RKMBs Forums .::Important::. Writer's Block The Gauntlet is Thrown. . .

"...there was Peru, you understand..." he said.

The lightbulbs along the ceiling shimmered, beginning to melt. Their white, milky hue dripping and darting the carpet, like luminescent honey...each drop reacting with a slight variation in a distant chime. She shielded her wide, terrified eyes from the flickering liquid, crouching back a few steps.

A man that looked like her husband floated before her. His eyes were not so much terrified, as ecstatic. The innate joy beaming from his godlike consciousness was comparable to making love on a pile of rotting flesh, unbearable to lower life forms in its nauseous mania. This particular man was aware of this particular side-effect and found some comfort in knowing that at least some portion of Shirley's terror was not induced by this. He could see her soul. He knew her taint...her evil. She was scared because he was better at this. Better than her. Better than him. Better than 'God' itself.

He would fix her. He would fix this entire world. This entire universe. He would fix everything. Everywhere. Everywhen.

Sooner or later, he would get it right....

"....oh, and the universe where Grissom Montag was a bad guy, and Ozzy Baxter had killed Drake Marshall? That one had potential." said the man who used Mick's lips. "I know I am bragging a little, but even the space exploration angle I went for earlier...had no one seen Battlestar Galactica?"

The 'room' surrounding them ripped apart and away, once again. Once again. Once again, time started over.

Jet-black mascara striped the corner of Shirley's eyes, her head turning away once again from a quadrillion deaths and re-deaths. Screaming into the white nothing. Mute, silent, and trapped. Ankles chained to the world of a mad god. Forever trapped. Forever.

"Fine. Okay." he nodded, swiftly kicking her two front teeth out. She lay sprawled against the edges of the continuum. Blood gurgled from her mouth, streaming out the sides. The warm, redish-black trickles dropped effortlessly into the swirling cauldron of existence below. Each drop....each drop igniting a universe.

"Let's see what we can do now..." he spoke to her, staring into brewing multiversal maelstrom below. "...and try to come up with something new, okay?"

Shirley Francis, the slave of a god burning in the center of time. She looked into the abyss, and wept once more......

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Muscles better suited for a male cheetah stretched and pumped along human legs; lean and fierce their rhythmic tissue ripped and healed with a heartbeat. The face of a leader...a little older...a little wiser...better suited for a younger man yelled with wide-eyed abandon:

"GOGOGOGOGOGOGO!!!!"

Danny Hearn had barely gotten the command out before the swarm of roughly six-hundred-and-seventy-three Tribal Knights of Lo descended on them. Ancient curses licked with modern insults rang from the warrior-class of this lush, continental jungle. Their diamond-tipped spears, not so lush, filled the narrow path ahead, sharp and extremely unpleasant edges fervently chasing the quickly retreating prey.

Drake Marshall jumped, twice, to avoid three coming from behind. The third spear he had caught, snapped in half, and kindly returned to its' owner, via experience, a bad mood, perfect aim, and the Knight's eye sockets. It should be noted that it wasn't necessarily the spears that put him into a bad mood. No, it was more that he was annoyed that Danny was running faster than him. He didn't have integrated genetic enhancements to fall back on. In fact, the only thing he had these days was a beautiful wife, mortgage, twin eleven-year-olds, a prospering book career (Night and Drake: The Drake Marshall Story), greying temples, and dwindling energy. And now, Danny was faster than him.

While it might be understandable for Drake to consider this, even as he ran in introspective and irritated terror, Grissom Montag was irritated for a different reason. He too was introspective. But, his ire sat around the preconceived notion of their mission. The situation he was originally described did not mirror their current situation. No one said anything about Tribal Knights of Lo. No one said anything about the molecular structure of the soil being different in this place. No one said he wouldn't be able to teleport under ground, above ground, anywhere.

Griss double-stepped to the right, a spear missing his kidneys by inches. His heel dug into the ground harder now, running breathlessly ahead.

No one said anything about any GODDAMN BLOODY spears either!



The whizz of a spear broke Danny's revelry. He and Drake running parallel through the alien jungle, Grissom had since leapt into the branches above, running through the upper mass of foliage like he was still in his twenties.

'What's their secret?' Drake panted with exertion, feeling every inch of his retirement.

Danny and Drake broke hard right around the corner, running past a terribly large man urinating on an alien tree trunk.

"ALIENSPEARGUYSOFDEATHTHROWINGDIAMONDSPEARSATUSFORFUCKSSAKELOOKOUT!!" they both yelled in breathless unison, spinning around behind the behemoth zipping his fly.

The ground trembled with the horde, as it avalanched forward shaded in the canopy of the large abnormal vista. And Frank Grimm turned and met them all with the bottomless eyes at the end of every universe. Lighting...thunder...and the howls of souls that dared to cross the elemental forces of nature....his battleaxe shown with a retribution reserved for the holy angel of death.

Grimm, the destroyer, the anchor, the entropy. A darkness beyond the kin of the Knights divided the flood, sending the edges of their ranks bowing in surrender and praise. The center of the swarm not so lucky, the putrid stench of their bones crumbling into powdery gravemarkers, haunting the surprisingly dry breeze.

"KAR-TOR-US-KARTARUS-YA-MILE!" the leader of the Jadhra Platoon bellowed with worship. His knights of two-hundred followed suit. They all bowed, the armor wracking against itself. Like the Eiffel Tower bowing to a bulldozer.

And everything got very, very quiet.

Grimm sheathed the axe, looking down.

"Oh dammit!" he suddenly said, grabbing the top of his jeans, trying to rub a wet spot off the groin area. "You didn't give me time to shake!"

Frank's face melted and crawled back into place. A thick, salt-and-black beard outlining his scowl. Green eyes replacing the vacant windows to his soul. And a head of surprisingly stylish, unkempt hair crowning the once-and-past avatar of Death.

The three men behind Grimm sweated profusely, panting from their twelve-minute sprint-of-death.

"I think...I'm going to....vomit my lung..." Danny panted.

Drake nodded with a shallow muttering, draped back against a buldging root. "...we're getting old..."

"Yes..." Grissom replied, only slightly winded.

Grimm looked back and forth between the men.

"Girls."

Danny, still hunched over from exertion, gave him the finger.

"No, really man. Why just the hard-legs on this mission?" he insisted, the worshiping horde slowly but respectfully retreating with a wave of Grimm's hand.

"I mean you nutsacks..." the semi-giant continued. Suddenly , the Ameristar armor glided down behind him, coming to a standing rest on the jungle floor. The engines whined down, Grimm barely responding to the new entry. "...and then there's Italy-in-a-can here..." he said, thumbing over the shoulder towards the armor that was, in fact, peeling away to reveal Edulcore Ciccioto.

Formerly, the winged Raptor. Now, the all-too-human, the all-too-fifty-year-old called Eurostar.

"...it's nothing but a party of one-hand fun, man!" Grimm emphasized. "Six days on an interdimensional planet. Couldn't you have at least picked Bri to be all hot sweaty with the rest of us?"

"Oi!" Montag barked, still horizontal.

"Oh shut up, you two've been apart for nine years now."

"Volcanoes!" Ed suddenly interrupted, brushing past Grimm.

"Hey I'm still talking about tits!"

Danny finally held up his hand. "Enough!"

Grimm grimaced. It was his favorite expression. It had been the first one he had perfected when he got his face back. He was very proud of his 'The Rock'-eyebrow, too. So much so that he very quickly forgot about grimacing and was now, in fact, doing his 'The Rock'-eyebrow. To himself.

"There are at least four active volcanoes no further than two miles from here!" Ed paused, looking around a bit. ".....did I miss something here?"

"Nothing you haven't seen a million times." Dan replied, standing up. "Volcanoes?"

"The map our target sent back to his superiors...during their first few days here..." Ed activated a holographic emitter in his wrist, a limited map of the surrounding area forming in a rotating sphere. "...it notes a chain of active volcanoes along the eastern coastline of this continent. We're near what I think is an ocean."

Dan stared at the map, and then looked up into the very calming blue sky, dimming by the minute.

"On the other side of the volcanoes?"

"Right."

"And that's where the signal-tag is leading us?"

"It's leading us east. That is, assuming the tech works accurately here."

Dan didn't say anything for a moment. When he finally spoke, his voice was tired. Already.

"Night soon. I say we should push on until the light's gone, and try and make camp north of those volcanoes."