Everything Quests: Scary Stories
Completed: Thursday, October 31, 2002 at 14:15:50, server time.
It was a dark and stormy night when I
logged in. Not that it mattered, as I had been inside for almost a week. And where I was going,
there's no there, there. But it was a dark and stormy night nonetheless.
Deep down in the statistics nodelet,
userstoday indicated triple-digits.
Writeupstoday indicated a staggering -293,037 nodes. In the
other users nodelet, a dozen-odd
Ø's caught my eye. Every single visible private /msg in my
chatterbox nodelet started: "
Klaproth ate your writeup..."
Something stank of trouble. Fire. Brimstone.
A hint of plumber's ass. Putrifying meat, the flesh of the unborn rotting in the teeth of the undead. A deep, profound tremor continuously rumbled far below, causing the
Cool User Picks to rattle and and jitter in their racks. The
Cream of the Cool list was in complete disarray, and had a glossy singed texture about it not unlike the blast crater of a
thermonuclear weapon.
And then, before I could even close the browser, my screen burst into pyrotechnics, the beloved default
jukka theme melting away into some hideous combination of colors that shouldn't ever be seen together without some sort of health warning or
protective eyewear. The rumbling increased into a shaking, and the shaking became a rolling. Terra Firma became Terra Incognito, crumbling away into flames like a delightfully flaky pie crust. A pie of fire and woe. A pie of inconceivable suffering and malice.
The Gods were all missing.
n0b0dy was gibbering
glossolalia to nobody in the catbox. Rumors flew that
nate and
Dem Bones were last seen snatched up by screeching, flying monkeys, leathery wings beating smoke, climbing into the sky until even the twinkle of sequins on the monkey's red jackets vanished into the night.
Everyone was crying. Half of the Other User's nodelet was consumed in writhing, sussurating flames.
Webster1913 had nothing to say, considering most of him lay still as the night on
node row. There were three editors left, but they were all borged, and looked more than a little dead. In a charnal pile slopped in the corner of the Epicenter was the remains of
Cool Man Eddie. Oh, Eddie, what did you ever do to deserve this? Oh,
right,
nevermind.
None of us have clean hands. Those of us that were left tried to regroup, tried to form a cohesive resistance to the looming terrors.
Raging
Giant Squid battled killer
Red Robots up and down
News for Noders, ink and sparks flying. Crusty, soy-based lesbian golems arose from the nodegel in ludicrous numbers. It's a good thing we have so many hungry vegetarian bisexuals here, or we would have been lost already. We were just about to turn the tide on the golems, and someone was preparing the giant vat of batter for the
fried calamari rings.
The
nodegel just cracked. It was a sort of crazy, hazy, folding sort of movement, like the laws of optical parallax just up and quit and left us all cross-eyed. As if you could see cross-eyed out of just one eye, and the other, simultaneously.
Paging Dr. Strabismus, you're wanted in opthalmology.
And there, in the scintillating, imploding, self-referential fragments, rises the
Borg, flinging aside continent-sized shards of
Perl, dripping in the gore of a hundred thousand nodes.
Cthulu's a purse-poodle compared to this, would curl up it's face-fronds and whimper away like a yapping - well, poodle - in the face of this incomprehensible affront to all that is pure.
Ba'al's a 15 watt bulb;
Anubis is hawking tacos in an ingratiatingly uncomedic latino accent.
The Borg is riding something up through the striated layers, an eight-legged, thirty-two eyed arachnid-beast-stallion from the deepest bowels of hell.
EDB's mount has a name, and it's name is
Klaproth.
"WE HAVE COME FOR THE BONES." EDB and Klaproth say in one voice, a voice like a thousand thunderstorms, a voice that could tear the sky off the Earth and boil the oceans.
The few noders not struck dumb cower, whispering, 'The monkey's got
Dem Bones, the monkeys...'
"SILENCE FOOLS! WE COME FOR THE BONES OF THE TROLLS, TO RESSURECT THEM AND BRING THEM TO THE DUTY AND GLORY THEY RIGHTFULLY DESERVE. THE TROLLS THAT WILL STAND AT THE GATES AT THE END OF ALL TIME. THESE WILL BE YOUR NEW GODS, AND YOU WILL WORSHIP THEM WELL.", a shockwave-blast like a million
Krakatoa, an active
Olympus Mons of our own on this shattered earth. Embattled noders scattered and panicked like ants under a giant, flaming boot.
"YOU KNOW WHICH CURSED BONES WE SPEAK OF... UH... oh, they don't? that's true, they can be rather thick sometimes. right, on to the point. WE HAVE COME FOR THE BONES OF
theonomist, OF
BaronCarlos! BRING US THE BONES OF
DMan!" and at that, all hell quite literally broke loose upon hearing the name of he-whom-can't-be-named. Fire, anguish, smoking magma bombs from the sky, Richard Simmons in a tu-tu singing Broadway greats whilst humping the corpse of David Letterman, Leona Helmsley in charge of housing, profuse wailing and the gnashing of teeth.
Carrot Top. That stupid Dell kid cranked up to
11 on some deadly mixture of
amphetamines and
PCP.
And lo, we suffer eternally to this very day.
Happy Halloween, E2!