At the shipwreck-rich beach of Mothdale...Sigmund freely admits defeat, and calls for the aid of his good buddy
Mark, his voice muffled by the warm, yet unyielding embrace of his ruined tent. As a particularly heavy piece of lumber he liberated off what must have been some sort of merchant ship threatens to make his precious stuffing spurt out of his ears in copious quantities, he hears something fleshy hit the ground nearby. And then the heavy load of his incredibly ugly wooden gargoyle facsimile is lifted off his chest, followed by the load of his improvised roof terrace following suit. And when most of the second floor is removed, Sigmund begins to once again regain that notoriously unreliable feeling that he's going to be alright after all. Fortunately, this feeling immediately fades when he spots the emotionless tree head of Mark regarding him through the hole he has dug down to find his gracious volunteer patient. Before Sigmund can say a word, Mark yanks him out from the rubble and shakes him in the air. When he notices that most of Sigmund's body seems to be flapping freely and at odd angles, he knows that some serious medicine is about to be done here.
[Mark's "medicine" roll: 6+1]
So serious, in fact, that he honestly guesses drastic measures will be needed. Fortunately, he has brought a whole cart full of corpses (they had those at the mortuary, which gladdened Mark's blackened and missing heart), so drastic measures are entirely affordable for him right now. He rolls the cart's wheel over Sigmund's foot so he doesn't have any second thoughts along the way, and begins his work. That dragon idea was pretty interesting, Mark thinks. He might have been on to something there, honestly. And now that he needs to help Sigmund, he has the motivation to resolve all those little design quibbles he had on his previous attempt.
Let's see... first there was the matter of the number of legs... his choices were two or four, so he guesses he'll go for the very nice compromise of eleven instead, because, as his mother always told him, anything with more than ten legs is bound to get somewhere in life. Then the wings - he supposes three pairs of batlike wings fashioned from human arms and skin would be sufficient, as long as he makes them big and scary-looking enough. As for the torso, well... he doesn't think the materials would lend themselves well to either lizards or serpents, so he once again compromises with a torso that resembles a three-meter-long furry leech complete with the necessary five eyes and nine ears spaced around its gaping, toothy, circular mouth. And though breathing fire seems impossible to achieve with his available materials, Mark does manage to add in a sort of giant bag connected to the mouth and a great number of muscles that can hopefully allow it to spit out whatever crap it has eaten. It takes quite a while for him to do all that, even while rushing a little, but eventually he's got a neat little dragon that's about the length of two cows and the height of a regular person. He looks back at Sigmund, who seems to have something between a pleading look of horror and a sad look of resignation on his face. Luckily, Mark's about to fix all his problems - he does so by cracking the fellow's skull open, becoming absolutely delighted when he spots a nice-looking white orb within which he removes immediately. When this causes Sigmund to cease all signs of unlife, Mark knows he's doing something right. He carries the orb over to the new body and plops it inside one of the handy skulls he incorporated into the body of the design, then seals the whole thing up quite tight. And with that done, he quickly skins the remains of Sigmund's previous body and collects the hide for later use - never know when you might need to make something reddish-purple and fancy-looking, after all.
From Sigmund's perspective, that last part is mostly just a very long moment of horror and darkness that he spends clinging on to his dear unlife, followed immediately by the sudden realization that he is a hideous parody of a dragon created by a teammate who he shall henceforth never ask to do anything.
Scott, meanwhile, saw the entire operation from his rather privileged vantage point. The process is morbidly fascinating, to say the least, almost enough to make him forget the important realization he made that magic is probably best practiced when under the effects of a homicidal rage, as that's what most ghosts he's heard about, you know, the really fun and scary ones, seem to have gone with.
In a very dark room...Timothy, finding nothing more obvious than the fact that there can be nothing good awaiting him at the top of that staircase, puts on his very best game face and tries an unorthodox ascension method - he phases into the stairwell and ascends, which the terrifying creatures above will presumably not expect. It does not take long before he reaches something intriguing - a corridor! Filled with sunlight! Obviously belonging to a regular, if seemingly abandoned house, at least as far as he can see from here. And there appear to be no frightening creatures in sight.
Then again, he hasn't turned around yet. In fact, this all seems like such good news, he's not sure he wants to, really. After all, there might be a pernicious fiend of some kind awaiting there to scare the living daylights out of him, which would, quite frankly, ruin the whole perfectly wonderful set of circumstances he's got going here.
In a mostly empty room...Niklas, though the circumstances he finds himself in are unusual, resolves to make the best of it. After all, rule one of northern cuisine is that everything can be eaten and possibly enjoyed if you're drunk and angry enough! His first step, naturally, is to loudly whine about still having only one limb when it is clear that he probably needs two to do this as rightly and properly as possible. When that avails him nothing, he drafts up a proper plan for his newest masterpiece - an amazing stew made primarily of wood mulch to provide much glee to all who eat it. After forming a nice little wishlist of the things he needs, he notices that the room seems to be completely empty of any fungus, liquid and dirt, and also that the end table appears to be both made of reinforced steel and secured to the ground. And also that mulching a tree with an awl will take a
very long time.
Still, none of those factors really make the plan impossible as such, they simply make it a bit unrealistic to achieve in a time period of less than a week or a week and a half.
Inside the Dancing Fly...Morton, possessed of that good cleaning spirit, begins the process of transforming this awful place into a respectable establishment once again. First, he prepares some buckets of hot soapy water to help him vanquish the scourge of filth that has infested this place. Then he takes the next step, which is to remove the bodies and broken bits of furniture, which proves simple enough. When he warns the gub of the bodies' presence, he hears a nearby splash, and when he looks at where he left the bodies, he notices that they seem to have disappeared, a few bloody smudges and a couple of confused flies serving as the only testament that the putrid corpses were there in the first place.
The next important step is to clean the furniture - this proves to be not overly difficult as well as mostly quite enjoyable, and he places what furniture he's got left in a specially cleaned corner. The windows prove more of a challenge - the glass is of rather low quality, and has the unfortunate tendency to look quite dirty and slightly yellowed no matter how much one tries to clean it - still, Morton gives it his best shot, and they do look better than they did a half hour ago, certainly. The floor is similarly damaged and cheap-looking, something Morton can't really correct with a mere mopping, but he still manages to clean out all the viscera, dead flies, leftover maggots and all the other more disturbing elements of the decor, and also make the counter look respectable after what must have been a long lifetime spent in a most dishonorable state. After he puts the unbroken furniture back in place, he does have to admit that this place looks halfway presentable now. And when he cleans the windows from the outside as well, he can see how somebody may construe the visual impression of this establishment as indicative of decency levels as high as 50 percent.
Inside a temple of Velusius...Kevin ponders the nature of this test as he sits on the floor. Obviously, the priest wants something of him, but what? Could it be-wait. No.
"Wait. Waaaaiiiiit," Kevin involuntarily vocalizes in what must have been a sudden epiphany. It can't really be that simple, can it? And yet there's a peculiar sort of elegance to it. Who would have seen a solution like that coming? It solves all of his problems while creating no new ones, the hallmark of truly correct answers. Left with no better choice, Kevin acts on the revelation that has struck him, winding up for a mighty punch that he then throws at
his face. That is to say, at his own face, as his face seems to be the only face within this room that is both easily reachable and eminently punchable. He winds up a mighty punch while he isn't looking, hoping to catch himself unaware.
[Kevin vs. Kevin: 5-
2+
1 vs. 3+1-
1]
His fist flies in an arc, smashing into his own face gracefully - he never saw it coming, it was so fast! His nose cracks painfully as the blow lands, and he falls to the ground on his back, both resplendent in his victory and ashamed for getting clocked across the snout like that by a rank amateur such as himself. The mixture of animalistic triumph and very human shame is breathtaking, he must say. Inspiring, even.
His broken nose definitely takes his mind off the rather poorly-contained chuckling he can hear from somewhere within this room, that's for sure.
Author
Topic: Life Begins At Death - Epilogue: We Live And Live Again (Read 565023 times)