Culluket

Job, Nevada (Supernatural Western/Mystery)

@Culluket So I didn't think this would happen so quickly but If you want you actually have the oppertunity to turn over a card which isn't currently in anyone's hand. Fully up to you though

@Themerlinhawk

Hell yes, of course I'm going to do it. Flip all cards. Roll all bones.

Job, Nevada (Supernatural Western/Mystery)

The skies were clear and the air was warm, and it was a miserable bloody wretched day.

Cullen Smith slumped morosely through the brightening streets of town, squinting. Someone’s wife or daughter or parasol-twirling step-sister called out a Good Day to him, and he mumbled something that might have been a distracted “You too.” It was early for most of these people, but for him? ...He couldn't even tell anymore. Digging and hammering and tending by day, and then God only knows what come sundown. Three years of turbulent midnights. And last night had been a rough one. Maybe even worth talking to Marks about. Almost.

Lost in thought, he barely noticed that he’d arrived at Jackson’s.

Well. Time to get this miserable bloody errand over with.

He put one foot on the lowest step and then stopped dead at the foot of the porch as the door swung open and he found himself right in the path of the Deputy Sheriff. Smith quickly turned his back, leaning against the post and fumbling in his pockets for paper and tobacco, pointedly scanning the street and the horizon; mentally reminding himself to finally get a proper cowboy hat so he could lower it forward over his eyes and give both of them a thin excuse to pretend he was somebody else.

Carter was a good man, at least. Probably.

Town like this, who even knew?

---

He stepped into the Jackson’s store, letting his eyes adjust to the merciful shade.

“Jackson.” he murmured, making eye contact with a large barrel of tacks.

The storekeeper nodded, warily.

“Smith.”

And lo, the formalities were over.

“...Yeah. So. Need a box of nails. Matches... “

He dropped a cracked shovel-head onto the countertop with a thump, the dark metal smeared with rust.

“...Repair job on that.”

“Hnh. I’ll be horsewhipped.” The shopkeep half-lifted the broken iron blade, examining the crack. “You hit granite down the cemetery..?”

---

He was panting, skin slick with cold sweat. Both men just stood there, gulping down night air. The thing between them groped nervelessly for the iron lodged in its skull and then lay still, silent and unmoving in the darkness.

“...Nice work, Scrooge.” rasped the gravedigger at last. The accountant swallowed, drily.

“Thank you sir.”

Smith gripped the haft of the shovel and yanked, lifting the ruined blade. He turned it in his hands, blood glistening in the moonlight, before tossing it back to the ground, nodding toward it.

“...Still coming out of your pay, though.”

---

Cullen cleared his throat. “...Scrooge did it. Also goin' to need two more boxes of bullets,” He patted the Smith and Wesson model 3 six-shooter stuffed into the waistband of his pants -- One of these days he’d get a proper holster to go with the hat. “Usual caliber.”

The Lady of the house looked over from her busywork at that, piping up with a note of something between desperation and relief in her voice.

“Oh -- You’re nervous about this business with the cow too, Mister Smith?”

“What c--” he cut himself off, paused.

Lie, whispered his better wisdom.

“...Right,” he half-shrugged, vaguely, wiping his mouth on the back of one dusty sleeve. “The cow. Well,” He sniffed, raising both eyebrows in an attempt to look interested, “...Better safe than sorry, right?”

“Parker’s boys were here before you, buying up buckshot. Even Deputy Carter said it weren’t normal, and I could tell he was holdin’ his words...”

Smith scratched the back of his hair, felt his attention fading. She was scared. He could almost smell it. That weird, familiar feeling: the terror of others. She was scared and she needed to know they were all in this together... Even him...

“--right there in the middle of the night? Folk are saying it was ripped right open, but nothing was eaten--”

The shopkeeper cleared his throat, laying the pouch and boxes onto the counter. “Mary, come on, that’s enough now.”

Smith studied the floorboards. Dust and wood shavings. Musty rays of sunlight. He rolled the paper and stuck the end in his mouth without waiting for permission.

“Yeah. Well.” He jerked the revolver a few times, flipping the heavy cylinder of the gun in and out of position in a motion of nervous, compulsive habit. “Maybe it was suicide.”

His gentle reassurance was met with thick, glacial silence.

He coughed, awkwardly, glanced to one side and there was Carter’s kid sat on the stairway, watching him with those unreadable doll’s-eyes. The cat hung in her arms, staring at him and growling. This, this was what happened when he left the shack. Disaster followed like a starving buzzard. Well to Hell with it. He was going for a drink and then maybe he’d get as much as a wink of sleep before it was time to get to work again.

Cullen slid the money across the counter, stuffed the iron back into his pants, bundled up the goods under his arm. He mumbled something that might have been “Always a pleasure,” and stepped out, squinting, into the warm, clear, horrible sunlight.

Job, Nevada (Supernatural Western/Mystery)

Cullen Smith

Cullen Smith

Age:
25

Appearance:
Smith is thin, long-faced and slightly gaunt, with tousled black hair, the eyes of a chronic insomniac and a near-permanent expression of unimpressed indifference. He wears black, apparently owning only one set of garments: a once-expensive pair of pants and suit jacket that have turned dusty and rumpled with neglect. That, along with the fact that he never seems to button his shirt all the way, gives him the appearance of having slept in most of his clothes and never quite having bothered to get properly dressed.

Occupation:
Gravedigger

Personality:
Furtive, solitary, unsociable and sometimes downright rude, Smith slouches his way through life with a morose air of apathy and resignation. He doesn’t care about news from across the pond, he doesn’t care about the comings and goings of his new home, and outside of a few scandalous (and obvious) dalliances with one or two of the younger and more attractive widows that have come a-calling, he doesn’t seem to care about chasing women. At the end of the day, all he seems to care about is putting dead folk into the ground.

And making sure they stay there.

History:
Smith was born in Scotland, finding work in his sixteenth year as a groundskeeper for a wealthy English family. Though the work was less than glamorous, he was a hard worker, and he managed to scrape together some meager savings.

The estate was thrown into turmoil as a romance blossomed between himself and his employer’s daughter. Her father adamantly forbid the relation, and the two, hopelessly in love, conspired to soon escape together and elope to the shores of the new world.

Alas, it was all for nothing, for the Lady expired. She had been a pale and sickly thing, and her constitution, all knew, had always been frail. With nothing left to hope for or care about, Cullen sailed to California alone, a dark stranger waving at him from the dock as the ship hoved away over the unquiet sea.

At this point, he’s been in Job some three years and change, keeping himself to himself by that fenced-up cemetery -- to keep out scavengers, he claims, coyotes and wolves in those parts have been known to do stranger things than try to dig up a meal when they’re hungry, after all -- and he takes the quirks and weirdnesses of Job with the same lazy, unfazed indifference he takes buying flour at the local store. He lives there alone in a modest, poorly-cared-for shack at the edge of the grounds, his only regular company a bookish young penny-counter (with the unfortunate name of Scrooge) who helps with the grounds for some extra spending money, and a dark, well-dressed stranger who stops by to visit once a year, regular as clockwork, on Samhain night.

A candle burns behind his threadbare drapes long into the quiet hours of the morning, and folk have long since gotten used to hearing the nocturnal report of gunshots crack across the desert from the direction of the graves.

Personal cards:
Hand: The Five of Cups, The Page of Wands.
Mysteries: Case of the miserable bloody day where that thing happened with the cow.

Create-A-Hero: A Superhero RPG Season 2- New Horizons (Closed)

Character you have created: Caroline Lewis
Alias: Babel
Speech Color: DeepPink
Character Alignment: Villain
Identity: Known
Character Personality:
Babel is entropy in action: a disaffected, destructive adrenaline junkie who now finds herself with the ability to fulfill every whim, appetite and revenge fantasy she ever had. There's no plan, no grand ambition, no long-term goal other than burning through life like a roman candle and tearing down the comfortable little illusions of a broken society. She's a one-woman circus, and everyone's getting a free ticket.

Uniform/costume:

Hider

_{Ruthlessly butchered from the original by Fukari}

Caroline herself is thin, her face long and a little too pale, crowned with a punkish, neglected mess of bright pink hair and glittering with a number of cheap piercings. Most of her life til now has been spent comatose in thrift store throwouts, threadbare stockings and hoodies and bad heavy metal t-shirts.

In contrast, her 'working' costume is a well-tailored carnivalesque outfit that was intended for an upmarket casino hostess: A glossy lycra catsuit the same deep, lurid pink as her hair, belted at the waist and stitched with six black diamonds in a playing card style, the ensemble completed with shoulder-length gloves and heeled over-the-knee boots in matching black patent leather. You know, like a comic book. Not practical? Maybe. But when all you have left is making an impression, why stop at the ankle?

She keeps two Glock-18 automatic pistols tucked into the belt, the slides repainted in pink and engraved in silver glitter -- one reading 'Eat Me', the other 'Drink Me'.

Origin Info/Details:
Babel was an experiment that both succeeded and failed. First a happy accident; then an unhappy one. Remember Darrow Engineering? They may be a lot of things, but they're not quitters. The loss of Dr. Gaster and xenohybrid experiment BPE-45A (Yeah. Her.) was a setback to their psionic tinkering, but while they lost the subject, they'd learned a lot. They still had a wealth of research, a clear agenda, considerable resources and powerful backers greedy or frightened enough to want that power in their hands.

With stakes that high, "ethics" is just a word.

And that's how we got the Babel project: a grand attempt to create organisms that could access and influence what they called the noosphere -- informational space. A tall order, and one that required raw material. A lot of raw material. Living material. Recidivists, junkies, the homeless; people nobody would care about or miss, supplied in secret to covert facilities by shadowy third parties or corrupt law enforcement. Deniable. Disposable. And Caroline Lewis was all of these things. A deeply troubled young woman who had lost the battle against her inner demons a long time ago and finally fallen so far down her own spiral of substance abuse and self-hatred that even the thugs she'd found shelter with had left her to overdose or die in a drunken fistfight with a moving train.

Despite her penchant for self-destruction, tests showed Lewis as one of the most promising specimens by far: in fact, she was a latent natural psychic in potentia, who only needed a touch of biological coaxing to blossom into rich, useful material for the project -- material that would then be harvested, cultured, and put to better use.

But history has a way of repeating itself. Impossibly and for no understandable reason, the subject activated before the altered brain could be removed. The half-baked specimen was unleashed, and the facility was burned out to the last living thing.

Guess they didn't learn as much as they thought.

The final punchline to this bitter joke is that the source of the girl's psychic potential is a small, anomalous brain tumor, inoperable and steadily growing, which allowed the unnatural treatment to take root, almost seeming to welcome it. By degrees, it is both twisting her brain into increasing states of mental power and ever so slowly killing her. She has a limited, stolen supply of an experimental medication, Noussphairaretroamphetamine 44 (abbreviated to Nupharamine, or just "Noose" on the black market) that stabilizes her condition and allows her to exert greater control over herself, but in one last, cruel twist of irony, the tablets are damagingly addictive when taken over an extended time, taking a toll on her even as they ease her burden.

Hero Type (Select one): Psychic
Power Level (Select one below): Street/City
Powers (Be Specific):

Psychohazard:
Babel radiates madness like an isotope. Where she goes, a whirlpool of psychic chaos goes with her, and unlike most metahumans, she doesn't so much employ her powers as try with all the willpower she can muster to keep it under control. Restrained, her influence manifests as overexposed vision and chromatic aberration, images splitting apart into flickering red, green and blue planes like a malfunctioning LCD monitor. Unleashed, her presence dramatically warps the perceptions and sanity of those around her, its intensity ranging from confusion and disorientation to mass hysteria. People collapse, scream, hallucinate, attack one another, and gradually lose control of language, regressing into an odd form of glossolalia. The closer to her epicenter one draws, the worse it becomes.

As if this weren't enough, she is vulnerable to rare, psychoactive seizures which tremendously swell the power of her abilities while completely incapacitating her control over them. Paradoxically, it is at her most vulnerable that she becomes the most dangerous.

Hallucinopath:
When in control of herself, Babel can influence the nature of the illusions she spawns, and through that, the people experiencing them. In accepting the evidence of their senses, people find themselves playing by her rules.

1.5 Second Sight:
Babel's affliction dilates her perception of time, allowing her to instinctively 'see' 0.5 to 2 seconds into the future. While so short as to be useless for planning, this expanded awareness has a critical effect on her aim, physical instincts and reaction time, giving her the appearance of having superhuman reflexes when in fact her physique is normal, and she's simply started moving a second before a shot is fired.

White Noise:
It's not that Babel is immune to mind reading; It's just that attempting to mentally probe or restrain her is like flying a light aircraft into a hurricane. To a psychic or sensitive, her mind reads as raw, lurid chaos, a raging pink vortex that doesn't repel them, but rather tries to drag them in and eat them alive.

Attributes (Select one at each category):

Strength Level: Normal human
Speed/Reaction Timing Level: Normal human speed/Uncanny reflexes (precognition)
Endurance: Normal human
Agility: Normal human/5x depending on illness and drug use.
Intelligence: Average.
Fighting Skill: Somewhat trained

Resources: Minimal -- if she wasn't able to take what she wanted, she wouldn't know where her next meal was coming from.
Weaknesses:
Pyrrhic Victory: Babel's greatest strength is also her most dangerous flaw: Her own power is slowly killing her. Restraining her psychohazard ability taxes her greatly, even painfully, and though rare, her random seizures can leave her hemorrhaging, crawling on her hands and knees.

Addict: A dependance on experimental, psychoactive medication to stay in control is its own set of problems.

How Can You Challenge a Perfect, Immortal Machine: Since Babel's abilities are almost exclusively mind-affecting, robotic adversaries, drones or those otherwise completely immune to psychic influence naturally counter her main advantage, leaving her to rely on her precognition window and her capable but limited combat skill.

Supporting Characters:

Cheshire Cat: Only Babel can see or hear this taunting, elusive monster. It has to be a figment of her fevered imagination, yet it sometimes knows things it shouldn't possibly know...

Rabbit Hole gang:
The Rabbit Hole is a seedy "villain bar" frequented by C-list bad guys unlikely to ever make the big time.

Tommy Trollface: A former mob triggerman, Tommy's life was changed after an accident during a shootout in a chemical plant with a vigilante hero left his face permanently twisted into an uncanny replica of the Trollface meme. Though initially embittered, Tommy has since embraced his new persona and is even considered something of a folk hero amongst the bulk of internet culture. If he had a voice actor, it would be Gilbert Gottfried.

Professor Amstrad: After being diagnosed with terminal cancer during the height of the cold war, this brilliant scientist replaced most of his body with mechanical parts, attempting to future-proof himself using the finest cutting-edge computer technology 1981 had to offer. The result is now something both impressively ahead of its time and laughably obsolete. Though something of a laughing stock amongst the meta community, it's never wise to underestimate the old professor. He may be a stubborn traditionalist, but he is still a genius, and his assault robots are no less lethal for being made of ribbon cables and cheap plastic.

Killa Deth: A hereditary metahuman and rap artist who inherited abnormal size and comparative super-strength from his father, an unnamed superhero who didn't stick around to pay child support. Despite his name, Killa Deth is actually a chilled-out vegetarian and not given to violence. Unless you badmouth his mixtape, in which case he'll pulp your skull with his bare hands.

Do you know how to post pictures on RPG boards?:

Hider

Sample Post:

It was a warm and sunny day in the garden maze. Insects chirped happily in well-tended flower beds. Birds sang from hidden perches amongst shady trees. Dandelion blossoms floated gently on the still and breezeless air. And for mile after mile in every direction, the maze stretched out, a deep, shady labyrinth of tall, green hedges, walling it all safely in.

It was a very calm and peaceful place.

At the center of the garden, on the trim, green grass, sat a long, low table draped with a white cloth, set as though for a tea party. At its head sat a dark-haired young girl of perhaps seven, dressed in blue and white frills, the other seats filled by a number of floppy, friendly-looking stuffed toy animals arrayed in their own little chairs.

With practiced manners, the girl picked up the teapot and poured, a stream of milky, violet fluid that smelt of hospitals and antiseptic bubbling from the spout. Setting down the pot, she took the lid from the sugar bowl, which was filled with small, plastic medical tablets, pink at one end, blue at the other. She dipped her spoon and emptied the pills into her cup, stirring vacantly. It was better to have one spoonful, but sometimes she needed two, for that was simply how things were done. She took a small sip, swallowing it down. It tasted like nothing at all.

The girl, whose name was Caroline, kicked her legs under the chair, back and forth, her thoughts empty. There was no bother to think of anything. It was a lovely day and she had only to wait here until her mother came for her, which would surely not be long now.

She had just started taking another sip when there came floating through the still, warm air a smooth, beguiling voice that didn't sound like anyone she knew. Caroline looked up, blinking as surprise slowly surfaced from beneath her placid thoughts.

"Though thy slumber may be deep," it crooned, "Yet thy spirit shall not sleep; There are shades which will not vanish; There are thoughts thou canst not banish..."

The girl's head tilted curiously as a wide, bright, toothsome smile appeared at the far end of the table, bobbing along the edge of the cloth.

"...By a power to thee unknown..."

Around the smile, a cat's head faded into view, followed by a long, plump body and a swirling, question-mark tail.

"...Thou canst never be alone."

"What a curious song," observed Caroline, blinking slowly. Though she had been content here with her tea and her dear animal friends, her thoughts now felt clouded and suddenly unquiet. She struggled to speak. "Wherever did you come from, mister cat?"

"Why, nowhere." the cat replied, smiling, "The same as you."

"Oh." The girl's eyes dropped. She stared vacantly down into her rippling cup of violet liquid. Her stomach rebelled, gurgling and twitching. "I feel... ever so queer, of a sudden." she said, softly. "Not well at all."

"Truly?" the cat paced sidelong in front of her, brushing her comfortingly with its tail, in the manner of felines. "Perhaps you would feel better if you drank a little less tea."

"But it's a tea party. One must drink tea at a tea party."

"Ah? But are you drinking tea because it is a tea party, or is it merely a tea party because you are drinking tea?"

Caroline's brow creased as she wrestled with the odd question. She went to take another sip, but faltered, held back, something nagging at her fogged mind.

"...Do you suppose mother will come soon?" she asked the cat, "I must wait here until she comes to collect me. But..." she trailed off.

"Perhaps we should go and find her?" the cat got up, stretching its forepaws and arching its back contentedly. "The Caroline I know was never much fond of doing what she was told."

"But I don't know the way through the maze." the girl protested.

"But I do." the cat declared. It coiled its way around the teapot, drawing close, eyes luminous above its glowing grin. "Come with me, Caroline. The way is simple, if you know it; Not out, but through. All you need do is open your eyes, and wake up."

"I can't wake up if I'm not asleep!" she admonished.

"Well then," grinned the cat, padding right up and smiling into her face, "You must be asleep."

The girl stared.

The teacup slid from her fingers and shattered, pink and blue tablets scattering across the tablecloth.

Whoah, is it supposed to light up like--

EEG just--

The girl's eyes fluttered open.

Oh sh--

LOCKDOWN LOCKDOWN START THE BAFFLERS

There was a horrific noise, like a detuned string section being slammed into an active microphone. Pain burst through her head. A woman started screaming into an intercom. A mirror-faced hazard suit standing over her swore and staggered backward, spinning cranial saw in hand, overturning a metal tray full of vicious stainless steel instruments with a tremendous crash that didn't stop but grew louder and louder and louder, joining the tumult of shouting and the pandemonium of warped, deafening noise.

The girl sat bolt upright, tearing a respiration mask from her face and dragging a ridged rubber tube out of her mouth, retching as she felt it come up her throat, trickling violet fluid. She heaved down breaths, facing her pale, pink-haired reflection in a mirrored observation window, coughing and blinking in the sterile glare of blinding hospital spotlights. No longer a child but a young woman, slumped upon a molded surgical table in an enclosed, glistening cell of shining white tile, air thick with the overpowering smell of antiseptic, surrounded by glowing readouts that flickered on wall-mounted machines straight out of a science fiction film.

"What the f..." The room heaved to one side and she slid from the table, falling heavily to her knees, fighting the urge to throw up. "What the fuhhh..."

Everything lurched and spun. Caroline clutched at her head, choking back a scream as her brain throbbed, burning in her head and swirling outward, thick and sticky like candyfloss and fallout. One of the machines sparked and went black. Alarms started blaring from outside.

A gloved hand grabbed hold of her roughly, the faceless, white-suited surgeon pulling at her, the electric saw still whirring in his other hand. She kicked, struggled, cried out, threw the bedsheet at him in an irrational, desperate reflex. The figure panicked, shrieking and flailing at the white fabric as though it were a scorpion, driving the whining saw through it and into his leg, stabbing again and again, yelling get it off, get it off GET IT OFF ME. Blood sprayed like sawdust from a mill, painting the pristine tiles red, and still he kept slashing, hacking and babbling until he sheared through the tendons of his leg and collapsed, thrashing helplessly in a spreading scarlet pool.

Caroline struggled to get to her feet, trying to raise herself from the blood-slick floor on shaking, nerveless arms. It was happening everywhere, now. The intercom filled with bellowing, panic, madness. Facility staff were attacking one another in the corridors, shooting at things that weren't there, doubled up on the floor in fits of hysteria. The men in the security station were laughing and slapping each other on the back, convinced they were watching cartoons. The walls seemed to melt, to run like quicksilver. Her head was pounding like a cheap apartment over a shitty nightclub and she could feel her poisoned mind spilling over, expanding like a nuclear accident, contaminating every living thing it touched.

one and two are overloaded--
--cinnamon the cinnamon we have to--
Go near that door son and I will put you down without a second--
/It's on fire it's burning--
MY BABY, MY BABY'S IN THERE--

She heard gunshots, saw silhouettes in the dark mirror with each muzzle flash, bodies slumping and falling as they ran for the door to her room. There was another shower of sparks and an electronic screech before the monitors blanked out and the room was plunged into pitch darkness, bathed in red emergency lighting a second later. The corridors outside rang with tinny, hysterical laughter, clunking metal and unhinged, animal howls that couldn't have been human but were. Caroline slumped on the wet floor, laughing weakly along with them, pushed beyond endurance as her mind continued to seep like radiation out of her skull. She was Chernobyl. She was Babel. She was Babylon. It was a horror movie, and everyone was the monster.

Fala la lan-

BURN IT TORCH THE FREAKING WING IF YOU HAVE TO JUST KILL IT KILL IT NOW KIT IT RAW KOIL LO L̶A ̨X̨F͡I Ļ̨́͢͠À̡̛͡ Z̧͞O ̴̛͠͝F̴̵͏H̕̕G̨̀̕̕F͡͠í͝͠͞I̴͘͘͡į̛͢͞͞i~̴̕

There was one final gunshot.

---

She stood in the pouring rain and watched it burn, barefoot in a backless hospital gown, soaked to the skin. Gun in one hand, plastic bottle in the other, coastal winds beating at her remorselessly. It all looked so small from outside. Just another ugly warehouse in a row of ugly warehouses. Nothing to suggest the six levels underneath it that were now going up in greasy, colorful smoke. Nothing to hint at the shrink-wrapped bodies and the floating brains.

Caroline tore her red-rimmed eyes away from the roaring inferno, staring off into the vague glow of night. The cat's smile beckoned from a streetlight far ahead, its tail flicking idly below, and she followed, as though in a trance.

What else could she do?

Create-A-Hero: A Superhero RPG (Closed)

The Elder Scrolls: Rage of the Waves

I am of course willing and able to insinuate myself Daedra-style into the story, but did want to wait on some initial scene reactions first.

Rain's Hand [ Culluket x Hank ]

Loka turned from the Inquisitor to the road at the bottom of the embankment. The shadows stretched long across the mud and hip-high grasses as the sun reluctantly heaped itself above the wretched moor, and the nocturnal mist had begun to lift, thinning into a bleak white haze. The rent torsos and scattered limbs of the dead travelers remained where they had been found, the blood slowly congealing into a dark, foetid mass. The first insects buzzed mindlessly from one to the next, filling the morning air with a droning cacophony that set her stomach twisting.

"It couldn't understand you," she murmured, tersely. "All it understood was pain."

Rain's Hand [ Culluket x Hank ]

Loka fidgeted under the sudden scrutiny. There was no elegant way to tell him. She would have to be subtle.

She struggled hopelessly with the notion for a few valiant seconds before it burst out of her in an explosive sigh.

"The moon turned," she explained, impatiently, "It was bleeding. The womb was bleeding! I can tell the difference!"

She walked in a tight, agitated circle, gesturing, wet bracken cracking underfoot. "I did not understand earlier because there was so much. But it was all over the road, where the bodies were." She made a vague motion with both hands in the direction of the muddy track. "Everywhere. ...Perhaps that is why it was in such a bad mood."

She sighed again, long and plaintive in the murky dawn.

"...I do not know how to make you understand how I know, when your life is the murder of those who see as I do. You call it witchcraft, but it is so much more than this. I feel things. I am close to a God. A real God. Not an empty house built over a prison. How could I see things as others do?

"So yes, I taste love and hate and see perfume on the air, and felt the madness boiling inside that... thing. Being near it hurt. It hurt!" She almost shouted it at the gore-stained head, as though it might wake up and apologize, "But this, it showed me how to make myself painful to it, too. I knew how to call to it, in a voice it could not tolerate. So I did. And it worked." She folded her arms around herself, shrugging with a creak of wet leather. "It seemed like a much better idea before it worked. If I were stronger, and had nicer clothes, I could show you more."

She ran her gloved hand down her cheek, staring at the monstrous severed head through the dim half-light. "...Please do not threaten to cut anything else off." she added, quietly.

She pushed on without waiting for a response, crunching toward the edge of the wood, but paused at the brink of the embankment and looked back, resting one hand on a slanted birch.

"...Why did you talk to it?"

The Elder Scrolls: Rage of the Waves

Ha. I was typing it right as you were posting, otherwise I would have skipped bargaining and gone straight to acceptance.