This Thing Don't Look So Tough

[Gamzee Makara]

The purple skinned motherfucker in front of the dizzy dumbass that was Gamzee Makara had the smoothest motherfucking skin he had EVAH felt. Yet somehow, the elf's shoulders had the appearance of being hewn from solid, craggy stone. Purple, craggy stone. Don't see purple rocks every day, Gamzee thought to himself as he gently squeezed his former enemy's squishy skin, his muscular muscles. Illidan Stormrage, assaultant of Darkshire, heralder of heralded things, tilted his head ever so slightly to the left to train one menacing emerald eye on Gamzee Makara, who, to his credit, smiled an incredibly warm, goofy ass smile right back at him.

The squadron of warriors marched ever forward, into the sleepy curtains of mist. Gamzee could barely see two feet in front of him, much less the forest path they were treading upon. He could only imagine the sort of nonsense and whimsy that must've been guiding whichever motherfucker happened to be in the front of this crazy train. The constant bombardment of ominous and unfriendly sounds coming from the forest proper were quiet, just on the edge of perception.

Gamzee could hear voices. He couldn't quite hear what they were saying, but he could hear voices.

"Ya'll motherfuckers hear that bullshit?" he said in a hoarse, hushed tone.

No response. As the words left his lips he wasn't quite sure that his voice was any louder than the ones surrounding them. Sooo...they probably technically maybe heard the voices, too, and he wasn't going crazy. Probably. Maybe.

Thirty minutes, thirty exhausting, blind, endless minutes they spent trekking through this mirth-forsaken wood. The voices had reached such a thundering height by this point that the juggalo couldn't hear himself think. Maybe they were lonely? It was almost as if they were trying to talk to each other, but couldn't quite hear themselves. He caught words, sometimes. At least, he thought they were words. All of their voices just ran and stumbled into each other, rendering them nothing more than babble and nonsense . Just as soon as he was contemplating shouting a greeting out into that pale void, an impossibly high scream pierced the veil of fog. It did not exactly startle any of the warriors, hardened adventurers that they were, but glances were certainly exchanged. It was dead silent once the scream ended. Even the muted murmurs from earlier seemed to have ended, all at once. The heavy mists that just moments ago provided some absolutely lovely acoustics for all those voices now smothered all sound. Deafening, all consuming, pounding-in-your-ears silence.

Gamzee coughed a bit, clearing his throat. All that fog couldn't have been good for his sinuses.

"Keep moving," ordered Atelos, albeit a tad quieter than he would normally order.

The troll couldn't tell if they were moving at all, really. Moving was not progress, not here, not in this motherfuckin' forest. The next step brought what he supposes could actually be considered as progress, in some horrid way. The curtain was called, it would seem. The fog lifted.

It was like the white smudge of an underdeveloped polaroid had finally dissipated, except instead of a cute, chic, hipster-y snapshot, there was only death and decay as far as the eye could see; which is arguably just as cliche. Corpses littered the ground and boughs above, hung from nooses and impaled on the branches, twisted limbs and contorted faces poking out of the piles of bodies before them. Many had uniforms and crests, those of Darkshire or Dracula. Others wore colors from factions and townships long past or unknown entirely. There were even a few stormtroopers, still clad in their plasteel armor. Death came to these folk in all manner of ways: sword wounds, bullet holes, the frenzied ripping and tearing only capable of beastly, insidious things. Pools of blood coalesced about by body piles and underneath the ones suspended above. Drip, drip, went the blood.

Death. A lot of it.

Gamzee could feel his mentor's grip tighten ever so slightly. Not out of fear, but out of preparation; scenes like this generally involved a fight, and boy was Strazio Rockwell ready for a fucking fight. Mr. Rocky McChiseled Shoulders in front of him also seemed to be wound up.

"You seem tense," whispered the clown with a friendly squeeze of the shoulders before peeking around him at the two dudes leading the pack. "Ya'll okay up there?" His concern was met with withering glares and rolled eyes. Gamzee gets a lot of those.

"You know it's kinda motherfuckin' straaaaange. I was expecting somethin' to try and murderize us by now," He wondered aloud. The horned boy releases his grip from Illidan's shoulders and shakes off Strazio's from his own, wandering off to a nearby pile of bodies.

"What are you doing?" hissed the begoateed motherfucker. Begoateed is a word, right? Yeah, Gamzee decides. Like bedazzled. Or bespectacled. But you know, with a goatee.

"Let him do his thing, Shang," Strazio said with a nonchalant wave of the hand.

The begoateed Shang Tsung made a sour face, voicing his concern, "And what exactly IS his thing?"

"I dunno," he said with a defeated shrug. It would seem the mage had been in this situation before, adding, "But it usually works."

Kneeling to the ground, Gamzee licked his lips and ran a hand through the nearest pool of blood. "Watery..." he murmured. He raises his hand closer to his face to get a better look, but the blood had hardly stained his fingers at all. Whatever this stuff was, it wouldn't paint well. Gingerly touching his fingertips to his nostrils, he takes a tentative sniff. "Watery..." he repeated softly.

"Shit ain't blood," the clown with a suddenly dour frown declared.

"He's right," mused Atelos, "All this gore and viscera carries no scent, no taste of copper in the air. This is no battlefield."

Gamzee nudged a pile of bodies with the toe of his purple canvas shoe. I should prolly get some boots or somethin', He daydreams. The pile of bodies topples over, nothing more than dead weight. Heheh. He giggles at his punnery, poking and prodding a dead dude with his pinky.

"These ain't bodies," the fool chuckled to his friends.

Indeed. The sorcerer Shang Tsung had already summoned his sword in preparation for in actual fight, but now used it to cut one of the hung bodies from the tree. As it collides with the forest ground, its legs burst open on impact.

"Sand. And more fake blood," he growled.

It is Illidan who posed the real question that had been on everyone else's minds. "But who would go to all this trouble? Such an extensive ruse in the middle of a seemingly uninhabitable-"

There be a bush a-rustlin'. A rustlin' in the bush. Everyone immediately readied themselves, drawing steel and magicks, all aimed directly at the rustlin' bush. Everyone except for the grey alien with wild, unkempt black hair and candy corn horns. He sat in his original spot, twirling a finger through the fake blood and makin' little swirlies.

"Come on out, if you value your life," Atelos ordered. He does a lot of ordering. The bush rustlin' ceases at his words, and out walks a fuckin' kid.

A human child, a girl, who couldn't have been more than the age of twelve or thirteen stepped clear of the brush. She had all manner of red and black streaks painted on her face, feathers adorning her braided raven hair, and bones covering her body in a vaguely armor like fashion with rags and linen for clothing underneath. Most striking were her beautiful, disarming, emerald green eyes that were in such bright contrast to her dirt covered appearance. Everyone immediately breathed a sigh of relief after getting over the inherent surprise, putting away their weapons and magicky hands. They wanted to seem as nonthreatening as possible to a scared little lost girl, of course.

Which, of course, was the perfect time for a countless number of very armed, very dangerous looking children roughly the same age as the little lost girl to drop and hang from the tree limbs above and sprout like weeds from the stomach high grass and shrubbery that surrounded them. They all carried tree trunk clubs and wooden spears, ashen bows and daggers of bone - and they all looked pretty pleased with themselves. There were far, far more arrows pointed at them than necessary. The group suddenly found themselves very outnumbered, and very vulnerable. And perhaps, to one or two of the warriors, a bit humiliated.

Gamzee looked up and all around him slowly, as if only just now realizing the predicament they found themselves in. "Huh," he says, rather matter-of-factly.