Episode 8 , Part 11 "Saving People is Fun"
BungieONI
Seven gremlins in a trench coat
- Location
- Lickwidget
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Episode 8, Part 11
"Saving People is Fun"
"Saving People is Fun"
You're flying through a cloud of white dust and shattered wall, your feet dancing fleetingly with the floor, contact made and then gone again.
Your Soul is hanging around you, your arrows so numerous they light it up from within like a hidden white flame. Through the dust and darkness you see one final wall. You don't stop for it and feel it part like a curtain around you, dusting you in glittering stone fragments.
He turns, holding her up like a piece of trash. You and your six lesser selves don't stop for him. You are burning on the inside, and then the air is aflame with Soul and shrieking as you engulf him in mirror bodies. You try to grapple with him as you lead the pack. Mirrors either strike him with ten hands, grapple him with nine more or shatter your Soul against him with a final five raised hands. He has to let her go and your many subordinate limbs carry her back behind the mass.
He howls like an exploding kettle, all high pitched tones and animal braying as he flails and your other selves explode into grey and black ichor to splatter the walls. You catch a fist across the brow and keep going, undeterred. Thundering piston lungs freeze under your hands as you seize them and crush him into a wall and then in another burst of arrow light crash through it. Flickering lights return outside, the things made by men responding to his call as he struggles against your four arms and breaks your fingers to free himself.
It doesn't matter against the burning.
More of your mirrors burn into being, arrows already in their hands as they scream at him. You're screaming too. A noise like the sound of tearing metal and burning human sacrifices. You give him a noose of Soul flame which he slips like a recalcitrant bull. It sears against the demonic steel of his horns, melting them short into a lumpy crown around his skull. Sweetness surrounds you, cloying corruption like a flowering sewer filling the air as scent and the presence of his Soul.
He is dying, but hate is in his eye as he goes. He spits at you shrieking epithets and powerless curses. You ignore his death screams even has you are forced to contend with his fists. They shatter your hands and his melting bulk turns aside your rain of magic arrows for just a moment. The lights dim and far above you hear the crack of thunder.
"Tar... Frim!" The shout is a broken croak, but cuts through the dust with ease all the same.
Then he must stop as a coruscating bolt of lightning as wide as your waist plows him off his feet.
He is dead before he lands with a clang and a crack of floor tile. And your fog is there to meet him and make his Soul yours. Distantly you feel more of him, and then the Slayer surges, her Soul gaining facets which then flutter away as his falls into that hanging state caused by death. It tries to flee, or move on, you don't care, and finds itself trapped by a barrier tasting of ozone and numbers and the sound of thunder wrapped around a well of ivy vines and hyacinth. Then the cyclone of your Soul tugs it in with the grip it already has on the part right in front of you.
Then he is consumed.
Moloch is dead.
Finally. Your thought is wearied. You sigh, your mirrors folding in on themselves and disappearing.
The armor lies silent and dead on the linoleum floor. You turn and then stumble, injuries and a ripple in your Soul conspiring to tip you over. Annie is there, catching you and coughing under your weight. With her holding you up by your shoulders and under your upper arms you try to stand and it hurts. Your skin and meat is sore from crashing through walls weakened by your arrows. You cannot bruise, but if you could you are sure your entire front would be purple and red.
Your fingers on your upper hands are bent and twisted, slowly turning in the meat of your fingers as you heal.
You're sore, and weary. You feel stiff in a new and unpleasant way after all of that.
Annie slowly settles besides you, realizing you're not really in the mood to get up. You relax against each other and just spend a moment recovering from that little ordeal.
Then she chuckles. She shifts and her hair falls over your shoulder, probably to mingle with yours in some fashion. You look at her and her furrow-browed mask. In the little details; her eyebrows are slowly tensing and un-tensing, her lips twisting slightly as she nibbles on them. Things like that.
She's worried. You realize, a flare of pain acting as punctuation to the thought as one of your index fingers snaps back into place. You focus on this puzzle so conveniently placed in front of you. What is she worried about?
You start with picking apart what you know of your loyally insane Knight.
You are an anchor to her because you provide service for her. Service which keeps away the bad visions and lets her vent by killing things.
Is there much else of importance? A moment's more thought and you can think of more.
She doesn't like multiple facets of her past, but for all of that, even so, she still carries around a lot of it as "sensible advice" in her mind. Thinking back to her gun care, looking her over again and noting her bruised but relatively intact state, hotwiring cars and other activities like how she carries herself and presents herself. She also has lingering fondness for it.
But again, you supersede most of it. She still feels for it, but it is no longer her drive. Not like it was. Which is good, the focus pleases you.
You think she sees you as a friend. Really her only one but that's how she conceptualizes actions like this, that she's doing with you right now. Or when she found you weeks ago in your sanctum and helped you by showing you vices.
Now, what does that mean? You consider it, weighing her relief, and stress, and her principles and motivation which all focus on you.
With her so focused on service to you, being unable to perform that service, failing in that service will be seen as very bad to her. Which you want. You always want that from your service. On another level you also know that humans who only have one friend don't like to fail their friends if they're doing something for them. They desire friendship.
So… she's worried about failing you. You look at her. "Annie." You say, making her look at you sharply. You look at her. She looks back, fidgeting and uncomfortable.
"Speak." You tell her. She blinks at the command, and then it seems to register as the surprise drains away.
"Thank you for saving me…and stopping me." She says awkwardly, her voice hoarse and thready.
"You're welcome." You reply with a smile in your tone and on your face.
"Fighting him is what you should have done." You tell her. She looks at you askance for a moment, then it clicks in her head what you're really talking about. She looks at you with a frown and glances over at the armor.
She's being stubborn, though you leave it since you can tell from the set of her shoulders and silence she can't tell herself you're wrong.
She looks away from the pile of parts behind you and out the door into the middle distance, her body relaxing and her expression becoming morose. "I could have died. I would have died." She coughs out, shifting the topic slightly. You're a bit surprised that she doesn't quite equate the two.
She snorts. Her lips wobble a little and she shivers. "That would have sucked." She says, swallowing heavily, her tone almost panicky underneath the croak. You look at her. She shrugs a little. "You being my friend has… helped, a lot. I think more than," She hacks a little, "...you might realize. So, thanks. A lot." She smiles.
You smile and slowly stand, leveraging your ability to cheat the hold of the earth. Which has increased significantly as internal fractures in your Soul smooth themselves out. You both walk over to stand over the armor and examine it. The body has disappeared, dispersed into nothing, leaving an empty husk. Annie huffs and shakes her head.
You have memories clamoring in your head. Of a man standing in front of you, facing you, clad in armor of ebony trimmed in silver and gold. In his right hand is a sword whose blade could impale three armored knights in one thrust. Memories of its deathly sharpness piercing the Fog before its inevitable subsumption.
Lochansabel. The Penetrating Sword. Your eyes drift and like lodestones land on her right hand.
The metal reflects the red light into your eyes, just like his sword did that day.
Knight Metas, the Archdemon Penetrator. Bearer of the Silver Demon's Soul. Your friend.
Knight Annie, sworn to you. You who bear the Doll's Demon Soul. Your…
You do not put words to the truth now laying itself down like a foundation stone in your mind.
Instead, "Hmm." Your nostalgic hum makes Annie look up at you and straighten from where she's poking at a tangle of wires near the armor. "Many centuries ago, before I was born as this," you gesture at yourself, "...and my Soul twisted into the Doll's Demon Soul, I had a Knight, a kind friend. His name was Metas. He was rather terrible at Sorcery, and I… barely... " You stop, and tilt your head. You thought you didn't remember, but you do now and you're not sure why.
"He was terrible at Sorcery, and rather bemused by the fact that all his talent lay with his sword Lochansabel. It's where he got his title of Knight Penetrator from." You're not sure why Annie gets a funny look at that title and press on. "He was an honorable and fun man who liked to entertain me and my husband with sword tricks whenever we would find him practicing somewhere on his lonesome."
You sigh, tapping a finger on your chin. "I did not see much of him after our respective ascensions. He had a larger role to play than I did. He was still fun, though."
You look over again and find her smiling. "He once said something similar to me about dying after a similarly hard fight. I think he would've liked you, no matter which side of his ascension he was on." Your voice is whimsical.
Annie raises an eyebrow. You continue speaking without paying it any mind on the outside. "We need to get these spoils out of here. The Slayer and her companions have dealt with the rest." You take another look at her. Red marks from Moloch's fingers are prominently visible and she is clearly favoring her side from bruised ribs.
"And we need to treat your injuries. You're no use to me if you can barely speak." You say imperiously.
Annie huffs, broken laughter which turns into silent coughing and twitching. Rubbing at her throat irritably she prods at the armor then starts looking around for something to carry it all in. You turn outward, looking for the Slayer and folding yourself into your human shape. Which is made to look bruised as it happens.
Crunch. Boom.
A subtle shift in the shape of the room pulses through it a second before the sound of a distant explosion reaches your ears. The Slayer and her band are moving together and seemingly heading deeper in. Towards you. To find you, presumably. You shake your head.
Then you turn and start looking for something to hold the armor in as well.
Several more booms and the groans of shifting steel are backdrop as you search through the room, along with occasionally flickering lights. You smell smoke before you both find a box as long and as wide as your arm and as deep as your forearm, full of tubing and wires. Which you then rip out and stuff the armor into.
Hefting it up onto your shoulder is easy, and while Annie looks slightly mulish you hurry her on ahead of you and so the two of you start off through the facility. You can see fire flickering down the path you carved through it and decide to avoid it. Instead you both walk out of the room Moloch died in and head right, apparently retracing Annie's steps from what she mutters.
And find yourselves in a maze, again. You both trudge onwards, Annie occasionally coughing and your spoils shifting around in your box unhelpfully. There are several more instances where you have to avoid fire or sparking wires or blocked doors, which seems to frustrate Annie. You keep her going and away from the smoke.
Eventually you reach a somewhat intact section of the facility, full of little cubicles with computers and work desks. Some of them have loose papers strewn about, and some of those loose papers a few rooms deeper in catch Annie's attention. Some are peeking out of vaults under the desks, or just left open and something in the text catches her eye.
You are standing next to her as she pages through a slim folder and leans on the desk with a cocked hip. The folder has Confidential Material' printed across the top, and is stained by the passage of unidentifiable fluids.
She stops somewhere in the middle. "Hmm? Governmental contract listings?" She whispers. You look over as she turns the folder towards you, the armor clanging in its box and see what is basically a manifest listing various project contracts. Some of them clearly marked with Confidential or Government in the little summary describing them.
Athena. Thor. Gawain. Lancelot. Gargoyle. Deep Blue.
"...Codenames." Annie tells you quietly.
You blink, and consider. Paging through the file you don't find any references to what these actually are, but it has you curious. And Annie as well.
You keep walking, list stashed in her coat. A few minutes of looking around has Annie finding and turning down a hall. The smell of smoke is approaching, though the explosions seemed to have tapered off. You can very distantly hear sirens.
Down at the end is an office with Project Manager stenciled into the glass. You walk in and find something interesting. The room is plastered with sketches and drawings and mad scribblings over every flat surface. And they look somewhat like the armor. You start rifling through the mess along with Annie, setting down your box to do so.
There's designs of the hands, the arms, the piston lungs. All of it, also marked up with mad ramblings and strange spiky symbols. The messages in those symbols aren't coherent enough to read. You find daubed here and there under the mess circles of dried blood. The largest one is on the floor in front of the desk and it stinks of death to your senses. A faint melange of rot.
You hear a quiet clunk as Annie messes with the computer. When you go over to her you find the screen full of files. Pictures and designs of different parts of the armor, in different stages of development. And there are even more symbols here, and they're coherent enough you start to make sense of them.
They're… meant to create a home for Moloch and his power, defining them as the same term. A metaphysical trick to fuse him to some human, 'according to His will'.
And on some of them you see references of 'Lancelot' and 'The Lancelot Subject' as Annie digs through the files. "Hmm." She grunts to herself and starts pulling drawers out of the desk, looking for something.
When you ask she just says. "Disks."
Quietly, you start looking as well, though your search proves to be futile.
Frowning in a mou of disappointment Annie rises back up from kneeling beneath the desk. "Damn… was hoping for compact disks… which had more on them." She says irritably, then starts coughing. You pull her up and help her out of the room until she stops. You decide you have enough to satisfy your curiosity and decide to leave.
You push on with Annie in the lead, and eventually you get out. Distantly and around the corner as you come out of a side door at the corner of the facility opposite where Annie parked the car, you can see the Slayer's Soul and hear her voice distantly. You can't hear what she's talking about. For the sake of your lies you come around the corner and start walking towards her with Annie in tow. There are some dumpsters which you slide the box behind between you and them.
Then you come into sight and they seem fine, if singed.
"Buffy!" You call out to the girl, making her flip around and her face light up in a smile.
"There you are, I'm so glad you guys are…" She falters a little as she takes in your bruised states, "Well, mostly okay. You are okay right?" She asks nervously.
Annie wiggles a hand and you nod. "We're fine. Did you find anything?" You ask her already knowing the answer.
She snorts. "Yeah this big nasty robot-demon-dude thing. Looks like you guys did too." She observes.
You nod. Then you look around as the sirens get louder.
You lean in conspiratorially with her, flicking an eye to where Giles and Xander are standing slumped near the fence. "We can get home on our own, you should get out of here." You tell her.
"See you Witchy Gal." She says with a jaunty salute and then turns back to her friends.
You disappear back around the dumpsters and then return to the car. Fire trucks and police cars being to cluster in front of the gates as you settle your box into the back seat and settle down into your cushy seat.
Annie backs you out of the alley and gets you both home without fuss. When you get there she seems to be feeling better, because she stops coughing occasionally and rubbing at her throat.
"Goodnight Latria." She says quietly, but without any seeming pain later that night as she holds ice in a bag to her throat.
You look at her and decide you'll spend the night keeping a watchful eye on her. And what you think will become her armor.
Where do your thoughts turn as you contemplate the Armor?
[] To the Old Monk, what took over your husband. What did it mean, what he did to you?
[] To Metas, your friend. What does he mean to you, really? Especially since you aren't sure if he still exists.
[] To yourself. What was it like in your Tower, really? Especially with your recent changes in perspective.
And that's Episode 8 all over and done with! Next episode I'm aiming to have up shortly after the vote closes.
Lots happened to and things are heading towards their finale this season, though we still have a few things to get through. Vote closes on Wednesday 12 AM UTC.
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