Chapter 30-1 Too Numb to be Numb

Chapter 30-1 Too Numb to be Numb

+Ahem.

Attention, people of the gutters. It’s uh... it’s your fucking boy Aedon—

What? What’s wrong with saying, “it’s your fucking boy,” Marlowe?

Why does it sound like shit? How do you know it sounds like shit, like, all the big vicarity stars—okay, yeah, I guess you have thoughtcasting experience but...

Alright. Fucking—alright! First impressions are important, I know—ah, fuck I’m already casting shitshitshit

Uh, hey, hey, consangs, it’s friend of the Strix, master of the rash, and twister of the flesh, Aedon Chambers here. Yeah. You might know me as a Low Master Acolyte or consang to the Strix. You might even know me as Steelhardfan6969 if you frequent certain lobbies—

What’s wrong with telling them my private account? I barely use it anymore! I practically can’t since the Nether came down. Shit, I’m on the verge of getting the shivers. Fuck. I’ve been cycling old vics through my head to keep myself calm! Don’t tell me to calm down! I am calm! I’m just running hot.

Godsdammit. Shit I keep getting sidetracked. Anyway! Main point: As you might have noticed, the Guilder half-strands are slipping down into the Warrens like shit... falling over from an overflowing shitter. Yeah, they really fucked their home up something good. Whatever the High Cuntess pulled at the end seems to have created a spreading metaphysical venereal disease that’s crawling down New Vultun to eat our asses. Shit’s fucked, yo. No two ways about it. In fact, if you got some numb, now’s the time to prick yourselves.

But all is not yet fucked to death. Our asses are, like, only two inches dicked by a fifteen inch Prolapsator-EXTREME Model 2. There’s still a chance we can slip free from getting a nightmarish pounding. But only if we work together.

Right now, the Colors are disorganized. They’re fighting each other and crashing down over your homes and shit. We have... a unique opportunity. One that might not come again for a long, long time.

What I need from you is simple: go seek out mem-cons with a specific pattern: a symbol that looks like a fire cut in half by a line. That’s the working symbol of the Symmetry. Pending changes. I’m not an artist and did the best I could on short notice. When you do, follow the instructions you’ll get from the memetic virus for next steps. You might think you’re outgunned and screwed with the Fifth Guild War kicking off, but things will be different this time. They already are.

We don’t need to take the Tiersfolk’s shit anymore. They’re in our house now. And understand the Symmetry will fight for you. To live. To see tomorrow. For a chance to decide who you want to be yourselves.

The Warrens might be a den of festering shit, but it’s ours. And the Guilds should’ve thought triple before they barged in here running from their fuck up.

Was... was that good? Good at the end? Hells yeah. Aedon Chambers lives for a climax+

-Aedon Chambers (Suspected Low Master Acolyte, Member of the Symmetry, Companion to the Strix, and Leading Representative of the Council of Fuck)

30-1

Too Numb to be Numb

Aedon Chambers couldn’t quite find it inside himself to shoot up, and his hand hovered over a vial of Numb. Drinkable, injectable—a promise of peace and relaxation guaranteed, if he’d only put it inside himself, some way, somehow.

Above him, light fell in dappled spots through dense foliage, and birdsong bathed the world in a dissonant tranquility. He stood at the end of a long table, its length stretching on for a good fifty meters while the other seats were occupied by a host of twenty-seven other individuals. Twenty seven people who resembled him and flesh and mind—ego copies created by Avo.

Here was the Council of Fuck. The members Chambers could get his hands on, anyway, convening to discuss issues of grave importance.

Things like: Just how fucked are we right now. Or: Maybe someone else should be calling the shots.

He’d spent the better part of the last day squirreled away in the Easy Armistice, monitoring situations across New Vultun from inside a rented demiplane. So far, things were as shit as he expected. With the Guilders fleeing the Tears and the Substance on the move, a cataclysm unlike any other was sweeping through the megacity. Panic was rising, citizens and subjects freaking out alike, and at the center of it all, Avo was still missing.

Draus had gone silent as well, despite coming online earlier. She had suddenly cut out—an ominous sign—but Chambers had more than a little faith in the regular. Jelene Draus was a tough sow. If all they’d experienced thus far couldn’t kill her, then whatever horrors were hiding behind that veil of metaphysical bullshit likely wouldn’t either.

That left him with the Warrens, and things weren’t looking so good there either.

In the days leading up to the trial, Avo had gone on a rampage alongside his Gestalt, tearing through the underworld of New Vultun in what could only be described as a cognitive genocide. The syndicate elites were burned and replaced by copies of Chambers, given his former expertise with the environment, and their enforcers became alternates for Draus, establishing a hidden army for Symmetry before proceedings even began. The technicians were fully staffed by amalgamated personalities—egos generated using memories and architectures gained from fallen Incubi.

They had been a valuable resource. A veritable legion in the Nether set to take over. Now? Well, there wasn’t much of a Nether, and a good bunch of the Incubi copies got nulled when Scale broke anyway, so that was that.

Now, Chambers found himself the senior leader of a gutter-spanning empire that ran smuggling rings, crucibles, dealt drugs, illicit organs, and trafficked implants while also warring against each other through death and entertainment. That had been his cover before to keep things going. That wasn’t going to last much longer. Once, the Guilds had used their syndicates to do dirty business, things they liked to keep their hands clean of. Now, with everything on the line, the syndicates were no longer needed. In fact, they were more of a liability. Citizens forced away from their homes were spilling down across the Warrens, pushing into other districts and displacing longtime subjects from their former abodes.

Scenes were represented in a holographic display of New Vultun. A simulation assembled itself from visual data captured by Sunrise—the Voidwatch bioform busting its buzzing ass as it flew here and there. From the very edge of the Tiers, traffic so dense they became webs descended over the Warren’s, blotting the face of night from above Light’s End. The blare of horns and the scream of sirens were nigh constant. Behind them, the Substance loomed, an ethereal tidal wave crawling forward inch by inch, with shimmering gold oscillating beneath its depths. In the upper atmosphere, voider ships were assembling, and what looked like a concentric megastructure was slowly fusing into shape along the horizon.

Calvino told Chambers that the Contingency Bleaks were coming onto the scene, supposed big guns of Void Watch specifically meant to deal with uncontrolled anomalies. Intermittent skirmishes still broke out between the Guilds, and when knots or cadres fought, thousands of salvages died. But through some small miracle—by some form of pressure from higher-ups or Voidwatch’s threats of embargo—a tentative peace was maintained. But it was not an easy peace by any means.

Chambers could see shimmering folds of space outlining the borders between countless districts. The Guilds were forming their battle lines, facing each other, even as more and more of their citizenry trickled in. As the population of Light’s End overflowed, the best and well-to-do subjects fled down into the Throat, camping out in former factories, processing plants, and generating laboratories. But those places weren’t built for long-term living, so further down they had to go, into the Spine, where criminals, ruffians, mind-hosts for cheap lobbies, organ carriers, and all the other dregs resided.

The traffic was constant and vast, as were the districts. New Vultun had always been a ravenous beast, and comfort belonged only to those who could afford it and keep it in the end. People were dying. That much Chambers already knew. Death rates were up by 650%. A dozen new plagues had been recorded, forcing over 700 districts to go into quarantine—or at least make the attempt. And every few minutes, a nuke would go off in the middle of a city, within a megablock, and a few thousand more would die.

But even a district across, people would barely notice. More space for the survivors. More space for those who could take it. Cancer could be handled by nanos or bio-thaumics. The rains would handle the burns.

And for those who couldn’t, for those who simply had no choice, the gutters were the way to go. Down in the gutters, the syndicates reigned as kings. And this was where Chambers found himself, playing the role of king of kings, even if he had no idea what he was doing. Even though he only knew what was going on with the syndicates in the Yuulden-Yang and Sasarchana Sovereignties.

True, attacking the Guilds had been fun—bombing an Omnitech facility here, assassinating a bunch of Seekers there. He knew how to get dirty with the best of them. But what he didn’t know was how to organize a civilization. People were flocking to his marketplaces, small oases of stability within the uncaring apocalypse—the ruins that constituted the gutters. But the markets were over capacity, partially connected to the Spine, with merchants and their families trying to establish themselves as priority subjects while overcharging newcomers. A fee that was sometimes worth a pound of flesh, literally.

To make matters worse, the Nether was down, completely collapsed, and with it broke New Vultun’s economic system, the imp trade stalling to a localized halt. Inner lobbies were no longer accessible, previously stored information possibly lost forever, and long-term communication was utterly disrupted. For most, at least. Chambers still had his Ansible, but even that was failing to provide him with any use. He’d pinged Avo 681 times since the destruction of Scale. Draus fifty, after she went silent. Denton—he managed about twenty-eight pings before he finally gave up.

And as for the others? Well, Cas had been with him all this while. He left to do some scouting earlier but would be back at any time. Marlowe just suddenly showed up in his megablock of the blue, dressed in that fancy trial outfit. She looked shell-shocked all to shit and went hard with the drugs for a while before she actually started talking to him. She, presently, was one of the few non-Chambers sophonts in the demiplane—had been a help cutting that recruitment mem-con earlier. Least the remaining Incubi could still do stuff like that.

The rest of the cadre? All the others?

Fucking lost. And so was Chambers.

Looking to his copies, Chamber sighed and placed the vial of Numb on the table and grimaced.

“Can’t fucking do this,” he muttered under his breath.

Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator.

“Not like the way you’re thinking, you degenerate. But yeah, she’s a... she’s a good partner. Reliable.”

“Bit cold,” Chambers said.

“It’s a positive quality for a spy,” Cas replied. Running his fingers through his thick, unkempt hair, Cas sighed. “There’s something else. The Nether’s come down, but we’ve also seen things out on the streets. Things that don’t make sense.”

“What kinds of things?”

“Saw a father kiss his kid on the head,” Cas elaborated. “Saw another block sealed by the Guilders. Rash quarantine measures.”

“So...” Chambers continued.

“These two were separate incidents. No one caught the Wombrash when the father did what he did. Nothing happened at all.”

“What?” Marlowe said, blinking.

All the Chamberses in the room were staring at Cas now.

“You sure you—” Chambers started.

“I can play the memory back a few more times. I know what I saw.” He rubbed his face. “That wasn’t all. Was vibrating through vents. Came upon some other... uh, developments. Think some people have been getting intimate. Physically. New refugees in the gutters, mostly.”

“Ah shit,” Chambers groaned. “Where?”

Cas just shook his head. “Nothing happened with them either.”

Silence. Utter silence.

“What?” Marlowe repeated. She shot up from her seat. “Are you saying...”

“I don’t know what this means,” Cas answered. “Far as I can tell, the Rash is active in certain places and absolutely dormant in others.”

“Then Avo must’ve done something,” Chambers said. He didn’t dare to hope. He did his best not to think about Kae, about what might’ve befallen her. She... she wasn’t dead. If Avo wasn’t dead, and if Avo had a plan—the half strand always had a plan—then maybe... maybe she could be brought back. Maybe this was a sign. He needed to.... He needed to test this. “Alright. Give me a second. I’ll be right back.”

Cas stared at him. “You sure?”

“Yeah. I mean, I did it all the time before. Worse case I suffer a torturous death and resurrect, right?”

The Columner opened his mouth and then closed it. An appreciative look came over him. “You’re a regular martyr, Aedon Chambers.”

“Someone’s gotta get dirty,” Chambers quipped back. “Alright. Let’s see this. Let’s see. You guys stick around.”

Marlowe shot him a worried look. “Hey. Be careful, alright.”

Chambers chuckled. “Sorry. I probably won’t.”

Then, with a thought, he adjusted the settings for his room, and the frequency shaping the plane diverged into two tones. One continued, maintaining the space his companions occupied. The other carried him to a secluded cube shaped from darkness. Only he, himself. And also the Fucktopia. A grumble of fire sounded inside him. And the Bioigniter. Couldn’t forget his original Heaven.

“I’m right here with you, buddy,” the Fucktopia said, placing a comforting cock on his shoulder.

“Thanks, Fucktopia,” Chambers said. “I don’t know how to say this, but I’m glad you’re awake, and I’m glad you’re here with me.”

“I’m glad I’m here with you, too.”

Another crackle of flame sounded within Chambers, a note akin to jealousy, but mostly just wanting him to remember it existed and also that it wanted to combust some flesh.

“Yeah, you’re really nova too, Bioigniter. Don’t worry, we’ll blow some shit up soon. But right now... right now, I gotta find out about something...”

And so, with a steadying breath, Chambers disabled his Lustaway phantasmic and accessed a vicarity.

THE SOFT MASTERS COLLECTION I

ENGAGING HOT-SIMULATION — FULL IMMERSION INTO ACTOR [DANNIS STEELHARD]

>>01:34:03

Shooting ahead to one of the most intense scenes in the vic where the lustful ghouls tried to break Dannis by electro-torturing his testicles using the electrical energy of an entire Sovereignty, Chambers convulsed as absolute agony exploded through him. Agony and a little something else.

A new physical sensation followed. A feeling he almost forgot. His pants—ghoul leather and perfect—grew hot and tight. Uncomfortable. He braced for the rash and the spreading of pustules, but just felt... just felt the vic play on.

There, in the dark cube, Chambers stood with a painful erection but no homunculi clawing out from his pores. He counted one second. Then two. Then three.

And nothing.

A lightness filled his body. He was clean. The Wombrash wasn’t here!

“Holy fucking shit,” Chambers muttered. “Hey Avo, I don’t know what you did, you demented half-strand of a rotlick, but I could fucking kiss you right now—I’m gonna fucking kiss you when I see you again!”

And doing that wouldn’t even kill them anymore.