The sun is dying, dying like you. Slowly ascending, it looks more like it's descending to you, its reddish glow dripping down the sky like the yolk of an egg that has been smashed against some cosmic table. The low-hanging morning-star bathes the grey and leaden clouds in a scarlet light. Fitting to your current situation.
And you? You're bleeding out in a Roman alley like a bitch.
You always wanted to be something. You always expected to be something. Through your entire life, success has graced you. No, you have taken success and made it what it is; rightfully yours. But tonight, you tried too much, and this time you bit more than you could bear and in response your failure perforated your lungs, broke both your arms and a shoulder, fucked up your throat, tore off a leg and left you with the garbage to cry out your sorrows like the failure you are. You're not actually sure whether or not you are crying right now though. There is definitely something liquid dripping down your cheeks, but you're not sure if that's tears or blood from the gashes in your face. You're not sure you want to know either, but then, you didn't want to be thrown aside like a discarded toy in a shady alley you should never have entered anyways.
What's that? A cough? Don't cough too hard, you might break something. If you haven't already, that is.
The dirt of the alley is really getting to you at this point. You don't know if it's hallucination or the last few metres of a dying mind trying to run its way to the goal marker, but everything seems so clear to you right now. It's none of that shit about life flashing before you, nah, you're seeing the centipedes and spiders in the corners, the true inhabitants of the hellish steel-and-concrete superstructures surrounding you. It was built by people, yeah, that's true, but the people built for the ants and the centipedes, the spiders and the flies. A mound of blood and shit the maggots cavort in as the people wear suits and crowns, calling themselves consuls and kings. Someone once wrote a poem about this; all man makes is deserts and war, and someday there won't be more wars and only desert. You can feel something inside you collapse, you think that might be your other lung, do you care anymore, child of dust?
Your old man always had it figured out, it was all a big cosmic battle to him; truth and lies. You can speak the truth, he would say, or you can be a liar, and there's really no middle ground between those. As you lie here, it's hard not to to consider yourself an an idiot in comparison to him. Success is what you've strived for your entire life and what you've justly received, but here you are, lying and dying on the pavement. Meanwhile, him and his moved all the way from Iran to reach the Eternal City and you spent your time:
Article:
Choose one:
[ ] Fighting Pointless Battles: You are a violent girl, you've always been so. You spent your time humiliating the chaff of McDojos and catching glimpses of violent enlightenment in the clarity of fist bones breaking and things giving way to the strength of your body. Your mother once told you to get a boyfriend and you laughed, you were sure that no boy in high school would date you and university sure didn't help either. People didn't fight you, you broke people. Well, until tonight. Haha.
[ ] Repeating Tired Arguments: You are an argumentative girl, you've always been so. You spent your time playing devil's advocate and toying with arguments. When you speak with enough force and power, everyone listens in the end. Reason surrenders where emotion wins, and when you speak? Emotion always wins. You were going to become a politician, you had already planned it all out. Power was your desire, and you were very good at grasping for it. Well, until you reached too far.
[ ] Reading Useless Texts: You are an inquisitive girl, you've always been so. You spent your time researching everything you could about everything. Your mind would make leaps of logic and shifts of association and you would forget to sleep in the mad fervor of your interests. You would never truly master your interests, but it is not most girls who learn to speak conversational Turkish in a few weeks of feverish obsession. Your parents were sure that university would ensure your eventual success. So were you.
[ ] Mistrusting Close Friends: You are not a trusting girl, you never were. You spent your days lying and cheating, never exactly on the side of the law. In high school, people knew came to you to get access to things they shouldn't get their hands on. Now? Well now everyone comes to you to get access to things they shouldn't have their hands on. You're not some back-alley dealer, you know people, many people, and you know how to get everything. It's just a matter of whom to ask.
[ ] Playing Mindless Games: You are a popular girl, you've always been so. Your life has been one long search for excellence. You were head cheerleader, most popular girl and queen bitch par excellence in high school, and when you reached the law school that you knew lay in your destiny, little changed. Little miss perfect's royal entourage of fawning admirers never shrank, nor did the hilarity you found in playing them off against each other. Oh, what joy.
It's honestly kind of embarrassing in hindsight. Despite your life-long struggle for success, most of it is hard to think of as anything but a failure. Maybe there really is some truth in what they say about the next generation always being weaker than the one that spawned it. Born into the niceties which your parents spent their lives to create, you never knew the real labour of their craft, entitled to all the paradisiacal fruits it bore for you. You thought you struggled and fought, but did you really? And honestly, did you really care? You remember countless evenings of your mother or your father trying to instill the proper filial duty in you, telling you of their own hardships or what they had worked for. You mostly thought they were entitled shits and that you didn't owe them anything. This, you stand by; you don't owe anything to anyone. Your soul is yours alone. Little good it did you in the end.
Regardless, here you are, lying in a dirty concrete alley in downtown Rome, bleeding out your lungs and apparently also your life story. Maybe it's true what they say about life flashing past your eyes at the moment of death. Honestly you had never really thought about it. Most people don't consider dying in an alley as a very high possibility on their list of things that they should worry about. Eventually life taught you better, unfortunate that this valuable lesson came with the approaching cessation of your existence. It's hard not to think back to what brought you here, your entire reason for lying broken and bereaved in this shitty alley of greys, browns and bloody red.
Well, it would be a funny story to tell the kids you're never getting.
You're bleeding out in a Roman alley and you're incredibly bored. So bored. There's nothing to do here and all you have to do is wait until the injuries bring an end to you. In the flickering half-light of street lights that haven't seen a repairman for years, a fly bewilders itself into your senses, flying into the shining cone of the lamp. But the fly, like you has made a mistake. Betrayal! The shining glory of the light cone hid a spider's web and the eight-legged arachnid descends, angel-like to your feverish senses, to behold its prey. With practiced weaver's legs, the creature wraps its meal in silken strands as it bites deep into it. Perhaps if you weren't dying, you would appreciate the poetry more.
Oh well, lights out, time to go. As fascinating as the waste and decay around you is, it seems like the light is dimming. It's getting harder to focus, and are the lamplights losing power or is it getting darker here? It's summer, but everything feels so cold. You try to move your arms and you're rewarded with a spike of pain, oh right, you forgot they were broken, guess you can forget to scream too. You tried screaming in the start and no one came, so why try again now? You're feeling tired anyways, so if you just close your eyes…
"Hey you!" A male voice calling out to you. Not far away.
Through your perforated lungs, yet despite a hint of pain, you whisper, almost inaudibly, "Who is there?"
"I came here to tell you to stop dying like a bitch, so maybe if you could stop doing that?." The voice replies, the tone register reminding you of a junkie or some lowlife. Heh, ironic, you're not exactly high class yourself.
Weakly forcing your eyes open to meet the source of your irritation, you're met with more or less exactly what you expected: unkempt and likely also unwashed, he is not exactly a sight for sore eyes. Sitting on the lid of a dumpster, right leg pulled up and the other dangling free, his right arm lazily arranged on his knee and the left balancing him on his precarious position. His dirty black hair frames his dark-skinned face like some lion's mane, although significantly less majestic and his bloodshot eyes meet yours, seemingly without a care in his world. A bored smile plays on his lips, as if he couldn't care less about your current situation. His clothes are hard to really pin down, as if seen from the corner of an eye, even when you're staring directly at them. Only the vaguest features can be made out, but you get the feeling that they don't resemble something people have worn in any time you've learnt about in various history classes. His skin is covered in minor and greater bruises, his uprolled sleeves clearly letting you see his arms and something that could best be described as an intimate love affair with the asphalt he must have scraped along a hundred times. He lazily flicks his fingers with his right hand, making a small rhythm eerily reminiscent of a human heartbeat.
Your eyes are inevitably drawn to his forehead, where an eight-spoked miniature sun in bright viridian green awaits, casting his entire body in its eerie, yet glorious light. Staring at it too long makes your eyes hurt, burning the memory into your eyelids as you blink the fire away. If the rest of his body made you think of a junkie or a lowlife, the sun upon his brow makes you think of emperors or a prophet of the Lord. An angel, perhaps? The disparity between the imperious solar display and the man himself is bizarre.
"What the fuck are you staring at?" The reverie is broken and your thoughts are turned away from suns and glory to the Roman alley currently set to become your grave and the irritation that sits in front of you.
"What the fuck are you staring at?" You retort intelligently. Fuck this guy already.
"I'm staring at a girl who told her old man that she wasn't spoiled 'cause being spoiled was when you had something you hadn't earned yourself. And here she is, bleeding out like a bitch 'cause she bit off more than she could chew. Ain't that a sight?" He replies mockingly.
"Fuck off. So what are you supposed to be, an angel or something? Go back and tell Him I don't care about His ten-step programme." You throw back. Here you were looking forward to dying alone and unloved, and then this fucker shows up to mock you. He sure as hell wasn't here to save you.
"Nah, I ain't no angel. She comes later." He cryptically responds, still with that mocking tone in his voice. "Still, I am here to offer you a choice and one of the possibilities is Hell, so I s'pose I've got that part pinned down."
Heedless of any possible objections of yours, he continues, "You were gonna be everything, y'know? Not gonna bow for any of this shit. You were gonna change the fucking world, and here you're calling yourself a failure 'cause you fucked up one time too many and it's a big nasty world out there that ain't got time for one spoiled little princess' dreams if she ain't got the cajones to back them up."
"So you're lyin' here, crying your heart out as if that's gonna help you for shit in five mins when the last neuron in your brain fires. Boo hoo. Ain't that unfair?"
You genuinely do not know what to respond to this, you are utterly struck speechless by this man, this junkie's utter disrespect for the fact that you are literally dying right now.
In a state of shock, you simply reply, "Y-yeah! I do think that's unfair, and what are you gonna do about it?" In the utter strangeness of the situation, or simply because you're literally talking to a hallucination, you don't really mind that the guy's body has caught fire, which is currently eating him up. You don't mind that it's eating the dumpster too, or the alley or you. That seems natural.
"Not a damn fucking thing." He flicks his fingers and laughs, the lazy smile on his face turning into a grin. "But she will." He says, the flames all but consuming him.
"I've been called Ravana before. Be seeing you girl." Even as the flames lick around his face and caress his body, consuming him bit by bit, he gets an ironic last word off. Fuck this guy, you hope your brain stops soon so you won't have to see him again.
And that is when SHE comes.
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
It begins slowly, springing out of the nowhere-aether of the nightly air. A vision out of nothing, a Fata Morgana produced by the final guttering sparks of neurons firing in a dying braincase. A greenish, viridian glow beginning in the very heart of the flames, where Ravana's green sun shone, licking the walls and dirt. It's too pure for this world, too clean. The impurity of the Eternal City cannot help but catch aflame and crumble like burning paper in comparison with its radiant glory.
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
A wildfire of emeralds, dancing like the evening fire of Saint John, engulfing the alley, terrible and majestic! Consuming all within your vision and forcing your eyes to open wide, the roaring thunder from within the flame drowning all lesser sounds, drowning you. You are swimming and greatness is your ocean, the ocean is made of emerald and fire, the fire of truth. Truth and lies. The deceptions of the world before you must retreat as you gaze upon the silhouette of the dancing figure in the nimbus-gyre of swirling flames before you. At the core of the flames SHE stands.
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
SHE is like a dancer, the ballerina that dances at the centre of the flames, a wild and unrestrained performer, innocent in HER resplendency. There is nothing but the dance to HER, the slender limbs, the glowing visage, the flowing hair, caught in the eternity of the dance. Yet SHE stares at you, eyes of fire and a face like the shining full moon. Through the roar of the flames you can hear HER voice, elegant yet overpowering; restrained, yet so like an angel of the Lord.
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
You understand, it is an offer, a proposal, the choice Ravana offered. It needs not end here, the fires could consume you, purify you, free you. SHE would set a crown upon you and name you Prince of the Earth, demiurge and demigoddess, divinity and diva. You would never need to bow to another being, the strings of the cosmos you would play with your left hand, the sun you would hold in your right hand. All grievances and slights against you, you would set right. All you would need to do is accept HER bargain.
Die as the fires consume your pathetic, broken body or be a good girl and make the right decision:
Choose fighting for the God's empty throne. Choose the Ten Thousand Hells. Choose the Yama Kings. Choose the Throne of Want. Choose desire and raw passion. Choose ascension. Choose an eternity of ambition. Choose hellish enlightenment. Choose the Wheel of Ages. Choose the quailing earth. Choose the trembling heavens. Choose the keys to the kingdom. Choose the Sixth Age.
Choose Royalty.
Choose Exaltation.
You've already made your choice, you realize, and the flames consume you. Oh, it is a good pain, but it is not the end.
You smile, you can definitely think of something you will do. Oh, yes you can.
Trigger warning: If you have chronophobia (like me lol) or are afraid of upsetting descriptions of maggots, please do not read this update without caution.
Chrysalis Grotesque
Hell is other people.
An old and common saying, you think, but not many people understand the real truth to it. Hell isn't other people because they are frustrating to be near or because they are annoying or because they dislike you, not even because they might be Ravana. Hell is other people because of perception. It is an inevitability that misunderstandings will occur between two people and their different understandings of each other. What then about fifty people? A hundred people? A thousand? This has always been to your great consternation and joy as a natural attractor of people. You were always on top of the social hierarchy, so you could only see the hell unfolding beneath you, how the royal subjects of the incontestable queen of bitches played games with each other, schemed behind each other's backs, ruined their own friendships, made themselves more miserable, all for a shot of being with her for a minute, a second.
You thought this would change when you left your expensive private school for university, but if anything it became worse. People did not stop committing social suicide for your amusement, now it was young adults doing it instead of kids. People who might otherwise be intelligent, be smart, be understanding and empathetic. You saw them do the worst of things. The road to hell is paved with good intentions, they say, but people weren't exactly pining for reaching hell. Perhaps you were their heaven? The road to their very own heaven was paved with the worst of deeds.
It is thus to your great bliss that the place which you find yourself in has absolutely no one. Perhaps, you think, this is the blast shadow of the fires. Or some limbo in the middle of nowhere, where you will spend eternity. That thought doesn't bother you too much right now, it wouldn't be hard to spend eternity here, away from the unfairness of the world, away from the pain of your body, away from all things. You would float here, because you're not really sure if your feet are touching anything, nor are you sure if you really can be said to be in any conventional sense. Perhaps your eyes are merely closed, and the world would reveal itself to be different were you to open them? You should try that.
You open your eyes.
Fire.
Two stars of emerald once hovered in a dark void, beholding everything and yet beholding nothing. For in every direction which their light fell, it fell on nothing. Not even darkness, for darkness is merely the absence of light. There was nothing there, only the light of the two green suns. In realizing this paradox, that there could be no darkness in this heart of nothingness, the stars shone brighter and the light fell upon a great secret: in Is Not, they found that most high of treasures, Is.
A bright flash and a girl stands upon a ground of eternal snow, or is it ashes? Cold winds touch her skin, but she does not feel them. She stands naked and without animus on a rocky, frozen earth; a motionless doll with no meaning to her existence. Wind-borne flakes of ash or snow slowly begin to cover her shoulders and rest in her hair, which she seems not to notice. Why is she here? Has she no purpose anymore? Did the fire of her fury lose its warmth? Gutter out and die like so many things in this benighted realm, that is the shadow of all things? Most empty of all is her eyes, which are dead and without the glamour of life, dumb and dull. Like herself. The only light within them is the reflected light of the green stars above.
So, the doll stands for five kalpas, just as dumb and just as lifeless, seeing nothing and being seen only be the twin stars of hell above it. All manners of skittering shadows explore it and find it to be just as bleak and lifeless as the rocks which they dance upon, shadows cast by nothing. The doll does not notice them, how could it ever do so? It is only a doll. Incapable of acting or thinking, it can only accept what is done to it, for that is the nature of the doll; a toy for others.
Another kalpa passes and the cold winds knock over the doll and the stars see it no more, as cold ashes cover its body over innumerable years. Now, not even the skittering shadows know where it is. They say that the ancestors of their ancestors knew that there was a strange thing where now there are mountains, but who are they to say if they were right or wrong? Now there are mountains there and to their lives which are as candle-flames to the seemingly eternal stars, they might as well have always been there.
Four scores kalpas pass and the stars compress, unable to support their own burning magnificence anymore, they first grow to enormous size, scorching the surface in red incandescence and revealing the dull beneath. They burn its body, leaving its beautiful dark skin scorched and blackened, leaving its once-vibrant face a husk. In the end, the stars crumble upon themselves, the emerald sisters being left as nothing but tiny specks rotating around each other, too old and withered to keep their fire burning. The doll is buried again beneath the ashes, and the shadow of all things is dark and cold again, the two stars of emerald fire reduced to mere seconds in its eternity of nothingness. What is a heroic soul when compared to the eternity of the universe?
A female voice, "No!"
A shout, a scream, who dares to interrupt the nothingness? Who will be forgotten?
The doll looks at the stars, the now-white specks that had once gazed upon it so many ages ago. It weakly raises a single arm from an endless silver desert towards the heavens and grasps for the two pinpricks so far above. Perhaps the doll's dull, dumb eyes realize that its endeavour is fruitless, that it will be covered once again, that there is no room for its theatricalities in this nowhere-place.
The doll does not. She does not.
The hand reaches the stars and grasps for them, folding them, palming them, closing itself and pulling. But the stars remain in heaven and the doll remains on the earth. The woman pulls herself from the ground, pulls herself to the stars. In place of eyes, she has black holes which have not seen light for the duration of the universe and many more ages and her hair is white like the ashes that have covered it for ages. But her smile, oh how she smiles. It is the smile of the victor triumphant, the smile of someone who has triumphed against the universe and found it wanting.
You touch your empty eye holes and place the stars within, their guttered-out white specks catching aflame with the vibrant viridian that so consumed your body merely one day and ten thousand centuries ago.
You open your emerald eyes and you SEE:
Article:
[ ] A Palace Ruined: Vines grow here over the stones. Glorious and mighty, this place has once been, but is no more. There is silence in this place where the clangor of a thousand instruments of violence might have sounded to billions of hoarse throats. Great battles were fought here, ashes mark the fires and the lightning. Brass grows here like verdigris on copper or weeds in a garden, in patches small and great. Once a great but humbled king called this palace his own, but this place has not seen a king in many years. Will it ever see one again?
[ ] A Plain Howling: The wind howls here, it howls and flays. They whip over endless plains not too dissimilar to those of the Red Planet. Sharp pinnacles and precipes of stone reach high towards heaven and the cutting winds dance through the rocks, free and innocent. Figures run down there, down on the plains. They run to escape the pain, they run to forget the cutting winds and piercing rocks and sharp sands. Their nakedness does not bring attraction or repulsion, only confusion. What fools they are, who can outrace the wind?
[ ] A City Sprawling: A skyline of wicked steel-glass towers rises in all directions heedless of human habitation. Angular and jagged, the rains and lightning dance their deadly dance with the inhuman towers wherein lines of power run through screens proclaiming "Eat! Eat! Eat!" and "Consume yourself!". Beneath the skyscrapers and looming skyline lie the temples and castles of yesteryear and yesterday, their visages forgotten in favour of high-flying advertisement boards and shining electricity. What have become of them now?
[ ] A Sea Boiling: Fat bubbles and boils, a greasy sea of burning blobs. The sea is mother to all life and mothers punish naughty children, the sea does not forget, the sea does not forgive. Even the skeletons are screaming, their pained and panicked yammering useless and pointless. How would the sea hear them? How would she care? Bubbling up from the dark depths below, gastronomic gases and stinking stenches rise, inducing nothing but revulsion and vomit. It is best they do so, who would gaze at the dark shapes that move below the sea?
[ ] A Desert Rotting: The desert is endless, its fine, white surface untouched. But the desert is not of sand and the surface is only untouched, not unmoving. Countless maggots make up this final place of decay, which once defined infinity. They crawl and burrow and bite into the fleshy tumors of residents who painfully trek through this rotting no man's land of squirming and spite. This place is not uncaring, it does not devour its inhabitants out of timeless existential conditions, but out of hate alone. What then, does this desert hate so cruelly?
You take in the new sights, making them part of yourself. Internalizing, memorizing and understanding. It goes deeper than mere rote memorization, for just like the nowhere-place, this place will stay with you forever, become part of what makes you you. You will carry this place with you forever, eternally holding a key to this hellish kingdom which you have reached. With a smile and the awareness that you are the mistress of this place far more than they are your masters, you take a step into nowhere and towards that which you know to be inevitable freedom.
"Sure took your sweet fuckin' time, eh? Sure you don't wanna take a detour for an ice cream now you're at it as well?" The familiar and mocking voice of Ravana breaks your multiplanar reverie like an icepick breaks the silent tranquility of frozen water.
"Fuck off Ravana." You say, getting the feeling that this is quickly going to be a very tired line of yours. "Okay, what is it?" You follow up, relenting a bit.
"Look, I'm sure you're determined to show me the full breadth of your personality, that is to say "dying in an alley" and "bitch mode", but I'm kinda here to talk about some important stuff so unless you feel really fucking confident, you really ought to shut up and let the adult here talk." He says with teasing sarcasm. You get the feeling that he really enjoys playing with you like this.
"I'm going to pretend you didn't just call me a child by implication" you begin, deliberately not commenting on the whole "bitch mode" part, "And then I'm going to grant you my leave to say what you've got to say if it's so fucking important."
"Oh well thank you gracious queen, are you sure you don't wanna withhold your blessing 'till you've completed your royal audience?" He quips back, mock-offended.
"Get it over with and get out of my face." Is your reply.
Laughing, Ravana finally gets to the point,"So you're a big fish now. The world ain't full of wonders and it's not all as it seems. I don't exactly know the real specifics-" You roll your eyes and sigh, "But I do know that you're fucking powerful now, and it's full of people who want to take advantage of that." He continues unabated, ignoring your disdain of him. Wait, is that alcohol you can smell on his breath? Why are you even surprised at this point?
"And here's the deal," he says, his bloodshot eyes trained utterly on you and possessed of a focus you had not thought possible for him, "No matter how much I frustrate you, It's my - admittedly self-appointed - job to make sure that you're capable of taking those people on. Do you get that? I know you do."
"So here's the deal," he says, repeating himself, "You're gonna say yes and you'll have the power to put any of those things to shame, the best fucking advisor you could ever have and the backing of all those terrible whatevers you have just gone through and more. I have faith even you couldn't fuck this up, although I'm sure you'll put it to the test."
"All you need is to say yes and take my hand."
You consider his offer. A big part of you wants to say no, to tell him to fuck off as usual, maybe ask him to eat shit for a change. You want to show him that you're in fucking command here and don't have time for his shenanigans and shit.
But on the other hand, he did take his time to be serious with you, and you get the feeling he means this, although you're not so sure about how much he really is "the best fucking advisor", but that can come later. More important, he also currently holds all the cards and you know nothing about this world you've found yourself in. If you want to make any sense of any of this, you need his help.
Haha! You thought it was dead! They called me mad! Mad!
Emergence
There is a special place in Hell for people like Ravana. That is not a lie, it is literally true; currently your head.
It is with sluggish speed that you begin moving within the chrysalis that has surrounded you. It feels like your body has taken a hundred punches and kicks, like it has been whipped blue and yellow all over, yet you know that your skin is purer than it ever was before. Your teeth grind against each other in frustration and exertion as frozen fingers force their way through a carapace of volcanic basalt around you. There, a speck of light reaches your eyes, blinding you for a moment until you get used to the still-dying half-light of the nightly street lamps, flickering and fluttering like the moths that surround their radiant luminosity in wing-flapping throngs.
Wait, no that's not entirely what you're seeing. Those aren't moths but confused specks of light playing on your eyes, and all the light is green and poisonous, like floating in an ocean of verdigris. This place of yours is cold and sterile, like a great freezer where meat past its expiration date is placed to be forgotten. A smell that you cannot quite place, fills the air, like old meat mixed with some sterile stench. Dragging yourself out of basalt-like confine, your palms scrape against the stony surface, which slowly breaks beneath them, pumice-holes collapsing internally at the pressure. A nail on your left hand lazily scrapes against the rock, uneven earth filing away and leaving it just as uneven itself. You grind your teeth. Annoying.
The verdigrised light of your soul bathes it in a splendorous green, in which hundreds of drawers in the walls, identical and given small numbers and labels in metallic letters, reveal themselves to you. You are not entirely sure what is within them, and you are not entirely sure you want to know either at this point. As you finish pulling yourself out, your bare feet land on cold, laminate floor, icy as the ocean in winter to your feet. A chill goes through your body, and the fact of your nakedness leaps to your attention as you realize that you are wearing none of your clothes. Cold panic floods through your mind as you frantically look around the room, the same featureless drawers looming above you in every direction, but the distant door.
For a moment, rest falls over you as you you realize they must simply be in the enclosure which you just stepped out of, left and discarded like that. With your newfound calm, you simply turn around to explore it.
It resembles a coffin to you, or perhaps an angel of grief, resting in a graveyard. A feminine figure of volcanic rock and basalt, from which you emerged in your rebirthing. You cannot see its face anymore, but in your inner eye you see it; a faceless visage marked only by a solar glyph. Many-coloured in greys and yellows, blacks and reds, its surface is chimeric, seamlessly blending into each other like so many patches, like a hundred faulty reparations on a jacket. Unfortunately, it also seems to be completely empty, containing nothing but residual dust that must have broken off when you left it. There is nothing within it but the dust.
You stare.
Panic rising again, you bend over to explore it from the inside with your head, green light colouring it with the clarity of some fucked-up day. Empty. The dust tickles your nose, making you want to sneeze, even as you near-effortlessly dig your fingers into the surprisingly fragile and brittle rock in desperate attempts to find something, anything, to cover yourself with. Unfortunately, your search does not turn out particularly fruitful. At the end, you may have found something to cover yourself with, but that is mostly useless dust in a particularly frustrating combination with the shame that fills you. Thank God that no one can see you right now.
After that complete failure, a new idea fills your mind; maybe the drawers might contain something? You run to the nearest drawer on your right, the implacable smell getting stronger as you approach, stronger along with an equally implacable feeling of worry in your stomach. You place your hand on the metallic handle of the semi-transparent plastic drawer, some dark shape within evident through the material as you pull.
You pull and reveal its contents, expecting, or perhaps hoping, more or less to find anything but that which you find within; meat.
Terrifyingly fresh and obviously frozen, perhaps treated with some form of chemicals or preservatives, the meat lies red and raw within the drawer. It looks like it has been there for weeks or longer. The obvious cold doesn't seem to bother you that much be because you're somewhat focused on something else. Namely the fact that you seem to currently be locked inside some fucked-up serial-killer lair straight out of a budget Netflix TV-show. With frenetic energy, you open another drawer; meat. Distraught, you hastily open as many drawers as you can, pulling again and again, only to reveal more meat. All of them, filled with nothing but different kinds of meat: Hearts, livers, lungs, flanks, briskets, ribs, loins, sirloins and chucks. Red and frozen animal meat of a hundred kinds, the stench, now very familiar, striking you in the face like a hundred fists. You turn up your nose at the smell, wanting to vomit.
Horrified and defeated for now, you sit down to think. You want to close the drawers again, but you can't muster the energy for it. And slowly, insidiously, with all the grace of a silent serpent within shades, a series of far more pressing questions steadily raise themselves within your unsuspecting mind. Where are you? Who took you here? For what purpose? Can anyone see you?
You look around the room again, this time far more attentive towards the upper corners and the doorframe far ahead in the other direction of the room, at the end of both the rows upon rows of drawers. Signs of where you are, signs of identification, signs of anything, perhaps worst of all, signs of surveillance. You find the last one, the red and evil glare of a CCTV camera gazing down upon you from the upper right corner, the baleful light indicating its watchful eye far, like the blazing gaze of some fantastic demon out of myth. Rather much more like one of your old man's stories of daeva, than the harmless man-made electronic which it is.
"Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck."
The realization strikes you like a punch: Someone could be watching you right now.
Someone likely is watching you right now.
You desperately try to cover your exposed body with your hands, even as the realization dawns upon you, looming above you like a dark cloud, that someone could be seeing you naked right now. Anyone could be seeing you panicking, desperately looking through drawers and frantically forcing them up, even as the stench makes you want to vomit, filling the air and your nostrils like mustard gas. You want to creep back in the rocky structure you left and hide out of shame and embarrassment, you want to slither down and pretend the world cannot see you. It makes you feel embarrassed, it makes you feel powerless, it makes you feel vulnerable.
It makes you feel angry.
What right do they have to move you around, to observe you with cameras, to force you to feel shameful and powerless? You were promised that you would never feel like this again, that you would never need to cower again. You have been victimized, forced into a situation you do not want to be. You don't like that. You don't like that at all. You're going to make them regret doing that. You're going to make them all regret that. Make them pay. And for a scant few moments, the world-shaking terror and vulnerability is replaced with righteous rage and indignant irritation at the world. This will not stand. You were promised better.
You angrily rise from your seated position, a slight stamp in the earth with your right foot as you do so. You stare at the camera, baleful intent in your eyes, wishing you could tear it down, wishing you could pull it to your hand and crush it. The violent will in your mind is the same as the one by which you have punched many would-be pretenders to your throne of sycophants, the same will by which you climbed to the top and forced everyone to recognize that it belonged to you. Murder on your mind, you all but command the camera to cease its staring. You have had enough. Staring daggers in its direction, your will is clear, it will cease or it will break.
A camera is a dumb machine. It could only choose to break.
A grinding force, an invisible power, pulling and pushing; electronic wires tearing and plastic breaking. The camera is, as if held by some invisible hand, pulled from its socket in the corner, smashed into the earth as if thrown, crushed on the ground as if stepped on by a giant. The violent force smashes your reverie as surely as it did the camera, as you are for a moment taken aback by the force of your intent. Staring at the camera, you look at the wreckage there, digesting slowly that you did that, the slightly smoking and sparking wreck your creation as surely as the camera itself had been someone's creation.
You smile. You don't mind that. You don't mind that at all. A few moments of happiness which you indulgently enjoy until you remember your current situation and look around the room one last time, perhaps hoping you missed something the last time. A pointless search, as fruitless as it lacks goals.
You begin walking forward, the door flinging open as you near it, even as you don't move a muscle. As you move past it, you can clearly see it hanging loosely on the hinges, torn partially free from the force you applied to it. Stepping outside the room, you are left in a corridor with no end in sight either left and right; only turns in different directions. It's hard for you not to feel a strange feeling of remembrance or reminiscence, that tinglingly delightful deja vu. Unfortunately, that feeling of reminiscence is not currently particularly that useful; no escape routes and far worse, no clothes.
These corridors are not foreign to you, it feels like you have been here before, or walked somewhere similar. They are utilitarian and simple, reminiscent of an institution of learning; a laboratory, school or university. Slinking down the corridor, you keep a watchful eye about you, fearful of interruption by whatever brought you here, and to what intentions. Urgh! There is a disgraceful lack of clothing lying around here. Or things that could be used as clothing. You'd settle for just a discarded hoodie or a forgotten waterproof at this point.
With nervous and measured steps, carefully ensuring that not a sound emerges from your tenuous tread, you walk down the right path. Your attention is firmly planted on the corridor around you. There, you see a camera in the upper corner as you turn, one which your will finally dislodges from its socket in the instant you turn your back to it; the glassy plastic dome of the camera breaking as you smash it into the ground. Then, turning the corner, Ravana appears from seemingly nowhere, and your focus quickly turns into simultaneously trying to appear in control and covering yourself up to preserve some modicum of decency.
A strangely well-groomed pompadour on his head, he looks far more presentable than he did when he gave you his offer. Leaning against a wall with a smug grin on his dark-skinned face; Ravana resplendent. Where the burning green sun used to shine on his forehead, a wound instead adorns it, red in gory glory. Over his eyes, a pair of sunglasses rest, you don't know where he got them from, but you have to admit that they look cool. A traditional Indian shalwar kameez adorns him in whites and gold, combined with a sash in ruby red.
He laughs, you're unsure if it's mocking your predicament or apologetic, you choose to believe it is the former, "Relax, I'm not going to look, women all over the world tell me that I'm a gentleman of highest caliber."
You somehow doubt the veracity of that claim, but choose to keep silent for now.
"Okay, that is up to the question, I know, but on the subject of questions, how do you feel we go make the people who put us here regret their life decisions and kick some ass?"
Mentally, you add "And get some clothing", but otherwise, this is the first time Ravana has said something you agree with, and you suspect neither of you are going to miss an opportunity to fuck some kidnapping shitheads up. Well, fuck some kidnapping shitheads up and find out what even happened here, who kidnapped you and why they put you in a room full of meat. Besides, with the sudden dopamine rush of the fact that you can crush cameras by thinking at them hard, it's not hard to feel a tiny rush of confidence and powerful, despite the compromising situation.
The corridor in front of you turns into a juncture, continuing forward and splitting to a parallel passage that opens up left and right, giving you a total of three possible paths from here. A helpful plaque in sterile steel or some other material, helpfully points out where each of the passages are supposed to lead. At the top right of the plaque, a familiar sign waits for your eyes to see; a seraphic figure upon a shield. Beneath it, big capital letters with artful serifs clearly spell out "STVDIVM VRBIS", an eerily familiar phrase to you.
A swift shiver passes through you for a moment, before being replaced with a moment of fiery anger. You know this place. This is the Sapienza university of Rome. You studied here and now they have taken you to it. The sign spells out various places, "haematology lab", "meat freezing room" and "medicine". All different rooms, connected to this part of the university. You may never have been much familiar with the natural sciences, but your feeling of deja vu is suddenly justified.
"Hell yeah." You tell Ravana. You wouldn't mind punching some idiots in the face. Not at all.
Article:
Where do you investigate?
[ ] The Office (1x): A few turns left and right from here, this place is likely to be without significant danger, but by the same note also not very likely to contain anything or anyone you can work out your anger on by beating them up. Not very likely to contain clothes either. On the other hand, there might be someone you could talk to.
[ ] The Laboratory (1x): Just down the corridor, you're not entirely sure what this place would contain. Most laboratories are likely to contain some form of clothes, so that's likely to be assured. But with most likelihood, whoever are inside it will not be capable of telling you a lot about why you're here in anything but scientific terms, useless to you.
[ ] The Security Department (1x): A bunch of corridors from here, this place would most definitely contain someone to beat up, but is not very likely to contain anyone who can tell you anything important. It might contain clothes though, and likely also a good idea of where an exit could be found. This is the most dangerous of your options.
Checking the plaque, you notice something standing out, "haematological laboratory". You smile, time to beat up some nerds. That's something you know how to do. Beat up some nerds and get some answers, preferably both. You aren't picky, though, so you'll take either.
Making your decision, you make a mental note that the laboratory is numbered "F17", and then the search begins. Every door has a number and a letter, most of these are lettered E, so you guess it's some kind of pattern based on compound or category. Currently, the nearest door to you is lettered E12, so you figure that the only option is to start walking. Passing seemingly endless, similar doors, all lettered and numbered, you quickly grow bored of watching out for obstacles. The doors are all similar, and you grow tired of pulling cameras down. The institutional-green linoleum under foot is slightly tacky in a way that suggests that the cleaners skimp on mopping.
You shift into a more casual walk, more annoyed than you are angry. Ugh! Why are there no labels on the doors? Which idiot got the idea to identify by numbers and letters alone. The faculty of jurisprudence was much better organized than this! No wonder all the people from natural sciences are so strange if they constantly have to navigate by this. Bleargh, you're getting more frustrated by the minute.
One of the walls dents as you telekinetically slam your pique into it. The doors around you rattle on their hinges.
Ah, there it is, finally you have reached section "F", albeit from the seemingly wrong direction. Currently you are glaring at a door labeled "F2", having hoped that you would have reached F17 first. Why doesn't this place have a map anyways? The jurisprudence faculty had a map.
There's a chuckle from ahead. Leaning against a wall, Ravana smirking at you with a shit-eating grin. "Well, let's be thankful you didn't choose to work as a scout. If this is your best attempt at finding your way, that explains so much about your life!" he mocks you.
"What do you know about my life?" you flare back at him.
"Eh, not much. I just knew I'd get a raise out of you," he taunts.
Teeth gritted, you try to give him a frustrated slap, which usually works for shutting people up. But Ravana simply dissolves into sparks of many-coloured flame. You've mostly gotten over your fear and the righteous anger has left you. Thus, you are left with frustration and irritation as your only company. Well, frustration, irritation and Ravana, but you repeat yourself. Just as you're ready to resume your search, you hear a sputtering sound behind you, and you quickly turn to face it, finding only Ravana with the same annoying grin.
"Careful, there. I know where that hand has been!"
"Jump up your own asshole and die!" you snarl, unconsciously covering yourself again.
"What's the matter? Don't you have more important things to worry about? Or did you miss me that much?" he asks, in-between chuckles at your expense. "Sorry about that thing with the slap, but I'm not into that kind of thing, I'm not judging though!" He exclaims, now openly laughing again.
Mazda, he is annoying. Why did you have to be saddled with Ravana of all people in your mind? "Shouldn't I be the one who asks if you have nothing better to worry about? You're not even doing anything! How about you just let me find my way out in goddamn peace?" you retort, venom in your voice. If there was a time to be the bigger woman, you missed it. Plus, he has everything you can do to him coming.
"But where's the fun in that?" Ravana asks. Hands raised in a mockery of your own attempts to preserve your modesty, he trails behind you. You're pretty sure he's looking at your butt, and you twist to keep your back to the wall, sidling along. "Besides, if I had to wait until you had handled everything, I'd have to wait a few centuries yet, and I don't have the patience for that."
"Can't you just go fuck yourself for a while?" you respond. You are not in the mood. You are so not in the mood that you may never be in the mood again. Not that he cares.
"Sorry, that ain't on the calendar for today. I'd need to stretch first. Get more flexible, you know? You, however seem to be pretty clearly on the 'spend more time looking for a door than it takes for a mountain to erode' side of things, though, so I should be good in a few days."
Biting back a curse, you roll your eyes and turn back to looking for the door. Ugh, Ravana. So frustrating.
Passing yet another infinity of identical doors, you finally reach the laboratory you're looking for. Pausing outside the grey-coloured door, you smile. Or at least bare your teeth. Finally some fucking answers. That, and hopefully someone to take out your anger on after Ravana reignited it. And some clothes. . It's not the cold. You're aware that it's cold around you, you just can't feel it. But the shame is a constant companion, especially with that ugly asshole constantly looking at you.
Things will only get worse when you get out of here, because the people looking at you wouldn't be arguably figments of your imagination.
"I'm not a figment of your imagination, but I am pretty argumentative," Ravana contributes.
You didn't say that out loud. The asshole is reading your mind? Fuck him. Fuck him raw with a chainsaw.
That rhymed.
"Maybe you'll find a chainsaw in there! Look on the bright side!"
Thinking of it, you have a lot of expectations for what this laboratory is going to contain, and you really hope that it can satisfy them.
Gathering your thoughts and focusing, you press your back up against the wall by the door, the painted concrete rough against your skin. There's noise coming from inside there when you lean your air against the door. Closing your eyes while you focus, you can hear sound from inside. You're not sure what they're saying, but it sounds very clinical; something about "subdual" and "proceeding with the plan". Gives you the creeps.
Placing your hand on the door grip, you take a deep breath. The steel is comfortably cool against your hand and you stand there, letting your arm rest upon the grip for a few seconds. Delicately you turn the grip to test if you can open it, making sure it's as silent as possible. Locked. Damn.
You try and focus on the lock instead, feeling its insides with your mind. It's like touch. Like you're probing the internals with your fingertips, only your fingers are an amorphous, flowing field of skin. Which doesn't even make sense, not even to you. There's a plethora of tiny parts you were only distantly aware were even part of a lock, but it's not exactly high-tech, ironically. Turning something here and moving a mechanism there, you hear a satisfying click. You let your hand go of the grip and snap your fingers. The grip turns and the door soundlessly opens, before a loud creaking sound interrupts it in the last moment. You cringe at that.
You ease yourself into the room, and it's unquestionably a laboratory. Petri dishes rest on the tables and boxy instruments of plastic and metal fill the room. You're not familiar with laboratories, so you let your eyes take in the room: Blinking lights from glossy black instruments, whirring and beeping noises of mysterious origin. You've never really been in this part of the university before. You always kept to the humanities and social sciences. You breathe in, getting used to its smells; a sterile smell that hangs over the room and catches in your nose. It smells like disinfectant, which it probably is. The talking you heard from outside has stopped, but you can still hear murmuring, coming from the other side of the room, where a group of scientist-looking people stand. They're looking at you like you're a foreign invader, or vision of terror, if you go by their shocked faces.
It better be terror. It better be. If they're checking you out, you're going to vent some of your quite large reservoir of anger, shame, confusion, and general 'what the fuck is this and what is my life' which is an emotion you're not generally familiar with. You don't like it. You want to punch something. Someone. Anything.
Then you catch sight of what's behind them, which they're currently obscuring; a steel-framed bed straight out of some budget asylum-set horror movie. You can see a person of indeterminate gender currently tied to it by leather straps affixed to the sides. They're not moving or making any noises, but they sure as hell don't look like a medical patient. You don't like the look of the tubes that run from various instruments into their skin, either. This smells way too much of "interrupted a horror movie set" to you. You're not sure if they're dead or whatever, but judging from the pointlessness of attaching tubes like this to a dead person, you're gonna go with alive. You kinda hope so, you could use some company that isn't Ravana.
"Who the fuck are you?" one of them asks.
"What the fuck is this?" you demand, hands balling into fists. One of them shifts, reaching for something. You're pretty sure you don't want to let him get it. "Get the fuck away from that person and answer me!"
One of the scientists, a man, steps forward. He looks like he's calming himself down. Like he's preparing to deal with the strangely naked woman in front of him. You're going to pretend you can't see some of them checking you out. Or at least you're going to pretend you can't until you get tired of it. You can't believe that a foreign woman just stepped into their room and telekinetically picked the lock and they're thinking about your fucking breasts. Mazda, it's making you sick thinking about. They're not moving, either. You don't have time listening to some old man scientist telling you off while the rest are staring at your body and not doing what you fucking told them to.
Spotting a bunch of lab coats hanging on hooks in the other end of the room, you make a quick decision. He looks like he's about to say something, so you stretch your hand out, as if to pause him. He pauses for a moment, and that's all you need. You turn that hand to the lab coats, and without looking at them, pulls one of them straight into your hand.
"I said step the fuck away." you emphasize, clothing yourself telekinetically and letting the buttons close themselves. "Was that so fucking hard to understand?"
You smile unpleasantly as the scientists shuffle about, moving away from the bed, a mix of panic and fear in the air. Oh yes. The whole tenor of the room has changed. Now you're not a mysterious naked lady that everyone is looking at. Now you're a woman who's only wearing a lab coat, which isn't a vast improvement - but now they know you're a telekinetic. And a superior being to them. Oh yes.
"Fascinating! Let's study her!" someone says. You're about to really tear lose, until you realise that it's Ravana, who has somehow acquired a lab coat of his own and is standing among the scientists with his stupid grin and his stupid pompadour.
You are going to ignore him. You are going to ignore him, and then murder him in the face.
"Now, let's start over. My name is Azar Ahura, and I want some fucking answers," you say. Intimidation has worked for you so far. There's no reason to stop.
You ignite the sun on your brow, and the air pressure in the room drops. Ears pop, and empty plastic bottles on the surfaces are tossed aside. The green light washes over the faces of the scientists, leaving them looking bilious and even more fearful. Your lab coat flaps in an unseen breeze
"You there!" you say, in your most imperious tone "Tell me your name!" He stumbles over his words for a bit before answering, "E-Eusebio, ma'am." You raise your eyebrow, you hadn't expected a title. Regardless, it doesn't matter. You finally have your chance of getting some answers and shoving around these people a bit as well. The latter is useless, but at least it lets you blow off some steam, which is fantastic.
Focusing on the bedridden body, you can see it's a man. Clothed in a grey tank top, baggy pants and not much else, his face and arms are too thin. It's not fashionable-slim. It's missed-meals slim. You think his face is more pretty than handsome, a small, bushy mustache above his mouth. Despite his obviously famished body, there are clear signs of athleticism decayed by hunger. He would definitely look better if he didn't seem to be sedated and forcefully restrained. And he's unhealthily pale, even under his olive-coloured skin. At least he's alive, you think.
Now that the scientists aren't being blocking your way, those instruments are suddenly far more visible. One of them is presumably indicating that he is alive with its slow and sequential beeping. Several tubes pierce his bare skin, kept affixed by IV drips and similar, either draining or injecting fluids of different colours. The entire display gives you the creeps. The leather straps that affix him to the bed are tied far too tightly, too roughly. This man struggled. He was forced here. A part of you can't help but wonder darkly if the scientists had something similar planned for you; sedated on a steely bed and connected to instruments you don't want to know the purpose of.
This is frankly creeping you the fuck out, and you don't like that. You don't like that at all. Not one bit.
You turn to the first guy, Eusebio, "What the fuck are you doing with this guy?" you demand,. You can smell his fear. Well, more like the glistening sweat on his forehead, but it's the thought that counts. There's a whole group of them there, but they don't rush the one woman who's burst in on them. They're tied down by fear of you.
Just like they tied that man down. Your eyes narrow. Your fingers twitch. Reaching for an unseen weapon. Wondering how they'd look with some of those complicated scientific tools and needles protruding from their bulging eyes.
Eusebio stammers, trying to find his words again, but you cut him off, "Now!" you command and he all but scrambles for something to tell you, seeking something to say. "W-we were draining his blood," he says, respectfully adding a nervous "ma'am," a half-second later. Your eyes widen. "He's… uh, donating his blood."
This shit is not how blood donation drives go.
"Then why the fuck is he tied down?" Do they think you're a moron? Of course this isn't above board! "Actually, you people over there? Untie him now!"
You emphasise your point by glaring at one of their carts, which slams into the far side of the room, overturning its contents all over the floor. The scientists leap to obey before you do something worse. You would comment on how you could get used to this, if it wasn't so fundamentally fucked up. Here you are, a woman naked but for a lab coat, throwing commands around to a bunch of scientists straight-out of some shitty B-movie with a budget horror plot about draining blood, probably for fucking vampires or something ridiculous. At this point, you just want this day to end. Or rather, this night, as the clock on the wall in the other end of the room informs you.
Eusebio responds stammeringly, "Well, the subjec-"
You cut him off immediately, "Use his fucking name, don't give me that 'subject' crap."
A mix of irritation and fear plays over his face for a few moments, before you take a step closer, cracking your knuckles, and he seems to decide that fear is the most reasonable of the two. "The sub- Ates Polat had to be coerced by force, as he resisted the procedure that was prescribed for him. Completely unreasonably, I might add." This close to him, you can all but smell the cold sweat of terror on his body.
One of the women in here - late forties, greying hair poking out from under her hairnet - has reached out for the lab phone while you were distracted. You grab it with your mind, and yank it off the wall, handset and cable and all. She screams at that.
"No," you say, voice deathly level. "No phones. No calling for security." You glance over them, eyes narrowed, burning forehead reflecting off the surfaces. "Shame on you. Calling the poor security guards in to die."
You're not sure if you really could kill whatever security guards a university has, but you're not going to sound doubtful. You're certainly angry enough. You turn your attention back to this rat, this weasel who's feeding you this bullshit. Striding up to him, you reach out and brush your fingers against his cheek, working them down until you have your hand around his throat.
He squeaks. You smile.
You all but whisper in his ear with a silken-soft voice, "You're going to tell me what I want to know, yeah?" He nods. "And you're not going to lie to me, and you're going to tell all your little friends over there to do the same as well, yeah?" He nods even more frantically. "Good. Now, begin. Make sure that you do good."
You pull an office chair over and almost sit down, before you remember what you're wearing. And not wearing. No, staying standing is a good idea. So instead you force him down into the chair. Making sure he looks up to you. Reinforcing that you are the one who is in charge here.
You've got time, so you decide to spend the next many minutes grilling the scientists for what they know.
Article:
Choose two:
[ ] What is "the procedure"?
[ ] Information about Ates Polat?
[ ] What are their reasons?
[ ] Why are you here?
[ ] Write-In
The larger hand on the clock has made a third of a revolution when the door opens behind you. You nearly jump when you hear it, lost in the… the outrage that's happening here.. Your bare feet squeak on the laboratory floor as you twist, lab coat flapping around you.
Three figures stand in the doorframe; two people that look more like gorillas that were pressed into human suits and a slender, smiling woman with a body shape out of a noir movie. Despite wearing a lab coat, the woman absolutely does not look like a scientist. She's dressed like you.
Or, well, like you would if you had your choice of clothes but had been told you had to wear an unfastened lab coat over the top. Low heels, enough to stretch out the leg but still practical. Black tights and a stylishly cut skirt just above the knee; a fitted blouse - good quality Egyptian cotton. It's not your unnatural powers that tell you what it's made of. It's the fact you have an identical one in your wardrobe. Tailored suit jacket, in a black that completes her monochrome look. She knows her complexion well. Ghost-pale, porcelain pale, with hair as red as her lips and dark eyes.
A smile plays over those bloody lips. She's the only one in the room apart from you who isn't scared. Well, apart from her thugs, who clearly don't have the cognitive capabilities for higher thought. She regards the room almost as a toddler would a room full of playthings and toys. Delight fills her eyes when she sees you.
She's looking at you, taking in your body with her eyes, and you know that the smile is for you. It's like she's looking at all of you at once, trying to eat you with her eyes. Her eyes linger on your bare calves, your bare wrists, your bare neck. You don't like her smile either, it's like she's looking at a delicacy or something sweet for dessert. There is no part of this woman that isn't uncomfortable to you.
"Who the hell are you?" you blurt out, and one of the definitely-not-university-appropriate gorillas makes a threatening move with the rather large gun in his hands, that you know for a fact is illegal. In response, the woman lays a hand on his arm, mumbling something about calming down, and he lowers the weapon again. Making a quick sign with her other hand for them to keep back, she begins walking towards you, her hungry smile unchanging.
"Oh, you don't need to worry about who I am, in fact you don't need to worry about anything at all, sweetheart," the woman says, "Especially not that… person over there." She makes a dismissive motion towards the now-untied, but still sedated Ates, as if he was a discarded toy or object.
Her dark, gleaming eyes meet yours. "No, wait, I…" you begin, before you notice something isn't quite right. She's not lit in green, you realise. At some point your forehead-brand must have died down. It must have happened when you were talking to the scientists.
"Why don't you just come with me, and I'll make sure to sort out everything." She drawls that last part, her voice almost reverberating within your mind. It's like an echo, blurring your vision and unfocusing you. You feel almost nauseous, the disinfectant smell making you want to puke. The woman smells of something too, now that she's closer. Is that some kind of flower? Roses, perhaps? There's something beneath it, something that puts you on the edge. She is a predator.
You can hear Ravana say something, and you think he's risen from his seated position on one of the desks, but it's getting hard to focus. He says something, but the sound is muffled, you can't quite concentrate on it, and you're so tired. You're not sure if you can stand much more. The woman has stepped closer to you and laid a hand on your shoulder and one on your hip to help you balance. That's really helpful of her. Her hands are very cold. You can feel them even through the lab coat. She feels like there's no heat in her entire body.
You're thankful that she's willing to explain it to you, truth be told, you're not very clear on why you're here, and you don't feel that good anyways. It's nice that she's available to tell you what's going on. You do feel a bit lost, even despite the scientists' explanations. She seems so trustworthy as well, like a respectable woman who knows what she's talking about. She probably knows much better than you anyways. The scientists seem to be thankful she's here too. Their adoring eyes are almost puppy-like. You hope you don't look like that. It'd be embarrassing if she saw you like that. She seems like someone people respect. You don't want to offend her or embarrass her. Not when she's been so nice to you.
Article:
Mind Control
Some creatures have the ability to inflict various forms of compulsions, geasa or inhibitions on other people. These can take the form of mental dominance, obligations, contracts or simple, pure seduction. Regardless of what it is, it is all resisted with a Willpower roll against a certain Difficulty and a target number of successes determined by the power in question. This can often turn out extremely unfair in favour of the dominator, but there is a recourse. Normally, the only defense for a mortal is to spend a point of Willpower to gain an automatic success on the resistance roll, but Azar Ahura is no longer a mortal woman.
She is bearer of a crown of Hell and vessel to the keter-soul that is the Infernal Exaltation. As such, she is afforded certain privileges in resisting, which allows her to, instead of spending a point of Willpower, to instead channel an Intimacy. When channeling an Intimacy, she may instead completely reject the influence if a compelling argument that this Intimacy would apply can be made.
[ ] Come With Her (1.2x): You will follow the woman.
[ ] Refuse (1x): Spend a point of Willpower and make a resistance roll when I tell you to. -[ ] Channel Intimacy: Make a case for why one of Azar's current three intimacies would allow her to resist. -[ ] Use a Charm: If you wish to use a Charm, please include it in the subvote like this.
Article:
Acquire clothes: Fulfilled
Discover why you're here: Unfulfilled
Make someone fucking answer to this: Unfulfilled
Learn what you can do: Unfulfilled
Find some exit: Unfulfilled
Motes expended/motes left: 1/10
1m spent on Mind-Hand Manipulation
Adhoc vote count started by ManusDomini on Mar 30, 2019 at 11:08 AM, finished with 270 posts and 6 votes.
[X] Refuse (1x)
-[X] Channel Intimacy: This is not fair. You were promised better. You were promised royalty and exaltation. It's not fair, so you will make it fair. She seeks to control you, but you are better than this. You are better than her.
-[X] Use a Charm: Shadow Spite Curse. Ruin her efforts at trying to be better than you.
Here we are again at the high-speed update schedule you can expect from an expert like me:
Grotesquerie
So nice. So kind. So warm and-
Cold. You're a fool to fall for this. How many people have you trapped with niceness? How many people have you destroyed because they thought your attempts to reach out to them were well intentioned?
There is a terrible anger in your gut, and that seething, toxic brew wars with the fog in your mind. You want to touch her. You want to punch her. Hate and love fight, but in the end only one will win out. You always did move in straight lines whenever possible.
You stumble forwards, reaching out for her. She smiles kindly - smirks smugly - at that, and doesn't act to stop you placing either hand on her cheeks. Her skin is so cold; her foundation comes away on your fingers.
The city screams in your ears, a wicked city of vice and control, where every camera is a watching eye and every speaker is a mouth. The city is not run for the sake of men. The city is. Men merely occupy it. This city, this hell has risen once more in the modern era, and you saw it in the depths of your dreams.
You are the eye behind the cameras. You are the mouth behind the loudspeakers. You are not controlled. You control! And anyone who says otherwise gets broken!
"What do you want me to do?" you ask. Your words are not words. They are meaning, hammered straight into the forebrain. Lyrical, melodic sounds like a finger on a windglass, remixed with static and the sound of a thousand screaming computers.
"Oh, my sweet, you'll-" she begins to respond, and chokes on her not-words that come out just like yours. She screws her eyes shut in sudden pain, brow wrinkling. Thick, cold blood oozes from her eyes and ears.
And in that moment of confusion, you slam your forehead into her nose.
She recoils in pain and you use the opportunity to drive an elbow into the stomach of the gorilla on your right. He doubles over, air forced out of his lungs. You don't give him time to recover, and you grab his hair, slamming his head into one of the cupboards. The white door bounces open, now smeared with red, and you do it again. Clumps of his hair come away as you yank your hand back, connected by scraps of scalp. He sinks down, dazed, and you snatch up measuring scales from the counter..
Some kind of one-liner about him not 'measuring up' or something is on the tip of your tongue, but right now you're too busy trying to smash his brains in.
The other gorilla shoulder charges before you can bring it down, though, sending you sprawling. The scales smash to the ground and he bounces off the wall. Rather than go down, you grab your own shoulders with your mind and yank yourself upright. The motion turns into a leap. To outside eyes you move through the air like cheap wire-fu, your bare foot snapping around to crack into his jaw. You fall with him as his back hits the ground like a localized avalanche, driving your knee into his chest. His pistol skitters out of his holster, sliding away. You throw your hand out and it leaps into your palm.
A slender, red-nailed hand locks around your wrist and bends your whole arm around backwards. You try to twist away - the dolled-up bitch shifts to keep working your arm against its socket. You're not even sure if you meant to squeeze the trigger, but you do. In this closed space, the sound is deafening. Overhead shatters. One of the lights explodes.
She slams your wrist into the wall, and you drop the gun. Now she's behind you, and she savagely drives a high-heeled foot into the back of your knee. For a moment, your entire skin is verdigris and copper, hellish glyphs and scenes of battle passing over you in a wave from the impact. Your leg buckles despite this unnatural skin-armour. Grabbing your hair with her other hand, she takes the chance to drive you head first into the door.
Your world greys-out in pain. Wood splinters.
"What the fuck are you?" she demands, punctuating each word with another impact. It's not the sound of flesh on wood. It's like a battering ram. The door is breaking, warping.
Seeing red, you grab her wrist with one hand and slam the palm of your other hand into her elbow as you twist your body, throwing her over your head with an exertion of force you didn't know you had. With a surprised yelp, she flies above you, but twists mid-air with a surprising burst of inhuman speed, landing in a crouch on one of the counters, a look of fury on her face.
You can't help but smile a bit at the smeared make-up and broken nose that ruins her otherwise-immaculate visage. Or well, it would be a smile. It turns out as something more like a bestial snarl. You're fine with that. You don't mind showing her that you're a predator too.
You hear the iconic click of a loaded gun behind you, and that's the only cue you need to throw yourself to the side. The dazed gorilla you'd inflicted head trauma on has drawn his own gun, still slumped against the side where you left him. He must be seeing double because his aim is none too steady. A hail of bullets dances around you, and you slide behind one of the lab benches. There's bleeping electronic equipment above you, but it can't stop a bullet.
The noise stops, and even through your ringing ears you hear the "click".
He frantically reaches for another clip, reloading as fast as he can as a black shadow moves over your eyes. For a moment, the entire room becomes a matter of lines and threads; fate and destiny unveiled to your eyes. Pulling a bit on one, the room is bathed in green light as your forehead becomes a fiery torch.
The gun is jammed. It was always going to jam. So you have proclaimed.
For a few moments, you stand there, facing off against each other; you and the woman. Her gorillas are there too, but this shit is personal now. The tense mid-battle peace is broken as the eyes of everyone fall upon the gun you dropped. Still non-jammed, still loaded and ready for fire. Your eyes widen in a split-second before you, the woman and the remaining gorilla leap all reach the same conclusion.
With the sudden realization, you all leap for the gun and transform into a chaotic mess of tangled limbs and grimaced teeth again. The woman reaches the gun first, but your right fist reaches her chin before she can aim it, and she lets out a scream of anger and pain as the gun is free again. This time you grab it, dimly realizing you have next to zero training with a firearm in the heartbeat before the gorilla's shoulder connects with your chest and you can feel your feet lose their hold on the ground as he shoulder-slams you into a wall.
Air explodes out of your lungs as your skin becomes metallic copper and hellish glyphs once again, a tiny comfort compared to the high-speed meeting of your back and the laboratory wall. Pain repeatedly surges through your body as he punches you in the stomach and pins you against the wall, his forearm against your neck and his left hand around your wrist. In his current position, with his mind set on choking you out or forcing you to give up on the gun, he's so close you can smell his breath. He sure hasn't brushed his teeth this morning.
He smashes your hand into the wall, trying to make your fingers slip on the gun, but you can still throw a punch with your left arm. You fold forearm along your upper arm and smash your elbow like a club into his face, a nasty sound of breaking bones escaping from his head as teeth fly out of his mouth. He releases you and you immediately smack the gun into his forehead from the other side, hoping his cranium isn't as thick as it looks, before you follow up with a knee to the chest that knocks him over, toppling into a bulky metal container full of some unidentified fluid. The container tumbles wobbles slightly, but doesn't tumble over. The thug, however, does.
There's only two of them now; the other thug, bruised and battered and - healing faster than a human should? - and the woman. She's not sleek, not any more. Her carefully coiffed hair is all over the place; her chosen clothing is in tatters and she's torn the seams of her blouse.
You're not one to criticise, though, as the two of them move in opposite directions, trying to flank you. "Stop that! Stop moving!" you scream hoarsely, tasting hot blood. You have no idea how much you're actually hurting through the metal skin, but your hard-stolen lab coat has given up the ghost. All that's really preserving your modesty now is blood. Yours and other people's.
Huffing and panting, your face is an exhausted grimace as the thug charges you with a fire extinguisher in his hands. He must've grabbed it while your attention was on the woman. Sloppy, you're tiring out. First, he wields it like a club, striking you with broad swings that use his entire body weight. You barely dodge, keeping yourself at the edge of his range, not wanting to risk coming too close. If you can just keep this up, he will eventually tire out, you think. Suddenly, your stream of thoughts are interrupted as he lets out a bellowing cry before finally getting you in the stomach with the fire extinguisher. You double over and are rewarded with a heavy overhead strike that you narrowly redirect to your back and shoulders rather than your head.
The force of the blow sends you face-first into the ground, and it is only with a narrow dodge roll that you evade his third strike with the thing, a heavy clanging sound as the metal strikes the laminate floor. Leaping to your feet, he sprays you in your face with the foam, which gets all over your face and in your eyes, freezing and biting. He kicks you in the head while you're blinded, a sickly sound from the bones in his leg as the kick connects. He lifts the fire extinguisher again, pummeling you mercilessly even as he screams in pain. In-between your attempts to evade the strikes or just parry them with your arms and legs so they don't hit your face or chest, you hear something from the fucked-up hospital bed-thing a few meters over.
It's him. The guy. What's his name? You'd like to say that the only reason you don't remember it is that you've just had your head repeatedly slammed into a door, but let's be honest, you probably wouldn't remember anyway. Weird thing to be thinking about now. Why won't your mind focus?
Oh yes. Head slammed into a door. Might be a concussion.
He's saying something. You're not sure what. But he kicks something shiny, something metallic that slithers over the floor to you. Your hand reflexively goes out to grab for it, and comes back holding a scalpel.
Oh. Oh yes. Even dazed, you know how to use one of these. It's not rocket science.
Scalpel in hand, you lunge upwards at the fire-extinguisher-wielding goon, who drops the makeshift club with an exclamation of surprise. The blade goes into his eye, and out through it. Red gushes down onto you, and he crumples down on you, only driving the thin metal blade deeper into his head.
You twist, and it vanishes inside. A little metal worm, cutting, slicing, giving the ol' Egyptian pre-mummification treatment and why the hell are you even thinking about the fact that pharaohs had their brains cut up from the inside with a hook before they were mummified? Maybe because it's better than thinking about what's coming out of his ruined eye socket, down onto you?
It's only then you realise your arms are still trying to block the strikes that no longer come, and the hand that holds the blade isn't one that normal humans can see.
With a thought, you slam his mutilated corpse into a wall nearby and rise from your position, turning to look for the shockingly absent woman.
She's sucking the other gorilla's blood.
She's sucking the other gorilla's blood. Like some vampire out of a shitty novel, the blood is dripping down her chin and she's drinking desperately as a mixture of ecstasy, pain and mortal terror play across the thug's face in the seconds before his life ebbs out. The woman rises from her kneeling position, a rictus of rage on her face, and in a flash of unnatural haste she's in front of you and grabbing you, her now-orange-red eyes like fiery charcoal. Taut muscles twist her features into monstrosity. Her tendons are steel cables; her veins are black lines on her skin. Too fast; stronger, too.
And then, suddenly, she's got her hands around your neck, her red nails - claws? They might be claws now? - digging in deep. Drawing blood even through the metal skin.
She's forcing you back and lifting you above the ground with terrifying strength. Her mouth is open in a silent scream of fury, clearly displaying the sharp fangs that drew blood mere seconds ago for you to see. Slamming you into the wall so hard you scream, she holds you against it with a grip like a vice. Choking you, she opens her mouth for a bite and presses her mouth against your own in a fucked-up mockery of a kiss.
The feeling is like chocolate, pills from parties and sex all rolled into one. Downsides and all. Because mixed in with that is the pain of an overfull stomach, the headache of the next day, and a deep sullied ache. It feels like those drugs parents tell their children to stay away from, it feels fantastic, ecstatic, addicting. It feels good and it feels so wrong. Even through the numbing bliss, you can feel the blood in your veins leave your body, pulse by pulse, heartbeat by heartbeat.
Entwined with you like this, the woman is just as cold as she looks. In-between shallow, stuttering breaths and desperate attempts to inhale despite her iron grip around your neck you try to force her hands away, frantically clawing and grabbing at them with as much strength as you can muster. But it's as if her entire body is locked, stuck in this position as she chokes the life out of you. If she doesn't suck it out first, that is. Up close, her skin lacks the luster of life, the glistening signs of sweat or the ruddy complexion of moving blood. She's more comparable to a corpse than a person.
And soon you will too, whisper the last few fragments of your consciousness that haven't either broken down from the choking or been subsumed into the mindless pleasure.
It's getting darker, it's getting colder. Your attempts are getting weaker. You're not sure when you slipped, but at some point, your arms fell down along your side, limp and weak, like a doll's. You can't feel them or your legs anymore anyways, and your body feels fuzzy, like it's sleeping. Your eyes are steadily closing, blinking in stutters as you force them open for a few seconds more every time. Thinking is hard. Reacting is hard. It's cold. It's dark. Colder. Darker. Murky. Going to die. Dying.
Oh fuck no, you won't.
You force your closing eyes to open again, frantically searching the room for something to use. There! The container that one of the thugs is still lying slumped against, his face a mess from your strikes. With an exertion of focus, the container rises from the ground, wobbling unsurely in the air.
And then, in a burst of power, you are cast in a gleamingly viridian light and you pull the container towards you, and towards her back, sending it hurtling through the room as fast as you can.
She notices it in a heartbeat, her grip loosening in the moment before impact.
She does not react in time.
The container strikes her back with bone-breaking force and unloads its contents over her as her bite is broken. She is slammed into you as tens of plastic cylinders empty out of the container on an avalanche of liquid nitrogen. She screams as the vaporous fluid flows over you both, a frantic frenzy filling her eyes and forcing her face into a rictus. Leathery gray-brown spots spring up like pockmarks on her frozen face, while you can feel her cold body lock up around you, even as she tries to get away with panicked clawing and senseless running. She reaches a few meters before she collapses on herself, still desperately pulling and clawing at nearby table legs and desk corners.
You allow yourself a few moments of respite, as you suck in air with deep breaths, drinking as deep as possible of it. Bits and pieces of scattered blood and brain on your body are freezing by the second, but you don't feel different yourself. Cold, definitely, but not freezing. A thin layer of icy glaze is forming on your body like a second skin, the emerald light of the symbols on your metallic carapace shining through with a twisted radiance. You slowly begin to walk towards the woman, only stopping for a brief moment as you catch your reflection in the glass windows.
You look like a vision out of nightmare.
Your hair is messy and scruffy, bits of brain matter hanging in it like jewelry with so much dried blood. Still, it slowly floats and waves as if underwater, or in a breeze, crowned by the halo of the green sun on your brow. Your eyes are jet black, darker than the night and darker than ebony. They remind you of the infinite darkness of the nightmare realm you stayed in for figurative eons. You are naked again, but you suspect that would be the second thing most people noticed, despite the lab coat being reduced to rags. Your entire body is covered in unintelligible symbols that you don't understand. Luminous and burnished, they shine with a devilish, green light, illumining a body that looks to have been fashioned of brass more than flesh and blood.
You take another step, she's in no danger of getting away, and you're in no haste. You do your best to look confident, like you're simply doing this to look powerful, but in truth, you're not sure if you're strong enough to run anymore, anyways.
The woman turns on her back, staring at you with a face caught in animalistic terror, pushing herself away with hands and legs, more than she's walking or even crawling. In her terrified eyes, you see only a sun of emerald green, shining and judging.
There's something monstrous in her expression. Her eyes are too wide; her pupils too small. She scurries away from you backwards on all fours, showing a feral ease that simply wasn't there when she approached you as a woman.
The blood around her mouth and her fangs catch the light.
You grin a bloodied, weary grin that's rich with anticipation. Without looking, a lab chair floats in front of you, tearing itself apart until you're left with just a sharpened pole.
Grabbing it, you swing it around in the air a few times. It makes a very satisfying whistle.
With a thought, you shear off the end. Now it's sharp. Your smile widens, as it hovers before you, floating over your index finger.
"Now, are you going to answer my questions?" you ask her with your most false, bitchiest sweetness.
She hisses at you like a cat, or a snake. She backs up further, moving on all fours. Her arms are moving like maybe she has more elbows than she should. But you're between her and the door.
"I wouldn't want you to leave," you gloat. "After all, there are so many things here you don't want to leave behind." You gesture, and the sharpened pole stabs forwards. It takes her clean through the bicep, pinning her to the wall behind her like an insect in one of those old nineteenth century butterfly collections you've seen elsewhere in the university.
"Like your arm," you say as she screams, a wordless feral noise. "That's something you're very attached to. So be a good little blood-drinking monster-bitch and-"
The veins visible in her shoulders flush red, and she tears herself loose from the pole, leaving arm muscle and skin behind.
"Oh what the fuck," you say, genuinely taken aback.
Those coiled legs expand, and she throws herself backwards at the glass of the window. She smashes through, and falls.
You rush to the broken glass. There's blood all around the edges, and torn clothing. But under the light of the sodium street light outside, there's no sign of her. There's no feral, bleeding woman running away on all fours across the empty car park; no trail of blood on the glass-littered grassy verge directly under the window.
You blink. You carefully look left and right. You look across the empty space over to the next buildings, just in case she could fly or some bullshit like that. You scan the horizon.
Nothing.
Like a mature, sensible adult, you turn around and kick a cupboard door so hard it goes flying off its hinges and bounces off two walls before it comes to a halt.
"That cheating bitch!"
Even as you watch, the flesh she left behind pinned to the pole is rotting. It's not fresh meat. It's decomposing before your very eyes.
With a drawn out sigh, you lean against the wall, and slump down. You hurt. You hurt all over. And you ache with a bone-deep ache. You just want to… to find a bed and sleep.
For days. Maybe a week. That'd be nice.
"Oh, come on," says that asshole Ravana, who's made an appearance now the fighting is over. "You can't be complaining that you're sore and that you're going to be waddling tomorrow already. That was only you handling three people at once."
You direct a filthy glare at him. "This is not about sex," you growl. There's a dead man there. The… the vampire drank all his blood. And the other guy is lying in a pool of his own blood and brain tissue. That which didn't get over you, that is.
"I know. If you're tired after a little three-vs-one, you're not impressing me."
"Look away, asshole," you gesture, as you pull off the utterly ruined, now-buttonless lab coat and try to wipe yourself down. There's paper towels from a dispenser on the wall that's survived somewhat intact, but at this stage you're mostly just smearing it all over you. The blood-brain-foam mix is sticky and tacky. Like children's glue. When you spread your bruised, gashed fingers, they try to stick together.
You want a bath. You're covered in your own blood and other people's blood and brain tissue Also, fire extinguisher foam. This has never happened to you before. You want a bath and soap so you can scrub the coppery smell away and if your eyes are watering and your vision is blurring, it's just before you have blood in your eyes and it stings. That's all.
There are taps in here, and the water is still working. You wash your face, then more paper towels give themselves to the cause of trying to get yourself clean.
Something moves behind you. You whirl, fist raised, muscles aching, ready to try to slug Ravana one. But it's just the unhealthily pale guy, the one you'd tried to rescue. He's holding a - praise be! - a towel, and even better has his eyes averted.
Ates Polat, that was his name!
"Have to say," Ravana says, sitting beside you, "he'd look better if he put more weight on. And of course, they hadn't stolen his blood to feed vampires. Not sure I like the moustache either."
You ignore him, taking the towel. "Thank you," you say to Ates. You drape it around your shoulders, immediately turning the white fabric pinkish.
He doesn't look your way. "Uh. There's more in one of the cupboards. I remembered that from one of the earlier times," he says. His Italian is heavily accented.
There are two dead people in here. You don't really need a towel. You need clothes, and then you need to get out of here. "You. Ates. Get me a fresh lab coat. One of the white coats hanging on the wall," you order.
While he obeys, you strip down the corpse of the gorilla the woman drained dry. He's got a shirt that's long enough to almost be a short dress on you, and while his trousers are clown-sized on you, you can tear them off at the knee and belt them in. They don't fit, but at least they stay up. You rummage through the gorilla's pockets, and find a wallet. There's some euros in it, as well as his debit cards and his CIE. You take it.
"You can look," you tell Ates, accepting the fresh lab coat. With a lab coat on top, you'll look… well, like a crazed woman who's probably living on the streets, but at least someone would need to get closer to see the blood splatters.
"What now?" he asks. He's picked up one of the handguns, and checks it with more professionalism than you're capable of. He even does the bit from the movies where they slide the bit with the bullets out so they can count how many they have left. You're not sure how old he is, but you suspect he's younger than he looks, for all that there's grey at his temples.
"We need to get out of here," you say.
"Time for the warpath!" Ravana cheers. "Let's go fuck them up! How do you find vampires? Goth nightclubs? Are those still a thing?"
You're not even going to ask Ravana how he knows about them. Asshole probably read your mind. N-not that you were thinking that yourself!
"I meant apart from that. There is no way that I will stay here." There's a dry note in Ates's voice. "But after that, what?"
Shit. That's something you don't know. Can you go home? Will someone have reported you missing? Does anyone know you were the woman taken to this place ruled by vampires who steal people's blood?
"Well, we could always go to-"
Article:
Choose one:
[ ] My Place: It may only be an apartment, but it's your own and it's not far from here. It has plenty of room for two, but you'll be alone and having to deal with whatever this shit is, alone
[ ] My Friend's Place: Your friend Giuliana has an apartment a bit further from here. It's smaller and doesn't have room for much, but at least you'll both have some less fucked company.
[ ] A Shitty Motel: One of the gorillas had some euros, and if you want to be circumspect and sure no one is following you, a shitty motel paid for by euros not your own, is probably the best.
Regardless of the vote option chosen, you will be able to reflect on the questions you asked the scientists in any of them. This means your questions will effectively be answered in the next update.
Article:
Acquire clothes: Fulfilled.
Discover why you're here: Unfulfilled
Make someone fucking answer to this: Fulfilled
Learn what you can do: Partially fulfilled
Find some exit: Fulfilled
Motes expended/motes left: 3/10
1m spent on Mind-Hand Manipulation
1m spent on Shadow Spite Curse
1m spent on Source Code Compliance Protocol
Azar's health levels: Unharmed/Bruised/Hurt/Injured/Wounded/Mauled/Crippled/Incapacitated