The prison-wagon ground to a halt a mile before The Overlook. Grim-faced guards jumped down from the running boards and blunted front end, preparing to disgorge their living cargo. Weak sunlight cast a bright gleam across their copper-and-bronze armour as they marched around to the back, wrenching open the doors and dragging the first wretched pair of prisoners out.
An iron-haired dwarf, his face lined with age and exhaustion. His clothing was tattered and filthy, made ragged by travel and lack of maintenance. His eyes were ringed with dark circles, and his nails bitten and picked down past the quick; dried blood crusted the tips of his fingers. The dwarf barely resisted as the guards half-helped, half-shoved him down from the wagon’s rear onto the dry grass underfoot, moving with the slow, stumbling gait of a sleepwalker. One of them roughly pulled him upright and began to unlock his shackles, but he barely reacted, lost in his own thoughts.
It had been a long chase indeed to catch him, but with the list of charges and price on his head, this had been the inevitable conclusion of his flight. With his resources (legal and otherwise) exhausted, his body wearing down from the stress, and a veritable library of evidence against him, he had opted to throw himself on the mercy of the justice system and come what may.
The sentence had been less than he had expected, though severe enough. The worst of the charges had been dropped – in no small part due to the evidence he himself had provided against his former employers, and the agreement to serve in their “experimental release program." But it would still be a year at the very minimum before he might be judged free to re-enter society; until then, The Overlook would be his home.
The other contrasted him sharply. Her ankles were shackled together with weighted iron chains; her mouth muzzled by a dark brown leather mask that had been strapped to the lower half of her face. The doctor’s smock she wore was smeared with brown-red and grey stains, tattered at the ragged edges and split open in a dozen more. Over it, a tight, restricting device pinned her arms to her sides with strong buckles and straps, weighed down with a number of iron chains that secured the whole array further to the point where she could barely move. It was chevroned at the shoulders with bright scarlet strips, marking her as one of the few prisoners requiring restricted transport. A nametag had been crudely stitched onto its breast – Dr. D. Lolorodom.
Unlike her companion, she seemed incapable of holding still despite her restraints. Her head twitched restlessly from side to side, as much as she could move it with the restraints binding her, one foot impatiently drumming up and down on the wagon’s wooden floor. Her eyes flashed furiously as the wagon halted; they made her contempt for the guards clear as she was “helped" to the ground before the fortress. Her guard – a copper-clad woman with the cockaded bronze helmet of a captain – shoved her forward to stand beside the first prisoner.
“Here’s what you’ll need to get back up to speed," The copper-clad dwarf tossed a tied-shut folder at the two of them. “Though I doubt
you need it, eh?"
She laughed at her own joke, already striding off toward the wagon again. The rest of the prisoners were being unloaded. Most had the simple green or white of low-risk prisoners – unlucky debtors and petty criminals, workers who’d failed to meet their bosses’ orders and tax-dodgers, a handful of granite-faced felons guilty of simple assault or cruelty. One or two of them bore the blood-red stripes and weighty iron shackles of restricted transport prisoners; another had the bright yellow of a convicted military felon. These ones were helped down none-too-gently by the guards, whose hands never strayed far from their weapons as the prisoners staggered back to their feet.
The exhausted-looking dwarf slowly regarded the image on the cover, before bowing his head almost to his chest as his shoulders began to quaver. He was uncertain whether to rage or cry or simply just break down in shrieking gales of laughter at the sheer irony of his situation. He’d often heard it said that the ghosts of your past caught up to you back in Hallstraded, and so it had in the most literal fashion possible.
His companion proved rather more enthused. Her eyes widened as they flickered across the cover; behind the leather mask, the flattened edges of her broad, unfinished mouth slowly quirked up into a smile.
"Quantum" Wardedbridges and Dr. Lolorodom looked toward the distant mouth of The Shin, and only one did so with trepidation.
5th SlateQuantum trudged into the Overseer’s room slowly, his eyes flicking warily from side to side. He’d been in The Overlook no more than an hour or two, and already he was on edge. It had been an unpleasant business getting in to begin with, and pure luck that there had been enough of a break in the siege for them to scramble through the main gate and into the dark tunnels beyond. They’d heard the creatures’ howls of rage ringing from the stone as the gate slammed shut behind them, but all of them had managed to reach safety before the creatures could them. Based on the wet noises he'd heard afterwards they were busy taking their rage out on the local wildlife, just as they'd been in the initial break.
Most of the passers-by had been fairly terse, though one of them – Splint, he’d called himself – had been kind enough to point him the direction of the Overseer’s office.
The current warden – whoever he might have been – was seemingly absent beyond the folder left on his desk. Beside it, a note had been left. Hesitantly, Quantum reached out and turned it over. On it, some wag had scrawled a message for the new overseer in block capitals: “YOUR PROBLEM NOW, IDIOT!" and what looked like a crude, hastily added drawing of pants.
Grumbling under his breath, he shoved it off to the side and began to read the remaining papers. Much of it was what he had expected: production orders and stockpile records, roughly labelled diagrams of the prison’s layout and terse explanations of what was to go where. He skimmed through them quickly and sorted them off to the sides and front, parcelling them out based on their topic until he finally reached what he had been looking for.
The prisoner records. He took his time reading them, familiarising himself with the very literal rogues’ gallery before him. A brewer-turned-accidental-poisoner and a doctor with a list of malpractice accusations longer than he was tall, a husband and wife pair with a dozen dead animals to their name, a discharged ex-soldier who’d been sent here for spiking his boss’s ale with horse piss and a litany of miscreants besides. He felt the pounding in his temples growing worse with every word, though he clung to the distant hope they wouldn’t be
too terrible a lot.
He was nearing the bottom of the pile and the papers he’d feared to find when the door creaked open and the other inmate from the wagon came swaggering in. Dr. Lolorodom almost casually dropped herself into the chair opposite the desk without bothering with a greeting, eyeing him up and raising a finger before he could speak.
“Well, we certainly lucked out getting into this place." She remarked, stretching herself out like an idle cat. “Even if the architecture is rather too morbid for my taste – what
is with their obsession with pumpkins and ghosts? – it’s certainly roomy enough for the lot of us and then some. Can’t say too much about their hospitality, considering how much booze I’ve had to buy these cloots before they started flapping their jaws, and the supply and provision situation is frankly aaa–"
“Is there a point to this, doctor?" He growled, placing his head against the table with a wince. His temples were pounding again. “Or did you come here merely to talk at me? I would not presume you to be so familiar with –"
“Well, I’ve been asking around the place while you went and moped around in here," She leaned across the table, her voice taking on an almost conspiratorial tone. One hand idly trailed across the polished stone before coming to rest on one of the papers, then spirited it away into one of her sleeves. “And a good number of them want you to run this freakshow."
“…You cannot be serious, Doctor." Quantum slowly raised his head from the table, fixing her with a bloodshot stare.
“As a heart attack. Your reputation has preceded you, I’m afraid – the last known survivor of Camp Crystallake, and the fool who tried to cover it up." She laced her fingers together before her, smirking slightly. “They want you in charge, because you’re one of the few with experience of liaising with the maniacs running this place. And, I would wager, because half of them want you to bite it when you smeg up."
Quantum slowly lowered his head back toward the table, fingers interlacing over his face as he started muttering something under his breath. While she couldn’t hear it, she could pick up enough of the tone to know it wasn’t polite. She merely chuckled, leaning across the table with a smug, wicked little grin.
“Cheer up, Quanty!" She leered. “I’m sure your administrative talents and…
prior experience will come in handy running this place. But, you know, I'd always be happy to take some of the weight off your back."
From the look on his face, she might as well have handed him a goblet of graving acid and ordered to drink it to the last drops. But the former DFM occultist-turned-crisis-manager merely nodded, and settled into the now-vacant chair, beginning to busy himself with the documents flung out across the table. He was already busy drawing up a new set of tunnels by the time she started for the door, letting the shape of a horned skull and ribcage form on the blank parchment before him.
"Doctor."
She looked back at him. Quantum slid the paper across the tabletop toward her, a tight grimace on his features.
"Get this design to the miners and tell them to get cracking. Tell 'em you've got my authority to do so." He gave her a tight, strained-looking smile. "Assistant Overseer Lolorodom."
The doctor grinned and nodded, then left without another word, melting into the crowd and walking briskly through the corridor outside. The main tavern and its surroundings were crammed with off-duty inmates and labourers, a handful of them bearing the ramshackle armour of the fortress militia. Others ran past at speed in their own little gangs, shouting orders to each other or straining and sweating as they heaved boulders or buckets of metal ingots past her toward the industrial quarters of The Overlook. She heard a snatches of a dozen different conversations, shouted at each other over the general hubbub and the heads of the wandering personnel.
“Did y’see wot Eral’s up to? Gone an’ shut ‘erself up in that shop of hers; ain’t said word in days!"
“Two rounds says she goes an’ craps out some overembellished trinket."
“Sal’s in good form – didya see some of those pumpkins e’s gone an’ carved up on the walls?"
“Aye, that I did. Scary stuff, eh?"
“Get your hand out of my pocket, or I swear I’ll feed you to a goddamn predator."
“There’s a meal in my fly!"
Dr. Lolorodom rolled her eyes at the noise, shoving her way through the crowd with the papers clutched firmly in her hand. She hoped the former DFM manager could whip these imbeciles into shape before his inevitable replacement arrived. It would be… difficult, if he did not. Such conditions were hardly conducive to her research, both physically and mentally. And the materials at hand – less than quality, to state the least. Grumbling to herself, she walked on.
At the edge of the tavern, she spied her target: a rough-looking, dusty dwarf in ragged overalls, a pickaxe hanging from the worn leather belt at his side and a miner’s cap perched on his head. He was at the centre of a small cluster of similarly-dressed labourers, all of them busy chattering or slugging back drink after drink from the rough metal and tone mugs the tavern had to offer.
She couldn't help the smug grin creeping across her face as she snagged the arm of one of the roughnecks, puffing herself up and handing him the papers. "Boss's orders; get this mined out, on two of the lower levels."
The miner started to say something, but she was already underway again. The doctor strode on purposefully until she could find an isolated corner, where she finally stopped. Her head snapped to either side with almost reptilian speed, checking for any eavesdroppers or snooping inmates, before returning her gaze ahead. Carefully, she stepped forward and pressed herself against the damp stone to minimise her profile.
There, she slowly withdrew the paper she had snagged from his office and hidden inside her sleeve, regarded it for a few tense moments, then slowly seized it with both hands and tore it in half, then into quarters and eighths and finally into nothing but a handful of confetti-like shreds that she cast aside before storming off back toward the main fortress, mind already re-aligning itself toward her plans for this place. The weary old fool wouldn't know what he had chosen to take in trust, now, and her experiments - so rudely interrupted by the close-minded fools in her former home - could resume themselves uninhibited. The
After all, she thought to herself with grim amusement,
They're dead men already.
Behind her, unseen by guard or inmate, the remains of her criminal record and its attached solitary confinement order settled in pieces on the stone. Among them, a few words still showed: "Experiment," "Necromantic craft," "Immaterial weaponization," and one half-illegible, underlined several times in an unsteady hand - "R_v__im."
(Introduction done. Will work on the actual turn events tomorrow.)
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Topic: Spookyfort IV: The Overlook - Overspookers welcome! (Read 14469 times)