Comic 1135 - Build a cage
Posted on 30th Nov 2018, 10:16 PM
in Like a Bullet from Behind
Average Rating: 5 (1 votes) /
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Author Notes:
You practiced for this--building walls, quickly. Bone, muscle, fat, veins--you add an extremely large amount of iron to the blood supply.
The charge builds. You don't have much time.
You conjure walls out of the trail your giant clot left behind. You have the walls spray more blood, giving you more places to summon walls from--
the room lights up.
You barely get the walls up in time, growing them into each other, using them as a protective cage from the electrical blast.
Control is difficult--the electricity causes the musculature in your wall to jerk and spasm. Blood on the inside begins to clot. You hurriedly convert what's left into portals, and use that to funnel electricity off into the red.
That, itself, is a struggle. There's... a lot of electricity, the excess burning and ripping through the tissue of your cage, and the portals themselves are... starting to clot. Both those on the inside, and on the floor.
You yell that you brought her.
You think.
You might be her.
You don't know who 'her' is!
The electricity fades to a trickle... and then stops.
You all breathe a collective sigh of relief.
"Who is she?," Michelle asks. "Who the hell do you want?!"
The ghosts flicker in and out of existence, barely sustaining even a portion of themselves long enough to speak.
"THE STRONG SOUL!"
"ALL THAT POWER!"
"I NEED THAT POWER!"
"THE PROPHECY!"
"SOON!"
"What prophecy?," Fuse asks loudly. "You gotta be more specific, man!"
"OLD GODS ARE f ADING"
"NEW GODS TAKE T h EIR PLAC-"
"I MUST BE rEAdy!"
"BR IN G He R--"
Another ghost starts to speak, but can't manage the words out. After that... no ghosts appear.
You don't sense any electricity coursing through the room. Whatever was distributed this direction, it was mostly used up in the blast--there's not enough power left for... whatever it is, to keep the ghosts conjured and talking.
At the very least, that means the thing can't immediately blast you again.
After a very tense silence, Michelle speaks up. "We safe?"
You nod. For the moment.
Caius shakes his head, scowling. "That... that's an awful smell."
Fuse snorts, almost smiling. "What, burnt flesh? You get used to it."
Caius's face scrunches up. "Really?"
"No," Fuse replies bluntly. "Not really."
"So, uh," Michelle pauses, "...gods, huh?"
"And strong souls," Caius adds, "whatever tha hell that means."
Fuse shrugs his shoulders. "Ghosts, astral forms, sense of self, souls--it's either after Blondie or Faraday. Dude probably doesn't even know himself. Or herself. Itself. Thing just wants power."
You give it a moment, and pay close attention-- but no more energy is being pulled toward his room, or charged up near here. You... may have successfully convinced the source of all this that you brought the soul it wants. Or... ARE the soul it wants.
You start dismantling and pulling your meat cage back into the red before it falls apart on its own.
In any case, what can we do for them? And do they have a method of communicating that doesn't involve *massive* blasts of electricity? I guess we just... need to ask the building in general, absent something to direct our question towards.
Can we enhance our ghost-sight, somehow, without *becoming* a ghost via the astral travel ritual? Incident F might have given us the resources to do that, possibly. Just... try to focus on sensing the electricity around us in more detail, see if we can get any "visual" information.
ready to turn it into a cage the moment something like this happens again
EDIT: also ask Pierce if he knows about anything about this?
EDIT 2: check on the bloodbug btw, if it's still in tact, we can use it to scout ahead more
Maybe some negotiations could be enough, but I kinda doubt the trigger-happy murderghost will be that nice.
It seems to need electricity to sustain the ghosts. Maybe let's feed it a small amount-- splash some portal blood onto the web and channel a controlled quantity of electricity into it from the Red dimension-- and see if it's able to manifest the ghosts to talk further.
Possibly with another cage prepared, just in case. And maybe someone should hold the ghost gun just to see what kind of readings are coming off the ghosts.
1. Leave and figure out how to make our portals more clot resistant.
2. Blood the webs and make new, non-clot portals. Now we can add electricity or drain it, directly from the webs... Even better if we can reach our portals through the physical webs into the non-physical ones somehow.
3. Let Spider Satan knkw we are in charge here. Bad behavior gets electricity drained until it is down to a less dangerous level. Good behavior, and we may be willing to provide more power to it.... On our terms.
After that? I reiterate my first suggestion. Fire, and lots of it.
Actually, we might should ask the Tradesmen if we can safely talk to it via Caius's phone. Might make the process a lot safer.
And as an irrelevant future experiment for later, blood-mist.
Bonus points if we figure out how to generate an electrical blood-mist, followed by making blood-storms.
As it stands, this thing sounds like it wants to eat Faraday, which is kind of a non-starter, but depending the situation, we might be able to come to a peaceful resolution here.
If we're worn out after one blast, we should probably back off and not deal with this right now. Its in an isolated area and cannot harm the populous from where it is so far as we know. Would need to come back eventually, probably after dealing with Carp.
If we are feeling aces, however, we NEED to push onward, press the advantage while we have it. Fortune favors the bold and all that.
Seems like its using the electricity to communicate, and it takes a while to charge. Dunno if we really want to be talking with it at all, though; it obviously wants someone with enough power to keep it going, or ascend -- definitely don't want the latter, and until we know more, no idea about the former. It could literally eat one of our peeps, and that's no good at all :C