Showdown in Gallows' Town
Sep. 19th, 2010 09:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jack_babalonAdam Last steps forward, hood thrown up and the shadow’s veil it casts over the top of his face ignites with the silver embers of a vast alien skyline. High above his head he bears a severed hand, whose necrotic gray skin flakes off in patches that flutter behind his stride. Within the petrified clutch of its brittle fingers, a red candle burns steadily with an ethereal green flame. Walking across a page-pure splash of white oblivion, Adam traverses through the grave of a long forgotten Sephiroth. Deep within the belly of a Kabalistic black-hole, with only the glow of the Hand of Glory to keep his memories from unraveling into the void, guided by the distant murmur of voices across that land without horizon’s measure.
Minute-months drag, with the muffled conversation growing no louder for his progress. A twelve month hour begins to gnaw at his resolve but soon chokes at the raw anger that fuels him. A small drop of eon trickles across his thoughts before he hears one of them say it… the magic words that will trigger his release:
“I am the song that my enemy sings!
And a key slips, clicks and unlocks the spell buried deep within Adam’s subconscious. His next step lands him along a busy intersection in the Terminus Sector of the Prototropolis. Around him phantoms flicker before dreaming pilgrims, their mute prophecies untranslatable and doomed to be forgotten upon their audiences’ waking. He walks through them indifferently, scattering their bodies into sudden fog bursts that reform instantly in his wake. He cuts down a side road, one that could be easily humbled by an alleyway, and it takes him directly to the Gallows’ Town district abandoned Brush Factory .
Adam pauses before a decrepit chain link fence standing a slouched vigil around the factory. A conspicuously new padlock binds the lone and rusted gate erect. Within, he counts five concentric rings emanating from the factory, through the courtyard and terminating directly behind the gate. The first a rounded trench whose bottom cannot be glimpsed. The second a moat of stagnant gray water. Next an undulating circuit of lapping flame, followed by a swirling gust of leaves trapped in a loop and finally… a shimmering white light that casts no shadow.
He hacks up a wad of spit from deep within the Vishuddha Chakra and catapults it towards the padlock. Upon contact it sizzles and evaporates into a wisp of violet-blue smoke.
Adam strokes the blond stubble of his chin thoughtfully. Crack of neck, left then right. Deep breath, slow and measured smooth. The thought currents stilled until only an unwavering reflection of awareness remains.
Keeping the Hand of Glory held aloft with his right hand, he covers his eyes with his left. Across the top of this blindfold, a crudely drawn red eyeball blinks and rotates around restlessly before focusing on the lock.
Eleven is his number and he whispers:
“ Thirty spokes are made one by holes in a hub/ By vacancies joining them for a wheel's use/ The use of clay in molding pitchers/ Comes from the hollow of its absence/ Doors, windows, in a house/ Are used for their emptiness/ Thus we are helped by what is not… to use what is.”
The lock pop and the gate creeks open with all the subtlety of a haunted house sound effect. Adam walks right on in, with the five rings not so much departing but ceasing to exist where he temporarily occupies it in his passage. When he arrives at the factory he walks straight through the brick walls…
…and steps directly within the consciousness of the one who spoke the incantation that liberated him. Frater Da’ath, to be specific, Perfected Knight of the Illuminated Dusk and agent of the Heart’s Beautiful Lie.
***
His vision hits in a vertiginous spin that leaves him staggering. Possession isn’t his strong suit, in fact outside a few practices tries with some random normies on the street, this is his first time ‘riding’. He focuses on his new center of balance and straightens up. Immediately he feels the five protection rings that bind the factory severing him from his connection with the Prototropolis he arrived by. The room whirl slows down to a claustrophobic spin as he begins to register three sets of eyes pinned on him.
On the left a kid. Baby faced, diminutive and similarly hoodied up. Standing center and ahead is a familiar looking woman. She’s zaftig in a form-fitting black vinyl bodysuit whose thighs and sleeves are lined with red talisman. Standing right is another woman in a white tank top and green camo pants. She’s panther lithe with a second skin of tribal weave tattoos flowing ceaselessly around hardened muscles.
Recognition comes slow, as his consciousness reboots across his hosts nervous system, before it hits him.
Kid’s Dent, a hired magickal gun working for the 13th Street Disciples. They’ve had a few run-ins before, with Dent itching for a fight each time. Adam figured the drama was all part of that unique occupational hazard amongst the occult set – where no two initiates could stand another’s presence for longer than a minute. At the moment Dent’s saying something, but it’s all a slowed down roar as Adam’s hearing adjusts to foriegn ears and his sudden emergence back into ‘real time’: “Wuh-sss-gooo-innn-ahh-‘n?”
Mistress Drown, an Alchematrix and old flame of Adam’s, answers as his senses catch up: “Heee’ssss here!”
Annie Kreist – representing the Terminus Riot Covens. She’s scanning the surrounding room and reaching for her piece holstered in the back of her camo pants: “Who?”
“Me!” Adam speaks with a voice that comes out too nasally and flavored with a slight aristocratic drawl that scratches at his own ears.
“Adam?” Drown blurts out in surprise as her two companions turn on her as one.
“Who else?” Adam composes himself and stretches out an awkwardly fitting smile towards the three.
Annie spins and drops to a crouch, Adam registering only a blur between her draw and the steady aim that drills directly between his eyes. Dent is slower, but only marginally so. He throws his hands out in front of him. Palms down as two balls of flame spark beneath his fingers and shape themselves into a pair of fiery 9 mms. Drown steps forward non-chalantly with a heavy sigh and uncoils from her hip a cat of nine tails whose knotted thongs of cotton cord slither through the air as if alive.
“Don’t even think about it people!” Adam peels back the Frater’s grin wide and stopping the three in their advance with obvious trepidation.
“Now, y’all know that while I’m behind the wheel…”, he sneers, tapping the side of his brow tauntingly, “… you can’t do jack shit to me. Least not without fucking up little Lord Fauntleroy here in return. Which, as you well know, would be a direct violation of the truce your boss has oh-so-carefully worked on over the last year. So unless you want to start a magickal war with the Nimbus Lodge you’ll quit flexing.”
The three exchange glances with each other, and then back at Adam/Da’ath, before Drown nods for him to go on.
“So here’s the deal.” Adam continues with growing confidence, “First, you surre…”
A crack of thunder drowns out the words as Drown’s whip slashes across the air to snap around the throat Adam was borrowing. The cords slither tighter and wide gray eyes bulge in fear and oxygen deprivation. With a shift in stance, Drown yanks the whip back and sends the possessed frater down to his knees.
“Naw, fuck that!” Dent growls and along with Annie Kreist steps up to level three sets of pistols on their asphyxiating target. “See we got a better deal. Boss wants you dead at all costs and offing the arrogant piece of shit you hiding in definitely counts as ‘all costs’”. With that Annie empties her clip into his chest first. Dent fires next - both barrels at the same time with both shots splashing across his target’s eyes before blowing the back of his skull out.
Drown’s whip slithers free of the corpse on its own accord, sending it to collapse unceremoniously against the floor.
Dent’s infernal pistols remain trained on the body, crackling and filling the air with the rancid bacon funk of burnt skin. Annie pops free the empty clip and clicks in a replacement.
Dent: “So… did we get this mother-fucker or what?”
Annie: “Well, Drown…?”
Drown: “I think so…”
Dent: “You’re gonna have to do better than - ’Think so’?”
Drown: “Yeah, okay here I you and normally sure… but ‘normally’ he shouldn’t have been able to pull something like this off in the first place. I mean to slip past our seals would take…”
Dent: “Yeah, ‘bout that… y’wanna tell me how he got in here? I mean, seeing as how you two used to be all intimate n’shit.”
Drown: “I don’t like what you’re implying, little boy…”
Dent: “I don’t give a shit what you like. When asshole here’s Lodge gets word of what we just did…”
Annie: “Shut up!”
Dent and Drown turn on her with feral rage.
“Look!” Annie points her chin to the body sprawled across the floor. There they focus in quick on a puddle of scorched blood seeping out of the dead frater’s skull. As it trickles out it seems to be spreading no further than a halo around the head before seeping inexplicably into the concrete floor. Annie reels back suddenly and feels a sharp nail drive into the center of her awareness. She can feel the first ring, the endless trench, seal up suddenly with earth before vanishing.
As the pain wave recedes from behind her eyes, she looks around and discovers that the room they’re in is suddenly covered - wall to wall, ceiling to floor - with a gallery of graffiti tags, mural creatures and wheat-pasted monsters. A stench of burnt aerosol fills the air and the tags begin to blaze under the luminescence of their myriad colors. The wild style letters flowing restlessly into new word combinations as the murals and wheat-paste jobs begin to come alive and struggle to free themselves from the brick wall.
Two tags directly in front of the lifeless mound of Da’ath– Atem & LAST - begin to bubble, merge, morph, melt and consolidate into an encircled five ring star that bursts into a incandescent glow of swirling violets and crimson. From out of the circle’s center a single green flame emerges. Then, slowly ghost rising out of the earth, the Hand of Glory clenched in a fist. Followed by an arm, a hood and the rest of Adam.
“Fine!” Adam snarls, “We’ll do it your way, then.”
“Aw, hell no…” Dent trains his pistols on Adam and opens fire. Twelve Hell Bullets screech across the scant distance between them.
Adam raises a hand and utters: NOPE.
The Hell Bullets explode inches from Adam’s face and in their aftermath twelve butterflies flutter away. Miles away, along a gray wall – the bombed ‘NOPE’ drains of all color before going completely transparent and vanishing from Terminus forever.
Adam’s picked up some new tricks since he’s been ‘gone’. His spells now can be counted across the thousand tags scrawled across the city. His grimorie written all over their walls. Every time he uses one though the tag is dispersed into nothingness.
Drown lashes out with her whip around whose spreading arc a blue snake, with large orange wings appears and whose razor tips slash through Adam’s magickal circle to wrap around the wrist he threw up instinctively. She goes to hank him out with a tug but Adam turns around and barks – SEVER!
And with a burst of black mana the whip is cut in half. The nine lashes of the tail wiggling helplessly and squirming out of the burn of Adam's circle.
Annie figures her odds are better served by a more mundane approach.
She discharges three shots for Adam’s face. The bullets hit a breath away from Adam and in that moment become mere paint splotches against an invisible surface. The paint drips down the unseen shell of Adam’s circle to form a wild style – ‘MISSED’ – before evaporating. She shifts her aim and goes to try again but not before Adam shouts – MORPH - and suddenly Annie realizes she’s holding a yellow plastic water pistol.
“Okay…” Adam steps forward as his magical circle, (with bubble lettered glyphs and wild style sigils flowing throughout its perimeter), follows him in perfect synch so he never ventures outside of it, “my turn.”
END PART 1
Minute-months drag, with the muffled conversation growing no louder for his progress. A twelve month hour begins to gnaw at his resolve but soon chokes at the raw anger that fuels him. A small drop of eon trickles across his thoughts before he hears one of them say it… the magic words that will trigger his release:
And a key slips, clicks and unlocks the spell buried deep within Adam’s subconscious. His next step lands him along a busy intersection in the Terminus Sector of the Prototropolis. Around him phantoms flicker before dreaming pilgrims, their mute prophecies untranslatable and doomed to be forgotten upon their audiences’ waking. He walks through them indifferently, scattering their bodies into sudden fog bursts that reform instantly in his wake. He cuts down a side road, one that could be easily humbled by an alleyway, and it takes him directly to the Gallows’ Town district abandoned Brush Factory .
Adam pauses before a decrepit chain link fence standing a slouched vigil around the factory. A conspicuously new padlock binds the lone and rusted gate erect. Within, he counts five concentric rings emanating from the factory, through the courtyard and terminating directly behind the gate. The first a rounded trench whose bottom cannot be glimpsed. The second a moat of stagnant gray water. Next an undulating circuit of lapping flame, followed by a swirling gust of leaves trapped in a loop and finally… a shimmering white light that casts no shadow.
He hacks up a wad of spit from deep within the Vishuddha Chakra and catapults it towards the padlock. Upon contact it sizzles and evaporates into a wisp of violet-blue smoke.
Adam strokes the blond stubble of his chin thoughtfully. Crack of neck, left then right. Deep breath, slow and measured smooth. The thought currents stilled until only an unwavering reflection of awareness remains.
Keeping the Hand of Glory held aloft with his right hand, he covers his eyes with his left. Across the top of this blindfold, a crudely drawn red eyeball blinks and rotates around restlessly before focusing on the lock.
Eleven is his number and he whispers:
“ Thirty spokes are made one by holes in a hub/ By vacancies joining them for a wheel's use/ The use of clay in molding pitchers/ Comes from the hollow of its absence/ Doors, windows, in a house/ Are used for their emptiness/ Thus we are helped by what is not… to use what is.”
The lock pop and the gate creeks open with all the subtlety of a haunted house sound effect. Adam walks right on in, with the five rings not so much departing but ceasing to exist where he temporarily occupies it in his passage. When he arrives at the factory he walks straight through the brick walls…
…and steps directly within the consciousness of the one who spoke the incantation that liberated him. Frater Da’ath, to be specific, Perfected Knight of the Illuminated Dusk and agent of the Heart’s Beautiful Lie.
His vision hits in a vertiginous spin that leaves him staggering. Possession isn’t his strong suit, in fact outside a few practices tries with some random normies on the street, this is his first time ‘riding’. He focuses on his new center of balance and straightens up. Immediately he feels the five protection rings that bind the factory severing him from his connection with the Prototropolis he arrived by. The room whirl slows down to a claustrophobic spin as he begins to register three sets of eyes pinned on him.
On the left a kid. Baby faced, diminutive and similarly hoodied up. Standing center and ahead is a familiar looking woman. She’s zaftig in a form-fitting black vinyl bodysuit whose thighs and sleeves are lined with red talisman. Standing right is another woman in a white tank top and green camo pants. She’s panther lithe with a second skin of tribal weave tattoos flowing ceaselessly around hardened muscles.
Recognition comes slow, as his consciousness reboots across his hosts nervous system, before it hits him.
Kid’s Dent, a hired magickal gun working for the 13th Street Disciples. They’ve had a few run-ins before, with Dent itching for a fight each time. Adam figured the drama was all part of that unique occupational hazard amongst the occult set – where no two initiates could stand another’s presence for longer than a minute. At the moment Dent’s saying something, but it’s all a slowed down roar as Adam’s hearing adjusts to foriegn ears and his sudden emergence back into ‘real time’: “Wuh-sss-gooo-innn-ahh-‘n?”
Mistress Drown, an Alchematrix and old flame of Adam’s, answers as his senses catch up: “Heee’ssss here!”
Annie Kreist – representing the Terminus Riot Covens. She’s scanning the surrounding room and reaching for her piece holstered in the back of her camo pants: “Who?”
“Me!” Adam speaks with a voice that comes out too nasally and flavored with a slight aristocratic drawl that scratches at his own ears.
“Adam?” Drown blurts out in surprise as her two companions turn on her as one.
“Who else?” Adam composes himself and stretches out an awkwardly fitting smile towards the three.
Annie spins and drops to a crouch, Adam registering only a blur between her draw and the steady aim that drills directly between his eyes. Dent is slower, but only marginally so. He throws his hands out in front of him. Palms down as two balls of flame spark beneath his fingers and shape themselves into a pair of fiery 9 mms. Drown steps forward non-chalantly with a heavy sigh and uncoils from her hip a cat of nine tails whose knotted thongs of cotton cord slither through the air as if alive.
“Don’t even think about it people!” Adam peels back the Frater’s grin wide and stopping the three in their advance with obvious trepidation.
“Now, y’all know that while I’m behind the wheel…”, he sneers, tapping the side of his brow tauntingly, “… you can’t do jack shit to me. Least not without fucking up little Lord Fauntleroy here in return. Which, as you well know, would be a direct violation of the truce your boss has oh-so-carefully worked on over the last year. So unless you want to start a magickal war with the Nimbus Lodge you’ll quit flexing.”
The three exchange glances with each other, and then back at Adam/Da’ath, before Drown nods for him to go on.
“So here’s the deal.” Adam continues with growing confidence, “First, you surre…”
A crack of thunder drowns out the words as Drown’s whip slashes across the air to snap around the throat Adam was borrowing. The cords slither tighter and wide gray eyes bulge in fear and oxygen deprivation. With a shift in stance, Drown yanks the whip back and sends the possessed frater down to his knees.
“Naw, fuck that!” Dent growls and along with Annie Kreist steps up to level three sets of pistols on their asphyxiating target. “See we got a better deal. Boss wants you dead at all costs and offing the arrogant piece of shit you hiding in definitely counts as ‘all costs’”. With that Annie empties her clip into his chest first. Dent fires next - both barrels at the same time with both shots splashing across his target’s eyes before blowing the back of his skull out.
Drown’s whip slithers free of the corpse on its own accord, sending it to collapse unceremoniously against the floor.
Dent’s infernal pistols remain trained on the body, crackling and filling the air with the rancid bacon funk of burnt skin. Annie pops free the empty clip and clicks in a replacement.
Dent: “So… did we get this mother-fucker or what?”
Annie: “Well, Drown…?”
Drown: “I think so…”
Dent: “You’re gonna have to do better than - ’Think so’?”
Drown: “Yeah, okay here I you and normally sure… but ‘normally’ he shouldn’t have been able to pull something like this off in the first place. I mean to slip past our seals would take…”
Dent: “Yeah, ‘bout that… y’wanna tell me how he got in here? I mean, seeing as how you two used to be all intimate n’shit.”
Drown: “I don’t like what you’re implying, little boy…”
Dent: “I don’t give a shit what you like. When asshole here’s Lodge gets word of what we just did…”
Annie: “Shut up!”
Dent and Drown turn on her with feral rage.
“Look!” Annie points her chin to the body sprawled across the floor. There they focus in quick on a puddle of scorched blood seeping out of the dead frater’s skull. As it trickles out it seems to be spreading no further than a halo around the head before seeping inexplicably into the concrete floor. Annie reels back suddenly and feels a sharp nail drive into the center of her awareness. She can feel the first ring, the endless trench, seal up suddenly with earth before vanishing.
As the pain wave recedes from behind her eyes, she looks around and discovers that the room they’re in is suddenly covered - wall to wall, ceiling to floor - with a gallery of graffiti tags, mural creatures and wheat-pasted monsters. A stench of burnt aerosol fills the air and the tags begin to blaze under the luminescence of their myriad colors. The wild style letters flowing restlessly into new word combinations as the murals and wheat-paste jobs begin to come alive and struggle to free themselves from the brick wall.
Two tags directly in front of the lifeless mound of Da’ath– Atem & LAST - begin to bubble, merge, morph, melt and consolidate into an encircled five ring star that bursts into a incandescent glow of swirling violets and crimson. From out of the circle’s center a single green flame emerges. Then, slowly ghost rising out of the earth, the Hand of Glory clenched in a fist. Followed by an arm, a hood and the rest of Adam.
“Fine!” Adam snarls, “We’ll do it your way, then.”
“Aw, hell no…” Dent trains his pistols on Adam and opens fire. Twelve Hell Bullets screech across the scant distance between them.
Adam raises a hand and utters: NOPE.
The Hell Bullets explode inches from Adam’s face and in their aftermath twelve butterflies flutter away. Miles away, along a gray wall – the bombed ‘NOPE’ drains of all color before going completely transparent and vanishing from Terminus forever.
Adam’s picked up some new tricks since he’s been ‘gone’. His spells now can be counted across the thousand tags scrawled across the city. His grimorie written all over their walls. Every time he uses one though the tag is dispersed into nothingness.
Drown lashes out with her whip around whose spreading arc a blue snake, with large orange wings appears and whose razor tips slash through Adam’s magickal circle to wrap around the wrist he threw up instinctively. She goes to hank him out with a tug but Adam turns around and barks – SEVER!
And with a burst of black mana the whip is cut in half. The nine lashes of the tail wiggling helplessly and squirming out of the burn of Adam's circle.
Annie figures her odds are better served by a more mundane approach.
She discharges three shots for Adam’s face. The bullets hit a breath away from Adam and in that moment become mere paint splotches against an invisible surface. The paint drips down the unseen shell of Adam’s circle to form a wild style – ‘MISSED’ – before evaporating. She shifts her aim and goes to try again but not before Adam shouts – MORPH - and suddenly Annie realizes she’s holding a yellow plastic water pistol.
“Okay…” Adam steps forward as his magical circle, (with bubble lettered glyphs and wild style sigils flowing throughout its perimeter), follows him in perfect synch so he never ventures outside of it, “my turn.”
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no subject
on 2010-09-20 04:00 am (UTC)no subject
on 2010-09-20 05:59 pm (UTC)Stay tuned... :)