METALCHEMY
a Metalocalypse fanfic by quantum witch © 2008
Rating: R – adult language, violent and sometimes disgusting imagery
Disclaimer: Metalocalypse is not mine, but I'd sign a pain waiver and then donate half my liver if I could be so.
Summary: "Allegory and regular gory blend together in the dreams of a slightly younger Dethklok, as they seek out their pent-ultimate band member." Note
1 : NIGREDO
Sitting in a smallish back room in a medium-sized tavern in Lillehammer, Norway, were the initial four members of what would soon become the biggest death metal band in history, Dethklok. Stuffed into the room with them were their instruments and equipment, none of which was especially impressive at the moment.
The fifth occupant of the smallish room was a smallish and exceedingly tidy manager/lawyer for the band, and he sat with a carefully crafted bland expression on his face. The argument had been going for five days now, which was three longer than they'd been in the city, and it saw no signs of winding down. The band frankly seemed to get hard-ons from fighting. Charles Offdensen wondered how much longer the fragile bonds holding them together would last.
"I's sorry," Skwisgaar Skwigelf rolled his eyes and clearly lied. "I stills don't gets why we needs another guitars player when I is the fastest guitarist alives anyway." The tall, thin, blond, attractive and arrogant man crossed his arms and leaned against the wall.
"I've been telling you," vocalist and song-writer Nathan Explosion rumbled with exasperation that was approaching violence. He was very large and could have used the skinny Swede as a toothpick and looked like it was a favourable option. He was also, typically, struggling to explain things. "Havin' five guys is, it's like a pentagon—"
"Gram, Nate'n, a penta-gram," Pickles, the drummer and arguably the most logical band member, even when stinking drunk, corrected the big man.
"Yeah, gram. Thing. Ya see it over, all over these famous bands' albums and stuff. It's fuckin' just, it's metal, all right?"
Pickles tried to fill in the obvious blanks. "It's like th' Satanic symbol, th' upside-down star thing, all dark and brutal and scary and shit. He's tryin' to say havin' five guys'd fit with th' symbol, make us look more dark and brutal. Y' see? It's symbolism."
"It's a symbolism, yeah," Nathan continued, "and then all the jack-offs who see us will think, 'Whoa! Those guys're already great metal musicians but they're more, they're way more metal because they have five guys, like a pentagogram!' And then we'll get bigger concerts and more money and record deals and stuff."
"Waits. Whats does cymbals gots to do with guitars?"
"No, no, 'symbol-ism'," Pickles corrected again, "It's'n allegory. It's… Fer fuck's sake, never mind. That's a bigger word'n my brain can handle right now." Pickles slammed back his beer and ignored them all.
"Shee, if we act like Shatanishtsh, then people will schit themshelvesh in fear," William Murderface, morbid-minded bassist, spluttered through the large gap in his front teeth. "People like to be schared to death sho let'sh give 'em something to be schared about…" He dug the perpetual huge knife he carried into the padding of a chair.
Which would be added to the list of things Murderface had casually destroyed, and thus added to the tab of expenses. Ofdensen rolled his eyes, pinched the bridge of his nose beneath his glasses, but kept silent.
Skwisgaar blew a raspberry and said, "Is still a dildos idea. Nihilism is way scariers than dem Satans guys. And who needs more dans one guitarist? I is metal enough for to be two guys anyways."
"Maybe, maybe not," Nathan muttered, glaring at the Swede, "but we're here, we came to Norway, we've spent a shitload of money to come here, and we're gonna find a guy before we leave. I hope. Besides, it'll only be a rhythm guitarist because, ya know, 'cause we already got everything else." He gave a canny smirk. "So, huh. No need to be jealous Skwisgaar."
"I's not jealous!" Skwisgaar countered with a pout that spoke volumes. "No ones wills ever be faster or better thans me! Buuut… Maybe insteads we gets tams-boring player. Dat would be metal."
Nathan glowered. "How the fuck is that metal?"
"It's gots dem little metal things what makes de twinkly sounds." Skwisgaar grinned maliciously. "Really big metal stuff dere."
Pickles snorted into his beer and Murderface chuckled softly, but both wisely kept their mouths shut.
"…You're a real dick, Skwigelf, you know that?"
Sighing, Offdensen rose to his feet and checked his watch. "Oookay. Boys. We have, once again, run out of time for the day. We've been here five hours and auditioned twenty-eight guitarists. Today, alone. The tavern will be opening for actual business in, ah, fifteen minutes. As before, they're letting us keep the equipment set up here through the night. So. You can all just go back to the hotel, have dinner or… whatever and, ah, be back here tomorrow at noon and we'll start again. One more day is all we have, but our advertisements are in all the clubs and music papers around town. Just because you haven't yet found anyone you think, ah, doesn't sound awful –"
"Shuckshassh," Murderface interjected soggily. "They all shucked assh worsh than a shchoolgirl giving her firsht rimjob, that'sh what I shaid."
"Ah. Yes. So you did."
"Ja, deys was alls little girlies who licks behindses like lollipop."
"Don't sound too bad when ya put it thet way," Pickles chuckled.
"Huh huh. Noes it doesn't..."
"But whatever, Offdensen's right," Pickles yawned. "We need ta get some food, get some more booze, get some sleep…"
"Maybe getsh a shchoolgirl. And a lollipop…"
"… An' come beck tomorra'. We get one more day, Nate'n. If we'resuppos'ta find a fifth guy, he'll show up."
"Yeah," Nathan grunted, not satisfied but definitely ready for food, booze, bed and maybe schoolgirls. "Tomorrow maybe…."
After many more hours of indulgence, the members of Dethklok eventually got some sleep. But none of them slept well.
They tossed and turned in their individual beds. And they all dreamed….
Nathan Explosion kicked off his covers, legs thrashing like a dog dreaming of running.
And he was running. He stormed down a football field, not ducking or dodging but barreling straight through the bodies, knocking them aside like fleshy and bleeding bowling pins. He could hear the screams of the crowd, the squeals of cheerleaders, and saw the flashing of cameras in the corners of his eyes. He soaked up the adulation.
He was huffing out steaming breath into cold air, when he heard his militant father's voice over everything else. Telling him not to disappoint. Not to fail. But also not to dream beyond the little field he was on. It was all he would ever be good at…
Nathan stopped running and stuck his fingers in his ears and grunted loudly to drown out the voice, not saying a word, just as he'd done until kindergarten. He filled his head with images of guts and blood, and music that sounded like the instruments themselves were being tortured by the Spanish Inquisition. He felt the noise inside drill outward through his skull until it spilled from his mouth into his hands like golden blood. The liquid gold covered his hands and arms, and flowed over his entire body.
He began to run again, leaving drops of gold behind him, which formed into music notes with every step. When he finally stopped, he was in a blackened and devastated area. The entire world seemed charred to a crisp. He stared at the ruined earth, the grey sky. He was the only bright thing left. His body and his words were gold. He was in his kingdom, ruling the dust. It ought to be depressing but he felt liberated.
He raised his powerful fists to the sky and roared like a lion. The sound resonated across the void land and shook the ground. Laughing with an odd joy, he felt the ground below his feet tingle. And when he looked down he saw a speck of metal glittering under the dust. He brushed that aside to find an entire road paved with gold. He followed it until he came to the crumbled remnants of a city, small enough to be crushed beneath his boots. He was not only golden, he was a giant.
The path went on through the ruined city.. As he walked along, his metal feet struck the metal road and sparks flew, making beautiful dark music.
In the distance, he saw flashes of light that he knew were actually sounds. The same music he made, coming toward him on different roads. He knew also that the sounds were people, others like himself. And when they were all together the music would explode and burn up what was left of the earth while at the same time bringing it to life, bringing forth a new era.
Soon he came to the end of his golden road, but where it ended four other metallic paths began. They extended away at perfect angles from his own, and he realised it formed a pentagram. Damn it, he'd been right.
As he waited, he looked down and saw the middle of the star had become a huge black hole falling down to the center of the earth, the center of the universe, the center of time and space itself. It was black and swirling with black music, sucking him in while also singing out through his throat. It was blacker than the blackest black, times infinity. And he felt perfect for the first time.
Dust was stirring along the other roads, as the others made their way toward him. The fifth metal man was further away, but he knew…
Nathan coughed violently as he awoke, as though his lungs were filled with ashes. He rolled over with a low groan like a wounded mammoth, and realised he'd fallen asleep with a cigarette in his hand and had burnt a smoking hole in his pillow. Reacting quickly, he threw it to the floor and stamped on it with a bare foot. Cursing as he hobbled to the bathroom to put ice on his foot, he completely forgot his dream.
William Murderface lashed out at his bed covers as he dreamed.
He was suffocating, perhaps buried alive. Even with his constant acclaimed desire to kill himself, he really didn't have smothering beneath the ground in mind. Being stabbed brutally with his own knife and his guts pulled out to be wound around a telephone pole would be preferable. A death like that would be metal. He clenched his fist and felt the knife in his hand even now, and used it to dig upward. As he hacked away at roots and stones, the knife made noises like a buzz-saw. The bowels of the earth gave way and soon he was breathing the air.
Which was fetid and rotting, like the stink of a thousand corpses stirred together with the shit of a thousand diarrhetic pigs. Pretty fucking rank. But he inhaled it like it was the finest perfume. He looked at the carnage around him, the bodies and bodily wastes, with hundreds of crows hopping abount, tearing out eyes and vital organs.
Ah, death. Nothing better than death. Unless it was death he was responsible for.
And apparently he was. On a nearby hillside, carved in letters fifty feet high, were the words 'Murderface wuz here… and analihated all you dildo-lickers and then shit and pissed on you becuz you fucking desserved it, you doueshbags.' After carving it he must have passed out and somehow sunk below the bodies. Weird. Even weirder, he seemed to be reading the words at eye-level and they didn't look very big at all. He looked down and saw that the heaping mounds of the dead, feces and urine was growing smaller. Or rather he was growing taller. He'd always wanted to be taller. The crows flew around his head, squawking and encouraging him.
He grinned his big gap-toothed grin, realising he now had a weenie the size of an elephant. Not an elephant's weenie. The entire fucking elephant. Life would be awesome with a huge package. He reached down to adjust it and felt it was quite hard. But so was his hand. Puzzled, he looked at the hand. It was a sort of bluish-white-grey colour. Actually it was metal, lead maybe. He opened his great maw and laughed loudly enough to rattle the stones of the hillside. He was a giant metal man. How metal was that? Very fucking metal. Can't get more metal than being metal.
He then went stomping over the hill, his enormous boots crushing trees and tiny wildlife in his path. He felt super. Until he came to a busy metropolis and found himself suddenly face-to-face with a mirrored skyscraper. His own ugly mug glared death back at itself. Self-loathing sizzled inside him, and in his rage he punched his fist through the building. As he pulled it back, he saw tiny humans attempting to flee for their lives. Well, he was having none of that crap. He grabbed double handfuls of them, squeezing until they were crunchy red paste oozing between his fingers. Then he licked both hands clean.
The town below him was just begging to be covered in bodily waste. And his belly was roiling like Hell's blender anyway so it would be a monumental shit, a literal mudslide to bury the town. Laughing evilly, he dropped his cut-offs and was bending over, when he felt a painful lurch inside. He shat and puked and pissed at once, and what came out wasn't shit or puke or piss. It was molten metal. His entire inner self had liquefied and was flowing away.
Sudden fear gripped him, and he scrabbled madly on the ground trying to gather up his insides. It clung to his hands, quickly cooling and forming into something like twisted boxing gloves. He'd never be able to pull his pants back up now. But he felt strangely better with his guts entirely emptied out and lying in his hands to see clearly. It looked pitiful and dull and pock-marked. He felt a welling need to cry, something he'd never do in public…and there were still tiny humans alive down there who might see him, blistered to shreds as most of them were from hot liquid lead. So he sniffled and shuffled away toward the hillside again, pants around his ankles.
He felt the tears start and they too were molten. Hot metal snot dripped and stuck to his hands along with the rest of the warped mess. But through the haze of scorching tears, he saw a sparkling line on the ground. It was a road of lead but it was polished and glowing. It seemed to be the only route away from the people, so he sniffed hard, sucking burning metal back into his sinuses, and stepped onto the road.
In the distance now, he could see other giants. Three slowly moving toward a central point, a fourth floating down in the same direction. And as they moved they all emitted fantastic dark music. When he arrived, it would be five. Like the pentagram. Interesting.
They were also much shinier than himself, but maybe they could help him shine too…
Murderface awoke with a groan, grasping his stomach. Damn, that smalahove was gonna be the death of him. It had seemed like the most brutal menu item he'd ever come across, but now it felt like the sheep's head was biting straight through his intestines. He spent the next six hours in the toilet, and the dream was washed away with every flush.
Pickles snored drunkenly, passed out more than asleep in his bed.
In his dream he was also pretty drunk, which was a good thing. Because he felt a crushing weight on his back and the booze kind of numbed it. He tried to dislodge it by shaking, by reaching around and clawing at it, but he couldn't get a grip and it was clinging like an alien blood-sucking tick. He felt what energy he had begin to drain.
Finally he found an open bottle of booze. There were dozens littering the ground around his feet, small surprise, but this one still had a little alcohol left inside. Resisting the urge to swallow it, he instead poured it down over his back and heard whatever was there snarl and finally release him. He also felt his skin burning and getting stiff. It spread to his arms and down to his hands. There was a sort of bluish-green crust creeping over them and he freaked out, trying to wipe it off on his pants. But his pants weren't pants anymore, they were metal. Wait, so were his arms. Everything but the crusty stuff was a shiny orangey-red metal. He was made of copper, for some reason, and the blue-green stuff must be that whatchacallit crap that happened to pennies and antique pots when they got handled to much or left in the rain. Had to be from the fucking blood-sucking thing on his back.
This wouldn't do. He liked brutalness, but not when it meant his body was being messed up and he wasn't the one doing the messing. He turned to find the creature who'd done this to him and saw nothing around but a small mirror on the ground below. It was tiny but he managed to pick it up and squint one eye into it. It wasn't quite his own reflection there, but close enough for him to know it was his goddamned prick brother. Snarling, he flung the toy mirror to the ground and crushed it beneath his metal foot, which began turning greenish as well. Damn it, mere contact with that douchebag was corroding him. Fucking hell. Pickles never could measure up to the older parasite, who spent all this time trying to suck the life out of the younger brother because he didn't fucking have anything inside him worth a shit. Fucking lose-lose situation. Time to run.
Pickles stormed in the opposite direction, cursing and crushing houses as he went. It was then he realised that he was in a toy-sized world. Or that he was a giant in a regular world. The latter sounded far better. He stomped a few more houses just for fun, then got bored. He wondered how many bottles of booze it would take now to get him drunk. It was already an astronomical number when the bottles and he were their proper sizes. Now what? Would he have to figure out how to home brew? Fuck that shit. It was a dream, so there had to be a vat of booze someplace.
Scratching at his green arms, he also wanted to find a cure for his skin. Maybe booze itself would be the answer, as it was to so many other problems.
After a length of time stumbling across the landscape, he spied a large crate with an XXX on the side. He knew it either contained some really freaking awesome porn or was the old-fashioned sign for liquor. Either way was pretty damn sweet. Cracking open the crate with one metallic hand, he found bottles big as water towers. He sighed like he'd found heaven in a box, then drank and drank and let the booze spill over his body. It stung his greenish skin, which seemed to gradually get brighter.
A glint of light on metal caught his eye. In the distance were other giants approaching a central location. Three were about as far away as himself, and there was a fourth flying along like mad to catch up. Hmm, five metal guys. Nathan was right. Cool.
He grinned and stood up, but wobbled and fell down again. When he got to his feet, he saw he'd uncovered a road made of copper like himself. Must be the way to go. But he also saw he'd dented his stomach pretty bad. Couldn't go to his destiny with a bunch of dings in his chassis.
He heard a rattling inside his chest and wondered how to make it go away. Oh, well that was obvious. Puke it up. He swallowed the contents of the last bottle to lubricate the process and bent over to heave. The liquor-bile gushed out like a tidal wave, sweeping away the little toy houses and the people inside them. It kept coming until it flooded the world up to his shins. And finally out came the clanging thing from inside.
It was a hammer, pretty big one. How the hell had he gotten that inside him? Hey, yeah, hammers were used to beat out the dents in copper. What he needed to do was swallow it again but make it work at the same time. Pretty big fucking pill though. He'd need a drink to get it down. But he had no more full bottles. Shrugging, he used an empty to scoop up the puke-booze, popped the hammer in his mouth, and swallowed. He saw tiny humans caught in the bottle. Just like worms in tequila, he figured, so down they went into his metal guts.
Inside now he heard the people screaming and the hammer pounding. The beat was powerful, each drumming strike was sending sparks through his body and out through his eyes and nose and mouth. He laughed in delight and walked through the floods on the copper pathway. It felt electric under his feet, and the drumming inside made terrible, wonderful music, and it all was leading him to…
Pickles awoke with a jerk and the taste of actual bile in his mouth. He rolled over in his hotel bed, vomiting on the floor. Gasping for air, he wiped his mouth on the pillow case, but he still grabbed the nearest bottle and swigged to wash out the taste. Then he curled up with the bottle like a teddy bear. The dream was long forgotten.
Skwisgaar Skwigelf twisted the sheets in his twitching hands and moaned softly.
His fingers danced a tarantella and capoeria that mated and birthed a crowd-killer mosh. The guitar wailed and cried so beautifully under his hands. He and the instrument lived in a constant, orgasmic BDSM relationship, and he loved the battle.
Now his fingers flew so fast that the strings sparked, fire engulfed his hands, crawled across his shoulders and became wings. He was lifted, laughing and crying, into the sky. No one could catch him up. He flew above the entire world, faster than light, lighter than air. He came to an icy mountaintop and settled down, perched like a great bird. And his guitar trilled, a metallic bird singing its heart out.
The way his fingers moved was unconscious and instinctive, and for moment he wished they might stop. What a strange thought. Because if they ever did stop all of his hated memories might creep out. The part of his brain that his fingers controlled made enough noise to keep the other part mostly quiet, and this was good. Things he didn't like lurked in that other part, things with painted faces and scowling red mouths, and laughter, cruel and unfeeling. So his fingers flew along the strings to keep half his brain occupied.
But now his fingers became entangled in the strings, metal vines pinching and biting into his flesh. He howled in fear as they burrowed into his skin, sliding up his veins and into his brain. His guitar had turned against him.
Suddenly he felt no pain. He became still and stared at the sky, where he saw a tiny pinpoint of light. Not the sun, not a star. But it was coming closer. Lifting his hand to shade against the brightness, he noticed it wasn't quite his own hand anymore. The skin wasn't skin. It was metal. Silvery but not bright and polished. Confused, he touched his hand with his other hand and saw they were both metal. It must be the strings, eating away at his flesh from the inside. But he wasn't the same kind of metal, that much he could tell. He touched his chest and heard a hollow clang. His insides were empty. He sounded like a tin can. He didn't think he could fill it up.
Coming down from the mountain, he saw that beneath his feet were thousands of women of every age and race and size, clamouring for his attention and his body. He towered over them, enormously tall. Much taller than a tree. Taller than a mountain.
The women weren't even that interesting to him. Hundreds were clinging to his metal feet and dozens had managed to crawl up his leg. As they crawled like insects over his crotch, he sighed and peeled away the fly of his trousers like foil. He was erect, as he often was, and most of the women crawled out onto the thick metal shaft. But it was icy cold from being on the mountaintop and their tongues stuck to him, and eventually they all froze and died. He flicked them away with his fingers. How boring they were. When his cock would not go down on its own, he pushed it and it creaked loudly as it bent. It should have disturbed him but it didn't. Doing up his trousers again, he signed.
He sighed and kicked his way through the remaining hordes of women. He saw that their bodies had covered a silvery metal pathway. It was wider than a guitar string, but when he touched it with his boot it began to throb and sing like one. He followed it, hoping to find something satisfying.
There came the glint of light again. He saw three other giants that seemed familiar, far in the distance. They walked toward one another, and toward him, music pulsing from them all. He kept moving but was more interested in watching the fourth one, the bright one that was silvery like himself. He played his guitar and the flying form echoed him. Over and over they sang to one another, and it made Skwisgaar happy and sad at once. Now it was coming closer, and he knew it would land soon and he would…
Skwisgaar shuddered violently, nearly falling out of his hotel bed. He wasfreezing, even with blankets up to his chin. Even though there was a roaring fire in the hearth, and being born to the climate where he now slept, he could not get warm. He scrambled from the bed and did something he hadn't done since his teens. He put on clothing to sleep. The dream stuck in the corners of his mind, almost but not quite hidden.
NOTES:
- In alchemy, the primary metals used were lead, iron, tin, copper, gold, silver, and mercury. Each responded to either the sun, the moon, or one of five planets thought to exist in the 16th century (not counting earth).
- Nathan is gold because, even though he's far from pure, he is the leader. The lion is a symbolic animal for the metal.
- Murderface is lead because of its depressive and even poisonous properties, and he badly needs to be purified. Crows are a symbol for the metal as well as the process of alchemy where lead is used.
- Smalahove is boiled sheep's head, eyes, teeth and all included. You apparently are meant to eat the whole face, and the cheek area is especially tender. I'm vomiting as I write.
- Pickles is copper, which is conductive and malleable, and he is rather a peacekeeper in his way. The mirror is one of the symbols of copper as it was highly polished and used for that purpose in ancient times. The verdigris corrosion would actually take salt and vinegar or scrubbing with chalk, to remove it, but booze worked for the dream.
- Skwisgaar is tin because it is really the most fragile metal of the group. The loud creak when he bends his penis down is called the "tin cry", and is caused by breaking crystallisation inside the tin. Though not mentioned clearly, one of the processes of alchemy is symbolised by a peacock, another is the phoenix. He has a touch of both in his dream.
- A tarantella is a violent and sexualised dance. The capoeria is a dance filled with sparring, kicking, and even headbutts. A Crowd-Killer is wild and done with no regard for the health and safety of those around you (in other words, what Toki does in the "Christian moshpit; his style may be "lawnmower" but don't quote me).
Also: "Offdensen" is how Brendon Small spells it, not the fandom.