"Let the days come as they please," he said, rolling across the cushions...

Quote: This is an anthology of unrelated posts. Just shit I type out for my own entertainment. Some of it definitely is RP. Some of it just goofin. it is what it is.

"Let the days come as they please," he said, rolling across the cushions like a pot-bellied puppy.

Meanwhile, outside, it was the Realm of Eternal Rain. Gum do Mugu sat, cross-legged, under the boughs and branches of a sodden apple tree. The droplets merged together and trickled down the creases in his leathery cheeks like tears. He drank from a flask of tonic and rummaged through weathered shoe boxes. Behind him, the trunk of the tree had a silver plaque nailed to it. And behind that, a scene of slate and wind washed over the hilly horizon.

For each shoe box, he thumbed around in the clay mud and scribed a forgotten glyph on the lid. For each glyph scribed, he sipped the tonic somberly. The shoe boxes found their place, slotted inside a larger crate. The crate was just warped planks banged together with rusty nails.

Those cracked old knee joints creaked, the old man was on his way up to the Big House. Splinters sank into the rough skin of his fingers, and the weight of the full crate tightened the ache at the base of his back. Barefooted, he could feel the crunch of the pebbled pathway that took him from the plaqued tree to the looming home of the rotten boy with the big belly.

^tap..._tap...^tap...

"You answer it," said the fat boy.

She smoothed her hand across the sheets. "No." She swirled from the boy and disappeared into the ornate carvings of a decadent hallway.

The front door of the Big House opened nervously.

"Here," said Gum, dropping the crate at the feet of the sweating boy.

As he walked away from the Big House, Gum glanced back at the tree under which he'd sat for so long. Before leaving down the long and winding road back to the public thoroughfare, he read the plaque aloud.

Let the days come as they please. We are here, in the Realm of Eternal Rain.

The		boy	shifted		the
lids	from		the		shoe
		boxes,	one	at	a		time.

		EACH	shoe		box	contained
the		shrunken			head
of	an						enemy.

They're all the rich man's war.

Quote: "These old rails never seem to end..." There was a grease stain smudging the ink on the yellowed page, its handwriting was lost like the spirit of those wild old days. He'd already paid his fare with his rough, suffering life. The iron rails at his feet were clean and shining, but the sleepers were dry and cracked. He stared ahead to to see the track lines and rails and lies stretch into the desert; either side he sensed the old friends lost along the way. He dragged a bag of bones in his hand and he strained his neck under a ring of skulls set across his sunken shoulders. Quote: "These old rails never seem to end..." Ravens, vultures, and crows twisted overhead, but he wouldn't look at their morbid union; their attendance persisted with haunting inevitability. Even from the distant brim of the world, those birds could smell death's tangling approach. "There is a voice that keeps on calling me." He shuddered under the cold blue sky, yet he was afraid to see the splintered wood cutting his feet. "I am on these rails, where I always seem to be." Memories of life were as hazy as the dust devils on the horizon. That promise was cruel and listless, and it was all his stinging eyes could see. "I must be almost there." He conned himself with the guile of his own whispers. "There is a voice that keeps on calling me." He admitted it aloud again. "I have made it through this far, maybe tomorrow I will reach the end." Quote: "These old rails never seem to end..." "My old friend," he begged when he stopped, wishing at the fading faces that visited him for every step he dared to stall. He turned around and the faces were gone again. "Maybe tomorrow." He kept moving on. He was on those rails, they never seemed to end. There were no bends or clouds or towns or trains, not even a hint of rain. He begged the ghosts to stay -- "Join me for a while?" -- but he lived like that, cursed on that melancholy trail. Tomorrow failed, so that narrow world went on to unfold. "I must be almost there," he said, clutching the tattered old page. "It is not tomorrow, so I will keep moving on." For all the desert's heat, he was cold and damp. Quote: "These old rails never seem to end..." In dreams, moments mixed with hours and years; the glue of continuity turned liquid in the cold sweat of a life's stalking anxiety. "How long have I really been here?" The question had no answer, for time had no anchor. "I remember a different life..." If he could tie himself to anything, it would be the slow devolution of his memories of that different life. He knew it was getting worse. Quote: "These old rails never seem to end..." He stopped at the sound of dogs barking in the distance, he looked around and saw, again, only the faces of his friends. "Friend, the hounds of hell are approaching... help me, please?" As before, the spectres twisted into the nether. Shaking his head in despair, he looked again at the soiled paper. "All these names... they are your names. I am carrying you all with me. Am I so guilty that none can afford me the assistance i require?!" The page disintegrated from his grip. Quote: "These old rails never seem to end..." The rails ran into something he had longed for, and in doing so, his mind entirely betrayed its hopeless setting. The imagined timeline of any nightmare could vanish with the flippancy of any faint notion; in spite of all the power they hold over the slumbering mind, dreams and nightmares were nothing but errant thoughts. Quote: "..." He pressed his hands on the lip of the station's platform and pulled himself up. "This isn't your stop," cawed the wretched carrion hunters from above. "It is my stop," he insisted, dismissing their poison into the whistling sands. The distance between the tracks and the platform was a good five feet, but his muscles didn't strain and his strength was all there. "Anybody here?" The ticket office was webbed and thick with dust. "When is the next train?" Nobody was there to answer him. A crack of thunder and rain washed out across the desert. The timelessness was gone and things were changing with a pace he hadn't known since his days in the warmth of the Overworld. Oxxad, that gruesome demon--a fairly fond comrade of the withered shaman--spindled a swirling waltz across the concrete. "Gum, so you're finally mine..." The Xangu death god smeared his words through his needle teeth and onto his thin lips. Swollen with the sorrow of so many moments gone awry, Gum's eyes were a secret held in with his bony fingers. Oxxad hissed at Gum. "For all your regret, you have served me well. You've brought thousands of souls to my domain." The shaman pressed the base of his palm to the thick creased leather of his forehead, sighing ruefully. "Paradise awaits, old friend." The demon's triple jointed arm wrapped Gum in an embrace and beckoned him towards the platform's edge. "Don't you see the carriage?" A steam engine had arrived at the platform, and had done so in the manner of dreams: suddenly and impossibly. The train's carriages stretched from one end of the platform to the other. Gum squinted at the chipped paint of the weathered engine, eager to read the plaque bearing the name of the infernal machine. He took in each letter at a time... Quote: J. Quote: A. Quote: C. Quote: K. "Jack..." The shaman's sullen frown turned to a scowl. "Is this a joke?" he asked his god and master. "Of course not," Oxxad giggled back. "Don't be sad for him," said the Underworld's dreadful shepherd. "The boy died, and we treated him like a prince here in my domain. And that was for you, Gum. We made him welcome here." "Ah, your bag!" The word's of Oxxad chastised the shaman for trying to board his carriage carrying that bag of bones. "This?" said the shaman, pulling open the bag's drawstring. "That," said the god, flicking his tongue with delight. "Show me its contents," he commanded. Obliging, Gum reached into the bag to pull out the bones. "What?" The shaman was surprised to feel dust between his fingers. He scooped out a handful of the bone dust and pressed it to his hooked nose, inhaling the stuff. "Do you understand now?" As he asked, Oxxad wondered if his underling would ever let go of life. "Take it," the shaman said, passing the sack of memories into Oxxad's spidery grip. "Ah, that's good, that's very goooood!" Oxxad bent down from his looming height to whisper in Gum's ear. "Friend, Gum, inside is paradise..." Oxxad laughed and clicked the handle to carriage, ushering Gum inside.

Droplets rippled in the puddles in front of their childhood home. They were busy-treading children again, in the dream at least. That old steamy abode was falling into a tobacco field. Rural and ramshackle, its structure was capped with the pelting chorus of a summer storm on a rusty tin roof.

Without a wrinkle or a worry, a girl spoke. "I want to go outside!" Her whispers fluttered thinly into the dust particles floating around the old house. Mother chided the voice through the tattered net curtains. The threat of her little girl being struck by lightning was too much for the parent. She didn't know though, but she was in love with a ghost.

From the long road came the city's pale face, it sulked around the ruined planks of the front porch and its outsider soul was inquisitive to a fault. "I'd rather die here, than live in that awful city." Even though a thunderhead loomed, saturating the black earth, the visitor went on unaffected. He barely reacted, nothing could dampen his fascination for the empty house. "Who's in there?" The boy, peering through the diaphanous window dressing, frowned with fright. Wind, like a wave, rustled through the fragrant crop and reminded the city slicker of those swells, rolling ashore. The girl, shivering with excitement inside, stared right back at him.

"Don't look at him, he'll see you!" She, the mother, sighed dejectedly. "Or maybe he won't." She'd remembered she was in love with a ghost.

And the child had forgotten. "Of course he can see me!" The daughter, flicking her chin-length hair, turned to the mother and exclaimed with frustration.

The mother faded away...

"Mother?"

The daughter faded away...

"Who's there I said!"

The stranger faded away...

The road was empty.

The house was empty.

Wind blew across the field.

The field was fallow.

Under the waking blue glow of his computer monitor, Cherub installed his codec in the canal of his right ear. The lithe black man reared up from his hunched posture and tapped the device. "Rooster." The word was a name, a codename. It was as secretive as the shadows flooding the broken boards and cracked plaster of his inner city hideout.

The Cherub clipped his weapon to his hip. He was skinny, but his tight-fitting body armour and white eyes produced a daunting horror for those who would be his victim. Trip wires were coiled and packed, and explosives ran the length of his belt. With a tug, his boots came up around his pocketed pants.

The Rooster asked him to "listen."

"I'm listening.

"Mugu's at the temple," she began. "Word came in from some Section recruits downtown."

"I understand."

"We have to exe-"

The Cherub cut his junior off. "We have to execute the plan."

Quote: Meanwhile...

Quote: Somewhere the fuck else...

Bop ba bop ba.

The stars, and all the magic they inspired, were hidden behind a midnight blanket of thick, pressing rainclouds. Every day was the dullest day–"SINCE RECORDS BEGAN!!!"* The very aging of the city slept along with a whispering song of dreadful drizzle that refused to end; the city was awash with uncomfortable dampness, the kind that sneaks up on you and it gets into your fucking bones. The rain never stops.

Unassuming and neatly dressed, Noon and his professional garb were both contained dryly in the arched halls of an ornate subway station. A subway station constructed especially for the corporate employees of the former chief power holders of this city – Guy Karde, Sledge Rivers, Reese Jarrek. This stop was for those working in ZCorp Tower. While peering over his shoulder, Noon's eyes became fixed on the flashing exit sign that pointed out of the subway and up onto the streets outside. Each step upwards was wetter and wetter until the shower could be seen beating onto the reaches; water was pooling. Mr. Reilson thought to himself, "I hope no poor old dear slips on their way down." Then, with regret, he remembered that people had long since stopped coming to the towers.

Clutching his briefcase as if it were a childhood treasure, he pondered the downfall of his employers. The railway line below began to sing a wailing blues as the graffitied SR1308 electrical locomotive, once the height of technology, laboured up alongside the platform. Our redundant Reilson boarded the rickety old thing when the sliding doors finally obliged by scraping open. They needed some oil. He was the single passenger making use of the station that evening. Looking for a seat took a moment, and when he sat down, he stared into the driver's cab. The two working men exchanged a sombre hint of eye contact; the whole world was in decline and soon their jobs would be gone too.

The engine pulled the carriages out of the station, roaring like subways do, into a dark tunnel. The ZCorp Towers subway stop in the old, nameless city would host no more trains.

"How am I going to tell her?", he mouthed to himself with his hands covering his face.

*In this world, pollution is slowly but surely blocking out the sun. It keeps getting darker and darker, but nobody cares because–fuck!–we're making money, right????

The music of his life had gotten predictable; it was fading to silence like the favourites of his youth. His feet were locked at the ankles and the wintry chains were looped through an iron mooring ring. So many years had battered his boyhood soul, and because of that, he knew not to struggle against his lonesome destination. Simple wisdom had taught him that even if he did fight, it would be pointless. A pair of a stinging and bloodied ankles would be his reward for defiance.

Seeing the white of the snow pile around the orange of the rusted metal reminded him of the colours of the fish he'd kept as a boy. As much as he loved them, he couldn't help but feel sad that he failed to keep them well. Their life was so vibrant, just as his had been. How could he be so obtuse? It was then that he came to understood why his grandparents needed him so much.

The wind whipped his eyes and he closed the lids with a snivel.

"Oh, the things I could have done differently."

He was speaking to the sea, the narrow sea between his own home and the home of his grandparents. It was a bitter green–or was it grey?–body of water. It swelled with his sorrow and then quickly sank with his bitter, reluctant resignation. At least, he thought, the smell of home would be in his nostrils. His boyhood friends, and all his relations, had all passed on. The sea was his last and only kin, and he saw it through Fitzgerald's eyes; it truly was the bleak waste that made the Norse sagas sad.

The cold blanket reached his knees.

"Happy days, spent so long ago."

Wind splashed over the seawater, pinching his face with tears of its own.

"It's getting worse," he admitted. "It won't be long now."

The snow crept to his waist.

In a panic, he began to fret over who or what should occupy his final thoughts...

The incoming blizzard had piled up to his chin.

Then, a memory, one as melancholy as any, came to him. His grandfather had explained, guardedly, that the men he watched die in the war called out for their mothers at the end.

Name of Judgement: "Let the days come as they please," he said, rolling across the cushions...
Judgement Type: No Judgement

Rewards:

Gum do Mugu receives:
924 EXP
99 GP

Inclusive of Althy Fest 1.5x

“Humans are a part of creation and shamanism is our way of connecting with the whole.”
― Will Adcock, Shamanism: Rituals For Spiritual Journeying And Creating Sacred Space

All rewards have been added.