Knocker King/Blood in the Water
From Unofficial Handbook of the Virtue Universe
Originally posted in several sections, this is a tale of a Knocker who has no desire to be in a stand up fight, and a Shark who has no desire to give him one. Here it is!
Down in Sharkhead Isle
The Knocker shop is in full swing tonight. It's a frantic pace. A hammer and nail and gear and sparking electrical pace of those looking to make this quick. Looking to make this work. It's hard to get the pulse of something like this.
Maybe we better watch.
Inside the storage house and workshop, Knocker is up on a ladder with a plasma-cutter. Attaching something to a wall. Grumbling to himself. It's interesting if you watch, for long enough. Patterns emerge. Swear, curse, frantically weld. Angrily solder. Climb down ladder. Move ladder several feet. Get what looks like a hair-spray can with an antennae attached to it from the table in the center of the shop. Climb up ladder. Rinse. Repeat. This has actually been happening all night. Ever since the Mechanic shut down his night of what knockers call socializing, what other people would call taunting homicidal maniacs to the point of thrashing jaws and gnashing teeth.
Weld. Curse. Weld. Curse. Move ladder.
Other things have been happening in the shop though. The tweedles have been arranging shelves. Their master's mind elsewhere. His magic worked in other places. They've moved everything off the back wall of the shop. There's a garage door there. Which is strange. Because that wall is flush against the brick wall of the other building. A door to nowhere, if you would. But the Tweedles are patiently moving the shelves off the wall, and lining them on the shop floor. Making a corridor of steel and rusted parts that leads to that nowhere portal. It makes quite the imposing corridor. Especially when they pile racks on top to give the rack-path a ceiling.
Suspiciously....nothing falls out of them. This is perhaps the first warning that the night is going to take a very strange turn.
And so the Shop works. Into the hours of the morning shelves are arranged and things are welded. Fire and steel dance in creation. Minions and masters putting a plan into action.
Catchy tune isn't it?
And as the morning light begins to creep into the windows. As the daystar banishes all goblins back to their mines, Knocker comes down from his ladder. The Tweedlebots finish arranging their maze of racks. A giant swirls on the floor, a lot like the Knocker's face, a lot like his tattoos. A lot like his kith and kin. It begins in the middle of the shop, it ends at the door. As the red mechanic climbs down from his perch, he hops onto the top of one of the racks and hops from shelf to shelf. Rack to rack, seeking that center first. Almost flying, almost falling.
That place between falling angel and rising ape.
The realm of the inventor.
The Tweedles are against the walls of the shop now. One of the gilded ego-bots tosses a pack to the center of the room. The lesser Tweeds, those comical Triple D, have long since dropped a long box on wheels into the center of the maze.
And there knocker stands. Hooking a pack onto his back. Placing a box onto a rolling-dolly from a rack. The sun comes up over the horizon. The kiss of Sol washes over dozens of small devices welded to the wall next to small, radio operated aerosol cans. The cans do nothing. They are boring. The small devices however, begin to hum and vibrate. Sparks soar and surge along exposed copper wiring mounted to the wall. Leading to the control-box for the garage door to nowhere.
And on que, Knocker begins to walk through his swirl. The racks hum as the power in the room builds. Something else is being caught in here. Something caught in the walk and the form and the circle. It's a call....
To the silver path.
As the knocker walks, things roll and rattle off the racks. Plated wrenches, silver plating long since removed. Chrome panels. Mirrors. Lost steel slivers and forgotten shining shards of glass. The racks contain hundreds of cast offs. Here in the swirl they form into a glimmering path that blazes in the morning sun. Crunches under Knocker's feet as he walks. If you can feel it, that electrical feel, that mental grease crawls over that path where the mechanic's feet touch it. Make it whole. Make it solid. Make it pure. Make that which was forgotten magic again.
The Silver Path.
Knocker walks. The door to nowhere creeps open with every step. Every coil of the swirl traversed, the door ratchets up a few inches. There's a sound behind that door. The call of the harp, the reel of the pipe. The scent of the last of the wild mornings in summer, the hint of the chill nights of spring when things ran free. Every step calls to be trod. And with every step, the Trod opens to the call of the Tinker Lord.
And he walks.......through.
It's evening now. The sun crests the steel-tipped hills of Sharkhead and casts a bloody shadow down over the pit. That's the thing about blood. Even when it's not shed, there's still a scent of it in the air. In the right circumstances you can sit back on a bloody sunset and let the smell copper creep right into your nose and smell the pulse of the heart of the world. It lets you know on the night to come you might be able to reach out and lick the blood slicked veins behind the world.
It's those people who swim in the currents of copper that wait for the sun to go down. Wait for their time. The time after the bloody fingers of sunset are done crawling over the edge of the pit. The time when darkness washes over the wounds of the day. The time when they can roam the streets and scent the sanguine taste that is the promise of violence.
In Sharkhead the evening fog that rolls over the landscape, over the scars of concrete and the scabs of factories, is called by some the breath of the Leviathan. In one smokey exhale the island is covered in a clinging warmth of the sea. The ocean crawling over the land in the night to try out it's land legs. Something else comes ashore as the Twilight settles and fades to black. This cloying, organic fog hides something. It's hard to tell what. Watch carefully. Listen in the smothering fog to what might be feet setting onto the rocky shores of the Sharkhead shore. Listen to the crunch of gravel and iron shards under foot.
Start being afraid when it stops.
The something swirls into the mist. Swimming. Gliding. A current of water in the ocean-ashore. If you were able to see it from above.....you might see something slicing through the vapor. Something with purpose. Something without form but with intent. Something that smells blood in the water. Follow the parting mist. Follow the unseen and you'll come to a shop with no sign. Just a large polished gear now dripping with the clinging damp of the night. But there are windows here. With light pouring out of them like cataracts of warmth into the cold and the wet.
Watch the current circle the building.
Let's step inside to the warmth for a moment. There's a car that looks suspiciously like a Trans-Am on the rack. A certain red mechanic is under it with a grease-gun and a set of wire-clippers. A sea-slicked hand-print appears on a window on the far wall from the Tinker's work. It's attached to nothing. Just a webbing of water pressing against tempered glass.
Leaving fine scratches as it slides away.....
Something takes form in the dark. Ocean bottom blues and storm greys peel themselves out of the fog and give shape to that feeling of menace. A milky white eye peers into the window, and slowly rolls forward until the socket is black as the pit of any nightmare.
The head tilts. Side....to side....and in the dark slitted gills flare a rich, bloody red.
Thresher Shark has found his prey.
Blood will be in the water soon.
Listen.
Silence.
It's the witching hour
(Thematic: NiN- Survivalism)
It's midnight in the Knockershop now. There's a a pile of rubble where there had been a car earlier. The mechanic is sleeping. The cantrip of creation slumbers. Looking over the lightless shop, things are almost serene. Robots slumber, standing by for the next day's orders. In a shop corner, in a cot, sleeps a tinker. On a stand next to him set those iconic red ear-mounts. The world is silent. Knocker is sleeping and the world is only filled with the song of the engine. It overshadows everything with it's roar. It edges out everything with it's perfected scream. The world is silent, because in Knocker's world, there is no room for any other sound....
Which is a pity. He might of heard the sound of something dropping onto the polished stone floor. The distinct sound of damp slap of something against a flat surface. But he sleeps on. The shop sleeps on. Nothing stirs.
Except the shark now prowling the darkness.
Watch him carefully. Low to the ground. Circling through the shadows. This is not a skulking imagined terror. Something very real moves through the racks of steel. Slips past the slumbering robotic guardians. The knocker shop is a painful place for something wired as the Thresher Shark is. The world normally twists and bends with magnetic harmony. The call of living electricity. The scent of intelligence crackling through the body and the soul. Here the hum of electronics mixes into the world like a band-saw in the brain. A constant, unending scream of false. Of impure. Of corrupted. The hand of man in what was once only the miracle of nature.
The cry of the earth comes from many things in the shop. The overhead lamps hum with it, even while dark. The inactive robots vibrate with it, waves of irritation grinding into the Alopias vulpinus brain. They are alive and dead. Falsehoods in the order.
But they do not inspire the stalking hunter to such rage as the constant whine emitting from the ear-mounts on that innocuous, harmless, cot-side table. They do not inspire the same feeling of rage as the slumbering form next to it that hums and crackles with a magnetic life all it's own, even in the dense noise of the shop's electrical feedback.
There is nothing graceful about this. There is nothing beautiful. This is something quick. This is something primal. It is as simple as the coil of muscles. It is as bloody as the heart. In a single leap the Shark crosses the floor of the shop. Soars over the racks and the lifts and the workbenches.
In a single leap the hunter lands with hooked talons into the soft body slumbering in the cot. There is a horrible cracking sound. There is a horrible smell of iron and copper and life that spells into the air. The animal rushes over the man and the tearing begins. The rush of air escaping internal pockets, the popping of joints being torn apart.
The wonderfully slick feel of your foe's life being gutted by your hand.
This is nothing pretty.
Perhaps we shouldn't watch.
The Knocker shop is dying. The workshop shudders. The workshop heaves.
Watch out.
When we'd last left, a predator had entered and begun violating it's master. Crouched over a cot, ripping and tearing. Biting and rending a fragile body apart. They say that knockers, creatures of creation, creatures of industry and coal, creatures of the forge and the assembly line, taste like grease. So tied to the process of creation, their work runs in their veins, thick flows of sour oil and cloying rust. They say not even a Redcap will eat a knocker will eat one because of that horrible taste. Unless it's really, really pissed off. Much like our shark here. So far beyond the bounds of reason and restraint that parts are flying into the air. So far beyond pity or remorse that a taloned hand tears a pumping heart out of coils of veins and.....
wires?
Tears a pump from a tangle of tubes and twisting lengths of copper slicked with blood and grease. Teeth gnash around lengths of blood-slicked plastic gizzards. In the jaws of a shark, a work of art made with sweat, laced with blood and care, is crushed. The machine tastes of the Red Mechanic. Smells like death and prey....but constructed parts crack and bend under frenzied hands. Exposed and shattered ribs shine wetly as metal. A cracked and pierced brain pan is jagged and sharp, glass and fluid pouring from the wound. Yes. The shark has begun a feast of metal. There is no Knocker here in his jaws.
The workshop shudders as the last pump of the still beating heart of the machine grinds to a stop. A blast of electrical noise from the ear-mounts, long since scattered to the concrete floor. The workshop comes alive. Metal plates slam over the windows. Metal slabs drop over the doors with the last beats of the constructs heart.
Even as the machine impaled in Thresher's frenzied grip ceases the world comes alive with the violent hum of electricity. The whirring spin of antennae. The snicker-snack of tiny legs unfolding. Tiny machines crawl from every pile. Skitter from every rack. Wondrous creations of brass and steel and plastic fall from every crack and every machine. They leak out of the robots in the room, bursting forth violently to heed their call. The shells of the Tweedlebots lining the walls crack and explode as their own bodies fail and die. As their own housings spew forth the flood.
The trap is sprung.
The shark's mind is returning to it. Eyes roll down from the sockets, black replacing white. Mind replacing instinct. The twitching metal heart is spat from clamping jaws. Dead black eyes watch the movement of the floor. The flood of tiny insectile robots catch things in their flow. Slabs of metal. Sections of wire. They come from under the floor clutching slivers of paper. They crawl out from the ceiling and the air vents dragging tools constructed out of origami. The rest pull the shop apart as they move. Cannibalizing their home for parts. All piling into a pulsing mass of interconnecting legs and clattering metal in the middle of the floor.
A twisting mass of creation begins to rise up on two legs. Borne of the swarm. Born of an old joke and an evil plan.
The shake knows his doesn't have much time. The thing is taking shape and gaining form. The tiny robots are connecting. Linking. Pulling parts into the protean mass and giving it life and movement and a pulsing, electronic whine of power that grates against his senses. The shark spies the vent he first came to the shop through. Empty. Not yet sealed. The predator leaps, covered in the greasy carrion of his false kill-promise. Leaps towards freedom. Leaps for an escape from this farce and this closing trap.
And is swatted out of the air by a malformed hand crawling with thousands of insectile legs.
Thresher rockets back across the room. Is thrown through several fragile racks with, now, little on them. The shark digs his talons into the concrete, leaving deep gashes in the stone to steady himself and his flight. He manages to roll and skid and claw to a stop. He manages to watch the thing that slapped him out of the air.
If it were bare to the eye, it may of have looked horrific. Leftover parts sewn together with still living minuture robots. Squirming and pulsing as an organic thing. But the robots have a sense of deceny....perhaps. They've pulled the only thing available to them in the shop over their naked form. Thousands of sheets of pink paper from the Knocker's hiding spots. Unfolded wrenches, unfolded flowers and tools and other delicate works are plastered over the metal like sheets of armor. It is that armor which shapes it. Gives it a form that isn't merely a horror. Gives it the face and body of a friend. Thresher can only look on in horror as the thing takes on a very tall, and very pink, version of Quana.
And can only stare as it charges him for a second chance to crush his body under a massive, delicate, pink hand.
The impact rattles the shop itself. A fist into the concrete where Thresher had been moments before. Cracks spiral from the embedded fist in the poured stone. Thresher has rolled out of the way in time. Only just managed to overcome the bizarre feeling of having to fight something that looks like something he might of called friend once. Confusion quickly gives way to howling fury however. The predator rises in a blue flash of movement. Claws howl for a trophy and rend through the wrist and metal of the pink-coated golem. They leave it severed in the ground, the pink-beast stumbling back, freed and now wounded with thousands of tiny, destroyed robots dribbling from the severed stump in it's paper skin.
Thresher Shark smells a new kind of blood as paper lips crack open to howl in pain. This thing echos life. It will die. It will know pain, and as he leaps to sink his claws into it's body, he knows it will suffer for trying to trap him here. The man fades again as the Shark frenzies in hate and the lust of the kill. The Shake knows only the fight and the rage. The bite and the tear. It does not hear the small devices on the wall. The hiss of chemicals being sprayed into the air. The whirr of those tiny engines welded to the walls so many nights ago by the mechanic firing up.
Thresher cannot hear the trap being sprung properly.
He can only hear the scream of the golem under his claws. The rip and tear of delicate paper and tempered steel under his blows and bites. He does not know what is around him. He only smells fear and he only tastes the kill. He does not feel the blows of the paper-sheathed fist against his body. He only feels his claws tearing the construct apart and the glorious wet slap of it's life being torn away part....by part....by part.
He doesn't smell the flame and the fire from the small engines. He doesn't know the room is filling with aerosol Greek Fire. He doesn't know that this is how the shop will Die. Perhaps he can't. He's lost to us, and the sense of survival. He's lost in the kill. Even as a spark is lit. Even as the world fills with the clinging, greasy feel of an ancient, water-consuming napalm, roaring with hate and heated fury all it's own.
Even as the golem roars it's own cry against the rushing onslaught of heat and death.
The world fills with flame........
It ends in a crater on the lip of The Pit. It ends in a workshop blown into pieces and scattered over the island. It ends with a lot of collateral damage and a lot of flame, and a lot of time spent by the locals trying to keep the strange, water-searing chemicals, from spreading to their own homes and their own businesses.
It ends the next morning, with the mist clinging to a large, seared, copper gear-sign embedded in the sidewalk several blocks away.
It ends in the center of that crater, where a twisted mass of burned and charred metal is hunched. It might of looked like something once. Bits of pink-paper still cling, against all odds, cling to it's dead body. It looks almost as if it had pulled something close against it. Pulled it close to protect it.
It ends in the sea, with the sting of the ocean around burns and wounds and a smoldering grudge.
Perhaps it really hasn't ended at all.
We'll see.
