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 Posted: Sat May 03, 2014 6:22 am
It occurred to him dimly that perhaps there was something truly, truly ******** wrong with him that his reaction to the sudden change in scenery, however minor, however ominous, was relief. Fiona offered up a dry, tense comment that he barely registered, swept away by the sudden sensation of being touched. Being touched had long since started feeling like a violation even from warm and friendly human hands. He bit down on the inside of his mouth, cringing, tense, and too afraid to turn around and see what it was that asked him the question. He paused, moved by caution to actually consider the question, but there was not much to consider and he remembered Graham Peasley asking him this question over a spartan breakfast table, when it had made no sense at all. "Let me be sure: are you," he asked, his own voice rough and rasping and quiet and shaking, "opening negotiations?"
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Posted: Sat May 03, 2014 6:40 am
She laughed, a dry ripple like pages in the wind. " I will end you. I will end your line. I will destroy those of the blood until none remain, not sire nor spawn. I hear the patter of little feet in your heart." The fingers drummed a gentle tattoo against his back, "You may buy yourself time, you have so little left."
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Posted: Sat May 03, 2014 6:46 am
The shaking spread from his hands and his voice to the rest of him, a brittle, weak sort of tremble that suggested his legs at any moment might give out, and he hadn't thought he'd had any tears left but he proved himself wrong, silently, as ever, until he spoke and the break in his voice was obvious. "I will not," he said, "trade someone else's life for my time. I will," he added, and his voice cracked, "trade mine for hers. A dozen times over."
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Posted: Sat May 03, 2014 6:55 am
Nails like claws danced across his bones, and a sing-song voice replied, "Let us begin." The hands turned to fluttering wings as the ground gave out beneath him, dropping the man into water. The last thing he would hear would be a rasping laugh of a question, "How many lives are worth hers?"
And on the third day, Taym drowned.
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Posted: Sat May 03, 2014 7:15 am
There was no reason to believe that a thing like her was capable of or reliable for upholding any kind of trade or bargain. He had no reason to believe that personal sacrifice could ever remove her from danger, when all he'd wanted to do, all he'd ever wanted to do, was to keep her safe. But there was equally no reason to believe that he had any other options. He was helpless, adrift, and the only bargaining chip he had was his own suffering, and he'd use it even if the game was rigged, and he was sure that it was. His first thought was one of perverse relief: water, finally, water. It made him laugh, choke. People don't drown like they do in movies, thrashing and screaming: people tend to drown silently, filling up their lungs with water and going still and heavy, and this he did. He thought he perceived, through the hallucinatory haze, a pair of translucent golden hands, long and slender with wrists bound in jewelry, closing over his own.
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Posted: Sat May 03, 2014 7:24 am
The man's hands caught and tangled in thick vines that crept up the sides of the well. With effort and will he could use them to climb out. With ease they could snare him and keep him under until his continued survival was no longer in question.
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Posted: Sat May 03, 2014 7:39 am
Time dilated as it always did in moments near death, and he considered, slowly and thoughtfully in the space of a heartbeat, the question of whether climbing out would be considered cheating. He did not trust his captor to behave honorably, but he held on to a tiny fragment of hope that by doing so himself maybe he could karmically force some sort of binding agreement. And more than that: he did not want to die. He'd thought he had, repeatedly: he'd convinced himself of it over and over. But more than that, he did not want her to die and selfishly, terribly, horribly, he realized that if she was going to that he did not want to be alive to know about it. Fiona urged him, begged him, pleaded, cursed, and raged in righteous fury in the buzzing confines of his skull, and he apologized again and again. He'd read that suicide by drowning was nearly impossible, because the body's urge to breathe would override attempts to keep one's face under the water. It was advisable, the book had drily continued, to find some mechanical means, a weight, an anchor, a snare, to keep from surfacing. I'm sorry, he thought, as the phantasm hands flickered out of the delirium amidst Fiona's resigned defeat. I'm sorry. I'm sorry.
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Posted: Sat May 03, 2014 7:53 am
The vines wrapped tightly around him, and were he not drowning already, surely he'd choke to death under the pressure of it. The pain only grew worse as they began to pull him up and up again, like a fish caught in a net. Remaining conscious would have been difficult for even a healthy man at this point, so perhaps Taym didn't see his own features staring vacantly down at him as he was hauled onto dry, hard ground. But he would most assuredly see several such faces upon waking.
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Posted: Sat May 03, 2014 8:04 am
The first thing he did, before he even reacted to the bizarre sight, was to run his thumb along the smooth curve of Fiona's ring. She was not speaking to him. He stared just as vacantly at his dopplegangers as they stared at him, hollow, emotionless, before he rolled over to vomit water through a throat screaming in protest, with the dim and giddy thought of make sure they sleep on their sides, don't want them choking to death if they throw up as he lay weakly in it afterwards. He watched the strange reflections of himself while he breathed as deeply as he was able, altogether more concerned with measuring each inhale and exhale than with registering what it was he was seeing.
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Posted: Sat May 03, 2014 8:12 am
The doppelgangers stared, still partially blind, until, as one, they suddenly lifted their heads and began loping back into the darkness of the cave's ever shifting labyrinth. The well room was of unremarkable size, lit by the sulfurous glow of hundreds of slug-like creatures that scaled the well's interior. There were exits, clearly labeled in the language of the Clans.
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Posted: Sat May 03, 2014 8:40 am
He watched them go with a dull horror far removed from any actual feeling, and for a long few moments he simply laid on the ground, dripping and disgusted and weak. When Fiona finally, finally spoke, it was with firmness, a command that instinctively had him moving: Move.It took him three tries to get his feet, the second resulting in a fumble that barked his knees, but he managed to half-walk, half-crawl through the sickly light towards the exits, labeled in marks he could not understand. His head was full of smoke and debris; he tried to decipher them, tried to remember anything he'd read, but nothing came, and so he selected one more or less at random, hobbling weakly. Fiona was as strong as he was fragile: Move, she demanded, and his body obeyed against his will. He was unable to move stealthily as was his wont, his graceful tomcat slink stolen away and replaced by a broken automaton motion, the stilted movements of a half-crippled spider punctuated by frequent stumbles that knocked the wind out of him and this, this he could not tolerate: at every gasping breath he was shut down once again and helpless until his weapon's imperious, disgusted commands pushed him to his feet again.
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Posted: Mon May 05, 2014 8:35 pm
rejam Roll 1d10 as often as you wish. 1: A doppelganger handles crouches on the ground, face lit by the dim glow of Taym's phone, expression dull and confused as it examines the device. (Roll 1d4 to retrieve it, 3-4 is success) 2: A cavern, dimly lit by mutated fireflies, filled with odds and ends. The tell tale white coats are piled here, along with clothes, shoes, and other items that were once carried by those unfortunate enough to be caught here. 3: He returns to the well room. 4: He enters a beautiful orchard, ripe with fruit, a large fountain sits at the center. 5. The room filled with body parts, its neat mounds ruined. Carrion is scattered across the floor. 6. A room filled with dried plants and scrolls. 7. A room covered in carvings. bobbing lights from various insects illuminate the walls and pillars to reveal the story of the last Famine Queen. 8. A room covered with vines and red flowers. 9. A room from which large, sticky cocoons hang suspended from the ceiling. 10. A doorway that opens to sky and desert.
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Rejam rolled 1 10-sided dice:
6
Total: 6 (1-10)
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Posted: Mon May 05, 2014 9:05 pm
He first hobbled, then limped, and finally managed something that was almost an actual walk, broken up by frequent terrified pauses, his shoulders hunched and his eyes closed while he waited for long bony fingers to find their way up his bare spine. He engaged in a brief argument with Fiona about the virtues of moving--he longed to lie down now that the floor wasn't teeming with insects, to sleep and to hell with what picked him up, to hell with what decided to kill him while he was out--and she won.
At the first turning that was not too dark or too ominous to consider he found himself in what he imagined must be a sort of museum of natural history, or library: he was too afraid to touch anything, but he examined what scrolls he could without disturbing them, wrestling the cloud of cotton between himself and his thoughts in an attempt to memorize what he could, out of habit. It was not, he thought dully, as though he'd ever be in a position to relay what scanty information he found.
His knees buckled as he turned to go and he begged her: let me sleep, he pleaded. Please. Let me rest. But she did not need to offer up an argument, because what he glimpsed around the next turning had his immediate attention.
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Rejam rolled 1 10-sided dice:
1
Total: 1 (1-10)
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Posted: Mon May 05, 2014 9:05 pm
Another shadow-Taym: another fetch, crouched with a puzzled expression over the beacon-glow of the phone screen, and for the moment oblivious. He adopted a stealthy movement instinctively and without trouble, aches and gnawing hunger and exhaustion temporarily suspended in favor of a sudden and concrete goal.
Maybe he would never again turn away disgusted from his own reflection, if he ever had the chance. The strange gauntness of his own body seemed exaggerated, a product of the creature's falseness and not of its accuracy, but he knew with creeping horror that he was seeing a true facsimile, and for a moment he paused and he ran his shaking hand over the jut of his own ribcage while he stared. The creature's eyes were as brightly curious and patently stupid as a bird's and it was the disgust of this that finally displaced his wretched fascination with the distorted contours of his own body: unreal angles wrought by militant self-deprivation and an inability to cope with a lack of vice. He wondered, in a hazy instant between stillness and motion, how it was that America had managed to tamp down the revulsion that he felt was inevitable, confronted with what he was seeing even in the absence of those wild-animal eyes. He'd not let her touch him almost anywhere. He regretted, dully and without grief, letting her touch him at all.
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Rejam rolled 1 4-sided dice:
3
Total: 3 (1-4)
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Posted: Mon May 05, 2014 9:06 pm
Fiona's restless, demanding urging stirred him out of his reverie and he summoned her to hand and in the same instant lunged. The knife swept, disappointingly, through empty air as the creature scuttled away, dropping the phone as it vanished into the dim labyrinth.
He very nearly gave chase, but when he stooped to retrieve his spoils his knees refused any further action, and he scraped them raw once again as he fell to them and clutched the phone, rocking back and forth silently. He had no idea how it was still working, but the screen was lit, and he checked the date, checked the time--too little time had passed, far too little--and checked a final time for the last picture America had sent him, burned as it already was on the inside of his eyelids. And then, calmly and without emotion, he turned it off. To save the battery. To save it for later.
Clutching it in his hand until his trembling knuckles were white with the effort, he hauled himself painfully back to his feet after a single begging request to Fiona to please, please let him rest that she met with adamant, barking refusal.
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