Shadowrun: Imugi
Imrix
Periodically Malevolent QM
oh hells
There's... There's a lot in this update. I don't suffer from depression, at least I don't think I do, but I've tried to understand it in order to help my friends and this... Hells.
There's a lot here. But I want to pick out this line;
[X] Strike from the Astral. Bypass everything but the spiritual defenses. Your Drake physiology and dual-plane biology allows you to not only view the shadow world but access it as well. Unfortunately, while you can inuit the process, this is your first time trying it.
It's tempting to go stealth, see if Christoph can surprise himself and discover his self-assessment is more pessimistic than it warrants... But in this case, I don't think it is. "Slithering golden lizard with no stealth training" does not scream Good At Hiding. Conversely, I already talked about how I like the empathy Christoph maintains for corpsec, and I don't want to trash that. Frankly I'd kinda like to try and get back in touch with Gahm sometime.
There's... There's a lot in this update. I don't suffer from depression, at least I don't think I do, but I've tried to understand it in order to help my friends and this... Hells.
There's a lot here. But I want to pick out this line;
as the point where it really started to get to me. Tenfold is always pretty good at this kind of murky, sucking prose that drags you under, but this was the first thing that made me wince in empathy. The idea of being so ashamed of your own enjoyment that you have to carefully ration out how much of it you allow yourself according to what it's 'worth'. Ouch.
yes good go for it get dat hiney christoph you deserve everything
[X] Strike from the Astral. Bypass everything but the spiritual defenses. Your Drake physiology and dual-plane biology allows you to not only view the shadow world but access it as well. Unfortunately, while you can inuit the process, this is your first time trying it.
It's tempting to go stealth, see if Christoph can surprise himself and discover his self-assessment is more pessimistic than it warrants... But in this case, I don't think it is. "Slithering golden lizard with no stealth training" does not scream Good At Hiding. Conversely, I already talked about how I like the empathy Christoph maintains for corpsec, and I don't want to trash that. Frankly I'd kinda like to try and get back in touch with Gahm sometime.
[X] Strike from the Astral. Bypass everything but the spiritual defenses. Your Drake physiology and dual-plane biology allows you to not only view the shadow world but access it as well. Unfortunately, while you can inuit the process, this is your first time trying it.
We've come a long way, haven't we?
[X] Strike from the Astral. Bypass everything but the spiritual defenses. Your Drake physiology and dual-plane biology allows you to not only view the shadow world but access it as well. Unfortunately, while you can inuit the process, this is your first time trying it.
- Location
- ?
[X] Strike from the Astral. Bypass everything but the spiritual defenses. Your Drake physiology and dual-plane biology allows you to not only view the shadow world but access it as well. Unfortunately, while you can inuit the process, this is your first time trying it.
Learning by doing is the best kind of learning, right? Right.
Learning by doing is the best kind of learning, right? Right.
[X] Strike from stealth. Play it like a horror movie. Your Drake agility and raw athleticism give you access to many unexpected avenues of attack. Unfortunately you are still a glittering golden lizard with no appreciable stealth training and thus not particularly covert.
- Location
- Dethklok
[X] Strike from stealth. Play it like a horror movie. Your Drake agility and raw athleticism give you access to many unexpected avenues of attack. Unfortunately you are still a glittering golden lizard with no appreciable stealth training and thus not particularly covert.
Let's be dragon batman! (yes I know Zerba has already made that joke)
Let's be dragon batman! (yes I know Zerba has already made that joke)
Act One Part Sixty Two: Replica
TenfoldShields
Lounging on a Hoard of Words
- Pronouns
- He/Him
You're half-hatched, half-formed, something more than human tearing its way through pale, scarred skin. Something made out of razor sharp angles and golden scales. You can taste mana gradients, feel the texture of Dust on your tongue; fortune and fear like a mouthful of rich red meat, thick and fibrous, dripping honey sweet blood down your throat. You see in shades of heat, slitted eyes behind your smooth visor; surreal colors rippling off of air conditioning vents, swirling around the exhaust turbines of the dropship in the distance as it banks around. The building pulses, shuddering with life. The darkness around you bleeding away to grey in every direction, charcoal mingling with bloody orange gleam of its windows, with the the rainbow shimmer of its thermal respiration.
Pick any point on the mirror-polished surface below you. Your reflection keeping pace as you flash past the offices inside, you're so close that if anyone looked out their window they could see you, if only for a second. You're so close that you can peel back the skin just by looking, feel the heat, the essence, note down every single detail. It's too much, should be too much, it's synesthesia, the kind of sense-blurring that foreshadows an epileptic fit. But it fits. It makes sense. Natural associations, instinctive connections, snapping together in your brain with barely a conscious consideration.
This is how dragons see the world.
Grey mist curls around your arms, whips past your shoulders. Rain pelts your body, boiling off as acceleration drags the drops down. Drying as they curl across your brawny chest, leaving steaming tracks as they follow the hard lines of your stomach. You beat your wings once, twice, each downbeat gathering, shaping, focusing, the streams of mana that howl past you. Tail twitching, guiding the flow like a rudder. For something almost spiritual it's so...visceral. Leathery membranes catching against the currents, the shudders working through the slab-muscle of your back and shoulders, the steady panting that presses your ribs stark against your sides. Parchment yellow skin, translucent and shot through with nearly black veins stretched out between skeletal gold-scaled struts, the tips terminating in vicious spikes. You can see the hand in it. See the flayed skeleton of a mammal's anatomy, blown up until the limb, the bicep, the fingers makes a span wider than you're tall.
Should be enough to make you sick huh? Feeling your frame pulling itself apart like this, the edges of your Christoph-suit crinkled up like burned paper where your real body burst through. You should be throwing up right now, retching at least. You should be screaming, the little lizard -hah- part of your brain desperately scrabbling for the ground below. But it's gone now. It's dead now. The bones in your ear shifting and rearranging, your guts crawling over themselves into new patterns.
The Earth's pull is just a suggestion. A plucking on the edges of your leggings, your silver-scaled sleeves. That's all. That's it. It doesn't hold you, can't hold you if you don't want it to. You're free, free of everything and you just...want to take this moment and capture it, frame it, chip it. Paint it onto circuits and get a slot in your head just so you could plug it in and play it, again and again and again for the rest of your life but God you don't even have to. You don't even need to and that makes you so happy you almost want to cry. You never have to be like Her. You don't have to desperately lick your good feelings off the flat of a simsense card. You can have this whenever you want it, you can rip your wings out through false muscle and fake skin and just kick away whenever you'd like.
You've got-
You've got people who care about you. As stunted and fucked up as you are. You've got a place where you fit, a purpose, as reason to be. That's all you need. That's all you've ever needed. You can do this. It was never in question, the only one who ever doubted was you.
The heliport rises up ahead, a stark cutout against the purple-black sky. Bulging out of the side of the building like some barnacle, some sea-thing: a collection of hard-edged shell segments and intertwined rubber tendrils, an industrial polyp. The kind of thing that slices open your foot in cold waters, where you don't even notice until your feel the faint pain and see the crimson curling around your ankle. Big enough now that you could slit your whole body open on the edges. It rushes to meet you, swelling until it fills your whole field of view.
Flare your wings, twist, your bare feet hit a support strut hard enough for a hollow boom to echo out, hard enough that your bones buzz with the impact. The reverberation lost in the sound of rolling thunder. Black talons, a curved dewclaw burst out of your feet, splitting nails and shredding tendons. Your lower limbs just stockings stuffed full of razorblades. Get a grip, hang on as gravity belatedly takes hold, your hair standing on end (your blood doesn't even rush to your head anymore). Flap your wings once, twice, then fold them behind you and wait. After a few seconds Tyrhand drifts up, rotor whirring, bobbing in the wind. You reach out, catch its ceramic casing and pull it in the rest of the way. The soft whine ceasing the second it's tucked into the underbelly with you. Safe and sheltered from the endless gale moaning, keening, through Pyongyang's artificial mountains. Count it off, exhale, let the qi circulate through your veins, collect in your lungs.
A dozen meters down a rotorcraft slices through the thinner clouds; blades whirling, wet with cold condensation, tiltjets humming deep enough to shiver in your chest, blasting away the wispy scraps with waves of rippling distortion. It's longer than the thing that blew up your apartment, wider, a two story whale to the sleeker shark. It lifts up its tail as it ascends and you can see the segmented underside. The cargo containers of bipedal droids hanging from clamps. The spider-tank curled up on itself like a sleeping tarantula, lovingly cradled in robotic arms. An entire drone platoon, ready to drop on command.
"I made it," you say quietly. Shit radio protocol you know but you're not corpsec anymore and you and the drone are distracted anyway, watching the monster drift away. Looking at the city as it spreads out below you, over your head. An artificial archipelago rising from filthy iron-colored clouds, smaller buildings and roads like reefs, wrapping around the bases of island megastructures. Tyrhand cants closer, its grey optic eye inches from yours, secondary lenses in a neat column on the side. You can see the finer mechanics irising inside the glass casing.
"What's the plan?" Fenrir's voice rumbles in your ear, you could almost confuse the harsh snarl backing the syllables for static if you didn't know better. As it is it still takes you a few seconds to shake your head, clear out the fascination and get your brain back in the game. Not that it'll necessarily help a ton because calling what you have a plan is so goddamn generous you could write it off as a tax deduction but-
Sure. Sure it's what you have and you're committed now, you're confident, you're not going to coward out just because you're slamming your face into a hostile dimension full of hungry spirits. For the first time. Upside Down.
"Foehn."
"Ah, sorry heh just- I'm just anxious. I'm going to infiltrate from the Astral Plane, my body's dual-natured so I can make the jump okay. Can you get Tyrhand in through the drone ducts?"
A huff, the click of long yellow teeth against each other. Razor sharp enamel behind thin black lips. He doesn't seem angry, and if he was he'd probably just tell you. But he doesn't even do that long-suffering sigh thing people do when they want to let you know you're being an obnoxious fuckup but can't be bothered to make you change. Instead he just hums, the sound wet and raw. A tone away from tipping into a gutwatering growl.
"Mnm. How long will you need?"
"Five minutes on the outside, distance is different in the Astral but it's not far."
"Understood."
The drone peels away, shadowing the savage angles of the landing platform. Ascending up, deeper into the guts. Just you now, all the privacy you need here at the roof of the world. Hanging from the attic eaves like a scarlet-stained nightmare.
Hah. Funny. If only they knew right?
If only they knew.
Your body swells, twists and breaks. False flesh charring away like a fresh coat of paint in front of a blast furnace. False bones crushed into nothing, cannibalized as fat red worms squirm beneath golden scales, something new slotting itself in place. Emerging piece by porcelain white piece into the mass of yourself. Your legs snap, knees crunching backwards as tendons come undone. Connective tissue flexing and curling up upon itself as new cartilage threads its way through you. Your body is a doll, a caul, an anchor: you replace yourself. You destroy yourself. You consume yourself.
Ash creeps up your cheeks, burning away the flesh nearly back to your ears, to the hinge where your jaw hangs from your skull. Your mouth shatters as razored fangs push through blackening gums. Your tongue splits apart into petal-portions as something longer, thicker, slips free and traces a circuit around your chops, tenting up the cloth mask. Sleek black material creaks over your bulging arms, your rippling legs. Layers of brawn slithering over your bare chest like snakes beneath the skin, anchoring, fusing, forming a new anatomy. In the end it really is just anatomy; instincts and autonomous functions.
Reach out, black claws slipping free of their casings. Reach through the layers, the slippery wet sheets of reality, overlaying, overlapping each other. The membrane between worlds, boosted and stabilized by local ward-systems. It doesn't matter, you find the seam, the catch between rubbery skeins, you pull down your mask and dig your claws in. Dig your teeth in. Pull your head back, twist and tear and feel the world snap. Ripping, fraying, a glassy patch pouring itself out into the rainy night, a half-visible wound. You ram your folded wings in the shimmer and fan those fingers out before it can reverse, before the cut can heal over and close up completely. .
Good, just like that.
Beat your wings once and let heat haze swallow you whole. Let it flow over your body, part scales, part skin, part leggings and sleeves and mask. Let it drag you through. It's a little like drifting off. That blurry unclear span where you slip down the spectrum from awake to asleep and can't quite tell where the change even occurred. But you open your eyes a second later as your talons touch the lip of the platform.
You wake up in a world on fire.
You weren't ready. You really weren't ready. You thought you understood it, and you did in the intellectual sense. In the astral metaphor has mass, imagery is architecture, but you're at the heights of power now and it's more than just an expression.
A solar eclipse burns in a golden sky, orange and copper clouds curling around the blazing rim. Perpetual sunset spilling down the flanks of the mountain range beneath your feet. You're at the end of the helipad, at the end of a polished pier of black stone and braided industrial cables. Pyongyang's Shadow sprawls out beneath you. Barely glimpsed through the rosey haze, arcologies and secondary superstructures, each one the size of a city block in their own right reaching up to the shadowed sky. Flowing into each other, a fused warren of roads that go nowhere, covered walkways that twist back into themselves, mag-rails that run into the ocean, into industrial cliff faces, into the sky.
A labyrinth rearranging itself in real time, portions of the map visibly shrinking, others expanding as the city respires and turns over in it's sleep. Streets sliding into each other as city blocks collapse down, apartment blocks folding out of the sides of buildings as composite complexes rise up. It all turned toylike by the distance.
Water swirls like so much spilled paints, pouring itself down streets in foaming white rivers, drowning entire Wards. Advertisements the size of skyscrapers dance down ashen streets in the twilight glow, digital dust storms billowing in their wake. Tiered pyramids crouch over vast plumes of mana, shopping malls and commercial concourses wrenched into massive mining rigs. Tear your gaze away, the entrance is assembling around you. More stone erupting out of the air, pylons and clouds of gold sand and silicate glass flowing up, solidifying, setting into the storefront of a modern transit terminal. Camera spirits line the walkways, the emaciated figures press their faces into the ground as you pass, their long-fingered hands over slit-ears. They won't see you, they don't want to hear you. But you hear them murmur let us be like a prayer. Chanting it like a mantra in the self-imposed silence.
Your scent, your heat, soaking the air. A tangible pressure deepening the golden glow around you, focusing it. Making the bloody lines of your uniform drip, making your gold scales shine.
You stand in the plaza before the terminal. Foot paths and elevated rails and secondary roosts for blade-winged things cluster around, branching and forking out crazily. Most wind to other levels, other floors, four seem to advance towards the central security office for this bloc.
[ ] So many workers sleep at their desks here that they've dragged visions of their homes with them, residential sections impinging on the more regimented landscape. A warren of blind hallways and private rooms infested with transplanted daydreams and mute longings.
[ ] The break room is a menagerie, overgrown and overrun, spirits from all over the bloc congregating to feed on the endless emotional turmoil (and each other). A clot that's one part industrial refinery to one part botanical gardens to one part potentially lethal watering hole.
[ ] This floor houses portions of the in house legal team, the offices of the more senior partners have grown proud and ornate, webbing together in a grand network of fortresses piercing the innards of the building. A steadfast and ultimately static network, well developed and immobile.
[ ] Human Resources is a small, unassuming outpost of an office whose Astral shadow sprawls like a malignancy. The first line of defense for the company against its employees and ostensibly their critical resource, its nature in this world is schizophrenic and seemingly all observing.
Pick any point on the mirror-polished surface below you. Your reflection keeping pace as you flash past the offices inside, you're so close that if anyone looked out their window they could see you, if only for a second. You're so close that you can peel back the skin just by looking, feel the heat, the essence, note down every single detail. It's too much, should be too much, it's synesthesia, the kind of sense-blurring that foreshadows an epileptic fit. But it fits. It makes sense. Natural associations, instinctive connections, snapping together in your brain with barely a conscious consideration.
This is how dragons see the world.
Grey mist curls around your arms, whips past your shoulders. Rain pelts your body, boiling off as acceleration drags the drops down. Drying as they curl across your brawny chest, leaving steaming tracks as they follow the hard lines of your stomach. You beat your wings once, twice, each downbeat gathering, shaping, focusing, the streams of mana that howl past you. Tail twitching, guiding the flow like a rudder. For something almost spiritual it's so...visceral. Leathery membranes catching against the currents, the shudders working through the slab-muscle of your back and shoulders, the steady panting that presses your ribs stark against your sides. Parchment yellow skin, translucent and shot through with nearly black veins stretched out between skeletal gold-scaled struts, the tips terminating in vicious spikes. You can see the hand in it. See the flayed skeleton of a mammal's anatomy, blown up until the limb, the bicep, the fingers makes a span wider than you're tall.
Should be enough to make you sick huh? Feeling your frame pulling itself apart like this, the edges of your Christoph-suit crinkled up like burned paper where your real body burst through. You should be throwing up right now, retching at least. You should be screaming, the little lizard -hah- part of your brain desperately scrabbling for the ground below. But it's gone now. It's dead now. The bones in your ear shifting and rearranging, your guts crawling over themselves into new patterns.
The Earth's pull is just a suggestion. A plucking on the edges of your leggings, your silver-scaled sleeves. That's all. That's it. It doesn't hold you, can't hold you if you don't want it to. You're free, free of everything and you just...want to take this moment and capture it, frame it, chip it. Paint it onto circuits and get a slot in your head just so you could plug it in and play it, again and again and again for the rest of your life but God you don't even have to. You don't even need to and that makes you so happy you almost want to cry. You never have to be like Her. You don't have to desperately lick your good feelings off the flat of a simsense card. You can have this whenever you want it, you can rip your wings out through false muscle and fake skin and just kick away whenever you'd like.
You've got-
You've got people who care about you. As stunted and fucked up as you are. You've got a place where you fit, a purpose, as reason to be. That's all you need. That's all you've ever needed. You can do this. It was never in question, the only one who ever doubted was you.
The heliport rises up ahead, a stark cutout against the purple-black sky. Bulging out of the side of the building like some barnacle, some sea-thing: a collection of hard-edged shell segments and intertwined rubber tendrils, an industrial polyp. The kind of thing that slices open your foot in cold waters, where you don't even notice until your feel the faint pain and see the crimson curling around your ankle. Big enough now that you could slit your whole body open on the edges. It rushes to meet you, swelling until it fills your whole field of view.
Flare your wings, twist, your bare feet hit a support strut hard enough for a hollow boom to echo out, hard enough that your bones buzz with the impact. The reverberation lost in the sound of rolling thunder. Black talons, a curved dewclaw burst out of your feet, splitting nails and shredding tendons. Your lower limbs just stockings stuffed full of razorblades. Get a grip, hang on as gravity belatedly takes hold, your hair standing on end (your blood doesn't even rush to your head anymore). Flap your wings once, twice, then fold them behind you and wait. After a few seconds Tyrhand drifts up, rotor whirring, bobbing in the wind. You reach out, catch its ceramic casing and pull it in the rest of the way. The soft whine ceasing the second it's tucked into the underbelly with you. Safe and sheltered from the endless gale moaning, keening, through Pyongyang's artificial mountains. Count it off, exhale, let the qi circulate through your veins, collect in your lungs.
A dozen meters down a rotorcraft slices through the thinner clouds; blades whirling, wet with cold condensation, tiltjets humming deep enough to shiver in your chest, blasting away the wispy scraps with waves of rippling distortion. It's longer than the thing that blew up your apartment, wider, a two story whale to the sleeker shark. It lifts up its tail as it ascends and you can see the segmented underside. The cargo containers of bipedal droids hanging from clamps. The spider-tank curled up on itself like a sleeping tarantula, lovingly cradled in robotic arms. An entire drone platoon, ready to drop on command.
"I made it," you say quietly. Shit radio protocol you know but you're not corpsec anymore and you and the drone are distracted anyway, watching the monster drift away. Looking at the city as it spreads out below you, over your head. An artificial archipelago rising from filthy iron-colored clouds, smaller buildings and roads like reefs, wrapping around the bases of island megastructures. Tyrhand cants closer, its grey optic eye inches from yours, secondary lenses in a neat column on the side. You can see the finer mechanics irising inside the glass casing.
"What's the plan?" Fenrir's voice rumbles in your ear, you could almost confuse the harsh snarl backing the syllables for static if you didn't know better. As it is it still takes you a few seconds to shake your head, clear out the fascination and get your brain back in the game. Not that it'll necessarily help a ton because calling what you have a plan is so goddamn generous you could write it off as a tax deduction but-
Sure. Sure it's what you have and you're committed now, you're confident, you're not going to coward out just because you're slamming your face into a hostile dimension full of hungry spirits. For the first time. Upside Down.
"Foehn."
"Ah, sorry heh just- I'm just anxious. I'm going to infiltrate from the Astral Plane, my body's dual-natured so I can make the jump okay. Can you get Tyrhand in through the drone ducts?"
A huff, the click of long yellow teeth against each other. Razor sharp enamel behind thin black lips. He doesn't seem angry, and if he was he'd probably just tell you. But he doesn't even do that long-suffering sigh thing people do when they want to let you know you're being an obnoxious fuckup but can't be bothered to make you change. Instead he just hums, the sound wet and raw. A tone away from tipping into a gutwatering growl.
"Mnm. How long will you need?"
"Five minutes on the outside, distance is different in the Astral but it's not far."
"Understood."
The drone peels away, shadowing the savage angles of the landing platform. Ascending up, deeper into the guts. Just you now, all the privacy you need here at the roof of the world. Hanging from the attic eaves like a scarlet-stained nightmare.
Hah. Funny. If only they knew right?
If only they knew.
Your body swells, twists and breaks. False flesh charring away like a fresh coat of paint in front of a blast furnace. False bones crushed into nothing, cannibalized as fat red worms squirm beneath golden scales, something new slotting itself in place. Emerging piece by porcelain white piece into the mass of yourself. Your legs snap, knees crunching backwards as tendons come undone. Connective tissue flexing and curling up upon itself as new cartilage threads its way through you. Your body is a doll, a caul, an anchor: you replace yourself. You destroy yourself. You consume yourself.
Ash creeps up your cheeks, burning away the flesh nearly back to your ears, to the hinge where your jaw hangs from your skull. Your mouth shatters as razored fangs push through blackening gums. Your tongue splits apart into petal-portions as something longer, thicker, slips free and traces a circuit around your chops, tenting up the cloth mask. Sleek black material creaks over your bulging arms, your rippling legs. Layers of brawn slithering over your bare chest like snakes beneath the skin, anchoring, fusing, forming a new anatomy. In the end it really is just anatomy; instincts and autonomous functions.
Reach out, black claws slipping free of their casings. Reach through the layers, the slippery wet sheets of reality, overlaying, overlapping each other. The membrane between worlds, boosted and stabilized by local ward-systems. It doesn't matter, you find the seam, the catch between rubbery skeins, you pull down your mask and dig your claws in. Dig your teeth in. Pull your head back, twist and tear and feel the world snap. Ripping, fraying, a glassy patch pouring itself out into the rainy night, a half-visible wound. You ram your folded wings in the shimmer and fan those fingers out before it can reverse, before the cut can heal over and close up completely. .
Good, just like that.
Beat your wings once and let heat haze swallow you whole. Let it flow over your body, part scales, part skin, part leggings and sleeves and mask. Let it drag you through. It's a little like drifting off. That blurry unclear span where you slip down the spectrum from awake to asleep and can't quite tell where the change even occurred. But you open your eyes a second later as your talons touch the lip of the platform.
You wake up in a world on fire.
You weren't ready. You really weren't ready. You thought you understood it, and you did in the intellectual sense. In the astral metaphor has mass, imagery is architecture, but you're at the heights of power now and it's more than just an expression.
A solar eclipse burns in a golden sky, orange and copper clouds curling around the blazing rim. Perpetual sunset spilling down the flanks of the mountain range beneath your feet. You're at the end of the helipad, at the end of a polished pier of black stone and braided industrial cables. Pyongyang's Shadow sprawls out beneath you. Barely glimpsed through the rosey haze, arcologies and secondary superstructures, each one the size of a city block in their own right reaching up to the shadowed sky. Flowing into each other, a fused warren of roads that go nowhere, covered walkways that twist back into themselves, mag-rails that run into the ocean, into industrial cliff faces, into the sky.
A labyrinth rearranging itself in real time, portions of the map visibly shrinking, others expanding as the city respires and turns over in it's sleep. Streets sliding into each other as city blocks collapse down, apartment blocks folding out of the sides of buildings as composite complexes rise up. It all turned toylike by the distance.
Water swirls like so much spilled paints, pouring itself down streets in foaming white rivers, drowning entire Wards. Advertisements the size of skyscrapers dance down ashen streets in the twilight glow, digital dust storms billowing in their wake. Tiered pyramids crouch over vast plumes of mana, shopping malls and commercial concourses wrenched into massive mining rigs. Tear your gaze away, the entrance is assembling around you. More stone erupting out of the air, pylons and clouds of gold sand and silicate glass flowing up, solidifying, setting into the storefront of a modern transit terminal. Camera spirits line the walkways, the emaciated figures press their faces into the ground as you pass, their long-fingered hands over slit-ears. They won't see you, they don't want to hear you. But you hear them murmur let us be like a prayer. Chanting it like a mantra in the self-imposed silence.
Your scent, your heat, soaking the air. A tangible pressure deepening the golden glow around you, focusing it. Making the bloody lines of your uniform drip, making your gold scales shine.
You stand in the plaza before the terminal. Foot paths and elevated rails and secondary roosts for blade-winged things cluster around, branching and forking out crazily. Most wind to other levels, other floors, four seem to advance towards the central security office for this bloc.
[ ] So many workers sleep at their desks here that they've dragged visions of their homes with them, residential sections impinging on the more regimented landscape. A warren of blind hallways and private rooms infested with transplanted daydreams and mute longings.
[ ] The break room is a menagerie, overgrown and overrun, spirits from all over the bloc congregating to feed on the endless emotional turmoil (and each other). A clot that's one part industrial refinery to one part botanical gardens to one part potentially lethal watering hole.
[ ] This floor houses portions of the in house legal team, the offices of the more senior partners have grown proud and ornate, webbing together in a grand network of fortresses piercing the innards of the building. A steadfast and ultimately static network, well developed and immobile.
[ ] Human Resources is a small, unassuming outpost of an office whose Astral shadow sprawls like a malignancy. The first line of defense for the company against its employees and ostensibly their critical resource, its nature in this world is schizophrenic and seemingly all observing.
Last edited:
[X] Human Resources is a small, unassuming outpost of an office whose Astral shadow sprawls like a malignancy. The first line of defense for the company against its employees and ostensibly their critical resource, its nature in this world is schizophrenic and seemingly all observing.
ZerbanDaGreat
Daemon Noble of D E M O G R A P H I C S
- Pronouns
- They/them
Discovering the Ruiner soundtrack was a very formative event for you wasn't it.
Christoph is good boy
Okay so I probably shouldn't quote every passage of god-tier descriptive work because if I did I'd just be quoting the entire thing and droning "me me big boy" every paragraph but hnnng I love how weirdly visceral and body-horror Christoph's constant dragon transformations are. It's a cool way to remind us that who he is as a human really isn't Him in a sense, how bursting free of it in this fundamentally gory way doesn't even bother him at all let alone hurt.
Also getting into the Astral by clawing and biting through the world's AT Field, that's some good shit.
Man this quest's version of the Astral is so fucking cool. I'm going to point it out every time it comes up because the game's is incredibly lame and also even that one time in Dragonfall where you and Glory go to the Silent Hill version of a cult lodge pales in comparison. Tightest shit. Now as far as the choices go...
[ ] So many workers sleep at their desks here that they've dragged visions of their homes with them, residential sections impinging on the more regimented landscape. A warren of blind hallways and private rooms infested with transplanted daydreams and mute longings.
[X] The break room is a menagerie, overgrown and overrun, spirits from all over the bloc congregating to feed on the endless emotional turmoil (and each other). A clot that's one part industrial refinery to one part botanical gardens to one part potentially lethal watering hole.
I'm genuinely super torn between these two because they both paint these potentially really vivid and rich pictures of what it's like to be a cog in this massive neon-lit nighttime rainy cyberpunk machine. But ultimately I'm going with the break room 'cause sleeping at your desk is a private affair whereas heading to the break room to both try and recover your stamina for the rest of your day as a soul-crushed office drone and avoid that bitch Gina from accounting has more potential for like, cross-pollination (the thing literally says it's a 'clot' and a 'menagerie' zerban you dumbfuck) and all that good stuff.
LaRed
Are you stupid or something
- Location
- Mou Ikkai hell
ghh I love the found family trope I love how Chris has gotten over his insecurities I love all of this so much.
[X] The break room is a menagerie, overgrown and overrun, spirits from all over the bloc congregating to feed on the endless emotional turmoil (and each other). A clot that's one part industrial refinery to one part botanical gardens to one part potentially lethal watering hole.
I was considering tackling HR but that's probably too high risk so I dunno
- Location
- Italy
[X] The break room is a menagerie, overgrown and overrun, spirits from all over the bloc congregating to feed on the endless emotional turmoil (and each other). A clot that's one part industrial refinery to one part botanical gardens to one part potentially lethal watering hole.
Redsoff
[DETACHMENT]
- Location
- By [your] side
[X] So many workers sleep at their desks here that they've dragged visions of their homes with them, residential sections impinging on the more regimented landscape. A warren of blind hallways and private rooms infested with transplanted daydreams and mute longings.
If most people sleep here then it would be better for stealth, probably?
Also are only three of these options valid? There are four choices but only three of them lead to the security office.
If most people sleep here then it would be better for stealth, probably?
Also are only three of these options valid? There are four choices but only three of them lead to the security office.
Romv
A Memory of TREES
[X] The break room is a menagerie, overgrown and overrun, spirits from all over the bloc congregating to feed on the endless emotional turmoil (and each other). A clot that's one part industrial refinery to one part botanical gardens to one part potentially lethal watering hole.
TenfoldShields
Lounging on a Hoard of Words
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Ah nah that's just an error on my part, fixed.
LupineVolt
Now with 200% more Puns
- Location
- Michigan
Just tagging these as some of my favorite descriptions out of this whole chapter. God I love sea metaphors.
[ ] This floor houses portions of the in house legal team, the offices of the more senior partners have grown proud and ornate, webbing together in a grand network of fortresses piercing the innards of the building. A steadfast and ultimately static network, well developed and immobile.
The going may be hard, but it'll be *static* hard. As opposed to whatever mishmash of personal drama we may encounter elsewhere.
Imrix
Periodically Malevolent QM
As ever, Tenfold's descriptive talent is some powerful stuff. The later passage of Christoph's transformation is this really intense biological stuff that plunges you guts-deep (stockings full of razorblades, guts slithering over each other, gives me the shivers) but this does really good at sketching the snapshot of Christoph's state, physical and emotional.
did... did Christoph just have good thoughts about himself? Holy shit he did! I mean, it's kind of unsteady, it reads like he's reassuring himself, but he did just have a moment of "life is good."
Hurrah! Our boy's on the right track! Call the quest here, Good End achieved!
C'mere adorable little rotodrone, have a celebratory hug~
... oh.
Oh right, yeah, going into the astral would mean Tenfold gets to let his descriptive talents go completely off the fuckin' chain.
Well! Everything turned out better than expected!
- Location
- Somewhere else
[X] Human Resources is a small, unassuming outpost of an office whose Astral shadow sprawls like a malignancy. The first line of defense for the company against its employees and ostensibly their critical resource, its nature in this world is schizophrenic and seemingly all observing.
[X] So many workers sleep at their desks here that they've dragged visions of their homes with them, residential sections impinging on the more regimented landscape. A warren of blind hallways and private rooms infested with transplanted daydreams and mute longings.
- Location
- Austria
ngl Tenford, your scenery descriptions are absolutely outstanding and vivid and I honestly feel a bit, uh, short on imagination and have to read them very slowly to imagine them
It's wonderful.
[X] The break room is a menagerie, overgrown and overrun, spirits from all over the bloc congregating to feed on the endless emotional turmoil (and each other). A clot that's one part industrial refinery to one part botanical gardens to one part potentially lethal watering hole.
Is this astral version of getting inside through the sewers?
It's wonderful.
[X] The break room is a menagerie, overgrown and overrun, spirits from all over the bloc congregating to feed on the endless emotional turmoil (and each other). A clot that's one part industrial refinery to one part botanical gardens to one part potentially lethal watering hole.
Is this astral version of getting inside through the sewers?