[Metanoia Fanfiction] Lessons Learned [Sample]

[Litrouke]

Hey all. This is inspired by Metanoia. It's a webcomic/fandom of amazing amazingness, 'nuff said.

MORE IMPORTANTLY. I'm posting this excerpt as a sample for my writing shop called Orchids. Thus, you can comment on this piece if you want, but that's not my main motive for tossing this out here.

(And yes, the main character's name is Star. Laugh all you want. xD)

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Aiming point blank, Star blew the lock out. The sudden bang ricocheted in the room as if amplified by the darkness. He slammed into the door, full body, and it gave way, dumping him into the hall. He managed to keep his feet under him and steady himself before taking a tentative, shuffling step to the right – toward the front door, he believed, but of course the hall was as black as the room. Gun in his right hand, Star ventured another step while digging in his coat pocket for a flashlight. But this third step found a distinct lack of solid ground under him; Star managed a “shi–“ before the floor slipped out from under his other foot and pitched him forward into the darkness. He leaned into the fall, tumbling forward in a mid-air somersault, head ducked.

The drop wasn’t long – Star slammed into jagged stone a half second later, landing on his back with a loud grunt. He skidded down a couple steps, then regained his senses enough to reach out and scrabble for a hold, fingers sliding on the stone. The descent slowed, and then came to a halt, his body sprawled over the stone stairs like a modern Prometheus. He could feel cold against his back; the impact must have torn his jacket and shirt, which meant he was bleeding and possibly imbedded with pebbles.

He sat up, groaning, and slowly checked himself over, trying to avoid stretching the fresh wounds. He still had his gun – very important – and most of his clothes. But the abrasions on his back were definitely bleeding, along with some on his elbows and forearms. From the electric zing of pain shooting up his left arm, he figured that he’d also slammed his funny bone against a stair on the way down.

“Spectacular,” he muttered and took a deep breath to make sure his lungs had survived. A creaking sound drifted down from somewhere above him, and he felt the whoosh of air that accompanied a door slamming shut. So he was locked in. Double spectacular.

Star rose to his feet cautiously, giving his head time to balance. He slid his hand back into his pocket, found the flashlight at last, and pulled it out. More or less recovered, he began the trek down the steps, flashlight barely bright enough to illuminate a full step. He trudged forward for some time – at least twenty minutes, he guessed – amusing himself with various methods of torture and death for the backstabbing German. Brauer had no idea what he’d gotten himself into.

At some point, Star realized that he could almost make out the full length of each step, even as the faint yellow circle from the flashlight had faded. There was another source of light – very dim, but definitely present. The knowledge invigorated his legs and Star hurried forward, almost tripping down the stairs in his haste.

The light grew steadily, along with two other sensations. The temperature rose, air thickening in the small passageway and drawing sweat from his body; this warmth carried with it an unusual odor. Star wrinkled his nose at the bitter, rank stench, but rushed on regardless. He thought he recognized the smell somewhat, but identifying an odor really wasn’t at the top of his mental list right now.

A flight later, the increasing heat forced him to pause and struggle out of his sweaty, tattered jacket. He pulled his hair up and bound it into a higher ponytail, trying to keep it off his sweltering neck. Between the strengthening odor and the stifling heat, Star joked grimly that he must be strolling into Hell. Not inconceivable, really, but he always imagined that the journey to be a little more dramatic than this.

Regardless of the destination, he had arrived. The stairwell curved away to his left, but Star could see the glow emanating from just beyond the turn. He clicked off the flashlight, jammed it back into his pocket, adjusted his sweaty grip on the gun, and entered the underworld.

The stench hit him like a tidal wave of puke and blood and rotting meat – Star actually staggered back a step, coughing and hacking. Quickly, he tied his jacket around his mouth and nose, taking a deep breath of humid cotton to clear his head. He coughed again, clearing his throat, before taking in his surroundings. Immediately, he wished he had given his stomach more time to recover from the stink.

The stairs had flattened into the entrance of a ballroom-sized area flooded with light. Heat lamps beat down on carefully arrayed tables, the displays sitting in immaculately spaced rows across the room. The tables held the evident cause of the stench: bodies, both animal and human, chunks of unidentifiable flesh, and dried-out bones were scattered across the tabletops like the forgotten leftovers of a massive cannibalistic feast. Closest to the door lay a pair of what he thought might have been legs at one time. The heat from the lamps had cultivated massive globs of black-brown decay in the flesh; the rot wormed through the legs like leprosy, mottling the skin and providing a meal for eager maggots. Most of the displays were at this stage – steadily decomposing, with putrid pieces fallen through to leave glimpses of stark white bone.

“…’s f--king sick,” Star whispered, the impromptu gag catching his words. The tables sat low enough that Star could see all the way across the room: nothing but skeletons and carcasses melting in the heat… And a door.

Star beelined for the exit, trying not to look to the sides. Yeah, he killed people, yeah, sometimes he tortured them, and of course, he had seen plenty of corpses. But this – this wasn’t natural death. This wasn’t something that should be seen by anyone but maggots and God. (He wasn’t sure if maggots had eyes, and he wasn’t sure God gave a sh-t, so even that list narrowed pretty quickly.) Thankfully, his jacket filtered most of the stink or he might’ve puked halfway through the place. Even his skin felt sick and slimy from being in contact with the same muggy air as the decomposing bodies.

He hit the door half-jogging and yanked it open, diving through to slam it shut behind him. Breathing hard, Star eased the jacket down to test the air in the new room. Clean. He pulled the cloth off and gasped, gulping in fresh air, and then turned to face his next obstacle.

Two doors presented themselves to him: identical, unmarked, solid metal doors. Rather than knobs, they had handles – push down, pull back, door opens. Perfect handles for booby traps; he had rigged many bombs over the years that launched once the handle had been sufficiently lowered. Let’s not have that happen today…

Star dropped his jacket and ruffled through the fabric, pulling out his rope and uncoiling the short length. Technically, it wasn’t rope but rather a specialized type of steel thread that held steady enough for Star to use. It weighed a whole helluvalot less than real rope, and worked just as well, so Star bought plenty of it.

He approached the left door and tied a knot around the handle, careful not to put any pressure on it as he worked. With the other end of the rope, he tied the same knot around the right handle. Holding the center of the thread, Star backed up slowly until it stretched taut. Keeping one hand steady on the rope, Star jammed his gun into the front of his pants and stretched backwards, pushing the door behind him open slightly. The stench of decay immediately swarmed into the smaller room, but Star sacrificed decent air for a quick escape route.

Prepared to flee if an explosion threatened, Star gambled and pulled the rope lower. The rope dragged the handles down simultaneously, and Star awaited the click or snap that would signal a triggered trap. He pulled it down farther, and the handles hit bottom, doors sliding open half an inch. Star took his hand off the door behind him and let it slide closed – evidently, he wasn’t going to need that escape. Once the pair of doors opened far enough so that their spinnels rested on the doorjamb and propped the doors open, Star let go of the rope and approached them.

Now, to decide. Without touching the left door, Star tugged on the thread to give himself a little glimpse into the room. Door One held anther spacious area, this one also well-lit but decorated with tall glass cabinets and shelves rather than rotting lumps. From a quick look, he thought the shelves held similar objects to the last room – body parts, mostly, and some strange substances Star didn’t want to dwell on.

He let Door One slide shut and repeated the procedure with Door Two. This one opened into a very different setting: no lights at all, but enough fluorescence spilled over Star’s shoulder that he could see the vague outline of another set of stairs winding away into the shadows.

Star closed the second door and untied the knot, then did the same with the other, weighing his options as he worked. Maybe he was just being lazy, or maybe he had a certain soft spot for being able to see, but regardless, he was definitely leaning towards the glass room. Besides, Star figured he had a better chance of finding Brauer by going the medical route – he couldn’t say precisely why that was true, but intuition pushed him that way.

“Left it is,” he concluded, coiling the rope and putting it away. Trusty gun back in his hand, Star pulled the left door open and stepped into the preservation chamber. Unlike Satan’s compost pile back yonder, this room was chilled. Star felt the sweat on his back and neck drying, and he shivered slightly, shrugging his jacket back on with a hiss as the fabric pressed against his open wounds.

Unfortunately, this room also contained more than low metal tables. The columns stood taller than Star and were crammed with specimens, effectively blocking his vision. As he passed through, he couldn’t help but look this time – body parts, of humans and many animals, as well as plants and what could possibly be stones. Another cabinet held only liquids, arranged in a splendid rainbow of colors, each identified by a label of tiny, scrawled letters that Star had to squint to read. Even then, he didn’t understand the words – German or Latin or Scientific Bullsh-t, he guessed.

One display in particular caught his eye. Five heads sat on a center shelf – human heads, hair and all, though they lacked eyeballs – each in a deep bowl. The bowls were filled partially with a fluid of dark magenta that looked like melted licorice, all thick and sticky. The first bowl nearly overflowed with liquid, the second less, and so on, with the last near empty. In concurrence with the amount of liquid, the faces of the dismembered heads changed shape and color. The fullest bowl appeared normal, but the last was shrunken like a Halloween apple, skin stretched so thin that Star could see the little bumps and ridges of jawbone through the latex-tight skin. Even more disturbing was the fact that the fifth head had taken on a dusky hue. Although Star hadn’t been in school for long, he remembered the famous capillary action experiment with a celery stalk: toss the stalk into a bowl of dyed red water and watch the whole celery turn red. That was the extent of his scientific learning, but Star was kinda sure the heads were doing the same thing.

“…goddamn,” Star summarized after nearly a minute of gawking, and then moved the hell on. He wandered for another ten minutes, distracted and disturbed by the things surrounding him – seven-fingered hands, beetles the size of his head split open like dissection frogs, a preserved skull apparently being melted down by acid. Eventually, Star got a hold of himself and reviewed the situation. He needed to: a) find Brauer, b) tear the German’s intestines out and strangle him with them, and c) find an exit. Goals in mind, Star squatted down and slid a small knife out of the bottom of his shoe. He didn’t have any breadcrumbs but he could leave a trail by carving notches into the German’s expensive cabinets. Using his Hanzel and Gretel technique to make his way through the maze, Star discovered a door only ten minutes later. Eager to get out of the room – and assuming Brauer wouldn’t endanger his own specimens with a lethal trap – he pushed it open, stepped through, and found himself in an airlock. The door opposite him led into an area with frosted windows and radioactive warnings plastered on every bottle. Not ready to gamble with nuclear warfare, Star ducked out of there and back into the preservation room.

“Let’s try this again…”

He must have saved a pile of babies or something before taking this mission, because karma seemed determined to help him out; another door showed up only a couple rows over. However, Star was starting to get very seriously sick of these damn doors. So, if only for sh-ts and giggles, he cocked his gun and blew out the lock on this one, ignoring that it wasn’t locked to begin with. And just because he felt like (destroying something) having a solid escape plan, Star shot out the hinges as well, making a fine racket – especially when he kicked the massive metal door and it crashed to the ground with a reverberating boom that shook the floor like a cannon blast.