First had come Duncan, and she had to admit, this Nightmare King was starting to get creative. Her old/new/young/old friend...The Tleilaxu had taken control over him again (damn that whistling language they used!). Duncan Idaho had advanced on her in the cool corridors of the no-ship. He had subdued her (of course he could! they'd trained him themselves) then cut her arms and legs off with a lasgun. The pain had been blinding and as she saw her ruined stump of a body as if from afar, she knew she would be turned into an Axlotl tank by the foul, tiny tleilaxu (http://danienlared.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/07/TleilaxuMaster_1.jpg). She heard him chatter to himself and Duncan in his piping, childlike voice about how she would be a wonderful tank, how she would birth many gholas.
She experienced a spike of real fear this time, which she calmed with the Litany. Maybe her assumption had been wrong. Maybe this nightmare wasn't going to go at all like she thought it would. Then the little Tleilaxu master had opened the back of her skull with a lascutter and she plunged back into herself.
A nightmare within a nightmare unfolded.
Inside her drugged mind-within-a-mind, she was a small, dusty Fremen girl again. Thin, dark of skin, hair and eye, she wore a much patched stillsuit as she hunted for Spice deposits in the desert. This was child's work and she was giving it the total concentration natural to children.
Here we are. This is the one. I know how this scene plays out.
Then a sound like the hissing of a thousand snakes at once intruded on her consciousness. She looked back at the miserable collection of adobe hovels she called her home, a grubby, poverty stricken set of what could generously be called buildings, a pioneer village sticking into the desert like a finger poking into shai-hulud's side.
A tall ridge of sand was moving towards it. There was the smell of ozone and the crackling of miniature lightning above it, divorced from clouds.
The girl Sheeana ran towards it, abandoning her rythmless walk. There was no point to trying to avoid shaitan now. He was under her village. The moisture barrier had been neglected and a tripartite mouth that could swallow a dozen of her burst through the sand, glimmering with thousands of sharp knives for teeth. There was the sound of screaming. Some tried to run. But Shaitan, Shai-hulud, The Maker, The Sandworm, he ate all. She saw it in agonizing, impossible detail as if looking through oilskin binoculars. She was certain she was to see this forever, over and over again in this nightmare-within-a-nightmare.
That was when she stopped her mad dash towards it and went off script. "Nightmare King." She said it quietly. If he could hear her, then the volume mattered little either way. "You've greatly underestimated how many opponents you face and how clever a Witch can be." Then to the worm: "Shaitan!" She stomped her foot, whirling arms and legs, spinning on a foot with the knee raised. "To me, Shaitan!" The worm whirled from its destructive work and came up around her, enfolding and protecting her dream self as thousands of women in Other Memory pushed against the very structure of the dream. And Sheeana flickered back to adulthood. The dream groaned, the simulacrum unable to hold up. "You let the real worm in instead of the fake one. And you forgot that a Reverend Mother is never alone in her own mind."
And the worm rose to meet them as she scrambled onto its back. Her interior choir sang out, and the worm sang to meet them. She was abruptl through in both the sense of 'finished' and 'out'. She broke the dream's strata and was birthed, with her worm, back into reality as it burst through the thin shell of her dream-bubble, leaving whisps of blue dreamstuff clinging to the creature's hide. She laughed maniacally. It was important to take a few moments out for a maniacal laugh after a success.
Roxie moves quietly through the corridors of the ship, setting warning glyphs, crafting wardings, shaping protections against outside forces. Her red cloak billows softly around her. Her manner is calm and gentle, almost innocently beneficent. To the outside gaze there is nothing to indicate anything strange around her—even the scars and glyphs carved into her skin are gone—except for the strange stark whiteness (http://www.webdesign.org/img_articles/15616/white_eye_7.jpg) of her eyes.
And then, in the city, she steps with the gentle grace of a lonesome child. "Are you finished?" she asks Sheeana, her voice in three-point harmony. "There is work to do."
Sheeana looked down, perhaps a bit chagrined at her unabashed display of semivictorious joy she'd just been caught in. The little girl had a Fremen's silent footsteps when she wanted them, it seemed.
She stepped down lightly, twirling as she did. "Yes, I am. Do you require transport?"
That was when she noticed her eyes. Featureless, even whiter than hers were blue, they broadcasted a warning from when she'd first met the girl.
Even with the worm to assist her, Sheeana doubted she could kill the girl in a one to one fight. She was a virtual homunculus, no less deadly in her child's body than Duncan or Miles. There was something else though...Voice. She could implant a command to stop Roxie's heart if she found she was truly Cho-infested, which would be exactly what the girl would want.
"Roxie...Listen very carefully to what i'm about to say." A gamble. Would it work?
It seemed to be working, but there was no way to tell for sure. In a few minutes it was done, the trigger-word implanted that would stop her heart. I hope you know the favor I would be doing you.
"We must disrupt the grip the being bound in the city has on the others on this ship," Roxie says, and the trigger word has left has an unfocused look in her eyes. Her mouth, though—her mouth has slowly twisted into an unconscious grin, all the more disturbing for the way it contrasts with her usually blank face.
Such a shame that those who tried to protect this world did what they had to do... they would have made such excellent meals...
On board the Black Arms' comet, Shadow looked down at the fallen bodies in front of him. Sonic, Tails, Knuckles, Amy, Eggman - all dead at his hands. Looming over him was A large, imposing, alien figure. (http://i288.photobucket.com/albums/ll164/gamefreak16236/ShadowCG_Blackdoom.jpg)
We may have lost the real Shadow, but... you've done so well in his place.
"Yes... yes, you have..." Shadow droned. He was right. The real Shadow was dead, killed saving the Earth from Gerald Robotnik's madness. The Shadow here was nothing more than one of Eggman's Shadow Androids, though, it seemed to be too perfect in its creation.
We shall go to another world and you shall be our herald. Black Doom replied.
"...of COURSE!" In one swift motion, Shadow ignited a Chaos Spear, leaped up and rammed it into Black Doom's chest. As the beast gurgled and sputtered, the hedgehog glared at it, death in its eyes. "Fool me once, shame on me. Fool me twice, shame on you. Fool me thrice...!" He ripped the spear from Black Doom's chest and impaled it into its head, killing it.
As the other aliens roared and raced towards Shadow, the hedgehog glared at them.
"Tell your master when I send you back that his reign has come to an end. I know who I am, I know my purpose. I am Shadow the Hedgehog. I was chosen to protect everyone on this ship. This is who I am!" With that, he leaped into the fray. Someone's gonna hafta pull him out...
They came upon their first glowing half-sphere nearby, in the middle of a derelict street. Receiving a nod of assent from Roxie, the worm and its two passengers plunged into the dreamscape.
Shadow, your dreamscape now has a sandworm ridden by two mysterious, slightly creepy girls.
Roxie leaps from the back of the sandworm and charges forward. An ivory, silver-edged spear flashes forward in her hands, and she hits one of the aliens like a brick meeting a water balloon. The front of the spear whirrs and grinds like a drill.
And she continues forward, ruthless and efficient, spattering herself with blood and other things. Her tattered red cloak and dead, white eyes (http://www.webdesign.org/img_articles/15616/white_eye_7.jpg) make her seem like something inhuman, but not at all like the aliens, and her presence is like a nail against the chalkboard of the dream, making things strap into strange, verisimilitude-breaking clarity.
As Shadow continues his attack, he's able to get out of the way of Sheeana's worm's Dynamic Entry and goes to join Roxie in getting rid of the rest of the dream creatures.
"...a dream, right?" Shadow said. "I'm getting tired of these..."
Where Roxie was an incredibly heavy projectile that barreled through the gates, Sheeana was a hail of well placed darts. She flickered in and out of a speed comprehensible to the human eye, dancing through the hordes and neatly slashing the throats or what passed for throats of whichever of them tried to circle to Roxie's back. The milky white crysknife flashed too, drinking hallucinatory alien blood.
When she'd cleared enough of a space: "That's right. Now..." She gathered up the full power of the Voice of Command, enough to compell instant obedience in who it was aimed at. "WAKE UP."
Shadow let out a pained grunt of sorts as the Voice of Command took hold, the dream world around them shattering around them. For a moment, the hedgehog drops to his knees, before standing to his feet to recover.
"Hnn... that's over..." Shadow said. "What was that? And now, what do we do?"
"Presumably we are to search for others and free them." Which sounded to her like a delaying action, but if it put people in her debt she could go along with it.
She climbed up the worm's side and cocked her head from the top as if to say 'you coming?'.
Roxie makes her way to the sandworm again and clambers up onto its back, ignoring the way the ectoplasmic dream-blood remaining on her slowly drips and evaporates.
"The more that is done to disrupt things now, the weaker the trapped being will soon be."
Jason's couldn't hear anything, and there was no light. His head felt like it was on fire, and his chest was burning. What was happening to him? He tried to blink away the darkness, but he was starting to realize just wear he was. Just what was happening. His nightmare. He was in the only thing to ever terrify him.
He was inside his coffin again.
He gasped and cried out, banging on the lid of the coffin and trying to break it open. But it wasn't working. He was trapped.
The roar of the fist breaking through the coffin is like being at the center of a thunderbolt. Small arms strong enough to bend steel tear at the wood and dirt.
Jason gasped as the light broke into the coffin and had to blink his eyes closed. But he didn't sit still. He pushed his arms forward and started to push the broken wood away from him. He opened his eyes and blinked them at Roxie.
Roxie grabs at Jason to pull him up. Her white eyes (http://www.webdesign.org/img_articles/15616/white_eye_7.jpg) stand out in almost as sharp contrast as the light.
"We save as many as we can. You're going to want to crouch for this." Sheeana said before making a sweeping gesture. The worm complied and brought them further into the city.
There were a lot of snakes. They were crawling toward him. They were slithering toward him. Where was his torch? He had to get them away-oh God he had to get out of here.
"Indy..." A woman moaned. Indy whipped around. Marion lay there, writhing, the little monsters crawled over her. They were covering her, climbing into her mouth, piercing out of her eye. A disgusting site. "Help..." she whispered.
"Help..." another echoed. "Junior..." It was his father. He met the same fate as Marion. His hand reached out towards his son, faltering. He was sinking deeper into the put.
"Dr. Jones..." The young boy, Short Round, looked up at the archaeologist with pleading eyes. The snakes wrapped around him. He seemed to be crying out for the man who had taken care of him for what would be years ago for Indy. Why won't Indy save them? Why is he so scared?
And at the top of the pit there was a very big snake. OK, it was actually a sandworm, with the rest of his team in tow. But dear god, it was poking its great, tripartite mouth through, breath a cinnamon scented furnace studded with sharp little knives.
"Grab hold!" Sheeana called, flattened against it to hold on.
Oh God what. Like hell he was gonna ride a giant Goddamn snake.
Except when it occurred to him that that there were actual crew members on top, he managed to make enough sense of himself to realize that his father really wasn't on the ship. That's right, he was on a ship in space. Had he forgotten that? Why-OH GOD WHAT IS CRAWLING UP HIS LEG.
Indy shakes off the beast frantically and scrambles towards the much larger (albeit apparently safer) snake and grabs hold before he can rethink this.
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1/2
First had come Duncan, and she had to admit, this Nightmare King was starting to get creative.
Her old/new/young/old friend...The Tleilaxu had taken control over him again (damn that whistling language they used!). Duncan Idaho had advanced on her in the cool corridors of the no-ship. He had subdued her (of course he could! they'd trained him themselves) then cut her arms and legs off with a lasgun. The pain had been blinding and as she saw her ruined stump of a body as if from afar, she knew she would be turned into an Axlotl tank by the foul, tiny tleilaxu (http://danienlared.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/07/TleilaxuMaster_1.jpg). She heard him chatter to himself and Duncan in his piping, childlike voice about how she would be a wonderful tank, how she would birth many gholas.
She experienced a spike of real fear this time, which she calmed with the Litany. Maybe her assumption had been wrong. Maybe this nightmare wasn't going to go at all like she thought it would. Then the little Tleilaxu master had opened the back of her skull with a lascutter and she plunged back into herself.
A nightmare within a nightmare unfolded.
Inside her drugged mind-within-a-mind, she was a small, dusty Fremen girl again. Thin, dark of skin, hair and eye, she wore a much patched stillsuit as she hunted for Spice deposits in the desert. This was child's work and she was giving it the total concentration natural to children.
Here we are. This is the one. I know how this scene plays out.
Then a sound like the hissing of a thousand snakes at once intruded on her consciousness. She looked back at the miserable collection of adobe hovels she called her home, a grubby, poverty stricken set of what could generously be called buildings, a pioneer village sticking into the desert like a finger poking into shai-hulud's side.
2/2
The girl Sheeana ran towards it, abandoning her rythmless walk. There was no point to trying to avoid shaitan now. He was under her village.
The moisture barrier had been neglected and a tripartite mouth that could swallow a dozen of her burst through the sand, glimmering with thousands of sharp knives for teeth. There was the sound of screaming. Some tried to run. But Shaitan, Shai-hulud, The Maker, The Sandworm, he ate all. She saw it in agonizing, impossible detail as if looking through oilskin binoculars. She was certain she was to see this forever, over and over again in this nightmare-within-a-nightmare.
That was when she stopped her mad dash towards it and went off script. "Nightmare King." She said it quietly. If he could hear her, then the volume mattered little either way. "You've greatly underestimated how many opponents you face and how clever a Witch can be." Then to the worm: "Shaitan!" She stomped her foot, whirling arms and legs, spinning on a foot with the knee raised. "To me, Shaitan!"
The worm whirled from its destructive work and came up around her, enfolding and protecting her dream self as thousands of women in Other Memory pushed against the very structure of the dream.
And Sheeana flickered back to adulthood. The dream groaned, the simulacrum unable to hold up. "You let the real worm in instead of the fake one. And you forgot that a Reverend Mother is never alone in her own mind."
And the worm rose to meet them as she scrambled onto its back. Her interior choir sang out, and the worm sang to meet them. She was abruptl through in both the sense of 'finished' and 'out'. She broke the dream's strata and was birthed, with her worm, back into reality as it burst through the thin shell of her dream-bubble, leaving whisps of blue dreamstuff clinging to the creature's hide.
She laughed maniacally. It was important to take a few moments out for a maniacal laugh after a success.
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And then, in the city, she steps with the gentle grace of a lonesome child. "Are you finished?" she asks Sheeana, her voice in three-point harmony. "There is work to do."
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She stepped down lightly, twirling as she did. "Yes, I am. Do you require transport?"
That was when she noticed her eyes. Featureless, even whiter than hers were blue, they broadcasted a warning from when she'd first met the girl.
Even with the worm to assist her, Sheeana doubted she could kill the girl in a one to one fight. She was a virtual homunculus, no less deadly in her child's body than Duncan or Miles. There was something else though...Voice. She could implant a command to stop Roxie's heart if she found she was truly Cho-infested, which would be exactly what the girl would want.
"Roxie...Listen very carefully to what i'm about to say." A gamble. Would it work?
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"What?"
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"Now, what's the next step?"
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Such a shame that those who tried to protect this world did what they had to do... they would have made such excellent meals...
On board the Black Arms' comet, Shadow looked down at the fallen bodies in front of him. Sonic, Tails, Knuckles, Amy, Eggman - all dead at his hands. Looming over him was A large, imposing, alien figure. (http://i288.photobucket.com/albums/ll164/gamefreak16236/ShadowCG_Blackdoom.jpg)
We may have lost the real Shadow, but... you've done so well in his place.
"Yes... yes, you have..." Shadow droned. He was right. The real Shadow was dead, killed saving the Earth from Gerald Robotnik's madness. The Shadow here was nothing more than one of Eggman's Shadow Androids, though, it seemed to be too perfect in its creation.
We shall go to another world and you shall be our herald. Black Doom replied.
"Yes... yes..." Shadow said, confused.
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"...of COURSE!" In one swift motion, Shadow ignited a Chaos Spear, leaped up and rammed it into Black Doom's chest. As the beast gurgled and sputtered, the hedgehog glared at it, death in its eyes. "Fool me once, shame on me. Fool me twice, shame on you. Fool me thrice...!" He ripped the spear from Black Doom's chest and impaled it into its head, killing it.
As the other aliens roared and raced towards Shadow, the hedgehog glared at them.
"Tell your master when I send you back that his reign has come to an end. I know who I am, I know my purpose. I am Shadow the Hedgehog. I was chosen to protect everyone on this ship. This is who I am!" With that, he leaped into the fray. Someone's gonna hafta pull him out...
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Shadow, your dreamscape now has a sandworm ridden by two mysterious, slightly creepy girls.
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And she continues forward, ruthless and efficient, spattering herself with blood and other things. Her tattered red cloak and dead, white eyes (http://www.webdesign.org/img_articles/15616/white_eye_7.jpg) make her seem like something inhuman, but not at all like the aliens, and her presence is like a nail against the chalkboard of the dream, making things strap into strange, verisimilitude-breaking clarity.
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"...a dream, right?" Shadow said. "I'm getting tired of these..."
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When she'd cleared enough of a space: "That's right. Now..." She gathered up the full power of the Voice of Command, enough to compell instant obedience in who it was aimed at. "WAKE UP."
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"Hnn... that's over..." Shadow said. "What was that? And now, what do we do?"
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What, no thanks?
"Presumably we are to search for others and free them." Which sounded to her like a delaying action, but if it put people in her debt she could go along with it.
She climbed up the worm's side and cocked her head from the top as if to say 'you coming?'.
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"The more that is done to disrupt things now, the weaker the trapped being will soon be."
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Leaping onto the worm, Shadow spoke up again.
"And... thanks for the help."
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He was inside his coffin again.
He gasped and cried out, banging on the lid of the coffin and trying to break it open. But it wasn't working. He was trapped.
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The roar of the fist breaking through the coffin is like being at the center of a thunderbolt. Small arms strong enough to bend steel tear at the wood and dirt.
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Sandworm as the vehicle of salvation...This is good. A good image to project. She thought.
"Climb up."
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He grins, seeing the newest addition to the group.
"Don't worry, it won't bite." Shadow said, chuckling. "Right now, we have bigger fish to fry here."
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"What happens now?"
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There were a lot of snakes. They were crawling toward him. They were slithering toward him. Where was his torch? He had to get them away-oh God he had to get out of here.
"Indy..." A woman moaned. Indy whipped around. Marion lay there, writhing, the little monsters crawled over her. They were covering her, climbing into her mouth, piercing out of her eye. A disgusting site. "Help..." she whispered.
"Help..." another echoed. "Junior..." It was his father. He met the same fate as Marion. His hand reached out towards his son, faltering. He was sinking deeper into the put.
"Dr. Jones..." The young boy, Short Round, looked up at the archaeologist with pleading eyes. The snakes wrapped around him. He seemed to be crying out for the man who had taken care of him for what would be years ago for Indy. Why won't Indy save them? Why is he so scared?
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And at the top of the pit there was a very big snake. OK, it was actually a sandworm, with the rest of his team in tow. But dear god, it was poking its great, tripartite mouth through, breath a cinnamon scented furnace studded with sharp little knives.
"Grab hold!" Sheeana called, flattened against it to hold on.
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Except when it occurred to him that that there were actual crew members on top, he managed to make enough sense of himself to realize that his father really wasn't on the ship. That's right, he was on a ship in space. Had he forgotten that? Why-OH GOD WHAT IS CRAWLING UP HIS LEG.
Indy shakes off the beast frantically and scrambles towards the much larger (albeit apparently safer) snake and grabs hold before he can rethink this.