Log:Test Your Metal, Scene 10

Test Your Metal 2017/01/22 Daemon Grimm 10

Daemon pauses as he thinks about Grimm's question. "Well- I don't think Primos ever bent Fate- not to any useful degree anyway. I think in the end he had to circumvent 'Fate' entirely. But I'm lacking a lot of contextual clues here." He explains, finding a well used book on Parapsychology & its applications. He picks it up and begins flicking through it at rapid speed again as he continues on.

"So this Traveller of the Realms thought that if he could bend fate if he could access this other plane- this magical dimension. He failed somehow and this guy (Mysterion) picks up the cause in his own name from there."

"Circumventing could be good enough!" Gabrielle exclaims with some desperation. She runs her fingers through her hair, then grasps it in her fist as she paces. "He failed? Damn...that could've been a way to save Malcolm. Maybe...maybe if we can find the original tome in the real world, we can study the parts Mysterion couldn't understand."

Her eyes turn towards the distraught professor in the memory. "Or maybe he knows already. His future self, that is."

Daemon can tell Grimm is desparate. "Who knows if it would have worked or not. Malcolm interrupted the person who got the furthest. So I wouldn't give up yet- its unlikely from what I can gather. Primos tried over a hundred different ways of swaying Fate. But it might be possible." He answers, trying to keep his friend hopeful. A personal 'service' he'd probably charge someone else for.

He drops the Parapsychology book, which he realizes he's still holding. His eyes glance around for some other basic level book on mysticism, hoping to be able to connect some dots here, but he knows he's well out of his depth here. He has been since they decided to go into someone's mind.

Talk of the real world prompts him to think of the person who's mind they're in right now. He thinks about how furious he'd be if someone was rooting around his mind. He'd run to the nearest thing that had been digging around int erhe and he would end it. Immediately. Mercilessly.

He adds a new item to his #TODO list to see if there is a way to double down on his mental defenses to prevent something like this from happening to him specifically.

A second later- and hundreds of thoughts later, Daemon turns to look at Grimm. "So how do we find the book in the real world?" He asks curiously.

Grimm still clings to home hope on bending or swaying Fate. She can traverse worlds and summon unthinkable creatures and forbidden power! Bending Fate to her will should be possible for her if anyone!

This could very well be the beginning of the Grimm Corruption story arc that fans have been theorizing for months.

Her eyes have an almost wild aspect to them as he asks about the book. "The last person to probably know where the book is is right here. Whether he hid it or the police confiscated it, he'd be our first lead in tracking it down. And I have its magical scent now." She walks over to a window and looks outside. "Now where exactly is this professor's office, I wonder? What if it's still hidden away in here after all this time?"

"We'll figure it out, Grimmace." Daemon says encouragingly. He thinks this sudden manic streak is entirely out of concern for Malcolm- not expecting this dark tome has already begun corrupting her mind. In fact, Daemon just thinks time is really working against them.

Her eyes though- well that almost unnerves the helmeted man. "Alright, Cujo- so let's see if we can get a good look outside. If only one of us could stick to walls and climb outside without worry.

Then we'll let you do your Magic-Hound thing and then on to breaking Fate's balls for once."

Our intrepid heroes look out the windows. This may prove to be a terrible idea.

From a distance and without paying particular attention to the windows, nothing about the exterior view seems interesting or relevant. Grimm and Daemon, however, move directly up to the windows and look out of them. There is, of course, the expected vista of central Brooklyn. A vast urban skyline, dotted with only a handful of local skyscrapers, largely comprised of apartment buildings and warehouses with smaller buildings knit into the interstitial spaces between the larger structures.

Beyond those idyllic urban sights, however, lingers something that communicates just how badly Grimm's attempts to burrow into Dr. Crawfeld's psyche have gone awry. Blood red clouds hang low over the city, bulbous and limned by obsidian and jade highlights. A pair of suns burn in the sky from opposite ends of the horizon, one a deep orange shot through with veins of emerald, scarlet, and taupe. Its twin is a horrible red-brown color, visibly banded by thick swathes of gold, copper, and rust that sparkle with unnatural light.

Swarms of bats - or something very much like them - hang in the sky, suspended upon invisible air currents generated by the unholy heat and light of the two suns in the sky. In the distance, one can see the all too familiar skyline of Manhattan engulfed in smokeless purple fire and framed by vast streaks of emerald lightning. On the street below, if Grimm or Daemon's eyes ever make it that far, Professor Mysterion's decrepit modern day form flickers in and out of existence as he cackles in silent-yet-cacophonous madness.

Daemon's going to want to get a move on developing those mental defenses. He can feel the SAN damage already starting to creep in at the corners of his increasingly electronic brain. It feels kind of like being rolled in fire ants, corn mash, and metal jacks.

[GM to Grimm] You recognize portions of the view immediately. It's not quite as you last saw it, but there is simply no denying the horrible, creeping, gnawing familiarity Grimm feels toward the vista. She - and Daemon - are somehow looking out onto the Colavrassa as it burns toward the desolate wasteland with which Grimm is so intimately familiar.

Grimm's astral blood runs cold as she looks out on the nightmarescape of Mysterion's Mad Mind. Her jaw goes slack for a moment, eyes wide in horrid recognition as it dawns on her.

"The...the Colavrassa...?" she whispers hoarsely. She shakes her head and clutches at it. "Wait...is that what he remembers seeing, or am I messing something up? Do you see this?" she gestures to the unearthly skyline.

She looks down to the street, expecting to see packs of Sarkterrans roaming about. But when she sees a flickering glimpse of Professor Mysterion laughing instead of Dr. Crawfeld. Her jaw works without words coming out as she tries to figure out what is happening, but she's at a loss for words, as if her mind were frozen from revelation.

"Ok- this was a terrible idea. How is it light and dark at the... and two..." Dameon says just after he changes his mind about this whole plan.

He's about to crawl back through the window when he spots Professor Mysterion's modern self flickering below. He fights the urge to shudder.

He hears Grimm whisper, "Whats a Cola-of-rossa? Yeah I see it. I wish I hadn't. You know I have an eidetic memory right?" Daemon responds grouchily.

A dozen - a hundred? a thousand?! A MILLION?!?! - fresh strikes of emerald lightning flash down from the clouds to sizzle into the steaming, churning, boiling black waves around Manhattan. Emerald streaks linger in the sky afterward, their existence as impossible to begin with as it is to deny, fading slowly as some kind of natural(?) phenomenon eases them out of existence in preparation for the next uncountable series of electrical strikes.

Daemon climbs back into the apartment through the window. Gravity lurches awkwardly around him, making it feel like he's being rolled around in a tight little container. Or perhaps being tossed about between a hundred thousand different centers of gravity, unable to escape from the horrible twisting pressures dragging him in so many different directions at once.

Grimm's resolve crystallizes as she spies Mysterion down on the street, flickering in and out of existence. She allows her subconscious to get away from her, however, and reaches out psychically again. Tendrils of darkness and chaos trawl out from Grimm's mind to slither amongst the gyrii of Mysterion's crinkly grey matter before latching onto a new memory.

Everything around our heroes lurches awkwardly and powerfully as Grimm wrenches herself and Daemon into the depths of Mysterion's warped mind. The apartment and its skewed perspective warps and twists, eventually melting away as it inverts around our investigative duo. Reality bubbles and froths, colors bleeding together until Grimm and Daemon are forcibly ejected from the ever constricting nether-space that once was Mysterion's apartment.

Fortunately, Daemon is fast enough and nimble enough to land on his feet, although the sudden cessation of whirling gravity wells may be as disorienting and disconcerting as the sensation itself was. He finds himself in a vast, semi-featureless desertscape. Huge, decaying ruins are visible in the distance, but they could be a dozen meters away or a dozen kilometers, there's not enough near ground to accurately determine distance.

And Grimm - poor, poor Grimm - is simply spat out of collapsing unspace to smash into the pale, chalky dust of the desert floor. Cracked rock looms directly in front of her nose, bleached a uniform near-white by the trio of suns overhead. Underneath her body is simply pale, bleached out, fine-grain sand.

Distantly, our heroes can hear a familiar sound. Something huge and unnatural renders a murderous shriek into the blazing mid-day air, the sound piercing as it travels well beyond any range the laws of physics as you understand it should have.

"Y-yeah, that's why I asked you to read up on the book of forbidden knowledge," Grimm finds her voice and snark for a moment, eyes narrowing at Professor Mysterion. Her mind unwittingly reaches out during that glare to send them eventually reeling through to another memory.

Vertigo momentarily sets in as she lurches through the collapsing space, feeling like she's falling forward...until she actually does while popping out of that memory and into the powdery dusty ground face-down.

Her black clothes are coated in the stuff along her front. It's just...everywhere. Her clothes, her face, her hair. She coughs and pushes herself up to her hands and knees, staring at the strange earth that reminds her of the playa at Burning Man. "W-whoops," she mutters, before her head jerks up at the shrieking noise.