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This is my heartfelt love letter to the organizers behind this website's events. There is a certain intentionality, but also an unintentional aspect, in how we as writers engage with these events and produce them. The participants drive the plot forward and build up the story, while the event runners utilize all the themes and character interactions that have been established throughout to electrify the course they've set—usually resulting in a fulfilling, satisfactory conclusion.
Events can sometimes seem insignificant, fleeting moments that only last a few months and have little lasting impact on the overall narrative. Sometimes they’re set in, like, literal pocket dimensions, after all. But in my opinion, these events are what keep us going as writers, providing the inspiration to continue our storylines while also refreshing and rejuvenating us for our main plots.
I am an event fanatic, let me tell you.
Two of the most popular events, Dante’s Abyss (Syntech/Dante’s Comet) and the Death Game (Carnivale Rosa), demonstrate the transcendental, sublime beauty of events. They’re a snapshot into human suffering, even for characters who are not strictly human or even anything approaching it.
I'm feeling particularly compelled to share my personal experiences from past events on this site and our predecessors, so I'll break them down into individual entries.
Summary of my event experience:
2016 - The Hero’s Graveyard, Anthony J. Crowley
2018 - Dante’s Abyss, Pennywise the Dancing Clown
2020 - Dante’s Abyss, Arthur Morgan
2020 - Death Game, Pathfinder
2020 - The Siege of Markov, Starscream
2021 - The Nausicaa Incident, Arthur Morgan
2021 - Among Us on the Ark, Perry the Platypus
2021 - Dante’s Abyss, Pennywise the Dancing Clown
2022 - Death Game, Klarion the Witch Boy
2022 - Dante’s Abyss, Father Gascoigne
2023 - Death Game, Coda Nitai
2023 - Dante’s Abyss, Skywarp
2023 - The Haven Hauntings, Host
2024 - Death Game, Rebecca Chambers
My first event, ever, was the Hero’s Graveyard on a previous website. I wrote Anthony J. Crowley of Good Omens fame… the novel version, before the TV series was even an inkling. I was in high school and waking up in the early hours of the day, just to check the site and see what fresh hell had broken loose.
While my memories of that time are somewhat blurry, I do recall performing surprisingly well and making it to the finale of the event. Along the way, I managed to collect some neat items, too. Although my writing skills were not as developed back then, what truly captured my attention during this event was the sense of danger, the personal struggle that my character faced.
Crowley was a fresh character and had very little power to speak of. He was a fallen angel in his previous world, and transplanted to a new one. He felt fear, loneliness, and utter confusion. He hated it! He got beat up! He got bullied! He ate a bird, bloody and still feathered! He roamed alone on an island for days before forming a fragile alliance with two others, and then they DIED HORRIBLY.
This event wasn't the most extensive, but I was intrigued by the concept. As a beginner writer, I struggled with character development and plot construction. Despite my shortcomings, what stands out in my memory is the sheer… obstinacy of Crowley's struggle. I couldn't stop refreshing the website, posting his various and often amusing hardships, eagerly invested in his survival journey as he tried to navigate an unfriendly, scary environment. There weren't a ton of physical fights involved, and I wrote mostly on my own before finding others. However, I poured a LOT of effort into creating narrative tension for him, into exploring themes of survival, mankind versus nature, and the human struggle against inhuman forces.
It was magical, and a small taste of event writing that I really appreciated… other unfortunate happenings at the time set aside!
During my first Dante's Abyss in 2018, I attempted to write Pennywise the Dancing Clown. This was a tournament-style event where we were randomly assigned partners with other participants, and then we’d duke it out in 2v2 brawls.
This writing experience did not go so well for me, for a variety of reasons. My writing partner did not appreciate my performance, though the exact reasons remain unclear to me. Despite being incredibly busy with life, though, I still made time to write. While I enjoyed writing the character as an exercise, It didn't face enough internal struggle. The main challenge It faced was being captured by external forces and forced to participate in the tournament—though the specifics are fuzzy in my memory. I particularly enjoyed delving into raw combat scenes and really driving home the monstrous aspects of Pennywise, but emotionally, I don't think I reached any significant depth or felt truly passionate about my writing here, except perhaps when pitted against Jason Voorhees.
Before Jason, It had been in a few fights, but It never really cared about what happened, or… the outcome? It was survival-driven, sure. It reveled in the opportunity to use Its claws and teeth, to release the frustration of being transported to a new world after Its last (canon and non-canon) defeats, but It wasn’t… interesting. But then the fight with Jason happened, and it forced me to ponder on a battle between two… well, movie monsters—one truly monstrous and literally out of this world, and the other formerly human, driven by sentimentality and revenge.
Despite some of the more harebrained portrayals of him in the Friday the 13th series, Jason is ultimately… a very human monster.
Overall, I was disappointed with my portrayal of Pennywise. I attempted to play It again in Dante's Abyss 2021, but I couldn't get very far. Life circumstances certainly played a role, but I also didn't have the motivation or drive to put so much of myself, my heart, into a character that, frankly, isn't meant to have heart.
It surprised me how utterly dissatisfied I felt with my own writing, and it brought me down. I don't think I will attempt to play this character again unless it’s in a minor NPC role, as much as I enjoy exploring Its perspective and writing horror… there is something inside me that just CANNOT fully detach and embrace the mindset necessary to get really, really messed up.
After the 2018 debacle, when the dust had settled with the creation of Multerra, I was… intrigued by the idea of joining an event again, when Alex mentioned running Dante’s Abyss. I’d never attempted or read Dante’s Abyss in the “island” format, prior to that point. It was honestly pretty scary to me, as an idea. I’m not afraid to say I can get competitive and take losses pretty hard. I was also recently married, moved to a new place, everything was in lockdown due to Covid breaking out, and I’d just started a new job after months of wallowing in depression and alcohol. I felt very alone and was at a pretty dark, painful point in my life.
I started writing Arthur because I enjoyed the video game he was in and the world of it. I felt a very close connection to that world, not just because I’d spent hours exploring it, but because a lot of it resonated with my own upbringing and experiences. I felt a deep connection with nature and animals, as Arthur does. I felt the pressures of those around me, and the crushing weight that failure holds. I wrote about loss, and grief, and survival through hunting. I felt alone and like I was struggling to keep several somethings afloat that should’ve died a long time ago, one of those somethings being myself.
The character was, is, raw and honest. He is personal to me.
When I first started writing Arthur on the site, I don’t remember having any intention of entering him in Dante’s Abyss. He was a comfort character to me, I would say. It felt warm, settling, to write this character. The narrative voice I used to write him was very intentional, reflective of his accent and culture, my own culture. I would say I modeled a lot of how he spoke and thought not just after his video game representation, but also after myself and the people around me in my day to day life.
Dante’s Abyss felt like such an alien environment to throw Arthur into, but it was honestly… so interesting, deciding how he would think about certain unfamiliar technologies, the whole concept of a parallel universe. How he would rationalize things that were totally foreign to him. How he would act, think and speak with people far more modern than him, and even others more antiquated or alien. I tried to write him honestly, with heart. I wanted to write him very seriously, and this was very intentional. His abilities were as close to canon as I could get him at that point, really. He was on a normal human level, a normal guy.
I wanted him to grapple with being human. I wanted him to fight to survive. When writing about his time on the island, I had him think very deeply and contemplatively about things. I had him be very aware of his physical self, his health, and the world around him. My strength when writing I feel has always been setting, but I didn’t just want to write Arthur floating in the setting, or just use it as a backdrop. I wanted to write him interacting with it, not blending with it, but interacting and coming up against barriers, finding things, moving stones, leaving tracks in the mud, bracing and shivering in the wind, freezing in the snow… overall existing as a real, human being connected to the world he’s in and fighting to understand it.
Arthur was very much a journey, and not a nice one. He wanted very much to return from the extraordinary to the mundane, as a character.
He joined Syntech's event for the money; not unlike his past life, always looking for money to support himself and those around him. He took comfort where he could get it, from his environment and others. His connection to Kopaka was initiated under duress, and it was all an attempt to gain some semblance of comfort. I wanted Arthur to be noble, but flawed. He’s a criminal and has killed people, it’s all he ever knew, but he’s trying to be better. He’s in a new world and he’s trying so damn hard to be better.
I don’t know, something about writing Arthur just really jived for me. I was really not expecting that people would like him at all, because he was an outlaw who should’ve been dead and somehow wasn’t. In a lot of ways I feel I’ve done this character a grave disservice, because in his source material his story was so complete and final. He didn’t need to live. But it made things… interesting, as a writer, to try and imagine what a man like that would do if he’d been given the opportunity to live, in a life totally divorced from his old one.
My first foray into Death Game as Pathfinder was… well, it was something. It was special. I wrote Pathfinder, from Apex Legends. A lot of us were writing Apex characters at the time… you had to be there!
Anyway, I struggled a lot with Pathfinder as a character. He didn’t have much conflict or internal doubts, he was so happy… the biggest struggle was that Revenant and I couldn’t find any fights to get into. I did enjoy writing his attitude and trying to flex my humor writing skills, but overall, my time spent writing Pathfinder was… staying up literally all night to produce posts I felt weren’t all that good or satisfying to read.
I think, at this point, I was suffering some… writerly fatigue, after the Dante’s Abyss with Arthur. I put my whole soul into that character and things got a little ugly, towards the end. I think I produced some of the best damn character writing of my life with him, but everything after, for a long time, felt very shallow compared to that.
Since I’ve already covered Dante’s Abyss 2021, I’ll hop right into Death Game 2022, where I played Klarion the Witch Boy. I was worried, for a while there, that Klarion would fall in the way of Pennywise due to his inhumanity/irreverence when it came to life. I also worried he might be too silly and like Pathfinder. But the immediate bond he formed with Sand Hawk really improved things. I was writing this absolute goblin of a character and Sand Hawk’s mere presence humanized him, gave me something to ground his shenanigans with.
Even though this event ended fairly prematurely, I was very excited by the mechanics in place, as I had been contemplating running an event of my own with similar mechanics at that point. Klarion’s magical knowledge and the uncovering of the Slenderman’s little altars that needed to be destroyed created such a dope character moment, because as soon as that information came to light, Klarion was driven—he was going to crush all those little shrines or whatever and die trying. He wanted to return to his cat and escape the Death Game, and by golly, that was the way to do it.
By the time of Dante’s Abyss 2022, I was fumbling again. I tried to write Father Gascoigne, from Bloodborne. I was dealing with a lot of things in my life, death and family problems. I think a lot of his personal struggles as a character hit a bit too close to home for me, and writing him felt actually painful… not to mention that Bloodborne’s characters are not very developed in the first place, so much of it felt like straight up projection. I feel that I actually faltered a lot when writing this character because I chose to avoid the deep grief and sense of de-personalization he would feel from recognizing what he had done in his former life, and really leaned more into his savagery and bloodlust.
In a lot of ways, Gascoigne felt similar to writing Arthur. He had a very distinct, antiquated voice that I tried to emulate. A unique perspective on life and the world. He was connected to his environment. He was a sad, flawed individual. But I just wasn’t capturing that same feeling I had when writing Arthur—I go back and read my Gascoigne stuff now and I don’t even recognize it. It reads wonderfully, to me, and normally I hate looking back on my old writing. But I can see the gaps where I cut corners, emotionally, to avoid delving too deep into my feelings, and that was why I couldn’t bear to write him for much longer.
I deeply appreciate Sigmund for writing with me in that event. Fennec/Jacob, Demetri, Aster, and Christine, as well. You all really made some great moments with this character that I consider some of my most well-written, to be quite honest. I think it was just a personal failing of mine that I couldn’t find it within me to connect with the character.
Compared to Gascoigne, Death Game 2023 had a lighter tone, at least initially. The trio of Coda, King Shark, and Zayin brought a rare and special dynamic that I’d lacked in my previous writing experiences.
In character, it was like a family group, or just a very dear collection of friends who’d grown close as family. Out of character, our interactions were full of laughter and we all thoroughly enjoyed writing together, it was literally electric. We were constantly brainstorming and discussing our plans, and the NPCs we were introduced to only fueled our enthusiasm for the event further.
I don’t consider Coda one of my stronger characters… personally. Her motivations for joining the event felt weak. Her emotions were, ultimately, trivialized by the narrative—something I walked right into and really stumped my motivation. I would like to think I wrote her well, but what really made her have a spark as a character was her interactions with those around her. Alone, she wasn’t very interesting at all, in my opinion… which somewhat makes sense, considering she was created as a one-off homebrew tabletop character. I think I’d like to try with her again, but I hesitate to pick her up as a main.
But still, that doesn’t mean my time writing her was any less golden. The hours spent thumbing over my posts was excruciating, but it was all worth it to show them to my fellow writers and discuss ways to move forward with our character interactions. It was all about telling a story, and I think we told a truly gripping, fun and heartfelt one.
Now, as for Dante’s Abyss 2023? I don’t know what came over me; I was on a Transformers kick for the billionth time in so many years. It was literally like catching lightning in a bottle, and I owe it all to Don Isaac and Thundercracker’s writers for helping to build such an absolutely fascinating, gut-wrenching dynamic between our characters.
Their story was about a struggle for humanity, through and through. The hardships our characters faced were just… so crucial to the narrative, and many of the elements and themes we introduced—both intentional and unintentional—really did a lot to ground things. The disaster movie and war campaign elements woven into the overall plot heightened this feeling. Our characters had a clear adversary and all came with battle experience, driven to defeat it for various, sometimes selfish reasons.
The bond between Skywarp and Thundercracker was shaky from the start. They had fought together as soldiers for countless years, but their relationship had evolved into that of brothers, over time. Despite their long history together, it was Thundercracker who seemed to truly understand the weight of their age and all they’d done, and he was the only one willing to let go of the past after being given the opportunity to start anew in the Crossroads.
While Skywarp held a disdain for humanity (or simply organics), viewing them as mere playthings and insects due to their fragility and short lifespans, Thundercracker had immersed himself in their world to better understand them. He had a dog, ran his own business, and we hinted at the possibility of organic connections before his human girlfriend even came together as an idea. And unlike Skywarp, Thundercracker had always been skeptical about their war and his allegiance to the Decepticons! This contrast in beliefs created an instant, fascinating conflict between these two giant FREAKING robots, leading to a gradual buildup of tension throughout the event!
As injuries mounted and the situation grew more and more dire, things began to quite literally fracture, with Skywarp frantically trying to patch them up, because despite everything—he did not want to lose Thundercracker, this last fragment of his home universe. He changed and grew as a character to keep him.
Don Isaac, on the other hand, was utterly human. He was an unhinged human, who wasn’t afraid to swing with the literal millennia old robots, but he was human. It made him so poignant as a character, I cannot state enough. Even as he was oblivious to what Skywarp and Thundercracker truly were, even as he went up against literal titans, he was so strong as a character. His body was so small and yet he fought so hard. He was so aware of how little he was in the grand scheme of things, and yet he threw himself into it anyway.
I think it’s also an interesting thing, how all of our characters were hiding things from one another, except Don Isaac. Skywarp was putting on an act, pretending to be a human pilot in order to flirt with Isaac, treating him like a literal source of amusement. It was like playing house or acting out a TV drama for him, with no intention of actually pursuing anything. He compared Isaac to a pet, an insect, multiple times. He barely considered Isaac sentient.
Thundercracker, on the other hand, was complicit in this—he knew about Skywarp's facade, but stayed silent, even as he hid his own doubts about the Decepticon cause and how much sheer humanity had seeped into him! God, it was so good! It just fell right into place!
Don Isaac was authentic. So painfully, unnervingly authentic it made Skywarp actually uncomfortable. So authentic it made Thundercracker respect him. So authentic and wholehearted it made them both come to view him as a leader, despite his comparative youth and teeny-tiny stature.
Isaac’s humanity was screaming in their faces, bursting at the seams of his armor and raging at the kaiju and robotic behemoths trying to crush him underfoot. He was so earnest and himself, both in romancing Skywarp’s holoform and when in the air. Skywarp and Thundercracker could not escape just how human and real he was! These robots, millions upon millions of years his senior, with hundreds of battles under their cockpits, could not ignore this tiny little man with his positively explosive persona.
And this made them confront things about themselves. Hard, ruinous things. Thundercracker grappled with his mortality, how his doubts had always made him a touch too sentimental to be a proper Decepticon. It bolstered his desire to connect with the temporary, the human and the mundane. I cannot stress enough how the plot line of having a dog, of wanting to be closer to organic life, of his fascination with human film and media, defines him as a truly sad, doomed character.
He’s this eternal thing that will never rust and never die unless he’s actually killed. He’s grieving things that aren’t even gone yet. Everything he loves will eventually rot… except Skywarp.
Skywarp is energetic, seemingly careless, hurling himself into danger without thinking twice. He’s grappled with his mortality before and has decided to live life to the fullest, even if he is afraid. He lectures Thundercracker on being weak, of being sentimental, for fearing death and letting it paralyze him… he doesn’t allow himself to be tender. He is disgusted by organic life and views it as innately lesser in value! But he deeply loves Thundercracker, and he grows to greatly admire Don Isaac despite his short existence, and so he comes to accept that the temporary isn’t any less meaningful for how short-lived or vulnerable it is—and now he’s inclined to cling to the temporary.
Y’all?!
And Don Isaac. It all revolves around Don Isaac, really, because he’s the catalyst for all this change. The Bespoiled Nippur and Detroit battles just… gosh, y’all. I’m speechless.
This is truly the magic of crossover and collaborative roleplay sites, and really the power of events, as a whole. They are the perfect juncture to push the boundaries of your writing, stretch your narrative muscles, to delve into themes that you may have never considered before—all in the company of very good, very dear friends.
*chef's kiss*
Events can sometimes seem insignificant, fleeting moments that only last a few months and have little lasting impact on the overall narrative. Sometimes they’re set in, like, literal pocket dimensions, after all. But in my opinion, these events are what keep us going as writers, providing the inspiration to continue our storylines while also refreshing and rejuvenating us for our main plots.
I am an event fanatic, let me tell you.
Two of the most popular events, Dante’s Abyss (Syntech/Dante’s Comet) and the Death Game (Carnivale Rosa), demonstrate the transcendental, sublime beauty of events. They’re a snapshot into human suffering, even for characters who are not strictly human or even anything approaching it.
I'm feeling particularly compelled to share my personal experiences from past events on this site and our predecessors, so I'll break them down into individual entries.
Summary of my event experience:
2016 - The Hero’s Graveyard, Anthony J. Crowley
2018 - Dante’s Abyss, Pennywise the Dancing Clown
2020 - Dante’s Abyss, Arthur Morgan
2020 - Death Game, Pathfinder
2020 - The Siege of Markov, Starscream
2021 - The Nausicaa Incident, Arthur Morgan
2021 - Among Us on the Ark, Perry the Platypus
2021 - Dante’s Abyss, Pennywise the Dancing Clown
2022 - Death Game, Klarion the Witch Boy
2022 - Dante’s Abyss, Father Gascoigne
2023 - Death Game, Coda Nitai
2023 - Dante’s Abyss, Skywarp
2023 - The Haven Hauntings, Host
2024 - Death Game, Rebecca Chambers
My first event, ever, was the Hero’s Graveyard on a previous website. I wrote Anthony J. Crowley of Good Omens fame… the novel version, before the TV series was even an inkling. I was in high school and waking up in the early hours of the day, just to check the site and see what fresh hell had broken loose.
While my memories of that time are somewhat blurry, I do recall performing surprisingly well and making it to the finale of the event. Along the way, I managed to collect some neat items, too. Although my writing skills were not as developed back then, what truly captured my attention during this event was the sense of danger, the personal struggle that my character faced.
Crowley was a fresh character and had very little power to speak of. He was a fallen angel in his previous world, and transplanted to a new one. He felt fear, loneliness, and utter confusion. He hated it! He got beat up! He got bullied! He ate a bird, bloody and still feathered! He roamed alone on an island for days before forming a fragile alliance with two others, and then they DIED HORRIBLY.
This event wasn't the most extensive, but I was intrigued by the concept. As a beginner writer, I struggled with character development and plot construction. Despite my shortcomings, what stands out in my memory is the sheer… obstinacy of Crowley's struggle. I couldn't stop refreshing the website, posting his various and often amusing hardships, eagerly invested in his survival journey as he tried to navigate an unfriendly, scary environment. There weren't a ton of physical fights involved, and I wrote mostly on my own before finding others. However, I poured a LOT of effort into creating narrative tension for him, into exploring themes of survival, mankind versus nature, and the human struggle against inhuman forces.
It was magical, and a small taste of event writing that I really appreciated… other unfortunate happenings at the time set aside!
”Before he could even bat an eyelid, Crowley was transplanted somewhere entirely different.
The modest plateau of grassland around him was brokenly shaded by trees, a deep teal green haze freckling the ground with fleshy fungus growth rippling along its edges. A faint breeze passed through, sending henceforth dangling leaves to the forest floor in dainty helicopter twirls. Delicate little bells of color, youthful cups of downturned nectar yellow and powdery blue petals, rose out of the tangled undergrowth in vibrant pockets of flowers.
Breathing in deeply, Crowley turned his chin up towards the sky. Not a single distant speck of a bird careened across it. The sweet, lulling notes of birdsong were suspiciously sparse and faded in and out of his hearing. Somehow, this was a cause of concern for him— a silence so nearly all-consuming could never bode well. Almost like heaven, then, but not quite.
Distantly, he wondered how it was that a pair of blistering miscreants had deemed him fit to be tossed across dimensions like a loaded dice. He was really getting too old for this, had been for the past couple decades. It was too bad departure from The Work in hell was absolute shit— which is to say, as fictional as a bleedin’ prancing unicorn.
Somehow he had completely failed to notice the odd weight settled upon the ground beside his feet. Stooping and lifting it into his arms, Crowley squinted curiously down at the dimly glowing, dark metal-streamed weapon he had somehow obtained while hurtling through a pocket in space-time. It looked just like something out of a whackadoodle science fiction film, but unfortunately for him there were no attractive aliens hanging around for him to cozy up to.
Indistinct electronic swoops and drops emanated from the weapon’s sizzling, sicknasty core. Crowley turned it over in his hands before simply letting it hang limp on one arm, surmising that it must be the weapon Teucer had secured for him. Wonderful.
A peculiar twinge of balled-up pressure coiled beneath his shoes as he strode forth. The earth was solid and intermittently bumpy, as if it were an old weather-beaten map someone had arranged a few toy soldiers and action figures upon before playing at war. Crowley became acutely aware that it seemed as if no one had ventured across these grounds before, and if they had, it was very long ago.
He had been wandering north only a few delicate, testing paces when a tall tree layered with pale bark waylaid his attention. It was endowed with thicker branches towards the topmost part of its trunk, the kind of branches a hangman would prefer to string a noose from. But, perhaps unfortunately, this was not what troubled the demon the most.
No, what Crowley saw when he gazed upon it was just how utterly different it seemed. Rearing up amidst a landscape of luscious, leafy green and brief flecks of robin’s egg blue, it was as forbiddingly smooth as an axe head and about as subtle as a skeleton picked clean of its flesh placed in a field of sunny wildflowers.
Something in his mind attributed meaning to the tree, and that small, budding connection erupted in a parasitic grove of intense fear. Crowley’s tongue flickered out in a bifurcated curve as he swiftly ducked his head down and stalked away, ignoring the prickling along the nape of his neck that gently informed him that, if he were to chance a glance backwards, the stake of bone-colored timber would no longer be there.
An evening-tinted shade stole after him as the demon passed under the frothy cover of trees, his suit jacket sweeping behind him as he proceeded in the direction opposite to the hated (feared) tree. This was not heaven, nor a haven or a sanctuary. With a thorny glare at his surroundings which was expertly concealed by his shades, Crowley chose to head off in a more southerly direction.
Surely it would yield more fruit.”
-
“One hand reached out to part the way between a bundle of dew-slick leaves as Crowley pressed onwards through crawling, shadow-stained vines and thick undergrowth. The ambient sounds of rustling leaves and the faint, hushed chirping of birds and hiccuping frogs accompanied his footsteps while he crept along, taking great care not to make a single sound as he went. A few more times than he would care to count the demon stumbled across a pile of loose pebbles or an unexpected dip in the damp jungle floor, but other than those few bumps in the road things were going swimmingly for him.
To pair this climate with swimming was a little more than he could ask, unfortunately; he was fairly surprised there weren't a million yellow-tinged mosquitoes buzzing about in this humidity, and once or twice he had caught himself tugging at his collar to loosen it lest it choke him in its fiery grasp. It was sort of funny, to him, that an agent of Hell itself couldn't handle the heat.
Eventually, however, it became apparent to Crowley that this plan of action just wasn't working. That brief venture into the unknown had borne surprisingly little fruit, and it just wouldn't do to press his luck in one direction while there were plenty of others ripe for investigation. But which one to take?
With an irritable huff, Crowley leaned against the barrel-wide trunk of a tree, letting the rather hefty and musically pulsing weapon rest against his hip while he regarded the nearly impenetrable canopy above. For a moment he simply rested there, staring, when a little glimmer of color caught his eye. Parched lips parting slightly, his head lolled lazily to the side so he could better see it.
A slight hummingbird, no bigger than a bumblebee, hovered beside a vibrantly-colored, sparkling bloom for a split instant before zipping away in a streak of lavender plumage. The demon's slitted pupils followed it only briefly before again flitting back to where it had once been. As he began to look more critically at the tree's branches, more and steadily more little buzzing birds became readily apparent. One by one, when all of the sweet sap had been sipped from their chosen bud, they would dart away to the west, leaving nothing behind but a wavering pocket of disturbed air.
Somehow, somewhere, from a background and life Crowley largely cared very little about, someone had said those little birds were good luck. And he would be blessed if he really didn't need some luck right now.
Crowley's snake-like tongue again flickered out, contemplative, almost as if he were tasting the air. From his sagged position against the tree trunk, he took a moment to consider his options: either he could remain here and melt in this blasted humidity, or he could follow after a few feathery tokens of fortune. Neither seemed especially promising to him, but it was a choice he simply had to make.
As fate would have it, Crowley straightened up from his slouch, a whole battalion of water droplets prickling against the dark fabric of his suit. He idly flattened his tie against his front, wondering just when he had lost the fancy pin that kept it shackled to his shirt, before setting off after the flighty birds.
He whistled lightly under his breath as he walked.”
-
“Things weren’t looking particularly good, no sir.
Everywhere he turned, his cheeks and chin scuffed up by the sharp, biting winds, the slightest shade appeared to slant and prowl along the edges of his vision, footfalls and the silent shuffling of cloth seeming to form chillingly deft contours from the dry crackling of dead leaves.
Crowley felt hunted. Trapped. No kind of patience, resilience, or naturally attuned instinct towards survival could quell the desperately fragile feeling crackling in his chest. It was almost as if he had sprained his heart, the poor muscle working overtime to go through all of the adrenaline-devouring motions of just staying alive.
He glanced towards Magus, a wide-eyed but haggard pull to his normally unruffled features. The forest canopy dappled over the pair with an almost paradisiac beauty, lovely green chasers of shadow smoothing across the gathered leaves and the snarling trunks of trees, occasional bashful pinpricks of heavenly sapphire peeking out amid their effervescent growth. They could just make out the whispering sounds of rain in the distance, brimming creeks and dripping moss contributing to their profound immutability.
At last the demon spoke, albeit with a hesitant, yellowish tang curdling upon his tongue, the words crawling with their underbellies low to the ground in a rushed approximation of speech. His shoulders hunched as he idly dipped the barrel of his gun towards the dirt.
“I don’t think we’re going to last much longer, you and I.”
It was true. Whether they deserved it or not, others would come. The Fiendlord wordlessly nodded, touching briefly at the terrible wound gouged so severely into his throat, the curl of his fingers coming away faintly rusted and wet.
They hadn’t bothered to talk about Kopaka. Not because of some bizarre cultural artifact that carries the uncalled-for pressures of needless aloofness among men, but because not saying anything somehow came close to all that really needed to be said. Grief was a language mutually understood between them. And, it also happened to be mutually understood that they should keep their traps shut.
Gritty bits of shattered bone ground to the forefront of his throat, sharp and agitating. The demon stretched his legs out in front of him on the dewy grass, staring forlornly at the mud-scratched tips of his shoes.
A silly little thought popped into his head with all the subtlety of a wine cork— he could just cut and run, right now. Take his piece and hike through the viciously hurtling winds, tangled jungle undergrowth, and stormy grey clouds to reach the marble sanctity of the temple. Maybe then he could hunker down until the others inevitably trampled all over him. Yeah, that would work.
This wasn’t a slice of life drama from The Golden Girls. Death was a very real possibility, as his numerous injuries told him, and the much more grievous wounds coloring Magus’ skin only affirmed that. Crowley just wasn’t sure if he was ready for that kind of commitment. And, to be honest, he almost kind of wanted to live.
Wait a minute. Crowley sat up fast, cringing and hissing sharply through his broken teeth when his eyesight careened roughly to the side along with about half of the goddamn island. The battered mage’s eyes swept over towards him, narrow and ardent, but when the demon didn’t immediately begin to flee in terror he resumed silently regarding the remnants of the scant meal they had managed to scrounge up.
Crowley had scaled at least four tall oaks before he had managed to find those birds’ nests. It wasn’t a meal of champions, to be sure, but when you have an overzealous firearm chirping along to Purple Rain at you, it certainly isn’t anything to complain about.
The demon stared at his hands, then at his knees and the bloody tears running through them. He… really wanted to live. Truly, this was quite the revelation. For a while there he had thought otherwise, believed that there wasn’t anything much worth living for when your own kind rejects you, but in these horrible, life-threatening circumstances, he had somehow come to terms with his own continued existence. Crowley wanted to live.
Conspiratorially, he looked sideways at Magus out of the corner of his eye. Well. He would like for that guy to live, too.
That resolved for the moment, the dynamic duo continued to sit in a peaceable, yet unspeakably uncertain quiet. The dismal clouds lurking in the upper echelons of the sky curled and wept, drizzly streams wailing down from above. It only took all of a heart-skipping minute for Crowley to notice that something was off.
“Hey, Magussss,” the demon said, his tongue coiling a little around the words. “Do you feel that?”
Stirring, the devilish mage squinted critically at him. “¿ʇɐɥʍ”
Crowley blinked, eyelids inching bit by bit, as if he wasn’t the type to blink very often. Then, he began to outright cackle, every loose snicker pittering out in some weird looping fashion that very nearly matched the kind of whooping his weapon of choice was prone to.
“¿ssssnƃɐɯ 'noʎ oʇ ƃuıʎɐssss ɯ,ı pɹoʍ ɐ puɐʇssssɹǝpun noʎ uɐɔ ¡ʎllɐǝɹ 'ǝlqıpǝɹɔuı ˙˙˙ʇssssnɾ 'ʇɐɥʇ oʇ uǝʇssssıl ¡pǝlqɯnɾ llɐ ǝɹɐ ssspɹoʍ ɹnoʎ”
This was just absolutely absurd. Something eerie was going on, no matter how hilarious Crowley found it. That Warlock was up to no good, and they had best prepare themselves for it. Just as he was about to share these preliminary inclinations to Magus, who would undoubtedly agree with him and at the same time understand very little of what was said, reality proceeded to go all topsy-turvy and dropkick him someplace entirely new.”
“A meteor wailed down on them from above at the Warlock's behest, the grassy prairie only lightly disturbed by the brilliantly burning corona of gaseous flame suspended in the sky. Time swung like a pendulum, melodious and crooning.
As the pair of devils made their way towards the center of action, Crowley attempted to figuratively break the ice a little. Magus seemed genuinely surprised to see him, offered a frustratingly inscrutable look, and then had the gall to say he 'appreciated' Crowley.
"Yeah, well," Crowley spluttered at Magus' retreating back, clearly at a loss for words. He hastily cobbled together something legible enough to spit out. "I appreciate you, too! Ha!"
Nice one, Crawly, a voice that sounded suspiciously like the Duke Hastur purred. Tell him you'll have his back forever and always next, yeah? Lend 'im a 'get out of Hell free' card, why don't you?
Stewing quietly in his own broiling thoughts, Crowley's gaze fled skyward once more to regard the impending meteor. It burned and bled thick, crystalline globs of smoggy vapor in its wake, mercurial veins of silver and molten bronze shimmering all around it. This would be one hell of a reckoning.
"Where's the Antichrist when you need him?" Crowley hissed under his breath, smoothing down the tattered lapels of his jacket before taking off after Magus at a quick, jilting step.
They entered the Warlock's concentrated sphere of influence with little resistance. Crowley found that more than a tiny bit unsettling; they were expected, then, and the impending battle would undoubtedly be a terrible one. Still, even as they strode inside, the air closed around them and murmuring like thousands of sudsy bubbles in his ears, he did not shy away.
One of those few they had fought before— clad all in green and equipped with a fiery determination that cumulated and burst into a lithe, gemstone-colored vulpine, dashed ahead of them into the fray. At Magus' signal, Crowley hefted his gun and unloaded a whole host of wailing sirens upon the hovering Warlock, the winds and the flaming energy of the moment rippling around him.
He was just a hop, skip, and a jump from insanity. It was a good thing his leg was likely to be out of commission soon, then, if these random blasts of explosive energy were anything to go by. Crowley yelped as one went off near to him, tremors traveling through the earth and temporarily making him deaf to the battle spinning around with all the tumultuous fervor of a hailstorm.
Along the steadily thinning extent of his attention, worn threadbare by the crashing noise and crushing pressure, the serpent saw Magus go flying through the air, the chainsaw snarling loosely in his grip as he slammed into a rocky outcropping. A fearsome, whiskered cartoon mouse entered the fray in that same instant, a determined set to his shoulders as his allies spilled in behind him.
I'm fighting alongside Mickey bloody Mouse, Crowley thought, dazedly, straightening up just in time to fire off another wingdinging shot at the Warlock. No one back home will believe this.
That is, if he ever made it back home. Alive.”
The modest plateau of grassland around him was brokenly shaded by trees, a deep teal green haze freckling the ground with fleshy fungus growth rippling along its edges. A faint breeze passed through, sending henceforth dangling leaves to the forest floor in dainty helicopter twirls. Delicate little bells of color, youthful cups of downturned nectar yellow and powdery blue petals, rose out of the tangled undergrowth in vibrant pockets of flowers.
Breathing in deeply, Crowley turned his chin up towards the sky. Not a single distant speck of a bird careened across it. The sweet, lulling notes of birdsong were suspiciously sparse and faded in and out of his hearing. Somehow, this was a cause of concern for him— a silence so nearly all-consuming could never bode well. Almost like heaven, then, but not quite.
Distantly, he wondered how it was that a pair of blistering miscreants had deemed him fit to be tossed across dimensions like a loaded dice. He was really getting too old for this, had been for the past couple decades. It was too bad departure from The Work in hell was absolute shit— which is to say, as fictional as a bleedin’ prancing unicorn.
Somehow he had completely failed to notice the odd weight settled upon the ground beside his feet. Stooping and lifting it into his arms, Crowley squinted curiously down at the dimly glowing, dark metal-streamed weapon he had somehow obtained while hurtling through a pocket in space-time. It looked just like something out of a whackadoodle science fiction film, but unfortunately for him there were no attractive aliens hanging around for him to cozy up to.
Indistinct electronic swoops and drops emanated from the weapon’s sizzling, sicknasty core. Crowley turned it over in his hands before simply letting it hang limp on one arm, surmising that it must be the weapon Teucer had secured for him. Wonderful.
A peculiar twinge of balled-up pressure coiled beneath his shoes as he strode forth. The earth was solid and intermittently bumpy, as if it were an old weather-beaten map someone had arranged a few toy soldiers and action figures upon before playing at war. Crowley became acutely aware that it seemed as if no one had ventured across these grounds before, and if they had, it was very long ago.
He had been wandering north only a few delicate, testing paces when a tall tree layered with pale bark waylaid his attention. It was endowed with thicker branches towards the topmost part of its trunk, the kind of branches a hangman would prefer to string a noose from. But, perhaps unfortunately, this was not what troubled the demon the most.
No, what Crowley saw when he gazed upon it was just how utterly different it seemed. Rearing up amidst a landscape of luscious, leafy green and brief flecks of robin’s egg blue, it was as forbiddingly smooth as an axe head and about as subtle as a skeleton picked clean of its flesh placed in a field of sunny wildflowers.
Something in his mind attributed meaning to the tree, and that small, budding connection erupted in a parasitic grove of intense fear. Crowley’s tongue flickered out in a bifurcated curve as he swiftly ducked his head down and stalked away, ignoring the prickling along the nape of his neck that gently informed him that, if he were to chance a glance backwards, the stake of bone-colored timber would no longer be there.
An evening-tinted shade stole after him as the demon passed under the frothy cover of trees, his suit jacket sweeping behind him as he proceeded in the direction opposite to the hated (feared) tree. This was not heaven, nor a haven or a sanctuary. With a thorny glare at his surroundings which was expertly concealed by his shades, Crowley chose to head off in a more southerly direction.
Surely it would yield more fruit.”
-
“One hand reached out to part the way between a bundle of dew-slick leaves as Crowley pressed onwards through crawling, shadow-stained vines and thick undergrowth. The ambient sounds of rustling leaves and the faint, hushed chirping of birds and hiccuping frogs accompanied his footsteps while he crept along, taking great care not to make a single sound as he went. A few more times than he would care to count the demon stumbled across a pile of loose pebbles or an unexpected dip in the damp jungle floor, but other than those few bumps in the road things were going swimmingly for him.
To pair this climate with swimming was a little more than he could ask, unfortunately; he was fairly surprised there weren't a million yellow-tinged mosquitoes buzzing about in this humidity, and once or twice he had caught himself tugging at his collar to loosen it lest it choke him in its fiery grasp. It was sort of funny, to him, that an agent of Hell itself couldn't handle the heat.
Eventually, however, it became apparent to Crowley that this plan of action just wasn't working. That brief venture into the unknown had borne surprisingly little fruit, and it just wouldn't do to press his luck in one direction while there were plenty of others ripe for investigation. But which one to take?
With an irritable huff, Crowley leaned against the barrel-wide trunk of a tree, letting the rather hefty and musically pulsing weapon rest against his hip while he regarded the nearly impenetrable canopy above. For a moment he simply rested there, staring, when a little glimmer of color caught his eye. Parched lips parting slightly, his head lolled lazily to the side so he could better see it.
A slight hummingbird, no bigger than a bumblebee, hovered beside a vibrantly-colored, sparkling bloom for a split instant before zipping away in a streak of lavender plumage. The demon's slitted pupils followed it only briefly before again flitting back to where it had once been. As he began to look more critically at the tree's branches, more and steadily more little buzzing birds became readily apparent. One by one, when all of the sweet sap had been sipped from their chosen bud, they would dart away to the west, leaving nothing behind but a wavering pocket of disturbed air.
Somehow, somewhere, from a background and life Crowley largely cared very little about, someone had said those little birds were good luck. And he would be blessed if he really didn't need some luck right now.
Crowley's snake-like tongue again flickered out, contemplative, almost as if he were tasting the air. From his sagged position against the tree trunk, he took a moment to consider his options: either he could remain here and melt in this blasted humidity, or he could follow after a few feathery tokens of fortune. Neither seemed especially promising to him, but it was a choice he simply had to make.
As fate would have it, Crowley straightened up from his slouch, a whole battalion of water droplets prickling against the dark fabric of his suit. He idly flattened his tie against his front, wondering just when he had lost the fancy pin that kept it shackled to his shirt, before setting off after the flighty birds.
He whistled lightly under his breath as he walked.”
-
“Things weren’t looking particularly good, no sir.
Everywhere he turned, his cheeks and chin scuffed up by the sharp, biting winds, the slightest shade appeared to slant and prowl along the edges of his vision, footfalls and the silent shuffling of cloth seeming to form chillingly deft contours from the dry crackling of dead leaves.
Crowley felt hunted. Trapped. No kind of patience, resilience, or naturally attuned instinct towards survival could quell the desperately fragile feeling crackling in his chest. It was almost as if he had sprained his heart, the poor muscle working overtime to go through all of the adrenaline-devouring motions of just staying alive.
He glanced towards Magus, a wide-eyed but haggard pull to his normally unruffled features. The forest canopy dappled over the pair with an almost paradisiac beauty, lovely green chasers of shadow smoothing across the gathered leaves and the snarling trunks of trees, occasional bashful pinpricks of heavenly sapphire peeking out amid their effervescent growth. They could just make out the whispering sounds of rain in the distance, brimming creeks and dripping moss contributing to their profound immutability.
At last the demon spoke, albeit with a hesitant, yellowish tang curdling upon his tongue, the words crawling with their underbellies low to the ground in a rushed approximation of speech. His shoulders hunched as he idly dipped the barrel of his gun towards the dirt.
“I don’t think we’re going to last much longer, you and I.”
It was true. Whether they deserved it or not, others would come. The Fiendlord wordlessly nodded, touching briefly at the terrible wound gouged so severely into his throat, the curl of his fingers coming away faintly rusted and wet.
They hadn’t bothered to talk about Kopaka. Not because of some bizarre cultural artifact that carries the uncalled-for pressures of needless aloofness among men, but because not saying anything somehow came close to all that really needed to be said. Grief was a language mutually understood between them. And, it also happened to be mutually understood that they should keep their traps shut.
Gritty bits of shattered bone ground to the forefront of his throat, sharp and agitating. The demon stretched his legs out in front of him on the dewy grass, staring forlornly at the mud-scratched tips of his shoes.
A silly little thought popped into his head with all the subtlety of a wine cork— he could just cut and run, right now. Take his piece and hike through the viciously hurtling winds, tangled jungle undergrowth, and stormy grey clouds to reach the marble sanctity of the temple. Maybe then he could hunker down until the others inevitably trampled all over him. Yeah, that would work.
This wasn’t a slice of life drama from The Golden Girls. Death was a very real possibility, as his numerous injuries told him, and the much more grievous wounds coloring Magus’ skin only affirmed that. Crowley just wasn’t sure if he was ready for that kind of commitment. And, to be honest, he almost kind of wanted to live.
Wait a minute. Crowley sat up fast, cringing and hissing sharply through his broken teeth when his eyesight careened roughly to the side along with about half of the goddamn island. The battered mage’s eyes swept over towards him, narrow and ardent, but when the demon didn’t immediately begin to flee in terror he resumed silently regarding the remnants of the scant meal they had managed to scrounge up.
Crowley had scaled at least four tall oaks before he had managed to find those birds’ nests. It wasn’t a meal of champions, to be sure, but when you have an overzealous firearm chirping along to Purple Rain at you, it certainly isn’t anything to complain about.
The demon stared at his hands, then at his knees and the bloody tears running through them. He… really wanted to live. Truly, this was quite the revelation. For a while there he had thought otherwise, believed that there wasn’t anything much worth living for when your own kind rejects you, but in these horrible, life-threatening circumstances, he had somehow come to terms with his own continued existence. Crowley wanted to live.
Conspiratorially, he looked sideways at Magus out of the corner of his eye. Well. He would like for that guy to live, too.
That resolved for the moment, the dynamic duo continued to sit in a peaceable, yet unspeakably uncertain quiet. The dismal clouds lurking in the upper echelons of the sky curled and wept, drizzly streams wailing down from above. It only took all of a heart-skipping minute for Crowley to notice that something was off.
“Hey, Magussss,” the demon said, his tongue coiling a little around the words. “Do you feel that?”
Stirring, the devilish mage squinted critically at him. “¿ʇɐɥʍ”
Crowley blinked, eyelids inching bit by bit, as if he wasn’t the type to blink very often. Then, he began to outright cackle, every loose snicker pittering out in some weird looping fashion that very nearly matched the kind of whooping his weapon of choice was prone to.
“¿ssssnƃɐɯ 'noʎ oʇ ƃuıʎɐssss ɯ,ı pɹoʍ ɐ puɐʇssssɹǝpun noʎ uɐɔ ¡ʎllɐǝɹ 'ǝlqıpǝɹɔuı ˙˙˙ʇssssnɾ 'ʇɐɥʇ oʇ uǝʇssssıl ¡pǝlqɯnɾ llɐ ǝɹɐ ssspɹoʍ ɹnoʎ”
This was just absolutely absurd. Something eerie was going on, no matter how hilarious Crowley found it. That Warlock was up to no good, and they had best prepare themselves for it. Just as he was about to share these preliminary inclinations to Magus, who would undoubtedly agree with him and at the same time understand very little of what was said, reality proceeded to go all topsy-turvy and dropkick him someplace entirely new.”
“A meteor wailed down on them from above at the Warlock's behest, the grassy prairie only lightly disturbed by the brilliantly burning corona of gaseous flame suspended in the sky. Time swung like a pendulum, melodious and crooning.
As the pair of devils made their way towards the center of action, Crowley attempted to figuratively break the ice a little. Magus seemed genuinely surprised to see him, offered a frustratingly inscrutable look, and then had the gall to say he 'appreciated' Crowley.
"Yeah, well," Crowley spluttered at Magus' retreating back, clearly at a loss for words. He hastily cobbled together something legible enough to spit out. "I appreciate you, too! Ha!"
Nice one, Crawly, a voice that sounded suspiciously like the Duke Hastur purred. Tell him you'll have his back forever and always next, yeah? Lend 'im a 'get out of Hell free' card, why don't you?
Stewing quietly in his own broiling thoughts, Crowley's gaze fled skyward once more to regard the impending meteor. It burned and bled thick, crystalline globs of smoggy vapor in its wake, mercurial veins of silver and molten bronze shimmering all around it. This would be one hell of a reckoning.
"Where's the Antichrist when you need him?" Crowley hissed under his breath, smoothing down the tattered lapels of his jacket before taking off after Magus at a quick, jilting step.
They entered the Warlock's concentrated sphere of influence with little resistance. Crowley found that more than a tiny bit unsettling; they were expected, then, and the impending battle would undoubtedly be a terrible one. Still, even as they strode inside, the air closed around them and murmuring like thousands of sudsy bubbles in his ears, he did not shy away.
One of those few they had fought before— clad all in green and equipped with a fiery determination that cumulated and burst into a lithe, gemstone-colored vulpine, dashed ahead of them into the fray. At Magus' signal, Crowley hefted his gun and unloaded a whole host of wailing sirens upon the hovering Warlock, the winds and the flaming energy of the moment rippling around him.
He was just a hop, skip, and a jump from insanity. It was a good thing his leg was likely to be out of commission soon, then, if these random blasts of explosive energy were anything to go by. Crowley yelped as one went off near to him, tremors traveling through the earth and temporarily making him deaf to the battle spinning around with all the tumultuous fervor of a hailstorm.
Along the steadily thinning extent of his attention, worn threadbare by the crashing noise and crushing pressure, the serpent saw Magus go flying through the air, the chainsaw snarling loosely in his grip as he slammed into a rocky outcropping. A fearsome, whiskered cartoon mouse entered the fray in that same instant, a determined set to his shoulders as his allies spilled in behind him.
I'm fighting alongside Mickey bloody Mouse, Crowley thought, dazedly, straightening up just in time to fire off another wingdinging shot at the Warlock. No one back home will believe this.
That is, if he ever made it back home. Alive.”
During my first Dante's Abyss in 2018, I attempted to write Pennywise the Dancing Clown. This was a tournament-style event where we were randomly assigned partners with other participants, and then we’d duke it out in 2v2 brawls.
This writing experience did not go so well for me, for a variety of reasons. My writing partner did not appreciate my performance, though the exact reasons remain unclear to me. Despite being incredibly busy with life, though, I still made time to write. While I enjoyed writing the character as an exercise, It didn't face enough internal struggle. The main challenge It faced was being captured by external forces and forced to participate in the tournament—though the specifics are fuzzy in my memory. I particularly enjoyed delving into raw combat scenes and really driving home the monstrous aspects of Pennywise, but emotionally, I don't think I reached any significant depth or felt truly passionate about my writing here, except perhaps when pitted against Jason Voorhees.
Before Jason, It had been in a few fights, but It never really cared about what happened, or… the outcome? It was survival-driven, sure. It reveled in the opportunity to use Its claws and teeth, to release the frustration of being transported to a new world after Its last (canon and non-canon) defeats, but It wasn’t… interesting. But then the fight with Jason happened, and it forced me to ponder on a battle between two… well, movie monsters—one truly monstrous and literally out of this world, and the other formerly human, driven by sentimentality and revenge.
Despite some of the more harebrained portrayals of him in the Friday the 13th series, Jason is ultimately… a very human monster.
”Even after Pennywise had struck the water like a skipping stone, it wasn’t long before the water once again became eerily still. Sinking into the murk and gloom of Crystal Lake’s shallows, the child-eating monster observed as the hulking, dark shadow that was Jason Voorhees approached the water’s edge.
Jason watched as the lip of the lake shivered against the shore, the pebbles under his mud-caked boots shifting as the tide came rushing in. Only a slowly expanding ripple remained to betray the creature’s disappearance, but the serial murderer just gripped his machete like a man possessed, the eyeholes of his aged hockey mask never leaving the water.
All at once a shape emerged from the lake, only the silhouette visible as water sloughed off from its frame. One arm stretched out to reveal the delicate webbing between Its clawed fingers, veiny and nearly translucent from the moonlight passing through it. Scaly skin was layered over Its body-- tough, chitinous, and rigid like armor, while the froggy lips of Its face gaped like a fish swallowing around a pebble, parted slightly to reveal fanged teeth. Mud and slime coated the thing’s scales, reeking of pondscum and gutted fish.
A gurgling croak came out from the gill-man’s throat as It lumbered toward Jason. It moved slowly. Purposefully, like a monster out of a black-and-white movie. Thus, it was rather easy for Jason to haul one arm back and smash his machete into the gill-man’s face.
“Holy shit!” Handsome Jack hollered from somewhere far off, apparently watching the fight while fending off Shantotto. “Get ‘im, Hockey Puck!”
Emitting a choked-off snarl, the aquatic man stumbled backward. Its scaly visage twisted with rage, the creature lunged at Jason’s midsection, claws slicing through the undead golem’s tattered clothing and digging into the decaying flesh underneath. Unfortunately, the newly-minted Creature from the Black Lagoon wasn’t quite prepared for the massive fist that closed around the fibrous gills on one side of Its neck, jerking Its head roughly to the side before hurling It toward the tree-line.
Pennywise collided with the trunk of a tall spruce with a solid thunk. Scrabbling at the damp earth littered with leaves, still rapidly shifting back to Its preferred form, the circus terror looked up to see that Its prey-turned-predator had vanished from the lakeside.
Ch ch ch... ah ah ah...
A very insistent and ex-ceeeeeedingly irresistible instinct caused It to tear through the wild blackberry bushes growing nearby and vanish into the undergrowth. It fled, not because of something so pathetic as Fear, but because… because…!
Suddenly, a spark of orange filtered through the mess of brush up ahead. Pennywise angled toward this spark like a hound catching a whiff of just the right scent and, after about fifty yards of tearing through the woods at breakneck speed, emerged into a clearing. A shack stood unassumingly at its center, dilapidated and toppling into disrepair.
But, the orange light was there, a beacon flickering against the cracked pane of one of the few windows left. Clawing at this window, the clown eventually bashed Its way inside in a shower of broken glass.
The first thing that caught Its attention was the candlelight. Tall and short pillars of wax sat upon what appeared to be an altar, the yellow glow of dozens of flames circling around it in a perfect circle. Pants and a pale cable knit sweater were laid delicately over the shrine, slightly wrinkled and stained. Most interestingly of all, however, was the severed head sitting at the center of it all. Shriveled up like an apple, brown with age, clumps of stringy blond hair still clinging to it like cobwebs, the head stared with eyeless pits back at Pennywise.
A harsh wind blew through the shack. It rattled the rickety walls and chilled the air, the many candles wavering fearfully. And with this wind came a soft whisper, low and sad, keening into the night.
“Jason…”
Pennywise stared at the dead woman’s dried-up, ugly little skull. If It was a dog, Its ears might’ve perked up.
”Oh, Jason. My special, special boy!”
And then, something clicked into place in Its evil, evil brain.
Grinning a toothy grin, the clown strolled up and plucked the woman’s skull from the table. It peered into ‘her’ eyes gleefully, shoulders shaking from mirth. “Sorry, ma’am! I’m gonna have to borrow your face for a while. Your kiddo’s about to get the surprise of his life!”
The wind moaned, roaring so loudly against the window panes that it almost sounded like someone screaming in anguish. Pennywise cackled and promptly chucked the head like a rotten tomato at the wall. The thing burst into dust and crumbly bits of leathery flesh, sending the clown into another fit of hysterics. And as It laughed, the Monster of Derry’s body began to shift, twist, change.
The door to the shack creaked open. Pamela Voorhees turned to welcome her baby boy home with open arms.”
Jason watched as the lip of the lake shivered against the shore, the pebbles under his mud-caked boots shifting as the tide came rushing in. Only a slowly expanding ripple remained to betray the creature’s disappearance, but the serial murderer just gripped his machete like a man possessed, the eyeholes of his aged hockey mask never leaving the water.
All at once a shape emerged from the lake, only the silhouette visible as water sloughed off from its frame. One arm stretched out to reveal the delicate webbing between Its clawed fingers, veiny and nearly translucent from the moonlight passing through it. Scaly skin was layered over Its body-- tough, chitinous, and rigid like armor, while the froggy lips of Its face gaped like a fish swallowing around a pebble, parted slightly to reveal fanged teeth. Mud and slime coated the thing’s scales, reeking of pondscum and gutted fish.
A gurgling croak came out from the gill-man’s throat as It lumbered toward Jason. It moved slowly. Purposefully, like a monster out of a black-and-white movie. Thus, it was rather easy for Jason to haul one arm back and smash his machete into the gill-man’s face.
“Holy shit!” Handsome Jack hollered from somewhere far off, apparently watching the fight while fending off Shantotto. “Get ‘im, Hockey Puck!”
Emitting a choked-off snarl, the aquatic man stumbled backward. Its scaly visage twisted with rage, the creature lunged at Jason’s midsection, claws slicing through the undead golem’s tattered clothing and digging into the decaying flesh underneath. Unfortunately, the newly-minted Creature from the Black Lagoon wasn’t quite prepared for the massive fist that closed around the fibrous gills on one side of Its neck, jerking Its head roughly to the side before hurling It toward the tree-line.
Pennywise collided with the trunk of a tall spruce with a solid thunk. Scrabbling at the damp earth littered with leaves, still rapidly shifting back to Its preferred form, the circus terror looked up to see that Its prey-turned-predator had vanished from the lakeside.
Ch ch ch... ah ah ah...
A very insistent and ex-ceeeeeedingly irresistible instinct caused It to tear through the wild blackberry bushes growing nearby and vanish into the undergrowth. It fled, not because of something so pathetic as Fear, but because… because…!
Suddenly, a spark of orange filtered through the mess of brush up ahead. Pennywise angled toward this spark like a hound catching a whiff of just the right scent and, after about fifty yards of tearing through the woods at breakneck speed, emerged into a clearing. A shack stood unassumingly at its center, dilapidated and toppling into disrepair.
But, the orange light was there, a beacon flickering against the cracked pane of one of the few windows left. Clawing at this window, the clown eventually bashed Its way inside in a shower of broken glass.
The first thing that caught Its attention was the candlelight. Tall and short pillars of wax sat upon what appeared to be an altar, the yellow glow of dozens of flames circling around it in a perfect circle. Pants and a pale cable knit sweater were laid delicately over the shrine, slightly wrinkled and stained. Most interestingly of all, however, was the severed head sitting at the center of it all. Shriveled up like an apple, brown with age, clumps of stringy blond hair still clinging to it like cobwebs, the head stared with eyeless pits back at Pennywise.
A harsh wind blew through the shack. It rattled the rickety walls and chilled the air, the many candles wavering fearfully. And with this wind came a soft whisper, low and sad, keening into the night.
“Jason…”
Pennywise stared at the dead woman’s dried-up, ugly little skull. If It was a dog, Its ears might’ve perked up.
”Oh, Jason. My special, special boy!”
And then, something clicked into place in Its evil, evil brain.
Grinning a toothy grin, the clown strolled up and plucked the woman’s skull from the table. It peered into ‘her’ eyes gleefully, shoulders shaking from mirth. “Sorry, ma’am! I’m gonna have to borrow your face for a while. Your kiddo’s about to get the surprise of his life!”
The wind moaned, roaring so loudly against the window panes that it almost sounded like someone screaming in anguish. Pennywise cackled and promptly chucked the head like a rotten tomato at the wall. The thing burst into dust and crumbly bits of leathery flesh, sending the clown into another fit of hysterics. And as It laughed, the Monster of Derry’s body began to shift, twist, change.
The door to the shack creaked open. Pamela Voorhees turned to welcome her baby boy home with open arms.”
Overall, I was disappointed with my portrayal of Pennywise. I attempted to play It again in Dante's Abyss 2021, but I couldn't get very far. Life circumstances certainly played a role, but I also didn't have the motivation or drive to put so much of myself, my heart, into a character that, frankly, isn't meant to have heart.
It surprised me how utterly dissatisfied I felt with my own writing, and it brought me down. I don't think I will attempt to play this character again unless it’s in a minor NPC role, as much as I enjoy exploring Its perspective and writing horror… there is something inside me that just CANNOT fully detach and embrace the mindset necessary to get really, really messed up.
After the 2018 debacle, when the dust had settled with the creation of Multerra, I was… intrigued by the idea of joining an event again, when Alex mentioned running Dante’s Abyss. I’d never attempted or read Dante’s Abyss in the “island” format, prior to that point. It was honestly pretty scary to me, as an idea. I’m not afraid to say I can get competitive and take losses pretty hard. I was also recently married, moved to a new place, everything was in lockdown due to Covid breaking out, and I’d just started a new job after months of wallowing in depression and alcohol. I felt very alone and was at a pretty dark, painful point in my life.
I started writing Arthur because I enjoyed the video game he was in and the world of it. I felt a very close connection to that world, not just because I’d spent hours exploring it, but because a lot of it resonated with my own upbringing and experiences. I felt a deep connection with nature and animals, as Arthur does. I felt the pressures of those around me, and the crushing weight that failure holds. I wrote about loss, and grief, and survival through hunting. I felt alone and like I was struggling to keep several somethings afloat that should’ve died a long time ago, one of those somethings being myself.
The character was, is, raw and honest. He is personal to me.
When I first started writing Arthur on the site, I don’t remember having any intention of entering him in Dante’s Abyss. He was a comfort character to me, I would say. It felt warm, settling, to write this character. The narrative voice I used to write him was very intentional, reflective of his accent and culture, my own culture. I would say I modeled a lot of how he spoke and thought not just after his video game representation, but also after myself and the people around me in my day to day life.
Dante’s Abyss felt like such an alien environment to throw Arthur into, but it was honestly… so interesting, deciding how he would think about certain unfamiliar technologies, the whole concept of a parallel universe. How he would rationalize things that were totally foreign to him. How he would act, think and speak with people far more modern than him, and even others more antiquated or alien. I tried to write him honestly, with heart. I wanted to write him very seriously, and this was very intentional. His abilities were as close to canon as I could get him at that point, really. He was on a normal human level, a normal guy.
I wanted him to grapple with being human. I wanted him to fight to survive. When writing about his time on the island, I had him think very deeply and contemplatively about things. I had him be very aware of his physical self, his health, and the world around him. My strength when writing I feel has always been setting, but I didn’t just want to write Arthur floating in the setting, or just use it as a backdrop. I wanted to write him interacting with it, not blending with it, but interacting and coming up against barriers, finding things, moving stones, leaving tracks in the mud, bracing and shivering in the wind, freezing in the snow… overall existing as a real, human being connected to the world he’s in and fighting to understand it.
Arthur was very much a journey, and not a nice one. He wanted very much to return from the extraordinary to the mundane, as a character.
He joined Syntech's event for the money; not unlike his past life, always looking for money to support himself and those around him. He took comfort where he could get it, from his environment and others. His connection to Kopaka was initiated under duress, and it was all an attempt to gain some semblance of comfort. I wanted Arthur to be noble, but flawed. He’s a criminal and has killed people, it’s all he ever knew, but he’s trying to be better. He’s in a new world and he’s trying so damn hard to be better.
I don’t know, something about writing Arthur just really jived for me. I was really not expecting that people would like him at all, because he was an outlaw who should’ve been dead and somehow wasn’t. In a lot of ways I feel I’ve done this character a grave disservice, because in his source material his story was so complete and final. He didn’t need to live. But it made things… interesting, as a writer, to try and imagine what a man like that would do if he’d been given the opportunity to live, in a life totally divorced from his old one.
My first foray into Death Game as Pathfinder was… well, it was something. It was special. I wrote Pathfinder, from Apex Legends. A lot of us were writing Apex characters at the time… you had to be there!
Anyway, I struggled a lot with Pathfinder as a character. He didn’t have much conflict or internal doubts, he was so happy… the biggest struggle was that Revenant and I couldn’t find any fights to get into. I did enjoy writing his attitude and trying to flex my humor writing skills, but overall, my time spent writing Pathfinder was… staying up literally all night to produce posts I felt weren’t all that good or satisfying to read.
I think, at this point, I was suffering some… writerly fatigue, after the Dante’s Abyss with Arthur. I put my whole soul into that character and things got a little ugly, towards the end. I think I produced some of the best damn character writing of my life with him, but everything after, for a long time, felt very shallow compared to that.
Since I’ve already covered Dante’s Abyss 2021, I’ll hop right into Death Game 2022, where I played Klarion the Witch Boy. I was worried, for a while there, that Klarion would fall in the way of Pennywise due to his inhumanity/irreverence when it came to life. I also worried he might be too silly and like Pathfinder. But the immediate bond he formed with Sand Hawk really improved things. I was writing this absolute goblin of a character and Sand Hawk’s mere presence humanized him, gave me something to ground his shenanigans with.
Even though this event ended fairly prematurely, I was very excited by the mechanics in place, as I had been contemplating running an event of my own with similar mechanics at that point. Klarion’s magical knowledge and the uncovering of the Slenderman’s little altars that needed to be destroyed created such a dope character moment, because as soon as that information came to light, Klarion was driven—he was going to crush all those little shrines or whatever and die trying. He wanted to return to his cat and escape the Death Game, and by golly, that was the way to do it.
By the time of Dante’s Abyss 2022, I was fumbling again. I tried to write Father Gascoigne, from Bloodborne. I was dealing with a lot of things in my life, death and family problems. I think a lot of his personal struggles as a character hit a bit too close to home for me, and writing him felt actually painful… not to mention that Bloodborne’s characters are not very developed in the first place, so much of it felt like straight up projection. I feel that I actually faltered a lot when writing this character because I chose to avoid the deep grief and sense of de-personalization he would feel from recognizing what he had done in his former life, and really leaned more into his savagery and bloodlust.
In a lot of ways, Gascoigne felt similar to writing Arthur. He had a very distinct, antiquated voice that I tried to emulate. A unique perspective on life and the world. He was connected to his environment. He was a sad, flawed individual. But I just wasn’t capturing that same feeling I had when writing Arthur—I go back and read my Gascoigne stuff now and I don’t even recognize it. It reads wonderfully, to me, and normally I hate looking back on my old writing. But I can see the gaps where I cut corners, emotionally, to avoid delving too deep into my feelings, and that was why I couldn’t bear to write him for much longer.
I deeply appreciate Sigmund for writing with me in that event. Fennec/Jacob, Demetri, Aster, and Christine, as well. You all really made some great moments with this character that I consider some of my most well-written, to be quite honest. I think it was just a personal failing of mine that I couldn’t find it within me to connect with the character.
Compared to Gascoigne, Death Game 2023 had a lighter tone, at least initially. The trio of Coda, King Shark, and Zayin brought a rare and special dynamic that I’d lacked in my previous writing experiences.
In character, it was like a family group, or just a very dear collection of friends who’d grown close as family. Out of character, our interactions were full of laughter and we all thoroughly enjoyed writing together, it was literally electric. We were constantly brainstorming and discussing our plans, and the NPCs we were introduced to only fueled our enthusiasm for the event further.
I don’t consider Coda one of my stronger characters… personally. Her motivations for joining the event felt weak. Her emotions were, ultimately, trivialized by the narrative—something I walked right into and really stumped my motivation. I would like to think I wrote her well, but what really made her have a spark as a character was her interactions with those around her. Alone, she wasn’t very interesting at all, in my opinion… which somewhat makes sense, considering she was created as a one-off homebrew tabletop character. I think I’d like to try with her again, but I hesitate to pick her up as a main.
But still, that doesn’t mean my time writing her was any less golden. The hours spent thumbing over my posts was excruciating, but it was all worth it to show them to my fellow writers and discuss ways to move forward with our character interactions. It was all about telling a story, and I think we told a truly gripping, fun and heartfelt one.
Now, as for Dante’s Abyss 2023? I don’t know what came over me; I was on a Transformers kick for the billionth time in so many years. It was literally like catching lightning in a bottle, and I owe it all to Don Isaac and Thundercracker’s writers for helping to build such an absolutely fascinating, gut-wrenching dynamic between our characters.
Their story was about a struggle for humanity, through and through. The hardships our characters faced were just… so crucial to the narrative, and many of the elements and themes we introduced—both intentional and unintentional—really did a lot to ground things. The disaster movie and war campaign elements woven into the overall plot heightened this feeling. Our characters had a clear adversary and all came with battle experience, driven to defeat it for various, sometimes selfish reasons.
The bond between Skywarp and Thundercracker was shaky from the start. They had fought together as soldiers for countless years, but their relationship had evolved into that of brothers, over time. Despite their long history together, it was Thundercracker who seemed to truly understand the weight of their age and all they’d done, and he was the only one willing to let go of the past after being given the opportunity to start anew in the Crossroads.
While Skywarp held a disdain for humanity (or simply organics), viewing them as mere playthings and insects due to their fragility and short lifespans, Thundercracker had immersed himself in their world to better understand them. He had a dog, ran his own business, and we hinted at the possibility of organic connections before his human girlfriend even came together as an idea. And unlike Skywarp, Thundercracker had always been skeptical about their war and his allegiance to the Decepticons! This contrast in beliefs created an instant, fascinating conflict between these two giant FREAKING robots, leading to a gradual buildup of tension throughout the event!
As injuries mounted and the situation grew more and more dire, things began to quite literally fracture, with Skywarp frantically trying to patch them up, because despite everything—he did not want to lose Thundercracker, this last fragment of his home universe. He changed and grew as a character to keep him.
Don Isaac, on the other hand, was utterly human. He was an unhinged human, who wasn’t afraid to swing with the literal millennia old robots, but he was human. It made him so poignant as a character, I cannot state enough. Even as he was oblivious to what Skywarp and Thundercracker truly were, even as he went up against literal titans, he was so strong as a character. His body was so small and yet he fought so hard. He was so aware of how little he was in the grand scheme of things, and yet he threw himself into it anyway.
I think it’s also an interesting thing, how all of our characters were hiding things from one another, except Don Isaac. Skywarp was putting on an act, pretending to be a human pilot in order to flirt with Isaac, treating him like a literal source of amusement. It was like playing house or acting out a TV drama for him, with no intention of actually pursuing anything. He compared Isaac to a pet, an insect, multiple times. He barely considered Isaac sentient.
Thundercracker, on the other hand, was complicit in this—he knew about Skywarp's facade, but stayed silent, even as he hid his own doubts about the Decepticon cause and how much sheer humanity had seeped into him! God, it was so good! It just fell right into place!
Don Isaac was authentic. So painfully, unnervingly authentic it made Skywarp actually uncomfortable. So authentic it made Thundercracker respect him. So authentic and wholehearted it made them both come to view him as a leader, despite his comparative youth and teeny-tiny stature.
Isaac’s humanity was screaming in their faces, bursting at the seams of his armor and raging at the kaiju and robotic behemoths trying to crush him underfoot. He was so earnest and himself, both in romancing Skywarp’s holoform and when in the air. Skywarp and Thundercracker could not escape just how human and real he was! These robots, millions upon millions of years his senior, with hundreds of battles under their cockpits, could not ignore this tiny little man with his positively explosive persona.
And this made them confront things about themselves. Hard, ruinous things. Thundercracker grappled with his mortality, how his doubts had always made him a touch too sentimental to be a proper Decepticon. It bolstered his desire to connect with the temporary, the human and the mundane. I cannot stress enough how the plot line of having a dog, of wanting to be closer to organic life, of his fascination with human film and media, defines him as a truly sad, doomed character.
He’s this eternal thing that will never rust and never die unless he’s actually killed. He’s grieving things that aren’t even gone yet. Everything he loves will eventually rot… except Skywarp.
Skywarp is energetic, seemingly careless, hurling himself into danger without thinking twice. He’s grappled with his mortality before and has decided to live life to the fullest, even if he is afraid. He lectures Thundercracker on being weak, of being sentimental, for fearing death and letting it paralyze him… he doesn’t allow himself to be tender. He is disgusted by organic life and views it as innately lesser in value! But he deeply loves Thundercracker, and he grows to greatly admire Don Isaac despite his short existence, and so he comes to accept that the temporary isn’t any less meaningful for how short-lived or vulnerable it is—and now he’s inclined to cling to the temporary.
Y’all?!
And Don Isaac. It all revolves around Don Isaac, really, because he’s the catalyst for all this change. The Bespoiled Nippur and Detroit battles just… gosh, y’all. I’m speechless.
This is truly the magic of crossover and collaborative roleplay sites, and really the power of events, as a whole. They are the perfect juncture to push the boundaries of your writing, stretch your narrative muscles, to delve into themes that you may have never considered before—all in the company of very good, very dear friends.
Original Post.
The daylight had long since faded. A red sky rose from the horizon, the evening sun sinking beneath the waves, illuminating the flotsam that was all that remained of the navies that sailed into the now-silent maelstrom. There, a ragged sheet of hull plating resting against a reef. Elsewhere, a splintered spar of wood from a classical vessel, its wood etched with sigils that still burned with an alien incandescence.
And here Isaac stood, above it all. A cigarette hung from his fingers, embers smouldering in the dying light. It was a Victory- and as such, it was glorious. The scars carved into his body, the pints of blood left behind in those sunken cities, wreckage of his craft, the uncounted dead that Syntech had marched into the meat grinder. He counted the cost as he lifted the smoke-stick to his lips, inhaling the nicotine in search of succour.
"Those things'll kill you, you know," Skylar smirked at him, leaning against the railing of the gantry overlooking the war-torn archipelago. She reached out, impishly flicking the burning ember from the tip of the cigarette, ash and sparks raining into the darkness far beneath Syntech's vessel. "I can't have my favourite Meatbag getting their filters dirtied."
Isaac scoffed, shaking his head as he gave a smile despite himself. "The least of our worries, I suspect," he said, tearing his gaze away from the holo-matter avatar as he looked back towards the seas beyond. "There were dire moments," he confessed, letting the ruins of his cigarette fall into the hungry depths. "I'm told that death is not the end, in this place," he said, looking back to Skywarp as he ran his fingers along the ragged edges of his moustache. "I know you'll want to find Thundercracker, wherever he's found himself."
"Yeah," Skywarp said with a shrug, brilliant eyes looking out into the setting sun alongside him. "Fun as it's been, I miss the big lug," she sighed, shaking her head. "If I leave him alone for much longer, wherever he's ended up, he'll end up- I dunno, weaving flower crowns or something," she sniggered. "Which- well, as funny as it would be, I can't let the man drag himself down into joining some kind of pacifist anarcho-syndicalist commune," the transformer said, pushing herself off the railing.
"I think I came here with someone else as well," Isaac admitted, turning and following Skylar as the pair of victors ambled along the gleaming gantry. "My Manservant, Pablo. We were together when I was taken, much like you and Thundercracker. It's been some time, since we arrived- I'm not sure what's become of him in the months that followed."
"Well, if present company is anything to judge by," the Lady Watari said, wrapping her hands behind her head as she made her way down the stairs. "Then anyone who survives more than a week with you is more than able to handle themselves," she snorted, rounding around the next flight of stainless stairs.
"Given the attrition rates, you might have a point," the noble said, electing to embrace a degree of dark humour, rather than dwell on the dead they had left behind them. He'd scarcely met them- but he'd seen great beasts of flesh and steel torn asunder, scant few inches from himself. The metal and meat strewn across those now-peaceful battlefields- could they have been him?
No. He was different- that fact had been drilled into him from the very beginning, and he'd never had cause to question it before now. He stood atop the mound of the lesser, unworthy dead, and as much as he might weep for their loss, there remained the simple fact that he was a Noble of Santagria- he was simply built different.
He smiled at Skylar as the pair of them arrived at a gleaming airlock, the portal sliding open on perfectly oiled mechanisms. Syntech may be an anarcho-capitalist juggernaut of entertainment that happily exchanged blood for profit margin, but damned if they didn't know how to maintain their facilities.
"Then it would appear that this is it, then," he said, taking a moment to lean his battered body against the doorway. "We've our companions to chase down, and worlds to explore," the Don said, a wistful grin on his weary face.
"I guess so," Skylar said, giving a shrug. "That would make this a goodbye, then, wouldn't it? Never been that great at those," the transformer said. How long had she warred alongside her compatriot? How many millennia had she spent with Thundercracker at her side, only to be left alone, now.
"But a momentary farewell, my Lady," Isaac said, his back protesting as he dipped low, seizing the holographic hand and gently pressing his lips to its back, an electric fizz suffusing the surface of his skin.
"We'll always have Detroit."
The daylight had long since faded. A red sky rose from the horizon, the evening sun sinking beneath the waves, illuminating the flotsam that was all that remained of the navies that sailed into the now-silent maelstrom. There, a ragged sheet of hull plating resting against a reef. Elsewhere, a splintered spar of wood from a classical vessel, its wood etched with sigils that still burned with an alien incandescence.
And here Isaac stood, above it all. A cigarette hung from his fingers, embers smouldering in the dying light. It was a Victory- and as such, it was glorious. The scars carved into his body, the pints of blood left behind in those sunken cities, wreckage of his craft, the uncounted dead that Syntech had marched into the meat grinder. He counted the cost as he lifted the smoke-stick to his lips, inhaling the nicotine in search of succour.
"Those things'll kill you, you know," Skylar smirked at him, leaning against the railing of the gantry overlooking the war-torn archipelago. She reached out, impishly flicking the burning ember from the tip of the cigarette, ash and sparks raining into the darkness far beneath Syntech's vessel. "I can't have my favourite Meatbag getting their filters dirtied."
Isaac scoffed, shaking his head as he gave a smile despite himself. "The least of our worries, I suspect," he said, tearing his gaze away from the holo-matter avatar as he looked back towards the seas beyond. "There were dire moments," he confessed, letting the ruins of his cigarette fall into the hungry depths. "I'm told that death is not the end, in this place," he said, looking back to Skywarp as he ran his fingers along the ragged edges of his moustache. "I know you'll want to find Thundercracker, wherever he's found himself."
"Yeah," Skywarp said with a shrug, brilliant eyes looking out into the setting sun alongside him. "Fun as it's been, I miss the big lug," she sighed, shaking her head. "If I leave him alone for much longer, wherever he's ended up, he'll end up- I dunno, weaving flower crowns or something," she sniggered. "Which- well, as funny as it would be, I can't let the man drag himself down into joining some kind of pacifist anarcho-syndicalist commune," the transformer said, pushing herself off the railing.
"I think I came here with someone else as well," Isaac admitted, turning and following Skylar as the pair of victors ambled along the gleaming gantry. "My Manservant, Pablo. We were together when I was taken, much like you and Thundercracker. It's been some time, since we arrived- I'm not sure what's become of him in the months that followed."
"Well, if present company is anything to judge by," the Lady Watari said, wrapping her hands behind her head as she made her way down the stairs. "Then anyone who survives more than a week with you is more than able to handle themselves," she snorted, rounding around the next flight of stainless stairs.
"Given the attrition rates, you might have a point," the noble said, electing to embrace a degree of dark humour, rather than dwell on the dead they had left behind them. He'd scarcely met them- but he'd seen great beasts of flesh and steel torn asunder, scant few inches from himself. The metal and meat strewn across those now-peaceful battlefields- could they have been him?
No. He was different- that fact had been drilled into him from the very beginning, and he'd never had cause to question it before now. He stood atop the mound of the lesser, unworthy dead, and as much as he might weep for their loss, there remained the simple fact that he was a Noble of Santagria- he was simply built different.
He smiled at Skylar as the pair of them arrived at a gleaming airlock, the portal sliding open on perfectly oiled mechanisms. Syntech may be an anarcho-capitalist juggernaut of entertainment that happily exchanged blood for profit margin, but damned if they didn't know how to maintain their facilities.
"Then it would appear that this is it, then," he said, taking a moment to lean his battered body against the doorway. "We've our companions to chase down, and worlds to explore," the Don said, a wistful grin on his weary face.
"I guess so," Skylar said, giving a shrug. "That would make this a goodbye, then, wouldn't it? Never been that great at those," the transformer said. How long had she warred alongside her compatriot? How many millennia had she spent with Thundercracker at her side, only to be left alone, now.
"But a momentary farewell, my Lady," Isaac said, his back protesting as he dipped low, seizing the holographic hand and gently pressing his lips to its back, an electric fizz suffusing the surface of his skin.
"We'll always have Detroit."
*chef's kiss*