Bogo (Closed)

The stink of stale old tobacco being lit was a very distinctive odor. It could curl even the hardiest of nose hairs, a thick and offensive reek that one could almost liken to grave dirt being burned - however that could be done. So, even over the stench of the unwashed, tightly packed bodies of the Blok, the waste being ground into the narrow roads winding like collapsed arteries through its clutter, Dalton still grimaced as he pushed the sulfur match into the tan wad of tobacco in his pipe. A thin gray coil drifted into his left eye and he cursed angrily as the sting immediately rocked his head back. The slick glass pipe almost slipped out of his fingers to fall three stories to the stomach churning ground below, but a chubby hand shot out from his left and snatched it with the dexterity only a factory worker could have.

"Shit hurts, eh?" Dalton grinned awkwardly, wiping a tear from his stinging eye, and took the pipe out of Klent's hand. Klent was the first friend he'd made in his childhood - they bonded over the fact that they'd each lost their first tooth fighting with each other. He was only about four inches shorter than Dalton, kept his head neatly shaved, and had his ears pierced with bronze studs. The Blok rats loved to decorate themselves, even if the jewelry was visibly fake. His round belly protruded over his faux gold belt buckle, but his arms were heavily muscled, and he arguably had the strongest punch of anyone in his generation.

"Yeah, almost makes me wanna quit." Klent gave him a quick, confused glance, and then the pair burst into loud, obnoxious laughter, slinging their arms over the rickety third floor balcony railing, blowing smoke rings out into the air, wobbling and wavering as the gentle breeze brought a small breath of fresh air through the ghetto. All around them, the post-afternoon shift commotion rattled and clattered, hundreds of bodies bustled back and forth, rushing to get dinner ready, rushing to get their hit packed up, rushing to keep their kids from beating each other bloody. Down in the streets, the lowest of the low were slinging their goods to the few trickling in from the last factory shifts, scuttling and hopping over gray skinny men and women laying motionless in the dirt roads. They were the people that let their habits come to rule their lives, the people whose hands shook so bad that they couldn't even wind together a simple antique fuse wick, so they'd sell anything and everything they could to get their next hit. Some sold badly made cups and plates, the red clay already chipped and warped. Some rummaged through market trash and found old medicine bottles to fill with ditch water and sell as "panaceas". Dalton watched a blonde man with burn scars on his hands kick a wailing woman down into a clogged storm drain after she threw a threadbare blanket over his shoulders and dove for his coin purse. It was ironic how much the denizens of the Blok hated them, considering that nearly nine out of ten of them would end up shuffling through turds down there, itching at scabs and trying to sell damp paper flowers.

"Got any sharpleaf?" Dalton eyed the soiled glass bottle Klent pulled out of his vest pocket with a bright, excited gleam in his eye. The cork popped loose with a little prying from a sharp corner of an iron ring on his chubby friend's thumb, and he kept his gaze on it as the mustard yellow powder dusted the inside of Klent's oak pipe. Sharpleaf wasn't hard to come by, and was probably the most common stuff you could get your hands on in Corone. It grew all around the shores of the rivers that snaked through Concordia, and you only had to fight off the boars to get a hold of the stuff. Bright yellow and eight leaves on each stalk, sharpleaf kept the factories churning and the armies marching, as long as the captains didn't find it. Something about the purity of combat, keeping the soldiers sharp, some nonsense. It was exactly what it did; numbed any pain you had, and gave you energy for hours! Or an hour. Depended on how much you did, which was also the beauty of it; you could smoke it, snort it, drink it in your tea....

Klent smiled, squinting against the pale-yellow afternoon sunlight trickling through the ropes and boards of the Blok, and leaned over to give Dalton's pipe a couple taps from the bottle. The bright red light that burst from the ember in his glass pipe mirrored the gleam in his eyes as he greedily pulled hard and felt the nervous energy jolt through his body. He could tell from the brightness of Klent's eyes that he was already high, and thus generous, but he wasn't expecting his next words.

"That's the first payment. You'll get an ounce of it if you wanna work tonight." Dalton froze, face unreadable as he ran formulas through his head. An ounce ought to last him the rest of the week, but most likely only three days but still....scratching at an ill drawn smiley face on the inside of his right wrist, he took another puff, feeling his toes dance in their paper-thin hide boots.

"Eh....doing what?"

"My uncle's boss wants to swap a shipment of sword hilts. They're just surplus junk, stuff that lays around in a warehouse, but they been hollowed out in the middle, stuffed full of shit."

"What sort of shit?" Dalton flipped his pipe and delicately tapped the ashes out against the railing. He watched them fall down to the road, focusing on one particular flake, watching as it shed itself and grew smaller and smaller, until it faded away and he was staring at a pair of watery opaque eyes locking their gaze on him from the most visible storm drain. Blinking, he swatted Klent on the shoulder, who had drifted off watching the younger women of the Blok.

"Oh, you don't wanna know. Bad bloody shit going out to the front lines. There's some heavy lifting, but nothing heavier than the usual daytime shit." Flexing his hands, Dalton chewed at his lip. He did want to know. Badly. Klent didn't know, or he would have told him, and it was a good idea - if it was anything good, they'd take it. The soldiers wouldn't bother coming to claim their illegal goods either. The Blok was as dangerous as most battlefields to outsiders, and the people living there would gladly dog pile a squadron and slit their throats for just their boots.


"Yeah....let's get Grimmy then," Dalton agreed, tucking his pipe into his pocket.

It was obvious to Dalton the second they shifted the planks that made up Grimmy's door, and stepped into his claustrophobic ten foot by ten foot apartment, that Grimmy was dead. It wasn't the black little insects that he stomped on as he took another step into the dim space, and it wasn't the smell. It was minute flickers of movement in the deepest of the shadows farthest back in the corner, the itch at the back of his neck, and he could simply smell and and taste something in the air. Grimmy had been alive yesterday, snapping together springs and plates into firing mechanisms at his typical teeth-on-edge speed, eyes practically bulging from their sockets, dark skin slick with sweat and grease and patched with dust. Sharpleaf wasn't cutting it for him anymore; Grimmy had started using Tilt, expensive stuff from Dheathain cooked up from some swamp viper that got one so hyped up they wouldn't sleep for a week. It earned its name from the penchant of users to sit on the edge of their seats, tilted forward, always ready to explode forward. The crash was hellacious, but Grimmy had always been about going fast.

Dalton said nothing, and neither did Klent; instead, they simply sat down at Grimmy's prized table at either side of his elbows on wood stumps pulled from the green edge of Concordia. He'd gotten it as a drug trade, and his fried little brain fixated on it. It was most likely the most well cared for piece of furniture in the Blok. Glossy and obsessively polished, Grimmy's dead fingers were still clutching the edges of the dark blue wood. Dalton picked at a finger, feeling unsurprised when the stiff digit slowly eased back to the wood.

"I don't know. Looks like last night, I guess." Klent let out a soft sigh and hunched over, running his hands over his smooth scalp. Most likely, not wanting the high to end, and feeling the crash coming like a fish hook deep in the guts, pulling hard, Grimmy had went ahead and did an extra little 'bump' as they called it. Just a pinch more of whatever you're smoking, snorting, whatever, to bring you back up. Or down, whatever direction one prefers. Whatever snake they made the tilt out of was a nightmare Dalton never wanted to come face to face with. Leaning over and pushing snarls of Grimmy's wild black hair out of his face, he could see the dry, clotted blood. Thick crusts of it on his nostrils, his eyelids, his lips. His still eyes were a dark red from dozens of burst blood vessels. Sitting up, Dalton put a hand on his knife and looked around. Aside from the table, the rest of the home was as one would expect; ashes ground between floor planks, a lumpy straw mattress a step from the table, a few scattered dice, and very little in the way of decoration. Very few people in the Blok decorated their homes. After all, the Blok was simply hundreds of interconnecting shanties and huts with dozens of badly maintained, poorly built walkways and staircases built onto a few simple brick buildings. There wasn't really anything to work with, so they preferred to decorate themselves. Giving up the search, Dalton let his eyes fall back on Grimmy. It had to have been terrifying, dying alone.

"Wonder if he did all the tilt?" Dalton looked up, his face a mixture of confusion, grief, and a small bit of disgust. It took him several breaths to understand, the words as strange to him as a dark elf, of which he'd only read about. For a moment, the fantasy that Grimmy had been a friend, a sliver of sentiment burned out of neighbors and coworkers ten years their senior, not to be defiled, shown like a sunbeam for a second, before it was buried by the itching reality of their situation. He blinked slowly as the words finally sunk their teeth in, and he understood his friend's hunger. Felt his own hunger.

Klent's eyes began to look around for hiding places, while Dalton reluctantly pulled his knife, laid it in his hand, and folded his palm over it, making a shallow cut in the skin. Dark droplets of blood dribbled onto the crusted, rusty leavings of the overdose. Dalton mixed it together into a runny paste, then began drawing a trio of vertically stacked triangles on the dead man's right cheek. His fingers were a bit clumsy from the sharpleaf and the long day, but memory lent itself well to him. After he'd read as much of the Yellow Book as he could understand, he'd collected every dead rat, cat, and dog, anything small without the gift of the gab, and had begun practicing the sigil until he'd raised a gibbering, howling, and hissing rotted chorus. Pulling in a breath as he made the last dot, he sat up, staring down at Grimmy's dead eye. Faint fingers of frost had spread out on his bloody fingertips, and the sunlight coming from the door frame seemed to lose some of its brilliance, for a heartbeat.

"Mare'alok, vishidus cholme."

Grimmy jerked, and the lightless eye spun in its socket. It jerked again, as though trying to sit up, then began to babble in a frightened panicked stutter until Dalton put his palm on the back of its neck. "Grimmy...buddy...did you do all of your tilt?"

"I, the river, it's all cold, all the way in, I don't want to be here, it...it...no. No. There's still tilt left. It's under the table. I used a candle to seal it to the bottom." Klent bent over, letting out a little groan as he pressed down on his round belly, then popped up a second later, grinning ear to ear as he held up a glass vial of amber colored syrup, wax flaking off his hands.

"That all you had?" Grimmy tried to lick his lips, but to Dalton, the thing that popped out of his mouth looked like a cockroach peeking out of a base board, before he shook his head. Dalton dipped his finger into his grisly red paint, and turned Grimmy's head towards him, so their eyes were meeting as he drew the sigil on the left cheek.

"Sorry it happened to you so early Grimmy, but hell, I may only got about a good five years, I think. It ain't no walk on the Blok." Dalton hesitated as he repeated one of their old childhood rhymes, transported briefly to days of scratchy burlap, days of innocent fights and innocent laughter, days before the dope days. He snapped back, meeting Grimmy's eyes again, and finished the sigil. He could feel his eyes stinging. He would not cry in front of Klent. The man knew about his odd hobbies, but he didn't know there was a part of Dalton that wasn't a purebred, brawling thug. "Cholme, karnuis."

"So, how about Styme? We give him a drop of this tilt, he'll do the job for free." Dalton glanced at Klent as he pushed the corpse up into its chair, stood, and grabbed the edges of the blue table.

"But...Styme is a sociopath with a bad speed addiction. Grimmy would have been a lot better." When he didn't get an answer, he sighed, shaking his head as he caressed the glass-smooith top of the liviol table.

"Fine. I'm taking this table though. It's a good fucking table." Without another word, he started dragging it towards the door frame, staring at Grimmy as he went. His mind, working still under the haze of sharpleaf, vaguely considered how true the words that left it a few moments ago really were. How many more sweating nights, digging through floor boards for just one more hit could he take? How many more years breaking his hands could they take before he was as strung out as Grimmy had been?

Dalton was still brushing flakes of frost off his fingertips onto his pants leg as they walked up to the top levels of the Blok's higher levels. He took care to step lightly; the boards were cracked with hairline fractures spreading their fingers across their lengths, wicked thick splinters jutting out from hastily chopped sides. Most likely made of refuse pallets from one of the factories. As they'd rose from the second layer, to the third, fourth, then fifth layer, the stains and slumped junkies started to fade - but never disappear. The sixth layer was the newest, and as the Blok continued to grow from the multiple unplanned pregnancies that happened about every two months, they would have to stop building shack on top of shack, and would have to spill out, to create a new Blok. The patrol pattern of the soldiers going by the diseased sprawl had increased over the past year, looking at the slump with loathing.

The huts and sheds at the top weren't worth value even as a toilet to the upper class of Radasanth, but they were a fair bit nicer than the ones on the fourth level, and were a dream compared to the dank concrete dungeons on the ground, where the sunlight only trickled down around noon. Generally, the upper levels were reserved for the families with the youngest newborns, or for the families that were crew leaders that hadn't saved enough for a cramped outer city apartment without any draft. Styme's father was a crew leader, and so he was the closest thing to a "rich kid" they knew. He tended to get the new, exotic drugs the sailors would bring back to port with them, but was also known for going to the ground to kick around the dying junkies, but none of them were saints, so they remained friends with him.

When they walked in, Styme's parents were both slumped against each other on their bed, visible through a sloppily hung curtain, and Styme was sitting in a heavy, blocky oak chair beside the door. He leaped up and smashed Dalton against the door frame, shaking the hovel's walls, and both had their knives out, an edge at Dalton's throat, and a point at Styme's crotch. A breath later and he spun away, throwing the knife across the room and shoving his hands into the thick tangle of wheat blonde hair on his head, murmuring to himself, before shuffling back to sit in the chair, scratching at the goatee hanging in scraggles off his sharp chin. Dalton leaned down, and the tip of his knife in front of his eyes.

"You ever do that again, and you're just gonna be another dead Blok rat." Dalton and Klent laughed loudly at that as he tucked his knife away, and Styme looked up, confused, his pupils as wide as a piece of straw.

"Is it time to go to work?"

"You have smoked yourself stupid," Klent replied, patting their wealthy friend on his head, disregarding the fact that a few moments before, he'd been holding a blade to someone's throat. From a pocket inside of his vest, he produced Grimmy's tilt, and told Styme to open his mouth. Carefully dribbling a couple of drops on his tongue, Klent jammed the stopper back in the vial, and then they all stepped outside to have a seat and shoot the shit while they waited fort Styme to come up. They talked about the greasy, obscene items most male factory workers in Radasanth settled on; what drugs they had and hadn't done, which of the girls on the Blok they wanted to screw, how much they hated their bosses and the soldiers. Suddenly, Styme popped up, his spine straight as an arrow, eyes wide.

"Wanna do some more work? Got a side job tonight, could use some hands." Klent leaned forward, and gave Dalton a knowing smirk. Styme didn't answer; instead, he kept looking straight ahead, breathing through his clenched teeth with a hiss. A few quiet moments passed, then finally, "Do we get to kill anyone?" They exchanged quick, worried sidelong glances. The Blok didn't particularly produce well adjusted individuals. People full of misguided rage, abandonment issues, deeply buried resentment - the list went on and on. It made it quite problematic then, to gather a personal crew for a bit of pocket change, because typically you'd end up with a motley assortment of twitching wildcards that would either panic and shut down at the sight of blood, or be far too eager to see it. Dalton habitually rigged the machines in the factory so they'd work better, so waving drugs in some lunatic's face to get him in line didn't really feel much different.

"Some coin and an ounce of - "

"I fuckin' want that!" Styme cut Klent off before he could finish explaining the stipulations of the job, and reached out with desperation fueled speed for the vial of tilt, but Dalton grabbed his shirt collar and yanked him back. "After. You in?" Styme nodded vigorously, baring his teeth in what he probably thought was a smile, but looked more like a crazed rictus.

Dalton finally let go of the hilt of his knife.