Witch (A Rewrite)
- Thread starter Shujin
- Start date
So basically, I'll take these and you leave alive? Sounds like a great deal.
Well... it's better than swallowing glass?
FEAR II
Shujin
M. NightShujinlan
- Location
- New York, New York
Thought I posted this yesterday, apparently not. My bad!
He knew English.
He'd been rated on his ability to comprehend orders in four languages, English was one of them. So he knew what, individually, each of those words meant. They just didn't make any sense together. He was left giving his hallucination a blank look, not even sure where to start.
All four of her eyes rolled in different directions. "I am a shard of - never mind, it isn't relevant. You are familiar with the concept of a solar system." It wasn't a question. "A plane is like a world. As each world in a system has its own gravitational pull, composition and orbit, so do each plane."
He was following so far, but he wished he wasn't. The concept itself was far above his pay grade, and promised to make everything more complicated.
"Yes, well - " She looked away from him for a second. "I will explain as you go."
He looked away, checked the ammo in his pistol and listened to the wind.
The urban decay had bitten deep into this apartment complex. The last one had at least looked like it had been living space once upon a time. The trash of things too inconvenient to move when you wanted to leave in a hurry, trash of things too inconsequential to take and trash of things forgotten piled up in rotting heaps. This one? This one didn't have trash. It had the occasional showroom, uncomfortably stiff couch in a corner showing off a living room to buyers that never existed. Most of it was rubble. Dirt. Plaster dust and plywood shavings.
The walls didn't have holes. There were walls and there were holes. Holes with boards sticking out like an exposed rib cage. Just from the look of it, it was unclear if the building had ever been finished, a construction project building homes for the dwindling number of people. Maybe the money ran out, or whoever commissioned the project realized they were dressing up a hole in the ground.
Auburn had been a bustling, busy industrious place once. From a bird's eye view, the entire thing had been built outwards from old military compounds in the center. Once condemned, twice closed down. When Armachan closed down, it took the life of the city with it. When the company came back, growth was sluggish.Stock portfolios flat lined. Hiring all the time. Sucking down money into the red digits no matter what they did.
Looking at this mess, he wondered why they tried.
"It's theoretically possible for one to move between planes. Practically possible, if the planes are close enough, but what separates them isn't something as simple as percentage of oxygen or ammonium in the atmosphere." The ghost's form clipped through a corner, exposed pipes and wiring disappearing behind ghostly folds of cloth. "It's reality. Each plane has a different reality rule set. Gravity works how it works here. It may not the next plane over."
That sounded like a tactical and logistical nightmare.
"Yes." Her smile was wry. "Then believe me when I say Nine-oh-Seven was created to burn through planes."
He stopped walking.
"Not just your nations and oceans," she continued. "Not just your planet. Not just your solar system. Your reality. Your entire reality."
He had never been very familiar with the concept of overkill. He heard the term a few times from other units, enough to piece together what it meant. He was meant to be deployed in missions where there was a reasonable expectation for a need of solo, high ability combat units. Overkill would be deploying a squad of units of his caliber in missions he could complete alone.
It was a hypothetical term. They didn't have a squad of units of his caliber.
If extreme measures were deployed, it was because the situation called for it. That was what he was taught. The line between 'too much' and 'not enough' often came down to the wire. Lives were wasted when the superiors tried to walk the tightrope.
"A pandemic," she began. "A disease so virulent, it can spread through any vector of exposure. Gas, liquids, solids. There is no incubation period and a one hundred percent infection rate of every organic being. Plants. People. Amoebas. Bacteria. Viruses." She said it quickly, rapid fire. Clinically. "One in three will die. The remainder will...turn rabid. There is no known cure."
Super-ebola, he thought. Or rabies.
The blonde screaming woman had been on fire.
Burn the plague out?
Where did the spider leg covered in eyes come in to the picture?
"Containment failure." His hallucination drifted in front of him, scanning the alleys with a frown. "Implant, imprint, stabilization, initialization. Steps one and two were completed as directed."
Which meant step three was the cause of the recent SNAFU.
"Situation normal, all fucked up?" Her head tilted, like a cat or a bird. "Appropriate."
The mission had been fucked from the first five minutes..
He grit his teeth. It didn't get to him. It shouldn't have gotten to him. He was trained not to let it get to him. He shook his head roughly.
It was the quiet, he thought. After hours of fighting through clones, it was quiet.
That was what was getting to him.
He rounded the next corner gun up, finger on the trigger. He knew the objectives of the other squad, in case at some point the situation developed to where their purposes crossed. He was in involuntary radio silence, but the last he heard was a call for retreat.
But he had objectives.
"And I will help you." The boards crisscrossing a door in his path shattered themselves to large splinters.
Yes, but then. She would want something in return.
"Is that so wrong?" she asked. "My problem will become yours, if it's not already."
It would be outside mission parameters. He had not been trained for anything remotely nearing that scenario. No one was. It was not his call to make.
She scoffed with very real disgust. "Soldiers."
He picked his way through the building, following a mental map. Nothing stopped him. No Replicas. No ATC.
Just silence.
He opened a red door cautiously, heart so far up his throat he could feel it beating. He could choke on it.
At first all he saw were rusted metal shelves lining the walls. The back wall had a large hole in it, a shortcut to the next room over. He put his back to the left wall, just brushing the shelves and crept forward just enough to see into it.
Alice Wade laid crumpled in the corner, surrounded by a pool of her own blood.
Fear and anger both screamed, a torrent of chaotic, raw emotion felt like it would burst out of chest. Then it was gone. Numbed. He swallowed something bitter. His grip on the pistol was steady.
This would not affect him.
Blood was rushing through his ears.
He was trained to not let this affect him.
"Focus!" The hallucination snapped at him. "I need you to concentrate!"
He blinked slowly.
Focus.
Bullet wound to the head; frontal bone, glabella. Exit wound, occipital bone. Shot angled downwards towards spinal column. Held down, kneeling? Didn't move, couldn't move. No other visible marks, bruises or scratches. Clean.
"Exactly. This can be reversed."
He let out a long, slow breath.
Reversed.
Death.
Now he knew he was crazy.
There was a loud, screeching sound as the rusted metal shelves in front of the hole slammed itself to the side. Some part of his brain said 'localized psychic phenomena,' but it had happened to many times in his favor for him to believe his ghost wasn't doing it. How was a question he wasn't equipped to answer.
He shuffled through the hole, the iron smell of blood wafted up to his nose.
Reversible.
He honestly didn't know what he would do if that was true.
Alice Wade's blue eyes were still open. She looked terrified.
"Very recent, good." His ghost crossed in front of his line of sight, stepping lightly around the body. "This might sting a little."
That was the only warning he got before his entire body seized in pain. His nerves were being peeled open one by one for molten lead to be poured in. His head throbbed, one half at a time, fire racing between the lobes. White light burned his eyes. Dimly, he heard a shot going off, but he couldn't tell he even had fingers.
It flared long enough that when the pain finally left, there was a void where feeling would have been.
At some point he'd fallen. His vision blurred badly, black creeping in on the edges.
"Active psychic potential." The voice was clear, and rough. It grated on the inside of his skull. "And yet ability to channel mana nigh completely atrophied." The voice tutted. "Careful, careful. New plane."
Shapes. Shadows.
"Don't waste assets."
Then nothing.
Origin Story: Awakening
He knew English.
He'd been rated on his ability to comprehend orders in four languages, English was one of them. So he knew what, individually, each of those words meant. They just didn't make any sense together. He was left giving his hallucination a blank look, not even sure where to start.
All four of her eyes rolled in different directions. "I am a shard of - never mind, it isn't relevant. You are familiar with the concept of a solar system." It wasn't a question. "A plane is like a world. As each world in a system has its own gravitational pull, composition and orbit, so do each plane."
He was following so far, but he wished he wasn't. The concept itself was far above his pay grade, and promised to make everything more complicated.
"Yes, well - " She looked away from him for a second. "I will explain as you go."
He looked away, checked the ammo in his pistol and listened to the wind.
The urban decay had bitten deep into this apartment complex. The last one had at least looked like it had been living space once upon a time. The trash of things too inconvenient to move when you wanted to leave in a hurry, trash of things too inconsequential to take and trash of things forgotten piled up in rotting heaps. This one? This one didn't have trash. It had the occasional showroom, uncomfortably stiff couch in a corner showing off a living room to buyers that never existed. Most of it was rubble. Dirt. Plaster dust and plywood shavings.
The walls didn't have holes. There were walls and there were holes. Holes with boards sticking out like an exposed rib cage. Just from the look of it, it was unclear if the building had ever been finished, a construction project building homes for the dwindling number of people. Maybe the money ran out, or whoever commissioned the project realized they were dressing up a hole in the ground.
Auburn had been a bustling, busy industrious place once. From a bird's eye view, the entire thing had been built outwards from old military compounds in the center. Once condemned, twice closed down. When Armachan closed down, it took the life of the city with it. When the company came back, growth was sluggish.Stock portfolios flat lined. Hiring all the time. Sucking down money into the red digits no matter what they did.
Looking at this mess, he wondered why they tried.
"It's theoretically possible for one to move between planes. Practically possible, if the planes are close enough, but what separates them isn't something as simple as percentage of oxygen or ammonium in the atmosphere." The ghost's form clipped through a corner, exposed pipes and wiring disappearing behind ghostly folds of cloth. "It's reality. Each plane has a different reality rule set. Gravity works how it works here. It may not the next plane over."
That sounded like a tactical and logistical nightmare.
"Yes." Her smile was wry. "Then believe me when I say Nine-oh-Seven was created to burn through planes."
He stopped walking.
"Not just your nations and oceans," she continued. "Not just your planet. Not just your solar system. Your reality. Your entire reality."
He had never been very familiar with the concept of overkill. He heard the term a few times from other units, enough to piece together what it meant. He was meant to be deployed in missions where there was a reasonable expectation for a need of solo, high ability combat units. Overkill would be deploying a squad of units of his caliber in missions he could complete alone.
It was a hypothetical term. They didn't have a squad of units of his caliber.
If extreme measures were deployed, it was because the situation called for it. That was what he was taught. The line between 'too much' and 'not enough' often came down to the wire. Lives were wasted when the superiors tried to walk the tightrope.
"A pandemic," she began. "A disease so virulent, it can spread through any vector of exposure. Gas, liquids, solids. There is no incubation period and a one hundred percent infection rate of every organic being. Plants. People. Amoebas. Bacteria. Viruses." She said it quickly, rapid fire. Clinically. "One in three will die. The remainder will...turn rabid. There is no known cure."
Super-ebola, he thought. Or rabies.
The blonde screaming woman had been on fire.
Burn the plague out?
Where did the spider leg covered in eyes come in to the picture?
"Containment failure." His hallucination drifted in front of him, scanning the alleys with a frown. "Implant, imprint, stabilization, initialization. Steps one and two were completed as directed."
Which meant step three was the cause of the recent SNAFU.
"Situation normal, all fucked up?" Her head tilted, like a cat or a bird. "Appropriate."
The mission had been fucked from the first five minutes..
'What is your earliest memory?'
He grit his teeth. It didn't get to him. It shouldn't have gotten to him. He was trained not to let it get to him. He shook his head roughly.
It was the quiet, he thought. After hours of fighting through clones, it was quiet.
That was what was getting to him.
He rounded the next corner gun up, finger on the trigger. He knew the objectives of the other squad, in case at some point the situation developed to where their purposes crossed. He was in involuntary radio silence, but the last he heard was a call for retreat.
But he had objectives.
"And I will help you." The boards crisscrossing a door in his path shattered themselves to large splinters.
Yes, but then. She would want something in return.
"Is that so wrong?" she asked. "My problem will become yours, if it's not already."
It would be outside mission parameters. He had not been trained for anything remotely nearing that scenario. No one was. It was not his call to make.
She scoffed with very real disgust. "Soldiers."
He picked his way through the building, following a mental map. Nothing stopped him. No Replicas. No ATC.
Just silence.
He opened a red door cautiously, heart so far up his throat he could feel it beating. He could choke on it.
At first all he saw were rusted metal shelves lining the walls. The back wall had a large hole in it, a shortcut to the next room over. He put his back to the left wall, just brushing the shelves and crept forward just enough to see into it.
Alice Wade laid crumpled in the corner, surrounded by a pool of her own blood.
Fear and anger both screamed, a torrent of chaotic, raw emotion felt like it would burst out of chest. Then it was gone. Numbed. He swallowed something bitter. His grip on the pistol was steady.
This would not affect him.
Blood was rushing through his ears.
He was trained to not let this affect him.
"Focus!" The hallucination snapped at him. "I need you to concentrate!"
He blinked slowly.
Focus.
Bullet wound to the head; frontal bone, glabella. Exit wound, occipital bone. Shot angled downwards towards spinal column. Held down, kneeling? Didn't move, couldn't move. No other visible marks, bruises or scratches. Clean.
"Exactly. This can be reversed."
He let out a long, slow breath.
Reversed.
Death.
Now he knew he was crazy.
There was a loud, screeching sound as the rusted metal shelves in front of the hole slammed itself to the side. Some part of his brain said 'localized psychic phenomena,' but it had happened to many times in his favor for him to believe his ghost wasn't doing it. How was a question he wasn't equipped to answer.
He shuffled through the hole, the iron smell of blood wafted up to his nose.
Reversible.
He honestly didn't know what he would do if that was true.
Alice Wade's blue eyes were still open. She looked terrified.
"Very recent, good." His ghost crossed in front of his line of sight, stepping lightly around the body. "This might sting a little."
That was the only warning he got before his entire body seized in pain. His nerves were being peeled open one by one for molten lead to be poured in. His head throbbed, one half at a time, fire racing between the lobes. White light burned his eyes. Dimly, he heard a shot going off, but he couldn't tell he even had fingers.
It flared long enough that when the pain finally left, there was a void where feeling would have been.
At some point he'd fallen. His vision blurred badly, black creeping in on the edges.
"Active psychic potential." The voice was clear, and rough. It grated on the inside of his skull. "And yet ability to channel mana nigh completely atrophied." The voice tutted. "Careful, careful. New plane."
Shapes. Shadows.
"Don't waste assets."
Then nothing.
- Location
- Hell
- Pronouns
- She/Her
An intriguing chapter, but seems kinda heavy on the exposition here. Yes, I know it's justified in text here, but it just kinda feels like this chapter has no real substance to it. The plot isn't really progressing in any way, and it's not even really telling us much we don't already know or could have guessed. I mean, it's only 1.5k words, but it just feels like this update should have been part of a larger chapter.
Enthusiast#117
This is not the Profile you are looking for
- Location
- United States
I wanted to know what's going on, and this chapter seems to be a big leap in that direction! I like it!
Shujin
M. NightShujinlan
- Location
- New York, New York
SI is 'adopted' by the Witch of Izalith for the purpose of being a suitable vessel for the Flame of Disparity. The Witch's children are all demons of Chaos, each and every one. The apotheosis process runs into a snag named Manus and his refusal to die. SI ascends as planeswalker instead of dying, plane jumps to FEAR. Gets shot in head. Sudden case of body death fucks with the already fucked ascension and her heritage as a daughter of Chaos is running amok.
Story is written from an outside person PoV, not the SI so far.
RyubosJ
Person that hates Mega Evolutions.
- Location
- UK
Oh. Cool thanks.
I think the bit which lead me wrong was I my tiny FEAR knowledge latched onto the idea that the girl in part two was Anna(?) (Canon character) + the line about sacrifice so the SI was getting reincarnated as girls fated to die.
Then planeswaker elf showed up and I felt like maybe she was the SI and this was years later, but that didn't quite make sense so I was left scratching my head.
- Location
- Actually pretty lost
Having absolutely no knowledge of FEAR, I had no bloody clue what was going on either. I loved the first Witch, but I was honestly considering dropping this in an update or two if it didn't start making sense, and only that long because of the first Witch.
Shujin
M. NightShujinlan
- Location
- New York, New York
Yeah, I wanted people not familiar with settings to get a hold on things, so each setting will be explaining itself. Unfortunately in media res start delays explaining a little, but the main purpose of FEAR is to reveal that.
Yeah, irony being I want to avoid that by having an outside looking in PoV to explain the backstory situation. Because that backstory just blew up.
Fair enough, FEAR will be explaining itself really, really soon.
FEAR III
Shujin
M. NightShujinlan
- Location
- New York, New York
Origin Story: Awakening
Getting res - resurrected wasn't all it was cracked up to be.
Her brain tried to say 'resuscitated.' Because she knew that could bring people back when they weren't breathing, or their heart stopped.
But not when their brain was splattered against the wall.
The faded words of 'Pendleton Inc.' stared back at her on top of the dilapidated warehouse building. She couldn't tell what color the paint was, as if she wasn't seeing through her own eyes. The rusted pipe with flaking paint felt strange under her palm, like it was fragile. Like it would break if she leaned too hard.
Everything was wrong.
Everything was wrong and she honestly didn't know if it could ever be right again.
Nothing was the same. She had been here, not that long ago. Passing through, too preoccupied with investigating where the chemical pollution was coming from to notice the skeletons of industry. Nothing but the ghosts of old newspapers on the wind and the shadows of large machinery left. It made her feel like she was haunting the place. A specter. Like she never came back, or like she came back wrong.
The hum of industrial air intake fans sounded off, like they were a note too low, or the timbre had changed. The usual creaks and groans of old warehouse buildings didn't sound like they belonged, like there were echoes underneath she could barely hear. The nighttime breeze felt rough on her skin, like sandpaper. Her sense of balance had taken a turn for the worse, leaving her tripping over her own two feet more often than not. Like her right knee was giving way, or like her legs were numb.
Her clothes were heavy. Sticky. Her shirt smelled like iron, constantly clogging her nostrils and drowning every other smell out. She tried not to think about it.
She had a headache. Right between the eyes.
Don't think about it.
Don't think.
The alien brushed past her through the open garage door. The woman felt like air, a slight pressure on the skin and that was it. The soldier was still unconscious, floating behind. Without the black face helmet thing, he looked both older and younger than she expected. She thought her would-be rescuer would have been a grizzled, salt and pepper combat veteran on an elite black ops team.
Only the best for Harlan Wade's daughter and all.
What she got was someone who couldn't be that much older than her, but the stress lines on his severe features cut deep into his cheeks and forehead. It said he lived through a lot, maybe too much. It aged him by a good decade, like stress did her father. He was frowning in his sleep, troubled.
She told herself it was just to check on him, when she reached out and ghosted fingers over his neck.
A pulse.
He was warm.
Alive.
He felt alive.
Then he was past her too and her hand was cold. She felt her own neck, again, searching for that beat. Cold skin on cold skin. Dead skin, her mind whispered.
Come on.
Come on, come on. Where is it, where is it?
The small, almost imperceptible pulse under her fingertips made her shudder, falling against the frame of the garage door.
Weak. Weak, but there.
"Be happy. Be happy. You got a second chance." Alice couldn't help the small laugh that stretched into a groan as she gingerly probed her forehead for the bullet hole she knew should be there. She could almost still feel it, the metal fragments in her brain. The phantom exit wound at the base of her skull felt like it was radiating heat. Venting. When she stood still, the crawling sensation of warm liquid dripping down her back returned.
"I am not handling this well," she hissed to herself. Honesty, right? She could be honest with herself. The Wade household had made a big deal about honesty, starting when she was a little girl having terrible night terrors. Dad had kept a journal. Any dream, big or small, he wanted to know about.
This wasn't a dream.
She wished it was.
"That goes away. Eventually." The soldier's floating body gently settled down in the bed of a pick up truck.
Alice crossed her arms, gripping them in her hands and feeling her nails dig into her skin. It didn't hurt as much as it should. She had time to get used to the idea of four eyed people. Not a lot, admittedly, but having been dead bothered her more.
"Eventually?"
"Eventually," the alien woman affirmed without a shred of consolation. "Figure out how to close that door, would you?"
Alice nearly leapt to obey, spinning on her heel as she searched for that big red button switch, already feeling that sense of rightness establish itself.
She made herself stop. Careful. Watch that.
Good old American values made her stiffen her spine. It gave her the strength to talk back.
To the person that literally pulled her from the grave.
Maybe it wasn't strength.
Maybe she was just stupid.
"C-can't you do it?" Her voice trembled. "Psychically or whatever?"
She nearly jumped clear out of her skin when the door made a loud, screeching noise as it started to descend. Goosebumps were raising all over. Her head swam, like she was going to be sick. There was a small stack of spare tires to the side of the door and she staggered over to it.
Sit.
Breathe.
"Alice."
"Yes, Mas - " She bit her lip, hard. She swallowed the urge to scream. "What?"
If the alien was offended, she didn't show it. She didn't show much of anything. Alice didn't know how to read her face, something about the four eyes kept throwing her off. It was those exact same eyes that told her she knew even less than she thought.
"The man who killed you."
She flinched. The fragile scab over those memories began to bleed.
When everything went tits up, people going crazy and men in Armachan armor storming the building, her father told her to stay where she was. To stay safe. To hide.
He said Paxton Fettel was dangerous.
She hadn't understood it, hadn't fully realized what he meant when the Replicas escorted her at gunpoint. Some part of her couldn't comprehend, couldn't cope. All she had known was that he had volunteered to be part of some old project, one of many the company had started up decades ago. Something happened, the details were scarce, but the project went bad. People died, and it was discontinued. It happened sometimes, that's what Dad said. They followed all the precautions, but they can't foresee every eventuality.
That was all she knew.
She didn't realize how much she didn't know. How much Harlan Wade hadn't told her. Not until Paxton Fettel was in front of her, screaming. Raging. Picking things up to throw them at the wall, punching concrete until his knuckles bled. Scratching at his face, tearing at his ears and lips. Biting at his wrists.
And then he just ...stopped.
For a few long seconds he did nothing, exhausted.
'She has a new toy, it seems. And you're not it.'
He lifted the gun.
"I see," the alien said.
"Do you?" Alice snarled back. The woman was in her head again. "How could you ever?"
Instead of replying, she held up a hand. "Welcome back to the light."
The soldier tensed, and then grudgingly sat up. He had dark eyes and they were moving, taking in the abandoned garage and lingering on some things. The gas cans, the forklift, the first aid station on the wall.
"Right holster," the alien said randomly.
His hand drifted there, and Alice could see a bit of tension drip out of his shoulders as he pulled out the pistol.
A shudder ran down her spine.
She had a headache.
Right between the eyes.
She had to look away from it.
"Follow."
Alice risked a glance and found the alien slowing moving a finger back and forth in front of the soldier's face.
"You had a seizure during the operation - " Alice could easily see the alarm blaring through his body language. "It was simply to correct an oversight. Your genetic modifications are...crude."
Gene mods? In spite of herself, Alice felt her curiosity prickle. Genetic modification was an elite industry. There were only a few names the military trusted, and Armachan was one of them.
Well, used to be one of them.
She wasn't sure their name would be worth more than dirt now. Losing control of a psychically directed army would do that to a company.
"The body follows the soul. The other way around - " The alien hesitated, before shaking her head. "You will never be a mage, but what little I have access to shouldn't kill you either."
"Shouldn't?" Alice couldn't help herself.
"Well, there is a risk of his spine dissolving."
Both humans just stared.
"I'm joking. Mostly." She shrugged. "Complete nervous system breakdowns are rare." She shot the soldier an irritated look. "Rare, thank you very much."
There was a burst of squealing static, slightly muffled. It probably came from the small, black two way pinned to the collar of his body armor. He'd given her one when he first came to her rescue, but when she...left. It - Fettel had crushed it. There was a crackling for a few moments, before the bark of a male voice filtered in.
"-ointman! Pointman! Where the fuck have you been!?"
Pointman? Alice wondered. Must be his callsign.
The soldier raised his eyebrows, looking towards the four eyed woman with what looked like skepticism. In response, she magnanimously waved her hands, as if granting him permission.
"You completed one objective, did you not? This is in good faith."
He huffed, a side of his lips curling up in a look that could have been amusement or disdain.
"Alice, I will apologize in advance."
Wha - ?
She felt her throat stiffen as that sense of rightness came over her again. It meant she couldn't panic when her mouth pried itself open as her heavy tongue moved, and a voice not her own came out.
"Hello? Is this...Pointman's superior?"
"Commissioner Betters," the voice snapped, stepping one notch below pissed off. "We weren't informed of any other VIPs on site, name?"
"Project Union oversight, department head Leah King," the voice coming from her mouth smoothly lied. It was said so confidently, it took Alice a moment to even realize it was a lie. Which was crazy, she was the one saying it.
"Fuck," Betters eloquently replied. "We don't have a lot of options for extractions, look, where are you?"
"Alice and I are holed up outside the Rammelmeier Indus-"
"Fuck! You gotta - wait, Wade is with you? Never mind, ma'am, get the fuck out of there."
A cold tension was seeping into her rib cage. The voice took on a hard edge. "What is the situation?"
"Unidentified bogey from hell comin' your - "
The numbness in her throat swiftly crept over the rest of her body. Alice turned, head already craned upwards towards the catwalks overhead. Her knees bent slightly, and then she was soaring, six, seven and then eight feet into the air. Her arm snapped out and for a moment, she thought she saw wisps of white light seep from her fingertips before her hand crunched around a metal railing.
The warehouse was one of the newer ones with a rough mostly made out of giant angled glass sky roof. In a single bound she was by the wall, looking out at a dark horizon. The numbness left, and all the panic, and hysteria, and fear she hadn't felt before finally came screaming in.
"Oh god."
It was covered in eyes.
It had too many legs. Too many segmented limbs on one side digging into the side of apartment complexes and office buildings as it dragged itself forward on a giant, twisted arm. The center of its body looked as if its spine had broken in half backwards, an exposed, gaping rib cage clawing at the sky as a vertical maw slit across its belly gnashed at the ground. Its skin smoldered with glowing embers, turning the very air around it hazy.
From beside her, the alien flickered into existence. The four eyed woman took one look outside.
"Blood of agekch." She said it like a curse.
The creature flung out its arm, maimed hand outstretched and went still. Alice stared into the eye on its palm, the eyes on its fingertips.
Alice knew it was staring back.
"Me? Is it - is it following - "
There was a pulse.
Like the moment just after a bomb went off, the shock wave of pressure. Something passed through her. The world went grey for just a second. Outlines blurred. Shadows darkened. There was a sound, like a puff of static from a very distant radio as something...touched her mind.
Faintly, she could still hear Betters over Pointman's radio. "What the -" static "- loving fuck was th-" static.
"No," the alien mused. "Not me, something else. Someone else."
Kill them, a little girl whispered. Out of the corner of her eye, in a dark corner there was a small silhouette. Small, bare bloody feet were exposed by a sliver of moonlight.
'She has a new toy, it seems.'
Fettel's voice, from just before he killed her, floated through her head.
Kill them.
Kill them.
Alice turned to face the corner. There was a pop, like a bubble in her head collapsing, and instead of a dark corner in an old warehouse, there was bright metal and dense concrete of a military bunker.
There was her father, a look of intense regret and fear on his face. His eyes wide behind his circle glasses.
And then his flesh began to boil off.
Kill them all.
The bark of a pistol slapped Alice across the face. She gasped, gulping down air, feeling like she came within an inch of drowning. The vision disappeared. The gun kept sounding and she turned in time to see several dark holes in the air below her slowly dilate open like wounds in reality.
They vomited nightmares.
Tawsnrrtsyip
Rick's Law Enthusiast
- Location
- Terra, Sol System, Orion Arm, Milky Way
- Pronouns
- Nice/Try/FBI/Pricks
Why, pray tell, did our lovable oversoulled protagonist go full-on Bloodborne on F.E.A.R., of all things?
- Location
- Russia
I'm pretty sure she caught the same issue that the Witch of Izalith did, only instead of the fake flame, she's suffering the real First Flame.
Tawsnrrtsyip
Rick's Law Enthusiast
- Location
- Terra, Sol System, Orion Arm, Milky Way
- Pronouns
- Nice/Try/FBI/Pricks
That... would do it. Intensely, if the Witch is anything to work from.
Shujin
M. NightShujinlan
- Location
- New York, New York
Thank you. One thing I want to try for this story is mimicking the style of each setting. A horror setting will have horror, a slice of life will have slices of life, an epic will feel epic. That is one of my goals, to exercise and expand my writing chops if nothing else.
@DestinyPlayer Has the right of it. The soul of Manus fucked up the Linking of the Flame, allowing for a Chaos corrupted First Flame to run amok. The end result is not pretty.