Dark_Harrier

The magic which grabbed him up held him in crushing force. He yelped, and the Eye yelped with him as ribs creaked and snapped. The Avatar was angry, the Eye mused in thought, and Dennis slid along that thought and agreed.

“If we cannot burn the human out of the vessel, we shall just tear it out.” Even as this was said, bones were straining to rejoin against the vice like clutch.

"Oh [censored]." That was purely Dennis.

As he plunged into the vertical tunnel, the Eye mused, You are about to see something interesting, Vessel of the Eye of Mu. Something no human has ever seen, and lived. The Avatar of Mu is trying to scourge you from me. It was chuckling at him, and it's thought that it also was interested to see the result, made Dennis angry. It was waiting casually, watching the cruel experiment of its ally, to see if Dennis would be emptied, like a young sociopathic child waiting to see what would happen as the focus of its magnifying glass narrowed a beam of sunlight over an insect.

The problem was though, that as the Eye mused about what was to come, it showed Dennis plainly., beforehand, and its own casual attitude emboldened the human fused to it. It was eager for him to be vacuumed out of his own body.

The abrupt submersion caused Dennis to clamp his mouth shut, but the Eye disregarded the minuscule air he'd had time to trap in his lungs as unimportant. Dennis sneered, and opened his mouth. The agony of water rushing in was brief, and didn't interrupt his consciousness. "Now, I know how it feels to drown, too," he thought aloud.

There will be alot more to this to learn of than drowning, the Eye retorted.

The invisible giant's fist paused then, and the gate opened.

As the unwinking eye of Leviathan yawned open and saw them, Dennis gaped. The red of his eyes lit the framing skin of the impossible orb down here in a lightless world and the pupil contracted against the intruder.

From the depthless hole of it poured an intelligence ancient and twisted. Within this creature, alive at the beginning of Life, swirled both knowledge of an impossible march of days, sights unholy, and the screaming souls of all it had ever consumed. It's soul was a crystal lattice within which lessers were trapped forever, never free. And they knew.

Dennis would be lost within that trap, but the Eye acted as an unwilling anchor. It was decidedly unpleased that Dennis was able to survive, and that it itself had somehow become a victim of this parasite, yet it understood that this was what it had intended, only in reverse, with Dennis. It understood the irony. Its alien intelligence however, did NOT appreciate in the same way.

Dennis was being buffeted in the wind of the Leviathan's gaze, yet, he remained. Eventually, the Eye realized this was just a fruitless exercise, and that Dennis might learn things he really, really shouldn't. This thought perked Dennis' interest, but it was ended before anything could come of it.

The Eye spoke into the water.

Return to sleep, Dweller of the Abyss Who Lived Since the First Day. Soon the land you covet will be yours, but on that day, we will feast on your flesh and your skin serve us as our covering. So it will be. Sleep!

In the red murk, the eye lidded, and was again as a rock wall with no seam or break. The invisible fist yanked Dennis away.

As his feet set down on the summoning room floor, he opened his mouth. Water and vile blind creatures he'd swallowed poured out. Seeing the horrid writhing things, Dennis put his foot down on them, then glared up at the Avatar with all the defiance he could muster.

He stole the words the Eye had given him. "I've seen it! I've seen the Dweller of the Abyss that's been alive since the First Day! And I still live! Yeah, what! Still alive!" he was shouting into a nearly silent chamber. His fists clenched at these things that wanted to toy with him, wanted his soul destroyed, wanted to steal the most precious thing, and kill him in the most inhumanly personal way. The veins stood out on his neck. He wished beyond wishing that he could unleash the horror in his eyes on them, but he and the Eye were realizing that this full power was muddled, with their joining. He would need to practice it, hone it, to sharpen it once more.

He was a small, scrawny, unwashed human, a piteous sight before the amassed Lacerta, but he had the floor, for the moment. He also had no idea of what really lay in store for him.

"I am the [blanking] Vessel of the Eye of Mu! The thing in the Abyss sleeps at my command! So you will show me respect!" He paused. "And get me some damned food! NOW!"

Dennis lurched to his feet on the stone disk. His head rang like a million bells; he grasped it as he slipped in the runnels of blood. he caught himself in mid-air, hovering slightly and uneasily, and settled to the warm stone floor. Although the beacons of his eyes passed around the chamber, no whithering wave of death followed.


Insolent fool! I will unmake you! What have you done with your meddling? The Eye of Mu was raging, circling inside Dennis' psyche like a trapped bird.. no, like a caged leopard seeking for exit.

Dennis' body wouldn't obey him, exactly. One side, the arm and leg, tried getting a better balance as rocks grated under his bare soles, while the other sought to throw him to the ground. He was now fighting for control over his own body, with the living terror inside him.

"I don't know, but it's too [censored] late now, [censored]! Nobody takes me down that easy!"


My followers will feast on your blood and flesh, the Eye roared at him. But then, it realized that it itself would end, if this happened now.

An instant too late, its own caution was suddenly cell-mate to a sly realization that was not its own; Dennis had heard it. He and it were now clearly sharing information, it was no longer a willful valve that gave out only what conversation it chose.

So many calculations flowed in the next few seconds, that Dennis' section of the shared consciousness struggled to keep up, but the Eye's portion acted as an unwilling buffer. memories went whirling away only to be brought back for quick examination. The Eye ripped things from Dennis' grasp; seeing his trapped foe vexed, the human grabbed at others.

He, the human portion, realized his [censored] was deep in trouble right at this moment, from those standing nearby. He blurted out a few sentences to gain himself some time, before a mistake was made, and to try and hoodwink whomever these Lacerta were.

"I am the Vessel of the Eye of Mu! Don't harm my flesh, or I will be undone!" He tried raising a fist in the air, but the Eye yanked it spastically around.

"My body! My body!" He said aloud; his gasp showed he hadn't meant to do so.


"Do not initiate attack! What has been wrought here!" He'd spoken again but the voice was distinctly different here, a deep resonant non-human tone. Perhaps something closer to what had been expected.
"Priest! Examine me!" The red torches oriented on Cold Heart, and a nauseous wave flowed inside those lights, but try as one half might, the other half of the Vessel would not allow its own priest to feel the unfurling of death.

Whatever torture had been initiated on Dennis while he'd been senseless, it brought all his senses back, and more.

In his mind, he hung suspended in nothingness that pulled at him. For a second it felt as if he hung inverted over a sucking pity; but no, his inner orientation showed him where up ought to be, and it was the up that drew at him slowly like a giant inhaling him.

This was happening in his mind, he deduced, because he had thought about it for a second and suddenly he could see his own body, floating unsupported there in a dull void. His form was whole and healthy, old scars gone, his fingernails perfectly trimmed to exactly the length he preferred. He wore clothes he was sure he'd not taken with him from the apartment, his favorite clothes, expensive jeans and a nice cotton shirt which had months ago become torn from wear and were now rags under his old kitchen sink.

That and the red tentacles that formed from the void inches from his chest and dove down into it, pulsing with power and light.

The tentacles wove together a few feet from him, winding slowly into being and stretching toward an indistinct sphere a few yards upward, toward what now appeared to be a swirling vortex into which the inhalation was drawn.

You are awake, Vessel, the familiar but until recently, silent, voice said.

"Damn right I am," Dennis responded, "What is going on?"

My people are calling me, I am leaving you, the Eye of Mu said flatly.

Dennis' simulacrum gulp and gawped. "The hell! What's going to happen to me?!" He demanded.

You have served your purpose. You have brought me to where I must be. Now I shall reform, my power transfered to another shape.

There were a few seconds of silence in the non-place

Something new and tattered was boiling inside Dennis Corvus.

"THE [censored] HELL YOU ARE! What am I, some piece of garbage to be discarded like an old skin? NO [censored] WAY YOU [censored] PIECE OF [censored]!" As his anger boiled, no longer fettered by the years of quiet anonymity of a typical science worker, scrubbed clean of many conventions by what had occurred, Dennis was taking stock of things with very little time left and everything to lose.

He was a new creature, was Dennis, and his new self was about to be hollowed out and dumped.

"I WON'T ALLOW IT," this odd fusion of nebbish and titan declared.

You have nothing to say about-

From within the Dennis simulacrum's chest, the tendrils of red energy suddenly jerked.

From his imaginary head, his eyes suddenly blazed like red beacons. Stark shadows were thrown across the unfinished form opposite him, he and it connected by the leeching tendrils, the power of the Eye leaving him. The sphere he recognized from the disposal suite, trying to reform itself and make him a useless husk. Dennis' false body clenched; the stalks of power thrashed in the air. He was pulling back against the drain.

Although his eyes could not transmit the deadly force of his repeating death at the Eye, the psychic might that had broadcast this had left an echo upon him. He took that echo and filled it now with his own hate, his own fear, his own need to survive. He had not come all this way, endured what he had, to simply be snuffed.

The floating Eye emitted a scream. So did Dennis, the sounds so simultaneous that they became a single discordant tone. The tentacles which connected the two in this netherworld thrashed like hooked trout. The color began draining from the Eye's new form, globs of it flowing back into Dennis as his own body gyrated like a demon-possessed girl under the ministrations of an exorcist, gurgling and shrieking likewise.

NO!

No!

NO!

The spiral vortex above this duel suddenly lit; as if it were butter and his mind a slice of bread, the events of the triple sacrifice outside of him suddenly were displayed to Dennis' mind's eye, all at once, from every angle. For a microsecond he felt what the Eye felt: the welling of power, the ecstasy, the call from the will of fervent supplicants.

Dennis, unused to this, grabbed at it like a lover grabs at his first willing sex partner at his first climax.

NO

The death-energy of three victims hit the strands connecting Dennis and the Eye dead center. There is no telling where the flow of each went.

Dennis and the Eye merged once more. An empty husk was ejected into the physical world, but it was not Dennis.

In the summoning chamber, the long-limp form of the Vessel of the Eye of Mu unexpectedly sat up, the bonds touching its flesh gone as dust. His eyelids rose, and lambent red light flooded the chamber.

Dennis woke in a sweat. His head was muddled, he thought the room he was in was filled with a hellish red glow.

No, wait, that was normal. At least, it was normal now. His groggy blinking strobed the room with red. He could see his body on the bed clearly, lit up like it was as if he had infrared vision.

He looked suddenly toward the door to the ratty motel room with a gasp, gripping fistfuls of the sheets, remembering his dream. He'd answered it, and there had been these.. lizards, hiding under the doormat, and they'd wiggled up from under it suddenly and grabbed at him, crawling up his body, and somehow one had gotten into his pant leg, he could feel it writhing up his leg toward his vulnerable crotch and everywhere its little hands came down there were sharp pricks from claws. He had shrieked, and awoke.

He turned toward the door as the sound of a passing car faded to reveal a more urgent patter that headed right at the wooden portal. His door thundered with impact, and burst in, splinters flying.

[[[Woot!]]]

[[Psst! What about mine! I'm not mentioned on your What's New either! Heheh.]]

[[Heehee!]]

CHARACTER NAME: Samhein Greystar
DORM ROOM/LOCATION: believe I called 1123; I may be wrong
STORYTELLER: Dark_Harrier
THEME SONG: Magic Man - Heart
PHOTO (URL): here
Crey Industries File : here
Known Associates: Includes Arrowlass and Flying Squirrel; still trying to fit in.
SHORT DESCRIPTION: Tall, slim, dressing in black frock clothing, a dark trenchcoat, formal boots. Dark hair swept back into a ponytail, sunglasses. Has a pentagram tattoo over his left eye, and blue sigils stiched into his trousers. He is not actually a student per se, but in fact is an operative from another dimension working at the behest of his deity. He is custodian of a magical artifact of Law, leant to MAGI, and kept in a secret chamber beneath the University library. Ms Binks is his Earth contact who is fully aware of his identity and mission. His classes allow him to llearn Earth culture and language, and to masquerade among the general population. He can magically read any written language [so long as its plain and not, for example, in code], and can understand any spoken language but can only speak in English. He hopes to learn to write English natively at some point.

He is actually a 50-year-old archmage, made youthful again via a magic potion, but his powers are diminished here [our mystical laws are vastly different than his home], and he hopes to integrate with the new system and increase his abilities.

He tends to have strokes of great luck, a side effect from contact with the artifact he guards, the Rod of Seven Parts. His speech patterns are verbose and eloquent, but dreadfully archaic. He affects no hero identity, but will only reveal vague details, for as an agent of Law he cannot lie directly. He can, however, be imaginatively misdirecting about such things.
Height: 5’9”
Age: actual/temporal: 50; appearance/physical: 20

Ooh ooh ooh! It begins!

For a little while now, something had been nagging at Dennis.

A few things, actually. Given his last day or so of life, this wasn't surprising, really.

He was headed north on the Saw Mill River Parkway, hoping to reach the interchange for the Taconic Parkway before dark, and perhaps make it all the way to Albany before it got too late. It had taken him the better part of the day locating a used car dealership that was shady enough to give him a car with no identification. He'd lost a huge chunk of his nest egg convincing someone in Lodi to sell him what had to be the most beaten-up AMC Javelin on Earth, give him the plates on it, and ignore all the details he was missing for a legit sale. And there had been too many mechanics and other salesmen around for Dennis to simply unveil his dreadful gaze and kill the guy. Had he been able, this would have been the last car he'd chosen from the lot's fare.

Dennis didn't like this car. It's last owner had been a smoker, and the upholstry reeked of it. It also stunk of its own exhaust, which was seeping into the passenger area somehow; likewise a whiff of antifreeze. It chugged reluctantly down the road as if any yard would be the last it ever crossed. This combined with the severity of official patrols on the road had Dennis very nervous. Hence the Taconic; it was a four-laned, twisty road with no shoulders that wound its way through mountains and parks all the way to the state capital 200 miles to the north. It was practically a local street, which was what Dennis wanted, so as to avoid any cops stopping his illegal vehicle and forcing him to expose his eyes on someone who would be missed. Someone who had organised friends who would hunt him.

New York city itself was still locked down. No traffic in or out. Had Dennis not began his journey on the Jersey side he would have been on foot. The way the Javelin sounded, he might still be, soon.

He tried taming his own nervousness with repeated musical riffs [the car's radio did not work] and chuckle-inducing lines in his head. The one making the rounds right now: Javelin, the kind of car you wanna chuck.

It was the car that chucked him, though. The engine gave out with a rattle and puff of smoke on local streets just short of the Taconic interchange. Dennis, swearing blue murder at the thousands this 30-mile journey had just cost him, rode it to a halt near a greasy spoon called the Red Apple Rest. After fuming in silence for two full minutes, Dennis left the AMC where it lay, with a distainful kick, and slunk into the 'Rest to get a burger and a beer.

Over his food, the other thing nagging at him rose to the fore. He'd had the feeling he was being followed.

It made literally no sense. He was being cautious as it was, and the creepy 'watched' feeling made him doubly so. No-one at the diner posed him any threat or looked like they'd even been out of this podunk portion of upper Westchester since Roosevelt was President. No-one else passed the diner while he was in there. Nobody was even looking at him too hard, even given his goggles.

And that was the other thing. Not his eyes, the voice that had come with them. The Eye of Mu had been silent since the dream he'd had last night. Nothing from it at all. he'd even tried addressing it directly, but got back nothing, not even echoes in his make-believe mental landscape.

That absense more than anything was making him nervous.

Grabbing a second beer, he wandered up the road a bit, and by the time the second brown bottle was emptied he'd paid forty dollars for a room in a run-down motel, flopped onto the bed to rest a second, and dropped off into a deep sleep.

In a hooded sweatshirt and his goggles, Dennis waited across the street from the Bank of Rutherford for the clerks to arrive and open the doors.

Jets patrolled overhead in an otherwise unoccupied sky. Once the place was unlocked, Dennis counted three bank personnel and one security guard entering. He crossed after they'd gone in, slipped inside the quiet bank.

Only a young clerk and the guard were now visible. Both appeared haunted, still in shock from what had happened the day before.

Dennis scribbled a withdrawal slip with his left hand [to disguise his handwriting if it were ever scrutinized], and hurried to the counter. The guard slipped inside a room he'd unlocked; probably the security room, somewhere off behind Dennis.

"Hi," Dennis said nervously to the clerk as he haded her his slip over the open counter," Need to take this money out. Gotta get away from the city, get away from here."

"Oh my god, I know," the clerk said, going through her motions with jangled nerves, "if i could I'd do the same, oh my God, it's so horrible." she was on the verge of tears. As she handed him all but the last 50 dollars from his account, she noticed for the first time the heaviness of his eyewear. And his gloves. "So many people dead... did you lose anyone? Did you get hurt, Mr. Corvus?" She seemed to be coming to some unfortunate worrisome conclusion about his clothes.

"Yeah, I lost someone," Dennis turned to see the guard coming back out of the locked room. Nobody else appeared to be on this floor of the bank. The stairs leading down to the vault were quiet. He pulled his goggles off and turned back to her.

"I lost me."

A bolt of psychic horror flowed out into the bank teller's eyes. For a brief second she was transfixed at what was being forcefed into her mind; then, with barely a whisper of a gasp, she collapsed behind the counter.

Dennis turned purposefully around as the bank guard was clearing leather and shouting "Hey!", but the flow anchored itself to his eyes now. With an animal sound, he fell flat on his face, gun sliding right acrosst he floor to Dennis' feet. Dennis maintained eye contact as the man went down.

He stood there several more seconds, seeing that the guard was not moving at all, and listening for movement from downstairs that was not coming. In haste he grabbed the pistol up and darted, not over the counter, but directly to the guard's belt. He grabbed the entire holster and set of reloads off him, then fumbled the keys into the lock of the room he'd vacated. Inside it, he pressed buttons ejecting tapes from all the VCRs he'd been praying were there, and stuffed them all into his bag with the money. The blue light of the monitor rack was overshadowed by flickering red from his searchlight eyes. Next he killed any power switches he could see in the dim room, disabling the camera system and a few other unrelated things besides. He dragged the guard's corpse into the room and shut the door behind him.

Only then did he vault the counter, grab all the cash in the single open drawer, his withdrawal slip and any other papers that had been in front of her, slammed it all into his bag and tore [censored] out of there before anyone else came.

Dennis' trip through the streets to Rutherford was relatively uneventful. With Manhattan in turmoil and events being broadcast live, almost nobody was on the streets. Police and Fire vehicles sped by him, the air was filled with wailing sirens and the smell from the destruction across the Hudson. Dennis could really only smell himself, though. So no-one passed Dennis before he reached his little walkup and staggered up the stairs, slamming his apartment door behind him.

He leaned there, panting a second, before divesting himself of the hobo's stinking clothes into a fetid pile right at the doorway. He then lurched into his bathroom and turned the shower faucets on.

Then, he leaned back and looked into the mirror.

His eyes were glowing like red suns.

In a vicious psychic feedback loop, his eyes fed themselves through his reflection. Suddenly, all reality around him wiped out, he sped fast-forward through the events in the Tower. With a scream he flung himself away; it had only happened for a second, not even a full one, but the contact had been a hint of what had blasted the homeless attacker's brain.

He retched all over the tiles, moaning and crying in between bouts. He had been a hair's bredth from utter mental ruin. It took him nearly ten minutes to compose himself while steam from the running water clouded over the glass and made the room humid and thick. Finally, he crawled into the water and lathed everything off himself; the day, the vomit, the dust and blood and stink. Even once cleaned, he lay in the water for minutes, not moving. Through all of it, the new internal voice was silent, as it had been since the tunnel.

Almost an hour passed before he crept back out and toweled off. He did so sitting on the floor, afraid to rise enough to come level with the mirror. He slipped into his white robe, stolen from a hotel in Atlantic City, while still crouched on the floor, then experimentally tried rising at a creeping pace, to see if he could risk the mirror. But the red glow came up even before his eyes, so he stopped, gasping, and decided to cease trying for now altogether.

He stuffed the hobo clothes into a garbage bag using smaller shopping bags as gloves, then tossed the things into the incinerator shute in the hall. He returned to his small, drab living room, switched on the TV, and lay on the couch watching the afternoon being rebroadcast again and again, until night fell and he passed out.

He dreamed.

He was in a version of his own apartment, sitting as he'd been falling asleep. But the place was drab. No, it was beyond drab, it was decrepid. Everything bore a dull soil. It made him not want to be there, it made him want to jump off the tattered couch and wash it's taint off himself. As he rose, he realized the TV was on, and the screen was filled with a red eye.

It was the Eye of Mu, that conclusion came to him instantly. Sized as it had been in its wrappings in the lab, but now revealed, shiny and aglow. Aglow with red light, like his own eyes.

"What do you want!" he shrieked.

From the TV speakers, the Eye replied, "I must return home."

"What about what I want," he asked back.

"You want this too," the Eye said conversationally. "This place is no longer your home. Look at it. It is mean, poor. Let us travel to my people and we will be enshrined as earthly kings, as we deserve. We are the Eye of Mu. Our fates are now as one. I am important to my people. Now, you are as well. You are the Vessel of the Eye of Mu. I will be honored and you will be also. Sacrifices will be given me; also to you, for we are now one."

"What kind of sacrifices," Dennis hesitantly asked.

"Although in ages past I subsisted on souls and flesh, I understand through you that things are not as they were, here. My people will provide for your human needs. Food, shelter, warmth -"

"Money." Dennis piped up suddenly. He was finding a new Him, slowly, as his mind adjusted to everything. having been a nothing for so long, living alone, in an apartment the Eye's subtle shading was painting as rather loathesome, there had dawned on him a chance for a complete remake of his entire life. He understood this is what the artifact was offering him, and with much of the old Him shorn away by what had happened, the offer was enticing. There was very little civilized that was left of Dennis; agony and horro had burned much of hima way in its literal and figurative fire.

"We will have no need of money," the Eye began.

"No, I need money." Dennis said as he rose to his full height in the dream. "I WANT money. I wanna be able to buy whatever I want. A better house than this," he waved his hands around the drab illusion of his lodgings, "Clothes, good food and booze, women, cars. I want it all!" He clenched his fist at the TV. "I'm tired, and I've BEEN THROUGH HELL FOR YOU! So you're gonna pay me back!"

"I do not need you," the Eye wanred menacingly.

"Oh," Dennis cooed, crouching next to the flat Eye on the glass. "I think you really do. I'll take you to your people, no problem. But you need me to get there, passed all the people and the checkpoints and the cops. The world's falling apart right about now, haven't you noticed? We just watched it happen on the TV, all night. You saw it! It's prbably the end of the freakin' WORLD and it started TODAY!" Visions flooded the dreamscape of the US going nuclear on whoever did this, al Queada or whomever it was as the news had said. Precipitating a nations-wide calamity.

The Eye had to admit tht this was possible. It had seen simliar things before, hadn't it?

"Today, I have a chance to get away clean!" Dennis hissed to his most unwelcome partner. "No trace of me, I'm dead now. No bills, no rent, no debt." He looked aside as he tallied how much he could get free of in an instant in this insane moment. "I can pack tonight. Just take a few things, get the rest of what I need later. We're going north, right? I've been up in Vermont a few times. There's bed and breakfasts we can stay at, or just camp. I'll need cash. And a car. I can... I can do, what we did to the homeless guy, get money or whatever we need, as long as we leave no trace. Avoid cameras and banks. Banks," he paused. "I got about six grand in the bank down the street. We can use that till it runs out. Then, ah.. I dunno, steal some more."

"We can easily overpower other humans and take their gold, yes. You will have all you need. But take me north, to where my people are." There was a plaintative quality to the Eye now; it was begging him to agree, almost.

Dennis understood, he'd need to be wary. There, in a part of his own mind, the Eye heard him warn himself, and it agreed with the assessment.

"You got yourself a deal. I gotta wake up and pack and we need to get to the bank at first light, and get the hell out of here."

In minutes Dennis had woken up, and cast about his apartment grabbing and packing his utmost essentials. He did, however, leave enough behind to make it appear to the police that this was the apartment of yet another working man who'd never be coming home again, and whose body would never be pulled from the wreckage across the river.

Just before he headed out and down the steps to his building for the last time, he went down into the basement and raided the super's tool room for a pair of welding goggles. With these on, he was able to actually check his reflection in the flat glass of the first floor apartment outside. He smoothed back his hair, hefted his lone bag of clothes and things, and headed down toward the bank.

Totally not an attempt at being rude, Artic_sun! But, er, well.. if we are discouraged from creating Bizarro signature game personalities, AND nobody will understand a Praetorian of one of our own in-game characters.. what makes one of the submitted characters stand out as a Praetorian other than that..... he's from that dimension?

Isn't it a better thematic shock to see a familiar character behaving as his opposite?

[[Heya guys and gals... Averick gave me permission to repost this origin, since I hope to take more part in the Cult of Mu on Virtue with this villain [already in, just not too active yet]. Sorry it's so long. Will post more current events after this.]]
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Early morning. Several years ago. The second week of September.

New York City.

Dennis Corvus pushed the wheeled cart down the long hallway. It’s front left wheel squeaked annoyingly, wobbling around and misaiming the cart. Dennis struggled to keep the thing pointed toward the magnetic doors ahead. A guard in a blue uniform stood against the wall, an M16 hung neglected at his side. The man was bored; Pat, was his name? Dennis could never remember. There were many guards here at Vortex-Kaiman, who rotated their shifts often. Given the nature of the work that went on here, the storage and destruction of artifacts and technology deemed too dangerous to reverse engineer or disassemble for study, management didn’t want the same guards knowing the daily routines, lest they let something slip and invite theft. The government paid big money to Vor-Kaim to get this kind of stuff out of circulation, and to make absolutely, positively sure, that nobody else got access to these things. Ever.

There was literally a multi-billion-a-year industry in smuggling of such items, and Vor-Kaim was kept rich by being spotlessly honest about its dealings.

Naturally, Vor-Kaim did not believe in the trickle-down effect much. It had in its employ a legion of drones, such as Dennis, who shuffled items of incredible power around the hallways here, high up in the North Tower. A lot of these items went into a private express elevator to a lower level of the parking garage in the sub basement, to be whisked away in the dead of night or early morning [since Vor-Kaim did it’s work while the world slept] in an armored convoy, to one of Vor-Kaim’s deep-earth storage vaults. The rest, like the item on Dennis’ cart, went into a variety of specialized destructive devices, rendered down into powder where possible, and likewise buried en masse at the end of each month.

The item Dennis was pushing towards its doom, was headed for Disintegrating Centrifuge #1.

Naturally, Dennis did not realize, that while he was accompanying it to its doom, it was accompanying him, to his.

Dennis made his dull way toward the maglock door ahead of him. He was rather nondescript, five foot six, reddish auburn hair, combed back. Nobody had ever been intimidated by his slim frame, nor had he ever really tried to do any intimidating. He was the type who did his job, not unmotivated but certainly no go-getter, looking forward to the day when he could retire from a calm, undemanding corporate technician’s position and buy some cabin in the woods and get away from the bustle of New York, and all the people in it, forever. And not do much of anything, else, really. Maybe do some fishing, maybe raise bees, shoot at squirrels with a rifle he didn’t own yet nor really knew how to shoot.

He would never see this day he dreamed of.

The key card hanging from his neck let him into the restricted disposal suite. The door shut behind him. It was the last time he would ever see Pat the guard alive. He wheeled the squeaky cart around the separate rooms to the one with the centrifuges, card-accessed that one too, slipped inside.

There, he slid his keycard into a special slot which would clock his time in the chamber. He took off his labcoat, opened a shirt button, and got to work, unveiling the clear poly case in which hung suspended the menu item of the day: the Eye of Mu.

Unearthed by Crey company divers, the Eye had passed several sets of hands before being captured in a raid on a Circle of Thorns stronghold in Longbranch, New Jersey. After a long period of study by several agencies, it had been sent to Vortex-Kaimen and was slated for destruction. Its crystalline composition had resisted various other test methods, and so, into the centrifuge it would go, spinning until its own mass chewed it to pieces. For safety, Centrifuge #1 had technological gravity inducers which magnified the spinning effect of its interior cradle many times. This kind of technology was the type Vor-Kaim often had to destroy, coming as it did from alien dimensions, but, a few such odds and ends wound up in Vor-Kaim’s arsenal, for use on itself, in a sense.

With heavy leather-palmed gauntlets on, Dennis unlocked the bulletproof case, lifted the Eye [it was unusually heavy for its size], and prepared to fit it into the centrifugal cradle. Like most things that passed through Dennis’ area, this one had with it a file of preparations and precautions to be taken and any other information higher-ups deemed need-to-know for people handling it. The most obvious were always printed and stuck out in the open. In the Eyes’ case, the label on the folder read DO NOT UNWRAP. DO NOT EXPOSE TO EYES. DO NOT DROP. DO NOT DISPOSE OF IN FIRE.

The Eye had been almost entirely mummified in dispersion bands appropriate for itself. They appeared to be linen-covered, and had inside them strips of lead and other esoteric substances that allowed it to be stored harmlessly. As he moved it, Dennis took absent note of its odd weight [it would have fit inside a typical bowling ball, but felt like it massed in like two of them], was a bit warm even through its encasement, and vibrated slightly. A wan, weak red light leaked out from its wrappings, but Dennis knew better than to go looking for a source. Using a pair of snips he clipped off the attached ID band without damaging the wrappers, tossed the tag in the normal trash, and got to work.

He took several minutes to make precise balancing adjustments so that the liquid levels showed equal all around and the cradle would spin true. When the control console showed all was set, Dennis locked the case, activating the software and beginning the gravity induction sequence. Without a cup of coffee to mull over while it happened, he hummed to himself dully, only vaguely annoyed at the restrictions that kept the room safe and clean, and deprived him of something to do during the intolerable moments when having little personal action bored him. He wasn’t overly interested in reading the rest of the file [not much of a reader, was Dennis], and might have been only slightly worried if he had. He watched the countdown indicator lights, feeling the slight humming the centrifuge emitted while it warmed up.

It was 8:45 AM.

Finally the software had increased the G-forces inside the canister, and the motors began their slow wind up to, as Dennis and his fellows referred to it as, ‘killing speed’. Dennis continued leaning on the desk, ten or so feet away. He was not cognizant of the extra, faintly, subsonic rumble also being felt throughout the building at this height, noticed only by a few persons on this and other floors so far. This extra rumble was caused by the four turbo jet engines of a full-sized jetliner, its throttles wide open, as it approached from over the Hudson River.

When 8:46 AM arrived, a great many things began happening.

Dennis noticed that the Eye, spinning along so that soon, its surface would be a blur to him, had begun to glow. This despite the presence of the restraining bands the thing had been cocooned in, preventing any of its emanations from affecting Vor-Kaim personnel. He leaned forward a little, not sure what was up, but pretty sure this wasn’t supposed to be happening. He made mental note of the alarm button on the desk, and how quickly he could get to it, if it came to that.

People outside the disposal suites, those with windows looking toward New Jersey, had also noticed something that wasn’t supposed to be happening. Many of them had begun to scream.

When the jetliner struck, its normally rather bendable fuselage pierced the outer skin of the building, like normally weak plywood planks or drinking straws sometimes do to park benches, trees or bricks when driven by tornado winds. Its wings weren’t as fortunate, and they crumpled outright as they were dragged inside. Jet fuel by the ton spewed into the building along with the jet itself.

At that instant, the Eye of Mu had been nearing its terminal velocity. Between ticks of Time, the bands restraining it had succumbed to gravitational forces shortly before the crystal itself had been in jeopardy, flying to tatters inside the Eye’s death chamber, allowing the artifact a brief moment to assess the entirety of its situation, abruptly aware of many things that surprised the odd intelligence it possessed. Bursting from its restraint-induced somnambulence, it had less than seconds to react before destruction came for it.

A brief moment in Time, between ticks of the clock; one moment, and an infinity of events.

The jet has smashed its way through the building almost to the center, doused in its own fuel which is in the process of full ignition. People are dieing by the hundreds, others soon to follow as this clock tick passes by. The death all around it has awakened the orb completely, succoring it, and yet, informing it as well. The remnants of the front of the plane are passing directly under Dennis’ room. The Eye of Mu is at the moment of its own death, for gravity has won and the matrix of its crystal can hold together no longer, even with the immense boost of its power and will, desperately clenching itself to the physical world. In this brief instant of Time a coruscating bolt has bridged the gap between the Eye and the closest living sentient organism, that being Dennis Corvus. The bolt is red, much like the pure color of the Eye of Mu when lives, blood and souls had been given to it in ecstatic worship, long ago. The bolt has reached across the room, and fixed itself on Dennis’ face. It is invading him, as horribly and finally as the jet has the North Tower. The force of the impact of the bolt alone has cast Dennis’ head slightly backward. Had he merely been standing there in a calm environment, the bolt would likely have put Dennis through the wall and burned a shadow of his skeleton permanently in the paint that had been left behind him. However, when this tick of Time passes on, the wall will no longer be there, for a shockwave is leaving the jetliner below the room, pulsing outward, and it will travel faster than Dennis will. Dennis’ mouth is agape in a scream he will never give voice to. This particular scream, in any case. The wall to the West, as well as the floor under his shoes, are bulging inward, and have just begun lifting Dennis toward the ceiling. The shockwave from the jet is so severe that its soundwaves alone would have burst Dennis’ eardrums and eyes, invaded his sinuses and pulped his brain, not even mentioning the damage it would have done to his bones, skin and other organs.

None of that matters now, though.

The tick in Time passes on, as it must.

Many people die.

Dennis does not.

Encapsulated in the power matrix of the Atlantean artifact, Dennis is shoved upward two stories as the building shatters in his general area. Flame roars through the gaps, fanned and driven by the hurricane blast of the shockwave. Fire and detritus burst from the building along the jet’s path almost all the way out the other side. The magnitude of the event is being made known to many witnesses and victims, but Dennis is firmly grasped by the Eye of Mu’s awareness. It remains coldly aware of every nuance of the experience for it must cling to Dennis for all its worth. To lack physical form is to cease to be. He is the only anchor left to it, for the destruction around it confounds it and it cannot fasten itself to any other living thing amid the turmoil. Dennis is all it has, so even as the human undergoes trauma that would kill him many times over, it keeps him alive. His soul melded to its alien soul matrix, Dennis, also, is fully aware of everything.

His body is smashed through layers of ceiling, insulation, cabling, steel and concrete, bent into a slim shattered rag of jellied bones, and yet, he lives and knows. He is scalded in an inferno, and cannot cease experiencing it. Parts of him come away and are shoved rudely back into place, though not fully repaired; the Eye of Mu is merely keeping its vessel as intact as it can, given the circumstances. Bones and organs precede skin in importance at this moment. When he comes to rest two floors above the labs he occupied, it is in the chimney of Hell, and yet, the Eye of Mu forces his body back together with enough cohesion that he crawls, a salamander thrown on a griddle, seeking in any direction for surcease that he will not find. He cannot scream, he cannot think, for the agony he experiences is beyond human comprehension, He Should be dead, but he is not. No-one has gone through this before.

Unrecognizable, this new vessel of the Eye of Mu crawls, dragging itself up through the angular wreckage to the third floor above where Vortex-Kaiman is no longer. Waterfalls of jet fuel, alight, pour back down into the void that spewed it up, sluicing around the monstrous thing that cannot live, and does. There are no witnesses. The thing’s mouth vomits burning fuel, blackened and crisp skin stretches over clasping muscles and shriveled tendons. It makes its way toward the corner of the building where the heat is least, wreckage as its staircase, now five stories above the labs. Visibility is zero, death all around, agony driving the human soul inside beyond madness. And riding there amidst it all, is the Eye of Mu.

Many ticks of Time pass by now while the vessel pauses, too stunned to move; the Eye of Mu gives it a brief respite as the alien construct gains its bearings. Events play out here and nearby while both rest. Many more are already dead, and a countdown to additional slaughter has begun.

Dennis comes to.

He is naked, his clothes blasted away. His skin feels as if its still burning. There are open wounds down to the bones in several places, but the bones beneath are somehow intact. He cries out and rolls over. Debris bites into his skin, which he sees now, is burned black. He doesn’t have much room to roll within, for objects hem him in on all sides. He is conscious at a time when no human could be. And his mind is reeling from the onslaught of sensation and agony he has just undergone. It is like the exact opposite of an orgasm, the antithesis of rational experience, and he pauses to gulp acrid smoky air. He can smell things that will linger over the city for weeks, for the smell is coming from where he is. He can see light through the smashed material around him, a brief draw of clear air quickly covered again by the pall that crowns the North Tower. There are human noises near him, horrible sounds.

It is 9:59 AM.

The horrible human noises near where he is, rise suddenly as the South Tower, visible to many survivors who are trapped at this altitude, collapses in thunder and other noise. To have the twin building perish before them throws survivors here who have seen it, into understandable panic. The sun is blotted out. Hope evaporates for most and the air in the building becomes a miasma of pitiable emotion on top of everything else, felt especially strongly by the Eye of Mu.

For the first time, the entity that holds Dennis Corvus’ life within itself, speaks to him.

Vessel. Arise, it commands. Like a puppet, beyond shock, Dennis must do so. He stands on wobbly legs, arms reaching out to brace against closing walls of rubble. With the Eye of Mu gazing out through his own eyes, Dennis clambers through the detritus of lost lives and makes his way to the gaping hole in the side of the building. It takes him a long time, for things must be moved out of the way with little room into which to cast them aside. Many times he sustains injury, is briefly buried, burned. Fire is climbing from below them and the temperature is rising. Finally though, as impossible sounds drift upward from the cratered street below and all that is occurring, the dual being comes up into a passable space. Someone runs by in the darkness and smoke, screaming and crying, but Dennis cannot see who it is or what shape they are in, nor answer their cries. They do not come to the space where he is but have run away from it, or him. Standing at the precipice with one hand grasping the window frame so strongly that the shattered glass digs into his palm, bare toes clasping at the flooring to steady him, he and it together survey what lies below.

Inside his own mind Dennis is gibbering.

Omygodwhatishappeninghowcanthisbeicantprocessthisi tsimpossibleimpossibleimpossible!
Silence! I must gather strength. There is something to come and we must weather it, Vessel of Mu. We must go down.

Dennis gazes out and understands the shared thought that they are about to jump.

NO! Dennis is shrieking into the echoing depths of his now-shared mental landscape, to the horrid thing that lurks there. He battles with it, in a sense, struggling to pull himself back from the drop. He will do anything, say anything, rather than face what lies outside that window. Beg and offer anything.

His permanently altered mind finds a rational possibility, for he is becoming a new animal inside his own impossible skin. He is somehow possessed, but the enormity of what he has already undergone had burned away much of him; some of what was lost would have caused him reasonable fear at this point. What is left of him attempts to be smart and analytical.

There is a way down! The private elevator, the private elevator!

There is a pause in the nothingness. Where is this thing? It will take us down?

Its near the middle of the building! Back down there. The motor room is on this floor! We can climb down to the car and use it if its working! At this point the rule of using the stairs in such a fire emergency have naturally been discarded. Dennis is trying to reason with what must be a demonic entity that has taken hold of him! Anything to placate it and keep it from making him jump from the tower. He simply cannot do that. Even after what he has seen happen to himself, even despite this, he cannot jump from here and watch the street come rushing up. As he moves backward, some poor soul from above does so, but with a goal in mind the Eye of Mu cares not a whit.

Grunting and bloodied again, his scalded burns gone and not even considered anymore, Dennis clambers toward the area where he knows the elevator motor room would be.

Time is passing. Things are rushing to a conclusion that has been already been demonstrated.

Somehow, the Vessel of the Eye of Mu finds the shattered frame of the elevator anchor and motor room. This shaft it sat upon reaches all the way to the third sub basement in a single throw, and Dennis can see as he approaches that the car is gone. Through the smoke billowing upward, the shaft a chimney funneling it up from the conflagration below, Dennis and the Eye of Mu can see the tattered ends of several sheered-through steel cables rocking back and forth, supporting nothing. Nonetheless, even as Dennis tries in images rather than words to convey that the car is useless, that they can try the stairs, please please anything but jumping, the Eye of Mu takes him to the brink. It looks in a casual way, hijacking his movements, all around at the interior of the shaft and the hellish drop at its feet. It also notes that the dangling cables are shifting as it watches.

With senses Dennis cannot grasp, it knows what this means.

Dennis only notices after it does, in the wan apocalyptic darkeness, that the cables are moving, all of the bunch stretching toward the right side of the shaft wall as if a snake charmer were calling them with an ill-tuned flute in some cartoon. He only notices the sensation in his inner ear secondarily, the canting of the floor, for the Eye of Mu has asserted itself treacherously, suddenly.

At 10:28 AM, the Eye of Mu steps its suddenly screaming Vessel over the brink and into the elevator shaft. Dennis is wide-eyed as he drops into the dark hole, his eyes burning from the smoke and very soon after, from fire. He passes floors below that are an inferno, and is flash-baked as he does so, fully aware. He is tumbling in darkness and agony, striking an incursion into the shaft and bouncing back into it, and as if his ragged body is a tossed kerchief or a starter’s pistol, the building above sags behind him. The roof and its broadcast mast sink into the wreath of smoke, and everything ahead of it joins in, in a domino effect. The collapse follows Dennis all the way down, until this new shockwave catches him in its tumult, a detonation chasing an overeager bullet down the barrel of a rifle. He is propelled down toward the depths of the earth by blast, fire, and the dust of inconceivable loss.

He is aware, all the way down.

He is held together by a power determined to not cease, as it surely would if this vessel were destroyed at this moment. When he would be pulped, he is kept together, surviving the horrid blender that the collapsing building becomes. He is bent but again not broken. The impact is not a single event, for by the time he reaches the ground there is so much debris in which he is mixed it is a kind of settling. He is the pea sandwiched in the mattresses. And he is alive, somehow. The agony and its duration are beyond reason.

Hours later. Efforts unlike any ever seen have begun pulling apart the still-hot pile above.
Earth movers cause the rubble to shift, and the Vessel of the Eye of Mu moves deeper as the wreckage of two buildings settles. Many times small movements happen. Soon, he is cast out onto the cold tile of what used to be the extensive subway station beneath the tower in a shifting avalance. His body moves, wrong angles and damage molding back into correct shape. Dennis is gibbering again because he feels it all, unable to pass into unconsciousness, again spitting out the plug of dust and blood that has filled his mouth countless times. He gives random cries, until he finally climbs to his bare feet, covered by more grey dust and dried blood [not the majority of it his own], in the blackness of the railway mall. Without Dennis’ own real awareness the Eye of Mu has wormed him through the rubble bit my bit, down and to the edge of the tower’s footprint. Though clogged completely at a certain point [essentially, directly behind him/them], the New Jersey transit tunnels are intact.

Tearing his bare feet on the track bed, Dennis slogs away from the disaster behind him. He passes under the Hudson, along the tracks which have been shut down. In the incredible silence deep in the earth, he speaks to his puppetmaster once again.

Who are you? What do you want? Please, get out of my head!

I cannot, Vessel. I must return to my people. I cannot end. You do not command me; I am the Eye of Mu. We will move forward and return to my people.

Your people! Who are –

The Eye of Mu shows him and he freezes midstride. He saw, heard, smelt, tasted, lived it. The Lacerta, through their glory and their fall, and the Eye as ritual witness. They were here now, they were searching, he could feel the longing reaching out, even here sheltered in the bedrock. It was somewhere to the north. Very close, in terms of the size of the world.

There are my people. We will go to them. No-one will stop us, Vessel of Mu.

What will you do with me?

You are the Vessel. To continue, you must live. We will return in glory to my people and bring about the glory of Mu.

This time, Dennis got no inner image to define what this meant. That should have disconcerted him, what was left of him, but at that moment, there was movement and noise ahead in the darkness.

The mouth of the tunnel would emerge near the Hoboken station, and the entrance, set below street level, was frequent home to the area’s homeless population. Most of these pitiable people had taken to the shore to witness the horror unfolding across the river. Some though, had remained behind.

One of them, a huge-bodied indigent man, watched the naked skinny Dennis emerging from the tunnel and saw, not a dust-covered victim in need of aid, but a helpless target on whom to vent the unease and agitation the disaster in New York was raising in his schizoid mind. With an inarticulate roar he bore down on Dennis, huge meaty hands grasping and ready to pummel.

Dennis felt only a shadow of fear, for after what he’d just been through, a simple beating was almost a nonevent; and yet, instinctual reaction to threat crept forward. He tensed, ready to defend himself in his vulnerable naked state.

The Eye of Mu struck first.

It knew Dennis would be no physical match for this other human. Instead, it reached with a clawed simulated hand deep into Dennis’ consciousness and took what it could. With a mental mitt aglow with collected imagery, it flung the sum of Dennis’ experiences that day at the homeless man’s formidable damaged psyche.

Compressed into a matter of seconds, the agony, fear, the ride through the collapse, the entirety of Dennis’ repeated conscious death that day bored like a diamond undergoing fusion into the mind of the homeless man. With a guttural animal shriek, the attacker gripped at his temples as the information, relentless, merciless, impossible, flooded into him. He scraped his nails down the sides of his face trying to stop the influx, skin peeling away in curlicues, but it would not stop.

The structure of his mind melted under the onslaught. The railway tunnel walls lit with a sodium white light, and then, the homeless man keeled over, stone cold dead, body spasming.

Dennis staggered. The Eye of Mu had overextended itself in its viciousness. For a moment the great entity itself was stunned, and Dennis reasserted control over his body. He could feel the entity inside him now, clearly and with no imposed filters. He also felt his body, made whole by its presence. He was shaken, trembling, exhausted… but he was alive. Able to think completely on his own for the first time in what was happening, the tattered remnants of his Self suddenly back in control and knowing it could not last, he made a decision all by himself.

He knelt over the corpse before him, and began taking its clothes. The Eye of Mu, quiescent, nonetheless approved. The rags stank, and wouldn’t fit, but he needed to get away from here. His small apartment was a few miles away up the coast in a small suburb. He lived alone, had no family who’d be calling for him to see if he was safe. His life had been work, and everyone he’d known, were they all dead? He needed to know. He scrubbed his face in a dirty puddle and lurched off to gain the street above, and find his way home, because at this instant, that was all he could think to do.

[[As stated, this is a villain's origin tale, for a new character for the Cult of Mu thread [and the VG group too!]. It's a bit graphic [though kept it PG, I think], so if you don't enjoy the horror-genre I'm not sure if you'll enjoy this. If you do, I hope it entertains. Several other posts will follow.

Want to thank Roger Zelazny, Lewis Shiner, Melinda M. Snodgrass, Walter Jon Williams, Leanne C. Harper, Chris Claremont, Victor Milán, and GRR Martin, several authors I've read, for character concepts and inspiration]]

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Early morning. Several years ago. The second week of September.

New York City.

Dennis Corvus pushed the wheeled cart down the long hallway. It’s front left wheel squeaked annoyingly, wobbling around and misaiming the cart. Dennis struggled to keep the thing pointed toward the magnetic doors ahead. A guard in a blue uniform stood against the wall, an M16 hung neglected at his side. The man was bored; Pat, was his name? Dennis could never remember. There were many guards here at Vortex-Kaiman, who rotated their shifts often. Given the nature of the work that went on here, the storage and destruction of artifacts and technology deemed too dangerous to reverse engineer or disassemble for study, management didn’t want the same guards knowing the daily routines, lest they let something slip and invite theft. The government paid big money to Vor-Kaim to get this kind of stuff out of circulation, and to make absolutely, positively sure, that nobody else got access to these things. Ever.

There was literally a multi-billion-a-year industry in smuggling of such items, and Vor-Kaim was kept rich by being spotlessly honest about its dealings.

Naturally, Vor-Kaim did not believe in the trickle-down effect much. It had in its employ a legion of drones, such as Dennis, who shuffled items of incredible power around the hallways here, high up in the North Tower. A lot of these items went into a private express elevator to a lower level of the parking garage in the sub basement, to be whisked away in the dead of night or early morning [since Vor-Kaim did it’s work while the world slept] in an armored convoy, to one of Vor-Kaim’s deep-earth storage vaults. The rest, like the item on Dennis’ cart, went into a variety of specialized destructive devices, rendered down into powder where possible, and likewise buried en masse at the end of each month.

The item Dennis was pushing towards its doom, was headed for Disintegrating Centrifuge #1.

Naturally, Dennis did not realize, that while he was accompanying it to its doom, it was accompanying him, to his.

Dennis made his dull way toward the maglock door ahead of him. He was rather nondescript, five foot six, reddish auburn hair, combed back. Nobody had ever been intimidated by his slim frame, nor had he ever really tried to do any intimidating. He was the type who did his job, not unmotivated but certainly no go-getter, looking forward to the day when he could retire from a calm, undemanding corporate technician’s position and buy some cabin in the woods and get away from the bustle of New York, and all the people in it, forever. And not do much of anything, else, really. Maybe do some fishing, maybe raise bees, shoot at squirrels with a rifle he didn’t own yet nor really knew how to shoot.

He would never see this day he dreamed of.

The key card hanging from his neck let him into the restricted disposal suite. The door shut behind him. It was the last time he would ever see Pat the guard alive. He wheeled the squeaky cart around the separate rooms to the one with the centrifuges, card-accessed that one too, slipped inside.

There, he slid his keycard into a special slot which would clock his time in the chamber. He took off his labcoat, opened a shirt button, and got to work, unveiling the clear poly case in which hung suspended the menu item of the day: the Eye of Mu.

Unearthed by Crey company divers, the Eye had passed several sets of hands before being captured in a raid on a Circle of Thorns stronghold in Longbranch, New Jersey. After a long period of study by several agencies, it had been sent to Vortex-Kaimen and was slated for destruction. Its crystalline composition had resisted various other test methods, and so, into the centrifuge it would go, spinning until its own mass chewed it to pieces. For safety, Centrifuge #1 had technological gravity inducers which magnified the spinning effect of its interior cradle many times. This kind of technology was the type Vor-Kaim often had to destroy, coming as it did from alien dimensions, but, a few such odds and ends wound up in Vor-Kaim’s arsenal, for use on itself, in a sense.

With heavy leather-palmed gauntlets on, Dennis unlocked the bulletproof case, lifted the Eye [it was unusually heavy for its size], and prepared to fit it into the centrifugal cradle. Like most things that passed through Dennis’ area, this one had with it a file of preparations and precautions to be taken and any other information higher-ups deemed need-to-know for people handling it. The most obvious were always printed and stuck out in the open. In the Eyes’ case, the label on the folder read DO NOT UNWRAP. DO NOT EXPOSE TO EYES. DO NOT DROP. DO NOT DISPOSE OF IN FIRE.

The Eye had been almost entirely mummified in dispersion bands appropriate for itself. They appeared to be linen-covered, and had inside them strips of lead and other esoteric substances that allowed it to be stored harmlessly. As he moved it, Dennis took absent note of its odd weight [it would have fit inside a typical bowling ball, but felt like it massed in like two of them], was a bit warm even through its encasement, and vibrated slightly. A wan, weak red light leaked out from its wrappings, but Dennis knew better than to go looking for a source. Using a pair of snips he clipped off the attached ID band without damaging the wrappers, tossed the tag in the normal trash, and got to work.

He took several minutes to make precise balancing adjustments so that the liquid levels showed equal all around and the cradle would spin true. When the control console showed all was set, Dennis locked the case, activating the software and beginning the gravity induction sequence. Without a cup of coffee to mull over while it happened, he hummed to himself dully, only vaguely annoyed at the restrictions that kept the room safe and clean, and deprived him of something to do during the intolerable moments when having little personal action bored him. He wasn’t overly interested in reading the rest of the file [not much of a reader, was Dennis], and might have been only slightly worried if he had. He watched the countdown indicator lights, feeling the slight humming the centrifuge emitted while it warmed up.

It was 8:45 AM.

Finally the software had increased the G-forces inside the canister, and the motors began their slow wind up to, as Dennis and his fellows referred to it as, ‘killing speed’. Dennis continued leaning on the desk, ten or so feet away. He was not cognizant of the extra, faintly, subsonic rumble also being felt throughout the building at this height, noticed only by a few persons on this and other floors so far. This extra rumble was caused by the four turbo jet engines of a full-sized jetliner, its throttles wide open, as it approached from over the Hudson River.

When 8:46 AM arrived, a great many things began happening.

Dennis noticed that the Eye, spinning along so that soon, its surface would be a blur to him, had begun to glow. This despite the presence of the restraining bands the thing had been cocooned in, preventing any of its emanations from affecting Vor-Kaim personnel. He leaned forward a little, not sure what was up, but pretty sure this wasn’t supposed to be happening. He made mental note of the alarm button on the desk, and how quickly he could get to it, if it came to that.

People outside the disposal suites, those with windows looking toward New Jersey, had also noticed something that wasn’t supposed to be happening. Many of them had begun to scream.

When the jetliner struck, its normally rather bendable fuselage pierced the outer skin of the building, like normally weak plywood planks or drinking straws sometimes do to park benches, trees or bricks when driven by tornado winds. Its wings weren’t as fortunate, and they crumpled outright as they were dragged inside. Jet fuel by the ton spewed into the building along with the jet itself.

At that instant, the Eye of Mu had been nearing its terminal velocity. Between ticks of Time, the bands restraining it had succumbed to gravitational forces shortly before the crystal itself had been in jeopardy, flying to tatters inside the Eye’s death chamber, allowing the artifact a brief moment to assess the entirety of its situation, abruptly aware of many things that surprised the odd intelligence it possessed. Bursting from its restraint-induced somnambulence, it had less than seconds to react before destruction came for it.

A brief moment in Time, between ticks of the clock; one moment, and an infinity of events.

The jet has smashed its way through the building almost to the center, doused in its own fuel which is in the process of full ignition. People are dieing by the hundreds, others soon to follow as this clock tick passes by. The death all around it has awakened the orb completely, succoring it, and yet, informing it as well. The remnants of the front of the plane are passing directly under Dennis’ room. The Eye of Mu is at the moment of its own death, for gravity has won and the matrix of its crystal can hold together no longer, even with the immense boost of its power and will, desperately clenching itself to the physical world. In this brief instant of Time a coruscating bolt has bridged the gap between the Eye and the closest living sentient organism, that being Dennis Corvus. The bolt is red, much like the pure color of the Eye of Mu when lives, blood and souls had been given to it in ecstatic worship, long ago. The bolt has reached across the room, and fixed itself on Dennis’ face. It is invading him, as horribly and finally as the jet has the North Tower. The force of the impact of the bolt alone has cast Dennis’ head slightly backward. Had he merely been standing there in a calm environment, the bolt would likely have put Dennis through the wall and burned a shadow of his skeleton permanently in the paint that had been left behind him. However, when this tick of Time passes on, the wall will no longer be there, for a shockwave is leaving the jetliner below the room, pulsing outward, and it will travel faster than Dennis will. Dennis’ mouth is agape in a scream he will never give voice to. This particular scream, in any case. The wall to the West, as well as the floor under his shoes, are bulging inward, and have just begun lifting Dennis toward the ceiling. The shockwave from the jet is so severe that its soundwaves alone would have burst Dennis’ eardrums and eyes, invaded his sinuses and pulped his brain, not even mentioning the damage it would have done to his bones, skin and other organs.

None of that matters now, though.

The tick in Time passes on, as it must.

Many people die.

Dennis does not.

Encapsulated in the power matrix of the Atlantean artifact, Dennis is shoved upward two stories as the building shatters in his general area. Flame roars through the gaps, fanned and driven by the hurricane blast of the shockwave. Fire and detritus burst from the building along the jet’s path almost all the way out the other side. The magnitude of the event is being made known to many witnesses and victims, but Dennis is firmly grasped by the Eye of Mu’s awareness. It remains coldly aware of every nuance of the experience for it must cling to Dennis for all its worth. To lack physical form is to cease to be. He is the only anchor left to it, for the destruction around it confounds it and it cannot fasten itself to any other living thing amid the turmoil. Dennis is all it has, so even as the human undergoes trauma that would kill him many times over, it keeps him alive. His soul melded to its alien soul matrix, Dennis, also, is fully aware of everything.

His body is smashed through layers of ceiling, insulation, cabling, steel and concrete, bent into a slim shattered rag of jellied bones, and yet, he lives and knows. He is scalded in an inferno, and cannot cease experiencing it. Parts of him come away and are shoved rudely back into place, though not fully repaired; the Eye of Mu is merely keeping its vessel as intact as it can, given the circumstances. Bones and organs precede skin in importance at this moment. When he comes to rest two floors above the labs he occupied, it is in the chimney of Hell, and yet, the Eye of Mu forces his body back together with enough cohesion that he crawls, a salamander thrown on a griddle, seeking in any direction for surcease that he will not find. He cannot scream, he cannot think, for the agony he experiences is beyond human comprehension, He Should be dead, but he is not. No-one has gone through this before.

Unrecognizable, this new vessel of the Eye of Mu crawls, dragging itself up through the angular wreckage to the third floor above where Vortex-Kaiman is no longer. Waterfalls of jet fuel, alight, pour back down into the void that spewed it up, sluicing around the monstrous thing that cannot live, and does. There are no witnesses. The thing’s mouth vomits burning fuel, blackened and crisp skin stretches over clasping muscles and shriveled tendons. It makes its way toward the corner of the building where the heat is least, wreckage as its staircase, now five stories above the labs. Visibility is zero, death all around, agony driving the human soul inside beyond madness. And riding there amidst it all, is the Eye of Mu.

Many ticks of Time pass by now while the vessel pauses, too stunned to move; the Eye of Mu gives it a brief respite as the alien construct gains its bearings. Events play out here and nearby while both rest. Many more are already dead, and a countdown to additional slaughter has begun.

Dennis comes to.

He is naked, his clothes blasted away. His skin feels as if its still burning. There are open wounds down to the bones in several places, but the bones beneath are somehow intact. He cries out and rolls over. Debris bites into his skin, which he sees now, is burned black. He doesn’t have much room to roll within, for objects hem him in on all sides. He is conscious at a time when no human could be. And his mind is reeling from the onslaught of sensation and agony he has just undergone. It is like the exact opposite of an orgasm, the antithesis of rational experience, and he pauses to gulp acrid smoky air. He can smell things that will linger over the city for weeks, for the smell is coming from where he is. He can see light through the smashed material around him, a brief draw of clear air quickly covered again by the pall that crowns the North Tower. There are human noises near him, horrible sounds.

It is 9:59 AM.

The horrible human noises near where he is, rise suddenly as the South Tower, visible to many survivors who are trapped at this altitude, collapses in thunder and other noise. To have the twin building perish before them throws survivors here who have seen it, into understandable panic. The sun is blotted out. Hope evaporates for most and the air in the building becomes a miasma of pitiable emotion on top of everything else, felt especially strongly by the Eye of Mu.

For the first time, the entity that holds Dennis Corvus’ life within itself, speaks to him.

Vessel. Arise, it commands. Like a puppet, beyond shock, Dennis must do so. He stands on wobbly legs, arms reaching out to brace against closing walls of rubble. With the Eye of Mu gazing out through his own eyes, Dennis clambers through the detritus of lost lives and makes his way to the gaping hole in the side of the building. It takes him a long time, for things must be moved out of the way with little room into which to cast them aside. Many times he sustains injury, is briefly buried, burned. Fire is climbing from below them and the temperature is rising. Finally though, as impossible sounds drift upward from the cratered street below and all that is occurring, the dual being comes up into a passable space. Someone runs by in the darkness and smoke, screaming and crying, but Dennis cannot see who it is or what shape they are in, nor answer their cries. They do not come to the space where he is but have run away from it, or him. Standing at the precipice with one hand grasping the window frame so strongly that the shattered glass digs into his palm, bare toes clasping at the flooring to steady him, he and it together survey what lies below.

Inside his own mind Dennis is gibbering.

Omygodwhatishappeninghowcanthisbeicantprocessthisi tsimpossibleimpossibleimpossible!
Silence! I must gather strength. There is something to come and we must weather it, Vessel of Mu. We must go down.

Dennis gazes out and understands the shared thought that they are about to jump.

NO! Dennis is shrieking into the echoing depths of his now-shared mental landscape, to the horrid thing that lurks there. He battles with it, in a sense, struggling to pull himself back from the drop. He will do anything, say anything, rather than face what lies outside that window. Beg and offer anything.

His permanently altered mind finds a rational possibility, for he is becoming a new animal inside his own impossible skin. He is somehow possessed, but the enormity of what he has already undergone had burned away much of him; some of what was lost would have caused him reasonable fear at this point. What is left of him attempts to be smart and analytical.

There is a way down! The private elevator, the private elevator!

There is a pause in the nothingness. Where is this thing? It will take us down?

Its near the middle of the building! Back down there. The motor room is on this floor! We can climb down to the car and use it if its working! At this point the rule of using the stairs in such a fire emergency have naturally been discarded. Dennis is trying to reason with what must be a demonic entity that has taken hold of him! Anything to placate it and keep it from making him jump from the tower. He simply cannot do that. Even after what he has seen happen to himself, even despite this, he cannot jump from here and watch the street come rushing up. As he moves backward, some poor soul from above does so, but with a goal in mind the Eye of Mu cares not a whit.

Grunting and bloodied again, his scalded burns gone and not even considered anymore, Dennis clambers toward the area where he knows the elevator motor room would be.

Time is passing. Things are rushing to a conclusion that has been already been demonstrated.

Somehow, the Vessel of the Eye of Mu finds the shattered frame of the elevator anchor and motor room. This shaft it sat upon reaches all the way to the third sub basement in a single throw, and Dennis can see as he approaches that the car is gone. Through the smoke billowing upward, the shaft a chimney funneling it up from the conflagration below, Dennis and the Eye of Mu can see the tattered ends of several sheered-through steel cables rocking back and forth, supporting nothing. Nonetheless, even as Dennis tries in images rather than words to convey that the car is useless, that they can try the stairs, please please anything but jumping, the Eye of Mu takes him to the brink. It looks in a casual way, hijacking his movements, all around at the interior of the shaft and the hellish drop at its feet. It also notes that the dangling cables are shifting as it watches.

With senses Dennis cannot grasp, it knows what this means.

Dennis only notices after it does, in the wan apocalyptic darkeness, that the cables are moving, all of the bunch stretching toward the right side of the shaft wall as if a snake charmer were calling them with an ill-tuned flute in some cartoon. He only notices the sensation in his inner ear secondarily, the canting of the floor, for the Eye of Mu has asserted itself treacherously, suddenly.

At 10:28 AM, the Eye of Mu steps its suddenly screaming Vessel over the brink and into the elevator shaft. Dennis is wide-eyed as he drops into the dark hole, his eyes burning from the smoke and very soon after, from fire. He passes floors below that are an inferno, and is flash-baked as he does so, fully aware. He is tumbling in darkness and agony, striking an incursion into the shaft and bouncing back into it, and as if his ragged body is a tossed kerchief or a starter’s pistol, the building above sags behind him. The roof and its broadcast mast sink into the wreath of smoke, and everything ahead of it joins in, in a domino effect. The collapse follows Dennis all the way down, until this new shockwave catches him in its tumult, a detonation chasing an overeager bullet down the barrel of a rifle. He is propelled down toward the depths of the earth by blast, fire, and the dust of inconceivable loss.

He is aware, all the way down.

He is held together by a power determined to not cease, as it surely would if this vessel were destroyed at this moment. When he would be pulped, he is kept together, surviving the horrid blender that the collapsing building becomes. He is bent but again not broken. The impact is not a single event, for by the time he reaches the ground there is so much debris in which he is mixed it is a kind of settling. He is the pea sandwiched in the mattresses. And he is alive, somehow. The agony and its duration are beyond reason.

Hours later. Efforts unlike any ever seen have begun pulling apart the still-hot pile above.
Earth movers cause the rubble to shift, and the Vessel of the Eye of Mu moves deeper as the wreckage of two buildings settles. Many times small movements happen. Soon, he is cast out onto the cold tile of what used to be the extensive subway station beneath the tower in a shifting avalance. His body moves, wrong angles and damage molding back into correct shape. Dennis is gibbering again because he feels it all, unable to pass into unconsciousness, again spitting out the plug of dust and blood that has filled his mouth countless times. He gives random cries, until he finally climbs to his bare feet, covered by more grey dust and dried blood [not the majority of it his own], in the blackness of the railway mall. Without Dennis’ own real awareness the Eye of Mu has wormed him through the rubble bit my bit, down and to the edge of the tower’s footprint. Though clogged completely at a certain point [essentially, directly behind him/them], the New Jersey transit tunnels are intact.

Tearing his bare feet on the track bed, Dennis slogs away from the disaster behind him. He passes under the Hudson, along the tracks which have been shut down. In the incredible silence deep in the earth, he speaks to his puppetmaster once again.

Who are you? What do you want? Please, get out of my head!

I cannot, Vessel. I must return to my people. I cannot end. You do not command me; I am the Eye of Mu. We will move forward and return to my people.

Your people! Who are –

The Eye of Mu shows him and he freezes midstride. He saw, heard, smelt, tasted, lived it. The Lacerta, through their glory and their fall, and the Eye as ritual witness. They were here now, they were searching, he could feel the longing reaching out, even here sheltered in the bedrock. It was somewhere to the north. Very close, in terms of the size of the world.

There are my people. We will go to them. No-one will stop us, Vessel of Mu.

What will you do with me?

You are the Vessel. To continue, you must live. We will return in glory to my people and bring about the glory of Mu.

This time, Dennis got no inner image to define what this meant. That should have disconcerted him, what was left of him, but at that moment, there was movement and noise ahead in the darkness.

The mouth of the tunnel would emerge near the Hoboken station, and the entrance, set below street level, was frequent home to the area’s homeless population. Most of these pitiable people had taken to the shore to witness the horror unfolding across the river. Some though, had remained behind.

One of them, a huge-bodied indigent man, watched the naked skinny Dennis emerging from the tunnel and saw, not a dust-covered victim in need of aid, but a helpless target on whom to vent the unease and agitation the disaster in New York was raising in his schizoid mind. With an inarticulate roar he bore down on Dennis, huge meaty hands grasping and ready to pummel.

Dennis felt only a shadow of fear, for after what he’d just been through, a simple beating was almost a nonevent; and yet, instinctual reaction to threat crept forward. He tensed, ready to defend himself in his vulnerable naked state.

The Eye of Mu struck first.

It knew Dennis would be no physical match for this other human. Instead, it reached with a clawed simulated hand deep into Dennis’ consciousness and took what it could. With a mental mitt aglow with collected imagery, it flung the sum of Dennis’ experiences that day at the homeless man’s formidable damaged psyche.

Compressed into a matter of seconds, the agony, fear, the ride through the collapse, the entirety of Dennis’ repeated conscious death that day bored like a diamond undergoing fusion into the mind of the homeless man. With a guttural animal shriek, the attacker gripped at his temples as the information, relentless, merciless, impossible, flooded into him. He scraped his nails down the sides of his face trying to stop the influx, skin peeling away in curlicues, but it would not stop.

The structure of his mind melted under the onslaught. The railway tunnel walls lit with a sodium white light, and then, the homeless man keeled over, stone cold dead, body spasming.

Dennis staggered. The Eye of Mu had overextended itself in its viciousness. For a moment the great entity itself was stunned, and Dennis reasserted control over his body. He could feel the entity inside him now, clearly and with no imposed filters. He also felt his body, made whole by its presence. He was shaken, trembling, exhausted… but he was alive. Able to think completely on his own for the first time in what was happening, the tattered remnants of his Self suddenly back in control and knowing it could not last, he made a decision all by himself.

He knelt over the corpse before him, and began taking its clothes. The Eye of Mu, quiescent, nonetheless approved. The rags stank, and wouldn’t fit, but he needed to get away from here. His small apartment was a few miles away up the coast in a small suburb. He lived alone, had no family who’d be calling for him to see if he was safe. His life had been work, and everyone he’d known, were they all dead? He needed to know. He scrubbed his face in a dirty puddle and lurched off to gain the street above, and find his way home, because at this instant, that was all he could think to do.

Yep, I agree... add anything you have in your brain already for the concept [what's there already is good fodder], and the whizzes here will go to work, I suspect.

Just popping in to say: thank you.. :heart:

[[Heh, dammit Bain, you and I need to hook up.]]

[[Say guys, are any of you [who are in it] active in the Whitmoore Tenants SG on Pinn anymore? I know I play rather late, but I never see any of the SG members on anymore. Is the SG dead? I'm not feeling the active-sg love any more and wondered if I should look for another one. I do know a few of you have moved to a different server, but I'm not redoing DH yet again. And I could use an active SG's support when I do play. Anyone?]]

Say Doc,

What will happen to her from the experience? Although Buffy stays the same, Marvel characters tend to go off in awhole new direction when they come back. Are you planning on a total toon change via the respect and all [and RP attitude change]? Just curious what plans you might have, that also might help us get the suggestion juice flowing.

Recluse: /inhales deeply
"Ah! I have just been liberated by the power of Vicks!"

***

Mako: "Ok! Who swiped my Elton John CD!"

***

Black Scorpion to Mako: "Dude, if the boss finds out we scratched the Reclusemobile, we are SCREWED!"

That made me think of:


/resonant booming knock on a door in the Evil Lair


"Candygram for Mako! Hahahah! Gets him every time!"

Hm, no idea why anyone else hasn't chimed in, but Pinnacle is also RP-strong.

[ QUOTE ]
Lord Recluse: Ghost Widow!

Sirocco: GHOST WIDOW GHOST WIDOW GHOST WIDOW! That's all I hear from you!

Black Scorpion: YAH! This is the first time I actually got my name on the forums!

Mako: Where is the bathroom? This base is too big!

[/ QUOTE ]

Hahah! Nice one.

Recluse: Ghostwidow. We have to talk.

Ghostwidow: Yes, Lord Recluse?

Recluse: I've been thinking about this for a long time now, and, well... I'm not sure how to say this, so I'll just say it.

Ghostwidow: Yes?

Recluse: ..................................... You need to wax your mustache.