Shimmer, Glimmer, & Gleam - A Quest of Loss & Gain

The plan is simple. Like most simple things, it will be complicated. Corporate will not leave its dominion; however, it can be induced to follow procedures from the old, dead world which fit into its paradigm. Calling the police, evacuating in case of fire...and if the store loses power, the employees (lower case letter, lower case, LOWER CASE) must seal up the fridges and freezers, all customers must check out their items with cash to be tallied by hand on actual note paper, and all customers and employees must leave. Based on the reaction of the hive-mind at Vivi's Yarn Barn, and your own unpleasant insight into its mind, it might try to freeze the employees rather than lose them.

However, this will make it vulnerable. And what it has frozen in glass, you can thaw with blade and bullet.

"We need to buy something first, so we can leave with it," you murmur. "...And then I'm going to destroy all perishable goods for a pretty good distance. For um. Forever."

"Why - oh. Oh!" Jill brightens up. "Get everyone out of the store, yeah?"

"Mmhm. Maybe cut down on having to deal with Asset Protection. So let's find something reasonably plausible that we're gonna want even if this fails."

The two of you wander the store, hemming and hawing, carefully not touching any of the items, before Jill makes a proposal that makes sense to you: sleeping bags. So you load up your carts with five of the things, throw in some kind of portable shelter-looking thing with it (it's like a tent without the tent part, for keeping rain off of the Eternal Soup), and trundle off towards the checkout. It burns a staggering $187.94 after tax, but you get a receipt and the two of you hold it out to Mikayla like a talisman on your way out. Neither of you breathe as you cross the threshold, but it seems your theory was correct: you can just buy shit and leave. This accomplished, you secret the carts in the wasteland that is employee parking, and consider how to cut the power.

"...Breaking in to cut the power from the inside defeats the point," you complain. Jill blinks at you several times and then points to the telephone poles up and down the street, which takes you a minute to catch up to. "...In my defense, I'm an amnesiac."

"A real weird amnesiac, flower. 's cute though."

Hrm. That causes some feelings. We're gonna repress those.

Another $15.33 buys and fills a pair of gas cans at the gas station, being run by a single terrified employee but, curiously, with no Asset Protection in sight. The two of you carry these with you and settle in to watch the building for hours. And hours. The sun is creeping towards dusk by the time the two of you are feeling well-rested and confident in your theory that Asset Protection can't or won't leave the main building, which gives you easy access to the propane tanks just outside the front doors. You break the lock with the hammer on your fire axe, and you and Jill set out to cause an explosion.

Step one: soak the three poles in gasoline.

Steps two and three: Jill stacks propane tanks around them and then starts rapidly busting their tops off while you pour lines of gasoline to create a fuse.

Step four: you and Jill run like hell after you toss a match.

This time the THUMP! of the explosion is anything but muffled, and is ringed with shattering wood, groaning wires, snapping metal, and finally almighty crashes. You spare a glance over your shoulder while you and Jill run for the front door of Bayview, and you see the electrical cables writhing like snakes while the transformer on the second pole sparks, shorts, and then explodes itself. The streetlights that had started to turn on flicker off immediately as just about everything on the drag loses power, and with it, the lights inside Bayview go dark. You two reach the doors to find Mikayla trying to wrench them open; it staggers backwards when it sees the two of you running up with axes, barely visible through the stained glass, and shrieks when the pair of you shatter the doors and continue inside without slowing.

"Run, out into the parking lot!" you bark, in commanding tones that come back to you with an unnerving ease. Mikayla, terrified, hastens to obey.

"Okay, so we shoot it -" Jill begins.

"No guns," you tell her. "They'll just attract Asset Protection. Axes and crowbars."

"Flower are you insane?"

"People keep asking me that. Is there a quota on when the answer is just yes?"

Another explosion outside somehow. This causes similar feelings to being called cute, which we will also be repressing at this time. The two of you skid to a slower pace as you reach the edge of the carpet that defines the entranceway-to-cart-stable area, duck low, and move with a purpose. Not near this aisle, not near that one...

"Where are the offices?" you hiss to Jill.

"Behind electronics."

Glorious. You passed electronics earlier. The two of you scurry, and this time you're far less worried about Jill's feet making noise; employees and customers are yelling, sobbing in terror, and a few in the Meat Department are clutching at bleeding wounds in their upper arms; Asset Protection stands behind them with long lances of glass.

Guess you know what happened to the shoplifters.

What do we mean, no road crews? No road crews? What happened? Where are the Employees?

You give a silent gesture to Jill, and cut left, towards hardware. As you dash through, you pick up a claw hammer from a bucket of many, many such claw hammers.

NOT PART OF US? NOT PART OF US? NOT PART OF US? SURELY WE HEARD US WRONG! NOT PART OF US?

Jill splits off, circling through the lightbulb aisle, and you turn the corner into the paint station, where the color swatches have run free to become reflections of dream houses and imagined nurseries, portraits of longing for a place to truly call one's own.

This is a greater beast than the other. Its half-molten appendages end in sharp spikes of rusty steel, which puncture the tiles as it paces and chatters away into the phone grafted onto its wire head; a mask of bone grows from the steel of that head, its eye sockets playing an endless stream of stock numbers and SALE: ACT NOW! that illuminate the semidarkness with a dull green glow. Growths of bone armor its suit, but you can see the tie, there in the center, wedged in between lapels of bleeding bone that drip and pass through the painted houses that are, alas, but reflections.

A hammer is a hammer, right?

You throw the claw hammer and focus on that warmth in your chest, and it hits the wire head like a sledgehammer, shattering the satellite phone and cracking the bone mask. Huge, gushing chunks of it calve away in an instant, giving you a moment to close in. Jill vaults the aisle she's in the middle of how high can she fucking JUMP holy SHIT and comes down swinging, swatting down a flailing 'leg' that threatens to slice you.

In your heart is a new feeling. Your damaged mind helpfully identifies it as hatred.

Lose 2
[ ] One Gift (current Gifts: 2. Remember that you will not gain more until the end of the next full arc.)
[ ] Your good health
[ ] An eye
[ ] Jill's good health
[ ] Your veneer of stability
[ ] Some of Corporate's victims

You lunge closer on instinct, swinging the hammer of your axe at the beast before you, this unholy thing; it skitters back, raising half-molten legs to block, and you're rewarded with the ring of steel on steel and a scattering of rust. You can feel your heart pounding in its glass prison. You can feel the window that reveals it warming, calling to you, wanting to be used -

- You remember another time, when it was dark, and it was raining. An island you had no good business being on, killing people who had done you no wrong. You remember a uniform. You remember shaking and shivering, watching every shadow. Would you be next? Will you be -

- caught out? No; you whirl the axe up, swatting aside a pair of scything talons, tears flowing freely down your face. Someone is screaming, a feral and inhuman sound of absolute contempt that satisfies something savage inside of you that is tearing its way loose from its sleep. On instinct you spin away, to your right, and Jill comes in with another leaping strike, slamming the blade of her axe into the bone armor just to the left of Corporate's glass tie. She can't get it back out, and you yank her away with surprising strength; the creature's pointed 'feet' pass bare inches in front of her breasts, and you reward its temerity with a backhanded swipe to that mask. One of the eyes goes -

- out, the lights are going out. It's here. It's here it's here it's here, the slasher that the natives summoned, called forth out of your platoon's nightmares, the lights are going out. You scream, grab -

- heated metal that has pierced the meat of your arm, cauterizing even as it cuts. A mistake on the part of Corporate. Terror weapons don't work when you're like this, when the boiling bile of your fury would make the sun hide its face from you in terror. You grab a fistful of cloth in your hand and hurl the beast. It's light. So light. Like a doll. Ignore that click in your elbow. Ignore the burn in your arm that says you pulled a muscle. It's meaningless, not when -

- the screaming won't stop. Slasher protocols, slasher protocols...they're usually immune to guns. You throw your rifle into the mud and draw your entrenching tool, sharpened specifically for this sort of thing. Stupid sort of tool here. You can't dig in the island mud, but you have to get -

- closer, at the speed of wrath. You stomp kick the hammer of Jill's axe. Someone is screaming a name, a hidden flower, something beautiful, but it has no meaning to you right now, not when you can hear the crack of bone, the shriek of agony, feel that rejuvenating spray of -

- blood, everywhere, running out in a waterfall from where the slender thing with knives for fingers opened Jacqueline up like a purse and hung her, still alive, by the neck with her own intestines. A red haze descends over your vision, and you scoop her entrenching tool from the mud too as you run in, fueled by grief and rage and a dozen dozen nights in each other's arms and gods above she was only nineteen, just like you, just like all of you, you'll kill -

- this thing if it's your last act in the new world! You whirl in to build momentum for a golf swing, slamming Jill's axe with the hammer of your own, and you are rewarded with the splintering of bone as Corporate's armor falls away. Its initial stabs go over your head, but the next two sink into your leg and the arm you just pulled, but who cares when -

- you can hear the ring of metal on metal, when your body burns, when it's your blood soaking into the mud from a dozen cuts. The slasher had begun by playing with its food, but you can see the fear in its eyes. A manifestation in distress can begin to develop human-like qualities. Good, you want it to be afraid of you when it dies. You want it to understand when you tell it to -

- "DIE, VERMIN, FUCKING DIE!" You snap the rusty steel tip using the handle of your axe as a bar, and Corporate shrieks in pain, and terror. Before it can attack again, you grab the burning metal of its bent wire head, heedless of the scent of charring flesh whose aroma is flavoring the air more and more, and hurl it into the path of an onrushing Asset Protection drone. The impact cracks something glass, and you hear an all-too-human yelp of undignified panic, see something that is not your enemy scramble away sobbing as you take up Jill's axe. Corporate...oh, it's fleeing. You laugh, and rush after it, leaking blood, limping and yet still so much faster than this thing. The hammers of the axes crash together in rhythm, making the beast look over its shoulder to see you gaining on it. "YOU'LL JUST DIE TIRED!" someone roars, and the roar makes your ravaged throat hurt. Oh glory. Oh fucking joy!

Years ago, and yet just like it was yesterday, a pair of sharpened shovels connect with a slasher's skull, and pop it like a grape.

Right here, right now, one axe pins a leg to the floor, and the other scythes through the back of a suit held together by tarnished silver wire to shatter a tie made all of glass.

The thing both moments have in common is roaring, maniacal laughter in a voice a lot like yours.

The spray of blood that erupts as Corporate shatters gets in your eyes; shards of glass lance into your cheeks, cut through clothes, lacerate exposed skin, and the sensation is cleansing. Primal. Triumphant. You slam your axe into what's left of Corporate's wire frame head, and then stomp it flat, again, and again, and again, and again -

"Orchid!" someone yells; you whirl to face the threat and -

- Jacqueline? -

- no, it's Jill. The adrenaline draining from your body takes the mixed memories with it, and the world tilts. The last thing you feel are strong hands catching your bloodsoaked body.

* * * *

You come to in - a bed? A bed? You try to shoot upright but your body patently fucking refuses in the form of agony that hits you in rolling waves. You can just about manage to move your head; you're heavily bandaged, and someone has set up a blood transfusion inside this...tent? Tent. Next to you in a chair, a pale Jill stirs awake, and cracks a wan smile. "Heya flower," she whispers. "...You helped a lot of people back there."

Did you? That's not how you remember it...

"How long?" you croak, weakly.

"About six days. You lost a lot of blood, but there were doctors amongst the customers an' such, and lots of supplies. A lotta people said they had to try to go home or to find loved ones...fewa those came back, so we've got somethin' like fifty, seventy people here now. Big help getting everything out of that fuckin' store, let me tell you." Jill ruffles your auburn hair delicately, like she's afraid she'll shatter it. "That's my brave flower..."

She's nodding off. You notice, dimly, that she has a bandage on her inner elbow.

Universal donor...

Wait.

Fifty to seventy?

Something is coming. It might be you. It might be something else. But it will change you, as all else has. Choose only one.
[ ] "...to any Threshold Innovation forces, we need relief immediately. We have wounded, I repeat, we have..." (Begin Part Two: Waking Nightmares. You will evolve Familiar Strangers and lose your certainty as you shy away from the violence you have just committed.)
[ ] "Flower? One of our lookouts has spotted caravans heading to the farms. Real people. It might be worth moving..." (Begin Part Two: Escape From Salt Bay. You will evolve The Glass Thumb and lose your sense of home as you abandon what you have bled and killed to build.)
[ ] "I don't want to hear it from you people. I killed two of those things and we've barely made a dent. Corporate needs to die before it poisons the new world." (Begin Part Two: Line Goes Down. You will evolve the Wings Everlasting and lose some of your human sanity as you rip your way into the mind of Corporate to better understand your prey.)
[ ] "How did you get this phone? It belongs to [XXXX], tell me how you got this fucking phone -" (Begin Part Two: Doppleganger Dance. You will evolve The Mime's Knack, and lose your ability to prioritize your new community as the mystery of who you were consumes you.)