Arun heads for the fire escape, not trusting the elevators.
Presumably, you lot all follow the writer/possible axe-murderer down the fire escape, out of the hotel, and onto the beach, greeted with pleasant warm and a cool sea breeze. Turning around, you would find that the city seems to match the beach-side buildings - differing aesthetics with similar sleekness, with generally lower, wider buildings with greater distances between them. It's like as if the entire city's a resort, which, honestly might be the case from the state of things. Two things are amiss, the first of which jumps out immediately - no one seems to be mind that members of your pose are brandishing firearms. They notice you, you're absolutely positive, a few children waved at you, a couple walked around you, they definitely know you're there, they just, don't seem to be reacting to your armaments. Te second one, takes a bit more time, but sooner or later, you would all find that this resort you're in, has no name. There are stone signs and places on some of the buildings where a name should go, but there's nothing there. Each and every last one, are blank.
You wait.
A minute passes. Soon it becomes five, and then, it begins to rain.
Droplets of burning quicksilver fall from cloudless skies upon the city, and as they hit the roads, and the buildings, and the streetlights, the colors and details wash away, revealing the pale infinitesimally thin wire-frames that lie within. But as they hit the people, something else starts happening. Their faces, and only their faces begin to melt, like hot wax, deforming and dripping. You see them grasp and clutch at their faces trying to hold them in place, but to no avail, soon enough, they begin tearing at it, trying, desperately to shape and reshape their faces, with, some success, though it never lasts. They weep, and the above sky bleaches into a starless night.
The wireframes fill with color, and the city you now see, is not what you once saw. It is a city of flesh and bone, of chitin and plant-matter. It is a city with rigid flowers for pavement, fluorescent ribs for street lights. But it too, is a city of clockwork, where everything and everyone is connected, one way or another. Where all hearts beat as one, each a cog, a component, in some infernal machine, with a purpose you do not know.
Hanging from empty arteries, puppeteered by mechanisms built into gears of black flesh that form the heavens above, birds of chitinous clockwork "fly" through the floral-scented air, above the weeping Defects whose forms mesh with the floral gears that form the streets they meander through. They too are turned and turned in turn by the great mechanisms of flesh that form the moving buildings and structures, the gears and the racks and the drive shafts.
Hovering above, is a great luminous clockface. It is six minutes till midnight.
Before you, are the narrow shifting streets of the clockwork city, and something in you, something ineffable, is screaming for you to destroy it. Behind you, is the beach, untouched by the anomaly, where it is still day, where the sun still shines, and where there are people who while utterly oblivious to what's happening, at least haven't turned into abominations.
((If any of you were planning to have grabbed more stuff, tell me and we'll assume you picked it up. Though do bear in mind these do take up real space, so carrying all four cacti isn't exactly an option for any one person
))
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Topic: Eschaton IC: An Utter Trainwreck (Read 16228 times)