Let the Dance Begin!

((Sven Vee continued from [url=http://sotfmini.com/SurvivalOfTheFittest/viewtopic.php?p=64512#p64512]elsewhere[/url]))

The passage of thorns tightened around Sven as he crawled, tearing at hair and clothes, and then piercing further, rending flesh from bone and disassembling him into his constituent molecules. He'd read that once, somewhere, that every breath you took you were breathing in some of the atoms that had been breathed by every notable figure in history. Every moment, you were part Hitler and part Gandhi and part Genghis Khan. There had been some profound meaning attributed to this, he thought, one so overblown and saccharine as to make him doubt whether it was even true. But if it was, then the moral was pretty clear: God was all about recycling.

"You can say that again," said Sven's friend, casually tossing a red plastic cup into the waste bin.

They stood, now that Sven had been reassembled, on the wooden floor of a large ballroom. They were off to one side, standing awkwardly between the refreshment table and the DJ's station. The latter had a long sheet of requests, and it was full of all sorts of horrible meme garbage. Sven didn't follow music that closely, and memes far less, but he'd found Rick Rolling funny enough, back when he was ten. Having it happen to him within moments of landing, well, he tried to give that moment to his inner child, but wasn't having much luck.

"Now, now," said the shadows. "You're right on time."

"What does that mean?" Sven asked.

He received a shrug.

"You know," he said, "being cryptic is a fine enough aim unto itself, from an artistic perspective, but it often engenders a certain hostility in the audience."

"Perhaps. But usually there's a point."

"Okay," Sven said, "so what's the point?"

The only two people who looked anywhere near as out of place as Sven and the anthropomorphic darkness at his side were a couple of grown men standing over by the entrance. The younger of the pair (though that was a loose qualifier; he had to be nearing the end of his thirties at least) was Asian, polished and put-together, and had about him an air of unmistakable familiarity. Sven knew him. No, wait, it wasn't quite that. He'd never met the man, but he recognized him. It was like he'd seen his picture somewhere, in an art history book maybe, or else...

"His Wikipedia article," his friend supplied.

Sven squinted. The bright flashing lights messed with his depth perception. The press of high schoolers dancing created a claustrophobic heat, and he was ever afraid he might tread on someone's toes. This was exactly why he'd skipped Prom. Was that what this was about? Was he being treated to a vision of what he'd missed? Was the purpose, then, to make him regret his hermetic ways? If so, it was doing a poor job of it. He was more convinced than ever that he did not belong here.

A girl and a boy stepped into the room, and then the girl spoke and bolted for the food table. Sven bodily recoiled as he realized that she was both speaking and thinking in blue. The tableau froze and everyone but Sven flattened out, no longer people but crudely (if strangely attractively) painted cardboard stand-ups. The streaks in the girl's hair were as blue as her thoughts were as blue as her eyes, and Sven was gripped by an irrational hatred, a surge of violence that saw his hand resting on the lightsaber upon his belt before he knew what was happening. He took one step towards her, two, was ready to draw and slice her in twain before he regained control.

He lifted his hand away.

The girl went back to thinking like the person she pretended to be.

Motion resumed. Cardboard transmuted back into flesh.

Sven took a cup of punch and returned to his position, sipping it. It was entirely flavorless.

"I don't think I want to be here any longer," he said.

"We don't have to stay." A nod, a shrug. "But, you may like the next place even less."

"I don't think I'm supposed to be here," Sven said.

"You are. Well, you were. It's difficult to explain. This is a copy of a copy. There used to be [url=s1.zetaboards.com/SOTF_Test_Board/index/]a place carved out for this[/url], but it's gone now. You might find some ripples [url=https://web.archive.org/web/20180620205050/http://s1.zetaboards.com/SOTF_Test_Board/index/]if you tried[/url]. Originally, I was going to take you there, but things happen. Nothing lasts forever."

"And you still won't explain why."

"You know what they say: 'Catch a man a fish...'"

"Then how about teaching me to fish?" Sven said.

The figure clapped its hands with great force and no sound.

"Excellent. That's the spirit. You're asking questions, and that's good, but you're not asking the right questions. Try these on for size:

"'Where am I?'

"'Who am I?'

"'What am I?'

"And then you'll know everything you could ever want, as much as it will help you."

"Okay," Sven said. "Where am I?"

"'Catch a man a fish...'"

He frowned and downed the rest of his drink. Almost drowned in it. Looked around.

And there it was: a little booth over to the side, where couples could go to get their pictures taken and turned into keychains. It was almost entirely deserted, no attendant even in view, but Sven picked up one of the unfilled keychains and the backing paper read "PROM 2008" and then the hall was gone and Sven was back on the island, shadowy figure right next to him, hand raised like it was going to rest it comfortingly on his shoulder but it was just hover-handing him. The forest was abuzz with bugs and birds and occasional gunfire, and then a tiny girl in an outfit Sven was embarrassed to realize he couldn't describe more precisely than "girly" (it had a skirt and these weird little touches of culturally-normative "cute") came stumbling into the middle of the clearing, eyes glazed, shell-shocked, not an ounce of stealth to be found.

There were others there, Sven now realized, phasing into being, fighting. It was the girl with the blue hair, tussling with a larger boy, and then this taller girl with blond streaks whispered something to the tiny newcomer and shoved her forwards.

"What?" the girl said, as she staggered and then fell.

And then the blue-thoughted girl pulled a gun and fired. But it wasn't a gun, not a normal one. It was orange, and it fired a bright, blinding light, like a ball of fire or something, and it hit the boy in the chest, then bounced off and landed on the small girl and got tangled up in her clothes, and the propulsion of the flare coupled with the heat to send it boring straight through her chest like some kind of molten worm. The heat was so intense it rippled through her body, turning flesh to ash and causing her skin to melt and peel away, revealing cooked muscle and brittle white bone, her screams echoing, and her hair caught fire like she was Ghost Rider, and the others were running away, and then it exploded in a giant fireball and Sven would've been blinded except he was wearing his shades so he was fine. The girl's torso evaporated except for a few scraps, and the metal collar she wore went off with a bang, shooting her head off like it had been packed onto her torso on top of a tight spring, and the whole area was a roaring inferno now, nothing left of the unfortunate girl but a few blackened bones from her limbs and a smoldering skull.

The flames raged for a time, and at first Sven just stood and watched. He warmed his hands on a burning patch of shrubbery, then sat down in the lotus position. A small stream acted as a firebreak. The fuel just wasn't there to maintain the conflagration. The fingers of the fire did not reach for him. Finally, all was still. The blue girl and the others had long since vanished. Sven's friend crouched beside him.

Eventually, Sven broke the silence.

"I don't think that's how it actually works," he said.

"It's not."

"So what am I supposed to learn from this?"

His friend lazily lit a fresh cigarette off the final embers and took a long drag. There was a span of contemplation, then a reply.

"That even God fucks up sometimes."

Sven nodded, and stood, and walked straight into the middle of the blast zone, leaving green footsteps behind amidst the ash. When he hopped across the stream, he could no longer see the incinerated clearing behind him, but he could still smell it.

((Sven Vee continued in [url=http://sotfmini.com/SurvivalOfTheFittest/viewtopic.php?p=65027#p65027]Woody Harrelson wearing a red wig in the Stinger of Venom saying “There’s Going To Be Carnage”[/url]))