Hell is Other People (Exalted/World of Darkness)

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