Demiurge : A Recorded History

Outside, a veteran with stitches across his forehead began to play dirty water from a trombone, looking for small change and buttons. The deep moans of the brass found its way into Dante's ears, pausing him for a moment. He smiled, glancing at Ooidal.

"Go shut him up," he directed in a sort of half-whisper. Ooidal nodded, excusing himself past Virtue and Vice. He hesitated, reaching for the door, first plucking an umbrella from the end table. His hand was in a greyish suede glove with nickels sewn into the knuckles, crawling out from the unbuttoned sleeve of a pea coat in charcoal. The click-clack and thunder of the 219 roared on the overhead tracks as the man stepped into the rain, catching the sideways glimpse of a stray cat. An explosion snapped across the very-early-morning sky, illuminating the blackened skeletons of clouds.

Ooidal blinked slowly at the roadblock along the manhole construction, spotting the street corner Satchmo near the vent of a basement Laundromat. His instrument warbled a kind of wet, uninvited stink like a vagrant dog. The man was in his late fifties, probably older, with no hair on his head, a long crooked scar mapped from his right eye to his left ear. His double chin expanded and contracted like a frog as he played, pouring his soul through blackened teeth into the brass.

"Can y'uh spur'r some change f'ur an old rain dog?" interrupted the music as Ooidal sloshed toward the man. His helpless groans were ignored by the streetlights as Ooidal pummeled him with eighty-cent fists. As his eye cracked and his teeth fell out, he fell silent. The sky dropped a bass drum down a flight of stairs, and Ooidal stepped away from the bloodied man.

"-in full drag," escorted the brute back into a cramped room above a hardware store. Vice wore a halfway sort of skim milk smile behind black cherry lips. She smelled like gasoline and envy, and her gums were always bleeding. Her blackened hair pulled on her scalp and punched out from the back of her head, twisting and splaying at the nape of her coffee brown neck and a black pea coat's collar. Ash fell from a Parliament in her hand.

"What do we do with the breakfast crowd?" rose from Virtue, unwavering. She was pale, with plain blonde hair dripping from a white mohair beret. Her eyes were a drowning victim's grey-blue, starting off at something inside her own head, and her stare was enough to hold back spring. She had on a look like she had just swallowed a bit of sour tasting poison, or maybe like she was chewing on a lit cigar.

"They won't be a problem," Dante commanded. "There aren't any heroes in Westview. If it gets noisy, the worst we'll get is a waitress looking to clean up a broken plate." His silhouette was all that was visible, shifting its weight between feet in front of the room's only window. They were all genuinely bad people.

A tornado of newspaper shard blew past as the old Lincoln stuttered and coughed to life, its tailpipe shuddering disapprovingly. Dante ground the gears and shifted out of park, splashing through a pothole as his blinker flashed left.

Twenty minutes of graffiti and brown brought the car to Southard's chugging factory row. Two men with shaved heads cracked jokes and eyeballed the big black boat as it came to a stop, the white bottoms of their pant legs grey and brown from city filth. Dante caught their glance, obscenities clogging his mind. He stepped calmly from the driver's seat, a boot landing in a damp pile of cigarette butts. Ooidal circled around the front of the car from the passenger seat, yawning and rapping his thumb on the hood as he went. Virtue and Vice huddled together, shivering and dripping from the weather.

The eight went east, and the five went north, and they all started down the block toward a neon north star that read Peg's Diner. Peg had never once stepped foot in the restaurant, she was the owner's way of coping with his Vietnam memories and social disorders. He had opened it just a month previous, and lived in a supply room around back; rumors would later surface that he hung himself, or shot himself, or jumped from a roof down the block. Vice stuck her hand into Ooidal's gloved mitt, and they strolled ahead of the captain, Vice leaning her head onto Ooidal's shoulder for a moment as they passed a man selling newspapers. They reached the diner's door and gave Dante polite, unfamiliar nods, signaling the hostess to find a table for two, preferably a booth near the window, and two coffees, cream in one, but only a little bit, with no sugar, please, and no cream in the other, but two scoops of sugar, thank you.

Virtue bought a newspaper to shield herself from the blurred drizzle leaking from the grey, morningish sky, and Dante whistled, motioning her to follow him. Five minutes passed, and a noise like an arguing couple erupted from the diner. Ooidal knocked his cup of coffee to the floor as Vice spat curses at him and tore a vending machine wedding band from her finger. Dante and Virtue stepped through the back entrance of the restaurant, well aware that nobody would be looking that way. After a few minutes, and a nod from a woman reading a newspaper near the back entrance, Ooidal settled down, and allowed a waitress to escort himself and his furious wife from the diner. On his way out, he caught the glance of a wide-eyed little redheaded girl with syrup at either end of her mouth. She stuck her tongue out at him, mad because he was a big stupid meanie that had ruined her breakfast and scared her.

He forgot about the girl at the chime of a payphone, and did not remember for eleven years.

He didn't forget about Virtue, though. Virtue with her dead eyes and her unhappy smile. He and Vice were back aboard the Lethe, each passing second catching in their throat like gargling weighted dice and lucky coins. Virtue checked her watch and almost cracked a smile, the corner of her lip stretching a tiny bit. She closed the newspaper and tucked it under a shoulder, catching herself in the glance of a little redheaded girl. She yawned, stepping away from her post, back into the alley behind the diner where a double-handful of bald men was standing.
"Oh fuck," Vice's eyes bulged as the display flashed a white rectangle and updated all at once. "What the hell'uz that little b!tch doin'?" She glanced at the next screen over, at her father beating a paperweight into the sequined chest of a broken old man named Peg. "Fuck, fuck fuck. This is total shit." Ooidal nodded, dumbstruck. "I've got to get back in there. Get me back in there." She glanced over at Dante's comatose form, resting comfortably with a six-inch needle comfortable in his head, and placed her hand on Ooidal's shoulder.

Ooidal's hands danced wildly across one, two keyboards, trying to find a hole to sneak Vice through. She planted herself in a worn armchair with a gaping hole in its headrest. The screens updated again, Dante's dark red form ducked and weaved liquidly, his thick, powerful fist catching the old man's stomach. Peg had been dreaming some bad dreams about robot spiders and big fields of people, but some talking head from Zion decided that he was better off dead than out. Just to old to fight the good fight. Virtue chewed a pattern into her lips as she walked up to Adrian Noble's car, its window sliding silently into a black envelope.
Behind, the bald men unholstered gleaming silver hand cannons, kicking down the door to Peg's. A steady tattoo ripped though the wall of the supply closet as Dante yelled, ducking toward a far wall. More than a few of the bullets hit Peg as the door fell from its shattered hinges, the man's unfortunate form wrinkling, falling into itself, a blonde wig falling into its eyes.

Vice exploded from the phonebooth on Sixth and Vine, the two-block sprint impossibly long. Her jet-black hair splayed behind her, sticking to her neck in clumps as it was pelted with rain.

"Y'know it pains'uh me t'uh make a y'ung'in like y'hurse'luff do this t'her daddy," crawled slowly from Noble's lips, his disarming bayou drawl doing nothing for Virtue's apathy. She yawned, cocking an eyebrow. "Fine then, miss-ey'uh. I'll give y'uh th'b-ahud news now then. There ain't gon-" A bullet whirred through the saturated air, eager to embed itself in the blonde's straight hair. Instead, it was lodged in the leather upholstery of Noble's car. Then another, his driver decided against heroism and shifted into reverse. Three more bullets, and Vice stood at the end of the street, her feet spread apart, her black leather legs in a triangle.

"Who was that, ‘sis?" she yelled toward the blonde.

[Author's Note: Originally written and posted by Ecks.]

His name was Ooidal and he worked mostly at the docks, (he said). And that's about all that I remember.

The night was grey and my hair even greyer. This city takes its toll on you. It starts off ok. You think to yourself. Hell! You even say it out loud; I'm just gonna take one little stroll over here, see. See what all the commotion is about. Then after a little while -- you feel comfortable in the hubub. You think to yourself. Hell! You even say it out loud; I'm thinkin' to start some commotion of my own, see. A young guy I knew once. Young chap, hair as brunette as the autumn sky. Newly acquainted with this place. If I'm - if I'm being honest, with himself, too.

Anyway, I'm just repeating myself now. Some broad. Heh. So she'd like to think. And of course I was never in love with her. Love; some sap of an emotion invented by someone somewhere on the top of a rock with some pen and paper looking down on the world and imaging what it might be like if he was a part of it. If one of those fine lookin' specimens of female homo sapien may take it upon themselves to make his acquaintance. Nothing ever works like it does in the books. Or the papers. Or on the radio. Not in real life; well apart from those pulp "science fiction" novels picked up from the side of a soggy magazine stand for 65¢. That kind of *censored* takes its toll on you, though. The gatekeeper guarding the bridge to some Freudian thoughts you'd never know existed. Some *censored* up. It's all anyone ever realises. Realised that they are but then it takes that to change it.

Too much brandy on ice and too much wine she said. Whether it was another sarcastic comment made through another toothless grin, I still dunno. I like to think it is. Whenever I think on it, I always produce a sarastic grin through a toothless smile - so I'm told. Looking in the mirror is dangerous enough as it is. One of them smashed once, though. Too much smoke from what I heard. Noone knew where it was all coming from. I mean I had the Mayor breathing down my neck - no I'm not gonna use some Ayetalyin American phrase like "bustin' my ass" because that my whooly inaccurate. Anyway with nothing more to go on, that mirror cost me my badge some say. The "unorthodox methods" as they liked to call it, say some others. The broad in the closet, more still. Old school? There's no two schools about it. There's a way to get a job done and there's a way to pose and posture and hope someone gets it done for you. I always preferred the former. I also preferred not to be poked at for some of my more advanced vocabulayry. Not that I'd care but start coming out with that sort of thing around here, and you're bound to have your *censored* busted up pretty bad for it.

Respect was something I had. Something this city used to have. It was no New York but it was something. He knew it, too. I mean it wasn't no Irish Mafia bootleg racket but noone's gonna' miss the odd crate or two. Especially if some burly guy is standing over it. You tend not to ask to many questions when a lion has its jaws around you. You tend to ask even less when those jaws snap shut. The contents? Rats. Mostly. Rats and magazines. And the odd "science fiction" novel from the side of a soggy magazine stand for 65¢.

Virtue was made up of the parts you throw away: all those sharp, plastic and sty-ro-foam things that get cut with a razor and tossed aside. In her twisty-tie-wrap life, she had seen no heartbreak, and felt no pain. She just was born with the kind of meanness that makes babies bite fingers and rumors bite egos.

A chasm of lightning split a fault in the mountainous sky, blooming at the edges of clouds then disappearing. It didn’t illuminate anything, though - it had arrived late, only splitting through the muddy grey of mid-morning with enough sun still peeking through to bar the rats from camouflage. Vice knew who had been in the car, the Lethe had dealt with Noble and his vanity before. She stood there furious, her aim unwavering, ready to punch holes in the blonde at any moment.

“I’m not your sister, Vice: you’re dumb if you thought so,” she blinked. “And the captain’s not your dad. He would have been ten when you were born.” Virtue did not waver either, her hands at her sides, rain melting her hat into a sodden jelly-bean of stained fabric hanging limply just above her bored eyes. “Noble’s men are going to kill him. I tried to tell him that you were more of a threat, but he did not want to listen.”

Vice counted to herself. She had fired five shots. One left. One chance.

A closer exit - Ooidal had opened the line back up, praying it would help. And looking at the odds, Dante needed all the help he could get. Just out front of Pegs, the jump-roping warble cut through the rain. Virtue heard it, then Vice, then Dante. Her eyes almost taking on a look of delight, Virtue spun, sprinting toward the noise. Vice chased after her, closing the distance, but the telephone was just too close. The blonde grabbed for the phone, Vice fired her shot, shattering the receiver as Virtue disappeared into wet, shining mosquitoes of greenish-white light.

The mosquitoes turned to diamonds and gold, and vanished. Virtue opened her eyes on the other side.

[Author's Note: Required Listening.]

[Author's Note: Originally written and posted by Ecks.]


"Nothing in forever. Not really sure when she's comin' back, kid."


"That's what I heard. Never can be too sure if your ears are tryin' 'a hear what you don't wanna' see, though."


"What? Black suits? Not aroun' 'ese parts, stranger. Likely to get you bruised and beaten. Or th'other way 'round as the case may be. Y'er lucky I don' take y'out t'the wood - shed."


"Vice? Dead. Finished. Out for the count. Sleepin' with the fishes. Fin. The End. Kicked the Bucket."


"I was still quite new to the City, then. Still a bit overwhelmed by the bright lights, you see. Moved in from the country..."

[Author's Note: Originally written and posted by Ecks.]

"The girl slinked through the tail end of the crowd snaked alongside the bar and out into the drearily dry midnight rain..."

Far from the furor of the fervent fans within, he finally had time to cool off. Such a mundane myriad of malevolent machinations was to be expected but not of this scale. He dreamily wondered to himself whether something would be done about them, decadently allowing himself the luxury of proclaiming "I'll be damned if we're doomed."Tried as he might to pull the tightly wound wire from around her neck, his efforts waned in the face of a such a wicked intent. What use was his freedom if all it afforded him was the accentuation of an abstract affordability which could often times amount to little more than an apparently acute aperture.

Free.

At long last, a gasp of breath was to be gotten and never before had he been so glad of it. The comfort of the drearily dry midnight rain soothed and calmed in a collected and considered generosity. At the least it provided a hub of communication for the inspired imaginations of those who remained. At the least he had himself.

[Author's Note: Required Listening.]

The sun started meekly peeking from behind a whitewashed splotch of sky, its blinding forebears squinting though a Marquis of Queensbury of metal blinds and dusty fabric that were all half-up-half-down in a messy mussed-up kind of way, the little white cord all tangled and knotted into itself. Shadows from the blinds painted themselves in a careful, geometric sort of pattern across all the room’s surfaces, a slight breeze making the whole wallpaper-and-Berber affair look fluidly mobile. Something like a bird passed by the window, stabbing madly into the light’s ebb and flow. The girl blinked hardly, stirring herself from unconsciousness again, her eyes opening into whitish almond shells, painted in a messy light brown and pitted black in the center.

“Who foun’urr” croaked Ooidal, his sloppy gaze darting between his two captains.

“Some scavenger punk, I ne’er got a good description from Alexis. Bas’surd got her healthy enough to work an’ sold her into the slave trade,” he coughed. “I guess it was luck that the Ephialtes was refueling when it was. Luck that he still recognized her, too. Told me she was jus’ about in the pawn shop when he bought’er.” Dante’s caricatured eyebrows lifted for a moment, a smile creeping across his lips.

“Why did’un’t y’hou nab her when y’whurr stringin’ them up by th’urr insides?” hissed the operator, his fat, sweaty nostrils flaring, his jowls slapping at the side of his unhappy chin.

“Don’ think I didn’t try. Alexis didn’t say two words - til I threw his whore’s ear into his lap. The whole crew was just as close-lipped. Hell if I know why, though. The kid’d skipped off to Erehwon at some point, back when they were still buildin’ that hole.”

The girl lifted her head slowly, her wrists still tied snugly to the back of her chair. She traced the side of her palm across the Braille messages carved all up and down the grain of the wood. It told a whole meandering, messy story that nobody wanted anything to do with: a haphazard heady tale of a little redheaded girl with pigtails and an old man with a spidery, creased scar across the back of his bald head where a blonde woman had bludgeoned him with a crowbar. Her own head felt heavy, a handful of conflicts squeezing their way between hemorrhaging capillaries and hammerhead migraines. “Why we’ar y’look’hin’ f’er me, then?” she whispered once, the raspy words only timidly creeping past her lips. She repeated it, her blurred halfway gaze meeting the lazy, happyish scowl chiseled into Dante’s dark face.

His mouth unbolted, showing just the off-white ankles of his front teeth as a floorboard creaked outside the door. The room was painted in a softish kind of gleaming yellow for a moment, and again, and again. The noise followed just after, explosive cracks elbowed their way out of the barrel of Dante’s powerful handgun, though the dusty, distilled air.

The door splintered, three, maybe, distinct holes nestled themselves in the wake of their projectile pedigree. Ooidal had tightened his fists, and with a vague fire in his belly, landed a shoe next to the door’s handle, sending a shower of toothpicks out into the hall and driving the door wildly out onto the cramped, beige balcony. A slippery looking red stain, no wider than a coal-miner’s smile contrasted the dark brown of a wooden rail. Ooidal’s cancerous, rusty form burst through the door’s absence, his hands landing on either side of the stain. Below, a little blonde sprite with a heart-shaped necklace and a cough from teenage smoking pointed to 1:35 on a collapsed poker table, a brownish-red pooling just under the dramatic tear in her abdomen.

Alexis grunted, placing the one-armed woman with straw-grass for hair and bleeding splits in her tongue on a shining metal table, knocking half-eaten bowls of something bouncing maverick across the grated floor. She lay there all rolled into herself like a porcupine cannonball rolling across the deck of some hellborne freighter. He leaned her onto her back, and she winced, sprawling out across the cold surface, her asymmetrical limbs splayed parallel, hitting six o’clock on the nose.

Ooidal’s hulking form turned pale as he felt a new kind of sweat splash itself upon his pockmarked forehead, noticing the duct tape across the clock’s mouth. He turned from the rail, his maw hanging just open enough to taste the 65% polyester, 35% viscose blend of a bootcut black pant leg as it collided with his teeth. Heavy leather caught the back half of his cheek, and flattened his ear into itself.

Dante caught himself in the ragged doorframe as the lanky black stroke slashed past him, into the operator’s face. An overflowing, guttural yell escaped him as he pounced through the hole, tackling the tobacco brunette goon toward, onto, through the balcony’s dry-rotted banister. They landed with a resonant thud, the dinosaur’s mighty, violent mass concentrated at the assailant, the force of his landing flowing out through the two cannons of his knee and elbow, crushing the man’s pelvis and sternum, respectively. As he rolled off the rapidly expiring form, Dante caught a glimpse of some kind of Greek looking ϝ tattooed all red and raw around the edges on his neck, teetering on the edge of his collar.

His sort of bubble-shaped face ended with a goateed chin that he stroked when he was thinking or not thinking, blood from his split lip was dying it a brownish red. He had no hair up top, but could have grown some if he chose to; maybe it would have disguised the big purple-blue egg forming across his temple. And he was sort of tan, but in an indistinguishable kind of rugged way that made him look like a pioneer or a circus clown, depending upon the time of day â?" but now he was a much more whitish kind of shade, shock and blood loss desaturating him quickly. “She’s gone, you fu-ging maniac,” spat Alexis, mediocre, forgettable captain of the Ephialtes as a rope was fitted around his neck.

Two more suits clogged the staircase, their roles suddenly shifting from upper- handed offense, to man-to-man defense against the two behemoths. Ooidal regained himself in just enough time to bring crossed arms in front of his face, blocking a piston-first. He grit his teeth, and locked his fist, shooting a cannonball uppercut into the tail end of a not-strong-enough ribcage. The mediumish black form fell into the punch, a strained cough exploding from its mouth. Trained well enough, its hand found its shoulder holster, snaking around Ooidal’s sausage link arm.

Fire spat from the beautifully polished and primed machine before it was parallel with the ground. One, two big serrated holes popped from the floor, then a ham hock elbow plowed into the back of the suit’s head. The world went all starry and was suddenly more comfortable and soothing â?" all warm milk and gently crashing waves. Then it was on the ground with three broken ribs and a dangerous concussion.

The remaining scowled, remaining on the stairs, removing an unsmiling submachine from inside a jacket that’s flowing cut now gained reason. His leatherly gloved finger clamped tightly on the little parenthesis of a trigger, and rounds began to pepper the nighthawk jungle. Liquid air seemed to fill the space between the gun’s screaming mouth and Dante’s hulking construction. He rolled dynamically to his left, stopping midway and jumping right, catching himself behind an overstuffed loveseat. Bullets zigzagged through the floral fabric of the armrest just above the man’s vintage haircut, half of them making it through and missing their mark by only a lucky quarter. And suddenly a much more commanding crash punctuated the meandering statement made by the submachine gun’s rat-a-tat.

Lethe smirked with one eye closed, the shot firing from his index finger hitting its mark - imaginary smoke pouring from his fingernail. Ooidal shot again, his forty-five caliber lead hornet stinging the shoulder of the man who was busy mourning his shattered wrist.

A silent man named Agustus carried another crate full of smuggled cigarettes, terrible, fake cigarettes, toward the Hovercraft Fawkes. Some slivered piece of wood was digging something fierce into his wrist. Three more, he counted to himself, then it’ll be the one with air holes â?" that’ll be a nice break. He nodded as Noone pointed him in the direction of a cargo hold in the belly of the fatter-than-long ship. She was just dead weight, anyway. What good is a miner with only one hand to grip a shovel? They were building a city, not a cripple’s home.

An unassuming white sedan signaled right, and pulled up just behind a similar one all scribbled over in black. Grinding the parking brake and killing the engine, two big men with shaved heads and white slacks snarled and exited the car.

[Author's Note: Required Listening. Also, the reporter at the start of this piece is Kate Adie, the bluepill that I played originally in the 'Step Forward' event, then revived for a few others. She was a columnist for the Sentinel Newspaper, and lived alone in Westview. For more, see Deconstructing Demiurge.]

Five stories in the air, an out-of-work reporter scribbled over the last few inches of window in her apartment in fat, black marker, holding a closet key in her hand. A door slammed down the hall as her landlord, a short, disagreeable man with curly brown hair and a small splotch of skin cancer on his shoulder waddled toward the stairs, hoping to catch the skinheads who had just double-parked outside of his building. She ignored it and placed a worn, brown hat on the kitchen counter. The smell of fecal matter finger paint and decaying woman would bother her neighbors within the week.

The floorboards creaked and moaned as Ooidal lumbered back to his captive captain. His hands were fumbling with an extension cord when Dante reappeared. He beat his fist on the door’s ragged frame to pull the tumor of a man from his work, knocking a clock from the wall. In eight minutes, a payphone at the foot of a block of rowhouses all frozen in mid-collapse twelve blocks away would begin to ring. The clock’s face shattered, leaving it forever eight minutes from an exit.

“You brought this upon y’urself, kid. You had mo’ than en’uff chances t’uh jus’ give me that gah-damm one-armed bih-”

“An’ wh’ut, Dante? Whu’thhen, huh? Jus’ ‘cause y’uh can’nuh get pas’ Vice dyin’ duz-zent mean y’gottuh live a decade in th’uh past. An’ it duz-zent mean y’gottuh brin-”

“This isn’t about Vice, kid. This isn’t about Vice, or Virtue, or Noble, or you, oh-renny oth’uh ghosts. This’us jus’ about fixin’ somethin’ that broke. Virtue was suppos’suh off herself an hour after I dropped her in that hole. Vice was suppos’suh put a bullet in Noble’s crooked little face. An’ you were suppos’suh bury your head in the caves at Ere-uh-won and never come up for air again.” Dante’s lips were wet, and he ran his hands through his hair as he spoke, his eyes not leaving Ooidal’s for a moment. His tempo fell apart, “That truce fell apart, an’ you jus’ itched for the good ol’ days, right? You came to me and asked, ‘What can I do, captain?’ an’ I answered. So what the hell makes you think you can side with her,” he motioned toward the redhead, “or Noone, or any one of these gah-damm brats? This generation’s not worth savin’, kid. Not one of ‘em.”

“Then why d’y’hoo want t’uh fight th’um so badly?” Ooidal squinted, his fingers still diligently working against the tense vinyl. “Why th’hull didn’t you jus’ take Virtue y’urself when y’foun’ur in New Antigone?”

The clock still read eight minutes as the two bald men entered the hall. It still read eight minutes as they stepped over the receptionist’s body, over the late Digamma unit. And when they climbed the stairs. And they marched toward the rotten apple of a door; and when the first clubbed Dante, hard, with the butt of his handgun, knocking the surprised man to the ground, his tongue all bloody from biting down on it. Still when the second trained his weapon on Ooidal, his fingers moving from the last strands of knot to the back of his bald head. The clock still read eight minutes away from an exit as the two gleaming devils lifted the bear, their trophy, over their shoulders and carried him from the room, leaving Ooidal alone with a girl he had lied to for a very long time.

[Author's Note: Originally written and posted by Ecks. Required Listening.]

The soft silk fabric pulled tightly around the tree trunk joining the old, weathered and leathered face to the hefty bulk beneath. Of a hot pink, almost red characterisation and hue, its presence was tolerated only because of the stature and authority of the man who wore it. As it lumbered toward the bar, like a worn old trumpet, it rasped "Straight up scotch and whiskey. Neat, on the rocks when you're ready." All four were downed before a knock came at the door. An announced P and D were the precursor to its forceful opening. Two stalks in striped suit to follow, each with a steely six - shooter drawn in expectation and one with a badge held open from a warm leatherette pouch.

A laugh warbled this side of the same bar. As did an eyebrow as almost as arched as the aged kingpin's forehead. A flurry of shuffles and folds, too. Both enforcement officials made good their entry, yelling at the old oak tree to face down lay on the ground.

"Tell you what." it creaked. "Ask me your question and I'll allow you to leave here with your pensions still intact." It turned in the wind, swaying back in forth and its branches stretched into the air and gave a worn sigh. Of course they wouldn't have cared for a pension so much as their care for the finesse of the job; lieutenants each of them being from a well-to-do background. It was their interest more to upkeep a semblance of society than to gush over a paycheck spent duly at the end of each and every month.

With the busied air now still; there was wait. They all waited.

[Author's Note: From here in, things tend to speed up a bit. I know from speaking to people about it, that the next several posts get a bit inaccessible, so I will do my best to outline them in Deconstructing Demiurge. Required Listening.]

And then it was one of those blank slate moments where the air stops tasting so recycled, and all of the anxious rain clouds blur into a big white two-fifty thread count with little grey creases drawn in where the wind keeps threatening to pull it from the clothesline. The brat sensed the relative quiet and opened an eye, her vision holding the silhouette of a worn teddy bear. She blinked a four count, all the loose ends knitting themselves into a brown three-piece suit, worse for the wear, but indistinguishably belonging to someone of markedly horrible taste. It was clogging a glowing square artery, a big furry paw pushing down on the blinds and making them crinkle-crankle with each subtle movement. She felt a distantly familiar looseness in her shoulders, and lolling her head to the side discovered a fresh parallelism in her arms, wrists no longer knotted up behind her.

Stand up. She considered it, her wrists connecting with the chair. Hurt was everywhere, but the dull flavor of bruised hurt that pales to stabbing, slicing, shooting or scalding. The girl pushed, her elbows and knees disgruntled laborers, but still waiting to strike for better conditions. On her feet, hair brushing at her vision, she took a determined step toward the bear, a loose floorboard catching his attention. And then the blank slate got all scribbled on and coffee stained. Rust flaked from a pipe, through an empty square in the drop ceiling whose occupant guarded a pile of his compatriots on a missing to-do list. It danced for a moment through dust and light streams, finally making port on the bloated oasis of Ooidal’s cheek.

Grease painted his cheeks, dripped from his brow - tribal markings of an endangered species. Ooidal pounded fervently at the keyboards splayed in front of, around him - the spring action in the keys fueling his launch to the next command. Dante was pounding the pavement inside, every ounce of himself willing the rest toward one goal: forward.

Forward was eleven blocks to a partway put-together promenade pointing to a half-built high-rise hulk that punched a hole in the night sky; construction lamps lit it like stacks of black dice around the tipped-over lightning bug jars at its base. Some new land acquisition by a software giant whose employees liked to dive into the street and splash up on parking meters and pedestrians. Forward was a janitor’s closet with two sets of locks, always-the-one-you-try-last opening into an endless river of glowing white with jade green dominoes lining either shore. Forward, Adrian Noble was about to murder Dante’s right hand, his lifeline, his accomplice - a girl he had raised as a daughter. Forward was all that mattered.

A headset held to Ooidal’s head for dear life, his thin hair knotted and tangled into and round the rubber-padded earmuffs, sweat dripping into his eyes. “Go’h som’ing fur y’uh, so’w. Bu’cher not g’hunnuh like it. Nex’ gan’way, behin’ a red dumpshtur.” The operator chewed at his overstuffed lip, all cobblestone and cracked because it was nothing new. A valve released itself with a cathartic sneeze, sending the man into the air; he was very much alone in this reality, and he felt it.

Go through it again; keep things straight - vitals first. Dante’s heartbeat was high, the extreme stress of impossibility weighing heavily on him. The man had been a father to Ooidal, though they were nearly the same age. The captain always seemed a generation above everyone he met - talking to every man like he was bored, and every woman like he was in love. That made Vice his sister. Her mean, dark eyes that were always underlined with crow’s feet and struck through with ruddy sties did nothing to keep Ooidal from loving every scrap of her. There was nobody in the world that was filled with as much rage, or as much happiness. She was a hurricane of every terrible piece of heaven wrapped up in barbed wire lace.

But that makes no difference, because Vice died. Vice died a long time ago, and you have the present to worry about. Eight minutes still held on the clock, its length much closer to five, maybe four. He turned away from the window, away from the vision of an ivory sedan driven by some Noone and his lackeys carrying away his unconscious, crimson-clad past. For a moment, everything was perfect, and he could have disappeared into the air with no consequence. But his eyes met the redhead’s, and eight minutes seemed an eternity.

[Author's Note: Originally written and posted by Ecks.]

Trickling through his lips was some early morning coffee; stale and pale from the night before, from when before the hand on the face of the clock had lopped to the side of its' highest peak. It was not to watch the clock or a watch that told him this, though. Rather, the scrawl scribbled to the corner of the luminous screen before him. The half shattered and shuttered slate of blinds which clinged to the window eeked out an orange hue and glow which came not from the unlit lamps outside but from the inexplicable luminense which swayed through the sky from behind even overcast clouds, readying themselves to make way for the afternoon heat. So did the small, unassuming upside-down dish which balanced perilously close to the edge of the bulb beneath, its thermistor inadequately fresh and new to fit with the cosiedly quaint delapadatedness which held and consisted of the rest of the room.

chapter twelve; la strada ciottolo in qualche luogo de Sarausa.

Filtering into his ears were the birds whom sang outside, perched perilously close to the edge of the tennament across the block; one a residual image flickering behind an eye - the other flying delicately from the gentlemen's club just two doors down. Also, a jog of faint presses against a newly wiped - clean but old, worn keyboard.

"Good to see you're awake."

"How did they do?"

"Well." he could see a smile stretch to the side of her mouth and to the side of her face, since he could see most of only the back of a head but also what it thought.

"As for the girl?"

A snicker, just a little too shrill to be the roar of a car of the early bird. "Alive."

Heaving up from the couch and delicately placing a hand around the side of the mug, another sip was taken and flowed down his throat, as he stretched to one side and then the other, and finally in a sort of apparently impressive looking circular motion from the back to the front; simultaneously scratching the hair stitched to its top and rubbing softly, his neck below.

"My apologies. However, it had to be made to look auth--"

"It's fine."

"You know, no matter how many times they've almost torn each other apart... they're knit tighter than an Orkney sweater and more tightly wound."

Allowing the thought and the caffeine a moment or two to sink in, a saunter to the same orange hued window was concluded by an observant watch with hands clasped behind his back, directed toward the quietly harsh reality outdoors, on to an unassuming white sedan as it pulled out from the side below and signaled left, transparently opaque in its contented willingness to remain more than a decade behind, putting a completely new spin on something nostalgically modern. Two young suits with sunglasses and unshaven heads got out from the low black luxury sedan as it came to a halt after signaling left and made hurriedly their way to the newspaper stand on the other side of the road.

[Author's Note: I'm sure there'll be questions on this one, if not only for the spastic switches between time, and the pile of accents and slurring. This is very much Fara beginning to think for herself, for the first time in a long time. What's more, it's Ooidal finally perhaps thinking that she can. Required Listening - it's not a bad idea to listen to this one before reading, rather than during.]

“Who is he?” the words were hoarse chirps like a cricket’s song. “Who is he, an’ who’re you?” The girl’s face was a car wreck, headlights broken, and odd fluids pouring from any hole they could.

“Y’urr not okay, Fara,” he had stopped using her name at some point, he recognized briefly. “Y’uvven’t been h’okay f’ur a lon’ time. An’ Dante, I jus’ thought yhoo’d always been s’uh much like’um back when-” he cut himself off. She had never been okay. When he was plucked from the comatose, comfortable life of regret in Erehwon and tossed onto the Equinox, a Tetragrammaton talking-head had handed him a board-stiff envelope, the dossier on 341102 - twenty-two pages whose meticulous findings had been skewered by a broadsword of black ink. But the first time he laid eyes on her, he did not want her to have a history.

The Hovercraft Archon was a thundercloud mountain of gleaming silver, each nook and cranny punctuated by a rafter stabbing blindly into the dark, cold, narcotic real world. Ooidal stood at the bow of the Equinox - he had been living alone aboard the rodent for nearly a week already. As the Archon’s stomach slowly began to bleed light from a small incision, he mused that the captain would be a stoic old bigot that had won the big for the new ship simply by seniority.

Here’s hoping.

She was barefooted, with the type of rubbed-down-with-turpentine redness in her skin that meant she had only recently lost her shoes, and had not yet gotten used to it. An odd white line, a scar, was drawn between two toes and up to the cuff of her pants. A cuff that was, as most, frayed and filthy, pants a sort of black that in normal light would seem like farmland at midnight, but when brought against the true darkness around her, paled to a grey that was much less sure of itself - a sentiment that would repeat itself. They were tied with a spare length of thick cable. He could only tell by the set of plugs hanging at her inseam, though, as a grey shawl with the mocking Tetragrammaton insignia branded into its shoulder covered the pants’ top few inches. Her torso was wrapped in the ripped ribbons of her bed sheet, though he could not tell at the time. Most parts of her arms were exposed, the skin a horrible patchwork of windburn outlined by the white jet stream of far away scars. Her hands were tightly balled, wrapped in the rest of the sheet. She carried nothing with her.

The girl’s mouth wore an unsteady smile, a young one, perhaps too big for her face but he had not thought of it back then. In the months she had been aboard the ship, her hair had reached just past the bottom of her ears, clawing desperately at her face, so as not to be swept away by the tide of cavernous wind and uncertainty. It was at the length where hair just stops standing up of its own will, a dirty mix of red, orange, and filth, like salsa that sits out for too long. As her whole head came into sight, his mouth hung agape, unsure of whether social standards mattered, unsure if she could see him, anyway. The girl’s right eye was a puffy almond shape with a yellow tint that would have been notably odd on anyone else. Bruised redness and a fracturing white interchange converged at her left. The eyeball itself was not. It was just a gooey white cataract that no longer did what it was supposed to. She gave her captain, a silverback in human clothes a hug, the top of her head barely level with his chest. It made her look about twelve years old.

He was going to be a father.

“There’s no confed’uracy, no Demiurge,” he wondered why he said it backwards, why he said it with such sweeping insensitivity. “Y’left th’Tetruh-grem’muhton beh-cuz I convinced’yhoo tooh. I was on’y lookhin’ ou’fur y’er bes’ intrust, an’ I thought our bes’ hope would be’h Dante. He whuz m’eh captain, Fara, bef’ur the war ended, be’fur y’whurr even in ele-huh-menturry school. Y’ove t’uh know tha-”

“Who th’ell d’you think you are? I ‘ed a-”

“Y’had nu’vvink, Fara. Y’were ‘uh litt-hull brat in a black dress th’shoots would trot out wh’un they neeh-did t’pretend t’beh human. I wan’ed sum’vink bett’urr f’er yhoo, an’ I knew we could geddit w’hif his help. He jus’ needed ‘uh favor.”

“Why didn’t he j’ess get Domino himself?” she begged, the words a mountain that suddenly stopped the semi-truck of explanations speeding fifth-gear from Ooidal’s bloated jowls.

“I don’…” he struggled, teetering on the edge of a tremendous truth.

…an ivory sedan driven by some Noone and his lackeys.

“He did. We need’uh leave.” The Hovercraft Fawkes disagreed with all of this action. It had enjoyed sitting idle in that arctic wound for so long. Noone, his characteristically classic-movie features slack, sat far from helpless in a rat’s nest chair, his eyelids fluttering delicately, like a dying butterfly, except more like a newspaper caught in a gutter grate. Next to him, his cumbersome, messy hair much more grey in this reality, his skin eroded and muddy limestone, sat the master of misdirection, ready to pull a Houdini on all of them. Noone had always seen Dante as a father figure, but so had everyone else.

He had been struck by a freight train when the behemoth died, and another when he returned to New Antigone very much alive. By his word, they hit Erehwon, hard, emerging with nothing but black-and-blue memories and a one-armed blonde. Another train when he was told to give the girl to Dante’s other favorite son and his little pixie of a captain. In response to why, he got a typically brilliant answer.

“The more’uh you I involve, the less like-uh-ly it’ll be that Noble’ll predict what’s next. I’d bet by now he’s foun’ I’m still alive an’ kickin’. I can’t let him get to her before I get to him. An’ I can’t jus’ take her without a fair amount of insurance. It’s bad enough already, this should’ve ended when Peg died.”

A tear shed for lessons learned and thrown away.

He was in front, half-pulling-half-carrying her from the room. The frail little brat was still demanding answers, her voice a whiny sort of animalistic snarl that he had not heard since her days with the intelligence department, just before the relapse.

In truth, probably during it.

“Listen,” he stopped, his voice the booming eastern-European bass that made more sense than the subdued slur that he typically poured. “Dante jus’ wan’nud us trap’t in’urr so that he could ge’rron t’th’Equinox without trouble. He’s gonna kill Noone, and all th’poor saps from New Antigone wh’ivvum. Then he’s gonna kill Systemic, an’ Domino, and then he’s gonna kill us.” The stoic old bigot’s eyes were wide, and he was panting; he had lied to her again. He already knew that Dante was not going to kill him, and that Domino would be left alive, at least until he could bring Noble out of his protective shell. But he could still save her.

Dante was trying to break through the face of the clock and spin the hands backward. But nine years will always be nine years, and eight minutes will never be enough time.

“We’re all jus’ fu’ghing rats in his claws, and’as goin’ t’chew on all’uv us ‘til there’s nu’ffink left, because rats are nu’ffink t’a worthl’uss, remor-suh-less bas’surd like him.”

“But what d-”

“No, no more ques-suns.”

[Author's Note: Originally written and posted by Ecks.]

The pinstriped flair rubbed against the edge of a precipice on a tall building in the middle-district of Westview, pulling at the rusted pipe which caught its attention; ripping into six. Detaching from a trouser leg as it spun over onto the other edge of the grittily carpeted ceiling - the black leather sole which projected within finding its footing upon a platform of nothing; its descent quickening as the Simulated laws of physics of the Simulated laws of physics took hold until it could, no more, increase in either speed nor velocity. The strong magnet of inevitability pulling it close. Its hold of force over the indirectly metallic but nevertheless steely, organic compound which, at this particular moment was contorted into an expression of everything but blankness, growing as it did so.

A concreted abyss had never been intended to merge with organic material, especially when both were traveling so quickly. It hadn't been as was expected; the bones, skin, and clothing of the occupant of the 'meat bag' compressed slowly but surely into a mould of a puddle of crimson mud; flattening itself into the press of a pancake - unable to resist the natural temptation of steely vice which pressed it together. The clamp of gravity on one side, the jaw of an unforgiving and timeless less beaten path on the other - cruelly conspiring together to expel the foreign object which had absolutely no right to tread upon nor make use of either.

Watching, describing, and reporting was unfamiliar visage at the other end of small, dark tunnel. An eminence of light from behind - a stairwell lamp hung atop the frame of a splintered, bruised and cracked door as it too hung open; still reeling from the unnatural rush of both of them as they had earlier run past. This time, it was time to replace the sidearm into its holster and report in the good news.

The good news and happy news - a celebrated end-of-life which would never make a funeral service nor obituary entry. "... sleeping for long enough."

A trickle of bright red fluidly liquid would have seeped its way through the ebb and flow of the chaotically outlined bricks below and dripped, drip by drip into over the side of a drain grate and into the sewer below; the Simulated laws of physics, taking a firm grasp of each drop; beckoning it closer to an untimely end to an unnatural existence before splaying it flat and whispered silent encouragement for it to rejoin humanity, as it had done its creator not a moment before - had there been one.

A warm smile seemed oddly out-of-context but it wasn't really because the same suit was in the middle of administrating a bio-chemical compound through means of injection to the sprawled mass of inconsistent life before him and held firm as it watched through glinted eyes - one narrowed because it was still human and didn't like dead things; as it re-composed itself into a complete figure once more; the bones restructuring themselves; the absent trickle re-grouping. it concluded sharply through a sharp exhale of breath as a conspicuously inconspicuous door screeched to a halt, leaving tracks of burnt rubber in the stead of spent blood. The door threw itself open from inside and waited patiently as a handful of hands picked up the animated monstrosity outside, and threw it through the doorway and drove off.

In less than a moment, the previous six were entirely undone.

---
To: Redpill#11634
From: Westview Janitorial and Maintenance Services
Subject: (None specified).

Dear [classified], your presence within the System serves as violation of System Protocol [classified]. Please remain at your current location and await assistance.

Does not it strike you as odd that a message would be sent out just as --- "Wake up!".

[Author's Note: Originally written and posted by Ecks. This is actually multiple posts put together, as I do recall there being a slight issue with the forums, causing some double-posting. The image at the bottom is Ecks' wonderfully atmospheric re-imagining of the final piece that I did for MxO, entitled Midtown.]

Search criteria modified...
...Displaying (6) of (128) results obtained:

"One, two, three, four five, once I got a fish alive. Six, sev--"

... process terminated... "Darn it."
"Wake up!" ... "Good to see you're awake."

"How did they do?"

"Well..."

[Author's Note: The image at the end of this was made, originally, to be built into the post, as it was the same colors and font of the forum on which this was originally posted. It was placed just before the final line. Do with that information what you may - I believe this serves the same purpose.]

Outside, midday was still hiding behind a whitewashed fence. Neon-vested tailors were measuring the streets for a new funeral suit as the tumor burst through the tavern’s front door, bee-stung and battered brat behind. An acute siren tore the air in half - all the more reason to get out of Dodge. Sweat leapt to its death as the behemoth stopped mid-stride, avoiding a head-on with a fortunate taxi driver.

Their means, a 1988 Buick yacht in dried-out-marker black with rust detailing in stool-sample brown, was just out of view, a pinball in its extra-life alley, itching to get jettisoned out to the 100 point bumper city spread in front of it. And then they had reached it. Sweaty, stubby, sausage links snatched the keys from their visor home-away-from-home as thin, knobby styluses were directed to the glove compartment, to a ready-and-rearing handgun and its spare magazine. A “just in case he didn’t underestimate us” nod came from the driver to quell his accomplice’s unsure eyebrows.

Duchess was not in the habit of overestimating her odds. Stay prepared to stay alive. It had not failed her so far, and as both operator and pilot of the Fawkes, she was not planning on having much free time to reconsider a mantra that had kept her fed through two embargos and a fire. Time - that was another thing that she had never overestimated. As far as she was concerned, they should have been on the edge of the Equinox’s radar before the captain had given his Marlon Brando wink and taken an ice pick to the neck. But she did not overestimate her importance - if he wanted to keep this down to the wire, she would not argue.

“Operator,” she held the nubs of her fingers, sticking out from frayed gloves, to a clamshell on her ear. “Sir, I have a bank of phonebooths I’m working to crack right now, but they’re on the old Metro phone network, so none of the current generation methods are any good. It shouldn’t be more than a few minutes.” The line turned to finger-snaps and sparkler fizzles, then to silence. She assumed that they would not reach the Equinox in time, but she hoped they would.

He felt like a hole with a wall built around it. Suddenly, his suit, a subtly striped chocolate affair that he had gotten for next to nothing on a trip to Indonesia was turning to midnight. For a moment, he thought he was bring rained on, then his skin stopped fitting and he tried hard to let out any noise, but all that came out was fingers muting guitar strings and scissors on a Wurlitzer. He felt the hard leather of his briefcase’s handle, then someone else dropped it. The new man’s hand moved to a holster in his black jacket. “This is a restricted district, operative.”

Lead nestled itself in its quarter panel home as a muffled black car sped past, a look of shock exploding from the redhead inside, a black slugthrower hanging confused in her hand, her driver cursing a pile of bibles and rabbits’ feet. A taxi stopped hard in front of him, its driver made up of a black two-button and bathroom attendant sunglasses. Ooidal tore the wheel to its side, his two-seater coffin clipping the cab, balancing by a bounce off of a halfway-on-the-curb sedan. The first suit unleashed two more lead beetles, missed his mark, stepped toward the taxi, and got in.

“The operator is the primary target.”

“Though the girl remains an unnecessary drain of resources.”

“Subduing both targets should not pose a problem.”

“After all, we did train them.” The manufacturer-neutral sedan swam back and forth through cement jelly for a few feet, then found its footing. And it was pins and brake discs from then on, the hushed tattoo of turn signals and horrible brass riffs of midday traffic horns provided a ripped and raucous canvas for the paint daubs and scattered streaks the two cars were carving.

“What th’ell’re they doing?” Fara blurted, instinctively checking the gun’s magazine, muscle memory conflicting with conscious thought. For the first time in a long time, she seemed almost like a competent professional.

“Thu’rufftur t’Equ-uh-nocks zebbuh-” he trailed off to unintelligibility, his concentration far from speaking, his nerves all singed split ends. Dante had a contingency plan, a good one. He would blame the past nine-

Don’t kid yourself, he’ll pin everything from back then on you, too.

-And selling out his suddenly capable captain to the beings that fronted the bill on her life support.

“Brake!” came in equal parts yelp and commend, the girl pushing her hand into the dashboard, the noise pushing hypothetical deaths from his forehead. He broke, spinning the wheel to avoid a sudden minivan wall being constructed ever closer to their front. Then they were on the sidewalk, and the world was foggy slow motion as cheap iron chairs and tables bounced off the car’s hood, coffee spilling onto its windshield.

Fara had time to blink. Her eyes closed on a man ducking behind a dumpster, and opened on the floor-to-ceiling glass façade of the soon-famous bistro, onto a dozen people comfortably plugged-in, blissfully enslaved, watching a fat old man and the girl he kidnapped flee their former employers. She watched them watch her, and felt an epiphany bubble up inside her brain, but get stuck just before revealing itself. They were running from control, but were still the byproduct of a meaner, more subversive manipulation. But it just did not mean anything. She blinked again, and they were back on the road.

Her arm snaked out through a window hole, shoulder following, twisting. She spun herself sideways in the seat and leaned akimbo into the smog and humidity. There was an APB put out for a possible drive by and reckless endangerment to Westview’s finest, but they would not arrive in time. Fara slunk herself out of the car even more, sitting her pockets on the window’s sleeve, and hugging her body to the car’s roof, steeling herself against the wind of fourth gear in a low quality car. She began taking potshots at the pursuing taxi, but it still did not mean anything.



This is his fault.

[Author's Note: Originally written and posted by Ecks.]

Cross-legged, the other red haired brat pushed comfortably into the straight-edged base of a cheap iron chair. The similarly statured table in front, missing a leg or two or three - in their place a loose column of rubble and a tower of bricks. The single piece of smoothly polished ore-derivitive which remained, finding itself holding the weight of its dependant surface only with the support of a three-fold menu underneath; adequately filling the space which would have otherwise been between it and the tired and stretched sidewalk, beneath.

He, however, was comparatively more refreshed - a relaxed yet focused set of eyes from behind a pair of bleached black rectangular shades, scanning the paragraphs of a freshly caught salmon broadsheet rag. Time taken to carefully absorb the nuances of connotation of each printed word with the intensity of a hawk; it's prey.

In fact, it was absurdly warm - a heat the likes of which would render those who would dare venture into its territory labelled as either tourist or in desperate pursuit of remedy to their pale complexion. From the familiarity with which he called the waiter in request of refill of the house-blend qahwat al-bunn, presumably from Kaffa, he was neither - or perhaps, a little of both.

The air was still, yet cool and for all intents and purposes, cleaner, and easier to drink than that which was to be found on the opposite side of the aqueduct.

Expectantly interrupted, his gaze detached, it found itself in observance of a metal hand of claws as they dragged themselves absent-mindedly into and across a blackboard of torn and shot-at pavement - the occasionally mis-placed shell of spent ammunition crossing its path with a cheery jingle and empty rattle'n'every so often; and then onto the medium-grey four door luxury saloon whose dark blue chaueffeur and contented growl had heralded the welcoming of the bald, pink-tied and pinstriped lion which was presently in the midst of confronting the perils of the apparent challenge of sitting down.

By the time it had traversed its own personal Everest, the same hurried waiter had returned to anxiously pour some cold refreshment into one of the small cups on the scrappily scratched table (the one which hadn't torn a chunk out of itself and retreated to below the table for safety when it had caught site of a swiftly moving bright yellow cab speeding toward it, earlier). An eyebrow which extended above and beyond the unreflective mirrors was met with a silent nod.

Drowning all audibility from the surrounding plaza came a drudging drone from a lazy barge, carrying in its cargo the previous annum's firearms and scrapped get-away car parts of which its investors could be sure to see a return. From the Captain's Quarters, was a magnificent view. Of a sun-soaked orange-peel drenched lake with a surreptitiously certain ripple in the wave lapping against an old wooden pier at a far away dock; a completely ruined and wrecked marina boardwalk, complete with upturned tables, cheap, thin metal chairs torn at the seems and a selection of... and two or three businessmen savouring the taste of a late afternoon cafe, in one of the more recent developments. The freshly painted name on the door in bright red having barely dried from earlier that day; the half-smashed glass wall being both an innovation in modern architectural design as well as providing a scenic outlook to the outlying area to its patrons; and in still in search of a full compliment of staff who had, if rumor was to be believed, resigned just before opening due to irreconcilable "artistic difference" with the management, aside from a single loyal, waiter now able to reap the benfits of a six-figure salary.

As opportune moment as any for the crew of one to call the mast and enjoy a small glass of Sherry out on deck as he wrote to the Ship's Log.

[Author's Note: In case it wasn't excruciatingly obvious before, Lethe isn't real. Required Listening.]

In a muted yellow, the ivory sedan signaled right, Noone pulling its bleached carcass onto a capillary of the varicose vein popping through the gutted brick façades, exchanging three lanes of someday-I’ll-hit-it-big white collars between the isolated boils of Richland and Westview. The lunch crowd, however, kept from leaving the warm blanket of their local crack den, and the asphalt anaconda was left as a shed shred of skin, only a few pioneer maggots sucking sustenance from the skeleton shell. “So I’m just going to step aside while you,” Noone’s voice was soaking wet, his mood worse, “usher in some antiquated reign of cops and robbers?”

Stretched out in the back seat, Dante blinked away the sight of a vaguely Asian man in sharp glasses and a tightly tailored black suit holding up a severed arm, the blood and bits of flayed skin still leaking, twisting about the parts of a shirtsleeve stained with motor oil and whiskey. At his feet was the collapsed form of some poor woman, her face tuck neatly into her stomach, shortish yellow strands of hair pooling on either side of her ears. Tuck under one arm, the sleeve half-rolled to her elbows, was a suitcase in light leather, a bus ticket out of this hole crammed into a divot where the handle sat. The big old man rubbed at a knot at the back of his head, tying himself up in a dusted black helmet of curls, and produced a pair of bent-off-to-the-left cherry sunglasses to combat the interrogating flashlight overhead. “I’m nah scrapin’ by in yo’ pile of glued togeh-thuh ships.”

Fully ensconced by freeway, their sudden isolation from any sort of witnesses sent a cold shiver down Noone’s spine, one he hid by splashing some dust from the dashboard. “That pile of ships’s the child of your thunder and lightning,” he paused, “sir.” He was up in his head again, as a trinity of green signs alerted him to impending exits. Noone had never been awarded the key to the city - after Dante was late for supper, the unfamous leader took it himself.

“The storm’s passed, kid.” His eyes closed behind the scarlet shades, and he placed a boot up on the center console of the suddenly cramped cabin.

“So what’ll I get from this rising-from-the-ashes mess you’ve thrown us into?” Suddenly a second wind fanned the fire in his belly. “You’re kidding yourself if you think you’re getting a free meal ticket along with your place in legend. I’ve bus-”

“I already tol’ you, kid. You ged-duh keep your big fancy title in that frigid hole. Y’uh been doin’ too much business wid-duh Frenchman if y’uh think you’re gettin’ anything else outta this.” Dante tucked his head into the corner of the seat, the leaned-back stance making him seem larger than he already was. “Not like yuh’d know whad-duh do with-um anyway.” Dismal dens of prostitution and back-alley law firms started giving way to a nicotine charade of breadbox apartments even with the raised road, stacked on top of closed-up mom and pop shops making way for coffee chains or respectable empty real estate.

Opposite him, fumbling with a ripped piece of sleeve, looking like it had taken a swim in a soda fountain, was Lethe’s willowy form, sleekly suited in black, a bus ticket sticking out from his breast pocket. He was nothing but a romantic dream conceived next to the cigarette machine, so nobody would miss him. No reason not to share the ride, anyway. Dante put his feet up on the seat, and watched the man glimmer as he crumpled through the door, rolling across the three-lane vein, and shatter beneath the tires of a unscrupulous semi-truck.

[Author's Note: Originally written and posted by Ecks. Additionally, this is Ecks' last post in Demiurge. Required Listening.]

Chapter 17: // An amiable chap from the Mid-West but a four month internship at the DA's made it impossible to...

It was getting late and Mega City's finest were out in force. Some dame had come to the crushing realisation that there was little else to do in this dead-beat town than try to stick it to the man. Maybe her parents hadn't loved her enough. Maybe they were the most supportive that some young innocent blonde could wish for to take good care of her in these rough times; not that they were any more dangerous now than they ever had been. She'd jumped and it didn't do the Chief any good to have Downtown's bold and Virtue-ous look at their own reflection sprawled across the side walk. The cold, hard, lifeless wind splashed wave and wave of the drenching rain against the side of the hat I'd picked up in some slum over in Westview longer ago than I like to remember; another lifetime away. It was the kind of nastiness that drove everyone else away yet somehow attracted an inordinate amount of flies, flees, vultures and buzzards to the *censored* storm. A junior probationer, with an old German-looking Sergeant close by; he'd been sick when he arrived. Wasn't cut out - hadn't been carved just right, yet to be able to take the strain. A pool of sick and blood trickling next to the sidewalk, all the while my eating a soggy, greasy sandwich of some kind of "meat" in all likelihood not intended to be edible. One of the finest joints in the city - mainly Downtown and Westview, though. It hadn't been a success in the other parts of the city where the customers new a good meal when they saw it and refused to sell a sliver of their soul for a quick, sure-fire, five-buck chow. It also dispensed a thick, gruel-like slop of harsh brown caffeine. Ideal for keeping you awake on this nights when you couldn't look yourself in the eye enough to go home and settle down until tomorrow. Sometimes it was better to leave work at work.

They shouldn't have been here - there wasn't even much of a corpse left to identify; dental records on a lucky day - maybe.

"About 6'2", red dyed hair."

A second bite was enough for my stomach to protest and voice its unwanted opinion; quelled and dulled by the third and fourth until all that was left was a crepe piece of paper with a dusty brown logo, emblazoned in a far-too-happy light blue. "Peg's" it read, even though rumour had it she'd been dead for the most part of the past 20 or 30 years. Not that anyone had ever actually seen it. Some government suits had turned up earlier, probably from the Mayor's office. It was after all, the guy his fourth cousin's niece's best friend's friend had spoken to in some shaky club once. He couldn't have the voters thinking he was likely to associate with the kinda people that "slipped" off of ledges, especially not when they were being chased by some federal G-man. Neither was needed and neither was wanted. He had been raised better then to try to lie under the lime lit spotlight. Especially not in an interrogation.

So it was, that next morning the file had disappeared from the desk - probably picked up in passing by one of those goons from the DA's office in their way to the Chief's with not even a trace sample accord left by the post-mortomer's desk. The three or four hacks for the town biggest rags may not even have been there at all since the obituary contained only the same records as the day before. It wasn't my job to question, though. Just to solve. I reached inside my coat pocket to grab a couple of smokes: even though I never smoked. "It'll kill you some day, kid." Everyone gets taken out of the game but my time to go wouldn't be because some jack-hole told me how cool it'd be. A single photograph; black and white still. Unidentified male, around 6'2 - dyed red hair and far too well dressed for that part of town. It was then that the first time since... that night that I threw a full cup of Joe into the trash without looking back - the still, still in the same hand.

I went home.

[Author's Note: Parallel lines in this one, kind of important ones. Italicized past of Ooidal's start and finish with the Tetragrammaton. Fun facts: 'Ooidal' means 'egg-shaped,' and 'Ed Adam Stoney' is an anagram of 'Dante Someday.' The music's pretty good, this time around. Required Listening.]

The realization was a semi-truck crushing her; the force of the wreck kept the girl from reloading the black dragon in her hand. Its impotent clicking sent nothing but smoke and sparks where fiery breath had been. “I’m empty,” escaped her, not loudly enough.

“Ooidal, this is your captain,” Beachhead’s voice was butter sitting out at a picnic, or more like tobacco chew that missed its target and was slowly dripping down dark wood paneling in a Mason’s lodge in the ass-end of the Midwest. “Fara Kerrigan Yazin, alias Eleutherophobia. From here in, you report directly to her while operating the Hovercraft Equinox.” As he spoke, the redhead stepped toward Ooidal, looking downward and half-skipping to avoid cutting her feet open. She smiled sheepishly at him, sticking a small hand out shyly, surprisingly strong as he shook it. “Should the need arise, you can contact me through Interim aboard the Archon,” it was unclear which of the two he was addressing.

A furious round pierced the driver’s mirror, shattering it into tiny fireworks - neither flinched. “I’m empty,” she croaked again, louder. Her free hand jumped through the car’s window as the empty storehouse slid from its dock. It fell in an off-center back flip, tumbling end-over-end as the cracked and grooved world came closer. A metallic clank was lost to engines and gearshifts as the box bounced against asphalt and disappeared under a black radial. The new one landed in her hand, no bounce, no metallic clank, just the queue of lead soldiers in their metallic u-boat falling from the operator’s mitt, hitting the girl’s outstretched palm, and her fingers clasping around it.

“Nuv-vin’ left ev’vur this’un,” burped Ooidal, easing slightly off the gas to pass between a pickup and a prison bus. But he lost his breath, ducking instinctively into the wheel as a round splintered through the back window, embedding itself in the windshield. Both panes frosted over in spidery cracks. Fara crumpled onto the sedan’s roof as it pulled toward the impending curb. She planted a foot into the door, and desperately tried to grab at any flaking pieces of frame sticking through the edge of the windshield. Another booming shot made its way into the car, this time splitting the back window to its edges, and pushing a puff of foam from the passenger’s seat. The exhausted, varicose rim of the pane let go, the rest already starting to split as it bounced off of the trunk. And it hit the ground, shattering, stretching out like a carpet of diamonds in the fickle sunlight between the brown-brick buildings. Partial reflections of the car pirouetted and fell onto the stretched out ground.

Fara regained herself, pushing off of the crown. She leaned an elbow onto the window’s sill, steadying herself as best she could, and landed an explosive blast in the taxi’s headlight, another in the registration sticker on its license plate. A loose sewer cap clanged and bounced, alerting the girl that she was sitting on the window of a moving car. Pulling herself back inside, she scowled at the operator, wondering if the harbinger of her demise was somehow a horrible misrepresentation. Instead of arguing this point, she insisted on, “Move closer.” The climax was palpable.

Domino jumped slightly as rotor spun and stopped spinning with a demanding click, a series of letters and numbers traversed the long black field of a monitor, and a telephone at a block of row houses’ feet began ringing. She stopped muttering jazz riffs to herself long enough to consider a last meal, but she decided to lean forward slightly, instead. Black mold on foam coated her ears, a headset’s microphone dangling by her razor mouth. Her fingers, cracked little matchsticks with chewed up beetle shells at the ends slapped against aluminum keys, each compressing for a moment, then springing back to their fully locked, and upright position with a hollow twang.

Ooidal let off the gas, braking to close the distance to his hopeful captors. A low buzzing erupted from his jacket pocket, shocking him as much as the mobile firefight had. Black rubber and sparks painted the road as one of their back tires fissured. His eyes glued to the back-and-forth sway of the road, Ooidal brought the grey plastic of a cell phone to his ear, fully aware of the only person that would be on the other end of the line. Fara leaned backward through her window, two more shots narrowly missing the yellow queen-bee pursuing the duo. If not for an immigrant’s life savings worth of convenience shop, their exit would have been within sight.

“Put her on.” The tinny warble of a fingernail sized speaker released the words, Ooidal not having expected anything other than “I’m pulling your plug,” to reach his cauliflower ears. Mildly entranced, and still slowing the sedan, he handed the telephone to the girl, her confused stare mimicking his own. “Captain, a hovercraft has appeared on our short-range, I would recommend a retreat, with our severe lack of personnel aboard.” Smooth vowels and sharp consonants were all that escaped the woman, no feeling at all in her voice.

“Do it, but-” but there was no time for more. Whiplash suddenly took hold, throwing the phone from Fara’s hand as the yellow cab clipped the back corner of the car, causing it to lose its footing and spring hard off of the curb.

Captain, Intelligence Officer, Public Relations Chief Fara Kerrigan Yazin crossed her legs, stacking balled fists on the knee of her stocking as she placed herself in the leather chair. It seemed to sink an extra few inches as she sat to make the man across from her seem that much more powerful. Beachhead placed himself on the other side of the expensive mahogany desk, his tie clip even with her impish nose. “You’ve come a long way in this organization, operative.” He had a habit of punctuating his first sentence with a long pause, as if carefully mapping the route the conversation would navigate. “I need to know if that means anything to you.” Another pause, he furrowed his brow and matched her stare, like a dog establishing its dominance. She looked away first.

Except she had forgotten part of the story. He had sunglasses on, black and mirrored to hide his eyes from the harsh sunlight that was crushing them into the balcony nested neatly atop McClaine tower. And there was no mahogany desk for him to frown across, because they were standing - she was still even with his tie clip because he was tall and she was short. Forty-story wind kept causing the girl to squint and look away, tears shrink-wrapping her eyes, her raven sunglasses laying in a cracked and bruised heap on the ground.

His knuckle was still bleeding.

“There’s nothing to say,” he yelled, no pauses, no script. There was no decorum or civility. “You’re stripped of your rank and privileges within the Tetragrammaton faction. I’m going to make sure you never get a call through to Gray again.” That had turned into an empty threat, fuller ones superceding his grudge. “I’ve ordered Shayel to keep the Equinox grounded, and ignore any and all orders from you until a Tetragrammaton captain is available to relieve you.” Two behemoths in dark suits and olive green shirts stood at either side of the man, machine pistols in their hands, aching to see action. “You’ve disgraced this organization, sullied this faction’s name, and directly disobeyed Zero One for the last time.” A fat, stubby, bureaucratic finger unrolled, aiming toward the sagging doorframe the girl and shattered through minutes earlier. “Get the hell out of my sight.”

Sidewalks and streetlights and strippers salsa-ed as the car spun to a stop. It caught on a trio of newspaper boxes, three month old copies of The Sentinel halting their tilt-a-whirl ride. Collapsing toward the car’s center, Fara landed on Ooidal’s shoulder as he collided with the driver’s side door.

Change places.

The villainous cab fused itself with the passenger’s wall, the girl pulling her legs into herself, two toothpicks perfectly pinstriped, going all zigzag. Hemmed flare left a silhouette trail behind their innards’ movement. Recovering, Ooidal fumbled for the door handle, fuzzy shapes and too-bright fluorescence filling his vision. Both black suits had already closed the distance between the edges of the motorized modern art.

“We don’ nee-dum,” he muttered into the headset wrapped around his scalp, squeezing at his temples. The brat, as she was at the time, stood in a stopped elevator, all poised to fall forty stories through McClaine tower. “Wh’urr bed-dur-roff wid-dout dino’shores like “um keepin’ us down.” He lied, one of the first big ones. “W’hurr gonn’uh ge’chu an’ Py’ruh-see to Zer’ruh Won on-nur-rown, and take th’uh reins fr’uhm th’uhr.” Brownish goo, like blood and blended fat leaked from a bandage around her wrist. A droplet dove into the waiting pool of off-white carpet at her feet. Outside, some kind of drug eagerly staked a claim in that same wrist, sputtering from an intravenous cuff. The airy hiss it let out was just audible over the encompassing silence that overtook the Equinox - a cold forebear of days to come.

It made Ooidal shrink in his seat. “W’hurr gonna be som’ving big someday.” But push came to shove, and shove became pith, and they ended up in a bruised jalopy across town from Easy Street, a telephone ringing just out of earshot.

Ooidal crawled from the debris; the girl did not. His ears were full of cotton, and his face was in a wreck, but he got to his feet, fists even with his neck. He was not obliged with a fair fight - the agents, their perfection eerie among the black-and-blue stretch of anguish, unraveled their midnight-black guns. Perfectly parallel to the ground, gleaming in the sunlight, they sat poised to spit fire into the meaty, egg-shaped man.

“Edward Adam Stoney; alias Ooidal; Hovercraft Equinox operator. You are no longer an operative in employ of the machines.” The non-man spoke as if he was reciting the buildup of a long joke, with a dry sort of memorization soaking the words. “You are responsible for the harboring of high-level machinist threats, the theft of a sizable amount of sensitive packets, and are directly implicated in the deaths of eleven machinist operatives.” Dante, the bastard, had laid everything on him anyway. “You are considered a menace to this system, and are to be exterminated.”