literature

TBOS Round 4.4

Deviation Actions

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Geezles were notably absent after that, despite their prevalence while she had been in the vents.  Flume wondered if she was being set up; specifically primed with what she was being shown.  Almost as soon as the thought came to her, she came around a bend in the passage and beheld, at the far end, a high, vaulted doorway.  The majority of the hall was clear, but tossed to either side in a pathway to the door were heaped the bodies of brutalized Geezles.  The smell of their undecayed bodies was almost overpowering.
She took two steps, and a funny humming sensation passed through the ground under her feet.  Flume realized what was happening and sprinted for the door, hooking her arm around the handle and covering her arm with the other.
``
Sinclair leaned against the wall, taking his weight off his leg.  He ran the rosary through his fingers, keeping a close watch on the little group of hairy demons cowering away in the far corner.  They weren't acting like proper demons.  First and foremost they were far too solid; even after sustaining injuries they didn't stop behaving like solid skin puppets.  And for all the creepiness in their appearance, they hadn't done anything but wildly wave their hands and try to stay out of his way.  He'd taken down a few of them before the doubts stayed his hand, and for the time being he was content to leave them alone as long as they continued to mind their own business.  He had said as much and there had been much enthusiastic nodding and hand-gesturing.  As he limped along the catacombs he had found more, all of them equally willing to do their very best not to bother him.

Sinclair didn't doubt they were some sort of unnaturalness, but he didn't see the need to go and mindlessly slaughter all of them just for being there.
He continued alertly down the passages, ignoring the insistent niggling in the back of his head that these were evil things he needed to exterminate before they amassed and destroyed him.  

He felt the ground vibrate politely through the soles of his boots, and had enough time to look down and wonder before the entirety of the catacombs shifted violently to the left, hurling him and everything else in the area violently against the walls.

The demons' bodies made a soft, dry thud on impact, peppered by what was probably the fracturing of a bone or two before falling to the ground in heaps.  Sinclair's own body was cushioned by enough healthy, living flesh to protect his bones, but the smack on his shoulder was enough to produce a harsh grunt of pain.  He struggled unto his knees, looking wildly around, and noticed the demons curling themselves up into balls, covering their heads, and seeming more or less calm about it.  

"What's going on?" He asked sharply, and a few looked up at him before the catacombs were stuck again, lurching forward at an impossible rate that smashed them all harder than ever into the wall.  The demons, who did not seem to feel pain, bumbled around against each other harmlessly, but the rush and shiver of the structure battered Sinclair, forceful enough to bring the taste of bile to his mouth.
There was a pause; he caught his breath and the catacombs jumped again, stronger and louder than before, there was a mad, rushing, ripping sound accompanying its flight, and all at once it smoothed out into a velvety calm, momentum tossing the inhabitants about with a last playful thrust, and of all the inexplicabilities, gravity failed them.

All at once they were airborne, drifting lazily off the ground in the grip of some unseen force.

"What is this!" Sinclair cried, waggling his limbs and sending himself into a slow spin in mid-air, feeling his hair and clothing lift weightlessly about him.  He didn't know what to do but flail about and shake his rosary, seeking whatever was causing this.

He snapped his head around to look accusingly at the demons, who were leaping off the walls and doing slow cartwheels in the antigravity, and then the world corrected itself, and everyone thunked to the floor.

Sinclair groaned and held still for a few moments before cautiously righting himself, but the catacombs were at peace again for the time being.  The demons seemed to realize they were afraid of him and ran off to the far corner.  Sinclair sighed, pushed himself upright, and walked towards the door he had been approaching before all this nonsense took place.

The door opened after some fiddling with the overcomplicated latch, and he pushed against it when it met resistance on the other side; some soft, heavy blockade.  With some effort he got it open enough to peer cautiously through.  He felt a trickle of anxiety at the sight.

The bodies of several dozen demons were discarded haphazardly in shallow piles thrown against the doorway.  But for the lackluster dimness in their eyes they were not so different from the living demons behind him- no gore colored the places they had come to rest- but as someone who had ended several of them personally not long before, he had no uncertainty that whatever lives had inhabited the constructs was gone.

Sinclair felt a twinge of regret for the destruction of these critters; the ones he had met at least seemed nice enough from across the room.  He stepped slowly out among the bodies, watching where he placed his feet.  What had killed them all?

Navigating the heaps, he crossed over one that was lying on its back, limbs splayed and head lolling, staring lifelessly towards the door.  He bent over it, feeling glad his mouth and nose were already covered; up close they really reeked. He observed a number of slashing stab wounds to the face and belly of it, wounds that were not unfamiliar…

Sinclair's mouth twisted as he lowered the silver blade of his knife to push a swatch of bandaging out of the way.  He compared the depth and style of the cut with his memories of ones he had inflicted with his own hand.  

There was no denying it.  The wounds were identical.

Sinclair looked sharply over his shoulder, suddenly realizing he hadn't been keeping an eye on the living.  He waited, listening, but they did not seem to left their place on the far side of the previous room.  His adrenaline was growing; he scoped out the corpses lying nearby and found the same rending, ending wounds as were present on the first.  

What hunted demons?
Well… he did, sort of.

There was no way to tell, furthermore, when this attack had occurred and who had been wielding the blade.  The dried flesh of the demons was so old on the living he doubted it would decay much after they had been killed, and there was no blood to dry.  It could have been minutes before he entered the area, or days ago.  

The sense that these were evil creatures warped- he could actually feel it happening- and became a powerful conviction that whatever had destroyed these demons was a truly wicked, sinister thing.  


Take-off hadn't been too bad; rougher than the ones she knew from home but it was a cargo ship, after all.  In fact the familiar feel of getting launched into space was, if anything, comforting to Flume.  When the engines sputtered hard enough to dislodge her from the door handle she landed agily on her feet a yard or two away, and kept her balance through the last surge, feeling her pulse gush excitably.  It had been nice until the gravity failed, and she was adrift in the air filled with corpses; even that had been alright until the artificial gravity came on and dropped them on top of her.

At first she panicked so violently she wasn't even aware of what she was doing, flailing against the weight above her.  After a few seconds of that she regained control of her higher thinking faculties and held perfectly still, holding her breath for as long as she could to stave off the choking scent.  She closed her eyes, fighting against the revulsion burning in her throat.  They were just bodies.  She had no excuse to be this upset.

This close, she was aware of the different origins of the mummifications.  Most has been fitted with a medium quality granular substance to fill in the atrophied places in their bodies, with medical grade tubing replacing the organs, and one had very expensive, high-quality stuffing, speaking of the finances of the Thelvets who had commissioned them, but several of the ones pressing against her were fitted with cheap, battered plastics and stuffed with what she was not convinced wasn't common sawdust.  Somehow knowing that the Thelvets of old could be so bent on securing ownership of their slaves that they would discard all pride at the expensive of the Geezles was worse than simply being smothered under these old bodies; lying in proximity to the physical manifestation of their disdain was too much.   Flume struggled and slowly managed to wriggle her way out of the heap without upsetting the corpses too much, holding her teeth tight together to suppress the feeling of angry sickness she was feeling.

Flume climbed out, teeth flashing in the light as she sucked in a deep breath, and with more speed than she needed tumbled down the pile and staggered across the floor, tripping over more unmoving mummies.  She gave into a last, powerful shudder, and turned to see that something new had come into the room, standing just before her.  She took her hands off the floor, standing straight, and it struck a vicious blow across her temple.

Flume yelped; the thin black shell protected her from real harm but it had been a powerful enough slash that for a moment she saw stars.  She was knocked back, instinctively throwing her arms up.  Another blow cut across her shoulder, and a powerful one smashed over her side.  She heard it biting into the carapace, felt the force of it, and then a horrific burning sensation seared across the cut.

Flume could hear herself screaming; it was a wretched, piercing sound as she collapsed, writhing under the biting, acidic pain. What was causing this? What the knife poisoned?  
Her attacker hesitated, watching her scrabble at her burning side, and raised its arm again.

"Wait, wait!" she cried out.  It waited.  "Stop!"
"You are a monster."  It wasn't a question.
Flume's fingers found the seam of the black plating over her side and tried to claw underneath it.  "You- uh- you're a monster slayer!"  She said, desperately.

It seemed to consider that and nodded.

"I was a monster slayer, too!"

Its eyes narrowed, in confusion or suspicion.  It was hard to tell with so much of its face covered up.

She cast around for what else to say, and in the meantime she felt the seams give on her carapace and she wrenched the broken plate off.  She threw it down on the ground between them and they stared in mute fascination as a greenish glop oozed out of the broken plating and dripped onto the floor, steaming and burning a hole through the metal.

"That- they told me to wear that," Flume said quickly.  After a pause she deftly found the seams in her armor over her head and shoulder, discarding the scratched pieces.  They were also 'bleeding,' though only on the surface.  Why would the Book set her up wearing something that bled hyper corrosive acid. Why.  "Listen, you- you're not from here, right? You got a- a page or- met someone, you're from somewhere else. I am, too! I'm not a- they only made me a monster."
I liked being able to throw back to Monsters and Monster-Slayer. I'm still not sure if I got Sinclair right, but in my earlier drafts he was gruff and aggressive to the point of being a jerk. I looked over his rounds and ref more and decided that really wasn't right, and a comment from Ariskari while in the tbos role play helped me get a better idea of how he'd probably treat all the weird critters in this round.

We're all monster slayers, after all.

:icontbos-oct:
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RamoranScout's avatar
I laughed at the hyper corrosive acid bit. Why indeed. Also, it could just be me, but this whole thing feels like a set up to get them to kill each other... :sherlock:

But why would anyone want to do that? Smarmadine would know.