i have not done less than duty requires.

[lyseandpurge]

There is a song in the flagstones.



It resonates, high-pitched, nonverbal, and arrhythmic, between the walls of the corridors and along the lengths of the old pillars and in the hollows of the alcoves.

It comes from a windowless hallway, from a door no one has seen before whose cobweb drapery is so old it has begun to peel away.

And even then it comes: from a little outside the world, from no room, from no mouth.

From the gap in the door a light has begun to bleed, vivid and violet and pulsing like a heartbeat. The song rises with it, falls with it, and harmonises with the whistling of the wind—the smell of hot metal mingling with something sweet.

If you open the door, it is because you have heard the sound, seen the light, felt the pulse—you have traced it to its source. It hangs before you, an immortal crystal of pure light, suspended in a shining, sickly abyss with no visible beginning or end. It is wounded. It is bleeding. A steady torrent of syrupy liquid pours from roots and pipes that have been forced through the wounds in its surface, and then been severed; the ichor streams down its lower facets and falls endlessly into the emptiness.

Its voice pierces your ears, louder and more melodic than ever.

And something dark and gaseous shifts warily under the glassy skin of the cell, watching you with its single eye.

= <o> =

a change. The ancient door has been altered recently: some wary soul has carved a message deep into the ageless wood, blackening it with heat. It reads: "DANGER, POSSESSION MAY OCCUR BEYOND THIS DOOR".

ooc. || hey everyone! this is Judgement or Ammit, the all-consuming vengeance of the immortal cell! she just got here, she's just a little lost, and she would appreciate something horrible happening so she can get back into the swing of things. anything's fine, though!!

nota bene—you can only get to the cell through this door, and Judgement can't see, hear, or perceive anything that isn't close to the cell. there's a little more information on these limitations in its bio​. sorry for the restrictions!

Comments

[demonthatcomes]

What is this? Where is this sound coming from? A song weaves through Chara that they just can't ignore. They set out to investigate, and eventually come across the door with the violet light. They think they could see handwriting... some kind of warning? But no matter how hard they try, they can't decipher the burned scrawl. If there was some kind of dangerous entity inside who could kill them, well... so be it. It's not like Chara is new to death and suffering.

* A crystal hangs in the abyss.

* The song crescendos into a shrill pitch.

[lyseandpurge]

They hear the cell, they see the cell, and as they pass into its reality, footsteps echoing on a floor as smooth as air, its pulse travels up through their legs and reaches their heart. They can feel it beating against their beating, gripping and oppressive.

The cell's oversaturated light, almost painful to the touch, washes over them. It turns their pallid skin a brilliant red, and its song trembles at the refrain.

For a moment its light dims, and the abyss grows deep, and the ground crumbles beneath their feet. Then Chara's Judgement comes down from the sky.

She descends in the form of black burrowing roots, anchoring themselves in the cell and in the light of the doorway and in the corners of Chara's vision. Ropy tendrils soak up the light in the room and form dense pillars of hairy matter, twisting down and down forever, and buried in the centre of the bramble-thick mass is a single glaring pink eye set over a pair of mandibles like an insect's.

Branches heavy with angled thorns gather and coil behind it, as if on guard for a hostile movement. The cell sings on behind them.

[demonthatcomes]

Chara barely has time to react before their breath is cut short. Something is alive and it's gripping them from the inside. Everything is blinding, blinding, their skin a bright hellfire laser-red. The song goes on and on, and their head is spinning as the ground vanishes from beneath them.

Their scarlet eyes widen at the black hairy roots towering all around them, the tendrils twisting and turning with an unholy mess of dagger-like thorns. Nausea grips the knot of Chara's stomach when they spot the eye piercing its gaze through them... something about this seems familiar, and above all, wrong.

"What are you...?"

[lyseandpurge]

The cell's light pulses again with its heartbeat, waxing white. The eye at the centre of Judgement's brambly mass... moves, drawing closer, a thick curtain of vines bending and cracking like strange, jerky joints as they cover and protect it.

She moves until she is directly above Chara, looking down, mandibles rotating uncertainly. Then there is a sound like a branch snapping, and she drops.

She jerks to a halt a few metres from their face. In the midst of the roots her eye seems almost projected on an oblong surface as smooth as glass.

It flickers, and something almost like a voice emerges from the mass of her body up above, a buzzing and a rumbling and a vision of a distorted memory.

F r i s k

?

[demonthatcomes]

Chara recalls only once they'd been mistaken for Frisk as opposed of the other way around. Was it Toriel, looking for the child who had so recently fallen from the Ruins? But Chara hadn't seen her for a long time in the Island, and now, there was this... thing questioning them. Had it met Frisk before? Had the many Frisks of this Island visited this room before? What was its connection to any of the Frisks?

"I am Chara." they answer as solidly as they could.

[lyseandpurge]

Almost as soon as they speak Judgement begins to withdraw into its body, long creepers with dripping pink scars peeling off its bulb of ropy flesh. The darkness squirms and heaves as it rearranges. Coil after coil of half-liquid plant matter, noxious as burnt rubber, pours down into a heavy heap of ropy flesh, and arthropoid digits burst from the edge of it like claws: a single misshapen limb, almost foot-like, blocking Chara's path to the immortal cell.

Judgement's eye glares out at Chara from a recess above.

A lightning-flash of sensations: the cell, close enough to touch, vast and wounded and immobile; the burning heat that emanates from its surface, touched by fingers unlike any fingers; an all-consuming hunger and need; fingers unlike any fingers cracking it open, sinking in, and through tiny mouths greedily drinking up the pink lifeblood.

A sudden force constricting their torso. Vines like ropes seizing and pulling them, desperate, away from the Cell, away from its warmth, upwards and away and into the mouth of the shapeless overgrowth above. The feeling of being enveloped and crushed.

Judgement glowers silently at them.

[demonthatcomes]

* Fight

Chara reacts on sheer instinct--their fists slam against the ropy flesh and the digits sprouting and lunging for them. A scream tears from their throat--the pink goop splattered on their burning hands, eating away at their flesh like acid. They thrash and kick and writhe as the ropes whip around their sorry worthless excuse of a body, mandibles gnashing around their. They clenched their own teeth as they glared at the blazing sharp eye.

It was Omega Flowey. Or some similar illusion. Some twisted, blinding pink copy of the enormous being who loathed them and wanted to save over their death again and again, gleefully torturing them in gruesome ways. But there was no thrill over the prospect of revenge from this creature. Chara couldn't put their agonized fingers on it. It wasn't sadism. But something like... cold consternation and slicing scrutiny.

[lyseandpurge]

Before the agony actually comes, the light fades, the world becomes dreamlike, and the experience dissolves into vision into something no longer real.

Judgement looms above them, vines still pouring and pouring and pouring out from its body into its single enormous limb. They have not moved towards the distant cell, and the beast has not moved towards them.

go

Again the pang of immeasurable alien hunger, located somewhere in the bowels of a body they do not have.

away

Their fingers, their fingers on the cell, digging into the cell, gulping up its contents—

go away

The vines tearing them from its skin, wrapping them up in a lightless sickly-smelling tomb.

The whole sequence of experiences plays at a strange mental distance in their heads, like watching an eclipse projected backwards through a pinhole onto a cardboard screen.

[demonthatcomes]

Chara has no idea what's going on anymore. Oh, believe them, they do want to go away. They do want to leave this room and this fleshy pink nightmare and never come back. A little difficult when your head is plagued with vision after vision of an unnameable creature tearing itself apart. Were they capable of running? Were they stuck here forever? If they can't find the door, there were only two options: A. Wait for the creature to kill them. B. Do the deed themself.

judgement tries to point

[lyseandpurge]

As if responding to their thoughts, the thing ceases her alien scrutiny and moves suddenly and swiftly towards them. The strange foot rolls laboriously forward, crushing its appendages under its own weight with a series of loud snaps.

It becomes a tide. Everywhere there is the crackling and ripping of plant fibres, everywhere in the black mass are jets of pink liquid bursting forth from gaping wounds. The air smells like petrol.

Up in the canopy of roots new orifices rip open, letting rivers of vines slam down and pour and pour endlessly out into masses that are swallowed up by the torrent. And it expands out and out, an elephant's foot of writhing life, until Chara is standing in the middle of a straight little groove of clear ground between two walls of buzzing, humming—

They are not vines, and they are not roots. Surging against the light of day, Chara perceives a sea of impossibly long chitinous legs, crumpled up and tangled against each other, quivering and immobile. Leaf-shaped gossamer wings vibrate meaninglessly on the furred joints.

The light of day—it is shining. The door has not moved at all. It is a stolid square of reality imposed upon the emptiness. They could walk into it.

Judgement's oblong face with the diamond eye extrudes itself from the space in front of Chara, mandibles snapping together furiously. It extends from a long, long neck that isn't quite visible behind her. She stares and stares and the smooth stone of her eye splits open down the middle. Something long and spiny and jointed reaches out, waving and thrashing. It is not a solid thing. It is a voice, but it has the texture of something scraping in the centre of their head.

nnnnn no th i i ng

is

h r e

there is no t thing left f f r us s her e

chara did you just scare cthulu?

[demonthatcomes]

Crackling and snapping, crackling and snapping, there's pink blood everywhere and the room smells like gasoline. At the end of the hall of legs, they spot the door--the light at the end of a tunnel or the light of a freight train heading their way? With the pink eye staring at them with her mandibles gnashing and her voice ripping through them like nails on a chalkboard, they had a tiny percent chance of making it and escaping. Chara decides to risk it.

* I'm out of here.

They dash for it, running, running, while the walls of legs scuttle and shake. They don't look behind them, their target fixed entirely on the light. They tear past the door and through the corridor, not stopping until they collapse in the outside grass. Panting, Chara boggles at the sight of their hand--because there's nothing. Nothing, as in their hand was never burned in the first place. It didn't even hurt anymore--it had been an illusion.

By the time Chara recovers, they'd curse themself, vowing from now on to try deciphering someone's written warning before blowing it off as nothing, no matter how suicidal daring they believed to be.