Poem: "The Bones of Truth"
Jul. 16th, 2014 04:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ysabetwordsmithThis 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.
Re: containment procedure
Date: 2014-07-17 01:20 am (UTC)Put it this way.. things like ebola and the reconstructed 1918 flu [and smallpox if they had it] are contained in a category 5 containment facility.. this, this is the sort of thing they use for cat 7 labs.
Whatever it is, it's serious shit... and very, very classified.
Re: containment procedure
Date: 2014-07-17 01:42 am (UTC)Let me ask the most pertinent question, rather than fuss around looking for a more precise definition-- Things within half a mile or so go directly to the afterlife of their choice, do not pass 'go,' do not collect cancerous cells and genetic damage?
Or more like a souped-up hydrogen bomb? Smaller bomb, larger and more immediately lethal blast of radiation? BUT, given a certain distance past the main pulse, survivors may have genetic effects?
I'm not even going to /begin/ to theorize about what could be /so/ dangerous, or volatile, as to warrant that kind of response, beyond half-jokingly suggesting that the "black oil" from the X-Files seems like a good candidate.
Re: containment procedure
Date: 2014-07-17 10:34 am (UTC)Which is basically how a gamma bomb works. You have a sub-critical mass of plutonium or uranium, so that when you smack them together it don't quite explode... but it does produce a chain reaction generating an intense neutron burst [lasting several tens of seconds before it burns itself out]. This you wrap in a couple of feet of plastic, water and lithium so the neutrons then produce a hailstorm of secondary radiation, mostly gamma and some x-ray...
You are correct insofar as the edges of 'blast' are non-lethal but damaging. However, this is electromagnetic radiation not particle radiation. Basically, it'll fry stuff up to a point, after which it drops off sharply [inverse square law] so the area of affect goes from lethal to damaging to non-lethal fairly sharply... typically under a 100 feet or so.
Re: containment procedure
Date: 2014-07-17 07:01 pm (UTC)That makes sense. It's like knapping flint. You wind up with a fucking mess of flakes everywhere.
>> [it's named after what happens to the inside surface of armour when you fire a shell at it, even if it doesn't penetrate, it blasts stuff off the other side.] <<
Which is one reason why depleted uranium is a problem.
>> Basically, it'll fry stuff up to a point, after which it drops off sharply [inverse square law] so the area of affect goes from lethal to damaging to non-lethal fairly sharply... typically under a 100 feet or so. <<
That's convenient.
Re: containment procedure
Date: 2014-07-18 01:44 am (UTC)Thanks for the explanation.
Re: containment procedure
Date: 2014-07-17 02:06 am (UTC)Also, wouldn't the shielding on-site be layered? A sandwich of high-density material like lead with a low-density material like Plexiglas or water in between, to help offset both the initial radiation and the bremsstrahlung radiation? Would sheets of flowing, circulated water, like sheet fountains, be more effective than pipes? Or are we talking several feet of water between layers of lead?
I've no idea, just tossing off questions as they occur to me, as this is the first time I've met this concept.
Re: containment procedure
Date: 2014-07-17 10:40 am (UTC)Actually, I'm not sure why they bothered with shielding.. given that the facility is located somewhere very isolated. [the actual location of course is classified, probably to stop madmen trying to break in.] I'd presume there's more to the facility, support staff etc, outside the death zone.
Re: containment procedure
Date: 2014-07-17 06:10 pm (UTC)Possibly to control the size or shape of the blast radius to desired parameters.
Far as I know, the Sterbenfeld device doesn't have shielding. It goes through everything. It's possible that someone would have a way of shielding against it that hasn't been tested for lack of access; there are many more superpowers now than when it was invented. But it's an instant effect, so you'd have to know it was coming and get the shield up in advance to test the premise.
Re: containment procedure
Date: 2014-07-18 01:45 am (UTC)Re: containment procedure
Date: 2014-07-17 04:32 am (UTC)Fascinating.
>> Put it this way.. things like ebola and the reconstructed 1918 flu [and smallpox if they had it] are contained in a category 5 containment facility.. this, this is the sort of thing they use for cat 7 labs. <<
This is the first I've heard of that scale even going past 5.
>> Whatever it is, it's serious shit... and very, very classified. <<
So presumably, bioweapons. That's nice. They've made things two ranks worse than stuff that already had potential to wipe out humanity if things went wrong enough. I swear, some days I think the whole damn species is actively trying for a Darwin Award.
Re: containment procedure
Date: 2014-07-17 10:49 am (UTC)Cat 5 is pandemic stuff, kills lots of people but not threatening on a species level. Cat 6 probably deals with bioweapons etc.. cat 7 is supposed to deal with things that could cause extinction level events. But even the existence of such labs is classified, no-one will confirm nor deny that they've been built much less where and why.
Re: containment procedure
Date: 2014-07-17 06:59 pm (UTC)Oh yes. I remember that one. I rolled my eyes, said "GREEN goo. That's brilliant," and moved on.
>> Cat 5 is pandemic stuff, kills lots of people but not threatening on a species level. <<
*sigh* It requires a little extrapolation to get why this level could tank humanity. First, people aren't as well adapted to pandemics as they used to be; the population has lost much of its biological and social resilience. We've developed a bad habit of living close to the edge of fault tolerance in terms of social function. A bad plague could very easily destabilize sociopolitical function. Then it would be a matter of squabbles turning into wars. And there's a ton of stuff going in the technosphere all the time that requires constant expert maintenance not to boil over; lose even a small percentage of that and you have a huge problem very quickly, as has been described in several of the "future without us" scenarios. A plague needn't kill every last human, just as a bomb needed destroy a whole building, if it hits the load-bearing columns.
>> Cat 6 probably deals with bioweapons etc.. cat 7 is supposed to deal with things that could cause extinction level events. <<
Alongside global warming. Whee.
>> But even the existence of such labs is classified, no-one will confirm nor deny that they've been built much less where and why. <<
In the absence of transparency, I tend to assume the worst and double or triple the damage estimate. Even I underestimated the fallout from Deepwater Horizon by a factor of about 10. So I'll just assume that somebody is poking at things that could sterilize the planet.
*sigh* I should probably tinker with my emergency backup spell. Right now it's really only set to jumpstart the environment if humanity wipes itself out. Having an extra layer in case life needs to be relaunched from component particles would also seem prudent.