Black Flowers: Brawl of the Dead REDUX

[Trenchcoat Man]

Elroodan, Elrood - An alleyways leading up to SPACEPORT B

“Aw, Sithspit, man – They’re coming! They’re karking coming!”

Smitt, Jezzy, and Fat Gay Dan were not native to Elrood by any means, as their tattered street fashion no doubt screamed to the more agrarian locals. Colored hair, spiked bracelets, black velvet and leather, vinyl and mesh were their counter-cultural attire of the day, vying for status within the Spunk Rawk scene (or what passed for it these days, anyway) and the relevant concert they were on-planet to attend. The whole thing was not at all shocking anymore and had become quite predictably uniform, but no matter what crimes of Posing had been committed, they were just teenagers, trying on new personas and then shedding them for new ones like dead skin cells, and they didn’t deserve to go out like this.

Devoured by a bunch of hungry conformists in a back alley while trying to make it to their busted-up astrovan.

“Shut the kark up, Smitt – Man the kark up and keep it the kark together.”

“Kark sake, Smitt – It’s karking unattractive as kark.”

Jezzy was a little spitfire in her straight laced combat boots, spikes adorning the toes like some wicked triceratops of podiatry as if she’d been waiting for this zombie apocalypse her entire life (and if you were to check the reading material on her holopad, you’d find she probably was). She had kept a brick in her purse for those moments where all the males in the pub got a bit too wasted and developed that rapey, predatory look in their eye. Naturally, when a significant number of the population began to salivate and come at her hungry, she fell into a familiar routine, making short work of their skulls and appearing every bit the veteran gladiator.

It was because of this hyper-aggressive disposition of men that caused her to seek out a night’s comfort in the arms of Smitt, his sensitive and nurturing nature persuading her to overlook his frail, tiny physique for the sheer novelty of going to bed with someone who wouldn’t think of her as his property or conquest. That was a week ago, and they reckoned themselves young and in love. Eventually, however, this once cherished sensitivity, when thrust into different circumstances, became an object of disdain as Smitt was found to be completely incapable of adjusting to this curveball that life had thrown their way.

Fat Gay Dan, on the other hand, acted the complete opposite, courageously battling back the horde with his fists, his weight, and a sewer lid. His valor was inspiring, and Jezzy would probably have considered his candidacy for mating, if not for the simple fact that Fat Gay Dan was quite dauntingly fat and probably more than a little gay. Surprise.

“We’re not going to make it. We’re karked. We’re so karking karked…”

Jezzy bashed a zombie in the temple, the momentum from her swinging purse then batting the head against the alleywall, smashing it soundly. With the momentary gap in attacks, she reached into her purse and produced a can of black spraypaint, tossing it to Smitt.

“There…Karking do something before your karking piss yourself.”

“What….What do you want me to do?”

Fat Gay Dan was getting bombarded, holding the line from behind the lid as Jezzy beat the zombies back one at a time.

“Call the karking bogeyman, you karking ____,” Fat Gay Dan exclaimed, calling Smitt a slur for homosexuals. “Do karking ANYTHING. ANYTHING AT ALL.”

“For real. Holy sith. Ugh,” Jezzy echoed, disgusted. Fat Gay Dan gave a hefty push, heaving some of the undead back into each other and causing them to topple over.

With shaking hands, Smitt began to spraypaint a sigil onto the alley’s back wall -- Their dead end. It was a tag that could be found in basically every city in the galaxy, but nobody really ever seemed to know who it belonged to or what it meant. It was superstition. It wasn’t working.

It was worthless.

“Aw, kark. Nothing’s karking happening,” Smitt was quite obviously crying at this point, crouching into a little ball. “We’re karked. We’re karking dead.”

They were exhausted, their morale extinguished. After all that fighting, they hadn’t made a dent, and the mob of zombies just kept coming. They wouldn’t be able to stand forever. Their parents were probably (and, in fact) dead and they had nowhere else to go but Hell.
Whether they knew or not, they were orphans. They were homeless and lost. They were gutterspunks.

And that made them part of his court.

It was the sickly stink of Gungan algae-tobacco that alerted them to his presence.

“Oi, children,” he spoke around the cigarette, gesturing with a thumb over his shoulder to the subway tunnel miraculously having appeared behind him. “On your bike, then.”

The youths didn’t need to be told twice, fleeing hurriedly down the Subway steps. The entrance vanished behind them.

He had been dealing with this type of thing all evening – vagrants escaping into his realm, leaving the door wide open, and him having to deal with more and more of this rubbish.

“Ruddy household drudge, I am,” he muttered, drawing his lightsaber and igniting it with a snap-hiss, the beam of light struggling to stay lit, humming arhythmically like a drunken dragonfly.

The zombie at the head of the pack lunged for him and was met with a quick vertical strike, dissecting him in half. Benedict continued the motion by drawing his blade out of the undead man’s hip, turning to take a shot at what may have been the corpse’s wife’s head.

The lightsaber’s poor battery faltered and the blade withdrew, leaving her head undisturbed. Benedict overswung, his motion continuing forward, lopping off the forehead of the walking dead beside her as the lightsaber reignited. He stumbled against the nearby building, pressing himself flat against it, narrowly avoiding the falling air conditioning unit as it fell from the 11th story apartment to “coincidentally “crush the female that had narrowly escaped decapitation only a moment ago.

It was as if the city were fighting alongside him.

“Tell me where it hurts, luv – I’m only here for you,” he stated to no one in particular, reacquiring his disinterested stance at the back of the alley. With a final exhale of smoke, he proceeded to flick the spent cigarette at the horde…

And, as if they had been pre-soaked in gasoline, the entire frontline ignited in a funeral pyre.

 

[Trenchcoat Man]

“Ah. You.”

It was only a matter of time until he’d found it. Fat Gay Dan’s sewer lid had to have to come from somewhere, and it came from here -- A picked scab on Elrood City’s concrete flesh, now pussing with the bubbling black that poisoned its sewers, its organs, its veins.

Benedict thought he recognized the thing that now barred his path.

The Invisible Witnesses to the Defilement of Our Beloved Sister Susan were no strangers to the darkened edges of the galaxy -- These monsters from outside known space, no mystery; the Black Myth enslaved all. Some say this one was even once a Witness itself.

Jezzy’s abandoned spraypaint can rattled as Benedict shook it, making small talk with what was understood to be a former acquaintance, but may have just been an exercise in practiced con-artistry and bad luck magick.

“It’s been a long time – A bit far from home, yeah?”

Around the sewer entrance, Benedict began painting the sacred geometry and forbidden language of a ritual sigil. If he and the ooze were ever once friends, it was betrayed when he sprayed the tendrils blocking the manhole in its projected face.

“Kark, mate, did you make a wrong turn...”

The unholy design complete, Benedict rolled his eyes back into his head, his free hand making odd gestures as he muttered allowed the miserable incantation:

XIQUAL UZARFE AEPALIZAGE​

Reaching out, he gripped an invisible doorknob and twisted.

And that was it. No fireworks, no glowing bright lights, or earthquakes, or bleeding walls. The ritual concluded as pompous and bombastic as a silent fart, and nothing more. The tendrils did nothing.

“Don’t just sit there looking all oozie, mate – You know the score. Sod off.”

Trembling and dissolving, they receded and vanished, granting Benedict entry at last. He tossed the spraycan down into the dark pit and began to descend the ladder as the clanging and rattling called out the infected rats and other vermin which surrounded the ladder and leapt at his combat boots, horny for vengeance.

With a satisfying crunch, he hopped off onto several of them, carapaces and bones instantly giving way to wicked tread. He stomped once more, but ceased, watching as the creatures began to scream and turn themselves inside out, ravaged by the tapeworms and disease and the myriad of other parasites and bacterias and viruses that these urban critters hosted as they warred against the oppressive, invading black slime. A Pyrrhic victory for those who stood with no fear in the service of the King.

A battle well-fought, he drew a cigarette and lit the tip, the smoldering cherry providing a ridiculous amount of light to the darkened sewers. He retrieved the spraycan from the mound of gore and shook it once more, proceeding to decorate the wall with an epitaph for the recently deceased and tossed the spent paint to the side.

“No, treasure, I’ve not forgotten about you,” Benedict muttered, again to no one in particular, making his way down the tunnel in the direction of the nearest Treatment Facility.

“Moan moan bloody moan.”

And to those that should follow, a greeting remained waiting at the bottom of the ladder, across from a pile of exploded tiny corpses:

HeLLo fROm THE crAcKs oF ElrOoD CiTy, & FrOm THE RaTs THaT FEAsT frOm theSE cRaCks ​

oN pET maNuRe, VOMIT, sTaLe wine, uRINe, sPeNT coNDOmS, AnD bLOod.​

 

[Trenchcoat Man]

ELDROODAN SEWERS in the direction of the TREATMENT FACILITY

It’s a common legend that alligators live in the sewers. It’s a universal cliché’ that mad men threaten to poison the water supply. These stories get spread around mostly because people are unoriginal. These stories get spread around because they’re believable.

From the depths of the river of human waste came half-rotted corpses, sick parasites clinging to their forms as they had the weeks prior. They hissed at Benedict from beyond the segregating cage, clawing through the bars and stamping over each other to do so. There were so many. So, so many. And Benedict wondered just how and why the city was built over so many dead.

It was like a David Lynch film – beneath a happy community of well-kept lawns resided a rotting underbelly of perversion, corruption, and cruelty.

FWOFIDAYO PAZFUGHENTH EJATHUNG​

Beneath the radiant consciousness of the enlightened man, a savage beast of the unconscious.

Rise, merciless leviathan.

With a throaty roar, a giant gator burst from the tide of feces, tearing hungrily at the already mangled walking and crawling dead. Benedict took a step back, muttering something to keep the gator from succumbing to the infection itself. When the carnage was over and the noises had subsided, he’d found that he’d nervously smoked his cigarette down to the filter.

“See, luv? Ain't nuffink to be afraid of.”

He slipped past the gate and followed the corridor down, passing an etching in the wall made by some nomad indicating nearby fresh water. Finding the sign marking the Water Treatment Facility, he opened the door and looked inside.

 

[Trenchcoat Man]

Laboratory sublevels – Treatment Facility

The smell had hit him long before the sight itself. It knocked the swagger from his step and the wisecrack from his lungs. He slammed the door, coughing; defeated.

For once, the guttermage was stuck for a line.

Street smarts and esoteric knowledge flooded his brain, supplementing missing information far before any degree of Force-based intuition. It was so disgusting, so horrible. His stomach wretched. For all the practiced bravado, and high stakes gambling, and cheating of death, and even succumbing to it…It was the awareness of what could happen to him while he was still alive that did him in. He, the Slum Lord, who inherited a throne of garbage and piss and festering rot and meth-digged out faces, lost his lunch directly onto the metallic sewer floor.
Trembling, Benedict patted himself down in search of his cigarettes, a worried mind fretting over just how much his limited skillset depended on his smokes. He thanked Elrooden for her providence without coherent phrasing, while at the same time begging additional protections.

He lit a cigarette, took a deep inhale, and straightened himself out. Calm, collected, he pushed open the door – the stink of Gungan algae-tobacco suffocating the cloud of spores.

“Health Inspector…,” Benedict rapped lightly on the door.

It was grotesque. The water treatment room had fallen into disrepair during the crisis; the moisture facilitating the growth of sewer fungus, growing from smattering of human excrement and the occasional carcass. It was promptly inhabited by the black ooze, propelling its spread and maturation to unheard of levels. Dark, twisted yams hung beneath crustacean-like flowers suspended from blacked, yellowed, and browned walls; the water ran stifled between vine-like teeth, perverting the cleaned water into something sinister and putrid as it passed; and there in the center, a man, his ribcage, the side of his skull, growing into an elaborate fungal pillar, smeared as though ground underneath the tread of a sandcrawler…

And yet, somehow, he was still alive. His security badge indicated he was a scientist. The scientist blinked, destroyed. Tears flowed down his face amidst suicidal blubbering.

“K—K—Kill me..?”

“I’m not here for you,” Benedict stated, unconcerned as he frisked the scientist’s pockets not absorbed into the coral. He transferred all valuables and curiosities into his own pockets, then clutched the poor doctor’s chin, the magus blowing smoke into his face like an angry dragon while he searched his eyes for something – someone­ – else.

The devoured man’s eyes went obsidian, and while he still breathed, something disappeared from him that made it monumentally more difficult to declare him “still alive.”

“There you are, you slimy little spaz –You’ve some brass karking bollocks coming here.” Benedict was livid, shaking the scientist’s helpless chin like a bully with miles and miles of leverage. “We were content to let you go about buggering your little Valhalans out on the fringe, but you got greedy, didn’t you, mate? You got gluttonous. Fatty Fat Fat Fatty. And then you got stupid. And then you came out here, to the cities.”

He grip tightened, smashing the lips of his victim.

“To my bloody turf,” he charged, Benedict’s demeanor shifted jarringly, from genuine outrage to something more sarcastic, more sinister. “To my place of power. So that courtesy, then? Consider it over.”

He threw the scientist’s head back against its lodging, turning around to head back to the door, taking a long, therapeutic drag off his cigarette. Again, he turned, expelling smoke and pointing his cigarette hand with menace. “You’ve done karked up, old son – and now, I’m going to do bloody terrible fings to you…”

Benedict’s face darkened into a grin, baring stained and missing teeth. “...On purpose.”

As he once more continued to the wall, he loosened the knot at his hip, letting the plastic department store bag of bones sink to the floor -- A minor sentry to guard his body in his absence. From the wall, he snatched one of the strange fruit from the gutterflowers. Grown from the filth of the metropolis, it was an offering to him, the Beggar’s Throne. A pomegranate to the black ooze’s Persephone, with Benedict in the role of Hades.

They were in the house of the Trenchcoat Man now.

“I’m coming for you.”

And with that, Benedict brought the blackened yam to his mouth, and just as the black ooze had taken bites out of the city’s denizens, the guttermage so took a bite of the black ooze.

His pupils expanded. Managing to take one final drag of his cigarette, Benedict entered some sort of trance.

 

[Trenchcoat Man]

The Gehenna of Black Ropes - Astral Plane​

​

Kill…

Consume…

Grow…

The snarling sentiments echoed in the decayed dialects of the enthralled multitudes. Here on this plane of tangible shadow, thick inky ropes dangled from above and hung the ghosts of the ensnared, filling their heads with the festering of individual worthlessness and submission to the collective.

Kill…

Consume…

Grow…

This was all there is, all there ever was – Slavery to the lower chakras. Be controlled by them. Be debased by them. Here in the Black Bug Room.

Kill…

Consume…

Grow…

The Gehenna of Black Ropes.

Spencer. She had touched it briefly, drawn away from her usual radiance by the temptation of the night. Such was her nature. Such was her nature that, tethered to a hivemind of her own, she would not be hung.

These tethers, unfortunately, would also ensure that she bore witness.

From the room’s dismal center, an inhuman shriek – the jarring movement of horrible violence. A large brown insect, part spider, part wasp, part cockroach, gigantic measure was planted firmly on the back of a similarly large, tar-like slug. The slug cried out, doing its best to battle back against the wasp stinger, burying itself mercilessly in its back over and over again. The scorpion-roach bit at its head, drinking in the thoughts and knowledges of lost citizenry and intelligentsia.

Kill…

Consume…

Grow…

The noise only got louder, a critical blow landed by the brown roach. A peculiar sack remained inside the slug even as the stinger withdrew, growing rapidly inside its back – A parasite with no immune system or skeletal structure or form to impede it, the ooze’s malleability becoming its undoing. The slug, desperate, attempted to escape.

Kill…

Consume…

Please…

The slugs eyestalks have been conquered now, blinded as the eggsac grows to conquer them, devouring their gelatinous interiors. It screams, terrified, running around blind in the collective consciousness and wasteland of its own creation.

Please...

Stop…

Stop…

With a final stab, the brown roach departs, flying off into the abyss, the tether requested by Spencer brimming with power and ugly with evil. Suddenly, the eggsacs erupt like a pair of subway cars, spilling countless tiny city-dwellers into the body of the slug, which feast upon its form like hungry maggots.

Stop…

Stop…

Stop…

Kill. Consume. Grow.

Laboratory C Sublevels, Water Treatment Facility​

On main street, a woman suddenly retained her humanity, immediately dropping to all fours and vomiting out the heart of her three year old boy. She was promptly redevoured by her cohorts, as was her spew.

Meanwhile, in the sewers, a dozen rats cannibalized one of their zombie brethren, choking down his morsels of meat without any ill effects.
And all over Elrooden, the undead mourned and clutched their stomachs in agony only to find them spilling over with floods and floods of maggots.

Gradually, Benedict’s pupils shrank to a size closer to normal, the high from the ooze (but maybe not the yam) coming to a close. His cigarette was spent, and his legs ached from standing, but at least he wasn’t devoured. He was cracking his back when he once again felt the pinging for power from Spencer (She had been drawing from all the Forcers in the area). “Ruddy household drudge, I am,” he reminded, giving her what she wanted like a burst of junk mainlined into her veins.

The guttermage kneeled down and reaffixed his plastic bag to his beltloop, casting a suspicious eye over the room. For the most part, it looked like the damage was undone; the water was running clean now, and the remaining fungi was of a more natural shade of completely disgusting. The scientist had even fallen from his etching, spasming and bleeding upon the grated floor….and yet, still breathing.

Benedict grinned his horrible grin and headed over to help.

That dreadful light of hope in his eyes was dwindling rapidly, smothered by the inky parasite of Mnggal-Mnggal. The ooze was trying to fool the magickian, keeping the scientist warm by way of its own brand of life support even as his brain drained like snot from the newly exposed hole in his head. Even as his skull, deteriorated by the fungal decay, now held the structural integrity of soggy cornflakes.

Benedict, still grinning, kneeled down, scribing upon what remained of the doc’s forehead the binding geometry of the Celestials, trapping this little piece of an amorphous cosmic terror inside this ruined prison. Stepping on the scientist’s chest, he then proceeded to tear the head off the body, skin ripping like a boiled chicken's, as the Mnggal-Mnggal tried to force a scream through a torn and dead throat. It was the gargling of tar. Pathetic and in vain.

“Now don’t you worry your pretty little head, dear heart….Somefing tells me this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship, like.”