[Lair Task] Si Deus Me Relinquit (Mort) (FIN)

[medigel]

OOC

[ Task of Death: ] The Reaping
This task can be performed SOLO. However, it is recommended to have at least another player. You can do this with a max of three players. They may go anywhere in the Human World using the portal catacombs in the Lair. These catacombs lead to small human world towns only. All players must follow these steps to successfully harvest Fear from death.

gaia_crown [ Step 1: ]

- You reach a quiet town, and the first thing you see is a funeral procession. There is death heavy in the air, but not quite enough for a proper reaping. You will need to create more death.

All humans have 10 HP. The CAN be npced.

- Simply select a human target. If you have two players, you can BOTH attack the target until they die. If three, all three of you attack the target until they die. Use proper dice mechanics (battle dice mechanics), Fear charges CAN be used.
- All humans do +4 auto damage, if you are a Death clans member they only do +3 and Death clans members get a +2 attack modifier
- HOW IT WORKS: I am a stage 1 horseman. I roll 2d8 and get 4, 5. That means I do 9-8 modifier = 1 damage to the human. That human now has 9 HP. My partner then rolls 2d8 -8 and gets a final damage result of 8. The human is now DYING. Our group has TAKEN DOWN ONE human. We can now target another
- Make sure to post in your OOC Tally at the bottom of each post which human number you are on and their current HP as well as how many humans your group has taken down.
- When your group has killed AT LEAST 2 humans you can move on to the next phase. You can only take down a MAX of 4.

gaia_crown [ Step 2: ]

- Now it is time to reap, aka, harvest the humans. The atmosphere is just as important as the (dying) human itself, and while it may be nice to gain some additional Fear for Halloween, you have no love for Halloween, and really, there is no reason to add to the ghost population. You are going to do a mock reaping, without fully completing it. You are only harvesting the Fear before the human is entirely passed away.

Roll a 4-sided dice If odd, you harvest 1 Fear point from the body. If even, you harvest 2. You continue to watch and reap in their Fear until they are dead. It is up to you if you want to burn/ destroy/ send off /bury the body or just leave it.
- You must do this for EACH victim (per player) you harvest. The Fear amount is different harvested, as it sometimes depends on what the human is exactly going through in their death throes. All humans are npcable/ you can rp/ gm them. Ie: I am player one and we killed three humans. I will roll for human 1, and I roll a 4. 4 = even. I get 2 Fear points. I watch them die. I do this again for human 2, etc etc.

 

[medigel]

Gray clouds. Of course it was going to rain on the day of the funeral. The Human World wasn’t devoid of its own clichés.

Mort was grim as he surveyed his surroundings, wishing this wasn’t so. Water never mixed well with him, not when he needed to call upon his electricity. But then again, maybe the overkill would be a good thing. He was already so on the fence about the killing of humans that perhaps visiting one end of the extreme would be enough to set him down one way or the other. Uncertainty about his stance on the matter had been bothering the zomboil for sometime now, exacerbated by the mounting concerns that he did not, in fact, know him as well as he thought he had.

The QB class, the Insanity nightmare, the Mirror Mort . . . All had shown him the inner darkness he held, the traits and thoughts and unerringly eerie behavior that, like it or not, had been based off himself, corrupted or not. And the Mirror one especially had been unnerving because he had been witness to what the inverted version of himself could be – even his ghoulfriend had only witnessed one side of it, and just a portion at that.

It was unsettling to glimpse at the true nature of oneself in such a raw manner. No-one could view each facet of their personality in such detail and expect to come back the same.

This was probably how the zomboil had landed in such a moral quandary: stuck in the gray between what he knew and what he didn’t want to know, his heart couldn’t settle peacefully on matters that required choosing black or white . Then again, students had never been taught to kill humans. It had always been scaring, creating atmosphere, finding highly imaginative targets, and the like. Not . . . not this. Visions of the woman he had accidentally sent to her death flashed to the front of his mind and made him wince.

It was that incident which had prompted him to go at this particular task alone. He wanted, needed to know if he could go through with killing humans. If he couldn’t do this to defenseless targets, how could he hope to eradicate Hunters?

This muddled landscape was what Mort’s mind was like when he first entered the Human World. That was before it struck him that he was going to a funeral. A legitimate, somber, day of mourning for mortals.

And that just opened a new can of worms.

Setting his jaw, the zomboil began to shuffle forward, watching for his first target. Maybe he could finish this before it rained.  

[medigel]

It wasn’t just one, but several different lines of humans that Mort could pick from. As he neared the slowest, he could hear some of them murmuring a name. Something that began with a T. The person they were going to inter? He kept hearing it over and over again until at last Mort put it together: Thomas, they were saying. Thomas Quinn. And the name refused to be banished as he stalked one of the older men, a stout balding fellow who reminded him an awful lot of Priam, the red-faced satyr whom he had grown to loathe over the course of a few years. It was startling how suddenly the well of emotions overcame him as he leapt towards the target.

The sound of the human's startled yelp was most gratifying to hear when the punch was delivered to his gut. The man fought back with a left hook of his own, but it was soft, fleshy, and most of all weak. Mort thought nothing of it.

It was too easy to superimpose someone else’s face atop the human’s, too easy to imagine the high relief of the satyr’s brows, the creases of many scowls about his mouth, small and dark eyes forever fixed in a half-lidded stare – the human even had a similar-sized gut as Priam. Mort delivered a second punch to double the man over, feeling bone giving way beneath his fist as the fragment within Thor called for more. So he gladly delivered more.

The bestial part of him stirred as he looked into the eyes of the frightened Priam, and a smirk began to worm its way onto the zomboil’s features. Callie deserved better. So much better. He had played at being her knight as a scareling, and now was the chance to act on it. This creature didn’t deserve to live, this useless pile of flesh should have never been given the privilege of being in her presence, let alone marrying her, this thing was a waste of space, this garbage, this piece of s**t human –

HP: 46
Damage: 6
Human #1 HP: 4  

[medigel]

– Human.

His fist stopped in midair.

Not Priam. Not Halloween. Human. Although looking upon the wretched thing now, he was more “bloody mass of pulp” than “human” looking. The man was cowering beneath him even as he tried to force Mort off with his legs, unable to open his eyes but still blindly flailing in the vague hope that he could get out alive. In that moment the zomboil felt a small stab of horror mixed with an equally keen sense of ego.

This was what the Horsemen did for a living. They reveled in the wave of blood and death that came in their wake and loved nothing more than to foster discord and destruction. Humans were nothing but cattle to be slaughtered, Hunters moreso. That fervor, that utter unification of cause, and most of all that sense of absolute power – that was what Mort liked. Amityville was blessed with a variety of opinions, but it was also an unfortunate curse: unless the goal was an umbrella that appealed to the masses, he believed it would be too hard for them to marshal nearly the same force as the Clans.

In the beginning it had seemed like a logical choice to become an Initiate, to help the first cause that looked so gleefully towards the complete wipeout of the Hunters. But here, under gray clouds, looming over the bloody mess that had been a human who had come only to mourn the loss of someone else . . . In that moment Mort began to question whether it had been a good idea at all.

He stepped off the man, took ahold of his arm, and dragged him away from prying eyes. He seemed to be lolling between states of consciousness, murmuring something under his breath as he was laid behind nearby bushes. Mort didn’t care to stay and listen and tried not to look at the blood on his hands as he looked for his next target.

HP: 42
Damage: 3
Human #1 HP: 1  

[medigel]

You’re weak. As if in response to the phantom voice, thunder rumbled ominously.

Mort trekked on.

You didn’t even kill him, it continued in his own terrible, terrible voice. You left him to bleed out on the ground alone instead of finishing the job yourself. It was not a literal manifestation, not another phenomena of the fragment coming to play – just a part of his conscious mind created expressly to spur him through this gray area of time. All truly great mad scientists were plagued by something: a great and often infuriating goal or object that, inevitably, became an inextricable part of their life.

For today’s purpose, it was just a question: Could he kill when it came down to it?

No, said the voice, and in the distance lightning forked across the sky and brought soft thunder.

And Mort trekked on some more.

The humans for Thomas Quinn’s funeral were still slowly trickling in. Perhaps the funeral had not yet begun, or it was a come when you wished affair. He didn’t know how humans approached death honestly despite being a third year – it had never piqued his interest to check, having thought he could move past the amnesia and just focus on the present. But as he lingered and eyed a woman who seemed downtrodden enough that he could sneak up on her, it grew hard to not entertain notions of what might or might not have been his past life.

He could feel the emotion beginning to well up, and so Mort rooted himself to the present by inhaling the woman’s scent of delicious flesh and letting instinct take over instead. So often had he been denied a bite by the Hunters but here, with this unsuspecting prey, he could at last have a taste . . .

Thunder echoed across the expanse again, louder this time. It was the starting shot that sent the zomboil hurtling at the woman, metal and flesh hands digging into her back as he threw her down under his weight. I am not weak, Mort thought above the hum of his brain as he tore the flesh from her shoulder blade with a guttural growl and began his feast. I am not weak. She’s the one who is weak! And as he began to gnaw on her arm, he noticed with some agitation that the woman was screaming overly loud, and with a growl Mort lifted himself enough to turn his prey over so that he might suffocate her cries.

It was a terrible idea, not in that it didn’t work – no, Mort most certainly clamped his hands around the woman’s throat with ease and cut off her shrieks – but in that by doing so, he had to look the human in the eye as he did it.

At first it was inconsequential. She struggled and thrashed but her throes grew weaker with each second as her frantic heart pumped out blood; the feel of its panicked rhythm fascinated Mort enough that his grip slackened just a bit so that he could feel it both beneath him and against his palms. Life. He held life in his hands; and he could take it away on whim just as much as he could let it go. The fact gave him such savage pleasure that it birthed an equally bestial grin that made the whites of her eyes seem to swallow her irises. He leaned his blood-stained lips close to the woman’s pallid face and took in her Fear-riddled scent.

I am not weak, he proclaimed with profound egoism. I am their worst nightmare that they cannot hope to stop.

In close proximity, he happened to hear something suspiciously like words gurgling from the woman’s mouth. Briefly he let up the pressure, gleefully awaiting his prey’s final words before tearing her head open for the brains within.

It was faint at first, and Mort couldn’t be sure it was what he thought it was. But the thunder and lightning stilled, and even the wind did not brush past, and in that singular moment he heard the woman murmur, “Th-Thomas . . . I’m sorry . . .”

And then that stillness was broken by a rage so overpowering that Mort thought he was literally seeing red. A few seconds later the mist didn’t clear – he realized that blood was copiously squirting from the tear in her throat and at his face, coating his glasses in a film of scarlet. His fingers were buried deep within the hole and had all but torn the cords of muscle underneath, and currently both hands were an inch away from the woman’s spinal chord; the flesh had caved beneath his Death Grip like a knife through butter. The hole was quickly filling up with blood.

Even in the end she had defied him. Even when her killer was looking her right in the eye, her final words were for a man already dead and unable to help. It had triggered a surprising amount of rage and confusion from the zomboil.

Who was this Thomas Quinn that could command such attention even after death? Why did Mort feel jealous of that influence?

Why did he feel weak even in victory?

Somewhere in the distance he vaguely heard the sound of a scream.

HP: 38
Damage: 11
Human #2 HP: -1  

[medigel]

He was still staring at the growing pool of blood staining his hands when something hard knocked against his head.

“MONSTER!”

The hit itself didn’t hurt so much as the shriek, and Mort swung to face the intruder with a several bolts of electricity flung at the human’s face. This time it was a man in a black suit and a cane that befitted someone older. It wasn’t his voice that had spoken, however; that belonged to the horror-struck scareling at his side.

“Jane, go,” ordered the man, forcing her back with his cane as he approached. “Go.” And the ghoul obeyed after a teary pause.

The man attempted to whack Mort in the head again, but he managed to duck down below the swing. Body charged, he sprang to his feet and met the human with a teeth-baring growl.

He had only meant to kill the minimum for the Task. Why did they have to interfere?

Can you blame them? asked the voice of reason. What would you do if you found a loved one killed by an enemy?

This elicited another feral growl that seemed to meld with the roll of thunder above.

HP: 34
Damage: 6
Human #3 HP: 4  

[medigel]

The battle was over before it could really begin. Mort saw that his opponent was at least in his fifties and knew that he would win, and there was something in the human’s eyes that said he knew as well – yet the cane came swinging anyway.

The man bellowed something wordless as Mort caught the hook into his arm and the fight for control began. In spite of his confidence, Mort found that the human had surprising strength to contend with, and though his opponent had a few spasms from the residual electricity he still kept a firm grip on his makeshift weapon. “Leave!” Mort hissed as he tried to force him back. “M’done here! Leave or – ”

The cane twisted out of his grasp and knocked him in the jaw, rattling his brain and forcing Mort a step back. A second came swiftly after that and he staggered from the burst of white before his eyes, nearly tripping over the dead woman’s limb. A soft cry came from the man as he knelt by her, a hand hovering over what was left of her throat.

“Kara . . . Kara, oh God . . . You killed her,” he half-whispered, half-choked. The man jerked his head up at him. “You killed her. Why?”

Mort remained quiet. His head throbbed and his words were like gunshots.

”Why?” the man demanded, anger and anguish contorting his aged face as he leaned on the cane to get back up. He never made it – green electricity suddenly surged through his body as Mort, biting the inside of his cheek hard, aimed to shut him up before something else happened. The man’s death throes were grotesquely animated, jerking and twitching until at last he fell rigid over the woman, a little foam dried at the corner of his lips.

Burnt flesh smelled delicious in a way a cooked steak did. Yet his hunger was masked by a sudden wave of revulsion that, had he a stomach, would have made the zomboil hunch over and vomit.

Three. Three in one day. He couldn’t take much more of this. Why had the woman said the name of a dead man? Why had the man bothered to talk to him when he looked so unnatural? And there was one more thing Mort wanted to do still, and that was see who this Thomas Quinn was, that he might get some sort of answer for this madness.

Just a little longer . . . The voice sounded almost soothing. Mort nursed his swollen cheek and began to trudge forward, not transverse to the path the humans had taken but parallel. He wanted to attend this funeral.


HP: 30
Damage: 9
Human #3 HP: -5  

[medigel]

He wasn’t terribly observant of the ambient atmosphere at this point, but somewhere in his walk it had begun to lightly rain. For the first time, Mort didn’t freak out about that fact even as it began to soak his head. Maybe it would wash the blood from him.

There were humans already sitting at the funeral in arrangements of white chairs, and as one they seemed to turn to look at him. The atmosphere had been heavy with such portending conclusiveness that it took longer than usual for the panic to being – almost as if they were all in a dream, or a nightmare as Mort would have it. And then the little ghoul from before shrieked of his coming and the humans were agitated into action. Screams and shout, chairs scraping together or falling down, stomps of feet eating wet earth to get away, slipping, falling, staggering: there was thunder above and below, yet it was about as important to him as a minipet’s bark.

No, more intriguing was the one woman who stayed behind, the only person between him and the coffin.

What struck Mort first was her hair, how it came in tumbles and cascades over her shoulders and seemed to have a vivid red sheen even when dampened; and her eyes, Jack, they were boring into him like jewels with jagged edges, equal parts defiant and pleading and, if he dared say it, beautiful even, and set with running mascara that, with the gloom around them, almost gave her face a hollow skull impression. She didn’t move even as he lumbered over, as straight as a pole and several inches shorter than Mort. Pale skinned, voluptuous in figure, and brave enough to confront him for a dead man.

Who is this man? Mort asked again, his brows drawing down over his eyes as he approached.

When he was several yards away, the woman made a strangled sound and pulled her umbrella off the floor, brandishing its pointed tip at him in a threatening manner. She thought he was here to feast on Quinn, Mort realized, or otherwise taint him. She must have been his lover.

“You’ll not have him,” the woman said in a quavering hiss of a voice. The clouds flashed but made no thunder, briefly lighting up her eyes. “He belongs to God, y-you filthy creature. Did you hear me? I won’t let you have him!”

Mort stepped forward anyway, grim and saddened by what he felt he was going to have to do. ”Leave us,” he said, and the woman started with a soft gasp. ”Or will kill you.”

The woman seemed to grow a shade paler but otherwise was rooted to the spot, appearing maddeningly lovely in her noncompliance – just like another redheaded, stubborn ghoul he knew. Mort kept moving forward despite her warnings and threats and only paused in midstep when he felt the end of the umbrella jab him in the breast.

It was silent for a moment as they held that position. The rain fell harder and blanketed them in noise and cold water. He become conscious of the fact that the woman had tried to stab him in the heart.

”Sorry,” he said with surprising sincerity as he pushed himself through the umbrella, her shriek of surprise white noise to his ears. ”Don’t have one.”

He held out his hands as if to grasp hers and delivered a burst of green electricity that burnt his fingers and palms and left him shaking under the weight of grey clouds and pain. And the woman crumpled without a sound, her thud hidden by the fall of rain.


HP: 26
Damage: 10
Human #4 HP: 0  

[medigel]

He didn’t hear the sound of each body being dragged along: not the wet slops or the soft slithers or the groans from the one still barely able to draw breath; the other three were still warm as well but the mock reaping had to be done now before . . . before . . .

Mort set up four chairs before the coffin and dragged each person into one. It was sticky, wet, and ungrateful work to set them down in such a way that they didn’t slip off, and all the while their mouths lolled and their eyes stare vacantly through him. And when he was finished Mort felt like they could have been sitting behind paper-topped podiums, and that he was on the stand for his crimes against them: literal judges, jury, and executioners, the lot of them.

It was stupid. They were dead or about to be, all by his hand. He had killed them; half in one hit. He was in control. They shouldn’t have been so condemning to look at.

Yet as Thor’s palm was opened to suck in the Fear their deaths produced, Mort couldn’t bear to look any of them in their sightless, judging, empty eyes. Circuits glowed and the machine whirred like a purring cat as it tasted the energy it always craved. Before all of it could be taken, however, the zomboil yanked Thor back and closed a fist over his palm and the fragment within, shivering for an unknown reason.

Grimacing, he turned away from the deceased audience and forced one foot in front of the other until his toes tapped the bottom of the coffin. Several roses had been placed atop it, several others scattered to the ground from the wind; along with them were two photo mounts whose depictions had been taken in the mass panic.

As Mort gazed upon the coffin, a sense of anxiety and expectation began to bloom within him. His hands hovered over the lid for a handful of seconds before he had the gumption to lift it. He almost immediately dropped it.

He wasn’t greeted with the face of a man but the face of a boil about his age, maybe a little younger, with wispy dark hair and an expression so serene that it hurt to look at. He was completely un-extraordinary to the naked eye; there was no magic, no secret, nothing to suggest what it was Thomas Quinn had done that had compelled such strong emotion in the other humans. But it wasn’t that which had nearly caused Mort to fall back in shock – no, it was the fact that in many respects, the boil looked like him.

Diluted blood dripped onto the deceased’s skin, and with a voiceless cry Mort tried to wipe it off with a hand that still was stained, smearing red everywhere. And he wiped at his shirt frantically as he apologized to the boil for making a mess, he was always making a mess of things, always, and if he could just hold still enough he’d use his shirt to clean it off and apologize some more, how clumsy, how inconsiderate, but he had only been doing his job, please forgive him, it was just a job and nothing personal, not until now when he looked upon his own face, not until he realized the full extent of that job, just a job, just a task, but no matter what he did the blood wasn’t coming off his hands, why wasn’t it coming off –

Lightning snaked across the sky and roared with thunder so loud that it startled the zomboil, and with a clatter the lid dropped closed. The noise seemed to reverberate throughout his entire body, made his bones shake and his flesh tingle until eventually all became gelatin, and he slumped to the ground, curled against the coffin and became engrossed in a cycle of memory and mourning and self-loathing and pity he had been trying so desperately to avoid.

It wasn’t a mystery why the humans had tried to stop him: they really and truly had loved the boil even in death. But the concept had escaped him so easily despite its simplicity. Why? Had he really been so doubtful this phenomena occurred . . . ?

Yes, Mort realized, he had been. The closest he had to such a bond was the affection from his mother and Callie, the former which he felt had waned into something more out of duty than love, the latter which could have been construed as sympathy from one generation to another. And his memory stretched back further to She who had left, She who had first taken him in when he was dug up in Halloweentown, She who had given him his name and yet could not be remembered by her own, who had suffered his presence in spite of his slow mind and faulty speech and withdrawn personality, had coddled, mothered, maybe even loved him for a period. And then he was reminded of how that rosy-hued time was cut short when she left without warning, doubtlessly tired of a problem child she had not envisioned would be so difficult. It didn’t matter that it made little sense or that there was still an air of mystery behind her disappearance – either way he had been abandoned.

And then his memory stretched even further, grasping at the nothingness before The Long Sleep. What had he been as a human? Had he been as awkward and ill-fortunate? Had he had a mother and a father or had he always been cursed to only know one? Had he had any siblings he would have played with? Friends? A home, a school, a job, something to show that he had once lived and breathed and existed? Did the world remember who Mortimer McNeal used to be and, more importantly, did it care? Did they care? Had he even been given a family, or had he also been cursed to be an orphan as a human?

How had he died? How many cared enough to come to the funeral? Had there even been there a funeral?

And the more Mort sank into unconstructive conjecture, the more he compared his miserable self to the beatific Thomas Quinn, the more he came to the grim conclusion that he was a wretch no matter what because there was no family who would truly come to accept him and his very flawed decisions; after all, he was a being who had thought it logical to wash his hands of blood with more blood, who had sought out death in the hopes that its inevitability would have given him focus, and who had now been reduced to a sobbing pitiful mess over what was essentially inconsequential in the grand scheme of things.

That was, most likely, the clincher: the insignificance of his own existence. And here he was grasping at power like a security blanket, so desperate that he had been driven to try and reap souls. Everything about this task was fundamentally wrong. Everything was wrong. And the worst part about it was that his own flawed self would not leave this morbid cause, not when it proved to be the most viable path that lead to the Hunters’ destruction. He would have to kill and kill and die and die and Jack knew what else, and there was nothing he could do about it because he had chosen, right or wrong, and he was going to have to see through it, insignificant or not.

And if it ended up being the wrong choice? He’d have to own up to it. But then, fate always made sure he had a trial by fire anyway, because wasn’t it funny to see the little zombie burn?


(( +3 ))