City of IF

[NeverNeverGirl]

This is the thread for all those bits of stuff that dont quite fit anywhere on IF. You will know what I mean if you have them - if you are unsure then PM me!

Loves
Ne

[Crossfire]

I wrote this a long, long time ago, in a language wholly dead. I tried the best I could to translate it into English, but it'll never feel the same.

There are some concepts that are wholly unique, no matter where you go to find them.

R e s o n a t e | A w a k e


I'd rather be here, walking in the coldest winter
To see the red against the snow flow softly with the wind

To know that far away
Cherry blossoms soar before full bloom
Nightingales fall in raptured sleep

Beneath the ground uncounted souls listen quietly for my footsteps
The echoes that I radiate

Resonate, awake
Watch them start to take

You, so gently, for the frost
Watch them try to smile

All alone the mountains sing
Watch them fade away

As I run the long-lost trail
Steal away to face the change that was so hard to make

All that's made of more than clouds, not forged from quiet lies
Watch the growth to a single thread that pierces unsearched skies

See it fade, thinner, higher, let it slowly break
Taste the calling wind today, look around, and wake.

[Crossfire]

A plot synopsis of a twenty-thousand word story I wrote a long time ago in another forum. A lot of people liked it, but when I came back after a long hiatus I lost it! Oh well...

I found this summary somewhere in the back of one of my terminals. If anyone actually bothers to read this topic, I would appreciate a PM to the effect of "You should make this again/you should burn this and jump up and down on it repeatedly/I really don't care".

A young girl, frightened that she may be a thief, tells stories of a dark and faintly paranormal nature.

It's raining very heavily. There's a storm just about to hit, and her father needs to collect the dividends from his stock sales urgently.

Back at their houseship, the Irellai, he is telling a crewman about his automated rudder system, recently purchased at no small cost. He bewails the fact that his family forced him to spend so many years training in its use.

However, he is informed that they are highly reliable in this kind of weather and that it was an excellent investment. It was a lucrative invention of his family company, Aestrien Holdings, and the crewman compliments him on its creation.

Within his first dozen flights outside the family estate, he's grounded by the appearance of skyfire, a deadly meteorological phenomenon that ripped through his starboard reapthrusters.

Sending his daughter out into the driving rain to get the funds needed for repairs from Brudcliffe Bankings, a low-profit investment fund on the shadier side of town, may seem like a cruel and unnecessary thing to do, but she was determined to prove to her father that she could do things on her own.

He had recently attempted to demonstrate her utter dependence on him in a variety of unpleasantly unusual ways. In any case, he didn't really care what happened to her these days.

Setting out to find this hard-to-find place, she encounters Noslur Flooddale, her uncle and a rather seedy man who trades at the same investment bank. He attempts to entice the young girl into trading in high-risk, short-term ventures with him.

She tells him the reason for her journey, and just incidentally he asks just how much profit she was collecting from her father's recent sales. She responds by saying that it was approximately ↕500 Kaerekana (it's actually 1175, but she's a little suspicious).

He encourages her to bet it all on a single, very high-risk venture, a caravan of souls going out this very moment and returning in precisely twelve point six nine five four eight seconds, or 4.5356444444... times the difference between the average weight of an adhesive sponge and the total circumference of Luna Deius and the common ball of twine in Reniniuan Dinnernets.

She is supremely successful, but he refuses to give her the profits! He hands her ↕500 back, and naught else.

Long-suppressed kleptomanic impulses come to the fore, irresistable temptations overriding her psychologically implanted inhibitions and making her hand reach into his wallet.

She knew he had no intention of repaying a small girl and is only giving her back the money she was supposed to collect in case her homicidal father comes after him.

"YOU INFANTILE THIEF!!!" he screeches maniacally, slapping her roughly across her pretty cheek.

She falls to the FarmaCrete sidewalk, lowering her head and muttering.

"I am not a thief, they checked after the time before, ran experiments on me, I am a butterfly! My back is straight, I STAND TALL AND PROUD!!!" she whispered passionately, intensely, to herself.

Mistaking her quiet words for sobbing, he said "Well, little girl..." leering, "If you really need the extra money I'm sure we can..." pausing with subtle menace and winking slyly, "...make some arrangement..."

He reached for the thin, soaked, diaphanous garment she was currently draped in, tearing it clumsily to expose her heartchilled body to the wind.

She stared horrified as he collapsed, a thin trickle of blood flowing down his left temple. Her hand had, purely of its own voilition, crept into the man's pocket, retrieved the stolen statue (recently purchased) he'd just recovered from her father's safe deposit box at Brudcliffe Holdings.

She had hit him over the head with it so hard that one half had had crumbled into finest dust on impact and a shard had ripped straight through his skull into Noslur Flooddale's brain.

She ran away, into the driving rain, one hand holding her shirt together and the other holding quite a large amount of money and a broken, beautiful statue that once belonged to her.

It was her first kill.

[Crossfire]

A Monologue.


Love. Hate. Fear. Hope.

Darkness- lit by light but brief, sacrifice- for little gain, destruction... of the perfect, the supremely beautiful.

Such is the harshness of my waking real, soon to be replaced by unending grey.

My purgatory lies between the rapture of my memories and the torment of my life as Persephone forever darkened.

It's such a wonderful place. A place for thought. A place for repose.

A place free, of any stimuli, a place where I could close my eyes forever... if I didn't see your face every time I tried to.

That's where I'll go, but my world today isn't much different.

I look around. The skies are bleak. Jagged peaks, rending the blasted earth, are burning knives scything through the heavens.

The grass is so very green, and the clouds dance in the bright air when I escape to the world of my memories. Shadows haunt me. I see them, just out of the corner of my eye. Like pieces cut out of reality.

Awful, inchoate. Anathema to look around, but every one's a rotten tooth in the screaming mouth of life. I dare not speak, but only run.

Obsidian shards litter the ground, and cut my feet. I ignore them. I'm no longer concerned about such things.

They're red already. They say the blood of the Iaorae villagers made a river when the nanites struck. They don't like blood, for some reason. Must be all the iron. Nanites don't like iron, but it doesn't matter anymore.

There's nothing to protect.

I made my home here, in the Raek|Irain Mountains, after you died. Iron in the soil, understand. Just for luck, you know. The only food here is... me.

I taste something. Something strange. Suddenly, it hits me, and I have to turn to the side of the road and vomit. A fluid, dark, thick and crimson, flows out, tinged with yellow. I don't know what it is, exactly, but I always knew in testing that the tiny bits of harmless radiation might prove to be a problem a little further down the track.

It didn't matter, I figured. There'd be another time or two to test them.

I guess this was it.

They flow towards you, so quick, like dark, fluid electricity, the current through a maelstrom. They're flawless, entrancing. You stand hypnotised, listening to their joyous mesmerade, the melodic hum they make as they burn a trail towards you.

When they hit, you're worse than dead.

You feel them inside you.

Second by second, you become less and less, and moment by moment, they become more as they feed off your living flesh.

They move like moonlight through the lithosphere, Mercury the messenger, bubbles in the air. Maybe a little like Charon, too. Ferrying stories from one side to the other, behind the perfect veil's gateway. In so many ways I see it's true. There's a little piece of you inside of each and every one now.

In a way, I'm feeding you.

But we all contain pieces of people long dead, they say. Atoms don't discriminate, I suppose that's just a human thing. I see them, reflecting the dying sunlight in the distance, forever searching for their food. That's the way I will go, as I walk along the beaten path with a hunk of ghostly iron in my frozen, storm-grey hands.

THAT'S THE WAY I WILL GO, THAT'S THE WAY I WILL GO, THAT'S... the... way... I... will...

Soaring, into the night. I'm leaving the safe zone now, the hyperpressurised canister's in my hand. I spent twenty years developing it. The mountains around me are a little less red now. I can see the scars I rent with steel claws, relentlessly searching for my blood-tinged treasures.

There aren't many people left, but the Princes keep records intact. Think it's funny, I guess. They'll use it to rebuild after I'm gone.

I alone am responsible for the annihilation of my race, through the forging of a transcendent weapon in the fires of hell.

The Princes. Genetically modified soldiers, armed with implants, no thinner than a hair. A few seconds, a brief link-up with their little friends and they could use an entire city and its inhabitants as fuel for the construction of massive fortifications armed with unimaginable power.

I created them. With my loving wife by my side- you, Juliette- I designed a team of engineers for the terraforming of alien planetscapes, supremely able and ideally suited for the job. What an idiot I was. The felons consigned to death row I used for my experiments proved Valinshov's theories.

Memory isn't just stored in the brain.

Their brains were blank slates, but it wasn't enough. I brought the first out of stasis myself.

I brought THE FIRST OUT OF STASIS MYSELF...

You were the first to go, my love. *chokes*

Oh, gods... I hope I can get to the transmit point before... *vomits*

It's so very cold now. The frost begins to break me. The radiation crashes into every cell, like a squad of drunken Princes looking for something quick to eat.

Still, there are worse ways to die.

I could have decided not to keep this little iron knife you gave me, the final gift from my soul's redemption.

Just for luck.

[Crossfire]

How cool the fires, love, sustaining your young fading life
How fast the rivers, love, flowing down your red-streaked breast
In the dark the red moon rides
The foxfire of your waiting breath

As the flames of dying blood all fade from red to black
Your smile gleams in spreading pools
The embers stir, yet slowly grey
The ash of so few years reclaimed.

How cold the burning flood
Bright flames once soared
Now quenched, unyearning.

[Black Hawk]

well I'm best at writing Sgames and linear stories so I don't have much to offer but I can appluad Crossfire for his wonderful writing

[NeverNeverGirl]

Woot! Much glad that i added this thread x!

I like your style my ethereal wafty misty grey smokey like substance friend!

GO YOU!
:P

[Christalnightshade]

Something for a friend of mine...


If I could give you anything as you graduate from high school, I would give you a candle that burn as BRIGHTLY as the light within you, the light you are… I would tell you to keep it burning, NO MATTER WHAT. I would say don’t let the well-intentioned extinguish it. Don’t let the mean spirited blow it out. Don’t let your light flicker and FADE because of everyday challenges and CONCERNS. The world is large, and no one can illuminate it alone, but it is AMAZING how a single candle, BURNING BRIGHTLY. Can light so many others. The world is your candle. Hold it high. Enjoy each day coming and going.

[NeverNeverGirl]

Gee Crady that was beautiful. Such a sweet sentiment towards your friend - I hope that you showed him/her what you had written :D

[Christalnightshade]

Sure I did give her it. :D

[Crossfire]

Storms, and screams, and waking light.

We hear the fire roaring along the ridges, and we smile, with brief fatality, as we man the guns. We're trying to drive the Dead away, but they just keep on laughing, and crying, and stumbling on.

The hail of ice from the barrels of our guns continues. Some of them fall to the mud, still twitching, stumbling, crawling up the hill. We stare at them, and we smile, with mocking sorrow, knowing that they'll never make it.

We carry on.

Vicious mercenaries hold the front lines, and we watch them from the barricades. Silver daggers, wickedly curved, gleam with blood and rain and ash, driven by the gales, from Nibelheim in flames. We see the forests burn, and we smile, with brief fatality, as we kill those once our own.

We are not afraid. The Perimeter lives on.

We let loose a thousand wild screams, as they struggle bravely on. We launch the flares, and watch them flinch, laughing as they weep.

The Perimeter always lives on.

We love this war.