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MacThorstenson

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  1. MacThorstenson

    Marcus Ashborn

    By MacThorstenson,

    Marcus sighed as the student fell asleep on the other side of his desk. It was not a pleasant activity, interplanar travel, but this was the most efficient way he had found. Standing up, he slid a bookshelf aside revealing what used to be an unfinished storage space, similar to an attic. Now there was a large smooth slate in the middle, and three sleeping people laid on the side of the room. Then deliberately walking around his desk, he picked up the student and carried her through the doorway laying her softly on the slate. Then he pulled some chalk from his pocket and begun drawing around her. First there were two perfect concentric circles, then in each of the cardinal directions a glyph was drawn, and finally with practiced precision he began inscribing abyssal spells on the inner ring of the circle. When he was done, there was a spell circle capable of sending a soul to hell. To the completely uninitiated, it was about as interesting as a crappy mandala. 
     
    To those who knew the basics of magic, it was a masterpiece. Each glyph and word was placed with exacting precision, and while most wouldn't know what they said, they would know the skill required to do it freehand. 
    To those who knew the abyssal tongue however, and still had some humanity, this was an abomination. It was a tool perfectly crafted to kill someone, and remove all the usable bits of their soul. It wasn't a weapon like a sword or a knife, but was instead a butchers shop, honed over years and years of study to give the demons exactly what they wanted as efficiently and quickly as possible. 
    With a somber face, Marcus stood up off the ground and withdrew his wand. He walked around it once, ensuring everything was in its place before bending over, touching the circle with it and muttering the activation phrase. As he withdrew his wand, magma seemed to flow along the chalk lines, illuminating the room with a reddish glow. Faintly, screams of terror could be heard in the distance as the students body jerked twice and she exhaled for the last time. And then it was dark again, the circle having been consumed in the activation of the spell. 
    For the next person the process was much the same. He picked them up, lay them in the slate, drew the circle. To the careful observer the glyphs would have been different, as well as the words written, but the intention was much the same. Quickly and efficiently separate the soul from the body and send it off somewhere. This time however, Marcus sat cross-legged next to the circle. One hand on one of the glyphs, the other on his wand. He tapped the circle again, but instead of glowing the red light of hellfire, it briefly shone with a cold white light before disappearing. Marcus' eyes glowed briefly as he absorbed the soul into himself before transferring it to a ring for later storage. 

    The final victim was a middle aged delivery man. No family, minimal connections like the other two, Marcus had picked an adult for the extra power in their soul. The more they grew, the more power available. And he would need every ounce of power to travel to this plane. 
    He quickly repeated the process, except instead of storing the soul in a ring he braced himself and absorbed it. Slowly he began stripping away each layer of identity from the soul. He felt every fear the man had, every moment of boredom and sadness and whatever else he experienced course through his body.
    Usually this was why he chose children. There was less of what made them them! Every aspect of their personality was malleable and changing and so digesting their soul was like eating pudding as opposed to trying to swallow a marble. 
    Thankfully, this marble was bland. He had chosen well. Their life was relatively meaningless and incredibly dull, and so Marcus remained standing as he used the soul to fuel his travel.
    Slowly beneath his clothes his veins began to glow like they were filled with magma and a tattoo on his forearm shifted and twisted till it settled on a glyph loosely resembling stars and a void. Then, a door opened up behind him, revealing an inky blackness with a couple silvery specs of light. Stepping backward, he fell into it. Ready to journey again.
  2. MacThorstenson

    Mac's dream

    By MacThorstenson,

    Mac dreamt of Darkness.
    He dreamt of the darkness of night. He dreamt of pinpricks of light, hanging far above tall forests of dangling vines. He dreamt of moonlit paths winding through the trees and underbrush, and he was happy. 
    But like all things in his world, dreams do not last. Their decay is quick in the face of a ringing clock. As the tension rose in his shoulders, and the dream fled to memory, he arose to a complete darkness. This darkness lacked the clarity of night, but instead brought the suffocation of mind and body with it. It was a darkness of a lightless room in a lightless box in a dark alley, hanging beneath the void. 
    He rose silently, deftly dodging the shattered glass and broken doorframe of his house. For he didn't need light to see where they were, and he stepped into the light of the alleys, leading to a third and final darkness. 
    This darkness weighed on his soul, its oppressive presence always remembered by the adage every denizen learns, Don't look up. No matter how much light one brought in, this darkness never fled, it never retreated, and it never abated. 
  3. MacThorstenson
    The Clocktower was admittedly a nice find. Not many people know about it simply because they fear missing it! Ives was safe from devious scientists trying to find him. 
    And HR. Cant forget HR. Some how those insane folk are still kicking around being annoying and stupid and weird and stupid-  Clocktower yes. His clocktower. 
    He made it way to the base of it, his padded moccasins barely making a sound against the cobblestones of the plaza he found himself in. The splintered wood of the door didn't provide much protection, if any except for the disguise bit. The best security was disguise and all that. 
    If his lab looked properly abandoned on the ground, and not many people were willing to risk glancing into the void just to find a feature on the skyline, well, he thought himself pretty protected. Pretty protected, pretty properly protected directed. Directed bibected. bibected pipetted prevented privated. Good words. They sounded similar, perhaps there was a connection? I should look at that. He paused, wait, no I need to see if the words are real first. Can't make that mistake again. Where was his dictio- ah yes upstairs, in his clocktower. The one he was at the base of. Gotta get up there, then I can check my words, then I can find my yarn and another cork board and start looking at connections between them.
    At Connections Between them? them could be dem, then it was the alphabet! Ives chuckled a bit, alphabet, alphabet alphabet.
    Shuffling over to his lift thingy, he pulled the lever and watched as the counterweights fell from above, lifting the rickety wooden platform high into the top of the clocktower. Yes his clocktower. Even when people found it, they didn't like it. Something about the scattered surgical tables with dissected abominations rubbed them the wrong way. Yes he could see that (Obviously he could see that). They couldn't see why he had them there so they thought them pointless, He understood that at least. If they didn't need to be there then they shouldn't be there. People lacked vision of course. Well, most of them did. And honestly Ives didn't blame them! He was good like that. Cant blame people for things they don't know. Especially if they only have a couple eyes. He made his way over to the back wall of his clocktower where his dictionary sat in a bookshelf. Gotta find his words. Cant forget the words. They were good words, infact, he realized, most of them are real! Bibected isn't which was rather unfortunate. That could have been the clue to everything, but it wasn't because it was fake. Gotta watch out for the fake words after all, they are annoying and stupid and stupid and a-- hmm this could be an issue. Pipetted works in the past tense, but privated doesn't really work, yet he was sure that he had seen something about private being a verb recently, and if you could do it then you could have did it. which meant it should be a word yet it wasn't. Hmm. Lets table this for now, I need to work on other things. besides, when one word is fake and another not officially recognized by Webster's Third New International Dictionary, I mean, he snorted, its obviously not prophetic. 
  4. MacThorstenson

    Mac 3

    By MacThorstenson,

    Mac walked his way through several alleys, his shredded soul giving him constant sight into the alleys and their horrors. Admittedly, being able to see all the alleys was nice when actively alley traveling, it was just that being able to turn it off was also very nice as well. Thats why he needed the monocle. While generally they helped restore stability, mental stability spikes were ineffective once a soul was too damaged. He had figured out however, that a single spike, hooked up to a monocle or set of glasses, at least stopped the hallucinations when he looked through them. Same thing with his aluminum lined bowler hats, they were all to enable him to focus on the real world when he couldn't indulge in the alleys.
    However, he had lost both of them, and so he needed to head to the place where they were made, his old hideaway. 
    It had been stashed in an old gothic alley, buried under a street. The only way to enter was to stand in one specific spot, and look for an alley thats entrance was smaller then an axi. Once found, the alleymancer would need to shrink themselves down, and follow the path carefully to the end, which placed them in a repurposed jewelry box. This atom sized path was the only entrance, as well as the only exit. Which was also the reason that this sorry attempt at a hideaway lay abandoned.
    The place lay in ruins. Instead of a pristine front yard covered with beautiful murals of nature, it was more reminiscent of a cheap movie set. Plywood walls were spray painted with light blue, and the flood with a grass-ish green. In the corner, there was a slag heap, consisting of what appeared to be picture frames or paintings, and mirrors, all crudely melted together in a heap. The walls were scorched where a fire had raged years before. 
    The front façade of the house was much the same. Each window was smashed and emptied, the glass littering the wooden "lawn". Any shards big enough to see a reflection in were also crushed to bits.
    Notably, the inside of the house was missing each and every reflective surface. Every metal door handle and brass finish was scratched, bent, or torn out so that there was no way to see any reflection. The mahogany walls were conspicuously lacking any décor, and their glossy finish was again scrubbed and scratched away. What little remained of the furniture looked like it had been through a hurricane. Tables were broken in too. Sofa's barricaded doors, or were in pieces across the room. The only sign of life was the basement door, which constant rattled, and a punching bag, that sat conspicuously in the living room as if it were the only thing that had been moved since all this destruction happened.
    Mac carefully made his way up to his bedroom. Like the rest of the house, it was in disarray. However, unlike the rest of the house, there was one nice spot. on the wall, there was a cabinet, in the cabinet a covered mirror. The only place for a reflection to be seen in the entire house. Beneath the cabinet, there was a chest containing bowler hats and monocles, as well as a small box of necessities, lint rollers, a razor, etc. 
    Carefully, he opened the box and the cabinet, setting up all the items for personal hygiene needed, then he placed a revolver, easily within arms reach. Ready to shoot the mirror should anything unwanted come out. Then with a final swoop, he lowered the cover and began to prepare to return to the alleys.
  5. MacThorstenson

    Mac 2

    By MacThorstenson,

    His hands clenched, Mac eventually forced out the words in a bare whisper "What do you mean he forged the planet?"
    The denizen wanted more then anything to slink away into the alleys, except that the alleys were in chaos right now. They were swirling around them faster then wind in a tornado. He knew Mac wouldn't take the news well, but in he hadn't seen Mac this visibly angry in several decades. No one had. "Yessir, the whole p- planet sir." The words came out in a stuttering flood, maybe if he just told Mac one bit of information that he liked he would end up being spared when the man snapped. "Th-thats why it seemed so nice and uh er we seemed so weak. There is good news [BIG REDACTED SECTION HERE FOR POTENTIAL SPOILERS]
    A little, miniscule, appeared in the back of Mac's mind. [REDACTED] He zoned in on that thought, letting it grow and consume him, slowly pushing the anger away. He forced a small smile onto his face as he loosened his hands and consciously slowed the spinning of the alleys. Without the red haze consuming his every thought, he regained control of his body, and the alleys. "No dead friend, I wont kill you." With a small, however fake chuckle, he added, "Haven't shot a messenger in 20 years, I'm not about to start now." He turned to the denizen, "Thank you for letting me know, though I do suppose, given this information, the city, and the DA will need a little check up so to speak. And who better to preform one then the Gentleman Hemalurgist himself. You are dismissed, thank you."
    Without a second word, the denizen melted back into the alleys. As he melted away into the infinities of the Dark Alleys, he noticed that for a brief moment, all the illusionary monsters and beasts seemed to be gone, and as he had that very thought, they slowly started to melt back in, as if they had been scared away, and were gaining the confidence to return.
    And with the beasties there would be significant annoyance. It seemed like it might be time to get his old bowler hat and monocle back.
  6. MacThorstenson

    Mac

    By MacThorstenson,

    Mac sat carefully behind the threshold of the alley. To his right lay an open street, to his left the alleys. Usually he wouldn't be so cautious about physically staying in the alleys, but on a day like today, in a place like this, he wasn't taking any risks. He was meeting a spy, one from his private network, whom he had sent back to check on The City. Mac more or less trusted the man, but one never threw caution to the wind when dealing with the DA.
    He glanced to the right, where he had sprinkled some black sand on the sidewalk. No one there was leaking any investiture. Then he braced himself and reached out into the alleys,  immediately being assailed by sounds and images extending from all the alleys that had been, were, and could be connected to this one. He grit his teeth, wished that he had his monocle and or hat with him, and focused on looking for moving alleys with people in them.
    Aha, there one is. He could see, in his minds eye, one fateful denizen, slowly and carefully sliding the alleys into place in order to make their way to the meeting point. Well, Nothing to do but wait then.
  7. MacThorstenson

    Why the DA?

    By MacThorstenson,

    He came to the AV because of his criminal past, and a strong desire to get away from the IRS. Rumor said that this was the biggest and best tax haven in the world. When he arrived, it made sense. The only city on the planet was in ruins, their infrastructure destroyed, and while everyone was reeling in a moment of momentary peace, the only group that was even slightly able to pay his wages was the DA.  He got in contact with them by nearly ingesting a cookie, but then convincing one of them to let him into the accounting building. While cutthroat, it didn't bring the other more disturbing parts of the alleys into his face. He worked his way up the ranks, not stirring too much. He kept the books clean, and would infiltrate places for them when they needed to draw in funds from outside the alley verse for whatever reason. Whether it was for the slave trade, acquiring blood, or copious amounts of wheat sugar and chocolate, they would occasionally need funds. His job was to ensure that they had apparently legal amounts of money available to them, and to ensure that no one would be able to trace the purchase of goods to a interdimensional illuminati. 
    Throughout all of this, he remained isolated from the more typical DA members, and viewed the company as a resource to use rather then be used by. Now however, he was being forced into more interactions with typical DA members, and was slowly realizing that he was out of his depth.
  8. MacThorstenson
    again, a rough draft.
     
    The DA had many places where one could turn for knowledge. The Department of Records was likely the safest of those, if the most mundane. It was there that Ronald started his search. 
    The long halls of the DADR were empty, with weak lights every couple of meters that flickered unevenly. It was almost as if they were trying to look like they were in a horror movie. He shuddered. To be fair, living here was like a real life horror movie. You had to eat or be eaten, and hope what you ate didn't burst out predator style. Though of course, some were lucky. Very, very lucky. His mind drifted to his conversation with Lita. Imagine on one of your first days in the alleycity running into the 3-4 most powerful person there, and having them take you under their wing. Kids born onto a silver platter didn't have it that lucky. No one would dare touch you if your mentor had been known to destroy planets for fun. Even if he never really cared about you, anyone who messed with you would be seen as stepping on his turf, and he wouldn't have taken that sitting down. Or he might've. The powers he wielded were unlike any other, his mastery of the alleys so strong, yet incredibly delicate as well. He could pull planets in on a whim, yet explicitly leave every mosquito floating in space. He was one heck of an insurance policy. He shook his head, no sense in being jealous. Reading the door label he turned into the musty record room. If the eldritch record keeper was to be believed, in here was the book he was looking for regarding investiture. Of course that didn't mean much, there were tens of thousands of books in this room alone.
    Now came the moment of truth. The record keeper had told him to trust in fortune, to close his eyes and tap this medallion. Either this would work and he would find himself with what he needed, or he would be devoured by some child of the alleys. He took a deep breath, and tied his tie around his eyes as a makeshift blindfold. Fortune improves your chances, and for it to do that, there needs to be a chance. Ronald was many things, but he was not good at leaving things up to the Gods of Luck and Chance. That said, their whims would need to bless his path today. To ensure that he didn't mess things up, he had decided to blindfold himself.
    Slowly, he walked forward and begun tapping the fortune.
    It was an odd experience to tap fortune for the first time. He already had an understanding of what it would do, but that was different then feeling it work. He suddenly felt emboldened, as if the mere possession of this power could grant him his desires. Perhaps, he thought to himself, it could. Hellbent had been a fortune compounder after all, and until he died things always seemed to go his way. He made a left, then a right, he walked for a bit, praying to whatever was out there that he wouldn't come across some hideous beast or worse, a child. Yet as he followed his path through the aisles of the department of records, he found himself drawing more and more fortune. It felt good. It felt emboldening. 
    The phrase fortune favors the bold came to his mind. Perhaps however, fortune didn't favor the bold but instead made the bold. He grinned, speeding down the path. He couldn't even see where a junction was, and yet he would randomly turn and not run headfirst in to a bookshelf. Truly this was a powerful tool indeed. He continued like this for several minutes. At times he thought that he was turning around and running circles, yet each time this doubting voice returned his confidence rose to match it along with the whispers of the ancient saying fortune favors the bold, until it stopped. 
    Immediately his newfound confidence fled. and he stopped. Crem. Had he run out? How was he supposed to get out? Why had he drawn so much! He pulled his tie off his head cautiously and immediately put his back against a book shelf. then he took several deep breaths. Calm down. You didn't have fortune before, and you don't need it now. Yes it was nice, but the shock of it leaving can't incapacitate you. remember where you are. He opened his eyes, and looked around himself. He was in an aisle between two bookshelves. The only sound in the room was the some of the lights flickering nearby. Immediately he noticed that this part of the room was much much darker then the entrance. Maybe cam should check this out he thought with a wry grin. 
    Slowly he began checking the books around him. Most of their titles were illegible. Likely scientific journals from years gone by. HE rounded the corner, and gave himself a little chuckle. At the very end of the new aisle he found himself in, there laid a book in a halo of light. This was it, this was what he was looking for. 
  9. MacThorstenson

    The Library.

    By MacThorstenson,

    NOTE: this is a very very rough draft.
     
    The Library. 
    Deemed utterly useless by some, and Voidus' great gift to mankind by others, it was a realization of Jorge Luis Borges's 1941 short story, The Library of Babel. No one knew how it ended up in the alleys. But considering these were the alleys, it likely popped up overnight. The contents were simple if irritating. Every book was 410 standard pages (about 1500 characters), like the original library. However there were 95 possible characters in each book in the Library, as opposed to the 25 characters available in Borges'. Someone wanted to be able to do math and properly cite things in these books apparently, and so they decided that all the characters you could get from a standard keyboard would be useful.
    Obviously most of the volumes in this library were completely useless. Complete gibberish in a physical form. In addition to the useless fluff, however, the library contained the sum of all human knowledge. Everything that could be known about the universe and written down, was inside of its hallowed walls. In an effort to properly gauge the task before himself, Ronald sat down with an envelope and preformed some proper back of the envelope calculations (Of course, my dear reader, Ronald is a fictional character, so I, the glorious narrator of his tale, actually sat down and spent a disturbing amount of time calculating everything out).
    His calculations revealed that there were 615,000 characters in a book (assuming 1500 characters in typewriter font per page), and each space for a character could be filled by 95 characters meaning that there would be 95^615000 books in the library, or 1.04x10^1216300 Books. To otherwise represent the shear quantity of paper in this library, we can take the number of books and multiply it by the volume of a 410 page stack of A4 sheets of paper, which is 0.0012 cubic meters. We get approximately 1.25x10^1216297 cubic meters. Thats roughly 1 followed by over 1 million 0's. Some have correctly pointed out that the observable universe is only 10^80 cubic meters. This would make this bigger then the observable universe by over 1.25x10^1216217 times. Basically, the library is massive. Truly, unbelievably, massive. 
    That was why the librarian, and her helpers, were there. The chief librarian was reportedly an eldritch being that none could behold with their eyes. Ronald wasn't sure how true this was, but he had never been there before, so he hadn't verified it yet. The helpers were apparently there to guide you around the library based off of your questions, but who or what they were, remained elusively out of reach. 
  10. MacThorstenson
    Ronald sat as his desk, pondering his meeting with Lita. He nearly hadn't made it out of there, He shuddered. Even a full 24 hours later the fury in her eyes as she realized that he was standing in her was scared him. Despite his best efforts at talking his way out of there, it barely worked. His gamble had failed. His attempt at pitting the two departments against each other had failed, and his life nearly taken in payment. 
    He had never really been one for power. To him it was a means to an end, and he wouldn't, couldn't, let it be any more. That hunger that possessed Lita was common in the DA. Each scientist and acolyte in these unhallowed Alleys starved for something, whether it was knowledge, or power, or blood, or cookies. They had this primal drive that pushed them to take for takings sake, and while it was so dreadfully common, it did give them strength.
    For hundreds of thousands of years, humans feared the night. Not for supernatural reasons as some would have you believe, but simply because predators lived there. Mere animals, creatures so far beneath us that we farmed them by the thousands now. Yet early on they terrified us, because they had this same hunger. They would push themselves harder and faster then we ever could, simply because they knew that we were food. We merely survived initially because our hunger for life outpaced theirs, but we only started thriving once we learned temperance. When we learned that we could outlast them in a hunt, by chasing them for days or even weeks, we started to thrive. When we learned that by sitting and waiting over a meager field of crops, we could grow our families and establish ourselves far bigger then we ever had by running ourselves to death hunting, we started progressing toward civilization. This ability to temper our passions and control ourselves led us to be the truly remarkable beings that we were today, but Ronald found himself surrounded by humans that gave into this passion, and worse of being, being completely outclassed by them. No matter how he played it, he was weak. And his ability to survive and play the long game did him no good if someone shot him in the back. 
    It was clear, after facing the ire of one of the department heads, that he needed more power. Not for its own sake, but to protect his life. If he was to sit at this high stakes table, working with and around department heads, he would need a bigger get out of jail free card. If they were displeased with him, they could simply kill him with a blink of their eye. He sighed. The one good thing about this situation was that the DA was exactly the place where anyone seeking power should be. But he couldn't just pick up any power. He needed a power that he could control.
    Walking up to his wall of books, he started pulling the ones off that discussed investiture. While he wasn't a researcher, it behooved him to have some resources nearby to reference the various powers he might come across. He started scanning through the tables of context, and slowly he came to the realization that this was going to be much more difficult then simply going to the store and picking out a couch. You see, in order for this new source of power to become useful, it needed three things. The first was that he needed to be in control. The second was that it couldn't change him too dramatically. And the third was that it needed to be strong enough to give him enough time to slip away from department heads.
    Very, very few things fit that bill.
    The metallic arts seemed to fit most things right off the bat. A fullborn certainly had enough power to take on the Department heads, and hemalurgy was readily available. But he couldn't use hemalurgy under any circumstance. The insanity brought on by an entropic god whispering in your ear would change him too much for it to be considered a victory, and to become a full born he would need a lot of spikes. If he could find lerasium, he could be a mistborn, but that still left 16 spikes for feruchemy. He knew his limits, there was no way in heck he would be able to survive that.
    Awakening was very controllable, and certainly didn't change himself all that much, but the power it granted likely wouldn't be enough for face off the department heads. He would also need to surround himself with miles of fabric to even have a chance at getting it to work. While potentially strong enough to face off against a department head, there wasn't anything in his book that would show how a non Nalthian could awaken. It did have the  benefit of not requiring Hemalurgy however. Awakening was on the table.
    Selish magics on the other hand seemed very much out of his reach. He wasn't from Sel, and as such didn't have any of the connection necessary to obtain these powers naturally. Hemalurgy or medallions would work, but Hemalurgy was out of the picture, and while medallions could potentially be used to obtain the power he would need further research to figure out if they were viable in the long term. More importantly, while being an Elantrian would certainly give them enough power to fight against the department heads, his reliance on the Cognitive realm would certainly pose an issue. At the push of a button they could simply cut of the Dor pipeline to the alleyverse and he would be done for. No Selish magics were too vulnerable.
    He worked his way down the list. Yolish magics were to weak, sand mastery was too environmentally dependent. Epic powers were unobtainable without hemalurgy, and they came with the anger that changed him, so they were out. Cytonics were unobtainable without hemalurgy. Aethers too weak. The chalk stuff from that odd earth place, while interesting, was still too weak. The old magic from Roshar was powerful, but came at a cost. And with a request as powerful as this, the odds that the cost took something important away from him were too great. What he needed was an arbitrage. A known benefit and a known cost that he could exploit for his profit. 
    He was nearing the end of his meager library when he came across surgebinding. This... could work, he thought. He read the descriptions of the honor blades and their power, as well as the knights radiant. Certainly he could escape from a department head with this much power, and he was in control. Ethically it seemed like a fit as well, with temperance and control as its biggest strengths. Yet that strength was also its weakness. The oaths were predetermined, and they constrained him in ways that he didn't appreciate. Perhaps that was negotiable. At the end of the chapter he noticed a footnote, stating that bonding with many cognitive entities was theorized to be possible. Perhaps their oaths were different, or their powers different. Certainly it warranted research.
    He stood up, shook his head as if to clear it, and checked his watch. It had been a full 8 hours of reading, but it seemed like it wasn't over yet. His resources weren't enough, but he knew the DA had a vast library, one that contained all the knowledge in the universe. It wasn't very useful, being that most of it was unintelligible nonsense, but the Library of Babel had what he needed. Hopefully the assistants would be able to help him locate this information.
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