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rainbowfic2012-09-08 07:13 pm
settecorvi) wrote in rainbowfic2012-09-08 07:13 pm
Entry tags:
Tyrian Purple #3, Alice Blue #10
Name: Chel
Story: Demiurge, The Bonetrain to Pandemonium, Part 3/? (Parts 1 | 2)
Colors: Tyrian Purple #3 (born of sea foam), Alice Blue #10 (life, what is it but a dream?)
Supplies and Styles: Pastels (gravity)
Wordcount: 826
Summary: In which the void stares back and Naveed makes a choice that will obviously have no negative repercussions whatsoever
Rating: G
Warnings: None
Notes: Mods, is it okay that this is one story coming out in dribs and drabs? Criticism is deeply appreciated! What didn’t work for you, or could be improved?
Since it's been a while, previously on the Weird Express: Naveed is a synaesthetic telepath. Where she comes from, they've figured out a way to half-reanimate giant snake skeletons and use them to navigate the void between the worlds. This kind of makes our public transportation look pretty efficient in comparison, especially since it turns out the bonetrains occasionally forget they're dead and swim off into the void to go do whatever giant space snakes do. Surprise, this is happening to Naveed's morning commute. Since she's not a fan of dying, Naveed's entered the bonetrain's mind to see if she can hit its mental snooze button.
***
A nothingness Naveed’s eyes color black surrounds her. That wouldn’t provide a problem; she’s walked architectures built without sight before. What disconcerts her is the absence of any recognizable cues whatsoever, chief among them a direction that registers as down. Even dolphins keep a sense of towards the surface, but in its life the bonetrain swam a sea unending, and in death gravity is still foreign to the shape of its mind. She hangs suspended in a void unbroken by even the sharp lines of the worldstrands.
No, not suspended, she has the subtle sense that she is in motion as she considers her surroundings. Naveed spreads her unseen fingers in the dark, and a current whispers between them. It feels like neither air nor water against her hands, closer to the vibration of sound below her hearing’s threshold than any earthly medium, which suggests that her mind is trying to translate a foreign sense. She kicks and doesn’t meet enough resistance to propel her anywhere, though it sends her spinning lazily around her own center of gravity until she backstrokes enough to counter her momentum.
Vision is useless, touch is unhelpful at best, and she can’t hear anything beyond that pervading thrum. Perhaps scent might orient her?
She sniff experimentally, and the bonetrain’s thoughts contract around her with all the weight of the ocean. There is no air here, and she should have known that. The act of breathing is alien, and the bonetrain is abruptly aware of her as an intrusion, something to be expelled or destroyed or smoothed until she fits. She is irritating as a piece of grit in the gut of its mind, and it wants her gone. She bites back the instinct to struggle for breath against the choking pressure bearing down on her. Her avatar’s lungs ache, but it won’t kill her, her physical body is still breathing. She knows that, reminds herself of it fiercely. The standard response would be to quiet her racing thoughts and breathe with the host until she registered as no more than another part of the autonomics, but that would be the opposite of a solution here.
Instead, she lets the current resonate through her, focuses on it even through the stifling attention bent on her and the flutter of her own rising fear. Sound has carried her into its mind, and now it carries her through the bonetrain’s scrutiny. Half-felt currents buffet her, snap at her chest until her bones creak, tug her braid taut behind her. The eddies seem to half blow through her rather than carry her with them, as though she is too solid, built out of the wrong sort of matter. They carry even fainter overtones of agitation/confusion/defense on a skirling, screaming melody, spiky and alien enough to make nausea roil in her stomach. She doesn’t even want to consider what vomiting in the bonetrain’s mind would elicit from her host.
An immeasurable time of listening and carefully not breathing later, the bonetrain’s awareness relaxes in a gradual decrescendo, and she with it. Drifting in the dark, she feels for the limits of her skin, the boundary where she ends and the bonetrain begins, while she considers her options.
She’s not quite where she started, literally speaking, given the current bearing her deeper into the train’s architecture, but she certainly hasn’t made any progress. How much time has passed already, while she tried to puzzle out how to navigate the bonetrain’s mind, let alone the source of its agitation? Angles? A radian? How much longer does she have before the bonetrain wakes completely from its dreaming death? How would she even know if it’s woken, from in here? Perhaps it’s already overwhelmed the conductor and they’re tearing away from the worldnet as fast as a skeleton can swim. Perhaps she’ll slip back into her body to find everyone dead and she the only one left, cushioned from the effects of the bonetrain’s rousing within its own mind. She is not built on the proper scale for this space, she doesn’t fit here. She can’t catch her bearings because there are no bearings to catch. Or at least none perceivable to a human.
A possibility occurs to her. On second thought, she almost wishes it hadn’t.
Her masters, sihara and mindreaver both, had lectured on allowing the host’s mind to dictate your form. What they’d mostly said was, “Don’t do it.” The reasons not to are quite cogent, the results of ignoring the advice quite gruesome. The thing is, everyone’s sanity is going to crack like eggs and they’re going to die horribly if she doesn’t try something fast, so the usually deterrents are looking less dreadful by the moment.
Naveed lets go.
Fingers and toes bleed into nothing, skin sloughs into senselessness, muscle unravels from bone, and with a wrench she tears herself from her face, forgets lips, teeth, closes her eyes and relinquishes them.
And then there is darkness.
Story: Demiurge, The Bonetrain to Pandemonium, Part 3/? (Parts 1 | 2)
Colors: Tyrian Purple #3 (born of sea foam), Alice Blue #10 (life, what is it but a dream?)
Supplies and Styles: Pastels (gravity)
Wordcount: 826
Summary: In which the void stares back and Naveed makes a choice that will obviously have no negative repercussions whatsoever
Rating: G
Warnings: None
Notes: Mods, is it okay that this is one story coming out in dribs and drabs? Criticism is deeply appreciated! What didn’t work for you, or could be improved?
Since it's been a while, previously on the Weird Express: Naveed is a synaesthetic telepath. Where she comes from, they've figured out a way to half-reanimate giant snake skeletons and use them to navigate the void between the worlds. This kind of makes our public transportation look pretty efficient in comparison, especially since it turns out the bonetrains occasionally forget they're dead and swim off into the void to go do whatever giant space snakes do. Surprise, this is happening to Naveed's morning commute. Since she's not a fan of dying, Naveed's entered the bonetrain's mind to see if she can hit its mental snooze button.
A nothingness Naveed’s eyes color black surrounds her. That wouldn’t provide a problem; she’s walked architectures built without sight before. What disconcerts her is the absence of any recognizable cues whatsoever, chief among them a direction that registers as down. Even dolphins keep a sense of towards the surface, but in its life the bonetrain swam a sea unending, and in death gravity is still foreign to the shape of its mind. She hangs suspended in a void unbroken by even the sharp lines of the worldstrands.
No, not suspended, she has the subtle sense that she is in motion as she considers her surroundings. Naveed spreads her unseen fingers in the dark, and a current whispers between them. It feels like neither air nor water against her hands, closer to the vibration of sound below her hearing’s threshold than any earthly medium, which suggests that her mind is trying to translate a foreign sense. She kicks and doesn’t meet enough resistance to propel her anywhere, though it sends her spinning lazily around her own center of gravity until she backstrokes enough to counter her momentum.
Vision is useless, touch is unhelpful at best, and she can’t hear anything beyond that pervading thrum. Perhaps scent might orient her?
She sniff experimentally, and the bonetrain’s thoughts contract around her with all the weight of the ocean. There is no air here, and she should have known that. The act of breathing is alien, and the bonetrain is abruptly aware of her as an intrusion, something to be expelled or destroyed or smoothed until she fits. She is irritating as a piece of grit in the gut of its mind, and it wants her gone. She bites back the instinct to struggle for breath against the choking pressure bearing down on her. Her avatar’s lungs ache, but it won’t kill her, her physical body is still breathing. She knows that, reminds herself of it fiercely. The standard response would be to quiet her racing thoughts and breathe with the host until she registered as no more than another part of the autonomics, but that would be the opposite of a solution here.
Instead, she lets the current resonate through her, focuses on it even through the stifling attention bent on her and the flutter of her own rising fear. Sound has carried her into its mind, and now it carries her through the bonetrain’s scrutiny. Half-felt currents buffet her, snap at her chest until her bones creak, tug her braid taut behind her. The eddies seem to half blow through her rather than carry her with them, as though she is too solid, built out of the wrong sort of matter. They carry even fainter overtones of agitation/confusion/defense on a skirling, screaming melody, spiky and alien enough to make nausea roil in her stomach. She doesn’t even want to consider what vomiting in the bonetrain’s mind would elicit from her host.
An immeasurable time of listening and carefully not breathing later, the bonetrain’s awareness relaxes in a gradual decrescendo, and she with it. Drifting in the dark, she feels for the limits of her skin, the boundary where she ends and the bonetrain begins, while she considers her options.
She’s not quite where she started, literally speaking, given the current bearing her deeper into the train’s architecture, but she certainly hasn’t made any progress. How much time has passed already, while she tried to puzzle out how to navigate the bonetrain’s mind, let alone the source of its agitation? Angles? A radian? How much longer does she have before the bonetrain wakes completely from its dreaming death? How would she even know if it’s woken, from in here? Perhaps it’s already overwhelmed the conductor and they’re tearing away from the worldnet as fast as a skeleton can swim. Perhaps she’ll slip back into her body to find everyone dead and she the only one left, cushioned from the effects of the bonetrain’s rousing within its own mind. She is not built on the proper scale for this space, she doesn’t fit here. She can’t catch her bearings because there are no bearings to catch. Or at least none perceivable to a human.
A possibility occurs to her. On second thought, she almost wishes it hadn’t.
Her masters, sihara and mindreaver both, had lectured on allowing the host’s mind to dictate your form. What they’d mostly said was, “Don’t do it.” The reasons not to are quite cogent, the results of ignoring the advice quite gruesome. The thing is, everyone’s sanity is going to crack like eggs and they’re going to die horribly if she doesn’t try something fast, so the usually deterrents are looking less dreadful by the moment.
Naveed lets go.
Fingers and toes bleed into nothing, skin sloughs into senselessness, muscle unravels from bone, and with a wrench she tears herself from her face, forgets lips, teeth, closes her eyes and relinquishes them.
And then there is darkness.
no subject
modly ETA: it is totally okay! Write as much or as little per story as you like. We're just glad you're sharing it with us.
no subject
I do hope she makes it out there all right, with the entire loss of her form.
Also, again, your use of senses in imagery is enviable. I think I would sacrifice...well, things to get mine like that.
no subject
(And thanks for the okay on serialization.)
no subject
Thank you for mentioning that you were confused by the bonetrain earlier! I was wondering whether what it came across clearly enough, so it's very useful to know I should stick in a more straightforward description of it.
no subject
Great bit with Naveed deciding to ignore the "rules"--because this is something that is not governed by human or even terrestrial rules. This is something totally foreign, and the only way she has to possibly save everyone is move on its level. Terrifying that she has to let go like that, and I'm eager to know what happens next!
no subject
And yes, you have it in one, and in fact described her thought process a lot more clearly than I did. :p
I can assure that unraveling your sense of self in the mind of a half-reanimated extradimensional predator will have no ramifications whatsoever. There may be cake.
<.<
>.>
no subject
Anyway, if I may go all So-Cal on you for a moment.
DUDE.
This is a story with none of the usual sensory input and yet I FEEL EVERY WORD OF IT. I also really enjoyed how your wording so carefully separates this unnerving situation from being outright frightening. There's this little ring of curiosity to it all. And, for all it's trying to nom Naveed away (love the idea that she's grin in it's mind) the Bonetrain itself remains sympathetic. I kind of want to hug it, so I'm super excited to find out what Naveed is going to do next!
Thank you very much for posting :D.
no subject
To my mind, the bonetrain is very much sympathetic. It's an animal; you can't blame an animal for [spoilers], and now it has this alien creature invading its mind while it's already trying to obey two conflicting impulses. I probably won't have the space to get into the tight-knit conductor subculture, but they're deeply devoted to their trains. They treat the bonetrains somewhere between a well-loved car, a favorite horse, and big toothy puppies. The trains themselves develop preferences for who directs them, and some have a reputation for being fractious, or mischievous, or not playing well with other trains.
And that is probably more than you ever wanted to know about my weird skeleton trains.
Naveed, meanwhile, is going to be perfectly fine. There will be utterly no consequences to letting an extradimensional predator define her identity. :3
no subject
Yipe. I love this world. It's so creepy and utterly unique.
no subject
Thank you for reading!