NationStates Jolt Archive

This one is a failure, and had to be, since it was written by a pillar of salt. It begins like this:
Listen:
Billy Pilgrim has become unstuck in time.
It ends like this:
Poo-tee-weet?

The book had been but an esoteric chronicle, a slightly controversial footnote on an otherwise blank page, before all of this. Now they were the failures; pillars of salt that hadn't died just yet, caught in the bitter irony of standing alive atop dead land.

Some distance away, a few figures pawed through mounds of steel dust in the hope some inorganic components of their former homes had survived the plague. Their identities and genders were made indeterminate by the ashen fog that enveloped them, and so their personal histories, triumphs, failures, loves, hatreds were all lost as well.

Everything, epic or infinitesimal, was gone.

They had no idea what they were doing, what they were going to do, or what to do.

But now, with the erasure came some solace. The will to survive still persevered, intensified by devastation, and they would bind together like the social creatures they were and do what they could. If they could ensure their survival, they would survive; might even be able to rebuild.

If they could not manage, they would die. Simple.

Memories of a modestly advanced civilization were buried somewhere in the past, before all of this. A civilization on the verge of quietly conquering its own modest specialization, a legion of perfectly melded biomechanical lives, cloistered privately within a carefully crafted, painstakingly balanced.

It was quiet in the past, before the plague brought it all down in a great cacophony.

Somewhere, maybe, the remains of their lives flickered. Maybe there was something untouched, wreathed in blessed silence, saved from the noise and the anarchy. If they saved it, maybe it would save them in turn. That was what the figures were pawing dust for; it was the alchemy of hope.

There were worthwhile things that had belonged to them; belonged to the plague now. There were modest advances others might be interested in, others untouched by the civilization before or the devastation after; ignorant of all but the opportunity now within their grasp.

The book was closed softly, its worn leaves of paper compliant, and discarded. The paperback made hardly a sound against the ash.

There was a bird without a perch some distance away. It had an alloyed skeleton and circuits running through it. It cocked its head to one side.

Poo-tee-weet?

The survivors had found a cannon, huge and unmovable. Preserved by the heap of rotting flotsam that was its once-living emplacement, the weapon had survived with its organic components intact, though deprived of life.

The metallic construction was entirely unsurprising; it was best described as a over-sized, modernized version of a galleon's ship cannon, as if designed by a time traveler infatuated with the poetics of 1800s sea battles.

Pallid flesh was stretched back along the length of the barrel, translucent and clammy to the touch. The flesh grew in thickness as it neared the rear of the cannon, before culminating in several bulbous growths nearly the size of a man. Studs of thick flesh were scattered – seemingly with a wild rivet gun – randomly along the cannon's length, ranging from pinheads to lumberjack's fists depending on their proximity to the weapon's rear.

Provided it was imbued with life, the flesh might have a rosier complexion, and the bulbs attached to the back would course with lifeblood and electricity. The studs growing out of the cannon would flood the flesh with ions, enticing energy into chemical storage cells. When the cannon demanded to fire, the electricity would power the electromagnetic coils within the barrel, and the target would be blown to bits with a chunk of fragmentary crystal, grown within the weapon's emplacement.

This all, of course, was provided the weapon was still alive. The weapon was dead, like all else around the survivors. That is, after all, why they were the survivors; everything else was dead.

The cannon reminded the survivors of what they had done best, though; they were adept at melding life and unlife. They had only dealt in unlife, not death, for that other path led to inevitable ruin. It seemed they had been ruined regardless of their restraint, though.

The cannon, in addition to serving as a reminder of what the survivors had been, was also completely useless. It was a weapon, for destroying things, but there was nothing to destroy.

They left it there, unmovable and useless. The unliving bird hopped along in their wake and perched atop the living weapon. It pecked a little at the dead flesh and wandered a bit before nestling down and cleaning its biologically perfect feathers.

The bird, unliving as it was, needed neither to peck, wander, nestle, or clean; nevertheless, its circuits instructed it to do so, for that was what real birds did.

And so it glimmered there in an ash-filtered ray of light.

They were killing time unabashedly. It was veritable genocide.

Literature and random postulation throughout humanity has suggested that the aftermath of an apocalyptic event would be marked by small bands of survivors struggling to stay alive, falling into patterns of tribal government and superstition. Some find the regression utterly dejecting, others find it romantic in its simplicity and natural brutality. Some believe the tribes would be torn by never ending skirmishes over resources, the survivors doomed to obliterate each other. Others disagree vehemently, preferring to subscribe to the hopeful theory of cooperation and a slow ascent into glory. All factions agree it would be an intensely interesting scenario to observe, but not to experience.

Literature and postulation, in their infinite comfort, neglect to account for the crushing blow to the spirit that is the belief you and the few ragtag members of your band are the last of your civilization.

When consumed by such a devastating lack of spirit or drive, its much easier to unthinkingly paw through dust in the hopes of happening upon a miracle. In the surreal aftermath of a cataclysm, it seems much more likely such a solution exists; there's a power plant to be restarted, there's an ancient treasure to revert our destruction, there's a wise old man to be found. Foreigners will arrive and rebuild their civilization for them. The hundreds of years of hardship and pathetic birth-to-death ratios promised by tribal life in a wasteland simply pale to nothing in comparison.

All across the wastelands, far out of contact with one another, clumps of survivors wander and sit, wasting time. They all know in the backs of their minds they will have to take action to preserve themselves sooner or later, and that any foreigners that arrive will steal and loot and reverse engineer rather than help, but for now it's easy to run automatically, to work towards nothing at all, but work all the same.

The unliving bird follows all of them at once, cooing and watching and wandering and wondering. It's an intensely interesting scenario to observe, but not to experience.

"This is amazing!" It really is.

Scamper, scamper. Anxious jubilation. A flicker of hope. "What is?!"

Lined paper, leaf after leaf, thrust proudly into unwilling hands. "Since we set up here yesterday, I've written essay after essay and tirade after tirade, pondering our condition, what lays before us."

A surge of skepticism. "And what do you predict, 'Nostradamus?'"

"We're as good as dead."

Oh. "Oh." It can't end like this. "Shut up and get back to work."

Work? "Work on what?"

Pause. "Scavenging." Another pause, as if reciting a telegram. "And leave that rubbish behind."

"We can't just keep moving on and moving on! If we're going to live, we have to stop at some point."

Not in their lifetime. "I said, let's go."

Thoughts and ideas spun carefully as a spider's web, discarded. The words that would salvage a civilization through the bizarre gospel of entropy and fatalism left behind, but not untended. A strange steward, a bird that neither breathed nor ate, gathered each wrinkled page only because its circuits told it to, flew erratically and spiraling into the sky only because its circuits willed it to be so.

It flew until fine airborne dust ruined its precision-made servos and it crashed soundlessly into the soft ground, scattering the pages as it plummeted.

Because its circuit-granted consciousness had led it to.

Time passed. Somewhere in there was several thousand years.

There were patterns of tribal government and superstition, as literature and posulation suggested. With the ebb and flow of life going nowhere fast came times of war and times of peace, but there were no great heroes or great villains.

Each tribe had a few precious artifacts of the technology it was once so easy to replicate a thousand fold. In their scarcity, the artifacts became nigh sanctified in the eyes of the tribes.

There was somewhat of a central trading post and diplomacy all but the most isolationist tribes frequented. In peace, it was flooded with recreationalists and vendors. Before war, it felt like Shakespearian Verona. In war, it sat abandoned. It had burned a few times.

Time continued to pass, but only in the sense cracked watches continued to tick. All else was standing still, held where it stooped by chains of fate.

Everything was waiting for something or someone from the outside. It was all a line of actors standing on stage, looking keenly into the wings as they waited for the lead to stride onstage. The cue had been spoken, and received silence in reply.

The show was frozen, aching to move forwards like the living, nourishment-requiring organism it was.

Out in the middle of nowhere, someone was dancing. In the middle of a field small, flickering fires ringed a truck-sized object, throwing its shadow in a dozen directions. The shadows lanced out and danced with their master before being gobbled up by the greater darkness.

The fires and shadows obeyed a witch doctor, for here he had carved out of the night a cloister for his midnight resurrection ritual. His festival dress — a suit of steel scales scavenged from the wastelands — jangled as he nimbly leaped to and fro with finely honed dexterity. The doctor sweltered within his decorative armor, despite the frigid night. As a highly respected elder of his tribe, the witch doctor had one of the first picks in armor and weapons. He had selected the fine scaled armor and, with the help of acolytes, blessed it heavily so it would encumber him less and exude magical auras to deflect hostile blows.

It may have been that his movements remained lithe despite the armor due to his frequent practice with the suit, and its superb protection thanks to the phenomenal pre-plague manufacture of the steel, but the witch doctor believed in his blessings' power. And really, some scattered gold dust couldn't hurt.

As the firelight glanced off of the armor like a stream of enemy arrows, the witch doctor threw handfuls of powder at the fat-encrusted hulk of organic machinery ringed by the fires. The organism produced intensely rich nutrients within its mass, and its expansive root system distributed them throughout the field's soil. The harvest would be especially bountiful once the proper season came, but the organism was on the verge of perishing from supporting so many plants.

Where the powder landed, pinpricks of ichor rose from the thing's flesh, and it writhed in mild pain. The organism's will to survive was being rekindled with each small jab at its nervous system, reminding it of pain, the pain of death which it should strive to avoid.

The witch doctor stepped into the ring of fires as his chants crescendoed. He coated his hands in the powder — ignoring the stinging sensation — and drew intricate consecrating symbols along the smoothest swaths of flesh.

The ground beneath the doctor rumbled and lowed deeply. The organism made a belching sound as it expunged the death-wind that had been growing inside of it, obliterating the ring of fires. The air turned rancid, and the witch doctor fainted.

When he came to a few minutes later, he smiled and laughed to himself, taking a small amount of pride in his work. All around him, stretching for miles, his tribe's fields lit up the night with energetic, fluorescent green.

A silver bullet split the air, leaving it howling and tortured. Its pilot peered low, saw waste and desolation and small figures moving like ants. He would have turned away, like others before him, had he not seen the glint of perfectly polished metal below him.

He turned, dived, crushed huts with his supersonic shockwave as he skimmed the ground at absurd velocities. The noise was loud and sudden and harmful to the ear - many would be left permanently deaf. The pilot didn't care. After he had crossed the village, he pulled up, circling, and reviewed what his cameras had captured.

A curved shell, gleaming; some piece of unidentifiable uncorrodable superalloy salvaged from parts unknown. It was supported on pillars of something that looked like bleached wood, but was not. Crude wicker screens defined and sharpened the resulting space, making it into temple or townhall. He considered looking again, but fuel was low.

The silver bullet turned on its edge and sprinted for home, ripping the air asunder. It would not be back. But someone else would.

******

"City tower, this is Swallowtail Four. I am returning to base. In the meantime, I think you might want to have a look at this, over."

As it is with glimmering aircraft rocketing by unexpectedly — at unexpectedly traumatizing speeds — people scattered and screamed in the hurtling object's wake. A few men readied arrows and spears, but the target of their warrior preparations had already vanished. The concept of aircraft had not entirely faded from the tribe's collective consciousness, and the sudden presence of such a machine awakened a vague familiarity.

A few aged warriors murmured an ancient oral legend about the good old days of air defense. If something to that effect had survived the millenia, the pilot would certainly regret his recklessness.

The bulbed form of the village's central structure was in fact rudimentary when compared to the civilization's former glories. Were it more advanced, it would likely have pulsated in irritation at the aircraft's passing and absorbed the sound, but instead its curvature warped and echoed the roar of the intruder, dissipating the sound until silence was once again attained.

It was a few days before the tribespeople were disturbed again. This time, though, the disturbance was quieter.

Thwop-thwop-thwop.

The transport helicopter moved slowly and carefully, the gust from its blades merely stirring where the jet had smashed. It was painted a deep brown, and its hull was covered in poorly-repainted dents and scratches. A symbol was painted on one side, with a little more care; it was half metallic gray and half sky blue, depicting a diamond circumscribed around a circle.

Fat, dusty tires touched barren soil, some distance outside the village. The great rotors slowly spun to a stop. A door opened, with the creak of unoiled hinges, and a man dropped through to the dirt.

He held out his hands, to show that he was unarmed. He was lying, of course; a pistol was carefully concealed under his khaki-colored outer shirt, in case of emergencies. But it's the thought that counts.

"Hello?" he asked, trying to appear as harmless as possible. He knew that he wouldn't be understood, of course. But trying wouldn't hurt.

"Does anyone understand me?"

The invader's craft might as well have been festooned with machine guns and autocannons. The alien that plopped onto the cracked, downwash-swept ground might as well have said — clearly, succinctly, assuredly, in their native language — "we are going to wipe you out to the last child."

A multitude of personalized spears and blades, marked with the vibrant colors of each warrior's choosing and unified by a predominance of teal, were leveled at the man. Silence reigned for a moment.

When it became evident the tribespeople would not have to fight for their lives, whispers and mild confusion deposed silence in an expertly executed coup.

While they debated amongst themselves, the man had the opportunity to inspect each defender. There seemed to be no discrimination in gender; several hardened-looking women also held weapons. Some young women had obviously focused heavily on dexterity in their training, while others looked as if they could match their male counterparts in pure strength.

Rank was evident; the quality and quantity of weapons and armor increased significantly with age and physique. Old men with long braids of white and gray hair down their backs and chests stood tall and powerful, seemingly unburdened by heavy suits of metallic and ceramic armor.

There were biological enhancements, too. The man would learn soon enough that augmentative implants were passed down through families as heirlooms, knowledge of their origin and age lost entirely. These, too, became more refined and abundant with rank. Scrawny teenagers — hardly men and women at their age — had bulbous, veined growths stitched onto necks, behind ears, and on limbs. Their skin was often raw where their bodies complained about the obtrusive additions.

The best augmentations were smooth and creamy in appearance, like the wood-like composite the surveillance pilot had seen supporting the central structure. These highest quality implants often stretched like webs across a host's skin, seemingly brittle but flexing alongside muscles with ease. Those tendrils that coated a warrior's legs might let him run faster, or, tracing the tiny bones of a hand, allow him to shoot a truer arrow than all his brethren.

Abruptly, the warriors silenced themselves and split evenly down the middle. Interposed between the new arrival and the grand hall of the village stood a man of pure brawn and great wisdom, engulfed in a great robe of teal satin. The spidery limbs of many fine augmentations were weaved into the robe. The eye that followed their erratic paths would find they all disappeared behind the chief's back.

The chief understood a sparse few of the alien's words; one of his augmentations — corroded heavily by abuse before it became his — acted as a translator. The chief coupled body language with what he could glean from the man's speech to determine the man meant no harm.

He slowly extended one hand towards the man, another towards the sizable living machine that acted as their great hall.

"Great bird leave. You, us, a feast."

The man jerks nervously as weapons are pointed, then relaxes - but not all the way - as they are withdrawn.

The appearance of the tribespeople puzzles him. There's obviously some level of technology at work here - but upon inspection, it becomes clear that the tribe's equipment is merely hand-me-downs, with nothing new or unrepaired.

When the chief's (well, he looks like he's in charge) response comes, in unexpected English, the man thinks for a moment. Then he climbs back up there into the doorway and stands there for a moment. He speaks, and the great rotors begin to spin again; some little scraps of speech make it though to the waiting tribespeople.

"...wants a feast... Yeah. If you don't hear from me in eight... maybe twenty or thirty miles... behind that hill... Radio."

A small, flat object is passed to him. He pockets it and drops from the helicopter again, then walks slowly towards the chief. Behind him, the helicopter begins to rise into the air.

"Great bird will leave. I will stay for the feast."

The helicopter turns towards the hills on the horizon, leaving a trail of sound and chopped air.

Thwop. Thwop. Thwop.

Nobody caught much of anything of the man's reply, but the departure of the helicopter convinced them their chief had done well, and this man was one to cooperate.

Most of the warriors dissipated, wandering back to talk excitedly with onlookers and spread the word of the alien. A few of the toughest warriors stayed with their chief; his honor guard.

The visitor was treated with great respect and care as he was led into the great hall. Some parts of it sparkled, others remained dull, and then entire portions of the construction would seem to swap places when left unwatched, and shadows would become flushed with light. When viewed from the inside, the building seemed positively gigantic in comparison to when viewed from the outside. However, it was fairly evident there was no magical influence at work; only intentionally disorienting architecture.

If the man was especially alert, he could pinpoint the source of his "being watched" feeling as the building itself. The construct had no external sensory organs, but it was alive and aware of an unusual presence strutting around within it. The sensation was not particularly pleasant, and so it observed the alien influence by tuning itself to the alien's electromagnetic field.

The building, in reality, was really quite lonely, though that's not the most accurate word. There was a time when it was connected to many others like it through a web of consciousness. They thrived as the civilization they housed thrived. The living building had been useful and respected before the plague — it had been on the verge of making a macroevolutionary step forwards after centuries of evolving itself in infinitesimal ways — but then everything around it had crumbled. It stood for thousands of years, nurturing the mewling, helpless survivors that had become the proud tribe it now housed.

But it desperately missed all the fellow consciousnesses that once flooded the air.

The chief carried on a semblance of a conversation with the man in their rapidly improving pidgin language. From the weapons and chronicles of military campaigns that defined the walls of great hall, the tribe was very warlike, from which the chief attempted to distract the man with a rapid-fire stream of questions. Where was he from? What was it like there? Did he know anything about the flying machine from a few days ago? Why now? Was he sent by a god? If so, which one?

The chief neglected to ask the man's name. He was evidentially intensely more interested in the faraway civilization the man represented, instead of the man himself.

Civilization has always quested for the ultimate human, and therefore always denied themselves the prize.

The ultimate human is that ideal being that performs consistently, exactly, at his or her limits, and does not seek to perform beyond those limits.

Nothing good has ever been attained from the sanity-shattering drive to perform beyond the limits.

This is the first postulate of our gospel.

It's true. It was, in fact, the first postulate of the gospel which all the tribes followed with varying degrees of intensity and piety. It was known to be the first — and most important (for the most important things always come first with gospels and the like) — postulate of their gospel because it was guarded and sanctified and looked upon with much endearing, appreciative respect. It always had been, and always will be. It was embalmed between twin preservative-saturated panes of glass at the center of all the tribes' main trade hub.

It was at the center of their world, reigned over by fatalism and entropic worship and a great seething displeasure at everything beyond their grasp.

Of course, not everyone hated everything all the time; that was not what was preached. Their gospel was not about losing oneself in an inescapable downward spiral of hatred. It simply maintained that there was no progress to be made, and those who tried to make progress by performing beyond their limits were fools who would make everything collapse so much sooner.

Those who live meekly would not be rewarded, but it wouldn't be their fault when everything inevitably fell apart. That is the most anyone can hope for; to be free of blame.

And that is what all the tribes strove for; or, to be more accurate, did not strive for.

There is an inherent beauty to the singsong whistle of arrows raining down.

Humans will always desire to kill each other. Failing in that regard, they will desire instead to kill something else.

A juggernaut in scavenged armor slammed into the archers, scattering their formation with shouts and flashing steel.

The reasons are varied, all warranting individual attention and their own hard-earned merit. Some are reactionary, others proactive. The closed-minded cynic will maintain war is waged over resources and ideology, and nothing else.

A mailed fist closed around a lanky arm that was slow to escape and hoisted the unfortunate figure into the air to dangle as if from the hangman's noose.

On the contrary. Humans will kill regardless; the reasons attached are only exterior justifications to avert the recognition of reality. The only true rationale for war is war itself.

The execution that was to follow was summarily efficient and set the stage for the rout to come.

War is the first mechanism of entropy.

The remaining opposing troops crumpled under the full charge the juggernaut led into their lines. Not all of them made it far enough to escape their foe's wrath.

This is the second postulate.

The man described...

...a place where the monotonous expanses of sand were broken only by barren, fruitless rocks. A place where nothing had ever grown, and nothing could ever grow. A place where the air was baked dry and it never, ever rained.

The man described...

...Tunnels, hidden beneath and through and in the rock. Aberrations, interventions in the lifeless stone. Wells more than a mile deep that sucked the merest suggestions of dampness from the parched bedrock.

The man described...

...Civilization, hidden under a skin of sand-and-stone. Pulsing with hard-gained energy, tapped from sources both electrical and eldritch. Cities miles wide and miles deep, factories full of hellfire, underground farms enough to feed a nation; all lit by the glow of their nuclear hearts.

The man described...

...His intentions. He did not seek for minerals or land - his barren home had them in plenty, locked inside the deadrock. Instead he sought knowledge - artifacts, things of power, ancient scrolls or books. Even the ruined devices, those which no longer functioned but still seemed to work; those he would take as well.

In return, he offered devices and wonders of his own. Chemicals and powders that would make soil more fertile than the best black loam. Potions and pills that would cure some of the sick and ease the passing of the rest. Weapons (and here his voice dropped low, as if he was telling a secret) that could kill an animal or a man from a hundred paces away, with nigh-instant speed.

Some (or all) of what he said may have been lost in translation. But he looked around at their intent faces, and felt that enough of it had been understood.

The teal-wreathed chief — and to a much lesser extent, his honor guard — felt a kinship with the man. He was on the same path as they, perhaps several steps behind or several steps ahead. It was clear their tribe and this man's civilization shared the burden of a wasteland. They had forged methods of survival — meek or otherwise — and been met with shades of success that wavered with time. Their tribe was fortunate — blessed, even — to have been the ones to make contact with an outsider with so much in common to them, even more so for the outsider to make such lucrative offers.

The man promised weapons of great power, usable by a single man to kill thirty of his enemies. The tribe knew of such weapons; they had retained a few throughout the centuries — they were exotic, perhaps more powerful, than those the man offered — but they were ancient and required a true master to use. The man told them of such weapons brought to them in bulk! For every one of his soldiers to be armed with a death-spitting, chemical-fueled tube...the chief's eyes lit up.

Perhaps the outsider would bring his own men to wield the weapons alongside the chief's forces. Together they could sweep across the ashlands, conquering and uniting. He would pay the man in the artifacts they relieved from enemy tribes, and the chief would be paid with the status of a warlord.

But then the cynicism that pervaded all the tribes — especially their elders — began to sink in. War was the first mechanism of entropy. The chief did not want to be blamed for the atrocities that would arise from beginning a great war, for to be blamed for anything is the worst punishment.

Furthermore, as he pondered how best to manipulate this outsider, what if the man was out-thinking him at this very moment. The man had not done enough to prove his trustworthiness. Even if he had, it might have been only so he could bury knives in backs.

The chief's vision for a bright future — for him, anyway — darkened. But not entirely. He would be careful. He would not perform beyond the limits. He would take what he could and do with it what he could and seek not for more. He, his tribe, and this man could go far together, but no further.

A few augmentations, an interesting firearm, and a few oddities were heaped, unexplained and unorganized, in front of the man for his inspection. He was left alone — but likely watched — while he deliberated over what he would offer for his side of the trade.

The augmentations were not the worst, but they certainly were not the creamy spiderweb implants the chief and his elders so proudly displayed. The implants before the man were a series of gray, fleshy bulbs. The more bulbs an implant was comprised of, the more powerful it was; the best one the man could find was three knuckle-sized bulbs attached tenuously by thin cartilage. There was apparently no specific purpose for each augmentation; presumably, it was grafted to the area the host wanted enhanced, and the implant would do its best.

The firearm was carbine-sized, with a wide bore of an indeterminate caliber and a full stock attached. The weapon's living internals were housed in a translucent encasing of organic polymer. The polymer was most likely extraordinarily flexible at some point in the past — allowing the weapon to shoot around corners and over cover with ease — but had become brittle with age. The trigger was easy enough to find — a bony stub where the man had expected to find it — but the "magazine" release was difficult. After searching extensively, he ejected a slimy, writhing bio-energy cell (which he had to rush to reinsert to keep the weapon alive), but could find no projectiles or a housing for them.

The oddities were just that; trinkets, mostly. There was a compass, but the only externally interesting thing about it was that it had no organic components whatsoever; it was if someone had airdropped this one compass into this land of living architecture. If the man had anything to cross-check with, he would find the compass worked, despite the fact he had to literally beg and threaten and fight the rusted hinges open (they had only cooperated with the fighting; bribes and death threats did not faze them). Other objects were somewhat useful and all were pocket-sized; one took organic material (like the man's finger, if he wasn't careful) and transformed it into pure water — it probably worked with seawater, too. There were living energy cells ranging from corroded to somewhat operable.

The tribe hoped this wide selection would interest the man. And, of course, being one of the larger and more successful tribes...there was more.

The man thanked the chief for the things he had be given. Secretly, though, he was disappointed. The things were advanced, yes; that was certain, and in fact it was the problem. They were so far advanced that they would be practically impossible to disassemble, to poke and prod and learn the workings of. Still, perhaps they could be of some use.

As a token, he produced his pistol (carefully, so as not to startle) from underneath his shirt. Next to the organic carbine-thing, the revolver seemed primitive and even crass in its metal construction. But it was polished and new, and (as the man demonstrated) it could shoot the head off of a spear from thirty paces. He gave it to the chief, along with a handful of bullets and a brief tutorial. He promised he would return in two days, with many more things that were suitable for trade. He wore a look of transparent honesty as he said this; but that meant little.

The worst criminals are the ones which you can't see coming.

His helicopter returned in an hour or two. The man disappeared inside, reappeared with another revolver and two boxes of bullets. In return, he took the carbine, and a few of the choicier implants and trinkets.

The great blades sliced the air, and the helicopter dwindled into the sky.

The tribe was pleased; their chief's good will had been returned. The promise of having their tribe lavished with faraway gifts rang in their ears long after the great metal bird chopped its way out of view.

Their insecurity dissolved as they experimented with the two revolvers they'd been given. Miraculously, none of the tribespeople were wounded or maimed as they raced through a box of ammunition, though there were a few close calls. The revolvers were infinitely simpler to use than many of the archaic firearms they'd horded, and put out greater lethal force than the best bow with a minimal requirement of strength and skill.

The tribe was pleased, content the gifts that were to come in two days time would solidify their permanence as an influential tribe and their friendship with the outsiders.

On the second day, a shot rang out.

High above the village, a pair of narrow many-rotored things circled like sharks in red-black livery. The pounding of cannons echoed down, followed by the howl and whistle of falling metal.

Pieces of shattered helicopter fell like apocalyptic rain. White-hot metal dug into the ground, scorching and burning where it touched. One of them bore the traces of a diamond, circumscribed around a circle.

The air smelled like smoke and broken dreams.

A strafing run by one of the red-black things (so like the one that had borne their previous visitor, and yet so different) left a line of huts in flaming ruin. Afterwards, it hovered ominously above the shining metal building, not deigning to touch the ground with its rolled-steel skids. An unfamiliar voice issued forth from its loudspeaker; harsh and commanding, yet speaking the same language.

"You will bring every artifact and ancient thing you own and place it at the edge of the village, else you shall feel my wrath. In one day's time, I will return to collect these things and to speak with your chief."

The attack 'copter turned and lifted back up towards the firmament, guns chattering again as it left. A smart man would note that the paths of destruction that it traced danced around the tribespeople, scaring or nicking but never quite coming close enough to kill, as if the unseen enemies wished to scare them but still found some use in their existence.

Some say that we are proud. I say that they are right. We are proud. Why should we not be so?

Before we came, this desert was abandoned, a place where nobody could ever live. We dug deep and found that they were right; nothing could live in this place.

So we set to work. There was no water; we dug the lifewells and the great channels that bring water a hundred miles from the mountains. There was no food; we built the great underground farms, and our crops flourished. The desert ate our roads; we built things that had no need of roads.

We took something unusable, shaped it to our will, and made it into a homeland. And what a homeland it is! No cities scar its surface. You can travel for a hundred miles without seeing a single human soul. Nothing has ever taken it from us; our cities are our fortresses, and even the greatest castles and buildings pale in comparison to the million-ton rocks that defend them. Not even nuclear fire can crack open our inner fastnesses.

We are proud of what we have done, and what we can still do. Some say that pride comes before a fall; I say that we need fear no fall, for we have earned our pride. Someday, we shall shape the face of the world.

- General Morth Steelfang

Hate not he that steals to live. Hate not he that steals for the love of the thief's art. But hate he that steals only for the sake of accumulation.

Greed cannot be reduced to simply a descriptor of the human nature. It is not a root of human nature. It is not a constant in human nature. To say so would suggest humans are evil by nature. They are not; they are only human — the god-adjectives of Good and Evil do not apply to their curious and complex essences.

Greed manifests itself in myriad forms with myriad intensities. It is not an action of itself, but it drives actions and plants seeds. It is rarely absent in a thought, and never alone; there is no "pure greed" — for that would imply greed as a sole powering force.

Greed is the second mechanism of entropy.

This is the third postulate.

One day. One day to convene. One day to debate and shout and plead and compromise. One day of soapboxes and verbal last stands and factions. One day to wonder why how who.

One day to gather the sacred artifacts that had sustained them in the wasteland unto whence they — the tribes and the artifacts — were born. One day to willingly drain themselves of their lifeblood, to postpone death so they can die shortly after. One day to surrender, or have their artifacts withdrawn from underneath the piles of their corpses.

Or. One day to prepare a defense. One day to make the buzzard hornet demon thing crash and burn, writhing in the incredible flames of its own fuel. One day to fight for their lives, the lives of their families, and the other tribes. The others didn't know, would be helpless; their tribe was now the sole bulwark against evil, for those tribes that had once been potential victims of conquest.

Something had to be done. Something would. They would not be the victims of entropy. They would, for once, not be blameless.

So much can happen in a day.

---

The chief and his honor guard stood with their backs to the late afternoon sun, proud and silent. The slowly golding rays picked out pricks of sweat on their backs and lit the top fringes of their hair with photon halos. The heavily ornamented men were armed and armored in impressive battle dress that bespoke their status, but it was nothing beyond with which they would greet a favored ally — or an oppressive enemy.

There was a mound — jagged in some places, smoothed in others — protected by a tarp of thick fabric. The breeze tickled the edges.

The village was silent; huts, hall, ash. It waited with them, backs to the sun.

The red-black thing came, swinging low, humming, leaving an intricate rhythm in its wake. Its sister - heavy, dual-rotored, ready to make itself full and pendulous with cargo - stayed patiently in the sky, orbiting.

It touched ground gently, as if disgusted by the earth. Its rotors did not stop, as those of the first one had done. They instead remained humming, spinning, quivering the thing with barely constrained energy, as if it was poised to spring and at any moment rain down again with its particular brand of hellfire.

Gun barrels watched the chief like the mouths of serpents. Perhaps there was some piece of obscure miracle-alloy, some bulletproof bone in their ceremonial armor. Perhaps they would be protected from harm.

Perhaps not.

The man that approached them was, in all respects, the opposite of the one they had first met. The first man had been thin and clean-shaven; this one was stocky and bearded, like a bear. The first man had spoken in pleasant, diplomatic tones; this one was gruff and commanding, and the way he moved hinted at a violent fate for those who disobeyed him. The first man had not been obviously armed; this man carried a rifle, and unlike the shining revolvers it was square and black and designed expressly for killing people. There was no elegance in it, except perhaps the elegance of efficiency.

"I have," he said, "a choice for you."

The man took a stride and tossed the cloth aside, exposing the piled treasures of the tribe.

"You can give me these," he said, "your hopes and wonders, your magic, your treasures. In return, I will give you the products of my people. They are not as wondrous as your things, but they are effective and plentiful. You have seen some of them already, and you know that I speak the truth."

He signals to the helicopter behind him, and a pair of men wrestle a crate out of it, remove the lid, reveal enough rifles to arm every warrior in the tribe with spares left over.

"You can take these in exchange; and for your finest warriors and chiefs, I shall provide special things. But there is a price," - and here he glowered - "there is a price."

"You will use these things that I give you to expand your territory and conquer other tribes. You will bring all of their artifacts to me, and I will replace them. I don't care how you govern once you have conquered; all I ask is that you will do this until there is nothing more left to conquer. When you are finished, I shall set you as rulers of the land, and give you things such that none will dare to challenge you."

He motions again. The crate is closed.

"That is one of the choices. The other choice is..."

The man grins, like a mobster, like a man who you know you can't refuse because if you do, you will suffer.

"...you refuse my generous offer, you make some petty attempt at resistance, and I crush you down to the last man, woman, and child before conquering this land myself."

The man grins.

"Do you understand?"

Ultimatums, like villainous monologues, often have a deep gorge of flaws scarring their thoughtless craftsmanship, unseen by their progenitor.

Here and there there was the disembodied creak of a drawn bow string, or the rustle of light feet steadying for a sprint. The warriors' collective tension was held in check only by their chief, and at his signal — or his fall — they would bound forth and give their lives willingly.

This warlord surely joked with his mention of "petty resistance." He had personally flown over the village, had spotted warriors enough to kill him ten times over before he could make it to his buzzing chariot. Those warriors surely surrounded him now, cloaked in the shadow of the village.

As for the escort, there was an artifact or two that would cause it damage, if a warrior could make it through the open ground to the collected mound. Perhaps the new weapons before them could harm the thing. They probably could not bring it crashing down, but they could cause it pain, send it limping away.

The chief stared intensely at his oppressor.

This bear of a man was wreathed with entropy, withering the fates of those around him. He was animal in his appearance, motives, and demeanor. His fate would be an animal's, too. He did not realize the mayhem he wrought would inevitably turn on him and he would succumb to a painful, unexpected demise. For this, the chief pitied the warlord. The chief was no seer, but he knew the teachings, and he knew what they spelled for this man.

Wordlessly, eyes locked with the warlord, the chief slashed his thumb against one of his sharpest ornaments. His robe billowing and brilliant in the golden sun, he strode forwards to place his bloodmark of ownership upon the crate of weapons.

The warlord smiled.

"I think there is a bright future for both of us."

He made a complex gesture to the buzzing thing behind him, and the transport poised high above began to descend. The warlord pointed to it.

"In there, I have boxes of bullets, armor, tools. Other things that you may find useful. You'll have them. But."

He pauses for a moment.

"There's also a man in there. I don't ask that you take orders from him - he will only be here to send messages to me, and to instruct you in the use of the things that I bring. All I ask is that you listen to his advice when he gives it, and treat him fairly. Every five days, he will report your progress to me. If you have any messages or requests for me, he will send them."

Behind him, the transport kicks up great clouds of dust as it settles to the ground.

"I will be leaving soon, but first I have one more thing that I want to give to you -" he nodded to the chief "-personally."

He walks back to his 'copter, retrieves something long and thin and wrapped in red cloth.

"Since we are taking your sacred things, your treasures, I think it is only fair that you should have one of ours."

He rests it on top of the crate, pulls the cloth aside.

"This once belonged to a great man. He did many things, but this is all that is left of him."

Sword. Simple, unadorned, with a guard that's no more than a metal bar and a leather-wrapped grip long enough for two hands. It is, in all, perhaps the length of a grown man's leg. The grip is perhaps a little worn - the guard, a little nicked; but the blade shines like a razor's edge.

"It will never dull, bend, break, rust or shatter. You could chop down a tree with it, and it would still be as sharp as it was the day it was forged. It is quite a bit lighter than any other sword of its size, and it is sharp enough to cut through a stone."

The warlord smiles.

"It's yours now. Do with it what you will."

He climbs aboard the buzzing thing, and it leaps into the sky as if suddenly untied. Below, in the dust, men unload crates.

"Only the weak are subject to destiny. The strong can plot the course of their own future."

- Proverb

******

"Free will? Yeah, I think we've got it. I have a story to go with that one, actually."

"A few years ago, we had a division of Special that was dedicated to looking into the future. It's gone now, because of one man. That man was the first person to ever catch a glimpse of hs own future. The people that were with him say that he managed to pick up a few seconds of sound from about a month into the future. In the recording that they made, the man was getting an award for his work in precognition."

"About three days later, the guy shot himself to prove a point. We don't do precog work anymore."

- General Morth Steelfang

We, as a civilization, are intensely familiar with the power of disease. We assumed we were immune, able to adapt far faster through our advancements.

We were proven wrong.

Humanity has always put its best efforts into combating sickness. Beginning with just herbs, crushed leaves, and an incantation, it worked its way up to viral immunizations and genetic manipulation. It conquered pandemics; it transformed influenza from a death sentence to an inconvenience.

However, disease is a swarm of flies, best smacked down one by one with a flyswatter. Tragically, humanity has only ever been able to make sledgehammers.

The impossibility humanity has been confronted with concerning the eradication of disease is due to illness' irremovable nature.

The case is not that disease cannot die because of its lightning rate of adaptation; rather, it adapts so rapidly because it cannot die. Disease cannot be allowed to vanish.

This is because disease is the third and final mechanism of entropy.

This is the fourth postulate.

Something leapt unexpectedly from behind the warlord and hopped erratically about the artificially lit helicopter until it could look the bearded bear in the eye. As it jockeyed for a satisfactory vantage point, it passed through jagged geometric shadows and swaths of stark light.

Where there were shadows the tiny bird incorporated itself unnaturally well, feathers sapping visibility from the polygon of darkness. The shadow it inhabited came alive, darkening into a disturbing shade of black and appearing to writhe slowly against the contrast of the lit alloy floor.

It would reappear suddenly, jarringly luminescent and glittering, before plunging into another shadow. For a few seconds here and there, it basked in the curious light that shone but did not warm. The bird had never experienced artificial light before, and the sensation scintillated its unattuned sensors.

The bird paused to peck at its own shadow, a sharply defined duplicate rendered in darkness against the dull metal skin of the helicopter's interior, before realizing it had attained the position it desired.

It affixed the warlord with unliving, porcelain-like eyes, cocked its head inquisitively, and asked a simple question.

Poo-tee-weet?

---

Predestination and determinism are fools' comforts. They preaches inflexibility, inaction, hopelessness. They teaches of a system of rails. A consciousness is locked into what it has done and what it will do, leaving only one choice for the present.

Be flexible! Take action! Have hope! But remain ever aware of fate's ability to outthink and outmaneuver you, and its tendency to do so. It controls the three mechanisms of entropy, and you do not. Fate has graciously allowed each consciousness a wide berth of movement, our choices stringing us along a multitude of elegantly entangled threads. Often, possibly our entire lives, we follow the thick threads of the middle road. These sturdy cables are the easiest to balance upon and the simplest to see ahead of, devoid of painful twists and hairpin turns.

It is when fate pushes humans to the outer extremes of their granted limits that the elegance is lost and clarity is torn asunder among the mess of tenuous spidersilk. Here, where a human consciousness is left unshielded, forced to witness the horrors of existence, intuition and human nature are the only unreliable guides.

Pushing oneself to those agonizing outer bounds — the home of heroism and villainy — is what we recognize as free will.

The chief stared down at the sword laying across his palms, the cold steel singing sweet resonant songs into his fingertips. He shifted the sword's position to be held neutrally, almost uncaring, in his off hand.

He selected two of his guard with a nod and told them of the warlord's envoy. They were to erect a serviceable home for the liaison; no better or worse than one of their own.

A signal was thrown casually into the air. Not a signal of capitulation, but one to relax. Unused arrows were returned to nestle in their quivers; tensed muscles and nerves were eased. The warriors would not have to sacrifice themselves today. They gave no helping hand to the men carting away their artifacts, their tangible heritage. To do so would be treason to themselves.

Their honorable and proud chief — still free in their minds — made his way (stately, unhurried, as great men are) to the warlord's man on the ground. At the man's first leisure he outlined (politely, without spite, as calm men do) what they must do.

With the assistance of a few crude drawings in the dust — the modest artistry quickly reclaimed by the greedy ground — the chief explained there was a graveyard of many great once-living war machines. To conquer all the tribes swiftly and leave no room for substantial resistance, he would need to raise an unstoppable force. These machines would form the tip of the spear.

To rekindle the life left dormant deep within their cores, they would require quantities of energy currently unattainable. The ruins of sprawling, city-powering organic energy complexes were scattered throughout the ashlands, but those that resembled their original architecture were far and few between; most had been reduced to mounds of dust. To find a pocket of recognizable city would be their best chance of locating an energy source that could be revived.

The chief had an idea of where to go, and his warriors were willing to trek across the nothingness to reach it. But they would not go alone, and not just because of simple superstition.

Ever a man lifts a finger against another, this is war's bloodied hand.

Ever an innocent cough ignites the slow dwindling demise of a civilization, this is disease's pestilent breath.

All else that leads to a fall, this is greed's false promise.

There is a fourth element; time.

Time is an element only because time is. It is beyond fate's grasp, but it works to fate's ends.

Humanity has striven endlessly to explain time. Its inexorable, ever-tightening grip on our lives and the weight with which it presses upon humanity's group consciousness was first explained with gods. Yet, these gods were never superior. Not Zeus or Jove or Ra or even the all-powerful Abrahamic Gods held much sway over time. It is as if humans throughout history have tried to ignore time, and yet the Titan Chronus was bested by Zeus, reflecting humanity's hope to evade the crush of time.

It is because time is the ultimate limit; your time is up, and you die. You lose your influence on the world around you; the earth reclaims your form, and humanity finds this unacceptable. Humans have always tried to ignore and surpass their limits, but we know time is inescapable. We collapse before it in awe and admiration, kissing its indifferent feet.

We recognize time's true power; its ability to wander ponderously forwards, the only element humanity has ever known that is entirely immune to fate.

Time is what it is only because it is, and that is all we can ever aspire to; simply to be.

The call is low and melodious, echoing over the fractal-like mountains that separate space from time, reality from nonexistence.

In gray skies, a hawk swivels and descends, cutting across thermals and slicing the wind. Its prey has taken off for shelter by the time it reaches ground. It seems to flex its claws, as if shaking off a leash of lethargy, an imprisoning band of apathy, and takes off again.

So too does a wanderer make her trek. The world she has left behind is true and shines in silver, when light beams off precise computer chips. The lagging footsteps she takes leave no imprint on the melting snow as she descends. She feels vaguely intrusive, as if it is not her place to be.

But she is a long way from home, and too tired to turn around.

OOC: Let me know if I'm invading into somebody else's story and should exit.

Joyce's snow was symbolic of a slow stifling existence punctuated by an ignoble death. Ashes are no improvement, but perhaps there is some solace to be found in its disappearance, melted forever in the heat of our fall.

Snow implies a vestige of an ecosystem, a rare thing in this land, practically an artifact itself. The snow is bleak, brusquely shrugging off the sun's rays, and grimy. The hawk trespasses upon what passes meagerly for a spring thaw; here and there unimpressive rivulets of gray water merge or part, on a long journey to nowhere.

As is often the case with the strange intruders as of late, the hawk was watched. By two pairs of eyes, to be exact.

One pair was jeweled with the gift of unliving consciousness. They had seen everything there was to see, and were set in the alloy-feathered head of a bird that stared down the hawk without fear.

The other pair glittered with innocence. By contrast, they had seen very little, but were brave. They were set in flesh tanned but not roughened by nature, and the flesh was hidden very well, protected by ash and continuous practice. Their owner was armed lightly with weapons he was highly proficient in, as a scout or lone explorer would be.

It has come too far.

The living bird loses speed, somewhat, as it tries to steady itself again. When that fails and it is too late to change the plan, it goes into a lopsided tilt until it seems to be turning around with its wingspan pointing from sky to ground. It remains in this tragicomic rotation as it departs.

Each expanse is the same. There is no glorious blinding because even if the once-proud star could poke through the cosmic blur to reach the trivial creatures so far below, the water is unyielding as well, and nothing can reflect.

The hawk cannot restrain itself: there is no beauty below to be spoiled. It gives way to instinct, preparing the way for the incessant cycle to continue.

The mountain has given way to a rugged plateau. When the young woman ducks, it is not because the incoming fall is so disruptive: rather, it is because any disturbance is magnified against the backdrop of silence. She has grown accustomed to monotony, and flinches easily.

On the contrary, our old friends literature and postulation have — in rote ritualism — reinvented the bird as the ultimate manifestation of freedom and eternal life. Thus, humanity's obsession with flight.

Remember always the stories of our own first defiances of gravity, with those roughly hewn man-bearing constructs of ours...

Reactionary, unthinkingly, an arrow notched. The arrow trusts its wielder, believing in the importance of its flight, the utter necessity that it be sent sailing into the air humming a singsong deathtune.

The complaining creak of strange, never-aging string urging the poles (north and south, up and down, ground and air) of the bow backwards. The head of the arrow — perpendicular shining steel — lays counter to the dull, unnaturally flexible something-metal of the bow.

All components trust their bearer completely in the righteousness of their use. They were all scavenged from the wasteland, made into something, given purpose. In their eternal gratitude, they serve their master unerringly.

Their bearer thinks of nothing but firing arcs, air friction, transversal movement. The hawk is nothing but a target, to be thoughtlessly struck down.

The arrow lances upwards, impossibly beautiful in flight. While all else consumes the sun greedily, swallowing its light, the arrow selflessly reflects for all to see. The song of its flight is distorted by its speed into a sheer howl.

The irony, of man shooting a bird.

Human hubris is indefinite. For so long have the brightest minds believed that with one more wrinkle, one more hypothesis, their theory will be complete, and they will understand.

Once in vogue was the concept that all motion was relative. The slightest perturbance, in contrast to meaningless static, could be as significant than a thunderbolt that was commonplace in a booming warzone.

The wanderer notices the bright metal of the arrow and feels only an ironic disappointment. The bird's death is of no consequence, but now she knows she is not alone. Despite the level of technology, it is a human-forged tool nonetheless.

She looks around, her nearsighted vision unable to tell her what lies beyond. She does not consciously noticed that she has stopped walking, fatigue having caused her to level out.

Preparations. Something to do, to pass the time of travelling.

The man turns the (somewhat old, somewhat outdated) rifle around in his hands.

This is where the bullet goes, he says. You slip it in, like so. Then you pull this back. You aim it like so. See how there are three posts? You want to hold it so that they look like this.

He scratches in the dirt.

The top of that middle post, there. That is where the bullet will go. Aim at the target, there, and pull the trigger, here.

Boom of exploding gunpowder. Crack of supersonic bullet. The man smiles.

Good. Now, I will show you how to clean it. This is not a spear or a bow, you see. It is a device. It has small parts that move, and if they are not clean they will scrape and stop moving. Then it will not work. So after every battle, when you return to your camp, you must clean it.

******

The convoy is an odd one. Perhaps someday it will be immortalized in a painting or computer-generated image. Perhaps not.

The tribespeople travel light, carrying only the essentials. The man who walks among them is not quite so stingy, but still bears only a backpack, rifle, holstered six-shooter inlaid with gold and silver. Among the barefoot trail of the tribe, his booted prints stand out.

Some distance to the side travels a thing, procured upon request. Its sort of tracks have not been seen in this place for thousands of years. It rides on four fat treaded balloons, and its engine purrs softly when it moves. It travels in short bursts, first falling behind then shooting ahead, so as to conserve fuel. The three men who ride it watch the tribespeople with suspicion, shooing away the curious, and there is always a man in the thing's single machine-gun turret.

******

That was then. This is now.

The situation is much the same. Things are maybe a little bit dustier, a little bit more worn. The buggy-thing is noticably lower on fuel, and the outsiders confer about this. It is decided to keep moving on.

And on, and on, and on. The terrain changes a little, but not much. Not much at all. The only mark the tribe and its visitors leave is a trail of footprints and treadmarks, and even that will be gone within the week.

Sometimes they see a third party, some scout or curious child in the distance. There are a few brief negotiations for travelling rights, some of them tense. Once, it seems about to come to blows when the buggy-thing's turret points at the ground and unloads for three seconds with a sky-ripping roar, leaving it perforated with holes. The liason smiles at the stunned party they are confronting.

"Imagine if that had been pointed at you. You cannot stop us, so do not try. We are only passing through."

Afterwards, though, reprimands are made to the buggy-thing's crew. What little of it that drifts back to the tribe is confusing, at best.

"...waste of ammunition..."

"...I had the situation under control..."

"...won't do it again..."

"...fire..."

And so it goes.

******

One day, there is a spire on the horizon.

Some people think time goes in one direction, and that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line.

In practice, it's not quite so simple.

- Martin Cromwell, Director of High Energy Physics

Despite her nearsightedness, the wanderer could make out that her feet had led her into the midst of her own personal Stonehenge. Monotliths of smooth ceramic, cracked and grayed by millenia of neglect, offered a compassionate modicum of protection. It was simple, undiluted luck that led her here; through her distance-blurred vision, it was unlikely she could have discerned this particular patch of ruins and shadows from the identically grim open ground surrounding it.

Similarly, through pure unluck, it was the case the arrow had originated from these ruins. Now, the hawk dead, the wanderer could feel the unseen hunter turn its attention to her.

A figure stepped from behind the tree-trunk base of the largest spire into the hawk's narrow cone of clarity. The hunter was far more substantial, in stature and presence, than any other living being the wanderer had encountered thus far, if any. The pair of eyes that stared impassively down at her were unlike any other pair that had laid eyes on her before; they were polished jet, sunken into hard flesh painted black. The eyes shifted without rest between wonder, indifference, and malice.

---

The chief trusted spirited, muscular manpower over all else, and so held deep distrust towards the four-tracked gun buggy. Its mounted weapon spit fire faster than he had seen any weapon do before, but he had realized the buggy gorged itself on fuel and ammunition, two resources he could not supply. The buggy was dependent on all the humans for fuel, bullets, and crew, but twenty warriors needed only to rely on themselves. The chief did not hate technology — he knew its value well — but he knew its steep costs.
He had heard from the shamans that knew the oldest stories that warriors weighed down with technology required others to support them. He had listened raptly to tales of armies with soliders that did not fight, whose sole duties dealt with logistics, and he promised himself he would never lead such an army.

For this reason — and because he had seen the rifles' slow rate of fire — he instructed his warriors with severe specifics on how they would use the new weapons. They would use the rifles to add one powerful preliminary shot to each warrior's arsenal, and then drop the encumbering weapons. They would use their spears until presented with an opportunity to throw them. Then, they would use their sabres as they closed with the enemy, and fall back on their bows in case ranged combat was required again. He trusted fully in each warrior's discipline and competency, but warned again and again that reloading the cumbersome rifle would not be to their advantage despite the straightness of its shot and the power of its blows.

Then, with the lowered voice reserved for conspiracies and ancient stories, he explained to his warriors about the ruins that dotted their land. There was a reason every tribe lived on the vast, open wastelands and scorned what protection the ruined cities offered.

There were those that did not simply respect the teachings of their gospel. Entire tribes went insane in the face of their paradoxical relationship with the universe, and burnt their villages to the ground to go live in the ruins. These tribes aspired not to live in fearful awareness of entropy and fate, but rather to spread it. They hoarded all the rarest and most powerful artifacts in their crumbling cities and proclaimed themselves harlequins of entropy, laughing and crying simultaneously at the indifference with which fate ruled their lives. They did not believe in the first postulate — that concerning limits, as they believed the limits were broken simply through existence — but they upheld the mechanisms of entropy with terrifying zealotry, and proved their faith by wearing nothing but black paint every moment of their lives.

It had been a long time since the maniacs had gone raiding, but they always met surprise visits with hostility.

Their tribe would likely be the first major visitors to this perpetually enraged lifestyle in several centuries, which spelled no good fate for the chief and his warriors.

The spire loomed closer, and dread bubbled up — contained only by bravery and honor.

OOC: If I haven't made it clear, the hawk and the "wanderer" are distinct entities: the latter is human and just happens to be going the same way.

((Fixed, apologies. I think I was thrown by the fact both the hawk and the wanderer were referred to as female, and thus combined them into one character by that virtue alone. Thanks for pointing it out, and tell me if that edit works for you. Also, minor storyteller's guidance as you can see to better incorporate you. Hope that's alright.))

(Yeah, that's great, thanks! Sorry for any confusion on my end-I tried to refer to the hawk as "it".)

She freezes, even stiffer than usual. In typical arrogance, she does not speak, assuming the hunter will not speak her language. Instead, she tries to focus on him, but it is difficult to do so for long: she averts her eyes.

She does not consider herself particularly impressive: her faded jeans and sweatshirt are rugged, and look as if they have not been changed in days. But it is certainly distinct from the contrasting alternative.

The wanderer is correct in assuming her scrutinizer understands little past the most exaggerated gestures. His quarry puzzles him; she freezes rather than flailing wildly in terror or shock. Her very presence confounds and undermines the normal raving fervor of his faith.

Afraid — afraid for the first time in his life — to touch her, his pitch-dipped hand tests the air around her for the icy afterchill of some freezing magic. There is none — she seems to have frozen of her own accord. She still breathes, and her eyes flicker between the ground and his own, confirming her continued life.

Filled again with conviction, he raises his weapon. It is a firearm, smeared in the same oily black paint layered over its bearer's skin, exotic and archaic. As the wanderer looks down its barrel, it reminds her of a toothless mouth, lined with dark pink muscle. Something dangles lamely from the weapon's rearward section. As the warrior tightens on the bony stub of a trigger, the dangler makes an electrical crackling sound and rigidifies.

But again, as if conflicted between multiple personalities, the warrior loosens his grip on his firearm. While he has kept the coals of his eyes locked on his increasingly confusing prey, now he averts them so that she will not easily detect the uncertainty that flashes through them.

Too much time has passed. A warrior — features indiscernible from the other beneath the black paint — steps from behind the same spire base. Had the wanderer not been watching, she might think for a glancing instant the warrior-predator had split himself in two. The second blackened predator held a weapon as well, intricate and impossible in an entirely different way.

Communication — utilizing words, but only as one minor component of many — pierced the first warrior's haze of confusion. Both men glance at the wanderer; there is no time to make a decision. They can only hope the interloper will be of no consequence. Both men disappear like oily smoke gusted across a wasteland. Insignificant, ignored in any other context — yet the only marks against the gray.

Hide, hide; enemies on the horizon. An army. They come with many weapons, and the first war machine in centuries.

And there are aliens. Invaders. The war machine is theirs. It clatters — steel, fuel, unrefined. Make it burn.

((Actually, reading your previous posts, there's little that would lead me to fail in differentiating the hawk and the wanderer. It's just sheer lack of reading comprehension on my part, I'm afraid. But it's all cleared up now.))

The woman stands and briefly notes the second warrior. Overcome with unprecedented panic, she tries to look at the stone monoliths instead. The crumbling derelects nevertheless indicate that some fading minds strove to place a pattern here, castigating the natural world to the forces of their intellect.

Stumbling, she tries to reach the center of the ruins. She only takes a step before falling completely over, at the mercy of the warriors.

The metal contraptions from which she was somehow, immaturely, trying to escape continue rising. In the boy's workshop, he turns the sheets over in his hands, smoothing their edges. He shakes the blood off his palms irritably: it flies across the room, splattering quietly.

He does not know what he is constructing, but it is a playful idle, a way to waste the time so carelessly squandered by the lost survivors. Chronocide, perhaps, is the appropriate term.

Piece by piece, he fuses it together.

The man atop the gun-buggy was the first to see the specks. Tiny dots of black, moving across the ground beneath the spire. He reached for his binoculars, hoping (no, praying) that they would be only some kind of savage beast.

Alas, it was not to be.

"We've got company! Look sharp, everyone!"

******

Belts of ammunition are fetched, readied, hung next to the buggy's gun. The third man - the one who neither drives nor shoots - grabs his rifle and disembarks, finding a low rise to conceal himself behind. He slips in a magazine, cycles the bolt action, adjusts the cunning system of optics.

The specks are larger now. In a few minutes, they will resolve themselves into men.

******

The liason notes the commotion, checks his weapons, loads his pistol. The bullets he uses are strange things, made not of lead, but of brass and red crystal.

"They are coming," he states, matter-of-factly. By now, the enemy is visible for all to see.

From the near distance, where the buggy is parked, rings the crack of a rifle. One of the approaching men (still made tiny by distance) staggers, lurches, falls to the ground. A few seconds later, the process repeats itself.

The liason smiles. He snaps his pistol shut, spins the cylinder, reholsters it. Around him, there are the sounds of warriors making ready.

"This," he says, "is going to be a victory."

Through the mist of her enrapturing panic, the wanderer's forced intensity of attention to the monoliths that surrounded her offer her a few unusualities. While the coloration and solidity of the ruins generally agree with a diagnosis of "this is stone," there is an absence of imperfections or syncopations in the rhythm of the material. Attention paid to the texture obliterates the suggestion the monoliths are stone.

The innate coarseness of even the most finely hewn stone is nonexistent to a degree not even fanatical polishing or a million years of erosion could attain.

There was much more than etched patterns to suggest a human attempt to subjugate nature; the only way humans knew to attain such natural perfection was through unnatural means — synthesis.

But the material was still undoubtedly organic in nature, which left but one answer. It had been grown.

In any case —

Perhaps the wanderer has managed to overcome the terror-forged child's urge to ignore the impending threat — the bogey man under her bed, in her closet, in the shadows — by utilizing all the free will her fight-or-flight reaction has allowed her. The mist of fear dissipates some, and she finds herself flattened against the ashes by her fall.

They are strangely comfortable, like down bedding.

As she raises her head and spits ashes in a wet glob, she realizes all that is left of the two warriors is a smear of black paint on one of the monoliths. A handprint.

Somewhere close by, the haunting, resonant pluck of a sitar begins to fill the air.

---

The enemy, still only a messy blur of black, pauses. Thinks. Reorganizes. There is no strategy involved, only instinct. A wave of disturbing almost-gunshots ripples across their form, signals aimed upwards. The creature talks to itself, conversing through weapon reports.

From the middle, two rapid flashes of blue streak upwards. The report rumbles and reverberates many times over as it washes over the wasteland's soft mounds.

The smears of black turn tail, retreating again into anonymity. The ruins swallow them, warm and welcoming.

---

The chief and his small army pick their way through the borders of the ruins, carefully, surreptitiously. Don't wake the monster.

It begins reverberating through the air, reaching the chief's warriors and the warlord's men on a near-subconscious level. The acoustics of the ruins begin to magnify the dreadfully beautiful plucks. The sitar is far away, only loud enough to reach the assembled coalition at that distracting level that just barely demands acknowledgment.

So she has been saved, presumably by some unknown entity. In typical human nature, she does not mind. But there is a nagging desire to know why. Knowingly or not, the counterattack has consigned her to guilt. She "should" not be alive. But she is.

Now the giddiness sets in. Her legs quiver as she rises: she wants only to run across the plain.

But it is gone as soon as it had come. Instead, she turns to the ruins that had served as some shelter, inhaling slowly and luxuriously. It is rather intoxicating.

~

He is tired, and wants to take a break. He sets his project down on the table.

As he turns away to catch a drink, he notices an intruder out of the corner of his eye. Instinctively, he whirls back on the sculpture: it does not have any value, he does not know why anyone would want to vandalize it: yet he feels it deserves his protection.

In the metal, he sees the "interferer": it is his own reflection, and it chills him.

See the savage. See the savage run. Run, savage, run.

The liason frowns as the enemy retreats. It was a victory, certainly. But a particularly hollow and pointless one.

"Well," he said. "It seems we will have to follow them into their own nest."

He peers at the city-wreck ahead. Corridors, towers, gaping glassless windows. Narrow places, low visibility, chokepoints. A perfect place for an ambush. He wished for artillery, but there was none. Besides, it had to be taken intact.

With the minimum of discussion, he moved forwards, positioning himself just behind the front rank of warriors. Shouted signals and hand-waving prompted the buggy to roll around to the rear of the formation. Not that it was really a formation - more of a purposeful blob.

******

Sitar music. Odd. He'd expected something a bit more... tribal. Drums, perhaps. But those were just his stereotypes speaking.

He travels... not quite nervously, but tensely. As if expecting to be ambushed at any moment, like he probably is. His rifle is carried in front of him, at the ready.

The buggy is its normal self, complete with quietly rumbling engine. One of the crewmembers seems to have vanished, though. The occasional glint of metal off to one side could be him, could be some piece of wreckage inside the ruined but still somewhat vertical buildings.

Given the uneven flow of time, it was possible that the young crafter could indeed have been the billionth citizen of his nation, a trivial milestone. His parents, binary believers, had nevertheless saddled him with the awkward name of "Guillermo".

It was too large for him. He preferred the abbreviated "Billy".

(OOC: Limited computer access for a week.)

As the chief, his warriors, the liaison, and the tracked beast picked and crept and rumbled their way though the city ruins, the sitar's plucked melody gained heightened resonance as it weaved through impossibly convoluted rhythmic beauty. The unaccompanied notes grew louder, but whether it was because they were getting closer to the source or because of some residual illusionary magic was up to individual perception.

One of the chief's warriors — the owner of several fine weapon and numerous augmentations — jogged up from the flank to hunker down behind a mound of steel dust with the chief. They whispered in the tone of planning, situated in the cracked and ash-strewn cradle of what used to be a great boulevard.

The reverberating sitar song remained the only hint the black-painted entropics were still present, though everyone could feel the smolder of each pair of haunted eyes on their backs.

After thirty seconds of strained discussion in the most primitive, time-efficient dialect of their native language, both the chief and his lieutenant stood up. The subordinate warrior raised his hand to the army, and the warriors jutted to their feet, casually relaxing their weapons.

No ambush was to come. Counterintuitively, this was the worst possible thing that could happen.

They had been lured and had bitten willingly, seeking the taste of battle. But now, their desire left unsated and dwindling, they were free to be toyed with at will. They would be made to regret the fateful decisions that had led them here. They would regret their entire lives, their very existence, and this regret would be justified in full by their sudden and violent deaths.

It was a favorite pastime.

Were the chief's army to attempt an escape, they would be cut down as they were forced to fight their way out. Were they to carry on to their goal, they would be surrounded and cut off while inside the power complex, doomed to the same butchering upon their exit.

They were left with one frustrating alternative; to idle within the ruins until their enemy tired of their presence, or they accepted their fate and converted.

The chief saw these options laid before him by the main emissary — the ruins themselves. In their pitiable state so far past death, they took on a life all their own. It was an unhappy existence, and the shells of consciences that still floated through the city took every opportunity to laugh at various mice caught in various traps within their inescapable maze.

With death blocking every exit, the chief made a decision. They would carry on.

---

Within the city sits a spindly behemoth, tendrils forever stretching and searching and branching until hulking limbs are rendered to brittle silk. Once the cream colored harbor of a powerful conscience, it is now home to the ashen pallor of death. The furthest of its conduits are nothing more than dust now. Closer ones wonder when their master will call upon them again, occasionally eking out the energy to surge desperation through nerve bundles which are no longer there.

Atop the train-wide gash of shattered ceramic which will serve as the army's entrance, the sitar player sits. He smiles deliriously at the insanity of his music and the auras of doom that surround the army. His one-man symphony ends with a mind-breaking flourish, and as the concluding note fades ghost-like into the air, the black blur assembles itself behind the army.

They are silent. They wait.

Without looking back, the chief steps into the breach.

---

As the sitar continued to play, the wanderer slowly realized she was breathing in the ruins just a few monoliths away from the musician. Perhaps she observes the arrival of the army and their subsequent entrapment.

Regardless, it comes to her attention there is a gash in the power complex's curving uppermost layer — the same layer upon which the musician sits — just large enough to squeeze through.

Well. This isn't pleasant. The liason's first instinct is to order a halt and mow them down with the buggy's MG. But orders are orders, and so he has to assume that the chief knows what he's doing.

Surrounded? Check. This would have been a problem, had they been fighting perhaps a hundred years prior to today.

******

The buggy is the last thing to pass through the breach. Well, technically pass. It actually stops about ten feet in, as the rest of the "army" (it's a bit small) continues on. In the far distance,

The driver gets out and takes cover. The gunner slips a fresh belt into place.

Click.

Horde of enemies? Check.

Chokepoint? Check.

Armored position? Check.

Fully automatic weapon?

Double check.

It would be quite hard for things to get any better. The gunner smiles.

"You know," he says, "I always wanted to say this."

"You SHALL NOT PASS!"

"You think we've got enough ammo, man?"

The nature of magic in the wastelands was of dubiously unconfirmed existence and value, and those who believed in or utilized it did so with the meek, logic-muddled half-steps of an agnostic and his Pascal's Wager — their fervor and dedication was reserved for living under the fearsome heel of fate.

Nevertheless, there had been a few figures through the millenia of tribal patterns who — engorged with faith in the mysticism locked within the ashlands — had made magic into the apocryphal mess of incompatible superstitions it was now. By overwriting each of their predecessors' unfounded assumptions with their own undiluted theory and slathering a concoction of new and reworked rituals atop it all, not only did they accidentally replicate the Christian appropriation of pagan rituals for their own purposes of conversion, but each unknowingly drew the inspiration for their layer of the cake from a preexisting form of magic.

This unconscious plagiarism had developed the wasteland's own brew of magic into a volatile and unpredictably uncooperative conglomeration of macabre Bayou voodoo, Aztec incantations of blood and gold, a dizzyingly bizarre mash of the heroism and miracles performed and demanded by the Greek, Norse and Egyptian pantheons, Native American nature-spiritualism, and good old fashioned burn-at-the-stake witchcraft.

They were known, respectively, as (roughly) puppeteers, sacrificers, reverents, world-talkers, and witches (or warlocks).

Less politely, they were corpsemongers, virgin-killers, gray-hairs, featherheads, and satanists.

Each of these had been established long enough to have schools — well, of a sort — in the central hub for the tribes. Each school taught the entirety of tribal mysticism, but concentrated obsessively on the flavor of magic their creators favored while fostering an intense rivalry with the other schools. Many a tribe had marched to war by way of a shaman's urging, on account of a rival schoolmate's appearance.

The wasteland's magic was thusly blighted and limited — or upheld and driven, depending on perspective — by constant bitter grudges, rituals and chants that would cause one shaman to scoff and another's eyes to twinkle in approval, and a nebulous, ever-slipping grasp on how and why the magic operated.

For some reason, it worked on occasion. Quite well, in fact.

Magic's testiness meant, ironically, it was incorporated into everything a tribe did — just in case. Witch doctors, therefore, were always in great demand — only outweighed in importance by the acquisition and retention of artifacts.

---

For this reason, the chief was accompanied by every one of his tribe's shamans — warlocks all, to avoid squabbles. Entirely depriving the remaining tribe of magic was risky, but necessary for the task at hand. He would need all of the reviving power he could scrounge if he were to revive the power complex.

Maybe it wouldn't be enough. Maybe he should have conquered some of the nearby tribes first for their own witches.

Then again, would it be so bad if they failed?

The tiny army and the liaison would be swallowed up by the ruins and rent to pieces by her servants. The warlord would return after losing contact with his man, and conquer the land himself, as he had promised.

Then again, wouldn't that latter bit happen anyway? The chief was only the warlord's proxy.

The proud man, flanked by his proud warlocks, closed his eyes and continued blindly along his current strand of fate.

The strand was weak. Bowed heavily under his weight. So far from comfort.

What was to come would come.

There was no map for the broken corpse of the power complex, but it was just as well. The only way to navigate its coiling dusty arteries and maddeningly coalescent spinal clusters was through instinct, for the complex had built itself in its own instinctual ideal. It was at once efficient and superfluous by way of nature, a product of sanity in a language only the most attuned could make sense of.

They worked their way towards its center — the sanctuary of its supposed conscience, shattered glass scattered all too purposefully across a void.

All, barring the incorporeal (and sometimes even then), can be pieced back together. Whether it is a reanimation of its original or something else altogether unintended depends, but the hope remains. Given pieces — no matter how vaporized or lost or aged — and a method of binding, all can be reconstructed.

There was the strange absence of any titanic struggle in their travel; only the exertion of the journey itself. Nevertheless — the chief, his warlocks, his warriors, his oppressor's man — all felt the press of doom on their hearts.

They forged their way through all three dimensions; timelessly. The absence of a grasp on that fourth dimension — so often taken for granted — was both unsettling and liberating.

---

The scions of entropy stood, a sleeping black dragon that did not stir at the minor Gandalf's shouted command. As a whole, the slumbering creature cared not for the tracked machine or the smaller death-spitting machine that sat atop it. It cared even less for the pale, squishy things that scurried about and sat upon the machines.

Despite this apparent apathy, the gunner could see something horrible in the eyes of each living scale that comprised the dragon's hide. It was not bloodlust. It was not even an unfeeling lack of conscience. It was not the presence or absence of emotion of any kind.

It was the way a saw might look at a plank of wood, a hammer at a nail.

It was the simplicity of purpose, without vindication or conviction.

---

One might wonder what became of the marksman and his glinting glass scope.

She is halfway through the chasm before she is aware where it leads. The entangling vines seem not to cling as tightly as they should: she is able to continue through, unaware of where she will exit. This surrealistic atmosphere is ever-mutable, and egress is far from her mind, only the unceasing journey.

The music toys with her ears much more powerfully than the odors did to her nose: they, at least, seemed to be uniformly strong for everyone. This was only a simple melody-no, a complex fugue-no, a rhythmic pulse...an undefinable song. She was getting closer now, more at its mercy, but her mind was conditioned not even to conceive of turning back.

There are two schools of magic here at the Academy.

First, there is ritual magic - the domain of wizards, shamans, and some varieties of priest. It relies on the memorization and performance of motions and incantations, the drawing and crafting of sigils and runes, and the choice and arrangment of material components. It relies on the spatial effects of these things, which will hopefully combine in such a way as to attract the attention of Someone (such as a deity or spirit) or Something (such as subdimensional Chaos) to perform the desired task. Given the simplicity of certain rituals, it is often the first form of magic to be discovered by primitive societies.

While there are certain rituals and spells that are fairly well-known and reliable, the great majority of ritual magic is individual and specific to the caster. If you chose this path, much of your time here would be spent in research, discovering the rituals and spells that worked for you. Ritual magic relies very much on guesses and intuition, and its reliability is poor at best. But it requires very little physical effort in proportion to the results attainable.

Secondly, there is channeling magic. This is the domain of mages, elementalists and psychics. It is by far the most popular school of magic at this Academy, because it is almost guaranteed to produce results. The basic principle is that the user of channeling magic draws upon power from an external or internal source and applies it to a task directly, without all the tedious and unreliable mucking about that ritual magic requires. Unfortunately, since the channeling magician does the work personally instead of relying on some other force to do it for him, the process of using channeling magic can be quickly draining unless you have a large source of external power to draw on.

Channeling magicians often focus on a specific area for study, as the predictable nature of channeling magic lends itself much better to specialization. Channeling magic has certain set behaviours and applications that can be taught, and as such we offer classes which emphasize the memorization of effective techniques over the research of new ones.

- MAGIC 101: Course introduction.

The liason shivered.

He'd seen more terrifying things, of course -

******

The man grunted, hauling the dead mass that, until a few minutes ago, had been giving him orders. His uniform was caked and soiled with mud, and every step was a labor. The pumps had long ago failed, and so he had to slog through knee-deep sludge in the bottom of the trench, stained red with the blood of men and other things. Above, he could hear the roaring of the artillery wave, coming steadily closer. On the other side, almost inaudible by comparison, the rumbling of the tanks.

The sky blacked out above him as the Samtonian tank bridged the gap. Artillery shells pounded down around him, and the man dropped the (dead by now) captain and dove into the mud, hoping (insanely) that it would protect him from the shrapnel. The world around him turned white.

A short eternity later (seconds? minutes?), he surfaced. The shelled tank suspended above (vehicle of his improbable salvation) dripped burning oil into his hair. He was the only living thing as far as he could see, and the command post was more than a mile away.

In the distance, the artillery thundered. The rain fell softly, in counterpoint.

******

- Somehow, though, this was worse. Here was an enemy that fought - not because it had to fight, not because it enjoyed carnage, not because it was paid to wage war, not because it was motivated by some ideology, but rather because this is what it did, with no real reason or motivation.

He followed the chief and his warriors, because there was no other way to go. He tried his best to memorize the route they took, but somehow the effort seemed futile. They would find their way out, or they would not. His striving would not help. But then again, perhaps that was the ruins talking...

Irritatedly, he realized that the marksman had vanished.

******

The marksman was hiding in plain sight.

He was a shadow, half-there, cloaked in bent light and chameleon camoflauge. He huddled atop a protrustion on the spire's outer shell, three stories up, in a position that would have been stunningly obvious and exposed for any other man. For him, though, it was perfect - he was nothing more than a slight protrusion in the power station's biological shell, like hundreds of others.

The marksman opened the bolt of his rifle, closed it again. Myriad buffers and damping fields of his will forced this action to be silent, and would even suppress a cough or a rifle-crack if need be. For now, though, the marksman simply observed the black sea below, darting from face to face, searching for some mark of identification or rank. There was none.

Instead, the marksman rested his crosshairs on the face of the most heavily armed man he could find, and smiled an invisible smile.

Branches of magic currently listed in the Guild Archives (shortlist):

Aeromancy
Aquamancy
Biomancy
Binding
Bonding
Chronomancy
Clerical
Curses
Demonology
Domination
Electromancy
Firebreathing
Geomancy
Glaciomancy
Gravity Control
Illusion
Invisibility
Ki Manipulation
Levitation
Lexomancy
Mage-Smithy
Magnetomancy
Necromancy
Ninjutsu
Ossomancy
Planar Translocation
Polymorphing
Powergunning
Psionics
Pyrokinesis
Pyromancy
Runes
Sealing
Seeking
Shamanism
Shapeshifting
Sonomancy
Spatiomancy
Summoning
Technomancy
Telekinesis
Teleportation
Translation
Transformation
True Knowing
Weather Control
Witchcraft
Wizardry
Voodoo

The vines that wrap themselves around the wanderer begin to grow in girth and feel as though they were muscled. As if they were not vines or plant-like at all, but more akin to tentacles. Moreover, they no longer entangle, but rather convey her towards the terminus of the gash; it is a good thing, for the journey is long — either the shell of the complex has been thickened with the armoring chitin of age, or the trip is being extended so a better sense of this wandering presence can be attained.

In fact, the gash on the shell's surface may not have been a wound at all — perhaps it had been a natural formation, or designed and positioned just to lure for purposes all its own.

Perhaps the titillating experience of having so many vibrant presences crawling around within it had roused the power complex's remaining shreds of consciousness, and it was taking control of its slumbering mass once more.

The music had long faded from the air, but not from the minds of those it had enraptured. It was still a prisoner of their minds, clanging its tin slop cup against the bars in a rhythm jarring and crude as the mind strained to recreate the unforgettable melody cloistered within it all.

Finally, the wanderer was regurgitated by the muscled tube the gash had gradually morphed into. She could sense her location within the complex was incongruent with the amount of time she'd been wiggled and wormed through the shell, but nothing beyond that. She had been deposited in the center of an octopus of tunnels grown organically in the power complex's original self-rendition, or later carved out with acid as a necessary expansion. Even in here, the surfaces were reminiscent in color and texture of mouldering parchment.

Now it became difficult. Or not, depending on the wanderer's level of attunement.

Perhaps it was a test; powerful consciousnesses, even when groggy and weakened by unsolicited slumber, are fickle and tend towards self-amusement at the best of times.

---

The marksman hears a low hum, and then a severely subdued crackle of electricity off to his side. If he looks, he'll see nothing but the same protrusions he's hidden himself in. They appear just as lifeless as before.

Except he swears one of the thinnest, most redundant appendages — not an auxiliary or even tertiary sensory organ — is wagging in laughter.

But then no longer.

---

The warlocks halted the entire group — perhaps a superfluous command — to convene in the murmured, lilting dialect witches were taught to help confuse eavesdroppers. It was really rather irritating to listen to, for many common words had their meanings and connotations transposed randomly. Plenty of unsuspecting passersby had amiably joined a gaggle of conferring witches only to be ridiculed and humiliated, finally stumbling red-faced on their way.

The head warlock — dominant teal embroidered and accented heavily with black, as witches were wont to do in admiration of their patron with his signature-laden Black Book — informed everyone the power complex would only allow them access to its heart when it deemed it proper. Therefore, it wouldn't hurt to take a break.

The combined fatigue of the long march to the ruins and the winding convolutions of the power complex had taken a toll. The warriors would normally be able to take much more than this, but they had been wandering without a sense of time or direction, which made their trail significantly more fatiguing. The warriors slumped down against the annoyingly frictionless walls and partook of their food and drink, which they had touched little over their travels at their chief's suggestion, expecting they might need the bulk in case they became lost or besieged in the ruins or the complex.

The chief approached the liaison and asked him, bluntly, if he realized what his warlord had gotten him into, and what he would do if a miracle did not deliver them from the blackened masses that had stalked them through the ruins.

Magic has long been a part of the human tradition. Throughout the long time they have spent on Earth, it has rarely been gleaming cities that have been their greatest pride.

But as the capability of a few select peoples outstripped their innate desire to harness the elements, magic was forced to retreat into the forgotten. And then it struck back.

The humans, of course, took credit for their brilliant accomplishments. But the power behind them was more ancient than their society could remember.

He cannot reach as high as it has towered now: perhaps it has sprouted wings of its own accord, trembling above him. Perhaps he is given over to hallucinations: the project, in a reversal of before, is creating him.

~

Was this what she had wanted? Her mind only another extension of the unholy paradise, she was nevertheless able to function, dimly aware that she was a separate entity, distinct from her surroundings.

She blinks, and sees the afterimage, colors too perfectly reversed for nearsighted and fatigued eyes to perceive, of a blank brown face: the stereotypical image, perhaps, of a sitar performer. Were not the simple definitions what she was trying to escape?

Escape...for every "where" and "to" and "here" and "now", there had been a "from" and "there" "then".

She had descended quickly: oxygen tried to fill her lungs once again, and mixed whatever pervaded the new atmosphere.

"Yeah, I know we're in trouble."

It's dark. So dark, in fact, that nothing can be seen. In here, a man can only be distinguished by the sound of his voice.

"We're not entirely screwed, though. This place is narrow, so they can only come in one at a time. The men I left at the entrance should be able to do some serious damage if they decide to attack. I have some things of my own that may be useful. And if all else fails, I can call for support." He patted the radio at his side, then frowned suddenly.

"That is, I can call for support if this thing works in here."

Travel, journey, and most of all escape are all left to perception's whims. From and to and why and how are questions only a master of the form knows to leave without a modicum of an attempted answer. The ceaseless traveler, the journeyman, and the escape artist all know motion is infinite, the answers of location and time and purpose always shifting. They leave that existentialism behind and wrap themselves up within their calling at the expense of all else, and this is their salvation.

The consciousness made no attempt to hide its slowly burgeoning electrical impulses from the wanderer, and so her inhalations were tinged with ozone — and something far more acrid.

As she stood, pulled in all directions by her personal eightfold path, the whistling death-harmony of an arrow sears the air. The sound fades away in eight directions while echoing back along the same avenues, and the wanderer first realizes through its many repetitions it is the exact sound that accompanied the death of the hawk.

Second, she realizes the sound had to have come from the dead center if it were to echo so evenly.

Third, she realizes she is standing dead center, atop a fine mesh that shouldn't be able to support her weight.

A multitude of ridges appear out of the floor — slowly, like flowers blooming — ringing the strained mesh. They form themselves into dozens of faint arrows, pointing inwards. Another layer of ridges arrange themselves differently.

They spell out "deliverance."

The mesh gives way, and she falls.

---

The chief takes the liaison's reassurances and concerns at face value, for a face is all he is to the chief. It is his purpose.

What is consciousness? Is it as effortless a diagnosis as "I think, therefore I am?" If so, how do we affirm it to others? Are we all conscious? Do we just think we are? Does thinking we are make us conscious, even if we aren't really? What is the extent of belief's power? Disbelief? Could one disbelieve oneself out of consciousness? What about disbelieving someone else out of consciousness? Or believing something into consciousness? Can it be done? Has it been done already? What are the ramifications? Is that creating life, or life creating itself?

It is these questions that led us to deal in the transmutation of unlife into life.

The fear of these questions, rather.

We sidestepped the complications of turning death to life; we thought by heeding the warnings history proffered, we could avoid repeating it.

We were wrong.

Eight is a number of duality. North and south, east and west, and their bordering constructs. Eight is a number of religious mantra, focused luck, concentrated competition. Eight is a rotated lemniscate, penetrating the infinite.

So. This is the ultimate sign, and if her mind had been able to function it would have come up with some meaningless symbolic rhetoric about how there is no turning back. She has fallen completely away from her world of distinct squares, and entered a vicious circle, a strange loop from which she does not know how to turn back.

She never believed in luck. Not before, anyhow.

What are you?

It was written, read, said, thought all at once, with all the murmured clarity of a mountaintop guru. It was a boggling four word greeting from a goofy amiable neighbor and the caustic interrogative of a Spanish Inquisitor.

They are my children, you know. The black-painted ones. Peculiar, but mine.

It was a infinitely lauded orchestral composition, it was an off-tune garage band White Stripes rendition, it was a laugh and a whisper and a fine painting hanging with austere elegance in a museum and an enraged artist throwing his pallet against the mildewed easel.

I know what I am, and I know what they are, but you...

What are you?

It was the clamor of desperate refugees throwing themselves against a chain link fence.

It was a grim critic defending his latest scathe with delicately pointed words.

With the most masterful flourish a disembodied consciousness could muster, the curtain of darkness was flung to an indiscernible horizon to reveal blankness. Not white, that assumed partner to blackness, but absence in contrast to presence. Nothing.

Except for a broken wine glass.

The stain of an excellent Cabernet clung to the nothing.

A name is a tool, created by humans for their own purposes, and any tool can be wielded against its former masters.

"Emma?" The utterance forced its way through her parched lips, not quite having lost meaning, but inflected with questioning tentativity, not spoken as a statement of fact.

Austere prohibition destroyed meaning. She could not fully appreciate the smell of wine like someone who had been nourished by it could. But that didn't matter, because nothing was, by her narrow definition, "normal".

Her ears function desperately to pick up on something, but all they can detect is a lingering resonance from her own attempt at speech.

You're honest with yourself. Unusual, for what you appear to be. The voice spoke without the reverberation of Emma's own. Perhaps it wasn't comprised of sound waves, or the consciousness simply had unparalleled mastery over its conjured realm of thought made tangible.

I'm sorry, it's been some time, but I still remember your type tend to be uncomfortable with...this. Somewhere unseen, there was the click, clack and whirr of a video tape being fed into a machine. Then, the soothing, momentous blur of sound that is a tape on fast forward.

The blankness is tinged with the faint acridity of singed magnetic tape.

Gray streaks silently roar from the cardinal directions to form walls, their color stunning in its neutrality. A ceiling careens soundlessly into place.

The broken wine glass uprights and reassembles itself before leaping topsy-turvy onto a fine antique endtable. With a gurgle, it quietly fills itself with scarlet.

A white shag carpet is catapulted upwards to slam against the four walls, the impact jostling the endtable and knocking the wine glass over again. It shatters in the same spot as before.

There are still a few problems, you see. It is not you who can rectify them, but those who can are conceited and unaware of their own faults. You can be my presence among them, so that I might teach through your example in return for the service they will perform for me shortly.

Right about now, in fact.

The outline of a door, faint and then more defined, ingrained itself within a wall. A white placard with black type hung from a bent nail in the door.

"Deliverance."

---

The knob of a door jabbed the liaison in the back in a manner not far removed from a tap on the shoulder.

It was a dead gray, as if wrought from a single chunk of the word "neutral" made concrete. Bold black type stared back at the liaison from a white placard.

"Custodial."

Beyond a certain level of complexity, certain species become impossible to encapsulate in detail. Once a primitive level of competition divides them into diverse subgroups, that, rather than the underlying (or is it overriding?) genetic code becomes with what they identify.

But general trends can be noticed, broad paintstrokes against the blackdrop of the cosmos. Not universally, perhaps, but often, there is a movement in a certain direction, a coalescence of sorts, driving people together to construct cities, united against entropy. And this force is so pervasive that it has been giving a name: it is the direction of civilization, its members boast. It is the way forward, into the future.

But there are always some who grow bitter the most quickly, that turn away and seek the stereotype of a simple existence, apologetics for humanity. The cycle of regression if not redemption is designed to be jarring, but on the broadest scale, it is the only commonality. The destruction that began this time around is a large version of the fractal reality of this and any other world. Forward and backward on an infinity of levels, down to this flickering image and beyond into the microcosm.

There is something that needs to be said.

"Thank you," she whispers hoarsely, her fingers running over the wood, looking for a doorknob to grasp. The way out.

"Ow. What- Ohshit."

A blink, and the man is across the corridor, crouched, rifle at the ready.

"Oh."

A relaxing, an activating of safeties. The rifle is slung back on its strap.

"It's been a while since I've seen one of those."

Click

Pistol is drawn and cocked. The other hand reaches for the doorknob, then stops as it slowly begins to turn.

"Well, if it wants to play..."

The liason takes a step back, snapping the pistol up as the door slowly (and silently) opens. A brief look of confusion flashes across his face, before it snaps into "impassive".

"No sudden moves, ma'am. Hands behind your head. Thank you."

He relaxes a little - but not much. The gun barrel is watching her.

"What are you doing here?"

That should have been it. It should have been over.

The end of childhood rarely comes in a dramatic thunderbolt, so it was perhaps a sign of his utter normalcy that no such fortepiano occurred, emotionally at least. He was climbing high, borne on the unknown, unable to identify how he could scrape the ceiling of the workshop.

He teetered over the edge of the contraption, hoping to twist a wire here or there-

-and fell, down among the metallic edges of the machine.

But it was still standing coolly there, not effaced into oblivion by maturity and outgrowing of silly diversions.

He staggered up, bleeding from his leg, and returned to work.

(OOC: Sorry for the double post: I had no idea whatsoever that Khrrck's post had the slightest bit to do with me. Apologies all around.)

More weaponry, no injury. She was beginning to get a worrisome sense of her own invulnerability. Calmly complying with his instructions, she looks at him for a bit as if to make sure that he is a real human being, communicating with her in verbal English. After eventually reaching the conclusion that it would be polite to do likewise, she responds glibly.

"I'm not sure. Actually, I don't have any idea."

The liason lowers his gun, sighs.

"Par for the course, I suppose. I'm not really sure what I'm doing here, either. You can put your hands down now."

The gun drops silently back into its holster. He allows himself a quick, narrow smile, then nods to the chief.

"She's safe."

******

Dead gray walls. Bone-white carpet, tinged with a single splash of sanguine red. Incongrously, a fine antique end-table.

"This has to be the place. It's too fucking weird to be anything else."

He picks up a shard of glass, peers through it. Colorless, hopeless.

"Is there anybody out there?"

******

This place is worse than the mud, really. It gives you that sickening feeling of inevitable doom, indescribable except through analogy. You know that you're going to lose; it's only a matter of when.

******

The man turns the shard, carefully. It glints in the sourceless light, briefly reflecting more than it should.

He murmurs to himself, a merest whisper of sound.

"Only the weak are subject to destiny."

She puts down her hands, but keeps her ears open. So, there is some third person involved. The level of complexity increases exponentially, but she barely has time to be conscious of that before inwardly grating at herself, chastising herself for her own stupidity. The self is always held to a higher standard than others, she has been taught, or if not, should be.

After all you've been through, you think this is complex?

She had had some reason for being released. A message to deliver. Something.

It was almost comic, really.

~

The harder he works, the less of a shape there is. Before, it had been a box, something to walk into and walk out of. Then, odd artistic waves had grown off the edges.

And now, it had come full circle, enclosing everything in its path, until perhaps the universe was inside and he was left out.

The warlocks and their chief follow the liaison into the puzzling room, somehow making it through the door while remaining six abreast. Their hundred odd warriors file into the room after them, carrying Emma in the press of their human tide. The room fails to feel any more or less cramped; the architecture remains stifling, but the addition of a small army makes no impact on the overall space of the room. The temperature fails to rise due to body heat.

"Is there anybody out there?"

Oh, A housewife from another era, pleasantly surprised by unexpected guests.

there are A defensive toddler, angered by his part in a broken vase's fate.

a few of us here. Casual banter, the warm white noise of a party in the background.

Or, Suddenly cold, withdrawn, alone.

really, Barely an exhalation, a marksman emptying his lungs before he takes the shot.

there's just...me. If Lovecraft's words had a voice.

You...you are the ones I have been waiting for. There is but one error you must rectify for me. I have manifested it for you in terms you can understand. The wine glass, piece it together again. It may take you some time — there are shards everywhere — but please do not hesitate. It is unsettlingly restrictive to continually construct facades that will not excessively bend your minds.

The consciousness spoke equally to all, but the warlocks — arrogant but correct — assumed it really meant them. Not even the eldest wizened magician among them had thought that they would be called upon to revive a glorious slumbering consciousness, or that of all the methods they would be told to employ the consciousness would instruct them to reassemble a wine glass.

Surely it had to be harder than that.

The band of warlocks immediately fell to their hands and knees, gathering even the tiniest flecks of crystal from the carpet without heed for palms and fingertips. They chanted quietly or mouthed words while they worked, murmured prayers to their unreliable patron.

Tribal warlocks and witches performed their magic under the auspices of the entity the Christian religion commonly referred to as Satan. Witches frequently importuned upon all of the entity's different names and manifestations, never knowing which one would answer their requests. Witches very rarely sold their souls, as the fine text of the guaranteed damnation attached to the accompanying power never worked in the witch's favor. Witchcraft was easily the most unreliable and inconsistent of all the magics used, often assisting the witch in mostly insignificant ways or even working counter to the witch's aims. Of course, every once in a while a prayer led to minds being blown away. Literally. The witches' patron was the one most ready to take malevolent advantage of a deal signed in blood, but while dangerous the power proffered was always just a prayer or a soul away.

The warriors, chieftain, liaison, and now Emma were left standing, ears teased by small, carefully worded promises to the Black Book.

---

Outside, the entropics — grimacing through their black paint — had begun to chant unintelligibly.

"Repair a glass, hm? Shouldn't be too hard..." He squints at the carpet. "If you can find the pieces."

Eyes closed, arm extended, palm up. He considers the shard with sense number six. In this light it looks... different from everything else. Not just an empty shell, there to provide context for simpler minds, but something denser, with a core of ineffable meaning. On some level, this is a real object. Whether it is actually a shard of glass is beside the point.

He lets his gaze filter downwards, through his hand. Below is a constellation, a galaxy of tiny shards. Some of them glitter in clusters, scooped up by the hands of the warlocks. The rest are scattered randomly within the blast radius of the shattered glass.

"I'm going to try something. Whether it works or not is anyone's guess. But I suspect that either way, it's going to be a lot quicker than waiting for answers to your prayers. I don't think we have much time."

Palm down. The shard drops a few inches, then hangs, suspended by force of will alone. One by one, then in streams, tiny particles rocket up from the carpet, forming a complex sphere of spinning silica dust.

The liason grins (briefly - the sphere wavered dangerously when he did so), and snaps the fingers of his other hand. The tip of his index finger wavers, blurs, vanishes into a heat haze, becomes a miniature blue-hot Bunsen burner. This he applies skillfully to the crystal galaxy, watching intently (with closed eyes) as it shrinks, loses definition, begins to melt and fuse. The vague indication of a stem begins to form.

"I need..." he says, voice strained. This is fine work, and although it requires little power, the concentration is difficult. A pause.

"I need," he resumes, "the rest of the glass."

"There was a time," she says tentatively, "that the glass was intact...Correct?"

~

Keeping the odd metal far away from his bare skin, he twists the power cord by tongs, just a half-loop, and connects it again. Now, it has but one side, one edge: the machine both creates and receives power, or perhaps is drawing on its own...something stored before or after.

There is just one question left, and that is to figure out what exactly it does.

The liason accepts a handful of glass from a warlock, gracefully folding it into the glowing globe. Eyes still fixed on his creation, he responds.

"I suppose that, given we've been told to repair it... Yes. Now if you'll excuse me, I need to concentrate. This is not my area of expertise."

The glass globe spins, glowing red-orange as the last pieces are incorporated into it. It ripples, flows as if touched by an invisible hand. A stem forms and flares into a base. The remaining glass bubbles out, expands, forms into a graceful sphere which splits at the top, opening out into a smoothly curved bowl.

The glass-shape spins, suspended, white-hot in the center of the room. Slowly, it begins to cool and harden.

"I don't know if this fits your definition of 'repair'," the liason said, watching it spin. "Remade, perhaps. But I think it's done. Are you satisfied?"

The wine glass is relieved of the liaison's control and lethargicly drifts through the air over to the endtable, before setting down with a crystalline click. The cabernet stain in the carpet coalesces itself from color to liquid and seeps up the table leg, up the still glowing crystal stem and into the bowl, leaving behind nothing but pristine white carpet. The refraction of the crystal creates a steep crimson meniscus, and an unseen light casts a shallow red-tinged shadow across the polished wood of the table.

It is... the voice is distracted, devotedly amused by distant happenings. yes. Satisfactory. More than, perhaps.

There is no thanks given for the efforts of the liaison and warlocks beyond that. There is nothing for me here. Power courses through me again with no immediate purpose. I am alive, but plagued by the discomforts of uselessness. Unique. Displeasing.

I will change this.

The room ages five thousand years. The table crumbles, becomes dirt, fertilizes plants. The plants bloom, wither, and die. Dirt again. The glass is buried within the mouldering carpet that joins the table in dirthood, wine evaporate clinging to its sullied crystal. The walls become stained with age, and then crumble. Before long there is only ash, and then not even that.

The empty shell the chief and his men now stand in is penetrated, reverberating with all the subtlety of a mental breakdown, by the howling of countless entropics as their ties to the power complex's consciousness are strained and then snapped.

Then, quiet.

In spite of their travels, a match's worth of light from the buggy crew's presumed position filters past the sole exit.

---

Outside, viewed warily through the iron sights of a mounted machine gun, the entropics are dead, having succumed to the shattering experience of a telepathic lobotomy.

Except, not all of them are.

Those that struggle back to their feet, anger or fear absent from their movements, realize what is happening before the buggy crew does when the ground around them cracks and then drops a meter. More accurately, the ground stays put as it should, while the shell of the power complex lurches upwards at a tilt, putting the buggy crew at an awkward angle. The tracks provide little traction against the nearly smooth floor of the complex, but the buggy's significant inertia keeps it from sliding but a few inches.

Finally, ecstatically, the entropics attack, dizzingly bizarre weapons firing as they throw themselves against the strongpoint of the entrance.

Now, it surges. He has only just stepped in, but pulls himself against the back as it begins to beat its outlying appendages. Faster and faster, hovering just above the ground, it remains in what passes for a workroom, while at the same time traveling farther than he could ever imagine going.

When it stops, the room is gone.

~

Everyone, around the time they gain consciousness, gets used to life. Emma is no exception, but her case is perhaps exceptional, having stayed there inordinately often under her currently chaotic circumstances.

She feels like she should act, somehow, without the mental capacity to reason how particularly. So she stands her ground, eyes flicking, waiting.

"Aww, shit."

Steel treads leave long gouges in the floor as the buggy slips sideways, screeching horribly for a few seconds until it connects with the wall, denting it. Then the complex takes another step, and the floor tilts the other way.

The gunner is almost overcome by the weirdness of it all. Then a sizzling ball of electrical death sails by, missing his head by inches, and he snaps out of it just far enough to tighten his grip on the trigger.

The machine-gun roars, stitching a neat row of smoking holes across the ruined city. An entire row of entropics falls, caught in mid-charge. The slightly smarter ones are still there though, firing from behind cover or sneaking around outside the gunner's line of sight.

A blob of spitting plasma splashes across the buggy's hood, eating deep holes into the engine. The gunner grits his teeth and fires again, sowing the sand with lead and making it almost impossible for the entropics to get a clean shot off.

To either side, he catches glimpses of entropics grabbing low-hanging tendrils and appendages, darting in and out of his vision as they scale the swinging building. He directs a few shots their way, but another volley of plasma from below forces him to return to laying down suppressive fire.

Still, the others should know. He takes a breath:

"Stand by to repel boarders!"

******

A jerk, a lurch. Sudden and abrupt decay. The room rolls like the cabin of some strange storm-tossed ship, sending the occupants into a heap against one wall. Outside, there are buzzes and bangs and booms, followed immediately by the horrible loud ripping of a heavy machine-gun. Then, the screams begin. In the distance, someone shouts something about boarders.

The liason looks momentarily stunned, then just as quickly composes himself.

"I'll take the main entrance. You," (he addresses the chief) "can you get your warriors to spread out and cover any other entrances? Yes? Good. By the feel of things, we're moving, but I don't think they're going to let us go without a fight."

He glances at the (as yet unnamed) woman. "Here. I don't need this. Do your best and don't die. I want to ask you some questions later."

With a practiced motion, he unslings his rifle and tosses it over to her. It's not elegant in any way; rather, it is black and heavy and designed for killing people with minimal amounts of fuss. The curved magazine seems shaped to hold perhaps twenty rounds.

And with that, he's gone.

******

He teeters, poised on the brink of a five-story fall that would inevitably kill him. Flailing hands find a grip that he could have sworn wasn't there a second ago. His camoflauge flickers - a leg, an arm, the gleam of a scope half-visible as the distorted air wavers. Fortunately, the savages below seem too preoccupied to notice.

His position somewhat secured, he looks below. The city lurches past ponderously yet quickly, each step taking ages to complete but covering entire blocks in its stride. Black ants scurry below, swarming up the tendrils and dangling protrusions of the power-beast, probing and searching for holes in its armor.

He should really do something.

One-handed, he steadies the rifle as best he can against his shoulder. He grits his teeth, trying to steady the bobbing sight, and swings it slowly to track a scurrying figure with an especially nasty-looking rifle in its arms.

clickBLAM

The recoil almost knocks him off his perch. The round itself, though, goes wild and drills a neat hole some ten feet from the target's head. The sniper frowns, scowls, works the bolt with his teeth, peers down the sight again.

This time, he does it properly.

A long, slow exhalation of breath. As the breath leaves him, so does something else; something intangible and ineffable, although mortals such as he would call it Time.

In a hazy dreamworld, he sees the scope bobbing slowly, gracefully. He has only a few subjective seconds in which to act, but fortunately luck is on his side today. Within a moment, the torso of the entropic drifts leisurely into view. His finger slowly tightens on the trigger, and he hears the firing mechanism begin to click, each of the few components sounding off one at a time in a symphony of death.

tick, tick, click fizzBLAM

The sniper staggers, suddenly jerked back to normality.

Below him, a man in black paint looks down at the ruin a .338 sniper bullet has made of his guts, teeters slowly, and then tumbles backwards off the edge.

Now there's a command she could follow, or, of course, die trying. Through a fair deal of luck, she's gotten rather good at it.

But the weapon feels odd and bulky. With no idea how to use it, she tries to mimic what she's seen, falling back into an unfamiliar conformity.

~

"Where am I?" He thinks he knows the answer, but feels like asking anyway. Not that there seems to be anyone around to respond.

The machine had spun on its own axis, perhaps, but he had felt no physical movement to take him away from the workroom. There was simply not a workroom: everything he saw was bitter rubble. The sun hung large and low in the sky behind remnants of gray explosions, or perhaps just normal clouds to which he was not used to seeing, staying inside so often.

A second question rises, unbidden, to his lips.

Once fully uprooted, the power complex defyed any one definition. Many of its muscled tendrils performed locomotive duties, while many more dangled useless in the air or dragged along the ground. It was a squid of crystalline spidersilk coalesced into immense ceramic fortitude. It was delicate and grotesque, amoebic and anthropomorphic depending on what angle it was viewed from.

It moved with the lumber of a being that found transience both instinctive and unfamiliar, the way an infant first feels about speech and solid foods. Innumerable cogs of the organic machine found new ways to work together, clanking or slithering, chattering with the language of machinery. The cogs and the greater creature moved with a confidence that comes only from knowing their destination is as immovable as they were a few sparse moments ago.

Follow me, my children...

And they did. Black specks of spite - confused and rejected - scaled the creature's sides or found entrances - wounds or otherwise - wreathed in chitin and musculature. An unlucky scaler here or there would meet his end at the marksman's trained hand, or a nastier demise to a riddling of lead from the ever sliding buggy; back and forth, the machine gun would gurgle, drowning in its own ocean of shell casings - plethoras of red blossomed across black-painted chests.

Entropics were dying everywhere, but far more were not. Many were repelled from the entry crevasses in the complex's shell, but so many more weaseled their ways in. They were separated from one another in their desperation to breach the complex, rendered less than lethal by their lack of numbers, but potentially debilitating nonetheless.

A scream - a raptor's diving scream - pierced through the complex' housing to rattle the eardrums of warrior and entropic alike. The liaison - and perhaps Emma - would have been the only ones with the backgrounds to recognize it from the idle play of childhood fantasies, maybe a cartoon or a movie or two. It was the scream of...a dragon?

((Apologies for the epic slowness; unfortunately, I'm leaving for a 17 day backpacking trip as of tonight. We'll pick up with greater speed after that, I hope.))

Emma flees with speed born of desperation. It is not a verbalizable "respect" for the creature that causes her to make no attack, but a deep-rooted fear. She grips her useless tool with no reason but as a reminder, a sign that she has been given a command that she intends to obey.

~

There is a faint smell of greasy smoke from a far breeze. He slowly walks in its direction-still naïve enough to trust civilization, or at least seek it.

Behind him, the machine might seem to shimmer, wilting like a mirage. But he does not believe anyone is there to notice.

Under his feet is hot sand-the ruins of exploded glass? Or the raw material from which once or once again the world can rise?

As the screaming speck's distance-fuzzed form is refined by virtue of its rapid approach, this or that characteristic breaks free of the pursuer's nebulous mass of blurred details; like water on the verge of boiling, a hint of a bubble swells with demands for attention before overcoming resistance and wavering its way to the surface. It becomes evident.

Wings that shuddered but did not flap - a half-finished evolutionary project, trapped between the rigidity of an aircraft and the fluidity of a bird - twitched impulsively, sending the creature into partially intentional death spirals. The flier would writhe midair, regaining composure and balance at the last moment through miraculous means.

Closer now. The wings had feathers, either chalky with the calcification of age or sticky with birth-slime; it was impossible to tell which.

Closer. Whatever stuck to the feathers inhibited the creature's control, forcing it to overcompensate repeatedly, sending it swishing in long sidewinder S'es towards the plodding power complex.

Even closer. The flyer's body is sectioned in the manner of insects, but its carapace is not an insect's smooth exoskeleton - rather, it is textured with the grotesque stucco of scar tissue.

The head droops while the thorax is tugged aloft by the effort of the wings, and the heavily muscled, whip-like tail snakes wildly to one side and then the next. Whether the tail acts as a boat's rudder for control or a fish's tail for propulsion cannot be told, though it's hard to believe the wings alone could hold the hulking perversion in the air.

If the creature's eyes had whites, now the defenders of Bunker Hill would fire. If it had eyes at all. The head would best be described as the flat wedge of a snake if it weren't for the bulbous tumor that dominated the thing's "face." Shiny, black, obsidian without the twist of beauty; a cruel singular eye without a pupil, iris or white to importune with pleas for mercy - inhuman in every sense of the word.

It's not an eye, though. It is the cockpit from which the creature is controlled, and through the glare those closest can just barely make out the figure of the pilot, raging and spastic.

The scream was the howl of speed and no vocal initiation of the predator-prey relationship, and it did not come from a dragon because there is not one. This creature is not a dragon for so many reasons, but the most immediate reason is that dragons do not commonly riddle their prey with blasts from swaying archaic cannons underslung with ropes of flesh.

Scattered throughout the labyrinth of the power complex - inexorably continuing on its way - warlocks fall to their knees in intense prayer. Many weep through the fingers that clutch their faces, not so much out of despair than to plead with more of the emotional saturation that attracts their patron.

All around him, warriors parry and slay and bleed and die.

All around him, men's rifles crack, firing bolts shuddering with the reverberation of gunpowder charges sending their molded lead siblings outwards; wildly, into the air or the ash, or finding their mark in yielding flesh.

They drop the rifles after the first shot and draw their blades - just the way he told them. From dull gunmetal conformity - mass produced interchangable parts clicking together to the preordination of a blueprint - to sharpened pieces of art, flashing with color and custom and the noble savagery of knowing nothing for a thousand years but the rudiments of metallurgy. Long hafted scimitars, short throwing spears, the odd champion's glaive, and a hundred heirloom daggers; all thirsted for battle in the manner of ancient weapons, but none thirsted for vibrancy in their design.

All around him, teal streamed - slithering, ragged, and proud - from every direction as the warriors fell upon their enemies.

All around him, warlocks prayed, bruised knees against pitted ceramic. One, a warlock so sly he had preserved himself well into the open-armed vestiges of old age, offered himself so intensely to his patron that the thick winding braid of his infamous beard began to smolder. Just a tip of glowering orange on the finest intoxicant of all - a human soul.

All around him, the wind bent to his will and did not rustle the tough pleated cloth that wreathed his armor. Though chaos whistled around him, he could not be touched. The eye of the storm stood gazing cooly over catastrophe, indifferent, calculating, wise.

He was the immovable statue of a chieftan-king who would be renowned throughout the centuries and recounted in legendary epics. He was proud above all, for his ownership of so much allowed him to be so. He was above the meek title of "man."

And yet, he was owned by a warlord from an unreachable land where every man was a god. A warlord who had spoken to him only once, and only to tell him he was no longer his own man.

The chieftan waded into the maelstrom.

In spite of everything, some distant corner of Emma's brain hums into function. Neurons link, greet each other like removed cousins they should have been familiar with, but had faded over time. They lose track with their families. All of the responsibilities pushed into the future eventually take on a nonexistence of their own, so it's impossible to know why this suddenly resurged: they can study a world rapidly becoming less knowable, but not themselves.

She wonders, Am I as strange to them as they are to me?

But she's too scared to vocalize it.

Lost in the glacial progression of her own thought, she fails to notice that she runs still: it is more as if the ground slowly unglues itself from underneath her feet, slides backwards, and returns to its rightful position.

~

There's so much for Billy to think about. What is that in the distance? How did I get here? Is "here" even the right word? It contrasts with "there", but he's becoming more confident that when it comes to distance, the only movement is this slow, purposeful, walk. How can I get back? Can I get back?

A maelstrom of thought coalesces within his mind, and he is caught up within it without protest.

Eventually, and of course it is by definition impossible to pinpoint when, he ceases immediately thinking about the contraption which took him to this state.

And at that moment, it disappears.

[OOC: Sorry this is late. I've been having an exciting adventure, including but not limited to:

1. moving from a house 60 minutes away from college to one only 5 minutes away
2. having no internet at said house
3. flunking out of History (I have As in my other classes, funnily enough)
4. writer's block

But hopefully it's all over now. ;) We'll see.]

He rounded a corner and received a faceful of screaming savage. He threw a punch which didn't actually connect, but nevertheless sent the black-painted man reeling across the corridor and into the wall with a sickening crack. He snapped his fingers, and grinned at the suddenly burning corpse.

"Sorry, man. Survival of the fittest."

At the end of the corridor was a light. He headed for it.

******

I'm not getting paid enough for this.

Which was, y'know, actually true. His contract mentioned capturing ancient artifacts, bossing around the natives, and a cool few million in pay. Nowhere did it mention sentient buildings, and it most definitely didn't mention that the natives had plasma weapons and fucking air support.

If he got through this alive, he was going to have a serious discussion with his employer.

******

Gold inlay glints in the light. It looks like the sort of weapon a rich frontiersman would purchase - pretty, yes, but small-bored, short-ranged, and ultimately quite ineffective.

On the other hand, .22 bullets don't usually leave smoking craters.

Boom.

Dead people and bits of dead people flew through the air. A few more shots, and the nearest clusters of savages are messily taken care of. The liason emptied the rest of his chambers at the aircraft, producing some spectacular fireballs in mid-air but not much else. He reloads by feel while scanning the rocking moonscape for a more suitable weapon. Some kind of guided rocket would be ideal, but he'll take anything that he can get.

******

The smooth wooden grip of his rifle spins, drops from his hand as the sniper's foothold is shattered from underneath him, leaving him dangling, visible, and horribly exposed. High above, the flying machine wheels, laughing.

The slender tendril creaks and bends under his weight. This is hardly a tenable position.

His free hand scrabbles at his belt, finds a handle, grips and pulls. The knife slides free, gleams briefly through the shattered scraps of his invisibility before it is buried in the hide of the power complex. He shifts his weight, releases the tendril and prays it will hold while he feels for the other one.

Thus he descends, hugging the wall, leaving a trail of slashed and bleeding holes. The roar of the machine-gun is close by - his only hope is that the entropics are too distracted to hit him before he reaches a new foothold.

Below him, the rifle slips off the complex's edge and drops to the ground, lost amongst the rubble.

"Though I lose my home,
Though I lose my friend,
Though I lose my weapon,

I shall keep my mind to guide me
I shall keep my body to move me
I shall keep my spirit to will me on

I am strong. I will prevail."

- Doctrine

******

"The most important thing to remember, and I cannot stress this enough, is that no matter what happens, you will survive the battle. Carry this in your mind, boys. You're the best of the best, and nobody on the whole Goddamned planet will be able to stop you for good."

- From a speech by the late* General Morth Steelfang.

*For certain definitions of "late"

And so it all comes together. Or, it all comes apart. It all depends on where you're standing, really.

---

The chieftan was drowning in bodies - his enemies, his allies. He was drowning in blood - his victims, his own. He was drowning in the frenzy, the rage, and the enlightenment of limitless battle. But drowning is commonly reported - usually by people who have not had the personal experience of drowning - to be a euphoric experience.

Battle, in the purest sense of the word, lacks borders to restrict and define it. Without rules of engagement or chivalry or honor or mercy or any other pollutant, perhaps battle could be related to drowning; both are euphoric, and both eventually result in death.

This connection has most likely been drawn by those who have experienced neither, an assumption easily supported by the fact they're still alive to make the connection.

Like myself.

Just like the archetypal drowning hand is slowly swallowed by the swells in a final seperation of the will to live and the hope to live, so too the entirety of the falling warrior's spirit is concentrated - consecrated - into his weapon. Warrior and blade - always one through the bonds of heirloom and proficiency - drift apart. The weapon moves of its own volition. The warrior may lose himself in two ways; taken aback by his weapon's initiative, he may lag behind and flail. Or there may be slaughter as one warrior becomes two.

In the wastelands in particular, those sparse few that have survived an encounter with a drowning champion sometimes report that the warrior simply dropped his weapon and continued to slay with his hands. And that the blade keeps hacking away, killing as well.

Those that have never drowned in water or in battle, while they are wont to put some credit in such claims, strangely and abruptly silence all accompanying reports of luminescent birds playing sentry over the aftermath.

The chief dropped his weapon - slowed and dulled from too many fellings - and continued to rail against the battering black-painted storm with his fists. There was one of the birds now.

---

Few paid attention to the slowly immolating warlock - those that meant him harm were repelled by the ring of his fellows that had formed around him. From white to ashen to charcoal to orange to simple ash and smoke, the coiling braids of his beard went. His patron was smoking the warlock like a fine cigar.

His skin was next - this is the part where he began to scream. His patron was not a kind one, and the immolation was not a painless one. There was no fire or spontaneous combustion; rather, the old man's skin turned golden-red before unfurling in a dozen spots into the petals of carbonization. To some, it might seem enchantingly beautiful; what better why to pluck the flower of the soul than to strip away all its cloistering layers, the sanctified shroud of its earthly manifestation? One by one by one.

He was burning like paper under a magnifying glass, the smoke coiling unnaturally into the visage of some ethereal being.

The sacrifice had taken his vocal cords now, and he was blessedly silent. Blind, senseless, musclulature charring now that his skin was gone, he remained kneeling, hands on his knees, head frozen - upturned in dumb awe to the smoke coalescing above him. His blacked skull was next, and all the rest of his skeleton until the bottle of his body had given birth entirely to the djinn of smoke. The entity began to reform itself into something more than vague anthropomorphy. It was so much more human than humans themselves, and just as it began to finalize its fine detailing - it was gone.

---

While the transposition of Billy's machine was later described as a deafening event marked by a blinding flash of light, the reality was that neither of these epic characterizations were present. However, the willingness to believe led future audiences to ignore the fact that the orignial storytellers were neither deaf nor blind. Plus, it just looked like One of Those Things that would put out great amounts of noise and light. There was really no getting around it.

In reality, Billy's machine was not there one moment, and was the next. While it arrived silently, the world - and those that laid claim to it - that now surrounded it made a great deal of noise adjusting to its newest occupant. Most notable among these was the flying machine-beast.

The explosions that pockmarked the air with flashes of deep orange sent the flyer reeling, screeching its displeasure. Scorched scar tissue dripped in thick chunks, writhing sickeningly as it fell. While the twisted griffin-thing was horrendous looking on the inside - even with the blessing of cauterization - it was more disconcerting to watch its skin grow back darker and even more mottled than before. The far edges of the wounds began to stretch towards each other, stitching and weaving new tissue as they creeped together.

While this regenerative capability would be troublesome for the mostly harmless warriors it now turned to bear its cannons upon, the flyer was temporarily occupied by having its front half replaced by Billy's machine. Its wings and tail flailed mightily against the air before realizing there was no longer any brain or pilot to command them and - free at last - they fell limp against the angular multiplicity of Billy's machine.

---

The marksman's rifle would be found four hundred years later and the last good round used by a tribesman to kill his conniving brother.

But for now, there was still a battle to be fought.

[OOC: Wanted to dash something off before I leave town for a couple days: if there are any problems with this, let me know and I'll change them when I get the chance.]

Oh **** oh **** oh ****, Emma tears her eyes if not her mind away from the warlock, doesn't he see it won't matter? A bitter pragmatist, she could not respect those who trusted in the ideal.

But it is impetus nonetheless, strength to get away from the dying land-no, that's not right. The land is long dead, and the blood of the dying flows like infinitesimal rivers: the only source of newness.

If, externally at least, her words are stymied, unable to express the insanity around her, it is small consolation that she is remembering words once repressed.

~

The machine flashes with power for which it had not been designed. Surging and gyrating, it lingers in the air without being defined by it: yet the people below are trapped upon a moving walkway, the famous arrow of entropy slicing them through. It may be an invisible trap, but a cage nonetheless, confining them so they cannot see what it really is doing.

The beast searing the air regenerates its flesh quickly enough to pull free, leaving a faint outline on the metal. The contraption continues spinning from the pressure, another of inertia's toys.

It is a rebel without laws: the boundaries of physics are as meaningless as national borders viewed from the tumultuous sky.

"O man, whatever country you may be from, whatever your opinions may be, listen: here is your history, as I have thought to read it, not in the books of your fellowmen, who are liars, but in nature, who never lies."

~ Rousseau

The bestial flier, having somehow extricated itself from the alloyed confines of Billy's machine, underwent a horrendous transformation in an attempt to knit its front half back together. From the neat bisection in its midsection, previously mottled and pocked scar tissue jutted abruptly into the air and stretched itself like hardening, chalky gum into a perverse armature of bone and cartilage. Fleshy wings flapped increasingly harder as veins and muscles - all manner of blues and purples from the effort of extreme regeneration - knotted themselves about the now glistening pearly skeleton. Sleek, slippery and heaving, purplish-black tissue wrapped itself around the entire package, a bio-engineered jack-in-the-box fit to scare a child to death.

Despite the phenomenal regenerative capacity of the hellish thing, the pilot had no such abilities; removed from his previous occupation of controlling the flier, he was now occupied with having his internal organs replaced with metal and exotic energies.

The flier's nigh-demonic visage failed to belie its nature while unmanned. At first glance, it seemed it would be predisposed to apocalyptic fits of indiscriminate rage if left unshackled, but instead of expending every weapon on board it just...hovered. Perhaps it was exhausted from regenerating fully half of its mass or stunned by its near death experience. It could have been unable to piece together the shreds of its faded consciousness into a course of action, or simply more docile than it initially appeared. Regardless, it spent many long moments drifting woozily while tribal warriors and entropics alike watched for the powerful machine-creature's next move. Eventually, it lazily turned about, seemingly hoping to divine a suitable direction to wander off in.

---

The power complex felt great perturbation at the wholly unwarranted interruption of its travels - it had not been so unexpectedly accosted by a rapid development since the original plague, and even then the complex had harbored its expectant suspicions. Being a creature whose mind lumbered similarly to its body, it much preferred that developments occurred as slowly as possible; though humans, who were but ants to the complex, could do as they pleased without causing undue displeasure.

But this! This would not do. What preconceptions was this construct operating under that the power complex would not be extraordinarily irritated with this unannounced arrival? What rudeness - fitting for a construct of such obvious power.

Partly out of curiosity and partly born from curiosity, the complex trundled the short distance between itself and the incomprehensible expanse of Billy's machine. Previously limp tentacles and appendages came to life and danced within the strange magnetism of the construct. The ballet continues into the theoretical, as the complex's consciousness frees itself from its prison of a dusty ceramic shell just enough to partially graft itself into the core mechanisms of the construct.

Did the machine think as it did?

The short answer is "no".

There is no long answer. Considering an event where reality has folded on itself to make a pattern in an infinite number of directions, such a concept as sentience cannot be extracted. To attempt to consider it in isolation would mutilate the entirety: pull too hard on one strand of the delicate fabric of existence, and it all comes apart at the seams.

Coming into contact with the power complex focuses the machine as it limits its scope. This other, this something that is not it, brings with it the constraints of time. This is after the plague, but before...something else.

And once bounded, it can concentrate all of its power.

~

The scope now increased by at least one order of magnitude, Emma feels oddly safe. She cannot influence what is going on, so why bother?

No worries.

What is going on? That's the question, and it's one that the sniper has ample time to contemplate as he descends.

Up above, the punctured flyer wheels aimlessly; down below, the power complex sinks complex tendrils into a being of metal and improbable angles. The black-painted horde seems to have either died or run away, but a few stragglers and fools still dart from nook to cranny as the biomechanical monstrosities fight underneath and above.

******

The liason has found what he was looking for. A tube, bone-white (perhaps it is bone) with a simple handle, sight and trigger. A slippery projectile, thick nodules of exotic explosive and volatile propellants packing its form. With fumbling, unsure movements he loads the two, stands up, raises it towards the sky. A click as the trigger is half-depressed; a shiver in the bone, a hum, a tone. A whir as the rocket-fish slips free and spins into the sky, trailing white smoke, moving fast on towards its final resting place in the belly of the flying machine.

A distant thud as it strikes home - the liason, with no other option, loads another round.

******

"We are all living on borrowed time. At any moment, you could die. Nobody and nothing is safe, and immortality is forever out of reach."
- Beacon

"Hell, we might as well take them with us, then. I don't us to be the only ones who died today."
- Morth

******

The last round rushes down the barrel, piercing the smoke-filled air to embed itself, quivering, in the flesh of a young madman.

"Was that..."

"Yeah."

"...So, we've got no-"

"Yeah."

"We're-"

"Screwed, yes. To put it mildly."

"..."

"I've got a shotgun under my seat. Let's go out swinging."

"I've got a better idea."

"Yeah?"

The gunner, his face blackened with the soot of cheap powder, his hands still quivering from the vibrations of the .50 cal, holds up the battered radio and smiles.

"Backup."

******

"When the going gets tough, the tough call for close air support."
- Captain Kaff Tagon

******

"Copy that, over. Two birds on their way, E-T-A fifteen minutes. Hole up and pray."

The potentcy of the dialectic contained within the machine stunned the power complex. Unsettled, it writhed and shook with the uncomfortable grace of an intrepid but terrified adventurer extricating himself from a snake pit. The complex shocked itself with the unprecedented range and subtlety of movement it had attained in the interest of immediately freeing itself from the machine's focus.

I...what?

Its cracked ceramic shell felt like powdery clay - it took a feat of willpower just to keep its material form together while its consciousness was stretching and tearing at the seams from exposure to the omniscient non-sentient.

Generation upon generations of humanity have toyed with the idea of the worthy hero or the conniving villain grasping a glimpse of what they would become - to momentarily free themselves from the shackle-shrouded coffin of the present and see beyond. Humans have forever dreamed of being on the outside, looking in. But rarely did they address the possibility of a horrible future. The future has always been a sanctuary for humanity - a land of opportunity where the travesties of the past might still be avoided. To see the future, what any one of us might become, is an unattainable magic of infinite hope. Forever, humanity has attempted to place their hand close enough to feel the radiant heat of clairvoyance; all they have ever managed to lay their hands on is a crystal ball.

But I...

Emma.

It was at this point that Emma realized with a sharp, skull-knocking jab she had been grafted into the power complex's consciousness. While the complex's consciousness stood agape before the whirling endlessness of entropy that the machine had opened to it, Emma saw something else. She saw the strands of possibility, and she could glimpse on the far borders of her vision something more - their destinations. Whether it was the machine or an influence more deeply interred within her, Emma had been allowed a cursory glance at fate's one weakness - itself.

Emma had a choice.

The entity that had originally interacted with the complex would have declined the offer before it was posed.

But interaction altered her. She, like anyone else who grew, had never existed, only been remembered by successive instances. What once was a threat to escape had become one of far too many forces. Their legal code could not be encapsulated by "physics": it appealed to long-forgotten precedents, cross-referenced throughout dimensions, and what appeared to be its violations were echoes of an even more complex pattern.

Lack of belief was enough. If what she was faced with was as inconsequential as those who held it in disdain dismissed it as, it certainly didn't matter what it said, or showed as possible. There was no harm in trusting it, if it wasn't necessarily right.

So she relaxes and lets it show what it has to offer.

~

Focus. All this has come to pass, or if it has not, the force of belief-even concentrated in so small a unit-impossibly strongly implies that it has. Ignore what might have been. This is what is: only it can determine what might be. It is all you have. (There is no "we": whatever is giving the instruction has no mind of its own.) But it seeks simplicity, like any algorithm: even if expending as much energy as is necessary to find that would only create more chaos.

From the given data, extrapolate.

The data includes, of course, the message itself, its transmitter, and recipient. The machine doesn't have the faculties to "guess" if that could possibly be included. Completeness is rare in this sense. The snake that swallows its own tail cannot taste its teeth as well.

There were a multitude of blanks in the equation; too many variables to bring the theoretical solution out into the cold, sobering rain of the concrete. Someone, somehow, had to fill in the blanks. But not with numbers - to resolve a fluid fluctuation into a static, human definition would not do. The variables needed to be reconciled into ideas, clouds floating in the sky of the mind. Currently, there were three minds with a stake in the gamble - three skies to blend into one. The outcome would either be beautiful, or sickening.

Billy's machine wasn't as all-powerful as it first appeared. It was a reconstruction of reality; it could show and see everything, but not itself. The power complex was something different, it was more akin to those that had built it - it was conscious of its consciousness, even if it didn't understand itself entirely. How odd, for Billy to have built something not in his own image. Unless, of course, Billy couldn't rationalize himself.

With Emma's complicity, the power complex found itself free to act, but without a real answer from her, that action lacked guidance. Variables and unanswered questions were being resolved into - replaced by - people, ideas, and dreams. Bundles of stray thoughts tied together with the tenuous strands of a greater plan become entire bales. But where's the pitchfork?

There is just one spot left blank. If this is where we have come from, and this is where we are, then everything fits. But...where to?

No miracle reared its glistening head, like a fantastical dragon from divine waters, to answer the eternal question. Left with the prospect of remaining stranded with a machine that broke all common conceptions of meaning, the complex made a choice. It randomized. The lever was pulled, and the triplet of wheels clacked mechanically, dutifully, into place. 777.

The equation simplified itself into direction charged with energy, the very mathematics of fate and luck and happenstance reforming themselves into sharp contrast against a nebula of possibility. Everything moved at once. Or was just the background moving while they stayed still?

All at once, they were surrounded by wreckage; war machines tangled inextricably with ash and the passage of time. Ruins and the weapons that caused them were arranged in orchestrated disorder. The ground was rife - positively glowering - with potential and possibility, and it was all due to the presence of Billy's machine.

The entropics were conspiciously absent, presumably left stranded and confused in the middle of the momentarily embattled wasteland. They had not been included in the equation. They were not a variable to be solved for, only a temporary abberation - a syncopation in the code of fate.

That was her destination. Brokenness isn't as chaotic as believed: it is not creative as it is monotonous and inescapable. Humanity's flickering fragments had leaped through their heart to what the brutal strand of computation had revealed. Nothing new, yet nothing to become new quickly enough to incite the populace.

Maybe it was just a lucky guess.

Hummm.

She didn't flinch, not relative to her frame of reference, because everything else vibrated momentarily. The string of reality that had been plucked quickly oscillated back to its starting point.

Nothing appeared to have changed.

Then what?

The simple act of visual perception seemed unnecessarily realistic, but she managed to notice a small figure walking away from the destruction. If it even deserved that subquality title. To destroy implied action...well, that was fair. Something had acted, out of ignorance, cruelty, the woof of humanity. Its animal nature. Everything was warped.

So destruction was apt enough, even if time had forgotten this place too long for it to be the best word. And the person. A child, perhaps? Gauging the distance and the relevant distortion was a challenge.

Don't bother. There's nothing for you here.

Emotion returned.

We're doomed. We've always been doomed.

There's that pesky "we" again.

She had seen this, but could it matter? The machine had to recalibrate, but its force was fading.

((Retconning back to post #89 for clarity, inclusion of Khrrck, and less quasi-philosophical rambling.))

The weapon that the liaison had found was fairly conventional in its approximation of a rocket launcher. Backblast scorched the curvature of the complex's ceramic exoskeleton, bathing it in red-orange embers that glowered momentarily before burning into ashes. It was too distant for the liaison to see, but the projectile blinked, once, before impact.

The drifting flier lazily wheeled halfway about, meeting the projectile head-on. The projectile punctured the already weakened nose, where the cockpit used to be, and erupted within. The abhorrent griffin performed a sickening zero-gravity tumble as reconstructed flesh and muscle melted away to fall to the ground - ash and embers. Basic skeletal structures were already attempting to reconstitute themselves as the flier succumbed to the gaping wound. With a tremendous death knell, its wings collapsed in on the body and the writing mass plummeted to the wastelands below.

---

Gunsmoke coiled upwards to dissipate in the featureless sky while the remaining entropics - enraged by wounded prides and bodies - crept out of cover to advance upon the vulnerable gunnery crew. Sweat and blood, tinged by black paint, dripped behind them as they took cautious steps. It christened the dead of their brothers in battle, alongside their enemies.

---

Emma might not care for her place in the present, but she has a place nonetheless. She has been placed for a purpose; while the power complex cannot adequately interface with Billys machine, Emma - the living one - can act as an intermediary. There is a gasp in her head, not her own, of another consciousness breaking into her mind. It is the gasp of a newborn breathing for the first time.

A voice speaks to her. Two voices. Four. A dozen. A thousand. Emma. And then, a vision that consumes the entirety of her sight; more than the same old wasteland, but ruins all the same - the destination the power complex had chosen at the moment of its uprooting. I - we - need to be there.

The realization is delivered to her, forthright and obvious in a plain manila envelope, that the power complex had grafted its consciousness onto her own during its time with her in the room. Emma will form the link between unlimited power and consciousness; if, of course, she makes the choice.

But then, hasn't it already been made for her? She simply has to play the part.

Fifteen minutes. The average American could boil an egg in that time, prepare half a dozen microwaved meals, listen to music or watch half a TV show, slaughter a virtual rat or learn a few words of Russian.

It takes less than a fifteenth of that time for the average American to be bludgeoned, shot, strangled, stabbed or sliced, crushed, electrocuted, suffocated, gutted or decapitated.

The gunnery crew is not average, American, unarmed or unprepared. But crouched in the cramped turret, armed with a simple 9mm service pistol and double-barrel shotgun, they feel about as helpless in this situation as the hypothetical person in question would. The cavalry's about as slow, too.

Fortunately for them, there's help a little closer to wrecked buggy.

******

The liaison is ecstatic. They may all be doomed, condemned to a pointless end supernatural or mundane, but he doesn't care. He's made a dent - no, a crater, a gaping hole in this crazy situation that Fate had shoved them into.

He raises the rocket launcher. This is his second round. There are no more. That's OK, though. It only takes one.

His finger tightens on the firing stud. With a hiss and a bang, the main entrance shudders, bows, crashes shut. With luck, it will merely seal the tunnel and leave the buggy unburied. But the thing's strong enough to keep his men alive - even if they have to wait to be dug out.

******

The sniper is mostly useless now, deprived as he is of his primary weapon. The wristbreaker and brace of knives are a comforting weight on his hip, but those are for last resorts.

So he creeps, trying to maintain both his footing and his invisibility on the unstable surface, searching for a weapon. Everything here seems crude, designed for raw power rather than the single-shot finesse he's used to. Perhaps that's what needed here, in this land of vast, faceless hordes. Still, he seeks the familiar: the long barrel, the telescopic sight, the heavy bullet designed to lance through the toughest armor and pierce the heart of a man.

******

A silver bird streaks through the sky. It is the pinnacle of two hundred years of machine evolution, only some of it metaphorical. Its angelic silver surface belies the bitter truth within: at its center is a demonic core, built for killing, breathing fire. Here, under the beautiful exterior, lies a beast that eats oil and shits death.

In its belly is a cluster of pods, heavy with explosive. A single one could take out a city block or two. Unleash the entire quartet, and you have yourself a national emergency.

Its rider is high on speed, watching the blurred world below as his green neon cage blips away the miles. In a few minutes, he will unleash Judgement.

"War's ingredients have changed over the years. At first it was wood and stone. Then iron came onto the scene, and stone knives fell out of favor. Steel, oil, uranium, information - they've all had their place in the spotlight. But there's one ingredient that always stays the same. One cost for victory that never changes.

"There will always be a price of blood."
-General Morth Steelfang

******

"Listen man. I guarantee you this. You have a problem? There's one simple, elegant solution to it. Every time. The thing to ask yourself is, "will I still have a problem if I bomb it to the ground?" I guarantee you that ninety-nine percent of the time, the answer is No."
-Ronald Greene, lieutenant colonel, Ironscale Militia.

Okay.

Okay.

Her memories formed an uninterrupted timestream, with meaningless wrinkles early on. They had something else in common, too, of course: they were all concentrated around a moving, growing, changing being.

At the ever-progressing instant of "present", the meandering line broke apart like a piece of string with frayed edges. She could consider not her own life, but that of the necessarily dynamic world.

Every moment she waited, however, time happened and the future narrowed.

"Hi," she said, testing the sound of her own voice. Only she could hear her reflections echo. "Okay, I think I've figured out how this is supposed to work."

Rubble and heavy ceramic slabs tumble, jostle, and vie for positions at the top of the pile. They all eventually give up and come to rest in a protective dog pile atop the buggy. There was a factor of luck involved - the liaison had placed his rocket just so that enough debris was created to protect the buggy, but if by some aberration his shot had hit slightly further away, the weight of the subsequent collapse would have crushed the buggy's armor. Slightly closer, and a pittance of dust and stones would have rained down. But, that is how fate works - in our favor and against it - per soulless indifferent whim.

---

The most common problem with invisibility is that being invisible does not grant you the privilege of seeing other invisible people. This was a problem with which the sniper was about to become intimately familiar.

Wise and revered as they were, not all the warlocks had survived the skirmish. Wisdom and respect do not often get you very far in bloody close combat. Their loss would be a serious problem for the spiritual integrity of the village, but that was a concern reserved for the future.

One of the younger warlocks had had his prayers answered, though it had taken an exhaustively fervent effort. In exchange for his piety, his patron had turned him invisible - flawless, without even the slight shimmer of refracted light that high technology must accept as its ultimate flaw. He was reeling from the sensation of having lost ownership over a small portion of his soul as he attempted to circle around the collection of entropics and gain a safer vantage point.

He flailed out of shock when he backed into the creeping sniper, threatening to send them both toppling backwards. His elbow jutted towards the sniper's face in his panic, and a few more accidental blows sailed in his direction before the warlock regained his composure. Luckily for the sniper, the warlock was entirely unarmed. Luckily for the warlock, his invisibility was not revoked - his patron must be feeling especially generous. Unluckily for both of them, they were well within earshot of the entropics who had gathered around the buggy.

As one, the entropics' heads turned towards the sounds of the unseen scuffle. The black-scaled dragon sniffed the air with a score of battered noses.

---

Emma's voice returned to her with different words. Yes, you understand. Very good. It was the complex. Now she did not just hear, but saw, smelled, felt. She was alive and feeling, and she was living and feeling fate. The possibilities were now a part of her. She could deign what was constant and what could still change. The complex's singular desire was front and center for her; it wanted to reach its destination, a graveyard of ruined war machines, the last place it could put centuries of dormant power towards a rejuvenatory purpose. It wanted only to rebuild.

On her periphery was a rapidly approaching constant, solid and glowing. It was aloft, bringing unimaginable destruction. It would arrive, and it would rain death. The complex was durable, but had been made brittle by the ages. Emma was presented with an uncertainty: would the complex survive the bombing?

Priorities.

The most important thing was preserving-no it wasn't. If she focused on saving the machine, she'd always wait to use it, never believing the situation was desperate enough to deploy it. It had to be used eventually. This was the time.

Even the ancients in their dull dim reality had understood the balance of power. She could not swing the battle's pendulum too far either way, not unless she dared to snip its string forever, sending it crashing to...But she wouldn't do that either, would she?

The message was clear: peace was the goal. A peace that would last, somehow. If any could, she had to find it.

Being buried alive isn't very pleasant. But hey, it beats dying.

The crew of the downed buggy huddles in the turret, thankful for their safety and the meager wisps of air sifting through the rubble above them.

******

The liaison, meanwhile, retreats to higher ground, taking refuge in one of the many clefts in the power station's battered hull. He pops up occasionally though, taking fireball pot-shots at stray groups of entropics. A few brave (or just especially suicidal) entropics try to venture close enough to return fire, but receive only a snap of the fingers and spontaneous combustion for their troubles.

******

Of all the things he was expecting, tripping over and getting punched by someone else invisible was not high on the sniper's list. Unarmed the warlock might be, but an elbow to the face still hurts. Unfortunately for the hapless little Satanist, it wasn't quite enough to disorient the sniper, although the man's concentration wavered and he became half-visible, a distortion in the air.

He flailed wildly and caught an arm, yanked it. His other hand snatched the wristbreaker from its holster and lunged forward with it until the muzzle collided with something that was probably a chest. He gritted his teeth and pulled the trigger.

The gun kicked like a mule as the twelve-gauge shell went off, sending a very visible spray of blood and shredded flesh through the air. The sniper shoved the mortally wounded, invisible man back towards the crowd of entropics and ran for all he was worth, doing his best to maintain a level head and his invisibility - at least until he found somewhere to hide and catch his breath. The odds were definitely not in his favor if he was followed.

******

Something's wrong. The target's not where he thought it was.

A quick check of his HUD shows that the bombing marker has moved at least twenty miles since he started his approach. At these supersonic speeds, there's no time to correct. He flashes past, bombs undropped, and begins the vast loop that will bring him along on target again.

For the first time since takeoff, he wonders for a moment just what the hell he's bombing. Doesn't really matter, of course. Not his problem.

The jet straightens out out, this time moving in line with the little target designation blip on his radar. If he times it right, there's no way he'll miss again.

The engines roar as he drops to just barely above terrain level, kicking in the afterburners. This machine is designed to quite simply be too fast to shoot down. At fifty meters altitude and supersonic speeds, even the best computer-controlled AA guns can't traverse fast enough to keep him in their sights.

Four minutes. Four minutes until he can push the button, pull away from this godforsaken place and go home.

By a twist of fate that was becoming increasingly cruel, the warlock remained invisible despite lacking functioning versions of several critical organs. The stumbling blot of blood and bone fragments wavered in a clumsy rendition of a ritualistic death-dance, a puppet helplessly thrown about by the mad puppeteer. Invisibility had saved the warlock and been the death of him, for the promise of the naive man's soul hadn't been enough to satiate his patron-puppeteer. After he collapsed in a heaving heap, with bated burbbling breath, the largest remaining cluster of entropics watched him intensely.

One entropic took a step towards the dying man. This blackened warrior was like all the rest - at a physical apex all silent, existentially-driven killers might aspire to. He had lost an arm, but it did not seem to bother him. The spectacle of this warlock before him, whose frantic writhings were rapidly slowing, drew all of the energy out of the entropic, and the warrior fell to his knees. They had been forsaken by the complex - their caretaker, their livelihood. They had been ravaged by bullets and immolation that were beyond them, and they were no longer a furious black dragon, each man an iron scale. They were disorganized clusters of naked men huddling in the cracks of the only creature they had ever cared to acknowledge and not to destroy, which had been taken from them and they had chosen to be dragged along to destruction. They were clutching weapons that were not even of their own creation and barely of their own understanding, forged by a civilization that had killed itself.

The entropic saw this for himself, and he was free, and he was crushed by this freedom far more than the sight of the warlock had debilitated him. His head drooped involuntarily, and then ricocheted back as he let out a sob that burned through its fuel of rage and became a cry of simple, indifferent desolation. Those entropics left standing on the hulking complex saw this desolation for themselves, and recognized it as their true anathema. Everywhere they fell to their knees, or just collapsed completely. The sniper would have no pursuers.