daily pollution it’s the horsemen today but shhh lore i thought up in the shower part 37
While they do not have birthdays, the horsemen (except for Death) all popped into existence.
First was Pestilence, who poured from the rotting body of the lion that Adam killed. He didn’t exactly follow them, just walked off to do his own thing until they had to kill something else.
Next was War, who came to life when Adam and Eve had their first fight. She toddled behind them for a while.
Then Famine, after Adam and Eve went their first night hungry. He and War followed after them for quite a while.
Pollution was much later. They crawled out of a smoking pitcher of oil down in the Cloaca Maxima or something during the fire of Rome.
Death encountered Pestilence at the lion’s corpse, not knowing why, but taking him along with him. He found War and Famine after they both got their first kills, taking them both along with him as well.
So, there Death was, with three young kids trailing after him, trying to figure out what they were, if they were demons, angels, or something else entirely. Death raised them.
They looked on from their corner, watching their… friend(?) be saved from the consequences of being near them for less than an hour. They knew this feeling very well. It always came back for them, reminding them that they were a Horseman and they’d never be anything but. It had happened first when they’d been about seven, wrestling with a Byzantine boy just like he’d seen all the other children do.
They watched the boy begin to cough, and wheeze, and cry. They saw the light fade from his eyes as he cried for help. No one could do anything. Mr. P started keeping them a tad further from people. Over the next centuries, they had incidents again and again, where they’d kept trying to be near humans. The numerous deaths they’d caused made them quit trying with mortal creatures altogether. They never touched another plant, petted another dog, shook hands with another man again.
They figured immortal beings were safe, and began reaching out for communication and conversation there.
They were sorely mistaken.
The uppers ran from them, cowering in the corners of Heaven and whispering about how a demon had gotten up into heaven. Alright, they’d thought. I’ve seen the lowers a bunch of times. Surely, they must want to speak with me.
Wrong again. Demons, despite their crowded hallways, always yelled down them to create a path for ‘the cursed boy of Pestilence’. They’d tried to see if they could at least be in the vicinity of either.
That was a horrific mistake. Worse than all the rest. It’s not very often you see immortal, unfettered forms writhing and screaming and bubbling and exploding with the force of a dying star before reforming.
They learned to stay away. Stay away from people, stay away from the uppers, stay away from the lowers, all of them. The one class of thing they could be around were the others.
And then they stopped meeting up. After the incident with the Boy, he hadn’t heard a peep from neither Miss Scarlett nor Doctor Sable. Hell, even before then, the contact had been dwindling. Sable stopped sending them contracts to eat or classified scientific discoveries. Scarlett stopped popping by to talk gossip and to fiddle with their hair.
They hadn’t seen Mr. P since the use of anthrax in letters. He hadn’t… hadn’t even written.
So, they sat. Sat in their cubbies, wandered the mortal world keeping their hands to themselves and unintentionally scaring away everything, investing their time in doing their job and acquiring all their little doodads and toys and merchandise to fill time. So, so much time.
They sat in that corner, barely hearing words. They needed to leave. Trying to make friends would never work. Too dangerous. Too many hurt. They’d unconsciously ruined this clean flat in less than an hour.
It wasn’t meant to be. It was never meant to be.
They quietly oozed through the cracks in the floor, reforming themselves, handheld console in hand, somewhere away from there. Somewhere far, far away. They chose Los Angeles, ironically. They needed to sit in the ash, in someplace they wouldn’t kill everything around them.
They found the nearest dump, making their way to one of their little cubbies on autopilot. They were playing Animal Crossing, console parallel to the ground with their neck and face positioned to see. Their posture was horrid. They cut through the trash with ease despite wearing blades. It was their domain, full of things they couldn’t tarnish.
They eventually found the place - one of their roomier cubbies, with more furniture than usual. It had a couch, a table, a fridge, a television, and several of their trinkets and collectibles that Sable always called foolish. They flopped down on the old, worn, withered, soft brown couch, sinking into the cushion. Their rollerblades undid themselves and plopped down next to the decrepit old thing.
They curled up into the cruxt between the back cushion and the arm of the sofa, in the same ball they’d been in before. They tapped away at the little screen with their stylus, lonelier than they’d ever been. As the soft music pinged in their old headphones, they curled up tighter into the couch, the only thing that would hold them.
@angelo-rib-shack @janeway-lover
not meant to be replied to, just
daily pollution lore I thought up in the shower pt 58
Sticking with the common theme that Famine Sucks, Pollution loves dirtying Famine’s suits. There’s nothing the Boy enjoys more than accidentally lurching forward and bleaching blotches on his expensive suits and watching his face contort in that controlled fury, more than puffing smoke that would blow downwind and ruin the texture, whatever that meant, of his latest same black shirt with a high price tag and seeing him remove himself from public to go Sharp and have a fit. Pollution had made a sort of game out of it. Just another petty spat between the two youngest Horsemen.
(Famine tries his hardest to try and get back at them. He grins with delight when he brushes Pollution’s Tamagotchis and listens to the beeps of their hunger-born death, when they’ve gotten their hands on one of their trivial little themed snacks and he passes by and the snack has mysteriously become nothing but remnants.)
daily pollution lore I thought up in the shower pt 56
Pollution, as the youngest, is the most in tune with general consumption trends and, thus, technology. They gather the other three Horsepeople together each month to brief them on the latest tech and show them how to use it. The rest of them tend to be very grateful, probably. Famine is just sort of quiet and scribbles notes about the new tech, War asks specifically about new tech on the battlefield she might’ve missed and riddles the Boy with fun facts, and Death seems sort of wordlessly thankful.
daily pollution pestilence and famine lore I thought up in the shower pt 51
The existence of the Nestle corporation was an idea conceived between two very powerful man-shaped beings on a twenty two hour first class fight. The evils of that corporation, including forcing and manipulating poor African mothers to buy their baby formula (resulting in the death of 10.5 million babies), exploiting droughted areas, child slave labor (they didn’t intend for that to happen but Mammon got his grubby hands on the CEO), being one of if not the worst plastic polluter on the planet (Pollution wanted a hand in this venture too), and contaminating groundwater (Pollution stuck their entire, microplastic covered hand into the venture), are entirely caused by Famine and Pestilence. They’d always been the businessmen on the group, after all.
daily pollution pestilence lore I thought of in the shower pt 48
He was the one who started all those rumors about big pharma and vaccines being poison and such. Humans are so quick to panic that he didn’t even need to do anything. Let them believe it’s not natural. It certainly made his job easier.
Every time a parent refuses vaccines or medical care on the basis of it being ‘poison’, Pestilence smiles inside.
daily pollution lore I thought of in the shower pt 45
If and when the Horsepeople all congregate at a bar, War will drink the hardest liquor she can find just to make a fool out of every man in there, Famine will wrinkle his nose up at anything caloric and begin giving unhealthy dieting advice to cope (he’s particularly good at using ethos to get people to listen), Death will be holding an ornate glass chalice of some sort that definitely didn’t come from the bar filled with a black… liquid (the liquid is ancient Roman wine that Pollution ‘dyed’ black as their first craft. They gave it to Death and he kept it for a multitude of reasons), and Pollution never even gets a chance to look at the options because one of the other three will have already ordered them apple juice.
daily pollution lore I thought up in the shower pt 39
When they got older, and they figured out how to live with their illness, it got harder and harder for them to walk without oozing. They began wearing rollerblades or rollerskates (they change out the wheel structure depending on their needs) constantly. It just made things easier for them. The other four had to get used to the speed.
It’s a little harder to use their skates in Hell, but, somehow, someway, there’s always a clear path. Either that, or anything in their path melts in acid. On days when they simply coast to where they need to go, they use skates, not blades, and it’s almost more unnerving to the surrounding demons than them dragging themselves through Hell Hexxus-style.
They also began keeping a skateboard and shoes on their motorcycle, just in case they need to wear shoes.
