Your eyelids crack open and the dry, caked stuff that has piled up there cracks too.
Groggily, you reach up to rub the sleep from your eyes, but the heavy metal manticle at your wrist stops you a few inches away and you have to lean into it to get the job done.
The rise and shine at'' Prudence’s Penitentiary for the Peregrine and Penalized'' has always been fraught with violence and the scent of distant and fecal blood. But only in the last four months or so, since the last ''Warden of Killhouse'' was ousted and was replaced by ''(text-colour:yellow)[Moriarity]'', has morning too been accompanied by the frenzied and ongoing efforts of your fellow cellmates to stifle their growing need to go absolutely fucking apeshit on any lineage within arm’s reach.
To kill and kill and kill and kill until everything is finally quiet.
You understand, though.
[[You feel it too.]]
Your forehead throbs, and then so does your occipital lobe. Your heart drums an unkind beat against the inside of your skull and with every breath you try to press back the bloodlust that rises and falls like a horrible tide inside you and has since the Butcher took you into her kindly ward and pressed a syringe of black liquid into your brachial atery.
Your bed is all rust and springs and, as you shift carefully to stand, your blood falls into your legs and away from your brain -- and for a blissful few seconds the world around you loses the redblack haze of whatever has infected you and you are aware of the way all of this must look. The bloodstained bricks. The body (//the body//) in the corner of your cell. Unmoving for days.
But as quickly as the revelation comes upon you, your heart quadruple triple-beats and the welcome flush of rage and joy that hits your amygdala is like a glass of cold water on a hot day.
And like salvation come early you realize that you have not woken up to the hour of morning.
But instead, to the sound of the familiar voice of the doctor in the doorframe.
[["You seem unwell."]] You are //not// well.
You are a raw and unrealized regression. You are a frantically beating heart pumping stolen blood into a lake of rage. Ever since you came here, to the XXX Wing of Killhouse, it has been as if a sickness has stolen over your heart and taken your vocal chords and whispered obscenities into your ear until you cannot hear your own thoughts for the wretched begging just behind you.
Last night you slept in hot sweat despite the chilly temperatures in the bowels of Prudence. Your body feels like a crucible. There is something very wrong here.
[[Agree that you are Unwell.]]
[[Insist you are Fine.]]
The eyes of (text-colour:red)[Doctor Hannible Nichols] flash behind his full-moon spectacles. “The last time I saw a patient so fine, he ended up like your friend there.” And, as you crane your neck to look behind you, you are reminded of the corpse (//the corpse//) in the back of your cell. Still unclaimed by the Grave.
“If you want me to move on without helping you, I will.” The terrible doctor chastises you. And you know he is telling the truth.
[[Agree that you are Unwell.]]
The Doctor nods, slowly. The top of his bowler hat is eclipsed by the doorframe of your cell. His teeth flash, visibly just-too-sharp and just-too-white in the subred light of Killhouse. “Increased heart-rate, weight loss functional of the personal morgue process…” He’s muttering, almost to himself, before he abruptly asks you. “Do you want to kill?”
[[You have never wanted to do something so badly in your life.]]
You nod, vigorously. You don’t trust yourself to speak and you haven’t for days. Your jaw is a knotted muscle of hate and hunger and once the body //(god the fucking body//) tempted you to masication and perestalsis when otherwise cannibalism wouldn’t have neccesarily //been// your bloodstained bag.
The good doctor reaches into his pocket and pulls out an unlabeled black canister, about the size of a D-cell battery. He motions for you to come closer, as close as the manacle shackling you to the wall will allow.
“This will help.” he promises.
[[Believe him.]]
[[Refuse.]]
You go to the bars of your cell, as close as the chains which are fastened to the brick and mortar with concrete screws next to your humble sink, will allow. Doctor Nichols reaches one long arm through the bars and, with his thumb, switches something open so that the canister, which is right beneath your nose now, begins exhaling oily black smoke into your cell and over your face as if under pressure.
Great gouts of the stuff spill into the corners of your criminally small apartment and you feel a sharp pain as your head hits iron, and then a dull one as it hits stone.
You taste blood, briefly. Then darkness.
[[Mutate According to his Terrible Design.]]
The Doctor’s expression doesn’t change, except maybe around the mouth. “You really ought to listen to me, it’s my job to know best about exactly these sorts of things, you know.”
And somewhere between the drum solo being played on your gray matter and the bloody haze of infection, you find yourself listening to him. The Doctor knows best, as the adage goes. And you really just feel so terrible…
[[Believe him.]]
The heat, at first warm and then incandescent, begins in the base of your neck and creeps up into your skull until it hits the back of your eyes, which themselves grow intensely hot; threatening to boil in their sockets.
As you go suddenly blind, you realize they probably are.
The sensation of melting crawls down your brainstem and back, unspooling outward into your neurotransmitters as an voltaic static that ricochets between your bones like the peal of a bell. Your body, not merely your head now, is a crucible of light and heat that only you are aware of, fetal on the concrete floor of your cell.
[[Remain curled in a ball for several minutes.]]Your meat moves around your bones. You are being remade in the raw and painful realness outside of the Morgue. Distantly you know this is a perversion of some basic nature. You should not be undergoing this process in the sharp and cold reality outside the meat of the Mortis. You are not //made// for this.
But you can feel yourself //being// made for it.
You let out a low moan. Reflexive and low-brained, the sound echoes against the empty hall outside your cell. The doorframe is empty and the good doctor has moved on, leaving you to fend for yourself against this infernal engine of change.
[[So fend.]]After what feels like hours, but could have easily been seconds or minutes, the unyielding heat of your own furnace withdraws and leaves you gasping on the concrete with lungs you barely recognize though a face that feels as if it //might// be yours, but might also belong to someone much, much worse. Power and joy have begun to eclipse the pain of your rebirth and like a burnt out old tree, you feel yourself collapse somewhere inside and become a kind of standing snag, not unlike the body //((ahh, yes, the body))//, that no longer terrifies you in the corner of your cell.
[[Examine the Corpse.]]
[[Break out of your Cell.]]You black out after you hit the floor. It’s hard to tell at first because the lights in Killhouse are the kind that put off more sound and heat than anything else. In the reddish haze of those halogen lamps it is easy to lose track of time. And the darkness that consumes you is the banal, uninteresting unconsciousness of injury.
Until, suddenly, it isn’t.
[[Become your own Personal Morgue]]
It feels //so// good not to fear. At the end of your chain, you approach the thing that had once been your cellmate but has been reduced to a pale and deflated version of itself. You allow your eyes, still warm from your apotheosis, to focus on the sunken face and collapsing cheeks and peeled-back-lips that, just an hour before, had filled you with sickness and cowardice.
You realize the difference now. You can feel it in the way your mind is quiet. You can feel it in the way your meat moves over your bones, and you can feel it in the gnawing hunger that has been sitting like a brick in your stomach since you awoke.
You and this body have achieved the same thing. Persistence. Immortality.
You are so, so hungry.
[[Break out of your Cell.]]
[[Eat the Corpse.]]
The bars are cold and solid iron, and your flesh remains flesh despite the godhood that presses against the underside of your skin. The manacle cuts into your wrist and you tug against it experimentally. Still as solid as ever. Still as trapped. Still hostage. Your stomach grumbles.
[[Examine the Corpse.]]It’s so //easy// to do. The blood is coagulated and hardly messy. You barely taste the meat that passes over your soft palate before tumbling into the chasm of your stomach. The skin is chewy, but you are starving. And, you realize somewhere deep in yourself, that the only biomass you have access to now is the stuff you consume yourself. And so, efficiently, you make quick work of the torso’s softest remaining elements.
And like a battery being switched on, you feel a surge of certainty and power flush your muscles like a stimulant. Your own morgue turns over. You feel, to a note and tone and tune, more alive than you ever have. And the heat behind your eyes feels suddenly like victory.
[[Break Out of Your Cell. ]]
You wipe your mouth on the back of your hand and you stand, sated and ready to do what good work the Doctor bids. You are better, you think. Better than you’ve ever been. The blood in your veins feels hot and clean, and your muscles feel like coiled springs, ready to snap into motion. If this is the sickness that is ravaging Killhouse, then you are a rat of that plague.
The manacle comes out of the wall in a shower of stone dust and mortar when you yank it’s chain this time. You feel your arm snap messily, and then heal in a shape that a doctor would blanch at, but you think will do for now.
With both your hands, one disfigured, you wrench the bars out of their natural shape and into something cartoonish with the welcome sound of ripping metal. The cold iron degloves your palms , but they regrow as quickly as thought and your new skin is so warm it steams in the cold wet of Killhouse.
Further down the hall you can hear the sound of other Lifers, the sickest maniacs in the Greater Wastes, breathing in the fumes of the Necrophage as though it were fresh air.
[[Step into the Hallway.]]
You squeeze through the bent bars of what was your cage and became your chrysalis, and into the winding and black corridors of Killhouse’s lowest level. Down close to the meat of the Mortis, where the stone walls drip like apodecere and the air always smells like rot and old blood, this is where the most terrible monsters of the Greater Wastes are kept cloistered from the tender civilization on the skin of the world.
But, thanks to the Good Doctor Nichols whose voice and intentions boom in your mind with the authority of (text-colour:cyan)[Compulsion], you are finally free to pursue the great passion of your heart and the dream of your soul.
[[Escape.]]
The white hot joy takes you as freedom washes over you, and, with the speed of a sugar-rush you surge down the corridor and towards the distant double-doors that serve as the barrier between you and further heights and greater freedoms.
As you sprint through the hallway that makes up the spine of Killhouse’s deep structure, the clambering, shuffling, limping population of the XXX Wing amasses behind you. Their doors hang crazily off their iron hinges and the bodies of those who did not take naturally to the Necrophage lay haphazardly in the corners and crannies, shoved there by careless boots and circumstance and unclaimed by the Grave.
[[Climb Upwards.]]
The pressing mob that surrounds you now is eerily quiet. Their jumpsuits all have some variety of gore splattered across the crossed keys of the Killhouse logo and their faces are angelic and blank as if the Sin that resides in and defines Prudence Penitentiary had been exhumed from their souls by the ardent heat of the Necrophage.
Floor by floor, wing by wing, the Necro-soldiers around you grow more densely packed. You have not received a specific command, but it is almost as if you know where the good doctor wants you to go. And it feels good to do that, to go where he would like you to, to kill what he’d like you to kill.
At last your throng of some hundred inmates push into the mess hall with a huge rolling door chained shut at one end, and some three hundred other Lifers gathered in a tight, barely controlled mob, directly in front of it.
[[Examine the Mob.]]
Most of these faces you’ve never seen before. Nameless assholes who’d killed or stolen from or lobotomized the wrong guy. But you know a few. (text-colour:cyan)[Eyeless Jack], with his horrible habit. (text-colour:purple)[The Saint of Three Mouths], who you’d heard escaped Killhouse last in the literal shit of some Survivor’s he’d forced to eat him. You see (text-colour:magenta)[Sugargums], one of the premier Candymen of the San Saba - and each and every one of these preeminent and regal bosses of the crime world -
Each and every one of them look up at the towering figure of Doctor Nichols with the same placid, admiring expression that a child wears for their grandfather at holidays.
[[Join the Mob.]] “Come, child.” A voice that might be your own paternal grandfather bids you. And you feel as if you are being invited fireside to listen to a story at the knee of some elder you trust as simply as a child, or a dog might.
Your legs move beneath you until you too stand beneath the improvised pulpit of the good doctor Nichols with your chin tilted upwards to meet the flashing and bespectacled gaze of the man who has gifted you your godhood.
Doctor Nichols begins to speak.
[[Listen.]]
//“Collected ones, dear and distant. Who has gathered here with me today, on the eve of my family’s reunion and dissolution; a story told in many parts. Who but the children of Sin and sacrament who labor for their crimes can bring the wretched to a true and informed justice?” //
The grandfatherly Nichols spreads his arms wide, and in each fist he holds another of those blackened cannistes. They look like bombs, almost.
//“Give the peoples of the Greater Wastes a taste of what is to come. Show them the soldiers even the wretched can become. Go out, good sons and daughters.”
//
The two canisters pop open in tinkling tandem, and a spray of thick black fog hisses out of the hermetically unsealed lids. The miasma overtakes the first line of cringing necro-soldiers and you barely see them double over in pain before the Good Doctor slams a button and the rolling bay doors behind him ascend with the sound of screaming metal.
//“Go out and kill fucking everything.”
//
[[Go out and kill fucking everything.]]
The smoke of the Necrophage rushes out ahead of you but you overtake it easily. The churning and whitehot refractory of your immortal soul spends itself to push your body faster even than the wind that carries the sickness that lives in your blood and your bones.
On the horizon you see Essex, then Bravado, and the rest of the Lonstar and beyond that - everything else in the Greater Wastes. You think you could keep running forever. Killing forever. Sustained by death and suffering, your joy glows phosphorescent.
You thank your wonderful Grandfather Nichols for all the good he’s done for this family.
And run faster still.
[[Go to Bravado.]]
OOC: Thank you so much for taking the time to play our text adventure! We hope this helps set the stage for ''Necrophage: The Pyroclasm''!
We'll see you this Friday!
PS: If you finished this text adventure, find Shan for a special, limited quantity item. <w<