Battle Not With Monsters
| Battle Not With Monsters | |||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Part of The Name of Heaven | |||||||||||
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| Factions Involved | |||||||||||
| ShadowHaven | The World Tree Trio | The Holy Order of Beast Hunters | Cathode and Their Beasts | ||||||||
| Caliban |
Br34ker chiTIN b0z0 | Foundation Entities | Foundation Entities | ||||||||
| Casualties and losses | |||||||||||
| N/A | The Host of the World Tree Trio Has Been Destroyed, and b0z0 Has Been Touched by Dissonance (RIP b0z0) | Caliban Has Ended the World | Cathode Has Refused the Preservation of Their History, and Caliban Has Ended the World | ||||||||
Summary
-Victor Hugo, The Hunchback of Notre Dame |
-Stephen King, Carrie |
Background
Cecelia Cross, like many technomancers, is keeping tabs on Heaven. Unlike many technomancers, however, she does not hold delusions like "utopia" so dear. Heaven is a curiosity to be tracked and manipulated, and its Heavenseekers the whetstone by which promising tools might become sharp.
And Caliban is a very promising tool.
The Meet
Cecelia Cross invites Caliban in for a chat at one of her personal hosts. "Invites," however, is a bit of a misnomer - Cecelia instructs Caliban to meet her at one of her personal hosts, and forces her to find her own way in. Caliban busts down the large wooden doors of the woman's gothic castle, and as she does, Cecelia pauses a large, floating, digital clock just beside her. It is the time, in minutes and seconds, between her invitation and Caliban's arrival.
She tells Caliban that she can do better.
The job is simple. There is a host, and she would like its data destroyed. She provides a location - a Rating Five host on the EvoGrid - and instructions to clear the archive and destroy the host if she would like. Caliban does not press too deeply for details, though learns that the host's entrance is a beneath a wide and shady tree in a public park on the grid.
As Cecelia's fractured tool leaves her host, the timer clicks, resets, and begins counting up once again.
The Plan
Caliban smokes a lot of red mescaline, like an irresponsible amount, pours herself an ice bath for her body to lie in while she is gone, and descends into the depths of the EvoGrid. From the inside of a world-sized dodecahedron, she navigates toward the public park, strips bark and bench to the quick of their code by sight alone, and determines that a host is running silent. Its entrance - a rabbit's burrow, tucked beneath a tree. The fractured beast steps forward, and to the general anxiety and fright of those who might be enjoying the sculpting at this late hour, she begins to dig.
She gains her MARK by tearing it apart. Her clawed hands plunge into moist earth and pile its cool flesh to the side, until that hole is wide enough, and deep enough, for her to slip into the void beyond - she falls, so much like Alice, into a nightmarish wonderland.
The Host of the World Tree Trio
The fields are vast and green and rolling with gentle breeze, flat save for a vast, mountainous oak at the very center of the host. Its trunk is carved into a massive, spiraling staircase marching ever upward toward its peak, where its living wood grows naturally into an intricate belltower, as one might find on a church.
Two personas chat casually at the base of the stairway - a bugman, chromatically chitinous, whose carapace gleams in rainbow hues, and a bright and colorful harlequinn jester, face painted and outfit devilishly dapper. A comically cartoonish ladybug perches on the bugman chiTIN's shoulder. The two of them wonder where their companion br34ker might be, and discuss aloud their leads toward finding the Matrix's own legendary Heaven.
Caliban does not know or care what they're talking about. Sharp eyes catch a glint of the underpinnings of the host, datatrails leading somewhere deeper, darker, and ever more sinister than this lying facade. Her broken steps trudge carefully past the two of them to ascend the stairway to the belltower, and after a lengthy climb, she finds herself in a casual lounge. Bookshelves line the walls, and wide windows the ceiling and upper rafters. She peruses the stac, running a grating hand along all the books' even little spines, and finally touches one that screams at her presence.
The Hunchback of Notre Dame. She pulls, and the bookcase swings open to reveal a hallway, and an elevator, and a single button pointing down.
She descends, as she has so often before, into the belly of the beast.
The Foundation, and Blood Born of Lies
Caliban awakens as a Hunter. Gritty cobblestone and distant flame and the smell of fresh blood fill her senses. A body, freshly maimed, lies just a few yards to her side, gutted and spilled and gently pooling through the crevices of the alley. Screams and clashing blades and hideous, crunchy, bestial 8-bit cries.
Emerging from the alley and gauging her surroundings, she comes to a crossroads where a small squadron of hardy men and women in combat leathers intersect her path. They greet her from mounted horseback, ask of her name, and question her presence without a partner. She informs them that they were maimed and dead, and they console her for her loss.
The leader, a man who describes himself as a captain of the Holy Order, tells Caliban that it is dangerous to be out alone, and to follow them back to the tower at the center of this city to regroup and rest and tell her story. The Cardinal will be speaking as well, and it will be nourishment for body and soul alike. She reluctantly agrees, for the sake of not yet breaking the paradigm before it can be reckoned. For a pittance, the group does grant her a small boon - each and every guard themselves represents the security node.
They are led through bloody cobblestone streets to the center of the city, a tower of Babel yet incomplete, and built atop the massive stump of a long dead tree. In the sky above, another Yggdrasil, opposite and verdant, hangs upside down. The great walls beyond the city block all other view of the sky.
The guard captain explains that the tyranny of the Great Tree had been quelled by the ingenuity of Man, but that its children have lashed out ever since. The distorted cries of the beasts these hunters are tasked to defeat come from broken and half-dead electronics cased in bone and vine and ambulant decay. The Cardinal Strith will speak on speak on the matter, as he frequently does, to boost morale, to assure his followers that all is well and that the tower, soon to be completed, will topple the great tree above and rob the creatures of any strength they may yet have.
As they step across a steady foot bridge, across the great stump, and into the gothic cathedral that is the base of this tower of Babel, they enter in the midst of the Cardinal's sermon. Caliban parts ways with the broader group, and as his sermon ends and his congregation rises, she steps to his altar with false reverence, and as he descends and brushes the hands of those crowded near before passing by, she feigns reverence to join them. She expects the Master Node, her gateway to the Foundation.
It is, instead, the Slave.
The nature of this world becomes a little more clear to her. She ascends the spiral stairwell all the way to the skyward tip of this pillar, and descends into its library. Again, she finds no node that may be useful, but instead the history of this world as told by the man who would be God. The great Yggdrasil once sprouted from the Earth, and its mirror the sky above. The two met betwixt those disparate worlds to bind them as one, their branches twirled as double-helix. In this world, humanity lived under tyranny, shaded from the light above. Its creatures, its birds and squirrels and others, might ascend above and beyond the shaded bough, and mankind was denied the full breadth of such divine light, oppressed and left meager scraps that fall between the leaves.
They cut the tree, and built their city atop its corpse, and built their walls to protect from the tempestuous and dying world beyond. As its corpse decays, so too did the sky run red and streets run black. Creatures, once vibrant, fell to earth, shut down, and decayed, and rose once again entangled with wire and leaf. The wrath of a false divine in its death throes, assures the text. The job, yet unfinished, need kill the great tree of the sky as well, Yggdrasil's hideous mirror. Cardinal Strith's divine imperative will ensure humanity's place among the clouds.
She is unimpressed.
Caliban descends and encounters several Hunters on her way, and after brief conversation, she gleans that they are to leave on patrol, and requests to join them. Brief conversation reveals a known cesspool from which the hybrid creatures emerge, a paved over entrance to the ancient underground embedded in the city walls. With the intent to split away and investigate further, she embarks unto the night.
Aftermath
This run directly precedes RIP Bozo.