"Hey, La Forge, hold on," Chester said. He tugged on his left hand and pulled out a section of wire. He used his still-connected hand to hold the dangling one out in front of Leonard, near the hand the other man wasn't trying to touch the door with. "Take it. Shit goes south, we'll have one hell of a game of tug-o-war on our hands, but it'll hopefully be enough to pull you out."
It took a short while before Leonard understood it was he that was being addressed. That was a strange nickname he had been given...he would have to ask Chester about it if he survived. He smiled at the outstretched helping hand, and accepted it gratefully. It was a big comfort.
"Thank you."
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The Wordnomnom
Typhoid loped down the hall and moved to position himself near Chester.
"I once heard that in the DMZ in Korea you have to wear a rope or you might get grabbed by Northern soldiers and dragged into the other country. No idea if it was real or not, but I dont want aliens getting any member of our group."
He paused.
"Im telling you this so you know, im going to be yanking your old ass back if he gets grabbed because I dont think you have the weight to pull against one of those big lizards. Maybe two of us could outmuscle one, though."
edited 18th Aug '12 9:22:27 PM by Stormthorn
While the breath's in his mouth, he must bear without fail, / In the Name of the Empress, the Overland Mail.
Wait, he isn't dead! Shia Surprise!
The very instant that Shanna stepped into the spiral’s blue light, she would feel as though she had entered a stream of cool water, like a waterfall that seemed to flow upwards. After a few moments she began to rise into the air as though she weighed nothing at all, riding the spiral from the floor all the way to the chamber’s distant roof, and here she would be able to see the apparent source of the luminous helix—a translucent, circular blue membrane at least eight feet in diameter. She did not stop upon reaching the roof, however, and Shanna continued to rise as though whatever antigravity at work was attempting to force her through this gel-like substance; it resisted her for a moment or two as she came into contact with it, but then the membrane parted around her and she was through.
The Aknoss had not followed Shanna despite her invitation, instead opting to remain where it was and calmly watch as the abductee rose into the air and left the chamber. Once she had passed through the membrane and vanished from sight, a process which took only a few seconds from start to finish, the reptilian giant turned and made its way towards the last of the unopened pods; dropping into a sitting crouch next to the opaque tube and placing its long arms on the receptacle in order to support itself, the alien pressed the side of its head to the glass as though it were listening to something.
Above, Shanna would find herself in a squat, cylindrical room that was much smaller than the dark chamber she had just vacated; numerous vertical ridges like the ribs of some giant beast adorned the rough grey walls, and on the ceiling the circle-and-arrow symbol that adorned her jumpsuit was embossed like a faintly-glowing mural. She now stood upon the membrane, which now seemed just as solid and unyielding as the cool grey flooring which surrounded it; it supported her weight easily, and there did not appear to be any danger of it suddenly giving out beneath her feet.
Directly across from her was an immense circular opening that measured ten feet in diameter and stretched from the ceiling to the floor; it was ringed by a series of twelve circular lights, eleven of which glowed a pastel blue while the last was instead a harsh red. White light filled this doorway, making it impossible to see exactly what lay beyond it. Someone—a red-headed woman clad in an organic-looking blue suit very much like the one Shanna wore*—had been making her way to this doorway even as Shanna herself rose up through the membrane in the floor; she stepped into the white light and immediately disappeared from view.
Leonard’s finger met no resistance as he reached out to the door; he would find that its surface was cool to the touch and a little damp, like a rock that had been plucked from a stream and had not had a chance to dry out just yet. The great slab did not open at his touch, however; instead, a sound not unlike a particularly low-pitched slide whistle going from its lowest note to its highest seemed to emanate from the door’s surface. This ascending whistle was immediately followed by a descending one, and then the sounds began to repeat this cycle like some sort of rather whimsical klaxon.
At the same time, were he in his infrared vision mode Leonard would notice that the tiny, shallow alcoves on either side of this door had suddenly begun to heat up, and those present would catch a faint whiff of ozone as tiny forks of electricity began to crackle within these waist-high cubbyholes. This strange electrical display lasted for only a second, and when it had died down the abductees would find that three of these alcoves were no longer empty; oily, amorphous globs of some grey material had simply appeared as if from thin air, basketball-sized things that rippled and throbbed gently in ways that might resemble the behaviour of ferrofluid. To Leonard’s eyes, these strange blobs would appear cooler than his fellow abductees but warmer than the surrounding environment, and with his x-ray vision he might see that inside these blobs were just as chaotic as on the surface; shapes and objects that might have been organs, bones or musculature formed, dissolved into nothing and formed again completely at random, as though whatever these strange entities were could not decide on how their internal anatomy should be laid out.
The three blobs slowly slid out of their alcoves, oozing across the floor like slugs and leaving trails of the same gooey grey substance in their wakes; this residue seemed to have a mind of its own, for after lying on the ground for a few seconds the oldest parts of the trail would suddenly break up into tiny rivulets and flow back into the blob which had left it in the first place. They took up a loose triangular formation around Leonard, Typhoid and Chester and then sat there, their surfaces rippling through a variety of peculiar shapes and patterns without rhyme or reason.
The Danse Macabre Codex
The Maid
"W-What are those things?" asked Elena as she looked at the strange grey blobs moving towards Leonard, Typhoid and Chester, relieved not to have those things trying to surround her. She had enough with catching the giant lizard's attention.
She wondered what would those things do... If they only had some tool to poke them with...
If I'm sure of something it's that I'm not sure of anything.
The Man in Black
A person! That must have been what the aknoss was talking about. As soon as she could pull herself out of the "elevator" like a swimmer emerging from the pool, she called out, "Hey, wait!" and ran toward the door, following the woman through it just after she'd vanished.
"Your mission is not to nuke the squid god." —Faramir
The Wordnomnom
Typhoid took a quick step towards the bloblings and tore away a strip of the material of his nanocloak, shuddering as more poured from his back to take its place.
"They flow like this stuff. Lets see if they are related."
With a gentle underhand motion he tossed the cloak strip at one of the blobs.
While the breath's in his mouth, he must bear without fail, / In the Name of the Empress, the Overland Mail.
Crazed Lawrencian
"I have no idea, but we need to figure out what they can do, what they can sense."
—Guy padded into the room as quietly as he could, watching the monochrome blobs carefully. He couldn't be sure if these things were animals, aliens, or machines yet. He chose one away from Typhoid, standing behind it. The bulky man put his fingers to his lips, and gave a shrill, piercing whistle. —
Proud member of the IAA What's the point of being grown up if you can't act childish?
Wait, he isn't dead! Shia Surprise!
The strip of nanomaterial landed on the floor before the blob facing Typhoid with a slightly wet plopping sound, and the amorphous entity slid a few inches towards it with what seemed like a mixture of caution and curiosity. Slowly, it extruded several dripping grey tendrils from its centre of mass and reached out for the cloak piece, gingerly picking it up and turning it over as if to see what it was. After a moment the gummy material suddenly broke apart into several chunks, and those tendrils swelled briefly with a faint slurping noise as the blob's appendages seemed to drink up the chunks like a bunch of straws; after it did this, the blob itself seemed to expand somewhat.
At the same time, Guy let out his piercing whistle, and the blob that he now stood behind—the one before Chester—froze up into a single shape. It had become a spiralling cone, shaped vaguely like some sort of seashell, and dozens of tiny little spikes which pointed outward had formed along its ridges; these quivered faintly to the frequency of Guy's whistle, and several of them extended towards the inhumanly muscular South Carolinian as if to poke and prod him for making that sound.
Finally, the blob in front of Leonard began to bubble and throb, and to the eyes of the frail twenty-seven year old it was clear that this...whatever it was...was going through a major change. Bones, muscles and tiny organs were taking shape beneath the surface of that oily organism, no longer at random but with a clear plan in mind; in a matter of seconds its interior had become like the anatomy of a human child, simplified and streamlined so that only the most essential components were there and everything else was either underdeveloped or missing altogether. It had become a tiny figure, barely as tall as Leonard's waist, with an elliptical 'head' the size of a football and a body so frail and thin that it should not have been able to support its weight; it had no fingers or toes to speak of, and its eyes, ears, mouth, nose and any other sensory organs that such a creature should have had were similarly absent; yet it seemed to perceive him nonetheless, for that oddly-shaped head had tilted back as though it were looking up at Leonard's face.
Further back, Madeline spun on her heels in shock as an unfamiliar voice called out to her. As she laid eyes on this pale, blonde-haired woman and the slitted folds on her face and arms, the red-headed single mother could not keep the surprise from her face.
"Where did you come from? We thought there was nobody else down there! And how did you get past that lizard thing? Are you all right?"
She knew that she was babbling, but she couldn't help it; the presence of this other abductee had thrown her for quite a loop, to put it mildly.
The Danse Macabre Codex
Leonard studied the door after he'd touched it, concern plain on his face. Had he activated some kind of alarm? It was Elena who brought her attention to the blobs behind him, and when he saw them he reeled back in shock.
More monsters! His eyes were telling him things that he couldn't entirely understand, but he could see plain as day as one of them tried to assume a humanoid form by creating an internal skeleton.
It slowly dawned upon him that it didn't seem hostile. It was mimicking him, but its low body mass made it small thing indeed. If Leonard hadn't been so shocked, he might even have thought it was cute in some way, the way it tried to see him without eyes. He decided not to disturb, and instead watched its further transformation closely.
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The Maid
"Everyone... I don't think we should be close to those... Who knows what they might do?" says Elena as she starts to very slowly retreat from the blobs.
If I'm sure of something it's that I'm not sure of anything.
The Wordnomnom
Typhoid looked around to take in the various reaction the blobs were having.
"That one...turned into an ear? And mine ate my cloak. We should maybe be carefull about touching them at least."
He moved back and forth in front of the one nearest him, tracking it.
"Well they dont seem very fast."
While the breath's in his mouth, he must bear without fail, / In the Name of the Empress, the Overland Mail.
The Man in Black
Shanna was too relieved at seeing another human to notice the questions at first, but eventually they got through to her.
"What? Oh, uh...I came out of one of those pod things. I guess you know what I'm talking about, you're probably from one of the other..." She trailed off as she noticed the other woman's hands, then caught herself and kept talking. "from one of the other pods, right? I'm not sure what you mean about 'getting past the lizard thing'—the aknoss, that's what it calls itself, seemed pretty decent to me."
"Your mission is not to nuke the squid god." —Faramir
Chester scratched the back of his head with the hand that wasn't in use as he looked ahead. "So flying seashells and human seamonkeys. And here I was hoping for a hangar." He looked over his shoulder at the newcomer, "Decent? Don't think we can use words like that to describe something that kidnapped us and spent some quality time chopping us up."
Crazed Lawrencian
—Guy stopped whistling, to stare at the grey points almost reaching his chest, and backed away. The giant gave a small double-take at the developing life-form closer to Leonard, before looking back at the pointy blob in front of him. —
"Hmmm."
— He began humming "When the Saints Come Marching in" at the thing.—
Proud member of the IAA What's the point of being grown up if you can't act childish?
Wait, he isn't dead! Shia Surprise!
The spikes covering that spiralled cone quivered as Guy changed his tune, and slowly it began to turn in place, sliding across the floor like some peculiar, inverted spinning top so that it remained within three feet of the translucent-skinned hulk. Several more spikes extended towards the South Carolinan as it spun after him, and now he was in danger of getting smacked and scratched rather than poked and prodded.
In front of Typhoid, the only blob to retain its amorphous natural form extruded a single, sinnuous appendage which ended in a small bulb—not unlike an eye on a stalk—from the top of its oily mass. This bulb seemed to track the movements of the spiky-haired abductee, swaying gently back and forth like a charmed snake in response to his movements. After a few seconds of this, the surface of the bulb suddenly inverted and split open, becoming what looked disconcertingly like a pair of lips; two rows of gleaming metallic teeth and an oily black tongue formed in this strange mouth, and then, slowly and haltingly, it spoke.
"Will...thy...dent...seam...vary...fast."
The blob's words sounded hollow and tinny, as if they were coming from an old speaker grill, and the pronunciation was obviously off for most of them; even so, the voice which came out of its mouth was clearly that of Typhoid himself.
Finally, the strange little humanoid slowly lifted up its left arm and extended it towards Leonard; where a hand should have been there was only a small, triangular appendage not unlike the blade of a trowel. It flicked this appendage up and down once or twice, as though it were waving goodbye to the visually-augmented twenty-seven-year-old, then swung its gangly limb off to its right, in the direction of the end of the corridor.
"It didn't try to hurt you?" Madeline asked, her surprise giving way to thoughtfulness. Her suspicions from earlier had returned, casting doubt on what she and the other abductees knew—or thought they knew—about their situation. Perhaps...
The red-haired single mother shook her head then. "Yes, we all woke up in the pods like you did. We had a run-in with the alien before, one that wasn't exactly peaceful—you called it an aknoss, right? What was it doing down there?"
Here she paused, then smiled apologetically. "Sorry about hammering you with all these questions; we're all a little confused right now. My name's Madeline. Who are you?"
The Danse Macabre Codex
Crazed Lawrencian
—Guy flinched and stood back, thrusting a massive open-palmed hand out in front of him. Aliens don't like music? Great. I don't want those things touching me... —
"Hey! Stop! Halt! Back!"
Proud member of the IAA What's the point of being grown up if you can't act childish?
The Man in Black
"I'm Shanna." She said. She went to raise her hand, then paused, self-conscious of what had happened to her arm, then decided to go through with it—it wasn't as if she was abnormal among this group, anyway. "Please tell me you know more about what's going on here than I do."
"Your mission is not to nuke the squid god." —Faramir
sword of promised halp
First contact. It was an electrifying phrase, something that shot through his brain and brought out a jumbled mess of scrambled connotations, darting hopes and creeping fears - the result of a lifetime spent wading in the neck-deep sea that was sci-fi, fantasy and pop culture.
The Enterprise, sailing through space under its gallant Captain, going boldly where no man had ever gone before. Welles’ Martians, making war on humanity only to fall to a well-timed dose of the common cold. The black Monoliths, possessed of a knowledge beyond time itself, sent to monitor the growth of a race that their creators had helped lift out of the murky depths of prehistory, waiting for the time that they too, could take to the stars -
And now it was real. Here. The rest of the world was supposed to be glued to their television screens, looking at the beginning of the most momentous event in the planet’s history.
If Jason Thrall hadn’t been stuck in the middle of the elevator shaft leading up to his ninth-storey apartment, he might be up there watching it with them.
“Come on, come on...” Sneakered feet shifting from side to side in clear agony, the scrawny young man looked at the frozen, taunting display of the blacked-out lift (currently on 08) and, not for the first time, inwardly bemoaned his horrible, horrible luck.
As if being a washed-out freelance writer whose day job happens to be ‘fast-food-restaurant cashier’ isn’t enough already, he thought sadly, slumping in both despair and frustration at his own pathetic plight.
No, the world just had to have it out for him.
He would never have expressed such sentiments in public, of course. By day and, indeed, by the occasional night when he was actually outside, Jason was a timid, perpetually nervous shrinking violet who would rather die than give anyone the impression of actually feeling any emotion other than anxiety at... well, anything. It incited conversation. He sucked at conversation.
His appearance didn’t help matters along much on that front, either. With his vapid, terrified gaze, round wireframe glasses, messy auburn hair, bland wardrobe and nearly ever-present slouch, the twenty-four-year-old looked, dressed and even felt like the lonely high-school nerd he had been six years ago - only frozen in time and thrown face-first into real life, with no alterations to anything at all. Kids ten years his junior treated him like a social outcast when they walked to the counter and browsed the hamburger menu. Businessmen elbowed past him on the street without a word of apology, wiping their two-piece-suits off as if his mere air of unsuccess had tainted their career paths forever. For as long as he could remember, no female he had ever come across, available or otherwise, had even bothered to give more than a passing glance in his direction - and when they were forced to go to the lanky guy with the non-existent fashion sense because the rest of the tills were closed, they invariably tended to give their orders to some undefinable point behind his left temple.
It was a pity, really, because he actually would have been quite handsome if he had bothered to look up once in a while. But he didn’t know that.
Biting his lower lip and wallowing in the depths of his self-perceived inferiority, Jason briefly considered hitting the button panel in front of him, before going against it. He might hurt his wrist... or something. In fact, he might even hu-
He had no time to finish the thought. At that very moment, an incredible, nauseating flash ran through his entire body, and he cried out in pain and alarm, tumbling backwards even as the arcs of light gambolled up his body and through his clothes and into his flesh -
Two seconds later, his broken glasses fell to the floor, landing crookedly into the smoking, tattered remains of his beige jersey.
With a cheery ding, the elevator’s lights switched back on, and its movement resumed, smooth as clockwork. As if nothing had happened.
Warm. Wet. Dark.
Where was he? He didn’t know. Floating. He was floating somewhere. Somehow. He didn’t know. It didn’t matter.
Something had just brushed his skin - was it seaweed? Or was it just a really wet blanket? Was he dreaming? Was he awake? Was he dead?
Somehow, he wasn’t quite sure...
But... then again....
Suspended in the depths of the proto-womb, Jason drifted back into blessed unconsciousness.
The first thing that he noticed when he came to was that it was still dark. Very dark.
Sitting up tentatively, Jason began gingerly poking at his new surrounds, wincing as his fingers came into contact with something very cold and very solid. Where was he?
...Who was he?
His name was... his name was...
His attempts at recollection were interrupted by a loud hiss. A very, very loud hiss, and a series of wet cracks. Jumping up at the sudden noise despite himself, the man yelped as he tumbled through the edges of two hard, moving things on either side of him, shoulders painfully scraped by the impact even as he sprawled out on a differently-textured surface -
He tried to feel around. It was still dark. This wasn’t right. Something wasn’t right.
His name was Jason Thrall, and... and...
Expression changing into one of utter panic, Jason clutched at his head with a cry and bolted left, giving a strangled cry of surprise as he smashed into yet another cold, round, smooth surface, before turning around again and breaking in the opposite direction. His lips, blued with cold, were moving in frantic tandem with his heaving chest, gasping feverishly - as if he were invoking whatever gods there were to come and save him from this nightmare.
“Oh God, oh God, oh God please no...”
Why couldn’t he see? Why couldn’t he see?
As he stumbled into a slightly warmer patch in the center of the room (and, somehow, right past the hulking black form of the Aknoss), his legs caught on each other in his hurry, and he fell forwards with a shriek - then his hands stopped dead in the middle of the air, and he felt his entire body being borne up, up to some unknown place, some unknown, dangerous place, some unknown, dangerous, wet place -
“Ahhh! God!”
Hands scrabbling uselessly for purchase even as he plopped straight through the membrane and into the narrow corridor above, Jason took one shaky step onto the now-solid floor - and immediately dashed left again without a second thought, head smacking straight into the ridged wall before he turned, hit the other wall and finally began running for his life in the right direction, bolting shakily through an invisible maze of complete blackness, wide-eyed terror and utter spatial confusion.
He couldn’t tell where his hands were. He couldn’t tell where the walls were. He couldn’t tell where anything was oh God voices
“Gaaah! Help me!” Running like the forces of Hell were at his heels, the auburn-haired, terrified-looking man barrelled straight into Guy’s back without so much as a word of further introduction, practically rebounding off his frame and sprawling on the ground several feet away. Now that he was under the scrutiny of people who still possessed their sight, one would be able to see that he was now clad in the same, seamless jumpsuit as the rest of them - but that seemed a trivial detail, given the way he was looking around. And breathing, for that matter.
“My... my eyes...” he mewled, unable to muster the strength to get up. His breath came in short, labored gasps, as he positioned his trembling hands in front of where he thought they would be.
The root of the problem would be immediately apparent to the group. His eye sockets were empty. In place of eyeballs, they were filled with large, lidless orbs of dull grey, half-translucent fluid, ones that only partially obscured the hollows of his inner skull from view - like they were being viewed through a clouded mirror. A network of thick, weeping, nearly rope-like pale blue veins spread out from either side of them and across his face, curving up and around his cheeks to meet at a pulsing, greyish, heart-like lobe that only just protruded from the back of his head, throbbing in tandem with his heartbeat (which, as of the present, was very, very fast). If the rest of his shock of tangled hair had not been touched, that part, at least, had been shaved bare, as if to highlight this alien feature of his.
The overall effect, to say the least, was rather disconcerting.
“...Why... why can’t I see?”
edited 20th Oct '12 6:31:55 AM by troydenite
'Being around you guys makes me go "wtf" instead of pondering the ever increasing dread of time' - EchoingSilence, 2023
The Wordnomnom
"Hey, guys, if this goes wrong, yank me back. Or cut my hand off if you have to."
Typhoid slowly kneels in front of the blob-thing and extends a hand. Internally he was chiding himself for taking a foolish course of action but his own natural curiosity at the mimicry of the creature was overwhelming. Although he didnt admit it to himself, by virtue of being trapped here, he had also already written himself off as being as good as dead. This was why he poked the Flu B (Fluid Blob) gingerly with one finger.
While the breath's in his mouth, he must bear without fail, / In the Name of the Empress, the Overland Mail.
Leonard approached the door that the line went through. He could see no obvious locking-mechanism, but then these were very advanced aliens. Their technology might work with cues and mechanisms that would never strike him as being such.
"...I'm gonna try touching it."
Slowly and carefully, he extended his hand towards the closed door. Sweat beaded on his forehead as his heart raced, fearing what might happen. But there was no other way. Warily, his pointer finger extended and got closer and closer to the surface of the door.
Join us in our quest to play all RPG video games! Moving on to disc 2 of Grandia!