ORIGIN

Cue the heavy metal, the bass thump of drums and the frantic shredding of a guitar—even a very creative chorus clamoring for BLOOD! Who was Draconua to deny it, even as the... thing before her looked moments away from melting into a puddle of Oil then and there.

She didn't spend long contemplating whether or not it was a ruse—his... trying to climb into her mouth? Go in for an attack?—before rearing out of proximity and back in with snapping jaws. Another attempt at dropping the guillotine.


@Alrik

As kind and unkind, helpful and unhelpful as the audience members were and tried to be... Alrik's fate had been sealed a long time ago. Longer, perhaps, than some of them had even been alive. How cruel it must have been to grow up knowing you were destined for something and then finally, when the time came, to wake up for something and find out it was this?

Truly a battle of fates!

And I could go on, but our time is... up!

...Wait what? What is he doing?! TRYING?!?!?! Oh dear. Look! That little beast, that dumpling-shaped guy, attempting to scramble up Draconua's mouth before the snap-clammer of the guillotine!

Assuredly, he does not make it completely. His swishing tail is certainly put in peril, but... he does make it. And now he's on her snoot.

What was the point of that?

If anything, this was yet another case of evidence for why he never should have tried... now he was certain to go down in some harsh, horrible way... with a fight.

Paws scrabbled against the chipped and worn smooth of her mask, a weight—however incomparable it was to herself—rocking against it. The fuzzball's tail swept in front of her nostrils, the hairs long enough to prick against nostrils and eyeballs alike. Draconua squinted, inhaling sharply to suppress a sneeze.

And to overcompensate, the Valkhound threw her head downward with a roar, shifting her weight backwards. A hand reached up, claws scraping against blood-red keratin(? Bone?) to find Alrik. If a few more chips and scrapes were added to the mix, then so be it—

—because she was going to get this foolish cat off of her face and devour him.


@Alrik

Fates and destiny, as we should all know by now, do not let up easily... if at all. If they exist, if anyone had the misfortune of being bound by such things, then they shall find that with every struggle the knots get tighter. If Alrik hadn't struggled, he would have been less of a pill to swallow. Would've saved the audience some heartbreak at least.

If hearts could break to the tune of clown music.

Bones sure could, but Alrik wasn't hearing any. Grasped, but not squozen... what did she plan to do then, eat him alive? At last, Alrik finally managed to meet acceptance. It's an important concept to meet right before death. I mean, now that Alrik had once last chance to think about it, his whole life seemed to be one big five stages of grief event. He'd done the denial, the anger, the bargaining-- boy howdy how he'd done the depression. This was the last stop. At least it would be a cool way to die, instead of something fully anticlimactic or traumatic like Alrik had expected. Now he was... just a little less insignificant!

Honk-a honk-a honk-a!

"Okay." His face was grim, sorrowful as ever. "Just don't bring me back." He sought out eyes. Did this thing have any? Probably not. Eyes were connected to a soul, or a heart, or some semblance of humanity. Eyes were given to things that live. Why does that matter now? Well, if this creature didn't have any, it meant she wasn't alive. She was just as heartless and cruel as the batcats. She was the blood of a savage.

"Go ahead." He bowed his head, and abdicated.

@Draconua

strong language

Figuratively speaking, Alrik had stuffed his hands inside of the pockets of an oversized hoodie. Kept his head down shouldering through the crowd, barely casting a glance as his shoulder was checked by a passerby. Took his hands out for nothing but scanning a ticket at the terminal. Had resigned himself to a pitiful nothing as he shoved through the turnstiles. Watched as the conductor sped by on magnetic rails and the wonders of technology.

Perhaps he'd wondered how the world had changed so much from what he remembered—thunderstorms and homemade stinkbombs hurled into the open windows of passing cars—and morphed into the picture of bloody red, Chaotic sigils, and Oilstained teeth guttering through every ounce of air. Perhaps he'd wondered, and decided that he did not like what was new, what had left him behind.

The conductor had looked an awful lot like Draconua. The sliding-glass doors of the railcar looked an awful lot like the jagged points of a maw gaping white. The hissing steam of condensation meeting linear synchronous motors looked an awful lot like the motes of entropic fire from a dark beast's belly.

The Sleepless Chaos lingered on none of this, far beyond waxing poetic like the faun in the stands. Instead the void where eyes seemed like they should be met the dim gaze of something long-dead and awaiting the necrophage beetles' arrival. They caught it, and they held fast. A sorrowful note filled the pitiful lump gripped in her claw; he made his plea as he stepped into the cabin.

It was not for survival.

It was for mercy.

Of course, too, it could be viewed as surrender. Restitution. A bid to be the reward well-earned. Draconua would not discriminate. The crowd rallied for blood, and she would deliver it for no one but herself. Herself, the harbinger only of death—merciful or not.

All things turn to Oil in the end.

"Avu kgwsd bgv kegwtce ofqahsj geiglgucs," she growled, in a thoughtless facsimile of a language spoken by no other creature but those old enough to remember it. Her voice was twisted into a guttural snarl, a completely different accent—and even dialect tracing her words. "Uuijwnpnu, lgyrwtnl lwlvse pwczt. Hzg yegl qm ycm yplz xqslco avu wf vpms." Draconua tilted her head, as if contemplating through her growling words.

Then, abruptly, as if she'd been speaking normally all along, she uttered with a lopsided, crooked smile: "your worth ends with this."

In the moment the valkhound tossed the cat high into the air, there was no humanity. No humanity as the pit of death yawned wide beneath his form as he surely reached the peak of his motion and gravity no longer was the weakest force upon him. No humanity as the grinning nightmare reared up onto her hind legs, springing to meet Alrik with the guillotine-snap! of jaws and thumping back to earth.

By all definitions laid out by the sad jester, Draconua was not alive.

@Alrik