[X] A saber-toothed tiger skull (it comes with a placard) that's been plated with metal and etched with complex circuitry. Apparently recover from a ruined "outpost" on Vancouver Island.
[X] A leatherbound journal written in runic script. You can't translate it, obviously, but you can definitely admire the almost Renaissance style anatomical drawings of animal-men hybrids.
[X] A medical injector and a small vial with a half-translucent…thing sleeping inside. Like someone crossbred a squid with a shell-less scorpion. It glows with a ghostly blue-green light.
[X] A saber-toothed tiger skull (it comes with a placard) that's been plated with metal and etched with complex circuitry. Apparently recover from a ruined "outpost" on Vancouver Island.
[X] A leatherbound journal written in runic script. You can't translate it, obviously, but you can definitely admire the almost Renaissance style anatomical drawings of animal-men hybrids.
[X] A medical injector and a small vial with a half-translucent…thing sleeping inside. Like someone crossbred a squid with a shell-less scorpion. It glows with a ghostly blue-green light.
[X] A thick, plastic employee ID on a cheap lanyard. It has the logo of a crescent arc with a long, tapered needle drawn through, a little like a bow and arrow. The bottom is stained rust-red.
[X] A saber-toothed tiger skull (it comes with a placard) that's been plated with metal and etched with complex circuitry. Apparently recover from a ruined "outpost" on Vancouver Island.
[X] A medical injector and a small vial with a half-translucent…thing sleeping inside. Like someone crossbred a squid with a shell-less scorpion. It glows with a ghostly blue-green light.
Your world is a box two steps long by two steps wide. Your world is four mirrored walls and a scuffed linoleum floor the color of a coffee stain. Your world is the hum of an unseen motor, the creak of unseen cables, the rattle and shudder as you pass through unseen concrete caverns emptying of cars. Ascending to the higher floors of the parking garage.
Foaming Fangs hangs beside you, invisible, an ambient atmospheric pressure. A barometric spike in the shape of a person. His anticipation is palpable. His breath, his body heat, coating the silvery surfaces with slick condensation. Water beading, droplets turning fat and swollen as they slowly work and quirk their way down, leaving behind dots and dashes of moisture in their wake: Morse code in precipitation. He's humming to himself, the notes rising and falling like ocean waves. The deep timbre of his voice buzzing in your bones.
Fuck if I called out every bit of description I loved I'd just be quoting the whole update but this is just... really really good. Your prose is just so enjoyable to read and paints such vivid pictures that I have no idea how you do it. Be proud of it you gross nerd.
He's pleased with himself for all that he did an absolutely awful job. As best you can tell he just… tailed random, suspicious looking people with a stench of the supernatural about them until he overheard something. Then spent twenty minutes trying to talk it up as a hard-won prize. A meeting place, a rough time, an airy estimate light on specifics or generalities. You do have a way of picking the biggest dumbasses don't you?
Your jacket smells like iron wool and burning dust from when you tried to dry it out with Summer's touch. You're still sore from earlier, the scratches along your shoulders still stinging and itching. You're still sticky, the last traces of your sweat and his tongue and the mess you made that you didn't quite clean up completely.
I also love the idea of Levi trying to use his powers for a quick-dry thing and his jacket just bursting into flames just long enough for him to go "SHITSHITSHITSHITSHIT-"
You're focusing on the most obvious parts. But it's not really what's on the outside that counts is it? Even that's just packaging, just a pretty wrapper for the shit going on behind your slitted, snake eyes. The inside of your head is like a jumble, jigsaw puzzle dumped back in the box and shaken until even the picture on the front is hardly any help at all. Cardboard cutouts flipped backwards and upside down, shuffled beneath each other. Five hundred pieces of flawed, fractured memory and detached feelings.
It's not fine.
It's fine, you're working on it. You're going to fix this, you're going to feel better, you're going to feel right.
Kill them all~
Stab that vampire/watch the leeches fall
Happiness ahead/when everyone's dead
Who needs cocaaaaaaaaine~?
Slowly, slowly, you reach out and press your hand to the twin panels. After a moment your reflection matches you. The half-familiar figure on the other side of the mirror, mimicking your motions behind the fogged up glass. His face, your features, worked into something like resignation, something like anticipation. Hesitation, indecision, fading away as the chrome ripples, as it cracks like a sheet of ice, jagged shards peeling back like petals at you touch. Your hand brushes past his, his closes around the muscle of your forearm. Oil dark nails streaked with silver.
[...]
His skin bubbles up, blisters, fingers forking like tree-roots, merging with the meat of your body. Your veins bloating as he pours himself into your blood, staining muscle tissue, red running to quicksilver. It creeps up your arm, spreading like a virus; blood vessels swelling, shining, until the limb looks broken pottery glued back together with silver-dusted resin. Cool metal creaks, whispering against itself as it crawls across your chest. As it burrows beneath your bone and slips into your ventricles. A thickened tendril beating a tattoo as pushes its way up along your throat, tenting up the skin. Your Reflection closes his eyes as his outline blurs. Distorts. Dwindles. Collapsing into fog, into nothing, into you.
Your hand comes away empty, you flex your fingers; the edges of your nails shining like straight razors. Your snakes curl around you, inspecting you and you glimpse yourself through their eyes in a melange of impressions. Green eyes stark against ashen skin. Soot stained lips and grey-purple gums. Lick your chops. Your tongue gleams like you just drank mercury.
"look at this little nerd, thinking he can out-edge vampires"
"Who the fuck do you think you are?" He asks, less venomous and more… honestly confused, bemused by you. Legitimately asking who the fuck are you and why are you here, in his face, unscheduled and unexpected and unwanted.
This secret rendered unto you:
Mercury is the Prime Matter, the chaos from which all metals can be drawn and in which all metals are dissolved; birth and death and the devouring.
This secret rendered unto you:
A reflection is the keenest edge, so sharp that it can skin a second world from this Fallen place; it is the fulcrum and the razor and the parasite mouth.
The bouquet of blades blossoms from your palm with the rasp and shriek of torqued steel. You shed them, send them slicing through the space between you and the cars in the instant of their creation. They cut through the ghouls like shrapnel spray. Like a shotgun blast. Leaving in their wake ruin of ribs and spiked torsos. A crimson splatter over an automotive finish. A woman's knees hit the ground, her head gone. A man is pinned to a door, a slender blade bisecting his heart.
Drink down their fear, their dying fury. Don't let a drop go to waste.
Muzzles flash and bullets ping off the half-translucent shield in front of you. A massive wall of corrugated metal torn from the wreck of a sunken warship, rust-brown and scarred by the Deep; Borne in one arm and braced in another. Foaming Fangs materializing around you, a fortress of slick muscle and tightly-wound sinew. Rubbery ropes straining over that chest as brawn knots and tenses. He bellows, eyes blazing within his mask, and the fog around him collapses. Solidifying into a slab of metal almost as long as you're tall, the sword's sharpened edge almost an afterthought.
You watch as lead slugs spark and deform. Axe is throwing himself between you and All American and you can see the metal he has beneath his hiked up sleeves now, brass and burnished alloy and complex clockworks. His left hand splitting, dividing up to the elbow and shredding his dress shirt, hypodermics punching through his ruined glove. Trenchcoat is leaping towards you, mouth fusing, crunching as chitinous spikes punch through the skin. A serrated proboscis sculpted from her tongue. Her limbs too long now, almost coiling back, bending back on themse- oh.
I admit I really don't know enough about nWoD to get some of the splats at work here down pat - wereflea and some kind of cyborg asshole? - but honestly who cares they look cool and Levi is murdering them stylishly.
All American is staring at you, eyes boring into you, he speaks and for all that his voice cracks his words are rich, his tone regal and imperious. Confident, the voice of command. "Stop."
You feel it try to crawl through your ears, burrow in your brain. It scratches the surface and is promptly annihilated by an ocean of acid. A second swarm of blades screams through the air.
"If you don't have the strength to stop me on your own, begging isn't really going to help. But here, let me show you."
And this time the air itself ripples, a dome of force racing out in every direction. Hurricane winds hit them like a blast wave, hallucinatory terrain hemorrhaging into the waking world. It's not real, it's not happening, it's still enough to make the SUV's rock on their suspension. Outside sleet and nascent snow boil away, steaming into a green-tinged storm. Inside coal black clouds twist and writhe from the ceiling. Wormlike parasites hatching from a concrete carcass, swelling in size even as they rip themselves free. Weaving themselves into a cloak around you.
Rain falls, whispering, hissing, isolated puddles merging together as the downpour fills the depressions and floods the lot. The water level rising until it spills down the central shaft in an ashen cataract. The ground beneath your feet is gone, worn glassy smooth: the surface of an iron-grey sea at rest. The deluge pitting and shattering the tension in countless places only for the skin to flow back, flawless as before. Shadows shift in the depths: tentacular coils bonelessly curling, something as big as a subway train moving through the murk. Reaching up to gently, delicately, brush the soles of your shoes. To fan out around your feet.
This is your Mantle. This is You. It's not a disguise; a disguise is supposed to conceal who you really are, to hide the truth. But that's the joke isn't it? You lie all the time, so fundamentally, so completely, that the truth is just another mask. That you can bare the purest expression of your self, your soul, and nobody who sees it will understand that it is you. Isn't it funny? You're laughing on the inside, honest. Just look at that good and wholesome smile. That Cheshire slash in the dark.
Verdant witchfire flashes, dancing, thunder booming as you stalk towards them. Foaming Fangs breaks away, eyes locked on the survivors, on the half-stunned Trenchcoat shaking her head clear; leaving the leader to you. Trail your hand on the side of one of the SUV's as he and Axe back away, back away, like that will save them. Your fingers flickering, smouldering with Summer's heat, leaving parallel streaks of char as they drag along the finish. Hitting the tinted window. You draw a sword as Axe lunges, catching the namesake on the edge, smiling that shit-eating-
He twists. It was a feint. You jerk your head back, eyes wide with panic, one of your snakes is too slow and you feel the crunch of bone chain up your spine. The pain that grips you is gutwatering, vomit inducing, and you can't help but reel as he folds his arm and steps in. And now, now you see the nested maneuver for what it was. A fraction of a second before he smashes the haft into your jaw.
Hurt is too small a word for what you feel. Too small to encompass the sheer enormity of it. You cry out and then Foaming Fangs is there, he's back, intercepting that elaborately engraved left arm, split into a nightmare surgical spider, and slamming Axe into side of the car. All but crumpling the chassis. He pulls back, Axe stumbles and you, half blind and snarling, hew him down. The sword itself shattering in the strike. Foaming Fangs finishes him for you, turning to cover you as you stumble away, gagging, choked sobs escaping your throat as your back arches. Your shoulders knot. As the headless serpentine body tears itself in two with a wet, rending sound and both halves begin bubbling, reforming. Your breathing gradually slows, quieting as the shield covers your indignity. As blind panic gives way to something like relief.
You're fine. You're fine. You'll do better next time. Composure returns by degrees. You dig your fingers into fresh-forming bruise to help it along.
Man that's kind of great. Levi's an unstoppable fuckhouse with all sorts of offensive fuckery at his fingertips and then someone drives an axehandle into his face and it turns out he's extremely stoppable because pain hurts and ouchie-ouch Foaming Fangs please kiss it better.
"This is pretty messed up isn't it?" You concede, mostly to yourself.
Foaming Fangs shrugs a little, huffing in amusement. "I appreciate your aesthetic, my lord."
You glance down at the ankle clutched in your free hand, dress sock drawn over a hairy calf. Gaze shifting to the bodyguard's carcass attached to it and the slick, scarlet trail stretching out behind you. You drop their leg with a small, self-conscious shrug.
Levi is already tumblr's gay yandere boyfriend and they don't even know it yet.
The elevator starts. The car descending down, down, back into the bowels of parking garage. You blink and lean around the SUV. Foaming Fangs peers over one brawny, bare shoulder, the two of you just staring. Long seconds passing as you process. Why is-
Oh.
Oh someone's coming and you're-
You look down at yourself. You slowly, slowly turn around and stare at the nightmare you made, the lovely, fluffy feeling of unreality vanishing as the last traces of the comfortable haze bleed away. Leaving you here, just a man cold and alone in a parking garage. With your art.
"Looks like I just picked a big bouquet of oopsie-daisies."
[X] A saber-toothed tiger skull (it comes with a placard) that's been plated with metal and etched with complex circuitry. Apparently recover from a ruined "outpost" on Vancouver Island.
[X] A medical injector and a small vial with a half-translucent…thing sleeping inside. Like someone crossbred a squid with a shell-less scorpion. It glows with a ghostly blue-green light.
[X] A leatherbound journal written in runic script. You can't translate it, obviously, but you can definitely admire the almost Renaissance style anatomical drawings of animal-men hybrids.
Because A) cyborg tiger remains, B) suspicious symbiote/parasite thing that someone could use for dank science experiments and C) god damn Levi you furry fuck just grab your spankzine and get outta there.
[X] A thick, plastic employee ID on a cheap lanyard. It has the logo of a crescent arc with a long, tapered needle drawn through, a little like a bow and arrow. The bottom is stained rust-red.
[X] A medical injector and a small vial with a half-translucent…thing sleeping inside. Like someone crossbred a squid with a shell-less scorpion. It glows with a ghostly blue-green light.
[X] A thick, plastic employee ID on a cheap lanyard. It has the logo of a crescent arc with a long, tapered needle drawn through, a little like a bow and arrow. The bottom is stained rust-red.
[X] A medical injector and a small vial with a half-translucent…thing sleeping inside. Like someone crossbred a squid with a shell-less scorpion. It glows with a ghostly blue-green light.
[X] A thick, plastic employee ID on a cheap lanyard. It has the logo of a crescent arc with a long, tapered needle drawn through, a little like a bow and arrow. The bottom is stained rust-red.
[X] A saber-toothed tiger skull (it comes with a placard) that's been plated with metal and etched with complex circuitry. Apparently recover from a ruined "outpost" on Vancouver Island.
[X] A medical injector and a small vial with a half-translucent…thing sleeping inside. Like someone crossbred a squid with a shell-less scorpion. It glows with a ghostly blue-green light
[X] A saber-toothed tiger skull (it comes with a placard) that's been plated with metal and etched with complex circuitry. Apparently recover from a ruined "outpost" on Vancouver Island.
[X] A leatherbound journal written in runic script. You can't translate it, obviously, but you can definitely admire the almost Renaissance style anatomical drawings of animal-men hybrids.
[X] A saber-toothed tiger skull (it comes with a placard) that's been plated with metal and etched with complex circuitry. Apparently recover from a ruined "outpost" on Vancouver Island.
[X] A medical injector and a small vial with a half-translucent…thing sleeping inside. Like someone crossbred a squid with a shell-less scorpion. It glows with a ghostly blue-green light.
[X] A leatherbound journal written in runic script. You can't translate it, obviously, but you can definitely admire the almost Renaissance style anatomical drawings of animal-men hybrids.
[X] A saber-toothed tiger skull (it comes with a placard) that's been plated with metal and etched with complex circuitry. Apparently recover from a ruined "outpost" on Vancouver Island.
[X] A medical injector and a small vial with a half-translucent…thing sleeping inside. Like someone crossbred a squid with a shell-less scorpion. It glows with a ghostly blue-green light.
[X] A leatherbound journal written in runic script. You can't translate it, obviously, but you can definitely admire the almost Renaissance style anatomical drawings of animal-men hybrids.
It's not guilt you feel. It's close, a cousin maybe, but it's not guilt; it's not shame, it's not even fear exactly. It's a kind of fragility, raw vulnerability. The toxic, chemical surf subsiding, the monsters in the depths sated. The seas placid, the night shining, and you, naked and shivering beneath the eye of a silver moon. Anger is a kind of armor for you. It insulates you, protects you because your skin is thin in every kind of way: it tears so easily, you bleed so easily. You need that rage, need it to keep yourself upright, to keep yourself moving, to make sure that your injuries are not fatal, never fatal, never enough to stop you. You can always take one more step, and if you can take one more you can take another.
Nobody gets to dismiss you, nobody gets to demean you. And you know, you know, there's nothing anybody has that you can't make, that you can't buy or take and in time every worshipful eye will turn to you. Beaming up at you while you give them a hero's smile. You will wear every skin that suits you, and you will be the envy of this ruined, storm-gutted city. This beautiful corpse.
That fury is your fire and this is the fire's gift to you. It's not your first sin, not your favorite, not the wound that runs the deepest or left the most lasting scar, but its a loyal kind of monster. And you rely on it, depend on it, and when it's gone it's...
Do you remember when you were in the department store with your mother? You couldn't have been more than ten, twelve, slowly suffocating in the tedium. A Gameboy Advance, one of those big bricks, dangling from your hand as you wandered the racks of handsome leather shoes and smart pumps. Sniffing and trying not to wrinkle your nose at fucking fog of perfume that hung thick in the air. Smelling more like bright copper pennies and clammy hands than flowers, than anything sweet, anything good. Staring up at the buzzing fluorescent lights, Pokemon theme blaring from the small screen. Rounding a carousel of belts before realizing that you'd gone too far. Coming back to the space where she was sitting and seeing only half-closed boxes and an empty bench.
And do you remember (you do don't you), when you were at that Summer camp (which one? There were so many) and they divided the whole two hundred strong mess of squalling, shouting, screaming kids into groups. And you thought it'd was all so boring, so beneath you, that you got distracted reading the book you brought and missed the role call. And when you looked up everyone was filing off of the bleachers and you had to go put the hardback in your battered locker with your lunchbox before you chased after them, but by the time you got back they were already gone. Vanished into the crush, the churn, as columns of kids wound out of the gym, shepherded by tired counselors. Leaving you standing in the middle of the polished basketball court, the space around you steadily emptying.
And do you remember (of course you do) the drowning dreams, the semi-lucid nightmares; where you'd be safe and warm beneath the waves watching the rain above and the black below. The whole world around you serene and soft and blue as you drifted, a soft sapphire haze stretching to the horizon in every direction. And then you'd try to will the gills into your throat, to rewrite the reality to realize the fantasy, and they wouldn't come. It wouldn't work. And you'd feel weight of the ocean start crushing you down, pulping your insides even as you tried to breathe through the brine. Even as you woke up, gasping, face pressed to a sweat-soaked pillowcase.
It's that sudden shift that leaves you like a snail pulled out of its shell. Exposed and vulnerable; cowering, half-hunching in on yourself. Rubbing your bicep with a hand that leaves trails of crimson flakes and smears the sleeve with clotted dust. You can smell it: metallic, copper.
Like pennies.
You did a bad thing.
Glamour clings to the corpses: a touch of gentle green light radiating all around them, the asphalt shining as if slick beneath their feet. The air laced with gauzy grey veils, the last tatters of true stormclouds. It gives them such a richness of color, highlights and complements the rest of your work. A swirl of oil paints threaded through with the impression of tentacular shadows; of something tenebrous and coiling, like crude oil given cephalopod flesh. Concrete pylons are the frame. The city's skyline serves as a backdrop. The Bay itself lost in the gleaming sleet, a hint of the Pacific's vastness waiting beyond the white curtain.
All American is riddled with stained glass; his body fractured by mercury roots, shattered by mirrors. A hundred shards of emerald and jade piercing his legs, his chest, his collarbone, his skull; buried in the front, bursting out the back. Razored spars as long as your hand, your leg, as your spear. Impaling him, holding him aloft, his arms pinned out by a peacock fan of slim spikes. A molten silver mask spreading from ear to ear, reaching up over cold flesh to his brow and down to his chin, his face a perfect, polished surface. Slim argent roots -makeshift stitches- holding it all together, binding the deep tissue lacerations that lace his body. You severed his head before you started. He was dead when you were working. You're a sadist sure but not a monster.
Besides, he would've been struggling too much.
You gave Trenchcoat a muzzle and Axe a pair of argent manacles. Both of them lowered in a bow, folded at the waist and propped up by a nest of translucent needles. One arm raised each, presenting the young lord to the audience. Ghouls kneel at their feet, lolling more or less lined up. A congregation in asphalt pews. Ruined and ravaged by your Reflections, ribs laid bare beneath suspenders and crimson soaked dress shirts. Still carrying the injuries that killed them.
The ground is thick with bloody footprints. A gory trail going around and around and around, echoes of your movements as you dragged them into place and posed them all. Splatters of thicker ichor dry on the garage columns; staining in messy arcs and heavy splashes. There's something of the Hedge in here, something of the Thorns, that mass of sharp seaweed that you passed through from that deep, alien ocean to the urban coast. There's something of the Sparker's too and it's not an allegory there's no one-to-one parity here. It's just a -hah- slice of life, a mood captured as you saw it. The beautiful, hungry dead, juxtaposed with the Sparker's Bay skyline.
Their prince wrapped in the frozen night, a crown of jagged glass gleaming on his head. You did a good job, you think, positioning him just right. He catches the light from Downtown and glimmers like a cathedral window, shining in the skyscraper glow. Glittering, casting dazzling patterns over the flooded ground. You gave it a name didn't you? You don't really remember doing it but it's there. Scored into tarmac by a ghoul's slow-dripping shoe.
New World Monarchy.
...God that's pretentious.
In the background the sound of the elevator stops. You come back to yourself with a small start, ears straining, swearing at yourself in silence. You can't hear the ding of the doors through fifty feet of stone and empty space, but you can imagine it. The car starts again, and that's enough to tear yourself away. To but hurl yourself at the open SUV, almost stumbling over an unused carcass.
Stop fucking around Levi and focus. Focus.
The messy contents of the half-unloaded car swim out of the darkness. You're panting, your hands trembling, eyes jittering as slit-pupils flick from case to case to case. Your brain stalling, gears spinning for agonizing seconds before anything catches. In the end it's your serpents that save you, sliding into the trunk ahead of you. Their scales softly rasping as they slither over the interior lining, over containers, over each other. Saurian jaws parting as they taste the air with forked tongues. Long coils of reptilian muscle; the regenerated twins slowly wrapping themselves around your waist like a living belt even as your own tail twitches back and forth.
Hydra-heads nose lids shut and take handles in serrated fangs. Your half-realized preferences blurring, dissolving into that border of blurred perception that surrounds you. 360 degree peripheral vision, constantly bending and flexing and focusing without your conscious control. They ignore the attache full of paper-bound bills. They ignore the wine bottle that's worryingly warm to the touch. Rigid plastic whispers across the inside of the trunk and you snatch at the containers with grateful, greedy fingers.
The saber-toothed skull, the fleshless thing safely nestled in a foam depression. The journal in its clear container, a sealed plexiglass box the size of a videocassette (you shove that in one of the pockets of your jacket). The fitfully stirring creature in its test tube, arthropod legs flashing bioluminescent as they drum on the glass.
Snap the latches, pass them back to Foaming Fangs. Ignore how your arms shake a little from the earlier exertion and the lingering strain, pain spasming up your back because you weren't lifting with your fucking legs. God who knew that two hundred plus pounds of brawn and bone would be a bitch to-
Right. Anyone. Everyone.
You flick your fingers at your familiar.
"Go," you hiss, and as he bows, long quills scraping against the skin of the car, leaving a half-dozen parallel scratches before he boils away into fog and ocean-mist. You can feel it unreeling, feel that tug somewhere behind your navel as that lead unspools. The visceral connection becoming a tether as the world closing around the scar. You spin, eyes darting, searching for a reflective surface amid all the shattered glass and filthy puddles. Hesitating, a feverish throbbing picking up in your brain.
Evidence. Did you...oh you left so much behind didn't you? God there must be fingerprints everywhere and there's still some skin on the axe and you probably shed scales and how could you clean up? How could you even begin to clean up in the few scant seconds you have left. Where would you start? What would you even do? The sum total of your forensic knowledge is the shit you gleaned from a Spring Break spent sprawled out on the couch, aching sockets where your wisdom teeth used to be, high out of your mind on painkillers and watching Law & Order: SVU. Just shoveling the garbage into your face alongside mashed potatoes and ice cream.
It's too late, it can't be helped, the elevator shaft is echoing as the car ascends and whoever it is is almost here, whoever it is is probably here to meet the man you just turned into an art display. You did your piece, you took enough that you don't look like, feel like, a complete psychopath. It's past time to go. You turn to leave and-
New World Monarchy catches your eye again and something else catches in your throat. A sharp-edged square, like you're choking down a playing block. There's a gentle wrenching in your chest, a squeezing, a torquing. A fist around your heart, squeezing even as something more sensible in your brain shouts at it to knock that shit out.
This is the last you'll see of it, maybe the last anyone will see of it. In a few hours the glass will denature back into quicksilver, the touch of the Deep will vanish. By morning it'll just be a pile of bruised, bloating meat. From then on it'll only exist in your mind, all your work, your first, fucked up, effort to express yourself. Explain yourself in the aftermath of your catharsis. A first draft of a manifesto, or maybe just the opening paragraph.
Focus. Scarlet stained hand wrapped around your mouth, bicep bulging as you try to physically drag your brain back on track. You look at the sleek automotive finish, the blood-flecked black. The impression of your Reflection on the other side, jabbing a claw at you, jabbing it mutely at the stairwell and exit; his anxiety oozing through. He feels guilty you know. He's concerned about you, for you. He cares. But he'll understand, you know he will, and you know you need this. Just have to make it fast.
Press your palm to the car, whisper Glamour into the skin. There's a few flashes of silvery light, a metal shearing. A fang-like, finger-long length of aluminum falling into your hand. You take it, hold it in front of you, concentrate. You can look into a mirror and see what it's seen, see anything it's seen in the past hour, past day, past week.
So you can preserve a single moment can't you? Can't you? You have time for that don't you?
Hold it up, hold it forward, cradling it in your hand. Feel the pulse beneath the glassy finish, the organic shudder as roots- no tendrils- no veins push up to the edges of your fingers and daintily supping on the small offered spark. Very nearly the last of your dwindling, depleted stores. A single heartbeat and it's done, glance down at the drops melting sleet clinging to the wrong side of the composite. The shard no longer holds your reflection. Good, that's- that's good. The tension in your head eases, clarity returns by degrees. Just in time too huh?
You take a step around the crushed fender of the SUV.
The doors ding open behind you and you snap back, snakes softly hissing, a delayed ripple working through your body. Shit. Shit shit shit. The trembling's back now, and your anger's gone and your energy's all but gone and all you have right now is your words and your serpents coiling around you. Wrapping themselves around you like a a security blanket. Scarlet stiffened cloth catching at their long, sinewy bellies. You're on the far side of the abandoned, brutalized convoy. A single motion activated light overhead; the rib-high barrier and a fifty-plus foot drop beyond.
There's a pair of footsteps, a pair of voices; you strain your ears to hear. Delicate black horns tapping against the tinted glass.
"Greg my dear you really must relax, it's nothing to-"
"-ill don't like it."
"-'ve said, but what a strange place to draw the-"
A man and a woman, her voice gentle and faintly amused. Words backed by a hint of melody, a richness, a depth. Something of a cigarette coarseness to them. Like a time displaced lounge singer, ripped from the 1920's and tossed almost a century forward. His deeper, gruffer, confident and a touch petulant. The kind of voice that called to mind a strong, stubbled jaw, dark and brooding eyes; an off-duty, unorthodox cop maybe, or a Private Investigator, someone with a battered desk and styrofoam cups of stale, cold coffee waiting for them at the office. Their sudden silence is a tangible thing, a heavy hush settling over the elevator bank.
The lights flicker on in front of them, fluorescent bars slamming on row by row, before ending in a shower of sparks. Gutted filaments flashing over the shattered remains of tubes. The lead car's hazard lights silently flash, on-off on-off on-off, an amber glow filtering through the air. A staccato heartbeat. You try to breathe as little as possible.
There's an exchange, terse and quiet. Tension wound through the air like wires, you taste those now familiar sweet-and-bitter notes from her, and something...else from him. It's like touching your tongue to the end of a battery, feeling the tingle, feeling the numbing charge. There's no screaming, not yet. They can't see it from where they stand but they must be able to smell it, even as the clammy air deadens the nose. What can they see from where they stand? The bloodied stakes still stuck in the side of the SUV? The stains on the ground? Maybe a hand laying still by the tires?
Another exchange, harsher this time. Her voice raising up into a question, the concern evident as she calls out. "Antonio?" You hear the man exhale, and he's afraid, he's afraid but he's got a collar on it, some mastery of it and there's anticipation there too paired with the first vestiges of adrenaline. Overhead the sensor winks out, the light extinguishes itself. You don't dare move. More footsteps, heavier, boots maybe? Greg probably.
"...Antonio?" The click-click of heels, the nameless woman now.
"Carmen," Gregory's voice is a strangled shout, filtered through gritted teeth. Carmen then. You flex your fingers, curling them around the haft of an invisible spear. "Carmen there might still be someone-"
And then she sees. And then she does scream. And then she darts forward, shoes tapping before she brings herself up short because she sees its far, far too late to do anything. Greg shouting for her to wait dammit, pounding the pavement behind her. The sensor flashes, tracking the blurring motion of your hand. Bathing you in stark, sterile light as you pivot, as you drive your empty fist forward.
"Ophidia."
Acid green light pulses. Empty space cracks and implodes. Already cracked windows shatter, exploding out in a gleaming spray; the crumpled chassis distorting around the point of impact. Metal screaming as your spear forms with enough force to flip it. To send two tons of machined steel flying like the hand of an angry god at poor Carmen the Vampire. You're already moving again, Mantle wrapped tight around you. The darkness stained, twisted and thick with a Summer typhoon. You wear the truth like a cloak.
The garage ignites, red-orange light scorching itself into your retinas as a lance of flame chews through the belly of the vehicle. An inferno that crinkles the hairs on your arm with its mere passage. Charring the space where you were standing, striking the barrier and flowing, roiling out. But you're fast, faster than he expected and you're already at the puddle. Throwing yourself forward like a baseball player diving for home, one leg outstretched one folded. Smacking your tail against the ground and flipping onto all fours, one hand catching against the soaked tarmac, your hips cocked up.
You see them for a second, just a second. He with his shoulder against the lead vehicle, now laying on its roof, visibly bent around him. Fire spilling out over torn seat cushions and spilled banknotes. He's got her wrapped up in a bear hug, his nearly ankle-length duster blazing with golden sigils. And she is beautiful, beautiful in the same, predatory way you are. And the dress she wears is lovely, framing her hips, her chest, just so. And he is black haired and brooding with dark circles under his eyes and two-day growth on his jaw. And you feel a little vindicated in the moment before Ophidia dissolves back into obsidian smoke and toxic light and you plunge your free hand into the frigid puddle. Paying the toll with their muted, masked terror. Twisting your shoulders, snapping your arm up, semi-liquid blades fanned between your knuckles.
What do they see when they look at you? A fog-wreathed beast? A slick squirming darkness, negative space between the clouds? You see their eyes, his more human than hers.
The missiles shriek through the darkness. He ducks behind the cloth, grunting as they hit his forearm, graze his shoulder; the lethal points sparking, shattering off the armored material but it doesn't matter. You're slithering into the puddle. The surface of the water parting to greet you as you fall into the world within mirrors, tail snapping like a half-sarcastic salute before that vanishes too.
You spend a solid thirty minutes beneath Arsenal Pier, with the beer bottles and cigarette butts, submerged to your scalp and scrubbing at your clothes, your skin. Feeling your phone vibrate even underwater and not even bothering to check it. Just taking it and the sealed case with the journal from your jacket pocket before you shed it. Your shoes too, clothing ruined beyond all repair. You stumble out of the surf, pausing only to push back your long, drenched hair. To skip the journal case over the coal dark waves, and to lob the shard, your shard, in a lazy arcwatching as a razor-clawed hand reaches up to neatly catch both.
You start the walk back barefoot. There's no Nathaniel to meet you this time. You don't so much as pass a single soul on the sidewalk, your only company the broad-boughed trees and the odd passing car. You were right, heh, it really is worse alone.
Although...you're not really alone are you? You can feel your shoulderblades itching as you pass the park fountain, the Imperator Rex rising up at the end of the road. Winter is watching. You wonder how much they've seen.
As you gingerly shoulder open the Employee entrance around the side of the sprawling, Art Deco colossus, you decide it doesn't really matter. If they know, they'll confront you about it. If they don't, they'll just think you're the generic kind of irresponsible. There's nothing to be gained by worrying and so, like a snake, you peel the anxiety away and shed it as you stand, dripping on the matte black floormat.
Act normal.
[ ] Change your clothes and meet up with Gallow and Glass, mix and mingle into whatever they're doing. Maybe chat up some of the other recent arrivals, whoever's not at the movie.
[ ] Clean up and go meekly report your tardiness to the nearest Winter Courtier, apologize for not noticing the time. Make up a decent sounding excuse, you can be plenty convincing.
[ ] Dump the salt-soaked rags and go find out what tonight's entertainment is; usually it's a movie and even if you've probably missed most of it that sounds nice. Just sitting in the dark.
[ ] Take a shower or something and then go find someone to top your Glamour stores off. It's easily harvested, you have permission, and it should help with the exhaustion.
Adhoc vote count started by TenfoldShields on Sep 15, 2018 at 12:56 AM, finished with 19 posts and 18 votes.
[X] Take a shower or something and then go find someone to top your Glamour stores off. It's easily harvested, you have permission, and it should help with the exhaustion.
[X] Change your clothes and meet up with Gallow and Glass, mix and mingle into whatever they're doing. Maybe chat up some of the other recent arrivals, whoever's not at the movie.
[X] Clean up and go meekly report your tardiness to the nearest Winter Courtier, apologize for not noticing the time. Make up a decent sounding excuse, you can be plenty convincing.
[X] Write in: If asked, get really blatantly wierdly sexual about what we were 'doing' so as to make people uncomfortable talking to us and distract them from asking us where we were and what we were doing. They can draw their own conclusions.
[X] Dump the salt-soaked rags and go find out what tonight's entertainment is; usually it's a movie and even if you've probably missed most of it that sounds nice. Just sitting in the dark.
Adhoc vote count started by TenfoldShields on Sep 17, 2018 at 10:25 PM, finished with 19 posts and 17 votes.
[X] Take a shower or something and then go find someone to top your Glamour stores off. It's easily harvested, you have permission, and it should help with the exhaustion.
[X] Change your clothes and meet up with Gallow and Glass, mix and mingle into whatever they're doing. Maybe chat up some of the other recent arrivals, whoever's not at the movie.
[X] Clean up and go meekly report your tardiness to the nearest Winter Courtier, apologize for not noticing the time. Make up a decent sounding excuse, you can be plenty convincing.
[X] Write in: If asked, get really blatantly wierdly sexual about what we were 'doing' so as to make people uncomfortable talking to us and distract them from asking us where we were and what we were doing. They can draw their own conclusions.
[X] Dump the salt-soaked rags and go find out what tonight's entertainment is; usually it's a movie and even if you've probably missed most of it that sounds nice. Just sitting in the dark.
[X] Change your clothes and meet up with Gallow and Glass, mix and mingle into whatever they're doing. Maybe chat up some of the other recent arrivals, whoever's not at the movie.
Do you remember when you were in the department store with your mother? You couldn't have been more than ten, twelve, slowly suffocating in the tedium. A Gameboy Advance, one of those big bricks, dangling from your hand as you wandered the racks of handsome leather shoes and smart pumps. Sniffing and trying not to wrinkle your nose at fucking fog of perfume that hung thick in the air. Smelling more like bright copper pennies and clammy hands than flowers, than anything sweet, anything good. Staring up at the buzzing fluorescent lights, Pokemon theme blaring from the small screen. Rounding a carousel of belts before realizing that you'd gone too far. Coming back to the space where she was sitting and seeing only half-closed boxes and an empty bench.
And do you remember (you do don't you), when you were at that Summer camp (which one? There were so many) and they divided the whole two hundred strong mess of squalling, shouting, screaming kids into groups. And you thought it'd was all so boring, so beneath you, that you got distracted reading the book you brought and missed the role call. And when you looked up everyone was filing off of the bleachers and you had to go put the hardback in your battered locker with your lunchbox before you chased after them, but by the time you got back they were already gone. Vanished into the crush, the churn, as columns of kids wound out of the gym, shepherded by tired counselors. Leaving you standing in the middle of the polished basketball court, the space around you steadily emptying.
Oh no he's having Real flashbacks and I'm getting my own flashbacks pull up pull up pull up
Glamour clings to the corpses: a touch of gentle green light radiating all around them, the asphalt shining as if slick beneath their feet. The air laced with gauzy grey veils, the last tatters of true stormclouds. It gives them such a richness of color, highlights and complements the rest of your work. A swirl of oil paints threaded through with the impression of tentacular shadows; of something tenebrous and coiling, like crude oil given cephalopod flesh. Concrete pylons are the frame. The city's skyline serves as a backdrop. The Bay itself lost in the gleaming sleet, a hint of the Pacific's vastness waiting beyond the white curtain.
All American is riddled with stained glass; his body fractured by mercury roots, shattered by mirrors. A hundred shards of emerald and jade piercing his legs, his chest, his collarbone, his skull; buried in the front, bursting out the back. Razored spars as long as your hand, your leg, as your spear. Impaling him, holding him aloft, his arms pinned out by a peacock fan of slim spikes. A molten silver mask spreading from ear to ear, reaching up over cold flesh to his brow and down to his chin, his face a perfect, polished surface. Slim argent roots -makeshift stitches- holding it all together, binding the deep tissue lacerations that lace his body. You severed his head before you started. He was dead when you were working. You're a sadist sure but not a monster.
Besides, he would've been struggling too much.
You gave Trenchcoat a muzzle and Axe a pair of argent manacles. Both of them lowered in a bow, folded at the waist and propped up by a nest of translucent needles. One arm raised each, presenting the young lord to the audience. Ghouls kneel at their feet, lolling more or less lined up. A congregation in asphalt pews. Ruined and ravaged by your Reflections, ribs laid bare beneath suspenders and crimson soaked dress shirts. Still carrying the injuries that killed them.
The ground is thick with bloody footprints. A gory trail going around and around and around, echoes of your movements as you dragged them into place and posed them all. Splatters of thicker ichor dry on the garage columns; staining in messy arcs and heavy splashes. There's something of the Hedge in here, something of the Thorns, that mass of sharp seaweed that you passed through from that deep, alien ocean to the urban coast. There's something of the Sparker's too and it's not an allegory there's no one-to-one parity here. It's just a -hah- slice of life, a mood captured as you saw it. The beautiful, hungry dead, juxtaposed with the Sparker's Bay skyline.
Their prince wrapped in the frozen night, a crown of jagged glass gleaming on his head. You did a good job, you think, positioning him just right. He catches the light from Downtown and glimmers like a cathedral window, shining in the skyscraper glow. Glittering, casting dazzling patterns over the flooded ground. You gave it a name didn't you? You don't really remember doing it but it's there. Scored into tarmac by a ghoul's slow-dripping shoe.
And I think he's even feeding off it somehow? I mean... fffuuuck I've gone through like four versions of this paragraph because I don't know how to say what I'm thinking but long story short it's kinda darkly funny and apropos to me for someone like Levi to be actively powered up by highly performative murderfuck of this degree. Although I do find it interesting that his narration mentions all the posing and other stuff was postmortem because he's not a monster (and because it'd ruin the setup yeah that's more for black comedy) when otherwise there's been a lot of emphasis on Levi's capacity for inflicting pain.
If I may be allowed to get wanky now, I'm sensing this trend of control and powerplay. Something kinda baked into Levi on a fundamental level by his time in Arcadia. There was an undercurrent to it during his time with Sebastian and it was pretty key to how he felt on the beach getting saved. He wanted this creepy Hannibal tableau set up so he could seem mysterious and threatening and aloof, that pretentious "ask me what it means because I'll tell you you don't get it" kind of vibe? He wants to be feared and in control. His big dumb scaly familiar's even in bondage gear.
Hm.
So let's recap.
Levi returned from Arcadia through the Hedge seemingly by accident, not the kind of superhuman determination and will it normally takes the Lost. He remembers almost nothing about his time there beyond vague impressions and romantic (well that's a bit of a strong word let's say 'amorous') memories of his Keeper. He returned with a big pack of other Changelings all with similar themeing to their mutations rather than some ragtag prisonbreak, complete with two discrete 'castes' with servile imagery built into their Miens, and Levi completely apart from the lot of them as mostly-humanoid and horns constantly referred to as a crown. He came packaged with a very powerful artefact which we sure as shit don't see anyone else in that pack with an equivalent of. He instinctively desires to lead, got blindingly angry when the Big Bad Wolf went over his head and treated him like just another one of the rabble he had to corral, and has been pushing his boundaries and delving into his powers basically the whole time since. He seems to crave ways to assert dominance, and even this Hannibal shit is about making a statement more than inflicting pain for pain's sake.
I am pretty sure Levi is the Witch-King of Angmar who got lost in the Hedge then tripped and fell into a bramble patch that ripped all his Nazgul shit off. I don't think it was even a 'I defected at the last second and led these people home' thing, I think it's a flat-out accident he popped out in the real world with his people having forgotten he should be going out to look for the fuckin Palantir or whatever it is the giant flaming eye needs now. Or to put it another way, he's Revan if the guy just tripped and banged his head on a footlocker on the Endar Spire rather than being actively brainwashed.
Which is very good for me because I enjoy stories about people who've lost most/all of their memories about being a piece of shit and as a result might be able to change
Still though, woof.
Evidence. Did you...oh you left so much behind didn't you? God there must be fingerprints everywhere and there's still some skin on the axe and you probably shed scales and how could you clean up? How could you even begin to clean up in the few scant seconds you have left. Where would you start? What would you even do? The sum total of your forensic knowledge is the shit you gleaned from a Spring Break spent sprawled out on the couch, aching sockets where your wisdom teeth used to be, high out of your mind on painkillers and watching Law & Order: SVU. Just shoveling the garbage into your face alongside mashed potatoes and ice cream.
New World Monarchy catches your eye again and something else catches in your throat. A sharp-edged square, like you're choking down a playing block. There's a gentle wrenching in your chest, a squeezing, a torquing. A fist around your heart, squeezing even as something more sensible in your brain shouts at it to knock that shit out.
This is the last you'll see of it, maybe the last anyone will see of it. In a few hours the glass will denature back into quicksilver, the touch of the Deep will vanish. By morning it'll just be a pile of bruised, bloating meat. From then on it'll only exist in your mind, all your work, your first, fucked up, effort to express yourself. Explain yourself in the aftermath of your catharsis. A first draft of a manifesto, or maybe just the opening paragraph.
Focus. Scarlet stained hand wrapped around your mouth, bicep bulging as you try to physically drag your brain back on track. You look at the sleek automotive finish, the blood-flecked black. The impression of your Reflection on the other side, jabbing a claw at you, jabbing it mutely at the stairwell and exit; his anxiety oozing through. He feels guilty you know. He's concerned about you, for you. He cares. But he'll understand, you know he will, and you know you need this. Just have to make it fast.
Press your palm to the car, whisper Glamour into the skin. There's a few flashes of silvery light, a metal shearing. A fang-like, finger-long length of aluminum falling into your hand. You take it, hold it in front of you, concentrate. You can look into a mirror and see what it's seen, see anything it's seen in the past hour, past day, past week.
So you can preserve a single moment can't you? Can't you? You have time for that don't you?
Hold it up, hold it forward, cradling it in your hand. Feel the pulse beneath the glassy finish, the organic shudder as roots- no tendrils- no veins push up to the edges of your fingers and daintily supping on the small offered spark. Very nearly the last of your dwindling, depleted stores. A single heartbeat and it's done, glance down at the drops melting sleet clinging to the wrong side of the composite. The shard no longer holds your reflection. Good, that's- that's good. The tension in your head eases, clarity returns by degrees. Just in time too huh?
Levi: *stares longingly at his design*
Dead Bodies: "Take a picture, it'll last longer!"
Levi: "Saaaaaay..."
As far as choice, hmmm
Reporting your tardiness is the most obvious choice but at the same time it's a bit too obvious y'know? Meekly begging forgiveness and making excuses please sir I'll be good just isn't in Levi's style no matter if you subscribe to my theory or not and I feel like he'd appreciate doing Literally Anything Else a lot more. Options 1 and 3 are a lot better for this I think, because then Levi can easily just say "oh I got distracted hanging out with all my Cool Awesome Friends Whom I Care About Deeply and forgot to check in" or something. But option 4 I think is also very helpful because it's kind of a weird look to come back late, visibly exhausted and low on Glamour. Like there's a low amount of reasons for a Changeling to be like that and none of them are good.
[X] Take a shower or something and then go find someone to top your Glamour stores off. It's easily harvested, you have permission, and it should help with the exhaustion.
So let's go with that. If pressured Levi can say "sorry sir I was too busy getting some hot ass"
"that's quite alri-"
"smashing that mudhole"
"levi-"
"beating cheeks"
"levi"
"hiding the salami"
"levi"
"riding a baloney pony"
"levi"
"having homosexual intercourse with men"
"yes i got that part"
"the words 'choke me daddy' were used and the context may surprise you-"
"levi"
Incidentally while writing that I flashed back to that bit in DBZA E60 Part 1 where Gohan goes "when I snap, I hurt people" and Cell's all [arousingly interested] "so like uh... whaddayadoto'em o_o" and that is possibly the most Levi thing I can think of.
[X] Take a shower or something and then go find someone to top your Glamour stores off. It's easily harvested, you have permission, and it should help with the exhaustion.
[X] Take a shower or something and then go find someone to top your Glamour stores off. It's easily harvested, you have permission, and it should help with the exhaustion.
[X] Take a shower or something and then go find someone to top your Glamour stores off. It's easily harvested, you have permission, and it should help with the exhaustion.
[X] Write in: If asked, get really blatantly wierdly sexual about what we were 'doing' so as to make people uncomfortable talking to us and distract them from asking us where we were and what we were doing. They can draw their own conclusions.
[X] Change your clothes and meet up with Gallow and Glass, mix and mingle into whatever they're doing. Maybe chat up some of the other recent arrivals, whoever's not at the movie.
I'm gonna go ahead and go for this instead of showering. While I'm usually all for self care, I think this will off up more chances for building relationships with characters we know. As opposed to wandering off to find something new. Cultivating our personal relationships can be refreshing in another way, and it'll open up different opportunities.
[X] Change your clothes and meet up with Gallow and Glass, mix and mingle into whatever they're doing. Maybe chat up some of the other recent arrivals, whoever's not at the movie.
[X] Take a shower or something and then go find someone to top your Glamour stores off. It's easily harvested, you have permission, and it should help with the exhaustion.
[X] Dump the salt-soaked rags and go find out what tonight's entertainment is; usually it's a movie and even if you've probably missed most of it that sounds nice. Just sitting in the dark.
[X] Change your clothes and meet up with Gallow and Glass, mix and mingle into whatever they're doing. Maybe chat up some of the other recent arrivals, whoever's not at the movie.
Topping off our Glamour and sitting in the shower for an hour while we contemplate our life choices(eheheheh...) sounds like a good idea but we haven't seen Tweedledee or Tweedledum onscreen since the prologue so
levi hannibal went to shit past season 2 is that really the road you want to walk
look into mads mikkelsen's empty, soulless eyes and tell me this is the future you want
[X] Change your clothes and meet up with Gallow and Glass, mix and mingle into whatever they're doing. Maybe chat up some of the other recent arrivals, whoever's not at the movie.
more character interactions
let's try and see how levi goes from mass murder to slice and life and botches the transition utterly
[X] Take a shower or something and then go find someone to top your Glamour stores off. It's easily harvested, you have permission, and it should help with the exhaustion.
