ysabetwordsmith (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
ysabetwordsmith) wrote2014-07-16 04:31 pm
ysabetwordsmith) wrote2014-07-16 04:31 pm
Entry tags:
Poem: "The Bones of Truth"
This poem was written outside the prompt calls, filling the "desperate" square in my 5-22-14 card for the ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
origfic_bingo fest. It has been sponsored by technoshaman. It belongs to the series Polychrome Heroics.
WARNING: This poem includes intense topics, and some of the warnings are spoilers; highlight to read. Be prepared for mass fatalities, EVERY LIVING THING in the radius is dead, heroes arriving too late to do anything but analyze what happened, war parallels, disturbing scene details, existential horror, and the aftermath of heroic sacrifice. Oh, and the villain is dead in a corner too. Not recommended for reading shortly before bed. Please consider your tastes and headspace before deciding whether to read further.
"The Bones of Truth"
All they knew, at first,
was that the Mandible had
taken over an island research facility,
intending to use germ warfare
to wipe out humanity
and that he had, somehow, been stopped.
Granny Whammy herself led the team
to find out what really happened,
her chest glittering with braid and metal
in case diplomacy was needed.
Once the Analyst confirmed that
she could detect no biohazards,
they all disembarked, with Stonewall
shielding them behind his massive form.
Skeletons lay strewn about the tarmac,
mute sign of the Mandible's terrible power.
The whole area was eerily silent.
Granny Whammy could read the signs
of a desperate battle in the scattered guns
and overturned vehicles, fires long since cooled.
Sunlight glinted on spent shell casings.
Indoors they found more skeletons
but also bodies whole and untouched.
"Death field," the Analyst murmured
as she twiddled with her instruments.
"That isn't the Mandible's power,"
Granny Whammy said,
"or at least it wasn't."
"I would suspect a failsafe,"
the Analyst said with a nod, "meant to
terminate everyone on the island
in case of a violent takeover,
to thwart plans like the Mandible's."
A death ray could be converted
into a sort of bomb with a field effect.
Granny Whammy hadn't seen that
since World War II, and she had
hoped never to see it again.
Silently she removed her helmet
and bowed her head in a moment of respect,
then put it back on and marched forward.
"Blood trail," Granny Whammy said,
pointing toward a spatter of red
that turned into a widening swath.
"That heads toward the control room,"
the Analyst said, showing them on her map.
"Let's follow it," Granny Whammy said,
leading her team deeper into the building.
They almost didn't recognize the Mandible
when they found him, because his trademark glow
had been extinguished, his corpse lying in shadow.
"Looks like someone finally got the bastard,"
Stonewall said. "I wonder who it was."
"Him," Granny Whammy said, pointing
to a skeleton draped over a control board,
phalanges still clasping a switch.
"He was a brave man. He saved the world."
"She," the Analyst said quietly.
"What?" Granny Whammy said.
"Look at the pelvic girdle," the Analyst said.
"That was a woman. Based on their positions,
the Mandible killed her as she activated the failsafe."
"She was a brave woman. She saved the world,"
Granny Whammy said. From her uniform
she detached a Purple Heart and a Medal of Valor,
then lay them reverently inside the ribcage.
After a long moment of silence,
the team moved onward, documenting
what the unknown hera had accomplished.
* * *
The Mandible (Harvey Williams) -- His body is average height and build, but he has no hair left; his nose and genitals were also smoothed away in the transformation. His lower jaw is enlarged and thrust forward, making it difficult for him to speak clearly.
Origin: He snuck through a fence in pursuit of fossils, not knowing that secret weapons testing was about to commence. Struck by a beam of unknown origin, his body transformed into a skeletal horror. He can open his mouth and emit a greenish beam that destroys soft tissue but leaves the skeleton intact. It also tends to dissolve organic fabric, although it leaves some synthetics alone.
Uniform: None. He goes nude. His soft tissues are dark and translucent, like smoky quartz, and his bones glow a lurid greenish white.
Qualities: Master (+6) Intelligence, Master (+6) Plans, Expert (+4) Intimidation, Good (+2) Dinosaur Fan, Good (+2) Gambler, Good (+2) Tough
Poor (-2) Hates Scientists
Powers: Good (+2) Flensing Beam
Average (0) Minions: The Knucklebones have seven named lieutenants and many nameless goons. Two of the lieutenants and about two hundred goons are killed alongside their leader.
Motivation: "The world is corrupt. You'll see! Someday I'll kill you all!"
The Analyst (Josephine Turner) -- She is average height and full-figured. She keeps her blonde hair cut short for convenience. Her father is a policeman; her mother is a librarian. Her childhood role model was Velma from Scooby-Doo, who also could not see without her glasses but did not let that stop her from solving mysteries. Now she works for SPOON, specializing in the analysis of incidents involving superpowers.
Origin: Her powers grew in slowly over time.
Uniform: She dresses in a version of the SPOON uniform with lots of pockets in her pants and vest, plus a toolbelt
Qualities: Expert (+4) Deduction, Expert (+4) Know-It-All, Good (+2) Determination, Good (+2) Dexterity, Good (+2) Friends on the Force
Poor (-2) Runner
Powers: Expert (+4) Super-Gizmology, Expert (+4) Super-Intellect
Expert (+4) Spic-n-Spanner: a portable super-gizmo with a vast array of scanning and analytical equipment.
Good (+2) Utility Belt: a compact way to carry many ordinary tools and small super-gizmos, thus ensuring she usually has the right tool for the job. Any job.
Vulnerability: Her eyesight is so bad that she is legally blind without her glasses. Her combat glasses have an elastic strap, and her everyday glasses have a jeweled chain, to reduce the chance of losing them.
Motivation: To find out what happened.
Stonewall (Aaron Jackson) -- Originally he was a black man with dark curly hair and brown eyes. Now he is about eight feet tall, and very bulky, three feet wide at the shoulders. His body is sandstone, primarily chocolate with swirls of caramel and red ochre. Unfortunately he has only two fingers and a thumb on each hand, which contributes to his poor dexterity. He smokes, and one of his habits is striking matches against his skin. ("Yeah, I know, I'm a shitty role model. Deal with it.")
Origin: A rock fell on him while he was exploring the southwest desert. He lay trapped beneath it for days, periodically trying different ways to get loose, without success. Slowly his body began to transform, taking on the characteristics of the nearby stone. As his size and shape changed, so did the balance of the boulder atop him, and eventually he managed to roll it off. By the time he made it back to civilization, he was a fully formed rock-man.
Uniform: Brown dexflan, similar to a weightlifting singlet.
Qualities: Master (+6) Strength, Good (+2) Campfire Tales, Good (+2) Loyalty, Good (+2) Survival Skills
Poor (-2) Dexterity
Powers: Good (+2) Invulnerability, Good (+2) Super-Armor, Good (+2) Super-Endurance
Motivation: To keep people safe.
* * *
The Sterbenfeld device, whose name literally means "death field," was a German invention during World War II. It's what the Axis powers were working on instead of an atomic bomb. They never got the killing field that wide, but they did make a very effective tool for killing every living thing within its radius, without affecting anything else. It is profoundly creepy in a way that's difficult to specify. Here it was used as a type of doomsday device or self-destruct mechanism. Mainstream media uses these all the time, but they almost never work exactly as intended; here it did. The result is that everybody's dead and the island is too quiet, both signs that some serious shit went down.
Self-sacrifice raises interesting ethical questions. Here we have a heroic sacrifice resulting in a mutual kill. By someone who almost certainly was not a superhero or even supernary, just an ordinary person determined to stop one of the truly batshit crazy supervillains from getting his hands on lethal goods.
Sexing skeletons is possible based on bone structure and other signs, and even has a scale of certainty. To be told at a glance, this skeleton probably belonged to a wide-hipped woman.
Sometimes soldiers will hand off their own medals as a show of respect. The Purple Heart goes to people wounded or killed in action. The Medal of Valor comes in multiple flavors, all relating to heroism.
origfic_bingo fest. It has been sponsored by technoshaman. It belongs to the series Polychrome Heroics.WARNING: This poem includes intense topics, and some of the warnings are spoilers; highlight to read. Be prepared for mass fatalities, EVERY LIVING THING in the radius is dead, heroes arriving too late to do anything but analyze what happened, war parallels, disturbing scene details, existential horror, and the aftermath of heroic sacrifice. Oh, and the villain is dead in a corner too. Not recommended for reading shortly before bed. Please consider your tastes and headspace before deciding whether to read further.
"The Bones of Truth"
All they knew, at first,
was that the Mandible had
taken over an island research facility,
intending to use germ warfare
to wipe out humanity
and that he had, somehow, been stopped.
Granny Whammy herself led the team
to find out what really happened,
her chest glittering with braid and metal
in case diplomacy was needed.
Once the Analyst confirmed that
she could detect no biohazards,
they all disembarked, with Stonewall
shielding them behind his massive form.
Skeletons lay strewn about the tarmac,
mute sign of the Mandible's terrible power.
The whole area was eerily silent.
Granny Whammy could read the signs
of a desperate battle in the scattered guns
and overturned vehicles, fires long since cooled.
Sunlight glinted on spent shell casings.
Indoors they found more skeletons
but also bodies whole and untouched.
"Death field," the Analyst murmured
as she twiddled with her instruments.
"That isn't the Mandible's power,"
Granny Whammy said,
"or at least it wasn't."
"I would suspect a failsafe,"
the Analyst said with a nod, "meant to
terminate everyone on the island
in case of a violent takeover,
to thwart plans like the Mandible's."
A death ray could be converted
into a sort of bomb with a field effect.
Granny Whammy hadn't seen that
since World War II, and she had
hoped never to see it again.
Silently she removed her helmet
and bowed her head in a moment of respect,
then put it back on and marched forward.
"Blood trail," Granny Whammy said,
pointing toward a spatter of red
that turned into a widening swath.
"That heads toward the control room,"
the Analyst said, showing them on her map.
"Let's follow it," Granny Whammy said,
leading her team deeper into the building.
They almost didn't recognize the Mandible
when they found him, because his trademark glow
had been extinguished, his corpse lying in shadow.
"Looks like someone finally got the bastard,"
Stonewall said. "I wonder who it was."
"Him," Granny Whammy said, pointing
to a skeleton draped over a control board,
phalanges still clasping a switch.
"He was a brave man. He saved the world."
"She," the Analyst said quietly.
"What?" Granny Whammy said.
"Look at the pelvic girdle," the Analyst said.
"That was a woman. Based on their positions,
the Mandible killed her as she activated the failsafe."
"She was a brave woman. She saved the world,"
Granny Whammy said. From her uniform
she detached a Purple Heart and a Medal of Valor,
then lay them reverently inside the ribcage.
After a long moment of silence,
the team moved onward, documenting
what the unknown hera had accomplished.
* * *
The Mandible (Harvey Williams) -- His body is average height and build, but he has no hair left; his nose and genitals were also smoothed away in the transformation. His lower jaw is enlarged and thrust forward, making it difficult for him to speak clearly.
Origin: He snuck through a fence in pursuit of fossils, not knowing that secret weapons testing was about to commence. Struck by a beam of unknown origin, his body transformed into a skeletal horror. He can open his mouth and emit a greenish beam that destroys soft tissue but leaves the skeleton intact. It also tends to dissolve organic fabric, although it leaves some synthetics alone.
Uniform: None. He goes nude. His soft tissues are dark and translucent, like smoky quartz, and his bones glow a lurid greenish white.
Qualities: Master (+6) Intelligence, Master (+6) Plans, Expert (+4) Intimidation, Good (+2) Dinosaur Fan, Good (+2) Gambler, Good (+2) Tough
Poor (-2) Hates Scientists
Powers: Good (+2) Flensing Beam
Average (0) Minions: The Knucklebones have seven named lieutenants and many nameless goons. Two of the lieutenants and about two hundred goons are killed alongside their leader.
Motivation: "The world is corrupt. You'll see! Someday I'll kill you all!"
The Analyst (Josephine Turner) -- She is average height and full-figured. She keeps her blonde hair cut short for convenience. Her father is a policeman; her mother is a librarian. Her childhood role model was Velma from Scooby-Doo, who also could not see without her glasses but did not let that stop her from solving mysteries. Now she works for SPOON, specializing in the analysis of incidents involving superpowers.
Origin: Her powers grew in slowly over time.
Uniform: She dresses in a version of the SPOON uniform with lots of pockets in her pants and vest, plus a toolbelt
Qualities: Expert (+4) Deduction, Expert (+4) Know-It-All, Good (+2) Determination, Good (+2) Dexterity, Good (+2) Friends on the Force
Poor (-2) Runner
Powers: Expert (+4) Super-Gizmology, Expert (+4) Super-Intellect
Expert (+4) Spic-n-Spanner: a portable super-gizmo with a vast array of scanning and analytical equipment.
Good (+2) Utility Belt: a compact way to carry many ordinary tools and small super-gizmos, thus ensuring she usually has the right tool for the job. Any job.
Vulnerability: Her eyesight is so bad that she is legally blind without her glasses. Her combat glasses have an elastic strap, and her everyday glasses have a jeweled chain, to reduce the chance of losing them.
Motivation: To find out what happened.
Stonewall (Aaron Jackson) -- Originally he was a black man with dark curly hair and brown eyes. Now he is about eight feet tall, and very bulky, three feet wide at the shoulders. His body is sandstone, primarily chocolate with swirls of caramel and red ochre. Unfortunately he has only two fingers and a thumb on each hand, which contributes to his poor dexterity. He smokes, and one of his habits is striking matches against his skin. ("Yeah, I know, I'm a shitty role model. Deal with it.")
Origin: A rock fell on him while he was exploring the southwest desert. He lay trapped beneath it for days, periodically trying different ways to get loose, without success. Slowly his body began to transform, taking on the characteristics of the nearby stone. As his size and shape changed, so did the balance of the boulder atop him, and eventually he managed to roll it off. By the time he made it back to civilization, he was a fully formed rock-man.
Uniform: Brown dexflan, similar to a weightlifting singlet.
Qualities: Master (+6) Strength, Good (+2) Campfire Tales, Good (+2) Loyalty, Good (+2) Survival Skills
Poor (-2) Dexterity
Powers: Good (+2) Invulnerability, Good (+2) Super-Armor, Good (+2) Super-Endurance
Motivation: To keep people safe.
* * *
The Sterbenfeld device, whose name literally means "death field," was a German invention during World War II. It's what the Axis powers were working on instead of an atomic bomb. They never got the killing field that wide, but they did make a very effective tool for killing every living thing within its radius, without affecting anything else. It is profoundly creepy in a way that's difficult to specify. Here it was used as a type of doomsday device or self-destruct mechanism. Mainstream media uses these all the time, but they almost never work exactly as intended; here it did. The result is that everybody's dead and the island is too quiet, both signs that some serious shit went down.
Self-sacrifice raises interesting ethical questions. Here we have a heroic sacrifice resulting in a mutual kill. By someone who almost certainly was not a superhero or even supernary, just an ordinary person determined to stop one of the truly batshit crazy supervillains from getting his hands on lethal goods.
Sexing skeletons is possible based on bone structure and other signs, and even has a scale of certainty. To be told at a glance, this skeleton probably belonged to a wide-hipped woman.
Sometimes soldiers will hand off their own medals as a show of respect. The Purple Heart goes to people wounded or killed in action. The Medal of Valor comes in multiple flavors, all relating to heroism.
Shocking, dark, and thought-provoking
Dark, because so many people are portrayed as mere skeletal set dressing. That disturbs me in this universe, because it's NOT commonly done, unlike Marvel (where nobody bothers to point out how many people died when the stadium went for a walk) or in DC, where it's hovering at the line of 'gore porn' almost by default. This... is far more effectively done.
Thought provoking, because I wonder if anyone escaped the field, or if the field interacted with non-mammalian life. Does it kill plants, too? How low on the 'life' scale? Yeast? Etc. You see where I'm heading; yet another incident with very, very unpredictable consequences.
Sometimes, all someone has is the /hope/ that they've done the right thing. She was a hero.
Re: Shocking, dark, and thought-provoking
Because that installation had something that the Mandible wanted and thought (mistakenly) he could get. He underestimated not just the caliber of material defenses -- he probably didn't know they had the Sterbenfeld because it's not the kind of thing people admit to having -- but also the quality of personnel.
Most supervillains have a consistent motive, even the headcases. The Mandible was really into creating mass casualties. So despite the collateral losses, everyone's going to be glad that he's gone. A lot of supervillains are into power, or money, or attention. These are reasons why they hit population centers. But if they're after things then that's more often a base attack -- they're going to hit someone else's lair or lab or vehicl -- which are often in more isolated locations. Villains put theirs out of reach for paranoia; good people do it to cut down the risk to innocent bystanders.
>> Dark, because so many people are portrayed as mere skeletal set dressing. That disturbs me in this universe, because it's NOT commonly done, unlike Marvel (where nobody bothers to point out how many people died when the stadium went for a walk) or in DC, where it's hovering at the line of 'gore porn' almost by default. This... is far more effectively done. <<
Yaaaaayyyyyy! My hypothesis has proved out, thank you for the confirmation. I believe that if you make everything the same, it loses its effectiveness. If every female character dresses and acts like a slut, then you can't really run a femme fatale effectively because they're all doing that. If there are bodies scattered all over the place, people get numb to it. But if those things are not common, then they have more impact. It has been literally about 70 years since Granny Whammy put her boots on the ground after a Sterbenfeld event. There may have been a few others go off in that time, but not much.
>> Thought provoking, because I wonder if anyone escaped the field, <<
No.
>> or if the field interacted with non-mammalian life. <<
Yes.
>> Does it kill plants, too? How low on the 'life' scale? Yeast? Etc. <<
It kills EVERY LIVING THING. Mammals, reptiles, plants, mold, bacteria, the whole shebang. You know what's really creepy? Three-day-old corpses that haven't rotted because the entire detritus foodweb is dead and hasn't recolonized yet. This isn't a physical-damage weapon; it doesn't so much kill as cause to cease living. It severs the life energy from the body. It's one of the few things that can kill a soup with Regeneration, although it tends not to affect Immortality (which typically makes for an uncuttable life thread).
You can see why Dr. Infanta has nightmares about things like this. And Granny Whammy isn't going to be sleeping through the night for a while.
In fact, a leading reason why people are even still working with death energy at all is because they'd like to figure out how to use it for sterilizing things. But they haven't been able to make it small enough or safe enough for that, and besides, it's so disturbing that most people refuse to have anything to do with it. The researchers in this area are the kind of people who grow up poking dead things with sticks.
>> You see where I'm heading; yet another incident with very, very unpredictable consequences. <<
Yes, I do. But if you're working with extremely dangerous microbes, it is rational and responsible to have a way of making SURE they can't get loose and wreak havoc.
>> Sometimes, all someone has is the /hope/ that they've done the right thing. She was a hero. <<
Sooth.
Re: Shocking, dark, and thought-provoking
Shudder.
Gah. Now /I/ might not sleep tonight!
Even with the potential to kill things like Ebola and the so-called superbugs...No. Just. NO. How deeply is the soil affected? You know it's completely sterilized now?
Talk about salting the earth!
Even MORE 'no'.
Re: Shocking, dark, and thought-provoking
Shudder. <<
Well, it WAS invented by Nazis. They were batshit crazy fucktards. Of course, as with the first hydrogen bomb, they had no way of knowing it wouldn't obliterate all life on Earth. They were just "pretty sure" it would stop somewhere. And they did it anyway.
>> Gah. Now /I/ might not sleep tonight! <<
Sorry. I went back and put warnings on this one.
>> Even with the potential to kill things like Ebola and the so-called superbugs...No. Just. NO. <<
Yeah, this may be the rare case where it really is possible to kill everything. Unless something has Immortality. I don't think I'd consider that justification for using it. I mean, what if something went wrong with the damn thing? The use to which it was put here is just about the only halfway-reasonable one I can think of.
>> How deeply is the soil affected? <<
Not very. It's a planar field, not a globe. Might have some upward curve in the center? It would wipe out at least the top foot of earth, which is most or all of the topsoil and ground life in most regions. I doubt it would go much deeper. Well, unless you set it off below ground to kill bunkers.
>> You know it's completely sterilized now? <<
Yep.
>> Talk about salting the earth! <<
Unlike salt, this is temporary. The physical structures are fine. There is some kind of lingering sensation for a few days but it doesn't seem to cause any detectable harm. You could plant things and they'd grow.
The Nazis were trying to make it permanent (remember, bugfuck idiots) but never did figure out how. Fortunately.
>> Even MORE 'no'. <<
Yeah. Even supervillains mostly agree on that point.