Earth Bet isn't ready for Doomsday (CYOA V6) (Description subject to change because I suck at writing them.)
Doomsday (Worm) (CYOA)
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SavicusVonde
99 problems and planning is definitely one.
- Pronouns
- He
April 6th, 2010
"-aking up."
I woke up to a gag in my mouth forcing me to choke on my scream and the eyeless gaze of a pure white face. It took me a moment to realize that it wasn't skin, as I blinked myself awake, but some strange material curved into the likeness of a woman with her eyes closed in a serene expression. It covered the upper portion of a man's head, the strangely feminine mask at odds with the harder edges of his masculine face. He slouched, leaning in so close to me that I couldn't see anything but the mask, and the start of his dirty blond hair above it, and couldn't feel anything but the pounding of my head and his breath against my face. I wasn't sure if it was his breath or just my general state of being seemingly halfway between dead and wishing I was, but I could feel bile rising up my throat.
Apparently, the man could too, because he lent back suddenly, just barely avoiding what felt like the entirety of my guts spewing from my mouth. Was that blood? The room, and now without him taking up the entirety of my vision, I could see that's what it was, was darkly lit, a singular light fixture hanging on thread-bare cables from the ceiling barely illuminated more than the grey concrete of the walls and floor, but it was enough to see traces of something darker mixed in with the stomach acid.
Now that he'd moved back, I could clearly see the rest of him as he towered over me in the chair. I didn't get the sense that he was tall, just that from where I was 'sat' he loomed over me. His clothes were strange. Light, flowing cloth wrapped around his body, pulled tight with tiny strings to emphasise his figure. Beneath it, a corset constricted his torso to the point his waist was nearly unnaturally thin. All of it was white, stark and ghost-like in the fluorescent light of the room. The shoulders and elbows were covered in feathers, just as white as the rest of his clothes, as well as something that might have been a cloak seemingly woven entirely of them. It would've looked ridiculous if it wasn't also terrifying at the same time.
"Well hello there." The man said, his mouth stretched into a smile too wide to be friendly, his lips thin and black, which only brought attention to the marks on his skin. The light behind him shone around his head, almost like a halo that cast what might have been tattoos into fangs of real bone. There was an accent to his words though one I couldn't place, "It took quite a lot of work getting you here, and I have to say I'm disappointed."
I tried to scream, ask questions, demand answers. The chair I was sitting on wobbled, metallic legs crashing angrily against the concrete flooring as I struggled in place. Something cold bit into my wrists, wrenching them in place and causing a flash of pain to shoot down my arms. I made to look behind me, but someone grabbed me with hands encased in something hard, forcing me to look straight forwards towards the masked man.
"Do you know who I am?" He asked, his gentle tone belying the quiet threat his entire presence gave off. The gag, moist and wretched from my retching wouldn't let me talk, it was tied so tightly I couldn't even close my mouth fully, but I wouldn't have known what to say anyway, "Do you know where we are?"
Did he want me to know who he was? Was I meant to know where I was?
Was I meant to know who I was?
The thought shook me, wiping away every other worry for a moment like a wave, it buried everything else underneath its waters. Because I didn't.
More than where I was, who these people were and what they wanted, or even how I was going to get out of this situation, that feeling of reaching for memories, reaching for my identity, and getting nothing was worse. Where did I come from? What did I look like? I couldn't even remember my name. There was just a great black pit of nothingness where my memories were meant to be, less like someone had taken a scalpel to them and more like they'd been torn out root and stem.
My breaths sped up, already ragged and catching on the wet cloth keeping my mouth, they roared in my ears like great gusts of wind swallowing any hopes of rational thought that I had.
It was only when the hand on my head squeezed down hard enough that I could have sworn I heard my skull creaking that I remembered that the man had asked me a question, his sightless mask somehow looking at me expectantly.
I mumbled something against the gag, though even I didn't know what I'd tried to say, my mind was still too occupied with not knowing who the fuck I was.
The man chuckled lightly, but rather than relaxing me, the sound sent shivers down my spine, and even with the upper portion of his face covered he still gave the sense that he was rolling his eyes. With an almost negligent gesture, he waved towards whoever was behind me, waiting impatiently. A moment later a breeze blew into my mouth, the gag splitting down the middle as it passed. It fell to the down with a wet splat, the cut cleaner than any knife could have done. I hadn't even seen anybody move.
What the fuck.
"I don't like having to repeat myself."
The man's voice shook me from my thoughts. His smile turned distinctly saccharine when my head turned almost robotically upwards from the broken gag.
"No," my voice was rough, like it hadn't been used in a long time, or I'd been screaming. Either of them might have been true, for all that I knew. "I don't know who you are."
His grin dropped slightly, though the sarcastic-looking smile remained. I couldn't tell whether my ignorance upset him or not. It felt like I was a half dozen steps behind at every stage. I had to force myself not to look away from him and down at the seemingly magically cut gag on the floor, and even beyond that I was still scrambling mentally about who I was.
"Or where I am," I quickly shot out, remembering the second part of his question and not willing to risk upsetting the apparently crazy, magical people who had tied (chained?) me to a chair in a basement somewhere.
He looked at me for a few seconds, or I assumed he did, while I tried to stay as still as I possibly could. My head was still locked in place by the hand on the back of it, the fingers were harder than they should have been like they were clad in armor as they bit deep enough into my head it felt like they had a grip directly on my skull.
"Really?" he asked without expecting an answer, stepping back even further until he was directly under the light. It shone down on him such that his hair was lit up a near-brilliant white, and the shadow cast left only the white of his mask visible, the eyeless stare boring into me. He gestured towards himself with a flourish, "I am Valefor, and my esteemed colleague behind you is Eligos."
He, the man, Valefor, said their names like I was meant to know who they were. They sounded strange, like my brain was telling me they weren't normal names, but then again I didn't know any better. Were they famous criminals? They'd kidnapped me and locked me to a chair for who knows what reasons so they couldn't be good guys.
"Nothing? Really?" He didn't sound upset, instead, it was like a kid that had gotten a surprise new toy and couldn't wait to play with it, "How fascinating. You see, we came here to finish Her work, and getting past the wall was no easy feat. And we had to gather all the little pieces of Her glorious work, all to be left with you. So tell me, whoever you are, what's so special about you?"
With every word he stalked closer to me, his shadow reaching out closer towards me with each one. By the end, I was head level with his upper stomach but he grabbed my chin and yanked my head up towards him. I felt the fingers that had been holding my head loosen enough for the movement, but barely noticed it over the pain that jolted through my neck at the sudden movement.
"I don't know," I repeated, too scared to feel embarrassed over how the words came out closer to a barely understandable sob than words.
The sharp crack of flesh on flesh cut me off, it took me a second and the sting that erupted in my cheek to realize he'd slapped me.
"Don't lie to me," He hissed, the thin veneer of civility broken as his smile twisted into something closer to a scowl. Again, his fingers found my chin but this time his nails dug deeper, enough that I could feel blood start to trickle over them. "Everything else had been looted, or torn apart, they vandalized Her work," Valefor spat out, like the very word offended his tongue. He turned away, fingers trailing down to my throat as he did, leaving a wet trail of blood down towards my chest.
Slowly, like he was preaching to a crowd he reached his arms out to his sides. The room was small enough that his fingers almost brushed against them on both sides. He spun to face me suddenly, that creepy smile back on his face like he hadn't just hit me.
"Everything! Except for the machine that brought you here. It was glorious," he spoke like it was a religious experience, something rapturous. I didn't know who this 'Her' was, but I didn't want to meet her if she'd gotten me into this situation. Had this machine they'd used taken my memories too? Just thinking about 'before' made my head swim and I had to bite back another wave of nausea, "glorious divine purpose. And you expect me to believe there's nothing special about you? That She didn't bring you here to carry her Word to us, her people?"
I shook my head as much as my captor's hand would allow, though the motion felt like it sent my brain bouncing inside my skull.
"I-" Bile rose up in my throat again but I forced it down. I tried my hardest to meet where his eyes would have been behind his mask, the serenely closed eyes contrasting with the vicious focus he was paying to my every word, "I don't even know who I am."
The confession left me feeling almost empty. Adrift.
I was shaken out of it by hands on either side of my face, he cupped my cheeks almost tenderly, thumbs drawing circles over the bones. They came to rest, his fingernails colored the same black as his tattoos, on the bridge of my nose, a half inch at most from my eyes. I could barely see them, so focused on his face as I was.
His smile had split ever wider. The peaks of his teeth shone between them, razors in the shadows as the tattoos stretched taut into talons across his skin.
"Think very carefully," he whispered, gently enough that I could barely hear him over my heart pounding, "about your next words. After everything it cost to get us here, to you, I find myself with staggeringly little patience for liars."
I tried to buck away from his hands, but the fingers on my scalp tightened before I could move at all, leaving me staring at the slightly sharpened nails pointed directly towards my eyes.
"I'm not lying," I promised, my eyes flicking between Valefor and the nails threatening to stab into them, "I swear. I don't remember anything."
His mask's pure white closed eyelids peered down into mine and I felt my breath get sucked away. It was like something was pressing down into my chest, as I was unable to move or look away from something horrifying.
Valefor tilted his head to the side, similar to a dog finding something it didn't understand.
"Maybe you are telling the truth," he declared, and I would have frantically nodded my head in agreement if I could have moved it at all. One hand trailed down to my chin where he'd cut into my skin. Slowly, his rictus of a grin relaxed into a triumphant smile, "or perhaps not."
His fingers turned into talons as they pressed my head up and around, forcing the armored fingers that trapped my head further against my skull before they relented, guessing Valefor's intention. With the movement, the man behind me was made visible to me for the first time.
My second captor was taller than the first, at least as far as I could tell from where my head was craned up, and presented to him like livestock. His… costume was a tale in contrast to Valefor's, black in its entirety, it looked to be made only of brutally twisted metal compared to the smooth and flowing fabric that Valefor wore. The 'armor' was covered in spikes, especially the head which boasted two great spires, beneath which one dark eye rested in their shadow, the only part of his body that wasn't covered in the thick-looking metal.
His eyes scanned my face while I took him in, coming to rest on where Valefor gripped my face.
"A Brute then?" The still-nameless man asked, his voice was harsh, nearly guttural but I could hear the note of recognition within it, like he'd had something confirmed that he suspected. Behind me, my arms were pulled taut at an unnatural angle, forcing a pained yell through my gritted teeth. "Not much of one is he?"
He spoke like I wasn't there, but I couldn't find any indignation at that fact, buried deeply as it was under fear and pain. I tried to follow his gaze but without a mirror, I couldn't see what they were talking about.
"It wouldn't do to underestimate someone whom our Lady has so clear an interest in."
Valefor released my head so suddenly that it flopped bonelessly forward without the support of being held in place. The armored hand returned to the top of my head but the white-masked man shot him a look that managed to convey disapproval even with only the lower half of his face exposed.
"We don't need to worry about him attacking anymore, Eligos. There's nothing to fear from a chained dog, after all." He sent a conspiratorial smirk to the now-named Eligos, an inside joke between them, one that the armored man thought funny enough to snort like a bull.
With a great crash of something shearing against metal, the chains that wrapped around my wrists snapped. My attention snapped to them. They were thick, maybe only a little less than my wrists which had deep, angry red marks on them from being pulled against their bindings. The metal was shorn like the gag had been. Impossibly cleanly for such thick pieces of metal. Eligos laughed again when he noticed my attention.
That snapped me out of the stupor at my sudden freedom. I tried to lunge towards Valefor, throwing my entire weight behind it. Compared to the heavily armored Eligos, with his 'powers', for lack of a better word, Valefor and his floaty fabrics seemed the much easier target.
But my body wouldn't move. No matter how much I strained, it was like my body was still tied down. My muscles locked up, and I had to stop trying to move to prevent myself from collapsing out of the chair. Sweat beaded across my brow as I glared up at the madly grinning Valefor, the manic expression at odds with his peaceful-looking mask.
"See? Eidolon himself couldn't do anything against us in his place, I don't think our new friend has much of a chance," he taunted, "isn't that right?"
Powerless to do anything else, I just glared at him, a prisoner in my own body as he leaned down towards me. He patted me on the cheek like I was a dog asking for attention even as every part of my being labored to throttle him. If he noticed how the veins I could feel pulsing in my throat strained then he only seemed more amused at my struggle.
"Now then, what to do with you?" He asked himself more than to me, or to Eligos, but his partner made no effort to answer the question, "I could take you back to Mama, she'd never say no to another Brute. But," he trailed off, his entire body stilling such that it almost looked like he'd lost consciousness while standing up. The sound of creaking alerted me to Eligos moving towards him, but whatever Valefor was thinking he snapped out of it before the armored man could say or do anything, "That doesn't seem right."
Again, his voice fell away into a whisper while he stared at me, fascinated by something only he could see. I wished that I could see beneath the mask, that I could see what the eyes of the man who was doing this to me looked like, or get some kind of idea of what he was thinking behind the expressionless mask.
"I refuse to believe that Her plan for you was for you to be a glorified bodyguard, there's more to you than meets the eye, there must be. She wouldn't be interested in a mere low-level Brute, not when she could take anyone that she wanted and Mother already has Chort," Valefor carried on in a one-sided conversation. I was too scared to interject or say anything. Or too angry, the two emotions mixed so thickly inside me that I couldn't tell where one ended and the other began, "No, I think I'll let you go."
The words came so out of nowhere that they didn't parse in my head for a few beats.
"What?" I sputtered, unable to stop myself. Behind me, I could hear Eligos as he moved in place; I wasn't sure what he was doing but the reminder of how close he was behind me set me on edge again.
"You're Her's already, even if you don't realize it yet. Every step you take is at Her behest, every move you make is in Her plan," his voice grew more agitated with every word, regaining the preaching nature of a priest at his pulpit, "I would not try to steal your fate from Her, for who am I to stand between your destiny and Her will?"
I stared at him for a second, unable to muster anything in response to the sudden rant. Did he truly mean to let me go? It seemed too much to hope for, who would kidnap someone, torture them, and then let them go? Valefor seemed crazy but…
"Not that you'll be going for free of course."
And there was the other shoe dropping.
"As you are Hers, you will be mine," he declared as if what he was saying made any sense. The more he talked, the more certain I was that I was being held captive by some sort of cult, and the more sure I was that Valefor was completely batshit insane. It didn't make me feel better. "Look into my eyes."
I tried to pull away, to disobey his command but that same feeling of being trapped in my body returned with a vengeance. Even if I'd been able to move though, I wouldn't have been able to as Eligos' armored hands grabbed my head below the ears on both sides and forcibly tilted it upwards. The feminine mask stared deeply into my eyes, and I was pretty sure I was going to be having nightmares about it for as long as I lived. There was no way I could forget how it felt to have those closed eyes boring into my own.
"Look into my eyes and be Bound," his voice didn't sound the same. Like there was some kind of echo coming from far away, a distortion or another voice layered over the top of it in a cavernous chamber. It rattled inside my head, reverberating and I could feel my body shake and tremble slightly between Eligos' hands. The eyes of his mask snapped open, pulling back and under the part above his eyes, revealing dark pupils burning with manic energy. "There is only one thing I would ask of one such as you. Run wild. Tear down the PRT, bring the Triumvirate low, do everything in your power to sow chaos."
I couldn't do anything but stare at him, wide-eyed and helpless, but I could feel the words flowing over me. Their claws scraped, struggling to find purchase in my head and what felt like my very being, so deep that I could only barely feel the difference between them and my own thoughts.
For a second, a mere moment, I felt something stir inside of me and latch onto Valefor's words. It rankled against them, and a great rage flooded through me even as it tried to tear the orders apart like they were a physical object. Whatever it was, it faded away a moment later, quickly enough that I was left wondering if it had been real, or just my mind playing tricks on me, leaving only a distant, foreign feeling of satisfaction.
After what felt like an eternity, Valefor took an unsteady step back. Sweat had broken out across his brow like he'd been moving something heavy up a hill, and his breaths came like pants out of his mouth. Eligos, whether out of fear for his partner, or because he forgot, never let go of my head, and I was left staring upwards at the ceiling feeling like I'd run a marathon myself.
He sent a look to Eligos. In the shadow beneath the overhead light, his eyes were shadowed such that I couldn't decipher. The look meant something, but I was too rocked to think about it any further. I'd steadily felt more alive as time had gone on, but I was right back to feeling like I was halfway in the grave. My vision swam, and my head felt weightless as I slumped backwards, only being held up by Eligos' hands. Valefor, his white clothes half floating around him and half clinging to him as he moved away, looked almost as if he was surrounded by white feathered wings before I blinked my eyes clear of the image.
He was looking at me, for once not smiling or smirking, his mouth instead set into a contemplative line. I thought he'd say something to break the silence, everything he'd done so far had shown that he liked the sound of his own voice, but he just stared at me without saying a word. In some ways that was more unnerving than if he'd continued ranting.
Finally, he turned his attention away from me and towards his partner, gesturing him over.
"Come, Eligos, we must leave before any unwanted guests arrive."
I pushed myself to my feet to try and stop them. Or I attempted to at least, as my knees buckled under me when I tried to stand and nausea surged through me again.
On one knee, all I could do was listen to two sets of footsteps walking away and upstairs. A door creaked open somewhere above me, the sound ominous and distant to my ears, before closing shut with a quiet click.
And I was alone. Alone in a basement, somewhere, in a world I didn't know or couldn't remember. More than that, I didn't have a single memory of who I was, or how I'd gotten here.
I stared down at my hands, uncomprehendingly. My shirt was covered in blood, I realized for the first time and was torn in so many places that I couldn't even tell what color it was originally. The pants weren't much better, though they had apparently managed to dodge most of the blood as the worn-down black was still mostly visible. I had no shoes or socks on, the cold of the concrete floor only just registering against my bare skin.
Slowly, like I was in a dream, I raised my hands to my head and cupped my face, sinking into them. I wished it was a dream but with the pain from Valefor's slap and his nails biting into my skin remaining fresh in my mind, there was no point in pinching myself.
Carefully, I rubbed my fingers over where he'd grabbed my face, expecting to find broken skin and still-flowing blood. Instead, there was only partially dried blood that brushed off into small flakes on my fingers, and smooth, undamaged skin. No fresh blood, no pain.
There was no mirror in the basement to capture how I must have looked as I stared at my fingers like they were foreign to me.
I should have felt happy. I wasn't bleeding, my face was fine, and I was 'free'.
Instead, I only felt lost.
And so I let my head drop back down into my hands and allowed the first tears to come. The first opened the floodgates, and soon I found myself weeping alone in an unknown place, by myself and feeling like I was a stranger.
Addendum - Isaiah (Eligos)
Isaiah didn't say anything for a couple of minutes after they left the house and entered the chaotic streets of Madison. The road itself looked like it was from some kind of war zone, great troughs of asphalt were missing from the ground, and fallen, bent, or missing street lights and telephone poles lined up on either side of the street. The buildings around them were hardly better, some of them were missing their entire fronts, others just had their doors busted down, but he couldn't see a single one that was entirely intact. Even the building that they'd come from had no windows, and the basement had been the single intact room, though only on the basis that it had been completely empty.
Empty until they'd left the guy they'd come all this way for in there.
"Are you sure about this?" He asked Elijah, eying him through the one opening in his helmet as he stepped over a piece of rubble that had fallen from a house.
His fellow Cape and friend hadn't said anything since they'd left, absorbed in his own world, which wasn't unusual. As much as he got on with the man, Elijah wasn't the most stable person. Growing up with Mama Mathers would do that to anybody. Isaiah remembered when he'd first been traded to her branch of the Fallen; he hadn't stopped hearing her whispers in his ears or seeing her out of the corner of his eye for weeks. Sometimes it still happened, but it had become so normal he was able to ignore it.
Elijah gave him a look rather than say anything, and he'd been with him long enough to know what it meant.
"There's nobody around," he confirmed, his sense of the air around them flowed through the smashed open buildings and open alleyways far enough that he knew there was nobody but the man they'd left in the basement near enough to hear anything the two of them say.
The pair lapsed into silence again, navigating back towards the Wall that loomed ever-present over the city, and Isaiah was content enough to let it continue until Valefor felt ready to answer. These periods of quiet between the two had become ever more frequent the more time they spent in the quarantined city. He'd often find his partner looking to the sky as if expecting to see Her there, descending through the clouds. The more of the Tinker Tech they'd put together too, pieces that they'd painstakingly gathered from around the country and those that they'd liberated from the locals left inside the city, the more Elijah had seemed to retreat inside himself at times, almost like his body was moving by itself.
Or as if he was being controlled by a guiding hand.
"We didn't have much of a choice," Valefor eventually answered. Now that they were by themselves, the performative nature of his speech dropped away into normal tones, his southern accent becoming more noticeable as it did, "getting outside the Wall will be much harder than getting in. The PRT cares a lot more about keeping the people in rather than keeping others out. And trying to get out with an unwilling captive that could give us away at any time? They'd catch us instantly."
Isaiah nodded along easily, happy as always to follow the other man's lead, "Your power still didn't work on him then?" He asked, gently, knowing how Elijah's ego could take it.
"No," even from behind him he could hear how his lips pursed together in displeasure, "even with eye contact none of my commands took hold. It was like he wasn't even there. And we have no use for someone that wouldn't be loyal, nor would I put Mama in danger with somebody that I couldn't control."
Just like with his voice, Isaiah noted.
"That last command almost did it," his voice was wistful, longing in a way an artist might remember a distant muse.
Elijah stopped near the side of the street, in the shadow of a shattered house, whether by the Simurgh, the Heroes or the residents he didn't know. He'd raised his hands in front of his face. They were shaking. One of them, the one he'd used to slap the man they'd summoned from another world, was bright red and stinging.
"It was like I could feel Her in my head, Isaiah," he whispered reverentially, stroking down the red palm with the other hand's fingers, "the words came to my head and they were so close to working. A Binding to keep him doing Her work." His shaking hands curled into fists.
"But it didn't?"
"It didn't," he confirmed, the shaking of his hands in front of him slowly. "Whatever he is, he's immune to my powers. With any luck, the PRT will have someone else on their radar, someone that would force their attention off of the Fallen, even without the commands."
They continued walking, Eligos mulling over Valefor's words in his head for a minute as they made their way over debris and broken streets, careful to stay behind buildings and out of obvious sight of the Wall.
"You're certain he'll be that big of a deal?" He asked dubiously.
Elijah gave him another look, but this one he couldn't read, "He was stronger this time. After he came back." He massaged the red spot on his hand absently, "Regenerated faster too. Where does that end? Will he keep getting stronger? If it's enough to delay Alexandria for a single minute, when we need it, then it will have been worth it."
"He didn't seem to remember," he pointed out, feeling the need to.
His friend just shook his head, "No, and isn't that a good thing for us?"
A good thing indeed.
When they'd first summoned him, the crude amalgamation of Tinker Tech they'd used had disintegrated, falling into burnt-out and unusable pieces, leaving them with an ordinary-looking guy that seemingly had nothing special about him.
Valefor had flown into a rage, throwing the pieces around the room and cursing, waking their extraterrestrial guest in the process. They'd asked questions, and when the answers weren't to their liking they'd beat him. When the answers didn't change, after more than an hour of bloody, brutal work, Elijah asked him to kill the man.
So he did. He'd cut his throat with his power, giving the man one little piece of mercy. They'd watched as the life left his eyes, as his blood stained his shirt and the floor. They'd watched as he died.
And they'd watched when minutes later his flesh knit itself back together, a flash of gray and then green under his skin before a breath burst into his chest.
They watched him come back to life.
"-aking up."
I woke up to a gag in my mouth forcing me to choke on my scream and the eyeless gaze of a pure white face. It took me a moment to realize that it wasn't skin, as I blinked myself awake, but some strange material curved into the likeness of a woman with her eyes closed in a serene expression. It covered the upper portion of a man's head, the strangely feminine mask at odds with the harder edges of his masculine face. He slouched, leaning in so close to me that I couldn't see anything but the mask, and the start of his dirty blond hair above it, and couldn't feel anything but the pounding of my head and his breath against my face. I wasn't sure if it was his breath or just my general state of being seemingly halfway between dead and wishing I was, but I could feel bile rising up my throat.
Apparently, the man could too, because he lent back suddenly, just barely avoiding what felt like the entirety of my guts spewing from my mouth. Was that blood? The room, and now without him taking up the entirety of my vision, I could see that's what it was, was darkly lit, a singular light fixture hanging on thread-bare cables from the ceiling barely illuminated more than the grey concrete of the walls and floor, but it was enough to see traces of something darker mixed in with the stomach acid.
Now that he'd moved back, I could clearly see the rest of him as he towered over me in the chair. I didn't get the sense that he was tall, just that from where I was 'sat' he loomed over me. His clothes were strange. Light, flowing cloth wrapped around his body, pulled tight with tiny strings to emphasise his figure. Beneath it, a corset constricted his torso to the point his waist was nearly unnaturally thin. All of it was white, stark and ghost-like in the fluorescent light of the room. The shoulders and elbows were covered in feathers, just as white as the rest of his clothes, as well as something that might have been a cloak seemingly woven entirely of them. It would've looked ridiculous if it wasn't also terrifying at the same time.
"Well hello there." The man said, his mouth stretched into a smile too wide to be friendly, his lips thin and black, which only brought attention to the marks on his skin. The light behind him shone around his head, almost like a halo that cast what might have been tattoos into fangs of real bone. There was an accent to his words though one I couldn't place, "It took quite a lot of work getting you here, and I have to say I'm disappointed."
I tried to scream, ask questions, demand answers. The chair I was sitting on wobbled, metallic legs crashing angrily against the concrete flooring as I struggled in place. Something cold bit into my wrists, wrenching them in place and causing a flash of pain to shoot down my arms. I made to look behind me, but someone grabbed me with hands encased in something hard, forcing me to look straight forwards towards the masked man.
"Do you know who I am?" He asked, his gentle tone belying the quiet threat his entire presence gave off. The gag, moist and wretched from my retching wouldn't let me talk, it was tied so tightly I couldn't even close my mouth fully, but I wouldn't have known what to say anyway, "Do you know where we are?"
Did he want me to know who he was? Was I meant to know where I was?
Was I meant to know who I was?
The thought shook me, wiping away every other worry for a moment like a wave, it buried everything else underneath its waters. Because I didn't.
More than where I was, who these people were and what they wanted, or even how I was going to get out of this situation, that feeling of reaching for memories, reaching for my identity, and getting nothing was worse. Where did I come from? What did I look like? I couldn't even remember my name. There was just a great black pit of nothingness where my memories were meant to be, less like someone had taken a scalpel to them and more like they'd been torn out root and stem.
My breaths sped up, already ragged and catching on the wet cloth keeping my mouth, they roared in my ears like great gusts of wind swallowing any hopes of rational thought that I had.
It was only when the hand on my head squeezed down hard enough that I could have sworn I heard my skull creaking that I remembered that the man had asked me a question, his sightless mask somehow looking at me expectantly.
I mumbled something against the gag, though even I didn't know what I'd tried to say, my mind was still too occupied with not knowing who the fuck I was.
The man chuckled lightly, but rather than relaxing me, the sound sent shivers down my spine, and even with the upper portion of his face covered he still gave the sense that he was rolling his eyes. With an almost negligent gesture, he waved towards whoever was behind me, waiting impatiently. A moment later a breeze blew into my mouth, the gag splitting down the middle as it passed. It fell to the down with a wet splat, the cut cleaner than any knife could have done. I hadn't even seen anybody move.
What the fuck.
"I don't like having to repeat myself."
The man's voice shook me from my thoughts. His smile turned distinctly saccharine when my head turned almost robotically upwards from the broken gag.
"No," my voice was rough, like it hadn't been used in a long time, or I'd been screaming. Either of them might have been true, for all that I knew. "I don't know who you are."
His grin dropped slightly, though the sarcastic-looking smile remained. I couldn't tell whether my ignorance upset him or not. It felt like I was a half dozen steps behind at every stage. I had to force myself not to look away from him and down at the seemingly magically cut gag on the floor, and even beyond that I was still scrambling mentally about who I was.
"Or where I am," I quickly shot out, remembering the second part of his question and not willing to risk upsetting the apparently crazy, magical people who had tied (chained?) me to a chair in a basement somewhere.
He looked at me for a few seconds, or I assumed he did, while I tried to stay as still as I possibly could. My head was still locked in place by the hand on the back of it, the fingers were harder than they should have been like they were clad in armor as they bit deep enough into my head it felt like they had a grip directly on my skull.
"Really?" he asked without expecting an answer, stepping back even further until he was directly under the light. It shone down on him such that his hair was lit up a near-brilliant white, and the shadow cast left only the white of his mask visible, the eyeless stare boring into me. He gestured towards himself with a flourish, "I am Valefor, and my esteemed colleague behind you is Eligos."
He, the man, Valefor, said their names like I was meant to know who they were. They sounded strange, like my brain was telling me they weren't normal names, but then again I didn't know any better. Were they famous criminals? They'd kidnapped me and locked me to a chair for who knows what reasons so they couldn't be good guys.
"Nothing? Really?" He didn't sound upset, instead, it was like a kid that had gotten a surprise new toy and couldn't wait to play with it, "How fascinating. You see, we came here to finish Her work, and getting past the wall was no easy feat. And we had to gather all the little pieces of Her glorious work, all to be left with you. So tell me, whoever you are, what's so special about you?"
With every word he stalked closer to me, his shadow reaching out closer towards me with each one. By the end, I was head level with his upper stomach but he grabbed my chin and yanked my head up towards him. I felt the fingers that had been holding my head loosen enough for the movement, but barely noticed it over the pain that jolted through my neck at the sudden movement.
"I don't know," I repeated, too scared to feel embarrassed over how the words came out closer to a barely understandable sob than words.
The sharp crack of flesh on flesh cut me off, it took me a second and the sting that erupted in my cheek to realize he'd slapped me.
"Don't lie to me," He hissed, the thin veneer of civility broken as his smile twisted into something closer to a scowl. Again, his fingers found my chin but this time his nails dug deeper, enough that I could feel blood start to trickle over them. "Everything else had been looted, or torn apart, they vandalized Her work," Valefor spat out, like the very word offended his tongue. He turned away, fingers trailing down to my throat as he did, leaving a wet trail of blood down towards my chest.
Slowly, like he was preaching to a crowd he reached his arms out to his sides. The room was small enough that his fingers almost brushed against them on both sides. He spun to face me suddenly, that creepy smile back on his face like he hadn't just hit me.
"Everything! Except for the machine that brought you here. It was glorious," he spoke like it was a religious experience, something rapturous. I didn't know who this 'Her' was, but I didn't want to meet her if she'd gotten me into this situation. Had this machine they'd used taken my memories too? Just thinking about 'before' made my head swim and I had to bite back another wave of nausea, "glorious divine purpose. And you expect me to believe there's nothing special about you? That She didn't bring you here to carry her Word to us, her people?"
I shook my head as much as my captor's hand would allow, though the motion felt like it sent my brain bouncing inside my skull.
"I-" Bile rose up in my throat again but I forced it down. I tried my hardest to meet where his eyes would have been behind his mask, the serenely closed eyes contrasting with the vicious focus he was paying to my every word, "I don't even know who I am."
The confession left me feeling almost empty. Adrift.
I was shaken out of it by hands on either side of my face, he cupped my cheeks almost tenderly, thumbs drawing circles over the bones. They came to rest, his fingernails colored the same black as his tattoos, on the bridge of my nose, a half inch at most from my eyes. I could barely see them, so focused on his face as I was.
His smile had split ever wider. The peaks of his teeth shone between them, razors in the shadows as the tattoos stretched taut into talons across his skin.
"Think very carefully," he whispered, gently enough that I could barely hear him over my heart pounding, "about your next words. After everything it cost to get us here, to you, I find myself with staggeringly little patience for liars."
I tried to buck away from his hands, but the fingers on my scalp tightened before I could move at all, leaving me staring at the slightly sharpened nails pointed directly towards my eyes.
"I'm not lying," I promised, my eyes flicking between Valefor and the nails threatening to stab into them, "I swear. I don't remember anything."
His mask's pure white closed eyelids peered down into mine and I felt my breath get sucked away. It was like something was pressing down into my chest, as I was unable to move or look away from something horrifying.
Valefor tilted his head to the side, similar to a dog finding something it didn't understand.
"Maybe you are telling the truth," he declared, and I would have frantically nodded my head in agreement if I could have moved it at all. One hand trailed down to my chin where he'd cut into my skin. Slowly, his rictus of a grin relaxed into a triumphant smile, "or perhaps not."
His fingers turned into talons as they pressed my head up and around, forcing the armored fingers that trapped my head further against my skull before they relented, guessing Valefor's intention. With the movement, the man behind me was made visible to me for the first time.
My second captor was taller than the first, at least as far as I could tell from where my head was craned up, and presented to him like livestock. His… costume was a tale in contrast to Valefor's, black in its entirety, it looked to be made only of brutally twisted metal compared to the smooth and flowing fabric that Valefor wore. The 'armor' was covered in spikes, especially the head which boasted two great spires, beneath which one dark eye rested in their shadow, the only part of his body that wasn't covered in the thick-looking metal.
His eyes scanned my face while I took him in, coming to rest on where Valefor gripped my face.
"A Brute then?" The still-nameless man asked, his voice was harsh, nearly guttural but I could hear the note of recognition within it, like he'd had something confirmed that he suspected. Behind me, my arms were pulled taut at an unnatural angle, forcing a pained yell through my gritted teeth. "Not much of one is he?"
He spoke like I wasn't there, but I couldn't find any indignation at that fact, buried deeply as it was under fear and pain. I tried to follow his gaze but without a mirror, I couldn't see what they were talking about.
"It wouldn't do to underestimate someone whom our Lady has so clear an interest in."
Valefor released my head so suddenly that it flopped bonelessly forward without the support of being held in place. The armored hand returned to the top of my head but the white-masked man shot him a look that managed to convey disapproval even with only the lower half of his face exposed.
"We don't need to worry about him attacking anymore, Eligos. There's nothing to fear from a chained dog, after all." He sent a conspiratorial smirk to the now-named Eligos, an inside joke between them, one that the armored man thought funny enough to snort like a bull.
With a great crash of something shearing against metal, the chains that wrapped around my wrists snapped. My attention snapped to them. They were thick, maybe only a little less than my wrists which had deep, angry red marks on them from being pulled against their bindings. The metal was shorn like the gag had been. Impossibly cleanly for such thick pieces of metal. Eligos laughed again when he noticed my attention.
That snapped me out of the stupor at my sudden freedom. I tried to lunge towards Valefor, throwing my entire weight behind it. Compared to the heavily armored Eligos, with his 'powers', for lack of a better word, Valefor and his floaty fabrics seemed the much easier target.
But my body wouldn't move. No matter how much I strained, it was like my body was still tied down. My muscles locked up, and I had to stop trying to move to prevent myself from collapsing out of the chair. Sweat beaded across my brow as I glared up at the madly grinning Valefor, the manic expression at odds with his peaceful-looking mask.
"See? Eidolon himself couldn't do anything against us in his place, I don't think our new friend has much of a chance," he taunted, "isn't that right?"
Powerless to do anything else, I just glared at him, a prisoner in my own body as he leaned down towards me. He patted me on the cheek like I was a dog asking for attention even as every part of my being labored to throttle him. If he noticed how the veins I could feel pulsing in my throat strained then he only seemed more amused at my struggle.
"Now then, what to do with you?" He asked himself more than to me, or to Eligos, but his partner made no effort to answer the question, "I could take you back to Mama, she'd never say no to another Brute. But," he trailed off, his entire body stilling such that it almost looked like he'd lost consciousness while standing up. The sound of creaking alerted me to Eligos moving towards him, but whatever Valefor was thinking he snapped out of it before the armored man could say or do anything, "That doesn't seem right."
Again, his voice fell away into a whisper while he stared at me, fascinated by something only he could see. I wished that I could see beneath the mask, that I could see what the eyes of the man who was doing this to me looked like, or get some kind of idea of what he was thinking behind the expressionless mask.
"I refuse to believe that Her plan for you was for you to be a glorified bodyguard, there's more to you than meets the eye, there must be. She wouldn't be interested in a mere low-level Brute, not when she could take anyone that she wanted and Mother already has Chort," Valefor carried on in a one-sided conversation. I was too scared to interject or say anything. Or too angry, the two emotions mixed so thickly inside me that I couldn't tell where one ended and the other began, "No, I think I'll let you go."
The words came so out of nowhere that they didn't parse in my head for a few beats.
"What?" I sputtered, unable to stop myself. Behind me, I could hear Eligos as he moved in place; I wasn't sure what he was doing but the reminder of how close he was behind me set me on edge again.
"You're Her's already, even if you don't realize it yet. Every step you take is at Her behest, every move you make is in Her plan," his voice grew more agitated with every word, regaining the preaching nature of a priest at his pulpit, "I would not try to steal your fate from Her, for who am I to stand between your destiny and Her will?"
I stared at him for a second, unable to muster anything in response to the sudden rant. Did he truly mean to let me go? It seemed too much to hope for, who would kidnap someone, torture them, and then let them go? Valefor seemed crazy but…
"Not that you'll be going for free of course."
And there was the other shoe dropping.
"As you are Hers, you will be mine," he declared as if what he was saying made any sense. The more he talked, the more certain I was that I was being held captive by some sort of cult, and the more sure I was that Valefor was completely batshit insane. It didn't make me feel better. "Look into my eyes."
I tried to pull away, to disobey his command but that same feeling of being trapped in my body returned with a vengeance. Even if I'd been able to move though, I wouldn't have been able to as Eligos' armored hands grabbed my head below the ears on both sides and forcibly tilted it upwards. The feminine mask stared deeply into my eyes, and I was pretty sure I was going to be having nightmares about it for as long as I lived. There was no way I could forget how it felt to have those closed eyes boring into my own.
"Look into my eyes and be Bound," his voice didn't sound the same. Like there was some kind of echo coming from far away, a distortion or another voice layered over the top of it in a cavernous chamber. It rattled inside my head, reverberating and I could feel my body shake and tremble slightly between Eligos' hands. The eyes of his mask snapped open, pulling back and under the part above his eyes, revealing dark pupils burning with manic energy. "There is only one thing I would ask of one such as you. Run wild. Tear down the PRT, bring the Triumvirate low, do everything in your power to sow chaos."
I couldn't do anything but stare at him, wide-eyed and helpless, but I could feel the words flowing over me. Their claws scraped, struggling to find purchase in my head and what felt like my very being, so deep that I could only barely feel the difference between them and my own thoughts.
For a second, a mere moment, I felt something stir inside of me and latch onto Valefor's words. It rankled against them, and a great rage flooded through me even as it tried to tear the orders apart like they were a physical object. Whatever it was, it faded away a moment later, quickly enough that I was left wondering if it had been real, or just my mind playing tricks on me, leaving only a distant, foreign feeling of satisfaction.
After what felt like an eternity, Valefor took an unsteady step back. Sweat had broken out across his brow like he'd been moving something heavy up a hill, and his breaths came like pants out of his mouth. Eligos, whether out of fear for his partner, or because he forgot, never let go of my head, and I was left staring upwards at the ceiling feeling like I'd run a marathon myself.
He sent a look to Eligos. In the shadow beneath the overhead light, his eyes were shadowed such that I couldn't decipher. The look meant something, but I was too rocked to think about it any further. I'd steadily felt more alive as time had gone on, but I was right back to feeling like I was halfway in the grave. My vision swam, and my head felt weightless as I slumped backwards, only being held up by Eligos' hands. Valefor, his white clothes half floating around him and half clinging to him as he moved away, looked almost as if he was surrounded by white feathered wings before I blinked my eyes clear of the image.
He was looking at me, for once not smiling or smirking, his mouth instead set into a contemplative line. I thought he'd say something to break the silence, everything he'd done so far had shown that he liked the sound of his own voice, but he just stared at me without saying a word. In some ways that was more unnerving than if he'd continued ranting.
Finally, he turned his attention away from me and towards his partner, gesturing him over.
"Come, Eligos, we must leave before any unwanted guests arrive."
I pushed myself to my feet to try and stop them. Or I attempted to at least, as my knees buckled under me when I tried to stand and nausea surged through me again.
On one knee, all I could do was listen to two sets of footsteps walking away and upstairs. A door creaked open somewhere above me, the sound ominous and distant to my ears, before closing shut with a quiet click.
And I was alone. Alone in a basement, somewhere, in a world I didn't know or couldn't remember. More than that, I didn't have a single memory of who I was, or how I'd gotten here.
I stared down at my hands, uncomprehendingly. My shirt was covered in blood, I realized for the first time and was torn in so many places that I couldn't even tell what color it was originally. The pants weren't much better, though they had apparently managed to dodge most of the blood as the worn-down black was still mostly visible. I had no shoes or socks on, the cold of the concrete floor only just registering against my bare skin.
Slowly, like I was in a dream, I raised my hands to my head and cupped my face, sinking into them. I wished it was a dream but with the pain from Valefor's slap and his nails biting into my skin remaining fresh in my mind, there was no point in pinching myself.
Carefully, I rubbed my fingers over where he'd grabbed my face, expecting to find broken skin and still-flowing blood. Instead, there was only partially dried blood that brushed off into small flakes on my fingers, and smooth, undamaged skin. No fresh blood, no pain.
There was no mirror in the basement to capture how I must have looked as I stared at my fingers like they were foreign to me.
I should have felt happy. I wasn't bleeding, my face was fine, and I was 'free'.
Instead, I only felt lost.
And so I let my head drop back down into my hands and allowed the first tears to come. The first opened the floodgates, and soon I found myself weeping alone in an unknown place, by myself and feeling like I was a stranger.
Addendum - Isaiah (Eligos)
Isaiah didn't say anything for a couple of minutes after they left the house and entered the chaotic streets of Madison. The road itself looked like it was from some kind of war zone, great troughs of asphalt were missing from the ground, and fallen, bent, or missing street lights and telephone poles lined up on either side of the street. The buildings around them were hardly better, some of them were missing their entire fronts, others just had their doors busted down, but he couldn't see a single one that was entirely intact. Even the building that they'd come from had no windows, and the basement had been the single intact room, though only on the basis that it had been completely empty.
Empty until they'd left the guy they'd come all this way for in there.
"Are you sure about this?" He asked Elijah, eying him through the one opening in his helmet as he stepped over a piece of rubble that had fallen from a house.
His fellow Cape and friend hadn't said anything since they'd left, absorbed in his own world, which wasn't unusual. As much as he got on with the man, Elijah wasn't the most stable person. Growing up with Mama Mathers would do that to anybody. Isaiah remembered when he'd first been traded to her branch of the Fallen; he hadn't stopped hearing her whispers in his ears or seeing her out of the corner of his eye for weeks. Sometimes it still happened, but it had become so normal he was able to ignore it.
Elijah gave him a look rather than say anything, and he'd been with him long enough to know what it meant.
"There's nobody around," he confirmed, his sense of the air around them flowed through the smashed open buildings and open alleyways far enough that he knew there was nobody but the man they'd left in the basement near enough to hear anything the two of them say.
The pair lapsed into silence again, navigating back towards the Wall that loomed ever-present over the city, and Isaiah was content enough to let it continue until Valefor felt ready to answer. These periods of quiet between the two had become ever more frequent the more time they spent in the quarantined city. He'd often find his partner looking to the sky as if expecting to see Her there, descending through the clouds. The more of the Tinker Tech they'd put together too, pieces that they'd painstakingly gathered from around the country and those that they'd liberated from the locals left inside the city, the more Elijah had seemed to retreat inside himself at times, almost like his body was moving by itself.
Or as if he was being controlled by a guiding hand.
"We didn't have much of a choice," Valefor eventually answered. Now that they were by themselves, the performative nature of his speech dropped away into normal tones, his southern accent becoming more noticeable as it did, "getting outside the Wall will be much harder than getting in. The PRT cares a lot more about keeping the people in rather than keeping others out. And trying to get out with an unwilling captive that could give us away at any time? They'd catch us instantly."
Isaiah nodded along easily, happy as always to follow the other man's lead, "Your power still didn't work on him then?" He asked, gently, knowing how Elijah's ego could take it.
"No," even from behind him he could hear how his lips pursed together in displeasure, "even with eye contact none of my commands took hold. It was like he wasn't even there. And we have no use for someone that wouldn't be loyal, nor would I put Mama in danger with somebody that I couldn't control."
Just like with his voice, Isaiah noted.
"That last command almost did it," his voice was wistful, longing in a way an artist might remember a distant muse.
Elijah stopped near the side of the street, in the shadow of a shattered house, whether by the Simurgh, the Heroes or the residents he didn't know. He'd raised his hands in front of his face. They were shaking. One of them, the one he'd used to slap the man they'd summoned from another world, was bright red and stinging.
"It was like I could feel Her in my head, Isaiah," he whispered reverentially, stroking down the red palm with the other hand's fingers, "the words came to my head and they were so close to working. A Binding to keep him doing Her work." His shaking hands curled into fists.
"But it didn't?"
"It didn't," he confirmed, the shaking of his hands in front of him slowly. "Whatever he is, he's immune to my powers. With any luck, the PRT will have someone else on their radar, someone that would force their attention off of the Fallen, even without the commands."
They continued walking, Eligos mulling over Valefor's words in his head for a minute as they made their way over debris and broken streets, careful to stay behind buildings and out of obvious sight of the Wall.
"You're certain he'll be that big of a deal?" He asked dubiously.
Elijah gave him another look, but this one he couldn't read, "He was stronger this time. After he came back." He massaged the red spot on his hand absently, "Regenerated faster too. Where does that end? Will he keep getting stronger? If it's enough to delay Alexandria for a single minute, when we need it, then it will have been worth it."
"He didn't seem to remember," he pointed out, feeling the need to.
His friend just shook his head, "No, and isn't that a good thing for us?"
A good thing indeed.
When they'd first summoned him, the crude amalgamation of Tinker Tech they'd used had disintegrated, falling into burnt-out and unusable pieces, leaving them with an ordinary-looking guy that seemingly had nothing special about him.
Valefor had flown into a rage, throwing the pieces around the room and cursing, waking their extraterrestrial guest in the process. They'd asked questions, and when the answers weren't to their liking they'd beat him. When the answers didn't change, after more than an hour of bloody, brutal work, Elijah asked him to kill the man.
So he did. He'd cut his throat with his power, giving the man one little piece of mercy. They'd watched as the life left his eyes, as his blood stained his shirt and the floor. They'd watched as he died.
And they'd watched when minutes later his flesh knit itself back together, a flash of gray and then green under his skin before a breath burst into his chest.
They watched him come back to life.
So, new fic. Hello. I may have made the mistake of opening a CYOA again. V6 I believe for those curious. Anyway, one thing led to another and I ended up spending half the day balancing points and trying to make a build that seemed interesting to me and, well, here we are. Doomsday.
Hello Hello
E(U)STSW has been marked as on hiatus for now, but I do intend to come back for it and have written a little of the next chapter. And there has been some progress made for the next chapter of Tyrant, so that's not done either. But this idea took over my brain and I've actually got some more ideas for how I want this first arc to go, and some ideas for how I want the rest of the story to go/what I want to be the theme/drive. Not sure if I'll post the build yet, as I keep on changing some minor things around to balance points and some mystery is fun, right?
Also, the summary/description is, as ever, a work in progress so may change. And expect maybe some edits coming when I wake up in the morning and realise I hate vaste swathes of the chapter and cry.
Anyways, hope you enjoyed the chapter, and there'll hopefully be more comingfairly soon at some point. I'm going to go collapse in bed as I once again finished writing past 2am in the morning.
As always, let me know what you thought of it! Hope you enjoyed it.
E(U)STSW has been marked as on hiatus for now, but I do intend to come back for it and have written a little of the next chapter. And there has been some progress made for the next chapter of Tyrant, so that's not done either. But this idea took over my brain and I've actually got some more ideas for how I want this first arc to go, and some ideas for how I want the rest of the story to go/what I want to be the theme/drive. Not sure if I'll post the build yet, as I keep on changing some minor things around to balance points and some mystery is fun, right?
Also, the summary/description is, as ever, a work in progress so may change. And expect maybe some edits coming when I wake up in the morning and realise I hate vaste swathes of the chapter and cry.
Anyways, hope you enjoyed the chapter, and there'll hopefully be more coming
As always, let me know what you thought of it! Hope you enjoyed it.
Also also, I stream games on Twitch but I was also thinking about doing some writing content where I write chapters for this, Tyrant, E(U)STSW live and if people wanted to chat, hang out, give ideas, dunk on my writing or my general lack of gaming skills then feel free to come hang out here. Link will also be in my signature from now on, I guess.
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SavicusVonde
99 problems and planning is definitely one.
- Pronouns
- He
I'll tell you some stuff that has been shown so far at least, not so sure about the full build. We've got stuff like:
Drawbacks: The Summoning, The Binding, Acclimation, Starting From Nothing (+more, secret ones)
Powers: Gamma Mutate, (You've probably guessed this leads to the Doomsday upgrade so...) (Wo)Man of Steel, Immortal Hulk, Doomsday (DC) (+more, secret ones)
Powers: Gamma Mutate, (You've probably guessed this leads to the Doomsday upgrade so...) (Wo)Man of Steel, Immortal Hulk, Doomsday (DC) (+more, secret ones)
I might reveal the full build at some point, but I'm not sure about that. Maybe I'll try and keep an updating list in the informational section with what parts of the build have been revealed. And also keep in mind that with a lot of these some creative liberties have been taken, like with Starting From Nothing.
wait if you chose starting from nothing then wouldn't the powers prevent you from resurrecting?
SavicusVonde
99 problems and planning is definitely one.
- Pronouns
- He
Like I said, liberties. Take it as every other aspect of that power is at 0%, and the same with almost every other power too, but for the sake of the story and because I just wanted to that part of it is at 1% or whatever. He is not a completely unpowered person, but 99%+ of his abilities aren't there yet, and even the resurrection isn't as full powered as it would normally be.
Hope that clears it up, it might feel like a bit of a cop out but I liked it. When I was messing around with the build I almost always had points left over even on hard so you could take it as those points doing this, if you wanted to.
Fair enough keep up the good work.
Odd1todd89
The strange tightrope
- Pronouns
- It
Take a watch and a like.
I'm looking forward to seeing where this goes I hope you continue it until it's completion.
I'm looking forward to seeing where this goes I hope you continue it until it's completion.
I myself like the idea of a overpowered protag, even if it takes him a year or 2 to get there
Mgunh1
Not an AI, honest!
- Location
- Northern Luna Base, Module 5, Sublevel 15
I'll be honest, I'm on the fence too. This could be either really good, or generic edgy villain wank. And frankly, hiding the build is often a red flag for me, so it is likely the later. Still, the opening was compelling enough to give this a chance at least.
Maybe he'll be able to throw off the command once he levels up his powers a bit.
SavicusVonde
99 problems and planning is definitely one.
- Pronouns
- He
If you want to know now, you can read the spoilered bit below.
You'll notice that Valefor's normal Master powers don't do anything, this is because the build has all the defenses built in. Defense against Masters, Thinkers, Trumps, etc, but the very specific word that Valefor emphasises is "Binding", a specific drawback in the CYOA for a one time Master-ing, wherein the character is bound to either one task, or a year and a day...
So you don't have to worry about him being mastered by anything else, and other stuff is down to the wording of the Binding drawback in CYOA, and my own creative liberties.
So you don't have to worry about him being mastered by anything else, and other stuff is down to the wording of the Binding drawback in CYOA, and my own creative liberties.
It's not necessarily his consciousness that has been Mastered...
- Pronouns
- Zug
Looks interesting so far, and your writing quality is massively improved from your earlier stuff. Keep up the good work.
- Location
- Deep inside the sand
- Pronouns
- He/Him/His
Looks interesting. We'll see if he gets too much railroaded into certain things since he was mastered by that last command. We'll see.
Cheers!
Cheers!
For a year and a day?
SavicusVonde
99 problems and planning is definitely one.
- Pronouns
- He
Ha,366 days to create a firm villain identity!!That's what the CYOA says yeah, so probably a safe bet
1.02
SavicusVonde
99 problems and planning is definitely one.
- Pronouns
- He
I wasn't sure how long I spent down there in the basement, only that by the time I'd stopped crying my joints ached from staying locked in one position for too long, and my eyes burned. What I did know was that by the time I left the sun was low in the sky, and it shone down into my eyes, nearly blinding after the darkness of the basement.
When my eyes finally adjusted, and after I blinked away the impressions the sun had burnt against my eyelids, I was greeted with a street that looked like it had been hit by a bomb, or several, years ago and nobody had bothered to repair it. Small tufts of grass poked through the concrete in uneven intervals where particularly heavy pieces of debris had shattered the asphalt and concrete, and what had once been the 'side' verge had at some point transitioned into just a verge, the boughs of the trees bending low under their own weight over sidewalks that were overrun with weeds which crept through cracks and around the outside.
The front lawns of homes were completely overgrown, some covered in flowers that had spread from their original bed to coat the entire lawn, others were just a mess of weeds that nearly rose to the top of my shin in height.
It was weird, like the city had been abandoned immediately after whatever had happened and nobody had ever made any attempt to reclaim it.
Buildings were left half lying down where they'd fallen or been blown apart, nearly every house like a corpse giving testament to something huge having happened here. It was as if the entire place had been turned into a memorial, which gave me the horrible feeling of walking somewhere I wasn't supposed to, like I was desecrating a temple.
There was no sign of either of the two men that had kidnapped me, though I wasn't sure if that was a good thing or a bad thing. The idea of running into them again wasn't something that filled me with joy, though a part of me suspected it was inevitable if I ever wanted answers to the hows and the whys of how I got here or who I was. Yet without them, there was no sign of any life in the street, there wasn't even a breeze, surrounded by houses as I was, trapping the whole place in an uncanny stillness that I was almost afraid of breaking.
The silence was oppressive too. Other than the occasional bird song, I was left alone with my thoughts and the feeling of my bare feet scraping against the street as, without any clear destination, I had no choice but to start wandering from street to street, just letting my legs take me anywhere as long as it was away from that basement. So it was that I left the building behind, a nondescript family home no different than others that were around me. Still, I thought that it would be a day too soon if I ever had to step inside it again.
Progress through the city didn't provoke any memories, not even the slightest stirrings. Passing by storefronts and parks that I thought might have once been local hotspots, where teenagers would have hung out in front of, or families would have done their weekly shopping, nothing came to mind. I was a stranger to this place as much as I was to myself.
And all of them were just as devoid of life as each other, except the weeds that were slowly starting to encroach through the cracked concrete and asphalt and the occasional bug. I checked inside some of the shops, calling out as I did so, but all of the shelves were empty of everything bar a thick layer of dust and the staff room, unlocked, held nothing but long abandoned mugs and broken vending machines and more importantly no people. After a while I stopped checking them, just stopping to peek in through the entrance to briefly see if anything stuck out to me but nothing ever did.
One time I thought I saw a fox, or a dog, watching me inside a shadow cast by a building on the corner of a block; the small store built into the ground floor long since shuttered, with windows all shattered inwards and enough paint peeled off the sign above the door that it was unreadable.
As I got closer I realized that the proportions were all off, its head reached nearly to the floor above, where a hole had been blown outwards, the detritus from which still lay scattered across the street.
But as soon as I got close enough to maybe make out details it was gone. Its tail, too long for a dog, flickered around the corner as it darted away and out of sight before I could see what it was. I only caught a glimpse of a flash of… green? My lack of memories might have been playing tricks on me, but I was pretty sure about what I saw.
Whatever it was, I could hear it as it slipped away. Its claws were sharp enough to dig into the concrete, as evidenced by the deep gouges in the sidewalk where it had passed, the distance between each step increasing the further away it went. Around the corner, there was already no sign of it, the 'track' heading into an alleyway on the other side of the street and off to who knows where. For a moment I was tempted to follow it, it would at least have given me some kind of direction but looking at the marks again, I was struck by how deep they were. It was hard to estimate, but it looked as if my entire fist could fit inside the indent of a single claw. Yeah, maybe not. Though not knowing its location was almost worse, like a nagging whisper that it could be watching me at any time, as it had been just now.
I shivered, taking a deep breath as I was reminded again of the feeling of wrongness that seemed to be soaked into the city; the silence, the lack of people, whatever that thing had been… for a moment I could feel eyes boring into my back, but there was nobody in the shattered windows, or any of the doorways or alleyways. I even checked the insides of a couple of buildings as I walked randomly through the seemingly deserted city. Every one of them was just as ransacked and abandoned as they looked from the outside, full of empty cupboards with doors hanging off their hinges or completely missing and walls that ranged between barely there and obvious health and safety hazards. None of them had any food in them, and nothing came out of the taps except the squeak of rusted, unused metal.
There were no clothes in any of the rooms either, and no shoes for me to cover my feet with, so I was stuck wandering around in a blood-soaked top and bare feet. Strangely, the soles of my feet didn't hurt even when I felt them drag across broken bricks and glass, and a quick look at them after brushing away the small stones and dirt that had accumulated on them revealed nothing but unblemished skin; not even a scrape or any redness. I didn't have any point of reference but something told me that something wasn't right about my body. Whenever I stepped on a piece of broken masonry or glass I instinctively flinched, like I was expecting pain, and had to force myself to relax after I confirmed that it hadn't hurt me every time. The thought wasn't a pleasant one, so even though it seemed like I didn't need shoes they were definitely a top priority. For my peace of mind if nothing else.
I gave up on finding them in any of the houses though, after the most I found in any of them were the scraps of what had probably once been curtains but were now more like tattered rags with more holes than actual fabric. Whoever had once lived here was long gone, and judging by the dust that coated just about everything nobody had lived here since. But then how had I gotten here? Who were those two men that had clearly abducted me from somewhere?
The only answer I got was the silence of the abandoned house. It didn't make me feel any better.
Exiting the house and walking back into the street again, the sun was hanging high in the sky. It shone down directly above me, casting the shattered road in a stark light. The whole place really felt like some kind of graveyard, or monument and not knowing what had happened was really eating me up at the back of my mind.
It was maybe half an hour later when I turned onto a main road, one wider than any I'd seen so far that I saw the wall. Really it was more a wonder that I hadn't seen it already, the way it loomed over the city looked more like a mountain range surrounding it than anything man-made. Even so far in the distance, I could see a wide swathe of land had been cleared inside of it, leaving an open space where anybody on top of the wall would have easy sight lines on any people approaching from the inside. The houses leading up to it looked like toys next to the wall, just little squares next to the great rise of grey.
Well, I had a way out now. Or a direction at least. If nobody was manning the wall too then I'd just have to hope they'd left the door open or something, but having a destination in the distance to work towards was a world better than picking random houses and streets to search through for any sign of life.
All the way down the main street cars lay abandoned and wrecked, some of them in worse states of disrepair than others. One, that might generously have once been described as blue, looked like it might have been parked there yesterday if it wasn't for the missing windows and dented doors. Another was closer to just a metal frame, everything else lying around it in a solidified puzzle as if it had been melted by a great heat. None of them looked like they were road safe, not that I remembered how to drive one if I had ever known in the first place.
Left with no other choice, I started to trek towards the wall, eyeing the houses that loomed silently on either side of me as I went. Along the way, the highway split off into equally deserted streets, full of broken storefronts and homes and still no people. I did however start to notice some signs of life; graffiti painted onto the side of buildings that looked fresh, they all read along the lines of 'LOCUSTS', or 'LOCUSTS 4EVER!', and once I noticed one I couldn't stop seeing them. Whatever the 'Locusts' were, they seemingly wanted to plaster their names over everything they could. The further I went, the more they appeared, from just on the side of a store, to buildings that had so many layered over their outside walls that I couldn't see the brick underneath anymore. Many of them looked like they'd been sprayed on recently, the paint on them still fresh and vibrant and suddenly my alertness for any onlookers shot back up again.
But despite my best efforts, and the ever-lingering feeling of eyes on my back whenever I turned away, I still couldn't see anyone. I kept expecting someone to materialise in the empty window frames that watched down over me from above, or to step outside from a darkened door frame but nobody ever did. Even as I got closer and closer to the wall, and it rose higher and higher in my vision, I was left by myself in stifling silence that bore down on me like a physical force.
I tried whistling to myself as I went, still carefully stepping around fallen debris and pieces of broken cars, trying to lighten the mood but it petered out after a few moments. Breaking the silence felt unnatural, like it was pressing down on my chest as I walked. Maybe I was just ascribing feelings and emotions to nothing, but the silence was heavy.
It didn't take long to get to the point where the wall took up the entire horizon, enough so that I had to crane my neck to a frankly ridiculous degree. Whoever had made the wall had seriously wanted to keep something out, or they were overcompensating for something, and had clearly failed judging by the state of the city. The wall was a dull grey, with no adornments or labels on it to tell me anything, and as I got closer I could see that it looked like it was made from a dull, smooth metal. So smooth that it didn't look like there were any seams, as if it was made from one giant piece of metal that stretched and curved from where I was standing without ending until it disappeared out of sight. Atop it, the metal bulged outwards, still in one flowing piece, into a walkway so high above that anything on it was hidden from my view by the angle I was looking at from below. Lights lined the outer edge of it, mostly smaller ones but at regular intervals there were great big ones that looked more akin to something you'd expect to see at prisons. More importantly, the small ones were on. The first sign of power or human life that I'd seen so far, and the sight sent hope swelling through my chest.
Finally, I reached the clearing before the wall. What I had thought had been open ground was actually tens, maybe hundreds of houses worth of foundations that had been demolished. Where once somebody might have lived their whole lives, nothing remained except an outline painted in concrete lines. But all I could think about was the possibility of someone, anyone, being up there at the top of the wall. I was sure that if there was I'd look like an ant to them, and that my voice wouldn't carry even if I screamed, but I did anyway.
"Hey!" I yelled as loud as I could, so loud that my still rough throat protested in a violent twinge that sent me into a coughing fit, but I ignored it as much as I could and continued, "Hey! I need help down here!"
Nothing. I couldn't see if there was anybody up there to hear me in the first place, but if there was, they didn't say anything or give any sign that they'd heard me. None of the searchlights turned on, and no heads popped out over the edge.
"Hello?" I tried again, pushing my voice harder but it was already at its limit, leaving me leaning against the side of the last building before the clearing coughing what felt like lungs up through my throat.
I spent the next few minutes like that, intermittently calling out, hoping against hope that someone would respond. But nothing ever came. It was just as quiet as the rest of the city had been. When it became clear that either there was nobody there to listen, or whoever was up there wasn't listening, I eventually gave up, struck with a feeling of helplessness. Was I the only one in this city? I couldn't have been, I'd seen the signs even if I hadn't seen any people, but despite it only being a couple of hours the isolation weighed heavily on me. Or more like the lack of any human contact other than those two men, 'Eligos' and 'Valefor', their names permanently seared into my brain.
Staring out over the landscape leading up to the wall, swept free of any buildings, it looked like it was miles away, even if I knew it would only take me a minute, two at most, to reach it on foot. But what then? There wasn't a door to knock on, not that I could see, or any way to climb up the sheer face of it without handholds. I wasn't confident I'd be able to do it with them, without them the wall may as well have been the end of the world for how traversable it was.
But I had to try. So, picking myself up from the wall, I stepped out towards it. Or started to, before a click behind me stopped me in my tracks.
Whirling around, I came face to barrel with a rifle of some kind, the end of the barrel pointing directly towards me from feet away but the hole of it still seemed to encompass my entire vision. It didn't so much as tremble slightly, unerringly poised to blow a hole through my forehead at the twitch of a finger. It was hard to focus on anything besides that, but my attention did snap to the person holding it a moment later.
The first thing that popped into my mind was 'professional'. Everything about them screamed it to me. They wore full fatigues that, though worn down, showed a clear military bent, along with some kind of black body armour that covered their torso in a thick enough layer that their body shape was largely unreadable. Instead of finding myself looking into eyes, I only found myself standing panicked in a reflective visor nestled under a helmet almost as dark as the body armour but greener. No hair was visible, either shaved close or kept out of the way under the helmet. Under the visor, an unmarked bandanna or piece of cloth was wrapped around their face tight enough that I could see the outline of their nose pressing against it.
"I wouldn't go that way if I were you," she said, voice carefully blank but decidedly feminine. I could hear the controlled breathing in the flow of her sentences, and in the way the gun didn't budge from my face even when she spoke. She stood next to the building, where I had just been, the wall next to her coated in so many spray-painted tags that it almost seemed to be yelling up at the wall as much as I did.
I took a moment longer just to appreciate the sight of another person, though that feeling quickly faded in the sights of a gun. My hands raised, palms outward in a placating gesture automatically, keeping them in plain view.
"Thank god," I muttered under my breath, but I think she heard me, "what do you mean?"
She didn't move, but I got the distinct feeling that she was unimpressed with me, or my lack of knowledge.
"They'll gun you down before you can get within a hundred feet," the words came out like she was talking to a baby, like they were obvious. Suddenly standing in clear sight of the wall seemed a lot less appealing, "How do you not know that?" She asked, continuing into more rapid-fire questions before I could answer the first, "Who are you? What are you even doing here?" She jutted the barrel of the gun towards the wall slightly before it returned to my face.
Somehow, 'I don't know' didn't seem like the kind of answer she was going to accept, but I didn't have anything else to give.
"I'm not from around here," I said, in what I hoped was a confident voice, "As for who I am…"
I trailed off and scratched the back of my head, but stopped when I saw her finger twitch on the trigger at the movement.
"I don't actually," pausing for a second try and find any word that didn't make me sound insane, but came up blank, "know?"
It came out more like a question than I'd wanted.
"What?" Her voice was flat, disbelieving.
I opened my mouth to say something, closed it and then opened it again, before finally I settled on, "Yeah…"
"You expect me to believe you came out of Locust territory, looking like that," again, the gun barrel was used instead of hand gestures to wave down towards my shirt that looked like it was more blood than fabric and my lack of shoes, "and that you don't know who you are? If Back-Up wants to get another spy in then he'll have to try harder than that. On your knees."
She pointed toward the ground with the gun, while my head swam with questions.
"Locusts? Back-Up? You think I'm a spy?" I sputtered. This wasn't how I saw a conversation going when I first found somebody, though my expectations also didn't feature a gun, "I don't even know what the Locusts are."
There was a sound that might have been a snort, of derision maybe, "Knees. Now."
"Okay, okay." I slowly moved down to one knee, then to both. They were shaking so wildly that I was worried I'd fall over, "I don't know what's going on. I promise, I just want some help."
"I'm sure." She didn't believe me, "Is that the story he told you to go with or did you come up with it on your own? Doesn't matter. Look, make one wrong move and my friends," I thought I caught a flash of a barrel inside a shadowed window frame, but it was gone so fast I wasn't sure that it hadn't just been my imagination, "will put a bullet between your eyes so stay still."
Waiting for me to nod shakily, she circled around me, keeping her weapon trained on me at all times. For all I knew she could've been lying about there being others, but even if there wasn't, what could I do? Fight back against someone that was obviously well-trained, and well-practised with their firearm?
"Please," I half begged, on the verge of tears. Unable to see her as she moved around me, I could only listen to the crunching of her steps, each one an avalanche in my ears. It was almost worse than having the barrel of the gun constantly in my vision, "I don't even know what's going on. Who are you? What are the 'Locusts'?"
There were so many questions on the tip of my tongue that I couldn't get them all out, they tripped over each other until I blurted out the first two that popped into my head.
"I am the one asking the questions," she snapped at me, and for a moment I felt a flash of searing, irrational anger burn through me, so hot that I caught myself rising and turning towards her before I stopped myself, "Stay. Down. You're in no position to be making demands of anybody."
After a few deep breaths, the anger slowly subsided, and strength fled from my knees fled with it, sending me back down to the ground. What was that? It had come out of nowhere, it rose above the terror and confusion before disappearing as if it had never been there in the first place. Sure, there was some anger at being held at gunpoint, indignation that she just wouldn't listen to me, but not like that. For a second there, I had thought I was going to attack her. My hands trembled in the air.
"What were you trying to do at the wall? Is Luminosity trying to escape again?"
Her voice was intense, like every question she asked was vitally important but I was too lost to even begin to think how to answer. 'Luminosity'? 'Escape'?
"Escape?" She grabbed my hands roughly, uncaring as to how she twisted my arms into an unnatural position, making me let out a grunt of pain. A soft click later, metal latched around my wrists in a cold grip. Handcuffs? She released my hands, but I still couldn't move them more than a slight wiggle, metal clinking against metal as I did. Definitely handcuffs. Was she a part of the police, or the military or something? It would make sense with how professional she looked, but then what had I done to deserve this?
I couldn't see her face, but I could hear the scowl in her voice, "What part of 'you're not asking questions' don't you understand?"
"I can't answer any questions because I don't know the answers," I snapped back, unable to stop myself as that same anger roared back with a vengeance. It chafed against the restraints as much as I did and my arms pulled taut as I tried to force my wrists apart despite the metal holding them together, "I have no idea who this 'Luminosity' is, or 'Back-Up', or the 'Locusts', or," my voice got higher and higher with each statement until I was nearly shouting before I cut myself off, biting my tongue to stop myself from provoking the person with the gun. I expected to be hit over the back of the head with the gun, or yelled at again, but instead there was only silence. I didn't dare try and look behind me, but I took the quiet as permission to continue, "look," with a deep breath, I bit back the anger, "I woke up chained to a fucking chair, was interrogated by two psychos and the first person I've found in this place has me at gunpoint and won't tell me what the hell is going on!"
My chest heaved with emotion and breath, as much as I tried to contain it I was still pretty much yelling by the end of my impromptu rant. It probably wasn't the smartest decision, but I couldn't claim that I was thinking straight. Anger still seethed inside me, foreign in its intensity and how it overpowered even the fear that had been so overwhelming just moments before.
"These psychos," she said, after a few beats of tense silence, "were they all the same person?"
I blinked slowly, feeling the anger wash away like the tide at the unexpected question.
"No? What does that even mean?"
Taking a chance, I looked back over my shoulder at her. The rifle was still held at the ready and it was hard to tell with her face fully covered, but she was looking at me differently. Or at least, I thought she was. Instead of pointing directly at me, the barrel was facing slightly away and, although I didn't doubt that she could bring it to bear on me before I could do anything, she seemed to be listening to me. Or maybe that was just wishful thinking.
"Were they Capes?" She asked instead of answering, moving on faster than I could react.
Again, she said the words like they had an obvious meaning, or like I was meant to know what they mean, but they flowed over me like water. I could hear the capitalisation, the deeper meaning that I wasn't aware of, but it didn't even sound familiar to me.
"Like the fashion accessory?" I asked, slowly, fully aware that I was wrong but unable to offer anything else. Surprisingly, the military soldier (what else could she be?) snorted a harsh laugh, before pausing as if surprised at herself.
"Good one," she paused, tilting her head to the side and letting out a deep sigh, "only you're not joking. Do you honestly expect me to believe this shit? There isn't a single person in this city that doesn't know the Locusts, and now you're saying you don't know what Capes are too?"
Said like that, it sounded like the least believable thing in the world.
"I can't remember anything," I repeated, emphasising the last word heavily. There were basics, I knew what a car was, and streets, and I could speak but anything more specific? Any personal memories or experiences, gone as if they'd never been there, "I don't know how I got here, I don't know where here is, I've got no idea who you are, what's up with the wall," I paused to suck in another deep breath and finished quietly, "I don't know who I am. How many more times do I have to say 'I don't know' until you believe me?"
She looked at me for a few seconds more, the silence only filled by my furiously beating heart. Then a few moments more. The gun twitched towards me and I was sure she was going to shoot me, that that was it.
"The people who kidnapped you, do you know who they were?" It was impossible to tell from her voice whether she finally bought it or not, but the lack of a bullet between my eyes seemed like a good sign to me.
I shook my head no rapidly, even as their masked faces filled my mind in an instinctual flood of fear, "No, but they said their names were Valefor and Eligos, if that means anything to you?"
I trailed off into an unasked question, but the answer was obvious in how she recoiled away from me like I was a snake reared back and ready to lunge at any moment.
"Valefor and Eligos, you're certain?" Her eyes bore into me, the reflective mask doing nothing to stop her intense gaze from meeting mine.
"That's what they called each other, yeah. Both of them were dressed in these really weird costumes, Valefor was this guy in all white, he had a creepy ass mask too. Eligos was-"
"In black, spiked armour."
It wasn't a question.
"Yeah, that's right. Don't suppose you shot them before you found me?"
She didn't respond, instead making some kind of hand gesture while looking over my shoulder. I turned to find people seemingly materialising from the abandoned buildings, one, two, three… six of them. They emerged from shadowed door frames, all of them dressed similarly to the first lady and all of them armed with a variety of guns, all trained on me.
"You got all that?" She asked as if I hadn't said anything, "The Fallen, here. That can't be a coincidence."
One of them, a guy, responded, "Foundation will want to know."
He said it like it was the last thing he wanted to do, but with a tone of acceptance that said he'd do it anyway.
"Call it in," the lady said, sounding much the same, "our new friend here suddenly shot up in importance. Isn't that great for you?"
Sarcasm dripped from every word, but I couldn't help but ask, "Does this mean you won't shoot me?"
All of them laughed, as if I'd asked something ridiculous, or like there was some kind of inside joke that I wasn't getting.
"Not yet."
When my eyes finally adjusted, and after I blinked away the impressions the sun had burnt against my eyelids, I was greeted with a street that looked like it had been hit by a bomb, or several, years ago and nobody had bothered to repair it. Small tufts of grass poked through the concrete in uneven intervals where particularly heavy pieces of debris had shattered the asphalt and concrete, and what had once been the 'side' verge had at some point transitioned into just a verge, the boughs of the trees bending low under their own weight over sidewalks that were overrun with weeds which crept through cracks and around the outside.
The front lawns of homes were completely overgrown, some covered in flowers that had spread from their original bed to coat the entire lawn, others were just a mess of weeds that nearly rose to the top of my shin in height.
It was weird, like the city had been abandoned immediately after whatever had happened and nobody had ever made any attempt to reclaim it.
Buildings were left half lying down where they'd fallen or been blown apart, nearly every house like a corpse giving testament to something huge having happened here. It was as if the entire place had been turned into a memorial, which gave me the horrible feeling of walking somewhere I wasn't supposed to, like I was desecrating a temple.
There was no sign of either of the two men that had kidnapped me, though I wasn't sure if that was a good thing or a bad thing. The idea of running into them again wasn't something that filled me with joy, though a part of me suspected it was inevitable if I ever wanted answers to the hows and the whys of how I got here or who I was. Yet without them, there was no sign of any life in the street, there wasn't even a breeze, surrounded by houses as I was, trapping the whole place in an uncanny stillness that I was almost afraid of breaking.
The silence was oppressive too. Other than the occasional bird song, I was left alone with my thoughts and the feeling of my bare feet scraping against the street as, without any clear destination, I had no choice but to start wandering from street to street, just letting my legs take me anywhere as long as it was away from that basement. So it was that I left the building behind, a nondescript family home no different than others that were around me. Still, I thought that it would be a day too soon if I ever had to step inside it again.
Progress through the city didn't provoke any memories, not even the slightest stirrings. Passing by storefronts and parks that I thought might have once been local hotspots, where teenagers would have hung out in front of, or families would have done their weekly shopping, nothing came to mind. I was a stranger to this place as much as I was to myself.
And all of them were just as devoid of life as each other, except the weeds that were slowly starting to encroach through the cracked concrete and asphalt and the occasional bug. I checked inside some of the shops, calling out as I did so, but all of the shelves were empty of everything bar a thick layer of dust and the staff room, unlocked, held nothing but long abandoned mugs and broken vending machines and more importantly no people. After a while I stopped checking them, just stopping to peek in through the entrance to briefly see if anything stuck out to me but nothing ever did.
One time I thought I saw a fox, or a dog, watching me inside a shadow cast by a building on the corner of a block; the small store built into the ground floor long since shuttered, with windows all shattered inwards and enough paint peeled off the sign above the door that it was unreadable.
As I got closer I realized that the proportions were all off, its head reached nearly to the floor above, where a hole had been blown outwards, the detritus from which still lay scattered across the street.
But as soon as I got close enough to maybe make out details it was gone. Its tail, too long for a dog, flickered around the corner as it darted away and out of sight before I could see what it was. I only caught a glimpse of a flash of… green? My lack of memories might have been playing tricks on me, but I was pretty sure about what I saw.
Whatever it was, I could hear it as it slipped away. Its claws were sharp enough to dig into the concrete, as evidenced by the deep gouges in the sidewalk where it had passed, the distance between each step increasing the further away it went. Around the corner, there was already no sign of it, the 'track' heading into an alleyway on the other side of the street and off to who knows where. For a moment I was tempted to follow it, it would at least have given me some kind of direction but looking at the marks again, I was struck by how deep they were. It was hard to estimate, but it looked as if my entire fist could fit inside the indent of a single claw. Yeah, maybe not. Though not knowing its location was almost worse, like a nagging whisper that it could be watching me at any time, as it had been just now.
I shivered, taking a deep breath as I was reminded again of the feeling of wrongness that seemed to be soaked into the city; the silence, the lack of people, whatever that thing had been… for a moment I could feel eyes boring into my back, but there was nobody in the shattered windows, or any of the doorways or alleyways. I even checked the insides of a couple of buildings as I walked randomly through the seemingly deserted city. Every one of them was just as ransacked and abandoned as they looked from the outside, full of empty cupboards with doors hanging off their hinges or completely missing and walls that ranged between barely there and obvious health and safety hazards. None of them had any food in them, and nothing came out of the taps except the squeak of rusted, unused metal.
There were no clothes in any of the rooms either, and no shoes for me to cover my feet with, so I was stuck wandering around in a blood-soaked top and bare feet. Strangely, the soles of my feet didn't hurt even when I felt them drag across broken bricks and glass, and a quick look at them after brushing away the small stones and dirt that had accumulated on them revealed nothing but unblemished skin; not even a scrape or any redness. I didn't have any point of reference but something told me that something wasn't right about my body. Whenever I stepped on a piece of broken masonry or glass I instinctively flinched, like I was expecting pain, and had to force myself to relax after I confirmed that it hadn't hurt me every time. The thought wasn't a pleasant one, so even though it seemed like I didn't need shoes they were definitely a top priority. For my peace of mind if nothing else.
I gave up on finding them in any of the houses though, after the most I found in any of them were the scraps of what had probably once been curtains but were now more like tattered rags with more holes than actual fabric. Whoever had once lived here was long gone, and judging by the dust that coated just about everything nobody had lived here since. But then how had I gotten here? Who were those two men that had clearly abducted me from somewhere?
The only answer I got was the silence of the abandoned house. It didn't make me feel any better.
Exiting the house and walking back into the street again, the sun was hanging high in the sky. It shone down directly above me, casting the shattered road in a stark light. The whole place really felt like some kind of graveyard, or monument and not knowing what had happened was really eating me up at the back of my mind.
It was maybe half an hour later when I turned onto a main road, one wider than any I'd seen so far that I saw the wall. Really it was more a wonder that I hadn't seen it already, the way it loomed over the city looked more like a mountain range surrounding it than anything man-made. Even so far in the distance, I could see a wide swathe of land had been cleared inside of it, leaving an open space where anybody on top of the wall would have easy sight lines on any people approaching from the inside. The houses leading up to it looked like toys next to the wall, just little squares next to the great rise of grey.
Well, I had a way out now. Or a direction at least. If nobody was manning the wall too then I'd just have to hope they'd left the door open or something, but having a destination in the distance to work towards was a world better than picking random houses and streets to search through for any sign of life.
All the way down the main street cars lay abandoned and wrecked, some of them in worse states of disrepair than others. One, that might generously have once been described as blue, looked like it might have been parked there yesterday if it wasn't for the missing windows and dented doors. Another was closer to just a metal frame, everything else lying around it in a solidified puzzle as if it had been melted by a great heat. None of them looked like they were road safe, not that I remembered how to drive one if I had ever known in the first place.
Left with no other choice, I started to trek towards the wall, eyeing the houses that loomed silently on either side of me as I went. Along the way, the highway split off into equally deserted streets, full of broken storefronts and homes and still no people. I did however start to notice some signs of life; graffiti painted onto the side of buildings that looked fresh, they all read along the lines of 'LOCUSTS', or 'LOCUSTS 4EVER!', and once I noticed one I couldn't stop seeing them. Whatever the 'Locusts' were, they seemingly wanted to plaster their names over everything they could. The further I went, the more they appeared, from just on the side of a store, to buildings that had so many layered over their outside walls that I couldn't see the brick underneath anymore. Many of them looked like they'd been sprayed on recently, the paint on them still fresh and vibrant and suddenly my alertness for any onlookers shot back up again.
But despite my best efforts, and the ever-lingering feeling of eyes on my back whenever I turned away, I still couldn't see anyone. I kept expecting someone to materialise in the empty window frames that watched down over me from above, or to step outside from a darkened door frame but nobody ever did. Even as I got closer and closer to the wall, and it rose higher and higher in my vision, I was left by myself in stifling silence that bore down on me like a physical force.
I tried whistling to myself as I went, still carefully stepping around fallen debris and pieces of broken cars, trying to lighten the mood but it petered out after a few moments. Breaking the silence felt unnatural, like it was pressing down on my chest as I walked. Maybe I was just ascribing feelings and emotions to nothing, but the silence was heavy.
It didn't take long to get to the point where the wall took up the entire horizon, enough so that I had to crane my neck to a frankly ridiculous degree. Whoever had made the wall had seriously wanted to keep something out, or they were overcompensating for something, and had clearly failed judging by the state of the city. The wall was a dull grey, with no adornments or labels on it to tell me anything, and as I got closer I could see that it looked like it was made from a dull, smooth metal. So smooth that it didn't look like there were any seams, as if it was made from one giant piece of metal that stretched and curved from where I was standing without ending until it disappeared out of sight. Atop it, the metal bulged outwards, still in one flowing piece, into a walkway so high above that anything on it was hidden from my view by the angle I was looking at from below. Lights lined the outer edge of it, mostly smaller ones but at regular intervals there were great big ones that looked more akin to something you'd expect to see at prisons. More importantly, the small ones were on. The first sign of power or human life that I'd seen so far, and the sight sent hope swelling through my chest.
Finally, I reached the clearing before the wall. What I had thought had been open ground was actually tens, maybe hundreds of houses worth of foundations that had been demolished. Where once somebody might have lived their whole lives, nothing remained except an outline painted in concrete lines. But all I could think about was the possibility of someone, anyone, being up there at the top of the wall. I was sure that if there was I'd look like an ant to them, and that my voice wouldn't carry even if I screamed, but I did anyway.
"Hey!" I yelled as loud as I could, so loud that my still rough throat protested in a violent twinge that sent me into a coughing fit, but I ignored it as much as I could and continued, "Hey! I need help down here!"
Nothing. I couldn't see if there was anybody up there to hear me in the first place, but if there was, they didn't say anything or give any sign that they'd heard me. None of the searchlights turned on, and no heads popped out over the edge.
"Hello?" I tried again, pushing my voice harder but it was already at its limit, leaving me leaning against the side of the last building before the clearing coughing what felt like lungs up through my throat.
I spent the next few minutes like that, intermittently calling out, hoping against hope that someone would respond. But nothing ever came. It was just as quiet as the rest of the city had been. When it became clear that either there was nobody there to listen, or whoever was up there wasn't listening, I eventually gave up, struck with a feeling of helplessness. Was I the only one in this city? I couldn't have been, I'd seen the signs even if I hadn't seen any people, but despite it only being a couple of hours the isolation weighed heavily on me. Or more like the lack of any human contact other than those two men, 'Eligos' and 'Valefor', their names permanently seared into my brain.
Staring out over the landscape leading up to the wall, swept free of any buildings, it looked like it was miles away, even if I knew it would only take me a minute, two at most, to reach it on foot. But what then? There wasn't a door to knock on, not that I could see, or any way to climb up the sheer face of it without handholds. I wasn't confident I'd be able to do it with them, without them the wall may as well have been the end of the world for how traversable it was.
But I had to try. So, picking myself up from the wall, I stepped out towards it. Or started to, before a click behind me stopped me in my tracks.
Whirling around, I came face to barrel with a rifle of some kind, the end of the barrel pointing directly towards me from feet away but the hole of it still seemed to encompass my entire vision. It didn't so much as tremble slightly, unerringly poised to blow a hole through my forehead at the twitch of a finger. It was hard to focus on anything besides that, but my attention did snap to the person holding it a moment later.
The first thing that popped into my mind was 'professional'. Everything about them screamed it to me. They wore full fatigues that, though worn down, showed a clear military bent, along with some kind of black body armour that covered their torso in a thick enough layer that their body shape was largely unreadable. Instead of finding myself looking into eyes, I only found myself standing panicked in a reflective visor nestled under a helmet almost as dark as the body armour but greener. No hair was visible, either shaved close or kept out of the way under the helmet. Under the visor, an unmarked bandanna or piece of cloth was wrapped around their face tight enough that I could see the outline of their nose pressing against it.
"I wouldn't go that way if I were you," she said, voice carefully blank but decidedly feminine. I could hear the controlled breathing in the flow of her sentences, and in the way the gun didn't budge from my face even when she spoke. She stood next to the building, where I had just been, the wall next to her coated in so many spray-painted tags that it almost seemed to be yelling up at the wall as much as I did.
I took a moment longer just to appreciate the sight of another person, though that feeling quickly faded in the sights of a gun. My hands raised, palms outward in a placating gesture automatically, keeping them in plain view.
"Thank god," I muttered under my breath, but I think she heard me, "what do you mean?"
She didn't move, but I got the distinct feeling that she was unimpressed with me, or my lack of knowledge.
"They'll gun you down before you can get within a hundred feet," the words came out like she was talking to a baby, like they were obvious. Suddenly standing in clear sight of the wall seemed a lot less appealing, "How do you not know that?" She asked, continuing into more rapid-fire questions before I could answer the first, "Who are you? What are you even doing here?" She jutted the barrel of the gun towards the wall slightly before it returned to my face.
Somehow, 'I don't know' didn't seem like the kind of answer she was going to accept, but I didn't have anything else to give.
"I'm not from around here," I said, in what I hoped was a confident voice, "As for who I am…"
I trailed off and scratched the back of my head, but stopped when I saw her finger twitch on the trigger at the movement.
"I don't actually," pausing for a second try and find any word that didn't make me sound insane, but came up blank, "know?"
It came out more like a question than I'd wanted.
"What?" Her voice was flat, disbelieving.
I opened my mouth to say something, closed it and then opened it again, before finally I settled on, "Yeah…"
"You expect me to believe you came out of Locust territory, looking like that," again, the gun barrel was used instead of hand gestures to wave down towards my shirt that looked like it was more blood than fabric and my lack of shoes, "and that you don't know who you are? If Back-Up wants to get another spy in then he'll have to try harder than that. On your knees."
She pointed toward the ground with the gun, while my head swam with questions.
"Locusts? Back-Up? You think I'm a spy?" I sputtered. This wasn't how I saw a conversation going when I first found somebody, though my expectations also didn't feature a gun, "I don't even know what the Locusts are."
There was a sound that might have been a snort, of derision maybe, "Knees. Now."
"Okay, okay." I slowly moved down to one knee, then to both. They were shaking so wildly that I was worried I'd fall over, "I don't know what's going on. I promise, I just want some help."
"I'm sure." She didn't believe me, "Is that the story he told you to go with or did you come up with it on your own? Doesn't matter. Look, make one wrong move and my friends," I thought I caught a flash of a barrel inside a shadowed window frame, but it was gone so fast I wasn't sure that it hadn't just been my imagination, "will put a bullet between your eyes so stay still."
Waiting for me to nod shakily, she circled around me, keeping her weapon trained on me at all times. For all I knew she could've been lying about there being others, but even if there wasn't, what could I do? Fight back against someone that was obviously well-trained, and well-practised with their firearm?
"Please," I half begged, on the verge of tears. Unable to see her as she moved around me, I could only listen to the crunching of her steps, each one an avalanche in my ears. It was almost worse than having the barrel of the gun constantly in my vision, "I don't even know what's going on. Who are you? What are the 'Locusts'?"
There were so many questions on the tip of my tongue that I couldn't get them all out, they tripped over each other until I blurted out the first two that popped into my head.
"I am the one asking the questions," she snapped at me, and for a moment I felt a flash of searing, irrational anger burn through me, so hot that I caught myself rising and turning towards her before I stopped myself, "Stay. Down. You're in no position to be making demands of anybody."
After a few deep breaths, the anger slowly subsided, and strength fled from my knees fled with it, sending me back down to the ground. What was that? It had come out of nowhere, it rose above the terror and confusion before disappearing as if it had never been there in the first place. Sure, there was some anger at being held at gunpoint, indignation that she just wouldn't listen to me, but not like that. For a second there, I had thought I was going to attack her. My hands trembled in the air.
"What were you trying to do at the wall? Is Luminosity trying to escape again?"
Her voice was intense, like every question she asked was vitally important but I was too lost to even begin to think how to answer. 'Luminosity'? 'Escape'?
"Escape?" She grabbed my hands roughly, uncaring as to how she twisted my arms into an unnatural position, making me let out a grunt of pain. A soft click later, metal latched around my wrists in a cold grip. Handcuffs? She released my hands, but I still couldn't move them more than a slight wiggle, metal clinking against metal as I did. Definitely handcuffs. Was she a part of the police, or the military or something? It would make sense with how professional she looked, but then what had I done to deserve this?
I couldn't see her face, but I could hear the scowl in her voice, "What part of 'you're not asking questions' don't you understand?"
"I can't answer any questions because I don't know the answers," I snapped back, unable to stop myself as that same anger roared back with a vengeance. It chafed against the restraints as much as I did and my arms pulled taut as I tried to force my wrists apart despite the metal holding them together, "I have no idea who this 'Luminosity' is, or 'Back-Up', or the 'Locusts', or," my voice got higher and higher with each statement until I was nearly shouting before I cut myself off, biting my tongue to stop myself from provoking the person with the gun. I expected to be hit over the back of the head with the gun, or yelled at again, but instead there was only silence. I didn't dare try and look behind me, but I took the quiet as permission to continue, "look," with a deep breath, I bit back the anger, "I woke up chained to a fucking chair, was interrogated by two psychos and the first person I've found in this place has me at gunpoint and won't tell me what the hell is going on!"
My chest heaved with emotion and breath, as much as I tried to contain it I was still pretty much yelling by the end of my impromptu rant. It probably wasn't the smartest decision, but I couldn't claim that I was thinking straight. Anger still seethed inside me, foreign in its intensity and how it overpowered even the fear that had been so overwhelming just moments before.
"These psychos," she said, after a few beats of tense silence, "were they all the same person?"
I blinked slowly, feeling the anger wash away like the tide at the unexpected question.
"No? What does that even mean?"
Taking a chance, I looked back over my shoulder at her. The rifle was still held at the ready and it was hard to tell with her face fully covered, but she was looking at me differently. Or at least, I thought she was. Instead of pointing directly at me, the barrel was facing slightly away and, although I didn't doubt that she could bring it to bear on me before I could do anything, she seemed to be listening to me. Or maybe that was just wishful thinking.
"Were they Capes?" She asked instead of answering, moving on faster than I could react.
Again, she said the words like they had an obvious meaning, or like I was meant to know what they mean, but they flowed over me like water. I could hear the capitalisation, the deeper meaning that I wasn't aware of, but it didn't even sound familiar to me.
"Like the fashion accessory?" I asked, slowly, fully aware that I was wrong but unable to offer anything else. Surprisingly, the military soldier (what else could she be?) snorted a harsh laugh, before pausing as if surprised at herself.
"Good one," she paused, tilting her head to the side and letting out a deep sigh, "only you're not joking. Do you honestly expect me to believe this shit? There isn't a single person in this city that doesn't know the Locusts, and now you're saying you don't know what Capes are too?"
Said like that, it sounded like the least believable thing in the world.
"I can't remember anything," I repeated, emphasising the last word heavily. There were basics, I knew what a car was, and streets, and I could speak but anything more specific? Any personal memories or experiences, gone as if they'd never been there, "I don't know how I got here, I don't know where here is, I've got no idea who you are, what's up with the wall," I paused to suck in another deep breath and finished quietly, "I don't know who I am. How many more times do I have to say 'I don't know' until you believe me?"
She looked at me for a few seconds more, the silence only filled by my furiously beating heart. Then a few moments more. The gun twitched towards me and I was sure she was going to shoot me, that that was it.
"The people who kidnapped you, do you know who they were?" It was impossible to tell from her voice whether she finally bought it or not, but the lack of a bullet between my eyes seemed like a good sign to me.
I shook my head no rapidly, even as their masked faces filled my mind in an instinctual flood of fear, "No, but they said their names were Valefor and Eligos, if that means anything to you?"
I trailed off into an unasked question, but the answer was obvious in how she recoiled away from me like I was a snake reared back and ready to lunge at any moment.
"Valefor and Eligos, you're certain?" Her eyes bore into me, the reflective mask doing nothing to stop her intense gaze from meeting mine.
"That's what they called each other, yeah. Both of them were dressed in these really weird costumes, Valefor was this guy in all white, he had a creepy ass mask too. Eligos was-"
"In black, spiked armour."
It wasn't a question.
"Yeah, that's right. Don't suppose you shot them before you found me?"
She didn't respond, instead making some kind of hand gesture while looking over my shoulder. I turned to find people seemingly materialising from the abandoned buildings, one, two, three… six of them. They emerged from shadowed door frames, all of them dressed similarly to the first lady and all of them armed with a variety of guns, all trained on me.
"You got all that?" She asked as if I hadn't said anything, "The Fallen, here. That can't be a coincidence."
One of them, a guy, responded, "Foundation will want to know."
He said it like it was the last thing he wanted to do, but with a tone of acceptance that said he'd do it anyway.
"Call it in," the lady said, sounding much the same, "our new friend here suddenly shot up in importance. Isn't that great for you?"
Sarcasm dripped from every word, but I couldn't help but ask, "Does this mean you won't shoot me?"
All of them laughed, as if I'd asked something ridiculous, or like there was some kind of inside joke that I wasn't getting.
"Not yet."
I live.
As always, not super happy with the chapter. Especially the dialogue, so I might come back and add some stuff to it later. And maybe edit some of the other parts near the first half, because I think it drags a little, but overall it's okay and (hopefully) readable.
Thanks as ever goes to my friend who beta-reads it before I post it.
I've recently gotten some more ideas for Tyrant, and how I kind of want it to mirror Doomsday in some ways which should hopefully be fun, especially because the idea should add some actual character to the titular Tyrant (eventually at least). As always, I'll be writing whatever my mind gives me dopamine cookies for, and whichever one doesn't leave me staring at a blank page the longest.
Hope everyone is doing well, and that you enjoyed the chapter.
As always, not super happy with the chapter. Especially the dialogue, so I might come back and add some stuff to it later. And maybe edit some of the other parts near the first half, because I think it drags a little, but overall it's okay and (hopefully) readable.
Thanks as ever goes to my friend who beta-reads it before I post it.
I've recently gotten some more ideas for Tyrant, and how I kind of want it to mirror Doomsday in some ways which should hopefully be fun, especially because the idea should add some actual character to the titular Tyrant (eventually at least). As always, I'll be writing whatever my mind gives me dopamine cookies for, and whichever one doesn't leave me staring at a blank page the longest.
Hope everyone is doing well, and that you enjoyed the chapter.
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Odd1todd89
The strange tightrope
- Pronouns
- It
Yay more story! I'm greatly looking forward the continuation of this story...
I hope you have a wonderful day/night.
I hope you have a wonderful day/night.
- Location
- Deep inside the sand
- Pronouns
- He/Him/His
I do hope we won't have a misery feast with mc as a buffet. Reading the woman keep threatening the mc, and he keeps answering her with 'I don't know' and the woman doesn't believe him, makes me angry.
Still, I'm looking forward to the next chapter. Thanks for the chapter.
Still, I'm looking forward to the next chapter. Thanks for the chapter.
SavicusVonde
99 problems and planning is definitely one.
- Pronouns
- He
I don't think I can say it'll be a super upbeat kind of thing, I always seem to come back to this kind of tone anyway. The woman not believing him makes me angry, but in her position as effectively a soldier in an ongoing war in which both sides has people with superpowers, I probably wouldn't believe him either... was my logic at least.
- Location
- Deep inside the sand
- Pronouns
- He/Him/His
I think I misconstruction what I wanted to say.
I'm angry that woman didn't believe him when he told her. Unless I am trained to spot lies and truths as easy as breathing I wouldn't believe him either. I identify myself as him when he's the mc. So I will get angry on his behalf.
It's that I don't want to read stuff that makes me angry for too long. It's a not a deal breaker or anything, it's just how I seek out new stories. I don't want to feel anger, contempt, disgust, guilt, fear and nervousness any longer than absolutely necessary and if there are stories that has that then they must be in minimal doses. It's just a reason why I read. I know people who like horror genres so there's a market for everything. It's just a personal preference.
I would like to read stories that makes me feel positive emotions, not negative like the previous mentioned ones, for example; joy, gratitude, interest, hope, amusement, inspiration, relief... Actually now when I began listing this. Why I reacted this strongly now was probably because the chapter ended on a negative emotion. To end my list; Satisfaction and happiness when something touches you deep into your heart.
Cheers!
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SavicusVonde
99 problems and planning is definitely one.
- Pronouns
- He
That's definitely fair enough! I'm generally the same, it's one of the reasons I struggled to read Worm for the first time because I'd heard so much about how upsetting it was, and found it difficult to read at first. It's definitely going to be a struggle for the MC, and think that the tone might not shift for a while at least. It's hard to say since I suck at planning anything.
Thanks for the feedback
I mean, to be fair everyone he encounters is walled off for a reason. The simurgh does not lead to rational or trusting actions.
Edit: also this story shows exactly why maxed anti-master defense and anti precog is basically necessary for any worm fics.
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