A brief Interlude
Feb. 19th, 2008 02:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jack_babalonThe Panthenon is just one of a dozen underground dance/sex clubs in Terminus located on the still pregentrified South Side. What makes it different from the other venues however is that the Panthenon (unbeknownst to its patrons), is actually a psychic feeding trough for a coven-tribe of vampiric magickians: The Lodge Thanerosia.
There is a room located on the second floor of the club that is VIP exclusive to only the thirteen elect members of the lodge. Accesible solely by a shoulder wide staircase tucked behind a door behind the main bar. You mount nine steps to the top but it'll feel more like thirty and once inside you can easily see why the members of the Lodge have named the space the Box. Roughly 20ft x 20ft in length and width with a ceiling low enough that you have to stoop your neck to move through it, the dimensions of the Box are askewed by five mirrors - four covering each wall and one more blanketing the entire ceiling. The floor is painted with a gold speckled olive base that squares in an amber circle with seven interlacing emerald spokes to form a heptagonical star. There are painted within the curve of this circle bright yellow lettering of a language that seems to be a cross-pollenation of Egyptian hieroglyphics and Hebraic lettering... if you stare long enough at the letters you'll begin to see them waver into life, wiggling to break free until they begin to flow sluggishly into the form of new glyphics.
The mirrored walls of the box are insulated with alternating layers of wood and sheet metal forming a crude Reichian Orgone Accumulator. Here the members of the Lodge Thanerosia would gather to tap into, feed really off the raw psychosexual radiation emanating from the frenzied crowd below. The dancefloor fog machine is laced with an aphrodisiac mist that sprays intermitenally along with a subliminal sound loop playing just under the audible frequency of the DJs set. This is all to establish a conducive atmosphere so to speak, no one wants to shit where they eat after all.
The lodge gathers every Sunday morning at midnight, throw back a handful of nanodorphins to stimulate the pleasure centers and slip into an astral trance, where upon they assume Lovecraftian god forms - donning the spectral bodies as easily as we slip into an old pair of clothes. The thirteen manifest spectrally as writhing tentacled tumors with phosphorescent red insect eyes, large arachnids with bristling copper fur with cleft bodies disturbingly vaginal in their shape or even the occasional batwinged lamprey with its tunneled mouth filled with squirming tendrils that attach to the necks of the floating astral bodies tethered to the packed dancefloor. Once the tendrils (or mandibles or proscosis or pincers) have sunken into the spirit flesh of its host a mild telepathic anesthetic is released one that numbs the seven chakras and leaves an artifical burst of confidence not unlike a solid bump of cocaine. Once attached the members of the lodge begin sucking from the soul the fleeting moments of rapture that they are experiencing. The host have no awareness of this process. The next day a lot of them will wake from bad dreams of being chased by shadows down geometrically impossible corridors followed by the worst hang over of their lives. Others will see doppler memories, deja-vu loops that hit with the strength of a recurring dream. Others just lay there in bed crying, knowing that something precious has been drained out of them but they no longer know what it was. Yet not a one of them will miss the next event at the Panthenon. They are addicted to that initial prick in the neck of their soul not realizing that their inner life is being bled dry. The older club goers are soon little more than vapid husks of dehydrated personalities and the younger ones not very young for long, each one caught on the wrong side of supply and demand.
At least that was until tonight.
All thirteen members of the Lodge Thanerosia are locked in the Box. It's obvious that they have torn the clothes off their bodies (indicated by the tatters that still cling around the collars, sleeves, torn stockings and each one slashed with self-inflicted claw marks). They are all shuddering on the floor, flopping around mindlessly, going through what seems to be a prolonged epilectic seizure. The six males of the lodge are fully erect and periodically ejaculate little puddles of blood that trickle down the shaft of their cock. The woman squirm, covering their mons pubis with flattened palms rubbing themselves into throes of a wild orgasm that only feeds the demand for the next one. Their eyes are all begining to bulge out of the eyesockets, their cheeks stretched taut into an skeletal grin, blood speckled foam trickling through their gritted teeth. The thirteen are reflected into over a hundred by the five mirrored surfaces of the Box - creating the illusion of an epedemic orgy spreading through a plague colony. The whole room is drenched with an almost eye watering musk of ferrets, sweat and dirty laundry.
"What are we looking at?" Trish asks lighting up a cigarettte.
"Fuck that... I wanna know what we're smelling!" Nikki squishes her face in disgust craning her neck over Trish's to take in the full spectacle.
Trish sniffs the air and recognizes the stink immediately: The reek of ultraterrestial on human sex - a unique stench that seeps psychically into those who come in contact with it, that instantly conjures up repressed sexual fantasies and fears. Trish trembles a bit and steady herself by focusing on a mobious mandala she summons into the front of her consciousness.
"You feel that?" Trish asks. Nikki answers by doubling over and heaving out a series of dry retching. Nikki is a lot more sensitive to these scenarios than Trish and as such the after stench of the Ultraterrestial love fest is too much for her to bare.
"You want to check downstairs?" Trish offers, she hates to be curt but there's not much time now before the police arrive.
"No... i'm good" Nikki looks up and reaches into her black furred jacket to produce a stainless stell flask that she keeps on hands for emergencies such as these. Alcohol is one of the best psychic dampeners going - blocking everything from possession to bad nerves to a sense of self-restraint. She takes a slug back and tosses the flask over to Trish who catches it with a grateful nod.
"Alright let's see what's really going on here" Trish says wiping the shot off the sleeve of her leather jacket, lowering the Kirlian goggles resting on her forehead over her eyes.
The image crackles in a series of transpectrum blurs then sharpens in on the thirteen as dark blue aura-blobs shimmering in a miasma of grainy blood red, the aura-blobs are all connected by oily black tubes that rise up into a crimson mist, well past the actual space of the room and connect in the air above to the floating translucent underbelly of a massive scyphozoan lifeform, its gelatinous shell filled with a viscous fluid that periodically flash with streaks of heat lightning around emerging chunks of dark blue matter. Trish can clearly see that the chunks are parts of the covens astral body being sucked up into the creature where it is breaking them down into some form of nurishment.
She lifts the goggles up, takes a long drag off her cigarette that burns a column of ash into the butt and asks for the flask again.
"Wha'cha see?" Nikki asks looking up into her reflection on the ceiling sensing something massive lurking above.
"Nothing worth sticking around for..." she rasps from the long shot of vodka, "let's go downstairs"
"We just gonna leave 'em like this?" Nikki asks stepping into the stairway.
"Fuck 'em!" Trish shrugs with no love closing the door behind them to leave the coven-tribe alone to entertain their guest.
Downstairs on the abandoned dancefloor. The place is closed up for the night. Management knows not to bother those upstairs and they're paid too well to ask why.
"So what do you think?" Nikki asks waving a patch of dull silver off her flashlight to glide along the ceiling, illuminating the dusty rafters, spotlights and snaked wiring coursing through the shadows.
"Honestly?"
"No lie to me"
"Hnh... we're looking at an advanced ATD infection"
"'Ayy-Tee-Dee'? What's that?"
"Astrally Transmitted Disease" Trish answers distractedly, she's picking up something familiar just under the currents of her awareness. The radar of her subsconscious is sending off storm warnings off the coast of her vision.
"A bit before your time probably..." she continues more to take her mind off the nagging feeling brewing in her than out of desire to explain herself any more than necessary, "but it almost devestated the occult community in the early 80's. Think sexually transmitted diseases that attach to the astral rather than the physical body. For example a common strain is called the Vapors... which widdles down the astral body until the inflicted are left to live their lives ghostless, becoming nothing more than a cluster of habits left to run on autopilot... not pretty!"
"Jesus... yeah I remember reading something about that now" she actually hasn't but she gets tired of Trish going on like she's an adept fresh out of the Academy.
"There are worse strains than that one actually" Trish continues dryily, knowing that Nikki has in fact never heard of any such thing until just now - "Qlippothian viral manifestations that attach themselves to the bodies inner tree of life, feeding off and inflaming the ten sephiroth until they begin to pus out in violent mood swings or suicidal bouts of depression. ATDs that attack the chakras, eroding them into psychic plague factories creating telepathic fevers that cause the host to spontaneously combust..."
"Jesus Trish... so wha'did they have?"
"A rare strain that attacks through a medium of black orgone energy. It saturates the astral body and creates the scene we just saw upstairs"
"Fuckin' A" Nikki shudders the memory out of her head.
"That's not the worse of it. Once inflicted your astral body becomes especially... what's the word... palatable... to ultraterrestial lifeforms. But here's the thing... what we saw were the advanced stages of the ATD... three years advanced as a matter of fact"
"Heh" Nikki is thinking and one question keeps bubbling up, "So what happened... did these diseases just die out or did we develop some form of immunity to them?"
"No, not really... certain protection sigils were created in the 90's that acted as a seal to insulate astral travelers from making any contact with the strain. They're really standard procedure in most advanced operations these days"
"Heh... so basically they're magick condoms, huh?" Nikki forces the laugh back into a snort.
"Something like that" Trish can't help but smile.
"So what happened up there?"
"That's what we're here to find out" Trish answers lighting a fresh cigarette and redonning her Kirlian Goggles. She scans the space above the dancefloor which is a more neutral shade of milky gray than the hues fluctuating upstairs. She quickly spots the ultraviolet sigil throbbing with an Irridescent Red in the center of the ceiling. That nagging sense of something on the verge of remembrance begins to gnaw in the belly of her intuition.
"Shine your light up there" she points to the sigil, she can't see the spotlight of course through the Kirlian haze of the goggles but when Nikki shouts a 'Got it!' she lifts the lenses too see spotlighted behind a cross section of rafting a basic Intention Sigil scrawled in what appears to be black magic marker. This is Chaos Magick 101 - the kind they teach at the Invisible College. It works simple: Write down a wish, remove the repeating letters along with the vowels and combine the remaining letters into a symbol representing your intention.
Trish taps into the matrix of weaves and curves that form the body of glyph, unraveling the knots of energy that charge the intention. She quickly realizes that it is in fact a specially designed snare, one specially designed to counter-act protective sigils being operated in the area while amplifying the very currents they were designed to block. The magickal equivalent of crashing an internet firewall. But that's not what's got Trish feeling a pang of nausea in her stomach. It's that she recognizes the distinct handwriting if you will behind this sigil... as unique as a fingerprint or a kiss. It all becomes clear in a flash of recognition. That which was forgotten emerges out of the darkened waters of her subconscious.
"Shh-it" Trish hisses.
"What?" Nikki lowers the beam of the flashlight into her face.
"He must've snuck in here sometime and deactivated their defeneses..." she's adds it up outloud, "He worked it so they'd not only catch an ATD but also arranged it so their room upstairs would magnify the effect at a hundred times the actual strength."
"'He'?" Nikki arches an eyebrow in concern at her friend, "'He' who?"
"My fucking ex-boyfriend..." Trish says spitting the name out not liking the taste it leaves in her mouth - "Adam!"
There is a room located on the second floor of the club that is VIP exclusive to only the thirteen elect members of the lodge. Accesible solely by a shoulder wide staircase tucked behind a door behind the main bar. You mount nine steps to the top but it'll feel more like thirty and once inside you can easily see why the members of the Lodge have named the space the Box. Roughly 20ft x 20ft in length and width with a ceiling low enough that you have to stoop your neck to move through it, the dimensions of the Box are askewed by five mirrors - four covering each wall and one more blanketing the entire ceiling. The floor is painted with a gold speckled olive base that squares in an amber circle with seven interlacing emerald spokes to form a heptagonical star. There are painted within the curve of this circle bright yellow lettering of a language that seems to be a cross-pollenation of Egyptian hieroglyphics and Hebraic lettering... if you stare long enough at the letters you'll begin to see them waver into life, wiggling to break free until they begin to flow sluggishly into the form of new glyphics.
The mirrored walls of the box are insulated with alternating layers of wood and sheet metal forming a crude Reichian Orgone Accumulator. Here the members of the Lodge Thanerosia would gather to tap into, feed really off the raw psychosexual radiation emanating from the frenzied crowd below. The dancefloor fog machine is laced with an aphrodisiac mist that sprays intermitenally along with a subliminal sound loop playing just under the audible frequency of the DJs set. This is all to establish a conducive atmosphere so to speak, no one wants to shit where they eat after all.
The lodge gathers every Sunday morning at midnight, throw back a handful of nanodorphins to stimulate the pleasure centers and slip into an astral trance, where upon they assume Lovecraftian god forms - donning the spectral bodies as easily as we slip into an old pair of clothes. The thirteen manifest spectrally as writhing tentacled tumors with phosphorescent red insect eyes, large arachnids with bristling copper fur with cleft bodies disturbingly vaginal in their shape or even the occasional batwinged lamprey with its tunneled mouth filled with squirming tendrils that attach to the necks of the floating astral bodies tethered to the packed dancefloor. Once the tendrils (or mandibles or proscosis or pincers) have sunken into the spirit flesh of its host a mild telepathic anesthetic is released one that numbs the seven chakras and leaves an artifical burst of confidence not unlike a solid bump of cocaine. Once attached the members of the lodge begin sucking from the soul the fleeting moments of rapture that they are experiencing. The host have no awareness of this process. The next day a lot of them will wake from bad dreams of being chased by shadows down geometrically impossible corridors followed by the worst hang over of their lives. Others will see doppler memories, deja-vu loops that hit with the strength of a recurring dream. Others just lay there in bed crying, knowing that something precious has been drained out of them but they no longer know what it was. Yet not a one of them will miss the next event at the Panthenon. They are addicted to that initial prick in the neck of their soul not realizing that their inner life is being bled dry. The older club goers are soon little more than vapid husks of dehydrated personalities and the younger ones not very young for long, each one caught on the wrong side of supply and demand.
At least that was until tonight.
All thirteen members of the Lodge Thanerosia are locked in the Box. It's obvious that they have torn the clothes off their bodies (indicated by the tatters that still cling around the collars, sleeves, torn stockings and each one slashed with self-inflicted claw marks). They are all shuddering on the floor, flopping around mindlessly, going through what seems to be a prolonged epilectic seizure. The six males of the lodge are fully erect and periodically ejaculate little puddles of blood that trickle down the shaft of their cock. The woman squirm, covering their mons pubis with flattened palms rubbing themselves into throes of a wild orgasm that only feeds the demand for the next one. Their eyes are all begining to bulge out of the eyesockets, their cheeks stretched taut into an skeletal grin, blood speckled foam trickling through their gritted teeth. The thirteen are reflected into over a hundred by the five mirrored surfaces of the Box - creating the illusion of an epedemic orgy spreading through a plague colony. The whole room is drenched with an almost eye watering musk of ferrets, sweat and dirty laundry.
"What are we looking at?" Trish asks lighting up a cigarettte.
"Fuck that... I wanna know what we're smelling!" Nikki squishes her face in disgust craning her neck over Trish's to take in the full spectacle.
Trish sniffs the air and recognizes the stink immediately: The reek of ultraterrestial on human sex - a unique stench that seeps psychically into those who come in contact with it, that instantly conjures up repressed sexual fantasies and fears. Trish trembles a bit and steady herself by focusing on a mobious mandala she summons into the front of her consciousness.
"You feel that?" Trish asks. Nikki answers by doubling over and heaving out a series of dry retching. Nikki is a lot more sensitive to these scenarios than Trish and as such the after stench of the Ultraterrestial love fest is too much for her to bare.
"You want to check downstairs?" Trish offers, she hates to be curt but there's not much time now before the police arrive.
"No... i'm good" Nikki looks up and reaches into her black furred jacket to produce a stainless stell flask that she keeps on hands for emergencies such as these. Alcohol is one of the best psychic dampeners going - blocking everything from possession to bad nerves to a sense of self-restraint. She takes a slug back and tosses the flask over to Trish who catches it with a grateful nod.
"Alright let's see what's really going on here" Trish says wiping the shot off the sleeve of her leather jacket, lowering the Kirlian goggles resting on her forehead over her eyes.
The image crackles in a series of transpectrum blurs then sharpens in on the thirteen as dark blue aura-blobs shimmering in a miasma of grainy blood red, the aura-blobs are all connected by oily black tubes that rise up into a crimson mist, well past the actual space of the room and connect in the air above to the floating translucent underbelly of a massive scyphozoan lifeform, its gelatinous shell filled with a viscous fluid that periodically flash with streaks of heat lightning around emerging chunks of dark blue matter. Trish can clearly see that the chunks are parts of the covens astral body being sucked up into the creature where it is breaking them down into some form of nurishment.
She lifts the goggles up, takes a long drag off her cigarette that burns a column of ash into the butt and asks for the flask again.
"Wha'cha see?" Nikki asks looking up into her reflection on the ceiling sensing something massive lurking above.
"Nothing worth sticking around for..." she rasps from the long shot of vodka, "let's go downstairs"
"We just gonna leave 'em like this?" Nikki asks stepping into the stairway.
"Fuck 'em!" Trish shrugs with no love closing the door behind them to leave the coven-tribe alone to entertain their guest.
Downstairs on the abandoned dancefloor. The place is closed up for the night. Management knows not to bother those upstairs and they're paid too well to ask why.
"So what do you think?" Nikki asks waving a patch of dull silver off her flashlight to glide along the ceiling, illuminating the dusty rafters, spotlights and snaked wiring coursing through the shadows.
"Honestly?"
"No lie to me"
"Hnh... we're looking at an advanced ATD infection"
"'Ayy-Tee-Dee'? What's that?"
"Astrally Transmitted Disease" Trish answers distractedly, she's picking up something familiar just under the currents of her awareness. The radar of her subsconscious is sending off storm warnings off the coast of her vision.
"A bit before your time probably..." she continues more to take her mind off the nagging feeling brewing in her than out of desire to explain herself any more than necessary, "but it almost devestated the occult community in the early 80's. Think sexually transmitted diseases that attach to the astral rather than the physical body. For example a common strain is called the Vapors... which widdles down the astral body until the inflicted are left to live their lives ghostless, becoming nothing more than a cluster of habits left to run on autopilot... not pretty!"
"Jesus... yeah I remember reading something about that now" she actually hasn't but she gets tired of Trish going on like she's an adept fresh out of the Academy.
"There are worse strains than that one actually" Trish continues dryily, knowing that Nikki has in fact never heard of any such thing until just now - "Qlippothian viral manifestations that attach themselves to the bodies inner tree of life, feeding off and inflaming the ten sephiroth until they begin to pus out in violent mood swings or suicidal bouts of depression. ATDs that attack the chakras, eroding them into psychic plague factories creating telepathic fevers that cause the host to spontaneously combust..."
"Jesus Trish... so wha'did they have?"
"A rare strain that attacks through a medium of black orgone energy. It saturates the astral body and creates the scene we just saw upstairs"
"Fuckin' A" Nikki shudders the memory out of her head.
"That's not the worse of it. Once inflicted your astral body becomes especially... what's the word... palatable... to ultraterrestial lifeforms. But here's the thing... what we saw were the advanced stages of the ATD... three years advanced as a matter of fact"
"Heh" Nikki is thinking and one question keeps bubbling up, "So what happened... did these diseases just die out or did we develop some form of immunity to them?"
"No, not really... certain protection sigils were created in the 90's that acted as a seal to insulate astral travelers from making any contact with the strain. They're really standard procedure in most advanced operations these days"
"Heh... so basically they're magick condoms, huh?" Nikki forces the laugh back into a snort.
"Something like that" Trish can't help but smile.
"So what happened up there?"
"That's what we're here to find out" Trish answers lighting a fresh cigarette and redonning her Kirlian Goggles. She scans the space above the dancefloor which is a more neutral shade of milky gray than the hues fluctuating upstairs. She quickly spots the ultraviolet sigil throbbing with an Irridescent Red in the center of the ceiling. That nagging sense of something on the verge of remembrance begins to gnaw in the belly of her intuition.
"Shine your light up there" she points to the sigil, she can't see the spotlight of course through the Kirlian haze of the goggles but when Nikki shouts a 'Got it!' she lifts the lenses too see spotlighted behind a cross section of rafting a basic Intention Sigil scrawled in what appears to be black magic marker. This is Chaos Magick 101 - the kind they teach at the Invisible College. It works simple: Write down a wish, remove the repeating letters along with the vowels and combine the remaining letters into a symbol representing your intention.
Trish taps into the matrix of weaves and curves that form the body of glyph, unraveling the knots of energy that charge the intention. She quickly realizes that it is in fact a specially designed snare, one specially designed to counter-act protective sigils being operated in the area while amplifying the very currents they were designed to block. The magickal equivalent of crashing an internet firewall. But that's not what's got Trish feeling a pang of nausea in her stomach. It's that she recognizes the distinct handwriting if you will behind this sigil... as unique as a fingerprint or a kiss. It all becomes clear in a flash of recognition. That which was forgotten emerges out of the darkened waters of her subconscious.
"Shh-it" Trish hisses.
"What?" Nikki lowers the beam of the flashlight into her face.
"He must've snuck in here sometime and deactivated their defeneses..." she's adds it up outloud, "He worked it so they'd not only catch an ATD but also arranged it so their room upstairs would magnify the effect at a hundred times the actual strength."
"'He'?" Nikki arches an eyebrow in concern at her friend, "'He' who?"
"My fucking ex-boyfriend..." Trish says spitting the name out not liking the taste it leaves in her mouth - "Adam!"
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
on 2008-02-19 11:06 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2008-02-20 12:44 am (UTC)no subject
on 2008-02-20 03:31 am (UTC)no subject
on 2008-02-20 03:54 am (UTC)no subject
on 2008-02-20 06:40 pm (UTC)Seriously though I just needed a quick break from my Unity book and had a few stray ideas/scenes bubbling in my head for Adam and thought it would be kind of fun to play around in a different universe for a day. I do plan on finishing up the Hearts Beautiful Lie/Adam Last series that i've been bloggin intermittently for the last three years now... probably will start back up when I finish the book (crossing your fingers i'm looking at mid-march, unless I have to find a job before then:)
Thanks for reading Fn'S:)
no subject
on 2008-02-20 06:46 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2008-02-21 05:02 am (UTC)