(also out of character) There WILL be resolution. Just improvise.
Dick Bresnick looked down at the keyboard, his hands…how could he have written something like this, not knowing the full range of consequences? He had written about the rituals and the demon and all that, and it seemed harmless enough until the news reports started sounding a bit too familiar…but now it was getting out of control; he felt as if his hands were guided by something…other.
Dick flicked the TV on; a storm was heading for D.C., just a few miles from him. This was just a coincidence, wasn’t it?
Musical interlude.
*There’s a killer on the road
His brain is squirmin’ like a toad
Take a long holiday
Let your children play
If ya give this man a ride
Sweet memory will die
Killer on the road, yeah *
Somewhere in Kentucky, a bedraggled figure staggers from the woods, stopping on the shoulder of the highway. The rain whips his face, as he raises a thumb towards an approaching car. A bolt of lightning illuminates the background, punctuated by the crack of a rifle. The man’s head explodes into a cloud of red mist. The car swerves wildly and accelerates away. A child’s face peering from the window as it flashes past…
The apparent switch in gender of ExTank was, of course, another mind-job. Maybe he was strong enough to resist, and maybe some others were as well, but there wasn’t a need to implement a long-term plan here; The point was to keep everyone confused long enough for all the rituals and sacrifices to take place. Most of the time, He’Tgraava just liked messing with people’s heads. Having Morpheus induce the altered perceptions took little effort but usually afforded maximum payoff. Multiple layers of illusion and deception ensued, ideally leaving the targets in a dream-state that they didn’t even *want *to wake up from.
**Lumpy **was emerging from the dream-state now, having been shocked out of it by the gunshot…
Cuckoorex scanned the horizon; the hospital was gone, though he could see some creatures about twenty yards away, something like cats, but with some bizarre clump of tentacles emerging from their backs. He heard…was that an organ? And some strange chant, something that sounded familiar but filtered, distorted, English words being twisted and recast in a different language. It sounded a bit like…like The Doors? The cadence was there, the organ sounded right, but the words were sounding like little more than grunting. Still, it sounded familiar.
“Hey, fucker!”
Cuck looked down to see a small lizard. The lizard stood up and addressed him directly. “Wake the fuck up! We need to find a way to stop this shit right fucking now!”
Cuck smiled; the lizard had a high-pitched voice that reminded him of Alvin and the Chipmunks. The lizard jumped up and tried to slap Cuck in the face, but missed. Cuck poked the lizard in the belly, like the Pillsbury Doughboy, and enjoyed the giggle that ensued. Cuck wanted to tell the lizard that everything would be OK, but the words came out sounding odd; “Ba weep gra na weep ninny bong…” The weird cat-things were getting closer…
ExTank, feeling bloated and not particularly shooty at the moment, still recognized the threat facing her.
To heck with it, she thought, and brought the big 12 gauge around and unloaded 8 rounds of Winchester PDX1-12 into Cuckoorex.
Yup, ExTank thought, best cure for morning sickness, aching back, and swollen ankles I could think of at the moment.
Cuckoorex’s liver shot across the room, mixed in with chunks of splintered bone. A particularly juicy portion of liver slapped **Lumpy **hard on the wrist, and the reflexive twitch of the trigger finger resulted in a fresh gunshot wound for Maus.
“Seriously?” **Maus **shouted, “why am *I *always getting shot?” **Lumpy **smiled sheepishly and shrugged, causing everyone around who wasn’t still in la-la land to duck in case that itchy finger might spasm again…
At this point, most everyone in the room began to stare, glassy-eyed, at a whole heap of nothing. No one moved, spoke, or even thought about anything for a long, long time. It was as if some vital portion of their essence had left, leaving only empty shells…
I’m bowing out. As I told elfkin477 in a private message, I simply have nothing to say about my character the way he’s been hijacked.
I’ll bow out of all future collaborative writing threads, as I’m assuming it was me that made Lumpy and others stop contributing. I really am sorry!
Hey, I was waiting for someone else, but what the hell…
…but it would spasm no more. The Vessel was shattered, and the Malefactor’s Avatar was dispersed (for now at least).
Sanity began to return to the world without the influence of the Avatar; the bombers returned to their bases, and the nuclear hellfire was once again disarmed and safely locked away.
In a medium sized town, where nothing exciting ever really happens, ExTank was helping doctors and nurses in the lobby of a smallish hospital, mostly by staying out of their way, but lending the occasional assist with lifting people onto stretchers and hanging IV bags on drip stands.
Once the worst of the wounded were seen to (and the dead bagged and taken to the mogue), the survivors of the “Night of the Hospital Lobby” gathered int he cafeteria, raiding it for caffeine, cookies, chocolate, potato chips, and God help them, someone was even eating the tapioca.
“So here’s the deal,” ExTank explained to the tired and shell-shocked group of survivors.
“Just about every God humanity has prayed to is real. They’re called Eternals. Some like us, and try to help us out as best they can, without doing everything for us. We call them Benefactors. Some don’t like us, because of the helping-hand the Benefactors give us; they consider it ‘cheating,’ or somesuch, and they want to do us in. We call them Malefactors.”
“Most Eternals can’t interact directly with with us Lesser Forms; they’re just too advanced to communicate directly with our primitive minds. So they create Avatars, which are essentially ‘created beings,’ typically corporeal, but sometimes not, preprogrammed with whatever message the Eternal wants us to receive. Jesus of Nazareth was one, as were several from the Hindu pantheon.”
“This whole incident was the result of a Class Five non-corporeal Avatar from one of the nastier Malefactors inhabiting yon dead dude,” ExTank indicated Cuckoorex, safely tucked waya in a body bag for the Retrieval Squad to take back for examination and containment. “Such mortals possessed in such ways are called Vessels, and the Avatar had a lot invested in controlling him. When I killed him, the Avatar dispersed; essentailly, it ‘ran home to momma’ with its tail between its legs. Metaphorically speaking.”
“I belong to a Top-Secret, Suicide-Before-Thinking-About-It, multi-naional, non-denominational organization called, amazingly enough, The Organization. Chrisitans, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Atheists, you-name-it-we-got-'em. Hell, we even got Shriners. Our mission is simple: protect humanity from the Malefactors, and don’t tell anyone the Truth, on the notion that humanity as a whole isn’t ready for it.”
ExTank deliberately ripped the No Smoking sign off the cafeteria’s wall, dug out a deck of smokes, and lit one up with a battered old Zippo that may have once been painted in a desert camouflage pattern. After taking a few meditative puffs, he went on.
“Well folks, I’m just a broke-down old Cavalry Trooper ex-sergeant, who got dragged into this whole ‘Organization’ mess ass-backwards, kicking-and-screaming. I think everyone who survived this night earned their spurs, so-to-speak, and I give fuck-all about what The Organization thinks.”
“'Cause that bad-ass spook is still out there, with all the backing of every god-like boogey-man humanity has ever written about, and a few we still know nothing about.”
“And they don’t forget, and they don’t forgive, and they never, ever die.”
Turning to the security guard, whose name tag read, amazingly enough, “Lumpy,” ExTank apologized, saying, “Sorry I didn’t drop the whole 4-1-1 earlier in the lobby when you asked; we were ass-deep in alligators at the time and I didn’t have a spare moment to fuck up your head with my nonsense.”
OOC: Bowing out…
THE END.
(sorry to those I disrupted: I thought maybe we’d have some crazy story where we were all improvising and all that, which I thought was the point, but I think I ruined it, and I really am sorry, and will stay away from any other collaborative writing threads, so no worries.)
On reflection: I really did ruin it for all of you, didn’t I? I’m really, REALLY sorry about that. Won’t happen again. Crap.
I’m just surprised I kept surviving. I figured since it was a horror story, somebody had to make stupid mistakes and get himself (and others) killed.
Lumpy, I hope I didn’t cause you to bow out.
Perhaps next ime we should have a control thread.
No you didn’t. And I won’t blame Cuckoorex because no one said he couldn’t have my character do what he did. I did have my own ideas of what I wanted my character to do and they were made obsolete by the turn of the plot. I’m not mad at anyone, I simply literally had nothing to say anymore. Either a control thread or at least an agreed upon set of rules for what you can make other characters do or say sounds like a good idea.