#avon our weird freak friend
Text
WS Chapter 58- The Storm
Previous Chapter
Masterpost
I always considered the wanderers as three different weather events. Ecto was the sandstorm, kicking up sand and changing the landscape. Avon was the storm, the darkness and rain refreshing the land. And Red is the eye of the hurricane, when you can see the sun after going through the worst part of the storm, the peace between chaos. And all three of these storms appear in this chapter- and we get to see Ecto being both a bastard and a badass!
Red belongs to @theguardiansofredland
Ecto belongs to @cooler-cactus-block
Nova was the easiest to find. Not because she was in the midst of the battle, dominating the field. No. She was cowering in the distance, at the back of the army. Sending messages like a wave through the soldiers of flame.
So when the wanderers cut her off, she immediately flees. Red and Avon look at one another. Is that enough? She’s no longer sending information, strategising the nether army. But Ecto knew one thing from her time a captive of the nether- Nova would only reappear, more annoying than ever.
Ecto and Jessie chase after her, Red and Avon trailing behind. Nova turns, eyes wide and terrified at the dragon and desert dweller right on her heels. She screams, and jumps into the nether. The four follow right in after her.
Jessie flits to the air just in time to avoid being crushed. Ecto skids into the netherrack, one leg extended while the other crouched beneath her. Red bounces off Ecto, and Avon just narrowly avoids sliding into a lavafall on her way through. Jessie lets out a roar, standing precariously on the cliff edge, her young voice reverberating off the lava and towards Nova.
Ecto was the fastest, following Jessie as they give chase. But Nova was determined to give them the slip. She leaps down a gravel hill, sliding along the pebbles and leaping across the lava pool beneath her. The wanderers halt, unable to make the jump as the gravel falls. Red clutches his totem of undying tight, a horrible feeling striking through his body. “We can’t keep up with her! We’re gonna lose Nova!”
“She has to be going somewhere, I can fly each of us over one by one.” Avon opens her wing, bloody from the battle but still able to fly.
Ecto shakes her head. “Nah, That’ll take too much time. You just cross with Red, I’ve got an idea.” She gives a whistle, waving at Jessie. The dragonet chirps in response, and swoops low.
“Wait, what are you-” Avon’s blonde hair momentarily blinds her, but Ecto knows exactly what she’s doing. It’s a stupid trick, but it’s the most direct way through this.
Ecto gets a running start, leaping across the gap with one final push of her flat, bound shoes against the clumpy red material. She’s airborne, for half a second still rising. But when she should be plummeting to the lava below, she continues to fly.
Jessie’s wings are open wide, soaring with her teeth and front claws dug into Ecto’s hood. She may only be the size of a fox, but her wings allow for the baby dragon to soar just far enough for the two to both make it across. They tumble to the ground, scratched but alive.
Avon flies Red over, shocked as she stumbles to her friend, her charge. “Is this what you two do when I’m out hunting!?”
“Maybe.” Ecto giggles, standing to her feet and brushing the red dirt off her. “Come on, we can talk about our parenting methods later. We have a hellspawn to catch.”
Red and Ecto take off, and Avon scoops Jessie up with one wing, looking pointedly at the baby dragon. “If your mother knew, she’d kill me.”
Nova was just ahead of them, hazy through the fog of the nether. But her blue hair, the bright pigtails held severe against her head, were easy to pick out. Just when Avon comes within trident range, hearing Jessie hurling up another ball of acid flame, Nova disappears through a portal.
The wanderers charge through, ignoring any sense to check what could possibly be on the other side. Branches poke and leaves brush against the wanderers. The nether portal has spat them out on the roof of a dark oak forest, tree leaves intertwining into one massive canopy above the trunks and grass. Flames rise high, footsteps across the leaves setting the forest alight. Nova’s high pitched laughter rings out, but the wanderers can hear the fear twinged through it. “You may have gotten me, but you left your army of freaks with no one to lead them!”
Ecto growls, and takes off, pushing through the flames at such a speed the heat has no time to catch her. She draws her sword, clashing with Nova and tossing her across the canopy. “You’ve got yourself surrounded. Give up, hellspawn. I’m not letting you destroy another biome ever again.”
“Ah, it’s you. The one that likes to play in sand.” Nova stands upright, pulling a shield out and hiding behind the barrier. “I’ll give it to you, you’re more than you let on. You're persistent as hell, never know when to quit do you? For what, some wasteland you called home?”
Ecto lets out a war cry, and barrages Nova with her sword. Even when the iron cracks, close to breaking, she doesn’t stop. “You wouldn’t know, would you? You destroyed your own home in the name of uniformity, destroyed the nether’s forests just because they were different as well. Face it- everywhere is different, everyone is weird!” Ecto’s sword shatters, sending her onto her rear end. Nova raises her shield, about to strike Ecto with the flat, spiked board. “And guess what? Weird is good.”
From above, a roar rips across the sky. So loud, it’s hard to believe it came from an infant dragon. The black form drops from the sky, mouth opening. Purple flames crest free of the dragonet’s lips, embers flying and dancing among wings as Jessie plummets. The fireball hurls just behind Nova, trapping her among the purple acid and flames. Ecto rolls to her feet, brandishing the jagged edge of the broken iron sword. She tosses a wayward orange scarf over her shoulder, the fabric like a pennant in the wind. Ecto tilts her head back, chocolate hair twisting free from her forehead as she looks down upon Nova.
Nova turns to her left, but Avon lands with wings wide. Fanning the purple flame, dark purple cloak snapping against the pauldron holding it to her neck. Purple fire illuminating her from beneath, casting shadows across purple eyes and pale skin.
The blue haired hellspawn turns to her right, but Red extinguishes the hellfire with one thing worse than flame- water. Swirling around Red, making his hair float and crest like seagrass at the bottom of the ocean. Bright, hopeful eyes beam back at Nova. She’s surrounded on all sides. Unable to run. Unable to hide.
Nova raises her hands. “Alright. You’ve got me. Go ahead- kill me.”
The wanderers look at one another, Red’s eyes pleading at the warriors beside her. He can’t force them to spare Nova. They have every reason to kill her- even Red wants to exact revenge, for killing Mama Gummi and destroying her home. But violence will only lead to more violence.
Ecto tosses her blade away. “No. We’re breaking the cycle. The nether needs the overworld, and the overworld needs the nether. I like a fight, but I’m not going to go around causing one. Not like Blu.”
“You...what?” Nova’s shock is genuine, her face so much more animated than the very same face beside her. The wanderers step away, watching as the fire of the forest dies back with Nova’s anger. She falls to her knees, looking at the burned trees. “It...It does look like what the nether looked like. Long, long ago. Before we destroyed the forests. We thought we were stopping an invasion. But we only made one of our own.” Nova’s head hangs with shame, her hair flattens, pigtails shortening to small tufts between her horns. “I used to love to play in the forests. I always...I always thought the warped forest was so pretty. It was weird, but...it was wonderful.”
Red bounces over to Ecto, giving her a sly smile. “See. I told you- a little kindness can go a long way.” Red knew Nova could be talked down. It’s the others Red worries about.
“You three need to hurry. Endo and Blu are still fighting. I’ll try to stop the army, but Endo’s the one in charge. She calls the shots.” Nova warns.
Red turns, back to the nether portal. “So that’s who we go for next.”
11 notes
·
View notes
Text
Sensor Sweep: Doc Savage, Gothic novels, Underwater, Appendix N
Horror (Cemetery Dance): Up until the publication of The Monk in March of 1796, the Gothics mostly followed Walpole’s formula. The books usually featured a mystery or threat to the main character, an evil villain threatening the virtue of a virginal female, supernatural elements such as a ghost or an ancestral curse, and secret passages in crumbling mansions or castles. That template carried over into the next century, as evidenced by the bulk of the stories published in the pulps during the 1930s.
Cinema (cbr.com): MOVIE URBAN LEGEND: A Doc Savage movie was cast and ready to go when they abruptly changed to an entirely different film at the last minute. In the mid-1960s, the success of heroes from novels and comic books like James Bond and Batman led to producers looking to see whatever other 20th Century heroes that could be adapted into films. Producers Mark Goodson & Bill Todman (best known for their TV game shows) decided to pick Doc Savage to turn into a matinee idol.
Westerns (Six Gun Justice): Gordon D. Shirreffs (1914 – 1996) started writing in 1945, after serving in World War in Alaska and the Aleutian Campaign. Coached by published boy’s adventure writer Frederick Nelson Litten at the Chicago campus of Northwestern University, Shirreffs broke into the young people’s market with pieces in Boy’s Life, Young Catholic Messenger and the later pulps like Dime Western, Ace High, and Six-gun Western. Experiences at Fort Bliss during the war served Shirreffs well in nailing down the gritty scenery of the Southwest, a setting that served him well throughout his career.
Cinema (Bloody Disgusting): While William Eubank‘s Underwater kicks off with immediate intensity, wasting no time plunging Kristen Stewart and the rest of the cast into the deep sea nightmare we bought a ticket to experience, it admittedly lags a bit around the middle, and unquestionably could’ve used a tad bit more monster mayhem to pick up the energy. The film’s monsters, with their massive gaping maws and spindly, Cloverfield-reminiscent legs, only actually kill one character in the entire movie, and for the most part we only catch glimpses of them in the darkness.
Science Fiction (Gizmodo): Futuristic militaries are a staple in science fiction. With their powered armor and laser guns, military science fiction novels are among the most exciting reads out there. Except for one problem. Most are not really about warfare. While military SF involves military personnel and technology, the cores of the stories tend to focus on elements other than warfare. Before I’m tracked down and shot for saying that, let me qualify that statement.
H. P. Lovecraft (The Mary Sue): When it comes to adapting the works of H.P. Lovecraft, it can be hard for some creators to decide whether they should ignore the racist politics that are embedded into the work, or address it head-on. As a Black fan of Lovecraft, I have long come to terms with the fact that he would dislike my existence, but still, find it endlessly frustrating when his “fans” insist on making excuses for his behavior.
Robert E. Howard (Black Gate): When I was around 12 in the basement of a friend’s house, I found an old copy of Weird Tales (I’m not sure about the magazine, but it must have been a pulp) and read my first Conan story. I loved it; not just for the action—I was a big fan of action stories—but because Conan was a barbarian. He was outside the settled boundaries of propriety and decorum. He made himself up as he went along. He wasn’t a woman, but I was already so sunk into the abhorrence of womanhood that that actually worked in his favor. Conan was outlaw fiction. I knew my own path forward was to be an outlaw.
Appendix N (Goodman Games): John Anthony Bellairs was born on January 17th, 1938 in Marshall, Michigan, which he described as “full of strange and enormous old houses, and the place must have worked on [his] imagination.” A shy and overweight child, he “would walk back and forth between [his] home and Catholic school and have medieval fantasies featuring [himself] as the hero.” He found refuge in books, excelling in college as an English major and even appearing on an episode of the TV quiz show G.E. College Bowl in 1959, where he recited the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales in fluent Middle English.
D&D (Jon Mollison): It’s time to break the seals and talks bout why you should run your D&D crew through Autarch’s Nethercity. But first we need to tuck all the sensitive and classified data behind the fold. Don’t click next unless you want to have the Secrets revealed through antiseptic blogging rather than rich play at the table.
Biography (DMR Books): Well, Crom willing, I’m here to celebrate Robert E. Howard’s birthday, despite the slings and arrows and technical glitches of outrageous fortune. I thought it would be fitting to review David C. Smith’s Robert E. Howard: A Literary Biography which came out just over a year ago. I’ve had several people ask me online about it and where it rates alongside the other two big REH bios. Let’s take a look.
Blogging (Brain Leakage): Doing that forced me to create some regular columns, like my ‘Pocky-clypse Now reviews and my Kitbashing D&D series. Both of those proved to be popular, and have managed to get me some regular readers. Several posts of mine got shared in regular PulpRev and OSR gaming blog roundups, like Castalia House Sensor Sweep, The DMRtian Chronicles, and Jeffro’s Space Gaming Blog. Each time that happened, I’ve reached a wider audience and gained new readers.
Art (Dark Worlds Quarterly): When you do find something new, it is usually very new. But every once in a while you stumble upon something old that is new. Blue Book’s covers and interior art were such a delight. Here was a collection of Burroughs artwork that you just never see. Not in the old fanzines, not in the non-fiction books. It is almost like we all forgot they existed.
Fiction (DMR Books): Pulp magazines are just plain awesome. For readers of old-time literature, they’re colorful time capsules of the nostalgic past that any time traveler would love to visit, and they’ve held a fascination for me since I learned of their existence. I couldn’t say how many times I’ve fantasized of stepping into a turn-of-the-century Five and Dime and plucking mint issues of Argosy and Weird Tales off the racks–imagine gazing on freshly printed copies of the February 1912 issue of The All-Story which contained the opening chapters of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Under the Moons of Mars… holy freaking smokes!
Robert E. Howard (Adventures Fantastic): I don’t know when “The House of Arabu” was written. It wasn’t published until 1952 in The Avon Fantasy Reader #18 under the title “The Witch From Hell’s Kitchen”. I like Howard’s original title much better. The story has been reprinted several times, but it isn’t as well known as much of Howard’s other sword and sorcery. I did notice that the version reprinted in The Ultimate Triumph had a slightly different closing line than the version in The Horror Stories of Robert E. Howard.
Tolkien (Tolkien and Fantasy): Christopher Tolkien has passed away in the night of 15/16 January 2020 at the age of 95. These two men taught me more than I can express about the literary life and what it means to be, and how to go about being, a literary scholar. I became friends with Humphrey in the summer of 1978 when I attended a summer program in Oxford. A few years later Humphrey put me in touch with Christopher. Though I had some excellent and helpful teachers in college, none of them affected me as profoundly, or as lastingly, as did these friendships with Humphrey and Christopher.
Leigh Brackett (Wasteland & Sky): As an example, I just finished reading Leigh Brackett’s Last Call from Sector 9G and had some thoughts about it. For one, the story was written in 1955 and it doesn’t quite feel like it. The era was full of misery and strife in her field, and yet she produced this gem in Planet Stories that could have just as easily come out of Weird Tales in 1929. It has a more timeless feel.
Fiction (Frontier Partisans): I woke up this morning thinking about old-school historical potboilers. Yeah, I know. But you all know by now that my mind functions this way…Actually, there’s a straightforward explanation for why I roused from my slumbers with visions of F. van Wyck Mason dancing through my head. I hit the pillow after scrolling through a Kindle series of novels set during the French & Indian War.
Pulp/Cinema (Don Herron): I didn’t have anything particular in mind, but then pulp expert John Locke jumped into the fray. “One of my sub-hobbies is spotting pulp mags in movies,” John just wrote to inform me. “My latest is a doozie. “It shows a Navy man reading a Fight Stories. “Better yet, the issue has a Sailor Steve Costigan story by Howard.
Writing (Emperor Ponders): Well, sure, but before my mind was even able to process that, what struck me the most was how uncomfortably written the entire thing is (or, at least, the first paragraph.) And I don’t mean typos, grammar errors, and such, but something that is deeper and harder to explain but is quintaessentially modern.
Gaming (R’lyeh Reviews): Conan the Barbarian is a supplement for Robert E. Howard’s Conan: Adventures in an Age Undreamed Of published by Modiphius Entertainment. It is the first in the ‘Conan the…’ series of supplements which focus on and take their inspiration from Conan himself at various stages of his life and what he was doing. Over this series, the supplements will track our titular character’s growth and progress as he gains in skills and abilities and talents. Thus this first supplement looks at Conan as a young man and his life among the people of his homeland, at the beginning of his career which will take him from barbarian to king, essentially the equivalent of a starting player character.
Sensor Sweep: Doc Savage, Gothic novels, Underwater, Appendix N published first on https://sixchexus.weebly.com/
0 notes
Last Seen Blogs
