loki laufeyson (toberuled) wrote in doorslogs, @ 2012-04-14 19:08:00 |
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Entry tags: | door: marvel comics, loki |
Who: Loki
What: Something nasty and insanity inducing this way comes.
Where: Midtown Manhattan through the Marvel door.
When: Today
Warnings/Rating: None.
Mass hysteria.
That's the way the news stations describe the scene in Manhattan. Broadway is a nightmare. Times Square, a madhouse.
From the sky, the island of Manhattan is sheer panic. People are flooding out of theaters and restaurants and apartment buildings, cars are gridlocked on the street, mothers are hiding with their children in alcoves, everyone searching desperately for cover. They're all terrified, so afraid that they have begun fighting each other for shelter. Windows are smashed, looting begins, and people choke the streets trying to escape.
So what is driving them? What appeared without warning in the middle of one of the most populous cities on the planet?
Well...it's funny, really. Somebody thought it would be a good joke, a fantastic trick, the illusionary monster, the worm with a thousand tentacles and a thousand thousand chewing, circular mouths. It seems to be almost without limit, black and green and red-veined, squelching and moist, its body centered in Times Square and its reaching limbs, wide as houses, stretching down and around city streets. To the people on the ground, the tentacles always seem just about to reach them, and so they trample anyone who falls, and they scream, and some of them collapse into insanity.
Of course, it isn't real. The slime the creature seems to leave behind can't be touched, and the people it seems to pick up and toss into one of its many maws don't actually exist, all an elaborate illusion created for the benefit of the people on the ground.
They only know what their eyes tell them. They see something beyond understanding, category, or naming. The creature warps back and forth, and its million black eyes shimmer with iridescence that is colorless, yet has every color. Its muscles ripple and twist. Some go unconscious simply from staring at it a few seconds too long, their minds overloaded by impossibility, the impulses on their brain stem crowded, choked, strangled by disgust and insanity. It cannot be known. It is the physical embodiment of despair, and the cold, isolated silence of the in-between spaces in the universe. It has no name and no category, the monster that devours the very light that strikes it. It tweaks an ancestral memory, long cast aside, of a worm that would devour their world and all the other realms with it, tweaking a line of fear so strong that they will do anything in their fruitless attempts to escape it.
If one knew that it might all be a trick, if one noticed that the buildings the tentacles seemed to tear down were, a moment later, whole again, they might see, in the central, writhing mass of the creature, another reality layered behind the monster. Reality, behind the creature's facade, winks in and out of existence, only there if one knows to look for it.
In the center of the creature's imaginary body, on the scaffolding of the enormous, glowing billboards, a hundred feet off the ground, there are eight figures standing. Seven of the eight are giants of men, half again as tall as the tallest human below them, thick and blue-skinned, their red eyes scanning the crowd, re-gripping axes and mallets, itching to fight.
Behind them is another figure, smaller, but still tall for a man, holding something that glitters. He has his eyes closed, and he is smiling.
He is wondering.
He is wondering if his brother remembers the snakes.