She felt a tug as her makeshift cape got caught on an exposed nail for the billionth time, and resisted the increasing urge to swear. She also stopping to waste time turning the cape into something that didn't get trapped constantly. Instead, she tugged it free and took stock of where she was again.
Yup, more abandoned corridors. More creaky doors. Ugh. Not even a picture on the wall. Yawn city.
Toinette continued her walk, humming under her breath.
Her mind wandered. How did Chas end up with cool fire powers? Technically Toinette had everything powers, if you counted spraying raw atomic creation everywhere as everything. But fire powers seemed way cooler. Um.
She seemed so confident and cool and in control, things Toinette never was. And she was hot, to boot. Where had she come from? How did she end up such a bad ass?
And, thought Toinette with a grin, can I meet her tailor?
And speaking of tailors, this place was tailor made for ambushes and traps. Instead, she’d encountered barely functioning messes who would have been incredibly dangerous if Toinette couldn’t fire existence out of her hands and had been handed a sword that burned through flesh and blood like a proverbial hot knife through butter. And she hadn’t encountered any in the last three minutes.
...so was that it? What would Chastity do?
Okay, once she was done listing all the things she’d LIKE her to do…
Okay...no map. No idea of what was where. No people. Did they go after Chastity? No, Toinette was sure she’d hear SOME kind of racket if that was the case. So if they didn’t do that and weren’t around, what then what then…
...all in one place?
Why?
What did Chastity say, worshippers of this disgusting parasite…
...worship. All gone, one place?
Oh joy. Considering the sad state her other two ‘dates’ had been in, Toinette REALLY didn’t want to know what she would find if she managed to find the rest of the Lambtons engaged in some obscene ritual or worship. On the other hand, maybe she could just lock them in the room and set the room on fire. Somehow.
Maybe she should have scavenged some armor off her vict...no, she didn’t want ANYTHING they’d worn touching her. The necklaces worked fine for protection: Toinette had felt the blows being blunted, like she was behind a small force field, but as for intimidation...a fiery sword couldn’t compensate for a ragged tarp barely covering anything. She didn’t care about the exposure, but it wasn’t good for scaring people.
...well, find the bastards first.
Toinette had a few tricks up her sleeve. Magic being used was super obvious to her, and if there was even a hint of that, she could sniff it out. Unfortunately, the iron in the sword… turned that off. Amongst other things. Iron was a real turn off - FOCUS.
She carefully, regretting it almost instantly, set the sword down and took a few steps away. Better. Her head didn't feel full of cotton wool anymore. But now all she has was the Indiana Jones whip, and she much preferred the sword. Ugh.
She focused, looking, searching. Knock knock. Any obscene rituals going on, folks?
...yeah, that sure as heck TASTED like one. She almost gagged as her senses interpreted the data as such a process. Wonderful. The closer she got, the most she’d feel like she’d drunk ten times as much as she had, and had rejected it all. But...that was likely where everyone else was.
The smart thing would be go back to Chastity and head for the exit while they were all occupied.
Toinette was not smart. She started back to pick up her sword, and then crept towards, heading towards the source of the horrible feeling.
...weird. Was the scratching and general squelching in the walls getting LOUDER? Wait no...that was coming from down the hallway and…
That was a scream.
...not a scream of fear, or rage, or something attacking. Though Toinette sure as heck didn’t know that at first. It probably would have unnerved someone who was familiar with the noises Lambtons would make as they ‘worshipped’; Toinette was about eight steps away from ‘unnerved’.
She missed Rory. Rory had nerves of steel. Also guns. Toinette was wishing for a gun right about now. Okay, plan plan plan....find room, go in, tell fire to go everywhere?
Yeah, good enough. She picked up the pace.
---
So, what did the altar room of a bunch of worm worshippers look like?
The answer was...bones.
In France, there was a cathedral that had been built from the bones of thousands and thousands of dead. The halls of the Order of the Ivory Hand were not actual bone, but conveyed something similar. The main altar room had that theme going on too, though in their case, the bones were mostly not human.
Bone lined the floor. Bone pillars held up the ceiling. The pew-equivalents were all cast in shaped bone. Toinette didn’t know any Lambton ‘theology’; if she did she would know of ancient ancestors of the Lambton worm, so called ‘conqueror worms’ who devoured whole empires and only left behind trails of clean bones, picked clean by a digestive system that consumed everything else. Holy relics, kept with care. Notably, none of the worshippers wore the bones. A blasphemy.
One way in. No guards. Inside...about fifteen ‘people’. Twelve in the pews, speaking...the phrase was ‘in tongues’, but to Toinette it sounded like the Lambtons were trying to chew off their own tongues rather than use them. Three people on the ‘stage’...
One of them being Ellie, now in a robe. Another woman Toinette didn’t know, and a rather older man who…
...who was the exact opposite of all the Lambton men she’d seen so far. All of them were deformed, mutated, changed horribly. This guy, who was wearing some sort of cloak instead of robes (rodent bones?), looked like he’d been subjected to plastic surgery, he was so unnaturally perfect. He was holding a double-handled bowl up, saying something in a foreign language, Ellie and the other woman looking on as the people in the pews snarled in guttural rapture.
Behind him was a statue of red clay-like stone, of a gigantic worm. Thicker than the kind that infested the Lambtons, lacking the extended intertwined pincers, instead just having an interlocking void of a mouth. Some father-worm? An aspiration? How the Lambtons were mind controlled into seeing their parasites? Who the fuck knew...well, Chastity probably.
The sound, the atmosphere...Toinette had been to a few ‘parties’ whose precise descriptive term started with an o. This was like a twisted inversion of them. United, yet not. Screaming in joy, yet not.
Twisted, infecting disease, walking around in willing hosts who would make you join up whether you wanted to or not.
Toinette began considering her “start fire, shut door plan”, and then realised there wasn’t enough material to really start said fire. Plus,. She’d be super noticed, and that would lead to bad times. She had to think of a way to break this up, somehow…
Man, if only she could throw her voice. Then she could play some real tricks. She’d never got the hang of it though.
She backed out of the doorway. Think, now. That perfect guy was their leader, but insta-killing him would just make a martyr. None of the others presumably cared about their lives, and fighting them all was a very bad idea.
Bone was a weird choice for building material.
She poked her head back in, looking for some kind of structural weakness, perhaps. The column bone is connected to the, seat bone, which is connected to the, don’t know.
Bone was hard outside and soft mushy stuff inside. Unless they hollowed out these bones, they probably left the marrow inside to...rot?
Dry out?
How the hell did bones even WORK?
Toinette gave up on her anatomy lesson. Good enough. Now she needed something heavy. Lots of junk in the house/mansion/wherever they were...some of the Lambton corpses...
Aha! Corpses! Uh… Okay.
Toinette picked up the nearest one, managing not to gag, and then gave up on calculating logistics and maths and just hurled the damn thing at the bone wall.
...the funny thing about considering a material sacred. You often didn’t want to touch it after it had been placed in its proper ‘holy position’. Or say, do something to harden it.
So the body smashed through the bone wall as well as a few hundred pounds of deadweight could.
The ceremonial chanting cut off immediately. The ‘priest’ was the quickest to recover, his face flushing with rage.
“WHO DARES SULLY THE DIVINITY’S REMNANTS?!”
For a second Toinette thought he’d seen her and she’d screwed up, and then he pointed at the wall hole, as the Lambton worshippers snarled and all went for it. They hadn’t seen the exact details. Just a hole abruptly appearing in their wall, and they thought the maker was in said hole. So now everyone save the priest and the two women were all heading there…
...CLUSTERING there…
Toinette grinned and let the magic spark in her fingers.
“I love the smell a’ napalm in th’ mornin’,” she crowed, and let it rip, starfire washing over the congregation.
A few things suddenly became apparent.
One was that whatever weird fire Chastity had woven onto her sword, it apparently registered Toinette’s attack as ‘dump all the remaining fuel, whatever that was, of the fire out at the same time’.
Which meant Toinette found her starfire stream suddenly turning into a rocket engine firing directly into the room. The good news was, the fire didn’t hurt her, even though even she was somewhere aware that so much fire, even moving away from her, should have cooked her to a cinder with the heat of it. What was it called, conversation? Eh fuck it. There was also bad news. That being the sword heated up so much it burned her hand, causing her to drop it.
The second discovery? Old bone burned REAL well.
The Lambton cluster caught alight, their screams being consumed by a roar as the fire seized onto every surface that it could, the sound almost like a living thing.
...unfortunately, despite the ‘solar flare’ she’d unexpectedly unleashed, it had just sideswiped the front of the pew. Fire had caught there, but not well enough…
Toinette heard the priest screaming in zealous, maddened rage, and then out of the smoke came the other woman, the flesh on her hands splitting open as snapping, boring mouths, grown worms that had seemingly linked up and weaponized themselves in the woman’s body, tried to tear Toinette’s face off.
“Woah!” The fae’s hand flew to the whip at her side as she backed up, sending it lashing out at the woman’s hands. “You should get that looked at!”
Toinette thought that the woman might have called her a ‘fucking floozy’; it all sort of came out in a garbled mess when the whip cracked and slashed through two worm-tendrils, dark green blood spraying as the woman’s insult turned into a scream. But even hurt, she closed the distance and….
Well, Toinette thought she tried to bite her nose off. Maybe she was going for her throat. But as she was closing in, some old lesson from Julius, that old fussbucket, kicked in, and she sort of stepped and shifted aside...and the woman overbalanced, tripping and falling past Toinette and…
...oh look. Gulk.
Toinette was surprised she recognized him. Because this time, he WAS on fire. All aflame.
Wasn’t slowing him down. He’d lost a hand. Beyond it was a blade of burning bone, like he’d somehow carved his forearm into a weapon and he meant to introduce it to her.
“Shit.” Toinette spread her wings and took upwards, trying to stay out of his reach -
Bonk went her head on the low ceiling.
“Shit!”
She backpedalled - backfluttered? - and lashed at him with the whip. Why did fire always make things worse? Now this asshole was still immortal AND he was on fire. She should have paid attention to those zombie movies she’d put on with Rory. Undead plus fire equals undead on fire.
She hit...in the sense the whip lashed around his body, and he grabbed it with his remaining hand and tried to yank her down. A second after that, Toinette felt worm tendrils lash around her ankle.
Had she not been wearing Chastity’s necklaces, the worms would have bit deep and infected her. As is, she just felt like someone was grinding a finger into her skin, and not in a remotely fun way. Oh yeah, and now she had TWO forces trying to yank her down.
“QUIT FINGERING ME,” Toinette yelled, and yanked.
And Gulk was promptly torn in two. Lambtons weren’t undead. Just badly mutated, and fire plus force on the whip meant bisection. There was a reason it had wrapped around him.
Unfortunately, this meant Toinette overbalanced.
“FUCK!”
She ended up doing nearly a complete 180 backwards flip. Unfortunately, the ‘nearly’ meant she landed facefirst on the floor, and felt her nose break. Pain flared, and she forced herself up with a wince. Blood didn’t pour - instead, blue, shimmering dust fell from her nostrils.
And now she was on the floor with a bunch of worms. Oh yeah, and Not-Ellie, who was coming right for her…
And stopped.
At first, Toinette thought backup had arrived. But when she twisted her head, she saw she was still alone.
Not-Ellie was still hesitating.
...It was the Astra. She had seen it and was reacting to the fact Toinette wasn’t bleeding red like normal.
Unfortunately, she was recovering. Toinette had dropped the whip. And Chastity’s sword had ended up behind Not-Ellie.
“F’ck yu, sw’rd!” Toinette yelled through her broken nose.
At which point the sword yanked out of the ground and flew back to Toinette.
Or rather, it flew point first into Not-Ellie’s back and knocked the woman to the ground with a scream, the sword impaling back into the ground from the momentum. Pinned like a butterfly.
Sting like a bee.
“...F’ck me.” Toinette grinned, and took a moment to reset her nose with a crunch and another spurt of blue. Then she walked over, discarding her cloak because fire everywhere, and leant over Not-Ellie.
“...yeah, I got nothing. I had a pun here. Uh, stop the cult shit. Take up… gardening. I dunno.”
She reached a hand out to pull out the sword.
Not-Ellie promptly tried to rip her face off with her worm mouth bite things. Not dead yet…
“Jeez!” Toinette jumped back, and then scrabbled for the whip and used it to judiciously remove Not-Ellie’s head from her shoulders.
“...Gimme head? No. I’m so bad at this.”
THEN she removed the sword.
She looked around. Lots of bone fragments and burnt corpses. Lots of things on fire. She was naked again, and had a sword, a whip, and a broken nose.
“I’ve ruined everything!” She yelled with glee, to nobody in particular.
Wait, where had Mister Perfect gotten to?
“Ruin speaks, if you can hear it.”
Oh, there he was. He’d strode through the fire like he wasn’t much bothered by it. But for all she knew he was wearing his own ‘necklaces’.
“You butchered my thralls, and stand here so...purely. It is a sign. Will you not join me in their place? They could do little, but you...you can become akin to the highest. The offering is painless.”
Oh hey, that goblet thing he had. He had produced it from somewhere, filled with writhing Lambton worms.
“There is no servitude. Just a bond, and bliss. Pure bliss.”
Toinette blinked.
“...Are you seriously asking the person who murdered your congregation to buddy up?” She shook her head. “Oh, buddy. You shoulda known people NEVER take up that offer unless they got something to lose. Is that how you picked these people up, by the way? ‘Cause if I were a regular girl in this shithole town, yeah, being a bag of worms might be tempting.”
Her wings blurred as she took to the air.
“But naw. If you knew anything about me, you wouldn’t make that offer. I ain’t pure, and I’m always high.”
She paused.
“...That sounded a lot better in my head. Okay, tell you what I’ll do. You put the worms down and surrender quietly and I guess we could have a trial and justice and all that boring human stuff. You’ll probably be hanged, because I dunno how this place works, but it’s that or I kill you now. I ain’t into worms.”
Another pause.
“...Why does everything sound better in my head?”
“A pitiful lack of vision.”
“I got vision enough for yah!”
The whip flashed out, and the man’s held fell from his shoulders.
His body spasmed.
Then the goblet fell onto him, and the worms began to burrow in.
His clothes split and burned away, his flesh warping, the stump of his neck grotesquely elogating even as it twisted open and jagged, bony teeth...no, replications of the worm’s hook-penetrator things, filling a ‘mouth, the arms warping into the man’s body even as the flesh went red, then a glistening purple, a shine that indicated natural armor.
This was not Chastity’s fault. She was not privy to the inner workings of how the Lambton alterations worked. Gulk and co looked so damn warped because they’d chosen immediate power. The high priest had not. His nest had awaited until he had chosen the right time, growing in strength, and between Toinette’s decapitation and the extra mass joining with the nest…
Toinette found herself facing a ten foot, snarling, worm on legs, acidic drool dripping onto the ground.
“WHO DARES SULLY THE DIVINITY’S REMNANTS?!”
For a second Toinette thought he’d seen her and she’d screwed up, and then he pointed at the wall hole, as the Lambton worshippers snarled and all went for it. They hadn’t seen the exact details. Just a hole abruptly appearing in their wall, and they thought the maker was in said hole. So now everyone save the priest and the two women were all heading there…
...CLUSTERING there…
Toinette grinned and let the magic spark in her fingers.
“I love the smell a’ napalm in th’ mornin’,” she crowed, and let it rip, starfire washing over the congregation.
A few things suddenly became apparent.
One was that whatever weird fire Chastity had woven onto her sword, it apparently registered Toinette’s attack as ‘dump all the remaining fuel, whatever that was, of the fire out at the same time’.
Which meant Toinette found her starfire stream suddenly turning into a rocket engine firing directly into the room. The good news was, the fire didn’t hurt her, even though even she was somewhere aware that so much fire, even moving away from her, should have cooked her to a cinder with the heat of it. What was it called, conversation? Eh fuck it. There was also bad news. That being the sword heated up so much it burned her hand, causing her to drop it.
The second discovery? Old bone burned REAL well.
The Lambton cluster caught alight, their screams being consumed by a roar as the fire seized onto every surface that it could, the sound almost like a living thing.
...unfortunately, despite the ‘solar flare’ she’d unexpectedly unleashed, it had just sideswiped the front of the pew. Fire had caught there, but not well enough…
Toinette heard the priest screaming in zealous, maddened rage, and then out of the smoke came the other woman, the flesh on her hands splitting open as snapping, boring mouths, grown worms that had seemingly linked up and weaponized themselves in the woman’s body, tried to tear Toinette’s face off.
“Woah!” The fae’s hand flew to the whip at her side as she backed up, sending it lashing out at the woman’s hands. “You should get that looked at!”
Toinette thought that the woman might have called her a ‘fucking floozy’; it all sort of came out in a garbled mess when the whip cracked and slashed through two worm-tendrils, dark green blood spraying as the woman’s insult turned into a scream. But even hurt, she closed the distance and….
Well, Toinette thought she tried to bite her nose off. Maybe she was going for her throat. But as she was closing in, some old lesson from Julius, that old fussbucket, kicked in, and she sort of stepped and shifted aside...and the woman overbalanced, tripping and falling past Toinette and…
...oh look. Gulk.
Toinette was surprised she recognized him. Because this time, he WAS on fire. All aflame.
Wasn’t slowing him down. He’d lost a hand. Beyond it was a blade of burning bone, like he’d somehow carved his forearm into a weapon and he meant to introduce it to her.
“Shit.” Toinette spread her wings and took upwards, trying to stay out of his reach -
Bonk went her head on the low ceiling.
“Shit!”
She backpedalled - backfluttered? - and lashed at him with the whip. Why did fire always make things worse? Now this asshole was still immortal AND he was on fire. She should have paid attention to those zombie movies she’d put on with Rory. Undead plus fire equals undead on fire.
She hit...in the sense the whip lashed around his body, and he grabbed it with his remaining hand and tried to yank her down. A second after that, Toinette felt worm tendrils lash around her ankle.
Had she not been wearing Chastity’s necklaces, the worms would have bit deep and infected her. As is, she just felt like someone was grinding a finger into her skin, and not in a remotely fun way. Oh yeah, and now she had TWO forces trying to yank her down.
“QUIT FINGERING ME,” Toinette yelled, and yanked.
And Gulk was promptly torn in two. Lambtons weren’t undead. Just badly mutated, and fire plus force on the whip meant bisection. There was a reason it had wrapped around him.
Unfortunately, this meant Toinette overbalanced.
“FUCK!”
She ended up doing nearly a complete 180 backwards flip. Unfortunately, the ‘nearly’ meant she landed facefirst on the floor, and felt her nose break. Pain flared, and she forced herself up with a wince. Blood didn’t pour - instead, blue, shimmering dust fell from her nostrils.
And now she was on the floor with a bunch of worms. Oh yeah, and Not-Ellie, who was coming right for her…
And stopped.
At first, Toinette thought backup had arrived. But when she twisted her head, she saw she was still alone.
Not-Ellie was still hesitating.
...It was the Astra. She had seen it and was reacting to the fact Toinette wasn’t bleeding red like normal.
Unfortunately, she was recovering. Toinette had dropped the whip. And Chastity’s sword had ended up behind Not-Ellie.
“F’ck yu, sw’rd!” Toinette yelled through her broken nose.
At which point the sword yanked out of the ground and flew back to Toinette.
Or rather, it flew point first into Not-Ellie’s back and knocked the woman to the ground with a scream, the sword impaling back into the ground from the momentum. Pinned like a butterfly.
Sting like a bee.
“...F’ck me.” Toinette grinned, and took a moment to reset her nose with a crunch and another spurt of blue. Then she walked over, discarding her cloak because fire everywhere, and leant over Not-Ellie.
“...yeah, I got nothing. I had a pun here. Uh, stop the cult shit. Take up… gardening. I dunno.”
She reached a hand out to pull out the sword.
Not-Ellie promptly tried to rip her face off with her worm mouth bite things. Not dead yet…
“Jeez!” Toinette jumped back, and then scrabbled for the whip and used it to judiciously remove Not-Ellie’s head from her shoulders.
“...Gimme head? No. I’m so bad at this.”
THEN she removed the sword.
She looked around. Lots of bone fragments and burnt corpses. Lots of things on fire. She was naked again, and had a sword, a whip, and a broken nose.
“I’ve ruined everything!” She yelled with glee, to nobody in particular.
Wait, where had Mister Perfect gotten to?
“Ruin speaks, if you can hear it.”
Oh, there he was. He’d strode through the fire like he wasn’t much bothered by it. But for all she knew he was wearing his own ‘necklaces’.
“You butchered my thralls, and stand here so...purely. It is a sign. Will you not join me in their place? They could do little, but you...you can become akin to the highest. The offering is painless.”
Oh hey, that goblet thing he had. He had produced it from somewhere, filled with writhing Lambton worms.
“There is no servitude. Just a bond, and bliss. Pure bliss.”
Toinette blinked.
“...Are you seriously asking the person who murdered your congregation to buddy up?” She shook her head. “Oh, buddy. You shoulda known people NEVER take up that offer unless they got something to lose. Is that how you picked these people up, by the way? ‘Cause if I were a regular girl in this shithole town, yeah, being a bag of worms might be tempting.”
Her wings blurred as she took to the air.
“But naw. If you knew anything about me, you wouldn’t make that offer. I ain’t pure, and I’m always high.”
She paused.
“...That sounded a lot better in my head. Okay, tell you what I’ll do. You put the worms down and surrender quietly and I guess we could have a trial and justice and all that boring human stuff. You’ll probably be hanged, because I dunno how this place works, but it’s that or I kill you now. I ain’t into worms.”
Another pause.
“...Why does everything sound better in my head?”
“A pitiful lack of vision.”
“I got vision enough for yah!”
The whip flashed out, and the man’s held fell from his shoulders.
His body spasmed.
Then the goblet fell onto him, and the worms began to burrow in.
His clothes split and burned away, his flesh warping, the stump of his neck grotesquely elogating even as it twisted open and jagged, bony teeth...no, replications of the worm’s hook-penetrator things, filling a ‘mouth, the arms warping into the man’s body even as the flesh went red, then a glistening purple, a shine that indicated natural armor.
This was not Chastity’s fault. She was not privy to the inner workings of how the Lambton alterations worked. Gulk and co looked so damn warped because they’d chosen immediate power. The high priest had not. His nest had awaited until he had chosen the right time, growing in strength, and between Toinette’s decapitation and the extra mass joining with the nest…
Toinette found herself facing a ten foot, snarling, worm on legs, acidic drool dripping onto the ground.
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