was an inscrutable snap decision, maybe he realized he'd been neglecting that general portion of the audience and wanted to smooth it over.

Maybe, while everyone was intently focused on the speaker, Holly had "accidentally" dropped her glasses and, fumbling around for them, launched what used to be a romance novel or a bag of coffee at him. There were many possibilities, so why bother focusing on one?

As he handed the microphone off to her, the elf cleared her throat, double-checked her brochure, and finally said "This is a question for Mr. 'Firestorm' LeMarche. In round two of The Gradual Massacre, Holly found out that Countess was made of nanobots. So, what exactly were the plans for that?"

Elmo "Firestorm" LeMarche - a man with a crooked nose, a pierced ear that really didn't suit him at all, a trim red beard, and a mildly stained blue suit - gave an exaggerated grimace as he picked up the microphone. "Well, by now you may have noticed that we're not entirely sure what we're doing." Pause for a mildly disappointing amount of laughter. "Initially, Algernon was going to end up with a note about it, which an engineer - probably Rolf, though this was a while ago, so I could be wrong - would explain the weaknesses of. But plans evolve, and we never actually..."

Holly's blood was boiling (figuratively speaking; in actuality, it was only about 115 degrees Fahrenheit). This asshole never even figured out what she was supposed to be weak to? This was the most useless thing she'd done in the whole battle Oh please, don't sell yourself short. You've done FAR more useless things.

In the midst of this hallucinatory self-deprecation, however, LeMarche continued. "...originally a much greater emphasis based on Countess's manipulations on behalf of the Controller, but as we trimmed the fat, it got to the point where we had to add The Message just to make it plausible that he could give her orders, seeing as..."

The elf calmed down a substantial amount at this point, and gave an authentic thank you when the microphone was once again pointed in her direction. The assistant moved on and the panel continued, with one elf much happier for it.
-----------------------------------
The Countess walked down the hallway with a woman wearing repurposed goggles (attained secondhand from a steampunk buff) and a labcoat. The latter, a young woman named Jessica, was scanning the crowds. Countess, doing the same, pointed at a man in the distance. "Is that him over there, perhaps?"

Jessica squinted. "Nah. First, he's blonde, and second I think that's the guy from the battle with all the fish." A rather portly fellow in a robot costume paused to clarify that it was the Relentless Slaughter and they were referring to Martin Holden, before heading off and adjusting the lobster-in-a-fishbowl attached to his hat.

The amalgam was about to suggest someone else, but was interrupted by a tap on the shoulder. Turning around, Countess saw an all-too-familiar face, albeit framed by a pair of glasses that wasn't typically there. Said face chirped "Hey there, Angie! I was wondering where you got off to. How about we go over that way and talk? We can... discuss what we learned at the panels." With that, the elf strolled off to a nearby water fountain.

Countess gave her best "can you believe this shit" look to Dr. Anarchy, who simply said that they could talk later, since her friend was clearly excited. Friend indeed. Nonetheless, she scuttled over, giving a phony grin. "Why, hello there, er..."

"Chelsea!"

"Chelsea," the amalgam continued, speaking with so much treacle you could practically see it dripping. "So, what is it that you're so very interested in sharing?"

Holly simply continued staring back cheerfully. "From what I've heard, a friend of yours already set you straight. What is it like, having a piece of paper as a co-worker?" Countess's grin rather quickly disappeared, and Holly continued, dropping any illusion of friendliness. "I know you're working for him. And after I learned that little tidbit, I got my hands on a copy of the Gradual Massacre, so I could learn more." Never mind that she was lying; she doubted Countess would notice, and if she did, she was unlikely to care. In contrast, if she didn't, Holly had even more leverage. "He's long gone, Countess. Nothing but voice recordings and underlings of underlings left." And finally, the coup de grace: She stared squarely into Countess's eyes, focusing on her with the best mix of pity and disgust that she could convey. "He abandoned you."

To the elf, it was as if flashing lights and ringing bells were going off all around the amalgam. The seed of doubt was planted, and if it took, the feelings of abandonment would bring forth all the worst emotions imaginable. Fear, hatred, despair, all trivial to manipulate with or without magic. She was in.

There was a long pause, though the background murmur of other visitors prevented any true silence. Finally, the Countess managed to spit out the words "I see. Allow me to respond in turn." Holly barely even noticed the sudden increase in anger before she'd been knocked flat on the ground. The wind knocked out of her, all she could do was stare upward and catch her breath as Countess ever-so-gently placed a razor-sharp foot above her chest. "One second, and you're bleeding out on the ground. Much less I have to deal with, too. Give me one reason I shouldn't."

The elf started a silent prayer, but quickly abandoned it, deciding that it was best if she didn't draw the attention of any gods. She managed to wheeze out a "revenge."

Countess sighed and removed her foot, helping Holly to stand. The small crowd that had gathered (as tended to happen when things like this occured at GrandCon) applauded and dispersed. The amalgam scowled. "I need to get back to business. Follow me."

The pair, both of them hastily putting their smiles back on, quickly rejoined Jessica. Countess pushed Holly forward. "Jessica, this is Chelsea. Chelsea, this is Jessica. I think you two will get along excellently."

Originally posted on MSPA by MalkyTop.

---

They scrubbed at the stains with soap. Miss Bartleby suggested that they use some of the wine to cover up the smell, but Algernon refused intensely and didn’t back down. So they dumped some shampoo instead and hoped that would work.

“Now what we should do is look for clues,” she said, almost wishing she was in her fem!Geoff costume instead.

“You mean the clues that we could have found if we hadn’t scrubbed everything away?” Algernon snapped, rubbing at his head.

Bartleby tried not to show any emotion, and especially not uncertainty. “We don’t need the crime scene, I got all the details in my head. And like I said, if it was discovered, then they would’ve shut down the convention.”

“Right. So what details did you notice?”

She paused. “There was a lot of blood.”

“Yes.”

The two of them stood there. Algernon massaged his head.

“I…actually…I think I’ve seen something, uh, like that. Before.”

Bartleby really doubted it, but she feigned interest. “Oh? Where?”

Did the worm on his head just move? It looked like it was…digging deeper. Man, how did he make that? “L-look, I don’t remember, it just popped into my head, okay? I feel like I’ve seen this before…and…there were bugs…”

Bartleby turned so that Algernon could receive the full force of her eye-roll. “My god, this is serious. Stop acting around, okay? We’re doing a real investigation here. Wait a sec,” she said, snapping her fingers. “I got it!” With a groan, Algernon leaned against the nearby wall and slowly slid down. She ignored him. “An Ouroborous cosplayer! This is exactly what the Ouroborous thingy from The Gradual Massacre probably does when it eats shit! You’re a genius, even if you’re stupidly eccentric. Now get up.”

When she tugged his hand, it felt clammy. She rubbed her hand on her pants before forcing him all the way up to his feet. “Righto, we need to ask around before Ouroborous guy strikes again.”

The headache was dulling, but Algernon didn’t feel any better. If he did, he would have told her how much sense she didn’t make.

“Hey, man, are you okay?”

“Ugh,” he said, hoping that she would infer that he very much would like a bed and a lie down and maybe some hospital staff.

“Okay, I’ll let you have my water bottle, but you really should’ve got your own. A dude can get majorly dehydrated at these conventions.”

“Ugh,” he said.

beware, he heard. it is near remember fire remember weakness remember the last time must show make connection

Algernon groaned. He had hoped that he would remain sane in an insane world. But no, he was hearing things. It didn’t help that Kchh’rl wouldn’t stop goddamn gnawing.

…Who the hell was Kchh’rl?

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

There was a disturbance in the air. There always was. Too many things moving around, too much artificial atmosphere. Never encountered this before, before the whole…event happened. It was a learning experience to be sure.

But there was a disturbance in the air, a steady vibration that nobody else noticed, even though it was impossible not to notice. It thrummed, a frequency above the regular, banal babble. It came from everywhere. That was possible, but unlikely judging from previous behavior.

There it was, stronger. Coming from…from…

Vents was the word, apparently.

The vents.

It’s in the vents.

it’s in the vents it’s in the vents it’s in the vents it’s in the vents

Originally posted on MSPA by MalkyTop.

---

The Countess knew disappointingly little. Well, it was to be expected, really. A pawn wasn’t meant to know too much. Sometimes even the fact that it was a pawn was meant to be unknown.

Does that make you a pawn? To someone, somewhere?

To be honest, Holly wasn’t entirely sure what she was doing. Was she going to actually go through with this plan of revenge? Or was she going to backstab the Countess as soon as she was able? Or maybe urging this plan of suicidal revenge was backstabbing, in a way. She didn’t know how to kill the Controller. She didn’t know how to kill the Countess. She was really in the same spot either way. Maybe the Countess was considering the same thing too. Maybe that damned inscrutable ticking thing was already thinking of a way to get her killed so that…well…who knows.

But there was such a thing as too much paranoia.

They bandied ideas back and forth in front of Jessica. She seemed fine with them talking about the power and nature of the Controller and possible ways to defeat him, oblivious to the fact that they were discussing the problem honestly. She even offered up some information and ideas of her own. Even though “he’s not gonna die or nothin’; the story never goes that way.”

“The closest he is is the round transitions. But he’s always prepared, isn’t he? We didn’t even see him last time. So we’d gotta barge in unexpected or something.”

“You want to somehow rip a hole into his pocket dimension, then. And make a precise rip so that we wouldn’t end up in a place we don’t want to be in.”

“Algernon might be able to do that,” Holly said with an upward, questioning lilt. “But…I don’t think he wants to.”

“He can be convinced,” said the Countess in a tone that made Holly uncomfortable.

“But even then, how would you kill him? We can’t just run in.”

“Everybody must have a weakness. Grandmasters are no exceptions.”

Jessica made a face that either said that she disagreed or that she had just stepped in something nasty. Holly found herself agreeing with the former. You’d need a god to defeat a god and…they didn’t have that. Determined to not be such a goddamned pessimist, she lurched towards a possible hope spot and said, “Hey, is there a panel about grandmasters?”

There was. Though Holly probably didn’t know the phrase, it seemed fitting to combat a god using the word of god.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

“Are you serious,” said Lynette, her expression saying that she would prefer a joke.

“Yes’m, we’ve lost contact with all ferries and planes. We’re trying to call them at regular intervals, but as it is, we are completely cut off from the rest of the world...” The woman behind the information desk waited patiently for Lynette to cease thudding her head against the smooth, clean surface.

“Why,” she growled, “is this convention on an island.”

“We are terribly sorry for the inconvenience,” recited the employee. “There are plenty of things to do here, would you like a complimentary tour? Perhaps you would like to enjoy the beach? Or – “

“Shut up,” said Lynette, who plodded off back to her room.

She hated this convention. She hated all the insufferable fans with their disgusting habits and atrocious behavior. The way they talked and the way they acted. Their very culture was offensive. And the worst part was that she was the cause of their very existence, as fans of all things Grand Battle. As Lynette Cooper, she was the creator of Grand Battle. And the organizer of everything that came after, when people flocked to her with praise and ideas and solicitations, their “would you mind terribly” and their “is it okay if I…”

Supposedly, she was obligated to make an appearance. Supposedly it meant the world to her fans. But all they wanted to know was if something was canon or not or whether she approved of how so-and-so was handling this-or-that. The same questions over and over. At every convention, she always made her obligatory appearance and left as soon as possible. But now she was stuck.

Along the way to her temporary Fortress of Solitude, she ran into LeMarche in the elevator. He was in the middle of gulping down some sort of drink or another and almost choked on it when she walked in. “Dang! You’re usually home by now, aren’t ya?”

She gave a stilted nod as she stabbed at a button. “Going to a panel or just coming back from one?”

“Latter,” he said, scratching at his beard and hoping that his voice wasn’t quavering. It always seemed to quaver around Lynette. “I’m goin’ back to write a bit more.”

“Hm,” said Lynette.

“D’ya think it’s okay if I” and then Lynette stopped listening after that.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

When Algernon woke up, he found himself in another bed. It was in a room whiter than any place he had been in previously. His head felt full of something squishy and horrible and it kept turning from side to side, as though it was weighed down by something. He gave out a gargled groan.

“Oh, you’re finally awake,” said the girl who had only introduced herself as Bartleby. “Christ, you’ve wasted a lot of time, passing out like that. At least when I had to drag your sorry ass here I found one of the thingies for the scavenger hunt thing.”

“Vents,” gurgled Algernon, though he wasn’t sure why he had said it. He tried to file through his memories but everything seemed all out of order and jumbled, like someone stuck a straw in his head and swirled his brain around into some sort of slurry.

“Went out and bought some shit too. Can’t go to conventions without getting some con swag, y’know? Of course, I totally was looking out for the Ouroborous murderer dude.”

“Vents?” He still felt sickly and balmy and all sorts of awful. He…he passed out. Because….because of…

Because he had been feeling feverous? So he passed out? No, it was from pain. Kchh’rl was feeling sick too. Maybe one of them caught a cold or something. So…he passed out because of the gnawing…no, it was something else.

Before he passed out…there was…he saw things? There was a pressure all around his head and he saw things that flashed by too quick for him to make out, things he didn’t think he had seen before, but at the same time he felt he must have. And then he passed out.

Algernon stared dead-eyed at the ceiling.

Did…did his worm just…barf…?

“Yeah, so I got a bunch of books I haven’t had time to pick up or anything. And some comics too, ‘cause I’ve heard tons of good things ‘bout some of them. Pretty sure you’d like something I got.”

Strange phrases and pieces of conversation drifted around in his mind. They danced around at the edges of consciousness, feeling somehow tattered and worn. He didn’t know them. And yet he did. One phrase echoed around in his head and ran unbidden to his tongue.

“…Gradual…Mass…acre…?”

“Yup. Got the newest issue here. They’re having a sale over at this booth if you’re interested. You can’t have mine, so don’t even ask.”

He didn’t understand. He didn’t understand what was going on. He never understood what was going on. The phrase left his tongue dry and his stomach all twisted but he didn’t understand…

…who the heck was Kchh’rl…?

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Elmo LeMarche sat at his laptop with a sigh. His palms were still sweaty, even when he had wiped them against his pants after Lynette had left him alone in the elevator.

It was undeniable. He loved her.

Not in the way that a fan loves a creator, but the way a man loves a person.

But Lynette didn’t love anybody at all, and certainly didn’t hold much love for anybody related to the franchise she had created. He suspected that she even hated herself.

At the very least, he just wanted to know more about her, but she was always closed off and out of reach, never drawing near to anybody. He just couldn’t approach her. She had to deign to approach him.

For the past year or so, he had been hoping that maybe his writing would attract her, but he himself didn’t hold much stock in his own skills. No matter what, Gradual Massacre continued to be a thing that he had ideas for, certainly, but he couldn’t do anything with the ideas, nothing grand or interesting, that led itself into any sort of spectacular narrative. Half of the time he forgot about Ouroborous.

The idea for this next round was ‘existential crisis.’ But even that was plodding along dreadfully slowly. Maybe it was because of the somewhat mundane setting. Or maybe it ought to be slow? If the whole thing was going to lead up to philosophical questions about the existence of the self and shit, it certainly wasn’t going to be too actiony, he supposed. He really only hoped that the whole philosophical thing would impress Lynette. And then maybe she’d actually be interested in him. And then there would finally be a mutual interest, and then after that, who knew…

LeMarche started to write:

When Algernon woke up, he found himself in another bed. It was in a room whiter than any place he had been in previously. His head felt full of something squishy and horrible and…

Originally posted on MSPA by Schazer.

---

Show Content

SpoilerThe sun was shining, the remnant rainforest scraps shrieked with birds, and the seas were a crisp apple green. Countess and Anarchy had agreed that was odd, then made no further mention of it. The wind had that persistent directionality to it which ran nicely through Jessica's hair, but just confirmed this as another closed-off dimension to Countess. The amalgam sulked, forelimbs slung over the balcony rail.

She still hadn't said anything of substance to Jessica, content to be silently miserable. The human, on the other hand-

"Why did you come here."

It wasn't really a question, alluring little music-box tones notwithstanding. Jessica blinked, and latched onto the chance to escape the awkward silence with a bit too much enthusiasm.

"Oh my god," she groaned, mimicking Countess' slump. "The worst story."

"Really."

"Yeah." The doctor-aspirant's goggles clanked against the railing, she shoved them further up her head. "I'm not even a huge fan of the series, y'know? Like, the only one I've sat through a whole chapter of was the Brawl, and I sort of lost interest in it after Anarchy died. Yeah, that's me," she grinned, to some kind of clanking of limbs that might've been a gesture costume-ward. "Have you watched it?"

"No."

"Oh," Jessica looked a little disappointed, but it wasn't like she suddenly thought less of this metal-clad fellow sort-of-fan for it. That would've been stupid. "She was pretty crazy. Didn't take shit from anyone. Anyway, it was my boyfriend who tried to get me into the series, called me the 'Anarchy to his Hoss' and stupid sappy nerdy crap like that."

"Sounds awful," chirped Countess, without a shred of sympathy. Jessica shrugged, dragging herself to the feet and strolling round Countess' hotel room, tactcully avoiding the broken bottles.

"I dunno. I guess. I guess I'm just glad I had a cool character to my name. Anyway, uh, him and I had a fight about twenty minutes after we got off the plane." There was a possibly-judgemental silence for a moment, until Jessica decided for herself it was just another awkward one. "Can I eat one?"

The golem didn't even bother turning around, waving a dismissive claw and hearing the crunch of an apple in response.

"Yeah, so. We got into an argument because he was dragging me around and showing me off to his fandom buddies when he knows I hate flying and would've preferred to sleep for nine hours."

"Mmm."

"So I might've snapped at him."

"Well done."

"Aaaaaand broke up with him."

"Well done."

"And, uh. Well, that's about the most of it. 'cept for the part where I marched off then forgot he had the only room key."

Countess, to her surprise, had been listening. She slid upright, head swivelling around with a disconcerting independence while her claws clanged like ugly bells against the railings.

"Well done."

"Shut up," retorted Jessica, then immediately wished she hadn't. Countess locked her in an unwinnable staring contest for a long moment, talons twitching trigger-happy at her sides, then broke eye contact in as belittling a manner as she was capable. A spring snapped back to ripose in her throat.

"You're simply an accessory in his eyes. Purely functional. A servant to his whims."

"Uh, I said he was a self-centred jerk, not, like, a psychopath-"

"I believe we should teach him a lesson."

A gutted pillow - and a cupboard door on the other side of the room to its respective cupboard - had (along with a few other variously-monstered cues) been skulking around the edges of the pseudo-Anarchy's attention for a while, only now jumping out at her. "I, uh, dunno what you're thinking, but-"

Countess shook her head and laughed pleasantly, which was far from reassuring. "Theatrics, dearest! Mere theatrics. Whatever else were you thinking of?"

Jessica didn't really want to answer, worried about enabling whatever mad plans percolated in that silver skull.

---

The plan, as it turned out, was uninspired as heck. They entailed the duo trundling down to the main convention floor, and suffering a bunch of gawpers as they set off looking for half a suave android. This didn't go so well, and watching Countess "act" out a scene with her "friend" Chelsea didn't exactly put Jessica at ease either. Her ability to sense impending violence was being strangled in its sleep by how straight-up geeky the conversation was getting, and Jessica wondered if she was dealing with as rabid a fan as her boyfriend. (Ex-boyfriend? Why don't we find the jackass first, how's that for a plan?)

The orderly queue outside Conference Room Four looked like her Hoss' company, if the meta-plotty esoteric horseshit they were spouting to each other was any indication. There was one Hoss, but Countess didn't even bother asking Jessica whether it was the one they were looking for. The droid's focus had been diverted to whatever mad plan she was cooking up with her obnoxiously pretty friend, leaving Jessica feeling more than a bit put out.

Anarchy let her attention drift, caught one earful of some petualnt manchild insisting that Lord Avery so was a Grandmaster, and decided she'd had enough. Muttering a promise to regroup to a barely-interested Countess, the supervillainess slouched off. Chelsea waved goodbye, but Jessica was pretty sure she already hated the elf's guts. She rounded a corner, stalked her way up a nerd-clogged hallway, and was rudely accosted by a floating chainsaw. A lady a ways off grinned, thumbing furiously at a radio-controller. The chainsaw bobbed about, and uttered a satisfying audio clip of a mechanical shriek.

"Group photo!" she laughed. "We needed a Dr. Anarchy, and your costume looks great!"

Jessica didn't know any of the characters off the top of her head, only vaguely recognising an impressive blue sea-serpenty costume (black-stockinged legs sticking out the bottom notwithstanding.) The Only Reasonable Scientist was trying on a Robin Pearson's coat, having a good laugh at the toy heron stuffed in a pocket. ("Oh man, I couldn't even tell you'd hand-made this! But real pockets!") A very humanoid Kriok introduced the group as the "Sisterhood of Scientist-Battlers (in coalition with the Strong Female Characters Squad)" led the charge on complimenting Jessica's Anarchy, while the Brooklyn Taylor with the radio-controlled chainsaw asked whether Jessica would care to join them all for elevenses at the Genreshift Cafe.

Jessica decided that yes, she would like that.

---

"Please answer the question this time," chirped Countess, ignoring the silent "what the fuck do you think you're doing"s from Message and Holly, and caring a similar amount for the ruckus she was causing. "What are the weaknesses and easily-exploited vulnerabilities of each currently-extant Grandmaster?"

Holly clutched her face in her hands, wondering if Countess' free hand could spit her like a pig at this angle. Either way, claiming plausible deniability seemed a safer route than pathomancy. The man on the end of Countess' occupied arm had dropped his microphone, more occupied with trying to keep the bobbing of his Adam's apple a safe distance from a pointy finger. He was whimpering, and his knees seemed about ready to give way from underneath.

"Put him down," Holly growled, realising the rest of the crowd had edged away and wishing she'd done similar. She wasn't sure who was the bigger moron here - the defective psychopath robo-slurry, or the man who'd laughed at her.

Security (the ones who weren't in costume) showed up. "Jesus fuck," one of them muttered. His partner just brandished a taser, and barked at the silver lunatic to come quietly.

---

Dear Countess,

It is with much regret that I inform you that this partnership of ours is delivering less-than-optimal results, a fact I will not hesitate to add frustrates me deeply. Whie I understand that this venture of ours was undertaken under a 'contract' in the very loosest sense of the word, it was with apparently-misguided hope that I believed you would be able to demonstrate the most basic tenets of cooperation.

"Shut up," sulked Countess. As Tropic Skies had a strict no-smoking policy, the amalgam was presently slumming it up on the hotel's front steps amongst some distinctly out-of-character characters. Princess!Eryntse exhaled a cancerous lungful veeeery carefully, not wanting to antagonise anyone who had half a dozen security officers march her out. The pointy-eared bitch hadn't even tried helping her.

It was my assumption that Miss Tallbirch would remain in the conference, under the assumption that useful information may eventuate despite your ill-thought out a tap-tap-tap, like Someone couldn't quite find the right word for it ... plan.

At any rate, her emotional manipulations would make smuggling you (when necessary) through the front door far easier than it sounds. I suggest you take some time to comport yourself before considering how best to spend your time in this locale. Perhaps firstly consider whether you seriously intend to follow through with neutralising our employer.

A note: I am quite ambivalent either way; I see ample advantages available to me whether he dies at your hands or not. It is entirely your decision, but I implore that you tarry no longer in making that very decision. You (and by current association, I) face being dragged along by events if we do not instigate them ourselves. Our employer has no time for those without intiative, and I daresay would look upon an attempted uprising in a far more favourable light, compared to your presumed present plan of claiming in the aftermath that whatever transpired was your plan all along. If you must insist on such intellectual laziness, I must insist in turn that I discredit every one of your lies when that time comes.

It has been quite an age since I permitted a host to retain autonomy of thought, Countess. You should take care to not make me regret that.

Regards,
Message

Countess' present posture didn't really facilitate slouching, or anything moodier than a laserlike glare affixed upon the ground five feet ahead. Her hands didn't even reach the ground to toy with a pebble or something.

"Those security guards had nothing that could harm me, did they?"

...

P.S. Of course not. Your courtesy at playing along and minimising bloodshed, for once, is greatly appreciated.

Show Content

SpoilerAlright guys, time to be swept up in the big wave of Grand Battle Initiative that's taking place. As it stands, I'm inclined to aim for deathery happening June 31st. I figure a month is plenty of- What? Fine, the 30th, whatever. End of the month, someone's getting the deadmark and we'll be moving on post-haste.

Holly took a deep breath and placed Annaliese's money on the counter, trying to avoid looking at the guy manning the fruit cart. What kind of outfit was that, anyway? It looked like he'd just put on some cheap fake ears and claws. "One..." she struggled to balance not sounding like an idiot with not coming across as disdainful - "uh, Sen salad, please." He handed it over without a word, which she was silently grateful for as she sat down at one of the benches.

She used one hand to massage her temples, the other frantically venting stress into a tote bag. God, I can't believe I was actually worried about her. Can't go two goddamn minutes without causing a scene and I thought she'd get the better of me. She stared at her fork, tilting it back and forth before shrugging and taking a couple bites of pineapple. And that would make everything simple if I could just figure out how to kill her already. She ate another forkful of fruit, silently wishing she'd paid more attention in class. Maybe then, at least, she could do something about all this.

Suddenly, irritation was replaced with panic. She hadn't even been considering the others. Was Algernon okay? Was Ouroborous still around?

Holly quickly ate the rest of the salad and then stood up. She had to find Algernon and get this sorted out, preferably before she started hearing voices again.
---------
LeMarche sighed, mashing the backspace. He managed to get about half a sentence in before deleting it once more. Maybe he should call it a day - he still had a while before deadline. Maybe he'd gotten enough done today.

He glanced over what he'd managed to write, mainly to make sure he hadn't made any glaring continuity mistakes; anything else could be edited later. Everything seemed fine until he reached a particular line:

"Everything seemed fine until he reached a particular line:

Everything seemed fine until he reached - everything seemed fine -"

He broke out into a sweat, hastily deleting most of the repeats. Maybe he could use the rest for effect, but for now it was unreadable. That wasn't the main thing he was concerned with, though. He glanced at the clock. Had it seriously been an hour already? Time was going by too quickly.

And that was exactly what it said on the page, too.

He mumbled "no, that can't be right" under his breath, only to see that was precisely what he had typed up. It just kept going, until eventually it got ahead of him. It started talking about Algernon attending a panel that wouldn't take place for another thirty minutes, and Countess managing to -

Elmo took a deep breath, permitting himself to chuckle and roll his eyes once he exhaled. "You're reading way too much into it, LeMarche." He stretched and yawned. "Let's see... bang out the rest of this section, then see what's on the tube, maybe. I could stand to relax more. Just... finish this bit up, right quick."

He stared at that screen, perfectly motionless, for another fifteen minutes. Finally, he added a perspective change and a couple more sentences:

"Elmo was immediately shaken out of his reverie. The screeching was unmistakable, if lower-pitched than he usually thought of it. Within seconds, a single Ouroborite - lost from its pack and half-starved, it was almost pitiable - latched onto Elmo LeMarche's arm and began to chew." Satisfied, he gave the next section the once-over to make sure there weren’t any glaring continuity errors, before pulling his chair away and shuffling over to the bed.
------------------
God dammit, how big was this stupid place? Holly groaned as she carefully slipped between two swordfights. She'd never find Algernon at this rate. You should just give up anyway, it's not like he means anything to you.

Oh, good, this again. Of course he meant something, she told herself - he was her anchor. She wasn't sure she could've... been Cherry very long, if not for him there. And you've already failed at that, haven't you? As soon as a little bitty problem comes up, you go right to backstabbing. You're not any better than you used to be. The only difference is you don't realize it now.

That was a momentary slip, of course. She wouldn't do it again. She couldn't do it again, it wouldn't be right, she'd just end up right where she was, insane and lost in some stupid swamp. Not that "lost in some stupid hotel" was that much of an upgrade, to be fair.

She continued trudging through the hall, doing her best to ignore the people around her, as well as the annoying hum that seemed to fade in and out of the background.
------------------
Elmo sighed and gave the television a third cycle of channel-surfing. As usual, none of the free channels were interesting and everything else was overpriced. His mind wandered briefly to “why would anyone rent porn at a hotel nowadays anyway,” then scuttled to “how the hell is Survivor still on the air?” before finally passing through “do I have another panel this evening, and if so, should I eat a quick dinner before it or a short dinner afterwards?” and managing to fixate on the Acquisition. It was basically guaranteed that the fans would be unhappy with it – if there was one thing LeMarche hated about writing, it was knowing that no matter what he did, there would be somebody somewhere that griped about it, good Lord he still had to decide who to off, especially since people were sympathizing with Countess more since the Swamp, what the hell was he even going to do with the whole –

Elmo was immediately shaken out of his reverie. The screeching was unmistakable, if lower-pitched than he usually thought of it. Within seconds, a single Ouroborite - lost from its pack and half-starved, it was almost pitiable - latched onto Elmo LeMarche's arm and began to chew. Surprisingly, he found that he wasn’t panicking, maybe because he’d already written this bit and knew what needed to be done. He slammed his shoulder into the wall, smashing the bug up in the process; once this was done, he ran over to his jacket, grabbed a pocketknife and pried the damn thing off, crushing it under his boot once it fell to the ground. He stared at it less with horror or surprise, and more with regret: it was real, somehow, and he had just killed it. The psychological implications didn’t quite hit home, though, because other, more important matters quickly distracted him.

“Oh, fuck, that means they’re –”
------------------
Holly did her best to chat with the man in plaid, but her mind was elsewhere, mainly with regards to how absolutely doomed they all were. She’d been so focused on dealing with Countess that she’d gotten distracted from figuring out how to kill Ouroborous. Fire did alright, but it was too easy to get away from, and went away too quickly. They needed something bigger, stronger, impossible for the little fuckers to escape from.

She frowned. What did they need, then? They were alive, so food and... maybe water? They probably got that from all the blood, though. Either way, too hard to deprive them of that, they’d just eat each other eventually. What did those bastards need that she could take away?

...They couldn’t fly forever, she realized. They got tired eventually, and they were on an island. And everything needed air to breathe, right?

She smiled and nodded, then quickly glanced at her wrist before lowering it again (hoping the man wouldn’t notice she had no watch, and was in fact trying to concoct a pretty pathetic excuse to stop talking about supervillainous plans and why a certain ray gun would be designed to turn ice cream into ravenous bears). “Uh, thanks, uh...”

“Angus MacScoffman.”

“Yeah that. Thanks, but I have a... panel, thing, to go to! I’ll see you later!” She ran off, desperate to find Algernon and explain the plan, seeking out trails of confusion wherever she could find them. Finally, she found one she was pretty sure was strong enough to be his, and chased it.
------------------
Harold Bauer stalked through the halls, mind spinning. If the rumors he’d just heard were true, then Grand Battles were about to be ruined. What could he do about it, though? The damn company was all about the money, like all of them. He’d trusted them. He’d trusted the writers. He’d shelled out the money for the trading cards and the Season Three memorabilia and even those godawful tie-in toaster pastries, and this was how they repaid him?

He ran a hand over the sleeve of his robes, entering the elevator in a daze. He could fix it, though. He could fix it. He had to show them what happened when you crossed the fans. No violence, of course, that would reflect badly on the fans, but a bit of burglary and vandalism shouldn’t hurt all that much. Taking some laptops and phones and notebooks. They’d have to start from scratch, and he’d have something new for his collection, right between the bookshelf of signed copies and the replica James Raven armor. The PR would be horrible, and, and the company wouldn’t want to buy them anymore, and everything would be okay. He pressed five, the floor LeMarche was on, and rubbed the ring he’d spent weeks working on until it was absolutely perfect, the ring he’d commissioned thrice over because the first time the topaz was a slightly different shade and the second time it was an inch too thick. They couldn’t do this to him. He wouldn’t let them.

As the elevator doors closed, the woman in the red suit smiled and turned to walk away. Things were about to get very entertaining, and security would undoubtedly be too distracted to deal with a break-in even if somebody did witness it.
------------------
There were too many of them to fit in the vents, now. They pushed each other against the walls, making clumps and clangs in a greater and greater volume. Their cry was louder and louder, and people were beginning to wonder why their ears were suddenly ringing.

Someone was selling burgers, fresh-cooked. The scent of blood and grease wafted through a vent cover, into a vent that some of the Ouroborites had only just reached. Blood and grease. Blood and grease.

Food.

It was the fastest that he had ever consumed a series in its entirety. What should have happened, he thought, was that he should have felt a crescendo of anger and righteous fury bubbling within him and exploding into an inferno of wrath. Instead he felt:

1. That this was completely impossible. It was a big trick. Or a big coincidence. In any case, he didn’t remember any of this in any meaningful way. This was only something with a character that happened to have his name. And his powers. And his past, but without all the holes.

no this has all happened

2. That, okay, maybe someone had been writing about his life, but he was real. He was a person, he wasn’t made-up, wasn’t the product of someone’s imagination. Even to him, this thought had a strong flavor of desperation to it.

3. That maybe he was insane. Maybe he was actually a cosplayer who sincerely believed he was Algernon. It would explain why he didn’t know all of Algernon’s life. The fact that Algernon was a character who constantly forgets was simply a convenient excuse.

no, no, you are him

This theory seemed extremely insane, even more insane than he (possibly) was, and was disproven by the materialization of a bullet.

4. That he was a fictional character. He really was a fictional character. He was created by a mortal god for the sole purpose of being tortured for the sick entertainment of others and all of his actions and thoughts were predetermined, even the thoughts he was having right now about the nature of his own existence and there was nothing he could do because everything he did was already written down, or maybe will be written down.

5. That this was really messing with his atheism.

you don’t have to stand for this

6. That he didn’t have to stand for this.

He turned back to the front of the book, casually, lazily, noting the name of the author. Bartleby had been standing by him the whole time, looking extremely impatient.

“I led you here so you could buy your own copies. I didn’t bring you here to read,” she said, her tone matching the affront on the booth-owner’s face. Underneath her words, Algernon heard her unsaid words, that he was a moron, a waste of time, a cheap miser, a not-a-true-fan. He ignored this, bought the books by imagining up some money to buy them with, and started the journey to the front desk. The booth-owner wouldn’t notice the money had disappeared instantly until a while later.

The woman behind the desk gave him a cheery smile that told him that she didn’t appreciate his clothes. He didn’t give her a chance to speak. “Where’s LeMarche’s room?”

The woman said, “I can’t tell you that,” but what she did not say was “504” and so he thanked her and started towards the stairs just as Bartleby caught up, shooting complaints at his back.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------

The trail of confusion suddenly disappeared, and Holly was left with no confusion except her own. He was always confused. When had he ever not been confused? Never. Algernon wasn’t Algernon if he wasn’t confused. Confusion was part of his entire being.

But it was gone. All she could vaguely get was that the trail was leading downstairs, mostly because she had been heading downstairs when the trail ceased. So now she was just standing in the stairwell, wondering if she should bother trying to search with her eyes when suddenly, Algernon almost walked right into her.

Holly instantly knew it was him. Once or twice, she had seen ‘Algernon cosplayers,’ and the difference between them and him was that they went with his clothes he wore at the start of the battle. Currently, Algernon was wearing the clothes he had from the swamp. Also currently (but not relatedly), Algernon looked…very different.

Well, he was clean for one thing, but that wasn’t what Holly was unnerved by. His face wasn’t the face of a sniveling coward, but the face of a Man on a Mission. He was Determined. Something that was completely foreign to her when associated with Algernon. Holly approached him nonetheless.

“There you are,” she said, but in a tone that did not imply a fact so much as a question. She tried to recover by trying to look accusatory. “I’ve been looking for you.”

Behind Algernon, there was some other strangely dressed woman who seemed to be struggling to walk. It might have something to do with the blocks around her feet. The woman caught her breath and then looked up. “What, you were looking for your girlfriend?” she sneered. “Let me guess, Hollgy shippers? Cute.”

Both battlers ignored her. The stairs were getting cramped.

“I’m not interested, Holly,” he said, and the elf tried not to show anything. Or was she supposed to show something? She didn’t want to show something but maybe she should. “I’ve got more important things to do.”

Of course. In a society filled with escapees from grand battles, he didn’t learn a single thing. But in a different society surrounding grand battles…well…they did sell books…and there were people going around sometimes dressed like them…and okay yeah maybe she should have seen this coming. The woman with the block feet just stood back and watched with some interest. “Look, I know you’re probably…um…a little disoriented…and maybe you’ve just learned some…look, I just wanted to talk to you, to help.” A man had been hovering above them for a little, apparently considering whether it was a good idea to try to squeeze past what appeared to be a lover’s spat in action.

“No. I don’t want it,” said Algernon, who was maintaining a lot of eye contact, Holly noticed. The waves of emotion she saw from him, she tried to compare it to a hurricane, but at least those had structure. This was more like an abstract painting. She saw hate wrapped around fear. There was a kernel of self-doubt somewhere over there. A blotch of what perhaps might have been nihilism, covered up very shoddily by self-righteousness. And…was that a flash of pity?

Instinctively, she raised an arm, because she knew she could make this better (and at the same time she knew she shouldn’t). “No,” Algernon repeated more firmly, raising an arm as though that would protect him. “If you pull your manipulative shit, I swear I’ll…” In typical Algernon fashion, he hadn’t actually thought of a threat. But Holly got the idea. The man decided that this lull was a good time to scoot past, and everybody shuffled to one side to let him by. “I don’t care what you want to say,” Algernon continued. “I don’t care what excuses you want to throw at me, I don’t care about how you’ve been manipulating emotions for so long, yours included, that you don’t even know what a true, genuine feeling is. All I care about is finding someone called Elmo LeMarche.”

Holly, stunned and disoriented, said, “He just passed us.”

Algernon whirled around. So did Bartleby. LeMarche had actually been frozen since he heard his name, and his eyes were staring at Algernon as though they wished they were seeing a wall instead.

Algernon walked up to LeMarche and punched him in the nose. What surprised Holly the most was that it actually toppled him over.

“What – “ Bartleby managed, not quite expecting this turn of events. She looked like she wanted to say more but was as frozen to the spot as Holly was. Algernon picked LeMarche up by the shirt.

“You shithead! You bastard!” Algernon spat. “You did this to me! You made my life a living hell! Well? Did you have fun?!”

Previously, LeMarche would have called for help and security, but his head was still spinning from recent events. All he could think to say was, “I’m sorry.”

At some point, Algernon had started crying, and his self-consciousness was starting to catch up and all he could choke out was, “Why.”

Bartleby looked like she was about say something again, but she was promptly interrupted by Ouroborous bursting out of the vents.

Algernon blinked. He had forgotten completely about Ouroborous. LeMarche, knowing what he was thinking, said, “I do too, sometimes.”

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Countess heard the noise and she knew what was going on. The others that had been kicked out quickly backed away from the building, but she strode up and pushed the door aside. After all, security was going to have a bigger problem on their hands.

Ouroborous was attacking. She didn’t really care about that. What she did care about was Algernon. All of a sudden, he was extremely useful. But also, frustratingly enough, extremely fragile. Did that mean that she was going through with the plan of revenge?

She wasn’t sure.

The Controller…she had admired him. She had wanted to impress him. She thought he was brilliant. She didn’t want to think he betrayed her, but recently, all evidence had pointed to this. She didn’t know if he had been planning this all along or if she had somehow disappointed him. But either way…Countess didn’t like it. The whole thing made the game itself go sour. She wanted to burn down the Ouroborites that were currently annoying her. She wanted to eviscerate that worthless elf. And she wanted so badly to torture the simpering human until he passed out.

But there was no fun in it. She couldn’t take pleasure in it.

Because…because…

…she felt used. Manipulated. And things that would have given her pleasure didn’t because she almost felt she had no autonomy in doing those things.

The only thing that would give her autonomy, to break out, was killing the Controller. That was the way forward. That seemed like the most meaningful future.

Dear Countess,

It appears that you have reached a decision, but have not yet formed any semblance of a plan…

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The four in the staircase heard the noise and three of them knew what was going on. The fourth was having trouble.

There weren’t really Ouroborites in the stairs. Ouroborous was more interested in the larger mass of meat in the halls. But it wasn’t to say that they wouldn’t soon be interested in smaller masses of meat. They were, of course, indiscriminate. So the four ran, automatically going back to LeMarche’s room. Four straight flights.

Once inside, everybody was out of breath. But Algernon still stared pointedly at LeMarche. “Finish it. Now.”

LeMarche looked up, panting. He had never been the athletic type. “Wh…how…”

“You started this, didn’t you? This whole mess is happening because of you, so finish it! Let me go back home, or something,” he pleaded.

LeMarche continued to try to catch his breath, but he was partly pretending because this was insane and also he didn’t want to be confronted by his actual work like this. Parents and media decrying his work was bad enough.

Bartleby had been too busy silently freaking out, being a fan and all. So Holly noticed it first.

“I think you were robbed.”

Both Algernon and LeMarche looked up at this. The room had the air of one that had been robbed. This was most noticeable by the complete lack of bags or a laptop.

Algernon was stunned, then became doubly-stunned when he saw that LeMarche looked stunned. He had no idea what this meant for the apparently deterministic world he lived in.

Maybe…this meant he actually had autonomy. Maybe he really was a separate entity, independent from anybody’s imagination.

This was almost a hopeful thought, if it wasn’t for the fact that his plan had been dependent on his universe being deterministic.

Holly wasn’t yet comfortable with talking directly to Algernon at the moment. But she was comfortable with talking. “So…what exactly are we doing up here?”

“We – I thought…he could…write things to make things…better.”

At this, Holly squinted at the highly unimpressive LeMarche. “No. That’s impossible. I’m not fictional. Writers can’t just make people. You – you probably just, like, dreamt about what was happening or something – “

“Wait,” said Bartleby, who was still struggling to comprehend what was going on. “You two are actually Holly and Algernon? And that was actually Ouroborous?”

LeMarche stood up straight. “Ex-cuse me? Are you saying that all my work, everything I was doing, I was just copying? That nothing I did was actually from me? My own mind, my own imagination? I’ve been writing everything that happened this whole time!”

“So…that means that…this is a grand battle round…and…I’m a character…in a grand battle.” Light was starting to dawn on Bartleby’s face and she began to dismantle her costume.

“What I’m saying,” Holly said, trying to be the reasonable one, though she spat that last word out, “is that you didn’t create me. I’m a real person, and – “

“Both of you shut up,” Algernon snapped, his mind growing frantic. “We need to get out of here. You need to write.”

“My real name is Alex,” said Alex nervously to nobody in particular, kicking off her styrofoam concrete.

“I mean if, if you need the stuff you wrote before, you have extra copies, right?” Algernon babbled. “Look, do you use paper? Laptops?” Holly looked confused at the last word, but LeMarche realized something. “I…I mean, I could…”

“No wait, I have an idea.”

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

When Lynette had heard the noise, she had absolutely no idea what was going on. But it sounded bad. So it was probably best to stay in her room.

When the noise didn’t leave, she started to worry and wonder if she should hide somewhere.

Then the door knocked and she spent a long time trying to figure out if she should open it or not. A look through the peephole revealed the distorted face of LeMarche. A peep through the door revealed three more people, two of them looking emotionally unstable, one of them obviously excited despite the situation, and she was ready to close the door again.

“Lynette, wait,” LeMarche said quickly. “This is really important but if I explain it to you it’s going to sound really crazy, so do you have that USB of every GB thing and also can I use your laptop?”

Lynette stared.

Lynette glared for a bit, before closing the door on them. LeMarche blanched visibly, Holly was momentarily speechless, and Algernon shoved her aside and slammed on the door.

"Cut that out," came Lynette's muffled voice, still carrying enough practised authority to make Algernon cut it out. He whirled on LeMarche instead, the look in his eye more desperation than anger. Like whatever resolve was pushing him doggedly along would drain right out of him in if he dared to stop.

"So now what? Do we go look for the thief?"

LeMarche shook his head. It'd be faster to convince Lynette to help, but that entailed convincing Lynette, which was the sort of thing which needed mental preparation before an email exchange, to say nothing of conversation in person.

"It'll be chaos down in the convention floor," added Holly. "People running and screaming and those damn bugs everywhere." You just pointed out countless innocents getting injured or eaten, and you don't care at all. They'll - everyone'll just run out the main doors. If they go anywhere. You haven't caught a glimpse of a window, for all you know Countess is tossing bits of security guards into an endless void, because you're too negligent to take care of one little psychopath. Ok, now you're reaching. Shut up and let me think. "If our burglar had any sense, they'd hiding in their room right now."

"Jeez, if you're going to be a pack of socially decrepit nerds, I'll explain everything to Miss Cooper."

"Can you not," hissed LeMarche, at Bartleby. Alex. Whoever the hell this girl was.

"Yeah, seriously. No thanks." Lynette had opened the door again while everyone's attention was diverted, and planted a USB drive in the nearest pair of hands. Algernon's, as it were. "That's my backup. You're not using my laptop. I don't-" she glared at Alex here "-need or want an explanation."

"This is a Grand Battle round Gradual Massacre actually oh and Ouroborous just swarmed the convention floor."

Alex stared back at their faces like there were no problems with her argument or delivery or its content whatsoever. "You're humouring this lot," Lynette eventually deadpanned, at LeMarche. LeMarche shrugged, bit his lip.

---

What a frightful mess, she thought to herself. And Message, she supposed.

Audio off. Can't appreciate the screams if the Ouroborite screech breaks up the feed anyway. It's like singing along to a summer season-long chart topper chorus. Any of them, all of them spilling out speakers onto a crowded street, joining the revellers dishevelled distorted staggering in the neon glare.

Bacchaus. A multiverse-spanning career ago. She'd not only been young, then - she'd been youth. Unrefined, savage boundless glitter knives the night is young, the night is forever, and it will be ours.

She rolled her shoulder, her swamp-proofed shell trickling away and exposing the clockwork. The ticking teeth. Four legs shuffled about, unfolded, steadied themselves on a solid if pointy octet. Eight was a very special number, even before the battles. Eight ways with a butterfly knife to stop a man in his tracks. Eight signs he's into you (and eight uses for his infatuation). Eight districts of Bacchaus, each closed on a different day of the week.

An extrapolation, sure, but eight eights are sixty four amps in her spark chamber ignition. Countess raised her arm, and, finding at the end of it more scythe than hand, shot a bolt of violet lightning into the ceiling. It would've lit up the main foyer if the lights weren't already working, though the spark shattered a ceiling lamp and at least contributed to a more horrific scene being set.

Yelling. Running. Humans - in a cavalcade of stupid outfits - trampling one another in their rush for the exit. A wild-eyed Michelle Davis stood in one corner, rhythmically smashing an Ouroborite to pieces with the butt of her mangled prop gun. There were a set of mandibles embedded in her arm, dripping something acrid where she'd divorced its face from the rest of it.

"Message," chirped Countess. "If it'd please you, find that Jessica girl. Tell her she and I must rejoin posthaste." She pierced a skittering something underfoot, only for three more to leap upon the carcass. "Also, that we shall require a crew - whomsoever she may muster."

Countess, began Message, with a near-audible inkblot of barely-restrained contempt punctuating it, It would behoove you to realise our partnership is far from equal. You as my host have little standing with which to request folly errands of me, and I for one have even less inclination to stoop to such drudgery.

Yours by convention alone-

"You've never joined a host in trying to overthrow our employer. Besides," Countess laughed, "I didn't need the Controller to appreciate a good pool of minions." She shot another spark of electricity. It sailed a foot over her target Ouroborite, but cooked another one behind it anyway. Close enough.

-Message slithered from some inscrutable gap in her gears, and made its oily way through the footsteps of the throng. It returned not moments later.

She's in the Genreshift Cafe, on the second floor. To elucidate further violates my policy of being my own Messenger alone.

Regards,
Message

---

The stairs were a breather, with only one skeleton, picked clean and left in a tidyish pile in a less tidy mess of purplish slick and blood. He must've been curled up in a corner, Countess emotionlessly figured.

Jessica was, to what could best be described as relief for Countess, doing a fair bit better. The Genreshift Cafe, being one of Tropic Skies' in-house eateries repurposed for the convention, had a proper door on it and everything. The muffled voices from behind it sounded more like people getting organised than eaten.

Countess couldn't read the would-be Anarchy's expression when she opened the door for the amalgam, though for Countess that was pretty par for the course. A Theresa Wren had taken off her coat and wig, revealing a "Team Jacob" t-shirt and hot pink hair respectively. She clutched a plastic bag with a steak in it like it was a grenade, and her eyes told them to close the damn door already.

The cafe housed a dozen-odd, most of whom just stared at Countess when she entered. One conspicuously alive Brooklyn (one hand clutched round the handle of her prop chainsaw) finally spoke up.

"Ok, so. If you're the real Countess, and the real Message contacted Jessica here-"

"Then we are fucked."

"Super-fucked." Brooklyn nodded. "I figured the best way to save my skin was to help one of you contestants out, and I didn't have the liberty of choosing amongst whichever one of you three invited me along. No offense." Countess just rearranged her cheek a bit, the closest metal approximation of a twitching eyelid.

"Are you sure it's a good idea-" began one Cascala.

"Probably not," laughed Brooklyn. "Seriously though, everyone here's willing to follow your lead. The general consensus is we're pretty fucking real, thanks, and if we have to lend a hand eliminating a contestant to go back to situation normal then Ouro seems the best choice."

"Indulge me then, if you would. What use can I expect you to be?"

"Heh, that's totally the kind of thing Countess'd say," muttered a lady in a Guillemet-coloured shirt and jeans and horns. She got the glare from Annabell, who hefted her accoutrements.

"This is a working flamethrower. It just needs fuel."

"Why did you bring a flamethrower to a convention," asked a horrified Eureka.

Annabell shrugged. "My dad had one in the shed. I like authenticity, ok?"

"How did you bring a flamethrower to a convention."

"There's a gas cooker in one of the cupboards in the kitchen," Brooklyn said hurriedly. "Also, there's a fridge full of steaks, and we've been crushing any bugs coming through the vents, so we've got a secure location and a possible lure." A clang, faint crunch, and triumphant yelling resounded from the back of the cafe, out of sight. "There's always the possiblity I rig this joint to blow up, of course, and Toni over there's the Creature Design consultant for Seasons 1 and 2-"

"Excuse me?"

"Oh, right. You're a Season 2 battle. Sorry, nerd terminology. More to the point, Toni helped design Ouro, so she can help figure out its weak spots and how best to kill it-"

"Mel, I think she's wondering what you meant by 'blow this joint up.' I'm wondering what you meant by 'blow this joint up'."

"Eh, I'm an engineering major. I did a pyrotechnics course last winter, it's easier than you'd think-"

"I'm staff here," interjected a suited woman. Her intricate face paint would've pegged her to a Season 1 fan as Frank/The Executrix. "I've got a map of the convention, and provided the power's still up I can access hotel records too."

"Nice!" A... person in a black morph suit flailed their way through the group, barely holding onto their camera. "Were you thinking what I was thinking?"

"... Probably not?"

"Well, we should find Firestorm's room, and see if there's more to the Battle then what we've all got so far! Or we could find Lyn Cooper!"

"Huh. Hell, we could get them to write us a plausible but happy ending to all of this. Write in some loophole so we can kill Ouro."

A Cultivator glared at Cascala. "That plan sucks."

Cascala shrugged. "Just cause you can't handle things getting meta without it exploding through the entire series-"

Countess shot a bolt into the air. That shut them all up.

"Well, you've clearly no shortage of ingenuity. I approve." She grabbed a nearby table and snapped one of its legs off. She tossed the metal bar to a girl in a white wig and goggles, all bedecked in silver. "What we still require, however, is a plan. Ouroborous cannot be exterminated by simply walking out and stepping on it."

"No shit," muttered Creature Design Consultant Toni, who'd been trying to avoid attention since Brooklyn/"Mel" had pointed her out. "It won't count as a kill until it's unable to breed and propogate. Ouroborous could be split in two swarms by now."

A Soft cosplayer approached with a reassuring smile. "Even knocking its numbers back should help, right?" she said to Toni, before turning to Countess. "Heya. Huge fan of yours. Read all the supplementary stuff, too."

Brooklyn, messing with something in her chainsaw, shot up in warning. "Dude-"

"Nah, come on. Paige here knows there's nothing like a little spree of violence to ease tensions up, right?"

The cafe went deadly quiet. Countess took a step toward the kid, somehow driving the silence to an even deadlier place. She tilted her head, bared her teeth, and raised a claw.

Before anyone could panic or start thinking about how they might actually stop her, she'd rested those talons on the girl's shoulder. Almost gently.

"That's right," she purred, then giggled. It wasn't an audio clip she'd had prepared, and it made everyone's hair stand on end. She spun around, the giggle distorting into a somehow-natural cackle.

"Once we're done tonight, they'll be wiping the floors of bug juice for weeks!"

She laughed, a glint in her eye and another dismantled table in her claws. "Let us fucking do this."

The assembled ladies managed a cheer. Let the bug hunt begin.

“Well at least all we need now is a computer,” said LeMarche when Lyn predictably slammed the door shut once more. “There’s plenty at the business center.”

“Yeah, if you don’t mind wading through a buncha omnivorous insects. The stairs are at the end of the hall, y’know. That’s a long stretch to get to the lobby.”

“Well, we could take the elevators – “

“Christ, aren’t you a writer? You never take the elevator in a situation like this!”

“Well I’m not just a writer, I’m the writer – “

“I’m a mass consumer of all entertainment media and I know my narrative rules let me tell you – “

Holly and Algernon stood back and simply witnessed the conversation. Holly didn’t really understand all the tech stuff – even exposed to it in the last round, she simply couldn’t understand it in any other way besides a different form of magic. Algernon hadn’t even seen a computer in twenty years or so, at least not a working one, and the only hotel he ever remembered being in didn’t have anything called a ‘business center.’ And both of them were in the awkward position of being fictional characters during an argument about narrative structure.

fire

Algernon rubbed his forehead. “Look, if any Ouroborites gets near, Holly can just do her fire thing.”

“’Fire thing,’” Holly repeated blankly. “You do realize that my ‘fire thing’ needs anger? There’s not a lot of that going on.”

“You seem plenty angry – “

“I’m not angry, I’m indignant there is a big difference – “

“Why are you still outside my room.”

Four sheepish heads turned towards the stony face of Lynette Cooper.

“Sorry,” LeMarche mumbled, and they all headed towards the stairs.

-----------------------------------------------------------------

The trick was, Toni warned, not to get Ouroguts on you. Of course, they’d swarm you, Ouroguts or no, but there was absolutely no escaping Ouroborous if you got Ouroguts on you. Burning them to a crisp was the best way to deal with them, of course. If you had to skewer them, then you’d better have alternate weapons on hand. You really don’t want to hold something that has hungry, flesh-eating bugs clinging to the other end. Oh, and watch your step.

There were several refugees who were very adamant about keeping a safehouse on hand, at least for those who didn’t think they could handle going out into the chaos again. Hiding in a café might not be the safest thing to do in the midst of an Ouroborous attack, but neither was charging an Ouroborous attack. Besides, it was comforting to know a place you could run to if you were in trouble.

So the plan was to find another closed-off area, secure and bait it up, then blow it to kingdom come. Fighting through swarms of Ouroborous along the way, of course.

A second, smaller group preferred to go looking for some writers, no matter what any naysayers said. They also preferred the Countess to come with them, but like hell she was choosing a rescue mission over a blow-something-up mission. The one dressed as the photographer was disappointed, but no less chipper.

The Countess wasn’t really interested in the planning stage. She only perked up once people started towards the door. Annabell, with her working flamethrower, took point alongside the amalgam. Somewhere in the middle of the group, Brooklyn spoke up. “Right, so make sure to stick together and shit. Watch each other’s backs. ‘Specially mine, since I got the explosive stuff and all.”

“Yeah, yeah, open the doors already.”

Taking in a nervous breath, Annabell barged through, blasting fire at anything that buzzed. The Countess emerged, a sparking monstrosity. Behind the first group, those staying in the café slammed the doors shut. At least until the way was relatively clear for the second group to head out.

The Soft cosplayer was the one who volunteered to carry the bait. She handled herself confidently, slamming her axe against any available surface, making it slick with Ouroguts, very much disregarding Toni’s advice. Allies around her tried to make sure she didn’t get herself eaten, but it was hard to do so when she was swinging a huge battle axe around, even if it was fake.

It was not a group that the Countess would normally associate with (understatement of the century), but in this moment of frenzied violence for survival, she couldn’t help but feel a sense of kinship. Not the common definition of kinship, but her definition of kinship, which was probably not quite the same, but close enough, right?

Annabell gestured towards a glass room and as one, the blow-something-up group barreled towards it.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The trip down the stairs was as nail-biting as it was uneventful. The more they descended, the louder the noise of chaos and devastation became, until Algernon was convinced that a swarm of giant bugs would just burst from the walls and eat them alive.

But absolutely nothing happened when they reached the door to the first floor. However, all of the pent up tension that had been simmering for the past few flights boiled over as soon as they opened the door and were immediately accosted by a cosplayer dressed entirely in black. The result was that everybody screamed.

“Wow, that was easy!” the camera-toting cosplayer chirped. Behind her, Frank and Cascala exchanged stunned, disheveled glances. “Mr. Firestorm sir? Pleasure to meet you, good to see you’re alive, we’d like to discuss a possible plan for the future – “

“Can we not do this in the open?” Cascala said.

LeMarche was the first to recover. He was impressed with how well he was handling all this really stupid shit. “We need to get to a computer. Can you help us get to the – “

The entire floor rocked with the explosive force of one semester of pyrotechnics.

“What the hell was that?” said Alex, steadying herself against the wall.

“Oh my god they blew up the business center,” Algernon said in one breath.

As the building settled and the ceiling stopped raining on them, everybody couldn’t help but stare at Algernon. Unused to being stared at and steadily losing his steam, he responded by retracting his neck like a turtle. It would have been more effective with his old turtleneck.

“How did you know that?” Holly asked, and the only thing he could do was glance at LeMarche.

The writer hesitated and then said, “Why don’t we see if the business center really did blow up.”

It really did blow up, to their dismay. It was even still on fire when they got there, and the whooping females did not raise any of their spirits. Although the melted slag that used to be a really nice business center did look cool in the sense that explosions (and their aftermath) are always cool.

The Countess noticed them, and Holly had to refrain from tacking the word ‘unfortunately’ somewhere in that sentence. She clacked her way over there, all sharp smiles. “Ah, Algernon. Finally. So good of you to join us.” Very carefully, Algernon did not shake her hand.

“Dang, you found Firestorm already?” Jessica said, looking a little singed. Her wide grin started to sag at the corners. “Uh. Why’s he here and not in his room? Y’know, writing?”

LeMarche gazed at the flaming room with the expression of a man on a deserted island who had seen a glimpse of civilization and then found out it was a village of cannibals. “Please tell me you at least saved a computer.”

“Uh,” said Jessica.

The Countess ignored what seemed irrelevant and delicately grabbed Algernon’s wrist. “Say, what do you know about interdimensional portals?” Holly stepped up to lay a hand on Algernon’s shoulder, but she didn’t pull him away in case that lost him a hand.

“Uh,” said Algernon.

“Wait a sec,” said Holly. “We’re trying something different. That guy,” she pointed at LeMarche, “is the writer of our battle or something. We’re thinking he might be able to write us a solution.”

“I thought you didn’t beli – “ Algernon bit his tongue as Holly very casually stepped on his foot.

“All he needs is one of those computer things.”

In a conversation separate from their own, Jessica said, “Maybe someone at the café has a laptop.”

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

“Of course I have my laptop with me,” said Eureka. “What, you think I’d leave it in my hotel room? Unattended?”

For LeMarche, it turned out the cannibal village was just him making racist assumptions about the indigenous people of the island. “Great. Marvelous. Can I borrow it?”

Eureka hugged her backpack protectively. “You’re not gonna do anything weird on it, are you?”

“Oh my god this is not the time,” Annabell said.

“It’s totally cool,” said the one dressed as the photographer, giving a double thumbs-up to emphasize how totally cool it was. “He’s Firestorm. He’s just gonna write things better!”

LeMarche sweated as Eureka relented, because this was entirely too many females in one room. “Um, thanks.”

“I still think this is a waste of time,” said someone who he couldn’t name off the top of his head. “But while you slowly write shit out, I’m gonna protect our asses and make sure Ouroborous doesn’t break down the door or something.”

Eureka leaned over LeMarche’s shoulder to type in her password, making sure that nobody was watching her quick fingers (as though anybody could figure out what she was typing anyways). The laptop flashed a wallpaper of Euryvex fanart. Eureka quickly brought up the USB folder.

“Right,” said Algernon, leaning over LeMarche’s other shoulder. This made him more uncomfortable than the women leaning over him. At least he never wrote them into existence. “So you can make it so that this never happens, right? An ‘it was all a dream’ scenario or something.”

Several pairs of eyes glared at him.

“You’re not much of a writer, are you,” said Frank disparagingly.

“Look, it doesn’t have to be good, it just has to get me home,” Algernon huffed, or at least tried to.

LeMarche tapped at the small keyboard. “I still lost everything I wrote today. You can’t expect me to rewrite everything and write everything that’s happened up to this point just to be able to say ‘it was all a dream.’”

Algernon shrugged. “Then write it at the beginning.”

LeMarche slowly turned his head up towards Algernon. “Are you serious.”

He was.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

"Acacia Skammer had the best of intentions when she became a part of the Last Sanctum, but, as they say, 'absolute power corrupts absolutely.' That collar on her neck is called a 'boomer,' and it's quite the sonic weapon. To use it, she was deafened, so she can't hear anything."

"And finally, we have Algernon. That worm on his head isn't just for show- For the low, low cost of a few memories, it can create anything he wants. Of course, when memories are all you have, they come to be rather precious. I wonder what it'll take to make it worthwhile?"

The Controller shifted his posture a bit, and the enthusiasm began to return to his voice. "Now that that's done, let us begin."

The plane around them began to blur, fading into black. Nine beings startled awake across different worlds and dimensions. It was all a dream.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

LeMarche was pretty sure that it actually physically hurt to write that.

“Nice job,” said Holly, winding up an ‘I told you so’ look towards Algernon. “I can’t help but notice we’re still here.”

“That’s ‘cause you can’t just change what already happened,” said Alex, joining the huddle around an increasingly sweaty LeMarche. “Think about it. If we changed everything so that it was all a dream from the very beginning, then none of the crazy shit in the hotel would have never happened, which means that then Firestorm would have never written the thing he just wrote meaning that it wasn’t all a dream. So everything happens again. It’s like the Grandfather Paradox thing.”

“So,” said the Countess, who only stuck around in order to keep an eye on Algernon, “you are saying we should resort to Plan A?”

“No, this could work,” said Toni, who was making the huddle quite crowded. “The problem with this was that it broke suspension of disbelief. Writing’s kind of like doing a magic trick. You have to make it so that even if what you’re writing isn’t possible in any way, it’s at least plausible for the audience. In this case, you could say that your audience is reality itself, so rewriting time is probably a no-no.”

This speech drew the attention of many other cosplayers. “You say that like you’re an expert on how metafiction interacts with reality,” Brooklyn said, looking rather skeptical.

Toni could only shrug. “I’m just saying what I think makes sense. We can’t write what’s presently happening because we don’t have the text, so our only choice is to retcon. That means we have to trick reality into thinking what didn’t happen, could have and did.”

“Um, I don’t think I understand this,” said Algernon.

The Cultivator rolled her eyes. “Metafiction.”

LeMarche only scrolled through the GM files, ignoring the bickering that was sure to come. “Trick reality, huh?”

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

As the door to the laboratory slid open, Thane sprung into action. With his instinctual knowledge of the station's functions, he'd formulated a plan, and he only needed a few more sacrifices to make it work.

The engineers, of course, did not expect him. How could they? Their confusion pitted against his ruthless efficiency made for poor competition indeed. As he froze all of the engineers to the spot by mentally assaulting them with the pain of broken legs before he broke their legs, he made sure to carefully avoid Algernon, who was slumped against the wall for some reason. If he were to die, then the plan would be for naught.

One of the engineers made a runner and Thane pursued, in the process, losing the Map of Rome that he had tucked away. Even if he had noticed it fall, he would have left it – it wasn’t needed for the ritual, and besides, it was obviously useless despite its great power.

The Map of Rome floated like any ordinary map would, and drifted onto Algernon’s stomach. Dazed, Algernon could barely register that something had indeed fallen on him. That he tucked the Map away in a small pocket of his backpack was the action of mere instinct rather than any conscious choice. Soon after, he passed out.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Algernon was one of the last to finish reading and once he did, he looked up to see several expectant faces.

He carefully unshouldered his backpack and set it in front of him. His hands reached towards a pocket that he was sure he had never touched. Even before he unzipped it, he could see that there was something inside.

It was the Map of Rome.

When he took it out, it didn’t glow, which was very disappointing. All the same, everybody regarded it with wonder and amazement. LeMarche mostly regarded it with smug self-congratulation.

“So…what am I supposed to do with this…?”

“Well, I haven’t quite hammered out the details yet – “

LeMarche was interrupted by a cavalcade of groans that filled the café.

“But,” he continued, glaring meaningfully at the moaners, “I have an idea. We need to kill all of Ouroborous, and the only way we’ll be able to do that is through some sort of magic genocide spell thing. The Map of Rome is like some sort of powerful magical artifact, so I figure we can use it to bullshit our way into making that thing I said.”

“‘Powerful magical artifact,’” Algernon repeated, holding the Map of Rome like a regular old map instead of a powerful magical artifact. His expression was that of a man trying desperately not to lose all reason but quickly realizing that reality itself didn’t have it in the first place. It was the expression of an extremely sober man.

Holly, the only resident magic expert (or close enough), snatched the Map away. “Holy shit,” she said, and Algernon sobered up even more. “Holy shit.”

“I assume that means it really does have as much power as advertised,” the Countess said, who had also been rather skeptical. Algernon suddenly found himself in the strange position of empathizing with the Countess, at least concerning magic bullshit. He decided that he needed a drink.

“You don’t even know how much power is in this,” Holly said. As Algernon started to down the first bottle, Holly tapped on the paper gingerly. “But…I don’t even know how to use it…”

LeMarche only shrugged when Holly glanced at him. “I didn’t really think about what it did. But there must be something you can do, right?”

“Look,” the elf said, looming over the author, “I only deal with pathomancy. Y’know, feelings. There’s no way I can translate a Map of Rome into an emotion. I can’t use this.”

“What if you translated it into ‘magical?’” said the one dressed as a photographer, leaning her chair on two legs.

Holly gave her a disgusted look. “’Magical’ isn’t an emotion.”

“Well, sometimes I feel magical.”

“How about ‘powerful?’” someone else suggested.

“That’s not an emotion either just because I described it as ‘powerful’ and ‘magical’ doesn’t mean they are emotions.”

“Well, you can feel powerful, can’t you?”

Holly banged her head against a table.

“Okay, okay, how about this,” said Toni the Creature Design Consultant. “The immense magical power had been stored in the Map of Rome at some point in the past because a map is the perfect object for magical energy to be unable to do anything. It’s basically a battery that can’t fit anywhere. To use it, we need to somehow transfer the energy into an object that can actually direct the magic or use the magic or whatever. If we want a genocide spell specifically, it’ll have to be an object associated with death.”

LeMarche reached into Algernon’s backpack, startling the still-drinking man, and pulled out the arm of Imaginary Death. “So like this. But we still don’t know how to transfer the energy into it.”

“Well, we could probably release the energy if we destroyed the – “

The Map of Rome suddenly suffered from spontaneous anger-related combustion. Holly felt a lot better.

The crowd in the café backed away from the charring map as a strong wind started to pick up, a staple sign of great power being released. There was a sudden pulse that pushed anybody too close to the Map away, which made Algernon spill some of his wine. As a bright light started to fill the café, Toni yelled, “Do you know how to channel it?” before she fell to the floor and was pushed to a corner.

Of course she did, didn’t she? That was Magic 101. You didn’t just go straight to learning pathomancy, you had to get all the basics down. Yeah, maybe she hadn’t gone over the basics in a really long time, a really, really long time, but it was like math, right? Just because you decided to specialize in calculus didn’t mean you forgot all about addition, right? And math was kind of like magic.

Holly dearly hoped this was the case.

She steadied herself, planted both feet on the floor, and took a deep breath. Concentrated. Raised her hands to gather the strands of magic that coiled and writhed in the air and then…drew it in.

No wonder, she thought, that this had all been stored in an inert artifact. All this power couldn’t be contained in one person, and it likely would cause no amount of trouble in just any ol’ object. It was still coming. It could tear her apart from the inside. It felt like it was starting to already.

As she grit her teeth, as she was brought to her knees, as she sweated out the pain, Holly screamed out, “Where’s the arm,” and LeMarche pushed a table off of him and held it up.

Holly lowered an arm, two fingers pointing directly at her target. Instantly, a bright stream of power shot out and into the skeletal arm, which grew so hot that LeMarche yelped and dropped it, or rather, let go of it as the arm apparently decided not to drop at all. The constant stream of power seemed unending as Holly struggled to keep the line going, keep herself together, keep the power under her control.

And then it was done.

With the power contained, the café seemed blindingly dark. Holly dropped onto her hands as everybody slowly got up, muttering and coughing. Algernon stayed down, now absolutely covered in spilt wine and rather unhappy about it. The Countess righted herself and scuttled over to the sizzling arm of Death.

The arm now had a Presence that it hadn’t held before, an ominous power that seemed to spark as she reached for it. “Careful,” Holly warned as she finally sat up. “Don’t touch the hand.”

The Countess obeyed, picking up the arm by the humerus with two, slender fingers. “And how do we use this…?”

“Just give it here,” Holly said, now on her feet again and trying not to sway. “I’m the only magic user here anyways. I’ll take care of it.” After a moment of contemplation, the Countess handed the arm over.

“Hold up, are you planning on going out alone? You don’t really look too good,” Jessica said, walking up to Holly but making sure she was out of reach of the arm. Holly only glanced towards Algernon, who had stopped fussing over his stained clothes and went back to finishing off the wine with gusto, and then turned towards the door. Nobody stopped her.

You really want to be a big damn hero? Don’t be deluded. You just want attention. You just want to prove him wrong. There’s nothing noble about that.

Holly tightened her grip on the thrumming arm.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

With all that had happened in the past few minutes, the Countess was now plenty certain that the pathetic-looking author really did have some semblance of control, or at the very least, some juicy knowledge that she could use to her advantage. And now that they were all in a state of downtime, it seemed the perfect opportunity to confront him.

LeMarche, on his part, was not entirely happy with the Countess approaching him. Of course, he did know what she wanted, at least in general. And that was part of the problem. So when the amalgam clacked her way over, he pretended to be busy writing. Which he knew wouldn’t stop her at all. And it didn’t.

The Countess leered at him, but at least tried to be friendly about it. “Now what are you doing here, then?”

“Figured I’d get a jumpstart toward writing a happy ending or something,” LeMarche mumbled. Maybe he shouldn’t have made the Countess quite so sharp.

“I see,” said the Countess, trailing a finger on the table that LeMarche was sitting at. It carved a little spiral into the wood. “I assume that means you have an idea about how to kill the Controller?”

LeMarche made a vague sound of non-commitance.

“If you haven’t…I suggest you think of something fast, hm?”

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

When Holly swung the hand at Ouroborous, it passed through, leaving corpses in its wake. But Death didn’t stop at what it touched. It sought out the parents. The children. The parents of parents and the children of children, up until it found nothing more in the family line.

All Ouroborites were related in some way, although sometimes the line abruptly cut off due to a little bit of cannibalism. But still, just one swing of Death’s arm made large cuts into the Ouroborous population. Bodies were dropping everywhere. Ouroborous had been so untouchable before, and now she could bring down an entire cloud, and then some. It was…

…well, she didn’t know.

Death coursed from one Ouroborite to another, passing through effortlessly. More bodies dropped at her feet. At this point, it was only a matter of waiting until Death found every last little bug.

Holly hated waiting. It often meant she couldn’t distract herself from…herself. God, when did she become so awful? Or at least awful at pretending she wasn’t awful?

Ouroborous, for their part, had absolutely no idea what was happening, nor did they care. Sometimes they even descended upon the recently fallen to feed. But although eating had been a viable solution in previous times, it was no match against the hand of Death.

None of them ran from Death. None of them hid. It wasn’t that they were brave. It wasn’t that they were too stupid. They were simply arational. Death had no meaning beyond, perhaps, being a source of food.

And so, the entire species of Ouroborous went extinct.

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.

Show Content

SpoilerWelcome to Tidal Cove, a lovely tourist destination for absolutely no-one! It's packed with such wonderful attractions as...

• A crumbling lighthouse featuring a familiar face chained up and hanging from the wall! That's right, Sir Scarlet is back, and he's not exactly the most well-adjusted tool in the shed these days. He's probably got revenge of some sort or another on his mind, and there's a good chance it's not going to be the well-thought-out kind.
  
• A traditional voodoo lady in a traditional voodoo lady shack! She's got herself all the accoutrements of the stereotypical voodoo profession along with a scrap of paper that may or may not be a recipe for a grand battle (serves 9).
  
• A fog that's less a fog and more a lack of anything! As the tide comes in over the course of the round, the fog'll be coming in as well, but instead of just obscuring things and making stuff damp, it basically makes the ground go away and trees fall into the abyss. What happens if you fall off the edge of the world that the fog demarks? Who knows! Maybe you wash up on the beach again, maybe you end up somewhere else, maybe some third thing happens. You've got the whole round ahead of you to work that out.

Sand in her gears, ink in her joints. The sea was mocking, mocking, begging her: come back my darling, come back my love, I can laugh for the both of us with my throat full of sand, for you and all the other lost things, come back, come back, come back.

Countess scrabbled harder, fingers yielding little screams and little purchase in the sand. Holly and Algernon were out of sight, the only sounds her own sluggish ticking and clicking and that fucking ocean pawing with dreary insistence at her legs. Her voltaic cannon shot errant sparks, she shrieked and thrashed and threatened just about everyone she'd ever met but her legs still wouldn't lift her out of this goddamned fucking damn sand and there.

"Holly." Bitch.

"Help me." It wasn't intended as a question, but the last syllable trailed off unbidden. The elf flinched, and turned back the way she'd come.

"You know fear. You know that I don't feel it. I'm not scared of you or of drowning. Holly. Look at me."

She did, and wished she hadn't, because Countess was right. The full spectrum of anger from resentment to murderous rage rose off the amalgam like steam. Another wave rattled over Countess, the pebbles-on-metal adding harshness to the sound of it receding. Countess slid seaward another half-foot, lenses fixed on Holly.

"You're a machine, or electric, or, or something. I'm pretty sure you and water won't mix."

"No, but it shan't kill me either. And I rrrrrrrsssshcan wait and wait and hate and sssssshkyou, Holly, until Algernon forgets rrrrrrrsssshto breathe or one of you dash your heads open on a sssssshk. Then I'll be there. rrrrrrrssssh Next round. sssssshk And I'll be angry. And rrrrrrrssssh in this shitty miserable corner of nowheresssssshk will tell you how to escape, or to kill the Controller, or kill me. In caserrrrrrrssssh you were still considering."

Holly had edged closer, toeing Countess' first frantic claw marks and still keeping a body-length away. The wave receded, and the machine-woman's legs jutted from the shallows like some alien coral formation.

"I'm going to use your resolve," Holly finally said. "Sue me, but I'm going to need my own for myself to stay convinced this was a good idea."

"Fine."

Holly resolved the resolve into a length of chain, and tossed one end to Countess. A couple minutes' straining and pulling dragged Countess onto more solid ground. By the time Holly had found a suitably action-packed young adult fiction novel to get her pep back, most of Countess' legs were working again.

"Marvellous." Countess nearly sounded her old (creepily chirpy) self again. "Now, would you rather I proceed to get out of your way, or remain in your sight until you find Algernon?"

This turnaround was a bit more than Holly could handle. "I- I'll search the other end of the beach. By myself, I mean. If the both of us washed up there, chances are Algernon did too."

"I'll be off to the tower, then." Countess raised her chin toward the crumbling spire. "It's the quickest way to see the extent of our location."

Holly's first thought was that climbing that thing was probably suicide, then remembered who she was talking to. "Excuse my scepticism, but the Controller wouldn't have dumped us somewhere with a mage's academy over the next hill."

"LeMarche couldn't tell me where the next round would be," chirped Countess, already testing her boulder-climbing prowess. "He did, however, give me some conventions used by the authors when they designed round settings."

"Right." Holly winced as Countess' leg slipped, eliciting a shriek from the rock underfoot. "That Message... guy... thing, he can come tell me if there's anything worth knowing, right?"

Countess didn't skip a beat, though she did miss another step and split a pebble in two. "Of course," she said.

Holly hated beaches. Of course, recently she’d been hating just about everything, but she especially hated beaches, and had for quite some time.

To begin with, she was used to trees, shade; generally, she viewed the sun more as something to stream through the leaves, half-faded by the time it reached the ground, not something to be focused on you full-blast so you could bake your skin into a golden-brown. Then there was the population – either practically nobody was around, leaving her alone with her thoughts (which, frankly, was tedious even before her self-hatred began independently vocalizing), or there were so many people you couldn’t walk three feet without tripping over someone. The latter wouldn’t have been so bad, of course, if there were any good materials around, if she could screw with people, but the beach barely had more to work with than the desert. Sand, shells, seaweed, all basically useless; some people were looking into redirecting the energy from waves into agitation, or vice versa, but that was so obvious, and required such precise timing, that it was basically useless to even try.

“Shit,” she mumbled, withdrawing an arm from the strap of her knapsack and swinging it to her front. She patted it down, and found altogether too much give. She was running low on materials, and she had no idea where the hell she was going to find more. She could take some rocks, maybe? That’d be better than nothing.

Holly shook her head, trying to focus on the task at hand. Simple as following the right signal, which was more or less the same as usual – lots of confusion, bit of sadness, and the interesting addition of anger and betrayal, thankfully fading not that it matters, because you’ll remember no matter what he forgets. Just had to keep walking through the stupid, godawful sand that kept getting in her stupid, godawful shoes. Holly grumbled a bit, but kept trudging onward until she managed to make out a figure lying next to the coast.

Breaking into a run, she quickly realized that Algernon was especially out of sorts; he seemed to be clutching his stomach with one hand and rubbing his temple with the other, and for some reason, there was... some pale purple stuff floating on the water. Maybe it was algae or seaweed or something? She’d definitely seen worse than weird-colored seaweed by now.

“Algy.” No response. She crouched down next to him, repeating, a bit louder this time, “Algernon?” This time he managed to get out a groan. Some of the purple substance dripped out of his mouth in long, thin strands, pooling when it hit the water. Holly winced, wiping his mouth with the sleeve of her dress and pulling him to his feet. “Get the hell up, already. You’re not doing yourself any favors.”

He managed to quietly groan a “where” before lurching and heaving some more onto the sand. After a long pause and a deep breath, he stood up in as tall and balanced a manner as he could (which is to say that he made the town drunk seem to have the finest motor control for miles around) and asked “Where are we?”

Holly sighed, and started walking again, dragging Algernon with her; he put up no resistance. “Hell if I know. Some shitty beach or something. He didn’t really say, uh... anything about it.” In retrospect, that was more than a little odd. Had he said less before last round, too? No, that was her imagination, trying to form patterns where there were none, trying to find hope where none could exist. Still, to just dump them here, no explanation...

“Fuck,” she whispered, then walked a few more steps before repeating herself much more loudly. Algernon jerked back, barely managing not to tumble over entirely; a couple nearby gulls flew off into the distance. “He’s pulling something, he’s got to be, the piece of shit.” It occurred to her that that statement could just as easily apply to LeMarche as the Controller, and thinking about it further, she wasn’t sure who she meant to direct it towards. Maybe both of them.

Holly took a deep breath, trying to focus on what she did know about the situation, and narrowed it down to about four things:

1. Wherever they were, it contained a shitty beach, a forest, that tower way over there, and some kind of houseboat-cabin thing, what the fuck was that even supposed to be?
   
2. Algernon was vomiting god only knows what and she really would like him to stop.
   
3. Countess was somewhere else. The tower, if she could be trusted as if you can fucking trust anyone, as if she’s not having the exact same thoughts about you but honestly where the fuck else would she have gone and why would it matter? Her guard was up, it wasn’t like she was getting ambushed any time soon.
   
4. They were completely fucked, it was all hopeless, and damned if she’d give up while the three of them were still drawing breath.
   

Sighing, she made a beeline for the houseboat, Algernon’s limp body leaving a trail in the sand that his mouth occasionally saw fit to decorate with a splash of mauve. It wasn’t like they had reason to go much anywhere else.
------------------
Betrayal. He’d always thought he would hear the word a lot more than he’d experience it. That’s what people always said, wasn’t it? The one thing nobles had to worry about more than soldiers and commoners was betrayal.

Of course, then he got lucky. He’d always been lucky, they said. Lucky enough to survive a battle that left five thousand Christians and eight thousand Moors dead in the mud, without an inch of territory gained or lost. Lucky enough to win a tournament when he knew he didn’t deserve it, all because the sun was improperly apportioned and got in the other man’s eyes. Lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time when a giant barely triumphed over ten men, and become famed for the killing blow as if the poor bastard wouldn’t have bled out by that evening anyway. And lucky enough to become immortal, of course.

He took it in stride. Things didn’t always go perfectly; his fellow survivors and his vanquished rivals showed no anger towards him, and that was all he needed. And he truly did help people; if ever a knight truly held himself to chivalry, Arnold was that knight. But rising from lowborn to lord and protector was unlucky in that one respect; it exposed one to tremendous betrayals.

He watched as Merlin, the wisest man between Ireland and Arabia, was trapped, seemingly forever, in a simple oak of all things. He’d tried to rescue him, more than once, but gave up after a couple centuries. He watched as the knights turned against each other, even Arthur and Lancelot, as the enchantress took their flaws and saw them amplified and applied wherever most harmful, until the Round Table could no longer last. He watched as the kingdom descended into civil war, and he watched as Harald and The Bastard massacred each other’s people.

He watched the coronation, where The Bastard, reviled, was now The Conqueror, beloved. Some still dissented, but many bit their tongues, and most didn’t care at all. Better a Norman yoke than fields unplowed and ravaged, his uncle said.

He traveled, and heard about men of all sorts constantly scheming against each other for power or vengeance. Even great religious leaders, meant to be paragons to their people, getting their positions through subterfuge only to be similarly undone.

And yet, through all of it, he retained hope. Because some men were not betrayers, he told himself. Some men are honorable, some men keep their word, some men will go to the ends of the earth to uphold their duty and protect their people.

But he realized now he was no man. He was a god among men, and all because of luck; he had no need to worry about betrayal, for what could any man do to him that time would not ensure? And this – consciously or otherwise – had comforted him, for he had once believed that no physical pain could be worse than the scars of betrayal, and if that was true, he was as good as invincible.

But he was wrong. Physical pain, it turned out, could be far worse than anything else, and when the torturer had centuries of practice and could shape reality to his will, it could break even the strongest man. The door opened with a creak, and the light shined on him. It seemed like forever since he had been free of almost total darkness. For a moment, he thought it might be a relief, but he quickly realized that it only made him feel worse.
------------------
Holly grumbled as she waded towards the cabin, struggling to keep Algernon over her shoulder. The outfit looked nice enough, but as soon as it was put through a proper test, it became very clear that it was made as an amateur project; the materials did not play well with water. She idly wondered if it was a bad idea to leave her bag on the sand, but decided that two soggy dresses and a bunch of ruined reagents was hardly any better than one soggy dress and shit all else.

Upon reaching the porch/dock/whatever the hell you called the damn thing, she flung her cargo aboard before clambering on herself. “Hey, try not to get any of that... whatever-that-is on the whatever-you-call-this-thing, alright, Algy?” Algernon responded by groaning, shuddering, and totally ignoring this request. “Right, okay, great.”

Holly sighed and approached the door, but it opened up before she got a chance to knock. In front of her was a fairly small woman, clearly aged but gracefully so; she looked up as she wrung out a rag. Something about her eyes made Holly feel uneasy – not worried or suspicious, per se, just ever-so-slightly on edge. She spoke softly, yet her voice seemed to drown out the waves. “Oh, you two. Come in, then.”

Holly stared at her in bafflement. “Aren’t you, uh, going to ask why we’re here or anything?”

Delphine responded with a humorless chuckle and waved the two of them in, heading back inside before her visitor could protest any further. “I think I have much more important questions at hand, ones I’m not sure you can answer. And besides, why waste time on particulars when you already have the broad strokes?”

Holly didn’t accept the invitation until she was sure that yes, the strange little lady meant both of them, including the one currently painting her porch with whatever the hell kept coming out of his mouth.

Delphine assured her that it was alright by going out, dipping her fingers into the purple gunk, and dabbing it on her lip. “It’s only silk,” she said to Holly, who now felt like joining Algernon in barfing. “I can clean it. I’ve got something he can drink.”

Frankly, Holly didn’t think Algernon could drink anything with this constant stream of purple strands pouring out of his mouth. But still, she propped him vaguely upwards once more and led him inside, hoping that he wouldn’t drip on her. It was difficult getting him into the chair, but eventually she got him in a position where he was leaning rather than falling and that was good enough for her. It was good enough for Delphine too, who turned around with a steaming something-or-other and pressed a spoon into Algernon’s mouth with all the practice of a recent mother. Algernon recognized medicine when he saw it and somehow managed to get it down his throat. Holly watched him as he sighed, choked violently, spat out a large glob of silk, and gently slammed his head against the table.

“Woah,” Holly cried out, her arm jerking automatically to Algernon’s shoulder. For a few panicky seconds, she thought he had been poisoned; but then Algernon flopped a sweaty arm upwards and attempted to shove her away. He didn’t have quite the force to do so, but Holly let go to be polite.

“I jus’ wann,” he slurred, turning his head slightly against the filthy table, “gouda sleep.” And with that barely intelligible request, he closed his eyes and made the face of someone who wasn’t quite unconscious, but willing to give it a shot.

Nothing was coming out of his mouth anymore, so Holly turned her attention back to her surroundings and wrinkled her nose. Was this a voodoo hut? It looked like a voodoo hut. Tasteless and filthy and full of disgusting, useless reagents that did nothing but besmirch the idea of magic. And unfortunately, it smelled like one too. Lovely. Delphine turned around from a bubbling pot and Holly forced an impassive face.

“Would you mind telling me why you were expecting us?”

“I wasn’t expecting you,” said Delphine with one long shrug, “you simply weren’t a surprise.”

Holly restrained herself from shaking the old woman until her bones fell apart. “Okay. Why weren’t we surprising, then?”

This had no answer, and as Holly waited, Delphine only glanced at a grimy little sheet. Her restraint was beginning to fade.

“What’s that?” Holly asked as she clenched her hands behind her back.

Delphine shot a secretive smile. “It’s a recipe for – “

“You know what, never mind,” said Holly, who was definitely not going to be drawn into some explanation of voodoo drivel, not now.

Algernon turned his head and groaned. His hands bumped the table as he struggled to get them to his temples. Instinctively, Holly said, “Go to sleep.”

“I caaaaaaaaaaaan’t,” said the muffled voice of Algernon. “Too much noooise.”

“Are we too loud? We can – “

“Nnnnnoooooooooooooooo,” said Algernon, and Holly remembered why she hated children. “Not that, too much noise in my head.” Like limp tentacles, Algernon’s arms gestured towards the air where his head would have been if it wasn’t face flat on the table. “I’m feeling people. In my head. It’s like flowers if flowers were heavy. And in my head. And also loud.” With his explanation done, his arms flopped back onto the table with a damp thwap. Holly could only stare.

“That made no sense. At all.”

Algernon burbled out something that was a groan and a sigh at the same time. “Is this telepathy? I think this is telepathy. I might have telepathy.”

“Why,” said Holly, glancing towards Delphine accusatorily, but the voodoo woman was at her large pot with her back to her.

Algernon presumably tried to bop the worm on his head but missed and his fist wavered over his shoulder instead. “Turn it oooooooooff. Stooooooooooop.”

This was going nowhere. Holly turned towards Delphine with great reluctance. “Do you happen to have some extra clothes I could have?”

-

The clothes were about as shitty as she had expected and didn’t fit well at all. It sagged in all the wrong places and in general made Holly feel profoundly old. But it was dry, or at least drier, and probably more practical. There wasn’t any private spot Holly could go to change, but Delphine had offered to hold up a blanket in front of her and Algernon didn’t look to be fully conscious anyways and it wasn’t like the tiny cottage was rocking a lot, just bobbing a little. While she was at it, she cleaned herself off as well as she could. Which wasn’t very well, considering her surroundings.

“I don’t suppose you have anything for him?” Holly asked, gesturing towards Algernon before actually looking towards him. In the time she took to change, he had gotten out a rather damp bottle of wine and was now trying to drink it while keeping his chin stubbornly on the table.

The bottle popped out of his grip with a worryingly disgusting sound. Holly’s prepared lecture transmuted into something between a ‘yeeurgh’ and an ‘eeew’ and she immediately set it down out of Algernon’s reach to wipe her hands.

“Givit back.”

“No!” Holly barked, dipping her hands in the basin of ocean water that Delphine thoughtfully provided. “I already have too many shitty problems, I don’t need a drunk idiot on top of that!”

“But it’s haaaard,” he sobbed, arms reaching for the bottle. The next instant, a toy claw appeared in his hands. Holly knocked it away. It also detached with great reluctance.

“Look, you had telepathy before and you weren’t like this! Can you just stop acting like a child?”

“’S not th’ same,” Algernon mumbled. “Back then, ‘s like she was just…tellin’ me stuff. Now, ‘s like I’m full of people. Four people is too much people to be full of. I hate this.” And with this declaration made, he fumbled for his bag. Holly confiscated this as well.

“’She?’” Her first instinct was to glance towards the worm on Algernon’s head. She tried to tell herself that it was just her imagination that it looked like it had somehow drilled further into Algernon’s skull. Then, her mind caught on something else. “’Four?’”

Let’s see. Countess, stupid voodoo lady, herself. “Is that including you?”

Algernon managed to shake his head, which was only impressive because his chin was still glued to the table. Holly turned towards Delphine, who had turned her attention back to her dumb recipe for whatever the shit. “Who else is here?”

Delphine responded with a broken grin as she held up a really shitty-looking and waterlogged doll. Holly stopped bothering to hide her contempt.

“Yeah, okay. Thanks. C’mon Algernon, let’s find a way to get outta here.” Holly pulled Algernon up by the sleeve and resisted the urge to wipe her hands again. His arm felt strange underneath the fabric, with a weird sort of consistency that was unnatural for arms, at least as far as she was aware of. Thankfully, Algernon was loads better at standing upright than he had been a little while ago. He made for the wine again but Holly transformed it into a burst of recklessness that filled her up with a cozy warmth. Slinging both their bags over her shoulder, she dragged him out, still careful to hold the sleeve. Delphine watched them leave, looking as surprised as when she had received them, that is, not at all.

“It will be good if you all left sooner rather than later,” the voodoo woman called out helpfully, making it apparent that by ‘left’ she wasn’t just referring to her house. Holly grabbed a bottle of something or other on the way out as soon as the old lady turned around again. Hopefully, it was something really important.

Once outside on the sand, Algernon started to protest. “Wait a sec, I can’t walk like this.”

“Walk like what?” Holly asked, even though Algernon was getting into a bad habit of giving her decidedly unsatisfactory answers, or at least answers that she really didn’t want to hear. In response, Algernon struggled to kick off his shoes, which came off with a slimy thok. It was only then that Holly noticed that they were practically overflowing with grey-purple gunk.

She let go of Algernon and tried to back away and peer closer at the same time. Algernon squirmed under her scrutiny. “Are you sweating silk?”

A real horrorshow post

Countess' legs and fingers were a mess of scratches; a back foot had almost certainly been bent out of shape when she'd slipped and got it stuck between two boulders.

The lighthouse door was halfway rotted through, squeaking in damp and swollen protest against the poured-concrete floor. They were too heavy to slam open, too warped with age to shove any more open than a few begrudging feet, a slender crack between two shades of gloom through which the Countess snuck.

Clickety tick click sshclick, one foot dragging just enough to scrape the floor.

Once upon a time, there had been something on a planet called Bacchaus, something which would laugh if you called it a lady. First thing in the global evening, before the roar-drone of the street sweepers passed the Glitterati hive, her hive, of her rats and her sisters; Paige-but-call-me-that-and-I'll-kill-you-haha would crawl out onto the balcony, and taste the air.

She breathed sand and salt and mist, sucked drew it in between the myriad teeth of her gears and joints.

She breathed the night to come, laughed-shrieked-sang to the still-sleeping hive of the clubs they'd storm, the fights they'd start, the turf the streets to carve.

Paige was no prophet. She made those nights, realised them.

She'd been such a fucking child back then. Tiny little Bacchaus, her birthplace and birthright. A footnote to her career, a footnote of a footnote of a footnote again in the vast uncaring multiverse. A Countess without her county. A lighthouse without light.

The tower was a husk, exposed from above to leaden miserly clouds that'd never relinquish their rain, never let the sun shine through. Half the spiral staircase had fallen, slumping upon itself like a dead snake's spine. It all loomed in a way that implied it should've fallen in on itself, but held itself together long enough to give Countess an unfriendly welcome.

A mildewed rug muffled the snick-tick-sshnick-tick-click, gave her pause to look down and spy three rotten planks that might've been a trapdoor once. The ring came out with a squeak and screech, so Countess resorted to kicking it until it gave way to a staircase, leading into truer gloom and a cobwebbed door.

Something behind the door moaned, and the corpse of the spiral stairs above trickled dust.

Countess ventured down. The distant sigh of the ocean was interspersed with the occasional, approaching splash.

---

"That is not normal," Holly explained to Algernon, for all the good that'd do. "Is it the worm doing that to you?"

Algernon shook his head; uttered some vocal midpoint of a whimper and a groan. Sitting dejectedly in a steadily-spreading puddle of the stuff, Holly had to convince herself he wasn't actually melting into it. A splash, out in the sea somewhere, gave her something to think about, and she spun around and tried not to step in anything. Shit. Where'd all this fog come from? Holly's sum knowledge of weather systems came from a meteromancer neighbour back in Wizard School, who spent more time fucking around with dorm-sized thunderstorms than properly studying.

The fog had -splash- swept around the cove, swallowing up the two spits and conceding Holly only the briefest glance at the lighthouse's upper reaches, before that too -splash- disappeared. It seemed to roll in from every direction at once, tumbling and slithering over the shore in a way that certainly -splash- wasn't natural.

Holly stared into the fog. Something big smacked the water behind her, and suddenly -splash- Algernon's assorted excretions seemed -splash- pretty benign. She -splash- grabbed him by the arm, snatched -splash- up her satchel of -splash- reagents, and -splash splash splash splash- waded back the way she'd come, back to Delphine's boat, hissing threats to Algernon if he didn't fucking stop flopping around and the splashing was getting louder and closer and it sounded like half the fucking island was collapsing behind her when Holly slammed her bags on the porch, hauled her soaked and shaking self and two bootfuls of silt aboard, and after all that dragging a limply defiant Algernon onto the boards beside her.

Holly's hand came away with an armload of purple slime. She wiped it off on Algenon's shirt. He was staring back at the shore, or more correctly, staring into the unbroken expanse of fog. The splash of rocks and trees and god knows who or what else falling apart and hitting the water continued, but the tiny circle of visible ocean didn't so much as ripple.

From behind them came a more distant tone, like something collapsing and the faintest wail. Holly spun around, and Delphine standing where she hadn't been half a second ago was a bit much for Holly's nerves. Algernon yelped as the pool of silk-and-seawater he was dripping froze over with some forcibly-expunged fear.

"That'll be the tower," murmured Delphine, unreadable as ever. Holly tried to peer around her, make sense of anything in the fog, but nope. Just a shitty wall of shitty impenetrable fog and the sound of an island getting devoured from the bottom up. Was Countess out there? Well, she fucking had to be, now, didn't she?

Algernon whimpered, and Holly seized the opportunity to converse with someone who wasn't Delphine with her barely-hidden little smirk. "Algernon. Your worm, can it still hear Countess?"

The worm wriggled a bit under the scrutiny. "Two people," Algernon mumbled, morose.

"Shit." Delphine had tottered back inside again. "Hey!" Holly yelled from the doorway, not stepping into Delphine's house again if she could help it. "What the fuck is this fog?"

Delphine looked up from the hooks, shuffling the unoccupied ones aside with the worm and the herbs. "You needn't worry." The rag doll and the music box remained above the cauldron, gathering condensation from the rising vapour. Holly sighed explosively.

"Uh, no, I certainly need should worry. I'm sick of smirky assholes knowing more about me than I know about me, and I want an explanation without cauldrons or curses or whatever other half-baked magic you think you're doing."

Delphine hmmmmed, ladled out two bowls of soup from an auxiliary cauldron and passed one to Holly. "I suppose you can stay a little longer. The fog clears in an hour or two."

---

Holly was fuming and ready to do something unpleasant by about ten minutes in. The soup wasn't the worst thing by a long shot; it was a better meal than the salad from the convention despite altogether too much seaweed. Algernon and Delphine managed to combine into something worse than a single conversation partner, and literally nothing except the fucking boat existed. She felt powerless and pissed off and about ready to choke on the silence.

Holly wondered if this was hell.

She'd downgraded to a Category Purgatory by the time a vague suggestion of hills eked its way from the mist. The rhythm of waves on the beach eased back like a volume dial being turned. Algernon sat up a bit at the noise, but looked in the opposite direction. A greyness in the shape of a lighthouse-adorned point emerged from the slightly-lighter greyness. Algernon shuddered; Holly chose to interpret that as him finally getting a chill from his rather disgusting coat.

"I'm leaving," Holly announced, gathering up her skirts and bags in a futile attempt to not get drenched again. "If it's going to be the Swamp all over again because Countess doesn't have the courtesy of having a proper spine to break, I'd rather find her and-"

"Don't."

"I'm joking," Holly rolled her eyes. "Christ. She's probably stuck in mud or something inane."

"Nnnnnnnooo," whined Algernon, flailing a rubbery arm, but Holly had already begun wading for the shore. The worm dug its teeth in, in what was meant to be a sympathetic gesture.

---

She didn't even make it halfway round the point before she heard the yelling, a hysterical near-roar that certainly wasn't Countess, but felt naggingly familiar. Holly pulled out one of Delphine's kitchen knives, if only to feel better, then took a couple more steps.

This was a horrible plan. The mist still insisted on sticking around, slithering off and away and down like it hadn't planned on moving until Holly showed up. The beach had been wiped clean like the tide had rolled in and out, conspicuously untouched.

Something slammed against the lighthouse doors from the inside, before a familiar wince-inducing skittering and a whole bunch more yelling. Holly figured it best to announce her presence from a safe distance.

"Countess!" Holly bellowed. She thought for a second that the screams had drowned her out, before a familiar set of lenses glinted at her round the gap between the doors. The amalgam made a noise of dull surprise, before something yanked her out of sight again. There was another unpleasant half-minute of listening to what probably equated to a malpractice suit, before a bit more steel-feet-on-concrete happened and something was bodily thrown out the door.

A body, to be precise. Countess came staggering out shortly after, to stab the poor fucker (who was still moving, somehow) through the back with a leg, another leg, leave a couple of casual gouges across his neck, and shoot him point-blank between the shoulders with her spark cannon. The spark chamber on her shoulder whined and shattered, shooting little flecks of glass. One of them landed a metre or so from Holly, before melting into a dull grey liquid.

"Lllggglghk who I found," said Countess. Other than the graunching note where the "look" should've been, her tone was organ-box as ever.

"You- uh-"

"I'm vvVvvvvvfine," Countess managed, through the side of her face that was still the right way out. She even grinned a bit, to show Holly she meant it. "Perrrrkfvvvfek-k-k-k-tly fine."