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mental link

[This little mental nudge comes from Nathaniel Horn, someone who is, oddly enough, not at all used to making these kinds of things on his own. Still, he's been thinking since the bombing a while ago, and this is a good chance to let everyone know what's been on his mind.]

(So........ladies, gentlemen, people in general, let's talk about monsters. Spooky beasts. Creatures that go bump in the night. Those things. They all exist in one form or the other. Lots of terrible tales about abominations that want to like, rip you apart and suck out your eyeballs or something. Anyways, they exist! And how do I know they exist?)

[A pause for dramatic effect here.]

(Because I am one. Annnnnnd I don't mean the whole "something is crawling inside of me, alas I'm like the worst person ever" kind of monster. And honestly, I'm not a monster, but an alien, but...semantics! Anyways, if you see a big hulking flesh thing that looks like it crawled from your worst nightmares sometime, please don't try to destroy it like right away. It might be me. And I wouldn't like that. Just say hi over the mental telephone before doing anything rash.)

[There's a long pause here as he tries to piece together what other points he wants to make. It looks like he didn't think all of this whole mental speech thing out beforehand.]

(Anyways, uh...are all of you human? For the most part? I don't think there's anything like me among the broods...unless I'm wrong. So like, if you have any questions for me to answer, or want to share examples of big spooky monsters where you come from, just, like, tell me? Honestly, I think I'm pretty good-looking no matter what form I take, but I know most of you guys don't like seeing things like, I dunno, teeth growing in different places outside of human mouths and stuff, so I just wanted to give you a heads up. I don't transform often, but it could happen. Just be aware, and all that.)

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[And it's not every day when you find out one of the nest has SUPER COOL MONSTERS at his beck and call. This is the best thing. Nathaniel grins, walking in and closing the door behind him before he walks over to casually sit down and lounge back in the spare chair.]

Ha! Well, I do try to keep it under wraps, but lucky you. You got to see what I don't show most people.

[He leans forward, cradling his chin in his hand. His eyes glint, mischievously.]

So, Mr. Dark Man...you want to see it up close, do you?

[ It was a glimpse, really - enough to nearly be a trick of the mind, until Nate went and brought it back up en masse for the entirety of the nest to know about.

Brave of him, on one hand. Vain, on the other. ] If by "it" you really do mean "me", then yes. I do. [ PLAINLY. ]

Possibly quite as much as you'd like to see mine.

[ did i really just write that wo w

]

Oh, is that so?

[And he winks. Because he's shameless and you shouldn't have said it in such a way, now he's going to be ten times as insufferable.]

Okay, well, I'll go first! Let's see...[He pauses, looking around the room.] Probably need to move some stuff out of the way. I won't get to my full size, because I don't want to be cramped, but I hardly want to be making a mess of your room. [A beat.] Unless you want me to, of course.

[Insert the smuggest little smirk in the whole wide world.]

Edited 2016-09-22 19:35 (UTC)

[ "Unless you want me to, of course." No, no!!! - as much as he's keen on this, he'd like to keep his quarters as tidy as possible. Everyone and their broodmate wants to use the roof now, otherwise he'd have suggested a better space for this. Beggars can't be choosers. Which means he's on his feet and actively shoving furniture aside to make as wide a space as possible for Nate to move in. Bed? Moved. Chairs? Moved. Stack of books? Do svidaniya, they've been tossed onto the bed. ]

Better?

[ Look, he even backed up to the doors by the balcony. ]

Much better.

[He stands up and immediately sets on removing his jacket and shirt, tossing them carelessly to the side, before his hands move to his zipper - but he pauses, looking over at The Darkling.]

I hope you're not prude. I hardly want to waste money on buying new clothes.

[Unfortunately, no clothes ever survive any of his more drastic transformations.]

[ ok nate is now stripping and things have taken a turn for the "um"

he has no trouble with nudity he's so freaking old it's just an eh thing ]

So, I take it that clothes are not a part of what you transform? Just your body then.

[ science > all else ]

Nope. Clothes aren't biological material, so I can't exactly replicate them. I only can replicate organic or living things. [He's already removing his pants.] So, sad to say, either I ruin them every time I transform super drastically, or I do this.

[Bye, pants! He tosses them aside. And...................bye underwear, too. He's naked, now. This is great (for Nate, anyways).]

So, want to ask any more questions before I turn? I won't be able to speak in that form, so I'll be using the mental link from here on out.

[ While Nate is skimming out of his clothes and answering questions about organic versus inorganic materials and what he can/can't do, the Darkling has busied himself on a search for a spare blanket. By the time he's found it, Nate is -- very naked. And still talking. There are a thousand and one questions that he has, and whether Nate answers them verbally or through the mental connection - it doesn't matter. ]

Oh, I have plenty of questions. I think I'll reserve them, for after you've changed. The rest of my brood might become curious as to why I have a young, naked man standing in my room if I delay you.

[ And he says it with such open amusement. CLEARLY NOT BOTHERED, BUT COME ON!! MONSTER TIME!!! ]

What, you wouldn't think they'd find it funny?

[He says, with a (very shameless) wink. But fine, fine, he'll bring on the monster time.]

[Instantly, his skin bulges, reddening, and his head just unravels like a spool of thread into a mound of thrashing fleshy tendrils, small dark eyes dotted along their surface. The rest of his body instantly follows suit - he leans forward, hands and arms bulging as bone pierces through them, and teeth-like bones protrude from his chest as he keeps growing. If the sight of his body changing wasn't gross enough, the sounds of his flesh shifting and squelching is certainly enough to cause a person to turn a little green with nausea. His legs fuse, forming a large tail with wicked bony spikes at its end, looking like some weird, biological mace.]

[It only takes a few minutes, but a monster now stands where the young man once was, large enough to have his "head" almost graze the ceiling. His tail swishes back and forth on the floor.]

[A voice sounds in the Darkling's head.]

(It's done.)

I think they'd be perplexed in my choice of partners, [ the retort is casual, and his smile just as calculated. He's used to jousting with flirtatious partners in court, and Nate is among the least gung-ho of them. There's an ease in banter, especially as he awaits the act of what he had presumed to be a young man as he transforms into a monster. An alien. Are they not all aliens, to one another, he wonders - and then Nate is simply... unreal.

He's seen the work of the Corporalki Healers, as they put together a human being who was nothing but pieces and tatters. He has seen a Corporalki Heartrender torment men who thought to keep their tongue neatly under control when all that was required of them was information. People in warzones - men, women, children. Bloodied, mutilated. The fact that there is a distinct lack of blood as Nate's entire form warps and shifts, is eerie - even to him. He can't take his mind off of it, even as Nate's form fills his room. ]

Incredible, [ even he can't disguise the awe in his voice. ] You are - incredible.

[ There are too many questions he has. A quick bout of mental triage, and he decides that the very first thing he needs, is a very personal, very unscientific matter: he needs to poke Nate. LET HIM TOUCH THIS TOOTHY FLESHMASS!!!! ]

[He can't react with words, of course, but the compliment makes him let out a loud, squelch-like sigh, the rumbling of feelings over the bond clearly pleased and flattered. His tail moves a little faster, like that of a wagging dog.]

(You think so?)

[He senses that desire over the bond, and bends his entire fleshy mass down - there are no facial expressions for the Darkling to read, but his bond says everything he feels about the request - Go ahead..]

[ Not only is Nate a toothy fleshmass, he's a vain toothy fleshmass. Or at least, he's looking for some sort of acceptance. Judging by the way he wiggles, he's glad for the lack of horror and rejection. ]

I do. I've seen my share of beasts and monsters, and you are - different.

[ Permission granted, he cannot resist any longer - he lays hand to the flex and motion of Nate's strange, organic body. There's a tooth, he presses a thumb against it. Testing, inquisitive and careful all the same. ]

(You need to tell me about all those beasts, you know. I need to add some to my little mental collection.)

[To hear about the variances of the different creatures that exist, and the thought of using those creatures as new forms and transformations is an wonderful thing indeed - he yearns to test his shapeshifting abilities in new, exciting forms.]

[A low rumbling noise comes from him as the Darkling puts his hands on him, flesh slightly shifting under his touch - surprisingly, while a bit sticky in places, he's not wet to the touch, despite the sheen and gross appearance of what seems to be exposed flesh and bone. His body doesn't seem to stay the same - it's like a moving picture, with striations of muscle and colors that occasionally shift to a different hue. The tooth moves under his touch up and down, like it's rubbing up against his finger.]

Of course, [ who doesn't love spinning a good story? Certainly not him.

For the moment, he's content to investigate Nate's monstrous shape. He has seen gross musculature and the insides of man and beast. The Corporalki had an extensive tradition that involved the physical form, and an entire wing of the Little Palace where they studied and learned how to further their unique talents. While personally unable to cause a man's heart to explode within his own chest, the Darkling had sat in on a number of anatomical lessons - had hunted and skinned animals just as often. Maybe that is why he is not as disturbed by Nate's form as others might become.

He's like an anatomy lesson. And who doesn't love poking their fingers into muscle fiber and bone? ] I have to make good on my end of the bargain, after all.

[ There are a number of semi-divine beasts that inhabit his world. Morozova's stag, the sea whip. The firebird. A great earth-wyrm, burrowing somewhere below the land - perhaps. What he settles on, envisions for Nate to see - is that unreal creature that he had offered him a glimpse of before. The thing that he creates. A nothingness, given eldritch angles and layers of shape that echo impossible proportions and perpetual motion. While he leaves one hand pressed to Nate's surface, the other stretches out to his side. In his shadow, spread across the floor, something flexes. Something surges. Shifting and heaving and pressing against reality from the cage of shadow. It punches through without shattering anything, a fluid birthing, a black limb. Long, angular. Human-insectoid-canid. There's something akin to strain, flexing at the corner of the Darkling's mouth and eyes. A deeper pain that he bites back, as he drags the creature from unreality and into the real world, forces it to fit and exist. The room is a tight fit, after it crawls forth from his shadow - he's forced to retreat to the far wall. Both to lean his back along it, and to give Nate and his strange, silent child-beast room to move. ]

It is nichevo'ya. Nothing. [ The implication is there. He's created it from what does not exist. It is abomination, to his people. ] How is this, to begin with?

[The first word that comes to mind when he sees that abomination ruse up out of the floor is gorgeous.]

[He can't stop looking at it - every eye dotted along the gross surface of his body widen as he takes it in, trying his best to examine every line, every ounce of it's un-being. He backs up slightly to give it room, bending down to take a look at it. Ah, his skin practically itches - would he even be able to replicate a thing like that? He doesn't know. He certainly wants to try.]

(I love it.)

[He says, mentally, as he lets out a low sigh, a tendril inching forth from his body to try to touch the thing, if it's even possible.]

[ She should have been more circumspect. Should have have taken note of the excitement and intrigue behind the door and thought to knock upon it first. She had allowed curiosity to get the better of her, and she had opened it without introduction. Whatever it was she had come to the Darkling's room for, she forgets in an instant when she finds the space filled with only horror.

The disorientation of it all is palpable, as if walking into a surreal nightmare, opening a door in the Bearings only to step into too many old memories.

She too has seen twisted bodies of gore like the alien's true visage. The piles of meat and parts the Dreus would sometimes leave behind after some unfortunate soul happened to become the target of his madness and wrath. That is all she can think of looking on that form. Madness. The sickly sweet taste of madness that had permeated her life as the Godking's gardener. Worse still the thing is surrounded by shadow sons. She had spent her entire life hunted by those forms, harassed by that chittering insectoid noise they made, the clicking of their teeth.

Her mouth goes dry, hand falling away from the door, limp and useless, her face is pale, her eyes wide.

Is her heart still beating?

The switch thrown, her panic begins to wail. A vibration that could very nearly break glass, that pierces into the skull with an ugly surety.

And then the room begins to change, to melt, the textures of things sluicing off in a greasy mess; like melting fat. Underneath is a world of fetid rot, diseased flesh, buzzing flies. The floor is tacky with blood up to the calves. More shadows than merely the summonings of the Darkling scream and chitter from every conceivable corner.

Intertwined with their inhuman noises is the voice, the impossible scalding heat:

Imagine he said all the flesh that is eaten, the teeth tearing into it, the tongue tasting it's savour, and the hunger for that taste. Now take away that flesh, take away the teeth and the tongue, the taste and the hunger, take away everything as it is....

She trembles, her entire body, like she might not be able to keep her feet. ]

[ There are now three of them, caught in this crossroads - and the third is not at all a fan of monstrosities. Not even a little bit curious, as the Darkling has come to know. He has witnessed Ilde's world of fire and blood, the strength of her King and the violent result of his rule - and as the door swings open, Ilde is framed by the light from the hall

and he knows

this is not going to end well at all, he is off-guard and caught up

( because the room WARPS, and he lunges to press his hand to Nate's body - it will be all right, only stay, the gesture begs - his other hand reaching for the maw of his own child-creation, as it works and gnashes and tenses, because it is not without direction, only higher function. it is not as elegant as nate, but it is unreal and has hungry teeth, and ilde burns through the room and turns itself upon her

reactive, as he commands it to be still

because it is his, he created it and controls it, but even he is not immune to the flow of her terror as it changes the shape of his room and it is DESIGNED to menace and devour )

He sets a hand to the angle of the nichevo'ya's flank and bids it to remain, to not lunge at the source of the terror, the rot and decay. ] Ilde. [ He calls to her, disguising the tremble in his voice and the convulsion of his lungs, rejecting the heat and the ash, with the force of her name. ] ( Ilde! ) Don't go there, ( you don't need to go back ) -

[ Saints, he hopes Nate holds together decently through this. He is shaped like a nightmare, but he is solid and the Darkling's hand remains on him. Maybe he's simply better equipped to handle this hellish creation? ]

[She enters, and for a moment, it's like the world stills. His tendril is only a few inches away from the Darkling's creation, but it never reaches it. It's interrupted, as he witnesses Ilde's entrance with multiple beady eyes.]

[He, like the Darkling, is off-guard. He means to shout, to yell, but it's already too late, and he knows it. There's that really familiar lurch, like he's been knocked off balance, and he watches as the room shifts and warps into something ugly around him.]

[He's been through something like this before, when he discovered Ilde after the bomb, but this is different, this is new, and the alien who calls himself Nathaniel Horn is not at all sure he likes new. He straightens back up to his full enormous height, brushing up against the pulsating meat of the newly transformed ceiling. Ever inch of him is begging to panic, to throw everything aside and save himself from this hell, but the Darkling's hand is on him, and it strangely grounds him. His mind feels pulled in a million directions, his body wants to rebel, but focusing on the Darkling is helping.]

[He twists himself, staring down Ilde without a discernible face for her to recognize. His flesh trembles, teeth and bone shifting in and out as he tries to hold himself together in the searing heat of the room.]

(Ilde, Ilde, it's okay, you...we don't mean you any harm, Ilde! S-stop it!)

[ She can hear them calling her name, but it comes to her as if she is deeply under water, the sound and meaning of it distorted, deflected by the rain of needles that emanates from the depths of her; her symbiote. She and her symbiote are well matched creatures, it converts her greatest weakness into her greatest strength. Breathes in her anxiety and her pain and sorrow and exhales back out a weapon.

She makes a sound: a wheeze, a gasp, not quite a scream.

For all that what is happening hurts them, she is in the center of it and the fevered sensation of sickness and dread is twisting her into knots. Her mind struggles to support this vast hallucination and remain lucid at the same time, failing by terrible inches every moment she cannot break the spell.

Hands reach up from the bloody pool they now stand in, each one mutilated in a different way. In the center of them all is a pair of hands she knows entirely too well, bound in violet silk. The flesh beneath horribly bruised, all too clear that the bones are broken beneath the crush of their pretty wrappings.

Grisly chunks of scalp and stained blonde hair start to rain from the ceiling.

Her shadows howl with laughter, stalking and clicking their teeth, slashing their claws at all three of them with a catlike playfulness. When one makes contact with her, she recoils with another of her labored, breathless, wheezing sounds. She stumbles to the floor before the both of them. Trembling and sinking into the gore of her own imagining.

And the voice continues with its sonorous toxicity: The sudden and the gradual, the painless and the painful. To yield but four ways to die and there are no others. Even after the voice stopped speaking, I listened for it to speak again. After hours and day and years have passed I listened for some further words, yet all I heard were the faintest echoes reminding me. There are no others. There are no others. ]

Edited (typo cleanup) 2016-10-06 06:47 (UTC)

[ Purposefully, he had immersed himself into her world. He had sought the knowledge of her burning and her pain, and she had shown him the madness and the need to make oneself numb against it. He wonders if it was a mistake, to have asked that of her, to have hungered for that, the way he hungered for everything else - her gaze, Ren's power, Nate's shape. He wonders if it will make him more susceptible, as she knows what twists his mind and presses rough against his tight control. One pair of hands she recognizes, another, clutching at the hem of his kefta are very small, nails broken and lined with frost. He has to keep a hand on Nate,

to keep him from panic. He is so large, like this, covered in spines and teeth and alien strength.

Who knows what might happen, if his fear becomes uncontrollable in such a small place. ]

Nathaniel, [ he urges, and sets his own child upon him. Long-limbed, sleek. The nichevo'ya he has unleashed within the room is cold as something made from the absence of light and reality might be, nudging its body along the teeth and muscle of Nate's own. It twists and twines through limbs and what passes as Nate's underbelly, heedless of the danger in being so close to someone who might lash or thrash - obedient to the Darkling's command. ] Nothing will happen to you, I promise.

[ Illusion is as dangerous as reality. As an entrapment of the mind, it is far, far more difficult to escape.

Ilde is the center. There is no eye to this storm, and it is her crumpled form that he knows he needs to approach. The voice boils the sea of gore around them, causes the air to blister - reminds him of the pyre, and of words he had spoken. Once, not too long ago to a young woman unused to a violent world. I hardly notice anymore - he'd told her. Time to make good.

It means he has to leave Nate's side, leaving the beast of his creation to wind among the alien-boy-monster in his stead. Wading through gore and grasping hands, resisting the urge to slap at them as they claw and snag at his person. Where Ilde has collapsed, he follows her down - kneeling into the spread of blood and slicing hands, hands pressing to either side of her face while she wheezes and drags all of them through her fears. He whispers something to her, loose and liquid, foreign syllables, dark words. Bayu-bayushki bayu, ne lozhisya na krayu. ]

[This is so bizarre that for the first time in his life, Nathaniel Horn wonders if he's going out of his mind.]

[Every instinct yells for him to get away, but he can't. Hands and hair and pieces of bodies coming all around him. Honestly, he finds some morbid appreciation in it all - his sensibilities fit this bizarre, terrifying world that Ilde has crafted with her own mind, but nevertheless, he recoils from it. It doesn't belong to him. He doesn't belong here. He's not wanted. He needs to escape. He needs to fight. he needs to survive.]

[He tries to focus, his mass shifting in place as teeth and eyes swim along his exterior, and he feels in a million places at once - and then the Darkling speaks. His attention immediately snaps onto his voice, seeing his shadow child wrap around him, and it's a bit like catching the glimpse of light at the end of the tunnel. The thing moves over him, wrapping around him like a parent with its arms around a shuddering child, and Nathaniel, in the midst of chaos, feels comforted. He manages to pull his brain back, his mental voice filled with concern:]

(Be careful.)

[And he allows Darkling to go, praying that somehow he'll put an end to this. His flesh pools along the floor, his many jaws gaping as he does his best to keep withstanding the ominous weight of this nightmare realm.]

[ She starts to cry. It's an odd silent kind of weeping, it doesn't wrack her chest and body the way sobbing should, the tears just begin to flow from her eyes. A stress that her body has to let out somehow. She hasn't cried since she was a child, and in her utter over-stimulation doesn't even truly realize that it's happening. The wet sensation on her face could just as easily be blood from the ugly tatters of Camille that drip from the ceiling.

Everything flexes around them. The pool of blood sloshing like a stormy sea, boiling and roiling as deformed hands claw and shriek. The dripping flesh of the walls seems to fall back somehow, as if expanding into an infinity. No longer just a room of meat but now a universe of weeping muscle and torn sinew.

She stares into the Darkling's face, even farther gone than she had been after the bombing. Her eyes are widely dilated, her expression so terribly pained, so utterly helpless to take control of what is happening. She shivers in his hands, but her mouth begins to move slowly, repeating back to him the lullaby he whispers to her in a ragged voice.

And she pulls at it, the central memory of where it came from. The boy she knows hides inside of him. She knows it is there, she knows its shape. She knows its fears. ]

( Don't fight it. )

[ Her mental voice is so very quiet, as if buried under the screaming of her symbiote. She needs to grasp something else. Something outside of herself. Take the blade of his fears and cut herself open on it to spill this poison out. ]

( Let me. )

Edited (typos) 2016-10-20 14:59 (UTC)

[ If none of them can run, then they must stand their ground. Ilde's infectious nightmares, against a brutal steadfastness and a deep, cold mind brimming with waters waiting to swallow her dead. That is what he brings to her, speaking old lullabys that he cannot remember his mother speaking to him. Perhaps someone else, another mother, one of the many he'd met while they wandered the world in search of safety and security. He contains that, within himself - in the form of frost-rimmed lakes and rivers shivering under sheets of ice. Deceptive. Dangerous.

Nate's fear presses at him, one-sided. Ilde's fear threatens to swallow them, while pieces of someone she once knew thrust her deeper into the nightmare. She's reaching for him, and at the same time that she is, he stretches a hand to Nate. Urges him to stay still, to not flee. He is a marvelous monster, and for him to attempt to run in this moment could shatter it. The black beast summoned by him is still, an unreal guardian over Nate's fleshy form - an extension of the Darkling's need to defend him. While Ilde looks for a blade among his thoughts. Pridyot serenkiy volchok, he repeats to her, on ukhvatit za bochok. ]

( Come find it, then. )

[ sorry nate, you might just get dragged into a new horror -- !! ]

[ She reaches, haphazard and dizzy, for anything sharp, for anything painful. The shapes of it are almost familiar to her now, like the edges of a sharpened icon that one might wear around their neck to remind them of their piety. She knows the burning side. The things that he had thought, memories raised like dust, when she had invited him in to her vision of the burning world.

And like a dream she nearly forgot... She knows the ice as well. The crack of frozen water. A girl's cry.

The two sides of it begin to burgeon, half of the room going up in a suddenly blaze that reeks of burning flesh. The other begins to crystallize, more frigid than death itself, everything turning hard and lustrous. Both sides ache desperately, each biting in their own way, blistered flesh and blackened frostbite. Blood boils into steam, the coppery scent of it dispersing in the room. Reaching clawing hands frost over, solid, and shatter into thousands of tiny screaming pieces.

Each half eradicates itself, tearing itself limb from limb, blood and bone and sinew and permafrost.

Where they meet in the middle is explosive. A crackle of energy and despair that shakes all three of them to the core for what feels like forever, but is truly only a few more seconds longer--

And then it is done.

The hallucination breaks, a fever subsided, and Ilde sinks, her face in her hands. She makes a woozy sound, the real world spinning around her sickeningly. She shaking, quivering in every muscle and whispering, ]

I'm sorry. I'm so sorry.

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mental link

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waggles eyebrows

Do Not

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body horror warning!!

IM SO HAPPY

SPINS AROUND IN SEA OF FLOWERS

puella magi fleshbeast

kyuubey went too far

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