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(Chapter 1?)
There is an organization with no name about which many things are said: that it serves a terrible demon from beyond time, that it predates humanity itself, that its members are not human but elaborate clockwork wind-up machines, that you can tell by a faint ticking noise that you will only hear when it is already too late. That it creates earthquakes, flash floods and hurricanes for its own unknown purposes, that it is the custodian, guardian or even creator of the blazing, crackling glory that will one day devour our sorry world, and even that it is solely responsible for the hairline cracks in the sky. Some things are true; most are not. Nothing is certain, except: if you ever do hear the faint ticking sound, it is already too late.
A bus stops in a dusty field just outside of town and its single passenger disembarks. She is dressed in a patched and faded hooded cloak and smells distressingly of musty fabric. She ignores the bus driver’s farewell and begins to trudge with surprising determination away from the city. He catches a glimpse of her eyes, before she leaves, and shudders; they are horribly bloodshot and a brownish-black smudge has eclipsed most of the white on one of them.
Her name is Hailey, and she is running out of time. For over a year, she has been searching for something lost; something deliberately misplaced. Every time she goes out and fails to find it, she fades a little. It is taking longer and longer for her to recover from these outings and each time the recovery is a little less complete. This lead feels different, stronger than the others, but she scarcely has the energy left to hope. She focuses totally on putting one foot in front of the other. The search will continue until she finds what she is looking for, or her legs give out for the last time. To do less would be letting THEM win, and she cannot allow that. She keeps walking in perfect rhythm, one foot in front of the other, tick, tick, tick, tick. She can feel, in the place where her heart should be, someone else not too far away, walking with the same perfect, unvarying rhythm, just slightly faster than the ticking of a clock.. They are getting closer. She must hurry.
There is a warehouse by the edge of town which, a month ago, did not exist. There are no records of it being built and no indication of its purpose; it simply sprung into existence during a brief burst of unexplained seismic activity. If you get very close to the warehouse (which is probably not a good idea) you might notice an unusual luster to the white material of its walls -- in colour and texture they resemble ivory more than any sort of concrete or brick.
Trucks occasionally come and go from the warehouse, bringing large loads of organic waste. Whoever operates the warehouse pays top dollar for plant and animal matter of all kinds. The drivers simply dock their trucks at a port in the outer wall and the waste is removed automatically with an unpleasant slurping noise and replaced with a large amount of cash. The exact payment is inconsistent and doesn’t seem to relate to the amount of waste delivered, but it’s always much more than the load of garbage is worth.
Aside from the one port, which only opens for trucks to dock, the surface of the warehouse is perfectly smooth and devoid of obvious doors and windows. Hailey trudges around the building in a slow circle, examining the shining surface carefully. She approaches a spot that looks pretty much the same as any other and, after a brief pause, walks directly through the wall and disappears altogether.
She pauses on the other side of the false wall because there is not really anywhere to go. The visible white dome of the warehous is apparently merely a cap on a perfectly round and indeterminably deep hole. A glistening, slowly pulsating tube leads from the truck dock into the gloomy darkness below. A little below the narrow leather ring where she stands, a waterfall of faintly glowing green liquid emerges from one of the walls and cascades downward. It is quite a place; she is slightly impressed despite herself.
And then, she knows. At last, she has found it. It calls to her, it joins with gravity in pulling her ruined body downward toward the greenish darkness below. She considers jumping, but does not. Perhaps a better way down will present itself. There is a simple watcher’s rune inscribed on the enamel roof. She turns to it and calls out in a cracked and raspy voice, “ELLIOT CRANE, YOU HAVE SOMETHING WHICH DOES NOT BELONG TO YOU. I HAVE COME FOR IT. THIS DOES NOT HAVE TO BE DIFFICULT.”
There is a silence just long enough for her to grow somewhat impatient and then an inhuman and panicky voice replied, “Y-you’re one of Them aren’t you. Y-you’ll never take it! NEVER!”
She pulls down her tattered hood, revealing a gaunt and ghoulish face framed by long, dark, matted hair. “DO I LOOK LIKE ONE OF THEM TO YOU, RIDICULOUS BOY? MY NAME IS HAILEY, I AM MY OWN AND I HAVE COME TO TAKE BACK MY PROPERTY.”
“You dont -- NO, you’re trying to trick me! Alright then, if you want it come down here and get it!” the oddly hissing voice of Elliot Crane replies, and then, unfortunately, the thin leather platform around the outside of the hole retracts and she tumbles downward into the abyss.
(rewrite this next paragraph maybe)
Hailey feels a complex mix of emotions as she plummeted. Even for a being as herself, the gut-wrenching terror brought on by the sudden departure of gravity is impossible to completely ignore. She is also more than a bit irritated with her host for making things so difficult, yet at the same time she can’t completely blame him for not trusting her and she has to admit this is a pretty good trap. She even has time to admire his sense of aesthetics a little; the eerie green glow of the unknown liquid and the fine tracery of magical runes along the smooth white edges of the vast pit combined to make what she feels is a very solid look for this kind of nightmare stronghold. Finally, she’s little exasperated by the sheer length of the fall. It was taking much longer than falling ever reasonably should -- it seems like perhaps this Elliot has a tendency to really overdo things. That probably doesn’t bode well if he decides to continue resisting, she reflects.
She hits the ground. She lands on her feet, obviously, but when you hit a hard surface at terminal velocity that can only make so much difference. There is a loud, sickening snap and a flash of unimaginable pain. She drops to the ground, rolls over and spends several seconds trying to collect herself. Her left leg is snapped above the knee, connected to the rest of her only by a few strands of flesh and sinew. With an exasperated sigh, she grips the now-useless limb and twists it off the rest of the way, sliding it into a pocket of her cloak, and begins to move again. She does not crawl; she moves smoothly and fluidly like a three-legged animal, like she was always meant to walk on one leg and two arms.
She is in an unimaginably vast underground cavern, lit dimly by streams and clouds of that green liquid and occasionally by strangely hovering lights. The ground is hard and leathery and in some places appears to be moving. Large bony structures rise around her on all sides, but she ignores them. Her goal calls to her.
She passes strange, roughly-humanoid flesh-creatures with round, toothy, sideways mouths instead of faces. They vary wildly in size; some come up no higher than her knee and others are towering, at least ten feet tall. Indistinct shapes move slowly in the distance, suggest other things too large to bear thinking about very much. The design, she notes, is simple and makes only minor sacrifices of efficiency to achieve a very unnerving effect. The lack of eyes seems like a needless hindrance, but in perfect darkness deep underground it might become an advantage. The monsters pay her no mind as she passes.
Something emerges from the gloom ahead. A building, much smaller than the bone obelisks arrayed around her. About the size of a small suburban house. Actually it is a small suburban house, complete with a driveway that goes nowhere and a green lawn made of some kind of fungus. A river of green liquid wraps around it, forming a sort of a moat. The front walkway leads to a small foot-bridge. The thing she seeks is there, in that obtrusive little house in this nightmarish cavern. Elliot must be there too.
Hailey hears a sudden hiss and crackle of static and stumbles, tearing her hood and scraping skin from her forehead. A terrible, sourceless light pulses around her for a moment as she lies there, gasping for breath. She shakes and forces herself to continue, moving at a normal walking pace on her three remaining limbs. Perhaps she has less time than she thought.
She reaches the little house. The front door is locked. She pauses in front of it and makes a noise that is partly a name but mostly a wordless howl: “ELLIIIOTE CRAAAAANE!”
“O-oh,” says a voice from the other side of the door. “You’re a lot more ... alive, than I was hoping.”
“OPEN THE DOOR AND GIVE ME THE KIT,” she snarls. It is so close. It calls to her, makes it difficult to concentrate.
“Why should I trust you,” demands the panicked voice behind the door.
“Why,” Hailey repeats, her voice suddenly cold. She grabs the doorframe and pulls herself upright on her remaining leg. “Okay. Okay. Let me tell you a story.
“About a year ago you got a package in the mail. It wasn’t addressed to you. You couldn’t even read the language the address was written in. On the bottom of the package there was a magic circle and a strange, off-centre six-pointed star. You opened the package, even though it wasn’t addressed to you, and you found a small metal sewing kit with a picture on the front, a picture of a crossed pair of needles in front of a realistic heart. You opened it, even though the package wasn’t addressed to you.”
“Inside you found some tools which did not particularly look like sewing equipment and, more importantly, you found a small square of paper with ‘INSTRUCTIONS’ written in big block letters at the top. They were not instructions for using the tools. They told you things about yourself you never knew before, things you could scarcely believe, along with a stern direction to never tell anyone else what they said. You felt different. You picked up the tools and you could almost hear them whispering to you, though you couldn’t quite understand what they were saying. You took those tools and you made terrible things with them; amazing, impossible, terrible things.”
“There was also a little note in that package which was not addressed to you, and that little note said, ‘whoever you are, whatever happens, don’t let them take this!’ The note was signed “Hailey” because I WROTE IT AND IT’S TIME FOR YOU TO GIVE MY PROPERTY BACK TO ME.”
There are uncertain shifting noises behind the doors, then soft clicking like a door being unlocked. The door opened and Elliot Crane stands in the doorway, quaking with fear. He is six and a half feet tall with long, lithe limbs and greenish-black scales covering most of his body. His face is elongated and spined; his eyes reptilian and beady. Two small, feathered wings fold behind his back. He is wearing a flour-smudged apron and holding a wooden spoon in one clawed hand.
“...Really,” Hailey says, flatly, leaning on the doorframe.
Elliot looks down at where Hailey’s left leg abruptly ends and gulps. “U-um ... s-sorry about that.”
“Yeah. Look, I need you to bring me the kit right NOW, before the clowns from the Lost and Found department get here.”
“W-who? Some of THEM? You led them here? Y-you--”
“Look, they would have found you soon anyway if you kept making big unexplained tooth-domes, a-and ... fuck ...” She trails off, leaning heavily on the doorframe. There is a soft hiss of static, gradually growing louder, and the sound of a clock ticking slightly too fast. Something in her chest is burning hot, right next to where her heart should be. “F-fuck. I think it’s too late. Just hide. NOW. Before the dogs get here, I’ll be --” The word ‘okay’ is drowned in hiss and crackle, and the world fades away.
(Chapter 2?)
This is a memory. It is another place, another time. Snow is falling gently. Two girls are walking down the street slowly, hand in hand. One is wearing a thick winter jacket, reflective wrap-around sunglasses and a scarf over her mouth and nose. The other wears a long, grey coat and looks very much like Hailey, although younger and with all her limbs properly attached.
They are not really holding hands. The girl in the grey coat is gripping the other’s wrist tightly, very tightly. They walk in silence for a while, then, the girl in the scarf tries to say something. It is hard to tell what she says -- as soon as her mouth begins to move there is an unearthly hissing noise, like radio static. The other girl responds by tightening her grip and gritting her teeth silently.
“You’re not her,” says the girl in the grey coat, after a long silence. “You’re just not.”
The hissing noise returns. The other girl says, “How can you say that?” It sounds like she may be crying, though it’s hard to tell. The wind is very cold, but neither of them shivers. A large snowflake falls on the girl with the scarf’s cheek and vanishes instantly with a soft sizzling noise.
There is a patch of ice on the sidewalk ahead. The girl with the scarf steps on it and slips, keeling over forward and smashing face-first into a metal signpost with an alarming crack before her companion can catch her.
“H-hey! Are you okay?”
The girl in the scarf steps back from the post, her head down, swaying slightly from side to side and making an escalating noise that now sounds more like a roaring fire, hissing and popping and cracking, than radio static. The noise seems almost like inhuman laughter, but her voice is sad when she raises her head and says, “Sorry. I’m really sorry.”
Her sunglasses are smashed to bits. Her eyes are not eyes at all, merely holes through which there shines a pure and terrible light that is also sound, that buzzes and pulses and frays the threads of thought and truth. Shining liquid drips from the sockets and from the cuts on her face. The girl in the grey coat lets go of her wrist and recoils back, covering her eyes and screaming. Things are fading, growing too bright, too clear to comprehend.
“I’m so sorry,” says the girl in the scarf, her voice barely audible over the roar and crackle of white noise, just as the world itself is barely visible through the blaze of white light. A spark of brightness jumps from her hand to the other girl’s chest. The universe explodes with light, then fades, slowly, into blackness.
There is an organization with no name about which many things are said: that it serves a terrible demon from beyond time, that it predates humanity itself, that its members are not human but elaborate clockwork wind-up machines, that you can tell by a faint ticking noise that you will only hear when it is already too late. That it creates earthquakes, flash floods and hurricanes for its own unknown purposes, that it is the custodian, guardian or even creator of the blazing, crackling glory that will one day devour our sorry world, and even that it is solely responsible for the hairline cracks in the sky. Some things are true; most are not. Nothing is certain, except: if you ever do hear the faint ticking sound, it is already too late.
A bus stops in a dusty field just outside of town and its single passenger disembarks. She is dressed in a patched and faded hooded cloak and smells distressingly of musty fabric. She ignores the bus driver’s farewell and begins to trudge with surprising determination away from the city. He catches a glimpse of her eyes, before she leaves, and shudders; they are horribly bloodshot and a brownish-black smudge has eclipsed most of the white on one of them.
Her name is Hailey, and she is running out of time. For over a year, she has been searching for something lost; something deliberately misplaced. Every time she goes out and fails to find it, she fades a little. It is taking longer and longer for her to recover from these outings and each time the recovery is a little less complete. This lead feels different, stronger than the others, but she scarcely has the energy left to hope. She focuses totally on putting one foot in front of the other. The search will continue until she finds what she is looking for, or her legs give out for the last time. To do less would be letting THEM win, and she cannot allow that. She keeps walking in perfect rhythm, one foot in front of the other, tick, tick, tick, tick. She can feel, in the place where her heart should be, someone else not too far away, walking with the same perfect, unvarying rhythm, just slightly faster than the ticking of a clock.. They are getting closer. She must hurry.
There is a warehouse by the edge of town which, a month ago, did not exist. There are no records of it being built and no indication of its purpose; it simply sprung into existence during a brief burst of unexplained seismic activity. If you get very close to the warehouse (which is probably not a good idea) you might notice an unusual luster to the white material of its walls -- in colour and texture they resemble ivory more than any sort of concrete or brick.
Trucks occasionally come and go from the warehouse, bringing large loads of organic waste. Whoever operates the warehouse pays top dollar for plant and animal matter of all kinds. The drivers simply dock their trucks at a port in the outer wall and the waste is removed automatically with an unpleasant slurping noise and replaced with a large amount of cash. The exact payment is inconsistent and doesn’t seem to relate to the amount of waste delivered, but it’s always much more than the load of garbage is worth.
Aside from the one port, which only opens for trucks to dock, the surface of the warehouse is perfectly smooth and devoid of obvious doors and windows. Hailey trudges around the building in a slow circle, examining the shining surface carefully. She approaches a spot that looks pretty much the same as any other and, after a brief pause, walks directly through the wall and disappears altogether.
She pauses on the other side of the false wall because there is not really anywhere to go. The visible white dome of the warehous is apparently merely a cap on a perfectly round and indeterminably deep hole. A glistening, slowly pulsating tube leads from the truck dock into the gloomy darkness below. A little below the narrow leather ring where she stands, a waterfall of faintly glowing green liquid emerges from one of the walls and cascades downward. It is quite a place; she is slightly impressed despite herself.
And then, she knows. At last, she has found it. It calls to her, it joins with gravity in pulling her ruined body downward toward the greenish darkness below. She considers jumping, but does not. Perhaps a better way down will present itself. There is a simple watcher’s rune inscribed on the enamel roof. She turns to it and calls out in a cracked and raspy voice, “ELLIOT CRANE, YOU HAVE SOMETHING WHICH DOES NOT BELONG TO YOU. I HAVE COME FOR IT. THIS DOES NOT HAVE TO BE DIFFICULT.”
There is a silence just long enough for her to grow somewhat impatient and then an inhuman and panicky voice replied, “Y-you’re one of Them aren’t you. Y-you’ll never take it! NEVER!”
She pulls down her tattered hood, revealing a gaunt and ghoulish face framed by long, dark, matted hair. “DO I LOOK LIKE ONE OF THEM TO YOU, RIDICULOUS BOY? MY NAME IS HAILEY, I AM MY OWN AND I HAVE COME TO TAKE BACK MY PROPERTY.”
“You dont -- NO, you’re trying to trick me! Alright then, if you want it come down here and get it!” the oddly hissing voice of Elliot Crane replies, and then, unfortunately, the thin leather platform around the outside of the hole retracts and she tumbles downward into the abyss.
(rewrite this next paragraph maybe)
Hailey feels a complex mix of emotions as she plummeted. Even for a being as herself, the gut-wrenching terror brought on by the sudden departure of gravity is impossible to completely ignore. She is also more than a bit irritated with her host for making things so difficult, yet at the same time she can’t completely blame him for not trusting her and she has to admit this is a pretty good trap. She even has time to admire his sense of aesthetics a little; the eerie green glow of the unknown liquid and the fine tracery of magical runes along the smooth white edges of the vast pit combined to make what she feels is a very solid look for this kind of nightmare stronghold. Finally, she’s little exasperated by the sheer length of the fall. It was taking much longer than falling ever reasonably should -- it seems like perhaps this Elliot has a tendency to really overdo things. That probably doesn’t bode well if he decides to continue resisting, she reflects.
She hits the ground. She lands on her feet, obviously, but when you hit a hard surface at terminal velocity that can only make so much difference. There is a loud, sickening snap and a flash of unimaginable pain. She drops to the ground, rolls over and spends several seconds trying to collect herself. Her left leg is snapped above the knee, connected to the rest of her only by a few strands of flesh and sinew. With an exasperated sigh, she grips the now-useless limb and twists it off the rest of the way, sliding it into a pocket of her cloak, and begins to move again. She does not crawl; she moves smoothly and fluidly like a three-legged animal, like she was always meant to walk on one leg and two arms.
She is in an unimaginably vast underground cavern, lit dimly by streams and clouds of that green liquid and occasionally by strangely hovering lights. The ground is hard and leathery and in some places appears to be moving. Large bony structures rise around her on all sides, but she ignores them. Her goal calls to her.
She passes strange, roughly-humanoid flesh-creatures with round, toothy, sideways mouths instead of faces. They vary wildly in size; some come up no higher than her knee and others are towering, at least ten feet tall. Indistinct shapes move slowly in the distance, suggest other things too large to bear thinking about very much. The design, she notes, is simple and makes only minor sacrifices of efficiency to achieve a very unnerving effect. The lack of eyes seems like a needless hindrance, but in perfect darkness deep underground it might become an advantage. The monsters pay her no mind as she passes.
Something emerges from the gloom ahead. A building, much smaller than the bone obelisks arrayed around her. About the size of a small suburban house. Actually it is a small suburban house, complete with a driveway that goes nowhere and a green lawn made of some kind of fungus. A river of green liquid wraps around it, forming a sort of a moat. The front walkway leads to a small foot-bridge. The thing she seeks is there, in that obtrusive little house in this nightmarish cavern. Elliot must be there too.
Hailey hears a sudden hiss and crackle of static and stumbles, tearing her hood and scraping skin from her forehead. A terrible, sourceless light pulses around her for a moment as she lies there, gasping for breath. She shakes and forces herself to continue, moving at a normal walking pace on her three remaining limbs. Perhaps she has less time than she thought.
She reaches the little house. The front door is locked. She pauses in front of it and makes a noise that is partly a name but mostly a wordless howl: “ELLIIIOTE CRAAAAANE!”
“O-oh,” says a voice from the other side of the door. “You’re a lot more ... alive, than I was hoping.”
“OPEN THE DOOR AND GIVE ME THE KIT,” she snarls. It is so close. It calls to her, makes it difficult to concentrate.
“Why should I trust you,” demands the panicked voice behind the door.
“Why,” Hailey repeats, her voice suddenly cold. She grabs the doorframe and pulls herself upright on her remaining leg. “Okay. Okay. Let me tell you a story.
“About a year ago you got a package in the mail. It wasn’t addressed to you. You couldn’t even read the language the address was written in. On the bottom of the package there was a magic circle and a strange, off-centre six-pointed star. You opened the package, even though it wasn’t addressed to you, and you found a small metal sewing kit with a picture on the front, a picture of a crossed pair of needles in front of a realistic heart. You opened it, even though the package wasn’t addressed to you.”
“Inside you found some tools which did not particularly look like sewing equipment and, more importantly, you found a small square of paper with ‘INSTRUCTIONS’ written in big block letters at the top. They were not instructions for using the tools. They told you things about yourself you never knew before, things you could scarcely believe, along with a stern direction to never tell anyone else what they said. You felt different. You picked up the tools and you could almost hear them whispering to you, though you couldn’t quite understand what they were saying. You took those tools and you made terrible things with them; amazing, impossible, terrible things.”
“There was also a little note in that package which was not addressed to you, and that little note said, ‘whoever you are, whatever happens, don’t let them take this!’ The note was signed “Hailey” because I WROTE IT AND IT’S TIME FOR YOU TO GIVE MY PROPERTY BACK TO ME.”
There are uncertain shifting noises behind the doors, then soft clicking like a door being unlocked. The door opened and Elliot Crane stands in the doorway, quaking with fear. He is six and a half feet tall with long, lithe limbs and greenish-black scales covering most of his body. His face is elongated and spined; his eyes reptilian and beady. Two small, feathered wings fold behind his back. He is wearing a flour-smudged apron and holding a wooden spoon in one clawed hand.
“...Really,” Hailey says, flatly, leaning on the doorframe.
Elliot looks down at where Hailey’s left leg abruptly ends and gulps. “U-um ... s-sorry about that.”
“Yeah. Look, I need you to bring me the kit right NOW, before the clowns from the Lost and Found department get here.”
“W-who? Some of THEM? You led them here? Y-you--”
“Look, they would have found you soon anyway if you kept making big unexplained tooth-domes, a-and ... fuck ...” She trails off, leaning heavily on the doorframe. There is a soft hiss of static, gradually growing louder, and the sound of a clock ticking slightly too fast. Something in her chest is burning hot, right next to where her heart should be. “F-fuck. I think it’s too late. Just hide. NOW. Before the dogs get here, I’ll be --” The word ‘okay’ is drowned in hiss and crackle, and the world fades away.
(Chapter 2?)
This is a memory. It is another place, another time. Snow is falling gently. Two girls are walking down the street slowly, hand in hand. One is wearing a thick winter jacket, reflective wrap-around sunglasses and a scarf over her mouth and nose. The other wears a long, grey coat and looks very much like Hailey, although younger and with all her limbs properly attached.
They are not really holding hands. The girl in the grey coat is gripping the other’s wrist tightly, very tightly. They walk in silence for a while, then, the girl in the scarf tries to say something. It is hard to tell what she says -- as soon as her mouth begins to move there is an unearthly hissing noise, like radio static. The other girl responds by tightening her grip and gritting her teeth silently.
“You’re not her,” says the girl in the grey coat, after a long silence. “You’re just not.”
The hissing noise returns. The other girl says, “How can you say that?” It sounds like she may be crying, though it’s hard to tell. The wind is very cold, but neither of them shivers. A large snowflake falls on the girl with the scarf’s cheek and vanishes instantly with a soft sizzling noise.
There is a patch of ice on the sidewalk ahead. The girl with the scarf steps on it and slips, keeling over forward and smashing face-first into a metal signpost with an alarming crack before her companion can catch her.
“H-hey! Are you okay?”
The girl in the scarf steps back from the post, her head down, swaying slightly from side to side and making an escalating noise that now sounds more like a roaring fire, hissing and popping and cracking, than radio static. The noise seems almost like inhuman laughter, but her voice is sad when she raises her head and says, “Sorry. I’m really sorry.”
Her sunglasses are smashed to bits. Her eyes are not eyes at all, merely holes through which there shines a pure and terrible light that is also sound, that buzzes and pulses and frays the threads of thought and truth. Shining liquid drips from the sockets and from the cuts on her face. The girl in the grey coat lets go of her wrist and recoils back, covering her eyes and screaming. Things are fading, growing too bright, too clear to comprehend.
“I’m so sorry,” says the girl in the scarf, her voice barely audible over the roar and crackle of white noise, just as the world itself is barely visible through the blaze of white light. A spark of brightness jumps from her hand to the other girl’s chest. The universe explodes with light, then fades, slowly, into blackness.
