Sunday 3 December 2017

Chapter 27 pt 1: Killer 'Splosion Drones.

Late again this week (sorry!) This chapter was always going to be rewritten and it wouldn't have made sense with some of the changes I made later on.

As usual, warnings apply. This is the rough draft of a story with adult themes and situations. If you are offended by bad language and grammatical errors, gentle reader, read no further! For those of you who have decided to stay, thanks for reading. I hope you enjoy this week's chapter!



Sam stumbled into blackness, and as he did it felt like he’d run into a screen door the size of the universe. It didn’t hurt, but feeling his body trickle through a billion billion holes randomly scattered across all the infinite spheres of reality wasn’t something he relished.

He was a particle, a wave, a random scatter of photons encompassing the length and breadth of time, and that freaked him out more than just a bit. As he watched, bodiless and helpless in the void, each of his individual quarks, gluons, and electrons were taken apart, cleaned, buffed, polished, given an oil change, then flung out again to body-surf in the quantum foam. Then, as though called, all of his trillion component pieces came zipping back together through tiny pores in the skin of the multiverse. They smashed together at the speed of light, and in the process, it felt like his soul took an uppercut to the testicles from the mighty fist of the cosmos.

Sam wasn’t given the opportunity to come to terms with the experience. Despite being disassembled and put back together again, his component particles still remembered the shove Aleph had given him on the Vancouver end of the gateway. Inside each them they carried the transferred momentum of that shove, so as he exited into this new world, Sam found himself off-balance and stumbling forward.

He staggered into a large square roughly the same size as the Memorial Park he'd just left. The square was rimmed with dozens of ornate stone gates, each attended by a uniformed customs agent. Old fashioned lamp posts with orbs burning brightly in glass globes surrounded the square. Though off-balance, he had the impression there were enough people walking around to call it busy, but not enough to call it a crowd.

He did a kind of cross-legged hornpipe trying to catch up to his balance which seemed to keep just a pace ahead of him. He would have ended up on the ground had he not suddenly collided with an ass the size and shape of two fleshy mooring bollards. He straightened and yanked back his hands as though he’d just touched a hot stove to look into the eyes of the owner of the arresting posterior.

The ass in question was the property of a man with a dense head of curly hair and a white-streaked beard so wild and massive that it looked as though he was being attacked a hirsute parasite in the process of consuming his face from below. His eyes were like reflective black glass beads that glittered from under his brows in the subdued light. He was wearing the black that all those in service to Penhold wore, but on top of his uniform also wore a bulletproof vest and had a set of cuffs in his belt that were inscribed in sigils. The crest on his shoulder was a crest that showed a shield surrounded by a wreath of nightshade leaves under the ducal crown. At his belt there was a holster with the handle of a softly glowing truncheon poking out. He also smelled as though he bathed in, showered with, and seasoned his food with Drakkar Noir.

The man gave Sam a hard look and adjusted his coat.

“Whoops, sorry,” said Sam, giving him a sheepish smile and wiping his hands on his pants.
“Sam! What did I tell you about consent?” asked Dimitri, who had just at that moment emerged through the gate without so much as a stumble. Behind him, Aleph materialized and the two strode into Asphodel like the eldritch version of the Right Stuff.

“We’ve spoken about this, Sam,” Dimitri scolded him. Dimitri turned to the liveried man. “Apologies, he’s just a lovable scamp,” said Dimitri over Sam’s protests, “he sees a guy in uniform and he can’t seem to keep his hands off the old man-ass.”

The bearded man glared at them and began what sounded like a scripted speech. “On behalf of Briar Penhold, Duke of the free city, Senak, I welcome you. Anything to declare?”

“Huh?” Sam asked, still disoriented from the trip. People beginning to look his way and he could feel sweat beginning to prickle on his scalp.

The man glared and repeated more slowly, but just as loudly, “Anything to declare?”

“Sorry for grabbing your ass?” Sam guessed.

“What?!”

Sam wondered if the man was deaf.

“It’s alright Pat, these two chucklefucks with me.” Aleph appeared from behind the bearded customs agent to put her hand on his shoulder in a familiar gesture.

The customs agent straightened when he saw her. “Ma’am, welcome back.”

“Anything happen while I was away?”

“Heard about the Necromancer?”

She nodded wearily, “Yeah, I heard about the Necromancer. Anything else?”

Pat shrugged his shoulders noncommittally. “It’s busier than usual, but it might just be Christmas shopping,” he trailed off.

“What?”

“I don’t know, some of the people coming in, well, this is going to sound strange, but they smell weird,” he looked like he was embarrassed to say it.

Sam thought he had a right to his embarrassment. How someone smelling like a frat boy’s laundry basket thought he held the moral high ground when it came to critiquing other people’s fragrance choices was beyond him.

Aleph looked at him intently. “What kind of smell?”

Pat shrugged again, “I don’t know, it’s a sort of chemical, alcohol smell. They all seemed to be out of it. Drunk maybe. ‘Tis the season, right?”

“Anyone still here that smelled like that?”

Pat scanned the area and pointed. “Yeah, that woman sitting on the chain over there,” he said pointing to a woman in grey track pants and hoodie who was perched a hundred feet away on one of the lengths of chain that stretched between cast iron pillars all along the border of the square.

The three of them turned their heads to look. The woman appeared to be expecting it because she grinned widely and waved them over.

“That can’t be fucking good,” Dimitri murmured.

“KSD, you think?” asked Sam.

“Duh.”

Aleph led the way over with Sam and Dimitri trailing in their wake. The woman swung idly on the chain and had a lollipop stick coming out of the corner of her mouth. She was in her early thirties and trying to hide the fact under a layer of bronze makeup. Sam only noticed because her makeup was in need of touching-up, even to his untrained eye. Sam knew that he was normally oblivious to such things, and if even he could notice her makeup was messed up, it had to be pretty bad.

Her nails were long, manicured, and had that white strip across the tips that Sam had seen before, but didn’t know the purpose of. Her hoodie had “Juicy” embroidered in a kind of gothic script on the pocket and she smelled worse than a science classroom after a dissection lesson.

“You’re already too late, you know.” The sound of the voice was normal, it was the tone that was completely at odds with what Sam was expecting. It was greasy, self-possessed, and it was familiar. It came to him that the way this woman spoke was a near-perfect match to the voices he’d heard coming out of the mouths of the KSDs in Memorial Park. The words seemed less like a recorded message now, though.

“Hello, Knox. What do you want?”

The woman drew the lollipop from her lips in a vaguely obscene way and languorously put a hand to her chest in mock surprise. “Is that who I am? If I was Knox of the White, that would be a dangerous accusation for someone in your position. If you were wrong and the Guild caught wind you were dragging the name of an alchemist through the dirt… well, goodness, it wouldn’t just be you to suffer, I’d imagine your duke would also. For the sake of this conversation, you can call me Marion.”

Sam snorted.

“What?” asked Dimitri, looking confused.”

“Knox made a dad joke,” said Aleph flatly.

“Other than make shitty jokes, what do you want?” Aleph repeated. “You called us over.”

Marion inspected the lollipop and gave it another lick and winked at Sam. He felt nauseous with just a hint of guilty thrill. “You probably won’t believe it, but I’m here to help you save lives.”

“You’re right, I don’t believe it.”

“Yes, I thought you would lack the imagination. Let me explain. This city is going to be mine.”
Aleph laughed. “You’re going to try and take Senak?”

“Take it? Goodness, no, I’m going to save it from the vile necromantic threat. Once the good Duke’s forces are destroyed valiantly protecting the city, of course.”

“Dude, have you even read the Evil Overlord list?” asked Dimitri.

The Knox hand puppet held up a manicured finger of silence to Dimitri. “When you’re spoken to. Your betters are speaking.”

“Oh my god, you’re too much,” said Dimitri laughing. “Look at you, sitting there wearing your brand new meat suit, licking your lollipop and putting out this temptress vibe. I mean it’s just so cute.”

Marion clenched her jaw but otherwise didn’t deign to so much as glance at Dimitri. A faint smile traced Aleph’s lips.

“I mean, I get it,” Dimitri continued, “who wouldn’t interested in what the other half has going on under the hood, am I right?” he gave Sam a grin and a nudge with his elbow. “If I had the chance, I’d take that for a spin just to see what it’s like. What you’ve got going on here isn’t that though,” he said motioning up and down with an arm. “You got all up in this salon-jockey’s skin suit and you’re trying to act like how you think a real woman would.”

The woman’s lips had thinned to nothing and there was a slight, but noticeable tremor in her right eye.

 “It would be funny if it wasn’t so sad. You couldn’t be more of a cartoon if your name was Jessica Rabbit. You think you’re being all sexy-scary, but you’re just a sad Buffalo Bill wanna-be with bad makeup and who smells like shit.”

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