SPACETRAVEL's Serial Thing

I haven't commented because I've been having a spot of Real Life myself, and this deserves more than a quick read-through when I'm tired and cranky.

It's okay. As I just said, you'll have time. Feel better, Madrugada.

Okay, I did do something.

I updated the mini-spinoff thread. What a silly, silly story. London has the protective instincts of a drunken she-bear.

edited 29th Apr '10 2:45:40 AM by harmattane

Oh, he does. And it is silly. But it's entirely enjoyable, as well. You have a real skill at creating both worlds and characters. I particularly like that you aren't afraid to make your characters look bad.

Considering this continuity, that's unavoidable.

You might be amazed at how many people will resolutely ignore that they're writing things set in a dystopia or crapsack world and try to make everything nice and clean and orderly and likable.

That's something I'll agree with. Crapsack Worlds are not populated by sweetness and light; there'll be good guys, but generally only relatively so, because they can't survive if they're not tough.

And I so need to read through this thread and your story. I know I've promised that before — mental blockage, perhaps?

I'm relived that you think I'm doing that well, considering my worryingly low level of cynicism in real life and a tendency toward seeing something funny in everything I could write. I was concerned.

Crapsack World never even occurred to me as an applicaple trope—I'm just parodying a bunch of villain tropes. Or putting a bunch of chaotic allignments in a story and seeing what happens. I'm just having fun; that's all.

edited 29th Apr '10 11:30:46 PM by harmattane

Before I update this again, I'll have to take a night to outline the beginning of the next chapter. It's a Story Within a Story, and I don't know the details yet.

Also, having one of those pesky "what is the point of it all?" nights. Hate them.

Keep going, Harma.

I look forward to reading this free of distractions once school is over.

Such a simple phrase becomes a puzzle when one is wondering "why" about things like keeping going. But as usual, it will pass. It sure would be nice to know why I write, though.

Dropping the realistic absurdities and funn-ness-es into a work is one of the things that many authors never manage to do effectively. But real life is full of momentary absurdities and funny things, and even in a dystopia or Crapsack World, things are going to happen that are simply funny. People like to laugh, and people in a dark situation will often search desperately for something they can laugh at. That's the whole reason black comedy and gallows humor exist.

I'm still here. Just in lurk mode. Forum problems are going on that I'm hesitant to talk about out in the open.

Spinoff updated. Clearly, I am addicted to a dangerous degree.

Click the blue link for Chapter 3.

Thank you.

Thank you very much.

Thank you, Blammy.

CHAPTER 3 : IN WHICH I POST THIS SHIT WHERE THE MARKUP FUCKING WORKS

“Are you awake? Lux? It’s Kenichi…are you? Hey, Lux…ow! You don’t have to do that…I get it; you don’t want to be bothered. I’m bored, though…the emptiness stopped being interesting yesterday. Lux…? Want me to try and remember that story your dad tell you every night? I found it on a piece of old paper upstairs; he’d tore it out of a book, but I lost the paper. But I think I can do it. I know it’s not night, but…can I? Yes? No? Okay, I’ll go until you tell me to stop…

“So, there was this woman…what was her name again? Don’t tell me…Corvus. Corvus was her name—kinda weird, but I think this was all in ancient Oceanus, so they were all weird. Around where Cedille is today, I think.

“But Corvus was a priestess while Oceanus was still small and rivals with Scylla. Oo, I’m doing better now! No one could build upon the towns because all of their stuff was used up fighting for leadership of the coastal cities, and they were eventually going to tire themselves out and die, dragging the whole Oceanus civilization down with them.

“So, Corvus…she was a priestess to the goddess of love, the symbol of the town of Scylla, but also of Oceanus’s god—Death. Supposedly—oh, shit! The story fell under your bed! Let me get it…okay. Here we go. Where was I…here. Corvus’s betrayal to her station went permitted by Scylla and Oceanus because the shard of Death she let into her worship made her something the men and leading bodies of neither city was willing to dispose of—a lover unsurpassed. Every evening, an official of either Scylla or Oceanus would have called for her execution as a defector, but every morning, the same one would rescind the order—haha; bet you didn’t get this story at all when you were little.

“It was a matter of debate how the introduction of the ferryman of the underworld elevated her powers under Vera to what they were. The most popular speculation was that the goddess was in love with the ferryman, and united, this, within this woman who had found the advantage of worshipping both, was what they produced. However, the deadly combination would be given new meaning on the eve of the Battle of Scylla—on the rocky shores before the city. Here, a new weapon was to be introduced into the fighting between the two rivals—a bow that could shoot its arrows through the opponent’s armor. Instead of retreat for the loser, death was assured. A defector had sold the design to Scylla from the inventors of Oceanus, and this battle would mark a new low in the relationship between the two.

“As this was likely to mark the end of Corvus’s travel between the cities, the conflicts were suddenly her business. Without the ability to travel between altars and, thus, to seduce her potential executors, she would certainly be put to death, and though she sought service from the ferryman, she had no interest in being his passenger. In the face of doom, she felt for the warriors who were going to go to die the next morning, too. She resolved, then, to end the fighting, for all of them.

“On a final visit to the altar of each city, she asked the god of each to make its soldiers invulnerable to the enemy.

“The next day, the sun rose upon the Battle of Scylla, but did not set for seven years—the seven years it took the combatants to fight through to the last of their weapons, their backup weapons, and their resources to make more weapons. No matter what the arrows hit, they would not kill or injure, so the armies turned to swords. They broke upon contact with even unprotected flesh. The combatants attempted profane tortures upon their captives, but could deal no damage, as the body’s physical limits seemed to have disappeared. No rack was long enough, and victims walked away feeling none but a bit tired after stomaching barrels of boiling lead. At last, Oceanus and Scylla turned to throwing the stones on the shores at each other, but even the largest hit like pebbles.

“By the time the cities, at long last, gave up, starved and exhausted of options, Corvus was gone, and so were the alters to the goddess and the ferryman. Through the battle, they had turned their eyes from the priestess for so long that she had been able to simply take the altars apart and steal them, taking them with her to somewhere far from here.

“Both starving, godless and equally destroyed, the two cities survived by coming together like two lovers incomplete without each other. As one Oceanus, they would rebuild and rise into the empire we now remember.

“Okay…I didn’t remember all of that at all. That was weird. But I guess he wanted you to hear it…a lot…hey, wait; page, two. It starts off—Corvus retreated into the mountains in hopes of finding other people and eventually did—one. A prince from the west had made his palace on a secluded, low peak, having turned to asceticism and left his homeland to seek a place nearer to the solar disc. He and his vizier had inhabited it alone until the arrival of Corvus.

“She came for shelter, but stayed for the prince, with whom she fell in love, and he with her, and for over a year, she found no reason to suspect anything harmful of their relationship.

“But then, one night, she witnessed the prince preparing a nightmarish device under the ceiling of the palace’s great hall. Out of sight, she watched him lower the fantastic stone mandala that graced the ceiling, and the stars showed through what was underneath: an enormous lens, larger than a two tall men standing side by side and surely heavier. Directly beneath, concealed beneath floor tiles set at the breadths of the human limbs, were chains clearly meant to bind one to the floor. As the moon drifted above the lens, the glass concentrated its light in a single, narrow beam that pierced the floor between the chains. When day broke and the sun moved overhead, the beam would be sharper, hot enough to burn through a human sacrifice—awesome, no? The prince loved Corvus enough to give her to his god, the sun. Corvus was not about to accept the gesture.

“The next morning, the prince awoke alone in bed. He called for his vizier, but the vizier did not come, but call him back. Angry and in a great hurry, as the sun would be over the lens in but two hours, the prince stormed into the hall to be halted immediately, overwhelmed by the smell of perfume. Two of the hidden tiles were removed, with their chains locked onto the ankles of the vizier, who curled on the floor, naked. His arms had not been bound, so he had been able to move just out of the range of the deadly beam.

"Corvus had gone, the vizier explained, and he had no regrets of letting her go. She had won him over the night before, and they had made love by the moonlight that streamed through the lens. When she had lifted the tiles and bound his legs before—hahaha. Oh, man, this is fucking hilarious. He can’t have read this part! I’m blushing. But, he knew he would have betrayed the prince a hundred times with her. He would not get the chance. She had left him there and retreated again into the mountains before the sun rose.

"And what about this ghastly smell, the prince asked, trembling with fury.

"Corvus had left an open bottle of her perfume somewhere in the great hall, hidden, to remind him of two things: what she had done to him and that she would be back someday to destroy his palace.

"The prince threw the vizier out of the palace in a rage, and rather than live to see the destruction of his home, strapped himself to his own device and burned himself to death when the sun reached the lens. It is said that the perfume was so strong that the air was made flammable, and rather than burning his heart cleanly out of his chest as it was intended to do, the beam engulfed his entire body in fire.

"Had Corvus ever found out that he had died, she would have been devastated. She had intended him to live the rest of his days in paranoia over her return, not for him to die.

"This is because she did not have to return herself to destroy the palace. So well hidden was the perfume that, as years passed, looters were unable to find it. The more value became placed on it due to its elusiveness, the more the looters dared to tear the palace apart in hopes of obtaining it. Today, the palace lies in ruin, a scant frame of its former self and still smelling of Corvus.

"Many years and many such stories later, Corvus died when she tripped and hit her head on a passing tortoise—haha, sorry, sorry; it's supposed to be sad...what? That's anticlimactic.

"But—where she found herself after death, however, was not in the ferryman’s boat, but sitting on the shore as Death and his brother, Nux, the lord of the shady, eternal land beyond the river. The two were arguing over her.

"Nux had forbidden Death from letting Corvus and her tricks into the afterlife, fearing that she would scramble its borders as she had Oceanus and Scylla and demanding that she be drowned in the river with the mortal sinners. However, Death refused to try that, fearing that Corvus would escape and humiliate him as she had done to so many captors in life. Neither would budge in their decision, so they decided to weigh the good and the evil portions of her heart and let the scale decide to whom she should go. This was to no avail. The weights came out equal. They returned to Corvus her heart, but looking at each other. The same compromise was on each of their minds, but something they would have to hide from the greater gods: neither desired to deal with Corvus, so they would simply not deal with her.

"Corvus was returned to the realm of the living, never to leave it again, and to this day wanders the earth as a deathless trickster—a lesser god, effectively but never to dwell among the rest.

"In a way, rather than receiving neither heaven nor hell, she received both: the gift of immortality and the growing power that comes with it, but the despair of having to watch each of her lovers die after what only seems a second to one who has lived thousands of years.

"That’s where the page ends. There’s no more…damn, I was starting to enjoy it, but for the life of me, I don’t know why he wanted you to know it so bad. You’re not even old enough to know half of what’s going on…weird Langley tradition, I guess. Kinda the explanation for everything…we’ll never know now. Lux? Still awake? Okay…well, I’m going to have a friend over in a while and am going to be kind of busy, but I’ll leave you a note with our room number. Promise. Lux…?”

edited 6th May '10 9:35:38 PM by harmattane

I am growing distinctly fond of Kenichi. I'm not sure why. Possibly because he is a bright spot of earnest compassion in a very twisted world. I hope he doesn't get broken too badly.

Good—I guess he's turning out to be better-written than I'd expected.

Lux's body had liked sleep. Sleep was something that it never got to do enough of, and given the anesthesia's offer of as much as it wanted, it had gorged itself until it could not take another hour. The evening after the day he had fallen asleep, Lux awoke fully alert, unable to keep his eyes shut longer than it took to blink.

His new room had gone dark, lit only by blue evening coming through a slit of a window near the ceiling; it illuminated a dim line of zebra stripes across the bed, curving over Lux's middle. The black blanket had fallen off at some point, or perhaps Kenichi had taken it off when he had stopped shivering—he wasn't shivering anymore. The stack of pillows had toppled, but for one that tipped off the very edge of the mattress when Lux's hand hit it, searching the space around him for a lamp. Finding none within arm's reach, he tried a few common triggers for remote ones.

"Light." Nothing happened, and his voice was hoarser than he knew it to be. He wondered how long he had been asleep to let it get so rusty. Strange taste in his mouth, too.

He clapped once. Still nothing. He clapped once, louder, to no effect. Then he tried the combination that he had set for the light in his old room, two claps in quick succession. There. Unfortunately, the light was no better than the rest of the room—tinted teal. He groaned. While considering turning it back off, he noticed his hands deepening from blue to violet...to blue...to green...to violet...oh, yes it did.

His first emotion in days welled up inside of him, something he had never experienced before: the urge to kill a room.

Speaking of things that would be better off dead, something bright in the corner of his eye activated a foggy memory—Kenichi had left him a note. He picked up the paper and read it.

Maybe the way Kenichi dotted his i's and excessive exclamation points with circles was what ruined it. He had written: "We are in room 346! If you need me, please knock!! -Kenichi" Lux almost gave him the benefit of the doubt; Kenichi wrote the way he actually talked.

Beneath Kenichi's chicken scratch, someone else had added, "Hi Lux I'm Tama!" She dotted her i's with hearts, which was unforgivable. Nobody talked like that.

If I'm in room 246, he dies tomorrow.

Lux fell back onto his pillow, but did not close his eyes, turn off the light or relax his brow. Not yet. After several minutes, his expression smoothed into something less definite. He kept watching the light change.

A while ago, Kenichi and Tama had greeted each other at the back door with a flying hug, like they hadn't seen each other in years. A week was a long time.

She was another, better school friend, and another one not to graduate, though she had left of her own choice in year two when she had decided that nothing her family could do from an ocean away was enough to stop her. She and Kenichi had cheated dormitory rules to become roommates. With opposite problems and similar personalities, their friendship had made itself.

She had taken up Kenichi's offer of any room in the skyscraper and arrived there at the end of her shift as a bartender at the bar managed by Nitya and Deva Chapal in place of reclusive Demetrius London, who had several years to go before he was old enough. It was enough to pay for Tama's minute but comfortable apartment in the twentieth century district a block south of the Langley skyscraper, and she was happy as long as Kenichi was there and Demetrius kept wanting to see her cats. She didn't need much.

As Kenichi and Lux had been, she was fascinated by the new echoes in the reverse hall. Walking together from the back door on the ground floor, they were silent at first, listening. No lights were on; the red and black marble tiles that spanned the ground floor appeared grey and black in the dim evening light.

At last, she joked, "So you finally scared them all away?" She whispered over her permanent, intractable grin in Oceanic—she did so around Kenichi in order to teach him his mother's language, an effort at which teachers with more credentials had failed.

Kenichi reverted back to Mainland Common, blushing and looking at the tiles. "I'm not a sensei anymore. Technically, I don't think I ever really was...don't ask; embarrassing..."

"But it's still funny when you're screaming into your pillow."

This brought the smile back to Kenichi's face that had been less omnipresent than usual tonight. "Point taken."

She wrapped her arm around his, getting strands of her waist-length, stringy hair shut between their tightly wound sleeves. "If you don't want to talk about what happened here—"

"No—it's okay! The kid looks better today. I just didn't sleep much last night—it's the quiet. I need static to sleep."

"Where is he?"

"Second floor." Kenichi had forgotten the number, but knew the room when he walked by it.

"Are you sure you can leave him alone tonight?"

"Yes. He's sleeping normally now. The anesthesia wore off long ago; I know by the way he was stirring this afternoon. He looked like he was scared of something, and I didn't even know if he was still asleep—only calmed down after I read him a story. Oh—have you ever tried to give a sleeping person a glass of water?"

Tama laughed. "You don't use a glass; you know that!"

"But I couldn't find anything else. My gods, it's a bitch." Kenichi's face reddened up to his ears as he suppressed his own laughter enough to let him just barely form words. "I tried juice first, but it missed his mouth and got on the pillowcase, which I think is ruined now, so I switched to water, but it still spilled all over the place—and he didn't wake up! He must be so exhausted..." Concern calmed his voice again. "He seemed just...numb yesterday. I don't know what it was like for him."

"You try so hard, Kenichi."

Awkward spot to stop, but I need sleep.

edited 13th May '10 11:32:20 PM by harmattane

Spinoff updated! And we can finally, finally say that its thread title is no longer false advertising.

Lots of information in that update, too, like how Aubrey London damaged his neck and, as well, kind of why he is the way he is. Bit intense update—I should've gone to bed long ago and finished it in the morning, but, er...I just couldn't leave him in the middle of that.

Here, have some pictures, too.

I drew the zombie while still thinking about how to do this update—it looks like this.◊ Yes, the picture of a bog mummy I used as a semi-reference did actually have hair that did that.

Here is my reference for descriptions of a wedge tornado. It takes a lot to make Aubrey afraid for his life, and when I saw the picture, I knew that this was what had to be in the update.

And the spinoff is all done! See the ridiculous conclusion, in which I shamelessly abuse Rule of [thing] tropes! You might spot a few shoutouts to zombie movie tropes. You will definitely get an idea of where Aubrey London's frightening reputation comes from.

That makes it the first piece I've finished here. How was it? It was way, way too much fun for me, and I'm sure it shows at the end.

Anyway, I'll repost it here so it doesn't get lost once I finish chapter 3. The next update will be back to this timeline.

edited 12th May '10 2:46:37 AM by harmattane