Sixth Sin: The Blooming Beasts (Pt. 11): Out Of The Fire And Setting It

  --- Mercer ---

  The basement was silent for a moment as Mercer waited to see if the green witch was playing opossum before he pulled out a small set of vials he tended to keep on him for dealing with villains and the occasional medical emergency.

  “Here’s hoping you aren’t allergic to any of this.” He told the villainess as he screwed one of the vials into an injector and tranqed the green witch to make sure she wouldn’t get back up in the next five or so minutes to rally her beasts.

  Admittedly, not the best thing to do to someone with a possible concussion but significantly safer than allowing someone with a floral army to run free and rampage while he was stuck cleaning up the rest of this mess. Especially given how with her powers she’d be able to escape most methods of restraining her.

  “Right now let’s see how Tris and Silo are doing.” He mumbled once he was sure the green witch wasn’t going anywhere for the foreseeable future, he made his way out of the basement alone, fairly certain that if he brought her with him every plant in the building would come down on him like he pissed off mother nature herself. (Again.)

  Part of him had been hoping that by taking the green witch out and having her husband so far from the scene might render the blooming beasts semi-docile, if still aggressive.

  Unfortunately, as he made his way through the library it became quite clear that most of the plants were still operating on their final orders of assaulting the library and overtaking Tris before she could complete the ritual that would stop all of this in its tracks.

  Even worse (I don’t have enough ammo to deal with all of these beasts…)

  He could still handle the smaller ones with his knife, but for an army of creatures at least half resistant to his concussive rounds, he’d be surrounded and overwhelmed before he could put a dent in their numbers.

  (Best bet is to get to the ritual room and hope to stall them long enough for Tris to do her thing.) He decided as he quietly made his way through the library, doing his best to avoid being seen by moving along the top of the bookshelves and use the various hanging ornaments that the sibling’s father had installed when he first adopted Kur’Silo.

  Upon actually reaching the main doors leading to the sibling’s main sanctum, he couldn’t help but pause if only because of the massive fire roaring in front of the door holding the beasts back without spreading to the rest of the library. (Guess Kur’Silo did something semi-productive with that gas can.)

  Normally he’d try diving through the flames to get through, confident in his helmet’s respirator to keep him from choking on smoke and his insulated jacket to keep him from burning. (If only I hadn’t lost all my gear in that stupid explosion.)

  And even if he was still reckless enough to risk it under normal circumstances, all of the angry flora surrounding the fires posed enough of a threat that he wasn’t in a hurry to simply dive inside and risk being the subject of a tentacle hentai. (Because karma dictates that is what would happen after abandoning Safeguard to their… tender mercies.)

  He quickly ran through what alternative routes through the library he knew to get into the sanctuary, of which there were actually very few given how the room was supposed to be semi-sealed to help minimize intruders and escapees in an emergency. (Siblings probably have an extra exit hidden in there somewhere, but they wouldn’t use it unless the entire building was lost.)

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  And given how well the three of them got along he fully believed that exit included a means of bringing the whole building down and sending whatever was inside into the deepest pits of the void.

  Luckily enough however there was still a second means of getting into the sanctuary, his preferred means in fact. (And with the wards down there’s no reason I can’t use it.)

  Quickly finding a broken window, Mercer counterintuitively made his way out of the library -was both pleasantly and unpleasantly surprised to find a lack of feral flora on the streets- and proceeded to go around to the front of the library.

  More specifically to the giant stained glass window that he attempted to break in via at the start of this whole misadventure and had been reinforced with an extra ward to prevent him from doing so. (Because ‘Only Kur’Silo is allowed to use the windows to come and go and you should use the front door like a regular human.’)

  Which was absolutely favoritism and speciesism in his very humble and totally unbiased opinion of rules that only seemed to apply to him.

  The only problem he found with this plan was the fact that it looked like some of the Blooming Beasts had beat him at breaking the window. (Which explains where all the ones that were out here went…)

  Moving quickly he rapidly pulled himself through the windows using his grapplers to rappel through the window, uncaring of the shards of broken glass that bit into his clothing or the small tears they put in them.

  Inside he found Tris surrounded by a large glowing spell circuit, sparks of magical power cackling and dancing along the edges as the power within slowly built to a crescendo.

  Surrounding this circuit was a small pile of dead plant matter and a masked Inferni looking half dead from exhaustion currently aiming a gun at Mercer.

  “Fuck, tol, almost gave me a heartattack…” Kur’Silo groaned, letting his gun drop to his side.

  “Looks like you’ve had fun.” He noted, kicking one of the dead blooming beasts before turning his attention to the fire. “Any idea how long that’s going to last?”

  “We keep throwing bodies on it? Till we run out of bodies.” The Inferni answered, resuming what seemed to be his previous task of moving one such floral corpse. “You take care of the tangina responsible for this shit?”

  “Left the mad scientist with Safeguard and half their army, before coming here and taking out his Arcane wife and leaving her tranqed in your basement.” He explained while grabbing a corpse of his own and beginning to drag it towards the pyre.

  “Fuck, we’ve got the Vigils to deal with too…” Kur’Silo groaned, knowing how much of pain the paranoid vigilante group was to deal with.

  “Maybe, maybe not.” He shrugged, glancing Tris’s way fully aware that the Practitioner was listening even if she was too busy focusing on the spell to actually talk. “Most of them seem wrapped up dealing with the plants spread across the rest of the city as a distraction. Safeguard was just taking point since they think he can talk me into not shooting him if he needs to come into the way.”

  “And how’d that work out for… him?” Kur’Silo wondered as he threw the corpse onto the fire.

  “Last I saw, he had another man on top of him as a dozen plant tentacles were reaching for them.” He admitted in a mix of amusement at the image and annoyance at how much his boots were slipping on all the plant blood on the ground.

  “Safeguard’s the gay one, right?” Kur’Silo frowned, wiping at his brow.

  “If you’re interested you can do so much better.” He assured the Inferni.

  Kur’Silo swatted him. “I may be into other species because there's no Inferni around, but I’m still straight.”

  “Not judging, just saying you can do better.” He pointed out, raising his hands as he released the corpse, close enough to kick it on the fire but far enough to avoid burning it too soon. “And I’m pretty sure he’s straight too, but he’s got a gay yandere that I encourage to stalk him on the side.”

  Kur’Silo pulled his mask off so Mercer could see his bewildered face. “That’s kind of fucked up, tol.”

  “It’s Joseph, and Jeremy asked me to do it to keep him out of trouble. Hence why I’m constantly spreading rumors that he might actually have a shot.” He explained.

  “Ah.” Kur’Silo nodded, eyes wide as if he suddenly understood. “I ain’t dealin’ with that crazy if I don’t have to.”

  “Sadly, my job means I have to.” He sighed, thinking about the many many side tasks the twins had given him via their mutual and extremely differing insanities.

  Kur’Silo gave him a there-there pat to his shoulder as they both watched the flames burn.

  For anyone who may be interested… Here's an audit of my writing for the Seventh Year Anniversary.

  Today marks the seven year anniversary of when I first started Deviant’s Masquerade and I just wanted to take a moment to thank everyone for following along this far and post a chapter for each of my stories. (Note: Was going to write Black Briar’s today but stuff got in the way.)

  Additionally, I also try to do something semi-special each anniversary and while I do not have a new quest or game what I do have… is an audit.

  You see about a year or so ago I saw this meme, the uncle iroh one, where it was asking writers ‘do you actually have plot or are you just going off of vibes’ and that sort of stuck with me.

  Namely because I realized how many of my stories are just going off of vibes rather than plot. Which is part of why for my seventh year as a writer I am doing a sort of self-audit as it were for this past year to see what I can do to improve each story partially by re-reading a lot of my previous stuff. (Note: This excludes the various chapters I am releasing today and tomorrow.)

  Hacking Reality

  -Age: 5.5 Years

  -Word Count: 263k

  -Word Average: 47.8k per year

  -Last Year: 14.4k

  -The original idea was just for a mad scientist protagonist, and as one of my early stories I didn’t actually have a big bad beyond the kidnapping group. (Which has sort of been forgotten about.) As such most of the plot has been sort of slap dash with things going through frequent slow patches because most stuff is made up as I go with this story while using humor and Maya’s insanity to cover it all up.

  In reality, we’ve a few small plot points that are sort of pushed to the side for a in game month until we eventually do something about them. Which in turn means there are no clear ‘arcs’ or ‘books’ that I can divide things by.

  So, Plot to Vibes= 3/7

  The Huntsman’s Quest

  -Age: 5.5 Years

  -Word Count: 370k (Excluding 25k for the preboot)

  -Word Average: 67k

  -Last Year: 17.1k

  -The original likely would’ve had similar issues as Hacking Reality, but at the same time Jon being more reactive than proactive in the reboot makes it easier for him to have events every month that he has to face and overcome over the course of that month. None of which quite make for an overarching plot.

  From there I’ve currently got two maybe three events outside of December/Christmas stuff which can form a sort of ‘monthly novel’ sort of approach. Though after December I’ll probably have six dead months as far as plot goes given the remaining time for ‘a year in the life’. (I have however had the ending more or less planned for years, with it being flexible enough to match our choices.)

  Plot to Vibes=6/4

  Get Ink’d

  -Age: 5 years

  -Word Count: 189k

  -Word Average: 37.5k per year

  -Last Year: 14.3k

  -From the very beginning we’ve had a general plan of ‘break away from the syndicate’ and ‘reopen the cabaret’ with one or two tasks a month giving us the most clear direction of my first three quests.

  Based on my timings I see us finishing the first Act mid-december (in story) while the second act of actually building a gang and escaping the syndicate taking two or three more months. After that though, I have no idea what to do for a final act unless I wrap things up at the end of Act Two, which again would fall short of the ‘a year in the life’ goal. (I do not actually have an ending planned though.)

  Plot to Vibes=7/3

  And All The Sinners, Saints

  -Age: 4 years

  -Word Count: 115k

  -Word Average: 18.75k per year

  -Last Year: 10.4k

  -This quest started out because I had an idea for a cool cast of characters (half of whom are batman expies) forming a found family and wanted to write a story about them. Unfortunately, even if the characters are cool, cool characters alone do not make a plot. Hence why things tend to slow down mid ‘sin’ while ‘sinless days’ progress so much faster.

  I do however have plans for two/three more kids to be adopted as well as further exploration of things with the vigils. That said, I might need to make ‘sins’ less of big overarching events outside of the children because of how much its slowing things down. (Basically if I can’t do an ‘event’ in less than 10 chapters, I probably shouldn’t.)

  Plot to Vibes=4/6

  Hex City Devils

  -Age: 2 Years (Upon finishing Act 1)

  -Word Count: 131k

  -Average Yearly Count: 65.5k

  -Word Count Since March: 8.3k

  -A national writing month challenge, the idea here was to write a certain amount every day for a whole month. In order to do so I slapped together a bunch of cool character ideas and threw them into a city together as it went to crisis/quarantine, each of which I had three ‘acts’ for.

  Unfortunately, I misjudged how hard it would be to stitch all of these stories together into something coherent, while also explaining why things were bad enough for a quarantine. The later of which I hadn’t actually considered and in turn made me grind the plot to a halt as I tried to fix things. And after finally wrapping up most character’s act one this story is going to need an overhaul with a lot of clean up to make it work after how bad I fumbled everything.

  Plot to Vibes= -5/5 (because there was a plot, too much of a plot honestly.)

  Smile Like You Mean It

  -Age: 2 Years (If we count Patron Time)

  -Word Count: 121k

  -Word Average: 60k

  -Last Year: 40.4k

  -This quest similar to the one above began with me taking one cool character and wanting to write a story exploring them in an interesting setting. Except I actually planned out a massive backstory for that one character that creates a sort of overarching plot as we explore the setting.

  Which when combined with the four contract children, the three hell children, the four family members, and the sin cadre all having their own interlaced plot points makes me confident that while a bit of long haul I will be able to write out an entire open and closed by the time we explore all 28 districts of hell.

  Plot to Vibes=8/2

  Black Briar Library

  -Age: 2 Year (If we include patron start time, and ignore a 5 month hiatus for SLYMI)

  -Word Count: 81k

  -Word Average: 40.5k per year

  -Last Year: 31.1k

  -Inspired as a sort of ‘anthology’ this was meant to be a story following a large cast of characters across numerous stories in what I now realize would’ve been a highly flexible but poorly thought out plot based on an episodic nature.

  That said, the story focuses so much on Fischer’s slow opening up and dealing with his guilt, that realistically I could consider his overarching plot finished by the end of Book 4. Which would just leave the plots of his co-librarians which we have not explored at all, and who at this point are far less thought out due to me wanting to maintain flexibility within the story.

  Plot to Vibes=6/4 for now, 5/5 overall

  Daemon Daze

  -Age: 7 months

  -Word Count: 94k

  -Word Average: N/A

  -Last Year: Total

  -This one is meant to be an exploration of the days of the Voodoo Wars, a sort of prequel time period to the rest of the setting while also letting me engage in a sort of creature collectathon.

  For the actual plot I have three overarching and intersecting ‘plots’ that I want to try and tie together. (Pennyworth, Helena, the Families. And the Daemons as a sort of side-story thing.) The cases themselves are meant as a sort of narrative vehicle for those plots, but admittedly I need to plan them out more to keep the cases more interesting for what will probably be 10-ish, novellas. (500k-ish words at the current rate.)

  Plot to Vibes= 7/3

  ---

  Now moving onto planned or unrealized quests that have been up for votes:

  -The Devil’s Due Casino: (3k Written) I had a cool character duo with three important plot points, and a small cast around him. I probably could have turned this into a duology type of book but in reality things were nowhere near planned enough to do a proper story putting it on the Hacking Reality level.

  -The Legendary Travelers: (3.7k) A cool idea following several interesting characters, each having a sort of cool plot. Could be a precursor idea to the BBL, as of now I probably could not create a good story intersecting them all as a cast so will cannibalize them for other stories each better fits within.

  -Sanctuary Rosemary Branch: (0k, memo side story) This one would have revolved around the relationship between Nicholas Stone and Caleb Cross, as well as Cross’s various misadventures and Stone’s clean up. In truth I had very little in the way of an overarching plot, but several cool characters. This one probably would have ended up somewhere around AATSS as far as plot to vibe, but stuttering out since there was no connecting plotlines between everything.

  -Simon Lorde, The Overlord: (13k) Another cool character prompts a story idea, with me having vague ideas for six different cities each of which having a character to tie back to Simon. While I had a cool overarching plot idea, the internal plot of each city/location was fairly lacking so it would probably end up in a similar space plot to vibe wise as BBL rather than SLYMI.

  -Soul Stitcher Quest: Looking back, this one was a quest born of a hyperfixation idea between Sinners and South of Midnight. I had a couple of cool characters and a decent setting idea, but in reality there was no ‘motivation’ to the plot beyond ‘you have the power, use it’ which would likely put this plot to vibe score on the same level as Hacking Reality.

  -Horror Survival Quest: This one plot wise was actually fairly straight forward, kill several demon bosses and their cultists before getting out of the sealed off town. And would actually be fairly easy to build an overarching plot for… but I’m a little unsure if it would be better as a quest than a video game. If done it would probably be a ton of sub-1000 word chapters while also being fairly game-y in nature which makes me a little iffy on writing it.

  -Drone Civ Quest: This idea, while technically not a previous vote, is one I’m considering for my next quest. The idea being that we play two competing factions, one a middle manager trying to reclaim a death world the corporation they’re a serf to lost control of and the other the drones working to maintain their freedom. While an interesting premise… I’ve realized aside from mechanically exploring vaults I don’t have an actual plot outline beyond the beginning.

  -Monster Hunting Quest: I’ve an idea for a sort of overarching plot line to tie things together, but the majority of the story would’ve been exploring several locations and hunting monsters with a colorful cast of characters. I have several overarching goals and several interesting boss monsters/quests for forming a pattern similar to Daemon Daze in structure and likely eventual Plot to Vibe in scoring with each ‘plague’ having its own plotline.

  -Vandergeist: Another next quest idea, but one where I have an interesting city with multiple clashing factions and several heroes for each that could make an interesting civ quest with the protagonist having a focused goal to carry things through several phases. And despite thinking it was a hyperobsession I have enough plot planned to safely put it with Daemon Daze on plot level if with a longer overall story.

  ---

  Now for the actual numerical values of my Stats as an author:

  Time Active: 7 Years

  Total Word Count For Anthology: 219k over 1.25 years, for an average of: 175.2k yearly

  Total Quest Word Count: 1231k over 5.5 years, for an average of 223.8k per year

  Quest Word Count of the last Year: 240k

  Side Story Word Count: 115.4k over 2.25 years, for an average of: 51.1k per year

  Unrealized Story Count: 19.7k + 25 k for the Huntsman flop.

  Total Overall Word Count: 1,611,500 Words, for an average of 230k per year

  Past Year’s Word Count:

  Total Page Count: Roughly 5800 Pages of story, 852 of which are from the last year

  (325 Page) Books Written: Roughly 17.84 (Ignore my books being closer to 425 pages for 13.64.)

  ---

  So, all in all I’m actually up on my yearly average if only because of how quickly I’ve been writing Daemon Daze. (Which I can so easily write due to not being bound by my usual OCD rules, which is a whole other topic.)

  At the same time, while often experimental I feel like I’m learning enough with each story written that my skill as a writer is slowly improving. (Especially after reading the first dozen chapters of Hacking Reality and the Huntsman’s Quest.)

  Still if you read all of this, or any of my stories really, I just want to take one last moment to thank you for reading and following along for as long as you have.