Re: The Open Door (megacrossover)
Posted: 2008-12-22 02:20am
Okay, so I uh... got a little bored, and its currently winter break so I have nothing better to do so uh... yeah.
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Chapter Fifty-six: Strange Lessons
For the children of Nesmé, the warnings to not stray out into the woods or monsters would get them had been very real warnings for generations, but still, children would be children and thus one of the responsibilities of the Riders was to round up stray young ones who wandered off before they got eaten. They weren’t always successful, and life was hard and often tear-filled out on the moors.
Thus, despite the uneasy alliance -vassalage at gunpoint really- the parents of Nesmé warned their children away from the camp at their doorstep… and were promptly ignored by the younger and/or more rebellious members of the village who had yet to be scared straight of the dangers around them.
That said, those in the camp did not trust trolls around the children and they were constantly monitored by either Lars, Skuld, the Erinyes, or one of the wizards powerful enough to produce fire or flame to handle the brutes when around adults. But as with all things, there was one exception.
The children stared up in awe at the troll, sitting there quietly, its hair done up in ribbons and wearing a straw hat with pretty swamp flowers all about it. Between two enormous pink painted claws it daintily held a crudely made clay tea cup that was sized for a small human. In its other hand was any equally tiny saucer. A rough sheet of flax was thrown over it in a crude imitation of a dress.
“More tea Mr. Green?” Gunnhild asked while holding a rough tea pot in her hands. She wasn’t quite sure where the idea for the game had come from, but she suspected it was daddy’s side of the family.
“Yar,” the troll grunted. Gunnhild glared at him and he tried to enunciate more politely, “Err… yes please.”
Lowering the tea cup, the troll allowed Gunnhild to ‘pour’ the imaginary beverage before he raised it up and took a sip, extending his pinkie at the last moment before he could be told off. Trolls as a species weren’t very bright, but this one had excellent Pavlovian conditioning.
“Thank you,” the troll grunted in its rough voice.
“You’re welcome Mr. Green. Would anyone else like some?” Gunnhild asked the braver selection of children who had gathered around the flat rock the troll had dragged into the clearing for Gunnhild’s tea part. There was also a large, awed collection of children who watched at a safer distance.
“No thank you, I’m good now,” Thomas Smith, son of a local craftsman replied. At ten he was just at the age to think he was the bravest person in the world without having a teenager’s cockiness quite set in yet. While he thought the majority of the games Gunnhild like to play were stupid, he was enthralled by the way she so effortlessly commanded the trolls and if playing her games was a way to learning such things then he would put up with them.
“More for me please,” Faeresta asked, holding out her little tea cup. The orphan child of a defunct house, she had been picked up the refugee column as they left Menzoberranzan and utterly adored Gunnhild.
“I still have half a cup left, I’ll be alright,” Emily Redford, another Nesmé child who refused to bend to anyone’s will, replied.
“Marvellous, marvellous,” Gunnhild replied dramatically before setting the teapot down. Adjusting her own broad rimmed straw hat, she asked in a gossipy tone, “Have you seen some of the patterns coming out of the new mill? Oh, those will be the talk of Waterdeep come the fall fashion season.”
Had the word ‘Victorianism’ been explained to Gunnhild, she would not have understood why anyone would act that stupid to her reckoning, and those around her really had no clue about the strange cultural mishmash she had inherited from the dozens of minds that composed her father’s form, but they all played along because Gunnhild found it fun.
“You mean the pretty flower clothing?” Faeresta asked innocently.
“Indeed. Quite the bit of finery, don’t you think?” Gunnhild asked her assembled guests.
“My dad helped set up that mill thing,” Tom said as something of a suggestion. “He helped set up the looms.”
“Oh excellent! You know, my mother says that the hard labours of craftsmen like your father are what the future is built on,” Gunnhild said cheerily.
Emily frowned and said, “Whenever my mother talks of the future, she says strange things like ‘stop daydreaming, a man is the only thing in your future’.”
In another life Emily would have eventually left home to become an adventurer, lived in Silverymoon for a while as a sellsword before returning home after nearly a decade’s absence to try to rebuild the ruins of Nesmé and settling down with a cleric of Lathandor before both of them died a decade after that in the chaos resulting in the death of Mystra. Again. However, that timeline had collapsed into non-existence recently, so she had a rather different future ahead of her.
“Oh nonsense, mother wouldn’t allow such a thing,” Gunnhild said with an extravagant wave of her hand. Unfortunately, her crude little tea cup did not have the strength necessary to stay together under such an acceleration and the handle broke off, sending the cup flying, to explode on the stone of the ‘table’ with a spray of clay shrapnel.
Wincing, Tom looked down at the little shard stuck in his hand and the tiny drop of red blood welling up from the wound. A slight shadow then fell over his hand and he looked up to find the troll leering hungrily over him, drool flooding out from between the gaps in its razor sharp teeth as it reached a gnarled, clawed hand bigger than Tom’s torso towards…
“Mr. Green!” Gunnhild barked, causing the troll to suddenly freeze up in absolute terror, its eyes loosing their hunger and instead gaining a spike of absolute terror. “That is not proper behaviour!”
A sour look on her face, Gunnhild’s features then softened as she looked at Tom. “I am so sorry Mr. Smith, I must make it better.” With a wave over her hand the tea set, constructed out of river clay by Gunnhild just recently, went flying, propelled by a telekinetic impulse.
Grinning in a slightly unsettling way, she said, “Let’s play doctor!”
The troll whimpered.
Skuld had a mirror, a full length mirror, set up in front of her, a ‘gift’ from the town of Nesmé, although ‘tribute’ was more accurate. She didn’t like the way she scared the poor people, but she had practically leapt upon the gift when it had been offered. It had been the first mirror she had seen in the better part of a year.
It had taken her six hours of staring at it, and later crying before it, before she had come to the conclusion that Belldandy wasn’t going to step out of it.
She had then stared at the mirror for a long time, not hoping for her sister but wondering at the reflection she saw within. She remembered the time she had been turned into an adult after the Lord of Terror incident, and staring at the mirror now, she realized she was closer to that point that she had realized.
Some part of her was still childish enough to wish for her big sister to come swooping in and make everything all right. Another part, a growing part, was realizing that she was an adult now. The Underdark had changed her, had aged her in ways that mere time could not do alone.
Not that time wasn’t important. Eventually, she had stripped off her clothing to stare at herself naked in the mirror, to see who she was beneath it all. She remembered a line from Nietzsche, “Man is a rope stretched between animal and overman suspended above the abyss.”
She certainly felt like she was caught on a rope between adult and child, stretched thin. She supposed from the triangular patch of hair between her legs, her body had been trying to tell her that she was an adult for a while now; it was just that she hadn’t really cared up until a few weeks ago. Goddesses didn’t have the same physiological maturation as human women, but many of the outer changes were the same.
Sitting there, in front of the mirror, Skuld placed a hand on her stomach, above where her womb would be. She closed her eyes and sighed at the sight of Gunnhild’s smiles. She wondered at other possible futures that might lie in store -that might have lain in store before Lars crashed into her life- and then she broke down crying again.
She had been such a bitch. She had been a selfish cunt. Once the thought of Belldandy holding Keiichi’s child would have been from a scene out of her deepest, darkest nightmare, let alone the image of her sister pregnant. It had been inconceivable, it had been the equivalent of some sort of disgusting, tentacle covered monstrosity crawling out of the ocean to molest school girls in her mind.
Now she was trying to get such a beast to molest her and the thought of Belldandy glowing with pride, Keiichi’s ear pressed up against her belly to listen in to the heartbeat of the tiny life they had created together, and Skuld wept. She wept because she doubted she would be there. She had never properly celebrated the love her sister and Keiichi had.
Wiping away her tears, she looked up at the mirror before approaching it proudly, chin and chest thrust out, her head unbowed. She looked over her frame with an appraising but not critical eye. She could certainly do some more growing in all areas, but she was not a little girl. She was a goddess, and she was crafting her own realm brick by brick.
She had taken the Shadow Weave from its creator with no outside help, proving her strength!
She had chosen to marry Lars with no outside encouragement, proving her will!
She was Skuld, Norn of the Future! She would make her own heaven on this world, become her own Valkyrie, and have her own king by her side!
Waving her hand, she conjured up new clothing, made from solid shadows, creating a tight, silky black dress that emphasized and accentuated her feminine traits while still leaving her plenty of mobility to get down and apply a wrench to a stubborn, oil covered bolt.
Maybe this change would help convince Lars to start fulfilling more of her fantasies. Like say working towards getting Gunnhild a sibling.
She was such a good little girl!
“Doctor Smith, you must hurry and find the tumour! The blockage is causing the patient such pain!” Gunnhild said enthusiastically while her telekinesis held down the ‘patient’.
“This is so neat,” Tom said while probing the troll’s brain with his finger, watching as his poking caused the giant to spasm and twitch in strangely predictable patterns. He and the other members of the original tea party, plus several of the more curious audience members, were all covered in blood and other fluids from the troll.
So far they had done a quadruple heart bypass, removed a ‘cyst’ from a lung, and about a half dozen other surgeries while Gunnhild suppressed the troll’s ability to regenerate until their play was done.
Lars meanwhile watched on from the distance, unnoticed by the children, two Erinyes next to him.
“Your daughter is impressively evil,” Autu noted with an impressed tone.
“A touch yes, but you’ll note she’s also selective about those she plays with. She won’t hurt the other children; it’s a compulsion she can’t overcome, but she does know who can take what level of roughness. For example, she knows that the troll she picked as her companion had a long history of ‘playing’ and she has a somewhat developed sense of fairness. I do believe our friend on the operating table will very nearly have learned his lesson by the end of this session. Plus she is teaching invaluable anatomy lessons, and she’s even using mostly correct terminology,” Lars said with some pride.
The other Erinyes, Caut, commented, “Sometimes Lars you sound like a mewling paladin, pleading for ‘justice’ and ‘mercy’, and other times you tingle our spines with talk of evil so grand.”
Lars let a strange look cross his face, something dark and predatory yet gleeful. He looked down at the gathering of children before he replied, “Your Blood War can be summed up with the two most evil phrases my people know. Your foes, the demons, have the phrase, ‘Because I can’ on their side. You devils however have ‘Because I had to’ on yours. These two phrases, when distilled down to their essence, account for all suffering, and in the end, the latter is more destructive. The truest evil is not achieved by the men who think themselves the villain. The truest evil is done by the good man who does what he feels he must, and thus he does it without hesitation.”
Lars paused before he said, “I saw the memories my daughter extracted out of that troll. He did not choose to be born a troll, he did not choose for the endless, predatory hunger to fill him, but he did choose what happened after that. The trolls are hungry and have to eat, but this one could slowly flay the skin off his victims’ flesh, could squeeze the marrow out of their still living bones, and could seek out the smallest babies because they were so tender, so it did. And now I can watch my daughter and her friends peel it back layer by layer, looking at what makes it tick, and I won’t lift a finger because I am not a good man. To my friends and family I will be loving and tender, selfless and self sacrificing. Nothing is too much for them. To complete strangers I will be polite and courteous. To those like the people of Nesmé who oppose me but who are just trying to live their lives, I will respect them while still grinding them into the dust. But to those who are my enemies, well… let’s just say that the children done there will be getting a debriefing about the appropriateness of what they just saw, but the troll will just get a little smile from me. Understand me ladies?”
Both Erinyes were quiet with thought. They were somewhat chilled by this perspective on evil. It was a flavour they had never seen before. It was darkness contrasted with light, which instead of diminishing the dark only made it sharper and deeper. It was colder and more methodical than the evil of the Hells, yet more brutal and savage than the evil of the Abyss.
They liked it. It was the evil of a good man. It was the evil of the eldest days of Hell, when Asmodeus still walked amongst the heavens. They liked to talk to Lars about good and evil, and slowly they were starting to understand.
The greatest evil is not committed by a devil or a demon; it is committed by a saint.
Strange lesson indeed.
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Chapter Fifty-six: Strange Lessons
For the children of Nesmé, the warnings to not stray out into the woods or monsters would get them had been very real warnings for generations, but still, children would be children and thus one of the responsibilities of the Riders was to round up stray young ones who wandered off before they got eaten. They weren’t always successful, and life was hard and often tear-filled out on the moors.
Thus, despite the uneasy alliance -vassalage at gunpoint really- the parents of Nesmé warned their children away from the camp at their doorstep… and were promptly ignored by the younger and/or more rebellious members of the village who had yet to be scared straight of the dangers around them.
That said, those in the camp did not trust trolls around the children and they were constantly monitored by either Lars, Skuld, the Erinyes, or one of the wizards powerful enough to produce fire or flame to handle the brutes when around adults. But as with all things, there was one exception.
The children stared up in awe at the troll, sitting there quietly, its hair done up in ribbons and wearing a straw hat with pretty swamp flowers all about it. Between two enormous pink painted claws it daintily held a crudely made clay tea cup that was sized for a small human. In its other hand was any equally tiny saucer. A rough sheet of flax was thrown over it in a crude imitation of a dress.
“More tea Mr. Green?” Gunnhild asked while holding a rough tea pot in her hands. She wasn’t quite sure where the idea for the game had come from, but she suspected it was daddy’s side of the family.
“Yar,” the troll grunted. Gunnhild glared at him and he tried to enunciate more politely, “Err… yes please.”
Lowering the tea cup, the troll allowed Gunnhild to ‘pour’ the imaginary beverage before he raised it up and took a sip, extending his pinkie at the last moment before he could be told off. Trolls as a species weren’t very bright, but this one had excellent Pavlovian conditioning.
“Thank you,” the troll grunted in its rough voice.
“You’re welcome Mr. Green. Would anyone else like some?” Gunnhild asked the braver selection of children who had gathered around the flat rock the troll had dragged into the clearing for Gunnhild’s tea part. There was also a large, awed collection of children who watched at a safer distance.
“No thank you, I’m good now,” Thomas Smith, son of a local craftsman replied. At ten he was just at the age to think he was the bravest person in the world without having a teenager’s cockiness quite set in yet. While he thought the majority of the games Gunnhild like to play were stupid, he was enthralled by the way she so effortlessly commanded the trolls and if playing her games was a way to learning such things then he would put up with them.
“More for me please,” Faeresta asked, holding out her little tea cup. The orphan child of a defunct house, she had been picked up the refugee column as they left Menzoberranzan and utterly adored Gunnhild.
“I still have half a cup left, I’ll be alright,” Emily Redford, another Nesmé child who refused to bend to anyone’s will, replied.
“Marvellous, marvellous,” Gunnhild replied dramatically before setting the teapot down. Adjusting her own broad rimmed straw hat, she asked in a gossipy tone, “Have you seen some of the patterns coming out of the new mill? Oh, those will be the talk of Waterdeep come the fall fashion season.”
Had the word ‘Victorianism’ been explained to Gunnhild, she would not have understood why anyone would act that stupid to her reckoning, and those around her really had no clue about the strange cultural mishmash she had inherited from the dozens of minds that composed her father’s form, but they all played along because Gunnhild found it fun.
“You mean the pretty flower clothing?” Faeresta asked innocently.
“Indeed. Quite the bit of finery, don’t you think?” Gunnhild asked her assembled guests.
“My dad helped set up that mill thing,” Tom said as something of a suggestion. “He helped set up the looms.”
“Oh excellent! You know, my mother says that the hard labours of craftsmen like your father are what the future is built on,” Gunnhild said cheerily.
Emily frowned and said, “Whenever my mother talks of the future, she says strange things like ‘stop daydreaming, a man is the only thing in your future’.”
In another life Emily would have eventually left home to become an adventurer, lived in Silverymoon for a while as a sellsword before returning home after nearly a decade’s absence to try to rebuild the ruins of Nesmé and settling down with a cleric of Lathandor before both of them died a decade after that in the chaos resulting in the death of Mystra. Again. However, that timeline had collapsed into non-existence recently, so she had a rather different future ahead of her.
“Oh nonsense, mother wouldn’t allow such a thing,” Gunnhild said with an extravagant wave of her hand. Unfortunately, her crude little tea cup did not have the strength necessary to stay together under such an acceleration and the handle broke off, sending the cup flying, to explode on the stone of the ‘table’ with a spray of clay shrapnel.
Wincing, Tom looked down at the little shard stuck in his hand and the tiny drop of red blood welling up from the wound. A slight shadow then fell over his hand and he looked up to find the troll leering hungrily over him, drool flooding out from between the gaps in its razor sharp teeth as it reached a gnarled, clawed hand bigger than Tom’s torso towards…
“Mr. Green!” Gunnhild barked, causing the troll to suddenly freeze up in absolute terror, its eyes loosing their hunger and instead gaining a spike of absolute terror. “That is not proper behaviour!”
A sour look on her face, Gunnhild’s features then softened as she looked at Tom. “I am so sorry Mr. Smith, I must make it better.” With a wave over her hand the tea set, constructed out of river clay by Gunnhild just recently, went flying, propelled by a telekinetic impulse.
Grinning in a slightly unsettling way, she said, “Let’s play doctor!”
The troll whimpered.
Skuld had a mirror, a full length mirror, set up in front of her, a ‘gift’ from the town of Nesmé, although ‘tribute’ was more accurate. She didn’t like the way she scared the poor people, but she had practically leapt upon the gift when it had been offered. It had been the first mirror she had seen in the better part of a year.
It had taken her six hours of staring at it, and later crying before it, before she had come to the conclusion that Belldandy wasn’t going to step out of it.
She had then stared at the mirror for a long time, not hoping for her sister but wondering at the reflection she saw within. She remembered the time she had been turned into an adult after the Lord of Terror incident, and staring at the mirror now, she realized she was closer to that point that she had realized.
Some part of her was still childish enough to wish for her big sister to come swooping in and make everything all right. Another part, a growing part, was realizing that she was an adult now. The Underdark had changed her, had aged her in ways that mere time could not do alone.
Not that time wasn’t important. Eventually, she had stripped off her clothing to stare at herself naked in the mirror, to see who she was beneath it all. She remembered a line from Nietzsche, “Man is a rope stretched between animal and overman suspended above the abyss.”
She certainly felt like she was caught on a rope between adult and child, stretched thin. She supposed from the triangular patch of hair between her legs, her body had been trying to tell her that she was an adult for a while now; it was just that she hadn’t really cared up until a few weeks ago. Goddesses didn’t have the same physiological maturation as human women, but many of the outer changes were the same.
Sitting there, in front of the mirror, Skuld placed a hand on her stomach, above where her womb would be. She closed her eyes and sighed at the sight of Gunnhild’s smiles. She wondered at other possible futures that might lie in store -that might have lain in store before Lars crashed into her life- and then she broke down crying again.
She had been such a bitch. She had been a selfish cunt. Once the thought of Belldandy holding Keiichi’s child would have been from a scene out of her deepest, darkest nightmare, let alone the image of her sister pregnant. It had been inconceivable, it had been the equivalent of some sort of disgusting, tentacle covered monstrosity crawling out of the ocean to molest school girls in her mind.
Now she was trying to get such a beast to molest her and the thought of Belldandy glowing with pride, Keiichi’s ear pressed up against her belly to listen in to the heartbeat of the tiny life they had created together, and Skuld wept. She wept because she doubted she would be there. She had never properly celebrated the love her sister and Keiichi had.
Wiping away her tears, she looked up at the mirror before approaching it proudly, chin and chest thrust out, her head unbowed. She looked over her frame with an appraising but not critical eye. She could certainly do some more growing in all areas, but she was not a little girl. She was a goddess, and she was crafting her own realm brick by brick.
She had taken the Shadow Weave from its creator with no outside help, proving her strength!
She had chosen to marry Lars with no outside encouragement, proving her will!
She was Skuld, Norn of the Future! She would make her own heaven on this world, become her own Valkyrie, and have her own king by her side!
Waving her hand, she conjured up new clothing, made from solid shadows, creating a tight, silky black dress that emphasized and accentuated her feminine traits while still leaving her plenty of mobility to get down and apply a wrench to a stubborn, oil covered bolt.
Maybe this change would help convince Lars to start fulfilling more of her fantasies. Like say working towards getting Gunnhild a sibling.
She was such a good little girl!
“Doctor Smith, you must hurry and find the tumour! The blockage is causing the patient such pain!” Gunnhild said enthusiastically while her telekinesis held down the ‘patient’.
“This is so neat,” Tom said while probing the troll’s brain with his finger, watching as his poking caused the giant to spasm and twitch in strangely predictable patterns. He and the other members of the original tea party, plus several of the more curious audience members, were all covered in blood and other fluids from the troll.
So far they had done a quadruple heart bypass, removed a ‘cyst’ from a lung, and about a half dozen other surgeries while Gunnhild suppressed the troll’s ability to regenerate until their play was done.
Lars meanwhile watched on from the distance, unnoticed by the children, two Erinyes next to him.
“Your daughter is impressively evil,” Autu noted with an impressed tone.
“A touch yes, but you’ll note she’s also selective about those she plays with. She won’t hurt the other children; it’s a compulsion she can’t overcome, but she does know who can take what level of roughness. For example, she knows that the troll she picked as her companion had a long history of ‘playing’ and she has a somewhat developed sense of fairness. I do believe our friend on the operating table will very nearly have learned his lesson by the end of this session. Plus she is teaching invaluable anatomy lessons, and she’s even using mostly correct terminology,” Lars said with some pride.
The other Erinyes, Caut, commented, “Sometimes Lars you sound like a mewling paladin, pleading for ‘justice’ and ‘mercy’, and other times you tingle our spines with talk of evil so grand.”
Lars let a strange look cross his face, something dark and predatory yet gleeful. He looked down at the gathering of children before he replied, “Your Blood War can be summed up with the two most evil phrases my people know. Your foes, the demons, have the phrase, ‘Because I can’ on their side. You devils however have ‘Because I had to’ on yours. These two phrases, when distilled down to their essence, account for all suffering, and in the end, the latter is more destructive. The truest evil is not achieved by the men who think themselves the villain. The truest evil is done by the good man who does what he feels he must, and thus he does it without hesitation.”
Lars paused before he said, “I saw the memories my daughter extracted out of that troll. He did not choose to be born a troll, he did not choose for the endless, predatory hunger to fill him, but he did choose what happened after that. The trolls are hungry and have to eat, but this one could slowly flay the skin off his victims’ flesh, could squeeze the marrow out of their still living bones, and could seek out the smallest babies because they were so tender, so it did. And now I can watch my daughter and her friends peel it back layer by layer, looking at what makes it tick, and I won’t lift a finger because I am not a good man. To my friends and family I will be loving and tender, selfless and self sacrificing. Nothing is too much for them. To complete strangers I will be polite and courteous. To those like the people of Nesmé who oppose me but who are just trying to live their lives, I will respect them while still grinding them into the dust. But to those who are my enemies, well… let’s just say that the children done there will be getting a debriefing about the appropriateness of what they just saw, but the troll will just get a little smile from me. Understand me ladies?”
Both Erinyes were quiet with thought. They were somewhat chilled by this perspective on evil. It was a flavour they had never seen before. It was darkness contrasted with light, which instead of diminishing the dark only made it sharper and deeper. It was colder and more methodical than the evil of the Hells, yet more brutal and savage than the evil of the Abyss.
They liked it. It was the evil of a good man. It was the evil of the eldest days of Hell, when Asmodeus still walked amongst the heavens. They liked to talk to Lars about good and evil, and slowly they were starting to understand.
The greatest evil is not committed by a devil or a demon; it is committed by a saint.
Strange lesson indeed.
I don't know which is more amusing: the idea of daemonic droids, or droids with “Skuld is my co-pilot” logos etched onto them. 
Happy Holidays 
