The Demon Plot: DEATH OF GRINDING MADNESS [July Player Event]

[pillz]

Who: Ensemble production, all individuals who opted in to the plot
When: July 9-21
Where: Two inhabited planets around the Ingress
What: The demon plot kicks off, in which malevolent shadow beings, copies of existing characters, begin to materialize and harass the PCs across the worlds. Plotting post is here, and a network post will go up within the next 2 days from several PCs advising on how to end the plot.
Warnings: Violence, psychological themes, possibly past trauma, etc.

Death of Grinding Madness
The Demon Plot
(mild spoilers for The Raven Cycle)

On July 9, a demon begins to make its way through the Ingress, summoned through by a shitty teenager.

July 9-12
Harrying

It's innocuous in the beginning. A movement in the corner of your eye, a shadow through a curtain-- merely a tree. But then the shadow figures begin to emerge into full being. Black-eyed wraiths that look like enemies, friends with whom you've had past conflict, or even you yourself. At first, it's merely harrying, minor harassment. Threatening gestures, broken gestures, jump scares.

Pursue them, and they disappear-- you might even catch a glimpse of how. They melt down into black slime, racing away across floors, through sewer grates, up walls, impossible to follow. By now, the worst of the climate freeze is over, but residual ice does pose a needles extra obstacle.

July 12-15
The Violence Escalates

In the days that follow, the situation only gets worse.

Sporadic harassment turns into outright attacks. The targeting is unmistakable. The shadow beings who can speak tell cruel tales of animosity, spite, even hatred. They are as deadly with their hands or strange powers as their doppelgangers are, and worse, they're functionally indestructible. Rip off one's head and it merely reforms out of sticky black ink. Limbs regenerate just as easily. The being might dispell for a few hours, but no doubt— it'll be back, if not to hurt you then someone you know.

The Savrii begin to notice. It's hard not to. While there is hardly an epidemic of panic, the disruptions are hard to miss-- broken windows, screams, random violence. Soon, the authorities begin to open safehouse facilities at which characters can seek shelter.

July 15-18
The Golem

On July 17, something horrific begins to happen— several shadow beings merge to form a massive golem in Kauto R1. It is a grotesque, horrifying spectacle, of limbs and eyes and pulsating flesh. It reaches almost sixty feet in height. Combined together, this shadow creature is considerably less intelligent than the individual beings were. However, it is also immensely strong and regenerates just like the smaller ones did.

Within the mall, hundreds of daytime shoppers are trapped within. Luckily, they have food and climate control. Perhaps you're one of them-- or perhaps you're trying to get in to provide medical care.

In the meantime, the attacks from the individual shadow beings don't stop. Despite the intelligence exhibited by some, all of them seem mindlessly bent on tormenting their targets until they are killed.

July 18-21
The Sacrifice

On the 9th day, a network post goes up (link pending, will be OOCly forward-dated to July 10th latest) revealing how to remove the invincibility of the attackers.

And by the 21st, the remaining beings utterly vanish without explanation— unless you happen to bear witness to the events that take place at St. Monmouth.

Comments

let's just play with triggery dynamics; this is going to get AWFUL

[a_perfect_end]

Rinzler just keeps stalking toward him at a tall, easy lope, steady and certain, head raised at a peregrine angle.

That noise slithers out of him again, impossible and incorrect and obscene with satisfaction.

Clu has long calculated this day would come--but not like this, not here, not now, and it rattles his projections apart in a bitter chill as Rinzler cants his head soft and slow; (confirmed...), natural sound raised almost to a purr.

And then it's gone.

--That is not Rinzler.

A dozen or more alerts squall to the fore, and he stumbles in his haste, and that's all that keeps his jawbone attached to the rest of him through the bright overwhelming stroke of pain that has him stalled, shrinking back on himself as lesser points tick over in slow, sick realization:

Hit me.

He'd asked for it.

VERY YES

[notglitching]

A stumble. A flinch. Reflexive and small and not enough to rob him of his prize completely. It's hard to say which is more satisfying: the slice and split of gold that mars Clu's face, or the wide-eyed freeze of comprehension. Better than both, how he shrinks back. So pathetic. So afraid.

"You did."

The laugh doesn't quite loop back, but its exultant, knife-edged joy leaks out in every word. Clu's not the only one who can read nonverbals. Rinzler's not the only one to use them.

"But you're still cowering?" Breath hisses out, not disappointed in the least. "Clu. Even you had to see this coming."

The distance is swallowed with soft, hungry steps. One cut isn't nearly enough, not even to get started, and the flick of Rinzler's blade for Clu's disk hand is almost casual. There's no crouch for combat. No tension. No need. This isn't a fight, after all.

He's just returning a favor.

"Deal's off."

[a_perfect_end]

This is excruciatingly correct to all of his very worst projections, down to the floating point.

There isn't room to run.

"...Okay," with a frisson of goldenrod into the carpet, reflexive prodding with the tongue that burns where it widens the gap. "So you're upset."

There is furniture in the room, straight out of and copied precisely from the catalogue, exact in each detail--sleek minimal surfaces poised to collapse under the weight of their own modernism--

There is nowhere to hide.

There is nothing either sensible or effective or safe to throw, and Rinzler (not Rinzler--)

Is just taking a stroll through his living room, fluid and personable, relentless.

"I absolutely respect that--!"

He needs that hand, and everything attached to it, or he is not getting out of here at all.

There's nothing dignified about the jolting hop, two-footed, that cracks the backs of his knees against the coffee table.

"We can talk about this," and it tastes a little hysterical, but he doesn't waver or chuckle or sob. "There must be something else you need."

Finally, blessedly, his disc is in his grip, bright as a welding torch.

"I've helped you before."

[notglitching]

Clu scrambles for one disk. Rinzler eyes the tableau scornfully, and reaches down, hands meeting and jerking apart to produce two. They linger carelessly at either side, extensions of his frame as he surveys the crumbling shape backed against the furniture. Not quite a corner, but it will do.

He doesn't strike yet, though. They're talking, after all. Clu helped him.

"You did." Acknowledgement, soft and calm and sweet like acid.

"But I never needed you."

A soft click, and opaque sections start to fold away. A fractional glimpse of dark hair and darker eyes—

—as charge crackles, shapes blur, and disks smash forward like forked lightning. The first, edge out, to engage Clu's weapon or remove the limb that carries it. The second? Stopping just short of Clu's throat. Rinzler's arm curves with the blow, frame surging behind it: a forearm strike, to tip Clu past the point of balance, and slam him down to the surface behind. Trap, not kill. Not so quickly.

That would hardly be fair trade.

[a_perfect_end]

The world truncates, all spare processing pulled to hazard calculations as Rinzler's scorn rakes across him, settling with predatory ease into a familiar configuration--

Not a stance. It's not a fight. If Clu had anywhere left to go, the correct term for that would be a stalk. His own systems are cheerfully providing lurid, entirely accurate projections in perfect detail; it's horrible.

It's breathtaking.

"...No." Tasting the truth of that evaluation with a mouth gone dry. "Guess not."

If he had a heart it might burst.

Rinzler doesn't show his face--that is not Rinzler--

Reflex keeps his arm attached to his shoulder, if only just; something is wrong with his riposte, like there was nothing in its path, nothing solid enough for purchase: no throughput. Gravity keeps his head on his neck--and just as neatly smashes his back flat to the table, jolting gold hot across his vision as the impact loops up through the dock.

This is an exceedingly poor position to be in. The correct reaction flashes to the fore of the queue, taken immediately: Clu's disc goes through Rinzler's shoulder backward...

Clu's disc goes through Rinzler's shoulder backward--bright and then dark, whole, shining, and inhumanly neat.

No effect.

[notglitching]

Clu's disk slides in one side and out the other, barely a ripple in the smooth black slope of armor left behind. The drag is palpable, the feeling of something sticky and weighted... and a glimpse, just maybe, of a darkness that seems to cling to the blade's edge. But damage?

No.

Black eyes glint in the reflection of their lights. A brow lifts, gaze sliding curiously back to Clu's attack. "Not this time," comes the unfiltered hiss, and now, Clu can watch as Rinzler's smile grows. Sharp and predatory right up to the edges of the void. The damage that crawls up his face is old, patched and salvaged and oh-so-painstakingly repaired. A ghost of an error. A mistake, come back to haunt Clu.

But wasn't Rinzler always that?

"Ų̴̨ş̴̛̕e̶͘r̴͘͘͜͝s҉̸̴̨͟. Friends." The disk in his right hand hums brighter as he leans in, pinning arm twitching just enough to let the blade brush, feather-light, against Clu's throat. Head back. "It was always an excuse. For both of us, don't you agree?"

It's the second disk that strikes, snakelike, for his administrator's shoulder: and the bright lines of light that trace down the limb outside. An arm for an arm?

"I'm doing this for me."

[a_perfect_end]

It has eyes like--no, not like mirrors, lightless, wet and deep.

Like the Sea.

And it watches him, traces the way he regards what's just happened here--the way warning: shrills through the queue--smirks at him with a quirk of an eyebrow. Just the one, just like--

It's not Rinzler. It's not anyone. It's not.

The smile stretches, skull-wide, frilled with familiar exacting ghosts of ancient damage.

A thrill of horror, disgust or something else, neither, both, flares through traitor circuits. He'd fixed it.

It. Isn't Rinzler.

"No!" And he isn't a User, to be nudged prone by the threat of a close shave. He won't go quietly, leading with a thrust of his chin, with a push of his pinned arm, backward scramble of a trapped leg. "That's not what happened."

The second slash is desperate, the swing of a hatchet for center mass, only he has no leverage.

And the disc in--not Rinzler's hand--finds its mark, chisels in with one neat blow.

He can feel it going, gold shirring away to ash. Action, reaction, and all he can do about it is yell.

[notglitching]

"Isn't it?"

No leverage. No chance. There's nowhere for Clu to retreat, and his push is met with an implacable, unbending strength. The panicked jerk of throat and chin, Rinzler won't interfere with in the least. Clu isn't a user, to be bled out with one cut, and if he's that desperate to slice himself apart?

Really, it might just save both of them some time.

No, Rinzler's gaze is on his own work. The scattering of shards across the carpet. The raw and open gap it leaves, and the way light dulls to empty down the limb. Clu likely won't be able to feel the darkness on his disk spread... but the clatter as it hits the floor is audible.

No weapons.

"You broke Tron because you were stronger. Because you wanted to... and could." The gleam in the dark eyes grows brighter, a glimmer of gold reflected back down to his prey. "You butchered my code from the start." A grin flashes across Rinzler's face, familiar and chiding and entirely at odds with the low scrape of errors that plays out in reminder. "Never perfect—just hobbled and helpless enough that even you could keep hold."

Force builds in increments as the enforcer leans forward. Forearm against core. Dock against table. It's a solid line of effect, flexed and held with enough pressure to shatter a lesser program—and certainly, to remove any margin for escape. Rinzler's stronger than he was. Still, the cutting edge of that disk... flattens, leaving the heel of Rinzler's palm in contact with Clu.

Just touch.

"But we're still here. Do you know why?"

Just touch, and an invasive trickle of corruption. Just touch, and a chilling, core-deep leech. It reads like Rinzler, and feels like the sticky darkness in the Sea. Clu's creations, both.

It will drain him to the edge of derezz without ever letting him shut down.

"Because you're weak."

[a_perfect_end]

Even if Clu could get away, there is nothing to use, his disc having rolled away somewhere and rattled flat to a stop.

...Maybe it's under the table.

The thought kicks air through his chest, choked and hysterical beneath the gathering fulcrum pressure of Rinzler's grip.

Not Rinzler.

Voxels grind gold in the cut with the effort of turning his head, of looking away, of looking again--shaking his head with gritted teeth.

"Tron got in my way." A firefly shiver of gold, a jagged loop. "I smashed him because he was in my way--!"

Rinzler’s elbow is still digging down, like he’s just gonna go through by pushing harder. Less robust programs would already have sheared apart under the pressure. The angle of the disc shifts forward, inward in Rinzler’s hand, and a hot rush of alert: blurs Clu’s vision for a nano.

He makes one more grab at it--the knee; get them apart, go for the--

There’s a tiny, brittle little noise somewhere down deep in his back and a sharp bloom of static all the way up the trunk line, and he forces himself to lay very still as Rinzler slides the edge of his weapon flat to lay hands on him. It’s almost serene, the way Rinzler is grinning, and the touch when it comes is so gentle that his sensors ache more from expecting hurt than receiving it.

At least at first. Its palm just rests there, black and implacable with its oilslick sheen. And then, gently, whisper soft, the script pries its way in.

“No.” Harsh, jagged with feedback under the mounting icicle pull, and like the Sea a bottomless thing, an absence of light, a deep anode draw that has power welling to the surface as warm and sudden as the rush to clot a wound. “Don't; you aren’t even--”

It is so cold, bitter with the risk of shutdown. He’s never been this cold, a chill of certainty that bites in down to the core.

Because you’re weak.

He’s so cold he’s shaking with it. And that’s all it is.

“No.”

[notglitching]

"I'm not even what?"

Gold pales, and red swells, a flexing, feedback hum of satisfaction. Rinzler's voice is all sharp edges, but this question is almost casual. Like shallow cuts, sullying the smooth expanse of the Arena a few voxels at a time.

"Not permitted? Not right? Or are you still trying to pretend that I'm not Rinzler?"

The pinning, draining point of contact stays, but Rinzler's other disk drags in as he leans closer, feathering over lit pathways without quite digging in. Shoulder to node. From node across core. There are so many options, aren't there? Should it be a test? A Game?

"Because Rinzler wouldn't do this? Because 'as long as he's himself, he's yours'?" Teeth show as he smirks. "Even then, you knew better." The disk hums a little closer. A little deeper, digging just enough to slice a shallow curve in and out of a gold stripe. Can Clu stay silent like he had?

"I'm just what comes next."

Whether to screams or stillness, Rinzler's grip won't budge. The disk curves to a neat spiral before merging with its match. Clu's vantage will offer little view of the seething coalescion of darkness on the floor. Still, he can watch as Rinzler's empty hand recedes from view.

"And as for Tron?"

He can watch as it returns, closed around a slim, gold circle. Not under the table after all.

"I didn't say 'shattered'."

He said that Clu broke him. Because he wanted it. Because he could.


Black eyes fix on the administrator's disk.

[a_perfect_end]

They each have their strengths. Clu's is leaving him in a bright, easy rush, hot tungsten feedback downshifting into a rich microphone hum of welling ember red.

"No authorization," his teeth want to chatter, would mince his words for him if he let go even slightly. But this is his function: access control and the law of least permissions. "You're something else--"

He's built for throughput, designed to turn one thing into another with minimal signal loss: transfer of power in a bright highlighter smear that pools thick and winks out ashen along the razor track of Rinzler's? brightening disc.

Because Rinzler wouldn't do this?

You know better.

"Still using my words for it!" Sharp, too high, half-shrieked against the pain. "Still mine."

Night seethes in the corner of his vision, boiling down below his line of sight, and his breath comes quick and hard through his nose, shaking his head or just shaking as he cuts himself again on his reluctance to look.

Rinzler's fingers curl dark around the very core of him, midnight eyes fixed and staring with a familiar acquisitive grace, dark and total as the first things that ever walked out of the Sea.

"No," and it seems to be all he can say, bright, sharp with the taste of mounting error, "no, no, no no no--" words, frantic in their haste to get out of his mouth, "Oh, I need that. Please."

MUTILATION INCOMING in 3... 2...

[notglitching]

Something else? Well, maybe. Rinzler is stronger; Rinzler is better than anything Clu ever made. Still, authorization had never stopped any version of him long.

Clu really should know better.

"Yours?" It's a low whisper, a gentle scatter of fine scorn, overlaid atop the percussive mutter of Clu's pleas. "You could barely make a claim worth stating with your fingers in my code. Should we see if the reverse applies?"

Fingers curl tighter, drain dragging Clu's last reserves of strength out through his core. If the administrator's lights are dimming near to dark, the clear gold of the disk display is all the brighter by contrast. Clu's face, sketched out in motes of light. The interface beneath, ready and waiting to be opened. It flickers under the sheer influx of intent, and for a moment, Clu will feel the ghost-pressure crawling inward, something sticky and dark pushing at his edges—

"Don't worry," A sigh, rising to laughter, and the code display goes dark.

"I don't want you."

The disk lowers. Rinzler's touch recedes. The enforcer reaches back to dock his own disk, and for a moment, Clu is left alone. Untouched. Unbothered. Drained and empty, as worthless and abandoned as he always was, beneath it all. No user. No system. No allies, and no slaves. It's fascinating to see how little is really there.

"Still... it's better to avoid confusion."

Clu's disk flares to life again: gold edged with white, sharp edges and a ready hum. Whatever barrier the locks on Clu's codebase might have posed, weapons overrides are no trouble at all. Any resistance he might muster will prove just as useless: as Rinzler's empty hand locks around his jaw.

Forcing it open.

"Especially about those words."