taxonomites | Entries tagged with metody green

Morning dawns bright and sunny over Taxon. The spring weather is holding, the blue sky is filled with puffy clouds, and oh yeah, there's graffiti over much of the Sanctuary.

It's 'art', if you can call stick figures and vulgar caricatures in spray paint 'art'.

( Demonic doodles. Uh. Warnings for extremely juvenile but pornographic sexual content, and some violence. )

personaldemon

The devil is exploring Taxon.

He has Sherlock Holmes's tablet in hand, and a freshly slaughtered Extra in his belly (along with his own tablet); a song in his heart and a smile on his lips.

The very first order of business had been the werewolf. The witch was already gone, and Etrigan found that a damnable shame indeed-- so much he would have said to her, so many whispers to share...!-- but either way, Jason's safeguards were the first targets.

The map made it easy to find one man in the forest. Etrigan had circled to downwind, prowled through the trees until he came upon Remus Lupin at his cozy little shack.

Moon's son, sleep; close your eyes.
Dreams are deep, and Lethe is wide.
Grief will keep. The sun will rise
On what I reap, with you inside...

He'd placed Lupin's (so soundly sleeping) body inside his humble home-- not out of any gentleness, but because he was less likely to be seen, and less likely to come to harm, in this way. Killing the pup would only bring him back.

Hiding Lupin's location on the tablet was as easy as hiding his own had been. What charming, charming toys their captors left them with!

And now, well... now it's time to have fun.

[OOC: Remus's sleep written with Jemi's permission-- let me know if anything here doesn't work for you, Jemi! <3

If you want your char and Etrigan to have some sort of encounter (any sort of encounter!), just tag in with where your char is and what is going on with them, and we will get some SHENANIGANS GOING. These threads can be assumed to happen over a several day period. Etrigan will be trollin' before getting into outright fighting, most likely!

skinandbone

This is completely terrifying.

Somewhere at the outskirt of the Market, Metody has rented a stall with the last of her money and some very fast talking. She sits at the front of it, giving the world a tense, edgy smile.

She is not wearing her environmental suit, and that is completely terrifying. Appearances matter and no one looks friendly in a black space suit, and so it is stashed under the tablecloth. In it's place, Metody is wearing her impression of business dress: Electric pink jeans, a green blouse, a blue net scarf and a blazingly purple jacket. She's done something complicated with a pink ribbon to one arm, and there's a band of carved ivory flowers holding back her hair, and okay, it's maybe not the most staid of outfits, but the jacket means it's professional, right? And so does the scarf.

Her wares are displayed as attractively as she could manage: on one side, delicate carvings of bone - little boxes with geometrical or botanical themes, long strands of interlocking beads, flowers with petals so thin that light shines through them, intricate ivory hair ornaments. On the other side is meat of the operation, ha ha: purplish venison steaks and what looks at first glance to be chicken thighs and cutlets, but is actually rabbit. She's even got a(n ivory) plate of samples with frilly toothpicks sticking out of them, and neatly hand printed recipe cards.

There is paper and string to package up the meat, and little boxes for the jewelry and carvings, and if no one buys anything, she is facing a long walk home followed by another meal of yet more freaking venison and rabbit.

She might just try eating grass and rocks instead. Or she'll try staring at the crowd and willing them into purchasing.

C'mon. C'mooooooooon.

theextras

The snow has gone from a winter storm to something truly impressive. Ground-level doors are nearly buried in it; windows reveal walls of solid white pressing against the glass. Chimneys have iced over, and cars are buried in deep drifts.

The trams stopped running two days ago, with polite notes reading Temporarily Out of Service - We Apologize for Any Inconvenience affixed to the frozen doors.

Taxon is very quiet.

The Extras huddle indoors, and the streets are long white swathes of virgin snow. No car horns, no hum of traffic. The river is iced as well, and the edges of the shore boast chunks of white ice floating in the black water.

Near the Sanctuary, a water main has burst in the night, and the day's slight increase in temperature thawed it enough to erupt and flood a street. The buildings of that street are hung with sheets of icicles, gleaming like someone's idea of a Christmas decoration taken beyond all reason.

The wind blows from the north, and skirls the snow into further drifts and piles. If you listen-- if you listen very carefully-- you can hear the sound of voices on the wind, and howls that cut as keenly as the Arctic wind.

If you must go outside, Taxonians, breathe slowly and carefully-- for an incautious breath can freeze the very lining of your throat.

And at night...? Well, tonight the howls become more than distantly-imagined sounds: tonight, white shapes stalk Taxon's white streets-- wolves the size of ponies, whose eyes flicker with blue fire and who are hungry for warm meat.

somelittleinfamy

Contrary to popular misconception, blood is--for most people--a finite resource. That's quite often the problem, in fact. Many individuals have expired due to the finite nature of their blood supply. Johannes Cabal does not intend to be one of them. He's already anemic; he can feel the circulation a little duller in the tips of his fingers and toes, a little slower to burn if he holds them to a candleflame, and it only barely occurs to him that some might find this behavior of his a tad disturbing to witness. He's attached to his blood. He has good reason to keep an eye on how much of it he has. Even more reason than most.

So he waits until his newest wounds have scabbed over, a few days and bunches of spinach later, until Horst is cool and white and hungry again, before he summons his demon. It's not really his demon, thank God, but it's easy to think of it that way: he's spent days picking it out, after all. He gets up a few hours before Horst in the late afternoon to sit and transcribe what he remembers of his spell oeuvre into a blank composition book. It's bleakly little. His memory is sturdy enough, no sturdier than that of any reasonably clever man with a disciplined mind, and the reason he keeps records in the first place is so he can rely on them--but he hasn't got his records any more than he's got his Webley, and so far no opportunity has presented itself to retrieve either.

Setting himself to the task of transcribing as many of his spells from memory as he can recall is his first silent concession to Taxon. It's a silent statement of, fine. You've got me. I suppose I might be here a while. It's his first real admission that he probably isn't going to be strolling out of here tomorrow. But he really does have nothing better to do.

Besides, it's getting cold outside. Johannes turns on another electric lamp in the basement and holds his half-bag of blood up to the light, a cotton ball pressed into the pit of his elbow. It's just a lesser noble he's summoning, the magician's equivalent of a ping command to a command prompt, to see if he can still summon in this dimension. Wherever it is. Whatever it is. He doesn't quite expect it to work, but at this level there's only so catastrophically awry it can go either--

He drizzles his blood into a candle and paints the floor in meticulous brushwork with the remainder, a cheap horsehair brush from an art supply store taking the place of his usual hair-of-a-dead-child brush. It'll do in a pinch. Here, three of his hairs, there, ash from the fireplace--now, the demon's true name.

He's summoned it before. Irascible little blighter. It doesn't like him. No matter: he knows it, so he'll know if something's gone wrong. But there is something off about this place, he's fairly certain, so when Johannes mutters the last words of the spell and opens his eyes, he doesn't actually expect anything to happen: "By the authority of Lord Satan, the Adversary, the Morning Star, I, Johannes Cabal, bind you. I name you, Lord Paimon son of Orobas son of Amdusias. Obey me."

Life has a funny way of surprising him.

theextras

It's the second day of the heavier snow. Taxon citizens are still moving about their business-- trudging through the deepening snow-- and Taxonian children are out on the white streets, school canceled for the day. Many of Taxon's broader streets have been turned into impromptu sledding areas, or battlegrounds for snowball wars.

At least at first. As the day carries on-- and the snow continues to fall, soft and silent, even the most exuberant of children begin to drift inside for hot cocoa and the chance to warm up.

The late afternoon sky is gray with clouds that promise no respite anytime soon. Sunlight seems a vague memory, and the white flakes continue to drift down... and down... and down.

aintnoconvict

"All right, I'll try and make this quick:"

Glitch? Getting to the point in a reasonable amount of time? Is it possible?

"For those who don't know me: my name's Glitch, I'm that guy who's been here since forever and kinda know the most about all the...stuff that goes on here. Sorta."

No, no it is not.

"Anyway, ah...I've been studying the lighthouse and found some peculiarities with the light-beam thingy which I wanna discuss with everyone. Or most of you, if you can make it. Plus there was that whole hanging out and having drinks thing which I mentioned before all the stuff north of the river happened-- hey we can talk about that too."

Yeah he is taking notes now, all frowny and confuzzled.

"Right! Unless you've got something drastic going on, let's meet at the Black Friar after sundown for the...sunlight-avoidant. First round of drinks is on me. See you later."

ooc: Gathering of the citizens! This is a mingle log so tag in, tag each other, frolic away. I will be adding a tag of Glitch discussing his Very Scientific Observations and there will e a Q&A to follow which I hope will e full of threadjacking. And here havesome pub details. Go go go!

somelittleinfamy

There is something stuck to Johannes Cabal’s wrist.

Oh, and it does rather appear that someone’s abducted him--again. But that’s a matter of secondary concern. There’s something stuck to his wrist and that’s annoying. It’s some sort of lady’s wristwatch and it’s fused straight through the skin of his wrist: molded seamlessly into his body like some demented surgeon’s flayed the skin off his right arm in a ring and lovingly stitched it back up with a smooth hard bracelet where his flesh had used to be. He worries at it with the fingers of his left hand but all he succeeds in doing is turning the skin around the wristwatch rash-pink: it won’t come loose. The watch is useless, too. It’s covered in pointless buttons and it hasn’t even got a face.

“Verdammt noch mal,” he mutters and resigns himself to looking around.

This is how this always works: 1. Someone abducts him. 2. They want something. 3. The something is either something to which he might assent, like creating a horrific monster for them, or something to which he won’t, like being tortured and executed. There is not usually a point in this process where someone consults Johannes. There is not even always a point in this process where someone explains to Johannes what’s going on. So finding himself in an odd room with some sort of collar fused to his wrist and not the foggiest idea of what’s happening isn’t quite as disquieting for Johannes Cabal as it might have been for other persons of his acquaintance; this sort of thing is, not to put too fine a point on it, always happening to him. He’s never been at a loss for enemies.

Usually, though, they have the decency to turn up at all. He takes inventory: he’s wearing everything he was when the ship he was on--er, crashed--and he’s got his cane, which is a trifle insulting, really, because no one ever leaves a prisoner with a weapon unless they’re making a point. And he still hasn’t seen a sign of who sent him here.

The metal room is bare, clinical, even a little laboratorial, which doesn’t surprise him: cells tend to be featureless. What they don’t tend to be is open. This room has an open doorway: waiting for him, it seems, to walk through. To Hell with the doorway. It’s clearly a trap. He ignores it: anyone who goes to the trouble of kidnapping him can damned well come and explain things to him themselves; he has no interest in running some sort of ridiculous rat maze for his captor’s or captors’ benefit.

The really irritating thing about this is--all right, all of this is the really irritating thing. This is a really irritating situation. Look, resigning yourself to this sort of thing and developing a tolerance for it are not quite the same. But the really, really irritating thing about this is he has no genuine idea of what’s happening. He hasn’t stolen any books recently. He doesn’t think this suits the modi operandi of any of the people he’s recently angered, most of whom are dead, anyway. If he didn’t know better, he’d have to say that about this whole situation, there’s something curiously--impersonal, almost.

This is stupid. Someone is going to turn up sooner or later, they’re going to tell him what they want, and either he’s going to give it to them or he isn’t. This is stupid, he tells himself and, still clad in his black waistcoat and jacket, sits down on the floor to wait.

As far as Taxon’s concerned, he’s a nondescript, yellow-haired man of about thirty wearing spectacles and a three-piece suit cut in the style of the late nineteenth century; he looks peeved, but not shocked, and like he has every idea of what’s happening and just doesn’t care for it. (In fact, he’s cultivated this expression; it’s amazing how far you can go in life simply by looking as though you aren’t surprised by anything.) As far as he’s concerned, he’s a necromancer of some little infamy and things don’t just happen to him without a distinct purpose: someone always wants something. Ergo, he’ll wait here until they tell him. The only thing that casts a shadow of doubt over his straightforward hypothesis is the open door: when he glances at it some rebellious part of his mind says, and what will you do if there is, in fact, something you haven’t accounted for?

trojanhorst

Horst Cabal (or, according to the listed name on the Taxon map that people can actually see, Horst Brauer) has had an eventful first day in Taxon. He's gotten a shiny new bracelet, sat down for tea and chitchat and househunting with a supernatural librarian, walked around a city of the future, and picked out a temporary home for himself. That last was more than a little harrowing, in his opinion -- he arrived at his new residence just near the airstrip, placed his hand on the lock, and was promptly greeted by a man and a woman and their large dog. The man welcomed him in and wished him good evening while the woman snapped the leash on the dog. They already had their coats on. "Good evening," Horst remembers saying to them, "I'm Horst Brauer. What's your name?" The man and the woman had given him bland looks and introduced themselves and their dog like a pre-scripted theatre routine. Then they'd wished him luck, and the Winslows had gone down the walkway, through the wrought iron front gate with their dog tugging them away on the sidewalk, and they very politely allowed Horst Cabal to steal their home without so much as a backward glance.

Two o'clock in the morning is awfully late to be out walking your dog, Horst remembers thinking.

He can't shake that last image of the Winslows -- the man with a smoking pipe in his mouth, the woman with a smart little veiled cap tilted jauntily on her head. Shiny white shoes and a pointelle apron. The dog's ears waving back and forth.

He'd changed the sheets on their bed before sleeping in it, even though Long had led him to believe that Extras didn't always lead full enough lives to actually use all of the things they appeared to own. It just seemed more respectful.

Then he'd wandered for a few hours, meeting a strange, otherworldy man hammering some kind of sword. That had been a long day.

Today, his second day, he can only hope will be a bit quieter. There's less he needs to do, for the time being, but he still needs to make an effort to fit in for the moment, until he eventually finds a way to escape. That in mind, he's taken back out into the city to learn a little bit more about life in Taxon.

For the past three hours, Horst has been riding the tram line back and forth. For the most part, he alternates between flipping through the pages of a large stack of magazines with studious concentration, or poking warily at the screen of his tablet as though it's a sleeping viper he expects might wake and jump out at him at any moment, or standing at one of the tram windows, staring out at the passing cityscape in obvious fascination and wonder. Occasionally, the train comes to the end of the line in one direction or the other, and Horst looks up from one of these activities for a moment, delighted that the tram ingeniously starts moving itself again in the opposite direction, without having to rotate on a turntable or hitch its cars to a new locomotive at all -- so clever! -- but then he returns to whatever he was doing the minute before with a self-amused shake of his head.

The tram makes all its regular stops quite faithfully, but Horst never makes any attempt to disembark. At this rate, it looks like he might, in fact, just as soon ride the tram for another few hours.

skinandbone

Metody has reached a breaking point.

This delusion is not fading. If anything, it is becoming stronger and more elaborate. There are more people now, not just the disturbingly hordes of empty people that Metody can write off as the repetition of a hallucinating mind, but real people. They have histories and motivations and they interact in strange ways, and they are so intricately real that he cannot explain them as echoes in his mind.

And there is detail. Every rock, every tree, every dried autumn leaf he can find - they're all different. Even things that are manufactured to be similar, like bricks, even those have tiny variations. A flick of lighter brick here, a different pattern of sooty inclusions, a little scrawl of dirt there - all different. And it all leads him to conclusions that make him feel overwhelmed and reckless, and massively self destructive. In another person, this might translate to wandering through traffic or climbing on ledges, but Metody has a more indirect form of risky behavior:

Somewhere in the city, there is a quiet flurry of clicks. Something scrapes at the mouth of a storm drain, and then a waving spine extends to quiver on the air. A moment later, the creature pours out after, tapping along on a multitude of skittering rib-legs, bold and open in the sunlight.

There are other creatures, elsewhere. In the library, a delicate mouse-thing darts along the tops of the shelves, peeking down at people with a multitude of eyes it doesn't have. In the forest, octopus-like things made of ringed pelvises and far too many spines writhe over rocks and trees. And in the sewers, the heavy dog-like skulls splash down the tunnels, lurching on their too-many legs. All of them spread out, dragging or darting, ranging through Taxon in a dizzied search for the repeated patterns or hidden symbols that would prove it's all just a crazy dream.

loves_bitch

This is most certainly not a voluntary broadcast.

The trees flicker by as Spike moves at speed through the forest. There is occasionally a flicker of his face palely reflected by the moon. His face is ridged and feral as the tree branches whip past. Then, all at once, all of the movement stops, there isn't even rapid breathing to denote his effort.

The pause does not last long before he takes motion again - a leap and then a snarl.

A deer loses its life beneath his fangs. The blood, what little of it escapes, glistens blackly in the moonlight.

The transmission flickers out.

theextras

As the sun rises on the first day of Taxon's new year, only a measly four months from its fourth anniversary, the artificial sun in the artificial sky shines down on...a Taxon of a different stripe altogether.

Gone is the massive city that took forever and a day to traverse: gone is the mall with all its nifty things you never knew you wanted, gone are...well, in actual fact a lot of the old city is still here. It is just...taken down to size.

At the heart of the city lies Central still, with its Sanctuary standing as proud as ever (though it seems to have undergone a facelift to match the new lighthouse in Speares); the district itself framed by the rivers Miskatonic and Buenaventura, which neatly divide the city into three sections: the northern, eastern and southern districts.

Waking up, people may notice a software update notif flashing brightly on their tablet screens. In so many words, it is an introduction to a brand new feature called BankBuddy, through which non-natives can transfer credits to each other as necessary. An apologetic post scriptum adds that unfortunately the replicator hatches are a thing of the past, so to speak, and shall not be implemented forthwith.

As for all the rest, well, there's only one thing to do. Go out into the city and explore.

genequeen

Tonight is the night of the big basketball game between Taxon High and their rival Cricetidae High! It is the biggest game of the season for the basketball team, the band /and/ the cheerleaders. All of them have performances that they need to hit out of the park. For some there are scholarships on the line and for others it is a huge peer pressure moment.

Of course, for others, it is just another thing to do, another place to be seen and another chance to get out of the house.

What might happen this evening? Will there be triumphs or tragedies? Will there be hookups or hangouts?

Only time will tell!

theextras

Morning comes to Taxon like every other morning, but, as is sometimes the case, the city is ever so slightly different. It is the first day of the weekend, a small but well needed break from the monotonous frustrations of school. Come Monday school begins anew - all the better to make the most of the weekend. Hang at the mall, get up to no good, stock up on energy for the coming week. You might just need it.

[OOC note: Consider this a log post for all your High School plot needs, in and outside of school - just label your tags accordingly.]

threelivesdown

"Well, Isis, I think it is time for us to find a place to live. Maybe a real place to live for awhile instead of this bouncing around from place to place." Selina doesn't notice that the tablet is on but the little black cat on her shoulder seems it. She jumps down and bats at the thing, knocking it down onto the floor. After it stops bouncing on the floor, it shows Selina packing a small bag. Looking up, she looks at what Isis is doing and seems amused.

"We're going to be here for more than a few weeks, so we might as well find a nice place to live - see if maybe we can enjoy it."

The rest of you, Taxon, are treated to the visual of being a cat toy for the next thirty seconds before the visual cuts out again. Through out the day, Selina will be exploring new places to live through out Taxon. It will also be an excuse to stop in and visit some other people. There is a Sherlock to bother, a Tony to chat with, a Logan to drink with and any other number of people to bother.

[OOC: This post is a catchall for anyone who wants to talk to Selina post-dinos! Or, you know, if you want to complain about being treated to a cat toy video.

skinandbone

" - now, one thing to note is that the farther we get away from the source rock, the smaller the grains in our sediment. This is because it's a heck of a lot easier for water to carry teeny tiny specks than boulders. Just like it's easier for you to carry handouts instead of – instead of – of textbooks...”

Metody falters, looking around. This is not Geology 101.

It is nothing new for Metody to find himself some place unexpected, or to lose pieces of time. There is a reason he writes everything down. But what is unnerving is the quiet.

There are no fans. No hiss of ventilation, no hum of distant machines. No purr of far-off mechanisms cleaning the poisoned air, and to a man who has spent the past few years surrounded by constant noise, the silence is a roaring terror.

“Agh – oh, no. No, no, no, no - “

Metody flings the large backpack off of his back. He chokes a bit on the breathing equipment - part of it remains in the throat - but that doesn't slow his well practiced motions at all. Goggles next, then the little clip that closes his nostrils, then the flexible mask. The rest of it is rather like a skin diver’s suit, but easier to wiggle on.

He swings his pack onto his back again and spends a moment attaching the supplemental oxygen tubing. Once basic matters of survival are handled, he looks around again. His face is no longer visible, but his posture is clearly confused.

Metody walks to the table and picks up the tablet. This looks familiar, at least, sort of. He pokes aimlessly at it. Any viewers get the benefit of a long minute of his alien-looking goggled and masked face before he realizes it is possibly transmitting.

He glances down at the indicator on the arm of his suit, then reaches up and slowly pulls out the core of the breather, coughing again as he removes it from his throat. He takes a cautious breath, and is relieved when it doesn't burn.

"Hk- kah. Hello?"

He licks his lips uncertainly. Is this okay? Oh, golly, he hopes this isn't some kind of official channel.

“Ah – is anyone there? I'm very sorry, but I'm lost and – I think – I, um....” A worried fidget, then in a rush, “The air is off in my building, I can't hear it at all. I don't think it's been off for very long because my suit says it's still good. Except I – I lost some time, so I don't know if there's gases or – “ A shaky laugh. “ - I just got checked out last month, so – my skin and breathing are okay, I think, so maybe it didn't linger - ”

The screen wobbles as he shifts his grip on it, lifting his head to look around the room. Is that a door?

“ - I'm sorry.”