Chapter 13 : Tempus Fugit - Alpha-001
ENTRY: Alpha-001
ANNO:0 - LOCAL:2009
LOCAL DATE: APRIL, 12TH
BEGINNING RECORD
"-you properly recording, Skully? Oh, yes you are.
"Well, isn't that neat, uh. So, where do I start?
"So, I've been in the world of massive boobaz and devils fascinated by chess for some reasons for the last week.
"I spent most of my time acclimating to my new circumstances and setting up a routine, trying not to blow someone's head off by accident with my newfound psyker powers, and experimenting with those in the privacy of my home.
"The Immaterium, at least the local variant, is absolutely fascinating, even if it has this tendency to scream in your ear at the most inopportune time. It ebbs and flows like a massive sea of colors, voices, thoughts and feelings.
"There's this sort of utterly alien beauty of seeing an entire plane of existence through some kind of psychic kinesthesia-thingie that allows me to decipher what I'm seeing with my mind.
"I generally grumble about having to meditate so damn much, but, I have to admit, there's a part of me that is always eager to go back to admire those strange and utterly fascinating vistas.
"At first, I thought that my presence had brought the Warp here, but I'm not so sure anymore: there's too many thing in there, and I just don't see how that many unbound souls could have been somehow lost by the local afterlives without one of the Gods traipsing around at least taking notice.
"Or maybe they do know and just don't bother: I don't know, I'm not an immortal, ageless being.
"Anyway, this riot of colored, ever present, psychic-soul stuff is here, and I had the time to try a few things.
"Channeling some aspects of the Warp to amplify/blunt my spells, as I had posited earlier at the beginning of the week, seems to be the way to go. I had the hunch with my Assail, and was able to confirm it while further experimenting with Smite: the short-ranged, channeled Warp-lightning one.
"To vulgarize, if Assail works better off Hatred, as its colloquial name would indicate, then Smite seems to run on something like Viciousness and Betrayal, I'm still not one hundred percent certain which one is correct, and I probably need further data to make up my mind about it. All I know for certain is that it is Dark-blue, for some reason.
"For the last of the low hanging fruits, I have, let's say, rather mixed feelings about experimenting with it.
"Let's just say that the entry for Brain Burst is… kinda explicit, and reading it gave me a severe case of the creeps.
"The principle behind it is actually the easiest to understand among the three 'spells' I had on hand: you're just overwhelming someone else's mind with everything you can channel from the Warp. Their brain can't handle so many thoughts/voices/emotions at once, paralyzing them momentarily, and the Warp opens a short lived connection with them, making their brain-meat and their cranial box both go splat as a sort of metaphysical Einstein-Rosen bridge is momentarily created linking the material plane and the Immaterium right in the middle of their face.
"It doesn't need line of sight, barely the impression of a mind to establish the lock, which makes it by default my scariest and most sneaky means of attack at the same time.
"Needless to say, I'm kind of scared shitless of doing it to some random schmuck by accident, because, yeah, on paper, it is actually that easy.
"I hope I won't have to use it any time soon, at the very least, or that'd mean a few things have gone wrong.
"Now, how do I turn off this-"
ENDING RECORD
ENTRY Alpha-001: ARCHIVED
I wake up with a start, my clutch on my pillow tighter than a vice, extremely confused, and with tHe VoIcEs-
-oddly tilted, if that makes any kind of sense, in a direction far from here-
-correction, not that far, merely a block and a half, ThE wHiSpErS urging me to look, look, look-
-I close my eyes, letting the Warp in its multi-hued cacophony of color wash over me, sitting myself against my bedhead at the same time, taking a deep breath.
The Immaterium is as empty as ever, in my mind of mind, yet, something sounds/feels/looks wrong, and I focus my attention toward that direction thataway, the same tHe SuSuRrUs tells me to look at-
-mentally blanking as I bear witness to something that I actually have to decipher.
My brows furrow.
…This doesn't make sense, my psychic kinesthesia-thingie never led me astray before.
I redouble my efforts, finally understanding that what I'm looking at are two different minds-
-one is steeped in Fear and Hopelessness, in all of their Dark Grey nuances-
-the other tastes of freshly spilled blood, of Madness and Hunger, a coruscant node of mainly Bright Red and Sickly Yellow.
I 'blink'.
Is that what I think it is?
In the material plane, I breathe, and focus even harder.
The first one seems to be 'running' -for a lack of better explanation- away from the second, which seems, almost, dare I say, playful in its chase?
Yet it is gaining on its prey, slowly, inexorably.
I inwardly scowl.
If I'm not witnessing the two respective imprints of a Stray Devil chasing someone in the middle of the night, I'm cutting off my left boob.
Now, what do I do about it?
The two peerages should be able to handle it, right?
…Who do you think I'm even kidding here, exactly?
Unbidden, almost by reflex, one of my hands makes a slow, clutching motion-
-and in the Immaterium, the ebbs and flows not-quite still, seeming to form a whirlpool of psychic-soul stuff, centered atop the node representing the predator's mind-
-I close my fist-
-I feel the node not-quite stumble, stilling in their approach, the prey gaining back some modicum of distance and safety, as the not-water of the Warp rushes in and slithers inside the node-that-is-their-mind-
-and I watch, utterly fascinated, as the node wobbles for a beat, before exploding apart, ripped out from the inside, the coalesced psychic-soul stuff flowing back the way it came, making the sea of thoughts and souls ripple.
Not so different from a drop of water landing atop a still pond.
My hand drops.
ThE vOiCeS recede, making me intimately aware of the beginning of a headache.
I exhale, feeling the Dark Grey blob of soul-thoughts slowing their mad dash to safety through their imprint.
My eyes flutter open, the coldness of the night air highlighting the clamminess of my skin, little beads of sweat on my forehead that I wipe distractedly.
Then, it rushes back.
Vision of a mind steeped in madness and hunger, breaking apart under the pressure of too much everything.
I dry heave, acutely aware of the nausea that takes me.
I scramble out of my bed, kicking off my bed sheets, dashing toward my water closet, almost falling on my face as I wrench the door open.
Seconds later, I hurl in the toilet bowl, naked and on my knees, clutching the ceramic for dear life.
Rias Gremory, co-owner of the Kuoh territory, finishes channeling her teleport spell toward the last known position of the Stray Devil which just triggered their wards-
-only to come to a halt, boggling a little, as she bears witness to the scene in front of her.
"...What?" Koneko, next to her, utters what everyone assembled thinks aloud.
In front of them, the Stray Devil, their chimeric, heavily mutated body, looking like a cross between a really short giraffe and a really big scorpion atop which someone had screwed a human torso, lay, dead, blood leaking from their neck, their head being very conspicuously absent from the vicinity, some strange kind of white-ish, smoky energy rising out of the newly created orifice.
Their current vanguard, Kiba, takes a cautious step forward, hands at his side in a ready to draw position, even if he hasn't manifested one of his blades quite yet.
Getting over her surprise, Rias gets herself back into the game.
"Akeno, go high and tell us what you see," she snaps, her own eyes starting to cautiously look around, "Koneko, do you smell anything?"
The diminutive white-haired cat girl closes her eyes, before taking a deep whiff.
"Blood. Sweat. Fear." she answers after a beat, before pointing in a direction, "That way."
"Probably the victim," the Gremory heiress mumbles to herself, one hand cupping her chin, "Do you feel up to handling the clean up? Just be careful.
"We could be dealing with a mage here." the crimson haired devil ends, eyes going back to the corpse of the stray.
"Nn." the yokai answers in assent, before jumping upward, and starting to dash in the direction she 'sniffed out'.
Shaking her head, Rias steps next to her knight, her eyes roaming the dingy, cramped alleyway where they found what was left of their target of the night.
"Found anything yet, Yuuto-kun?" she asks, prompting the blond haired knight to look back at her from his half-crouched position next to the cadaver.
"He's still hot, which means it happened barely a few minutes before we got here." he explains while gesturing toward the stray.
Rias tilts her head in thoughts.
"Do you think someone did it to save the victim?" she asks.
Kiba goes to answer-
-only to get interrupted as Akeno lands gracefully nearby, prompting the King and Knight to look at the Queen, Rias' eyebrow arched in askance.
"There's no one here, my King." the half-fallen answers the unasked question, prompting the Gremory heiress to 'tsk' in annoyance as she crosses her arms under her bust.
"Alright, fine, we can deal with this." she grumbles, before shifting her attention back toward her Knight, "What were you about to say, Yuuto-kun?"
"The blood splatters, they're odd." he starts, prompting Rias to look downward, wrinkling her nose as she sees that the pool of blood has widened, making her take a step backward so as to not dirty her shoes-
"Not those, Rias," the blue eyed boy denies, shaking his head for emphasis, before gesturing around, "Those on the walls."
The crimson headed devil quirk an eyebrow at the sentence, before paning a curious look around, her eyes landing on multiples, tiny drops of blood and-
"Is that…" she trails, eyes squinted as she takes a few steps forward, "Brain matter?"
"Uh, didn't notice that." her Knight mumbles, before straightening back up, "But that would make sense.
"I don't know how, but it looks like the stray's head somehow exploded inside out."
Rias boggles, taking a step backward, before whirling on her heels to face her two retainers.
"Is that even possible?" she wonders aloud, before elaborating, "With a spell in the Merlin school of magic, I mean."
Akeno hums consideringly, before shrugging minutely, hands clasped in front of her.
"Maybe? I wouldn't know for sure, but everything is rumored to be possible as long as you have the right equation. The hard part is to find it." she ends up answering.
"Alright, alright," the Gremory heiress answers, "So, we either have a mage runing around or-"
"-a human sacred gear user with heroically inclined tendencies?" Kiba hazards, making his King pause, before slowly nodding.
"Possible too, yeah." she answers, before her whole complexion lights up, "Hey, maybe I could recruit them?"
"Let's not count our chickens before they hatch, my King." Akeno chuckles in a good humor, "How about we make our little problem vanish first, regroup with our errant Rook, and see from there."
"Of course!" Rias answers, black-red energy starting to gather in her hands, "Let me deal with this!"
I stare lifelessly at the bathroom's ceiling under the curtain of blessed warmth, the nearly scalding rain falling off the shower head barely soothing my feelings.
I just killed someone, and I feel like absolute utter shit.
I went and assumed that it was a Stray Devil, and I'm almost positive that I'm right on my take, but even then…
Even if the target was 'acceptable' and I may have saved a life…
It shouldn't be this easy.
It shouldn't have been this easy.
It took me, what? A few seconds of focus and a mnemonic gesture?
And boom, head goes splat.
End of the story, end of a life.
I take a breath, coaxing tHe VoIcEs away, banishing the dark thoughts plaguing me, motioning to rise up, while shutting the shower off.
I step in front of the sink, idly noticing my slightly bloodshot eyes in the mirror, preparing my toothbrush to wash the sick aftertaste in my mouth that the shower hasn't managed to deal with.
Well, at least, now I know what the proper emotion to channel to go along with this awful spell is.
Emptiness.
…I kinda feel like it right now, if I have to be honest.
[AN: and we enter the time-skip period with a bang, and a little 'oopsie' from Prima's part.
Well, not totally, the voices told her to do it, after all.
Only little issue is that the Devils will know from now on that something is sus in Kuoh. :3
Hope you enjoy, xoxo]