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rainbowfic2014-08-27 02:29 am
greenling) wrote in rainbowfic2014-08-27 02:29 am
Blue Opal #6
Name: Greenling
Story: Unnamed Mosaic AU #1
Colors: Blue Opal #6 (Clear head)
Supplies and Styles: Mosaic (Exalted), Eraser (Crackpairings AU), Paint-by-Number (He wakes up in a room he’s never been in with a person he’s never met and no memories of the past twenty-four hours.), Stain (What we anticipate seldom occurs; what we least expected generally happens. Benjamin Disraeli (1804 - 1881))
Word Count: 2,118
Rating: PGish
Warnings: Mild violence and ickish gory things.
Summary: A character deals with some very bad impulse decisions, while another one tries to figure out how his life went so very wrong so very suddenly.
As with the first one, it shouldn't be super necessary to know the Mosaic canon. There will be threads connecting all this eventually. Comments, criticism, and questions are all appreciated.
I should be doing like three other things right now including work and tags, but I've had like five fics on a rotation for most of the month and I really wanted to finish something.
When he came back up, everything was different.
That was a stupid way of putting it, and a part of his mind chided him for thinking it. He had died, and now he was alive. He had died, and now he was reborn. He had died, and his soul had slowly begun drifting apart, and everything was all glass now like frozen sandy pebbles, except some of them were other selves, and some of them were his brain trying desperately to process new sensory information, and others were his brain trying desperately to process itself as it changed, became more, became something else.
When he'd first gotten up, he had snapped. No. No, he had chosen, somehow, to let the boiling black rage inside him take over. His mind was still catching up with itself, sorting out the information pouring in from every angle, and the first thing he'd chosen was to grab the little shit who'd knocked him down and pulp the man's throat with his bare hands. They tried to scream. He couldn't let that happen. And then all reason left him for a while.
He could still hear the creeping whispers coming from that Thing from the void, gently acid-etching horrible visions into his mind. He could feel a thousand phantom memories and a dozen selves worming their ways under his skin, fighting for dominance with each other and the sensory overload of the external world.
I could keep doing that,, said a part of him. That felt good. Just kill. Twist. Break. Find new ways to break. Make them break each other, take the corpses and make a pet, kill them slow or fast or-
I could make them listen to me now, said another part. Power begets power. I could make them listen, I could have an army, I could be worshiped as a god, I could -
No! I'm a hero, damnit! Clean this up, help my Mom, and I can fix things now, make things okay and get Dad a better job and help people and-
The sheer strangeness of the last one shook something loose. Past everything, there was- had been- a Name. In the middle of him, in the heart of his soul, something, he still had his Name, though it was dead and buried and hanging in the black void-
-and sealing it, something he could use. An image. It looked to be a medieval woodcut carved from human flesh, depicting a dirt road leading through a wooded area to a nebulous place in the far distance. The road was cut off by an overwhelmingly large set of gates made from twisting horn, with an angel- a Christian angel, specifically a half-naked, buff, vaguely-Caucasian, curly-haired angel holding a trumpet and a sword- strewn artfully but messily across said gate.
That was his new name, and he clung to it, reflexively trying to translate it into words. Angel Impaled on the Gates of Horn? Guardian-Devouring Monster Gate? Harbinger of Internalized Eurocentrism?
He figured "Angel" would work fine until he'd thought up a proper supervillain/demigod name. He fucking hated "Sydney" anyway. And that was when he realized he was more or less back in control of himself.
Okay. He was standing atop the Asian Grocery, glowing with a black light that made the shadows look bright. He had just killed like five people, and maybe they deserved it and maybe they didn't, but either way they were there, dead in the alley, resting mostly in pieces; and he'd finished it all off by making an easy 25-foot vertical leap up to said roof. Magic existed, or a damn good doppelganger of it. There were things he had to deal with now.
He was probably not going to be buying that garam masala.
*
Meanwhile, somewhere between a few and several million years ago...
Jaymie knew when he woke up that it was going to be a really shitty day.
It hit almost every box on the checklist of shitty days. He didn't know where he was, but he was lying prone on a cold, hard floor somewhere: check. He didn't remember falling asleep: check. He didn't remember what he'd been doing before he fell asleep: check. There were strange noises around him, tinkling bells and soft but insistent beeping: maybe not specifically on the list, but a check in spirit. He felt really drunk and really high at the same time: definitely check. He was still wearing his pants, mostly, but his right leg and side tingled deep in the skin like a healing sunburn.
Come to think of it, a lot of things smelled like burning. He brushed his hair out of his face and opened his eyes, staring up into the blazing cold light of a solar eclipse hanging in the sky above him.
He lay there staring for a long moment, wondering if he was going to die. He knew he wasn't dead, because by all accounts the Underworld was grim and dreary, not bright and filled with ur-legendary omens. He also didn't think he was dreaming, partly because he figured there was no point in wondering if he was dreaming, because if he was it didn't matter what happened and if he wasn't he'd figure it out soon enough.
Then he realized he was staring at a ceiling. Specifically, the ceiling of a huge dome of gray-blue stone, softly lit by five sparkling, gem-inlaid floor pillars and the scene above. Upon closer inspection, said scene was a 360-degree panorama of the area around a tower- a tower which, after a moment, he recognized. Lira. Lira had dragged him to some Manse in the middle of Bumfuck, Southern Threshold on a business deal, a giant blue stone tower in the middle of the endless desert. He had spent the past week being incredibly polite to all the nice Dragon-Blooded and not getting in the way, because even if the Manse's owner was some minor-House Fire Aspect with pathetic breeding who apparently got all the swank magical stuff from raids on mortal villages that had never heard of plumbing, it was never prudent to piss off the Princes of the Earth. Hell, pissing off Lira was probably why he got dragged along in the first place, and they were actually sort-of-friends.
And now he was here. None of that explained where exactly he was or how he'd gotten there. With a wary yawn, he sat up, examining the room around him more closely: he was in the precise middle of the room, surrounded by scorchmarks, bloodstains, a few loose sparkly gems that looked like they'd been pried out of their sockets... and now that he looked at himself, a silver-white aura.
He screamed.
Cutting him off in the middle, a violent snarling rose up beind him. He leapt to his feet with surprising agility and turned, half-falling into, half-leaning on a pillar.
Luna stood behind him, tail twitching, looking annoyed- wait, back up. A nine-foot-tall, androgynous figure stood there, surrounded by a shifting silver-gray aura. They had Jaymie's face, more or less, but with silver-and-blond hair down to Their feet, the body of a bipedal lion bristling with jewel-toned spike-horns, and loose robes that seemed to be made of colored sand flowing in a slow wind. Three things hit him at once: one, his reasonably extensive secondary-school education in theology and divine semiotics told him that, no matter how unlikely the idea was, this might actually have been Luna, as in holy-shit Luna, the Incarna of the Moon, Shapechanging God/dess . Two, he knew instinctively that this was Luna, as the blazing light now taking up residence inside his soul responded to Their presence with an odd sense of antagonistic-slash-worshipful kinship. Three, They were wearing one of those trendy silver-wire name necklaces with "LU NA (divinity-radical)" spelled out in Old Realm seal script.
That confirmed it. Somehow, he had become an Anathema. Somehow, and he couldn't remember how or why, he had performed an ancient evil ritual, stolen a part of Luna's power, and then become the world's unluckiest bastard as They had actually personally noticed, and somehow- possibly due to the eclipse?- defied the laws of Yu-Shan and the Immaculate Dragons to actually come down to Creation and do something about it. That was the only possible explanation.
"Look, let's make this short," Luna spoke, a terrible rumbling in Their voice. "You've picked a really bad time for this."
Jaymie started screaming again- and Luna lunged. Time slowed to a crawl. He moved by instinct, turning away away from the gleaming white claws, leaping away with a grace that would normally be impossible for him. The claws flew past, then turned with a blur, and a split second of elation gave way to searing pain.
Searing, burning, tearing at his chest. He crumpled instantly, falling to his knees in blank silence. The Great Beast approached him, tail swinging.
"Why don't you ever Exalt from the Realm, she asks me. Country at the center of Creation, ten billion people, there has to be someone." He couldn't scream. He couldn't make a sound. He backed up towards the door, looking for the handle or button panel thing or whatever would open it, his mind somehow working through the sheer terror. "Someone who fits my exacting specifications. Someone willing to throw away everything they are for the chance to be something greater. Someone who survives the attempt."
Luna walked forward until he was pressed against the door. They leaned down; he tried to dodge again, but was stopped. Once. Twice. By an arm- three times. The pain didn't help. Luna grinned a broad, vicious grin; the expression was especially disturbing with Jaymie's face. One gleaming claw slid under his chin, lifting his head up; he didn't fight it, but grimaced and clenched his eyes shut.
"But maybe I'm just a sucker for a pretty face. Open your eyes."
Jaymie didn't want to. He really didn't want to, but the same part of him that was listening to the conversation (such as it was) and picking up on some very strange choices of phrasing did it anyway.
"Good," They purred. "Now listen, because I mean it about the bad timing. You are one of myChosen. Forget everything you were taught, unless you don't want to, and go become the world-shaking artist I know you want to be. Or the underdog paragon who surpasses your father's legacy. Or a cat burglar- Gaia's ponderous tits, just be interesting, all right? None of this screaming and running away garbage."
The pain in his chest was slowly receding into five long fiery lines. He glanced downward- he wasn't exactly coherent enough to feel reassured but he was, perhaps, less terrified- at his chest and the blood running down it. His tunic was a mess, but under all the blood, it looked like the marks were clean, though they shined a slightly different silvery-white than the aura around him.
Luna seemed to be waiting for a response. That made him think, think about something other than escape and fear. Chosen. He was- but that didn't make sense. There was no such thing as Chosen of Luna, as far as he knew. That honor belonged to the Dragons. He could understand if, more generally, maybe (somehow, wonderfully) he was wrong about having become Anathema; glowing auras and feelings of incredible power were a pretty good sign of being Anathema, but he didn't really feel like a hollowed-out shell possessed by a demon. On the other hand, he had no idea what feeling like a demon entailed, and he could just be a demon trying to convince himself he was actually Jaymie. On the other-other hand, if he could trust his senses, this was Luna Themself, and who the hell was he to argue with that?
He decided nodding slowly was his best option.
Luna's grin became slightly less predatory, and the claw under his chin slid bluntly up along his jawline and over his left cheek, making a circle around his eye. "Very good."
A shimmering haze surrounded Them as They stepped back, cycling through forms. He caught glimpses of a few that struck him: a red-furred wolfman with curling ram's horns, a beautiful woman in fantastical silver armor, a sullen man in all-black save for a long patchwork belt. Luna stopped on one of his most iconic forms: a smiling young man in rich silver robes, clearly and heavily pregnant. Then, he faded away.
"Otherwise, maybe I'll be taking that pretty face."
His smile lingered for a moment after the rest of him did, and his voice a little longer after that.
Jaymie remembered to breathe.
Story: Unnamed Mosaic AU #1
Colors: Blue Opal #6 (Clear head)
Supplies and Styles: Mosaic (Exalted), Eraser (Crackpairings AU), Paint-by-Number (He wakes up in a room he’s never been in with a person he’s never met and no memories of the past twenty-four hours.), Stain (What we anticipate seldom occurs; what we least expected generally happens. Benjamin Disraeli (1804 - 1881))
Word Count: 2,118
Rating: PGish
Warnings: Mild violence and ickish gory things.
Summary: A character deals with some very bad impulse decisions, while another one tries to figure out how his life went so very wrong so very suddenly.
As with the first one, it shouldn't be super necessary to know the Mosaic canon. There will be threads connecting all this eventually. Comments, criticism, and questions are all appreciated.
I should be doing like three other things right now including work and tags, but I've had like five fics on a rotation for most of the month and I really wanted to finish something.
When he came back up, everything was different.
That was a stupid way of putting it, and a part of his mind chided him for thinking it. He had died, and now he was alive. He had died, and now he was reborn. He had died, and his soul had slowly begun drifting apart, and everything was all glass now like frozen sandy pebbles, except some of them were other selves, and some of them were his brain trying desperately to process new sensory information, and others were his brain trying desperately to process itself as it changed, became more, became something else.
When he'd first gotten up, he had snapped. No. No, he had chosen, somehow, to let the boiling black rage inside him take over. His mind was still catching up with itself, sorting out the information pouring in from every angle, and the first thing he'd chosen was to grab the little shit who'd knocked him down and pulp the man's throat with his bare hands. They tried to scream. He couldn't let that happen. And then all reason left him for a while.
He could still hear the creeping whispers coming from that Thing from the void, gently acid-etching horrible visions into his mind. He could feel a thousand phantom memories and a dozen selves worming their ways under his skin, fighting for dominance with each other and the sensory overload of the external world.
I could keep doing that,, said a part of him. That felt good. Just kill. Twist. Break. Find new ways to break. Make them break each other, take the corpses and make a pet, kill them slow or fast or-
I could make them listen to me now, said another part. Power begets power. I could make them listen, I could have an army, I could be worshiped as a god, I could -
No! I'm a hero, damnit! Clean this up, help my Mom, and I can fix things now, make things okay and get Dad a better job and help people and-
The sheer strangeness of the last one shook something loose. Past everything, there was- had been- a Name. In the middle of him, in the heart of his soul, something, he still had his Name, though it was dead and buried and hanging in the black void-
-and sealing it, something he could use. An image. It looked to be a medieval woodcut carved from human flesh, depicting a dirt road leading through a wooded area to a nebulous place in the far distance. The road was cut off by an overwhelmingly large set of gates made from twisting horn, with an angel- a Christian angel, specifically a half-naked, buff, vaguely-Caucasian, curly-haired angel holding a trumpet and a sword- strewn artfully but messily across said gate.
That was his new name, and he clung to it, reflexively trying to translate it into words. Angel Impaled on the Gates of Horn? Guardian-Devouring Monster Gate? Harbinger of Internalized Eurocentrism?
He figured "Angel" would work fine until he'd thought up a proper supervillain/demigod name. He fucking hated "Sydney" anyway. And that was when he realized he was more or less back in control of himself.
Okay. He was standing atop the Asian Grocery, glowing with a black light that made the shadows look bright. He had just killed like five people, and maybe they deserved it and maybe they didn't, but either way they were there, dead in the alley, resting mostly in pieces; and he'd finished it all off by making an easy 25-foot vertical leap up to said roof. Magic existed, or a damn good doppelganger of it. There were things he had to deal with now.
He was probably not going to be buying that garam masala.
*
Meanwhile, somewhere between a few and several million years ago...
Jaymie knew when he woke up that it was going to be a really shitty day.
It hit almost every box on the checklist of shitty days. He didn't know where he was, but he was lying prone on a cold, hard floor somewhere: check. He didn't remember falling asleep: check. He didn't remember what he'd been doing before he fell asleep: check. There were strange noises around him, tinkling bells and soft but insistent beeping: maybe not specifically on the list, but a check in spirit. He felt really drunk and really high at the same time: definitely check. He was still wearing his pants, mostly, but his right leg and side tingled deep in the skin like a healing sunburn.
Come to think of it, a lot of things smelled like burning. He brushed his hair out of his face and opened his eyes, staring up into the blazing cold light of a solar eclipse hanging in the sky above him.
He lay there staring for a long moment, wondering if he was going to die. He knew he wasn't dead, because by all accounts the Underworld was grim and dreary, not bright and filled with ur-legendary omens. He also didn't think he was dreaming, partly because he figured there was no point in wondering if he was dreaming, because if he was it didn't matter what happened and if he wasn't he'd figure it out soon enough.
Then he realized he was staring at a ceiling. Specifically, the ceiling of a huge dome of gray-blue stone, softly lit by five sparkling, gem-inlaid floor pillars and the scene above. Upon closer inspection, said scene was a 360-degree panorama of the area around a tower- a tower which, after a moment, he recognized. Lira. Lira had dragged him to some Manse in the middle of Bumfuck, Southern Threshold on a business deal, a giant blue stone tower in the middle of the endless desert. He had spent the past week being incredibly polite to all the nice Dragon-Blooded and not getting in the way, because even if the Manse's owner was some minor-House Fire Aspect with pathetic breeding who apparently got all the swank magical stuff from raids on mortal villages that had never heard of plumbing, it was never prudent to piss off the Princes of the Earth. Hell, pissing off Lira was probably why he got dragged along in the first place, and they were actually sort-of-friends.
And now he was here. None of that explained where exactly he was or how he'd gotten there. With a wary yawn, he sat up, examining the room around him more closely: he was in the precise middle of the room, surrounded by scorchmarks, bloodstains, a few loose sparkly gems that looked like they'd been pried out of their sockets... and now that he looked at himself, a silver-white aura.
He screamed.
Cutting him off in the middle, a violent snarling rose up beind him. He leapt to his feet with surprising agility and turned, half-falling into, half-leaning on a pillar.
Luna stood behind him, tail twitching, looking annoyed- wait, back up. A nine-foot-tall, androgynous figure stood there, surrounded by a shifting silver-gray aura. They had Jaymie's face, more or less, but with silver-and-blond hair down to Their feet, the body of a bipedal lion bristling with jewel-toned spike-horns, and loose robes that seemed to be made of colored sand flowing in a slow wind. Three things hit him at once: one, his reasonably extensive secondary-school education in theology and divine semiotics told him that, no matter how unlikely the idea was, this might actually have been Luna, as in holy-shit Luna, the Incarna of the Moon, Shapechanging God/dess . Two, he knew instinctively that this was Luna, as the blazing light now taking up residence inside his soul responded to Their presence with an odd sense of antagonistic-slash-worshipful kinship. Three, They were wearing one of those trendy silver-wire name necklaces with "LU NA (divinity-radical)" spelled out in Old Realm seal script.
That confirmed it. Somehow, he had become an Anathema. Somehow, and he couldn't remember how or why, he had performed an ancient evil ritual, stolen a part of Luna's power, and then become the world's unluckiest bastard as They had actually personally noticed, and somehow- possibly due to the eclipse?- defied the laws of Yu-Shan and the Immaculate Dragons to actually come down to Creation and do something about it. That was the only possible explanation.
"Look, let's make this short," Luna spoke, a terrible rumbling in Their voice. "You've picked a really bad time for this."
Jaymie started screaming again- and Luna lunged. Time slowed to a crawl. He moved by instinct, turning away away from the gleaming white claws, leaping away with a grace that would normally be impossible for him. The claws flew past, then turned with a blur, and a split second of elation gave way to searing pain.
Searing, burning, tearing at his chest. He crumpled instantly, falling to his knees in blank silence. The Great Beast approached him, tail swinging.
"Why don't you ever Exalt from the Realm, she asks me. Country at the center of Creation, ten billion people, there has to be someone." He couldn't scream. He couldn't make a sound. He backed up towards the door, looking for the handle or button panel thing or whatever would open it, his mind somehow working through the sheer terror. "Someone who fits my exacting specifications. Someone willing to throw away everything they are for the chance to be something greater. Someone who survives the attempt."
Luna walked forward until he was pressed against the door. They leaned down; he tried to dodge again, but was stopped. Once. Twice. By an arm- three times. The pain didn't help. Luna grinned a broad, vicious grin; the expression was especially disturbing with Jaymie's face. One gleaming claw slid under his chin, lifting his head up; he didn't fight it, but grimaced and clenched his eyes shut.
"But maybe I'm just a sucker for a pretty face. Open your eyes."
Jaymie didn't want to. He really didn't want to, but the same part of him that was listening to the conversation (such as it was) and picking up on some very strange choices of phrasing did it anyway.
"Good," They purred. "Now listen, because I mean it about the bad timing. You are one of myChosen. Forget everything you were taught, unless you don't want to, and go become the world-shaking artist I know you want to be. Or the underdog paragon who surpasses your father's legacy. Or a cat burglar- Gaia's ponderous tits, just be interesting, all right? None of this screaming and running away garbage."
The pain in his chest was slowly receding into five long fiery lines. He glanced downward- he wasn't exactly coherent enough to feel reassured but he was, perhaps, less terrified- at his chest and the blood running down it. His tunic was a mess, but under all the blood, it looked like the marks were clean, though they shined a slightly different silvery-white than the aura around him.
Luna seemed to be waiting for a response. That made him think, think about something other than escape and fear. Chosen. He was- but that didn't make sense. There was no such thing as Chosen of Luna, as far as he knew. That honor belonged to the Dragons. He could understand if, more generally, maybe (somehow, wonderfully) he was wrong about having become Anathema; glowing auras and feelings of incredible power were a pretty good sign of being Anathema, but he didn't really feel like a hollowed-out shell possessed by a demon. On the other hand, he had no idea what feeling like a demon entailed, and he could just be a demon trying to convince himself he was actually Jaymie. On the other-other hand, if he could trust his senses, this was Luna Themself, and who the hell was he to argue with that?
He decided nodding slowly was his best option.
Luna's grin became slightly less predatory, and the claw under his chin slid bluntly up along his jawline and over his left cheek, making a circle around his eye. "Very good."
A shimmering haze surrounded Them as They stepped back, cycling through forms. He caught glimpses of a few that struck him: a red-furred wolfman with curling ram's horns, a beautiful woman in fantastical silver armor, a sullen man in all-black save for a long patchwork belt. Luna stopped on one of his most iconic forms: a smiling young man in rich silver robes, clearly and heavily pregnant. Then, he faded away.
"Otherwise, maybe I'll be taking that pretty face."
His smile lingered for a moment after the rest of him did, and his voice a little longer after that.
Jaymie remembered to breathe.
no subject
no subject
I also seem to enjoy making Jaymie miserable, but that's more general.
Thanks for reading!
no subject
All of the narration here is great, very much in-head with lots of personality, but this made me laugh.
no subject
Thank you!
no subject
I like the casual, inhuman viciousness Luna displays. This - Three, They were wearing one of those trendy silver-wire name necklaces with "LU NA (divinity-radical)" spelled out in Old Realm seal script - was also ridiculous and charming in a way that only made the rest of Their presentation eerier. I'm also curious about what "radical" means in this context - are there other sorts of divinity, or is it meant in the sense of chemistry/mathematics/Chinese linguistics?
no subject
I hadn't actually thought about that specific bit of the name, but it fits. I mostly had a cool mental image of something to do with the flowery, sometimes silly names his kind of Exalt normally get.
It's meant in the linguistic sense. Old Realm is described as having bits similar to Mayan languages, Chinese, Ancient Egyptian, and some other stuff, so I borrowed.
Thank you for reading!