On the road to somewhere...Kevin, perhaps overly enthusiastic about meeting somebody on this frankly sinister road, waves at the approaching figure.
"Hey, there's nothing this way! The bridge has collapsed!" he shouts from afar. The rider looks his way, but keeps on coming closer, so Kevin freely assumes that he hasn't been heard correctly, and waves again, shouting roughly the same thing. This time, though, the figure does not even raise its head. Within a few minutes, the rider comes within about ten or so meters, and finally looks at Kevin again. It's a wizened, shrunken old woman, and, looking at her face, it suddenly occurs to him that not all of the lines are wrinkles. A significant proportion of them are scars, in fact, and one or two defy any sort of explanation whatsoever. She tilts her head as she examines Kevin.
"Hey, there's nothing this way. The bridge has collapsed," he says weakly. His skeleton creaks at the jaundiced, dark-eyed gaze of the woman. The horse's gaze, though much clearer, is also accompanied by bared teeth that are a very familiar shade of yellow.
"That's where you're wrong, friend!" the rider says, her voice shrill, the last word coming out critically wrong, as if only half-memorized phonetically.
"You're here! So why don't we talk business?"The woman laboriously dismounts from the horse, showing her apparent age very definitively. She digs around in her saddlebag and produces an ancient-looking leather scroll. Her pudgy, spotted hand holds it out for him to see and perhaps grab at.
"Do you want to see the extremes of the universe? Heights and depravities both? Do you want to know? Do you want the Mantra? I know you do! Take a look!"She pokes the scroll impatiently in Kevin's direction.
Up in the sky, where no birds dare fly...Like a pyrokinetic airborne manta ray
Scott descends upon Eckledun, prepared for a hero's welcome, though he finds himself becoming increasingly unsure of getting any such thing as Eckledun, upon closer and closer inspections, appears to look quite different than he remembers it. There's pink spikes poking out of it. There's no people. Something's burning. Distant screaming that cuts out suddenly.
Probably nothing, of course, but it does make one a little leery. The streets seem empty, too. And some of the buildings are twitching, twisting.
And finally, there's a badger looking soulfully at the city from a distance. Next to it is a sphere of stone, which looks like an odd combination. It pauses in its observation and starts to snuffle around a little, seemingly examining the area in front of it. It is greatly startled by Scott's sudden proclamation.
In an overly long alley...A strange feeling is suspicious. A simultaneous strange feeling for three different people is adequate grounds to suspect enemy action.
Mark takes the lead, and explores a little further while the others stay put, traveling about 100 meters down the path, at which point it occurs to him that he's about halfway to the end of the alley.
Morton, however, tries a different tack.
"Hmm... Yes, same here good mage Wilma. Most strange. I could try floating above to see how much longer we have, if wished," he offers, and Wilma shrugs in response.
"I don't see why not, surely?" she says, and moves to examine a nearby wall. Taking this as approval, Morton ascends slowly, past a single barred window, then another, and then past another that, he notices, seems to not be a window at all - merely a painted-on ornament that nevertheless looks exactly like the ones below from a certain perspective. And above that is the roof.
Above the roof, though, there is nothing. Absolutely nothing at all, just a narrow band of blue skies above. The buildings are not buildings - they seem to be fences, props, false. The alleyway stretches off in the distance both ways, its walls coming to a point visually, insufficiently far apart for Morton's sight to resolve. But that's nothing compared to what lies below, beyond the fence. It only occurs to Morton in the last moment to actually look down. He'd assume there was nothing there, after all, same as in the distance.
However, he is wrong. Terribly wrong. A single look, not enough to tell what he saw in detail, reveals this readily. What it also reveals, it should be noted, is that perhaps Morton would be a better person for never looking that way again.
One other thing, though. Whatever it is down there, it seems to be rising. Coming up. Reaching.
Outside the ruins of Eckledun...Sigmund is not about to walk into a trap. Consequently, he looks around to see where the pebble might have fallen - it flew far, this much he knows. If it landed before the first building, it probably disappeared in the long grass. And if it flew deeper in, it'd probably be very hard to discern where it might have landed. Especially from this distance. Maybe it even landed in a gutter or some pool of stagnant water. In any case, the only safe way of telling where it might be would be to go over and find out with his own body. This, naturally, is not the most appealing proposition. He sniffs the air. Can't smell the pebble, either. Damned useless animal senses. This will require some careful-
"Doo-Dabee-Da, Da Da, DA-DA-DA! I have defeated a monstrous magical field that was attracting and trapping ethereal creatures with an unthinkable amount of force! Now... Where my money and axed peas?!" comes a shouted proclamation from behind Sigmund, tempting him to play dead in a most unbadgerlike way. He turns his head to see...
Well, Scott, obviously, since that's who it sounds like, but he looks different. Very sheetlike, which seems appropriate enough for a ghost. A little like a flag, maybe, now that he's triumphantly waving in the air.
((How did kevin become a woman?))
He's a man in a woman's body that was given to him by the Gub to facilitate infiltration and also to forcibly separate the crew neatly into two parts - the ones the Gub like, if I remember it correctly, and the ones they wouldn't mind finding dead in a ditch. Kevin was in the latter category.
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Topic: Life Begins At Death - Epilogue: We Live And Live Again (Read 562270 times)