Changeling stories

[aumentou]

One of the things I really like about Changeling is the combination of magical dreaming, supernatural wonder, and raw horror. The story below is under a cut partly because it's quite long and partly because it's nasty. The nastiness involved a creature that looked like a child, being killed messily.

The events described happened in game. It's a live game, and it was harrowing for me without the gore.


---

I realise that I'll have to kill the little blonde girl not long after bringing her downstairs.

I'm ahead of myself, I should backtrack. I'd gone to some trouble to get her - she ran into the hedge and it rose up against me - and she still wouldn't answer my questions. So I'd brought her downstairs in the hope that my supposedly nurturing information gatherers would get something from her. They didn't. Instead she ran to Gemma, and started talking to her. Most of it I didn't catch. I think she said her name was Claudette. I know she asked if she could play with Rebecca. Since Rebecca is Gemma's daughter and has been missing for twenty years, Gemma burst into tears.

I watch now, wondering. Is that the point? Is she trying to upset Gemma? Or is that just remarkably easy? Is she trying to control her now? Clearly she's appealing to her maternal instincts, but is that conscious manipulation or unconscious instinct?

She's still talking, and I'm adding things up. She isn't human. She isn't one of us. She isn't a fetch. She can control the hedge. She made magic happen over a mile-wide area.
She's one of Them. What else could she be?

I ask for Gemma to give me the child.

The little blonde girl is talking again. She's talking about how things happen that she wants. She's talking like she doesn't understand it, like she isn't in control.
Gemma is doing what the girl wants. She's holding her. Mothering her. She's a mother, she's lost her own little blonde girl, she's not going to be able to stop this.
The little blonde girl is talking again. I can't hear her words, but I can see it. Every sentence is a request which is really an order. Everything she asks for that Gemma doesn't say no to is bringing Gemma more under her control.
Gemma isn't going to let her go. I'm not going to be able to do this behind closed doors. I try anyway, one last time, ordering her to hand the small blonde body that houses one of the Enemy over to me.
She gets up and starts moving towards the stairs. I want the child upstairs, but I don't want her to see this. I stop her. She won't let go.

I'm out of time. The police will arrive soon. The granny must have gone for them. I'm out of time, and Gemma is not going to let go of the little girl in her arms.
I am Autumn. We deal in harsh truths, and harsher actions. I call on Fate to favour me, then I ram the poisoned iron blade into the child as hard as I can. The shock of my action finally makes Gemma let go. I think she screams - irrelevant input vanishes during moments of action - and I grab the bleeding bundle of flesh that is somehow still alive.
Nothing remotely human could survive that. I wouldn't have survived that. I bring the flames from my back to my front and immolate the child with all the power I can muster.

Irrelevant input vanishes during moments of action. I take the corpse up the stairs to the bedroom which is a disguised part of the hedge. I step through the wall into the hedge proper, and then make sure. I carve and burn through flesh and bone until her head comes off. Then I carve and burn through flesh and bone to expose joints, which I char to weaken and then tear apart. I burn the flesh away and scatter the bony remains of the limbs as far apart as possible given the time.

Have you ever dismembered a half cooked child? I can see from your eyes you have not. Your life has been better for it, trust me on this. The smell, the sight, the noises, the feel of warm meat, the taste - you don't have to put it anywhere near your mouth for the smoke to get on your tongue! In sensation terms it's remarkably similar to serving a pork joint, except that pork isn ever served that red. The familiar sensations are associated with eating something tasty, a pleasant experience. But there are other things - the shape, the hair, the eyes, the tiny tiny hands - that change the familiar to the macabre, and the combination of familiar and pleasant sensations with the unfamiliar and horrifying is far more disturbing than any of the purely nasty things I have experienced.

I doubt I'll be eating pork any time soon.

Comments

[aumentou.livejournal.com]

Good point. Would you like to write it, or shall I?

[mondayscalamity.livejournal.com]

You do it. I'm curious as to what other people think of her and how they see her.