NOVEL WEB V1CH3 Quit Clowning Around
A woman was frantically running down an empty city street in the dead of night. Her face, which was covered in snot and tears, was twisted up in a grimace. She went in and out of the shadows cast by the streetlights while running from her pursuer, only stopping periodically to try doorknobs and bang on doors. She did not realize the significance of the black fog that clung to all the surfaces around her partially hidden by the shadows.
For you see this world had a very special property, an invisible black smoke, which hid the moonlit world from the uninitiated. It would dampen noises, alter sight, twist perceptions, anything to keep dark deeds hidden from the mundane. There were only two ways to be initiated: awaken some mystical ability, be born a creature of the night, or be confronted with evidence that you could not refute or explain away. As the latter usually involved being attacked by what goes bump in the night, often fatally, the former two ways were the more common methods for those that were truly residents of the moonlit world.
This chase kept up until she stumbled over her own feet and fell to the ground. She then looked back and saw what caused her current state.
_
Eugene Simmons AKA Killer Klown
“IDK. He’s kinda boring, like all killer clowns”
Grade D
_
The clown had a huge, twisted mocking smile and an axe that like its wielder was covered in blood. The clown’s body was twisted up into knots and almost danced along the ground towards its target. He was also billowing a cloud of the black smoke thus explaining how both a bloody clown and a woman screaming bloody murder could be ignored.
He started approaching her while dragging his bloody axe behind him. She backed away from him until she hit the wall and could go no further.
“HELP! HELP!” the woman screamed hoping that someone would hear her. It was her misfortune that her attacker happened to have a certain aptitude for manipulating the smoke.
“PLEASE! MERCY!” the woman beseeched.
“PLEASE! MERCY!” the entity mockingly repeated along with his victim savoring her desperation.
The woman closed her eyes and prayed it would be over quick, but she had a feeling that the clown would make this long and painful. She felt the axe strike her thigh bone and tried not to cry out so as to not give the clown any more pleasure. She was unable to keep it in any longer when the clown got to the second bone in her thigh.
When it was over, the woman was not relieved, she was worried about what she was going to lose next. She sat there trembling, weeping, and waiting in dread.
“Killer clowns, so cliché.” Said the mysterious man with a mouth that seemed full of gravel.
She saw a tall man wearing leaning on a cane standing behind the clown.
***
It took about five hours and fifty-seven rats before I figured out seed creation. I turns out that I don’t create the small black seeds I have to create “apples” that rot into seeds. I saw the end stage of my cores not what I needed to provide. The apples were about the same size as the seeds but were a vibrant red and were created by weaving together the brain, heart, and soul of a being.
Well, the outer layers of a soul. The core of a soul was off limits. No idea why, but the second I even thought of keeping one I felt the very world turn to look at me. Something told me that if I continued what I did would be forever remembered, so I let it out of my proverbial grasp. It blinked out of existence the next instant.
I had five slots for seeds total and the apples did not allow for long term storage. The apples were by design meant to break down and provide energy. Which meant that rat apples only lasted me several hours total before I needed a new set of five. That also wasn’t considering that the energy provided was the equivalent of junk food. It filled me up but made me feel awful.
I spent the next week suffering the rat apples so that I could practice and experiment with my abilities.
I had stumbled across another aspect of my new abilities sometime during the week, creating artifacts. Artifacts were what I called items that achieved some extraordinary effect that I created using essences. Each artifact contains an essence core which produced the corresponding essence. The larger the core, the faster the energy regenerated and the larger the reserve. Cores were created by concentrating essences until they crystalized, another thing I figured out. The artifacts were finished by giving them a name that solidified their purpose and place in reality.
I created two tier zero artifacts during the week. The tier system was something I had come up with to help categorize artifacts. Tier zeros had limited use and/or power, usually just this side of magical. Every tier afterwards was a somewhat arbitrary jump in one of those categories.
The first artifact was created to provide training to my sixth sense, Sense Cane. Not the best name, but I couldn’t think of a clever name so a descriptive one would have to do. The cane was created out of the various senses I obtained from different animals. This was a rosetta stone that allowed me to translate physical senses to the outputs of my sixth sense. It also had the side benefit of providing some support as I was quite weak physically. This artifact appeared as a simple wooden cane engraved with various sensory organs: eyes, ears, fingers, mouths, and noses.
The other was a simple bone gun that shot bone bullets that I named Weaver’s First Firearm. This was from some of the rats I had left over.
Sense Cane allowed me to finally see what I now looked like. I was a seven foot tall adonis with golden hair and nails that lacked any visible flaw. Those were not too noteworthy, unlike the next set of features, blackish veins and pupilless molten gold irises. Said features showed my clearly inhuman nature, but they were nothing a light layer of black smoke won’t fix though. And what a discovery that was, a prevalent essence that could befuddle the mind and senses. I had to create an artifact that could produce it before I left this world as my abilities made me a natural.
After a week to get my bearing straight and prepare, I set out to acquire better apple fertilizer. My self-imposed deadline of two hours was so that if I didn’t get anything I had time to make more rat apples.
Surprisingly I only had to walk for about twenty minutes before I noticed a concentration of negative aspects that stood out from its surroundings. Another two minutes I came upon a scene that had just what I was looking for, a big bag of energy that I would not mind taking.
My target was boring and cliché in addition to his sadism. Which while a lesser crime than mutilation, torture, and murder, was still a strike against the man. I mean really, a killer clown. Don’t get me wrong it’s a great concept, the contradiction between someone meant to bring joy and someone bringing suffering is interesting. It even benefits from clowns naturally being a little off-putting. It’s just been so over done that it’s become uninteresting. Most are silent as well, which takes away the best part of the idea in my opinion, the whole laughing at the world and morals thing.
All this to say, “Killer clowns, so cliché.”
The clown’s head rotated almost one hundred eighty degrees to face the new potential threat.
“Well now that’s just creepy” I said in my distorted gravelly voice resulting from my rotten vocal cords.
The clown started to charge me with its axe.
“Look out!” the woman called for some reason. Seriously why do people do that when either the other party is clearly already “looking out” for what was right in front of them or is going to be distracted by the shout.
Nevertheless, the clown continued to charge at me. It looked at my hand raised with a bone white gun pointed at its knees. It does not matter what else is going on ability-wise, being kneecapless is debilitating. The several bullets that promptly went through its head and chest were more debilitating I would imagine.
Before I could take my prize, I first had to rid myself of my audience.
“Hey lady, you interested in a deal?” I asked, still surprised by my new voice.
The woman visibly confused at the series of events, “What?”
“Listen I can reattach your leg, but I will take all knowledge of this night” I offered. I wanted to keep a low profile after all.
“You can really reattach my leg?” the woman borderline begged with hope in her eyes and tone.
“That’s what I just said. Now yes or no, I’m on a bit of a deadline.” I told the girl feeling my self-imposed deadline.
“Yes! Yes! A thousand times yes!” the girl shouted before trying to get up and subsequently failing.
“Alrighty then. Nighty night” I said before using my weaving ability to knock her out. While my weaving was too slow for combat, out of combat it was quite versatile.
I then extracted the memory of this encounter. This was usually hard to do without damaging the person, but her agreement went a long way to stopping her subconscious from rejecting the extraction.
It then was just matching frayed threads in her limb and attaching them back together. This was easy as her soul accepted that her natural form had two legs, this even helped smooth out my mistakes. If this was an old and/or meaningful injury her soul would have recognized it as a part of her and thus rejected the change. This would lead to body and soul rejecting each other and a violent painful death. Unless I also manipulated the soul into a new form which was above my skill level and much riskier. The only reason I did it the first time was it was on myself and if I failed unreality would put me out of my misery quickly.
With that done it was time to move on to my own business.
The first thing I did was craft a clown apple from the comedic corpse. This one would last me about a week.
The next thing I extracted was the clown’s skill and talent in black smoke manipulation. My skill came from a general talent for manipulation, while this was specialized and more potent. While I could integrate it into my body, this was a strong talent that would have to be integrated individually over a long time and it was not worth it for such a situational talent. Instead, I made a ring out of it.
_
Black Smoke Ring
“The cover of dark deeds”
Tier One
A ring that grants the user near perfect control over the obscuring smoke of a certain world
_
I then proceeded to put my new ring on my right middle finger.
I next extracted the clown’s flexibility, his killing intent, and a sliver of his death essence. I put the grape sized pink and ice blue essences containing the first two in my spatial storage along with a translucent pale green dog tag created from the last. The spatial storage was something I created during my experimental period. It was just a bubble in unreality that I could throw things inside.
With that business out of the way I went back to my current sleeping arrangements while picking up the clown’s axe along the way.
Current Equipment:
Head:
[]
Earrings:
[]
Necklace:
[]
Clothes:
[]
Rings:
[Black Mist Ring]
Bracelets:
[]
Shoes:
[]
Armaments:
[Weaver’s First Armament]
[Sense Cane]
Storage:
[Various Essences]
[Murder Weapon: Axe]