RP:Thinking Like A Hammer May Be Hazardous To Your Health
Background
This is part of the Kurgan's Run story arc.
Kurgan returns to Leifong through one of his own 'doors' - which has gone terribly wrong - and gives the priest a lesson in self-empowerment - which also goes terribly wrong - while Caedan finds them both and hints that a lot of other things - have gone terribly wrong.
No Time At All Later
“Pssssst.” The sibilant sound would break Leifong’s quiet contemplation, no time at all later. “Psssssssssssst. Pst. Psssst.” And so on.
Leifong rubs his temples, feeling tired and frustrated. The room is in a right state, wholly dismantled and trashed, with fragmented bits of charred material which might have once been a rug or a bookcase lying everywhere. "What!?" he grumbles from his sulking position, head on his folded arms which rest upon the table's surface. Apparently having forgotten that he was the only one here.
“Pst. Over here. Here, look.” The voice was slightly muffled. “On the table. Stop slouching, and give me a hand, will you?” There’d be a bone-china rattle, as the lid of the teapot toppled onto the surface, not far from Leifong’s ear. A set of pale fingertips waved from the vessel. “Here… “
Leifong slowly picks his head up from the table and blinks once or twice, making sure that he was really seeing this. Not that it surprised him too much, given the nature of where he was currently trapped, but it was always good to double check. He then eyes the cup of tea from which he'd been drinking, his first thought, ironically, is of how clean those fingers are. "Who are you, and what do you want?" The priest asks in an authoritative tone, perfectly unwilling to take the hand of anything that was reaching out of a teapot without a bit of investigation.
“You can’t possibly be that much of a pillock.” The voice was still slightly muffled, though crisper now the lid was gone, and slightly hollowed, with an echo. “It’s me.” The fingers wiggled, and then slumped. “Bloody chaos. That’s what this is. Things just aren’t tickety-boo. Too many opposing forces wandering about, you know? I mean, dichotomy is all very well and good in its place, but it does play havoc with the … uh. Havoc. As it were. In any case, I should most appreciate a little help, if you’d be so kind?”
Leifong eyes the fingers for only a moment longer before he rises with a grumbled sigh and reaches over, taking hold of the waggling fingers and pulling. "Couldn't you just make yourself a door?" the priest chides, "Or do you always squeeze yourself through steaming hot china?"
The teapot lifted off the table, leaving a ring where spilled tea had gathered under its base. Orange-scented liquid sploshed about, and there was a faint gurgle, from behind the fingers Leifong had in his grasp. “I did… make myself a bloody door. But… look, put me down, can you?” There was a wet sneeze, again accompanied by a slight echo.
Leifong , true to form, drops the teapot the moment it is requested, letting it fall back to the table and in all likelihood shatter. Not that wouldn't just match everything else in the room now. "Pick me up, put me down, hold my hand." the priest mutters as he retakes his seat, wondering how -this- had become an entity of such power.
“No need to sulk.” The pot had landed with a loud clunk, and a soft groan. “No time for it, either. Things are falling apart. Splitting, black and white. Order, Chaos, Good, Evil. I’m in a fecking –teapot- for the love of….which ought to tell you how serious it all is, wot? So listen to me, carefully.” The fingers flicked a little tea off themselves, and the forefinger was raised, alone. “Try to think like a hammer. I’m almost certain it’ll be second nature to you. A hammer. An inert, metal-ended club. Go on, then.”
Leifong was beyond frustrated by this point, having moved firmly into the realms of livid. He'd been lost, cold, manipulated and insulted for what could have been years if the way he felt about it was any indication, which it wasn't, but you know. "Think like a hammer, Kurgan?" he announces in a tone which wavers angrily, "I'll show you thinking like a hammer." and with that the priest rises from his chair and upends it. He kicks one of the legs loose, and then using his foot for leverage snaps the leg off entirely, holding it and the metal rod which had been used to connect it to the body in his hands like a club. "Is this enough like a hammer for you?" Leifong yells as he swings the makeshift bat with all his strength into the teapot which, to all his knowledge, contained the being who was responsible for his plight.
“Ow… what the…. Stop. Stop that!” The makeshift bat pinged off the pot, or thudded on flesh, or a bit of both, as the priest bashed away, the fingers retracting as the illusionist shouted over the sound of metal beating apparently indestructible fine bone china, “I said THINK, cloth-ears, not ACT. Put that thing… dammit, put it away. No wonder your compost-god’s giving you the runabout...” The fingers appeared again, briefly. “OW!”
Leifong tosses his bat down on the table next to the tea pot and retreats to whatever point in the room is furthest from his torturer. Huffing a bit from the physical exertion, and utterly enraged at the situation in general, Leifong drops to the floor and resorts to the only method he knew how to forget about the horrible state of his affairs. The priest closes his eyes and begins chanting, slowly killing all but the background processes of his mind one by one, bringing back the silence he so desperately needed.
It would seem like the mildest of intrusions, at first. A cat’s foot of thought, a insect’s whisper, a falling leaf of suggestion that would drift through the scattering morass of emotion and mental turmoil the enraged priest had given in to, wending its way in between the sonorous syllables of the chant. “Yes… that’s it.” The words would seem to solidify, even as they were heard, somehow perceived as smelting together, coalescing to a shape in the forefront of Leifong’s meditative mind. A shape, soon more sharply defined: an object. A hammer. An inert, metal-ended club. “Yes, yes, now we’re getting somewhere. Stop that racket, lad, and –think-!”
Kurgan tsked, wagging one slightly battered-looking finger. "BE the hammer."
Leifong tries to do as he is told, to... 'think' like a hammer. But the more he tries, the less sure he is that he's doing this properly. It's maddening, oh so maddening, yet it is at his least hammer-like moment, that he has a stunning realization, and has to keep from cursing himself for not figuring it out sooner. A hammer does not think, it does not feel, it does not question or theorize or desire... it simply exists. Inert, solid, cold, real... a hammer does nothing unless first gripped and swung, it is but a tool. At first the concept only serves to enrage him further, exist as a tool, think not, want not. But here it was, struck over the head with it, and what else could he do but shut it all down. The first to go would be his emotions, so human and trivial, followed by logic and reasoning, a tool needs not neither. Then even his core processes begin to slow and shut off, and it happens so rapidly, so thoughtlessly, that without even noticing it Leifong's breathing itself halts.
Kurgan roared, “Success!” Though the effect was somewhat dampened, teapot and all. In the priest’s mind, quiet as an unoccupied tool-shed, the voice would sound more crisp. “You are the servant, Leifong. The hammer, lying about, waiting for the carpenter’s hand. But… it never comes, does it?” The tone was tinged with sympathy. “You are never picked up, never used. You might become a little rusty, over time…” The timbre of the voice changed again, taking on a crackle, a rough burr that would reverberate through the near-comatose man’s flesh and psyche alike, “The trick, dear boy… and the power to open that box is in being at once the hammer… and the hand.” Around the priest, shadows gathered like air-borne eels, ribbons of blackness, like a visible version of sickness seeping from the air of a plague-pit. “Breathe, Leifong. Inhale the dark. Let it fill you. Let it be your fingers, let it form your palm. Then pick that hammer up, priest – and wield … yourself.”
Leifong 's body gasps as some deep bit of human instinct rejects what his mind was now doing, sucking in the shadows as a surrogate for air, an act mirrored in the priest's mind which is still and solid. He breathes deep of the chaos, letting it fill him, encircle him, wrap him in it's embrace and bolster his resolve. A 'hand' reaches out, tendrils of the shadow given life within Leifong's mind, reaching for the 'hammer' longingly, unconsciously, as though it were only instinct. Yet it went against every bit of humanity he possessed. His body tries to fight it, tries to start back up, create new processes, take control, yet with the power of chaos pulsing through his mind, the priest's body didn't stand a chance. In the room, the man's body twitches, nerves sending signals randomly, protesting, warning that something was terribly wrong, but the brain wasn't receiving them properly, for the spirit was... occupied, too busy being a hammer. And it was now, at his most hammer-like, that Leifong would 'transcend'. His metaphorical hand wraps around that figurative hammer, and all at once his body begins to spasm as though a noose had tightened around it's neck. It flails wildly, instinct fighting back in the war this new level of control and power had begun, but the outcome was already decided. Slowly the priest's heart slows, his lungs stop receiving air, his blood stops flowing as that great thumping organ in his chest beats its last, and finally, beaten, his body stops twitching. Minutes pass, the body of the sanctioned growing cold, fingertips turning a ghastly off-blue, a testimonial to the fact Leifong was, now and forever, dead.
Kurgan said, from within the teapot, "Bugger."
There was a tremendous shattering, then, and a spray of shrapnel, china and wood as the pot swelled and buckled outward, and the table bowed it top like a wild horse trying to dislodge an unwanted rider, both suddenly sundered into shards that flew to lodge in the walls. Kurgan stepped out of the explosion, frowning at the ruin of his shirt, which like the rest of him was damp, and stained in sepia blotches with bergamot tea. He’d stare down at the priest, shaking his head. Long fingers – no longer battered-looking – pinched his lower lip, pulling it out and releasing it to make a rubbery snap back into shape. “Who’d’ve thought…” he mused, nudging the corpse with the toe of his silver -buckled shoe.
Leifong looks, for all intents and purposes, quite dead. Which he is, dead as a doorknob. Yet something had remained. The walls begin to hum slightly, and waver a little as Kurgan had done earlier, though not to such a degree, not with same level of control. The fluctuations were random and uneven, imperfect, though they were growing steadily in intensity as the once-man exited his teapot and came over to examine the corpse of Leifong. Even on closer inspection, the corpse is quite definitely that, a corpse, stiff and turning cold, ashen blue, yet as that thrumming sort of vibratory resonance that was slowly seeping into the room around them grows in power, Kurgan might be given reason to question it. But it seems as though Kurgan was more the type to poke with sticks than to probe with reason, and as the toe of his shoe strikes Leifong's shin, the reaction is explosive. All at once the Priest's eyes and mouth open and a strange, viscous sort of darkness surges from the openings like liquid fire. It stutters and cracks, arcing out from the corpse's facial orifices and striking all within close proximity, scarring it like some immense electrical current let free, a wave of energy channeled straight through the corpse from the bowels of chaos itself. Whatever the power is, it runs over the corpse as if oil, some strange, ever shifting mercurial substance that slowly covers the body from head to foot, continuing to arc away randomly with great intensity, but any flecks cast around always return to the mass, as though it were attracted to itself. Then, wrapped as it is in that sort of cocoon, the body begins to move, slowly pulling itself together and rising first to a knee, then to a crouch, and then to a standing position, it's edges never completely solid, for upon close inspection the strange darkness can be seen to vibrate, thrum in unison with the walls.
Kurgan's body jolted oddly, first at the shoulder as though he'd been punched by a dark fist, then at the stomach, skewing him to one side, and so on, the dark miasma leaping in greats bows off the revenant pummelling the illusionist hard, and all the while Kurgan howled with laughter, clapped his hands when he was able. "Bravo!" he chortled. "Like a hammer, indeed! And the hand, the hand!" He doubled over, whether from that frightful laughter or another blow wasn't certain, and took to loping around the room as a child might when pretending to be a horse, a silly gallop that took him circles, all the while hooting, as the electric blackness looped in threads back to its source. "Bravo! And up yours, O Lord of the Heap! Look what I've made of your hammer, now!", and such triumphant cries. That Kurgan's sanity was rapidly dwindling again would have been obvious to anyone, with the possible exception of a corpse.
Leifong , wrapped in his cocoon of darkness, raises his arms to either side, as though testing his control over the strange matter and space bending phenomenon. The gentle thrumming of the walls responds, changing in frequency and power, first from small, erratic ripples. To deep, steady waves, which roll as easily as the ocean. The now-corpse was pleased, and for a moment seems content to play with this new power and test it's limits. Yet..things were slowly coming back, the fog which had settled over his thoughts as a by-product of prolonged exposure to the fortress was blowing away, and in its wake a slew of memories began to return, or at least make themselves known. He'd come here for a reason, a reason larger than himself, he was on a mission to make sure that.... "Where is the sin-eater, Kurgan?" Leifong asks in a cold voice, devoid of any emotion, collected and confident as it had been when he'd first approached this place. As he opens his mouth, the shadows wrapped around him are all sucked back in, as though pulled into a vacuum, revealing Leifong standing there much as he had been only... dead.
Caedan roused after a lengthy time asleep, as though she inherently needed more of it in this place than in any other. Upon waking, she felt, foremost, a lust for opium to even her out -- especially as a sense of claustrophobia she normally didn't possess settled in, making breathing difficult as the walls bent and flexed around her when they noticed she'd awakened. The psychic staggered to her feet and pressed her hand against the wall, which turned spongey and nearly sent her toppling through it until she pulled her hand away and took a step back, promptly falling over a displaced chair to land on her bum. "Whoa." Lips pursed as she cast a glance around the room, one she didn't remember falling asleep in; so it goes, here in the Pool.
Kurgan couldn’t see her.. not while her mind was switched to the frequency of sleep, that thing he had not done in several millennia now. The scrape of the chair from which Leifong had torn his makeshift club, and the girl’s exclamation made perfect sense of the fact that his bourgeoning return to the inky well of madness he’d so long inhabited had halted abruptly, so that he’d stared at the newly deceased priest agape, agog, and had muttered, “What have I done…” Shadows fled into the maw of the corpse. The room began to right itself, almost liquid in the way fragment of furnishings drew back together, a slow dance of reversal, torn pages sliding back into their books, leaping onto shelves that sat up like good dogs, their backs to the stilling walls. “Lola…” He’d leave Leifong’s question unanswered for the moment, while he rushed to offer her a hand, the tea-stains on his sleeves bleeding out to liquid that trickled along the floor, up the leg of the reformed table, and slithered into a no-longer-shattered pot, which began faintly steaming. “.. ever so glad…” He’d half-turn to the revenant, then. “Why do you want to know?” As if he didn’t know why. But he’d been wrong, once or twice before – very, very wrong – so it was always worth checking.
Caedan lifted her foot as a throw pillow wandered by, en route to a nearby settee, and glanced skeptically in Kurgan's direction, pinning the blame on him for subjecting her to a room that had been initially less than inviting. She pointedly ignored him then, to punish him, as her gaze swept the room to rest on Leifong. "Whoa." She picked idly at the bottom of her fraying sweater. "What happened to you?" The psychic brushed by Kurgan in a full-on rebellion against the Pool who wouldn't give her what she wanted (because it couldn't take what she needed, likely) to shuffle towards the deadish person.
Leifong seems to be ignoring Caedan just as pointedly as she is ignoring Kurgan, his dull grey eyes focused on the creature that had once been a man, oh so long ago. "New things have come to light. This... this" the newly deceased human raises both hands up in front of his face and slowly tenses them, clenching down as though grabbing onto the fabric of reality itself, for as he does so the room starts to bow inwards. The dead flesh of Leifong's face warps as well, twisting, distending, vibrating at an impossibly high frequency, and in the ever so brief moments between the opposite points of those oscillations, a face not entirely the priest's own can be seen, grinning sadistically as though it were looking out from behind a mask. "Power..." he finally finishes, allowing the room and his own body to snap suddenly back into their normal forms like they were made of rubber. The priest's eyes are wide and wild, dark circles rimming the sinking sockets as he revels in what he has now become. "Where is she, Kurgan! I must know, there won't be much time.... time, no, not much..." and then he starts to murmuring, gaze flitting unnecessarily quickly around the room before landing and sticking on Caedan, as though it were the first time he'd noticed her. But rather than speak he shuts his eyes entirely, and takes a deep breath out of habit rather than need, trying to keep hold of himself as his mind moved in three separate directions at once.
Books tumbled off the shelves anew, only to fling themselves back in. The illusionist had his eyes on Caedan for a long, clearly pained moment, after which he sighed raggedly and stepped, too, toward the dead man. “I… happened to him,” he told her, in a mutter, watching the results of his ‘lesson’ remeld the once-mortal’s face. “Time has never been my friend,” the corpse was reminded, “I slept with his girlfriend. And the Key? She’s…” he paused, his features blanking. The room paused, likewise, breathing. “… killing me. In the well.” With a candlestick, he thought, wryly, though that was actually half-true.
Caedan ducked, needlessly, as a book headed her direction did an abrupt about face. She took umbrage at Leifong not immediately capitulating to her desire to have a conversation. She turned then, and stalked toward an archway which shivered and bent, but didn't collapse or prevent her from exiting. She stayed there, under the stone arch like she was preparing for a tornado, and crossed her arms over her chest as she stared sullenly toward the two in the room. Eventually she jerked a finger toward Leifong. "You should leave this place and tell her to stop. She's not here? Inside?" This, directed to Kurgan, then back to Leifong. "Go to Xalious if she is not. Tell her I need to speak to her. Things are missing." Because clearly her issues should take first priority at all times.
Leifong doesn't waste the little time that he has left by spewing further words, instead setting himself instantly to his mission as it stood now, altered. A vague sort of empty expression settles over the priest's face as clears his mind, preparing himself for the first real use of this strange new ability that he seemed to just... know, and yet not fully understand. Thin, skeletal digits tremble slightly as slack-wristed arms are pulled up before him, placed palm to palm in front of his chest, and then in one fluid motion they part and are thrust down in the manner someone might force another's head underwater. The floor becomes viscous, and Leifong crumples into a it, passing through the elastic hole with little difficulty before it springs back up into position violently. He had thought that perhaps Kurgan deserved his thanks, or at least some acknowledgment of what he'd just done, but time was indeed running out. He could -feel- it, feel her... and perhaps if he succeeded, that would be thanks enough. Though... it's not as if the priest is motivated by anything other than selfish motives.
Kurgan said, "She's in the pool.. me... the well. Or perhaps here..." He glanced about, inky eyes swimming with dark on dark, oil in a puddle. "It's all rather becoming the same thing. The same.. " he looked to Caedan, ".. moreso, when you're here. Must you go?" He tried to keep it from sounding like a plea.
Kurgan studied the spot on the floor into which the dead man had sunk, his shoulders slumping. "As for ... whatsisname. One ought to be careful what one asks for."
Caedan gritted her teeth and swung her legs back and forth in agitation. "I'm not Lola. I'm not keeping you alive." She studied him from where she sat and considered a pang of something she felt before quelling it almost immediately, subjecting it to some dark recess of her mind where it wouldn't spring back to her consciousness. "Tell me where she is. I will go. You will come. I need to speak to her. There are things missing. Missing. Do you understand?"
Kurgan drew to his feet, and for a moment, a brief moment, the twin darknesses of his eyes shone a bright sky-blue, before the ebon stain of his soul’s damnation washed over them again. “I told you. She’s in the Pool.” He stepped toward the arch, pausing because.. well, she was in the way. “Let’s go. And…” he almost looked guilty, then. But not quite. “…what’s missing?”
Caedan dodged Kurgan, and inexplicably started to make her way the other direction; apparently she didn't trust Kurgan to take her to Tenebrae. Maybe she'd have better luck if she looked herself. But she delayed to look over her shoulder, and say mopily, "Days. Days are missing. Gone."
“Days. Is that all?” But somehow, Kurgan sensed a ripple, no – a rip, a tear - in some distant fabric. None of his business, probably. Probably. He set off after her then, his strides long. “Lola, wait…” But, as ever, she didn’t.