//------------------------------// // Level Seven: When Your Fan Asks You What That Smell Is, Run // Story: Delinquency // by Daemon McRae //------------------------------// Level Seven: When Your Fan Asks You What That Smell Is, Run “So, THAT was ugly,” Treble groaned, jabbing a thumb in the general direction of the golem’s remains. He’d taken up his usual spot on the couch, while Spooks had almost immediately dived back into his books, which nearly buried the frail kid in the large chair. With Rubble taking a very shaken Twilight home, and Dusty both cleaning up the mess (with much protest on his behalf) and repairing the sigil on the side of the building, it was down to the two of them to parse what information they had. Or, it would be, if Bones would actually join the conversation. The horror wizard had said something about the creature looking ‘familiar’, and then hadn’t spoken a word since. The only sound he made was the prolific shuffling of papers and the thuds of books opening, closing, and hitting the floor in frustration. Thus, Treble was left to his own devices. Which at this hour would usually mean a nap, but now he was all over adrenaline. Being the only one not actually being productive also made him feel bad, at least a little, so he looked around the room for something to do. He settled on cleaning. The building that they had made their home away from home apparently used to be a financial building of some kind. Treble wasn’t sure exactly what they got up to, here, as exploring more than the first floor had proven difficult; there was a substantial amount of debris blocking the only stairwell up, and the elevator of course didn’t work any more. There were still some rooms on this floor with most of the walls left standing, but they’d found no real use for most of them. Their kitchen, sitting room, and ‘bedroom’ were all technically part of what used to be a lobby, though with all the desks, decorations, and wallpaper gone it looked more like a low-budget horror movie. Which is probably why Spooks spent so much time here. Of course, they hadn’t gotten around to cleaning the entire floor, as of yet. The living room had come first, mainly as a place to put some old couches they’d found (One of which had been thrown out after they’d impaled a zombie on it. Some smells you just can’t get out.). After a few months of cleaning and making it clear to the one or two cops who actually patrolled the area that they weren’t turning it into a crack den, they’d made room for the kitchen. Which again they had to explain wasn’t a crack den. The bedroom had been their summer project, as they’d all wanted a place to crash away from home, for one reason or another. Rubble still saw the ghost of his father whenever he walked into his house, Bones’ parents never seemed to stop fighting, and Dusty never really explained why he preferred to be anywhere else except ‘home’. For Treble, it was less about running away from something and more like running to it. His parents were encouraging enough, treated him well, and they weren’t hurting for money or food. He even got along with his little sister just fine. In truth, Treble’s problem was that he’d never really found anything to be good at. He loved music, and spent as much time as he could practicing. He’d even gotten a part-time job at an old recording studio that now gave vocal coaching and singing lessons. Yet he hadn’t really mastered the art of creating music of his own. He could sing well enough, if not great. His guitar saw plenty of use through practice, though he’d never bring it here (Rubble had a tendency to grab the biggest heaviest metal thing he could to hit monsters with). The biggest problem seemed to be that he wasn’t making any real progress. This, however, [i[this he was good at. Fighting monsters. Protecting his friends. Running headfirst into dangerous situations, even if only to serve as a distraction. This was a life he was getting better at, every day. This was one thing he could be proud of, on a list that could generously be called short. Really, Treble just wanted a place he could go where his presence meant something. At school he was just seen as a hopeless flirt who hung around kids with anger issues. True or not, he didn’t want to live a life you could condense down to a single sentence. He wanted to be a whole damn library. “Did you have to light the damn thing on fire?!” a loud shout followed by the all-too-common slam of a metal security door made Treble jump and lose his grip on the large wooden beam he was trying to push to the side. Jumping out of the way before it fell on his… well, everything, his heel caught yet more debris, and he fell backwards. Only to be caught by Dusty. “Jesus, you alright? Don’t go dying in this shithole.” the bigger kid groaned, helping him to his feet. “Thanks,” DT grumbled, shaking himself off. A layer of drywall dust shook loose from his hoodie as he patted himself down to check for mortal wounds. Finding none, he reoriented himself and went back to work. That beam wasn’t gonna move itself. Devil watched him work for a second, then dropped himself onto the ratty couch as close to Bones as he could get. “No seriously. Fire? Really?! Do you have any idea how hard that was to clean?” Bones slammed his book with a frustrated glare in DD’s direction, and growled, “Yes. Yes I did. As a matter of fact, that’s the only thing that killed it. Knocking it’s head off, while mildly effective, wouldn’t have stopped it completely. It doesn’t have a brain,” he elaborated, as Dusty raised a hand to argue. When he put it back down, Spooks continued, “Look, that thing was basically spare parts. No, you don’t want to know where the parts are coming from. It’s really kind of disgusting, even for us. The actual golems, according to gramps, are much more efficient. And better constructed. They’re faster, stronger, and apparently look like flesh mannequins.” Dusty flinched. “Ooh, Rubble’s not gonna like that. He hated mannequins.” Bones rolled his eyes. “Yes, yes he does. Now, there’s good news and bad news. Again. The bad news is that yes, the real golems are going to be harder to fight, even though we know how to kill them. The good news is, we don’t have to fight a hundred and fifty of the fucking things.” “OH THANK GOD,” Treble groaned, heaving a sheet of broken drywall out a busted window. The ‘backyard’ of the building basically served as a dumping ground for debris at this point. “We just have to kill enough of them that they can’t gather a hundred and fifty. I don’t know how many there’s actually going to be,” Bones continued. Dusty stared at him, mouth agape. “So what, we just have to find wherever this stupid ritual is, and keep killing golems until some arbitrary clock runs out?” The ghastly kid sighed. “Yes, apparently. I actually found the ritual, thanks to that sideshow failure out there, and the basic gist of it is that they need to gather enough raw material to create the three giants. If even one of them fails to rise, they all do. They keep each other alive, it seems.” Treble groaned with hard-earned effort, and flopped into the bean bag chair, not wanting to walk the extra five feet to the couch. “So I know I’m going to egret asking this, and I’m telling you right now to use small words, but why exactly is this a time-sensitive issue?” A few piles of books got shuffled around as Bones made room in the chair for the granddaddy of old-ass books: his grandfather’s grimoire, the accumulation of all the general knowledge he’d gathered over the years. Lacking many of the finer points and specific details the smaller journals had, this book primarily acted as a reference, and The Idiot’s Guide to Everything Terrible. Which is what they usually called it. Spooks flicked through the pages with practice, landing on a specific entry. “Well, explaining that also answers that question earlier that I said you didn’t want to know the answer to. Good thing Twilight’s gone home. So here goes: you know how All Hallow’s Eve is the one night of the year where the barrier between the world of the living and the dead is the thinnest?” Neither of the other two boys liked where this was going. “Yeah….” Dusty said hesitantly. “Well, it’s just one of many, many ‘Barrier Days’ throughout the year. Our universe is basically a big-ass marble in a whole bag of the things, and we’re constantly brushing up against other marbles. Some are bigger than others, some are so tiny you don’t even notice them, and some… well… some eat other marbles,” Spooks explained with no lack of trepidation. His metaphor was met with uneasy looks. “This is where things get really really gross really quick, and we get an extra history lesson. There’s a reason the hecatonchieres overthrew the Titans so well. They’re apparently not actually storm giants. That’s why I was having so much trouble finding any information on them. I was looking in all the wrong places.” Treble gulped audibly. “So, uh, what are they?” Spooks turned the big-ass book around, showing them a picture they’d really rather have not seen, of a massive creature of flesh and bone who’s construction and anatomy not only made no sense, but was actively painful to look at. “They’re Beasts. From the Outer Rings.” ------------------------- Rubble sighed into his cell phone as Spooks finished a very long, vey disturbing, and entirely unasked-for explanation of the real threat. Then followed up with several kicks to his car tire and some choice cursing. His outburst was met with more than a few worried looks, as he felt the eyes of a few girls behind him. Twilight had asked not to be driven home, instead opting to go to Sunset’s house, calling her friends on the way. They’d all met so that Twilight could recount her… experience, much to the dismay and varying degrees of disgust of her friends. Apparently Twilight had a wonderful eye for detail. Which would explain the need to stop two more times on the way here to vomit some more. Rubble had been just about to leave when his phone had rung, and he stood outside his car to have the conversation. It wasn’t exactly a newer model, so setting it on speakerphone and driving while he talked was a… suboptimal situation. Now he wished he hadn’t answered the thing, and just drove home to go to sleep. “Um, do I… do I want to know what that call was about?” Sunset asked. She, Twilight (not the princess, that one went home) and Applejack had come outside to see what the fuss was about the first time he’d started swearing. Something about 'mannequins'. Rubble looked up with an expression that wasn’t so much ‘dissatisfied’ as it was ‘life is meaningless and someone just explained why in great detail, fuck off’. “No, no you don’t. Alright, back in the house.” Twilight and Applejack exchanged worried glances as Sunset raised her eyebrows. “Um, why?” Sparkle asked. “Because I’m going to explain it anyway.” -------------- Once they’d all settled into Sunset’s living room, which was a bit smaller than the one at the boys’ hideout, if much more comfortable, Rubble took a seat against a wall near a window. One, because all the actual seating was taken, and two, so he could bounce his skull against the drywall a couple of times when he got mad. Sunset had put a pillow behind his head when he’d explained this, as she wasn’t confident in her wall’s ability to be more stubborn than Rubble’s skull. “Ok, look. I’m going to explain this as best as I can, so for those intellectuals among you who might want more detail, god help you if you do, ask Spooky. Now, you all know about Halloween being like, the day where the veil is thinnest, right?” Rubble asked. His question was met with various levels of nodding and verbal agreement. He went on to explain the marble metaphor that Spooks had told him, bless the kid’s heart, and they seemed to follow that okay. “Right, here’s where things get God-Awful fucking scary,” Rubble continued. “There are some marbles in the bag that are just… wrong. Other worlds where literally everything you know about reality is not only actively wrong, it’s a joke. Places with more spacial dimensions than we’re capable of understanding. And yes, I know I’m using a lot of big words here, but Spooks has explained this bit to me more than a few times. Whether I like it or not. Now, some of these places are referred to in certain communities as the ‘Outer Rings’. Dimensions so far apart from ours that just brushing up against them creates all kinds of havoc. Like the Hundred-handed ones. They weren’t, and never have been, storm giants. They’re Beasts. Which is a nice way of saying they’re unholy indescribably monstrosities whose very presence in our dimension would start to break down the walls of reality.” He paused for a second to gauge their reactions. Rainbow Dash raised a hand. “I understood exactly none of that.” There was a soft thud as Rubble’s head met pillow met drywall. “Ok. You know how when you have a nightmare, like about some really horrible monster, you can’t remember what it looks like?” The athlete nodded. “Yeah?” “Imagine that in the real world. A creature so malformed, so horrible, that you can’t remember it when you look away because your brain literally can’t retain the information. Twilight, all that vomiting you did? That’s like step one in a twelve-step program for recovering from an encounter,” he added, directing his attention to the purple girl, who was growing paler by the second. Unfortunately, she was more than smart enough to understand what Rubble was saying. Even more so, she knew he was reaching to try and explain things the best he could, which meant it was actually worse than it sounded, because Rubble wasn’t exactly the most academic person. She nodded slowly, not saying anything. “Wait,” Sunset interjected. “If Twilight threw up just by looking at the flesh golem, how come you didn’t?” Rubble groaned. “The body and mind build a tolerance. No, we’ve never fought a Beast before, not even close, but we’ve seen some horrible stuff. It… changes you. Slowly. Your mind little by little gets an idea of what’s out there, and adjusts itself accordingly. Also, that wasn’t an other-dimensional creature. That was just spare parts.” Twilight passed out. “Oh good, she’s asleep. She’s probably not going to want to hear this next part,” Rubble mused. A statement that was met with varying degrees of alarm. “So, to get to current events, the Hundred-Handed ones, not storm giants. Evil Beasts from beyond our time and space. And their dimension just happens to make a pit stop right next to ours over the next few weeks. The peak of which is apparently a week from now, which is when some idiot is going to try and do this ritual thing.” “So what is the ritual?” Rarity asked after a moment, because it didn’t seem like anyone else wanted to. “Mostly? It’s a cash grab,” Rubble answered. “Some dumbass who thinks they can take advantage of the weak spot in the dimensional walls and either make a deal with, or try to control, the things on the other side. This whole ‘collecting golems’ thing is just a physical metaphor for the Beast accumulating enough of itself on this side of the wall to manifest entirely. The good news here is that if it’s missing even a little bit of the power it needs, it can’t stabilize, and the whole mess falls apart and gets sucked back into its own dimension.” “Is that where the ‘hundred and fifty’ part comes from?” Sunset asked, being one of the two people in the room around for the original explanation. The other being passed out on the couch. “Yeah. This thing creates, or, more accurately, shows up, as a bunch of weird human-like flesh monsters that all try to gather together into some giant monstrosity,” Rubble sighed. “That’s the good news. We just gotta keep knocking them down until there’s not enough for the Beast to get a foothold.” “So...” Applejack asked slowly, hesitant to even join the conversation. “What part about this did you say Twilight wouldn’t want to hear?” Rubble groaned in distaste, his expression one of almost amused disgust. “Cause you gotta set the things on fire, and the smell is fuckin’ atrocious.”