More Adventures in Pandemonium · 5:55am Mar 24th, 2016
Hey remember those Pandemonium blog posts I did a while back, Glass Steagall rambling about this big 'ol world?
Decided I might actually write a book set in it, and I finished the first chapter. Wrote four thousand words in a day. Felt rather inspired. Don't know if it's any good, since it's way outside my usual genre and tone. Think it needs more dark humour. God damn do I love dark humour.
New chapter of Mare who Once Lived on the Moon is up to 9,000 words as of writing, and quite possibly close to finished.
I look down at my reflection in the glass of distill and wonder how the fuck I ended up here, in a dive bar far too shadey to call itself the Prancing Pony of all things.
Sitting on a -- hell let's be nice for a change and call it rustic -- wooden bar chair to my left is 'Blinky' Bill, little bald man built like Gimli from Lord of the Rings, sitting pretty in his boiler suit covered in I-don't-even-know how many pockets, all of them filled with their own precise little tool, everything from mallets to soldering irons to salt lens. God only knows what a techie is doing this far outside of Spacecamp. But he makes for good muscle with a pipe wrench in hand and a sawn-off filled with scrap and rock salt at his side and I'm glad he's here.
He sips at his watered down beer. He's a hell of a party when he's drunk, but we're doing business. Which is why he's going sober and I'm going in the opposite direction fast as I can.
Perched on a seat to my right, sitting cross legged like an attentive child, is Doc Mittens. Almost hugging his knees to his chest, smiling like he's threatening to giggle at any moment. Drinking a glass of milk. Got his medical license at just-how-bad-are-you-bleeding-yeah-that's-what-I-thought – he'd never put it like that, though Mittens would just say he's here to help. He's the kind of guy you want on hand when things go bad, which they always do. I can't remember the last time things went good.
Oh, wait, Pablo. He was gorgeous, wasn't he? Heh. Shame I'd have tainted everything I loved about him if I stayed any longer, he was good for me like I was bad for him.
Doc Mittens is probably the most damned cuddly guy I've ever met though, even if he is wrapped in enough copper wire and car batteries to be his own portable jump paddles set. The electrodes in those mittens of his don't fuck around.
Rounding out our merry band was me, staring into my reflection in my cheap drink. Distill used to be made from anything you could ferment in a bucket, but a couple of years ago they worked out how to ferment the bucket too, and it's just got cheaper ever since. But if you're doing it right, you should only ever taste it coming back up anyway.
My drink of choice.
Looking back up out of it was a pale girl with a purple pixie cut and purpler shades, deep tan lines you could see at the edges of their shadow where the skin almost goes translucent. Too old to be young, but still far too young to be old, enough scars deep and shallow to show you I'd been through some shit in that time. The kind of girl who stares into a cheap drink and wonders where her life went wrong. You know, the usual.
That's all fine so far though. What I'm wondering about is how we sunk low enough that us three are sitting across from Snapper, who holds the bottle that birthed my shot glass.
Snapper is... something. The biggest, blackest man I've ever seen. Always smiling way too wide, eight gold teeth front and center, four on top and four on bottom, always displaying "Fuck You!" proud as punch. He's also six-foot-fuck-off and almost as wide across the shoulders. His biceps look like beef basketballs crammed into a leather. The kind of guy you never want smiling too wide at you.
He's also our employer.
Yep.
I don't taste my drink as it goes down fast.
"Terms sound good," Blinky says. "Half now, half when we're finished, we'll collect your insurance for you."
"We don't worry so much about burning bridges when we're always just passing through." I agree.
Snapper laughs at that, a big "Hurr hurr hurr!" guffaw, slapping the table. It splinters a little. "Is that so? Should talk to Rook. But since we're all square and tight on this and all." He squints at Bill, who hasn't blinked once during the whole negotiation. "You sure you can't stick around? We're gonna need some quick hands next few weeks. Pay only goes up from here. Not going to find too many folks who can afford you."
He's right about that much. One big reason we do the wandering mercenary thing is because of what we do to the economy of any little place we stay in too long. Genesis, though, might be big enough for a change.
I give Blink a look, touching the rim of my thick glasses where they meet the frame, lowering them a little – not enough to expose my eyes to the light, but enough that he gets the signal. I'm seriously considering maybe staying in town a little if the work's good.
He shrugs.
"Offer like that isn't usually on the table." He admits, smiling a little. "Might be nice to stay in the same place more than a few days for a change."
"We'll make sure Doc is dealing with your 'insurance negotiations'," I agree, "So it's less bridge burning and more... what, heating?"
Doc just nods, smiling contentedly, sipping his milk. He manages to get a handlebar milk moustache. "I can do that. I'll just ask super nicely."
Bill and I will be standing behind him when he does though.
Snapper laughs again. "Hurr hurr hurr!" clutches his gut like it's the funniest thing he's ever heard. "Not the usual, but if the usual were what we were after, we'd do that. Alright, alright, yeah. You collect from the names on the list, come back to me here tomorrow at five, we'll talk about your futures."
I get a gutfeel, and my eyes go wide behind the shades.
Quick as thought, I flip the circular bar table table up vertical, creating a wall between us and Snapper. The last thing I see before I lose sight of him is his lips finally covering those gold teeth of his. He stops smiling, looks confused more than anything else. Guys that big tend to deal with confusion with their fists though.
Blinky still doesn't blink as he throws himself down after me. He's been with me long enough to know not to question this, and his hand's already going for the sawn-off as he twists to get behind the table with me. The Doc hesitates for just a moment, he's spinning with the table to stop his hard-won milk from spilling.
That's when the whole goddamn world explodes and Snapper disappears in a fine red spray all around us.
Eardrums took a real hit, and I think my left ear's bleeding. Nothing that won't heal, but it makes it that much worse then the Doc is howling in my only good one. I twise my head away and can hear Bill's hissing and groaning. Still can't see yet, too much dust and smoke and debris. Start hacking on it. Grab a kerchief from my vest and dump it in my water canteen, tie it off around my face.
Got to think about upping the shades to goggles one of these days, because it isn't doing jack about my eyes. Gah. Like a thousand tiny, smokey needles.
It takes a little for the dust to settle. Don't know how long, but honestly it takes as long as it takes, it's not like you've got anything else to do. Doc's screams have become a low whimper, and Blinky's just taking long, gutteral breaths out through his nose.
When it clears, can't be more than a full minute later, we can see how much worse the rest of the place is. Bartender's more shrapnel than man, and most of the bar open to the front wall is broken bottles and fragments.
Oh, yeah. Also, most of the front wall's gone. Should have been the first thing I noticed, but I was paying more attention to potential coping mechanisms.
Bill's tied his jeans tight with some white plastic zip ties, and he's bleeding from the leg that wasn't covered by the table pretty badly. Bleeding seems to be slowing though.
Doc's got it worse though. He didn't have the whole table. He's mostly saved by the fact that snapper dodged into him, acted as a wall of meat. He's covered in blood, but only a third is probably his. Still, that's a hell of a lot of blood, and he's looking a bit pale. A chunk of wall about as thick as my thumb is jutting out of his hip where it struck bone. Doesn't look like it hit anything vital.
I snap my fingers in front of his eyes a few times until he snaps into focus. Something stirs behind the panic, and Mittens starts pulling together into work mode. All those bits of him that had been scattered like so much of everything around us clumps like gravity until there's a steel edge.
"Triage. I'm a bit roughed up, but the copper plates have done enough to protect the vitals. No burns, none of the batteries were compromised. Wouldn't want to get that in an open wound." I shudder. Eugh. "Snapper..." he looks at the pile of mincemeat with scraps of cloth stained red that has been splattered against him, the floor, the table... checks his watc. "Calling time of death as three forty three pm."
Whoever said that was too early to be drinking didn't have to deal with this shit on a weekly basis.
"Hold still, Miss Helvetica, you're next." He grips my head in his firm, boney hands. His once curly-blonde hair that bounced whenever he even twitched is matted and blood-caked to the sides of his head and neck, but the kindness is still there behind the eyes. Everything was going to be alright. Some adrenaline leaked out of me as he held me by the head and neck. "Possible perforated left eardrum, right looks good. Almost certainly a concussion. You didn't pull yourself back fast enough when you got the feeling. You're going to have a hell of a headache as soon as fight-or-flight fades, so I recommend you go behind the bar and grab whatever you can. Bring me something too."
I look at him, astonished. Doc doesn't drink.
He shakes his head fast, like how a little kid does, flicking little speckles of blood as he does from the force of it. Fortunately I had my mouth closed. "For disinfectant, silly. Me and Blinky have shrapnel wounds. Head back to the Crash Cart when you're good. I'll get you your lollipop."
He's not kidding about the lollipop. It's just a thing he does for patients he likes. I always get grape, because it's my favourite. It's the little things.
Bill's pretty shellshocked too, but he's handling it better. He hadn't opened himself mentally to the blast like I had, so it hit him in the leg worse. He's scouring the skull-shaped pile in the meat pile and comes out with eight little gold nodules. Spells "Fuck you!" out in his hand.
I retch.
"Hey," he protests, pocketing them up near his breast somewhere after wiping them off on a less-bloody portion of his jumpsuit, "We aren't getting paid, and gold's a great conductor even if the resale's garbage." He squints at it a moment, twists the '!' between his thumb and forefinger bit. "It's Murdoch gold too. Pretty pure."
If Bill says it, it's true. He just knows, in the same way I get gutfeel, he says he feels it in his fingers, in his bones.
After the bombs dropped, the mental walls seemed to become more like mental suggestions. I our brains are all electrical impulse, and radiation is just EM waves, maybe all those stray charges shooting around make a path of least resistance between our heads, or carry them along and shoot our thoughts into each other's skulls like so much debris caught in a cyclone.
I am super obviously not a scientist.
I am a Tic, though, charming little nickname that it is. Like the parasite, like the weird twitch crazies get, and like the abbreviation for 'neurotic' all rolled up into one nice little pejorative. Blinky is a cleverfella, a fella that is, in fact, quite clever. And Doc? Doc is... something else.
Doc throws himself under Blinky's left shoulder and hawls him up, heaving him out towards the hole in the wall and towards the Crash Cart. I take the hint to dive behind the bar and grab as much as I can.
Register's mostly shredded, and there wasn' much to begin with. I still take what I can. Most of the bottles behind the bar survived the blast, but it's not the stuff the owner was advertising for a reason. Grog on one end of the spectrum, rotgut on the other. I grab what distill I can, the forty proof and above, and run back out. Stop. Head back.
Oh, you are fucking shitting me.
There's a bottle of actual, genuine, old-world rum back here. Top shelf brand, too. Barkeep was holding out on me!
Head's starting to pound, but I make a point to savour it. I drink enough to get my buzz right up to a hum before vaulting the bartop and heading back out. Doc's right, now that the adrenaline's starting to wear off I'm really feeling the pain. You ever have professional-grade earphones plugged into a system, you think the volume's too low so you twist the knob to max, then some chucklefuck figures out he forgot to plug it in, does without telling you?
That feeling you get when some primo wubs penetrate your skull because you couldn't get the headset off fast enough?
Yeah, it feels like that, only I don't have headphones I can throw off to make it go away.
It's stepping out into the afternoon sun that I see what's really happened. Bar wasn't the target. There's a crater in the bank opposite, and the Prancing Pony just happened to be hit hard. Explosives don't tend to discriminate, they're equal opportunity nightmare fuel. Christ.
Obviously wasn't financially motivated, because if that were the case they wouldn't have vaporized the loot. Shape charges around the back of the bank if you have this much firepower would have done better, inside man to get you a layout so you do the least damage, in and out in a couple seconds. How I'd have done it.
No, the place just... crumbled in on itself. No survivors, none that I can feel anyway.
"Helvetica!" Doc calls, and I snap out of it. He's leaning out of the armor plated old-world ambulance with the spiked cow catched that we affectionately call the Crash Cart, because we're punny. Closest thing I have to a home most days, which is why I grimace when I see Doc and Blinky bleeding all over it. Really rather wish they wouldn't.
I mean, that's a selfish thought. It's a field hospital first, my bunkhouse second, but I really made it my own hanging all the neon up, yeah? Glowsticks aren't easy to find in Pandemonium. Also, I'm pretty sure they aren't bleeding on purpose, and are actively doing everything they can to stop it, but... I mean that's where I was going to sleep tonight.
"Miss Helvetica, stop catching flies, I need that disinfectant." Doc chastises, stern voiced.
Oh, right, the booze. Eugh, such a waste to use it for medical purposes when I could be getting hammered off it.
I'm finding it really hard to focus for some reason.
Jog up to the back of the open Crash Cart, pass up some bottles. Doc refills his stock, pours some out on Blinky's wounds. He winces, hisses air through his teeth, but at least he's alive to complain about it. I'm standing in the dirt looking in the open double doors as Doc does what he can for Blinky on the center table. Doc's almost certainly done worse than Bill, but that never seems to factor into his triage.
"I'm running low on necessities." Doc admits. "Right now I could get the shrapnel out, but I wouldn't have anything to close the wound with. Make the bleeding worse. Most I can do right now is gauze and disinfectant."
"S'alright," Bill groants, holding his leg at the knee, "Just a real big splinter. I'll walk it off."
"You'd push it in deeper, and while it hasn't nicked anything huge just yet, that'd be a surefire way of making sure it did. We're keeping you up on the bed until I can get us something to suture this with."
"Was a joke, Doc."
"Oh! Oh, ha ha," Doc says more than laughs, but the smile's genuine, "I see. Sorry, I'm a little too focused."
The hair stands up on the back of my neck, and I realize I've been a little too focused too. Or inattentive. I turn around.
Genesis is mostly one mainstreet with splintering off side alleys, like something you'd see in a Wild Western. Aesthetic's helped a lot by the buildings mostly being made of gnarled deadwood, put up after the End. Only the Cathedral stands, now, as a proud testament of old times. One wide street for the freight that passes through, and so it's real easy to see a threat a mile off. Ambushes work almost exclusively on the hometeam's favour, which is probably why we've been so easy about a followup attack.
No bursts of gunfire, just one blast – big as it was – and no one mowing us down as we limped out of the Pony... but that's no excuse for
Five men in priest's cassocks move with military precision down the street, each holding enough firepower to give me warm tingly sensations. I wonder if they'd let me look them over if I asked nicely enough. One of them even has a huge black tank on his back and a complex nozzle strapped to his arm, and it's impossible not to see the pilot light. Church boy's bringing the hell fire.
They move in a grid, two facing the rear, two facing the front, covering all possible angles. The man in the center doesn't have a big gun himself, just a bull-barrel .44, but even from here I can see it's covered in intricate etchings and artwork in the way the piece catches the summer afternoon light.
I'm not getting malice vibes off them. One of them's throwing off some freaky mojo, and the one in the center is distinctly... wrong somehow, not bad just... a hole in the world.
"No sudden moves." I say over my shoulder at Doc and Blinky. They stop talking shop and look out at the approaching squad of men moving like so much clockwork. Bill still reaches for his sawn-off, but my word tends to be enough. He doesn't draw.
The one in the center of the priests, and I can see him more clearly now, is old. At least mid fifties, and his hair's more white than black. His face is long and angular, jaw like a steelcap boot and his nose probably looked like it had been measured out with a protractor before it got broken so many times.
When he speaks I nearly feel my knees give out. If a pool of water in the deepest caverns of the Earth could have a void, it would be this. Deep, authorative, calm, and terrifying. I feel the weight of my sins crawling up my back.
"We have wounded confirmed. Friar Lawrence, escort these weary travellers to the Cathedral. Assist however possible." The man with the flamethrower moves up beside me wordlessly, and I'll be damned if he isn't as big as Snapper, if only in the most whitebread direction. Where Snapper gave the impression of a beast let off its chain, Lawrence moved with stoic precision. Doc gets the wheels out under the bed, and they get it off the back of the Cart.
Friar Lawrence looks at the Doc oddly. Gets back up into the Cart, grabs a pair of crutches, and passes it to Bill. Gestures for him to get up off the stretcher, which he does. Then the big man, still silently and without a word, throws one up against Doc's back and the other scooping his knees out from under him and lies him on the stretcher instead. His hands come away bloody. The Doc smiles kindly as his eyes close, and a ragged breath heaves from him.
Holy shit.
Lawrence pushes the stretcher towards the looming Cathedral in the center of town, which must be at least five hundred meters away from us here at the Prancing Pony, as Bill keeps pace on the crutches, trying to work out just how many wounds the Doc wasn't telling us about.
The old man with the bull barrelled .44 turns to me, now. "I don't recognize you or your friends. I do not know your business in my town. But you have been harmed under my vigil, so I shall not insult you further by treating you with suspicion."
Oh, that's good, because we totally warrant that suspicion. Just not for, you know, the bomb.
"You're obviously drunk and concussed, as well, so I won't bother asking for a witness account until tomorrow morning. Go with my blessings to be with your friends, and the Sisters shall attend to you."
Hey! I'm not drunk, I've only had...
Shit.
Okay.
Maybe it wasn't just his voice making my knees all wobbly.
"Thank you... I'm sorry, what do I call you?"
"My reputation usually precedes me, I was curious as to why you had not addressed me. Father Martin."
Oh, shit. This is... Him, of course it's him.
Okay, so, when we came to Genesis, I thought this guy had to be an urban legend to scare off raiders, slavers, anyone who'd think the Rabbit Cult lands – Bibulous, sorry – were easy picking for Forge.
But no. Here he is, standing in front of me, and if even half the stories about this guy are true, then taking that job from Snapper might have been just about the last mistake we ever made. No wonder he felt like a hole in the world to me.
A faint smile passes across his face. "Ah, recognition at last. Then I trust you understand the significance of my hospitality?"
I nod so fast my head just about falls off my neck.
"Then go. Sister Josephine has fresh eggs of her avail, and Sister Pruwitt knows how to blend them into a fantastic hangover cure for reasons that are entirely, she assures me, selfless. Having known her in our youth, I am not so certain. Leave us, now, child."
And with that, before making sure I do exactly that, he turns and snaps orders at the other three Friars, who begin to search through the debris of the once-bank for... God only knows what. I hope they're looking for clues, I think, as I stagger-walk after my friends, because they're not going to find survivors.
twist
Forgot to capitalize Snapper's name.
That i is almost definitely not supposed to be there.
hauls
Don't know what word you were aiming for, but catched ain't it.
First question: am I an asshole for suggesting edits for something that will almost certainly be edited en-masse when it's finished?
Second question: How much money am I going to have to throw across the world to get a leather-bound edition on the next plane to Canada?
Closing statement: If any of these 'edits' are in fact nullified by Pandemonium's conlang, I sincerely apologize for my ignorance.
Hm, an interesting start. :)
3823925
To the first -- nope! Snapper capitalizations are because I'm doing this in Libre, too, and it's too busy trying to think I'm writing about the kind of fish.
To the second -- Intense shrugging. I'll need to finish it first, then I'll get back to you on that one.
3823977 Well, the second was basically just an overblown way of saying ERMAHGERD I AM FULL OF WANT.
Ooooooooh, nice. I'd buy it if I could, but living in a place where the dolar:local coin exchange is at 1:15 kinda makes it improbable for me to be able to.
Still, good luck in the story.
3823980
Actually, I'm Australian, so it's only 1:10!
Incredible stuff thus far, though the crawling sins combined with the character named after a typeface had me picturing skeletons.
You going to go all the way and publish it? Self-publishing, for example through Amazon, is apparently pretty easy these days.
3824070
My use of Helvetica as a character predates Undertale, actually -- I've used her in a few World of Darkness campaigns as an NPC -- it's just that when I realized that, I had to slip a Sans line in there.
3824479
No sense of legitimacy to it though! You gotta get real-published or you don't get to put it on a resume. Having a published novel really opens up your employment potential.
Hooooly fuckshit, do I want more of this... in short, you'd have another customer in me for a book.
Also, regarding Mare in the Moon update? Oh Sisters, so much yes~
Ooh. Nice.
Also, cow catcher. Like on trains, right? Great visual image, there, I can see all the armor plating the poor ambulance must have to balance that thing out.
Oh yes, this looks good.
Soo, you book now? Well, good luck bud! But when you're swimming in bukmunneh don't forget about your humble readers over here.