Blood_And_Ashes.docx

Hey there again!  TL;DR Below, but why not read my journal entry anyway?  It’s fun, and the TL;DR jokes make sense when you know what happened. =)  Anywho, do what you will, I’m off.

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So much is going on right now, I don’t know if I can even make this short.  I have written long entries, and so I feel like anyone reading may find them frustratingly pedantic.  But the events of the last week have been such that I feel I’ve had a lifetime in this body.

While reading through my past journal entries, I had the insight that I’m playing through a real-world scenario of Dorothy’s Tinman.  Granted, the allegory is a bit more on-the-nose for my situation than it was meant to be, but I am not sure how I missed it.

I sit here, in Hank’s adopted Nana’s living room, passively analyzing the blood and entrails that still hadn’t come out of the cracks in my robot components, looking back at the last few hours.  What I have come up with is a horror movie where one of the friends is a sick, sadistic murderer – and in this case it’s because he’s a murdering, heartless robot.  Listen a while and you’ll see what I’m talking about. I mean honestly! I hadn’t done more than punch someone before I died, and now I’m a killbot on a mission to destroy all humans…

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After arriving at the Church of Reflections, I shot at a woman I wasn’t sure was a threat, and then stood uselessly at the doors of an empty meeting hall.  Those that were inside other than Gryphon passed through the doors to start addressing the bedlam. BP yelled at me again to go get John and Stelman, so I grabbed him by the collar, and launched myself in the direction he indicated.  I dropped him on one side of them, and I rounded in front of them to cut off their escape.

The RubberBand Man caught up, and detained them by wrapping his legs around them, his head sticking up between their shoulders like some weird clothes hanger.  BP told me to bring them to the base, to which I quipped, and he started to call Geist. I said, “fine,” and took the gift-wrapped couple with me. The Horseman was following me, so when I got to the Hangar entrance, I waited for him to catch up around the corner before passing through the bay doors made to look like the bottom of an old, abandoned community pool.

Archie complained and I told him Hank was with us.  I asked Archie about holding cells, and was told we had none – since we weren’t really in the kidnapping business – so I put the two prisoners into a couple of the empty dorm rooms and locked them in.  While rushing about with Victor to grab food and water for the prisoners, and a better carrying method than a pair of utility arms wrapped around someones’ waist, BP jumped on the coms yelling at Shorty.  Victor, who hadn’t been introduced to absolutely everyone earlier today, didn’t know who the clone was, so I explained his situation in as many derogatory words as I could. This just caused confusion with the latino, so I told him he’d see when we saw him, as BP asked us to kick his butt into line.

I burst into the control room, and saw something that didn’t surprise me – Shorty’s shorts around his ankles, righty working, and lefty clicking.  It seemed he’d found some compromising videos of the Mayor through the surveillance equipment. Phantom veins throbbed in my temples, and I blew a gasket… but not literally.  I started to grab for the teen, intending to make him get into line, but for whatever reason the human was evading me. Whether grabbing for his neck, nuts, or hands, I was simply too slow.  Archie wasn’t helpful either, as there weren’t any authoritative ranks put in place other than to make Geist the highest clearance. I wasn’t able to lock the kid out of the surveillance room, but Archie said he’d keep an eye on the city.  

Through all this, Victor had backed into a corner, holding his hand over his mouth and nose.  When I left the room, he gladly followed, getting his harness on. Trip and BP had talked over the coms, and BP was worried.  He told us to get back to the Church to help him rescue the shapeshifter.

We didn’t see Hank anywhere, and Victor said he probably went back to his Nana’s house – where he’d been at the beginning of the night.  The jockey called his horse, and directed me to where he’d been told to go – across the street from the church! Well wasn’t that convenient?  No, not really.

We called for Hank, me with my loudspeakers, and he popped his head out of a quaint centennial house.  We went to recruit him, but he wanted to be nice to Nana. I told him we could assure her we’d be back in an hour tops, and we’d play cribbage.  Hank thought that’d be acceptable, so we went to find our friends.

Through the front doors, and down a side passageway, we followed Geist and Gryphon.  As we started down an oversized staircase my audio pick-up registered a commotion, so I took off, drawing my weapons and putting my back to the wall next to a closed door.  Gryphon arrived at my side almost immediately, and he kicked the door in, running into the fray. I glanced into the room to see where best to go, and my brain convulsed reflexively.  

I’m a fan of Horror films, but seeing beings of asymmetrical form and outlandish makeup in person does something to you.  You have to just stop and pull yourself back together. Luckily this time it only took me a handful of seconds to get back to fighting shape.  

By the time I was ready to move, everyone had gotten into the fray.  Mutant animals, demons, mutated human forms, there was no unifying base other than “Wrong.”  I sped past all of them, though, seeing BP and Alice being hounded by one of the beings, and one that seemed to have his wits about him.  A disorienting scream had erupted and was reverberating off the mirrored walls, so I used what I could remember of aerodynamic physics to negate the effects.  It seemed to cut the confusion a bit, but everyone was screaming for a cease fire.

I think I would have gone along with the cease fire if the “Leader” hadn’t continued his aggression.  I shot him with my particle beam wrist cannon, and it struck him in the chest. An expression of shocked pain crossed his face, followed by concentration, and the entire room went black.  If not for my radar and thermal sensors, I’d have been completely blinded. As it was I still was a bit disoriented. I yelled at him to drop the darkness, and he complied.

Geist told Savior to stand down, so I lowered my weapons.  Gryphon started talking to his sword – so very freudian of him – and then addressed the freakshow.  He started to talk about Nightbane, and their conversation seemed to make some progress with the underlings, but when he mentioned they were fighting against the Nightlords, Mr. Leader’s face contorted in rage for a fraction of a second.  Time slowed, and I pointed my gun at him. I yelled a warning to Savior, and he lunged at me. My laser targeting system lit up a dot on his forehead an instant before his head collided with the barrel of my particle beam gun. The gun fired, and the body exploded from the force.  Blood, Bone and Viscera coated the mirrored wall panels that hadn’t been shattered by the explosion.

The shock of it washed over everyone’s face, and I excused myself while they sorted out the situation.  Victor and Hank followed shortly after, and we sent EMTs down to deal with the survivors. After a quick rinse, the three of us took a much needed detour for some Cookies and Cribbage.

Such violence and destruction, and while playing through the events, I was the only one that took any sort of violent actions, the only one that had used weapons.  Was I truly supposed to be part of this group? Was Lunet right, and I needed to be placed at the mercy of CS Department of Corrections? Why was I so quick to anger, resorting to it when in any sort of charged situation?  How could I change? Could I?

These questions I’ll just have to mull over, I guess.

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TL;DR

I kidnapped two lovebirds and put them in a cage, stopped a diseased snotrag’s deviance temporarily, and made a disgusting firework.