@herebedragonflies / herebedragonflies.tumblr.com
You walk into the temple, and wander around for a bit until you find a human-shape holding a sword. Yours now.
You don’t bother looking both ways before you grab the blade. If anyone’s watching you, you’re already armed and about to add more if they object. The sword hums as you pick it up, and reshapes itself in your hand.
You step to the side of the door, where people are less likely to be walking, and get out your Time-Tables. There’s a subtlety to finding where the peculiar melody of paradox space will drop you, and you spin carefully. This isn’t your world, but here, this time, farther back than expected, is a heavy drop but easy as the boys Bro brings home who lose their shirts just in the door. It’ll be almost effortless to shift to.
So you do.
The streets are still reasonably populated, but today you’re lucid and notice that everyone looks kind of stressed and about a third of them are leaving the city with luggage. The kid takes you through a veritable maze of streets to a building that looks pretty much like 1950s corporate architecture horror. It’s like coming home. It’s filled with a variety of statues, and looks more like what you think a museum or art gallery would than a temple.
Whelp. Time to roll.
“Okay, thanks, kid, I’ll meet you back at yours.”
He looks disappointed. “I can’t stay with you?”
“Nope. Private religious shit. See you.” You nod back towards his house, and he goes.
We may be getting some outlining done.
Yes, all of these tabs are deeply relevant.
You rifle through your sylladex for the least gross shoes and equip them. Then, at your host’s insistence, you turn over all your dirty clothes. She knocks on another door with her arms full of bloody, stained clothes, and her son opens it, still rubbing sleep from his eyes. “Our guest needs to go to the temple, honey. Put on some clothes and take him there and by the time you get back I’ll have breakfast for you.” The kid looks at you and his eyes widen, but he doesn’t say anything, just goes to get dressed.
Come bid for me a the AO3 auction. In return for your donation to AO3, I will write you 4k of pretty much any pairing, style, or storyline. You should come bid!
Check out the other authors, too - there’s some pretty amazing talent.
Taking time out of your regularly scheduled hiatus to reblog this!
You pat her awkwardly on the back after a pause of three seconds.
“Thank you so much. They’re a menace.” She releases you, and eyes you appraisingly. “Let’s get you some breakfast, and I’ll put those clothes in the wash for you.”
“You know I don’t have any of whatever currency you use here.”
She smiles, quick and sharp. “These days steel is better than gold anyway. I’m not exactly overwhelmed with paying customers when everyone with means is trying to flee Ir.”
Log:
TG: why arent you leaving then InnKeeper: Where would I go? IK: I’m going to turn into one when I die no matter where I am. I should be comfortable in my own home until then. TG: ignoring the whole turning into a zombie thing, how is it comfortable to have those things at your back gate TG: do you sleep in your own fermented excrement too IK: That’s quite vulgar. IK: The problem of the dead has worsened in recent days, but they do largely leave us alone. Most have headed out into the wilderness. TG: right TG: i need to make a stop TG: theres a temple here right TG: with a statue of a dead warrior queen TG: i need to go there IK: I’ll have my son take you. Would you like a change of clothes before you go? TG: nah im good
There’s a fluffy pink bathrobe on the back of the door. It’s probably your host’s, but it’s probably less alarming for her to see you in this than in clothes covered in blood. You don the robe and your shades and go looking for laundry facilities.
Your host is hovering outside the bathroom door. “Are you the one who killed it?”
“‘It’ being the zombie so brain-damaged it didn’t know it was supposed to stop when I cut its head off? Probably.”
She’s coming at you and you nearly take her hand off before you realize it’s for a hug.
You go back inside looking for some kind of bathroom, because peeing is really kind of an urgent proposition now, and you’re a bit filthy. You find one two doors down from the kitchen, with the toilet tank a few feet up the wall from the toilet itself and a chain to flush. Whatever: it works, and that’s the important thing.
There’s a tub, but no shower. That works, though. It’s been longer than you care to remember since you were really clean. You turn the one faucet on, and it’s kind of lukewarm. You strip and stand in the tub and rinse off without letting the tub fill for a while, using the sliver of soap you’ve dug up, until the water’s running clear. Then you stopper the drain and sit down and let the tub fill. It’s not relaxing, exactly: too cold to be relaxing. But soaking makes you feel almost orgasmically clean, so it’s twenty minutes thirty-six seconds before you climb out of the tub and let the slightly grey water drain. All of your clothes are dirty, some of them covered in blood.
Happy Apocalypse/One Year Birthday for HBD!!!
In honor of the occasion, I finally present you with the other winning pairing from our request earlier this year. Hussie/Luka.
It's been a great year, and here's to another one (because it is definitely going to take us that long to get anywhere with this).
You cut off its hands, but everything keeps moving and you’re going to have to take it completely apart before it stops coming for you, aren’t you?
Shit.
You get started.
It takes seven minutes nine seconds moving at flashstep speed to cut it into small enough chunks that it stops moving. Bits are still trying to twitch, but the muscle fibers are no longer attached to anything to pull against, so it just resembles a faintly seething mass of meat.
If you had kerosene, you’d light it on fire now just to be sure. You don’t, though, so you just wipe your sword off on your already-stained pants and captchalogue it back into your strife specibus. You should go get the less-broken sword the space cadet mentioned. Maybe you’ll find the temple when you’ve cleaned up.
It’d be nice to have a bigger meal, too, but you’d just throw it all up and waste it. Your stomach is making vague protesting waking-up noises at the apple, and you probably won’t be able to handle substantial meals for a couple days of decent food. Hopefully you can find some way of paying to stay here that long.
There’s a sword in your hand and half-congealed brown blood on the blade and the head is falling to the ground slowly, so slowly.
The body keeps moving, and that’s not how this is supposed to work. It’s supposed to fall down or turn to ash or be a normal corpse again.
It doesn’t.
The body is groping for you, and not like a chicken who hasn’t quite noticed the missing head.
Flimsy and being opened. Great. You pause deliberately, in case it’s your hostess or another guest. The parts of you that have gotten really sick of dying and so try to spot when it’s going to happen are screaming at you that this is not right. Not until the figure is through the gate and shambling towards you and actually kind of way too close can you actually see that it’s not a strange grey shirt, it’s mottled aging skin.
The wind shifts, and you’re now dead certain you have a zombie on your hands.
Hey! I've started a new project that's going to be updating with daily fic things while I work on the main story. Humanstuck post-Sburb AU focusing on emergency medicine and shipping. The ficlets will mostly be back-story, and none of it is illustrated. AB: what she means by "no illustrations" is that updates won't be delayed forever by a lazy artist.
You find the dining room empty but with a pitcher of water on the table with barely any settling of dust on the top at all from sitting overnight. You drink straight from the pitcher again, but a bit slower because to properly rehydrate you need to go slow or something. And also something about Gatorade, and science.
With half the pitcher gone, you put it down and investigate the kitchen. Past the oven and long countertops, the kitchen opens into a garden with what look like fruit trees. Apple trees, though not blue like the last time you saw one. You’re still wearing your shoes, so you walk outside and grab an apple off the tree, crisp and ripe and yellow-green. You survey the walls of the garden as you eat. They look more for privacy than protection, and the gate in the back wall looks flimsy.
Your pants are all crusty, so you equip the least gross ones in your sylladex.
The sun’s just rising, so you go through your basic forms and then wipe yourself down with the cloth next to the pitcher and basin on the bedside table. You’d wash up more thoroughly, but you drank all the water last night.
It’s good enough for now. You’re hungry enough to eat Bro’s cooking willingly, which means you’re probably like a day from death by starvation.
You may be fighting gods, but you have gods on your side, too. Three of them to Tcaolin and Kuroyama’s maybe one-and-a-half. Yeah, you have to do the fighting yourself, but everyone seems to have magical weapons, yourself included.
You just hope you manage to win before all hope of future is destroyed for good.
