>>5696526You turn to see a wrinkled old man in velvet silk robes, fancy even here, but you aren’t paying much attention as he holds out his gnarled hand. You instinctively grab it to shake and stop dead in your tracks. His grip is the strongest you’ve ever felt, an unnatural strength that nearly powders your reinforced bones and leaves you kneeling in pain. When you look to meet the darkness in his eye sockets, you are met with a bottomless malice that chills the blood in your veins and for a second, almost makes you forget your faith in the USA. The sheer, palpable evil pouring from his every pore rivals the original Communist Manifesto.
He spreads his lips in a grimace and begins to chant in a nameless tongue, paralyzing everyone nearby with heart-stopping dread. You feel those forbidden syllables as much as you hear them, chiseling and scraping your psyche. This black rite breaks the barriers of your will and lets in a conceptual construct, a tangible darkness that crushes your soul and cages it in an abyss that has no beginning or end. You feel the flesh on the back of your hand burn as a profane sigil is etched into it, a sickening glyph that shifts and wavers into newer, fouler shapes even as you struggle to forget the last. The moment it is done, you are wracked with an even viler existential dread than the fear of being passed over for draft picks on your first season. It is an absolute, inescapable certainty that you are damned. Worse, he curves his index finger and tickles your wrist as you finally force yourself to let go and collapse, drenched in sweat.
The old man’s crooked smile only deepens at your sudden weakness. “On the eve of your victory, Ge-orge, you have received the greatest of honors. I, Yomon Zobon, greatest of the wizards of eld, have marked your inner vitae. Flee it, fight it. It makes no difference. Your warrior’s soul is MINE. On the moment of death, you shall come to me and I shall show you such wonders, such terrors, you would die before your next breath if you knew them now. Then… oh, you shall know soon. VERY soon. AHAHAHAHAHAHA!”
You get back on your feet and feel your strength returning, even if your inside feels cold in a way you can’t explain. This so-called “wizard’s” cackle infuriates you but something in his words cuts deep, an impossible weight to the arrogance that you can’t dismiss with patriotic spirit alone. You reach in deeper to find the unfeeling nanomachines within, but they are no help to the unease crawling in your skin. Your time is short. You must act!
>Attack the wizard!>Demand answers!>Get away from him!>Banter while you can!>Turn to Sauteur for help!>Ignore it, just be casual!>(2/2) 