Pete Wisdom is saving the world...from itself. (mister_wisdom) wrote in valarlogs, @ 2012-06-27 04:14:00 |
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Entry tags: | !complete, pete wisdom |
"It beats for you, it bleeds for you."
Who: Pete Wisdom
What: Dreaming of a mission involving a cult and it's most precious artifact.
When: Last night, prior to this log which contains the lovely aftermath.
Where: Domino's bolthole
Rating/Warning: R like Domino's is, for a potentially heavy squick warning. It's slippery. Of the "I see and smell (lots of) dead people n' animals" variety. Wasn't going to post this even if it is canon (right down to the animal mention), in case it offended, but...eh, might as well let it see the light of day and not languish in relative obscurity. If death grosses you out, best skip this.
Status: Narrative, Complete!
It was after he was transferred from MI-6, that Pete's life began to take one of several, steadily degrading, turns for the worst. While his work had been exemplary in British Intelligence, he was still a mutant, and mutants were generally expected to make themselves useful if they were able, or could be called upon to stop all threats to the country or its citizens. Unsaid or not, that was simply the way things worked and no one called much attention to it. So it was with duty in mind that he was transferred to Black Air, assigned as a wetworks agent, licensed to kill. And kill he did, in abundance. By the time he'd accepted this particular mission and with his powers being so useful in a destructive context, Pete had quite a few hits under his belt.
The missions had all been to gather this or that object or information, or to kill a particular person or group who had somehow gotten in the way, posing a supposed threat. It got to the point where he didn't even think the threats were facts, but fabrications. But Pete did his job, regardless, because he believed that it still needed doing. And, in his mind, the people who had the things he was after or who needed stopped, were still posing threats. To someone, out there. Somehow.
The current outline seemed so deceptively simple.
The Location: New York, New York, United States
The Objective: Retrieve a potentially dangerous object being worshiped by a doomsday cult.
Mission Summary: Infiltration of storage facility, obtain object, deliver it safely back to the Black Air headquarters in Blackwall for further testing and containment.
They often seemed so rudimentary during a mission briefing. It often turned out that they really weren't as cut and dry as the summaries ever made them out to be.
This time was no exception.
When he arrived outside the cult's residence, it was on the tail end of what had been a very muggy midsummer's day. He expected it to be mostly deserted, even at that moment when he finally picked a lock and opened a door to set foot inside. After all, his debriefing had stated it was being stored at the location in question, not that it was heavily guarded or that anyone was even in permanent residence.
That was why he wasn't prepared for the smell of all encompassing rot that hit him in the face, nearly as effective as a fist would've been, had it punched him right in the nose. In fact, the smell crawled up into his nose and left him retching, eyes watering, and he had to turn away, doubling over and trying not to lose his lunch.
Inside, dead for days, was body after body after body, all slumped over precisely where they'd died. They were arranged in a sitting or a kneeling position, around a pedestal that had an ornate box set upon it. The steady hum and rustle of flies moving to and fro was the only sign or sound of life, within. But it was the sheer sight of it, which had left him just as stricken as the smell did. What once was skin had already begun to slip off the bodies in a gradual slide down to the floor, bloat had given way to liquefaction, lividity had been and gone into ever darkening shades and tones. The floorboards were slick with fluids that he didn't even want to begin to sort out what came from what. It was all slimy blacks, tarry browns, filmy whites, sickly dark yellows, and a smattering of toxic greens that had to be what they'd taken to kill themselves.
Men, women, children. All gone. Right down to their pets. There was a dusty grey cat contorted in one corner of the room, he'd noticed as he carefully tread past, with its kittens laying dead underneath the twisted remains of it's legs. They resembled nothing more than a few forgotten tufts of matted fur, curled in on themselves.
He never liked cats anyway, to begin nor end with. It would be hard to look at another feline ever again, without picturing what he had seen with but a glance, at that very moment.
Now all of the sights, as well as the combined smell of it all, had crawled up his nose, burrowed in through his eyes, and etched itself permanently into his brain.
Moving through it was like ice skating. Or, rather, it was what he imagined ice skating would be like, as he slid his way toward the center of the room, trying not to trip over the bodies, carefully making his way toward the pedestal. At one point, he had to reach out and grab hold of a corpse's head to keep himself upright, nearly ending up face first in the muck when the head snapped clean off the body, sending maggots and what he imagined were the sludgy remains of its brain, all over the tops of his shoes. A quick kick of the head aside, with another minor slip and near tumble, and Pete told himself that he could cope with this. The smell wasn't so bad. Think of grandmum. She smelled funny. This was just like grandmum, with cancer eating at her from the inside out, dying and then dead, pushed into a box so she could push up the daisies, and...and...the worms crawl in, the worms crawl out....
Fighting off another monumental wave of nausea, he seized hold of the pedestal with desperate hands and looked down into the box.
Inside was a still beating heart, blood red, making a sucking sound as though it was drawing air through it instead of blood.
It wasn't dried out. It wasn't shrivelled up.
It was very much alive.
Sometimes he wished he didn't see or know some things.
This definitely qualified as one of those things he'd like to forget.