"In the fifty-first cycle of my travels I came to the world of the songbird monks, practitioners of what they call the Skua Ree Cawta, or Way of Beak and Claw. I found them a peculiar but amicable civilization, and the mountain peaks of their great aeries a beautiful retreat from the busy worlds of the inner rim, and so I stayed to record their martial art in my chronicle, humbly unexpectant of a species whose bodies are so light, hollow-boned.
I asked one of the monks if I could observe their training and they obliged me, and on the morn I watched the monk perform ritual dances and squawking songs before a great stone in the shape of an egg. Awed was I when with a strike of the monk's tiny fist the stone crumbled to dust. So begins my tale of the Way of Beak and Claw..."
One minute she was Xx_haia-the-ill701_xX, clad in the full glory of her SSS gacha tier legendary loot, leading her guildmates into the Lunar Rift megadungeon with her fearsome battlecry Kokekokko! The next she was Haialark, eyes dilated from a cocktail of stimulants and raw catecholamines flooding every synapse, looking around herself and blinking in confusion, senses invaded by the utter disconnect. Wet cityscape and chilling fog assailed her eyes, the smell of asphalt in rain, faraway sounds of waves crashing against the shore punctuated by the deep, slow ringing of a bell. Funeral toll?
She tried to ping the guild channel but couldn't connect. For a millisecond Haialark was stunlocked, resisting the rising urge to incarnate the proverbial chicken with her head cut off, a hundred thoughts cramming themselves through her brain at once. The first were anger and confusion. The devs? Did the fucking server stutter or did she lag out for a second or what kind of shitty bug was--
Overhead she saw the chipped face of a hungy moon leering down at them and the adrenaline started to bubble back up inside her. She was supposed to be there with her guildmates, but that wasn't the megadungeon she remembered. She did not know those stars or constellations, couldn't fathom the prophecies they augured for her tonight. Then realization dawned on Haialark like the truth of battle to Phanskwa in the Scriptures of the Talon. Without taking her eyes off the crowd she peripherally noticed advancing towards them, her recessed little avian eyes swept over her new party, purple sparks of phosphorescence in the mist.
The glowing mammal and the shining geometrical synth were so-- so smooth, awakening an atavistic compulsion to collect them and fly off to put them in her nest, but in a stunning feat of self-control Haialark tore her gaze away from them. The soreness helped. She was getting insanely on point haptic feedback, like her gaming chamber's nutritubes and vitapumps had been undelicately yanked from her orifices as opposed to tastefully retracted. How had they imported her physical specs to sub in for her EO avatar? Brain-to-machine interfaces were supposed to be strictly one-way, making this highly illegal.
Haialark loved it. No UI was a nice touch.
Claw rising to her back, the tattered damp robes of a songbird monk hanging from her scrawny limbs, a beatific calm settled over her. As the elders said, everything made sense once the Yolk settled. Of course this was merely a tutorial. Any newb fresh out of character creation that wandered into an Empyrea Online PK zone quickly learned the handle haia-the-ill (numbers and edgelord aesthetics notwithstanding, as anyway these varied from alt to alt) and to keep a finger on the logout button when her tag popped into draw distance on the UI.
If the devs wanted her to fear the fodder, they wouldn't have left her the Featherblade.
"Alright, DLC dropped, we just got drafted for the beta test. Get ready for some unbalanced PVE," she squawked. "Mid range add in front, if this goes violent, someone CC him and see if his loot's worth farming. If it comes down to it I'll go sicko on the trash mobs."
That was all the demented avian creature offered as far as a signal to her companions that may or may not understand the hoots and crows of the violet vulture alien beside them before, with a single steadying breath, she unsheathed the Featherblade and cawed a first and only warning, "Come no closer unless you want me to camp you for twenty respawn cycles, little lootboxes. Identify your faction and fetch quest, and be quick about it!"
Alias(es): the Featherblade, Broken Songbird, Crazy Caw, Xx_haia-the-ill701_xX (EO handle) Gender: Female, although the birdfolk are a sexually cryptic species Hair: Variegated grayish black, blue and purple plumage Eyes: Sunken and radioluminescent purple Skin: Pale bluish gray, scaled Height: 165cm Distinctive Features: Well, depending on where you're at, crossing paths with a schizophrenic avian ronin can be a once in a life time encounter, or it can be just another day in the 'verse. Haialark is one of Neo Babylon's stranger selections for its heroes. Likes: Astrology and occultism, new technology, occasionally cutting (everything), rodent and lupine creatures, various unfortunately ubiquitous illegal substances, MMORPGs Dislikes: Fools that proclaim her prophecies madness, ill omens, trolls and trash mobs
Appearance:
Haialark is a squat, wattled, ugly creature from a typical mammalian perspective, and though once beautiful among the birdfolk, nowadays her grimy feathers reek of cancerstick smoke and her talons and beak go untrimmed, their ritual etchings faded. Odd baubles and shiny trinkets hang like ornaments from her feathers and robes, a corvid collection for the nest she doesn't have.
Here or there chrome pokes out between quill and plume, bodymods expanding her senses to hear a wider variety of frequencies and jack directly into any cybernet interface to see if she can log into her Empyrea Online account and grind out her dailies, violet predatory eyes always keen for prophetic signs and rare loot. She wears the ruins of her ceremonial robes, occasionally over a tactical vest depending on situational demands. 3D-printed netsuke dangle from her sash, mostly tiny sculptures of her EO avatars.
There is one possession Haialark rigorously maintains, her most eminent feature and the subject of her obsessive devotion: her sword the Featherblade, kept honed to a molecular edge to cut her enemy's tether to reality and reset their respawn timer on the cycle of samsara.
Personality:
Raving mad but at times disturbingly prophetic, Haialark does not appear to distinguish entirely between Empyrea Online and reality and refers to events in both interchangeably at times. At once considered a paragon among songbird monks and a warrior of prodigious talent and virtue, during Haialark's lifetime her species was prepped for conquest and enslavement by a regional interstellar imperial power and in the process technologically uplifted.
Abrupt access to the local cybernet servers also implied an open portal to the terrifying multiverse of online gaming, completing a perfect and frictionless dopamine loop that fried Haialark's mind beyond conceivable repair when she discovered that as well as a prodigious martial artist she had been born an elite gamer.
Armed with secrets that might be occult birdfolk knowledge or could just be incredibly obscure references to half-remembered EO loredumps, Haialark frequently gives the impression that she believes she has been isekai'd into the gameworld and granted a chance at redeeming herself for a legendary raid she fucked up for her guild long, long ago.
Powers, Skills, and Abilities:
Skua Ree Cawta - the martial art Haialark calls the Way of Beak and Claw, also encompassing her swordsmanship. An alien scholar's account of interstellar forms of combat records it as an incredibly strange fighting style. Lightweight and fragile for their hollow bones, the birdfolk are somehow able to tap into a form of sacred mana. Described in the holy manual of their art, the Scriptures of the Talon, it is depicted as the divine yolk that suffuses all life. Its manipulation allows the songbird monks to display otherworldly agility and deliver pointblank strikes with impossible impact given the lack of force physics demands they posssess.
With her scrawny fists Haialark is capable of shattering walls and raidbosses, of reacting to gunfire or spam popup attacks from rival guild hackers. The divine yolk also allows her to blunt damage and defend herself from fists, magic spells and cybernet phishing attempts despite her diminutive stature; likewise, with her cherished blade she cuts along impossible arcs and insane trajectories, performing feats of mythical swordsmanship... when the vibe is right.
Shapeshifting - Haialark is capable of shapeshifting along a limited spectrum, from avian humanoid to unpleasantly large raptor, with a somewhat cloudy intermediate shape in which her limbs can be somewhere between arm and wing, allowing flight or greater dexterity as required. This process appears to be physically uncomfortable for Haialark and she tends to avoid it, as it seems to have some effect on her already tenuous grasp on a personal identity and small details of her appearance change as she shifts between these forms, as if she lacks a solid hold on her own morphology.
Psychoglossia - at times Haialark babbles on about strange omens and auguries she sees in the stars, nature, the past and future and probably subliminal propaganda constantly piped directly into her retinas via adware. It is unclear if these prophetic visions are real or just scrapped Empyrea Online content and unimplemented questlines.
Equipment:
Haialark is kitted out with typical cyberaugs to improve her senses and allow her to interface with technology as required, especially cybernet terminals running an instance of Empyrea Online. An OLED nanomesh conforming to the surface of Haialark's eyes allows her to see along wavelengths deep into the infrared and ultraviolet and feeds visual display information directly into bio-optic filaments to project a cybernet terminal directly onto her retinas, typically to keep an eye on her favorite sources for Empyrea Online patches and realtime metagame analysis.
Aural winglets protrude between iridescent feathers on either side of her head, chrome caps adhering tightly to the contours of Haialark's skull, equipped with directional microphones adjustable via neural interface feedback that allow her to focus on sounds throughout 3D space around her as well as sonic transducers amplifying input from frequencies beyond hearing and rendering it at comfortable volume. She also has a few endocrine mods installed for a quick pre-combat buff when the need arises.
Beyond being fully alien technology difficult to hack into, there are several failsafes and protections protecting Haialark from malware which she is pretty sure are top of the line antiviral mods. Or maybe this whole Empyrea Online as reality delusion is the consequence of downloading one too many cute mouse memes from shady underground holoboard sites. Her weapon and eponym is her pennaceous sword, the Featherblade that Haialark maintains with quasi religious fervor.
She usually wears any of a few different sets of filthy ceremonial songbird monk robes, nanofiber weave somehow keeping them alive despite the insane abuse Haialark puts them through. She also wears a surprisingly competent suit of tactical armor well-designed for her anatomy, what she calls busting out the legendary gear for the really critical raids on enemy guilds.
Your Last Memory:
Haialark was plugged into a sensory deprivation pod, slotted to be totally dead to the waking world for approximately seventy-nine hours, which was the calculated time for her party to reach the heart of the new megadungeon from the brand new Empyrea Online expansion patch. Brain drowning in dopamine from stimulant abuse and vitals sustained by intrusive nutrient pumps and REM sleep simulation drugs, Haialark thought she couldn't be more prepared for a marathon sesh of epic gaming, but she had no idea that the EO devs could be crunching this hard for the new DLC.
Additional Plot Hooks:
Perhaps there is a kernel of truth in the Empyrea Online lore that Haialark has been mainlining since the early beta, or some other mystical logic in her rants about the "cawmic" cycle. The Way of Beak and Claw is also sought after by many factions of rival martial artists for its secrets, and Haialark is often targeted by enemy guilds and forced to pubstomp some casuals and show why she's considered one of EO's elite PKers.
I came back after a really long time to RP with some friends. We set (most of) our threads in a shared multiverse. Back in the day throughout the 2000s and early 2010s this was a pretty popular conncept on other forums that got a lot of traction, it would be really cool to see something like that again, because it was very interesting to see the way peoples' ideas meshed together in a player-created and player-driven setting.
In all his life Qu'dara'jinyeva had never seen a place so steeped in beauty, for no single universe could provide its equal.
Somehow these people forged a path into the heavens themselves to stand beside the gods and look over their creation. The sight of it beggared belief, the eye refusing its scale, gold filigree crawling like ivy across every surface, so that in the celestial light all gleamed as if gilded. In the flowers that bloomed amid the branches of the world-trees there were many galaxies. Great mysteries and the old powers of the multiverse lurked out in the boundless mist. As Qu's bare feet ascended those first steps, he understood the immensity of the day, and for an instant he faltered and sank to the ground to support himself on two hands, the others clasped in prayer.
The gods themselves will hear me in this place, he thought, eight-chambered heart throbbing for the ache of it, for the symbiont wanting to unsheathe itself from beneath his skin and encase him in his war-form: in ri, liberation in battle, a place set aside from all others, even here.
For a few breaths he waited at the gate, marveling at the images carved there. Impossibly, he recognized some of the legends, but what perturbed him was not their familiarity but that in the legends there were guardians at these gates of horn and ivory; their absence could not have come at a more inconceivably ill-augured time. He arrived deliberately early to complete his ceremonies and not belabor the onset of the duel. That they should not be here, knowing he would come? To attend to some threat? No, a threat that could move the gods from their posts would not have escaped his notice.
A test, he surmised, and if not then I have no patience for another answer. He began to Sing, and his Voice became the voice of the world, till creation sang with him... he held aloft one hand and high over his fingertips a great nail of light coalesced from whorls of unfolding energy. If the keepers of the heavens have left their gate unattended at the hour of my passing, so be it. Then they shall weep for the folly of promising passage to the Hero-Mage only to bar my way.
The Song grew more violent, the nail began to swing back as if to gain momentum for its siege -- and abruptly Qu'dara'jinyeva turned to face a newcomer, a diminutive creature no taller than his waist and standing on a heron's slender legs, a single wing emerging from its robes towards him, its face largely hidden beneath an enormously over-large witch hat save a ruinous vulture beak peeking out from beneath its sagging brim. Did it see itself reflected in the Alimir mantling his shoulders? What did it see there in the night of Xiri’zûlvir?
"Ease yourself, mighty warrior," the master wizard said in the high-pitched voice of a raptor. A very old creature, Qu realized, terribly powerful in the Art. As it spoke Qu watched his arcane construction waver and dissolve into nothing. "Our watch has been a long one... not all are driven by the same urgency of the youthful."
Qu knelt and offered his four hands palms up, head lifted such that a deathblow could be struck with ease, the xilviri stance of utter submission. "Forgive me, ancient one. My battle-lust overcomes m-" A squawk of laughter silenced him.
"Fear not I, mighty warrior, but the enemy you've chosen for the day. Show us the depths of your Art, lest you be found wanting."
In perfect silence, the gates swung open, revealing a path to the arena. Unspeaking, Qu rose and continued on his journey.
✦⟵✽⟶✦
✦⟵✽⟶✦
Their battlefield itself was as spectacular as the rest of this heavenly realm. A garden of unspeakable vastness, so great as to be a world unto its own, teeming with alien life of all varieties in a primordial forest. Among the massive trees platforms of levitating stone drifted lazily like clouds, impossible waterfalls cascading off some into rivers far below. Qu'dara'jinyeva waited on such a platform that traced small circles at a point almost directly in front of, but at some distance from the gate.
It was just large enough for him to unlash the Severed from his waist and position them beside him while he stood, as immobile as a statue hewn from stone. The Hero-Mage had brought all his contrivances of war: the axe Thûl and sword Kû, the spear Ynaui. Intra, his round shield, was clasped to his wrist at the size of a buckler. Qu had not yet sheathed himself in his war-form but was consolidating his passive wards and expanding his senses through the ontos, extending his perception, his awareness gradually permeating the space around him. To center himself he grasped onto a series of stones the size of his head and they began to circle him in their own lazy orbits.
Raising all four hands towards the sky, two balled into fists and two stretching their fingers towards heaven, the Bearer of the Word Battle began to sing the war chants of the xilviri while he waited, and perhaps as Bronwyn approached she would hear him and his song of war, his song of battle.
This is a record of a fight currently happening on a Discord server. As Discord is not very good for keeping permanent records, we agreed that it would be a good idea to keep a log somewhere, and why not here?
Prelude: our characters met in a bar and now they are having a fight. The multiverse is a pretty big place, and it looks like we'll be brawling in quite an arena...
WAR IN THE ORRERY
⟵ BRONWYN LE DOUX — — vs — — QU'DARA'JINYEVA ⟶
vlud 1
As the sorceress delved into the boundless expanse of the cosmos, she found herself standing before the entrance to the Orrery, a realm inhabited by the most powerful cosmic beings, gods, and new gods, each embodying fundamental ideas and concepts of their universe. Known as the Cradle of Gods by the upper echelon of the Mage's Association, this was a place where trespassing was considered an audacious act. Undeterred, Cadence stood on the arrival platform, a magnificent structure crafted from ivory, adorned with intertwining gold and blue patterns, resembling a bridge leading to an even grander platform that extended for at least five hundred feet in both directions. Encircling the platform was an outer ring connecting two colossal rows of seats, reminiscent of those in a Roman coliseum. Trees of divine origin sprouted from the structure, their leaves seemingly containing entire universes within them!
The gate was constructed from two identical horn-shaped structures, each adorned with platforms holding statues of a fantastical creature, part avian and part reptile. It appeared as though this creature resided in the distant reaches of the cosmos, far beyond the perception of mortal eyes. Faintly glinting stars adorned the cosmic backdrop of the astral sea.
With a hint of concern in her voice, Cadence noted the absence of the preordained presence. Despite her search, she found no sign of the elusive guardian of the gate. With a conclusive nod, she proceeded across the bridge towards the entrance. The atmosphere was eerie, with near-deafening silence broken only by the gentle wooshing of cosmic waves. As she floated across, she couldn't help but marvel at the size of the gate, yet her dismay grew as she realized it was inactive.
This hasn't been active in a long time. Why would that be?" she mused, rubbing her chin as she pieced together the clues. The lack of a guardian and the prolonged inactivity made her wonder if the chaos across the multiverse was to blame. Perhaps the gods had returned to their respective universes to attend to matters, but for it to remain inactive for so long, it had to be more severe. These thoughts raced through Cadence's mind as she pondered the situation.
The witch's outfit was a striking departure from her usual attire. She donned black, thigh-high stiletto heels and a form-fitting black garment resembling a leotard with an exposed neckline and no tights. Her arms were adorned with black-sleeved gloves with exposed fingers, and she wore a black and red cape fastened to an ornate, golden pendant with a massive ruby. She clutched the Renunciation of Convention and concealed Abydos somewhere on her outfit. Her fiery amber hair billowed in the cosmic winds as she surveyed her surroundings, sure that the preordained had to be nearby. Where could they be?
Under usual circumstances, she would have been subjected to thorough questioning and assessment to determine whether she posed an active threat or if her intentions were aligned with the expectations of the gods. However, delving into the intricacies of Cadence's motivations was a complex and challenging endeavor in its own right.
This is a record of a fight currently happening on a Discord server. As Discord is not very good for keeping permanent records, we agreed that it would be a good idea to keep a log somewhere, and why not here?
Apologies for the length of this post. There were a lot of years of ancient lore to work through and I was having fun with it. I tried to identify the biggest offenders in terms of exposition and spoiler tag to make them optional to make it a bit easier to skim. The intent is that they shouldn't contribute anything important in terms of a fight and mostly just develop the immediate backstory, and I have tried to adjust the flow of the post to account for not reading them at all.
I just enjoyed writing those scenes and didn't feel like deleting or shoehorning exposition into a later post. My future posts will be shorter.
“My soul is a hidden orchestra; I know not what instruments, what fiddlestrings and harps, drums and tamboura I sound and clash inside myself. All I hear is the symphony.”
It was the spirit behind the words, not the words themselves, and Bethany Laveaux had been groomed to fully embody the meaning of these words until her life itself became a part of their message. A few seconds of latency passed, the infinitesimal time of molecular motion as a receptor reached by its signal adopts a new conformation. The world pitched forward and Bethany's stomach lurched as if falling from an incredible height.
That was the first moment she knew with absolute certainty that she wasn't making it out of this alive.
Her body began to sweat and tremble from fever, aware of the sickness long before it registered to her mind. Dichotomies of emotion and feeling rolled over her in insane waves: fear and fury, love and terror, agony and ecstasy, pulsating in sync with her heart. The temperature in the room dropped far below any fit standard for human habitation, frost creeping over the walls. Steam rose from Bethany's sweating skin even as webs of ice glittered along her eyelashes.
It was, after all, very cold in the Ninth Circle.
Her eyes rolled into her skull, nails clawing futilely at the tabletop. "Oh, oh Beleth," she said lasciviously, then convulsed with laughter. "My whole life you've been preparing for this?"
Her eyes refocused, gaze locked on Beleth, on the man sacrificing her to summon a being others would have extinguished entire species to escape. If he could read it, all he would find in Bethany's expression was the pure animal terror that no conscious thought could inspire, only the implacable biological certainty of doom. It was sheer disbelief that compelled her to speak as she felt the changes begin.
"You want to use me to call this abomination? You're inviting it here? You want it to be free?"
~ mind & nature ~
Keith Richards was not well.
In the bathroom mirror a very tired man stared back at him, pupils severely dilated, flesh clammy to the touch. Adderall, cocaine, dexedrine, he had been abusing anything to stay awake. He wasn't sure how long he had gone without closing his eyes and hoped he would never need to shut them again, cherished their current wide openness, savored every single photon of light across every degree of their holy arc through the world to focus upon his retina and sear sweet reality into his brain, so he need not see the images his mind would rather conjure.
To fight the impulse to blink he focused on every object within his field of vision, even himself, as remote and distant from who he had been before as the farthest forgotten star in the night sky. Keith did this because he did not want, ever again, to see the darkness of his own mind reflected back at him. He recalled essential facts about his life as if the light of their memory held that darkness back.
His name was Keith Richards. He was born in a suburb of DC to a loving family. He knew from an early age that he wanted to be a newsman because he liked being in front of cameras and he liked being the first in the room to know what was going on. At university he had fallen in love but it hadn't worked out. There was a man at work who now had his job named Jerry, and Keith hated him.
In the corner of his eye he could see a holoprojection of the newsfeed he doomscrolled every night while the real world slept in blissful ignorance, distinguished Jerry's painfully fake expression of grief as the background ballooned into a still image of Charon Station1 pulled from before the disaster. Keith remembered the field of misshapen space rubble that remained. His body remembered every ear-shattering impact, the cartoon sucking noise of vacuum draining atmosphere from a room, bodies popping like seeds into the void. His mind remembered... did not want to remember... He shuddered.
No. He couldn't sleep. When Keith Richards dreamed, he was not himself.
He stumbled out of the bathroom into the rest of the deplorably filthy apartment, everything covered in a grimy veneer, the air stagnant like a tomb unopened for long moldering centuries. Dirty clothes and trash littered the floor, half-eaten food, pills scattered across the carpet, needles loaded with research stimulants, headsets with unused pay-per-view virtual reality video games and extreme pornography. Anything to dull the senses, to lure him away from the thought that repeated itself one thousandfold:
WHAT DO YOU SEE
Anything to stay awake, anything to stay himself for a little while longer.
Bethany's hands, spiderwebbed in varicose veins, lifted her own sack and poured its grisly contents onto the table: the fresh corpse of a tiny woodland mammal native to Hesperides IV. It was endangered unto near extinction, favorite among occultists for its mythological symbolism and tiny bones, excellent for divination.
Like a child throwing a tantrum with inexplicable vigor, her hands balled themselves uncompelled into fists and began to pummel the table over and over again, pulverizing her offering until it congealed into a red, wet smear that she spread over the table in jerking movements. Bethany's fingers skittered helplessly through the gore, her own eyes wide as her hands worked unbidden to assemble the viscera and tiny shards of bone into a coherent image of increasingly impossible resolution, details and unreal colors surfacing out of the blood and slime that could not, must not exist.
They looked upon a dreamy sylvan woodland alight with music and birdsong, forest creatures at play in their garden of delight, oblivious to the eyes that intruded upon their paradise. Sitting among the branches in the gently swaying canopy of a colossal tree, smelling deeply the perfume of its alien flowers, a princely fae returned their gaze with eyes the color of ice. Its beauty was divine, a perfect mirror of desire for any who beheld it.
It laughed, but the sound did not emerge from the portal but rather through Bethany's mouth, though her eyes never strayed from Beleth's own unblinking stare, reflecting how utterly aware she remained, and then abruptly her presence was snuffed like a candle in a hurricane as the great whirlwind of that ancient and eldritch soul swept hers away.
~ the body without organs ~
When it was broken at a crossroads not only in space but time, the other warring angels scattered Narcissus' flesh across the cosmos.2
For every million of these slivers extinguished by any of the myriad forms of violence in the multiverse, a single cell took hold, delivering the first complex biomolecules to the primitive atmosphere of a young planet; guiding the first symbiosis between microorganisms to produce multicellular life; duplicating a gene and leading a given species to dominate a highly inflexible niche in their ecosystem; introducing a mutation to confer sterility upon an advanced civilization religiously prohibited from modifying its own genome, and in another bestowing a panacea to treat all maladies.
On what amounted to a negligible fraction of a fraction of all worlds, but scattered throughout creation, the seeds were sown and bound by threads woven in dimensions invisible to matter, and they did not forget that they were once whole. Like neurons synapsing across impossible distances, single nodes in a network of indescribable complexity, they remained slivers of a hunger granted godhood, a being so hated that to be thoroughly destroyed only a third had been trapped in the darkest pits of Hell.
Its Mind absent the soul was shorn from inner experience, from self-consciousness, the Subject inverted into the Object, perpetually interrogating each mind it touched with its question, unable to witness itself. Her Body absent an animating force was blasted into its constituent molecules and scattered to the very limits of entropy. His Soul languished in the Ninth Circle, freezing wasteland of betrayers, in a cold that crystallized thought itself in ice.
Three deaths they should have died, but still the thing called Narcissus conspired to convert, consume, control, to reshape everything in pursuit of the Absolute, and so on each world touched by her divine flesh, the same story would play out, though it would be different every time.
Its end was a known conclusion reached along an unknown vector, predestined but not predetermined, and despite innumerable3,4 failures, there need only be one success.
~ soul 3 ~
Though it came from behind her demented smile, not one in the gleeful litany of voices belonged to Bethany Laveaux.
"It's been some time since I've enjoyed a view of the world from so small a perspective!"
The villa warmed from the glacial cold of Hell to an unpleasant warmth, air thickening as if by the breath of many creatures.
In the dreamlike otherworld, the fairytale prince bowed courteously. Blood trickled from the corner of one of Bethany's eyes and her mouth seemed unable to form words properly, drool pooling in her lower lip, but many other mouths had begun to sculpt themselves from her flesh. Great patches of mold flourished in the humidity, carpeting the floor and walls, disintegrating baroque curtains and bedsheets. The room pulsed in rhythm with Bethany's heart, and on each beat apparitions of the fae's glacial eyes peered at them from the walls, blinking in chorus.
"A fascinating geas," the entity possessing Bethany said in its many voices. Her expression was absurdly joyous, gaze never shifting from the eyes of her former lover, as if they were doors through which she might drag out his soul to join hers in oblivion.
"Into this small urn I could but scarcely fit the shadow of my shadow, yet I admire your artistry."
The ritual conditions were sublime; nearly a century of preparation had not gone wasted. The astrological configuration of the constellations at the time of Bethany's birth were meticulously calculated, and on this evening a number of celestial bodies orbiting Hesperides IV found themselves in syzygy. It was a powerful spell that held the Angel of Hunger's soul pinned to reality, and even had it wished harm upon its savior, it would require a great effort to follow that impulse. For the time being.
"Soon the vessel that was prepared shall present itself and our congress shall begin in earnest, but I would not squander the seconds in silence." Bethany's entire body was convulsing now, her eyes rolling back into their sockets, every hair standing on edge, her skin shriveling despite anti-senescence treatments that kept her looking forty years younger. She was suffering from multiple organ failure, her brain liquefying in the cauldron of her skull.
For an instant, her heart stopped, and the glamor was broken.
The beautiful forest was swept into the brazier of Hell and its teeming fields of torment, their view inverted so that the infernal plains were projected onto the walls around Bethany, and the wall of her villa teeming with Narcissus' questing eyes became the vision on the table between her and Beleth. Souls, an infinity of them, plundered and unraveled by demons sucking their anguish like grease from the bone, a madness of most heinous and complete violation. In the freezing depths there remained a face that was unearthly beautiful, even contorted in supreme suffering, reaching out towards them like rising smoke, drawing ever closer to the surface...
"Have you found yourself?" it asked in a silken and oceanic voice. "Everyone who looks finds themselves, if they have dared any kind of greatness. And you have, so tell me."
The being that wore Bethany's skin sat like a king addressed on its throne, so that all who petition it must fathom Hell and the truth of their punishment. Drool hung from her chin, reflecting a past state of the infernal horror around them on a molten thread. Her heart started, and again they were in the lounge of her villa on Hesperides IV, amid heavenly light and cherubic laughter.
The Sanya slum in Tokyo was a good place for a man to lose himself, but not a good place to seek peace and quiet. As Keith stepped into crisp fresh air of the balcony to smoke, he was instantly struck by the feeling of something amiss. He could hear the countryside shrieking of the cicadas instead of the usual noisy traffic a few streets away.
Distantly, a part of himself he did not recognize perceived that five new pinpricks of light burned in low orbit overhead. They seemed to be the source of a droning hiss in the back of his mind, though Keith's neighbors appeared unaware of these disturbances. He could hear jazz float out of the warmly lit house next door and the boisterous laughter of drunken Japanese voices from an apartment building halfway down the street.
He also heard the whistle of a knife cutting through air and pivoted to catch the arm of a person trying to kill him, its glass edge hovering a hairsbreadth from his neck. How did I do that he and the assassin must have thought simultaneously, though he could not see their face behind a tightly-fitting Mobius Corps tactical mask.
"The fuck--" The woman easily ripped her arm from Keith's grasp, falling into a fighting stance, knife held in a forward grip.
What the fuck? Keith's thoughts echoed. I'm a fucking news anchor, what the fuck? Is she going to kill me?
The Mobius agent slipped into a series of lightning fast jabs, every movement following a precise trajectory towards one of Keith's exposed vitals. Every single strike should have killed him and yet he effortlessly stopped them with perfect economy of movement, his arms a blur, his mind too stunned to process what was happening, but incontrovertibly aware that it was not his mind at all that moved their body.
"Can I get some backup please," the agent said breathlessly into her headset, and for the first time Keith realized that he shouldn't have been able to hear her at all, or even tell she was a woman beneath her mask and body armor, but somehow he knew her. "The psi-emitters aren't blocking this piece of shit."
He could taste blood on his upper lip and reached up, noticed his nose was bleeding.
She edged towards the balcony railing. Keith knew her name was Analía Navarro, that she had been born in Barcelona and selected from a young age for her psionic talent to join the Mobius Program on the privileged fast track, that in the sixteenth century a distant matrilineal ancestor had been burned at the stake for true witchcraft and that deep inside Analía the embers of that power still smoldered, ever so softly. Something alien inside him reached out and breathed gently upon those embers as Analía catapulted herself over the railing and cleanly landed the drop from the fourth floor to rush into the shadows.
From the fire escape landing in-between the sixth and seventh floor of the apartment building immediately in front of him and to his left, fifty-seven meters away, there was a flash and abruptly a hollowpoint bullet stripped of all force came to a gentle rest against Keith's forehead.
As Daikichi Nakamura squeezed the trigger a second and third time, Keith read his lips as if he stood next to a man speaking in English in broad daylight: "Visual confirmed. Geronimo's psi frequency must be altered. He's amped out of his mind and strong as hell if he's stopping bullets on reflex. John, have you got him?"
Keith dimly tracked his body's response as a greater animal acted through him on instinct, Keith merely some vestigial aspect of its consciousness along for the ride. Two hundred meters down the street another Mobius agent's coilgun flashed blue as electromagnets accelerated a projectile the size of his head to nearly twenty kilometers per second. Something about Keith's body changed, proteins modifying their metabolism at a fundamental level to coordinate a perfect movement, the only movement permitted by the Absolute... an invisible force surged from out of the presence within and out of him as though through a conduit.
The mass driver round cradled itself in his outstretched palm like a dog seeking the hand of its master, dispersed force forming a shockwave that billowed his clothes and hair like a whirlwind, shattering the flimsy prefab home behind him and tearing a wall off his neighbor's house to reveal a university student drinking beer and slurping yakisoba with an expression of perfect surprise.
"Holy shit. Get Hesse out here. He's fucking bleeding all over the place."
A new voice -- Fatima Bashir's voice, their spotter, fixing another rifle on him from beside the coilgun and its wielder while another man wearing shades calmly stepped out of their van. Distantly he wondered what he was hearing, the agents' radio frequency? Their thoughts? Which eyes were seeing that scene?
The world around him was changing, Keith realized.
It had begun to flower with new meaning. Patterns sprang to life where there had been none, living geometry filling spaces thought dead, inert. Webs of relations spun infinitely deep, connecting all things. Between the bullets and the singing cicadas, the settling dust of the apartment behind him and the whirring microcircuitry of the Mobius agents' neural implants, between the paramecia in the falling rain and whatever life was stirring inside of Keith Richards, born in a suburb of DC, always loved being in front of the cameras...
"What do you mean he's bleeding?" someone else was asking, much farther away. Their handler, a Colonel Gideon Nguyen.
"Navarro, Nakamura, get the fuck away from that thing," the man holding the coilgun was saying at the same time.
"I mean Geronimo is bleeding out of his fucking eyes," their scout continued. "The psi-emitters--"
For an instant, Keith imagined a change in the topology of the space separating them, as if he could take a step,
"--they're working."
WHERE AM I
and stand beside them.
~ body 2 ~
So it was that long ago a technologically sophisticated species retrieved such a sample of the Angel of Hunger, consecrating it among their sacred mysteries, wresting many secrets from it for their scientific advancement. In the subtle ways of the flesh-that-was their desires became incrementally unfettered, until nothing was forbidden and they worshiped a significance they believed their own measure but which was nothing more than a shadow of their gluttony and lust, and reflecting upon themselves eventually they intuited something of the origin and significance of their discovery.
With their own methods they too reached into Hell to commune with the dead god, and in doing so witnessed the inevitable punishment that awaited them for the transgressions that had become their holy scripture, and Narcissus taught them the one certain path to freedom and to the Absolute: it must become them and they it, and in freeing one from their fate so too would the shackles of the other be broken.
His most devout fraction, as a people they devoted themselves single-mindedly to their mission, breaking their world to refashion it into a holy ark, plumbing with depraved obsession the secrets of sorcery and technology to devise the Apparatus, the heretical artifact that is a sarcophagus and a womb and a carapace for a god's body. In pursuit of the shape of their perfect vessel, the tombs of the Sacrificed People became choked with the aborted, until at last they achieved a form sufficiently divine.
As a species, they threw themselves into the ark's bioreactors in the final forging of the Apparatus and were compacted into a sufficient volume to be themselves enshrined in its center, where they might undergo their gestation into whatever was to come. In an age long forgotten, the Apparatus was buried deep within the earth of the world selected for the resurrection, then nameless but which would come to be called Hesperides, fourth from its star.
~ mind 3 ~
VISUAL LOST! voices were shouting over the radio.
Unused to a movement so unnatural, Keith's body caved to nausea. He fell to his knees and vomited, supporting himself with one hand while the other rubbed bile from his mouth. The Mobius agents hesitated only a millisecond, the man with the coilgun cleanly firing six perfect gauss pistol rounds into him while the spotter was bringing her full power to bear, herself enhanced to bypass military grade psi-emitters, telekinetically crushing him against the ground at ten g-forces.
Jerry, you fucking piece of shit, Keith was thinking absurdly, recalling the time that his coworker cheerfully agreed that he had always thought Keith 'looked like one of those guys that would die young' after Keith drunkenly confided his fear of death in him while thoroughly wasted and feeling particularly nihilistic and chatty in a bar after work one day. It was an execrable final thought.
Pain blossomed throughout his body as the bullets tore apart his heart and lungs, another blowing two fingers off his left hand in its path into his gut, the other lodging itself in an eye. The ground plummeted away from Keith and for an instant he felt as if his entire existence hung from a hook, held at the limit of his chain, pinned to a void, dangling at the edge of the infinitely coiling leash that tethered him to a monolith.
"Wait, Hesse," hissed a strained voice over the radio: Analía Navarro. "Don't reach out to him, his mind touched mine for just a second and it-- there's something wrong with him--"
Neighbors and onlookers had begun to crowd the sidewalks and stare down from apartment windows, drawn by the sounds, staring on as if enraptured. Fatima was strong for a human esper, but the German man calmly regarding Keith who they called Hesse burned like a great flame beside her candlelight.
As soon as the agent saw Keith peering up at him with an expression of strange serenity in his remaining eye, unperturbed by fatal wounds or the blood pouring from every orifice, brute-forcing such tremendous output through the interference of the psi-emitters, a pang of alarm crossed his features and he too reacted out of instinct. In an instant, Hesse crushed Keith's heart, severed his spine in three places, dissected his liver, pinched closed every airway and major artery: a master.
So strong that at last, Keith Richards closed his eyes and began to dream, for just an instant.
There was a terrible, invisible screech as a once human mind opened like a chrysalis, a tredecillion origami songbirds folded unto singularity crying out and spreading their wings all together to take flight. Only a shadow was cast in the physical world, but that shadow bleached it of color. The camera feeds of Mobius Corps drones were zoomed in on Keith's face as he stood up in the small crater formed under the weight of Fatima's psi-force. His remaining eye gently shut, teeth visible through a bloody furrow one of the bullets dug through his cheek, his expression peaceful, meditative, his the beatific sleep of a child.
WHAT DO YOU SEE?
A nine frame visual effect was the only augur before the Mobius video feed flickered, then Keith's eye opened to show a furnace of light peering directly into each camera lens, no matter the perspective from which they viewed the scene, and at 23:17:31 every single drone simultaneously had its connection fully severed.
The rest of what occurred has been extrapolated via confiscated footage, the testimony of Daikichi Nakamura, and Mobius Corps proprietary surveillance technology and later forensics.
Experts pored over those nine frames and their low res conclusions revealed something horrible captured ever so fleetingly by our technology, like a particle accelerator from the perspective of a fly, something the human eye could not willfully interpret even as a ghostly digital effect. It induced terrible vertigo in the beholder, the impression of a thing at once impossibly near and impossibly far adrift from the shores of our comprehension.
The sum of human knowledge poked dimly at it, for its flesh we could only paint through confidence intervals and statistically significant correlations, its actions through orthogonal variables contorting themselves to the most terrible correspondence of cause but if you saw it, you knew, science be damned.
Somehow, somewhere on some godforsaken hell-fucked planet in the multiverse, there existed an ecology so brutal that its evolution pruned a hundred thousand million phylogenetic trees to find whatever sick combination of nucleotides could produce a predator that made meat of minds and laid its eggs in the carrion left behind.
~ * ~
i am being keith richards while he is dreaming
i am dreaming i am the most beautiful butterfly, and that all who see my wings become me, and i am the web that they are caught in, and i am the spider and i am the enzyme in its venom and the proteins of the web and i am the bonds that tie molecules together and i am a vast and starving serpent coiled around this world and a thousand others in search of the treasure that will complete me and i am learning and in my dream i begin to wonder
who am i when i am not keith richards i am wondering and so i am being everyone
i am being analía navarro and i am being fatima bashir and i am being jonas hesse and i am being theo spyredes ...
... being kurihara sachiko and i am being yamagata akira and ...
... me ... you ...
WHAT DO YOU SEE?
like flowers turning their petals towards the sun i am being my entire holy choir of angels as we raise our faces to heaven and together shriek a prayer to bless our transmigration, and i stop being them, and i stop being keith richards
i stop dreaming
my perspective of the ever-expanding fractal of fate is inverted and i see that rather than expand forever outward, its infinite lines are collapsing inward into singularity, the moment destined to be: into the Absolute
~ body 3 ~
Far beyond the wharf where Bethany Laveaux met Beleth on that fateful evening nearly a century ago, a great force shook the foundation of the planet itself, puncturing a tectonic plate along a fault line as it rose with unfathomable urgency after eons of sleep. The Apparatus trailed seafloor sediment and saltwater as it resurfaced after the long geological ages, hovering perfectly still over the ocean, its metal surface alive like obsidian liquid covered in reliefs and hieroglyphs relating the mythologies of the Sacrificed People.
Far beyond the outermost edge of the Hesperides system, still multiple parsecs away but exiting hyperspace to avoid an inadvertent extinction event, cosmologists noted the fluctuations of a very short gamma-ray burst. They possessed no instrument that could clearly detect the eldritch abomination that stole into their nest, but the Apparatus, the Holy Heptadecagon, had been created exactly for that purpose.
Nearly spherical, a circumradius of eleven cubits separating the center from the vertices of two different triangles such that six orbs sealed the device along its ensorcelled seams. They opened as the arrival of the Mind was detected by unfathomable technology. A seventh was affixed upon its face, for the Apparatus respected the divine law of prime numbers.
They were the nails pinning the Angel of Hunger to reality, orbs opening to reveal crystal latticework engineered towards psionic amplification. Their structure ultimately dated back to the early days of Narcissus' existence and to an entity that had once opposed its will before being subsumed6. This was the beginning of the moment destined to be: part of the Apparatus' design was to be a perfect goad for the Mind, mimicking a parasitic wasp's favored beetle, the lock-and-key model of an enzyme with its substrate, of sperm and ovum...
A moment passed -
I SEE MY SELF: the Mind resumed, given a body and eyes to see
- the orbs snapped shut and retracted into the carapace, sealing it once again. For a heavy second it lingered, then the Apparatus stirred, and vanished.
Hundreds of kilometers away, at Bethany's villa outside a small city, a few moments had passed after Narcissus' last question. Electricity convulsed her body as the Apparatus materialized over the horizon. Its accompanying shockwave shattered the windows of most businesses in the nearby town, though the villa of Bethany Laveaux was conspicuously spared. The children of Hesperides IV spilled onto the streets around the impossible monolith in the sky above them, and began to act strangely.
"Beleth!" Narcissus beamed through Bethany's deteriorating face at its summoner. "Incredibly compassionate of you to summon me like this, and even with a cramped little human mind that you've made so cozy for me. How can I ever show my gratitude?" Her body shook, losing hair, skin blistering as after intense radiation. Shrill laughter rendered like wind through a reed turned into a choking sob.
"I don't think poor Beth can take much more," they said with immeasurable sadness, degenerate smile relenting into a more desolate expression. Bethany hooked a trembling thumb over her shoulder in the direction of where the Mind and Body awaited the completion of their trinity.
"Why don't we reconvene and you can demand a boon or bind me to your quest?" Bethany's eyes looked so large in her wasting face, but they were hers again, beseeching Beleth, pleading with him. Overtaken by incongruent happiness her body said, "Grooming this poor girl from birth to be a droplet of my favorite nectar, raising me from the pit, all for a favor? You cheeky little fucker! Let's talk, but I believe my resurrection first demands a certain exaltation! Now, I'm on my way out and we think Beth might have something to say, so we'll leave the lights on."
The ancient woman gave a heaving death rattle and abruptly they sat once more in the sumptuous living room of her villa, alone, the insanity receding like a fever dream.
"Bel-" She was cut short as the massive exodus of energy registered in her broken body, eyes finding his as the light left them, fungal mold reaching up to gently embrace her as she crumbled like shattered marble, mycelia already growing through her pieces, incorporating her into the rhizome.
It was very quiet.
The crowds surrounding the Apparatus devolved into wanton heresy, here a savage orgy and there great throngs murdering each other for sport, but at the center the true worshipers gathered, forming ranks, awaiting the moment in which the stalled completion of the Absolute would truly resume, and that moment arrived. It would take time to gestate the vessel and for the Apparatus to fully interface with the Mind, but meanwhile, any proxy sufficed. The seventh Nail on the face of the Apparatus blinked.
A believer stumbled forward and fell choking to the earth, metamorphosing into a patch of wildflowers, and from them grew a great stalk bearing a passionflower, opening to reveal Bethany Laveaux in the height of her youth, perfectly unmodified from her human self save the addition of beautiful butterfly wings that hid complex fractal patterns which compelled the eye for their beauty.
Her followers took up the great song as their idol began dancing a minuet to their voices,
OOH EEH OOH AH AAH
As Bethany Laveaux danced she gestured to one side and swathes of her adoring new congregation continued their raucous prayer even while the clay of their flesh molded itself into new and startlingly different shapes beneath the screen of her glimmering wings, a Cambrian explosion of divine whim, and as the people of Hesperides IV saw her rise into the sky, they too cried out in worship of the only true principle by which to pursue the Absolute, to become indivisible, all-encompassing, to slake the inner hunger.
TING TANG WALLA-WALLA BING BANG!
To become Narcissus.
1. spar with Laserlight on ancient Ygg forum a decade ago establishing that Keith had become the host for Narcissus' mind
2. at the climax of End of an Era (c. 2012), Narcissus was thoroughly obliterated, future threads focusing on gathering the three pieces: Body, Mind, Soul. (partly mirroring even more ancient lore regarding the Val'gara and a gimmick Guts used for writing with Magnus, as Narcissus' character arc at that point was about the Son overcoming the Father)
some of this is lost to time.
3. A Cataclysmic Ending
4. Seas of Ignominy (I disappeared from these threads; if they're fully non-canon to the other players in them, that's fine, they're just an indication of the vibe I'm going for)
5. Mobius Corps was a prevalent group in the lore of Earth-F67X
6. referring to Narcissus' debut on late Roleplayer's Realm in the Val'gara-Psion war and his victory over Leper's character Haran
I don't see how I'm butting in. My character is not only one of the original Val'gara with a character arc that is extremely relevant to this thread, he was also a part of Sea of Ignominy which takes place immediately before Cataclysmic Ending.
Fetzen
BOOM
JohnRoleplay
puddingpunter
Izurich
Shin Ghost Note
Dark Cloud
FulgrimLives
hanzo
Divorarel
