New Vig post introduces my ultimized version of Vigilante villain The Dummy. He'll turn out to be a little more threatening to the GR powered Vig than the standard version.
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I feel sorry for you if you let AI generate ANY of your prose. Real hack work. That goes for images too.
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”The Ranchero of Miracle Mesa” - Strings: Part Four
“The Cowboy must never shoot first, hit a smaller man, or take unfair advantage.”
-Anonymous
Warpath, Texas
Vigilante could feel needles of bone piercing his shoulder, tearing more and more muscle as he reloaded his guns. The pain shot down his arm and up through his collarbone in white hot spikes. He just had to grit his teeth and take it. Wasn’t becoming of a cowboy to sit there, bitching and moaning while his enemies came up on the horizon, no sir. Vig set his jaw and rolled his shoulder, grunting as agony leaped through his nerves.
“Something wicked this way comes.” The voices in Vigilante’s head joined in unison. Vig shook his head, trying to rid himself of the noise and focus. Time to face center. Couldn’t do with Mephisto’s curse distracting him from the fight.
The dust cloud swelled in size, towering from its point of origin like the Groom Cross. It fanned out in a wide cone from an advancing black speck rumbling across the desert. Slowly, it resolved into a vehicle. It was a long, black plated limo. The desert sands it kicked up slid off of the paint job like water off a duck’s back. Vig couldn’t get a read on anything inside through the tinted windows. He’d have to wait for the fight to come to him.
Vigilante limped back to the wall as the billowing smoke encroached. With no way over, he started shoving aside the bodies of Fatboys with his feet and dug in amongst the copses for cover. He rested the butt of his weapons on the bodies. All that was left was to lie in wait. Any manner of things could be in that limo, most likely entities of Greed. Homunculi, Midans, Speed-Demons…
The limo stopped thirty yards out from the barrier. Vig tightened his grip on his pistols. His fingers found their way inside the trigger guard. The driver’s side window rolled down, and a pair of human hands shot out.
“Don’t shoot! Jesus gawd!” A voice shouted from inside. The hands were shaking. Vigilante could see cufflinks on the intruder’s wrists.
”Come on out now. Real slow like. Keep them hands where I can see ‘em.”
The man’s hands jerked to the door handle from the outside, awkwardly opening it and stumbling out of the vehicle. He was a tall, lanky man, stuffed into a poorly fitting suit. His hair was slicked back with cheap gel. The feller’s skin was sallow, but not in the usual way. Where Vig might have expected a pale over his skin, there was a sickly brown. He looked twenty, twenty-five. His hands were too knobby for his age. Most curious of all were raised spiral scars on both of his cheeks, like someone had gone in with a knife to try and make ‘em stand out. He held his hands over his head and dropped to his knees.
“Please man! My boss an’ I are just here to talk!” The man pleaded. Vig could make out the outline of a handgun against his waistband.
“Drop yer handcannon n’ we’ll see about that, boy.”
He nodded a dozen times more than he needed to and quivering hand went down to his waistband. His movements were jerky, uncertain. He pulled the glock from his pants, lifting the end of the handle with his thumb and pointer finger. He threw it away from him out into the sands.
“See? Unarmed! We just wanna talk!”
“Yer “Boss” wanna come outta that there car? Without no guns, neither?”
”I thought you might take more kindly to my associate there first.” The rear door of the limo opened. Vig adjusted his aim, keeping one squarely on the goon’s stomach, and the other on the door.
Vigilante could scarcely make out the figure’s head as he stepped out of the car. The man instantly dropped below the window as he stepped out; he was so short that Vig could only see the top of his bowler hat as he passed behind the car door.
The man that emerged was victim to what seemed a cruel kind of dwarfism. He was scarcely as tall as the car door, but had lanky, ill-fitting limbs that hung loosely at his sides. The worst was his face. He seemed carved out of wood by a drunken craftsman, his cheeks and jaw were out of proportion with a face that struggled to contain two bulging brown eyes. His pallor seemed like that of his lackey, but worse. His features were hard and almost wooden, there seemed to be horizontal lines running up and down his exposed skin.
”My name is Daniel Matthews.” He spoke in a subtle New Yorker accent, unlike his compadre’s brazen one. Matthews had an old school tommy gun slung over his shoulder. He made a show of undoing the strap with gloved hands. The gun clattered to the ground.
”Certain… Unwise former associates had taken to calling me ‘The Dummy’. I advise you to not make the same mistake.” He stepped a few paces forward. Vig raised his pistol. Matthews stopped, showing open palms. ”My associate and I merely wish to parley with the vigilante known as... Well, Vigilante.”
“You got ‘im, pardner.” Vigilante stepped out of cover, mounting the pile of Fatboys. He kept his weapons trained on the newcomers. “What I’m innarested in knowing is what a city slicker packin’ all sortsa popguns wants with a little town like mine. ‘Specially someone who ain’t bothered by a pile of corpses.”
Matthews shrugged. ”I’ve seen worse, in my line of work. My employer wishes to provide aid given the… Situation here in Warpath. We can provide weapons, ammo, men. All we ask for in exchange is one little artifact we believe to be in your possession.”
“Look, mister. By the look of ya, you ain’t with SHIELD, and I’m eck-stra confused about how the de-tails of our little predicament found their way into your ears.” Vig stepped down of the corpse pile. “But… You ain’t tried to kill me yet, and that’s a damn sight better that mosta the folks I’ve met over the past few years.”
“Kill him! Kill him good kill him dead kill him good kill him dead kill him kill him kill him kill kill kill...” The voices in his head hissed. The closer Vig got to Matthews the more ferociously it burned. It felt like the taint of Mephisto in his mind, trying to drag him back to Hell again, screaming to keep him away from this man -- or put a bullet in his head. He thought that was a good sign. Anybody Mephisto didn’t like was a pal to Vigilante.
”Glad you see it my way.” Matthews extended a hand. ”Do you have a real name, or just Vigilante?”
“Vig for short’s fine.” Vigilante reached out to shake his hand. As he neared, every nerve in his body erupted into fire, the voices trying to hijack his system, screaming for him not to broker with this man. They pushed on his brain, his muscles trying to drive him back.
Vig put his hand into Matthews’ and a sick smile crossed the Dummy’s face. It went from ear to ear, a perversion of human anatomy. ”You cowfucking idiots are even easier to trick than I thought.” Instantaneously a shiver shot up Vigilante’s arm, squeezing his muscles and locking his joints, flushing away any of the burning from moments ago. Vig went for his guns but he found his joints locked. He looked down. Fine wood was spreading across his body, turning complex ball and joint sockets and ligaments into carpentry and screws.
“Motherfu-” Vigilante’s legs gave out and he slammed into the sand, cracking his head on the ground. At the edge of his swimming vision he could see The Dummy’s lackey, reduced to a similar state. He had crumbled to the ground, like a lifeless doll. His skin was all the more wooden now, as if all the life had been sucked from him in an instant.
The wood crept across his chest and Vigilante could feel his organs seizing mid operating in the cage of his chest, heart stopping mid-pump, unable to deliver blood to a body that no longer needed it. The dummification spread up to his neck and stopped just short on consuming his head.
“I’m gonna tie you to a horse and drag you across the goddamn-” The Dummy’s elbow smashed into Vigilante’s face. His nose shattered on impact.
”Not fun, is it? I don’t like being made of fucking wood either.” The Dummy clasped a hand over Vigilante’s mouth. ”So you and everyone in your shithole town are going to help me get out of my… Illness. Unfortunately for you, there are two ways out, and both of them end with you dead.” The Dummy’s free hand fished in his coat pocket, and produced a bloodstained polaroid. It was a picture of a picture, but through the levels of abstraction Vig could make out what appeared to be some kind of trident. ”You give me this trident right now, then I kill you and I’m on my way. Or...” The Dummy got up, walking over to his tommy gun. He hefted the weapon in both hands. ”I kill everyone in your shitty little town, one by one, until you tell me.”
Vigilante spat out a mouthful of blood. “I don’t have no Trident! If you touch a hair on anyone’s head...”
The Dummy made a tut-tut-tut noise with his tongue. ”You’re not in any position to make threats. Tell you what, I’ll give you some time to think about it.” The Dummy put his tommy gun over his shoulder, and pressed his hand into Vigilante’s dummified chest. The power started spreading up his neck and over his ears.
”I’ll wake you in a few hours. That’s when the real fun starts.”
As Morden can vouch, before I used to want to find a new outfit for Iris for it to have an emblem.
Though it's growing on me.
Tried my best to whack a logo onto this one in Photoshop in ~2 mins: prntscr.com/kdwpc3
Can someone give me links to the games you guys are referencing? I feel a mighty hankering for more of everyone's writing, since I'm all caught up on the IC.
<Snipped quote by Byrd Man>
So...
When did everyone start rping, where and who was your first character? Mine was on a browser game that also had forum rp going on. I was a Jaffa called Tul'ak I think his name was
At age ten, in a Pokemon RP Thread, I was Logan Darklighter, master Pokemon Breeder with, exact quote: "logan wears a t-shirt with a picture of a pokeball on it,an always unzipped black jacket and blue jeans and his pure white hair done like sora's(from kingdom hearts)and blue eyes"
From ages 8 to about 12, I used to go by legolosarrow and legolosarrow0726, because 8 year old me couldn't figure how to spell "Legolas" for the life of him.
Sliding in at the last minute with a post, it's me! I decided to retcon the post before this one, such that Vig is still in Warpath. I figured with the event wrapping up so soon it wouldn't be satisfying for him to show up only at the very end.
And since it's now non-canon, it's definitely not incredibly lazy that I just reused the beginning part of that old post, right? Right?
And since it's now non-canon, it's definitely not incredibly lazy that I just reused the beginning part of that old post, right? Right?
”The Ranchero of Miracle Mesa” - Strings: Part Three
“The Cowboy must never shoot first, hit a smaller man, or take unfair advantage.”
-Anonymous
Warpath, Texas
”How’s the news treatin ya?” Vig asked. Jonah Hex sat with his feet up on the porch of the Crossroads Saloon, L-Pad in hand. For an old world cowboy, he’d caught on to the new technology quick. He didn’t much prefer it to newspapers, but those had stopped coming a long time ago.
“Some Silver-Surfboard hooligan been sighted in Central City. Given Flash n’ Superman the ol’ runaround. No word from Frank or the others.” Hex said.
Vigilante nodded slow and pulled his hat off his head. He ran a hand through his sweat slicked hair. The sun was high in the sky, he and Hex and just spent the last six hours using horse teams to drag in old car husks from the nearest junkyard to bolster the outer lines. Gunn was down by the Town Square, trying to teach the townsfolk what he could about gunplay.
Much like The Crossroads, Vig reckoned that Warpath was damn near impossible to kill. Three years real-time with only Gunn and and handful of other gunslingers to protect it and the town held out like it was the Alamo. In Hell, it was impossible to defend a single location. If you tried to lock down any one spot, the demons would be itchin’ to bumrush you before you could proper take your boots off. Maybe it had something to do with the magic of the spot. Or maybe Gunn was a better sharpshooter than anyone realized.
”Well, they better git back soon. More and more Fatboys coming to knock every day. Saw three or four fixin’ to breach while you were just readin’.” Vig said. Fatboys were entities of plague. Demons wearing human skin, gone turgid with puss and disease. They were low level scum, but usually packs of Fatboys meant somethin’ a whole lot bigger and meaner was around the corner.
Hex gave a slow nod and set the L-Pad down on the porch railing. He leaned back into his rocker.
“Whaddya think they’re after?” Hex didn’t look at Vig. He just stared into the sky, tracking the rising sun.
”Man to man?” Vigilante pushed his hat up and locked eyes with Hex. ”I got a couple ideas, n’ both of ‘em scare the shit outta me. This didn’t start til’ I disappeared. Which means one of two things.”
“Either you jes got real unlucky…” Hex started.
”Or Mephisto’s playin’ a real long game on us.” Vigilante set his hat down and hoisted himself up onto the porch railing and looked up into the sky.
Hell makes a man yearn for things you’d never have batted an eye about when you were piddlin’ away your time in the land of the living. On the few quiet nights that Vigilante could really lay his head down and rest in that place, when the screams of the damned were quiet, and when the demons lay dead in droves around them, all he could see out the throat of Hell was the underbelly of the world. It hung from the sky like it was a Fatboy’s stomach. The sins of the Earth, bubbling and popping and depositing damned souls into the place of their worst nightmares. Garlands of bones and viscera hung from it, sometimes low enough that he could touch it.
But now Vigilante was back in Texas town. Seemed like he could spend hours just kickin’ his spurs up and gazing into that sky, just enjoying that lucky old sun. First time in a long time he had somethin’ to protect. For what felt like a thousand years, he was just a cowpoke trying to get out alive. But now? He was a real goddamned Vigilante.
On the edge of town, Vigilante picked up a gentle groan of steel. He might’ve mistaken it for the car hulks settling, if it weren’t for the fleshy smacks that accompanied every protest of the metal.
”More gotdamn Fatboys. I’ll mosey on over n’ handle it. Hows about you see what kinda progress Gunn’s making?” Vig hopped off the rail and fished a pistol from one of his holsters.
“Holler if you need me.” Hex stepped down from the porch and headed towards the town square, while Vig started the brisk walk to the edge of town.
As walls go it was a squat thing, but it’d more n’ have to do. What was once a long thoroughfare stretching into town proper was now blocked off by rusted out cars stacked two high, with sheets of corrugated metal and plywood filling in the gaps. Wooden pallets formed a makeshift gangplank up to a haphazard guard post made from PVC Pipe, repurposed fence lumber, and a whole lot of hope that the damn thing wouldn’t fall apart the instant you stepped on it.
Walking up, it was hard to hear the creak of the pallets over the low moans of the Fatboys. The poor little bastards weren’t smart things. They had just enough of the demonic in ‘em to animate ‘em and motivate them to kill, but that was where it began and ended. What little brain was probably left in those corpses had to be workin’ a thousand miles a minute to even think about smashing into the barrier to try and break through.
It was dirty work that Vig didn’t much like doing, but it had to be done. He’d stopped looking at them as he did it. Seemed too much like shooting somethin’ livin’ and breathin’. Fatboys were one of the few demon types round these parts that still looked human. Disgusting sacks of shit that they were, it never felt right puttin’ a bullet in the face of somethin’ that looked like that. Usually he just fired until the moaning stopped.
BANG!
BANG!
BANG!
He suffered it quietly, just focusing on the recoil in his hand. The rawhide of his gloves rubbing against his skin. Suddenly he felt a tug -- and he gun wasn’t in his hand anymore.
”What in Sam Hi-” Suddenly there was something around Vig’s ankle, snaking up into his jeans and wrapping itself around his calf. He could feel liquid running down his skin. It burned.
There was a pull and he was in the air, flung a dozen yards through the sky before crashing into the sand beyond the wall. Vig felt his right shoulder crack on impact. Before he could push himself to his knees the thing started dragging him to its source. He was facedown in the sand, his hands dragging behind him as he tried to bring himself around to bear.
He managed to turn face up. He coughed the dust out of his lungs and saw the thing that was trying to make him dinner. Astride the corpses of the Fatboys was a demon with its chest cavity hanging open, full of endless rows of gnashing teeth, waiting for the tongue that stuck out of the void where its heart should’ve been to bring in the latest catch. A Digester.
”Hex! Backup!” Vig’s other pistol was in his hand in an instant. .38 rounds tore through the thing’s tongue like tissue paper and it hissed in an inhuman language. Vig scurried backward across the ground, keeping his gun up. Bullets cracked into the opening in its chest and bourns of blood sprouted from it, running over the closing teeth. Its insides sealed and now it was a raw mass of chitinous armor.
As disgusting as its open form was, a closed Digester was durable as a tank. The rest of the revolver’s clip dented the beast’s hide, burying itself in the chitinous material. The chest armor rattled as the thing let off a roar from behind closed lips, dropped its shoulder, and charged.
Vig rolled out of the way as it barreled past, annihilating the turf where his head would have been. Its momentum carried it through, and it started to careen to stop itself. Before it got a chance, Vigilante’s hand went to his lariat and the whip snagged around the beasts thickly muscled thigh.
”Dangnabit!” Vigilante hadn’t had rugburn in his life quite like getting dragged along by a speeding slab of demonic muscle, trying to shake him off like all get out. The one thing that made fighting Digesters survivable was their joints. Only way they could move so quick was if their joints were free of armor and ripe for the shooting.
Vig nearly broke his hand wrestling another revolver from his chest holster. He took aim and the monster banked a hard left, Vig’s shot went wild and dinged off the carapace into the desert beyond.
”Stay still you gosh darn--” The gun cracked in his hands and the monsters kneecap exploded in a fountain of blood and sinew. It slammed into the ground with a sickening crunch as all of its momentum was delivered into its chestplate.
Greg staggered to his feet. The monster wheezed, trying to compensate for its completely shattered rib cage and trying to push itself up. Vig wiped the dust from his chest and limped to the creatures side. He shoved a boot under its chest and flipped it over. It squirmed like a beetle. It’s chest armor was cracked, and what there was of a ribcage below that had been powdered. Its tongue snaked up, trying with its last gasps of energy to devour Vigilante.
Vig pulled another revolver and emptied it into the beast. It stopped moving. Vigilante let loose a heavy sigh, and turned his attention to the horizon. Way out in the distance, he could see a dust cloud starting to rise, as high as three or four men.
”Hope this feller’ weren’t the best you boys got...” Greg started slotting more bullets into the guns he’d emptied. Time for round two.
I'm done with Space D&D now, so I'll read a few posts in the IC before I hit the sack tonight. That way I don't end up 100 posts behind in the IC.
EDIT: Wait. I am 111 posts behind in the IC currently. Scratch that, I'm dumb.
At this point, if you're not far behind on the IC, you're probably doing something wrong. Like me, I'm caught up on the IC, but I'm 24 hours away from having my character taken.
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