ic Siren Song of The Void (IC)

[Gizmo]

For a split second Set looked as though he'd been slapped across the face but in the span of a blink the gosling had schooled his features back into an easy grin. "Selfless as ever, oh strong-willed spiritualist but I could never forgive myself should you be relegated to airborne amenities less than you have rightfully earned. And so needlessly! Sekhmet delights in jesting over the daily trials of mortal existence but obviously Heliopolis' finest need not rely on mundane conveyance for a mere hop, skip and jump across the earthly plane." He wagged a finger at the statuesque goddess with a bright chuckle.

 

Sekhmet for her part furrowed her brow. "Eh? Nay--"

 

"Right indeed, of Lady of Slaughter! There I go again about hashtag just god things, ha! Temperance can certainly tell you, Ms. Epstein, I am positively insufferable at times. We shall leave you to make your arrangements and rendezvous in Bedlam, aye? Adventure and failed city planning await!" Taking Sekhmet by the elbow he hurried them both out the shop's front door with a cheery wave.

 

His taller companion let herself be led away more out of bemused curiosity than anything else. "Liesmith, unless our previous leg-cramping, stomach-churning journeys have been an admittedly characteristically distasteful farce..."

 

"I know! I know! I'm texting Huang," Set muttered irritably, taking out his phone as soon as they were out of direct eyeliner of the storefront.

 

"Thy plan be to beseech thy consort to transport us by mystic means so thee may not loose face before a woman who once spurned thy advances?" Neither her flat tone nor her lidded stare suggested she was impressed.

 

"Mayhap I shan't phrase the situation thusly!"

[Amelia]

GM

 

Unfortunately for the heroes who had turned down a chartered plane and who didn't have a boyfriend who could teleport, there were no direct commercial flights between Freedom City and Bedlam City. Grimalkin and Temperance had to take connecting flights looping all the way down to Atlanta. They each spent about nine hours in the air, with three hours of layovers in between.

 

Set and Sekhmet arrived at Bedlam International Airport sooner than Grimalkin or Temperance, but not much sooner. Huang didn't take long to answer Set's text message, and both of Set's trips, from the bookstore to Huang's dorm and then from Huang's dorm to the airport, were instantaneous, but the time with Huang in between was not. Several hours waiting while Set and Huang enjoyed "quality time" together left Sekhmet in only slightly less foul of a mood than the hypothetical bus trip she'd been dreading.

 

While Set sat in the airport lounge and Grimalkin sat in a business class seat thirty-thousand feet in the air, they both had ample time to scroll through local news feeds (and, in Set's case, to eavesdrop on the conversations of other flyers). A couple of items stood out among the noise. An article in the Bedlam City Paper, the free alternatively weekly rag staffed entirely by freelancers and owned by an out-of-town corporation, claimed that human limbs and organs were being found in random dumpsters and trash cans all around the city. The Bedlam Informer, the conservative-leaning reputable newspaper staffed entirely by freelancers and owned by a different out-of-town corporation, wasn't running that story, and the Bedlam Police Department claimed it was a hoax. The Informer did publish a tiny blurb about some unusual seismic activity in the southern half of the city, which an editorial in the City Paper used as the springboard for a rant about fracking.

 

When Temperance's plane dipped below the clouds, she could see that the project coordinator at her engineering firm hadn't been exaggerating about Bedlam City's skyline. It wasn't "eclectic," just confused. The unfinished Gorman Tower she already knew they couldn't afford to knock down thrust defiantly but weakly into the air, like the bloody stump of a soldier who'd just stepped on a land mine and was using his last few moments of life to imagine making a rude gesture with the hand that was no longer attached to what remained of his arm.

 

The airport was no more impressive than the bus terminal Set and Sekhmet had sampled on their previous trip. The passengers had to walk off the jet directly onto the runway and across the runway to reach the terminal, which had no restaurants or convenience stores, just some dusty vending machines.

 

Once reunited, the quartet learned that no ride-sharing applications were available in Bedlam City, so they would have to get a taxi. They called Red Apple Cab first, since it was the first one listed in alphabetical order. After waiting an hour for their taxi to arrive, they gave up and called Yellow Cab instead. But when they quickly realized that the dispatcher's voice was the same for both companies, they gave up and waited for the first one. The driver who showed up in a Red Apple branded minivan another half-hour later was a young Somali immigrant who spoke very little English, mostly smiling and nodding in response to anything they said. He was visibly relieved when Set revealed that he could speak and understand the man's native tongue. The driver was polite and friendly during the whole trip, but as soon as everyone buckled their seat-belts, he pulled a Glock 9mm pistol out of the glove compartment, chambered a round, placed the pistol on his lap, and kept one hand on it during the entire trip.

 

The cab took the foursome on what they would've called "the scenic route," if there'd been any scenery worth mentioning. The area around the airport was a vast, chaotic suburban sprawl, consisting of odd clusters of one and two-story strip malls, warehouses, and apartment complexes, with a lot of nothing between them, barely connected with streets named after letters, numbers, and nothing else. Once the cab made it into the older eastern areas of the city, and especially when they crossed the bridge into the center of town, it became clear that the driver's knowledge of the city's layout ended a few miles past the airport. His cab didn't have a GPS unit, and his cell reception was random at best. He drove in circles, doubling back on himself several times, and it was an hour and a half before the trip finally came to a merciful end in front of Hawthorne Books & Curiosities, on the edge of where Hardwick Park faded into Downtown. The cab driver gave them the last of what seemed like it had been hundreds wide toothy smiles and waved as they stepped out, his jolly demeanor never having shown a single crack during the whole miserable odyssey.

 

It was just after 11PM, more than eighteen hours since they'd left Freedom City, when the heroes finally found themselves standing hungry and exhausted at Hawthorne's door. The sign on the two-story building claimed it was a store, but it had clearly been built as a residential townhouse and later converted to a commercial space. Most of the surrounding buildings were also businesses: bars, bodegas, smoke shops, and cheque-cashing pay-day loan-sharks. A smaller sign was taped to the front door of Hawthorne's, reading "CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE". The front windows were obscured by heavy drapes.

 

Edited November 30, 2018 by Grumblefloof

[trollthumper]

Eliza had been expecting a bombed-out craphole. She hadn't quite been expecting this bombed-out of a craphole.

 

It had started with seeing the tower extending into the sky as her plane descended. She was instantly reminded of that grand, stately bombed-out pyramid that seemed to eternally hang in the middle of Pyongyang. It was nowhere as tall, but it seemed to exude the same energy - a monument to greatness whose reach vastly outmatched its grasp, an attempt to add grandeur to the fallow soil it had sprouted from. And then there was the city itself. Temperance didn't like to pass judgment on cities - she knew all too well that the difference between "a vibrant community with some local misfortunes" and "a ghetto" could often lay in the local melanin count. But it seemed like, in most other cities, there would be some force sweeping in to try to pretend that they were "revitalizing" the community, finding the glorious and peeling away the unworthy (which, in a number of cases, involved the original residents).

 

There was none of that here. It was as if certain chunks of the populace had decided there was little worth saving. 

 

A part of her wanted to peer backstage, to see the animistic landscape and get a sense of how deep the rot went... but doing so would likely leave on some dark, obsessive jag that might end in her painting "REDRUM" on the walls. So, she focused her gaze on the mundane, taking in the surroundings and eventually settling on the apparently shuttered Hawthorne's.

 

"So. Who wants to knock?"

 

 

[Heritage]

Lynn did not enjoy commercial air travel; it was boring, claustrophobic and expensive. She missed her powers of flight and teleportation, which she had to sacrifice to help Gretchen escape from a black pit of despair over the summer, though admittedly neither would have helped her today. To pass the time, she started Googling the requirements for getting a pilot's license in the States and the costs for small aircraft, because she was not going through this BS again.

 

Yet somehow, as horrible as the series of flights to get to Bedlam were, the cab ride to the bookstore was even worse; it was clear it was a city without hope, like the worst parts of Detroit, East St. Louis and Gary, Indiana combined. Halfway though the ride, she mutely held up a conjured sign that read 'Please Kill Me', an apparently sincere request judging from her crestfallen expression.

 

At last, the four heroes found themselves in front of the building, irritable and tired at their final destination. Stretching to get a kink out of her back, the changeling then shrugged. 

 

"Okay, I'll give it a shot."

 

She strode foward and firmly rapped her knuckles on the door, her faerie ears straining to hear any sort of reaction from within.

[Amelia]

Mister Strix had been staking out the empty bookstore for two consecutive nights by the time the Freedom foursome arrived in Bedlam City. The heavy drapes covering every window completely blocked any view of the outside, so he was startled for a moment when he heard Grimalkin's knocking. His head jerked away from the open tome he'd been perusing, toward the front door. But he had no breath to suck in and no heartbeat to accelerate. Compared to that of a mortal's, his flesh experienced so few involuntary twitches or aches from maintaining the same position for long periods. Despite his surprise, the empty house remained as silent as a grave.

 

The way it reeks of blood in here, I figured someone would show up soon. But I figured on someone with a key. Didn't expect visitors.

 

He remained deathly quiet and still. Just wait. They'll go away, and they'll never know how lucky they were. Whoever they are, there's no book or trinket they could get in this dumpster that they can't get somewhere else. And what's upstairs isn't for casual gawkers.

 

Edited December 6, 2018 by Grumblefloof

[Gizmo]

Fingers laced behind his head, Set rocked idly back and forth on his heels until it became clear that no-one was coming to answer the knock. "Shall we stand about for another few hours, then?" he asked the three women with exaggerated cheer. "Nay?" The godling made a show of placing a thumb alongside his chin and audibly cracking his neck  then shaking out his hands from the wrists. When they stopped shaking he'd grown a set of vaguely avian talons at the end of each finger, black at the tips with a faint ombré to deep cardinal red.

 

The claws sunk into the brick of the townhouse-style building with satisfying ease and in moments Set had hauled himself up to a second storey window. Balancing there he spayed the fingers of one hand rested them against the glass, pushing carefully while rotating them in a perfect circle and etching a deep groove. He plucked the disk free, held delicately between his talons until he tossed it aside to shatter against the open lid of a dumpster in the adjacent alleyway. Reaching through the new opening Set flipped the interior latch and shoved the window open. Looking over his shoulder down to the street he sweetly called, "Coming?"

[Heritage]

"Here's hoping there's no silent alarm...," Lynn muttered to herself as she looked up and down the street for any witnesses. Seeing none, she quickly changed into Grimalkin, whom then faded from view as she approached the wall. Flicking out her ebon claws, she effortlessly scaled the wall. Once she got to the open window, she climbed in, returning to the world of the visible as she got her bearings inside, dreading what she might find.

[Amelia]

GM

 

The first thing that struck Freedom foursome as they pulled themselves up through the window was that it was colder inside the house than outside. And 11-o-clock on a fall night in Bedlam wasn't exactly warm.

 

Once they got inside, Grimalkin and Sekhmet both picked up on a few scents that were both, to put it mildly, unpleasant and out of place. The increasingly familiar mix of saltwater and saliva that greeted them at Silbermans was present here as well, though it was duller, more faint here than it had been there. They also both smelled blood, human or something similar, also faint, and a couple different types of mold or mildew, one significantly stronger than the other.

 

Temperance, meanwhile, felt a slight charge in the air, and smelled a faint hint of ozone, similar to the air after a lightning strike. There weren't any spirits here, nor had there been. But some sort of passage between dimensions had taken place, more than once, and it had left traces similar to those left by spirits who travel between their native worlds and this mortal plane. Something from another place had been coming and going, and the scars in the fabric of this universe from the holes they'd torn open to do it were nearby, still raw and tender.

 

The room they had climbed into was designed as a bedroom when this house had been built as a family residence, but it had long ago been converted into a study. The furniture was all solid oak, the color of fresh-roasted coffee beans. Half the room was dominated by an antique roll-top desk. Every inch of surface space on the desk was covered with old open books and hand-written notes. Bookshelves lined two of the walls, while a third was given over to a cork-board. Several newsprint clippings and photocopies of the like were pinned to the board. The articles came from both sides of the Atlantic, and ranged from just a few years ago to the early 1800s. Together, the books, clippings, and notes combined to paint a picture of how the occupant had been spending his time. He'd been making a detailed study of a volume of Scivias from the same series as the tome which had been stolen from the Silbermans vault, the same series as the book that had sold at auction. The same Latin morality plays written on the faded parchment taken from the Greek merchant's journal that had described his doomed voyage. The same faded ink embedded in those pages listed the same lyrics and musical notes for the same impossible songs the sirens had used to summon the leviathans who'd broken the Greek's mind.

 

There was an obvious deterioration in the quality of the penmanship of the notes over time, as the writing degenerated from flowery to frantic, and the notes grew steadily less coherent. Those trends continued as the author had abandoned pen and paper in favor of clawing snippets of text directly into the wall and the hardwood floor. A close inspection revealed tiny spots of blood and chunks of human fingernail embedded in some of the writing.

 

SING THE SONGS                     EYES             DON'T SING THE SONGS

HE SEES            THEY WANT TO BE SUNG            HIS EYES

BLEEDING EYES           HE WATCHES          TEN-THOUSAND EYES

HE RISES                           HE RISES                       HE RISES

Edited December 7, 2018 by Grumblefloof

[Amelia]

When the knocking stopped and the people outside walked away, Mister Strix relaxed. He'd have breathed a sigh of relief if he'd had any breath to hold. He tensed right back up again when he heard the glass shatter in the alley behind the house.

 

Not customers, then. Opportunists. Of course. This is Bedlam City, after all.

 

He crept up the stairs to the second floor, where he dissolved himself into a cloud of mist and slipped through the crack under the door to the study. None of the people climbing through the broken window spotted him as he coalesced back into solid undead flesh.

 

They don't look like hardened criminals, just young punks. I can just scare them. I don't have to hurt them.

 

"You broke into the wrong house, Children." Between the blinks of the foursome's eyes, a man in white appeared in the shadows on the far side of the study. An unsettling echo reverberated under his deep voice as he spoke. He had the darkest eyes any of them had ever seen, and his skin was so pale, it was difficult to tell where it ended and his cowl began. "There is nothing here worth stealing. Here, there is only death."

 

He grasped the lining of his massive cape with both hands and lifted it into the air, like the spread of a massive raptor's wings. He looked like a photo-negative version of the original Raven. "Leave, now, while you still can. While I still allow it."

 

Edited December 7, 2018 by Grumblefloof

[trollthumper]

None of this was good. 

 

There was the sense of a draft in the fabric of the world. Temperance had only encountered this feeling a few times. Once, when she and Sharl had fought against a strange city-parasite that seemed eager to impose itself on the spiritual landscape of Freedom. Another time, when dealing with cultists of a hideous fire entity that had infiltrated the Freedom FD. Dealing with the bureaucracy of spirits meant getting a sense of the machinery of the world, of everything having its place... which always resulted in an awful sensation when you lifted the hood, only to find a tumor growing on the engine.

 

Then there was the etching. She was perhaps a bit too used to the blood-stained ramblings of madmen, but this still made her feel a chill. And nothing made her feel a chill. She was trying to figure out what it might mean, racking her brain for mentions of a ten-thousand eyes monster, when the man in the suit appeared.

 

Finally. Something familiar. Somebody stepping up and thinking they were Billy Badass.

 

The room dropped several degrees quickly as water flowed from Temperance's Camelback, swiftly forming into a dance of shards of ice. "I don't know how they do things in Bedlam," she said, "but I did not come a thousand miles to try to avert some terrible malfeasance, just to end up getting lectured at by somebody who wears white after Labor Day. If you're a vigilante, perhaps we can talk as equals. If you're a cultist... you really chose the wrong time to speak up." 

[Heritage]

Grim felt sick to her stomach; this bore all the trappings of some antedeluvian elder gods sh##, of which she was not a fan. Clear signs of passion becoming obsession, as old dark magic tended to go.

 

And then the joker in white showed up to pull a jumpscare; it was hard to sneak up on a changeling, so when Grim jumpeed and clutched her chest, she was being completely sincere.

 

"Jesus f###ing Christ, why would you do something like that?!" Then she paused for a moment and squinted as she recalled an old teammate who once used a similar approach. "Wait a sec. Deathly palor, super-sneaky, voice from beyond the grave...are you a vampire? Because I've worked with them before, with to be honest, mixed results, though I try to keep an open mind." 

 

The fae extended a hand and smiled. "I'm Grimalkin, Mistress of Mystery; nice to meecha."

[Gizmo]

"Eyes eyes, blood blood, blah blah. Learn a new tune," Set groaned, rolling his storm grey eyes while leafing through the documents. "An entire ice cream parlour of deities and pantheons to which a mortal might devote themselves and some sack of diseased hippopotamus phalli ever chooses rum raisin."

 

The godling turned on his heel to find Grimalkin extending a hand to the posturing mystery man in white, flanked by Temperance surrounded in a glittering halo of razor ice shards and Sekhmet with her fists alight with the golden flames of the merciless sun and bared teeth as sharp as Temperance's ice. "Oh, we're doing a thing!" He took a dramatic pose with his fingers splayed, arcs of crimson lightning jumping from fingertip to fingertip, crackling and adding a whiff of ozone to the cornucopia of aromas in the study. "~Just five pals looking cool in a crazy man's bookstore, ooh~!" he singsonged, moving his electrified hands about in something that looked vaguely like a fandango.

[Amelia]

The man in white cocked his head slightly and blinked at the Freedom foursome, which drew their attention to the fact that it was the first time he'd done that since they first saw him. When he spoke again, his voice was still quite deep, but not as deep as it had been, and while it still had a slight reverberation beneath it, the effect wasn't as pronounced as before. "Well, then. Not thieves. Not vandals. Investigators, from out of town no less. That answers some questions, and raises new ones."

 

Quote

The room dropped several degrees quickly as water flowed from Temperance's Camelback, swiftly forming into a dance of shards of ice. "I don't know how they do things in Bedlam, but I did not come a thousand miles to try to avert some terrible malfeasance, just to end up getting lectured at by somebody who wears white after Labor Day. If you're a vigilante, perhaps we can talk as equals. If you're a cultist... you really chose the wrong time to speak up." 

 

"It's the first one. Put the knives away."

 

Quote

"Wait a sec. Deathly palor, super-sneaky, voice from beyond the grave...are you a vampire? Because I've worked with them before, with to be honest, mixed results, though I try to keep an open mind."

 

His eyes widened slightly. Is my true nature really so obvious that everyone in this city with even a passing knowledge of the paranormal can identify me on sight?!

 

"I don't know how forthcoming supernatural predators are where you're from, but if I were a vampire, would you really expect me to admit it?"

 

Quote

The fae extended a hand and smiled. "I'm Grimalkin, Mistress of Mystery; nice to meecha."

 

The man in white raised an eyebrow and stared at her extended hand for a few moments. Then, tentatively, he raised his own to take it. The man's skin was cold, like he'd been holding an ice pack, but dry. She could feel the cold even through his gloves. "The name I use to create a bogeyman in the minds of the local hoodlums is 'Mister Strix.' You can call me whatever you want."

 

Quote

The godling turned on his heel to find Grimalkin extending a hand to the posturing mystery man in white, flanked by Temperance surrounded in a glittering halo of razor ice shards and Sekhmet with her fists alight with the golden flames of the merciless sun and bared teeth as sharp as Temperance's ice.

 

When Sekhmet's fists lit up, Strix's eyes widened more than slightly. He flinched, and lifted his cape to cover his face. A literal tiger's growl rumbled from behind the cape. His voice deepened back to its original pitch and regained its former echo. "PUT. THAT. AWAY." His teeth grinded audibly for a few moments before regaining his composure. Then he slowly lowered the cape from his face, and his voice softened again. "This is an old building full of old books. One stray spark could turn the whole place into a crater." The deflection was obvious. The fire Sekhmet conjured up had either infuriated him, or scared him half to death, if not both.

 

Quote

"Oh, we're doing a thing!" Set took a dramatic pose with his fingers splayed, arcs of crimson lightning jumping from fingertip to fingertip, crackling and adding a whiff of ozone to the cornucopia of aromas in the study. "~Just five pals looking cool in a crazy man's bookstore, ooh~!" he singsonged, moving his electrified hands about in something that looked vaguely like a fandango.

 

The man in white gave Set a look that was almost, but not quite, a sneer. "Hilarious," he muttered flatly. "The body parts are barely making the news here, let alone out of town. Are human limbs showing up in random dumpsters in your city, too? Or is this 'Hawthorne' mixed up in something else?"

[Amelia]

GM

 

The second bedroom, across the hallway from the study where the vigilantes crossed paths, was a far more mundane affair. It had been converted into an office, with a couple of desks and filing cabinets, and a few boxes of books that probably hadn't been catalogued yet. The most striking feature was the complete lack of any computers, or electronic devices more complicated than a calculator. All of the business records were kept on paper. A quick examination showed that "Hawthorne Books and Curiosities" was a sole proprietorship owned by a "Lucien Hawthorne." The only employee listed in any tax documentation or paycheque ledgers going back at least two years was a "Dale King." The only listed address was a post office box, and even that seemed to have changed several times. The office also contained a half-size refrigerator, filled with spoiled food, reeking of mold. The decay of the food was far more advanced than it should have been given the condition of the rest of the house. The house appeared to have been abandoned for a period of days, while the food looked as though it had been sitting for weeks. This was one of the moldy smells that caught Grimalkin's and Sekhmet's attention when they first entered the house, but the second one remained distinct and faint. The only other room on the second floor was a lavatory.

 

A single staircase led down to the first floor. Most of the dividing walls between rooms had been knocked down, turning the entire first floor into a single chamber. Only a small powder room remained. The walls were lined with shelves, and the floor was filled with tables and more shelves, all overflowing with books and assorted paraphernalia associated with numerous neo-pagan spiritual practices. Every piece of merchandise had a paper price tag affixed to it. There didn't seem to be any system of organization a fellow bookstore owner like Grimalkin could figure out. There was no proper "counter," just another table dominated by the most ancient cash register most of the assembled vigilantes had ever seen, with a "CASH ONLY" sign taped to the outward facing side. None of the books or other items appeared exceptionally old or high-quality to those with the experience to know such things.

 

There was a sort of crawlspace beneath the stairs on the first floor, filled with more dusty boxes of books stacked all the way to its ceiling. Grimalkin spotted some odd dust patterns on the floor which seemed to indicate that the boxes had been moved recently. Once the vigilantes hefted the boxes out into the main room and cleared the crawlspace, they revealed a trap door set into the floor. Set and Sekhmet both spotted a brown stain in the wood on the trap door. A quick sniff confirmed it was blood. When they looked up, they found the source. At the highest point inside the crawlspace, staring straight down at the trap door, half-shrouded in darkness, a mound of what appeared to be moss was affixed to the ceiling. Resting in that moss was a cluster of eyeballs. The eyes appeared to be human, rimmed in red as though tired or irritated. The eyes moved, glancing back and forth between all of the people below them. A couple of fresh drops of blood fell from the eyes onto the same spot on the trap door.

 

Opening the trap door revealed another flight of stairs leading down into a basement area. The second they lifted the door open, Grimalkin, Sekhmet, and Strix were all assaulted with the stench which had only teased them before. Saltwater. Saliva. Mildew. And even more human blood. Temperance, meanwhile, felt the skin of the universe flinch when the door was opened, as though the act of opening it had found the most tender spot under a ruptured blister, and poked it.

Edited December 17, 2018 by Grumblefloof

[Heritage]

In response to Mr. Strix' comment, the changeling grimaced slightly; when she spoke, it was with a wisdom and gravity that didn't quite match her sprite-like appearance. "My apologies; rightly or wrongly, it was rude and inconsiderate of me to make assumptions." When he spoke of Hawthorne, Grim shook her head. "No murders back in Freedom, but theft and property damage in the quest for dark power. Whoever or whatever this Hawthorne is, he's gone to great lengths to collect the volumes he desires, though I'm not sure if the man I saw back home is the original."

[trollthumper]

Vampires. Of course. 

 

They were... a part of the world, Temperance reckoned. As much as the vampire bat, or spirits of death, or... The more she went down this path, the weirder it would get. And, as somebody whose very existence depended on a water elemental deciding to impregnate a human, she knew she wasn't really one to talk about what was and was not a violation of the natural order.

 

"Very well," she said, slowly slinking the ice and water back into their pack. "We haven't had any dismemberments in our city - or if there are, they're being kept quite under the radar. Though, the number of dismemberments might explain that 'ten thousand eyes' detail. I just dread finding out what they've been planted in."

 

As they moved further into the building, Temperance felt that itch at the back of her head more and more. The first thing to set it off was the mold, but it was more than that. It was the seeming lack of spirits of decay and fungus, who should have been running roughshod over a fetid feast like this. But all that seemed to be answered when they found the hideous growth in the midst of the mold, the growth that stared back at them.

 

"...right. Really regretting that joke now." Temperance looked to the group. "Somewhere in this building is a grand insult to the silent machinery of the universe. I say we go find it and kick its teeth in."

[Gizmo]

"Blessed Ra!" Sekhmet exclaimed as she looked up to see the horrific, blinking mass. The oath turned into a leonine roar midway as her head shimmered into its fully feline appearance, fangs bared threateningly.

 

The scowl Set wore went well beyond his usual mocking distain or eye-rolling annoyance. Temperance had seen that look only very rarely, in moments when she was reminded that the flamboyant troublemaker was a being who might consider 'smiting' a measured response. "You'll wish to cover your eyes now, vampire," he warned flatly, not taking his eyes from the ceiling.

 

Sekhmet had already torn a baluster free from the railing beside the stairs above the crawlspace with a splintering crack and with her hands ablaze with solar flame, fashioned a sanctified torch. "By the All-Seeing I shall not suffer such depraved abomination!" The sizzle of burning moss and meat followed as the goddess proved her words.

[Amelia]

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"My apologies; rightly or wrongly, it was rude and inconsiderate of me to make assumptions."

 

Mister Strix raised a thick, dark eyebrow at the chipper lady in the black and blue jumpsuit. "You're the first vigilante I ever met who worried about courtesy. I tried to scare you off, you assumed I was a vampire, so let's just call it 'even' and move on. Besides, you're hardly the first person to make that assumption."

 

Because it's true.

 

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When he spoke of Hawthorne, Grimalkin shook her head. "No murders back in Freedom, but theft and property damage in the quest for dark power. Whoever or whatever this Hawthorne is, he's gone to great lengths to collect the volumes he desires, though I'm not sure if the man I saw back home is the original."

 

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"Very well," Temperance said, slowly slinking the ice and water back into their pack. "We haven't had any dismemberments in our city - or if there are, they're being kept quite under the radar. Though, the number of dismemberments might explain that 'ten thousand eyes' detail. I just dread finding out what they've been planted in."

 

"I don't know anything about the book he was studying or the eyes he was ranting about. And no one's been in here for at least the last two nights. Every time I found another body part, I followed the trail..."

 

Tread carefully.

 

But how else do I explain it?

 

Maybe some way that doesn't make me sound like a vampire.

 

No. If I dance around it, I'll just raise more questions.

 

"...The smell of the blood. But it always ended abruptly, like whoever had left the trail just vanished. Until a couple nights ago, when one of those trails led here. I've been staking out the store ever since."

 

As the assembled vigilantes moved through the store, searching for clues, it became obvious to everyone that the man in white was doing everything in his power to remain constantly aware of Sekhmet's location, but also to avoid looking directly at her. Whenever she turned to face his general direction, he would grimace and stop moving entirely, sometimes mid-step, and stagger backward, as if he'd been struck. The vigilantes could see his black veins bulge beneath the white fabric of his costume whenever he found himself facing her, despite his best efforts.

 

Strix's eyes narrowed when Grimalkin spotted the dust patterns in the crawlspace. "Two nights in this dump, and it didn't occur to me to move some boxes. Some detective." He tried to make up for his lack of observation by helping to clear the way. Each box of books weighed fifty pounds or more, but the man in white casually picked them up and tossed them aside like they were empty cardboard coffee cups.

 

Quote

But all that seemed to be answered when they found the hideous growth in the midst of the mold, the growth that stared back at them.

"...right. Really regretting that joke now." Temperance looked to the group. "Somewhere in this building is a grand insult to the silent machinery of the universe. I say we go find it and kick its teeth in."

 

Quote

"Blessed Ra!" Sekhmet exclaimed as she looked up to see the horrific, blinking mass. The oath turned into a leonine roar midway as her head shimmered into its fully feline appearance, fangs bared threateningly.

The scowl Set wore went well beyond his usual mocking disdain or eye-rolling annoyance. "You'll wish to cover your eyes now, vampire," he warned flatly, not taking his eyes from the ceiling.

 

Strix cringed.

It really is that obvious.

 

Quote

Sekhmet had already torn a baluster free from the railing beside the stairs above the crawlspace with a splintering crack and with her hands ablaze with solar flame, fashioned a sanctified torch. "By the All-Seeing I shall not suffer such depraved abomination!" The sizzle of burning moss and meat followed as the goddess proved her words.

 

When Sekhmet conjured more flame, Strix turned away from the crawlspace, groaning and hissing. Once the fires died down, he crept back inside. The man in white knelt down beside the brown stain Sekhmet had found, and sniffed at it. "Definitely blood." He extended his index finger toward it. The reason he chose fingerless gloves became obvious when a razor-sharp talon burst forth from his fingertip, almost as long as the digit which had deployed it. He scraped at the wood, pinched one of the shavings between his fingers, and brought it to his tongue. He grimaced and quickly spit it out. Then he gagged, clutched his forehead with one hand, and stumbled for a few moments. "Not...not human."

 

He leaned against the nearest wall, steadying himself with both hands. "It killed them. Whatever It is, It saw us, and It killed them."

 

He pinched the bridge of his nose between his fingers and rested his forehead against the wall, still holding himself up against that same wall with his other hand. "When I found the body parts, I...it's hard to describe what I did. What I can do. I 'looked' into their blood. Your thoughts, your feelings, they leave echoes in your blood. You know the legend that a dead person's eyes capture the last thing they saw before they died, like a photograph? If you know how to look, a person's blood can tell you a lot more than that. It can tell you everything. I looked into their blood, and I saw them die. That's all I saw. They were cut open, and they were torn apart. So much pain, so much terror, I couldn't see anything else. But That..." He pointed down at the bloodstain. "That...Thing showed me a little more. It tore them apart, from the inside. That's how It's coming 'Here,' from 'There.' Don't ask me where 'There' is; I don't know. I smell the ocean. I hear...singing. I see darkness. I see eyes in the dark, looking back at me. Back at us, right now. But that's it. Wherever 'There' is, I just know it isn't 'Here.' But someone over 'Here' is cutting people open, and using them as...tunnels. And these Things...this Thing...It's coming through. It's Them. They're It. And It's coming Here, a piece at a time."

 

Edited January 3, 2019 by Grumblefloof

[Amelia]

GM

 

The basement was a square roughly fourty feet on a side. It had been used for storage of excess stock. Metal filing cabinets of various sizes and boxes of books lined the walls. But someone had flooded the basement floor and drenched the walls by bludgeoning open some exposed pipes. The assembled vigilantes waded through water halfway up their shins, tinted pink and smelling of the sea. The standing water had consumed the books and papers. Black mold had climbed up the piles and the walls in streaks, reaching far above the water line. The cabinets were rusted. Even those without enhanced olfactory senses were now overwhelmed with the combined stench of mildew, salt, and blood. But those so blessed enjoyed the addition of copious amounts of saliva, diluted but still distinctive.

 

The assembled vigilantes barely had time for a cursory examination of their surroundings before the center of the room exploded. Everyone was splashed with spatters of blood and spit diluted in stagnant saltwater. A creature rose from the depths, despite those "depths" being no more than a foot to a foot and a half before hitting solid ground. Those who looked at the creature, fighting the sudden urge to look away, to run away, saw an oblong mass of flesh surrounded by a dozen tentacles, taking up half the basement floor with its bulk. The scarlet skin had a texture and a glistening coating of saliva which made it appear as though a human tongue had been inflated and stretched out to form something between a starfish and an octopus. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of eyes of various sizes, ranging from a pea to a baseball, lined the body and the tentacles alike, in roughly the same pattern as the spots on a leopard. The creature pushed itself up, exposing its underside, to reveal not so much a "mouth" as a sphincter, which stretched open to reveal countless rows of razor-sharp teeth, like the mouth of a lamprey or a leech. The mouth was surrounded by several concentric circles of even more eyes of seemingly random sizes.

 

When the creature's mouth stretched open, it unleashed an unending cacophony of shrieking and bass vibrations. Those who listened too long also heard...singing. "He watches...He sees...sing for Him..."

 

Several of the creature's tentacles lashed out at Set, wrapping around the diminutive deity, squeezing the breath from their throat and dragging the god across the floor, through the tainted water and into its great fanged maw. For Set, the tactile sensation confirmed the visual suspicion: The tentacles felt like great slobbering tongues. On every spot where the tentacles touched Set's divine flesh, the god felt the sting of several needles, and clusters of new eyeballs instantly sprouted, the god's skin parting as eyelids to expose them. As soon as the new eyes opened, Set could see through them, as through Set's "real" eyes, and any touch to the new eyes felt the same to Set as the same touch to the old ones. The dozens of different perspectives all invaded Set's field of view simultaneously, as translucent overlays over one another. Bile churned up in Set's throat. Set's stomach clenched. The eyes growing from Set's flesh moved of their own accord, guided by some other force, some other will. Set watched from a hundred different angles as the creature's sucking tube of teeth clenched down onto Set's torso and began shredding their flesh. The tentacle wrapped around Set's throat crushed any screams before they could leave the god's throat.

 

Edited January 7, 2019 by Grumblefloof

[Amelia]

GM

 

During any given second, roughly one out of every ten to twenty of the hundreds (thousands?) of eyes lining the creature's body weeped blood into the standing water flooding the basement floor.

 

The shrieking continued to echo back and forth between the basement walls. Grimalkin, Set, and Temperance could all hear the song between the sounds.

 

Sing His Song                       Become One with Him              All voices, singing as One

 

All eyes are His eyes            With His Kiss, you will See          With His Song, you will Hear

 

After sinking its teeth into Set, the creature directed its attention, and its many eyes, at less divine fare. A lone tentacle remained wrapped around the god's limp, bleeding body, while others shot out at the faerie and the vampire. Mister Strix was caught in the monster's slimy grasp. The creature pulled Strix up under its maw and clamped down with its dozens of razor-sharp teeth. Its horrendous bite broke his ribcage in half, then tore it out, along with most of his internal organs, and the skin and muscle which had formerly shielded them. Strix fell limp in the monster's grip, and the monster dropped what was left of him to vanish face-down in the fetid pink water. Its fanged sphincter squeezed shut momentarily, before forcefully spitting out the chunk of the vampire's flesh it had torn free, leaving it, too, to disappear into the water. The shrieking became more shrill for a few seconds. The strangest part of this disgusting spectacle was that Strix's grievous wound did not bleed. Not a single drop of blood accompanied his flesh, bones, or organs as they were ripped from his body. The organs themselves were shriveled and blackened. What was less obvious was that, unlike with Set, none of the few spots of bare flesh which made contact with the creature's tentacles sprouted any new eyeballs.

 

Edited January 9, 2019 by Grumblefloof

[Amelia]

GM

 

Grimalkin was more fortunate than Mister Strix. She evaded the creature's lashing tentacles with the grace of a gymnast and the speed of a fencer. Her terror at the sight of the monster grappled with the bloodlust stirred by its song, and the latter won out. Glamour, the pure energy of the fae, coalesced around her fingers and solidified into razor-sharp claws, which she used to slice into the monster's flesh. The creature howled in fury and pain. She cut deep, but no bones were exposed, only muscle. Her fingers dripped with blood and vitreous gel from many ruptured eyeballs. She looked down at them just in time to watch tiny eyes sprout from the skin on her hands, and to simultaneously look through those new eyes back up at her own face. The rush of so many visual perspectives all hitting her brain at once was too much. She doubled over and vomited into the already blood-soaked stagnant water the vigilantes had all been wading through.

Edited January 11, 2019 by Grumblefloof

[trollthumper]

Just like a part of Antarctica falling into the sea, Temperance's mind broke cleanly.

 

There was a part of her that recognized that she had seen worse. That she had dived into the guts of the ephemeral, seen horrors trapped within groves of life, seen cities that hungered to replace normal civilization and feast on those unaware within its buildings and corridors, seen things of decay and rot and fears of insanity.

 

All that logic, however, was stuck behind a wall of ice, looking outwards at everything that was being driven to scream at the sight of this grand atrocity. She turned to run, only to find her path blocked by what she hoped to Christ was more couch than organism. And in that moment, realizing the sheer absurdity of it all, everything went cold and clear again.

 

She couldn't look on it. She knew that much. In these cramped quarters, throwing ice blindly would just make things worse. But it seemed the best option of a lot of bad ones. She drew deep within herself. Crafting ice of this density would normally be an issue... but this basement was practically a swamp already. While she didn't want to think about what the ice would look like, it would at least put some distance between them and the horror. 

 

 

[Gizmo]

In the years that Sekhmet had been cosigned to the mortal plane she had made some measure of peace with a role that ranged from champion to nursemaid depending on the day. She had adapted to the laws of the land and shown mercy to the fragile things she found cause to battle and tempered her bloodlust with dignity and poise as befit a goddess walking among those in her charge.

 

But here before her was a true enemy of Heliopolis, of all creation and that restraint turned to mist like water splashed against a fired forge. This mockery of ht thought to cow her with its twisted appearance? She was the Mistress of Dread and it mattered not what form was taken by her prey. It thought to addle her mind with screeching out of tune with the song of reality? She was the Lady of Slaughter and singleminded in her purpose. It had the audacity to lay its putrid flesh upon her charge, to do genuine harm to one who, though she would never admit it aloud, was her friend and companion? She was She Before Whom Evil Trembles and She Who Mauls and she was no longer holding back.

 

Sekhmet was already charging forward as Temperance's wall of ice formed in front of her but the warrior goddess did not slow. Her makeshift club had become a column of pure golden flame and she crashed through the barrier at superhuman speed with a great leap. Shards of ice exploded outward, frost before the full fury of the sun, reflecting and refracting the light that poured off of her straining muscle and bared fangs. For a split second she seemed suspended in the air over the writhing mass of eyes and flaps and teeth. Then her weapon struck at the centre of its mass, the very definition of divine judgement as a leonine roar shook the walls of the basements and sent ripples through the standing water.

[Amelia]

GM

 

The deep spawn of He Who Watches Through Ten-Thousand Bleeding Eyes howled and screeched as Sekhmet's flaming makeshift spear impaled its bulbous flesh. Dozens of its eyes were burst like pustules by the impact and the heat. The vitreous fluid boiled and charred, leaving black streaks. Its tentacles flailed in its death throes, lashing out at the ice wall surrounding it, finally shattering it as the monster slumped into the water with a splash and died. Its eyes remained open, but they stopped moving. Trickles of blood still leaked from them into the water below.

 

The purging of Grimalkin's guts seemed to clear her head as well. Once her stomach ran out of anything remotely solid to vomit up, she staggered back to the basement stairs and calmly sat down, alternately staring at the new eyes growing from her hands and then shuddering and looking away.

 

Mister Strix's corpse remained completely submerged in the fetid pink water still flooding the basement floor.

 

[trollthumper]

Temperance felt the last fleeting tendrils of madness detaching themselves from her brain. It was unpleasantly like feeling an octopus's suckers detach from one's hands. 

 

There was still that feeling that things weren't right. Given all the defilement of spiritual concepts that had happened within the basement, that feeling would not go away for some time. There was also the matter of the smell, which was both less unsettling and more aggressively offensive at the same time. But for now, the great, necrotic sore on the face of reality was gone, and she could breathe a little easier.

 

Entirely through her mouth, of course.

 

"Well," she said. "That... was singularly horrifying. And yet, that thing had somebody higher up the hierarchy. It was calling to 'Him.' So now we need to climb that ladder, greased and fetid as it may be." 

 

Her boot touched the still limp Mister Strix, and quickly withdrew. "Is he... I mean, he was from the start, but I thought dead vampires usually decomposed rapidly? Or has media been lying to me again?"