BP, (Ghoul)- The Theater of Pirapasa

Wichahpi al-Malek. Ghoul 5, 3, 5, 5, 1, Chief

The lone figure walked across the arid wasteland at a steady pace. Draped in a thin off-white cloak in defense from the high sun’s blazing light, the figure approached the eroded ruins. Standing in the shade formed by a fractured but still standing pillar, Prvt. Wichahpi al-Malek took stock of the remains of the Theater of Pirapasa. The tall woman was of roughly average build. The reddish cast of her skin and her long ruddy hair framed a pair of watchful purple eyes.  A long bone sat in the corner of her mouth, its length bobbing up and down as she idly chewed it.

Downward from where she stood was an ancient auditorium. Wide layers of stone stairs were arranged in a semicircle around a large circular stone platform. The stairs must have doubled as seats for the audience, allowing them to watch the circular area. Behind the circular stage lay a tall rectangular building, what her briefing had termed the “facade” of the temple. That will definitely have to be cleared, thought Wichahpi, as she dropped her pack by the pillar. Tossing off her thin cloak and stuffing it beneath her pack, the tall woman adjusted her fitting khaki uniform. She paid special attention to the ammo-filled bandoleer laying diagonally across her chest, sitting comfortably between her medium sized breasts.

After a moment spent rummaging through her bag and placing some essential equipment within her uniform’s many pockets, she took a deep breath to steady her nerves. Un-slinging and cocking her rifle with ease of long practice, the young Ghoul sat it by her pack.  Drawing a small double barreled coach gun from the pack, Wichahpi opened the hinge-action and loaded both barrels. There was almost no choke or stock to it, the wooden part usually used to brace against the shooter’s shoulder had been sawn down to a bare minimum. Prvt al-Malek’s unapproved modifications would eventually be deducted from her pay from the Order, but they had proven their worth repeatedly. Though a human would break a wrist from firing it, Ghoulish strength made to rend flesh easily handled the recoil. She spent a moment adjusting a wide heavy knife sheathed at her belt until it was at the easiest angle for drawing quickly.

After another deep breath, Wichahpi made her way down the stairs. Soon past them and standing in the center of the gray circular stage, the Ghoul stood before the doorway into the shadowy abandoned temple. Giving herself a moment for her eyes to adjust, she stepped inside. She could feel it here, the abomination-spawn that mamono instinctively sensed, hated. The bone crunched loudly and comfortingly in her mouth as she swept the central room’s confines with the gun. She held the coach gun like a handgun in her right hand, the her left hand bracing the wrist.

The temple was large and shadowy with a rectangular floorplan. There were two aisles at either side, one to her left and right. Deciding to take the rightmost Wichahpi followed the instinctive sense of wrongness around the corner of the L-layout of the aisle. The feeling of an alien regard increased and focused in a spasm of hate, and the room was filled with the distorted and reverberating sounds of whistles and pipes. Her senses sharp, the ghoul stepped around the corner to see the source of the malevolent noise that made her flesh throb and ache with fierce instinctive loathing.

The mass of large tissue was floating in the air. Constantly regrowing and sloughing off its flesh, the flying polyp was more abominable than any mamono, even the abyss dwellers, could make themselves appear. Spawning and shedding tendrils in every moment, it’s form stank of sickness, death, and corruption. Its cancerous flesh faded in and out of corporeality, portions of it shifting into translucence and solidity in no discernible pattern. With the sharp senses of a Ghoul, she took all of this in within an instant of seeing the monstrosity. Her senses, keen and agile enough to sense prey both living and dead through several solid feet of earth, processed the sight in less than the time it took for her reflexes to level the double barreled coach gun at it. Ghoulish reflexes were nearly as fast as their senses. Deep in her heart a mix of primal fear and anger was bleeding out into the rest of her, a deep inescapable need to eliminate this blot upon the world. She pulsed with the hot red rage of her natural mana as her gunhand tracked the twisting dexterous shape twisting in a dizzying dodge. The blast took the beast square as she pulled on both triggers at once without the slightest hesitation.

The natural prey of mamono had been humans in an earlier age, but the ancient and natural enemy of her ancestors was before her. Every fiber of her being thrummed tensely in primal territorial instinct. Despite the loud sound of the shots and inhumanly strong force of recoil she absorbed with her arms, she could hear the cacophony of whistles and piping sounds twist and mar. The cruel grin of a predator scenting blood flashed on her face effortlessly. Neither the angry sounds of the wounded creature nor her primal pleasure distracted her from the immediate response of the flying polyp. Wichahpi dodged the tendril that shot from the beast and carved a strip from the stone aisle with its passage. Unlike mamono, true monsters felt no fear nor hesitation. All of the abomination-spawn reacted so, attacking without regard to pain or wounds taken.

Springing into action, Wichahpi sprinted around the corner from which she came, her left hand drawing another two packed shells from her bandoleer. In her brief moment of cover she loaded both barrels of the coach gun, closing the breeches with a practiced hand. Her respite was short, no later than an instant after she’d finished, the flying polyp’s tendrils were flashing for her. She shifted low beneath the tendril’s strike a moment before it swept through the space her head was. Ignoring the shower of small chunks of stone and grit it cleaved from the stone corner of the aisle wall. With another pulse red of mana within, she ignored the dust, shadows, the disorienting quick twisting of the flying beast. Her primal focus, uninterrupted by the polyp’s continuous floating dodge, was true once more as she unloaded both barrels into the creature. As soon as she felt and absorbed the recoil, she threw herself into a roll beneath the flying tumor, doubling back to the other side trying her best to use each side of the aisle’s now shredded corner to disorient and limit the more maneuverable beast.

Not missing a beat, seamlessly springing out of the roll into a sprint, running down the aisle further into the temple with the madly piping beast behind her, the ghoul drew another two shells from her bandoleer. Now deep into the main room of the temple, she could see the bright open entrance across the room, illuminating a solid stone altar in the center of the room. Senses alert, she felt the polyp appear in front of her before it faded into visibility. Selectively intangible when not attacking, the flying tainted creature had cut her off by phasing through the stone aisle cutting off her movement further inside. Mere feet from her it thrust a tendril at her, the cancerous rope moving at perilous speed. Twisting to the side, avoiding the point blank thrust by reflex, the ghoul leaped backwards into the corridor.

Moving with its characteristic speed and hemming her into the narrow confines, the beast’s inhuman piping and deadly tendrils followed. Hitting the wall near the temple entrance,  Wichahpi shoved herself around the worn corner again just as a tendril tore a chunk from the wall. Two shells clutched in one hand, and the shortened coach gun in the other, she’d yet to have a spare moment to reload once more. The beast wasn’t inclined to give her one, it turned the corner immediately. The piping beast came at her, moving low and lashing at her legs in an unexpected tactic. The ghoul managed to leap onto wall and avoid the low blow.  Angry at being forced back to the entrance wall, the Wichahpi growled, kicking off of the wall and cracking it with her species’ enviable strength. The reckless maneuver helped her land far enough away that she could finally load her gun without being struck. She did so quickly, expecting for the beast to be on her immediately.

What she sensed was even worse. The beast was floating in the same position, it’s vile flesh growing, dying, and spawning tendrils every instant. Portions of it faded in and out of visibility, but none of this is what disturbed her. The sight that would grind at the sanity of humans was merely loathsome to mamono. No, it was the piping that sent a chill up Whicahpi’s spine. The alien discordant sounds changed timber and pitch in preparation. Despising the thought of fleeing outside via the entrance, now yearning for the thing’s end more than ever, the Ghoul made her choice. She ran as fast as she could deeper into the temple, towards the central altar. Sparse seconds after she’d leaped over it, placing it between her and the flying polyp, it started.

The obscene whistles vibrated painfully through the room and the air was filled with the roar and howl of wind. Crouching behind the altar, Whichapi clutched her gun tightly as she ground the bone in her mouth to shards. The normally comforting crunching sounds were dulled by the loud combination of the roaring wind and monstrous piping. The agitated Ghoul quickly pulled another bone from one of her uniform’s pockets and crammed it anxiously in her mouth. The sensation of the bone sliding easily into her throat as her mouth, tongue, and throat instinctively caressed and fondled it was enough to calm her nerves once more. The young Ghoul took stock of situation as the beast’s summoned tunnel of wind howled, breaking on the altar she cowered behind, none of it able to touch her. She was all too aware that the roaring tunnel of wind pouring from the beast would be flaying her apart were it not for the altar shielding her. Not knowing the specifics of why didn’t make the blast any less terrifying. Simply knowing that to stand within the blast would literally tear and strip the flesh from her bones while making the parts not facing the wind dry and burn like a dying wanderer in the desert was enough.

Her mouth and gullet futilely did their best to milk a sense of satisfaction from the inert bone as she held her loaded gun in her red-stained hands. It is still too strong to kill the normal way, thought Whichapi to herself, I must use the human tools for as long as I can. A flying polyp could bear the wounds of more than a dozen Ghoul’s deaths before finally succumbing. Goddess only knew how many humans that would be, few of them were fast enough to dodge tendrils which phased through armor and ate flesh with every strike. The muscles in the ring of her throat churned around the bone in agitation, pulling and pushing it strongly enough that it slid back and forth across her lips.

The fingers of her hands, holding the gun like the lifeline that it was, caressed it in the Chief Goddess’s sign of The Scintillating Eye, as her father had taught her. There was no magic to the gesture, but some part of her felt better, as if he were still alive and the desert hadn’t taken him. The Chief Goddess’s illusion magic, which she’d learned while raised in the Chief’s Cult as father wanted, was of little use with the abominations despite its potency. She stifled the urge to use it to see him again, even as an image. Every bit of her mana and skill would be needed to slay this beast.

The howling death-wind ceased, and so did her thoughts. The beast could move about now that it had ceased blowing its evil. Straining her acute senses, for the possibly invisible beast, she was taut and tense. Too wary to even loosen her hold on her gun, her elbow prodded the large forearm length knife sheathed at her belt to a better angle. The weight of her father’s knife at her belt was reassuring as she crouched behind the altar, her senses probing for the wrongness of the beast. She could feel it getting closer rushing at her. Her left, she thought, turning instinctively just as it sped past the altar appearing on her side of it. The small vicious beast flew at her, spinning and floating with tendrils poised to thrust and tear. Its erratic jittery motion making it nearly impossible to acquire in her sights, Whicahpi forced herself to track it. The pulsing red  primal mana pouring from her heart flooded her, pushing her to try harder than should be possible.

She unloaded both barrels into it during its erratic and spinning rush. Her aim was true, and it bore the the full brunt of the shot. The continuous piping shifting to signal its injury didn’t draw a smile from Whicahpi as she absorbed the recoil. The weight of mantically forcing herself to do the near impossible fell on her, burning through her mana. She felt the throb of primal lust and hunger that signaled that she’d half or less of her mana reserve remaining. Desperately the Ghoul did her best to ignore it, using willpower alone, for only human mana or time could quell the primal desire. She couldn’t allow herself to slip into the bestial mamono fugue, with its attendant priorities. To do so could be death, especially while the creature was barely wounded.

A/N: Currently, Prvt Whicahpi al-Malek 12-0 = 12hp; Flying Polyp 138-46 = 92hp

Whicahpi smoothly, quickly drew her knife with her free hand and holstered her gun, the altar at her back. In an unexpected tactic, the beast didn’t close with her. Instead it drew back. The shrieking whistles that could wear down a human mind were shifting in structure and rhythm. For a moment she regretted holstering her gun. The moment was short-lived as the space around her distorted and nearly a dozen tendrils sprung up from the floor about her. She was surrounded by them, caged with the altar at her back. Another pang of hunger and lust shot through her, and she had a brief moment to once again fight off the urge to descend into bestial instinct. She slashed angrily at the rightmost of the tendrils surrounding her in frustration and hunger. The tendril nimbly coiled avoiding her blade entirely. Then the five closest tendrils attacked all at once.

She fell fluidly into the motions of twisting and parrying with the heavy bladed flat of her knife, her reflexes barely kept her unscathed during the barrage of thrusting, slashing and whipping tendrils that could steal life with a touch. Forcing the distractions of hunger-lust, and territorial anger at the beast for merely existing aside; she focused. Turning a parry with her blade into a mana fueled strike, she cleaved through the dexterous rightmost tendril. The vicious smile that was a predator’s due for such a pretty blow didn’t blossom on her attractive copper toned face. Despite having just slain a portion of the beast and clearing the way for her escape, her face was set in a pained grimace. The mana-fueled focus of the last strike had cost her. She felt the agony of its demand as it drew not just upon all of her remaining mana, but the life of her flesh to fulfill the energetic need required. Thought the sharp pain in her flesh marred her instinctive pleasure in the beast’s injury, her ability to move was retained. Whicahpi forced herself through the opening, avoiding tendrils. Only pausing to rest as she leaned on the opposite  side of the altar, which was now separating her from the cancerous ropes of flesh and keeping her beyond their reach.

The beast had learned to keep its distance. It was now in the corner of the room covering the strip of temple between her and the door to the outside. The tired Ghoul huffed angrily. Did the foolish beast think she wanted less than its death? Even drained of mana and wounded from having spent life on her last strike, Whicahpi would take no less than that. Smelling the reek of its corruption in her nostrils was insult enough that no coin but it’s death would satisfy her. Restraining the urge to simply run to it and fight it tooth and claw, thoughts be damned, was a Goddess-send though she was slightly too disturbed to appreciate it.

The abnormal piping of the beast, normally enough to make her hackles rise in anger, shifted again in a familiar unappealing cadence. A streak of fear, far more powerful than any she’d felt during the entire battle, shot through her. Though she did not know the piping tongue used by the flying polyps, she recognized the pattern of shrieking whistles. It was calling another death-wind. Now in the middle of the room Whicahpi would be an easy shot for the beast’s large tunnel of wind. She could not close with the beast in time to disrupt the summoning, even with the short ranged coach gun. The aisles were too far away to reach in time, the other side of the altar was filled with tendrils that would make short work of her. Without cover, the death-wind would flense and tear the flesh from anything in its path. With perfect exquisitely agonizing timing, another pulse of primal lust-hunger tore at her soul. Resisting the urge to simply let go into the unthinking bestial state where everything was so much simpler was its own special form of agony. It was so tempting that it was a physical ache. Her body and soul clenched on the edge of despair, the large knife in her hand was clenched so painfully tight that the bloody red hued skin of her arm was pale with tension.

In that endless moment spent suspended, the handle of that knife bit into her hand. Her human father, who would never return from the desert, skilled with metal-work but not blades had made the handle. He’d taught her to cut and dress her food with it rather than simply tearing it from the game in bloody chunks. Like a human, but without having to use fire to eat. With a burbling gulp of loss Whicahpi mastered the temptation, shrugging it off as she kneeled next to the altar. Her free hand drew a heavy white stone octahedron from one of her pockets. The Order mana stone was carved with arcane symbols, enchanted to hold human mana. She spat out the bone in her mouth and thrust her mouth on the handle of the knife, smoothly and easily swallowing its quarter forearm length. She pulsed her mastered hunger-lust at the stone. It unlocked instantly, and she felt the spurt of immaterial human mana flowing into her. Spasms of pleasure took her as the human essence restored her flesh and filled her reserve of mana. She shuddered with small orgasms as her throat sinuously spasmed and pulled at the roughly patterned metal-work lodged within her.  The rough feeling of it made her heart stutter with enough emotion to make both of her mouths drool with happiness. The pulsing spasm of pleasure echoed from her heart down into her lower mouth. The pulse flowed into it,  making her lower mouth tense in pleasure before spasming and spitting its hot citrus scented juices all over her thighs and the khaki pants of her uniform.

Now with possibly enough mana to survive the death-wind, the fumbling Ghoul dropped the empty Order mana stone. With her right hand, she brutally yanked the knife handle from the needy frenzied spasming of her still sucking throat and mouth. She had just covered as much of her face and right side, putting her left between her and the distant piping polyp, when its hellish wind struck her.

The howling wind shredded what it touched directly and burned and dried what it struck indirectly. She couldn’t even hear her own scream of agony as it flayed her left side, tearing chunks of flesh as easily as she tore game. Her right side braced and covered from the wind’s direct effect was still a mass of pain. She felt her right side burn and crack from the wind’s second indirect death. She held it in place despite the continuous pain, desperate to keep her knife arm and the knife it held intact. After an eternity of suffering, she noticed that the wind stopped. She somehow managed to stand for a moment, before her left side gave out and she collapsed on the stone block altar. Propping herself up with it into a position similar to standing. She couldn’t see out of her left eye and her vision was blurred despite tightly closing them both during the wind. She tasted blood and could feel air where it should not be besides the endless hell of pain riddling her wrecked flesh.

Wichahpi had a plan before the wind struck, but she couldn’t remember. Even stronger than her suffering, she could feel her primal hate and anger for the polyp. The mana she had consumed earlier, now still within, throbbed and pulsed with the feelings. There was a blurred moment of impossible clarity where she recalled that she could restore her flesh with it. Then the thought became hazy and uninteresting. Now growing numb and disinterested in anything but the instinctual spite within, she shakily leveled her father’s intact knife at the beast’s unfocused shape. It had done this to her, given her this pain and suffering. She would return it to the beast and steal its life for her own use in the old way. The way of all mamono when it came to the Enemy and its spawn roared angrily in her heart. Mamono and the bestial abomination-spawn shared no real common language, but the shared fate of instinctually fighting and destroying each across centuries had exposed weaknesses and flaws on either side. The Goddesses had shielded humans from the abominations. Mamono however, had been left to their own devices. A truly adaptable species, mamono had instinctively changed in response to the Enemy. All were immune to the madness that the beasts provoked on sight in most untrained humans. They’d changed in many ways guided by these instinctual and heritable traits derived from continuous conflict. They’d evolved to rip and tear the corrupted mana from the abominations and to process the purloined rotten fruit of Enemy mana.

Wichahpi wanted it in arms reach, to rend and tear it so badly, to make it hurt in the primal way echoing in her blood. A way that knew nothing of man-things or mercy. The throbbing call to show it her pain and rip the life from it echoed through her. Just as she could not stand it, it could not stand her. There were degrees of intolerance however. Her thoughts vague and unclear, except at the deepest primal levels, the Ghoul forced her ruined throat to shape the sounds that mamono had learned to goad the Enemy. She snarled it out of her raw torn, bloody, and burned mouth to call it to fight tooth and nail. The air twisted and curled about the snarl though she couldn’t see it. The polyp’s blurry shape rushed at her with implacable speed. All the while, a cold disinterested part of her gripped her father’s knife unrelentingly. She throbbed with the consumed mana, caging it with an iron focus.

As the beast closed with her, she thrust at it, putting the force of her waiting mana reserve into guiding the blow. As her mana pulsed and burned to nearly nothing, she struck perfectly, piercing the polyp upon the blade. The force of the blow knocked them down. With desperate strength she pinned the blade to the temple floor. Now the beast was at her mercy, transfixed on the blade. So Wichahpi showed it the only sort either of them could have for the other. She showed it her pain and hunger, unleashing it in a savage pulse down the length of the blade, battering the beast with her innate mamono magic, and tearing the tainted mana from it into herself.

To mamono, human mana was like ambrosia and most other types were neutral or pleasant. However, every fiber of her being recognized that the Enemy mana was revolting. It induced pain, hate, and ever growing hunger no matter how much was consumed. Even as her body broke down its taint, restored her body to healthy wholeness, and filled her mana pool to capacity – she could feel the aftertaste of its hate for everything, could feel her pain, anguish and hunger growing no matter how much she tore away. Every second she spent with the stench, sight and sound of it near, every moment her body ground its tainted mana into useful mana made her pain, disgust, and anger grow.

The instinctive magic mamono had gained was a very limited weapon against the Enemy. The amount of tainted mantic life force that the Ghoul could rip away was limited to the amount of injury/lack of mana effecting her. Though not nearly as powerful as the spells of the abominations, this was enough to aid in survival, since mamono could heal and recharge from the loss. Unfortunately, like the feeling of mamono mana-hunger, the strain of processing the tainted mana prodded mamono directly in the savage hind-brain. And it was this Whicahpi, a frenzied vicious predator set on the beast’s destruction, that responded as she sunk into reflexive amity. So the intact coach gun holstered at her right side didn’t even occur to the Ghoul. Instead she lashed out punching and tearing at the beast with strength that could tear limbs and break bone. All the while the pinned polyp shot forth tendrils, slashing and whipping the Ghoul. Each contact with the cancerous creature burned and desiccated her flesh, but Whicahpi was long past caring. She didn’t even bother to block as the mass of angry tendrils tore and ripped at her. Whenever her strength flagged she followed her instincts, seizing its disgusting sloughing and burning flesh and blasting the beast with her pain and emptiness. Tearing away at the tainted mana that animated it, healing her flesh at the cost of waves of renewed agony and mind submerging hunger that echoed painfully inside her. After an uncountable time, where there was once an abomination there was now ash and a knife. Kneeling before it with her fist raised, Whicahpi probed the temple with her keen senses. Her insides twisting with a wracking painful hunger, no matter her fully healed flesh or that she was suffused and full of processed mana, she let out a keening moan at the realization that nothing else was in the temple. No abomination-spawn, humans, nor even animals lurked within. She nearly sobbed as her insides spasmed in a fresh burst of hollow anguish, for misery without distraction is the worst kind of all.

But time is the balm for all wounds, and eventually reason returned to her. She spent a moment recalling the blurry but functional memories of her hunger-fugue. She spread out her senses, confirming once more that she was alone in the temple. She took stock of herself, laying curled upon the temple floor. Predictably, the handle of the knife was halfway down her throat. Her red-stained hands were covered in a darker hue of crimson than her actual Ghoul-markings. They were sticky with coagulated blood and cuts from her fugue-self’s careless fellatio of the knife’s handle. Even now she was gripping the blade carelessly. Her throat and mouth kneaded the handle lovingly as she drew it out of her throat with barely a sound. She still felt the painful ache of unnatural hunger, but forced herself to focus on cleaning the knife with the tattered and shredded remains of her uniform. As an afterthought, she healed her minor wounds wiping her hands clean. Muzzily rising to her feet, Whicahpi clumsily tore off the remains of her light khaki uniform making a makeshift sack. Walking around the confines of the temple collecting her scattered equipment, soon all of it was collected and accounted for.

The red haired Ghoul stepped nude into the sunlight, blinking at the auditorium of the Pirapasa Theater. After reclaiming it against the Enemy of man and mamono, standing nude on the theater's center stage as she vaguely recalled ancient actors doing, she could feel the moment calling for some response from her. Thinking that words in her heart, ones of the gnawing hunger of her battle or the ache of her father’s absence, might not be as fitting as she felt, she instead remained silent. Moving into the ritual posture of obeisance to the Chief Goddess with a sincerity and gracefulness that belied her ragged makeshift sack, the tall copper-skinned Ghoul finished with a bow. Whicahpi strode off stage, moving towards where she had left her pack before entering the temple.

Stopping by the shaded pillar where her pack was laying, she sat the sack down and drew a new uniform from the pack. The brown loose uniform was thin, but the Order’ s magic had made it more durable than it looked. Putting it on adding and adjusting her equipment helped her suppress the aching contradictory hunger of her full stomach. Now fully outfitted, she drew a vial of milky substance from the pack. The mind gnawing hunger would continue until either time or human mana quelled it. The Order’s human mana charged stones were for engagements, they only unlocked under the pulse of true mana hunger, not the nagging ache the abominations triggered. And they would only discharge their entire load of mana, no more, no less. The purified and reconstituted human mana in the vial allowed for more precise dosing. Despite its bland unappealing taste, Whicahpi knew from experience that it far surpassed the agonizing taste of the Enemy’s tainted mana.

Still it would be a waste to use it to quell the pangs of hunger when her mana reserve was nearly entirely full, thought the Ghoul. Sitting on her pack in the shadow of the pillar, she drew upon the Chief Goddess’s teachings and used her mana to conjure an image before her. She would have to change out her empty mana stone for the one sitting hidden in the pillar, charging in a covert mana cage. There was more of the resurrected and scattered city of Pirapasa for her to reclaim and patrol over the coming days. The Goddesses had seized it from the mouth of the Enemy and there was much work to be done.
But that was for later, she had time yet. And so Whicahpi watched the moving image of man whose eyes and hair she’d inherited while she drank enough of the bland liquid to quell her hunger and restore her mana fully. Her own purple eyes were wet and shining as she watched the memory of him teaching her to field dress a deer. This time, she managed to watch until he indulgently gave her past self the first slice of the still warm liver, before she couldn’t hold her tears in any longer.

Fin.