Below the depths of the corrupted lake, Luchesi lay in the fetal position, pressed to the lake's deepest point by the oppressive weight of the black rain above. The inky liquid had long since proliferated his lungs, but the eventual release of death that came with drowning seemed to ignore his spasms and shakes, leaving him to be invaded by the liquid evil for what felt like eternity. His pale skin offered no warmth in the frigid climate of the lakebed.
It was a violent kind of cold, worse than the mere measure of temperature. It incorporated the emotional feeling of coldness, as if Luchesi were wholly abandoned by life, by death, and even his very senses. He was blind, deaf, mute, only able to perceive the feeling of drowning in the dark.
In his mind, he wept, consumed by bitterness from all that his life had ever led up to. Defeat. He'd been beaten again, both in the physical sense, though at the hands of a demonic presence rather than his father, this time, and in his quest, if it could be called that. His loose goal of taking revenge and spreading misery to protest the hand he'd been dealt had also been overthrown. Cast down here, weakened, de-clawed, he felt like some discarded animal. Roadkill. A starved rat crushed beneath every boot to ever cross its path.
Luchesi screamed, or tried to. Another failure. His lungs, throat, mouth and nose were all occupied by the black rain. Not even so much as a bubble made it to the surface for his effort. He became conscious of the darkness around him, which was somehow worse than the dark behind his eyelids. When he focused, he could feel himself...shrinking. As if his blood were being leached out by ten thousand stringy parasites, skin pruning under their mandibles as the flesh beneath was rendered thin and inert.
In the depths of that black sea, the withered Luchesi began to float, eyes somehow adjusting to the darkness enough that he could see just a few feet ahead of himself, staring at the stained-black sand of the lakebed, looking more like crushed charcoal. Something caught his eye then, a length of chain, half buried at first, but stretching at a slight upward angle beyond his limited line of sight. It was coiled around a cinderblock at the end, jutting out of the inky sand like some buried landmark. As Luchesi drifted within reach, his bony hands choked around the chain.
”Finally, an escape from this hell!” Luchesi’s thoughts echoed, muffled even in his own head through the quagmire of Black Rain around him.
He pulled himself up the chain slowly, his drained body lacking much strength, though he was much lighter than before.
Luchesi felt his withered limbs tiring quickly as he heaved himself up the chain, feeling some give now on the other side, perhaps attached to something like a buoy which would bob when he pulled on the tether. Determined not to fail at failing at his failure, Luchesi grunted and struggled onward anyway, the goo in his lungs becoming easier to force out as he ascended. perhaps the thickest of the stuff sank to the bottom, which would explain how he could now see, too.
Perhaps ten minutes of struggle later, the crestfallen jester catches a glimpse of something gruesome, a humanoid shape lurking like a ghost in the distance above him, the chain attached to its left leg. Luchesi paused, curious what he was looking at. Continuing to ascend, the figure came into full view.
A waterlogged corpse, skin perforated with holes where eels and waterborne parasites had opted to make their dens. Its arms were raised above its head, like a concert conductor just before cuing a fortissimo from some great hellish band.
Though the sunken eyeballs had long since turned to inert white jelly, Luchesi swore he could see burning, vengeful pinpricks within the empty sockets turn to him. Grinning jaws fell open like an unhinged trapdoor, and a silent accusation pierced Luchesi. The tattered, grease-stained rags fluttered around the four long strokes the jester himself had raked open the long way down the man's torso, sundering ribs and splitting the stomach and bowels. In the yawning crevices of the slashed body, more eels and squirming things made their nest. A pointing finger curled like a claw - the irony weighing sick and heavy in Luchesi's polluted gut - on the end of an arm whose wrist had been snapped sharply at a cringe-inducing angle.
You.
Luchesi thought.
Staring him down, face to face like a karmic highlights reel of Luchesi's self-damnation, the vagrant mugger he had slit open to implicate his dear Richie now leered at Luchesi.
You're the man who killed me. those demonic eyes growled.
"Yes" Luchesi would have said. "You've got me there. I put my hand in the cookie jar."
The Faceless Man had beamed some insight into Richie's guilty conscience into Luchesi's own before. He knew the boy admonished himself for leaving the 'crackhead' to his violent end.
Oh how much more delectably the cute little ginger would squirm had he only known that his attacker was no more than an entranced pawn himself. The sudden attack had been no mugging - the Faceless Man had touched him with the black rain for the express purpose of sending Richie running. Now, forced to confront the ghosts of his past in a feverish nightmare world where they took on new life to admonish him, Luchesi felt a final twinge of remorse that, just maybe, other human beings had been 'real' like him after all.
But it was far too late for doubts. The Faceless Man too must have accounted for the seditious thirst for vengeance Luchesi had harbored against his master within the sea of darkness. How could he not have picked up on this? The ocean Luchesi was undergoing his baptism within was after all the ichor that pumped through the cloaked abomination's wicked heart.
Too late in life, Luchesi would be reminded what it was like to be in another's shoes. It would be raped into him as a blending force swirled him and his victim together, a sadomasochistic symphony of pain and pleasure, victimization and victimizing, murdering and the terror of being murdered, melded into one maddened, cackling mindscape.
The corpse gripped its own wrist, twisting its mangled body and sending its aquatic inhabitants scrambling out of its nostrils and the holes that adorned its ribs. With a grisly series of cracks, the mugger wrenched its own right arm off, the end of the bone sticking sharp and jagged out of the decayed flesh.
Those hollow sockets stared deep into Luchesi, jaw unhinging as it screamed in agony, stagnant blood beginning to flow from the corpse's eyes. "You are damned!!" The corpse plunged the splintered end of its own severed arm between Luchesi's ribs, driving the sallow bone deep enough to puncture his lung. With his remaining hand, the claw-raked vagrant seized Luchesi by the neck, dragging the jester towards his gaping maw.
Teeth that were rotten and plagued with disease even before his slaughter by Luchesi's hand and dumping in the lake dug jaggedly into Luchesi's forehead, scraping against his skull with audible grit as it tore a chunk of flesh off and spat it back at him. "You shall never open your third eye." The corpse hissed, its grip squeezing tighter around Luchesi's neck as he wailed in pain from his injuries, vision clouded with nothing but blood, darkness, and the disfigured, rotten face of his former prey turned karmic reaper. This, Luchesi realized, was true terror. True to the corpse's haggard screams, Luchesi felt something snap in him, like the last string dangling a marionette above the inferno. Part of his spirit, what little was left, was amputated by those tobacco-stained teeth.
Above, in some strange amphitheater of void that swirled like an unclear boundary between the Station Bay sewer and this endless black sea, the Faceless Man watched on, empty hood inclined. Bubbles that had trickled steadily to the surface abruptly stopped. Whether Luchesi's perception of eternal torment, or this brief time lapse of a mere few minutes, were accurate, it seemed irrelevant to the enigmatic observer. Here was an entity whose very concept of cause and effect had been so thoroughly twisted and convoluted as to become one and the same. It may have been days, even weeks, perhaps. He simply stopped making note of any change on the black rain's surface the moment that trickle stopped.
The fusion underway beneath the still waters was an iron left in the fire to return to at another time.
The Faceless Man heard the echoes of his feline servant pouncing Chikita in the fetid tunnels beyond.
"It seems my children are all beginning to piece things together now." he said to himself.
Be that as it may, the countless variables that had been guided into play would ultimately serve only one purpose - his will.
The Faceless Man faded out of the boundless chamber, sweeping across the vast waves of time and space to his home, leaving the gestation to complete itself.
-
Richie has awakened his runes and done the impossible by catching me off guard, Freyja has remembered her rebellion against the heavens and discovered the paradox of the complex, Chikita has learned the nature of my essence and the strength of souls, and Holly has undergone an assimilation of many wills into one common understanding. You are all exceptional pieces. I can't wait to see you play.
Only the puppeteer remains unclear at the moment. Doubtless he has deepened the guilty link to the good Director for my convenience, and I harbored no doubts Cuppy himself could survive his ordeal. But the probability of his soul leaving its strings in the complex was so low I hadn't bothered to think the scenario through to its conclusion. Whether he survives to go on as part of my design hinges on how quickly his body can revive itself. I wonder... How deep do his threads sew?
And what of Richie's vision? Twelve lights, each with its own energy, all shaken into meeting by the wake of something unseen. Azure and the orange hues of fire, of course Richie's and Freyja's, that much was clear, and the ice blue of Chikita. But what of the grass-green? And that...flash of darkness. I suppose there were eleven lights, weren't there? And that utter void of light, familiar...
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The Faceless man chuckled, regarding his own shadowy heart and the Black Rain that he lorded.
Gold there was also, and that sallow beige, one blood-red, a dark purple, and a lighter violet. That...eye-searing pink, and finally silver, flecked with rust.
-
Cuppy tossed his hood back, letting the river-tinged breeze ruffle his cherubic blond curls. Owl-like eyes poured over the scene of opposing armies squaring off against each other. On one side was Shunpei's circle of friends, among them a ginger girl in orange, a scraggly boy with black hair, and a brown-haired girl with a bobcut and green sweater. They wielded a jump rope as a whip, a pair of sticks, and open fists, respectively. At their front, Shunpei twirled a long tonfa, his swimwear goggles catching the sun's glint.
On the opposing side, the tall boy with frosted tips rallied his entourage - a punk rocker chick, and a tan boy with a buzz cut, built like a brick shit house. The eldest, a boy Cuppy could identify as Justin for the seething hatred rippling through this memory, had a yet unseen member of Shunpei's group by the hair. Cuppy peaked around the formation to see a smaller blond boy, this one with a messy bedhead of wild spikes, struggling to free himself from the bully's grip. His white shirt was torn and scuffed, splotched with blood. At his feet was a six foot long stick with a brown knot in the side at its base.
Cuppy felt his breath catch as the pipsqueak twisted free, snatched up his stick, and swung against Justin, who blocked the strike with an old fashioned billy club.
As if this had been the signal shot to start a race, the two throngs of juvenile street fighters threw themselves against each other. Eyes were blackened, lips split, and ankles twisted.
The tan boy threw the much smaller black-haired boy against a tree trunk, knocking him breathless, and the punk girl lashed out a long leg, hugged tight by slashed jeans, into Shunpei's side.
Through it all though, Cuppy found his attention continually drawn to the boy with the long stick, who kept getting up even after being rolled across the ground again and again. He saw a spark of determination in those emerald eyes, and knew at once that this was the person whose memories he was reliving.
Sparks almost seemed to fly when his stick and Justin's club clashed, as though they were swords.
That's the guy Shunpei went to pick up back at the apartment. That complex - Misty Glen - it looked exactly like our home. What does this all mean?
Cuppy shrugged. Unannounced, he dove into the fray.
The silver-haired punk girl - Freydis; the names were coming to Cuppy the longer he inhabited this looping dreamscape - widened her visible icy eye in surprise as Cuppy's float ball flew at her face. She leaned back out of the way in a frantic reflex, doing an impromptu limbo. Cuppy jiggled his line midair, and the forty pound orb sledged down... directly into her tits. She mewled and collapsed.
"Chest lumps are lady nuts." Cuppy nodded emphatically.
Shunpei and the others stopped a moment to blink and stare at the newcomer.
"...ok then, don't look a gift horse in the ass." Shunpei shrugged, and casually kicked Freydis while she was down.
"Little shit!" the huge tan boy - Ryder - bellowed, and charged Cuppy.
Cuppy easily tripped him with a concealed wire as the battle continued around him - and the boy landed right on top of Cuppy, driving the back of his head into a rock.
The scene faded, and Cuppy snapped his fingers at the sight of unending black.
"Fiddlesticks." he crossed his arms. "Alright, need a bit more practice." he let his consciousness ride the flow of this living memory, and carry him through a flash forward of sights, sounds, and scents, back to the dawn of this children's turf war.
"Press start to continue." Cuppy cracked his knuckles out, and prepared to try again.
-
Meanwhile, Richie felt his skin crawl as he and Freyja looked over the frozen black rain, and stifled the urge to vomit from the idea that they might have drank that shit.
Freyja was padding at the bank, indecisive. Richie caught a glimpse of her pale face as she lifted a hand that conjured a glowing red fireball.
"Don't." Richie said.
Freyja looked at him, confused.
"We don't know if you can destroy it with fire. You might just melt the ice."
"Then what should we do?" Freyja asked, dispersing the flame, a whiff of smoke rising from her palm.
To her credit, the ichor did look a bit like something petroleum-based that'd burn well, but caution was the better route for now. As Richie looked into the lake, he felt the tingling sensation of being watched, like some cryptid of legend were staring up through the darkness at him, maw agape as it tensed itself to break through the ice and drag him down to the black depths. He growled, irritated by his own apprehension. "I don't know. I don't like it here." Richie said plainly, through his teeth. He glanced at his dragon tattoos to see if they were looking as disturbed as he felt.
Freyja hummed, rolling her shoulder a bit as she stretched her arms overhead. "Do you think a strong enough light would snuff it out?" She asked, imagining a spotlight shining into the lake and sizzling away all the inky sludge it touched. "Not that I know where we'd get one." She added.
"Light?" Richie repeated.
He recalled how his runes had unfurled azure luminescence a few times now, always prompted by the proximity of some rival predator. First back when his closet had opened into a sewer tunnel spewing that giant albino alligator on a flood of filthy backwash, and then later when they nearly lost themselves in the bloodlust invoked by the Faceless Man. He had been there during the gator incident too, of course; perhaps it was that Richie's runes had not fully awakened then as they had now. Since then, he and they had spoken freely, and Richie had learned to harness and extend their wind to tools as he saw fit. And, strange as it seemed, despite all the broken bones, torn muscles, and spilled blood, Richie's body felt much sturdier now - closer to that of a dragon's.
He, while dwelling in dreams imposed on him after Chikita had seen fit to knock him out for his own safety, had clutched his body to that great Sun against the Void's event horizon.
Light and darkness. They were two sides of the same coin who met at twilight, long conflated with pancreationist forces of good against evil. The girl next to him even now was some product of the latter's conception. Yet, so long as one existed, so did the other.
Richie's dragons, sniffing out the darkness, shone their blue light in response to guide him. He had always thought of his inborn tattoos as a burden and a curse that attracted monsters, beginning with that cult. Only now did it dawn on him that so too could he track the monsters.
Was it foolhardy instinct that stirred his runes to seek battle? Or was their restlessness rooted in Richie's potential to actually meet and overpower the dark, and the things that hid in it?
He looked down at his right arm, writhing and glowing faintly as one of his till-then sleeping dragons opened a single reptilian eye that locked onto his.
"Why you looking at me like that?" Richie grumbled, tempted to flick the dragon on the nose. The dragon's brows lowered seriously. "Something is stirring, we feel the energies of combat nearby."
Well, that wasn't a confirmation of his fears below the lake surface, but it did give him a good excuse to move away from the gloomy pool. "Where?" He asked, climbing up on a municipal power box and surveying the local area. He didn't immediately see or hear anything going on, but he could subtly detect some kind of disturbance near the treeline. "Tats are saying we've got company, can you smell or hear anything?" He asked his lupine companion.
Freyja twitched her nose, repulsed by the idea of shifting it to canine mode this close to the fetid pool, frozen over though it was. Instead, she tilted her head up toward the treetops, spotting an ideal branch perch. She strained her legs, muscle bulging around her thighs and calves as the skin turned jet black and sprouted fur. Her toes compressed into paw pads armed with wolfen nails, and a curved dewclaw poked out the back of either calf.
She crouched low - looking as though she were going to lay an egg, Richie thought, and grimaced that Cuppy's nonsense was starting to infect him - and jumped straight up, landing gracefully on the branch.
Severed leaves rained over Richie's head from Freyja's impact.
I should have enough distance here.
She wrinkled and wetted her nose over into a partially-formed wolf snout, and inhaled the air flowing through the canopy. A few seconds later, she dropped down again, landing beside Richie, her nose regressed.
"Adrenaline and stress hormones, feline; fight or flight. And something artificial." she rubbed her nose and pointed into the greenlit distance. "Sixty yards that way."
"Something fighting a cat? Beats standing around here waiting for hell to unthaw." Richie says, cracking his knuckles. He hopped off the electrical box, starting to jog in the direction Freyja had pointed. Freyja followed close behind, wondering what the artificial thing was. It had a bit of the smell of the electronics aisle in a big box store, the subtle scent of plastic and freshly-built TVs. It was a sterile sort of thing, difficult to compare to anything else. "Might be a robot or some kind of drone." She thinks out loud.
"Huh? Like a Roomba?" Richie says, slowing down just slightly and trying to quiet his own breathing. "Smells like a new camera or something, must be some kind of robot the cat's fighting." Freyja says, unsure if Richie or anyone with non-enhanced sensory organs could really pick up on such scents. The duo neared the treeline now, and the sounds of the skirmish became audible to Freyja. Hissing, footfalls in brush, soft mechanical whirring, and the occasional zipping sound that might've been a quick movement from a small machine.
What they saw instead was initially cause for confusion. The metallic smell Freyja expected belonged to a robot instead blared from a hellish, concentric wreath of flames on the prowl, skimming the ground and leaving trails of burnt grass and scorched soil in its wake. The unnatural light in Richie's eyes made him remember all at once. This was one of those goddamned tracers the dressy cunt made, like the one that had escalated O'Gravy's already cantankerous bad mood by virtue of nearly annihilating him. And now, one of those digital firestorms was biting at the ass of another familiar face.
"Incest cat?" Richie tilted his head.
The six-limbed, twin-tailed wampus cat that he and Cuppy had absolutely beat the ever-loving shit out of, had its back haunches, already raw from Cuppy's spicy pellet, snared in the mobile tracer's burning reticle.
The agonized yowling and desperate mad panic in the faux-puma's eyes touched some exposed nerve of Richie's psyche. The amnesiac haze of the night he had returned to Cuppy had faded, and he realized that he could identify the crippling aftereffects of every blow they had dealt the cat on its body now. It still limped from its cracked spine and neck.
His mind was a whirling recap of the mugger he left for dead to Luchesi's blades, of O'Gravy who had idiotically drowned himself to spite their pacifism, and of-
"Mom... The kids..." Richie trembled.
He turned his back on Ella as she was mowed down by cultist gunfire, and fled again when he escaped the kennel, leaving the other rune-marked sacrifices to their fate.
Not his problem. Survival of the fittest. Not his problem. Not his fault. Not his responsibility. Not-
Richie screamed a primal, self-loathing roar.
"Fuck it." - he sprinted into the struggle.
It was his problem now. He wouldn't be responsible for another creature being murdered again.