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Root of All Evil

Started by Gremmy, March 25, 2019, 12:52:02 AM

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Gremmy



Jiro could not believe his luck. Apparently luck was not on his side that day, even as a demigod. He bit his lip so hard it bled as he let out a laugh of pained pleasure. He had not expected the glass to be so fragile when he stepped on it. The result was him falling. The shards lacerated and cut him as he collapsed onto the ground underneath the glass, glass dust and sand surrounded him as he laid in a heap.

The deity of violence bit back another laugh as he felt his body break. He could feel the minor cuts and scrapes healing already. The larger lacerations were not going to heal for a while. Blue eyes scanned the area around him. Well, fuck...

He did not know how long he lay there, embracing the agony his body had been put through. it could have been mere minutes. Or maybe it had been hours or days. He could not be sure. His vision blurred from the healing process and the searing pain scorching through his body.

It felt like he had been there for years when he finally heard a sound from above him. His wounds were healed by that point so it must have been a few days. He had survived off snakes and other small creatures that seemed to hibernate and burrow in the glass dunes. "Anyone there?" he called out. A fractured laugh escaped him as he spoke.

The laugh echoed off the walls of where he was trapped. It was a sound of insanity, of someone who was not quite all there. "If you're there, can you help me? I fell in and now I'm stuck..." Hopefully whoever was passing through was either insane enough to help or too naive or gullible to know not to help strangers.

WC: 317

Zombie

((I figured, why not have one extremely odd character run into another? =P  Also, I'm usually pretty long-winded, so don't worry about mirroring me at all! ^.^))


Her patience was wearing thin, to say the very least. Things were not supposed to go the way they had been since early that afternoon; it was supposed to have been such a simple job in the first place. Meet up with and protect a merchant caravan as they traveled across the glass desert; though it would have been unlikely that they'd have been attacked by anything more dangerous than the odd band of desert raiders while they made their way toward their destination. A job so gods-damned simple that any mercenary worth their salt would have been able to accomplish it while hung over and half-asleep. Except for one little detail that no one had even bothered to tell her: those merchants hadn't just been transporting spices and silks.

That had been a cover for their real cargo: an extremely spoiled and willful young desert princess who was only being escorted to the place of her wedding; sure, it was an arranged political marriage and the princess had been extremely bitter about the whole situation. But there was no real excuse for her making a break for it as soon as the caravan and their hired guards had decided to stop for lunch. But as the fates would have it, that was exactly what had happened.

The living weapon had tirelessly followed her charge across the damnably strange glass desert for a few hours; contending with how every crack, splinter and prism of the desert scattered and refracted the light into disorienting, scattered bursts of brilliant, multi-colored light. Fought with the heat mirages and the alien hallucinations that seemed to arise from the bizarre terrain; half-formed, twisting images that seemed to have been born from the strange landscape itself.

Not being an Essyrnian and having had no idea just how powerful or realistic the fleeting, illusory images could be, Cierzo had ended up chasing shadows -and losing her target in the process- as she trekked across the vast expanses of gleaming glass that stretched out as far as the eye could see. Had she been a normal being, the shattered visions the desert presented her with would probably have driven her quite mad; or at the very least, she probably would have torn out her remaining eye. Perhaps she should have been grateful that she wasn't a normal being and that those visions were little more than an annoyance.

However, it was difficult to navigate a desert she'd never visited before, especially when she had no map of the place at her disposal. She'd ended up turned around and quite lost. And the sun had reached its zenith, which had not only intensified the heat, but had set the refracted light to dancing in scintillating, shattered prisms that had made any chance of navigation all but impossible. Hyacinth eye narrowed against the nearly-blinding glare, it had become nearly impossible to tell how long she'd traveled across the surface when she had come across something that caught her attention. A rather deep, ragged hole that had been punctured through the glass; apparently, one of those thinner areas that the caravan leader had warned everyone about.

And coming from within that hole was something even more interesting. Rather pathetic laughter that, to her ears, seemed to border on madness- and a plea for help. Cierzo knew it wasn't her target (which she'd given up on, believing that damn princess to have made it all the way across the desert by now) and she damn sure wasn't someone stupid enough to freely offer aid to an unknown being who could very easily have been lying about their predicament. (Hell, she was the type that would have sooner delivered the killing blow to a desperately-wounded ally than go off to find assistance.) But her curiosity was drawn and -as far as she knew- the worst that could happen would have been that she'd have the opportunity to let off some steam by slicing a bandit or desert raider to ribbons; which would have been quite fun.

So, rather than continuing on her way, she knelt by the hole and called down: "Give me one good reason why I should help your sorry ass, instead of burying you." Not that she could have made good on her threat anyway, what with there not exactly being anything to seal the hole with and all.

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