The Psychopath
I'm back! Dropped those two math classes like a lead weight and haven't looked back. Now I just have to figure out how I'm going to get my university and work schedules to compliment each other.
This is the chapter many have been waiting for: the introduction of the Son of Jashin!
We also—finally—hit 100 Reviews! It took five chapters and nearly 60k words, but we made it!
Disclaimer: I don't own Percy Jackson or any other works of fiction herein
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
The light of the teleporter faded, revealing the so-called Psychopath, and upon seeing him, many hairs on the backs of many necks stood up as all their instincts screamed out DANGER!
The Psychopath, or Tobi, as he had been previously called, was another Percy Jackson, looking about fourteen, with messy black hair and purple eyes, wearing black jeans, worn-out steel-toed boots, and a brown denim vest with fur lining. Around his neck was a pendant of a triangle inscribed within a circle, and he had many rings. Matching metal rings on his thumbs, a ring on his left pointer finger that was silvery, with an orange stone emblazoned with a kanji of three lines, and a ring on his right middle finger that looked like it was made of bone.
There were three things about Tobi that mad everyone feel in mortal peril just by his mere presence: one, his vest left his arms and chest visible, revealing his skinny body that was littered with more scar tissue than healthy skin; two, clutched in his hand was a gleaming, shiny scalpel; and three, in Tobi's mouth, twitching rhythmically as he sucked on it, was a pacifier. White with a pink ring, the guard of the soother was decorated with little images of fairy princess paraphernalia, like tiaras, star-topped wands, butterflies, etc.
So it wasn't just that Tobi was covered in scars and was holding a scalpel and was sucking a pacifier, it was that Tobi was covered in scars and was holding a scalpel and was sucking on a girl's pacifier…but it didn't look like he was doing it out of some kind of joke or morbid sense of humor. No, the look on Tobi's face was one of wonder and curiosity, exactly like a toddler's in a mall.
But that expression changed when those purple eyes landed on Sally.
Tobi instantly went rigid, his eyes glowing and sparkling, giving off the same vibes as a certain mongoose when he saw a couple of cobras in the house.
"Aww, shit," Shin'en muttered.
And then Tobi lunged at Sally, too fast to be seen by most. Percy let out a squawk, one of those few that could see Tobi coming, and he drew Riptide out of instinct. He was too slow—but Asteria wasn't. She intercepted Tobi mid-air and slammed her body against his, sending him flying away into the opposite stands, the einherjar scattering like ants when their hill was kicked through.
Asteria stood in front of her mother in a threatening pose, pitched slightly forward with her arms splayed, claws in front. Her tail was arcing forward, her jaw open wider than any human's, strands of saliva connecting between her teeth. She made a guttural screech that shook the floors and had hands on ears it was so loud.
There was a loud, rapid thumping that exponentially got louder and louder before there was an eruption of debris as two huge white shapes came barreling through the hotel, sailing through the air to crash down on the floor. It was the two Khione-morphs, only they'd molted from Warrior to Praetorian since the last time they'd been seen by Sally and company.
The two hulking aliens roared at Tobi, their secondary mouths protruding for all to see.
Tobi picked himself out of the wreckage of the stands. He'd taken a really hard hit from Asteria, his ribs visibly crumpled, his side purpling from internal bleeding, and his head was sitting on his shoulders in a funny way. His ribs and neck glowed red, and when the glow faded, there wasn't a hint of injury anywhere on him. His pacifier wasn't in his mouth anymore
He wasn't looking at the snarling Asteria, or the growling Khione-morphs that were locked onto him. His eyes were focused purely on Sally, nothing but rage and hatred in his purple orbs.
Asteria hissed from across the way, her two children taking up defensive positions between her and Tobi, einherjar, magicians, demigods, and whatever was left scrambling out of the way or out of the Feast Hall.
"Get her out of here," Shin'en said to Leviathan, who nodded and vanished, reappearing next to Sally.
He grabbed her by the arm, "Let's go."
Tobi saw this, screamed, and moved. The leading Khione-morph screeched and moved to intercept, only Tobi flipped over it, grabbed its tail, and displayed incredible strength by flinging the alien into its sibling hard enough that they both went flying away. Tobi looked back at Sally to see her gone, Leviathan's cape fluttering through the door close by, and then Asteria's tail went through Tobi's chest, going through ribs, lung, heart, and vertebrae in one go.
She cracked her tail like a whip, intending to send the boy flying, but her grabbed the tail and swung his scalpel around, the little blade going for Asteria's eye. She raised her arm and caught his wrist, squeezing so hard the bones instantly splintered. Asteria opened her mouth and spewed acid right in Tobi's face. His skull instantly steamed as it melted, skin, then muscle, then bone, then brains, and the acid chewed its way down.
Asteria flung the melting cadaver away towards Shin'en, lose drops of acid flying everywhere, creating dozens of steaming holes all over the place.
Meanwhile, Leviathan was yanking Sally down the halls of the hotel.
"What's happening? Why is he trying to kill me?" she asked in a panic.
"He has the mind of a small child," Leviathan answered. "In such a mind, one bad experience with one thing is enough to ruin their outlook forever. Take the police. A kid goes to the police for help, but that one officer is an ass, and now that kid will never trust the police again. Something similar applied with Tobi."
"What did I do to him?" Sally gasped, piecing things together.
The pace of the Leviathan was close to a jog for Sally, and she wasn't in the best shape for cardio.
"The more appropriate question is what did you not do to him. In case you haven't noticed, not every version of your son is the same across the dimensions, and neither are you. Most of you are supermom, with undying love and loyalty, while others are evil enough to replace the Devil. Tobi got to grow up with the latter version of you."
Sally recalled the scars on the boy, and she turned green.
Back in the Feast Hall, Tobi's unrecognizable corpse glowed red, and when the glow faded, the boy was completely healed. Healed. Of molecular acid sprayed right in his face at pointblank range.
Tobi glared at Asteria. "Get the fuck out of my fucking way, fucking bitch!"
He lunged, this time ready to tear Asteria apart into little pieces, but he was pinned to the ground by something from above and found he couldn't move no matter how hard he thrashed. Tobi screamed angrily, loud enough that it was heard through the floors. He screamed, and screamed, and screamed, and jerked, and thrashed, and tossed as loud and as much as he could, but Shin'en's foot was absolute.
Tobi wasn't going anywhere.
He eventually resorted to angry hissing.
"Tobi," Shin'en said, "what, exactly, are you going to do to Sally?"
"I'm gonna tear out her fucking bladder and shove up her ass that way she pisses out of her ass!"
Now, Canon-Percy, C-Percy, was still here, along with several significant others, all united on the idea that Sally was probably fine with Leviathan, seeing as how strong he was, so it was best of them to remain and provide support for Asteria, however little that may or may not actually be. However, when C-Percy heard Tobi scream that at the top of his lungs, he was thrown for a huge loop, as was just about everyone else who had a working set of ears.
"Is that all?" Shin'en asked, sounding unimpressed.
"I'm gonna reach inside of her cunt and invert her fallopian tubes so they dangle out of like a couple of fucking worms!"
Hazel turned green and leaned over the back of a seat to puke.
Percy's jaw was on the floor, and when he looked at Asteria, she glanced at him out of the corner of her eye.
'Just let it happen. Shin'en's burning him out.'
"Not bad, not bad," the First Master nodded. "Is that it, though?"
"Fuck no it isn't! I'm gonna shove a hot curling iron up her fucking ass and melt her shit! I'm gonna take a fucking nutcracker and break every one of her fingertips! I'm gonna slice her tits and peel them apart like a fucking four-leaf flower! I'm gonna gouge her fucking eyes out and pour bleach into the fucking sockets! I'm gonna peel her fucking skin off and pour lemonade all over! I'm gonna shove a fucking beer bottle up her ass and break it! I'm gonna cut her fucking gums out! I'm gonna shove a stick so far up her cunt her heart's going to be beating on it! I'm gonna beat her with a crowbar! I'm gonna slice her up with a broken bottle! I'm gonna feed her rat poison! I'm gonna dunk her in boiling grease and fry her head off! I'm gonna shove her in the oven and cook her! I'm gonna—I'm gonna…I'm gonna…"
Tobi had been shouting at the very top of his lungs all the things he was going to do to Sally. His face was red, tears were running down his face, his voice was hoarse, and he'd finally run out of steam. Now he was just crying.
With a start, C-Percy realized what had just happened. Recalling Shin'en's description of Tobi back on Olympus, mentally stuck at three-years-old, and then Asteria's explanation that Shin'en was burning him out, and then what he'd learned from his mom about raising a child, specifically how to differentiate between a tantrum and a meltdown, Percy realized that this whole, crazy, hectic, confusing, episode was just a humongous meltdown on Tobi's part. For whatever reasons, the mere sight of Sally was enough to send Tobi into a meltdown, and Shin'en had pinned him and rode out the fire until it burned out.
What happened next threw everyone present for a loop even bigger than what had just happened: Shin'en picked Tobi up and held the sobbing boy in his arms, bouncing him a little bit while rubbing his vest-covered back. There was a shadow crossing over Shin'en's face, his eyes aimed at the ground but looking at somewhere far away. He wasn't happy, but it wasn't about the fact that he was cradling a mentally handicapped teenager, but seemingly more at…why Tobi was handicapped.
He was angry with Tobi, not at him.
Percy had seen a similar look on Paul's face at school. Whenever the man heard students talking ill about Percy, or teachers talking bad about him, or whenever Percy brought these things to Paul in order to vent his frustrations in order to avoid punching someone and taking their head off, Paul got the same shadowy expression that Shin'en got. The expression of a furious father.
The fact that Shin'en could genuinely make that expression was shocking, because that required feelings of love and sympathy, and so far, the only feelings anyone got from Shin'en were those of a dispassionate asshole.
His condemnation about them choosing how they got to live their life, his beleaguering of the LGBT, his dismissal of their pain and suffering on the grounds that someone had it much worse and therefore they should be grateful they only went through what they did, his uncaring disposition towards their desire to fight and help, and his general displeasure about his circumstances, those being yanked across the dimensions by Chaos in order to fight a war he had no part in.
Though, to be fair, that last part was totally reasonable.
However, despite how he'd greeted Asteria with a sibling-like hug and kiss, and arm-wrestled with Leviathan like a brother, there still hadn't seemed to be a loving bone in his body. And yet here he was, loving Tobi, not like a father, but like a dad.
Shin'en looked at Asteria and she nodded. She went over to the crater where she'd originally body-slammed Tobi, picked something up out of the debris, then went over to Shin'en, handing him what she'd picked it.
"Hey, kiddo," Shin'en jostled Tobi a little, "say ah."
Tobi raised his head, poor little face streaked with tears and mucus, and opened his mouth, readily accepting his pacifier back. He started sucking on it before he buried his face back into Shin'en's shoulder. Tobi's shudders eventually subsided, and the paced rising and falling of his back indicated that he'd fallen asleep.
Shin'en handed him off to Asteria, who accepted the boy with all the tenderness of a mom, despite how she'd thrown down with him just minutes before. Shin'en left the Feast Hall, briskly ascending the stairs, walking right past Percy and crew without a sideways glance. The Khione-morphs picked themselves up and started prowling around the marble floor, their heavy bodies making dull thumps as they stepped about. It was clear that no one was allowed to approach.
"Is he okay?" Kraken asked, indicating the sleeping Tobi.
'Just a meltdown. He's fine.'
"He tried to kill Sally."
'He has really violent meltdowns.'
"I take it, in his world…she made the scars?"
Asteria nodded.
Tobi stirred in his sleep, pained moans escaping behind his pacifier as he started to twitch. Asteria entered his head and destroyed the nightmares, making him become still once more.
Kraken released a contemplative hum.
"Kinda puts things into perspective about life and the universe in general, doesn't it?" Wheels asked with a grin.
"Yeah."
Shin'en found Leviathan standing guard next to Sally not too far from the Feast Hall. More or less just down a corridor and around the corner. The reason for the short distance wasn't out of arrogance on Leviathan's part, but trust and confidence that Shin'en and Asteria could handle Tobi, even in such an unstable state. Sally saw Shin'en approaching and practically ran to him.
"What-"
"You do not go near Tobi," Shin'en said sharply and concisely. "You do not approach him, look at him, or even so much as think about him. Tobi will go out of his way not to kill you, but to torture you in ways you never thought were possible, and then kill you. Like I'm sure Leviathan told you, just as we are so very different from your son, yet having been born as Percy Jackson, son of Poseidon, there are other Sally's so very different from you. The Sally that mothered Tobi tried to kill him every single day, and being immortal, she failed, but that didn't stop her from getting very creative. The psychological trauma he carries is staggering, to the point that he's severely underdeveloped mentally. He is unable to see any different between you and his own Sally, and he hates you very much for all that you did to him."
"But I didn't-!"
"I know. That's the saddest part of it all."
With a slight incline of his head and a warning look, Shin'en turned away, Leviathan following after looking at Sally with his own ocular warning.
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
The Feast Hall started to steadily fill back up as word of the passed danger started to spread, the damager to the stands repaired by magic to no longer show an impact crater and huge acid burns.
Tobi was still asleep, peacefully resting in Asteria's arms, pacifier rhythmically twitching in his mouth as he sucked on it. It was a cute sight, his tender features, messy hair, and pacifier, but it was a gilded sight. There was dark power that surrounded him, those who had seen what Tobi could do—getting hit so hard his body broke, impaled through the chest through vital organs, acid poured right in his face, and regenerating from it all—were wholly unwilling to go anywhere near the boy. Even the einherjar, who were immortal in the halls of Odin.
There were five of the Seven Masters here now, the Alien, the Leviathan, the Ghoul, the Psychopath, and whatever Shin'en was supposed to be, leaving the Assassin and the Gunslinger to have yet arrived. So many thoughts, emotions, and opinions swirled and surrounded the five so far, with speculation around the last two. There were those who wanted to pull a coup the Masters and go to war, those who wanted to just sit back and relax, and enjoy the fact they didn't have to fight this time, and those who were convinced this was one seriously elaborate dream sequence they were all stuck in and they needed to combine forces to wake up.
But now that Tobi was here, with the danger he radiated, enthusiasm for an attack had dwindled considerably.
Right now, the Five Masters were up on their stage reading the things that Wheels was pulling up for them. It looked like reports, but the text was scrolling so fast that hardly anyone could read it.
Then the alarm went off that signaled and incoming message from Chaos, making Tobi jump awake in Asteria's arms and whine at being awoken in such a manner. She patted his back and set him down, showing that the top of his head was level with Asteria's nearly flat chest.
"You're up, buddy," Wheels announced, looking at Tobi.
"Hm?"
"Otrera's come back and is amassing a rogue Amazon army under their building in Seattle. Chaos says to have fun."
Tobi's brow furrowed. "Who the fuck is Otrera?"
At the name of the ancient Amazon queen, Hylla stiffened, along with the other Amazons that had come with her instead of remaining on Earth. Hylla had to fight and kill the former queen twice during the Son of Neptune in order to remain as queen herself, and not let the Amazons fall into the hands of Gaea through Otrera. Hylla obviously won, but the duels were not easy, as Otrera more than lived up to her name as the first Queen of the Amazons.
As such, despite what she'd seen Tobi do already, she felt compelled to stand and deliver her warning, making everyone look at her.
"She was the first Queen of the Amazons. She's a formidable warrior, and very dangerous."
Tobi blinked once behind his pacifier. "K…"
"Thank you, peanut gallery," Shin'en said evenly.
Hylla sat back down, torn between feeling embarrassed and angry.
"So…what the fuck am I supposed to do again?"
"Kill Otrera and all her Amazon followers," Wheels informed.
Tobi's face lit up. "Yay! Can I sacrifice them? Pretty please with a virgin testicle on top?"
Shin'en patted the boy's head. "Go have fun."
Tobi squealed.
Wheels opened the teleporter, and the little psycho went running into the light. The light faded as the teleporter shut back down, and Wheels started hitting buttons on his expansive keyboard, the screens lighting up with all of Tobi's vitals, a cross section of his body, and the magical cameras that followed his person.
"This is going to be nasty," Wheels muttered.
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
Tobi appeared in an alley across the street from the Amazon Seattle building, the same one featured in the Son of Neptune. One he got his bearings, Tobi literally went skipping across the street, across four lanes of traffic, causing a huge accident of cars slamming into each other, cars veering off the road into pedestrians, cars slamming into first floor restaurants, people running and screaming in all directions; it was total pandemonium, and Tobi was extremely pleased with himself.
Looking to his left, he saw that a lifted dually had plowed right into a mother who had been pushing a stroller that had once been occupied by a couple of babies. Now there was a pile of paste with clothes in it.
"Fruit salad," Tobi giggled, "yummy, yummy!"
He entered the Amazon building to find that there was no one in the lobby. Shrugging, he casually kicked the doors that were off to the side clear off their hinges, sending them banging down a set of stairs that led to a massive underground cavern with huge racks overflowing with billions of dollars' worth of merchandise. It seemed he interrupted a meeting, because down there was a huge group of women with powerful builds centered around an older woman that Tobi assumed was Otrera.
Tall, muscular, flowing silver hair, wearing the Amazon Set from AC:OD, she and everyone else was looking up at Tobi with a mixture of shock and anger.
"Who dares!?" Otrera called.
Tobi from the top of the stairs. "I do!"
He promptly jumped, falling almost five stories to the ground to land in a crouch.
"Superhero landing, yay!"
Otrera's eye twitched. "Someone kill him."
The Amazons felt that "someone" translated as "most of them," and out of the gathered assembly of about a hundred women, nearly sixty of them drew their swords, released battle cries, and charged. Tobi giggled, remembering that was told he could have fun.
He stomped the ground, and a sudden, powerful gust of wind erupted underneath the feet of the charging warriors, sending them all flying into the air in arcs that all general crossed above Tobi's general airspace. The boy smirked and leaned forward slightly, and what happened next would forever be seared into the minds who saw it.
Tobi's bones exploded out of his back, his ribs and spine stretching up and around like jagged, ivory vines, and all of the airborne Amazons were caught in this vine, screaming and moaning as they were each impaled in unique and different ways. Otrera and her followers stared in abject horror at this hellish tree of bone and blood, blooming with the bodies of their sisters, all of them crying out, groaning and moaning because as it happened, none of them had been pierced in vital areas, just places where it really hurt.
Blood trickled down the bones, rivulets breaking surface tension to go dripping on the floor. Blood poured down from Tobi's back where the bones had gone through his skin, soaking his vest and jeans in tandem with the blood falling on him from above. His head was slightly bowed, the overhead lights and the bodies causing a shadow to obscure his face, but not his glowing purple eyes nor his pearly white smile.
Tobi jerked and the bones snapped off his back, falling to land perfectly upright with a loud thud, making all the impaled girls and women cry out in pain. Tobi advanced giggling happily to himself. The remaining forty or so Amazons that didn't have Tobi's bone somewhere in their body stepped back and trembled at this thing that was approaching them.
"Stand fast, sisters!" Otrera yelled. "We are yet many and he is one. Together we can defeat him!"
Her confidence was inspiring, enough to where swords were drawn and looks were shared.
"Blegh!" went Tobi. "Heroic speeches fucking suck! Always so serious…why always so serious? You guys wanna know how I got all these scars?"
Without breaking his stride, Tobi dragged the blade of his scalpel across the back of his hand, splitting his skin and spilling even more blood in addition to all that was still leaking out of his back. How was a boy his size still standing with these wounds, losing this much blood?
"Don't let him get to you!" Otrera ordered. "Attack!"
About twenty Amazons found the nerve to charge.
Tobi grabbed the back of his bleeding hand, and his arm started swelling, the muscles and veins bulging. Tobi drew hand back, a glowing amalgamation of blood was stuck to his palm. Bladelike and wide as the cut that was made, with a strange pattern of hexagons running the growing length as Tobi pulled. Then there was a high-pitched sound a smokey streak of red across the knees of the charging Amazons, and their legs were sliced away in the blink of an eye.
"Invisible Black," Tobi grinned, his arms wide apart with a scythe-like blade of blood running from the back of his hand to his opposite palm. "Read it and weep, bitches."
There was certainly a whole lot of weeping. Most of the Amazons stuck on the tree had passed out from blood loss and pain and were on their way to the afterlife, while the ones who just had their legs cut off were all screaming and going into shock at the sight of their bloody stumps and severed limbs lying away from them.
That did it for the remaining Amazons. They dropped their weapons and all went running in the opposite direction of Tobi.
"Aww, no running!"
He pointed his palms at the fleeing females, and they all tripped over themselves, screaming and writhing on the ground.
"W-What are you doing to them!?" Otrera gasped.
"Inducing a psychokinetic attack on their central nervous systems based on my own prior experiences of pain, particularly the pain of being exposed to temperatures in the hundreds of Celsius."
Otrera stared at him. "What?"
Tobi grinned. "I'm making their brains think they're on fucking fire!"
Otrera grabbed a sword and ran at Tobi, having not learned from the previous attempts that running at him just was not the way to go about things. Granted, she got all the way up to him and sliced his head right off his shoulders.
The screaming of her sisters stopped, and Otrera took that to mean that Tobi was finally dead. She breathed a sigh of relief. It had only been a couple of minutes, but the carnage was done. About four out of every five of her sisters was dead, most of them from blood loss, and those still alive were going to need help. Otrera needed help after what she'd just witnessed.
The Amazon Queen opened her eyes and figured she was going to need a whole lot of help, because Tobi's headless body was still just standing there, and his head was nowhere to be seen.
That's when two glowing red circles and a red rectangle appeared in the space of Tobi's empty head, and in those two red circles, a pair of purple eyes suddenly popped open, and in that rectangle, and happy grin made itself known. The glowing shapes got bigger, spreading to eventually form a whole head, and when that glow faded, black hair spilled from the top of Tobi's regrown cranium.
"You done goofed, bitch!"
Otrera dropped her sword. "How in the hell…?"
"Fuck you, that's how!"
Otrera did a one-eighty and broke the concrete she ran away so hard and fast.
Tobi pouted, "What a pussy."
Then he regarded the Amazons who were all still lying on the ground, their bodies still hurting from the phantom agony of being immolated.
"Look at all these chickens!" Tobi crowed as he advanced.
He flexed his thumbs, causing little blades to pop out of the rings, and he used those blades to slice his forearms up, drawing twin lines of red. Blood flowed out and coalesced into a pair of long, sharp scythes. There was much trembled and whimpering at the sight of the approaching Tobi, a happy smile on his face like any other child would have when in the toy section of the store.
"You…bastard!" an Amazon wheezed, getting to her feet as she fought through the pain that wasn't actually there.
She set an example, the others all getting to their feet as well.
Tobi frowned at being called a bastard, the word dredging up some very bad memories. "Cunt-ucky fried chicken it is, then," he said lowly.
Red streaks tore through the air, and the Amazons didn't even know what happened when they just started falling apart, skin, muscles, and bones separated so fast and cleanly they hardly felt a thing. But all those Delayed feelings quickly caught up when they realized why they were all either staring at the ground, the ceiling, at a wall, or some other point, unable to feel their arms or legs or even move their bodies. The screaming started back up again, music to Tobi's ears.
With Otrera, the terrified and disgraced queen had found what she hoped was a hiding place, now understanding what it felt like to be in a Resident Evil videogame, stuck with crappy, ineffective weapons against a monster that seemingly couldn't be killed. Then a little sticky note suddenly appeared out of thin air before Otrera.
Tobi's weakness is cold water.
Mr. C
Otrera stared at the note, then proceeded to go running for some things.
Back with Tobi, he was happy enough to literally be dancing amongst the carnage he'd wrought. He was even singing.
"Dance on me balls, cat fucking a handbag, yours only yours, I wanna dance with Winston, it's no lie, Lisa in the crowd said, 'Look, Harry had a vaginal malfunction!'"
"DIE!" Otrera screeched as she turned the nozzle on the hose that was hooked up to a portable water tank that was filled with ice and water.
Tobi turned and was blasted with the pressurized stream right in the face. He was knocked clean off his feet and was pushed across the ground and until he hit a wall, and then he was just tortured with the cold water until Otrera ran out of ammo. She lowered the nozzle and was both confused and horrified at the high-pitched whine.
"I hate being a fucking girl!" Tobi cried out. "I suddenly get boobs, and a pussy, and my hair turns into a big fucking mess, and then I get so horny I wanna grind on a fucking porcupine and tear myself up! Being an immortal sadomasochist sucks sometimes…"
Otrera wanted to bleach her ears right about now.
Tobi picked herself up from the ground, quite clearly a she now. Her hair was indeed longer, her figure more of an hourglass, her jeans not fitting right anymore, and there was a set of B-cup boobs on her braless chest, letting the fatty tissue freely hang about. Honestly, Girl-Tobi was kind of cute, but all the scars and her murderous intent ruined the image of a perky young lady.
Tobi glowered at Otrera. "I'm gonna turn you into a fucking Halloween decoration."
The woman heard a slushing sound and looked to see something horrible. All the blood on the bone tree and around the tree, all the blood from the legless Amazons, and all the blood from the Amazons Tobi had just recently finished slicing up was moving across the ground in a flood of crimson-tinged black. Like any sane person, Otrera turned to run, and was promptly clotheslined after taking one step.
Tobi unceremoniously sat on the woman's stomach as the blood got closer, and Otrera understood what that horny comment was about, as she could smell the girl's arousal amongst all the other smells, even the overwhelming stench of dead bodies and the coppery scent of blood.
Otrera trembled, frozen from reacting out of sheer terror over what was happening. Tobi fit her scalpel inside of Otrera's mouth, eyes gleaming.
"Let's put a smile on that face!"
The huge wave of blood rose up and crashed over them both just as Otrera screamed.
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
"Well, that wasn't as nasty as I thought it going to be," Wheels commented.
There was a lot of disagreement surrounding that comment, seeing as there were a lot of empty seats in the Feast Hall.
"That was rather tame for Tobi," Shin'en agreed.
"Tame?" Hylla gasped. "That was tame!?"
"Indeed, it was," Shin'en said. "You didn't see what he did to the daycare he used to attend, nor did you see the aftermath of what he did to Gotham High School."
"Gotham what?"
"High school. A place of sin and debauchery."
Hylla decided it was best for her mental health to not ask anymore questions, go get her sister, and take a hot bath with some vanilla cream in the water like they used to do on Circe's island together long ago, when they were still overcoming the trauma of their abusive father.
The teleporter hummed and Tobi came stepping out of the light, still a girl, holding Halloween decoration that looked like Otrera. It was the skeleton of an upper body, with spine, ribs, shoulder blades, collar bones, and about half of the humorous bone, both of looking like they'd been snapped off. The bones were covered in a light sheen of blood, and it was the neck up where things got scary, because the neck up was Otrera's perfectly intact head. Skin, muscles, teeth, tongue, eyes, eyebrows, ears, and hair.
Gasps and cries echoed throughout the Feast Hall when Otrera's eyes moved, locking onto Hylla, and there were screams and fainting when Otrera, having no lungs in her hollowed ribcage, spoke.
"Help me," she begged. "Please, help me."
Tobi shook her toy. "You shut the fuck up. I'm not done with you."
"Did you have fun, kiddo?" Shin'en asked.
"Right up until my dick changed into a pussy. Do you know how fucking weird that feels?"
"Yes," Shin'en answered plainly.
A bubble of water appeared over Tobi and dropped on her. It was hot water, and so she changed back into he.
"You didn't lose your pacifier, did you?" Shin'en asked, noticing how it wasn't in Tobi's mouth.
The psychopath reached into his back pocket and produced the soother. He popped it in his mouth and toddled his merry way up the stairs to stand with the rest of the Masters, still holding Otrera's living corpse.
"Help me, please," she begged of them, and none of them could really be bothered to do that.
Her soul was Tobi's now.
"I said shut the fuck up!" Tobi thundered, and he began beating Otrera against the ground, cracking her skull open and spilling the insides of her head across the stage.
Kraken nudged Asteria, getting her attention so she could see him pointing at this display of violence, asking a question without actually speaking. Asteria answered by giving Wheels the nod, and just like with the previous four, Wheels started playing the video that was Tobi's introduction.
"Percy Jackson, aka Tobi, the son of Jashin, Shinto god of pain and blood, father of Shinigami, the Shinto god of death. The story of Tobi must first begin with the story of his mother, Sally Jackson. In a world in which her parents did not die in a plane crash, she flourished with their support, becoming valedictorian, student council president, cheer captain, beloved local employee at the grocery store, blessed with a bright future through several scholarships at various Ivy League schools across the country, but this life was incinerated by the dark god.
"In the world that Tobi is from, the chief Shinto god Izanagi grew bored and restless, and convened a council of the gods to determine a new form of entertainment, and amongst all the pitched ideas, it was Jashin's that won. Children were to be sired by the Shinto gods, children with great power and greater freedom, and they were to be sired through unsanctioned union, through rape. Even the Shinto goddesses took a male form and found woman to rape. Under the orders of Izanagi, the others just found a woman and did their best to forget what they just did, but Jashin, for his whole aim was on Sally, and claiming a Percy Jackson for himself as his own son. He got what he wanted.
"He destroyed Sally's social life bit by bit, making himself invisible to her but not anyone else, and after Sally was finally abandoned by those she called friends and was left to walk home at night, Jashin grabbed her and raped her in an alley, leaving her bleeding in the back, and hoarse in the front. Not yet done, Jashin created a fake video depicting Sally at a party, drinking smoking, doing drugs, kissing the guys and the girls, letting herself be groped, and eventually passed out in a puddle of her own vomit and waste. After this video surfaced, Sally's scholarships were revoked, she was kicked out of every school program, fired from the store, excommunicated from her parents, arrested by the police on charges of underage drinking and smoking, and where her parents bailed her out, they then dumped her on the streets, disgraced, ashamed, and unwilling to listen to her cries and pleas that it was all fake, and that she had been raped.
"Still, Sally is nothing if not resilient, and after losing everything in her life, she tried to make a new one for herself if only for the baby that was growing in her. Unfortunately, she was only able to find work in a sleazy dive in the red-light district of town, and that resiliency crumbled through months of constant sexual abuse by the patrons, Jashin's spell around her driving all other rapists to only do anal on Sally in the dive bathroom. Men, transgenders, women with strap-ons, and even more. Poor Sally's sphincter eventually became so abused that her waste just voided itself unimpeded. She attributed her suffering to the growing child in her, and when the bump started to show, she started to try and get rid of it. Abortion clinics, pills, cigarettes, alcohol, drugs, even a coat hanger, and eventually…suicide. But Jashin would not let his investment go that easily, and so he kept Sally and his son alive all the way through term.
"After Tobi was finally born, Sally tried to get rid of him. Simple ways at first, just dumping him on the steps of an orphanage and running away, only to find him back at home by the time she got back herself. Then she tried dumping him in parks, or in the woods, hoping someone would find him or an animal would eat him. No such luck. Jashin wouldn't let Tobi leave Sally, and one day she discovered something about the baby: it wouldn't ever die. Tobi was screaming one night, his diaper beyond in need of changing, the rash causing him to scream at the top of his lungs, and Sally, drunk and angry, lost her mind and grabbed her son by the leg and flung him across the room into a wall. Such an act would've killed any other newborn, but not Tobi, not son of the god who was the father of death, and Sally quickly took full advantage of her son's immortality.
"Every day for five years straight, at the slightest irritation, Sally would vent every iota of her frustration, whether it be from getting fired or from running out of beer, on Tobi, beating him with her fists, with a crowbar, a baseball bat, or cutting him up with a knife or the jagged ends of the bottle she broke across his head. Food for the growing Tobi was scarce to nonexistent, sometimes being fed rat poison and bleach and left to puke blood everywhere. On the rare instances he actually had enough food for his body to produce waste, his diaper was never changed until Sally couldn't bear the smell anymore, leaving him with a near-perpetual diaper rash. Sally saw no beloved son in Tobi, only the cause for her suffering and an immortal outlet that let her go as far as she wanted before she burned herself out and just left his little body to stitch itself back together.
"When Tobi did turn five, Sally had an epiphany. One of the driving forces behind her initial buckle-down was the hope that the child in her would be a girl, and Tobi being a boy shattered that hope entirely. However, if Tobi couldn't die even if she bashed his head into paste, bathed him in hydrochloric acid, lit him on fire, collapsed his lungs with a crowbar, fed him poison, dropped him off the roof of a building—if Tobi never died not matter what she did, then…could she have a daughter, even if technically? Sally gave it a shot, cutting off Tobi's genitals entirely to create a mock-vagina, and the gushing blood was usually handled with a kiss from white-hot metal. Other times it was with a diaper or other absorbent garment in a horrendous form of potty-training roleplay.
"For the next five years, Tobi was made to grow up as a girl, periodically having his penis and testicles removed to keep up Sally's insane delusions that she now had the daughter she always dreamed of, and being severely beaten every time his genitals grew back of their own accord as per his immortality. When Tobi turned ten and Sally decided to start making money off of him by having him star in pedophilic porn films, he finally snapped and proceeded to butcher every man, women, and raped child that was in the hellish studio, including Sally.
"After that, Tobi lived as a nomad, killing anyone he wanted, doing whatever he wanted, meeting the odd cousin every now and then, and stuck with a vocabulary primarily revolving around the word 'fuck,' and the education of a kindergartner. His life didn't pick back up until he ended up at Westover Hall in Maine and one Dr. Thorne attempted to recruit him to the Titans, only for that to end about as well as you could expect. Immediately following that episode, Tobi met Bianca di Angelo, born in 1993, Thalia Grace, Annabeth Chase, and Grover Underwood, along with the Hunters of Artemis and their goddess, and they took him to Camp Half-Blood under the strict supervision of the then-lieutenant of the Hunt, Zoë Nightshade."
And at the name of the daughter of Atlas, Tobi violently flung Otrera's mangled body into the computer screen, completely shattering it in an explosion of glass, wires, and sparks.
Wheels balked, hands flying up. "God-fucking-dammit, man!"
Shin'en's hand clamped down on Tobi's shoulder to keep him from hunting Sally down to do everything he said he was going to do. Tobi looked at Shin'en, angry tears welling up in his eyes, pacifier rapidly twitching in his mouth. Tobi flung himself at Shin'en and the First Master scooped him up and left them Feast Hall.
It reeked of vomit and tears in the spacious room, because the accompanying video had spared nothing. The scenes of Sally viciously beating her son were not edited or censored to show limbs flying on the other side of the couch, but were shown in full HD. Grabbing his chunky baby leg to swing him into the ground over and over again, the baseball bat cracking against his skull, then coming down again and again on his twitching body, Tobi curled in a bleeding ball as blood gushed from his mouth, then, older, as a mutilated child in a pastel pink summer dress, his hair in pigtails.
And so much more.
Not even the bloodthirsty einherjar could completely stomach the abuse, many having voided their stomach contents, others having left the hall, and many more across the pantheons were in tears at witnessing such cruelty.
Percy was in a state of existential crisis after watching…that.
Everyone who knew Sally Jackson was also in a state of existential crisis after that wonderful Hallmark movie.
Asteria gently put her hand on Wheels' shoulder, breaking his profane muttering about his broken monitor and how long it took to put that together and hormonal psycho kids. Wheels looked at Asteria from behind his goggles and sighed.
"I know, but still…shit." He gestured at the mess.
Asteria squeezed his shoulder lightly and gestured at the still and stunned Kraken, indicating she desired his company. She went away after Shin'en and Tobi, feeling that the unstable boy needed a maternal figure right now in the absence of the one he held in that position, and that Kraken needed a bit of help right now.
With the other two gone, Leviathan took the center stage and raised his voice.
"Is there anyone present who would like complain about how hard of a life they've had? Anyone at all? No? No one wants to try and measure their suffering with Tobi's? Good, because no one here even comes close."
Alex very nearly turned into a mouse when those mismatched eyes bored into hers, daring her to say anything else about the suffering of her people. In addition to that dare was also a warning, that anything else said would not be met kindly. Those eyes moved from Alex's and almost to every other person's in the Feast Hall, raising the challenge of whether they'd like to complain about their circumstances in lieu of what Tobi's life had been like. It did not go unnoticed how the intro went unfinished, and so there was still a whole lot of Tobi's story left unrevealed.
It was kind of like the Percy Jackson musical number, "The Campfire Song," in which the half-bloods were all lamenting about their godly parents one at a time, until Luke asks Chiron about his parent, to which the centaur replies that his father was Kronos…who ate his own children. Luke declares Chiron the winner of the competition of who had the worst parent, and the chorus to the song went "things couldn't be worse when your parents run the universe."
To that point, Tobi won in regards to who had gone through the most horrible childhood and life experience, and so no one had any room to complain of their own circumstances, and the chorus to the song was dead wrong.
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
Some Reviews require my attention:
The story of Natalie Finn is not fake. It is a very real story, and you can read all about it in all its articles and facets by simply Googling "Natalie Finn." Tack on "Iowa" to the end of that to narrow the results.
Sentiments have arisen about the inclusion of modern politics and the misuse of real-world information, with requests to keep such things out….No. The whole opening modern scene with the PJO cast coming together, wearing masks, the museum, the conversation in the restaurant—did none of you realize how that was all a huge metaphor? Everyone sharing the things they'd "read" and "heard," Percy sitting there about to blow a gasket because he didn't want to hear about this stuff—all modern stereotypes. Stereotypes of me, you, us, our friends, everyone.
This is a thinking man's story, with scenes that are meant to make you sit back and question things. The inclusion of the modern things followed immediately by epic fights is, in and of itself, a metaphor for how the modern life works. Horrible things happen, then a new movie is released, or a new videogame or hit song is made. A real, attention-demanding event occurs, and then it's quietly swept away from the public eye with a focus on some entertaining thing that takes your mind off the serious stuff.
The "author' purpose," to quote all those lovely English tests back in grade school, is to tell a story about what happens when the superheroes who can save the world choose not to. The PJO cast decided to take a load off after Gaea, the Emperors, Ragnarök, and Apophis, and now here they all are—here we all are.
Anyway, I've been a bit of a bad boy and watched way too many of StealthgamerBR's Dishonored videos, and now I can't get a PJO/Dishonored crossover out of my head. It goes that Sally is the last witch of Delilah's coven, and a ritual is performed to prolong her life so she can get revenge on the Kaldwin family, too powerful with Corvo and Emily still alive, and so with all these extra years, Sally collects knowledge, using all the Bone Charms and Runes she can find and make to craft a weapon to take down the Kaldwin family, that weapon being a child, whose bones are made of Charms and Runes, to be taught and raised by her how to kill and how to use magic, but things get complicated when Poseidon takes notice of Sally when she's on the beach one day, and now this child becomes burdened with prophecies and gods. I have the setting to be in the future, about 200 years after the games, with an exposition outlined on how the world of Dishonored ties in with the world of Percy Jackson.
Not really good when I have this story going, and still have yet to start work on the promised RWBY crossover.
Not to mention I'm still at the question of whether to put this on hiatus to finish AC:T and RSD.
Decisions, decisions…
Like your decision now to Fav, Follow, and Review please!
