Nearer to Thee
These events take place shortly following @cloudbattrolls Repentance storyline.
Toyhou.se version here.
"Every day now, I find myself in the same place."
"I walk along the old corridor. The air is thick with rot. I can see their faces looking up at from below. Broken bones, chemical burns, most with their flesh melted right from the skull."
"They reach for me as I march, splintered fingers clutching at my boots as they try to pull me through."
"The exit leads to a forest, one that I never recognize. Then I meet it, the blackened creature that waits for me. Every day, I never get close enough to reach it. Its blank head turns towards me, and I wake up."
"Today, however, something new happened."
"Today, it tilted towards me, then it smiled, though it lacked any mouth to do so with. I merely felt it smile. No. That is not correct."
"I smiled. I felt happy. A sense of relief passed through me as joy filled my heart."
"I awoke still feeling that joy, and now I copy that feeling here before it passes."
Platar set the pen down on his desk, running a hand through his moderately shaggy head of hair. It had been perigees now that these dreams had continued, but this new development was a big problem.
He had not yet managed to track any information on what exactly the thing was that had marked him so long ago. All he had was a small sample of the rot that it had left him with.
He turned in his chair, checking the computer monitoring the quarantine. It showed a room locked behind thick metal doors, a glass case on a pedestal in the center. Inside of it was the carcass of a desert rat he had retrieved. Its body was decomposing at a rapid rate, already half skeletal despite only being dead a night.
What remained of its flesh was marked by a softly pulsating series of black bands, almost resembling severe burns. The rot had to be fed to stay alive, and his experiments had shown it held no interest in being fed old plants.
He looked back at his journal, chewing the inside of his mouth. This was not possible to conclude on alone. The world was getting worse. A city simply obliterated by... something. Just gone. No matter how hard he tried, he could not make a difference, even with his strange abilities. That one group had ignored him, but...
He had been hearing rumors lately, of some sort of machine-hunter...
=====
The stranger wove between the other trolls delicately, robes fluttering about their heels. The only sound in the room were the muffled cries of the persons struggling to try and rise from their chairs. Though nothing visibly bound them to the seats they were in, sweat poured off of each as they tried to stand, to move even one muscle that wasn't restricted to their faces.
The stranger wore a timid smile, the only part of their face visible beneath their hood, as they pushed the chairs into a circle, with each troll facing inward. They paused beside a brownblood, who had tears trickling down his cheeks.
"No tears, please," they whispered, whisking the wetness from his cheeks with a flick of their sleeve. "It's a waste."
The troll's eyes shook wildly as they looked at the stranger, who returned their look with that same smile as they proceeded to the center of the circle. The living room of this hive had been cleared of everything but for a chair in the middle and the trolls arranged in a wide circle on the edges. A few sleeping bags were still wadded up in the corner of the room. Through the blackout curtains on the windows, the rays of the setting sun could still be seen.
The six trolls here were lowbloods in all, ranging from red to yellow. The stranger sat down on the chair in the center, drawing a hand to their throat. "Thank you for the invitation, we will gladly accept your assistance," they whispered.
Their hand sharply plunged towards their own throat, flesh bubbling and beginning to melt.
======
"Which brings us to this kind of fucked up thing that turned up recently," Garsad said, clicking his remote and moving the slideshow to the next slide.
The slide was a picture of a rather mediocre looking hive, the only standout thing about it were the only slightly ominous looking stains on the interiors of the front facing windows.
He, along with Xrumon and Avanti, were crammed into the too-small back room of the cheapest storefront they could have afforded for their meager little group. The wallpaper was peeling, there were some mild cracks in the foundation, and if the sole lamp in the room was on, it probably would have been flickering. There were some shelves with nothing on them pushed to the sides of the room, with the middle being taken up by a cart with a computer and a projector on it. The other two trolls were just in front of it and off to the sides on their own chairs. A single, ancient landline phone sat on the wall.
"Moreso than the entire city that up and left?" Xrumon groused, chafing in the uncomfortable folding chair he was forced to use.
"Well yeah, I mean. What do we even do about that? That's like. An ant trying to worry about a lawnmower," Garsad replied, shrugging. "Besides, your boss made it out, right?"
"Feh. Not much of a boss now since the factory went-" the teal snapped his fingers, grumbling. "Anyway, forget it."
"Did you send Alpha to check it out already?" Avanti asked.
"There's nothing to check. Whole place is cordoned off by the navy, I'm not sending those twitchy bastards something fucked up like our science project to shoot at."
Garsad cleared his throat, pressing the remote again. The next slide showed the interior of the hive, specifically the living room. Xrumon winced, feeling his stomach churn slightly.
Avanti, as well, pursed her lips and leaned forward in her seat, looking slightly more pale.
"Not a fan of censorship? Is this why we're doing this before breakfast?" Xrumon complained.
"Yeah, actually," Garsad nodded. "You need the raw details, man! Plus, I mean, look. There's actually important stuff here besides the guy's int-"
"Skip to the relevant parts, please," Avanti chimed in.
The brownblood picked up a laser pointer and gestured with it over the slide. The laser danced across the photo of the room in a distinct pattern, matching the whorls of blood seen in it.
"See this here? It's a little pattern I saw. Patterns are like, big shit in the supernatural world. From what I've learned anyway," he began. Xrumon wryly noted he appeared to also be avoiding looking too much at the scene pictured. "But this one? I haven't seen any like this in what I can get my hands on. But it's definitely deliberate."
He clicked to the next slide, a photograph of the same room from another angle, and his laser danced about again.
"See? Same pattern, bigger. In circles, over and over around the whole room."
"You sure it's not the workings of your average blitzed out subjug?" Xrumon asked, only mildly joking.
"Nah nah, they try to paint with their shit. Always looks terrible, probably since they're mad doped off their sopor pies and shit soda. This is delicate and precise, which, uh, hides pretty well behind everything else."
"So what do you think it is? Any theories?" Avanti asked.
"I think... I think it's some kind of message. You can, you know, call things, I think, if you write the right message. Usually it's names, like how you write a letter and put my name on it?" the mechanic tried to explain, stumbling only slightly as his brain tried to reach all memories needed. "This, I think, is like that. Like a.... a.... hailing?"
"A beacon," Xrumon said, earning a nod.
"Yeah, that! You know bloody mary and all? Say her name three times? Well this pattern, I think, is like that. So I think it's supposed to represent something. And, you know. Call it. Message it?"
"Well what the hell kind of shape is it? I can barely make it out past the viscera and your stupid laser pointer!"
Garsad clicked to the next slide, a photograph taken from the ceiling's point of view.
"...Is that an eye?" Xrumon asked. Something inside him went deathly chill at the sight of it.
======
Corelo pinched the bridge of his nose, drumming the fingers of his other hand on his desk.
When the highbloods had started acting nicer, that had been worrying. When everyone started clearing off the streets, that had been concerning.
When the navy destroyers appeared on the horizon and the city seemed to begin to twist and mutate, that had been catastrophic.
Fortunately, most of the mob's people had been able to escape. His hand moved from his nose to the beeper laying still in front of him, next to his notepad. It paid to have backup communications available, and doubly so to have escape routes, bugout bags, and tunnels ready.
He could still easily recall the strained silence as his group had sped out of the city, explosions and lasers lighting up the darkness behind them in the sky. Then the blinding flash as the city decided it had no business being here and simply vanished, like a god had scooped it right from the ground with a cosmic melon baller.
Now, back at his office, he was trying to figure out what to even do. Membership loss had been minimal, but any inroads he had been making into the city were obviously vaporized. That was a substantial loss of revenue, even if there had been nothing he could have done to prevent it. Nobody at all knew what the hell had happened, and if the empire knew, it certainly wasn't about to tell people how it had failed.
He took a deep breath, let it out slowly, then checked the potted plant in the corner for the fiftieth time. It was still perfectly plastic and dead, as it should be. All plants were banned from the office after what had been witnessed happening in the stars above some perigees ago. Odd shit seemed to be happening at an increased pace. He grit his teeth.
He was tired of this, this feeling of lack of control, of always being on the backfoot. He would never rise up further in the ranks if he was always having his fronts lost to the void or his members being culled by some sort of psionic serial killer (though that, at least, seemed to have stopped), or rogue members going around attacking hospitals.
He paused. He'd had everyone pore over the information on that case. The doctor he'd kept tabs on. She was in some sort of caravan, doing medical work, followed around occasionally by some odd other troll he'd never been able to get anything on. Sure, he could probably order some form of reprisal on her, but that wouldn't gain anything, especially with how far she had moved from their operations.
But that wasn't what he was concerned about. Odd shit. There had been that one report of a bizarre robot that had arrived one night to see her.
His eyes darted to his rolodex. He flicked through the cards in it until he came to the one he wanted. He opened a drawer in his desk and picked out a phone at random, flipping it open and dialing the number as he retrieved a notebook from a different drawer.
"Hi, I've got a friend who's celebrating something soon," he said as soon as the call was answered. "I'm looking for gift ideas. Do you know anything about a..."
He flipped through the notebook for a few pages.
"Xrumon Arigah? I think he likes mechanical stuff, but I haven't been able to reach him."
There was silence on the other end for a few moments. Then: "We have a few options in stock. Would you prefer us to perform further research on what they may enjoy?"
"That would be wonderful, thank you. You can send a letter to my post box." Corelo replied, hanging up shortly after.
That robot had been odd. That doctor had been odd. But that teal had remained in the background until he'd been forced to come forward.
Well, maybe it was time to shed some light on his involvement, and on that machine.