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THE ABYSSAL FORMERLY KNOWN AS RILEY QUEST [Worm/Exalted]

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Finally finished writing the update. 2.8K of freshly minted feels, just awaiting a bit of editing before I pop this up sometime tomorrow.
Adhoc vote count started by Origami Clock on May 18, 2018 at 2:58 PM, finished with 64 posts and 45 votes.
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Blood - 1.5 - Part 2
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    • Blood - 1.5 - part 2 ​

    You trail after her in a slightly wobbly line, Phyla leading you into the confines of the breakroom, which is thankfully entirely empty of life, discounting one of the ubiquitous camera balls secreted in the corner.

    Phyla notices your bleary fascination with the ball, though thankfully she remains ignorant to the strange power-fuelled tangents of your thoughts.

    "Tinker thing? Normally people are just a bit creeped by them, if they even notice them at all. Connie-sorry, Pantopticon's pretty good at making them blend in."

    Ooooh! So that's what her specialty is; I wonder if I can talk her into making fluffy crow spy-drones, or what if…

    It is only due to your rather extensive muscular replacement that you don't start to drool slightly at the mental visions of flocks of mind-linked cybercrows, their oil-black eyes gleaming as they expand your sight from horizon to horizon. Then you feel something alarmingly similar to a cold nose being pressed to the back of your knee, which swiftly banishes any thoughts of avian doom.

    You instinctively dropped an arm to your side, ready to administer scritches behind the ear to a certain excessively fluffy, if exceptionally needy dog…that isn't there. You abort the motion half-way, but not soon enough for Phyla not to notice it.

    "Yeah, Tinker thing…err…you want me to grab a pad of paper or something? I know how moo-um-distracted Pantopticon can get when she's got an idea stuck in her head."

    "I'm fine."

    It's a hideous lie, but in this very specific case, somewhat accurate. You don't need to write down ideas, not really. They just go to sleep for a bit, waiting till you need them, until they can spill across your eyes written in lines of lilac and grey. Given what you made the last time you made the lines dance for you, you aren't particularly sad about not having to see the murderous potential buried in each and every object within your sight.

    "…ok. Well, hopefully you'll have some time to talk to her…um, later. From how long she likes to spend messaging Embrasure over in Quebec, I'm sure she'd appreciate another Tinker to talk to. Anyway…how do you think your power changes you? I thought Tinkers couldn't really do that sort of thing without already having Tinkertech for it…"

    She trails off, not feeling confident in the slightest to actually address the blood-stained elephant in the room. How, precisely, had you been able to modify yourself with a power if you had Triggered less than 24 hours ago? Especially since that time was mostly occupied with you being tortured, enabling the torture and murder of your family, and other fun subjects that were in no way suitable for this sort of conversation.

    Not that you could really give a good answer, either. What, were you supposed to say that you made a dying pact with a being that, if not actually Satan, did a very good impression of him? That using your power makes you hallucinate, amongst other things, snippets of history's greatest atrocities, the memories of an insane Tinker serial killer, and laughter from a man you had made very sure was as dead as dead could be?

    'Amusing, if terribly inaccurate. You do not have the mind to comprehend what our Masters would not give to merely be condemned to Hell. As for the rest, I suspect you will want some privacy to discuss such things.'

    You give an almost imperceptible shudder at the sensation of that voice cutting its way out of nowhere into your skull, like spiders made of ice were running up your spinal cord. It recedes quickly, leaving only Phyla's concerned expression to mark that it had ever occurred…well, that and the flicker that you saw of your dim reflection in the vending machine glass opposite you, in which, for a horrible moment you noticed what looked terrifyingly like a spiny bug crawling out of your ear before buzzing away.

    "…You ok?"

    "…um…sorta? Making my power look at itself…"

    "Ouch. Remember to tell the labcoats that when they put you through power testing. Anything that you can tell them is a bad idea straight out will save so much bother later. When had mine done, one of them asked me to try to adapt myself so I could use my powers better, want to guess what I ended up as?"

    You gave it some thought. Powers needed bits of brain to work…incidentally if there was some spare parahuman brain bits around you were so going to ask for some…getting back on track, poking your brain for ideas on hyper-adaptive things were giving you lots of weird ideas, but the clearest one was a giant sea of silvery goo, endless shapes forming before collapsing back into the whole, it was pretty scary, but honestly so was quite a bit your power showed you, even without all the…everything that had happened so recently. But as well as scary it also looked really cool and it even had it's pretty bits; you were just thinking about a grove full of shimmering silver flowers in the shadow of silver trees before you received a teasing boop to the nose that brought you back to the world.

    You pouted, and took some visceral satisfaction in the barely supressed cooing that you could see hovering behind Phyla's face before it shifted for a moment into chitin to hide all of her adorable microexpressions from you and that wasn't fair at all.

    "It's something blobby, isn't it? My power keeps insisting that all the best adapty things are big puddles of shiny shapeshifting goo for some reason."

    "Yep, you would not believe the noises some of them made when I dissolved into a puddle of jello in the testing chambers."

    "Soo cool! What colour were you? Were you see through so everyone could see if you still had squidgy bits or were you just goo all the way through? If I can have a cup of you-goo I promise I won't ask you for samples for Tinkering at all ever afterwards, please~?"

    She was doing the armour thing again. Boo. Disentangling your own mild-to-moderate squeeage with your power's resurgent interest in making an unstoppable army of pretty shapeshifting cyborg ninjas with pointy ears, you restrain yourself just enough that Phyla's power doesn't feel the need to make herself scalpel-proof.

    "Um…sorry for getting excited. You're still really cool though."

    This time, she had formed a layer of glittering iridescent scales, that as you reigned your enthusiasm in thinned and folded themselves until Phyla was left with a plumage that would make a bird of paradise go green with envy.

    "…It's fine, really. Nothing the labcoats haven't put me through a dozen times over."

    You get the feeling that you don't really want to be grouped together with them in her mind, so you resolve to charge the subject away from anything that might inspire any unwanted interest in her from your power. It did help that she was really fluffy and cute now, and you didn't want to make her power shift away from it before you had a chance to ask for a warm and snuggly feather-hug.

    "M'sorry…um, can I ask how you know where to go around here? All the corridors look the same, and-and there weren't signs or anything to show where things are."

    You may have played up your small person adorableness there, as only an eight-year old really can, but it was a question that you sort of needed an answer to, not to mention providing you a nice opportunity to change the subject away from anything that could make Phyla change away from her current floofy configuration.

    "You mean you weren't- ergh, no, I guess they'd thought you'd sleep for longer or something. What were you looking for?"

    And just like that, you had reached the limits of the mask you wore. A happy smiley cute little girl shouldn't have to worry about hearing things that might not be there, feeling things that nice pretty people like Phyla probably couldn't even understand. They mustn't know how much of a monster you are, that you're a horrible thing that should be locked up in the Birdcage forever and ever and ev-

    You were being hugged. You could feel your teeth itching, sharpening themselves behind your thin, tightly clasped lips. She needed to run away, before you forgot how to pretend that you had a name rather than a title.

    Sorrowful Artisan of Crimson Mercy.

    Just a single thought, and the tears trickling down your face would go black as soot, seed crystals blooming into ebon snowflakes of necrotising toxins while harmless spores bloom and thicken the thin fluid into viscous neurovorous slime. Surely, her power could feel the danger embodied in every single inch of you. It must be screaming at her to run, that holding onto you was as safe as juggling vials of nitro-glycerine.

    She isn't letting go. You're still being hugged…and you don't know why.

    You hear her voice in your ear, light and soft as gossamer.

    "I'm sorry for scaring you. I've…I've got a spare visitor's band, clicking the button on the side will give you a map for the nearby corridors. If you want a bit of space…?"

    A map. A way out of this mess. Yesyesyesyesyes thank you thank you feathery-Phyla, even with you getting your feathery-hug all damp and sad with your murder-tears she really gave the best hugs.

    Dropping one arm from the hug to her belt, she retried a square of slightly squashy grey plastic that she pressed to your limp wrist. The contact tingled for a moment, before a thin tongue of the same grey plastic curled around your wrist to form a band that merged seamlessly with the other side.

    She stepped back, an awkward expression on her face as she watched you poke at the screen and this little button on the side, cycling through the few modes before it settled on a map. You look up for a moment and notice her faintly expectant expression, causing you to rack your brains for answers for what she wants for a moment before you realise that you'd forgotten to actually say thank you out loud for being so nice to you.

    "Thank you."

    There, problem solved. Now you really do need to go and see what precisely was causing all that woofing, and why precisely you seem to be the only one to be noticing it. You stride purposefully out of the break room, eyes glued to the little map and entirely missing whatever Phyla may or may not have been doing behind you.

    The woofs resumed, as if the source of them could sense your approach, the funereal reverberations dimming and being replaced with what could almost be the happy woofs of a dog welcoming back his owners. A dog the size of a pony, whose barks were so low pitched that it almost felt like your bones were vibrating in sympathy to them.

    You barely notice your own acceleration, phase shift motors and the tangled black spider web of sinews and half-synthetic musculature driving you onwards at a speed far beyond what your frame would suggest you capable of.

    The beige labyrinth lies behind you now, reduced to just a vague memory of motion contentedly consigning itself to nothingness, to sleep in the cold archives beneath your mind alongside the countless schematic-dreams that linger within you, dead to the world until they are needed once again.

    The only thing that remains to bar you from your way is a door, an especially frustrating one, since in following the aesthetics of the rest of the PRT Headquarters, it seemed to think that features like doorknobs were for people who didn't have easy access to Dragon's logistics loop. The door marked on your helpful little map as the secondary entrance for the medical section's reserve morgue.

    Now, you could simply tear your way through it, should you feel like it. If you were really annoyed at it, you could even tear away the lie that your powers had anything to do with Parahumanity, with technology or reason or restraint, take a mote of purest NOT from your heart and have it reduce the door to dust and less than dust.

    But all of that would be incredibly rude to the nice people in the PRT and Protectorate who had given you warm showers and comfy beds and hugs in a variety of textures and temperatures.

    So you consider the number pad placed adjacent to the door, and with a moment of concentration that has your forehead splitting open to reveal a gleaming wound that forms the shape of a lidded, leering eye, mocking the creations of those limited by such petty things as logic or sanity. Your shadow unfolds itself from your back, slender, many-fingered hands peeling the casing off the wall like some overgrown steel scab, revealing the soft electric guts behind it. Blind snakes spun out of smoke and nothingness crawl in, their dainty razor-edged teeth flaying the plastic casings from the wires before snipping them. A faint pressure behind your eyes, and your glare neatly solders wire to wire and wire to circuit, until at last the door happily slides open.

    All in all, it had taken you barely twenty seconds to bypass the security, and a subsequent ten to tidy up after yourself and sear a little note of what you did on the underside of the steel cover in case your repairs somehow aren't good enough. You hope Dragon won't be too mad, if she finds out.

    You step into the cold confines of the morgue, and it feels almost like coming home. It was like stepping into a swimming pool on a too-hot summer day, or like coming through the front door in the teeth of a freezing gale into a well-warmed hallway. It felt right to be here, with all the dead things. All the other dead things.

    Moisture beads on the gleaming steel of the morgue drawers, sparkling in the cool electric light as scintillatingly as any babbling brook. You see specks of darkness flit through the thousand reflections shining within the room, congealing together and sinking into one of the larger drawers, one marked as possessing active biohazard seals that clicked off, one by one, as you watched.

    A millennium of fatigue occurring in an instant, the lock on the drawer finally failed, spilling out a heavy white body bag, outlining a four-legged form that was horrifyingly, tantalizingly familiar. Responding to some subconscious urging, your shadow leaps forth in a spray of razors, peeling back the plastic away to expose the remains of the very best dog in all the world.

    Then the body's head turns up to look at you, eyes gone a cloudy grey scattered with faint amethyst sparks. One final howl shakes the room, long and sonorous, and making you tremble to be so close to it as it goes on and on and on…

    Smoke spills from the mouth of the corpse as the howl goes on, pooling around you until the floor is obscured and the surroundings made abstract silhouettes. Then it finally ends, and you feel heat on the back of your neck, like you were standing with your back turned to a towering bonfire. Only the light that cuts through the smoke is not the cheerful orange of autumn but a phosphorescent green, spitting and crackling.

    You turn slowly on your axis, and you see that behind you, silently, the smoke has pulled together into the outline of a dog the size of a small horse, whose eyes burn with the light of murdered stars. The smoke, as if on a signal, rushes into him, forming a vast body the colour of stormclouds. Then, before you can do anything to react, he leans forwards and gives your face a lick with a tongue so large that it leaves your whole face damp.

    It was…it was Wuffles. It was the Wuffles that lived in your dreams given flesh, a wall of phantom muscle and teeth between you and the rest of the world, a bed of divine fluff to spoil and stroke to your hearts content. As you rushed forwards to vainly attempt to hug the vastness of his smoke-soft fluff against you, you felt something that you had not felt in what felt like a very long time. Unambiguous, pure happiness.

    It was to the credit of the universe that it allowed this strange and anomalous circumstance to persist as long as it did.

    From speakers that as far as you knew could be an integral part of every room in this building, a familiar voice emanated, falling down upon you like rain to soak all your hopes to the bone.

    "…Riley…what did you just do?"

    It just had to be Dragon, didn't it?

    =========================================================================
    What will our intrepid heroine do now?
    - [] Panic
    - [] Lie
    - [] Hide behind Wuffles
    - [] All of the above
    - [] Let it go! Let it go! Don't hold it back any mooore!
    I'm sure that this will all just be one of those harmless misunderstandings that we will look back on later and laugh at.​
     
  • Threadmarks
    • Riley: "I summoned the soul of my dead dog to be my eternal servant in undeath."

    - [X] Hide behind Wuffles

    Also, bad invisitext. Bad. ... Or good maybe. Because she would stop playing Riley at least. On the other hand, collateral.

    ... On the third hand, Dragon's actually the best person to learn about this. She doesn't have the inherent squick factor with use needing human corpses beyond them being dead in general.
     
    [X] Hide behind Wuffles

    RoninSword said:
    So is Wuffles actual corpse still lying there on the ground?
    Or did it animate and become spectral?
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    Riley called forth the ghost of Wuffles. Wuffles' corpse is still lying on the ground, but Riley can fix that! It shouldn't be too difficult for a Daybreak to have Wuffles' ghost possess his own corpse, and protect said corpse against decay!
     
    [x] Hide behind Wuffles
    Dog is Love, Dog is life.

    RoninSword said:
    So is Wuffles actual corpse still lying there on the ground?
    Or did it animate and become spectral?
    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...
    In exalted animals have a Po, or lower soul, where humans have both upper (Hun) and lower souls. Basically he has been magically brought back as a ghost by the power of love to follow and protect Riley for all eternity.
     
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