Flaming Sword of Justice!
From your hand a pillar of flame appears, and you bring it down to cut the very world in half. It looks less cool than you thought it would, presumably due to limitations of imagination. You wonder if you could imagine something that would cause your brain to lag. Like a device so complex, even god himself couldn't comprehend it. But the problem there would be that you'd need to comprehend it to start imagining it. What's the most complex thing you can think of, you wonder?
An image begins to swim before your eyes. A massive device, formless and without purpose, roughly the size of your house. It's pretty easy to imagine, and a decent starting point. But it has no purpose. To refine its construction, a purpose is needed. You imagine one - to confound your pursuers. This would require relatively minor contrivances, such as a neighbor in the way, your mother realizing that you're definitely innocent and not collaborating with the police, and a few other things you can name. The machine, a large, rotating, branching metal frame, begins to take shape within your mind, and also within reality - it shrinks in response to the problem, ending up only slightly taller than you and just as wide. It doesn't look very complex, but you suspect that's because the problem is simple. You turn to something more complex - making you the President of Zimbabwe. This requires a far more elaborate set of coincidences, some of them downright improbable under the best of circumstances. The device bloats and branches in response, its details becoming finer and finer, until it is about the size of a four story house, made of things like niobium, antimony and blue diamonds arranged in perplexing patterns on the molecular level. It's a bit hard to take in all at once, and you're not sure you fully understand the arrangement of all the materials and the orientation of the device. But you don't think that's quite complex enough. You look at the Sun for a moment. What if you wanted it to, by coincidence, never drop out of the main sequence?
The device shrieks and suddenly explodes into a patterned, repeating, bizarre frame the size of a whole goddamn planet, made of antimatter arranged in delicate, magnetically suspended and mediated interplay with small clouds of purified pions. Even considering its basic principles makes your head hurt immensely. And that's
before you look at it. You seem to have turned aside your gaze reflexively. When you look at it, you don't exactly discover why, because you immediately wake up. It seems to be the very early morning right now, and the sudden, all-pervading feeling of confusion you experience leads you to believe that you may have just crashed your dream with that particular bit of imagining. You dare say you did not expect that, though whether you're a better man for discovering that such a thing can happen is really up for debate.
((Just for clarification before I post an action, that couch was the one Nick was on, right? Wait, different room, nevermind.))
"Damn it, what the hell? Giant ass storm, furniture flying around, the hell is going on?" Jake mutters, more than a little unnerved by the events. He was wracked with indecision, unsure whether it would be better to take his family outside where they might be hit by lightning, or stay inside where they might be crushed by furniture. What could be causing all this? Wait, wasn't there some parahuman from that Project Ed group that Dad was always ranting about that could do something like this? She had a radio show or something, right? Jake thinks to himself as he moves back to the same room as his mother and Nick, quickly moving to turn on the radio and scanning through the stations.
You run back to the room where your mother and Nick seem to be - the dinner table appears to have toppled apropos of little, causing a panic. You move over to the radio, but then realize that the power's out. Luckily, you do have a phone, so you tune in with that to Ed FM, your friendly neighborhood activist radio station. The result is a little garbled, though you're not sure why, but you can distinctly perceive somebody ranting on it.
"-what kind of fucking RACISM *bzzsht* I mean, who the FUCK does he *kshhh* the most SHALLOW goddamn reasoning-" and so on is what you can hear, and each time the girl accentuates a word, something crashes within your house. Uh... big trouble.
Suddenly, a flash of fire erupts in one of the corners of the room, setting the curtains aflame. Your family collectively yelps at this, fairly sure that this has officially graduated into a major disaster, flashes of regular fire punctuated by regular lightning strikes within meters of your house.
"You killed them, you bastards!" Alex would yell. He would pull his gun (hopefully SMG, probably a small handgun.) and he would aim directly for Ms. Black as he wrapped his finger around the trigger and pressed down.
You just bought that MAC-10 a couple of days ago in anticipation of moving up in the world - it was much more expensive than you would have expected, in all honesty. And as you spray its entire clip over the group of assholes who killed your friends, grazing Mrs. Black and hitting some from the other group, hopefully lethally. You're not really looking, and you're nearly half-deaf from the gunfight and in a bit of pain from several wounds. And now you see a dude running toward you. Your buddies shoot him down, but he seems to be... uh... engorging bodily, and giving off heat.
Oh, fuck, are these guys Mujahideen or something? What the fuck kind of operation is the crazy bitch running here? You seem to be the one quickest to duck and cover, partly because you've got the best view of the happenings. You're pretty sure you're gonna die now. You're gonna die, and the rest of your buddies are going to die with you. There is a flash of light and heat, an explosion you wouldn't have expected a mound of flesh to make. Your quickness and reasonable cover make your experience a painful, but survivable one, though judging by the screams, your buddies, who decided to run away rather than drop to the ground, were not quite as lucky. 20 seconds or so pass, and your ears are still ringing, but you realize that you're no longer in any danger, though you're pretty sure you feel second-degree burns on your back nevertheless. You stumble to your feet, noticing that the warehouse and the corpses look nearly unrecognizable now - charred in a peculiar manner, without flame or anything - just desiccated, dried out. And there, on the far side of the warehouse, you notice Mrs. Black, coughing wildly underneath the dead body of her last henchman. She seems to be trying to get away. You hear a sound, but do not immediately recognize it, being a tad disoriented. Mrs. Black rolls the body off herself and begins to make a slightly limping escape.
You quickly reload the MAC-10 and spray a hail of bullets her way wildly, cutting across her legs and right arm due to poor aim on your part. She screams and drops, and you stare at her for a moment blankly. Crazy bitch. You should carve her fucking eyes out for this. You pull out your knife and proceed toward her slowly, and dimly begin to realize what that sound is. Police sirens. A tinny megaphone voice declaring you're surrounded. Quick response time, you think and laugh to yourself as CS gas grenades sail in through the broken windows. Come on, you just need a little time!
But the cops come in anyway, and as they shoot you in the back, you feel a sense of profound despair as you look at the body of Mrs. Black. She's gonna get away with this. She might live through this. She
can't live through this. You can't allow it. She might get another crew to fuel her perverse drug jihad or whatever the fuck she's doing. These aren't even
fun drugs, you notice. These are some kind of fucking WMD drugs. That's crossing so many lines of basic decency and respect for your fellow man that even you are more than a bit shocked. You scream and charge forward, intent on not letting the bitch get away with it, and at that moment something happens. Visions run through your mind, of
things you do not quite recognize and cannot quite place, immense things that you are not even slightly equipped to process in your current state, and it lasts for a split second before you snap back into reality, and take a hard look at Mrs. Black, a sudden rush of adrenaline filling you, your pain receding, your body primed for grisly murder, everything slowing down a little as you look at her, and as you pounce, suddenly the world around you melts away.
In a millisecond, the charred warehouse is gone, the cops are gone, everything's gone but you and Mrs. Black, lying at your feet, bleeding heavily. Around you is an infinite, featureless, flat plain of light gray, a darker gray, equally featureless sky right above you. The air is cold and invigorating, and you feel
alive. You look at your knife, appreciating its look under this lighting, then at Mrs. Black, who appears to have lost her gun, and also her cool as she begins to form an idea of what's going to happen now.
Screaming, Ricardo was rapidly cut down, but not before the big man made it halfway to the gunmen. Following his collapse, his body begins to engorge and glow. Lying down and cowering, Carrie can feel the heat as the big man finishes his trasformation into a timebomb.
A wave of heat and light washes over you and the entire warehouse, and you involuntarily shriek as you get burned by it - you are well and truly covered, and thus are harmed little. But this doesn't help against hearing the screams. Oh god, the screams. You shriek more to shut them out than due to the pain, and it feels like all hell has broken loose. The next moments include, first of all, a bit of silence, followed by one last stream of gunfire, your mother emitting a sound of pain, a body hitting the ground. The sound of metal hitting concrete, a dreadful hiss, police sirens, people shouting, people charging, more gunfire, a scream, pain, death, agony, CS gas in your eyes, blindness...
Visions. Great, massive things in the void, moving about, doing something you can't quite understand, confusion. The vision doesn't last, but you feel indelibly marked by it somehow, altered...
Time has stopped. You are standing in place. Everything is still. You look to your right. The frozen body of yourself, fearfully cowering from the gunfire, gas and lunatics. A squad of frozen police officers in full gear, trapped mid-run. SWAT, maybe? You don't know. You go over to them and take a look. Yeah, probably SWAT. They got here fast. They seem to have shot a guy who's still standing - one of the guys who started shooting. Your mother's on the other end of the room, shot several times in the legs and right arm, police converging on her. You look at yourself. Not the cowering you over there - the current you. You seem transparent. And, as you discover while you wave an arm through the police officer, also intangible. Are you a ghost? You feel a strange pull toward your own body, but also a peculiar curiosity that prevents you from immediately giving in to it.
This worried me more, rather than less. I wasn't sure why, so instead I said, in as calm of a voice as I could manage, "Ah, well, they're quite recognizable. Dominic's in sixth grade, and Lucian is in seventh; Lucian's a bit on the skinny side, but he's in sports, so he's not really thin, I wouldn't think. Dominic wears these big, bulky glasses; he hates them, but he's practically blind without them, so, you know..."
I was rambling. I knew that, but it was hard to stop. "And, uhm, Lucian has really bright blue eyes, very recognizable...big ears, too, I've heard, but I think that's just a family trait. They're Hispanic, of course, like me....you don't think anything might have happened to them, right?"
I wasn't sure I wanted her to answer, but I'd rather have asked the question than not. Either I got reassurance, or I had my fears confirmed...either way, it would let me know what to do next...I wasn't good at being idle.
Miss Hanstead seems to recall who they are.
"Oh, them! I do remember those two. They met up in here not twenty minutes ago. I think they went outside. I'm sure they're around someplace. Maybe they went to the store to get themselves something to eat?"
Author
Topic: Worm: Edwardstown (Read 135727 times)